Screening Log, September & October

Material (d. Thomas Heise, Germany, 2009) A–
What is the relationship between history and memory? Can we understand one without the other? And how does either appear to us: as linearity, as narrative, or as a jumbled heap that suddenly appears, daunting in its messiness? These are the beguiling questions that documentarian Thomas Heise poses to us with Material, albeit implicitly: the nearly-three-hour documentary/essay is comprised of archival footage, spontaneous imagery shot by Heise while living in East Berlin in the late 1980s and early '90s, and material leftover from Heise's 35mm productions and excised from the final films. The diversity of sources from which the footage is culled results in an eclectic visual palette – from grainy black-and-white digital video, to the vivid images from news programs distorted through magnification, to pristine color film – yet this sometimes-jarring combination of styles is itself a fascinating portrayal of the various guises in which memories and past events appear to us, as though their passage through time has colored them in unforeseen ways. While theoretical notions of historical analysis remain under the surface, the movie explicitly illustrates an East German society in the midst of drastic transformation: every figure we see onscreen (from esteemed theatrical directors to former Stasi bureaucrats, from imprisoned murderers to opinionated grandmothers) responds to their sociopolitical climate with rhetorical fervor, collectively weaving a bewildering tapestry of a particular time and place. To add to the chaos, Heise offers little to no explanation for the events we see onscreen: a forced eviction early in the movie and a riot that breaks out in a small movie theater, for example, simply play out before our eyes with overwhelming immediacy, removed from their immediate context. Thus estranging itself from typical political documentaries, Material draws a further correlation between historical events and the visceral spontaneity of memories, as though East Germany itself is desperately referring to the memories and histories that brought about its downfall. Those looking for a document of East Germany in its waning years will probably be disappointed, but by questioning the nature of history and documentary itself, Material transforms into something infinitely more troubling and thought-provoking.

A Grin without a Cat (d. Chris Marker, France, 1977) B+
A Grin without a Cat would actually make a fine double-feature with Material, though seven hours of dizzying political history presented in a rush of archival imagery would be tough going for even the staunchest cinephile. The late, great Chris Marker's four-hour compilation of turbulent world events throughout the 1960s and early '70s is comprised mostly of on-the-ground, spontaneous footage captured by everyday witnesses who happened to be present (with some televised news programs and excerpts from other films thrown in). Marker's whirlwind, globetrotting breadth – we leap from Vietnam to France to Cuba to China to the U.S. to Bolivia, making some detours along the way – is made even more overwhelming thanks to Marker's unwillingness to clearly explicate the sociopolitical context of these scenes. (Some considerable knowledge of mid-20th century world history is practically a requirement here.) The benefit of this lack of talking-heads explication is that A Grin without a Cat offers a visceral, baffling document of a tempestuous turning point in global events: we really do feel like the world is teetering on the brink of either rejuvenation or collapse, with each shaky handheld viewpoint immersing us in this raging torrent of history. The movie also offers us the opportunity to witness compelling political characters like Fidel Castro and Salvador Allende addressing their constituents. It's no coincidence that Marker begins by citing Battleship Potemkin: throughout the documentary, Marker uses montage editing (in the purest Soviet sense) to pose juxtapositions and correlations between geographically distant events, suggesting the forces of dialectical materialism with characteristic intellectual agility. At times his connecting tissue can be pretty flimsy, but then aren't we always at the mercy of a flippant, capricious history?

Interiors (d. Woody Allen, USA, 1978) A–
I had been intending to check out Woody's first all-out dramatic film (an homage to Ingmar Bergman, one of the director's idols) for a long time; happily, Allen reveals himself as sure-footed with drama as with comedy (at least during this fertile mid-to-late '70's period. Three sisters' lives are unsettled after the divorce of their parents, a demanding matriarch and an aloof father who wants to make the most of his remaining years. As Eve, the mother who is at once frail and volatile, Geraldine Page (who garnered a slew of awards for her performance) commands every scene she's in: a study in restrained anger and insecurity, her character (even, or especially, through her absence) catalyzes the rest of the ensemble. (Allen originally wanted Ingrid Bergman to play the part, but she was committed to shooting Autumn Sonata with Ingmar Bergman; the casting switch may have actually benefited Interiors in the long run, as Ingrid's effortless poise would have innately altered the character.) Shot in muted browns, blues, and grays by Gordon Willis, Interiors extends its central thematic motif (characters who feel the need to tyrannically control their external worlds to make up for the turbulence of their inner psyches) to its close, suffocating compositions: the lack of distanced establishing shots and the tendency to edit abruptly between brief snippets of scenes (a dangerous technique that works better here than in practically any other instance I've seen) powerfully conveys the tense relationships between a number of compellingly troubled characters. Some other Allen movies are off-putting in their middle-upper-class insularity, but that privileged milieu actually acts as a nice counterpoint to these characters' messy lives (and in any case, the character of Pearl, the father's new wife, acts as an implicit critique of bourgeois arrogance).

Caravaggio (d. Derek Jarman, UK, 1986) B
Jarman's biography of the controversial 17th century painter treads a fine line between kitsch and tragedy, a balancing act that succeeds to varying degrees throughout the film. Jarman envisions Caravaggio as a bisexual blaspheme, a drunken brawler revisiting his scandalous life from his deathbed, as the sound of foghorns (and, occasionally, automobiles and trains) filter through the open window. Ripe with pederasty and homoeroticism, the movie paints an extravagant portrait of a painter whose beauty was inseparable from his sacrilege; his religious iconography typically used ruffians and prostitutes as models, a duality that's also reflected in the movie's numerous anachronisms (from the aforementioned cars and trains, to calculators, typewriters, and electric lighting). Jarman and his crew get around the difficulty of believably conveying 17th century exteriors by containing all of the action to interiors shot on studio sets, which makes for a bold, colorful, occasionally surreal visual palette, but which also makes the movie seem at times like an intentional curio, sardonically exploiting its barebones budget. That kind of thing works well in Flaming Creatures or George Kuchar movies, for example, but is trickier when the movie also contains portentous proclamations and extravagant portrayals of lust, jealousy, murder, and revenge. In any case, Jarman's artistry is invigoratingly unique, and the movie is never less than thought-provoking.

Looper (d. Rian Johnson, USA/China, 2012) B+
Despite cribbing from both La jetée and that masterpiece's own "remake," 12 Monkeys, Looper still manages to be refreshingly original and, at least so far, the most exciting Hollywood movie of the year. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is Joe, an assassin in 2044 who is tasked with offing victims sent back in time from 30 years in the future. Inevitably, one of those targets ends up being his older self (Bruce Willis), whose escape leads to an especially fraught game of cat-and-mouse (not to mention a grappling with morality and sacrifice). The background of this peculiar time-scrambling enterprise is surprisingly well thought-out, and the portrayal of this near-future is as immersively thorough as those in A.I. Artificial Intelligence or Blade Runner. That careful verisimilitude in a fanciful world extends to the characters, who sometimes function only as cogs in the narrative machine but who are nonetheless offered fleeting moments of personality and empathy. (This is thanks mostly to a stellar supporting cast; Paul Dano, Noah Segan, and Garret Dillahunt all bring uniqueness to what could have been stock B-movie roles.) Ultimately the movie can't transcend its genre trappings to be anything more than an exceptionally well-told story, but in this case that's enough. Looper's most impressive miracle: yet another eerie little kid who has supernatural powers, yet who never quite descends into the morass of syrupy cliche (though he comes dangerously close at times).

