Carlos Valladares – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com Breaking news from the Farm since 1892 Fri, 20 Nov 2020 06:31:13 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://stanforddaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/cropped-DailyIcon-CardinalRed.png?w=32 Carlos Valladares – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com 32 32 204779320 An alum’s response to ‘The case against BLM’ https://stanforddaily.com/2020/11/19/an-alums-response-to-the-case-against-blm/ https://stanforddaily.com/2020/11/19/an-alums-response-to-the-case-against-blm/#respond Fri, 20 Nov 2020 05:27:13 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1175392 As the former editor of the Arts and Life section and senior film critic at the Daily for three years (2015-18), I rolled my eyes in exhaustion as I read such naïve arguments as those contained in Lucy Kross Wallace’s op-ed (making the non-case “against BLM”).

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As the former editor of the Arts and Life section and senior film critic at the Daily for three years (2015-18), I rolled my eyes in exhaustion as I read such naïve arguments as those contained in Lucy Kross Wallace’s op-ed, which made the non-case “against BLM.” There’s a cozy, quaint familiarity to this bull. It’s the shining example of what happens when you check out of discourse, don’t do the reading and don’t analyze how the words and the language that you unconsciously inherit from the air around you forms your psyche in insidiously racist ways. 

Like many of her ideological ilk (those who read New Discourses, who “pursue the light of objective [sic] truth in subjective darkness”), Lucy is disturbed that the BLM movement “perpetually eludes categorization” —which contributes to its effectiveness, without a single figurehead upon whose shoulders the burden of a people’s cause is placed. As I see it, the striving is towards police abolition — far beyond weak “reform.” She complains that she can’t find a Statement of Intent in any “official” Black Lives Matter website — as if it’s law school with a doorstop of a prep book. If Kross Wallace had done any kind of serious research, any hard listening to Black or Indigenous or anti-colonial thought this summer, she’d soon realize that she’s engaged in a vain and doomed search for an institutionally approved party line, which would negate the whole grassroots propulsion of BLM and of the Black freedom struggle in the U.S. in the first place. Maybe she could have read anything said by Dr. Clayborne Carson at the King Institute right down the street from her — or maybe she couldn’t find it, tucked, as it is, out of sight from main campus in a small bungalow behind the Engineering Quad for over 40 years.

She unquestioningly trots out the same old “looters and thieves” logic that Breitbart, aristocrat Democrats and the bubbles of Facebook spew on an hourly basis. I’ll just quote back to her one of the texts that went viral this summer, courtesy James Baldwin in a 1968 interview with Esquire:

“The story isn’t in yet, and furthermore, I don’t believe what I read in the newspapers. I object to the term ‘looters’ because I wonder who is looting whom, baby…How would you define somebody who puts a cat where he is and takes all the money out of the ghetto where he makes it? Who is looting whom? Grabbing off the TV set? He doesn’t really want the TV set. He’s saying, screw you. It’s just judgment, by the way, on the value of the TV set. He doesn’t want it. He wants to let you know he’s there. The question I’m trying to raise is a very serious question. The mass media—television and all the major news agencies—endlessly use that word, ‘looter.’ On television you always see black hands reaching in, you know. And so the American public concludes that these savages are trying to steal everything from us. And no one has seriously tried to get where the trouble is. After all, you’re accusing a captive population who has been robbed of everything of looting. I think it’s obscene.”

Lucy, my inbox, too, was filtered with those very same performative gestures from school departments, news outlets and earnestly liberal friends trying to reach out and prove to themselves, “Racist? Pas moi!” What I did was check my own contempt, re-read Frantz Fanon and Audre Lorde and George Jackson and Paulo Freire, send the money to those bail funds, protest with a mask alongside the people I love, watch Jacques Demy’s “Une Chambre En Ville” (1982) and move on with my day — with the quotidian, unseen work of dreaming and planning and loving a something beyond the carceral capitalist state. This is a being-in-the-world at odds with the anti-Black state of things in the current U.S. imperialist system — a system that ensures people who think, similarly to Kross Wallace, that nothing exists beyond the confines of the self or arbitrary borders. Such a system champions this status-quo-approved discourse as a kind of sociological triumph of free speech in the newspapers of schools worth billions of dollars — a fortune made on the backs of slaves, Chinese and Mexican and Irish railroad workers and San Franciscans forced by Silicon Valley to live on the streets. Imagined neutrality, viz. a reliance on the imaginary objectivity of statistics (which lie like hell), is on the side of the police, racism, fascism (e.g., Bertolucci’s “Conformist,” 1970).

And if, by Wallace’s definition, “left-wing outlets” include such toothless neoliberal publications like Elle, Buzzfeed and the Guardian, then my name is Clint Eastwood.

Carlos Valladares ’18

Former Arts and Life Editor, Senior Film Critic, The Stanford Daily (2015-18)

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ alumni.stanford.edu.

The Daily is committed to publishing a diversity of op-eds and letters to the editor. We’d love to hear your thoughts. Email letters to the editor to eic ‘at’ stanforddaily.com and op-ed submissions to opinions ‘at’ stanforddaily.com. 

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Valladares: In a sentimental mood https://stanforddaily.com/2018/06/14/valladares-in-a-sentimental-mood/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/06/14/valladares-in-a-sentimental-mood/#respond Thu, 14 Jun 2018 16:56:52 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1142142 Today — Saturday, June 9, 2018 — I cried on the basement floor of the Stanford Bookstore. I was there to pick up my cap and gown. At the cash register, a sudden realization flashed through my head: I was standing in the exact same spot where I met my first Stanford friend back in 2013.

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The last column of my Stanford career is dedicated to the late David Wiegand of the San Francisco Chronicle — a critic, a mentor and a mensch.

Today — Saturday, June 9, 2018 — I cried on the basement floor of the Stanford Bookstore. I was there to pick up my cap and gown. At the cash register, a sudden realization flashed through my head: I was standing in the exact same spot where I met my first Stanford friend back in 2013. I was then a rising high school senior who attended the Stanford High School Summer Session on a Questbridge scholarship. She was from Tokyo, Japan. That day, we talked about life in Tokyo, life in Los Angeles (where I grew up), what our futures held. That day, we ate Panda Express — she had mixed veggies. It began to rain outside the black Tressider tables, and we had to walk back to Otero (our dorm) trying to stay dry. We marveled at the many cheeses Subway had to offer. Memories of Kubrick’s “The Shining,” CoHo couches and Skype sessions with her Tokyo girl-friends all merge into one blissful summer. It started incredible adventures for both of us that still keep going.

These termite-sized details are so precious, so beautiful. We all have them. We must preserve as many as possible. When you read them in a novel (from George Eliot to NoViolet Bulawayo), they make you stop and reassess the way you approach what we deem “important” in life. They constitute what my favorite film critic Manny Farber calls “the unheralded ripple of physical experience, the tiny morbidly lifeworn detail which the visitor to a strange city finds springing out at every step.” When we read each other’s termitic details, a once-mysterious part of life suddenly zooms into focus.

The sad, ironic thing is that I hadn’t thought about the wondrous day I met Rachael until today. Yet, my brain still lodged the day in its astonishingly vast bank. When the time came, it shook me and said, “Remember? Remember?” I did, and the tears came.

We spend our four or so years here, noses stuck in books or P-sets, sleep debt ever increasing, not really understanding that our college time is slowly running out. We only realize it when we have a week left on campus. That’s when we say to ourselves, “Oh shit. I leave forever next Sunday.” Then it’s all over: You walk, you get your diploma, you take a couple snaps for the fam, and Stanford sends you on your merry way to your hazy, never-sure, debt-riddled future. Somewhere along the way, in the deal you made to spend four years studying, the wonder of the daily gets “the fuzzy end of the lollipop,” as Marilyn Monroe once sadly mused.

* * *

Valladares: In a sentimental mood
A farewell. Judy Garland in Vincente Minnelli’s “Meet Me in St. Louis.” Photo: MGM/1944 and Doc Macro.

But it needn’t be like that. For me, the best part of “The Sound of Music” is that unforgettable ditty “My Favorite Things,” in which Julie Andrews tries to comfort the scared Von Trapp kids by reciting a list of things she loves. The things are delicate and haunted by ephemerality: “whiskers on kittens,” “crisp apple strudels,” “snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes.” What is this list if not a list of childhood memories — ones that will either be preserved or be lost to time? I think of “My Favorite Things” when I reflect on all that has kept the flame inside my heart kicking at Stanford.

A Daily-specific memory: the movie nights I’d have with The Daily’s layout guru, Duran Alvarez. I recall the time we watched “Point Blank” (1967) and we could not suppress our glee at the gloriously weird nightclub beatdown. In two tight minutes, a whole flurry of questions are posed — and are never answered. Is the music — an unholy cross of church-funk, Sunset Strip Otis and the Stevie Wonder of “Fingertips” — a parody of or tribute to soul? Why does director John Boorman cut to jarring close-ups of the imitation Stevie Wonder and the fat guy with jowls? Why is the only lyric to this song “I say, YEAH!”? Why does Boorman shoot the fight in pitch-dark, so that we can barely see any movement? In an action film with such crazily erratic editing, why is the scene filmed in such action-killing long takes? Why is the black singer so obsessed with this one fat white guy? What was the photo-session like with the go-go dancers whose constipated faces flash behind Lee Marvin? And let’s not even start on the go-go-dancer’s screams, which add an even more psychotic flavor to a surreal scene — but how do you describe that flavor? To Duran, the song reminded him uncannily of “Tighten Up” by Archie Bell and the Drells. Thus began a tradition of me “tightening-up” to the song every time I came into the Daily House. I didn’t even need to come into The Daily daily. I haven’t been a managing editor of Arts and Life since early 2017. And yet I did, because I loved the vibe, the energy, the people, my fellow journalists who got solid papers out with a consummate professionalism that still continues to provoke awe in me.

Here are a few more of my favorite Stanford things: Happy Donuts runs with the gals and guys of Delta Omega (Stanford’s unofficial breakfast fraternity). The times I’d wander into the Cantor or Anderson and stare at a random painting for 10 minutes plus. The late-night trips to ’Llags, where caffeinated study buddies with bloodshot eyes sat next to out-of-it partygoers who moved in slow-motion.

On the Quad streets at 9:20 a.m., 10:20 a.m., and 1:20 p.m., the run-ins with biking friends — or, even better, friends walking in my same direction. On our frantic way to class, we all surged as if we were in a Stanford spinoff of Jacques Demy’s “The Young Girls of Rochefort.”

The times I would stagger out of the Stanford Theatre, dazed and buzzing, after having discovered a profound work of art like “Only Angels Have Wings” or “The Wages of Fear” or “Hard to Handle” or “The Heiress” or “Bringing Up Baby” or “The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg,” or rewatching a familiar classic like “The Birds” or “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” with wiser eyes.

Tutoring middle-schoolers on Saturday mornings at the Haas Center. The time at the gym when I wheezed “My hip! my hip!” and my best friend broke into wild laughter. The times we would both keep from doing our official work by doing something far more worthwhile: rewatching pre-2004 episodes of “SpongeBob SquarePants.”

Bonfires and luaus and runs to In-N-Out. Rolling down the 280 while singing “American Girl” and “You Can’t Hurry Love.” Bitching sessions at fountains. Sob sessions with friends — sometimes out in broad daylight. We need that daily reminder that, no, everything is not all right. The heartaches, frustration and fears which flowed out, because they could not stay pent up. We need that daily reminder that, no, everything is not always “good, good.”

Throughout the four years, there were not enough words to express the constantly-felt pains and joys. Memories were made, but we don’t know which ones will last. Friendships were broken, but they may be mended. I’d meet someone new and the jazzy path of my life would pick up a beautiful, life-affirming countermelody. I’d talk with an old friend and they would reveal a new dimension to their soul, leaving me as humbled as Louis Jourdan in Vincente Minnelli’s “Gigi”: “Have I been standing up too close, or back too far? I was mad not to have seen the change in you…”

Whatever the case, at Stanford, life was always fresh and exciting and — one of my favorite words — weird. I hope life after Stanford stays weird. I hope we remember to pause and delight in the flavor of green tea over rice — whether it is late spring, the end of summer, or an autumn afternoon. I hope when it rains in Cherbourg, we have an umbrella. I hope when we hear our whisper of the heart, we listen. I hope we meet that king in New York; I hope we find that countess from Hong Kong. And I hope that the best years of our lives are yet to come.

Thank you so much for reading.

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvalladares0896 ‘at’ gmail.com.

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Carlos Valladares’ favorite movies https://stanforddaily.com/2018/06/11/carlos-valladares-favorite-films/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/06/11/carlos-valladares-favorite-films/#respond Mon, 11 Jun 2018 07:01:03 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1142149 It’s a question I get all the time: “So what are your favorite movies?” Here, finally, is an answer. My idea was that the list could be some neat number, like 100. Turns out that, for me, such a reduction is nigh-impossible. Instead, I’ve opted to go through my film diary and pick out which films have pierced me the most. These are […]

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It’s a question I get all the time: “So what are your favorite movies?” Here, finally, is an answer.

My idea was that the list could be some neat number, like 100. Turns out that, for me, such a reduction is nigh-impossible. Instead, I’ve opted to go through my film diary and pick out which films have pierced me the most. These are the films which line my DNA. The films I often return to. The films that consume my thoughts. The films I’d swear and die by.

I’ve listed my favorites chronologically, by year. The films in bold and astericked are the cream of the crop. My immediate favorites include “A Hard Day’s Night,” “PlayTime,” “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” “The Young Girls of Rochefort,” “Nashville,” and “Edvard Munch.”

  1. A Trip Down Market Street Before the Fire (1906)
  2. Les Vampires (1915)
  3. Sherlock, Jr. (1924)
  4. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)
  5. The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (1927)
  6. 7th Heaven (1927)
  7. The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
  8. The Circus (1928)
  9. The Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
  10. City Lights (1931) *
  11. M (1931)
  12. Trouble in Paradise (1932)
  13. Broken Lullaby (1932)
  14. I Was Born, But… (1932)
  15. The Music Box (1932)
  16. I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang! (1932)
  17. Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933)
  18. Footlight Parade (1933)
  19. Duck Soup (1933)
  20. Design for Living (1933)
  21. Hard to Handle (1933)
  22. You’re Telling Me! (1934)
  23. L’Atalante (1934)
  24. Ruggles of Red Gap (1935)
  25. Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935)
  26. The Devil is a Woman (1935)
  27. Partie de Campagne [“A Day in the Country”] (1936)
  28. The Awful Truth (1937)
  29. Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)
  30. Porky in Wackyland (1937)
  31. Angel (1937)
  32. Bringing Up Baby (1938) *
  33. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
  34. La Règle du Jeu [“The Rules of the Game”] (1939)
  35. Only Angels Have Wings (1939)
  36. The Wizard of Oz (1939)
  37. The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
  38. Christmas in July (1940)
  39. The Great Dictator (1940)
  40. His Girl Friday (1940)
  41. Sullivan’s Travels (1941)
  42. How Green Was My Valley (1941)
  43. To Be Or Not To Be (1942) *
  44. The Palm Beach Story (1942)
  45. The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
  46. I Walked with a Zombie (1943)
  47. The Curse of the Cat People (1944)
  48. Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
  49. The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944)
  50. The Clock (1945) *
  51. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) *
  52. A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
  53. Notorious! (1946)
  54. The Big Sleep (1946)
  55. It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
  56. Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)
  57. The Heiress (1949)
  58. Jour de Fête (1949)
  59. The Red Shoes (1949)
  60. The Breaking Point (1950)
  61. The River (1951)
  62. On Dangerous Ground (1951)
  63. Ikiru (1952) *
  64. Limelight (1952)
  65. Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
  66. The Road Runner, Bugs Bunny, and Daffy Duck shorts of Chuck Jones, especially the “Hunting Trilogy”(1944-1963) *
  67. Tokyo monogatari [“Tokyo Story”] (1953) *
  68. Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot [“Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday”] (1953) *
  69. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)
  70. Pickup on South Street! (1953)
  71. Le salaire de la peur [“The Wages of Fear”] (1953)
  72. Roman Holiday (1953)
  73. Sansho dayu [“Sansho the Bailiff”] (1954) *
  74. Seven Samurai (1954)
  75. Rear Window (1954)
  76. Johnny Guitar (1954)
  77. Nuit et brouillard [“Night and Fog”] (1955)
  78. Pather Panchali [“Song of the Little Road”] (1955) *
  79. Ordet [“The Word”] (1955)
  80. Summertime (1955)
  81. The Night of the Hunter (1955)
  82. Lust for Life (1956)
  83. The Girl Can’t Help It (1956)
  84. Tokyo boshoku [“Tokyo Twilight”] (1957)
  85. Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
  86. Mon Oncle (1958)
  87. Gigi (1958)
  88. Some Came Running (1958)
  89. Vertigo (1958)
  90. Imitation of Life (1959) *
  91. Les Quatre Cents Coups [“The 400 Blows”] (1959)
  92. Rio Bravo (1959)
  93. Shadows (1959)
  94. The Apartment (1960) *
  95. Tirez sur le Pianiste [“Shoot the Piano Player”] (1960)
  96. Akibiyori [Late Autumn] (1960)
  97. Peeping Tom (1960)
  98. Meghe Dhaka Tara [“The Cloud-Capped Star”] (1960)
  99. Bells are Ringing (1960)
  100. Psycho (1960)
  101. Lola (1961)
  102. The Exiles (1961)
  103. The End of Summer (1961)
  104. Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961)
  105. The Errand Boy (1961)
  106. An Autumn Afternoon (1962) *
  107. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
  108. The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
  109. Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962)
  110. Hatari! (1962)
  111. La Jetée [“The Jetty”] (1962)
  112. El angel exterminador [“The Exterminating Angel”] (1962)
  113. Days of Wine and Roses (1962)
  114. 2 Weeks in Another Town (1962)
  115. The Birds (1963) *
  116. Le Mépris [“Contempt”] (1963)
  117. The House is Black (1963)
  118. Muriel, ou Le Temps d’un retour [“Muriel, or The Time of Return”] (1963)
  119. Mahanagar [“The Big City”] (1963)
  120. Tengoku to Jigoku [High and Low] (1963)
  121. It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)
  122. A Hard Day’s Night (1964) * 
  123. Les Parapluies de Cherbourg [“The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”] (1964) *
  124. Nothing But a Man (1964)
  125. Mary Poppins (1964)
  126. Kiss Me, Stupid (1964)
  127. The Naked Kiss (1964)
  128. Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
  129. The Shop on Main Street (1965)
  130. Le Bonheur [“Happiness”] (1965)
  131. Help! (1965)
  132. The Knack…and How to Get It (1965)
  133. Tokyo Olympiad (1965)
  134. Repulsion (1965)
  135. Au hasard Balthazar (1966) *
  136. Sedmikrásky [“Daisies”] (1966)
  137. Chelsea Girls (1966)
  138. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)
  139. La noire de… [“Black Girl”] (1966)
  140. Playtime (1967) *
  141. Les Demoiselles de Rochefort [“The Young Girls of Rochefort”] (1967) *
  142. A Countess from Hong Kong (1967)
  143. How I Won the War (1967)
  144. Weekend (1967)
  145. The Graduate (1967)
  146. Point Blank (1967)
  147. Monterey Pop/Shake! Otis at Monterey/Jimi Plays Monterey (1967)
  148. Petulia (1968) *
  149. Faces (1968)
  150. The Swimmer (1968)
  151. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
  152. Night of the Living Dead (1968)
  153. The Party (1968)
  154. Model Shop (1969)
  155. Z (1969)
  156. L’armée des ombres [“Army of Shadows”] (1969)
  157. Wanda (1970)
  158. Woodstock (1970)
  159. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)
  160. Out 1: Noli me tangere (1971) *
  161. McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) *
  162. Minnie and Moskowitz (1971)
  163. A Clockwork Orange (1971)
  164. Minamata: The Victims and Their World (1971)
  165. Land des Schweigens und der Dunkelheit [“The Land of Silence and Darkness”] (1971)
  166. A Touch of Zen (1971)
  167. A New Leaf (1971)
  168. The Heartbreak Kid (1972) *
  169. Avanti! (1972)
  170. Cabaret (1972)
  171. The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973)
  172. F For Fake (1973)
  173. A Woman Under the Influence (1974) *
  174. Edvard Munch (1974) *
  175. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
  176. Angst essen Seele auf [“Ali: Fear Eats the Soul”] (1974)
  177. Le Fantôme de la liberté [“The Phantom of Liberty”] (1974)
  178. Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
  179. Nashville (1975) *
  180. Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) *
  181. Barry Lyndon (1975) *
  182. Welfare (1975)
  183. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
  184. Tommy (1975)
  185. Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
  186. Salò, o le 120 giornate di Sodoma [“Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom”] (1975)
  187. Robin and Marian (1976)
  188. Canoa: Memoria de un Hecho Vergonzoso [“Canoa: A Shameful Memory”] (1976)
  189. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976/1978)
  190. Mikey and Nicky (1976)
  191. Carrie (1976)
  192. Family Plot (1976)
  193. Killer of Sheep (1977) *
  194. Eraserhead (1977)
  195. Opening Night (1977)
  196. Hausu [“House”] (1977)
  197. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
  198. Ese oscuro objeto del deseo [“That Obscure Object of Desire”] (1977)
  199. Dawn of the Dead (1978)
  200. Bush Mama (1979)
  201. Richard Pryor: Live in Concert (1979)
  202. Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979)
  203. Real Life (1979)
  204. All That Jazz (1979)
  205. The Big Red One (1980)
  206. The Shining (1980)
  207. My Dinner with Andre (1981)
  208. Blow Out (1981) *
  209. Modern Romance (1981)
  210. White Dog (1982)
  211. The King of Comedy (1982)
  212. L’argent [”Money”] (1983)
  213. Love Streams (1984) *
  214. Stop Making Sense (1984)
  215. Shoah (1985) *
  216. Lost in America (1985)
  217. The Color Purple (1985)
  218. Castle in the Sky (1986)
  219. Au revoir, les enfants (1987)
  220. Hotaru no Haka [Grave of the Fireflies] (1988) *
  221. Tonari no Totoro [My Neighbor Totoro] (1988)
  222. Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988)
  223. The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)
  224. Do the Right Thing (1989) *
  225. Majo no Takkyūbin [Kiki’s Delivery Service] (1989)
  226. Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1989-1997)
  227. To Sleep with Anger (1990)
  228. Close-Up (1990)
  229. Omoide Poro Poro [Only Yesterday] (1991) *
  230. Gu ling jie shao nian sha ren shi jian [A Brighter Summer Day] (1991)
  231. Daughters of the Dust (1991)
  232. Defending Your Life (1991)
  233. The Long Day Closes (1992)
  234. Porco Rosso [”The Crimson Pig”] (1992)
  235. Side/Walk/Shuffle (1992)
  236. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)
  237. Short Cuts (1993)
  238. Groundhog Day (1993)
  239. Chungking Express (1994)
  240. Hoop Dreams (1994)
  241. Haut, bas, fragile [“Up, Down, Fragile”] (1995)
  242. Do lok tin si [Fallen Angels] (1995)
  243. Jackie Brown (1997)
  244. Dil Se… [“From the Heart”] (1998)
  245. Beloved (1998)
  246. Babe: Pig in the City (1998)
  247. The Hole (1998)
  248. The Last Days of Disco (1998)
  249. My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999)
  250. Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
  251. Faa yeung nin wa [In the Mood for Love] (2000) *
  252. La Commune — Paris, 1871 (2000)
  253. The Emperor’s New Groove (2000)
  254. Domestic Violence (2000)
  255. La Ciénaga [“The Swamp”] (2000)
  256. Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi [Spirited Away] (2001) *
  257. A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)
  258. Mulholland Drive (2001)
  259. Monster’s Inc. (2001)
  260. School of Rock (2003)
  261. Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003)
  262. Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003)
  263. Moolaadé [“magical protection”] (2004)
  264. Before Sunset (2004)
  265. La niña santa [“The Holy Girl”] (2004)
  266. I Heart Huckabees (2004)
  267. National Treasure (2004)
  268. Inland Empire (2006)
  269. The Darjeeling Limited (2007)
  270. Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea (2008)
  271. Wendy and Lucy (2008)
  272. Bernie (2011)
  273. Silver Linings Playbook (2012) *
  274. Stories We Tell (2012)
  275. Moonrise Kingdom (2012)
  276. To the Wonder (2013)
  277. Kaguya-hime no Monogatari [The Tale of the Princess Kaguya] (2013) *
  278. Kaze Tachinu [The Wind Rises] (2013)
  279. American Hustle (2013)
  280. Boyhood (2014) *

And, separately, my favorite films that have been released during my time at Stanford. “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” and “Leave No Trace” have not been released widely, though they surely would be on this list.

  1. Gone Girl (2014)
  2. Olive Kitteridge (2014)
  3. Inherent Vice (2014)
  4. Güeros (2014)
  5. The LEGO Movie (2014)
  6. In Jackson Heights (2015) *
  7. Joy (2015) *
  8. Tangerine (2015)
  9. Knight of Cups (2015)
  10. Mistress America (2015)
  11. Certain Women (2016) *
  12. Paterson (2016) *
  13. Silence (2016)
  14. La Tortue Rouge [”The Red Turtle”] (2016)
  15. A Quiet Passion (2016)
  16. La La Land (2016)
  17. Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) *
  18. Lady Bird (2017) *
  19. Zama (2017)
  20. You Were Never Really Here (2017)

Update: Adding “The Misfits” (1961), “The Nutty Professor” (1963), “Jesus Christ Superstar” (1973), “Losing Ground” (1982), “Ishtar” (1987), “Old Joy” (2006), and “Wall-E” (2008).

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvalladares0896 ‘at’ gmail.com

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‘The Ocean & the Avenue’: an antidote to deadened Marvel cinema https://stanforddaily.com/2018/05/25/ocean-and-avenue/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/05/25/ocean-and-avenue/#respond Fri, 25 May 2018 08:00:57 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1141568 A strong new short film by Bella Levaggi ’18 and Spencer Slovic ’18 debuted last night at Roble Arts Gym. “The Ocean & The Avenue,” quite subtly well done, is an imaginative and unflashy 20 minutes that uncovers a glimmer of life’s beauty — the reason for breathing. As a trigger warning, I should caution that it […]

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A strong new short film by Bella Levaggi ’18 and Spencer Slovic ’18 debuted last night at Roble Arts Gym. “The Ocean & The Avenue,” quite subtly well done, is an imaginative and unflashy 20 minutes that uncovers a glimmer of life’s beauty — the reason for breathing. As a trigger warning, I should caution that it deals with suicide and suicidal ideation, as well as those equally important tough shards which, by the way society patronizingly treats them as “little” or “unimportant,” are often hand-waved away or ignored by less attentive artists. The shards: catcalls in the street, the Millennial malaise too often dismissed as laziness or precious sensitivity, hangups with dads and sisters and lovers where the hanger-uppers struggle to find the words to communicate their lostness. Slovic and Levaggi give us cause to pause and think in a non-cheap way, which is something that you won’t get in bigger hits like the cowardly irony of “Deadpool” or slick, odorless, do-gooder Oscar bait.
Bella Wilcox ’19 and Elias Mooring ’18 are two loose strands whose stories converge in an quietly exciting way. Much of the film is walking — to a diner, up a hill, down a bridge, from a bike. In these downbeat moments, Levaggi and Slovic show just exactly what the short-film form can do: bring attention to an everyday that otherwise gets glossed over in flashier, longer narrative works. I love that most of the film is just waiting to see where the story emerges, which is gravely different from having no story or no sense of direction. “The Ocean and the Avenue” meanders like the windy streets of “SanFran” it so obviously is in love with, is fascinated by. We delight in the fractured feelings of the characters — one low on money and out of love, the other suicidal — that cannot be shaped into a conventional narrative. To do so would be obscene.
I hope there is another chance soon to view this film on campus; it really deserves a big audience, and it deserves to be seen more than once.
Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Recs from the Vault: The best new films I saw in theaters https://stanforddaily.com/2018/05/10/recs-from-the-vault-new-films-edition/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/05/10/recs-from-the-vault-new-films-edition/#respond Thu, 10 May 2018 09:00:17 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1140711 In this week’s Recs from the Vault, I look back at the best films I saw in theaters during my four years at Stanford. Whether new films or old ones, these were the movie experiences that impacted me the most. In all of these cases, I wrote extensive reviews. What I present here are mini […]

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In this week’s Recs from the Vault, I look back at the best films I saw in theaters during my four years at Stanford. Whether new films or old ones, these were the movie experiences that impacted me the most. In all of these cases, I wrote extensive reviews. What I present here are mini reviews, with parts from those long-form pieces. As usual, all of these films are available to watch at the Media and Microtext Center in Green Library.

“Joy” (2015)

David O. Russell (“Silver Linings Playbook,” “American Hustle”) directed this weird and wonderful biopic about Miracle Mop inventor and entrepreneur Joy Mangano (Jennifer Lawrence in her best role so far). As a biographical film, it’s leagues above the routine drivel we usually get (“The Theory of Everything,” “The Imitation Game”); it’s a post-Howard Hawks paean to matriarchy, shrewd wiles and incessant drive, filtered through Russell’s screwball comedy sensibility. Russell hasn’t quite been recognized as the major American auteur he is, partly because critics confusingly label his films as “messy,” “over-the-top” and “shrill.” In fact, the Russell ensemble is tightly controlled, emitting sparks on the level of Robert Altman’s or Preston Sturges’s players. “Joy” is the work of an artist at the height of his powers: relaxed, confident, slightly kooky. 124 minutes. With Robert De Niro, Bradley Cooper, Diane Ladd, Edgar Ramirez and Isabella Rossellini. The balletic cinematography is by Linus Sandgren. ZDVD 38415, ZDVD 38450 BLU-RAY.

“Only Yesterday” (1991)

My favorite anime from the world-renowned Studio Ghibli, and one of the greatest films about the quiet pains we endure as we grow up. The late Isao Takahata, who also did the emotionally devastating “Grave of the Fireflies” and “The Tale of the Princess Kaguya,” made this in 1991, and it was that year’s highest-grossing film in Japan. But it was not released in North American theaters until 2016; at the Aquarius Theatre, it ran for a full month. I went to watch it three times. It was my most treasured theatrical experience that year. Each time I see it now, I burrow deeper and deeper into Takahata’s plush blanket of memories and melancholia.

It’s 1982. Taeko is 27, unmarried, and living a monotonous city life in Tokyo. She decides to take a holiday and spend her summer farming with distant relatives in the Japanese countryside. On the train ride there, she reminisces about her fifth-grade self in 1966, her “awakening” year. It was the year the Beatles came to Japan. Miniskirts and electric-guitar-boy-bands were all the rage. And it was the year Taeko first learned about boys, periods, pineapples and patriarchy. Now, age 27 and worried she’ll be forever alone, she starts romancing a young organic farmer in the country. But the unmoored Taeko wonders whether she’ll be able to overcome her fears of her past and build a confident future self.

“Only Yesterday” is remarkable for its vivid rendering of its hero’s girlhood. From sibling squalors to grade-school crushes (here this week, gone the next), “Only Yesterday” is sculpted from the moments of our lives that are raw, naked, honest and quietly forgotten. The movie comes to a sublime stop in order to observe a Japanese family learning how to cut a Hawaiian pineapple. Takahata’s masterpiece is unsentimental, sparse and unsparing. 119 minutes. Based on the 1982 manga “Omoide Poro Poro.” The unforgettable score is by Katz Hoshi. ZDVD 39808, ZDVD 39807 BLU-RAY.

“Broken Lullaby” (1932)

One of the most astonishing discoveries I made at the Stanford Theatre. This profound melodrama was directed by Ernst Lubitsch, the great German-American director who is more known for his bubbly comedies and musicals. No one comes to its defense today, which boggles the mind.

Its plot is gripping and horrifying: A French soldier kills a German in hand-to-hand combat in a World War I trench. He finds a letter on the German’s body addressed to the German’s fiancée. Wracked with guilt, the Frenchman decides to meet the German’s family to absolve his sins.

“Broken Lullaby” is an absolutely essential watch, both as a humanist-political statement and as an unusual summation of Lubitsch’s philosophy. The gravity of “Broken Lullaby” compliments the serious levity of his “Trouble in Paradise” and “The Shop Around the Counter” (his more celebrated masterworks). In “Broken Lullaby,” music is equated to love, which Lubitsch suggests is the only salve to the tragedies and miseries of life. There’s not a shot wasted, as is typical of Lubitsch and his famed “Touch.” 76 minutes. With Phillips Holmes as the Frenchman, Lionel Barrymore as the German father, Nancy Carroll as the fiancée, and ZaSu Pitts as the maid. Cinematography by Victor Milner. The first of nine legendary collaborations between Lubitsch and the playwright Samson Raphaelson. ZDVD 41096.

“Certain Women” (2016)

The best new film I saw in 2016. Kelly Reichardt adapted a series of short stories by Maile Meloy to craft this river-like miracle of Acting and Setting. Reichardt’s adaptation weaves together the stories of four women in Montana: a disrespected lawyer (Laura Dern) must defuse a hostage situation; a new homeowner (Michelle Williams) tries to convince a senile old man (Rene Auberjonois) to sell her his pile of rare native sandstone; and a lonely rancher (Lily Gladstone) falls in love with a young lawyer (Kristen Stewart).

This brown-heavy tale of woe and despair in a Montana town is radical for several reasons. Besides drawing our attention to the small details of daily monotony — Dern’s untucked shirt, the ginger and exact way Kristen Stewart slices her burger with a dull diner knife — Reichardt digs deep beneath life’s surface to uncover the disharmony of the world, an unsettling American loneliness. The film’s tough and total dramatization of drab folk in a drab world moved me to tears. 107 minutes. ZDVD 41483, ZDVD 41484 BLU-RAY.

“La La Land” (2016)

My original 2016 review of “La La Land” was the most read piece I wrote for the Daily. I still love “La La Land” to pieces — and I’m fully aware of its “flaws;” I’ve heard most of its critiques. At its base, it is a romantically cynical work about narcissism and self-absorption, and how this is the key to success. It is more honest than most works in revealing that basic human drive for selfishness, every person for themselves, success at the cost of a dynamic ensemble à la “Joy” or “Certain Women.” It’s reflected in the empty frames (they drain of people as the film focuses on Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone), the narcissistic “Vertigo” greens and purples dominating the color spectrum, the blurring camera motions which finally focus in on our two heavies, the sheer lack of faith they have in the ensemble. Emma Stone’s one woman show. Gosling’s need to save jazz by himself.

Stone and Gosling’s sin is the sin of self-enclosure, of being so wrapped up in their own fantasy worlds that they forget the weird Los Angeles reality around them. When they nod to each other at the end, it is not an acknowledgment that they got everything they wanted, that they are “successful” emotionally or spiritually; rather, it is a manic-depressive, defeated gesture that acknowledges how much they now realize the limits of idealism, the limits of fantasy, their shared passion in the world lost to time, but the gnawing justification that “perhaps, it was worth it.” Won many Oscars, including Best Actress for Stone and Director for Damien Chapelle. Score by Justin Hurwitz. 130 minutes. ZDVD 40877, ZDVD 40878 BLU-RAY.

“Lady Bird” (2017)

A low-key masterpiece by Greta Gerwig in her solo directorial debut. It stars Saoirse Ronan as the titular Catholic high-schooler from Sacramento; in the course of only 90 minutes, she has to deal with boys, the college application process, lower-middle blues and her mother (Laurie Metcalf).

Gerwig’s was the most relatable American film of the 2017-18 season because her vision was based in daring interiority. Her love of people is apparent in the unstudied, naturalistic performances she culls from her actors. Each “Lady Bird” hero (two priests, Laurie Metcalf as Lady Bird’s vicious yet sympathetic mother, Timothée Chalamet as the pretentious hipster who you used to want to be or date) has a moment to rise up then recede out of the shimmering, washed-out background of Gerwig and co.’s collective memory.

Like Isao Takahata’s “Only Yesterday,” “Lady Bird” is a deftly conjured-up recollection of what it is to be young and aimless. It is non-judgmental in a completely clear-eyed way. And it has internalized emotion so well that we feel as mixed up as Lady Bird. We don’t know whether to cringe, chuckle or cry during a scene, so Gerwig suggests we do all three. 90 minutes. ZDVD 42462, ZDVD 42448 BLU-RAY.

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Recs from the Vault: “In This Our Life,” “Meet Me in St. Louis,” “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” https://stanforddaily.com/2018/04/26/recs-from-the-vault-pt-3/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/04/26/recs-from-the-vault-pt-3/#respond Thu, 26 Apr 2018 07:09:00 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1140022 In this week’s Recs from the Vault (a weekly column of some old reviews I’ve written about films that I’ve loved during my time here at Stanford), we take a look at three emotional juggernauts. They’re all available to watch at the Media and Microtext Center in Green Library. The first is best seen on a hot […]

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In this week’s Recs from the Vault (a weekly column of some old reviews I’ve written about films that I’ve loved during my time here at Stanford), we take a look at three emotional juggernauts. They’re all available to watch at the Media and Microtext Center in Green Library. The first is best seen on a hot summer day; the third, on a wintery night. Any clime or time is fine for the second.

“In This Our Life” (1942)

Crazier than sin; as Justine Smith wrote, “it’s a classic of anti-chill cinema.” John Huston’s unjustly forgotten sophomore feature is like a gangster flick with Bette Davis as Scarface. Davis steals and kills more husbands than we can keep track of; Olivia de Havilland is her “good” sister who dates a man (George Brent) who may or may not be a socialist, integrationist radical; Liv’s idea of a romantic night out is watching a forest burn. Charles Coburn plays the jolly old uncle who pervs on Davis — who returns his incestuous flirtations in order to get what she wants.

Here, Davis is at peak star power, in the middle of her “Jezebel”/”Now, Voyager”/”The Letter” period at Warner Bros. You can’t look away from the screen, because you can’t believe the lengths to which this post-Scarlett O’Hara belle will go to secure her personal happiness. If it means blaming the town’s only black law student (Ernest Anderson) for a hit-and-run she committed, because she knows her white privilege will let her get away with it, then she’ll do it. The prison scene where she visits him is pure sadism: She knows every white cop in town will take her word over his.

This progressive potboiler deftly deconstructs the genteel Southern plantation drama. In the film’s opening, a dummy Tara is being torn down in the middle of the city by untyped, urban black workers. Hattie McDaniel, who won an Oscar for her animation of the ultimate screen Mammy (“Gone with the Wind”), picks apart that very same type. She plays Anderson’s mother with a chilling low-key dignity: “They wouldn’t believe a colored boy,” she explains, tearfully, to Liv — who plays a curdled and more world-weary variant of her most famous creation, Melanie Hamilton.

“In This Our Life” was quickly churned out on the heels of John Huston’s “The Maltese Falcon,” and it shows: the moody noir chiaroscuro, the mad scramble of events, the desperate image of a rotten city. The title doesn’t do it justice: it should have been called “White Heat” or “Great Balls of Fire.” Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name by Ellen Glasgow. The swirling score is by Max Steiner, the composer of “Gone with the Wind.” 97 minutes. Black-and-white. ZDVD 17232.

Recs from the Vault: "In This Our Life," "Meet Me in St. Louis," "McCabe & Mrs. Miller"
(l-r) Judy Garland and Margaret O’Brien in a promotional still for Vincente Minnelli’s 1944 musical “Meet Me in St. Louis.”

“Meet Me in St. Louis” (1944)

Really one of the saddest musicals in existence. No surprise, considering it was directed by Vincente Minnelli, whose depth of feeling is unparalleled among Hollywood directors. Minnelli’s colors, the cooking of bright-red ketchup and Judy Garland’s cakewalk dances are manic attempts by the Smith family to keep their depression at bay, futile efforts by the Smith sisters to remain kids forever. As soon as the fun parts of the day end (John Truitt turns off the warm, orange lights after he asks Judy to marry him), darkness creeps in (Judy and sister Tootie are cloaked in deep-dark blues — the shade of sorrow; they will be moving to a new city where they know nobody and won’t be able to do anything “like we do in St. Louis.”) Judy Garland only infrequently smiles. In “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” (a performance that never fails to produce shivers down my spine and tears in my eyes), she degrades into melancholy, forgetting that she’s supposed to be singing to make Tootie feel better, instead turning her eyes to the heavens and mourning some kind of death, the family’s, the home’s, perhaps her own.

“Meet Me in St. Louis” is a precarious film, a bauble of happiness that slowly shatters with the final, rueful lines:

“Grandpa? They’ll never tear it down, will they?”

“Well, they’d better not.”

By the end, I find myself missing St. Louis so much — and I’ve never even been. 113 minutes. Color. ZDVD 14814, ZDVD 26196.

Recs from the Vault: "In This Our Life," "Meet Me in St. Louis," "McCabe & Mrs. Miller"
(l-r) Warren Beatty and Julie Christie are a gambler and a madam who team up to run a saloon in Robert Altman’s 1971 revisionist western “McCabe & Mrs. Miller.”

“McCabe & Mrs. Miller” (1971)

Loneliness in community — or, as Robert Altman would prefer it, communal loneliness. The blurring of dreams and reality. An “auburnt”-sepia-postcard look that conflates the reality of the past with an illusory perception of what it was like from the present. The break-down of physical space. Manny Farber nailed it: “The lay of the land, in the Seventies film, is that there are two types of structure being practised: dispersal and shallow-boxed space. ‘Rameau’s Nephew,’ ‘McCabe & Mrs. Miller,’ ‘Céline and Julie Go Boating,’ ‘Beware of a Holy Whore’ are films that believe implicitly in the idea of non-solidity, that everything is a mass of energy particles, and the aim, structurally, is a flux-like space to go with the atomized content and the idea of keeping the freshness and energy of a real world within the movie’s frame. Inconclusiveness is a big quality in the Seventies: never give the whole picture, the last word.”

Robert Altman’s cinema: half-swallowed words jumbling over one another; cohesion is not the aim, nor can it be the aim in this brave cold world. The beauty of the world infrequently flashes up from the muck: a soliloquy delivered by a half-crazed fool in love whose sole audience is his bed; a gathering around a camp-fire to hear “Silent Night” picked on Leonard Cohen’s guitar (his mournful songs are the film’s brilliantly out-of-time soundtrack); the morning glow of a whore in the arms of a dumb kid cowboy (Keith Carradine) who’s here one day and brutally gunned down the next. These are moods and modes which vanish, painfully but necessarily, with the relentless march of time. Warren Beatty’s McCabe smothered by the snows of history, Julie Christie’s Mrs. Miller lost in an opium haze. We exit through her eyeball, she who (by her very inability to restore balance) restores the sanctity of what it means to live.

“McCabe & Mrs. Miller” does not cater to a formula; it does not fit into a mold. This snowy western breaks apart, diffusing like P.B. Shelley’s Ozymandias — the tip of the tongue receding further and further into the maw: “The lone and level sands stretch far away.” 121 minutes. Color. ZDVD 39828 BLU-RAY, ZDVD 39823 DISCS 1-2.

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Recs from the Vault: ‘Tommy,’ ‘The Verdict,’ ‘Canoa,’ ‘The Bride Wore Black,’ ‘Pretty Poison’ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/04/12/recs-from-the-vault-pt-2/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/04/12/recs-from-the-vault-pt-2/#respond Thu, 12 Apr 2018 07:01:27 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1139201 This week’s “Recs from the Vault” — capsule reviews of films I’ve loved during my time here at Stanford — we take a look at two little-known thrillers from 1968, a true-crime story that shocked the nation of Mexico, and a delirious rock musical from the Who and Ken Russell. For last week’s “Recs from […]

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This week’s “Recs from the Vault” — capsule reviews of films I’ve loved during my time here at Stanford — we take a look at two little-known thrillers from 1968, a true-crime story that shocked the nation of Mexico, and a delirious rock musical from the Who and Ken Russell.

For last week’s “Recs from the Vault” and its writeups on films like Richard Lester’s “Petulia,” Charles Burnett’s “Killer of Sheep,” and Lucrecia Martel’s “La Ciénaga,” click here.

Pretty Poison” (1968)

A truly wild thriller. Anthony Perkins (“Psycho’s” Norman Bates) is a con man and arsonist who’s just come out of a stint in a mental asylum. He pretends to be a CIA agent to impress the captain of the local high school’s cheerleading squad (Tuesday Weld). But Perkins keeps up the act for too long, and Weld starts to believe he is a CIA agent—to fatal ends. Perkins wants out, but he can’t get out—he’s just awakened a deadened suburbanite who grew up on true crime trash. Anthony Perkins starts out as the psycho who holds all the cards, but he ends up totally outdone by Weld’s slyly knowing blonde. He starts out the looker, she the looked; by the end, the tables have gloriously turned.

Nearly every shot is stunning in clarity and purpose, and a good number of director Noel Black’s images (Weld’s varsity legs splayed in a splits over a construction worker’s corpse while smiling like a bobby-soxer at boy-toy Perkins; Weld and Perkins disposing of another body while walking through lush suburban greenness, clothes hanging in the late-day sun, the sounds of Fido barking) are unforgettable in their social precision and perversity. It looks like an episode of a mid-60s TV crime drama—which works to the film’s advantage, giving it a “normal” edge and bolstering the barbed satire on suburbia.

