The Vault #5: The Trial

Made in Italy in 1962, Orson Welles' adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Trial stars Anthony Perkins. It would seem with this director, this source material and this star, known primarily for his role in Psycho (1960), The Trial would need no introduction. However, until a professor showed me this version in a German lit class, I had no idea it existed.

In regards to the faithfulness of the adaptation, Welles takes liberties. However, the oblique angles and vertiginous pacing characteristic of nearly all his films, especially Citizen Kane (1941) and Mr. Arkadin (1955) work well with Kafka's style. One particular piece which Welles gives more weight to is the parable of the gate, which gets its own f/x sequence in the prologue. We then move directly into Perkins awaking as Jozef K, with the camera over his shoulder offering his point of view. The terror that the reader experiences from a distance in the novel becomes horribly immediate in the film version. 

The most interesting facet of this movie is that it is as close as Welles ever got to a science fiction production. In the same way that Lamar Burgess's A Clockwork Orange lost some of its social realism on its way to the screen, Welles' heightening of the existential in Kafka's work removes it entirely from the real world. The film, shot at Cinecitta, in the suburbs of Rome, uses many of the alienated 60's architecture made famous in Antonioni's trilogy and Fellini's La Dolce Vita and brings a post-apocalyptic desolation. Perkins eerie presence in this harsh, 1984-ish environment begins to give us the feeling that he is actually guilty. 

And of course, Welles himself. Playing a role he initially promised to Jackie Gleason, Welles makes the Prosecutor a mesh of all his other villains, from Kane to Quinland to Harry Lime. At the center of the action, the madman in control. The Trial is one of Welles' final features behind the camera. It is also one of his finest.

More on Actors

This is a post about James Gandolfini. I promise.

Stanley Kubrick said there was no such thing as a bad actor - however, with the notable exceptions of Kirk Douglas (who was essential to Kubrick's early success) and Peter Sellers (whose work in Lolita and Strangelove is irreplaceable), Kubrick rarely used the same lead twice. While many directors, from Scorsese to Fincher to Kurosawa to Ford often use the same actor again and again, Kubrick seemed to purposely avoid this. This separates the films much more from one another, and heightens the stylistic disparity. The Shining is Jack Nicholson, A Clockwork Orange is almost all one can remember about Malcolm McDowell. Especially in this latter case, the film is so striking and the actor so relatively unknown that it really ended up ruining any chance McDowell had at a versatile career. He landed the title role in Bob Guccione's Caligula and that was pretty much it; he was pigeonholed as a pervert and rapist, a misbehaving schoolboy (like the one he played in Lindsay Anderson's If) and his career was over. 

The same seemed dangerously close to happening to James Gandolfini, three-time Emmy award winner for a show whose very name precedes itself. Even before he was Tony, Gandolfini was repeatedly cast as a thug, a hitman or a general brute. After he became known as a mob boss, producers and directors decided to add power. In mediocrities like The Last Castle and All the King's Men, Gandolfini plays one dimensional villains whose physical appearance is used only to convey aggression. 

In the American adaptation of Yasmina Reza's play "God of Carnage" which opened in New York last week, the production finds a god way of playing Gandolfini's physicality in a similar, but not identical direction. Frankly, this is the first time one can say that violence does not seem right around the corner - at least not from Jim. He's still a bit shorthanded smarts-wise, and does scream "I'm a fucking neanderthal!" at one point, but this is a much softer, human Gandolfini than we're used to seeing. He is polite in his own way. It was very refreshing to see a director attempt to show us the larger than life man can be just like us, rather than his film work, especially since his fame, which seeks to underscore the fact that James Gandolfini is in fact a big, scary man. 

Where guys like Gary Oldman and Jeremy Irons have the looks to play all manner of villain, casting JG continually in those roles limits him far too much. Look, we'll never forget that James Gandolfini was Tony Soprano (whoops). but that does not mean his talents have to go to waste. This goes back to what I wrote a couple weeks ago about older male actors being typecast. Isn't it the weird, against-type roles, like Pitt in 12 Monkeys or Mifune in Red Beard that really stop is in our tracks? I learned something today; James Gandolfini doesn't need the backdrop of Jersey or the context of the Mafia to move me and more importantly, make me laugh uncontrollably. One of the people with their finger on the button in Hollywood could learn that too. Or not.

