Dvd Review: Rashomon, Criterion Collection

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I must confess that my first acquaintance with the subject matter of Akira Kurosawa's 1950 classic Rashomon came not from the film itself, but from the 1964 American adaptation, The Outrage. This was unfortunate, because that early experience had something of a retarding effect on my appreciation of what Kurosawa had done when I finally did get to see the original. The Outrage, set in the 19^th century American west, was culturally familiar. The cultural idiom of Rashomon, especially its acting, was unfamiliar at best, if not completely alien. It was a cultural ignorance that took a number of viewings over the years to overcome, but since great art given the chance will make its greatness felt, it was an ignorance that didn't last.

Watching it now in a 2008 restoration on DVD from the Criterion Collection, it is hard to believe that there was a time when I didn't appreciate Kurosawa's brilliance. From its intellectually challenging script, its innovative use of the camera, its stylized performances, and its aesthetic play of light and shadow, Rashomon is a virtuoso performance.

Based on two stories, "Rashomon" and "In a Grove," by Ryuwanosuke Akutaga, the film tells the story of a rape and murder from four different points of view. A Samurai warrior and his wife traveling in an isolated wooded area are accosted by a bandit. He overcomes the warrior and rapes the woman.  There is a fight and the husband is killed. What happens after that is subject to the interpretation of each of the people involved (the dead husband speaks through a medium) as well as a wood cutter who chanced across the scene and watched in hiding. Each has a different version of the events. If one of these is the 'true' narrative, there is no indication. In the end, the viewer is left with the understanding that truth in this case, perhaps in all cases, is unknowable.

It is a bleak vision of the human condition emphasized from the very beginning with its shots of the wrecked Rashomon gate drenched in a terrific rain storm as the wood cutter and a priest sit in dismay in the aftermath of the bandit's trial. The woodcutter goes on to tell the story to a newcomer who shows up to get out of the storm. This, of course, removes the story one more step from the actual event, and raises even more questions about the nature of truth .

The scene then shifts to the woodcutter in a sun drenched woods as he walks axe on shoulder only to discover first a woman's hat, then the hat of a Samurai, and eventually the body. The camera follows the woodcutter in a lengthy dolly shot as he treks through the foliage, spots of bright sunshine, deep shadows; it is a setting that seems poetically symbolic. Add to this a score that at times builds with the intensity of Ravel's "Bolero" and the scene takes on a sense of portentous dread. There is an interesting explanation of how the scene was shot in some excerpts from the documentary The World of Kazuo Miyagawa, Kurosawa's cinematographer which is included as bonus material on the DVD.

The excerpt ends with Kurosawa saying that it is the camera that has "the starring role" in the film. Indeed, there is something paradoxical about its visual ambience. Its black and white simplicity belies the inherent opacity of its narrative. Indeed the stylized acting does much the same thing. Nothing is as simple as it seems it should be. It is an interesting   juxtaposition of form and content that mirrors the film's themes.

As usual with the films in the Criterion Collection there is an abundant selection of bonus material. Besides the excerpts from the Miyagawa documentary, there is a short interview with director Robert Altman, an hour long documentary with members of the crew and cast called A Testimony as Image, a radio interview with Takashi Shimura who played the woodcutter, the original and a re-release trailers, and audio commentary by film historian Donald Richie. There is also a booklet which includes an essay by Stephen Prince, an excerpt from Kurosawa's Something Like an Autobiography, and translations of the two Akutagawa stories.

DVD Review: Harold and Maude Criterion Collection

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If over the years since its initial release in 1971, Harold and Maude, Hal Ashby's portrait of, if not the most controversial love affair to hit the big screen, certainly one that belongs in the top three or so, has grown in reputation exponentially, its current release as part of the Criterion Collection is a clear justification of that growth. Back then, the very idea that there could be a romantic relationship between a woman of 80 and a youth of 20 was at best farfetched, at worst perverted. Times have changed. Many of those, I suppose, who would have been horrified by the idea of a marriage between an 80 year old woman and a 20 year old boy are now so busy defending marriage from the gay attack that their horror might have dissipated.  Many of those who would have found it farfetched may well have come across contemporary examples on the internet.  At any rate what was shocking in the 70s has lost much of its shock value in the new century. 

The romance between the octogenarian survivor of the Holocaust with an almost insane passion for living every moment and the youthful loner who can only express himself in elaborately staged suicide attempts has become for many an emblem of the victory of the counter cultural values of the 60s over conventional social values.  Ruth Gordon's performance as the vibrant Maude is masterful, and the baby faced Bud Cort matches her as the depressed young man who blossoms under her influence.  There is an on screen chemistry between the two that makes the May December relationship not only credible, but inevitable.  That an introverted young man obsessed with death might well be seduced by the intensity of her life force is not even strange.  She is a dynamo charging everything and everyone in her path.

