The Pianist

World War II on film again - from The Pianist...

Friday 13th Music

Celebrating the date, let's say - may your luck hold...

1. Johnny Cash - Thirteen
2. Big Star - Thirteen
3. 13th Floor Elevators - You're Gonna Miss Me
4. John Lennon - Luck of the Irish
5. Madonna - Lucky Star
6. Modest Mouse - Shit Luck
7. Richard & Linda Thompson - Hard Luck Stories
8. Sunburst - Lucky You
9. Strokes - Trying your Luck
10. James Blood Ullmer - I Ain't Superstitious

Well? Can't find video of James Blood Ulmer doing it - lots of video of Jeff Beck and other lesser musicians at it, but hard to sort through them for anything close to the original... So - here's the audio of Willie Dixon, from 1970, I think...



I'm going to update this sucker again - finally found the original Howlin' Wolf recording. That's worth having. What a pain, rooting around through 5000 cover versions - Megadeth? who the fuck wants to hear Megadeth doing Howlin' Wolf? Who wants to hear Megadeth do anything, I suppose, but really... clutter clutter clutter!



And 13th Floor Elevators miming...



And Big Star is always welcome...

Christian Imagery in WWII

It is fascinating how much films about war, one of the more convincing disproofs of the existence of God, rely on religious imagery. I suppose it's irresistible - to find meaning in all the suffering and sacrifice through the obvious imagery. And - it's not as if the imagery isn't earned. War is full of sacrifice and suffering that does, or can, contribute to a higher cause - people dying for others... And when you look at the life of someone like Corrie Ten Boom, or the people I mentioned a couple weeks ago, Leopold Socha or Si Kaddour Benghribit, it's hard to deny they make as good an argument for God as you are likely to find. It's a notion of god that is equal to the best men do - and god's as good a name for it as anything...

And so for this Easter - sacrifice:









And resurrection:

Lick 'em tomorrow, though

Today is the 150th anniversary of the second day of the Battle of Shiloh - the first really big battle of the Civil War. (Bull Run resulted in some 5,000 casualties - Shiloh in 23,000 plus.) The war had been on for almost a year by then, but people on both sides still seemed to think it could be ended fairly quickly, and without the kind of cataclysm that did, in fact occur. But Shiloh rather demonstrated the contrary. It was a shockingly big battle for the time - and, looking back on it, it's also clear that it demonstrated a couple things that bode very ill for the coming years. It demonstrated the lethality of the war, the ability of modern armies (in 1860s terms) to deal out damage - and the resilience of armies, the difficulty of actually destroying an opposing force. The Confederates caught the Union by surprise - drove them well back - but both sides shot the hell out of each other, and the next day, the Union received reinforcements, and drove the Confederates back in turn, again, both sides shooting the hell out of one another. After it was done, the Southern army was a wreck, but the North wasn't much better off - a result that came up over and over in the war. Winning left armies almost as incapacitated as losing.

In any case... from here one, the battles got bigger and bigger - even in the spring of 1863, McClellan had 100,000 odd soldiers sitting on the Peninsular in Virginia - by the time he got around to using them, the Confederates were able to muster nearly as many, leading to fights that would start to dwarf Shiloh. And as the war went on, and arms got better (there were still a fair number of soldiers, especially in the South, armed with very old guns, smoothbores, shotguns and such, at Shiloh), and tactics and command structures got better, and the troops got better - the battles became increasingly deadly. A very bad time was in store for all.

Still. Things could have been worse. The Union could have lost, and if they had, odds are Grant, and Sherman to boot, would have gone the way of John Pope. Shiloh wasn't Grant's first major battle - he had already won the battle of Forts Henry and Donelson, in February - but it was one that, in a lot of ways, defined him. Nor for the good, at first - even after winning, he was blamed for the surprise, accused of drunkenness and so on - he spent the next several months in command limbo, a fact that probably contributed to the stagnation that developed in the west after Shiloh. EVen now, historians tend to see one of his more dangerous qualities at work here - he tended to make plans and execute them without really thinking about what the enemy might do. He seems to have expected them to sit there and take it - when they did, as at Henry and Donelson, at Vicksburg (especially in the spring and summer of 1863), even at Shiloh, on the second day - he gave them a shellacking. When they didn't sit there and take it - as at Shiloh, or in Virginia in 1964 - he ran into trouble. But what came next is probably what really defines Grant, and certainly distinguishes him from many of the other Union generals of the war. At Shiloh, and at the Wilderness, the enemy didn't do what he expected, and things went badly - but in both cases, he remade his plans on the fly. He was reinforced at Shiloh, and went on the attack on the second day, winning the field. And at the Wilderness, when it was clear he wasn't going to get through the wilderness by force - he switched directions, and went around. He did not, in either case, go away. The title of this post sums him up, in a lot of ways -"Well, Grant, we've had the devil's own day, haven't we?" said Sherman. "Yes. Lick 'em tomorrow, though." said Grant.

