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A Journey Through The Eclipse Series: Yasujiro Ozu’s Early Spring

David Blakeslee — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 19:32:18 +0000

The world today isn’t very interesting.

Everyone’s dissatisfied.

You ought to try and have a good time.

You’re right. That’s the only way.

I guess that’s about it.

After a weekend packed with tweets, blogs and breaking news about hotly anticipated fantasy/action/adventure/sci-fi movies from the San Diego Comic-Con, I’m sure that some of us are ready to spend a few minutes thinking about poignant, calm, reality-based films for grown-ups as a refreshing change of pace. At least I hope so, since that’s where I’m trying to draw your attention. For this week’s column, I’ve chosen Yasujiro Ozu’s Early Spring, from Eclipse Series 3: Late Ozu. It’s Ozu’s follow-up to Tokyo Story, one of those perennial candidates for “greatest film of all time,” at least within some subsets of the art house crowd. I’ve chosen it for the simple reason that, like Kurosawa’s I Live in Fear back in June, this 1956 release happens to fall right in line with my larger project of watching all the Criterion films in chronological order. I did think about reviewing a comic-themed movie in honor of #SDCC, but William Klein’s Mr. Freedom is as close to that genre as I could find in my Eclipse collection, and I already covered that one earlier this month.

Early Spring also represents a 23-year leap forward in Ozu’s career after last week’s viewing of Passing Fancy, one of his last silent movies. A few small details link the two otherwise unrelated films: first, the male protagonists both have to passively endure some well-deserved face slapping, and second, a character in each film appears on screen with an unexplained eye patch. As would be expected, Ozu’s techniques were further developed and refined over those two decades, but his style remained quite distinctive and consistent as well, perhaps more than any other director over the course of such a long career. The setting of Early Spring has shifted upscale a bit, to an urban working class neighborhood (instead of Passing Fancy‘s shoddy tenement) and the impersonal corporate office spaces of mid-50s Tokyo. The story concerns Shoji, a “salaryman” and war veteran who’s entering his early 30s and settling into the realization that he has a long, slow grind ahead of him as he awaits his turn to climb a few rungs on the corporate ladder over the course of the next several decades.

The snippet of dialog at the top of this column is just one of several exchanges that Shoji witnesses over the course of Early Spring, concisely summing up the mood of oppressive futility and weary resignation that the film delivers. This opening clip captures the first six minutes or so of Early Spring, and it’s a lovely (and rather leisurely paced) introduction to this very mundane slice of Japanese life in the midst of their postwar economic rejuvenation. Don’t expect slam-bang excitement here, folks – Ozu’s not the director who’s going to grab you by the collar and plunge you into a whirl of adventure. But savor the subtle details as we start an ordinary day: Shoji and his wife Masako rouse from their slumber, giving small but unmistakable cues of a marriage that’s grown stale and distant; familiar migratory patterns emerge as local breadwinners tread beaten paths en route to the train station, where they each cluster into their chosen cliques, an instinctive safeguard against the dehumanizing effects of their daily commute into downtown Tokyo.

Once we arrive at Shoji’s office, we begin to learn quite a bit about his life. He’s on a management track, likely to be an employee of the Toa Fire-Brick Company until the day he retires, if he so chooses. His friend Miura, hired in at the same time as Shoji, has been laid up with a lung ailment for several months. He has an older mentor, Onadera, played by Ozu’s acting stalwart Chishu Ryu, though with darker hair and a younger appearance than I was expecting based on the elderly characters he played in Tokyo Story, Early Summer and Late Spring. Shoji is integrated into his social circle and generally well-liked, but he’s not particularly seen as a leader or dominant force within the group. Though he’s handsome and seems to have a fair amount going for him, he hasn’t taken that big step to really stand out from the crowd quite yet, and you get the sense that he’s not really clear or confident about where he’d like to take his career. He’s playing it safe, biding his time, observing and holding his thoughts and feelings inside – even concealing them from the viewer. Shoji’s lack of expression and reticence to speak candidly about what’s on his mind is both realistic and at least potentially frustrating. He doesn’t do a whole lot to make himself an interesting character on the screen, but his blank and non-committal affect ends up making him quite believable as a typical guy – and I think “ordinariness” was clearly Ozu’s intention in Early Spring, as in just about all of his films.

The central complications develop when Shoji briefly capitulates one night to arranging a secretive rendezvous with a pretty and flirtatious young woman in his circle, nicknamed “Goldfish” because of her big eyes, her affectionate nature and her reputation for being “best seen from afar.” We already know that Shoji and Masako aren’t getting along, due to general marital fatigue and also the emotional scars wrought by the death due to illness of their son some years earlier that have never really been healed. Goldfish is an amusing plaything for Shoji, but disaffection sets in quickly after he’s satisfied his curiosity, and he shows little interest in prolonging the affair or deepening their relationship in any meaningful way. But the small hints of their encounter have a ripple effect, and soon the gossip and speculation rev up loud enough that Masako begins to harbor her own suspicions. (This plot element makes Early Spring a suitable “Variation on a Theme” of Infidelity, as was discussed in our recent podcast on Wong Kar-Wai’s In The Mood For Love.) Despite his efforts to maintain a passive, implacable surface, Shoji is forced to confront the difficulty of his situation and the lack of a convenient explanation for his recent conduct. Successive scenes throw additional wrenches into the gears of his conscience:

He hears the news about the widow of one of his slain war buddies who’s remarried and moved on from her first husband’s loss
He plays host to a couple of drunken pals who remind him to appreciate the comforts and privileges he’s taken for granted and grown bored with
He listens to Miura’s reminiscence of being hired to work at Toa, seemingly the happiest day of his life – what turns out to be among his ailing friend’s last words
He offers counsel to a younger neighbor who’s dealing with the unwanted anxiety of his wife’s unanticipated pregnancy and his lack of confidence in meeting the financial obligations of parenthood
He grapples with the offer from his employers to transfer out of the Tokyo office and relocate to a remote branch of the corporation in the small mountainside manufacturing town of Mitsuishi, city of belching smokestacks and rickety freight-trains and not a whole lot to do…

These central predicaments constitute the core of Early Spring‘s narrative, and without describing how it all ends up, I will forewarn that you won’t get the satisfaction of some big, emotionally wrenching declarative climax. Which isn’t to say that Early Spring lacks an effective punch; it’s there, you just have to let it sink in and hit you. There’s a resolution, and the very mundaneness of the characters’ activities and responses makes it believably satisfying. But I’ll leave it to the readers to determine how much pertinence these kinds of dilemmas have to their own lives. As for myself, I found it all engrossing and stimulating enough to hold my attention over 2 1/2 hours. I’ve lived through my 30s and most of my 40s now, been married for 25 years and I’ve worked for the same employer for over two decades, so there’s a lot of material in Early Spring that I can relate to. Younger viewers, those who mainly seek escapism in their movies, or anyone who’s not been sufficiently oriented to appreciate the craft of Ozu, may want to try some of his lighter, more engagingly entertaining films featured in the Criterion Collection – those mentioned above, or even Good Morning, if you’re looking for something that’s just flat out funny and even raucous by Ozu’s standards. Early Spring is a more bracing concoction, a shot of the hard stuff, like the old and burned out salarymen toss back as they ruminate on where their toil has gotten them. It may not go down so smoothly but it might just be the kind of eye-opener we need to jolt us out of the torpor of a midlife rut. Whatever season of life we may be in, Ozu’s sometimes bleak and sometimes quite amusing depiction of a workingman’s ennui and the plight of the wife who’s pulled along in his wake offers an oblique pointer away from the dead ends and stunted emotions that threaten to engulf us, should we surrender to the tedious monotony that serves as a price tag for the comforts and securities of modern corporate codependency.

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A Journey Through The Eclipse Series: Yasujiro Ozu’s Passing Fancy

David Blakeslee — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 19:00:41 +0000

With better manners, he’d be head of his class.

Over the course of a career spanning the late 1920s to the early 1960s, Japanese auteur Yasujiro Ozu released 54 films. Of those, 17, nearly one-third, are irretrievably lost and a pair exist only in fragments. Of the films that remain, another 17 have now been released in the United States through Janus Films and the Criterion Collection. That number was just attained last week when Criterion issued a lovingly crafted box set of two films: The Only Son and There Was a Father. This news, combined with our recent podcast focused on Floating Weeds and the in-depth Ozu retrospective series by Moises Chiullan in his Arthouse Cowboy column over at Hollywood-Elsewhere.com, have made Ozu a frequent topic of conversation on this site and in the online community of Criterion and cinema fans over the past few weeks. So now seems as fitting a time as any to add my thoughts to the mix by taking a look at one of the titles in Eclipse Series 10: Silent Ozu – Three Family Comedies. I’ve chosen Passing Fancy (1933), chronologically the last of the three in this set, which places it right before A Story of Floating Weeds (1934), the last domestically available Ozu silent, which in turn precedes The Only Son (1936), for those interested in placing all this Ozu chatter into a manageable timeline!