Perkins and Weld would pair up again in the 1972 film adaptation of Joan Didion’s “Play it as it Lays.” 89 minutes. Color. ZDVD 26618.

“The Bride Wore Black” (1968)

François Truffaut’s delirious, patriarchy-skewering thriller (1968). On the day of her wedding, the husband of the bride (Jeanne Moreau) is shot to death in front of her eyes; she goes on a quest for revenge, brutally murdering each of the five men responsible. No matter what Tarantino says, I will never believe he hadn’t at least heard of this film before making “Kill Bill.”

Truffaut’s love and awe of women shows in every camera set-up. As in his “400 Blows” (a child who retreats to the world of cinema), “Shoot the Piano Player” (soft masculinity caught in the hard-edged webs of film noir) and “The Soft Skin” (adultery), Truffaut turns his camera on himself — male artist, a Romantic who bolsters women as much as reduces them to a type, critiquing as much as revealing. Moreau walks out of the film breezy, unrevealed, self wholly intact (at one murder scene, she leaves behind a little portrait, wanting to get caught but playing by her own rules). She’s given a role that is both a parody and the quintessence of her Jeanne Morose persona.

The film continues a marked trend towards Hitchcockian aesthetics present in Truffaut’s previous two films, “The Soft Skin” and “Fahrenheit 451.” But it’s not in slavish obedience to Hitch; Truffaut gleefully takes whatever rules from Hitch’s playbook convenience him, and adds his singular love of people and cinema that kept him barreling in his scruffy Nouvelle Vague days (1959-64), mixed in with flat, odorless color by Raoul Coutard. 107 minutes. ZDVD 1262, ZDVD 40222 DISCS 1-21 [a box set of all of Truffaut’s films].

“Canoa: A Shameful Memory” (1976)

This 1976 masterpiece about an under-talked massacre in modern Mexican history is at once a docudrama, a horror film, a travelogue, a Hawksian hangout picture, an elegy, an essay, a whodunit, a how-was-it-done and a radical political manifesto for moviemaking. Director Felipe Cazals traces the events leading up to and following the San Miguel Canoa Massacre of September 14, 1968 — two days before El Grito de Dolores, Mexican Independence Day.

The opening title card reads simply: Esto si sucedo (“this really happened”). Five university workers decide to take an impromptu hiking trip up a mountain. They stop over in the village of San Miguel Canoa, located at the base of the mountain. Because of a nasty storm, the workers decide to stay the night at the abode of the local pariah, Lucas (Ernesto Gómez Cruz). Lucas is ostracized for his critiques of the town’s dictatorial priest (Enrique Lucero). Lucas tells the workers about the priest’s disturbing control of the villagers’ minds. The priest has the mayor and the police in his pocket. He exploits villagers who don’t pay him tithes by humiliating them over loudspeakers (the village’s form of mass media). Eventually, the villagers get wind of the workers’ presence. They mistakenly assume that the workers are university students, and therefore Communists and heathens. Without having to do anything, the priest watches as his flock (worked up by him for weeks) gathers machetes and sticks and torches, rushes to Lucas’ abode, hack and shoots him in front of his family, and then proceeds to lynch the workers and torture the survivors.

It is an extraordinary film made during a particularly fruitful time in Mexican cinema history — the 1970s, when the government wanted to appear more open by allowing strong-voiced auteurs (Arturo Ripstein, Paul Leduc, Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, and Cazals, to name a few) to represent Mexico in the international cinema realm. It’s set in 1968: the year of youth riots across the world — the DNC riots in Chicago — assassination in the air — May ’68 in Paris. Mexico was hosting the Olympics that year, and the state wanted to appear more cohesive than it actually was. The events of Canoa took place a few weeks before the infamous Tlatelolco Massacre on October 2, 1968, where hundreds of university students and civilians were gunned down by the Mexico City police in an attempt to suppress youth revolt and dissent.

“Canoa” has the rage of a lit Costa-Gavras thriller (like 1969’s “Z”) while remaining coolly distant. There are no moving shots; it’s a series of still rectangles, history frozen in time, our memories playing back mundane events like cantando corridos aboard a bus with the horrible, unforgettable shots of the lynching of Ernesto Gomez Cruz. (“Canoa’s” supporting peasant characters speak the slang-filled, beautiful language of the everyday, and the movie is more convincing, fresh, and alive as a result.) When it raises itself into a fury, you need to shirk away, but you cannot.

With Salvador Sánchez as a Brechtian peasant known only as “The Witness,” who keeps up on all the chisme and layman’s politics. The perfectly constructed screenplay is by Tomás Pérez Turrent, and the cold, unmoving images are Álex Phillips Jr.’s. Color. 115 minutes. ZDVD 40608. ZDVD 40609 BLU-RAY.

“The Verdict” (1982)

In 1957, Sidney Lumet (“Dog Day Afternoon,” “Serpico,” “Network”) started his film career with the canonical courtroom drama, “12 Angry Men.” In 1982, he returned to the genre, a jaded survivor of the ‘70s, with “The Verdict.” This deceptively do-gooder film stars the lionlike Paul Newman in his graceful late period. Paul plays a alcoholic, Irish, ambulance-chasing attorney from Boston who lucks upon a solid case against a powerful Catholic hospital. From Day 1, the odds are stacked hopelessly against him; as Paul’s case for the prosecution becomes more frenzied, the defense becomes more calmer in its casual solidification of victory. From minute 1, the viewer is pummeled in the face with stellar images of misery (Paul drunkenly playing a game of pinball, his only source of pleasure). We don’t forget for a second the stranglehold of power held by the wealthy over the legal system—from the selection of jurors to witnesses to even their own victims in court. Not even the incredible outcome can reverse what “The Verdict” uncovers, in its deeply cynical view of the American law system. Sneakily, the American people (via the jury) find justice—in a situation which, in real life, would have gone the other way. The will of the people is both raised and then rejected; the chief feel of the finale is not glorious victory, but resigned emptiness in the face of pure, brilliant brutality.

James Mason, who specialized in playing charming British monsters (from “Bigger than Life” to “Lolita” to “Mandingo”), was nominated for an Oscar as the cold defense lawyer for the hospital. But Charlotte Rampling’s performance as a has-been lawyer who romances Newman is perhaps the most interesting. Rampling beautifully stages her character’s complex inner drama; she wants to help the underdog, but succumbs (in a delicious twist) to her mortal instinct: Working in her own best interest. Also with Jack Warden as Paul’s lawyer best friend, a rousing Lindsay Crouse as the surprise witness for the defense, and Milo O’Shea as the most hateful judge in American cinema. The screenplay was adapted from a Barry Reed novel by David Mamet. Nominated for 5 Oscars, including Best Picture, Director, Actor for Newman, and Adapted Screenplay for Mamet. Color. 129 minutes (they go by fast). ZDVD 14820 DISCS 1-2. ZDVD 3124. ZDVD 30989 BLU-RAY.

“Tommy” (1975)

Future post-La La Land directors, take note: study this one. I have no idea whose crazy idea it was to adapt the Who’s bizarre 1969 rock opera “Tommy” to the cinema. Nor do I know whose even crazier idea it was to have the bloody thing directed by Ken Russell, the master of 1970s British excess. But we need to thank her or him unil the end of time. The plot (not like it matters) concerns a deaf, dumb and blind boy (the Who’s Roger Daltrey), who endures torture at the hands of some pretty weird family members, becomes a pinball god and starts a religion devoted to his luscious blonde locks and mad pinball skills. The idea sounds ridiculously pretentious, but it plays better than it has any right to.

The first hour of “Tommy” is bananas: 5-Hour-Energy cutting, reckless zooms, savagely hedonistic sets, overacting from Ann-Margret as if the future of Western civilization depended on her bathing in champagne and baked beans. Tommy’s parents sing with schizoid-camp grit: half Broadway broadness (Ann Margret), half boozy badness (Oliver Reed-y, with a voice to match). The supporting cast is the Who’s Who of the biggest stars in pop culture in 1975. In “Eyesight to the Blind (The Hawker)”, Eric Clapton preaches for the Church of Marilyn Monroe in a number that doubles as Ken Russell’s über-bad-taste takedown of celebrity culture — the bread and wine are MM’s pills and a handle of Jack Daniels. Elton John’s pinball wizard lolls his tongue around as his big boots fail to trip overgrown Tommy, a deaf-dumb-blind Messiah who Snapchats God in his mind palace. Tina Turner is the Acid Queen, whose twerking face fills up the screen in gelatinous close-ups, whose trippy red room looks shuttled in from an Vincente Minnelli musical pumped with molly. And say, is that Jack Nicholson? And Keith Moon?

When Tommy finally learns how to sing like Roger Daltrey, “Tommy” becomes semi-serious about wanting to say something about Culture and Civilization and Society. Thus, it loses the bonkers edge of its first half, which made some weirdly insightful observations about culture and civilization and society. (Obsession with bodily fluids through the semen and shit puns of “Champagne” is the glorious climax.) One of the greatest of all Freakishly Mannerist musicals. Watching this with my grandmother, who loved it, is one of my most treasured memories of her. Color. ZDVD 2029.

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Recs from the Vault: swampy sounds, Eugene O’Neill and wild Wilder https://stanforddaily.com/2018/04/05/recs-from-the-vault-pt-one/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/04/05/recs-from-the-vault-pt-one/#respond Thu, 05 Apr 2018 07:01:44 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1138743 Nearing the end of my senior year (tear), I take time to reflect on the movies that have most shaped who I am as a person. This quarter, I'll be starting a weekly column called "Recs from the Vault."

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Recs from the Vault: swampy sounds, Eugene O'Neill and wild Wilder
(l-r) Sir Ralph Richardson, Dean Stockwell, Katharine Hepburn, and Jason Robards in the Sidney Lumet film of Eugene O’Neill’s ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’ (1962). Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Nearing the end of my senior year (tear), I take time to reflect on the movies that have most shaped who I am as a person. This quarter, I’ll be starting a weekly column called “Recs from the Vault.” These are capsule reviews I’ve written on some of the films that have most powerfully affected me during my time here at Stanford. I’ve included their call numbers in Green Library’s Media and Microtext Center to make it easier for readers to watch these incredible works.

The Breaking Point (1950)

Warner Bros.’s and Michael Curtiz’s 1950 re-adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway novel “To Have and Have Not,” this time with two battle-worn leads (John Garfield and Phyllis Thaxter) as a lower-middle-class boating couple struggling to make ends meet. Apparently, Hemingway once said “The Breaking Point” was the greatest film adaptation of any of his works, and you can see why. Garfield is superior to Humphrey Bogart (“To Have and Have Not,” 1944) in the role of a hardboiled skipper who gets involved with shady criminals against his will — and with tragic consequences. Juano Hernandez, one of the best black actors of the late 40s and early 50s, is hypnotizing as the independent skipper who is the film’s untyped conscience. Patricia Neal as the platinum blonde has the film’s meatiest and juiciest lines, delivered with such casual grace and framed in Curtiz’s untelegraphed, deep-focus long shots. The melancholy is palpable in every scene, camera movement and character gesture: No person seems overworked, and the dialogue between Patricia Neal’s trouble dame and the troubled John Garfield skipper is much subtler than anything in the comparable “Casablanca,” also directed by Curtiz. Infuriatingly, “The Breaking Point” has never recovered from the trumped-up scandal involving John Garfield’s Communist ties that doomed it to obscurity and suppression during the McCarthy/HUAC hearings. Phyllis Thaxter’s expressive eyes should have also made her name, but alas, her star died with Garfield’s — and Garfield. (He died of heart failure only two years after “The Breaking Point,” purportedly brought upon by the stress of the HUAC hearings.) What a shame, since “The Breaking Point” is ripe for rediscovery in our times. Its existential doom is palpable (one of the best lines is transposed from a fine Hemingway film, “The Killers”: “One man alone ain’t got no chance …”). And it has perhaps the most devastating final shot in all of American cinema. What it says about America’s deeply embedded racism is honest, unrelenting and refreshingly upfront. 97 minutes. Black and white. ZDVD 41307, ZDVD 41308 BLU-RAY, ZDVD 27408.

Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1962)

Everyone is at the top of their game in Sidney Lumet’s 1962 film of Eugene O’Neill’s posthumous play (based on the playwright’s own life, struggling to support his own drug-addicted mother). It’s 1912, and everyone suffers in a New England family of artists: The father (Sir Ralph Richardson) is a boozed-out has-been of a Shakespearean, the eldest son (Jason Robards) spends his days drinking in a whorehouse, the mother (Katharine Hepburn) got addicted to dope after the painful birth of her youngest son (Dean Stockwell), a poet who has a fatal case of tuberculosis. In the course of one day, all the sutures come undone; together, they must confront their misery. Katharine Hepburn delivers one of those performances that haunts you forever, reaching astonishing heights that very few actresses of her generation could aspire to. Her natty hair, her glazed-showgirl eyes and her piercing monologues (“I was happy … for a time …”) provide the human face to every American family’s dirty little secrets. Though the film is marred by the queasiness inherent in the creation of a piece of filmed theatre (Lumet feels the need to awkwardly jam in reaction shots where they break up the flow of a monologue), the four actors provide a tearful desperation to O’Neill’s words. And when Lumet suddenly realizes he’s making a film, it soars — literally — as in the entire staging of Hepburn’s final monologue (a floating crane-like camera that shrinks the house to make the people look puny and insignificant vs. bulging close-ups of the tired suspects so that we understand their individual traumas — a great dichotomy of distance). Andre Previn’s haunting, atonal piano score is a highlight. In a rare sweep, all four of the principals won the Best Actor and Best Actress awards at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival. Katharine Hepburn was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, losing to Anne Bancroft in “The Miracle Worker.” 174 minutes. Black and white. ZDVD 29053, ZDVD 29048 BLU-RAY. Also on YouTube.

Kiss Me, Stupid (1964)

A cynical takedown of marriage, a celebration of human frailty and Billy Wilder at his sunny gloomiest. As is typical of a comedy script by Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond (they wrote “The Apartment” and “Avanti!”), summarizing the film is a hopeless effort, for it’s a labyrinthine plot that must unfold before you to be admired. At the start, I was bracing myself for a mediocre Billy Wilder comedy. It’s not talked about as much as other Wilders (“Sunset Blvd.”, “Some Like it Hot”), and Wilder later disowned it. By the end, I was sold and hooked. Why would any artist turn their back on such a glorious work? The women (Kim Novak and Felicia Farr) are the clear highlights. Dean Martin plays an unsavory version of himself. Ray Walston amazingly, gradually, soars; despite the fact that (or rather, because) he is so pencil-necky and unlikeable, he is perfect for the role of the hen-pecked husband. (Jack Lemmon and Peter Sellers, whom Wilder preferred to play the husband, would have been way too charming.) But the most stunning performance is from Kim Novak as the waitress-prostitute Polly the Pistol. With her tender eye-flutters alone and her heart-to-hearts with Felicia Farr, she shows she’s doing much more than just a Marilyn Monroe impersonation. Her performance gives the film existential stakes. It would make a killer double-feature with Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” two films where Kim Novak is doubled, and she must navigate the tricky grooves of an increasingly fractured personality. Everything builds, and by the end, each new plot twist is giddier than the last. The film was condemned by the Catholic League of Decency — and you can see why, even if Wilder perversely calls it “the most bourgeois picture I ever did.” It’s much less stuffy than that, Billy. The dramatic string score is Andre Previn’s; all the corny songs are actually from the reject pile of George and Ira Gershwin. 125 minutes. Black and white. ZDVD 34814, ZDVD 35145 BLU-RAY.

Petulia (1968)

A bottomless pit of insight, truth and ruin. Richard Lester shot this aching 1968 melodrama during the Summer of Love in San Francisco. The film is ostensibly about the love affair between two doomed metropolitans, a bored surgeon (George C. Scott) and a flirty socialite looking for meaning in modernity (Julie Christie). But the film slowly escapes the two stars and becomes more about the incomprehensibility of the 1960s, the incoherence of the citizens who claw at each other, forming only the most basic of “communities” in a strange place. The editing is fragmented, and the story is told out of order: It starts in the middle of the affair, moving forward to the bloody end, whilst flashing back to the torrid beginning. With each new viewing of “Petulia” the hard-to-follow story keep peeling off and off like an onion with no center. At the core is a hole big enough to fill the lost souls of Petulia and Archie; a kooky woman turns numb, and a numbed man turns into a kook. It’s Lester’s most effective drama, my favorite of his astonishing run of 1960s films (which include his two Beatles films, “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Help!”). With Joseph Cotton. The ravishing color cinematography is by Nicolas Roeg (who would become a crucial 1970s auteur himself). Music by John Barry. 105 minutes. ZDVD 12326.

Killer of Sheep (1977)

Charles Burnett’s neorealist masterpiece of Watts, Los Angeles in the late 1970s. A black family is led by the stoic, slaughterhouse-worker-patriarch Stan (Henry G. Sanders), his unemployed wife (Kaycee Moore) and their two children, a quiet girl and a playful boy. The memory of Watts ’65 hangs over each scene; the smoke may have dissipated, but the pain and the desperation have not. Every cut in “Killer of Sheep” is a new truth being staked out for the first time in fresh cinematic terms. When he interposes the yakking of a black man whose tire has blown out over the instrumental breaks of Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues”, Burnett demonstrates his firm belief in spirituality of a mysterious source; there’s poetry in every black soul, Burnett says. We all speak, live and breathe jazz; we’ve just never been reminded to such poetic heights. (Buried in the special features is the essential “When it Rains”, Burnett’s 1995 short about jazz, griot and the blues.) A crucial film of the L.A. Rebellion, a series of films revolving around the lives of black people in Los Angeles in the late 20th century and which include Julie Dash’s “Illusions,” Haile Gerima’s “Bush Mama” and Larry Clark’s “Passing Through.” It’s a seemingly inconsequential detail, but the moment where Stan’s son pours endless heaps of cane sugar on his Corn Flakes pierced me with such an emotional force that I had no choice but to quietly recede into my childhood memories in a stream of tears. 80 minutes. Black and white. ZDVD 16033.

La Ciénaga (2001)

Ennui has rarely been so sensually evoked as in Lucrecia Martel’s 2001 debut about a rotting bourgeois family in Argentina. She made one of the most narratively disjointed and off-kilter cinematic experiences I’ve ever endured. Lurching between mind-numbing listlessness and unprovoked action, Martel termite-eats her way through the doldrums of life. The picture is mostly a family waiting around their pool in the sticky summertime, waiting for something, anything to happen. It is constantly on the precipice of turning into a David Lynch nightmare, which it does so casually. Characters are so hush-hushed in Martel’s world that we can’t tell who’s who and how people are related to one another. And this is to say nothing of the sound, which redefines what it means to create cinematic atmosphere. As Martel says, filmmakers who don’t think about sound work within the illusory two-dimensions of the screen. Filmmakers who do (such as Jacques Tati, David Lynch, Andrei Tarkovsky and Martel) realize the ability of cinema to use the full senses, to drown the spectator in self-awareness of the space around them — all to achieve various states of reverie. For Tati, it’s humanist comic freedom. For Lynch, it’s surrealist skin-crawling terror. For Martel, it’s the essence of the unheralded ripples of life itself, the dull moments where no action happens — and when static horror sneaks in. What a brave filmmaker to work exclusively in this domain. 101 minutes. Color. ZDVD 34702 BLU-RAY, ZDVD 34701.

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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From wolves to dogs to Wes: the strange cuteness of ‘Isle of Dogs’ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/04/04/isle-of-dogs-and-so-will-you/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/04/04/isle-of-dogs-and-so-will-you/#respond Wed, 04 Apr 2018 07:01:47 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1138688 Wes Anderson’s “Isle of Dogs” is cute, but not cutesy. This clean and cold-blooded animated feature, Wes’s second after “Fantastic Mr. Fox” (2009), does not drive dog lovers to the edge of cheap tears à la “Marley and Me.” Anderson avoids the common trap, partly, by frontloading his work with endless groan-worthy puns. From its title (isle of dogs […]

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Wes Anderson’s “Isle of Dogs” is cute, but not cutesy. This clean and cold-blooded animated feature, Wes’s second after “Fantastic Mr. Fox” (2009), does not drive dog lovers to the edge of cheap tears à la “Marley and Me.” Anderson avoids the common trap, partly, by frontloading his work with endless groan-worthy puns. From its title (isle of dogs … I love dogs … ha!) to its lines (“You son of a bitch!”), the film’s sense of humor feels like it was plagiarized from a Dad Jokes manual. But this very basic, Japan-loving film goes beyond the groans, and lands — with a quiet puff of smoke and a mute thud — into a nice realm of wistfulness, a tender yearning for people and creatures. Wes animates our furry friends with a hard-nosed social life; they talk with to-the-point bluntness, which I secretly wished I possessed. “Isle of Dogs” wants to have it both ways, hypocritically but humanly: reach out to a mass audience, but also only talking insularly to itself, in love with its own pop Japanese references (never as clever or refined as it thinks they are) and its tinker-toy set (a new Wes set is always more whirligiggy than the last).

“Isle of Dogs” neuters the wildness of dogs (already calmer wolves) and turns them into neurotic Anderson constructions, bundles of nerves and quirky quips. The team of dogs (and the English-speaking Americans in Japan who are “our” way into a land whose language we don’t speak) is the Wes Anderson Stock Company, a crew of sophisticated actor-celebs with names like Bryan Cranston, Ed Norton, Greta Gerwig as a foreign exchange student from Ohio, Frances McDormand as the translator, Bob Balaban, Jeff Goldblum, Scarlett Johansson as the superfluous love interest, Harvey Keitel, Tilda Swinton with the funniest reaction shots, Yoko Ono in a role beneath her and of course Bill Murray. They all have to cope with a dystopic Japan where dogs are banished to the Island of Trash after they’ve been tagged as “undesirables” with “canine flu.” Meanwhile, a Japanese boy named Atari (Koyu Rankin) crash-lands on Trash Island, in search of his missing dog Spots; the island’s rat pack of dogs (Cranston, Norton, Balaban, Murray) agree to help Atari find Spots, against the doubts of the one stray dog (Cranston) who is revolted by the idea of masters and pets.

Anderson’s tinker-toy Japan is the sleekest and most machine-like world he’s created yet. It basks in the mangy knots of dogs’ furs, deadened by the annoyingly dead-of-center compositions, filled with grim and steampunk visuals like robodogs and abandoned factories. The film, like the set, has the weightlessness of papier-mâché: if you move an inch to the left or right, the illusion crumples feebly. Anderson domesticates the world even further than his neo-Ernst Lubitsch tribute to European decadence, “The Grand Budapest Hotel” (2014). He retreats, like Damien Chazelle did in “La La Land,” into a land of his own mind’s making — not away from the trash heap of society, but indirectly into it, by digging (as a man) into a dog’s mysterious consciousness.

Anderson cruises on autopilot in “Isle of Dogs,” achieving a calm that is neither boring nor involving. It’s a quick, clean affair that is over before you know it. The elements we’ve come to expect of Anderson quirk-fests are here, but sophisticated in their simplicity. Front and center is the cheery gallows’ humor, where dark comedy veers dangerously close to bad taste. However, with each new film, Anderson moves into black comedy with increasing quietude. Choice example: a prolonged Anderson montage where we see the preparation of poisoned sushi, then the victim’s tiiiiiiny lick of the wasabi, then his bloated and bug-eyed corpse on a white stretcher. It’s a one-two-three series of shots that heartlessly (and hilariously) end a great life with the clipped efficiency of a bureaucrat filing paperwork in the city morgue. Anderson’s films have little time for grief, and none for memory.

To match the no-nonsense bluster of his canine subjects, Anderson treats love as a very tempered thing. The bougie show dog Nutmeg (Johansson) straight up tells the stray dog Chief (Cranston): “I’m not attracted to tame animals.” While Gerwig’s Cincinnati Kid recites her plans to rescue Atari, she stutters in her narration, stops and sighs deeply: “Damn it. I’ve got a crush on you,” uninflected, without feeling, like a cold morning fact. The vocal equivalent of Anderson’s info-crammed tableaux, these lines are the opposite of the writhingly cute romance of the “Moonrise Kingdom” kids, who danced to French ya-ya on the beach and knocked me out with an audacious sublimity.

“Isle of Dogs” is recognizably the same Wes, yes, but much darker, a bit more tired and world-weary—especially sonically. The only 1960s-era crate-digger song on the soundtrack is the West Coast Pop Experimental Band’s “I Won’t Hurt You” (1967), where the hazy whispers and erratic heartbeat and guitar-strums make the song an incredibly depressing declaration of love. The song plays as the dogs travel through the Isle of Trash in search of Spots. When we suspect we’ll never find him, the feeling is expressed not through the predictable plot, but in that precisely chosen musical downer. Like most of the Anderson deep pop cuts (“Where Do You Go To, My Lovely?”, the early acoustic Kinks song from “Rushmore”), we are privileged to hear a man’s private connection to music, since these aren’t the typical pop hits of “Fortunate Son” / “Yesterday” / “Satisfaction” that are more obviously remembered. Instead, we sense an idiosyncratic personal taste that shuns the desire to be obviously involved in the world — but not with a slavish complacency. Thus, “Isle of Dogs” (in its detachment and lack of obvious neurosis) loops around in a circle and comes back to the unruly and shaggy “Darjeeling Limited,” probably Wes’s best film, certainly his most honest. “Darjeeling” centers around sibling rivals who couldn’t even come together to agree on how to talk to Mom; “Isle of Dogs” deals with a similar desire to return home, only to discover there is no home to return to. The city of Megasaki is such a traumatized space, feelings are not allowed to seep in, since society has violently repressed the individual’s capacity to feel. Anderson’s films are not detached and clean because they themselves are; they are because they reflect the world they see around them, sighing in deep rueful tones, with only a keen eye and a good ear to guide him.

To some, this is not enough. “Isle of Dogs” has been making the 2018 rounds with charges of cultural appropriation. The charges are not wrong, per se. In our post-movie debrief, my viewing partner and I both expressed doubts about certain unconscious effects left in by Wes related to the Japanese setting. Why couldn’t we hear what the Japanese were saying? We sit listening to the Toshiro Mifune-inspired president groan and gruff— somewhat gratuitous in its tooned harshness. I was bored of the Japan gleaned through a set of stock Western images of the country: Hokusai’s woodcut of a wave, Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” theme, the non-conceptual-art image of Yoko Ono. Actually, this latter image angered me the most; as I’ve written before, I hate the treatment of Ono as a punchline in the popular American imagination. Anderson does nothing to complicate the idiotic stereotype of a crucial 20th century avant-garde artist; in a display of Dad Humor gone too far, showing Dad’s age, he presents her as “Assistant Scientist Yoko Ono”; she has no lines except a series of pat, cliché pleads in broken English. Ugh.

Ultimately, these moments didn’t cancel out my quiet admiration for “Isle of Dogs.” Since his first film, Wes has always presented himself as an upper-class white dandy. It’s who he is. It’s an identity that he has always been framed with self-deprecation. He presents his people, extensions of himself, more often like fools than wisemen. We can pick apart Wes Anderson’s flaws and gaps in knowledge until the sky caves in. Spiritually, I’d rather spend my energies focused on other things. Like Wes, I recognize my inevitable distance with everything and everyone around me, but I still try to establish some sort of common ground with people. “Isle of Dogs” is built of a series of gazes at people who aren’t the gazer, who don’t come from where the gazer comes from, who don’t speak the gazer’s language. An American looking into Japan. A human looking into a dog. Long lost brothers trying to recall a past that they can’t remember.

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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At the Stanford Theatre: In ‘A Farewell to Arms,’ Frank Borzage finds love in war https://stanforddaily.com/2018/03/12/at-the-stanford-theatre-in-a-farewell-to-arms-frank-borzage-finds-love-in-war/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/03/12/at-the-stanford-theatre-in-a-farewell-to-arms-frank-borzage-finds-love-in-war/#respond Mon, 12 Mar 2018 10:20:52 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1138147 There are two not-to-be-missed opportunities to watch Borzage's incredible coup d'auteur at the Stanford Theatre on Thursday and Friday, March 15 to 16, at 7:30 p.m.

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Now that’s what I call Romantic.

“Romantic” isn’t a word I’d use to describe a book as stark and jaded as Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms” (1929), about the doomed romance between an American ambulance driver and an English nurse in Italy during World War I. But it’s the most perfect word to describe its 1932 film adaptation, mounted by the great Frank Borzage, and starring Helen Hayes and Gary Cooper.

There are two not-to-be-missed opportunities to watch Borzage’s incredible coup d’auteur at the Stanford Theatre on Thursday and Friday, March 15 to 16, at 7:30 p.m.

Don’t be tempted to think that Borzage’s “Farewell” is merely a cheap watering-down of Hemingway’s novel. They tell the same exact story, and stylistically they are worlds apart, but each is a self-contained masterwork in its own right.

Borzage is an artist who truly puts one’s beliefs — in love, in the beauty of life, in God — to the test. His fervent romanticism is so extreme, they have the power of scaring the unprepared. He sure as hell scares me — and I’m a diehard Jacques Demy stan.

In softening the dark hues of Hemingway’s book, Frank Borzage has crafted an entirely different beast of a morality tale — no better, no worse. His aims are squarely at odds with Hemingway’s journalistic, no-frills realism. From the opening Jacques Demy-like camera glide across a snowy mountainside that looks like the “Price is Right” Cliff Hangers game, down to a bird’s-eye-view shot of a line of toy-car ambulances that recalls the frantic taxi-cab surge of Borzage’s divine silent melodrama “7th Heaven” (1927, another love-during-wartime story), Borzage’s film forges an Expressionist identity committed to showing truth at obtuse angles. It does not seek to replicate the style of its source (Hemingway’s terse, stripped-down prose), nor does it try to convince you that its visual representation of soldiers fighting in the trenches is anything close to the experience (the seductive mistake of many a war yarn, from “Sands of Iwo Jima” to “Dunkirk”). In Borzage’s conception, one gets the sense that the Great War was fought for dames with long gams — from shaky cardboard sets on a Paris, Paramount soundstage — within a mysterious mustard-gas fog — in and out of hospital beds, truck beds and bedrooms. Everything is pitched at a shrieking volume of blooming floweriness. (We should expect a lot of flowery lushness in the best films by Borzage; for here was a man who didn’t just want his name to be rhymed with “massage”; instead, it had to be “bore-ZAY-gee,” three-jangling-syllables-and-a-hard-“G” or bust.)

Borzage puts all of his energy into visualizing the main relationship between Hayes and Cooper with as much beauty as he can muster. When they first meet, the encounter is drunken slapstick, involving Hayes’ dropped high-heel and Cooper caressing it with puppy-like attention. When they kiss, she bizarrely bites into his chin, so that their faces meet with Cubist angularity. When Cooper gets up from his bed, blanket draped around his shoulders like a high-school football player with oversized shoulder pads, he sweeps her into his arms as she briefly disappears under his grey Superman cape. They appear to be one globular unit moving in erratic synchronicity with one another. All the while, the smell of cheap Parisian perfume wafts about, and the movie is better because of that pungent odor.

Their romance is, on paper, purely conventional. It’s happened a billion times before, and it will happen a billion more. Yet the specificity of these romantic actions — and the way Charles Lang’s unforgettable images makes it feel like the camera is recording love for the first time on film, in its natural habitat —speaks volumes to the powerful nuances in Hollywood films. The film critic Andrew Sarris, as well as the Cahiers crew of critics, those French eccentrics-with-taste (Godard, Truffaut, Rivette, Daddy Bazin), were among the first to fully explain how certain traits, tics or tricks in Hollywood cinema individualized each film. It was not all just some homogenized whole; there is a philosophical difference between a Lubitsch musical and a Maumoulian musical, between W.C. Fields’ brand of vaudeville and the Marx Brothers’, though they all worked at the same Paramount Studios.

Similarly, Borzage realizes that there are tics (which can seem subtle but are actually vast) that differentiate one couple from the next. Thus, the romance between Hayes and Cooper (lanky, tall, tender man-boy next to mousy, little, tough nurse — a pregnancy that goes every wrong way you can think of — a tragic demise) is completely different from Borzage’s sublime, low-trash couple in “7th Heaven” (Janet Gaynor’s doe-eyed pining for Charles Farrell’s beefy hulk with a soft, pubescent heart). Even though they have basically the same visual grammar (Borzage loved a good resurrection), the unbridled joy of the miraculous “7th Heaven” ending only serves to confirm our own tragic inability to transcend life, while the bleak Hemingway-penned scenario of “A Farewell to Arms” becomes a hymn, not a dirge, to lost love.

What we have in Borzage’s “Farewell” is one of the most jaw-droppingly sustained engagements of a Romantic viewpoint since Caspar David Friedrich accompanied a man and a woman on their trip to the moon. Using the slightest dollops of Friedrich’s soft-focus sublimity, Borzage starts his film in a similarly dreamlike register. Though his goal is for a similarly Friedrichian sense of evenly-applied sublimity, Borzage isn’t afraid to let his sutures show. His film is quite lumbering in its emotional sentimentality. It is an early sound film, so continuity is brazenly off at points, actions don’t match and there are leaden cuts between Gary Cooper pining over his love in a Parisian café and Helen Hayes about to endure an emergency C-section. But the choppy, stop-start quality ends up enhancing everything Borzage has to say about love. In Borzage’s view of it, love is a similar series of stops and starts — an imperfect flow of awkward gestures, facial expressions and clumsy words that add up to statements of devotion that sound campy and ridiculous to the outside viewer but ring true to the lovers themselves — who, in the end, are the only ones who matter. Borzage is breathtakingly faithful to love’s fractured nature.

Borzage is also faithful to love’s ephemerality. In the end, only the strongest memories are preserved, and even these will pass. During the love scenes in the middle of the picture, we never get a good look at Hayes’ or Cooper’s faces. They are shrouded in black. Borzage and Lang give their lovers the proper privacy of a moment. Then, once the lovers’ fate is sealed — when Hayes raps upon the Pearly Gates — Borzage brings them out into the blinding light, bombarding them with every ray of Paramount-powered sunshine he’s got. I fear what will happen to the Stanford Theatre’s screen, which may explode from the sudden surge in Love Power of this wild finale.

The sharp contrast between dark and light is just one of the myriad examples of Borzagian binaries at play. The man loves a good, simple, clean contrast. There is loudness, and there is silence, and nothing in between: An Italian priest mumbles to himself as he marries our lovers in a quiet ceremony that betrays the clatter of their bomb-bullet-battleship courtship. And just when you think Borzage has gotten comfortable with silence, slambang! We get a neo-Soviet-montage sequence of war that raises utterly holy hell. One specific cut — from a frightened boy soldier cowering in a lake one second to an explosion from the same lake the next, with no trace that a boy was ever there — sticks in the mind longer in its putrid, “Guernica”-like horror than any graphic injury in “Saving Private Ryan” or “Dunkirk.”

And then, there are the moments in “A Farewell to Arms” that defy words. I think specifically of an Ozu-like “pillow-shot,” just as Helen Hayes’ train has parted, amidst a torrent of hellish rain. As the train recedes from our vision at the bottom of the screen, rain pours clatteringly down onto a thatched roof with a loose gutter at the top. Down the gutter races a tear-like blip of rainwater, leaving behind a thin trickle. Borzage’s world cries for love, and we cry with it.

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Carlos Valladares’ Oscar Picks 2018 https://stanforddaily.com/2018/03/02/carlos-oscar-picks-2018/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/03/02/carlos-oscar-picks-2018/#respond Fri, 02 Mar 2018 15:08:20 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1137643 Even though the Oscars treats movies like a gambling bracket, I can’t resist the effortless urge to predict which middlebrow white elephant flick will win over the Academy this year, which unexpectedly nominated film should win and which masterpieces weren’t even considered. (And once again, a reiteration that the most magnificent moving-picture work from last […]

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Even though the Oscars treats movies like a gambling bracket, I can’t resist the effortless urge to predict which middlebrow white elephant flick will win over the Academy this year, which unexpectedly nominated film should win and which masterpieces weren’t even considered.

(And once again, a reiteration that the most magnificent moving-picture work from last year was David Lynch’s and Mark Frost’s “Twin Peaks: The Return.” It would sweep my Oscars if it was eligible.)

Best Picture

Who will win: “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” (ugh)

Who should win: “Lady Bird” or “Call Me By Your Name”

Who wasn’t even nominated: lol. Where to begin. Let’s start with “A Quiet Passion,” “Ex Libris,” “The Red Turtle,” “Baby Driver,” “Personal Shopper,” “Dawson City: Frozen Time,” “Song to Song,” “The Florida Project,” “The Other Side of Hope,” “On the Beach at Night Alone,” “Good Time”—but, of course, none of these were ever seriously in the running.

Best Director

Who will win: Guillermo Del Toro for “The Shape of Water”

Who should win: Greta Gerwig for “Lady Bird”

Who wasn’t even nominated: just pick all the directors from the above-mentioned films and add Dee Rees for “Mudbound,” Raoul Peck for “I Am Not Your Negro” and Alexander Payne for “Downsizing” (whose ambition still amazes me, even if the film is a failure in retrospect).

Best Actor:

Who will win: Gary Oldman for “Darkest Hour”

Who should win: Denzel Washington for “Roman J. Israel, Esq.” or Daniel Kaluuya for “Get Out”

Who wasn’t even nominated: Robert Pattinson for “Good Time”

Best Actress:

Who will win: Frances McDormand for “Three Billboards”

Who should win: Saoirse Ronan for “Lady Bird” (though I wouldn’t mind a McDormand win—she’s the best part about “Three Billboards”)

Who wasn’t even nominated: Cynthia Nixon for “A Quiet Passion,” Brooklynn Prince for “The Florida Project,” Aubrey Plaza for “Ingrid Goes West,” Regina Hall for “Girls Trip,” Vicky Krieps for “Phantom Thread” and Kristen Stewart for “Personal Shopper.”

Best Supporting Actor:

Who will win: Sam Rockwell for “Three Billboards”

Who should win: Willem Defoe for “The Florida Project”

Who wasn’t even nominated: Lucas Hedges for “Lady Bird,” Tracy Letts for “Lady Bird,” Stephen McKinley Henderson for “Lady Bird,” Lil Rey Howery for “Get Out” and Jon Hamm for “Baby Driver.”

Best Supporting Actress:

Who will win: Allison Janney for “I, Tonya”

Who should win: Laurie Metcalf for “Lady Bird”

Who wasn’t even nominated: Tiffany Haddish for “Girls Trip,” Hong Chau for “Downsizing,” Esther Garrel for “Call Me By Your Name,” Bria Vinaite for “The Florida Project” and Lois Smith for “Lady Bird.”

Best Original Screenplay:

Who will win: Martin McDonagh for “Three Billboards”

Who should win: Greta Gerwig for “Lady Bird”

Who was not even nominated: Edgar Wright for “Baby Driver,” Terence Davies for “A Quiet Passion,” Sean Baker and Chris Bergoch for “The Florida Project,” Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor for “Downsizing,” Dan Gilroy for “Roman J. Israel, Esq.,” David Branson Smith and Matt Spicer for “Ingrid Goes West.”

Best Adapted Screenplay:

Who will and should win: James Ivory for “Call Me By Your Name”

Who was not even nominated: Matt Reeves and Mark Bomback for “War for the Planet of the Apes.”

Best Animated Feature:

Who will and should win: “Coco” (though I have not seen “The Breadwinner”)

Best Original Score:

Who will win: Alexandre Desplat, “The Shape of Water”

Who should win: Jonny Greenwood, “Phantom Thread” (though his score to the 2017 Lynne Ramsay film “You Were Never Really Here”—soon to be released in April by Amazon—was even more impressive)

Who was not even nominated: Laurent Perez del Mar for “The Red Turtle,” Rolfe Kent for “Downsizing,” Jon Brion for “Lady Bird.”

Best Cinematography:

Who will win: Roger Deakins for “Blade Runner 2049”

Who should win: Pretty fine with any of these winning, honestly, but I’ll pick Dan Laustsen for “The Shape of Water”

Who was not even nominated: Emmanuel Lubezki for “Song to Song” (they would snub Chivo the year he shoots a masterwork)

Best Original Song:

Who will win: “Remember Me” from “Coco”

Who should win: “Mystery of Love” from “Call Me By Your Name”

Who was not even nominated: “Visions of Gideon” from “Call Me By Your Name”

An earlier version of this article misidentified the screenwriters of “Ingrid Goes West.”

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Art++: Diebenkorn/Cassavetes https://stanforddaily.com/2018/02/27/art-diebenkorn-cassavetes/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/02/27/art-diebenkorn-cassavetes/#respond Wed, 28 Feb 2018 02:35:44 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1137452 I see Richard Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park #94” (1976), or I watch John Cassavetes’s “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974), and I’m reminded of home.

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I see Richard Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park #94” (1976), or I watch John Cassavetes’s “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974), and I’m reminded of home.

Home for me is Los Angeles. On freezing days like the ones we’re now enduring at Stanford, I’m California dreamin’, yes, but not for warmer climes — for the exact same cold, but dispersed across the sprawl of LA. On such a winter’s day, the LA I long for is overcast — which, to me, is not dreary. The one egregiously false note in Damien Chazelle’s “La La Land” (which moved me terribly) was the endless sun; surely Chazelle could have added a shot or a scene of Mia and Seb pummeled by a rainy frenzy without disrupting his Demy-derived realist magic. When LA shines, the days blend into one history-cancelling whole. But when it rains, that one day will stand out more profoundly to the Angeleno’s conscience than all the bright and sunny days combined.

Diebenkorn understood LA sweater weather. He moved from Berkeley to Santa Monica in 1967, whereupon he took up a professorship at UCLA. He set up his studio in Ocean Park, a tiny neighborhood in Santa Monica, and began painting the series that brought him worldwide acclaim: broad, busy networks of clumsy lines and dully shimmering color-patches, caught between figuration and abstraction. At Stanford, you can see two works from the Ocean Park series: the baby-blue “#60” (1973) in the Anderson Collection and the heavy-gray “#94” at the Cantor. Both are made from the perspective of someone who has understood LA climes to such a degree that the city’s haphazard urban sprawl is depicted in all its surprising beauty.

The two Diebenkorns are in the same family, but are strikingly different in mood and mode of approach. They both share the crisscrossing lines which shiver in the margins and go in wild directions, like LA’s improvisatory grid system. “#60” evokes LA life from one of the cool beaches near Santa Monica on an afternoon in late spring or early summer. From far away, the baby-blue sky is neatly divided from the cerulean sea; but as you walk closer and closer, they both seem to collapse into one another. It is the weird space between abstraction and figuration (a precious Diebenkorn zone) that allows Diebenkorn to depict the LA beachfront with resounding emotional accuracy.

“#94,” by contrast, is a bit tougher and wearier and less sure of its place in the world; all of the blue splendor has been segregated to a corner of the canvas, with insignificant blues speckled randomly in the main area of business: a gray-white swath. Mistakes are more on display in “#94”; Diebenkorn sets the pathways for lines in his mind, but his brushwork escapes his best efforts to contain the lines. They come out looking sloppy and dumb. In the middle of “#94”, it looks as if Diebenkorn drew a blue line, then changed his mind and tried to erase it with Wite Out—which only makes the suppression effort even more obvious. “#94” is not afraid of ugliness; in fact, it welcomes ugliness into its world. Ultimately, the emotions on display in the gloomy-brooding-hopeful “#94” are more diverse, more dispersive, than the Beach Boys optimism of “#60.”

These two Diebenkorns share a lot in sensibility with two contemporary films of the ’70s moment: Robert Altman’s offbeat take on the film noir “The Long Goodbye” (1973) and John Cassavetes’s “A Woman Under the Influence.” Just as “#60” and “#94” are in the same Diebenkorn family, the Altman and the Cassavetes were made are often grouped together as classics of 70s American independent cinema — but actually, they exist at opposite poles to each other. Altman has a much more rambling and jovial sense of humor. His visions of society are bleak, but his view of select communities are insular, warm, familial. In “The Long Goodbye,” Altman’s ’70s reimagining of Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled Philip Marlowe, the joke is that Marlowe (Elliot Gould) is less concerned with solving the mystery of his friend’s wife’s murder than he is with finding his missing cat (and his favorite brand of cat food). The film is set largely at a beach-house in Malibu, about fifteen miles north of where Diebenkorn painted “#60.” The sky is always clear and bright, which conceals the ridiculous conspiracy over which it hangs like a cheerful Monty Python undertaker. “Long Goodbye” is becalmed and lackadaisical; its actors form a wonderful community that is carried through in the best Altmans (“Nashville,” “McCabe & Mrs. Miller,” “California Split”).

Art++: Diebenkorn/Cassavetes
Poster for John Cassavetes’s “A Woman Under the Influence,” starring Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk. (Photo: Faces International and Janus Films, 1974)

In contrast to the mellow Altman, “A Woman Under the Influence” is one of the most stressful films imaginable. (Stock up on stamina, dear reader, before you tackle this 155-minute behemoth.) The camerawork is just as fluid as in “Long Goodbye,” but emotionally it is more tightly clenched and controlled, which gives its bursts of emotion an explosiveness that Altman’s films rarely have. Altman springs surprises on you where they are least expected; Cassavetes builds and builds to his operatic climaxes.