The Master (d. Paul Thomas Anderson, USA, 2012) B
We shouldn't be surprised that Anderson's newest film is a sprawling, ambitious, cryptic, and unsettling account of postwar America and the ease with which people can be coerced into faith; nor should we be surprised that the writer/director concocts an episodic, open-ended, disquieting story to parallel the sense of confusion felt by both a single man and an entire nation in the immediate postwar years. Call it aimlessness by design, then, but this aimlessness is still what prevents The Master's characters from feeling real and compelling, and what prevents the movie's larger themes from cohering into a complex expression of societal cancer; I can't say it better than Roger Ebert, who wrote, "The Master is fabulously well-acted and crafted, but when I reach for it, my hand closes on air." Joaquin Phoenix is Freddie Quell, a withered and rage-fueled veteran of WWII; he drunkenly stumbles onto the yacht of Lancaster Dodd, the charismatic yet manipulative leader of a cultish religion called "the Cause," who sees in Freddie's twisted desperation a wounded man in need of recuperation. The Cause is famously reminiscent of Scientology, and it's true that The Master offers some subtle allusions to L. Ron Hubbard's New Age delusion (Dodd's "processing" technique most of all), but the movie should be read as a broader snapshot of how drastically World War II imploded modern society (whether in America or Japan, Germany, France, Britain, etc.). That snapshot was filmed (mostly) on pristine 65mm, and projected on larger-than-life 70mm in some areas (not mine, unfortunately), meaning The Master is as visually awe-inspiring and technically immaculate as we'd expect from Anderson and his crew (with cinematographer Mihai Malaimare, Jr. replacing Robert Elswit, Anderson's usual collaborator). But, if the movie powerfully evokes a troubled and alien environment (only sixty years removed in actuality, yet metaphorically eons away from us), what about the people within it? Quell and Dodd are clearly discombobulated, lonely souls, but by stranding them amid their confusion and alienation, The Master fails to say anything significant about their lives or their world. (The movie's finest scene is the one that most effectively conveys the two men's desperation, which they try to alleviate in disparate ways: Freddie paces furiously in front of an audience of observers, unable to transport himself to the distant, metaphysical realm that Dodd paternalistically demands of him.) Narrative elusiveness is not in itself a detractor, but Anderson is not aiming for the same amorphousness that Claire Denis or Apichatpong Weerasethakul achieve so well; it's clear that The Master has something (too much?) to say, yet is as confused as its protagonists in trying to articulate what that might be. Should we fault a movie for trying to tackle too much? Probably not – but it still keeps The Master from the level of greatness.

Night Train to Munich (d. Carol Reed, UK, 1940) A–
A rollicking early actioner from Carol Reed (who would go on to direct Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol, and The Third Man). In the thick of World War II, a dapper British spy (Rex Harrison, at his least aggravating) poses as a Nazi major in order to rescue a Czechoslovakian scientist and his alluring daughter from the clutches of the S.S. The movie is clearly propaganda (especially given the introduction of two supporting characters, Charters and Caldicott: jovial Brits who decide to band together to help their endangered countryman and defeat the Germans), and its scenes set in a concentration camp inevitably take on the perverse sheen of escapist entertainment, but if we think of the setting into which this movie released (that is, a beleaguered country in the thick of war, in need of uplift and unification) its more lightweight aspects aren't necessarily flaws. Technically the film is charmingly ingenious: the model sets (like the still above, or the numerous rail-travel scenes obviously achieved with a toy train set) and rear-projection effects aren't exactly convincing, but they're grandly immersive in the larger-than-life way that only cinema can accomplish.

Samsara (d. Ron Fricke, USA, 2012) B
The director of Baraka (and cinematographer of Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi) returns to similar territory with this plotless, nearly wordless visual poem centering on spirituality and materiality (or, as the press notes claim, offering us "a guided meditation"). There's little originality in its concept or even its broad thematic structuring (sequences about religious zealotry, modern life in the metropolis, the commodification of sex, the wonders of a decaying natural landscape, and so on are practically ripped straight out of Baraka and Koyaanisqatsi), but the images themselves are astonishingly unique and overwhelmingly beautiful. (No offense to The Master, but Samsara is actually the first film to be shot entirely on 65mm since Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet [1996], since parts of The Master were shot on 35mm.) Some stretches in Samsara are obnoxiously heavy-handed: a shot of a geisha crying, or of Indonesian strippers dancing for the camera, are as cheap and pretentious as they sound. But other scenes are jaw-dropping: a high-angle extreme long shot of pilgrims at Mecca, Saudi Arabia; ethereal helicopter shots of rustic temples shrouded in fog; and, most of all, a surreal and horrific scene in which a man in a skyscraper's lobby slathers clay on his face, smears on disturbing make-up, gouges out his artificial eyes, then repeats the process. (It's as insane as it sounds.) Ethnographically, then, the movie may be hollow and even condescending, and its overarching theme is offensively shallow for anyone who's thought even remotely about the stampede of modernization. As cinema, though – as pure, immediate visual spectacle – Samsara offers us sights we would never otherwise see, in an oneiric alternate world that's as awe-inspiring as the religious rites it ambivalently documents. True, I had to force myself to ignore the movie's witless themes (and occasionally block out the cliched musical score), but if you're able to do this, Samsara will be one of the most breathtaking movie experiences you'll have this year (or for years afterwards), though it must be seen on the big screen to be fully experienced.

Intruders (d. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, USA/UK/Spain, 2011) C–
Fresnadillo made the excellent sequel 28 Weeks Later (and the acclaimed Intacto, which I haven't seen), but Intruders mostly falters as narrative, as horror movie, and as aesthetic enterprise. Two children – one in Spain, one in Britain – begin having nightmares about faceless creatures who want to steal their senses (beginning with speech, then vision, and so on). Of course their parents (tormented by their own demons) initially chalk it up to childhood whimsy, but gradually come to realize that their nightmares are more real than they thought. The twist? The kids give life to these creatures by writing about them, turning illusion into reality – a meta-cinematic concept that horror directors should have realized a long time ago is not even remotely scary. The movie is too clever for its own good, but it's also annoyingly over the top (the awful musical score reliably dilutes scares rather than enhancing them; here's for an embargo against all string instruments in future horror-movie soundtracks) and relies on cheap CGI to create its supposedly terrifying monsters (which look more like the poor man's version of the Dementors from the Harry Potter movies). A few interesting ideas are folded into the overstuffed narrative (such as the unexpected suggestion of an incestuous Elektra complex between Clive Owen's character and his daughter), and there's one chilling scene in which a woman sees a religious icon in a Barcelona church turn into a menacing demon before her eyes, but mostly this is a flimsy horror concept, and a poorly-told one at that.

The Age of Innocence (d. Martin Scorsese, USA, 1993) A
To my eyes, Scorsese is one of the few directors who makes the most of his historical settings, fleshing out distant periods of time with fleeting gestures as well as sweeping verisimilitude, realizing cinema's potential to make immediate life both immersively real and viscerally hyperreal. This may be less true of The Aviator and Gangs of New York than of Hugo or, especially, The Age of Innocence. Using Edith Wharton's 1920 novel as a springboard to indulge a dizzying play with modes of address and the interweaving of art and society (Scorsese indulges his literary, theatrical, musical, and painterly tendencies along with his cinematic one), Scorsese slyly infuses Wharton's satire of upper-class mores in 1870s New York City with a surprisingly metacinematic emphasis on how art reflects, or refracts, broader movements in society (the best example: an opulent tracking shot through a mansion's hallways festooned with classic paintings, all of which say something about the aristocrats who argue over them). I may be biased – late 19th century America may be the historical setting that fascinates me the most – but this is the most vivid examination I've seen of how a still-nascent American upper-class defined itself in contrast to its European forebears. There's also a tragic love story, brought to fervent life by Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Winona Ryder, all of whom lend aching gravity to the emotional hoops they're forced to jump through. (Scorsese called this his "most violent" picture, but it's violent precisely because each character sublimates their desires and passions in favor of social decorum – a semblance of "innocence" more maddening than anything else.) Staggeringly complex and visually dazzling, this is one of the most undervalued works in the director's esteemed career, revealing (along with Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and The King of Comedy) how eclectic and sure-footed Scorsese truly is.

