by Stephen Russell-Gebbett

(Japan 1997, 61min – aka It’s Keiko; Keiko Desu Kedo) not available on DVD

Director, Writer Sion Sono Starring Keiko Suzuki

Keiko Suzuki is a 21 year-old girl. Her father passed away a year ago and the film (part diary, part document, all fiction) depicts her life and her grief, which lasts.

We see a clock and she counts the seconds. 1, 2, 3, she walks down the street for minutes on end counting each step as she goes (as you can imagine this can dip into boredom a couple of times, but not only briefly). The passing of time fascinates her; her loss has made her aware of what comes and goes. Each second a struggle without him, each second forward to, perhaps, peace. She is comforted and daunted by the fact that life goes on regardless; what moves seems to be standing still, what stands still seems to slip away. Time is even more of a fetish here than in Wong Kar Wai’s stories.

We will see her smile a little, and watch her continue to return, almost imperceptibly, back to herself.

At the very beginning, she tells us that the film will last precisely 1 hour, 1 minute and 1 second, after which we can leave (“This film will be over at exactly 8:23”). She doesn’t want to intrude but she appears to need us as an audience (she lives alone) and, frankly, when that 1 hour, 1 minute and 1 second is over, it has been a privilege. How often do we feel as an audience that we are of use? Therefore I expected the film to end exactly as it did, with one simple word in Japanese, two in English.

She stares out of the window, she cleans shelves. After a while, as if more comfortable with us and herself, she presents humorous news reports on what she’s done during her day. She shows us what her father has left behind : “…This is the fountain pen my father once gave to me as a present. This is a letter my father once wrote me. This is a present my father bought for me in Hawaii. This is the daughter my father gave life to. Keiko Suzuki”

This would all be very sentimental were it not so unassuming.

In the long shots of empty rooms, still lifes of a box of her father’s bones, or of Keiko staring at us for a couple of minutes (truly mesmerising if you return the gaze), I Am Keiko has a soft minimalism; that is, one that never reaches starkness. One is reminded of the films of Robert Bresson for how we are concentrated on essentials without emoting or superfluous details of character or motivation. She does recount highlights of her past, her physical attributes, likes and dislikes (as Amelie would do so charmingly a few years later or indeed, less charmingly, Gaspar Noe’s I Stand Alone) only to say “what you can get from this I’m not sure. I don’t know. No idea”.

When we get to know someone we generally, genuinely, feel closer to them. Here we get to know them simply by being close to them, observing and sharing as much as Keiko, still sad and raw, will allow us.

These types of films can often be self-congratulatory, wallowing in finely honed and fragile tragedy. There is nothing in I Am Keiko (an affirmation that she still exists) that manipulates reactions like a hammer-tap to the knee manipulates reflexes.

There is no plot to speak of but plenty to be spoiled – little surprises, expressions, ideas and angles. It holds your attention, is beautifully paced, contains lovely images and is amusing too (I don’t think I’ve come across a character reading out the end credits before). Like all of Sono’s films, it has the energy and freshness of a debut work.

In short, a fine film.

Sion Sono is best known for 2001′s Suicide Club and best loved critically for 2009′s Love Exposure. I Am Keiko is unavailable on DVD but can be found on YouTube unsubtitled. Subtitles can be easily found and it is well worth the effort.

Sylistically audacious French drama "Declaration of War" emotionally potent

by Sam Juliano

While at least one person with a long Wonders in the Dark association will be rooting his head off for the New England Patriots in next week’s Super Bowl contest, it does appear that most with a feigning interest are hoping short order vindication isn’t achieved.  Joel Bocko believes a Pats victory will erase the bitter taste of the 08 upset that spoiled a perfect season and sent New England fans into a prolonged depression.  He also sees a side of stone-faced head coach Bill Belichick, that Pats haters hate to acknowledge, one that reveals a master at his craft and the genius behind the NFL’s most dangerous offense.  Tom Coughlin’s Giants, however, are the stronger defensive unit, and the Big D is often what wins Super Bowls.  The oddsmakers by 3 points believe the Pats will be getting their revenge in Indianapolis on February 6th.

The Bresson Film Festival at Manhattan’s Film Forum has concluded, but the same venue has presently reached it’s meatiest stage at the Siskel Center in Chicago, where several WitD staff and associates are presently immersing themselves.  Back at the Film Forum after a one-week run of a minor camp classic Pretty Poison, the theatre will be running a comprehensive three-week festival on William Wellmann, that will include appearances by author William Wellmann Jr., some piano accompaniments by Steve Sterner, and a few rarities.

As the Noir City Festival at the Castro in San Francisco winds down, we at WitD look forward to Dee Dee’s summary report on the event she has promoted so generously and enthusiastically.  The Director’s Guild award went to Michel Hazanavicius for THE ARTIST, while the Screen Actor’s Guild was copped by THE HELP, which all won two other acting awards in a rather embarrassing strong showing for the controversial drama.

     Lucille and I saw five films in theatres (6 if another viewing of THE ARTIST is counted in):

    Show People (1928)  **** 1/2   (Monday evening)  Film Forum

    A Man Escaped      *****          (Thursday night)  Bresson at Film Forum

    The Grey   ***  1/2                (Saturday morning)  Edgewater multiplex

    Declaration of War  ****     (Saturday evening)   IFC Film Center

    Beauty and the Beast in 3D  *****   (Sunday afternoon)  Edgewater multiplex

  A survival saga set in the snow starring Liam Neeson THE GREY has it’s moments and some excellent visual atmospherics and set pieces.  It ends poorly and follows a predictable path too, presenting a TEN LITTLE INDIANS/THE CALL OF THE WILD hybrid.  DECLARATION OF WAR is a sylish and brave French drama that follows the details of a real-life story.  The film’s two lead stars are also directors, with the female behind the camera here.  The film is moving and spirited and shows how a certain group of people would bond and handle the ultimate tragedy.

     Bresson’s austere prison drama never gets stale after endless viewings; King Vidor’s SHOW PEOPLE is a charming comedy with real life appearances from early era stars including Chaplin; the animated BEAUTY IN THE BEAST doesn’t need 3D, but if it’s an excuse to see it again, so be it.  Watched THE ARTIST a fourth time with some people who hadn’t yet seen it and a few adoring family members and the magic remains in full flavor. 

John Greco has written a stupendous essay on the universally-acknowledged Billy Wilder comedy classic “Some Like It Hot” at Twenty Four Frames: http://twentyfourframes.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/some-like-it-hot-1959-billy-wilder-2/

Ed Howard has authored an extraordinary review of John Ford’s “How Green Was My Valley” at Only the Cinema:                                                                       http://seul-le-cinema.blogspot.com/2012/01/how-green-was-my-valley.html

Tony d’Ambra is leading up at FilmsNoir.net with a terrifically insightful piece on Robert Wise’s 1947 “Born to Kill”: http://filmsnoir.net/film_noir/born-to-kill-1947-a-violent-ironic-and-macabre-paroxysm.html

Pat Perry has posted a stupendous Top Ten of 2011 list over at Doodad Kind of Town:                                            http://doodadkindoftown.blogspot.com/2012/01/last-word-on-2011-best-and-brightest.html

Judy Geater at Movie Classics offers up a series entry “Take Five: Films About Films” which includes some fabulous capsules on some unforgettable screen classics:                                     http://movieclassics.wordpress.com/2012/01/23/take-five-films-about-films

Jon Warner has penned an outstanding double review of two films by Italian melodrama king Rafaelo Matarrazo at Films Worth Watching: http://filmsworthwatching.blogspot.com/2012/01/nobodys-children-1952-white-angel-1955.html

Another great round of ‘key films’ by Peter Lenihan at The Long Voyage Home:                                       http://thelongvoyagehome.blogspot.com/2012/01/key-films-29jan12.html

Marilyn Ferdinand has written a thought-provoking piece of the apocalyptic drama “Take Shelter” at Ferdy-on-Films: http://www.ferdyonfilms.com/?p=12985

Laurie Buchanan talks about retreating for those short moments of re-charging the batteries in a marvelous post titled “Rain Retreat Meditation” at Speaking From The Heart: http://holessence.wordpress.com/2012/01/24/rain-retreat-meditation/

R.D. Finch has penned a superlative review of Preston Sturges’ comedy classic “The Palm Beach Story” at The Movie Projector: http://themovieprojector.blogspot.com/2012/01/cmba-comedy-classics-blogathon-palm.html

Anu at The Confidential Report has checked in with a fabulous Ten Best list that fully warrants everyone’s attention: http://theconfidentialreport.wordpress.com/2012/01/09/top-ten-of-2011

Just Another Film Buff (Srikanth) has posted indelible stills for an American screen classic at The Seventh Art: http://theseventhart.info/2012/01/29/study-in-verticality/

Samuel Wilson has penned a fascinating review of the Soviet “Commissar” at Mondo 70:                            http://mondo70.blogspot.com/2012/01/commissar-1967-88.html

Jason Marshall has penned an excellent takedown of Spielberg’s “War Horse” at Movies Over Matter:                              http://moviesovermatter.com/2012/01/10/you-can-lead-a-horse-to-war-spielbergs-war-horse/

Roderick Heath at This Island Rod is an incomparable horror film writer and his review on 1986′s “The Hitcher” is wholly masterful: http://thisislandrod.blogspot.com/2012/01/hitcher-1986.html

Jaime Grijalba has unveiled his towering Top 10 list over at Exodus: 8:2:   http://exodus8-2.blogspot.com/2012/01/las-mejores-peliculas-del-2011-chilean.html

Joel Bocko offers up “Highlights For the Holidays” at The Dancing Image, which showcases some of the great posts from the past year: http://thedancingimage.blogspot.com/2011/12/highlights-for-holidays.html