All four works represent Los Angeles with subtlety, intelligence and lack of pretense; they are cinematic exemplars of the city. They share one thing in common: None of them are “about” Los Angeles in any conventional sense. When one thinks of the biggest Los Angeles films, one recites a good yet stock list of usual suspects like kindergarten roll-call: “Double Indemnity,” “Chinatown,” “Blade Runner,” “L.A. Confidential,” “Mulholland Drive.” These are works which foreground Los Angeles, but only to milk its most common and basic dichotomy: the orange-juice veneer with a sinister-twisted-sick underbelly.

By contrast, “A Woman Under the Influence” takes place largely indoors, in one house, mainly in the living room. Location — the familiar architecture, buildings and monuments that distinguish a city —is never pushed. No character in “A Woman” ever states the name of the city they’re in.

Yet this is not Cassavetes’s cheap aim at a generalized universality. “A Woman,” and indeed most of Cassavetes’s features (“Faces,” “Minnie and Moskowicz,” “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie,” “Opening Night” “Love Streams” — all stealth L.A. classics) — are concerned with how people interact with the stark environments around them. Out-of-shape actresses looking for a final comeback. Divorced parents. Jazz players. Museum curators. Businessmen and prostitutes. Women on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It’s these people whom Cassavetes made the consistent subject of the lightning bolts he made outside of the American studio system between 1959 and 1984. By being so focused on developing an organic, spontaneous, jittering rhythm in his actors’ performance, Cassavetes also picked up on how a city like Los Angeles — with its wide expansive vistas, hence its lonely bigness — plays a central role in the trials and tribulations of a working-class suburban family like the Longhettis: the housewife Mabel (Gena Rowlands, John’s wife and closest artistic collaborator), the construction-worker father Nick (Peter Falk), and their three children.

L.A. is central to “A Woman” by being so seemingly marginal. It’s not just there because Cassavetes lived in Los Angeles for most of his adult life. The city shapes the characters’ relationships to the outside world: Why is Mabel so eccentric? Why is Nick so high strung? Why can’t he express to her, in clear terms, his love for her? The clogging stasis of their L.A. house provides some answers. The rotted aimlessness of domestic life is conveyed, silently, by Mabel’s late-night stroll along Hollywood Boulevard. How did she get there? Cassavetes elides this information, visualizing the process of Mabel in the throes of forgetting. The city is being erased from her view, yet is more present by its very erasure.

Where is she walking? We can tell it’s Hollywood Blvd., because Mabel walks — barefoot! — along the Hollywood Walk of Fame. A fine but less sensitive film director would have inserted an establishing shot, telling (not showing) the audience where they are located. Cassavetes communicates a great truth: how the city dweller internalizes the streets and directions and sights of their home city, which seem like a maze or (worse) boring to the uncaring outsider. (Contrast that to the heartless, condescending tourist’s view of L.A. taken by Woody Allen in “Annie Hall” [1977].) Because Cassavetes wants to us to understand Mabel’s head-space, he refuses to establish where we are; she knows, and we pick up, too.

I see a lot of the shiveringly imprecise fire of Diebenkorn in Cassavetes. Their images give off an amateurish, almost dumb quality. In “#94,” Diebenkorn draws two sides of a bottomless triangle. Then, he “ruins” the right side of the triangle by clogging it up with extra brush strokes of black. He only does this on the right side, thus giving the painting’s central shape (which isn’t even finished!) a lopsided effect. Yet, it is an effect which asks us to consider the touching beauty in clumsiness. Likewise, during Cassavetes’ time, film critics like Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris tore into him for his choppy, violent cuts from scene to scene. His editing does not follow neat, classical patterns of start-flow-pause-flow-stop; it lurches, screeches to a grinding halt, tracks back, skips ahead in time, remembers something that was important like seven minutes ago. To Cassavetes, this is the only accurate and honest way to present the world. The longest-lasting films always seek out truthful images; they must not be strictly factual or attempt to paint a slavish realism (indeed, when they are, the image is flat and dreary), but, at their best, they must reconstitute the merely mundane to a higher aesthetic, emotional, moral plane. They show universality through specificity, a sense of a world briefly experienced from the side-streams of our pathways through life. Both Cassavetes in film and Diebenkorn in painting worked in this terrain of shivering, wondrous marginality.

I return to Los Angeles. I fly back from Stanford to Los Angeles, see the plots of houses from my plane, and flash back to the Diebenkorn — which, when you stand far back (after a half-hour of looking at close-up details), looks as beautiful as seeing L.A. from the heavens. Then I remember the scene in “A Woman Under the Influence” which most excites me (and scares me): Mabel’s return, where Mabel (after spending six months in a mental asylum) has come back home and is greeted, with nervously fake smiles, by the very same people who committed her in the first place. I am excited and scared because I recognize it as the last quiet moment before the harrowing, stormy Act 3 — when all hell will break loose.

Mabel’s return is set against that typically overcast backdrop, that hot second where L.A. is overcome by grayness and drizzle. Cassavetes called this scene “a lucky accident.” On the morning of the day he was slated to film Mabel’s return, he was hoping and praying that it would rain; the script called for it. Yet all morning, the sky was stuck in a state of sunny “La La Land” perfection. Cass didn’t need perfection.

Suddenly, however, for a window that lasted for no longer than a half hour, the clouds rolled in. Rain softly fell. Cassavetes had his stage set by God: an ominous prelude of the final, hectic, stressful 30 minutes of “A Woman Under the Influence” where we see how love manifests itself with incoherence and ambiguity. Perfect L.A. weather is gone, now we are in shivering chaos, a zone between forms and non-forms. Humanity faced with its own mortality, idiocy, and disorientation. In L.A. that day, Cass got rain.

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Sundance 2018, part 2: Valladares’ take on ‘Hale County,’ ‘You Were Never Really Here,’ ‘Leave No Trace’ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/01/31/valladares-sundance-2018/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/01/31/valladares-sundance-2018/#respond Wed, 31 Jan 2018 08:01:31 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1135811 This is one article in a series of Sundance coverage – follow The Daily’s reviews of select Sundance films every day this week, extending into next week. Brief notes, now, on three vital films I was able to see at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. These three alone prove that the […]

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Sundance 2018, part 2: Valladares' take on 'Hale County,' 'You Were Never Really Here,' 'Leave No Trace'
The Egyptian Theater marquee in 2015 in Park City, Utah. (JEMAL COUNTESS/Sundance Institute)

This is one article in a series of Sundance coverage – follow The Daily’s reviews of select Sundance films every day this week, extending into next week.

Brief notes, now, on three vital films I was able to see at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. These three alone prove that the state of narrative cinema is alive and well — if not on the widescale horizon, then at least in dribbles and pockets.

RaMell Ross’s “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” and its subtle poetry knocked me the hell out of my seat — easily the biggest revelation for me at Sundance. The other two films — Debra Granik’s “Leave No Trace” and Lynne Ramsay’s “You Were Never Really Here” — both physically affected me with their visions of specific people swallowed up by brute, uncaring worlds. Debra Granik inspired tears of togetherness and separation with “Leave No Trace,” while Lynne Ramsay provoked screams of horror and revulsion (never gratuitous) with “You Were Never Really Here.”

 

Sundance 2018, part 2: Valladares' take on 'Hale County,' 'You Were Never Really Here,' 'Leave No Trace'
Joaquin Phoenix and Ekaterina Samsonov appear in “You Were Never Really Here” by Lynne Ramsay, an official selection of the Spotlight program at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. (ALISON COHEN ROSA/Sundance Institute)

Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s airtight “You Were Never Really Here” starring Joaquin Phoenix is the latest in the scuzzy-city-neo-noir canon (see also: “Taxi Driver,” the films of Dan Gilroy, the oddball if overly-Arty “Drive,” and the fractured 1967 classic “Point Blank”); Ramsay’s contribution is equal parts cathartic violence, Catholic grace, and taut cinematic precision. Like “Point Blank,” it goes back and forth in time to reveal why its antihero is so traumatized. As a veteran, he saw children slain in a Middle Eastern desert; as a police officer, he opened a dock container filled with dead smuggled girls. By the end, the film is so choked up with Phoenix’s haunted past, one begins to feel like they are in a crisper, tighter version of Phoenix’s PTA film “Inherent Vice” (2014): Hazy, lost, confused, but with none of the Pynchon absurdity to lighten the mood.

Phoenix plays “Joe” (what a name), a private-dick hitman whose weapon of choice is the humble hammer. Joe is the modern-day Misfit: a morally incoherent drifter (yet never morally confused) who feels unconscious grace in violence and who wants to save others from feeling the same. Joe is assigned to kill the men who kidnapped Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov), the daughter of a local politician, and rescue her safely. Soon, though, he uncovers a citywide conspiracy far more vast and disturbing.

In this thriller, a boy’s best friend (and his only friend) is truly his mother. An unabashed momma’s boy, Joe tends to his ailing mother (Judith Roberts) when she falls asleep during the opening of Sam Fuller’s “The Naked Kiss” (1964). In one of Ramsay’s many cinephilic in-jokes [1], Joe and the mother confuses it with Hitchcock’s “Psycho” (and after all, aren’t these three basically the same film?).  Aptly, the Ramsay film uses these two landmarks of the American macabre as its central guideposts. Fuller and Ramsay take child-molesting perversity as a truth universally unacknowledged in the city. Meanwhile, in eras where audiences are increasingly desensitized to images of blood and death, Hitchcock and Ramsay cleanly elide violence with knife-like editing in order to make it more present, more real. Ramsay’s heroes (Joe and his mother, the kidnapped girl Nina) are all survivors of traumas too numerous to count, too ubiquitous to pinpoint, too horrifying to relive (but relive them they must, if they wish to lead honest lives). Thriving was never an option for Ramsay’s characters; surviving is the only viable option, and even this often seems impossible.

[1] Ramsay also harkens back to the unforgettable bullet-pierced pince-nez of the Odessa woman in “Battleship Potemkin” (1925), and has conceived what must be the most chilling water scene since Charles Laughton’s and James Agee’s “The Night of the Hunter” (1955).

The city does not let them live their own lives. Joe’s compulsion to love his fellow (wo)man finds him at odds with the destructive passivity of the Big City. To survive, he needs to ignore everyone around him, because one person’s life-baggage, his own, is already too hard to handle. The case of young Nina — and the nameless girl he cannot save — will break him.

Ramsay may be serious, but she is still funny. Her gallows’ humor is breathtaking. Massacres are set to Rosie & the Originals’ “Angel Baby,” the first song you’d think to waltz to at a 2 a.m. milkshake-diner, but the last song to which you’d want to bash someone’s head in with a hammer. Joe forgives a dying hitman by not torturing him, but harmonizing with him to a Hollies song. The humor has a sophistication that is not present in, say, Samuel Maoz’s “Foxtrot,” a heavy-handed thought experiment which played twenty-four hours before the Ramsay film, in the same Park City Library. Maoz applies Levity and Humor like plaster of Paris to patch up queasy transitions. The comedy of Maoz’s traumatized Israeli soldier suddenly bursting into a foxtrot — and the obvious military pun in the title — is edgy and intriguing at first. But stack it next to Lynne Ramsay, and it becomes clear whose hysterically tragic humor cuts deeper; she doesn’t even seem to be trying, because the humor unfolds so naturally.

In contrast to the slickly contrived “Foxtrot,” there is not a wasted moment or dishonest shot in the smoothly conceived “You Were Never Really Here.” Its trips into hallucinogenic violence — especially towards the end, where the absurd melts into reality with a waitress’s spine-chilling “Thank you, come again” and a moment in which everyone in the audience screamed in terror — are always earned, unrelenting, brutal, yet never mired in hip nihilism (Quentin Tarantino) or, worse, cowardly non-belief (Jim Hosking’s “Evening with Beverly Luff Linn,” an Aubrey Plaza film which makes you forget you are watching an Aubrey Plaza film — which should be a criminal offense in all 50 states and Puerto Rico).

 

Sundance 2018, part 2: Valladares' take on 'Hale County,' 'You Were Never Really Here,' 'Leave No Trace'
Thomasin McKenzie and Ben Foster appear in “Leave No Trace” by Debra Granik, an official selection of the Premieres program at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. (SCOTT GREEN/Sundance Institute)

In terms of feels, I was overwhelmed most by Debra Granik’s “Leave No Trace,” a father-and-daughter yarn which treats the timeless theme of alienation without fear or cliché. A homeless-by-choice dad and daughter (Ben Foster and Thomasin McKenzie) live in the margins of Oregon’s forests, surviving by living out in the wilderness. Theirs is not at all a Romantic or dreamy idyll. His name is Will, and he is an Iraqi War veteran who has given up all hope of ever integrating back into civilization. His daughter Tom, wise beyond her years, supports him through thick and thin. But once Tom gets a taste of what community feels like, she wants it — at the cost of supporting her father, who is in bad shape but who refuses to let it show.

I cried with terrible fury, not because I saw crying on screen, but precisely the opposite: Everyone holds it in so skillfully, so destructively. They must suppress themselves, if they are to survive an uncaring 2018 America’s lack of empathy with an individual’s plight. (To see what happens when we do try to care, watch “You Were Never Really Here.”) In this regard, Granik’s sparsity — stoically-faced actors, to-the-point dialogue, shots which artfully present poetic facts — reminds me of Robert Bresson (“Au Hasard Balthazar,” “L’argent”), who also had no use for indulgent shots that didn’t lead the film’s spirit to a higher place.

There is a moment in “Leave No Trace” — a non-underlined meeting between Tom, a service dog, and an ex-military medic in a tiny role — that reduced me to savage, sudden tears. The quiet, backgrounded tragedy (the medic, barely a supporting actor, offers his dog to Tom to help her dad out, because, in the medic’s words, “he’s sure helped me”) still affects me gravely when I think about it. And I can’t think about it long enough, or else I start to feel hopeless.

The Bressonian element of “Leave No Trace” extends to both artists’ interest in animals, their unreadable expressiveness, their knowledge of mental arenas where humans can never enter. Granik offers up hope — hope that calm currents exist where the disturbed veteran’s problems pool into the dog’s, and become one, and catharsis precedes peace, alienation precedes belonging. Even if the dog cannot understand a word Will says, maybe the dog will ease him into a community. We think this hopefully. But judging by what Granik ultimately suggests, those hopes are just that.

Debra Granik launched the career of Jennifer Lawrence in 2010 with the magnificent “Winter’s Bone,” and it seems as if she’s poised to do the same with Thomasin McKenzie. As the beautifully tough Tom, everything McKenzie says and does suggests an endless series of hidden mental layers, ones we can never access yet which we know must exist. She pets and tends to a fluffy rabbit as if she’s been doing it her whole life. She stands on top of a neighbor-boy’s makeshift house with Alice-like, not-quite-romantic curiousness. Her questions, delivered in a quivering New Zealander accent, are lofty yet personal: “Why do the kids look at me different?” Tom is trying to figure out her unclear future — but to do this, she must leave behind her father, whose slow metaphorical death is painful for her (and us) to endure. All the time, McKenzie holds scenes together purely with her eyes, their haunted and too-wise blankness mirroring her father’s soul.

 

Sundance 2018, part 2: Valladares' take on 'Hale County,' 'You Were Never Really Here,' 'Leave No Trace'
A film still from “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” by RaMell Ross, an official selection of the U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. (RAMELL ROSS/IDIOM Film)

Another film with poetic grace in a community that rarely sees their individual problems expressed: RaMell Ross’s “Hale County This Morning, This Evening.” Ross is a Black photographer who made his feature film debut at this year’s Sundance. His film follows two Black teens, Daniel and Quincy, in Alabama’s Black Belt; Daniel attends Selma University, while Quincy fathers a son and, later, twins. It is ostensibly a documentary, but its elastic playing with time (long chunks of uninterrupted home video-ish plan-sequences, staccato stabs of free associations) and its off-center treatment of its central concern (how to present Black bodies in a cinema that was not designed to show off dark skin as beautiful) makes it something quite new and strange…yet familiar (to me).

What is “Hale County”? It is truly a moving picture. Of course, every film is technically a moving picture. However, a good chunk of them — the most unimaginative and non-gutsy — consist of people going through rote motions to convey abstract ideas with little specificity (“Three Billboards,” “The Untamed,” “And Breathe Normally”). At their worst, they merely mechanically record what’s in front of the camera, accomplishing nothing (this year’s nadir will be “Beverly Luff Linn”, an anti-human anti-comedy). “Hale County” rejects that notion. Ross knows the moving image is too precious to be treated frivolously, and so he advances cinematic art with poetic, philosophic, and political possibilities — all in their own spheres, moving parallel to each other.

It primes the viewer in the history of the marginal image. Plainly, Black and Brown people have rarely had the privilege of seeing themselves on the wide screen in unfettered, un-signposted lyrical trips. (The artists who do make such films, like Julie Dash and her “Daughters of the Dust” [1991], don’t have the extensive career of their white counterparts.) Ross makes the point clear by returning to the ruins of a decrepit Southern plantation and interpolating footage of Bert Williams in the recently-rediscovered “Lime Kiln Field Day” (1913), one of the earliest surviving films with Black performers. Williams, a popular Black vaudevillian of the early 20th century, dons blackface; here, Williams sees right through the racist comic conventions of his time by yanking them back for his own purposes, mocking convention by shining a light on the perverse doubling: a white blackness, masking the real human underneath. In “Hale County,” Williams imagines a future beyond his time, a future carved out by a generation of Black filmmakers (Juano Hernandez, Dorothy Dandridge, Sidney Poitier, Julie Dash, Ivan Dixon, Kathleen Collins, Charles Burnett, Haile Gerima, Spike Lee) whom he cannot imagine, yet whose spirits he nonetheless believes will come to fruition.

To achieve the film’s hallowed intimacy, Ross lived with the two Black teens he filmed over a period of five years. To know is to better express, to produce feverish images which can exist outside of space and time — but which always return to their source, eerily.

Ross has made a major work of our times, in which every shot (girls dancing during a lightning storm; a knockout long-take of basketball players horsing around in a locker-room with a couch, with one player texting and anxiously surveying his friends as if he has something to say [he says nothing]; a post-Robert Frank funeral where the Black mourners move in one direction and a shiny new car zips past them along a stretch of highway, their paths never crossing) is doing something, forging and collecting as many truths as it can carry, and letting them talk back to each other as in a moving picture book.

In the future, I hope to more closely explore the shot-by-shot beauties of “Hale County.” But Sundance — with its critical-thought-killing rush and din, the refusal to stew within the world of a just-finished film, the urge to pick up the smartphone and see what’s the next big Hit we can snag tix for — was not the place or time to do so.

“You Were Never Really Here” will be released by Amazon Studios in April of this year.

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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‘The Misfits,’ Marilyn Monroe’s final film, is bleak perfection https://stanforddaily.com/2018/01/18/the-misfits-review/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/01/18/the-misfits-review/#respond Thu, 18 Jan 2018 14:28:22 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1135199 “The Misfits” is one of those screamingly hopeless films that only occurs when the stars magically align. Said stars (Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift) are all shown on their last legs; within two days after the shoot wrapped up, Clark Gable would suffer a massive heart attack and die within the week; Monroe would die about a year […]

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“The Misfits” is one of those screamingly hopeless films that only occurs when the stars magically align. Said stars (Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift) are all shown on their last legs; within two days after the shoot wrapped up, Clark Gable would suffer a massive heart attack and die within the week; Monroe would die about a year later from a drug overdose; Clift, too, would die in 1966 after a lifetime struggle with substance abuse. Scripted by Arthur Miller (Monroe’s soon-to-be-ex-husband) and directed by John Huston (who spent much of the shoot drunk, asleep or gambling himself into crippling debt), Miller and Huston make a work which traps, in a brief instant, pathetically dying embers. Now, I’m not talking “pathetic” in a pejorative sense; after all, Webster’s tells me “pathetic” not only means “pitifully inferior or inadequate,” but also “having the capacity to move one to compassionate pity”; “marked by sorrow or melancholy”; and just plain “sad.” “The Misfits” is all of these.

Monroe is Roslyn Taber, an ex-stripper filing for divorce, who ends up in Reno, Nevada with four equally lost sad-sacks at the end of their ropes: the aging cowboy Gay Langland (Clark Gable, in his final film role); former World War II flying ace Guido Racanelli (Eli Wallach, “The Good, the Bad & the Ugly”); a has-been rodeo rider (Montgomery Clift); and a lonely divorcee, Roslyn’s only friend (Thelma Ritter of “Rear Window” fame). They strike up a business capturing wild horses.

“The Misfits,” written in the typically obvious, highbrow declamatoriness of Arthur Miller (but the actors escape him), is crazy to watch, namely because it constitutes one of the rare instances where a film’s subtext is the text. Knowing the behind-the-scenes horrors of its making enhances the viewing experience. It is like one long, sleepless journey into darkness. “The Misfits” is just one long howl of misery that gains in desperation the more it rolls on — the slacker, the lonelier.

“The Misfits” comes out at the tail-end of the classic Hollywood era (1961), and it shows. The photographers who drifted on and off the set (Eve Arnold, Bruce Davidson, Henri Cartier-Bresson) showed off Monroe, Clift, Gable in all their un-Glamour, in a starkly honest look that would have been unthinkable in the studios’ heyday. Everyone has the hang-dog look of tiredness. The players (even Eli Wallach, who still glows from his sexed-up turn in Elia Kazan’s “Baby Doll”) are all made to look bloated or grotesque or basically dead. The editing is odd and erratic, but these glitches actually contribute to its depth. At one point, Monroe’s lips go out of sync with her voice. At another, Monroe’s close-up is interrupted by a blurry soft focus. She has none of the leering, near-pornographic dazzle of her 1950s promotional photos. Here, the camera looks as if it were just crying, doing a terrible job at wiping away its tears, overwhelmed by the state of Marilyn.

Monroe’s melancholy is not just some passive by-product of her mental and physical state; it is an intentional actor-driven melancholy, which shows her remarkable skill at rendering the lonely divorcée who goes to Nevada to drink and drift and die. Her spaced-out husk, perking of bust, and nanosecond weird smiles are all consciously worked out; she does this miserable business only in front of men who expect it of her, then relaxes in front of Thelma Ritter, her only friend. Ritter banters with Monroe with liveliness, but the former is soon ejected from the film’s narrative, leaving Monroe to size up these pathetic men by herself.

The Marilyn performance is so brave precisely because, despite the odds, she survives. She trips over her words, but she survives. Her dress slips off her bare shoulder, as she collapses onto a drunk heap of Clark Gable bellowing “GAYLOOORD” while slamming a car over and over again in punk desperation — and still, she survives.

What’s unusual is that the men do not hunger after Monroe in the typical wolf-whistle, ha-ha way of her more famous, earlier work (“Some Like it Hot,” “Seven Year Itch”). Obviously, the men chase after her — but they do so with the energy of someone half-heartedly trying to turn the lights off without climbing out of bed.

The actors indulge themselves in some grotesque bits of business: Eli Wallach randomly stacks up planks of wood in a drunken early-morning stupor, Gable slams his car until his hand bleeds, Monroe paddle-balls and seduces without being aware of it, Clift confesses to Monroe whilst lying in her lap as if she were his priest, mommy, bae and therapist all rolled into one. Clift is especially a sad case; he doesn’t even seem to be aware there are cameras around him. He is so out of the picture, he is so never in a scene, it becomes painful to keep returning to his gaunt face, his empty eyes.

No actor in the ensemble seems to be aware of the other’s existence. Eli Wallach is a purposeless and disturbed ex-pilot veteran, musing that when he dropped bombs (and maybe the Bomb), he felt nothing: “I can’t make a landing, and I can’t get up to God, neither…help me.”  The only person who could possibly change this profound life-hating pessimism is Thelma Ritter, who as usual (c.f., “Rear Window,” “Pickup on South Street”) is the most fun — and who too quickly leaves the picture, just before things get really sad. Otherwise, the “Misfits” ensemble speaks way past each other, never burrowing “inside” the Scene. We don’t see characters interacting with characters; we see stars talking back to stars, confusing their fake life on the page with their real life off the set.

The “action” scenes have none of it; the scenes where Wallach and Gable chase after wild horses have the fun of watching paint dry — and that’s the point. An action-versed and taut director like Howard Hawks would have been disgusted by the utter lack of formal discipline of Huston’s wild-horse sequences, which hang sloppily; just take a look at John Wayne on safari in “Hatari!” (1962) to see how such a scene “should” be done. But to do the scene with Hawksian efficiency would lose the point of this haunting picture, which wants to show (through endless repetition—first a horse, then another horse, then another, then Gable, then Monroe, then another horse, then a truck…) what banality feels like. Huston shows the wild-horse chase for what it is: The last-ditch efforts of failures who whirl around in mad circles in the desert.

Yet behind the dispersive misery, there is exactly one glint of sturdiness, maybe of hope. It is when the men, after all their hard work and physical exertion, decide to shoot the wild horses they just captured, selling their meat for a few lousy hundred bucks. Suddenly, Monroe darts off into the distance and screams at the top of her lungs, “I PITY YOU. I PITY YOU.” Obviously this is not some cheery our-team-wins, guy-gets-the-girl-or-guy moment. But after the knife-twisting anguish of the rest of the picture, Monroe here provides the exact catharsis needed to make us care again about the sanctity of human beings. The camera hangs far back in an extreme long shot, making me feel Rosalyn’s insignificance, and, contrariwise, Monroe’s strength. It’s a rare instance where Rosalyn/Monroe has privacy to herself. Huston wisely does not go in for a typically Hollywood close-up that would show her breakdown and emotional turmoil with dramatic, lurid tastelessness. The camera cannot go in for a close-up. To do so would completely negate the scene’s point: the breaking out of a woman from her banality. She screams: “ENOUGH.”

The dialogue in this remarkable scene (perhaps the climax of Monroe’s acting career) also predicts Monroe’s eventual suspected fate so eerily that it made my skin crawl: “You [men] are only happy when you can see something die. Why don’t you kill yourselves, and be happy?” She could just as well be talking back to Arthur Miller (and the viewing public — us) as she is to Gable, Wallach and Clift. It’s an amazing example of an actor taking back her agency in a narrative that, at first glance, seems to float above the actors. That’s also why its final happy ending is so weirdly successful — because it is so blatantly false, and we know better. As Guido/Wallach observed, we are just aimlessly following the luminescence of stars that are long dead — until the watchers themselves drop dead. Such is the fate of the Misfits, and the fate of those who watch and care for films like “The Misfits.”

 

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Marilyn Monroe’s final film screens on campus https://stanforddaily.com/2018/01/11/marilyn-monroe-misfits/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/01/11/marilyn-monroe-misfits/#respond Thu, 11 Jan 2018 08:01:20 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1134903 John Huston’s quietly devastating 1961 drama “The Misfits,” starring Marilyn Monroe in her final film, plays at McMurtry Building, Rm. 115, on Thursday, Jan. 11 at 5:30 p.m. This is one hell of a bleak film; you don’t want to miss it. The cult over only the indexical sign of Marilyn Monroe (the blonde hair, the sexpot […]

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Marilyn Monroe's final film screens on campus
Marilyn Monroe shows the boys who’s boss at ping-pong in a lobby card for John Huston’s THE MISFITS (1961). Courtesy of Jerry Murbach.

John Huston’s quietly devastating 1961 drama “The Misfits,” starring Marilyn Monroe in her final film, plays at McMurtry Building, Rm. 115, on Thursday, Jan. 11 at 5:30 p.m. This is one hell of a bleak film; you don’t want to miss it.

The cult over only the indexical sign of Marilyn Monroe (the blonde hair, the sexpot husk, the eyes) gets nowhere near her weirdnesses and complexities as a person. Of course, can we ever know? Her performances in her best work — “Don’t Bother To Knock” (1952), “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” (1953), “Some Like it Hot” (1959), “Let’s Make Love” (1960), and especially “The Misfits” — give us an actual glimpse into one of America’s most obsessed-over stars.

Monroe is Roslyn Taber, an ex-stripper filing for divorce, who ends up in Reno, Nevada with four equally lost sad-sacks at the end of their ropes: the aging cowboy Gay Langland (Clark Gable, in his final film role); former World War II flying ace Guido Racanelli (Eli Wallach, “The Good, the Bad & the Ugly”); a has-been rodeo rider (Montgomery Clift, who soon died after filming from a lifetime of alcohol and drug addiction); and a lonely divorcee, Roslyn’s only friend (Thelma Ritter of “Rear Window” fame). They all strike up a business capturing wild horses.

“The Misfits,” which was scripted by Monroe’s soon-to-be-ex-husband Arthur Miller (yes, that Arthur Miller), punctures the popular perception of Monroe as an unreal sex goddess to be whistled at. As the critic Angelica Jade Bastien writes, “For me, Monroe is evocative more of a mood and a time than just the dumb blonde sexpot she’s become known for. Through this lens, her startling, heartfelt, gorgeous work in “The Misfits” feels strangely like an elegy for the “dumb blonde” she never truly was, and the Hollywood she existed within … she explores and brings to life the cloying weight of loneliness the way few actors can.” Monroe delivers a frighteningly frank performance, as does everyone else in this tired film about tired failures.

“The Misfits” screens as part of the syllabus of Professor Usha Iyer’s course “The Body in Film and Other Media.”

 

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Carlos Valladares’ favorite movies of 2017 https://stanforddaily.com/2018/01/10/valladares-faves-of-2017/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/01/10/valladares-faves-of-2017/#respond Wed, 10 Jan 2018 09:00:13 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1134653 Another year, another batch of great films. Some are pop gems (“Baby Driver,”) some weren’t as heavily pushed as they should have been (“Dawson City,” “A Quiet Passion”). All of them are absolutely worth your time. My favorite films list is presented in alphabetical order, except #1—which was my absolute favorite. No. 1 is technically a 2016 […]

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Another year, another batch of great films. Some are pop gems (“Baby Driver,”) some weren’t as heavily pushed as they should have been (“Dawson City,” “A Quiet Passion”). All of them are absolutely worth your time.

My favorite films list is presented in alphabetical order, except #1—which was my absolute favorite. No. 1 is technically a 2016 film (its official US release date was December 28, 2016), but I’m including it in 2017 because that’s when most would have watched it. My three favorites from this year—”Paterson,” “A Quiet Passion,” “The Red Turtle”—all deal explicitly in poetry. They struggle to find a way of communicating the literary-poetic into the cinematic, no small order. Luckily, they succeed beyond the wildest aspirations.

N.B.: I do not include David Lynch’s and Mark Frost’s “Twin Peaks: The Return,” which was the best moving-picture thing of the year. It is neither film nor TV; it is something much stranger, more wonderful. It belongs in its own category. I’ve written extensively about it for the San Francisco Chronicle here. This is a major work you’d be doing yourself a disservice in skipping. Of course, it requires a knowledge of the original two-season series from 1990-91 and Lynch’s furiously personal feature-film prequel “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” (1992).

I specify this as a list of personal favorites that I was able to watch — and not simply “the best of 2017.” To attest “best” status is to assume you’ve seen all or most of the films that come out in any given year in the same year — and that’s just not possible. Hell, we’re still trying to catch up with 1933.

Carlos Valladares' favorite movies of 2017
Golshifteh Farahani (“About Elly”) and Adam Driver (“Star Wars”) are husband and wife artists in Jim Jarmusch’s “Paterson,” Carlos Valladares’ favorite new film he saw in 2017. (Courtesy of Bleecker Street and Amazon Video)

1. “Paterson,” written and directed by Jim Jarmusch

Elia Kazan once gave a great piece of advice that informs Jim Jarmusch’s achingly poetic masterpiece of the ordinary: Never take a taxi cab (or an Uber, or a Lyft) if you can take the bus. Buses attract oddballs from all corners of life; they are breeding grounds for observation, specificity and knowledge of the world beyond one’s bubble.

The poet-hero of “Paterson” (Adam Driver) is a bus driver. He is named after the New Jersey city in which he works, and the William Carlos Williams poem that guides him. Paterson is in the unique position to hear people’s everyday thoughts: what are anarchists, construction workers, and twins planning? He has a strict daily routine, but in the blissed-out and pleasant meanders of 118 minutes, he finds endless variety. Every night he walks his French bulldog Marvin; every night, he leaves Marvin outside a bar, has one glass of beer, and chats up the encyclopedic Doc, the Black owner of this mostly-Black-establishment bar. He never knows when his next bar visit will end with a suicidal man pulling a gun on himself, because he can’t imagine a world without the woman he loves.

In “Paterson,” everyone is hung up on love, artistry and the pursuit of both. The film believes that everyone has limitless poetic potential — if they know how to tune their eyes and ears to life’s exact frequency. “Paterson” makes you want to create —passionately, tearfully, lovingly. The big question: Is creation of poetry enough? Or does it have to be “out in the world”—known en masse, published — to be successful? Is it enough to just keep creating and never let anyone know who you are? Or should you reach for the renown of a William Carlos Williams? The private and the public clash in profound ways in “Paterson,” a film that makes you feel alive to the possibility of beauty in an ugly, self-enclosed America.

Forgive me for not being able to convey the gobsmacking amazing experience of watching “Paterson.” It is the most ambitious new film I’ve seen, and the one that has made me feel like maybe, if a filmmaker watches it, America won’t be so deadened and uncaring in its view of art.

 

Carlos Valladares' favorite movies of 2017
Left to right: Baby (Ansel Elgort), Bats (Jamie Foxx), Darling (Eiza González) and Buddy (Jon Hamm) in Edgar Wright’s “Baby Driver.” (WILSON WEBB/TriStar Pictures)

“Baby Driver,” written and directed by Edgar Wright

Still a damn delight. Edgar Wright understands why we need musicals. His “Baby Driver” is a sharply felt film seriously in love with pop. With the proliferation of Spotify and other various digital-era ways of listening to music, Wright knows we live in the glorious (?) age of the Walking Musical. It explores how it feels to be stuck between two modes of living: lonely silence and bursts of emotional energy.

“Baby Driver” continues Edgar Wright’s love of smart surface. There’s barely time to stop and dwell on the images, which flick by with a rapid yet clear sense. Wright sees dancing and walking as inseparable—two modes of the same inexpressible emotions, ones that the cinema can best capture. In that vein, one of the best moments is when Ansel Elgort kicks a sheet of newspaper into the air to the tune of Commodores’s “Easy.” The move morphs into a dance figure, not fully formed, and is soon forgotten amid Wright’s kinetic shots. But for a brief moment, Elgort and Wright discover the bridge between the all-dancing ideal of a movie musical and the real world. We must dance, it is natural, and, with a little help from our iPod or our Spotify, we shall dance.

 

Carlos Valladares' favorite movies of 2017
Armie Hammer (“The Social Network”) and Timothée Chalamet (“Lady Bird”) in “Call Me by Your Name.” (Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)

“Call Me by Your Name,” directed by Luca Guadagnino, written by James Ivory, based on the novel by André Aciman

An aching memory film about a romance which fades even as it unfolds. Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (“Uncle Boonmee”) captures fleeting snatches of sunlight, sweat and cum on the skins of actors, unafraid and unbashful.

The story unfolds not through declamatory speeches, nor flashy displays of technique, but in sudden stops and starts, burrowing erratically into the love that grows between a 17-year-old on the cusp of leaving innocence (Timothée Chalamet) and the grad student hunk (Armie Hammer) who thrusts him into experience.

Director Luca Guadagnino refuses the easy image; he makes you scan this softly lit Northern Italian world, as in the breathtaking long-take (4+ minutes in length) where Maurice Revel’s “Une barque sur l’ocean” fills the air, and the camera dances around the men’s desires like a deleted scene from Godard’s “Contempt.” Chalamet and Hammer smoke quietly and without fuss, but the piano tinkles and hurls down on them like a monsoon; the image is placid on the surface, but great waves (of desire, of sex, of the need to be loved by another human) rage underneath. Later, it all gushes forth in the scene where (spoiler?) Chalamet furiously masturbates into a peach, an intense scene of frustrated desires.

Guadagnino knows this landscape won’t move without precisely deployed support. So adding definition to the delicate Hammer-Chalamet foreground are Michael Stuhlbarg as the father who mourns his youth by comforting his son in a Eric Rohmer-like monologue; Esther Garrel, the young French crush whose pathetic naïveté (same) is played straight and without a hint of condescension; and Amira Casar, who projects a respectful coyness about the sex her son is having (the beauty is that neither Dad nor son are sure how much Mom knows; Dad assumes nothing, but we have a hunch it’s more than she lets on).

Add in the songs by Sufjan Stevens, and it becomes a haunted musical about unattainable dreams that, like “Baby Driver,” takes place in the loneliest recesses of a lovesick mind. “I think of you as my brother, although that sounds dumb.”

 

Carlos Valladares' favorite movies of 2017
Mae Marsh in “Polly of the Circus” (1917), one of the films from the Dawson City collection. Bill Morrison tells the extraordinary story of the Dawson City film find in “Dawson City: Frozen Time.” (Courtesy of Kino Lorber)

“Dawson City: Frozen Time,” written, directed, edited and co-produced by Bill Morrison

An unconventional documentary, which reminds us of the fragility of cinema history.

Bill Morrison has made a career out of avant-garde explorations of physical silent film — decaying, rotting, worn out after years of improper storage. Now, he turns his eye to a story that sounds too good to be real. In 1978, a cache of more than 500 silent films (thought to be lost) was discovered beneath the swimming pool of an old athletic center in Dawson City, Canada. Here was the final resting place of thousands of feature films produced by Hollywood; since it was so far up north, the studios never recalled their prints. So for years and years, hard-to-find silent films lay in Dawson City, a testament to a rich history in danger of going up in nitrate flames.

The film is a three-part endeavor: a history of Dawson City, which was caught up in the Klondike Gold Rush at the turn of the 20th century; a look at the silent footage unearthed at Dawson City; and an exploration of cinema’s physical history.

Bill Morrison had made a work so obsessed with the past, it actually feels more present than anything else I’ve seen this year. Think of what we take for granted as a critical part of how we consume information and knowledge of the world today. Now think how this will all be erased in the future, only understood by a few fringe folks who make it their lives’ mission to accurately render our lives. And in the future, the majority of folks will simply not care. That’s the incline Morrison is up against.

In 2013, the Library of Congress issued a report estimating that nearly 70 percent of all American silent films are considered lost. Such a profound loss is unimaginable; such a fortuitous rescue of that precious history in Dawson City, even more so.

Carlos Valladares' favorite movies of 2017
Willem Dafoe and Brooklynn Prince in Sean Baker’s “The Florida Project.” (Courtesy of A24)

“The Florida Project,” directed by Sean Baker, written by Baker and Chris Bergoch

Sean Baker proves himself one of the most insightful and loving American filmmakers working in the present day. The proof is in 2012’s “Starlet,” 2015’s “Tangerine” (which was one of my top films of that year), and now “The Florida Project.” It’s a nice pun: set in the ‘projects’ in Kissimmee, Florida, a run-down community of motel tenants right outside of a Disney World. But it is also Baker and company’s hilarious and serious project: a project to conjure up a world rarely seen on the screen, one which is done in an unusually free-narrative style of ragtag sketches and a disciplined refusal to let the audience know what they should be made to feel, and how they should judge a character.

Baker has described his Florida project as a modern update of Hal Roach’s “Our Gang”—those little rascals and their Depression-era misadventures. Indeed, much of the film’s strength lies in its kid ensemble, especially six-year-old Moonee (Brooklynn Prince). The father figure is the motel manager, Willem Defoe’s patient Bobby. The mother is Bria Vinaite, who is a heady mix of irresponsible, immature and fun. Yet the real villain is not this woman whom society pegs as a trash-talking, Worldstar sex worker with scandy booty shorts — no, instead, it’s the incredibly annoying Portuguese tourists, the security guards who try to keep up a morally bankrupt façade by driving the poor off their property with golf carts.

Brooklynn Prince’s rambunctious energy reminds me of 14-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud in his and François Truffaut’s debut, “The 400 Blows” (1959). Prince’s snap looks, sassy talk-backs and impishly-turned-up nose are tightly controlled, applied to a character that defies easy box-checking.

Is it a comedy? An escapist film? A 2017 update of a Great Depression tragedy like 1933’s “Wild Boys of the Road”? A committed look at poverty in a realistic vein? A class fantasy gone wild with a sugar rush from the tutti-frutti section of a Baskin-Robbins? It’s all of these.

 

Carlos Valladares' favorite movies of 2017
Left to right: Jada Pinkett Smith, Regina Hall, Queen Latifah and Tiffany Haddish in “Girls Trip.” (Courtesy of Universal Pictures)

“Girls Trip,” directed by Malcolm D. Lee, written by Tracy Oliver and Kenya Barris

Easily the funniest movie I saw this year, and (along with “Baby Driver”) the most fun I had in a movie theater. “Girls Trip” is shrewd, vulgar, committed and knowing. Its love of raw laughter, at any costs, is all that matters with an ensemble as tightknit as this: Regina Hall, Queen Latifah, Jada Pinkett Smith — each a vivid character, never a type. Tiffany Haddish gives the best physical and knockabout comic performance in a while; she deserves all the Oscars I’m sure she won’t get. (Will she even be nominated? If the Academy actually cared about good pop film work, they would seriously consider her.) The occasional hokeyness, especially near the end, deserves a pass, because this is a comedy about the pains black women must endure to cultivate some sort of public success in this country. In other words, it is radically frivolous. To recognize the brilliance of “Girls Trip” is to defeat the default condemnation of comedy as something escapist and un-serious.

 

Carlos Valladares' favorite movies of 2017
Ingrid (Aubrey Plaza) reads Joan Didion in a public place in “Ingrid Goes West.” (Courtesy of Neon)

“Ingrid Goes West,” directed by Matt Spicer, written by Spicer and David B. Smith

A comedy-satire about 2010s digital disguises, Facebook masks and Insta-fakery with too many rugs to pull, so much passive aggressiveness clogging up the air. Spicer goes all the way with his miserable, absolutely hopeless depiction of social media ugliness.

What makes the picture so successful is its dark humor: A tight yet blunt script that always shows where it’s going ten scenes before it does, garishly colored period interiors that would make Frank Tashlin and Jerry Lewis weep with envy, a cast of kooks who deprive us of any sort of sympathy with them and their vapid plights. The air they breathe in is toxic. With the exception of Aubrey Plaza’s Ingrid, any attempt to humanize them is doomed, because they only exist on a cartooned surface, with only a motley of deadened Instagram filters allowed to creep into the flat visuals. The satire expands our minds in a proud Jerry Lewis tradition; there’s even a touch of Lewis in some of Plaza’s best physical gags, like her first encounter with Elizabeth Olson in the bookstore. We laugh and we recognize a certain vileness which exists in the peculiar world of screens we live in, one which has yet to receive a sharper movie analysis than in “Ingrid.”

Normally I’d hate the kind of glibness the ending peddles, but the subject warrants the contempt. Amazing we can see this in a multiplex theater. And it shares more in common with “Girls Trip” than I expected, right down to their ending speeches about women (Regina Hall foregrounding her authentic Blackness; Aubrey Plaza foregrounding the painful nothingness of her lonely profile picture) exposing “the real me” — a trick which ends up being even more popular with the consumer audience than expected. But there is a key difference between these two endings, which has everything to do with these films’ gravely different attitudes towards 2017 America. The revelation of “Girls Trip” is in the service of hope and love and a human desire to connect with the outside world; there’s no hope in any of the callously jokey “Ingrid” images, just a cold punchline straight out of “Taxi Driver.”

 

Carlos Valladares' favorite movies of 2017
A Casper David Friedrich moment in Studio Ghibli’s “The Red Turtle.” (Courtesy of Sony Picture Classics)

“La Tortue Rouge” (“The Red Turtle”), directed by Michaël Dudok de Wit, written by de Wit and Pascale Ferran

This year, this French animated tearjerker bowled me over the most, by which I mean I bawled. The Japanese bastion of animated masterworks, Studio Ghibli, co-produced this haunting gem, about a sailor stranded on a desert island and his encounters with the uncaring flora and unique fauna (the titular tortoise). Only one English word (“Hey!”) is screamed, so it’s essentially a silent film.

Dutch writer-director Michaël Dudok de Wit has crafted an existential fairy-tale about family, love, death, nature’s shocking neutrality, human cruelty, growing old and what the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi saw as humanity’s cicada syndrome — our inability to stretch our minds beyond our own tiny scale. Ghibli director Isao Takahata (“Tale of the Princess Kaguya,” “Only Yesterday”) served as “artistic producer” for this venture, and in a way, it functions as a sister film to Takahata’s World War II melodrama “Grave of the Fireflies” (1988). Takahata’s aesthetic is writ large in every one of de Wit’s minimalist cels, devastating orchestral cues, and oscillations between concrete plot and abstract atmosphere. We are asked to observe the grainy smoothness of sand and endless, still horizons—how that blue heaven in the sea can swallow us up without a taste. It’s skimpy on “character” because it’s explicitly a fable — and one of immense beauty.

 

Carlos Valladares' favorite movies of 2017
Greta Gerwig (right) directs Saoirse Ronan on the set of Gerwig’s film “Lady Bird.” (Courtesy of A24)

“Lady Bird,” written and directed by Greta Gerwig

Greta Gerwig makes the most relatable American film of the season because her vision is based in daring interiority. A skill mostly de-valued in popular movies today (as seen in most politically-minded middlebrow cinema with very few satisfying returns, from the sanctimonious and talky “Three Billboards” to the irresponsibly hollow spectacle of “Dunkirk”) is soft character shading: Drawing the outlines of a fictional hero in as simple and un-fussy a manner as possible, with no falling back on extraordinary events to make us care. The goal (as it is with Charles Burnett, John Cassavetes, Satyajit Ray, Kelly Reichardt, Jean Renoir et al.) is to continually search for the essence of the people one knows from one’s own self, positing a person’s raw individuality and flawed nature as the end of the artist’s search (which obviously never ends).

