Battles without Honor and Humanity

To prepare for a new series that's currently in the planning stages (partly because I miss doing the "Best Pictures from the Outside In" series, which is on hiatus), I'm watching and writing about Japanese gangster/exploitation films. I started with The Yakuza Papers (1973-74), a six-film series about dishonor among thieves in postwar Japan. Read about the first film.

Away We Go to Austin with Todd P

Wrote a couple reviews.

Away We Go starts out as the worst film in the world. Then it gets better. A LOT better. Read the rest.

Todd P Goes to Austin was the best film we showed at the Chicago International Movies & Music Festival in March. Read about it.

Thank You, James Rocchi

You've simplified my life with this sentence from your review of Transformers: ROTFL, which I refuse to see:

"And no, I can't shut my brain off and have fun, anymore than I could rip out my tongue and enjoy a meal, because my brain is where I feel fun."

I couldn't have said it better myself. No one could have.

Drag Me to Hell: I love it.

I can't remember the last time I had so much fun at the movies.

Read about it.

Star Trek: I don't like it.

J.J. Abrams's Star Trek reboot would be passable as a sci-fi film if not for the title: this is supposed to be a Star Trek film, and this is a long, long way from anything that Gene Roddenberry imagined. Star Trek is supposed to ponder and consider; this film smirks and explodes. (It also shines bright lights into the camera, but more on that later.)

Read the rest.

Extra: He made old Star Trek look like new Star Trek!

Lymelife

It would be easy to dismiss Lymelife as yet another in an endless line of "evil suburbs" dramedies, with shades of American Beauty family crises, but it's notable that the suburbs don't come off as the bad guy here. They're not a seething marsh of unhappiness that sucks the life and joy out of otherwise good people. In fact, I'd say the best thing about the film is that you get the clear sense that, aside from the unfortunate Lyme disease scare, any and all of these problems could manifest had the film taken place in the precious Brooklyn that the Bartlett family fled for rural Long Island. Affairs, bullies, splintering marriages, budding sexual relationships, father-son complications—the film blames none of this on the suburbs. If Steven and Derick Martini, the cowriters and likely codirectors (only Derick took credit), have any particular gift or insight into the human condition, it's their clear knowledge that most real problems of human interaction are internal, not native to a particular place. The only problem is that this insight is the only really notable thing about the film.

Read the rest.

The Killer Inside Casey Affleck

"It's a good act, but it's easy to overdo."

Casey Affleck is starring in Michael Winterbottom's upcoming adaptation of Jim Thompson's 1952 novel The Killer Inside Me, and I'm more excited about a film adaptation of one of my favorite books than, perhaps, I have ever been. First, there's the casting of Affleck, who is perfect.

Lean and wiry; a mouth that looked all set to drawl. A typical Western-country peace officer, that was me. Maybe friendlier looking than the average. Maybe a little cleaner cut. But on the whole typical. That's what I was, and I couldn't change. Even if it was safe, I doubted that I could change. I'd pretended so long that I no longer had to.

What he's "pretending" is that he's a likable, easygoing lunk who bores the shit out of people with long conversations loaded with tired aphorisms ("I tell you the way I look at it, a man doesn't get any more out of life than he puts into it."), when underneath he's a brilliant, savage killer. At the beginning of the novel he'd managed to suppress "the sickness" for fourteen years, but his relationship with a prostitute (played here by Jessica Alba for some unfortunate reason) sets him off again.

Stanley Kubrick described this novel as "possibly the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered." The covers of thrillers always bear that kind of exaggeration, usually supplied with exclamation points by helpful book designers, but in this case the blurb doesn't quite cover it. I'd remove the "possibly," along with the "first-person," because this novel is quite simply the scariest book I've ever read. It's 244 pages inside the head of a frightening, believable lunatic. Stacy Keach, now king of the stage historical drama, played Lou Ford in a 1976 film that I haven't seen.

