Changeling

Clint Eastwood, 2008

Going into a film 95% blind is difficult to accomplish. Thanks to the media frenzied world we call home, contemporary films coming out a dozen a day announce themselves months in advance. When we sit and watch one we know who is in it, who made it, and something about the plot. If we’ve seen more than 20 films in the past we can probably tell you several more things about the plot.

I missed Changeling. I knew it had Angelina Jolie, and that it was one of her bleeding heart movies. Although it was exactly that, it had an unusual dose of righteous triumph that tasted good at times.

Otherwise, pacing was inexorably slow, and not in a bad way. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, in a time of movies paced like meteor showers and Ritalin test labs, long pans and tingles of piano music ramp up tension.

The plot itself doesn’t give itself away, almost ever. Hard to do when you hear the premise: Woman has child kidnapped and the returned child is not her own. Right, then you think, well, she’ll fight it and get him back. Cut and dry. However, Eastwood makes us rethink how things happened with police and women’s rights in 1928, and suddenly the story is twice as interesting. The interest factor adds to the tension, and the sympathy for the various characters.

Jolie, for her part, does not sex up the character at all and thanks to a reduction bra and some genuine acting, the role of Christine Collins is magnetic unlike any other character she has played. You literally want to hug this woman and punch some guys in the face on her behalf. It’s a new feeling. It magnifies the emotion you have already put into the show. It’s a surprise.

Such a surprise is bought at a high price. Christine is so sympathetic because she is put in so brutal and hopeless a situation. The situation, dealing with police, serial killers of children, kidnappings from well-to-do neighborhoods, mental institutes and radio priests, is smothers like LA smog. It is not fun to watch. It is perfect, in that it is complete. It is beautiful in that it elicits such strong reactions from the viewers, but I doubt I could ever watch Changeling again.

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.

Easy Rider

1969

Dennis Hopper

I watched Easy Rider and had my mind blown. The great thing about being saturated in crap new movies with their high saturation everything and epileptic editing and cinematography is that we can look at things like Easy Rider, 8 1/2, and The Good the Bad and the Ugly and have our minds genuinely blown by the different uses of camera. Who knew it was possible to actually manipulate your instruments for a variety of settings and situations? Not most blockbuster makers. JJ Abrams, much as I love him for his strong female characters and zany stories that actually catch me taking them seriously, is the perfect example of a director who can use "shaky fast cam" or "tight face tension cam" and nothing else.

Other things that blow my mind: Dennis Hopper. I am ashamed to say that I knew him first from a cameo in Entourage. The show made a big deal about how cool he was, and I just went along with it. Then I saw Blue Velvet. Clearly the man is a great actor. Then Gunfight at the OK Coral. And my heart almost skipped a beat he was so good looking. It was like watching Grapes of Wrath and seeing Henry Fonda's face for the first time. Or Kelly's Heroes with Clint Eastwood. I mean, damn. Good looking.

Then this. I recognized him immediately, then that the other guy was Henry Fonda's kid. And that opening! Steady shot of the Mexican shack. Everything in Spanish. No subtitles. Henry Fonda's kid is speaking Spanish. Then the meeting at the airport with sound mixing taken straight from Fellini or Godart. I was so disoriented I clung to these two laid back men with sweet sunglasses and jackets, knowing they, who were so cool in these crazy scenes, would get me through.

And the movie progresses. It's a picaresque. Each setting more home town american than the last, and becoming more restrictive as they go. It's simple, but what works better at making a point? A text book explaining the poetic devices in the book of Revelations or the book of Revelations? The parable is going to win.

What's better, is that 10 minutes from the end, at minute 121, I still had no idea how it would end. No clue. Could not predict a single thing. Is it because of the simplicity? Is it because of the repetitive nature of it? Is it because of the insanely abrupt and brutal nature of the ending?

After bonding so intensely with two characters we know to be good, and harmless, and completely unrelated to anything they see along the way, it is really shocking. And what's worse than that, is that I have watched half a dozen parodies of this ending (the best being the end of season 1 of The Venture Brothers) and other parts of the film.

It gets even better. Dennis Hopper didn't just star in it as a true incarnation of a free spirit, but directed it. And he and Henry Fonda's kid wrote it. It's beyond my comprehension. So good.

An American made, with a totally American feel and chunkiness found only in Hemingway novels, directed like a French New Wave or high style Fellini film.

Are there other movies like this? I am ready for options!

PS. Did I mention Jack Nicholson? Equally hot. Equally brilliant. As always, a scene stealer. Not even Dennis Hopper is able to withstand that man's presence on film.

The Hurt Locker

The Hurt Locker

Kathryn Bigelow, 2008

Only about 20 seconds of this movie fail. The ending is can't help but burst into some crap nu metal as our anti-hero strides into a dusty sunset, but the rest of the two hours and three minutes are as near perfect as the poster says.