Gerwig works with a similar love of people: Is this true to my own self, to my own understanding of truth? She proves detail, patience and accuracy are all virtues. She is generous with her actors, boasting (along with the “Florida Project” players) this year’s tautest ensemble. Each “Lady Bird” hero (two priests, Laurie Metcalf as Lady Bird’s put-on mother, Timothée Chalamet as the pretentious hipster high-schooler that you used to want to date or befriend) has a moment to rise then recede in and out of the shimmering, washed-out background of a collective memory.

“Lady Bird” is a deftly drawn and delicate vision of a woman’s adolescence. It is non-judgmental in a completely clear-eyed way. And it has internalized emotion so well that we feel purposely mixed up. We don’t know whether to cringe, chuckle or cry during a scene, so Gerwig often makes us do all three.

 

Carlos Valladares' favorite movies of 2017
(Left to right) Sherwan Haji, Nuppu Koivu, Janne Hyytiäinen, Sakari Kuosmanen and Ilkka Koivula in Aki Kaurismäki’s “The Other Side of Hope.” (Courtesy of Janus Films)

“The Other Side of Hope,” written and directed by Aki Kaurismäki

The story of how an Anton-Walbrook-from-“Colonel-Blimp”-like refugee from Syria crosses paths with a Finnish restauranteur. It’s Aki Kaurismäki’s touching, oddball take on the Syrian refugee crisis. It’s like the “Three Billboards” film with intelligence, or maybe a modern equivalent of William Faulkner’s MGM film “Intruder in the Dust” (1949)—a major artist makes as clear a statement-picture as he can make. It is made explicitly so that no one will be unambiguous as to the message, yet through its sheer artistry, it skirts the talky trappings of most message-pix (cf., again, “Three Billboards,” “The Post,” “Lobster”). The proof of Kaurismäki’s artistry is his delightfully random blues-rock performances, his crisp compositions, his Jacques Tati-inspired humor. The most telling and honest line, from our refugee hero: “I fell in love with Finland — but if you find a way out of here, tell me as soon as you can.”

 

Carlos Valladares' favorite movies of 2017
Kristen Stewart feeds forbidden desire in “Personal Shopper” (Courtesy of IFC Films).

“Personal Shopper,” written and directed by Olivier Assayas

This Kristen Stewart-led semi-horror from Olivier Assayas is both an effective thriller and a smart deflation of its own non-logic, of the virtual emotions conjured up by movies. “Personal Shopper”‘s not-cliché hauntedness doesn’t just stay in the theater; it stalks us back to our beds.

Assayas is working through one of the generally unsung masters of silent cinema, the French director Louis Feuillade, who birthed the modern-day paranoid thriller, where an ordinary landscape hides a vast conspiracy. Feuillade’s trippy, proto-TV serials (“Les Vampires, “Fantomas,” “Judex,”) used “normal” Parisian buildings as the perfect backdrop to channel abstract fear in the modern world: abstracted through networks of masked madmen and venomous vamps. Assayas transposes that always-being-watched creepiness to the 2010s: iPhones as the new (un-)normal. Like Feuillade, Assayas suggests these bumps in the night — signs we tell ourselves mean something — might just be in our head. But are they? We’re hoodwinked time and again by Assayas/Stewart, by virtual screens, by not-there illusions — by cinema! Our senses run faster than our brain — and yet we don’t mind the hoodwinking, because the film is so smart about it. In the end, what we’re left with is a weird modern faith in mystery.

 

Carlos Valladares' favorite movies of 2017
Emily Dickinson (Cynthia Nixon) and her pious family in “A Quiet Passion,” the newest film by Terence Davies, out in Bay Area theaters May 5. (Courtesy of Music Box Pictures)

“A Quiet Passion,” written and directed by Terence Davies

Davies — Britain’s cinemaster of ex-Catholic, gay, working-class, spiritualized pain — uses film as a way of capturing whatever the forgetting mind can recall before the memory dissolves. His work (“Distant Voices, Still Lives,” “The Long Day Closes,” his autobiographical trilogy of short films) is informed by the trauma he endured at the hands of his abusive father, the Catholic Church and homophobic school bullies, but also by the love and hope he saw in his mother, his sisters, Ella Fitzgerald, poetry and cinema. They are radical testaments of faith and strength.

“A Quiet Passion” is Davies’ latest masterwork, a biopic about the American poet Emily Dickinson, starring Cynthia Nixon. It’s funnier and more buoyant than previous Davies films, despite the fact that it’s based around the increasingly isolated life of Emily Dickinson (who is given complex movie life by Nixon). Davies is the perfect person to make a film about Dickinson, since their work so thoroughly understands the thrill in creeping mortality.

Those who harp on Davies’ historical accuracy are missing the point: The unbridled joys that “A Quiet Passion” evokes. And what joy in this film! No, it’s not “joyful”, per se; in fact, it’s often glum and depressing and painful to watch. What makes a film like “A Quiet Passion” joyful is its respect of the sanctity of lived experience — of breathing, love, family, mortality and, of course, that thing which brings our lives in boldest relief: Art.

 

Carlos Valladares' favorite movies of 2017
Denzel Washington in a career high: Dan Gilroy’s “Roman J. Israel, Esq.” (Courtesy of Sony Pictures)

“Roman J. Israel, Esq.,” written and directed by Dan Gilroy

I have to say that I’m truly stunned by the mixed-to-negative reception of what strikes me as the most constantly surprising thriller released by a major American studio. It’s one where I truly forgot I was watching “a film,” so total was my investment. Its visuals (is this the Robert Elswit of the pure and raw “Desert Hearts” or the hazy and paranoiac “Inherent Vice”?) and its various genres (a detached and odorless gaze that makes it feel like a biopic, quiet Tati-like body comedy, crime procedural, morality play or thriller on the order of Coppola’s “The Conversation”) all reflects the inner tumult of its protagonist, a genius civil-rights attorney (Denzel Washington) who is slowly losing his grip in 2017.

It’s a stellar showcase for Washington’s talents. The calm, assured way Washington puts wrong-headed people in their place is a perfect counterbalance to the moments where he goes way over the line just to prove that he’s right (i.e., his circa-1970s fight over nonexistent chivalry with two Black woman activists of the 2010s). The genius of Washington’s performance is that he doesn’t over-emote, over-shout or over-mug — he plays his semi-nerdy smugness, earned righteousness and paranoia at the same subdued level.

It’s a truly 2010s film — confused, chameleon-like in its rich multiple identities, unsure of where to go. But the filmmaking is as steady and sure as they come. In many years, we’ll be kicking ourselves for sleeping on such a terrific movie.

 

Carlos Valladares' favorite movies of 2017
Sally Hawkins and Octavia Spencer in Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water.” (Courtesy of Fox Searchlight Pictures)

“The Shape of Water,” directed by Guillermo del Toro, written by del Toro and Vanessa Taylor

Sure, I liked it enough. The production side of it (sets, colors [heavy 50s greens and blues], wistful music) all made me an immediate fan. While I’m generally suspicious of art thinly veiled as a way of cashing in on a politically convenient “NOW,” this is one film that doesn’t quite take the obvious route. It’s mainly because of the horrifying and un-audience-appealing key shifts at certain moments, like the cruel Michael Shannon character and the beautiful lovemaking scene in the makeshift tank. I thought of Flannery O’Connor’s Southern allegories a lot while watching it; while “Three Billboards” is like an O’Connor story gone badly off the rails, del Toro’s “Shape of Water” (even though it’s essentially optimistic and “positive”—but then again, I’m not so sure, given the quietly tragic fantasy of the finale) has a frank vision of today that I think she’d approve.

Yet part of me knows that “Shape of Water” functions as a mere placeholder on my list. It is a tall order to be on top of all the good cinema of any given year—and doubly so if one is still in college. Had I had the time and opportunity to see, before deadline, films like Frederick Wiseman’s “Ex Libris: The New York Public Library,” Abbas Kiarostami’s “24 Frames,” Dee Rees’ “Mudbound,” P.T. Anderson’s “Phantom Thread,” the Safdie Brothers’ “Good Time,” Todd Haynes’ “Wonderstruck,” maybe Noah Baumbach’s “The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected),” Kogonada’s “Columbus,” Nana Ekvtimishvili’s and Simon Groß’s “My Happy Family,” or Bertrand Bonnello’s “Nocturama,” at least one of these would have certainly taken “Shape of Water’s” place on my under-informed list.

 

Carlos Valladares' favorite movies of 2017
Patti Smith (left) and Rooney Mara (right) in Terrence Malick’s “Song to Song.” (Courtesy of Broad Green Pictures)

Song to Song,” written and directed by Terrence Malick

As I’ve said before, I’ll stan for Late Malick any day. And the more I reflect on his abstract rock fairy tale “Song to Song,” the more I love it.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Terrence Malick’s “Song to Song” ended up being my favorite of his post-“Tree of Life” experimental work. I say that since it’s the one I struggled hardest to enjoy — and that’s, I think, a good sign. For the first two hours, I was sighing deeply and tapping my feet, feeling every second of the second hour. I worried that Malick had finally gone off the deep end into his own murky funk — but then! for the final half-hour, I was bolted to my seat, tracing the steps which led to my sudden love for what seemed like a self-indulgent boor.

“Song to Song” traces the increasingly mind-numbing sexploits of two musician gonna-be’s (The Great Gosling and Drab Fassbender) trying to figure out at what point in their coke-fueled affairs, orgies, betrayals did they stray off the cosmic art path. Fassbender plays God with women, treating them as heaps of meat and sex-dolls in ways that make your skin crawl; Gosling almost gets there, but MVP Rooney Mara asserts her presence and helps Gosling (and, more importantly, herself) see the spirituality s/he’s missing.

Its closest cousin is Richard Lester’s splintered, cold-shower romance “Petulia” (1968). What Lester’s bitter pill was to the hippy-dippy ’60s, Malick’s spiritual balm is to the insufferably ironic and fractured 2010s. “Song to Song” is necessary for its times, offering contemplation in an age where we need stimulation, fast, now. Malick’s film believes (either naïvely or bravely) in the Spirit’s eleventh-hour triumph over an ugly atmosphere of misogyny, a lack of modern faith, loveless sex, drugs, selfishness, snobbery and hip nihilist distance.

A few other good films I watched this year: Raoul Peck’s “I Am Not Your Negro,” Hirokazu Koreeda’s “After the Storm,” Alexander Payne’s woefully maligned “Downsizing,” Pixar’s “Coco,” João Pedro Rodrigues’ “The Ornithologist,” and Steven Spielberg’s “The Post.” This final do-gooder film about the Now, with Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep in wonderfully mannered gruff-accents, is quite well made. However, its chin-up, back-patting, distanced Liberal piousness made me hunger for something with a little more bite—maybe a snappy, cynical newspaper comedy à la “His Girl Friday” set in a Trump-era newsroom.

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Greta Gerwig’s ‘Lady Bird’ is a miracle of people-watching https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/28/ladybird/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/28/ladybird/#respond Tue, 28 Nov 2017 15:30:51 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1133862 The richly observed “Lady Bird” by Greta Gerwig is not a filmmaker’s debut. Gerwig has been honing her skills for years through her Noah Baumbach work (“Mistress America,” “Frances Ha”), about spunky twenty-somethings with nowhere to go. Now, she has made a film (her official solo directorial debut) which is stabler and less fancy-free than Baumbach’s screwballs — […]

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The richly observed “Lady Bird” by Greta Gerwig is not a filmmaker’s debut. Gerwig has been honing her skills for years through her Noah Baumbach work (“Mistress America,” “Frances Ha”), about spunky twenty-somethings with nowhere to go. Now, she has made a film (her official solo directorial debut) which is stabler and less fancy-free than Baumbach’s screwballs — with an even more miraculous grasp on people.

Saoirse Ronan (who can play no wrong) is Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson, a Catholic high-school senior from Sacramento who is navigating a vicious non-relationship with her mother, a rocky college app process, a messy love life and lower-middle blues. Like her father (Tracy Letts), she’s pretty lonely; the distance she cultivates between herself and her mother and two key best friends (Lucas Hedges, Beanie Feldstein) is the film’s central strain. Ronan and Gerwig conspire to bring out Lady Bird’s flash yet vulnerability through scenes which mix emotions so intricately it hurts to recall them:

(1) Ronan’s/Lady Bird’s innocent, hoarse voice when she tells her maybe-boyfriend (Timothée Chalamet): “We deflowered each other — we have each other’s flowers” — with a delivery that is both deeply funny and deeply melancholic.

(2) The half-New Orleans-jazz rhythm of Lady Bird’s arguments with her mother (Laurie Metcalf), where each woman has a valid point and speaks her mind over the other’s, only concerned about her own solo righteousness — understandable yet tough to hear, because their vengeful back-and-forth rolls off their tongues so chillingly naturally.

Gerwig makes the most relatable American film of the season because her vision is based in daring interiority. A skill mostly de-valued in popular movies today (as seen in most politically-minded middlebrow cinema with very few satisfying returns, from the sanctimonious and talky “Three Billboards” to the irresponsibly hollow spectacle of “Dunkirk”) is soft character shading: Drawing the outlines of people from a place deep inside one’s self, with no concern for how it looks to an outside spectator. The goal (as it is with Charles Burnett, John Cassavetes, Satyajit Ray, Kelly Reichardt, Jean Renoir, et al.) is to continually search for the essence of the people one knows, positing a person’s raw individuality and flawed nature as the end of the artist’s search (which obviously never ends).

Gerwig works with a similar love-of-people: Is this true to my own self, to my own understanding of truth? She proves detail, patience and accuracy are all virtues. She is generous with her actors, boasting (along with the “Florida Project” players — different mode-of-attack, same attitude) this year’s tautest ensemble. Each person has a moment to rise then recede in and out of the shimmering, washed-out background of a collective memory.

Greta Gerwig's 'Lady Bird' is a miracle of people-watching
Greta Gerwig (right) and Saoirse Ronan on the set of Gerwig’s film “Lady Bird.” (Merie Wallace/A24)

Gerwig’s plan is to bundle together the loosely connected shards of Lady Bird’s life and squeeze them into 90 minutes where we are overwhelmed by the level of attention (=love) given a completely de-sensationalized crew of Central Valley Catholics. This ersatz cataloging results in a de-centered narrative, where we are in a lot of places at the same time. Gerwig’s dexterous give-and-take is reflected in her and editor Nick Houy’s sharp sense of timing. There are two stellar long takes which come to mind: Lucas Hedges makes a desperate plea to Saoirse Ronan, and Laurie Metcalf drives away from an airport in a car. The emotional content of both scenes is already huge (one is a boy coming out, the other is a mother snubbing her daughter and slowly regretting it), but they gain tremendously by the Kelly Reichardt-like length of time Gerwig chooses to hold the take, refusing to cut just when we think we’ve understood the scene. This waiting — where we are allowed to stew with Ronan’s/Hedges’ and Metcalf’s mixed-up emotions — goes in the opposite direction of the typical popular independent film, which always feels the annoying need to say something profound and timely every 3 minutes.

One of the most disturbing of the happy-sad “Lady Bird” heroes is the big-lug Father Leviatch played by Stephen McKinley Henderson. In an acting exercise where he challenges his students to cry, he’s (hilariously yet sadly) the first one to succeed. Later, he’s upset when people don’t “understand” his adaptation of the musical “Merrily We Roll Along.” Gerwig’s brilliance is her sinuous, Wellesian long-take where she tracks away from one major plotline (Julie’s silent pain when her dream-teacher will never feel anything for her) and, in the same shot, picks up the devastated Henderson in a seemingly minor plotline. This single camera movement by Gerwig reveals everything about her generosity of heart: In her eyes, Julie’s and Leviatch’s quiet devastation should be given the same amount of attention. You don’t know what events make people feel the way they do. They may be comic to you, but of the utmost inner turmoil to me — how would you know? The next and final time we see Fr. Leviatch is when he meets with Laurie Metcalf. It’s to discuss his depression. “Please don’t tell your daughter about this,” he says with a nervous, embarrassed pain in his eyes.

As the cute, bashful, respectful first crush of Lady Bird, Lucas Hedges under Gerwig’s direction is expansive in a way that he is not in “Three Billboards” or “Maximalism by the Sea.” Pay attention to what he whispers when he runs into the McPherson family at a post-graduation dinner celebration: “I miss you guys.” The line is barely emphasized, but it conveys everything about the melancholic drift of his character. How did his story shape up after his big revelation? We can’t say for sure, but we know it wasn’t an optimistic “Edge of Seventeen” ending where two kids make up. Gerwig is less assuaging. With the Hedges and Henderson characters, Gerwig, who can’t be everywhere at once and knows it, does the next best thing: Suggest a life of resolute sadness in as few gestures and words as possible.

If there’s one person that consistently stands out from the pack, it’s Laurie Metcalf as Lady Bird’s mother Marion. She is taking on an impossible task: Navigating a relationship with a daughter who is so ashamed and disgusted with her family’s class that she refuses to have friends over. Theirs is like the chicken-or-egg of mother-daughter contempt. Each woman has her own reasons, you can’t tell who was to blame for any given situation, but they each keep up a nastiness to each other that is hilarious, cringe-worthy and real. The final airport scene is completely Metcalf’s, the heart of “Lady Bird.” What I will never forget, what will always haunt me, is the manically hopeful grin on Metcalf’s face when she thinks she’ll be back in time to say goodbye to her daughter. She goes through so many emotions, and lands with only one: A profound failure, temporary, but whose memory her daughter will surely never forget. Metcalf is always dry and ungiving and tense, but with a boundless love — one that Lady Bird/Christine will recognize once she’s older, much older. Metcalf is exactly “warm and scary,” as Lucas Hedges says.

“Lady Bird” is a deftly drawn and delicate vision of a woman’s childhood. It is non-judgmental in a completely clear-eyed way. And it has internalized emotion so well that we feel purposely mixed up. We don’t know whether to cringe, chuckle or cry during a scene, so Gerwig suggests we do all three.

“Lady Bird” plays at the Guild in Menlo Park and the Cinemark 20 in Redwood City.

 

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Frances McDormand shines in the flawed ‘Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/20/three-billboards-ebbing-missouri/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/20/three-billboards-ebbing-missouri/#respond Mon, 20 Nov 2017 08:01:29 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1133774 The people I feel closest to in “Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri” are the people who don’t talk. The extras. The supernumerary actors, or “supers.” This diverse crew of background players (black, white, Mexican, cameramen, school moms) often don’t have lines or names. But they’re our way into this intriguing film, Martin McDonagh’s sometimes-annoyingly-2017 update on the […]

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The people I feel closest to in “Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri” are the people who don’t talk.

The extras. The supernumerary actors, or “supers.”

This diverse crew of background players (black, white, Mexican, cameramen, school moms) often don’t have lines or names. But they’re our way into this intriguing film, Martin McDonagh’s sometimes-annoyingly-2017 update on the theme of Little Gal/Guy versus the System. The supers look on in wide-mouthed horror when men are thrown out of windows, beat to a bloody pulp or kicked in the balls by a jaded mom, the town pariah. In a way, we are those nameless supers: gawking (or looking away), mouth agape at the willful nastiness of this small-town film.

In “Three Billboards,” McDonagh gives the classic Jean Renoir motto “everybody has their reasons” an anti-Renoir approach. Instead of Renoir’s soft, flux-like people drawn with pastel hues of patience, McDonagh’s people are talky political abstracts who are either violently one thing or violently another. The “Three Billboards” player is hateful first, pretty loathsome second, human last (very, very last). Whereas Renoir would take us within the French character, McDonagh is wary of American interiority, so he keeps his camera neatly on the outside; with the exception of McDormand, we never feel like we inhabit a world through the characters.

That’s perhaps the biggest flaw of this Icarus film’s high sights. It’s guided by the spirits of two key masters of the American vernacular: photographer Walker Evans and writer Flannery O’Connor. To help, the film brings into the fold a modern master of her own: resolute Frances McDormand, who centers the work as she did “Olive Kitteridge” (2014) and “Fargo” (1996). She plays Mildred Hayes, the mother of a teenager named Angela, who was brutally raped and murdered (burned alive — the body, charred beyond recognition) on a stretch of road, lined with three decrepit billboards, outside the titular town. Seven months on, the town’s chief of police Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) has not come closer to arresting the man responsible. Before Mildred hatches her Big Plan, the billboards resemble an Evans photo: oddball snatches of capitalist ad talk (“of your life!” “worth shopping for”) and wonderfully weird imagery that stands outside of time-space-place (the body of a cherubic 50s-era baby is split in two, like a Cubist painting, by modern graffiti tags).

After Mildred’s Big Plan, “Three Billboards” quickly morphs into a Walker Evans picture gone wrong. The billboards’ content is more fantastical and showy than anything Evans would have cared to touch: three electric-red billboards, on the same road where Angela was found, each more cutting than the last: “RAPED WHILE DYING” — “AND STILL NO ARRESTS?” — “HOW COME, CHIEF WILLOUGHBY?”

O’Connor, too, is a silent witness to the grotesquerie of “Three Billboards.” When Mildred enters the advertising agency to rent out the billboards, the head of the company, Red (Caleb Landry Jones), is seen reading O’Connor’s 1955 short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” McDonagh throws down one hell of a challenge for himself: Conjure up the precision of O’Connor’s world for modern 2017. Cruel people in a cruel world whose fleeting revelations (of a divine nature in O’Connor but never in McDonagh) only accentuate the cruelty. O’Connor would have made a great story out of only one of the various incidents smashed together in “Three Billboards”: Mildred drives a dentist’s drill into his thumb, Officer Dixon (Sam Rockwell) throws Red from his second-story office window and punches out his hapless assistant Pamela, a stupidly corny deer, an even stupider caricature of Millennials (two of the film’s falsest notes), countless counts of arson, American imperialist wrong-doings and suicides. (But the best O’Connor-like details are, of course, the subtlest: a knockout shot of a gentle turtle on the lap of sleeping Momma Dixon, a cigar-store Ma Jarrett played with steely gruffness by Sandy Martin.)

Evans’ strength was his pithiness. O’Connor’s strength was her lack of sentiment. Martin McDonagh’s weakness is his treacle-filled talk. The screenplay and the plot-beats are often unforgivably overworked, arrogant and strained. Certain lines are grooved to score quick, cheap, political points at the expense of an organic scenario and a proper arena for the actors to riff. These annoyingly on-the-nose coincidences just pile up on a second viewing:

(1) Pamela’s needlessly specific mention of a fat little Mexican boy (“on a bike!”)

(2) Penelope, the vapid and chattering Millennial stereotype who can’t tell the difference between polo and polio. It’s a condescending character, always cringe-worthy

(3) The bit about “persons of color torturing!” (“because,” sez Rockwell, “ya can’t say nigger-torturin’ anymore!” — har har, pee see, snicker snicker)

(4) The film’s only flashback, to the last time Mildred saw Angela alive. “I hope I get raped on the way there!” Angela says. “Yeah, well, I hope you get raped on the way, too!” Mildred hollers back.

(5) Cornball symbolism, like a teddy bear on the shore, horses grazing, an upside-down beetle, an endless stream of letters to move the plot artificially forward and that damn deer (K. Austin Collins is on point when he says the deer scene was ready-made for McDormand’s Oscar reel)

(6) Certain moments involving the Sam Rockwell sheriff, who is beautifully acted yet forced into situations that I couldn’t accept (based on what we’ve seen in the first half, can we believe that Willoughby thinks Dixon has any makings of a great detective?)

Frances McDormand shines in the flawed 'Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri'
Left to right: Frances McDormand, actor Peter Dinklage and director/writer Martin McDonagh on the set of “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.” (Photo: Merrick Morton, 20th Century Fox)

Though it’s one of the most sanctimonious and overworked things I’ve seen this year, a great deal of “Three Billboards” works thanks to the actors in the small-town setting. I expected the Ebbing scandal to somehow spiral out of control and become some national phenomenon; it doesn’t. Only one plucky morning-TV reporter is covering it. What’s interesting is seeing how the Ebbing townsfolk react to the Billboard saga: from punishments as petty as tossed milk on Mildred’s car, to toxic threats from a man who whispers in Mildred’s ear: “I didn’t rape your daughter, but I would have liked to.” This town and its folks are small, unkempt, never-changing. Ebbing, Missouri tries to present itself as one thing but can’t conceal its pseudo-“Blue Velvet” rottenness. Ebbing thinks of itself as a town where everyone can speak on the level, where churchgoers are as rosy as the glossy “Welcome to Ebbing, Missouri” sign that looks like it was preserved in Coca-Cola-syrup since the 1950s. In reality, the real Ebbing is in the very first shot of the film: “Ebbi—”, a half-stratched-off, unreadable piece of billboard paper, whose history and memory is constantly forgotten as more people paste their 10-words-or-fewer ads over it.

But not Mildred; Mildred’s going to give the town something worth remembering.

The biggest draw of the film is by far the implosive performance from Frances McDormand. With the relish she gave her character in the four-hour HBO epic “Olive Kitteridge,” she inhabits the tightly-written role of a mother protecting the public afterlife of a daughter who privately hated her while alive. Her brutally unchanging costume is always fresh: blue overalls, tough bandana, burnt-hair ponytail chopped off to make her look like a Toshiro Mifune samurai but with a drained-of-color face that betrays the thickness of her skin. McDormand puts Mildred’s scary immobility to good use: While drilling holes into dentists’ thumbs (obvious), she also pokes holes into Woody Harrelson by scanning relentlessly around his bald head with the deep darkness of her eyes (subtle). Mildred always has the upper hand without ever having to move or stand up. The good, quiet, wordless images by Ben Davis catch the sitting Mildred during powerful moments at a breakfast nook (white harsh morning light, hair in a tired natty tangle) and at the window of a gift shop (profile, drenched in black as the sun sets on a eventful day, pondering in secular loneliness why the town hates her guts).

Even the McDonagh script can’t bring McDormand down. The fatuous anti-Catholic Church monologue, which works under a presumption that it’s uncovering radical truths, is saved by McDormand’s rambling delivery. She’s why I’m utterly convinced that McDonagh’s words have been stewing in this atheist for a damn long time. Sometimes, all it takes is her pure delivery to escape the confines of the script. Among the best fusions of tragicomedy in “Three Billboards”: Mildred crying and slumped up in bed, having a conversation with her two bunny-sandals in a creepy, baby Elmo voice: “We gonna crucify the motherfuckers? Thaaaat’s right—I’m’unna crucify the motherfuckers!” while Carter Burwell’s serious, wintery piano chords play as a fantastic counter.

McDonagh’s handling of other supporting actors also shows a deep interest in character that his obsession with words rarely suggests. Peter Dinklage’s puppy-dog niceness is a highlight: The relish he takes in his scenes with McDormand and his goofball demeanor (“I like cheesy things”) is a strong counterbalance to the constraints of the sophomoric humor (“I have to go to the little boys’ room”). Likewise, Sam Rockwell acts a believably lumbering mess. His key weapon is a big-cat prowl, walking like a semi-drunken John Wayne on his way to beat up Red and Pamela. He always needs to take command of the space around him, but it is never his to command in the first place. Look at the brilliant way he fumbles with a metal chair when accosted by McDormand; it’s gut-busting. Near the end, Rockwell has an amazing tête-à-tête with a gun-barrel — fondling, kissing, leaning it against his forehead — that makes us seriously question his state of mind: “Is he thinking what I think he’s thinking?”

This mistrust of a person’s consciousness is at the infrequent heart of “Three Billboards.” Like O’Connor’s Catholic stories, “Three Billboards” uncovers a world of people who are sickeningly callous or self-involved on the surface but who conceal a frightened, vulnerable underbelly. One’s public image of oneself never matches up with one’s private thoughts: TV, radio and billboards say one thing, but an understanding letter between passive-aggressive friends says another. Maybe that’s why McDonagh rejects Renoirian interiority: He may think it’s dishonest to be anything but hopelessly outside a person, place, subject. Maybe that’s why the turtle is worthy of O’Connor — a moment of respite that is at stark odds to the vile, petty, violent rage of the human heathens in Ebbing.

But why do the heathen rage? And who has the more honest, meatier answer? Does “timely” mean “better”?

“Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri” plays at the Aquarius in Palo Alto and Cinemark Downtown 20 in Redwood City.

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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A scan of J-pop https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/13/me_cv-magazine-3-a-scan-of-j-pop/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/13/me_cv-magazine-3-a-scan-of-j-pop/#respond Tue, 14 Nov 2017 00:57:04 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1120647 I stood next to the Palo Alto Station, waiting in the sweltering heat for the next Marguerite. A man behind me was conversing rather loudly with a woman: “You know, if you’ve never been to Japan, their music is kind of….” He trailed off. I wanted to turn around. Music from Japan is kind of […]

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I stood next to the Palo Alto Station, waiting in the sweltering heat for the next Marguerite. A man behind me was conversing rather loudly with a woman: “You know, if you’ve never been to Japan, their music is kind of….” He trailed off.

I wanted to turn around. Music from Japan is kind of what? Cool? Not great?

If anything is for certain, Japanese music is eclectic. Who’s in? Who’s out? It can be difficult to keep up with the pace at which the art changes.

In an effort to clear the haze, let’s assemble a look at Japan’s current popular artists and “idols” (or singers who dance).

Kyary Pamyu Pamyu: J-pop with the edge of electronica

Her stage name’s a mouthful, but Kyary’s songs are nationally popular and branded as the epitome of the “kawaii” (cute) culture, inspired from movements centered in Harajuku, Tokyo. As her international fan base grows steadily among those who appreciate electronic music merged with elements of “kawaii” and the bizarre, malls never stop blaring her music. The young artist is known for her rather eccentric, abstracted live and recorded performances, with choice images ranging from dancing brains to humanoid pink background dancers. Despite all the colorful outfits and interesting, quirky images found in Kyary’s music videos, she has had a very strict upbringing. Her mother taught her the value of perseverance and work ethic, which would later contribute to success in her music career.

If you’re entranced by the moving pale yellow shooting stars and raindrops in the music video “Yumeno Hajima Ring Ring” (“The beginning of dreams”), you might miss the subtle references to the 23-year old’s life. Behind the weirdnesses of anthropomorphic objects, cute pastel outfits and mismatched shoes lies the central concern of growing up. The “stalker”, a polar bear, is an extended metaphor for her concerned and supportive parent, a figure who is always there in times of happiness, sadness and everything in between, but who must leave once the child reaches adulthood. The idea of a lifetime, leading up to the artist’s graduation ceremony, is represented in traditional uniforms. Although the outfits have a “kawaii”, asymmetrical style, her last outfit definitely resembles a hakama, a traditional piece of Japanese attire usually reserved for formal occasions, graduation ceremonies in particular. Perhaps then, while music fans may enjoy the strangeness of the music videos or the poppy melodies, fans also appreciate the subtext of a more relatable, serious theme. Kyary’s songs are also not just a mixture of themes, but also a conglomeration of different styles and genres—from electronic to pure pop. For Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, music is a platform where she can be herself and embrace weirdness, a place where she can share and exercise her creativity with those who enjoy it.

Babymetal: J-pop with a dose of the heavy stuff

A very recent group that debuted in 2014 on Youtube to international fame, Babymetal is a heavy metal/Jpop group comprised of three young girls, aged 17-18. Su-metal (age 18) does the main vocals and dance, while Moametal (age 17) and Yuimetal (age 17) dance and scream along with their songs. Their song “Gimme chocolate!!”, racking up more than 61 million times, won its group the heavy metal world cup, hosted by UK’s magazine, “Metal Hammer”. Famous YouTube channels reference the band; their internationally successful concerts sell tickets out immediately. Yes, Babymetal has been growing strong for two years with a mainly young fanbase and will continue to do so, both globally and nationally.

Babymetal’s approach is to combine heavy metal, Jpop, and idol culture, utilizing traditional concepts like karate (in “Karate”) and megitsune (female foxes) in a very modern style. It defies the simply “kawaii” stereotypes of idol musical groups through its incorporation of heavy metal, a genre typically associated with strength and non-kawaii characteristic. They have honed an encouraging approach to spreading positive messages on serious social issues, like widespread bullying. (Their tune “Ijime Dame Zettai” translates to “No bullying, ever.”) Despite the fact that most of their lyrics are in Japanese and emphasize Japanese culture, Babymetal retains a loyal fanbase worldwide; this may suggest that a new, surprising mix of ideas that happens to sound pleasing to the ear appeals to the world today.

A pattern amongst such emerging pop artists/groups is their overlap among genres, and merging of new styles which seem to be well-received among the public. We seem to be looking for new trends and unusual deviations from more traditional Jpop styles, but is this the only way emerging artists can succeed—by mixing genres? Looking at Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and Babymetal, Jpop certainly seems to be headed in a direction of blending genres, but is there another path Jpop could take in the future?

SMAP

Let’s take a look at an immensely successful group that actually deviates from the recent trend of Jpop blending: SMAP. This teen-boy-band-unit, who started out as Sports Music Assemble People, have stayed strong for 28 years. SMAP quickly rose to the top of Japanese hit bands and is still currently one of the most, if not the most, famous musical group in Japan. SMAP has become so popular its fans are from all over the world, but unlike Kyary Pamyu Pamyu’s fans who love electronic music and Babymetal’s young heavy metal followers, SMAP’s fan base crosses all genre, gender, age, and nationality lines.

SMAP’s appeal and popularity comes in many forms. Members of SMAP are not just trending singers and dancers. As individuals, they are also known for their multi-talented personalities: hosting regular television programs, acting, learning and studying Korean, and painting.

Unfortunately, SMAP plans to disband on December 31st, 2016. Understandably, this news has shocked numerous fans in Japan, many Asian countries, and around the world. Once this piece of celebrity news got out, reactions from fans and media were so strong that SMAP had at one point decided to continue (before restating their decision to split up). Their popularity and impact even affected Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who expressed relief over SMAP’s temporary decision to honor their fans’ wishes and continue performing. SMAP was also chosen as a cheering supporter for the 2020 Paralympic Games in Tokyo.

SMAP skyrocketed to superstar status with their hit song, “Sekai ni Hitotsu Dake no Hana” (“The Only Flower in the World”), released in 2003. One of the longest music television programs that broadcasts weekly in Japan to date ranked “Sekai ni Hitotsu Dake no Hana” as the #1 most influential Japanese song this September. When news leaked that SMAP was on the verge of splitting up in January and August, Oricon, the Japanese equivalent of “Billboard”, ranked this song as #1. Fans have been desperately purchasing the single, refusing to believe the SMAP disband, others accepting the news and giving the band a final farewell. No doubt SMAP touched many lives; #世界に一つだけの花 (#TheOnlyFlowerintheWorld) is trending, and SMAP fans have successfully made the song a triple million single—it has in fact exceeded three million. SMAP is a large influence in the music industry and yet has somehow managed to remain in Jpop instead of crossing over to other genres with the intention of creating new music. The question is, how?

One answer lies in SMAP’s ability to capture uplifting, profound messages of life in its lyrics. “Sekai ni Hitotsu Dake no Hana” is an internationally recognized song, still played in shopping malls or on radio. It is known for its catchy (but not excessively repetitive) chorus, the distinct soft melody line, and its empowering lyrics. In particular, one line involves English: “number one” and “only one”. The song places a special distinction between the two phrases; the translated lyric is “No need to be number one. Just be yourself, be the ONLY ONE.” “[N]umber one” refers to competition and comparison, but SMAP clearly supports individuality as in the “ONLY ONE”. Furthermore, the flower is an extended analogy for the unique individual. The many flower types, different seeds, and the statement that all flowers are different may refer to the diversity of humans, but each and every one is described as beautiful. This emphasis on the unique individual is reflected in the members themselves: their interests are diverse, and their individual choreographies are uniquely different from one another. The members of SMAP each have their own take of the same dance routine in all performances.

The song “Sekai ni Hitotsu Dake no Hana” celebrates diversity and encourages people to stay proud of who they are, with peace and in unity. It is a message that is especially relevant today, now more than ever.

Hence its musical beauty, coupled by strong, positive, and bold themes that not many musical artists and idols would delve into, has resonated with the public and survived decades along with SMAP. Yet, the popularity of rising artists including Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and Babymetal and their new genres is undeniable. It seems as though Jpop is splitting into multiple roads of new and old genres, but one thing is for certain—if you have hit melodies and meaningful lyrics that truly strike into the hearts of listeners, it will be appreciated regardless of genre—beautiful music is beautiful music after all.

Contact Maimi Higuchi at maimih ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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[ME_CV] Magazine: Dylan concert, live in London https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/13/me_cv-magazine-dylan-concert-live-in-london/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/13/me_cv-magazine-dylan-concert-live-in-london/#respond Tue, 14 Nov 2017 00:56:50 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1127097 The post [ME_CV] Magazine: Dylan concert, live in London appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

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100 films to watch at Stanford https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/11/100-films-to-watch-at-stanford/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/11/100-films-to-watch-at-stanford/#respond Wed, 11 Oct 2017 16:43:08 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1130683 A friend once sent me a picture that said, “Watching one great movie is equivalent to the lessons learned from one entire year of living life.” Movies are the great connector where the spectacle of theater’s human drama merges with the rhythm of dance, crispness of photography and melody of music to create tapestries scrawling […]

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100 films to watch at Stanford
James Cagney in “Blonde Crazy” (Courtesy of Warner Bros. Entertainment).

A friend once sent me a picture that said, “Watching one great movie is equivalent to the lessons learned from one entire year of living life.”

Movies are the great connector where the spectacle of theater’s human drama merges with the rhythm of dance, crispness of photography and melody of music to create tapestries scrawling and complex. They’re beasts that implore thought, can make you laugh or cry, leave you feeling angry, frustrated or hopeless and confront you with humor, lightness or hope. Sometimes all in the same scene.

As it’s plugged, Stanford is a place of growth. And that growth has as much to do with a mind-expanding movie as it does a late-night dorm conversation, a lecture, a new love or a night cruising up or down the 280, windows down, “In the Air Tonight” blasting “Miami Vice”-style. (Specific, isn’t it?)

We have two* great resources for watching movies on campus. One is Kanopy, a streaming service through Stanford which has, along with a slew of documentaries, many classic and contemporary films in the Criterion Collection (“The 400 Blows,” “Tokyo Story,” Charlie Chaplin, etc.). The other is the Media and Microtext Center, with its 40,000 plus movies and TV series. They have basically everything on DVD and Blu-Ray with more on the way. If you don’t have a DVD player or drive, there are DVD and Blu-Ray stations with couches everywhere. The Media & Microtext Center, sweeter than chocolate, is in the basement of Green Library. You can look up the call-number of the movie you want on Searchworks. I still continue to be surprised by how little people know about this amazing resource; some go their four years without knowing they can watch basically anything they want here.

*(Technically three, with the Stanford Theatre on University Avenue. But that goes almost without saying — and you’re probably sick of me Howard-Hawking it all the time).

This M&M obscurity was the genesis of the list that follows. They’re more or less obscure films. I don’t really deal with established popular movies that people tell you to watch over and over again — there will be no Tarantino, “Social Network,” “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Breathless,” “Mulholland Dr.,” or “Casablanca” on this list. Instead, it’s a mix of established classics of the cinematic canon (the “Bicycle Thieves”-“Seven Samurai”-“400 Blows” heavy-hitters) and less well-known works that you’ll only really find in the Stanford library (see all four hours of “Edvard Munch” while you can — you will not regret it).

Much of this is a re-canonization effort — important films only recently appreciated. Kathleen Collins’ “Losing Ground” is one of the first features directed by an African-American woman, and it is a revelation, as is Julie Dash’s restored “Daughters of the Dust.”

At least one is a cheat entry — when I list “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” (which was, up until this summer, David Lynch’s craziest mind-bending masterpiece), I really mean the entire “Twin Peaks” series: the ’90-’91 show, the ’92 film, the 2014 deleted scenes (“The Missing Pieces”) and the 2017 mini-series.

With two notable exceptions, the list stops at around the year 2000. I find that I tend to look with more sobriety at previous years of film. (Just a few choice films from the last decade: “American Hustle,” “Boyhood,” “Certain Women,” “Güeros,” “In Jackson Heights,”  “Inherent Vice,” “To the Wonder” and “World of Tomorrow.”)

All are deeply personal. They’re films that have unabashedly shaped me, helped me think more clearly. But they are also established masterpieces that many critics, writers, movie-lovers, thinkers and intellectuals before me have championed for their vitality. I hope you find these films as helpful, instructive, beautiful, sublime and life-changing as I have. I can only provide what I know at this stage in my life. And I will probably kick myself for excluding films which I will watch at 50 that I wish I had seen at 20. Alas.

A key: “Dir.” = directed by; “st.” = starring; “wr.” = screen-written by; “pr.” = produced by; “m.” = music by; “ZDVD xxxxx” = call number at Media and Microtext Center in Green Library.

100 films to watch at Stanford
Setsuko Hara in Yasujiro Ozu’s “Tokyo Story” (Courtesy of Shochiku).