The pathway to becoming an Ozu aficionado seems fairly well marked. Typically, a novice to the work of the great director will first learn about his work by coming into contact with the lofty reputation of one of his so-called Noriko Trilogy films: Late Spring, Early Summer or most prominently, Tokyo Story. Let’s call that Stage 1 of the Ozu Initiation. After making casual acquaintance with the Master, the neophyte may be deemed worthy to advance to an apprentice phase, Stage 2, where one learns about other of his later works like Floating Weeds, Good Morning or An Autumn Afternoon. These exquisite relics from the later chapters of Ozu’s oeuvre often prove sufficient for many of his admirers, but as with any other esoteric disciplines, there are further levels of ascendancy to attain, should one be daring and resolute enough to brave the journey.

For as we see, there is an earlier realm to explore, which I’ll call Stage 3, the level I’m currently at, where one becomes adept at understanding and appreciating the wordless spells that Ozu is capable of weaving. My ambition here is to help Stage 2 apprentices take that next step, with the understanding that there are others more advanced than I, acolytes of Stages 4, 5 or beyond: disciples like Moises Chiullan and Michael Kerpan who have rigorously tracked down and viewed every last scrap of film that emerged from Ozu’s camera – and I will only utter the names of Tony Rayns and Donald Ritchie in a hushed, reverential tone, for they have trod in the Master’s footsteps, ascending to heights of Ozu-satori that induce dizziness at the merest contemplation.

Setting aside then the prospects of accomplishments quite likely beyond our grasp, let’s return our gaze to the object before us: Passing Fancy, Ozu’s affecting comedy about single fatherhood and the perennial masculine resistance to growing up gracefully. The first hurdle that most of us face in entering this world, and the others evoked in the Silent Ozu box set, is that the film is, indeed, silent. Unlike most of the other silent films featured in the Criterion Collection, Passing Fancy offers only two audio options – a lilting piano score, composed by noted silent film composer Donald Sosin in the spirit of Ozu but not what the original audiences were likely to hear, or nothing. There’s no audio commentary (since Eclipse discs are bare bones) or more elaborate selection of soundtracks such as one would find on The Passion of Joan of Arc or Pandora’s Box DVDs. This lack of audible stimulation requires a bit of work for many of us, but stick with it. I recommend the piano track for beginners. But go ahead and give it a try without sound for a second viewing, after you’ve gotten to know the characters and story line. The silence has a way of drawing our attention further in, once we learn to discern the subtleties it reveals.

A second obstacle is that these old films carry their scars. Just the fact that roughly a third of Ozu’s films no longer exist says a lot. Even though he was a highly successful film maker in the postwar years, conditions were tough, the esteem of old movies was so low and preservation was such a low priority that little could be done to restore his early works. The images of Passing Fancy show a lot of damage – it seems likely that for certain scenes, the reel they used for the transfer must be the only one in existence for that particular segment. But the sheer rarity often enhances our respect and even awe that these films have survived the ravages of time.

The story itself is fairly unprepossessing. Kihachi is a single father, and it’s never made clear what happened to the mother. There’s a brief mention of his “ex” by his friend and neighbor Jiro. Other reviews give the opinion that Kihachi is a widower, so I’m not sure. But he has a son, Tomio, who we first see laying sacked out on the floor of a local working-class music hall. Kihachi keeps time by tapping out the beat on Tomio’s rear end, a small indicator of his oblivious disregard of parental duties. He’s there for a night’s entertainment and the opening scene wins us over with some simple physical comedy involving a misplaced coin purse and antagonistic fleas. From there, Kihachi and Jiro continue on for a night of drinking, and we get the sense that it’s late, that Tomio is being lugged along like so much excess baggage and that Kihachi is not doing a very good job of looking after his kid, who’s got some kind of eye problem and obviously needs his rest.

Into the drunken gaze of the drinking buddies wanders Harue, a young woman just let go from her factory job and now without a place to stay. Kihachi looks her over, noticing that she’s pretty enough to suit his tastes. “I have a kid, but no wife!” he blurts out, briefly losing contact with propriety, but Jiro is there to bring him back in line. Jiro is skeptical of Harue’s story, sizing her up as a troublemaker bent on taking advantage of vulnerable men. Kihachi, characteristically wavering as he does throughout the film, can’t follow Jiro’s impulse to just leave Harue to fend for herself. So a night’s lodging with Otome, matron of the local inn, is arranged for Harue and the men stagger home, Tomio in tow.

Ozu cuts directly to a nicely composed shot of a young hand skillfully drawing the face of an alarm clock – it’s Tomio’s work, and we see that this neglected boy has some native talent. We’ve jumped to the following morning, and Tomio notices that it’s well past time for his dad to wake up and get to his job at a nearby brewery. But Kihachi is under his nets, sleeping off last night’s alcoholic stupor. The usual methods of rousing him don’t work, so Tomio resorts to the old reliable “whack the shin” method to wake both his old man and Jiro from their slumber. These comical bits establish quite a bit regarding the functionality of the household and the essential likeability of the central characters. Even though Kihachi is a scoundrel, Tomio is a brat and Jiro has a hard-bitten cynical side to him, it’s hard to not feel affection for them and empathy for their plight.

Kihachi in particular, in all of his various “passing fancies,” holds our attention as he gradually comes to recognize his inadequacies, first as a lover in his futile and funny efforts to woo Harue, and later as a father who takes way too much for granted regarding Tomio’s ability to roll with the punches brought about by his poverty, his drinking, his lack of education and his foolish pursuit of a woman half his age. Like many (dare I say most?) guys, Kihachi is not above resorting to a bit of scammery and double-talk to buy himself some time when facing pressure, nor is he immune to self-deceiving flatteries if it helps him to ignore the long-shot odds of success. He’s a lot more show than substance, but the way he goes about it – dressing up in his finest white gown and “breaking the bank” on an ornamental comb gift in his pursuit of Harue – can’t help but make us laugh as we recall other versions of that guy we’ve seen (or been) in our own lives.

Besides Kihachi’s misguided attempts at romance, the father-son relationship between himself and Tomio provides Passing Fancy’s moral center of gravity. As is often the case with emotionally immature single dads and their only sons, the bond degrades a bit to blur the boundaries between parent and child. Tomio is the one growing up too fast, put in the position of having to defend his dad against the ridicule of his peers while also coping with his own disappointments and frustrations. Kihachi and Tomio often resort to smacking each other, and though it’s comical at first, it erupts into a more heart-wrenching episode halfway through the movie, after Tomio has destroyed Kihachi’s prized bonsai gingko plant in a fit of frustration..

The outburst proves somewhat cathartic, restoring a brief equilibrium, before matters turn much more serious in Passing Fancy’s third act. An impulsive act of generosity and showmanship on Kihachi’s part leads to an illness that threatens Tomio’s life – and ultimately clarifies his father’s understanding of what he must do (though only in an indirect, roundabout way.) Despite his frequent wrong-turns, and a proclivity to dropping his trousers numerous times over the course of the film (a running gag that leads to a poignant payoff at the end), Kihachi proves ultimately trustworthy to do the right thing – though it’s an anxiety-provoking process to finally get him there.

The concluding minutes of Passing Fancy ramp up the melodrama and the emotions to a stirring climax that I could describe here but I won’t. A summary of the plot only goes so far in capturing the moods that Ozu evokes, and might even persuade some readers to think that the movie isn’t worth their time. My recommendation is that anyone new to Ozu stick with the traditional route of entry, through Tokyo Story or Late Spring, then on to other later works, and then tread backwards in time to see if the old silents deliver enough charm to win your own Passing Fancy. Personally, I really enjoy seeing Ozu’s depiction of this cluttered, cramped, workingman’s environment that he focused on before moving to the more prosperous middle class environs of his later films. The elements so familiar from the films of his full maturity – the pillow shots of industrial and natural landscapes, the low camera angles, the elliptical leaps in time and space – are already settling into place here, but not as formally refined and therefore even more fresh and vibrant. Check out Passing Fancy or any of the other silent family comedies in this set. And if you like them, file your report with us here at CriterionCast. Send us a self-addressed, stamped envelope and $5.00 for handling fees, and we’ll send you your official Stage 3 Ozu-phile Badge. Be the first on your block to get one!

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Joshua Reviews Roger Corman’s Galaxy Of Terror And Forbidden World [DVD Reviews]

Joshua Brunsting — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 13:00:50 +0000

When people think of Roger Corman, they think of two things: camp filled films with copious amounts of blood and skin, and Death Race 2000. However, hoping to help change that is the genius collective known as Shout! Factory.

