Movie n Cinema

I Was a Male War Bride

I Was a Male War Bride manages to take a madcap premise, a first-rate comic actor, and a director famed for his mastery of screwball comedies, and still produce a boring, turgid mess of a movie with few enough smiles, let alone laughs. It should be comic gold: reunite Cary Grant with director Howard Hawks and give them a plot that pits Grant's stolid masculinity against a gender-bending scenario where he's forced to pose as a "war bride." Unfortunately, the script is as flat and characterless as a blank sheet of paper, and even the best efforts of Grant — a fine physical comedian who's always ready with some priceless facial expressions whenever the dialogue fails to crackle — can't salvage this turkey.

The film's problems start with casting Grant as a French officer in the aftermath of World War II, since he's as American as gas-guzzlers and greasy fast food: one is constantly wondering why there's such a fuss over his supposedly foreign status, when he's speaking English just as well as anybody else. There are even a few jokes that point out the incongruity, when American soldiers begin speaking to Grant in mangled French, while he answers them with his perfect unaccented English. It's obvious that everyone involved knew how ridiculous the whole set-up was, and these sly winks acknowledge that at least they're in on the joke. Grant plays opposite Ann Sheridan, as an American officer who he's placed on assignment with despite their past history of bickering and fighting. He spends the first half of the movie hating her and continually butting heads with her, at least until he decides he wants to marry her: then he spends the second half of the movie frustrated that he can't spend more time alone with her. Sheridan and Grant are both good actors, but there's virtually no comedic or romantic chemistry between them, mainly because the script gives them little chance to develop any; the dialogue has no sizzle, no momentum, and too often Sheridan is reduced to simply laughing while she watches Grant do something kind of goofy. Their sudden romance is thus completely without a foundation, and the switch from standoffish sparring to lovey-dovey canoodling is awkwardly handled. They go from kissing one moment, for the first time, directly to announcing their marriage.

The film does earn some chuckles along the way, mostly from Grant's deadpan handling of the script's understated humor. His grumpy back-and-forth with Sheridan yields some moments of comic interplay, though the spartan dialogue never gives the duo a chance to really let loose in screwball style. They're rarely allowed to simply spar and trade quips for its own sake, as Grant often did in lead turns opposite Jean Arthur or Katharine Hepburn. Not that Sheridan doesn't seem game for it — she's cheery and has a playful attitude that makes her fun to watch — but the dialogue is too practical, too focused on advancing the utterly uninteresting plot, so that the two of them rarely talk to each other except about what's happening at that immediate moment. Grant fares much better with non-verbal humor, and a lot of the film's best moments come from his physical comedy. There's a running gag where Grant, always forced to sleep in unconventional places, struggles to get comfortable, first while sitting in a chair and then jammed up in the fetus position in a bathtub. It wouldn't be funny in itself, but Grant mimes his discomfort and his awkward contortions brilliantly, doing a lot of the work with his big, slab-like hands, which he can never seem to find a good place to rest.

Grant's physicality also injects a lot of humor into the final stretch of the film, when army regulations force him to register himself as a "war bride" in order to be able to enter the United States with his new wife. It's a clever bit of satire, poking fun at both the torturous maze of military regulations and documentation, and an inherently sexist culture where sex roles are so rigidly codified that even the paperwork makes assumptions about what men and women can and can't do. There's some downright subversive material hidden here, about how uncompromising society can be in its accepted situations and behaviors for men or women. Ultimately, it's easier for Grant to simply pose as a woman — with a hideous horsehair wig and that distinctly un-feminine mug of his — than to continue explaining how he came to be a man in the situation he's in.

It's unfortunate that this satire isn't made the focus of the film, since it's definitely the film's most enjoyable stretch, and gives Grant the most to do. It's also the section of the film of the most obvious interest to Hawks, who naturally gravitates to material that deals with sex roles and reversals. It's perhaps for this reason that the film wakes up a bit the deeper it gets into this subject, overcoming the sleepy pall hanging over the first two-thirds or so. It still never quite approaches the energetic rhythm of the best classic screwball comedies, but in its relatively laidback, laconic sense of humor it at least has a little more spark and fizz. Even so, as enjoyable as the denouement is, the film as a whole remains disappointing, its promise in theory much greater than the result.

Sweet and Lowdown

Woody Allen had originally wanted his second film, his follow-up to Take the Money and Run, to be a dramatic fictional biopic of a 1930s jazz musician entitled The Jazz Baby. Needless to say, the idea didn't fly with studio execs of the time, who were expecting the young comic they'd just signed to turn out another comedy; he complied, and made Bananas instead. So when Woody revived the basic idea thirty years later as Sweet and Lowdown, it had had the longest gestation period of any of his films. The film takes the form of a documentary of fictional jazz guitarist Emmet Ray (Sean Penn), with Allen and a handful of jazz experts appearing as talking heads to narrate his story and introduce selected anecdotes from his rough-and-tumble life, the accounts of which are filled with inconsistencies and pure myth. Among other things, the film comments on the impossibility of constructing a definitive biography of a figure like this — the interweaving of a slim body of known facts with a healthy dose of speculation and outright rumor is reminiscent of the real-life history of blues guitarist Robert Johnson, whose biography as it's known today was constructed from a similar hodge-podge. At one point, the fabric of the story breaks down completely, and Woody provides three different mutually contradictory versions of the same event, with the caveat that in all likelihood none of them is "true."

Within this patchwork framework, Emmet develops as a hilariously unlikable protagonist who is nevertheless somewhat poignant. He's arrogant, nasty and demeaning to the women in his life, a drunkard, and notoriously unreliable whenever he has a gig, which is why he never keeps a steady job for long. And yet his arrogance is tempered by an acute awareness of the one man in the world who is a better guitarist than him: Django Reinhardt. Emmet's egotistical instinct is to declare himself "the greatest guitarist in the world," but even his ego can't prevent him from immediately qualifying himself by invoking Reinhardt. Sometimes he corrects himself, "well, at least in America," or he counts himself "one of the top two," always referring to "this gypsy guitarist in France," as he invariably calls the rival who he has never met, and whose playing makes him cry or faint whenever he encounters it. Emmet's constant qualification of his title comes to be downright funny, but there's also something sad and pathetic about it: this egotistical man who's forced to admit that his ego is not entirely justified, that he cannot call himself the best without endless fudging and backpedaling.