The Criterion Collection's DVD is a new digital restoration with an optional remastered stereo soundtrack.  Bonus material includes an audio commentary by Hal Ashby biographer Nick Dawson and producer Charles B. Mulvehill, a 2011 interview with Yusuf/Cat Stevens whose songs, including two new ones, were used in the film, and audio excerpts from American Film Institute seminars with Ashby (1972) and screenwriter/producer Colin Higgens (1979). Both are illustrated with candid still shots often from the set of the film.  The Ashby commentary focuses on his general ideas about filmmaking, but he does talk about the casting of Cort and the film's central relationship.  He also talks about the Cat Stevens music. The Higgens commentary talks about how he managed to sell the script and has quite an interesting discussion of the how he got the idea for the film's opening sequence, surely one of the most creative film openings you're likely to come across.   

There is also a booklet with a critical essay by Matt Zoller Seitz, a 1971 profile of Ruth Gordon from the New York Times, and excerpts from interviews with Cort and cinematographer John Alonzo in 1997 and executive producer Mildred Lewis in 2001.  The Seitz essay is an impressive piece of film criticism that attempts both to explicate themes and ideas and to locate the film in the social context of the period.  The Gordon profile emphasizes the quirkiness of the actress, a quirkiness that shines through on the screen. 

If only for Gordon's enchanting performance, Harold and Maude remains a film to be savored, and Criterion's DVD offers the best way to do so, absent access to the big screen. 

TV Review: American Masters - Woody Allen: A Documentary

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To look at the short 'shlumpy' septuagenarian hiding under a floppy hat as he makes his way about the Brooklyn streets of his youth, it's hard to think of him as the model of the comic genius.  To listen to his self effacing comments on his life's work, it's hard to imagine him in the role of the dynamo filmmaker who has managed to turn out a film a year for longer than many of us have spent on this earth.  To hear the roster of cinema greats and near greats who come to praise him as a great collaborator, tolerant director and sensitive writer, it's difficult to reconcile their description with the director who makes casting decisions in seconds and fires actors he is unhappy with.  To listen to his quick witted  dead pan quips, the existential angst he claims as a world view seems ludicrous.

This is the paradoxical portrait of Woody Allen that director Robert Weide paints in American Masters—Woody Allen: A Documentary that premieres on PBS in two parts, Sunday, November 20 from 9-11 and Monday, November 21 from 9-10:30.  Weide, an award winning filmmaker, has directed , written and produced  in a variety of combinations documentaries on Mort Sahl, W.C. Fields and Lenny Bruce among others.  Most recently, after his 1999 comedy special Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm for HBO, he has served as the director and executive of the spin-off series that has been running for eight seasons.  He is a man who understands comedy and knows how to work with comedians.  Perhaps this is why the notoriously publicity shy Allen was willing to provide him with the kind of access necessary to make this film.  If so, Allen made a wise decision.

Not only is Allen willing to sit down and talk about his childhood, his parents, his various wives, although there is only a mention of his current family, and his career, but he even has nice things to say about Mia Farrow, at least as far as her abilities as an actress are concerned.  As far as other family matters are concerned the film talks about them, but Allen does not. 

He talks about how he began his career as a young high school student writing jokes for news paper columnists and graduated to writing for TV shows and comedians.  He explains how he was turned into a stand-up performer despite his queasiness about getting up on stage.  Weide intersperses clips from some of his early stage and TV appearances; Allen may have been unsure of himself in his own eyes, but one thing for sure he was funny.  Clips from his stints with Dick Cavitt are hilarious; hilarious enough to make you wish he had somehow found the time to keep doing stand-up.  While Weide does mention his playwriting, and there are some clips from Play It Again, Sam, that and his fiction writing get short shrift.  It is his career in film that gets the bulk of the discussion, and how can you blame Weide?  If your choice is between the New Yorker and Penelope Cruz, there really isn't much of a choice. 

He talks about how he got involved with movies and his unhappiness with what the studios did with his first film, What's New Pussycat?, which led to his demand that he be given complete control over his future projects.  The documentary then goes on to examine his development as a filmmaker through his early sketch-like comic turns to his great character driven comedies and his attempts at more serious drama.  It looks at his successes; it looks at his failures.  It interviews people involved in the films, and it gets him to talk about what he was trying to do and about what he thought he actually accomplished.  If the people he worked with—the Diane Keatons and the Scarlet Johanssons, the Sean Penns and the Chris Rocks—are generally effusive, in their comments,  Allen, himself, always gives the impression that he didn't do all that much.  If he has one of those Hollywood egos, he does his best to hide it.

