19th Century writers were wonderfully unembarrassed to elaborate a metaphor. They could go on for pages. Here at the beginning of the 21st Century I’m hesitant to use one at all, but here goes.
I’ve recently seen three good films with great performances, real jewels, shining at their centers. They are “Milk”, “The Wrestler” and “I’ve Loved You So Long”. I’m going to make each review into its own post.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Friday, December 19, 2008
Let the Right One In (revisited briefly)
Although the San Francisco Film Critics Circle is hardly a name to conjure with, I was happy to see that they voted “Let the Right One In” the best foreign film of 2008. It means something that the film critics for most of the media in the Bay Area voted for this excellent little film. Apparently, Oskar and Eli come to DVD in March.
Monday, December 1, 2008
Let the Right One In
“Twilight” is in lots of theaters right now. According to the reviews it’s the film version of the first of a series of Romance novels with a vampire theme, aimed at pre-teen and teenage girls. Apparently some of the vampires are reformed and get by on animal blood. And they make really cute and soulful boyfriends. It’s sold a lot of tickets.
The Swedish film, “Let the Right One In”, which is in exactly one theater in San Francisco, isn’t like that. It is the story of a romance between the blond, angelic looking Oskar and the dark haired, pale Eli. He’s twelve and so is she, but as she says, she’s been twelve for a long time. She also mentions eventually that she’s not really a girl. In this film a vampire drinks human blood and getting the blood out of the human can be a messy business.
It takes place in a working class suburb of Stockholm. Oskar is ping-ponged between his divorced parents’ places and is bullied at school by a particularly odious classmate and his two henchmen. He’s full of rage and frustration but doesn’t act on it. He’s lonely. Eli moves into the apartment next to Oskar’s at night. She lives with a middle aged man who seems to be her guardian. Oskar meets Eli at night by a snow covered jungle gym. She doesn’t feel the cold.
I felt the cold. I was on the edge of my seat for most of the film because I liked Oskar and Eli and didn’t know what was going to happen to them in this seeming unconventional vampire film. And then I realized that the filmmakers were going to honor the conventions of the classic vampire story in a brilliant way.
I don’t want to give anything else away but this is a very good film, creepy and darkly funny, and I urge my stalwart readers who haven’t seen it, to see it. And for those Bram Stoker fans among you I’ll give a little more away by saying that the film could have been subtitled “The New Renfield”.
The Swedish film, “Let the Right One In”, which is in exactly one theater in San Francisco, isn’t like that. It is the story of a romance between the blond, angelic looking Oskar and the dark haired, pale Eli. He’s twelve and so is she, but as she says, she’s been twelve for a long time. She also mentions eventually that she’s not really a girl. In this film a vampire drinks human blood and getting the blood out of the human can be a messy business.
It takes place in a working class suburb of Stockholm. Oskar is ping-ponged between his divorced parents’ places and is bullied at school by a particularly odious classmate and his two henchmen. He’s full of rage and frustration but doesn’t act on it. He’s lonely. Eli moves into the apartment next to Oskar’s at night. She lives with a middle aged man who seems to be her guardian. Oskar meets Eli at night by a snow covered jungle gym. She doesn’t feel the cold.
I felt the cold. I was on the edge of my seat for most of the film because I liked Oskar and Eli and didn’t know what was going to happen to them in this seeming unconventional vampire film. And then I realized that the filmmakers were going to honor the conventions of the classic vampire story in a brilliant way.
I don’t want to give anything else away but this is a very good film, creepy and darkly funny, and I urge my stalwart readers who haven’t seen it, to see it. And for those Bram Stoker fans among you I’ll give a little more away by saying that the film could have been subtitled “The New Renfield”.
Friday, November 7, 2008
La Nuit des morts vivants
When I started The Bureau, it was my intention to only write about things that I had enjoyed. I didn’t see the point of bringing something up just to beat on it. I rented “Lola Montez” thinking I would be writing about a masterpiece but ended up writing about the film I had actually seen.
I watched about 20 minutes of Robert Bresson’s “Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne” some months ago before turning it off in boredom. I wondered if I should give it another chance, since I had watched it after a big meal with wine, but the DVD sat around and I finally sent it back to Netflix.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I had my pocket picked on the Paris Metro this past summer. I’ve told the tale to all who would listen since I at least got a story for my lost Euros and inconvenience. One of the people who heard the story mentioned that Bresson had a film about a Paris pickpocket. Voilà, I could give the famous filmmaker one more chance.
I started watching Bresson's "Pickpocket" in the late afternoon, fully alert. Initially I was interested, but I rapidly noted that everyone in it was wooden, dour and, when called upon to portray any emotion, incredibly inept. It was like watching a zombie film without any gore or humor. I turned it off after 45 minutes, mystified.
