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Will we be a couple?
I am feeling very much lately as though it is physically difficult to think. I need to do something major with my brain soon. Like write about Alan Ladd in This Gun for Hire (1942). Read on for three movies I've seen recently that weren't that one.
1. I can't believe it took me until tonight to realize how great a debt all the Death Star scenes in Star Wars (1977) and Return of the Jedi (1983) owe The Guns of Navarone (1961). We get to the climactic deployment of the guns themselves, as the British convoy approaches Keros in the trust that the "great, newly designed, radar-controlled guns" have been successfully neutralized by our heroes: they are immense as monuments, their cave-carved bunker legendarily impregnable to assault by sea or air; the gunners in white protective gear and goggles load the massive bores while the commander of the fortress stands over his charts and seated technicians with screen-reflecting faces monitor radio traffic and radar sweeps and I don't just mean that the stop-the-superweapon scenario is familiar, I'm expecting to see Peter Cushing or Michael Pennington somewhere among the straight-backed German officers in their grey uniforms. The place looks like a volcano erupting when it blows. I haven't seen The Guns of Navarone as many times as The Great Escape (1963), but I have lost track of how many times that is; I just don't think I had ever before seen it in a year in which I rewatched Star Wars. That movie really is an amazing grab-bag of personally remixed pop culture. No wonder nothing else feels quite like it, not even its original sequels.
2. On Friday night,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks and I saw Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Тіні забутих предків, 1965) at the HFA. It was part of a series curated by Guy Maddin; he wrote the blurb I've just linked to. I think the HFA should let him write all their film descriptions from now on. We actually own this movie on DVD; four or five years ago we found it in the half-off discard bin at Hollywood Express, thought they were crazy for letting it go, bought it on the spot because we had recently seen and fallen in love with Parajanov's The Color of Pomegranates (Նռան գույնը, 1969) and then never got around to watching it, perhaps out of fear that it wouldn't be as good. It is in some ways a very different kind of movie. Watching The Color of Pomegranates is like being inside someone else's head, or their poetry, or the icons of their art. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors films a meticulously naturalistic recreation of a culture in an emphatically non-naturalistic style, leaving an effect that is simultaneously stylized and documentary. It is beautifully shot, intensely musical, and when its folk-culture sense of ritual or epic breaks into the supernatural as the characters would recognize it, the realizations are powerful and plausible and demonstrate once again that digital special effects are nothing when compared with a tree bursting into flames or an actress with a thin dusting of birch-grey paint across her face. This is a movie in which a neglected wife becomes a witch and the sorcerer she summons falls out of the sky as a raven and changes to a man at her feet. A drowned woman appears at a window of a house that has been ritually barred to her, flattens her hand against the window and does not look dead in any conventional way except that time goes strange around her. Her soul browses as a deer around her grave. In between there is a lot of sheep herding, forestry, axe fighting, harvesting, Christianity. There is a holy fool, charcoal-faced, a mute storyteller. I would love to be able to evaluate the film's ethnography, because it leaves the impression that watching its protagonist's life gives a pretty good idea of the wheel of the year in his time and place, but I know nothing about the Hutsuls that I did not gain from the movie or from resorting to the internet when we got home. I was reminded of Pasolini's Medea (1969) and Kaoru Mori's A Bride's Story (2011–); Rush-That-Speaks thought of Ulrike Ottinger's Taiga (1992). The subtitles were terrible and gave us about every second or third sentence. Sometimes it was one in four. Parajanov's sense of time and narrative is legitimately elliptical, but we might still rewatch on DVD just to see what we were missing. I expect it to reward multiple viewings and wish a decent transfer of The Color of Pomegranates existed. Discovering that A Hawk and a Hacksaw had written an entire album of music inspired by Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors led me to the Sayat Nova Project's Mountains of Tongues: Musical Dialects of the Caucasus (2013), which I recommend.
