by Jaime Grijalba.

Well, might as well write about some other movies of the BAFICI. Last month I had two entries on my coverage of the Buenos Aires Festival International of Cinema Independent that I attended, and I was signaling what I thought about them. Now, as part of what I did after the Festival was over, was to contact some of the people who owned the movies on competition, to know if they’d let me see their films after the festival was done, mainly because I had no time to see all of them. So, some answered and had the graciousness of giving me their movies for me to watch and review in this particular ocassion. So, I shall be repeating some capsules from those as we take a look at all the films that were on competition that I was allowed to see online or at the cinema in Buenos Aires. Thanks to all of the filmmakers, producers and releasing companies for making them available. So, without futher ado, let’s continue our travel to the cinema.

· Acá adentro (In Here) (2013, Mateo Bendesky)

One of those nice surprises that you are glad to see when you find them. If this movie is something is an experiment, an experiment on liking a character and how a film can possibly force you to like him in one way or another, here we have an experiment that triumphs (at least for me) we are inside the mind of the main character at all times during one day (hence the name ‘In Here’), except for a few lapses in which we don’t see certain events of his life, like when he visits his shrink. Yet, we listen, through a voice over, all his thoughts, specially his own train of thought that leads him from one theme to another, from one subject to the next, remembering things suddenly, shifting the narrative, seeing how this man is just like you and me: alone with his own thoughts on how to act, what to do, the plan of action that he needs to follow, everything that comes to his mind we know it immediatly, and that is a bold act, and it works, it really works well. We follow a film director who is struggling to get a new script idea after his first films and his own sentimental break-up with a girlfriend who works in a similar line of work, we see how he tries to come up with ideas and we sometimes even see those ideas in an audiovisual way.I plan to do a more extensive review at my blog soon enough. (****)

· Leones (Lions) (2012, Jazmín López)

This must be one of the most enigmatic and praised films (in certain sectors of the critic world) in a long time, for some it’s a masterpiece while for others is one of the most original and intriguing films that have come out in a long time. When I finally had the chance to watch it, I was not impressed, it wasn’t because it wasn’t beautiful, because it is, it has an amazing cinematography with steady cam operated by the same guy who operated the steadycam in the Gus Van Sant film ‘Elephant’ (2003), and it wasn’t because it wasn’t interesting, because it had one element that intrigued me and amazed me by the way they handled it. Nevertheless, it was the constant visual rambling that made me not love this film, because I do think it’s worth checking out at least once, there is a constant repetition of the back of the characters moving around, walking and walking without saying anything and then the camera disengages them and goes rambling through the woods only to find them again, some would say wow to the choreography, I say that the whole thing was unnecesary. The story about 5 young people trying to find a house in the middle of the woods is thin, to say the least, but I don’t think that the script is the main selling point… even though they try by having snappy snobbish hipsterish dialogue. (***1/2)

· Viola (2012, Matías Piñeiro)

Based on texts by William Shakespeare, this film succeeds at giving a sense, a feeling that something else is going behind all what we are seeing, is the perfect example of the ‘slice of life’ in the sense that it’s just a peek at some world that is completely created and that works on its own, and that it would continue going on even when we don’t watch it, we have a sense that there is something before and so much afterwards, yet we are given just a little over an hour to enjoy these characters and their chemistry. It’s a bunch of scenes that mix the world of theater, obsession, film and business. Playing in the international competition, this film from Argentina was my favorite and my pick to win the final contest, it did win the FIPRESCI award and a comunal award for all the actresses, but this deserved more, now I must only say ‘watch it’, it’s one of those films that can be said are among the most surprising experiences, and you just want more and more, yet, you can’t have it. (****1/2)

· Soy Mucho Mejor que Vos (I’m So Much Better than you) (2013, Che Sandoval)

This is a spin-off of the chilean film ‘Te creis la más linda… (pero eris la más puta)’ (2008) where one of the characters that the protagonist encounters is followed here in his own adventures and desventures. He is a married man with kids, yet his wife has left for Spain after an opportunity to study her profession there through a scholarship, yet he is apalled, she wanted to leave with their kids all by herself and he wanted to stay, so he just didn’t give her permission to take the kids, so she left anyway, leaving the kids to his grandmother. He just drinks and tries to have sex with all the different people who he encounters in the night of Santiago de Chile: prostitutes, young girls, old women, anything that he has a shot at. It’s a comedy, but at the same time it’s really really dark, with elements like drugs and abuse thrown in, as well as the sensation that he is just escaping his life, he doesn’t want to acknowledge the superiority of his wife, and so this is a treaty on the male oriented society in which Chile, and maybe other countries (hah) live in. I’ll write more about this film at my blog when it comes out. (****)

· Los ilusos (The Wishful Thinkers) (2013, Jonás Trueba)

A movie whose main inspiration is clearly the plots and certain elements of the films of Hong-san Soo, with their protagonists, situations and certain landscapes, but this one goes a little bit further with the whole meta ideology where movies talk about movies or moviemakers… it goes beyond a lot. It’s a film about a filmmaker who wants to make a film about his life, and the main visual style of this black and white film is that we sometimes see how this film (Los Ilusos) is being made, like when they record folley or yell out action, how they frame the shot, how they prepare it, how sound is recorded and how the whole thing is coming together. Does it make it smart? Mhh, not really, actually it’s pretty unnecesary and sometimes it goes just way over the top, but it manages to forget all those moments thanks to a story that it’s sometimes funny and at times really warm on the inside, still at many times I stood there watching the screen and all the people around me would laugh and laugh, and I would go ‘huh?’, it’s like when people tell a joke and you just don’t understand it and keep quiet, and then you wonder if you’re stupid or the rest of the people are really dumb and would laugh at anything… I’m leaning towards the first option myself, but whatever, I guess I can live a life of stupidity. (***1/2)

· Exit Elena (2012, Nathan Silver)

The film manages to create a feeling regarding its main character, Elena, in terms of what she actually thinks and believes in her mind regarding her work as a nurse asssistant. We don’t know if she likes the job or if she hates it, we know that she does it the best way she can, and maybe that’s not enough for the standards of the people contracting her. Her life inside the house turns a bit claustrophobic in terms of the motherly figure that tries to controle and put her wing above her head and take her in as another daughter, but at the first sign of trouble or dissent she is obliged to take her out, no matter how much (fake?) sentiments she had for Elena. It’s still a bit lackluster in terms of how murky the picture looks and how the main character is a bit passive, that doesn’t mean that she isn’t fascinating. (***1/2)

· Tchoupitoulas (2012, Bill Ross IV, Turner Ross)

It’s an interesting documentary in terms of how much of it is actually staged (which is a lot) and how much of it looks natural (actually very little). The camera used here may be small, but it isn’t as small as to be that un-noticeable in certain circumstances in which the camera(s) is(are) put in. Nevertheless, there is a certain cheer and celebration of life in terms of the music and how the dreams and hopefulness of the kids featured in the film manage to overcome their own limitations and the place that they are sorrounded by (a poor zone in New Orleans). It’s more interesting than good, and I don’t really know if there’s some value in telling you that, because at times it felt good and at times it felt… just unnecesary to be made at all. And that’s not a good sign. (***1/2)

· Les coquillettes (2012, Sophie Letourneur)

Maybe the least interesting element of this feature is what it’s being promoted as the most interesting: that it happens at the Locarno Film Festival, and that it was shot guerrilla style during its 2011 edition, and maybe it’s because movies take so little part of the whole endeavour, as it’s more the substance and psychology of the three main characters that is much more charming than the landscape or the fact that they are presenting a movie in the festival. Their escapades, acting and presence on the screen salvages what could’ve been fatal, the double exposure of the story, as they are talking about things that happened to them, but most of the time they’re all together, the necesity of recopiling all the events makes up for a weak frame for the story to unfold. Could’ve been so much better than this, but we still have a good amount of acting and some funny situations and psychologies. (***1/2)

· Su Re (The King) (2012, Giovanni Columbu)

Interesting experiment when it tries to narrate specific parts of the Passion of the Christ, but it quickly becomes tiring due to its unaccesible editing (showing events our of order without a clear explication) and the conventionality of the project, filming it in rustic places doesn’t make it better or worse, it makes it… just something to watch, I guess, and that’s how I felt for most of it: this was something that I was seeing and little else was happening inside of my mind or in terms of feelings, this must be one of the first movies where Christ doesn’t deserve my pity nor I feel a strong emotion when he dies, and I guess that’s something that was sought for. Nevertheless, the production stories behind it make it interesting and it is still pretty much one of the most interesting renditions done in recent years of the life of Christ. (***1/2)

· Kujira no machi (The Town of Whales) (2012, Keiko Tsuruoka)

A simpler and more independent kind of japanese film that we don’t get to see that often is good to measure the actual power and resonance of the japanese film industry and history, if films like these can be made, then there’s no crisis in Japan, they’re still making the most interesting cinema of the world right now. This movie features three children of a small town that go to Tokyo to search for the brother of our female protagonist, who seems to have left home a long time ago. The style and presence of the film make the obvious love triangle that ensues between the three much more enigmatic, thanks to the fact that they are practically the only three actors in the film, as if they were ghosts or the last people on earth wandering in their town and later in Tokyo, knowing, asking and feeling. The emotions portrayed here are incredible and the performances are entirely believable, and the ending, bittersweet. Yet, at the same time, it lacks something distinctive and different. (****)

· A World Not Ours (2012, Mahdi Fleifel)

An extremely interesting documentary on a refugee camp for people from Palestine where they are practically prisoners, they can’t leave the camp freely and they can’t work in that country because of stupid restrictions. The director takes an approach already started by his father, who chronicled the life in the camp during the time he lived there and then continued to receive audiovisual materials from his brother as a form of communication, and the narrative of the documentary is based on the latest visit to the camp by the director, who films every interaction with his family and friends, where he finally can understand and get a real glimpse at what the life in the camp means. It’s an insider’s look, but at the same time is one that tries to understand and doesn’t go away with the answers. Approachable and recommended for one time watch. (****)

· Berberian Sound Studio (2012, Peter Strickland)

This film won the main international competition at the festival! It was a surprise for many but at the same time you can see how it would’ve been seen as the best movie since it’s the movie that’s best produced and well made (even if it’s not my favorite from the lineup). I mean that it was a surprise in the sense that the festival usually delivers its big prize to independent films that in no other way would have the attention that they would have, while this particular film is so different: it’s a genre film (horror) and it has garnered enough praise and buzz from earlier festivals and other events, so what’s the deal here? Maybe there’s an internal change, or maybe they did choose what was the best film of the lineup, and I must quietly respect and nod, because it’s still a fantastic movie that fails because it doesn’t go balls-out earlier into madness, as it does in its final 15 minutes. It’s a movie about a british sound designer who goes to Italy to work on a horror film, and how the cultural and the animosity backgrounds difer between the people. It has an impressive and at times breathtaking cinematography, as well as a carefully put together soundtrack and sound design, how could we not get that? It has an impressive main performance from veteran Toby Jones as well as a feeling of Argento and Bava that I wish could’ve been put a bit more on the screen. (****)

· Dur dêtre Dieu (Playback) (2012, Antoine Cattin, Pavel Kostomarov)

A documentary about the making of a film for the most part of a filmmaker’s life, the recently deceased russian Aleksey German who wanted to make ‘It’s Hard to be a God’ for the past 30 years of his career, but he eas always caught up with problems and censorship, and the film chronicles (partly) the extenuous shoot of 6 years (between 2000 and 2006) and how the imagery and the constant shouts of the director and his relation with his actors and crew, who was based around shouting and insults. There are some telling images about the making of the film and the instruments used, as well as how extenous and hard it all seems, specially when we see the funeral of the director of photography of the film, who worked since the inception of the film. Right now the film remains unfinished after the death of German, and even if this particular documentary ends its narrative way before there was any news of the death, it seems as if the film is doomed, as if it’s destined to never be seen. Nevertheless, besides the images and the description of the film, the documentary tries at times to breach other barriers, but it fails. (***1/2)

