Well and Truly Screwed

As most of you know, I've been a fan of Film Noir for going on 30 years now. I've poured over most of the classics and still derive great pleasure from watching some poor schmuck make the slightest error in judgment and then find himself unable to extricate himself from the inevitable results (Kadas comes to mind for some reason here). The best of the classic cycle found the central character dead, doomed or dying (the three “D”s as I like to call them), but it was actually a fairly rare occurrence in most '40s and '50s Noirs for the protagonist to pay the ultimate price. There were exceptions of course (Ace in the Hole, Double Indemnity, Pushover and few others) and it was these early films in the Noir canon that hooked me. The later French Noirs of Jean-Pierre Melville (and others) pushed the genre into bleaker territory and still stand as amongst the most accomplished and satisfying films I've seen.

In subsequent years, films with noirish plot lines have cycled in and out of popular film making and have been given the “Neo” moniker to delineate them from the earlier classic period. There have been a few standouts, but for the most part they've paled in comparison to the originals. Even though the origins of Film Noir stem from a uniquely American perspective, Hollywood hasn't been able to expand on the genre in recent decades. Perhaps this stems from the fact that present day America rarely examines its failings and instead concentrates on endlessly trumped up flag waving and goofball escapist entertainment. It has morphed into a country that abhors doubt and sees any criticism as undermining the American way of life, regardless of its intent. The classic Noir period found American film makers exploring the inherent human weaknesses in all of us and the ramifications, both social and personal, that those weaknesses provoked. It was Freudian introspection on a pop culture level, something that's almost impossible to imagine today. Interestingly, the purveyors and champions of the early Film Noir period were predominantly European directors transplanted by world conflict to Hollywood and perhaps it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that the best examples of Neo-Noirs continue to come from Europe.

All this is a precursor to provide some framework for a particularly effective 2007 Danish film I watched tonight called Just Another Love Story (Kærlighed på film). I'd never heard of it until Joe mentioned it earlier today and while I'm not sure if it's a great film, it's certainly a very good one. As I watched, I found myself thinking about Godard's famous adage “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun” and how that idea was melded with some very slick technical prowess to come up with a wonderfully engaging Neo-Noir that felt both contemporary and traditional. The story is wonderfully twisted with a solid mystery at its core, but what makes it particularly effective is the terrific cast and a shifting time-line that opens with a dying man lying on wet sidewalk with blood draining away from some mortal wound in the rain (thoughts of Kadas again). The “look” of the film ranges from creepy Lynchian to stylized Asian crime drama, but at its heart this is about as Noir as Neo gets and a terrific updating of oft-reworked but rarely-improved-upon genre.

A must see for Kris & Joe and recommended to anyone looking for a solid thriller with some style.

Sporgey

New This Week at the FBE! (June 30/09)

A whole bunch of cool stuff this week:

Cat People - Paul Schrader directs, Natassja Kinski stars in this oversexed revamp of the Jacques Tourneur classic.
Alice's House
Colors of a Creative Culture - Brazilian street art cornucopia!
Angel Face - Preminger. Mitchum. Simmons. Noir. Rent now.
Man Walking on Snow - Contemplative modern Japanese family drama.
Just Another Love Story - slick looking Danish modern noir.
Momma's Man
Preludes: Selected Works of Peter Mettler - collects Balifilm, Scissere and Eastern Avenue, three short(ish) works by the fascinating director/photographer.
The Strange One
They Call Me Bruce? - reissue of long-loved comedy/kung-fu classic
Love on the Dole
Kaidan - Ringu director Hideo Nakata mines classical Japanese ghost romances for inspiration. Ugetsu 2?
Monsterquest season 3 - exactly what the title implies - filmmakers seek out supposedly real monters. Looks cool.
Monster X Strikes Back: Attack the G8 Summit - if the title doesn't sell it for you, nothing will. Modern kaiju classic in the making gets topical.
IT Crowd season 2
Eastbound and Down - absolutely hilarious new HBO series about a fallen baseball player climbing his way back to the bigs.
Tokyo! - triptych from Bong Joon-Ho, Leos Carax and Michel Gondry about the titular city.
Doctor Who season 3 & 4 - after shipping these back and forth between the two stores virtually every week for the past 6 months, I got sick of carrying them across town on my bike, so caved and dropped the $90 per season that these command. Hope no one breaks a disc...and yes, we aso have seasons 1 & 2.
RiP: A Remix Manifesto - an intriguing look at music sampling and copyright law.

