Very enjoyable but perhaps the least successful of the Kurosawas I’ve been seeing recently. Each individual episode is masterfully shot but the film as a whole doesn’t cohere. It begins as a light and glamorous screwball about a famous artist (Toshiro Mifune) who meets a star (Yoshiko Yamaguchi) in a mountain retreat, the paparazzo take a shot of them together and sell them to the Amour magazine claiming evidence of a secret affair. They decide to sue and hire a lawyer (Takashi Shimura) with a gambling addiction and a tubercular daughter. At this point the film shifts tone and focus, leaving the glamorous couple behind to focus on the moral failings of a good but weak man. The film then shifts again, this time into a Christmas film, with lots of orchestral versions of famous American holiday songs, culminating in Auld Lang Syne and highlighting the redemptive potential of the holiday season itself. Will the lawyer whose sold out his clients to the pulps honour his now dead daughter and do the right thing for his clients? This is drawn out in the finale which becomes a courtroom procedural. So, a film with serious themes — the limits of free speech in the age of mass media — but of dual protagonists, various genres, too sudden shits in tone, that doesn’t quite cohere. What I liked best were the montages, first a 30s style one of the pulp press sinking its teeth into the story, then the cycling races affording opportunities for gambling. There’s also an incredible shot of Mifune looking very dashing, riding his motorcycle with a fully decorated tree at the back being followed by children. It’s a film of many pleasures that is not quite good.
José Arroyo
The Scandal Montage:
At the (bicycle) races:
Cool Yule turns melodrama:
An illustration of the mastery of compositions, a triangle structure of paparazzo at the centre as the lawyer on the left speaks, leaving room for another court official on the right, thus illustrating the tension of the theme, the law vs the press:
A lovely film that makes me think of the extent to which working people have been evacuated from cinema. In this one, two young people in a Tokyo, occupied, in ruins, and with black marketeers putting prices out of reach, sweethearts since before the war meet every Sunday. We encounter Yuzo (Isao Masaka) embarrassedly picking up a cigarette butt on the street while he waits for Masako (Chieko Nakakita) to arrive in the streetcar. He’s only got ten yen; she’s got 25. But he says a man who’s a man doesn’t take a woman’s money. So how will they spend the day? They see an advertisement for a cheap home they can never afford and go visit it. They play baseball with a bunch of kids. They go to the zoo. They go visit a nightclub run by one of his old army friends but his clothes are so threadbare he refuses to see him and insults him with money instead. They meet a homeless kid whose got more money than they do. They go to a cheap concert, Schubert’s Unfunished Symphony, put on for the masses, only to find that touts have bought up all the cheap tickets and are re-selling them for a higher price. He protests but they beat him up. It’s hard living up to Yuzo’s ideals of masculinity when they can’t even afford a cheap room in which to start married life much less buy a home or start a business. He’s despondent throughout, she tries to cheer him up. He’s also horny throughout, trying to steaL kisses here and there, coercing her into the room he shares with his friend, who’s away. He tries to force himself on her and when she won’t, he tries to jerk off on the sink. He finds it hard not to go into crime. He’s making it hard for her to remain decent. They almost break up. She returns to the room, in tears, if sex is what it takes for them to continue as a couple. But he loves her, recovers his own decency, and they continue with their day, dreaming of playing Schubert and of starting their own café at some point. Near the end there’s an extraordinary sequence where Masako addresses the camera directly: ‘Ladies and gentlemen a round of applause. Please find it in your heart to cheer him on. There are so many poor lovers in the world. Please give us all a big hand. We’re freezing in the cold winds of this world. Do it for poor young lovers everywhere. Please cheer us on. Help us dream beautiful dreams. Please a round of applause.’ It breaks the fourth wall, appealing directly to the audience and is extraordinary. A very moving, highly cinematic work that beautifully incorporates the theatrical. Griffith, Capra, and Italian neo-realism are cited as references but what it makes me think of is Borzage, the whimsy, the poetry, the delicacy of feeling and heightened romanticism. I found it beautiful.