Dark Days (d. Marc Singer, USA, 2000) B–
The production circumstances of Dark Days practically beg for your sympathy: shot amongst a homeless community living in New York City's abandoned subway tunnels, the film was shot on black-and-white 16mm film by Marc Singer, who knew the onscreen subjects and had never shot a film before. The community collaborated on the project, rigging together lighting setups and dollies for camera movement, and the general intention of the project was to improve the living condition of the people we see onscreen (which it does, as Singer's lobbying led to housing vouchers from the city of New York for all of the people living below-ground). It's a noble work of social activism, obviously, but as a film it's problematic. The movie seems to be at odds with itself, precisely through its attempt to sympathize with the homeless community: initially the point is made that they have forged a legitimate world for themselves (complete with electricity, running water, comforts like television and music, etc.) in order to escape from life's cruel realities; yet when the storyline shifts gears to portray their new above-ground apartments, the air of triumphant reintegration seems forced, as though the film craved a happy ending while dismissing some lingering, unsettling concerns. (How long will they be able to afford their housing? Will they actually be able to readjust to life "above ground"? Some of the climactic interviews seem to suggest a feeling of discomfort and doubt on the part of the subjects, though the movie itself seems to skim past these uncertainties.) It's strange how legitimately unique the film is in production background and audio-visual style, yet how closely it still adheres to a conventional story arc, even when that plot progression seems to contradict what's taking place beneath the surface. The emotional power of Dark Days might be diluted, then, but it's still overwhelming at times: ultimately, the movie reminds us how extreme and uncompromising human life can be, and casts an eye on the kind of sobering underground community that typically remains concealed.

House of Pleasures (d. Bertrand Bonello, France, 2011) B+
At once opulent and morose, House of Pleasures is set in a stately Parisian brothel at the turn of the 20th century (literally, in the months directly preceding and succeeding 1900). On the surface, all is luxury and hedonism: certainly for the men who have the money and the power (and who loll about gazing at the merchandise, exploiting them with various degrees of cruelty), and occasionally for the prostitutes who are aware that there is no escape from their servitude, yet whittle away the hours with champagne and fantasy. At times, though, disturbing visions intrude upon the elegance: a vicious knife attack that transforms one of the ladies into "The Woman Who Laughs," or a nightmare vision of a prostitute weeping semen. A wispy surrealism is achieved by musical anachronisms (James Brown and The Moody Blues are included on the soundtrack), a dizzy shuffling of time and space, and the confinement of almost all the film to its maison interiors. Ultimately, the dominance of money, implicit throughout the entire film, becomes a bleak omen casting its shadow upon the twentieth century to come. At times, House of Pleasures comes off as self-consciously clever, but uniformly graceful performances more often enmesh comfortably with Bonello's bold, hyperstylized vision. The movie is undeniably sexy, yet primarily to make the point that even (or especially) sex has become a commodity in a nascent modern world ruled by capital.

The Innkeepers (d. Ti West, USA, 2011) C+
So slight it's constantly in danger of vanishing into nothing, The Innkeepers is an old-fashioned ghost story that coasts by mostly on atmosphere and dread, strategically spacing its scares at about 25-minute intervals. (The still above is one of the few outright "boo" moments in the entire movie.) This is the kind of thing I typically love (and which was outstanding in Ti West's previous effort, The House of the Devil), but here it simply seems like a by-the-numbers rehash (though the numbers are traced particularly well). At the Yankee Pedlar, a New England inn that would be at home in a Stephen King story (and which is imminently going out of business), two bored desk clerks investigate rumors of ghostly hauntings. Is there something unknown lurking in the basement? Does the mysterious guest who's shut himself up in an ominous hotel room have anything to do with the poltergeists? You probably already know the answers; to be fair, there is some fun in following the generic story to its inevitable conclusion, but there doesn't seem much point to the paint-by-numbers setup. What made The House of the Devil so strikingly unique was precisely its bold setup and staggering payoff (practically nothing happens for the first hour, then everything happens in a ghastly rush); The Innkeepers may be charming, but in this case that's not enough.

Haywire (d. Steven Soderbergh, USA/Ireland, 2011) C+
Put this in the "by-the-numbers" category mentioned above: assemble an all-star cast, paste together a lame crime story about double-crosses between stoic assassins, throw in a David Holmes score that tries too hard to be suave, and you've got your next Steven Soderbergh movie. That all-star cast does enliven the proceedings, and the fight scenes (sans music, with every blow landing with tremendous dull force on the soundtrack) are undeniably exciting; too bad that appeal wears off after a while (around the time that it becomes clear that there's absolutely nothing going on in this plot). Soderbergh and screenwriter Lem Dobbs had previously collaborated on The Limey (1999); at least that dreamlike thriller was able to disguise its familiar storyline with dazzling construction and unexpected poignancy. In the lead, Gina Carano proves she could be a striking action star in the future; but, stranded in the middle of a vacuous plot and hollow characters, she can only provide fleeting glimpses of her potential here.

Screening Log, September 1 - September 7

Utamaro and His Five Women (d. Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan, 1946) B
Mizoguchi's biography of the celebrated 18th-century woodblock artist Utamaro Kitagawa is more accurately a plaintive portrait of the numerous women who orbit around him. Numerous critics have drawn analogies between the Tokugawa Era in which the film is set – with its rigid class hierarchies and patriarchal sexual politics – and the immediate postwar period in Japan, during which American occupiers strictly censored the subject matter of Japanese films. This analogy is most powerfully suggested once Utamaro is literally handcuffed after using one of the shogunate's courtesans as a model; it's a potent symbol for artistic suppression. Utamaro and His Five Women (like most of Mizoguchi's films) epitomizes mono no aware, a term in Japanese culture for a wistful sadness at the transience of human lives; at times this film can seem too gentle in its melancholy (it's not as emotionally devastating as Osaka Elegy or Ugetsu), but it's still an ethereally beautiful depiction of the artist's perceptivity in observing the lives of those around him. Maybe most interesting is the claim (offered by the movie's screenwriter himself, Yoshikata Yoda) that Utamaro is a stand-in for Mizoguchi, particularly in his emphasis on subtle emotion exhibited by women in traumatic circumstances.

Life of Oharu (d. Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan, 1952) A–
The tragic life of a beautiful samurai's daughter doomed to eternal subjugation: Oharu is a saintly martyr for the suffering of women in Mizoguchi's magisterial adaptation of Saikaku Ihara's 1686 novel Life of an Amorous Woman. In adapting the book, however, Mizoguchi retained Saikaku's criticism of a draconic society stifled by unjust customs and restrictive moral codes, while avoiding the novelist's depiction of Oharu as an "amorous woman" whose downfall was partially the result of her own sexual self-liberation. Life of Oharu may be Mizoguchi's most characteristic movie not only in its gorgeous, long-take "picture scroll" tracking shots, but also in its bleeding-heart sympathy for the lives of tormented women (a sympathy which stemmed, according to most accounts of the director, from his family's selling of his sister into geishadom when Mizoguchi was only a young boy). The film is unmistakably heavy going: Oharu's life truly is a marathon of cruelty and misery, as she's sent on a downward spiral due to her love for a lowly page; chosen to be the mother to a powerful shogunate's heir (then spitefully cast out by the lord's barren wife); sold by her father into a brothel, then again cast out due to her hatred for a money-obsessed client; mercifully taken in by a middle-class family, then sexually exploited and again cast out once they find out about her scandalous past; and on and on. (We become inured to this pattern quickly: even when episodes begin with hope and anticipation, we know another misery is right around the corner.) But what saves the movie from unbearable bleakness is its prominent sociocultural commentary – the film is about how obedience to cruel and arbitrary patriarchal customs can torment people within that society, not about the innate awfulness of human beings – and of course Mizoguchi's poetic visuals (thanks especially to cinematographers Yoshimi Hirano and Yoshimi Kono, who had to work in an abandoned warehouse with severely limited funds), which effortlessly infuses the tragedy with ghostly grace. Oharu's fleeting, distant reunion with her lordly son (with whom she can no longer have any contact) must count as one of Mizoguchi's most incredible directorial moments.