· Tanta agua (So Much Water) (2013, Ana Guevara, Leticia Jorge)

A sometimes moving and sometimes interesting portrayal of a vacation of a broken family: divorced parent and two somewhat distant children. The film manages to create an atmosphere of certain familiarity between the characters and with the audience, we quickly understand their characteristics and how well defined they are, yet the film doesn’t manage to refer to the actual relations between the characters, keeping them hidden, or just changing the animosity between them from one second to the next, as if the characters were constantly changing their mind, and that to me is no particularly inventive or fun. It sports some deadpan performances that help to build the mood of the film, but when it comes to the real emotions that a film like this could elicit, this doesn’t come close to what was achieved in the similarly themed piece ‘De Jueves a Domingo’ (2012). (***1/2)

Next week, we continue with the Masters of Horror. Enjoy!

by Allan Fish

(Japan 1951 123m) not on DVD

Aka. Genji Monogatari

Be happy

p  Masaichi Nagata  d  Kozaburo Yoshimura  w  Kaneto Shindo  book  Murasaki Shikibu  ph  Kohei Sugiyama  m  Akira Ifukube  art  Hiroshi Mizutani

Kazuo Hasegawa (Prince Genji Hikaru), Machiko Kyo (Lady Awaji), Michiyo Kogure (Lady Fujitsubo), Nobuko Otowa (Lady Murasaki), Mitsuko Mito Lady Aoi), Denjiro Okochi (The Harima Priest), Yuji Hori (Yoshinari), Chieko Soma (Lady Kiritsuba), Chieko Higashiyama (Concubine Kokiden), Eitaro Shindo (Minister of the Right), Ichiro Sugai (Minister of the Left), Sakae Ozawa (Emperor), Yuriko Hanabusa (Kuritsubo’s mother), Osamu Takizawa (Kiritsubo gomon), Kentaro Horima (Kashira), Yumiko Hasegawa (Oborozukiyo no kimi),

It’s hard to over-estimate the importance of Murasaki Shikibu’s book in Japanese culture.  It’s often seen as the first Japanese novel, indeed pretty much the world’s first novel.  It was written in the early 11^th century, in which time Shikibu lived and worked as a lady in waiting at court.  Its story is one known by everyone in Japan from their childhood, but is virtually unknown to most westerners.

Set in the Heian period (the same period it was written in), Lady Kiritsuba is the favourite mistress of the then Emperor, but falls foul of the machinations of the bitter old favourite Kokiden.  The Emperor is forced to give her up and, though she gives him a son, Genji Hikaru, he’s superfluous to needs when Kokiden is preparing her son to succeed as crown prince.  Kiritsuba dies when Genji is a boy but when he’s grown to manhood the Emperor invites him to court as a minister, but still Kokiden will not bear to have him around.  Genji falls in love with a young girl, Fujitsubo, only to find that she’s destined to become the latest wife to his father.  Unable to be with her, he takes solace in the love of two other women; Murasaki, who loves him deeply, and the frivolous Awaji, who also flirts with her former beau, Yoshinari. 

For such a legendary work of literature, it could be argued that only a two hour running time is giving the story short shrift, and indeed, while admired, it isn’t necessarily seen as a masterpiece in its native Japan.  However, Genji is a film that owes as much to western cinematic models as Japanese.  There are Wellesian touches worthy of the man who directed The Ball at the Anjo House, such as when passers-by are seen to comment on Genji as he passes through to the palace.  And while it perhaps could have been a bit longer to give the various relationships time to breathe, the script by Kaneto Shindo is a miracle of economy and also typical of Shindo’s later work as a director in its study of man’s weakness in a world where women often hold the power.

Stunningly shot by Kohei Sugiyama (who would be better known but for the even greater Kazuo Miyagawa), virtually entirely in the Daiei studios, the mise-en-scène is quite wondrous to behold.  Yoshimura’s framing is so incredibly intricate that each shot is like a painting.  Think of the scene where Kiritsuba lies on her death bed and how Yoshimura draws our eyes to the woman preparing tea through the transparent walls of the house.  Indeed, no director used the transparency of the divides in Japanese buildings as symbolically as Yoshimura, both expanding the space frame and isolating characters from each other.  Equally exemplary is his direction of the actors.  Hasegawa is perfect as the man who grows to realise that happiness is only transient, learning to forgive as he observes “it is befitting that those who love each other should be together for life.”  Yet throughout the film he’s dominated by women and they all make their mark.  Soma is deeply effective in the prologue, Higashiyama is splendidly malicious as the old hag concubine (a million miles from her mother in Tokyo Story), Otowa is touching as the steadfast Murasaki (based on the author perhaps?) and Kogure is typically melancholy as Genji’s true love.  Last and anything but least, there’s Kyo, sucking the blood vampire-like from Hasegawa’s wounded arm, getting practice in for Mizoguchi.

Cliffside Park High School symphonic band, including back row trumpet player Sammy Juliano at ‘Crescendo’ Spring Concert on Wednesday, May 15 (Sammy’s birthday!)

by Sam Juliano

With the end of the school year either completed in the institutions of higher learning or winding up in area grammar, middle and high schools, many have been attending year-end events in support of their children, relatives or friends.  This past week was memorable for two wonderful venues, attended by the entire family on Wednesday evening and Sunday afternoon.  The first, a mid-week spring concert titled “Crescendo” features the school’s symphonic band, advanced band, chorus and ensemble, under the guidance of director Derek Nelson for band and chorus and Leslie Auslin for ensemble.  My son Sammy played trumpet for the symphonic band, which negotiated Highlights from the Star Wars Saga, Selections from The Lord of the Rings-The Return of the King, Moussorgsky’s Great Gate of Kiev, a Beatles medley of “Yesterday,” “Michelle,” and “Eleanor Rigby” and John Philip Sousa’s El Capitan.  The Advanced band continued the program with highlights from West Side Story, an excerpt from Elmer Bernstein’s The Magnificent Seven, and selections from The Prince of Egypt.  After the chorus put their distinguished mark on the “Riversong,” “Beautiful Day,” “Turn Turn Turn,” “As Long As We Got Each other,” “I Won’t Give Up,” “Put A Little Love in Your Heart,” “Viva La Vida,” and “Go Ye Now in Peace” an impressive ensemble contingent gave rousing treatments to ‘Choral Highlights from Jersey Boys,’ and ten selections from Les Miserables including a solo from former Fairview Public School student Ernest Barzaga of “Stars” that sent the packed auditorium audience into frenzied applause.  Cliffside Park High School (my old alma mater, graduating class of 1972) should be proud of their musical chargers and the terrific work of their teachers.

Sunday’s commencement exercises at Hofstra University’s David S. Mack Sports and Exhibition Complex opened with a heartfelt moment of silence ordered by University President Stuart Rabinowitz for the young girl who was tragically killed in a tragic episode involving a home invasion in a campus housing facility a few days before.  Media trucks could still be seen on streets near the fateful incident.  It was followed by a rousing speech from New York Senator Chuck Schumer, who also made initial mention of the tragedy.  Ushered in by the Hofstra University Commencement Band’s spirited rendition of Elgar’s traditional graduation anthem “Pomp and Circumstance” this section of the college graduating class included approximately 350 students, one of whom was 22 year-old James Lampmann, who received a Bachelor of Science degree in television-video.  The young Lampmann was present in the back stage control room at October’s Presidential debate at the University, the second squaring off between President Obama and Mitt Romney.  A brunch was offered first off at the school of communication, where films created by the senior students were screened, and the Lampmann family treated the family guests afterward at the Cozymel Mexican Restaurant in nearby Westbury on a rainy day on Long Island.

In other news the sole winning Powerball lottery ticket was sold right outside of Tampa, Florida in a small town supermarket.  The ticket is worth $600 million dollars for some lucky person or persons.  Well I do know one Tampa resident quite well and hope he’s the lucky guy!

The WitD western polling began last week, and readers are welcome to hand in their ballots by e mail any time up till the opening days of August.

Sunday commencement exercises at Hofstra University on May 19th. Lucille’s godson and nephew James Lampmann received a BS in television/video.

In view of the busy week Lucille and I only managed to see a single film in theaters this week, though I returned to see that same film a second time on Saturday afternoon.  As far as Saturday night, our plans to see the critically-praised Korean film PIETA were dashed by downtown Manhattan traffic that kept things crawling at a snail’s pace.

The one film we did see (as I say I saw it twice) is STAR TREK INTO THE DARKNESS, which is the subject of a spirited if borderline contentiousness thread under Bob Clark’s Saturday review of the film.  I found it exhilarating, excellently mounted and acted, and in keeping with the humanist underpinnings that have made this such a beloved franchise for trekkies over decades.  I state my own case in a series of comments under Bob’s review:

Star Trek Into the Darkness    **** 1/2  (Friday night)  Secaucus multiplex

Samuel Wilson offers up an extraordinary essay on Malick’s “to The Wonder” at Mondo 70:                                                          http://mondo70.blogspot.com/2013/05/on-big-screen-to-wonder-2013.html

Jon Warner has hit another home run with his own profound essay on Terrence Malick’s To The Wonder at Films Worth Watching: http://filmsworthwatching.blogspot.com/2013/05/to-wonder-2013-directed-by-terrence.html

Shubhajit Lahiri has penned a brilliant capsule on the western classic “Red River” by Howard Hawks at Cinemascope:                                                                   http://cliched-monologues.blogspot.com/2013/05/red-river-1948.html

Craig Kennedy is at Cannes, offering up fantastic capsules reviews at living in Cinema daily.  His latest is a sought after report on the new Coens film “Inside Llewyn Davis”:                                                 http://livingincinema.com/2013/05/18/cannes-2013-joel-and-ethan-coens-inside-llewyn-davis/

John Greco has penned an excellent essay on Woody Van Dyke’s Penthouse at Twenty Four Frames: http://twentyfourframes.wordpress.com/2013/04/26/penthouse-1933-woody-van-dyke/

Van Dyke scores again in Judy Geater’s marvelous essay of The Thin Man at Movie Classics:                                       http://movieclassics.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/the-thin-man-ws-van-dyke-1934/

Laurie Buchanan offers up the “makings of Home Sweet Home’ in another marvelous post at the ever-popular Speaking From The Heart: http://tuesdayswithlaurie.com/2013/04/30/the-makings-of-home-sweet-home/

Marilyn Ferdinand has penned a fabulous review on Raymond Bernard’s 1934 masterpiece “Les Miserables” at Ferdy on Films: http://www.ferdyonfilms.com/2013/les-miserables-1934/18492/

Joel Bocko offers up an authoritative, passionate master-class presentation of the Astaire-Rogers musical treasures at The Dancing Image:     http://thedancingimage.blogspot.com/2008/12/astaire-and-rogers.html

Tony d’ Ambra takes an ever-insightful look at 1955′s The Big Bluff at FilmsNoir.net:                                                                   http://filmsnoir.net/film_noir/the-big-bluff-1955-the-bitter-flavour-of-festering-reality.html

Jeffrey Goodman is back in action at The Last Lullaby with a terrific round-up of four films including “Zero Dark Thirty” and “Scarecrow” and that’s great news for movie fans!:                                             http://cahierspositif.blogspot.com/2013/05/favorite-four-part-nineteen.html

Dean Treadway has a fantastic display of 70 double-feature movie posters up at Filmicability:                                                    http://filmicability.blogspot.com/2013/05/i-love-double-feature-movie-posters.html

David Schleicher’s magnificent review of the superlative Mud at The Schleicher Spin is just what the doctor ordered: http://theschleicherspin.com/2013/04/27/his-name-is-mud-and-its-a-helluva-thing/

Sachin Gandhi features a stupendous post on the Cinema of Neveldine/Taylor at Scribbles and Ramblings:                             http://likhna.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-cinema-of-neveldinetaylor.html

