August 28, 2008

Mutiny in the Arena: Covered in Man-Sweat

MIKE, aka goatdog: Episode 8 of Best Pictures from the Outside In brings us two big hunks of manly, epic action. There was so much testosterone flying through the air that I almost felt compelled to grunt and scratch myself. Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) is a solid action-drama featuring two titanic performances from Charles Laughton as the despicable tyrant Captain Bligh and Clark Gable as the noble Mr. Christian; they both received Oscar nominations along with Franchot Tone's composite Roger Byam. It has the kind of epic scope, larger-than-life performances, and special effects that gets Oscar salivating.

And then there's Gladiator (2000), which had me scratching my head. It has several of the same ingredients—representatives of pure good and pure evil (Russell Crowe's Maximus and Joaquin Phoenix's Commodus, respectively), an epic scope (from the wilds of Germany to the deserts of North Africa to the streets of Rome), and special effects. But to quote a friend, it's like they threw eggs and milk and flour onto a table and called it cake. Aside from Crowe's Oscar-winning performance, nobody really impressed me, Phoenix least of all. The much-lauded battle scenes were unwatchably shot and edited (fast! slow! fast! jittery! slow!), the Oscar-winning visual effects looked like the crowd scenes in a Sega Genesis game, and the screenplay distilled a lot of potentially interesting issues down into unimaginative talking points.

So we have two! big! films! that feature pitched battles between utter good and utter evil—or does the sequence where Bligh guides his loyal crewmembers across 3500 miles of ocean in a teacup provide Laughton with a bit of three-dimensionality that Phoenix's Commodus lacks? How does Mutiny's shot-on-location ethos, supplanted by some judicious use of rear-projection, stack up against Gladiator's cartoon Colloseum? And, most importantly, did you grunt and/or scratch yourself during either of these films? Be honest: you're among friends.

NICK: Hold on—I have to finish watching The Game and polish off some more Michelob and bring my voice down a few scales before I'm ready to talk about this.

At which point, I'll be agreeing with virtually everything you just said. Though I will also add that the visual and narrative economy of Mutiny on the Bounty, keeping over a dozen recognizable characters in play and following three major protagonists without the pace flagging or the story losing its balance, shows that Frank Lloyd was a lot more proficient at captaining this ship than he was the S.S. Cavalcade two installments ago.

I may also let on that Franchot Tone's might be my favorite of three very good lead performances in Mutiny (all of them Oscar-nominated) and that I think Crowe is phenomenally good in the chintzy, continually disappointing Gladiator. Beyond holding the film together against heavy odds, he actually sold Maximus to me as a character instead of a plaster-cast of generic clichés. Though his remarkable, charismatic earnestness only makes the rest of Gladiator look more and more like a moderately diverting coloring book about Roman Times.

But like I said, I won't be prepped to delve into any of this before I've finished updating my Fantasy Football roster and eating the rest of my Manwich.

NATHANIEL: Nobody told me there was a coloring book!? I suddenly like Gladiator so much better. Even if it the crayons are only in blue (mood lighting), sepia (sand... and oldey times!), and red (real men do bleed).

I kid. You know what's weird? I actually liked Gladiator much better this time than I did in 2000 when I was horrified that it beat up on Crouching Brockovich and Hidden Wuxia. At the very least I'd forgotten that Crowe is really strong in it (though that Oscar is still a stretch) and that Ridley Scott always can be counted on for at least a few sharp or memorable visuals. I loved that plasterhead of Caesar behind Commodus (boo hiss—to both character and performance sadly) and that fakey CGI collisseum is easier for me to swallow in a way since there's that great shot of the same building preceding the f/x games where suddenly Commodus is in frame, placing little dollies... excuse me figurines into the center. To quote Monty Python's Holy Grail... "It's only a model"

The same could be said of Connie Nielsen. She's really only there for demographic quadrant reasons. She's not organic to the material at all. I generally appreciate backstory intrigues that aren't fully shared with the audience but her previous relationship to Maximus is so vaguely drawn that I just didn't care.