  1. “Les Vampires” (1916). Dir. Louis Feuillade, France. Thriller/crime serial. 400 min. in ten parts, each between 15 to 59 minutes. ZDVD 28992, 28993 Blu-Ray. Also on Kanopy.
  2. “Sherlock Jr.” (1924). Dir., pr., st., ed. Buster Keaton, USA. Slapstick comedy, 45 min. ZDVD 21880, 24887 Blu-Ray, 1606. Also on Youtube. Or watch it on the essential “Buster Keaton Collection,” a 14-disc boxset/rabbit-hole, with all of Keaton’s comedies: ZDVD 31564 Blu-Ray.
  3. “The Passion of Joan of Arc” (1928). Dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer, st. Maria Falconetti, Denmark/France. Drama, 82 min. ZDVD 816. Also on Kanopy.
  4. “The Man with a Movie Camera” (1929). Dir., wr. Dziga Vertov. Russia/Soviet Union. Documentary/city symphony, 67 min. ZDVD 40743, 34829, 34840 Blu-Ray. Also on Kanopy.
  5. “City Lights” (1931). Dir., wr., st., m. Charlie Chaplin, USA. Comedy/melodrama, 87 min. ZDVD 31852 Blu-Ray, 31853, 6005. Also on Kanopy.
  6. “M” (1931). Dir, co-wr. Fritz Lang, st. Peter Lorre, Germany/Weimar Republic. Crime/thriller, 111 min. ZDVD 23643. Also on Kanopy and YouTube.
  7. “Gold Diggers of 1933” (1933). Dir. Mervyn LeRoy, musical sequences by Busby Berkeley, USA. St. Joan Blondell, Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell, Guy Kibbee, Warren William, Ned Sparks and Ginger Rogers. Comedy/backstage musical, 97 min. ZDVD 11896.
  8. “Make Way for Tomorrow” (1937). Dir. Leo McCarey, st. Victor Moore, Beulah Bondi and Thomas Mitchell, USA. Drama, 91 min. ZDVD 22423, 35983 BLU-RAY.
  9. “Bringing Up Baby” (1938). Dir. Howard Hawks, st. Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, USA. Screwball comedy, 102 min. ZDVD 25493, 9454.
  10. “To Be or Not To Be” (1942). Dir., pr., wr. Ernst Lubitsch, st. Carole Lombard and Jack Benny. USA. Screwball/black comedy, 99 min. ZDVD 31296, 31297 BLU-RAY.
  11. “In This Our Life” (1942). Dir. John Huston, st. Bette Davis and Olivia De Havilland, USA. Melodrama, 97 min., ZDVD 17232.
  12. “The Palm Beach Story” (1942). Dir., wr. Preston Sturges, st. Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea, USA. Screwball comedy, 88 min. ZDVD 34679, 34693 Blu-Ray. If you love this, check out “The Preston Sturges Collection” (ZDVD 14465), which includes “Sullivan’s Travels,” “Christmas in July” and “The Lady Eve.”
  13. “I Walked with a Zombie” (1943). Dir. Jacques Tourneur, pr. Val Lewton, USA. Drama/horror, 66 min. ZDVD 10841. Also appears on “The Val Lewton Collection” (ZDVD 34842), which includes the other horror masterworks produced by Lewton between 1942 and 1946, including “The Leopard Man,” “Curse of the Cat People” and “Bedlam.”
  14. “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp” (1943). Dir., pr., wr. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, st. Deborah Kerr, Roger Livesey and Anton Walbrook. United Kingdom. War/romance/drama, 163 min. ZDVD 29678, 29924 BLU-RAY.
  15. “Meet Me in St. Louis” (1944). Dir. Vincente Minnelli, pr. Arthur Freed, st. Judy Garland, USA. Musical, 113 min. ZDVD 26196, ZDVD 14814.
  16. “The Clock” (1945). Dir. Vincente Minnelli, pr. Arthur Freed, st. Judy Garland and Robert Walker, USA. Drama, 90 min. ZDVD 13708.
  17. “The Best Years of Our Lives” (1946). Dir. William Wyler, USA. St. Dana Andrews, Harold Russell, Frederic March, Myrna Loy, Teresa Wright, Virginia Mayo and Hoagy Carmichael. Drama, 172 min. ZDVD 38827, 38826 BLU-RAY, ZDVD 20400.
  18. “Bicycle Thieves” (1948). Dir., co-wr. Vittorio De Sica, Italy. Drama, 93 min. ZDVD 38213 BLU-RAY, ZDVD 14143. Also on Kanopy.
  19. “Ikiru” (“To Live,” 1952). Dir., co-wr. Akira Kurosawa, st. Takashi Shimura, Japan. Drama, 143 min. ZDVD 38971 DISC 1-2, 38974 BLU-RAY. Also on Kanopy.
  20. “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952). Dir. Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, USA. St. Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, Donald O’Connor, Jean Hagen. Musical, 103 min. ZDVD 29043 BLU-RAY, ZDVD 33472.
  21. “Tokyo Story” (1953). Dir., co-wr. Yasujiro Ozu, st. Setsuko Hara and Kyoko Kagawa, Japan. Drama, 136 minutes. ZDVD 32858, 32025 BLU-RAY, ZDVD 5312. Also on Kanopy.
  22. “Rear Window” (1954). Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, USA. St. James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter, Raymond Burr. Thriller, 112 minutes. ZDVD 37636, 39634 BLU-RAY.
  23. “Sansho the Bailiff” (1954). Dir. Kenji Mizoguchi, st. Kyoko Kagawa, Japan. Drama, 124 minutes. ZDVD 15547, ZDVD 30020 BLU-RAY. Also on Kanopy.
  24. “Voyage in Italy” (1954). Dir., co-wr. Roberto Rossellini, st. Ingrid Bergman, Italy. Drama, 85 minutes. ZDVD 31597, 31925 BLU-RAY. Also on Kanopy.
  25. “Seven Samurai” (1954). Dir. Akira Kurosawa, st. Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura, Japan. Drama/samurai epic, 207 min. ZDVD 11796, 22510. Also on Kanopy.
  26. “La Strada” (1954). Dir., co-wr. Federico Fellini, st. Giulietta Masina, Italy. Drama, 104 minutes. M. Nino Rota. ZDVD 5433, 20054. Also on Kanopy.
  27. “Johnny Guitar” (1954). Dir., pr. Nicholas Ray, st. Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden and Mercedes McCambridge, USA. Western, 110 minutes. ZDVD 28589, 28587 BLU-RAY.
  28. “Night and Fog” (1955). Dir. Alain Resnais, France. Holocaust/documentary, 32 minutes. ZDVD 4855. Also on Kanopy.
  29. “Pather Panchali” (“Song of the Little Road,” 1955). Dir., pr., co-wr. Satyajit Ray, st. Karuna Banerjee, India. M. Ravi Shankar. Melodrama, 125 minutes. ZDVD 37237 BLU-RAY, ZDVD 37236. Also on Kanopy.
  30. “The Night of the Hunter” (1955). Dir. Charles Laughton, wr. James Agee, USA. St. Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters and Lilian Gish. Thriller/horror, 93 minutes. ZDVD 24297, 24398 BLU-RAY.
  31. “The Girl Can’t Help It” (1956). Dir., pr., co-wr. Frank Tashlin, st. Jayne Mansfield, USA. Rock musical/comedy, 99 minutes. ZDVD 13143
  32. “Rio Bravo” (1959). Dir. Howard Hawks, USA. St. John Wayne, Dean Martin, Angie Dickinson, Ricky Nelson, Walter Brennan. Western, 141 minutes. ZDVD 15805, 1561.
  33. “Imitation of Life” (1959). Dir. Douglas Sirk, pr. Ross Hunter, st. Lana Turner and Juanita Moore, USAMelodrama, 125 minutes. ZDVD 18083, 4147.
  34. “Ohayo” (“Good Morning,” 1959). Dir., co-wr. Yasujiro Ozu, Japan. Comedy/drama, 94 minutes. ZDVD 41071 BLU-RAY.  Also on Kanopy.
  35. “Shadows” (1959). Dir., wr. John Cassavetes, st. Lelia Goldoni and Ben Carruthers, USA. Drama, 87 minutes. ZDVD 8365 PT.1,  32433 BLU-RAY DISCS 1-5 (1). Also on Kanopy.
  36. “The 400 Blows” (1959). Dir., wr. François Truffaut, st. Jean-Pierre Léaud, France. Drama/bildungsroman, 99 minutes. ZDVD 32844 BLU-RAY, ZDVD 32845, ZDVD 21968 BLU-RAY, ZDVD 20056. Also on Kanopy.
  37. “Peeping Tom” (1960). Dir., pr. Michael Powell, wr. Leo Marks, st. Karlheinz Böhm and Moira Shearer, United Kingdom. Horror/thriller, 101 min. ZDVD 2038. 
  38. “The Apartment” (1960). Dir., co-wr. Billy Wilder, st. Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine and Fred MacMurray, USA. Comedy-drama, 125 min., ZDVD 16545, 36973 BLU-RAY.
  39. “The Cloud-Capped Star” (1960). Dir., co-wr. Ritwik Ghatak, st. Supriya Choudhury and Anil Chatterjee, India. Melodrama, 132 min., ZDVD 4497.
  40. “The Exiles” (1961). Dir. Kent MacKenzie, USA. Docu-drama, 72 min., ZDVD 21599.
  41. “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962). Dir. John Frankenheimer, wr. George Axelrod, USA. St. Frank Sinatra, Angela Lansbury, Laurence Harvey and Janet Leigh. Thriller, 126 min. ZDVD 38166, 38165 BLU-RAY.
  42. “Cléo from 5 to 7” (1962). Dir., wr. Agnes Varda, st. Corinne Marchand, France. Drama, 90 min. ZDVD 16248 DISCS 1-4 (2). Also on Kanopy.
  43. “La Jetée” (1962). Dir. Chris Marker, France. Experimental drama/photo-story, 32 min. ZDVD 14926, 27682 BLU-RAY. Also on Kanopy.
  44. “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (1962). Dir. John Ford, st. John Wayne and James Stewart, USA. Western, 123 min. ZDVD 19881, 1872.
  45. “El angel exterminador” (1962). Dir. Luis Buñuel, st. Silvia Pinal, Mexico. Surrealist black comedy, 94 min. ZDVD 19375, 40100 BLU-RAY. Also on Kanopy.
  46. “The Birds” (1963). Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, st. Tippi Hedren, USA. Thriller/horror, 120 min. ZDVD 37116 BLU-RAY, 29533 BLU-RAY DISCS 9-15 (10), ZDVD 614.
  47. “Muriel, or The Time of Return” (1963). Dir. Alain Resnais, wr. Jean Cayrol (“Night and Fog”), st. Delphine Seyrig, France. Experimental drama, 116 min. ZDVD 39212, 39217 BLU-RAY.
  48. “The House is Black” (1963). Dir. Forough Farrokhzad, Iran. Documentary short subject, 26 min. ZDVD 10609. Also on YouTube.
  49. “The Nutty Professor” (1963). Dir., co-wr., st. Jerry Lewis, USA. Comedy, 104 min. ZDVD 12773. 
  50. “A Hard Day’s Night” (1964). Dir. Richard Lester, United Kingdom. St. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr; m. The Beatles and George Martin. Comedy/musical, 90 min., ZDVD 33762, 33266 Blu-ray. Also on Kanopy.
  51. “The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg” (1964). Dir. Jacques Demy, st. Catherine Deneuve, m. Michel Legrand, France. Musical, 90 min., ZDVD 33470 DISCS 1-13 (5-6). Also on Kanopy.
  52. “Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins” (1964). Dir. George Stevenson, st. Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke, USA/UK. M. The Sherman Brothers. Musical, 140 min., ZDVD 19662, 9196.
  53. “The Shop on Main Street” (1966). Dir. Jan Kadar and Elmar Klos, st. Ida Kaminska, Czechoslovakia. Holocaust drama, 125 min., ZDVD 2180.
  54. “Au Hasard Balthazar” (1966). Dir. Robert Bresson, st. Anne Wiazemsky, France. Drama, 95 min., ZDVD 19976, ZDVD 10159. Also on Kanopy.
  55. “Daisies” (1966). Dir. Vera Chytilova, Czechoslovakia. Surrealist comedy/satire, 79 min., ZDVD 28104. Also on Kanopy.
  56. “Playtime” (1967). Dir., wr., st. Jacques Tati, France. Comedy, 124 min., ZDVD 34759 DISCS 1-12 (7-8), 34758 Blu-ray DISCS 1-7 (4), 21761 Blu-ray. Also on Kanopy.
  57. “The Young Girls of Rochefort” (1967). Dir., wr. Jacques Demy, m. Michel Legrand, France. St. Catherine Deneuve, Françoise Dorléac, Gene Kelly, Danielle Darrieux, George Chakiris, Michel Piccoli and Jacques Perrin. Musical-comedy, 126 min., ZDVD 33470 DISCS 1-13 (7-8). Also on Kanopy.
  58. “Weekend” (1967). Dir. Jean-Luc Godard, st. Mireille Darc, France. Experimental drama, 104 min., ZDVD 29125, 29219 Blu-ray. Also on Kanopy.
  59. “Petulia” (1968). Dir. Richard Lester, st. Julie Christie and George C. Scott, USA/UK. M. John Barry. Romance/experimental drama, 105 min., ZDVD 12326.
  60. “The Night of the Living Dead” (1968). Dir. George A. Romero, st. Duane Jones, USA. Horror, 96 min., ZDVD 17729, 6370.
  61. “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” (1971). Dir. Robert Altman, st. Julie Christie and Warren Beatty, USA. M. Leonard Cohen. Western, 121 min., ZDVD 39823, ZDVD 39828 Blu-ray.
  62. “The Land of Silence and Darkness” (1971). Dir. Werner Herzog, Germany. Documentary, 85 min., ZDVD 35179 DISCS 1-13, 10361.
  63. “The Heartbreak Kid” (1972). Dir. Elaine May, st. Charles Grodin, Jeannie Berlin and Cybill Shepherd, USA. Romance comedy/black comedy, 106 min., ZDVD 2542. Also on YouTube.
  64. “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974). Dir. John Cassavetes, st. Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk, USA. Drama, 155 min., ZDVD 8365 DISCS 1-8 (4), ZDVD 32433 Blu-ray DISCS 1-5 (3). Also on Kanopy.
  65. “Edvard Munch” (1974). Dir. Peter Watkins, United Kingdom/Norway. Docu-drama, 220 min., in two parts 110 min. each. ZDVD 16186.
  66. “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul” (1974). Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Germany. Melodrama, 93 min., ZDVD 4927, 33852 Blu-ray.
  67. “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” (1974). Dir. Tobe Hooper, USA. Horror, 84 min., ZDVD 12792, ZDVD 179.
  68. “Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” (1975). Dir. Chantal Akerman, st. Delphine Seyrig, France. Experimental drama, 200 min., ZDVD 20893, 41020 Blu-ray.
  69. “Barry Lyndon” (1975). Dir. Stanley Kubrick, st. Ryan O’Neal and Marisa Berenson, United Kingdom/USA. Period drama, 183 min., ZDVD 26188 Blu-ray.
  70. “Welfare” (1975). Dir. Frederick Wiseman, USA. Documentary, 167 min., ZDVD 34323.
  71. “Nashville” (1975). Dir. Robert Altman, st. many folks, USA. Drama, 160 min., ZDVD 31914, 31915 Blu-ray.
  72. “Canoa: A Shameful Memory” (1976). Dir. Felipe Cazals, Mexico. Docu-drama, 115 min., ZDVD 40608, 40609 Blu-ray.
  73. “Carrie” (1976). Dir. Brian De Palma, st. Sissy Spacek, USA. M. Pino Donaggio. Horror, 98 min., ZDVD 55.
  74. “Killer of Sheep” (1978). Dir. Charles Burnett, USA. Drama, 80 min., ZDVD 16033.
  75. “Bush Mama” (1979). Dir. Haile Gerima, st. Barbara O, USA. Drama, 97 min., ZDVD 35512
  76. “Monty Python’s Life of Brian” (1979). Dir. Terry Jones, st. Monty Python, United Kingdom. Comedy/satire, 93 min., ZDVD 6776, 16138.
  77. “Real Life” (1979). Dir., wr., st. Albert Brooks, USA. Comedy/satire, 99 min.,ZDVD 1278.
  78. “My Dinner with Andre” (1981). Dir. Louis Malle; wr., st. Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, USA/France. Drama, 111 min., ZDVD 20449 DISCS 1-2, 41285 Blu-ray. Also on Kanopy.
  79. “White Dog” (1982). Dir. Sam Fuller, st. Kristy McNichol and Paul Winfield, USA. M. Ennio Morricone. Drama, 90 min., ZDVD 18802.
  80. “Losing Ground” (1982). Dir. Kathleen Collins, st. Seret Scott and Duane Jones, USA. Drama, 86 min., ZDVD 38231, ZDVD 38230 Blu-ray.
  81. “El Norte” (1983). Dir. Gregory Nava, USA. Drama, 141 min., ZDVD 20338, 21969 Blu-ray. Also on Kanopy.
  82. “L’Argent” (1983). Dir. Robert Bresson, France. Drama, 84 min., ZDVD 41207, 41210 Blu-ray.
  83. “Vagabond” (1985). Dir. Agnés Varda, st. Sandrine Bonnaire, France. M. Joanna Bruzdowicz and Fred Chinchin. Drama, 105 min.,ZDVD 16248.
  84. “The Color Purple” (1985). Dir. Steven Spielberg, based on the novel by Alice Walker, st. Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glober. USA. Drama, 154 min., ZDVD 28040, 4588.
  85. “My Neighbor Totoro” (1988). Dir., wr. Hayao Miyazaki, Japan. M. Joe Hisaishi. Anime/fantasy. 87 min., ZDVD 16580.
  86. “Grave of the Fireflies” (1988). Dir. Isao Takahata, Japan. Anime/melodrama. M. Michio Mamiya, 88 min., ZDVD 14038, 2906.
  87. “Do the Right Thing” (1989). Dir., wr., co-st. Spike Lee, st. Danny Aiello, USA. Drama. 120 min., ZDVD 12796 DISCS 1-2, 32161 Blu-ray, 32162.
  88. “Close-Up” (1990). Dir. Abbas Kiarostami, Iran. Docufiction, 98 min., ZDVD 23348. Also on Kanopy.
  89. “Daughters of the Dust” (1991). Dir. Julie Dash, USA. St. Cora Lee Day and Barbara O. Drama/experimental drama, 112 min., ZDVD 40981, 40975 Blu-ray.
  90. “Only Yesterday” (1991). Dir. Isao Takahata, Japan. M.Katz Hoshi. Anime/drama, 120 min., ZDVD 39808, 39807 Blu-ray.
  91. “A Brighter Summer Day” (1991). Dir. Edward Yang, Taiwan. Drama, 237 min., ZDVD 30815.
  92. “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me” (1992). Dir. David Lynch, st. Sheryl Lee, USA. M. Angelo Badalementi. Surrealist horror, 134 min., ZDVD 2900, coming soon to Criterion.
  93. “The Long Day Closes” (1992). Dir. Terence Davies, United Kingdom. Drama, 84 min., ZDVD 32419, 32178 Blu-ray.
  94. “Fallen Angels” (1995). Dir. Wong Kar-Wai, st. Leon Lai, Michelle Reis and Takeshi Kaneshiro. Hong Kong. Romance drama, 96 min., ZDVD 20744, 25672 Blu-ray, 12603.
  95. “Babe: Pig in the City” (1998). Dir. George Miller, Australia. With the voice of Elizabeth Daly as “Babe the Pig.” Fantasy, 95 min., ZDVD 37202.
  96. “Dil Se…” (1998). Dir. Mani Ratnam, India. St. Shah Rukh Khan and Manisha Koirala. Bollywood/drama, 165 min., ZDVD 6680.
  97. “In the Mood for Love” (2000). Dir. Wong Kar-Wai, Hong Kong. St. Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung. Romance drama, 98 min., ZDVD 3464, 25675 Blu-ray. Also on Kanopy.
  98. “La Ciénaga” (2001). Dir. Lucrecia Martel, Argentina. Experimental drama, 103 min., ZDVD 34701, 34702 Blu-ray.
  99. “Spirited Away” (2001). Dir. Hayao Miyazaki, Japan. M. Joe Hisaishi. Anime/fantasy/bildungsroman, 125 min., ZDVD 37054 DISCS 1-2, 37055 Blu-ray, 4556 DISCS 1-2.
  100. “Moolaadé” (2004). Dir. Ousmane Sembene, st. Fatoumata Coulibaly, Senegal. Drama, 124 min., ZDVD 16269.

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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“Edvard Munch,” Warner Bros at the Stanford https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/05/throwback-thursday-catch-up-on-film-with-edvard-munch-and-warner-bros-at-the-stanford-theatre/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/05/throwback-thursday-catch-up-on-film-with-edvard-munch-and-warner-bros-at-the-stanford-theatre/#respond Thu, 05 Oct 2017 22:17:21 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1130543 “Edvard Munch” (Peter Watkins, 1974) SFMOMA’s exhibition of Edvard Munch paintings is set to close on Monday, Oct. 9. Check it out — then check out, as a supplement, Peter Watkins’ astonishing 1974 film portrait of the Norwegian proto-Expressionist artist, “Edvard Munch.” This freeform 211 minute saga comes in two parts, both two hours long. It casts amateur Norwegian non-actors in the […]

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“Edvard Munch” (Peter Watkins, 1974)

SFMOMA’s exhibition of Edvard Munch paintings is set to close on Monday, Oct. 9. Check it out — then check out, as a supplement, Peter Watkins’ astonishing 1974 film portrait of the Norwegian proto-Expressionist artist, “Edvard Munch.” This freeform 211 minute saga comes in two parts, both two hours long. It casts amateur Norwegian non-actors in the roles of Munch, his family, his politically radical colleagues fighting bourgeois mores and the mysterious woman who stokes his passion. It tracks Munch’s progress as an artist: his early sketches, his mid-career breakthrough (a painting of his tuberculosis-ridden sister), “The Scream,” the revulsion of his art by the public, his experiments with wood-block prints and his eventual mental and physical collapse.

The film flows like a slack eavesdropping session, with the camera picking up snatches from major moments in Munch’s life and mixing them, back and forth across time, in quick flashbacks. Like the subjects of his paintings, Munch often uncomfortably stares into the camera, never letting us forget what we are seeing are uncanny recreations.

Watkins, who has made some of the most revolutionary works of “docu-fiction” in the past half-century (“The War Game,” “Punishment Park” and “La Commune [Paris 1871]”), succeeds in totally collapsing categories which are typically set up as polar opposites: the artistic and the political, the private and public spheres of the self, fiction and the uncannily real. It is made with radical human emotion and historical introspection. Watkins is brutally critical yet not wholly dismissive of his subject, a distance not quite objective.

Media and Microtext call number: ZDVD 16186

 

Warner Bros. at the Stanford Theatre

"Edvard Munch," Warner Bros at the Stanford
Dorothy Marlone and Humphrey Bogart size each other up in Howard Hawks’ “The Big Sleep” (Courtesy of Warner Bros. Entertainment).

The Warner Bros. festival at the Stanford Theatre concluded in violent style on Monday, Oct. 2 with two classics: the Dede Allen-edited gore and Arthur Penn-directed tonal whiplash of “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) and a hysterical, scene-eating Edward G. Robinson performance in “Two Seconds” (1932). This past summer, the Stanford put together one of their best retrospectives yet: 67 films and 32 cartoons, all from the studio that Andrew Sarris once said “walked mostly on the shady side of the street.” Most of us students were off-campus, so we only really got to experience the tail-end (“My Fair Lady,” “Calamity Jane” and “Bonnie and Clyde”) of that amazing retro. But not to fear: Almost every film that was shown is available to watch at Green Library, in the Media and Microtext Center.

I’ll capsule review a couple of the most interesting films I saw this summer. Meanwhile, here’s a list of some of my favorites:

“Gold Diggers of 1933”  (1933)
Directed by Mervyn LeRoy, Busby Berkeley (musical numbers)
Starring Joan Blondell, Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell, Guy Kibbee, Ned Sparks, Warren William, Aline MacMahon and Ginger Rogers
Dick and Ruby play two young hopefuls struggling to make it on Broadway during the Great Depression. Even falling in love has its hardships, as Powell’s high-brow Eastern family is determined to break them (and the show) up. More complications set in when his brother (William) falls for Keeler’s wise-cracking roommate (Blondell).
Call number: ZDVD 11896

“I am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang” (1932)
Directed by Mervyn LeRoy
Starring Paul Muni
Wrongly convicted James Allen (Muni) is sent to work under the intolerable conditions of a Southern chain gang. Based on a true story.
Call number: ZDVD 9975

“Other Men’s Women” (1931)
Directed by Wild Bill Wellman
Starring Mary Astor, Grant Withers, Joan Blondell and Jimmy Cagney.
Bill and Jack are best friends. They are railroad men. When Bill comes to stay with Jack and his wife (Astor), they fall in love. Jack confronts Bill about his suspicions. Tragedy strikes.
Call number: ZDVD 20461, Disc 1

“Wild Boys of the Road” (1933)
Directed by Wild Bill Wellman
Starring Frankie Darro, Dorothy Wellman and Sterling Holloway
The brutal tale of a group of young kids struggling to find work on the railroad after their parents have lost their jobs during the Great Depression.
Call number: ZDVD 20461, Disc 3

“Footlight Parade” (1933)
Directed by Lloyd Bacon, Busby Berkeley (musical numbers)
Starring Jimmy Cagney, Joan Blondell, Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell, Guy Kibbee and Frank McHugh.
Stage shows and silent pictures are out; sound movies are in. To keep up with the times, crackerjack director Chester Kent (Cagney) struggles against time, romance (Blondell) and a theatre rival’s spy to produce spectacular live “prologues” for movie houses.
Call number: ZDVD 11895

“Picture Snatcher” (1933)
Directed by Lloyd Bacon
Starring Jimmy Cagney. Ex-convict Danny Kean decides to find honest work as a photographer for a tabloid newspaper.
Call numer: ZDVD 18210

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1935)
Directed by Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle
Starring Jimmy Cagney, Dick Powell and Olivia De Havilland
Warners’ bizarre adaptation of Shakespeare’s classic comedy. A mix-up of romances, fairy-ballets and Jimmy Cagney as Puck. Would make a nice double-bill with Demy’s “Donkey Skin.”
Call number: ZDVD 15004

"Edvard Munch," Warner Bros at the Stanford
James Cagney in “Blonde Crazy” (Courtesy of Warner Bros. Entertainment).

“Five Star Final” (1931)
Directed by Mervyn LeRoy
Starring Edward G. Robinson, Aline MacMahon and Boris Karloff
The City Editor (Robinson) of a sleazy tabloid goes against his own journalistic ethics to resurrect a twenty-year-old murder case … with tragic results. One of the most cynical and bleakest newspaper movies in existence.
Call number: ZDVD 24854

“The Flame and the Arrow” (1950)
Directed by Jacques Tourneur.
Starring Burt Lancaster and Virginia Mayo.
Tourneur’s brisk re-imagining of the Robin Hood yarn, transposed to medieval Italy. For my money, it’s better than 1938’s “The Adventures of Robin Hood.”
Call number: ZDVD 16102

“Hard to Handle” (1933)
Directed by Mervyn LeRoy.
Starring Jimmy Cagney.
Small time con artist Lefty Merrill (Cagney) has co-organized a crooked dance marathon and set up his girlfriend to win the prize money. When his partner disappears with the money before the contest is over, he’s forced to come up with a series of wacky scams to help pay it back.
Call number: ZDVD 29484

“The Letter” (1940)
Directed by William Wyler
Starring Bette Davis and Herbert Marshall
The wife of a rubber plantation owner shoots a close family-friend six times in the back. What happened and why?
Call number: ZDVD 8977

“One Way Passage” (1932)
Directed by Tay Garnett
Starring William Powell, Kay Francis, Aline MacMahon and Frank McHugh
A man and a woman fall in love aboard a ship. He has no idea she is dying of cancer; she has no idea he is a convicted murderer en route to San Quentin.
Call number: ZDVD 25356

“The Track of the Cat” (1954)
Directed by Wild Bill Wellman
Starring Robert Mitchum, Teresa Wright, Diana Lynn, Beulah Bondi and Tab Hunter
A family in the snowy Northern Californian mountains starts to split apart as the eldest brother (Mitchum) becomes obsessed with the pursuit of a mysterious killer black panther.
Call number: ZDVD 26554

“Gentleman Jim” (1942)
Directed by Raoul Walsh
Starring Errol Flynn and Alexis Smith
The story of James T. Corbett (Flynn), the bank-clerk turned World Champion who elevated boxing from bare-knuckled brawling to the sport of skill it is today.
Call number: ZDVD 14338

“The Big Sleep” (1946)
Directed by Howard Hawks
Starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.
Private eye Philip Marlowe (Bogart) is called to investigate the most feverish, complex and confusing detective-case in movie history. Also, he falls in love (Bacall). Maybe.
Call number: ZDVD 12862, ZDVD 38888 Blu-ray

“Black Legion” (1937)
Directed by Archie Mayo and Michael Curtiz
Starring Humphrey Bogart
After a Polish co-worker has been given a promotion over disillusioned white worker Frank Taylor (Bogart), Taylor is seduced into joining a secret society of hood-wearing terrorists who wreak havoc on anyone they deem “alien.” The film’s tagline: “Frank Taylor and people like him have a vision for America. It is a vision shaped by terror and fueled by fear, ignorance and hate — a nation of ‘free, white, 100 percent Americans!'”
Call number: ZDVD 17946

"Edvard Munch," Warner Bros at the Stanford
Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty in the 1967 film “Bonnie and Clyde” (Courtesy of Warner Bros. Entertainment).

“The Roaring Twenties” (1939)
Directed by Raoul Walsh
Starring James Cagney, Gladys George and Frank McHugh
The rise and fall of a disillusioned World War I soldier (Cagney) turned bootlegging king of NYC.
Call number: ZDVD 9002

“Strawberry Blonde” (1941)
Directed by Raoul Walsh
Starring James Cagney, Olivia de Havilland and Rita Hayworth
Quick-tempered but likable Biff Grimes (Cagney) falls for the beautiful Virginia Brush (Hayworth), but he’s not the only young man in the neighborhood who is smitten with her.
Call number: ZDVD 20697

“The Breaking Point” (1950)
Directed by Michael Curtiz
Starring John Garfield, Patricia Neal, Juano Hernandez and Phyllis Thaxter
An otherwise moral captain of a charter boat (Garfield) becomes financially strapped and is drawn into illegal activities in order to keep up payments on his boat. Based on the Hemingway novel “To Have and Have Not.” Be warned: this will crush you.
Call number: ZDVD 41307, ZDVD 41308 Blu-ray

“East of Eden” (1955)
Directed by Elia Kazan
Starring James Dean, Julie Harris, Raymond Massey and Jo Van Fleet
The saga of three generations of the Trask and Hamilton families in the early 1900’s in Northern California.
Call number: ZDVD 10254

“My Fair Lady” (1964)
Directed by George Cukor
Starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison
Outside Covent Garden on a rainy evening in 1912, cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle meets linguistic expert Henry Higgins. Higgins bets with his companion, Colonel Pickering, that within six months he could transform Eliza into a proper lady, simply by teaching her proper English. The next morning, face and hands freshly scrubbed, Eliza presents herself on Higgins’ doorstep, ready and willing to be turned into a lady. But who’s turning whom?
Call number: ZDVD 5888

“Bonnie and Clyde” (1967)
Directed by Arthur Penn
Starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway
Dunaway and Betty star in the story of real-life 1930s bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, mixing romance, adventure, glamour, comedy and violence in a way never seen before. They rob banks.
Call number: ZDVD 16601

Other films that I couldn’t see but which I’m sure are worth checking out: “They Won’t Forget” (1937), “They Drive By Night” (1940), “Baby Face” (1933), “Mildred Pierce” (1945), “Key Largo” (1948), “Four Daughters” (1938), “Beyond the Forest” (1949) and “Young at Heart” (1954).

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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At the Stanford: Michael Curtiz’ ‘The Breaking Point’ is a more brutally honest ‘Casablanca’ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/09/20/thebreakingpoint/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/09/20/thebreakingpoint/#respond Wed, 20 Sep 2017 17:37:04 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1130085 You may know Michael Curtiz and Warner Bros. as the minds behind that perennial classic, “Casablanca.” But there’s an even fresher movie — same director, same studio, similar themes and characters — playing tonight at the Stanford Theatre. Do not miss Michael Curtiz’ devastating romance-noir “The Breaking Point,” playing at the Stanford on Sept. 20, at 7:30 p.m. […]

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You may know Michael Curtiz and Warner Bros. as the minds behind that perennial classic, “Casablanca.”

But there’s an even fresher movie — same director, same studio, similar themes and characters — playing tonight at the Stanford Theatre.

Do not miss Michael Curtiz’ devastating romance-noir “The Breaking Point,” playing at the Stanford on Sept. 20, at 7:30 p.m. — one time only.

This 1950 film was the second time Warner Bros. adapted Ernest Hemingway’s deeply pessimistic “To Have and Have Not” (1937), the story of a lower-class boat skipper forced into shady dealings for the money. The first was in 1944, when Howard Hawks made his “To Have and Have Not” with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Made on the heels of the trio’s masterful “The Big Sleep” (1946), it was a wacky, fun adventure yarn that has precious little to do with Hemingway’s work. The Bogart skipper is compelled to work for an unambiguously righteous cause: He has to smuggle resistance fighters out of Vichy France — not deal with shady Cuban criminals as in the Hemingway book. Like “The Big Sleep,” it’s more of a romantic-screwball caper than anything else: The film is charged up by the super-sexual banter between Bogie and Whistlin’ Bacall.

The 1950 adaptation was Warners’ way of getting closer to the spirit of Hemingway’s original. It loses the ramblingly personal touch of Howard Hawks’ film, but it gains in world-weariness and stylistic dexterity. Here, the unjustly obscure star John Garfield (“Body and Soul”) plays the skipper, Harry Morgan. His best shipmate is Wesley Park, a black man and fellow skipper (Juano Hernandez, MVP). Harry is not a lone wolf like Bogart; he has a wife (heartbreaking Phyllis Thaxter, co-MVP) and two daughters he needs to feed. Most of the film’s first half gains its surreal pull by the exacting accuracy, time and respect it gives to scenes of a tired Harry coming home after a long-day’s boating to his quietly unhappy wife. There are moral quandaries raised when Harry starts to fall for a sultry-voiced, alluring blonde (Patricia Neal). When Thaxter learns about the affair, her character dyes her hair blonde. On paper, the transformation reads like hokum. In 35mm in the Stanford, it swims in an intensely profound sorrow. She looks at her newly blonde self in a mirror like a character in a Douglas Sirk melodrama, and it just about breaks one’s heart to see the desperation so achingly conveyed by Thaxter’s eyes.

At parts taut robbery caper, film noir, domestic family drama, tearjerker and social-conscience picture (Afro-Puerto Rican actor Juano Hernandez [“Intruder in the Dust,” “Stars in My Crown”] shifts from Black presence to absence in two fast, shocking shots that snatch your breath and leave you muttering “Oh my God“), “The Breaking Point” is perhaps the best display of journeyman director Mike Curtiz and his adroit juggling of mature material. He directed so many famous films that appeared in the Stanford’s summer-long Warners festival, including “Yankee Doodle Dandy” (a.k.a., “The Best of James Cagney”), “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (starchy, languid), “Mildred Pierce” (bonkers) and the most famous of them all: “Casablanca.”

Yet the nostalgic wartime wistfulness of “Casablanca” pales in comparison to the depths Curtiz and company plumb in “The Breaking Point.” Like “Casablanca,” a romantic loner with a black buddy is forced to make a decision that may irreparably affect him, his friend and his sweetie(s). But in “The Breaking Point,” the hero exists in a weirder liminal space of flighty hopes and hard-angled truths. It’s a fantasy that hems close to the edges of an uncomfortable postwar American reality: A marriage slowly unwinds, people are tempted and fail to resist, the African-American spirit is snuffed out violently, the next Black generation is left out in the open, ignored. There are lines and performances in this film which will haunt you, shake you, never leave you: Phyllis Thaxter as the desperate woman pleading with husband John Garfield in a knockout long-take (“How will I sleep nights? You know I can’t sleep when you’re gone. I don’t sleep. Don’t leave me all alone”) should be seen by as many people as possible.

It isn’t as well known as Michael Curtiz’s other films — partly to do with the fact that Warner Bros. failed to promote the film following accusations that its leftist star John Garfield was affiliated with the Communist Party. (In highly-publicized testimony, Garfield refused to “name names” and denounced any Communist ties, but the damage was done: He was blacklisted from working in Hollywood and would die of heart failure only two years later in 1952, at the age of 39.) It has fallen by the wayside — unfairly — but a recent restoration and home-video release by the Criterion Collection, as well as its prominence in the Stanford’s Warner Bros. festival curated by David Thomson, brings this emotional masterpiece back for our times.

“The Breaking Point” runs 97 minutes. The Friz Freleng short “Dog Pounded” (1954), starring Tweety Bird and Sylvester the Cat, plays before the main feature. (Two master craftsmen in one night!)

“The Breaking Point” is shot by Ted McCord (“The Sound of Music”) and also stars Wallace Ford, Victor Sen Yung and Juano Hernandez’ own son Juan — who is the center of what may be the most devastating final shot of any Hollywood studio picture I’ve ever seen.

 

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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This weekend at the Stanford: ‘My Fair Lady,’ ‘East of Eden’ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/09/18/my-fair-lady-east-of-eden/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/09/18/my-fair-lady-east-of-eden/#respond Tue, 19 Sep 2017 04:08:13 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1130073 The Stanford Theatre’s summer-long festival on the films from Warner Bros Studios is coming to a close. It’s beginning to end with great style: “My Fair Lady” (1964) plays Saturday, Sept. 23 to Monday, Sept. 25 at 7:30 p.m, with a 3:00 p.m. matinee on Saturday and Sunday. Jack Warner, the long-time studio head of Warner Bros., […]

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The Stanford Theatre’s summer-long festival on the films from Warner Bros Studios is coming to a close. It’s beginning to end with great style: “My Fair Lady” (1964) plays Saturday, Sept. 23 to Monday, Sept. 25 at 7:30 p.m, with a 3:00 p.m. matinee on Saturday and Sunday.

Jack Warner, the long-time studio head of Warner Bros., personally guided this film adaptation of the hit 1956 Broadway musical, itself based on the 1913 play “Pygmalion” by George Bernard Shaw. Cockney flower-girl Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn) is taken under the wing of the pretentious and misogynist English linguistics professor, Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison in an Oscar-winning performance). Higgins bets a colleague that he can transform her into a fine English lady — but overrates his own English-club-coolness and slowly falls in love with his “creation.”

Harrison reprised his Broadway role for the film, but there was controversy with the decision to replace Julie Andrews (who originated the role of Eliza) with Hepburn. Warner reasoned that Andrews was too much of an unknown at the time, so he went with the established Hepburn. Andrews then famously accepted Walt Disney’s offer to star in “Mary Poppins.” Lots of people like to point out that Hepburn doesn’t sing her own songs while Andrews did, and this won the latter the Oscar for Best Actress that year. The story is somewhat true: Hepburn was dubbed over by Marni Nixon, who also did Natalie Wood’s singing voice in “West Side Story” (1961) and countless other voice-overs.

But this actually adds much more to the film. Eliza Doolittle is a completely constructed entity: Nixon’s singing voice, Cecil Beaton’s fabulous costumes, George Cukor’s empathetic direction, Andrews’ Cockney vocal twists, which Nixon picks up — all juggled by Hepburn. The musical’s driving tensions are between the artificial and the organic. How do we determine authenticity? And to whom does authorship of the self belong? It’s a work with contradictory messages: Eliza is free and not free of patriarchal influence in the maddeningly ambiguous final shot. It represents the best of what Studio Hollywood films could be and do.

And there are beautiful moments that could fill a whole book: Hepburn sashaying to “I Could Have Danced All Night,” Eliza’s return to her lower-class stomping grounds; a satiric scene at the races where lords and ladies glide in jerky, starchy motions and all of Rex Harrison’s slyly-knowing numbers — especially “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.” What joy there is in seeing Prof. Higgins go back and forth, his worldview shaken by a woman, and him unable to circle around it with the squares he’s used to. There’s a disturbing under-belly to this ostensibly cheery musical. I think back to each of Higgins’ hurtful condescensions-masked- as-good- ol’-chap humor or Eliza yeowling as she is forced into a tub of sinister steam (you don’t see the water). Here, Cukor and company subtly reveal the limits of enlightened English civilization — which Eliza Doolittle has been trying to lick for more than 50 years.

The film runs 170 minutes, with intermission. The music and lyrics by the team of Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner, who worked on MGM’s and Vincente Minnelli’s “Gigi” (1958) — another musical with similarly unresolved tensions involving the heroine.

This weekend at the Stanford: 'My Fair Lady,' 'East of Eden'
Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty in “Bonnie and Clyde.” Photo: Warner Bros/1967.

Some of the highlights of the final two weeks of the Stanford’s Warner Bros. festival include:

“East of Eden.” The 1955 adaptation of the John Steinbeck novel by Elia Kazan (“On the Waterfront,” “A Face in the Crowd”), starring James Dean as the reckless Cal Trask — his first film role. (It would be the only film of his Dean would be alive to see released — by October of that year, he would be dead from injuries sustained in a car crash.) The cast includes Julie Harris, Raymond Massey and Jo Van Fleet in an Oscar-winning performance as the vengeful matriarch Cathy Ames. In CinemaScope. Plays Thursday and Friday, Sept. 21-22 at 7:30 p.m. On a double-bill with King Vidor’s Ayn Rand film “The Fountainhead” (1949), starring Gary Cooper.

“Calamity Jane.” The gay and fancy-free Western musical starring Doris Day as the titular raucous cow-pard, who may be in “Secret Love” with Wild Bill Hickok (Howard Keel). “Annie Get Your Gun” redux — or “Cat Ballou” without any camp quotation-marks. Plays Thursday and Friday, Sept. 28-29 at 7:30 p.m. On a double-bill with Gordon Douglas’ tender, aching “Young at Heart,” starring Day and Frank Sinatra in a musical remake of “Four Daughters” (1938), which plays Tuesday and Wednesday, Sept. 19-20.

“Bonnie and Clyde.” Arthur Penn’s chic, unstable scan of ’60s America — as seen through the eyes of the ’30s robber-couple Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) and Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) and their gang. Along with the Mike Nichols films “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “The Graduate,” its intense violence is said to have ushered in the New Hollywood (~1967-1982), giving rise to the cinema-school pack of George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, John Milius and more. With a cast that includes Gene Hackman, Michael J. Pollard, Estelle Parsons as the Oscar-winning shrieker Blanche — and a scene-stealing Gene Wilder (“Willy Wonka,” “The Producers”) in his first film role.

 

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Pop thrills: Edgar Wright’s ‘Baby Driver’ is a smart, sexy musical for the age of Spotify https://stanforddaily.com/2017/06/28/babydriver/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/06/28/babydriver/#respond Wed, 28 Jun 2017 08:00:32 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1129261 I’m digging the recent resurrection of the film musical for postmodern times. Whit Stillman’s “Damsels in Distress” (2012) ended with a ludicrous dance combo across Stanford-like fountains of a preppy university, where sorority sisters and their thick-skulled Roman frat bros joined forces to spark the latest dance craze. (Do the Sambola!) Damien Chazelle’s “La La […]

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I’m digging the recent resurrection of the film musical for postmodern times. Whit Stillman’s “Damsels in Distress” (2012) ended with a ludicrous dance combo across Stanford-like fountains of a preppy university, where sorority sisters and their thick-skulled Roman frat bros joined forces to spark the latest dance craze. (Do the Sambola!) Damien Chazelle’s “La La Land” showed how our minds are slowly degraded by mutt modern culture: whitewashing, the forgotten and eroded history of a city, an omnipresent fear of failure, money values trumping aesthetic and moral ones. These directors bring the musical back in a cheery, perverse manner: not as they once were, but as they can never be, and probably never were. Chazelle’s view is incredibly cynical; Stillman’s, more buoyant and chipper.

And what of Edgar Wright’s view? For him, Pop aesthetics are all we have; they will rule the day.

His “Baby Driver” is the latest entry in this Perverse 2010s Musical canon. This self-described “car chase musical” is full of surprises from minute one. It is choppy, unpredictable, bloody crazed. The kinetics of his previous comedies (“Shaun of the Dead,” “Hot Fuzz,” “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World”) haven’t quite prepared us for this sophisticated update on Jacques Demy’s “Lola” and the existential-road-movie. Rather than musing profoundly (“Two-Lane Blacktop”) or pining tragically (“Lola”), Wright’s mood is pretty optimistic—again, that modern perversity. The pop music of his childhood fills the air of “Baby Driver.” Wright has replaced the song-and-dance of a typical musical with sexy car chases and tender moments of lovers jamming out to T. Rex and Barry White through their Apple headphones. It’s a sharply felt movie that knows we live in the glorious (?) age of the Walking Musical. It explores how it feels to be stuck between two modes of living: lonely silence and bursts of emotional energy.

As in Wright’s best work, the film starts at Point A and will spend a half-hour before it lands at B . The opening car-chase, an indulgent interlude that works like an opening musical number, stems from the rich tradition of “Bullitt” and “The French Connection.” Constructively indulgent, it’s the type of spectacle you’d separate and watch on its own in hypnotic YouTube visits. There’s something sleekly erotic about it: Chiseled auto-bodies, the squeals of tires on hot pavement, the crew of saucy mixed-race criminals (Jon Hamm, Eiza González, peak Jamie Foxx) making their getaway.

Pop thrills: Edgar Wright's 'Baby Driver' is a smart, sexy musical for the age of Spotify
(l to r) Baby (Ansel Elgort), Bats (Jamie Foxx), Darling (Eiza González) and Buddy (Jon Hamm) in Edgar Wright’s “Baby Driver.” (Photo: Wilson Webb, TriStar Pictures)

At the wheel of these absurdly mint cars is Baby, the titular baby face, played by magnetic 23-year-old Ansel Elgort. Baby is a getaway driver in the vein of cinema’s Ryan Drivers (O’Neal in Walter Hill’s “The Driver” of 1978; Gosling in Refn’s “Drive” of 2011). But unlike his icey-distant cousins, Elgort’s Baby moves and mumbles with an infectious, warm, cute petulance. His edges seem to blur into the world he barely engages—rather than cleave himself from it, at sharp right-angles, in the mannered Ryan tradition. Elgort’s natural, uninflected stare (it’s all in the eyes) arouses the ire of his fellow bank robbers Foxx and Hamm. Elgort rejects their approach—hard-edged, cocked-eyebrow menace and scary facial hair—and, by being his own Millennial self, forges his own path: out of the getaway-driver game, and into the arms of a Shelly Johnson-like waitress (Lily James). Together, James’s and Elgort’s dreamy smiles are sketches of people who want to live life to its lovely fullest, but are too stupid to realize that such dreams are lies and myths today.

And yet—the music never stops in “Baby Driver.” It’s all anyone seems to be able to talk about. Baby and a postal worker both manage to bond over their love of Dolly Parton. What sets Jamie Foxx into fits of rage isn’t the success of a job, but the fact that this Millennial Brat won’t turn off his iPod for 5 minutes. And—even more so—that Baby is hella good at doing his job, while completely plugged in. The music has honed his skills. It has ironically connected him to the world around him and distanced him ever further. Maybe a connection is yet possible? But with whom? Lily James? And where? In the mind? In the la la land of the grey screen?

Wright understands why we need musicals. His “Baby Driver” uses pop music as a quasi-escapist release from a society that frowns on escapism. Fairly quickly, a state of disreality takes over the film. Its logic permits gun fights synced to the beats of The Champs’ absurd “Tequila,” with the cheeky brass toots underlining shots of mowed-down bad guys. Baby even restarts a song in the middle of a propulsive car-chase, because his movements weren’t synchronized to the music. To this barely-formed aesthete, the rhythm comes before everything else.

“Baby Driver” continues Edgar Wright’s love of smart surface. It’s rare that such a surface-oriented film feels so smashingly satisfying and intellectual. There’s barely time to stop and dwell on the images, which flick by with a zippy yet clear sense. Similar surface artists, like Demy and Vincente Minnelli, traffic in the same kinds of disparate emotions: an overload of surreal joy with shades of manic melancholia. They all see dancing and walking as inseperable—two modes of the same inexpressible emotions, ones that the cinema can best capture. In that vein, the best moment is when Ansel Elgort kicks a sheet of newspaper into the air to the beat of Commodores’s “Easy.” The move morphs into a dance figure, not fully formed, and is soon forgotten amid the shot-shot-shots. Here, Elgort and Wright discover the bridge between the all-dancing ideal of a movie musical and the real world. We must dance, it is natural, and, with a little help from our Spotify, we shall dance.

