To be honest with you, I think a crash course in cinema would be worse than no course at all, incomplete superficial knowledge is not always a good thing. Welles is not just Citizen Kane, Renoir is not just Le Regle de Jue, and Kurosawa is not just Seven Samurai. Just let yourself be immersed in all the great movies and great directors out there, in all the different styles genres and national schools of cinema, it’ll take years before you can even say you’ve scratched the surface but you should be doing this because you love movies not because you wanna tick boxes towards cultural enlightenment. Find your niche and work from there.
Typical Godard hyperbole for the sake of provocation it would seem but yes, Nicholas Ray was a damn good director. My favourite of his films is THE SAVAGE INNOCENTS.
Depends how you define critical acclaim and how readily you much of a damn you give about the collective subjectivity that defines the film establishment. Takashi Miike will never be a pantheon director for example. His films do tend to suffer from hasty shooting schedules and the slashed budgets that accompany Japanese coproductions. It shows in the hard-edged video look of his films. Yet, he’s made consistently great movies by the dozen and if he’s become a synonym with a specific type of filmmaking (madcap gore OTT craziness) that says more about the kind of film Western audiences will gobble down than the kind of film Takashi Miike can do well.
In the end I think it’s a combination of quality and quantity. Bergman and Kurosawa were prolific but many of the films they made were great.
I’m going to assume we’re not talking desert in climate terms but the aesthetic qualities of vast expanses of arid landscape, which is actually one of my favourite settings for a movie of any kind, it just seems to add a little extra something magical, possibly something with an existential quality because deserts are places that have exhausted their future so that we begin to see things happen there stripped of their worldly context.
I like the stark black and white contrasts between clear skies and dark walls of rock in ‘outdoors’ film noir.
- Border Incident (1949, Anthony Mann) with DP Alton’s help, Mann captures images of sizzling latenight desert ambiance, when the rocks crack back the heat of the day and the atmosphere is mysterious and suggestive
- Yellow Sky (1948, William Wellman) a subpar movie mostly because one-note Gregory Peck is cast in a role that screams for Bob Mitchum, but the outlaws’ trek through the salty flats in the first half is amazing.
- Blood on the Moon (1948, Robert Wise)
- High Sierra (1941, Raoul Walsh)
and then you have the desert of the western movie, spaghetti or otherwise, with cactii or without them, usually a character all by itself. Most memorable desert westerns for me include:
- El Topo (1970, Alejandro Jodorowsky)
- Once Upon a Time in the West (1968, Sergio Leone)
- Sentenza di Morte (1968, Mario Lanfranchi)
- Vera Cruz (1954, Robert Aldrich)
- Comanche Station (1960, Budd Boetticher)
- The Hellbenders (1967, Sergio Corbucci)
- The Hired Hand (1971, Peter Fonda)
Finally, my favourite of them all, the scorched dusty arid lands that stretch in the closed space between the western and gritnik crime cinema, a little above or below or across the Mexico border, faces are sweaty, you can taste the dust in your mouth, and the conclusions are usually bleak.
- Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974, Sam Peckinpah)
- The Shooting (1967, Monte Hellman)
- The Hit (1984, Stephen Frears)
- No Country for Old Men (2007, Coen Brothers)
- The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2004, Tommy Lee Jones)
- Deadlock (1970, Roland Klick)
- Badlands (1973, Terrence Malick)
I feel perfectly comfortable calling it one of the best westerns I’ve seen and I’ve seen more than a hundred of them. Great movie and Warren Oates is amazing as usual.
Interesting lineup of acclaimed directors in the main competition. I’m mostly surprised to see Miike there, with his remake of Seppuku. I don’t know what miniscule chance he has to create outside the shadow of Kobayashi, but he’s there for a reason probably. Malick’s film is the obvious behemoth there, and with Robert DeNiro president of the jury, he stands a good chance for his first Palm D’Or. Both he and Nuri Bilge Ceylan have won Best Directors in the past, so I think it will be played out between the two of them
With Malick I usually come away with few things, simple wonderings
about meaning and the desire to transcend. But there is something here
worth talking about, a wondering that I believe matters. It is about
the great lie upon which we have placed all our hopes and has fed us
only suffering. It includes god but goes beyond, way beyond.
