Gruesome look into Ukraine - Russia conflict

A film that brings home the conflict between Ukraine and Russia in all its searing hatred is Donbass. Released recently on the Criterion Channel the movie was actually made long before the present Russian invasion – in 2018 in fact – but when there was still simmering anger and military action in Ukraine’s eastern region, known as Donbass, from an earlier Russian incursion. Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa won best director at Cannes for this. Donbass is one of those films so realistic it seems like a documentary and where you ask yourself, 'how can they have acted out these scenes?' There are 13 segments or chapters that show various incidents. In one, a German TV crew rolls up to a Ukrainian armored personnel carrier. The journalist asks who’s in charge and the crew mock him by each taking a turn saying, “I’m in charge…No, I’m in charge!” Just as the reporter starts interviewing the real officer in charge a shell explodes in their midst, killing them all. Many of the scenes are filmed in alleged Russian-occupied territory (though really not shot there) and it’s surprising how loyal the citizens are to Russia and not Ukraine. A boisterous bride at a wedding praises to the hilt all the Russian defenders of the town. A captured Ukrainian soldier (photo) is tied to a lamp post and assaulted by a variety of ordinary citizens, including the most mild-mannered housewives just walking along the street otherwise going about their business. A businessman has his SUV captured by Russian occupying forces but they won’t return it to him unless he offers up his bank savings to help finance the new civil “defense” protecting him. He’s taken to a hall where a couple of dozen other businesspeople are frantically phoning their banks pleading the same. An intercity bus is stopped at a roadblock, only the men are ordered out, made to strip and are immediately conscripted into the army. Virtually all of the scenes, even ones of merriment like the wedding, are awful in the underlying sentiment of hate that’s either expressed or implied. And they’re so otherwise real because all the other aspects of modern life go on as usual, whether it be people driving their contemporary model cars, shopping or taking selfies.

More recently watched films:

Seconds: John Frankenheimer’s 1966 flic is a cut above and then some to his more celebrated The Manchurian Candidate (see my Aug 16 post). This is a Kafkaesque mind bender starring of all people Rock Hudson whose character undergoes an involuntary life change - yup.

Hit and Run: Hugo Haas’s 1952 film noir is a clever twist on the plot of The Postman Always Rings Twice, so well-acted and paced you’ll be as mystified as the characters are about one of their real identities.

Look Back in Anger: Tony Richardson’s 1959 remake of John Osborne’s famous play, the seminal film of the British New Wave, has a performance by Richard Burton so intense you’ll feel almost seared. No wonder Burton is considered one of the world’s forever best actors.

A Taste of Honey: Also by Richardson this 1961 film introduced the famed of-the-era Rita Tushingham as a free spirited schoolgirl in industrial Manchester with a story that, for its time, broke racial and gay barriers.

After the Fox: This 1966 comedy by otherwise dramatic film director Vittorio de Sica and starring Peter Sellers and bombshell Britt Ekland had all the makings of a send-up of 1960s spy thrillers. But, that is,  for an interminable put-you-to-sleep plot. The highlight, though, is actor Victor Mature, a kind of Dean Martin on steroids.

Damnation: Hungarian director Bela Tarr’s 1988 flic seems the archtypical slow-moving Eastern European meditation on the bleakness of the human condition. Not especially my forte but even I found this interesting.

 

 

Another life for one time famed Montreal festival?

