John Berendt’s original 1994 book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was a work of non-fiction told in novel form, ostensibly a portrait of the antebellum culture of Savannah, Georgia, as told by a visiting writer turned resident Berendt, that becomes a true-life crime story: a rich antique dealer and member of the city’s social aristocracy, Jim Williams, was accused of murdering his younger lover, a male prostitute named Danny Hansford. The book, rich in atmosphere and filled with vivid characters and larger-than-life personalities, became a bestseller, remaining on The New York Times list for 216 weeks.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997) was not a typical Clint Eastwood project. The book was a meandering portrait of a town and a culture with numerous diversions and supporting characters and a murder mystery weaving through the narrative, but it nonetheless intrigued the director. “This isn’t the South the way it’s portrayed most of the time, with an overabundance of clichs,” he explained. His intention was to show modern Savannah society as “sophisticated, cultured, intelligent, very much in the public view, people no one would ever think could be interested in sorcery.”

It was Clint Eastwood’s twentieth feature as a director but only his third directorial effort in which he did not appear on screen. John Cusack took the lead, playing a fictional replacement for the author, renamed Kelso for the film and given an active role in the story beyond mere observer. Kevin Spacey, fresh from an Oscar®-winning turn in The Usual Suspects (1994), brings an easy confidence and lived-in drawl to the charming, enigmatic Williams. The actor spent weeks researching the part in Savannah, talking to people who knew the real person and soaking up the atmosphere. Jude Law, whose star was on the rise (he appeared in Wilde and Gattaca the same year Midnight was released), is his lover and murder victim (renamed Billy Hanson for the film). Mandy, a minor character in the book, was changed and expanded for the film, transforming her into a flirtatious love interest for Kelso. The part was tailored for Alison Eastwood, Clint’s daughter, as a way to launch her fledgling acting career with a substantial role.

Continue reading at TCM.com

Plays in the week hours of Friday morning. Also available on DVD.

On Sunday, October 20, 2001, on the final day of the 20th Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (the greatest, grandest silent film festival in the known universe), I boarded a vintage steam engine with a few hundred other silent movie-loving patrons, traveled from Sacile to Udine, filed into the Udine Opera House, took my nearly-front row seat (the Camerata Labacensis, Ljubljana, a 35-or-so-piece orchestra, was practically under my feet) and was, for the next 5 ½ hours (divided up by two intermissions and a dinner break), entranced by Kevin Brownlow’s 2000 restoration of Able Gance’s Napoleon. It was the most transporting, invigorating, exiting cinematic experience of my life to date. Mr. Brownlow did not lie when he stepped on to the stage and made his introduction: “If all you’ve seen is the cut American version, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

His introduction ironically but endearingly twists the words that heralded the sound film era and sounded the death knell of silent cinema. When the movies first learned to talk, the camera became a slave to the primitive sound technology. Abel Gance’s Napoleonpremiered in 1927, the year of The Jazz Singer, and is as fluid and adventuresome and cinematically thrilling as The Jazz Singer and hackneyed and mawkish and, in its sound scenes, static and stiff. The future was sound butNapoleon, the most expensive film made in France to that time, remains the glorious lifeblood of cinema. Like Birth Of A Nation before it and Citizen Kane to come,Napoleon uses practically every technique developed at the time of its production, refining and in some cases redefining them in the process, and creating a visionary work of film.

On Saturday, March 24, 2012, Kevin Brownlow’s full restoration of Able Gance’s Napoleon makes its long-awaited American premiere in Oakland at the Paramount Theatre, presented by Brownlow and accompanied by a full orchestra under the baton of Carl Davis, who conducts his score. There are only four shows of this all-day event: March 24, 25, 31, and April 1, and there are no further American screenings planned. If you love the cinema and have any opportunity to see one of these shows, by all means make every effort to do so. Yes, it is an event. It is also a transporting cinematic experience like no other.