And on Blu....
Rockers

Ashes & Diamonds – Wadja (1958)

A new Criterion release of this classic that has been on my list of “to-watch” movies for a while. I’m not sure where I heard about it, but I know it is a noteworthy work, and Criterion describes it as “one of the most important Polish films of all time.”

The story is set on the last day of WWII, and Poland is in the middle of an identity crisis, with mixing influences of Nazi Germany, the West and communism. The main characters are actually anti-communist revolutionaries trying to assassinate a government figure. If you are a history buff, I’m sure this would be a great watch for you, but I found it pretty slow. Perhaps it’s our collective post-modern ADHD that makes films like this hard to get through. Perhaps it’s a boring movie. I can’t really tell.

A major difficulty for me was that I couldn’t connect with any of the characters. We aren’t really given much of where they came from, though they have all had pretty violent & desperate lives. We are also not given a “side” to join with, everyone seems to be grasping at either a dying political ideology or an immature one. This is, no doubt, intentional, but makes it hard to understand the characters’ motivations. Perhaps this is another vestige of a contemporary need to have Hollywood-style “good guys” and “bad guys” Perhaps it’s a bad movie.

The real feeling that I got from this was that it is an film adaptation of a novel (it is—by Andrzejewski) and that there is a huge story that is trying to be squeezed into 110 minutes. This is why we don’t get a clear picture of what is motivating the characters and who’s who. This is why the politics seem shallow and ambiguous. Maybe reading the novel first would be a better idea.

Clone Wars

Every month or so I receive an email from the fine, fine folks at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival, and invariably each one includes some kind of giveaway contest whereby I drop my name and email into a virtual hat from which 10 lucky winners are selected to receive any number of prizes, from DVDs to movie tickets. Anyways, I always enter (it takes 30 seconds), and have even won a few times in the distant past. However, I was informed Wednesday that I had won a pair of tix to this past Thursday evening's sneak preview of Moon (2009). Kris had shown me the trailer for this one about a month ago and and I've been anxiously awaiting its release ever since. I picked up my tix from TADFF director and founder Adam Lopez in the lobby of the Varsity, and, after staring into the fish tank for a few minutes, entered the cinema...

Moon, directed by Duncan Jones (yes, that Duncan Jones......!?!?), is an existential sci-fi/subtle comedy/thriller starring the universally loved Sam Rockwell in what is essentially a one-man show. Aside from HALesque (one of several obvious visual and aural nods to 2001) voice work from Kevin Spacey (has there ever been an actor more suited to monotone robot voice-over than he?), and a few piped in recorded e-videos, it's all Rockwell, all the time. And as it mostly all takes place within the confines of a space station on - you guessed it - the moon, I had the sense that this would be wonderful material for the stage. The moon itself operates as an abstract idea, and someone could certainly adapt the surroundings to the jungle, the arctic, or underwater. Or to take the idea even further - and I guess this is what the filmmaker was going for - it could even take place in the dense urban jungle, for Moon is essentially a film about loneliness, and a bit about what it means to be a human, errr, being.

After a somewhat shocking mid-movie reveal (which I thought was going to be the film's natural conclusion), there is a distinct shifting of gears and the film moves into unexpected territory. At first, I scoffed at what I thought was a clumsy storytelling device, but as the second half of the film unfolds, it really blossoms into something entirely different, a meditation on mortality and morality, and it began to make much more sense to me. Apologies for the vagueness, but to talk specifically about the plot would not only be incredibly confusing but also a disservice to your own viewing.

Cycling home after the film, I sort of pushed the celluloid experience into the back of my mind. But since then, I can't stop thinking about what I saw: a deceptively simple story presenting many more questions than it provided answers, always a good thing. Check it out.

