Beauty and the Beast

When Cocteau finished "Beauty and the Beast" in 1946 I don't know whether he had seen "The Wizard of Oz" made six years earlier in 1939. There was a war on. I can't get over how little he had to go on with "Beast": it was essentially a picture book, a text and some black and white drawings. I have to get those drawings...but it seems like a huge amount of the imagery is Cocteau's: the look of the beast with the big head, high collar and fangs and the animated mansion with those arms sticking out of the walls. Whereas "The Wizard of Oz" started as a picture book, then was turned into a play before the movie was made, so it was the music and a lot of the dialogue that was original. The imagery had been established: I remember a photo of a tinman costume from the 30's, and the whole thing is already there, including the funnel on the head. But "Beast" is almost completely from Cocteau's imagination.... I have to get those drawings.

And, intentionally or not, for a "monster in a haunted house" movie, it's un-German or un-Gothic. (There's only one 4 second Gothic touch: when the father comes to the door, his shadow grows in size, even though he's standing still; it's a trick he stole from Murnau. But that's it.) When I first saw the movie 35 years ago, I was most impressed with how many scenes are filmed outside, in bright sunshine. It's really the exact opposite of "Alien."



It's amazing to think that they gave Cocteau all that money and the resources to make a major motion picture when he had only made a few arty films ("Blood of a Poet" - sure, I liked it, but it's not exactly "Gone with the Wind") and really he had only his reputation as a poet, painter and a gay public intellectual. He had a huge ego, and he also had that old-school notion - almost completely gone now - that if you had a really good education in the Classics: the art, philosophy, and culture of the ancient Greeks and Romans, then you could do anything, from making a great work of art to running a country.

Academy Awards 2010 - some final thoughts

I'd always wanted to see those short films that get Academy Award nominations, so I rented a DVD of the nominated shorts for 2007, live action and animated.

And I found out that the shorts that make the cut are a microcosm of the rest of the Academy Award process: the strange and exciting films are long gone and we're left with films that are well-meaning and earnest. Even the comedy was earnest. And unremarkable.

But it was the animated films that were a revelation: every one was stop-motion animation with computer assistance, in other words, puppets with computers.

So things have changed: we all grew up with cartoons that were based on drawings. I remember someone saying in film school: "I'm not signing up for Animation because I can't draw."

So instead of cartoons originating with ink on paper, now we have the work of hi-tech puppeteers. There was a cartoon clown in the 30's that climbed back into the ink bottle at the end of each episode...I'm thinking of those surreal black and white cartoons (I think "Betty Boop" is the only one commonly known today). Puppetry is not a bad thing, because puppeteers are mainly interested in creating a character and telling a story in a theatrical way, so it's a good match to the movies. But, let's face it, a puppeteer is used to being ruled by theatrical conventions, so I'm not surprised that the results, with or without computers, are conventional. As opposed to a wild guy with a pen and a blank piece of paper (or clear plastic) where anything goes.



We saw "God of Carnage" last night. With Lucy Liu ("Kill Bill") and Jeff Daniels ("Dumb and Dumber" and "Something Wild"). It was written by someone who knows what theatre is all about: talking. This was all talking and almost no spectacle (I hate that "Miss Saigon" helicopter stuff.) Great opening: the curtain rises to a pitch black stage, the lights come on and the four characters are already there, so there's none of that "enter stage right" business. Sal saw it with James Gandolfini ("The Sopranos") and I'm sure he was great, but Jeff Daniels was great too.
Reminder: "Something Wild" (1986) by Jonathan Demme was a very well-made comedy with a climax that takes place on Long Island...very good.

The Hurt Locker

The Academy wanted to give the Best Director Award to a woman and so here comes this movie directed by James Cameron's ex-wife made in the same year he's in contention too and they definitely don't want to see him up there with another "Top of the world!" moment and it's a Serious Movie about a Serious Subject (it's not "Point Break") and that's it, award goes to...



You don't have to be a veteran of anything to be able to criticize all the bone-headed activities of these three Americans running around Iraq. From what I understand, only the location scout deserves praise here, because it appears that Jordan, where the exteriors were shot, does resemble Iraq.