Penn's performance is excellent, giving a wry, blunt charm to Emmet, a crude lout who just so happens to be a musical genius as well. He does a lot of acting with his eyebrows, raising and arching them whenever he's playing the guitar. At moments like this, Emmet goes off into another place, the crudity and temper vanishes from his face, and his eyes seem to be far-off, his face comically contorting as his brow furrows and his eyebrows dance. He looks peaceful and content when he's playing, like this is what he's meant to be doing, and all the other nonsense in his life, the drinking, pimping, gambling, sloppy relationships and money problems, that's all just extraneous to whatever's going on inside him while he's playing. Woody keeps this mystery intact, the central mystery of creativity, despite the probing attempts of Emmet's wife Blanche (Uma Thurman) to investigate his soul.

Blanche is a debutante and a would-be writer, and she tends to view everyone she meets as though they're characters ready to be adapted into her work. She's drawn to Emmet for his harsh nature and his wild life, and she continually attempts to psychoanalyze him, to draw out his thoughts and feelings. She asks what he thinks about when he's playing music, and Emmet memorably responds, "that I'm underpaid, I think about that sometimes." Her questions get only blank, uncomprehending stares from her husband, who doesn't understand what she's getting at; he doesn't think, he just plays. When she asks him why he likes to watch trains so much, he gets it even less, and her psychosexual ramblings prompt him to deadpan, "it sounds like you want to go to bed with the train." This is a blunt, no-nonsense guy, and the film's central question, danced around but never answered or even asked outright, is where art comes from: if a guy like this can make great, beautiful art with his instrument, what does that mean for the more romantic notions that art comes from the soul, from the emotions?

In some ways, the answer to that question lies in the character of Hattie (Samantha Morton), who though never married to Emmet is the closest he ever gets to love in his life. She's something of an unlikely match for the guitarist, a mute laundress who's perhaps a little slow, with a childlike innocence and a shy, awkward nature. Woody reportedly told Morton to play Hattie like Harpo Marx, and she gives a phenomenal performance without ever saying a word: it's all there in her subtle gradations of smiles, her downcast eyes, her shuffling walk and the flapper hat pulled tight over her curls, partially shading the upper half of her face. Hattie is a genuine, sweet, loving young woman whose silence is remarkably communicative because of her expressive face. She becomes an unacknowledged anchor for Emmet, who resists being tied down to one woman and inevitably leaves her, though she continues to linger in his thoughts in a way that no other woman does. He says that Reinhardt haunts him, but Hattie is in some ways a more potent force in his life. When he loses the chance to be with her again, towards the end of the film, Woody and the other commentators step in to proclaim the music he made afterward the best of his career, making him finally an equal of Reinhardt.

Morton's Hattie is thus the film's heart and its soul, as well as the unspoken inspiration for Emmet's finest music. She is the answer to the riddle of how a seemingly unemotional and brutish man could produce such lovely and enduring art. It's typical of Allen that these foundational questions concerning the origins of art and creativity are hidden within a light, airy, cleverly constructed film that's essentially comedic in form. Sweet and Lowdown is a fine effort from Allen, a nod to his earlier period mock-documentaries like Zelig as well as to his idol Fellini, whose La Strada provides the domineering man/childishly innocent woman template for the relationship between Emmet and Hattie. Woody continues to be fascinated by the intersections of love, relationships, and artistic creativity, and these perennial subjects continue to drive his best films.

Quantum of Solace

Quantum of Solace is Daniel Craig's second picture in the role of James Bond, continuing his reinvention of the suave British superspy as a brooding tough guy with cold-steel eyes. The film picks up in the immediate aftermath of the previous Bond film, 2006's Casino Royale, marking the first time that this kind of direct continuity shows up in the usually self-contained Bond universe. It is one of many departures that these new films represent for the franchise. The films are darker, more bluntly violent and less light-hearted, with chopped-up, frantic action scenes inspired by the fast cutting of the Jason Bourne movies, which for better or worse seem to be the new template for modern action flicks. And in the aftermath of Casino Royale's climax, Bond is devastated and driven by a thirst for revenge, having lost Vesper, the woman he loved, soon after finding out that she had betrayed him for a shadowy international espionage organization. This is a very different Bond from the wisecracking, smooth-talking, martini-sipping gentleman of the classic franchise: when this Bond enjoys his signature drink, he gulps it rather than sips it, and he does it to get drunk.

There is, inarguably, something missing in this new Bond; there's a reason he's such an enduring, iconic figure, and his playfulness was always a big part of that, along with the often campy situations and outrageous villains he was pitted against. The new Bond risks becoming unrecognizable by jettisoning so much of his past and refashioning his image so drastically. The new film makes fewer nods than ever to the Bond of the past: he still drives a flashy car in a high-speed chase, and he still looks dashing in a tux, but there are no gadgets, no tongue-in-cheek quips — unless you count Craig's deadpan announcement that an agent he was tracking was "a dead end," a code for "I killed him" that even his handler M (Judi Dench) recognizes. He never gives his trademark introduction ("Bond. James Bond.") in this film, nor does he ask for a martini "shaken not stirred," and the typical sequence where the agent walks into the sight of a gun barrel, then turns and fires, doesn't appear until the very end of the film instead of preceding the opening credits. One could go on for quite some time enumerating the ways in which Craig's Bond departs from tradition.

Still, even if the classic Bond is somewhat mourned, this new Bond is interesting and enjoyable in his own right, and Quantum of Solace is a surprisingly satisfying sequel that both ties up loose ends from the previous film and sets up the groundwork for the new Bond status quo. The film opens with Bond continuing to track the secret organization that took Vesper from him, partially for revenge and partially because MI6 is equally interested in their doings. His search leads him to Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), a sinister businessman who's setting up a military coup in Bolivia in order to gain control of the country's water supply for himself. Bond also finds himself tangled up with the mysterious Camille (Olga Kurylenko), a girl who's using Greene as part of her own quest for vengeance against a deposed dictator (Joaquin Cosio) who murdered her family when she was a young girl. As Greene realizes, she is like Bond in many ways: they are both "damaged goods," both killers trying to put the ghosts of their pasts to rest.