Once upon a time, this time of year, I would be in Montreal. From 1977 until 2018 the Montreal World Film Festival was a 10-day extravaganza, a late summer smorgasbord of world film. In its early days it rivalled the Toronto International Film Festival (Toronto started in 1976, Montreal in 1977). I remember attending the first edition held at Montreal’s Man and His World (former Expo 67). In the years since it morphed into the city’s downtown core, with unofficial headquarters being the great, late and lamented Le Parisien cinemas (photo), with five cinemas and escalators to different floors – a high rise cinema complex! Other venues were all within a few easy blocks for walking including the grand old Cinéma Impérial, still in existence, and alternately Complex Desjardins, Lowe’s and the Eaton Centre, and the city’s magnificent live arts showcase, Place des Arts. No matter where I lived in Canada, I would make sure to take off several days or an entire week and head to Montreal (I missed four or five years.) I went to the rival Toronto festival twice. And while Toronto overtook in prestige the Montreal festival, those of us who favored Montreal would still snobbishly look down our noses at it – “it’s soooo Hollywood, Montreal is a much more international festival!” Which was true. As well, from a purely logistical viewpoint, the Toronto festival was harder to get around – you sometimes had to take the subway long distances between theatres – and there was the annoying stand-by tickets, if you could get tickets at all for what turned into a human zoo. Montreal by contrast was professionally run using Famous Players and then Cineplex staff and their box office infrastructure. The Montreal fest had a good run - at one time it was actually more popular than Toronto - but increasingly there were news reports that the director, Serge Losique, was playing fast and loose with government and private funding. One by one government agencies pulled out, and critical news stories turned off audiences, attendance continued to drop until Losique’s final send off in 2018. I'd given up by then, last attending in 2016. It was pitiful. Cineplex pulled its venues, among other failings, because Losique had not paid up. So it comes as a surprise to read news stories over the past week in the Montreal press that Losique, who we always joked had nine cinematic lives, is trying to rekindle his beloved festival. This week, for example, he’s showing the greatest hits from the festival’s past. And there's talk of a resurrected permanent festival, now dubbed the Global Montreal Film Festival. Losique, who traces his roots in part to the French New Wave and worked with Jean-Luc Godard, is a diminutive, dishevelled guy who always walked around the festival in a battered baseball cap. We festival goers joked about what a “dictator” he was. It appears at age 91 he might have one or two lives left, the kind of guy who says never says die. We will definitely see.

Famed Cold War movie left me a little cold

The Manchurian Candidate is one of those seminal films so emblematic of its time and, given the nature of seemingly never-ending conspiracy theories, of all times, really. Based on the Richard Condon book, the 1962 John Frankenheimer film plays into the popular anti-Communist hysteria of the day. Of course, it’s subtly making fun of it or demonstrating its danger. Broadly speaking, the film deals with then Cold War themes of Communism vs. American freedom. But what I’ve seldom seen commented upon about this longtime cinematic favorite are some of the uncanny references to real political figures and events. For one thing it deals with a political assassination. The film was released on Oct. 24, 1962, smack in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis between the US and Soviet Union, when the world teetered on nuclear war. Second, the film's release was almost exactly a year prior to the greatest assassination in modern US history, that of John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald. In fact, one of the movie’s three main stars, Frank Sinatra, insisted the film be pulled from theatres after the assassination and it was not really granted an audience until two decades later when the movie became an instant classic. While some might suggest The Manchurian Candidate has no political bias there are definite aspects of it that show it very much has a pro-Democratic Party theme, no surprise in liberal Hollywood. For example, the anti-Communist senator, based on the loathed real-life Joseph McCarthy and played here by James Gregory, bears an uncanny resemblance to Richard Nixon, the Republican presidential candidate who had just been defeated by Kennedy in the 1960 election. Second, both the senator and his wife, played by the truly ageless Angela Lansbury, are devout “patriotic” Republicans and the plot undermines their values in a truly frightful way. Ironically, the man who killed Kennedy was a devout Communist. Laurence Harvey, one of my favorite British actors of the era, plays the main character Raymond Shaw. Sinatra is also in it and considered it his best role as Shaw's Korean War army buddy. And Janet Leigh also stars. While The Manchurian Candidate has pretty much entered iconic status – and has a 97 per cent Rotten Tomatoes rating - I found it only mildly interesting and plods along until, finally, at the very end, there’s a great deal of commotion indeed. And there are aspects of the film that are laughably absurd, like the the ladies’ horticultural club indoctrination scenes.   

More recently watched films:

Husbands (John Cassavetes 1970) is a searing portrayal of three middle class men played by the director, Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara, having, let’s say, a mid-life crisis. Fewer truly realistic movies have been made.

That’s Life (Blake Edwards 1986) Jack Lemmon plays a very annoying husband among a family of neurotics whose only sane one is the wife, played by Julie Andrews, who really has reason to complain.

