Drop everything and come to Shaw Lido tonight (Sept 19, Mon, 9.30pm) to see Pina, which I saw two days ago and can’t wait to see again. Here’s why:

It’s a vision of the future of 3D cinema. Even more than James Cameron’s Avatar before it, Pina makes a single-handed, multi-bodied case for what 3D cinema should look like if it is to take pride in being a legitimate art form. The elaborate planning needed to capture famed choreographer Pina Bausch’s dances—ingenious with space, and filmed nonstop before live audiences—even implies that 3D might be the key to restoring lost staging practices and less hyperactive editing styles to the movies. (Ironic that this newfangled “gimmick” should offer itself as a potential messiah to all the ever-lamenting Hollywood classicists.)

It’s the hulking Citizen Kane of dance retrospectives. As if its groundbreaking use of deep cinematic space wasn’t enough of a clue, Pina stakes its claim to being the Citizen Kane of dance retrospectives by revealing Bausch to us through the legacies and people she left behind, in ways that defy easy summary. Instead of filming regular talking heads, Wenders layers the testimonies of the dancers of Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal over clips of their faces. More than one reminisces about Bausch’s penetrating gaze, which read them more clearly than they could give voice to, so it’s almost like Wenders is trying to exhume Bausch’s very gaze.

It was almost never made. The attention that Pina accords to the Tanztheater Wuppertal dancers grows even more poignant when you learn that Wenders cancelled plans to make the film after Bausch died unexpectedly, just a few days before filming was initially slated to begin. It was at the behest of these dancers (and Bausch’s fans worldwide) that Wenders decided to press on. “Dance, dance, or we are lost,” cries the movie’s subtitle as the credits end, and I can’t think of a more fitting rallying cry for these people who, through Bausch’s influence and choreography, ask to be found.

CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS
Just as Pina feels infused with the spirit of all the dancers that surrounded its making, Cave of Forgotten Dreams has the head and heart of the people that accompanied its making: academics. It isn’t a knock to say that this documentary about the Chauvet Caves, which hold the earliest cave paintings known to man, feels much like the movie an archaeologist or art historian or anthropologist would have made.

I daresay director Werner Herzog is a little bit of all those respectable professions, and he defers even more to the small group of actual professors in his midst who, like his filmmaking team, have been allowed a rare visit to study the caves under limited time and conditions (no touching, no straying from the narrow central walkway, etc). Yet Herzog’s own specific penchant for spelunking for people’s stories and dreams shines through (an archaeologist he interviews turns out to have been a unicycle-and-juggling circus man), even if his inimitable deadpan sometimes makes his meditations on the subject more portentous than his documentary-101 approach otherwise affords.

A woman getting pounded into by a man oblivious to her distraction, turmoil, inner life: Any cinema that attends to such an image surely has an eye to that woman’s strengths and vulnerabilities in other ways that surprise and resonate.

Which of these performances do you most admire, or look forward to seeing? Do you know of others like them?

• Melanie Lynskey in Heavenly Creatures (1994)
• Julianne Moore in Safe (1995)
• Zhang Ziyi in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
• Nicole Kidman in Birth (2004)
• Tang Wei in Lust, Caution (2007)

Lina Lamont as “Yvonne”: Pierre will save me. Pierre!

“Rouge Noir”: Pierre is miles away, you witch!

Lina as “Yvonne”: No, no, no!

“Rouge Noir”: Yes, yes, yes!

— Singin’ in the Rain (1952)

Stromboli: There! This will be your home, where I can find you always!

Pinocchio: No, no, no!

Stromboli: Yes, yes, yes!

— Pinocchio (1940)

How do you prefer your “No, no, no” and “Yes, yes, yes”?

• With Jean Hagen’s helium-frizzed flutiness and an uncredited actor’s mustachioed villainy in Singin’ in the Rain
• With Dickie Jones’ fear-struck protests and Charles Judels’ hulking malevolence in Pinocchio

Mention your pick in the comments below!

Schindler: There’s no way I could have known this before, but there was always something missing. In every business I tried, I can see now it wasn’t me that had failed. Something was missing. Even if I’d known what it was, there’s nothing I could have done about it, because you can’t create this thing. And it makes all the difference in the world between success and failure.

Emilie: Luck?

Schindler: War.

— Schindler’s List (1993)

Valmont: Now, yes or no? It is up to you, of course. I will merely confine myself to remarking that a “no” will be regarded as a declaration of war. A single word is all that is required.

Merteuil: All right.

Merteuil: War.

— Dangerous Liaisons (1988)

How do you prefer your “War”?

• With Liam Neeson’s suave amorality in Schindler’s List
• With Glenn Close’s vindictive divadom in Dangerous Liaisons

Mention your pick in the comments below!