There is little on the planet as beautiful as “tulips on Mayne Island” and it’s there at the Creativepotager’s blog in all it’s visual splendor: http://creativepotager.wordpress.com/2013/05/05/sister-oil-paintings-of-tulips-on-the-springwater-deck-mayne-island/

J.D. LaFrance at Radiator Heaven has started up a fascinating new series on film critics who inspired him, with the celebrated Harlan Ellison as his first subhject: http://rheaven.blogspot.com/2013/05/film-critic-hall-of-fame-harlan-ellison.html

The exceptional writer Andrew Katsis has a terrific essay on “Casablanca””’ up at Dee Dee’s place Darkness Into Light: http://noirishcity.blogspot.com/2013/04/heres-looking-at-you-kidas-my-writer.html

Jaimie Grijalba has penned an excellent review of the Argentinian “Mujer Lobo” at Overlook’s Corridor: http://overlookhotelfilm.wordpress.com/2013/05/02/argentinian-cinema-2013-4-mujer-lobo-2013/

Patricia Hamilton’s frank and insightful review of the novel “A Complicated Marriage” at Patricia’s Wisdom is a must-read: http://patriciaswisdom.com/2013/05/a-complicated-marriage-my-life-with-clement-greenberg-janice-van-horne/

Murderous Ink at Vermillion and One Nights has written another extraordinary essay, this time on Yosujiro Shimazu’s 1931 “Love, Be With Humanity””: http://vermillionandonenights.blogspot.com/2013/05/love-be-with-humanity-1931.html

Incomparable Civil War scholar and maven Weeping Sam has penned another engaging feature on the battle of Vicksberg at The Whispering Ear: http://listeningear.blogspot.com/2013/05/vicksburg.html

One of the best writers out there, the incomparable Ed Howard is still working at an impressive pace at Only The Cinema, with his latest post on the silent classic “Golem”:                                                                                                                               http://seul-le-cinema.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-golem-1920.html

Jason Bellamy tackles Malick’s To the Wonder in typically spectacular form at The Cooler:                                                http://coolercinema.blogspot.com/2013/04/penrose-stairs-to-wonder.html

Paddy Mullholland has penned another excellent “Hidden Treasures” installment at Screen on Screen:                    http://screenonscreen.blogspot.com/2013/05/hidden-treasures-all-about-lily-chou.html

by Allan Fish

Best Picture La Belle Noiseuse, France, The Double Life of Veronique, France/Poland, JFK, US & Raise the Red Lantern, China (3 votes each, four-way TIE!)

Best Director Krzysztof Kieslowski, The Double Life of Veronique (5 votes)

Best Actor Anthony Hopkins, The Silence of the Lambs (8 votes)

Best Actress Jodie Foster, The Silence of the Lambs (7 votes)

Best Supp Actor John Goodman, Barton Fink (8 votes)

Best Supp Actress Juliette Lewis, Cape Fear (4 votes)

Best Cinematography Zhao Fei, Raise the Red Lantern (6 votes)

Best Score Zbigniew Preisner, The Double Life of Veronique (5 votes)

Best Short Bedhead, US, Robert Rodriguez & The Comb, UK, Stephen & Timothy Quay (2 votes each, TIE!)

—

1992

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Best Director

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Actress (Hong Kong…Stanley Kwan)

Aileen Wuernos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (UK…Nick Broomfield)

Aladdin (US…John Musker, Ron Clements)

And Life Goes On… (Iran…Abbas Kiarostami)

Autumn Moon (Hong Kong…Clara Law)

Bad Lieutenant (US…Abel Ferrara)

Baraka (US…Ron Fricke)

Basara: The Princess Goh (Japan…Hiroshi Teshigahara)

Basic Instinct (US…Paul Verhoeven)

Bitter Moon (France/UK/US…Roman Polanski)

The Blue Eyes of Yonta (Guinea-Bissau…Flora Gomes)

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (US…Francis Ford Coppola)

A Brief History of Time (US…Errol Morris)

Brothers Keeper (US…Joe Berlinger, Bruce Sinofsky)

The Camomile Lawn (UK…Peter Hall)

Chaplin (UK…Richard Attenborough)

Conte d’Hiver (France…Eric Rohmer)

Cronos (Mexico…Guillermo del Toro)

The Crying Game (UK…Neil Jordan)

Damage (UK/France…Louis Malle)

Dialogue (Japan…Akio Jissoji)

Dragon Inn (Hong Kong…Raymond Lee, Ching Siu-Tung, Tsui Hark)

Glengarry Glen Ross (US…James Foley)

God is My Witness (India…Mukul Anand)

Guelwaar (Senegal/France…Ousmene Sembene)

Hard Boiled (Hong Kong…John Woo)

Heimat 2 (Germany…Edgar Reitz)

Hoffa (US…Danny de Vito)

House of Angels (Sweden…Colin Nutley)

Howards End (UK…James Ivory)

Husbands and Wives (US…Woody Allen)

Hyenas (Senegal…Djibril Diop Mambéty)

It Wasn’t Love (US…Sadie Benning)

The Last Bolshevik (France…Chris Marker)

The Last of the Mohicans (US…Michael Mann)

Leolo (Canada…Jean-Claude Lauzon)

Lessons of Darkness (France/Germany…Werner Herzog)

The Long Day Closes (UK…Terence Davies)

The Lover (France/UK…Jean-Jacques Annaud)

Malcolm X (US…Spike Lee)

Man Bites Dog (Belgium…Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel)

El Mariachi (US…Robert Rodriguez)

A Midnight Clear (US…Keith Gordon)

My Cousin Vinny (US…Jonathan Lynn)

Naked Killer (Hong Kong…Wong Jing)

The Oil-Hell Murder (Japan…Hideo Gosha)

Olivier, Olivier (France…Agnieszka Holland)

One False Move (US…Carl Franklin)

Orlando (UK…Sally Potter)

Passion Fish (US…John Sayles)

Porco Rosso (Japan…Hayao Miyazaki)

The Player (US…Robert Altman)

The Quince Tree Sun (Spain…Victor Erice)

Reservoir Dogs (US…Quentin Tarantino)

A River Runs Through It (US…Robert Redford)

Romper Stomper (Australia…Geoffrey Wright)

Singles (US…Cameron Crowe)

Sneakers (US…Phil Alden Robinson)

The Story of Qiu Ju (China…Zhang Yimou)

The Strange Tale of Oyuki (Japan…Kaneto Shindo)

Strictly Ballroom (Australia…Baz Luhrmann)

Sweet Emma, Dear Bobe (Hungary…István Szábo)

Tokyo Decadence (Japan…Ryu Murakami)

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (US…David Lynch)

The Undeclared War (France…Bertrand Tavernier)

Unforgiven (US…Clint Eastwood)

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Best Actor

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Omero Antonutti The Fencing Master

Henry Arnold Heimat 2

Robert Downey Jnr Chaplin

Russell Crowe Romper Stomper

Clint Eastwood Unforgiven

Anthony Hopkins Howards End

Harvey Keitel Bad Lieutenant

Harvey Keitel Reservoir Dogs

John Lithgow Raising Cain

Matthew Modine Equinox

Gary Oldman Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Al Pacino Scent of a Woman

Joe Pesci My Cousin Vinny

Benoit Poelvoorde Man Bites Dog

Stephen Rea The Crying Game

Tim Robbins The Player

Denzel Washington Malcolm X

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Best Actress

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Maggie Cheung Actress

Catherine Deneuve Indochine

Gong Li The Story of Qiu Ju

Rebecca De Mornay The Hand That Rocks the Cradle

Jennifer Ehle The Camomile Lawn TV

Charlotte Gainsbourg The Cement Garden

Lisa Harrow The Last Days of Chez Nous

Salome Kammer Heimat 2

Sheryl Lee Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

Mary McDonnell Passion Fish

Michelle Pfeiffer Batman Returns

Michelle Pfeiffer Love Field

Susan Sarandon Lorenzo’s Oil

Assumpta Serna The Fencing Master

Sharon Stone Basic Instinct

Tilda Swinton Orlando

Emma Thompson Howards End

Robin Wright The Playboys

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Best Supp Actor

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Alan Arkin Glengarry Glen Ross

Kevin Bacon A Few Good Men

Alec Baldwin Glengarry Glen Ross

Steve Buscemi Reservoir Dogs

Seymour Cassel In the Soup

Jaye Davidson The Crying Game

Al Freeman Jr. Malcolm X

Fred Gwynne My Cousin Vinny

Gene Hackman Unforgiven

Ed Harris Glengarry Glen Ross

Tommy Lee Jones Under Siege

Jack Lemmon Glengarry Glen Ross

Jon Lovitz A League of Their Own

Michael Madsen Reservoir Dogs

Jack Nicholson A Few Good Men

Al Pacino Glengarry Glen Ross

David Paymer Mr Saturday Night

Tim Roth Reservoir Dogs

Michael Schönborn Heimat 2

Campbell Scott Singles

Wesley Snipes The Waterdance

Kevin Spacey Glengarry Glen Ross

Billy Bob Thornton One False Move

Lawrence Tierney Reservoir Dogs

Forrest Whitaker The Crying Game

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Best Supp Actress

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Dominique Blanc Indochine

Helena Bonham Carter Howards End

Judy Davis Husbands and Wives

Bridget Fonda Singles

Helen Hunt The Waterdance

Lena Lessing Heimat 2

Juliette Lewis Husbands and Wives

Susanne Lothar Heimat 2

Tina Malone The Long Day Closes

Vanessa Redgrave Howards End

Miranda Richardson The Crying Game

Miranda Richardson Damage

Noemi Stauer Heimat 2

Marisa Tomei My Cousin Vinny

Alfre Woodard Passion Fish

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Best Cinematography

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Michael Ballhaus Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Michael Coulter The Long Day Closes

Ernest Dickerson Malcolm X

Robert Fraisse The Lover

Ron Fricke Baraka

Jack N.Green Unforgiven

Poon Hang-Sang Actress

Yoshiyuke Miyake The Strange Tale of Oyuki

Tony Pierce-Roberts Howards End

Alexei Rodianov Orlando

Phillippe Rousselot A River Runs Through It

Dante Spinotti The Last of the Mohicans

Wing-hang Wong Hard Boiled

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Best Score

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Angelo Badalamenti Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

Philip Glass A Brief History of Time

Jerry Goldsmith Basic Instinct

Mark Isham A River Runs Through It

Trevor Jones The Last of the Mohicans

Wojciech Kilar Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Lennie Niehaus and Clint Eastwood Unforgiven

Zbigniew Preisner Damage

Richard Robbins Howards End

Vangelis 1492: Conquest of Paradise

Gabriel Yared The Lover

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Best Short

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La Course a l’Abime (Switzerland…Georges Schwizgebel)

The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (Russia…Aleksandr Petrov)

Franz Kafka (Poland…Piotr Dumala)

Frog Baseball (US…Mike Judge)

Invasion of the Bunny Snatchers (US…Jeff Bergman)

Omnibus (France…Sam Karmann)

Rispondetemi (Canada…Léa Pool)

A Sense of History (UK…Mike Leigh)

Still Nacht III: Tales from the Vienna Woods (UK…Stephen Quay, Timothy Quay)

Stuff (US…Johnny Depp, Gibson Haynes)

Swan Song (UK…Kenneth Branagh)

Untitled (For Marilyn) (US…Stan Brakhage)

By Bob Clark

Though it began and broke new conceptual and thematic ground on television, and wound up thriving in spin-off after spin-off years later, the Star Trek franchise only really took hold and proved itself as something viable once it channeled its creative energy onto the big screen. That’s not to say that The Motion Picture was a resounding success– despite the talent and pedigree of director Robert Wise, special-effects guru Douglass Trumbull and of course the entire returning cast of the television series, that first film venture proved itself just a little too remote for most audiences. Amounting to something of a high-concept, somewhat more linear cousin of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the movie has quite a lot going for it if you want a piece of hard science-fiction that could stand tall with any of the speculative episodes that came before it on television (its script began as a pilot for a return to the small-screen, which wouldn’t happen until The Next Generation). But it was a little too slow for the mainstream crowd, and even a little trying on the patience of fans, who missed the adventurous, swashbuckling style that William Shatner cut on television as Captain Kirk, and that’s what they got in droves in The Wrath of Khan, perhaps the one movie perhaps that lives up to its reputation as a sequel that doesn’t just match the original, but handily outpaces it.

