Film: Michael Clayton (2007)
Date: 2/1/07
Place: AMC Media Center, Burbank

Advice from me to a film snob: Every once in a while go see a movie at a mall movie theater. It's a much different experience in LA to see an Oscar nominated flick with the Friday night mall crowd than at some other industry hoopla.

Michael Clayton is one damn fine film. It's a fairytale for this modern age. I chalk it up with the other beautifully bleak Oscar contenders from this year (There Will Be Bloood, No Country For Old Men). Tilda Swinton plays a wonderful villain and Tom Wilkinson is consistently stunning. For the first half of the film George Clooney distracted me. His charisma is sometimes too much to take on one screen and fights the smaller character driven moments a film like this demands. But by the end I was hooked. The end title sequence, by the way, is one of the best I've ever seen. There's a silence and lyricism that you don't usually find in Western filmmaking. In fact, it might be a Wong Kar-Wai or Hou Hsiao Hsien rip-off. If not, then filmmakers take note. That is one effective ending.

Michael Clayton comes out on DVD 2/19 for those not lucky enough to have mall movie theaters bring back movies for Oscar season.

Labels: film journal

Film: The Red Balloon (1956) & The White Mane (1953) Double Feature
Date: 11/26/07
Place: Nuart, Santa Monica

Thanks to celebrating a new DVD release by Janus, I got to see my favorite short film of all time: The Red Balloon. It's French; it's practically silent; it's close to perfection. Directed by Albert Lamorisse, who is also famous for inventing the board game Risk, he cast his son as the precocious little boy who befriends a balloon. I remember watching this on rainy days as a child. My parents watched this as children. With adult eyes the poverty of urban Paris during the 1950s is much more evident, as well as how cruel children can be to each other. Seeing it on the big screen doesn't break any illusions. That balloon gives a fantastic performance. On a completely restored print, you don't see any strings.

The White Mane is Lamorisse's earlier short. These are by no means 10 minute quickies, but cinematic novellas of 30+ minutes each. Like the Red Balloon, but in b&w and with a horse, a poor boy befriends a wild stallion and the film culminates in a bittersweet existential conclusion. The photography could be a nature film and the over-dubbed soundtrack is simply charming. Again, Lamorisse gives a lesson to the aspiring filmmaker that a story doesn't need a lot of dialog or fancy camera work to make it work - it just has to be real.

The Nuart gave everyone a red balloon to take home after the screening. Out on the streets we were all children. If that's not the definition of magic at a movie house I don't what is.

Labels: film journal

Film: American Gangster
Date: 11/11/06
Place: The Vista

First off: I love love love The Vista theater. I worked in a one screen movie house just like it in high school, except where we lacked in uncomfortable seats, a sub-par sound system, a cracked screen, and stale popcorn, The Vista excels in. The technical quality of each film they screen is always superb. Even the cheesy pre-show reels worn down from show after show make me smile every time. And the Vista is the best place to go for an opening night. You will not find more dedicated fans all crammed up together and applauding the screen every chance they get.
On a Sunday evening the Vista is the perfect refuge from a hectic weekend where I can just snuggle up with my date. At this point, does what I'm watching even matter?
Yes. Of course it does.
So me, my man, plus The Vista's Sunday showing of American Gangster was the perfect equation. But American Gangster is not a perfect film. It's the popcorn fare that makes film snobs scratch their heads and wonder when the big boys will pull their heads out of the sand and attempt to make movies that matter. Like the string of gangster films released right after The Godfather, AG will be forgotten soon. It's entertaining, well acted, and well shot but just not that special. I was thankful to see director Ridley Scott give up the dreaded bleach bypass shaky camera look his brother likes so much (see Domino) and get back to traditional period cinematography. This is a crime drama in the '70s so mustardy-green tones dominate an already high contrast look. It's nothing innovative, just effective. In fact that could be applied to every aspect of the film, including Denzel's performance -- Effective, yes. Innovative, no. I will admit again, I am really starting to respect Russell Crowe as a fine, fine actor. Here he pulls off the Charlie Bronson style-action and gets to have those touching vulnerable moments. I love a good gangster flick and AG follows all the standard genre conventions. It also touches down in cliche-town quite a bit. Crowe's vulnerable when he's fighting for custody of his son. That's right: good cop, bad father. Denzel Washington as Frank Lucas is the ultimate bad ass. He does bad, bad things (drug trafficking, war profiteering) but gets the cleverest lines and falls in love with the prettiest lady on screen at first sight. Josh Brolin shows up as the crooked NYPD detective we're supposed to condemn more than Mr. Frank Lucas the drug-running, murdering gangster. How do we know Detective Brolin is going to hell? Well, he's got no respect for the system he skims off of so greedily, plus he smacks women around and he shoots a dog. The life of Frank Lucas was controversial and revolutionary. He was a bad man but he stuck it to whitey at a time when whitey needed it stuck to. For this, I am grateful to the film for exploiting that part of the '7os and throwing"Across 110th Street" into the soundtrack. More than just another drugs will kill ya tale, American Gangster gets to let the public know about how Frank Lucas and one cop brought down a very corrupt NYPD. Does this matter in the scheme of things? I'll watch Scarface and The Public Enemy a couple more times and get back to you.