If there’s any doubt what Belle’s life as a princess will be like after the credits have rolled, this shot provides the answer. ”Far-off places, daring swordfights, magic spells, a prince in disguise”: she’s been there, and more besides. Is there another movie—an animated children’s film, no less—that has so compellingly explored the complex emotional territories of filial self-sacrifice, mob hysteria, the politics of mental illness, and full-blown romantic despair? One imagines Belle will now be content if everything else were to be found just in books. I know I would be, if I had a library like that.

]]> http://www.againstthehype.com/2011/04/beauty-and-the-beasts-best-shot/feed/ 2 http://www.againstthehype.com/2011/04/heavenly-creatures-best-shot/ http://www.againstthehype.com/2011/04/heavenly-creatures-best-shot/#comments Thu, 07 Apr 2011 02:00:55 +0000 Colin Low http://www.againstthehype.com/?p=1841

Back in 1994, Peter Jackson already showed a great facility for having his camera swoop around the vistas of New Zealand. The above swirling shot of Heavenly Creatures might well recall the iconic opening of The Sound of Music—until we hear Juliet Hulmes’ bawling seep into the soundtrack. Using a sunny, animated landscape shot to indicate a tormented interior? Yowza! Indeed, no screencap can do justice to the persistence with which Jackson and his editor Jamie Selkirk keep the camera alive and moving throughout Heavenly Creatures, by means of trailing the wild swoops, fancies and injustices in the minds of its adolescent leads. Come back to us, Peter Jackson!

I’ve tried. I swear I’ve tried. But after numerous repeated viewings, I still look upon Vivien Leigh’s Blache DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire and wonder what gains the feisty, ever resourceful Scarlett O’Hara thinks she’ll get out of posturing so self-consciously and pitching her voice around the range of a twittery coo. It’s a testament to Leigh’s legendary performance as that other Southern belle in Gone with the Wind that it haunts this role too. Yet Leigh is so much more stiffly heightened here, even while keeping within a similar vein of theatricality, that we can’t quite say she’s approaching Blanche as an aged, more destitute remainder of who Scarlett once was either (though now that I would’ve liked to see).

Now, I know a good number of critics whom I admire are fond of how Leigh’s Blanche so clearly knows she doesn’t hold up to the light. And I grant that her overt, somewhat off-putting theatricality does give credence to her antagonist Stanley Kowalski, whom Marlon Brando embodies with slurred, masculine brutishness without turning himself over to a Raging Bull-esque caricature of ego-bruised paranoia. Brando’s Stanley is astute enough to catch just how much flirtation is going into a request for a cigarette, or how much disdain is intended by his wife’s curt naggings about being a pig at the dinner table. This version of A Streetcar Named Desire thus retains a thrilling charge, as we take to Stanley’s clear-eyed grasp of how Blanche’s presence truly encroaches on his marriage and poker-night fiefdom, even as we grow horrified at the lengths to which his inability to stomach Blanche will eventually go.

Failed oppositions
But much as A Streetcar Named Desire enthralls us through these shifting allegiances, I still would have liked for the movie and actress both to have more thoroughly sold me on Blanche’s fantasies and frailties. As written, Tennessee Williams’ masterpiece richly evokes the dialectic between two ways of ekeing out space for oneself, in a life that doesn’t ever serve things up the way you want them. Between a hardbitten refusal of sham, and a wholehearted embrace of romantic fantasies. Between a resolve to assume the worst in people, and a dependence on the kindness of strangers.

It hence feels like a lapse on this dialectic, if not outright treachery, that the movie doesn’t animate itself when Blanche breaks out into a twirl amidst radio jazz and a lantern’s glow; the camera stays cruelly rooted as she dances herself in delusion, just before Stanley charges in to hurl the radio out of a window. Likewise, in the movie’s most overt statement of purpose, Leigh bulges her eyes and hardens her voice as she makes her Norma Desmond-ish pronouncement that “Deliberate cruelty is not forgivable.” What are the gains from burlesquing Blanche in this way? Perhaps one might find the tragedy in her patent self-deceit, but it feels like the kind that forces us into a chilly remove—especially since Williams has stripped her of a moody Gothic estate to help her along, and as noted, director Elia Kazan leaves her to fend for herself amid the grimly realist mise-en-scène.

