Echo transmission from the cinenecrosphere / a degraded bootleg of The Monkey Talks (Raoul Walsh, 1927)

The Man from Nowhere (Lee Jeong-beom, 2010)

No fake beards to speak of, but still a "haircut movie" par excellence, where every major character reveals himself through his hair style (see the heavy with the moddish cut above, in the midst of torturing a woman with—yes!—a hairdryer), where the camera intermittently lingers on women's hair, and where, of course, the protagonist indicates his resolve by finally chopping off his shaggy mane.

Insects in Amber

There's no terribly good reason why I never sent in this short text about 127 Hours, which was originally intended for the Daily Notebook. I wrote it in December of 2010 and intended to significantly expand it later, but never wrote another draft.

***

A thought comes together about a film seen several weeks ago: if Danny Boyle didn't think that a man pinned under a rock was very interesting, he shouldn't have made a movie about it. Directors make problems for themselves (one definition of directing: the fabrication of obstacles), and the one Boyle keeps trying to solve in 127 Hours is how to make the Aron Ralston story "exciting" when it's obvious that it's a little too uneventful for his skittish brain. Somewhere in there is the buzzing germ of a good 65-minute movie, but it has been drowned in overbearing sticky sap, as though Boyle can't bear the indemnity of actually having made a movie that was only about a man trapped under a rock (which is, frankly, a pretty good plot) and must instead cheat, cheat, cheat at every available opportunity. With his arm crushed between a canyon wall and a boulder, James Franco escapes the dusty reality of his situation and re-experiences his life as a block of bad MTV videos circa 1996 while thinking of name-brand items (we all know the cinema's a marketplace, but—seriously—has there been another movie in recent years so goddamn molded up with product placements?). Dream sequence upon dream sequence harden into impenetrable authorial amber, until Franco's performance and the boulder are barely visible.

Boyle's big dumb artwork springs from a mindset that sees form as an escape from content, plot as the characters' escape from a situation (see: every one of his films) and cinema itself as an escape from reality, as opposed to a burrowing-in. At the very least, he should be commended on his nearly-impermeable consistency. His ugly, affable collage-style sometimes extends into head-slappingly literal metaphoric activities: no one is more prone to having his characters run away, or is, admittedly, better at directing scenes of people running (127 Hours being the exception: Franco’s final limp jog combines the hammy sprints of 28 Days Later with a pronounced nostalgia for the Surge commercials of yesteryear).

Like a lot of smart people, Boyle has convinced himself that movies really are an escape, instead of merely appearing / pretending to be (the most escapist fare tends to also serve as a nightmare ride into the subconscious insecurities and prejudices of the audience for which it offers “escape”). The best stretches in his body of work remain Sunshine (up until the ending) and the first half-hour of The Beach; that both examples come from the earlier parts of the films speaks of another Boyle problem: his inability to end a movie. A cinema of perpetual escape eventually collapses in on itself, leaving only a dull, stylish void.

L'Amérique vue par un australien / Reckless Kelly (Yahoo Serious, 1993)

BB / BB

“Not individualism, but real individuals.”
--Bertolt Brecht

“The more vicious the society, the more vicious the individual.”
--Benjamin Britten

The Burglar (Paul Wendkos, 1957)

Sex & death a la Wendkos & Goodis: a single, fluid, furtive motion of a woman's surprisingly bony hand across the surprisingly phallic tie of a man who has a gun to his back.

Battle: Los Angeles (Jonathan Liebesman, 2011)

A few delayed responses to Battle: Los Angeles:

• Friday, March 11th, 2011: two disasters arrive simultaneously on American screens, one real (on the small screens of televisions and computers), one imagined (on the big screens of multiplex movie theaters), and, as always, the real one is conformed to a fictional narrative (specifically, the narrative of disaster movies, complete with nuclear powerplant cliffhanger) while the fictional one seeks—bluntly, shoddily, thuddingly—to give itself an iota of credibility by stealing from reality.
• Battle: Los Angeles is a bad film, and, as bad films tend to do, it not only reveals its flaws but the flaws of the audience it was made for.
• Serge Daney once said that only imperialist countries made disaster films—or, really, what he said was “it's only imperialist countries that can afford disaster films,” but ultimately one does what one can afford. Even more accurately, there are two factors: 1) only imperialist countries have the resources to make disaster films, and 2) only imperialist countries have audiences that want to see disaster films.
• The proliferation of alien invasion / disaster films in the US since the 1990s—of "national survival" narratives, masochistic wish-fulfillments for audiences that want to be told that they, as a society, will do the right thing when the time comes—has a fascinating contrast in the fact that the greatest disaster to befall the modern United States, Hurricane Katrina, was more of a moral and social failure than a natural calamity.
• "Invasion literature" dominated British popular culture from about the 1870s to World War I and, like many American disaster and invasion films, it was often produced with the help of military advisors. Sometimes the writers were military men themselves: George Tomkyns Chesney was a lieutenant colonel at the time he wrote The Battle of Dorking and was eventually promoted to general towards the end of his life.
• Saying that Battle: Los Angeles is an advertisement for the Marines (and it is in a certain way) or that it resembles a recruitment ad (which it does) overlooks the fact that it serves as an advertisement for numerous other products as well: Vaio computers, Pepsi Max (whose billboard stands proudly amongst the ruins of Los Angeles), even Yellowtail wine.

