Best filmmaker of his generation?

Ross Douthat makes a strong case for the gentleman pictured at left.

Mr. Picasso, meet Howard Armstrong. . .

Louie Bluie (Dir. Terry Zwigoff, 1985)

Smile

Modern Times (dir. Charlie Chaplin, 1936)

Beyond Belief

The story of two 9/11 widows planting seeds of hope among the widows of Afghanistan. . .




via Nicholas Kristof

Where the grapes of wrath are stored

"I think any young man or any man who isn't angry at one time or another is a waste of time. No, no. Anger is a symbol of thought and evaluation and reaction: without it what have we got?"

- John Steinbeck

Recently I've been captured anew by John Ford's 1940 film adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath. If the Hollywood studio system needed any justification, the fact that it could produce a motion picture like this one is justification enough. Much credit goes to 20th Century Fox Studios chief Darryl Zanuck. Even though Zanuck was an anti-labor Republican he had the artistic integrity to let Ford and screenwriter Nunnally Johnson make a film that was true to the spirit and sensibilities of the novel. It's actually astonishing that a movie this controversial and overtly political emerged at that time.

Steinbeck was clearly a man of the left, though he took flak from some for not being radical enough. By all accounts he had nothing but good things to say about Hollywood's treatment of his work. When watching the movie later on in the 50s he remarked that it made him believe in the book all over again. Ford's politics were a complicated mix of conservative and liberal, but he always had a soft spot for the underdog and the common folk. If I had to label Ford I'd call him a bleeding-heart conservative.

Of course, some of the content of the novel was too shocking to put on film, and the economic and political messages were somewhat watered down. Not only that, the arc of the novel -- ending on a pessimistic note -- was turned around to give the movie version a more upbeat (Hollywood?) ending. This is forgiveable though, since it allowed Ma Joad -- played memorably by Jane Darwell -- to deliver one of the great uplifting closing lines in American cinema history. "We'll go on forever, Pa, 'cause we're the people!" It gives me goose bumps every time.

Even with some of the hard edges smoothed off Steinbeck's prose, the movie has a visceral power thanks to the stellar acting and Ford's impeccable direction. The Grapes of Wrath unfolds as one pitch-perfect scene after another. There's nary a false step. Henry Fonda's Tom Joad is one of a handful of big-screen performances worthy of the adjective iconic. Darwell won a well-deserved Oscar as the matriarch who keeps the family moving forward on their exodus to a hoped-for promised land. Her scenes with Fonda are the dramatic and spiritual center of the film. John Carradine, as disillusioned ex-preacher John Casy, almost manages to upstage Fonda with his laconic delivery and eccentric mannerisms. Some of the finest character actors of Hollywood's "Golden Age" show up in smaller roles e.g., Charley Grapewin and Ford favorite Ward Bond.

What the acting and directing couldn't do to adequately convey Steinbeck's lacerating vision of human struggle against injustice was accomplished through Gregg Toland's cinematography. Toland would achieve legendary status a year later by shooting a little film called Citizen Kane, but his work here is no less impressive. He and Ford achieve a stark visual style that often conveys more than words would have been able to do. In addition, they modeled the film's look on the Depression-era photos of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange which gives it a documentary-like quality. What the Italian neorealists would do after the war, Ford and Toland were doing in 1939.

Here are two examples of Lange's photography. . .





And some stills from the film. . .







Tom Joad is a fascinating protagonist. If anything, Fonda's characterization makes him more memorable in the movie. When we first meet Tom he seems like a conventional angry young man. He's a wiseacre with a chip on his shoulder and not very likeable. He's more like the solipsistic characters later glamorized by James Dean than a humanitarian crusader. But the example of Casy's Christlike sacrifice, as well as a growing power of observation, transforms Tom into a rebel with a cause. By the time of his famous farewell to Ma he's come to see his destiny as bound up with the downtrodden everywhere. The story of the Joad family is a microcosm of the larger American story. It's a story of change and movement -- movements of adventurers, settlers and migrants looking for a better life. The Grapes of Wrath celebrates some of the people who paid the price on the road of progress, and invites us to channel the spirit of Tom Joad in the continuing struggle for liberty and justice for all.

Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build - I'll be there, too.

Grief and Longfellow

Matt Fowler, the character played by Tom Wilkinson, is playing cards with his war buddies for the first time since burying his son. Character actor W. Clapham Murray, in a magnificent performance that moves me every time I watch it, captures the moment with some lines from the Longfellow poem "My Lost Youth".



In the Bedroom (2001, dir. Todd Field)

Loneliness

Collateral (2004, dir. Michael Mann)

From Brooklyn to "John Ford country"

If someone asked me which filmmakers they should study to understand what America is all about I would answer John Ford, Clint Eastwood, and Spike Lee. Lee may seem an odd choice considering almost all his movies take place in Brooklyn, and a relatively thin slice of Brooklyn at that. Just as Ford did with his western stories, Lee's Brooklyn tales manage to tell a wider American story. In his hands Bed-Stuy or Bensonhurst becomes a microcosm of us all. Lee (and Ford and Eastwood) "get" both the glory and the shame of the American experience. I would have said all that even before I watched Clockers last night, Lee's 1995 film about street-level drug dealers in the Brooklyn projects. This scene -- accompanied by Terence Blanchard's elegiac cue -- blew me away with its evocation of John Ford and the wide open possibilities of this big beautiful country.



Happy Fourth of July everyone!

Are you ready for some football?

I mean the other football. The one we Yanks call soccer. I admit it, I'm psyched about the World Cup -- a month-long extravaganza of sport, nationalism and cheesy pop anthems. It's the world's favorite sport played every four years on the world's biggest stage. To try and get you in the mood here's the clever Nike Write the Future ad starring Didier Drogba (Ivory Coast), Wayne Rooney (England) & Cristiano Ronaldo (Portugal), along with a few of their friends. It was directed by the talented Alejandro González Iñárritu (21 Grams, Babel).

James Cameron on BP's "spillcam"

Director James Cameron -- who knows something about submersible movie making -- commenting on BP's underwater film project:

"The government really needs to have its own independent ability to go down there and image the site, survey the site and do its own investigation and monitor it. Because if you’re not monitoring it independently, you’re asking the perpetrator to give you the video of the crime scene."

via Amy Davidson

Go, Roger, go!

Roger Ebert takes out the garbage:

Some of these people make my skin crawl. The characters of "Sex and the City 2" are flyweight bubbleheads living in a world which rarely requires three sentences in a row. Their defining quality is consuming things. They gobble food, fashion, houses, husbands, children, vitamins and freebies. They must plan their wardrobes on the phone, so often do they appear in different basic colors, like the plugs you pound into a Playskool workbench.

And that's just the first paragraph. He's still the best.

Artisans at work

Warning: this is a thinly veiled advertisement for a product that's mediocre but gets a lot of mileage out of its famous name. But it's also a beautifully done short film about a group of workers with a far healthier approach to work than the Chinese workers I wrote about yesterday. Why do these guys take joy in their work when so many others don't? I have some ideas. . .

UP THERE from The Ritual Project on Vimeo.

Woody's world

Woody Allen has churned out a lot of schlock in recent years but he's still one of the most interesting filmmakers out there. Even if he never matches early perfect films like Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanors he's earned his spot in the pantheon of great American artists. One of the things that makes his best work so compelling is the serious way he faces up to the human condition. He usually does it by way of trenchant comedy, but it's no less serious for eliciting laughter more often than tears. No existential compromise for Allen. Either there's a God who gives meaning to life with its attendant happiness and suffering or this is all a cruel joke.

Recently Allen was interviewed by Rev. Robert Lauder in the Catholic magazine Commonweal. Lauder asks astute questions and Allen is his typical self. Here's one illuminating exchange.

RL: At one point in Hannah and Her Sisters, your character, Mickey, is very disillusioned. He is thinking about becoming a Catholic and he sees Duck Soup. He seems to think, “Maybe in a world where there are the Marx Brothers and humor, maybe there is a God. Who knows.” And maybe Mickey can live with that. Am I interpreting this correctly?

