Some Came Running

Blu-ray Consumer Guide: August 2011

Damn, got it in just under the wire. Man, I don't know how Christgau did it, month after month, for so many years. Fewer titles this month and probably fewer next month, if I'm gonna keep this up month to month. We'll see. In any event, enjoy. Equipment: Playstation 3 console and Oppo BDP 83 were the players, Panasonic Viera TC-P50S30 the display, Pioneer Elite VSX-817 AV the amp.

L’Age d’Or/Un Chien Andalou (BFI U.K. import, Region B locked)

It’s kind of odd that these two still-galvanic classics of surrealism in cinema are now by and large, as far as I can tell, perceived as objects for study rather than, you know, “real” movies; for me they’re still aesthetic touchstones and Age in particular a great hoot. So of course I was looking forward to this package with GREAT anticipation and I was not disappointed. Age looks largely great, although its restoration does show off its rough edges; startling and innovative as it is, it’s not the most consistently technically proficient film in spots (it’s worth remembering that it is, in a sense, almost an underground film). On the other hand, some crucial sequences (the ball scene) authentically/convincingly reproduce studio artifice and work, pastiche-wise, precisely as must have been intended. Cinema doesn’t get more essential than this, and I’ve never seen better presentations of either film. —A+

 Animal House (Universal)

A different kind of essential cinema, to be sure, but in a certain sense not that different. Among other things, this is a genuinely impolite and impolitic movie; its rather authentic-seeming mean-spiritedness (only slightly ameliorated by the cutesy “where-they-are-now” coda—which in itself isn’t all that cutesy in the larger scheme of such things) puts the sentimentality of most contemporary “edgy” comedies in what they call bold relief. Never the most visually beautiful of motion picture experience, it looks just fine here, although on certain of the picture settings of my new plasma display, the flesh tones look a little flushed. Hard to say if this is a function of the transfer or actually has to do with the cinematography/film stock but I’d actually guess the latter. This doesn’t look like it’s been screwed-around with digitally all that much. Nifty. —A

Battle Beyond The Stars (Shout Factory)

This rendering of Roger Corman’s biggest-budgeted production is both handsome and dinky! The cheap entertainment value extends to the cheesy effects and the 1980 haircuts and so much more. Even if you’re not a student of Corman practices, the solid, Seven-Samurai-derived story and snappy direction make this good popcorny fare, and the materials are clean and very nicely digitized. The set and lighting design presents an object lesson in how blue and green gels make everything look cooler and more “futuristic,” and these refracted hues come across with no video noise or nothing. The Shout! Factory Blus of the “Roger Corman Presents” series are, admittedly, a bit on the pricey side, but with respect to quality they do deliver. You’re gonna see more and more of this as Blu-ray grows even more long-tail in its market appeal, alas. —A

Beauty and the Beast (Criterion)

One of the reasons Criterion are the good guys of home video is their habit of updating already-released editions of their library when better materials/transfers arise. This Blu-ray represents the company’s third version of Cocteau’s ever-amazing 1946 picture, as exemplary and transportive and haunting a filmed fairy tale as ever was, and it is entirely remarkable and beautiful. It is, for all intents and purposes, merely a high-def upgrade of the second edition that was released in standard def in 2003, but the boost in detail is noticeable, and regardless of what you think of the Phillip Glass opera offered as an alternate soundtrack (it was written to sync up to the film, and FYI, I quite enjoy it), the 5.1 surround on that puppy is just exquisite. Overall, beautiful, a really wonderful way to experience a picture that just never gets old. —A+

The Blues Brothers (Universal)

Animal House did so well that Universal appears to have given director John Landis the key to the studio, or at least its garage, to concoct this
low modernist ode slapstick car chases and classic R&B.  Again, the genuine rudeness of much of the comedy is kind of bracing. As for the Blu-ray quality, it’s solid. As with Animal House, we have some noticeably flush flesh tones, in this case it seems a combination of the cinematography, display settings, and somewhat more noticeable digital manipulation than on the Animal House DVD. Like fried ice cream, digital manipulation is a reality, and it’s not going away, so we might as well meet it on its own terms. I didn’t find it all that noticeable or egregious in terms of “viewing experience” here, so if you’re a fan of the film this is a buy-with-relative-confidence call. —A

Boudu Saved From Drowning (Park Circus U.K. import, Region B locked)

Renoir in high-def is a potential home-vid trend I can totally get behind. This version of his 1932 celebration of being a filthy slob (okay, not really…okay, kind of…) is compelling evidence in support of such a thing.  Pictures such as this and 1935’s Toni are why some will insist that Renoir was the father of what many call neo-realism, as well as everything else good in cinema. Anticipating both Rossellini and Godard (and many others, but bear with me here; these are capsule reviews), he took the camera out of the studio and into the streets, the better to capture “real” life and its attendant behaviors (not just human behaviors, either; the way Renoir holds a shot of Boudu’s dog at the water in the Bois is, as you’ll see, an emblem of his genius.) The views of Paris don’t just have a documentary vividness here; they’re simply gorgeous. In fact the outdoor sequences are sharper than the soundstage bound ones in many cases; you get a little more diffusion/softness in the interior scenes, particularly in the medium close-ups. In any event, while skimpy on the extras (that is, there's a trailer), this is as a whole a really special disc. —A

