Was it 1989?

It’s an anniversary of sorts today. T. and I started dating 15-years ago tonight, little knowing that marriage and babies were to come in the decades that followed.

Our first (of many many many) movie dates was Back to the Future Part II.

Part II, mind you! I can’t speak much for the movie because I don’t remember thinking much about it at the time. I was completely distracted by the company and that intense high-school-era, first-date pressure. It was years later before I got around to seeing Part III.

But it sure helps to put 15-years in perspective, don't it?

Lunchtime in Hadleyville

High Noon (1952), which I hadn’t seen before last week, has the distinction of being my first Classic Hollywood Western. To be clear, I’ve seen plenty of westerns. Most were even made in the Hollywood studio system. But it seems that all of the westerns I’ve seen (and loved) have been left of centre: ironic, jaded (Unforgiven), sentimental (Once Upon a Time in the West) or simply ground breaking (Stagecoach). After sitting through dozens of revisionist westerns, I can safely say that I’ve never seen a true, honest-to-goodness, middle-of-the-road, baggage-free western: the kind with the untarnished hero and the simple white-hat and black-hat conflict. A bona-fide Classic Hollywood Western.

Now having seen High Noon, I understand completely why an entire generation of kids grew up playing sheriff. I recognize the appeal of the staunch, besieged lawman. I see all of the reasons why directors like Leone and his Italian peers paid so much attention to reworking and saluting the Old West. High Noon is the sort of confection that inspires daydreams and puts people on the road to making movies.

The film starts on exactly the right foot by introducing a supporting thug played by Lee Van Cleef, entirely dialogue-free and looking astonishingly young. Here’s the thing: I love Lee Van Cleef. With a dash of Van Cleef in the recipe, I’m immediately having a good time no matter what I’m watching. I’m certain that he is the best thing to come out of the Leone spaghetti westerns, save for the Morricone scores and the Leone close-ups. But seeing him this young and in this role, throws a whole wagonload of new baggage on his roles in the Leone films. It’s easier than ever to imagine him as a young Sentenza (the second part of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly equation.) [I have to confess that it bothered me for a few minutes, trying to pinpoint who the young Lee Van Cleef was reminding me of – but My God, when it came, what a revelation! It’s true that Van Cleef in High Noon is the spitting image of a young Snoop Dogg.] Apart from Van Cleef, the film is stuffed with a ton of delicious and familiar character actors: Lloyd Bridges, Harry Morgan, Lon Chaney Jr. and even Jack Elam, who shows up as one of the three killers at the start of Once Upon a Time in the West.

Force me to put my finger on the thing I enjoyed most about this movie, and it would be spotting the legion of connections to the later westerns that I’ve grown to adore. The action is set up quickly (it has to be – the movie unfolds in real time) and within minutes the bad guys of the film are waiting on the platform of a train station for the their brother, the arch-villain of the movie, to arrive. The angles on the train station and the layout of the buildings are practically identical to the opening frames of Once Upon a Time in the West. One of the waiting goons even has the good sense to pull out a harmonica. While none of this really surprises me, it’s a good thing when a fine movie forces your appreciation of not just one, but several other films. There’s a domino effect here that is really exciting.

Still there is one flaw that I need to pick at. The name of the flaw in this instance comes above the marquee, and it’s Gary Cooper. I’m sure Cooper is an excellent actor and a worthwhile addition to most movies he’s in. He emotes well and his eyes carry a sadness that lends a lot of gravity to whatever’s happening around him. Crap, he won an Oscar for his part in this movie. Even so, he’s clearly the wrong man to carry this movie. To start with, he seems much too old to play the sheriff, even if the sheriff is soon to retire (forget that he’s a newlywed!) We’re told that he captured and arrested Frank Miller (our villain) 5 years before the start of the movie, but this seems unlikely. If it’s true, then his energy and spirit have drained tremendously in the years that followed because Cooper has the passion of a piece of plywood. Worse still, he seems more like an office manager than a lawman, with the sort of face you’d find in a bank not in a dusty frontier town. This dissonance is most evident in a fistfight that happens at the mid-point of the movie. In action, Cooper seems stiff and decrepit, making the fight feel as stiffed and choreographed as most late-career Hulk Hogan matches. Only without the sense that Cooper could’ve won the scrap a decade earlier.

Despite Cooper’s wooden performance, the movie still manages to build an aggressive amount of momentum. Like the training arriving at noon, the plot of the film picks up speed the longer it plays, accelerating to a dizzying pace in the final reel. In many ways, the film is like a bomb waiting to go off, only the audience has been told exactly when to cover their ears. The clock ticks and the editor gets busier. The countdown builds and, well, look who I'm talking to. You remember what it was like in 3 O’Clock High, don’t you?

It’s pretty great stuff.

Was it 1982? (ii)

Tied with my memories of E.T. are, of all things, my memories of Conan the Barbarian. In grade 4, they were my yin and yang.

Now remember, this predates the mainstream awareness of movie pirating by a good spell, but I had a friend who had E.T. on VHS (or perhaps Beta?) within weeks of it appearing in theatres. I thought it was a miracle of sorts. The tape was crappy, much too dark (a sin for a movie as underlit as E.T.) and likely shot by a hand-held camera (the big boxy early-80’s kind.) On the same tape was a pirated copy of Conan the Barbarian, also still in theatres.

Here’s the rub. To visit this friend and maybe, just maybe, catch some of that E.T. action (which was seldom) I sat through at least a dozen basement screenings of Conan. I’m not sure I ever really saw the beginning. The movie was always in progress when I arrived, and I remember it mostly out of sequence; it was years later before I could put the scenes in any kind of order. Most importantly, I hated it. I hated everything about it. I was a relatively sheltered 9-year old and had been exposed to very little violence in the movie theatre, much less sword play and giant spikes skewering folks. Nudity was not a familiar concept for me. Gore was something that I would grow into years later. Conan had all of these things and most of them in abundance. It turned my stomach. I remember walking home in the afternoons, shell-shocked by the carnage.

Perhaps it was like throwing a child on a roller coaster too early in life (another experience I can share, I’m afraid) but it was at that time that I recoiled against Conan and violent movies in general. It would be years before I could get the nuts to sit through any movie with unnecessary violence or gore. [Note: the distaste translated into a backlash later in life, where I chewed up as much violence and gore as I could get my hands on, channeling obscene amounts of Nightmare on Elm Street and Schwarzenneger movies in my parents’ basement. Making up for lost time.] Much, much later I would grow to love Conan and respect it as a piece of balls-out, fantasy storytelling. Even later still, I would watch it (sound off, of course) while I was putting my newborn daughter to sleep. Blood, guts and baby bottles, if you can imagine it. Full circle, sort of. Or not.

But no matter where I am, I can still smell the basement when I watch it.

Was it 1982? (i)

Forgive the hyperbole to follow.

The short version first. There has never been another movie experience quite like E.T. The Extra Terrestrial (1982) for me. No other movie has impacted me so much and so deeply and so sincerely. In the pantheon of movies I’ve seen throughout my life, E.T. is the Big Cheese, the King of All Shit and the One That Hooked Me. It’s the Red Pill.

Funny then that I don’t really remember seeing E.T. for the first time. Like so many movies, I know where I watched it. I certainly remember seeing it at least two more times in the weeks that followed (one instance – my favourite instance – was at the 5 Drive-in with the unlikely partner of Night of the Comet.) However I can’t say that I have any memories of the actual theatre experience. It’s the days and weeks afterwards that stay with me instead, because the damn movie buried itself so deep in my waking mind that it was all I could think about. I was a kid possessed: E.T. sketches on my notebooks, E.T. posters in my room, E.T. toys, E.T. books, E.T. everything. I must’ve made quite a site in my grade 4 classroom, turning a potato art
project into a tribute to E.T. Though I couldn’t have told made the connection at the time, the final product probably looked a little like Andy Warhol’s famous portrait of Marilyn Monroe, but for E.T. heads in different colours spread across the paper. The obsession may have only lasted for months, but in my mind it went on for years. Later in school, people still remembered me as the "guy who really like used to like E.T." Not too freaky that label.