Releasing a collection of films under the banner of Roger Corman’s Cult Classics, then company has added to their ever growing catalogue of Roger Corman produced projects, which currently includes the aforementioned Death Race 2000 among others, with two new releases of classic projects, Galaxy of Terror, and Forbidden World.

Both are solid winners here, but the true king of the pair here is Galaxy Of Terror.

The film follows the crew of a rescue ship, who while on a mission, come into contact with a group of monsters. However, these aren’t just your run of the mill beasts. These monsters are bread from th very subconscious of each member of the crew, making them physical manifestations of their worst and darkest fears.

Personally, while I like my sci-fi a little more along the lines of films like Solaris or last year’s Moon, this is one of the more engaging sci-fi films I’ve had a chance to see in a long time. There is an inherent charm behind Corman and his productions, that no matter how poor the effects may look, or how cartoonishly theatrical the performances truly are, the film takes all of the influences that the film may have taken from films like Alien, and really runs with it.

The budget is minute, but the themes here aren’t. Yes, the film avoids pulling any punches, often times making what it’s trying to say seem a little heavy handed, but if you truly let yourself go along for the ride, as wild as it may be, it’s a really fun and interesting little picture. The film is directed by Bruce Clark, and it definitely fits the Corman bill, as it’s a low budget, nudity filled film, that features over the top in both conviction and tone performances, and while it has been called a no budget take on Alien, it takes what it has been given, and makes a film, clocking in at just around 80 minutes, that is both engaging, as well as completely brisk. Sure, the film won’t work for those looking to watch a film with a bigger budget, and the film in and of itself doesn’t completely work, but this is definitely worth the price, particularly because of what it has in support of the film.

Galaxy Of Terror features a low number of special features, but what it does have, are some of the more interesting and truly reflective special features given to a film in this collection. The release comes with a fantastic commentary featuring members of the cast and crew, trailers for the film as well as other films released by Corman’s New Worlds Pictures, a photo gallery, and even the film’s original screenplay. However, the crème de la crème of the release is the massive making of documentary, broken into sections looking at the cast of the film, the creation of the films sets and landscapes, it’s make up effects, it’s editing, and even a selection of memories from the cast and crew of the film, who had the chance to work with one James Cameron. The film has garnered comparisons to films like Cameron’s Aliens, as a lot of the effects crew actually moved on from this film, to that one, and here you learn about that, but you also learn that Cameron may have been just as egotistic as he is now, back in the day. It’s an amazing documentary, particularly when looking at what Shout has done with this series, particularly Death Race, a DVD without a truly interesting making of documentary.

The other film, Forbidden World, also high on the violence and nudity, while being low on the budget, is a film that I enjoyed, but didn’t quite get much more out of.

Personally, the thing that keeps me coming back to Corman’s projects, even the ones that he produces, are the combination of charm, and thematic weight that makes his films more than just simply campy classics. However, here it seems that while the premise is fun; a group of scientists come under attack on a remote planet after an experiment goes loose, the film doesn’t have much more below the surface.

The film is exactly what you would expect from a Corman produced film. It’s a sci-fi action thriller made on a nonexistent budget, chock full of performances that would be home on any sci-fi episode of The Young And The Restless, which is all fun and good, but without that extra level of thematic weight, the film really doesn’t stand up against films like Death Race and Galaxy of Terror.

That said, what makes this release worth your money, is the fact that this is a truly legendary release. With every previous release of the film, the 77-minute, Roger Corman edited cut of the film has been the one to see the light of day. However, this sees the first release of the completely unrated directors cut of the film, originally called Mutant, which features five more minutes of footage, previously unseen. For any completist, this is an absolute must own, as it includes the extra cut, along with a collection of trailers, stills, and interviews pertaining to special effects work on the film, memories of the cast and crew, and a really interesting look at the score of the film. The release also comes with a commentary on the director’s cut, from director Allan Holtzman.

Overall, these aren’t the best films in the world, but for fans of camp filled sci-fi thrillers, there is literally no better place to turn that Roger Corman and his crew. The films here are top notch, and are collected here with such a fantastic collection of features, that for any fan of this type of film, these are absolute must owns. If these aren’t your cup of tea, than this of course may not be worth it, but if you are looking to get into a world that isn’t normally talked about when discussing film and film history, at least amongst the mainstream, than there is no better place to turn that here with what Shout Factory is routinely putting out.

GALAXY OF TERROR BLU-RAY AND DVD SPECIAL FEATURES INCLUDE:

Commentary with Cast and Crew
New Worlds – producer Roger Corman, screenwriter Marc Siegler and director Bruce D. Clark discuss the origins of the film
The Crew Of The Quest – Actors Robert Englund, Sid Haig, Taaffe O’Connell and Grace Zabriskie discuss their experiences as crew members of the U.S.S. Quest
Planet Of Horrors – A detailed look into the creation of the film’s memorable sets and alien landscapes
Future King – Memories of co-production designer (and future visionary filmmaker) James Cameron from members of the cast and crew
Old School – A journey into the complicated mechanical and makeup effects with artists Allan A. Apone, Douglas J. White, Alec Gillis and others
Launch Sequence – Co-editor R.J. Kizer walks us through postproduction and a profile on composer Barry Schrader
Theatrical trailers
Extensive photo galleries including posters, production sketches and designs
Theatrical trailer with commentary from writer/director Joel Olsen, courtesy of Trailersfromhell.com
Original screenplay

FORBIDDEN WORLD 2-DISC SPECIAL-EDITION DVD BONUS CONTENT:

New anamorphic widescreen (1.85:1) in high definition transfer from the Inter-Positive films elements of the R-rated theatrical cut
The never-before-seen, unrated Director’s Cut (4:3 – Full Frame)
Audio commentary with director Allan Holzman
Interview with producer Roger Corman
Interviews with cast and crew including director Allan Holzman, composer Susan Justin and actor Jesse Vint.
A look at the special effects of Forbidden World with John Carl Buechler, Robert Skotak, Tony Randal and R. Christopher Biggs
Poster and still Gallery
Original theatrical trailer
Additional New World trailers

James Reviews Karen Shakhnazarov’s The Vanished Empire [DVD Review]

James McCormick — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 21:00:05 +0000

‘The Vanished Empire‘ came out of left field to this viewer, especially when it comes to a part of youth that I never thought about in the first place. Soviet youth sounds like it would be about war torn Russia, at least to a close-minded individual, but watching the new film by Karen Shakhnazarov, it shows us that no matter what time and country it might be set in, a film about teenagers tends to be about the same thing: friends, girls, betrayal, school, banned rock music and the collapse of a society around them.

The film follows Sergey Narbekov (Alexander Lyapin), who is a student in 1973 Moscow, who likes Lyuda (Lidiya Milyuzina) and wishes to impress her any chance he gets. One moment in the film is when he thinks he’s bought a mint LP of the Rolling Stones’ “Goat’s Head Soup” for Lyuda, but when he opens it in front of her, it is a copy of Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake”. She doesn’t mind, she likes the score, so all is no lost.

Shakhnazarov is a talented director who deserves some recognition here in this part of the world. ‘The Vanished Empire‘ works perfectly as a coming of age story, but as opposed to most of those films, this one deals more with Russian youth culture and how they are going forward toward a future that isn’t certain. A society that bans rock music, such as The Rolling Stones, The Beatles… hell, even The Archies “Sugar, Sugar” is a call to arms to these kids who have to secretly listen to these songs in order to ‘fight the power’, so to speak.

The screenplay, by Sergey Rokotov and Evgeny Nikishov, shows a city that is much more dilapidated than 70′s London or New York City, and the relationships between not only Sergey’s friends but also his family as well, especially his grandfather (Armen Djigarkhanyan), who is a well respected archaeologist who did the major excavation of the ancient Khorezm civilization in present day Uzbekistan. Which then has some great surreal moments, such as Sergey’s first use of marijuana, which takes him to a the City of the Wind, which his grandfather has named in Khorezm.

The film has this sense of loss and disconnect, which happens to many of us when we are in our teens. We gain friends, we lose them. We fall in love with people and they break our hearts. We think we are lost and blame our youth for it all, but when looking around us, we see that the adults aren’t much better than us anyway. The youth in this film have moved on from their elders, who no longer have any hold on them.

A film that luckily has not been ignored by Kino Lorber Films, we get to see a film that might have not been seen for years here. Karen Shakhnazarov is a filmmaker that is now on my radar, which has me looking for his films “Jazzman”, “City Zero” and “The Rider Named Death”. He perfectly captures and shows us Brezhnev-era Moscow, and with a wonderful performance by Alexander Lyapin, you can’t help but want to know about this time in the Soviet Union’s history and how it affected the people then and ultimately the people still living there today.

Emotionally acute, grittily realistic, and surprisingly lyrical, The Vanished Empire is a “wise, elegiac film” (The New York Times) that depicts a teenage boy’s stumbling journey into adulthood from the streets of early 70’s Soviet Moscow, to a lost city in the timeless Uzbekistan desert, to a post-communist Russian future that seemed impossible during the height of the cold war.

