68 Sentences

Carax remains one of the few genuine mysteries in cinema because he puts everything out in the open. The Heartbreak Kid is a comedy of repeated phrases or words ("50 years," "teddy bear," "Minnesota," "wonderful," "don't like," "Jockey Club," "ni-i-i-ce," "pecan pie") that become mantras or magic spells that imprison the characters; for Charles Grodin's character, every utterance turns the key a little further in the lock. Tennis and soccer depend on an evenness of light, on illumination, to provide drama (through clarity), while the drama of boxing lies in shadows. In his 1960s and 1970s films, Zanussi delivers well-reasoned, well-argued reports on the narrative complete with facts (throwaway moments captured in images, like the old friends checking their hairlines in the mirror in Structure of Crystal) and figures (the cause-and-effect of the plot); the films are well-reasoned experiments devised in order to demonstrate certain theories about human activity and experience (human evidence). Moral vs. ethical filmmaking: the moral is that which reaches for the impossible and the ethical is that which chooses, out of a list of possibilities, the one that most closely resembles a shadow of morality. Fassbinder used post-synced sound extensively; it's the most brutal aspect of his films (as it was with Antonioni), even more than the fatalistic movements and framings he gives the camera, because, while the camera may turn away, the microphone remains poised in the same position in front of the actor's mouth. Few movies are ever saved in the editing, but plenty have been ruined in it. All films nominally about girls are really about the boys who watch them. In regard to classical Hollywood filmmaking, the editing is usually the most overlooked aspect; part of this might be the length of the takes, but it might also be a bit of auteurist bias. King Vidor's best characters are unindividualistic individuals. My Wife is a Gangster: a good laugh, sometimes resembling a pre-Code American comedy, but that’s it, since the movie's not directed much better than a joke is usually told. Van Damme directed poorly is still Van Damme. Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls: Metropolis' Hal + Shelley Duvall. Hartley was the best of the directors to emerge from the American independent filmmaking boom of the late 1980s and early 1990s: more sensitive than Van Sant, better at combining his interests and his education than Haynes, more concerned with form than Soderbergh. Verite (Clouzot): in the courtroom, to show her seriousness, Bardot wears her hair in a bun, looking like Tippi Hedren. Viewed as a Flash Gordon serial or a space opera (with Clive Owen as the dashing starfighter pilot), Elizabeth: The Golden Age ain't that bad. We had Westerns in Italy and Spain; we can handle a Romanian film from Chile (Tony Manero), though one wishes it was better. With Oliver Twist, Polanski's isn't trying to be Dickens -- he's trying to be Cruikshank, reducing Dickens' characters to their essences (looks, faces, features). When Claude Jade puts on the "Japanese" make-up in Bed and Board, Truffaut is making a reference to Tashlin's The Lieutenant Wore Skirts (Tashlin, of course, plays his scene for comedy, and sides with the wife). Directors are the ones who must learn to express themselves fully without having their voices heard or their words read. The least sophisticated forms of montage often have the most complex results. The landscape is the oldest image. The simplest ideas are the hardest to grasp / master (no one could play a scale like Coltrane). The bras women wear in 1950s and 1960s French films make their breasts look like knees. When someone says they don't care about artists, what they mean is they don't care about art, because art isn't some nebulous force that comes out of the ether: it is human expression and human work. Jesse Eisenberg: a second-rate Michael Cera but a first-rate actor. Everyone's been obsessed with the mundane, "the quiet;" too many films deny the excitement of everyday life. Matt Porterfield’s Putty Hill is set in Baltimore, but it could just as easily be St. Petersburg, Florida (like Chris Fuller’s Loren Cass), or a less urban part of the same state (like Trans, Julian Goldberger’s first movie), or in Jem Cohen’s Georgia or even somewhere in the Pacific Northwest (like, to a certain extent, Dance Party, USA, Aaron Katz’ debut), or Detroit or Cleveland or Northern Indiana or Toledo or Akron or any of the hundreds other American cities and towns where these sorts of movies haven’t yet been made but probably will be in the next few years, because for all their regional specificity, Putty Hill and the films I’ve mentioned share enough stylistic qualities and stances that it would be possible for them to swap locations; they constitute a shadow movement. What movies often forget: war is not corpses, it's the reality of having to walk past the corpses to get to the market every day. Jarmusch had discovered something that seemed obvious: a sort of rigid and physical non-time, the concreteness life takes on when you don't wear a watch. The Fountain: every image is carefully lit, designed and manipulated, and not one of them is worthwhile (see also: It's All About Love). In the early days of the cinema, no one thought to point a camera at the sky. There's no need for poetic realism, because realism is poetry enough. Up in the Air: a mixture of "Yes We Can" populism and passable melodrama that suspiciously resembles an American Airlines ad; hypocritical while also lulling its audience in hypocrisy. Serge Daney once pointed out that cinema could be like the rear view mirror in a car, moving forward while it keeps looking back at a dissolving past. I think there's been enough chance and accident in film methods; time to get back to a cinema of decision-making. The way Peter Lorre puts on his shabby coat in Crime and Punishment: pure Chaplin. Love with the Proper Stranger: film about uncompromising people than ends in compromise. The problem with modern Westerns is that so few are made nowadays than whenever someone gets around to making one, they feel like it should be the Western to End All Westerns. The dialogue and the camera eliminate every tangible "naturalistic" emotion, leaving only the basic urges Blier is interested in. Only forgeries need to be realistic. It's a well-known fact that Bela Tarr is a fan of Night at the Crossroads, and it's become something of an "accepted idea" of sorts that The Man from London is largely indebted to Renoir's intoxicating, enigmatic movie ("BT does JR") -- but actually, the movie The Man from London resembles (and I don't mean just a passing resemblance, but a total physical resemblance) is Henri Calef's Les Violents. It's important to make serious inquiries into unserious subjects. In A Gentle Woman, Bresson reduces a complex domestic drama to several shots, intercut, of two people eating soup. Shin Eun-kyung has the sort of face that gets ruined by showy make-up and the sort of slim figure that looks good in a men’s suit; she's better with her hair short, and her slouch is more attractive than her saunter. Wenders' goal: to mix literary "great themes" with observations of the minutiae of life. A note to directors: even children don't like being treated like children. Though Amreeka's script seems to have been collaged out of panels from Sally Forth, For Better of Worse and Cathy, it contains the only convincing high school principal in the history of American cinema. Montage is, at the most basic level, "the presentation of images," so Russian Ark is, in fact, a masterpiece of montage. Walter Hill belongs to the best sort of hardworking men, a sort that's always damned when they become successful: he works well with sparse resources and no expectations, but give him too much money (Another 48 Hrs.) and he doesn't know what to do with it. There has never been as much variety in cinema as there is now. What I like about I Can Do Bad All By Myself, besides the fact that Tyler Perry writes consistently funny, snappy dialogue and the fact that he knows the rhythms of his actors and the fact that Madea's verbal / vocal shenanigans make me laugh the same way Julius Kelp's and Eugene Fullstack's do and the fact that every actor can sing pretty well and might at any moment break into song, is the sense of purpose in its every element. Gerard Depardieu is slowly turning into a perfect sphere. We think of the movie camera as something beyond writing because a writer is only capable of writing down his or her thoughts, while the moment you start filming, you begin recording all sorts of things you aren’t even aware of, maybe even things you won’t discover until decades after the fact. Scripts are expected to be written slowly, and films are expected to be made quickly. Tilda Swinton in Julia is every graceful attribute taken to the breaking point, with a leg emerging from a car becoming unsteadiness and the lighting of a cigarette a disaster. Radzilowicz, Depardieu, Gabin: the most trustworthy faces in cinema belong to wide-nosed men. There's no image in cinema that brings a person closer to being a monument or a statue than a figure against the sky. The definition of Woody Allen's style is a struggle with the self to prove that the subject matter he's chosen was worth choosing; form, therefore, becomes that which justifies the content. Chahine was cinema's great slave: to the culture he was born into, to the history taking place during his lifetime and, of course, to the movies, to whose many shapes he was passionately devoted. Jean Rabier is the most underrated of the major Nouvelle Vague cinematographers (and maybe that fate seems inevitable for the man who was for decades the regular DP of Chabrol, the most underrated of the major Nouvelle Vague directors; but then again, Rabier shot Cleo from 5 to 7, Bay of Angels, Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Le Bonheur and lent his precision as camera operator to Leon Morin, Priest -- but we're back where we started, because that's the most underrated Melville). What is admirable about Dirty Work is that, though not everything about the movie is funny, every element of the film constitutes a joke. There is great cinema that goes unnoticed because no one regards it as cinema. Abraham Polonsky understood words chiefly because he understood feelings; he could see the emotional punches in the gestures and actions that made up everyday life. Eisenstein may have made his films based on theories, but he developed those theories out of curiosity, not out of the assumption that cinema always functioned based on principles. Ethics constitute the lowest form of morality; the moral is often unethical. People who contend that everything is bad are the ones who'll most readily settle for mediocrity. Good ideas are not good enough.