I recognize that E.T. is a strange movie to provoke this kind of roof-blasting reaction, but I must've been sitting bullseye for the target audience for the film. I was 9-years old. Most of my days were spent on my bike cruising the suburbs or exploring the woods behind my house. Nighttime was a scary place. There was no one in a better position to relate to the movie. But don’t misunderstand – I wasn’t projecting myself into the movie or even developing any "alien friend" fantasies like you might expect. I didn’t see the movie as any sort of daydream. Rather, I was delirious with what the movie did and where it took me. More than any other movie I had seen, it was the movie itself that ensnared the 9-year old. The overall experience of sitting in the dark theatre, with the smell of popcorn and the sticky floor and waiting for the lights to go all the way down: it was, if you don’t mind me rolling out the dusty cliché, pure magic. Bicycles over the moon kind of magic. The movie swept me away.

It was probably the first movie that I cried in. I know for certain that it was the first movie to frighten me. I was tense, emotional, excited, delighted and terribly sad. It was the first movie that didn’t have an easy handle or a quick solution for the question, what did you like about it? There was no shortcut like giant boulders or Wookies or Muppets. The movie sort of danced around me until I was dizzy, unsure what to isolate as the reason for the odd blend of feelings, and that made it an enigma. Not that I’m going to pretend that E.T. was any kind of Lynchian masterpiece, but I remember vividly that it was mysterious. Prior to seeing it, I had no clue at all what it was about. I didn’t know what an extra terrestrial was and from the TV commercials, I only knew that the boy in the red hooded sweater cut his finger on a saw. Then someone raised a hot poker towards it (after Raiders, I believed that the glowing finger was exactly that.) These were pretty fleeting impressions and tough for a kid to nail down. But there was also E.T. himself who seemed to look different to me in every photo I saw (different sculpts probably), lending to the feeling that he was part of the dream. As an adult, the movie has lost that complexity, but as a child, I remember that it was the most sophisticated experience of my short life.

Which brings me to adulthood. I was delighted by the opportunity to take my wife to see E.T. again in the theatre in 2002, with an amped-up digital soundtrack and a remastered picture. Forget about the crumby new CG effects (thank you Spielberg for leaving the original film intact on the DVD release), the treasure of seeing E.T. again on a monstrous modern screen was invaluable. The movie made very few bones at the box office, but I am so grateful for the decision to re-release it.

Seeing the film as an adult was startling, because it was like watching an entirely different film. I could see Spielberg pulling many of the strings that were invisible to me as a child, and I could appreciate the mastery with which he did it. The movie pushes buttons, there’s no question about that. But there was also an added layer to the film that I could appreciate as an adult: a sort of sentimentality about childhood that was sweeter for the fact that the movie figures so strongly in mine. It’s a rare experience for a film to allow an adult to revisit the world from the level of a child.

I think that’s what makes it special to me now.

December. No friend of the Monday Project.

Three Mondays. That's how many have been lost to Christmas activities and scheduling conflicts in the coming month. Work and weather permitting, it will be December 20th before I am home again on a Monday night. Christmas should also put the screws to the last week.

As a result, the movie project is likely to become a little scattered. Updating this blog will get a little dicey.

I mention all of this in case there is any radio-silence in the weeks to come. I don't intend it. It's my plan to keep watching the movies, and I hope that there will continue to be at least a few updates per week. But who can say?

It's in the hands of the movie gods and the Baby Jesus now.

Bob and Doug in 16-bit

Canadian films are a funny animal, no? I’ve tried to throw as many Canuck films into my Monday list as possible, but they are tough nuts to find. Very few carry the weight or reputation of being high quality, historically important, or (sorry to say) even entertaining. Looking for trust-worthy lists on-line is like sifting for gold. As a result, I’m afraid only a handful of Canadian titles are on my 500+ list of movies. Still, if anyone reading this post has any valuable suggestions, please please let me know.

So it is that the first Canadian creature to scamper onto my Monday nights is Don Shebib’s Goin’ Down the Road (1970.) Heard of it, gentle reader? Few people have it seems, though if the DVD packaging is to be believed, the title is "a superb movie, the finest Canadian effort ever, and excellent by any standards" (Montreal Gazette) and "a legend…a landmark in Canadian filmmaking" (Peter Feniak, Globe and Mail). In an effort to put this rep to the test, I asked a few people if they were familiar with the movie before I watched it. My father, who was 23-years old when the film was released and teaching Canadian history in Calgary, tells me that it never showed up on his cultural radar at all (which I can vouch was fuelled tremendously by the CBC.) And if he doesn’t remember it, I would suspect it was not top of mind among most Canadian moviegoers. Film critics, sure. Regular joes, not so much. [Still, I should point out that Shebib’s movie was note-worthy enough to be parodied in a famous sketch by SCTV, which he talks a little about in the commentary.]

So what kind of animal is it then? Well, close your eyes and imagine a Lars von Trier film shot in the early 1970’s on the streets of Toronto. Cinema verité to the extreme, shot guerrilla-style with no budget at all (to call $27K "shoe-strong" would be generous) and a 3-man crew: the film school definition of quick and dirty. Shebib explains in the commentary that the crew had no permission to film at any of their locations and no insurance of any kind. Case in point, from the production notes included with the DVD:

The car that features so prominently in the film was one great worry. The car was an old Chevrolet convertible, vintage 1960, which a friend of Shebib’s painted in outrageous colours. It was acquired without the remotest possibility of proving ownership; as it had passed through so many hands, its ownership history was a complete mystery. Nor was there time to get it passed as a roadworthy vehicle. While shooting it was discovered that neither of the lead actors, nor Shebib had a driver’s license. All in all, they were paralyzed by the prospect of being stopped by the police.

The result is a remarkably natural film, showcasing Toronto as it must have been in 1969. Though I’m told in the DVD packaging that the film has been remastered for DVD, it’s astonishingly flat and colourless (note: it’s not black and white), riddled with film grain and overly dark sequences. It reminded me most of those great Hinterland Who’s Who segments that appeared on the CBC throughout the 70’s and 80’s, highlighting Canadian wildlife with scratchy newsreel footage. Or better yet, the movie feels sort of like your parents’ home movies, catching the atmosphere and authenticity of the early 1970’s, without ever feeling scripted or rehearsed.

It must be this authenticity that makes the film so appealing. The acting in the film is so naturalistic that it’s hard to imagine either of the actors behaving or speaking differently in their regular lives (perhaps this is the case, since only one of the leads was a semi-professional actor.) Nothing about the movie seems composed or directed. The expression that comes up again and again in the commentaries and extra features on the DVD is the "documentary tradition," which was the whole of the Canadian film industry prior to the 1970’s. Shebib himself had his most success with documentary films and so it is that this movie, his first foray into fiction, carries a lot of documentary baggage: stolen shots around the city, close-ups of non-actors, available lighting. Each of these components lend something to the striking realism of the film. The 3-man crew carried all of their equipment in the back of a station wagon and literally improvised the shots and set-ups as they came upon locations. Toronto itself is a character, a very real character, in the film.