I'll leave the big stuff (characterisation, plot, common sense) to others. I want to focus on something small: technique. After the first scene with the broken robot (I did like the robot video POV), we're back at the "barracks" (or whatever it's called nowadays) where the soldiers sleep, the soldiers engage in conversation and the camera is still hand-held and we're still seeing jump cuts. Only five minutes into the movie and I'm already put off, because I want these techniques to "express" something, and here their use is just dishonest, a means to give the scene a cheap "tension" that's undeserved, and that the actors could have carried off on their own, thank you very much...

This forces me to wax nostalgic about "Breathless" (1960) where the jump cut and the hand held camera meant so much in a movie that was able to be anti-Hollywood (quirky plot structure and low-budget) and an homage to Hollywood (gangster movies and the star system) at the same time. In "Breathless" the technique was new and exciting (and, yes, a little mystifying) but here we're looking at something straining to be authentic in a pseudo-documentary sort of way.

So don't watch the Academy Awards for the awards. Watch it for the dresses or the jokes or something else important. I watch it for those old-movie montages: I love to try to identify every damn one-second clip, and I get upset with myself when I can't...

"Up", animation, and the Oscars

So the creative team behind "Up" went to Venezuela to see the location that inspires the movie's main character: a series of rock plateaus that rise out of the jungle, with the world's highest waterfall as an added bonus. I suppose there are worse ways to spend money when you're making a big-budget movie. The lush scenery did distract me until about halfway through the movie, when the similarities to the Road Runner cartoons hit me: you have a character that's obsessed with chasing a fast-running, non-flying, non-talking bird, through a strange landscape, employing complicated traps and things that never work...

But I liked the movie. It seems insulting to call it a cartoon (to the Academy it's an "Animated Feature"), with all that expensive hi-tech stuff being used to tell the story. And it may just be the best movie to win an Academy Award this year (Best Animated Feature Film and Best Original Score). It's certainly the only one people (small people) will be watching a few years from now.

Someone knew what they were doing: a wrecking crew is seeking to evict the old man from his house. He argues with someone at the curb, the argument escalates, and he hits the man with his cane, drawing blood. The supervisor comes over to survey the scene and realizes that this is the excuse they need to get rid of the old fellow. As he stands there with his clipboard (old man POV from the house) he puts his hand on the fencepost. That's it. It's like Darth Vader saying "I have you now" before being blasted off course. It's completely understated and it's pure cinema.

How important are the Oscars? I need say nothing more than this: look at the list of Best Picture winners from 1927 to the present. I guarantee you'll see many unrecognisable titles. And it's not your fault: the list is filled with many earnest, well-intentioned movies that deserve to be forgotten.

Lenten film: The Flowers of St.Francis

A recent re-issue of three Roberto Rossellini DVD's prompted me to see "The Flowers of St. Francis" (1950). Federico Fellini co-wrote the screenplay.

I think I wanted to see if there would be any of that rough camerawork I remember from the "wartime" films, but there is none of that here. The movie is very low-budget, with simple camerawork and editing and mostly exterior shots, a kind of religious "Blair Witch."

The thing everyone talks about here is the performances of all the non-actors in the movie: he uses real Franciscans. (That's really low budget: hire people who've taken a vow of poverty.) They're great, to Rossellini's credit. He had a lot of experience working with non-actors throughout the 40's, so he was good at it. One Italian critic said, "Everyone in this movie is an idiot." So maybe you have to be a little sympathetic to the subject matter, but a little Fellini humor comes through in every scene.

I've counted about four or five movies about St. Francis. The most famous is "Brother Son, Sister Moon" (1972) by Franco Zefferelli. I even found one with Micky Rourke as St. Francis made in the 80's. I'm sure "Flowers of St. Francis" is the best, but I might seek out a few of the others.

Rossellini got a lot a grief during his life about inserting heavy-handed religious themes into his movies, while his personal life was messy: he fell in love with a married actress, Ingrid Bergman, who left her husband for the director. But since the subject of this movie is religious, his temperament is a good fit.

Be Kind Rewind

I knew I'd have a problem with "Be Kind Rewind" (2008) by Michel Gondry because I had so many issues with his "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (2004). But I'm a sucker for concept movies and Jack Black always seems to try hard...

