Criterion Sunday 647: On the Waterfront (1954)

Undoubtedly a classic film, one that had a lasting impact on the film industry and on screen acting. That of course may be its greatest legacy, but it’s a film suffused with the craft of generations of American filmmakers, feeling of a piece in its carefully-toned monochrome with the films noirs of the decade before, and has all the hallmarks of a prestige drama, bolstered by a fine line-up of character actors all doing some of their best work. It’s a pity then that it feels like an attack on the idea of unions—which is a problematic message to take from Elia Kazan—as these dockworkers are shown in impotent thrall to the power plays of the criminal gangs who could have been union-busting thugs but instead feel like the unions themselves. In a sense I suppose the physical world of work on the docks is just a backdrop to an internal struggle, but it boils down to: whether to go to the cops when you’ve witnessed a crime; whether thereby to save your eternal soul (a rather heavy-handed part nevertheless laid down with conviction by Karl Malden). Still, it has some classic speeches, some great scenes and some arresting cinematography.

CREDITS
Director Elia Kazan; Writers Budd Schulberg; Cinematographer Boris Kaufman Бори́с Ка́уфман; Starring Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Lee J. Cobb, Rod Steiger, Eva Marie Saint; Length 108 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Melbourne, Monday 22 May 2023 (and earlier on VHS at home, Wellington, September 2000).

Criterion Sunday 636: Heaven’s Gate (1980)

Given the extent to which this film was used as a byword for what defined Hollywood overreaching in the 1980s, it’s difficult not to lead with the naïve question of why it should have been that way. I can see that its bloated budget and runtime can’t have been great news for film executives, but the rest of us are just people watching a film, and from my point of view this is a lot better than the nasty mess that is The Deer Hunter. It does still feel messy, of course—it’s a sprawling story with a large number of characters—and the sound design feels particularly loud and bombastic (I couldn’t much make out what a lot of people were saying, but it feels weirdly close to Days of Heaven a few years earlier in that respect) but it’s a beautiful film with a real sense of place and a heart-breaking central narrative involving one of her (and our) generation’s finest actors, Isabelle Huppert. Perhaps I might assume that some of the bad feeling was towards the film’s loose, dismissive relationship towards the historical events it’s based on—it has almost no overlap with what really happened amongst the characters who share these names in the part of the world and the time when it was made—but in that case perhaps it is best seen as a sort of recreation of what might have happened, an alternative history that still honours the land and the aspirations of the people. Sure, it’s long, and I wouldn’t wish to try and rehabilitate the reputation of Michael Cimino himself, but this particular movie is a fine, epic story.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Michael Cimino; Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond; Starring Kris Kristofferson, Isabelle Huppert, Christopher Walken, Jeff Bridges, Sam Waterston, John Hurt; Length 216 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), Melbourne, Sunday 23 April 2023.

Criterion Sunday 623: Lonesome (1928)

This is technically not a silent film, but it’s also not not a silent film. In fact for much of its running time, it’s an exemplary advertisement for the freedom and artistic possibilities that the medium had reached in the year after the similar Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans came out, because when the brief segments with synchronised sound arrive they literally stop the film in its tracks. What is a city symphony for New York City, with loose impressionistic photography, heady use of lap dissolves and location shooting, suddenly becomes for about a minute each time a static and ugly dialogue scene with an unmoving camera and no real sense of place. Luckily, those scenes pass quickly, largely self-contained, leaving Lonesome to be a sweepingly romantic film about two people who find each other by chance, visit Coney Island, then are separated just as (un)fortuitously (by the cops no less, going above and beyond their duty of care), and that’s pretty much the plot of the thing. However, it’s a fairly swooning film that for all its slender plot still manages to carry you along.

CREDITS
Director Pál Fejős [as “Paul Fejos”]; Writers Edward T. Lowe Jr., Tom Reed and Mann Page; Cinematographer Gilbert Warrenton; Starring Barbara Kent, Glenn Tryon; Length 69 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Melbourne, Friday 10 March 2023.

Criterion Sunday 618: Gray’s Anatomy (1996)

This is a filmed version of one of Spalding Gray’s famous stage monologues, which tend to involve him sitting behind a desk with his notes in an otherwise unadorned black box space. Of course director Steven Soderbergh has done his best to make this format more visual, with his full bag of tricks, but the origins and format of the show are still fairly clear. This, then, is a film that’s primarily about words, which makes sense because its subject matter is the loss of vision. It incorporates little spliced-in interviews with random people on the subject of eye health, and as a fair warning to those who aren’t expecting it, those stories can get pretty gruesome (the release also includes footage from Gray’s actual eye surgery, and let’s just say I won’t be watching that). This film, however, is certainly likeable, for it rests largely on Gray’s ability to tell a story, which by this point he is a master of doing, and as Gray is likeable so is the film.

NB The Criterion Collection lists the date as 1997, although the film premiered at 1996’s Toronto International Film Festival so that’s the year I give here.