Those of us in the West trace it back to Descartes, the foundation of
what we call our Enlightenment. The title of the 1641 book where he
tells us that we are because we think translates as “Meditations
touching the first philosophy in which the existence of God and the
distinction between the body and soul are demonstrated”. This alone
reveals it; a distinction between body and soul, that has produced a
culture that considers everything a commodity, that revolves around
pleasing the needs of one or the other. And about us perceiving things
as what we are in need of and by our ideas of them.
The imaginary conundrum of duality goes way back, it’s what the film
starts with. A distinction between the way of nature and the way of
grace, again body and soul. Implying there is no grace in the first and
that a way of grace cannot be found in what we readily observe around
us, in how the world simply presents itself to us (which includes our
body and what sensations appear in it – either considered impure or to
satiate), but needs to be separately thought by us. The nuns told us;
about a world devised from nothing in the creator’s own good time, and
us separately placed in it, even created in a separate day from the
rest of creation, to atone for an original sin.
This is the worldview we are born into. A world itself as punishment,
which we are called to subdue to our satisfaction. Modern science has
done little to improve it, only now we explain away in order to subdue
and have replaced one creation myth with another.
Now both ways created by Malick, so that we can see where the lie
begins. The creation of creation, from the Bing Bang onwards, rendered
with overblown Wagnerian crescendos like what Kubrick did 40 years ago.
Malick shows us here that mercy exists among the predators. And then us
separately born into creation. The first words uttered by the infant
are “it’s mine”, the first words uttered by the father a lesson to his
young son about the imaginary line that separates his garden from the
neighbor’s and never to cross it.
In the second half of the film we get a few codas on what destructive
illusions have evolved from these notions. How we should strive to
obtain and subdue until satisfied, and to admit otherwise is weakness.
And how the pursuit never satisfies the hunger, but only leads us to
imagine a lacking in what we already have. And how we desperately cling
to things, things felt as either ours or to be made ours, even as we
know that they will come to pass.
But at the absence of the fatherly authority, we see how the kids
become an aimless mob. And how the violence trickled inside the kid,
eventually poisons and erupts.
Over the course of all this, we get Malick’s tricly soliloquy that has
always been the easiest to attack. “Was I false to you?”, “forgive us”,
“where have you gone?”. It’s not my favourite aspect of his work, but I
truly believe he’s a feather-brained bard and deeply means it.
The movie is worth it then because it goes beyond the simple poetry and
shows the mechanisms that on the top level make these people wax
lyrical. In Red Line it was the war and men yanked from life to die in
it, here it’s a lot more complex in how it deals with lost innocence.
We see how these people are and then we go back and see how they
became.
What visual splendor I will keep from the film is most of it images of
a sleepy suburbia, of quiet evenings out in porches. The rest is in the
finale. It’s not so much about closure that restores balance, but a
process of emptying out and letting go of what has poisoned the soul.
So that upon transcending the illusions of duality, remains only the
unbound sentience of the world giving itself back to us.
Pitt is terrific in this, in ways he hasn’t been before (compare to Ben
Button that strived for a similar somber effect). But what truly stands
out is the boy and the look of grief piling inside.
Malick tells us about his parents fighting inside of him, this is the
great war in nature. Who of the two to become, without betraying the
other? The one who loved harshly because he wanted his kids to have, or
the one who loved tenderly but did nothing to alleviate the suffering
in her own home.
So these are the two natures, as falsely taught to us by the ‘nuns’.
The father as embodiment of the “nature that only wants to please
itself”, but that nature is a false nature. Our false notion of a self
that expects to be pleased projecting itself upon the world. A tree
doesn’t please itself when it’s watered, it takes only what it must to
grow into what it has potential to be.
I think the film perfectly shows this as the baby discovers the world.
“It’s mine” is not something it was born with, but something learned. A
tree doesn’t learn to crave water, it already knows what it must reach
for.
And the mother’s way of grace that stoically accepts, also false
because it accepts without complaint the injury of the innocent. The
mother allows by her passive stance both her children and her husband
to remain unhappy.
So, who to be eventually, as grown men who have lived so long with
grieves that are not ours?
Zen Buddhism hints at this and goes beyond, with its koan of koans (the
enigmatic phrase that doesn’t have an apparent answer yet demands one
by the initiate, meant to tie his tongues in silent meditation); Zen
Master Huìnéng asks, “Without thinking of good or evil, show me your
original face before your mother and father were born”.
Which is way of saying that we were here before we remember being here (literally), before the first memories
imprinted us with fatherly sins (“tell me something that I don’t
remember”, as one of the sons asks). So we were born
empty-to-be-filled, ‘capax’ in Latin meaning a void that anticipates
its fulfillment (like a mug that has the capacity for only-so-much).