For the first 55 minutes HIGH AND LOW (Akira Kurosawa, 1963) is a sparse and minimalist chamber piece in which moral and ethical considerations are put into play, in dazzling long takes and expressive compositions. Mr. Gondo’s business associates present him with a plot to oust the current head of the shoe company they all work for. Sales have been stagnant. The current president is old fashioned. They would make more profits by making more fashionable shoes with in-built obsolescence. If they all gather their shares they could take control of the company. Mr. Gondo (Toshiro Mifune) turns them down. What he doesn’t tell them is he’s mortgaged everything he owns in order to get 50 million to buy a majority share, take over himself, and build shoes that are both fashionable and good quality. As he kicks his associates from his house, Gondo gets a phone call saying his child has been kidnapped and they are asking for a 30 million ransom. If he pays this, it will cost him all he’s worked for since he was a 16 year-old apprentice, his plans for his future, possibly his home. He’s willing to do that for his son. But he will he do the same for someone else’s son? It turns out that the kidnappers have made a mistake and have kidnapped the chauffeur’s son instead. The two moments were the chauffeur gets on his knees, first to beg for his son’s life, and then, once again, when Gondo agrees to pay the ransom and the chauffeur realises the full extent of the sacrifice , were most moving. What is a life worth? Is the life of a chauffeur’s son worth the same as that of an industrialist’s son. What is loyalty? What are a person’s obligations and responsibilities and how should one act to meet them? It’s superb.
The second hour and a quarter turns the film into an exciting police procedural. Who did it? Why? How to find the culprit? In this half, the film descends from the heights of Mr. Gondo’s apartment to the lower depths. The transition is an exciting scene on a train shot with multiple handheld cameras of the exchange of the money for the child.
This is introduced by a wipe, and there’s something to be thought about in the way Kurosawa uses wipes, it’s not just a transition, it’s a move in time, space, mood.
There will be another wipe when we’re introduced to the perpetrator, the camera picks up his reflection in a pond, follows him, through a slum, and into his room where we finally see his face as he then checks out the newspapers and radio to find out where he stands in relation to the police’s investigation.
There’s another incredible scene in a heroin den that is as brilliant a piece of cinema as I’ve seen (the way Kurosawa frames, the balance between close-ups underlining individuals, and the more crowded shot symbolising crime and affliction, the frames within frames, the way the camera is often outside a window looking in, often also through a curtain or screen, the moments of showmanship (the light reflecting on the sunglasses). It really is quite extraordinary.
The film ends with a conversation between the industrialist and the perpetrator. I won’t spoil the film by divulging the reasons for the kidnapping but will merely note that Kurosawa films the reflection of one on the face of the other. Then in the last shot we are left with a pensive industrialist meditating on his own reflection, interestingly with his face not being visible either in the foreground or in the reflection.
It’s a great film. It was also the number one box office success of its year.
I also very much liked Spike Lee’s remake of this, which I will now see again but I don’t remember it being as elegant or as moving.
Another extraordinary crime film from Akira Kurosawa, this one dealing with corporate corruption. What I found most remarkable was the story-telling, of which the opening scene is an extraordinary example. It starts theatrically with a group of waiters making a greeting line in front of a lift. The doors slide open, and we get a wedding party. The door opens again and this time it’s a whole gaggle of paparazzi, who will act as a Greek chorus, doing quite a bit of exposition, telling us who the main characters are, filling in background, contradicting or elaborating upon what the characters themselves are telling us. It’s a wedding, a happy occasion but after the first 30 seconds the drama begins. We see that the bride is crippled, walking on crutches with one foot higher than the other. The father is the head of the corporation. The groom is poor. Did he marry her just for her money? As the wedding banquet proceeds, the police arrive, we see messages of an imminent arrest passed around and on top of it, the brother says if the groom doesn’t make his sister happy he’ll kill her. After the nervous applause dies down, the wedding cake gets brought in. But there are two, one of them a scale-model of a building where a man jumped off the seventh floor, with a rose marking the exact spot, linking the current scandal and some of the top managers who work there to the previous one where they had worked at before. As one of the journalists says at the end of the opening scene, ‘A funny wedding, the best one-act play I ever saw’. ‘A one-act play,’ says another. This is merely a prelude’. And indeed a newspaper appears on the screen, ‘A big scandal unfolding. Police raid Dairyu. A chain of investigations’. The main narrative is well and truly on its way. It’s fantastically told visually (the choice of shots and compositions), musically (the abruptness with which the music often stops), the use of close-ups to single out individuals, how every beat in the story adds information whilst increasing the drama.
