Welcome back. Previously, on 1/12, I had written the first part of this column, covering the Decalogue, volumes IV-X. You can read that here. Today we’ll take a look at five other films I’ve watched in the recent past. I apologize for the sporadic posts of late. I was on vacation in Mexico last week, and though I briefly considered leaving the pool and my frozen margarita to write about electro-pop and independent silent films, I decided to put it off for a while.
Trailerz
Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997)
Director: Werner Herzog
Principal Actors: Dieter Dengler, Werner Herzog
Famed idiosyncratic director Werner Herzog helmed this documentary about a German-American fighter pilot shot down over Laos in the Vietnam War and the incredible struggle he endured to make it back home safely, a story that provided the basis for Herzog’s 2006 feature film Rescue Dawn (discussed in more detail back on 5/28/09). Herzog, both in his features and documentaries, loves subjects who live off the beaten path. He makes films about big dreamers, tyrants, wanderers, revolutionaries, and the like, and shows us how their desires and ambitions drive them mad. He also enjoys the dichotomy of the reasonable complexity of humanity against the natural complexity of the jungle, and Little Dieter Needs to Fly provides him with both.
Herzog gives us the back story of Dieter Dengler, a man who had known since he was a baby boy growing up in Germany that he wanted to be a pilot. We go through Dengler’s life; his immigration to America, his initial service time in the armed forces performing menial work, and finally, his conscription as a Navy pilot. Dengler joins the Vietnam War, but is shot down shortly afterwards, and Herzog and Dengler together describe the torments and hardships Dengler suffers as a captive of Viet Cong-sympathetic Laotians. Dengler’s personality is the most enjoyable part of the film; he speaks of his time in the jungle, his trials, and the friends he made while in captivity in a soft but factual tone, as if trying to explain his experiences to close friends. He’s not captivating only because of what he went through. Dieter Dengler, we can see, is a good person and a good soldier. The way he tells his story and the way he conducts himself, apart from the gruesome details, is why the film works.
Ideas in Little Dieter Needs to Fly fall flat. Herzog does a tremendous job of showing the thoughtful side of Dengler, but he often tries to force and further connections and comparisons that either aren’t necessarily there or aren’t built up strongly enough. Make no mistake; the film is about Dengler’s time as a captive in the jungle, despite the title. Herzog attempts to portray Dengler as a dreamer solely determined by his desire to be a pilot at the beginning of the film and at points throughout, but the connection isn’t convincing. It’s not that the film truly suffers because of it, but at its ending, when we get a shot of Dieter Dengler in an airfield surrounded by thousands of aircraft (the point being that this is paradise for him), the symbolism rings a bit hollow. Despite these shortcomings, Little Dieter Needs to Fly is a well-made film with an engrossing subject and story. B. (Originally aired on television, the film was nominated for an “Outstanding Non-Fiction Special” Emmy Award in 1999).
The Public Enemy (1931)
Director: William A. Wellman
Principal Actors: James Cagney, Edward Woods, Joan Blondell, Donald Cook
The Public Enemy, at the time of its release, was considered an ultra-violent, ultra-bloody gangster film, and though it is indisputably tame by today’s standards, one can see a connection between this film and more recent gangster films like Goodfellas and Casino. The Public Enemy shows the seemingly great life one can achieve when they take a life of crime, and then scramble to show all of the awful negatives that accompany such a life toward the conclusion of the film, just like the aforementioned Scorsese films.
The Public Enemy stars James Cagney, in one of his first leading roles, as Tom Powers, a local hood who works his way up in the world of organized crime. The film launched Cagney’s career, and rightfully so; he’s terrific in it, and the film wouldn’t be half as good without him. Cagney’s Tom Powers has a look of perennial meanness and intensity; we see it at points, like the famous scene where he smashes a grapefruit into his girlfriend’s face, but most of the time it’s hidden just beneath the surface. We always know it’s there, but we don’t know when it’s going to explode, and this guessing game provided by Cagney’s acting helps keep us engaged.
Looking at the story of The Public Enemy from a 2010 perspective, you’d think it’s not breaking new ground, but I’d imagine for the time this was pretty groundbreaking and serious stuff. It follows the usual routes. Hood starts as a child, works his way up the ladder as time goes by, experiences setbacks, consolidates power, gets too big for his britches and gets his comeuppance. By now we’ve seen it a thousand times, but we’ve seen it a thousand times because it’s effective, and thankfully Cagney carries the film where it needs to go. The gangsters could have been badder and more ruthless to really drive the film’s point home, but it was successfully made. Crime and hooliganism = bad. B+. (Nominated for “Best Writing, Original Story” Academy Award in 1931).
The Battleship Potemkin, or Bronenosets Potyomkin (1925)
Director: Sergei M. Eisenstein
Principal Actors: Aleksandr Antonov, Vladimir Barsky, Grigori Aleksandrov
Perhaps the most well-regarded and most important silent film outside of the work of Chaplin or Keaton (Buster, not Michael), The Battleship Potemkin was once thought to be so powerful that it could incite revolutionary riots among its viewers. It was banned in several countries at various times due to its political rhetoric, and, according to Roger Ebert, was listed in various “best films of all time” lists from the time of its creation an onward through several decades.
