Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie (1972 Luis Buñuel)

Written by Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière, Oscar-nominated (won BAFTA), winner of the Best Foreign Film Oscar and BAFTA. Interestingly didn't pick up French Oscars or Cannes prizes.

Fabulous cast: Fernando Rey, Delphine Seyrig, Bulle Ogier, Stéphane Audran, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Paul Frankeur, Julien Berthau (Monsignor).

Photographed by Edmond Richard.

Most enjoyed performances. Very funny. Dreams in dreams (soldier). Inspired The Meaning of Life? (Probably.)

Taxi Driver (1976 Martin Scorsese)

Scorsese was so lucky to get Herrmann's last great score. According to Time Out  his "remarkable score was completed hours before his death in December 1975".

The naturalistic sound effects are great - you often feel you are in the café etc.

Powell's red! Vertigo's green and red! French!

Probably Scorsese's best film - he needs to go back to this.

19 September 2010

Again. It seemed very French this time.  A work of genius. He should have won the Oscar for this (not even nominated, naturally.)

Everyone's in it (Harvey Keitel, Albert Brooks, Cybill Shepherd, Peter Boyle, Jodie Foster...)   

19 June 2010

(While the Q sang to herself in the bar.)

It made me think of killers like Derek Bird (Cumbria shootist) - he even tries to shoot himself in the end.

It also made be think of influence on Tarantino, especially where Scorsese is in the back of the taxi.

The last shots of Shepherd in the rear view mirror in a sea of light are absolutely beautiful (Michael Chapman):

 Scorsese's list of influences is remarkable: Godard, Fassbinder's Merchant of Four Seasons (for the blocking: arrangement of actors in the frame), Francesco Rosi's Salvatore Giuliano (1962), Louis Malle's  Le Feu Follet (The Fire Within) (1963; to look like this but in colour), The Wrong Man (camera moves, guilt and paranoia) and Jack Hazan's A Bigger Splash (1973) with David Hockney for its square on framing. And film noir, which he expressly states runs from Double Indemnity to Kiss Me Deadly.

What's surprising is how little Jodie Foster is in it.

In Tarantino's Top 10. I wanted to watch it again the next night.

Scorsese driven by de Niro, shot by Steve Schapiro.

Top Boy (2011 Yann Demange, writer Ronan Bennett)

Demange had made Criminal Justice (2009), Dead Set, Secret Diary of a Call Girl. Bennett had written Hidden, Public Enemies (Johnny Depp, gangster), 10 Days to War, Face (1997).

With Malcolm Kumelete (the young RaNell), Sharon Duncan Brewster (mum), Kierston Wareing (Luther, The Shadow Line, 5 Daughters, Fish Tank), Ashely Walters (top dog) and Kane Robinson, Giacomo Mancini (RaNell's friend).

Photographed by Tat Radcliffe (My Family and Other Animals, Casanova, The Shadow Line) in a particularly green pallette. Very good music by Brian Eno.

More than an echo of Mean Streets (not, as some would have it, a British The Wire).

Tree of Life (2011 Terence Malick & scr)

Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Hunter McCracken, Laramie Eppler.

Photographed by Emmanuel Lubezki. Music by Alexandre Desplat.

Hypnotic event, giant. How does Malick get the performances out of the boys? Utterly extraordinary and unlike anything else, though made me think of Tarkovsky a lot. Sean Penn's in this film. Also amazingly edited, plus roving Steadicam gives it intense momentum.

P.S. 3/11/23. Wonder how much I'd still like it after Song To Song...

Quando Sei Nato Non Puoi Più Nasconderti / Once You're Born You Can No Longer Hide (2005 Marco Tullio Giordana & co-scr)

Written with Sandro Petraglia & Stefano Rulli, book Maria Pace Ottieri.

Ph Roberto Forza, Panavision.

Alessio Boni, Matteo Gadola (Sandro), Michela Cescon, Ester Hazan (the girl), Vlad Alexandru Toma ('brother'), Rodolfo Corsato, Adriana Asti (the youth judge).

Monocular story (to use Paul Schrader's expression) of Sandro's journey, cleverly assembled and strong on audience manipulation, particularly in scarily shot night scenes. Has quite a twist, and the slightly inconclusive ending seems right in that context.

Won three Italian Globes.