With other (personal / televisual) duties taking up a lot of my time, I haven't been writing as much for Cine-File in the last few months. Here are four from the last few months.

***

Abraham Lincoln (D.W. Griffith, 1930)

From its opening trick dolly shot—a trip through a windswept cardboard forest to find William Thorne chopping away at lumber in front of a log cabin—on, D.W. Griffith's first sound film resembles no Hollywood movie made before or after. Bubbling with nearly-pagan imagery and Wagnerian portent, it's also uncommonly earthy, funny, and candid; Walter Huston is the only Lincoln one could imagine farting on screen, even as Griffith's shadows and tracking shots imply that he might at any moment take up his sword and travel into the underworld to fight Nibelung dwarves (John Wilkes Booth, in turn, is portrayed as an evil wizard who murders Lincoln to steal his power, proclaiming, "The man who kills Abraham Lincoln will be an immortal!"). The jarring push-and-pull between these two forces—symbolism and naturalism, you could call them—reaches a fever pitch in the staging of Lincoln's assassination, where a wild-eyed Booth, lit like the villain of a German Expressionist film, shoots the president only to have him twitch and slump over slightly, just like an ordinary man. The often indecipherable, hissing mono soundtrack takes on a shape and presence of its own.

Casino (Martin Scorsese, 1995)

Martin Scorsese's densest film is also his most analytical and, on the surface, appears to be his most emotionally distant. Like quite a few directors of his generation, Scorsese was enamored with the work of his late contemporary Rainer Werner Fassbinder (he even went so far as to make RWF's cinematographer Michael Ballhaus one of his regular collaborators following the director's death), and this project, in turn, can be thought of as his answer to Fassbinder's mammoth television serial Berlin Alexanderplatz. Taking acknowledged inspiration from the seminal, Michael Mann-produced TV series Crime Story—itself modeled on Alexanderplatz by Mann and co-creator Gustave Reininger—Scorsese tackles the story of a Jewish mob bookie (Robert De Niro) and his troubled relationships with his wife (Sharon Stone) and a longtime associate (Joe Pesci) by folding the narrative in on itself over and over, piling on layers of tangents, intertitles, facts, Rolling Stones songs, Expressionist flights-of-fancy and, most infamously, multiple voice-overs. However impressive as a work of popular art—especially considering just how tangled its chronology and point-of-view (not so much shifting as continuously jumping) actually are—the film is undeniably a great big puzzlebox.

Of Gods and Men (Xavier Beauvois, 2010)

Thin as a religious statement and muddled as a political one, Xavier Beauvois' drama is best appreciated for what it is: a very strong, terse B-film which delineates the inner workings of a group (in this case, Trappist monks living in Algeria in 1996) through abrupt shorthand, establishes its distinct personalities (including Lambert Wilson as the reluctant leader and King of the Slouches Michael Lonsdale as the resident doctor), and then, in the tradition of the most hermetic Westerns of the 1950s, observes as this "group of individuals" attempts to reach a consensus around a decision (specifically, whether to abandon the monastery or face an uncertain fate at the hands of local extremists). All the long takes in the world can't help Beauvois establish a tangible connection between the monks' decision-making and their humble Catholicism, but, then again, theology isn't exactly Beauvois' strong suit: regardless of his high-minded intentions, Of Gods and Men succeeds at more basic levels—in its portrayals of procedure rather than "good works," ritual rather than faith (especially in how the monks' services and singing relate to their everyday experiences), and characters rather than ideas. A failure that is also, in its own way, a victory.

Secret Sunshine (Lee Chang-dong, 2007)

Secret Sunshine begins with a shot of the sky and ends with a shot of the ground, and could therefore be described as a nearly-2 1/2 hour downward pan: from milieu to character, from ambitions to realities, from action to aftermath, and from a higher calling to its failure to its fitful application. This drawn-out movement isn't readily obvious, and a first impression of the film tends to be dominated by its unpredictability: where the story is going (and, considering Lee Chang-dong's elliptical matter-of-factness, how quickly it'll get there), and, by the second hour, what Jeon Do-yeon's character will do at any given moment. That the movie manages to be simultaneously sprawling (in terms of plot and characterization) and compact (in terms of pacing and setting) owes a lot to the strength of Lee's style, which seems off-the-cuff at first, but slowly reveals its rigor; it's a carefully-designed middle-ground that allows Secret Sunshine to pass through numerous genre shifts (drama, comedy, thriller, tragedy) without ever seeming to over-extend itself.