Buster Keaton: The Short Films Collection (Kino Lorber)

Nifty. This presents 19 solo shorts by il miglior fabro, not just a performer of genius but as great and crucial a director as Griffith or Eisenstein or Feiullade or Godard. In what I believe to be a first, four of them, all personal favorites (including “The High Sign”) are included in both untampered-with (relatively) and digitally enhanced versions, which latter have noise reduction tech addressing all manner of scratches and other kinds of damage. Very considerate, I think, and honestly the digital cleanup on the enhanced versions makes for a cleaner viewing without ruining the look of the silent-era material. As for the rest…well, these are Keaton shorts. Even without the generous and pleasurable supplements, there’d be no excuse not to own ‘em. —A+

 Conan the Barbarian/Conan The Destroyer (Universal)

Early on in the first Conan title, I got a little worried at the stark contrast of rear projection and foregrounded characters in a scene; “Yeesh,” thought I, “is this gonna be a botch in the tradition of Uni’s ungodly Out of Africa?” But no—that’s kinda how it looked in the movie, I surmised, because the rest of John Milius’s Robert E. Howard/Marvel Comics adaptation—which looks as stately-paced by comparison to today’s “comic book” pictures as a, um, Tarkovsky film—has a lot of what they call “good grain” and doesn’t come off as having been digitally cleaned up to death. As a film it turns out on revisiting to be pretty damn satisfying in its anachronistic way, although the question “Why is that snake wearing a hat,” asked by my wife as she passed by the set at a crucial point in the film, remains troubling. Primo cheese for sure, and the subsequent Destroyer is cheesier still, its initial effect of Valeria in flames a rather charming relic of the unconvincing appeal of the now more or less optical effect. In some respects Destroyer is even more visually “impressive” than Barbarian but for sure it’s also an even goofier movie. Both of these will more than satisfy any high-def Vintage Arnold jones you’ve been nursing. —A

Cul de Sac (Criterion)

 “A film to reflect our taste at the time,” director Roman Polanski says (in an interview included as a supplement here) of his 1966 followup to the staggering Repulsion. It’s a sufficiently unyielding enterprise that some might argue that the verb in that sentence ought to be changed to “indulge” for accuracy’s sake. In many respects this deceptively austere exercise in cinematic acrobatics is a tough Beckettian sit, but in the right cranky mood it’s a tonic, and this is an absolutely gorgeous rendition, the oft sickly gray scale of Gilbert Taylor’s cinematography getting a genuinely staggering presentation. Extras are sparse but well put-together and well presented. A must for Polanski junkies—I’m one—and a calculated gamble for everyone else. Even so, I give it an…—A+

 Deep End (BFI U.K. import, Region B locked)

Long-buried films such as Jerzy Skolimowski’s 1967 1970 British production acquire such an underground reputation during the period when they’re incredibly difficult to see that they more often than not disappoint when they’re finally made accessible. This, I am delighted to report, is not even close to the case here. Deep End still packs a wallop; assuredly creepy and funny from the very beginning, with Diana Dors’ cra-zay-zy paean to footballer Georgie Best likely to be the convincer for you if you’re not immediately sucked in. London doesn’t “swing” in this movie; it roils with sexual tension and dribbles and jerks with sexual repression and aggression. One senses that it had a pronounced influence on Taxi Driver, and a less pronounced but very real influence on Rushmore. And it looks incredible, which is another thing about such long-buried pictures; it’s also kind of amazing when they turn up looking so great. Great extras, too.— A+

 The Egyptian (Twilight Time)

In the exciting tradition of MICHAEL CURTIZ IN WIDESCREEN, only it’s not that exciting a tradition, because poor Mr. C. didn’t quite figure how to adapt his ever-engaging baroque visual styles to Cinemascope dimensions. Dave Kehr detailed the ways in which the format kind of hogtied Curtiz in his typically perceptive and acute review of this pricey disc. And as much as his points are well-taken, I still find this to be a fascinating film visually, particularly in the way Curtiz falls back on DeMillean tableaux of Eisensteinean human triptychs when he’s stuck for a composition. And every now and again, particularly when there’s a reflective surface to be seen, a hint of the old-style Curtiz magic makes itself known. As for the disc itself, it’s the first Blu-ray venture for Twilight Time, a slightly Olive-esque concern making disc space for titles that Fox can’t be bothered to put out itself. Apparently the studio itself was responsible for the high-def master of this, and commissioned the excellent commentary from James Ursini and Alain Silver. In any event the picture is beautiful but also kinda soft in parts, hard to tell if it’s the transfer or having to do with early Cinemascope and lens issues. One senses the transfer could have been a bit better, but this is NOT a fake high-def rendition. The colors are VERY strong throughout, and they’re like half the movie. I’m looking forward to revisiting this peculiar melodrama as the weather gets cooler; it’s that kind of movie comfort food. —A