It is really superb and so is the rest of the film. A revenge film in which Mifune seeks to avenge his father’s death by destroying the life of the father of his wife. It’s supposedly influenced by Hamlet, though I can at best detect a loose resemblance. The themes are however Shakespearean, a man destroying his life to keep his position, a young man seeking to write wrongs who commits even worse ones, a wife torn between love for her husband and duty to her father. It’s a film where no one wins except the viewer.
Tony Zhou has a very fine short essay on Kurosawa’s compositions in The Bad Sleep Well, which you can see here.
PS I see now from wiki that ‘ Francis Ford Coppola has listed The Bad Sleep Well as one of his favorite films, citing the first thirty minutes of the film “as perfect as any film I’ve ever seen” and used it as inspiration for the wedding sequence in the 1972 Oscar-winning gangster drama The Godfather,’ which makes all kinds of sense.
The End of Oak Street puts Mike in mind of the sort of disposable but likeable films he watched on video as a child, although they didn’t tend to cost $85 million to make. Writer-director David Robert Mitchell conspicuously apes Steven Spielberg with a family, a suburb, a dinosaur invasion, a large pile of poo and a lot of 1980s nostalgia. We debate whether the film’s derivativeness, charmless performances, ropey CGI and poor plotting are outweighed by its genuinely effective set-pieces and its success as uncomplicated monster-movie fun. The End of Oak Street is far from good but if you watch it on VHS when you’re eight years old, just as Mike did with The Pagemaster and 3 Ninjas, it’ll probably stay with you forever.
I’d only really been familiar with Kurosawa’s famous samurai films. The post-war noirs in the BFI’s box set have been a discovery: the more I see of them the more my admiration for Kurosawa as a filmmaker grows.
STRAY DOG is a re-teaming of Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura from DRUNKEN ANGEL (1948). Mifune plays a young cop whose knapsack gets stolen on the bus. Inside it is a Colt revolver with seven bullets. It’s now being used to kill innocents. How many will have to die before the weapon is recovered? Will the cop survive his guilt?
Kurosawa is a master of conveying the elements themselves. Here it’s the heat and humidity of a Tokyo Summer, exacerbated by having a killer on the loose. People perspire, wipe their faces, sigh with tiredness (see the gorgeous montage below).
As the two investigators move from suspect to suspect, we get a panorama of post-war Tokyo society, all the low-lifes, criminals, prostitutes, dancers’ all with lives that exceed the activity or profession society defines them for; poor people without space; professionals on low incomes and their way of life, a rich lady who shuts her window to a crimes she’s witnessing before returning to her piano, a young dancer for whom a dress has become a symbol for a different kind of life, wished for but forever out of reach. In fact the killer ends up being someone not unlike the young inspector, a war vet whose also had his knapsack stolen, as a result left desperate and derelict, who ends up making bad choices.
The last chase scene is exciting, beautiful and expressive. Both men now handcuffed together, occupying the lower third of the frame, as young innocent children walk in the background at the top of the frame singing, and then the thief begins to weep at the choices he’s made. It’s gorgeous and moving (see clip below), as is the whole of the film. I’ve included frame grabs from some of the compositions to illustrate the variety, originality and expressiveness of Kurosawa’s compositions, which continue to astonish me.
The incredible extended montage from the beginning.
The moving and beautiful final chase scene (above)
Pastor Hall (Roy Boulting, 1940)/ Obsession (Edward Dmytryk, 1949)
Richard I talk about two films screened recently at Cinema Rediscovered in Bristol, that will be touring around art cinemas this Autumn and will also be released through Indicator.
PASTOR HALL is an early anti-Nazi film that somehow feels very timely now. A small village in Germany, a happy recognisable place, patriotic, is taken over by a platoon of stormtroopers and suddenly young women are being brutalised, jews have their homes destroyed and even the Pastor is in trouble. Based on a true story about how German pastor Martin Niemöller got sent to Dachau concentration camp for criticising the Nazi Party. In the podcast we discuss how the film raises questions of morality, ethics, collaboration, resistance, how easily it lends itself to current events in the US now, and how much people knew about concentration camps then.
