Our favorite art form is crumbling away at an alarming rate.  The world’s film heritage — barely a century old — is shriveling, disintegrating and turning to vinegar like so much cheap wine.  In a statistic quoted in this short produced by Greg Ferarra of Cinema Styles, fully eighty percent of the films made before 1930 have been lost forever.

As film bloggers, we can do something about it: if we have disposable cash, we can donate to groups like the National Film Preservation Foundation.  If we’re a little short (of cash, that is), we can still help by using our bully blog pulpit to help get the word out, and there’s no easier way than by participating in the upcoming For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon, hosted by Ferdy on Films and Self-Styled Siren.

Though it’s too late for some films, there are still many worth saving, and we can all help.  Join in beginning Valentine’s Day, February 14, for a week of fascinating reading, and maybe even a little rabble-rousing aimed at saving some endangered works of art.

Federico Fellini famously opined that artists have about ten good years in them, that after that, things go down hill.  This proved prophetic about his own career (perhaps it was self-fulfilling), in that his masterpieces, all but one, anyway, appeared from 1954 (La Srada) to 1963 (8½). The exception is 1974’s Amarcord, the bittersweet “reminiscence” of his days growing up in Fascist Italy.

Though none but Amarcord match his earlier output, there are things to recommend all of his post-8½ movies, and any film by Fellini puts one by Rob Marshall or Michael Bay to shame. (Well, maybe not City of Women.) Take Intervista, for example, the director’s penultimate feature.  Filled with tenderness and humor, it is easy to forget that there’s not really a lot there.

Like all of Fellini’s films, it’s about himself, and this time he’s quite up front about it: it’s a fake documentary about Fellini making a movie,and preparing the long-planned, never-produced Amerika. As such, it is an at-times fascinating peek into the maestro’s methods, tempered by the fact that he was an inveterate, self-admitted liar.  Especially when the subject was himself.

Continue reading The Maestro’s Penultimate Fantasy

Way back in Christmas of 2001, my daughter bought me the DVD box-set of the Godfather trilogy, and at the time, I was thrilled with their quality.  I had a 32-inch, standard definition (SD) set, I didn’t know scan rate from a hole in the ground, and I thought I was on my way to true cinephilic nirvana.  State of the art format, state of the art equipment.

Only, of course, it wasn’t, and five years later I got an enormous, 50-inch HD Sony.  One of the first things I slapped into the player was The Godfather, and WTF? It looked terrible.  The image was soft and lacking in detail.  It was muddy and dim — even dimmer than I remembered — and there were numerous nicks and scratches and jumps.  In short, I found out what many a film buff has in recent years: if you blow up crap, it doesn’t make it any better.  It just looks like bigger crap.

I was seeing a combination of crappy Paramount encoding and really bad prints; I raged against the machine (and the studio).  Two of the most significant American films of the last half-century — with Part III thrown in as a bonus — shamelessly mistreated at the hands of a system concerned only with profit.  I had visions of cigar-chomping Paramount executives, counting their pennies, asked to produce a quality product, and saying “Naw, it’s the Godfather, for Christ’s sake: they’ll take what we give ‘em and like it!”

Continue reading From God-Awful to Practically Perfect

The post-World-War-II reality of American global hegemony was viewed with deep ambivalence by our European allies.  In Part I, we took a look at how that dynamic is portrayed in The Third Man, as filtered through the sensibilities of the British Major Calloway (Trevor Howard), and embodied by Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten).  Martins is portrayed as the stereotypical American boor who — although clueless and gauche — nevertheless by main force blunders into a solution to the problem of Harry Lime (Orson Welles).

At the film’s end — after Lime’s second funeral  — Calloway offers Martins a lift to the airport, and displays a grudging respect; at the same time, he’s still trying to ensure that Martins does indeed go away. Americans are like strangers who ride into town, vanquish the bad guys, but don’t bother to ride away when they’re done.

Continue reading Friends and Enemies in The Third Man: Part II

Everyone has probably already seen this, but hey . . .  it’s new to me.  Wenders’  charming story behind the photo is in the Guardian. Kurosawa looks like he’s working, but maybe he’s just taking a nap.   (Click on the photo for a much better view.)

Up on Coosa Creek — which as you know is not New York or Los Angeles — it’s been a pretty grim prestige-film season.  I just haven’t yet seen anything like a crop of year-end hopefuls that would get my blood going, much less anything that will make me mildly curious come Oscar time.  (Insert standard critical disclaimer about Oscars here).

I did see a couple of films back-to-back over the Thanksgiving holidays.  My daughter and son-in-law were in town from Williamsburg (Virginia not Brooklyn),  and their mother and they hatched a plan to see two movies back to back, simulating a double feature.  The problem was that the films were (a) Fantastic Mr. Fox and (b) 2012. But, trooper that I am, I reluctantly went along, hoping for a little excitement as we snuck (sneaked?) from the first (Fox) to the second (2012). Alas, that was not to be: my straight-laced wife and children actually bought tickets for the second before we went into the first, leaving me to wonder: where is the sense of larceny these days?  Where is the sense of sticking it to “the man?”   Sigh.