Since then, it seems that nearly every succeeding Star Trek theatrical venture has tried to imbue itself with at least some of the swaggering manner of Khan, or even pattern itself after its basic structure of space warfare and revenge storylines, this in a series that began as a vision of mankind coming together from all differences to reach a better society, free of hatred or conflict of any kind. In a sense, it’s only natural that the franchise should rely upon it as a standard narrative, as it provides a very nice way to contrast the high-minded social themes and concerns inherent in Gene Roddenberry’s hopeful look into the future with more personal motives, allowing an audience to better appreciate the sometimes more distant utopian aspects. The fact that the film also married this with the killer sci-fi MacGuffin of the Genesis device, capable of bringing life to a dead planet or wiping out the existing natural order of an inhabited world, and was moreover willing to take real chances with the status-quo of the series and add legitimate life-or-death stakes to the mix helps it stand above even the better imitators in the franchise. First Contact places a worthy, if distant second, mostly thanks to Patrick Stewart’s commanding lead and the genuine menace of the Borg, as well as a nifty inversion of the Captain Ahab tropes, but it’s by no means the only Trek film that attempts to resurrect the vengeance-themed goalpost of Khan, most of which have been middling affairs. But none have been so direct in their appropriation or as epic in their failure as Star Trek Into Darkness.

Picking up where 2009′s time-traveling reboot of the series left off, what we have here is mostly a rather complete recycling of the same narrative elements that the original series’ episode Space Seed and The Wrath of Khan used, retelling the same basic plot points with a younger cast, and characters switching in and out of their respective places from the original timeline. We still have all the same players occupying their characters– Chris Pine playing Kirk less as the showboat adventurer of Shatner and more douchey frat boy in dire need of having a chip knocked out of his shoulder with a sledgehammer, with Zachary Quinto and Karl Urban not so much performing Spock and Bones as delivering impersonations that could be mistaken for Disneyland animatronics. Joining the fray is Bennedict Cumberbautch as the lead villain, who in all fairness pours just as much menace and relish into his performance as his predecessor, but not enough to make up for box-office bait like this being the reason that we only get three episodes of Sherlock a year. In addition there’s a distracting subplot involving Peter Weller as a Starfleet admiral pursuing a militaristic course that subverts the organization’s utopian ideals of exploration and peace in favor of trying to start a war against the Klingon Empire with futuristic black-0p technology– in other words, the basic plot of The Undiscovered Country and Insurrection, which earn points for not copying and pasting the Khan revenge story outright, despite both still being a little dull.

In that sense, Into Darkness is at least in good company among the more middling Trek efforts, but not so much because it’s dull– rather, it’s so unrelentingly bombastic and explosive in its pace and action formula that it quickly becomes deadeningly monotonous. One of the things that writer/director Nicholas Meyer, himself a Trek novice at the time, understood was that the series was essentially a naval adventure of the Horatio Hornblower or Master & Commander ilk set in space, and the template he established of cat-and-mouse style capital-ship battles is one that the best films of the series have followed for how they favored both the actors, who could chew plenty of scenery in the command-deck portions, as well as the special-effects spectacle by creating something distinctive from the more kinetic duels and dogfights of Star Wars and its ilk. When directing the 2009 reboot J.J. Abrams seemed only all too willing to throw out the more strategic starship shootouts of the series in favor of a hyperactive brand of digital fireworks that makes Michael Bay’s Transformer movies look docile by comparison, throwing volley after volley of laser blasts and explosions into sequences that have the standard shake-and-bake look of action movies whose makers think that coherence only stands in the way of realism. This gets ramped up even more throughout Into Darkness, which piles on so many additional chases, shootouts and attacks in its running time that there’s barely any time left over for anyone to figure out how to get their hand into the right position for a Vulcan salute.

And this in and of itself wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing– First Contact jettisoned the capital-ship combat mostly and focused on the Borg, basically amounting to a cybernetic variation on the zombie genre– if it weren’t for just how derivative the sequences Abrams stitches together feel. It’s especially sad considering how unique the best of his work on television could be, like the sensational pilot to Lost, but here as a mercenary auteur for Star Trek, it seems like all he can do is steal set-pieces, story beats and atmosphere from a whole decades’ worth or more of more original adventures and slap a Starfleet logo on it. In allowing Cumberbautch to be taken under arrest all as part of an elaborate plan, it joins the ranks of Skyfall, The Avengers and the Dark Knight movies and their increasingly far-fetched Rube Goldberg plotting masterminds. In weaving together a mad dash through the insides of the Enterprise as it loses control of gravity during a firefight it copies the same stunts that Inception pulled, with perhaps even less visual grounding. And in a late-climax series of escalating chase and fistfight across a vast futuristic cityscape it recalls not only Minority Report and the latter-day Star Wars films, but also films that have already been drawing from the same well for their own derivative action sequences.

It was bad enough when Len Wiseman’s Total Recall remake owed far more to Lucas & Spielberg than it did to the Paul Verhoven original, to say nothing of Phillip K. Dick, and when Into Darkness begins looking more like Wiseman’s nested-dolls of ripoffs and homages, it becomes hard to see it as anything other than pop-cultural wallpaper– a reboot wrapped in a remake inside a retelling. The fact that Abrams has moved on to another one of those franchises is all the more telling in how cynical and impersonal his time in Trek has been, and it doesn’t bode well for how he’s likely to treat even a series he’s spoken fondly of. It’s all the more disappointing to look at his original television creations and see how corporate his vision has become after being drafted into pre-existing franchise filmmaking, from Mission: Impossible onwards– even his so-called original movie Super 8 felt less like a work of real inspiration and more an attempt to genetically reverse engineer the manner of 80′s movies Spielberg directed and/or produced under Amblin. Like that film, the most descriptive thing that can be said of his Star Trek films is to paraphrase a filmmaker who has had the time to throw a quote from Khan into one of his own revenge-fantasy pastiches– “It’s a wax museum with a pulse,” but I’m not certain at all its heart is beating.

File #6 – F.W. Murnau

Hey! What do you know? Another well known director for this installment of Masters of Horror! I’m glad that as we move forward in time the names get more recognizable, yet at the same time maybe we will still find some unearthed treasures around here, so we might as well have some discussion here on the merits of certain ‘masters’ (there was a nice comment from Allan Fish on one of the earlier pieces, in it he questioned the qualification of the director written up as a master), or even if you have certain complaints regarding other directors that may have been forgotten as we move ahead, please go ahead and point them out, I’m following some shady guidelines, and I might miss some if they don’t meet them, but they might as well be worth writing about, specially if they are truly masters of the horror genre, or of the craft, whatever. So, continuing to divert from what meets us here, I have to say that there’s another idea that is making the rounds in my head: there are certain filmmakers that have a great ouvre, a nice group of films in their filmography, but there’s one spot where they continued (or not) their explorations in cinema with a film of the horror genre, and that is the only one they make (easy examples are Stanley Kubrick and John Huston), so I’m putting this forward if anyone else wants to write on the One Hit Horror films of the history of cinema, I’d be so glad to lend this space once a month so people can write about it, it’s an open call! So, back to the subject, Murnau, one of the most known german directors after Fritz Lang and Werner Herzog, easily one of the masters of the silent cinema in terms of how they perfected the narrative and the visuals that were needed at that time, he also knew that horror was one of the most powerful feelings that a human being could be affected by, making more than 5 pictures inside those realms, nevertheless, when one takes a look at the visual style of certain specific films, specially his horror ones, makes one think about german expressionism, and as I’ve said before this clasification is wrong in most cases regarding german filmmakers of that era, expressionism was mostly expressed through painting and only a few times it went ahead and made the jump to the movie territory, Murnau expresses what a romanticist style would be in the realm of filmmaking, with lustrous visuals, but a style nearer to what the emotions portray over any effect the visual flamboyance of painted shadows would make on the viewer Lamentably many of them are lost forever in the seas of memory and film, and that is a sad thought, that maybe one of the greatest artists of the image has lost some of his films (and most of his horror films while following that thought), and with that sour note, we take a look at Murnau at one of his strongest suits, shall you dwelve with me into the dark corridors of his mind, where the moral and squeamish shall cry? Go on.

Lost Beginnings

Here you have Murnau’s full horror filmography, as always, with notes on the status of the films, if aplicable. Look at we might have missed! I’m so sad!

· Der Januskopf (1920) Lost
· Der Bucklige und die Tänzerin (1920) Lost
· Schloß Vogeloed (1921)
· Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922)
· Faust – Eine deutsche Volkssage (1926)

Best/Scariest Film: Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922)

What might be the first feature-length vampire film is also possibly the best vampire film of all time! How was it that the vampire genre realized its peak and most complete artistic success, and it’s also one of the scariest films of all time, specially in the frames where the image and figure of Nosferatu is more hidden than shown in full motion in front of the camera, when it’s more an insinuation instead of a full-body shot, like in the famous shot of the vampire itself going up some stairs, how it’s not his figure what we see but its shadow, that stretches as the landscape and the things that it sets on move or change sizes/shapes, maybe one of the most powerful and complex shots in the history of cinema… maybe this particular shot is the most important and even greatest of all time, the way that it encompases both classic and the modernity of cinema, and the fact that it’s not more than 7 seconds long in all three of its incarnations (the stairs, the reaching hand, the woman’s chest):

Those moments are the perfect examples of planned visual filmmaking in terms of how they are supposed to distort and find their way in the places where the shadow is casted, exactly where its supposed to be and the effect that its supposed to have on the audience: dread, fear, suspense… it is also one of the scariest sequences of all time, the moment and the final blow of the heart, that seems to be squished under the mighty magical claws of the vampire, it’s a strong feature that makes it also the scariest film of the ouvre of Murnau (not that there’s much competition in that area). But let’s go back a bit to what I was saying about those shots and how they are the perfect representation of modern and classic cinema, that is because they incarnate perfectly both of the particular elements that Deleuze classified as principal in the cinema, the Image-Movement and the Image-Time, the first being more related to classic cinema, where the action commanded the image and the cuts, while the second one is much more related to modern cinema in terms of its reflection and how the passage of time is the main source of the images of the film, specially when the images conjured up in the frame change as time passes. These shots represent it fully because they are guided by movement (going up the stairs being the most obvious) and are action related, this is an attack from the vampire to the girl, and there’s little that she can do to prevent it; then, when the shadow extends itself and changes its form as it projects itself either on the walls or the skin (and clothes) of the woman, it seems as if there’s no movement, but it’s time itself portraying its passing as the shadows advance not because of a movement (there’s no body for it to be connected with) but all the contrary.