The Dark Knight Rises (d. Christopher Nolan, USA/UK, 2012) B–
It's too bad Christopher Nolan doesn't make silent movies: his films are striking, magisterial, at times awe-inspiring...at least until somebody starts talking. Thankfully, though, Nolan's propensity for having characters blatantly voice the themes of his movies (or for having them spout pithy one-liners in the midst of ostensibly serious-minded subjects) is less ruinous than in The Dark Knight or Inception. Love it or hate it, The Dark Knight Rises is some kind of achievement: an operatic blockbuster that attempts (with only half-successful results) to encapsulate our turbulent modern society, particularly its vitriolic class divisions. But, as this Film Quarterly article points out, the movie's politics are muddled at best: it obviously recognizes the class warfare endemic to modern capitalism and the tyrannical control that the 1% have over American society, yet that hegemony is never viewed through the eyes of the disenfranchised who are supposedly the subject of the movie's (and Bane's/Selina Kyle's/Bruce Wayne's) sympathies. A reformation of our current economic and political system is seen as solely cataclysmic and horrific in the movie, which takes recent Occupy protests and disfigures them into a shocking French Revolution-style Reign of Terror, complete with the Scarecrow acting as a modern-day Robespierre. The Dark Knight Rises' essentially conservative agenda is clinched with the ridiculous final image of the movie, which offers a happy ending in the form of several characters luxuriously drinking aperitifs on a Venetian plaza. (Apparently the movie couldn't care less about the hordes of impoverished Americans as long as Bruce Wayne can reclaim his fortune.) In any case, the fact that the movie can be construed as both politically subversive and simplistically reactionary suggests that the movie has no genuine politics whatsoever: it's just trying to cash in on fashionably hot-button issues. (At least The Dark Knight has a cohesive theme, even if it's conveyed too often through mundane dialogue.) Politics aside, the movie is visually awe-inspiring: Nolan's dexterity in juggling numerous simultaneous plotlines while maintaining clarity and impact is more impressive than ever.

The Dictator (d. Larry Charles, USA, 2012) F
Lowest-common denominator comedy that assumes the more shocking and hate-filled its humor is, the more "radical" it will seem. Whatever was amusing about Borat or genuinely daring about Brüno has completely vanished from Sacha Baron Cohen's General Aladeen, a dictator from the fictional country of Wadiya who discovers a plot to instill democracy in his native country and attempts to stymie it at all costs. Of course the democratic coup is just a ploy to make the country's oil reserves available to American corporate interests, which suggests an all-inclusive attack on what's wrong with modern diplomacy. In fact, The Dictator's humor is shockingly xenophobic and hate-mongering: the only glimmer of American self-criticism arrives in a climactic speech during which Aladeen lauds the merits of dictatorship, telling Americans they'll finally know what it means to have 1% of the populace control society, to have media outlets that seem unbiased but promote a particular agenda, to have leaders who are clearly in the pockets of large corporations, to have a military that can serve despots' misguided interests, and so on. Aside from these 90 seconds of half-assed political commentary, the movie's comedy would seem embarrassing in the fifth American Pie movie, much less in a supposedly "intelligent" political comedy. Middle Eastern people rape young boys, prefer sex with goats, throw female newborns in the garbage, and torture for amusement – these are the noxious stereotypes the movie thinks are fair game to perpetuate. (Yes, genocidal dictators are prime targets for ridicule, but only if that satire makes any attempt at all to direct its animosity at real-world atrocities.) The Dictator's allusions to the Israel-Palestine conflict are even more pathetic: apologists claim that Cohen's usage of Hebrew to stand in for Arabic means something significant, but doesn't it just mean that Cohen (who speaks Hebrew anyway) assumes that we're too stupid or presumptuous to care which language is actually being spoken? (Either way, we're meant to laugh at the guttural syllables Aladeen coughs up whenever he's enraged or agitated.) The only other inclusion of the devastating conflict in the Middle East has a Wadiyan imbecile accidentally spilling his own urine on an Israeli diplomat, an idiocy which is emblematic of both the movie's juvenile sense of humor and its one-sided analogies to real-world conflicts. (This movie would have us believe that Israel is completely ethical and blameless in the ongoing violence waged between itself and surrounding nations.) There are also jokes involving shit missiles rained down upon Manhattan streets, the severed head of a black activist used as a ventriloquist dummy, and two characters digging around in a pregnant woman's womb for a lost cell phone – if this is your idea of good comedy, enjoy. The fact that The Dictator has been distributed throughout the world as representing American humor offers a convincing explanation as to why we're so universally reviled. (If you're unfortunate enough to sit through this movie, I suggest rewatching Team America: World Police as soon as possible afterwards to see how this sort of thing should actually be done.)

Naked (d. Mike Leigh, UK, 1993) B–
A volcanic eruption of rage, hopelessness, desperation, and abuse, Naked is bearable almost entirely because of its incredible performances, especially that of David Thewlis as Johnny, a charismatic yet misogynistic, hate-filled drifter whose various interactions in Thatcher-era London simply degrade his view of humanity even further. Yet the entire cast is incredible: Katrin Cartlidge, as drug-and-alcohol fueled, desperately lonely Sophie, makes a torrent of horrible decisions heartbreaking rather than infuriating; Lesley Sharp, as maybe the most intelligent and compassionate character in the movie (Johnny's ex, Louise), provides a glimmer of much-needed decency; Peter Wight, as a security guard with too much time on his hands, enacts a virtuoso dialogue with Johnny about the impending apocalypse and the entirety of the evolution of life on this planet; and so on. As this description might suggest the movie is incredibly smart and never less than fascinating, yet its view of humanity is ultimately aphoristic: we're nothing more than toys for God to laugh at, a despicable culmination of biological life that will ultimately cause our own downfall. (Evolution is mentioned repeatedly in the movie, almost always in an ironic way.) The movie has been accused often of misogyny, but misanthropy is more like it: Johnny (and, maybe by extension, writer/director Mike Leigh) abhors men and women with equal vitriol. This may be too harsh – Leigh is a great, subtle, multi-faceted director (especially in movies such as Secrets and Lies and Topsy-Turvy) – but judging by the evidence in Naked, we can only detect an all-encompassing hopelessness. (Some reviews link the movie's bleak view of human relationships with the turbulent climate of Margaret Thatcher's England, but there's absolutely nothing in the movie to suggest this sociopolitical analogy.) The character of Jeremy, an upper-class rapist and sadist who allows us to see that at least Johnny is not as awful as he could be, offers a key to unlocking the movie's philosophy, yet also reveals what keeps it from greatness: with no emotional shading or psychological sensitivity, he (and the movie) come off as simplistically, stubbornly outraged.

Cosmopolis (d. David Cronenberg, France/Canada/Portugal/Italy, 2012) B+
A natural companion piece to Cronenberg's Crash (1996), Cosmopolis is also about a radical alienation from the modern world: if, in Crash, characters have become so inured to rampant mediation that they require extreme violence to feel genuine human and sexual emotions, the main character in Cosmopolis – Eric Packer, a 28-year-old billionaire on a cross-Manhattan quest to get a haircut – has built a buffer between himself and the world with money. He's even lost the ability to have a genuine conversation with anybody, which suggests why the dialogue in the film (like the dialogue from the Don DeLillo novel on which it's based) is so wildly artificial. The Brechtian motivation of both Crash and Cosmopolis is to distance the audience radically from the story and the characters, allowing us to observe them with clinical exactitude. Yet at times this works better in theory than in practice: both films are easier to admire than they are to actually become involved with. That said, the episodic, rambling nature of Cosmopolis provides plenty of meat to dissect (particularly fascinating are Eric's dense conversation with a political theorist while an Occupy-style protest rages outside of his limo, and a lengthy climax in which Eric is possibly killed by a disgruntled former employee), and the actors do an admirable job giving bizarrely detached life to Cronenberg's and DeLillo's philosophical ruminations. Love it or hate it, you have to respect Cronenberg's brazen originality and his obedience to his own overarching themes, even at the risk of sacrificing his audience's engagement. I can't remember ever seeing a more potent depiction of how exorbitant wealth allows the rich to build up a hermetic shield around themselves.

House of Bamboo (d. Samuel Fuller, USA, 1955) B+
Fuller's square-jawed actioner, set and shot entirely in Japan (Tokyo and Yokohama particularly), mixes pulp and sociopolitical commentary with typical aplomb. Army detective Eddie Spanier (Robert Stack) storms through the movie's exotic locales with American bullishness: he interrupts ceremonies and rituals to demand answers (in terse English, of course) from uncomprehending Japanese folks; his typical entrance has him shoving hoodlums through sliding screen doors, with absolutely no regard for the foreign world he's demolishing. Spanier is investigating a gang of American thieves, most of them ex-soldiers, led by the merciless Sandy Dawson (Robert Ryan), who runs his network with the exactitude of a wartime general. The notion of a postwar action noir set in Japan is often as thrilling as it sounds, thanks to Fuller's and cinematographer Joe MacDonald's vivid colors and emphatic widescreen compositions; the story also offers plenty of allusions to the American occupation of Japan (an infiltration continued, at least metaphorically, long after U.S. troops officially left the country) and the moral corruption of individuals who served in World War II. That said, the movie's sexual politics are unfortunate (Spanier relies upon the meek devotion of a Japanese woman, Mariko, who exists only to provide him with information, home-cooked meals, and undying love) and its stoic tough-guy characterizations don't date well. (As Spanier, Robert Stack is almost a self-parody – the sort of B-movie archetype that would practically be outdated by the 1960s.) If you don't mind a dose of ridiculousness with your action, House of Bamboo is an occasionally thought-provoking blast, with an incredible climax that cannily symbolizes the topsy-turvy nature of modern global relations.

