Ninotchka

Saw Ninotchka, an Ernst Lubitsch film about a woman from the USSR who comes to Paris to sell some jewelry which was liberated from pre-revolution Russian royalty. The woman, who is of course cold and calculatingly utilitarian, runs into one of these disgraced royals, a duke, in a soft-focus part of town. He sets to work seducing her in a kind of pushy 1930s sort of way while she rebuffs him as any woman would rebuff some dude who began following her around town. Eventually though, because it's that kind of film, she falls for his charms. But behold! The duke is in some kind of semi-romantic relationship already with the ex-owner of the Russian jewels, a duchess who is old and twittery and aristocratic.

the film is essentially a romantic comedy, focusing much more on the cute romance and involving a trio of funny-accent-ed Russian guys who are practically the Marx Brothers, but there's a lot of interesting politics going on, just out of sight. The Russian woman lets her hair down but declares that so much fun must be payed for, that she should be lined up against a wall and shot. She is correct, of course, that her fun comes at the labor of many background waiters and barmen, but she is wrong that this is necessarily morally reprehensible. The count meanwhile, is always perfect. He speaks mostly about his own love for the Russian lady. He comes off squeaky because he just pursues what he wants which is also, this being a romance, what the Russian woman wants too. How lucky.

The antagonists are the Russian government, as personified by Bela Lugosi, and the jealous duchess. And these are the true bad guys I think anyway. The Russian government was at the time starving its people (the ongoing famines come up again and again in this film) but of course the excesses of the Russian royalty that the communists replaced were terrible as well. At one point (the film's most serious one,) the Russian woman and the duchess snipe at each other, their fight really over the duke, but their words dealing with very recent history. This fight, between the rich and the poor, the pragmatic and the romantic continues to this day and will probably forever.

An interesting movie which keeps its brains mostly off screen, the better to put its heart on display.

Salesman

Saw Salesman, a Maysles brothers documentary about door-to-door bible salesmen in the late 60s. We follow a team of Boston-based old men who are whithered and pomaded, dressed in short-sleeved white shirts and black ties, they speak bitterly about brush-offs and rejections, about thinking negatively and pushing product. There's a uniquely American feel to the film, with the salesmen badgering families of poor and religious folks into buying lavishly illustrated bibles, cradled in pebbled leather (comes in both red and white, but we find most people go for the white.) It's a complex mixture of social forces. These people are parasites, bilking the poor and lonely and faithful, but surely no one is scrounging harder than they for a buck. One of them remarks that the bible sales business is like a carousel where even the gold paint has been stripped off. The others rebuke him for thinking negatively.

There's an interesting scene where they go to the regional meet-up to receive pep-talks and to watch other people receive awards. The pep-talks, of course, loudly proclaim that there's money out there and that the salesmens' struggles are just because they're not passionate enough or because they're not devout enough. It's unclear whether the devotion is supposed to be to the church or to the bible marketing company.

The film is a documentary in the true sense, with no narrative to push, only events to witness. It's fascinating window into a few lives lived on the fringes.

Ravenous

Saw Ravenous (thanks, Anne!) It was a western/horror about a Donner Party-style disaster which ends in cannibalism. This event is tied to the myth of the Wendigo, an evil spirit of cannibalism. It's sort of reminiscent of some vampire films I've seen, with a powerful enemy circling around our heroes, always smugly and smilingly just out of reach, who must be taken down by a good guy with similar "powers." Nicely, the supernatural aspects of the story are kept in the realm of believability, so no one is jumping 40 feet in the air or bending steel or any such nonsense. The social breakdown associated with cannibalism is also mined here for claustrophobic atmosphere. A good, uncomfortable film.

There's a lot of symbolism on display here, much of it obvious enough that I caught it. The frontiersman's coats are blue on the outside and red on the inside and yet somehow when they're being particularly bloodthirsty, their coat always gets flipped around somehow, showing the red side. Also of course there's a heavy theme of food. We open with one of the characters, a soldier, contemplating a very rare steak and flashing back to old battles, where meat did fly. The final showdown even ends with a person caught in a bear trap, it's metal teeth looking very mouth-like.

Not a bad film but it didn't really grab me. Perhaps if I'd been watching it at the dead of night in the middle of winter it would be more effective. It was very morbid however and frustrating in the way horror films cultivate. Unusually well-grounded in gold-rush era costumes and set but a horror film underneath it all in the end.

Withnail & I

Saw Withnail & I, a grotty sort of British comedy about two struggling actors who are constantly drunk, constantly penniless, but come from families which are basically too wealthy for them to actually get in any trouble. They flounder around hilariously being unable to even clean dishes without descending into wild, bizarre, drunken soliloquizing and shrieking hysteria. It feels a bit gay to me, this inseparable but dramatic duo, but I think it's supposed to be more of a throwback to the sort of unstated queerness of Laurel and Hardy and so on. They're not gay, just ridiculous.

The film makes its stance in regards to homosexuality much more explicit with the introduction of Morty, a fat old gay man who they sponge off of for a while and who obviously has designs on one of them. The character is florid and pompous, daintily hinting at youthful blowjobs at Harrow and so on. He's absurd and repulsive but also hilarious. The film is a sort of throwback to an older time, filmed in the 80s but featuring nuttiness fueled by drugs and marijuana ala the 60s and featuring a platonic comic duo ala the buddy films of the 40s. The Morty character is a specimen of the by-now extinct aesthetic homosexual, who powders his hair and paints his face and winkingly quotes Oscar Wilde and uses dainty euphemisms for almost everything. It sort of makes sense that this dinosaur of a character should be included in a film which is, itself, an anachronism.