We were just filled with the wrong things.
9
The film that Jacques Rivette writing for Cahiers described as “a pure article of sex and Technicolor”. Yes, from afar this is the Hollywood dream of cinema, a dream of murder and lust; the promise of sexual danger (here personified by a sultry Marilyn Monroe dripping with the wet fantasy we invest her), the magical backdrops in which to escape, the immoral cruelties of noir eventually set straight.
But, but, so much more, while building on precisely the immaculate surface that Hollywood was propped against. The false likeness of that dream.
Hathaway may had been a journeyman for most of his career, here though he exhibits an intuitive propensity for where cinema would take these stories, and how later filmmakers would invest them with collective nightmares of the mind.
The opening image is a dead giveaway; a man (the hapless schmuck as we soon find out) standing before the vastness of the Niagara falls, as he wonders what instinct or fate brought him there. And a little later it’s the newlyweds exchanging kisses on the deck of a tour boat, which Hathaway cuts with the imposing enormity of the falling waters.
More portents and omens; a bell ringing from the distance fateful news of the dream coming true. Ringing again later as reminder of the dream having turned to nightmare. Faces obscuring themselves in the dark, usually by closing blinds. The first we see of Marilyn she is the sexed-up movie doll, with red lipstick and flowing blonde hair. The second time, she is the silhouette of a woman sitting on a bed, literally without face, with her features bathed in shadow.
Better yet, the wonderful folding. One couple, the happy-go-lucky newlywed on their honeymoon, coming to live in the bungalow where the romance of the other couple withers away in bickering and frustration. A room ‘intended for them’! One woman becoming seduced by the image of the other, the mischievous femme fatale. We see her speak on the same phone as the other did earlier, looking on the same mirror (where the second time we can see in a little corner the reflection of the broken man). And of course, this man assuming the identity of another, grasping at the chance to start life anew.
And the visitation upon all the various schemes by the karmic forces of noir. Here it’s twofold the stage of that visitation, both high places. One is a bell tower, the manmade structure in which the poor schmuck who could’ve been free to start life anew returns and is literally locked in by desire! The other is, of course, the Falls, where all things flow to the inevitable end that restores balance.
We return at the Falls in the end, this time charged with meanings. About life as the quiet river that inadvertently gives way to the rapids and the violent fall (“which nothing can stop”), about love as the same. And about cinema, as characters marvel from behind the blinds of the bungalow overlooking the falls, lit in colorful hues for the night and quite a spectacle.
All this is inconspicuous enough, that if we simply follow the story we may be inclined to think it’s another ordinary riffing on a Double Indemnity scheme. But if we follow the false likeness of that story, the reflected image?
This is where Vertigo begins, as studied composition to this early sketch. Miss this at your cost.
9
Rivette favourably mentions nexto Niagara, North to Alaska and Legend of the Lost, about John Wayne and Sophia Loren lost in the Sahara. Any opinions on these?
Frankly,. I don’t see much actual discussion going on there upon which to contribute, unless I am navigating the page wrong and there’s a way to comment on reviews. I thought you meant here on the forum.
This is one of the tautest things I’ve seen in a long while. It’s about secret service agents who leave no moral boundaries uncrossed in their effort to bring down the counterfeiter who killed their partner. They start out as tough-guy cops and become crooks, on the run from gangs and police. The whole law enforcement system is neither entirely corrupt nor properly lawful, just a big gambling house where every deal hinges on what you bring to the table. Law enforcement in a place where the law enforcement logo on the sides of police cars is actually written in quotations marks, as though meant ironically.
It’s a mean, violent thing, where life isn’t worth a damn and people are shot in the face no questions asked. In the 70’s, all this would’ve been cast as reflection of general social malaise and justified by it. But it’s the 80’s, the time of a culture so apathetically bland and desensitized in its short-lived opportunism and lack of ideals that so much casual violence without backdrop bewilders. It is a time when artists burn their paintings and devote their craft towards counterfeiting money. In place of original creation, the dutiful reproduction of commodity.
So, even though we hear Reagan talking from a TV in the beginning promising new plans for the future (soon to turn sour), nothing seems planned in this world. The only promise of order in this impromptu mess, is that “the stars are god’s eyes” as a girl ruminates looking out at the night. The hope that at least someone is still watching over the sorry affair.