Dee Dee has posted a wonderfully informative and engaging piece on the origin of lobby cards at Darkness Into Light: http://noirishcity.blogspot.com/2011/11/holding-auctiontaking-look-at-eleven.html

At Roderick Heath’s solo movie blog “This Island Rod” the great writer offers up a classic takedown of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”: http://thisislandrod.blogspot.com/2011/12/tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-2011.html

At Heath’s literature blog, English-One-O-Worst, the great writer takes on the Bard’s “King Lear” and the result is a scholarly masterpiece: http://englishoneoworst.blogspot.com/2011/11/what-he-rightly-is-king-lear-as-king.html

Craig Kennedy’s always engaging Watercooler post is leading the way at Living in Cinema:                                                                 http://livingincinema.com/2012/01/15/movie-vacation-all-i-ever-wanted/

Murderous Ink, in Tokyo examines ‘Nuclear Noir’ in a brilliant new post at Vermillion and One Nights: http://vermillionandonenights.blogspot.com/2011/12/nuclear-noir.html

At Patricia’s Wisdom, Patricia relates some trying conditions caused by crippling weather that has even caused power outages in her post “Eye of the Storm”:                                                                    http://patriciaswisdom.com/2012/01/eye-of-the-storm/

At Scribbles and Ramblings Sachin Gandhi features an engaging film itinerary engagingly seen in the light of football groupings: http://likhna.blogspot.com/2012/01/2012-african-cup-of-nations-film.html

At the always-spectacular Creativepotager’s blog, artist Terrill Welch focuses in on a “Good Day by the Sea” after high winds and rains on Mayne Island:                                                http://creativepotager.wordpress.com/2012/01/27/a-good-day-by-the-sea/

The gifted and always brilliant Jason Bellamy takes a fascinating and perceptive look at “J Edgar” that in some measure differs from the majority stand. It’s at The Cooler: http://coolercinema.blogspot.com/2011/11/solid-weight-j-edgar.html

Filmmaker Jeffrey Goodman at The Late Lullaby has posted a stupendous round-up of the best cinematic experiences he’s enjoyed in 2011: http://cahierspositif.blogspot.com/2012/01/my-top-10-or-so-films-for-2011.html

Again Stephen Russell-Gebbett offers an original piece on the artistic worth of the “remake” at Checking on my Sausages:          http://checkingonmysausages.blogspot.com/2012/01/remakes-why-not.html                                             

At The Schleicher Spin our very good friend David take a look at both “The Iron Lady” and “Haywire” and the results are terrific: http://theschleicherspin.com/2012/01/25/the-iron-lady-goes-haywire/

At Cinemascope Shubajit Laheri has penned an excellent review of Woody Allen’s “Play It Again Sam”:                                                                                          http://cliched-monologues.blogspot.com/2012/01/play-it-again-sam-1972.html

Adam Zanzie at Icebox Movies has authored a marvelous essay on “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”:                                      http://www.iceboxmovies.blogspot.com/2012/01/on-torture-and-revenge-in-girl-with.html

Michael Harford, the erstwhile ‘Coffee Messiah’ offers up an engaging video about the beverage’s worldwide popularity: http://coffeemessiah.blogspot.com/2011/11/coffee-break.html

Troy Olson announces plans to commence with his Robert Bresson project at Elusive as Robert Denby: http://troyolson.blogspot.com/2011/11/argh.html

At Radiator Heaven J.D. has penned a excellent piece on Martin Scorsese’s “The Color of Money”:                                  http://rheaven.blogspot.com/2012/01/color-of-money.html

At Petrified Fountain of Thought Stephen Morton has penned a masterful takedown of “Melancholia” http://www.petrifiedfountainofthought.blogspot.com/2012/01/review-melancholia.html

Drew McIntosh is a real scholar and good skate, as he just gave away a blu-ray of Tarkovsky’s “The Sacrifice” at The Blue Vial: http://thebluevial.blogspot.com/2012/01/take-two-tarkovsky-blu-ray-giveaway.html

Kevin Olson offers up a postscript to his recent Horror Blogothon at Hugo Stigliz Makes Movies:                                                                                                    http://kolson-kevinsblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/italian-horror-blogathon-postscript.html

Tony Dayoub at Cinema Viewfinder offers up an interview with the Self-Styled Siren:                                                     http://www.cinemaviewfinder.com/2011/11/gone-to-earth-conversation-with-self.html

At The Man From Porlock Craig exlores the work of the great S. Ray with a splendid review of “Pather Panchali”: http://themanfromporlock.blogspot.com/2012/01/iu-cinema-experiences-pather-panchali.html

Hokahey has penned a terrific review of “War Horse” at Little Worlds:                                                                                                                  http://hokahey-littleworlds.blogspot.com/2011/12/spielbergs-war-horse.html

Dave Van Poppel is gearing for some updates at Visions of Non Fiction, but presently is still leading up with his very fine review of “Project Nim”: http://visionsofnonfiction.blogspot.com/2011/08/project-nim.html

At The Reluctant Bloger Jeff Stroud has offered up some stunning beautiful images in a post titled “Autumn Leaves”: http://jeffstroud.wordpress.com/

by Allan Fish

As per the norm, straight to the results…

Best Picture  Our Hospitality, US (5 votes)

Best Director  Buster Keaton, Ernest G.Blystone, Our Hospitality (3 votes)

Best Short  Paris qui Dort, René Clair & Le Retour à la Raison, Man Ray (3 votes)

Best Actor Harold Lloyd, Safety Last (4 votes)

Best Actress Edna Purviance, A Woman of Paris (6 votes)

And my own choices…

Best Picture  La Roue, France

Best Director  Abel Gance, La Roue

Best Short  Le Retour à la Raison, France, Man Ray

Best Actor Severin-Mars, La Roue

Best Actress Edna Purviance, A Woman of Paris

And without further a-do, on to 1924′s nominations…

Best Picture/Director

Aelita (USSR…Yakov Protazanov)

America (US…D.W.Griffith)

The Cigarette Girl of Mosselprom (Russia…Yuri Zhelyabuzhsky)

The Comedians (Germany…Karl Grüne)

Dante’s Inferno (US…Henry Otto)

The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (USSR…Lev Kuleshov)

Forbidden Paradise (US…Ernst Lubitsch)

The Girl from Carthage (Tunisia…Scemana Chikly)

Girl Shy (US…Fred Newmeyer, Sam Taylor)

Gösta Berlings Saga (Sweden…Mauritz Stiller)

The Great White Silence (UK…Herbert J.Ponting)

Greed (US…Erich Von Stroheim)

The Hands of Orlac (Germany…Robert Wiene)

He Who Gets Slapped (US…Victor Sjöstrom)

Helena: Parts I & II (Germany…Manfred Noa)

L’Inhumaine (France…Marcel l’Herbier)

The Iron Horse (US…John Ford)

Isn’t Life Wonderful (US…D.W.Griffith)

Kino Eye (USSR…Dziga Vertov)

The Last Laugh (Germany…Friedrich W.Murnau)

The Marriage Circle (US…Ernst Lubitsch)

Mikaël (Denmark…Carl T.Dreyer)

The Miracle of the Wolves (France…Raymond Bernard)

The Navigator (US…Buster Keaton, Donald Crisp)

Die Nibelungen: Parts One & Two (Siegfried & Kriemheld’s Revenge) (Germany…Fritz Lang)

Nju (Germany…Paul Czinner)

Peter Pan (US…Herbert Brenon)

The Red Lily (US…Fred Niblo)

Reveille (UK…George Pearson)

The Sea Hawk (US…Frank Lloyd)

Sherlock Junior (US…Buster Keaton)

Die Sklavenkönigin (Austria…Michael Curtiz)

So Big (US…Charles Brabin) LOST

Strike (USSR…Sergei M.Eisenstein)

Sylvester (Germany…Lupu Pick)

The Thief of Bagdad (US…Raoul Walsh)

Waxworks (Germany…Paul Leni)

Wild Oranges (US…King Vidor)

Best Short

Ballet Mécanique (France…Fernand Léger, Dudley Murphy)

Entr’Acte (France…René Clair)

Symphonie Diagonale (Germany…Viking Eggeling)

Best Actor

John Barrymore Beau Brummell

Lon Chaney He Who Gets Slapped

Douglas Fairbanks The Thief of Bagdad

Gibson Gowland Greed

Lars Hanson Gösta Berlings Saga

Emil Jannings The Last Laugh

Buster Keaton, The Navigator

Adolphe Menjou The Marriage Circle

Rudolph Valentino Monsieur Beaucaire

Conrad Veidt Waxworks

Best Actress

Elisabeth Bergner Nju

Betty Bronson Peter Pan

Carol Dempster Isn’t Life Wonderful?

Greta Garbo Gösta Berlings Saga

Gerda Lundeqvist Gösta Berlings Saga

Zasu Pitts Greed

Florence Vidor The Marriage Circle

By Bob Clark

Late in Peter Weir’s underrated Fearless, there’s a scene where Jeff Bridges, newly transformed from a mild-mannered San Francisco architect into a passionate bon vivant by the divine intervention of a catastrophic airline crash, violently unplugs his son’s video-game system (a TurboGrafx-16, if memory serves), protesting the cavalier attitude that the boy’s game (Splatterhouse, I think) puts forward about death. In real life, Bridges insists, there are no such things as “continues” or “extra-lives”– just one great big “game over” for the rest of forever. It’s a funny and meaningful scene for any number of reasons, not the least of which being how Bridges himself played a game designer turned video-warrior in Steven Lisberger’s Tron, but mostly for how it exposes the central fallacy of mainstream gaming in its depiction of life-or-death adventures. Because like it or not, the man is right– in real life, there are no second chances, and not just from the big stuff like death. Indeed, most of us would probably write off the consequences of life’s end if we were given just one opportunity to go back and redo some smaller, more intimate moment of our time on Earth. Whether it’s the girl that got away, that job you never got or even that ball you couldn’t hit like Casey at the bat, there’s no shortage of regrets built up over a lifetime’s worth of pruning at our own personal gardens of decision trees.