While the film follows fairly conventional documentary tropes—talking heads, family photos, film and video clips, when you have talking heads like the actors from Allen's films and clips from Love and Death and Manhattan  conventional tropes are nothing to sneeze at.  Besides although the spine of the film is generally chronological, Weide is perfectly willing to break into the narrative to make a point or add a current perspective on something that happened in the past.  It is a neatly constructed with an insight, wit and intelligence worthy of its subject.

DVD Review: Still Walking

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Japanese writer/director Hirokazu Kore-eda's sixth feature film, Still Walking is now available on DVD from the Criterion Collection. In discussing the film, Kore-eda speaks of this story of one day in the lives of a typically dysfunctional family as his most personal work to date. Written two years after the death of his mother, he sees it as his attempt to come to terms with his personal conflicts over his loss. The family in the movie is not his family, he says, but the conflicted emotions are his emotions. He has taken his own subjective experience and objectified it in an attempt to universalize the individual.

Kore-eda, who began as a director of documentaries, turned to fictional features in 1995 with Maborosi, a film about a young wife's attempt to deal with her husband's suicide. This was followed by After Life in 1998, Distance (2001), Nobody Knows (2004), and Hana (2006). Critics have praised his films for the way they deal with themes of memory and loss with sensitivity, but without sentimentality. Indeed in an interview included as an extra on the new DVD, Kore-eda, while acknowledging the personal nature of his film, disclaims feelings of nostalgia. Clearly nostalgia is his term for sentimentalizing the past. The material of his films may be fictional, but it is screened with all the realism of his documentaries.

Still Walking is one of those dramas in which nothing seems to happen yet everything happens: think Chekov. The Yokohama family has gathered on the anniversary of the eldest son's death, a fact that only gradually becomes apparent as the film progresses. In fact most of the undercurrents of the family relationships are revealed through indirection and innuendo as the film progresses. Ryota, the second son, feels the typical inadequacies of the younger child. He has married a widow with a child, and he is having trouble finding work. His parents are less than thrilled with his marriage and disappointed with his failure to follow in his father's, a doctor, profession. His sister and her family are trying to wheedle their way into living with their parents, an arrangement which would involve moving into the older brother's room, which their mother treats as something of a shrine. The relationship between the older Yokohamas is also less than idyllic. They rarely communicate and when they do, they quarrel. There are reasons, and they are revealed slowly and subtly. Kore-eda is nothing, if not subtle.

Subtlety and indirection are central to the film's imagery as well. Kore-eda and Director of Photography and cinematographer, Yutaka Yamazaki, also in an interview included as one of the DVD extras, both talk about the importance of what is happening outside the frame. Yamazaki's comments are illustrated by a scene from the film where the frame is focused on an empty room as action is going on just outside. This is a technique used often in the film. The audience is always made aware that what they are seeing on the screen is only the surface. It is necessary to look beyond the frame to get an idea of reality. The cinematic technique reinforces the thesis that much that is significant in human interaction is hidden beneath the surface, just as the dead son's absence dominates so much of what is happening.

Although when one has to depend on subtitles it is sometimes difficult to tell, performances are natural and realistic. There is no chewing of scenery. Hiroshi Abe's Ryota is appropriately miserable without being sullen. Yoshio Harada plays the father with a stern stoicism that ignores everything around him, but every once in awhile opens up, especially to Ryota's son. His sister is played by You (the name of the actress) with a kind of nasal good humored artificiality. But perhaps the subtlest performance is Kirin Kiki as the mother. She can drop the most biting of remarks with the most casual aplomb. She hides her unhappiness with everyone around her in fussing attentiveness. Even her care with cooking seems calculated to other ends. This is an ensemble cast that works together about as well as any real family could.

Besides the interviews the DVD also includes a half hour documentary on the making of the film and a trailer. The interviews are well worth your time. Besides talking about the personal nature of the material, Kore-eda talks about his career in general, his influences and ironically the removal he now feels from the material. It is as though the making of the film had a therapeutic effect. Yamazaki talks about how he came to work with Kore-eda as well as the collaborative process. The documentary provides insights into the way this particular director works with his actors and the rest of the creative team. It looks at large elements like rehearsals and details like costume choices. The DVD also comes with a little brochure that includes an essay of the film and the writer/director by Dennis Lim, and a set of recipes from Kore-eda for the dishes prepared in the film.

Movie Review: Cold Souls

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I guess if you've got a film from a writer/director named Barthes, even though in this case it's Sophie, you've got to at least imagine you're going to see something out of the ordinary. And if you get a chance to see Cold Souls, her first shot at a feature length production, you'll discover very quickly that you imagined correctly. Because Cold Souls is a quirky comic drama with surrealistic overtones, just the kind of thing that would have warmed the intellectual heart of even a Barthes named Roland.