New This Week at the FBE (June 23/09)

Wow, BIG week:

Iron Maiden: Flight 666 - Sam Dunn (with Scott McFadyen) follows up his previous two forays into documenting the rise of metal with an insightful look into what is arguably the world's best-known metal group. You might even see the director browsing in the FBW.
Wallander season 1 - Kenneth Branagh's take on the original Swedish detective series.
Murdoch Mysteries season 1 - science and crime-solving cross paths in this mystery show set in the late 19th c.
What's Up, Tiger Lily? - One of Woody's wackier ones gets a non-upgraded re-release.
Legend of the Bog - It's got dreamy Nora-Jane Noone, so automatically gets a pass in my book.
My Dinner With Andre - Finally back in print thanks to Criterion?!? Inconceivable!

And showing up on Blu-Ray:
The Seventh Seal - prequel to The Secret of Roan Inish gets a beautiful Blu-Ray package.

And, as usual, all the big new releases are here too.

New movies Graham is excited about:

Dead Snow
Last Ride
Survelliance
District 9
Moon
Moscow Belgium
Big Man Japan
Visioneers
Ballast

Clean, Shaven (1993) – Lodge Kerrigan (dir)

This was a random pick while I was shelving movies...looked interesting, so I took it home. It has actually taken me a while to crack the box on it though, it looked really heavy and I needed to build myself up to it. Anyway, it was a little heavy, but mostly pretty dull, unfortunately.

The film follows a schizophrenic man who is in search of his estranged daughter and murdering other little girls along the way. There is an additional sub-plot of an almost equally tortured detective hunting him down. A number of comments on IMDB say that the film is a realistic and “sympathetic” portrayal of schizophrenia, but I am not so sure. Schizophrenia, from my understanding, is a pretty terrifying and alienating illness. Though Clean, Shaven does capture these elements, the viewer still ends up feeling more scared of the character than scared for him. Not all schizophrenics, not even the majority of them, are kid killers. Though there is a glimmer of kindness behind the crazy shown through his devotion to his daughter, we’re still not sure if the devotion is one that stems from love and loss or from a desire to chop her up into little kid-bits.

Though there are some incredible and haunting scenic shots in the film, a lot of it had a very “student-film” vibe to it (or, even worse, a “Canadian film” vibe—though it was American). Really stilted acting from most of the supporting cast. There were also plenty of “thriller” genre tropes (creepy kids, abandoned warehouses, tortured detectives) and I don’t think there was a single scene free of “spooky” ambient soundtrack, which gets pretty fucking tiring after a while. On the plus side, both Peter Greene (as the schizo) and Jennifer Macdonald (as the daughter) are fantastic in their roles. The cinematography is also pretty spectacular. Anyway, worth a watch if Confessions of a Shopaholic is rented out or something.

My final few moments.....?

I leave everything to Donna, Nick & Gwynne.

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1962)

I finally got around to watching this fantastic short film after hearing about it for years and much urging from Sporge.

Filmed in France in 1962, the look of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (La riviere du hibou) is more akin to that of a D.W. Griffith effort. In fact, knowing nothing of the film beforehand, I was under the impression that it was the product of early American cinema. However, once the movie began, I began to notice some very strange camera techniques. The use of sound in bizarre ways completes the surreal feel of the film. Then there is the repeating theme, "Living Man", which punctuates the absurdly tragic outcome of the prisoner....wait, prisoner? Let me go back a step here...

The film is based on a story by American satirist, ex-Civil War soldier, and later, Pancho Villa's right hand man, Ambrose Bierce, in which a treasonous member of a Union regiment is set up to be hanged at the titular span. As the man falls, however, the rope breaks, and after a series of close brushes with death, he is on the road to freedom, and back into the arms of his sweetheart...or is he? To say more would be a disservice to the film's unique structure, visual tone and sound design. Truly a virtuoso work that draws as much from Griffith as it does from the French and Spanish surrealists.

Don't make the same mistake I did - watch it now - you can probably even find it online somewhere. If you can, see the original, although the Twilight Zone-edited, Rod Serling-narrated version will do just fine. You'll get more out of this film's 25 short but dreamlike minutes than you will from watching another rerun of Two and a Half Men.

"It rises!"

I'm pretty sure we need to get this, even if the only people that watch it are me and Kendall.