Breaking away from 

The Vault #4: Stroszek

Werner Herzog loves ugly. If not ugly, weird. If not weird, disgusting. From Christian Bale downing maggots to an asylum riot of violent little people, the man has a knack for capturing unusual images. His concern is primarily with the baseness of man, the brutality of nature and the ultimate cruelty of life - nature is an "overwhelming vision of collective murder."

I have said in the past that Herzog is a kind of bizarro-Terrence Malick. Where Malick sees beauty and wonder in nature, something for man to marvel at, Herzog sees an imminent threat. Many of his films are set in wildernesses so teeming with life that they threaten to swallow his protagonists whole. See Grizzly Man or Fitzcarraldo.

It is refreshing then to see Stroszek, Herzog's only movie set in middle America. Akin to Malick's Days of Heaven, the film is about a man running from his past who settles in a bucolic corner of the Midwest to take up a simple occupation and escape his past. Unlike Malick, the protagonist is played by a mentally challenged actor (Herzog regular Bruno S), and is accompanied by an aging prostitute and a strange uncle. 

Stroszek is essentially an immigrant tale, but it just as much a Western. As a Wisconsin auto mechanic, Bruno finds little bounty in America, mostly xenophobia, greed and heartbreak. Stroszek is one of Herzog's least nature driven films. Though it is beautifully photographed, its focus is decidedly industrial. A stranger comes to town to try to make his way, only no one accepts him. Not to give too much away, here we find a case of society turning make back to nature, rather than the expected other way around.

Companion Pieces: Dogville, Harlan County, PA

Terrence Malick's Lost World?

This here site loves it some Terry Malick. So we now pause from our normal critical output to speculate on his next movie, Tree of Life. If you follow that link, you'll see that the film has a chronological scale of more than a few eons, and happens to star a pair of Hollywood A+ listers, Brad Pitt and Sean Penn.

But this post is mostly about digital dinosaurs. Malick, who we have to love for his normally hyper-naturalist aesthetics, be it with the aid of Nestor Almendros in Days of Heaven or Emmanuel Lubezki in The New World. Malick knows what he's doing - he can make the light seem like a visual effect (see above). But he never creates a sunset from whole cloth.

Does it bother anyone that, with this newfangled effects, Malick could be touching up the most breathtaking parts of his cinema? Does this lessen their effect? See Prince, Stephen "The Myth of Total Digitality" or Bazin in the earlier same vein but I think there's something here. And if the vision brought to screen is somehow unreal, what does that say about the ideas behind it? Prince argues that what we think of as "real" up on the screen has been inalterably changed by the realms opened by f/x. I would have to agree - twenty years ago, Malick would have never conceived of jumping back to the Mezozoic to show off some placid dinos. 

The Vault #3: The Grey Zone

Schindler's List was, perhaps in a less obvious way than other Spielberg movies, highly influential. Not stylistically perhaps, but in terms of subject matter, the Holocaust had only been touched in hermetic, legalistic, and pretty distant ways until Stevie decided to make a sweeping, humanistic epic about the uplifting power of the human blah blah blah. This led to an entire new genre of heart-string plucking stories of perseverance, human cruelty and fill in the whatever. Nazis, Jews, death camps: they are all great topics for morality play type movies, tearjerkers.

Think The Pianist, Jakob the Liar, The Reader. On a more independent level, Amen and The Counterfeiters. Though the last two are pretty good, in general, these movies are cheap. They play off the same structures and impulses that movies about terminal illness do. It's just too easy.

Then came Tim Blake Nelson's The Grey Zone (2001). Nelson may be best known for dull-witted roles in movies like Heavyweights and O, Brother Where Art Thou?, two resume items that would not seem to qualify him for an adaptation of a Primo Levi essay. The film is about the Jews forced to work in the gas chambers, leading the doomed into their final shower and dragging their corpses to cremation. Uplifting, right? Anyhow, this group, known as sonderkommandos, planned an uprising at Auschwitz in 1944. 