(Finally - expect a lot of these posts. I was not born in time for the 100th anniversary of the Civil War, and doubt I'll be around for the 200th anniversary - so I am going to seize on 150. It is a big deal - really, the biggest deal in American History. We must remember.)

A Musical Interlude

150th anniversary of the Battle of Shiloh today. I may have to come back to that - it lasts 2 days, so I have time! For now? a bit of music, shall we?

1. Madvillain - Do Not Fire!
2. Edgar Broughton Band - Apache Drop Out [thank you Mojo, again - Captain Beefheart plus the Shadows - I am glad to have found this...]
3. Descendents - Sour Grapes
4. Arcade Fire - Rebellion (lies)
5. Richard & Linda Thompson - A Man In Need
6. Bob Dylan - Restless Farewell
7. Brian Jonestown Massacre - (You Better Love Me) Before I am Gone
8. Michio Kurihara - A Boat of Courage
9. Black Sabbath - Sweet Leaf
10. Billy Bragg & Wilco - One by One

Videos? I can't not post this - though they've sort of dropped the "Apache" but for some Guru Guru style wailing, the Beefheart is still there.... and look at that hair!



That would seem to indicate an appearance from the Sabs, but as I can't find any vintage live Sweet Leaf, I may have recourse to a slight typo - here are the Surfers with Sweat Loaf:



And finally - can't quite find the song that came up, but I feel a need to post some BJM - here's a live rendition of Anemone from 2008 or 9 or so:

WWII In the Philippines

This is where the class I am taking has gotten to - the Philippines, maybe the center of the American war in the Pacific. It's where the first extended fighting took place (for Americans) - scene of the biggest American disaster, at Bataan - and the key to driving the Japanese back, when the war turned our way. So it's gotten an extended treatment - a couple weeks, a couple films - it's a big deal.

The problem is, the films in class have been American films, and alas, pretty mediocre one at that. So Proudly We Hail is a 1943 film about nurses on Bataan - it has the merits of the times - it's a solid studio production, with a fine cast, and Mark Sandrich directing, and it even takes some effort to stay true to the nurses' story (which is pretty astonishing, when you get down to it.) Unfortunately, it couples this with a few bits of shameless melodrama, grafted on love stories, and a very dubious bit where Veronica Lake blows herself up to prevent capture by invisible Japanese. And - Sandrich doesn't seem to have the chops for it. He's a fine director when he has Fred Astaire to photograph - here, he seems pedestrian, and the film, though honorable enough, I suppose, feels awfully flat... The other film isn't much better - The Great Raid. This is the story of a raid by a Ranger company to rescue the last 500 or so prisoners at Cabanatuan POW camp - the last of the survivors of the Bataan Death March still in the Philippines, I think. It's a pretty astonishing tale - but the film manages to bloat it up and slow it down and sap most of the energy from it. Problem there is, it splits its attention between the rescuing Rangers, the POWs, and the civilians in Manila smuggling food into the camps. Particularly one Margaret Utinsky - a woman who definitely deserves her own movie, and a better one than this. The film works well enough when it sticks with the Rangers - but the camp scenes are sappy and predictable, and marred by an unjustifiable imaginary love affair - with the poor Miss U, whose 3 years of smuggling is compressed into the 3 days of the raid for no good reason. And that love story - sweet lord - what a cheap plot device!

It is a shame, I suppose, that no Americans have managed a great film about the war in the Philippines - it just so happens, though, that from the other side comes what is probably the single best film about any part of World War II - Kon Ichikawa's masterpiece, Fires on the Plain. This is set near the end of the war - on the island of Leyte, where the Americans landed before landing on Luzon (the main island of the Philippines, where Manila, Bataan, Cabanatuan are.) The film starts after the Japanese have been beaten on Leyte - the remnants are still there, some looking for a way out, some waiting to die. It follows one soldier, banished from his unit because he has TB, but banished from the hospital because he can still walk, as he wanders...



It's a death march to nowhere for Tamura and the others. It is strange how much the Japanese ended up reproducing the conditions they imposed on others. At the beginning of the war, they forced the American and Filipino prisoners from Bataan to march across Luzon, nearly starving to death - the Bataan Death March. At the end of the war, the Japanese soldiers were doing the same thing, on their own. That's what this film is - a death march - soldiers walk back and forth, a kind of quest with no purpose, waiting to die. Or more often - kill one another, to eat or be eaten.



It's important, though, that they do it to themselves - as much as they did it to their enemies. Behind it all is bad planning and bad tactics, and through it all, they are all at one another's throats. Ichikawa lays it on thick - these soldiers are constantly fighting themselves. From the very beginning - Tamura being slapped -



To the end (almost the end) - three soldiers killing each other -





The Japanese soldiers devour one another - figuratively as well as literally... I think this film is sometimes criticized for not taking sides - for not acknowledging the Japanese culpability in all this horror. But that doesn't seem fair. It's a film about soldiers, from the bottom up - politics would be out of place. I also think it reflects the divisions in Japan - it does seem that a lot of Japanese films about the war, at least the ones that come to the US, were made by liberals and humanists - the anti-war voices in Japan got to express themselves after the war. But while Fires on the Plain lacks the sometimes explicit criticism of Japanese militarism and its aftermath that can be seen in other filmmakers (Oshima and Kobayashi come to mind), it's hard to miss the way, even on its own terms, almost everything that happens to the Japanese soldiers is caused by Japanese actions. They all turn on everyone else, and Ichikawa, one of the great underrated craftsmen of film, shows it, all along:



