Just Watch.

The Tudors S1E1: In Cold Blood

This had a rather slow, plodding pace, but we're basically laying groundwork at this stage, so I'll forgive it for now. We open with the murder of the Duke of Urbino, which isn't filmed in a terribly exciting way and is treated as what it is -- a plot device, a pretext for war. Speaking of "pretext for war," in this episode we learn thank God for video games, because before they came along men with money and time to kill would just start up fightin' any time they got bored.

This episode sets a lot of balls in motion, and not all of them are going to be winners. For one, the Buckingham treason plot bored me to tears. The Thomas Tallis storyline feels like a completely ancillary flourish, but Joe Van Moyland, who plays Tallis, is crushingly gorgeous in a fragile sort of way, and I know it's heading to a sexy place, so I'm hanging in there. But let's face it we're all just waiting around for Anne Boleyn. We see her briefly this time, and I'm really reluctant to bag on actresses but Natalie Dormer is not as beautiful as I remembered from the previews. Her face is softer, more plasticine; maybe that means she'll prove a more expressive actress.

Ivan the Terrible, Part I

Sergei Eisenstein, 1944

An Eisenstein film with sound? Mon dieu!

This film draws you in right away; I found the coronation scene a marvel of construction. It exhibits a more subtle kind of montage, one that, like the best of Eisenstein's work, successfully integrates the epic with the personal to form a cohesive whole.

Part I has one major large-scale scene, the siege of Kazan, which is technically proficient and basically well executed, if a little lacking in passion. I had to rewind due to falling asleep, and though I think we can at this point determine that the problem lies with me and not the films, I still think it might say something.

Intrigue and scheming prove to be the main substance and themes of Part I, and you get lots of shots of faces, augmented by beards, exaggerated collars, and furry hats, contorted into deliciously evil expressions. And while the moral simplicity of the plot leads to appealing villainy, and many of the shots astonish with their beauty, ultimately Eisenstein can't sustain them and they get a little tiring by the end.

The film's Ivan is essentially monomaniacal, he doesn't really exist apart from his desire to unite Russia and as a person or ideal for people to betray. Nikolai Cherkasov retains something of the silent film school of acting, granting Ivan some grotesque magnificence; he often repeats the gesture of thrusting his head back and sticking his beard into the air. Eisenstein also plays a lot with Ivan's silhouette and shadow, with aesthetically pleasing results.

Solaris

Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972

"All these heartbreaking lamentations are nothing but second-rate Dostoyevsky."

How can you not love a movie with a line like that? But this must be a place for honesty, and I have to tell you that Tarkovsky might have finally gotten a little too meditative for me. I had to restart this movie five times because I kept falling asleep. I think this had more to do with when as opposed what I was watching, but I wanted to give you all the facts.

My preconceived notions (which are proving remarkably persistent of late) of this film were informed by Soderbergh's remake. I haven't seen it (Do I want to?) but I have a very distinct memory of the poster, basically a beautiful blown-up photo of Clooney and Natascha McElhone kissing. And of course we expect the prospect of reunion with a departed love to feel romantic, overlooking the reality that it can prove deeply troubling and disturbing. Here, when Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) first sees the manifestation of his dead wife Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk), he freaks out and sends the "guest" out into space. Here this "second chance" does not offer a blissful idyll beyond the parameters of a flawed human relationship, but a kind of eternal, repetitive return to all the trauma and pain associated with that relationship on Earth.

Man Bites Dog

Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel & Benoît Poelvoorde, 1992

We have criminals as heroes in film all the time and we don't think twice about it; I had to work hard to figure out what the difference between those films and this one, in which a documentary crew follows a criminal, in a conceit that doesn't so much, as Netflix describes, mock reality television as it presages it. The violence here seems random, no-frills, perfunctory; it's not fun or exciting the way it so often can be in films. Interestingly, Wikipedia describes the criminal Ben (Poelvoorde) as a serial killer; he struck me more as just a thief who kills people. Maybe more glamorous films (not to mention our culture at large) have deluded me into imagine serial killing as something more splashy, exquisite and byzantine. Maybe the film was so skillful at normalizing the violence that it ceased to strike me as something out of the ordinary.

