The Aero:
The first of Jacques Tati’s feature films as director lacks the sense of obsessive control that escalates through his next pictures - Holiday, Mon Oncle (1958) and Playtime (1967) - but the gags are nonetheless highly organised, and it is perfectly charming from start to finish. In The Big Day (Jour de fête) he plays François the postman, bumbling through his round in the northern French countryside while the small local town prepares for its annual fête. There’s little story, but a series of charming encounters and splendidly silly gags (often involving his bicycle) and gradually running jokes as the day progresses. Alongside the black and white version, Tati filmed with the new Thomsoncolor process and it is this version, splendidly restored to its lovely gentle tones, that’s showing here.
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Tags: Film · Upcoming events
Blue flags are coming down all over town; Broxton in Westwood is reopening; and local movie theatres are returning to their regular programming. With the glitzy closing gala (the well-received Hellboy II, reuniting much of the cast from the first movie, again under the direction of gothic fantasist Guillermo del Toro) and the distribution of various awards - amongst others, Target best narrative feature to Prince of Broadway, audience award to The Wackness, best international feature to Man On Wire, Spirit of Independence award to Don Cheadle - the 2008 Los Angeles Film Festival is over.
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Friday 27 at 7.30: Baie des anges (1963) / Model Shop (1969)
Saturday 28 at 7.30: Les Demoiselles de RochefortLes Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) (1967) /
It’s a Jacques Demy-fest in Santa Monica this week, with a nice selection of his fantastical work. Most famous for Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, a sung film about lost love and innocence with Catherine Deneuve and a lot of striking colors, he ploughed his vision of a candyfloss but heart-tugging cinema of light and music into several features, including Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (also starring Deneuve, plus sister Françoise Dorléac and featuring Gene Kelly). This last is spoiled for some by the overreliance on / homage to American musical forms, as opposed to the perfectly French Parapluies, but both films boast splendid operetta scores by legendary French soundtrack dude Michel Legrand.
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Tags: Film · Upcoming events
The LA film festival is more or less half way through now, and has so far been entirely satisfying in its range of movies, from great to sub-par, or unexpectedly good to unexpectedly poor. One of the latter was the much-touted Heartbeat Detector (La Question Humaine), the new film from Nicolas Klotz and starring Mathieu Amalric (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly). Amalric is a corporate psychologist asked to investigate his CEO, a marvelously weary Michel Lonsdale. He was born in Strasbourg and Lonsdale in Germany, as was the corporate partner who might be usurping. The first half of the film is a mixture of scenes in the sterile office building, and odd punctuations of Amalric and co. letting off steam. A secret past with blackmail potential is revealed, and the plot, such as it is, grinds to a halt; the revelations are unsurprising; and the film sputters down to a black screen and the incomprehensible horror of the holocaust.
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Thai director Wisit Sasanatieng’s follow-up to the eye-popping Tears of the Black Tiger (2000), Citizen Dog (2004) is a thoroughly enjoyable picaresque, telling the slight story of Pod, a country bumpkin and a “romantic without a dream”, newly arrived in Bangkok. His unusual adventures unfold in a series of titled vignettes, along with those of his unusual acquaintances.
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Don’t forget, centered around Westwood the Los Angeles Film Festival is starting this week and runs for ten days until the closing gala on 28th (Hellboy II). There’s up to 170 separate films showing, so surely you can find something of interest. If not, there’s always these:
Fri 20 at 7.30: Once Upon A Time In The West (1968)
Sergio Leone honed his craft with the Dollars trilogy before spreading his operatic wings with an intimate epic as grand(iose) as its title. The hypnotic opening gives way to a sudden violence that will erupt regularly throughout the film, against a backdrop of civilization’s westward advance via the railroad. Henry Fonda’s baby blues glint with pure evil for once, Charles Bronson is the voiceless “Harmonica” on a quest of his own, and Jason Robards plays the (wily) fool. They are all drawn to Claudia Cardinale’s widow, holding onto her land ’til the railroad comes, and the tangle of relationships, the inexorable passage of time and progress, and the bravura film-making add up to a masterpiece, accompanied by one of Ennio Morricone’s finest score.
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Tags: Film · Upcoming events
Film Independent and the LA Times’ Los Angeles Film Festival is not a big hitter on the circuit, mostly serving up offerings from other small fests around the world, but with over 175 features, documentaries, shorts and music videos, there’s plenty to invite one to take a plunge. Check out the website to explore strands such as the International Showcase, High School Shorts, a Shaw Brothers retrospective, two “eclectic” mixes of music videos and Summer Previews, as well as Ford Amphitheatre screenings, Films That Got Away (featuring two almost-forgotten discourses from impassioned 60’s revolutionary Robert Kramer ) and the sinister Dark Wave. Screenings are centered around Westwood, as are special events (anyone for a poolside panel discussion at the W about the increased presence of pot in Hollywood movies?), with nightly DJ sessions at the Target Red Room. I love the pot-luck of film festivals - so many unknown names and quantities, intriguing reports from previous festivals - and here’s what I’m hoping to catch:
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Bay Theatre:Sun 15 at 6.00, Mon, Wed 16, 18 at 8.00: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955)
A quiet week, this week (even the UCLA programes at the Hammer are closed down, presumably in breathless anticipation of the upcoming film fest extravaganza) but if you’re down Orange County way, why not check out this imposing theatre (with a really cool Wurlitzer) for Don Siegel’s paranoid sci-fi classic. No-one will believe the small-town doctor when he says everyone is being replaced by pod people! The basic premise is so potent that it’s been remade twice (and innumerably inspirational) but the original has never been beat.