They do run into the Americans, eventually - with disastrous results. And the guerillas - the fires on the plain... The Americans are dangerous - the Filipinos ruthless - but even here, Ichikawa leads us back to Japanese behavior. Maybe not directly, but indirectly, symbolically. Note that a total of 2 women appear in the film: one the Filipino civilian that Tamura shoots; one a Filipino guerilla who shoots a man trying to surrender. The latter may seem cruel - but the former reminds us who started that kind of thing.




And so - it is a great film. Brutal - harsh and sharp, devoid of sentimentality - strangely comic, but one of the most complete visions of human evil as there is. But not just evil. And all of it stunningly beautiful.

Music on Friday

I don't have much to offer today. An Earl Scruggs video would not be out of order I think:



And - a Friday random ten:

1. Black Sabbath - Hand of Doom [Paranoid really is a record that just keeps on giving...]
2. Tom Waits - Lucky Day
3. Outkast - B.O.B
4. Roxy Music - Whirlwind
5. Franz Ferdinand - Dark of the Matinee [I've mentioned this before - one of the best songs of the millennium] [Finding that link is a rather disturbing reminder of how long I have been doing this blog - though maybe more disturbing is that I had no idea I posted it 5 1/2 years ago.]
6. Pere Ubu - Cry Cry Cry
7. John Cale - Guts
8. The Seeds - Daisy Mae
9. Modest Mouse - Alone Down There
10. Mercury Rev - Secret for a Song

Video? Lots to choose from today... though there are few things more irritating than official videos, with their ads and all the rest - I have to post the Outkast...



And I don't remember posting John Cale in a while, so here you go:

Two New World War II Films

Along with the films for the World War II class I am taking, there have been a couple newer films on the subject out recently. In an ideal world, I might have seen Red Tails - but it came and went almost before the class got started, and before I really thought about making a point of seeing any WWII films that might appear. But since then, a couple other films have come out, and now, I'm looking for them.

In Darkness (12/15) - An excellent film directed by Agnieszka Holland about a Polish sewer working in Lvov, who saves a group of Jews when the Ghetto is liquidated. He starts as an amoral scoundrel of sorts, robbing abandoned houses, skulking around the sewers - he finds some Jews who are looking for a way out of the ghetto, and offers to help them escape, for a price of course. When the Germans close the ghetto, a good many Jews get out through the sewers - he ends up hiding a dozen or so of them in the depths of the system. Meanwhile, the Germans and their Ukrainian allies are looking for Jews - they get a good many of them, but not his. He has a friend, though, a Ukrainian who knew him from prison - this friend has joined the Nazis, is an officer of some sorts - and tries to recruit him in the effort to find the Jews in the sewers. So our hero plays a double game. It is something of a familiar story - he starts as an opportunist, but becomes more and more committed to helping the people he is hiding - he becomes heroic. The film also does a good job of filling in the other characters - the Jews are developed - one is heroic; one is rich; others are faithless, others are weak, several of them emerge as fairly well rounded character. In all aspects of the world of the film, Holland is attentive to the devisions between people, the calculations of class and wealth and ethnicity. It is a very fine film, suspenseful and rich. The hero, Leopold Socha, was a real figure, who did just what the film shows, sheltering a group of Jews in the sewers of Lvov throughout the war...

Free Men (9/15) - A similar story, of Muslims in Paris protecting Jews and working with the French resistance. This too is centered on a real person, Si Kaddour Benghabrit, rector of a mosque in Paris who used his position to help fugitive Jews and others during the occupation. The film concentrates, though, on a fictional character, a young Algerian named Younes. He starts as a spy for the police, but soon discovers that a musician he admires and befriends is Jewish - and so switches sides. Before long he is working with the resistance, and with the mosque to protect Jews (including the musician), as well as resistance members, political refugees and so on. The musician in the film is Salim Halili, another real person, apparently a very great musician. (That link provides a fine example of his music.)

It's a good film - it's a fascinating story, suspenseful and sometimes moving - though a bit disjointed at times, and maybe a bit too willing to go for the cliche. We get 2 big ones - the kid-going-back-for-her-teddy scene that seems to be a requires feature in any films of this sort... and the "bad guy shot from behind by unseen good guy just before he kills one of the heroes", bit... And we get episodes, details that don't go anywhere - the revelation that the singer is a homosexual is - just there. Younes sees him with a man - but - so what? It's a strange moment... But that aside - pecestrian as the film is at times, it is a gripping story, well made, acted (the great Michael Lonsdale plays Benghabrit), with some really fantastic music - a very worthwhile movie...