The romances in Mutiny on the Bounty are easier to buy, partly becaue they're not meant to be taken as seriously. They're romps in the grass, summer flings... they just happen to come with marriage and babies due to unpredictable forces of nature (i.e. Bligh vs. Christian)

But again... it's all about the men. Even the love stories. Gladiator's love triangle romance is totally between Maximus and Marcus Aureulius (oh Daddy!) with Commodus being the (wo)man scorned. and Mutiny's is totally all about Christian & Byam with Laughton not invited to the nuptials. Bless Frank Lloyd for even giving Gable & Tone a post-coital shot lying pleasantly in the grass—admittedly their women are just out of frame but still... they're brothers in arms and nearly in each others.

MIKE: I'm glad you brought up Connie Nielsen, Nathaniel. I'm still somewhat confused by the film's treatment of her. We get a solid hour of muttering and insinuation about how she's a super-schemer, completely untrustworthy and the most dangerous dame in town, but it seems all she does is frown and cry. Her big speech at the end seems both out of nowhere and completely redundant.

In fact, that whole scene... all right, I know movies aren't history lessons, and if you expect good history from Hollywood you deserve what you get (which is usually a pie in the face), but I was still surprised that Scott and company hijacked history so much in the service of their vaguely pro-democracy and ant-tyrant message. The historian in me is much happier with Lloyd's seafaring epic, which hews pretty closely to history, at least history as modified by literature—aside from importing Nordhoff and Hall's fictional creation Byam and upping Bligh's air of supernatural evil by having him recapture Byam, they provide a pretty solid little history lesson. Oscar loves a historical epic, and sometimes he loves facts, but, well, does any of this matter to you guys?

NICK: Let's say that it bothers me when the history doesn't even feel true. An emperor getting into the ring to fight a prisoner, just to prove a point? And in a disgusting eggnog-colored outfit, to boot, that makes him look like a pupating insect? Not just historically insane (from the very little I would even know), but afoul of every reason of absolute power for which Commodus wants to be emperor. He'll kill his own father but won't "make a martyr" of Maximus?

MIKE: The weird thing is that Commodus DID get in the ring, decked out as Hercules, which maybe explains the buggy costume—one of Hercules's less famous adventures, of course. But when he fought, it was only for show, against people who would submit to him. But the only "point" he was proving was that he was colossally egotistical.

NICK: What really bothers me about the social context in Gladiator, though, is its incessant chatting about "the mob" without getting close to it, ever, and the extreme condescension it voices about pop crowds (bloodthirsty, mindless) while being so hell-bent on flattering the film's own audience that "the mob" never makes a wrong move. As much as we hear that they are cosmically depraved, etc., they instinctually hate Commodus, who is furnishing them with all this spectacle that they love (hate?), and they cheer for Maximus even when he berates them. Filmmakers: MAKE UP YOUR MIND. Take a risk and smack your audience for our own bloodthirstiness ("Are we not entertained" by those grisly sequences in the ring?) or shut up with your vague moral judgments that you're unwilling to dramatize.

About Connie Nielsen: if you scoot really close to her, does that tattoo between her eyebrows read "we tried so hard to get Monica Bellucci"?

NATHANIEL: While we're scooting close to the screen, did I actually catch side boob and nipplage on the Tahitian honeys in Mutiny on the Bounty? I hate to be so juvenile but I dug all the explicitly implied (?) sex of Mutiny on the Bounty. Are we still Pre-Code Hollywood or did Frank Lloyd get away with it because he's lensing the "natives" ... and that doesn't count as real nudity. At least it doesn't in conservative American homes of the 1970s with subscriptions to National Geographic.

Oops... We left Rome & Tahiti for Michigan and my childhood! My apologies. Back to the topics at hand: How strange is it that we've had two Clark Gables up against two Russell Crowes, two huge alpha males in the Hollywood firmanent. Preferences? Thoughts?