Well, the concept (the two video store clerks accidentally erase all the tapes - this is the 70's - then proceed to re-shoot the movies on demand) made me laugh out loud, but the movie did not. Jack Black really does try hard and I came away thinking that Mos Def simply had no talent as the straight man, but it's really the director's fault: he's French. And he should know that you cannot do verbal humor when you living with English as a second language.

However, here's the funny thing: to promote the movie the producer started a website where you could watch all the movies the two characters "made." These are known as "Sweded" films, because they cost more to rent, as if they'd been imported from Sweden - you can actually look this up on Wikipedia. Anyway, the producer's website is gone, but Youtube has picked up the "Sweded" concept, and the results are uneven (of course) but much funnier than the original movie- an irony that is, perhaps, not lost on New Line Cinema.

If you Google "youtube - bekindmovie channel" you'll find what I'm talking about. On the right press "see all" under "uploads" and "favorites." There are the Sweded movies (none more than 4 minutes) by Gondry himself and, better yet, movies that have been submitted to Youtube by ordinary citizens. I had time to watch the Sweded versions of Blade Runner and Kill Bill, and my favorite was Goldfinger. Very funny.

They reminded me of a certain short film, "Spiderman vs. Superman" starring Michael Costagliola.

Avatar and the curse of originality

So Avatar is a re-telling of the Pocahontas-John Smith story except this time, the natives win.


Reviewers have groused that it bears a too-close resemblance to "Little Big Man" (1970) and "FernGully" (1992) "The magical inhabitants of a rain forest called FernGully fight to save their home that is threatened by logging and a polluting force of destruction..."

Just for fun, I'd like to like to add my own comparison, to "Battle of Algiers" (1966) by Gillo Pontecorvo where the lo-tech insurgents battle the intruding French occupying force. More precisely, the character of Colonel Quaritch in "Avatar" reminded me instantly of Colonel Mathieu in "Battle of Algiers." The two characters are very similar, right down to the well-fit camouflage fatigues they wear during briefings.

But movie critics need to be reminded of what all you Shakespeareans out there already know: originality takes second place to the tale-well-told. I guess we should call it the Homeric tradition of storytelling: where everyone in the audience knows the story already. They know how it's going to end and who lives and who dies, but it's the voice of the storyteller that they've come to hear. My Dad said the same thing a few weeks ago in a different way: that Giuseppe Verdi must have had a really big ego to write his opera "Macbeth" (1847). To think that he could top Shakespeare. But of course the story was just source material. The real work was making the music.


At the other end of the Great Hall of Storytelling is suspense. The "What happens next?" story; the story where "I can't stand it, the suspense is killing me." This is Alfred Hitchcock land. It's very hard to tell a suspenseful story, whether it's around a campfire or in a movie, because you've got to have your technique down just right, or you'll ruin everything.

The middle ground, just to be a little academic here, is occupied by the movie serial, where we don't know the story, but we know that the hero will not die, and we're still kept in suspense by the "cliff-hanger" elements of the story. You young guys know this as "Raiders of the Lost Ark" territory.

So where does this leave "Avatar"? Steve Martin sprayed all those little white floaty things like they were roaches at the Academy Awards last night. I think history will be as kind to "Avatar" as it is to "Titanic", whose special effects looked pretty impressive back in 1997.

"Land Before Time" and the Wiseman Connection

3 year-old Caroline insisted that we watch "Land Before Time" about six or seven times, so I'm well-prepared to do an in-depth visual analysis, but I really want to comment on something that struck me about 10 minutes into the first viewing, and that's the narration. The story is basically a re-telling of "Bambi" (1942) set in the late Jurassic era, so there's a certain amount of science that's nice to know: earthquakes and volcanoes are inconvenient for living things, and there were quite a few inconvenient things in the time of the dinosaurs. That's about it. The rest is plot contrivance: the animals travel west (to California?) in search of a better life and along the way they overcome their segregationist tendencies in the name of survival.


