Strangers on a Train

no. 5 on the list of Kiddo Watching Hitchcock

Hitchcock 1951

Oo! Screenplay by Raymond Chandler, this can't go wrong. Yet, it turns out the plot is unlike Chandler novels. hm.

The strangers are identified by choice in cab, luggage, shoes, and the music accompanying them through the term. No faces—the camera follows only their feet as they exit their taxis and enter the train station. So effective. They are strangers even to the audience so far. Even so, it seems like a simple set-piece idea. The biggest set piece of the film is at the very end, an allegorical trampling of men with carousel horse hoofs, which is very fun, but by no means plausible. In fact it's the most ridiculous thing I've seen Hitchcock try to pull off. The set pieces don’t end there. What seems worst about Strangers on a Train, is the Hammer Horror sort of reliance on set pieces strung together with suspense.

The best of them is the map and flashlight at minute 63. The map is only on A4 size paper, and the flash light isn't too large, but only an inch-wide circle illuminates any part of the map at any time while our hero blunders around in the middle of the night in the murderer’s mansion. Pretty adorable way of making the audience feel claustrophobic and, therefore, building tension, similar to how Beowulf never shows you the monster, and The Blair Witch Project only uses a hand held camera.

Though, here, it is just another way in which Hitchcock stolidly refuses to create tension through melodramatic music (see anything by JJ Abrams) or killing off of random people (see anything from Gene Roddenberry). It is truly, as many before me have noticed, visionary and inherently superior movie making

But, double layering tension from the tennis match with reaching for a lighter just isn't enough to create the same intensity seen in other Hitchcock movies. And certainly doesn't live up to the artificial claustrophobia of the map/flashlight.

Longer reaching tension is found in the setting up of evidence for and against each stranger and their murder. The lighter, the glasses, acknowledging that Haines is playing a different style of tennis than ever before. Various people witnessing various things. Anthony getting off the ride, skeptically observed by someone on the dock. Someone asking the Anthony for a light on the train, and Anthony's big show of using matches instead of the lighter. Presumably, these could all be gathered in the same way that Caller of Delaware Tech, another stranger met on another train, was gathered in the initial questioning of Haines' alibi. This time, though, to build up against the real killer. Phew, justice is a-comin!

No amount of intriguing set pieces and chance encounters with nut balls, though can hide a mediocre presentation. Strangers, though, has all no bodies and not a really good one between them. All the lines are carried out with such flat ceremony it seems they had only just memorized the things to say without thinking of actually how to deliver them. There's not a single memorable facial expression, gesture or intonation at all. I felt like I was watching the first run through blocking. In his other films, H uses either big stars (Jimmy Stewart, Grace Kelly, Carey Grant, Ingrid Bergman) or brilliant no names (Anthony Perkins).

What's up here? It's not like H hadn't been making movies with actors for 30 years already. Notorious was a couple before this one, and Notorious was excellent. Not just thanks to Grant and Bergman.

Not as strong as any of the others I've seen so far, but not a bad film. I guess starting with Rear Window is just silly, it's all downhill from there.

Girl with a Pearl Earring

Peter Webber, 2003

The perfect cure for Bridget Jones: Pushing Me to the Edge of Reason. Also, Colin Firth, but sexier.

How I have not written a review for this movie yet is baffling. I've watched in the range of Casablanca and American Beauty, and it actually hits on more things I hold dear in film and life. Girl verges on the religious for me, and not because one of the main themes is the difference in lifestyle between Catholics and Protestants.

Like Vermeer's paintings, Girl is painstakingly naturalistic in story, mood, visuals, and sound. A person's life is rarely consumed in a single plot line event. Most people handle tragedies like losing a job or inadvertently making a wife jealous, amongst getting married and your father going blind in a freak kiln accident. So too does Griet, heroine. The plot concerning paintings and Vermeer—the only one worth listening to, a butcher's fiance does little worth notice in her life—stops but Griet is not fazed.

Director and /or cinematographer, Peter Webber and/or Eduardo Serra, are clearly northern renaissance enthusiasts and familiar with how to copy the compositions of the time and place because shots and scenes often look far more like animated GIFs than they do like bits of movie. The three seconds of the servants eating with the family children, for example, seriously could be a Rembrant. Grit and her maid manager Tanneka sit upstage looking downstage and just left of center with the two eldest/tallest children flanking them facing each other so the audience sees them in profile. Two 5-7 year olds eat at the table with their backs turned to us to complete the circle. A single unseen candle is the only lighting and it shines forth from just right of center, making what would other wise be genuinely stodgy and overly framed (see Botticelli and most southern Renaissance paintings) is full of movement and not a little tension.