Trapped by obligations to his pre-teen brother, archaeologist single mother and aging grandfather, the illicit temptations of youth, and the social hypocrisy of life in a USSR fifteen years away from its own inevitable transformation, 18 year old Sergey rebels by sidestepping responsibility altogether. Aided and enabled by the privileged, westernized diplomat’s son Kostya and straight-laced schoolmate Styopa, Sergey pursues girls, vodka, pot, and Western rock and roll with equal abandon. But then the arrival of gorgeous, innocent Lyuda threatens to break Sergey out of his rootless cycle of teenage kicks, even as it tests his already tenuous connection to friends, family, past, and future.

Working in widescreen, director Karen Shakhnazarov (Jazzman, The Rider Named Death) expertly recreates Brezhnev-era Moscow, captures the hypnotic otherworldliness of the West Asian desert, and crafts a bracingly unsentimental, humorous, and moving portrait of youth and country on the threshold of inevitable change.

2008 Russia 104 min. Color In Russian w/ English subtitles

Letterboxed (1.85:1) Enhanced for 16×9 TVs

James Reviews Aleksandr Sokurov’s The Sun [DVD Review]

James McCormick — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 17:00:34 +0000

A film that came out in 2005 to rave reviews during the Berlin Film Festival and is finally out on DVD here in the U.S. 5 years later sounds like an adventure all its own, but this is what happened to Aleksandr Sokurov’s ‘The Sun’. Add to that already ardent fact is it is a film about the Japanese dictator Emperor Hirohito and his last days in power before Japan surrendered to the Allies in World War II, mostly set in the basement bunker of the Imperial Palace.

Hirohito (Issey Ogata) is a bit insane and suffers from dementia. He needs constant reminding of his divinity (being one with God was why the people believed he was ordained in the first place) and he’s almost childlike, needing servants to dress him and they are shocked to see this once worshipped ‘deity’ believes he’s not “Tenno” (Heavenly Emperor), but instead only one weird man who has bad breath and loves Western Culture, especially one silent film star he likes to dress up partially as.

We leave the Imperial Palace at one point for an encounter between Hirohito and the American general Douglas MacArthur (Robert Dawson), who invites him to dinner so they can discuss, like civilized men, how Japan will surrender to the Allies. But it’s staged almost like a horrible first date, awkward and unnerving, with Hirohito running off but ultimately coming back and just talking nonstop about random things, which has MacArthur excusing himself, only to call his “girlfriend” the President as a way to complain about the meeting itself. It’s almost comedic but really is a sad display of someone, up until recently, was shown as a peacemaker and stoic, not a neurotic mess the way Sokurov shows him.

Not only is Sokurov’s direction and framing of the film a wonderful eye-opening experience (which makes myself and everyone else have to seek out the other two films in his ‘dictator trilogy’, ‘Moloch’ which is about Hitler and the Lenin centric ‘Taurus’) but so is the tour-de-force performance by Issey Ogata. He somehow finds different ways to play neurotic and strange, giving Woody Allen a run for his money. He usually says more with his body than with words, his body being the dialogue of his character.

The script by Jeremy Noble and Yuri Arabov has a great sense of humor but a sense of humility, showing this once proud man who led Japan into WWII and now is almost giddy when he hears the American forces marching in Tokyo. His obsession with crabs and their beauty is a constant theme, which some people have said have a place in showing mental illness, especially in Japan. Was this what Sokurov going for in his Hirohito ‘revisionist’ history lesson? It’s a film that Kino Lorber Films thankfully have given us cinephiles a chance to sit back, watch this film with our colleagues and have rather intricate discussions about. Which is always what a good filmmaker wants their film to do.

Following up his portraits of Hitler in Moloch (1999) and Lenin in Taurus (2001), Alexander Sokurov’s film is a mesmerizing tour of Emperor Hirohito’s final days in power during the waning moments of WWII.

Hirohito (Issei Ogata) wanders through his palace in a child-like state of denial. He spends his time studying marine biology and paging through a photo album of Hollywood stars. Hirohito’s patient chamberlain (Shiro Sano) encourages his isolation through banal daily rituals, which include “time for private thought.” But reality soon intrudes, as American soldiers overrun his manicured gardens and nightmare visions of Hiroshima invade his dreams. No longer a God among men, Hirohito is forced to kowtow to General MacArthur (Robert Dawson), who softly pushes the terms of the occupation and, even more dramatically, for the renunciation of Hirohito’s divinity.

One of the best movies released in 2009 (NY Times), THE SUN is an elegantly constructed meditation on absolute power and how it dissipates the man who wields it.

DVD Extras:

Production Notes by Alexander Sokurov
Theatrical Trailer
Stills Gallery
Presented in 5.1 Stereo Surround

A Journey Through The Eclipse Series: Louis Malle’s Vive Le Tour

David Blakeslee — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 19:00:35 +0000

As soon as they see a bike, they can’t quit, and off they go.

Another annual running of the Tour de France just began last weekend, and the timing couldn’t be better for the nation that hosts the world’s greatest bicycle race. The French national soccer team suffered humiliating opening-round failure in the just-concluded World Cup of football/soccer in South Africa, an embarrassment compounded by the fact that their neighbors to the north (Netherlands) and south (Spain) played for the trophy. Even in light of the snide sarcasm directed their way in last week’s featured Eclipse title Mr. Freedom, France badly needs the boost to their collective self-esteem provided by this impressive, internationally renowned event.

Though I’m a sports fan (American baseball and football mainly), I have to admit I’ve never paid close attention to or even understood the Tour de France, despite having a brother-in-law who’s followed it closely for years and tried explaining to me how the champions are determined on several occasions. But there’s nothing like a well-made documentary to draw my interest in a new subject and that’s what I’m here to write about this week: Vive le Tour, a short subject from Eclipse Series 2: The Documentaries of Louis Malle. This film is only 19 minutes long and focuses more on the visceral experience of participating in the race or observing it as a spectator, rather than the mundane results of who won what stages or whether any records were broken. In that respect, it reminded me of Kon Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad from 1964, where the camera lingered on the athletes in motion and gave only scant attention to the outcome of the competition.

Instead of a report on what specifically happened in a particular series of races held in the summer of 1962, what we have in Vive le Tour is a gripping though brief impression of what Le Tour looked and felt like in that era, back when France was a lot more traditional, monocultural and low-tech than the scenes we can watch on our screens over the next few weeks. Imagine dozens if not hundreds of men hurtling across the countryside on their bicycles at speeds upwards of 30 mph, not a single bike helmet in sight. Some of the injuries suffered for that lack of precaution are caught on camera here: blood pouring down the side of a rider’s head as he pedals relentlessly while a friend in a car rolling alongside him daubs at the wounds; other cyclists woozy and wobbling until they literally topple over in the street, likely victims of concussions, exhaustion or other internal injuries in the aftermath of a massive crash. The bulk of these guys aren’t probably much past 5’ 6” and 140 lbs (convert to metric as necessary) but they are some tough dudes!

Meanwhile, other anachronisms caught in the footage include inhabitants of the rustic French villages lining the streets, wearing the caps and colors of favorite riders, many of whom are in the competition to bring honor and perhaps more tangible rewards for themselves and the area they represent. Through the spectacle they create, it’s obvious that even at this time the Tour de France was a commercialized, highly organized affair, but we can’t help but appreciate the homespun funkiness on display. Spectators routinely break out of the sidelines to help push straggling cyclists up the mountain inclines, a breach of etiquette (and security) that would be utterly intolerable nowadays. Vive le Tour opens with the garish artwork and parade float decor of the festivities. We also witness “drinking raids,” where riders swiftly jump off their bikes, barge into roadside cafes and just grab whatever liquid refreshments were at hand – champagne, beer, wine – leaving the tour promoters to foot the bill when the race had concluded. And after the cyclists had finished their chugging, of course they’d have to relieve themselves of the fluids they hadn’t already sweated out – and Louis Malle’s camera is there to immortalize those transient moments!

The tour was nearly 60 years old at this time, certainly at a mature enough point in its development that serious prestige and intense competition factored into the public’s interest. The festive atmosphere and its galvanizing effect on bringing masses of people together in celebration of a beloved tradition overcame the signs of corporate exploitation that were already becoming quite evident, though still pretty modest in comparison to the logo-festooned jerseys of today’s riders and the surrounding sea of advertising through which they pedal. And doping scandals were beginning to encroach on the supposed purity of the sport (although cheating of all sorts goes back to the very earliest races, reaching such a crisis point that the whole thing was almost called off after only the second year!)

