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Touch of Evil (1958)
Movies like it
Sadly, IMDb does not allow updates to its FAQs for films from experienced and knowledgeable film fans.
Nevertheless, to the question of "any recommendations for films like it," I would add early Russ Meyer work. Surely the settings and cars and women and music and moral relativity caching a truer survivalist instinct found increasingly full (if not necessarily rawer) expression in films such as _Faster Pussycat, Kill Kill!" _Touch of Evil_ perhaps influenced B films more than A (and B, really, almost always determines A), but still it's hard not to think that Godard wouldn't have seen or had in mind _TOE_ when making _A bout de souffle_.
Part of the technical brilliance of _TOE_ is that is begins with a long take, but from that scene on, it is relentless short cuts. With film stock, no wonder studios hated Welles. He could do what he wanted back at the Mercury Theatre, but any Hollywood chief would have gacked completely at a 1hr50min film containing what must be a hundred separate scenes or more. This approach alone--of countless brief, intense scenes--makes the film daring and avant-garde and foreshadows the digital world to come. Other filmmakers would make quick use of many of the tropes and motifs and suggestive scenes Welles offered in _TOE_, but it would take a long time before some of his really individual methods became standard.
Henri Henri (2014)
Henri adds two new surnames
Henri is an orphan boy at a convent who, once the convent in Quebec (as countless did and have, in recent history) closes down, must leave the cloister and fend for himself--find work, find love, and find a way to pass on the gift he received there.
Thematically, the film is a long meditation on sight and perception that can branch off through many characters, from the ingenu titular character with a facility for illumination, to the turbanned business owner who can't get his educational credentials recognized, to the blind porn theatre ticket wicket girl who can "read" palms, and on and on. The sentient viewer will enjoy how the impressions and observations regarding viewing build up during the film.
This is a delightful/charmant film. Part of what makes it great is what usually makes great films great--tremendous supporting performances. It's a pity the role of blind Helene wasn't actually played by a blind person, but I guess we're so over that now, cavilling about such things. Oscarssowhite lasted what, 10 minutes? Accuse me of slacktivism, but the film would have been the more powerful, and if you tell me that a sightless person can't act sightful, but only a sightful person can act sightless, well. . . . Major, major opportunity missed, by having a sighted person play a blind one, instead of an actual blind person who gains some sight. (I've still never seen _Philadelphia_, and I'm sure it's a great movie, but if an actual gay person portrayed the protagonist, I'd probably see it; someday we'll get to the point at which you'd actually _lose_ money if you had straights play gays, but I guess that's generations down the road.) For a film that is supposed to challenge and overturn clichés, it does (charmingly), not just that. It tries to fight against its own clichés. But. . .it's 80% great, and the last 20% is so Dickensian/Hugoian and backloaded with clichés, that the film disappoints the eager and committed and devoted viewer; the director, having gone to so much hard work early in the film, completely lets us down and submits to total cliché in the end. It's understandable, since obviously the end was written first, and that's how you usually go about these things. But the huge sag between the early parts, when the director is thinking, and the end, when the director is on auto-pilot, is hugely and dismayingly palpable, especially for a film with such great pacing.
But there's great poetry and earnest effort in this film, still the same. I would like to highlight three excellent features of this film, that you will NOT regret having watched:
1) There's a loving and accurate dedication to accurate scenes here. So perfect and exact is the attention to this detail, that you forget completely that (there being no budget) there are no cars or anything, despite the film being set in Montreal--major triumph here. Anyone, in Quebec, or . . . Poland. . . or anywhere, will get it. Yeah, everything gets too set-piece, but the director employs colour and pacing excellently.
2) There are several comedic scenes, but a few are terrifically set up, and they also pass translation--I know, because, well, I speak both of those languages(and they're the only ones I know well)--so pretty good translations, on the whole, and how many movies have you watched when you just know the translations are off and you get distracted because they are so off?--here's a "foreign" film in which the translations might help and not hinder your enjoyment. If you're going to have comic moments in a sentimental film, you might as well make those comic moments good, and this film makes them great.