The film stars Paul Giamatti as Paul Giamatti. Giamatti is, of all things, an actor. He is in a thoroughly depressed state because he is rehearsing for a stage production of Anton Chekov's Uncle Vanya, a play which never had a problem depressing anyone, and he is having significant trouble dealing with his role. He can't sleep. He wanders about aimlessly. He is going through his own personal dark night of the soul. Then, in of all places The New Yorker, he reads about an organization which deals in soul extraction and storage. He visits the outfit's high tech facility where he meets the medical director played by David Strathairn who, much like a salesman pushing a nose job or liposuction, explains the advantages of soul separation. There may even be some echoes of selling the soul to the devil, although nothing overt. Devastated by his depression, Giamatti is willing to try anything, and he agrees to the extraction.

The plot gets complicated with the introduction of a gang of soul dealers from Russia who are using Russian women as mules to smuggle souls in and out of the United States. One of these, played by Dina Korzun, steals Giamatti's soul for her boss's wife an aspiring actress who wants a soul of an American actor, preferably Al Pacino. When Giamatti decides he wants his soul back, he discovers that it is missing and the film follows his attempt to find out what happened and then get it back. While the premise here is something you might associate with a film maker like Charlie Kaufman, the film never gets quite that far out. More importantly after the initial premise, it plays out fairly conventionally.

Giamatti's performance is fine tuned. He is at his best in the Uncle Vanya rehearsal scenes. He plays it with his own soul, without any soul, with a transplanted soul of what he thinks is a Russian poet, and each time he manages precise differentiation. He is also good at bedraggled depression. Emily Watson plays his unsuspecting wife who senses something strange going on but can't quite comprehend what it is. Michael Tucker, he of L. A. Law, plays a frazzled director. Katheryn Winnick is the Russian actress in want of an American soul, and there is one scene at the end for Michael Stuhlbarg (Boardwalk Empire) as a hedge fund manager.

Although billed as a comedy, Cold Souls has very few laugh out loud moments. Giamatti is offended that his soul when extracted is something very like a chick pea. One expects an artist to have a 'great' soul. Souls on display at the storage facility tend to be black or brown or gray. Then, of course, there is the irony that it is a Chekov play they are rehearsing as well as that it is The New Yorker that proffers the medical information. The closest thing to a slapstick moment comes when Gaimatti manages to drop his newly extracted soul on the floor of Strathairn's office. What you get here are smiles and intellectual chuckles, not belly laughs. For a first effort, Barthes has produced a very intriguing film, a film which promises well for the future.

DVD Review: Mi Verano Con Amanda

Four young misfits out for a summer vacation's fun and games survive a series of mishaps and wind up happily fulfilled at least for awhile, if not necessarily ever after. One or the other of them has to deal with problems growing pot, a catatonic fear of bugs, and failure to perform sexually, and this collection of problems as well as a Job's list of others is what passes for a plot in the 2008 Spanish language comedy, Mi Verano Con Amanda (My Summer With Amanda), now available on DVD with English subtitles.

Joel "El Rockero Loco" Contreras, the central character is a shy, wannabe film director who is in love with a beautiful actress model whom he has never met. Too timid to approach her, he nevertheless remains true to his love and refuses to chase after other women. While Contreras does manage a nice innocence on screen, he is not above mugging for the camera. And since the script puts him and his friends in one silly situation after another, he and the rest of the cast have plenty of opportunity.

The other three members of the crew are stereotypes out of any number of "young guys out for a good time" movies. Francis Rosas plays Fabio a drug addled faux philosopher. Erik Rodriguez is Chicho, the fat slob character made famous by John Belushi. Eugene Rodriguez is RS, the rich guy who knows all the angles, can get the girl, but can't quite manage to seal the deal.

Tania Rodriguez is fetching as Amanda, the conniving object of his affections, a girl only interested in men with money or position. She gets to wear a lot of sexy outfits, but really has little to do other than appear bitchy and look angelic, which is pretty much par for the course in this kind of escape farce.
Writer director Benjamin Lopez manages to put together a film that is heavy on titillating suggestive erotica and indulgent depictions of bodily functions and light on effective plot development and character nuance. The film is unrated. Although there is no outright nudity, there are enough discussions of sexual activity and simulations of some of that activity to keep the teen crowd out of the theaters. And this is a shame, since this is the crowd that could be the most likely audience for the film. There is nothing like gas and excrement to impress a growing boy.

Filmed in Puerto Rico, Lopez does include some beautiful scenery to complement the women in bikinis, but it is always the bikinis that get the lion's share of attention. Quite obviously Lopez knows his target audience.

Some of the extras on the DVD include bloopers and interviews with the director and the stars. Unfortunately these are all in Spanish, and there are no subtitles. I should also add that the subtitles for the film itself could use some editing. There are a lot of spelling errors, usage problems and missing words. Subtitles are a necessary evil. At their best they distract the viewer from the visual action, at their worst they destroy any verisimilitude, by calling attention to themselves. Subtitles need to be unobtrusive. Silly errors call attention to themselves and away from the film.