OBSESSION is a British noir in which Robert Newton kidnaps his wife’s lover to murder him at a later date and commit the perfect crime. It’s directed by Edward Dmytryk (FAREWELL MY LOVELY, CORNERED, CROSSFIRE) then on the run from the House of Un-American Activities and finding temporary shelter in the UK. We discuss it as a noir, as a British film, and praise the way the film uses the bombed out setting, London in ruins as setting for a life in ruins, an Empire dissolving and Americans walking ‘our’ streets and stealing ‘our’women.
Two old films that feel newly relevant and are worth looking forward to.
A noir that well showcases Kurosawa’s capacity for film poetry and a young Toshiro Mifune at his most beautiful. Mifune is Matsunaga a small-time Yakuza who runs everything that can be turned to crime in the shantytown of the lower-depths of some part of derelict post-war derelict. At the centre of the neighbourhood is a swamp, a dirty, disease-ridden dump with umbrellas and other waste jutting out, a symbolic setting for all the low-lifes that live around it. Matsunaga has got TB. An alcoholic doctor in the neighbourhood called Sanada(Takashi Shimura), can cure it. If only Matsunaga would listen. But Matsunaga is trapped within ideologies of yakuza masculinity: he’s afraid and can’t show it. The word ‘coward’ is enough to drive him to extraordinary violence. Moreover, the yakuza who ran the neighourhood before him is coming out of prison and will challenge him for his turf. It’s not a good time to be ill and to be scared. Matsunaga is having difficulty living up to socially acceptable ideas of masculinity much less a yakuza code. Mifune looks so beautiful here. Cinematographer Takeo Ito and Kurosawa fill him from below, to show off his long pompadour, lit to highlight the symmetry of his face, a body that once evoked power and is now diseased, the terror that follows the peacocking. But is he the drunken angel or is the doctor who’d have a swank practice if he wasn’t so alcoholic and so fundamentally kind. Kurosawa brings in nightclub number and dream sequences. He uses mirrors and inventive, unusual compositions. He is not afraid to symbolise or to linger over the swamp, or over a song, or over a space that seems dead only to become anticipatory, a setting for action. A very beautiful film.
The Young Yakuza collapses as the old gangleader shows up to be no. 1, through a swamp that is full of junk but surrounded by music. Part of why Kurosawa is a poet.
A friend recently reminded me that THE LADYKILLERS is set around King’s Cross, with St. Pancras visible in so many of the external shots. So when I saw the disk at the shop earlier today, I thought I’d revisit. The area is unrecognisable from now. A fat-faced Peter Sellers in an early film role and Herbert Lom, with hair, are recognisable but both look so different than they did in their Inspector Clouseau heyday. And what’s with Alec Guiness’ odd prosthetics make-up? It’s thought to be patterned after Kenneth Tynan but I see him more as a cross between Nosferatu and his henchman, and rather unnecessary. None of this ultimately detract from the ingeniousness of the comedy which Alexander Mackendrick directs with a very pleasing combination of the macabre and the endearing. A shared sense of good manners and propriety is the very basis of William Rose’s screenplay, the rationale for each plot development, and the film is unthinkable without it. I suppose it’s part of what makes Ealing Ealing. I saw it in the Studio Canal disc, and it looks wonderful, but the default is German, which makes watching things, particularly the extras, irksome, as none of the main titles are translated; a bother when they offer essential information on the disc. Stil, the three-strip technicolour looks wonderful.
Why hasn’t this been a hit? It’s got an extraordinary cast (Matt Smith, Liev Schreiber, Regina King, Carol Kane, Vincent D’Onofrio, Bad Bunny) a big new star at his most desirable (Austin Butler) and a heterosexual couple (Butler and Kravitz, whose every move is a thrill) that has great chemistry and smoulder and sizzle in each scene. Plus a cute cat. The plot, a combination of Long Goodbye/ After Hours/ duck out of water narrative in which Butler’s neighbour asks him to look after his cat and unwittingly lands him in a heap of trouble with two rival gangs over money and drugs is deftly handled, the action is good, it’s got laughs. Darren Aronofsky’s only fun film, shot with considerable flair and style. At any other time, this should have been a big hit. Probably, with better marketing, at this time also: I hate the poster. I missed it in Montreal, it’s no longer playing in Birmingham and had to make a special effort to see it amidst the few screenings still on offer in London. It was worth the trouble and I recommend.