Wallander

Finished the second series of Wallander, another collection of snakey, one word titled stories. Both trainees Pontus and Isabelle get shot, and the latter gets into serious trouble with her ex in the penultimate episode. In the last, the writers adhere to the golden rule of 'never kill the dog' and Jüssi escapes with a hurt leg, and the series ends with Jüssi licking the little Lithuanian girl's face while Wallander accompanies her to Stockholm. "When will you be back?" Svartman asks. "I'm not sure."

Come and See / Иди и смотри / Idi i Smotri (1985 Elem Klimov)

Written by he and Ales Adamovich, based on a 1978 book 'I Am From the Firey Village'.

I managed to take a breath after about an hour of Elem Klimov's final film, Come and See, when a hiatus occurs after a barrage of unrelenting sound and devastating images. This is a war film totally unlike anyone else's. No doubt Roger Deakins (who recommended it) admired Alekei Rodinov's amazing tracking shots in difficult light.

Hallucinogenic and searingly powerful, after which Q said I looked 'depressed'.

Blackmail (1929 Alfred Hitchcock, and adaptation)

Play  Charles Bennett, also wrote key b&w Hitches.

Anny Ondra, Donald Calthrop, John Longden, Cyril Ritchard, Sara Allgood (mum), Charles Paton (dad) and Joan Barry (Anny's voice).

Ph. Jack Cox. Uncredited and possibly fictitious contribution from Michael Powell!

Longden is very leaden in some (though not all) places. Rest of cast good esp. Calthrop. Camera fluid, cutting evidence of Eisenstein, looks crude at times, clever at others (her memory of dead arm cuts to tramp's, scream is landlady's at discovering corpse).

Tricks us by beginning as silent with effective expressionistic Flying Squad scene, then effortlessly switches to sound. Despite occasional staginess, has plenty of Hitchcocky stuff going on.

Hitch seems obsessed by the sound of car klaxons going off all the time, which is quite endearing, and offsets the unenjoyable music.

Shanghai (2010 Mikael Håfström)

Scr Hossein Amini.

John Cusack, Gong Li, Chow Yun Fat, Ken Watanabe, Franka Potente (!), Hugh Bonneville

Ph. Benoit Delhomme, Panavision
Ed. Peter Boyle, Kevin Tent
Good prod. des. Jim Clay (looks expensive)

Brutal depiction of events (in noiry voiceover) in 1941 Shanghai, surrounded by Chinese - Japanese war, which Mark Cousins told us killed 13 million people. Actually, I would have enjoyed the beheading (Q wondered if head ever stayed on, and I conjectured in some Asian film that had probably happened).

Somehow lacks the pull of a good dramatic narrative and - as so often - needs vital shots of humour.

Film seems strangely to have disappeared from sight (we have Dutch version which seems to miss Chinese subtitles).

Bon Voyage (1962 James Neilson)

Fred MacMurray, Jane Wyman, some other people.

Overlong film isn't too funny or annoying, focus on family stresses without too much back projection. Paris police on seeing finger emerge from manhole probably thought "the surrealists are at it again". Actually, both friend and wife-stealer are both annoying.

Disney.

They Made Me a Fugitive (1947 Cavalcanti)

Scr. Noel Langley, novel Jackson Budd.

Trevor Howard, Sally Gray, Griffith Jones (a memorably nasty turn), René Ray, Mary Merrall (the old lady)

Ph. Otto Heller, Mus. Marius François Gaillard

Unexpectedly tough revenge thriller which hardly lets up from the start, with an almost Performance-like realistic underworld and sharp, sardonic dialogue, particularly from crime 'madame' Merrall.

Made for WB UK Ltd, which may explain the title, though the Americans didn't even like it themselves, called it 'I Became a Criminal' and cut 20 minutes down to 78!

Nasty beating up scene, with that shot of Jones' distorted face, and the double-exposed kicking, particularly memorable. Bleak down to the ending: ironic final battle against RIP sign is not the only smart directorial touch.

A Double Life (1947 George Cukor)

Ronald Colman (AA), Signe Hasso, Edmond O'Brien. Shelley Winters, Ray Collins (Bachelor Knight, Best Years..., Kane), Millard Mitchell.

Music Miklos Rosza (AA), ph. Milton Krasner (stylish)
Scr Ruth Gordon (yes, the same one) & Garson Kanin (they were married) - also nom. with Cukor

Not what we were expecting, as bonkers as Black Swan, and we certainly know that scene from Othello well now.