I looked Bresson up on the invaluable Wikipedia and it all became clear. Here’s the description of his method with actors:
“With his 'actor-model' technique, Bresson's actors were required to repeat multiple takes of each scene until all semblances of 'performance' were stripped away, leaving a stark effect that registers as both subtle and raw, and one that can only be found in the cinema.”
And further:
“Some feel that Bresson's Catholic upbringing and Jansenist belief-system lie behind the thematic structure of most of his films.”
I felt like a complete bozo. Over the years I’d read critics who mentioned his asceticism or his nonprofessional actors or his stylized acting methods but no one just came out and said that he was making Catholic zombie pageants! If that’s your taste, fine, but I got my degree from a Jesuit university in the last year of the Johnson administration and turned my back on that stuff forever.
On the plus side I can take M. Bresson off the list of directors whose films I really ought to take a look at.
I watched about 20 minutes of Robert Bresson’s “Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne” some months ago before turning it off in boredom. I wondered if I should give it another chance, since I had watched it after a big meal with wine, but the DVD sat around and I finally sent it back to Netflix.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I had my pocket picked on the Paris Metro this past summer. I’ve told the tale to all who would listen since I at least got a story for my lost Euros and inconvenience. One of the people who heard the story mentioned that Bresson had a film about a Paris pickpocket. Voilà, I could give the famous filmmaker one more chance.
I started watching Bresson's "Pickpocket" in the late afternoon, fully alert. Initially I was interested, but I rapidly noted that everyone in it was wooden, dour and, when called upon to portray any emotion, incredibly inept. It was like watching a zombie film without any gore or humor. I turned it off after 45 minutes, mystified.
I looked Bresson up on the invaluable Wikipedia and it all became clear. Here’s the description of his method with actors:
“With his 'actor-model' technique, Bresson's actors were required to repeat multiple takes of each scene until all semblances of 'performance' were stripped away, leaving a stark effect that registers as both subtle and raw, and one that can only be found in the cinema.”
And further:
“Some feel that Bresson's Catholic upbringing and Jansenist belief-system lie behind the thematic structure of most of his films.”
I felt like a complete bozo. Over the years I’d read critics who mentioned his asceticism or his nonprofessional actors or his stylized acting methods but no one just came out and said that he was making Catholic zombie pageants! If that’s your taste, fine, but I got my degree from a Jesuit university in the last year of the Johnson administration and turned my back on that stuff forever.
On the plus side I can take M. Bresson off the list of directors whose films I really ought to take a look at.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Bad Beer
Proust had his madeleine and I have the bad beer of my youth. In his case it was the taste of a fragment of buttery madeleine soaked in tea that evoked a forgotten memory. Luckily I didn’t have to taste any of the aforesaid bad beers since they mostly disappeared several decades ago. It was an article (you may have to endure an ad) in Salon.com that triggered my memories.
It turns out that with the sale of Anheuser-Busch to the Belgians, Pabst is the largest American owned brewing conglomerate. According to the article they’ve also acquired many of the national and regional cheap beers and, if they don’t retire them, they keep the label and fill the bottles with something made by Pabst.
The only Western New York label they mentioned in the article was Genesee Cream Ale but it got me thinking about driving up a two lane highway, maybe an hour outside of Buffalo, heading to graduate school in that city in 1968, and seeing a weathered sign for Topper Beer, with the silhouette of a dapper gent in a top hat. I’d never heard of it but it seemed to announce that I was in new territory now. I really had left the Washington D.C. area where I had spent my life so far.
America at one time had hundreds of brands of beer but by the late 1960s they had mostly disappeared, victims of their inability to compete with the big national brands. Of course they really didn’t have much of a basis for competing since all American beer tasted pretty much the same, except for some that tasted particularly bad. American beer was a universal anodyne lager and the national brands had more money for advertising to push their imaginary unique qualities.
When I got to Buffalo I found that Topper was not generally available (it was actually a Rochester beer) except on tap at a particularly low dive on Allen St. that was briefly popular with grad students from the English Department I was part of. I’ve forgotten the name of the bar and the beer tasted like all the others. Iroquois Beer was local but wasn’t very good and the label featured a painting of a Native American wearing the war bonnet of the Plains Indians, which had nothing to do with the Iroquois.