Robinson in Ruins (Patrick Keiller, 2010)

Abelar: Tales of an Ancient Empire (Albert Pyun, 2010)

Appendix to Episode #104

Since this week's Ebert presents At the Movies is devoted to the films that had the biggest impact on shaping our work as critics (mine, in order of appearance: True Heart Susie, Foolish Wives, Play Time, Shoah, Histoire(s) du Cinema), I thought I'd put together a little appendix about how I work as a critic.

***

1. I work in admittedly weird ways. The best way I have to describe my methods -- the one I always end up falling back on -- is to say that, over the years, they've turned into an imitation of film production. "On location" (I rarely write at home) I produce material (writings that range from phrases to sentences to whole paragraphs), sometimes doing "re-takes" (re-formulating the same set of ideas in different ways), which I then edit together into texts.
   
2. I end up writing quite a bit of new material while putting something together, but the bulk of my reviews, essays, etc. originate from handwritten drafts. Sometimes I scour my notebooks for ideas, inserting sentences or phrases into new contexts.
   
3. I've used the same brand of notebook for several years -- a pastel-colored model apparently intended for teenage girls -- because of the durability of the covers and the quality of the paper.
   
4. I'd say that, altogether, I've only used about 10% of what I've hand-written in finished texts.
5. I've never been very good at taking notes during movies, and rarely do. However, I will sometimes take notes if I'm seeing a film for the second time, and I also write observations down directly after screenings.
6. If I'm having trouble, I'll try some other route. Talking into a digital voice recorder has never really worked, because my style isn't very "conversational," though certain aspects of it do originate in the way I talk.
   
7. Sometimes I'll use my typewriter. What I like about typewriting is that you can feel yourself putting words and sentences together. It's much a less fluid process than hand-writing or typing on a computer. The typewriter I use has an AZERTY layout; because you have to shift to place a period, it means that you can never end a sentence casually.
8. In the past, I've used large cork tackboards, on which I would attach notes or lists of observations and use them in putting together the basic structure of a text. I still have two hanging above my desk, though I've used them less and less in the last few months; currently, they mostly hold receipts and reminders.
9. Even if I start far in advance, it sometimes takes me a while to get a piece of writing into a "finished" state -- and even then, I may make drastic changes at the last minute. Some essays begin as reviews; others begin as two different pieces that end up getting joined together at the last minute. Sometimes, it's both: "Morel vs. Besson" began as two different film reviews which were combined at the last minute into a single piece.
10. Interviews: I use a digital voice recorder to record interviews. On more than one occasion, I've used a video camera, because the sound quality is higher. This seems obvious and is standard practice for film critics, but, having spent the last month or so getting interviewed frequently, I've learned that it isn't standard practice, for, say, a lot of journalists, many of whom simply take notes or (if it's a phone interview) type directly into their computer. I'll admit that, for me, this other method is unfathomable: there are many comments that I don't completely pick up on until I listen to the interview later and often the most telling statements aren't straight responses, but things said between questions. Also -- with the exception of the Eugene Green "questionnaire" I did via e-mail -- I never write questions ahead of time or work from a list of notes.
    

Some Excuses and Justifications

CBS Films' poker-faced rudimentary action: first Faster, an extended tribute to Walter Hill re-framed through Evangelical Protestant morality, then The Mechanic, wherein the angry bald head of Jason Statham and the guilty face of Ben Foster unleash grisly violence on a variety of people-we-know-are-bad (drug dealers, false prophets, traitors, assassins) and then each other. While the former is comparatively sleek and the latter is scuzzy, both indulge in the classic mechanics of the genre without making a big, disingenuous show of it—though, more importantly, what links the two is a certain ethical tidiness.

Dwayne Johnson hunts men in Faster for righteous revenge (whose reasons are explained in much greater detail than exactly how Johnson was able to plan this plot from prison), and in the end he offers one of his targets a chance at revelation on a beach behind a revival tent. Statham and Foster, we are told again and again, are troubled, friendless men, and it's for that reason that they've got into the assassination game; it is not, however, for that reason that they assassinate--it's because their targets are bad people, and Statham's central crisis of conscience revolves the realization that one of his targets was not as bad as he thought.

This isn't something specific to these two films; it's partly built into the genre: the plots of most American-style action movies are concerned with making excuses for the action. It's a genre obsessed with self-justification.

The Mechanic is itself a remake of a Charles Bronson vehicle, and while the early Bronson movies flirted with moral ambiguity (usually in the most tone-deaf ways possible; see Death Wish), by the 1980s, when the genre solidified, they had become overtaken with increasingly baroque justifications. If those Bronson movies aren't art, writing them sure must've been, because a man can only avenge a murder so many times.