Besides all this critical mumbo-jumbo there’s still a lot to say about this film, and why not? It’s incredible, it must be one of the most written about films of all time, specially when you take in consideration that it’s a Dracula film, adapted from the Bram Stoker epistolary novel, and having many of the same beats and scenes that would be repeated ad nauseam for the rest of the history of cinema to this day: the arrival to the castle, cut of the finger, fear when he sees the cross, the travel to the new location, the finding of the boat destroyed or decimated… all elements that would be so influential that they would make it to each and every one of the most loyal versions of the film to the book. There’s a genuine question here when I ask if there’s anyone else who reads the novel when they try to adapt it to a new film, when they could just start watching the films made before them, and maybe there’s no one more influential than Murnau and this particular picture for them all, their beats and imagery is so scary and iconic that you can’t help but notice it in all of the subsequent films, good or bad, that have come out. (****1/2)

And the rest…

Schloß Vogeloed (1921)

A melodramatic and sometimes creepy film with a complicated plot of murders, lies and cover-ups; disguises and misunderstandings; heritance and much much more behind everything that we see on the screen. There are certain moments that recall to later Murnau pictures, like claws against the bodies, shadows and dream sequences that are visually appealing. There’s not much interest besides in those moments where the true Murnau seems to find a way out and show us what he is capable of. (***1/2)

Faust – Eine deutsche Volkssage (1926)

Impressive in its visual style and the way that it plots its morally ambiguous characters, this film is a complete triumph of the force of awe of the spectator in terms of what it can actually achieve, since its beginning with the image of the devil looking over the city, shadowing with its cloaky wings, it never ceases to amaze with its special effects, costumes, acting and particular ways of telling this classic story. It also manages to be complex in its questions and the way that it wants you to react to all the characters. Impressive and one of the best silent features of its time. (****1/2)

The Romanticism

The way that Murnau uses visual academicism and accurateness towards its images, it’s just so that it leaves the most accesible way for the feelings and emotions of the story and plot of the film to unfold, and in the end that’s what it’s really important, how in Nosferatu everything is under the spell of terror and awe, as well as in Faust the whole film is filled with little snippets of horror and awe, it’s still more important the whole romantic and emotional part, and that is just regarding how romanticism and its search for emotion over beauty was primordial, and while here the beauty is a strong part of the films, it’s just there because it’s an standard, in those years you couldn’t go ahead and make an ugly picture, it had to appeal the viewer, specially when you had no other way to catch their attention, there were no loud sounds or colour for it to be catchy, you only had your craft, and in horror, Murnau surely had a nice touch.

Ranking the Horror

1. Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922, F.W. Murnau)
2. Faust – Eine deutsche Volkssage (1926, F.W. Murnau)
3. Schloß Vogeloed (1921, F.W. Murnau)

Next week, we have another director from the land of Germany, but this one made the jump in many ways.

©2013 James Clark

While working on a probe of Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching for Sugar Man, my attention would sometimes drift over to the Steve McQueen film which I had puzzled over for a long time, namely Le Mans (1971). There was about the dignified isolation of the protagonists of both films, as introduced by a brand of cinematography vastly out of step with movie commerce, the oddest and thereby most compelling of kinships. McQueen, sometimes referred to as, “the King of Cool,” was in fact as much an athlete as an entertainer; and, as we know, Rodriguez in his prime did a lot more digging than being digged. McQueen’s sporting efforts were in the area of car and motorcycle racing, a far more spectacular and homage-attracting dynamic than that of cleaning out basements.

That much said, in lining up a case for seeing these disparate figures as teammates, we should draw up logo designs for each, consisting of paths that, in being reverse-images, amount to equivalency. We have, on one hand, a characteristically American embodiment of kinetics in public display, in sharp contrast to the European predilection for letting rip the warp and woof of mobility in private endeavors. (Though operating at the home of renowned motor racing extravaganzas, major European filmmakers—not to be confused with those behind the dreadful soap, A Man and a Woman—had no time for such souped-up events.) While set in Europe, Le Mans, concerning the 24-hour car race in the French town of that name, is a very American film, in its adopting the priorities of its Hollywood star, who was also, with indeterminate input from others, the general producer, director and writer. Thus we have McQueen covered by camerawork at the Le Mans site, heavily immersed in explosive speed, seamlessly dovetailing with actual footage of the 1970 Grand Prix splash, and thereby launching avant-garde proportions and problems under cover of the misleading bluntness of kick-ass prize-winning. Sugar Man, on the other hand, though largely set in America, has been seen (by me) to be a Euro-centric revelation, an avant-garde exposure of fantastic creative intimacy under cover of the misleading overtures involved in recovery of a stolen career. Whereas Le Mans was a commercial disaster, bankrupting its guiding light, and the beginning of the end of McQueen’s shot at bringing to the world something special, Sugar Man was, though also a sort of swansong (for the protagonist), an amazing popular success and the launch of a new auteur of exciting potential.

So, as we get that flashy vehicle lined up on the starting grid, we imagine hearing quite a barrage of protests from its die-hard subscribers along gasoline alley, who, over and over, dare anyone to see their cult gem as anything else than the best damn delivery of the heart of motor sport, mercifully free of story line and anything else that might make them think—with none, therefore, of that wretched European mumbo-jumbo. In regard to Le Mans’ unsuspected mode of athleticism, it comes as a bit of a surprise that there is a nominal director of the final cut, not McQueen’s long-time crony, John Sturgis, but one Lee Katzin, and therein we come upon the extra ingredient this strange filmic invention needed to make it airborne. Katzin was enlisted after Sturgis, beholding the feisty but, until now pragmatic megalomaniac to be scarily intense this time out, put an end to their lucrative association. By all accounts the newcomer was more or less someone for the King to give commands to. But by then, McQueen had hit a speed bump leading to his being, however slightly, amenable to some kind of earthly narrative to complement the primeval discoveries of the phenomena of uniquely fast cars hurtling together along a variegated track. While Sturgis was still a part of the scene, he oversaw a large ream of pre-race, location filming which was irrevocably flawed; and there were other indicators that the six million dollar production budget was headed for a white-knuckle cost overrun. The financing wheels of this wild roll, Cinema Center Films (a subsidiary of CBS), consequently speeded over to that zone of unnerving largesse and saw to it that McQueen—no longer appearing to be a ticket to the gravy train—would be put on a short leash and induced to confine his artistry to the usual side of the camera.

It is, though, the other side of the camera we have to pay some attention to at this stage, because this vehicle has been discreetly outfitted (by somebody) with an unsuspected range of motion, which seals the deal. There was Katzin, and nominal screenwriter, Harry Kleiner—neither being, for all their Ivy League background, a force for the ages. What they did have, however, was an association with Robert Aldrich and a predisposition to attend to dramas where there is someone who must (like Kiss Me Deadly’s Mike Hammer) stand alone, for want of useful encouragement in the workplace and at home. The scenario McQueen had favored, for all its paucity of this-planet enthusiasms, did relate to the loneliness of a top-flight Grand-Prix celebrity, constantly exposed to nature-inflecting, life-changing motions. So between them, this unholy trinity did something that, if ever known, would break many hearts in the driving fraternity and render Le Mans even less marketable than generally understood. A storm-tossed voyage, no doubt; but notably having had its moment of brief, powerful (though unnoticed) buoyancy.

That unlikely triumvirate—American to the core, but pushing the envelope in an unexpected direction—has been joined here by French composer, Michel Legrand. And now, I must confess, what cooks from there is beyond strange. And yet it is the musical component of the prelude, with its bubbly oboe motif, tracking protagonist, Michael Delaney (in his impressive sports/touring vehicle [a Porsche 911S], more understated than Mike Hammer’s [Spillane’s] Jaguar) which keys the focal character’s opening progressions through the French countryside. Whereas Mike plies the California night and is forced into a ditch by a woman hitch-hiker in a light-colored raincoat, Michael sails through the Chateau- glistening Loire countryside, with its narrow roads and their perfect cathedrals formed by overarching trees, and glides by a beautiful, tall blonde woman in a light-colored suit, intent on the poetry to be embraced at a dowdy street vendor’s flower stall (located on a dowdy town square that bears no resemblance to the Rochefort of Legrand’s collaborator, Jacques Demy, after his making every structure a Technicolor dream). (She conspicuously struggles with her large leather bag, in finding payment for the posies. Unlike the spilling open of a large leather book bag, in Demy’s Young Girl’s of Rochefort—as hearkening to the leather bag containing an atomic bomb—a Pandora’s Box—in Kiss Me Deadly—which elicits Gene Kelly and [sort of] happily ever after, there is no melodrama here, Michael in fact proceeding without even noticing her.) This first glimpse of the site of a weekend fete with a motoring theme includes shots from a plane, whereby Michael’s poetry-conversant transportation, amidst vibrant fields, woods and skies, gives us a kick-off similar to that of the outset of Young Girls and its ferrying a carnival troupe headed for a Honda Motorbike promotion, also touched by the celestial music of Michel Legrand.

Michael’s progress (just as that of the carnies, not to mention that of Mike Hammer) is not, however, all clear sailing. His momentum that stirring afternoon comes to an abrupt halt on a stretch of lonely road, where he parks on the shoulder and stares in pain at the guardrail. His anxious reverie, in proximity to his black luxury car entails the precedent of Soberin’s black and deadly Lincoln, in Kiss Me Deadly. McQueen’s convincing confrontation of monstrous abysses—his hands, barely but discernibly, flicking outward from arms placed over the open door at the driver’s side, in a bid to restore poise, and his taut, ravaged face—takes us into a very black night with nuclear-level screaming motors and variously colored headlight discs, pushed like electrons on a cyclotronic pathway. Gradually, planes from the hoods of deluxe racing cars pop in and out of view, a driver emerges, his eyes thrust into fear. There is a deafening crash—a mushroom firebomb fills the sky.

That fulsome brush with death gives way to a far more tempered plunge, namely, the current race course for 24-hours of non-stop exhilaration, where Michael has the briefest of encounters with that lovely woman. She has been part of his reverie, where a sweet Italian member of the Ferrari team to which the bomb victim belonged quietly attends to the shock of her having been robbed of her husband. This angel of mercy addresses her as Signora Belgetti, and there is a visual reinforcement of this tagging in jump cuts between her husband’s name on a charred and shattered helmet, and the same name on her team jacket. (As Mike Hammer’s engagement with the hitch-hiker moves, by way of a fast sports car, inexorably toward her death and, much later, a mushroom cloud—his own sign-off—he learns that her name is Christina, a name chosen with reference to the proselytizing Victorian poet, Christina Rossetti. The catastrophe at Le Mans [having happened one year before, we learn, from the track announcer] takes place at a zone named Maison Blanche [White House; the nuclear frenzy doing in Mike, and his partner, Velda, having taken place at Soberin’s white beach house]. Just before curtains for Christina, the roadster stops for minor repairs at a white gas station, some years later playing a part in the bittersweet denouement of Demy’s film, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg; and she urges him, “Remember me!”) While the murky earlier race and its moment of truth runs its course, we learn, from the PR feed to the throngs in the Grandstand, that Michael was also involved in that smash-up. And so it is that Signora Belgetti, a welcome visitor to Team Ferrari’s pit area, comes upon Michael, suited up for this year’s action—or more accurately, notices him walking by the Ferrari area and toward his team’s headquarters, that of the Gulf-Porsche complement of four entrees. As befits racing royalty, he is the focus of many cameras, professional and amateur, receives encouraging applause and waves to the faithful with that stiff-armed mixture of the mechanical and the humbly grateful you would see at Buckingham Palace. Signora Belgetti follows with her glance this procession, with a mixture of controlled loss and tantalizing gain, putting her on a markedly different course from that of importunate Christina. How, on the other hand, does Michael measure up to Mike? During his first break, while his teammate hits the blacktop, Michael sees her in the dingy, grotty corridor just in from the pits, and comes over to her. A naturally occurring restraint in each of them covers this encounter. Their voices are not much louder than a whisper—in striking contrast to the screaming and roaring motifs of the race course—and she begins by congratulating him on his “very good start.” He sombrely replies, “It’s a long race,” in doing so almost imperceptibly maintaining a decorum tracing to a wider perspective. “Are you well?” he asks in such a way as to bring onstream that being “well” is beset with heavy odds. She nods yes, and she watches him pass by, after he mumbles, “Excuse me…” Casual viewing of that down time from the thrills of the prize might seem a confirmation that Michael does not at all share Mike’s robust fluency with women—we recall the latter’s becoming entranced with Christina’s murder and becoming distraught about the abduction of his roguish soul mate, Velda.