DVD Review: The 39 Steps(2008)

Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 adaptation of John Buchan's The 39 Steps has been praised by many critics for its witty dark comedy, its atmospheric handling of different settings, and for some fetching performances, especially that of the star, Robert Donat. Donat plays an innocent man accused of a murder on the run from both the police and the group of spies who are actually guilty. While the plot borders on the silly at times, the film has a kind of innocent charm—with Madeleine Carroll and Donat chastely handcuffed together in an old Scottish inn and its dark scenic shots of the chase through the Scottish countryside, not to mention Donat's bravura impromptu speech before a political rally and the shooting at the Palladium with the villain jumping to the stage a la John Wilkes Booth. And, of course there is the iconic image of the woman's scream merging into the whistle of the railroad train carrying the fleeing Donat.

Still despite the fairly positive criticism of this early work by one of filmdom's great directors, The 39 Steps is a film ripe for remake. Although the plot does have its moments, it has its problems as well. Character motivation is an issue. The plot can be somewhat confusing, and the climactic revelation is something of a letdown. Moreover, the script is quite an embellishment on the actual source material. So it is not surprising that it was revisited in 1959 in color and then again in 1978. The latter is the version that is credited with being closest to the source.

Now comes a 2008 BBC adaptation newly available on DVD. This version stars Rupert Penry-Jones as the innocent on the run and Lydia Leonard as his companion in flight and unlikely love interest, and while closer to the novel than the Hitchcock, it probably takes more liberties than the 1978 film. Overall this new adaptation emphasizes the thriller aspects of the story; there is a lot more gunplay, an airplane attack, and some tumbling down hillsides in front of oncoming cars, just the kind of thing we have come to expect from modern action heroes chasing spies. There is less of the dark comedy that distinguishes the 1935 adaptation, and what there is lacks the Hitchcock charm. There are certainly some beautifully filmed scenes of the Scottish countryside. Location shots of Scottish castles and manors are excellent. Most importantly, the plot is not quite as farfetched, and most of what is most difficult to swallow is explained by surprise revelations, which is better than nothing.

There are some nice little bits of homage to Hitchcock: some shots of running legs, a shot of the two killer spies from the rear dressed in coats and fedoras, and a merging of a little girl screaming and the attempts to start cranking a car motor (which seems to echo the classic railroad whistle/scream). But for the most part, this is its own movie. It does a fine job of evoking the feeling of pre-WWI England, beginning with the stuffy London men's club and the Scottish manor house to an accurate portrayal of the British attitudes to the Germans before the beginning of the war. Although as it was pointed out when the film first aired there were quite a few historical blunders in the film's use of planes with machine guns and trains which were not available in 1914.

Performances reek with BBC restraint. Penry-Jones is dashing and noble as Richard Hannnay the bored engineer newly returned from Africa unhappy in stuffy old London who learns, under duress, to value his country. Every once in awhile he meanders towards James Bond, but he never really gets there. Lydia Leonard's Victoria Sinclair is a modern woman looking for a greater role in the world and capable of taking on that greater role. She is less a damsel in distress than a reliable partner in crime. Although some complain that she is an unnecessary addition to the original. Patrick Malahide is the gentleman villain, ruthless but understated. Eddie Marsan, Inspector Lestrade in the new Sherlock Holmes film, plays Scudder, the spy who sets everything in motion when he runs into Hannay's apartment and gives him the code book before he gets killed.

While there is nothing especially memorable about this remake of The 39 Steps, there is no Mr. Memory shot at the Palladium, there is no one hanging from the hands of Big Ben, the DVD does provide a pleasantly entertaining hour and a half.

I might add, although it has nothing to do with the film, the DVD does contain a very clever advertisement for BBC America. Don't skip it.

DVD Review: Surrogates

It was in 1920 that Karel Capek, a Czech writer, first used the word robot in a play called R. U. R., the initials standing for Rossum's Universal Robots. His robots were humanoid machines that in the course of the play developed the capacity to love, so that not only were they human-like externally, but internally (at least as far as emotions are concerned) as well. The implication was that they were no longer machines, but had become human like us. They were a new Adam and Eve.

Since that first appearance, robots of all kinds have invaded both fiction and the cinema screen. There have been threatening mechanicals and cute little droids. There have been servants to man and servants to man gone berserk, computer-like know-it-alls and dogged garbage cleaners. There have been diabolic humanoids and perfected human idealizations. The surrogates in the eponymous Jonathan Mostow film are robots from this last category.