NICK: Mutiny could have started production before the passing of the code, but it certainly opened later. The National Geographic factor is the clincher here: you can see the same stuff in Hawaii (1966), right before the parameters for screen nudity technically got widened. You know, for white people.

Speaking of white people: ever notice how weird Ridley Scott is around anyone BUT white people? He sold a great Aryan villain in Blade Runner, but he sure bungles Djimon Hounsou's "Juba" here, and Black Hawk Down is just around the corner...

And speaking of nudity: Russell Crowe. (What do you mean, he didn't do any?) What I love about the Gladiator/Beautiful Mind pair is that it shows how profoundly Crowe can shift gears: he's as compressed and direct here as he is fussy and "technical" as Nash. It's exactly this quality of simplicity that saves the movie for me, since, as we've already mentioned, it's always trying so frenetically to throw so much at the screen. Crowe is grounded and substantial, and his subtle shifts in expression (smoldering at injustice, adrenalized in the ring, visibly reminded of his grief, stunned and angered by the audience) suggest eddies of deep content in Gladiator that just aren't there. He's like a sexy, muscular Spencer Tracy, when the Spencer Tracy "let's play it low-key" thing actually works.

Gable, for me, repeats a neat trick in the Capra and Lloyd movies, starting out affable and getting testier and testier. I admit that I admired the performance more this time than the first time I saw it (at Goatdog's theater!), because it keeps Fletcher from being altogether admirable. Meanwhile, Laughton seizes some moments to make Bligh's desperation to be liked and his miserable self-pity quite naked. Tone has to be a bright, fresh-faced blank slate throughout and register every little wrinkle of experience that Christian and Bligh etch onto his face and his spirit throughout, so that he'll have some moral credibility at the end. I think he's quite marvelous at this, and I love the whole movie's resistance to superficial personalities.

ME: I agree that Scott does get a little weird around non-white people, although for the most part American Gangster didn't strike me that way. Maybe it's up to the actors to make their scenes work: for example, Ghassan Massoud, as Saladin in Kingdom of Heaven, stands out as one of the film's most interesting characters despite its weirdness about the Muslims.

I like Crowe better overall here than I did in A Beautiful Mind, but he doesn't achieve the heights of that film's last third, when his twitches coalesced into a fully realized personality. But the winner for me is still Gable in It Happened One Night (if only because I can't pick Claudette Colbert in that movie, since you asked about the men). What he does feels like more than just a "neat trick," although I agree that it's basically the same thing here and in IHON. He hints at tiny cracks in that affability in both films, but when they appear in IHON there's a surprising underlying viciousness that I didn't see as much here. If I had to pick one of the 1935 nominees, it would have been Laughton, mostly for what he does in that rowboat sequence when we realize what a capable captain he can be when he has something specific to concentrate on. And you have me almost convinced about Tone, who I've always thought of as a distant third in a race between Laughton and Gable, perhaps because as the composite everyman fly on the wall type guy, he has to carry too much of the burden of explaining things to the audience.

NATHANIEL: Maybe Ridley Scott should make a B&W picture so that extreme variance of skin tones don't distract him? I still shudder thinking about a few moments from Black Hawk Dawn. Yikes. Or perhaps he's just stronger if there's a limited palette. I mean you have to love all the pasty whiteness of the Hauer / Hannah scenes in Blade Runner and the twin sunburnt reds of Sarandon and Davis in Thelma & Louise.

I was actually so surprised at the late scenes when Bligh turns out to be a resourceful leader. Gladiator (and many other movies for that matter) would never muddy the waters to that degree. Could you imagine if Commodus had some late breaking scene where he reveals some hidden kindness or stealth wisdom? Even his affection for his nephew is viewed as sickly. He starts out nasty and he just gets keeps getting nastier. It's less a character arc than a freefall.

