Matty

The Rules of Film Noir is that rare type of retrospective documentary that isn’t made up of cut-rate anecdotes from the filming of a half-forgotten classic and adoration of dead colleagues, but is instead an attempt to define the style of a certain group of films (a group that also contains, for example, The Master’s Touch, which encapsulates the hallmarks of Hitchcock’s work). Despite that, however, the film suffers from ills similar to those that afflicted Going to Pieces, a documentary about the slasher genre. Though the attractive means of presentation (with an occasionally ironic wink) will be appreciated by noir fans, I’m afraid the film doesn’t offer real experts a satisfying amount of revelatory information. The Rules of Film Noir doesn’t embrace some basic questions at all (is noir a genre/subgenre/trend?) and too briefly addresses others (at least poetic realism could have been mentioned as an influence). However, there is sufficient information to give viewers an elementary overview. Nevertheless, what I consider to be the film’s main benefit is that when it's over, you are guaranteed to get a taste for a portion or two of chiaroscuro fatalism.

Harrison’s complicated search for a fixed point within himself generally fits in nicely with Scorsese’s fictional films with male protagonists who question whether they have chosen the right path, while also partly reflecting the life path of the director himself. Harrison and Scorsese were both raised according to strict Catholic principles and grew up outside the circle of their peers. Both of them also found a refuge in the world of music and film. Art thus became for them much more than a mere everyday diversion. They elevated it to a position among the main reasons for their existence. Despite the similarity of their stories, Scorsese attempts to maintain greater critical distance than in his cinephilic documentaries about films and filmmakers (My Voyage to Italy, A Letter to Elia). This documentary is not dominated by an adoring tone and it is far from being a reverential memorial. Scorsese is more interested in Harrison’s personality and in his work, which would have been easier to uncritically admire – this, along with the quantity of collected archival material, explains why the music is present mostly in the background rather in the form of concert clips. However, Scorsese didn’t stop with gathering together lesser-known photographs and videos. He composes from them a mosaic of Harrison’s life with the carefulness of a palaeontologist building a dinosaur skeleton from small fragments of bones. Every shard of the past is thoughtfully incorporated into the context of the “narrative”. For example, a video of the Beatles actively taking photographs is followed by the photographs that they took at the time. It looks logical and obvious, but there are undoubtedly hours of hard work behind it. The most devoted Beatles fans will doubtlessly find certain parts of the documentary to be too short and others will find them inappropriately long. For me, as a listener who respects but does not worship the Beatles, George Harrison changed over the course of three and a half hours from a quiet, rather inconspicuous musician with a sorrowful look into an immensely talented man worthy of admiration and fascinating in his nature. 80%

L'amour fou as the boldest motif of a film that is otherwise intentionally “broken” and devoid of narrative points of reference. Why waste time on the narrative when all you need to put the better society at unease are individual scenes and gags that seem to be taken from rather coarse slapstick? (I consider the kicking of the dog and the shooting of the boy, though gratuitously shocking, to be the peak of Buñuel’s feats of anarchy). Buñuel also dealt with the obstacles that civilised society places in the path of natural human needs in his later work, but he gave them a more modest form and subtly hid the phallic symbolism beneath the surface, whereas here he puts it front and centre with obsessive thoughts of sex. As his method he adopted entomological observation, with which The Golden Age begins. He limited direct interventions in the image and held back with the visual assaults (Un Chien Andalou begins with one such unforgettable assault) in favour of more subversive provocations such as bending genre rules, concealing what’s essential and exaggerating what’s marginal. Still, I wouldn’t condemn The Golden Age as the cold class (and generational) rebellion of a once hot-blooded Spaniard. No one has yet shot a more accurate scene about the fetishisation of the human body. 75%