High and Low (Criterion)

Kurosawa in widescreen black and white (and, in this case, a couple of plumes of pink smoke) is always a kick in the head. This high-def upgrade of a Criterion classic looks real nice and crisp, displays good grain. This epic crime drama starring Toshiro Mifune as a bullheaded shoe manufacturer dealing with a kidnapping underscored for me, on this rewatching, that very often Kurosawa’s signal strength as a filmmaker is his LACK of subtlety (as in the on-the-nose bit early on where Mifune’s character instructs a couple of kids on how to properly play cowboy) combined with an innate security in just how far he can push the emotion or sentiment or even sentimentality (although this is absolutely one of his least sentimental pictures) of  given scene. In this respect he’s very CLASSICAL Hollywood (Ford, McCarey, etc.). He’s also not afraid to be epic…although it’s worth noting that for all intents and purposes this film doesn’t leave its first set for nearly an hour; anyway, who else then or now had the stones to do that? A very, very rich picture, in an exemplary edition. — A+

The Killing (Criterion)

Interesting how young Kubrick the precocious master technician embraced in 1956 the notions that were soon to be adopted by the somewhat more emotional nouvelle vague a few years down the road, particularly with respect to realism in location shooting and stuff. Not quite a noir, not quite a procedural, this magnificently intricate and brisk heist picture exhibits mordant daring in some of its themes—a first-time viewer was kind of blown away by the blatancy of Jay C. Flippen’s man-love for Sterling Hayden—and is also a great source of Lucien Ballard black-and-white shooting, which this disc gets like nobody’s business. Incredible. And incredible extras. The French television interview with Hayden is particularly incredible. And oh so sad. —A+

 Leon Morin, Priest (Criterion)

I wrote of the film in 2007: “Melville's shooting-on-the-fly methods, use of actual locations, and inventive but hardly stately visual style all influenced the Nouvelle Vague, and the Nouvelle Vague influenced him in turn, as 1962's Occupation-set Leon Morin, Pretre, shows. The freedom Godard and Truffaut and others insisted on seems to have emboldened Melville a bit in that here there's more of the liberty-taking he showed younger filmmakers. A scene of young children preparing for mass is done in a series of quick dissolves. The use of once-seemingly outmoded visual devices that were joyously revived by the New Wavers is more pronounced, e.g. the optical wipe; some scenes last mere seconds; and so on. That said, this is one of Melville's quietest and most dialogue-heavy films, consisting largely of conversations between the title priest and a young atheist widow (Emmanuelle Riva, of Hiroshima mon Amour) about the nature of God and faith. Leon Morin is not the kind of Father today's Vatican would approve, what with his talk of "a larger Church" than the Catholic one. Melville's casting of Jean-Paul Belmondo in the title role was a piece of counterintuitive genius; having established himself as a supremely ironical performer in Godard's A Bout de Souffle, here he is asked to portray a paragon of sincerity. Belmondo's seemingly innate amiability enables him to do so without coming off in the slightest bit pompous. It's a remarkable performance.” If that sells you on the film—and I hope it does, because as “uncharacteristic” a Melville work as it could seem to some on the surface, it’s entirely key to the rest of his work—then this is the edition to see it in. —A+

Life During Wartime (Criterion)

Yikes! Full digital from camera to intermediary to filming out back to disc (compressed of course), so whatcha want? It is a beautiful picture that also gives you the sense of what we’re giving up by going fully digital—the PHYSICAL quality of it. It’s almost like there’s a layer MISSING. It isn’t so  much the lack of scratches, but the lack of the possibility of scratches. It’s quite interesting and a little disquieting. As for the content, I liked, and dealt with it here. —A

Monamour (Cult Epics)

More softcore filth from the fine folks at Cult Epics. Ah, Tinto Brass; in manners “erotic,” he’s the honest man’s Michael Bay. I like the way he dollies in—no cheap zooms for him!—far further than to merely the crack of his lead actress’s butt. Tasteful. Hard to believe this was made in 2006, it plays EXACTLY like Paprika or whatever the hell the last Brass movie I looked at plays like…was it Cheeky!? WAS there even a Brass movie called Paprika?... Then again, what do I know, a lot of the Brass fans in the IMDB comments feel this is just a retread, and the newbies weren’t’ impressed either, to wit: “There was no erotic, no thriller and no plot at all, just a poor actress committed to an old mans [sic] chauvinistic fantasies.” . “It is another movie full of Brass obsessions like hungry voluptuous women, impatient to be sodomized, to be unfaithful, to go with everyone but not their husbands.” Boy you say that like there’s something wrong with it. In other news, prosthetic penises look more prosthetic in high def. And said lead actress, one Anna Jimskaia, IS pretty easy on the eyes. And the image quality is reasonably snazzy. But people who tolerate your Radley Metzger advocacy won’t look so kindly on this item, I guarantee you. —B