The problem with games of any ilk, digital or otherwise, is that you can always find a way to erase your past mistakes in ways that just aren’t possible in life– all you have to do is reload a past quicksave, use that last 1-up, or just call “mulligan”. That’s the problem with games, but that’s also the magic, as well. Some of the best video-games have known how to explore this territory, in their own odd ways. Sometimes they introduce crucial decisions into the matrix that can’t be so easily overwritten during the course of gameplay– whether it’s Solid Snake unable to withstand Revolver Ocelot’s torture and save the captive Meryl or Andrew Ryan’s ill-begotten offspring giving into the temptation of harvesting a Little Sister in the underwater dystopia of Rapture, there are plenty of games whose designers cleverly structure savepoints and moral choices in rather uncomfortable ways, forcing the player to live with their actions rather than going back in time and editing their mistakes, like so many Marty McFlys or Docs Brown. Sometimes, however, we see games that do not so much avoid the fallacy of gaming-revisionism as they do embrace it, making the player’s natural instinct to rewrite the past not just a feature of the game but a central tenant of its design, itself. Probably the best example of this (or at least the most well-known) would be from the experimental Legend of Zelda entry Majora’s Mask, released in 2000, which put Shigeru Miyamoto’s iconic Link on a three-day mission to save a parallel world from impending destruction, in which he must constantly travel back in time and relive the same three days in order to accomplish his quest within the limited time-span. Upon its release (and lukewarm reception), the game was often compared in the gaming press to Groundhog Day, which had only been around for seven years but had already gained a surprising popular embrace from moviegoers, film critics, philosophers and religious leaders around the world for being something more than just a mere comedy. It became one of those rare catchphrase movies were merely stating the title would be enough for people to understand its premise, and more importantly a movie with a premise that was worth embedding into pop-cultural ubiquity to begin with.

As directed by Harold Ramis, who co-wrote the screenplay after Danny Rubin’s original script, the film doesn’t appear to aim terribly high, despite the altitude of its concept. At first glance, it seems just another well-meaning, likable vehicle for Bill Murray to ply his trade as a sarcastic, egotistical clown who slowly but surely learns the value of putting up with all the other dumb schmucks who get in his way. That was the standard character arc for Peter Venkman in both of the Ghostbusters movies, the paranormal scientist who treated his research into ESP as an excuse to hit on blondes and only took interest in his colleague’s research into the afterlife once they hit upon the idea of doing it for money. It was repeated with a startling meta-clarity with Richard Donner’s modern take on Dickens in Scrooged, where Murray’s exploitative television head-honcho found himself visited by three ghosts to teach him the error of his yuppie ways in the midst of his live Christmas-Eve production of A Christmas Carol starring Buddy Hackett and Mary Lou Retton. That movie had its moments– it was funny, fitting with Murray’s anarchic Saturday Night Live roots and contained its own kind of authentic urban pathos, updating the Victorian English classic to a more contemporary Manhattanite context, and one that especially jabbed at the consumerism and corporate greed of the Reagan years. But there was something a little too on-the-nose about it, the way that all repurposings of the Dickens tale tend to be when divorced from their original surroundings. It was a Christmas comedy trying too hard to pattern itself after what had already come before, and as such could never really establish itself as a modern classic in quite the same way The Nightmare Before Christmas, Miracle on 34th Street or especially Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, whose angelic third-act twist was worthy even of the creator of old Ebenezer himself.

Earlier efforts like Ghostbusters, Stripes or even Caddyshack all offered much more authentic uses of Murray’s comic gifts, all while showing the potential he had to play a thoroughly populist, American caricature of down-on-his-luck hardship and stuck-up-his-ass contempt. In any of his slob-versus-snob laughfests, he could very easily occupy both roles at once, giving you the satirical thrills of pointing a crooked finger to snicker at all kinds of sacred cows and institutions while at the same time providing enough of a narrative beginning-middle-and-end for him to change into one of the good guys by the final reel. Yeah, he’d slack off, roll his eyes and make fun of you right in front of your face for most of the picture, but eventually he’d grow a conscience and put in a good day’s work, after all was said and done. No matter if he was breaking the rules or living up to them, he represented very much the same kind of unsentimental, working-class romantic ideal that guys like Humphrey Bogart or Steven McQueen did, except in the realm of comedy instead of noir or action– a hero of the underdog, us-vs-them spoof genre. It’s one of the reasons why you look at Scrooged and for a little while wish it was a better movie– yes, it’s got a wonderfully biting kind of satire that’s pitch-perfect for the holiday season, but the whole surrounding context of Christmas and Dickens’ structure is far too formulaic to feel anything other than phony. Though Donner did a good job of displacing much of that patterned feeling with its self-aware nature, there’s only so much you can do with the three-ghosts set-up before a sense of knowing fatigue sets in– it’s already been preordained that the Scrooge figure’s heart is going to grow three sizes and rescue the Cratchits from a fate worse than poverty, so what’s the point of paying too much attention?

As with all remakes, unless you’re willing to take chances with the source material and deviate far off track, there’s really little point in putting in too much effort to begin with. For once, Murray’s lazy mannerisms feel less like those of the character, and more like his own, sleepwalking his way through so many underdone potatoes. This is why Groundhog Day means something special, even before you get to its own supernatural themes, because it’s essentially telling exactly the same kind of Murray-esque comedy take on a good natured holiday spirit, only with one key exception– it has nothing to do with Christmas. Indeed, many have called the film a kind of secular equivalent to Dickens’ or Capra’s takes on the season, a winter’s fable with its own kind of jaded curmudgeon who learns at great lengths the value of people, generosity, and all that other bullshit. Like his best comedies, it manages to communicate that positive message with a great deal more weight than other likeminded efforts thanks to the way it indulges in meaner streaks for long periods throughout. Every Murray comedy has a big, bull’s eye of a target for all his blue-collar humor to be pointed at– Caddyshack‘s country club bluebloods, Ghostbusters‘ city bureaucrat creeps, even Rushmore‘s elite prep-school cretins, where Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson wrote what might be the defining monologue for exactly this kind of us-vs- them mentality that permeates the comedian’s work (“Take dead aim at the rich boys, get them in the cross-hairs and take them down”).

In Groundhog Day, however, the target seems to be fairly innocuous, nothing more than the small-town spirit of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania’s annual festival to determine whether or not Phil the Groundhog has seen his shadow. The townspeople are etched in an odd combination of rustic, country charm and outright dorkiness in their enthusiastic embrace of this utter charade of a holiday. It’s hard not to react to all the dumbfounded citizens with their empty pleasantries and god-awful polka music with just the same kind of barely restrained contempt that Murray’s TV-weatherman greets them upon his arrival to cover the festival alongside Andie MacDowell and Chris Elliot. Truth be told, all the comedic targets of the movie are fairly large, and hard to miss– top-hatted local politicians, bald and nerdy insurance salesmen, Sonny & Cher– each of them something of a softball pitch to a major-league pro like Murray, all mere paper tigers to his seasoned hunter. The lack of a challenge is part of the joke, of course, as his character doesn’t even have to put up much of an effort to mock his way through every obstacle without them even being aware of it. It’s also part of the deeper, and more immediately apparent message– yeah, these townspeople, their music and celebrations are corny and ridiculous for any number of reasons, but they aren’t hurting anybody, so why bother getting so worked up about it? The implicit answer made apparent throughout the film is that anybody who’s so determined to pin the tail on a donkey big enough to be found blindfolded has to be a fairly big ass themselves, and more to the point is probably somebody who doesn’t really enjoy their own company too much more than anybody else. The more you target that many sitting ducks, the likelier it is you’re just going to wind up pointing the Elmer Fudd hunting rifle in your own direction.

And that’s just what happens, at great length, after the movie’s deceptively clever high-concept kicks in and begins the glorious game. Like any modern 3D adventure released for Nintendo, PlayStation or Microsoft platforms, Groundhog Day clearly establishes the closed set of its playing grounds right from the start. Attempting to leave the town after delivering a half-hearted coverage of Phil and his shadow, Murray and his co-workers find themselves blocked by a sudden storm, something he has previously dismissed on the air in his role as a televised meteorologist (instead of fog, which keeps most post 16-bit games from having to display too many polygons at once, we get snow). Weathermen function as a kind of oracle for the boob-tube, themselves another criminally easy comedy target for all their shortsighted predictions, and perhaps it’s appropriate that a man unable to correctly guess the future finds himself doomed to keep repeating the same yesterday over and over again until he learns to live in the present tense. Ramis uses a handful of cleanly repeated gags and scenes (that dopey song and dopier banter on the radio, those kindhearted idiots throughout town) to establish the temporal dilemma Murray faced better than any longwinded exposition possibly could. We don’t need some externalized moral figure to condescendingly explain the rules to us– there’s no ghost of Jacob Marley or wingless Clarence to explain to Murray’s self-absorbed weatherman that he’s going to keep repeating the same day until he learns to become a better person. All we have to do is watch with delight as he reacts to each incident with a new stage of incredulous grief, learning the limits of this rule-set at the same pace that he does, the same way you might follow a computerized avatar during a tutorial mission. Like all the best games, Groundhog Day teaches you how to play on its terms without resorting to holding your hand and dumbing things down for you. That’s one of the reasons it’s good that so many of the well meaning rubes in town aren’t that hard to beat– like the little goombas littering an early Super Mario Bros. level, it pays to keep your challenges easy while you’re still trying to get your players to clear the hump of a learning curve.

