February, Pt. 1

PRO:

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Fritz Lang, 1933)
Best opening scene ever?

An Unforgettable Summer (Lucian Pintilie, 1994)
The first 40 minutes or so would have you believe Pintilie is the unsung cinematic heir to Tolstoy, with a Levin-esque husband whose self-defeating instincts drive him to say stupid crap like “Don’t regret marrying me,” as his wife wittily rejects the advances of another man and changes the subject when he gets insecure. But Pintilie considers the politics of compassion with a reserved cynicism all his own. On the one hand, politics are motivated by petty squabbles at home; on the other, these squabbles have a touch of the humanitarian otherwise alien to wartime tactics. Love the moment when Scott Thomas lovingly tells a servant, “don’t cry,” before screaming the same.

They Were Expendable (John Ford, 1945)
Ford had been using Wayne the same way from the beginning: here he represents an outlet for frustration brewing amidst the whole company, but his toughness e.g. almost leads him to an amputation. But then he weirdly adjusts his petulance to accommodate the romantic subplot, demanding that a conference between generals end so he can chat with his lady. Other interesting bits: Ford cuts to a stoic Asian woman as the Pearl Harbor is announced; the stupid jokes of young up-and-comers are met with convincingly awkward laughter; exchanges on the paucity of supplies, simmering with indignation underneath, are played with civility. I have to admit that Ford’s battle scenes, which prioritize special integrity over much human interest, tend to bore me.

pro:

The Hitchhiker (Ida Lupino, 1953)

The Wrestler and the Clown (Boris Barnet, 1959)

Good Dick (Marianna Palka, 2008)
Everything kind of works here, although not in a tight or connected way. Lots of contradictions abound—Ritter is a well-adjusted stalker, Palka gets off to porn but objects to use of the word “cock”—but they don’t seem interrogated so much as poked at. Ritter should’ve been more Leaud-in-Mother and the Whore, following through on his grand acts rather than proving such an obvious non-match for the heroine. Palka glosses over disbelief-suspending turns like her growing tolerance for the dude with a dead, placid slickness. Her character is kind of vital in some ways: the way acts of genuine sympathy repulse her rings distantly true. But I can’t get over the impression that this woman represents a fantastically stunted, primal version of herself.

Time of Favor (Joseph Cedar, 2000)
The love triangle stuff is good, sometimes better than good: only a serious-intentioned director would cut from a heartbroken man fainting to casually reassessing heartbreak as an intellectual challenge. Michal is an extraordinarily unsympathetic, albeit independent-minded love interest, whose cruelty mars her without dimming her attractiveness. The film totally skids out of control when the focus is shifted to the explosives subplot.

mixed:

The Secret Agent (Christopher Hampton, 1996)
Not bad, with a moment or two of beauty, and an opening fraught with hushed performances and well-considered compositions. Things get one-note towards the extended Winnie-Verloc confrontation and never quite recover. It struck me that, although Hitchcock’s adaptation is fine and this one is serviceable, the ideal director for this material might have been Alan Clarke, whose Beloved Enemy traffics in long, elegant conversations between powerful men, with latent unease all but swept under the carpet.

CON:

The Merchant of Venice (Michael Radford, 2004) [second viewing]

DNF:

Time Between Dog and Wolf (Jeon Soo-il, 2006)
As beautifully shot as any Hong movie; shame about the thin wisp of a narrative. Jeon likes to make everyone passive-aggressive towards his protag, which usually has a chillier and less nuanced effect than he’d probably like given the art-film posturing.

Hard, Fast and Beautiful (Ida Lupino, 1951)

Four Nights With Anna (Jerzy Skolimowski, 2008)

Literature:

PRO:

Howard’s End (E.M. Forster, 1910)
Forster comes dangerously close to idealizing Margaret, even though her near-perfect inner nature is sometimes misinterpreted as passivity. All she really has is an awareness of how thornily incompatible the worlds around her are, but Forster does relatively little to downplay the lovability of this worldview. Nevertheless, the Wilcoxes’ class condescension has its virtues—indeed, sometimes the Wilcox ideology and Forster’s narrating voice get almost offensively intermingled. I guess Forster needs a character like Margaret to defend himself against the lower classes, whom he has serious trouble identifying with.

As I Lay Dying (William Faulkner, 1930) [second reading]

Much Ado About Nothing (William Shakespeare, 1598-9)
These comedies just progressively get better, in my opinion. The Beatrice-Benedick sparring is like an apology for the extremes of Katharina and Petruchio; Don John may be Shakespeare’s least charismatic villain and is all the more fascinating for it.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (William Shakespeare, 1594-6)
Great means are taken to preserve psychological plausibility in the midst of transformations even more sudden than e.g. Katherina’s. The silliness of Demetrius’s newfound love for Helena is interpreted in a bevy of ways.

The Secret Agent (Joseph Conrad, 1907)
There’s an emotional directness one has to deal with in Conrad’s exploration of madness. Reading Heart of Darkness, I couldn’t: abstraction seemed to err towards exaggeration. But my reaction to this novel was so different I’m tempted to give that one another look. The inner depths of a singular personality still concern Conrad more than, say, physical gestures. But something about the rhythm of this really worked for me: oftentimes a seemingly weighty exploration of internal turmoil will be matched by quiet, inadequate expression. (E.g., Winnie’s incoherent grief, or the Professor’s small, miserable stature.)

pro:

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain, 1884)

The Merchant of Venice (William Shakespeare, 1596-8)
Dunno if Shylock’s commingling of rousing series of rhetorical questions, itself a wrench in the play’s prescribed anti-Semitism, is enough to defuse the pleasure Christian couples unabashedly take in his downfall.