The Music Room (Criterion)

I’ll admit it—I’m so far behind on my Satyajit Ray knowledge that for me to beat my chest about how his work is criminally underrepresented on DVD would be almost disingenuous. Suffice it to say that I’m very happy this version of his 1958 film exists. It’s a wonderful picture. Materials were clearly in rough shape (check out the scratches in the opening sequence) Sometimes the roughness is such that this almost registers as a document of the film rather than the film itself (c.f. L’Age d’Or). But there’s incredible detail in the transfer, and as the damage subsides, the cinematic storytelling takes over. Speaking of Buñuel, the lighting often resembles that of some of Buñuel’s Mexican films. Ray’s shooting style here is very straightforward but not lacking in verve. An object lesson in both universality and cultural specificity, with extensive and illuminating extras. Can I say with confidence that it’s an excellent and engaging entry point into Ray’s world? I think so. —A+

Naked (Criterion)

These subtitles are helpful, aren’t they? Mike Leigh’s controversial 1993 film is in English, British English yet, but so variously clipped and slurred and elided and grogged that, yeah, the subs are nearly as essential as they are on The Harder They Come. Also: It’s entirely appropriate that every person and every décor here looks like shit. The grey walls. The characters’ flesh tones almost uniformly alcoholically flush.  Even the chicken chomped by Greg  Crutwell’s ultimate yuppie scum Jeremy is incredibly nasty looking. Never before has such an unstitnting devotion to delivering high-def ugliness been manifested with such unfailing integrity. In all other respects, e.g. supplements, a repro of the standard def edition. So it gets an A rather than an A+ on account of being not quite such an event. —A

The Romantic Englishwoman (Kino Lorber)

A really scintillating Joseph Losey ‘70s picture, a followup of sorts to the sublime The Go-Between but altogether more odd and idiosyncratic and not quite as perfectly turned...and all the more intriguing for that. Another obscure item that kind of knocks you out of the box with its picture quality right off; Gerry Fisher, who also lensed Go-Between, shoots here, and his work with reflective surfaces at the very beginning testifies to a near-casual mastery. The aspect ratio here is 1.66,not 1.85 as is claimed on the box. And as is specified on the IMDB tech page. But I have to say it looks entirely fine and proper in 1.66, which as we know was maybe not an entirely uncommon ratio in Europe at the time and…aaaiieee. No, seriously, it looks fine and proper and is a Losey freak’s dream acquisition, or one of them.—A

The Sacrifice (Kino Lorber)

Beautiful…just the very first three shots, that is, the film’s first fifteen minutes…it’s just wonderful the way the opening shot starts out so gray and overcast and as man and boy walk home from the water’s edge the colors of even their clothing bloom and blossom.  I didn’t find the slight edge enhancement as distracting as the reviewer at DVD Beaver did, to be honest. The soundtrack is also aces,  I think,  very nuanced and tricky, telling so very much of this odd story in and of itself. What I DID notice very much this time around was the post-sync dialogue,, particularly in the case of British actress Susan Fleetwood, who I can now see is saying her lines in English. As Tarkovsky in high-def goes, it’s the second such item, and in terms of quality I’d say it’s a relatively close second to Criterion’s great Solaris. —A

Sands of the Kalihari (Olive)

Very nice, the best-looking Olive Blu-ray I’ve seen, I think, and completely bereft of the soundtrack modulation issues that plagued the two Olive Blus I reviewed in July. Cy Endfield’s nasty and tense 1965 plane-crash-survival potboiler-with-brains is tense and terse and engrossing enough to have earned its cult. ”A brutal critique of American self-interest in a Third World context,” Jonathan Rosenbaum posits; also, I might add, the first and last time Stuart Whitman was asked to represent American self-interest.  It never looks anything less than solid, and the twilight shots of wherever it is the charter plane that’s gonna crash is taking off from are just gorgeous. The swarm of locusts looks laughably phony, but the "actual" smashing locusts and their inner essences and guano are effectively gross. As are the primates, both the talking and screeching varieties.—A

The current cinema, "never gonna do it without the fez on" edition

Jason Sudeikis and Tyler Labine show you more than you might want to see in the unfortunately limp sex comedy I review for MSN Movies today. 

The current cinema, "Debt" management edition

Above, Sam "I can SO act" Worthington and Jessica Chastain, of whom I've grown fond strictly on account of the fact that the clubbish logrolling Wesley Morris has deigned to feign being so-over-her-already on Twitter (just in case you thought I didn't have perfectly solid rationales for my likes and dislikes) in John Madden's so-so The Debt, a workmanlike but uninspired Thriller With A Conscience and a Labor-Day-Weekend opener to suggest that, movie-wise, this September might be the Merry Month of Meh. Actually, some expectedly good stuff and some surprisingly good stuff is in store. But not just yet, and I won't be reviewing all of it.  In the meantime, there's this John Madden remake of an Israeli film I'm kind of interested in seeing now, for reasons I go into in my review for MSN Movies. 