All that repetition of key phrases and routines gives so many of the townspeople a programmed feel, as well– they’re like the NPC’s found throughout the villages in any given RPG spouting off the same pre-scripted lines over and over again, even after you’ve met certain conditions. You could say that Groundhog Day amounts to one giant Zelda-style chain-quest once Murray gets his moralistic bearings, scrambling across town to meet the various demands posed by each character, helping them out as best he can. They provide an excellent stomping ground for Murray’s characteristic sarcastic anti-hero to mock throughout the film– like the repeated threats and obstacles found in similar trapped-in-a-snowglobe stories like Lost and The Prisoner, they turn the movie into a set of variations on a theme, recycling a format as many times as is possible and necessary in order to get the maximum potential out of a premise before it wears out its welcome. The shallow characters also provide a nice contrast for Murray and MacDowell, who are the only people in the film developed well enough to stand-out amidst the pre-scripted crowd, a little like two real people finding one another in an MMORPG filled with nothing but AI-bots. She’s the only one who strays from her predetermined script as much as he does, the only one who poses a real challenge to him both as a moralstic homespun girl and as a plot-device in the script. That spontaneous, spitfire character doesn’t just manifest in her dialogue or performance, but in the way that both function in the film as elements of change in the fixed system that Murray finds himself trapped in. Early on, Ramis cleverly (but by no means subtly) introduces her as a ghostly apparition on a TV-studio monitor, wearing a blue jacket against the weatherman’s blue-screen. Whereas Murray himself was introduced there as an empty-hearted ass gesturing in front of a blank canvas (a clear-sky tabula rassa, if you will), she is rendered as a kind of Mother Earth, her face and hands floating on a map of the United States. With that pleasant twang in her voice, she isn’t just a country girl, but a manifestation of the country itself.

So it’s no wonder nearly all Murray’s attempts to game the system and use the day-after-day repetition of Groundhog Day to his advantage begin and end with MacDowell. Watching him play out the same evening bit by bit over and over again to learn more about her character and thus look all the more impressive to her each successive time is like observing a gamer play the same level again and again, memorizing the landscape and locations of enemies and power-ups in order to achieve and ever-higher score, to speed-run the obstacle course in record time and as few slip-ups as possible. It’s some of the funniest stuff in the movie, but also the most telling of Murray’s character at his most egotistical, selfishly exploiting the Twilight Zone scenario he’s in that’s supposed to be teaching him how to to stop being such a jerk in the first place. But like a truly deep game, he isn’t restrained from all this bad behavior, or even really punished for it. There’s no voice of God booming down from the sky scolding him for eating so many apple-pies from the tree of knowledge, but an even more telling, even more frightening silence. It’s a game that gives zero feedback for the choices it doesn’t want you to make, one that only recognizes the right decisions, and puts the onus on the player to figure out what must be done next. It takes a long time before Murray is able to get all of that rule-breaking out of his system, testing the boundaries of the game’s conditions regarding romance, social behavior and even death until he finally knows the town’s layout and patterns by heart. He’s allowed to go on as many selfish and self-destructive phases as he wants until he finally wises up on his own accord and begins to put his temporally displaced activities to good use, performing enough good deeds over the course of a day to earn himself a whole uniform’s worth of Eagle Scout merit badges. By the end of the film, Murray has learned Punxatawney’s movements and patterns just as much as a reader of Ulysses comes to know those of Dublin on Bloomsday (which is fitting, seeing as Groundhog’s Day doubles as James Joyce’s birthday, something I’d like to think he would’ve found mildly amusing, were he aware of it).

And it may seem just as corny and sentimental as everything else in the town to see Murray turn into such a do-gooder by the end, but the over-the-top level to his generosity and the comic treatment of it helps keep it all in character. Like the Grinch sledding down from the top of Mount Crumpit or Scrooge himself making a big show of buying the biggest bird on display in the grocer’s window, his meteoric rise to morality has to be just as big and showy as the proud display of his misanthropy was beforehand. Like any piece of well-worn Americana, Groundhog Day may go to great lengths to criticize much of what’s wrong, or in this case merely foolish, about this country, but in the end it only does so out of a genuine love for it. The same can easily be said for how it treats mankind in general, with only the national landscape as its stand-in microcosm– yes, we’re all sort of silly, naive, superstitious and grumpy at any given time, but there’s also great generosity and creativity in our character, as well. Ours is a spirit that can make time move forward once again after repeating itself ad infinitum like a record skipping on a broken player– all it takes is for one broken man to open up his heart and accept that the world and its people aren’t nearly as stupid and worthless as he thinks they are (himself included). And though it’s all delivered in an easy, Reader’s Digest version of pop-mythology that’s prevalent throughout American sci-fi and comedy of the 80′s and onward, there’s something about the unpretentious holistic embrace of the film that gives it a zen kind of quality, making its message almost universal to people of all faiths, or lack thereof. Finally, this is why it’s so important to have a holiday movie that doesn’t have anything to do with a real holiday, because it articulates the religious experience without any actual religion to get in the way, and does so with a sense of humor that would probably get kicked out of any house of worship anyway. That all-embracing approach is deepened thanks to how well the narrative works as a game in play, with rules that are clearly illustrated and easy to understand even if the objectives are never stated outright. It all helps Groundhog Day become a film that isn’t merely a modern classic, but one that deserves the recognition without that contemporary signifier in front of it, and a work that ought well to work no matter how one tells it. Just as Dickens’ Christmas Carol has found itself adapted countless time for the stage and screens both big and small, I’d like to think that Ramis’ film could find itself rearticulated for any number of mediums, we well. Not long ago I recall reading that Stephen Sondheim was interested in making a Broadway musical based on it, and that’s not a bad idea. But if somebody up there likes me, then please, let me do the video-game.

by Allan Fish

(Italy/Switzerland 2010 88m) DVD1/2

Dust to dust

p  Philippe Bober, Elda Guidinetti, Marta Donzelli, Gabriella Manfré, Susanne Marian, Andres Pfäffli, Gregorio Paenessa  d/w  Michelangelo Frammartino  ph  Andrea Locatelli  ed  Benni Atria, Maurizio Grilli  m  Paolo Benvenuti  art  Matthew Broussard

Giuseppe Fuda, Bruno Timpano, Nazareno Timpano,

Of all films of the 21^st century I have had cause to write about, there is none that has filled me with more trepidation than Michelangelo Frammartino’s truly extraordinary Le Quattro Volte.  After all, my role is one of converter in chief, of trying to make the reader want to seek out the film, a minority film at best, and yet any description of what takes place cannot help but send the reader into a mild coma. 

            We’re in a remote Calabrian village perched high on a citadel, and in essence we follow the last days of an old goatherd.  We see that he’s frail; he’s coughing repeatedly and is seen taking something in his water before he goes off to sleep in his truly Spartan bedroom.  On his rounds, we see him go to the local church where an old woman tears half a page out of a magazine and folds up some dirt from the church floor into it.  It transpires that he’s using this to put into his water as a sort of immersion.  Needless to say it does no good, and he’s found dead one morning and is taken away for burial. 

            What perhaps surprises here is that the old man dies barely half way through and from this point there is no human protagonist at all.  One of his goats gives birth, the kid literally plopping out of its mother and seen trying to take its first steps and take its first feed.  We see it getting used to being around other kids while their parents are taken to graze on the mountains, until it finally is allowed out with them.  On its first day out the goat gets itself positioned in a sort of trench which, while it could extricate itself quite easily, it cries out to its mother and the mother doesn’t hear or doesn’t return.  We last see the kid huddling up against a tree on the mountainside as the camera fades to black.          Even now this isn’t the end, there’s another act to come, and in many ways this plays like a nature play.  Man is seen as no more important, indeed less important, than the animals around him.  The camera largely stays still and allows its characters to move within the frame, but for one or two exceptions.  The biggest of these takes place in a sequence that becomes one of the funniest scenes you will see in modern cinema but which on the page would not raise so much as a smirk.  A camera is perched high above a goat pen and we see a truck pull up.  Out of the truck three Roman soldiers emerge looking like they have returned from the world’s longest ever stag do, closely followed by a woman dressed up like she’s an extra in Pasolini or Rossellini’s Christ film, and it becomes clear that a sort of passion play is taking place, in which villagers enact the roles of the Romans, Christ and the thieves, and they are taken to a nearby hill to be nailed up in the accepted manner.  The man playing Christ – assuming he is playing him and that he’s not really going to be nailed up – literally drags his own cross as the long procession is followed by the camera.  The camera then turns back to its position above the pen to see a dog – that of the old man – pestering a latecomer to the parade, but as he runs off to catch up we see the dog pull out the rock that is holding the truck in place, which proceeds to run back and crash into the goat pen, leaving the goats to merrily make their way out onto the street and up into the village.  It’s in following these goats into the village we first become aware of the old man’s passing. 

            It’s details like this that help to contribute to what becomes like a requiem for innocence lost, for a mankind that has, by and large, long since lost its connection to nature.  In doing so, humour alternates with inherent sadness and a sense of poetic beauty all the rarer in modern times.  That Frammartino does this purely through visuals and noises, without a single word of dialogue, only adds to the cumulative effect.  It’s little wonder it’s been seen as a religious experience by some critics; even an agnostic would have to concede that it’s one of the most spiritual films of recent times. 

One of the top 20 movies from the list

by Jaime Grijalba.