But back to Mutiny. I haven't seen the Marlon Brando version of this movie but I remember the 1984 Mel Gibson production as being far less balanced. You were basically on Team Mel the whole time. I was never really on Team Laughton but I wasn't always entirely with Team Christian and suddenly I was thinking Team Tone seemed pretty smart. I thank the movie for questioning my allegiances since that's, you know, what the story is about.

NICK: Plus, isn't it kind of amazing that there's hardly a scene in Mutiny that could be cut without any loss to the film? Even with a grandstander like Laughton, a cock-of-the-walk like Gable, and a new star in Tone that the studio really wanted to sell, I don't get any sense of the actors pulling focus or of the film losing sight of its narrative, its themes, or its ensemble disposition. Maybe the falling-in-love interlude between Gable and the island woman is a bit smooshy, but that's all I can think of.

Whereas, I'm convinced that you could start Gladiator with the scene where Commodus kills his father, more than half an hour in, and the movie wouldn't miss a thing. In theory, we'd lose our sense of Maximus' battlefield prowess, but as Mike indicated earlier, that whole sequence is so terribly shot and edited that we don't understand that prowess anyway.

I don't want to sound like I'm overpraising Mutiny—it's a terrific achievement in workmanlike craftsmanship, but it doesn't really hit any Masterpiece notes. And I don't mean to short-sell how fun Gladiator can be when Scott captures the enervated energy or the life-or-death stakes inside that ring. I admit that I like the score a lot, too. But it still stands that there's almost nothing in Mutiny that I want to fix and almost nothing in Gladiator that I don't want to trim, tighten, deepen, or improve.

MIKE: Well, I think I speak for the rest of us when I say, "What he said."

What say you, readers? Gladiator is #125 on the IMDB's top 250 films; did we miss the boat on that one? Does Mutiny on the Bounty warm the cockles of your landlubbers' hearts?

Stats: Mutiny on the Bounty was nominated for eight Oscars (three lead actors, director, editing, screenplay, score) and won only Best Picture. Gladiator was nominated for twelve Oscars (supporting actor, art direction, director, cinematography, editing, score, original screenplay) and won five (picture, actor, costume design, visual effects, sound).

Previously: #7: It Happened One Night and A Beautiful Mind, #6: Cavalcade and Chicago, #5: Grand Hotel and LOTR: ROTK, #4: Cimarron and Million Dollar Baby, #3: All Quiet on the Western Front and Crash, #2: The Broadway Melody and The Departed, #1: Wings and No Country for Old Men

Posted by mike | Comments (20)

August 22, 2008

The Movies About Movies Blog-a-Thon

Welcome to the Movies About Movies Blog-a-Thon HQ. Entries are already pouring in, and I'm looking forward to a torrent of great posts on movies about the movie industry's favorite subject—itself.

It's not quite the end yet, but I wanted to thank you all for helping make this THE GREATEST AND MOST SUCCESSFUL BLOG-A-THON EVER held here at goatdogblog. I'm really shocked (happily so) at how many of you participated, and I can't wait until the dust clears and I get a chance to read all of your entries.

The Participants (in approximate order of appearance):

Posted by mike | Comments (24)

Wear the White Dress Without the Brassiere

Hollywood attacks itself like a rabid dog gnawing on its own leg in Bombshell, a surprisingly vicious indictment of everything it stands for. It seems surprising for something so mean-spirited to have come so early in the Dream Factory's saga of self-loathing, and it's even more surprising because it seems so heartfelt. Bombshell passes itself off as a lightly satirical romantic comedy, but I don't think it believes this nonsense for a second, because the romance is all disguised manipulation, and the comedy is almost all bitter. Of course by displacing much of the evil onto a single character, string-pulling and fast-talking publicity man E.J. "Space" Hanlon (Lee Tracy), it protects the real bastards (studio heads, producers, etc.) from undue attention. But despite this shield of plausible deniability, it still serves up a pretty strong indictment of the virtual indentured servitude of contract players: famous actress Lola Burns (Jean Harlow) has no control over what parts she plays, no control over what the studio machinery decides is going to be written about her in the papers, literally no control over her own reality, a fact that's revealed to her when she decides to ditch it all and escape into the real world.