They are also both perfectly willing to use sex for their own ends, and this is perhaps the first Bond film to explicitly question the ethics of 007's trademark seductiveness. Camille admits she slept with Greene in order to get close to him, and asks Bond if he judges her for this. He gives a wry smile — one of the only times he shows any hint of mirth in this film — and it's obvious that he realizes he habitually does the same thing. Indeed, he does the same thing even in this film, to British secret agent Strawberry Fields (Gemma Arterton), who's memorably introduced wearing a trenchcoat and seemingly nothing else underneath; one expects her to launch into a stripper routine at any moment. Bond seduces her from her purpose of reining him in, and her association with him gets her killed in a way that recalls the old inventiveness of Bond villains who would strap the agent to a laser or suspend him over a shark tank. It's an oblique nod to the franchise's past, very welcome in a film that otherwise makes few acknowledgments of this past, but Fields' death has a very specific purpose, to point out the amorality of Bond's treatment of women. Bond's charm and ease with the ladies is one of the few facets of his persona that is retained in these new 007 films, and even this aspect of his legend gets interrogated and cast in a new light.

The reinvention of Bond's personality, imbuing him with a complex personality and a dark past, is the most obvious change in the 007 reboot, but the hyperactive action scenes, using the Bourne series as the model, are equally important to changing the franchise's character. Director Marc Forster came to the film with no background in action of this sort, quite unlike Casino Royale director Martin Campbell, an old hand who had even helmed a Bond film (Goldeneye) before. Forster's handling of the action scenes is inconsistent as a result, sometimes resulting in the muddled incoherence that the worst Bourne-style editing is often accused of, but at other times turning out some crisp, satisfying thrills. The whole opening stretch of the film is a fantastic example of the latter, with a viscerally exciting car chase as Bond escapes while bringing in the shadowy Mr. White (Jesper Christensen), who he captured at the end of the previous film. This sequence leads into a beautifully executed building-to-building chase that pays direct homage to the rooftop chase sequence from The Bourne Ultimatum. The editing is fast and frenetic, the action chopped up into bite-sized pieces, but it's always clear exactly what's happening at every moment. There's a precise geometry and economy to this sequence, a sense that the architecture and geography of the chase and fight is perfectly calibrated and choreographed. Bond's final dispatch of a would-be assassin is well-earned, resulting from the flawless timing of every element in the scene: a rope and pulley system, a pair of guns, a multi-level building under construction.

Forster surprises by pulling this scene off so well, avoiding the trap of too many tight close-ups and the confusion between the protagonist and his adversary that has plagued other Bourne imitators. Forster has a good eye for chopping up and condensing these scenes without losing sight of the whole, which is perhaps why he shows a predilection for including periodic overhead shots, bird's eye inserts that step above the fray and take in the entirety of the geography. Even so, several scenes in the latter half of the film don't have quite the same clarity and coherence. He does a nice job with Bond's clever scheme to listen in on Greene's plans when the businessman meets his partners in plain sight at an opera house, but the subsequent firefight is sloppily handled. Forster cross-cuts back and forth between the battle and the action of the opera, which takes place on a bizarre set with a tremendous eyeball that opens up to reveal what looks to be a chorus of Catholic bishops inside. The surreality of the opera's staging is a nice touch, but the clarity of the action is sacrificed as a result. The film's explosive climax, at a rapidly burning hotel in the middle of the desert, is equally incoherent at times — it's not always clear why Bond seems to be running along the hotel's rooftop at one moment and through its corridors the next, or even what's causing all those explosions in the first place. And unless my theater managed to cut out something from Bond's final encounter with Greene in the middle of the desert, there seems to be a big chunk of action or dialogue or even a convincing transition in there somewhere.

Despite the sometimes shaky action sequences, Quantum of Solace is a strangely satisfying second installment in the new adventures of James Bond, one that definitively establishes Craig's version of the character. By the end of the film, he has completed his transition from fun-loving ladies' man to complicated killer, and he has achieved some closure if not quite vengeance. The film isn't perfect, but it's exciting and has more than enough visceral thrills to make up for any weak stretches. It's a post-Bourne action movie that in many respects is even better than any of the Bourne films, perhaps because its hero is so ingrained in the popular consciousness and thus more moving in his new, emotionally wounded incarnation.

Holee Sh*t!

I completely forgot to post about the New York African Diaspora Film Festival...definitely one of the best film fests by far, and maybe the best Black one. Hopefully my comrade Tambay Obenson won't mind me repostimg his comments, as I am doing this on the quick...

Certainly one of the more worthwhile black film festivals in the country. You're always guaranteed to find a wide variety of films from every segment of the Diaspora - both old and new. This year is no different, with around 100 films on the festival's schedule, from just about every continent, occupying its entire 2-week run to screen them all - November 28 to December 14.

Of particular interest to me:

The Prince of Broadway

An Ethiopian film titled 13 Months of Sunshine

Disappearing Voices - The Decline of Black Talk Radio

A Cameroonian Film called Paris A Tout Prix (Paris or Nothing)

Charles Burnetts's Namibia epic - Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation

Sexe, Gombo Et Beurre Sale (Sex, Okra and Salted Butter) - a French film by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, who previously brought us the critically acclaimed 2006 film, Daratt.

Go to the NYADFF website for a list of every film screening, accompanied by any relevant information (synopsis, dates, times, etc...).

Show your support! We say we want change; we cry out for it; now, here's yet another opportunity for all of us to affect it.

