Sirk x 2; Sturges x 2; Praise; oh yeah, and Muriel's Wedding

I'm watching a lot of films for school, hence repeat viewings that I'd otherwise put off, or, in the case of Muriel's Wedding, happily do away with altogether.

Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956) [2nd viewing]

Usually I'm not a screen-cap kinda guy, as I suspect were Andre Bazin to blog, neither would he be. But check out the above composition, expressive of everything that's great about Sirk: nostalgic pleasure (i.e. the etching), sorrowful defeat (i.e. Dorothy Malone hunched over), the evocative location (i.e. water), all quiet, all together, all simultaneous. Earlier on, we have Lauren Bacall's introduction to the suite: gaudy, lush production design fills the frame, swelling music fills the soundtrack, and Bacall looks downright nonplussed, at a standstill between the surrounding beauty and the knowledge that she's being duped. Even minor characterizations are really satisfying, like the bartender who persistently sides with Robert Stack in action, but never in emotion, suspended in dubious loyalty. The "happy" ending, a bit of a lift from Notorious in my opinion, significantly shifts emphasis away from the few who prevail back to Malone. A quibble: the camera ominously rests on Stack's dad's portrait, shortly before [SPOILER]. Sirk is too good for superfluous foreshadowing.

Muriel's Wedding (P.J. Hogan, 1994) [2nd viewing]

Just godawful, but it presented a challenge to my descriptive abilities when trying to slam it in a class discussion. (Yes, apparently this is more representative of quality Australian cinema than Praise or any film by John Duigan.) I was tempted to write: "Hogan reduces adult interaction to middle-school terms"--but s/he (sorry, too lazy) fails to even capture the social repercussions of the latter. Yes, the social persecution of Muriel is exaggerated. BUT, yes, Muriel is herself a pitifully inept outcast. That said, I'm not seeing any graceful attempt to juggle levels of heightened realism here, just a disengaged wash of cartoon and soap opera impulses.

Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959) [2nd viewing]

It's no Written on the Wind, but it has its pleasures. Liked how Annie is intrusive but well-meaning; liked how, a la the above image, Sirk gives us at least one striking composition in which latent ugliness underlies catharsis. (I'm referring to Annie's deathbed speech to Lora, in which Sarah Jane's smiling photograph is sandwiched in between the two. This drew audible laughter from my audience, and it is funny in the sense that no other director would dare draw such sharp attention to the thorny contradictions of melodrama, for fear of falling into camp.) Didn't like boyfriend's sudden, unnatural transition from lover to oppressor, which is inexplicable apart from giving the audience a cheap jolt; didn't like Sirk's deficient understanding of the typical ego of a teenage girl, or perhaps people in general. (E.g. Sarah Jane's earnest admission of "you've been wonderful" after humiliating her white friends.) I have subdued affection for this: Sirk's mastery is evident throughout, but he can't quite find a satisfying way into the material.

The Great McGinty (Preston Sturges, 1940)

Sturges's debut, but it seems he'd had everything figured out. There's a dialectic here between McGinty's laconic pragmatism and his wife's admiring intellectualization that nearly functions as an allegory for the relationship between early Hollywood auteurs and auteurists, even if the latter had yet to come along. McGinty has vague aspirations to greatness, but he also laughs incredulously when earnestly called decent. (Hawks, anyone?) Sturges derives a lot of humor from the way motivations are naturally obscured in real life: loved the way McGinty's future wife shyly disguises an earnest marriage proposal as a business transaction; also loved the way McGinty shamelessly glances at her legs and she weakly retorts with the barely credible, “What’s that got to do with it?” And I laughed very hard at the chauffeur's vague, boring, and rather endearing one-sided conversation.