The later Bronsons set up Rube Goldberg chains of motivation, something which reaches its pinnacle (or is that "low point?") with Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects. J. Lee Thompson's dreamily lurid last film finds Bronson hunting for a gang because they sold the daughter of the man who groped his daughter into prostitution (all of this filtered through a very '80s brand of Nipponophobia).

Woman of Tokyo (Yasujiro Ozu, 1933; photographed by Hideo Shigehara)

Ozu's von Sternberg-influenced silents are full of these kinds of still lives, usually coupled with a backwards dolly -- as though the objects carefully placed in the frame at the beginning of the shot are an entry-point into a world, a world which becomes more and more visible as the camera moves away from the objects.

Paying Debts

I'm trying to overcome a fear of list-making and, in the process, I also want to give credit where credit is due. So here's a little mental / personal exercise: an incomplete list of films which opened doors or made me turn a corner. That is: an unranked, non-chronological cine-autobiography.

Difficulty level: 20th century post-silents only, no JLG.

The American Soldier (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1970)

Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966)

Antoine & Colette (François Truffaut, 1962)

An Autumn Afternoon (Yasujiro Ozu, 1962)

Away with Words (Christopher Doyle, 1999)

A Ball at the Anjo House (Kozaburo Yoshimura, 1947)

The Bells of St. Mary's (Leo McCarey, 1945)

Berlin Alexanderplatz (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1980)

Bigger Than Life (Nicholas Ray, 1956)

Bitter Moon (Roman Polanski, 1992)

Bitter Victory (Nicholas Ray, 1957)

Bhowani Junction (George Cukor, 1956)

Blaise Pascal (Roberto Rossellini, 1971)

Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981)

Bonjour Tristesse (Otto Preminger, 1958)

The Bronte Sisters (Andre Techine, 1979)

Bullet in the Head (John Woo, 1990)

Le Chant du Styrene (Alain Resnais, 1957)

Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles, 1965)

City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 1989)

A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)

Cold Water (Olivier Assayas, 1994)

The Cotton Club (Francis Ford Coppola, 1984)

A Countess from Hong Kong (Charles Chaplin, 1967)

The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (Otto Preminger, 1955)

Cracking Up (Jerry Lewis, 1983)

The Crime of Monsieur Lange (Jean Renoir, 1936)

Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996)

The Crazies (George A. Romero, 1973)

Dangerous Game (Abel Ferrara, 1993)

Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1988)

Die Hard with a Vengeance (John McTiernan, 1995)

Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davies, 1988)

Doomed Love (Manoel de Oliveira, 1978)

El (Luis Buñuel, 1953)

Everybody's Woman (Max Ophüls, 1934)

Five Women Around Utamaro (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1946)

Forty Guns (Samuel Fuller, 1957)

Four Adventures of Reinette & Mirabelle (Eric Rohmer, 1987)

Four Nights of a Dreamer (Robert Bresson, 1971)

The Gang of Four (Jacques Rivette, 1989)

Germany Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini, 1948)

The Great Garrick (James Whale, 1937)

Happy Together (Won Kar-wai, 1997)

Hatari! (Howard Hawks, 1962)

The Heartbreak Kid (Elaine May, 1972)

Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980)

Henry Fool (Hal Hartley, 1997)

Hôtel des Amériques (André Téchiné, 1981)

The House is Black (Forugh Farrokhzad, 1962)

House of Bamboo (Samuel Fuller, 1955)

House Party (Reginald Hudlin, 1990)

I Confess (Alfred Hitchcock, 1953)

I Am Twenty (Marlen Khutsiev, 1961)

The Illumination (Krzysztof Zanussi, 1972)

Jacques Rivette: The Night Watchman (Claire Denis, 1990)

Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954)

L'Argent (Robert Bresson, 1983)

The Ladies Man (Jerry Lewis, 1961)

The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1948)

Le Plaisir (Max Ophüls, 1952)

The Lieutenant Wore Skirts (Frank Tashlin, 1956)

Life Lessons (Martin Scorsese, 1989)

The Little Theater of Jean Renoir (Jean Renoir, 1970)

Loulou (Maurice Pialat, 1980)

Love Streams (John Cassavetes, 1984)

The Lovers on the Bridge (Leos Carax, 1991)

The Lusty Men (Nicholas Ray, 1952)

Magnet of Doom (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1963)

The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942)

The Man I Killed (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)

Man of Marble (Andrzej Wajda, 1977)

Manpower (Raoul Walsh, 1941)

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962)

Model Shop (Jacques Demy, 1969)

Modern Romance (Albert Brooks, 1981)

The Moderns (Alan Rudolph, 1988)

Monika (Ingmar Bergman, 1953)

Monsieur Verdoux (Charles Chaplin, 1947)

Montparnasse 19 (Jacques Becker, 1958)

Mother and Son (Aleksandr Sokurov, 1997)