Clinging to the Rituals - Friday Random Ten

Somehow, I have fallen into a terrible writing slump - not just for this blog. I don't know why, it drives me crazy, but there it is. I can't even muster the will to loose the occasional tweet on the world. It's maddening. Anyway - I can hope, these things come and go, and this one will go again - and meanwhile, keep the lights on here any way I can. And so? Random Friday etc!

1. Melt Banana - Lock your Head
2. Gomez - Charlie Patton Songs
3. Sonic Youth - Pipeline/Kill Time
4. Mercury Rev - Opus 40
5. Elastica - Smile
6. Cream - Sitting on Top of the World
7. Madvillain - Rainbows
8. The Who - A Man in a Purple Dress [of that new record, of all things - I have good WHo music on here, why is this coming up?]
9. Built to Spill - Liar
10. Johnny Cash - Send a Picture to Mother

Video? How about a Mercury Rev video?



I can't find an actual video of Madvillain doing Rainbows - but here's Accordion, cause - I should post some Madvillain/MF Doom once in a hwile, shoulnd't I?

Cross of Iron

Another world war 2 film - Sam Peckinpaugh's take. Slow motion ultra-violence, and an approach that empties the war of any meaning except the act of fighting. That may be a good or bad - it's somewhat strange to see an American film do it, Especially set on the Eastern Front - it's a bit less strange when Germany and Japan do it... You don't see a lot of films like that about WWII - WWI is the anti-war film... it tends to make you wonder if maybe Peckinpaugh had others wars in mind...

In any case, it is a fine film, that hits all the notes war movies have to hit - the camaraderie of the unit, the conflicts in any given army, the inevitable trip to the home front (or a hospital), where the hero is more lost than he is in battle - and of course, trial by violence...

Friday Music Again

Friday - I find myself falling back into bad habits - a postless week? a busy week it must be said, with a weekend away (Vermont and other points north), then way too much to keep me entertained at home - Champions League games to watch, a fantasy baseball draft, and me breaking down and buying a Deadwood set... "one vile fucking task after another" - well... you know what I mean...

Music then - randomly selected from the iTunes Library - for today is Friday:

1. Rocket From the Tombs - Search & Destroy [we were listening to the iPod in the car on the drive and it occurred to me how strange it was to get through half an hour of music without any Pere Ubu, Rolling Stones, Velvet Underground or the Feelies coming up. Here today, you see, that is not an issue - no time wasted at all before the dulcet tones of Mr. Thomas grace us...]
2. Don Giovanni - Della Sua Pace [I gots some culture you know!]
3. St. Etienne - Hobart Paving
4. Pavement - Baptist Blacktick
5. My Blpody Valentine - Soon
6. Dead Boys - Not Anymore & Ain't Nothin' to Do [Cheetah, take 2!]
7. Ramsey Lewis Trio - Wade in the Water [thanks again to one of those Mojo collections - neat stuff anyway]
8. Melt Banana - Chipped Zoo on the Wall, Wastes in the Sky [8 minutes long? they are branching out in this one a bit...]
9. Bill Frisell - Have a Little Faith in Me
10. Bishop Allen - Choose Again

nice set, have to say... here's some video. Start local, with Bishop Allen - a neat song that departs a bit from their usual template:



And - since Cheetah made it twice - here's the Dead Boys...

Simple Friday Pleasures of Music

I'm in a bit of a scramble this morning, so nothing fancy... Random Friday goodness...

1. Devendra Banhart - Pumpkin Seeds
2. Butthole Surfers - I Saw an X-Ray of a Girl Passing Gas
3. White Stripes - I'm Finding it Harder to be a Gentleman Every Day
4. Pavement - Type Slowly
5. Isley Brothers - It's Your Thing [do what you wanna do]
6. Wipers - My Vengeance
7. Stooges - No Fun
8. Revolting Cocks - Red Parrot
9. Matisyahu - Chop em Down
10. Melt Banana - His Name is Mickey

That was, it must be said, a rather lively set. Video? Can't find that Wipers song - but here's another - Over the Edge (which sounds a more than a little like a rewrite of Sonic Reducer, doesn't it? lesson being, of course - if you steal, steal from the best.)



Iggy and company, in their dotage:



And finally, a soothing ditty from the island nation of Japan:

Fighting Elegy

Continuing with World War II films - this one, not actually featured in the class, and set before the war - is still a fine example. Japan in the 30s, the build up to the war, increasing militarism, through the case of a single student... And, characteristically of Suzuki's work - gorgeous...

Random Friday 10

March comes in like a lion this year, though admittedly, a declawed and rather mangy one. But there was rain and wind and snow yesterday, and today, there is actual snow on the ground! possibly for the first time this winter! This is not normal, and undoubtedly bodes ill for the rest of the year's weather...

That doesn't have much to do with Friday music posts, but I thought I'd mention it. I could also mention Davy Jones' passing - The Monkees were never a central part of my life, but always there - a fun TV show with music, when I was a kid, more than enough reason to watch it. And the songs they sang were, let's face it - top shelf. Pre- or not, they were surely fab.

Anyway - this is still mostly random...