Originally this was one of the most intriguing inventions of film noir. A world seemingly lawless and left to our cruel whims, where a man can make the big time overnight, yet over the course of these films we came to surmise unseen forces looking over the world. The beauty of the thing was that the strident moral warning doubletimed as karmic revelation; that these forces that govern us come from inside, and it’s us digging the pitfalls.
Here we see quite transparently how the protagonists ruin their lives. The ones who get out of it are the ones who quietly endured and assisted this, the two girlfriends. A dubious message at best.
What truly stands out though is the ride itself. Through a Los Angeles of oil derricks, strip joints and Venice beach-houses, an architecture so enthralling to me in its utter blandless that looks like a world of the near-future only yesterday erected from the desert. Smog sunsets, electric cityscapes by night. Michael Mann would take it from here.
Any other films like this Mubi?
I’m strangely drawn to 80’s cop stuff with cool nightscapes and electronic beats in the soundtrack. It gives me a strange watching-latenight-TV-in-the-summer-with-the-windows-open feel.
I tend to advise chronological starts, but only if you’re going to commit for the long run.
Andrei Tarkovsky IVAN’S CHILDHOOD (he gets progressively more difficult)
Jean-Pierre Melville LE SAMOURAI
John Cassavettes KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE
John Huston FAT CITY
Jacques Tati VACANCES
David Lean LAWRENCE OF ARABIA
Billy Wilder SUNSET BLVD
Werner Herzog FITZCARRALDO
Buster Keaton SHERLOCK JR
Michelangelo Antonioni ZABRISKIE POINT (an easier film than the rest perhaps)
I’m a big fan of 00’s Mann, and just so happens that Collateral is my favorite of his work. It’s precisely this thing I’m looking for, where it’s all about the city scape. Any more like it?
Also a big fan of Fukasaku, and have enjoyed the majority of his yakuza output. Ditto Thief, an excellent movie which perhaps surpasses this in thickness of mood.
To narrow this down a bit, I was initially looking for latenight wanderings around the big city (I always am, in fact). Having just seen this however, I find myself craving more of this particular thing; something with a cheesy synth score as counterpoint to all the nihilism, with a sense of place that reaches out.
So yeah, Melville did some great stuff in his day. Un Flic is my favorite of those. But more clinical than I’m currently in the mood for. King of New York sounds like it might be just the thing, though I remember disliking it upon a first viewing years ago.
Colors was actually okay for about an hour, then it kind of fizzled out in so much cliche. I’ll look into Menace II Society (though I imagine the ideal thing I’m looking for with a cheesy synth score).
I’m already a fan of Thief, will look into the others.
And I also feel perversely, shamefully compelled to check out the Breathless remake with Richard Gere. That, and Internal Affairs again with Gere was brought to my attention in another forum.
Yeah, the Breathless remake was surprisingly great, miles better than the Godard film. And possibly the best of these journeys through LA that I’ve been looking into.
Meanwhile on the same subject, Kitano failed me with Brother. A so so film. The Limey on the other hand was fine.
A Crash Course In Film (Help Needed) almost 3 years ago
To be honest with you, I think a crash course in cinema would be worse than no course at all, incomplete superficial knowledge is not always a good thing. Welles is not just Citizen Kane, Renoir is not just Le Regle de Jue, and Kurosawa is not just Seven Samurai. Just let yourself be immersed in all the great movies and great directors out there, in all the different styles genres and national schools of cinema, it’ll take years before you can even say you’ve scratched the surface but you should be doing this because you love movies not because you wanna tick boxes towards cultural enlightenment. Find your niche and work from there.
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Nicholas Ray almost 3 years ago
Typical Godard hyperbole for the sake of provocation it would seem but yes, Nicholas Ray was a damn good director. My favourite of his films is THE SAVAGE INNOCENTS.
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Is Ravenous the best film about cannibals ever made? almost 3 years ago
No, that would be the indomitable CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST.
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If Nolan is ________, then Aronofsky is ________ over 2 years ago
If Nolan is Howard Hawks, then Arronofsky is Fritz Lang.
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Is being a prolific Director an impediment to critical acclaim? over 2 years ago
Depends how you define critical acclaim and how readily you much of a damn you give about the collective subjectivity that defines the film establishment. Takashi Miike will never be a pantheon director for example. His films do tend to suffer from hasty shooting schedules and the slashed budgets that accompany Japanese coproductions. It shows in the hard-edged video look of his films. Yet, he’s made consistently great movies by the dozen and if he’s become a synonym with a specific type of filmmaking (madcap gore OTT craziness) that says more about the kind of film Western audiences will gobble down than the kind of film Takashi Miike can do well.