There's an incredible amount of overlap between reality and fiction. Harlow seems to be playing herself: her Lola is an actress typecast in raunchy comedies, known for her censorship-baiting costumes ("wear the white dress without the brassiere" is her wardrobe instruction one morning), who longs to be recognized for her acting chops instead of her bustline. They even call her "the If Girl," a nickname rich with the kind of delicious questions her male (and female) viewers must have asked every time she strode onscreen. Beyond that, though, this Lola happens to have recently costarred with Clark Gable in Red Dust, and her primary assignment at the beginning of this film is to do retakes of the infamous rain barrel bathing scene. Remove the "Lola" part, and it's like a documentary. There are other constant references to the real Hollywood, too: Lola mentions Gable's performance in Susan Lenox with Greta Garbo and later appreciates some romantic wooing by comparing it favorably to scenes in Norma Shearer and Helen Hayes films, and an assistant director waxes fondly about Tahiti by discussing his assignment on White Shadows in the South Seas. Throw in the rumor that the film was partly based on Harlow's own experiences in Hollywood, right down to her greedy father (played by Frank Morgan here), and tell me where exactly the line between reality and fiction falls. The film's title even ended up as the title of one of her biographies.

I'm guessing it's somewhere around the film's portrayal of Lola Burns, because I think (or would like to believe) Jean Harlow was probably a lot smarter and less shallow than her character, at whom a fair amount of the film's venom is directed. Sure, she's the victim of an unjust system that makes it quite impossible for her to live a normal life, but honestly, she doesn't seem quite capable of normalcy. From her designer sheepdogs to her designer European-Count boyfriend to the awful "mid-Atlantic" accent she adopts when she can't help being pretentious to her gold-plated phone (yes, the film is black and white, but the phone is so obvious that it had to have been intentional), Lola embodies the Hollywood artificiality she hates.

And it's here, when Harlow has to communicate this contradiction—basically, she wants to escape from something that she can't separate herself from—that I finally got her as an actress, as a sex symbol, and as a unique combination of the two. I have to admit that I've never really liked her or understood her appeal. She stinks up the room in The Public Enemy (honestly, what the hell is she doing in that movie?), and she's shrill and mostly unfunny in Platinum Blonde and Libeled Lady. I finally understood her sexiness in Red Dust, but Mary Astor blew her off the screen in that film, and the only time she'd convinced me as an actress was her delivery of a single line in China Seas. But I finally get her appeal. She's consistently funny: her near-constant high-pitched temper tantrums are a hoot instead of being grating, and her deluded attempts to behave like a normal human being are simply side-splitting. She's best in a couple of silent moments that had me laughing out loud. First, after she decides what she really needs to do is adopt a baby, the music swells on the soundtrack and she gazes reverently upward—at a velvet painting of a mare and foal!—selfishly unable to understand how horrible the empty chaos she inhabits would be for a child. And second, after a last-act romancing by the suave and wealthy Franchot Tone, she retires to her room for romantic daydreams, a trick she learned from Hollywood. She turns on the radio for the soft music that's supposed to be playing, and it doesn't register on her face for a moment that what comes out is ear-splitting jazz. It's a great comedic performance that provides a new delight in almost every scene. And she doesn't skimp on the drama, either: late in the film, after Hanlon's hijinks have driven her nearly insane, she's quite moving in her desire to get a little taste of reality, even if it means jettisoning her career.

If it were all Harlow, this would have been a really good movie, but it's also stocked with a number of supporting players, familiar faces and strangers, who nail every line in the excellent screenplay by Jules Furthman and John Lee Mahin. Una Merkel, always a delight as the squeaky-voiced, wise-cracking second female lead in countless films, plays Lola's scheming assistant Mac, who has a series of whip-smart exchanges with Louise Beavers, whose standard role as the maid is expanded here into someone who gets some of the film's best lines: "Don't scald me with your steam, woman—I knows where the bodies are buried!" And there must be so many bodies—perhaps soon to include Lola herself, the film implies with its odd ending, which states uncategorically that Lola's little bit of defiance did nothing except to convince her that defiance was utterly futile under the studio system. Unless your name is Bette Davis or Olivia de Havilland, I suppose.

