Coosa Creek Mambo

Nobody was better at composing for the 4:3 frame than Akira Kurosawa. Like many of the directors of the day, he routinely used normal to slightly wide lenses; with the advent of widescreen, he abandoned them in favor of telephotos, and rarely looked back.

Here’s a scene from Ikiru (1952) that illustrates. The protagonist Watanabe (Takashi Shimura) has been having stomach pains; he has finally gone to the doctor. The scene takes place in the waiting room and proceeds in four movements, each one characterized by a different composition.

In part one, he enters the room; note the multiplane composition at which Kurosawa excelled. Notice also the newspaper in the foreground — it punctuates the scene, at the beginning and end, like bookends.

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In 1939, The Rules of the Game was such a failure with the French public that they threw chairs at the screen and set newspapers alight in the theaters. It wasn’t much more popular with critics, and in 1940, director Jean Renoir fled Paris to make films abroad. He ended up in — where else? — Hollywood, where he made six mediocre films and one good one (The Southerner) before before seeing the tinsel-town handwriting on the wall. In 1949, he left Hollywood for India to make his first color film, the privately financed The River, and after shooting The Golden Coach (1952) in Italy, returned to Paris to shoot French Cancan.

The film is an highly fictionalized account of the creation of the Moulin Rouge, with the great Jean Gabin starring as Harold-Ziegler-surrogate Henri Danglard. Danglard meets laundry-worker Nini (Françoise Arnoul) whom he takes under his wing and eventually into his bed. The film follows Nini’s rise to stardom, paralleled by Danglard’s dogged attempts to get the nightclub off the ground. Gabin is simply wonderful as the impresario, and the beautiful Arnoul brings a charming naiveté to her roll as the ingenue.

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Tags: French Cancan, Gabin, Renoir

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Here’s one more clip from Jean Renoir’s Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932). Unlike the indoor tracking shot from yesterday’s post, it’s a pan (i.e., the camera remains still and rotates around its vertical axis). It takes place near the beginning of the movie as the homeless Boudu wanders aimlessly along the Left Bank, in front of the used book sellers that line the Seine even today.

The shot’s documentary look was novel for the day. Coupled with Michel Simon’s one-of-a-kind performance, it gives it an absolutely authentic feel. Boudu is there yet not there, as detached from the booksellers’ world as would be a Martian. It serves to illustrate the idea of class-separation that is one of the film’s themes; Boudu, the marginal, the outcast, wandering in the very heart of intellectual, bourgeois Paris. Note the extremely foreshortened, 2-dimensional space produced by the camera’s telephoto lens. It enhances the painterly compositions Renoir learned from his Impressionist father.

Enjoy!

Tags: Boudu Saved From Drowning, Renoir

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Those who’ve read this blog before (and you know who you are!) will know that I’ve made a case for Jean Renoir being perhaps the greatest director of all time. As Peter Bogdanovich has noted, during the 1930s he made a virtually unprecedented string of masterpieces, including Grand Illusion, La Bête Humaine and The Rules of the Game.

Here’s a clip from one of those films, Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932), that illustrates some of Renoir’s genius. It’s a tracking shot through the halls of a typical Paris apartment of the period. The maid leaves the table of her employers, pauses in the intermediate hall, then reappears doubly-framed in the kitchen window. The camera glides over and between these spaces, emphasizing the differences in social class — a major theme of the film — as the maid moves from living spaces to hallway to kitchen, from the realm of her employers to her own domain. At the end of the track, the camera pushes in, and then a reverse shot brings us into the maid’s point of view. Notice the deep focus Renoir helped pioneer, and the use of frames within frames to suggest enclosure and confinement; in Renoir’s world, even the bourgeoisie are trapped in their own milieu.

Enjoy!

(Unlike many of Renoir’s 1930s masterpieces, Boudu is available on DVD in a fine Criterion Collection edition.)

Tags: Boudu Saved From Drowning, Renoir, tracking shot

Adam Sandler’s latest movie You Don’t Mess With The Zohan has a title ready-made for lampooning. Never ones to miss an easy target, critics have been happy to oblige: “You mess with the Zohan at the risk of your own IQ,” says Chris Vognar of the Dallas Morning News. And “while you don’t mess with the Zohan, unfortunately you don’t laugh with him much, either,” opines Adam Graham at The Detroit News.

And though I’m not going to mess with him either (at least not until there’s a cold day in HBO Hell), according to Aron Heller of the the AP there’s a whole nation filled with Zohan love:

“You Don’t Mess With The Zohan” looks to be a big hit in the Holy Land. Billboards bearing the leading man’s split-legged, blowdryer-wielding image are plastered across city walls and numerous stories have been written and broadcast in the local media, which has called it the “most Israeli film in Hollywood.”

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Tags: Sandler, Zohan

In the opening scene of Barton Fink, there’s a play put on by some New Yorkers about some guys selling fish or something, and the first thing I thought about was “who wants to see a play about some fish?” And the second thing I thought was “Geez, it’s just like those Cohan boys to make fun of simple fisher-folk. I bet they all die in the end, too.” (But I fell asleep before the end so I didn’t find out.)

Anyway, that just goes to show you about Joe and Ethan Cohan: they really suck as movie-makers. I mean, really, really suck. Over their five-film career, they have ran the gamet from stupid bar-room movies (Blood Simple) to stupid desert comedies (Raising Arizona) to idiotic hat films (Miller’s Crossing) to movies about bowling, hoola-hoops and cereal killers (The Big Lebowski, The Hudsucker Proxy and No Country for Old Men, respectfully), and you would think that with all that experience, their movies would be better, but they’re not. They’re all just crappy and despite the variety, all the same.