I'll certainly be there for some of the films, and will share my thoughts on my podcast.

www.nyadff.org

Encounters at the End of the World

Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World is a conscious sequel of sorts to his previous film, The Wild Blue Yonder, utilizing the footage of composer and underwater photographer Henry Kaiser, whose images from Antarctica appear in both films. The film is also a very Herzogian nature documentary, an attempt to find in an unfamiliar natural landscape the themes and ideas that animate all of the filmmaker's best work: the hostility of nature to man, the fatalist heroism of exploration, the religious and apocalyptic overtones that Herzog can find in seemingly any subject. He explicitly contrasts his effort against fluffy feel-good nature documentaries like March of the Penguins: he does not want merely pretty or cute images, but images that reflect his own insights into the natural world, with its cruelty, harshness, and a beauty that is not comfortable but overpowering, awe-inspiring. Even when he does come across some of the little waddling, adorable birds, leave it to Herzog to locate, and focus in on, an "insane" penguin. Herzog questions a reclusive penguin researcher, a man who seems more comfortable with birds than people, about the incidence of homosexuality, unusual sexual behavior, and dementia among the species he observes. The researcher responds with laconic anecdotes about the penguin equivalent of prostitution, and explains that for these birds the only analog to insanity might be their occasional tendency to grow disoriented and go where they are not supposed to go. There is obvious poetry in this. For birds whose lives consist entirely of a narrow track between the ocean and the nesting grounds, the ultimate insanity is the individualist drive to set off in a different direction. Herzog finds one of these nonconformist birds and isolates him in a large expanse of white, vacillating between the two accepted destinations before finally setting off in a third direction, towards a distant mountain range and almost certain death. His quest is quixotic, comic, and doomed to fail, but it is also in its odd, waddling way a noble venture. He is the penguin version of the archetypal Herzog hero: the penguin Fitzcarraldo, the penguin Aguirre.

This suicidally heroic penguin is not the only Herzogian character who seems to have cropped up in real life down at the south pole. In fact, one of the film's primary themes is the way that this extreme place seems to attract extreme characters of all kinds, all of whom suggest different metaphors for why so many unusual, solitary people have gravitated to a single location. Over the course of the film, Herzog meets and conducts interviews with a staggering variety of people. There's the compulsive world traveler who endured military coups, malaria and rampaging elephants in a trip across Africa, and who now enacts, in Antarctica, bizarre performance art pieces where she stuffs herself into a suitcase. There's a plumber and builder who's proud of his multifaceted heritage and displays like a badge the unusual configuration of his fingers, which he has learned marks him as a descendant of the Aztec royal families. There's a worker who's introduced with the immortal tag, "philosopher, forklift driver." There's a physicist whose study of neutrinos has led him to a quasi-spiritualist view of the universe: these invisible particles, which are everywhere and can be measured in abstract ways but never apprehended, are like harbingers of "the spirit world" for him, which makes his work the process of quantifying God. His scientific instruments are decorated with ritual inscriptions and art, signifying this unexpected overlap between religion and science. Under Herzog's inquisitive gaze, Antarctica becomes a transitory colony populated exclusively with exactly the kinds of people who might be expected to populate a Herzog film. Antarctica is transformed in the same way as the Sahara Desert was in the hallucinatory Fata Morgana, a film that is subtly referenced with an early shot of a plane descending on McMurdo base in Antarctica.

In addition to profiling these odd and intriguing characters, Herzog brings to Antarctica the apocalyptic view of the natural world that has been woven through virtually his entire filmography. There is perhaps a streak of masochistic glee in this director, who has forged his career around visiting and documenting the harshest, most unwelcoming frontiers in the world, and who then, naturally enough, finds that they confirm his essential opinion of the world as a cruel, uncompromising place. Herzog is the ultimate documenter of natural selection at work, whether it is the fate of jungle explorers going beyond human boundaries (Aguirre: the Wrath of God), the level of superhuman achievement where athleticism becomes life-endangering (The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner), or the borderline where admirable determination shades into maniacal obsession (Fitzcarraldo). He is fascinated by things humans are not meant to do, and places where humans are not supposed to go, much as the "insane" penguin is not supposed to head for the mountains.

He also sees in this harsh terrain the closest approximation to true religious experience that humans can reach on Earth, although he never traffics in any hackneyed "beauty of God's creation" nonsense. For Herzog, underwater shots beneath the Antarctic ice floes have the atmosphere of "cathedrals," with their hanging ice stalactites and bizarre, translucent inhabitants. He accompanies these images with stirring choral music, though the spirituality he imparts into these hidden landscapes is indivisible from the science that documents them. Herzog knows that it is possible to understand the foundations of life, to study one-celled organisms for their DNA structures, and to still possess a mystical, spiritual appreciation for the wonders of the world. Kaiser's images have a spectral, unbelievable quality, imbued with rich shades of light and color. Even when, on occasion, the images have a creepy horror movie vibe — a series of haunting shots of tentacled creatures that look like alien monsters, photographed in a small circle of light amidst the blackness — they are still beautiful and moving.

Ultimately, Herzog's union of religious and scientific experience results in an apocalyptic vision that holds a dim view of humanity's chances for survival. He points to the extinction of the dinosaurs and says, "we seem to be next." This is a continuing theme for Herzog, who has now made at least two films (Fata Morgana and Lessons of Darkness) in which a future alien species arrives on a decimated planet and attempts to understand the remains of its strange culture. He raises the question again here, wondering what these hypothetical aliens would think of Earth if they took Antarctica as an example of the planet's culture: they'd find little but a frozen sturgeon and a handful of fake flowers surrounded by a ring of popcorn, cheesy relics frozen beneath the ice.

At several points, Herzog's apocalyptic fervor even takes a detour into earnest environmentalism, although always through the voices of other characters rather than from Herzog's own narration. Several of his interviewees take the opportunity to speak about global warming, green living, and the importance of taking these issues seriously. They look into the camera, with grave sincerity, and impart stern warnings that the world is on the brink of devastation. It's uncertain whether Herzog shares their cause, mainly because he seems to think that nothing can be done, and that humanity is doomed no matter what. Herzog can hardly be called an environmentalist, and as usual he completely ignores the political implications of his film's subject. When he brushes up against these environmental issues — as when he speaks with an ice researcher who talks about humongous melting icebergs and the rising oceans that result — he seems more interested in capturing the man's enthusiastic love of ice than in the actual substance of what he's saying. Herzog is stringently apolitical, and almost always has been, even when dealing with subjects that seem to demand a political point of view. As a filmmaker, he is simply not interested. His concerns are broader, both more universal and more personal. Indeed, his agenda might be described as the union of the universal and the personal. The philosophizing forklift operator explains it in the perfect way. He gets the final words of the film, taking over as the Herzogian narrator with words that might as well be coming from the director himself: "through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself, and through our ears the universe is listening to its cosmic harmonies, and we are the witness through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory."