The current cinema

You gotta hand it to the French—even when they're being crassly commercial they've got taste. Colombiana, an image from which is above, not only knows from Danger: Diabolik, obviously, but it's even got a John Martyn song on the soundtrack. Classy. I enjoyed it, as my review for MSN Movies also attests; and I didn't much mind Our Idiot Brother, which I also review. 

Squarer for Maud

I've only just now taken a look at Maud Newton's August 19 New York Times Magazine "Riff" (and really, I'm beginning to get the idea that his newish section is being conceived and executed for the sole purpose of royally pissing me off on a consistent basis)on a certain David Foster Wallace stylistic tic, and while it certainly irritates me on a personal level, and I certainly find its "Let's All Write Very Sincerely From Hereon In And Then We'll Have World Peace" conclusion exceptionally disingenuous, I did perk up a little at a particular citation, where Newton notes, "[a]n icon of porn publishing described in the essay 'Big Red Son,' for example is 'hard not to sort of almost actually like.'" Here Newton sees prevarication and self-aggrandizement. (For me, well, self-aggrandizement, thy name is "Riffs" in The New York Times Magazine.) But when Jim Meigs and I first saw that passage in manuscript form in 1998, we saw something wholly other. I wrote about it in a sort-of memoir that I've since abandoned, but thought I'd share it with you, not just for the hell of it, or as a rejoinder, but also as an excuse to name one of my posts after a National Health song. Enjoy: 

There’s a sentence in “Big Red Son,” the essay David Foster Wallace wrote about the 1998 Adult Video News Awards for Premiere under the dual pseudonyms Willem de Groot and Matt Rundlet, that Jim Meigs and I repeatedly marveled over while the piece was still in manuscript. It derives from his depiction of one-time Screw magazine editor and publisher Al Goldstein at the awards ceremony: “He drinks in the applause and loves it and is hard not to sort of almost actually like.” Where a more proper, or conventional, or dare I say banal, writer would have most likely come up with one modifier for “like” and stuck with it, Wallace whips out three: “sort of,” “almost,” and “actually.” Each one, as we see, serves a different function, or I should say, implies a different state of mind, and each state is competing with the other. By the point in the essay at which the description of Goldstein arrives, the reader ought to have sussed out that Wallace has some very substantial problems with both pornography and the industry that produces it. But he’s also been bracingly honest about the attraction that walks hand in hand with his repulsion, and when he’s not going at his subject with something resembling all-out disgust (as in the passages about Paul Little, a.k.a. Max Hardcore), there’s a bracing and troubled honesty at work here, as in all of Wallace’s essayistic work, a desire to get at moral truth without being, well, moralistic; and a constant ambivalence. This of course exists in his fiction as well, but some would argue that it’s most accessible in his sort-of journalism. In any event, to say that Al Goldstein is “hard not to sort of almost actually like” for that reason struck Jim and I as quintessentially Wallacean.

The rock band Pere Ubu, in its early days, had a synthesizer player named Allen Ravenstine who played a very old-school model of the instrument, an EML synth that worked with patch cords instead of dials or buttons. And Ravenstine used it to make any number of pinging, buzzy, often static-filled noises. I don’t remember if this was an observation of a critic or something that someone in Ubu, Ravenstine himself maybe, said in an interview, but in likening each one of the band’s instruments to parts of the human body, the buzzing synth was said to represent the brain, in that it created a sort of un-shut-offable noise that, while seeming not to make sense on the surface, actually connoted a genuine function. In Wallace’s prose, the device of using three modifiers where one might have “done” achieved something similar: it showed the progress, or at least the movement, of an extremely active and searching mind, its reluctance to nail down conclusions even as it sought resolution. It codified, or maybe I should just say represented, a species of self-consciousness that people of Wallace’s and my generation (Wallace was born two and a half years after myself) believed, for better or worse, to be unique to us. 

The trouble with movie stars

I remember the thought occurring to me well into a screening of, believe it or not, Milos Forman's 2006 Goya's Ghosts. I was thinking, this is Forman's most interesting movie in quite a while, it's not working entirely, but he's making some bold choices, and it's going to get lambasted, and mainly because of Natalie Portman. It wasn't that she was bad, it was just that she was so...Natalie Portman that her character had trouble registering, and her character was the real key to the film. And I thought, I wonder how this film will play in 15 or twenty years, when Natalie Portman's Portman-ness isn't quite so nearly palpable in the zeitgeist. Will the picture be able to make itself felt more truly by then?

I recall these thoughts as internet film writers the world over go slightly batty tripping over themselves to agree with an individual who they'd characterize as either full of it or an insensitive boor 99 percent of the rest of the time. I refer, of course, to Sean Penn, who tried to express to the French publication Le Figaro his misgivings about Terrence Malick's recent The Tree of Life without seeming peevish or that he was speaking altogether from wounded vanity or ego (there is a slight distinction between the two). I refer you to Richard Brody's ruminations on the statement, as Richard's post is both admirably civil and sufficiently eccentric to have earned the impatient dismissal of the renowned esthete John Nolte.