CREDITS
Director Steven Soderbergh; Writers Spalding Gray and Renée Shafransky; Cinematographer Elliot Davis; Starring Spalding Gray; Length 79 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), Melbourne, Saturday 18 February 2023.

Criterion Sunday 617: And Everything Is Going Fine (2010)

Spalding Gray was an American literary raconteur primarily known for his monologues, with which he toured like any stand-up comedian, and which like many a stand-up hour were committed to film (the Criterion Collection has followed up this film with Gray’s Anatomy in its list of releases, which represents one of them). And Everything Is Going Fine in certain respects is like those—it’s a film narrated entirely by Gray in clips from his monologues, interviews and other on-stage events—but instead it tries to tell the story of his life from beyond the grave (he committed suicide in 2004). It’s a way of a telling a life story without resorting to familiar stand-bys like the talking head interview or archival footage (written texts on screen, photos and the like), and makes this final testament to the man more like one of his own works, and that makes sense given the involvement of his widow and son (who does the music). It all zips by rather nicely, and gives you a sense of him as a public figure and hints towards himself as a private individual too, about some of the life issues he was going through (which always would be grist to his monologuing, but became more fractured as a source after his debilitating injury sustained on holiday in Ireland). It’s a work that’s evidently made with love, and that shows.

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CRITERION EXTRAS:

• There’s a nice little piece with interviews with producer (and Gray’s widow) Kathie Russo, as well as the film’s editor Susan Littenberg (for once not a pseudonym for the director and an actual person) and director Steven Soderbergh explaining the genesis of the idea and how the film came together. Nice to hear from them all about the project, and about the choices made in telling it. Turns out, for a man who chronicled his life and experiences for his art, there was plenty to choose from.

CREDITS
Director Steven Soderbergh; Starring Spalding Gray; Length 89 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Melbourne, Thursday 16 February 2023.

Criterion Sunday 611: Being John Malkovich (1999)

I can’t really be considered part of the cult following of Charlie Kaufman. The tone of his work just doesn’t resonate with me so much, and there’s a lot here too, in what must surely be considered his foundational work, that leaves me a little cold (though it clearly works for a lot of people). That said, like plenty of classic comedies (albeit with an ironic 90s tone), this film throws so much at the screen that plenty of it does hit, and some of it really is quite affectingly off the wall. Specifically, the way that the film utilises Cameron Diaz is very much against type, and Catherine Keener too has never been more striking (usually those two actresses would be playing these roles the other way round, you feel), but together they create an emotional bond via the mediation of the titular figure that almost erases John Cusack’s puppeteer from the film entirely. By the final third, things have been put in motion that pull the film off in all kinds of weird directions, and the constant accrual of detail makes for a rather rich and perplexing series of thematic explosions that have a cinematic pyrotechnic value at the very least, though some even achieve emotional resonance. It remains a film I still admire more than fully love, but that’s on me; it’s a singular American achievement both coming out of the 1990s and drawing a line under it for a new decade.

CREDITS
Director Spike Jonze; Writer Charlie Kaufman; Cinematographer Lance Acord; Starring John Cusack, Catherine Keener, Cameron Diaz, John Malkovich, Orson Bean; Length 113 minutes. Seen at the Penthouse, Wellington, Saturday 27 May 2000 (and on VHS at home, Wellington, May 2001, and most recently on Blu-ray at home, Wellington, Sunday 29 January 2023).

Criterion Sunday 609: ¡Alambrista! (aka The Ilegal, 1977)

For all that this is from a different era of filmmaking—when earnest, socially engaged white men made films about the immigrant and Black experience (the director of this film was also writer and cinematographer for the excellent 1964 Nothing But a Man)—this also feels like a prescient film, and a contemporary one too. It’s about a young Mexican man who goes to America to get work to help feed his family, and there becomes entangled with forces intent on preventing him from working, cops and traffickers (including a memorable small role for Ned Beatty) and such. It’s a film that without making any grand speeches, eloquently lays bare the way that migrant workers (who may have illegally entered but are so clearly necessary for many industries) are treated and the lack of rights afforded to them. At some point, these kinds of stories became less trendy to depict, perhaps, and nowadays the creative talent behind the cameras would likely have the personal experiences of those on screen, but this is a fantastic bit of engaged 1970s filmmaking that deserves a wider audience. It must surely be one of the more overlooked standalone Criterion titles.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Robert M. Young; Cinematographer Tom Hurwitz and Young; Starring Domingo Ambriz, Trinidad Silva, Linda Gillen, Ned Beatty; Length 96 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Saturday 21 January 2023.