Screening Log, July & August

 
3 Women (d. Robert Altman, USA, 1977) A
Altman's dreamlike masterpiece seems to have been a huge influence on David Lynch's Mulholland Drive; at the very least, both movies have overlapping interests in the blurring of identity and the transformative power of sexual desire. 3 Women steams ahead on a wave of propulsive dream logic; more important than narrative causality is how the characters' passions and delusions manifest themselves in amorphous, surreal fashion. Many oneiric films such as this are ultimately hampered by their complete lack of characterization (see Beyond the Black Rainbow below), but 3 Women treats its titular trio respectfully; Millie (Shelley Duvall) and Pinky (Sissy Spacek), and to a lesser extent Willie (Janice Rule), are all fully-fledged characters whose camera-friendly quirks also offer fleeting insight into their veiled psychologies. Benefiting from the sort of unfettered production background that's practically unheard of in Hollywood (Altman reportedly pitched the idea after dreaming it all up while his wife was ill in the hospital; producer Alan Ladd, Jr., provided funding and final cut without a screenplay ever being written), 3 Women transplants Altman's typical roaming camera (the cinematographer here was Chuck Rosher), overlapping soundtrack (enlivened by Gerald Busby's bizarre musical score), and genre-bending narratives to immersive dream territory, and the results are hypnotic.

Shoeshine (d. Vittorio De Sica, Italy, 1946) B+
Made two years before Bicycle Thieves, Shoeshine might be deemed a trial run for De Sica and writer Cesare Zavattini's subsequent collaboration: this film displays the neorealist interest in the everyday lives of lower-class Italians following World War II, yet was shot mostly on studio sets and has a narrative familiar from numerous prison melodramas of the 1930s. (In addition to a prison riot, tyrannical guards, and a climactic escape, even the cellmates are an ensemble of cliches, from the sleazy bully to the bespectacled bookworm.) But it's unfair to compare Shoeshine to De Sica's later, more idiosyncratic films, especially when it's so achingly, humanely sincere. Pasquale and Giuseppe are two young boys eking out a living by shining foreign soldiers' shoes on the streets of Rome; their unbreakable friendship is endangered when they're embroiled in a black market scheme, imprisoned in a jail for juvenile delinquents, and ultimately turned against each other by an indifferent penal system. The story offers an unsettling parallel to Italy's wartime fascism, as young innocents are forced to rat on their loved ones by callous forces of law and order, and the damning processes of greed and xenophobia inure Giuseppe and Pasquale to a world of barbaric cruelty. At times the film is too polished and relies too heavily on cliches to be as emotional as it wants to be, but the ending is an undeniable tearjerker, and the young actors who play the protagonists (Franco Interlenghi and Rinaldo Smordoni) offer an effective portrait of sublime youth tarnished by a bleak world.

Prometheus (d. Ridley Scott, USA/UK, 2012) D+
So there are these inscriptions throughout human history that seem to point towards a planet called Prometheus. This may be the same place where, at the start of Prometheus, we see a mysterious creature ingest an oyster-like object that proceeds to tear him apart from the inside. Millennia later, a crew of scientists and space explorers voyage to Prometheus, hoping to find the birthplace of the human race. They're funded by the Weyland Corporation (the same conglomerate that instigated the space missions in the original Alien movies), whose CEO may or may not be dead and who could have started the mission with ulterior motives in mind, and who may have a secret relationship with the Prometheus mission director. With me so far? None of this has anything to do with the original Alien franchise, which is fine in theory; what's unfortunate is that Prometheus sets up a handful of intriguing questions only to ruin them all with inconclusive cliffhangers, overelaborate CGI that begs for your attention, some of the worst dialogue ever spouted by a great cast, and a general visual drabness that provides little distraction from the increasingly by-the-numbers plot. In other words, everything great about the first three (yes, three) Alien movies is missing from this "prequel" (or spinoff, or whatever they're calling it). A self-performed abortion, while as ludicrous as it sounds, at least provides a memorable and thrilling setpiece, but for the most part Prometheus is surprisingly tepid; if only it had had the courage of its initially ambitious convictions.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (d. Chantal Akerman, Belgium/France, 1975) A
I finally got around to seeing Akerman's celebrated, meticulously controlled study in gender politics; rather than being underwhelmed due to unrealistic expectations (as sometimes happens when catching up with universally-heralded masterpieces), I ultimately asked myself why I hadn't leapt at the chance to see the movie earlier. Jeanne Dielman's release in 1975 coincided with concurrent waves in durational modernism and overt feminism: Akerman's film uses a rigorous long-take setup (in which the camera's static compositions seem to trap Jeanne as inescapably as her domestic milieu) to eviscerate preconceptions about women's role in society. Drawing upon memories of her mother and grandmother observing precise routines in an observant Jewish household, Akerman plots out Jeanne's menial chores precisely; the first hour of the movie is dedicated to immersing us in her everyday existence, so when things start to unravel (as they do around the 100-minute mark) it unsettles us with unexpected intensity. Given its emphasis on tedium and its 200-minute running time, some may claim that "nothing happens" in Jeanne Dielman; actually, though, we're bearing witness to the unraveling of one woman's sanity, and it's both hypnotic and highly disturbing.

Assault on Precinct 13 (d. John Carpenter, 1976, USA) B–
Carpenter gets my vote for one of the most underappreciated auteurs in mainstream American film (The Fog in particular is about as painterly as horror movies get), but Assault on Precinct 13 demonstrates the director's narrative efficiency without any of his later compositional prowess or offhand surrealism. (True, this was only his second feature after Dark Star, so Carpenter was undoubtedly still honing his skills.) Reportedly given full creative license as long as he stayed within a minuscule budget, Carpenter realized he couldn't carry out his ideal project – a remake of Rio Bravo (which was directed by Carpenter's idol, Howard Hawks) – so he updated the classic Western to a dilapidated, nearly-abandoned police station in a Los Angeles ghetto. A murderous gang bombards the precinct in order to avenge the killing of one of their members; inside, a laconic lieutenant, two female workers, and a handful of prisoners mid-transport try to fend off the assailants. The protagonists are a mix of white, black, male, and female, but it's still baffling that this movie is lauded for its diversity: the murderous gang outside is clearly comprised solely of Hispanics and East Asians. Furthermore, the stock characterizations and pithy one-liners – while amusing in campier Carpenter films, like Big Trouble in Little China and They Live – don't mesh well with the movie's gritty evocation of a racially turbulent war-zone. But Carpenter's ability to make the most of his tiny budgets (at least until the success of his follow-up movie, Halloween) remains impressive (the scenes in which the gang bombards the station, zombie-like, are thrillingly effective) and the movie gets a stranglehold on your attention with an early murder scene that remains one of the most genuinely shocking in film history.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (d. Timur Bekmambetov, USA, 2012) B
Believe it or not, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is even more preposterous than its title makes it sound: turns out slavery was a massive conspiracy undertaken by vampires who relied upon slaves for fresh meat, and who saw the abolitionists as a threat to their survival. Gleefully rewriting history with the zeal of Tarantino, it's disconcerting (to say the least) how the movie turns the institution of slavery into fodder for Hollywood's next high-concept SFX extravaganza. And yet, it's hard to deny that the movie recognizes how films turn history (and/or reality) into mythology; if we're being kind, we can even find evidence that Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter draws intentional correlations between the act of bloodsucking and the development of American "democracy," making the point that this country arose out of the blood of innocents (the animation over the end credits makes this point succinctly; it's worth the price of admission alone). The pleasure may not be all guilty, then...but it mostly is; for better or worse, this is the most brazenly ridiculous Hollywood movie you'll see all year. Thankfully no one involved in the project seemed to realize how absurd it was, or at least didn't let on: there's no ironic Snakes on a Plane-style winking at the audience, which allows the movie to excel in its own bombastic way.