3. I have been describing Hail, Caesar! (2016) as "insubstantial but fun." As a series of sketches on different genres of mid-century Hollywood blockbuster, it's utterly delightful: I started laughing the moment a road-weary centurion in the time of Tiberius invoked the Baths of Caracalla and may actually have applauded the lonely-sailor dance number "No Dames," which starts somewhere between On the Town and South Pacific and ends up closer to Provincetown and Fire Island. (Seriously, I knew Channing Tatum could dance, but I didn't know he could tap-dance on tabletops while an exasperated waiter whisked the tablecloths out from under his feet. He's not Gene Kelly or Donald O'Connor, but he's not bad, either.) The parodies are just the right envelope-push past plausibility to be really funny while still retaining the nostalgic affection that the film is apparently relying on, if its thesis really is that cinema is a kind of transcendence and that enabling the creation of foolish, fluffy, Technicolor dreams, even if sometimes that involves paying off the world's most inefficient Communist cell and slapping Capitol Pictures' biggest star across the chops, is work worthy of the world's redeemer. As a movie in its own right, though, it never really coheres. It doesn't add up to anything more than itself, which is a problem for a deliberately miscellaneous plot that switches between threads as if pointing toward some unexpected resonance, and if the anticlimax is purposeful, it is nowhere near as effective as the same maneuver in The Big Lebowski (1998). I would have liked the whole thing better if everyone in it had been even half a dimension more real. I think we are supposed to take Josh Brolin's crisis of job-related faith as the moral center of the action, but the scene in which I turned out to have the most emotional investment was the studio-arranged date between Alden Ehrenreich's Hobie Doyle and Verónica Osorio's Carlotta Valdez—respectively, an acrobatic singing cowboy who has just been dropped into a mid-Atlantic drawing-room comedy and a Carmen Miranda-esque performer of hip shimmys under tutti-frutti hats—which has been staged as a photo op for the gossip columnists, but which turns almost immediately into the real thing as the two young people hit it off and bond over their weird entertainment skills. I also feel a bit sorry for the Communists, who failed to script their kidnapping plot as tightly as any of their prizewinning pictures. Otherwise the movie mostly looks like George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, Ralph Fiennes, and Scarlett Johansson having fun, which is fine, but I can get it for better value by rewatching O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) or The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). That said, everything we see of the epically Biblical trainwreck Hail, Caesar: A Tale of the Christ (1951) is pitch-perfect and hilarious and we wouldn't have it without Hail, Caesar! the minor comedy by the Coen Brothers, so, you know, see it if you get the chance. I may also have applauded the anecdote about Danny Kaye. [edit] Alex von Tunzelmann has a theory about the meta nature of the film which, if accurate, at least gives it some intellectual substance.
I seem to have written through the changeover to Daylight Savings. I didn't think I had gotten quite so slow as to misplace an actual hour. Excuse me while I see if I can sleep. These notes brought to you by my forgiving backers at Patreon.
1. I can't believe it took me until tonight to realize how great a debt all the Death Star scenes in Star Wars (1977) and Return of the Jedi (1983) owe The Guns of Navarone (1961). We get to the climactic deployment of the guns themselves, as the British convoy approaches Keros in the trust that the "great, newly designed, radar-controlled guns" have been successfully neutralized by our heroes: they are immense as monuments, their cave-carved bunker legendarily impregnable to assault by sea or air; the gunners in white protective gear and goggles load the massive bores while the commander of the fortress stands over his charts and seated technicians with screen-reflecting faces monitor radio traffic and radar sweeps and I don't just mean that the stop-the-superweapon scenario is familiar, I'm expecting to see Peter Cushing or Michael Pennington somewhere among the straight-backed German officers in their grey uniforms. The place looks like a volcano erupting when it blows. I haven't seen The Guns of Navarone as many times as The Great Escape (1963), but I have lost track of how many times that is; I just don't think I had ever before seen it in a year in which I rewatched Star Wars. That movie really is an amazing grab-bag of personally remixed pop culture. No wonder nothing else feels quite like it, not even its original sequels.
