The Royal Tenenbaums

The Royal Tenenbaums is the third Wes Anderson film I've seen, and probably the best. What I think puts it over the top above Rushmore is what Peter Travers described in his review. He said that the film is better "not because its cast is starrier but because the film has an accessible maturity." This is an important point. Rushmore is memorably funny, but with this film the seriousness aspect of Wes Anderson's movies has come to match the humor and make something more complicated. Things start out spiffy, but time and discord split the family up into a sprawling wreck. It becomes something kind of comparable to Nashville, where we see the inhabitants of the film interact and live out their crises and relationships. It doesn't suffer from the sprawling messiness of Altman's film, though, since everything is closely interconnected and not as detached from the viewer. With its hands-on auteur feel, there is a soul central to the film. The story is then set in an ironically storybook-like setting, as the narrative awkwardly jumps from humorous to bleak. Many of the shots feel like they belong in a children's book, with dense, colorful sets and framing that hones in on the principal characters.







The whole film is a mood piece, with music buoying it up and dragging it down at each turn. This roller-coaster existence for the characters is an important contrast to Rushmore; though the protagonist there does have some 'troubles', the bigger bumps in this film help to humanize and explain how the stylized, caricatured characters that Wes Anderson loves have come to be. It provides a reason for the wackiness that we see, and makes it funny and sad. The Royal Tenenbaums is a strange film, and I'm not sure what sort of a conclusion I would make about it, but it was certainly my favorite of those by Wes Anderson that I saw.

Coens

Watching the three films that we did, it is understandable that the Coen Brothers have come to hold the reputation that they have among critics and audiences. They have a strong, technical control of cinematography and editing that serves them well in creating memorable films. The stories in their films still take center stage; comparing Raising Arizona and No Country for Old Men, some important similarities and differences come out.

The big thing that the two films share is the general plot concept of individuals taking what isn't theirs and getting caught up in the chaos that results. Raising Arizona is a screwball comedy about parents with fertility issues stealing a quintuplet, and No Country is a desolate thriller about drug money and a number of people getting killed. So, there's clearly some difference between the two. One of these differences is in the tone that each film's conflict takes on. In Raising Arizona, there is a class conflict aspect; the troubled, childless new family in a trailer vs. the wealthy furniature salesman with 5 new babies. No Country turns out as more of a bleak portrait, in which once things go wrong, everybody is taken down. As multiple people remark at the scene of the failed drug deal, "they even shot the dog."

The two films can also be compared by their bad-guy characters. Raising Arizona is more comedic, of course, with Leonard Smalls, the 'biker of the apocalypse' who blows up rabbits with grenades. He's an absurd character, but as such he's the perfect fit for the film; he's not an antagonistic bad guy as much as a mythical embodiment of disaster. This ties him in somewhat with Anton Chigurh, who in No Country is an almost indescribable killer with a disturbingly off-kilter manner. He embodies the whole 'fate' idea of the film when he tosses a coin to chose if someone lives or dies. Both characters are well suited to their films and make up an important part of the whole for each.

Altmania!

I don't quite know what to think about Robert Altman. He had quite a low batting average, producing many duds per relative hit, and produced many films that feel lethargic and self-indulging. I came up with a few things in his work that I could identify which bugged me. One of these is that his stories feel as if they are geared more appropriately towards literature than film. One challenge that film faces and literature does not is that a film needs to be pleasantly watchable in a single sitting. Nashville, in my opinion, is a bit unwieldy; not just because of length, but because of pacing. Novels can tell long, sprawling character stories like Nashville's nicely, but in a film, it becomes difficult even to pay attention when many unrelated scenes come end over end with little progression. The musical content is the only justification to present Nashville as a film; in no other area does it seem well matched to the medium. Even for such a character-centric film, there are few changes or transitions in any of the large number of major characters, removing the last possibility for a 'plot'. We get to know them, sure, but that's what the film ends up being: a lengthy, lengthy exposition. As we get to know these characters, it exposes a fuller image of the broader system of music and politics that the characters live in, but there's no conclusion the viewer is being guided to. This is where people may say that the film should be looked at and interpreted, but with the real-time aspect of viewing a film, this need for broader analysis plus the lack of progression within the film makes me say that the story is far better suited to literature.