3) The soundtrack. Honestly since _Casino_ I cannot remember a film soundtrack having such an impact on me. In _Casino_, it's Scorcese playing the faves of his youth and basically mocking his own self-indulgent film, but here, it's a director actually marrying music to the score of his film and enriching nearly every scene with music, from popular to classical. Outstanding.
My DVD box tells us to buy it because of _Forrest Gump_ comparisons, and I guess those are there. But there is a difference, I think. Normally American studios scout the world over for old ideas they never thought of but can recreate, with money. In this case, a Quebecois director--and let it never not be said that no people, anywhere in North America--allo Police!--are more obsessed with America than the Quebecois--did take a Gumpian story and try to renew and refresh it and in some ways make a copy. Still, (lacking money) rather than simply compare what you just can't compare to, this film actually does extend the narrative and actually build upon other films. For that and for all this movie does, I'd say you wouldn't be disappointed if you saw it.
God's Pocket (2014)
God's 99%
Mickey (Philip Seymour Hoffman), an outsider and man of uncertain means, finds that his stepson, Leon, has died in a construction accident. As an outsider, Mickey tries to work with reality in Devil's Pocket, Pa. His wife (Christina Hendricks), however, knows the hood, and feels that her son's death was not an accident.
Mickey loves Jeanie, so he's willing to get his underground buddies to help him calm Jeanie down; besides, he has money troubles of his own.
Along the way, town tribune and echo of sentiment/voice of morality Richard Shelburn (Richard Jenkins) haphazardly, but ultimately self-interestedly, connects the dots.
This is one brutal take on the true America—cash only, lacking health care or basic human dignity or unions or any sense of community beyond cheap whisky. Futureless Leon apes DeNiro like any al-Quaeda fighter. Florida and more guns are the only hope for 'Bird'; Jeanie glimpses only an unbuilt plot the rotting Shelburn is a skeleton upon. With a truly telling fact, the movie isn't even shot where it's about, Devil's Pocket, Pa. Actually, it was shot in New York—not even the desperate people it was about could get any jobs out of it.
A curious factor about this movie, and pretty well any other ones, is that all American reviewers seem to want to judge it on its "comedy" quotient. In other words, if it doesn't make you laugh (laugh at the killing and the poverty and racism and hopelessness and lack of education, and so on), then it just ain't doggone no good of a fillum. From the Marx Brothers' "why I oughta" to _I Love Lucy_ to now, some Americans should query just what they're supposed to find so funny about hurting or killing often defenseless others (women, children, non-whites). There's a moment or two of dark humour in _God's Pocket_, but those aren't the moments that are supposed to define the movie. For American reviewers, however, they are, because Americans can't see their own destitution in any ways but laughter or money—normal human emotion/sentiments simply don't apply, or constitute currency.
Here's a hint, or a tip, for those who really want to follow this film, but are too bored. The tortured drunk Shelburn isn't just put there for comic effect at the beginning, and the voice-overs later aren't there just for hapless loser commentary at the end. Americans know that they can't be un-American, even if it means losing to the rest of the world. In life and love, and in the town he owns, this is Shelburn's conundrum, and he attacks it with words, drink, a booty call, and probably being beaten to death.
I don't know; I don't see how anyone, outside of America, could call this anything but a pretty good and ambitious, if hopeless, film.
The Railway Man (2013)
Bloodless War Story
In 1980, Eric (Colin Firth), traumatized WWII Pacific theatre veteran (and "railway enthusiast"—not "trainspotter") meets, (on a train, of course), long-time nurse Patti (Nicole Kidman). They converse, he about trains, she cattily about her intended travels. Within a few frames, they're married, and she finds out (oh!) that he's haunted by recollections. She can't get to him, so she talks to his wartime fellow prisoner, Finlay (Stellan Skarsgard). Finlay says she should keep to herself, but resolves to do something. Eric returns to the scene of the crime and meets his torturer. Back in England later, he gets a letter from his torturer, and decides to revisit the place, this time with Patti.
