The Aero:
Thur 18 at 7.30: Harold and Maude (1971) / The Man Who Shot Chinatown (2008)
John A. Alonzo (1934-2001)
The man who shot Chinatown, John A. Alonzo, also shot the charmingly whimsical Harold and Maude, that perennial favourite with adolescent Bud Cort (death-obsessed and generally weird) becoming best friends with peppery old Ruth Gordon (essential viewing - if it’s so far passed you by, check the trailer). Alonzo (1934-2001) also shot such classics as Vanishing Point, Wattstax, Farewell My Lovely, Bad News Bears, Tom Horn, Scarface, Overboard, Steel Magnolias and, ahem, Star Trek: Generations. He was also the director of FM (1978), a slice of the late 70s LA rock radio scene (with a Steely Dan theme song!) Expect luminaries from throughout his career (tho maybe not the Dan) to pop up in this documentary tribute, and a host of great clips.
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Wong Kar-Wai is the internationally-acclaimed director of Chungking Express, In the Mood For Love and, most recently, My Blueberry Nights. His cinema is characterized by loneliness, introspection and musings on memory and the impossibility of love. The setting is most usually 1960s or 1990s Hong Kong; despite departures for South America (Happy Together) and the future (2046) the real most apparently anomalous entry in his filmography is Ashes of Time, a martial arts film set in the timeless fantasy world of the jianghu. In fact, its protagonists share many of the same preoccupations as his contemporary characters, and the film pays no more than lip-service to the conventions of the genre. A newly restored, re-edited and rescored version, Ashes of Time Redux will be released in October and in support of its North American theatrical debut, Wong met with several journalists last week for roundtable discussions at the Beverly-Wilshire.
I understand that the process of going back to this film was initially based on a desire to restore it; I was wondering where along the line you decided actually to do more than that, with the re-edit, rescore and coloring and so forth, or whether these changes were always part of your intention.
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Tags: Film · Interviews
Derek Jarman (1942-1994) was for almost his entire career the enfant terrible of British cinema: his homoerotic feature debut Sebastiane (1976), a retelling of the saint’s story in Latin no less; his punk “celebration” of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee (1977); and his high-camp adaptation of The Tempest (1979) had all raised serious eyebrows; elsewhere, however, they were a cause for celebration that here was a hope for the moribund British film industry, defiantly homosexual, defiantly artistic, and defiantly personal.
Jarman’s films were the antithesis of most British cinema, never mind the product from Hollywood, but there were those who feared his first venture into establishment-funded film-making (courtesy of the British Film Institute) would result in a sell-out costume drama. They needn’t have worried: Caravaggio is no conventional biopic but rather a meditation on the artist and his life, the conflicts therein, and the parallels to be found with the modern world and with Jarman himself as an artist.
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The Aero:
More on this elsewhere, but I can’t omit it from the week’s highlights, cos it’s really good. It’s like a secret history of LA through the movies - all those backdrops that look so movie-anonymous, or buildings that look so strangely familiar, alongside all the landmarks and neighborhoods that no longer exist except almost by accident in cinema history. The film takes a turn for the political in the last hour (it’s three hours long) - it’s just as fertile an area as the geography and as a result feels a bit skimped and tacked on - but overall, a marvelous feast for the eyes, and a terrific portrait of the home of the movies.
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Wong Kar-Wai applies his customary elliptical, introspective style to the traditional martial arts fantasy world of the jianghu: Ashes of Time is his one stab at the popular wuxia genre of Chinese action film. Taking characters from a famous martial arts novel (The Eagle-Shooting Heroes by Louis Cha) Wong has reimagined the Lord of the East and the Lord of the West (and other characters) as younger men, less sure of themselves, far from their eventual literary destiny.
A series of vignettes each captioned by almanacal season: Ouyang Feng (Leslie Cheung - A Better Tomorrow, Farewell My Concubine, Days Of Being Wild) lives in the desert and is visited once a year by an old friend. He has a lost love, the widow of his brother, for whom she had jilted him; and the friend, Huang Yaoshi (Tony Leung Ka Fai -The Lover, Love Will Tear Us Apart, Election) has carried a torch for her himself all these years. Haughty Murong Yin commissions Ouyang to have Huang killed for jilting his sister, and his twin Murong Yang (both played by Brigitte Lin - Love Massacre, Red Dust, Chungking Express) commissions her possessive brother’s murder. Then there’s a young swordsman going blind (Tony Leung Chiu Wai - Hard Boiled, Cyclo, Lust, Caution, 2046 and most other WKW films) who just wants to see his wife again; and a slobbish swordsman whose wife refuses to stay at home. Everyone is driven to action or, in Ouyang’s case, chronic inaction, by their passions. Love is the ruling force of Wong Kar-Wai’s universe.
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Arclight Hollywood:
It doesn’t matter so much that Ridley Scott has come up with 500 different versions of his movie, because it’s good enough to bear infinitely repeated viewings. The future looks like someone’s actual present for once, and the photography and set design alone make it a classic. Rutger Hauer’s star-making turn as leader of the replicants renegades is a highlight, Harrison Ford has never been better and even Sean Young is pretty good - one of the tweaks in the “final cut” is softening the tone of her voice, as well as actually reshooting one action scene (crashing through a series of glass doors, one of the female replicants was clearly a stunt man). Essential viewing, especially in the luxury of the Arclight.