An independent 'G.K.' (Garson Kanin) production.

Kiss Them From Me (1957 Stanley Donen)

scr Julius Epstein, play Luther Davis, novel 'Shore Leave' by Frederic Wakeman

Cary Grant, Jayne Mansfield, Suzy Parker (well-known fashion model), Ray Walston, Larry Blyden, Leif Erickson (ship builder)

Ph. by the always reliable Milton Krasner, in CinemaScope and De Luxe.

Not very funny, but has unexpected anti-war stings in its tail / tale, and is quite risqué for its time. Jayne not unnaturally gives her trademark squeal. C4 presentation looks very slightly stretched?

20th-Fox.

The Man Who Watched Trains Go By (1952 Harold French & co-scr)

Claude Rains, Marius Goring, Marta Toren, Ferdy Mayne, Herbert Lom, Anouk Aimee, Felix Aylmer.

Ph. Otto Heller in his very distinctive pallette.

Downright odd film (source: Georges Simenon), quite dream-like, with a most peculiar ending.

Wanted more Heller, though, so went straight into The Ladykillers. He has 235 film credits, from 1918 - oldest ones look Czech.

The Brave One (2007 Neil Jordan)

Jodie Foster, Terence Howard, Naveen Andrews (a bit).

Curiously uninvolving remake of Death Wish (maybe that's why) despite talent involved. Good vigilante film needed. Jordan puts film on too much of a tilt.

Ph. Philippe Rousselot, Panavision, very green.

Distinctive editing by Tony Lawson.

The guy from Changeling? No - Nicky Katt.

Cocoon (1985 Ron Howard)

The sudden, brilliantly timed appearance of a friendly dolphin in a log sea / night take with Steve Guttenberg is worth the price of admission alone. Also fun are the shenanigans of the oldies, who are Don Ameche, Hume Cronyn (Lifeboat and Shadow of a Doubt early appearances), Wilford Brimley (looking too young really), Jack Gilford (Catch-22, lots on TV), Maureen Stapleton (Q correctly pegs her in The Money Pit; Plaza Suite), Jessica Tandy (Fried Green Tomatoes - Q again, Driving Miss Daisy, Garp, The Birds). Brian Dennehy (Belly of an Architect) is the strangely shaped alien.

Stromboli, Terra Di Dio (1950 Roberto Rossellini & co-scr)

Ingrid Bergman, Mario Vitale.

Music by Roberto's son Renzo, making me think a little of Herrmann. Ph. Otello Martelli.

Bleak but interesting - I don't blame her for wanting to escape. Amazing fishing scene. She attempts even to seduce the priest - scandal!

Talking of which, Bergman fell in love with Rossellini, became pregnant and was blacklisted in Hollywood for years.

Quite understandably there are only a few hundred inhabitants now. Hoping Lipari nothing like it!

Tough, grim way of life presented in neorealist style (non-actors etc.) Neorealism came out of post-war problems and dissatisfaction with film industry by a group of film critics, therefore obvious influence on French New Wave.

There is a funny alternate ending - she does make it over the other side, and there's a fun party town..

Hereafter (2010 Clint Eastwood)

Matt Damon, Cecile de France, Rebekah Staton, Lyndsey Marshal (heroin mum), Frankie and George Mclaren, jay Mohr (Matt's brother), Marthe Keller.

Ph. very darkly by Tom Stern. Scr. Peter Morgan. Music by Clint.

I didn't really get it. Unfortunately the quotes from Dickens are better than anything in the screenplay.

Madeleine (1950 David Lean)

Ann Todd, Norman Wooland, Ivan Desny.

Ph. Guy Green. Music William Alwyn.

Not quite sure why I didn't get on too well with this. Todd's performance somewhat petulant, makes her unsympathetic, in fact only her fiancé I liked. Certainly cinematic in places.

Blithe Spirit (1945 David Lean)

Written and produced by Lean, Ronald Neame and Anthony Havelock-Allen.

Rex Harrison, Constance Cummings, Kay Hammond (Elvira), Margaret Rutherford (energetic - 'That cuckoo's very angry,' 'How can you tell?' 'Timbre.')

The photography (Neame) and make up are very clever, especially in outdoor scenes. Love the realism of the garden backdrop (except when it doesn't move in storm!)