This is a curiously bloodless film, in the sense of emotionlessness. One could not say that any of the acting performances are poor—Jeremy Irvine, as the young Eric (Firth) is plummily and not entirely annoyingly unwatchable. On a relatively small 18m budget, many scenes and locations are well brought to life. (Truly endless consortiums of taxpayer-funded state and national governments contributed to this film, so if you see this film, no matter how, you paid for it, big time, and the stars and the Weinstein Company got YOUR money, and no lawyer, no matter how expensive, could pretend otherwise.) But the film made back only maybe a quarter, at best, of its expenditure (wonder who got it?). Despite its gold-plated cast, its focus on war and romance and those bankable stars and those nasty enemies (in this case, the Japanese) why?
Solipsism, indulgence, and mutual self-admiration. And maybe a story waiting too long to be told.
The film is hobbled hopelessly by trying to pack too much in to too short a space. When you consider that this film is about lifelong and never-leaving trauma, the director's decisions to chop it up so close so that so many events happen so quickly over the course of a short-ish film (I saw the American cut), it kind of gives the lie to their noble views about making an important film about a forgotten event that just had to be known about. A bit like saying, "sure it's torture, but you'll get over it"—which is the obverse of the film's lofty purports.
Maybe having to get so much public funding—i.e., yours and mine—so that the private sector would at last chip in, took some time. The long gestation and many false starts—these must have contributed to what the film became. Initial enthusiasm can wane and get diluted (or, yes, reanimated sometimes, though not in this case) across time. Who can dislike an economical film? But if you've got the stars, and heaven knows an endless script, let them work with it.
Firth openly suggested Kidman, and Irvine, and, who's to say, possibly the international accountants who swung the deal.
In the "bonus" material, narrated by the oddly off-pitch and off-styled Lisa Ling, each of the stars engage in talking about just how amazing it was to work with each other. In the commentary with director Jonathan Teplitzky and co-writer/producer Andy Paterson, both emote and slaver over just how amazing each of the scenes were, and just how amazing each of the actors were in being with each other. It only takes a little while of this before your stomach creeps up, and you can't help but think of what this film was supposed to be about, and how this story—any story, got hijacked by self-promoters and moral relativists.
Surely this was a story that ought to have been told. But maybe, as for those actually involved, it just had to be gotten over, chalked up to life's enduring inhumanity.
The real-life protagonist of the film, Eric Lomax, died shortly before it was released. In the extras, the filmmakers suggest that this was just as well, and as Eric wanted it, and it would have been too much for him to revisit the trauma (rather playing against their own chuffed-up self-imagined achievements).
As a war story, this film fails. As a romance, it also fails. As an inward-looking self-congratulatory reel that sucked in public money to make quite a few rich people richer, well, that worked.
Walk on the Wild Side (1962)
If you made this film today, with four strong female actors, you wouldn't get this
(That's not to say that you wouldn't get it in the next 20 or 40 years, but now, that's just what I'm sayin', sayin'
).
I came to this film because of Brook Benton's vocal version of the title song. His deep, almost militaristic voice (unusual for Benton) and the marching drums--suggesting damnation, or at least eternity--evoke powerful sensory responses—it seems like an R&B song with a gospel preacher teaching a hoodlum, and the ending is nigh-on (perfectly and compellingly—but about what?) operatic. With memorable Mack David lyrics like "One day of praying, and six nights of fun; the odds against going to heaven—six to one," the song encapsulates the moral compromises the film shows but doesn't study.
The ludicrously named Texan "Dove Linkhorn" (Brit Laurence Harvey) sets off to find his former brief flame, Hallie (the French Capucine), and at first encounters "Kitty Twist" (Jane Fonda), then supposedly Mexican Teresina Vidaverri (Anne Baxter), and then his beloved Hallie, and then, along with brothel-owner Jo (Barbara Stanwyck), all of them more or less separately or all together. He travels from Texas to Louisiana, and it sure does seem that short a stretch, no matter how big you think Texas is.
Paint by numbers rarely works.
(The idea of a bunch of people from different backgrounds completely suits polyglot New Orleans, but almost nothing is made of the music and the few glimpses we get of black musicians or actors make this 1962 film retrograde for its time. Sexually speaking, for the film IS about sex, I suppose one can only say this—back then, a sexual transgression made you infamous, and now it makes you famous. In broad terms, which is the more morally appropriate?)