‘All men are bad’ says a Judge in LE CERCLE ROUGE (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1970), ‘they’re born innocent but are quickly corrupted. In this film, two of the main ones are crooks: Corey (Alain Delon) just released from prison; Vogel (Gian Maria Volonté) recently escaped capture and on the run. The two others are cops: Inspector Mattei (André Bourvil) who’s chasing Vogel; and Jansen (Yves Montand) now an alcoholic and open to a heist. All are lonely: the inspector returning home to his cats, Corey returning from prison to find his girlfriend with an old crony and his apartment full of dust; Jansen alone battling nightmares brought on by alcoholism; Mattei, is in hiding. They get together for a heist at Boucheron on the Place Vendome, a triumph, only to be caught and shot by the Inspector and his men at the end. It’s a beautiful, fatalistic film, the mood constructed by the framing, wide, but sparsely peopled. On this viewing, what I noticed most was sound. It has no extra-diegetic music that I can detect. Most of it is heard in the nightclub scenes. There are a few moments where I’m unsure but I attribute the soft jazz to the car radio. There are entire scenes with the only sound we hear is diegetic and then singled out – brough to the fore singly — for narrative purposes: the sound of footsteps, or doors unlocking. All of this adds to the loneliness and alienation evoked by the imagery. Yet none of this adds up to futility. It’s as if each of the main characters, unafraid of death, find purpose and meaning in doing what they do best, even if it contravenes social norms and ends in the red circle we’re warned off in the opening title. Women in this film signify merely sex and betrayal. This is a marvellous disc, by Studio Canal, showcasing its first restoration, the 140 minute version beautifully shot by the great Henri Decaë, with lots of extras, including an introduction by Ginette Vincendeau.
On a side note, it’s surprising how little Melville appears in film noir festivals considering how he is one of the greatest directors in that particular vernacular.
Two men are in love with the same women but only one is married to her. The trio lose track of time when walking in the countryside and find shelter in a monastery, where Brothers of the Order of Silence assure them they’re safe so long as they don’t harbour ill intent. Since one man is in love with the partner of the other and since she loves him back in spite of the vows that bind her, they’re already off to a bad start. A very beautiful restoration, rich blacks, a gradation of whites, of a prototype of the haunted house film, this one with more religious overtones than most as rationale for the supernatural, and with an understated but nonetheless central misogyny at its heart: the woman brings in evil and potentially death to the house of God. One offshoot of the genre – the haunted house – here meets another – the mummy film – as we’ll find out that these monks who go about their chores at night, spend their days as mummies in coffins. It struck me whilst watching this film how often books and knowledge are posited in film as both the source of evil and the way of over-coming it. A handsome-looking film, well-plotted, with a rich concept and striking imagery, and as one of the end titles reminds us, made entirely in Mexico. Another handsome disk from Indicator with an interesting introduction, rich in context from Abraham Castillo Flores and audio commentary (which I have yet to listen to) from Stephen Jones and Kim Newman.
I loved the Frida Kahlo exhibition at the Tate. I have had friends gripe that the exhibition is lacking some of her most famous paintings, which is true, but then it also has some smaller, lesser seen works. Besides, the clue is in the title FRIDA: THE MAKING OF AN ICON, and this the exhibition does superbly. We see her clothes, her jewellery, films of her in her house, how she was painted by her contemporaries, most famously by her husband, Diego Rivera. How and why she was taken up by pop cultures globally. The exhibition ends with these huge glass cases showing the hundreds of books written on her in the past few decades, dolls, merchandising, the posters of films about her. Her connection to liberation struggles, Marxism, Surrealism, feminism, queer cultures, indigenous cultures, Mexicanidad and its connections to broader Latin American cultures etc. It’s a great exhibition. Her painting is central but not the main focus of the exhibition; and how she became an icon and why she remains one is well illustrated and fascinating.
Others have argued that it doesn’t have a main narrative thread, which I also don’t agree with. The exhibition is chronological from ‘construction/ self-construction, the first room, to the Fridamania of the last room. In between we see how the one led to the other though works ‘On the Other Side of the Border’, Neo-Mecicanisms, A Pro-Activist Legacy, etc. Some were bothered by the recurrent mention of ‘gender fluidity,’ finding it too obvious. There’s clearly needed by some people; and also ‘Gendered dialogues’ on her iconicity is a running thread through the exhibition. I would also have liked to have seen more of her most famous works but still appreciated how the exhibition accomplished its own goals. And brilliantly so.
