Category: (random lists)

Days of Heaven (1978)

Last summer I tried to watch The Thin Red Line. I didn’t get too far. All of the huge name actors showing up throughout reminded me too much of It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t what Terrence Malick was going for. (Isn’t Phil Silvers in the Thin Red Line for a minute?)

The New World, well, Colin Farrell insured that I’d stay away from that one. But I was really struck by the cinematography of the Assassination of Jesse James, which of course got compared – poorly often – to Malick, though I thought the shots there were quite beautiful.

So, heartened by its 90 minute running time, I picked up the new Criterion edition of Days of Heaven. Anyone seen this recently? It’s really an impressive piece of work. The cinematography, of course, but also Sam Shepard’s performance – just the way his face looked throughout – was wonderful. Richard Gere, alas, looked like Richard Gere. Usually movies in the 1970s had the decency to cast actors who didn’t look like freaking models from the pages of Vogue. Except for Gere. He looks like the Fonz when he’s supposed to be working in a filthy Chicago factory.
Continue reading Days of Heaven (1978)

There Will Be Blood

Wow. I can honestly say I’ve never seen anything like it. Sure, there are echoes of Griffith, Welles, Wyler, Huston, Kubrick, Malick, and Coppola but There Will Be Blood is its own beast—a remarkably assured, unpretentious, muscular work of American filmmaking (I’ll compare it right now to Citizen Kane, The Godfather, Part II and Raging Bull). Anderson tells an epic narrative of power and providence, fathers and sons, religion and commerce, sin and hypocrisy; and he is assisted by a towering, career-defining performance from Daniel Day Lewis. Lewis is rail-thin, his shoulders hunched forward, his body askew and slightly out of balance; nevertheless, his Daniel Plainview is a determined, singularly-obsessed yet tortured maverick of a character, and Lewis fills the screen with a searing, charismatic, misanthropic intensity. He is equally matched by Paul Dano who mesmerizes as the evangelical preacher who won’t back down as well as this preturnaturally astute child actor, Dillon Freasier, who plays Plainview’s son H.W. Jonny Greenwood’s score punctuates Robert Elswit’s hardscrabbled images with scraping discordant notes. I can’t think of a thing I would want changed and can’t wait to see it again. Run, don’t walk.

the center of the world (molly parker)

i met luminous canadian actress molly parker, who plays a main character in deadwood and may be known to some of you through that show, in marion bridge, an equally luminous, if painful, 2003 canadian drama of family, abuse, and endurance. since i found molly parker stunning — she is, yes, beautiful, but she’s also an actress who can convey a whole depth of feelings with just the way she looks — i went looking for other films of hers and saw last night wayne wang’s 2001 leaving-las-vegas-remake(of sorts) the center of the world, based on a story by wang, miranda july, paul auster, and siri hustvedt. Continue reading the center of the world (molly parker)

A Woman Under the Influence (1974) / Cassavetes / Peter Falk

We talked a while back about the remarkable movie Keane, and a couple questions were brought up concerning depictions of mental illness on film that don’t collapse into the redemption-by-love / Sally-Field-TV-movie stereotypes.

We had just finished watching Return of the Secaucus 7 and were talking about filmmakers who self-financed their work through acting and writing for other people’s movies. So we decided to watch a few Cassavetes films.

This is a tough one to start with. Continue reading A Woman Under the Influence (1974) / Cassavetes / Peter Falk

You shitty, shitty, shit-faced Danes.

Saw two films with ambitions to reframe the satire of corporate mindsets, one of which fell apart (or maybe never really cohered at all), the other of which I loved.

Severance sends a group of corporate-office types out for some team-building in the backwoods of Hungary, then sics some rejects from Hostel at ’em. The film’s set-up–and its snarky title–gave me high hopes, as it promised to be a scary slasher flick and a caustic deconstruction of cutthroat capitalism. Alas, it was not to be. The humor is mild, rarely cutting; the cutting, too, is mild, and rarely interesting.

Meanwhile, Lars von Trier’s The Boss of it All seemed in reviews to be all trite concept (actor hired to impersonate a boss never seen by the office) and trite aestheticism (yet again, von Trier trots out some technical device meant to bang your head against the fourth wall–a camera that randomly shifts its framing of the shot, so that characters are seen from the bridge of their nose up, or four-fifths off to the left of our view). It was, however, a hoot–and smart, returning to old themes for this director (the purpose of art, the failures of sentiment, the hopeless inadequacy of realism) and this genre (the narcissism of corporate ambition, the false bonhomie of community, the acidity of greed) but working all kinds of lovely and–despite so much obviousness–many subtle, sly, often outstanding variations. It’s one of my favorite films of the year. Continue reading You shitty, shitty, shit-faced Danes.

I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry

Everytime I see the trailer for this film I feel the fury of righteous indignation (“that’s not how anybody should roll in anybody’s house” I scream to myself); I even want to boo the screen but I haven’t. Nathan Lee’s review in the Village Voice, however, is a hoot and a smart rejoinder to straight gentiles like myself. And Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor get credit for a rewrite, which is interesting, but probably not interesting enough for me to see the film. Still, Nathan Lee rocks!

Sam Fuller

I hate to shift gears, particularly since the thread on Xala is terrific, but I watched Sam Fuller’s The Big Red One last night and I was mightily impressed. I had seen this film long ago, on network television I think. Maybe it was USA or something, because I don’t recall much being deleted. But I couldn’t resist revisiting the film since it’s been “reconstructed”–that is to say, some 45 minutes have been restored. My recollection of the theatrical version is too dim to make any comments about the differences between it and the “reconstructed” version (for anyone who is interested in that, watch the bonus DVD, which has “before and after” scene comparisons). So let me instead just sing praises. Continue reading Sam Fuller

Joe Dante

I’m a fan. I’m not sure any of Dante’s movies completely, totally crystallize — they’re almost all burdened with strange mismatches of tone and the constraints of either too small a budget or too much studio interference . . . and yet I think his films are glorious, the kinds of things that managed to tiptoe along the line between the sincerely low-budget exploitational and the smartly self-referentially genre-invigorating. The Howling veers from its first twenty minutes’ feel of tawdry sex-drenched horror, turning a serial killer flick into a werewolf movie, but then it heads into the woods and becomes homage, parody, recreation of classic horror films in a cheesy 1970s world, complete with John Carradine, Slim Pickens, a terrifying transformation scene, and stray jokes about Thomas Wolfe. (John Sayles, who wrote this script and Dante’s prior estimable Jaws rip-off Piranha, plays a morgue attendant.) Continue reading Joe Dante