Pedro Almodóvar, a rebel who sowed his wild oats long ago and who emerged from the Madrid underground into the festival sunlight, allowed himself to be a bit more eccentric than in his previous film, this time taking literally Barbara Creed’s idea (from the book The Monstrous-Feminine) about women as horror-movie monsters.  As befits a post-modern artist, few things are unambiguous, least of all who will ultimately win this multi-genre battle of (with) the sexes. The Skin I Live In is an excellent example of an open text. Some questions are left without answers, while others are answered with such straightforwardness that they raise suspicion. The film veers from the serious topics of voyeurism and self-identification to shallow viewer attractions known from Italian giallo films (whose visual opulence Almodóvar’s work always most closely resembles). The narrative is much more muted than the characters’ behaviour and, as a whole, The Skin I Live In comes across as surprisingly balanced and coherent, without room for truly disturbing content, which is also due to the “gentle” transitions between scenes of radically different content and the relaxed pace of the narrative. Unfortunately, there is also no room for enabling us to delve into the characters in order to determine who deserves to suffer and how much they deserve it. It remains up to us who we will feel sorry for, which can be part of a game without clear rules. But it doesn’t have to be. 80%

Morons, sycophants, hypocrites. The nouveau riche, the Church, the military. They collide again and again, and nothing comes of it. They are scared to death that someone might uncover their true intentions. The accumulated lies emerge in dreams that may ultimately be more true than what is passed off as reality. Buñuel made an astonishingly caustic comedy with a slight hint of surrealism. Food, sex, dreams and scenes like something out of an art-house film viewed through the lens of Monty Python. The directing is admirably economical; if something can be said in one shot, it’s not said with three. However, I wasn’t always entire sure what was actually being said, but if by no other means, the film entertained me with its subversive unpredictability. 80%

After the opening twenty minutes, I was prepared for a futuristic variation on existential crime films along the lines of Le Samouraï. However, Rian Johnson directs with much less focus than the precise Melville. Thought the result doesn’t fall apart like The Brothers Bloom, the film still lacks a uniform style. Despite the absolutely serious and very impressive cutaways into the mechanised life of a hired assassin (though it somehow wasn’t clear to me why the targets aren’t sent back in time already dead), Looper also contains farcical black humour, a saccharine romance, brutal “Rambo” action and a bit of telekinesis for beginners (not to mention the very western-style final conflict on the street). Johnson switches not only between a lot of genres, but also between a lot of narrators. Though the narrative thus unfolds in an interesting way, it doesn’t ultimately lead to any surprising “convergence” into a unified point.  The use of multiple points of view essentially only confirms the truth of my favourite line from The Rules of the Game: “The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.” I’m afraid that the attempt to apply Bordwell’s forking-path model of narration to the film, placing in front of us two human minds influencing each other instead of two time planes, would lead us up a blind alley (though I would like to have this assumption refuted by a second viewing). More important than the time paradoxes for Johnson are the moral dilemmas with which the characters are confronted and which force us to constantly assess the situation from an emotional perspective. To whom does the future belong? Where does the line between a wasted and fulfilled life lead? What right do we have to make decisions for others? Here the non-Hollywood-style desperate fatefulness appears again, but repackaged in a more familiar, family-melodrama wrapper. I believe that if Johnson had stuck with a short runtime, as was the original plan, Looper would have been a great film about which geeks would tweet enthusiastically from the whole known internet world. As it stands, however, it is a very imaginative film that is more about sense than sensibility in conflict with its dominant sci-fi genre. 80%

Scorsese’s greatest commercial success prior to Cape Fear is essentially a film of the 1980s in many respects. As a sequel to The Hustler, The Color of Money fits in with the fashion of sequels at the time, with Tom Cruise, enjoying his new-found fame thanks to Top Gun, in the second-biggest role of his career to that point, and is a very cool spectacle thanks to the music and cinematography. The Colour of Money is not a typical, somewhat forgettable product of the eighties, but a distinctive work by a filmmaker with a rather clear vision. Scorsese’s films have been cool at least since Mean Streets, so the (audio-)visual style here was not a reaction to the period demand for outwardly bombastic spectacles; in fact, the opposite was true – the times finally caught up with Scorsese. The casting of the ascendant Cruise could also have led to false conclusions. Though the screenplay doesn’t favour either him or Newman, it definitely isn’t the then-desired variation on the story in which a young pup learns new tricks from an old, incorrigible dog. Furthermore, the relationship between the cynical Eddie and the brash Vincent reflects developments in the film industry as such, specifically the redistribution of power in Hollywood: from the hands of the old guard into the paws of eager young yuppies. So, whereas Newman, who doesn’t have much room to rise (and, at the same time, doesn’t want to fall) practically has nothing else to do but recapitulate his career with nostalgia and put his life priorities in order, Cruise, who fittingly works in a toy store at the beginning, demonstrates with monumental arrogance and zero respect that, as he himself believes, no one has anything on him. Both of them are stubborn, but only the younger one is incorrigible. Because if I understood the last shot correctly, Eddie, after his plan to gain control of his apprentice (and as a bonus, make some money off of him) fails, not only returns to the game, but mainly returns to the game for the sake of the game itself. After many years of cynically hustling others and proving god knows what to himself, he is finally becoming a real king of pool. It doesn’t matter than his kingdom is roughly two square metres in size – it is where he has won and lost the most important battles of his life. The importance of this object covered in felt with the colour of money for both players is constantly emphasised by the camerawork, often at table height and reminiscent of the stroke of a pool cue with its abrupt approaches to the characters. Just as Newman can steal a scene in a moment with his charisma, Scorsese is able to create the necessary atmosphere in a just a few seconds and prepare us for the importance of the event that is about to happen. However, the truth is that the individual scenes, however imaginatively directed, are quite similar to each other in their resulting feeling and after two hours I was immensely grateful to finally get out of those smoky pool halls. Even so, The Color of Money is still a very, very stylish film with one of Newman’s best later performances. 75%