MMM (mini movie marathon)...

I went on one of my MMM's the other day--I'll talk about them in relevance to the subject matter of this blog.

The first one I'll keep short and sweet; "Volver" starring Penelope Cruz. It garnered a great amount of hype, most of it revolving around Penelope's performance. I wasn't buying into it, but if the movie is right there on your TV for free, and there's nothing else on, why not?

I must say, I was deeply impressed. Pedro Almodovar has to be one of the greatest storytellers in our history, and I always become completely immersed in all of his films--so far as to say I usually forget I'm watching one until it's over--it has me that involved. Cruz does seem to be a genuine actress despite my misgivings...it is a story of deep family secrets, what loneliness and betrayal can manifest, and how family ties, no matter how eroded, can be healed with kind words, understanding, and genuine love. Despite the description, it was by no means a "chick flick" (which I loathe). I highly recommend it.

Next up is another film I should have seen way before now--the South African movie"Tsotsi". Tsotsi is an African term for thug, or gangster, and is the name of the anti-hero in this film. In a nutshell, Tsotsi car jacks a wealthy woman, and when she protests, he shoots her in the stomach. As he drives away, he discovers that her infant son is in the back in a car seat. For reasons unknown even to him at the time, he takes the baby boy home with him.

This is not a perfect film, but it is an arresting one. Through the baby, Tsotsi finds his way from a hardcore, unapologetic criminal life to one of redemption, compassion, conscience, and consequence. I would have liked more backstory, and a bit more of what lead him to redemption, but considering the choices in films we have these days, I'll take what I can get. The performances are natural, understated, and completely affecting---the actors don't seem like actors at all, but regular folks plucked to be in this film. Think "City Of God"....if you enjoyed that one, you'll definitely get what Tsotsi is aiming for. I recommend this one as well.

We'll save the most questionable for last, which is "Divine Intervention". I confess, I sometimes have this morbid curiosity to view some DVD's that look like complete and total garbage. I think it's the same gene that makes me look at stuff like "New York Goes To Hollywood" on VH1, and "The Real Housewives of Atlanta".

Anyhoo, Wesley Jonathan is a very young guy who takes the place of the very older guy as pastor of a church. Shenanigans ensue. Honestly, there is not much to say beyond that, except for the women in the congregation's relationships with God seemed to be in direct linear context with how low their cleavages go. I didn't know if it was a church or Magic City (if you don't know what Magic City is, ask your nearest Southern friend or relative).

Oh yeah, Jazmine Lewis' acting skills seem to consist of how many ways she can style her hair in one week, and it is beyond sad to see the once promising Cynda Williams reduced to being Luenell's sidekick as a weedsmokin' heathen of the church (screen time about 8 minutes). Wesley Jonathan has a way of delivering his lines like he's talking to someone in real life, and trust me, in this context, it is not a good thing. This one is not even worthy of purchase from the bootleg blanket. Lord let us pray....

In A State Of Grace....

I wanted to write this yesterday, but I was in Limoncello Heaven, so it's a day late. Though I don't celebrate Thanksgiving out of respect for the Native Americans, I do think about what I am grateful for.

My goal for some time has been to live my life in a state of grace; completely calm, with security, peace, and beauty deeply permeating my life on the daily (which, of course, means not going near Black Friday).

I'm not completely there yet, but the drama in my life (of which used to be almost unbearable) is no more. My home exudes peace, and I can focus on things that are important to me. Music being one (I was listening to Sylvester yesterday--whatcha know 'bout dat?) and the importance of friendships being another.

this is sylvester, or one of his album covers to be exact

I am so very grateful for the amazing and awesome friends that I have, and even more grateful that my circle is increasing on a strong foundation. I even found one of my dearest long term friends I lost contact with on the internets last week, bringing my grace factor up 100%! Please check her out at her blog Sistah Goddess; she is living her whole life in grace in a major way.

And speaking of friendships and the internets, I thank the most high for your presence here. Taking the time to read my sometimes crotchety opinions, laughing with me at the ridiculousness, leaving amazing and well thought out comments--I really love you guys (and no it's not the vodka talking, that was last night!) Folks like Ms. Marvalus, sdg1844, Madame Z, and the Happy Go Lucky Bachelor seem like cousins that I like hanging out with--I just name them cause they are here every day without fail. For all of you that are here every day, or once a week, or once a month even, please know you are truly appreciated by the author of this blog.

Be blessed and prosper your azz off in the '09!

Casablanca

So much has been said about Casablanca, which is widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, that it's difficult to know just where to start. It's easy to see why the film has become so ensconced in popular culture. It unites Humphrey Bogart, one of the finest tough-guy leads of the classic Hollywood era, with the gorgeous vulnerability of Ingrid Bergman, and gives them a tragic romantic backstory that charges every glance passed between them. The film is also blessed with a compulsively quotable script, strewn with lines that have passed into common usage even for those who have no idea where they originated: most people can quote from the film without realizing they're doing so. The dialogue has a sharpness and hard-edged wit that marks it as a close relative to the noir tradition, even if its sweeping romanticism and the crisp beauty of its big-budget images distances it from the cruder B pictures that shared its verbal sensibility.

The most famous lines — "Here's looking at you, kid" and Bogey's epic final speech to Bergman ("maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow...") — have a timeless quality to them, a lyrical beauty that's only enhanced by Bogart's laidback delivery. The script is knowingly artificial, meticulously crafted, and Bogart handles its cadences perfectly, letting his voice gather momentum as he charges through the lengthy and often convoluted blocks of text he's given. He can dash off lines where it sounds like he's losing his breath rushing through the words, and still sound natural, relaxed, and most importantly cool. These words wouldn't sound nearly as good — or be nearly as famous — if anyone else had said them. Not everything in the film is as frequently quoted as those few most famous moments, but nearly everything Bogey says in the film seems like it's ready to be quoted, like it was written and said with the knowledge that it would reverberate forever. There's no such thing as small talk for Bogart: he's always on, always ready with a clever quip or a quietly sarcastic rejoinder or a coolly romantic speech.