Like Austen novels that quiet, anal retentive romantics batedly devour, Girl hinges on layered tensions carefully folded into place. That is, the scene where nothing is said, but our heroine takes her skull cap off is one of the three climaxes. Editing (Kate Evans) contributes to movement, and even a feast-prep montage hurries things along. Webber will often end a cut on a percussive sound, like a floor brush scraping suds and sand off a step, and pick up on another, a hand pat to meat jelly or walking cane puncturing wood floor. It keeps attention up like little slaps to the face (if such are needed by ADD viewers with too much candy thrust in their faces).

Like my life, the rational is revered and the irrational hated, the artificial pointed at and respected for being so, even as it chases the natural essence of life. Vermeer immortalized seconds of life, fleeting impressions of life without reducing himself to half-blind approximations of brush strokes like the Impressionists claimed was true and correct. He captured human expression and emotion in those stills, not light on haystacks. However noble actual naturalists may be, they miss what is truly essential about vivid, conscious life in their ponderous dogma.

Tracy Chevalier, who wrote the book this screenplay is based on, captures this perfectly. She saw the painting Girl with a Pearl Earring, and noticed the surprised vulnerability on the model's face. Then she noticed that blue and yellow head dress was not exactly a fashion statement for the time. The artifice of the scarf, juxtaposed to the wetness of the girl's lips; the lack of facial make up juxtaposed to the rich weight of the pearl hanging from her one ear. How did a poor girl come to wear such a piece of jewelry in such a strange hair covering and be so turned on by it? A plot line was born of a few leaping assumptions.

Webber captures this. He lays out Chevalier's characters, motivations and actions growing naturally there from on a canvas at least as rich as one layered in “urine of elephants fed only on mango leaves” and precious stones otherwise hoarded by Tsars.

It is, in every way, the antithesis of Bad Boys 2 by Michael Bay, and although I appreciate an eleven minute car chase scene on an interstate with a never ending bridge on fire doused only in quippy swearing as much as the next adrenaline junky, it will never float my boat in quite the same way that almost touching fingertips daubed in ground lapis lazuli does.

That is, like the patron character Van Ruijven (Tom Wilkinson), Kiddo Porn most likely is fully clothed, sans the word “fuck” and accompanied by piano solos. 'Cus if you have to actually see people getting it on in order for your brain to engage, you are going to miss some crucial details that make the whole effort futile.

Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason

2004, Beebon Kidron

There absolutely are reasons for doing all things. Venturing in the world of movies you know are going to be bad, for example, reminds you why you watch Brick on repeat with intervals of Studio Ghibli and Bill & Ted. The Bridget Jones sequel is exactly that.

Even though the quirky feel-good original is delightful, sequels rarely are any good, especially when their budgets are doubled but the plot line and set pieces are demanded to be replicated almost exactly. It takes all the bloody magic right out of the first one plot and pieces. From the opening scene of torturous New Year’s party, to love triangle set-up, the same insecurities the same jokes about bums and knickers, the same fight scene between Darcy and Cleaver. It’s pretty drear.

The premise is good enough, yes, of course Bridget is going to be clingy and ridiculous now she has won Mark Darcy, but the number of embarrassing instances the writers put her through in the first 51 minutes that lead to her breaking up with said dream boat is beyond endearing and funny, and becomes a grotesque caricature of what was lovable about the first Jones film.

Thankfully, there are about 30 minutes of redemption then. There is a new adventure to be had. One that is actually interesting, and funny all in its own right. Bridget, as goofy TV reporter is, through a believable twist, partnered to Daniel Cleaver, the brilliant Hugh Grant role, and they are bound to Bangkok. I’m not giving anything away by saying they flirt as they film things. Like the first one, the chemistry between Zellweger and Grant is stellar and I end up kinda rooting for the man slut. In this instance the rooting is doubled after watching how foolishly Bridget genuinely squandered the Darcy love affair. I’d have dumped her way earlier, but then, in movies, no one is allowed to have reasonable conversations.

While in Bangkok Bridget runs into genuine trouble, ie. Jail, and Darcy has to rescue her while Cleaver visibly leaves her to the dogs. Perfect. It is also in this setting that we get a glimpse of genuine feminine bonding which I assume is what the demographic for which this film was made needs injecting with. Doubly perfect.

Then she’s suddenly back in Britain, and its all cocked up again with the revisitations of scenes past and jokes told.