An apology to myself

Well, it's painfully obvious that since Jack was born (six days after my last post) that I've been as likely to play Guitar Hero: Nickelback as post on this blog. Lest it seem I'm blaming my adorable eight-month-old son for my shoddy output, I'd also like to blame the teenagers I attempt to teach the magic of cinema to every day, since their vacuous stares and incessant texting-while-watching-some-of-my-favorite-goddamn-movies-ever makes the prospect of thinking and writing more about movies when I get home practically unbearable.

But now that same ennui is making me think about restarting this thing again. It's near the end of the year, and I'm feeling incredibly unproductive at work -- as much as I love teaching film, the fact that I seem to be getting so little in return is making me want to work even less, and I'm starting (hell, I started a while ago) to think about what I'm going to change in the curriculum this summer and how it will play out in the fall. In other words, I need something concrete right now that I can feel moderately good about. It's sad, but at this point I will feel a greater sense of accomplishment writing blog posts that no one will ever read than teaching 130 young minds every day. Yup, it must almost be May.

Rebel Samurai: Sixties Swordplay Classics

I've been looking forward to catching up with this set ever since I saw Sword of Doom at the Oak Street Cinema in Minneapolis a few years ago. A hundred or so death-by-sword-slashes/impalings later, as we walked out of the theater, my friend Mike said, "Well, that certainly was a sword of doom." That film isn't in this set, but another one with that film's director and star, the superfluously punctuated Kill!, is. Though I loved every movie in the set, I've probably either forgotten some key details about each one or I'll end up commingling them.


Sword of the Beast (Hideo Gosha, 1965) -- This is one of the two movies in the set with a protagonist who's haunted by a murder he committed in the name of clan stability and betterment (Kill! is the other). In fact, all four have a very strong anti-feudal, pro-individual choice theme in them. Very entertaining throughout.





Samurai Spy (Masahiro Shinoda, 1965) -- By far the most overtly stylized film of the set -- shadows, trees, etc., often obscure characters and the action, slow motion is used in several of the fight scenes, and the final confrontation is presented to us primarily in an extreme long shot that makes it pretty much impossible to tell what's going on. The film is also different from the others in its prolific use of ninjas and their weapon of choice, the throwing star. In the interview on the DVD, Shinoda talked about his fatigue with heroic swordplay violence in samurai movies, feeling that the assassination-style killings done by ninjas was more disturbing and revealing of human nature.

Samurai Rebellion (Masaki Kobayashi, 1967) -- This film is a coiled snake, and the masterpiece of the set. For its first hour and a half, it's a patient domestic drama, with each scene helping advance the story toward its tragic, inevitable outcome. Each meeting between Toshiro Mifune's family and the clan higher-ups seems absolutely necessary in order to explain that absolutely nothing else could be done, and that the bloodbath in the final half-hour is a fait accompli. It was so strange to see Mifune play such a henpecked character -- we're thrilled in a way to see him get back into his sword-swinging ways at the end of the picture, even though it will be his last stand. 

Kill! (Kihachi Okamoto, 1968) --

This is the goofiest movie of the set, though it settles into a groove after an uneven first 10-15 minutes. It ends up being the most satirical film of the four in that it not only criticizes the feudal society in which samurais lived, but also the very notion of samurai and their bushido code. Tatsuya Nakadai was excellent, using his eyes in such an expressive way so that you can see how he was able to be so duplicitous yet stay alive. He's a completely different character here than in Okamoto's film three years earlier, the aforementioned Sword of Doom, in which he played an irredeemable, violent narcissist. 

A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, 2005)

Embarrassingly, this is my first Cronenberg film. Also somewhat embarrassingly, I'm still unsure of my initial reaction to it -- as I was watching it, I think I was dismissing a lot of it as trite, rolling my eyes at some of the '80s-movies bullying of Viggo Morensen's son, for example. I mean, the kid catches a fly ball in gym class and it sets off the class douchebag? Isn't he supposed to hit on his girlfriend or something?

But what I think I missed is that Cronenberg was using these cliches and exaggerating them in some cases in order to explore his and his audience's reactions to violence. Another example of this is the town of Millbrook, Indiana, in which Mortensen's family lives. Here's Cronenberg on the setting in a Village Voice interview:

It's perversely idealized. It's almost Twilight Zone-y. There's an appeal to that longing for an imaginary past -- a yearning for an innocence that was never so pure anyway. It's meant to be recognizably real, but it has to play as mythological as well. That's part of the balancing act.