Maid Jacqueline Clarke also in The Way to the Stars.

Suffers from Coward's insistence to change not one detail from the play.

Mi Fratello è Figlio Unico / My Brother Is An Only Child (2007 Daniele Luchetti & co-scr)

Unsurprisingly - sharing the same writers Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli - it comes across as a mini-Meglio Giuventu, setting a family saga within the mess of modern Italian politics, and charting the course of two brothers, Elio Germano and Riccardo Scamarcio, and how the former travels through Facism (egged on by substitute father Luca Zingaretti), communism, and finally honorable family man, in part down to love for Angela Finocchiaro.

Distinctive sounds courtesy Franco Piersanti. Ph. Caludio Collepiccolo.

Le Souffle au Coeur (1971 Louis Malle & scr)

Lea Massari, Benoit Ferreux, Daneil Géllu, Michael Lonsdale.

Ph. Richard Aronovich. Lots of Charlie Parker.

Not your average coming-of-age film, unpleasant story charts adventures of callous youth, whose mother is somewhat over-solicitous to him!

Maltin "Builds to a thoroughly delightful resolution"?? What film was he watching?

M*A*S*H (1970 Robert Altman)

Scr Richard Hooker (& novel), Ring Lardner Jr.

Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Tom Skerritt, Sally Kellerman, Robert Duvall, Roger Bowen (Colonel), Gary Burghoff (Radar), Micahel Murphy, Jo Ann Pflug, Bud Cort.

Ph. Harold E Stine, Panavision.

Another film Q didn't want to watch then thoroughly enjoyed. Radar stealing Colonel's blood; dog in Sugar Lips line-up; Keystone Cop moments; overlapping dialogue; frequently pointless PA system; completely useless priest.

Kinamand / Chinaman (2005 Henrik Ruben Genz)

Bjarne Henriksen, Vivian Wu (The Last Emperor, many others). Linkun Wu (working as a bus driver when cast fo this, his first film).

Scr. Kim Fupz Aakeson.

Maybe a shade too gentle and slight. But fun. The first Chinese-Finnish co-production.

Une Femme Infidèle (1969 Claude Chabrol & scr)

Stephane Audran, Michel Bouquet (an unforgettable performance), Maurice Ronet.

Beautifully simple.

Loved the giant Zippo!

Ph. Jean Rabier

 

Sophie's Choice (1982 Alan J Pakula & scr)

Meryl Streep (AA), Kevin Kline, Peter MacNichol.

Ph. Nestor Almendros.

It wasn't all depressing, contrary to urban myth.

Oh, Mr. Porter (1937 Marcel Varnee)

Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat were writers.

Will Hay, Moore Marriott, Graham Moffat (the three often appeared together; Moffat is the 'Seven Sisters sergeant' in Canterbury Tale.)

Funny gags at outset not sustained ('What happened to him?' 'I don't know, but I remember we sent a wreath') but good windmill and train chase scenes.

Ph. Arthur Crabtree.

The Poseiden Adventure (1972 Ronald Neame)

Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Stella Stevens (his wife), Red Buttons, Roddy McDowell, Shelly Winters, Jack Albertson (her husband), Pamela Sue Martin, Eric Shea (her brother), Carol Lynley (the singer), Leslie Nielsen (difficult now to take seriously in anything).

I though the other preacher looked familiar - Arthur O'Connell from Anatomy of a Murder, written by Wendell Mayes, who also wrote this (with Sterling Silliphant). Music John Willimas.

It was more tragic than I remembered. And, therefore, not as much fun. The lengths some filmmakers will go to show off girls' legs...

Le Feu Follet (1963 Louis Malle)

Maurice Ronet kills himself.

Malle doing Bresson before Bresson.

Volker Scholdorff is assistant director.

Zazie Dans le Métro (1960 Louis Malle & co-scr)

Catherine Demongeot, Phillipe Noiret, Hubert Deschamps, the striking-looking Carla Marlier.

It's as though Malle saw what the New Wave were doing (referenced in the film), then threw away the rule book. The dazzling tricks and colour (ph. Henri Raichi) seem to have influenced Amelie, or closer in time, Dick Lester's Beatles films and the swinging sixties, though the hilarious chase sequence is pure Warner Bros. cartoon. Zazie's coarse language also makes us think of Paper Moon.