Let me adjudicate: their cinematography — by the brothers themselves under the pseudonym “Roger Deakins” — is decidedly third rate: it’s as flat and uninviting as a tranny hooker (not that this reviewer knows anything at all about tranny hookers). And whoever thought it was a good idea to let Carter Burwell write the music for all four movies? It makes me question Joe and Ethan’s judgment right alongside their talent.

But the heart of the matter is, the brothers just can’t direct their way out of a paper bag. They have no sense of pacing, their movies either go at a walk (and not fast like a race-walker walks, either, but more like a slow, arthritic, old-lady walk) or gallops along like a thoroughbred on steroids. There’s just no in between. And don’t get me started on their work — or lack of it, haha — with actors. To site just one horrid example, in Raising Arizona they made the normally sophisticated, erudite Nicholas Cage look like a hick, and Holly Hunter appear as if she were from the South. Now that’s bad directing!

To some it up, though I’ve seen all eight of their films — and three of their rock videos — I haven’t seen one thing I thought was worth the price of tea in China. But I will persist, gentile reader, because it is my mission to sacrifice myself for the sake of your knowledge and enjoyment. If you see the words “A Joe and Ethan Cohan Joint” on a movie trailer, run to the ticket window to get your money back.

I’m just glad that they haven’t won any Oscars!

(Note: this is an entry in the Bizarro Days blogathon over at Lazy Eye Theater. What? You thought I really wrote like this? Don’t answer that . . .)

Tags: bizarro

Director: Steven Soderbergh
Writers: Brian Koppelman, David Levien
Cinematographer: Steven Soderbergh (as Peter Andrews)
Editor: Stephen Mirrione
Production Designer: Philip Messina

The third of the Ocean movies by Soderbergh and company, Ocean’s Thirteen follows the formula laid out in the first two: Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and his cronies set out to accomplish an un-accomplishable heist. In the first one (Ocean’s Eleven) they take down the Bellagio Hotel in Vegas (I’m not spoiling anything … do you really think they wouldn’t succeed?), thus setting its understandably pissed-off owner Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia) on their tails. In the second installment (Ocean’s Twelve), Benedict has caught up with them and demanded their money or their lives, and to pay him back they steal a Fabregé egg. Or something.

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Tags: Clooney, Ocean's 13, Pitt, Soderbergh

Director: Anne Fletcher
Writer: Aline Brosh McKenna
Cinematographer: Peter James
Editor: Priscilla Nedd-Friendly

I confess a fondness for romantic comedies. (That’s right — I’m male and I like rom-coms. Wanna make something of it?) And one of the reasons, I suspect, is their predictability: they are as formal and mannered as Kabuki theater. And there’s something comforting in that. You know the structure, you know where the emotional beats are going to be, and you expect them, you fit into the film like a warm blanket, or a well-worn sofa.

In an above-average rom-com (Notting Hill, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and My Best Friend’s Wedding come immediately to mind), the pleasures sometimes lie in sharp, witty dialog. That is not the case with 27 Dresses. At other times, those pleasures will be in how the script playfully subverts the genre. Although 27 Dresses aspires to this, again — no cigar. About the only thing the film has going for it is Katherine Heigl, so stunning in Knocked Up. Here, her looks have been been dialed down a bit, perhaps to support the utterly ridiculous premise that she is always the bridesmaid but never the bride.

The direction, from Anne Fletcher, is plodding and arrhythmic, and the dialog is only fitfully funny. Ed Burns (the other guy, as usual) does his nice-but-bland shtick, and as the guy she gets, James Marsden is nothing but a good-looking cipher. As a film this is way below par; as a rom-com, slightly below average. Now that it’s out on DVD, and you can rent it for a fraction of what you’d have to pay in the theaters, it might not be a bad investment. Or maybe it’ll do if you’re trapped on a plane for 5 hours like I was.

In case anybody’s wondering, I’m up in Seattle getting my daughter married off. Being a preacher type, I’m going to perform the ceremony myself. Needless to say, we’ve been kind of busy this week, and I haven’t had time to update this blog.

On the film side of things, these are the last few days of the Seattle International Film Festival, and I think I’m going to manage to see at least one. Now let’s see … should I see The Unknown Woman, the trés serious offering by Giuseppe Tornatore? I don’t particularly care for his not-so-trés serious stuff (e.g., Cinema Paradiso, Il Postino), and this sounds a little like “I’ll show them, I don’t have to be treacly!”

Or maybe I should see Triangle, the latest Hong Kong gangster flick from Johnnie To and company, billed as “Three giants of Hong Kong crime cinema—Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam, and Johnnie To—join forces to create Triangle.” I do love me some Hong Kong crime movies.

Decisions, decisions . . . but whatever, I’ll be back blogging soon enough, as soon as I get this wedding thingy out of the way.

It must be nice being Martin Scorsese. He’s acclaimed as one of the greatest filmmakers in the world, he finally won the Oscar he’s been pining for, and best of all, he gets to make movies about his rock n’ roll idols. Well, once in a while, anyway. First there wasThe Last Waltz (1978), and damned if he didn’t hit it right out of the park, making one of the greatest concert films ever.

In the intervening years, he made the odd rock video, and a well-received television documentary of Bob Dylan (No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, 2005). Now, thirty years after The Last Waltz, he gets to make a movie about the band who, after outlasting the Beatles, declared themselves the Greatest Rock n’ Roll Band In the World. And it seems like a match made in heaven: Marty obviously loves the Stones (his soundtracks sound like Rolling Stones compilation discs) and Mick and the boys are still going at 60+ years of age, still producing records and touring. And anybody who has any fondness for The Last Waltz is probably wondering: did lightning strike twice? Did Scorsese make another masterpiece in Shine a Light?

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Tags: Mick Jagger, Scorsese, Shine a Light