But here it is the default current of solitude in both of them (amidst much ado, much of it dubious) that makes its case for attention, intimating that a nourishing preparation struggles to make an impact where gamesmanship seems to be the order of the day. Tearing ourselves away from the scuttlebutt hounding this strange (particularly strangely balanced) film, to the effect that it is underwritten, underdirected and by and large pointless (and hence deserving the neglect it has suffered), we can discern many features, of its supposedly dispensable periphery, installed to accentuate and hence illuminate the ways of the protagonist and, for want of a better way to put it, the lady in his life. Le Mans, the film, and Le Mans, the race, are not—despite what cult followers will maintain—distillates of sheer dynamic power. They in fact stream forth with torrents of rancid, self-destructive coagulation. The very first shot, of exquisite flora (from the point of view of configuration, texture and color), looking like a vast showroom for Michael’s approach in his spiffy roadster), is right out of the Demy who would have his settings hand-painted in activation of the “more” which surrealistically haunts his painfully empty players. Therewith, when we first get to the revered racing event, we are especially tripped up by its rampant ugliness of objects and people. Far from a streamline consummation, there is a campground, featuring an almost gravestone-scale and graveyard-array of pup tents (with number tags), and then we see those who have chosen to limit themselves to unsheltered sleeping bags strewn about a grassless yard of mud in that pedestrian homeland. We go on to see a large group brushing their teeth in trough-like sinks. Again activating Young Girls, there are police and military units heading out on what appears to be utterly joyless rounds. From the perspective of a plane, we can size up the enormity of traffic jams and parking lots near the track (a scene insinuating that that track is the only space in view affording free motion). It is a scene dismayingly lacking the thrust of that soaring ferry-bridge into Rochefort. While the subject of acreage is in the air, we should note that somehow a colossal display of design, speed and resoluteness is not enough to occupy those pilgrims; but in addition a huge midway lumbers into contention, and the campers commence to divide their time between attack and retreat. That converse flood is spiked with a number of well-paced vignettes, flashing in and out of sight at Grand Prix speed: camp-followers drained of adventure, picnicking on rude fare in rude perches; a sleep-deprived, obese man, no longer young, wearing a tiny clown’s hat he probably won at one of the games he’ll probably describe as awesome when he gets home; one of the motorcycle cops can’t get his machine to start, all the while the Captain blowing on a whistle and waving his arms; one of those at the trough, soaping up and splashing and all the while clenching a cigarette in his mouth.

The track announcer refers to “an extreme test of speed and stamina.” On the track buffer near the starting line there is an ad with the war cry, “toujours en tete avec…” (“Always in front with…) As Michael meets that searing memory on the road, there are multiple signs, already in place for a contest that spans a coliseum and country roads, snapping out to so many and comprehended by so few: Total, Total, Total… There is a moment when the sublime, fire-red Ferraris and deco-blue-grey Porsches are carefully craned down to the track, the lighting and focus at a startlingly professional bearing, by comparison with grainy, amateurish visuals for the fans trying to wake up. Michael soon joins his Porsche-team colleagues in purposefully milling about their track-side premises, and we notice two parallel lines running vertically down the front of his jacket, and, fastened there, the word (covering a well-known sponsor, but covering a far from well-known factor), “Gulf.” (Similarly, the Ferrari uniform carries the also mundane, and also primal crucible, “Firestone.”) That would locate one of Michael’s teammates, Johann Ritter, who, with his wife in his nearby trailer, discusses retirement. The affection they show for each other is genuine; but also hitting the mark is their inapt retreat from daring to domesticity. (Ritter, meaning knight or champion, some wry irony comes into play here.) Johann asks his wife, Anna, how she will tell their (as yet in the planning stage) children what their father did. She replies with a satisfied twinkle in her eye, “I’d say their father is the greatest chauffeur in the world.” Sipping the tea she has prepared for him, he prolongs the apparently untroubled reverie with, “I’d say to them [about their mother] she lies… Yes, it’s the right time to stop.” (The Ritters are right in line, then, with the peals of national anthems stroking the stolid customers.)

Such definiteness as that just touched upon is especially instrumental here, due to a scenario teetering between torrents of primordial kinetic powers, pit-bull intentness about advantage and a nearly invisible thread of love (between Signora Belgetti and Michael) as difficult to locate and assimilate as it is royally right. In attempting to do justice to that challenging equilibrium, we should perhaps add here that her struggling with her bulky leather handbag at the outset constitutes keeping ajar, in this reflective-metaphorical context, a Pandora’s Box (never mind the absence of horrific climax), a bid to struggle with unearthly prizes, and thereby she forms another kind of Grand Prix driver, her Ferrari jacket that terrible night far from being a merchandizing perk. In blasting off, the race has been cinematically engaged at such a level of close-up intensity that its storm of dynamics (its major broaching of Pandora’s Box) isolates the participants in leaving virtually no room for anything but the choice of knight or chauffeur. (The Gene Kelly role in odd synchronization with this plunge would speak to the ways of the Ritters.) Much of the smattering of admiration for this film has to do with its allowing the viewer to get under the skin of a motor sport contestant. But surely the disclosures give us entities being swept far beyond cool jobs and toward a quite devastating reckoning with a seriously new, advanced and dangerous history. It is in illuminative conjunction with such venturesomeness and its implications for interpersonal continuity, particularly in Michael and Signora Belgetti, that the nearly overwhelming frenzy of speed performs its most significant function. Waiting for the flag that starts the proceedings, we are embedded with Michael, though we briefly invade other drivers on the brink. He is outwardly calm in his sound-proof silence (giving his hands some chance to re-establish a ground zero by way of little chores like touching up the rear-view mirror and moving the gear-shift); but he conveys to us his pounding heartbeat, hitting a wild pace in the last seconds before launching into another space—the actual start being the instant when vacuum-silence becomes deafening interstellar cataclysm.

With the race still raging, but without him—the protagonist having failed to alertly keep track of a slower-category vehicle, a lapse of resolve leading to his swerving at those unforgiving speeds, crunching (shown in both real-time and very slow motion) off the guardrails on both sides of the track, and, very fortunately halting momentum in a heap of shredded metal—Michael brings a shaken and depressed Signora (Lisa being her first, more accessible, first name) to his trailer. (Though he comes out of the nightmare with some pedestrian patchwork to his jaw [hardly momentous for a man of so few words], there is a closely linked accident supplying breathtaking, slow-motion levitation, pulverizing of matter, fire and blood, to underline the abysses being tested.) He thinks to bring her out of it by claiming that the game she’s trying to take the measure of is “a professional blood-sport” (a sort of high-tech gladiatorial conflict—the press having hyped up a bitter rivalry between him and a Ferrari driver). A preposterous self-effacement, which Lisa explodes in an instant. “When people risk their lives, shouldn’t it be for something important? What’s so important about driving faster than anyone else?” This checkmate has forced him to devise a better response, a response his face and body reveal to be peculiarly agonizing, his being a pronouncedly (and necessarily) laconic take upon dynamics. Barely audible, he takes a stab at conveying the nub of his involvement with fast cars. “A lot of people go through life doing things badly. Racing is important to men who do something well… When you’re racing, it’s life…Anything that happens before and after, it’s just waiting…” That last sentence, as with the “blood sport” crack, betrays a vein of shallow bravado; but it also thereby spotlights less than “doing something well” that matters, to wit, in accommodation of the world at large—including his comportment toward her—a fellow driver (of sorts) who—and here the metaphorical overlay is crucial—is in the midst of fathoming the sensuality of the matter which encompasses racing speeds, and so much more. Her face registers disappointment with that inhospitable end game. She had, in response to his question (at the drivers’ restaurant in the middle of the night, prior to the crash), “I’m just wondering why you came back here,” maintained, “For myself…” As with Michael, at the tete-a-tete after the accident, her first version of a reply needs fleshing out, provision of a more primal structure than mere self-improvement. Her terse comment underplays the aspect of her being part of the thrills, glamor and affectionate resonance of a year ago; but that she “came back here” implies a need for a more trenchant comprehension than before. In short, both of them are like Mike Hammer—captivated by a monstrously difficult purity of action that leaves them in painful suspense and quiet desperation.

On that just cited occasion, Michael had noticed her at the restaurant (where someone calls him “Mike”), and he comes up to her up to her while she flips through a magazine. He starts with, “It [the empty chair at her table] seems to be the only seat left.” There are in fact many empty seats and she, looking up from her glimpse at the world beyond the track, casts a bemused glance over the property. He says, “It must have been hard for you.” She replies, “At first. But now I’m alright…Was it difficult to return to racing?” “Not really,” he says. There was yet another awkward interplay, set off by his asking where she’s living now. “Paris,” she replies. At which point, like some kind of predictably macho jerk, he intones. “I have to watch myself in Paris. I always get fat there.” But she had had him pegged from the beginning of the day, largely on the basis of his unspoken, physical language, that he was (as was Mike to Velda, who knew all about his cheesy side) a source of genuine authoritative energy—in contrast to the mobs, their escapes and even in contrast to a handsome young Italian driver with the Ferraris, whom she politely turns down in his offer of going for coffee with her.

So it is, that, when, during the final repairs of vehicles (to match Michael’s need for some structural repairs to correct dangerous slipping and sliding), the manager of the Porsche team goes to his trailer (where Lisa is seated, wrapped up in a blanket, looking the worse for wear) and asks him to take over Ritter’s car—“He’s not quick enough”—the bruised but more than game exponent of quickness (he was leading when trouble struck), whom we had accompanied at the windshield, sizzling over pavement in sun, rain and the blackest night, knifing past other cars and—our being suddenly outside—coming at us and roaring by at speeds that lift our heart to our mouth, immediately grabs his gear and leaves without so much as a glance at her. Moreover, this fracture comes at us not as a wayward strike of lightning, but rather as something to be engaged from out of the imperfect but promising bonds they have so un-movie-like, cultivated.

Michael is immediately confronted with that priority of canny advantage he has never been able to steer around without some damage being done. On the way to the track, the boss (his golf cap always in place) declares, “I want you to drive flat-out. I want Porsche to win Le Mans!” With only minutes left on the clock, Michael’s drive is largely flattened out on behalf of gobbling down a payoff easily understood, if not fully enjoyed. He manages, by dint of mastery of steering and well-reasoned flights of intimidation, to squelch the lone Ferrari contender; and he brings forward a savvy boosting of the lead Porsche by coming up to and staying for some time within inches of its back. (Earlier in the race, Michael and the “rival” he outmanoeuvres at the last lap are to be seen screaming by a cow pasture, the camera positioned within the field, and showing only the window areas of each car flashing in an otherworldly way, the wheels concealed by the guardrail. During that last lap, the same scene is covered, only now the cows have left the event, helping to evoke a far more nuts and bolts phenomenon.) This thrust of advantage, however, does not drain all of the poetry out of the finale. Michael’s work ensures the other car’s win, and he places second, not without honor. The crowd may only have eyes for the winning car and its two drivers; but the manager gives the also-ran the thinnest of smiles and says, “Thank you, Michael.” Michael nods in a deadpan way.

The last scene indicates that Lisa, too, knows and cares about that disinterestedness deriving from death-defying daring. It includes a preface comprising the self-interest of the Ritters. Johann is a bit shamefaced in ending his career the way he did, as a healthy scratch; but his wife argues, “What’s the difference?” Then there are, in quick succession, various instances of dealing with losing favor in the sweepstakes of advantage. The leader, when Michael checks into his second car of the day, is a Ferrari which proceeds to blow a tire and thereby fails to finish. The driver, so close to victory, takes a breath and stays calm. The Ferrari team-boss also handles well the bad news coming over the PA. A Ferrari second-stringer, however, complains bitterly, making an obvious fool of himself amidst his more professional colleagues. The rival Michael had relegated to a Bronze is generous in his admiration of that protagonist’s smarts and courage (and display of confluence between positing canny schemes and mastery of their uncanny groundswell). Michael gives the latter a two-finger salute, and the two pros enjoy their own (less visible) version of glory. (The winning duo spray champagne in all directions and generally act like fun-seekers at the midway.)