Posted by mike | Comments (6)

August 21, 2008

CIMMfest

The brand spanking new Chicago International Movies and Music Festival (CIMMfest) is occurring next March 5-8 at the Chicago Cultural Center and other venues around town. It's the brainchild of Ilko Davidov, one of the owners of the film studio where I work, and Josh Chicoine of the Chicago band The M's. I'm the Programming Director. During the day and evening there will be film screenings, panel discussions, and workshops; at night there will be a series of concerts at clubs around the city. The City of Chicago is sponsoring it, and we're already taking submissions through Withoutabox.

You're saying, "Another film festival?" But this one is different, even aside from the concert series. The movies are all about music: how it's made, who makes it, what drives them to make it, how it shapes people's lives. They could be Don't Look Back-style documentaries, Almost Famous-style narratives, Stop Making Sense-style concert films, or anything that is about music, or uses music in an interesting way. Music videos, experimental shorts, musicals, mockumentaries, you name it—if it has a strong tie to music, we want to see it.

Posted by mike | Comments (1)

August 17, 2008

Silent Sunday: The Cat and the Canary (1927)

German director Paul Leni made only four films in Hollywood before he died of blood poisoning in 1929 at the age of 45: the lost Charlie Chan film The Chinese Parrot; The Man Who Laughs and The Last Warning, both of which I really want to see; and this, one of the first "old dark house" mystery-thriller-comedies, which was based on a popular 1922 play and brought to the screen as an amazingly un-stagy, expressionistic, fast-moving whodunit that inspired, among other things, Scooby Doo.

It's not much of a horror film, being that it's not scary, but it is a beautiful work of art that demonstrates much of what made the late silents so great. Leni's camera is fluid and poetic, his shot setups are usually excellent, and the film makes great use of tinting, and even the usually momentum-killing intertitles are put to good use. It's all in the service of a pretty silly story, but the visual style is enough to make the film well worth watching.

Read the full review.

Posted by mike | Comments (0)

August 13, 2008

It Happened One Paranoid Delusion

In this, the seventh episode of Best Pictures from the Outside In, Nathaniel, Nick, and I finally have some serious disagreements: is It Happened One Night absolutely perfect, or only nearly so? Can one really get enough of Claudette Colbert in this movie, or is her screen time sufficient? Are there enough pitch-perfect scenes, or should there have been one more? Readers, it's a surprise we didn't resort to physical violence to resolve these issues.

And then there's the whole issue of A Beautiful Mind, which also nearly resulted in tears: is it really bad, or just relentlessly average and anonymous? Do we care not a whit about the main characters' relationships, or is there a glimmer of something worth paying attention to? Is Ron Howard a boring, characterless director, or is he in fact devoid of a heart?

Head on over to Nathaniel's Film Experience Blog to discover just how close we were to tearing each other's hair out in this contentious discussion.

*    *    *

One of the problems with this series is that in the interest of not driving readers away with our blathering, we try to keep the entries somewhat short. This is a problem because I could go on all night about how wonderful It Happened One Night is, and how it gets better every time I see it. It's obviously the best screwball comedy ever made, and according to my own stupid, outdated Top 100 list, it's also the 13th best film ever made. That list needs lots of fixing, but this film's place is secure.

But calling it a screwball comedy seems to sell it short, because there's so much more to it than the madcap antics of its followers. It leaves those films (mostly) in the dust on the comedy side of things, but it also has more of a heart and more of a brain than most of them, a fact that's still surprising even after seeing it the third or fourth time. The scenes between Colbert and Walter Connolly (as her father) have become my favorites because they depict one of the most fully developed and complicated parent/adult child relationships I can remember seeing in a comedy. It's a shame the Best Supporting Actor category was still a couple years away, because Connolly would have been a lock.