1. Pere Ubu - Stormy Weather [not completely random, maybe...]
2. Pavement - Sue Me Jack
3. MIssion of Burma - Einstein's Day
4. Pere Ubu - I Wanna be Your Dog [live, the Laughner days...]
5. Gram Parsons & Flying Burrito Brothers - Thousand Dollar Wedding
6. Consonant - Love & Affection
7. Bright Eyes - We Are Nowhere and It's Now
8. The Beatles - Mean Mr. Mustard
9. The Open Mind - Magic Potion [another Mojo collection here...]
10. The Polyphonic Spree - Wig in a Box [from the celebrity tribute album version of Hedwig and the Angry Inch...]

And video? Monkees, obviously -



The TV intro...



And - for good measure - Mickey singing, too...

If I Were Picking the Prizes

I am not a fan of the Oscars. They're industry awards, and the movie industry doesn't interest me all that much. As artistic awards, they very seldom intersect with my tastes or interests - so I let them be. The show? I wouldn't watch it even if they were nominating the awards. I watched the year they gave Robert Altman a lifetime achievement award - that should hold me for a while...

On the other hand, they provide as good an excuse as any to post a list. I thought I'd occasionally posted category lists before - my favorite actors, directors, what have you, for the year - but the only one I can find was in 2006! I should have done this in January, but there you go. Works now. So here goes....

Lead Actor - this is one the Academy got this one totally wrong. Shannon and Fassbender are well above anyone else this year. The fact that neither was nominated is inexcusable, and all the excuse I need to ignore the whole affair.

Michael Shannon - Take Shelter
Michael Fassbender - in take your pick; Shame might have been his best performance, but I think he could have been nominated for three different performances last year...
George Clooney - The Descendants
Brendan Gleeson - The Guard

Lead Actress - another one where the award nominations bear no resemblance to my opinions:

Kirsten Dunst - Melancholia
Elizabeth Olson - Martha Marcy May Marlene
Mia Wasikowski - Jane Eyre
Michelle Williams - Meeks Cutoff
Kristen Wiig - Bridesmaids

Supporting Actor:

John Hawkes - Martha Marcy May Marlene
Kiefer Sutherland - Melancholia
Sasha Baron Cohen - Hugo
Albert Brooks - Drive
Mark Strong - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Supporting Actress:

Charlotte Gainsbourgh - Melancholia
Melissa McCarthy - Bridesmaids
Carey Mulligan - Shame
Keira Knightley - A Dangerous Method (or is this a lead?)
Lucy Punch - Bad Teacher

Director:

Von Trier - Melancholia
Jeff Nichols - Take Shelter
Martin Scorsese - Hugo
Pedro Ammodovar - The Skin That I Live In
David Cronenberg - A Dangerous Method

Cinematography:

Hugo - Robert Richardson
Tree of life - Emmanuel Lubezki
Restless - Harris Savides
The Skin I Live In - Jose Luis Alcaine
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - Hoyte van Hoytema

Original Script:

Take Shelter
A Separation
Melancholia
Bridesmaids
Midnight in Paris

Adapted Script:

Descendents
Dangerous Method
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Jane Eyre
Drive

Animated film:

Rango was outstanding, and even nominated! I hope it wins. Though half the regular nominees are as much animated as not - Hugo? did any of that exist anywhere outside a computer?

That's about right.

Friday Random Ten

Nothing fancy today - just 10 songs coughed up by iTunes:

1. TV on the Radio - Wear You Out
2. Blind Faith - Can't Find My Way Home
3. Melt-Banana - Cracked Plaster Cast
4. Isley Brothers - I Wanna Be With You
5. Devandra Banhart - Tit Smoking in the Temple of Artisan Mimicry
6. The 5 Royales - Think [another gem courtesy of Mojo - "James Brown's Funky SUmmer"]
7. Van Morrison - the Big Royalty Check [from "the Bang records contractual obligation sessions" - one of the great kissoffs in rock history, a bunch of improvised abuse for a record company he wanted out of.... you can read about it at WMFU's site... for all the bad history, though - this is a pretty catchy tune...]
8. Spirit - Girl in your Eye [one of the great and mostly forgotten bands of the 60s, Spirit...]
9. The Carpenters - Top of the World [not as good as the Shonen Knife cover, but still a great little song]
10. Modest Mouse - Lounge

I guess that was a rather eclectic playlist, in the end.. Video? TV on the Radio, probably the best band in existence just now, always works:



And - sweet Mary, Joseph and Jesus! here are the Carpenters, faking the country, with Karen on drums and in fine voice - playing at the white house for Tricky Dick and Willy Brandt!

Cranes Are Flying

For this Sunday's screen shots, another great World War II film - Cranes are Flying, a Russian film from 1957. You can't really do justice to it with screen shots - it's one of the most extreme, and breathtaking, pieces of moving pictures you will find - the name refers to a poem the heroine recites, but it might just as well refer to the camerawork - the camera is flying, swooping, spinning, running, everything.... It's a wonder to behold.