Well, here we are, it’s time to be outraged, whine and scream as I mention my 20 favorite movies of 2011, the year that just went about three weeks ago. I usually do my list around this time of year, because it gives me time to catch up with the late releases, when supposedly the good stuff comes out, as well as a personal task to come up with a list after the Oscar nominees are announced (as this past tuesday showed us how surprising they can be, for better or worse). Why after the nominations? Well, the thing is that where I live, Chile, there are certain festivals at the start of the year (first two weeks of january), and they show a lot of films that haven’t had their premiere in Chile as of date. As years have gone by, these festivals have diminished in their overall quality, and they have become more and more expensive, which is a bitch for a film student as myself, who barely can finance his own short film. So, yeah, out of a whim, I used to do this even before I started to comment in this amazing house of bloggers/writers, I did it when my blog was the number one stop of my friends when they needed a film recommendation, and now is just a barren wasteland, filled with new content, but voided of comments, the thing I love the most about having a blog: the conversation. So now I have the opportunity, at a bigger venue, a wider audience, a better time and more universally understandable language: english. Now I’m just making a mess of myself, so why don’t we just go ahead and move along, onto the movies?

Well, I think it’s time for me to say how good or bad was 2011 for movies in general, before going into the list in particular… it wasn’t good for me. I mean, there are some great movies, but even if I thought movies weren’t that good in 2010 (and in that year I had four ***** movies), this one is even worse, with just one movie getting the highest mark from my end of the spectrum. How sad is that? I mean, I’ve seen 108 movies from 2011, I’ve seen most of the most rewarded and critically acclaimed films from the year (and with that I mean, the pure year, actual releases from 2011, no commercial releases after festival runs in 2010, or foreign films that never got distribution but now have, which seems to be the way of American critics, and I can’t blame them– except for that one last thing I said… I mean, really? A Yang film?) and still I found myself not moved by most of them. It must be one of the most boring years in what I think is what I like in movies, and what I think movies should do with people: make them feel something. And in that regard, the 2011 movies I saw left me cold, except a few ones, these I’m going to mention here, but besides that, even these 20 are stretching the term of giving me an emotional response (and I don’t mean crying, when I cry for the first time in a movie, I’ll call it the best movie ever made, but that hasn’t happened yet). So, do my eyes deceive me or I’m just turning a new leaf? These 20 movies, I’d say, are the most impressive of the year, and I could live in a world where the rest of the 88 films I saw didn’t exist (not that I actually want that, but it’s pretty narrow the margin of good movies coming out these days, specially since 2010, weirdly). Nevertheless there were certain films that I had an interest in that either weren’t available or just didn’t have the time to see them properly: ‘Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol’, ‘The Adventures of Tintin’, Hugo’, ‘Mientras Duermes’, ‘Kotoko’, ‘Killer Joe’, ‘Ichimei’ and while I just came back from the avant premiere of ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’, the film was seen out of time given by myself to see these films. Now, prepare yourself, because I’ve been told many times that my list contains ‘shit’ and that is ‘weird’. I don’t really care, I can tell for sure this thing: from the oscar nominees for best picture, only one of the 9 is in my top 20. Which one is it? Take a look for you to see…

20. ‘The Adjustment Bureau’ (George Nolfi)

Here we have the debut in the directing chair of the action screenwriter George Nolfi, and this time drinking from the waters of the science fiction master that is Phillip K. Dick, and even reteaming with the actor of his earlier screenwriting credit ‘The Bourne Ultimatum’ (2007), the star and great actor Matt Damon, that with every year that passes demonstrates once more that he is much more than a pretty face and young girls appeal, even if it is that what makes his movies a success at the box office. And in this movie, they work perfectly together, telling us a story that goes to the source of one of the most important questions in the human existence: fate. Does fate exist? Is it something that is predetermined or something that changes along with you? Who manipulates fate? Is there a God? Even if the movie ends up giving you the answers to all these questions, I felt completely attracted to the premise itself as well as the mythology and the figures and the whole visual work that was displayed in the film itself. This film tells the story of a young politician played by Matt Damon who runs for the senate, but ends up loosing due to the circumstances of the race. It is in that fateful night that she meets what may be the love of his life, a girl called Elise (Emily Blunt) who gives him a kiss. It is four years later that she meets her again, when he’s gearing up for a new campaign for the senate… but he wasn’t supposed to meet her again. Here comes the bureau, a group of non-humans, that look exactly like humans from the 50′s, who take care of the fate of all the people from the world, fixing heads and even changing the rules of the game, just as the chairman (the g-word present) seems convenient. The movie becomes action-thriller-romance and even a sci-fi film, but not just another sci-fi movie, but one that is lo-sci-fi, one with little yet important elements (in this case, the fate books are incredible dispositives that seem like they come from the future), and some of my favorite movies are lo-sci-fi, so there you go.

19. ‘Thor’ (Kenneth Branagh, Joss Whedon)

The best of the Marvel movies to come out leading out to the big event that will be ‘The Avengers’ (2012) in the next year, directed by the talented and geek-favorite Joss Whedon, famous for writing comics and creating two of the most fan-loved series of all time, ‘Buffy’ and ‘Firefly’. Yes, I think it’s better than ‘Iron Man’ (2008), which seems to be the standard and ground for many comic book movies, specially those of the Marvel universe, but I never quite liked Tony Stark as a character nor Robert Downey Jr. as an actor in a role that would glorify the conduct he (supposedly) stopped having when he took this and other roles, as if it were some kind of comeback from the rehab. It’s good to see that Downey Jr. has left the shadow of Downey Sr., but I don’t think that makes him a great actor, just a good one. Anyway, let’s talk about this one, which is actually good (not that ‘Iron Man’ (2008) is bad, but…), not because of the action scenes, not because of the memorable characters that we always wanted to see reincarnated in the screen (as well as ‘Green Lantern’ (2011), no one really cared about seeing a movie on the subject of the norse god/superhero Thor), but because it’s a definitive and great mixture of the holy and the prophane, the art and the pop, a visual treat for those who are really looking, and not just dismissing it as pure popcorn entertainment. Kenneth Branagh was the needed addition to the world of Marvel, as he inflicted his own shakespearian ways into the plot and the acting of the characters, as well as the whole solemnity and the importance of the family tribulations in a royal group, but filled with characters with silly costumes. Then comes the whole way the film looks: bright, yellowy, specially the scenes in the plane of the gods… it is quite beautiful, even if its computer generated, but still there’s some beauty in it, and an akin eye to match those scenes with the murky and really not as good-looking planeth earth. A real document for art as commerce.

18. Moneyball (Bennett Miller)

This is the only movie nominated for best picture that has a feature spot on this personal top 10 list. It doesn’t usually happen like this, I mean, last year I had four of the ten nominees in the top 20 (and 3 of them in the top 10), so I don’t know what has happened this year to me, or to the movies the Academy seemed to like this year. Anyway, I’m not an Oscar nut, I’ve hardly been on the same ground with them in the last few years (the last time was when ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ (2008) won best picture, and yes, I loved the film). But this film, as if it were some kind of miracle, clicked with me, and it’s quite surprising to me that it worked on a gut level, filling me with joy and even with content as I saw it develop before my eyes. It’s a great real story, and I usually hate those films… it was a sport film, not with much sport, but all the talk was about baseball, and I don’t like either sport movies (box seems to be the exception) nor baseball (hell, I’m not even sure how baseball even works, so that’s that)… it had Jonah Hill, an actor I’ve never cared about, but suddenly he made the most worthwhile performance in his career, and the best of the film after the turn of Brad Pitt in this spectacular fest. Now, I knew I was in for something good when I saw that Bennett Miller was the director, after all, he directed ‘Capote’ (2005), one of my favorite films about the process of writing and what it actually means to investigate and suffer for the things you write, as well as a great performance from the best living working actor: Phillip Seymour Hoffman (I usually change that with Paul Giammatti, but then I remember he made ‘Sideways’ (2004) and I get so angry that I want to punch him), who also acts in this movie in a small role as the coach of the baseball team. The film itself is great because it mixes a simple enough story about the fall and rise of a baseball team that failed to maintain its best players, and how with the aid of the inventive, statistics and just sheer luck (at some points) made them the best team of the year, winning 20 consecutive games, a record at that year. The editing and the score are perfect, this one is the movie I root for at the Oscars… too bad it won’t win a thing.

17. We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay)

You either love or hate this movie, and I can easily think why I would love or hate this, but I ended up in neither of those spectres, but that doesn’t leave me in the middle of it, but leaning more to the positive, but not being completely blinded by its genius. This is the ocassion where the film itself connects with me in a professional way, and I mean that I don’t see every movie with the critical eye of the process of filmmaking, because I really find that seeing movies with a scalpel and mask is boring, it takes the fun out of the joy that is to me watch films. After all, my approach to the art of the film buff is that the film itself must be ‘entertaining’, but not in the sense of funny or thrilling or anything like that, I find myself entertained in various ways, and whenever I think that a film is eliciting an emotion in me, or having me inmmersed into the plot, I feel entertained in the way that I don’t think about what my present situation is, not as in a way of escapism, but that the film can take me to another reality, real or not, but if you manage to make me believe that what I’m seeing is possible inside the rules of its own world, I feel entertained and so I aproove of your film. While I found this film thrilling and tense, it was also entertaining for me, but it also was possible for me to see it technically, and I’m talking about what has been the beef of many when they oppose this great movie: it’s ‘style over substance’ method. I’d like to think that when people say ‘style over substance’ are wrong, as this movie is more like ‘style is substance, substance is style’, as every shot of the film is filled with imagery that combines with what is happening plot-wise, expanding and even showing you the metaphors explicitly in a way that could only be akin to what I was doing at the moment: I was filming a (failed) short film, and in every shot I was trying to do the same thing, telling the story visually as well as through the dialogue. Now, of course, THAT didn’t work, but this movie does, and deliciously.