Continue reading on Parallax View

Biblical epics, costume dramas and ancient world spectacles were a Hollywood fixture since the birth of the feature film. Italian cinema made a specialty of the lavish pageants with such early silent epics as Cabiria (1914) and D.W. Griffith imported the genre to America through the Babylon sequences of Intolerance(1916), spawning a Hollywood staple carried on by Cecil B. DeMille and others. In the 1950s, as Hollywood responded to the threat from television with widescreen spectacles, the lavish historical pageant was a natural to fill the big new frame. 20th Century Fox launched CinemaScope in 1953 with The Robe, a biblical tale set against the decadence of ancient Rome. Soon all of the tales of the ancient world were being plundered by Hollywood all over again, this time in color and widescreen.

While this kind of lavish spectacle wasn’t exactly standard fare for Warner Bros., a studio more noted for handsome, sturdy dramas and tough, brawny adventures than gloss and spectacular production values, they nonetheless entered the fray of widescreen epics with the Biblical tale The Silver Chalice in 1954. Helen of Troy, from the Greek legend celebrated in Homer’s The Iliad, followed in 1956.

Brigitte Bardot and Rossana Podesta

Helen of Troy retells the story of Paris, prince of Troy, and Helen, Queen of Sparta, and the love that launched the Trojan War as a grand tragedy of devotion and greed, without the gods of Homer’s tale interfering in human affairs. This 1956 version offers a romantic tale with Paris as the peace-loving prince from the persecuted Troy who risks his life to pursue peace from the kings of Greece, who prove to be a scheming, greedy bunch of rulers looking for an excuse to pillage the treasures of the well-fortified Troy. Helen rescues the valiant Paris from her despotic husband and together they flee to Troy with the united armies of the Greek kingdoms following in their wake.

Shot in Cinecitta Studios in Rome and on location on the Italian coast, with a crew of Hollywood and Italian artists and technicians, Helen of Troy made spectacle its selling point, from the ship braving raging seas to bring Paris to Greece to the magnificent palaces and ancient cities recreated for modern audiences. It all culminates in the invasion of Troy, where a screen filled with war ships brings a veritable cast of thousands to storm the walls of the city with spears and swords.

Continue reading at Turner Classic Movies. Plays on TCM on Friday, March 16. Also on DVD.

“History Is Made at Night is not only the most romantic title in the history of cinema but also a profound expression of [Frank] Borzage’s commitment to love over probability.” – Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema

Frank Borzage was arguably the most unabashedly romantic director of his time. His late silent “trilogy” – Seventh Heaven (1927), Street Angel (1928) and Lucky Star (1929) — is the holy trinity of “love conquers all”: stories of star-crossed lovers whose unconditional love transcends mortal boundaries. His 1932 screen version of A Farewell to Arms was despised by author Ernest Hemingway, yet for all of Hollywood’s sanitizing of Hemingway’s earthy characters, Borzage gave us a frank romance between sexually sophisticated and romantically committed adults. No other director presents love — that is, the unequivocal emotional commitment between two adults — as such a spiritually pure act or powerful emotional force.

History Is Made at Night (1937) is one of Borzage’s masterpieces of romantic triumph through unconditional love. Produced by Walter Wanger, an independent operator in Hollywood, without the budgets or resources that an MGM or Paramount might have brought to the film, it relies on the strength of its stars: continental actor Charles Boyer, the “French lover” of Hollywood romances, and all-American Jean Arthur, best known as a spunky, street-smart gal Friday and deft screwball actress in such films as The Whole Town’s Talking (1935) and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town(1936).

The film depicts a chance meeting between Paul Dumond (Boyer), “the greatest headwaiter in Europe,” and society figure Irene Vail (Arthur), a forthright, independent woman, trying to escape a pathologically jealous husband (played with manic intensity by Colin Clive); their encounter blossoms into true love and looks forward to Love Affair, the beloved romantic drama that Boyer made with Irene Dunne and director Leo McCarey in 1939, but without the elegance of the latter film’s script. Their first meeting — in a Paris apartment, where Irene is saved from a devious plot by Paul’s impulsive chivalry and quick thinking — plays out like a crime thriller with a screwball twist but eases into a delicately-played romance. History Is Made at Night relies on contrived plotting and an obsessive madman of a villain to throw obstacles in the way of its star-crossed couple, the savvy and chivalrous maitre d’ and small-town girl turned high society prisoner. Yet the grace of Borzage’s direction and the emotional conviction and palpable devotion of its two stars makes this romance glow with the fires of true love.