Mouchette (Robert Bresson, 1967)

Muriel (Alain Resnais, 1963)

Mr. Arkadin (Orson Welles, 1955)

My Friend Ivan Lapshin (Aleksei Gherman, 1984)

No Fear No Die (Claire Denis, 1990)

Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone, 1984)

One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (Agnes Varda, 1976)

1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (Fritz Lang, 1960)

Ordet (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1955)

Othello (Orson Welles, 1952)

Out 1: Noli Mi Tangere (Jacques Rivette, 1971)

Parade (Jacques Tati, 1974)

Park Row (Samuel Fuller, 1952)

Play Time (Jacques Tati, 1967)

The Plough and the Stars (John Ford, 1936)

Pola X (Leos Carax, 1999)

Prefab Story (Vera Chytilova, 1979)

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (Billy Wilder, 1970)

Rancho Notorious (Fritz Lang, 1952)

Red Line 7000 (Howard Hawks, 1965)

Red Viburnum (Vasili Shukshin, 1973)

Rendezvous in July (Jacques Becker, 1949)

Rock-a-Bye Baby (Frank Tashlin, 1958)

Rue Fontaine (Philippe Garrel, 1984)

The Saga of Anatahan (Josef von Sternberg, 1953)

Security Unlimited (Michael Hui, 1981)

The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (Preston Sturges, 1947)

Sisters of the Gion (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1936)

Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985)

Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, 1995)

The Soft Skin (François Truffaut, 1962)

Some Came Running (Vincente Minnelli, 1958)
The Spirit of St. Louis (Billy Wilder, 1957)
A Star is Born (George Cukor, 1954)

Strangers When We Meet (Richard Quine, 1960)

Street of Shame (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1956)

Street Scene (King Vidor, 1931)

The Struggle (D.W. Griffith, 1931)

Summer Interlude (Ingmar Bergman, 1951)

Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami, 1997)

Thief (Michael Mann, 1981)

Thieves' Highway (Jules Dassin, 1949)

Three Days (Sharunas Bartas, 1991)
A Time to Love and a Time to Die (Douglas Sirk, 1958)

Topaz (Alfred Hitchcock, 1969)
Track of the Cat (William Wellman, 1954)
The Trouble with Harry (Alfred Hitchcock, 1955)

Two English Girls (François Truffaut, 1971)

Two People (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1945)

Under the Bridges (Helmut Käutner, 1945)

Van Gogh (Maurice Pialat, 1991)

Von Heute auf Morgen (Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, 1997)

Voyage in Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1954)

We Can't Go Home Again (Nicholas Ray, 1976)

Welfare (Frederick Wiseman, 1975)

The Weir-Falcon Saga (Stan Brakhage, 1970)

A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes, 1974)

The Wrong Man (Alfred Hitchcock, 1957)

Zero for Conduct (Jean Vigo, 1933)

"Aesthetics are translated into devices, form into technique ... Hence, close-ups become 75mm lenses, sumptuous images become filters and tungsten lights, the sound of footsteps becomes a cardioid microphone, locations become budgets, et al. ... What is important is not always that the image is an image, but that it is an accumulation of tricks and processes that allows it to become an image."

--Ricky D'Ambrose, "Notes on Film School"

Sorry 'bout the mysterious disappearance, am returning / Sound and Fury (Jean-Claude Brisseau, 1988)

Romance in Manhattan (Stephen Roberts, 1935)

Red Hill (Patrick Hughes, 2010)

11 more C-F blurbs on 12 more films, April 2009 - May 2010.

***

The Baader-Meinhof Complex (Uli Edel, 2008)

The Red Army Faction, brought to you by the producer of Resident Evil and Fantastic Four! Bernd Eichinger's starting a franchise: The Baader-Meinhof Complex is a spin-off of Downfall: besides Eichinger as screenwriter and producer, the two films share actor Bruno Ganz, cinematographer Rainer Klausmann and, even more importantly, production designer Bernd Lepel. It's The International inverted: the Tykwer film found in the crisp images of a modern thriller the tangled world of politics; Baader-Meinhof finds in Germany's tangled politics a crisp modern thriller. A whole lot of good opportunities tucked away in the history books: a band of policemen chasing a gunman along a silvery river; Deutschmarks crinkling like wrapping paper at Christmastime on an apartment floor; Ulrike Meinhof seated alone in her room with a desk and a typewriter, the television on. Martina Gedeck gets top billing as Meinhof: the unstable journalist-turned-figurehead is made into a crumbling moral observer. But the film's real center--and what ultimately defines it--is Johanna Wokalek's characterization of RAF theorist Gudrun Esselin. She's got thick black eyeliner and a raspy voice, and looks equally good in a leather jacket or naked. Poor history can make for alright entertainment.

