Thursday Minute
No. 105 | May 27, 2010

Shades of Gray

Our theme this week
Black-and-white movies since 1990

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)
Tuesday         —   Clerks (1994)
Wednesday    —   Ed Wood (1994)

The Good German (2006)

Director of Photography:  Steven Soderbergh (as Peter Andrews)

Watching The Good German made me wonder what Steven Soderbergh did to offend the critics.  Did he forget to send them Christmas cards?  Did he shoot spitballs at them from the back of the theater?  Did he say something nasty about their mothers?

Surely he did something egregious to account for the reaction to his film.  The critical response doesn’t seem entirely rational.  I hesitate to use the word savage, but after reading another review just now, I’d say it might be the right word for describing the critical war party that was out to get the director when The Good German came out.  “Off with his head!” is the approximate gist of many reviews, though as far as I can tell, those exact words didn’t make it into print.  (It might have made for an engaging ad campaign.)

I won’t say that The Good German is an unqualified success.  I’m not sure it’s even a qualified success.  But I’d say at the very least it’s an interesting misfire, and probably even better than that.  I’ve only seen the film a couple of times—once when it was first released, once recently—and I may need another viewing before making any firm assessments.  Some films are like that.  This one seems to be.

Set in 1945, in the aftermath of the Allied victory, The Good German follows Jake Geismer (George Clooney), a war correspondent (for The New Republic, no less), as he returns to Berlin to search for, among other things, his former lover, Lena Brandt (Cate Blanchett).  Lena’s husband, Emil (Christian Oliver), is a mysterious figure and the “good German” of the title.  Having been involved with the German rocket program during the war, Emil is a much-wanted man, sought by the Americans, the Soviets, and the British, all with their own motives.  The war was hell, and even for those who made it through, there was a price paid for survival, secrets they’d rather not divulge.  The end of the war is no end to the moral compromise, and in Soderbergh’s universe, there is not the usual clear line between the good guys and the bad guys.  At least you can’t tell by the uniform.

The Good German is an adaptation of the 2001 novel by Joseph Kanon.  The film version departs from the book, and Soderbergh borrows freely from films of the ’40s for story material, and more.  One obvious influence is Casablanca, and perhaps this is where Soderbergh gets himself into hot water with the critics.  It’s an unwise comparison to draw for any film, but more than that, the borrowing overshadows what’s onscreen, especially the final scene with the plane waiting at the airstrip, and it does get in the way of The Good German telling its own story.  The divided-city milieu of The Third Man is also evident, as are echoes from Chinatown, though that isn’t a war film or in black-and-white.

Soderbergh has had an interesting career, hopping between entertainments and experiments.  The Good German qualifies as one of his experimental works, though essentially it’s a genre film, an historical spy story/murder mystery, with a recognizable narrative.  Soderbergh made a 1940s film in the 21st century.  He did mimic the technology of the early era, at least, though the sensibility—not to mention the language and subject matter (the Hays Office would have had a field day with this one)—is more appropriate of our time.

The initial response was hardly receptive, though I do think it’s worth another view.  The final word (as always) has yet to be written.

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The Good German and Casablanca
Homage, Theft, or Just Wishful Thinking?  Discuss.

 

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The Good German (2006)
Steven Soderbergh, director, director of photography
Trailer

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The Good German (2006)
Cate Blanchett, Tobey Maguire

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Quote of Note
“You can say what you want about the war, but the war was the best thing that ever happened to me.  Because when you have money, then, for the first time in your life, you understand it, what money does for you.  Where before all you understood was not having it? Money allows you to be who you truly are.”
—Patrick Tully (Tobey Maguire), The Good German (2006)

…58…59…60

Friday Minute
No. 91 | May 7, 2010

Plight of the Piano Player

Our theme this week
Piano-playing protagonists in peril

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   Shoot the Piano Player (Tirez sur le Pianiste) (1960)
Tuesday         —   Five Easy Pieces (1970)
Wednesday    —   The Piano Teacher (La Pianiste) (2001)
Thursday        —   Shine (1996)

The Pianist (2002)

What can you say about Roman Polanski?  With a certain scandal in the news lately, it’s hard to find a kind word about the man.  Yet it shouldn’t be controversial to say that Polanski is one of the outstanding film artists of our time.  His body of work is impressive:  Knife in the Water, Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, Tess, The Pianist, and The Ghost Writer.  (The current court case is outside my beat, but for the record, I have no patience for the argument that Polanski should be exempt from justice because of his film work over the years, nor for the argument that his work should be boycotted.  Both are very wrongheaded ideas, if you ask me.  Not that anyone did.)