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’: Reflections on a Beatles opus, 50 years on https://stanforddaily.com/2017/06/06/sgtpepper50/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/06/06/sgtpepper50/#respond Tue, 06 Jun 2017 23:31:22 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1128922 This month, we celebrate 50 years since “Sgt. Pepper” taught the world to listen. As the years ran on, the “foreign” modes of this thirty-five-minute-long album (Hinduist philosophy, ‘20s music-hall, hippie stoner culture) became familiar, lodged into a generation’s memory bank. But can we separate the legacy from the musical text? What else is there to glean in “Pepper” in 2017, beyond […]

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This month, we celebrate 50 years since “Sgt. Pepper” taught the world to listen. As the years ran on, the “foreign” modes of this thirty-five-minute-long album (Hinduist philosophy, ‘20s music-hall, hippie stoner culture) became familiar, lodged into a generation’s memory bank. But can we separate the legacy from the musical text? What else is there to glean in “Pepper” in 2017, beyond all the hosannas?

We must clear away the overpraise and the underpraise, the cobwebs of myths and the underselling of extraordinariness. There is “Sgt. Pepper’s” false status as the first long-playing (LP) work to be approached by the artist as a ‘concept album.’ (“Dust Bowl Ballads,” “In the Wee Small Hours,” “Freak Out!”, “Pet Sounds,” etc. would contest that.) There is Rolling Stone, the old white male rocker’s nostalgia pill in tabloid format, declaring “Pepper” the greatest album ever made. The release date certainly doesn’t help. June 1, 1967 — is there a better date for a work of art to come out and be asked to define an epoch, the Summer of Love? Strip away all the praise, and what we’re left with is but one square on the schizoid quilt of the 1960s pop scene — a lovely time to imagine yourself in, one based on a unity-in-cultural-separateness that is all but dead today.

On “Pepper,” the guise of a Technicolor band gave the Beatles an image on which to build a mini-world. Even though the Sgt. Pepper band was nothing more than a cute McCartney gimmick he conjured up on a plane-ride, and even though the Beatles were beginning to think as four separate artists in late 1966/early 1967, “Sgt. Pepper” still has that distinct Beatles sound—three-part harmonies, shockingly deep simple-lyrics, a bass fatness inspired by the Black artistry at Motown and Stax. At times, it sounds like “Sgt. Pepper” was composed on a 19th-century Wurlitzer organ touched up by a mom-and-pop Guitar Center. It’s an agile contraption, with too many settings to count — instruments culled from decaying British dance halls, Motown’s Detroit studio, an Indian music school, MGM’s movie orchestra and maybe a guitar or two from the early Cavern Club days. The interest in sonic experimentation was whetted by the Beatles’ foray into tape looping (“Tomorrow Never Knows”, off 1966’s “Revolver”); but just a year later, each Beatle was wondering, Can I even achieve what *I* want with the four other lads? The guise of the Lonely Hearts Club Band provided a tentative answer of “for now, maybe.”

Where are they, even? A hippy harpsichordist’s practice room? I’ll bet they bought their bassoons and clarinets at Monsieur Dame’s megawhite music shop, from the Jacques Demy musical “The Young Girls of Rochefort” (released three months before “Sgt. Pepper”). I’ve never figured out what the hell The Lonely Hearts Club Band wants. Love, I guess — but I mean musically, artistically. I suppose they’re some sort of punk Edwardian brass group — you know, with the usual timpani-guitar-trombone section. (Add in some funky bass riffs and incredibly virtuosic Ringo drumming; what fury compelled him to play the way he did on “Rain,” “A Day in the Life,” “Good Morning Good Morning,” “Strawberry Fields Forever”?) If you subscribe to the theory that the Lonely Hearts Club Band is the unifying life-force of the album, then you must love how wonderfully diverse they are: interests in vaudeville, raga rock, circus music, Schubert and a Kinks-y (proto-“Village Green”) love of all things English.

Oh yes—and of course, the Beach Boys. The Beatles and producer George Martin had been blown away by “Pet Sounds,” Brian Wilson’s 1966 magnum opus, a similar Rube Goldberg Music Machine made in California. But there was a key difference. Wilson was one; the Beatles were four, with personalities and philosophies that often clashed. As a mostly solo auteur, Wilson’s “Pet Sounds” pushed his love of clouds of angelic sound to the musical breaking-point. Each “Pet Sounds” instrument is basically unrecognizable, because they’re each working towards a specific harmonizing goal. As a noble naïf, sunny Angelino, and a quiet and spiritual man, Wilson wanted to ritualize the private pleasures of romantic love, to make it cover every square-inch of modern life. The Beatles on “Sgt Pepper’s,” on the other hand, were more drawn to dispersiveness, empty spaces, sharp right-turns at every corner that proclaimed Newness and the uniqueness of each instrument.

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Hunting for Connections, Meanings, and Conclusions amongst the “Pepper” songs is a Sisyphean task. At this point in early 1967, the Beatles realized that their artistic interests were beginning to bifurcate — and they embraced that natural separation. Lennon and McCartney each gave five or six songs to fit the size of an LP (George Harrison, one or two; Starr, one; with countless suggestions from both). Beyond this, though, the songs shouldn’t be collectively considered “a statement about x, y, z.” The magic lays in the sounds floating atop the surface, as these disparate songs are asked to share space with one other. Starting with “Sgt. Pepper,” the Beatles wanted each finished LP to be a glorious patchwork, one which nevertheless felt finite and calculated when it hit store shelves. Since “Sgt. Pepper” is still recognizably “psychedelic,” it isn’t quite to the radical unity-in-separateness of their White Album a year later, which defies all conventional categories of musical genre. But “Pepper” is getting there.

The setlist was also pretty hazy. The idea of having a single concept drive the album was Paul McCartney’s, who wanted an LP that explored the Beatles’ boyhoods growing up in Liverpool. But of all the songs composed during the “Pepper” sessions, only two (and maybe a third) followed that concept, and both of them (John’s “Strawberry Fields Forever” and Paul’s “Penny Lane”) were released as a double-A-side single, not the LP proper. (The third, George Harrison’s atonal and underloved “Only a Northern Song,” is like a mockery of the project, with its jarring atonal horn blasts, meta lyrics and disquieting aloofness in Harrison’s delivery; it was too gruff and strange for “Pepper,” so it ended up being released in 1969 on the “Yellow Submarine” soundtrack.) By 1967, McCartney had become the group’s de facto leader, writing the majority of the songs on any given LP and shaping the thematic structure. But despite Paul’s desire for a (Paul-approved) Beatles front, the post-’67 Beatles records resisted a uniform sound.

From “Sgt. Pepper’s” onward, the band’s diversities were more on display than their similarities. No tone is settled on for long, fluctuating dramatically not just from song-to-song, but within songs. “A Day in the Life” is the most obvious example, but how about a song about relationship abuse like “Getting Better”? It’s shocking how upfront the male narrator is: “I used to be cruel to my woman/I beat her and kept her apart/from the things that she loved.” (This is a very Lennon-specific addition to a song that otherwise screams Paul’s hub-dub-dub cheeriness; just as acidic and Billy Wilder-like are John’s and George’s harmonies: “It can’t get no worse!”) Sonically, it plods along in a pretty stable soundscape; but those disturbing lyrics (along with a simultaneous tambura drone from George Harrison) upsets the balance. The return back to the Western pop of the chorus (cute, slickly sick, campy) is like the happy ending of an MGM melodrama of the 1950s: Both are blazingly pat, a consciously failed attempt to forget an uncorked past, but still seductive enough to ensure a comfortable fade-out for the listener.

Weaving in and out of “Sgt. Pepper” are two core moods: cheery British pluckiness and barely concealed melancholy; as the years pass, the melancholy slowly creeps over. And it’s everywhere.

It’s in “Within You Without You,” where, at the song’s end, laughing Western snobs mock Harrison’s attempt to merge two different spheres of culture. Instead of admiration for the effort, there is disdain, hostility —“Why dilute one at the expense of the other?,” or “Why bring that foreign gobbledegook to the table?” seem to be the two knee-jerk responses Harrison feared, and that I fear today.

It’s in “With a Little Help from My Friends,” where Billy Shears (Ringo Starr) sings with a soul-crushed flatness. “I need somebody to love”, he says with a glum ‘optimism’; he must repeat it over and again, pop-hook-style, because he holds on to the belief that it will maybe come true. The same year, Grace Slick sang a similar phrase with Jefferson Airplane on “Surrealistic Pillow”; in her case, it was a question (“Don’tcha want somebody to love?”) and a warning (“You’d better find somebody to love”). Hearing her confident belt, you were damn sure Slick was firm and upright. She knew that you knew that she knew the answer. But what does Billy Shears know? An overburdened lounge-singer type, Billy Shears is more insecure than Slick. Except, of course, when he’s with his squad. Even then, those friendships cannot erase the individual lack of confidence he deep down inside feels.

It’s in “Good Morning Good Morning,” where John Lennon shows us the absurdity and arbitrariness of living. In the opening moments, a man’s been killed, the doctor calls the wife to tell her the awful news, then the doc and team shrug it off: “What a day, how’s yer boy been?” What?! Here and in “A Day in the Life,” Lennon is sick of the slump caused by modern monotony, the wake-up-watch-TV-eat-sleep routine. A year ago, in 1966’s “I’m Only Sleeping,” sleep was salvation. In 1967, it is a slog. On “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” the other big Lennon winner on “Pepper,” escapism to a La La Land of dreams and wonderment is only temporary. Eventually, Lennon crashes down to earth. The comedown is hard.

But perhaps the place where Melancholy and Melodrama find their greatest home on “Pepper” is “She’s Leaving Home,” which is so dizzingly devastating and traumatizing the more you listen to it. Here, a McCartney “Pepper” song is at the peak ambitiousness of Lennon’s “Day in the Life” or Harrison’s “Within You Without You.” It is actually less interested in the runaway young woman (unknowable, described solely in a series of crisp actions) and more invested in the crusty, old mother and father! Were they written today, the parents’ remarks (“We gave her everything money could buy,” “Never a thought for ourselves,” “We struggled hard all our lives to get by”) would be delivered with a snide, ironic, superior air (“Let’s laugh at how entitled and un-woke they are, and at the fact that they’ll never learn.”) But McCartney’s benefit-of-the-doubt impulse gives the parents an awakening, a moment of epiphany for privileged folk who have never had to question their interiority until now. They slowly come to — not senses, but a sense. Still trying to find themselves. Still un-formed. Inching in some right direction. Comic-book caricatures given an individuality. It’s a glory to behold. Serious irony. An ultimate balancing act of empathy.

*

'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band': Reflections on a Beatles opus, 50 years on
Courtesy of Universal Music Group.

“Pepper” sings to us today, but how could “A Day in the Life” (the most ambitious of the “Pepper” tracks) have predicted a period 50 years beyond it, of which it had no knowledge? The spacey, empty vat of sound — interrupted by networks of busyness and gorgeous cacophony (an infrequent drum fill here, an atonal orchestra there) — a sensory overload all at once because of the derelict bits of important, some pertinent, most not. The world in Lennon’s epic and today is just a slapdash of Information, where people can choose what to tune in or out, arbitrarily declare Authenticity wherever it suits them. “A Day in the Life” is a dirge to unity. It jams many sections together. Together, they sound interesting, yes, but they are never more than the sum of their ersatz parts. Such is the point of most of the famous Beatle combinations (cf., “I’ve Got a Feeling,” the Abbey Road Medley), but they were never so dramatically effective as in “A Day in the Life.”

As one of the last true collaborations by John and Paul (too many irreconcilable differences on 1968’s “The Beatles” and 1969’s “Abbey Road”), “A Day in the Life” is probably the Beatles’ best synthesis of the ordinary and the extraordinary, the natural and the supernatural, the secular and the spiritual. And, tellingly, tragically, the synthesis nears a feeling of completion without ever getting there.

It is built upon the moments in our lives that go un-narrated. Reading the newspaper. Watching a movie. Catching the bus.

Some of the events can maddeningly blur into one another without a fuss: Our hero blazes twice, in illusory symphonies of nice white noise.

Other events are once-in-a-lifetime: The movie people all turn away from is Richard Lester’s 1967 anti-“anti-war-film” film “How I Won the War.” (Did you follow?) Lester’s angry and alienating masterwork is one of the purest Brechtian epics the Western cinema has ever produced. John Lennon himself “starred” in it, in a supporting role that brilliantly demolished his image as a guru pop-icon of Truth. He was just one of the scurrying ants, a sick victim of sanitized “War is Heroic” imagery. But rather than be subjected to this unpleasant, non-entertaining, eye-opening experience, the crowd prefers to look away. It’s never clear what will stand the test of time, and what will fade away, until the dust of the present moment clears away.

That’s the horrid truth about the daily. In “A Day in the Life,” something extraordinary like “How I Won the War” is just one station in an ambling, humdrum day. In a present moment, solid things are treated as ephemeral smoke.

We knew the state-of-matter of “Sgt. Pepper” when it came out in 1967. In 2017, we’re more sure.

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Q&A: Daveed Diggs muses on fame, the accessibility of theater https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/26/daveed-diggs-2-2/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/26/daveed-diggs-2-2/#respond Fri, 26 May 2017 08:00:07 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1128055 On Wednesday evening, Tony- and Grammy-Award winning actor Daveed Diggs — best known for his roles as Thomas Jefferson and Marquis de Lafayette in the national musical phenomenon “Hamilton” — spoke to an excited, fan-filled crowd at Dinkelspiel Auditorium. Currently stretching his legs in television, including parts in “Black-ish” and “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” Diggs is […]

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On Wednesday evening, Tony- and Grammy-Award winning actor Daveed Diggs — best known for his roles as Thomas Jefferson and Marquis de Lafayette in the national musical phenomenon “Hamilton” — spoke to an excited, fan-filled crowd at Dinkelspiel Auditorium. Currently stretching his legs in television, including parts in “Black-ish” and “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” Diggs is producing the ABC pilot “The Mayor” as well as starring in the TNT pilot “Snowpiercer.” The Oakland native is back in the Bay Area for a month. The Stanford Daily had a chance to talk with Diggs about his experiences working in theater, keeping the arts accessible and perceptions of fame.

The Stanford Daily (TSD): What was your experience of acting and performance in college, whether that time shaped you in any way — what kind of lessons did you learn?

Daveed Diggs (DD): Yeah, I mean, it’s funny. I took a lot of classes in college and learned a ton of technique, but I felt it was total bullshit. I felt very frustrated in college: learning a lot of technique, doing a lot of shows and trying to marry the two. It wasn’t until I got out in the world and started worked professionally when I realized that the people I admired were the ones who had taken the little snippets of what they learned that worked for them — and strung them together in their own technique.

One of the good things about Brown was getting to learn a bunch of different theories and not having to sign on to anything like, “I’m going to learn Stanislavski!” When I realized I could just pick and choose parts that worked, then it was like, “Oh, this theory is interesting!” I actually came to appreciate my college time a lot more, but not until much, much later.

TSD: I was really struck by your comment [during the main event] about cultural shock. Gaining recognition, but just waiting for someone to say “psych!” and suddenly [the fame is] all gone. Growing up poor and being catapulted into such fame and acclaim as well as being on Broadway, historically known for having that “cutoff” of who can access Broadway shows — how have you reconciled that divide?

DD: I think being on the other side of anything makes you realize that there’s no real reason for those ceilings to be there. It’s actually detrimental that they are there, and it’s mostly due to a general societal and cultural laziness, because changing things is hard.

I think the best thing that “Hamilton” will ever do is the student matinees. They’re very committed to making sure the students get to come through and see it for an affordable price or for free. And representatives from each school perform on the same stage where “Hamilton” is performed. The first time I ever stepped on a Broadway stage was for “Hamilton,” right? Even just the act of walking onto one as a kid would’ve changed everything. Now, actually getting to perform something on one? That’s a total game changer, because all of sudden, you’re like, “This is a stage. It is the same as every other.” The audience is bigger or whatever, but I can do a thing that I know how to do on this stage. It’s not different. It’s about access. Everything is about access. Societally, we spend a lot of time keeping people from each other, creating elite groups. If there’s enough to go around, then why are we doing that? Actually, we’re cutting off our own resources. I never thought about Broadway before. If I had never accidentally stumbled upon it, I never would have gone there.

I know a hundred people as talented as I am, or who care as much about performance as I do, or think art is as interesting as I do. But none of them had the series of fortunate events that led to this. What if the door had been open to them? What if it didn’t have to be an accident, and that was a valid career path for somebody in my circumstance? What about all these other brilliant performers in my circumstance?

TSD: Do you then see yourself playing a role in that accessibility going forward, forging a path in this field?

DD: I don’t know. I mean, I’ll do my part. You sort of do what you can. As more doors open for me, I try to always bring people who I know, through. So right now, I’m working on a project with a lot of friends in mind. It’s a bigger budget than anything I’ve ever done before, and there’s going to be more eyes on it. There’s a chance for everybody to stunt a little bit. Like #BARS, at the Public Theater — Rafael [Casal] got into working there because we were best friends, but it was crazy. It’s not like he wasn’t ready or didn’t earn that spot. We work on everything together, whether or not if it’s only my name attached to it or not.

It’s a very easy thing for me, if I have a platform, to be like, “This is a person that everybody should be looking at.” Rafael Casal is one of those people. He’s always going to live up to that. He’s better than I can brag about.

I sort of have this feeling about change in general. We can make baby steps on a macro level. We can try to shift policy, voting and changing who’s in office. But we can make huge, sweeping changes on a personal level and in your immediate circle, or just the people around you. The act of being nice to somebody at Starbucks is actually a huge thing. It’s a real change you can effect in somebody’s life every day.

TSD: Who would you be if you didn’t have this public profile? Has having this public platform changed who you are, artistically? 

DD: That’s a good question. I hope not — or I hope not too much. I’m sure it has. I’m doing so many things that sometimes I feel like I don’t have time to do anything well. (laughs) Or not as well as I would like to. So it’s made me have to be a lot less of a perfectionist about my own work, just letting things go.

I hope that I don’t censor myself too much. I try to push myself not to do that. If there’s a thing that I believe in, I hope that I am still putting that forward. But maybe as I’m examining those things more closely, I might be being more careful about the statements I make publicly. Maybe.

TSD: Have you seen any movies or TV shows, or listened to any artists, that you think people should be aware of? People or things under-the-radar that deserve more attention.

DD: I don’t think any of these things need me at all. (Laughs) “Moonlight” — obviously it doesn’t need me. It was recognized as great, but that’s also the work of Tarell McCraney. He’s an incredible playwright. Hopefully, there’s also a boost of people producing his plays. The “Brother/Sister” trilogy is amazing.

For TV, I’m just really goddamn into “The Great British Bake Off.”

As for musicians, keep your eye out for a young artist named Elena Pinderhughes. She has a lot of music coming out that is going to break everybody’s brains. Her brother Samora has a jazz project out called “The Transformations Suite” that’s totally gorgeous and incredibly important. That’s for sure something that everybody should be listening to. And SiR — inglewoodSiR— he’s with TDE [Top Dawg Entertainment], he was like “John Doe 2,” but “Her Too,” like his last EP. That’s magic. He has new music coming out soon.

 

Contact Olivia Popp at opopp ‘at’ stanford.edu and Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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An evening with Daveed Diggs at Dinkelspiel https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/25/daveed-diggs/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/25/daveed-diggs/#respond Thu, 25 May 2017 08:12:16 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1128035 “I call myself a nerd all the time,” said “Hamilton” superstar Daveed Diggs to Nerd Nation at Dinkenspiel Auditorium. Last night, at an electrifying event hosted by the Stanford Speakers Bureau, the Tony and Grammy Award winning actor spoke with coolness, casualness and a refreshing candidness. On-point undergrad moderator Michelle McGhee ’18 superbly guided the discussion […]

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“I call myself a nerd all the time,” said “Hamilton” superstar Daveed Diggs to Nerd Nation at Dinkenspiel Auditorium.

Last night, at an electrifying event hosted by the Stanford Speakers Bureau, the Tony and Grammy Award winning actor spoke with coolness, casualness and a refreshing candidness. On-point undergrad moderator Michelle McGhee ’18 superbly guided the discussion with Diggs through a variety of topics of great and moving import: his early life, acting career, involvement in Lin Manuel-Miranda’s brilliant show, and the good and the bad of hip-hop’s mainstreaming.

McGhee and Diggs kicked off the night with a picaresque rambling tour through Diggs’ early days. Playing up his Oakland heritage (“Everybody from the Bay has a superiority complex, because we’re dope”), Diggs took the room through a series of amazing twists-and-turns: his “crazy birth story” (he was born in two hospitals), his experience playing Charles Darwin at a production in Dink years ago (it wasn’t very good), his mother’s stint as a DJ in the ’70s and early ’80s, and her dropping out of college to go hitchhiking with a German Shepherd named Beowulf. (“That’s some Berkeley-ass shit.”) Throughout, his elegant storytelling skills kept the audience hanging on his every bon mot.

Where Diggs really struck home were his descriptions of culture shock at Brown University, his alma mater. “[There,] the standards for ‘Normal’ seem so restricted,” he said. When he visited Brown on an athlete recruiting trip, he noticed how every single black person greeted him with, “What’s up,” or “a complicated handshake.”

Diggs mused, “It wasn’t until I’d been there for several years when I realized: That’s what you do when you’re an endangered species,” to gasps, claps and snaps. For people of color coming from predominantly multiracial environments as Diggs did, to be transported to a liberal college campus comes at the risk of being shook at how much your color really pops out — in ways you didn’t think were relevant to you.

(This week, he plans to go to Brown to receive an honorary doctorate: “I asked if they would give it to me in engineering, and they said no.”)

Transitioning to “Hamilton,” Diggs described, in rich detail, how he came on board Miranda’s production, sparing no rod to our beloved Puerto Rican.

“I was emailed Lin’s fucking god-awful demos,” he says to great audience laughter. “Him rapping and singing every part. All those falsettos. Even still! It was so brilliant.”

What most impressed Diggs was Miranda’s ability to break the typical mediocrity of so-called hip-hop theater.

“‘Hip-hop theater’ usually means that something suffers,” he noted. “Either the hip-hop is not good, or the theater is not good. One of them is a misunderstanding. [“Hamilton”] was not that. Lin’s a really good rapper for real. He’s also a nerd about it.”

McGhee pressed Diggs on his thoughts on hip-hop entering an elite, predominantly white, mainstream space like Broadway — and what is won and lost in the move.

“That’s a tricky question, and something I’ve been struggling with a lot,” he said. “Hip-hop was indifferent to Broadway. We didn’t need Broadway, but I think Broadway needed hip-hop. It needed something contemporary. You know, Broadway in the ’30s and ’40s was using jazz music — genres on the cutting edge of popular music, on the same exposure level as Tin Pan Alley. So I think having the vocabulary of hip-hop [in Broadway] is like another tool in the toolbox for artists to use. It’s useful for the art form.”

When asked by McGhee on playing Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner, as a black man, Diggs was swift: “It was a trip.” But his answer proves that Diggs exudes the Black confidence, swagger and brilliance of the historically white men he plays in the show.

“I approached it the way I’d approach any character, which is trying to find real-life analogues in my own life. You discover he’s an incredible writer; it made sense to me, then, to make him a confident rapper. He was an incredibly curious person, inventing things all the time.

“He was also just insanely privileged — to a degree which I had never experienced, and don’t have any real-life analogues to it. I read once that his first memory was of being carried in a bassinet by one of his slaves. That was key to me. Being aware of the way that someone like that walks through the world. Creating a character who was as privileged as I could possibly imagine.”

Diggs went on to describe a key moment in Jefferson’s first appearance (“What’d I Miss?”), and how the staging worked to complicate the Jefferson of the show.

“Jefferson’s entrance is him literally being wheeled around on the stage by all his slaves. And they’re cleaning up the floor, scrubbing around him, stand in a straight line. No one talks about that, but that is what’s happening on stage.”

An evening with Daveed Diggs at Dinkelspiel
Stanford student leaders speak with Daveed Diggs, who originated the roles of Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette in the Broadway musical “Hamilton.” (Courtesy of Alexander Lee)

The conversation expanded beyond “Hamilton,” touching on Diggs’ recent spots on the TV show “Black-ish.” Diggs explained that he was brought in to fill in the gap of Millennial Blackness, “a version of Blackness that they weren’t exploring.” Diggs expressed shock when he was asked to reprise the role in another episode.

“I think I’m always waiting for someone to say ‘Psych!'” he said. The wave of laughter in the audience — some nervous, some not — was a wry counterpoint to that statement’s depth, pain and sting of truth.

On his massive success, the humbled Diggs  said, “I get to say ‘no’ to a lot of things. That, for an artist, is crazy. You want to talk about privilege. I’m still getting used to it! I say ‘yes’ too way too many things. I feel nuts most of the time, running around and feeling like I’m doing too many things.

“I’m loving what I’m doing, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t believe that it will be there forever for me.”

Afterwards, the floor opened up to a question-and-answer session with the audience. He answered questions on his favorite rappers (E-40 of Vallejo and Aesop Rock) and his experience working on the Netflix sitcom “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” (“Tina Fey is a national treasure”).

In response to a question from Victor Ragsdale ’19 on advice he would give to young black kids wanting to navigate the waters of Broadway and TV, Diggs was soul-stirring.

“Bring all of your self. Don’t leave any of your self home. Nobody wants you for what you think they want. Yes, Hollywood is racist and sexist. So is Broadway. So are all of these industries of art of which we are practitioners. That’s not your fault. You can’t change yourself to fit into their mold.

“As an actor, you spend a lot of time trying to figure out what the director wants from you. That’s not what people really want. It’s the most exciting thing in the world to interpret something that someone didn’t think of. Those people always get called back. You may not get the part, but you at least get called back and put on people’s radars.”

Asked on the state of hip-hop today, Diggs was fervently optimistic.

“I love it all. Obviously the underground is where I grew up. What’s really impressive is how weird everything mainstream is. Young Thug is a star — but his stuff is out there, avant-garde, wild.”

But then Diggs left the challenge to all of us, the next generation, to push art and thought to the next level. “I’m getting too old to be asked these questions. I don’t get to dictate what culture is anymore. I now get to watch what the kids create and be a fan of it.”

He encouraged open-mindedness of other artists’ work, regardless of political leaning or disagreements with mode of attack. “As a consumer, you get to say, ‘I don’t agree with this piece of art, so it’s not good.’ As an artist, I don’t think you get to do that. I think you have to explore the reasons you like or dislike something a little bit more than whether or not you agree with it.

“Just because an artist doesn’t align with me politically, that doesn’t give me any reason not to listen to them. Or to say that they’re bad outright. And if don’t like their ‘message,’ then it’s my job to put an alternative message out there.”

 

The Daily’s interview with Diggs will appear in tomorrow’s paper.

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Act naturally: Billy Wilder’s ‘The Apartment’ at the Stanford Theatre https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/19/theapartment/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/19/theapartment/#respond Fri, 19 May 2017 07:21:58 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1127665 Everything about Billy Wilder's 1960 romantic comedy is so perfectly constructed — not a shot wasted, not a beat missed.

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Star-wise, humor-wise and emotion-wise, there are few films that can match “The Apartment,” playing at the Stanford Theatre this Friday, Saturday and Sunday at 5:15 and 9:35 p.m.

Everything about Billy Wilder’s 1960 romantic comedy is so perfectly constructed — not a shot wasted, not a beat missed. Its tight-rope marriage of vulgar laughs and suicidal melancholia works better than it has any right to.

So what’s it about? We’ll let Wilder’s one-sentence summary speak for itself:

“This is about a young fellow [Jack Lemmon] who gets ahead in a big company by lending his apartment to executives for that grand old American folk ritual — the afternoon shack-up.”

Reportedly, those were the only words Shirley MacLaine needed to accept the part of Lemmon’s love interest. Wilder would also call it “a dirty fairy-tale about the price of success”: Lemmon has to do a lot of sucking-up to secure his high position at the firm. When his boss (Fred MacMurray) double-crosses him, will he still accept the American dream?

Acting-wise, this is one of the most elegant comedies in American moviedom. It is a film graced with endless moments for actors to jam within small, tightly-choreographed grooves: Jack squirts his nasal drips across the wide-screen, Shirley twirling an egg-roll with her pinky. Both noble losers. Each bit player chips away the hard-edged vision of New York as a cesspool for ad execs and proto-venture capitalists. From Jack Kruschen’s kindly Jewish doctor to Hope Holiday’s lonely souse spending New Year’s Eve without her Cuba-imprisoned husband (“Do you like Castro?” she memorably asks Jack), not since Vincente Minnelli’s “The Clock” (1945) had a Hollywood film offered such a beautifully up-and-downbeat vision of the city.

For me, though, one moment towers above all the rest. It’s Christmas. A raucous holiday party is being thrown at Consolidated Life, the firm where Lemmon (C.C. “Bud” Baxter) works and nurses a crush on MacLaine, the elevator girl with the boss pixie cut (Fran Kubelik). Baxter races to the elevator, carrying two cups of liquor — one for him, one for Miss Kubelik. He rarely drinks, but on Christmas with Miss Kubelik, he breaks his informal vow.

The dialogue in a Wilder romance-comedy has a musky, snappy, American feel to it that is never flat-footed and always keenly aware of story and the players’ chemistry. In the elevator, Miss Kubelik apologizes to Baxter for the night before. Nice guy that he is, he shrugs it off. “You couldn’t help yourself.” She’s less adamant: “It’s unforgivable.” “I forgive you!” “Well, you shouldn’t.” Bashful Baxter, ever the assuaging office-drone, is genuinely happy: “Ya did the only decent thing.” Miss Kubelik, her ire increasing, pushes the point, wants him to understand that, no, what she did last night wasn’t right. She pitches some Wilder wordplay his way: “Well, I wouldn’t be too sure. Just ‘cause I wear this uniform, that don’t make me a Girl Scout.” Finally, he curiously asserts himself in a delivery for the ages: “Miss Kubelik, one doesn’t get to be a Second Administrative Assistant around here unless he’s a pretty good judge of character. And as far as I’m concerned, you’re tops. Decency-wise, or… otherwise-wise! (tiny guffaw) Cheers!”

Pause on that guffaw. Listen to it again and again and once more. Worlds turn around that guffaw. Every time I hear Lemmon’s guffaw, I truly, honestly get chills. A slight tear wells in my eye. Here, Lemmon proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that a deep movie character doesn’t rest in the big gestures. What makes someone come alive are the minor moments. Those crisp nods when Baxter watches a ticker-tape click his life away. The mock-operatic grandeur of the nonsense Italian song he bellows, as he cooks spaghetti for himself and — finally, finally! — romantic company (Miss Kubelik). Baxter’s guffaw is otherworldly. It’s a laugh that says, “I’ll try to be happy, even though this party is more crowded than a subway at rush hour, even though everyone’s having fun except me and my love. I’ll try to look happy, just this once.”

But embedded in the guffaw is an infuriating naïvité and gullability — Baxter’s fatal flaw. He is both refreshingly decent and irritatingly complacent. He doesn’t lift skirts like the other chauvinist male workers, yes, but he doesn’t try to criticize or discourage it. He’s chained to the American concept of success-at-any-cost — don’t speak out or risk offending those around you — being liked is the ultimate. It takes Miss Kubelik to take him out of that turtle shell, and vice versa.

Act naturally: Billy Wilder's 'The Apartment' at the Stanford Theatre
Courtesy of Jerry Murbach

You may watch a Wilder film and come out of it feeling good, or just dandy, or even slightly cold. But I guarantee — you spend enough time with the Wilder, focused intensely on character gesture, delivery, pitch, movement, framing of camera around the actor — and you’ll come out of it with a whole new appreciation for every bitter person’s nuance. For this is a cinema that shuns elaborate camera movements — virtuoso in Welles, Ophuls, Preminger, etc., but far too distracting for a hard-boiled prose director like Wilder. His is a cinema that cares first and foremost about the actor — the star — the shiny soul in Baxter’s black-and-white blue eyes.

Jack Lemmon was the secret ingredient, the organic tenderness, that Wilder needed in his cinema. He first worked with Lemmon on 1959’s “Some Like it Hot.” Dissatisfied with the way he treated Jack’s character in that picture (stuck with the horny old man while Marilyn Monroe got Tony Curtis), Wilder made Lemmon the center of six of his subsequent films, including ”The Fortune Cookie” (1966) and his late-period masterwork “Avanti!” (1972). In “The Apartment,” Lemmon was made the moral center of the Wilder universe. Lemmon was able to curb Wilder’s enthusiasm for the jaded, perverse and cynical. Lemmon was so effective as Wilder’s conscience that when he played a total bastard in “Avanti!,” the polar opposite of C.C. Baxter, it didn’t come off as a bad thing. Rather, somehow, the audience knew that this asshole’s cartoonish anger would soon melt into Lemmon-y Snickers. Yes — even Wendell Armbruster, Jr., (“Avanti!”‘s pathetic, angry bulldog of a lead man) inched his way to C.C. Baxter territory in a space of 144 minutes — thanks to the Italian location, slow pacing, sharp Wilder/I.A.L. Diamond script and a never-better Juliet Mills.

Billy Wilder’s New York is oddly accurate despite being shot entirely in a studio set. Wilder always preferred the comfort of a set of having to finagle an on-location shoot. He disliked his beautiful “Avanti!” because, in his words, “it smelled like it was shot in Italy.” (It was — and Jonathan Rosenbaum rightly notes this is its strength, since the real-Italian locations add to the romantic, authentic air of the picture.) Despite Wilder’s anti-location bias, he was, like Vincente Minnelli’s NYC of “The Clock,” obsessed with getting every detail right inside. Baxter’s apartment is authentically lived-in: down to the marks where matches have been struck right above the oven, the pieces of chewing gum underneath the sofa and the cheap borderline-kitsch reproductions of famous paintings in the bedroom. (Baxter is a lazy fan of Rousseau’s “Sleeping Gypsy” and Picasso’s “Three Musicians.”) The Oscar-winning set and interior designs (by production designer Alex Trauner) are filled with dejection, tiredness and crisp starchiness: the perfect pad for a loser loner like Buddy Boy.

Wilder renders Baxter’s living-space with palpable loneliness, thanks to his signature wide-shots. Wilder apparently struggled with his cinematographer Joe LaShelle, who was used to working with TV directors who leaned heavily on the close-up to frame the actors’ movements. Wilder, by contrast, hated close-ups, using them only when necessary — and even then, skipping past them as soon as possible. He prefers to let the camera hang back from a distance, observing the players move naturally about in an undisturbed space. The CinemaScope stretchiness of Wilder’s shots only adds to the isolating feeling that Baxter’s apartment is too big for him. At night, we can understand why he started lending it out to other guys; if he’s not going to have fun in it, maybe he should let others. A character mark of both tremendous generosity and naïveté; but then again, that’s the sweet and sour of Wilder’s characters, who he treats with alternate coldness and warmth, contempt and empathy, condescension and humbleness.

In a New York City as antiseptic as Wilder’s, Lemmon’s C.C. Baxter and MacLaine’s Fran Kubelik are breaths of fresh air. They give NYC its human charm — which it doesn’t lack, of course, but which is simply forgotten in its sardine-packed rush of people going from place to place, in the adulterous-lecherous-opportunist air of the capitalist office. The city can be cripplingly lonely. But Baxter and Kubelik are committed to find a private human connection, to be the exception in a city where everyone is also trying to be the exception.

“The Apartment” was nominated for ten Oscars in 1961 and won five, including Best Picture, Best Director for Billy Wilder, Best Original Screenplay (Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond), Best Film Editing and Best Art & Set Decoration for a Black-and-White Film.

 

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Quel grit! ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ at the Stanford Theatre https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/17/breakfast-at-tiffanys/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/17/breakfast-at-tiffanys/#respond Wed, 17 May 2017 23:29:35 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1127609 Huckleberry friends and buddy-boys: two great ones screen at the Stanford Theatre this weekend. “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” plays Friday through Sunday, May 19-21, at 7:30 p.m., with a 3:10 p.m. matinee on Saturday and Sunday. Billy Wilder’s “The Apartment” plays on all three days at 5:15 and 9:35 p.m. (I’ll talk about this — my favorite romantic […]

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Huckleberry friends and buddy-boys: two great ones screen at the Stanford Theatre this weekend.

“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” plays Friday through Sunday, May 19-21, at 7:30 p.m., with a 3:10 p.m. matinee on Saturday and Sunday. Billy Wilder’s “The Apartment” plays on all three days at 5:15 and 9:35 p.m. (I’ll talk about this — my favorite romantic comedy — in Friday’s paper.) Both, of course, will show on 35 mm film.

Based on the 1958 novella by Truman Capote and directed by Blake Edwards, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” features, for better and worse, the most iconic and memorable Audrey Hepburn performance. “When you think of Audrey Hepburn, you think of ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’” – a phrase uttered with delight by producer Richard Shepherd and with exasperation by critic Karina Longworth. I sympathize with both takes. That image of Hepburn, cradling a cat on her shoulder (eccentric, offbeat) with her ridiculously long cigarette-holder and her de Givenchy black dress (chic, perfect), is the elegant, sumptuous, pop-art shorthand of not only Holly Golightly, but also Audrey Hepburn, and the film itself. But, in so many ways, it’s a reductive shorthand; the actual Holly of the film (and the actual Audrey Hepburn) is far more sorrowful, complex and angst-ridden than the happy-go-lucky kook of the poster implies.

Quel grit! 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' at the Stanford Theatre
Courtesy of Jerry Murbach

The Holly Golightly of the Hollywood “Breakfast” is the result of several authors: the writer Truman Capote, the star Audrey Hepburn, the director Blake Edwards and the composer Henry Mancini. Let’s start with Capote first. Holly, as imagined by Capote, was an attempt to reckon with perhaps the most important woman in Capote’s life: his mother. Peter Krämer suggests that Capote based Holly on his mother, Nina, who, like Holly Golightly, grew up in the rural South, came to New York looking for a life of glamor and bon-bons, changed her name from “country-ish” to “city slickin'” (Lillie Mae to Nina, Lulamae to Holly), married in her late teens and left her Southern husband for a sophisticated Latin American (a businessman in Nina’s case, a Brazilian aristocrat in Holly’s). Nina, who was never a stable presence in Capote’s life and basically left him orphaned, eventually committed suicide in 1954; “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” would be the next substantial work Truman would write. Holly ended up a compendium of his mother and the several high-society New York female friends he associated with in the 1940s and early ’50s. The openly gay Capote was deeply interested in the women who try to re-make themselves in a big city, “spin in the sun for a moment like May flies and then disappear.”

Capote famously said he envisioned Marilyn Monroe for the part of Holly. Confronted about his thoughts on Hepburn in a 1968 Playboy interview, Capote didn’t mince words: “[My] book was really rather bitter, and Holly Golightly was real — a tough character, not an Audrey Hepburn type at all. The film became a mawkish valentine to New York City and Holly and, as a result, was thin and pretty, whereas it should have been rich and ugly.” But we shouldn’t take Capote’s word for it, since if we look long and hard, the ugliness of Holly and her world are there. It takes Audrey Hepburn and Blake Edwards to bring it out in classic Hollywood terms.

What has kept “Breakfast” in the American pop canon for half a century is not its false lovey-dovey vibe, but its “falseness” in and of itself — a common theme among Audrey Hepburn’s most famous films. “Breakfast” is just one of a series of Hepburn vehicles (along with “Roman Holiday,” “Funny Face,” “My Fair Lady” and Billy Wilder’s lesser-but-crucial “Sabrina”) centered around the Cinderella-like makeover (or reverse de-mystification) of Hepburn — a process which reveals how a woman’s image is mediated by bourgeois mores and strict tastes. Whether the outcomes are triumphant (“Sabrina,” “Funny Face”), tragic (“Roman Holiday”) or ambiguous (“My Fair Lady”), Hepburn’s films all question the perception of her characters’ individuality by the people (usually well-to-do men) surrounding her. Voyeurism of the woman is encouraged: “Sabrina” and “Funny Face” are less interesting on the narrative level than on that of the costume; they’re all about how Hepburn trades in her poor kids’ dresses for Parisian haut couture. At some point, the Hepburn character breaks the monotony: In “Roman Holiday,” she goes from robotic smiles and rote beauty queen answers to (in a slapstick scene that would make Blake Edwards jealous) smashing goons with guitars, winking at cats and throwing life-rafts to drowning villains. Later, in “My Fair Lady,” Hepburn’s Eliza proudly rejects the misogynistic haughtiness of Professor Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison). By the final scenes (when Eliza has become a lady [woke?]), she simply sits at the sidelines, hocking spit-balls to discourage Higgins’ pomposity, until he suddenly realizes (“damn, damn, damn, damn, damn”) that she can live without him, but that he can’t live without her.

Audrey’s always being judged, looked at, measured to impossibly high standards — which perhaps mirrored how she felt before she hit it big with “Roman Holiday” in 1953. In her excellent podcast “You Must Remember This,” Karina Longworth talks up the dark past that contributed to Hepburn’s gangly body look — a story even more traumatizing than Holly Golightly’s. While she was training to be a world-class ballerina, World War II broke out, Britain declared war on Germany and Hepburn’s family relocated to Netherlands in 1939, thinking it would be safe there than in England. But just a year later, in 1940, the Nazis occupied part of the Netherlands; Audrey’s uncle was shot and killed for his involvement with the Dutch resistance, and her half-brother Ian was deported to a German work camp. She said: “Had we known that we were going to be occupied for five years, we might have all shot ourselves. We thought it might be over next week … six months … next year. That’s how we got through.” Audrey survived the infamous Dutch famine of 1944 when the Nazis cut off access to rations for citizens in German-occupied Holland. She ate only endives, tulip bulbs and water, confined in bed, reading for days on end, in order to keep her mind off hunger. But the repercussions were life-lasting. She contracted asthma, jaundice, anemia and edema from malnutrition. At the end of the war, she weighed 88 pounds. Since her weight and weakened body prevented her from becoming the prima ballerina she so wanted to be, she took up acting instead. Even on stage and on screen, she had to fight off the insults against her gangly, “awkward” body frame from gossips and film critics who were oblivious to the incredible challenges of her early life — just as all the men in “Breakfast” are convinced that Holly is nothing more than kook and cotton-candy on the surface. They see her solely in their fairytale projection of creeping male desire. Holly and Audrey are more — much more.

Quel grit! 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' at the Stanford Theatre
The woman in the mirror: Audrey Hepburn in the famous opening of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” (Courtesy of Jerry Murbach)

 

Nothing is ever known in Audrey Hepburn’s world — or Blake Edwards’s. Edwards’ role in the movie is rarely foreground, and that’s probably for good reason. Even the sharp Edwards scholar Sam Wasson doesn’t include “Breakfast” as one of Blake’s masterpieces. Maybe that’s for good reason. “Breakfast” isn’t really “a Blake Edwards film.” If anything, it’s Hepburn’s show; the sophisticated physical gags and manic vulgarity that makes up Edwards’ brutally personal masterworks (“The Pink Panther,” “A Shot in the Dark,” “Days of Wine and Roses,” “The Great Race,” “What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?”, “The Party,” “S.O.B.,” and “Victor/Victoria”) don’t show up in “Breakfast.” But the Edwards touch is writ most large at Holly’s cocktail party — the film’s greatest setpiece, a Jacques Tati-like swarm of beehive hair-jewels-bodies, which Pauline Kael wrote “ranks with the best screen parties of the era.” Here, the wacky irreverence and psychological horror of parties is pungently rendered. Amid the funky gags which keep toppling on top of one another include a token Asian woman (she’s an unexpected extra, especially if you’re aware of the film’s other Asian…) who drifts around and looks lost in the sea of white; a drunk woman who thunders to the ground like a chopped tree (“TIMBER!” yells Holly); a lady’s pillbox-hat is caught on fire by Holly’s cigarette holder and quickly extinguished with a glass of whiskey; and a dinner-guest who laughs hysterically, then breaks down in mascara-black tears at her own image in the mirror, unable to recognize herself. Edwards’s brand of dark, vulgar comedy (which may be even wilder than Wilder) was always good at deflating the absurd cartoon-personas we construct for ourselves when we schmooze in social settings. It’s when he’s making fun of these outward projections of ourselves that he arrives at his odd pathos.

Edwards’ manboy-ish obsession with slapstick and acidic bodily satire (cf., the infamous glow-in-the-dark-condoms scene in 1989’s “Skin Deep”) has tended to draw attention away from his films’ vivid female protagonists: the gender-fluid Julie Andrews in “Victor/Victoria” and “Darling Lili,” Lee Remick’s tortured alcoholic in “Days of Wine and Roses” and Hepburn here. It’s Edwards who pushes the reading of Holly as a transparent, ghostly presence whom no one, not even the male authors Capote and Edwards, will ever fully know. In Edwards’ famous first shot, Holly departs a taxi on a surreally-empty Broadway, dressed in a lavish black dress and sunglasses at 5 a.m., approaches a Tiffany’s window, and gawks at her reflection. So many questions. What’s she thinking? Who does she see? Is she going somewhere? Is the Lulamae of years past still there? Do her eyes conceal happiness? Or play up her misery? All these questions flit by Hepburn’s bony face. All remain unanswered by the film’s end, which (framed in a rainy, tight alleyway which threatens to swallow Hepburn and Peppard whole) is Edwards’ way of undercutting the sappy Hollywood-mandated ending. Does it work? Not quite. But is the overall emotion happiness? Not quite.