Celine and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette, 1974)

For all of its reputation as a film studies favorite and perennial thesis subject, Celine and Julie Go Boating is ultimately a great giddy fib of a movie, and probably the breeziest three-hour film ever made. Red-headed bluestocking Julie (Dominique Labourier) and pouty brunette Celine (Juliet Berto, the greatest improvisational actor of her generation and, goshdarnit, a real pretty girl) get involved with phantom ladies, horseplay, zombie make-up, incantations, Art Nouveau lettering, cats, loft beds, white bathrobes, a mysterious house, roller-skating, tarot, and magical candy in what is either a marathon round of Clue with liberal borrowings from Alice in Wonderland or an epic of playing dress-up and talking in funny voices. Shot on pastel-colored 16mm by Jacques Renard (familiar to those who attended last week's screening of The Mother and the Whore as Jean-Pierre Leaud's unnamed friend), its unavailability on domestic DVD is made doubly unfortunate by the fact that it's probably the best introduction you can have to the work of Jacques Rivette; its freeform sprawl is a counterpoint to the resigned smallness of his most recent (and possibly last) film, Around a Small Mountain, which screened at EU Fest last month. This is a great work of art, a loopy entertainment, and, despite (or maybe because of) its infamous narrative and spatial labyrinths, strangely liberating. (For those playing Post-Nouvelle Vague Bingo: this is the second movie in Doc's Tuesday series to be edited by Nicole Lubtchansky and to have a cameo by critic Jean Douchet.)

Harmony and Me (Bob Byington, 2009)

A series of trifles adds up to a trifle of a movie, sure--but trifles can make for a pleasant 75 minutes. Produced, as these cheap and unambitious movies usually are, by Filmscience, Harmony and Me is not much: just a series of jokes that remain funny until the next edit and are then forgotten. It's pretty good comedy, a little like laughing at a comedian you have no interest in ever seeing again at an open mic. Of course Justin Rice is in it, and of course he twists and contorts his tongue through the usual social acrobatics, surrounded by the usual mumblecore ringers as the twenty- and thirty-somethings and by broad caricatures as everybody else. Rice is funniest when he doesn't look people in the face and when it becomes obvious that he's far from being 20; Bob Byington knows those two principles, and that's enough to make a film.

Jet Pilot ("Josef von Sternberg," 1957)

Are Howard Hughes productions the most well-funded outsider art in history? Begun sometime in 1949 but released as his last film as producer, Jet Pilot is the masterpiece of the Hughes style, a live-action comic book in which a preteen boy's view of the world--complete with jet planes and an unconscious eroticization of external threats, namely women and Communism--is played out by John Wayne and Janet Leigh. Its intense simplicity borders on incoherence. The fact that it has any semblance of human emotion, or that its images make a lick of sense, can probably be credited to Josef von Sternberg, who was fired from the production (his only work in color) after a few months, though one assumes he had more say in the film than Howard Hawks did when Hughes hired him to helm the puritanical/psychotic Western The Outlaw (Hughes was in the habit of hiring and firing great directors; Don Siegel did unused re-shoots of Jet Piloet in the early 1950s). Wayne, who might as well be one of Henry Darger's hermaphroditic Vivian Girls, falls for Leigh's Soviet defector; they get married, and fly off to a honeymoon in her homeland. Of course she's a double agent, because alluring Commie women are treacherous that way. But before she can steal her new husband's precious bodily fluids (and the secrets of the US Air Force), Wayne gets wise, setting up the kind of romantic comedy that only the inelegant Hughes touch could make possible.

Me and Orson Welles (Richard Linklater, 2008)

Because Zac Efron wears his hair like Jean-Pierre Leaud, because the film positions art as forbidden pleasure and artists as striving for guiltlessness, because of the careful framing of sacred objects, because of the book hidden within a book, because the geometry of the frame resembles Antoine & Colette applied to a more traditional structure of master-shot-medium-close-up, because of the boy in over in his head who falls for an older woman instead of the redhead his own age (i.e. Stolen Kisses), because of camaraderie of the theater (Day for Night + The Last Metro)--because of, frankly, a lot of things, Me and Orson Welles seems at first glance to be Richard Linklater's "François Truffaut movie," Truffaut's concerns filtered through Linklater's cinephilia (his favorite film, Some Came Running, takes the place I Confess would for F.T.). This extended homage, whether deliberate or unconscious, will automatically peg it as "minor" for even Linklater fans, but in a minor film one often finds major ideas, and for a director as smart as Linklater, abandoning his usual trappings doesn't mean abandoning intelligence. On the contrary: Me and Orson Welles is felt-through and fully realized, and a raw nerve runs under this veneer of period-film clichés (Bronzed color grading? Check. Swing soundtrack? Check. Forced insertions of period slang like "swell" into otherwise genuine dialogue? Check.). As tied as his films are to concrete locations (Austin, Vienna, Paris, etc.), R.L.'s plots are all about going somewhere, and most of those film-journeys--whether Slacker, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Waking Life, Dazed & Confused and even Bad News Bears--are stories of arrivals (at a location/realization/idea); this one, on the other hand, is about a departure and a return, and there is a clear understanding that the week Richard Samuels (Efron) spends in the company of the Mercury actors in 1937 is all theater--it is a romance, a comedy and a myth staged for his benefit. When in the end, he realizes that even genius/dick/fraud/real deal Welles (Christian McKay, who at 35 is paradoxically more convincing as 22-year-old than 18-year-old Efron is as a teenager) was just acting for him, it's not a betrayal, but a victory. And that might just be Linklater's grand idea about the purpose of theater: having seen and enacted falseness, Samuels can now understand what is truly genuine.