I can’t pretend to have deep, firsthand knowledge of the Russian Revolution and the anti-Czarist, anti-government feelings that permeated that time, and truthfully, The Battleship Potemkin didn’t provide me with any. That’s not, however, the point of the film. Potemkin, in terms of storyline, is a pure propaganda film extolling the virtues of the rebellion against the Czarist regime in Russia. We are beaten over the head with symbolism of Russian sailors eating maggot-infested meat, mistreatment of sailors by one-dimensional commanders, cruel and needless deaths of Russian civilians at the hands of Czarist soldiers, etc. Eventually, the symbols lose their meaning. The Battleship Potemkin, in some ways regarding storyline, resembles a Saturday morning cartoon, with perhaps less depth and less respect for the audience’s intelligence.
Really, though, The Battleship Potemkin isn’t about the story. It’s about the amazing things that Sergei M. Eisenstein was able to capture with his camera, in a silent film, in 1925. Its sequences are huge and breathtaking. Remember that scene, parodied in countless television shows, cartoons, and films (notably The Untouchables) of the baby carriage careening uncontrollably down a flight of stairs? That scene came from this film, and that sequence of a crowd of innocent civilians being gunned down on the Odessa Steps by government troops, is one of the most famous of all time. The Battleship Potemkin gives off a surreal aura. It’s old and its story is rather foolish, but it has an unmistakable air of power, importance, and even mysticism about it, as if you’re watching something unearthed from a time capsule. B+.
Reservoir Dogs (1992)
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Principal Actors: Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Steve Buscemi, Chris Penn
Being a huge Tarantino mark, I surprised even myself by not having seen Reservoir Dogs until a few weeks ago. Tarantino’s feature film debut sets the tone for his later releases; tremendous dialogue, brutal violence, and the idea of grown, (semi) reasonable people grasping for order and truth amidst chaos and disorder.
The majority of the action in Reservoir Dogs (in fact, all of it, apart from flashbacks) takes place in an industrial garage, which serves as a rendezvous point for several professional thieves. The thieves have been tasked with robbing a jewelry story, but everything during the heist gets fucked up. They return, one at a time, to the garage to try and piece together what happened, why it happened, and what to do next. The most exhilarating part of Reservoir Dogs, to me, was watching the thieves, specifically Mr. White (Keitel) and Mr. Pink (Buscemi), alternate between arguing with each other and trying to work together to forge a plan to get them out of their predicament. The violence and bloodshed is just garnish; the real meat comes from the characters, who pride themselves on being “professionals”, trying to figure out what happened and what to do and continually coming up empty.
The film begins Tarantino’s penchant for telling the story out of sequential order, a trait that works very well here. Piece by piece, he provides us with details of these characters; how they came to do this particular job, how one was shot, how another died, how another made it back to the safe house, etc. Each time we learn a little more about what happened before, and we can decipher part of the story for ourselves. Reservoir Dogs is an involving film with a great story, great acting and great dialogue. It’s hard to ask for much more than this from a(n admittedly non-prototypical) gangster film. A-.
The Fearless Freaks (2005)
Director: Bradley Beesley
Principal Actors: Wayne Coyne, Steven Drozd, Michael Ivins, various family members of these three
The Fearless Freaks is a retrospective documentary about the history of the Flaming Lips, an alt-rock band from Oklahoma. It follows the creation, continuation, stagnation, and ultimate promulgation of the Flaming Lips as they went from being a seldom-heard noise rock outfit to critically acclaimed, commercially successful (though not mainstream) noise rock outfit.
The Fearless Freaks tries to strike a balance between discussing the history of the band and painting a picture of each of its members, which allow them to go off on zany tangents and discuss their many passions and musings on life. Wayne Coyne, the lead singer and guitarist for the band, is the focal point, and he comes off as quite humble, charming and likable. He talks at length about his childhood and the effect that it had on his music, and tells a story about how he was held at gunpoint in a Long John Silver’s he worked at as a teenager. He goes back to the site of the restaurant in the film and cutely reenacts the robbery with the children of a Vietnamese couple who had since purchased the establishment. He talked about the robbery, and how pissed the gunmen were and how he thought he was going to die, and said, “This is really how you die; it's just one minute, you're just cooking up someone's order of French fries, and the next minute you're laying on the floor and they blow your brains out, and there's no music, there's no significance, it's just random - it could've been anybody.” There are unexpected moments of truthfulness and intensity like this throughout the film that give it a bit more weight than a standard rockumentary.
Of course, the film is meant to give unenlightened viewers a history of the career of the band and a glimpse of the people in it, and it succeeds at doing this. We see footage and hear music from the band’s first gigs in the early 80s, and the trajectory of their career is handled expertly. The Flaming Lips are truly interesting, quirky guys, and the film follows this ideal by being quirky in itself. Its cuts, interludes, and asides are often brisk and unexpected, and things often seem cheerfully and methodically unhinged, much like the band itself. B+.
John Lacey
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