That self-consciousness helps when we see other events play out that we've seen before, like Mortensen saving the day when two killers invade his diner. He guns them down, and we do feel a visceral thrill that justice has been served. But we also get a brief look at the half-blown-off face of one of the baddies. We don't feel sorry for him, but we are repulsed by the sight of what violence does to the human body. And the incident starts the unraveling of the nice Midwestern persona of Mortensen's character, as people from his past start to show up and call into question who he really is. The "perversely idealized" town, I think, is supposed to put the audience on guard that this isn't reality, it's more of a metaphor than anything -- as a poster on criterionforum.org put it, it's Mortensen's "misguided ideal" that his body won't let him achieve because it's so natural committing violence.

On the other hand, the same poster, who admits he loves the film, says "the inherent problem of the film is that it chooses to undermine the conventional revenge flick by emulating it to excess." That excess is what I saw the first time around more than the undermining, but in reading and writing about the film, I'm starting to understand the subversion much better.

The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008)

I have no idea what I can say about this movie that hasn't been said somewhere, even though it's only been out three weeks. For posterity, though, here are a few of the many things I liked:

1) I'm no judge of acting, but I was on edge whenever Heath Ledger's Joker was onscreen.

2) The opening heist scene was both tense and a perfect intro to the Joker's methods and morality.

3) The shot of the Joker hanging his head out the window of (I forget) either a cop car or the semi-truck. Some people have suggested the movie should've ended there, and I can see their point.

And a few of the things I didn't:

1) Two-Face's transformation felt rushed, and added another prong to the story that I didn't think needed to be there -- save him for the third film.

2) I had no idea what the hell was going on in the waterfront scene before Batman's final showdown with the Joker.

3) Some of the obvious tie-ins to today's political situation took me out of the movie. For example, Batman's wiretapping policy -- when Morgan Freeman says, "This is wrong," I almost groaned. Now of course, spying on an entire city during a normal day is wrong, but this is the ticking time-bomb scenario that never actually happens in real life but happens all the time in the movies. All Batman wants to use this for is to find the location of the Joker, who he knows is going to kill a lot of people that day. The whole situation is an obvious Patriot Act reference, but if we're really supposed to contemplate the ethics of our real world government, we can't really do it in such a fantastic scenario (one that pro-domestic spying and pro-torture folks will invariably bring up to try to justify these kinds of tactics). Freeman's line comes off as a half-hearted sop to the left so the movie can at least give the appearance of exploring both sides of the issue when really, there's only path for Batman to take to save Gotham. The executive producer of 24, a registered Democrat, said something interesting about that show's tendency to justify torture: "The politics of the show are narrative politics." Batman was just following narrative politics.

That gripe aside, I liked a lot of the other inquisitions into whether Batman's presence and actions helped or hurt Gotham -- it's suggested that Batman helped inspire villains like the Joker ("You complete me"). In that respect, it's like several other Nolan films since Memento. As an auteurist whore, I'm happy to find thematic connections between his "artier" films like Memento and The Prestige and blockbusters like the Batman franchise. He seems to be interested in issues like the psychic toll of fighting injustice, the thin line between justice and revenge, guilt, the power of memory, etc. 

Reign of Terror (Anthony Mann, 1949)

This is the fourth Mann/John Alton combo movie I've seen (after T-Men, Raw Deal, and Border Incident), and I'm now pretty sure they could make me want to watch a movie of Keanu Reeves reading the phone book. The visuals in all their collaborations are absolutely stunning. Even the still at the left looks pretty good, and that's taken from a shitty transfer, apparently the only one any the DVD's of this film have been made from. This is quintessential noir cinematography. Yes, this is noir, even if it does take place in 1794 France.

How nasty and twisted is this movie? At the end of the film, when the villain is pleading his case in front of a mob, his former right-hand man turns to the man standing next to him and says, "Shut his face." So the guy SHOOTS HIM IN THE FACE! This is, of course, right before he gets beheaded at the guillotine. This is hard-core for 1949. 
 