At best, I can countenance Leigh as fearlessly tamping yet another angle to the dialectic, battling Brando’s gut-tethered Method approach with her own clinical, estranging Brechtian affect. But we know who won this war. We are all Brando’s children, and much as I appreciate the difficulty of Leigh’s work, the drive to accept an actor as fitting naturally into her mise-en-scène makes this Blanche a hurdle I have yet to cross. The most fascinating moment in this movie, for me, is hence reflected in my pick for best shot above. Stanley, who has not long ago burst his top at Blanche’s phoniness, watches as Blanche molts an unvarnished flare of emotion at a dead lover’s letters. Blanche, for her part, will soon shift into a posture of businesslike calm to meet Stanley’s invocation of the Napoleonic Code. Watch as they arrive at some odd understanding, if only for just a while.

A Streetcar Named Desire | 1951 | USA | Director: Elia Kazan | Screenplay: Oscar Saul, Tennessee Williams | Cast: Vivien Leigh, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden

These days, director Christopher Nolan is justifiably esteemed for risking his blockbusters on such nominally cerebral material as Inception, The Dark Knight, and The Prestige. But for me, Nolan’s breakout success Memento—today celebrating the tenth anniversary of its release—is still the movie that best corrals his recurring strengths and weaknesses into one taut package. I’d go further to advise fans and skeptics alike to catch the chronological-order cut of the movie (available on the Limited Edition DVD), which shores up how duly the movie’s meticulous construction serves its high-concept premise, its reliance on copious exposition and its motivating dead lovers—all tropes that have since dogged Nolan’s work, often for the worse.

But more than that, the chronological-order cut also offers a crucial look at how editing can utterly change our conception of an actor’s craft, and a writer-director’s rounded compassion. The above shot, my pick for Nathaniel Roger’s Hit Me with Your Best Shot series, offers the gist of my elations and problems with Memento. I’ve heard somewhere that, coming off the back of The Matrix’s success (my review), Carrie-Anne Moss’ signing on to Memento was what led to the project being green-lit. Funny that we haven’t seen much of her since, while the two movies that remain her most prominent cultural legacies are still going strong a decade later. And they both reduce her to token plot points! That’s irony for you.

Of course, Memento knows from irony; it peddles unabashedly in it. Layered dream-heists, impossibly diabolical terrorist plots, obsessive magicians’ gambits: none of these quite hold a candle to the simplicity and continual thrills of Memento’s backwards chronology, as motivated by the short-term memory loss of its protagonist Leonard Shelby. Yet this doesn’t mean we’re being dropped into scenes without preconceptions, despite some critics’ claims that this continual backwards structure is meant to put us into Leonard’s shoes. It’s not like we have anterograde amnesia ourselves! Given the way the narrative is structured, we know each new scene is going to show us how Leonard’s been duped yet again. The fun of Memento is in seeing how it’s done, and its enjoyably ironic scene-by-scene revelations play out all the way to the celebrated twist ending. As it turns out, that irony holds up just as brutally when we’re going forwards instead of backwards, only we now get to catch Leonard in the very moment of misreading the scenario in which he finds himself.

Warning: Spoilers follow!
With one exception. Carrie-Anne Moss’ performance as Natalie visibly improves from theatrical to chronological-order cut. The problem with Memento’s structure of continual revelations is that they imply that we’re verging onto the truth of what we’re seeing. But what this does for Natalie is “reveal” her to be a femme fatale who is manipulating Leonard for her own purposes, especially since this aligns with Memento’s use of detective noir conventions. However, watching Memento in chronological order, we learn that Natalie is really the character whose motivations happen to shift most across the events of the story. Leonard just keeps trying to find his wife’s killer, and Teddy keeps trying to get him to leave town. By contrast, Natalie has to:

1. Wonder what happened to her boyfriend, and why some oblivious stranger has his clothes and car
2. Realize she’s in deep shit, because the money her boyfriend took with him for a drug deal is now missing
3. Use Leonard as a means of getting rid of her pursuer (Why not? If he shows up with her boyfriend’s stuff, he was probably involved in his disappearance somehow)
4. Repay Leonard’s help by getting info of the driver who owns John G’s license plate, even though he probably won’t remember that he did

Now why would Natalie do this last point, other than out of kindness? Some viewers have floated the possibility that she’s trying to get Leonard to kill the “Teddy” who set up the deal with her boyfriend. Except: 1) nothing in the film indicates that she has enough information to link Teddy with “John Edward Gammell”, and 2) the license plate number is legitimately Teddy’s. This interpretation is likely influenced by the way that the original Memento tracks Natalie’s motivations backwards, so that we’re increasingly met with a Natalie who is justifiably guarded, even furious, at Leonard’s blithe audacity and his cluelessness at her plight.