A friend and I took up Stroh’s. It was made in Detroit and, in an effort to get it into the Buffalo market, was selling for 99 cents a six-pack. Plus it was “fire brewed”, although if that process added anything extra to the taste of the beer, I could not detect it. We did discover a great selling point with a select audience, but societal prejudice would have kept the brewery from advertising it. After taking acid that was far too powerful, out in the wonderfully named Zoar Valley, the same friend and I made a hallucinatory and dangerous trip back to Buffalo and, lacking Thorazine©, drank a ridiculous amount of Stroh’s. It smoothed out the rough edges and brought us back to “normal” reality.
Even back then I really liked the idea of regional beer, beer rooted in the history of a place. Maybe at one time the various beers of America did taste very different from region to region but refrigeration and industrial methods had robbed them of any uniqueness. A decade later I made it to San Francisco and tasted Anchor Steam. It didn’t taste like anything else. Within a few years it was joined by other beers from small regional breweries.
Today we have battalions of artisanal beer and, although they probably represent a tiny fraction of the beer sales in this country which is still dominated by the horsemen of the “Lite” brewing apocalypse, many are delicious and they don’t taste like each other. Bravo!
The logo below doesn’t really equal my vision on that country road but I thank this web site for it.
It turns out that with the sale of Anheuser-Busch to the Belgians, Pabst is the largest American owned brewing conglomerate. According to the article they’ve also acquired many of the national and regional cheap beers and, if they don’t retire them, they keep the label and fill the bottles with something made by Pabst.
The only Western New York label they mentioned in the article was Genesee Cream Ale but it got me thinking about driving up a two lane highway, maybe an hour outside of Buffalo, heading to graduate school in that city in 1968, and seeing a weathered sign for Topper Beer, with the silhouette of a dapper gent in a top hat. I’d never heard of it but it seemed to announce that I was in new territory now. I really had left the Washington D.C. area where I had spent my life so far.
America at one time had hundreds of brands of beer but by the late 1960s they had mostly disappeared, victims of their inability to compete with the big national brands. Of course they really didn’t have much of a basis for competing since all American beer tasted pretty much the same, except for some that tasted particularly bad. American beer was a universal anodyne lager and the national brands had more money for advertising to push their imaginary unique qualities.
When I got to Buffalo I found that Topper was not generally available (it was actually a Rochester beer) except on tap at a particularly low dive on Allen St. that was briefly popular with grad students from the English Department I was part of. I’ve forgotten the name of the bar and the beer tasted like all the others. Iroquois Beer was local but wasn’t very good and the label featured a painting of a Native American wearing the war bonnet of the Plains Indians, which had nothing to do with the Iroquois.
A friend and I took up Stroh’s. It was made in Detroit and, in an effort to get it into the Buffalo market, was selling for 99 cents a six-pack. Plus it was “fire brewed”, although if that process added anything extra to the taste of the beer, I could not detect it. We did discover a great selling point with a select audience, but societal prejudice would have kept the brewery from advertising it. After taking acid that was far too powerful, out in the wonderfully named Zoar Valley, the same friend and I made a hallucinatory and dangerous trip back to Buffalo and, lacking Thorazine©, drank a ridiculous amount of Stroh’s. It smoothed out the rough edges and brought us back to “normal” reality.
Even back then I really liked the idea of regional beer, beer rooted in the history of a place. Maybe at one time the various beers of America did taste very different from region to region but refrigeration and industrial methods had robbed them of any uniqueness. A decade later I made it to San Francisco and tasted Anchor Steam. It didn’t taste like anything else. Within a few years it was joined by other beers from small regional breweries.
Today we have battalions of artisanal beer and, although they probably represent a tiny fraction of the beer sales in this country which is still dominated by the horsemen of the “Lite” brewing apocalypse, many are delicious and they don’t taste like each other. Bravo!
The logo below doesn’t really equal my vision on that country road but I thank this web site for it.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Lola Montez
When I watched Max Ophuls’ “Lola Montez” (1955), I was delighted to find a shout-out from the 1950s to my adopted city of San Francisco. There’s a scene where the ringmaster of an American circus (Peter Ustinov) offers Lola Montez (Martine Carol) a job as the main attraction---a sort of freak/fetish object whose scandalous life story will titillate the audience. In listing his own résumé the ringmaster mentions that he found the three headed woman for Barnum, booked the only elephant that could play the piano and, in New York, filled the house for four weeks with the anarchists who killed the Sultan of Turkey. In San Francisco the run was five and a half weeks. Bravo! We’ve had our reputation for a long time.
Speaking of reputation, the film has a good one with many critics and I was primed to like it, but ended up enjoying it more as an introduction to the historical Lola Montez than as a work of art. The central conceit of the film is that Lola has finally taken the job with the circus and we cut between the big top show that tells the story of her life and the actual scenes of it. This framing device is interesting initially but increasingly serves to distance the viewer from the material. It doesn’t help that Martine Carol is not a good actress. I wanted to be moved by the material but was just occasionally amused.