The movie also does a nice job of snapping a valuable photograph of the city at that time. The skyline (with only one major skyscraper) is remarkable and the visits to Toronto landmarks (including the old A&A Records building on Yonge Street, which I believe is now the HMV Superstore) are appealing. More importantly (and this is something that clearly couldn't have been appreciated at the time, but is invaluable now), the movie captures the particular look and feel of the early 70’s in a refreshingly truthful way. Between the wash-outed wallpapers, the boxy TV sets, the cars on the street and the overall vibe of the film, I swear (even though I was born a few years after the film was shot) that I can remember when the world looked exactly like this. Unlike Hollywood films of the same period which were still only as sincere as Hollywood’s imitation (look at movies released this year for evidence of this reliability), the movie doesn’t seem to be projected through any filters. What you see is what you get. And what you get is a version of Toronto that only lives in books now.

Tell me if this sounds at all Canadian. A couple of hosers move from Cape Breton to the big city of Toronto, chasing their dreams and a sense of liberty that they can’t find in the Maritimes. What they get up to in TO is a cycle of drinking beer (out of stubby bottles, no less), looking for work, chasing women and sharing cigarettes in the frosty air. Amid all this, there's an awful lot of TV watching and nights out on Yonge Street. The fact is that not a lot really happens in the film; Goin’ Down the Road is extremely light on plot on relies instead on the atmosphere of Toronto, as well as the deflating expectations of these two Eastern losers. But it’s good that way.

The movie must have been good, because even though it took me most of the week to finish it (an indication of my timetable, not my interest in the film), I made the time to sit through both of the commentaries on the disc on Saturday and Sunday afternoon. The commentaries were very worthwhile, especially Shebib’s insights into where a lot of the film was shot (location info like shooting at Yonge and Major Mac or Don Mills at Shepherd add to the distinctly Toronto flavour of the film.) Furthermore, there’s a 30-minute interview between the director and Pierre Berton which is a little ironic in light of the fact that Berton passed away this week. [As a point of interest, the Berton interview was shot in 1972 and in it, Shebib explains that one of his favourite Capra movies is It’s a Wonderful Life, which both he and Berton regard as obscure during the conversation. The interview clearly predates the proliferation of this film during the early-80s.]

Music plays a very important part in the film and I’m disappointed to hear (in Geoff Pevere’s analytical commentary) that the songs used in the movie will probably be hard to track down. The soundtrack was written (and largely improvised) by Bruce Cockburn and they soak the film with a certain sad and doomed optimism that is really touching. I’m anxious to include them on my Monday Project compilation. And so it is that I’m going on the hunt…

How about “scurrying along” with Giants?

The following excerpt is taken from the introduction to Roger Ebert’s 2005 Movie Yearbook. I like and agree very much with what he’s saying here. In fact, he’s done a wonderful job of laying out exactly why I’m jamming these movies into my eyes each and every Monday night:

Too many moviegoers look at movies and do not see them, but then it has always been that way. Movies are a time killer or a casual entertainment for most people, who rarely allow themselves to see movies that will jolt them out of that pattern. The jolting itself seems unpleasant to them. I'm not a snob about that; anyone who enjoys a movie is all right in my book. But the movies don't top out; as you evolve, there are always films and directors to lead you higher, until you get above the treetops with Ozu and Murnau, Bresson and Keaton, Renoir and Bergman and Hitchcock and Scorsese. You walk with giants.

Now listen up. I certainly hope I’m not a snob about any of this either. And if I ever am, please please PLEASE - call me on it. It’s not my intention at all to become that snooty movie guy. The purpose of the blog is just to share how much fun I’m having with a lot of movies that don’t make the chart at Blockbuster.

You can read the rest of Ebert’s article here.

She walked up to me and she asked me to dance, / I asked her her name and in a dark brown voice she said…

A great Monday night movie – in fact, a great movie by any definition – gets past the defenses and finds a home under the skin. These movies do much more than entertain. They take up residence somewhere at the back of the brain and drops time bombs in the days that follow. Experiences like this storm past the traditional meaning of movies; they might be better described as dreams organized and manufactured by committees. I’m learning that a lot of old movies are good that way.

Take Josef von Sternberg’s Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel) (1930). The Blue Angel is a movie that I had never heard of before compiling my Monday list. In fact, the only blue angel I was familiar with before Monday was the one that involved drunken university students, some light flatulence and a Bic lighter. (There’s a world between, let me tell you.) This Blue Angel is actually an early German talkie (subtitled for those of us that don’t sprechen sie Deutsch) about an upstanding and strict university professor who falls in with and then falls in love with an exotic dancer named Lola Lola. (Mind you, that’s not just one Lola; a temptress this bad has to wear the name twice.) What follows, and I don’t think this will give much away, is his downfall. What I won’t spoil here, and what they certainly don’t advertise on the VHS case, is that the professor’s ensuing descent into madness is as primal and shocking as any old monster movie, made worse because we haven’t been anesthetized by decades of familiarity. No, I think it’s safe to say that I was chilled somewhere under my daytime conscience by this film.

Speaking of scary, this was also the most frustrating presentation to show up in the Monday night line-up so far. I’ve begun to take DVD’s for granted. The Blue Angel was only available to me on a crummy library-copy VHS tape, and it was easily the scratchiest and most antique thing I’ve ever seen. Between the jumpy, washed out images and the thick muffled audio, the experience was a little like watching the white ghostly projection of a story broadcast from another dimension. And while this sensation certainly extended the dream-like quality of the film, I could never completely trust the aspect ratio of the picture, which cut off heads and subtitles at random. This is one that I’d love to revisit as a crisp, polished DVD transfer (John Ford’s Stagecoach is another.)

One thing that I will come back to again and again when I’m watching these old movies is the awesome economy of storytelling. The brevity of information on-screen (and the presumed intelligence of the audience on the part of the filmmakers) is marvelous. Vast sections of the film pass with little or no dialogue, letting the actions and looks of the characters fill in the details of the story. Considering the age of the film, this might well have been a consequence of restrictions imposed by the new sound technology being used, but the ultimate effect on both the narrative and the mood of the film is breathtaking. [I should also point out that big chunks of the German dialogue were simply not subtitled on my VHS copy, meaning that there were a few points where I had to draw my own conclusions about what was being said. These sections didn’t fall during any of the key turning points of the film, but they did remind me I was watching a foreign movie from time to time.]

The Blue Angel shares a curious connection with the theatre. It’s no secret that screen acting (and in many cases, the stories themselves) came from the vaudeville tradition, but what’s fascinating about these early movies is that the connection is still so strong. A lot of the actors in these films came up on the stage or in the circus-like environment of the vaudeville houses. As a result, The Blue Angel is at its best when it’s in this environment. Much of the film unfolds backstage and on the road, and between the clowns, the bears and the overall circus environment, the film seems like a credible witness of that sort of life-style. In fact, the movie delivers some pretty racy material (relatively speaking), including a couple of sequences with Marlene Dietrich stripping down or wearing only her briefs.

And on that note, let’s talk about Marlene Dietrich for a moment. Looking back (and I’ve already told you that I had not heard of this movie before), I imagine that she was the primary reason why this movie found its way onto my Monday list. Dietrich is one of those old, old, old-school actresses whose name is more famous than her face. I’ve never seen her before and I doubt most of my generation has either. She was, if the film books and the Internet are to be believed, a model of the style and fashions of her time. The highest paid actress in the industry. Enormously popular on both sides of the ocean. A 1930’s sexpot. The whole package. OK, that’s all fine. But reporting back from the 21st Century, I’m afraid she was also a little manly. In fact, startlingly so. And not altogether the best actor on the screen in this movie.

I want to give that title to Emil Jannings, who played the central role of Professor Immanuel Rath. Jannings delighted me throughout the film, giving a subtle and surprising performance that never seemed to go where I was expecting. In fact, his performance was so believable and human that I think it’s the very thing that grounded the film for me (particularly in that rocky opening, as I struggled to get past the VHS flaws and into the movie.) His transformation is equally spectacular; I revisited a couple of early scenes in the film before returning the movie and marveled that the same actor played the professor at the start and end of the film. [Spoiler ahead, my mates. One thing is certain: I won’t be able to look at the sad face of a circus clown again, without flashing back to the final scenes of the movie.]