Whether you sympathize with Penn or not, there is the fact that with both audiences and critics, the announcement of Sean Penn's presence in a movie brings with it an expectation that Penn will not only appear in a large portion of the film, but that he will do things in it other than sit or stand around looking deeply perturbed. That he will perform Feats of Acting that audiences and critics have come to expect from hi, whether they be chameleonic or merely steeped in emotional intensity. Penn's is the movie star iconography of the master thespian, and while Malick's film does many things, it does not honor Penn's iconography, at least not in any conventional way. 

By contrast, Mike Nichols' 1965 film adaptation of Edward Albee's sensational play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? isn't just that, or maybe even that, at all; it's also or primarily a film about MOVIE STARS acting in an adaptation of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Specifically, about Elizabeth Taylor throwing away everything that makes her "Elizabeth Taylor" and still being Elizabeth Taylor anyway. How aware was Mike Nichols of this? Very aware, I'd say; aware enough so that almost 40 years later his film adaptation of Patrick Mawber's sensational play Closer was a film about Julia Roberts talking really, really dirty. People who complain about Judy Garland having been too old to play Esther Blodgett in Cukor's 1954 A Star is Born are missing the point in twelve different ways, as the film is about NOTHING BUT Judy Garland playing Esther Blodgett, everyone else's impeccable contributions notwithstanding. Just as North By Northwest is Hitchcock making the ultimate Cary Grant film by Hitchcock. And so on. 

Ignore star iconography at your film's peril, as Joseph Losey learned with his almost impossibly muddled 1968 Secret Ceremony, in which he had La Liz and Mia Farrow enact proto-ur-Lynchian encounters with no regard for the extradiegetic resonances of the screen personalities, treating them as mere performers. Actually, Losey didn't learn, not right away at least, as he next made the ineffable Boom! with Liz and Dick entirely in sub-surreal earnest. 

As for Malick, in his latter-day films he doesn't so much ignore star iconography as he behaves as if it doesn't exist. And again, there is a slight distinction between the two. It's clear that he casts for presence, and it's pretty clear in Tree of Life that he wanted what Sean Penn's got. He just wants it differently. Which perhaps inevitably (or is that so?) creates a disjoint with an audience conditioned to expect, or want, a certain Penn-ness. Something not dissimilar is in effect with Malick's ostensible comeback film, 1998's The Thin Red Line, which was so star-studded, and within which certain of the stars made appearances much more fleeting than one would expect from such names within the context of a "star studded" film. Hence, the first viewing of the picture one might ostensibly spending an inordinate amount of time noting, "There's Travolta! There's Clooney!" and so on. It's only with several viewings that one can break through that. Just as it might take several viewings of Tree of Life to fully get past the circumstances of Penn's manifestation in the film. Add to this the fact that Milick arguably needs these names in order to get his films made, and that talents of Penn's caliber are falling over themselves to work with Malick, and this particular conundrum gets knottier still. 

You know nothing of my work

Mahalia Jackson, Imitation of Life, Douglas Sirk, 1959

I've said my piece about The Help, and I'm satisfied with it, and feel no little need to revisit my case in the face of the film's defenders. I have noted that some of the film's defenders have been a tad excitable in a potentially, um, opportunistic fashion, and frankly I'm not surprised that whoever wrote the headline for the John McWhorter piece about the film (and for all I know it could have been McWhorter himself) went there and wrote "The Help Isn't Racist. Its Critics Are." I don't know why the writer didn't just drop the other shoe and add , "And Should Be Lynched." But whatever. This is the sort of agit-contrarianism that The New Republic has been specializing in for decades, and could actually teach Slate a thing or two about, but whatever. Still. As one of my fellow cinecrophiles pointed out to me in suppressed-sputtering outrage, the piece's author, John McWhorter, warming up to his impassioned defense, casually appears to slander a movie much beloved of our ilk early on, to wit: "This is a 'feel-good movie for a cowardly nation'? How could it be that this film, hardly The Sorrow and the Pity but honest and thoroughly affecting, is being treated like a remake of Imitation of Life?" Now forgetting the question begged concerning just how McWhorter apprehends the Marcel Ophuls film, just what is he getting at about a "remake" of Imitation of Life? Is he not aware of the fact that two films were made of Fannie Hurst's book Imitation of Life in the first place? Is he talking about the 1934 John M. Stahl version being remade, or the 1959 Douglas Sirk film being remade? Does he even have any idea of what he's talking about at all? (We'll need a bit of time to get to that last question.)