WA: No. I think it should be interpreted to mean that there are these oases, and life is horrible, but it is not relentlessly black from wire to wire. You can sit down and hear a Mozart symphony, or you can watch the Marx Brothers, and this will give you a pleasant escape for a while. And that is about the best that you can do…. I feel that one can come up with all these rationalizations and seemingly astute observations, but I think I said it well at the end of Deconstructing Harry: we all know the same truth; our lives consist of how we choose to distort it, and that’s it. Everybody knows how awful the world is and what a terrible situation it is and each person distorts it in a certain way that enables him to get through. Some people distort it with religious things. Some people distort it with sports, with money, with love, with art, and they all have their own nonsense about what makes it meaningful, and all but nothing makes it meaningful. These things definitely serve a certain function, but in the end they all fail to give life meaning and everyone goes to his grave in a meaningless way.

This is the scene where Mickey goes to see Duck Soup:

Final scene of Au hasard Balthazar (dir. Robert Bresson, 1966)

Kurosawa at 100

Wednesday was the 100th birthday of revered Japanese director Akira Kurosawa (1910 - 1998). The Daily Mirror has a collection of tributes from Kurosawa's fellow filmmakers -- one for each decade. Here they are:


1. Jaws and E.T. director Steven Spielberg once called Kurosawa "the pictorial Shakespeare of our time".

2. Despite only seeing one of Kurosawa's films, Seven Samurai, Italian director Federico Fellini described him as "the greatest living example of what an author of the cinema should be."

3. Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci said of the Japanese film-maker: "Kurosawa's movies and La Dolce Vita, Fellini, are the things that pushed me, sucked into being a film director."

4. American director Sidney Lumet said: "Kurosawa never affected me directly in terms of my own movie-making because I never would have presumed that I was capable of that perception and that vision."

5. American film-maker Sam Peckinpah said: "I'd like to be able to make a Western like Kurosawa makes Westerns."

6. Swedish director Ingmar Bergman said of Kurosawa: "Now I want to make it plain that The Virgin Spring must be regarded as an aberration. It's touristic, a lousy imitation of Kurosawa."

7. Martin Scorsese said of Kurasawa: "His influence on filmmakers throughout the entire world is so profound as to be almost incomparable."

8. Francis Ford Coppola paid his own tribute, saying: "One thing that distinguishes Akira Kurosawa that he didn't make a masterpiece or two masterpieces, he made, you know, eight masterpieces."

9. Chinese director John Woo said: "I love Kurosawa's movies, and I got so much inspiration from him. He is one of my idols and one of the great masters."

10. German director Werner Herzog said: "Of the film-makers with whom I feel some kinship Griffith, Murnau, Pudovkin, Bunuel and Kurosawa come to mind. Everything these men did has the touch of greatness."

There's something about a library . . .

This compendium of beautiful libraries reminded me of two favorite movie scenes that take place in a library. Here they are:



Se7en (dir. David Fincher, 1995)





Wings of Desire aka "Der Himmel über Berlin" (dir. Wim Wenders, 1987)

Revisiting the "long take"

A while back on Friday is for film I wrote about the long take, and included one of my favorite examples from Robert Altman's The Player.

Recently blogger Mike Le compiled the 20 Greatest Extended Takes In Movie History. Check it out. But be warned: if you're a film buff this is a huge potential time waster!

Wong Kar-wai's cinema of longing

This is a slightly reworked post from 2008. I like it because it includes two subjects I love: Wong Kar-wai and C.S. Lewis.

Three minutes into 2046—the 2004 film from Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai—the screen goes black and the words "all memories are traces of tears" appear. This will be the thread that runs through the film we're about to see. 2046 is a companion piece to Wong's masterpiece (I don't use that word lightly) from four years earlier—In the Mood for Love. He has been called—without hyperbole in my opinion—the world's most romantic filmmaker and lauded for the "visual splendour of his film aesthetic." And music, oh how he uses music! There are few films that made as big an impact on me as In the Mood for Love, which I first watched on the splendid Criterion DVD, and was my introduction to Wong's cinema of longing.