In the end I think it’s a combination of quality and quantity. Bergman and Kurosawa were prolific but many of the films they made were great.
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Favorite auteurs missing from the profile selection box. over 2 years ago
Masaki Kobayashi
Masahiro Shinoda
Kenji Misumi
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Last movie you saw and rate it over 2 years ago
His Girl Friday 5/10
It has a lot to admire but god, what an obnoxious headache of a movie.
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Best movies filmed in the desert about 2 years ago
I’m going to assume we’re not talking desert in climate terms but the aesthetic qualities of vast expanses of arid landscape, which is actually one of my favourite settings for a movie of any kind, it just seems to add a little extra something magical, possibly something with an existential quality because deserts are places that have exhausted their future so that we begin to see things happen there stripped of their worldly context.
I like the stark black and white contrasts between clear skies and dark walls of rock in ‘outdoors’ film noir.
- Border Incident (1949, Anthony Mann) with DP Alton’s help, Mann captures images of sizzling latenight desert ambiance, when the rocks crack back the heat of the day and the atmosphere is mysterious and suggestive
- Yellow Sky (1948, William Wellman) a subpar movie mostly because one-note Gregory Peck is cast in a role that screams for Bob Mitchum, but the outlaws’ trek through the salty flats in the first half is amazing.
- Blood on the Moon (1948, Robert Wise)
- High Sierra (1941, Raoul Walsh)
and then you have the desert of the western movie, spaghetti or otherwise, with cactii or without them, usually a character all by itself. Most memorable desert westerns for me include:
- El Topo (1970, Alejandro Jodorowsky)
- Once Upon a Time in the West (1968, Sergio Leone)
- Sentenza di Morte (1968, Mario Lanfranchi)
- Vera Cruz (1954, Robert Aldrich)
- Comanche Station (1960, Budd Boetticher)
- The Hellbenders (1967, Sergio Corbucci)
- The Hired Hand (1971, Peter Fonda)
Finally, my favourite of them all, the scorched dusty arid lands that stretch in the closed space between the western and gritnik crime cinema, a little above or below or across the Mexico border, faces are sweaty, you can taste the dust in your mouth, and the conclusions are usually bleak.
- Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974, Sam Peckinpah)
- The Shooting (1967, Monte Hellman)
- The Hit (1984, Stephen Frears)
- No Country for Old Men (2007, Coen Brothers)
- The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2004, Tommy Lee Jones)
- Deadlock (1970, Roland Klick)
- Badlands (1973, Terrence Malick)
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Which directors have you given the most 10/10's to? about 2 years ago
Three TENS
Sergio Leone, Orson Welles, Masaki Kobayashi, Robert Altman, Kenji Misumi
Two TENS
Hideo Gosha, Sam Peckinpah, John Huston, Kinji Fukasaku, Ingmar Bergman
That is all. I’m a hardass with my tens.
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The Hired Hand--an Obscure Western That Shouldn't Be about 2 years ago
I feel perfectly comfortable calling it one of the best westerns I’ve seen and I’ve seen more than a hundred of them. Great movie and Warren Oates is amazing as usual.
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Battles Without honor and humanity about 2 years ago
Big fan here, as with all the other Fukasaku movies from the late 60’s to the mid 70’s.
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Cannes 2011 Lineup announced about 1 year ago
Interesting lineup of acclaimed directors in the main competition. I’m mostly surprised to see Miike there, with his remake of Seppuku. I don’t know what miniscule chance he has to create outside the shadow of Kobayashi, but he’s there for a reason probably. Malick’s film is the obvious behemoth there, and with Robert DeNiro president of the jury, he stands a good chance for his first Palm D’Or. Both he and Nuri Bilge Ceylan have won Best Directors in the past, so I think it will be played out between the two of them
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art house films masquerading as mainstream flicks about 1 year ago
Miami Vice and Collateral.
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Top 5 De Palma's about 1 year ago
1. Obsession
2. Dressed to Kill
3. Femme Fatale
4. Mission to Mars
5. Carrie
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The Good The Bad and The Weird about 1 year ago
Who says Asians can’t do spectacle as ditzy as Hollywood?
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Thoughts on Tree of Life 11 months ago
With Malick I usually come away with few things, simple wonderings
about meaning and the desire to transcend. But there is something here
worth talking about, a wondering that I believe matters. It is about
the great lie upon which we have placed all our hopes and has fed us
only suffering. It includes god but goes beyond, way beyond.