I'm gonna take a wild guess and say that McWhorter means the 1959 film, and, further, that the 1959 film is the only one McWhorter knows exists. Which is kind of weird, because THAT film is pretty largely beloved of a lot of people who've seen a lot of films, some of whom are practicing professional film critics who didn't particularly like The Help. But I don't think McWhorter feels that a remake of that film would upset critics because it would desecrate a sacred high modernist text. I think he's saying that the film is a genuine example of the condescension certain critics complain about with respect to The Help. And this is a staggering charge, because the film is, as a matter of fact, one of the most trenchant, ironical, and moving films about racism ever made, and a film that pays more real respect to its African-American characters, and to African-American culture, than any made in Hollywood up to that time, and most made in Hollywood since. AND, one doesn't really have to look all that far underneath its glossy Ross-Hunter-produced surfaces to see that; in fact the surfaces are entirely functional within Sirk's scheme. That is to say, its high modernist scheme is (potentially) easily discernable even to those who claim to deplore, God forgive me for using the term, "cultural vegetables."

So what's McWhorter on about? Well, maybe we should go back to The Sorrow and the Pity, a film made by the son of a Sirk contemporary, an epic, complex, also highly ironical work that is not asking the viewer to commend it on grounds of "honesty" or being "affecting." And here we come back to the question of whether McWhorter, not to put it vulgarly or anything, has any idea of what the fuck he's talking about. Well, apparently he knows a bit about linguistics, he's written a bunch of books about linguistics and race, and he's a contributing editor at The New Republic. And he apparently believes that these credentials confer upon him the privilege that so many multi-degree-laden brilliant people have, the privilege of not taking film seriously enough to actually go to the trouble of picking actual apropos examples for your little parallel constructions, of just arbitrarily picking one film from Column A of the "serious" cinematic canon (and a documentary, at that) and the other film from Column B of what you think are schlocky movie melodramas featuring a black maid. Well, sorry, John McWhorter, that won't do. But it also won't make any difference to say it won't do, because...well, I don't wanna go off on a rant. (But if I did want to go off on a rant, it would have something to do with how fucked our cultural discourse is, and how it's just getting/gonna get worse...)

And if you still need convincing that, expertise in linguistics and multiple degrees aside, McWhorter's pretty much full of shit, here's the kicker to his piece: "The Help’s director and producer Tate Taylor, white, grew up with a black maid. She’s still alive, and in the film as the first of the maids after Minny to testify for Skeeter. For the record, Tate brought her to the premiere of the film. She loved it." Oh, well in that case, forget anybody said anything. 

Raoul Ruiz, 1941-2011

From Les trois couronnes du matelot, 1983

I have made my decision. There is something odd about writing a story in the past tense even though it has yet to take place. I suppose, the present tense would be better, and easier. I had started by saying: Silver's men gather on board the ship in a cabin near the galley. The sea is visible. Birds circle overhead, above the ship, a sign that the location must be quite close. The boy makes his way towards us, crossing the deck without appearing to notice us, though he knows I must be there. He vanishes from sight. Almost immediately, we see him in the canteen. He's hungry. He discovers the apple-barrel. A scout signals to Silver's men. One of them says, unnaturally loud, in a kind of theatrical way: "Oh no, we can't. We can't kill him." To which another replies: "Oh yes we can." And so on.

—Raoul Ruiz, In Pursuit of Treasure Island, 2008

Bite me, it's the current cinema.

So this remake of Fright Night turns out to be kind of a pisser; who'd uh thunk it? Colin Farrell's having a time, as is David Tennant; Anton Yelchin's now poised to take all the good troubled-post-adolescent roles Jesse Eisenberg's getting too old for; Imogen Poots, nice kid. And I also dug the gore and the shamelessly shameless 3D stuff. I didn't wanna get too inside baseball about it in my review for MSN Movies, but I credit this pleasant surprise largely to exec producer Michael DeLuca, who, as a fellow crit observed on the way out, has "good quality control." Fun. Less fun is that One Day number, considered here. 

"Mise-en-scene," what does it mean?

Raymond Burr takes it and doesn't like it from Robert Ryan, as Rock Hudson looks on in brotherly admiration, Horizons West, Budd Boetticher, 1952

Cahiers: For ten years Cahiers said that mise en scene existed. Now one has to say the opposite instead.

Godard: Yes, it's true. It doesn't exist. We were wrong. 

—"Let's Talk About Pierrot," Cahiers du Cinema 171, October 1965, reprinted in Godard by Godard, edited and translated by Tom Milne, 1972

As per Wikipedia, "mise-en-scene has been called 'film criticism's "grand undefined term"'" and while it's arguable that its literal French definition denotes something reasonably specific, over the years the term has become a kind of amorphous shorthand pertaining to visual language and directors we like. I recall a friend who went to NYU film school in the early '80s (one of her classmates was future video director and Two Lovers co-screenwriter Ric Menello) telling me about a faux-catechism that circulated casually among the students: "Who is [director X]?" "[Director X] is an auteur." "Why is [director x] an auteur?" "Because he has mise-en-scene." And there you had it. The non-specificity with which the term has tended to get thrown around enabled David Kamp and Lawrence Levi to make some good-natured sport of cinephiles in their book-length jape The Film Snob's Dictionary. And yet, it persists, kinda sorta, in part because, to borrow a notion Christy Lemire recently put forward w/r/t Apichatpong Weerasethakul, it's fun to say!