Bullfighter and the Lady (Budd Boetticher, 1951)

I'm feeling lazy and I have other films to catch up writing about, so here's what I wrote over at criterionforum.org:

I thought it was beautifully photographed, with an interesting mix of stylized low-key compositions (strange to see in a Boetticher film, since all the Ranown Westerns are in color) and documentary-style footage of bullfighting (though there is some stylization there, too, particularly in the lyrical slow-motion sequence at the end). I also thought Boetticher handled the relationship between the famous torero and his wife, as well as the bullfighting training scenes, with aplomb. As far as the main story arc goes, I was intrigued early on with the idea of the fair-haired American nonchalantly asking the greatest torero in Mexico to teach him the ropes basically so he can impress a broad. I kept waiting for Robert Stack's character to get his comeuppance for not understanding that his attitude and behavior, while rewarded in America, are not as well-received in Mexico (ala John Grady Cole in the novels All the Pretty Horses and Cities of the Plain). But he kept getting better than he deserved, even after he inadvertently caused the death of his mentor. I didn't think he deserved the redemption he achieved, but the movie thought he did.

There's some great stuff on Boetticher's career over at Senses of Cinema, too.

Three Days of the Condor (Sydney Pollack, 1975)

It's been awhile since I've seen one of these good ol'-fashioned '70s paranoid thrillers. I watched Coppola's The Conversation and Alan J. Pakula's All the President's Men a long time ago. Coincidentally, and I'm sure someone has written about this somewhere, at the end of Condor I saw a perfect segue into All the President's Men, which came out a year later.

The most obvious similarity is Robert Redford playing the crusading hero fighting against corruption that goes up to unfathomable heights in the federal government. Another one comes in the coda to Condor, when Redford says he's told the whole sordid story to the New York Times. Here's where it gets interesting. At first, you feel that Redford has scored a victory, using the press to expose governmental corruption the same way he would as a reporter in All the President's Men. But then the CIA higher-up, played by Cliff Robertson, asks him, "Do you think they'll print it?" implying that the CIA has the power to squash the story. Redford reasserts that they will, but the film ends with a freeze-frame on Redford's expression definitely betraying some doubt that justice will be done. As it turns out, Pollack wanted that ambiguity, talking about the ending in this 1976 interview. Of course, in All the President's Men, the idea of the press going up against a crooked, monolithic institution was explored further, with the press coming out on top (that being said, knowing that this was real lent the film a certain sadness that so much of our government could be so corrupt).

Elsewhere in the interview, Pollack (as everyone has assumed anyway) said the Watergate scandal was a prominent subtext of Condor:

Here I tried to deal, as much as I could, with trust and suspicion, paranoia, which I think is happening in this country, when every institution I grew up believing was sacrosanct is now beginning to crumble. It’s destroying, in a very serious way, a certain kind of trust that is essential to have in a working society.

These days, that would count as an optimistic outlook on our country's leadership. Which is why so many films have come out in the last few years that have addressed issues like the war in Iraq, torture, etc. This article from The Atlantic analyzes the resurgence of this '70s-esque phenomenon. The most interesting part of the story for me was the end, in which author Ross Douthat contrasts the attitude of the country during the wars that shaped their respective eras in order to explain (and I'm simplifying a bit here) why there haven't been any real good movies about the Iraq War.

That is, in the end, the key distinction. The Vietnam War was a bipartisan fiasco that took place amid profound social disarray, and everyone was understood to be complicit—Democrats as well as Republicans, ordinary citizens as well as politicians, the soldiers on the ground as well as the Best and the Brightest shipping them overseas. The conflict in Iraq is occurring during a time of relative domestic peace, and as a result the pessimism it’s produced, though real enough, hasn’t shaken our civilizational confidence in nearly the same way.

The difference is readily apparent in our politics. The Vietnam era had riots and rallies, the Weathermen and the Symbionese Liberation Army, because the rot seemed to go so deep that only desperate measures were worth contemplating. The resistance movements of this era, by contrast, spend most of their time raising money for Democratic candidates, because it seems to many people that winning a few elections could make the nightmare go away. And what’s true for MoveOn.org is true for the entertainment industry. The popular culture of the 1970s reflected the widespread sense that only a revolution could set things right. But nobody’s going to write a 21st-century version of Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998), a book about the revolutionary spirit and countercultural excesses of ’70s Hollywood stars; this generation of stars is too busy fund-raising for Hillary and Obama.
All of this suggests that the ’70s revival, though pervasive at the moment, may not have that much staying power. 

The original decade of nightmares didn’t end when the Vietnam War did; it persisted through Ford and Carter, oil shocks and stagflation, and the Iran hostage crisis. The new ’70s may go out with George W. Bush.