So as a glimpse of a colorful, simpler stage in the evolution of a sport, Vive le Tour has historic value, but Malle’s accomplishment goes beyond satisfying our curiosity or inducing nostalgia. It’s also a finely crafted film, not merely an assembly of scraps from various points in the month-long procession. Malle, still a relatively young filmmaker at the time, demonstrates technical expertise and a sharp eye for detail, whittling his project down with the same spartan discipline embodied by the athletes he filmed. He and his crew incorporate excellent footage from a variety of perspectives, mostly handheld shots, incorporating swift blurs of pure motion, first person compositions as if we were pedaling in the race ourselves, and intense close-ups of grimacing, sweat-dripping faces pushing their bodies to the limit over many different terrains – countryside, mountain passages, small towns and big cities. A dynamic and creative sound mix augments the viewer’s involvement as well, conveying in a brief span of time a vivid sense of just how demanding Le Tour is on the physiques and psyches of the competitors.

Louis Malle ranks among the most accomplished directors featured in the Criterion Collection, producing a number of highly-regarded and award winning documentaries and traditional narrative stories over a 30+ year timespan. I risk embarrassing myself by admitting that I’m not as familiar with his work as I should be. I’ve seen and enjoyed Elevator to the Gallows and The Lovers, but that’s it so far! I know there’s a lot more to be discovered, so I won’t pretend to offer any great insight on Malle’s career – but this brief sample of what’s generally seen as a minor work offers the promise of many more intriguing and challenging cinematic masterworks to come.

You can watch Vive le Tour in its entirety on YouTube, in two parts. But I recommend the DVD!

Order the Eclipse set from Amazon

A Journey Through The Eclipse Series: William Klein’s Mr. Freedom

David Blakeslee — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 20:00:41 +0000

F-R-double-E-D, D-O-M spells Freedom! We fight for freedom, for one and for all!

It’s you-and-me-dom, and ten foot tall! Freedom, freedom, and oh-can-you-see-dom!

We’ll always beat ‘em with star-spangled freedom!

Another Independence Day has come and gone in the USA, but before we bundle up the bunting, furl up the flags and blaze that last pack of firecrackers, let’s take a few minutes to celebrate the meaning and grandeur behind all that traditional hoopla: I’m talkin’ about FREEDOM!

Yeah, FREEDOM, that wonderful essential quality of life we all enjoy here in America, unique among the nations in granting FREEDOM as a birthright to its natural born and duly assimilated citizens. FREEDOM, that allows us to choose our own destiny, chart our own course, shrug off the rules that don’t apply to us and righteously snuff out any and all tyrants that dare to stand in our way. FREEDOM! Our forefathers caught it, we inherited it and we aim to spread it around as far and as wide as our FREEDOM-loving loins allow us to roam! FREEDOM - it’s that sound of the drumbeats of liberty you hear, approaching, rumbling, pounding in the distance… it’s the sight of millions of disciplined individuals all marching in lockstep, determined to make everyone else free just like them! …it’s the undeniable, irresistible power that overwhelms and subjugates all who dare obstruct FREEDOM’s path! And FREEDOM has a champion – and that Champion’s name is… MR. FREEDOM!

If all that rhetoric kind of has your head spinning and your ears ringing, don’t worry, that’s the effect I was trying to induce. A brief period of disorientation, where words cease to have meaning and all that’s left is knee-jerk stimulus/response, helps us make the necessary adjustments that allow entry into the world of Eclipse Series 9: The Delirious Fictions of William Klein. This set contains three films created in the 1960s and 70s by an expatriate fashion photographer who emigrated to Paris and spent the majority of his film-making career creating documentaries on subjects like Muhammad Ali and the French Open tennis tournament. I’m thankful that William Klein found the time and resources to put his vivid visual and satirical imagination into these unique, vibrant features. Mr. Freedom, from 1968, captures the radical, revolutionary energy of that pivotal year, incorporating documentary footage from Parisian street riots and kitschy advertising pastiche into a wicked lampoon of right-wing Cold War jingoism at a time when it seemed just possible that the whole edifice of Anglo-American imperialism might collapse in on itself due to youth-fueled resistance from within.

For readers who haven’t studied or given sustained consideration to the art and culture of the late 60s, it was a time of great turbulence and experimentation across all forms of media. The influence of psychedelics, the sexual revolution, the civil rights movement and political upheavals in all parts of the world engendered strong feelings of both hope for positive change and dread of what would be lost in the process. Stakes were high, tensions seemed to be continually mounting and partisans on all sides of the conflicts were readier than ever to take drastic measures and advance their cause. Mr. Freedom belongs to that brief flowering of subversive, brutal parody that produced music like The Mothers of Invention’s We’re Only In It For The Money and Absolutely Free and The Fugs’ It Crawled Into My Hand, Honest; the free-wheeling, ragged improvisation of theatrical productions like Hair and short films like the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour; and the “nobody can stop us” vulgarity of early underground comix by Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton and many others. Boundaries were pushed, taboos were challenged, blunt provocation was the order of the day. A wooly, tacky aesthetic thread runs through these works – unrefined, crude, immediate, grandiose and amateurish at times, but relentlessly exploring and flush with the the excitement of new possibilities. Though it received only a limited, belated release here in the States and was poorly received by the critical establishment at that time, Mr. Freedom struck me as an extraordinarily entertaining send-up of the hawks who were escalating the Vietnam War, unleashing the pigs to hassle the hippies, blacks, peaceniks and radicals and who believed themselves to be the last best hope for the advancement of humanity against the evil threat from godless Communism.

We first meet Mr. Freedom as a sandwich munching, malt liquor chugging enforcer of the law, going about his routine duties in the USA. The film opens with documentary footage of riots in urban America, with looters raiding burned out stores grabbing TVs, appliances, whatever they can carry. Witnessing the lawlessness, Mr. Freedom ditches his sheriff’s uniform, retreating into his flag-draped secret chamber to don the first of his many red-white-and-blue ensembles. Next thing we see, he’s barging through the window of a black family, imparting lessons on right vs. wrong and spraying a few bullets around to emphasize the points he wants to make. Then he’s abruptly called away, via his nifty two-way wrist-TV, to the skyscraper corporate headquarters of Freedom, Inc. where he’ll receive a new set of orders.

The plot, such as it is, of Mr. Freedom follows its eponymous character (who has no other name or alter-ego, though an endless variety of costumes at his disposal, never repeating his look from one scene to the next) as he carries out a mission of revenge under orders by his boss, Dr. Freedom, the white-coated mastermind of Freedom Inc. that we only ever see on glitchy TV monitors. The mission is halting the overthrow of France by Commie infiltrators aligned with the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China.

Just as Mr. Freedom serves as a proxy for the USA, the adversary nations are represented by their own costumed mascots, namely Moujik Man, a double-talking Kremlin apparatchik in an overstuffed Nerf suit, and Red Chinaman, a giant inflatable cartoon dragon. They’re suspected in the tragic death of French superhero Capitaine Formidable, who pops up in a couple of quick cameos, portrayed by none other than Yves Montand (The Wages of Fear.) Capt. Formidable was the last remnant of the whithered French resistance, and now that former ally has once again lost its collective nerve and needs the mighty Yanks to come over and bail them out just like we did in the two World Wars.

Upon landing, Mr. Freedom quickly meets up with Marie-Madeleine (Delphine Seyrig, a Criterion favorite from her appearances in Last Year at Marienbad, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.) Here her role is much less demanding, as she basically has to flounce herself around as Mr. Freedom‘s head cheerleader in a skimpy sexy outfit. And she does that very well! But there’s more going on with her character than the appealing (if somewhat zany) surface initially reveals. She helps him set up the Freedom Rally that he hopes will capture the imagination of the French populace, and from the looks of things, he gets off to a pretty good start:

As impressive as the presentation is though, somehow the pitch fails to take hold, even after Mr. Freedom opens up a facility where recruits can practice their insurgency and counter-insurgency skills. If it weren’t for the noble cause they served, the unhinged, freaked-out mayhem that takes place there might be confused for what you’d see in a terrorist training camp! Despite his willingness to cut out the middle-man and offer bulk wholesale discounts on the handy leatherette-bound Freedom Kits (featuring Super-F defoliant and 2-ton TNT equivalent exploding ballpoint pens) Mr. Freedom still faces resistance. Is it because of the moral or intellectual weakness of his would-be proselytes? Are his enemies arguing points that resonate more strongly with the silly deluded natives? Is there a betrayer in his midst? Would a new and improved marketing campaign turn things around?

Mr. Freedom doesn’t have the time or the inclination to wonder and worry about such things! He’s a man of action, and when Plan A doesn’t go according to plan, it’s time to press harder on the gas pedal – no slowing down, no retreat, no surrender! That’s not what Mr. Freedom is all about. Having used everything else in his arsenal to win French hearts and minds, Mr. Freedom makes one last appeal, begging them to not force him to go all the way and drop THE BIG ONE!