Continue reading at Turner Classic Movies.

Plays on TCM on Tuesday, March 6. Not on DVD.

Daniel O'Herlihy

In the early 1950s, before he had become an internationally acclaimed auteur, Luis Bunuel was a prolific director in the Mexican film industry specializing in popular comedies and melodramas for the domestic market. Most of these were for producer Oscar Dancigers, who had ambitions beyond the local market. Dancigers had already produced Bunuel’s Los Olvidados (1950), still considered one of Bunuel’s great films, so when he decided to make an English language film for the international market, he offered Bunuel the chance to direct the project: The result was Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1954).

“I didn’t like the novel but I did like the character of Crusoe,” Bunuel noted later in an interview. And he must have appreciated the opportunity. None of his previous films had had a shooting schedule more than 28 days. For Adventures of Robinson Crusoe he had a luxurious three months to shoot his very first color film, for which they left the studio and went to Manzanillo, then a small Pacific seaport near Acapulco with a lush jungle interior. It was shot simultaneously in English (another first for Bunuel) and Spanish with an acclaimed young actor in the lead: Daniel O’Herlihy.

O’Herlihy first made his name as a star of Dublin’s Gate Theater (where Orson Welles also had his first stage success) and made the leap to the big screen in Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947) and Orson Welles’ Macbeth(1948). Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, shot in 1952, was his first film lead and the first half of the film is essentially a one-man show. O’Herlihy doesn’t just carry the entire story with a largely wordless performance (his narration, which plays as if read from a journal, provides the audience’s need for dialogue) but presents the evolution of a man stripped of civilization and human companionship, from hope of rescue to resignation to his isolation. As in the novel, the film spans 28 years on the island and (according to the film’s own publicity notes) O’Herlihy had a wardrobe of eleven beards to mark his evolution.

Apart from a fever-dream where his father’s disapproval delivers an I-told-you-so monologue to the hallucinating Crusoe, O’Herlihy is the sole human actor on screen until the arrival of Friday (Jaime Fernndez) late in the film. He talks to animals rescued from the ship for companionship and, at one point, screams into a vast valley simply to hear his own voice echoed back as he shouts the 23rd Psalm. When he “celebrates” his fifth year of solo survival by getting roaring drunk, he hears the voices of revelry as if his cave had become a tavern, but Bunuel keeps the camera fixed on his face, not even allowing us the illusion of company. The slow return to the reality of his isolation is devastating.

Continue reading on Turner Classic Movies. Plays on TCM on Tuesday, February 21.

Also available on DVD.

By sheer numbers, the 84th Annual Academy Award Nominations seems to belong to Hugo, with 11 nominations. But given those are largely in the technical / craft categories, the success story this year is The Artist, a modern silent movie, shot in black and white, with two French stars practically unknown in the United States. With ten nominations, it should be the surprise off the season, except for the fact that this is simply the last lap in its run as the unlikeliest picture to win the hearts of awards season voters.

'The Artist' - 10 nominations for a silent film in black-and-white with two French stars

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences moved the nominations announcements to January a couple of years ago, effectively shortening the “awards season,” but the unintended consequences have been to push the rest of the pretenders to Oscar glory into a free for all, everyone trying to predict or influence or simply contrast eventual Academy Award nominees. As a result, there are few real surprises by the time the Oscars are announced. It’s the final party in an absurdly overcrowded season of awards proms and I’m about partied out.

Plus there’s that new Academy sliding scale of Best Picture nominees. Bumped up from five to ten spots last year (not out of altruism but because indie pictures kept knocking the big audience-pleasing Hollywood movies out of contention), the number is now determined by the number of “You like me, you really, really like me!” number one votes a film received on the Academy ballots. This year, it resulted in nine nominations: an odd number for an odd year.

And yet… it’s the Oscars. They still matter. A nomination is indeed an honor (certainly more of an honor than the Golden Globes) and a snub is still something to get worked up over. And so here is out annual scorecard on Oscar’s slights and oversights: they shoulda been a contender.

