Films Watched 2013: #4

Down in the Valley (2005)

Summer in the San Fernando Valley and seventeen-year-old Tobe (Evan Rachel Wood) is heading to the beach with her girlfriends when she meets thirty-something cowboy Harlan (Ed Norton) at the gas station. Instinctively she asks him to join them and he does, quitting his job on the spot. An idyllic day leads to sex and soon Harlan is being introduced to Tobe's father Wade (David Morse) and younger brother Lonnie (Rory Culkin). The romance is immediate and intense, Tobe fascinated by the novelty of Harlan, his country charm and simple philosophy. He's like something from a movie. Harlan, for his part, can't believe his luck, that this pretty girl has latched onto him. She's like a fate foretold, the key to another life. But Wade, a law enforcement officer, is suspicious of Harlan straight away. He tries to control his daughter but she rebels. Soon though, Harlan's inability to tell reality from fantasy becomes clearer and things escalate dangerously. For much of the way Down in the Valley is a peach of a film, romantic, complex, with a 70s feel for ordinary lives, long summer days and the twilight glow of taillights as evening traffic floods the valley. The direction is confident, the acting uniformly fine, especially Norton, who gives one of his best performances here, part Travis Bickle, part Joe Buck (Midnight Cowboy). Unfortunately the film becomes less convincing in the last third, straining too hard for symbolism, spelling out the cowboy/modern world, fantasy/reality clashes too literally. It isn't a disaster but the realism and emotional truth built up are sacrificed for the sake of plot. While Harlan thought he was in a western it was okay, but when the film thinks it is too that's when it loses its way. Still an underrated film, I think, certainly one that deserves better reviews than it got at the time.

My Man Godfrey (1936)

We're showing this great screwball comedy tonight at the film club. Can't wait. Here's my review from last year. 

'Life is but an empty bubble,' sighs Carole Lombard's spoilt socialite in Gregory La Cava's My Man Godfrey, casually summing up the philosophy at the heart of the screwball comedies of the '30s. In fact, this is probably the prototype '30s film, a Depression-fuelled screwball romance with all the blithe wit of a Broadway play leavened with scabrous contempt for the rich and blessed with that mysterious light touch that the best directors of the era seemed to have in abundance. It's a classic. William Powell plays homeless bum Godfrey Smith living at the city dump and minding his own business when snobby rich girl Cornelia Bullock turns up and offers him five dollars to be her 'forgotten man' for a scavenger hunt. He refuses and she storms off. But her younger sister Irene (Lombard) stays behind, intrigued by this strange man. Touched by something sweet-natured in her (and by a curiosity to see such an event at first hand) Godfrey offers to help her beat Cornelia. In the ballroom of the Waldorf-Ritz Hotel we're treated to a scene of undignified chaos as hundreds of socialites push and shove and argue over who gets to register their scavenger hunt items first. Irene's father Alexander (Eugene Pallette) observes, 'all you need to start an asylum is an empty room and the right kind of people'. And that's the film right there, the rich are crazy (with greed and boredom), American capitalism is teetering on the brink of savagery, but the poor, the forgotten men, have had all the crazy knocked out of them. It's touch and go as to who should be pitied more. Only Irene is absolved, she's a kind of holy innocent who offers Godfrey a job as their butler so she can have a protege like her empty-headed mother (Alice Brady), who has free-loading poet Carlo (Mischa Auer). As the new butler in the Bullock madhouse Godfrey is the most refined character in sight. No one had the elegant poise and knowing intelligence of William Powell. He moves through the film with the careful reserve of an adult trapped at a children's party. And Lombard is sensational, a ditzy dope with a big heart, a loveable child prone to funny moods and irrational fits of mania. There are twists and turns that ultimately let the rich off the hook somewhat, lessons learned, the social satire softened, but somehow it doesn't matter as faultless direction pulls us through to the perfectly delivered last-line closer most films would kill for.

Films Watched 2013: #3

Silent Hill (2006)

To be honest my wife started watching this and I kind of drifted into it too. A not very scary horror based on the video game of the same name about a mother who takes her adopted daughter to the mysterious town of Silent Hill to solve her sleepwalking problems. What follows does have some undeniably arresting visuals but is hamstrung by inane dialogue, incoherent, game level plotting and Sean Bean's rubbish American accent. It doesn't make a jot of sense and soon it's hard to care as characters stumble around in the dark mouthing portentous inanities. Even the great Alice Krige can't save it from being anything more than a mildly diverting exercise in style over substance, a surreal-lite car-crash. Although having said that, director Christophe Gans' all-out disregard for plot or sense in favour of having troupes of zombie nurses doing interpretive dance routines could see it become a bit of a cult classic in time.