I thought the narrator would be killed off at the beginning, perhaps struck by a meteor, but the white guy with the deep voice just kept going on, describing character's thoughts and desires and generally telling us things we already knew. My memory is hazy, but I do not remember "Bambi" having a narrator, and I'm sure this movie would have been quite a bit better without one.


Woody Allen movies run the gamut in narration from good to bad to ugly, and I'll admit to being mystified: sometimes he appears to know what he's doing and sometimes I think everyone's too scared of him to tell him when to let it go...


But the most important point regarding narration has already been made by Frederick Wiseman, the documentary filmmaker whose movies have never included narration and never will. My favorites are "Titticut Follies" (1967) and "Primate" (1974) but you can pick any one to get the point, and everyone, regardless of whether they "like" documentaries or not, should watch a Wiseman documentary, so he can show you how it should be done.

A first list: American Culture

I must make a quick start to this, then come back and make changes:
I hate lists, but there's something about movies that drives otherwise astute people to make them.
This list is a short one. It's a list of movies you have to watch if you're an American. Either because of the illustration of American culture, or the sheer weight of cultural references. I thought of this a lot when I was teaching ESL, but never got to act on it.

Here's the list:

The Wizard of Oz
It's a Wonderful Life

That's it. The list of runner-ups is very long and says more about my taste, but I cannot defend these 100%:
Greed (Eric von Stroheim), The Kid (Charlie Chaplin), The General (Buster Keaton), High Noon, Shane, Stagecoach, The Godfather.

I know someone younger than I am would include Star Wars and Forrest Gump...
I'm leaving room here for mistakes: (I can't believe I forgot about...)

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

It's hard to be kind to a movie that was made in the comfort of Hollywood while Rossellini was working on a shoestring in the rubble of Italy inventing neo-realist cinema. Criterion has just released a new DVD set of Rossellini's war trilogy, so Italian movies of the 40's have been talked about a lot recently.

For the record, the war trilogy is "Open City" (1945), "Paisan" (1946), and "Germany Year Zero" (1948). The old prints (especially the subtitles) of these films are famously bad, so I plan to hold off seeing them again until Netflix offers the new ones.

I'll stress the positive: you can be impressed with Gregg Toland's work in 1946 only if you haven't seen "Citizen Kane" (1941). Frederick March comes home from the war and his children greet him at the door and there's Myrna Loy, his wife, in deep-focus in the background, as witness. I think Gregg Toland allowed William Wyler to look like a better director. It's sad to think that Toland would die only two years later, in 1948.

Hoagy Carmichael is really good as Uncle Butch: the scene with the other non-actor in the cast, the disabled sailer, where Hoagy gives advice while playing piano, is especially good - he plays the only real music in the movie. Hoagy's children reported that he took his on-screen persona very seriously: he played the same easy-going musician in film after film, and that casualness required an astounding amount of rehearsal.

Other films of 1946: Hitchcock's "Notorious", "The Big Sleep", and "It's a Wonderful Life", but my favorite of the year is Jean Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast.": soft-core surrealism in a children's story, a really haunting film that will really make you forget that Walt Disney ever existed.

First mention: "Avatar" and reductionist story theory

When someone says "Avatar is just Pocahontas" they mean the movie's just a re-telling of the story of the relationship between Pocahontas and John Smith. This is meant as a put-down. As if to say, "Well, this 3-D multi-million-dollar pic ain't really new after all, because the story is old."
As if every story hasn't been told before. But that's reductionist.
It's good to talk about reductionism because you don't want to be accused of doing it unintentionally. (It's a classic criticism of undergraduate theorising.) And, it's good to talk about reductionism because it's funny.
This reminds me of John Gardner.
John Gardner was the most famous professor at SUNY-Binghamton when Mary and I were there in the late 70's and early 80's. No, I never laid eyes on him, although you'd think a white-haired, over-weight motorcycle-riding professor would have stuck out. He died in a motorcycle crash in 1982. He's most famous for writing "Grendel", the story of Beowulf from the monster's POV, but in academic circles, I think he's well-known because he wrote two books that are often assigned reading in undergraduate writing classes: "The Art of Fiction" and "On Becoming a Novelist." I know I liked "Grendel" so much that I wrote a treatment for a screenplay based on it.
Anyway, John Gardner said (I'm paraphrasing here) "there are only two stories: "you go on a journey" and "a stranger comes to town."
And, to belabor the obvious, this is a joke, because, if you're being reductionist, then there's really only one story, because the difference between Gardner's two stories is just POV. The other reference is to Homer because there's the Iliad ("a stranger - the Greeks - comes to town") and the Odyssey (the biggest, bestest journey of all).
Laugh all you want, but there are people today who use the comedy of reductionism to make millions of dollars for themselves, and these are people who pitch movies to studio executives. You know: "It's a romantic gangster movie, like "Goodfellas" meets "Pretty Woman."