I also am bugged by Altman's cinematography. He loves his slow zoom-in-zoom-out shots, and for lack of a more specific description seems very bland in his style. It feels like he is putting most of his effort into the content of the movie, acting as a simpler window to the more theatrical elements of what occurs and how it is portrayed by the actors. This can work, but I think Altman is shabby here too. Put bluntly, his films often aren't that interesting. I would label The Long Goodbye as an exception here, with Elliot Gould's strong performance and an original plot. In The Player, I found the acting by Tim Robbins to be little short of painful. He seems incapable of expressing emotion or mood, as if he were perpetually bored by everything occurring to him. While his character certainly wasn't sympathetic, I still can't imagine him feeling as flat as Robbins' portrayal. The Player had a strong B-movie vibe, particularly in the scene with the argument and the death of the writer. In a film which seemed bent on portraying harsh realities about Hollywood, it felt off to have a man drown after 10 seconds underwater, or for someone to try such an over-the-top movie gag as a fax message in the protagonist's car pointing down to a box with a snake in it. With the Hollywood self-references, like the mention of Touch of Evil during the lengthy opening shot, and the sell-out ending to 'Habeas Corpus' with Bruce Willis, the film had hints of a bitter comedy. They were too little, in my opinion, against the personality-less seriousness pervasive in the rest of the film.

Yojimbo Is A Nifty Film

After watching three films from Akira Kurosawa, the one that left me the most impressed was Yojimbo. The lead character, a coy, unemployed samurai in 1800s Japan, finds his way to a town overtaken by the warring of two competing clans, and tries to shake things up as a lone man out. The film had an influence on later cinema, notably prompting Clint Eastwood's character in the Dollars Trilogy. What I really enjoyed about the film is the dark sense of humor that it carries. The main character, played by Toshiro Mifune, is clearly amused by the state he is able to bring the two clans to, as he weaves his way from side to side, changing his allegiance and sowing the eventual destruction of both parties. He is morally ambiguous; his methods are almost villainous (although used on villains), but he does achieve what nobody else could or would and rids the town of the paralyzing state it is in.

The film is funny - Mifune's character seems almost gleeful at times as he sees how hard he can pull on the strings of the two sides, bringing them down without them being any the wiser (at least until the end). If comedy is a hard thing to do well, then dark comedy is a real delicate balancing act. At one end, it may seem too depressing and muddied, or it may come off as trite and misguided. In movies like Yojimbo, though, or Dr. Strangelove, the result of the film as a whole is to ridicule the sort of conflict or situation that it shows. It's like comic relief taken to an extreme. It's important to point out that this film is not a 'comedy' - it's still quite dark at times - but it looks on, as does the protagonist, bemusedly at the conflict within, and makes fun of it when it can. The protagonist is like an ideal antidote to the conflicts of reality, who, though unrealistic, is a lot of fun to see in action.

Clint Eastwood #3: Unforgiven

I first saw the pseudo-western Unforgiven a couple years ago, and though I liked parts of it, I sort of wrote the film off in my head without giving it much attention. When I watched it this time, though, I got a better impression of the film, possibly because I was already more accustomed to Clint Eastwood's style. He thrives on exploring the identity of his characters, and showing the audience bits and pieces of who they really are. This film is no different.

Eastwood plays William Munny, an aging ex-ruffian, living with his two children in a dingy and isolated house marked only by a tree and his dead wife's grave. She was the one who 'cured me of my evil ways', as Munny says. He departs from his peaceful though somewhat pathetic life raising pigs when a young, cocky gunslinger calling himself the Schofield Kid tells him that a brothel is offering a reward to anyone who kills two rowdy cowboys who slashed up the face of one of their girls. Munny decides to go, and the story covers what happens as he returns to the past that he had once sworn off.

What's remarkable about the story is that none of the characters involved can be called 'good'. Many characters work towards good in some senses, but they all have strong failings. Munny does try to get the town to leave the injured girl alone, but he degenerates into a cold-blooded killer once more along the way. The girls at the brothel, initially the victims, show another side as they push for the killing of the two cowboys. In fact, one of the two was clearly remorseful, and was killed even after he showed kindness to the girl who was injured and tried to repay her.