In a world in the not too distant future humans have taken to living vicariously through perfected humanoid surrogates controlled by their thoughts as they, themselves, lie prone in their homes. The surrogates are all good looking, all young, all physically strong and athletic, supermen and women. Surrogates work for their controllers; they play for them. They love for them. All interaction between people is between surrogates: even, it seems, between husband and wife. Life is beautiful for everyone in a world where everyone is beautiful and nothing seems beyond human capacity through the agency of these surrogates. But when suddenly two surrogates are destroyed by a secret weapon, and even more significantly, their controllers are killed as well, this utopian paradise begins to reveal some fissures.

Enter Bruce Willis as F.B.I. agent Tom Greer; it is up to him to find out what is going on. This is the set up of Mostow's Surrogates based on the comic series by Robert Venditti now available on DVD. Willis plays both a bald grizzled human version of himself and his wavy haired surrogate, and he plays them both with more or less the same kind of intense commitment we have come to expect from the hero of the Die Hard franchise. He is aided by Radha Mitchell as his surrogate F.B.I. agent partner. Ving Rhames does a supporting turn as the dreadlocked leader of a sect of surrogate refuseniks and James Cromwell shows up as the discarded inventor of the surrogates. In general all their performances are workmanlike, if not award winning.

Indeed, workmanlike is an apt description of the whole film. The plot is perhaps overly complex. Too often action sequences, car chases, crashes, surrogates leaping onto roofs of buses, substitute for dramatic content. Nevertheless the film is effectively paced and beautifully photographed. And if its themes are not as compellingly elaborated as they might be, they are still worth thinking about. After all the idea of a world in which we can all be the beautiful people we want to be and do all the exciting things we wish we could deserves some consideration. Although one might well wonder how it is that in a world capable of inventing surrogates, the surrogates still have to get around in cars and buses. A little more futuristic thinking might have been welcome.

Still, if you missed it in the multiplex, Surrogates is certainly worth a spot in your Netflix queue (if only to see Bruce Willis with hair). Besides, the DVD includes a commentary by director Mostow, and a well done music video, "I Will Not Bow," with a collage of scenes from the movie, by Breaking Benjamin.

Book Review: Kazan on Directing by Elia Kazan

When you talk about the great directors of the middle of the twentieth century, whether of the stage or the cinema, one name is bound to come up, Elia Kazan. After all, this is the man who was responsible for iconic productions of modern American classics like Death of a Salesman on stage, On the Waterfront on the screen and A Streetcar Named Desire on both. He worked not only with playwrights like Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, but others like William Inge, Thornton Wilder, and Archibald MacLeish. He directed Brando and James Dean, Vivien Leigh and Jessica Tandy, Lee J. Cobb and Raymond Massey, and, well many too many others to mention. So any book that gathers together his analyses of his individual works, his thoughts and advice about the directing process, and his characterizations and evaluations of those he worked with is bound to be a gold mine for anyone concerned with the art of directing.

Kazan on Directing is just such a gold mine. Edited with scholarly care and erudition by Robert Cornfield, it collects original material about each of Kazan's major productions from interviews, his production notes, journals, and letters to collaborators. It provides insights into the way he went about analyzing the work he was directing, the way he worked with actors and playwrights, and the values he sought to communicate to his audience. The book is neither a systematic presentation of a coherent aesthetic, nor a practical guide for the student director. What it is, is a miscellany of bits and pieces, a hint here and a suggestion there, and every once in awhile an aphoristic precept or two about how to go about the business of directing thrown in for good measure.

So, for example, the director's first job, he tells the reader, is to find a 'center' or 'spine' of a play to give his direction "organic unity." The 'spine' of Arthur Miller's All My Sons "has something to do with how to live in this age and in this civilization." The spine of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth is to "show with pride the lasting power of the human race." Within the spine of the play, each character has his own or her own spine. In A Streetcar Named Desire for example, Stella's spine "is to hold on to Stanley;" Mitch's spine is to escape his mother's control. It is necessary for the director to get the actor to find the spine of his character on his own, but he must make sure that the spine the actor finds is the one the director has determined is there. The director is always manipulating, always in control.

Directorial control is no less essential when shooting a movie. In one of the two lengthier pieces in the collection, "The Pleasures of Directing" (the skeleton of a more systematic approach to the subject that Kazan never got around to completing), he talks about the necessity for the director to enforce his own vision of the film on all his collaborators. The director should be willing to listen to other points of view, especially those of the technicians—the camera men, the costumers, the designers—but he must always have the last word. He must not allow commercial concerns to affect his decisions. He must not allow those who are financing the film to dictate what he does. He must demand final cut at all costs, even at the price of walking away from the project. As the editor notes, when Kazan's films began making money, he demanded control of all aspects of filming and he got it. When his films didn't do that well, he had trouble getting the kind of control he wanted.