Yesterday I trekked over to the Film Forum to catch a double bill of early '50s Universal programmers directed by Budd Boetticher and starring Robert Ryan, and it did not begin auspiciously. The print of the first picture on the bill, 1952's Horizons West, while visually better than okay, had a completely fucked up soundtrack. What came out of the speakers were a lot of optical track artifact, almost nothing in terms of sound effects and music, and dialogue so thoroughly muffled and scratchy that even when paying very close aural attention, it was largely undecodable.

This state of affairs produced considerable disapprobation on the audience's part. The film was stopped, equipment was adjusted, and the film was started again; same bad result. This is a rarely screened picture and a lot of the New York cinephile usual suspects who are sometimes cited as lacking in social and hygienic graces were becoming discomfitingly restless; eventually the film was stopped again, management deigned to cancel the screening and substitute The Naked Spur in the double feature...and a few in the audience, myself included, suggested that since the immediate alternative would have been a dark theater for about an hour, why not complete the screening of the print, inaudible sound notwithstanding? "It'll be pure mise-en-scene," I remarked to a critic acquaintance who was sitting behind me. "It's not as if we're watching this for the dialogue," he noted. (The script and story were by Louis Stevens, a stalwart whose filmography dates back to the '20s.)

Indeed not. The lack of sound compelled, maybe even forced, us to watch the film with a different sort of concentration; to focus on what the visuals were telling us, shot by shot. The story is of a couple of brothers, Ryan and Rock Hudson, coming home to Austin, Texas after Civil War defeat, and how Ryan turns ruthless rustler and land-grabbed and brother Hudson is eventually forced into a position to bring his older brother to justice. Now Horizons West is not particularly noteworthy in the respects that mise-en-scene originalists might value; it was a low budget studio B-picture made using the resources available to said studio. The cinematography was by Charles P. Boyle, then in the middle of a multi-year run at Universal; he'd soon be tapped by Disney to shoot the Davy Crockett pictures. The set design...well, not to put too fine a point on it, but what Variety would call the tech credits are all executed at a level of professionalism that was a point of pride with name studio product. As for what Boetticher was bringing to the table, this picture was one of a bunch he made in the early '50s after his 1951 passion project Bullfighter and the Lady and it's kind of clear that he was doing these jobs as jobs but at the same time at least trying to enjoy himself a little. As such, the film plays like an exercise in solid, unobtrusive directorial craft. "A very quiet, elemental camera," was how Andrew Sarris described the Boetticher stylistic signature, hastening to add "elemental but not elementary." In Horizons West, it's both elemental and elementary. The pacing and alternation of a series of camera setups that's limited by constraints of time and budget is what we might call textbook excellence. The relationships between the characters is instantly established via the way they're placed in medium establishing shots, and as a given scene progresses, a simple cut to a tighter shot, combined with the acting (Ryan's squint on horseback, along with his dusty gray uniform, convey a not-poignant but rather cynical sense of postwar disillusionment, and comes to define his character) pushes those relationships and the action further. A quite beautiful example comes in a poker game that Ryan's character joins with Raymond Burr, playing a ruthless cattle baron whom Ryan eventually turns the tables on. The dealing and raising is shown via a couple of angles around the table; then, as Julie Adams, playing Burr's wife and, natch, a frustrating love object of Ryan's, walks in to the scene the camera settles on a simple straight-ahead medium shot of the three characters. And then something is said that slightly provokes Burr. The next setup is of a medium close-up of Burr, looking irritated. I infer that in shooting this scene, Boetticher knew that he had a limited number of setups he could execute, and in the approach to the terminus to the scene, every setup had to count. And so, while the editors cut away once or twice from the medium closeup of Burr back to the "master," Boetticher and Burr pack a lot of "action" into that medium closeup, including Burr giving a menacing squeeze of Adams' arm. 

So it goes for the rest of the picture. There's a bit of visual poetry when Ryan first infiltrates the camp of dissolute war veterans that he's going to turn into his gang, a descent-to-hell resonance that's extremely pleasing...but for the most part, it's clarity and momentum and the necessary information placed in the correct space with little sense of fuss or strain. Which could, in a sense, be mise-en-scene.

UPDATE: In comments, I am chastised (not, thankfully, in the manner suggested by Emile Meyer's Lt. Kello in Sweet Smell of Success) by a concerned soul for not spelling the term under consideration properly. Honest, officer, I never could figure out how to work the accent grave on my Mac keyboard, try as I might. But this morning, before seven a.m., through dedicated research and application, I finally cracked it, and so, comme ça: mise-en-scène! And now, without hyphens: mise en scène! Unitalicized: mise en scène! And while I'm at it, Buñuel!