Edwards has been rightly criticized for his frequent (lack of) taste, which lapsed more frequently than that churlish imp Billy Wilder. Case in point: Mr. Yunioshi, Holly’s Japanese cartoon of a neighbor, played by the grating Mickey Rooney. Rooney’s cataclysmically-unfunny mugging, pathetic racism and poorly-timed slapstick — encouraged by Edwards — only appears in four short scenes, each less than a minute long; but the stupidity of each appearance ensures Rooney sticks in the mind far longer than he should be allowed to. In Capote’s novella, Yunioshi is actually a respectable Japanese photographer and freelance artist. But except for a slurred line, you wouldn’t get that from Rooney’s Yunioshi, who curls his upper-lip, bares his front teeth and plays up the white man’s idea of har-har Orientalism. Pretty much no one on set found it funny except Rooney and Edwards; everyone ended up denouncing it, with Edwards ending up being the most apologetic, chocking it up to an egregious lapse of judgment.

(For a potential sign of maturation on Edwards’ part, check out Peter Sellers as the Indian actor in “The Party,” Edwards’ 1968 avant-garde Hollywood comedy. Among the many weirdnesses of this artistic triumph — the apotheosis of Edwards’ 1960s comedies — is Sellers’ brownface performance, which doesn’t play up the aggressively racist Indian stereotypes that Sellers employed on comedy records and TV appearances of the 1950s. Instead, Edwards directs Sellers to underact, resulting in a weird naturalism which hews closer to the universality of Chaplin’s Tramp or Tati’s Mr. Hulot. The result may be the most soulful character that either Edwards or Sellers created.)

Quel grit! 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' at the Stanford Theatre
It may not be a Blake Edwards film, but the cocktail party is festered with classic Blake Edwards gags. Courtesy of Jerry Murbach.

Hepburn’s Holly is a stand-in for those of us who have felt insecure and shallow on the inside, who have projected outward an illusion of who we’d like to be — but ultimately aren’t. She suppresses her Texas past life because she doesn’t think it can ever square with her NYC bohemianism. But when she starts to raspily sing Henry Mancini’s folksy, country-potato tune “Moon River” (an Oscar-winning song), she proves that, yes, the two lines can meet. Henry Mancini, in a 1970s newspaper interview, on the matter:

“It’s unique for a composer to really be inspired by a person, a face or a personality, but Audrey Hepburn certainly inspires me. If you listen to my songs, you can almost tell who inspired them because they all have Audrey’s quality of wistfulness — a kind of slight sadness. To this day, no one has [sung] it with more feeling or understanding.”

The ending has Holly finding (temporary) happiness. But this is a Hollywood movie, where things happen ten times faster (and prettier) than in real life. Holly, a hipster-loner, waits dreamily for romance to pick her life up — but for most of Blake Edwards’s film, it’s an aching wait. In the meantime, the men in Holly’s life cast down harsh, brutal judgments on her. A movie executive (Martin Balsam, one of late Hollywood’s great character actors) pegs her as “a real phony — a great kid, but a phony.” A suave Brazilian aristocrat in line to be the next president of sugarcane country says she’s “dangerous for any man’s image.” And our lead guy, a formless WASP pudding (nicely under-played by George Peppard), calls Holly “a coward” and tells her straight up, “You’ve got no guts.” The criticisms only seem to ennoble the featherweight Holly; like the glamorous new actresses of the French New Wave contemporary to Hepburn’s time (Jeanne Moreau in Jacques Demy’s “Bay of Angels,” whose ending is a close cousin to “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”), Hepburn/Holly look at a steady romance like it was a gambler’s game, an unsure but exciting roll of the dice.

It’s tempting to read Holly Golightly as some ’60s prototype of the manic pixie dream girl — but that’s an exasperatingly modern reaction to a character who cannot be troped in a box. The best thing about Holly is that she is a wonderfully wicked iceberg who only elects to show the tip. Not even Capote’s narrator could tap into Holly’s interior. We can only gauge what she isn’t, and where she may go. This dizzying mystery — the self-mysteries we all keep — is enough to guarantee Holly her place in the pantheon of great American pop figures.

 

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Our fair lady: Audrey Hepburn classics (‘Roman Holiday,’ ‘Sabrina’) at the Stanford Theatre https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/12/hepburnholiday/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/12/hepburnholiday/#respond Fri, 12 May 2017 08:27:37 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1127307 Billy Wilder once said, “There could be no more perfect Cinderella than Audrey Hepburn.” This weekend, Stanford and the Bay Area get to ride around with Cinderella in two of her most beloved vehicles. The Stanford Theatre will screen 35 mm prints of William Wyler’s “Roman Holiday” (1953) and Billy Wilder’s “Sabrina” (1954), this Friday through Sunday, May 12-14. “Roman […]

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Billy Wilder once said, “There could be no more perfect Cinderella than Audrey Hepburn.” This weekend, Stanford and the Bay Area get to ride around with Cinderella in two of her most beloved vehicles.

The Stanford Theatre will screen 35 mm prints of William Wyler’s “Roman Holiday” (1953) and Billy Wilder’s “Sabrina” (1954), this Friday through Sunday, May 12-14.

“Roman Holiday” plays at 7:30 p.m. on all three days, with a 3:15 p.m. matinee on Saturday and Sunday.

“Sabrina” plays at 5:25 p.m. and 9:40 p.m. on all three days.

With this weekend’s Hepburn Holiday, the Stanford continues its tribute to the British-American legend, whose “My Fair Lady” (1964) played to packed crowds last Saturday and Sunday.

“Roman Holiday” stars Gregory Peck as an American photojournalist on assignment in Rome who falls hard for the bored and excitement-hungry Princess Ann (Hepburn). It was America’s introduction to the grace of Miss Hepburn, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance. (Edith Head’s costumes and blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo’s story also won Oscars.) Directed by William Wyler, “Roman Holiday” has the delicacy, attention to soft interiors and tearful emotionality of his masterworks “The Best Years of Our Lives” (1946) and “The Heiress” (1949).

The double feature also reminds us just what a one-two sucker-punch Hepburn landed in her first big roles. Though “Roman Holiday” is often called her feature-film debut, that’s not quite true. Before ’53, Hepburn appeared in minor walk-on parts in British comedies, like the brilliant 1951 Ealing farce “The Lavender Hill Mob” (opposite Alec Guinness), and a ballerina in the dramatic “Secret People” (1952). Her first real breakthrough was on the stage in the 1951 Broadway production of “Gigi.” Hepburn was handpicked by “Gigi” novelist Colette herself to play the titular French girl (again, in the typical Hepburn transformation plot). From there, Hollywood took notice, filming a now-famous screen test with Hepburn that sent William Wyler swooning. On the basis of that test, he chose the “unknown” Hepburn to headline “Roman Holiday” — over Paramount Studios’ first choice, Elizabeth Taylor. (Gigagasp!)

“Sabrina” was slickly conceived to make the most out of Hepburn’s waif-like, wispy sashaying. A rich hotshot playboy engaged to be married (William Holden) catches the eye of the poor chauffeur’s daughter (Hepburn), while the more sophisticated and logical older brother (Bogart) watches with half-cocked brows and cracked lips. While nursing a crush on the playboy, Hepburn’s girl goes off to Paris (for reasons I won’t reveal) and returns a sophisticated young woman, catching the attention of the Holden playboy (remember, he’s about to marry someone … ) and the big brother, whose heart betrays his business interests. (Love, you brutal tempest, you.)

This very Ernst Lubitsch-y comedy (Wilder was Lubitsch’s biggest fan) has the signature Lubitsch love triangle – with some juicy class stakes. It was unique for featuring three recent Oscar winners in the main roles (Bogart for “The African Queen,” Holden for Wilder’s “Stalag 17” and Hepburn).

The production of “Sabrina” wasn’t an easygoing one; Bogart was reportedly a real bastard to everyone involved. Feeling like a used shoe (he was the studio’s replacement for Cary Grant, who was originally meant to play the big brother), Bogart routinely insulted Hepburn’s youth and perceived naïveté, resented Wilder for refusing to invite him to a dinner party (and mocked Wilder’s thick German accent) and nursed a savage hate for Holden. (According to Bogart’s wife Lauren Bacall, when Bogart was dying of cancer in 1957, he called up Wilder to apologize for his boorish on-set behavior.) But the hair-pulling doesn’t show on screen. It’s the unexpected tenderness of Bogart and the pluck of Hepburn that lends the story its preciousness, that special Wilder grip with actors, situational-kook and joining of dark-grey and lovey-dovey tones.

When asked who the titular “Sabrina” was, Hepburn described her as “a dreamer who lived a fairy tale” and “an incorrigible romantic, which I am.” Oh Audrey, how you get us.

“Roman Holiday” and “Sabrina” have been the second and third most widely attended films at the Stanford Theatre, respectively. “Roman Holiday” has sold 71,232 tickets since 1989; “Sabrina,” 68,522.

Next weekend at the Stanford: Blake Edwards’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (1961) and Billy Wilder’s “The Apartment” (1960) with Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine! The former has the quintessential Hepburn performance — and the latter is easily my favorite romantic comedy. (Why do we say “favorite” when we really want to say “the best”?) I’ll explain why in next week’s columns, so stay tuned!

 

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Terence Davies’ and Cynthia Nixon’s Emily Dickinson biopic burns with ‘A Quiet Passion’ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/05/davies-quiet-passion-review/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/05/davies-quiet-passion-review/#respond Fri, 05 May 2017 18:03:30 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1126035 What joy in this film! No, it’s not “joyful”; in fact, it’s glum and depressing and painful to watch. It’s from Terence Davies, Britain’s cinemaster of ex-Catholic, gay, working-class, spiritualized pain, director of such brutally personal masterworks as “Distant Voices, Still Lives” (1989) and “The Long Day Closes” (1992). It’s about a poet, Emily Dickinson, whom Garrison […]

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What joy in this film!

No, it’s not “joyful”; in fact, it’s glum and depressing and painful to watch. It’s from Terence Davies, Britain’s cinemaster of ex-Catholic, gay, working-class, spiritualized pain, director of such brutally personal masterworks as “Distant Voices, Still Lives” (1989) and “The Long Day Closes” (1992). It’s about a poet, Emily Dickinson, whom Garrison Keillor called “the patron saint of shy people” — who for her entire life rode shotgun with bosom companions Spurned Love, Loneliness, and Death. The joy in an item like “Quiet Passion” is the preservation of sanctity of lived experience — of breathing, love, family, mortality, and of course, the thing which brings the above in sharpest relief: art.

There’s a different kind of joy: that of an actually-meaningful artist tackling the life of a kindred spirit. Quel bonus if the artists are cut from the same cloth, if they are in sync, if they engage in dialogues across years, decades, centuries. The personal touch always helps. In Vincente Minnelli’s “Lust for Life” (1956), the melodramatic soul of the Hollywood auteur was aptly attuned to the swirling, emotional anguish of Van Gogh’s brushstrokes. Likewise, only David O. Russell with his kinetic kook could, with “Joy” (2015), capture the off-center grit of Miracle Mop inventor Joy Mangano’s struggles to get her invention off the ground. In both, the key stars, Kirk Douglas and Jennifer Lawrence, were somehow completely acting like themselves in unchanged star personas (Kirk Douglas doing his grit-teeth act; Jennifer Lawrence just a shade mellower than her “American Hustle” wildness) and, at the same time, deeply submerged in the psyche and torment of their subjects (today, it’s much easier to see this in the Douglas performance, since Douglas isn’t as ubiquitous a presence as Lawrence.)

Such is the case with “A Quiet Passion,” where Terence Davies’ pointed anguish has a decisive effect on the controlled, inward cool of Cynthia Nixon. She’s part of that Douglas-Lawrence tradition of glamorous stars sliding into the skin of their famous doppelgänger, without fuss or Daniel Day-Lewis posturing. Nixon is damn good at mixing the mundane and the mythic sides of Dickinson. When Emily writes her verse, humoring her sister or mother or Lady Austen-like best friend (MVP Catherine Bailey), Nixon’s voice carries the gentle lilt, patience, ordinariness of a Takahata or Ozu hero — Taeko in “Only Yesterday” (1991) or the myriad Setsuko Hara-played daughters, where the richness of the character lays in an unregretful/melancholic embrace of the present. From three in the morning till sunrise, Emily Dickinson is hard at work; when questioned, she explains her odd method with Setsuko Hara-like relish: “It’s the best time. When it feels as if the whole world is asleep and still.” The up-down-dash lilt in the Nixon voice is downright musical. When Emily’s mother (Joanna Bacon) dismisses her own boring existence (“No one would know I was here”), Dickinson responds with a rousing anti-world force that dissolves into a weird, existential angst: “But if you weren’t — oh! — what a chasm you would leave!” It’s like Dickinson’s verse leapt from the page and into the room — an eerie effect.

But a gravely different Emily emerges as her life slowly transitions from Whit Stillmanesque snipes at the patriarchy to an ever-paralyzing stillness inside her bedchamber. From her publisher to her suitors, she refuses people’s advances, talking only from the top of the stairs. Fantasies begin to trickle into her life more often; a mysterious man in black — her impossible ideal — ascends Davies’ signature staircase, up to her room. The fantasies sustain her through her bouts of kidney failure and epilepsy, which make her life a living hell. Indeed, the scenes of Nixon/Emily suffering seizures are among the most violent and distressing images Davies has ever shot.

It’s a Davies film, through and through. As Mr. Dickinson, Keith Carradine plays a Davies father in a smaller subset of Brutal Abusers, the second most common male in his work. The fathers of “Sunset Song” and “Distant Voices, Still Lives” are more violent than Mr. Dickinson, yes, but Carradine’s unsmiling face and intolerance of frivolity is essentially the anger of Pete Postlethwaite or Peter Mullan bottled up and dressed in New England niceties. For her part, Emily (the termite rebel) is furious at how men treat women in Massachusetts. Paradoxically, however, she gets part of her spunk from Father himself, who encourages his children to be “sophisticated,” not “docile.” As was the case with the other abusive fathers in the Davies oeuvre, the would-be victim turns a thorn into a rose, refuses to be pushed in the mud, picks herself up and stokes her inner fire, aiming anger back out in creative outlets (cultivating land in “Sunset Song,” Bud watching cinema and daydreaming in Welles and Wyler in “Long Day Closes,” writing poetry here).

There are breathtaking long takes that pause on seemingly nothing. At the opera, during a piano interlude before the soprano starts singing, Davies refuses to cut or move the camera; we just see Emily’s rapt face, Dad’s stern disapproval, Aunt Elizabeth pretentiously eyeing the room to see if she’s being looked at. It’s a glorious moment of human observation — Davies’ faith in smallness, once again confirmed. And not surprisingly, the moment picks up a trend that weaves in and out of Dickinson’s small-size, huge-ambition verse, which prefers the anthill to the mountain:

A little Road—not made of Man—

Enabled of the Eye—

Accessible to Thill of Bee—

Or Cart of Butterfly—

 

If Town it have—beyond itself—

’Tis that—I cannot say—

I only know—no Vehicle

Bears me along that Way—

Terence Davies' and Cynthia Nixon's Emily Dickinson biopic burns with 'A Quiet Passion'
The only confirmed daguerrotype of Emily Dickinson, ca. 1847. Public domain.

The screenplay — “the best/funniest/spiffiest of Davies’ career,” etc. — is chock full of such rich moments of pause it makes you want to reach for your journal and jot down every word. Like last year’s Davies picture “Sunset Song,” some will probably find the dialogue tedious and obvious, or (at worse) starchy and declamatory. After all, this is a movie where men acknowledge the first shot at Fort Sumter, the beginning of the Civil War, the real reason it’s being fought (slavery), the immoral implications thereof, the draft, and the millionaire’s evasion of said draft — all in a span of a heated thirty-second convo. Realism as such, however, is never Davies’ goal; far too drab for him. What’s maybe even more stunning is how Cynthia Nixon’s curious-attentive listening has so sneaked itself into the film’s bone structure at this point, that we notice Emily is not in the frame. She listens nervously beyond the shot, holding her sister-in-law’s baby in her hand (after having casually composed “I’m Nobody!/Who are you?” on the spot); to inspire her verse, she uses, not the literal exchange about the Civil War, but rather the soul and meaning underneath the literal — the bloody deaths, neatly skipped yet feverishly there.

Even the first half’s unexpected humor (not common for Davies’ works) is coated with a Hollywood musical blueness, Rembrandtian black. It’s gravely different from the evenly-applied airiness and gaiety of Whit Stillman, whose “Love & Friendship” (2016) resembles the first half of “A Quiet Passion” on the surface. When the persnickety Aunt Elizabeth (co-MVP Annette Badland) departs the Dickinson kids with a perfectly delivered “I shall pray for you all!”, Davies balances out this unexpected moment of levity with an equally unexpected come-down to earth, courtesy of Nixon reciting Dickinson’s poem “I went to thank Her — but she Slept —” as Aunt Elizabeth’s carriage departs. Suddenly, the comedy is infested with Death, the two never separate. One truly doesn’t realize the beauty, the privilege, the precious holiness of a tea date or a family member until that person is asleep. As Emily writes:

‘Twas Short — to cross the Sea —

To look upon Her like — alive —

But turning back — ‘twas slow —

Davies is such the perfect artist to make a film about Dickinson; they understand hope and mortality like the backs of their hands. In the most knockout shot of the film (recalling Hawks’ “Red River” pan around a sleepy cow-herd about to be taken to Missouri), the camera creeps and circles around the living room, observing life about to begin (young Emily will grow into the poet) and death fast on the family’s heels. It starts with Emily quietly reading a book of poetry. Then, one by one, we pass by each Dickinson, frittering away the night in her or his own mundane zone (knitting, reading, watching the fire crackle). Emily’s voiceover hovers above their unknowing heads, briefly flooding the room with her lilt’s natural loneliness — which at the core we all bear. The shot ends parked again on Emily, now trained away from the book and staring frightfully at her family, her eyes darting back and forth in agitation, reading death and obscurity in each family member’s face. They won’t leave a lasting impression. Her? Maybe — maybe not — she is unsure, as we all are. For all her life, Dickinson was negotiating the place of her family in her poetry, of her private feelings standing in for the universal. Nagging doubts, existential and atomlike, plagued this poet, as they do our best artists (like Davies). Emily looks at her mother on the cusp of death, and she feels torture, angst. There’s a dramatic chasm that separates Joanna Bacon’s frozen, waxlike figure, Emma Bell’s mortal youngness, and Cynthia Dixon’s confident, fluid voice. While Mother Dickinson is lost in the fire of her quotidian thoughts (she will never transcend her time), Young Emily is sharply aware of past, present and post-death future (she has historical consciousness). Both bear burdens too great to name, burdens preserved by Davies’ fleeting-gliding camera.

The camera is the key to this queerly not-sad sorrow. “A Quiet Passion” moves in slow, inevitable glides, like we’re trotting parallel to the Carriage carrying Emily, Death, and Immortality. Regardless of whether or not Dickinson was the subject,Davies’ motion pictures have always had her dash-like rhythm: Random snatches of dialogue are picked up an hour after they were passingly introduced, and the feel of an established scene get dropped without a warning. Think back to “Distant Voices, Still Lives,” when, in one scene, the kids are celebrating the joys of gifts and family at Christmastime, and, in the next, the Father trashes Mother’s Christmas feast by pulling the tablecloth, dishes crash everywhere: “NOW CLEAN IT UP,” he screams to Mother with her head buried in her lap. A similar trippiness of memory is shown in the scene where Emily religiously awaits a mysterious “looming man at midnight” — set to a Celtic, mournful rendition of Thomas Ford’s “Since First I Saw Your Face.” It’s a scene of great romantic ache — and it’s sandwiched between two hilariously inconsequential scenes where a man-boy suitor tries to get Emily to leave her bedchamber. The bookmarks seem to happen on the same day, but the Celtic interlude (Davies returning to the phantasmagoric imagery of “The Long Day Closes” and “The Neon Bible”) breaks up the smooth temporality. The structure of Davies’ films is set by the mind’s volcanic moods, of a person in the throes of remembrance, regardless of whether their source material is explicitly literary (“The House of Mirth,” “Sunset Song”) or autobiographical (“The Long Day Closes,” “Of Time and the City”).

“For the first time in my career,” Davies said recently, “I’m in danger of being prolific.” What a time to be alive. We hear that his next project is a biopic of Siegfried Sassoon, one of the three great poets of the First World War. If we are to expect anything from that picture, it should be a joyful sadness — which, like “A Quiet Passion,” is not a contradiction.

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Master director Terence Davies talks Emily Dickinson, Brando, and growing up on movies https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/05/davies-stanford-daily-interview/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/05/davies-stanford-daily-interview/#respond Fri, 05 May 2017 17:45:49 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1126312 “I’m very good at misery and death,” says Britain’s greatest working director in his soothing, musical rasp. “Just a bit short of the ol’ joie de vivre!” Yet one look at “A Quiet Passion” (the latest masterwork from Terence Davies, his biopic on Emily Dickinson) and you must doubt that statement, however jesting and joshing. Davies’ early career (his bleakest work […]

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“I’m very good at misery and death,” says Britain’s greatest working director in his soothing, musical rasp. “Just a bit short of the ol’ joie de vivre!”

Yet one look at “A Quiet Passion” (the latest masterwork from Terence Davies, his biopic on Emily Dickinson) and you must doubt that statement, however jesting and joshing. Davies’ early career (his bleakest work “The Terence Davies Trilogy” [1976-83], “Distant Voices, Still Lives” [1989], and “The Long Day Closes” [1992]) was a true Artist’s radically impassioned manifesto, sculpting and defining the rest of his career. Davies’ self-styled protagonists — Catholic working-class boys in 1950s Liverpool, abused by alcoholic fathers, raised by strong women, bullied at school, praying until their knees bled, realizing and struggling with the fact that they are gay — continue to move those of us who still question our place and direction in the world.

Until now, most everything after his magnum opus “The Long Day Closes” has been literary: adaptations of John Kennedy Toole’s “The Neon Bible,” Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth,” Terence Rattigan’s “The Deep Blue Sea,” and Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s “Sunset Song.” (His 2008 film essay “Of Time and the City” was a stirring and uncompromisingly personal history of Liverpool, England through Davies’ eyes.) Refracted through Davies, these adaptations are of a rare sort, nailing the emotional spirit of the source material while resisting the look of stiff, upper-crust, point-and-shoots or a Wikipedia spew of facts and boring safety (viz., 2014’s forgettable double-feature, “The Imitation of Everything.”).

In a phone interview with Davies, the Stanford Daily talks with the legendary auteur about his artistic kinship with Dickinson, Marlon Brando, and the good movies he’s seen lately. (Hint: not many.) This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

The Stanford Daily (TSD): This is the first biographical picture of yours. What’s it like to make a film like this as opposed to autobiography or a literary adaptation? 

Terence Davies (TD): Well really, I responded to three things in [Emily Dickinson’s] life. One, she was very ill with homesickness when she was at Mount Holyoke [Dickinson’s alma mater]. And really ill with it — that’s why she was brought back home. When I was in primary school, I was about ten; I had a really bad chest infection and I was sent from Liverpool to North Wales for a month to convalesce. And I hated it! I just hated it — a fairly long time. I felt that in common with her.

Also, I really felt a rapport with her spiritual quest. If you really look at her poetry, she guards her soul, but she’s not actually sure whether there’s a God or there isn’t. And she always manages to imply something beyond that. I was brought up a Catholic, and I was very, very devout. Between 15 and 22, I had a long struggle with doubt. And I felt, Actually, it was all a lie. That there was no God. I’m an atheist now, but I know what that’s like: Going through your conscience, constantly. Examining what your soul is and what its point is.

She also comes from a very close family. I’m the youngest of ten, with seven surviving, and our family was very close — and I wanted it to stay like that forever. And I think she did, too. The problem with that, of course, is that the family can’t stay like that. It will get older, it will go away, it will die. [For Emily,] having come back to this haven [her family home, where she stayed for nearly all her adult life], over time, that haven becomes a prison. And when she realizes that, of course, it’s too late to do anything about it.

TSD: It’s being called your most autobiographical film.

TD: Well, it was only after I’d finished it and my manager said, “It’s your most autobiographical film.” And the penny dropped, I felt: “God, he’s right!” At the time, I just wanted to make a good film about somebody whose poetry I loved, and who should have had a claim while she was alive — that’s the other thing that moves me very very deeply, that she never got acclaim during her lifetime, because I think she is the greatest of all the 19th century American poets.

So I didn’t realize that. When you’re writing something, shooting it, putting it together — those things are in your subconscious, and they come out in a sort of refracted way. Which is what they should do. So you don’t know what you’ve done ‘til you’ve finished it. If you were to start from the reverse position, I think you’d destroy any kind of subtext that would be there. You’d be wanting every single shot to carry all this dramatic and emotional weight. And you can’t do that. The script has got to be true to what you felt or what I thought about her life.

Obviously, it’s not a definitive life — it’s a subjective view of her life through my prism. By the very fact of that, though, I’ve drawn on things that were personal and autobiographical. But I didn’t do it consciously.

TSD: You get such rich and fresh performances from your actors. I wonder if you could elaborate on a piece of advice you often give your actors: that is, you tell them not to “act,” but to “be.”

TD: Mmm. It’s very difficult to be. It really is. The instant is, to start thinking it in terms of “How do I act this?” Which is never really interesting. If the actor has an idea on what the character is, obviously they’ve got to find that themselves. I can give them only so much help.

But of course, film captures the small things and the fleeting moments. And those things only happen when you’re not acting — when you’re really feeling it. It’s the same with music. You can play a symphony very accurately, and it can be dead. But what musicians have got to do, they’ve got to be able to play what’s between the notes. It’s the same with acting. The actors have got to get what they think the character is, keep an overall structure with that performance within the disjointed way you shoot a film. If it’s felt, then it’s unbearably true. When it’s “acted,” you’re just conscious of acting.

TSD: How much of this approach is a response to your growing up with Hollywood cinema and the naturalistic style of acting we see there? 

TD: It was the fact that they were musicals. My sisters took me to the cinema; they loved American musicals and of course so did I. At six and a half, I was taken to see “Singin’ in the Rain” [1952]. I mean, my God, what an introduction. And that acting style, I wasn’t aware of style at all; I was far too young. Just as I wasn’t aware of moving a camera with music that I was thrilled about, I had no idea why. But it’s not so much the naturalism of it, it’s — it’s trying to capture what is the essence of character without layers of business. Either emotional or physical business.

In this country, when we first saw something like “On the Waterfront” [1954, starring Marlon Brando], it was revelatory. We always saw America as all-colorful, everyone was perfect. Then we saw “Waterfront” and saw that it looks cold all the time. That was why it was so breathtaking. It was made in the same year as “Young at Heart” [one of Davies’ favorite films, a musical starring Doris Day and Frank Sinatra], which is scarcely hard to believe now. But like all great innovations, it’s now become simply ossified and it’s descended into mannerism. You can’t watch that kind of performance anymore because you think it’s just sub-Brando — and even he became awful, even Brando became sub-Brando towards the end of his career.

So it’s not so much that — how they acted — what was more important to me, as a child, was that it was musical, it was in Technicolor, the camera moved — I thought it was just magical. I could remember going to see “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.” And at the end of “Lonesome Polecat,” the snow falls, and I thought, How did they get the snow to fall on [Howard] Keel? Of course, now I know — it’s inside of a studio — but at the time, I was eleven and I just thought, God, isn’t that magical!

TSD: In interviews, you often mention William Wyler’s “The Heiress,” with the great Olivia de Havilland, in relation to “A Quiet Passion” — what is it about the film that stirs you?

TD: Well! A) it’s gorgeous to look at, even if it’s in black-and-white. Absolutely gorgeous. But B) the formality of the language! People don’t understand that American English in the 19th century was very, very formal because we were the dominant power and you were imitating us. And [“The Heiress”] is beautifully written and delivered, as well as being a marvelous story about a woman being changed into something that she wasn’t. I think it was David Thomson who described Ralph Richardson’s performance [playing Olivia de Havilland’s domineering father] as “a study in hushed tyranny” — isn’t that a wonderful phrase? He’s such a swine, he’s so cruel.

But it’s also the way the emotions are played. The only time she [Olivia de Havilland] has one, big outburst — it’s when Morris [the suitor, played by Montgomery Clift] doesn’t come, on that night. And you can see her change into something much harder — not becoming cynical, but realizing the truth of the world. And it’s a wonderful story. Just so powerful.

Equally powerful, though, is “Letter from an Unknown Woman” [1948, directed by Max Ophuls, starring Joan Fontaine]. It has the same formality and gorgeous black-and-white — but a formality not only in the way they speak but also in the way in which it’s shot and cut. They’re both just so exquisite. I love that restrained emotion — I love that much more than everyone crying all over the place.

Master director Terence Davies talks Emily Dickinson, Brando, and growing up on movies
Max Ophuls’ “Letter from an Unknown Woman” (1948), starring Joan Fontaine — a seminal film for Davies. Courtesy of Jerry Murbach.

TSD: There’s a slightly fatalistic Ophulsian touch in that stunning 360-degree pan around the Dickinson living room. Everyone’s in their zone, it starts with Emily, then returns to her with this pained and scared expression on your [sic] face. Could you talk to me about that shot? It blew me away when I first saw it.

Mmm. Well, I come from a large family. We only had the radio, which wasn’t on all the time. You only switched it on for special programmes. So very often, I would often watch my sisters and my brothers and my mother doing ordinary things, doing nothing, just looking at the fire. And I wanted to show that. This is [Emily’s] little haven, this is what encompasses her world. I said to Emma [Bell, who plays young Emily Dickinson]: “At the end of the camera, when it comes back to you, something has died in you.” And that something is: Even at the peak of happiness and ecstasy, you know that it is already going.

TSD: In terms of modern cinema, are there any new films that you’ve enjoyed, that you’ve been shocked by how good they were, or—?

TD: No, I don’t actually go to the cinema anymore, because the best way to destroy something for you is to do it as a job. And I can’t watch films with fresh eyes. I find it very difficult to suspend my disbelief now. I’m conscious of no acting, music everywhere.

But two films which I actually saw on television which I did enjoy were “Foxcatcher” and “Beyond the Candelabra.” I thought they were very well made, very well done. And it was a real joy to actually watch someone make a film and you clearly know that you’re in good hands. They know what they’re doing. That is so rare. Before that — it must be ten or twelve years ago — it would be Bertrand Tavernier’s “Laissez-Passer” [“Safe Conduct,” 2002], which I liked very much.

TSD: “A Quiet Passion” is a glorious contradiction — by which I mean it is quite melancholic and glum, yes, but out of this comes an affirmation of life so strong it leaves you in soaring joy — crying and singing at the same time. Almost like a Hollywood musical.

TD: Oh what a lovely thing to say! But I didn’t want it to be glum! There’s nothing worse than someone going around glum for ninety minutes. What’s interesting in that? Nothing at all. For instance, Miss Vryling Buffam [Emily’s wildly vibrant best friend in “A Quiet Passion”] was Vinny’s [Emily’s sister’s] friend, not Emily’s.

When, on the Fridays when my sisters’ friends would come ‘round to do their makeup and go out to the dance, those friends were like Vryling! Wonderfully funny, wonderful to be around. And I thought, she’s my amalgamation of my sisters’ friends who radiated those evenings. So I wanted her to be irreverent because that’s much fun.

TSD: I see. Yeah, maybe “glum” was not quite the right word for it—

TD: (laughs heartily) No, no! I’m very good at misery and death. Just a bit short on the ol’ joie de vivre!

 

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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At the Stanford Theatre: ‘My Fair Lady,’ May 6 & 7 https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/04/myfairlady-3/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/04/myfairlady-3/#respond Thu, 04 May 2017 19:32:10 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1127026 The loverliest musical of all returns. “My Fair Lady” plays this weekend at the Stanford Theatre, Saturday, May 6 at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday, May 7 at 3 p.m. The 170-minute classic from Warner Bros., directed by George Cukor (“A Star is Born,” “Gone With the Wind,” “The Philadelphia Story”), is a graceful reimagining of […]

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At the Stanford Theatre: 'My Fair Lady,' May 6 & 7
Audrey Hepburn in a studio portrait for “My Fair Lady” (1964). Courtesy of Jerry Murbach.

The loverliest musical of all returns.

“My Fair Lady” plays this weekend at the Stanford Theatre, Saturday, May 6 at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday, May 7 at 3 p.m.

The 170-minute classic from Warner Bros., directed by George Cukor (“A Star is Born,” “Gone With the Wind,” “The Philadelphia Story”), is a graceful reimagining of the 1913 play “Pygmalion” by George Bernard Shaw, and, interestingly enough, surpasses its worthy original in fame, acclaim, pop brilliance and belovedness.

“My Fair Lady” stars Audrey Hepburn in the now iconic role of Eliza Doolittle, the poor English flower girl who is made over by the persnickety phonetics professor Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison). He makes a bet with a colleague that he can make even the lowliest Cockney sound like the Queen. Trying to maintain a cool distance, Prof. Higgins ends up growing accustomed to Eliza’s face, falling in love with her (as these things often go).

It was a hit in 1964 — a great year for musicals in general, like “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Mary Poppins.” The latter starred Julie Andrews, who played Eliza to Harrison’s Higgins in the original 1956 Broadway adaptation. But in 1964, because Andrews was an unknown in cinema (and because of a lack of instant name recognition), producer Jack Warner hired Hepburn to play Eliza over Andrews.

(Andrews got slight revenge at the 1965 Academy Awards, where she won the Best Actress Oscar for “Mary Poppins” over Hepburn.)

“My Fair Lady” was one of the last great Hollywood musicals. In the exciting time of turbulence that was the ’60s, this type of glossy, high-octane filmmaking faded away as the young turks of Hollywood became more frank and immediate in edgy subject matter. Once, “My Fair Lady” looked quaint to hippie and straight squares. Now, it is downright dizzying — a delicious thing to behold, and a masterful final gasp (no, deep breath) for Classic Hollywood.

Regardless of who was the better Eliza, it cannot be denied that “My Fair Lady” provided Audrey Hepburn an avenue on which she gave one of the best performances in Hollywood history. As critic Molly Haskell writes, “Hepburn wore clothes better than any other actress ever has; it’s an essential element in her persona. And ‘My Fair Lady’ was an exceptional showcase for her — when she emerges the fair lady, wowing even arid Rex Harrison, she is sublime in her Cecil Beaton period costumes.”

Roger Ebert opines: “‘My Fair Lady,’ with its dialogue drawn from [George Bernard] Shaw, was trickier and more challenging than most other stage musicals; the dialogue not only incorporated Shavian theory, wit and ideology, but required Eliza to master a transition from Cockney to the Queen’s English. All of this Hepburn does flawlessly and with heedless confidence, in a performance that contains great passion.”

The tender handling of the performances is due to master actor’s director George Cukor. Says Dave Kehr on Cukor’s direction: “Cukor doesn’t try to hide the stage origins of his material; rather, he celebrates the falseness of his sets, placing his characters in a perfectly designed artificial world. Every frame of this 1964 film bespeaks Cukor’s grace and commitment — it’s an adaptation that becomes completely personal through the force of its mise-en-scene. Rex Harrison deserved his Oscar for his performance as Henry Higgins, and Audrey Hepburn (though her singing voice is dubbed) is an enchanting presence and a clever actress.”

“My Fair Lady” has been the 12th most widely attended film at the Stanford Theatre — 44,957 tickets since 1989. It first played at the Stanford on Sept. 8, 1990; it was last played in July 2015.

 

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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The sad and the beautiful: Val Lewton and Vincente Minnelli at the Stanford Theatre https://stanforddaily.com/2017/04/28/bedlambadbeautiful/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/04/28/bedlambadbeautiful/#respond Fri, 28 Apr 2017 07:12:46 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1126652 Once upon a time, producer Val Lewton’s horror films were only considered the “B” (or secondary) part of a movie double-bill; a slick flick like “The Bad and the Beautiful” was the “A,” or the main attraction. This weekend, the tables will be turned. The Stanford Theatre screens a new 35 mm print of Val Lewton’s […]

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Once upon a time, producer Val Lewton’s horror films were only considered the “B” (or secondary) part of a movie double-bill; a slick flick like “The Bad and the Beautiful” was the “A,” or the main attraction.

This weekend, the tables will be turned. The Stanford Theatre screens a new 35 mm print of Val Lewton’s “Bedlam” (1946) as the “A.” The supporting feature is Vincente Minnelli’s “The Bad and the Beautiful,” (1952), the uber-meta MGM melodrama that offers a fascinating look into the world of classical Hollywood from one of its masterminds.

“Bedlam,” the last of Lewton’s unmatched cycle of thrilling “B”-terrors, plays Friday, April 28 to Sunday, April 30 at 7:30 p.m. and also at 3:50 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday.

“The Bad and the Beautiful,” Hollywood’s quasi-modernist tribute to its own genius, plays on all three days at 5:20 p.m. and 9 p.m.

“Bedlam” features Boris Karloff (Frankenstein’s monster) in one of his greatest roles: Master Simms, the brutal head of the titular asylum. When the inhumane practices of Bedlam catch the attention of actress/amateur sleuth Nell Bowen (Anna Lee), Master Simms kidnaps and commits her. It’s about the gap between theory and practice (can Nell the social crusader walk the walk?), female resistance to patriarchy, the blurring between real and nightmarish states and (as is typical of the melancholic Lewton) existential loss inside the soul. It has high-art aims for a surprisingly low-crust “B”; the 18th century English painter William Hogarth receives a screenwriting credit, because Lewton wanted the film to look like one of his grotesque prints from hell (“The Four Stages of Cruelty,” 1751).

“The Bad and the Beautiful” (1952) is not a Lewton film; rather, it’s director Vincente Minnelli’s tribute to artists like Lewton — and a fascinating glimpse at the Hollywood studio system, during its own heyday! This movie-about-movies is not as well-known as its popular older brother, Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Blvd.” (1950), but “The Bad and the Beautiful” is its equal in pathos and performance. It’s a flashback yarn in three parts. Kirk Douglas plays a washed-out producer who wants to get his three favorite people in the biz — a starlet (Lana Turner), a director (Barry Sullivan) and a screenwriter (Dick Powell) — together for one final film. But they aren’t eager to work with such a brutal, manipulative and scheming cad. Each explain their side of the story — what a genius Kirk was, and what a monster.

The sad and the beautiful: Val Lewton and Vincente Minnelli at the Stanford Theatre
Lobby card for MGM’s “The Bad and the Beautiful” (Courtesy of Jerry Murbach).

Though it’s not a direct parallel to Lewton (he tended to leave directors like Jacques Tourneur alone to do their own business on set), one sequence serves as a magnificent ode to the Russian-born producer. The scene: Kirk and Barry are trying to make the most out of a schlocky horror assignment (“Doom of the Cat Men”) neither of them want. Director Barry hates the Cat Man’s costume. But Kirk comes up with an ingenious solution: Don’t show the Cat Man. Barry asks, Will that work? Kirk responds, Of course it will. When Kirk gives Barry his reasons, he gives us the perfect epigram for Lewton’s cinema, and the weird, spooky phenomenon of watching movies:

“What scares the human race more than any other single thing? The dark. Why? Because the dark has a light of its own. All sorts of things come alive!”

(“The Bad and the Beautiful” is one of the many great Minnelli films, but he would outdo himself 10 years later with the even more self-aware “Two Weeks in Another Town” [1962], a modernist snuff film of classic Hollywood’s own suicide — and brief resurrection? This weirdie is even more obscure. I’m convinced J-L Godard made his best ’60s film, ‘‘Contempt,’’ as a response to ‘‘Two Weeks.’’)

This double feature wraps up the Stanford’s month-long retrospective on the films of Val Lewton. The Russian immigrant-producer infected his films with a pungent melancholy that gains extra poignancy for being released as “B” movies (they were meant to be schlocky, disposable, forgotten) during the years America was fighting World War II (1942-46). As the head of a B-movie horror unit at RKO Studios, Lewton was only beholden to three rules: budgets of less than $150,000, running-times of less than 75 minutes, lurid titles (“The Curse of the Cat People”) that couldn’t be changed. Otherwise, Lewton had free reign to make whatever movies he wanted. Even the exploitation-style ad campaigns (“Lovely woman … Giant killer-cat … The same ‘person’! … IT’S SUPER SENSATIONAL!!”) couldn’t do anything to morph the deep stoic respect Lewton bestows upon subjects as diverse as childhood trauma, slavery (in ‘‘I Walked with a Zombie,’’ America’s greatest sin), the mentally insane and patriarchally oppressed Woman.

Val Lewton could have made schlocky quickies — good money, but totally disposable products. He didn’t. Instead, across nine films in a space of only five years, he crafted an intense world crippled by gnawing loss, deep anguish, amnesia of history, amnesia of a dark past and a quasi-suicidal desperateness. It ranks alongside Preston Sturges’ ’40s screwball comedies as the greatest hot streak of classic Hollywood.

 

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Cold jazz: Stuart Davis is ‘In Full Swing’ at the de Young https://stanforddaily.com/2017/04/26/stuartdavisdeyoung/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/04/26/stuartdavisdeyoung/#respond Thu, 27 Apr 2017 06:30:58 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1126460 The Stuart Davis exhibition, “In Full Swing,” does anything but. It’s a retrospective (up until August 6 at the de Young) of a virtuoso painter, known for his jamming of chic European modernism (Cubism, the Matisse fascination with color) and new innovations of America (jazz, cinema, the Model T). The exhibition covers an incredible range of sides […]

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Cold jazz: Stuart Davis is 'In Full Swing' at the de Young
Stuart Davis’ ‘The Mellow Pad’ at the de Young (Courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco).

The Stuart Davis exhibition, “In Full Swing,” does anything but.

It’s a retrospective (up until August 6 at the de Young) of a virtuoso painter, known for his jamming of chic European modernism (Cubism, the Matisse fascination with color) and new innovations of America (jazz, cinema, the Model T). The exhibition covers an incredible range of sides to this not-boring city slicker — proto-Pop Art still-lifes of commercial goods, small-scale landscapes of Paris and Massachusetts, sprawlingly urban murals (with a hint of Marxism), all-over even paintings, and finally (the formula he finds for Masterpiece Art), nicely colored puzzle-pieces clashing with quasi-jazzy “spontaneity.” Depending on the way you look at him, Davis is either cool or cowardly. To combat incoherence, his spontaneity is exactingly worked out, before brush has hit the canvas. The payoff is immediate, running parallel to the brisk chill (not bad) of all his Dada-ish collages and post-Matisse/proto-Techicolor palates.

Judging from the one-note humor of his canvases (a comic panel — how lowbrow! — is the front page photo of his “Lucky Strike 1924” newspaper — how cheeky!), Davis never seems to have been plagued with gnawing personal angst. To him, Abstraction, hedonism and private pleasure (which he instantly rejected) were rascally diversions to the real purpose of art. To Davis, Art is best in an Apollonian (calm, controlled, even) state. His works craft a mutt mix that, like it or not, is American in its ambition and hit-or-miss in the landing.

The earliest paintings of “In Full Swing” show that, in his hunt for elusive American-ness, Davis happened upon an idea of it fairly quickly, never really expanding it to any radical extreme. He lived and breathed the 20th century and had his finger on the pulse of what made the new age so speedy. With “Edison Mazda” (a tongue-in-cheek still life of a blue lightbulb), the only hints of vibrancy are the active brush swipes near the crocheted mat; otherwise, it’s a painting representative of the Davis aesthetic: illusionistic, movie-like, give ‘em a virtual representation of the thing but never the thing itself. “Salt Shaker,” one of the huge successes, hums with subtle vibrations. The “Salt Shaker” lines’ uniform individuality (the ideal of American rhetoric) is festered with a jazzy energy that the later works completely lack.

Starting around 1928, Davis takes up a Paul Whiteman/George Gershwin approach to art, prettifying and domesticating the ugly city while latching on, floatie-style, to the jaggedness of city jazz. Prime example: In his “New York Mural” (1932), the sources (Mexican muralists, “Rhapsody in Blue,” Art Deco) come all spat out in a diluted state. “New York Mural” traces back to Davis’ inferiority complex (common amongst most Americans), which says that America — land of the coarse and vulgar — has to aim for “refinement” and “juxtaposition” with European gilt culture to achieve sweet satisfaction. The assumption is a good one in theory, but in practice, Davis leans too close to slavish Europeanism (see: the pretentiously-titled “Colonial Cubism”).

Rather than embracing a scruffy “lowbrow,” Davis goes for gilt. Thus, we get virtual illusions like his Parisian city works of the late 1920s. These postcard-ready landscapes are stuck in time by an anti-motion enamel coating, which sparkles like wolf’s teeth after a round of Colgate and Odol — a hint of mint which dissipates after about an hour. “American Painting” is just as frozen, despite its bold appropriation of a Duke Ellington lyric: “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got swing.” (And apparently, the reverse is true.) This sweet jazz is a hodgepodge of forms, all rigidity, fixed into position, découpage free of any signs of last-minute life.

Nearby, however, “Tropes de Teens” complicates my image, since it has an exciting half-awareness of its virtuality; this even further ossified remix of “American Painting” seems to presage Pop Art’s obsession with itself, its glorious repetitions.