Posted by mike | Comments (3)

August 10, 2008

Silent Sunday: Sunnyside (1919)

Charlie Chaplin's 1919 short Sunnyside is a highly weird little film, full of typical Little Tramp-tics and sight gags, but with a couple of digressions into fantasy and a completely inscrutable ending. One doesn't expect to leave a Chaplin film wondering if the Tramp kicked the bucket in the end (unless it involves a real bucket, of course), but here we are nonetheless.

The bulk of the film is what we expect from two- or three-reel Chaplin. He plays a farmhand who spends most of his time getting kicked in the butt by his employer; he also runs the desk at his boss's hotel, cooks all the food, and cares for the livestock. The best gags involve his attempts to save time by having the chicken lay her eggs in the frying pan and milking the cow directly into a coffee cup. He's in love with the neighbor's daughter (Edna Purviance)—a plot development so inevitable that it's announced by a title that reads "And now, the 'romance'." Two things complicate his wooing. First, after a run-in with a renegade bull, he's knocked unconscious, an interlude in which his spirit cavorts in a field with a troupe of faerie ballerinas. Soon after he wakes, a rich guy from the city arrives, gets into a car accident, then starts macking on Edna, who seems taken with the guy's spats. Charlie attempts, in his inimitable way, to imitate the wealthy heel, but when it fails, he tosses himself into the path of an oncoming car, and kablam! He's dead.

Or is he? There's a quick fade to the hotel, where his boss is kicking him awake; he's fallen asleep in a chair, and Charlie's suicide over Mr. Rich and Edna's romance was just a dream. Before leaving, Mr. Rich smiles at Edna, who spurns him, and she and Charlie waddle off happily. The end.

Except I don't buy it. The whole suicidal despair segment doesn't fit with the film's already-demonstrated dream world, which is much lighter in tone—remember the faeries. It seems like too much for a 30-minute film to make a bunch of "dream rules" and then break them. And Charlie's behavior and the gags he's involved in during the "second dream" are completely consistent with reality—there are no visitations, but he does attempt to make spats out of a pair of wool socks, resulting in hilarity.

Of course, if the suicide is real then what comes after is one of those Jacob's Ladder-style "at the moment of death" dreams, which isn't entirely satisfactory, but is at least novel. The suicide angle might seem a bit dark for a Chaplin film, but the other option is that the film is kind of sloppy and thrown together. I realize this was surely the case in many, many instances, and probably is the correct answer here, but I like my ending better.

Posted by mike | Comments (0)

August 4, 2008

Slim Is the Boss

This is Slim, the oldest and smartest cat. If at some point in the future she starts speaking English, we won't be all that surprised. She's in charge around here. Sometimes the other cats get out of line—often, their mere existence is enough to set her off—and she has to beat them up to remind them of their place, which is away from her. Once in a while she has to put us humans in our place as well, like if we are asleep and she is hungry. Do not be misled, however: she's a sweetie who loves nothing more than to be on you and on your stuff while you're working, your pillow while you're sleeping, and your bathmat while you're showering. (She waits on the bathmat so that when you get out, she can lick your wet ankles, which is only sort of as weird as it sounds.)

Posted by mike | Comments (3)

August 3, 2008

Silent Sunday: Broken Blossoms (1919)

Is this a good place to admit that this is my first feature-length Griffith film? Probably not, but it's too late now. I've seen chunks of The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, but I'd never really tackled the guy who basically invented the modern cinema. I'm a bad cinephile, but I'm working on that.

My first foray is into his depressing tale of a forbidden, interracial love between a Chinese man and a white woman. Of course, it's so understated that it's possible to read it as a completely unreciprocated love. Richard Barthelmess, a great, unjustly forgotten actor, is very good as "The Yellow Man," but the film belongs to Lillian Gish, who works her closeups with dazzling skill.

Read the full review.

Posted by mike | Comments (1)