The Dailies 9/29/10 - I've Fallen Way Behind

Well, I’ve watched a lot of movies recently, many of them really fucking good. So let’s dive right in.

Trailers

Stray Dog (1949) – C
- Directed by Akira Kurosawa
- Starring Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Keiko Awaji
- Yes, it’s a Kurosawa picture, but the incredibly slow pace and the hopeless reactions of the characters to nearly every obstacle they encounter led to the average grade.

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) – B-
- Directed by Stanley Kramer
- Starring Spencer Tracy, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Jonathan Winters and countless others
- Awards: Won – Best Sound Effects. Nominated – Best Color Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Original Song, Best Original Score, Best Sound
- An endlessly spoofed treasure hunt comedy featuring pretty much every funny screen personality from the turn of the century to its release.

The Wages of Fear (1953) – A-
- Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot
- Starring Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Peter van Eyck, Folco Lulli
- An effortlessly and incredibly tense story of four downtrodden men tapped to drive unstable dynamite across treacherous terrain.

The Hustler (1961) – A-
- Directed by Robert Rossen
- Starring Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason, Piper Laurie, George S. Scott
- Awards: Won – Best Black & White Set Decoration, Best Black & White Cinematography. Nominated – Best Actor (Newman), Best Supporting Actor (Gleason), Best Supporting Actor (Scott), Best Actress (Laurie), Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Picture
- A movie about a pool hustler that becomes much more than that due to four epic performances by the principals.

Stroszek (1977) – A
- Directed by Werner Herzog
- Starring Bruno S., Eva Mattes, Clemens Scheitz
- A Herzog classic that doesn’t star Klaus Kinski, and already one of my favorite films ever.

Rocky Balboa (2006) – B+
- Directed by Sylvester Stallone
- Starring Sylvester Stallone, Antonio Tarver, Milo Ventimiglia, Burt Young
- Much, much better than a sixth Rocky movie has any right to be.

Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders (2006) – C-
- Directed by James D. Scurlock
- Featuring various talking heads
- A documentary that purports to inform us of predatory credit card practices and ends up telling us nothing we didn’t already know.

Features

The American (2010)
Directed by Anton Corbijn
Starring George Clooney, Violante Placido, Irina Bjorklund

Here’s a film that’s too patient, too deliberate and perhaps too directionless for its own good. The material in The American screams for more action; for the film to shed its meticulousness and give us some sort of blow-off that never arrives. I’m a believer that one can make a good film about anything, and there is a good film to be made with this story. Unfortunately, that film will have to be made another time.

George Clooney plays an experienced assassin who takes into hiding in Italy shortly after the film begins. You see, the film opens with Clooney being nearly killed by assassins in Sweden, which causes him to go on the run. We are not told who the Swedes are or why they want to kill Clooney, but this actually becomes inconsequential as we continue. The American admittedly does a fine job of keeping Clooney’s encounters in Italy self-contained, so that we don’t need to know who is pursuing him to get the gist of what’s happening.

Though the film begins promisingly, it eventually feels like we just start following Clooney’s character around as he does different things. It doesn’t feel like a cohesive film. Things happen, and the camera films them, but it all feels empty and rather pointless. The American is so purposely esoteric that it eliminates most of the investment we have in its characters.

The American does have its merits. It looks fantastic. It is shot very sharply and very well. The Italian scenery is great to look at. It features a couple of incredibly beautiful women. Clooney does a nice job as the tired, lonely veteran assassin, who just wants to leave the killing business and settle down on a villa somewhere but realizes that’s probably not realistic for his line of work (which is itself a tired theme). The other actors and actresses perform admirably as well. It’s too bad there’s just not enough going on to care.

C-

The Town (2010)
Directed by Ben Affleck
Starring Ben Affleck, Rebecca Hall, Jon Hamm, Jeremy Renner

The Town is half blue-collar crime film and half romance film, with elements from each intersecting with each other in different ways. It’s a slick film with well-done action sequences, but its great flaw is its attempt to try to be more than it really is.