I enjoyed the film but I didn't find it very funny. It was enjoyably manic and frantic and messy though and well worth a look. There's a hint of gayness to it which made it interesting to me so I wonder if it would hold up for someone similarly humorless but who has the misfortune of being straight. It's very frantic and funny though, so check it out maybe.

Animal Kingdom

Saw Animal Kingdom, an incredibly tense crime film. It opens with the protagonist, Jay, watching TV with his mother snoozing beside him. Then the paramedics show up because no, his mother is not snoozing, she's dead of an overdose. This sets us up for a film which will pull the rug out from under us, which will not let us relax. After his mother's death, Jay stays with his grandmother and his uncles who are all bank robbers in the grubby, tattoos and guns style. These are not romantic gentlemen robbers, but desperate, angry men with emotional disorders. The film is setting them up to be the animals whose kingdom Jay has entered.

There's a simple animal motif throughout the film, with lions showing up here and there and later, as Jay is beginning to question his own ability to survive in this jungle, even an ironic baby lion wearing a silly little crown. Jay does not want to be king but in this brutal world he must be the strongest if he wants to survive. Really rattling movie. The family members stalk around kitchens and gas stations. Eye contact is far more threatening than raised voices. Everything's very brutal. But even the animalistic family is shown to be as nothing compared to the trained attack dogs of the police and lawyers who are casually and indifferently cruel.

The camera work is great too. We're always recoiling away from Jay's family and sneaking up on Jay himself, stalking him as he feels his family is hunting him. Later in the film, things have become so tense that calm feels ominous. At this point, the camera switches to flat, static shots, with Jay and his family sitting ominously still or perhaps petrified. Good stuff.

All That Heaven Allows

Saw All That Heaven Allows, a drama from the 50s about a widow who falls in love with a younger man who is her gardener. It's very precious and the gardener is this very clench-jawed attractive man who, despite his unspeakably low birth, is the perfect gentleman, a sort of outdoorsy-type who paints landscapes and pictures of ducks in his spare time. Anyway, this being the 50s, the news of this love affair is greeted in the town (which is of course a small town) with gasps and arched eyebrows. The protagonist woman cannot bear the opprobrium of the town and of even her own children but she cannot be without her backwoods poet. Will she? Won't she?

This film is a sort of morality play about the terrible effects of the scorn of small-minded society which, being a part of, we accept as righteous, even as we intellectually know that it's absurd. Set in opposition to the scandalously young backwoodsman we have television, a tawdry, fake spectacle which symbolizes the kind of dreary living death that awaits respectable old women. Her children and high-society girlfriends are always pushing her to get a TV set and indeed when her children are first introduced, they're framed inside of a mirror, as though on a television set, setting them up as fake, unfeeling, television-type people; antagonists.

This sort of film has been done many times since, the story of a woman falling in love with a man and society not approving. It's been pointed out by others that it's never the other way around, with an older man falling in love with a young woman, but even Hollywood, bastion of fearless truth-telling, has its limits. Curiously (or perhaps not so curiously) these films seem to attract homosexual talent. Off the top of my head, I know Ali: Fear Eats the Soul has a similar plot and was directed by the bisexual director Rainer Fassbinder. This film stars Rock Hudson as the gardener and the sort-of-related Gods and Monsters not only stars Ian McKellen but is about the life of homosexual director James Whale.

Anyway, the film is good social commentary picture, frustrating but ultimately pleasing.

Tales from the Script

Saw Tales from the Script, a homey little documentary where a bunch of screenwriters talk about their lives working as screenwriters. They're mostly delightful little bookish people who speak with the assured tones of a parent talking about their job. This seems like a great film to show someone who wants to be a screenwriter because they talk in about the grim realities of their jobs. They don't glamorize themselves as starving geniuses, indeed they claim their worst mistakes were made as idealistic youths who approached writing as an art, rather than as a craft. They also don't present themselves as smug insiders who have made it. They talk about how as soon as you make a big movie, all the doors shut all over again and no one wants to see you. And they pepper these lessons with funny anecdotes and wry observations.

They also talk about how big studios have changed. Probably in reaction to the double-whammy of decreased theater attendance and an abundance of new talent struggling at the gates, almost no one can get a script accepted anymore and the scripts that do get accepted have to be based on something (and therefore prepackaged with a fan base) and allow for sequels and franchises. Grim times ahead. This is all about risk minimization and profit maximization and why shouldn't it be? Art is all very well and good, but this is a business. Still sometimes, by accident perhaps, good things are allowed to be made.

I don't really have much to say about this film because, funny anecdotes aside, this seems like a documentary that was genuinely trying to be informative. There's talk of emotional states when starting out, when pitching ideas, how to deal with movies that bomb and how to get your script read and how to deal with actors. Most of this isn't mechanical but philosophical. One distinguished gray-hair keeps repeating that no one intends to ruin your films, they just do, and that when some idiot in a suit tells you a scene isn't exciting, it's because you've failed to make it exciting. There's also advice on when to move on to greener pastures which, for me, for this review, is now.