Elena (d. Andrei Zvyagintsev, Russia, 2012) B+
With slow-burning intensity a family unravels: a stoic patriarch alters his will, revealing the ruptures and unexpected empathies between himself, his cynical yet emotionally honest daughter, his distant wife, and her deadbeat family. Directed by Andrei Zvyagintsev (The Return), who some say is Russia's modern heir to Tarkovsky, Elena is hardly a political treatise but it still works as a sobering depiction of how capitalism's emphasis on greed and self-preservation can turn individuals against each other. The movie doesn't exactly have a bleeding heart – the ensemble is observed with clinical, observational detachment, and the lower-class characters are a bit too simplistically malicious – but that doesn't prevent the film from ending with an emotional wallop. If nothing else, the movie demonstrates what will probably be the best cinematography of the year (courtesy of Mikhail Krichman); the opening and closing shots, which act as subversive bookends, are especially astounding.

Beyond the Black Rainbow (d. Panos Cosmatos, Canada, 2012) C
I actively wanted to like Beyond the Black Rainbow before I even sat down to watch it: the trailer promised something like a bad LSD trip, a surreal, mind-bending pseudo-story that prioritized dreamlike images over narrative cohesion. I usually go for that sort of thing (sometimes against my better judgment), but sadly Beyond the Black Rainbow reminds us that even the trippiest film-as-nightmare needs solid ideas, relatable characters, or at least a sort of ethereal grace to hold our attention. (The Holy Mountain, Mulholland Dr., and Un chien Andalou, for example, are great not just for their surreal imagery but for what else they offer us: beauty, complexity, heartache, tantalizing mystery.) In some ways Cosmatos' debut sustains Canadian film's legacy of forward-thinking innovations that exist somewhere between narrative and experimental cinema, between genre templates and free-flowing dream imagery, between pop and the avant-garde (previously practiced by David Cronenberg and Guy Maddin, among others). Give the movie credit for eschewing filmmaking conventions, and for providing the most horrific and unshakable image I've seen so far in 2012 (as far as I can tell, it involves a man climbing into a vat of oil, witnessing the face of God, and decaying into carrion until his body somehow reassembles itself). But there are only a few such awe-inspiring moments; the bulk of the movie is comprised of monotonous dialogue (conveyed via dead-eyed performances that seem to reaffirm that the characters and whatever they say don't really mean all that much) and contradictory references to both '80s slasher films and more surreal abstractions (including avant-garde masterpieces such as Dog Star Man and The Exquisite Hour). Call it a failed but noble experiment, though it's one that suggests fascinating things to come from Cosmatos.

The Sacrifice (d. Andrei Tarkovsky, Sweden/UK/France, 1986) B–
A lesser film by Tarkovsky is still better than most other directors' works, but there's no denying that The Sacrifice, for all of its magisterial imagery, winds up a bit disappointing. Filmed on the Swedish isle of Fårö (where Ingmar Bergman lived and worked), with Bergman's cinematographer Sven Nykvist and one of his frequent actors, Erland Josephson, The Sacrifice does in fact seem like a middle-ground between the two auteurs: Tarkovsky's austere imagery (comprised of abstract memories and dreams, gracefully-composed long takes, and the employment of numerous planes of action in one shot) and philosophical ambiguities are still in full force, but with lengthier monologues and, perhaps, an earthier fascination with tenuous human relationships, both reminiscent of Bergman. The film's drawn-out dialogue sequences involving Nietzsche, Shakespeare, science, morality, war, and Da Vinci's "Adoration of the Magi" are as weighty as they sound, but the philosophies they espouse may be less eye-opening than they presume to be: ultimately, the movie's message may be that a faithless, self-centered modern world may already be doomed to apocalypse, a concept that's certainly worth articulating but may not be particularly multifaceted. In any case, Tarkovsky's command of visual language is astounding as always, and certain scenes (such as the apparent onset of World War III and the resulting views of a city street obliterated by nuclear holocaust) are impossible to forget.

The Lubitsch Touch: "The Merry Jail" and "The Eyes of the Mummy"

What is "the Lubitsch Touch"? A phrase beloved by Hollywood marketers, the Lubitsch Touch was meant to denote sophisticated comedy, sparkling dialogue (an impression even conveyed, somehow, by his silent movies), urbane treatment of sex and desire, and a seemingly effortless grace that could convey complex jokes and punchlines in a single camera movement. Lubitsch was arguably the most famous emigre director in 1930s Hollywood, as gradually the Lubitsch Touch transformed into its own brand name: a near-guarantee of reliable craftsmanship and elegance. Only Hitchcock's "Master of Suspense" moniker rivaled the Lubitsch Touch for most well-known directorial catchphrase (reportedly, Billy Wilder struggled to find a similar slogan for himself in the 1940s and '50s, and eventually gave up). In Ephraim Katz's estimation, the Lubitsch Touch "was characterized by a parsimonious compression of ideas and situations into single shots or brief scenes that provided an ironic key to the characters and to the meaning of the entire film."

Irony, subtlety, elegance – these descriptors offer an impression of what the Lubitsch Touch might have been, but it's something more than that, too. Some aspects of the film image can't be put into words (that's what makes them cinematic), and in danger of sounding too hyperbolic, this ineffable visual quality seems to subsume Lubitsch's movies. Since I've become a fan of the director (which is basically since I first saw Trouble in Paradise eight years ago) I've suspected that the Lubitsch Touch is more of a fleeting aura than a quantifiable stylistic trait. Hopefully, if visual evidence of the master's touch can be parsed out, I'll be able to do so by charting his filmography, in chronological order, as fully as possible (which unfortunately is not as full as one might hope: many of Lubitsch's films, including most of his silents, are now lost).

A young Mr. Lubitsch

Lubitsch was born in 1892 Berlin to a Jewish family. His father was a tailor (a profession that features prominently in some of Lubitsch's films, notably The Shop Around the Corner) and Ernst, drawn to acting but encouraged to continue the family business, led a double life, serving as bookkeeper for his father by day and acting in cabarets and music halls at night. In 1911, he joined Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater; a year later, he was hired as the handyman for Bioscope Film Studios, and in 1913 began acting in a series of film comedies as a character named Meyer, who represented a then-popular brand of ethnic Jewish humor. (This is according to Lubitsch's biography; these films are now lost, so it's hard to know exactly what this "ethnic Jewish humor" constituted.)

Gradually turning his attention to directing, Lubitsch garnered acclaim in Germany for his tragic fantasy The Eyes of the Mummy in 1918, but it wasn't until 1921 that he found success in the US. In that year, three of his dramas – Madame du Barry, aka Passion, 1919; Anna Boleyn, aka Deception, 1920; and Carmen, aka Gypsy Blood, 1921 – were released stateside and chosen by The New York Times as three of the most "important" movies of 1921. (His 1919 comedy The Oyster Princess, though now seen as his first masterpiece, was less famous at the time.) Lubitsch left Germany for Hollywood in 1922, and it was there that he solidified his legendary status.

Yet if it was his historical epics and dramas that first brought him esteem, it's his sophisticated comedies that eventually revealed him as a master of the craft. Whether in elaborate musicals or smaller-scale comedies, he seems to display a bemused fondness for his characters and their sexual hangups and desires. Indeed, some of his movies, joyous as they are, were scandalous upon their release: as Michael Wilmington writes, his films were "at once elegant and ribald, sophisticated and earthy, urbane and bemused, frivolous yet profound. They were directed by a man who was amused by sex rather than frightened of it – and who taught a whole culture to be amused by it as well." Another of Lubitsch's favorite satirical targets was money, specifically the kind of excessive wealth that carries a semi-automatic excuse for horrible behavior. Both sex and money were touchy subjects for American audiences, but Lubitsch's elegance and wit turned self-ridicule into a gentle diversion (particularly during the Great Depression, when Lubitsch was arguably at his peak).