Let me pause for a moment. This movie stars David Arquette. Allow that thought to wash over your mind. David Arquette plays a starved Jew who in one scene beats an older man to death for his watch. No one saw this movie, probably because it stars David Arquette. You, noble reader, may stop reading for this fact alone. This movie also feature Steve Buscemi, Mira Sorvino and Harvey Keitel. 

The Grey Zone has everything good about Schindler's with none of the colorized little girls or humanizing climactic scenes. Nelson first adapted Zone into a play, and that is evident. It moves not unlike Billy Wilder's Stalag 17 and the writing crackles like David Mamet. Only these are real characters. Character actors Allan Corduner, Daniel Benzali and David Chandler brilliantly fill out the ensemble cast. 

What's most important is The Grey Zone does not hold its victims above judgment. Gone is the ever-wise Ben Kingsley or the helpless Embeth Davidtz of Spielberg's fantasy world, in which Nazis were Ralph Fiennes, shooting innocent people for fun like an out-and-out clocktower-climbing psychopath, and the oppressed were above reproach. Such a take on this material is untrue, disingenuous and ultimately destructive to the project of making people care about the Holocaust. Morality is not black and white in this way, and thinking about it like that contributes to the ideas of Germans as insane. Things were and never are quite that way; instead they are grey.

Watchmen Watch

Well, if you thought the nerdosphere hadn't lost control of itself, now a public entreaty from the screenwriter of Watchmen, who's been working on it for "ten years". He begs us all to go see it again if we were at all pissed or argued or felt, i don't know, anything at the end of this movie. Even if we did not like it, Mr. Hayter insists our going to this movie is imperative, otherwise, things of this nature will not be seen in Hollywood again.

In the opinion of this blog-o-naut, this guy should have written a better movie if he wanted people to see it. Never mind that the 56 million he dragged in during the opening weekend is better than three of the latest Best Picture nominees combined. Its funny that the nearly three hour long epic romance set in 20th Century New Orleans with two scenes of action is going to make more money than an adaptation of "the most celebrated graphic novel of all time". Shows what a little star power can do. 

To quote: "Despite having run the movie in my head thousands of times, my two viewings still don’t' allow me to view the film with the proper distance or objectivity. Is it Apocalypse Now? Is it Blade Runner? Is it Kubrick, or Starship Troopers? I don’t know yet."

Allow me to assure Mr. Hayter: this is no "Kubrick", whatever that means. Sure there are masks, dystopia, shitty perfomances by actresses and more than a slight dose of trap theory, but "Kubrick" it isn't. I think SNL is missing a golden opportunity if Andy Samberg doesn't read large portions of this letter on the air in sniveling nerd voice this weekend. Watchmen was a relative failure, Hayter; just deal with it and move on to doctoring up the fifth X-men movie.

Is this movie really a bad rendering of the source material? No. Maybe it just proves what I've been saying for years: graphic novels are graphic novels, movies are movies, and never the twain shall meet. You will note that Apocalypse Now, Blade Runner and Even Starship Troopers were not visual in their original incarnation. The Dark Knight is as close as one comes to a great movie with a comic book as its source, and that film abandons a great deal of the look of the comics, instead eschewing urban crime principles of Michael Mann and Martin Scorsese, to name a few. These fantasies were written for overgrown manboys; they werent meant to either entertain the general public that sees the light of day occasionally or the hardcore cineastes who can make a truly great film an underground success.

Watchmen works on neither level, yet it still raked in more than the 53 Kansas City Chiefs make combined in a years. So shut the fuck up, guy who's name I've already forgotten. 

A Few Corrections on Performative Auteurism

A few days ago, I posted an item called Acting Out.

This entry discussed ways in which the actor, if they are of a certain level of fame and in a particularly high demand, can bring dangerous projects from borderline writers and directors to the forefront of popular culture. It was meant as a new sort of  auteur theory, Francois Truffaut's critical claim to fame.

Truffaut claimed the director to be the author of a work. In other words, when discussing the films of one director, they should be discussed as flowing from the same single creative source, as we do with novelists. It was qualified by the fact that not all directors are auteurs, but only those who cultivate a specific style (he lists, to name a few, Mizoguchi, Ophuls, Renoir, Bunuel, Welles etc.) In short, he only names men, because in 1954, when Truffaut was 22 (your blogger's age), men were the only ones to have directed major films (one exception being Leni Reifenstahl, famed German documentarian behind Triumph des Willens (1934) among others). 