Now despite the fact that I’ve already spilled that one small spoiler, I want to write about that ending without speaking further spoilers. It has been promised to some that I will try keep these reviews as clear of spoilers as possible. While I can’t imagine anyone reading this will be lining up to watch an old German film anytime soon, I won’t spills the details of the conclusion. Mostly because the finals scenes are remarkable, and I think everyone should see them. Suffice to say that the final minutes of the movie were strong enough to propel the movie from being a curious museum piece to a deeply troubling, nightmare-painted, piece of scar tissue. The movie ends (mostly) in the theatre house where much of the story takes place, but the greatest miracle is how the final act elevates the action from burlesque side-show to Pagliacci-ish Grand Opera. The melodrama is off the planet.

And that, my friends, is what sticks with you in the days that follow.

An ocean of red brake lights.

Now, I'm not necessarily saying that I loathe the drive to and from work. Nor am I saying that it was definitely a good idea that T. and I bought a brand-new bigger house closer to the office (even if we have to wait 21 months for the house to be built.)

But what I am saying is that I spent more time in the car tonight, struggling with the absurdity of the 401, than I did watching the whole of tonight's Monday night movie. [It was The Blue Angel, in case you're asking - details to follow in the days to come, traffic permitting.]

The saddest part of this post is that I had almost 2 hours to dwell on it.

When you put your hand into a bunch a goo...

Timing is everything.

Here’s something I never thought I’d say, but I was in a military mood on Monday night. Having spent much of the weekend with Roméo’s Dallaire’s devastating Shake Hands with the Devil, I had spent many hours trying to adjust my thinking to the politics and military maneuvers Dallaire describes in his book. I was already thinking about artillery and infantry and leadership issues. I think I was in the right head space to watch Patton (1970), though let’s be clear here: Roméo Dallaire and General George S. Patton could not be more different, both in personality and leadership style.

I carried baggage with me into Patton. My expectation (and first impression) was that Patton, being a decorated and much-ballyhooed war hero, was someone to be admired – at least by the gung-ho American audience who regard this film as a classic. I didn’t expect him to be my hero necessarily, but I certainly expected that he would be hero-like, possessing some qualities I would admire. However as the movie got underway, I became more and more aware that Patton was not only a bastard (which was no surprise of course), but that he was also a bit of a fool: glory-driven and arrogant. In fact, the Patton on-screen seemed to me to be no hero at all. Despised by his men and tolerated (barely) by his peers, Patton was a wild card that no one seemed to have much tolerance for. The early scenes were a bit of a struggle for me, as I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to be identifying with or admiring Patton (in which case, the movie was failing) or simply marveling at George C. Scott’s spectacular performance. I chose the latter.

Let’s talk about the good stuff then. Patton – by way of George C. Scott – is a wonderful character, a full-bodied performance and a great many things that I didn’t expect: a poet, a student of history, and a fiercely spiritual man who believed strongly in reincarnation. I particularly enjoyed the assessment that he was an anachronistic Romantic warrior forced to lead troops in the 20th Century. But of course, that’s entirely right. Even 60 years ago at the height of the biggest war in history, he was starting to become dangerously outdated, a relic of a different type of warrior. Imagine with me the surprise then that the balls-out, war-loving General, who was already out of fashion by the end of WWII, would likely fit in better with this year’s president’s agenda than any in the last 6 decades. I don’t want to stymie this review with politics, but with the climate of the world today, it’s tough to watch a war-movie without thinking about the real wars going on in the world. And watching Patton in an early 21st Century context is probably a pretty similar experience to watching it in 1970 (when another widely unpopular war was deep underway.) I can’t help but think that even as Patton’s behaviour is thrown up on the screen for scrutiny, there are some (active) military leaders that might admire him and overlook the critique.

Patton was written by Francis Ford Coppola, which seems a little funny. The reason being is that Patton’s swaggering battlefield bluster reminds me so sharply of Robert Duvall’s Colonel Kilgore character from Apocalypse Now. In that film, there’s a scene when Kilgore surveys the battlefield, elbow on one knee (just after the "smell of napalm" line) and observes that, "someday this war will be over." The burden of the line is that without the war, the true warriors (like Kilgore) will not be able to survive. Patton is another of these doomed characters. There’s a melancholy throughout the last act of Patton (after Hitler’s forces are defeated) when Patton realizes that, by winning the war, he has also destroyed his own sense of purpose. He grapples with the idea of starting up a new war right away (against the Russian allies – prophetic, no?) but resigns himself instead to the fact that he’ll never be in another world war. That realization drains him. And maybe that also goes some distance to explain the war-mongering leaders in the world today: where would some of these men be without their wars? [I’m getting further from the point here, but it reminds me most of that classic Looney Tunes cartoon where Elmer Fudd finally kills (or rather, thinks he kills) Bugs Bunny. Depression sets in for him immediately.]

So then. That’s the good…

The purpose of this blog is a little funny. After all, I’m watching and writing about movies that have already (in most cases) proven themselves to be classics. Thousands of words have already been written. Some of these movies have books written about them. I’m not really telling you anything you don’t already know if I say that a movie is good or isn’t good. Case in point: Patton won 8 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, so there’s no point trying to tell you that it isn’t an accomplished movie. Instead, this blog is really about my impression of the film, or better yet, answering the basic question: did I like it?

The truth is no, not really.

I’ve grappled with this question a little bit, because when I don’t like a movie, I always like to know the reasons why. I’ve been running through a list of ideas. Was it perhaps that I’m not a big fan of the war movies after all? Patton is about little else other than a revered general launching an invasion. But then I remembered my affection for Apocalypse Now, Band of Brothers or even Saving Private Ryan (and more recently, Barry Lyndon) and I concluded that not to be true at all. Big explosions are the bee’s knees. I love war movies as much as any genre and look forward to more of them in the Monday line-up. Perhaps then, could it be that the main character was so unlikeable? But again, there are so many movies that I adore with unsympathetic leads that there’s no point in even trying to pack together a list. That’s not an issue for me at all. Bring on the bastards. Was the movie less than meticulously performed and directed? Absolutely not. Again, who am I to pick apart an Academy Award-decorated picture like Patton? The movie was perfectly great.

Nah, it just seemed to me that there were a handful of things that prevented me from completely enjoying the film. Chief among them: the stiff and spare battle sequences, that seemed more akin to an A-Team episode than a war epic; the portrayal of Patton’s war-time nemesis, the British Commander Montgomery, played so much like a panty-waist as to seem like a retired Monty Python character. Really, the movie just didn’t take off.

So let’s leave it at this. I don’t know what it is exactly, and I’m not going to call is a misfire in the Monday Project (because I certainly expect to feel cool about a good many titles in the 500+ list that are queued up to go.) It was a fine experiment.

But by Good God, let’s hope George C. Scott shows up again.

… that a moment before was your best friend's face, you'll know what to do.

I'm having some problems writing up Patton (1970).

I didn't very much like the movie, but can't exactly say why. I'm working on it though. I hope that I'll have something to say about it by the end of the weekend.

In the meantime, let me just marvel at how much George C. Scott as the white-haired Patton reminded me of Dick Cheney in the film...

Does Your Compass Point North?

I had a chance to see The Polar Express this weekend. A quick observation.

Every once in a while, a movie comes along that performs like a perfect litmus test for determining a movie-goer’s sensibilities. In other words, your reaction to the film says an awful lot about you both as a person and as a movie lover. Are you a cynic? Are you a child? Are you a believer? Are you capable of giving a movie full and complete release? Or are you worried about what your friends might think?

The Polar Express is this kind of movie.