Walk on the Wild Side (Edward Dmytryk) is a superb character study of a bunch of misfits played by actors like Jane Fonda (in one of her first film roles), Anne Baxter and the inestimable Capucine.

The Running Man (Carol Reed 1963) teams up Lee Remick and Laurence Harvey as a couple on the run in southern Spain. There are some memorable lines like, “insurance…it truly pays to crash.”

Little Miss Market (Walter Bernstein 1980), a remake if the 1934 Shirley Temple film, stars Tony Curtis, Bob Newhart and Julie Andrews with the endearingly grouchy Walter Matthau. But there’s no oomph as everyone seems to be calling it in.

Silver Streak (Arthur Hiller 1976) This comedy-drama features Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor fighting some dastardly guys led by Richard McGoohan in some perilous scenes aboard a train with the climax in, yes, Toronto’s Union Station. Enjoyable floss.

Get to Know Your Rabbit (Brian De Palma 1972) An absurdist comedy starring Tom Smothers, Orson Welles and Katherine Ross. What happens when a gray flannel suit executive drops out, is reborn, and drops out again? Absolutely hilarious.

 

 

 

 

Dare I say it? Hannah and Her Sisters is almost iconic

Turner Classic Movies screened yet again Hannah and Her Sisters on the weekend. This film seems to get recycled more than any other Woody Allen film – there are almost 50! – so it was tempting not to watch it again. Especially since this was probably my seventh time seeing it. But with little else on my agenda it’s hard to resist an Allen film and this is one of his best. The story’s outline is simple. Bookended by consecutive Thanksgiving dinners it’s a story of family and romance among three sisters: Hannah (Mia Farrow), Holly (Dianne Wiest) and Lee (Barbara Hershey). Elliot (Michael Caine), Hannah’s husband, has the hots for Lee, the predominant story line. Holly and Mickey’s (Woody Allen) relationship also heats up. This is all old hat for viewers who’ve watched the film innumerable times. But there are so many secondary story lines and nuanced scenes which make this movie so whole and sumptuous and therefore - dare I say it? - even iconic. And the cast of stars is stunning: Lloyd Nolan and Maureen O’Sullivan (Farrow’s real-life mother), Max Von Sydow, Sam Waterston, even little known future stars like Julia-Louis Dreyfus, John Turturro and Carrie Fisher. Famous jazz pianist Bobby Short puts in an appearance. Some of Farrow’s humongous family of kids, including Allen’s future wife, Soon-Yi, are bit players. Among the film’s takeaways: Mickey’s (Allen) typically neurotic obsession with death and his dad’s (Leo Postrel) matter of fact response, “when I’m dead I’ll deal with it then.” There’s the underlying showbiz theme, often an Allen meme.  The sisters’ parents Evan and Norma (Nolan and O’Sullivan) are old time Broadway performers, Holly’s (Wiest) constant singing auditions, Mickey (Allen) is a TV writer usually caught in the mania of a production office with his delightful sidekick Gail (Julie Kavner), his better professional half, propping him up. Mickey: “we’re all going to die someday.” Gail, “You’re just realizing this now?” Other images: Mia Farrow’s apple-like cheeks, Manhattan’s famous Café Carlyle where Allen himself has long performed on clarinet. Dorky record store signs that could have only been made in a bad design decade. The gritty and trash strewn mid-1980s Manhattan streets. And, among this group of New York Upper West Side liberals - all white – the only black person in the house is the maid Mavis (Verna O. Hobson).

More recently-watched films: 

The Poseidon Adventure (Ronald Neame 1973) This supposed mother of all disaster films is really a ho-hum stage play with a small group of cruise ship passengers traversing the bowels a sinking ship; there’s even a few laughs.

The Hard Way (Vincent Sherman 1943) Ida Lupino and Joan Leslie are terrific as ruthless sisters trying to make it on Broadway.

SubUrbia (Richard Linklater 1996) I’m a big Linklater fan but this is a humdrum drama of growing up in a typical suburb that’s not much different from you and I experienced. But it does star Steve Zahn, Giovanni Ribisi and, my Indie queen fave, Parker Posey.