The Town concerns a group of bank robbers from the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston, who are led by Ben Affleck. We start with a bank robbery in Harvard Square, where things go awry and the group takes a hostage (Hall). After the robbery, the gang finds that the hostage lives in Charlestown and Affleck sets off to intimidate her, but ends up falling for her instead. He then has to keep his bank robbing activity secret from her while continuing his illegal activities.

The film serves as a commercial for Boston, with great chase scenes taking place in the claustrophobic North End section and a final shootout occurring at Fenway Park. These and other action scenes in The Town provide the most enjoyable aspect of the film; back to basics police vs. bad guys car chases and gunfighting.

Storyline problems, however, haunt the film. Believability issues are a constant, glaring annoyance. Rebecca Hall’s character repeats that the hostage encounter was the worst experience of her life, but when she finds out that Affleck was one of the robbers (he was disguised during the heist), her fury dissipates almost immediately and she remains in love with him. The police, despite knowing that Affleck and his gang are responsible for the rash of bank robberies in the area but not having enough evidence to convict, somehow forget to tail them at the end of the film, allowing them to participate in the Fenway Park theft.

The acting helps us move beyond these problems. Affleck has played “young blue collar Boston bozo” more times than I care to remember, but he does it reliably well. His best friend and second-in-command Jeremy Renner is terrific as the psychotic muscle of the group. Jon Hamm, so great as Don Draper on Mad Men, is unfortunately saddled with a one-dimensional and thankless role as stock “threatening FBI agent”.

The Town should have stuck to its guns as an action-thriller. The love between Affleck and Hall is forced and unbelievable and barely affects the outcome of the film. The addition of cornball romance to the central story was used as a device to make the film seem like more than it really is when it would have been fine all along.

B-

John Lacey

Film Convention #2: Badass Western Artifacts and Weaponry

Two vital components to any western film are aura and legend. Successful westerns need to convey an inherent primordial lawlessness and chaos that would allow the characters in them to exist and thrive. Everything contributes to this feeling: the horses, the guns, the outpost town and its saloons and hotels, the desert or mountain surroundings, even the dirt and grime that covers most of the people. All of these factors must be spot-on in order to create the western illusion and to allow us to suspend our disbelief.

Nothing in a western embodies aura and legend more than the heroes and villains in these films. Their exploits are often well known by the other characters in the town, who speak of them in reverent or frightful tones. Western heroes and villains often have either cool or menacing nicknames, immediately distinguishing them from the two-dimensional riff-raff that otherwise inhabits the town. These characters command authority, from the other characters, from the filmmakers, and ultimately, from the viewer.

A convention often used in western films to push these main characters over the top is to adorn them with an artifact or weapon that works to strengthen the character’s motives or to make them seem even more unstoppable. Today, we’ll take a look at a few examples. Some are items, but not weapons, that spell doom for an enemy when they make their appearance. Others are unique or formidable weapons, like guns or knives, that give them an advantage in their nomadic travels and chance encounters.

“El Indio” – played by Gian Maria Volonté – For A Few Dollars More (1965)

“El Indio” is the principal villain in the second film of the Man with No Name trilogy (following A Fistful of Dollars and preceding The Good, the Bad, And the Ugly). Indio is the most wanted fugitive of the outlaw west. He’s a seemingly bipolar killer who operates under the pretense of being a bandit and bank robber. Though much of the action in the film revolves around an Indio-orchestrated bank robbery, the man himself is insanely detached from his actions, and we only see glimpses of his genuine humanity when he tortures and kills his enemies and those unfortunate enough to run afoul of him.