16. La Piel que Habito (Pedro Almodóvar)

The Skin I Live In is one of the most shocking and director friendly movies of the year, meaning that it is here that we can find that the auteur (Almodóvar) can surpass a story that it’s completely different from what we are used to see from his continuos spanish output. Here we have a story that is more akin to the world of horror and the science fiction (lo-sci-fi again) more than the usual melodramas that he makes, even if they are filled with mystery or comedy, they are all after a while, melodramas. And even if this film is a genre exercise (genre in more than one sense), Almodóvar shows up in the whole extension of the film in different ways, even more than you would think: always talking about the issue of gender, the figure of the woman as a genre, the body itself as a way of communication (personal) to the other, homosexuality, and at the end of it all: family and melodrama, it all comes down to that issue with the films he makes, and he has made a name of himself out of the tragic issues of the human people, elevated to the highest of the emotions the human being can express, and even in this film, a clear genre excercise, you can see how his true spirit dominates the themes present in all the plot points of the film. The movie has been made important due to one twist that seems obvious starting the middle of the film, but I’ve seen it twice, and even if I knew the twist, the film itself becomes another thing completely different: a tale of obsession and love, of looking for things past, of the importance of the family and the fact of ‘being at home’ as the ultimate goal for everything, that can be seen in the detail that Almodóvar and his collaborators go to humanize the dehumanized ambients in which the characters move, giving each place that seems cold or forgettable, and that, in the world of medicine, it is hard to find the warmth of the maternal womb that the house that you can call yours has.

15. The Umbrella Man (Errol Morris)

Errol Morris knows how to direct documentaries, but I guess it was my first time seeing him tackling the short form and make still one of the best and most worthwhile documentaries of the year. Initially released at the New York Times website, this 7 minute short film goes to one of the most important sources regarding the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Josiah ‘Tink’ Thompson, author of the book ’6 Seconds in Dallas’, regarding the same subject, and talking about one thing: the umbrella man, one of the most famous conspiracies and theories regarding that still mysterious death, one that has been the subject of many takes, including fiction, and that’s besides the three books per year that go out trying to solve the problem, involving, as time goes by, even more and more absurd implications. The short film is a summarization on one short film of a 6-hour conversation using the always incredible Errol Morris approach to documentary, essentially conversation/interview based. The short film makes many claims and states the fact that sorround the presence of the man with the umbrella. Josiah is a joy to watch and hear, as well as the whole morale of the story: a cautionary tale of a day where all was alright in the neighbourhood. You can see the short film if you click the name of this short, right beside its number placing. Errol Morris still has the touch and he still makes great documentaries. Be prepared, this is a test reel for a documentary on JFK’s assasination, and if this kind of stories we are going to have, we may have a masterpiece in our hands.

14. Mildred Pierce (Todd Haynes)

Now, you know that I put many things in my list, as you can see, I put a short film only available online just before this, and now I put a TV miniseries… a great TV miniseries I’d have to add. This one is a great piece of period drama that advances into time and with a great art direction, great acting, great editing, great direction from Todd Haynes and just a classic story. The film is about how Mildred Pierce, an almost modern woman becomes a modern woman, her growth and her raise (as well as her fall) as an owner of one of the most delicious and succesful restaurants. When she knows that his husband is cheating on her, he abandons her and leaves her with her two childs, having to find herself a job as a waitress, where she starts becoming famous for her bakings and becomes known with the usual clients at the diner, so she can come up with funding for the start of her restaurant and family dining place. In the meanwhile, her daughter Veda becomes evil, as she despises the work that her mother does, just because she is working and he shouldn’t (let’s remind ourselves this is, I think, before the economic crash of 1929 or during that, so women in such an elevated figure as businessman, as we see her later in her career, was rare), and then she dissapears, just to be found as an impressive singer of opera. The miniseries takes its time, after all, it is 5 episodes long and a total runtime of 363 minutes, and makes its revelations slowly, and not rushing anything that will come back, because in this TV effort everything comes back to what it was in the past, and that is the fact that this miniseries tries to put across, there are certain moments, certain characters and situations, even dialogues, that communicate with each other as reiterations across time, and that is what makes the seeing of this effort important. To see and remember, as weeks went by on HBO, that everything that was will more likely come alive again than be forgotten, and that even what we want to see dissapear, is always there, looking at us, and that feeling is not creepy, but more heartwarming, as you will never, ever be alone with the forgetfulness of the man (or woman in this case) that feels that has lost everything.

13. Win Win (Thomas McCarthy)

Paul Giammatti is in this film and it’s maybe the only thing I can say to proove why I liked it. Well, there’s also the thing that the film is beautifully shot, incredibly well directed (no performance is a waste here, and all the young kids act wonderfully, each one of them is a discovery for the art) and of course, the most important of all, the script is a marvel in itself, which shouldn’t be a surprise for those who follow the career of screenwriter turned director Thomas McCarthy. Even if this film was incredibly well received when it opened early last year (after a great Sundance run), it was mostly forgotten in all the lists I can think of, and that I find dissapointing. Bob Clark, last week, mentioned how people tend to forget the movies released early and just consider the screeners they get when the prizes are getting near and at hand, and it is true, this little marvel was universally ignored, even by Sam, one of the people that championed the films for the same reasons I’m giving, and yet it was missing from his list, and I don’t remember seeing it in his also-rans. Now, I’m not questioning the practice of making lists, as people usually tend to forget what they say and what they think, or even forget if they saw this or that film, but what I’m trying to say is that the ‘considered best movies’ shouldn’t be released all at once at the end of the year, it makes one confused and just anxious to see everything, and in that craze you just forget that little gem you saw at the start of the year and that was completely put away because you just saw a bunch of ‘good’ films at the end… Oscars aren’t good to that, and that’s because some movies that had Oscar chance and were released at the end, got the shit end of the stick and where ignored, just because they had one-week qualifying runs and just nobody knew they existed and just wanted to be there, oscarbaiting. Anyway, I spent way too much time talking about other stuff that is not the film itself, because… well, I’m forgetful and I remember most of the film, but not details to really get into it. I remember that the newcomer is a great actor, and the fighting scenes where worthwhile. The whole mix of the strangeness of the characters, the exhasperated situation in which the Giammatti character is at the moment, make this one film to treasure just because of the characters it sports and how good it looks: that will keep it in your memory.

12. Le gamin au vélo (Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne)

The Dardenne Brothers take a naturalistic approach to filmmaking, trying to be as close to human life as possible, following the sight and attention of the people they portray, and making films about the common people, the people who work, the people that don’t have an easy life, people who struggle every day to have something to live for, and in that they have become the common man’s champion, and with that comes The Kid with a Bike, where they not only continue with their stupendous portrayals of the (let’s say it) poor and less fortunate people, but give us the best male performance of the year as well. Thomas Doret plays Cyril Catoul, a kid that desesperately, at the start of the film, wants his bike, but people from all around try to prevent him from entering the building where he thinks it is, and that’s because his father has left him and hasn’t come back, and has left an empty apartment and sold everything he had. The kid now lives at a orphanage, which he hates, and just wants to be free and have his bike again. In one of his escaping travellings to find his bike, he comes across Samantha, a woman who helps him and fosters him during the weekends, in a tale of love of the most pure kind, where the characters feel an inmediate attraction for the other, but they don’t treat each other equally, as he is more interested in the liberty that he has to leave the place that he hates more than that he wants to be with her, but that’s just assumed. The film itself is perfect in its filmmaking inclinations, it is a Dardenne film, which gives natural inclinations to the movement of the camera, giving us the perfect Image-Time, even if it seems more akin with Image-Movement, that we are looking for in modern and even post-modern cinema. Nevertheless, the Dardennes are starting to free themselves from the usual restraints that they usually put in their films, as it is their first co-directed movie where scored music comes in, in certain spots where we see the face of Cyril, we hear a piece of classical music, and that, even if it breaks the famous name they’ve made for themselves, it is quite perfect for the moments they chose. An achievement that, if continues, will give us more room to breath and a change of pace for these amazing directing brothers.

11. Rango (Gore Verbinski)

This animated movie was at the top of my list for more than three months, making it clear how much I liked this film. Here we have the first experience of the animated kind in which instead motion-capture, the technique that many 3D films (animated or not) are using right now to capture performances from famous actors and cover them with a different skin or just making them something not human, there was the use of emotion-capture. Every actor that was on the film, instead of being called alone to record their lines in a booth, they were called all together, to film the movie in a green screen with some props and a lot of recording devices, so to capture every sound and movement they make, and transport them to the animated film. The result? Maybe the most important time in which actual stars have done the voice of an animated character, as their acting and personality is actually there for you to see, even if you don’t actually “see” the actor behind all the animation. Of course I’m talking specifically about the protagonist of the film, Rango, an iguana voiced by Johnny Depp (coming with his fourth collaboration with Verbinski after the three Pirate of the Caribbean films), where you can practically see the attitude and the usual quirks that make every Depp character memorable for us, and the film itself is great, with a pastiche on the western genre, with self-aware references to the movies of the most classic canon, and a dream sequence to be remembered as one of the best in film history. The film is just a joy to watch, and it’s not even close to being just another kids film, it is quite extraordinary in the way it plays around with the usual tropes, and at the same time gets a whole trippy atmosphere to it, due to the state of the main character and the whole aspect of the dessert in the middle of the day. It is a fun rise and my pick for the best animated film of the year.

Now here where I trick you (again), so you can visit my site. If you want to know the top 10 of the year, you need to follow the link here. So, that’s all here, thanks for having me and reading me, and comment accordingly in both places, if you want to.

by Jamie
Rereading one of my favorite books about rock music recently (‘Britpop! Cool Britannia and the Spectacular Demise of English Rock’ by John Harris) I was struck by a wonderfully perceptive quote from Jarvis Cocker that gets to the heart of the matter just four sentences. It almost seems like it could be a thesis to this entire Series as well:

“When British pop is great, it’s great because of the personality in the music. The sense of the romantic in the everyday. Ray Davies finding the poetic in the sun going down over Waterloo Station. You don’t get that much in American rock.”