Picture

There are nine nominees this year, but is more really better when Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Hollywood’s inevitable and inadequate 9/11 drama) and The Help (this year’s answer to The Blind Side?) and War Horse (Spielberg sentiment run amok) fill out those extra slots? This year swings so far in the other direction of Big Films with Important Messages Hammered Home with Insistent Direction that the indie films that spurred the expansion are all but ignored.

Take Shelter

Two of the most glaring slights: Meek’s Cutoff, Kelly Reichardt’s lost-in-the-desert frontier drama (did it play too early in 2011 for voters to remember its understated virtues?), and Take Shelter, a psychological drama about mental illness and end-of-the-world fears wrapped up in contemporary anxieties of economic survival.

Continue reading at MSN Movies

'House'

There is a long and creative horror tradition in Japanese cinema but Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 House is like nothing seen in the genre before or since. Even the horror classification isn’t quite accurate. Call it a haunted house/high school romp/demon killer/surreal fairy tale: a stylized candy-colored bomb of a ghost story more jaw-droppingly unreal than scary, an experimental piece of pop-art genre filmmaking with a cartoonish flair to its art direction, special effects and graphic expressionism.

The bare bones of a plot sends seven high school girls from a pastel-colored world out of a romantic manga, all heightened emotional melodrama with a palette and decor to match, and into a weekend in the country. Gorgeous (Kimiko Ikegami), fleeing the sudden upending of her home-life when her widower father brings home a new wife, takes her best friends with her to the country home owned by her seemingly benign spinster auntie (Yôko Minamida); the place turns out to be a demonic funhouse, a bit like Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981) cabin as reimagined by a child. The seven girls, much like the Seven Dwarfs, are described as much as named: accompanying Gorgeous are Kung-fu, Fantasy, Prof, Melody, Sweet and Mac (short for Stomach).

The first suggestion that there is something, shall we say, odd about this isolated, out of time villa and their unusual host comes when auntie remarks, “Mac, you sure look tasty, being round and all.” Sure enough Mac is the first to disappear into this hungry, hungry house, which proceeds to dismember and devour the entire cadre of teenage youth in cartoonish scenes of carnage that are more like performance art pieces than sadistic exploitation. The limbs and fingers of one girl (animated with cut-and-paste images and blue-screen effects) appear to dance in celebration at their liberation. There’s nothing mean-spirited or gruesome here, and no effort made to scare the audience. Nobuhiko just wants to dazzle your senses and blow your mind.

Continue reading at Turner Classic Movies

Plays on TCM on Friday, January 13 as part of their late night TCM Underground programming.

Also available from Criterion on DVD and Blu-ray.

For Seattle cinema lovers, 2011 was a good news/bad news year. For the bad, there was the May closure of the Columbia City Cinema and the February conversion of the Neptune into a music and events hall. The empty Uptown reminded us of another neighborhood theater with history gone dark. And the rush to digital projection in the minimally manned multiplexes left too many screens getting dimmer because of 2-D digital prints run through 3-D splitters (no, it’s not your eyes going bad) and more digital prints replacing 35mm screenings of classic films. But let’s not forget the good. Here are the 10 best reasons for movie-loving Seattleites to celebrate this year.

1) SIFF saves the Uptown! And in the same year the Seattle International Film Festival left its McCaw Hall time-share for its own year-round theater/permanent headquarters at Seattle Center. The Uptown deal came together more quickly (over the past year), and its October reopening gave SIFF four screens with both film and digital capabilities. Two blocks apart, the two venues will expand local access to the kinds of foreign, art-house, and independent films that other cities can experience only on Netflix and VOD.

2) The Cinerama 70mm Festival. Paul Allen just gave his pet movie palace a costly new renovation, and brought in independent management (Greg Wood of Portland’s Roseway Theater) to replace national operator AMC. So while it can and does show big blockbusters and digital 3-D, the Cinerama celebrated its makeover in September with 16 days of 70mm and Cinerama prints of classic films (the original high-def). Change is inevitable, but every movie lover deserves to see the texture and color of actual film.