Geronimo (Walter Hill, 1993)

BUTTON-MOULDER:
At the last crossroad I shall meet you, Peer;
Then we'll see--whether -- ! I say no more.

Peer Gynt (Henrik Ibsen; translated by R. Farquharson Sharp)

Six Great American Films, 1978 - 1988

...All the Marbles (1981)
This was Robert Aldrich's last movie, and I like to believe that Aldrich died happy, knowing he'd made it. Along with Abel Ferrara's Cat Chaser, made, at the tail end of the decade, this is one of the last true examples of film noir. It's simultaneously shadowy and colorful, in every sense. But what do you expect from Joseph Biroc, who gave the world the image-monuments of Forty Guns and the careful delirium of Confessions of an Opium Eater? And you end up wondering the kind of movies Peter Falk would've been in if he was born 20 years earlier--him and Harry Dean Stanton. How many bits of 80-minute grit could they have cranked out in the post-war years?

Big Wednesday (1978)
History, tugging like a hand on your sleeping shoulder. John Milius's best film, and one of the few epic films. The mise-en-scene is Vincente Minelli and John Ford arguing about a decade; you're never sure if the 1960s were a tragic romance or some great folly. Waves crash, punches are thrown, mistakes are made and lived through. Grandly sincere, or sincerely grand, this is Milius's attempt to make The Great American Movie. The attempt is a failure, but the result is a success regardless. That's the funny thing about movies: though the intentions behind them play a role, intentions aren't the final result. Yes, a film is a gesture, but it is more importantly a film. The writer only writes what he or she thinks up, while the moment you start running film through a camera, you let the world in. What language can't communicate, cinema wholeheartedly accepts, sometimes without us even noticing.

The Driver (1978)
The vague and the painstaking. The soundtrack is a terse musique concrete composition for voices, squealing tires and slamming doors. The driver of title is played by Ryan O'Neal, an actor without temperature, neither cool nor warm. Maybe that's why Stanley Kubrick managed to put him to such good use: Kubrick's cinema is climate-controlled, which leads many people to wrongly assume that it's cold. Walter Hill is an abstractor (this film, 48 Hrs.) and a parabalist (Streets of Fire, Crossroads, Johnny Handsome), which is more or less the same thing. To take something complicated (a history, a morality) and turn it into a parable is not very different from taking a real thing and, through its image, making something direct: a color is easier to understand at first glance than a street, the cold light of a headlamp is simpler than an oncoming car. But, of course, no two things are completely alike: the parable has only a limited meaning, while the image is bottomless.