Those of us in the West trace it back to Descartes, the foundation of
what we call our Enlightenment. The title of the 1641 book where he
tells us that we are because we think translates as “Meditations
touching the first philosophy in which the existence of God and the
distinction between the body and soul are demonstrated”. This alone
reveals it; a distinction between body and soul, that has produced a
culture that considers everything a commodity, that revolves around
pleasing the needs of one or the other. And about us perceiving things
as what we are in need of and by our ideas of them.
The imaginary conundrum of duality goes way back, it’s what the film
starts with. A distinction between the way of nature and the way of
grace, again body and soul. Implying there is no grace in the first and
that a way of grace cannot be found in what we readily observe around
us, in how the world simply presents itself to us (which includes our
body and what sensations appear in it – either considered impure or to
satiate), but needs to be separately thought by us. The nuns told us;
about a world devised from nothing in the creator’s own good time, and
us separately placed in it, even created in a separate day from the
rest of creation, to atone for an original sin.
This is the worldview we are born into. A world itself as punishment,
which we are called to subdue to our satisfaction. Modern science has
done little to improve it, only now we explain away in order to subdue
and have replaced one creation myth with another.
Now both ways created by Malick, so that we can see where the lie
begins. The creation of creation, from the Bing Bang onwards, rendered
with overblown Wagnerian crescendos like what Kubrick did 40 years ago.
Malick shows us here that mercy exists among the predators. And then us
separately born into creation. The first words uttered by the infant
are “it’s mine”, the first words uttered by the father a lesson to his
young son about the imaginary line that separates his garden from the
neighbor’s and never to cross it.
In the second half of the film we get a few codas on what destructive
illusions have evolved from these notions. How we should strive to
obtain and subdue until satisfied, and to admit otherwise is weakness.
And how the pursuit never satisfies the hunger, but only leads us to
imagine a lacking in what we already have. And how we desperately cling
to things, things felt as either ours or to be made ours, even as we
know that they will come to pass.
But at the absence of the fatherly authority, we see how the kids
become an aimless mob. And how the violence trickled inside the kid,
eventually poisons and erupts.
Over the course of all this, we get Malick’s tricly soliloquy that has
always been the easiest to attack. “Was I false to you?”, “forgive us”,
“where have you gone?”. It’s not my favourite aspect of his work, but I
truly believe he’s a feather-brained bard and deeply means it.
The movie is worth it then because it goes beyond the simple poetry and
shows the mechanisms that on the top level make these people wax
lyrical. In Red Line it was the war and men yanked from life to die in
it, here it’s a lot more complex in how it deals with lost innocence.
We see how these people are and then we go back and see how they
became.
What visual splendor I will keep from the film is most of it images of
a sleepy suburbia, of quiet evenings out in porches. The rest is in the
finale. It’s not so much about closure that restores balance, but a
process of emptying out and letting go of what has poisoned the soul.
So that upon transcending the illusions of duality, remains only the
unbound sentience of the world giving itself back to us.
Pitt is terrific in this, in ways he hasn’t been before (compare to Ben
Button that strived for a similar somber effect). But what truly stands
out is the boy and the look of grief piling inside.
Malick tells us about his parents fighting inside of him, this is the
great war in nature. Who of the two to become, without betraying the
other? The one who loved harshly because he wanted his kids to have, or
the one who loved tenderly but did nothing to alleviate the suffering
in her own home.
So these are the two natures, as falsely taught to us by the ‘nuns’.
The father as embodiment of the “nature that only wants to please
itself”, but that nature is a false nature. Our false notion of a self
that expects to be pleased projecting itself upon the world. A tree
doesn’t please itself when it’s watered, it takes only what it must to
grow into what it has potential to be.
I think the film perfectly shows this as the baby discovers the world.
“It’s mine” is not something it was born with, but something learned. A
tree doesn’t learn to crave water, it already knows what it must reach
for.
And the mother’s way of grace that stoically accepts, also false
because it accepts without complaint the injury of the innocent. The
mother allows by her passive stance both her children and her husband
to remain unhappy.
So, who to be eventually, as grown men who have lived so long with
grieves that are not ours?
Zen Buddhism hints at this and goes beyond, with its koan of koans (the
enigmatic phrase that doesn’t have an apparent answer yet demands one
by the initiate, meant to tie his tongues in silent meditation); Zen
Master Huìnéng asks, “Without thinking of good or evil, show me your
original face before your mother and father were born”.