The pace is slow; there are many good lines, but they're derivative of the hard-boiled genre, and add up to nothing in a film about serious issues like prostitution and abuse and subjugation; it ends up being every actor for him or herself, and the leads let us down (everyone else breathes life into the movie!). The metronomic and unconvincing Harvey shows down in a cool-off with the somnolent and at-best unpersuaded Capucine (the script? the role? her place in a movie taking on serious issues as superficially as this?).
Renowned director Edward Dmytryk bears part of the blame for this movie, too. He had such a collection of actors around him that, perhaps, he chose to go almost exclusively with medium shots, or occasionally head shots. That's understandable, but the longish (for its era and for all the script has to say) film becomes oppressive as a result; the movie is supposed to be in New Orleans, but it could have been shot at your house. Yes, a brothel is a sealed place, but its sealedness only takes meaning from the sense of a world outside.
The black and white filming is nice, for those who like it (like me), but in the end feels a bit false, already, for its time. It really is neat to see a film that is essentially dominated by a strong female cast—Fonda, Stanwyck, Baxter, Joanna Moore (Miss Precious—about to marry Ryan O' Neal), and I guess Capucine. But it also shows how dim-witted screen writing, unimaginative directing, and desiccated morals can take some strong performances and turn them into a weak result.
The movie does gather some momentum towards the end, as if everyone realizes what they're there for—to end this abortive effort. It has an ending at once ironic and unironic, much as the song, in Benton's singing, anyway, does—it's frankly impossible to tell what is more successful, more alluring, more saving, than walking or not on the wild side. Once you hear Brook Benton's "Walk on the Wild Side," it probably won't ever fade away from your memory banks forever. The movie. . . yeah probably.
Dast-neveshtehaa nemisoosand (2013)
Those who get out alive will eventually regret it
Maybe I'll come back someday and digress on the politics of this film, but I would just like to hail it for some fine, fine acting. It's long, but I doubt anyone could say the atmospheric shots were overdone, and few frames were wasted--they almost all reflect on something else in the film. It's like a very long, slow, convulsion, if that makes any sense.
If you, like me, were disappointed by the manipulative, false, Academy award-winning _A Separation_, then restore your sense of probity with _Manuscripts Don't Burn_. I also can't believe the director hadn't had Shelley from _Glengarry Glen Ross_ in mind as he drew the protagonist here, but, if he didn't, it probably only makes both films more real and remarks an essential cultural and human sameness at play. (Both movies, don't forget, are based on real-life situations.)
Unit 7 (2011)
gritty, worthwhile
The minute I looked at this, I thought instantly of _The Seven-Ups_, about cleaning up New York. I was a bit wrong, but not too much; the film leans a bit much on possibly the stupidest film ever made, Goodfellas, but in its own way Grupo7 is intense and believable--even has probably some good writing, as well as some good performances.
The director was clearly pretty uncompromising, and on the whole you have to respect that. It made me think of how American Hustle ripped off Layer Cake and made the bad guys the good guys; here, the good guys are the bad guys, but Grupo7 combines the two other movies in a way and indicates--maybe--a slight bit more ambiguity (and Grupo7 is not nearly as flabby as either of those two aforementioned, or Goodfellas). Missing almost entirely from the film is any sense of the real ravages of street drugs; yes we get the poverty and desperation and the way too obvious scenes of the lead character's need for insulin, but still there's a bit of moral vacuity here. That could have been connected to the Seville expo in '92 (I saw the people and places razed by the Barcelona Olympics), but that was only done through sort of stock footage--kind of 7-Ups on that one.
Still, you've got to like a taut film with good performances and great editing. It could have made greater points and done more, but by doing less it's possible the film did more, and you have to like that. I won't watch it 10 times, but I'd definitely watch it again.
Politist, adjectiv (2009)
Outsider attempts to do the right thing
Police, Adjective This is an absolutely brilliant film. Many films have been made in Germany or the Czech Republic or Spain or various Latin American countries, and so on and on, about periods of interregnum between one form of government and another. Writer/Director Porumboiu goes right to the details in Romania. He takes the smallest possible case, an undercover officer checking out a high-school drug dealer, and makes us wonder about the biggest metaphysical situations involving law and justice. Wisely—almost incredibly—Porumboiu sets aside macropolitics and doesn't make a partisan or political film. Instead, he forces us to imagine the links between private behaviour and philosophical concepts.