The Merry Jail (1917)

But let's flash back to Berlin, 1917, when Lubitsch made his earliest surviving film: The Merry Jail. It's surprising how much this early effort encapsulates and foreshadows Lubitsch's later comedic style: a movie about shameless carnality, both spirited and subtle, The Merry Jail lampoons a wartime Berlin in which wealthy aristocrats entertain themselves by initiating torrid affairs and getting obscenely drunk. The gravity of the Great War doesn't seem to affect these characters at all. If the interwar Weimar period of Germany was known for its amoral hedonism and the disastrous simultaneity of lavish spending and severe poverty (a social unrest ridiculed by Fritz Lang's Metropolis, among other films), that period seems to have its origins in the freewheeling culture portrayed here. Lubitsch, though, doesn't judge his characters or this society, perhaps seeing moral conservatism as a restrictive force.

The plot is a familiar one (it was actually adapted from Strauss' operetta Die Fledermaus): Frau von Reizenstein, an aristocratic wife well aware of her husband's adulterous affairs, attends the same costume ball as he does one night, unbeknownst to him; they end up flirting unabashedly, with Herr von Reizenstein unwittingly attempting to initiate an "extramarital" tryst with his own wife. There are other dalliances transpiring: between the Reizensteins' maid and a doddering aristocrat (Mizi the maid is clearly enjoying her sexual liberty: upon tripping on a staircase while entering the costume ball, she turns to the gentleman escorting her inside and flirtatiously says, "That was my first bad move of the day"); or between Frau von Reizenstein and an overzealous suitor named Egon Storch. Basically every relationship is a potentially sexual one, with a passionate affair always lurking in wait. The sexual openness is summed up by a piece of advice given to Mizi by her sister: "If someone tries to kiss you, don't giggle. That's not chic."

There's also the merry jail of the title, a jail that Herr von Reizenstein is supposed to occupy: given his "scandalous behavior" one drunken evening, the police have issued a warrant for his arrest and one-day imprisonment (a warrant he ignores in order to attend the costume ball). The jailer at the prison, Quabbe, is at least as sexually frank (and as drunkenly lecherous) as the rest of the ensemble, and his homosexuality is displayed brazenly: he continually strokes one prisoner's arm, kisses another on the lips, tells another one that he really likes him. (Quabbe is played by Emil Jannings, who would become famous for complex dramatic roles in later classics such as F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh and Josef von Sternberg's Der Blaue Engel. Here, outfitted with a gnarly mustache, Jannings demonstrates devious lunacy in one of his rare comedic roles.) Lubitsch's pre-Code Hollywood movies are known for their sexual openness, but the jailer's homosexuality is a liberty that would be unavailable to him later on in his career – a surprising indication of movies' licentiousness before the strictures of social censorship clamped down.

The Merry Jail

While most film comedies in 1917 were essentially vaudeville acts performed in front of the camera (which isn't necessarily a criticism – Chaplin made poetry out of such a setup), Lubitsch here shows an early flair for using the camera and montage editing to deliver the punchline of a joke. The film opens, for example, with Frau von Reizenstein searching throughout the house for her absent husband; when she retreats to the den and reads the arrest warrant that's been issued for him, the camera slowly tilts down to reveal the presumably-still-drunk husband passed out underneath the desk. The joke's not quite over yet: feeling something brushing against her legs, Frau von Reizenstein agitatedly informs Mizi that the house has mice. In response, the maid offers her an elaborate mousetrap, unexpectedly conveyed to us via a close-up insert. Throughout this sequence, Lubitsch reveals himself as a master joke-teller through purely visual means (camera movement, varying shot scales and edits) as the scene culminates in what might be the visual equivalent of the punchline: a close-up.

Sometimes, on the other hand, Lubitsch's jokes are so subtle you're not even sure if they're jokes at all. At the end of the aforementioned sequence, for example, the besotted husband gingerly gives the maid his cane and top hat. As he extends his overturned top hat to her, he seems to look inside and come perilously close to vomiting into it; when the maid takes it, she glances into it, recoils in disgust, and holds the hat at arm's length while she exits the scene. Lubitsch doesn't offer us a closer angle so it's impossible to know for sure, but the suggestion is that this callow aristocrat lives a life of privileged luxury while overdrinking so heavily that he throws up into his accoutrements – itself a sly and subtle conflation of elegance and vulgarity.

Herr von Reizenstein is undeniably a shallow cad who inflates his self-worth by racking up adulterous affairs – in a modern romantic comedy, he'd be the smug asshole competing with the sensitive hero for a woman's affections. But all ends well in The Merry Jail: the following morning, as the whole ensemble is deliriously hungover, Frau and Herr von Reizenstein make up after she reveals she was the masked paramour from the night before, Mizi and her aristocrat drive off together, and Quabbe the jailer admits his suppressed feelings for the unreciprocating prison warden. Sexuality is an amusing riddle here: Lubitsch doesn't judge Herr von Reizenstein's adulteries or Quabbe's homoerotic longings. Most mainstream romantic comedies are obliged to supply a happy ending which takes the form of a man-woman romantic union; The Merry Jail suggests a more chameleonic sexuality, which doesn't abide by the rigid contours of a cinematic genre.

The Eyes of the Mummy (1918)

Unfortunately, there's a lot less to say about The Eyes of the Mummy, which Lubitsch made a year later (1918) for the UFA film studio. To modern viewers, it may seem strange that Lubitsch first found success and acclaim thanks to large-scale dramas like this; even the visual style of Eyes of the Mummy seems less exuberant than in his comedies, and the narrative is patched together from a number of outworn Gothic horror and melodramatic cliches.

The Eyes of the Mummy was the first film collaboration between Lubitsch (graduating to feature-length drama) and Pola Negri, who would be invited to Hollywood (along with Lubitsch) by Paramount in 1922. Negri would go on to become one of Hollywood's most adored stars (especially in her roles as Rudolph Valentino's love interest) and the first in a long line of "exotic" actresses imported to the US from Europe (Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, etc.). Here, she plays "Queen Ma" – actually not a queen at all (much less a mummy), but a young Egyptian country girl kidnapped by the villainous Radu many years ago and imprisoned in a tomb located in a pyramid somewhere outside of Cairo. (Emil Jannings, in semi-blackface, appears once again as Radu.) When Ma is rescued by a German painter on vacation and returns with him to Berlin, Radu follows soon after (now the servant to a nobleman named Prince Hohenfels) and vengefully searches Berlin for his "queen." Firmly placed in the genre of tragic melodrama, Eyes of the Mummy proceeds to its inevitably bleak conclusion; there's not much in the way of horror (and, as many critics have pointed, nothing at all in the way of mummies), so we're basically left with a lugubrious drama about starcrossed lovers.

Both Negri and Jannings belong to the emotive, theatrically-based style of silent-film acting that puts off most modern viewers; while their performances here can be enjoyed in a markedly distinct, almost abstract time-capsule way, they do little to draw us emotionally into the movie. The problem is compounded by the fact that the story is riddled with irrational holes (who exactly is Radu? why does he seem supernatural at times and powerless at others? what were the painter and Prince Hohenfels doing in Cairo?) that demonstrate a reliance on secondhand genre tropes and plot structures. Quite obviously shot on a low budget (the interiors of the "mummy's" tomb especially emphasize the barebones nature of the production), The Eyes of the Mummy today seems like little more than a curio in the director's early career, although there is one shot that nearly makes it worth watching: a reverse tracking shot during the climax that retreats in horror as Radu approaches menacingly. It's a sequence of visual intensity and narrative engagement that most of the film is sorely lacking.

An UFA advertisement for Die Augen der Mumie Ma (The Eyes of the Mummy Ma), 1918

NEXT UP: Another blithe sex comedy, the cross-dressing I Don't Want to Be a Man (1918); and another exotic melodrama with Pola Negri, Carmen (aka Gypsy Blood), 1918.