C.S. Lewis described his experience of being in a record shop and hearing Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries for the first time as "like a thunderbolt" because it conjured up "the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing" he felt as a 14-year-old boy. The Germans (a more naturally romantic people) have a great word for this—sehnsucht—which means something like wishfulness or longing. German artists such as Goethe, Beethoven and Brahms richly mined the vein of sehnsucht in their books and music. Wong's films are shot through with this sense of longing—longing for lost loves, lost eras (especially the 1960's Hong Kong of Wong's childhood), lost years, and the music, fashion and art of the past.

Another major obsession is time. 2046 is separated by title cards which announce the day/month/year or sometimes simply "one hour later" or "1000 hours later". It takes the viewer effortlessly between present, past and future exploring how time works on our memories. Chungking Express (1994), another favorite of mine, features a protagonist whose girlfriend dumps him on April 1. He obssessively collects tins of pineapple with the expiration date May 1 (his birthday), reasoning that if they haven't gotten back together by May 1 then their love has expired. A pile of empty tins serve as visual metaphor for his frustration.


2046 was four years in the making, and in my opinion, is a penultimate film in which Wong synthesizes much of what came before. For instance, he brings back characters and musical cues from earlier films, and uses all of his formidable stylistic tools. In the Mood for Love has a fairly unified look and static style (very static to the irritation of some viewers), but in 2046 Wong alternates between the kinetic style of earlier films and the ravishing slowness of In the Mood, even throwing in a dash of future-noirish CGI. Think Blade Runner. It's worth noting too that Wong loves shooting at night, and with rain. But then, so have many of the best visual stylists.

I would have a hard time explaining to you what exactly happens in 2046 or its predecessor. Well I could, but it would sound absurdly prosaic. Asking the question "what's it about?" of these films reminds me of Steve Martin's line about music: "talking about music is like dancing about architecture." So true! One can't do justice to the works of a cinematic genius like WKW by explaining plot details. Snatches of music from a radio down the hall, a tear suspended in air, steam rising from a bowl of noodles, the sound of rain on a sidewalk, a passing glance or searching gaze—these are the more important details that go into creating something ineffable, intangible. An overwhelming sense of loss hangs over the proceedings, yet there are moments of uncontrolled hilarity. We're passing through a vale of tears, but laughter is a frequent and welcome companion.


Wong Kar-wai is in love with beauty, but I see hints in his films that perhaps beauty is his idol in a way that carries within itself the seeds of destruction. C.S. Lewis writes of beauty in the autobiographical Surprised by Joy:

The books or music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

How sad to mistake the beauty for the thing really desired. Yet, beauty of the kind conjured up by Wong Kar-Wai seems (almost) enough.

Overstreet: feasting on film

Babette's Feast (1987, dir. Gabriel Axel)

At the feast of movies, I'd like to leave gluttony, judgment and fear behind me. I know that I am free to eat almost anything, but I want to be strong and fit, disciplining myself to a diet of excellent, nourishing work.

Dessert? Alcohol? In moderation, on occasion.

As a critic, I feel more like the nutritionist—doing my best to counsel others on a balanced diet that serves their individual needs and respects their sensitivities. But I also want to be the kind of connoisseur who can speak knowledgeably about the culinary arts. I want to speak with eloquence about Sofia Coppola's sauces, the exquisite wines of Eric Rohmer and the finer points of Martin Scorsese's pasta.

But the more I learn, the more I'm in danger of becoming another character at the table—the snob. It would be easy for me to leave behind enjoyment of the simpler sorts of films and demand only the most sophisticated work, sneering at those who don't understand or appreciate it. I have, at times, ranted against the ignorance of others, forgetting that I was once at their place in the journey.

Jeffrey Overstreet, Through a Screen Darkly (Regal Books, 2007), pp. 93-94

That's very nicely said! There have been quite a few books in recent years on theology and film, but none better (that I've read) than this autobiographical journey of a Christian moviegoer and critic. Whether your tastes run to the mainstream or the obscure I think you'll find it a profitable read.

A time to laugh

It's been a week of serious topics here at Frightfully Pleased. But as a certain margarita-swilling troubodour has reminded us -- "if we couldn't laugh we'd all go insane." On that note let's end the work week with some classic comedy from Some Like It Hot starring Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe.

Here's the final scene, which features possibly the best punchline in the history of film comedies.


Some Like It Hot (1959, dir. Billy Wilder)