The Great Moment (Preston Sturges, 1944)

Lesser Sturges, but a singularly dry biopic all the same. Token romance is played so casually it barely exists; Morton, the ennobled discoverer of ether as an anaesthetic, is also a belligerent psychopath who orders his patients to open their mouths and abruptly begins smashing glasses at a store. The crudity of 19th century dentistry, rather than merely representative of past blunders, is played for derisive comedy, and Sturges doesn't fail to temper exaggerated tributes demanded by friends (“every hospital should be named after him!”) with low-key ones made by others ("maybe one or two hospitals...") A lesser film might have portrayed Charles T. Jackson as a "sarcastic drunkard" and an incompetent failure alongside our hero Morton, who in Sturges's film merely looks humorless next to Jackson's funny, credible resignation. And then there's this film's equivalent of the chauffeur's platitudes: a hilariously mundane series of intertitles detailing every stop Morton makes while thumbing through a medical encyclopedia. Why? Why not! It seems the running theme I'm getting from this Sturges double-header is an analysis of the ways in which essentially noble men are dangerous and immature...

Praise (John Curran, 1998)

As embarrassed as I am to link here, I guess I just did.

Proof; Romper Stomper; Some Came Running; Stella Dallas; Wuthering Heights

Proof (Jocelyn Moorhouse, 1991)

I was starting to like this for a bit when it became clear Martin was an off-putting, albeit disadvantaged guy, but it soon turns into a preposterous celebration of his pleasurable condescension, and gets worse with the introduction of a caregiver-client relationship absurd in countless ways.

Romper Stomper (Geoffrey Wright, 1992)

Repulsive, although Crowe has a credible moment or two. Questions of glorifying racism aside, how about the device of throwing in an epileptic fit to bring two coy lovers together? Somehow offense pales next to contrivance.

Some Came Running (Vincente Minnelli, 1958)

Shortly after the screening, a friend told me Minnelli had previously worked as a designer of window displays for upscale shops; a light bulb subsequently blazed directly above my head. I actually think Minnelli’s instinct to “frame” moments a certain way hurts him, resulting in theatrical gestures that bare vague relation to what’s going on dramatically. (E.g. Dave’s first kiss with Gwen, silhouetted to induce awe, or Dave cradling Ginnie at the end, which only serves to obscure the prior complications of their relationship.) I still enjoyed it, especially Sinatra’s dry, sarcastic portrait of resignation, sometimes funny and sometimes merely cranky.

Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937)

Really liked the interplay between Stella and Steve: she’s a hedonistic dreamer, he’s handsome but reserved. He gets in the way of her dreams, but in the process seems like a pretty reasonable guy. The “other man” is ugly but fun, establishing a weird, uneven dialectic. Once the film hits Stella’s later years, her daughter grows into a saintly, embarrassed but forgiving girl, and Vidor doesn’t manage to milk much from the mother-daughter stuff, aside from a wonderful ending that he might owe to the way Stanwyck anxiously bites her scarf.

Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte, 1847) [2nd reading]

The contrast between Cathy I / Heathcliff and Cathy II / Hareton forms a jagged structural shape in the mind, in which the only antidote to a curse of heartache is the joining of two souls opposed in nature, rather than aligned. Regarding the latter couple, it’s impossible to promote a healthy, symbiotic relationship between a condescending intellectual and a strong, humble idiot in any direct, sentimental way, only to suggest it works because each party receives something in the process of trying to rationalize his or her flawed position. So bad adaptations of the novel not only miss but inevitably distort the point.

Bronte isn’t unlike Pialat in her approach to hysteria as an idea-free vehicle for emotion—Cathy violently seeks out a second opinion while blindly asserting her own. Then there is Nelly, who voices an opposing pacifist sensibility that proves crude and cruel next to the material she struggles to conceptualize. In class I felt strangely defensive of the “weird” Bronte, anti-social by some accounts. Surely such a refined sensibility doesn’t discriminate entirely out of shyness, which casts doubt on the coolness of those giving the accounts.