By far, the greatest moment in the film involves two characters who pop up along the way: an ex-gunslinging sheriff, Little Bill, and English Bob, a paid killer working for the railroad. Bob is ruthlessly beaten and aprehended by Bill, because of a no-firearms ordinance. Following this comes a scene in which a writer, W. W. Beauchamp, who was writing a dime-novel take on English Bob's life, is shown the reality of the West by Bill. The scene basically destroys the image of the western genre, as Bill, himself a ruthless scoundrel by any objective view, describes how a shootout that Bob had embellished to Beauchamp was actually a pathetic drunken disaster. It's a great scene, and it most likely won Gene Hackman (as Little Bill) his Oscar for best supporting actor.

Unforgiven is considered by many to be Clint Eastwood's best film. At least of the three that I have seen, I would agree. Much of the strength is in the script and in notable performances like Hackman's, but the film does play to Eastwood's strengths with character development, and he makes it work well.

Clint Eastwood #2: Letters from Iwo Jima

Whatever it may be, Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima does not feel so much like a war film. It does cover war, and it shows the brutality of the fighting that occurred over the 35 days that it took before the island of Iwo Jima was cleared by American forces. But it plays out differently, looking from the Japanese perspective at the men who fought on the island, showing their personal histories and experiences, and showing the mental struggle over what they were fighting for and what they were fighting against.

Like with Million Dollar Baby, Eastwood seems to cover the story the film portrays through a series of episodes that form the scenes of the movie, each of them advancing the plot or expanding on characters' stories or identities. This is sort of true for any director, but he doesn't cut time up during these periods or skip over anything. In short, you could say that his style is the anti-montage-sequence. Everything is shown in substantial chunks of real time, and it jumps the gaps in between, hitting the important bits of the story. As a result, some of the transitions and jumps feel abrupt or disconnected, but within a given scene, it works well to get the viewer involved in the moment and to take the point of view of the people involved.

This organization also makes sense because the scenes that appear seem closely chosen to expand on the characters. The connections that several characters have to their homes are shown, through flashbacks tied to letters that they read and write. There are plenty of scenes in which characters question why they are fighting, and ponder what will happen to them. The 'why' question and its tension peak when a wounded American soldier is taken. The Japanese colonel orders him cared for, before talking to him and revealing that he had spent time in America himself. The soldier dies from his wounds, though, and the colonel reads a letter that his mother had sent him. The letter connects his experience to that of the Japanese soldiers, whose own letters had held such similar messages, making them question what they have heard about the enemy. It takes only seconds after hearing the letter before their thoughts are disturbed by the explosion of enemy fire, and harsh reality takes over once more.

The film's episodes show moments of hard decision in war, and frame the tensions that drove the war effort. One example is when the protagonist Saigo and another private decide to keep fighting instead of following their captain and committing seppuku with grenades. Mirroring scenes show American and Japanese soldiers who choose to kill hopeless enemy soldiers instead of taking prisoners. An elite soldier explains how he was sent to Iwo Jima as punishment after refusing to kill a civilian's dog as a show of obedience. These scenes show how each individual follows a different course under the threat of war, and reveals his true colors in the process. In taking the perspective of the side that was isolated, outnumbered, and hopeless in the long run of the battle, the film shows the full force of war and sends the message home: that war really sucks.

Cure Rear Window Vertigo in 39 Easy Steps!

The impression I get from Alfred Hitchcock, from the three films we watched in class and from others that I've seen, is that he is a skilled filmmaker. His great talents, I think, are his understanding of the audience and his ability to make all sorts of stories work that you wouldn't expect to.

It's interesting to compare Hitchcock's famous movies to those of other 'great' directors. Some critics have suggested that interest in the Oscars this year will be lower, because the highest acclaimed Oscar contenders, There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men, fit the common mold of the critically-acclaimed-but-not-as-popular movie: bleak, somewhat depressing, and not having enough explosions/speedy plotline/Keira Knightley. Hitchcock, on the other hand, is as close as the 60s got to 24 or the Bourne trilogy: come on, he had Cary Grant get chased down on foot by an airplane, before finishing up with a nose-tickling cliffhanger on Mount Rushmore.