Wikipedia also describes Ben as charming; I found him completely insufferable. He has that smarmy self-satisfied know-it-all air that drives me up a wall. I don't like cultural pretension in normal people, and I find it no less appealing just because you don't expect it in a thug. Serious credit must be given to Poelvoorde, who contorts his horsey, plasticine face into a panoply of loathsome expressions. Some of the contrasts to Ben's uncontrolled baser instincts are obvious, but that doesn't mean they don't work: many of the scenes with his family prove genuinely touching, and the moments of him practicing classical music have an oddly calming effect in the midst of all this chaos. It reminded me of the "October 18, 1977"  series by Gerhard Richter, in which he showed the full bookcase in Andreas Baader's cell to counter the notion that he was just a thug who manipulated the political ideals of vulnerable youth. 

Chaw

Jeong-won Shin, 2009

You can always count on the New York Asian Film Festival to bring the wacky, and tonight, with this film about a giant, man-eating wild boar, it did not disappoint.

In his review of the festival for the Rail, David Wilentz invokes Zizek's famous prescriptive for horror films: if you want to find out what one is about, take away the monster and see what you've got. Wilentz reckons that this make Chaw really about man's inhumanity to man, which proves far worse than anything the pig can do. To this I would only add that Shin quite cleverly leaves it up in the air whether this cruelty and bad behavior is pure animal instinct or a more recent development related to the rape of the environment that has caused the animal to turn to human prey.

NYAFF billed Chaw as a black comedy; so often that means less "really funny" and more "obvious and snide social comedy." But Chaw made me laugh my ass off; its portraits of human frailty and cowardice prove genuinely funny. Most horror films let you feel comfortably superior to its scared characters, Shin keeps you aware that, given the circumstances, you'd probably behave in the same way. Shin also successfully deploys different kinds of humor, from satire to gross-out. Even more than poop jokes, there's lots of piss jokes. Shin very cleverly rotates the horror genre formula of (s)he who has sex dies to he who pisses in public gets attacked. (Does this maybe exist in other horror films?)

The film is not as gory as I expected, and while it definitely errs more on the funny side than the scary, the film nevertheless delivers some thrills. The creature is a lot of fun and only obviously CGI in a few fleeting moments. Shin wisely aims for creating tension rather than strictly scaring you, and the chase scenes toward the end are good fun.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Sergio Leone, 1966

Dun nuh nuh nuh nuh... mwah mwah mwah!

So let's all admit that little snippet of music is pure genius...eerie, anticipatory, and atmospheric all at once. It manages to convey a whole slew of western iconography (that lone figure slowly approaching in the distance) with just a handful of notes. (Though take heed, ladies: if you meet a gentleman at a party and he has this as his ringtone, he is probably a douchebag.) In spite of its genius, one feels tempted to say that Leone & Co. probably dipped one too many times into that particular well, I'm damned if I didn't enjoy it every single time.

I got a level of sheer enjoyment out of this film that I haven't felt...well probably since Le Cercle Rouge (no offense, Andrei Rublev, you know you're just a different kind of film.) And I think the reason I found it so easy to dive into, as opposed to a lot of other westerns, is that it's so operatic and Italian in its tone. Leone tends to operate in two chief registers -- that of the extreme close-up and that of the extreme long shot -- and tends to alternate between the two very rapidly to ratchet up the tension. Also, the film starts off in very disparate places and you don't know how they're going to come together, so it's fun to see how all the bricks are going to fall into place. So while it takes about an hour for the main narrative thrust to get going, you're not bored waiting for that to happen. Leone proves very good at plotting, and he has excellent reveals, like when a soldier wipes the dust off his uniform to reveal it's blue, not gray. He expertly deploys montage to build a scene, as in the scene where Tuco is running through the graveyard (where he expertly moves from close to far away to emphasize the gargantuan task Tuco faces, and uses swirling frenzied camera movement to express the manic element of his search) or the scene where the three main characters stand off (where he keeps cutting from their guns to their eyes until you go cray.) Indeed, Leone's characters tend to look at each other so often and so intently that it almost becomes a parody of the concept of "the gaze" and, while may one be tempted to seek and find homoerotic content here, I don't think you can say that of this more than you can any film taking place in a hypermasculine, male homosocial environment.

