The Man Who Wasn’t There
2001, directed by Joel Coen
This is a very odd film. It has beautifully poetic passages of dialog and wonderful acting, but the plot is bizarre and meandering. I can tell The Coen’s were trying really hard, but the end result is a mess. It’s a noir film, with a classic crime framework, but it’s an anti-noir in its execution. In the film’s world no one is really very bad, everyone makes mistakes and chaos rules fate. For a black and white film, its morality is very grey.
Scarface
1932, directed by Howard Hawks
I’m always impressed when films from the 20’s and 30’s have complex cinematography, smart dialog, or ironic imagery. Scarface, the “daddy of all gangster films,” has all three. I guess I get so used to watching the lower, b-grade films from that period: aka, Universal monster films, that I forget how complex the art form was even then. There will always be cheap popular films and artistic films. This, apart from a few melodramatic bits, was the latter.
Cassandra’s Dream
2007, directed by Woody Allen
A classic tragedy, with one sin begetting another, Cassandra’s Dream reminded me of my favorite Allen film, Crimes and Misdemeanors, although it had a much grimmer, classical ending. The acting was wonderful, with Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell playing middle-class British men seeking their fortunes at almost any cost, and the score by Philip Glass really made their journey an emotional ride. The film is full of references to Greek tragedy and dreams, the most obvious reference in the title, Cassandra being a Trojan prophetess who constantly foretold Troy’s doom, but was ignored. Similarly, Colin Farrell’s character sees the coming danger, but his pleas are ignored by McGregor’s. Woody Allen understands the human condition very well, highlighting man’s struggle between selfishness and guilt, just as he did in Crimes and Misdemeanors, he just can’t seem to connect the dots that lead to Christ and His forgiveness.
The Phantom of The Opera
1925, directed by Rupert Julian and Edward Sedgwick
This film has lost none of its power with age. The sets are enormous and give the sense that the opera is an actual place, full of mysterious passages and deep tunnels, with stairs and doors leading off in every direction. Within these catacombs the phantom lurks, dashing across rope bridges, and appearing behind walls and mirrors, with a huge black horse to navigate a maze of arches and a black gondola to glide across a cavern lake “five cellars underground.” These sequences are truly nightmarish. Unlike the Broadway musical, this film has no sympathy for the phantom. He is revealed to be a criminally insane killer who practices the dark arts. Hidden beneath an angelic mask, his features are monstrous and he terrorizes and tortures his victims with infernal machinery much like modern Hollywood psychopaths. At one point he even descends under water to capsize a boat, in a green colored sequence reminiscent of The Creature From The Black Lagoon. The filmmakers tinted the black and white film different colors to match the locations, with orangish yellow used to convey the lighted interiors and sickly glow of the caverns, and blue and green to convey the dark backstage and hidden passages of the opera house. There is even a masquerade scene that is hand colored, an early attempt at at Technicolor. I was really surprised at how dramatically powerful, scary and well-filmed this was. It’s probably the best monster film I’ve seen.
Treeless Mountain
2008. directed by So Yong Kim
A sad and delicate film about two little girls living in poverty in South Korea. Their mother cannot support them and has to leave them with their aunt, who later leaves them with their grandparents in the country. The film is told from the girls’ perspectives, in mostly shallow depth-of-field close-ups. It is edited like a child thinks, with much importance placed on seemingly unimportant events: catching grasshoppers, eating, wetting the bed; but there are enough snatches of conversation from the mostly off-screen adults to understand the tragedy of the children’s situation. As the quality of their lives worsens, the two girls’ resilience and love for each other is strengthened, and the viewer is left with a small sense of hope for them.
The Magnificent Ambersons
1942, directed by Orson Welles
Orson Welles was an incredibly creative director. So much so that his creativity occasionally got in the way of his films. There were shots in The Magnificent Ambersons that were so complex, and so strangely edited and framed, that they jarred me out of the story. That being said, the story was interesting and well told, a strong morality play about how selfishness can destroy lives. It reminded me of Dickens’ Great Expectations.