Those familiar with me can probably guess where I stand on the movie. But I’ll be interested to hear the reactions of friends and family in the weeks and months to come.

[I wish I could drop a link to Geoff Pevere’s black-hearted lump-of-coal review from the Toronto Star because nothing I’ve seen demonstrates this point more clearly. Alas, his review is available on-line for Star subscribers only (jerks!) Nevertheless, here’s a reviewer on the other end of the spectrum, and one with whom I totally agree. Two links: On the movie itself and the IMAX experience of the same - I saw the movie in IMAX.]

[Spoken Backwards]: “You look just like my cousin…”

The Monday Project is still relatively new. Yet 15 weeks in, I’m startled by the number of connections I’m seeing between the new (OLD) movies in the Monday line-up and those tattered favorites that I’ve seen 100 times. Nothing is new. Everything is derivative (in its own way.) Case in point: Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967).

Tell me if this sounds like anyone you know. A beautiful blonde, virginal and post-card perfect in that Stepford Wife sort-of-way, leads a double-life that descends into promiscuous sex, bizarre fetishes, prostitution and a violent tragedy. If you’re thinking about Laura Palmer, that means you’re already familiar with Twin Peaks (or better still, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.) And if you’ve been to Twin Peaks, then you already know the terrible (and absurb) kind of spirit that lurks in Belle de Jour. Make no mistake. Belle de Jour is its own fish. Twin Peaks was a television show that hinged on a lot of strange and surreal characters navigating eccentric small town patterns. Belle de Jour is not quite the same Lynch-ian experience, but the central song is the same. Blondes like to have their secrets.

Belle de Jour (Catherine Deneuve), the eponymous character of the film, seems to me to be an interpretation of Laura Palmer just a few years past her big date with Bob. She’s no longer the homecoming queen, though it’s possible she was at one time (do they have homecoming in Europe?) She is newly married to a successful Parisian doctor who thinks she is the sun rising and setting. But for all his affection, he doesn’t seem to understand her at all, and that disconnect drives her deep into her own fantasies. She is cold and aloof, often seeming to be outside of what’s happening and privy to things that other characters are not. She also has those eyes – those icy eyes that stare off into space, as if the person inside has escaped somewhere else. She speaks very little in the film. She seems to drift like she’s lost; however, there’s no question that she is (almost) always in control of what is happening to her.

Let me address those fantasies for a moment. The film is 37-years old and it sent chills through me the way that very few 21st Century movies do. The opening fantasy sequence, sprung from the daydreams of Belle de Jour, caught me by complete surprise and unsettled me for most of the film (particularly the final scenes.) There is also a section.at the exact mid-point of the film that so complete surprised me that I believe I made one of those embarrassing movie-theatre exclamations. It might have been as simple as an "oh" or a "Jesus", but there’s no question my legs went cold. These are good feelings. Lord knows you don’t want this kind of dread and anxiety in your everyday life, but in the context of a movie, particularly an old movie, these are good feelings indeed.

I’ve written before about how much I love LOVE LOVE surprises in the Monday night line-up. Belle de Jour was such a surprise. This was first French film of the Project and the second film (after Ikiru) to carry that film school baggage of being maybe too artsy or too snooty to be purely enjoyed. The subject matter didn’t appeal to me in any way. In fact, after reading the synopsis at http://www.allmovie.com/, I was prepared for a soft-core erotic European film of the sort found on late-night TV. This isn’t really any of those things (well, OK – I guess it is French.) Belle de Jour is about sex (and more particularly deviant sex) to be sure, but it was not created to titillate the audience or exploit Deneuve. In fact, there is absolutely no nudity or on-screen sex in the entire film. Buñuel cuts away during the actual act of intercourse in every instance, choosing instead to leave Belle de Jour’s bedroom adventures (or the consumation of said adventures) to the imagination of the viewer. This may have been a consequence of the censors at the time, but like Jaws (where mechanical shark problems forced the monster to be kept off-camera), the film is more effective for what it doesn’t show.

What Buñuel does leave in the film are the absurd customers and the frankly bizarre sexual situations that Belle de Jour finds herself in. And they are hilarious or intriguing, each and every one. There are no straight-forward Johns in the picture it seems. Every man who comes to visit Belle de Jour has a secret fetish or kink that surprises and (sometimes) shocks. I’ve already mentioned the effectiveness of the set-piece at the centre of the film, but I haven’t mentioned the other note-worthy clients: the total Odd Job imposter with the mysterious buzzing box or the Professor who wants only to be scolded (well, scolded and spanked) by the ladies. I had no idea before watching the film that I would actually have fun simply watching the men who came to the brothel for sex.

Finally, and this is neither here nor there, but Catherine Deneuve in this period reminds me an awful lot of Nicole Kidman. More than once, as she surfed the Parisian streets or found herself with a customer, my thoughts returned to Eyes Wide Shut. There is a scene in Eyes Wide Shut that shuts me down whenver I see it: I’m thinking of Nicole Kidman confessing to her husband her deepest fantasies of infidelity, even as it’s the very last thing he wants to hear. It occurred to me after watching Belle de Jour that Eyes Wide Shut now has a whole new series of connections. For one, Kidman’s confession echoes back forcefully to Buñuel’s film, suggesting that Kubrick and Buñuel were both playing with skeletons from the same closet. And for another, Cruise’s mad quest for infidelity now seems to me to be the perfect flip-side to Belle de Jour’s story. The same and different in every way.

Now see how this Monday Project is making everything better?

This upcoming Monday should bring Patton and a scenery-chewing George C. Scott. Colour me delighted.

Was it 1977?

To the shame of my generation, I don’t remember the first time I saw Star Wars.

Make no mistake. It’s on the pedestal that I reserve for my favorite movies of all time. It’s stacked near the top. But my affection grew and grew and grew on the repeated viewings of ratty VHS tapes. I can’t remember seeing Star Wars clearly in the theatre.

At all.

Daddy's Got a Nemesis.

It’s not my intention to write much about new movies on this blog. Other people handle that business just fine on other sites, and I’m more interested in looking at the movies that other people aren’t talking about. But let me sidestep that quasi-rule for just a moment.

I want to write a little about The Incredibles, because it absolutely blew me away.

T. and I made a special trip to the Silver City last night for the new Pixar movie. We both had high expectations because literally everything Pixar has ever done has entertained us enormously. The trailers looked great. The reviews for the film mostly gushed. Everything pointed to a pretty marvelous film.

And that’s the word that tells the whole story: marvelous. Because I can’t remember the last time that I saw a movie that so affectionately bundled all of the conventions of action, adventure, comic book and science fiction films into such a satisfying whole. It’s the perfect recipe really: equal parts of Superman, X-Men, Fantastic Four, Unbreakable and James Bond, with a passing reference to Star Wars for good measure. A completely breath-taking adventure film to make 10-year boys fall on their asses. And a full-bodied movie-theatre experience at that. Quite literally the best thing that Pixar has ever done.

The hero is probably Brad Bird. Anyone who has seen Iron Giant, already knows that Bird has the ability to tap right into the life-force of the 10-year old audience. He knows what fantasies are spinning in their heads. Chances are good that those same fantasies are still spinning in his. I’ve read that getting The Incredibles on the screen was at least a 12-year process for Bird, but watching it, it’s pretty evident that it was a lifetime of pulp stories and piles upon piles of comic books that got him there. This movie is made up of all of those things that make every little boy crazy with excitement. The roots of the story were as transparent as glass.

And that, I think, is what made the movie so appealing for me. T. loved it because it was Pixar and because it was a really good film, sure. That’s probably what the critics are responding to also. But I don’t think everyone will tap into the undercurrent that hooked me, and that will hook most of the Spider-man reading, Star Wars playing full-grown kids out there. For this audience, the movie is every comic book movie (even those that disappointed) made perfect. [Frozone’s ice slides? My God, why couldn’t they have pulled that off in X-Men?] The film pays homage to the best comic book stories but then turns around and makes them better. Makes them more accessible. Makes them (strange to say for a CG-animated kids film) more grounded.