Films Watched 2013: #2

Vincere (2009)

We began our new film club season with Marco Bellochio's extravagantly melodramatic Vincere, the story of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini's secret lover, Ida Dalser, who bankrolled his rise to power and conceived a son for him only to be denied once he'd achieved that power. A heady mix of sexual desire and political unrest at first, recreating the rise of fascism with newsreel footage and on-screen Futurist slogans, the film gradually resolves into a compelling study of one woman's bloody-minded refusal to let go of what she believes is her right and her son's. It's hard to know, though, whether to admire her or despair at her near-suicidal delusion. Giovanna Mezzogiorno can't quite generate the sympathy required to make us really care what happens to Ida. She seems spurned by power as much as love, robbed of her chance to lord it over the nation, to see her son heir to a new imperial dynasty. Which isn't to take away from Mezzogiorno's powerful performance or Filippo Timi's marvellous bug-eyed intensity as Mussolini. But for all the near-operatic passion of the story, its heightened emotions, what really stands out is Bellochio's bravura direction, mixing painterly composition with experimental daring to great effect.

Films Watched 2013: #1

Animal Kingdom (2010)

Animal Kingdom is a tautly impressive crime drama, directed with unshowy power by David Michod and very well acted. Seventeen year-old J. (James Frecheville) has nowhere to go after the death of his mother but the home of his grandmother, Janine Cody (Jacki Weaver), the matriarch of one of Melbourne's top crime families. The Codys are at war with the Armed Robbery Squad who've taken to offing gang members vigilante-style. The man they really want, though, is Janine's eldest son Andrew 'Pope' Cody (Ben Mendelsohn), who responds to one of these killings by murdering two patrolmen in revenge. J. is implicated in this and is soon the target of the police, specifically Sgt Nathan Leckie (Guy Pearce). What follows is an engrossing study of loyalty and ruthlessness, portraying the criminal world as a Darwinian eco-system of the strong and weak. Brought in for questioning J. is soon in a position where he can't trust the cops to protect him or his family not to kill him. Frecheville is impressive as the still centre of the film, Weaver icily chilling as Janine with Pearce quietly impressive as always. But it's Mendelsohn who steals the film, his Pope an unsettling presence not just for his unpredictable violence but also his predatory, passive-aggressive caring, belittling one minute, entrapping with fake intimacy the next, always probing for emotional weakness. It makes him one of recent cinemas more memorable and acutely-observed monsters.

The Thinking Machine

Agnes Moorehead, The Magnificent Ambersons, 1941

‘What the camera does, and does uniquely, is to photograph thought. That’s my profoundest conviction in this business of moviemaking: the camera is not so much a lie-detector as a Geiger counter of mental energy. It registers something only vaguely detectable to the naked eye, registers it clear and strong. Every time an actor thinks, it goes right on the film.’

- Orson Welles to Peter Bogdanovich from This Is Orson Welles

Edit Worthy

'As a filmmaker I'm speaking to you from my home.' His home being the editing suite. He being Orson Welles in his documentary Filming Othello (1978). In our digital age the tactile art of editing film has mostly been lost but this is still gospel. Editing is arguably the true creative process. Everything else is just gathering the ingredients. How you put them together is the real test. As he quotes Carlisle: almost everything examined deeply enough will turn out to be musical. The best artists have an ear for the rhythm of how scenes or sentences flow. An innate feel for how they follow each other. For Welles the moviola is a musical instrument where you search for the right tempo, splicing the images together until the hum, until they reveal an inner harmony, because 'a film is never right until it's right musically.' The pursuit of that rightness can take years. And often sense plays second fiddle to rhythm. Meaning follows form. You understand the shape or rhythm of it long before you understand what it is you're trying to say. In fact, the rhythm can often dictate the meaning. So editing can reveal the greatness waiting inside a film, manifest the dream inside the filmmaker's head, or, as Welles knew only too well, it could gut that greatness like a dead fish.