To torture, he uses a musical pocketwatch. He obtained the pocketwatch, we learn, from a woman he raped years ago. The woman was so disgusted and shamed that she committed suicide in the middle of the crime, and Indio stole her pocketwatch as a keepsake of that demented moment. Indio challenges his opponents to duels in the film, using the chimes of the pocketwatch as an indicator of when the duel begins and when the participants can fire on one another. Only Indio knows the chimes of the watch and exactly when the music will end. Multiple scenes in For A Few Dollars More consist of Indio’s enemy rigid with fright, awaiting an inevitable death while they both wait for the chimes to complete. Indio couples this unfair advantage with his expert gunmanship, meaning that the chimes of the pocketwatch mean certain death for whoever hears them.

“Silence” – played by Jean-Louis Trintignant – The Great Silence (1968)

Sometimes these weapons and artifacts don’t have a long back story. Silence, the appropriately named hero of The Great Silence, eliminates evil bounty hunters with a simple but awesome rapid-fire pistol. No story is given as to its origin, but we can tell from the way that Silence shoots this pistol that he’s had it for a long time, and that it has ended the lives of many people. Whereas in some films, like the aforementioned For A Few Dollars More, the item adds to and builds on the character, in some cases the character adds to the item. The protagonists in The Great Silence are Silence, a mute, scarred gunfighter railing against frontier injustice, and the maniacal Loco (played by Klaus Kinski), a bounty-hunting killer indiscriminately and excessively ravaging the local populace. Their conflicting personalities drive the film, and in this case they lend weight and importance to their weapons, particularly whether Silence has enough firepower to overcome his nemesis.

“Harmonica” – played by Charles Bronson – Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

The harmonica in Once Upon a Time in the West serves a similar purpose to the pocketwatch in For A Few Dollars More (which makes sense, because Sergio Leone directed both films). The harmonica is meant to portend doom for those who hear it. Charles Bronson (he of Death Wish fame) plays “Harmonica”, who is actually unnamed in the film but gains this moniker because of his penchant for playing an eerie repeating tune on his namesake throughout the film.

Harmonica spends the film following Frank (Henry Fonda, in perhaps the best villainous performance in film history). You see, years before the events of the film, Frank tied a noose around Harmonica’s older brother’s neck, and forced Harmonica to support his brother and save him from hanging by standing underneath him for support. As Harmonica struggled, Frank stuffed an actual harmonica in his mouth, hence the gimmick and the name. The older brother died, but the harmonica became a calling card and provided a swan song to those that would soon be defeated in battle. Frank, too, is forced to hear that eerie song right before Harmonica gets his revenge.

“Django” – played by Franco Nero – Django (1966)

Django may have the greatest weapon of all western characters. A hero, he drags a coffin with him everywhere he goes. We don’t at first know what is in the coffin, but when Django is pressed into combat, we learn that it conceals a machine gun, which makes quick work of his pistol-carrying adversaries.

The Django character is an interesting case because the machine gun itself is so ridiculous and dwarfs the relatively puny weaponry of his foes, allowing Django to destroy large quantities of enemies at once. More interesting is the visual aesthetic of Django dragging his coffin, an image that has been recycled by a number of musicians and films (including countless copycat Django-themed westerns). The coffin gun provides both the character and the film an iconic weapon and an indelible image.

“Britt” – played by James Coburn – The Magnificent Seven (1960)

You may know James Coburn as the old commodore who didn’t cheat well enough at the final poker table in Maverick, but thirty-five years prior he was a switchblade-throwing hero in The Magnificent Seven. Coburn later became a western veteran, but here he was a fresh-faced newcomer to the genre, playing a character that is lightning-quick with a knife.

Knives aren’t often used as primary weapons in westerns because they aren’t as exciting as guns, but the film takes pains to show just how good Coburn is to establish him as a threat. When we’re introduced to him, we see him challenged to throw his knife faster than a bullet. He easily wins the contest, but the challenger demands that they duel, knife against bullet, for real. Coburn wins that battle, too, showing that western weaponry isn’t limited to enormous or otherwise crazy guns.

John Lacey