Again and again, he mentions the fact that most people considered him an actor's director. In a sense this is true, often he was able to get memorable performances from his actors, but this was not always because he coddled them. The most important thing for a director is to cast the right actor for the part. He, himself, liked to look for actors who had something in their personality or life history that paralleled something in the character they were to play. He chose Ed Begley to play the father in All My Sons because he was a reformed alcoholic and his guilt over this mirrored the guilt of the father in the play. He liked Peggy Anne Garner in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn because the young girl was experiencing pains and uncertainties in her real life which came through on the screen. When he found there was a real antagonism between Raymond Massey and James Dean on the set of East of Eden, he stoked it whenever he could, because it worked for what he wanted on the screen. On the other hand, when it came to Marlon Brando, he says it was best to let him work things out on his own. The best way to handle him was to leave hands off.

Kazan on Directing is an incisive look into the mind and method of a theatrical genius. The more the reader knows about Kazan's films and plays, the more meaningful this look will be, but an encyclopedic knowledge of Kazan's work is not essential. The editor manages to provide an abundance of background material to make everything in the volume intelligible to even the least knowledgeable of readers. There is an introduction, a critical afterword, a chronology, and there are editorial introductions and interpolations for each of the individual entries. This is a book that belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in the stage or the cinema from the professional to the novice, the actors on the stage and members of the audience.

Last Year at Marienbad, Redux

Alain Resnais’ classic Last Year at Marienbad which had been at the bottom of my Netflix queue for years finally became available in June. It is a film that has both fascinated and infuriated viewers and critics since it first played in the art houses back in the sixties. And improbable as it seems, it is more than likely that those very aspects of the film that infuriate some movie goers are the ones that fascinate the others. Count me as one of the fascinated.

Here is an idea of the problem. I had seen the film at least twice when it was shown in theaters in Manhattan in the sixties, and at least once at a film festival in Boston. Sometime around the late seventies, I was team teaching a class in film studies for a communications program at what is now California University of Pennsylvania. Along with the likes of The Bicycle Thief, The Magician,, and Blow Up, we decided to show Last Year at Marienbad. This was in the days of the three reeler and the sixteen millimeter projector. Since we only had one projector, after we watched the first reel, the lights had to be put on while the projectionist changed reels. The lights went out again, and we settled in to watch the second reel. Perhaps ten minutes later, the door to the room opened, the lights went on, and a red faced projectionist announced from the back of the auditorium that he had loaded the third reel by mistake. The reels were changed, and we went back to the film. Now here’s the point of this story: by this time I had already seen this film at least three times. It was a film I liked and thought I remembered very well. Yet here I sat watching it again, and I hadn’t the least clue that the reels were being played out of sequence.

Last Year at Marienbad is, to say the least, an enigmatic film. It is not a chronological narrative. Reviewers who attempt to summarize anything that might be called plot must either over simplify and ignore those things that seem to make little sense or give up in disgust. Take a look at some of the admirable attempts made on Blogcritics. The problem is that viewers understandably want to find some kind of meaning in what they are watching. They expect a film to make some kind of sense in the context of the world, to mirror in some recognizable way the world they see around them. They expect it to reflect some kind of reality, naturalistic, psychological, or symbolic. While such expectations are normal, after all that is what most cinema does, they are the wrong expectations for this film. This is a film that deliberately eschews the aesthetics of art as mimesis.

The film’s screen writer was the French novelist, Alain Robbe-Grillet, who is most famous , if not infamous, for his experimentation with the genre and is usually associated with what is called the ‘New Novel.’ Even a cursory examination of his work, especially his later work, reveals that much of it offers the same kind of frustrations for the reader with traditional expectations as the film does for movie audiences with traditional ideas. There is never any constant against which to measure the events of the story. What appears to be happening turns out to be a description of a painting. Characters morph from photos into action. Sequences of events are repeated with slight changes sometimes, significant changes at other times. Time is fractured. For Robbe-Grillet, realistic representation of the world is the one thing to be avoided at all costs. The key statement of his aesthetic is a little book of essays called For a New Novel. What he has to say about the novel in this book would seem to explain as well what he and Resnais were trying to do in their collaboration on Last Year at Marienbad.

The central point of an essay called “A Future for the Novel” is the insistence that it is a mistake to look for meaning in the new novel. The novelist creates things that are, not things that mean. Here for example is Robbe-Grillet: “Instead of this universe of ‘signification’ (psychological, social, functional), we must try, then, to construct a world both more solid and more immediate. Let it be first by their presence that objects and gestures establish themselves, and let this presence continue to prevail over whatever explanatory theory that may try to enclose them in a system of references, whether emotional, sociological, Freudian, or metaphysical.” What is true for the future of the novel envisioned by Robbe-Grillet is no less true for the screen play he wrote for his collaboration with Resnais. They have created a ‘presence.’