Hugo and The Artist and neo-Silent Movies

Back in the 90s, there was a rash of films about, set in, imitating, what have you, the silent era. They seemed to be oriented toward the centennial of cinema - the trend kind of faded out after a while (other than the true believers, like Guy Maddin.) Last year, though, we got a couple new entries - The Artist and Hugo - pretty good films that are quite highly regarded - The Artist is even the favorite to win the Oscar! This doesn't seem to be a trend this time, just a coincidence of two films - though, you never know. We are, here in 2011 and 2012, in the midst of a technological shift more or less as profound as the coming of sound - we are pretty much at the point of the end of film itself... and this is running parallel to a number of other changes, that may or may not take over the artistic side of cinema - 3D, CGI, digital projection, the replacement of public film viewing with home viewing, shifts from physical home formats (DVD, Blu-ray etc.) to streaming - etc... All these changes create anxiety in the cinema world - and that anxiety tends to find its way into films. So - films about technological changes may well become a trend again.

The films in the 90s were, I say, oriented generally to the anniversary of cinema - many of them explicitly so: Lumiere and Company, A Trick of the Light, etc. , etc. They came in many forms, too. Some were about the early days of cinema: Chaplin, Shadow of the Vampire say; some were in the style of ancient films: Lumiere and Company, Train of Shadows; some were a bit of both: the Wenders film, or Forgotten Silver, or Makhmalbaf's Once Upon a Time, Cinema. However you want to classify Irma Vep, Freaks and Men, Shadow Magic - and that's not to mention filmmakers who adopted early cinema as their own style - Guy Maddin prominently. Hugo and The Artist would have fit in fairly well. They are different in some ways, but the differences would still land them somewhere on the continuum - Hugo as a thoroughly modern fiction film; The Artist as a pastiche of late silent, mainstream style, where the 90s films tended to emulate either primitive styles or art films, or to adopt a more explicitly historical (or mock-historical) tone. They'd have fit.

Still - I think Hugo has more in common with that run of films then the Artist does. Because it was a very explicitly cinephilic, self-conscious trend, films directly concerned with the history of films, the development of films, as art, as culture, as technology, often an explicit reenactment of that development. Experimental film has often worked by retracing the history of films, reclaiming abandoned techniques - and many of the 90s films I named followed the same path - many of the filmmakers (Maddin, Guerin, Makhmalbaf, etc.) work on the edges of experimental film anyway, and this is part of it. Hugo has that spirit. As does Scorsese - though he has not tended to be a particularly experimental filmmaker, most of his career, he has roots in the more adventurous parts of American film. And he is, as much as Assayas or Makhmalbaf or Maddin, a devoted cinephile, a historian of film. He brings all that to this film.

The story is this - Hugo is a boy living in a train station, living in the walls, minding the clocks and watching people. He also is a bit of a thief, especially from the old man who runs the toy shop in the station - but the old man catches him, confiscates his notebook, and sets the plot in motion. Truns out - Hugo has an automaton that his father found and was trying to fix, but his father is dead - but this is linked to the old man. The old man has a goddaughter who reads a lot, but (like Mohsen Makmalbaf or Paul Schrader, though for different reasons) is forbidden to go to the movies. She and Hugo soon are pals, and conspire - this might count as a spoiler, but the movie's been out long enough I don't feel any guilt about it - they soon discover that the old man is Georges Melies, filmmaking pioneer, and they set out to restore him to his art. Everything works out in the end - everyone is fixed, everything in its proper place - it's lovely and generous to all. The story itself is a bit disjointed at times, starting and stopping and switching directions and generally subordinated to the spectacle at every step - but that isn't much of a problem, really.

The spectacle, after all, is most of the point. It is wonderful to look at - I saw it in 2D first (since that was playing closest to home), later in 3D - it's the first real film I've seen in 3D, the first film I've cared about seeing in 3D. Even in 2D, it's lovely, with its eye popping colors and fine use of space. In 3D, it becomes more apparent that the primary subject of the film is smoke. Smoke in three dimensions, twisting in and out of spaces, filling the air. It's amazing, really. Scorsese is on his game here - he makes the 3D seem to matter - activating not just the whole screen, but the illusion of depth. There are some rather aggressive 3D images - things coming at you, dogs and people and the like - but the main use of 3D is to open out the space, away from you. Scorsese has always loved sending his camera into his spaces - all those tracks and steadicam shots people love - and here, he gets to indulge that to a fault, plunging into spaces - in a way that keeps opening out more spaces in front of you. You get the sense of behind things - it's very impressive. Though - to be sure - after a while - the showy way he sticks things in the front of the shot, to create those depth effects get a bit tiresome - and remind you, maybe, that that sort of thing works perfectly well in 2D, and is less distracting. But that's all right.

Meanwhile, Scorsese also gets to wallow in the magic of primitive cinema - reproducing the process of shooting those old films, working the films into his film. And that, I think, is the ultimate point of the film - it appropriates very old, primitive films as a way of championing another technical innovation, 3D. It's an apologia for special effects, and for the value of spectacle, and specifically, imaginative, imaginary spectacle, and technical trickery, over story, plot, etc. It makes that case - it is all those things - it makes a convincing case indeed.