Criterion Sunday 608: Harold and Maude (1971)

Having not been much of a commercial (or indeed, critical) success at the time of its release, like a lot of the New American cinema of the 1970s, this film has attained a certain cult status. It’s easy perhaps to see why, with its unconventional story of the odd, cherubic-faced, yet morbidly death-obsessed young Harold (Bud Cort) falling in love with the elderly Maude (Ruth Gordon) after meeting at funerals which they’ve been in the habit of crashing. As we see in the early part of the film, Harold has a flair for staging elaborate suicide scenes for the benefit (well, not ‘benefit’ exactly) of his status and image-obsessed mother (Vivian Pickles). Indeed their grand home is not unlike a mausoleum, with its rich mahogany surfaces and elaborate ornamentation. I can’t be entirely sure I like the resulting film, though it surely has its moments, and the romance (such as it is) is treated fairly obliquely. The two characters have contrasting, but complementary, personalities, as Maude seeks to teach Harold something about why life is worth living, and there’s a gratuitous shot of a fading tattoo on her forearm near the end just to drive that point home. But for the most part this is a pleasantly agreeable little black comedy about an odd couple, and made with assured directorial flair by Hal Ashby.

(Written on 30 December 2014.)

CREDITS
Director Hal Ashby; Writer Colin Higgins; Cinematographer John Alonzo; Starring Ruth Gordon, Bud Cort, Vivian Pickles; Length 91 minutes. Seen at the ICA, London, Sunday 28 December 2014.

Turning Red (2022)

The full list of my favourite films of 2022 is here but I’m posting fuller reviews of my favourites. There aren’t too many animated films in there, because I don’t go to so many of those anymore, which it turns out is fine because Disney is barely making an effort to get them into cinemas, so most need to be watched via their streaming service. Hence this one, which I gave a shot to because it seemed to come from a more interesting perspective than fairy tale princesses, and it is indeed very lovely.

It’s somewhat sad to me that Pixar films are so rarely nowadays shown in cinemas, because the attention to detail in the design and the animation that shows in films like this, or the previous year’s Soul, deserve the big screen but instead we have to subscribe to Disney+, which somehow lessens them. It also leads to factoids like it being the biggest money loser for a cinematic release (even though I’m fairly certain it was barely placed in any cinemas worldwide).

However, Turning Red still strikes me as one of the better recent crop of animated films, which both tells a discernible story from a specific perspective (a young girl from a Chinese background growing up in Toronto, voiced by Rosalie Chiang), but makes it both metaphorically rich and also cartoonishly cute at the same time. A lot of elements feel familiar from any coming of age/high school American movie, with its cliques of friends and confected schoolyard drama, but there’s a real strength to its focus on the setting, the details of the family temple such that even the supernatural plot twist (and I think the posters and marketing make it fairly clear that a large anthropomorphic red panda is involved) feels grounded in an authentic expression of familial ties and Chinese-Canadian culture.

CREDITS
Director Domee Shi 石之予; Writers Julia Cho, Shi and Sarah Streicher; Cinematographers Mahyar Abousaeedi and Jonathan Pytko; Starring Rosalie Chiang, Sandra Oh 오미주, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Ava Morse, James Hong 吳漢章; Length 100 minutes. Seen at home (Disney+ streaming), Wellington, 2 July 2022.

Spencer (2021)

Following up the reviews of my favourite films of 2022 (full list here). This isn’t the only film on my list to have been comprehensively talked out already. You don’t need another review of it, you got everything you needed about a year ago. But it wasn’t released in NZ until into 2022, and despite all my many reservations, I really enjoyed it. Not because of any fondness for its subject, but because of the way it was done, the atmosphere it evoked. So here we go, another review.

This film is a whole vibe, and either you get with it or you don’t, I somewhat suspect. I did, but I can understand people who go the other way. In terms of its felicity to ‘real life’, well I think that’s a fraught question at the very least; I’ve seen some people marvel at the accuracy of Kristen Stewart’s performance. I’m not enough of a devoted royal watcher to really know how much she captured Diana, but I don’t really see her specifically in Stewart’s portrayal. This is as much a story about a woman in a particular situation, imagining how it might go down; it’s a fable and a fantasy, it’s shot in a hazy, gauzy, pastel-hued way yet somehow also manages to channel gothic horror. But Stewart’s Diana is trapped from the start, a doomed woman, even if around her the royal family seem nothing so much as zombies, not least Charles (Jack Farthing) and Her Majesty, who have the deadest of eyes. This leaves only her head to delve further into; she gets visions of Anne Boleyn and increasingly dissociative fragments of an alternate reality, which we know is not her own because she’s giddy and happy, moving down endless corridors like Kubrick’s The Shining, cautiously at first perhaps, but with an increasing abandon as the film progresses. Against my best instincts—because at this point, I really do not like or want to hear about the British royal family—it manages to be a beautiful film, and showcases an excellent performance as ever by Stewart who goes in fully and bodily to the whole thing. Whether it captures Diana per se, I can’t say, but it captures something fleeting, somehow both archly camp and deeply felt, about an impossible life.

CREDITS
Director Pablo Larraín; Writer Steven Knight; Cinematographer Claire Mathon; Starring Kristen Stewart, Timothy Spall, Jack Farthing, Sean Harris, Sally Hawkins; Length 117 minutes. Seen at the Penthouse, Wellington, Sunday 6 February 2022.