The film is an odd mixture of the modern and the old fashioned. Ophuls’ cynicism about human beings oozes out of every frame, resonating strongly in these degenerate times. He also shows a feminist understanding of how Lola’s beauty and fearless pursuit of sexual affairs fascinates society at the same time that it causes it to want to destroy her. In the final scene of the film Lola kneels in a decorated cage with her hands through the bars, so that two lines of men can file by and kiss them, having paid a dollar for the privilege.
On the other hand, the story telling in the vignettes that make up the tale seems a bit musty. It has a whiff of Ruritania or “The Student Prince” about it. Of course a supporter could argue that this is completely appropriate given her affaire with Ludwig I, King of Bavaria.
The film is finally more fun to think about afterwards than it was to watch but does make me want to see some other of Ophuls’ works. As I said before, it also got me interested in the real woman. I can recommend the Wikipedia article on her. Did you know the only house she ever owned was in Grass Valley, CA?
Speaking of reputation, the film has a good one with many critics and I was primed to like it, but ended up enjoying it more as an introduction to the historical Lola Montez than as a work of art. The central conceit of the film is that Lola has finally taken the job with the circus and we cut between the big top show that tells the story of her life and the actual scenes of it. This framing device is interesting initially but increasingly serves to distance the viewer from the material. It doesn’t help that Martine Carol is not a good actress. I wanted to be moved by the material but was just occasionally amused.
The film is an odd mixture of the modern and the old fashioned. Ophuls’ cynicism about human beings oozes out of every frame, resonating strongly in these degenerate times. He also shows a feminist understanding of how Lola’s beauty and fearless pursuit of sexual affairs fascinates society at the same time that it causes it to want to destroy her. In the final scene of the film Lola kneels in a decorated cage with her hands through the bars, so that two lines of men can file by and kiss them, having paid a dollar for the privilege.
On the other hand, the story telling in the vignettes that make up the tale seems a bit musty. It has a whiff of Ruritania or “The Student Prince” about it. Of course a supporter could argue that this is completely appropriate given her affaire with Ludwig I, King of Bavaria.
The film is finally more fun to think about afterwards than it was to watch but does make me want to see some other of Ophuls’ works. As I said before, it also got me interested in the real woman. I can recommend the Wikipedia article on her. Did you know the only house she ever owned was in Grass Valley, CA?
Friday, September 5, 2008
Decalogue 5
Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Decalogue” is a remarkable collection of odd shaped objects. Madame Le Chef and I have watched the first six commandments and they are not a walk in the park, unless it’s a park that’s dark, rundown, confusing, sad, but also very beautiful.
I choose to talk about Decalogue 5 (Thou shall not kill) because it concerns a murder and the execution of the murderer and seems the most straightforward of the episodes. It’s clearly against capital punishment---it’s hardly happenstance that both the murder and the execution are initially botched strangulations. But we wouldn’t expect Kieslowski to make a tidy polemic and, of course, he doesn’t. Yes it’s crime and then punishment but what about the communion picture of the little girl, the mean cab driver, the dog, the sandwich, the other half of the sandwich? He leads us all over the place between beginning and ending with the young defense attorney.
I’ve mentioned before that I have nothing against beautiful messes but this episode is not really a mess. Instead it’s a crafty puzzle that never answers all your questions. The cinematography is beautiful. It tends towards sepia but also has an overexposed look in some exteriors that is reminiscent of Carl Dreyer’s “Vampyr”. The acting is excellent as usual with Kieslowski. The more of his stuff I see, the sadder I am that he died at 54.
I choose to talk about Decalogue 5 (Thou shall not kill) because it concerns a murder and the execution of the murderer and seems the most straightforward of the episodes. It’s clearly against capital punishment---it’s hardly happenstance that both the murder and the execution are initially botched strangulations. But we wouldn’t expect Kieslowski to make a tidy polemic and, of course, he doesn’t. Yes it’s crime and then punishment but what about the communion picture of the little girl, the mean cab driver, the dog, the sandwich, the other half of the sandwich? He leads us all over the place between beginning and ending with the young defense attorney.
I’ve mentioned before that I have nothing against beautiful messes but this episode is not really a mess. Instead it’s a crafty puzzle that never answers all your questions. The cinematography is beautiful. It tends towards sepia but also has an overexposed look in some exteriors that is reminiscent of Carl Dreyer’s “Vampyr”. The acting is excellent as usual with Kieslowski. The more of his stuff I see, the sadder I am that he died at 54.
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