Continue reading at  Seattle Weekly

Kenji Mizoguchi is, along with Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu, the most celebrated of Japanese directors of the 20th century. Yet, today he is less well known and far less revived than Kurosawa, whose rich samurai adventures and vivid historical dramas have kept his name on the top of favorite director lists for decades, or Ozu, whose quiet tales of families facing the trials of everyday life offer some of the most sublime portraits of contemporary living in the world. Mizoguchi falls between the two poles of the triumvirate of Japanese masters of cinema. He’s the poet laureate of Japanese cinema, gracefully exploring the battered but resilient souls in the cruel worlds of Japan’s feudal past and present. And in the 1950s, at the peak of his powers and his international success, he was Japan’s standard-bearer on the world stage. For three years in a row, Mizoguchi won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, the top prize at one of the most prestigious film festivals in world. Sansho the Bailiff (1954) was the third of these (following The Life of Oharu (1952) and Ugetsu, 1953). It was the master filmmaker’s 81st feature.

Based on a story by 20th century author Ogai Mori, Sansho the Bailiff follows the trials of the wife and children of a provincial governor, enslaved by a feudal lord after the principled ruler sides with the oppressed farmers against the lord’s demands for soldiers and rice. The mother, Tamaki (Kinuyo Tanaka), is sold into prostitution, while son Zushio (Yoshiaki Hanayagi) and his younger sister Anju (Kyko Kagawa) are handed over to Sansho (Eitaro Shindo), a pitiless slave owner who metes out swift, unequivocal punishment to all slaves captured in escape attempts. Mizoguchi and his writers, longtime collaborator Yoshikata Yoda and veteran freelance screenwriter Fuji Yahiro, both expanded the original short story and made small but crucial alterations. In particular, they make Zushio, who is the younger brother in the original story, into an older brother to his innocent, idealistic sister, who remains devoted to him as he becomes corrupted by his hostile, brutal environment. The story becomes one of sacrifice and redemption, themes that run through Mizoguchi’s work.

Continue reading on Turner Classic Movies.

Sansho the Bailiff plays on TCM on Sunday, November 13.

The Netflix plan was brilliant. Emphasis on was. After defining and dominating the DVD rent-by-mail market, the company dove into streaming video, made deals with Blu-ray and PSP manufacturers to install software to stream Netflix content to TVs and made the service part of the Netflix subscription: a library of thousands of movies and TV episodes available for free instant viewing, as well as New Releases that could be rented for a fee.

And then they alienated a large part of their subscriber base by deciding it was time to charge for the service at the very time households were cutting back on expenses. It was a self-inflicted wound created by bad timing and PR management and they lost 3 million subscribers in the last quarter. Meanwhile Blockbuster has made a play to take some of the rental-by-mail business and launched a streaming service partnership with Dish Network, the satellite service. And then there’s Hulu Plus, the pay component of Hulu, which includes a deal to stream titles from the Criterion library (including films not yet available on Criterion DVD or Blu-ray).

Dave Kehr explored some of the rarities and oddities available via Netflix Instant and Hulu Plus for the New York Times (read it here) and you can add Amazon Instant Video and iTunes to the list of options, with thousands upon thousands of movies and TV shows accessible on a per-title basis, the equivalent of a virtual rental or digital purchase. They are all industry heavyweights who don’t need a plug from me.

Here are a couple of alternate services that offer a different kind of line-up and, unlike Netflix, don’t demand a complete commitment. You can subscribe or simply pick a la carte. But if you are tired of the sameness of the New Release rack, these services offer something different.

Continue reading on Videodrone

In August of 1971, Nicholas Ray moved to Binghamton, New York, to take a two-year post with Binghamton University’s Harpur College as a visiting professor in their film department. “You can only learn film-making by making films,” was Ray’s mantra, and he put it into practice. He drafted all three classes to become his crew, cast and collaborators: forty-five students rotating through the various production roles (camera operator, sound recorder, editor, electrician, script supervisor, etc…) to learn hands-on filmmaking with Ray as mentor, ringmaster and director. We Can’t Go Home Again, first screened in unfinished form at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival and famously unfinished until Susan Ray, the director’s widow, completed/restored/reconstructed the film in 2011, made its official re-premiere at the 2011 Venice Film Festival, almost forty years later. (The restoration was in collaboration with EYE Institute Netherlands and The Academy Film Archive and with the support of numerous film foundations and archives).