He knew that movies could have a dose of implausibility and absurdity without being stupid. Take The 39 Steps. Yes, I'm sure that some guy would take in a random woman claiming to be a spy, and not only believe her but take on her task once she is killed. But the film works because of what Hitchcock fills it with, like the clever scene with the main character's impromptu political speech.

Or look at Rear Window. A man looks out his window, and manages to convince himself and several others that a murder occurred before he has a shred of real evidence. But the movie creates a full story involving an entire neighborhood, works successfully with its windowside shooting perspective, and gets viewers to identify with the protagonists so closely that Mr. Thorwald's simple piercing look at the camera is actually alarming. People can look into the film's broader meanings, sometimes too far, but just on its own, the film provides a lot and draws the viewer in.

Vertigo has the most implausible story: A murder plot that is covered up by a ridiculously over-the-top possessed-by-the-dead fraud pulled by a woman playing the double of the murderer's victim, his wife. Add a romance between the unsuspecting fall-guy protagonist and the fake wife, and it sounds like the sort of crap that happens when the writers are on strike. But seeing the story unfold is something different. The mood of the film is creepy, due partly to a great score by Bernard Herrmann. The key is seeing how James Stewart reacts to and is affected by what happens. His madness after Madeline's death, his obsession for Madeline-who-is-actually-Judy, before and after her apparent death, and his freakish desire to turn Judy back into the woman who he thinks is dead give this twisted plot a bigger impact. What happens to Scottie is far freakier than the murder plot itself, and since he is the main character, who the audience is supposed to relate to, the plot is translated through his experience and is made more significant, dramatic, and involving.

I know that Hitchcock had a number of movies that were stinkers, or at least a lot more mediocre. But hey - what's life without a little excitem-WHAT'S THAT BEHIND YOU?!?!!!

Clint Eastwood #1: Million Dollar Baby

(I apologize for the image, a product of boredom and I don't know what)

My thoughts are mixed on Million Dollar Baby. My knee-jerk reaction after finishing the film was that it was caringly made and technically well-executed, and had strong acting as well, but the story was too cliched and the progression of events never really drew a viewer to root for Maggie (Hilary Swank), the lead character, who is helped by trainer Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood) to become an unlikely boxing champ. One problem may have been the way the film was focused. With the title being 'Million Dollar Baby', and with the story presented the way it was, the apparent inevitability of her story made me feel less involved in the film. (I should add, though, that I may have just been put off by our technical problems; the first DVD we rented skipped relentlessly.)

After thinking about it more, it seems like the way the film progressed may have been more intentional than a problem. Maggie's seemingly guaranteed against-the-odds success set the film up nicely for its tragic ending, which manages to come as a genuine surprise. Even more surprising, to not give too much away, was Frankie's decision and shift in opinion at the end. The film may come off as an overly-pretentious Oscar-fodder look at a controversial issue, but I think the focus is more on the changes and troubles of the characters than on the moral issue.

The thing that appealed to me the most in this film was the way it showed the true colors of several characters. Clint Eastwood's tough'n'gruff image fades through the film into the image of a man who is deeply caring and possibly over-protective. Maggie, who may appear as timid or over-enthusiastic as Danger, a skinny, hapless, perhaps deluded fighter who goes to Frankie's gym, turns out to be tough as nails, through to the end. Maggie's family, by contrast, is shown to be ungrateful, cowardly, and opportunistic in their relations with her. One of the only characters who stays as he is is the janitor/helper Eddie (Morgan Freeman), who counters to Frankie as the caring and helpful one in his gym, who we learn will still turn fierce and tough when he needs to.

The Blog Arises

So - a blog. I'm not really sure that using a blog to talk about film for a class is useful, but here it is. I first took Art of Film 1 last year, but I came back for the new class because I like films, and I wanted something enjoyable to give me my last lit credit :)
Other than that, there really isn't much to add, so let the movies begin!