Ten songs for the week…

Brendan Benson – "I’m Blessed" (One Mississippi)
Cardinal – "If You Believe in Christmas Trees" (Cardinal)
Jim Carroll Band – "Wicked Gravity" (Catholic Boy)
[Most of this album is affected and pretentiously intellectual (going she said that "everything is permitted" makes you picture Carroll manically congratulating himself for conflating Dostoevsky with VU), but it's a testament to his post-addiction sanity that this song exists.]
Catherine Wheel – "Delicious" (Adam and Eve)
Elvis Costello – "Blue Chair" (Blood and Chocolate)
[Aside from This Year's Model, there isn't a Costello album I consistently like. (Get Happy!! is a distant second.) Blood is no exception, but at least we get this song.]
Dire Straits – "Tunnel of Love" (Making Movies)
[The only case where Knopfler's supposedly R. Thompson-influenced playing seems to grasp the contrast of Thompson's work.]
Elastica – "Line Up" (Elastica)
[A bit of a Sleater-Kinney thing going on here: the straight punk songs don't work too well for me, but sometimes there's more contrast, more "duelling" in the guitar work, like in this.]
Brigitte Fontaine – "Le Noir c’est mieux chois" (Comme a la radio)
[I'd take Francoise Hardy over Fontaine any other day, but this is more nuanced than any Hardy song.]
Gladhands – "Kill ‘Em With Kindness" (La Di Da)
[Feels a lot like one of Jason Falkner's better songs from the same era.]
Squeeze – "Pulling Mussels (From the Shell)" (Argy Bargy)
[Amazing, as are several other songs from Argy Bargy and East Side Story.]

Melville; The Nerves; Renoir

Moby-Dick (Herman Melville, 1851)

Good dialogue; pity about the whaling lore. And days later, a reference book’s worth of whale info has hardly made a dent. Sort of like a book on the Fourth of July in which numerous commercial fireworks are meticulously described, gently sarcastic attempts at profundity are made, and the big night itself is a mixture of subdued awe and anticlimax, which just goes to show how hard it is to differentiate the moral implications of slaying relatively inexpressive animals from blowing shit up. I had quite a mixed reaction to this, and am curious if I’d like Melville’s other work more, but it’s not encouraging that this is considered the masterpiece.

The Nerves (The Nerves, 1976)

For 12 minutes, Jack Lee was the greatest songwriter in the world. Each song here is a concise, devastating, 2-minute hall of mirrors in which individual parts and sections subtly contradict each other. His solo material, unfortunately, is mediocre aside from, well, rehashed material from this E.P., which is realized to perfection in its original form anyway.

The Golden Coach (Jean Renoir, 1953)

My favorite ‘50s Renoir film. In some ways it resembles Lola Montes, in which archetypal male lovers are given equal weight by a conflicted heroine, but I found Coach protag Camilla’s nasty, witty allure more palatable than Lola. Riccardo Rioli—what the hell happened to this dude?—is especially wonderful as a doggedly persistent bullfighter whose self-presentation is presented as more of a personal affront to Camilla than his own failing.

Campion; Roeg; slasher movies; Austen; Handel and Beethoven

Sweetie (Jane Campion, 1989)

I’d seen this before, and vaguely remembered its stilted, poetic tone. It’s bizarre: whimsy bent on flagellating itself, Amelie gone depressive. It’s a mystery how Campion went from this, the edifying work of someone who finds herself unforgivably cold, to the pat, foregone Holy Smoke! in a mere ten years, one I plan to cease dwelling on as soon as I finish writing this sentence.

Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg, 1971)

Meh. Liked certain behavioral bits, especially the lead girl's irritated impassivity in the face of trauma. But Roeg's editing, while vague in its intentions, is vague and not exactly subtle. Sometimes it appears that We Are Like Them; sometimes We Are Different From Each Other. Got it. But why limit yourself to that register, aside from pleasing symbolism-hungry film studies majors?

Friday the 13th Part 2 (Steve Miner, 1981)

Not good. But I’m beginning to appreciate experiencing these films as social rituals a la getting drunk. Not all appreciations are healthy—see also the way Laura Mulvey’s execrable ideas seep into my consciousness, not unlike an extended hangover, for a period of several days following forced repeated readings of her stupid fucking essay.

Northanger Abbey (Jane Austen, 1817)

Uh, forget what I assumed about Udolpho: this is a precise indictment of both Radcliffe’s faults and her detractors’ careless exaggerations. Can’t think of an equivalent to the Gothic novel that I naively embraced at age 17—I dunno, Mystic River?—but can relate to Austen’s impulse to explain, over the course of a standard, albeit brilliantly plotted and observed, comedy of manners, why her tastes evolved out of a need to bridge the perilous gap between art and life.