But it's all too much - needs a chill-out section, which it nears in a night scene with a great jazz-pop score - and the end punch-up in the restaurant is just silly (though even here there's a very Godardy device of background images being bigger than the foreground). The scenes atop the Eiffel Tower are terrifying.

Richard Ayowade reckons he watches this film once a month.

12:01 (1993 Jack Sholder)

Richard Lupoff's story was first published in 1973 and filmed as a short by Jonathan Heap in 1990.

Lupoff and Heap were 'outraged' by Groundhog Day but no legal action was taken (presumably a David and Goliath scenario would have ensued).

Jonathan Silverman, Helen Slater, Martin Landau, Jeremy Piven.

Beggars of Life (1928 William Wellman)

If you screw your eyes up and peer hard into the screen you can just about make out the faces of Louise Brooks, Richard Arlen and Wallace Beery in the tinted murk of my copy of the ultra-rare Beggars of Life. After a while, the totally unsynced classical music background (Swan lake, most inappropriately) is so distracting it's better to watch with the sound of birds in our garden instead. Funnily enough, it's playing at the BFI next month, having been restored by George Eastman House, with the Dodge Brothers playing the music.

Anyway, I managed to pick out enough film to realise it's brisk and modern. Lulu's story is told with no titles, and of course all eyes are on her, until Beery turns up behind a case of XXX moonshine, larger than the other beggars, and following a hilariously worded kangaroo court, decides to make Lulu his 'ward', a tight corner she manages to sly her way out of. There are some thrilling scenes with trains, looking uncomfortably real.

The source was Jim Tully's 1924 'hobo autobiography'.

Valerie a Týden Divu / Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970 Jaromil Jires)

About as close to a dream as you can get, whilst remarkably holding the attention, and quite unlike anything I've seen, inspiring thoughts of Cocteau, Borowczyk and Rollin. Film writer Michael Brooke usefully introduces us to poetist author Vitezlav Nezval, inspired by Gothic literature and dream theory, and film collaborator and writer Ester Krumbachova (you start sounding very intelligent rolling names like this off the tongue), and argues that the film is not strictly surrealist and it's not 'continually trying to subvert a world view'. He also points to the influence on Angela Carter's 'Company of Wolves'.

The kaleidoscope of dream / flawed logic ('I've never had a girlfriend before'), startling imagery (birds, weasels, fire, horses), characters whose identities constantly change, shifts of mood, the familiar in the bizarre, are stunningly shot by Jan Curik and scored by Lubos Fiser. The flashes of nude grapplings are not as erotic as claimed and seeing as Jaroslava Schallerová actually was thirteen at the time, it's probably just as well.

An Education (2009 Lone Scherfig)

Carey Mulligan (BAFTA), Peter Sarsgaard (what a shit!), Alfred Molina, Olivia Williams (teacher), Rosamund Pike (her face of boredom in classical concert is brilliant), Dominic Cooper, Cara Seymour (mother), Emma Thompson.

scr Nick Hornby from Lynne Barber memoir
Ph. John de Borman

49th Parallel (1941 Michael Powell)

I really don't know where Powell was going with this one: where's the great talent he supposedly surrounds himself with? In this paltry assemblage, he finds Oscar-winning Pressburger, David Lean as editor, Frederick Young on camera and some dude named Vaughan Williams composing, and could then only find the likes of Olivier, Leslie Howard, Eric Portman, Anton Walbrook and Raymond Massey to act in it.

The German U-Boat crew are memorably nasty, except of course for nice Raymond Lovell, who's shot for wanting to be a baker. Damn those Nazis!

Une Femme Douce (1969 Robert Bresson)

After Une Femme Douce was over Q asked me if it was good, and I said "I don't know"... It has an astonishing opening and its treatment of the relationship of Dominique Sanda and Guy Franqin is typically lean and Bressonian. It's one of his 'lucid' films, his first in colour (Ghislain Cloquet again), and very hard to get hold of, even in France.

Ascenseur Pour L'Echafaud / Lift to the Scaffold (1958 Louis Malle)

Existential 1950s night-time Paris, with Miles Davis score and even Lino Ventura: does Sunday morning get any better? Malle's debut followed a stint on A Man Escaped, cueing priosony lift sequences (Bresson, with Renoir, Malle's heroes) and sort of Hitchcocky too. Henri Decae's naturalistic photography highly influential to nouvelle vague, of which Malle was not a part.