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Celine and Julie Go Boating is the best-known film by Cahiers du cinema alumnus Jacques Rivette, master of slender, ghostly narratives and serious cinematic high-jinks (his best film is 12½ hours long and doesn’t really have a story..) This one does, although it’s unusual to read an introductory title card “Sometimes it begins like this..” We see Julie first, with giant curly red hair and big round spectacles; she’s reading a book on magic on a slow afternoon in the park when as it were a magical gust of wind blows in a gangly sprite, all flowing boa and skirt and scarf trotting by. It’s Celine. She drops a handkerchief and Julie follows. The hunt is on and the games begin, prowling all over Paris and checking each other out like a pair of cats.
Celine is a teller of tall tales it turns out, one of which is having been chased from a house where she worked, on the wonderfully named Rue du Nadir des Pommes. It’s an imposing pile in a bit of acreage, covered in ivy behind a wall, and Julie pays it a visit. Having entered the house, one is ejected sometime later remembering nothing of the visit. Julie finds a boiled sweet on her tongue and replacing it there later, remembers what went on.
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The Aero:
Patti Smith is now an American rock institution and so naturally she has a documentary. I feel a bit churlish to have gone off her since she stopped sounding like an androgynous angry young thing (right before the Springsteen collaboration) but even if her songs no longer cut like a rusty razor, she’s still a damned cool high priestess of punk. Made over the last twelve years, this promises to be a revealing portrait of the abiding poet and musician.
Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theatre:
A lovely downbeat poem of a film, the first feature from Scottish film-maker Lynne Ramsey, who’s gotten criminally little work since. Once again a Scot shows how to make something captivating and moving from the austere reworking of personal reminiscence, economic deprivation, familial discord and the blighted state of the 1970s nation, all with lovely semi-abstract black and white photography.
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This is a noir-tinged melodrama from the Japanese post-war master, Kurosawa Akira. Takeshi Shimura plays alcoholic Doctor Sanada, living and working in a slum area of Tokyo dominated by a yakuza-run market district and a noxious bubbling swamp. One humid mosquito-ridden night, young gangster Matsunaga comes in to have a hand wound repaired; Sanada has no trouble diagnosing TB, despite the gangster’s denials. The advance of the disease and the return of the old neighborhood boss from jail spell trouble for Matsunaga’s career.
This was Kurosawa’s eighth film and the first in which he felt that his own style really emerged, and the hand of the master is evident in the superb evocation of the sweltering, festering summer heat around the swamp (even though the film was shot in winter); the integral use of music to heighten both dramatic tension within scenes and sense of character; the photography filled with ambiguous shadows; his ability to elicit superb performances that bring so much more to the relationships between characters than the script alone could manage; and a morally-anchored protagonist who is nonetheless an irascible old grouch.
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The Aero:
Peter Bogdanovich may have gone seriously off the boil with a series of movies too in love with his own film history scholarship or the belief that Ryan O’Neal was a good actor, but his reputation was justifiably made with this elegy for a time when the movie theatre was a gathering place for communal dreams, and an escape from the harsh realities of the world outside. As such, he channels the spirit of his beloved John Ford through a coming-of-age story that coincides with the passing of an era, set in small-town ’50s Texas; that it manages to be touching and unselfconscious is thanks mainly to direction that gives ample room to a fantastic ensemble cast including young Jeff Bridges and Timothy Bottoms, grizzled Ben Johnson, vacuous Cybill Shepherd (well-cast), and roles that actually provide some substance for Ellen Burstyn, Eileen Brennan and the wonderful, desperate Cloris Leachman.
A post-apocalyptic fable starring young Don Johnson and a talking dog. That seems to say it all really (plus it’s pretty funny).
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This is one of my favourite movies ever, and as such this is less a review than a eulogy.. Having a tangentially medical background, I feel no abashment at admitting my fondness for anatomical anomalies (perhaps it also has something to do with seeing Romy Schneider’s webbed fingers in The Trial at an impressionable age) and Freaks has physical abnormalities galore.
The setting is a travelling circus, one of the olden days when the freakshow was de rigeur. The film opens with a hideous half-woman-half-chicken attraction, and the promise of revealing how she got that way. Flashback: Hans the midget is engaged to the similarly-sized Frieda, but pines for the beautiful trapeze artist Cleopatra, herself happy in the ample arms of Hercules, the strongman. Until, that is, Hans comes into a sizable inheritance and Cleopatra starts to show an interest..
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Arclight Hollywood:
Perhaps the primary reason why Woody Allen is actually a significant film-maker, before he started marrying his children and making shit movies. So good you can watch it twice in a row. Brilliant, neurotic, truthful comedy from start to finish, adorned with kooky Diane Keaton (when she too was actually funny), more one-liners (Jeff Goldblum: “I forgot my mantra”) and perfect comedy vignettes than one could imagine possible, sprinkled with awesome cameos (was Christopher Walken ever actually creepier?) and all totally personal. If by any chance you’ve not seen it you must do so immediately.
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