So with that today, I offer what I consider to be the greatest Pop band Britain has ever produced: the Ray Davis led Kinks.

Saying this one then realizes how difficult, and perhaps arbitrary it is to nominate a single album from their catalog today. It would just barely speak on the albums brilliance and more about my personal preference. But, as I said last week all great bands have a stretch in their career of about 3 to 5 years where nothing is released but supreme masterpieces, and the Kinks run, from roughly 1966 to 1971 is second to none. Just consider the albums in order: Face to Face, Something Else by the Kinks, The Village Green Preservation Society, Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire), Lola vs. the Powerman & the Money-Go-Round, Pt. 1, and finally their most underrated album Muswell Hillbillies (there is also untold riches in the singles from this era as well). From there there would be a smattering of high points (sometimes it’s just a single track like ‘Celluloid Heroes’, and sometimes it’s a complete album, like Misfits from 1978) but never did they reach that point consistently again. And, this is more then understandable and perfectly fine, that run is perhaps the greatest ever (and you could even go a little earlier if you wanted to as something like Kinks Kontroversy from 1965 is great too). The fact that this era also coincided with a late 1965 ban by the US Government that stipulated the band not be allowed to enter the country that wasn’t lifted until late 1969 meant that they were deprived of the largest market in the world and their most brilliant period would never be given its full due. In an era of such social and musical change a voice as articulate and perceptive as Davies’ would have surely been welcomed. Instead, the Kinks are always viewed as slightly lesser then the other titans of the form, always viewed primary by a rabid cult for what they really were.

Today, I’ll be picking for discussion their 1969 concept record Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire), but I’d like to make special comment that I could just as easily be talking about Muswell Hillbillies had the coin toss came out oppositely as they are neck and neck as my favorite from the band.

Arthur opens  with the bluesy strum shuffle of ‘Victoria’, which points that while Arthur may be similar to their earlier effort (that many probably thought there’d be no way of topping) Village Green in concept, it was an altogether more rocking affair. ‘Yes Sir, No Sir’ opens with a military cadence and expounds the sometime lack of self worth so found in the working class. It becomes apparent here that this is a chief concern of Davies throughout this record, a class struggle is further articulated into a struggle within the individual, an individual that’s been shown nothing but ill will his entire life and how he (or she) can rise above this for real change. Will he continue to ask permission for such simple acts as breathing from his ‘superiors’ or will he take some semblance of control. Davies gives it the added historical relevance of an entire Imperialist culture for added measure.

The context grows into ‘Some Mother’s Son’, which is easily one of Rock’s defining anti-war statements. A generation later Paul Weller would see the same story for his similar ‘Little Boy Soldiers’ (Setting Sons) but here is the original in all its melancholy timeless beauty. Its vivid imagery makes no connections to any specific conflict thus making it about all modern armed conflicts. ‘Drivin” then seemingly lessens the mood, but therein is the brilliance, as the ‘troubled world around us’ is the specific reason the charms of turning to an open road and just motoring with a loved one is such a desired idea. Dave, the Kinks great guitarist, and Ray’s brother, offers one of his many exciting and instantly recognizable guitar breaks.

‘Brainwashed’ and ‘Australia’ work in tandem to point towards what a more nailed down concept would have sounded and been concerned with (Arthur was originally set to be a TV piece as well). Both songs feature the Kinks sounding like they did a few years prior— a band that executed the greatest examples of British sloppy drumming and garage sound around.

‘Shangri-La’ comes next, and for my money is one of the Kinks truly great tracks, if not my all-time favorite. It turns the album from masterpiece status to status as one of Rock’s true landmark records. It’s achingly bittersweet and poignant, the most beautiful punch in the gut you’ve ever heard. It begins in a stark sarcastic tone, about a retired man who has been spit out from a hard life spent doling towards a twilight where he figured he’d have at least something meager to look forward too. Davies understandably cuts all this down, and around 2:50 the rest of the band joins in to thoroughly trash this culturally respected idea down to nothing but a sedate roll on the old rocking chair. It’s such a powerful track that one doesn’t know to cry tears of sadness or have their eye’s squeeze out tears in the name of righteous anger.

‘Mr. Churchill Says’ continues the song cycle away from Australia and more towards Britain looking eastward upon Australia, and the role the mother country must play going forward. ‘She’s Bought a Hat Like Princess Marina’ continues the Anglocentric portion of the record, and indulges with several new musical textures.

‘Young and Innocent Days’ makes a great argument as the best straightforward pop song on the record. Midtempo ballads had by now been almost been a market cornered by the Kinks (what else can one say when you think about it, this is the band that had offered ‘Waterloo Sunset’, ‘Sunny Afternoon’, ‘Well Respected Man’, ‘This Time Tomorrow’, ‘Dandy’, ‘Village Green’, ‘Animal Farm’, ‘Big Sky etc in the previous few years), and ‘Days’ does nothing to disappoint. Again, a sad longing hangs over much of the affair, but it’s an epic beauty as well making countless plays virtually impossible to resist.

It’s then no wonder that ‘Nothing to Say’ is arranged as it is, uptempo and quite bubbly. The entire band seems in great spirits, there is a rolling piano, Davies offers several vocal ideas and cadences, and the drums remain at their bar room beat best. ‘Arthur’ furthers the upturn in musicality as the album comes to a close. Lyrically it’s wonderfully concise and full of summarization. It’s essentially the entire albums story retold as an epilogue on clarity. Arthur was a swell fellow, and in this frank matter of factness one can either feel happy and joyful or incredibly sad. It’s quite up to you how you take life no?

“Arthur was born just a plain simple man
In a plain simple working class position
Though the world was hard and its ways were set
He was young and he had so much ambition.”

It can crush or it can come and go. As Ray says, “Someone loves you, and wants to help you / Don’t you know it?” In an episode of the old UK show called ‘My Generation’, a show where each episode was devoted to a classic English musical act that some great soul has uploaded a good number of episodes into youtube, Ray Davies himself closes the Kink’s episode with such a perfect and melancholy tribute: “I’ve always been wary of doing interviews, because my work is better then I am. I just don’t live up to it. I’d love to be as good as ‘Waterloo Sunset’.”

(it’s also worth mentioning as long as this album is the subject, is that the deluxe remaster added additional tracks and B-sides from the albums sessions and one is really foolish to not be aware of something like say, ‘This Man He Weeps Tonight’ or the weirdo beautiful melody contained within ‘Mr. Shoemaker’s Daughter’. Bands kill for tracks like these while the great ones stick them on B sides or in vaults unreleased for decades)

Happy listening, see you next week.

By Peter Lenihan

Finding Ford is a biweekly series in which I examine the films of John Ford.

There are, it seems, at least two ways of framing Rio Grande, one of the three Ford features of 1950 (Wagon Master and When Willie Comes Marching Home are the other two). The first (and far more common) way to discuss it is as the final entry in the cavalry trilogy, a series of films starring John Wayne and many members of the Ford stock company that revolved (some would say obsessively) around notions of duty and justice and the (im)possibility of reconciliation. Despite these films’ rejection of classical storytelling technique and traditional methods of audience identification, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Fort Apache are, at least among Fordians and western aficionados, very kindly looked upon, and have been embraced in a way that Rio Grande, a film no one seems to know what to do with, hasn’t.

It’s not all that hard to see why. Next to Fort Apache, whose tonal complexities and simultaneous celebration and repudiation of the U.S. military is among the most contradictory in the director’s filmography, and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, which features some of the most poetic color cinematography in the history of cinema, Rio Grande can seem a little, well, slight, and its undeniably low-budget feel only contributes to the sense that the director might be on auto-pilot here. History suggests Ford made it for Republic to help get The Quiet Man off the ground, and the digressive, ramshackle nature of the “plot,” and the familiarity of the characters’ names (protagonists named York, Quinncannon, Sandy and Tyree had all appeared in earlier Ford films) has helped encourage the view that it is something minor.

It’s an understandable position, though one I’m not particularly sympathetic to, partially because Ford at his slightest is often Ford at his most interesting. Take, for example, his employment of John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara here. As a director, Ford was never above building films around his stars, and in The Quiet Man and The Wings of Eagles he came close to doing just that, wrapping the disparate narrative strands around their (frayed) relationships in a way that is a lot more familiar, though no less affecting. Here, however, neither actor gets significantly more screen time than Victor McLaglen or Ben Johnson, and its focus on the ensemble, on a social world outside of the “leads,” occasionally makes it seem like those involved are coasting. (Nothing, it must be mentioned, could be farther from the truth, and Wayne gave few performances this tender, or in which he seemed to be so aware of the frustrated pain his face was capable of expressing.) This brings us, I suppose, to the second way we can frame Rio Grande, and the way I think we should—not as the third cavalry picture, but as Wagon Master, Part 2. Released only six months apart, they share Bert Glennon, Ben Johnson, Harry Carey Jr., the Sons of the Pioneers and what appears to these eyes to be many of the same Moab locations. From the font of the opening titles to the beautiful, modest cinematography—and it’s worth noting that few of the films Glennon worked on (and he shot everything from The Last Command to Crime Wave) look like this—all this seems to be of a piece, and if the two films hadn’t been made for two different studios one might suspect they were shot concurrently. Given the director’s fondness for Wagon Master (he frequently listed it, along with The Sun Shines Bright and The Fugitive, as the favorite of his own films), it’s not unreasonable to think that Rio Grande may have been an attempt to remake it, to recapture the very specific magic of that film. And even if it isn’t quite its equal, it remains a striking achievement, and one that deserves to be discussed more seriously than it generally has been.