Which is way of saying that we were here before we remember being here (literally), before the first memories
imprinted us with fatherly sins (“tell me something that I don’t
remember”, as one of the sons asks). So we were born
empty-to-be-filled, ‘capax’ in Latin meaning a void that anticipates
its fulfillment (like a mug that has the capacity for only-so-much).
We were just filled with the wrong things.
9
Thoughts Mubi?
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Henry Hathaway's Niagara (1953) 11 months ago
The film that Jacques Rivette writing for Cahiers described as “a pure article of sex and Technicolor”. Yes, from afar this is the Hollywood dream of cinema, a dream of murder and lust; the promise of sexual danger (here personified by a sultry Marilyn Monroe dripping with the wet fantasy we invest her), the magical backdrops in which to escape, the immoral cruelties of noir eventually set straight.
But, but, so much more, while building on precisely the immaculate surface that Hollywood was propped against. The false likeness of that dream.
Hathaway may had been a journeyman for most of his career, here though he exhibits an intuitive propensity for where cinema would take these stories, and how later filmmakers would invest them with collective nightmares of the mind.
The opening image is a dead giveaway; a man (the hapless schmuck as we soon find out) standing before the vastness of the Niagara falls, as he wonders what instinct or fate brought him there. And a little later it’s the newlyweds exchanging kisses on the deck of a tour boat, which Hathaway cuts with the imposing enormity of the falling waters.
More portents and omens; a bell ringing from the distance fateful news of the dream coming true. Ringing again later as reminder of the dream having turned to nightmare. Faces obscuring themselves in the dark, usually by closing blinds. The first we see of Marilyn she is the sexed-up movie doll, with red lipstick and flowing blonde hair. The second time, she is the silhouette of a woman sitting on a bed, literally without face, with her features bathed in shadow.
Better yet, the wonderful folding. One couple, the happy-go-lucky newlywed on their honeymoon, coming to live in the bungalow where the romance of the other couple withers away in bickering and frustration. A room ‘intended for them’! One woman becoming seduced by the image of the other, the mischievous femme fatale. We see her speak on the same phone as the other did earlier, looking on the same mirror (where the second time we can see in a little corner the reflection of the broken man). And of course, this man assuming the identity of another, grasping at the chance to start life anew.
And the visitation upon all the various schemes by the karmic forces of noir. Here it’s twofold the stage of that visitation, both high places. One is a bell tower, the manmade structure in which the poor schmuck who could’ve been free to start life anew returns and is literally locked in by desire! The other is, of course, the Falls, where all things flow to the inevitable end that restores balance.
We return at the Falls in the end, this time charged with meanings. About life as the quiet river that inadvertently gives way to the rapids and the violent fall (“which nothing can stop”), about love as the same. And about cinema, as characters marvel from behind the blinds of the bungalow overlooking the falls, lit in colorful hues for the night and quite a spectacle.
All this is inconspicuous enough, that if we simply follow the story we may be inclined to think it’s another ordinary riffing on a Double Indemnity scheme. But if we follow the false likeness of that story, the reflected image?
This is where Vertigo begins, as studied composition to this early sketch. Miss this at your cost.
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Thoughts Mubi?
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Henry Hathaway's Niagara (1953) 11 months ago
Not familiar with BAM I must say.
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If You Met Godard, Would He Approve of Your Taste in Films? 11 months ago
Probably not. But then I’d tell him what I think of his Nouvelle Vague and it’d be tie.
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Henry Hathaway's Niagara (1953) 11 months ago
Rivette favourably mentions nexto Niagara, North to Alaska and Legend of the Lost, about John Wayne and Sophia Loren lost in the Sahara. Any opinions on these?
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Thoughts on Tree of Life 11 months ago
Point well taken. I’m relatively new here, and not familiar with the board etiquette. I will keep your advice in mind for the future.
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Thoughts on Tree of Life 11 months ago
Frankly,. I don’t see much actual discussion going on there upon which to contribute, unless I am navigating the page wrong and there’s a way to comment on reviews. I thought you meant here on the forum.
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To Live and Die in LA (1985) 11 months ago
This is one of the tautest things I’ve seen in a long while. It’s about secret service agents who leave no moral boundaries uncrossed in their effort to bring down the counterfeiter who killed their partner. They start out as tough-guy cops and become crooks, on the run from gangs and police. The whole law enforcement system is neither entirely corrupt nor properly lawful, just a big gambling house where every deal hinges on what you bring to the table. Law enforcement in a place where the law enforcement logo on the sides of police cars is actually written in quotations marks, as though meant ironically.