On Handel and Beethoven

I’ve been wondering lately, in the process of briefly checking out a bunch of classical composers and concluding that I only really dig Handel and Beethoven, a) if there are some equally great ones I’m missing out on, and b) how sorely isolated those two must have felt, considering the distance between them and seemingly everyone else. Beethoven’s fabled social ineptitude makes almost too much sense: aside from problems w/r/t hearing and women, genius can only be disgruntled by a glut of mediocrity. (Apparently, if randomly Googled sites are to be trusted, the latter was a big fan of the former.) I can’t imagine ever liking Bach, who I find so diffuse that any emotional continuity fizzles out every two or three measures. I have the opposite problem with Mozart: complexities feel telegraphed, big, obvious. I find Haydn and Mendelssohn more intriguing, but both are working in a mode of counterpoint that leaves me instinctively cold, as if I’m either supposed to be sitting back and coolly observing, or making a strained attempt to feel something. The beauty of H and especially B is roughly a gazillion times more natural and fluid to me. But I’ll update if I find someone else I like.

Radcliffe/Stahl/Wallace/NRBQ

Sorry if this gets sparse on cinema-related stuff, which will remain in bold.

The Mysteries of Udolpho (Ann Radcliffe, 1794) [DNF; got to ~200 pages]

Of interest because, on the basis of Northanger Abbey, we can assume Jane Austen was a fan—why, Jane? Radcliffe is surely coming from somewhere faintly intelligent, but the extent to which she wants you to know that is weird and hypocritical: she celebrates Modesty with a capital M (not unlike Jason Sudeikis’s Joe Biden impression), negating her own values in the process of assaulting the reader with descriptions of Beauty, never failing to remind us that Emily St. Aubert is Sensitive. I suspect I'm having more of a clash with Radcliffe in particular than sentimentalism in general.

Holy Matrimony (John M. Stahl, 1943)

I’d started thinking of Stahl as a precise visual stylist to rival Rohmer after seeing Leave Her to Heaven, but I didn’t get that vibe from this lively, nuanced farce. Gracie Fields gives my fave performance, a reliable, adoring wife who’s still at odds with her husband underneath the winks and smiles. Monty Woolley is louder and harder to enjoy, but props to Stahl for making his hero such a vehement prick.

“The Depressed Person” (David Foster Wallace, 1998)

Marginally liked it. Spot-on about the subjective particulars of depression (e.g. combo of need and anticipation of boredom in trying to explain away indescribable torture to contented friends, or the patient-therapist relationship being both ideal and patently false in its one-sidedness), although reading it is a bit like watching someone scrape away at quicksand. (Mimicking tact in the midst of severe depression takes heroic willpower, but I’ve seen it done.) Parts are perhaps unconsciously revealing, like the recurrent phrase “abstract guilt,” [of a non-depressed person] which can only imply opposition to the depressed person’s bottomless, visceral guilt.

“That’s Alright” (NRBQ, All Hopped Up, 1977)

From the NRBQ stuff I’ve sampled, I’m rather baffled—the vast majority of it is pretty by-the-numbers. And yet “That’s Alright,” a serene needle in their bloated haystack of a discography, is as perfectly constructed a song as I’ve heard, an ode to the ambivalence of rejection as propulsive as the Raspberries’ “Go All the Way” and as meticulous as Richard Thompson’s better work. (I also like “It Feels Good” from the same album and “It’s Not So Hard” from Scraps.)

Weir/Pakula/Von Trier/Hardin

Films:

Gallipolli (Peter Weir, 1981)

Weir makes tripe, but a special kind of tripe that’s recognized by some as mysterious or distinctive. To me, the guy’s incapable of locating anything of interest in his material—I was thinking about looking up whether he had a hand in his screenplays, before realizing I didn’t give a shit. Hearing peers talk about the film’s portrayal of the depth of “mateship” was a particularly bitter laugh: it’s as if they actually believe Australians were born with some neurological mechanism that allows men to, y’know, just be closer with each other than we yanks could ever manage.