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, despite its preoccupation with the ghost of Wayne’s dead wife, opened with the witty repartee of McLaglen and Wayne; Fort Apache, a comedy in which almost everyone dies, openly and humorously mocked the stiffness of Fonda in its first minutes; Wagon Master, a comedy in which almost no one dies, begins with some jokes about Solomon’s wives and the horns hiding under Ward Bond’s hat—Rio Grande doesn’t. Instead, things proceed solemnly—it opens with a battle unseen and all we glimpse is the tired aftermath, the soldier and officers and Native Americans returning exhausted and disappointed, incapable of crossing the Rio Grande, incapable of fighting the fight they believe they should be. In the face of death (and Ford is always thinking of death) all conflict is pointless, but Wayne & co. aren’t even able to recognize that pointlessness, to wage combat of any kind, and the weariness of being able only to face the possibility of pointlessness shows on their faces. No jokes, then, or at least not until McLaglen (who was English, if you can believe it) shows. Instead, movement for the sake of movement, talk for the sake of talk, ritual for the sake of ritual, and already the deep melancholy that pervades so much of the film sets in. Boys, faced to see their fifteen year absent fathers as commanding officers and nothing more, and men, American and Mexican alike knowing what they should do and knowing they can’t—these things are the body of the film, and while for any twenty-first century filmmaker they would be ironies of history, for Ford they’re goddamn tragedies, athough you’d never hear him admit it.

Eventually the jokes come. Most of these revolve around McLaglen and O’Hara—she keeps calling him an arsonist, and he doesn’t know what the word means. Shenandoah, a place first referenced in that opening conversation and resurfacing throughout, is Rio Grande’s ghost (there’s always one in a Ford film), now a farce in long shot but no doubt a tragedy in close-up were we permitted to see it. Wayne, a Northerner and West Point officer, seems to have been ordered to burn down his Southern wife’s plantation, and O’Hara never forgave him, leaving him and raising their son on her own. McLaglen, we later learn, was one of Wayne’s men, and she doesn’t seem to have forgotten that either. And of course his son is transferred to the regiment he commands, and of course his wife shows up—as plot points these are obvious, but Ford needs excuses to get these people and ideas into the same room, and they go down easier on-screen than they do on paper. Nevertheless, the construction is clumsy even for Ford, and the half-assed approach to the film’s plot will no doubt be off-putting for those that go to the movies to see a story well-told.

(A quick aside here: how many great movies are actually great stories? I’d argue there aren’t many, and, even more importantly, that most great stories make for really bad movies. The fact that the directors (Ford, Hawks) who most frequently claimed they were just telling tales, and that were most often cited as embodying a rich tradition of narrative classicism, were such lousy storytellers, and so consistently made movies defined by their lengthy, dramatically unjustifiable digressions, only supports this I think. “Storytelling” is the arena of a Zinnemann, not a Ford.)

And it’s not that this is a significantly more lackadaisical or stubbornly anachronistic film than She Wore a Yellow Ribbon or Wagon Master are—but everything here is a bit more transparent, and while Ford would quicken or revise a scene he wasn’t interested in to reshape the trajectory and rhythms of a film, here he doesn’t even bother to finish the scenes he’s bored by, and the radically oscillating tones are almost without parallel among his mature works. There’s a let’sjustshootthisscene spontaneity to it, and when a wagon train is raided out of nowhere by a band of Native Americans, ruthlessly interrupting the subtle, developing sense of social interaction among these frightened people, it’s hard to shake the feeling that in this moment, in this film, right now, anything can happen. Is it inelegant? Of course, but it’s very hard for me (an avowed Fordian, admittedly) to fault a director for making a film that privileges all his bizarre, wildly lyrical idiosyncrasies over the (potentially banal) let’s-get-them-Indians narrative.

And so it goes; incidents happen, many of which I could comment on, many of which I couldn’t. Two moments linger above all others, however, and neither of them have anything to do with tracking shots, gunfights or running horses. The first is a simple shot of Wayne, looking in on his wife helping her son, badly beaten in a fight the night before. Many Ford movies exist through their windows, and having a character look through one at a world that is no longer their own is hardly new. Neither is pointing it out. But there is something embodied in this shot, something Ford and Wayne were able to put into it, that’s unshakeable. Perhaps it’s this–Ford’s movies are filled with outsiders who long to be part of a community, despite their awareness (or ours) that the group itself is a humiliating beast, and that if they were a part of it they’d either hate themselves or be bored. Nevertheless, because Wayne is looking in not on a social order but a family that abandoned him (or, perhaps more accurately, he abandoned), it generates a striking, deeply emotional pitch that cuts through, and states without stating that he ain’t living like he should.

The other moment, and one I cannot really remark on, is this. The Sons of the Pioneers (corny to some, but not to me) sing an unbelieveably beautiful song called “I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen.” “I will take you back Kathleen to where your heart will feel no pain,” the man sings. Ford cuts to Wayne and O’Hara. And they both seem to have died.

by Sam Juliano

     Yeah the Oscars are a sham and many of the voters are wankers.  Artistry escapes them, and politics and commercialism rear their ugly heads definitely.  When Crash beat Brokeback Mountain in 2005, many tuned off for life, unwillingly to even engage in the fun.

     Allan Fish, Maurizio Roca and Jamie Uhler are classic Oscar bashers as well as they should be.  I choose to engage in all the guilty pleasures it afford, and have hosted a party with an Oscar pool since 1978 at my home.  it’s fun to discuss the omissions and the dire rules each and every year and to make predictions.  It’s also fun to acknowledge that rare unexpected time when the voters by luck or a rare moment of inspiration make some right choices.  While the masterful The Artist will be taking home the Best Picture prize on February 26th (it received 10 nominations to Hugo’s 11) the naming of The Tree of Life in the nominations for Best Picture, and Terrence Malick for Best Director is surely one of those great moments that are reached even as Allan Fish states, ‘they have to get it right sometimes.’  War Horse also got into the Big Show in the main category.  Here are the nine films that are in for Best Picture:

The Artist

The Descendants

Midnight in Paris

The Tree of Life

Moneyball

The Help

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Hugo

War Horse

For best director:

Hazanavicius (Artist)

Payne (Descendants)

Malick (The Tree of Life)

Scorsese (Hugo)

Allen (Midnight in Paris)

Anyone have anything to say about these nominations and/or the acting noms, or all or any of the others?

by Allan Fish

(UK 2010 166m) DVD1/2

Being second is to be the first of the ones who lose

p  James Gay-Reese, Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner  d  Asif Kapadia  w  Manish Pandey  ph  Jake Polonsky  ed  Chris King, Gregers Sall  m  Antonio Pinto

In the introduction I recall mentioning how up until a certain age movies didn’t mean much to me.  As a youngster, sitting down to watch anything for over two hours meant it was either a football match, a Saturday afternoon’s racing or a Formula One Grand Prix.  I’d grown up with it.  I even used to do my own commentaries, amusing myself for hours using bits of card with the drivers’ names on.  Invariably, one driver always won…Alain Prost.  He had the same name as me, after all, and he was called The Professor. 

            There were two camps, of course; you were either for Senna or for Prost.  At the time I was for Prost.  Prost had retired in 1993.  By that time, I was beginning to move away from watching Formula One.  Schumacher was emerging on the scene, Mansell had retired.  Yet if someone were to ask me what turned me away from Formula One to the point where I no longer watch it at all and haven’t done or a decade, it’d be the events of 1^st May 1994.  I don’t really remember where I was when Prost won any of his four World Titles, but I remember where I was when the news of Senna being declared dead was announced; at my grandmother’s an hour or two later. 

The death of Ayrton Senna, at the peak of his powers, at the age of 34, and the outpouring of grief displayed during his Sao Paolo funeral, which was like Eva Peron’s on a more spontaneous level, affected us all.  It’s difficult to put into words, but even if Don Bradman had been taken from Australia in the 1930s the grief would still have paled into insignificance.  This wasn’t adulation but worship, and his death seemed to do what the death of the equally seemingly invincible Jim Clark had done a generation earlier.  Everyone began to think ‘if Ayrton Senna could be killed, we all could be.’ 

            Kapadia’s film, which improves markedly in this hour longer version, follows Senna from his beginnings karting in the late 1970s as a teenager to his death and virtual deification in his homeland.  It takes in the miraculous early drives for Toleman and the then dwindling Lotus, the glory and infamy years at McLaren and the final dance of death with Williams in a car with all the stability of Bambi on ice.  The interview footage with Prost, Ron Dennis and other who knew him was priceless enough, but the real fascination goes into seeing behind the scenes, the sense of camaraderie that was felt among the drivers, the nerves and tension and the almost guesswork that went into experimenting with the car often in the racing environment.  We get insights into Senna from both sides, and while both he and Prost possessed inflated egos and the politics of the sport were as draconian as ever, one can find oneself changing loyalties from incident to incident.  The final fatal chapter isn’t gone into in any real detail, and rightly so, for this is not a post mortem but a celebration of a man and his time. 

            Back in the late eighties and early nineties, the final glory days of Formula One (which now sees drivers not so much driving the cars as sit in them), of the Turbo-engined beasts, the sport quite literally transcended barriers.  The rivalry between the two greatest drivers of their generation, the yin to the other’s yang, was unprecedented in sport.  Just as McEnroe was nothing without Borg and Connors, as Coe needed Ovett, Senna and Prost and their fierce fights, on and off the track, and their reconciliation just before Ayrton’s death, symbolised the end of an era.  There has, touch wood, been no fatality in Formula One since, and in some ways with it went the romance and the ghosts of not only Clark and Graham Hill, but Jochen Rindt and Gilles Villeneuve, went into the night bearing Senna with them like Doug Fairbanks at the end of The Iron Mask.  The most telling remark perhaps comes from Ron Dennis, who observes that even if he’d known and had a premonition of his death, Senna would still have gone out and embraced it as he had life.  Kapadia, his editors and composer Antonio Pinto have made the film worthy of the subject.