It was brought to my attention that my analysis might be slightly sexist, in that most (maybe all) of the actors I name were, well, actors and not actresses. Critics of my theory would be quick to note parts for women in general tend to be more limited and less juicy, and thus choice does become a problem. The deck seems stacked against actress auteurs. I would counter that while women do have fewer interesting directions in which to move, they tend to not get pinned down as easily.

A crucial part of my theory is that the window is brief. Eventually, Al Pacino is only the guy that yells, the cop with a drinking problem, etc. We would not really believe him as a stern religious figure like Meryl Streep in Doubt (2008). If you want to see Pacino's limited range, look at every movie he's in from about Scarface (1983) on. He's being type-cast. There are always more serviceable actors, where as a truly great actress is irreplaceable. 

When an actress does find an interesting part and tries to go somewhere with it, however, it is rarely a financial success. Two recent examples are Anne Hathaway's turn in Rachel Getting Married (2008) and Laura Linney in You Can Count on Me (2000). Linney's performance in particular is one of the best by an actress in recent memory, but this Sundance favorite was hardly seen. Mickey Rourke's The Wrestler (2008) was not as much of a stretch; but parts for older actors seem written for them, rather than in a void. 

The conclusion is maybe that from ages 20-40, men have the advantage, but beyond that it slides back to women. Sort of the opposite of sex. Oooooh, Ricci!

The Vault #2: After Hours

After Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese desperately wanted to adapt Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ. No one would let him. He turned to other projects, and had one of the steadiest, most interesting phases of his career. The Last Waltz, Raging Bull, The King of Comedy and The Color of Money are well-known projects from this period.

One less well known is After Hours, the story of one desk-schackled functionary's Kafkaesque night in the West Village. It seems to me that this film should have been a wild success and should still be at the peak of the canon, given its "authentic" New York situations and the fact that it comes from one of New York's most revered artistic products. Not to mention the cavalcade of B-List eighties stars that populate the frames, from Patricia Arquette to Jon Heard and Catherine O'Hara (the parents from Home Alone). 

It seems Scorsese is commenting upon the neutered state of Americans in this film. Milquetoast Paul Hackett is assaulted on all side by caricatures of gay men, punks, "artists" and petty thieves (wildly realized by Cheech and Chong). Hacket cannot comprehend or cope with any of what affronts him in this film, and is literally suffocated by art in the final reel. This film is funny, surprising and fast-paced, and also marks Scorsese's closest approximation of Fellini. The circus quality of humanity is here at an all time high. And he references Henry Miller.

The Vault #1: The Exterminating Angel

Thank God, or something, for Luis Bunuel. Marxist, atheist, misanthrope, weirdo - whatever you say about the guy can't do him enough justice. One of the original auteurs, Bunuel had incredible staying power, putting together a fifty year career of oddities, incongruous social commentaries, and strangely erotic mysteries.

Bunuel's career had three phases: 1) His Spanish films, some made in part with schoolmate Salvador Dali, which show little technical skill or film knowledge, and probably belong more in the category of video art. 2) After Franco's rise to power, Bunuel fled to Mexico, and made dozens of low budget "surrealist melodramas. These became so popular that Franco demanded Bunuel return to Spain to make a film for official submission to the 1961 Cannes Film Festival. That film, Viridiana, about a nun seduced by her uncle, was shown to Franco after Bunuel had absconded to France with the original print. Franco was furious. Bunuel won his only Golden Palm. This led to 3) Bunuel's hyper surreal French films, which heighten the erotic and the politically surreal.

The Exterminating Angel is something of a bridge, made just after Viridiana, it is Bunuel's last film in Spanish. A group of well-to-do socialites (a physician, an architect, a symphony conductor among others) attend a party. Like every Bunuel film, there are secret affairs, closeted homosexuals, foot fetishists, drug use and abuse of hired help. Except at the end of the party, no one can make themselves leave. Without physical obstacles preventing them, each finds new excuses to stay in the parlor, and eventually they spend several days there, coping with starvation, cabin fever and increasing apathy. Not to give any more away, this film is hilarious, chilling and features the original disembodied hand effect later seen on The Addams Family.