Fun-seekers race along the track, and we see Lisa standing there, her eyes fixed upon Michael. The pace shifts to slow-motion, and Michael attempts to approach her, his face a mixture of amazement and letdown. They have stirred up some intimate factors together, without ever touching each other’s skin. She smiles in conveying that he has made sense of the premium upon those “who do it well,” that, in fact, being a premium upon grace. Disinterestedness is in the air. So is rare mutual respect. So is love, of a certain kind. But his face is set in a frown, his eyes show his having slipped, despite some unusual traction. They are pushed apart, not by a fireball, but by the solitary demands of unfinished business.

The iconic silhouette from the opening credits

by Allan Fish

(UK 1964 1,040m) DVD2

This business may last a long time

p  Tony Essex, Gordon Watkins  w  John Terraine, Corelli Barnett, Anthony Jay, Ed Collins  ph  various  ed  Barry Toovey  m  Wilfred Josephs  narrated by  Michael Redgrave (with Ralph Richardson (Field Marshal Haig), Emlyn Williams (Lloyd George), Marius Goring, Sebastian Shaw, Cyril Luckham)

The Great War is the sort of television event that truly deserves the epithet milestone.  It’s the first truly great documentary series produced not only by the BBC but arguably anywhere in the world.  It really has, the best part of half a century later, stood the test of time.  And time itself is very much to the forefront here; the achievement all the greater for contriving to remain in the British public consciousness for the forty years it was unseen on TV after its first broadcast.  It was the template from which such later documentaries as The World at War and even Ken Burns’ The Civil War took their cue, but it was more than that.  The most remarkable thing about it is that, for all the black and white interviews with the survivors of the calamity, it’s an incredibly modern achievement. 

The series covers, over twenty-six episodes, with suitably sombre narration from Michael Redgrave, and in enthralling detail, the story of the greatest calamity the world had yet seen (and, to these eyes, would ever see).  It discusses the events that lead up to the war, the uneasy peace of the Belle Epoque and the shaky alliances that would soon be tested to hitherto undreamt of levels; as we are told, “the peace of Europe in 1914 was a fragile thing.”  All the events and battle places that have gone down in horrific infamy – the Marne, Ypres, Champagne, Verdun, the Somme, Passchendaele – are here, along with extended sequences involving such factors as the home front, the role of women in the war, the war in the middle east, the Russian withdrawal, the Italian/Austro-Hungarian front and, of course, the ultimate personification of the pointlessness of war, the Western Front.  More than that, however, is the illustration of the little things that made this war the most poignant of all; the 24 hour armistice of Christmas 1914 where the notion of fighting for freedom becomes all the more blurred, the soldiers hardened by the experience of Passchendaele singing “we’re here because we’re here“, images of ant-like armies crawling out of the crater-infested mud baths, the sardonic singing of “hangin’ on the old barbed wire“, and the description of how soldiers on leave thought the outside world was the one that wasn’t real.  It’s a war that has always captured the imagination, and the screen has done it justice, at least in spirit if not in reality, with the likes of The Big Parade, The Last Flight, Paths of Glory, Verdun, Les Croix de Bois, La Grande Illusion, and All Quiet on the Western Front.  Most touching of all, perhaps, is how we are shown how both sides not only shared a “companionship of mud“, but grew to feel solidarity with the enemy far more than their own brass hats and politicians, for here was the ultimate expression of what Shakespeare once called a “fellowship of death.”  Though it does offer possible underlying reasons for the war’s beginning and end, in the end it could be argued that Edmund Blackadder summed it up by saying “it was too much trouble not to have a war.”

The Western Front – Christmas 1914

Forty years on we live in an age where the last veterans of this cataclysmic event are passing away.  We live in apathetic times, where the modern generation hardly care about what their grandfathers did in the Second war, let alone their great-grandfathers a generation earlier.  We need to make series such as this available to today’s youth to remind them just what hardships were suffered, just what war really was about.  Yet how many of them would watch something this old, and in black and white, too?  Now the testimonies of the survivors, from all the armies, are more valuable than ever.  It’s a war that haunts us still, for it not only marked the end of the old order and class society, but the beginning of our loss of innocence.  Siegfried Sassoon once famously asked the reader “have you forgotten yet?“  This series should be shown every November, as it is crucial in making sure we never shall forget.

another iconic still from the opening credits

Danny Juliano with dad Sam at JFK’s gravesite in Arlington National Cemetery in Washington D.C.

by Sam Juliano

To all those loving and resilient Moms and Mums out there, I hope you all had a beautiful Sunday in honor of your incomparable legacy.  I want to thank our very dear friend Dee Dee for remembering Mother’s Day on the sidebar, much as she acknowledges the year’s most celebrating moments on a regular basis.  She remains our own Rock of Gibraltar and loving friend.

Half of this past week was spent preparing for and attending an eighth-grade school trip to Washington D.C.  I served as one of the seven chaperons on the annual venture, which this year included the attendance of my son Danny, who graduates the eighth grade next month.  Although there was a period in my teaching career when I regularly made the trip, this is the first time I have done so in about 19 years.  Still overall I have participated about nine times, both as an educator and as a trustee on Fairview’s Board of Education (prior to my teaching career.)

I honestly can’t remember the last time I managed so much walking over a three-day period, and even now as I pen this report my legs, feet and hips are exceedingly sore.  The two buses left Fairview at around 6:30 A.M. on Wednesday morning, stopping first at Fort McHenry in Baltimore to tour the grounds and watch a video on Francis Scott Key and the advent of the “Star Spangled Banner.”  From there we arrived at Union Station in D.C., where the 66 kids and seven chaperons were given meal vouchers to negotiate at an over packed food court.  I sat at a table near an escalator and waited a while, only to find out later that the principal and a few other teachers were “looking” for me.  Getting lost on this trip on the very first day will be a humorous anecdote well into the future, as I have been reminded a few times already!  Ha!  In any case at this stage of the trip the kids were energetic, excited and having a great time.  Next up was an extended marathon visit to Arlington National Cemetery, which included a three mile walk to and from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and J.F.K’s eternal flame.  Although we absorbed a few rain showers during the three days, the time in Arlington was marked by gorgeous blue skies and sun.  The emotional Changing of the Guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier included the laying of the wreath by four Lincoln School soldiers, an act that was announced to the large gathering by one of the cadets.

Lincoln School eighth graders offer up wreath to cadets at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery

The group stayed at the Best Western Pentagon Hotel right outside of Washington in northern Virginia, where everyone had their 7:00 A.M. continental breakfasts and boarded the buses for the all-day touring of the Capital Rotunda, and a bevy of memorials (someone declared recently that the city is basically comprised of memorials) including famed ones for Lincoln, Jefferson, Martin Luther King, World War II, Vietnam, FDR, Grant and the Korean War.  Perhaps the most ubiquitous structure of all, the obelisk Washington Monument could be seen from all sides with  scaffolding constructed to help make needed repairs from a mild earthquake of a few years ago.  It will continue to be closed to the public until 2014, according to the National Park Service.  The long walk up the hill to the Capital was one of the most physically demanding of the trip, even for the kids.  Other stops included the National Archives (where the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights parchments are on display), the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, the Pennsylvania Avenue side of the White House (where a group picture was taken), the Smithsonian Museum of American History, the Library of Congress and the National Zoo with the featured pandas.  Plans to visit the F.B.I. were scrapped at the last minutes for various reasons.  The group’s superb veteran tour guide, “George” accompanied us at every stop holding his trusty umbrella to speak to the group before each visit.  We had to settle for a talk outside the Ford’s Theater (and the Peterson House across the street) as bookings to enter are always maddeningly hectic.  I proposed that the group consider Mount Vernon outside of Arlington for next year’s trip.  It was always one of my favorite places to visit.

The kids were exceptionally well behaved throughout, and my son Danny (enthusiastically manning the camera every day) was certainly a happy camper.   I’d say the only aspect of the trip that was frustrating were the long waits at the food courts and at the entrances of the museums.  I missed seeing the pink cherry blossoms around the Jefferson Memorial of course, but May is a bit late for that.  My own favorite tourist site of them all is the Lincoln Memorial for so many reasons.  Danny’s was the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

After a brief recovery on Friday night and a good rest, I got back into the movie scene with Lucille and a few of the kids on Saturday and Sunday.  We saw:

The Great Gatsby  **** (Saturday afternoon)  Edgewater multiplex

In the House    ****      (Saturday night)  Landmark Cinemas

Kon-Tiki ***                  (Sunday evening)  Montclair Claridge

KON-TIKI is a kind of dramatic re-enactment of the events chronicled in the Academy Award winning 1961 documentary about Norwegian Thor Heyderdahl and five others who crossed the Pacific on a simple raft en route to Polynesia to prove some meteorological and geographical facts in one of the century’s most celebrated achievements.  The new film is neither original nor especially well-made, but the events remains tense and riveting and the film contains some striking sequences.  IN THE HOUSE, directed by the talented Frenchman Francois Ozon brings quite a bit of creativity to the narrative table in a story of a student who gives his high school literature teacher a continuing saga of his observations of a family he gets closer to in revelations that become more shocking at each turn.  THE GREAT GATSBY by Baz Luhrmann takes a good stab at F. Scott Fitzgerald’s practically unfilmable literary masterpiece, and is aided by some dazzling style, engaging performances and a good approximation of period and mood.  No masterpiece, but all considered a solid effort.

Capital Rotunda

Purple-shirted Fairview students approach Lincoln Memorial

Students milling around Jefferson Memorial

Iwo  Jima Memorial in Washington D.C.

Samuel Wilson offers up a splendid essay on Iron Man 3 at Mondo 70: http://mondo70.blogspot.com/2013/05/on-big-screen-iron-man-three-2013.html

Jon Warner has hit another home run with his profound essay on Terrence Malick’s To The Wonder at Films Worth Watching: http://filmsworthwatching.blogspot.com/2013/05/to-wonder-2013-directed-by-terrence.html

John Greco has penned an excellent essay on Woody Van Dyke’s Penthouse at Twenty Four Frames: http://twentyfourframes.wordpress.com/2013/04/26/penthouse-1933-woody-van-dyke/

Van Dyke scores again in Judy Geater’s marvelous essay of The Thin Man at Movie Classics:                                       http://movieclassics.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/the-thin-man-ws-van-dyke-1934/

Laurie Buchanan offers up the “makings of Home Sweet Home’ in another marvelous post at the ever-popular Speaking From The Heart: http://tuesdayswithlaurie.com/2013/04/30/the-makings-of-home-sweet-home/

Joel Bocko resurrects a fabulous post once published at WitD at The Dancing Image on “Avant Garde Legends”‘: http://thedancingimage.blogspot.com/2011/12/avant-garde-legends.html

Tony d’ Ambra takes an ever-insightful look at 1955′s The Big Bluff at FilmsNoir.net:                                                                   http://filmsnoir.net/film_noir/the-big-bluff-1955-the-bitter-flavour-of-festering-reality.html

Dean Treadway has a fantastic display of 70 double-feature movie posters up at Filmicability:                                                    http://filmicability.blogspot.com/2013/05/i-love-double-feature-movie-posters.html

David Schleicher’s magnificent review of the superlative Mud at The Schleicher Spin is just what the doctor ordered: http://theschleicherspin.com/2013/04/27/his-name-is-mud-and-its-a-helluva-thing/

Marilyn Ferdinand has penned a magnificent essay on the pre-code musical “Delicious” at Ferdy-on-Films: http://www.ferdyonfilms.com/2013/delicious-1931/18417/

Sachin Gandhi features a stupendous post on the Cinema of Neveldine/Taylor at Scribbles and Ramblings:                             http://likhna.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-cinema-of-neveldinetaylor.html

There is little on the planet as beautiful as “tulips on Mayne Island” and it’s there at the Creativepotager’s blog in all it’s visual splendor: http://creativepotager.wordpress.com/2013/05/05/sister-oil-paintings-of-tulips-on-the-springwater-deck-mayne-island/

Capsule kingpin Shubhajit Lahiri, one of the net’s most talented and prolific writers again writes superbly with his review of the excellent Un Coeur en Hiver: http://cliched-monologues.blogspot.com/2013/05/a-heart-in-winter-1992.html