In an introduction he wrote for the Grove Press edition of the screenplay, he suggests that the only people who will have trouble understanding the film will be those who try to find some kind of rationale explanation for what they are seeing. “This spectator,” he writes, will certainly find the film difficult, if not incomprehensible. . . . “ The spectator, on the other hand, who “lets himself be carried along by the extraordinary images in front of him, by the actor’s voices, by the sound track, by the music, by the rhythm of the cutting, by the passion of the characters. . . to this spectator the film will seem the ‘easiest’ he has ever seen. . . .” It is a film, in this sense, that is not meant to be experienced rationally. It is a film that is meant to be experienced, period. It does not mean something. It is something. To paraphrase the poet: a movie should not mean; a movie must be.

Perhaps, one needs to speak of Last Year at Marienbad in the same way one speaks about a string quartet. Don’t ask what it means. Experience what it is.

DVD Review: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Kenneth Branagh's 1994 remake of the James Whale 1931 horror classic, Frankenstein, could have been a remarkable film. It has a fine cast of top shelf actors, led by Branagh himself as the obsessive creator and Robert De Niro as the monster. Helena Bonham Carter plays, Elizabeth, the deluded scientist's beloved. Ian Holm, Tom Hulce, John Cleese and Aidan Quinn round out the cast. It has the laudable aim of producing an adaptation that comes closer to the novel that Mary Shelley actually wrote than does the Whale film. It has access to a whole new world of special effects and screen make up. It some beautiful scenery shot in gorgeous Technicolor. Above all it has a modern mythic tale of science gone wild going for it.

Yet with all this, the film never really delivers the goods. It's not that it's bad. It has its good moments, some good performances, a memorable touch or two. But as a whole, it falls short. It is a horror film that never really delivers on the fright. Perhaps because the story is so well known, perhaps because the monster has become a kind of benign icon who sells cereal and does the soft shoe, perhaps. . . .Well, whatever the reason, if you're looking for thrills and chills, you're not likely to find it in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. De Niro's monster is scarred and repellent, but he is still recognizably human. His murderous acts are not always depicted, and the one act that is shown on screen isn't really defined until it is over. Indeed the scenes of the birth of his brother are perhaps more detailed, perhaps more horrifying.

Some of this is owed to the attempt to get back to the novel. The monster in Mary Shelley's book is in some sense more sinned against than sinning, at least at the start. He looks so horrible because his creator was careless in his creation; Frankenstein is an imperfect artist/scientist. He is betrayed by his creator. Victor is repulsed by him when he sees life begin to awaken in him. The monster seeks companionship, but no one can stand to look at him. He wants Frankenstein to create a female for him so that he will have someone like himself, but Frankenstein can't bring himself to complete the task. Much of this is mirrored in the film in one way or another, and it does have the effect of mitigating the audience reaction to the monster, as indeed it does in the book.

Branagh doesn't stick to everything in Shelley's book. The whole episode of the creation of the female, for example, is developed differently. In the film, Elizabeth, Victor's wife, is killed by the monster, and Victor tries to resurrect her for himself. Then, the monster challenges him for the creation. The resurrected Elizabeth then kills herself in disgust at what she has now become. In the book, the monster kills Elizabeth as revenge after Frankenstein destroys the female he is creating to be the monster's consort.

Also, Branagh's elaborate scenario for the making of the monster owes a great deal more to James Whale than it does to Mary Shelley. Mary Shelley has very little to say about how the monster was made and life created, possibly because she hadn't the slightest idea how to present a convincing explanation. All the thunder and lightning and electricity that animates Branagh's creation scene comes right out of the Whale tradition. He adds a touch of acupuncture to put his own signature on it, but whatever it is it's not Mary Shelley.

Of course, it is wrong to quibble over the fact that the movie differs from the novel, even though coming closer to the novel is obviously one of its aims. After all a movie is not a novel. It couldn't possible do everything the novel does. Besides, it does include much of the novel's frame as Frankenstein tells his story to Robert Walton (Aidan Quinn), the obsessed explorer who is a foil character to the scientist in the book. It does include the whole episode of Justine and the death of Frankenstein's little brother. It even makes sure that Frankenstein has the right first name. How much can one ask for?

The real problem with the film is the acting. Most of the actors chew the scenery without mercy. Branagh, himself, is the main offender. His performance is pure camp; there isn't a melodramatic string he isn't willing to pull. And the rest of the cast takes its cue from him. In fact the only major performance that doesn't go over the top is the one where it would be most justified: De Niro's monster. More often than not, De Niro plays in a minor key. His monster is almost subdued, especially set against the turmoil of Branagh and Bonham Carter. John Cleese in the role of Professor Waldman, Frankenstein's mentor, is like De Niro somewhat less melodramatic.

If Mary Shelley's 1818 novel needed another adaptation to the screen, this wasn't it.