Five other Bunuel movies to see:

Viridiana

El (This Strange Passion)

Los Olvidados

Diary of a Chambermaid

That Obscure Object of Desire

Acting Out

Every actor has a shelf life. Some are longer than others. I do not refer to popularity, or ability to keep getting the same roles, but rather shelf life here means the time in which an actor can truly spread their wings, look over all the juiciest roles, and take some risks. It is in this special time that George Clooney made O Brother, Where Art Thou, Christian Bale made Rescue Dawn and Jack Nicholson made The Passenger. Almost without exception, the best performances of an actor's career come when they are at the height of popularity, but make a movie which may be unpopular or even unseen.

Anthony Quinn in La Strada. Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers. Dustin Hoffman in Straw Dogs. These are lesser known movies from greater known stars. To me, this is what separates a good actor from a bad actor: are they smart enough to take the risk? Brad Pitt turned a borderline torture porn from an unknown Madonna music video director into his highest grossing movie of the nineties. This is the actor's power: to draw the attention of the viewing public to something strange and disturbing simply by putting their name on it. Almost every huge movie has a huge star. By agreeing to go out on a limb, big ticket celebrities contribute to the discourse. 

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

"Who watches the Watchmen themselves?" Juvenal's timeless question is on everyone's mind this week, if not on the silver screen than certainly on the smaller one in front of you. The interweb is abuzz with fanboys, professional critics, and unprofessional haters pondering how successful and adaptation the movie is, and how successful a business enterprise it may turn into. Without going into a great level of detail about the plot, Watchmen is a titanic moment in Hollywood business/artistic history. The 1986 graphic novel by Alan Moore is widely considered the Ulysses of graphic novels. In turn, graphic novel is the newest word for "cha-ching" in LaLaland. Can art and finance unite for an orgy of backslapping and humanity-pondering? Three studios have money tied up in it, with Paramount and Warners coproducing, and Fox due as much as 8.5% because of an out of court settlement over the rights. 

Saying this, the movie is in the middle of a semi-flop, not unlike what happened with Mission: Impossible III a few years ago. It opened with a 55.66 million dollar weekend (Total domestic gross is usually calculated by multiplying the opening number by 2.5), but the running time, the so-so reviews and byzantine plot do not portend good word of mouth. Bad acting aside, this movie was probably doomed to fail, and despite the best efforts of several Hollywood businessmen, art and money remain unreconciled. 

Stanley

This week marks the 10th anniversary of Stanley Kubrick's death. As this is the maiden posting on this blog, I should say now that I find Kubrick to be the most original, insightful and interesting filmmaker of all time. If you have not seen all of his movies, you are missing out on some of the greatest films ever made, both in visual style and philosophical depth.

This entry will focus on two of Kubrick's less beloved films. On the right we see an image from his final feature, Eyes Wide Shut, in which cock-strong physician Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) slowly gets scared shitless by an escalating series of sexual events. Above is a still from Barry Lyndon, a sweeping epic of love and gallantry set in the 18th century. While Kubrick remains a revered director of films like 2001, Dr. Strangelove, Spartacus, Full Metal Jacket, A Clockwork Orange and The Shining, these two films rarely make it into Kubrick marathons, are rarely given their deserved critical place, and are thus highly underappreciated.

The knock on Kubrick is usually that he was a hyper-masculine control freak who had little to no connection with humanity as we know it. The laboratory stillness of these two films does not help that image, but it does perhaps allow for a re-examination. Both are about men starved for sex, one established in society and the other not, and how they switch places, one becoming increasingly more aware of his place (Harford), and the other increasingly less (Lyndon). 

I will often argue in this forum that some characters are not specific people, but rather broad archetypes. Both of these movies are larger allegories about class (Schnitzler's "Dream Story", upon which Eyes Wide Shut is based, is about a Jewish doctor not allowed into a society orgy; Thackeray's Lyndon is a Irish commoner who attempts to ascend the rungs of English society despite his brutish and depraved instincts). To boil down Stanley Kubrick's films to expressions of masculine dominance is to miss the larger point. In the world he saw, this was the way things were. He was not making his own reality, only creatively recording our own.