Okay - that's Hugo. The Artist, meanwhile, is something different. As a film - it's enjoyable fluff about a silent film star who can't adjust to sound - he spends all his money making his own film, which bombs, and he sinks intio misery. All this is paralleled by the rise of an actress, who, in the end, saves him. That is, this is another variant on A Star is Born, this time with a happy ending (and the romance starting at the end.) It's charming enough, but it's a pretty thin storyline, and it sags a bit (a lot) in the middle - enough to make the Oscar talk all too understandable. The academy has a nose for mediocrity...

It's problems might not matter more if it had a bit more to say about the history, though. (Or vice versa - if the story were better, the lack of the kind of cinephilia Hugo has wouldn't be a problem.) Because it doesn't really do anything with the style - it's black and white, it's (sort of) silent - and so what? That isn't entirely fair - there are moments. There are the films in the film - most of them invented (though they do steal a bit of The Mark of Zorro at one point) - and, while nothing too spectacular, amusing, and, I have to admit, rather more interesting looking than the film we get to see. And there are a couple moments where the film actually uses sound - there is a dream sequence that is worth the price of admission, and indeed, works in precisely the way the best of those 90s neo-silents did. Exploring the effects of technology, playing with them, bringing the technology of film to the foreground. And - very welcome, because the truth is, the coming of sound was not a big feature in those 90s films - nor in Hugo - Maddin is the only one of the filmmakers I mentioned above who really dwells on that moment of change.... BUt unfortunately, that's about the end - Hazanavicius doesn't really pursue it.

And so - in the end, The Artist is just an imitation of an old style, without a strong critical element. That's part of it. You could also say, it's just less inventive, less surprising, not as good as Hugo. Never mind Tren de Sombras or Forgotten Silver or Heart of the World.

Another Lazy Friday

And again... I find myself much lazier than I want to be - so lacking any special inspiration, let's just play around in iTunes and YouTube, shall we?

1. White Stripes - Catch Hell Blues
2. PJ Harvey - Rid of Me
3. Simon Wickham-Smith & Richard Youngs - Lake
4. Interpol - Memory Serves
5. Mnor Threat - Filler
6. Girls at our Best! - Going Nowhere Fast
7. Radiohead - Sit Down, Stand Up (SNakes & Ladders)
8. Paul Revere and the Raiders - Just Like Me
9. Camper von Beethoven - Turqoise Jewelry
10. Saint Etienne - Hobart Pavement

Video? We need PJ:



And some old, rather blurry Camper van Beethoven:



And - a random (and very beautiful) Richard Youngs song:

World War II In Films

I am taking a class again - at Harvard Extension - this one is called World War II Through Film and Literature - and is roughly what it says it is. The history of the war, covered in the context of films and books. We're three few weeks in - the first three films have been The Mortal Storm, The Winter War and Mrs. Miniver. The Winter War is the outlier there - a film about the war between Finland and the USSR in 1939-40, made for the 50th anniversary. It's an obscure episode in the war, not fitting with the dominant story - the Russians attacked Finland in a dispute over land (the Soviets wanted land, to help defend Liningrad, basically) - since Russia had signed the non-aggression pact with the Germans, the western allies flirted with jumping into the war on Finland's side... they didn't, and a couple years later, Finland rather rashly started this war up again, on the German's side... complicated. Anyway - the Soviets invaded, the Finns fought back, and for three months or so held off the infinitely stronger Soviets, in a gruesome bloodbath. The Russians just kept coming and the Finns mowed them down. It was 1916 all over again. In the end, the Russians punched through a couple places, enough to convince the Finns to take the Soviet offer of peace, though they were still holding most of their land. Anyway - the film is a grunt's eye view of this war, a Finnish unit in the trenches, fighting off the Soviets, day after day after day... It's brutal and unrelenting, and the film keeps you in the middle of it - but for all its harsh realism, it still manages to hit nearly every cliche in the book. Story and style - the training, the banter, the mix of characters, the home front, the girls, the wounded soldier gone home to find himself alienated, etc. - and the style, pulls out music and slow motion and sound design at the places where war movies always do those things.... It's a noble attempt to show war at its ugliest, but it doesn't quite seem to have the chops to do it.

The other two films are a different matter. The Mortal Storm is one of those films made between the start of the war in Europe and Pearl Harbor that started to take sides - while maybe trying to maintain some plausible deniability. It's about the opening period of Hitler's rule in Germany - Frank Morgan plays a college professor who everyone loves - but then Hitler is made chancellor and things go wrong. He is hounded from his job (the people who celebrated him before turn against him - including his own friends and family); Jimmy Stewart is another one - a pacifist, a liberal, and a horse doctor - who before long has to run away to Austria. Margaret Sullavan is in it too - Morgan's daughter, courted by Robert Young (of all people) in the role of a Nazi student... It is a Frank Borzage film - a handsome, rather gloriously overdetermined melodrama that ends as badly as one might expect. It's also a pretty decent account of the early years of the Nazi rule - showing the slow but inexorable logic of their extension of terror and persecution... It doesn't pull a lot of punches in this - though it's interesting which punches it does pull. No one mentions Jews - "non-Aryans" only; the film barely mentions Germany... It's interesting too that even at the end, when the pacifists are chased out of the country, murdered, shot down in cold blood and so on - they don't take up arms. This isn't quite Sergeant York.... I don't know how much of that is from the story and how much from the times - some of it must be from the times, as those American films tended to keep pushing closer to calling for war...