Rabbit Hole is an uncompromisingly serious psychological drama in which even a car’s trunk lid closes with insistent slowness. While Kidman explores the hole created by the loss of her child, Eckhart tries to fill it. She deals with the past; he looks to the future. There is no present in which they would find common ground. The film’s strange aloofness and the absence of everyday intimate moments between the central couple are explained by the devastating yet hopeful ending. They spent the entire ninety minutes seeking a path to the moment captured in the final shot. This is not in any respect a groundbreaking film and Kidman previously did a superb job of playing a woman dealing with a marital crisis in Eyes Wide Shut, but there is something quite rare in Rabbit Hole – a bit of truth. 80%

A guy met a guy... and then a girl interfered in their relationship. Roughly two-thirds of the way into the film, I realised that Sirk’s Written on the Wind isn’t so much a traditional heterosexual romance as it is an almost western duel between two men, friends for life and in death, whose frustrations (of different origins) gave rise to a weakness for guns and alcohol rather than members of the opposite sex. Women are their downfall. It’s possible that I’m completely missing the mark, but I’m trying to understand why (because of my delayed recognition of the creative intention) the film completely left me cold emotionally (which doesn’t happen to me very often with melodramas). In spite of that, however, I admired the pleasant directness of the storytelling from the beginning, as well as the ambiguity of the dialogue, the expressive language of the Technicolor hues (which stand in for more graphic erotic material) and the unmissable phallic symbolism, i.e. mostly indications of Sirk’s theatre background and his ability to connect the characters with the mise-en-scéne. However, his experience from the theatre does not explain the several brilliantly edited sequences (the father’s death) or the use of subjectivising camera angles that make us sympathise with the supposed villain, which are evidence of Sirk’s exceptionalism as a film director. I consider the final stroking of the model of an oil derrick, representing the phallus of the complex-ridden male protagonists as well as American society at the time, as clear proof of Sirk’s affiliation with the classic-era Hollywood “smugglers” who inserted rather subversive messages into stories that appeared to be so innocent on the surface. 75%

Nine is a case of careless thumbing through the life and work of Federico Fellini. Sometimes the pages are turned so rashly that you can’t keep up, while at other times (and more frequently) you have time to think over every sentence and realise how banal and literal it is. With the exception of a few theatrical-musical displays, the scenes are rather sloppy; Rob Marshall apparently has a better feel for directing for the stage than for the camera. There is simply nothing to see here, by which I of course do not mean the acting marvels of all generations, lasciviously circled by the camera from all angles, but the other objects in the mise-en-scéne. The whole film itself is just as empty, particularly when it comes to emotion. It’s not helped by the actresses, as each of them has to have a certain space, and the film shatters on a succession of bizarre musical numbers and it can’t be held together even by Daniel Day-Lewis, whose character is something between a hyperactive Italian and existential-minded Frenchman. His Italian accent and Sophia Loren are thus the only things that bring Nine anywhere close to the country that it constantly refers to, but which can’t be felt from the film. I’m going to close this kitschy colouring book (why the constant switching to black-and-white?) and treat myself to a bit of authentic Italy by perusing Fellini’s  readable autobiography. 50%