Bogart is of course Rick, the owner of a nightclub in Casablanca during World War II, inhabiting an uneasy neutral ground between the "unoccupied French" and the fascist forces ravaging Europe. His club is a way-station for all the various illegal and semi-legal activity in the city, which is a key stopping point for all those who seek refuge from Europe and a flight to America. This being a wartime film, there's of course no way that Rick's neutrality can last, and the intrusion of a particularly nasty Gestapo officer (Conrad Veidt) ensures that he will have to take sides sooner or later. But the film's real focus is the love triangle between Rick, his former love Ilsa (Bergman) and her husband Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), who happens to be one of the most infamous figures in the anti-fascist resistance, and who is thus fiercely hunted when he arrives in Morocco seeking a route to the United States. Ilsa and Rick have a past together, a passionate affair that ended when the Germans invaded Paris and Ilsa didn't show up for a rendezvous to leave town together. This intimate connection is obvious from the moment they first appear on screen together, and the soulful looks that pass between them practically ignite the celluloid. The couple has an intuitive chemistry that Bogart would only match when playing opposite his real-life wife Lauren Bacall, who presented a very different kind of love interest from the mushy, wet-eyed Bergman. Where Bacall always met Bogey on her own terms on screen, Ilsa tells Rick to do her thinking for her, and her swooning fall into his arms has an air of innocence and surrender that one would never see in the proto-feminist Bacall.

Bergman's demeanor is perfectly in keeping with the tone of Casablanca as a whole. This is an unapologetically romantic film, in every sense of the word. It is lush, with a visual sensibility that can only be called pristine. Director Michael Curtiz is unshowy with his camera, but he makes up for it with his expressive lighting, which nods to the high-contrast shadowy look of contemporary noirs but goes for a more balanced grayscale that makes the spotted areas of deep black even more eye-popping. Bergman especially benefits from Curtiz's aesthetic, which occasionally goes in for the usual goopy soft-focus actress closeups, but more often sculpts and shapes her beauty with shadows and artfully placed lights, giving her real grandeur and dignity rather than the usual cheap Hollywood glamour.

So there's certainly a reason this film is such a classic; in fact there are many, many reasons. Seldom has there been such a perfect union of stars, aesthetic atmosphere, and plotting — the narrative has just enough suspense and action to inject some tension, but not so much that it overwhelms the characters. It's this emphasis on character that is really the film's core, and the romance of Rick and Ilsa is one of the great movie romances precisely because there's so much depth to them as individuals. The long flashback montage of the couple's original Parisian affair is perhaps the film's least interesting sequence, if only because it shows explicitly what was already so succinctly suggested. This is, if anything, even more of a testament to the performances of Bergman and Bogart, who establish with pointed glances and body language the depth of their relationship, and made irrelevant any attempts to make what's between them explicit. This unspoken love, coupled with Bogart's timeless attempts to speak it, makes Casablanca a romantic masterpiece.

The Talk of the Town

The Talk of the Town is a truly preposterous film, a bloated epic that isn't sure if it's a legal thriller, a screwball comedy, or a love triangle romance. Director George Stevens does his best to juggle a whole lot of balls here, some of which are pretty hard to keep in the air — starting with the ridiculous premise, in which the anti-capitalist radical Leopold Dilg (Cary Grant) is framed for arson and murder, escapes from jail, and winds up hiding out with spunky schoolteacher Nora Shelley (Jean Arthur) and future Supreme Court justice Michael Lightcap (Ronald Colman). Nothing is said outright, but it's heavily suggested that Leopold is some kind of pseudo-socialist agitator, rousing up the people of the town against corrupt factory boss Andrew Holmes (Charles Dingle). Holmes, in turn, pins the burning of his factory on Leopold, a convenient scapegoat to cover up his own insurance scams. The outlines of this intrigue are made apparent right from the start, and despite a very effective Wellesian suspense sequence in which Leopold makes his escape through a rainy bog, accompanied by exclamation-laden newspaper headlines, the film's emphasis is not on its thriller aspects.

Rather, the film's core lies in the contrast that develops between two opposing outlooks on the law: Leopold's practical, common sense variety, seen from the perspective of an innocent man wrongly accused; and the iron, unshakable faith in justice possessed by Lightcap, a scholar who never considers the practical applications of the law but only its "principles." Grant plays his side of it well, and his character is in some ways very similar to his part in George Cukor's great Holiday: a common sense kind of guy, with little patience for ceremony or tradition, who wants to make his own way. It's often forgotten that Grant, despite his well-earned reputation as a suave Hollywood leading man, was just as good at playing earnest, rugged proles. His dark stare and expressive face are perfectly suited to Leopold, who can be fierce and passionate in an argument and yet curiously relaxed when facing down his own impending death. He increasingly settles in around Lightcap's house, posing as a gardener and engaging the law professor in legal argumentation while gulping down prodigious quantities of food. It's all faintly absurd, and would barely hold together if not for Grant's typically game, laidback performance.

Even so, the film's greatest asset is unarguably Jean Arthur, who provides most of the laughs as the high-strung schoolteacher who becomes entangled with both Leopold and Lightcap, desperately trying to hide the escapee's secret from the professor as they all live uneasily under the same roof. Arthur is a total riot, and her performance goes a long way towards making the film bearable even in its dullest stretches. She's always active with some small bit of business, enlivening the film with her rubbery command over her face. She's always flitting about, bird-like, her carriage thrust forward, chirping and smiling broadly, her body propelled by uncontainable nervous energy. In a scene where Leopold sneaks around the house in search of food, Nora gapes in shock and horror at the convict tip-toeing through the kitchen right behind the professor's back, but she keeps taking dictation the whole time, without letting her pen pause. Her increasingly outlandish attempts to hide Leopold and then, when he's relatively out in the open as the gardener, to keep his secret, inspire some great comic lunacy, like the scene where she squeals and hurls an egg onto a newspaper photo of Leopold's face, letting the yolk come to rest neatly right beneath the escapee's hat. Even when there are no plot contrivances necessitating these kinds of gymnastics, Arthur is a blast. One of the film's best scenes is an utterly extraneous throwaway where Nora poses coquettishly in front of a mirror, pulling a stray curl of hair under her nose like a mustache and telling herself how pretty she is.