Friends who teach in the areas of Latin American cinema will be interested in LA LLORONA (Ramón Peón, 1933), ostensibly the first horror film made in Mexico in the sound era. It begins with a man who dies in front of a church apparently seeing a ghost and sets up a discussion of superstition vs science. It then cuts to a child’s fourth birthday party where a father tells his son of a curse on the family where the firstborn son gets killed at four years old. This is then explained through a tale where Hernan Cortés betrays the mother of his child, whom he’d seduced but refused to wed, in order to marry a Spanish aristocrat. In response, the woman kills her four-old son, then herself and curses his lineage. So this is a tale of the crazed woman, the vengeful woman. Half-way through the film the story is told again through the tale of La Llorona, this time through an indigenous woman whose Spanish lover betrayed her and she too kills her son and herself and curses the family. But in this indigenous retelling the story also becomes a metaphor for the Spanish conquistadors killing off the indigenous population and the rape of Mexico. La Llorona is Mexico herself. It’s a fascinating film, lots of attempts at camera movement, some of it a bit stodgy, lots of double exposure for the ghost parts, and interesting contrast between imagery of the conquistadors with their fanned collars and Mayan imagery. It’s a very teachable film that should lead to lots of interesting discussion in an excellent disk from Powerhouse with lots of history, and context and an audio-commentary from Stephen Jones and Kim Newman.
I had never heard of POPPERS (José María Castellví, 1984), until I came across it on the marvellous box set of Spanish ‘S’ classified films of the transition, EXORCISMO: DEFYING A DICTATOR AND RAISING HELL IN POST-FRANCO SPAIN. And it’s a discovery: a punk/new wave proto queer film made at the height of the Movida Madrileña. It’s about a punk musician who finds his girlfriend flirting with another guy during one of his sets and, before he knows it, he’s stabbed him. Cut to two years later when he’s mysteriously released from prison. It turns out the father of the boy he killed wants in turn to kill him. But not in any old way, no; he wants to organise a hunt, with a coterie of his most perverse rich industrialist friends as the hunters and with the young punk killer as the hunted. The film does posit a new generation out of control versus the old Francoist guard, steeped in power, privilege, and, in this film at least, perversion. In this type of film in this period, a beautiful woman wearing as little as possible is necessary to ensure financing and distribution. Giannina Facio, who later went on to wed Ridly Scott is that woman here, though she’s of so little interest to the main narrative that she’s dropped in as killer/accomplice, love interest and not given much else to do. Miguel Ortiz, whose first film this is, and who wears less than she does, is the punk and real object of the film’s desire: the narrative starts off with a close-up of his chest. The film is beautifully designed, steeped in queer S/M imagery, with surrealist touches (a horse giving birth in a palace, a church (Madrid’s Almudena Cathedral, before it was finished) decked out with 18th century furniture in which farm animals walk through, a herd of goats barely separated from mad dancers in the nightclub scenes. Castellví was a famous photographer of huge stars (Sara Montiel, Carmen Sevilla, etc) undressed for Interviu magazine as well as – for a while – Julio Iglesia’s personal photographer, so the film looks ravishing. It’s very interesting to consider it next to other queer films of the period such as LAW OF DESIRE (Almodóvar, 1987), which was also designed by Javier Fernández. The title has no bearing on the film except by association. It is the intoxicant most sniffed in gay nightclubs of that period. It’s not a great film, perhaps not even a good one, but few bring up the queer structure of feeling, even with its alibis and delusions, of that particular place and time better. It would make an interesting double-bill with Tony Scott’s THE HUNGER, which visually at least, looks like an influence. Alfredo Mayo, one of the icons of Francoist cinema, is the leader of the hunters.
We’ve tuned out of Marvel on the podcast for a little while, but one of the eternally entertaining superheroes, Spider-Man, reignites our interest with Brand New Day. With Doctor Strange having cast a spell at the end of 2021’s No Way Home to make the entire world forget Peter Parker, for reasons that Doctor Strange presumably cast another spell to make us forget, Peter, newly isolated, returns to fighting street-level crime in New York City while pining for his old relationships and suffering severe headaches. Can he revive his former life? Surely it wouldn’t be a Marvel film if an enormously significant, cliff-hanging event had permanent consequences.