Although Thompson wrote the screenplay for Kubrick's amazing Paths of Glory, his relationship with the movies hasn't been good. Directors as varied as Stephen Frears, Roger Donaldson, James Foley, and Bernard Tavernier have tackled his novels, but none of them has grasped that peculiarly Thompsonian edgy craziness. The ones I've seen have either been bad (After Dark, My Sweet; the Getaway remake with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger) or seemed to miss Thompson's particular kind of insanity (The Grifters, which is otherwise a good film). And one of the most popular, Sam Peckinpah's 1972 take on The Getaway, manages a happy ending, eliding the surreal, horrible-ever-after that Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw's characters faced in the novel; the real getaway happened when McQueen balked and had Walter Hill rewrite Thompson's script. The Tavernier (Coup de torchon, based on Thompson's Pop. 1280) I haven't seen, and most look forward to. At least, until now.

The only real question is which Winterbottom will show up. The restless, probing, intelligent director of A Mighty Heart, who might concentrate on the beggar's banquet of personalities in Thompson's fictional Central City? The sober, cold, calculating director of The Claim, who might delve into the story of Lou Ford and his father and adopted brother, who knew of his sickness but chose to cover for him? Or the pretentious wanker behind 9 Songs, who will fuck things up? Here's hoping it's one of the first two.

Holy Crap I Wrote Something

A brief review, but still: something. Richard Pryor ... Here and Now.

Two somethings! My Sister Eileen (1942). I'm back!

One Last Goatie

The first-ever Goatie for Best Focus Pulling in a Feature Film goes to Leigh Gold for Last Chance Harvey.

That's right. Best Focus Pulling. The focus puller, often called First Assistant Camera, is the person who changes the focus on the camera within a shot, sometimes to keep the focus when the camera or actors are moving, and sometimes to shift the focus to another element in the frame. Most people have probably never thought of focus pulling before, but it's an essential and unheralded part of filmmaking.

Leigh's work in Last Chance Harvey is the second best thing about this underrated film, after Emma Thompson's reminder of what an amazing actress she is, and before Dustin Hoffman's reminder that he's a really good actor too. The bulk of the film is shot with an amazingly shallow depth of field; there's basically one point of focus, and everything between that point and the camera, and everything behind that point, is out of focus. Reaching back into my hazy memory of the single filmmaking class I took, I believe this involves using telephoto lenses, but I could be misremembering.

All I know is that the incredibly tight focus in this film is astounding, especially in the riverfront scenes late in the film where Hoffman's trying to convince Thompson that he's not a total asshole. Thompson's face is the center of the frame, the center of the film, and for a few seconds it feels like the center of the world—Leigh Gold's focus-pulling ensures that our attention is directed to the proper place. The focus is so tight that Thompson's gorgeous cheekbones are in focus, but her stray hairs, caught in the no-man's land between those cheeks and the camera, are out of focus. That's right—anything outside Emma's anguished face, including her hair, is an afterthought to Gold's singleminded attention.

Bravo, Leigh Gold, whoever you are. I admired your work in Casino Royale, and it tickles me that you got your start in Muppetland. (Even if it wasn't on the good Muppet films.)

BPFTOI 14: How Forrest Was My Gump

Mike: This episode of Best Pictures from the Outside In is a milestone in the admittedly brief (in entries, if not in time) history of this series. For the first time, gone is the middling crap we're often forced to discuss. Instead, fate has allowed us to pair two earth-shattering films, films that redefined the very art of cinema in their respective eras. From 1941 we have a movie that's topped dozens of lists of the greatest films ever made. Its spectacular cinematography spawned countless imitators, and its labyrinthine plot still has few equals. From 1994 we have what is arguably its modern equivalent, a film whose brilliant dialogue, fragmented plot structure, and myriad pop-cultural references spawned countless imitators, including some by this film's own director. Dear readers, it is my pleasure to present the Best Picture winners from 1941 and 1994, Citizen Kane and Pulp Fiction.

Nick: Hon, I hate to be the bearer of notorious mistakes, but I think you need to hit reload on your Oscar page and look a little closer.

And hang in there—one of the movies is perfectly fine! You'll see!

Nathaniel: Nick the killjoy. Next thing you'll be telling me that I should cancel my 50th anniversary celebration of Vertigo's Best Picture & Director win on April 6th this year! I've already ordered the cake shaped like the Mission San Juan Bautista's bell tower. That sweep for Gigi is pure fiction. A conspiracy hoax!