While Mr. Freedom‘s absurd, exaggerated narrative spins wildly toward its apocalyptic, cartoonish finale, packing its own simplistic political punch, what knocks me out through the course of the film are the vivid colors and playful details of Klein’s set designs and costumes, just short of miraculous considering they had to have been produced on a shoestring budget. Among my favorites are the US Embassy, a supermarket stocked full of bland generic branded products and staffed by bouncy go-go dancers, and the ridiculous pseudo-tech Freedom bunker that serves as command central when the incorrigible French citizenry force Mr. Freedom‘s hand to escalate the conflict.

I’ve peppered this review with many screencaps that I think speak eloquently enough for themselves without requiring a lot of commentary from me. Some parts remind me of the trippy flourescent whimsy of Yellow Submarine and early Peter Max, while other segments resemble the pop-art carnage of Godard’s Pierrot le Fou.

It also brought to mind more recent films like Team America: World Police (in its over-the-top political satire) and even the Matrix Trilogy (with its banks of TV monitors and subway tunnel hero vs. villain encounters.) Mr. Freedom also served as inspiration for Beck’s Sexx Laws video, and its explosively abundant visual flair makes for wonderful mash-up possibilities like this one, which adds digital enhancements you won’t see in the original:

Mostly though I just laughed out loud throughout the film, enjoying the continually audacious mockery of consumerism, action and spy movies of the period and especially the portrayal of cocksure, in-our-face, unapologetic, my way or the highway reactionary conservatism gone wild. It’s pretty much impossible for me to watch and listen to Mr. Freedom and not experience flashbacks to Reaganism and the Bush/Cheney years, especially in the aftermath of 9/11 and their War on Terror.

And it gets me thinking about today’s political situation here in the United States. We have a full summer and fall of electioneering to get through before we know for sure what changes will take place in our nation’s political life, but in the meantime, I’m hearing a lot of squawking from Mr. Freedom‘s ideological descendants, the “Tea Party” factions and other such paranoiacs who are looking for a real Mr. Freedom they can rally around and put out there as their public spokesman. When, not if, they find their dream candidate and put the new Mr./Ms. Freedom up before the American public to sell us their repackaged 21st century “handy leatherette Freedom kits,” I hope the voters have the good sense to pay more attention to what the next Doctor Freedom is saying behind the scenes.

A Journey Through The Eclipse Series: Akira Kurosawa’s I Live In Fear

David Blakeslee — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 23:00:11 +0000

I keep thinking about the H-bomb, but all I can do is think! …

It’s a living hell!

This week’s selection for the Journey Through the Eclipse Series is driven by a desire to maintain some continuity with my Criterion Reflections blog. On that site, I’ve been watching and writing about films released by the Criterion Collection in their original order of release (as films, not DVDs.) I Live in Fear, a 1955 film featured in Eclipse Series 4: Postwar Kurosawa, just happens to fall in line with my most recent review over there, Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog. So during the past few days, just like a small handful of movie watchers in late 1955, I’ve been contemplating those two great horrors of the World War II era: first, the Holocaust, and now the prospect of death by nuclear attack and radioactive fallout. Anyone got a Xanax they can spare? I’m feelin’ kinda shaky at the moment!

I Live in Fear opens with shots of busy Tokyo intersections, accompanied by music of the theremin, that eerie high pitched electronic wail that instantly signals 1950s Atomic Age paranoia. I’m used to hearing it in American sci-fi of the period and was impressed/surprised to hear it used in this Japanese setting. Music is a universal language indeed! The action opens with a dentist taking a phone call right in the middle of doing a check-up – I could hardly imagine such a thing happening nowadays. He’s summoned to a family court hearing, where he serves as a mediator for the purpose of resolving domestic disputes. He’s apparently forgotten about his commitment and now has to wrap up business lickety-split to make it to the hearing on time. As a result, some lucky kid gets out of his dentist appointment…

Upon arrival, Dr. Harada is plunged into a roiling dispute afflicting the family of Kiichi Nakajima, a wealthy, aging industrialist whose increasingly eccentric behavior is creating a rift between him and his dependents. Further complicating matters, we quickly learn that his offspring include more than just the children that he and his wife have raised. He’s also the father to three other children, through three different mistresses he’s had over the course of his career. Though polite conversation and customs prevented these people from openly acknowledging each other’s existence for some years, new realities compel them to dispense with such formalities. Tensions are already at a boiling point as we get to know the basic facts of the case. Mr. Nakajima, used to calling the shots after years of ruling his steel foundry with an iron fist, is facing unexpected opposition by his own sons, Ichiro and Jiro, who serve as spokesmen for the rest of the family. They oppose the old man’s desire to sell off the family assets and relocate the whole bunch of them to, of all places, Brazil. Kiichi’s outrage at this resistance from sons he no longer respects pushes him over the edge. In the first of several physical outbursts, he slams the desk of the mediators, knocking over a water glass and driving his poor wife to tears.

Unfazed by Mr. Nakajima’s blowup, Mr. Hori from the bar association patiently explains the purpose of the family court: to resolve conflicts between spouses, siblings and generations by patiently listening to all points of view, considering the merit of each, and doing their best to guide the disputants toward the most amicable solution. Clearly, in 1955, Japanese society is at a different place than it was in the past, as recently as the war years, when solemn paternal decrees were issued and obeyed without question. I Live in Fear is, among other things, an attempt to grapple with new ways of coping with families in turmoil, reflecting the cognitive dissonance experienced by many, now that they are given a legal leg to stand on in denying their patriarch the obedient deference that in earlier times was naturally regarded as his due.

Akira Kurosawa employs an interesting device in illustrating how third-party rulings based on abstract principles of the law now govern modern Japanese life. As a petition is read, outlining the basis of the complaint against Mr. Nakajima, a dual exposure of the text is laid over images of the family as they sit on time-out in the hallway adjacent to the meeting room. Words on paper now limit a man’s ability to act, giving weight and substance to the rebellion and laziness of an ungrateful generation! Nakajima, who’s apparently built his steel foundry business from scratch, must now suffer the indignity of seeing his role as head of the clan subverted by sons who fail to grapple with the threat from which he seeks to protect them.

And what is the nature of this threat? Nothing less than instant, horrific death through an atomic bomb attack, or worse yet, exposure to the terrible radiation that is certain to sweep over Japan whenever the Big One drops. Mr. Nakajima, you see, is the one who says I Live in Fear – not always in so many words, but by his actions, flinching and cowering in a nervous heap when he hears jets flying overhead or sees a flash of lightning come through the window, convinced that the annihilation of all he holds dear is mere moments away. Those deeds also include more sustained efforts, like building an underground fallout shelter but then abandoning that task (at the cost of several million yen) when he learns new facts about the expected distribution of fallout patterns that would make the bunker ineffective. His new plans now revolve around emigration to Brazil, where we wants to swap his land with an expatriate farmer eager to return to his childhood home. He pursues this quest against everyone else’s wishes, since they’re content to take their chances in Japan with the other millions of their neighbors. The only route open to his sons, their wives and children, is to have Mr. Nakajima declared mentally incompetent, thus preventing him from selling the foundry and family properties out from under them.

This synopsis sets up the central tension of I Live in Fear, a story of inter-generational rivalries, shifting social mores and, most emphatically, Atomic Age paranoia run rampant in the fevered imagination of its flawed, painfully frustrating protagonist. Probably the most immediately amazing detail of this movie is that the lead character, Mr. Nakajima, is played by Toshiro Mifune, the brilliant actor best known to audiences then and now for his memorable performances in Kurosawa’s massively successful run of samurai features that began with Rashomon in 1950 and reached a new pinnacle with Seven Samurai (1954.) Mifune daringly transformed himself into the guise of a crumbling elderly man on the brink of losing his sanity while at the very peak of his physical powers, filming I Live in Fear between his outings in Seven Samurai and the MacBeth-inspired Throne of Blood, as well as his epic portrayal of samurai legend Musashi Miyamoto in the Samurai Trilogy directed by Hiroshi Inagaki. To fully appreciate Mifune’s courage in taking on this role, imagine some of the prototypical action stars of American cinema over the past couple of decades basically stripping themselves of their stock-in-trade just for the sake of stretching themselves professionally by playing a cranky old man. Even when Brad Pitt went through that old age transformation in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the marketing department made sure he had the opportunity to turn back into the “young and gorgeous” version of himself that was featured on the posters!

Mifune’s experiment isn’t necessarily the most rousing success – he labors a bit to contain his wild, animalistic energy and the makeup only goes so far in disguising his handsome features – but I admire the effort, keeping us mindful of the enormous power that Mr. Nakajima wielded in his prime as he juggled business matters and his personal affairs without paying much heed to future complications. Likewise, the subdued meekness of the dentist Harada serves as a study in contrast for Takashi Shimura, the venerable warrior-sage Kambei of Seven Samurai who dials down the majestic awesomeness of that role to take on one drenched in ambivalence and befuddledness. Harada’s character serves as the prime point of access for most viewers – he’s the first character we meet and he’s the one who strives the hardest to stay objective in regard to the underlying dilemma of I Live in Fear: Is it rational or irrational to allow our dread of nuclear weapons to establish the guidelines by which we live?