I don’t expect that many people reading this blog are familiar with Astro City: a comic book created by Kurt Busiek that explores the super hero culture from a more realistic (and sometimes civilian) perspective. Busiek’s book rests on characters instead of super-powers, circumstances instead of big plots. The stories are built on years of comic book tradition, but always take the route that isn’t usually explored. Consequently, the stories are always fresh and exciting, but strikingly familiar. The Incredibles might very well be one of the super-teams living in Astro City.

And so it is that the experience got me to thinking a little bit about comic book movies in general. Live action movies specifically. There were a lot of things that The Incredibles did right that will raise the bar for upcoming comic book films. First, I thought it was a great idea to dispense with any kind of origin stories for the heroes. For too long now, it seems that comic book movies have slipped into a formula that demands a fleshed-out origin for every new character. It slows the movie down and who really cares? I don’t think anyone watches a new superhero smashing a wall and says, "What? How is that possible? OK, science accident? Now, I understand." The origin doesn’t matter if the rest of the film adds up.

Something else that puts The Incredibles over the top are those wonderful action sequences. Granted that the world of CG storytelling doesn’t have the earthly restrictions that keep the Spider-man or the X-Men movies grounded (though let’s be honest: most of the action in those movies is CG-generated anyhow,) but it’s all about the creativity really. The use of powers in this film never stopped surprising me. And for someone who’s read, literally, thousands and thousands of comic books, a little originality is enough to carry the film a long, long way.

Finally, and most importantly, the movie was not about stopping the villain. Yes, there was a villain and an over-arching (and diabolical) plot to push the heroes into action. But the villain was really just the sub-plot in this film, necessary only as a framework on which to hang the more important elements of the story: the family, the mid-life crisis, the challenge of putting the glory-days behind you. Like most Pixar films, there was a stronger story underneath the obvious one. This is also true of the best comic books. In a perfect world, it would be true of the best comic book movies (Spider-man and X-Men come closest, but that’s because they are largely interpretations of the comic book stories that are already out there.) Watching a hero in spandex grapple with a villain in armor is not enough to make a movie good. Comic book readers may be simple cats, but we aren’t simpletons.

[At the very least, things are looking very bleak for the Fantastic Four movie. They’ve been scooped. It will take the best live-action comic book movie ever just to put them in competition with The Incredibles. Pretty unlikely.]

And then there are the depths of adulthood and parenting themes that played on notes that I wouldn’t have appreciated when I was 10. This, I think, it what put The Incredibles in its own stratosphere. A 10-year old boy will love the action. But a 31-year old boy with a wife, a job, and a toddler will be able to enjoy the entire package.

I’ve gushed enough for now. And I haven't even talked about how unbelievably advanced the animation seemed (miles beyond Finding Nemo even.) Another time, maybe. Or not.

This week’s Monday night movie (which was also marvelous, for different reasons of course) was Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour. I expect to have some thoughts posted on that movie in the next day or so.

The Top Shelf.

I feel like I need to talk about the favorites. Just this weekend I’ve updated my profile to include my lists of favorite movies and music, but I was a little disappointed that the profile wanted titles only. No room for any extra baggage: 600 characters max. Scat on that. I feel like I should say a little something more. These are my favorite movies after all.

First, let’s be clear. The purpose of this project (and in connection, this blog) is to open my eyes to a whole lot of new movies and dig deeper for some new favorites. With that in mind, this list comprises only my favorites as the project begins and evolves. Don’t be surprised that all but two of the films were released in my lifetime and that a huge chunk of them were in theatres after 1980. Before starting this project, I didn’t adventure too far out of the current multiplex line-up.

Alphabetically, the top 12 or so look a little something like this. These are the movies that play for me when I shut my eyes.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – The Big One. Here’s a movie that took me a long time to love, but when the walls came down, the walls came down. The reason is so simple: Stanley Kubrick’s movie destroys me every time out. Call me a sucker for clinical cinematography and pensive pacing. In spite of the mission statement of this Monday Project, I’m not some prissy Film-School Art-House snob. I want to make it clear that including Stanley Kubrick is a gesture from the heart and that my decision to include 2001 in this list is an entirely emotional choice. And to be totally honest, on any given day I might just as easily replace 2001 with Dr. Strangelove or (now that I’ve seen and loved it) Barry Lyndon. But there’s no contesting 2001 as a crucial movie in my life. But my God, what an experience! The movie controls my breathing. It’s a movie that takes me out of my chair and into the back of my own skull. That’s gotta be worth something, right?

Amélie (2001) – Sunshine, pure sunshine. My happy place. I saw this movie under ideal circumstances – at a jammed press screening during the Toronto Film Festival. There’s no experience like watching a movie like Amélie with a group of tired and cynical movie critics who start with arms folded and finish by eating out of the filmmaker’s hand. Leaving the screening, I was flying high, walking on air. I felt like I’d been to movie nirvana. The very next morning someone flew a couple of airplanes into the World Trade Centre. And in that strange way that memory works, the two experiences are somehow tangled together. Absolute yin and yang.

Brazil (1985) – Brazil is everything I’ve always wanted in a movie.

E.T. the Extra Terrestrial (1982) – This movie is so important to me that I want to save it for its own posting. For now, let’s say that there has never been another movie to so completely overwhelm the 9-year old in me. This is the first-time fix that this poor addict is still trying to re-experience every night he’s out.

Edward Scissorhands (1990) – Tim Burton is a marvel. With the exception of the Coen Brothers (who have never disappointed me), Burton probably has the best batting average of any filmmaker out there: at the very least, I can count on him to hit a double every time he’s at bat. (Only one single Burton movie sucks ass. We won’t talk of it here. This is a happy place.) I considered putting Pee Wee’s Big Adventure on the list in this spot (let’s face it – it’s a perfect film), but opted for the movie that tugged a little deeper. I can’t explain my affection for it; however, every piece of the movie is at the top of the charts for me: most effortless score, most astonishing design, most clever performances, most marvelous snowfall. And that fairytale story which stumbles towards sad madness? Total bliss.

The Godfather Trilogy (1972-1990) – I’ve posted already on behalf of The Godfather Part III, but I’m not sure if I was entirely clear on my affection for the first (and infinitely superior) parts of Coppola’s saga. For an epic afternoon-swallowing saga, I’m completely ensnared and engrossed every time I happen upon it (damn you TNT for playing all the time! I have things to do!) The movies just get better every time.

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2001-2003) – And speaking of epic time-swallowers, this list is turning out to be a little silly, isn’t it? Next thing you know, I’m going to want to include the Star Wars trilogy and Indiana Jones trilogy (um, see below). But in all seriousness, there haven’t been many movies since that golden spell in the early-80’s to encapsulate pure-cinematic-action-adventure-spectacle the way this movie does (and let’s face it – now that the films are on DVD, they’re ONE big movie, right?) If Peter Jackson had made three good movies, that would have been a thing. But instead, he made three mountains with detailing as spectacular as a Renaissance catheral. December 2004 is looking pretty disappointing without a new installment.

Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) – The most recent addition to this list is also, ironically, the oldest. A good write-up on this DVD prompted me to pick it up cold and it absolutely demolished my expectations (OK, I had no expectations.) But this film put me in touch with a couple of my new favorite things: the Sergio Leone close-up and the Ennio Morricone score. The performances are remarkable, but it’s Leone’s eye that makes this movie a masterpiece. The opening sequence and the final showdown are now and forever, without question, two of my favorite pieces of celluloid. I watched the movie three times that first weekend.