[sigh]

But as for the Academy-stamped winners of '41 and '94. Well, you lose some you lose some. This is not to say that I didn't find grace notes worth appreciating in How Green Was My Valley buried somewhere in its rubble. I'm guessing it was the weight of all that earnestness that caused the coal mine to collapse in on itself. There's only so much sober nostalgia a structure can take.

Anyway, I sincerely hope that BP '41 is the one that Nick deems "perfectly fine" and not BP '94 or I'm going to need to fly to Chicago for an intervention. I thought I hated Forrest Gump in 1994. I hadn't seen it since then but the past 15 years weren't kind to it. It's a pandering corny stinker from frame one with that damn feather and big score. I don't even know how to parcel out all my problems with it. I suspect I hate it as much as Forrest loves Jenny.

Nick: Except that Forrest may or may not know what love is, whereas I feel sure that you know what hate is. Also what cynicism is. And what tone-deafness is. And what....

Well, wait. Mike, make a sound that lets us know what you think of Gump, and then maybe we can figure out how quickly we can get this one out of the way. I'm proposing a quick "Top 5 Things I Hate Most About Forrest Gump" list from each of us. I'm curious how closely they'll overlap. Or, as Tom Hanks would say, "OH-vurr-LAYYY-upp!"

Nathaniel: OK, I'll bite on that box of chocolates. (Don't read until you've composed your own.) Here are the five things I hate most about Forrest Gump:

05 That twee feather. Barf.
04 "Run Forrest Run" ... I can only take so much hokum in movies.
03 The narration / bus stop framing device. Who in their right mind would sit on that bench for even a minute listening to him drone one. And the film lasts for 142!
02 The way it keeps reminding us that being like Forrest (apolitical, passive, simple) is preferable to being like Jenny (political, searching, complicated).

01 That cute joke of his mic going out when he talks about Vietnam: "...and that's all I have to say about that." Evading difficult reflections on what wars mean and how we end up in them and playing it for comedy instead? Reprehensible I'd say. But this movie would accuse me of overthinking it. Forrest Gump to its audience: DON'T THINK!!! Just do as your momma and country tells you and everything will be fine.

Mike: Here's my top (bottom?) five things I hate about Forrest Gump. When you read them, imagine my voice becoming more strident and angry as we get toward the nadir.

5. How many syllables Tom Hanks stray-ett-chez words out to. "Jenny" clocked in at five, I think, and "Dan" at least three. He won for this? He sounded like he was voicing Saturday morning cartoons on obscure cable channels.

4. How it has some pretty astounding special effects that still hold up after 15 years (can't say that about most big-budget action movies), but it used most of them in essentially meaningless gimmicks. Only Lieutenant Day-ee-un's missing legs were worth the effort.

3. How apolitical it got once the 1980s and the morally and politically corrupt Reagan era rolled around—where was Gump during Iran Contra, the hostage crisis, the savings and loan scandal, the erosion of the social safety net? Oh, right: he was inventing stupid catch phrases and silly iconic images.

2. How fucking conservative it is about the Vietnam era. The only antiwar people we see are loudmouthed blowhards, drug addicts, and abusive boyfriends.

1. The fact that it won all the awards that Pulp Fiction deserved. I know, I know—I should hate it for all its intrinsic flaws, not things extrinsic to it, but it will always go down on my list as the biggest "We are completely out of touch" sign in the Academy's history.

I need to calm down. Does anyone have a chocolate?

Nick: Okay, I've been a good little soldier and skipped over the content of the lists. But I do see that you asked for a chocolate, Mike. You can have as many as you want, and thank God you didn't ask for any shrimp, because:

1. The blatant racism: Mykelti Williamson may well be doing his best to make the role work as written (!) and allow his performance to jell with the crazy thing Tom Hanks is doing, but... REALLY? Surely among the Top 10 most indefensible roles of the decade.

2. The running. WHAT. THE. F----?!!!

3. The (pop) music: constant, decontextualized, and as trite as the silliest "compilation" CD in the $1.99 bin at Target. A low-water mark in the grand sweepstakes of What Hath The Big Chill Wrought? And the orchestral score is almost as bad.