If Polanski were to make a film of his own story, I think he’d take an approach you’re not likely to find in today’s media.  You get a sense of it in The Pianist, a film about Wladyslaw Szpilman, the Polish pianist who barely survived the German occupation during World War II.  Szpilman is a talented musician whose only crime is that he’s a Jew.  The film is about the Holocaust (and among other things, extraordinary survival and art), but Polanski, who lost his mother in Auschwitz, is not primarily interested in moral judgment.  The horror is a given, but the film seeks, as much as than anything else, understanding.  That seems to me what the best art is all about.

Adrien Brody gives a tour-de-force performance as Szpilman.  We meet him in a Warsaw radio studio, at the piano, unwilling to leave mid-song as the first bombs fall.  But soon he is knocked to the floor, the concert has ended, and his life will never again be the same.  He loses his family, his friends, his country, and the war grinds on.  As the years pass Szpilman is witness to, and victim of, unspeakable brutality.  His body is wasted, all vigor is gone, yet somehow he survives.  Toward the end of the fighting Szpilman is caught by a German officer (Thomas Kretschmann), who asks what he does.  “I am—I was a pianist.”  They walk into the next room.  “Play something.”  Szpilman takes a seat at a piano and plays Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23.  It’s a not-so-subtle statement from Polanski.  The German is moved, and Szpilman is saved.

After the war Wladyslaw Szpilman resumed his music career, performing and composing.  In 1945 he wrote his memoir, republished by his son five decades later.  Szpilman lived until 2000.   Polanski’s film is a remarkable tribute.

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The Pianist
Roman Polanski, director
Trailer

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The Pianist
Adrien Brody

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Quote of Note
“I’m sitting here in my own house, minding my own business, playing my own piano.  I don’t think you can make a crime out of that.’”
—Vienna (Joan Crawford), Johnny Guitar (1954)

…58…59…60.

Friday Minute
No. 36 | February 19, 2010

Women Behind the Camera I

Our theme this week
Women directors of notable films from 2009

Featured this week
Monday         —   Lone Scherfig
Tuesday         —   Nora Ephron
Wednesday    —   Claire Denis
Thursday        —   Anne Fletcher

Kathryn Bigelow

The essentials
Notable 2009 film:  The Hurt Locker; nominated for 9 Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director; nominated for 3 Golden Globes; won DGA Award (first woman to win).

“This is the most incredible moment of my life,” Bigelow said, winning the DGA Award a few weeks ago.  Wonder what she’ll say if she wins the Oscar next month.  It’s a good bet too that she’ll do it—only six times in six decades has the DGA winner not won Best Director.  Three women had been nominated in the past—Lina Wertmüller, Jane Campion, and Sofia Coppola—but Bigelow could be the first woman to win the Academy Award for directing.  Bigelow, nonetheless, would prefer to downplay her gender, shunning the “woman” description in her occupational title.  “I suppose I like to think of myself as a filmmaker.”

She’s right.  The sex of the person behind the camera shouldn’t be a big deal.  The exclusive men’s club nature of past directors’ awards, however, makes Bigelow a noteworthy figure.  There needs to be a first before there’s a second, a third, or a tenth.  Her success, and others’, will make it easier to see ”women directors” as just directors who happen to be women. 

There’s nothing in Bigelow’s work that says “this film was directed by a woman.”  Except, perhaps, that she sees men—especially men who like danger (one of her favorite subjects)—with a certain clarity that it may be hard for men themselves to have.  Point Break(1991) features a thrill-seeking gang of surfers and a scene with Keanu Reaves’s undercover cop jumping from a plane without a parachute.  (There’s also a group known as the Ex-Presidents, who rob banks while wearing masks of Presidents Reagan, Carter, Nixon, and Johnson.  It’s a clever visual, not to mention, a sly political comment.)  Set in an L.A. on the verge of apocalypse, Strange Days (1995), with Ralph Fiennes and Angela Bassett, has an ex-cop who relives better days with his ex-girlfriend by playing ”SQUID” recordings that connect directly to the memory center of his brain.  (The SQUID experience is not unlike an avatar’s.  James Cameron co-wrote the script.)  K-19:  The Widowmaker (2003) is about the men on a Soviet submarine’s ill-fated maiden voyage.

“War’s dirty little secret is that some men love it.  I’m trying to unpack why, to look at what it means to be a hero in the context of 21st-century combat.”  That’s Bigelow on The Hurt Locker.  Her focus again is men, three soldiers in a bomb squad.  The leader is a staff sergeant who doesn’t shirk from danger, but instead revels in it, bravely and recklessly.  The film’s opening quotation provides an explanation:  ”war is a drug.”  (More on The Hurt Locker here.)

Beyond the final credits
Kathryn Bigelow was married to James Cameron twenty years ago.  Both are up for the directing Oscar this year. It was Bigelow’s only marriage, the third of five for Cameron.  Three of Cameron’s wives had worked on films he directed (Gale Anne Hurd, Linda Hamilton, and Suzy Amis), though not Bigelow.  Cameron, on the other hand, has collaborated (writing, producing) on two of Bigelow’s films:  Point Break and Strange Days.