Many people are constantly writing that the movie is too slow or too long. Hell, I say that about car-chase movies that are 90 mins. of explosions or 130 mins. of James Cameron's computer-animation teams. There is not one wasted second in this film. It is not indulgent in the slightest. There are no car chases. This is a movie about a narc tailing a high-school kid. That's what it is. The only time the movie really really drags is when Cristi, the narc/undercover guy, is watching the home of the alleged squealer. That does go on for a long time, but, structurally, it makes sense, and Porumboiu leavens it a bit by making Cristi get tea from a nearby shop and discuss what he's doing in a communist-realist way that chips in to the overall narrative.
The way Porumboiu binds the film together is admirable—we see Cristi early on telling his overweight colleague that that colleague just can't play soccer with them—those are the rules. Then Cristi gets told by the prosecutor that he isn't entitled to comment on laws. And then there's Cristi's girlfriend (the rules of language), and Zelu (sees all laws, accepts none, really) and Cristi's boss, Angelache (the rules of law, expressed by language).
The endless opening and closing of doors, the bureaucracy, the people who think their lives are so much more important than yours, is compelling. Cristi never really imposes. He just has a sense of what is right (and he is a policing figure). His overweight colleague puts upon him. His lazy (political but useless) colleague Zelu is of no help. He goes to the prosecutor (Marian Ghenea—in a truly wonderful performance) and is granted a promise that we later learn has probably been betrayed. Costi, Vali, Doina—all are unwilling to act, knowingly or unknowingly, towards justice. Part of what made The Death of Mr Lazarescu by Puiu so compelling was precisely the fact that one knew that, whether or not you had the greatest American health insurance in the world (or even the most money in the world, maybe), or you lived in a country with one of the greatest public health insurance programs there were, you still were not immune to basic human failings. If Puiu did that with health care and medicine, Porumboiu does that with law and justice and society. What Poromboiu shows us, relentlessly, is that our lives are contingent upon others, and if others treat us the way we treat them, well. . . .
There just isn't a bad performance in this film. One would finally have to say that Dragos Bucur is effective in his impossible role. He is the hunched anti-hero post-communist but still communist narc. His girlfriend, Anca, can talk of anaphoras, but when he tries to express what he knows is right, the state, in the person of well-known Vlad Ivanov, gets Cristi out a dictionary from which he cannot escape. Dictionaries, after all, like language, are arbitrary documents. A "tree" in Brazil means something entirely different from a "tree" in Siberia. Language is arbitrary and contextual, and this sophisticated film works with this knowledge.
This is a carefully filmed movie that rarely draws attention to itself. As far as I can tell, every time Cristi is shadowing someone, the effect is very authentic. There are a lot of long shots. Close shots are sparing. Office shots are always as they should be or oblique. When Cristi gets back to his flat, the way Porumboiu films it so that we could only ever see the hallway and never a bedroom or any kind of intimacy at all is very, very wisely done. In some respects, Porumboiu boldly refuses to answer American hopes. He gives us no cheesy intimacy, and keep us always focused on Cristi, the man outside—outside shadowing a kid who may be a drug dealer, outside the changing Romanian legal system, outside his girlfriend's perfect—but changeable—command of language. Maybe Anca is the one who really ought to be determining things, for images are symbols, and symbols are images.
As for the climactic scene, 20 mins. of pure dictionary: I can't think of 20 other minutes I'd love to watch more, from _The Getaway_ to _Unforgiven_. The climax of _Police, Adjective_ is utterly riveting, if you've grasped what has gone on before.
This is just an all-around great movie. At times, you can sense opportunities for indulgence, but Porumboiu never takes them. I hope he'll continue not to.
Yes, it's a given that people not from the U.S. may not understand movies from other places. But I'm getting a little bit tired of this. I can watch movies from Korea or Argentina or just about any country in the world and enjoy them and understand them and feel my way into them and engage with them intellectually and emotionally.
Police, Adjective is definitely going to go down as a very important film. It comprises the human and the metaphysical the while excising the obvious political. That makes it political. This is an important film. Negative reviewers desperately cling to seeing "police" as a noun, and that is not what this film is about. ww