Davis wows when he’s half-finished and not thinking in any direction, and for no audience but himself. In certain mid-period works (“Ultra-Marine,” 1943), Davis predicts the revolutionary, evenly applied, equalizing all-overness of Jackson Pollock. We get lost in the pinball-machine beauty of interlocking blocks interrupted by syncopated green dots. Elsewhere, “Landscape, Gloucester” (1922/1954/1957), despite being as irritatingly overworked as everything else, is much richer because the lines (as in “Salt Shaker”) are not exactingly rigid — the overall work denied the chance to become bogged down by perfection. The wet black and Jacques Demy red of “The Paris Bit” (1959) and the self-contained rhythms of “Salt Shaker” are cut from the same cloth.

Probably his saddest and most touching work are the Odol pictures, two still-lifes of mouthwash, tragically stuck in the past. Maybe in the 1920s, the viewer would have known the function of Odol. Today, however, we only see the wide gulf of a time foregone. The past-ness is, like chipping paint, an accidental byproduct of Davis’ work — yet no less compelling. The slogan (“it purifies!”) gives me no hint on what it even does. Something approaching Surrealism creeps in. The known-today-forgotten-tomorrow quality of advertising is far more apparent than in Davis’ obvious satire of the same subject in the 1950s, just a few steps beyond. The ’50s ad-blitz pictures aren’t half as interesting as the Odol gawking at itself in the mirror, in a weirdly stirring way.

 

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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At the de Young: Danny Lyon’s ‘Message to the Future’ and ‘The Summer of Love’ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/04/26/lyonsummerlove/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/04/26/lyonsummerlove/#respond Wed, 26 Apr 2017 16:15:22 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1126457 Montage is at the heart of three compelling exhibitions at the de Young Museum. In Danny Lyon’s photo gallery “Message to the Future” (closing this Sunday, April 30), the source of the pathos is the splicing together-act itself – snapshots of humans culled from disparate corners of the world (Civil Rights activists, undocumented workers, Colombian street […]

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Montage is at the heart of three compelling exhibitions at the de Young Museum. In Danny Lyon’s photo gallery “Message to the Future” (closing this Sunday, April 30), the source of the pathos is the splicing together-act itself – snapshots of humans culled from disparate corners of the world (Civil Rights activists, undocumented workers, Colombian street kids, prisoners, drifters like Faye Dunaway in “Bonnie and Clyde”), the eyes all meeting at the center of a deeply sympathetic camera lens. Downstairs, “The Summer of Love Experience: Art, Fashion & Rock ’n’ Roll” (up until August 20) offers a local look into a crucial part of American history, when San Fran was the center of pop culture and the smell of revolution was pungent. The buzz and life of these two exhibitions drifts slightly upstairs to “Stuart Davis: In Full Swing” (up until August 6), where a destructive interference effect (endless modernist collages canceling each other out) ensures that most of Davis’ sweet-jazz canvases blur in the recalling mind. (I’ll talk about the Davis exhibition in tomorrow’s paper.)

At the de Young: Danny Lyon's 'Message to the Future' and 'The Summer of Love'
Danny Lyon, “Kathy, Uptown, Chicago,” 1965. Gelatin silver print, Image: 24.1 x 23.9 cm (9 1/2 x 9 3/8 in.); sheet: 35.6 x 27.9 cm (14 x 11 in.). Collection of the artist, L174 © Danny Lyon, courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York. Courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Danny Lyon’s “Message to the Future,” celebrating fifty-plus years of the illustrious photographer’s career, is too hard to leave. One of the 20th century’s most powerful photographers, this rightful heir to Robert Frank’s “The Americans” snaps shots with a confidence that hits your spirit in gentle waves. As the official photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Lyon captured lunch counter sit-ins, the March on Washington, police brutally beating nonviolent activists. For five years (1962-67), he joined an outlaw motorcycle gang, capturing the casualness of societal outsiders with interviews and arresting portraits. For 14 months in the early 1970s, he took pictures of Texas prisoners, going far beyond the social importance of such work into a rarely attempted terror. His prolific filmmaking oeuvre (which I have to start immediately) covers a range that’s just as wide: homeless Colombian kids (“Los Niños Abandonados,” 1975), tattoo artists (“Soc. Sci. 127,” 1969) and his own father and son (“Two Fathers,” 1982).

It is Lyon’s willingness to stay close to his subjects (encouraging them to look straight into the camera, skirting to the edge of private danger zones in frighteningly cinematic close-ups) that gives these pictures their social and artistic power. Like Frank, he understands America because he is unafraid of intimacy. But unlike Frank, he shows Apollonian calm and reservation. He eschews the frantic Frank need to capture the ephemeral present, here, now! Instead, time and experience are allowed to pool into untouched, never busy, still lives. The relaxed, unreadable look of Kathy (one of Lyon’s subjects, with whom he fell in love) hints at so much rich backstory; she is like that supporting character in a film you want to follow, but never will. They are the more interesting people anyway. The world belongs to them. Time and again, Lyon’s photography understands this principle: (1) The boy with a tucked, button-down shirt in “Uptown, Chicago 1965” is uncertain and unbearably proper, in a world far away from his three snarky, tough-looking friends, (2) the hazy men shooting lonely pool like a scene straight out of Ken McKenzie’s 1961 docudrama on Native Americans, “The Exiles,” the unexcitable city hangs just centimeters away from sight and (3) the hauntingly foreshortened hobnail boots of two undocumented workers near the Mexican border – seen only for what they do (work), not who they are (face).

At the de Young: Danny Lyon's 'Message to the Future' and 'The Summer of Love'
Ruth-Marion Baruch, “Hare Krishna Dance in Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury,” 1967. Gelatin silver print. Lumière Gallery, Atlanta, and Robert A. Yellowlees. Courtesy Special Collections, University Library, University of California Santa Cruz. Pirkle Jones and Ruth-Marion Baruch Photographs. Courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

“The Summer of Love” presents a different view of city life – less beautifully fragmented, more specific and kooky, but with a still notable diversity. The exhibit marks the 50th anniversary of the legendary Summer of Love in San Francisco, when more than 100,000 young people came in droves to the neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury in 1967 to kickstart a revolution. History has tended to relish the failure of the so-called hippie movement, as the 1970s hangover of Law-and-Order Nixon, Watergate, oil crises, and deep American cynicism kicked in. But “The Summer of Love” isn’t meant to be either a come-on or a come-down; it’s somewhere in between, with a timeliness that invites a look-back into history to see what the hippies got right.

It’s pretty shocking to see the scale of the experiment. In Jim Marshall’s 1968 photo of a Grateful Dead concert on Haight Street, you can’t even see the sidewalk, it’s so teeming with hairy bodies. In a poster advertising three free classes of “survival school,” or “how to stay alive on Haight Street,” the roster of activities is telling: Monday nights at 8 p.m., you learned about drug lore (“how to keep from getting killed for kicks”); Tuesday nights, same time, there was sex education (“how to avoid gangbangs, rape, VD & pregnancy”) and a lesson on Street Wisdom (“how to avoid beatings & starvation, how to survive without money”); Wednesday nights, experienced hippies taught the babyish newcomers the way to live. Buttons with witty truisms announced who you were to the world, and where you stood:  “I am a beautiful people” – “I’m manic depressive, be warned” – “If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem, [Black Panther Eldridge] Cleaver” – “I’m a member of the L.S.D. for lunch bunch” – “Would Christ carry a draft card?” – “Mary Poppins is a junkie” – “I’m from Berkeley, but I’m not revolting!” – “You’re sitting on my hair.” In a letter typical of the times’ fervor, a 12-year-old girl asks to be part of the hippie movement: “My sister dose (sic) not like Hippies and will not let me come into her room. My mother under stands me and Hippies. I took some clay and made a hippie love Peace sing (sic) and where (sic) it around my neck as a necklace. I understand Hippies.”

The “poster shop” – psychedelic designs announcing the next performers at Bill Graham’s famous Fillmore Auditorium – is a real treat. Only in 1960s SF could you have a double bill with swamp-rocker Leon Russell and Miles Davis, or comedian Lenny Bruce and art-rock Mother of Invention Frank Zappa. The Fillmore posters want to look cool while flirting with complete unreadability. Most pass the first test.

They talk about “living history,” but when it’s something as massive and popular as the Summer of Love movement in San Francisco, you really feel it. As I was looking at copies of the San Francisco Oracle (the hippies’ short-run yet wildly popular magazine), I couldn’t help noticing an old man with a snazzy silver vest and smart spats. He didn’t have the smell of hippiedom on him; but the subtle smile and bashful look on his face betrayed the disguise. Two teen boys (maybe relatives or sons?) were letting him reminisce. “After a while,” he explains to the young’uns, “most people ended up selling all the copies of the ‘Oracle’ they had. But I never did. I still keep all of these” – he points to three covers – “and, of course, the Monterey Pop edition.”

Suddenly, the room came alive. Yes, tons of other people were there who certainly lived through the Summer of Love. Yes, the aging, brown Monterey magazine, fixed behind protective glass, gave me a glimpse into that particular event. And yes, the label on the wall explains how Bay Area newspapers would give 10 copies of the “Oracle” to any young person who wanted to sell them as a means of financial support. Yes – the history is there and on the museum wall. But what makes the exhibition real was someone delving deep into their memory, beaming with pride at having lived through it. A buzzing part of history in San Francisco surged through the room – and it’s damn exciting to be next to it, however secondhand. What the hippies harnessed that hot ’67 minute was a mind-boggling synchronicity of goals — something we probably won’t see in America anytime soon.

 

 

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

 

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Alexander Nemerov: Stanford’s art history preacher https://stanforddaily.com/2017/04/07/nemerov-magazine/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/04/07/nemerov-magazine/#respond Fri, 07 Apr 2017 07:20:40 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1124740 How does a bulldog, Yale chap, son of a poet, and an arts man, nephew of the late Diane Arbus from Vermont and St. Louis — Rachmaninoff and heavy metal lover — grow up to be our hero and a scholar? Most of Stanford knows the name now — Alexander Nemerov. He is said not to […]

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How does a bulldog, Yale chap, son of a poet, and an arts man, nephew of the late Diane Arbus from Vermont and St. Louis — Rachmaninoff and heavy metal lover — grow up to be our hero and a scholar?

Most of Stanford knows the name now — Alexander Nemerov. He is said not to teach art, but to preach it; he does not deliver lectures, but sermons. Taking on a semi-mythic register for his idiosyncratic lectures, Alexander Nemerov is one of Stanford’s most beloved, confounding and discussed professors.

But this is not his goal. Fame or not fame, the name of his game is art history.

“Teaching is totally humbling,” Professor Nemerov tells me after a long Friday of work. “At least teaching the way I teach, because you’re just putting yourself out there. I like the challenge of that, and I believe in the passion of it.”

Before landing his current position as Chair of Stanford’s Art and Art History department, Nemerov forged a long and winding path through academia. From 1992 to 2000, he served as an assistant professor (later professor) at Stanford. From 2001 to 2012, he taught and led the art history department at Yale, where, in 2007, he began teaching his now-famous survey class of Western art from the Renaissance to the present. It soon became Yale’s most popular class; his final semester there, more than 500 students shopped it, despite a cap of 300 set to accommodate people inside the Yale University Art Gallery where it was held. In 2012, much to the consternation of the Bulldogs, he left Yale to teach again at Stanford.

The first year teaching at Stanford was a tough one.

“It was a really down experience,” Nemerov says. “It was demoralizing, a small class in Annenberg [Auditorium — now torn down]. I remember it being the first day and I couldn’t believe that there were that few people who wanted to take it.

“But overall, my lectures are better here. I work much harder at Stanford. At Yale, I gave lectures twice per week; here, because of the quarter system, I do them three times a week.

“It’s just practice; the more I do them, the better my thought process gets for how to give a lecture.”

Now, his Introduction to Western Visual Art class, Art History 1B — which covers, in a ten-week span, artists as broad and diverse as Giotto, Rembrandt, Goya, Matisse, Salomon, Pollock and Basquiat — had over 200 students enrolled last fall quarter, not including Palo Alto residents, Continuing Studies members, and random undergraduates curious to hear Nemerov’s freeform, poetic, Agee-like thoughts on art.

It’s been a long time coming to arrive at the Nemerov we see and hear on a weekly basis. Before, he hadn’t the gumption to teach an entire survey course. “The reason I didn’t start teaching the survey course until 2007,” he says, “was cowardice.”

Three crucial experiences changed that line of thinking; the first was his family. “I had kids, and that made life seem much more intense and precious to me.”

The second was reconnecting with his famous relatives: the poet Howard Nemerov (his father) and the photographer Diane Arbus (his aunt).

“As a scholar,” he says, “I began to make contact with the work of my father and my aunt. For the first time in my life, I looked them in the face in such a way that I was not totally intimidated. I saw clearly and positively that they believed in art religiously, that they were truthtellers, that they weren’t dogmatic. Arbus was trying to see what a human being is, just that, nothing else. And I think my dad was, too.

“That essentially religious conception of being an artist, I suddenly saw, and I thought, ‘Why can’t that be me? Life is short, why not?'”

The third was an affinity for the 40s.

“Writing the Val Lewton book [“Icons of Grief,” a masterful analysis of Lewton’s B-movie horror films of the 1940s through the films’ supporting actors], I realized that the 40s were incredibly important to me as a time of pathos and loss and permanent destitution in the world. A way of tapping into the deep importance of sadness and melancholy and their connection to history.”

With all of this, Nemerov moved away from traditional art historical work to the kind of offbeat, intuition-based writing for which he is renowned today.

But he is not unaware of the hostility towards his work, which is too frequently impassioned for some.

“A lot of people don’t like what I do,” he says, “because they don’t go to scholarship to have some guy be a good writer. That’s not why they read it. They’re reading it to find out the facts about what happened, which just seems absurd to me. It seems like a category mistake. It’s almost like I’m an artist and my medium is scholarship.”

* * * 

Professor Nemerov’s style is quirky, to say the least. His fifty-minute classes straddle the line between lecture and actorly performance. As he struggles for the right words to distinguish Margaret Bourke-White’s eroticism (“the sex appeal of steel”) from Edward Weston’s (“Who knew radishes had so much sex in them?”), he takes lots of generous, natural pauses, looks at the floor with an alternatively meandering and obsessive focus, contorting his body, physically wrestling with a description of a Raphael Jesus stretching His limbs to the heavens. Action helps him find words.

At his employ is a smorgasbord of dazzling rhetorical moves that make his connections all the more convincing. Part of his worldview is considering the world “diachronically” — that is, tracking artistic sensibilities over massive chunks of time, an Old Master tendency popping up in modern form in unexpected ways. Rothko was Rembrandt, he argues.

One of his pet phrases, the “strong misreading” (taken from the literary critic Harold Bloom), involves seeing an artist as “working through” a previous artist; “strong misreadings” make a past artist’s sensibilities come alive in the strong misreader’s era. So Cy Twombly, in his childlike scrawls and intimate canvas sizes, “strongly misreads” Jackson Pollock’s painterly pirouettes and uncensored expressions of the tortured mind.

Nemerov often takes what he calls “leaps of faith” — placing two items in dialogue that may seem to have nothing to do with each other on the surface. His “leaps of faith” are exactingly researched hunches (never anything as crude as guesswork), that, say, Thomas Eakins’ 1895 painting “Swimming” (a group of boys skinny-dipping in a pool of water where once there was a mill, in before-during-after poses that give the painting a cinematic, stop-motion-animation feel) is a precursor to the eerie, halting time seen in the Abraham Zapruder film that captured President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Nemerov argues that a fruitful connection lies in knowing that Jackie Kennedy, an art history major, slept the night before the assassination underneath Eakins’ painting, capturing the dual senses of time moving forward (the photo time of the naked boys, the cinematic time of the Zapruder film) and one’s presence slowly fading out (the lost mill, the assassinated President).

In the spirit of jazz, he goes on “riffs.” A prime example is the above Kennedy-Eakins comparison, which was a branch of a larger discussion on how the Abstract Expressionist painter Morris Louis best captured the spirit of the Kennedy/Camelot era of the early 1960s. His riffs are rambling musings, on derelict bits of detail that have nothing and everything to do with the paintings he’s describing. Talking about the myth of late Jackson Pollock, he detours and describes three melodramas by the film director Douglas Sirk in hilarious detail. The riff is constructively indulgent, oddly touching — for it shows the necessity of melodrama, of the kind of writhing, passion-filled emotion (in Pollock’s “Lucifer” and in Sirk’s “Imitation of Life”) that speaks human truths.

These tools converge to produce lightning bolts of insight, compact like a haiku:

“Does life get into art, and if so what does it look like?”

“Learning to see is the longest apprenticeship of all the arts.”

“We need not behold a flower for it to grow.”

They are general enough so that an lecture attendee can connect it to their own life, offering a rich multitude of readings. These statements partially solve the problems that come with addressing more than two hundred listeners, each with their own distinct backgrounds, identities and experiences.

In all of this, Professor Nemerov explains that his goal is to “not worry about the propriety of the connections [he makes]. It’s just to worry if they make sense, if they’re intuitively plausible and exciting to people.”

In his searching delivery, the words seem to come to him in real time; by and large, they do. On the process of preparing for a lecture, he says, “I’m intuitive, so now I’m learning to trust that more. Before, I felt like I needed the safety net of notes. Now, no notes. Just trust myself. I’ve always liked that Who song, ‘Pinball Wizard,’ — you know, ‘that deaf, dumb, and blind kid/sure plays a mean pinball.’ That has always made sense to me.”

Though Professor Nemerov won’t explicitly state what he expects from his students (“I have zero learning goals in my syllabus, because how can you?”), he hopes to develop students’ skills to think critically about art beyond thinking “this is good” or “this is gorgeous.” When he says, “It’s never pretty picture time in my class,” you understand what he means. Undergraduates like Eva Hong ’20 see it: “Before, I just looked at paintings and admired the beauty of it. Now, I see there are stakes behind certain depictions of beauties.”

Nemerov also proposes something that is radical and sounds impossible: the merging of art with real life. He aims to instill a critical artistic perspective in his students, encouraging them to integrate this in everyday life, demystifying the derisively-dubbed “fuzzy” perspective. It’s a tall order, especially at an institute like Stanford, where, as Nemerov observes, “we [art and art history majors] are said not to deal with the real because we deal in art.” Nemerov’s advice is to stop and contemplate nature, people and the self with the same patience Munch and Van Gogh drew upon to create “Starry Nights.” Art makes real-world experiences more legitimate and powerful; walking in the city (Norman Lewis’s and Vincente Minnelli’s New York), swimming in the ocean (Matisse, Miro), or stargazing at night (Munch, Van Gogh) become much more alive and resonant when those raw experiences are channeled through an artist’s distinct vision. When Nemerov says that art creates our real world, (1) he believes it, (2) you do, too, since (3) to a large degree, it’s true.

To provoke this radical melding, Nemerov ties the art he covers with the world at large — in social, historical and political terms. The slick businessmen whom Mark Rothko wanted to upset with his Four Seasons murals are “Trumpian.” The wandering, sauntering, bohemian spirit of Gustave Courbet’s anti-hierarchy paintings gets picked up by the Ginsbergs and Kerouacs of the Beat Generation. What he wants to develop in his students is “historical consciousness” — a “liberating” idea, to think that who people were in the past were who they are in the present. The fascistic, Nazi circumstances under which Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon’s emotionally devastating “Life? Or Theater?” gauche paintings are crafted, are not simply forgotten in the modern world; the hate remains. And the commitment to artistic expression, too.

“If you have a strong or active historical consciousness,” Nemerov says, “then you’re never quite always in the present.”

“It has to do with memory. I remember a lot, and so it’s very easy for me to call up a sense of where I was on a given day. The past doesn’t seem that remote or hazy to me.”

The students are transfixed and moved. Holly Dayton ’17 wanted to take a Nemerov class before graduating; with Art History 1B, she was not disappointed. “Understanding how the world sees art,” she says, “is understanding the world.”

Tracy Roberts ’18, majoring in International Relations, calls Nemerov’s survey course “the greatest class I’ve ever taken.”

Roberts goes on: “For him to open up his class to people not in art history, I think, is phenomenal. You can tell that this is bigger than him. It speaks to something — maybe the word is insightfulness? — beyond being proficient in your own career.”

Then there are the rhapsodes, the hosannas. Angela Black ’20 gushes on the “mindblowing” aspects of Nemerov’s style. “His lectures touch my soul; I’m almost reduced to tears by the things he says.”

Black says, to her, “it’s not just some made-up façade, he’s not presenting anything, it is all so genuine.”

Other students also enjoy the performative aspects of Nemerov’s lectures and their embrace of intellectual openness. Alison Jahansouz ’18 says, “His lectures are performances, which is very different from other classes I’ve taken. You’re getting a taste of Western art, but you’re also getting Nemerov’s interpretation of it. There are lots of parts where you’re allowed to disagree; he encourages that, and it’s definitely taught me how to look at art.”

Is the Nemerov off the stage same as the one on it? Yes, only quieter, more reserved. Nemerov often gets the question: “Well, what’s the difference between you when you’re lecturing and you when you’re not?” And, as he says, “besides the performative aspects of it, there’s no difference. Absolutely none.”

* * *

“One is ecstatic because one is deeply unhappy with the world.”

Nemerov says this in relation to Francisco Goya, whose feverish, Romantic style conveys the anguishes of the inner mind — the seedy noir-ish underbelly of all that Rembrandt privacy. But beyond connecting Goya from Rembrandt (or, later, Rothko), the saying has a specific political weight to it. For the date of the Goya lecture is Wednesday, November 9, 2016 — the morning after Donald J. Trump was elected President of the United States. Perhaps surprisingly, the auditorium is more packed than usual. The room reels with anguish, numbness, panic. Nemerov marches in, trying to ignore the friends embracing each other in hugs and tears of solace, solidarity. Knowing his mission, he delivers the lecture without missing a beat. His tone is more apocalyptic and brooding than usual. He has not pushed the political point, but it has been made, regardless.

The manic-depressiveness of that statement — “one is ecstatic because one is deeply unhappy with the world” — so perfectly captures the temperature of Cubberley that morning, of perhaps all American artists and citizens. In times of desperation and dejection, one marches on, lifted by the ecstasies of anger, of the belief that art (whether Goya or Ernst Lubitsch’s anti-Nazi satire “To Be Or Not To Be”) can offer a constructive path towards resistance of injustice.

With that Goya lecture, the point of Nemerov’s class is placed in its starkest relief. His lectures are about maintaining your presence in the world, balancing the sociopolitical, the historical and the artistic, with a special emphasis on developing the latter (so easily dismissed, it seems).

Nemerov thinks that, today, “being moved is in short supply.” He aims to change that, one lecture at a time.

* * *

Alexander Nemerov’s future classes include AMSTUD 124A, “The American West,” an interdisciplinary American Studies course, taught this spring; ARTHIST 1B, “Introduction to the Visual Arts: History of Western Art from the Renaissance to the Present,” taught in Fall 2017; and two in Winter 2018, an undergraduate lecture course on American photography since 1960, and a freshman Introductory Seminar called “The Sisters: Poetry and Painting.” He will also lead a Sophomore College seminar on the American painter Edward Hopper, putting his works in dialogue with films, paintings, and novels; applications are due by 8 a.m. on April 11, 2017.

This spring, he will travel to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. to deliver the Andrew W. Mellon lectures on “The Forest: America in the 1830s.” Topics of discussion include Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emerson, the Hudson River Painters, Edgar Allen Poe, and the forest as a metaphor for the unruliness of life and how this gets into art. 

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Cat people and leopard men: Val Lewton at the Stanford Theatre https://stanforddaily.com/2017/04/01/val-lewton-stanford/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/04/01/val-lewton-stanford/#respond Sun, 02 Apr 2017 06:06:02 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1125163 Zombies and ghost ships and cats — oh my. For the month of April, the Stanford Theatre will screen the films of legendary horror producer Val Lewton. All nine of Lewton’s horror films will be screened in gorgeous 35mm film: “Cat People,” “I Walked with a Zombie,” “The Leopard Man,” “The Seventh Victim, “The Ghost Ship,” “The Curse of the […]

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Cat people and leopard men: Val Lewton at the Stanford Theatre
Lobby card for “I Walked with a Zombie,” produced by Val Lewton, directed by Jacques Tourneur. Courtesy of Jerry Murbach.

Zombies and ghost ships and cats — oh my.

For the month of April, the Stanford Theatre will screen the films of legendary horror producer Val Lewton.

All nine of Lewton’s horror films will be screened in gorgeous 35mm film: “Cat People,” “I Walked with a Zombie,” “The Leopard Man,” “The Seventh Victim, “The Ghost Ship,” “The Curse of the Cat People,” “The Body Snatcher,” “Isle of the Dead” and “Bedlam.” “Bedlam” screens in a brand new 35mm print, prepared by the Library of Congress for this occasion.

Although David W. Packard, the stalwart owner of the Stanford, has screened Lewton’s movies in the past, this is the first time he will dedicate an entire retrospective to all nine Lewton horrors (or should we say, “terrors,” as Lewton preferred?)

Seventy years on, these masterworks of dread still chill the bones. Lewton, a Russian immigrant, took his melancholy with him on the boat to America. It infected his work when he was named the head of a B-movie horror unit at RKO Studios in 1942. There were only three rules: budgets of less than $150,000, running-times of less than 75 minutes, and rigid, lurid titles (“The Curse of the Cat People”) that couldn’t be changed. Otherwise, Lewton had free reign to make whatever movies he wanted.

Lewton could have made schlocky quickies — good money, but totally disposable products. He didn’t. Instead, in nine films in a space of only five years (the length of American involvement in World War II), he crafted a sad vision of a world crippled by gnawing loss, deep anguish, amnesia of history, amnesia of a dark past, and suicidal desperateness.

Lewton’s influences were wide-ranging: from Dostoevski to William Hogarth, from “Jane Eyre” to pulp porn. An unforgettable team of collaborators helped sustain his vision during the trying war years. The director Jacques Tourneur, with a pictorial feel for the unknown. The black actor Darby Jones as the zombie we walk with, the spirit of the slaves who stalk the sugar plantations. The French actress Simone Simon, the face of the displaced Eastern European, of repressed Woman.

Here’s my rundown of the five double-bills this April. All are essentials.

“Cat People” (1942)/”I Walked with a Zombie” (1943). The scary movie that started it all, and one of the greatest explorations of race, slavery and the loss left in the wake.

In “Cat People,” Simone Simon is a Serbian sketch-artist who refuses to consummate her marriage with a dashingly bland chap (Kent Smith); when she feels aroused, a condition in her bloodline makes her feel…rather catty? In “Zombie,” a Canadian nurse visits a sugar plantation island in the Caribbean, haunted by the history of slavery. She must cure the plantation owner’s mute wife, whose sickness may be a voodoo hex conjured up by the island’s slave descendants.

The best moments of “Cat People” (the beast’s growl morphs into a bus screech, running footsteps, spacey echoes in a rec pool) make up the entirety of “Zombie”: a hermetically sealed atmosphere of woe, tiny particles of terror packed together from various fears (social, psychological, racial, sexual). Lewton only suggests, even though we know what’s being suggested. We know “Cat People” is about sexual repression and ethnic homogenization; we know “Zombie” is about America’s hands stained with the blood of slavery. They are the skeletons in our closet — there and not there, acknowledged and yet ignored.

In both, the camera keeps needing to look away from the inexplicable horrors it shows. This can’t-look-away quality is courtesy of one of Hollywood’s great abstract directors, Jacques Tourneur. Like Vincente Minnelli, Tourneur fits into abstraction because he uses Hollywood plots as an excuse for deeper explorations into indefinite moods and emotions. Tourneur’s chief emotions — gloriously on display in “Zombie” and “Cat People” — are mania, oppression, empathy for outsiders who don’t fit the model of happy, healthy society.

“I Walked with a Zombie” plays Friday, March 31 through Sunday, April 2, at 7:30 p.m. — and 4:45 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. “Cat People” plays all three days at 6:05 p.m. and 8:50 p.m.

“The Leopard Man” (1943)/”The Seventh Victim” (1943). For me, these are Lewton’s two grisliest and depressing films — a stellar double-bill.

The New Mexican village of “The Leopard Man” is the site of a series of brutal serial murders against young Mexican women. There is a moment in this film — we only see seeping liquid beneath a door — that will shock you with its horrific poetry. Here, Lewton’s pet themes are in full effect: the focus on the marginalized edges of society, fetishizing the fear of the unseen, the bizarre appeal of the occult.

The latter is given its own 71-minute elaboration in “The Seventh Victim”  — or, “The Big Sleep” if Bogie and Bacall were up against satanic cults. Choke-stuffed with too many twists to count on one hand, stuttering in and out of coherence, the characters are as lost as we are. When it starts, a schoolteacher is investigating the disappearance of her sister. When it ends, you simply won’t believe it. I still don’t. The ending literally sucked the breath out of me. I had to rewatch it three times on DVD, just to make sure my mind wasn’t playing jokes on me (it wasn’t) and Lewton was seriously suggesting what I thought (he was).

“The Seventh Victim” plays Friday, April 7 to Sunday, April 9 at 7:30 p.m. — and 4:45 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. “The Leopard Man” plays on all three days at 6:10 p.m. and 8:55 p.m.

Cat people and leopard men: Val Lewton at the Stanford Theatre
Lobby card for “Bedlam” with Boris Karloff and Anna Lee. A must-see. Courtesy of Jerry Murbach.

“The Curse of the Cat People” (1944)/”The Ghost Ship” (1943). The moving sequel to “Cat People,” and the captain of a cruiser goes drunk with fascism.

“Cat People” was about feminine and ethnic repression; its daughter “Curse of the Cat People” is about the hallucinations of childhood. A little girl with an active imagination (Ann Carter in a spirited child performance) is visited by the ghost of her mother (Simone Simon of “Cat People”). It’s a story about a mother’s loss, the broken family, how grief pollutes the hopeful heart.

In “The Ghost Ship”, there is a hardening of arteries: wall-to-wall cruelty, the grisly smothering of a sailor with an anchor chain — and it only gets more hysterical from there. Though its title may seem to have no connection with the non-ghostly story, it does make a startling insight on the supernaturality of irrational power. We are reminded of this on the daily. The captain (Richard Dix) gets a thrill off killing people because his status and position guarantees no one will ever stop him. The desperateness of the positive ending only masks what we know is the real ending. This is only a movie. Out there, the Dixes rarely meet justice.

“The Curse of the Cat People” plays Friday, April 14 to Sunday, April 16 at 7:30 p.m. — and 4:50 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. “The Ghost Ship” plays on all three days at 6:10 p.m. and 8:50 p.m.

“The Body Snatcher” (1945)/”Isle of the Dead” (1945). Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster meet, and a plague spreads across a Greek island.

“Body Snatcher” stars the two giants of classic horror: Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff.  I haven’t seen it, so I can’t speak for or against it. But come on: It’s Lewton.

He had the good sense to cast Karloff again in the apocalyptic “Isle of the Dead.” The situation is old yet always ripe: isolate some people in a remote setting away from civilization, tell them a plague is upon them, and watch them slowly turn against each other. Playing a Greek general guilty of unspeakable war crimes, Karloff is Frankenstein’s monster without the pathos — a chill in his heart — his untrusting face blocking access for those foolish optimists who try to read a hint of humanity in everyone. Martin Scorsese considers “Isle of the Dead” one of the eleven scariest films he’s ever seen: “There’s a moment in this Val Lewton picture that never fails to scare me. Let’s just say that it involves premature burial.”

“The Body Snatcher” plays Friday, April 21 through Sunday, April 23 at 7:30 p.m. — and at 4:35 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. “Isle of the Dead” plays on all three days at 6:05 p.m. and 9:00 p.m.

“Bedlam” (1946)/”The Bad and the Beautiful” (1952). The last of Lewton’s horror cycle, and Hollywood’s quasi-modernist tribute to the cycle’s greatness.

“Bedlam” features Boris Karloff in one of his greatest roles as Master Simms, the brutal head of the titular asylum. When the inhumane practices of Bedlam catch the attention of nurse/amateur sleuth Nell Bowen (Anna Lee), Master Simms kidnaps and commits her. It’s about the gap between theory and practice (can Nell the social crusader walk the walk?), female resistance to patriarchy, the blurring between real and nightmarish states, and (once again) a festering sense of a loss inside your gut that can’t be explained.

“The Bad and the Beautiful” (1952) is not a Lewton film; rather, it’s director Vincente Minnelli’s masterful tribute to artists like Lewton — and a fascinating glimpse at the Hollywood studio system during its own heyday. It’s a flashback yarn in three parts. Kirk Douglas is a washed-out producer who wants to get his three favorite people in the biz — a starlet (Lana Turner), a director (Barry Sullivan), and a screenwriter (Dick Powell) — together for one final film. They aren’t eager to work with such a brutal, manipulative and scheming cad. Each explain their side of the story — what a genius Kirk was, and what a monster.

Though it’s not a direct parallel to Lewton (he left directors like Tourneur alone to do their own business on set), one scene serves as a magnificent ode to Lewton. It’s when Kirk and Barry are trying to make the most out of a schlocky horror assignment (“Doom of the Cat Men”) neither of them want. Director Barry hates the Cat Man’s costume. But Kirk-as-Lewton comes up with an ingenious solution: don’t show the Cat Man. Barry asks, Will that work? Kirk responds, Of course it will. When Kirk gives Barry his reasons, he gives us the perfect epigram for Lewton’s cinema, and the weird, spooky phenomenon of watching movies:

“What scares the human race more than any other single thing? The dark. Why? Because the dark has a light of its own. All sorts of things come alive!”

“The Bad and the Beautiful” is one of the many great Minnelli films, but he would outdo himself 10 years later with the even-more-self-aware “Two Weeks in Another Town” (1962), a modernist snuff film of Classic Hollywood’s own suicide — and brief resurrection?

“Bedlam” plays Friday, April 28 to Sunday, April 30 at 7:30 p.m. — and 3:50 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. “The Bad and the Beautiful” plays on all three days at 5:20 p.m. and 9:00 p.m.

 

For more on Lewton, I highly recommend Stanford professor Alexander Nemerov’s book on Val Lewton, “Icons of Grief: Val Lewton’s Home Front Pictures” (2003), where he analyzes with poet’s precision “I Walked with a Zombie,” “The Ghost Ship,” “Bedlam,” and “The Curse of the Cat People.”

 

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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A perfect movie week? ‘The Red Turtle,’ ‘Personal Shopper,’ ‘I Am Not Your Negro’, ‘Song to Song,’ ‘Frantz’ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/03/28/perfect-movie-week/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/03/28/perfect-movie-week/#respond Wed, 29 Mar 2017 06:24:53 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1125141 In recent memory, has there been a more inspiring week for film? Think on it: Malick’s latest joint, Studio Ghibli is back, Kristen Stewart fights texting ghosts (and herself), and James Baldwin goes to the movies. All of these were released in the past week or two—not to mention the still-playing “Get Out,” “La La Land,” “Moonlight,” “The Salesman,” “Hidden […]

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In recent memory, has there been a more inspiring week for film? Think on it: Malick’s latest joint, Studio Ghibli is back, Kristen Stewart fights texting ghosts (and herself), and James Baldwin goes to the movies. All of these were released in the past week or two—not to mention the still-playing “Get Out,” “La La Land,” “Moonlight,” “The Salesman,” “Hidden Figures,” “After the Storm,” “Raw,” and the cat movie. Here’s a quick scan of this unusually rich week of cinema:

A perfect movie week? 'The Red Turtle,' 'Personal Shopper,' 'I Am Not Your Negro', 'Song to Song,' 'Frantz'
A Casper David Friedrich moment in Studio Ghibli’s “The Red Turtle.” (Courtesy of Sony Picture Classics)

“The Red Turtle” (directed by Michaël Dudok de Wit)

This French animated tearjerker bowled me over the most, by which I mean I bawled. The Japanese bastion of great film art, Studio Ghibli, co-produced this haunting gem, about a sailor stranded on a desert island and his encounters with the uncaring flora and unique fauna (the titular tortoise). Only one English word (“Hey!”) is screamed, so it’s essentially a silent film. All the better—to place us in a more patient, attentive mood.

Dutch writer-director Michaël Dudok de Wit has crafted an existential fairy-tale about family, love, death, nature’s shocking neutrality, human cruelty, growing old, and what the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi saw as mankind’s cicada syndrome—our inability to stretch our minds beyond our own tiny scale. Ghibli director Isao Takahata (“Tale of the Princess Kaguya,” “Only Yesterday”) served as “artistic producer” for this venture, and in a way, it functions as a sister film to Takahata’s moving World War II melodrama “Grave of the Fireflies” (1988). Takahata’s aesthetic is writ large in every one of de Wit’s minimalist cels, delicate/devastating string cues, and oscillations between concrete plot and abstract atmosphere. We are asked to observe the grainy smoothness of sand and endless, still horizons—how that blue heaven in the sea can swallow us up without a taste. It’s skimpy on “character” because it’s explicitly a fable—and one of immense beauty. 80 minutes.

 

A perfect movie week? 'The Red Turtle,' 'Personal Shopper,' 'I Am Not Your Negro', 'Song to Song,' 'Frantz'
Kristen Stewart plays a “Personal Shopper”. (Photo courtesy of IFC Films)

“Personal Shopper” (directed by Olivier Assayas)

This Kristen Stewart-led pseudo-horror from Olivier Assayas is both an effective thriller and a smart deflation of its own non-logic, of the virtual emotions conjured up by movies. Stewart hates her job as the personal shopper of a high-profile celeb model, she wants to escape Paris, but she can’t because she’s a medium trying one last time to contact the spirit of her dead twin brother Lewis. Like Deborah Kerr in “The Innocents,” Stewart has nobody to corroborate her story of paranormal activity. She is utterly alone, fighting against the spirits of a ghostly underworld, her own self and her/our ever-mounting schizoid terror.

“Personal Shopper”‘s not-cliché hauntedness doesn’t just stay in the theater; it stalks us back to our beds. Assayas is working through one of the still-unsung masters of silent movies, the French director Louis Feuillade, who birthed the modern-day paranoid thriller, where an ordinary landscape hides a vast conspiracy. Feuillade’s trippy, proto-TV serials (“Fantomas,” “Judex,” “Les Vampires”) used “normal” Parisian buildings as the perfect backdrop to channel abstract fear in the modern world: abstracted through networks of masked madmen and venomous vamps. Assayas transposes that always-being-watched creepiness (which our civilized selves must constantly work to ignore) into the 2010s: iPhones as the new (un-)normal. Like Feuillade, Assayas suggests these bumps-in-the-night—signs we tell ourselves mean something—might just be in our head. But are they? We’re hoodwinked time and again by Assayas/Stewart, by virtual screens, by not-there illusions (by cinema!). Our senses run faster than our brain—and yet we don’t mind the hoodwinking. 110 minutes.

 

A perfect movie week? 'The Red Turtle,' 'Personal Shopper,' 'I Am Not Your Negro', 'Song to Song,' 'Frantz'
James Baldwin in Raoul Peck’s “I Am Not Your Negro” (Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures).

“I Am Not Your Negro” (directed by Raoul Peck)

Through the words of James Baldwin, Raoul Peck recreates the shouting-match of 20th century American history. He uses key texts by Baldwin as a starting-point: “The Fire Next Time,” “The Devil Finds Work” (Baldwin’s excellent dissection of race in American cinema), and the notes for an unfinished novel that would have traced modern Black history through the lives of Dr. King, Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers.

“I Am Not Your Negro” provides a rich model for how to more explicitly integrate questions of race into 21st century documentary forms.. Peck’s film shows how a meandering, jump-from-one-topic-to-the-next tone (the Peter Watkins approach) is needed in the best documentary cinema. His doc pays tribute to American film criticism in its striking series of clips, grappling with the history of American movies (i.e., the history of American racism), of erratic back-and-forths: from Sidney Poitier uplift to Stepin Fetchit shame.

“I Am Not Your Negro” is part of a larger artistic effort to understand the place of words, Truth, and acts of social dissent, now. It has a remarkable fluidity that proves how documentaries, when done with guts and boldness, give art the tools to enact social change. 90 minutes.

 

A perfect movie week? 'The Red Turtle,' 'Personal Shopper,' 'I Am Not Your Negro', 'Song to Song,' 'Frantz'
Patti Smith (l) and Rooney Mara (r) in Terrence Malick’s “Song to Song” (Photo courtesy of Broad Green Pictures).

“Song to Song” (directed by Terrence Malick)

I wouldn’t be surprised if Terrence Malick’s “Song to Song” ended up being my favorite of his post-“Tree of Life” experimental work. I say that since it’s the one I struggled hardest to enjoy—and that’s, I think, a good sign. For the first two hours, I was sighing deeply and tapping my feet, feeling every second of the second hour. I worried that Malick had finally gone off the deep end into his own murky funk—but then! for the final half-hour, I was bolted to my seat, tracing the steps which led to my sudden love for what seemed like a self-indulgent boor.

“Song to Song” is something of a postscript to the first Malick work from last year, “Knight of Cups,” which derived its boldness from expansiveness. “Cups” dealt with the history of cinema, of Los Angeles, and of Malick’s family background, all filtered through a dense web of references from movie, literature, and philosophy. By contrast, the focus of “Song to Song” is much smaller: the increasingly mind-numbing sexploits of two musician gonna-be’s (The Great Gosling and Drab Fassbender), trying to figure out at what point in their coke-fueled affairs, orgies, betrayals did they stray off the cosmic art path. Michael plays God with women, treating them as heaps of meat and sex-dolls in ways that make your skin crawl; Ryan almost gets there, but Rooney Mara (MVP) asserts her presence and helps Ryan (more importantly, herself) see the spirituality s/he’s missing.

It starts off as a scurrying send-up of Late Malick. A volley of techniques is deployed: hoary fish-eye lens, sleek “Point Blank” apartments for savage Rooney-Ryan sex (50 shades of hate), the camera’s nose turned toward the Sun, five ring-around-the-rosie narrators, every third shot is an actor twerking or jumping up-and-down in mock mania. (Malick loves to choose his actors’ least appealing, most artificial moments—most human?) All this busyness stiffens Malick’s hard-earned new cine-language.

But suddenly, almost like a miracle, “Song to Song” ditches the melodramatic and flat Fassbender narrative (the real thorn and the less interesting thread) and achieves a stunning coup de cinéma, soaring along with Rooney and Ryan finding love and meaning with the fury and frenzy of Malick’s previous 2010s films (“To the Tree of Cups in Time”).

Its closest cousin is Richard Lester’s splintered, cold-shower melodrama “Petulia” (1968). What Lester’s bitter pill was to the hippy-dippy ’60s, Malick’s spiritual balm is to the post-fracture 2010s: Necessary for their time, offering contemplation in an age where we need stimulation, fast, now. Malick’s film believes (either naïvely or bravely) in Romance’s eleventh-hour triumph over an ugly atmosphere of misogyny, drugs, loveless sex, selfishness, snobbery, lack of modern faith and hip nihilism. 129 minutes, with Natalie Portman, Cate Blanchett, Holly Hunter, and (in the best cameo) Patti Smith as a punk Mr. Miyagi of love.

 

A perfect movie week? 'The Red Turtle,' 'Personal Shopper,' 'I Am Not Your Negro', 'Song to Song,' 'Frantz'
Pierre Niney and Paula Beer in François Ozon’s “Frantz” (Photo courtesy of Music Box Pictures).

“Frantz” (directed by François Ozon)

François Ozon’s “Frantz”the cocksure remake of an already great work of art, Ernst Lubitsch’s “Broken Lullaby”—toes the fine line between a poetry of directness and straight-up cliché. Both films are based on the 1931 play by Maurice Rostand called “The Man I Killed.” In the aftermath of World War I, a romance blooms between a writhing, tormented French soldier (Pierre Niney) and the fiancée (Paula Beer) of the German soldier he killed. It was a hit in France; at last year’s Césars (the French Oscars), it tied Paul Verhoeven’s “Elle” for most nominations.

If I agree with the ideals of “Frantz,” I disagree with how it’s executed. Its arty, prestige qualities (“I’m Making an Important Statement about Humanity” and “I’m Improving a Film That Didn’t Go Far Enough”—a deadly partner dance) make it too clean, too hell-bent on an unearned humanism and modernization. Its best shots are inspired by the contemplative paintings of Casper David Friedrich; but these moments whisper “kitsch.” (Watch the scenes of the sailor mulling over his fate in “The Red Turtle” to see Friedrich absorbed — an allusion, not a blatant reference to/copping of CDF’s hard-earned style.) Its chief gimmick is switching colors to match the moods of our heroes: a slick black-and-white in scenes of sorrow, faded colors in scenes of joy and beauty.

But “Frantz” is really quite ambitious, and its patchwork ideas are knockouts. Choice example: the über-patriotic nationalists in a French café singing “La Marseillaise” as Paula Beer and a few other Germans shift nervously in their seats. It’s a great inversion of the famous “Casablanca” scene and its off-putting optimism; it’s even got shades of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” the Nazi song from the dark Bob Fosse musical “Cabaret” (1972). Ozon’s adaptation also brings out the queerness of the two soldiers’ relationships. Such tension was there in the gay Rostand’s original play, but were lost in adaptation by the hetero Lubitsch; Ozon—a seminal figure of modern queer cinema—restores them to rich effect. 113 minutes.

 

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

 

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