Smithereens (Susan Seidelman 1982) This indie auteur’s first film would soon lead to Desperately Seeking Susan with Madonna three years later. Wonderful early 1980s NYC grit and punk life.

Raw Deal (Anthony Mann 1948) Rather stilted noir with a man (Dennis O’Keefe) on the run with two babes vying for his love – feminists would say “so typical.”

Manhattan Melodrama (W.S. Van Dyke 1934) has delicious performances by Clark Gable, William Powell and Myrna Loy.

Stamboul Quest (Sam Wood 1934) Myrna Loy again as a World War I no nonsense spy who can’t be dissuaded by men or enemy governments, sometimes the same. 

This woman just wants to get drunk

Every once in awhile you come across a film so different you think why can’t more filmmakers make movies like this, or take risks, or come up with totally innovative concepts that show how an art form can be stretched and re-interpreted. It’s like painting. At one time there were just pastoral landscapes and representative portraits. Then Picasso came along and overturned our pre-conceived notions of art. Well, German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger does the same with her films. Criterion Channel has released a slate of her films this month and the first I watched, Ticket of No Return (1979), is a stunner. The movie stars Tabea Blumenschein as a woman who travels to Berlin (I love the old Pan Am airline insignia). She’s all high fashion, with couture brightly colored coats, hats, dresses and heels (even in bed). But we don’t know who this woman is, and she doesn’t say a word throughout. Instead, she proceeds to where she can get her hands on the first alcoholic beverage in sight. From there it’s a non-stop, well, pub crawl, throughout the then divided city, though she remains on the western side of The Wall, which in a couple of scenes we catch glimpses of. Our woman wants to drink and drink. No alcohol is too much whether it’s beer, wine or hard liquor – alcohol is alcohol, right? It’s an insane premise and may seem absurd – well, it is absurd. But this entire plot, if you can call it that, works. Blumenschein’s stark mannerisms and at times unpredictable behavior, like where she throws a tantrum in a café, have you glued. Meanwhile, she’s repeatedly followed by three uniformly equally high fashion but strait-laced “schoolmarm” women who comment on her every move both analytically and censorially. “Women are more prone to become alcoholics than men” and after the tantrum, “Disgusting, women getting drunk in public.” A film with also some social comment (women's behavior objectified and same sex fulfillment), it may not be everyone’s cup of tea, er alcohol, but I found it absolutely exhilarating.

More recently-watched films:

Foreign Intrigue (Sheldon Reynolds 1956) starring Robert Mitchum, a film noir spy thriller set in post-war Vienna. A little stilted.

Party Girl (Nicholas Ray 1958) Great close-up of Cyd Charisse’s acting prowess as a principled woman holding her own among Chicago mobsters.

Pal Joey (George Sidney 1957) The quintessential Frank Sinatra vehicle as an unscrupulous nightclub performer squeezed between two women - Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak.

Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang 1957). A surprisingly despondent Edgar G. Robinson plays a subservient amateur artist put upon by all those in his life, and he pays the price.

The River’s Edge (Allan Dwan 1957). Tough guys Ray Milland and Anthony Quinn duke it out over, who else, a beauty played by Debra Paget in this modern-day desert western.

Film clips

Watching Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks 1953) and the ditzy character Lorelei Lee played by Marilyn Monroe with her absurdist lines (“I won't let myself fall in love with a man who won't trust me, no matter what I might do.”) I started wondering if this character was the source of the forevermore ubiquitous “dumb blonde” jokes. 

Watching British actor Ronald Coleman in Random Harvest  (Mervyn LeRoy 1942) about a war veteran suffering amnesia, Coleman is the quintessential sophisticated debonair male. Mustached and his hair swept back he epitomizes a certain mid-century – indeed classic – masculine persona, whether dressed in rugged field jacket or in a tuxedo – with qualities of handsomeness, charm and integrity.