As funny and lively as Arthur is, neither her whirling dervish performance nor the able sparring of Grant and Colman can entirely save a film that is basically flawed right from conception. The cast does a fine job with what they're given, but the plot is just too much of a meandering mess and the shifting genres and moods are sloppily handled. One hardly knows what to make of a bizarre scene where Lightcap shaves off the beard he's long worn, a symbol of his isolation and containment in an ivory tower. At this moment, Stevens cuts away to a poignant, vaseline-lensed closeup of Lightcap's black valet (Rex Ingram), who grows bleary-eyed and actually begins to cry at the sight. It's hilarious, if only because its intent is so puzzling and its execution so strange. Can this maudlin moment really be meant in earnest? It's hard to believe that Stevens would invest so much of the film's melodrama into the shaving of a beard, but there's little enough to indicate it's a joke either — and if it is, it's probably a somewhat mean one on the sentimental black servant.

This odd scene is indicative of the ambivalent effect of the film as a whole. Stevens can often be technically effective in isolated scenes, and he has an especially good hand for crowded comedy. An early scene where Nora frantically tries to clear out the house only to have more and more people unexpectedly arrive is particularly sharp in its sense of comic timing and its handling of the increasingly cramped space in front of the camera. But no matter how good individual scenes can be, the whole thing holds together awkwardly, particularly in the slapdash and seemingly never-ending finale, which finally shambles to an unsatisfying resolution after way too many half-realized false endings. The film is a sporadically interesting and even entertaining mess, but it's a failure nonetheless.

Bell, Book and Candle

Bell, Book and Candle is a fanciful, charming, lightweight love story, a low-key comedy about magic and love, and whether there's really any difference at all between the two. The witch Gillian (Kim Novak, sporting the most ridiculous painted-on eyebrows in cinematic history) is growing bored with her life and wants something different, which for her means hanging out with ordinary mortals for a change. Naturally, she takes a liking to her new upstairs neighbor, the publisher Shep Henderson (Jimmy Stewart), and she becomes determined to make him hers when she discovers that he's engaged to marry her college rival Merle (Janice Rule). The set-up is an obvious one for a romantic comedy — what are the odds that Gillian falls in love with the guy she's only using for revenge and cheap thrills? — and the only real wrinkle is a light dusting of magic, which is used sparingly and with not much flash or impact.

Still, despite its obviousness there's a lot to like here. Novak and Stewart worked together on two films in 1958 (the other probably doesn't need to be named), and their chemistry is obvious. There's something inherently appealing about throwing together Stewart at his most "aw-shucks" with the icy, glib Novak, a perfect Hitchcock blonde if ever there was one. Sparks fly just putting the two of them together, and there's something urgent and believable about their kisses, an uneasy passion that Hitchcock would channel into something sinister and gripping in Vertigo, and which here director Richard Quine uses to much more prosaic effect. It's a good thing that the stars are so good together, because in some ways they're the film's primary pleasure. The script lacks the crackle and punch of the best romantic comedies, and there's little enough truly engaging patter — a stray quip here and there elicits a smile, but the film is more amusing than actually funny. Jack Lemmon, as Gillian's brother Nicky, gets most of his laughs from physical comedy. You'll rarely find a more natural comedian than Lemmon, but he doesn't get many choice lines; he's hilarious anyway at times, and it's hard not to enjoy his introduction, looking stoned out of his mind as he bangs on a pair of bongos at a nightclub. His goofy smile and rolling eyes define a character who otherwise doesn't have much to do.

Even Stewart does his best work with his face rather than with the rather generic dialogue. He gets a lot out of pure nervous energy: a self-conscious stammer, manic pacing and arm motions, eyes popped so wide they look they're going to fall out of his head. On anyone else it'd look like hammy mugging, but Stewart manages to make this kind of over-the-top awkwardness seem natural to the character. Stewart's characters in this mold — which is to say, when he's not working with Hitchcock or Mann, two directors who tended to roughen up the actor's edges — are charming and kind of naïve, genuine nice guys who have a real down-home appeal even in their darkest moments. This certainly describes Shep, who is sympathetic even when he's dumping his fiancée for Gillian, a woman he met only yesterday. He tells Merle that he's "a cad," and smiles politely as she slaps him. That's a Jimmy Stewart nice guy, alright.

In addition to Stewart and Lemmon, the film is graced with several fine comedic bit turns: Ernie Kovacs as a perpetually disheveled, alcoholic writer drawn to New York by one of Gillian's spells, in order to write a book for Shep; Elsa Lanchester, the Bride of Frankenstein herself, as Gillian's lovably dotty old aunt; Hermione Gingold as a powerful rival witch. But again, the writing doesn't seem to be on par with the quality of the cast, and most of the fun arises from seeing these great comic actors inject bits of physical humor and small visual touches into their performances. Gingold doesn't have much to say or do, but she's fun to watch, all done up in thrift-store rags and almost constantly lit from above by a diffuse green light, puttering around her old haunted house, mixing occult ingredients with a bemused smile on her face.

Quine also graces the film with a light touch behind the camera, an unobtrusive but nevertheless strong perspective as a director. The credits sequence, in which the camera moves around Gillian's antique shop from one relic to another, pausing for a few moments on each, foreshadows a technique that Quine will employ several times throughout the film. He likes to move the camera gently within a scene in order to shift from one point of interest to another. A shot outside Gillian's store, as her things are packed away into a truck outside, slowly tracks in, edging around the truck, so that Gillian and Nicky can be seen through the store's front window. In other scenes, Quine's playful sense of framing elicits eccentric effects: Kovacs, Lemmon and Stewart outside Gingold's house, clustered on her steps like ersatz Christmas carolers; a long shot of Gillian and her aunt walking through a beautifully artificial snowy city set; a shot of Stewart distorted through the lens of a crystal ball. There is nothing, though, that can quite match the startling, haunting closeup of Gillian as she casts her love spell on Shep, holding her cat familiar Pyewacket under her nose, her deep blue eyes and the cat's both staring into the camera, her face lit with an otherworldly glow. It's the film's most exciting image, and the only one that truly probes the magical, mystical quality that is really at the story's core. This is the only moment where it feels like anything magical is happening, in either cinematic or narrative terms. It's a masterful shot. The curve of the cat's black ears mask the lower half of Novak's face, letting her eyes shine intensely in isolation, mirrored in the lower half of the frame by the cat's own blue eyes.