Still, even for those as cynical as it’s possible to be about the MCU, Brand New Day has plenty to recommend it. It aims for thematic depth – though how fully that’s achieved is up for discussion – and is genuinely moving. Indeed, certain moments move the audience to cheer and applaud, which in turn moves Mike to harrumph bitterly. Destin Daniel Cretton, directing his second MCU entry following Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, demonstrates a gift for working with actors and a strong instinct for staging action, although Cineworld does its best to undermine those virtues with its poor projection.
We also return to our discussion of IMAX and The Odyssey, asking whether the frame’s envelopment of the visual field impedes filmmakers’ ability to express through composition and framing, and considering whether there’s something fundamentally anti-democratic about making films whose fullest form can only be experienced at a handful of cinemas around the world.
As ever Richard and I loved attending this year’s edition of Cinema Rediscovered at the Watershed in Bristol. They do so many things for the city and for cinema; bringing in so many venues into the festival; offering young people the opportunities to programme, to get experience with criticism, to learn about Bristol as a cinema city (Mark Fuller’s wonderful walks), familiarise themselves with different histories (Rosie Taylor’s equally wonderful talk on 9.5mm film; the Queen Kelly programme with Pamela Hutchinson’s superb introduction, and in two different venues, so one can explore different cinemas in Bristol) and so much else. In this podcast Richard and I go through the programme day by day, speaking on all the events we attended (everyone will have a slightly different experience of Cinema Rediscovered), praising much (Different Ways of Seeing panel, the Cruising pop-up, many of the individual films, with ANNIE GIVES IT THOSE ONES, a particular highlight for borth Richard and I) and offering some criticisms which we aim to be constructive (is it time to let go of the 70s, rogue or not? Might the comic book adaptation strand have been better shaped and signalled; might connections between films in the programme have been better highlighted). That said, another brilliant year, it’s tenth! Here’s to many more. Congratulations to Mark Cosgrove, Maddie Probst and the dozens of other people who made it all possible.
The sound problem with ‘In The Soup’ mentioned by Richard has been identified and fixed for the rerelease”
Realising his dream of shooting an entire film on 70mm IMAX stock, Christopher Nolan adapts Homer’s ancient Greek poem The Odyssey, a vast mythological epic and one of the foundational works of Western literature. We haven’t seen it in full IMAX but IMAX Digital, the pretender to the IMAX name that nonetheless offers the best screen in Birmingham, which for three hours immerses us in the story of a war hero’s attempt to return home and handle his past.
Other than the film’s tempo and structure, which tell the story swiftly and non-chronologically, but without ever losing us, we don’t agree on much. For José, it’s beautiful to look at; for Mike, the visual pleasures are few and far between. José likes the performances across the board; Mike expresses serious reservations about some of them. We also discuss the disappointment of the final action scene, the extent to which the film treats the Greek gods as real, Zeus’ law and how well the film represents ancient Greek culture and ways of thinking, and whether its explicit contextualisation of the story as a metaphor for PTSD is earned.
My first impressions after seeing THE ODYSSEY for the second time, the first in IMAX 70mm, is that it’s more richly a film about morality for immoral times. The 1.43 IMAX 70mm ratio and the huge screen make it a more intimate epic. One is immersed in these faces, often shot in two-shot, medium close-up, close-up. It’s amazing to see the preponderance of these shots in an epic. One is instantly immersed in these thinking, feeling beings. Focus pull doesn’t seem easy in this format and often the frame goes in and out of focus when in movement, which adds to the lack of clarity in the character’s understanding. There is a lot of shooting through screens, particularly in the scenes with Penelope, which have a similar effect. Mike was telling me the other day that in an interview with cinematographer with Hoyte van Hoytema, he discusses the compositional restrictions of the format, how everything important has to be shown in the centre of the frame, and this viewing experience confirms it. The screen is so huge, and one is so immersed, everything important happens at the centre of the frame. Of course this the begs the question of the experience in digital widescreen IMAX and whether that’s a diminished experience, and if so how.