Everyone laughs at the line from The Graduate (Mike Nichols 1967) where the recently graduated – and alienated - Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) is given advice about career choices from his family neighbor, Mr. McGuire. “I want to say one word to you. Just one word…. Plastics.” Of course, the comment was a big put down of the modern plastics industry. But it wasn’t the first-time plastics was ridiculed by Hollywood, as many think. The execrable character Helen Jorgenson (Constance Ford) in A Summer Place (Delmer Daves 1959) has just bought a plastic Christmas tree – of course. “This should last 10 years, it’s solid plastic,” she boasts. The tree shortly after is knocked down when Helen slaps daughter Molly (Sandra Dee) for meeting her boyfriend (Troy Donahue) illicitly. The camera zooms in on the broken down forlorn looking tree. So much for durability.

If you want to see a consummate film, watch The Entertainer (Tony Richardson 1960), featuring one of Britain’s all-time greatest actors Laurence Olivier as a third-rate music hall vaudevillian who is past his prime. Richardson puts on a master class performance as Archie Rice, who is at turns charismatic, volatile, sensitive and scurrilous. You can't take your eyes off him.

I finally got to see Eating Raoul (Paul Bartel 1982), a black comedy starring Bartel and the famous underground film cult actress Mary Woronov. They play a Los Angeles couple trying to lead a decent life amidst the debauched moral decline of southern California, with cheap and exploitative sex all around them. Trying to raise money to open a restaurant, they latch onto an idea of .... murdering swingers. Bartel is almost identical looking to contemporary actor Paul Giametti, complete with bald head and beard. Woronov was a mainstay of Andy Warhol’s films including in his famous 1966 Chelsea Girls. 

And, recently in Salzburg, Austria and unbeknownst to me, I had booked into a hotel that had one of Europe’s oldest movie theatres. This was the Mozartkino (Mozart Cinema) in the Altstadthotel Kasererbräu in the city’s old town, close to the famous castle. Opened in 1905 and circular in design it’s actually one of the oldest theatres in the world (photo above). And every night it features a different currently-released film. During our single night stay in May, Downton Abbey: A New Era (Simon Curtis) was screening. “That’s great!” said my partner, a huge Downton Abbey fan. Only problem: it was dubbed in German. English films in German-speaking countries are overwhelmingly dubbed, not given sub-titles. Presumably this keeps the large film dubbing industry alive. 

Licorce Pizza: what do they mean by that title anyway?

Licorce Pizza is one of those films for which you have such great expectations but then are let down in a massive “HUH?” The film, released late last year, garnered terrific - and I mean terrific – reviews. Chris Knight’s review in National Post gave it five out of five stars, calling it a “glorious trip” back to 1973. Adam Graham in the Detroit News’ headline was a “tale of young love delivers.” What, in fact, is Licorce Pizza, such a strange title, in the first place? It was a Los Angeles record store back in the day. LA is where the film is set. Folks, I have seen many a nostalgic return-to-the Seventies movie and this has to be the blandest and pointless yet. And while there are a few laughs and good performances here, they still come within a viewer’s mindset of “where is this going?” or “get on with it.” Why filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson feel the need to return to their teenage roots is another thing. This movie pales, by comparison, to films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Amy Heckerling, 1982), Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (John Hughes 1986) or Election (Alexander Payne 1999). Hell, there are loads of genre films that are better. Yes, it’s a coming-of-age tale and, yes, the acting and character connections between Gary (Cooper Hoffman) and Alana (Alana Haim) are decent enough. And there are some riveting if hilarious performances by Sean Penn (Jack Holden) and especially Bradley Cooper as movie producer Jon Peters. But the film is really a slog through two hours and 13 minutes. And so many sub plots are silly or don’t add up. Gary apparently has a film career, then starts selling waterbeds, and is arrested pointlessly. There’s a stupid motorcycle trick (The 1970s Evil Knievel? No, I jest.) And, to take the cake – and in reference to the 1973 oil crisis (you had to be there) – scenes where Gary and Alana are confronted with an obnoxious waterbed customer who’s run out of gas. And an absolutely silly - and boring - box truck running-on-empty scene, meant to be hilarious. Oy! This film only made me long for a stellar high school film, like Ridgemont, Cooley High (Michael Schultz 1975) or even The Breakfast Club (John Hughes 1985).