It’s a mean, violent thing, where life isn’t worth a damn and people are shot in the face no questions asked. In the 70’s, all this would’ve been cast as reflection of general social malaise and justified by it. But it’s the 80’s, the time of a culture so apathetically bland and desensitized in its short-lived opportunism and lack of ideals that so much casual violence without backdrop bewilders. It is a time when artists burn their paintings and devote their craft towards counterfeiting money. In place of original creation, the dutiful reproduction of commodity.
So, even though we hear Reagan talking from a TV in the beginning promising new plans for the future (soon to turn sour), nothing seems planned in this world. The only promise of order in this impromptu mess, is that “the stars are god’s eyes” as a girl ruminates looking out at the night. The hope that at least someone is still watching over the sorry affair.
Originally this was one of the most intriguing inventions of film noir. A world seemingly lawless and left to our cruel whims, where a man can make the big time overnight, yet over the course of these films we came to surmise unseen forces looking over the world. The beauty of the thing was that the strident moral warning doubletimed as karmic revelation; that these forces that govern us come from inside, and it’s us digging the pitfalls.
Here we see quite transparently how the protagonists ruin their lives. The ones who get out of it are the ones who quietly endured and assisted this, the two girlfriends. A dubious message at best.
What truly stands out though is the ride itself. Through a Los Angeles of oil derricks, strip joints and Venice beach-houses, an architecture so enthralling to me in its utter blandless that looks like a world of the near-future only yesterday erected from the desert. Smog sunsets, electric cityscapes by night. Michael Mann would take it from here.
Any other films like this Mubi?
I’m strangely drawn to 80’s cop stuff with cool nightscapes and electronic beats in the soundtrack. It gives me a strange watching-latenight-TV-in-the-summer-with-the-windows-open feel.
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Director Starting Points! 11 months ago
I tend to advise chronological starts, but only if you’re going to commit for the long run.
Andrei Tarkovsky IVAN’S CHILDHOOD (he gets progressively more difficult)
Jean-Pierre Melville LE SAMOURAI
John Cassavettes KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE
John Huston FAT CITY
Jacques Tati VACANCES
David Lean LAWRENCE OF ARABIA
Billy Wilder SUNSET BLVD
Werner Herzog FITZCARRALDO
Buster Keaton SHERLOCK JR
Michelangelo Antonioni ZABRISKIE POINT (an easier film than the rest perhaps)
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To Live and Die in LA (1985) 11 months ago
I’m a big fan of 00’s Mann, and just so happens that Collateral is my favorite of his work. It’s precisely this thing I’m looking for, where it’s all about the city scape. Any more like it?
Also a big fan of Fukasaku, and have enjoyed the majority of his yakuza output. Ditto Thief, an excellent movie which perhaps surpasses this in thickness of mood.
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To Live and Die in LA (1985) 11 months ago
I looked into Frankenheimer’s 52-Pickup, again about the seedier side of LA. What’s the word out on it?
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To Live and Die in LA (1985) 11 months ago
To narrow this down a bit, I was initially looking for latenight wanderings around the big city (I always am, in fact). Having just seen this however, I find myself craving more of this particular thing; something with a cheesy synth score as counterpoint to all the nihilism, with a sense of place that reaches out.
So yeah, Melville did some great stuff in his day. Un Flic is my favorite of those. But more clinical than I’m currently in the mood for. King of New York sounds like it might be just the thing, though I remember disliking it upon a first viewing years ago.
I wonder about LA Takedown and Colors.
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To Live and Die in LA (1985) 11 months ago
Colors was actually okay for about an hour, then it kind of fizzled out in so much cliche. I’ll look into Menace II Society (though I imagine the ideal thing I’m looking for with a cheesy synth score).
Any others?
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To Live and Die in LA (1985) 11 months ago
I’m already a fan of Thief, will look into the others.
And I also feel perversely, shamefully compelled to check out the Breathless remake with Richard Gere. That, and Internal Affairs again with Gere was brought to my attention in another forum.
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To Live and Die in LA (1985) 11 months ago
Yeah, the Breathless remake was surprisingly great, miles better than the Godard film. And possibly the best of these journeys through LA that I’ve been looking into.
Meanwhile on the same subject, Kitano failed me with Brother. A so so film. The Limey on the other hand was fine.
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