The truth is, for all Nolan’s investments in scowling, grim-jawed leading men (both here and in his subsequent movies), Carrie-Anne Moss still provides the best snapshot (heh) of grief over a dead lover in his filmography thus far. As she points out to Leonard, in a line that reads as cryptic so early in the original cut, but that is fully attuned to how far she’s come in view of chronological events: “You know what you and I have in common? We are both survivors.” They have also slept together the night before, and Moss astutely implies that Natalie is doing so partly to replace her lost boyfriend (see the shot up top), while also making Natalie pragmatic enough to pull away because Leonard’s not worth the emotional trouble (“You don’t remember me.”) She walks out the diner a survivor, but only before Nolan’s partiality towards cleverness over empathy lead him to remake her in his image.

ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE, ‘74: Starts treacly, but once mother-son duo hit the road, so does film: flighty & grounded at Alice’s pace of life

ENTER THE VOID, ‘09: Low-life melodrama bled through experimental art. “Soul’s eye view” mannered, meditative, crass, whettingly psychedelic

ISHTAR, ‘87: So they made HAROLD & KUMAR movies in the 80s, starring A-listers (Beatty, Hoffman) to boot! Preposterous, broad, kinda funny

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (Extended), ‘01: Expansive, mythmaking

LOVE ME TONIGHT, ‘32: Rickety songs, but crisp chiaroscuro, sprightly direction, comic use of sound make up for a lot. “Oh! oh! oh! oh!…”

MEMENTO (Chronological), ‘00: Brutally ironic. Memory-loss plot duly serves Nolan’s penchant for exposition. His most moving dead wives, too

NEW YORK, NEW YORK, ‘77: De Niro fearlessly mean, Minnelli never splashier; Scorsese milks their push-and-pull with grandiose aplomb

RAGING BULL, ‘80: A stylish, dripping biopic of raw male ego. De Niro’s weight flux a bit gimmicky; Pesci understatedly impressive

SCARFACE, ‘32: Thrilling eruptions of gunfire abound, and yet hammy and preordained as a Thankgiving dinner. Are remakes hammier still?

SHE DONE HIM WRONG, ‘33: Mae West still chews delightfully on her rounded vowels, but scripted quips don’t match her NIGHT AFTER NIGHT debut

STAGECOACH, ‘39: Inventive boxing-in of a tiny motley cast across dusty, empty locales, capped with two genre-making showdowns

TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT, ‘44: Reprises CASABLANCA’s moods of war-time dissent, quiet heroism, sultry exchanges—and yet never feels copied. How?

THE YOUNG MR LINCOLN, ‘39: Atrocious liberal tosh, beautifully staged and lit, tastelessly incoherent on justice and mob rage

BLACK SWAN, ‘10: Aronofsky’s mastery of body horror prickles the skin. Other scare tactics, dance clichés, flat character types unimpressive

I AM LOVE, ‘09: Lavishes on Tilda’s face and body as it does on hairdos, garments, cuisine. But we see, not feel, as she (and plot) unravels

THE SOCIAL NETWORK, ‘10: A new story (Facebook-era entrepreneurship) witticized zippily through old idioms (loneliness of power/fame/riches)

TRON: LEGACY, ‘10: Dramatically conflict-free; no human in sight. Scant SFX-on-rails action better than D.O.A. exposition that drags forever

ALIENS, ‘86: Still enraptured by its tension, weight, mutating missions, fullness as sequel. Removed scenes make theatrical cut less urgent

BALL OF FIRE, ‘41: So dowdy are its professors and mobsters, Stanwyck’s saucy wits unchallenged, though she slips nicely into “vulgar” role

JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH, ‘96: Still a cherished fairytale of adventure and song, imaginatively visualized. Lumley, Margolyes savvily camp

LA JETÉE, ‘62: Haunting visions of apocalypse and lost wonders. Yet don’t all obsessives have this girl, all time-travellers have this end?

MINNIE AND MOSKOWITZ, ‘71: Trainwrecks falling in love—volatile Cassel, desolate Rowlands. Lets them enjoy selves. A New York, New York whose love I believed

MR SOFT TOUCH, ‘49: Trenchantly amoral humor on poverty (and wife-beating, natch) rubs shoulders with sentimentally clichéd narrative

REMEMBER THE NIGHT, ‘40: Stanwyck, too smart by half to be naïve bad-girl, opts for restive observation and snark. Great warmup to THE LADY EVE

THE BLOODY OLIVE, ‘96: Beautifully lit, deliciously farcical short on the noir genre’s requisite twists. See it!

THE RED BALLOON, ‘56: Light and bouncy as title object, but path traced is wholly predictable. Coda reads oddly like a widower on rebound

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE, ‘09: Dares to be terminally sour on childhood neglect and destructiveness; misses a few chances for visual aplomb

ZELIG, ‘83: A hit-and-miss lark of a mock archival-footage documentary, though Allen as actor can’t quite pull off “human chameleon”