Tuesday of your Discontent

One movie in the past two weeks...

REVANCHE

Another deceptively conventional film, because its style is so full of literal and metaphorical quiet and cavernous spaces that there’s a tremendous amount of room for a film-viewer to see some clear elements of other brooding neo-noir films in its tone. The immediate comparison I could make was with my experience of watching Handsome Harry, as I go through the motions of watching what I think to be a standard story of someone with a dark secret of their past, told with a familiar sequence of juxtaposed flashbacks, only to realize I was caught in a trap of expectations making the devastating ending almost completely counter-balance the flaws during the rest of the movie. Revanche (German for Revenge) was a case where I was in tune with the stark style, the director’s patience with character actions, and the expectation that the ending was going to be inconclusive in a typical modern indie foreign film way. I felt I had drank from this cinematic well before, even if this film was being executed near-perfectly. Then that ‘conclusion’, or lack of one, that I knew was coming became a haunting and unique way to tie up the loose ends the loose ends that had been created through the plot, but without created anything resembling a happy ending. You could almost visualize the sharply cornered geometric shape of tension created by the new place these characters are at… but the film seemed to suggest that this impasse would be far better than the risks of a more explosive situation. The tragedy at the center of the story created a limited range of outcomes… none of them pleasant… and our acceptance of these extremely uncomfortable but not horrifying circumstances is one of the most exceptional things about this movie.

Tuesday Post With No Name

A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (1964)

The free cable movie on-demand movie selection had been bad for a while, so what a nice surprise, the morning after my Saturday trip to Lollapalooza in Chicago, to the first of Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name trilogy available. Perfect timing too, as I was ready to jump into this trilogy very soon via Netflix.

This was a pretty direct remake of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo, which was one of the first movies I saw on my new HDTV upon purchase! And it was odd how something that has some of the exact same scenes translated into a Western setting (with guns instead of samurai swords) was still riveting due to filmmaking and acting quality.

I can tell why these films are legendary... they are confidently cool and very influential. I can't wait to see that next two. Given that On-Demand offered the three films of the Pusher trilogy in quick succession, I'm hoping I'll see A Few Dollars More, and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly soon.

Thoughts on 2 movies

As promised...

GOODFELLAS

A sprawling, lively epic movie with plenty of nuance and misdirection. This movie has seeped into so many pop culture reference areas I know that I can’t view it objectively. In addition to the spot-the-Sopranos actor game, it was also impossible to watch without thinking about the amoralism inherent in that TV mob epic. I’m reading a writer from AV Club’s recap of the Sopranos, episode by episode, and the theme that creeps up is that while you are learning about these characters inside and out and learning to sympathize with them, there is some rotten at the center of them, something self-interested and shallow, that would still stink, even if every person in this mob organization was involved in legal modern business activities. Ray Liotta’s Goodfellas character goes through quite a bit of struggles but the selfishness of him and his collaborators ultimately backs him into a corner. While his mob buddies, when backed into a corner, have different, more bloody ways of dealing with their issues when at a dead end, the way the film wraps up through legal means is kind of off-putting but very appropriate.

That being said, I’m glad that most of the movie was new to me. The Joe Pesci character, repeated many times in future mobster charicatures, didn’t dominate the movie, but knowing that he was a bit of a hothead made the scenes with him very tense. I also didn’t know the film was so focused on the outsider perspective, and the true story of a mob witness. It works on many different levels… you can almost see anyone excited about any get rich quick scheme to take the same journey Ray Liotta does.

And, again, because of the Sopranos and the short fuses of everyone on that show, I was absolutely cringing when any character muttered or said something under his breath after a ‘boss’ gives an order in Goodfellas. You know things are not going to end well. Maybe The Godfather movies seemed so formal and calculated, that having a few of these people go crazy at the drop of a dime was a good departure from previous mob movies.

THE WHITE RIBBON

A textbook case of the types of films that would be difficult to convince most friends to watch. If I have to spend more time explaining why this movie is worth watching despite its difficulty than what the movie is actually about, then I can’t expect to win everyone over. So I went back into my thought process as to why I was in a hurry to see this. Because my Netflix queue is completely full, I like the freedom of being impulsive and moving a movie up to the top of my list due to some outside stimuli. Well, this time, it was the AV Club’s Gateway to Geekery feature covering the films of Michael Haneke. The White Ribbon was originally in my queue because it was the Palm D’or winner in 2009 at the Cannes festival, and I had a little more interest because the first (and only other) Haneke film I have seen, 2005’s Cache, was so obtuse and difficult that I wanted to see his style more, especially as it applied to a historical drama taking place in Germany in 1913, just before World War I started. Cache had some real issues if you want clarity and conclusions in movies, and at the time I saw it (just 2-3 years ago) I don’t think I had come to terms completely with the concept that a film doesn’t have to give you all the answers, even nuanced ones, to be successful. But as I’ve learned with some unique music that I seem to listen to over and over again to pick up what I was missing, there are filmmakers who demand more attention because they’re not going to present you with direct information. So, my free time limitations don’t give me much options to always be watching the same movies again, but they do make me eager to see more of a distinctive director’s work, perhaps knowing what complexities I’m in for before I begin. With a 2.5 hour movie like the White Ribbon, you definitely should not be going in with an idea that this film is going to be straightforward. In fact, the similarities I found to Cache was the intriguing twist that while you don’t know definitely who the real culprits of the main crimes in the movie are, the environment and suspicions those crimes create do more everlasting damage than the original despicable acts. Without the empty feeling I felt after Cache, The White Ribbon would be even more frustrating upon it’s conclusion.

Once thing the White Ribbon did have was extensive narration from one of the only likeable characters around. This made each scene and each missed opportunity for conclusion more powerful. I had also read before watching this that the movie was a take on the beginnings of Fascism in Germany. Now, it’s very likely that I wouldn’t have picked up on this without reading what critics said about the themes of the movie. But the narrator removes the mystery by saying, in the beginning, that his story of the activities in this small village might shed light on “what happened in this country”. But except for the incredibly haunting references to the historical events leading up to World War I at different times that seem to suck the withering vitality out of every scene, all the activities take place within this little idyllic village. Many of the violent actions, done without reason or explanation, are on a small scale and shown off-screen, while the characters are at their most despicable when acting towards eachother and not towards some larger sense of patriotism or militarism. Yet the looming idea that these young kids must be seen as the future Nazi party faithful does not go away with the initial tone. The groupthink, the discipline, the irrational hostility, and self-righteousness, on this village-level scale must be the seeds of horror to come, yet it’s never made to seem like the activities of this band of villagers ties to a greater whole.