Begun under the working title “A Gun Under My Pillow” (a reference to Sal Mineo’s character in Rebel Without a Cause, 1955), the film was embarked upon with the spirit of collaboration and experimentation. Ray had not completed a film since 55 Days at Peking in 1963, itself a frustrating experience for the director thanks to interference from the producer. He spent the next decade trying to get new projects off the ground, with a break hanging out with Dennis Hopper on his radical The Last Movie (1971). He even started shooting a film about the trial of the Chicago Eight with the defendants playing themselves, grabbing footage of events outside the courtroom along the way. Some of that footage, along with other documentary slices of America’s volatile political culture, found its way into this new production. The rest was concocted and created by Ray and the students.

Ray himself narrates and stars as a version of himself: the director of Rebel Without a Cause and They Live By Night (1949) who comes to the liberal arts college to teach filmmaking and gets to know his students (overcoming their initial sense of distrust) as they embark on a film inspired by their own ideas and experiences. While making 55 Days at Peking, Ray had a premonition that he would never finish another film. That premonition, as well as premonitions of his death, frames his story. While grappling with the idea of being a teacher and an authority figure (“Don’t expect too much,” he tells one student, a resigned, ambivalent bit of philosophy where we expected the punchline to a joke), his students’ lives and relationships guide their stories. A former seminary student named Tom Farrell became a central character whose initial antagonism turns to camaraderie. Leslie Levinson, a dancer brought into the film by a friend, became another defining character in We Can’t Go Home Again, and her startling stories and daring revelations (all inspired by actual events in her life) push the film’s content as much as Ray’s relentless experimenting pushed the form. The film reflects and confronts the political volatility of the era, looks at sexual freedom and guarded relationships and takes an ambivalent stance toward authority figures.

Continue reading on Turner Classic Movies

We Can’t Go Home Again debuts on TCM on Tuesday, October 25 and repeats Wednesday, October 26.

Buster Keaton returns to a familiar type for Doughboys (1930), his second sound feature under lucrative MGM contract. Elmer J. Stuyvesant, the pampered scion of a manufacturing magnate, is a sweet but sheltered young playboy with no conception of life in the real world. It’s another version of the part he played in such silent films as The Saphead (1920), The Navigator (1924) and Battling Butler (1926), only this time he doesn’t merely talk, he inadvertently talks himself into the army, mistaking an enlistment center for an employment office. The hapless Elmer only wants to woo Mary (Sally Eilers), a pretty, plainspoken girl who works in the family factory, but after she turns down the well-heeled suitor time and again, her interest is piqued when she sees him in uniform. As he bumbles his way through basic training, he brings his brand of comic chaos to the front lines of France and manages to turn bad luck into a happy ending in the trench warfare of World War I.

Keaton is clearly no longer a young man and the gentle, slow baritone of his stage-trained speaking voice made him sound even older than his 35 years, but the great stone face also had an ageless quality. He was the eternally hapless and guileless innocent in a world of schemers, wise guys and, in Doughboys, enemy soldiers with guns and bombs. Next to his rough and tumble drill sergeant (Edward Brophy), who becomes a rival for the attentions of Mary (just one of the many complications that sets his commanding officer against him), Keaton comes off as, if not a younger man, at least a gentle and benevolent soul and a model of generosity and trust. Vaudeville veteran Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards, later famous as the voice of Jiminy Cricket, plays the urban wise guy to Elmer’s well-meaning naïf and joins Keaton for one of the musical interludes, tapping out a tune on his ukulele with a pair of drumsticks while Keaton works the frets and they scat out a jazz tune together. It’s a rare moment of Keaton camaraderie and a wonderful bit of bonding both onscreen and off. A lifelong friendship between Keaton and Edwards began over their shared love of eccentric old vaudeville songs and they could be found between takes huddled in a corner of the studio strumming out tunes together on the ukulele.

Continue reading at the Turner Classic Movies website

Plays Sunday October, 23 on TCM