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André de Toth was a Hungarian filmmaker who relocated to Hollywood during the war with a great professional training, where he proceeded to churn out excellent but unassuming B-pictures. He was also married to Veronica Lake for eight years, which must have been interesting. Beaten to the punch by The Man With The Golden Arm, his excellent junkie film stands in gritty contrast to Preminger’s typically self-important A-flick. There’s nothing flashy or self-aggrandizing about this (true) story of champion boxer, marine and morphine addict Barney Ross, and it is told with the efficiency and immediacy of a Fuller exposé.
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The Aero:
Thursday 5 at 7.30: Clint Eastwood: a Life In Film (2007) / The Beguiled (1971)
This week the American Cinematheque celebrates the long and distinguished career of Clint Eastwood, with a handful of his films as director (Breezy, The Outlaw Josey Wales, High Plains Drifter etc). The best of the bunch, however, is the one film in the series in which he only acts, The Beguiled, directed by the great Don Siegel. It’s a weird southern gothic in which a civil war soldier (Yankee) ends up in a house of ethereal women who initially seem winsome and harmless but reveal themselves to be repressed and menacing and the atmosphere of the house dreamy, strange and sinister. It is an appealingly odd film; that it includes amputation and magic mushrooms is all in its favor. It’s presented in conjunction with the premier of a new documentary that I suspect will make up in clips for what it lacks in critical distance, but the real plus is the presence of the man himself for a Q&A between screenings (thus, it has probably sold out by now..)
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Tags: Film · Upcoming events
Continued from yesterday’s post:
Back to the matter in hand. Following the documentary on Friday night was Forbidden (1932), directed by Frank Capra and starring Barbara Stanwyck and Adolph Menjou in an excellent example of the sort of themes that would be nigh-on impossible to treat following the introduction of certification. Stanwyck is a lonely librarian who falls in love with wealthy lawyer Menjou on a cruise to Havana. They continue their affair back in New York, but an argument over his not leaving his (invalid!) wife forces them apart, at which point Stanwyck drops a sprog. They get back together, of course, but she remains his mistress, set up in an apartment and standing by him as his career progresses through mayor-hood to governorship. All the while she is working as Mary Sunshine, a newspaper agony aunt who dispenses such advice as “if you love him and he loves you what else matters?” by which dictum she has condemned herself to a life in the shadows. Ralph Bellamy, far more dynamic than usual, plays her editor, endearingly archetypal, and whilst continually proposing to Stanwyck, is obsessed with proving his suspicions that Menjou is a double-dealing hypocrite. Menjou is convinced of this himself, and only to save his resignation does Stanwyck leave him to marry Bellamy.
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The Hays Code, or Production Code, effective from 1934, was a set of industry-compiled guidelines covering material that was considered unacceptable for inclusion in motion pictures. It covered areas such as sex (no adultery, nudity, “perversion”), crime (no vicious violence, revenge, unpunished criminals), morals (no unpunished “loose” women, suicide) and general anti-social behavior (no drug-taking, excessive drinking, bad language).
Hollywood had been practicing a form of self-censorship since 1915, when the Supreme Court ruled that motion pictures were not protected by the First Amendment, but as the twenties wore on and the wild party of the prohibition Jazz Age grew ever wilder, film-makers took advantage of the escalating popularity of the movies and their stars to include whatever indiscretions took their fancy, contending only with an unregulated, state-by-state system of censorship decisions, and vague outlines from the precursor to the Motion Picture Association of America, formed in 1922.
Hollywood had long been regarded, with some justification, as an iniquitous den boundless drug-use, sex and general hedonism; a series of scandals (most famously the “Fatty” Arbuckle murder trial), the growing influence of right-wing former Postmaster General Will Hays as head honcho of the proto-MPAA, and the increasingly vocal objections of various religious groups, culminating in the formation of the Catholic Legion of Decency in 1933, resulted in a stamp-down on all this indecent material and the drawing up of unprecedented provisions for enforcing the previously largely symbolic code. The actual Hays Code was introduced in 1930, but from June 1 1934, an amendment required all pictures to obtain a certificate of approval from the Code administration before release. The wild movie party was over.
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Tags: Film · Reviews
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