All the President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976)

A good rejoinder to any who claim that recreating reality results in dramatic inertia, and a tightrope act of dramatic tension, eschewing the lapses into convention of Klute for investigational rigor. The journalists are a little insecure, a little inarticulate, a little sadistic, but they’re also different: Redford is sincere (to a fault), and Hoffman is conniving (to a fault). One is never sure whether to want them to stop hounding witnesses, or root for something explosive: both ends are kept so hushed and omnipresent.

Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier, 2000)

Bipolar cinema. I’d seen this before, several times, so as I tried to explain my problems with it to a professor with an uber-placid facial expression, it was painful in an I’m-vicariously-disillusioning-my-14-year-old-self type of way. But I did enjoy the unenjoyability of the experience of watching it. (It’s complicated, but the sensation of boredom is actually kind of therapeutic at the moment.) Strangest of all to think that I once found Bjork attractive. Or did I? I probably did.

Song:

"It'll Never Happen Again" (Tim Hardin)

Wouldn't feel out of place on After the Gold Rush. And AtGR is one of my favorite albums--Hardin is no Young c. 1970, for me, but his best work is on that level. Other faves: "Reason to Believe," "Black Sheep Boy."

Recent viewings, meaning more recent than last month.

In light of some recent personal troubles—in short, the title of my website came disturbingly close to having an unintended double meaning—I’m trying to write more, but the old 100-point system having become arbitrary to the point of meaninglessness, all I can bring myself to do is, y’know, write about the movies. I’m not trying particularly hard here—hell, I don’t have time to—but we’ll see if I can manage something verging on coherence.

Deep End (Jerzy Skolimowski, 1970)

Mike is at once reasonable and freakishly immature in his attitudes towards sex. The high point is the initial encounter with a woman in the bathhouse, in which he flails like a maniac but obviously tries to keep his composure all the while, and the woman makes a subtle shift from trying to seduce him to not caring whether he enjoys the experience. Skolimowski is the rare comic director who explores the possibilities of a scene rather than relying on behavioral exaggeration: when he watches the policeman accept a drink from the porn theater operator, it’s less an indication that the operator is screwed or that the police force is corrupt than that even bad-guy cops like G&Ts.

Klute (Alan Pakula, 1971)

Like how Bree’s attitude—she’s okay, because the guys are nervous, and she isn’t—runs counter to the very conventions the film is built upon, viz. perverse killer gradually succumbs to preying on prostitutes. Also like how Sutherland’s nice guy is also a little weird and withdrawn. But I’m disappointed that that weirdness is divorced from his sexuality, which seems utterly conventional, but that’s a perhaps necessary sop to audiences expecting an ordinary romance. Worse as it goes along, collapsing under the weight of romance and thriller conventions, but even the final villain speech is a surprisingly low-key and contemplative rumination on mistakes made and mistakes to follow.

Lola Montes (Max Ophuls, 1955)

A contradiction: a garish, romantic study of utter emotional isolation. Lola seems as incapable of finding strength in the wisdom of an older man as she does in finding joy in the free spirit of a younger man–and even when she seems close to a psychic match, e.g. Liszt, there’s a constant sense of up-and-down. We’re there with her, wistfully observing the barriers of incompatibility and trying our best to break through them.

Night and Day (Hong Sang-soo, 2008)

For some reason this made me think of Candide—maybe in the protagonist’s persistent, delusional belief that he can suddenly overcome his faults. But Hong doesn’t exactly let it become a running gag: sometimes, the contrast between intention and follow-through is blatant enough to funny, and at other times his dissipation seems to mirror Hong’s. Inchoate and rambling alongside Hong’s features, but I’d like to see it again—maybe there’s more here.

Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone, 2008)

Liked it, esp. the way Garrone blunts a sense of resolution—the final scene is like if Rossellini took on a gangster movie, at least in terms of pacing. I’m with the detractors who are confused as to how the various storylines overlap—I’d imagine that reading the book would be helpful.