Before we provide too glib of an answer to that question, consider the circumstances of Japan in 1955. Scarcely ten years had past since the nation had suffered two atomic attacks. The Soviet Union and the United States were deadlocked in the Cold War, China and Korea, neighbors to the East, were both hot zones of geopolitical conflict, and Japan possessed no serious deterrent force of its own. As eccentric and extreme as Nakajima’s fears may seem to us now, he only stood out because his resolution to do something that would allow him and his family to escape the danger was backed up by the financial means to do so. But that resolve meant unwanted disruption and relocation to younger generations who had somehow come to terms with living in such peril, and they wanted no part of it. In a sense, Kurosawa was posing a question that ran through his earlier postwar films: given our past and the conditions of the here and now, what kind of society will we become in the future? I think his response in I Live in Fear denies the option of simple escapism but also cautions against materialistic complacency. Though we might be tempted to side with Nakajima’s children in the underlying dispute, there’s not much to be applauded in the petty squabbling that takes place among their ranks. Tempers flare on several occasions to the point where family members come to blows and its definitely not played for laughs. These are people in crisis, with no easy solutions to be found.

As the film concludes, I Live in Fear jumps to a level of high pathos that may not play well with some viewers. Nakajima takes drastic measures to sway his children to see things his way and everyone winds up paying a dreadful price for his folly. The Kurosawa theme of an utterly bereft and shattered old man floundering in the mud makes an appearance here, setting the stage for future expansions of this scenario in Ran, among others. My hunch is that this kind of nervous breakdown plays better in “classical” settings, at least for Western viewers who are used to Shakespearean characters groveling in tragic misery. The drastic fall of a contemporary corporate titan like Nakajima, for various reasons doesn’t seem as likely, and that may be one reason that I Live in Fear turned out to be one of Kurosawa’s least commercially successful films. The relatively small cinematic canvas allowed fewer opportunities for Kurosawa to show off his ability to viscerally enhance the viewing experience through camera work and editing, though there are enough moments to reward fans of his art. It also brought to an end his alternating pattern of historical followed by contemporary films, at least for the remainder of the 1950s. After seeing the international critical and financial success of Rashomon and Seven Samurai, Kurosawa and Toho Studios recognized the obvious: AK could make a lot more money cranking out the samurai films than he ever could making films focused on the plight of modern Japan. With films like Throne of Blood, Yojimbo, Sanjuro and The Hidden Fortress in his future, who could ever complain about the direction his career took? Still, I Live in Fear powerfully captures the genuine anxiety and uncertainty that beset a nation at a critical juncture in its history. I’m glad that, for now, those worst fears have not yet been realized.

A Journey Through The Eclipse Series: Gabriel Pascal’s Caesar And Cleopatra

David Blakeslee — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 01:01:11 +0000

I shall have many young kings with round, strong arms.

And when I am tired of them, I shall whip them to death.

Last week, controversy developed over reports that Angelina Jolie has been cast to take the lead role in a biopic about Cleopatra, the historical Queen of Egypt whose reputation over the centuries has developed to nearly legendary proportions. While I think Ms. Jolie has the perfect blend of beauty, attitude and screen presence to pull off a job that’s served as a platform for silver screen goddesses of decades past, critics take issue with the fact that a Caucasian woman is once again being awarded the opportunity to play one of history’s most noteworthy African female characters. Despite the legitimate argument that Cleopatra’s lineage included European ancestors, I understand the sensitivity of their concern. Similar objections have been voiced about the upcoming The Last Airbender, which also employs a white lead actor to play a child of clearly Asian descent, as well as The Prince of Persia‘s use of Jake Gyllenhaal to play the family adventure film’s Arab protagonist. Even the flap on Twitter stirred up by black actor Donald Glover’s self-initiated campaign to land the role of Peter Parker in a planned Spiderman reboot demonstrates the volatility of this topic. But in my opinion, it takes a certain megastar status to give Cleopatra’s portrayal due justice on the big screen. All questions of ethnicity aside, Angelina Jolie has the screen goddess credentials to follow in the footsteps of Elizabeth Taylor, Theda Bara, Claudette Colbert and (by arrangement with David O. Selznick) Vivien Leigh, the star of this week’s feature in our Journey Through The Eclipse Series, Caesar and Cleopatra.

This 1945 Technicolor spectacle is part of Eclipse Series 20: George Bernard Shaw on Film. The package marks a new angle for Eclipse in that it’s dedicated not to a particular director (though Gabriel Pascal did direct two of the films and produced all three) but instead, a playwright. Shaw was considered in his time the heir apparent to William Shakespeare, and that comparison holds especially true for his play Caesar and Cleopatra, the film version of which bears such a strong resemblance to earlier straightforward movie adaptations of Shakespeare (before it became trendy to put the stories in alternative historical settings.) Similar in look and feel to the Laurence Olivier Shakespeare productions included in the Criterion Collection, Caesar and Cleopatra functions as a kind of companion piece to Olivier’s Henry V in that both were released in close succession, shot in vivid Technicolor and funded by the same tycoon, J. Arthur Rank. Whereas Henry V is regarded as a classic and even an heroic achievement, providing a badly needed rallying cry on behalf of British nationalism in the dark days of World War II, Caesar and Cleopatra hasn’t fared so well. I’ve come across some rather hostile reviews, which you can find by visiting some of the links in this article. I am not without sympathy to some of the objections raised. I had to work a bit to set aside some of the initial skepticism I felt, especially in the early portion of the film. But I’ve come to appreciate it and actually enjoyed my second viewing quite a bit earlier today – so if you’re inclined to check out Caesar and Cleopatra, I recommend that you not give up too quickly. Maybe what I write here will help you hang in there!

The opening credits, etched in faux marble, with all the Us turned to Vs, give an impression of seriousness and grandeur to start things off. The illustrious name of Bernard Shaw (what happened to “George”?) is given prominent credit for the scenario and dialogue (not merely “written by.”) At nearly 90 years of age, this was Shaw’s last direct involvement with a film adaptation of his works for the stage. I think it’s safe to say that the filmmakers back then assumed their audience had a fair amount of familiarity with the basic facts surrounding the Roman general Julius Caesar, his rival general Pompey, the rift between two factions in Egypt’s Ptolemaic Dynasty and Cleopatra’s seductive powers that ultimately ensnared both Caesar and his younger protege Mark Antony. It may help to read up a bit on all that in order to keep up with the plot and appreciate some of Shaw’s foreshadowing of later events that occurred outside of his play. But a careful viewer will get the needed information by paying close attention. Still, my experience of watching Shakespeare on film applies equally well here – it helps to know the basic outlines of the story going in.

Another lesson from Shakespeare on film fits here too: don’t hold the staginess and artificiality of the characters on screen as a detriment to the film’s overall effect. These movies are not the place to go for convincing portrayals of regular folks just like us. The literary quality of the text, peppered with memorable, epigrammatic quotes, and the mythic dimensions that the two lead characters in particular have assumed in Western culture, put us in the realm of archetypes. In this case, we have Caesar, the aging conqueror, pinned down for the moment in a strange and hostile land, and Cleopatra, the privileged, powerful yet naive young woman who’s just coming into her own as a wielder of power on both the political and sexual level. Each character serves as a canvas upon which Shaw can layer observations of varying degrees of profundity, that the rest of us can relate to in some way or other, either personally as they apply to our own lives, or observationally as we see connections to the lives of others. Caesar’s plight involves the degree to which he exercises his noble inclinations of clemency toward his foes as he reconsiders his war-like ways, while Cleopatra’s character arc transforms her from foolish child into the cunning, seductive manipulator of powerful men that has made her both an object of fascination and a proverbial harlot, albeit one who uses her lack of scruples to achieve notable conquests.

Still, the biggest hurdle for today’s viewers to get over is the blend of colonialist, patriarchal and chauvinistic assumptions that were inherent not only in Shaw’s view of the world but also the culture in which the film was made. Shaw’s play was written in the 1890s. Fifty years later, as Caesar and Cleopatra was being filmed, the legitimacy of European armies descending on North Africa to conquer and impose order in the name of “civilization” was easy to take for granted. As was the inherent sexism of a narrative that, in a very Pygmalion-esque style, emphasized the necessity of an older gentleman’s guiding hand in order to make a “real woman” out of an emotionally vulnerable, even somewhat hysterical young girl. The opening dialog between the worldly sophisticate Julius Caesar and the credulous Cleopatra, all a-tremble under the sway of her silly native superstitions, is potentially noxious enough to cause many viewers less dedicated to the task than me to bail out right away, or take such lasting offense that the rest of the film never gets a chance to work out from under the burden. Caesar treats her condescendingly, a plaything for his amusement, and her easy submission to his mind-games has, at times, an implicitly smutty quality to it.