Labels: film journal

Film: The Assassination of Jesse James by The Coward Robert Ford.
Date: 10/5/07
Place: Burbank AMC 16




The entire title could not fit on my ticket stub so I went to see "AssAss of" on a pleasant double date night. I was warned the film is LONG and I was warned the film is SLOW but ended up at a 10:40pm screening. Needless to say I nodded off more than a couple times. But that is not the end of my review. This is one interesting film. The acting all around is superb, especially Casey Affleck (Ford). And Mr. Pitt proves again why he is our shiniest Hollywood star. He's deeply sunken in to the tragic anti-hero Jesse James and radiates a dark charisma in each pale smile. Sam Rockwell, aka the most underrated character actor, fits into the cast nicely. He verges on buffoony but redeems the role-reversal of the central characters at the end. It could not be played more poetically.

The Burbank mall multi-plex is a theater to embrace all digital projection (vs. 35mm film). I haven't found myself affected by this yet, until now. Like an old record put up next to a remastered CD, the picture was crisp but left me cold. Cinematographer's magazine this month detailed the film's DP Roger Deakins' (of Jarhead, A Beautiful Mind, The Big Lebowski) bleach-bypass method and assured me this was indeed shot on film before undergoing the digital intermediate process. When I compare Deakins' gorgeous compositions to the iconic shots of Westerns past I miss the grainy warmth from a Peckinpah or Ford epic. But this is not your average Western. In fact, the flick doesn't feel like a Western at all. The parts are there - guns, bandits, and horses - but the revenge of Robert Ford has little to do with the genre. I admit I missed the bravado. Maybe I'm too fresh from 3:10 To Yuma. That film will go down as one of my favorite westerns of the past few years while Jesse James... will most likely fade to obscurity once post-Oscar season washes the celebrity away. The film weaves a voice-over narration into the story with moody montages shot behind beveled glass. A narrative purist, I usually detest the voice-over but the glass effect mesmerizes and the narration unfolds like a novel on screen. The poetry is so strong you think you see words gliding up over the homestead landscapes. But to what greater purpose? The source material is so iconic there doesn't seem to need to be another re-telling of the coward Robert Ford and how he shot Jesse James down. In fact, the film depicts Ford's audience growing tired of his weary tale. It's a beautifully executed moody, weary tale but I can relate to Ford's audience. I was left sleepy and wrapped up in the story of a man's great depression. Not depressed myself, just cold.

Labels: film journal

As of late I've been out of the scene and enrolled back in school. UCLA's Moving Image Archiving Master's Program - I tell everyone it's like a program to make librarians for the movies. The highlight of the program is UCLA's very own Film & Television Archive where they not only preserve and house the second largest Film & TV archive in the country but they do their own restoration work and host a plethora of screenings year round. I'll not only be doing the prerequisite grad school reading and writing but I'll also be watching a lot of great movies. Some rare and some restored favorites along with my usual diet of multiplex openings and special events. Back in my undergrad film school days I had a brilliant professor who encouraged all his students to keep a Film Journal. We basically made a list of all the movies we would see with a couple paragraphs on not only it's critical significance to whatever we were studying but wrote about the personal experience as well. A lot of times I wish I had my old notebooks at my fingertips. As any film student can attest, we watch so many films day in and day out one can easily lose track. So as I embark on archiving some of cinema's lost treasures I'll try not to lose my own notes.




Film: Take A Letter, Darling (1942)
Date: 9/29/07
Place: Billy Wilder Theater

Part of the Screwball Comedy screening series hosted by the UCLA Film & TV Archives. The farce is Rosalind Russel plays a powerful advertising executive and Fred McMurray is her secretary. She constantly flaunts her sex and her by-any-means-necessary approach to nabbing the big clients. McMurry is an ex-football star/out of work artist who's god-given chauvinist charm gets put the test with every new assignment. The set design is so gorgeously stylized. McMurray hovels in a bohemian paradise then puts on full tails for nights on the town with Russel and their clients in restaurants each more opulent than the next.

I've been hooked on AMC's "Mad Men" all summer and this film is a perfect politically incorrect companion from the period not afraid to laugh at itself as long as you laughed with style. I've never seen McMurray look more handsome and Russel as supremely confident in the role of a fabulously clever and gorgeous executive. Of course they fall in love. Their romance gets complicated when (of course) she choses business over pleasure but longs for him to melt her heart and then further complicated when a wealthy tobacco family comes into the picture to marry off these two singletons. It's a formulaic 1940s "will they or won't they" but the cynical delivery keeps all the dialog so fresh and funny. Even though the strict studio code won't ever flat out address issues of sex the implications are everywhere and the screwball side comes out when every supporting character gets to assume McMurray is a gigolo when really he just aims to make the best of his position. Because why on earth would a male secretary make so much money? And why on earth would a man stand the demoralization by a female boss if he wasn't making good money? I don't see the theme as so far off from any other office romance comedy Hollywood's released in the last 60 years. Social implications aside, I keep remembering the sets. All staged interiors with detail but without the ornate fuss one's used to seeing in golden age hollywood films. Russel's cabin retreat is especially fun, where she steals McMurray away for a weekend of uninterrupted work. It's a two story modern playground for the camera decorated with a masculine fireplace and even a stuffed bobcat. A nod to the cougar stereotype not missed but today's or yesterday's audiences.

Labels: film journal