The rest of the film doesn't have anything quite as tingly or evocative as this sequence, but even by itself it's almost enough to elevate this otherwise rather middling romantic comedy to something of a higher level. As it is, this is an intermittently enjoyable and amusing fantasy, a cute picture but with just enough substance to prevent it from being completely disposable. It's about the magic of love, how falling in love is so inexplicable, so mysterious and resistant to logic, that it might as well really be magic.

Random Movie News....

Yes, very random--a veritable Black Hollywood stew.

First up--Spike is all over the place these days...he is making a film on the L.A. Riots. From comingsoon.net:

Spike Lee may be close to filming his movie about the 1992 Los Angeles riots with producer Brian Grazer, who tells ComingSoon.net that it might hit theaters before their sequel to “Inside Man 2.”

Grazer, the founder of Imagine Entertainment with filmmaker/partner Ron Howard, said the L.A. riots film would be a “360 degree view of what that is, an autopsy of how a riot works."

Like Spike, Grazer has been trying to get the project made for a long time.

From IW: Hopefully, Spike and Grazer won't butt heads--those are 2 massive and polar opposite egos in the room. But if Spike gains control, at least it will be from a Black perspective for once.

Question...why, why why, is Universal ready to make a "Nutty Professor Part 3"?

I'm sorry, except for Hugh Jackman, this has to be the sorriest ass Sexiest Men Alive Top 10 List in homosapian history. Pathetic! (sorry Blair)

Have you heard that Cedric The Entertainer is in talks to make a movie based on the life of Marcus Garvey? About f*cking time somebody is! It will be extremely interesting to see Ced play a dramatic role with Garvey, and he does have the look for it.

And for all of you checking out the Old Boy/Will Smith/Spielberg saga of an "Old Boy" remake (including me), here is the latest.

No one really expected that team to come through, and I was wondering what the cop-out would be--here it is; the movie will be based on the graphic novels of Old Boy, and not a remake of the Korean film. That f*cking figures. I knew they would get around actually making something truly noteworthy somehow....it kinda pisses me off, to tell the truth.

And finally can someone explain what these folks are trying to do here? This "Black Dynamite" movie seems to be a copycat blaxploitation movie with a straight face, but I can't tell. With such random folks as Arsenio Hall, Nicole Sullivan, and Jimmy Walker, are they serious, or is this a parody? Note to the filmmakers: "I'm Gonna Get U Sucka" was done 20 years ago--we still remember it!

Off Topic, But My 2 Cents....

Hey all. I'll just make a quick mention of The American Music Awards, which I honestly haven't watched in years. I've always found it too pop-ee, too Billboard 100 for my taste. I watched it last night from a kind of sociological point of view, and here are a few of my observations:

-Chris Brown still looks like he's 13 years old

-Speaking of Chris Brown, Rihanna--the metallic eye patch? I mean really. The whole "edgy" thing is starting to look more than forced.

-Neyo is doing his damnedest to channel Micheal Jackson; Mike should be asking for royalties

-Pink has my respect all day; she is very obviously in it for her love of music, and she killed it in her performance

-All of Beyonce's songs sound exactly the same to me, but Lord knows she can dance her azz off, I can't even front.

-My husband the RZA was looking extra finger lickin' delicious.

-Mariah Carey is about as exciting as an ingrown toenail, and just as painful to watch. Is she still using the wind machines to blow her hair--even on live TV? Give it up, girl!

-The B-52's should be at the courthouse at this very moment filing a lawsuit against Miley Cyrus and her crew for stealing their sh*t--it's just plain robbery. And nobody's father should be looking all blowdried and leathered out with a huge soul patch (I'm talkin' to you Billy Ray Cyrus). The "high concept" behind her performance/song was completely laughable.

-Poor Scott Weiland (Stone Temple Pilots). He used to be on track to be the biggest rock star in the world...now he's like the embarrassing uncle at the family gatherings--you know his azz is gonna get fucked up and cause a scene, and there is nothing you can do to stop it, but you invite him anyway cause he's really harmless, and inside you love him and feel a bit sorry for him.

-The Eagles were eligible for an award?

-Christina Aguilera's singing grates every single, solitary pore and fiber of my soul.

-There was a noticeable absence of Neo-Soul, or really any real soul, period.

-I still have absolutely no idea who Taylor Swift is.

That is all.

Films I Love #8: Naked (Mike Leigh, 1993)

Johnny (David Thewlis), the homeless, wandering central character in Mike Leigh's Naked, issues a profound challenge to audience identification right from his first appearance on screen: in the opening minutes of the film, he violently rapes a girl against an alley wall, fleeing afterward through shadowy streets until he stumbles upon an unattended car he can steal. He is, to say the least, not an especially likable protagonist, but Leigh nevertheless trains his camera on him, sticking with him and the other downtrodden characters he encounters on his rambling adventures. Johnny doesn't necessarily get any more likable, but he does become more sympathetic, more complex, even in some strange ways taking on the voice of the film's moral compass. In an urban wasteland that offers few opportunities — and none that the restless, angry Johnny would want to consider — Johnny's half-crazed rants about political exploitation, homelessness, and the fulfillment of apocalyptic biblical prophesies in the form of the bar code begin to sound, if not reasonable, then at least understandable, a natural extension of this landscape. The film is anchored by Thewlis' fearless performance, investing tremendous energy into the unhinged Johnny, drawing out both his undirected universal anger and his surprising (if often short-lived) moments of warmth and tenderness towards his fellow down-and-outs. Leigh's camera lingers on Thewlis and the other actors for revealing close-ups that capture this expressive troupe of born character actors (Karin Cartlidge, Lesley Sharp) at their most unveiled and even transcendent. The film's probing, mordantly funny social critique of working class London is by turns sharp — a wonderful sequence with a bored night watchman (Peter Wight) who refuses to believe that he has no future — and utterly brutal, a hammer to the head — the creepy, sexually sadistic landlord (Greg Cruttwell) whose profound sense of smug upper-class privilege makes him a much more dangerous evil than Johnny's more diffuse outbursts of misdirected violence.