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) – A classic that needs no explanation whatsoever. A perfect piece of entertainment.

Raising Arizona (1987) – Dance with the girl that brought you. The Coen Brothers are in a league of their own at this point, but this is the first Coen movie I saw. Like most good Coen Brothers pictures, the first viewing was sort of un-spectacular. But on repeated viewings, I started to pick up on the rhythm of the movie and Nicholas Cage’s performance in particular. The film is like a piece of music really, meticulously metered and performed from the first frame to the last. In fact, the experience reminds me most of one of those insane Herb Alpert tunes that gets faster as they play, one note falling into the next. Once the movie cues up, I’m hooked and the spell gets worse with every scene. The supermarket robbery/chase is one of my favorite sequences of all time.

Some Kind of Wonderful (1987) – Maybe this is a guilty pleasure, but for a kid whose first impressions of high-school came from John Hughes, this movie is always the dark horse for me. I adore all of the Hughes movies between 1983 and 1987 (then came Curly Sue? What the hell happened?), but for reasons I can’t tap into, this one gets me there every time. Maybe it’s Eric Stoltz’ awkward performance. More than likely it’s Lea Thompson (there’s a bit of crush there, sorry.) And that teen melodrama! This really is the boy’s answer to Pretty In Pink. Call me silly, but I even have the audio of this movie on CD – I just love the rhythm of the scenes.

The (original and untampered) Star Wars Trilogy (1977-1983) – These movies are so integral to my movie-going lifestyle and have been watched and re-watched so many times, that I had to put them on a personal moratorium to protect myself against over-saturation. So it is that I haven’t watched a frame of these films in almost 7 years, and to my great surprise, I didn’t even pick up the DVD set in September. It goes without saying that.these movies pretty much represent the most direct route to the purest part of my movie-loving self. And somehow, they surprise me every time I see them.

Honourable mentions:

The Abyss (1989), Howard the Duck (that’s right and I'll thank you to shut up) (1986), Weird Science (1985), Unforgiven (1992), Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Donnie Darko (2001), Gremlins (1984), The Muppet Movie (1979), Apocalypse Now (1979), Pee Wee’s Big Adventure (1985), Superman: The Movie (1978), Flash Gordon (1980), Se7en (1995), Alien (1979), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), Starman (1984), Revenge of the Nerds (1984), Teen Wolf (1985), The Princess Bride (1987), Legends of the Fall (1994), Evil Dead 2 (1987), Batman (1989), The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), The Fisher King (1991), Braveheart (1995), La Cité Des Enfants Perdus (City of Lost Children) (1995), Miller's Crossing (1990), Big Trouble in Little China (1986), Far and Away (1992), Heat (1995), The Secret of NIMH (1982), The Dark Crystal (1982), Jaws (1975), A Simple Plan (1998), Office Space (1999), Wonder Boys (2000), and just about all of the James Bond films, most especially The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and The Man With The Golden Gun (1974).

Was it 1990?

I’m sorry to make this confession, but I liked The Godfather Part III most of all. I think it’s about context so please let me explain.

In the early 90’s, before the Silver Cities and Coliseums of the world devoured the shoe-box multiplexes, the only place to see a movie – I mean, a big, BIG movie with skull-rattling sound and skyscraper dimensions – was at the Ontario Place Cinesphere. An IMAX screen, the only IMAX screen in Toronto at that time (I believe), the Cinesphere was your one-stop shopping for monstrous movie-going. And best of all, every December, January and February, the Cinesphere opened its doors for mainstream, standard Hollywood movies. As big as they could be.

I saw as much as I could in that environment: Apocalypse Now, Star Wars, Edward Scissorhands, Backdraft, Star Trek Generations. These are only a few of the movies that I remember, all second-run. But I recall very clearly coming home from University (3 hours away!) in the early-90’s specifically to see movies at this theatre. Movies played for only a couple of nights and tickets were bought in advance like a theatrical run. It was total movie-crack.

But my point is The Godfather Part III. In 1990, I was 17-years old. I had never seen The Godfather (I or II), but I was anxious to see what the buzz was about when The Godfather Part III opened on Christmas day. CITY-TV helped me out by playing both of the first two films in their entirety, completely uncut. I taped them and over the course of a Saturday and Sunday, I watched The Godfather saga unfold. On a small screen. Between commercials. Amid the everyday distractions of a teenage life.

And I remember this like I remember the bullet popping Moe Green’s eyeball: I was in a big hurry because I had to catch up with the story before the Sunday night screening of The Godfather Part III. The experience was a bit of a rush-job.

So it goes that the first two movies sort of raced past me. I remember being unbelievably shocked by the horse-in-the-bed bit (try to remember seeing that for the first time!) and moved more by the first film than the second (which was the more-rushed experience of the two – I might have dawdled watching that first film.) I definitely liked both movies a lot. They were everything I was expecting, and they were pretty violent (always something for the plus column when you’re in grade 11). The movies were little long though and there were an awful lot of names to remember. It would be another couple of years before I really started to dig into the films in university and before I watched them again and again and again. It would be another couple of years before I started to absolutely adore them.

Time is funny. Anyone familiar with the Godfather Trilogy can understand that loving the third movie most is a little like choosing Return of the Jedi over Empire. Silly business. But over that weekend, the final dramatic images of The Godfather Part III (and Andy Garcia’s spitfire performance) stuck with me more than those first 6 or 7 hours. I consumed the opera performance. I loved the cynical tone. Sophia Coppola seemed fine to me, just fine.

It’s funny what a reee-ally big screen and a little volume will do for your movie-going experience.

A New Hat is a Good Start.

A life unexamined, and all that mumbo jumbo.

If you’re on the brink of examining, I mean really examining your life, your job, your relationships or your place in the world, I expect that Ikiru (1952) is a harrowing journey. Time certainly hasn’t softened it. This doesn’t seem like the kind of life-loving animal that could have hung in theatres in the same years as Leave It To Beaver and Singin’ In The Rain. And while the Criterion DVD seems a little rough and aged at times, the film itself doesn’t seem anything like a 50-year (plus!) document. It’s a sharp and intricate narrative that puts some pretty universal (and always relevant) philosophy up front. Kurosawa’s appeal is immediately evident.

Ikiru isn’t really what I’d regard as a famous movie, so indulge me for a minute while I share what it’s about. Such a simple story. A life-long (and completely anesthetized) bureaucrat named Watanabe learns indirectly that he is dying of stomach cancer. His oncoming death shakes him out of complacency and forces him to confront the fact that life has completely passed him by. He spends the last weeks of his life chasing life itself, asking the big questions, searching for some meaning that will help justify his time on the planet. The big twist? He actually finds both meaning and purpose, and more surprisingly, the answer is overwhelming satisfying.

The film is a very complex experience. Like the big questions in life, the movie flips and flops, drawing the audience close enough to share private moments and still pushing them far enough back so that the film is never sentimental. There are scenes that are searingly intimate, as inclusive and tender as anything I’ve seen on film. Watanabe’s private moments in his bedroom, crying himself to sleep under his blanket, are simply painful to experience. There’s a voyeuristic quality to the moments he spends alone, as though it’s not quite fair to be watching this man struggle with this terrible burden for our entertainment. But at the same time, the experience of Ikiru is often very distancing. The main character, despite the private sequences, remains a cipher to some extent, with a tremendous amount of back-story left untold. The film makes huge jumps in time and travels back on itself to fill gaps in the narrative. Case in point: the last 50-minutes of the film are primarily composed of talking heads – worse than talking head: bureaucrats – discussing Watanabe’s days and trying to solve the mystery of what how he spent them. There’s not a single sympathetic character among them and believe me when I saw that they talk and talk and talk. The viewer is forced to piece together the resolution of the story in much the same way. I realize that this sounds like a frustrating experience, but there is such a wonderful payoff, maybe one of the best of the Monday line-up so far, that the experience never sags.