Continue reading Fox is Fantastic … The End of the World? Not So Much.

After World War II, the United States emerged as a world power, and films from more than one nation reflected a profound ambivalence about the new reality.  In Japan, filmmakers like Ozu and Kurosawa expressed it from the viewpoint of a vanquished nation.  On the other side of the world, our allies — grateful though they were over American intervention — were equally wary over the new world order.

In this period, The Third Man stands out: though it is a product of British minds (director Carol Reed and screenwriter Graham Greene), it takes place in Vienna, a city occupied by the Allies for a decade after the War.   Because of this, there is a kind of multiple-sensibility about the production that reflects the multi-national character of its context.  First, there is the cynical, world-weary tone of the “natives,” who have seen — and many times done — it all.  They are survivors, eking out a living via the black market, shady trading deals, and just plain double dealing.  But over it all is an European veneer of erudition and gentility that infuses even the shadiest of characters.

Continue reading Friends and Enemies in The Third Man: Part I

I don’t go to many opening day screenings, and for several reasons: first of all, I hate crowds.  Just hate ‘em.  Second, I hate today’s movie crowds.  Note the caveat:  today’s movie crowds tend to talk all through the picture, telling their friends what to expect, commenting noisily on the action, or answering their cell phones.  Because of this, I generally wait a week or so to see the film, which sometimes bites me on the ass, because the films I like to see don’t generally stay long at the multiplex, which is all we have here in Tuscaloosa.

Anyway, I have nevertheless seen a few flicks on opening day, and one was Star Wars (yes, it’s true: I’m old).  On May 25, 1977 I walked into a theater in Spokane, Washington and paid some doubtless ridiculously low sum to see the first of George Lucas’ epics.  I was on a date which — believe it or not, given my present studly image — was not a common occurrence in those days.

I’d expected to have to stand in line (reason three for not going on opening day), because I’d read the ecstatic review in Newsweek.  But no: there was no line, and we just waltzed right in to the first showing of the evening.  Guess the folks in Spokane weren’t great readers of news magazines. But as the movie unspooled, as the adventures of Luke and Leia and et al. unfolded, I remember a gradual hush coming over the audience.  And although it was a different time, when people were more polite at the movies, there was very little jabbering, very little kibitzing as we all sat enthralled.

Continue reading A Tale of Two Openings

If good ol’ imdb.com is correct, and you know they never lie, you’ll see that Alfred Hitchcock directed some 65 features.  Of those, the first 24 were made in his native Britain, before he and his family moved to California for good.  The penultimate feature made before the move was The Lady Vanishes, and for many, it’s the best of his pre-Hollywood years.

Although I’m not in a position to judge that claim, having seen only a few of his pre-war features, for my money Lady is one one of Hitch’s most purely entertaining films, period.  It is a tightly plotted, highly-efficient exercise in (a) drumming up suspense and (b) igniting chemistry between two sexy stars: Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave.  Lockwood plays Iris Henderson, a callow playgirl traveling home to London to marry some House-of-Lords stiff named Charles.  Redgrave is Gilbert, a free spirit who is (of course) the opposite of everything Iris (of course) holds dear.

They meet cute in a mountain hotel in an imaginary European nation in political turmoil.  Iris’ train has been trapped in the snow, and Gilbert is engaged in a quest to document the indigenous folk music of the country’s happy citizens.  She is trying to get a good night’s sleep, he is upstairs presiding over an impromptu clogging session, and as is mandatory in these affairs, it’s love at first fight.

Meanwhile, strange doings are afoot.  Sweet old Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty) befriends Iris, and they take a compartment together on the train.  While Iris sleeps, the old lady up and disappears, and nobody in their compartment sees her go.  But here’s the thing:  no one in their compartment — or the entire train, for that matter — will admit to ever seeing the old lady in the first place.  Strange doings, indeed.

Continue reading The Strange Case of the Vanishing Lady

I like Larry David.  I like Woody Allen.  So, when I heard that Woody and Larry were teaming up for Whatever Works, I thought:  “Why not?”  It might not be terrible, given that Woody’s been experiencing something of a renaissance lately, with one film (Match Point) nominated for Best Picture and his latest — last year’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona – a popular and critical success.

Alas, it was not to be.  Whatever Works … doesn’t.  Har.  I’ve always wanted to write one of those joke lines.  In fact, the best thing about this film is the potential for mischief in the title.  I can imagine Nothing Works, Water Works, and Nobody Works. Oh, yes, and simply Whatever … (pronounced, of course, in a Valley girl whine: What-ev-ah!).

The sad fact of the matter is that it doesn’t work, and rather than engage in the usual Wood-ites’ laments about how I don’t know why I even bother any more, how he’s failed his loyal fans again, I’ll just cut to the chase.  There are two things I think renders this film dead on arrival:  the casting and the script.

Continue reading Woody’s World