The exceptional writer Andrew Katsis has a terrific essay on “Casablanca””’ up at Dee Dee’s place Darkness Into Light: http://noirishcity.blogspot.com/2013/04/heres-looking-at-you-kidas-my-writer.html

Jaimie Grijalba has penned an excellent review of the Argentinian “Mujer Lobo” at Overlook’s Corridor: http://overlookhotelfilm.wordpress.com/2013/05/02/argentinian-cinema-2013-4-mujer-lobo-2013/

Patricia Hamilton’s wonderful review of the novel “The Bequest of Big Daddy” at Patricia’s Wisdom is a must-read:                       http://patriciaswisdom.com/2013/04/the-bequest-of-big-daddy-jo-ann-costa/

Murderous Ink at Vermillion and One Nights has written another extraordinary essay, this time on Yosujiro Shimazu’s 1931 “Love, Be With Humanity””: http://vermillionandonenights.blogspot.com/2013/05/love-be-with-humanity-1931.html

Incomparable Civil War scholar and maven Weeping Sam has penned another engaging feature on the battle of Chancellorsville at The Whispering Ear: http://listeningear.blogspot.com/2013/05/chancellorsville.html

One of the best writers out there, the incomparable Ed Howard is still working at an impressive pace at Only The Cinema, with his latest post on the silent classic “Golem”:                                                                                                                               http://seul-le-cinema.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-golem-1920.html

Craig Kennedy has penned a terrific review of Susanne Bier’s ‘Love is All You Need’at Living in Cinema:                                       http://livingincinema.com/2013/05/03/love-is-all-you-need-2013/

Jason Bellamy tackles Malick’s To the Wonder in typically spectacular form at The Cooler:                                                http://coolercinema.blogspot.com/2013/04/penrose-stairs-to-wonder.html

Paddy Mullholland has penned an excellent capsule on the Tribeca hit The English Teacher at Screen on Screen: http://coolercinema.blogspot.com/2013/04/penrose-stairs-to-wonder.html

by Allan Fish

Best Picture GoodFellas, US (12 votes)

Best Director Martin Scorsese, GoodFellas (12 votes)

Best Actor Jeremy Irons, Reversal of Fortune & Paul Newman, Mr & Mrs Bridge (4 votes each, TIE!)

Best Actress Joanne Woodward, Mr & Mrs Bridge (5 votes)

Best Supp Actor Joe Pesci, GoodFellas (14 votes)

Best Supp Actress Annette Bening, The Grifters (6 votes)

Best Cinematography Pierre Lhomme, Cyrano de Bergerac (4 votes)

Best Score John Barry, Dances With Wolves & Danny Elfman, Edward Scissorhands (4 votes each, TIE!)

Best Short The Cow, USSR, Aleksandr Petrov (3 votes)

—

1991

—

Best Picture/Director

—

35 Up (UK…Michael Apted)

Adorable Lies (Cuba…Gerardo Chijona)

Les Amants du Pont Neuf (France…Leos Carax)

Autobus (France…Eric Rochant)

Barton Fink (US…Joel Coen)

Beauty and the Beast (US…Gary Trousdale, Kirk Wise)

La Belle Noiseuse (France…Jacques Rivette)

The Best Intentions (TV version) (Sweden…Bille August)

Bhopal (India…Tapan Bosé)

Billy Bathgate (US…Robert Benton)

Black Robe (Canada…Bruce Beresford)

Boyz N the Hood (US…John Singleton)

A Brighter Summer Day (Taiwan…Edward Yang)

Bugsy (US…Barry Levinson)

Cabeza de Vaca (Mexico…Nicolás Echevarria)

Cape Fear (US…Martin Scorsese)

City of Hope (US…John Sayles)

City Slickers (US…Ron Underwood)

Clarissa (UK…Robert Bierman)

Un Coeur en Hiver (France…Claude Sautet)

The Commitments (UK/Ireland…Alan Parker)

Daughters of the Dust (US…Julie Dash)

Defending Your Life (US…Albert Brooks)

Delicatessen (France…Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Marc Caro)

Dogfight  (US…Nancy Savoca)

The Double Life of Véronique (France/Poland…Krzysztof Kieslowski)

Europa (Germany/Denmark…Lars von Trier)

The Fall of Otrar (Russia…Ardak Amirkulov)

The Fisher King (US…Terry Gilliam)

La Frontera (Chile…Ricardo Larrain)

G.B.H. (UK…Robert Young)

Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (France…Jean-Luc Godard)

Grand Canyon (US…Lawrence Kasdan)

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (US…Fax Bahr, Eleanor Coppola, George Hickenlooper)

Homicide (US…David Mamet)

I Don’t Hear the Guitar Any More (France…Philippe Garrel)

JFK: director’s cut (US (1992)…Oliver Stone)

Kasba (India…Kumar Shahani)

Like Water for Chocolate (Mexico…Alfonso Arau)

Lovers (Spain…Vicente Aranda)

The Man in the Moon (US…Robert Mulligan)

Merci la Vie (France…Bertrand Blier)

My Own Private Idaho (US…Gus van Sant)

My Sons (Japan…Yoji Yamada)

Naked Lunch (Canada…David Cronenberg)

Night and Day (Belgium…Chantal Akerman)

Once Upon a Time in China (Hong Kong…Tsui Hark)

One Day in the Life of Andre Arsenovich (France…Chris Marker)

Only Yesterday (Japan…Isao Takahata)

Paris Trout (US…Stephen Gyllenhaal)

Proof (Australia…Jocelyn Moorhouse)

Prospero’s Books (UK…Peter Greenaway)

A Question of Attribution (UK…John Schlesinger)

Raise the Red Lantern (China…Zhang Yimou)

Rambling Rose (US…Martha Coolidge)

The Rapture (US…Michael Tolkin)

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (US…Kevin Reynolds)

Sex and Zen (Hong Kong…Michael Mak)

The Silence of the Lambs (US…Jonathan Demme)

Slacker (US…Richard Linklater)

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (US…Nicholas Meyer)

The Suspended Step of the Stork (Greece…Theo Angelopoulos)

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (US…James Cameron)

Tetsuo II: Bodyhammer (Japan…Shinya Tsukamoto)

Thelma and Louise (US…Ridley Scott)

Three Days (USSR…Sharunas Bartos)

Toto le héros (Belgium/France…Jaco van Dormael)

Urga (Russia…Nikita Mikhalkov)

Van Gogh (France…Maurice Pialat)

Zirneklis (Latvia/USSR…Vasili Mass)

—

Best Actor

—

Daniel Auteuil Un Coeur en Hiver

Sean Bean Clarissa TV

Warren Beatty Bugsy

Lothaire Bluteau Black Robe

Michel Bouquet Toto le Héros

Albert Brooks Defending Your Life

Willem Dafoe Light Sleeper

Robert De Niro Cape Fear

Jacques Dutronc Van Gogh

John Gielgud Prospero’s Books

Anthony Hopkins The Silence of the Lambs

Dennis Hopper Paris Trout

Val Kilmer The Doors

Robert Lindsay G.B.H. TV

Joe Mantegna Homicide

Nick Nolte The Prince of Tides

Michael Palin G.B.H. TV

River Phoenix Dogfight

River Phoenix My Own Private Idaho

Michel Piccoli La Belle Noiseuse

Wesley Snipes New Jack City

John Turturro Barton Fink

Robin Williams The Fisher King

—

Best Actress

—

Pernilla August The Best Intentions

Emmanuelle Béart Un Coeur en Hiver

Juliette Binoche Les Amants de Pont Neuf

Geena Davis Thelma and Louise

Laura Dern Rambling Rose

Jodie Foster The Silence of the Lambs

Linda Hamilton Terminator 2 – Judgment Day

Irène Jacob The Double Life of Veronique

Jennifer Jason Leigh Rush

Gong Li Raise the Red Lantern

Saskia Reeves Close My Eyes

Mimi Rogers The Rapture

Susan Sarandon Thelma and Louise

Lili Taylor Dogfight

Saskia Wickham Clarissa TV

Reese Witherspoon The Man in the Moon

—

Best Supp Actor

—

Ned Beatty Hear My Song

Jean-Claude Dreyfuss Delicatessen

André Dussolier Un Coeur en Hiver

Larry Fishburne Boyz N The Hood

John Goodman Barton Fink

Ed Harris Paris Trout

Steven Hill Billy Bathgate

Samuel L. Jackson Jungle Fever

Tommy Lee Jones JFK

Ben Kingsley Bugsy

Michael Lerner Barton Fink

Jack Palance City Slickers

Joe Pesci JFK

Brad Pitt Thelma and Louise

Alan Rickman Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves

David Ross G.B.H. TV

David Straithairn City of Hope

Donald Sutherland JFK

Nigel Terry Edward II

Rip Torn Defending Your Life

—

Best Supp Actress

—

Victoria Abril Lovers

Fairuza Balk Gas, Food, Lodging

Emmanuelle Béart La Belle Noiseuse

Connie Booth American Friends

Blythe Danner The Prince of Tides

Judy Davis Naked Lunch

Barbara Hershey Paris Trout

Diane Ladd Rambling Rose

Juliette Lewis Cape Fear

Kong Lin Raise the Red Lantern

Kate Nelligan The Prince of Tides

Genevieve Picot Proof

Amanda Plummer The Fisher King

Mercedes Ruehl The Fisher King

Meryl Streep Defending Your Life

Tilda Swinton Edward II

Julie Walters G.B.H. TV

—

Best Cinematography

—

Nestor Almendros Billy Bathgate

Henning Bentsen, Edward Klosinsky, and Jean-Paul Meuisse  Europa

Adrian Biddle Thelma and Louise

Roger Deakins Barton Fink

Jean-Yves Escoffier Les Amants de Pont Neuf

Zhao Fei Raise the Red Lantern

Freddie Francis Cape Fear

Freddie Francis The Man in the Moon

Adam Greenberg Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Gilles Henry, Jacques Loiseleux, Emmanuel Machuel Van Gogh

Zhang Hulgong, Li Longyu A Brighter Summer Day

Slowimir Idziak The Double Life of Veronique

Peter James Black Robe

Darius Khondji Delicatessen

William Lubtchansky La Belle Noiseuse

Jorgen Perssön The Best Intentions

Robert Richardson City of Hope

Robert Richardson JFK

Sacha Vierny Prospero’s Books

—

Best Score

—

Carter Burwell Barton Fink

Elvis Costello, Richard Harvey G.B.H. TV

Georges Delerue Black Robe

George Fenton The Fisher King

Brad Fiedel Terminator 2: Judgement Day

Michael Kamen Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves

Ennio Morricone Bugsy

Michael Nyman Prospero’s Books

Zbigniew Preisner The Double Life of Veronique

Howard Shore Naked Lunch

Howard Shore The Silence of the Lambs

Naioki Tachikawa and Jiping Zhao Raise the Red Lantern

Colin Towns Clarissa TV

John Williams JFK

James Wong Once Upon a Time in China

—

Best Short

—

Bedhead (US…Robert Rodriguez)

Carne (France…Gaspar Noe)

The Comb (UK…Stephen Quay, Timothy Quay)

Crack Glass Eulogy (US…Stan Brakhage)

The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia (Czechoslovakia…Jan Svankmajer)

Entre deux soeurs (Canada…Caroline Leaf)

Father Christmas (US…Dave Unwin)

M is for Man, Music, Mozart (UK…Peter Greenaway)

Muppet Vision 3D (US…Jim Henson)

Office Space (US…Mike Judge)

Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies (UK…Stephen Quay, Timothy Quay)

The Sandman (UK…Paul Berry)

Stille Nacht II: Are We Still Married? (UK…Stephen Quay, Timothy Quay)

Winnie the Pooh & Christmas Too (US…Jamie Mitchell)

A Wish For Wings That Work (US…Skip Jones)

World of Glory (Sweden…Roy Andersson)