"Rashomon" and the structure of time

Mike and I watched "Rashomon" a couple of weeks ago and the thought of Narrative Cinema makes me want to list the ways movies structure time in the telling of a story. I'd like to keep a running list, so I'm open to entries.
"Rashomon" tells the same story four times in four extended flashbacks. It's 60 years old and it hasn't been done better yet - although this time I found the Western-style music really annoying (Mike was OK with it.)
"The Bridge of San Luis Rey" has been made into a movie three times and they've all been bad. In high school they called it "circular construction": the bridge collapses at the beginning and then you follow the lives of all the people who died on the bridge.
Flashbacks are more often mis-handled than not, as they slow down forward motion for (frequently) needless exposition. They frustrate the basic story-telling question: "What happens next?" The "whole-movie flashback" has been done dozens of times. The classic is "Lawrence of Arabia" where the main character dies in the first scene and then we're told the story of his life in one extended flashback. The best flashbacks are those in "8-1/2": pure cinema-as-memory.
"Memento" has to be on the list. Telling the story backwards has been used before - but in the theatre. The movie was definitely worth the effort, but I have to admit to being disappointed with the boring ending.
Two movies try to tell the story in real time: "High Noon" is one. We studied it in NYU writing class because it's very well constructed, but Gary Cooper sure does look at the clock a lot.
"Run Lola Run" combines "Rashomon" with real time: three versions of the same story are told and each version, and the action of the story, lasts for 25 minutes. Definitely recommended.

Brakhage - 1998

Brakhage - a documentary made for Canadian television

A very good 1-1/4 hour documentary, if any one's interested, from Netflix.

In the documentary, an elderly American critic says, "Film is just about over now." This is a very old-fashioned distinction which will soon be lost: he could have said, "Film as an analog medium is giving way to all the digital media out there." This distinction is most important to those who use the chemistry and physics of the plastic piece of film to create images. Still, just as CD's have not wiped out records, there are other considerations more linked to the quality of the image than to the "art" of Brakhage-style film making.

But the most interesting comments were those that applied the label "abstract expressionism" to what Brakhage was doing. Thirty years ago, this would never have occurred to me because, no matter what camera trickery is employed, I knew the camera was pointed at something in the world around us. In fact, no one can claim that every second of Brakhage is transcendental: sometimes you're sitting there just trying to figure out what the camera is pointed at. I figured he was closer to Georgia O'Keefe (get close enough to that flower and it becomes abstract) than he was to the Abstract Expressionists. But now I'm coming around to the "look, don't think" philosophy. It's abstract. It's expressive. It's expressively abstract and it's abstractly expressive. I'm thinking in particular of everything he did after "Dog Star Man" (which, after all, told a simple story) particularly "Text of Light" and on to the later films made with scratches and noxious chemicals.

Although Brakhage's life fit the counter-cultural mold of the 60's (without the drugs and the rock and roll) his personality really makes him seem closer to those Abstract Expressionist painters of the 50's: the emotional intensity, the high-seriousness, and the urge to "make it new." And here's the point where his personal life makes sense. I've said before that American avant garde cinema didn't disappear, it's images simply flowed out into the very real world of TV advertising, the impressionistic pitchmaking of the 21st century. Abstract Expressionism, in contrast, met a very real death, when Pop Art killed it in the early 60's. But Brakhage, the oblivious filmmaker, just kept going and, sure enough, starts suffering from the filmic version of writer's block. It may have been bad, but at least he didn't wind up like Jackson Pollack.