2. On Friday night,
rushthatspeaks and I saw Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Тіні забутих предків, 1965) at the HFA. It was part of a series curated by Guy Maddin; he wrote the blurb I've just linked to. I think the HFA should let him write all their film descriptions from now on. We actually own this movie on DVD; four or five years ago we found it in the half-off discard bin at Hollywood Express, thought they were crazy for letting it go, bought it on the spot because we had recently seen and fallen in love with Parajanov's The Color of Pomegranates (Նռան գույնը, 1969) and then never got around to watching it, perhaps out of fear that it wouldn't be as good. It is in some ways a very different kind of movie. Watching The Color of Pomegranates is like being inside someone else's head, or their poetry, or the icons of their art. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors films a meticulously naturalistic recreation of a culture in an emphatically non-naturalistic style, leaving an effect that is simultaneously stylized and documentary. It is beautifully shot, intensely musical, and when its folk-culture sense of ritual or epic breaks into the supernatural as the characters would recognize it, the realizations are powerful and plausible and demonstrate once again that digital special effects are nothing when compared with a tree bursting into flames or an actress with a thin dusting of birch-grey paint across her face. This is a movie in which a neglected wife becomes a witch and the sorcerer she summons falls out of the sky as a raven and changes to a man at her feet. A drowned woman appears at a window of a house that has been ritually barred to her, flattens her hand against the window and does not look dead in any conventional way except that time goes strange around her. Her soul browses as a deer around her grave. In between there is a lot of sheep herding, forestry, axe fighting, harvesting, Christianity. There is a holy fool, charcoal-faced, a mute storyteller. I would love to be able to evaluate the film's ethnography, because it leaves the impression that watching its protagonist's life gives a pretty good idea of the wheel of the year in his time and place, but I know nothing about the Hutsuls that I did not gain from the movie or from resorting to the internet when we got home. I was reminded of Pasolini's Medea (1969) and Kaoru Mori's A Bride's Story (2011–); Rush-That-Speaks thought of Ulrike Ottinger's Taiga (1992). The subtitles were terrible and gave us about every second or third sentence. Sometimes it was one in four. Parajanov's sense of time and narrative is legitimately elliptical, but we might still rewatch on DVD just to see what we were missing. I expect it to reward multiple viewings and wish a decent transfer of The Color of Pomegranates existed. Discovering that A Hawk and a Hacksaw had written an entire album of music inspired by Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors led me to the Sayat Nova Project's Mountains of Tongues: Musical Dialects of the Caucasus (2013), which I recommend.3. I have been describing Hail, Caesar! (2016) as "insubstantial but fun." As a series of sketches on different genres of mid-century Hollywood blockbuster, it's utterly delightful: I started laughing the moment a road-weary centurion in the time of Tiberius invoked the Baths of Caracalla and may actually have applauded the lonely-sailor dance number "No Dames," which starts somewhere between On the Town and South Pacific and ends up closer to Provincetown and Fire Island. (Seriously, I knew Channing Tatum could dance, but I didn't know he could tap-dance on tabletops while an exasperated waiter whisked the tablecloths out from under his feet. He's not Gene Kelly or Donald O'Connor, but he's not bad, either.) The parodies are just the right envelope-push past plausibility to be really funny while still retaining the nostalgic affection that the film is apparently relying on, if its thesis really is that cinema is a kind of transcendence and that enabling the creation of foolish, fluffy, Technicolor dreams, even if sometimes that involves paying off the world's most inefficient Communist cell and slapping Capitol Pictures' biggest star across the chops, is work worthy of the world's redeemer. As a movie in its own right, though, it never really coheres. It doesn't add up to anything more than itself, which is a problem for a deliberately miscellaneous plot that switches between threads as if pointing toward some unexpected resonance, and if the anticlimax is purposeful, it is nowhere near as effective as the same maneuver in The Big Lebowski (1998). I would have liked the whole thing better if everyone in it had been even half a dimension more real. I think we are supposed to take Josh Brolin's crisis of job-related faith as the moral center of the action, but the scene in which I turned out to have the most emotional investment was the studio-arranged date between Alden Ehrenreich's Hobie Doyle and Verónica Osorio's Carlotta Valdez—respectively, an acrobatic singing cowboy who has just been dropped into a mid-Atlantic drawing-room comedy and a Carmen Miranda-esque performer of hip shimmys under tutti-frutti hats—which has been staged as a photo op for the gossip columnists, but which turns almost immediately into the real thing as the two young people hit it off and bond over their weird entertainment skills. I also feel a bit sorry for the Communists, who failed to script their kidnapping plot as tightly as any of their prizewinning pictures. Otherwise the movie mostly looks like George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, Ralph Fiennes, and Scarlett Johansson having fun, which is fine, but I can get it for better value by rewatching O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) or The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). That said, everything we see of the epically Biblical trainwreck Hail, Caesar: A Tale of the Christ (1951) is pitch-perfect and hilarious and we wouldn't have it without Hail, Caesar! the minor comedy by the Coen Brothers, so, you know, see it if you get the chance. I may also have applauded the anecdote about Danny Kaye. [edit] Alex von Tunzelmann has a theory about the meta nature of the film which, if accurate, at least gives it some intellectual substance.
I seem to have written through the changeover to Daylight Savings. I didn't think I had gotten quite so slow as to misplace an actual hour. Excuse me while I see if I can sleep. These notes brought to you by my forgiving backers at Patreon.
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Yes; it's the link in this post with Alex von Tunzelmann's name. I found it right after finishing my writeup. I've been reading Reel History for years.
(I also like An Historian Goes to the Movies which does historical analysis in more depth. That blog hasn't addressed Hail, Caesar! however. I just thought I'd mention it in case it's of interest.)
I don't know that one at all, and it is! Thank you.