Andrei Rublev

Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966

Once again, I find myself wrecked and confounded by my expectations of films, versus what they actually are. Going into this, buffeted by Andrew O'Hehir's description of the film as kind of transcendentally boring, I hoped for long, meticulous shots of painting (and maybe even of paint drying) in beautiful technicolor.

Aside from the fact that it's in black-and-white (except for a brief montage of Rublev's paintings at the very end), the film isn't about artistic creation in and of itself. Which is probably all to the good, as watching artists work, much like watching writers write, can prove very boring. Rather, it's about how artistic inspiration and endeavor play out against the sweeping pageant of history. I think the choice to go with the black-and-white stock (ignoring the fact that budget cuts plagued this film) was the right one, as it seems to better capture the stark, dingy brutality of the time period. And that glorious color at the end, and the camera's careful lingering over Rublev's work, feels like a real artistic triumph over adversity and ugliness.

Cria Cuervos

Carlos Saura, 1976

You can't say anything about this film without noting that it hinges on the performance of Ana Torrent as Ana, the young girl surrounded by death and convinced she's killed her philandering father. You may have seen Torrent in her film debut in Spirit of the Beehive, as an adult she acquit herself quite nicely in a small role as Catherine of Aragon in The Other Boylen Girl. Here, as in Beehive, she has a wonderfully grave, forthright presence; her big eyes register everything, and she so expertly underplays moments with a resolute deliberateness that you forget she can't be held accountable for her actions and that the (for us) banal adult bad behavior she witnesses actually has a traumatizing, deleterious effect on her. Until she does some little thing that makes you remember with a powerful punch. Ana watches her mother (Geraldine Chaplin) in pain and terrified of dying, and those big eyes, though they register pain, don't flinch. Later we watch her retreat and cover her ears so she can't hear her mother's cries, and it totally breaks your heart.

I Am Love

Luca Guadagnino, 2009

So I realized watching this film that I'm much more tolerant of and sympathetic toward tales of adultery when the woman is the adulterer. I wonder if men tend to have the opposite reaction. I will say this: when you're a housewife, and your whole life is basically predicated upon being married and raising children, chafing against those constraints and breaking free seems a little more justifiable. Although it's apparently very difficult and stressful to be a man these days, and while I can certainly understand this it may still take me some getting used to. 

I had high hopes from the trailer for some quiet desperation, stately misery, and elegant opulence. It didn't quite deliver that. In his review for Salon, Andrew O'Hehir said that every shot looked like a Vogue spread, but with emotions behind it. He's right about the emotions, but wrong about the Vogue analogy: that implies a static, lifeless thing, and this film is anything like that. The life of the genteel rich doesn't strike one as stuffily oppressive; rather it is a delicate dance, an elaborate balancing act. More than standing beautifully still, everything gleams. And, even before the adultery occurs, the outside world is pressing in and things are bleeding out of the seams. There is a palpable sense of desire, not necessarily yearning to break free, but bubbling over in unexpected ways.

The Man Who Fell to Earth

Nicholas Roeg, 1976

There's a scene late in The Man Who Fell to Earth where the alien Newton, and his paramour, now aged, play ping pong and sip martinis dressed in tennis whites in a room covered in photographic wallpaper meant to make the room look like a forest. This setting says so much about modern life on Earth, its creepiness, its inauthenticity, its vague decadence with a pretense of gentility, that you get the sense that this is exactly how our planet would look to an outsider.

At first, Man is a science fiction film that isn't one (yes, I realize I said something similar about Ashes of Time); it's hard to get around the disappointment that an alien, upon landing on our planet, would embark upon an exciting foray into...patent law. For about the first half the film Roeg falls into a rhythm of intense scenes buffeted by stretches of tedium. It's a rhythm I've grown accustomed to from Roeg, with the exception of Don't Look Now. This film turns out to be less about space than about the seduction of Earth... a seduction that exists precisely because of it's boringness, and it takes a while for us to readjust our eyes.