In this viewing I particularly appreciated Travis Scott as The Bard in the opening; the calm, elegant strength of his bearing and the way he says the opening lines:’ “A face… a fleet… a war… a man… a thought… a trick… a trick to break the walls of Troy… and burn it screaming to the ground!”, and which reinforces my disagreement with those accusing the film of being tokenistic with people of colour (including Wilson).
Maybe because of the format, I also found the film more moving (Leguizamo on Odysseus’ return; the exchange between father and son, coded and clear; the husband’s return, each emotional beat achieved by the actors at their peak; and I liked Tom Holland much more this time around, the callowness, lack of strength, powerlessness, etc being part of the character, though I do think the final exchange in that scene of recognition could have been better handled. But this is quibbling. A serious film about our times, beautiful, delicate, exciting. The image of the cyclops clearly taken from Goya’s Saturn Devouring his son becomes even more potent this time around. Also seeing it at the BFI’s IMAX brought out all the sound work on the film, a work of art on its own, a sharpening of feeling. I think it a better film this second time around and now want to see it once more.
Third time seeing The Odyssey, in yet another format, 70mm. at London’s Picturehouse Central. It becomes clear that the only design proper in relation to composition is in the IMAX 70mm format, the rest is mere cropping, with some of the beauty and story-telling lost in translation to other formats. I still loved seeing it, now with other episodes eliciting emotion, this time, for example, those last lines of the siren scene, ‘What you want most is what you can’t have, and what you can’t have is what you already had and lost’, which seem straight out of a noir. What comes into sharper focus on this third viewing is the ingeniousness of the structure, the telling and re-telling of the Trojan Horse scene, by different people and at different times, its play with time, point-of-view, reliability, and then re-told again to Penelope at the end, just at that moment and related to the scene where Odysseus return Antinous his shame, just as he’s acknowledge, perhaps by confessing to Penelope, unburdened himself, of his own. And doesn’t that whole set up with Penelope, the way, she’s photographed, now convey both cloister and confessional? I find it brilliant. It does now seem that when most people refer to the weakness of the script they’re really saying they don’t like the dialogue, primarily Tom Holand saying Mom and Dad. I’ve noted no references to structure, imagery or sound design when detractors reference a script. Sometimes, as Richard Brody commented recently, the process of translation encompasses translating written words into sounds and images, sometimes images and sounds are part of the script, and the process, perhaps more of realisation in another medium, which I suppose is also a process of translation, if of another type or degree.
Mike and Jen, who I saw it with, responded differently, and to different degrees. They certainly didn’t like it as much as I. Online, one already sees backlashes to the good reviews it’s been getting, the absurd positions attention-seekers often deploy (‘Nolan is the worst director in history!’), well-meaning but half-baked political positionalities (boycott the film because part of it was filmed in Morocco occupied Western Sahara). I found it beautiful, entertaining, a successful attempt to make one of those ancient rune-y texts people go to to seek answers newly relevant (about marriage, father-son relationships, duties and responsibilities, home and exile, the individual vs the community, drugs and trauma, ptsd and the rule of law, etc), and inclusive. The MAGA twits are already in a snit over the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen. There’s been less mention of the wonderful uses of Elliot Page as Sinon. I loved seeing Samantha Morton, Robert Pattinson, magical movie goddesses like Charleze Theron and Zendaya play legendary magical beings, John Leguizamo, and I think Matt Damo is superb. I’m not sure Tom Holland succeeds in conveying that move from callow youth to someone ready to be King, but that and some of the action sequences, particularly the ending one, would be my main quibbles. It’s a film to see on a big screen. I’m booked at the London IMAX. I also want to see it on 35mm at the Warwick Arts Centre. Podcast will follow.
Saw MINIONS AND MONSTERS yesterday and it is a film buff’s delight; Muybridge, Meliês, the Lumières, Harold Lloyd, Chaplin, Keaton, all get referenced; and jokes are made of those references visually and aurally. In fact, the pidgin dialogue (I can pick out bits of Spanish, French, German and Italian) is as witty as the use of music and visuals. It’s like a whole history of cinema ( Citizen Kane, Casablanca, gangster films, monster movies, ad nauseum) is brought out and dusted off with the intent of making the audience laugh. And it succeeds, as much with children as with adults. A delight. I’d be surprised if this wasn’t used in future film courses to illustrate bits of film history and aesthetics.
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