My Little Chickadee (Edward F. Cline, 1940)

n My Little Chickadee, Mae West is paired with (or, really, against) W.C. Fields, whose nose is roughly the shape and size of one of her breasts. West had by this point already graduated from plump, foul-mouthed sexpot to biologically female drag queen. Fields, vaudeville juggler turned hooch-scented misanthrope, misogynist, mis-everything, seems like the perfect foil to deflate her everything (not the least of which is her ego). Surprisingly, they prove to be an even match, though that may be because West wrote most of the script. The result is a mean-spirited excursion into Western territory, with West's unfailing desire to play it both ways (to satirize "sexiness" while being perceived as "sexy") against Fields' relentless ugliness. Consisting of protracted scenes in stock genre locations (a train surrounded by Indians, a hotel, a saloon, a sheriff's office), which carefully build the jokes up through observation, commentary and repetition, it's a deeply bitter (West swore never to work with Fields again) and very funny film, full of bile and comic tension.

Nights and Weekends (Joe Swanberg, 2008)

Yes, it's the best Joe Swanberg movie, but is it Joe Swanberg's best movie? That seems like a funny question: Swanberg is clearly the author, the driving force, behind his films. But at the same time, he can't quite be called their director. He's a filmmaker first; what he does has very little to do with direction (which is credited to him and co-star Greta Gerwig) or dramaturgy (that can be credited to cinematographer Matthias Grunsky, "the steadiest shoulder in filmmaking," Andrew Bujalski's regular cameraman and an improvisational virtuoso who can get two people into a frame like no else; he shapes the action here into drama). He's a filmmaker in the sense that he makes a film, which is something like sending out invitations for a party or arranging a walk in Millennium Park. So it's possible to say that Alexander the Last is better directed, or that his one-scene cameo in Quiet City is his best acting, and still feel that Nights and Weekends might be the better film, because the closer you get to his contribution, the further you get away from his work. He's a matchmaker, a social worker, a half-willing negotiator; his goal, for better or worse, is the success of others. His performances, even in a movie like this one, where he shares top billing, have always been more about bringing out elements in other actors than making any sort of statement himself; to build a cinema of "real people," he's unwittingly become a character actor, both as a performer and as a filmmaker. So Nights and Weekends isn't really the story of a couple, but more the story of a girl, with Swanberg (as the boyfriend) coaxing Greta Gerwig's best performance out of her and moving his body around hers in a way that allows Grunsky and co-cinematographer Benjamin Kasulke (Swanberg apparently believes very firmly in the buddy system and Kasulke, who shot Maddin's Brand Upon the Brain!, is almost an even match for the Austrian) to create the most direct images to ever appear in his films.

Rien Que Les Heures (Albert Cavalcanti, 1926) & A Propos de Nice (Jean Vigo, 1930)

The beginning and end of the "city symphony," in one double feature: from Alberto Cavalcanti embracing Paris, with neither scorn nor praise (the impulse here is to capture, to mention), to Jean Vigo's show trial of a resort town, less a symphony than a raucous, mocking band. Cavalcanti finds beauty in the city as a place where so many different social strata live, sharing the same streets; Vigo sees only a group of wealthy escapists unknowingly subjugating the world. Besides coming from the same genre, both movies share another distinction: they were debuts. Rien Que Les Heures is a napkin sketch of that distinctly architectural style that would take Cavalcanti to England, back to his native Brazil, and finally to French television. A Propos de Nice is the first volley in Vigo's short snowball fight against the world. From unthinking wonder to invigorating contempt in 70 minutes.