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The Hurt Locker (2009)
Kathryn Bigelow, director

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Interview with Kathryn Bigelow

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Quote of Note
Thelma:  Good morning everybody, this is a robbery.  Now if nobody loses their head, nobody will lose their head.  Now Simon says everybody lay down on the floor, except you, sir.  You’ll have a story to tell your friends, or a tag on your toe, it’s your decision.  Now you take this bag and empty the cash register into it.
Store Clerk:  Yes, ma’am.
Thelma:  Let’s see who wins a prize for keeping their cool.  Now you, sir, lay back down, thank you.  Can we get a couple of Wild Turkeys too?
Store Clerk:  Sure, ma’am.
Thelma:  Thank you, now everybody just stay down on the floor until I leave.  Thank you for your cooperation and have a good day.
—Thelma (Geena Davis), Thelma and Louise (1991)

…58…59…60.

Monday Minute
No. 17 | January 25, 2010

Best of the Decade

Here are the best movies of the past ten years.  Sez who?  Sez the critics, that’s who.   How do I know?  I can look it up, and you can too.

One distinct change for moviegoers last decade was having easy access to the opinions of movie critics, and lots of them.  (You could argue that critics matter less than ever before, and there’s some truth to that, but I like to think the critics, at least some of them, still count.)  Way back when, if you wanted to know if a movie was worth seeing, you’d look in your newspaper and see what the local reviewer thought.  The four stars (****) next to some reviews meant very good.  Then for a while the gold standard was “Two Thumbs Up!” from Roger and Gene.  That worked pretty well in the pre-internet days.  Now everything is online, just a few mouse clicks away, and the measure of a movie’s worth is all about the numbers—one at Metacritic, one at Rotten Tomatoes.

Both websites provide links to a wide variety of reviews from critics.  The two sites are useful for that, if nothing else.  But at each site it’s a number that matters.  Each takes all the words, all the reaction, for all the critics (or a lot of them, anyway) and reduces their combined assessment to a single number, an average.  The methodologies are different.  Metacritic assigns a number for every review and uses a weighted average to calculate a “Metascore” between 0 and 100.  Rotten Tomatoes judges each review as either positive or not and provides a “Tomatometer” rating, a percentage of reviews that are favorable.  Green scores (60 and above) are desirable at Metacritic.  The “Certified Fresh” seal (75% and up) is the benchmark at Rotten Tomatoes.

How do the two sites compare?  Rotten Tomatoes is somewhat older (it launched in 1999, Metacritic in 2001) and somewhat more popular.  Metacritic, in my opinion, is somewhat more useful.  Rotten Tomatoes looks at nothing more than a reviewer’s thumbs-up or thumbs-down.  Metacritic tries to gauge the level of intensity or excitement behind an opinion, not just whether it was positive or not.  If a film’s response is widely positive but not especially enthusiastic, it may do better at Rotten Tomatoes than Metacritic.  I tend to like films that push the limits one way or another, which may mean a more enthusiatic but divided response, and perhaps a lower score at Rotten Tomatoes than it “deserves.”  The way I see it, if everyone likes a film, what’s left to argue about?  And if no one dislikes a movie, it may not have been trying hard enough.

That said, here’s my caveat about both sites:  No one number tells you very much about a movie.  Movies should be talked about, even debated.  But rated?  I don’t see great value in it.  Should the pleasure we take in watching a film be reduced to a number?  Do movies need to be graded like a student’s math homework?  Don’t we get enough scores from watching sports?  If I ask what you think about a movie, I’m interested in more than ”I’d give it an 8.”  I’d like to know what you think.  My advice:  read the reviews.  Take the numbers with a great big grain of salt.

Even if the numbers shouldn’t matter, for many people they do (you know who you are).  So—here goes, anyway—let’s see what movies scored top numbers in the past decade.  The two sites don’t always agree, so I’ll be picking among their choices for best-reviewed films.  The selections skew toward the tops films at Metacritic.  A Taste of Others (2001), for example, scored 100% at Rotten Tomatoes (along with quite a few others), but 78 at Metacritic.  It doesn’t make the cut.  Other exceptions include Army of Shadows (99/97%) and Killer of Sheep (94/97%), which truly are films from previous decades, not the 2000s.

The two sites are very much in sync for the movies we’ll cover this week.  The Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes numbers, with one tiny exception, are all above 90/90%.  (One final reminder:  this week’s theme is not my list of best films of the decade.  That you’ll find over at the blog.)