4. The blatant misogyny: Sally Field sleeping her way to Forrest's enrollment in school. The unbelievably crass way that the script milks an "isn't he dim?" punchline out of Forrest's misunderstanding of Jenny's childhood abuse. Everything involving Jenny's childhood. Nearly everything involving Jenny. Jesus.

5. The evaporation of any content, complexity, sensitivity, or stakes from the way we think about history.

Those are mostly unranked, except for the last one. Now we play Scattergories and find out if we repeated each other! Meanwhile, I'll throw out there that amidst everything, I did feel Tom Hanks took some risks with the character (admirable in a sense, even when some of them don't pay off), and he did manage to play dumbfounded adoration and (more surprisingly) dumbfounded grief pretty strongly, especially within the limited emotional borders of this piece. And some of the visual effects hold up to the "astonishing" label that the effects in Benjamin Button, for me, didn't, despite nakedly striving for the same rep. But that's .... wait for it .... all I have to say about that.

Mike: So we're done with Gump? Right? Because I don't want to talk about it anymore.

Nathaniel: Yes we're done talking about Gump. I suppose we'll have to wait for the comments to hear a suitable defense for its numerous sins against the cinema—I'm noticing it's still sittting pretty in various top 100 lists.

Mike: I want to talk about John Ford and what I think Nick called the "John Fordiest of John Ford's films." HGWMV doesn't necessarily deserve its reputation as the film that stole Citizen Kane's crown, because it's a damn good film, nearly a masterpiece, and yes, the most succinct statement of John Ford's particular ethos—respect for mom, God, community, and fairness are the cardinal virtues, and hypocrisy is hated above all things. It carries with it that earnestness that Nathaniel disliked, so I can see how it would be hard for some people to love it, but love it I did. It's not his greatest film (sorry, Kyle), but it's up there. It's basically the second best of his small-town Americana films (after Judge Priest)—take away those Welsh accents, and you're in Appalachia or some other American mining area. And parting from his usual Southern setting frees him from the regrettable (some would say jaw-droppingly racist) stereotypes his small-town films embrace.

He's such a brilliant visual filmmaker—all props to Gregg Toland's pioneering deep-focus work in Kane, but Arthur Miller's work here is the pinnacle of classic studio cinematography: the heartbreaking shot where Bronwyn gives birth soon after Ivor's death, and it looks like Ivor's ghost is watching over the scene (I realize it's another brother's shadow, but the effect is the same); the elevator rising out of the ruined mine, bearing Mr. Morgan's body and composed like something out of a Renaissance painting; the women turned suddenly into nuns bearing witness at the wreckage; that ineffably sad first/last kiss between Maureen O'Hara and Walter Pidgeon. The performances are all top-notch, especially Donald Crisp's distillation of fatherhood in all its merits and demerits, but also Sara Allgood, who gives Jane Darwell a run for her money as the best Ford female supporting performance (and her speech to the striking miners is even better than Ma Joad's "We'll go on forever" speech).

I'm blathering. Someone else say something.

Nathaniel: HGWMV. I did not dislike it. I suspect it comes down to a taste issue. I'm not necessarily proud of this but I believe that I have too much modern snark in me for something this sober. The film seems frozen in time by very design. Did it already feel old-fashioned in 1941? Especially standing next to Citizen Kane? I love melodrama and actively enjoy heightened retro homage but when there's only reverence for the past with no distancing artifice, I have trouble. Never been one of those "everything was so much better in the past!" types.

Loved the cinematography and composition choices. The repeated longshot of that curved steep road to the coal mine, the only work in town, and how richly that shot was mined (ha ha) for storytelling throughout. It was like the road was a slightly twisted spinal cord for the achey body of the village or maybe its primary artery or central nervous system. The cumulative affect got to me. And Ford's love of community rang out loudly and beautifully. I was a complete mess when the convalescing mamma (Sara Allgood) emerged from her house to that throng of respectful apologetic townsfolk.