Modern Romance (1981)
The present hasn't been too kind to Albert Brooks, but history will be kinder: we'll someday say "Brooksian" with the same ambiguous clarity as "Hawksian." Fed by a distinctly American sense of compromise, that sour taste that accompanies every sweetness, Brooks' cinema is not one of contradictions: the world is complicated, but it isn't fractured. Every happy thing is sad, and every sad thing is a little funny; there is no clear separation in our experience of things. It's through focusing on certain elements, through the sieves of our memories (or the editing of a film), that we are able to look back and distinctly say that an event was tragic or that it was good. It's the basic premise of Brooks' later Defending Your Life, in which the newly dead must argue that scenes from their lives display their strengths, even though it can just as easily be said that they show them at their worst. Absolute happiness is an illusion: it's just something you claim to win an argument. Modern Romance is a rejection of traditional dramatics, a serious approach to comedy. And always unflinchingly intelligent.

The Moderns (1988)
An incomparably passionate film by the most brilliant American director of the 1980s. The Jazz Age is to Alan Rudolph what the Belle Epoque was to Jean Renoir: an era of creativity that inspires more creativity through reflection. A film about the ideas of an era more than its specifics. Or, to rephrase, a film that takes inspiration from the ideas of an era to create something new. Keith Carradine is Keith Carradine is a painter, Wallace Shawn is Wallace Shawn is a gossip columnist, John Lone is John Lone is a businessman and Kevin J. O'Connor is some dream image of Ernest Hemingway. Here the elements that are used haphazardly or lazily by other directors become rigorous and expressive. Rudolph stands with Fassbinder--and now Hong Sang-soo--as one of the few poets of the zoom lens: what is done with a jerky hand-operated zoom in a brief sequence in The Moderns is more beautiful than most directors' camera movements. The use of black-and-white historical footage is genuine quotation instead of a lazy attempt to set a mood.

Paradise Alley (1978)
I refuse to believe that any movie directed by Sylvester Stallone isn't at the very least interesting. Sometimes, as in the curious case of Paradise Alley, the movie's much more than that: it's great. Case in the sense that Paradise Alley is isolated from its contemporaries and seemingly the rest of film history; curious in the sense that every film is the result of a set of choices, and the choices here are, as if often the situation with a great movie, infuriating--certainly more infuriating than Big Wednesday, and possibly more infuriating than The Moderns. A movie that seems to belong to no time and no mindset. Lit with the kind of neons that bathe a body but designed in the earth tones that make every character feel like a part of the room they're in, it's set in 1940s New York--more of a location than a period, just one of those places any story can be set as long as it's costumed accordingly (like "Morocco").

As a director, Stallone is always acting. Every one of his movies isn't directed by Sylvester Stallone, but by Stallone playing some directing archetype; he's clearly playing a different character behind the camera of every film. So maybe Paradise Alley is his best movie because Sylvester Stallone, Director of Paradise Alley is his most original character, the ordinary visionary he'd re-use for the first half of Staying Alive.

48 Hrs.

Lobby cards for Walter Hill's 48 Hrs.

48 Hrs. is a mysterious film.
The greatest puzzles in Walter Hill's 1982 action flick are the lights: frequently out of focus in the foreground, they pop up seemingly unexplained. Streetlights become will-o-wisps at the edge of the frame; streets are photographed from above through of clusters China lanterns that form glowing clouds. We can still tell what they are—ordinary, familiar objects—but in the way they’re introduced, they become foreign. Suddenly the ordinary warrants an explanation. San Francisco is some place we've never heard of; when its hilly streets are used to set the film's car chase, we're surprised--the streets that we've seen a million times have become unfamiliar.
The film seems shot through binoculars—or, rather, with a zoom lens. We’re aware of the zooming (every time the camera moves, we notice the tell-tale distortion of space), but it doesn’t suggest physical distance—rather what we become aware of are the numerous objects, many of them obviously far from the actors, in the foreground. The zoom lens becomes a way to sketch telling details while allowing them to remain vague; we take these details for granted, yet we can’t completely make them out--they’re like the false memories a dream leaves behind, readily accepted but not completely understood. These qualities are all reinforced by the film’s numerous unresolved plot points, which don’t seem messy, but rather consistent with its aesthetic—even with its acting, with that odd chemistry between Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy. It leaves you with a sensation that doesn’t easily submit to written or spoken language—one that can only be described by making another film.