Screening Log, May 30 - June 5

Moonrise Kingdom (d. Wes Anderson, USA, 2012) B

As you can probably tell from the still above, Moonrise Kingdom has Anderson continuing to preserve his hermetically-sealed diorama of the world, this time telling the story of two young lovers, Sam and Suzy, who run away (from their Scout Camp and their crumbling home, respectively) to live together in a secluded cove on the island of New Penzance in 1965. You know whether or not you'll like the movie depending on your existing opinion of Anderson. As a fan, it's always a pleasure to spend some time in the director's meticulous playground (he also wrote the screenplay, with Roman Coppola), but those pleasures seem to be diminishing each time Anderson returns to the well. (At least Fantastic Mr. Fox departed from the template a bit.) The stellar cast brings droll life to the characters, but they're not given a chance to turn them into flesh-and-blood people: there are some melancholy undercurrents to the story (failing marriages, extramarital affairs, self-loathing), but Anderson oddly mutes and rushes past their suffering, whereas in his best movies (The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic) he would have respected and fully conveyed their heartache. The movie ends up being pleasant, spry, and (it almost goes without saying) visually intoxicating, but it's also completely inconsequential: the pitfall of an auteur being able to do whatever he wants is that his characters and sets gradually come to seem like toys shuffled around for the director's own amusement.

Pépé le Moko (d. Julien Duvivier, France, 1937) A
In many ways the French prototype for Casablanca (made five years later in Hollywood), Pépé le Moko shimmers with a tragic beauty; it attains the kind of cinematic poetry that American and French studios managed occasionally in the 1930s. French gangster movies are a lot like the American films noir made a decade later (which they themselves influenced): unassuming genre pictures that smuggle great beauty and despair into their seemingly simple bloodlines. The inimitable Jean Gabin plays Pépé, a gentleman's thief more elegant than Thomas Crown and Danny Ocean put together: a Parisian transplant stuck in the Casbah of Algiers, he's a jewel thief and bank robber who remains outside the grasp of the French and Algerian police, thanks to the shady cohorts who sequester him in the Casbah's alleyways and terraces. He's already imprisoned, in other words: all he wants is to return to grand Paris, a desire that burns even brighter after he meets Gaby, a beautiful Frenchwoman staying in Algiers with her rich husband; her sparkling diamonds tempt Pépé less than her dazzling beauty and bona fide Parisian elegance. Like most heroes in French crime movies from the '30s, Pépé steps headlong towards a doomed fate, and he seems to know it: he considers death for the sake of freedom and love more honorable than his slum notoriety. The movie achieves an effortless grace and overflows with one astonishing sequence after another: an early montage of the Casbah's labyrinthine exoticism, a hyperreal murder scene in which a dying hood guns down the man who betrayed him, the simmering chemistry between Gabin and Mireille Balin as Gaby, and most of all a climactic series of rear-projections that foreground Pépé against a dreamy vision of death-soaked Algiers. You want to criticize the movie for its complete indifference to the actual city and people of Algiers (the movie is practically an apologia for colonialism), but it so obviously takes place in a realm of heightened visceral poetry that real-world political quibbles hardly seem to apply.

Persepolis (d. Vincent Paronnaud & Marjane Satrapi, France/USA, 2007) B+
Satrapi's series of graphic novels, which detail her childhood in Tehran and ambivalent feelings towards postrevolutionary Iranian culture (the overthrow of the Shah, the Iran-Iraq war, and so on), are condensed into a film that employs deceptively complex black-and-white compositions to magnify her tempestuous emotions. As headstrong young Marjane listens to Western punk and rock-and-roll and defies the men who, thanks to the paternalism of her culture, treat her with callous entitlement, the movie becomes both flippantly entertaining and harrowingly tense: her youth is built off of the carefree verve she wants to embrace and the oppressive regime that won't let her have it. Persepolis is eye-opening and engaging at the same time, but it also moves so quickly that certain images and emotional traumas don't have the chance to register, and some of the stylistic tricks are too self-conscious for their own good. (The anarchic spirit of Satrapi's illustrations work better in still images than moving ones.) But it's hard to disparage the turbulent history undergone by both Marjane and her country, even if this movie only offers us a hasty Cliff's Notes version of it.

Monkey Business (d. Howard Hawks, USA, 1952) B–
There's an incredible wealth of talent at work on Monkey Business – Howard Hawks behind the camera (with Milton Krasner his cinematographer), Ben Hecht and I.A.L. Diamond as writers, Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, and Marilyn Monroe onscreen – so this amiable screwball comedy inevitably disappoints a little bit. It's nowhere close to the freewheeling lunacy of Hawks' better comedies (Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, Ball of Fire, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), and the humor dates more awkwardly than in many of Hawks', Grant's, or Rogers' finest hours. (Today's audiences probably won't find jokes about early-50s clothing and automobile fashions particularly hilarious.) At its best, screwball comedy is pure anarchic zeal, but the subgenre has a tendency to try too hard, screaming its jokes at us and hoping that its sheer bombast will cover up the weaker spots. For the most part, Monkey Business is best at its quieter moments: the sweet and witty interplay between Grant and Rogers (when they're not under the effects of Grant's disastrous youth serum), some chimpanzee actors who threaten to upstage their human counterparts, and a ludicrous but laugh-out-loud gag with an infant that Rogers assumes is her husband, reverted to his newborn years. Monroe, unfortunately, has little to do but look astounding (which of course she does).

4:44 Last Day on Earth (d. Abel Ferrara, USA/Switzerland/France, 2012) A–
Ferrara's latest is set on the day of the apocalypse, as a couple (Willem Dafoe and Shanyn Leigh) deal with the impending end of the world, their own failed relationships and broken friendships, and past demons. They have sex, struggle to abstain from drugs and alcohol, paint, wander around; much of the movie is comprised of Skype sessions and grainy digital videos viewed online. If this sounds hilariously anti-special-effects for an end-of-the-world movie, that seems to be the point: these two people spend their last day on earth as they would most any other day, albeit with a greater sense of immediacy and regret. As in Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse, the apocalypse approaches quietly, unavoidably: humans are powerless to thwart it, and simply go about their routine until they can't anymore. Yet if Tarr's film is more bleakly existential (emphasizing the insignificance of humans within the cosmos), Ferrara's allows room for a bit of humanism: in their last moments, these characters at least try to reach out to their loved ones, the pain of mistakes and unclaimed futures unspoken yet written on their faces. (Equally existential, then, yet in a different way: if there's no pattern to the cosmos, all people can do is forge their own relationships, writing their legacy by the way they lead their lives.) Quietly thought-provoking, 4:44 Last Day on Earth also has a fascinating view of technology as a bridge (rather than a hindrance) for human interaction – a theme devastatingly conveyed by a Chinese delivery man, who uses the main characters' laptop to Skype (in an unsubtitled conversation) with his family back home, tearfully saying his last goodbyes.

Accattone (d. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy, 1961) A
Besides Buñuel, no other director mixes the profane and the sacred as audaciously as Pasolini, a tendency exhibited even from his feature debut, Accattone. Vittorio is a lowlife pimp on the outskirts of Rome; known as "Accattone" (a disparaging term for scrounger or beggar), he wanders the slums, visits his estranged wife and the son who doesn't know him, exploits the prostitute Maddelena (whose name pointedly echoes Mary Magdalene) until she's beaten by violent thugs and imprisoned by the police, and makes a fleeting effort to go straight for a beautiful peasant girl named Stella – an attempt at an honest living that doesn't last very long. Emblems of Catholic piousness (statues of angels, iconography of the crucifixion) commingle with the crumbling buildings and decrepit streets of the slums, turning Accattone into a spiritual story of degradation and the illusion of redemption. The movie is bleak and unflinching in its portrayal of the main character's coarse selfishness, but it's also tremendously sympathetic and humane: as in neorealism (the movement in which Accattone is usually, somewhat misleadingly, placed) the characters' everyday lives take on the vivid scope of real human experience, but Pasolini's formal ingenuity and gritty symbolism transcend neorealism, attaining something more spiritual.

The Merry Jail ("Das Fidele Gefängnis," d. Ernst Lubitsch, Germany, 1917) B+
Lubitsch's earliest surviving film is an interesting precursor of things to come for fans of the director, not to mention a blithe sex comedy (made in Berlin during the first World War!) that revels in carnal pleasure. More will be written on this soon, as I'm starting a series of articles about Lubitsch's filmography; here, I'll just mention that "the Lubitsch touch" is on display right from the beginning, especially in the director's subtle visual touches, which can deliver an entire joke and punchline through a simple tilt or pan.