The Road (John Hillcoat, 2009)

In The Road, Viggo Mortensen's face is caked with dirt; his eyes are beady and wild. He travels accompanied by his son, played by Kodi Smit-McPhee, an actor chosen for his striking resemblance to Charlize Theron, who plays Mortensen's late wife. Robert Duvall appears by the campfire as an old man; he's been made up to look like a crone in a Caravaggio painting, gray-lipped and cataract-eyed. The essence of this movie is all in the dirty faces. Actually, Mortensen's face never looks clean anyway; at best, it looks washed. Cronenberg uses this to great effect in A History of Violence; the actor's rustic features and skin make it seem as if he's just scrubbed off soot or mud or blood. Mortensen is therefore the perfect match for John Hillcoat, a director who films rough faces as if they were rugged landscapes (just look at the vistas of his last film, The Proposition: Guy Pearce's sunburn, Ray Winstone's red forehead, John Hurt's pores). Cormac McCarthy might have provided the source material, and Hurricane Katrina and the Tunguska Incident might have provided the reference points for the production designers, but it's the faces and the way that they're filmed that make The Road a good movie. Bankrolled, like all hopeless projects, by 2929 Productions, it's a daringly small film, devoid of any spectacle except for darting eyes, quivering mouths, and runny noses.

Saint Joan (Otto Preminger, 1957)

It's funny that Saint Joan, the movie where Otto Preminger deploys some of his longest and most detailed takes, should be so thoroughly a "hat-and-hair-movie"--a variation of the beloved "hat movie" genre in which meanings and characters can be divined from what the actors have on their heads, whether it's their haircuts (the cast includes Richard Widmark's childlike and psychotic bowl cut, Jean Seberg's boyish short hair, some wigs, and a profusion of tonsures) or headgear (Seberg's leather coif, which gives her the expression of an eager dog in a veterinary collar; Widmark's ill-fitting crown; countless bascinets, chaperons, hoods, and hats that resemble purses, thimbles, and discarded gloves). On the one hand, this is understandable (Bonjour Tristesseis, in some ways, a dress-and-swimsuit movie), and yet it seems to run counter to Preminger's intention of showing figures moving through history--but then again everything in Saint Joan seems to run counter to the intentions of its authors: Graham Greene's Catholic script romanticizes George Bernard Shaw's deliberately de-romanticized play, Preminger's direction turns "Shaw's only tragedy" into a rousing religious drama, and Jean Seberg's tomboy virginity seems to go beyond the scope of Preminger's analytical eye. Preminger's work was governed by a desire to fulfill two duties--to provide analysis, and to provide entertainment--and the balance in Saint Joan is squarely on the entertainment side. It is, in short, the least sensible Preminger, set in the sort of Middle Ages where everyone has dirty clothes and impeccably clean faces, a place where Seberg can rally her Transatlantic-accented troops to save Fr-ah-nce from Englishmen garrisoned in Schüfftan process castles. And yet there's a depth to this movie, even if there isn't any to its painted backdrops: it exists in the details, in how ill-fitting Joan's long hair looks when she has it (even if it's not a wig, it fits like one) and in how the Inquisitor's cap fits his head like a condom. It's the rarest of movies: a masterwork of objects.

Small Soldiers (Joe Dante, 1998)
Small Soldiers is one of Joe Dante's tilt-shift satires, where prejudices/desires/America get miniaturized to the size of toys (see also Gremlins 2, Matinee, certain parts of Looney Tunes: Back in Action) and tossed around, burned, played with. Two well-meaning toymakers (a strangely Jerry Lewis-like David Cross, and Jay Mohr doing Dean-lite) design a line of action figures using their parent company's military artificial intelligence chips, unaware of the consequences. When the teenage son of a bumbling toy shop owner talks a delivery truck driver into letting him have a few for his store, they come to life and wreak Chuck Jones havoc (rockets, pop culture references, sound effects gags) on a sleepy town (locals include Phil Hartman and a 15-year-old Kirsten Dunst, seeming more alive than she does in any of her adult roles). Some of Dante's funniest material is here, as is some of his creepiest, like the scene where an army of sentient Barbie dolls tie Dunst while blasting a Led Zeppelin song.

Woman in the Window (Fritz Lang, 1944)

The first thing that strikes you about Woman in the Window is that you're expected to believe that Edward G. Robinson is a fogeyish square in baggy trousers and striped socks; this movie's a parade of physiognomies (just look at the membership of the club Robinson hangs out in--one fat, one short, one lean...), and E.G.R.'s harsh face hints otherwise. But maybe that's because Woman in the Window is a film that intends to make us see through the way the characters present themselves and how they rationalize their actions. After all, if they're so erudite and educated, why are Robinson and his friends so struck by a kitschy portrait? If they're real intellectuals, then why does the intellectualism they practice consist of sitting around in armchairs smoking? If Dan Duryea's supposed to be such a smooth operator, why does he wear that ridiculous boater that makes his ears look like snowshoes? If Joan Bennett is so universally beautiful, why does she put on so much make-up? The truth is that in this movie, everything's a sham, especially the ending. It is, along with Clash by Night, one of the cruelest of Fritz Lang's American movies, which Cine-File's Rob Christopher succinctly dubbed "majestic downers" when writing about Scarley Street (made the next year with the same cast and a similar set-up) last week. Maybe the cruelest aspect of Woman in the Window is that the camera always moves a beat too early, as though in anticipation of the next step. And it always guesses right.