Our theme this week
Best movies of the decade at Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes

The Hurt Locker

The essentials
Metacritic:  94
Rotten Tomatoes:  97%

Of the many events in the eventful decade that just passed, two stand above the rest.  The first is the tragedy of 9/11, an attack of one historic morning (though the rise and threat of terrorism is a decades-long story).  The second is another tragedy, the war in Iraq, which began in March of 2003 and continues to this day.  Movies have been made about 9/11, though no great ones.  More movies have been made about the Iraq war, some of them quite good, and finally, as the past decade was drawing to a close, a great one:  The Hurt Locker.

Other Iraq War movies have delved into the politics behind the invasion, especially documentaries.  The Hurt Lockerdoes not.  It’s the story of a few soldiers at ground level who are in Iraq not ostensibly to fight the enemy but to protect people from danger.  It’s a movie that people on either the left or the right might admire.  An apolitical film, though, it’s not.  Director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal ignore the political leaders and their supposed reasons for the war, but the filmmakers are not playing it safe.  Their focus, with laser-like precision, is on the day-to-day reality of three men in a bomb squad, and in their story the film provides a more lucid understanding of why we are there than hours of political speeches and analysis ever could.  War is a drug.  The addict in the movie is Staff Sergeant William James, played wonderfully by Jeremy Renner.  James does not run from danger.  He can’t get enough of it.  He risks his life and the lives of others, even to the point of recklessness.  As you watch you can’t help but admire his bravery, yet at the same time shudder at his display of bravado.  The rush of adrenaline is palpable, as James gets his fix again and again, unable to stop himself, despite witnessing and suffering extraordinary loss.  That’s what addiction, and war, does to you.  James is hardly the only addict.  Though the film doesn’t state it explicitly, the implication is clear.  Addiction is not just James’s reason for being in Baghdad—it’s ours too.

Beyond the final credits
The screenplay for The Hurt Locker is by Mark Boal, who as a freelance writer was embedded with a bomb squad unit in Iraq.  His one previous film credit was for the story of In the Valley of Elah, a 2007 film about the return of a soldier from Iraq.  The opening quote for The Hurt Locker, however, comes from a 2002 book by Chris Hedges, a former New York Times correspondent who covered wars across the globe over several decades.  The book is War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, and the full quotation is “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.”

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The Hurt Locker (2009)
Brian Geraghty, Anthony Mackie, Guy Pearce

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MAD FilmFest 101 Hint:

The final answer to the puzzle is the title of the American remake of a 1973 film.

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Quote of Note
“Nobody ever lies about being lonely.”
— Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt (Montgomery Clift),  From Here to Eternity (1953)

…58…59…60.

Thursday Minute
No. 10 | January 14, 2010

At the Movies

Our theme this week
Movies set in movie theaters

Featured this week
Monday         —   Sherlock Jr.
Tuesday         —   The Purple Rose of Cairo
Wednesday    —   The Last Picture Show

Inglourious Basterds

The essentials
Once upon a time, you could count on a few things in a World War II movie.  Good guys who fight fair and square, bad guys who don’t, and most of all, a certain chronology of events.  That’s not this kind of movie.  This is a Quentin Tarantino movie.  It’s hardly the first movie about the Big One to play loose with the facts, but any limits that may have applied in the past are blown to smithereens here.

Inglourious Basterds is a revenge fantasy.  It’s got a bit of history, a lot of killing, and yes, even a movie theater.

Le Gamaar is a small Parisian cinema operated by Shosanna Dreyfus, a French Jew whose family was murdered by Nazi Colonel Hans Landa in 1941.  The theater has been Shosanna’s sanctuary during the war.  When she meets German war hero Fredrick Zoller, the star of his own cinematic life story, a propaganda film called Stolz der Nation (“pride of the nation”), he insists that the world premiere be held at her theater.  Attending the premiere will be not only Landa but also much of the German high command, including Joseph Goebbels and Adolph Hitler.  Shosanna plans to make the premiere, and Le Gamaar, the venue for her revenge.  Meanwhile, “the Basterds,” a rogue band of Jewish soldiers led by Southern boy Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), learn of the event.  They storm their way to Paris with their own plot for payback.

The climax takes place while war scenes unfold in the film-within-a-film before the opening night audience.  No surprise, the action isn’t all onscreen, as the theater erupts in fire, gunfire, and explosions.  Shosanna gets her revenge.  So do the Basterds.  Perhaps most of all, so does Tarantino.  No telling just what it is that drives him, but what he delivers is stunning moviemaking, the kind that grabs you in the first scene and never lets go.

Beyond the final credits
One of the more grisly and commented-on aspects of the film is the scalping.  It’s the Basterds’ way of doing business (100 scalps apiece is the order).  That’s a new twist for World War II films, which generally adhere more closely to the historical record.  It’s a genre-bending invention from Tarantino, and the director, in a cameo role, plays one of the Germans who loses his head, so to speak.  In a second bit part, Tarantino plays an American sergeant in Stolz der Nation.

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Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Trailer

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Point of View

…58…59…60.