Likewise, the cavalier mockery of native cultures can be grating. The “humorous” touches of a buffoonish black slave, bugged-eyed and fearful, running around in his underwear screaming “Fly! Fly!” when the Romans approach, or the running gag about the invaders’ inability to pronounce the name of Cleopatra’s head servant Ftatateeta come across as obtuse and boorish more than anything else, but such was the smugness of the old-time boys’ club mentality back then. I suppose it’s good to see with fresh eyes such biases revealing themselves in the guise of entertainment. Caesar’s tutelage of Cleopatra in how to use the threat of raw violence to assert her royal sovereignty is both disturbing and fascinating to behold, especially when it produces such an instantly sadistic response from his young pupil (alluded to in the quote to lead off this article.)

Setting the problems aside then, there’s still plenty to enjoy for lovers of classic, large-scale film sets of the monumental sort, even though they do have that stage-like air of artifice about them and cling rather closely to the conventions of Orientalist fantasy, similar to what you see in The Thief of Bagdad, on the few occasions that attention is given to ordinary Egyptian peasantry. My eyes were pleased by a few beautifully composed exteriors and I’m a big fan of Technicolor too, so that alone validates the price of admission. Less successful are some attempts at “cast of thousands” style spectacle toward the end of the film – the potential for climactic battle scenes on both land and sea was sadly under-exploited, with a feeble montage of very short battle images having to suffice when I was expecting a major throw-down between Caesar’s army and warriors under the command of Cleopatra’s sibling rival Ptolemy and his general Achillus. I get the sense that this production grew kind of exhausted toward the end, which was understandable after learning about some of its setbacks. These included Vivien Leigh’s pregnancy, miscarriage and the early onset of bipolar disorder that would plague her the rest of her life, budget overruns that drew negative attention from the British Parliament (during wartime, no less) and an unplanned relocation of production from England to Cairo (at least they could almost say “filmed on location”!) While there are many fine moments, Caesar and Cleopatra rarely delivers in terms of the sheer entertainment value promised in this trailer:

Due to the cumbersome weight of the spectacle and the general unwieldiness of the whole enterprise, Caesar and Cleopatra failed to recoup its investment, thwarting its creators’ ambitions to go toe-to-toe with Hollywood in the production of blockbuster spectaculars. That was probably a good thing for the overall British film industry, which went on to create some great successes as the careers of David Lean, Powell & Pressburger and many others thrived under more modest cinematic budgets and expectations. Keeping all that in mind then, let’s consider the choice of Vivien Leigh to take the pivotal role of Cleopatra when she did.

In the mid 1940s, Vivien Leigh was the biggest female star in the world, primarily based on the phenomenal success of Gone With the Wind and her iconic performance as Scarlett O’Hara. Her youthful beauty and fiery, impetuous on-screen persona captured the fancy of women and men alike, and she seems to have made a specialty of playing women who transition from times of severe adversity to pinnacles of power, only to face another round of setbacks that force them to rebuild their lives once again. At least, that’s judging from what I’ve seen of her in Gone With the Wind (1939), Caesar and Cleopatra (1945) and That Hamilton Woman (1941), a Criterion release from last year in which Leigh starred with her husband, Laurence Olivier. Cast opposite Claude Rains, who took the male half of the title roles, the two of them make a compelling and entertaining lead couple, though there are only flickers of romantic attraction between them – a dynamic built into the script, not a failure of their screen chemistry in the slightest. On the contrary, these two accomplished actors succeed in building a convincing rapport between older man, seasoned in the accumulation and expansion of power, and younger woman, born to privilege but naive about how to apply her advantages most effectively. Rains is probably most famous nowadays for his supporting role as Capt. Renault in Casablanca, and he’s enshrined in the Criterion Collection as Ingrid Bergman’s sinister husband in Hitchcock’s Notorious.

Other noteworthy contributions include Francis L. Sullivan (the slimy club owner in Night and the City) who plays a similarly ill-fated character here; Flora Robson as Ftatateeta, who’s better known as Sister Philippa in Black Narcissus and as the Stygian Witch (her last performance) in the original Clash of the Titans; Stewart Granger, who telegraphs a coded gay swagger (he’s a dashing, flamboyant, bronze-skinned interior decorator, with a dangling earring and the shortest tunic that censors could presumably allow); and Granger’s future wife, a very young, uncredited Jean Simmons (on the verge of breaking out in Great Expectations) as a fetchingly cute harpist in Cleopatra’s lavish harem, after the queen has completed her inevitable ascendancy to a life dedicated to voluptuous leisure, where all fantasies of Cleopatra eventually lead.

So though its clearly not a cinematic masterpiece by any measure, Caesar and Cleopatra has plenty to recommend it, even if one chooses to give it a “camp” reading. That’s apparently the value discovered by the Worth1000.com website, which takes iconic images and encourages participants to try their hand at coloring them creatively. Click the link for a gallery of takes on one poignant image (though it’s not one that’s lingered over at all in the actual film.) As they say, a picture can be worth a thousand words – I’ll leave you to fill in the blanks however you’d like on this one!

James Reviews Pablo Larrain’s Tony Manero [DVD Review]

James McCormick — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 18:58:29 +0000

A man determined to not just emulate the character of Tony Manero portrayed by John Travolta in the 1977 film ‘Saturday Night Fever‘ but become the misogynistic screen presence doesn’t naturally come to one’s mind when thinking of viable movie plots. But in Pablo Larrain’s 2008 film ‘Tony Manero‘, he somehow weaves a world surrounding this 52 year old with a peppery grey pompadour, striving to win a contest as the “Tony Manero of Chile”.

Raul Peralta (Alfredo Castro) frequents the often abandoned movie theater nearby, re-watching the film, mouthing off the words in English that Tony Manero speaks, almost becoming one with his own personal celluloid god. He steals and deals with a neighborhood criminal to get glass bricks for a dance floor to properly present the disco dancing scenes from the movie for an upcoming show at the cantina he is staying at.

The movie deals with a character with the soul of a zombie, but there’s something more brewing underneath this sociopath’s exterior. The film takes place in 1978 Chile, four years into Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, and we can see from Larrain’s eye that he detests this fact and even Chile today for that matter. Raul is searching for his own identity, just like the country was searching for it’s own while a reign of terror was plaguing the streets on a day to day basis. The way Raul ducks and hides in the shadows from random army patrols and undercover detectives who beat and kill those resisting of the dictatorship is an underlying current throughout the film, but something that ultimately sticks with you long after the end of the film.

The film opens with him arriving a week early for the Tony Manero lookalike contest, amongst a group of Chuck Norris lookalikes. It’s an awkward uncomfortable scene, like many throughout the film’s 97 minute running time. Without giving too much away, Raul starts to let loose with his vicious violent side, first beating an old woman to death, but only after helping her home after she was mugged by some toughs on the street. He then feeds her cat and watches her color television while her body is seen, blurry in the background. When he returns one day to the theater and sees that ‘Saturday Night Fever’ has been replaced by another John Travolta film, ‘Grease’, he still buys a ticket for it anyway, holding out hope that it might echo something from the previous film. But after a few minutes, he finds his way up to the projectionist’s booth and beats the projectionist’s head into the projector, not even blinking for a second. He then notices the ticket booth attendant, the projectionist’s wife, who has brought up his dinner and we cut to the next scene, with Raul finding the film canister with his eternal mentor but we already know what has happened to the poor lady who stood in the way of his fantasy that gave him any sense of an identity, even a borrowed one.

His fellow dancers in the troupe all battle for his attention in some way or another. Wilma (Elsa Poblete) who runs the cantina, secretly years him Raul while Cony (Amparo Noguera) has a somewhat skewed relationship with him already. We see this in a failed sexual encounter between the two, with Raul not being able to perform or maybe just not even caring about that, because it has nothing to do with his portrayl of Tony Manero. And this is where someone actually calls Raul out on his soulless personality, how he is basically the walking dead and how he ultimately only cares about himself. You could go a step further and say that he doesn’t even care about himself but the character that he wants to become in his daily life.

A big thank you to Kino Lorber Films for releasing this underseen film, which was actually Chile’s submission for the Academy Awards and for good reason. It’s a harsh film, set in a reality that most people don’t even know remotely about. It will make you want to go to Wikipedia and read up on this time in Chile’s history and see where Pablo Larrain and co-writer’s Alfredo Castro and Mateo Iribarren were trying to portray in this film. A character that we can’t relate to at all but in some ways we can relate to the loss of identity and how sometimes it’s easier to escape into the world of film when reality is a bit too scary for one to handle.

Buy Tony Manero From Amazon