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42 posts tagged movie
“Part of me was afraid of what I would find and what I would do when I got there. I knew the risks, or imagined I knew. But the thing I felt the most, much stronger than fear, was the desire to confront him.” — Apocalypse Now (1979)
Donald Crisp: The Navigator (1924)
At the request of his star Buster Keaton, producer Joseph M. Schenck purchased an obsolete ocean liner for $20,000. Keaton wanted to use the boat as a “prop” in his upcoming feature comedy, but went into production with nary a plot idea in his head. Eventually, Buster and his chief gagman Clyde Bruckman came up with a story involving two wealthy, pampered young people (played by Keaton and Kathryn McGuire), who through a series of fantastic but logical plot convolutions end up stranded together on a drifting, deserted ocean liner.
At first, the young couple is helpless because they’ve never had to lift a finger in their lives. As the weeks pass, Keaton and McGuire become quite adept at fending for themselves, utilizing the huge facilities of the liner (its steam room, its enormous kitchen) for the simplest and most basic of necessities. An attack by a cannibal tribe requires Keaton to be more resourceful than ever; the build-up to the climactic contretemps between Keaton and the cannibals is almost as side-splitting as the climax itself.
While the film is rife with some of Buster Keaton’s most elaborate gags, he scores equally well with smaller, more intimate comedy bits, notably his losing battle with a deck chair and his attempt to shuffle a waterlogged deck of cards. read more
Henri-Georges Clouzot: Le salaire de la peur (1953)
In a decrepit South American village, men are hired to transport an urgent nitroglycerine shipment without the equipment that would make it safe.
Whoever it may be to rightly claim that he invented the action thriller genre (Méliès, I suppose), Henri-Georges Clouzot’s “Le salaire de la peur” is an indispensable milestone on the exciting route to the best films of that kind in the 70’s, 80’s and nowadays. In its tenseness, as symbolized by the danger of explosion of the lorries’ loads, it has hardly been surpassed.
The plot is perfectly worked out from start to end, the leading players act in some of their best parts ever, the (almost) absence of music supports the brutal realism and the consequent choice of authentic outdoor settings contributed a lot to the film’s deserved success. Historically, it ranges between neorealismo and nouvelle vague, and yet it is its pure action and suspense that make it worth watching.
Clouzot’s wife Véra (also well-known from his “Les diaboliques”) plays to the “most breathtaking angles” gallery when she bows down to scrub the floor of Dario Moreno’s gin joint. It’s a man’s world after all and there are male perspectives on human survival only. Well, it’s existentialism, mates. Altogether, the black and white photography is gripping. The gun scene between Lulli and Vanel is one of the best montages in film history, and there is more excellent editing in “Salaire” (including the finale) that completely fits the hot atmosphere. read more
Takashi Miike: The Bird People in China
A young Japanese salaryman is sent by his company to a remote Chinese village to evaluate precious Jade that is found there, but before he arrives meets the yakuza who was sent to tail him to protect his bosses interest in the company. When the men finally arrive their mission become sidetracked by their interest in a mysterious young village girl, her haunting English language song and the secret that makes men fly like birds.
A masterpiece, nothing less. read more
Saul Bass: Phase IV (1974)
Hands down one of the most unjustly neglected Sci-Fi flicks of the 70’s. Phase IV had a lot going for it: mysterious cosmic events, bizarre behavior of ants, alien-like constructions found in the desert… It was directed by Saul Bass, renowned title designer that worked with Alfred Hitchcock and Martin Scorsese (which it certainly shows in the film), starred well established actors Nigel Davenport and Michael Murphy, and the electronic soundtrack by Brian Gascoigne was a marvel by itself. read more or watch the trailer on youtube.
Jean-Luc Godard: Alphaville (1965)
In many ways, Jean Luc Godard’s Alphaville remains cinema’s most unconventional science fiction film. With science fiction, filmmakers usually ask the audience to believe that certain technologies have advanced, or in the case of dystopian scenarios such as the brilliant Blade Runner, that technologies have advanced and subsequently corrupted society, standing as a testament to the foolishness of blind faith in progress.
Godard, on the other hand, has made a film that asks its audience to take downtown Paris as the center of the galaxy by eliminating all special effects and simply shooting the film in the nocturnal, fluorescent and neon lit interiors of hotels and office buildings. That this technique works so well (much better than many films with millions of dollars worth of effects) represents only one of the triumphs of this remarkable work.
Besides being the only film in history where the galaxy is, in effect, saved by poetry (here Paul Eluard’s gorgeous poems in the book La Capitale de la Douleur), Alphaville teems with an eccentric mix of high and low culture. read more
John Cassavetes in Johnny Staccato (1959 - 60)
Perhaps better known to the general public as an actor, John Cassavetes’ true artistic legacy derives from his work behind the camera; arguably, he was America’s first truly independent filmmaker, an iconoclastic maverick whose movies challenged the assumptions of the cinematic form. Obsessed with bringing to the screen the “small feelings” he believed that American society at large attempted to suppress, Cassavetes’ work emphasized his actors above all else, favoring character examination over traditional narrative storytelling to explore the realities of the human condition. A pioneer of self-financing and self-distribution, he led the way for filmmakers to break free of Hollywood control, perfecting an improvisational, cinéma vérité aesthetic all his own. read more