The movie also unfolds a lot like a good novel, driven by interior forces and unfolding at a pace that scarcely seems suited to the screen. There are long shots that would never hang onto a screen today. There is a shot of Watanabe waiting in a chair that must last longer than a minute. Many of scenes play as long takes, unbroken by close-ups or any other edits. The commentary on the Criterion DVD makes much out of the fact that Kurosawa was influenced heavily by Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych. It shows. The film sports that sort of pedigree.

For me, the film was a most unusual experience because I was in a strange place on Monday night. Coming off a weekend of weddings and old friends, I was filled to the lid with an unusual amount of vitality. Believe me that life certainly is not passing me by this month. So it is that Watanabe’s suffering washed over me to some extent. I like my job an awful lot. I love my family. I’m content with just about every piece of my life so reminding me that life is short doesn’t really drive me to make different choices. But this is why I can only imagine where this movie might take me otherwise. We’ve all been in that job or position where we wondered what it was all for. This movie puts that question into a leg-lock and twists hard. Watching Watanabe’s face and body language will make just about anyone question their own decisions.

And I think that it’s Watanabe’s face that inflicts the most pathos. That face, which carries both the terrible secret of his cancer and the burden of his empty lifestyle, is still haunting me days later. Upon watching the film a second time yesterday (it’s about the commentary – yo!), I was immediately struck by how much affection I had for Watanabe the very first time he showed up on screen. He has the widest eyes and most expressive eyes I’ve seen since Bette Davis a few weeks ago - and astonishingly, he puts her to shame.

There are at least a half dozen sequences in Ikiru that make it a masterpiece. At least three of these are as good as anything you’ll see in a movie. And one of them is so moving and transcendent, that only the language and context of the film does it justice. Describing it is a waste of time.

Despite all of this, I’m not so sure about Kurosawa yet. I want to put that in writing because I’m almost certain that the feeling will change in time: one day I may laugh to re-read this. But of all the great cinema masters, Kurosawa is the one with whom I’m not yet comfortable. I mentioned in an earlier post how much I’ve come to adore Stanley Kubrick. Even those most off-putting and Kubrickian of devices are now familiar and endearing. Of all the masters I’ve seen so far, Kurosawa reminds me most of Kubrick. He certainly has a rhythm and a style of his own but ironically, he's probably more accessible. I look forward to seeing more Kurosawa films in the coming months and hopefully coming to terms with that style. But for now, I’m wrestling with it.

And on the subject of time, I have the strong suspicion that Ikiru is a film that I will want – and maybe need – to revisit in the decades to come. It has that kind of temperature. I certainly adored it this time around, but I have the very certain sense that in a decade or more there will be a lot more layers revealed to me. Certainly the theme of living life while you can is quickly forgotten and worth revisiting from year to year. This probably makes Ikiru sound a lot more preachy and didactic than it is; but the fact is there are just some movies that cut deeper and tease harder at the underlying and larger questions.

I’m glad to have Ikiru as such a touchstone.

Swipes dust. {cough} {cough}

It was certainly not my intention to disappear. Crap, has it really been 2 weeks?

Companion to my commitment to watch a new movie every Monday is my commitment to keep this blog running. Regularly. If I drop out of sight for more than a week, there's good reason. Yes sir.

A couple of bad sick days. A new house (finalized now with bank, lawyers and all, thank you very much.) And at last, a wedding that went wall-to-wall for at least 4 days.

I should have some thoughts published on Kurosawa's Ikiru in the next day or so. I also want to reflect a little more on some old favorites as I'm having a good time trying to recollect my first impressions (comme ça.)

Jefferson Airplane? OK, now I understand.

Like most North Americans kids, I was raised on Disney. I’m not a Disney zombie or anything, but I can say for certain that the first 3 movie experiences I remember were distinctly Disney. The Rescuers was the first movie that I ever saw in a theatre and I loved it to death. Disney’s Sunday Night movies were the entertainment staple of my early years, even without a cable television. I was surrounded by Disney storybooks and toy characters in those blissful years when I didn’t and couldn’t comprehend the difference between real magic and the business of entertainment. To a six-year old, Disney isn’t a company making movies. Disney simply is. All this is to say that I figure I have seen most, if not all, of the Disney feature-length films, and I know them all very well. Except this one.

Disney’s Alice In Wonderland (1951) probably would have made my childhood a very different experience. Because as an adult, it certainly messed me the hell up. I suppose I saw it under nearly ideal circumstances, dopey-tired and just barely this side of awake. It was a long day at work on Monday, and I was grateful that Spartacus was not available at the library because I don’t think I could have withstood any movies longer than 75 minutes. But even still, I wasn’t quite ready for the sideways dream-scape that is Wonderland.

Simply put, the movie is mad. There were sequences in the film that I could barely believe were made anywhere, much less in a Disney workshop: the caterpillar who blows dialogue, the insolent Cheshire cat, the tea party comprised of absolute and hard-core mental patients, the disjointed story tangents. This isn’t to say that the film is particularly subversive, because it’s not. But it is such an unusual Disney feature, so divorced from any kind of linear and formulaic Disney narrative, that it almost seems like the output of a rogue studio.

Of course, even without having seen Alice In Wonderland before, I was quite familiar with the story and images. I wasn’t surprised by any of the familiar characters or situations exactly. I already knew where Alice’s trip down the rabbit hole was going to go in a vague way. What I wasn’t prepared for was the manic pace of the film or the abrupt sequence of events. The truth is – and blame this on my exhaustion if you’d like – there were times in the film where I was absolutely lost in the plot. In the blink of an eye, the story changed direction so much fast that there were at least 2 or 3 instances where I had to rewind and realign my bearings. Even paying closer attention, this didn’t help. The movie simply moves like a child’s mind, with no concern for reason or cohesion. It’s the dictionary definition of marvelous.

Why did it trouble me so much? I don’t know. Perhaps it’s that the movie seemed to tap into a part of the imagination that so rarely ends up on-screen (at least in the current animated output of the major studios,) and I was startled. Perhaps it’s the way that Alice In Wonderland just sort of hides amid Disney’s output, never regarded as one of the cornerstone classics and probably not revisited by many people (Disney’s dirty little secret.) Or perhaps it was those damn singing flowers, all of which seemed obscene to me in the most Freudian way (like I said, I was awfully tired. I’m sorry.)

Which leads me to the dark side of Alice In Wonderland. Unlike so many Disney fairytales, it seems to me that there’s a genuinely dreadful and threatening current running through Wonderland. And the threat isn’t just that Alice may be killed; there’s a real possibility that she will be killed and eaten. I’m not really talking about the most obvious threats (i.e. the Red Queen with the ol’ “off with her head” directive) so much as the feral and unpredictable elements of the story: the Cheshire cat who comes and goes as he pleases, but always with the flashing teeth; the caterpillar with his pipe, possibly stuffed with the sort of plantweed you don’t find in the Magic Kingdom; the wild birds that seem to have flown right out of the imagination of children; and even the Mad Hatter and March Hare, who might just as easily tear Alice apart as pour her tea. Now, I’m certain this dark side must’ve been prevalent in Lewis Carroll’s book, although I’ve never read it. I know that other creators in the last 50 years have played up the dark and sinister side of Wonderland (wasn’t there a video game?) But in the Disney context, it’s sort of a unique dimension. The movie is just barely kid-friendly.

I like surprises in the Monday Night line-up. I love it even more when a movie exceeds my expectations by being something completely different than what I’m expecting. With Alice In Wonderland, I was expecting a relatively quiet and colourful Disney movie that I hadn’t seen before. I was certainly not prepared for a movie that got into my head and under my skin.

Those damn singing flowers.