Finally, Mrs. Miniver. Like the Mortal Storm, this is a big, handsome MGM production, directed by one of the high end directors of the time - William Wyler this time. This is about the Miniver family, Clem and Kay, their three kids, especially son Vin, and the aristocratic girl he falls in love with. The film commences in the summer of 1939 - before long, England is at war. Vin joins the RAF, everyone else does whatever their duty happens to be - home guard, air raid wardens and whatnot - the film jumps ahead to the summer of 1940, and things happen. Dunkirk - the Battle of Britain - bombing raids - death from the sky... It was started before the US entered the war, but not finished until early 1942 - this led to certain scenes (especially the one with a German pilot) being amped up a bit. Though the main story would have been pretty straightforward pro-British more or less propaganda from the start. It's an interesting film - it's a handsome, impeccably made work, with a very strong script, and a few moments of truly magnificent filmmaking. The problem is - as consummate a work of art as it is, it is very polite, very MGM - with all the sense of stasis and self-congratulation that can entail. I'm not a fan of the style - it goes against me, even when the filmmaking is as good as this is. Somehow, even though it is made about the same time, at the same studio, in the same style, I much prefer The Mortal Storm - it seems - more at peace with its melodrama. I guess. All this tends to disappear as the film goes on - there are moments - the assembly of the Dunkirk fleet - the bomb shelter - most of the ending - that are filmmaking at its finest, on par with Lang or Hitchcock. Wyler is known for his love of deep spaces - and certainly, he uses space to great effect here.... But what's surprising is how much tension he milks out of the lack of space - the bomb shelter sequence, and the ending, are brilliant - using tight framings, sound, flickers and flashes of light - to make extremely powerful, stressful scenes.

Randomizer - Randomize!

Hello Friday again! Another random day - time's been tight lately - I am taking a class again - I hope to get some material out of it though, so - there may be some real content here in coming days! Could be. Anyway, it is Friday, thank the good lord, and thus time for a post of music.

1. A Ha - Take On Me
2. Preston School of Industry - Take a Stand
3. Bill Callahan - Eid Ma Clack Shaw
4. Mozart - Ah! del padre in periglio [Don Giovanni - hey! I got some cultha here and there!]
5. Come - Sad Eyes
6. Pink Floyd - Corporal Clegg
7. Ryan Adams - Sweet Black Magic
8. Yo la Tengo - If It's True
9. Gomez - Very Strange
10. Audioslave - What you are

Video? You know - in fact, A Ha can never come up on these random lists - it's the very first song that appear in iTunes, and it's where I click to start, to make sure that when the next song is random! fun fact! But today - there are North Koreans playing accordions to post:



And - why not? Here's the Mozart number that came up, from the Joseph Losey film:



And finally, somethign completely different - Pink Floyd in Belgium, in their early, very early, Dave Gilmour days.

Ben Gazzara

Another of American's great actors has died, Ben Gazzara. Like Peter Falk, he probably got his best movie roles from Cassavetes - though like Falk, he worked for many significant directors, had many juicy roles - and his presence always graced the film. He had a face - looking at The Killing of a Chinese Bookie for this, you notice how much of the film consists of shots of Gazzara listening - waiting - Cassavetes' tight framings and long dialogue scenes require something like that - he cuts between the speakers sometimes, but just as often, maybe more, he just holds on Gazzara, listening, looking around (trying to catch everything, like he's trying to spot where the next disaster is coming from)... That is a great film, and one that is profoundly dependent on the lead...

Musical Friday and Soul Train

Friday again, and another fairly simply random 10, but I want to add a note of goodbye to Don Cornelius - I don't remember Soul Train as clearly as I remember MIdnight Special, but in the 70s, any TV show with music - lots of music - was like manna... So - start with Marvin Gaye, a long segment chatting with Don and the audience, then singing "Let's Get It On" - yes indeed.



And? let's turn the randomizer over to Genius today, and start with Marvin Gaye....

1. Marvin Gaye - What's Goin' On
2. James Brown - It's a Man's Man's Man's World
3. The Isley Brothers - That Lady
4. Stevie Wonder - He's Misstra Know It All
5. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles - Tears of a Clown
6. The Temptations - Get Ready
7. Sly & The Family Stone - Hot Fun in the Summer Time
8. Prince and the Revolution - Purple Rain
9. Curtis Mayfield - (Don't Worry) If there's a Hell Below We're All Going to Go
10. Meters - Cissy Strut

And more Soul Train - here are the Isley Brothers:



And - though not the song on the genius list - Stevie Wonder...