But even good things (love of community) have a dark side. I was completely turned off by the Roddy McDowell arc. There's a bit of lip service paid to "he should stay in school" once he's decided to respect his family by remaining in poverty and dead end jobs with them. But mostly I think the storytelling underlines this is a noble decision. It rang true sociologically speaking (you don't have to look far to find examples of public wariness regarding higher education and certainly some less advantaged communities wear their lack of education/money like a badge of honor) but it really bothered me. Give the kid a chance. I kept wanting to see a more progressive movie wherein we follow the two brothers who abandoned the sinking ship for America.

Mike: I didn't need any more than Donald Crisp's "I'm goin' to git drunk!" reaction to Roddy's decision to underline his heartbreak. And this community did have a dark side. The film is framed as a "wow, things were so much better back then" homage, but so many of those reminiscences are of heartbreak and cruelty. Ford spends a lot of time on how quickly the community is willing to turn on the less fortunate—the woman who gets pregnant and is excommunicated, the scandal when O'Hara comes home without her husband and the resulting rumors about Pidgeon, and so on. Ford loves this time and place, but his eyes are wide open about it.

Nick: My favorite thing about How Green Was My Valley is the soot that just seems to be hanging everywhere in the air, and the way that Miller and Ford evoke this look not to make a simply didactic point about how miserable life is in a coal town but to establish the same point you just made, Mike: the overlapping beauty and sadness of these memories, and the thin line between nostalgia and regret. I agree that it's a gorgeously and thoughtfully photographed movie—so much detail and texture, and so many gradations of light and dark. You really feel the cycles of the day and the season, sometimes within a single shot.

That said, I think the scenes that privilege McDowall betray a hokiness that the film largely avoids (or at least complicates) when it dramatizes the dynamics among the adults, or between the adults and their environment. At the expense of knocking a kid, McDowall is part of the problem for me: he's just so gormlessly, sentimentally earnest. His performance is the one place where I wish the original director, William Wyler, had stuck around to shape the work, though Wyler's the one who picked the kid, so who knows. There are squishy spots elsewhere in the dramaturgy, like Allgood's harangue against the miners, that seem like they're from a different, frankly a pushier movie than the gracefully devastating sequence at the mine-shaft elevator. Again, par for the course with early-40s Ford, at least in my experience.

Speaking of "who knows," though: can I air a bit of confusion? IMDb says that How Green debuted in New York in December of '41 and in LA in January '42. By Academy rules, as witness the eligibility ruling on Casablanca two years later, shouldn't this have made it a '42 film? Am I still grasping at straws to give Kane, Welles, and Toland the Oscars we all wish they had?

Nathaniel: Ack. Don't go there. Then How Green would've taken Casablanca's Oscar. Because it's squishier just as you say. Either year it's trouble! Not that it's not a good film but damn that Oscar win can deflate your reputation quickly if you beat something far superior. See als—NEVER MIND. I was going to name a few years but there are too many to choose from.

Nick: Just to clarify, a How Green/Casablanca square-off wouldn't be possible; Casablanca got moved to '43 for the same reasons it seems to me that How Green should've been moved to '42 yet somehow wasn't. But you're right, whatever happens, even if you try to gerrymander things in retrospect, something always falls casualty. The Ford movie would have just joined the ranks of those other '42 movies that trounced, say, The Magnificent Ambersons. But we'll get to that next time. And anyway, you were saying...

Nathaniel: To twist Mike's words, I love this part (anything with Allgood) or that (anything with the unconsummated romance) but my eyes are wide open about the whole: the corn of the McDowall story, the uneven acting, those uncomfortably dim trips to the sister in law's house or the distracting way that the Morgans are supposed to be poverty stricken but they keep inviting the entire town into their house and they have enough food and liquour for all. This conversation has helped me respect the film but not love it. I didn't feel at all tied to the town, I was ready to pack up my knapsack, take my share of the wages, and be off.

Mike: And that's such a heavy knapsack that Nick and I will help you carry it into 1942, when Orson Welles suffered another defeat at the hands of tradition with Mrs. Miniver's victory over The Magnificent Ambersons, and 1993, when a handful of "greatest films ever made" (at least according to me and Nick) duked it out for supremacy. But before we go, dear readers, do you have anything to add? We could rent one of those coal carts if the load gets too heavy.

Previous BPFTOI episodes

Keywords: Best Pictures, BPFTOI