Tense, well written, well acted, well photographed – this director actually uses that horrid hand cam thing that 24 uses to subdue its audience into barfing submission correctly. She combines it with long shots, steady shots, medium shots. Like many other films with the interior of a car being a main set, she is forced to stay on people's faces longer than perhaps is prudent if you are afraid of air born contagions, but there is definitely about 5 minutes of time filmed in a Humvee that must have its door off in order to get the kind of personal space most humans like from one another.

She has reason to do this because she's directing another story from the current Iraq war. A squad of three soldiers are expert bomb detonators, getting called in all over Baghdad to disarm road bombs found in sacks, gravel, children, jackets, cars, you know, the usual.

What gives this movie a kick above things like Jarhead is the character. The characters are stylized from their original men (it's based on Mark Boal's accounts as an embedded reporter) into workable pieces of fiction. So stylized, they actually engage the audience more than Anthony Swofford can being so realistic. Either that or Jake Gyllenhaal sucks.

And when you go with no name actors you either win hard or lose hard. Bigelow approved some pretty amazing actors for the lead trio. When big names pop up (Ralph Fiennes has the sexiest cameo ever and Guy Pearce shows off his ever impressive American accent for three lines) and promptly die.

Fiction wins again with the story structure. While Band of Brothers was its own stranger than fiction jack pot of climaxes for one group of men, Generation Kill has to focus on non-plot related stuff some episodes and Schindler's List sort of war films focus so hard on a single story that they don't really have to use fiction to make a good film. The Hurt Locker combines these. It samples every type of bomb you hear about on the radio and CNN and illustrates it from the no-nonsense points of view of James, Sanborn and Eldridge.

These three make our elite team of “specialists”. They use a special bomb proof suit, robots, pliers, C4, detective skills, determination, some whiskey and a slew of concise insults and compliments to make it through the last 39 days of their tour. The heart weepy story here ties family back home and slaps it against the realities of war in a desert. Which, the audience is asked alongside James, Sanborn and Eldridge, is preferable?

And honestly, it will convince you. One way or the other.

Tension Low? Listen to some new Kills...

The Kills, Blood Pressures

2011

In this neck of the woods, I often hear the complaint "my tension is low". Moldovans refer to their blood pressure here. If they feel lackluster, they know it's because the ol' singe ain't thrummin so fine. It's like a country full of educated diabetics. It's awesome. We Murkans just say things like "i feel glum" or "I don't know what's wrong with me". Eat something salty and sweet and get on with it.

Also helpful: kick ass music.

The Kills have been (sorry) killing with their discography. Their first two albums sounding like they were written and recorded in a trash can behind the bar where The White Stripes were becoming famous. Which is to say, awesome and more aggressive about it.

Their third, Midnight Boom, departs a bit with synthy touches all over the place. Just as fundamental in makeup and design, just electronic. The departure is neither good nor bad for the band since it's just a different form of sounding really really good.

This new effort, 3 years later, is itself a synthesis. Blood Pressures has no electronic SOUNDING stuff, but the production itself, the electronic mixing and so forth, is so far and away more expensive sounding the listener knows they have landed among the rock angels at last.

Another way to say this is they sound like a British version of The White Stripes. Which, it turns out, they half are. The guy (brit) even married Kate Moss recently. The chick, meanwhile was drafted into one of Jack White's side projects (The Dead Weather). Blood Pressure was recorded in Michigan and mixed in London. We can see where this extra cash flow and recognition is coming from.

And where it's going. Blood Pressures is garage rock at its best. Where bands like the White Stripes and The Black Keys do garage rock in thick bluesy refrains and masculine bludgeoning, The Kills are sharp, and wickedly feminine racket-rousers.

For one thing, their lead singer is female. Alison Mosshart has an imperfect voice that drips with sardonic sex. Jamie Hince, backs up with some seriously delicate harmonies. The guitar work is precise, fuzzing out now and then with one or another of the climaxes per song. There are acoustics; there's finger slide work, there is variation in warp. There's reverb with finger picking layering over it. The noise makes a sick back drop for what they are actually presenting:

A sucker punched Clash/Nirvana confrontation. Audibly, it's gritty and loud. Emotionally it's brutal. Either it will jack up a second wind for you on a gray day, or it'll drain every last drop of frustration out of your cochleas.

Opening with Future Starts Slow, Mosshart and Hince declare their undying love for someone. who may "swing, you may sail / you can fuck like a broken sail/ but I'll never give you up". They know this person will also be the only one to "know what's left of my right mind". They get on with life regardless of its pitfalls.

The Last Goodbye, their only ballad, looks at better off days and sighs "I can't rely/on a dime a day/that dont go anywhere." Though the conviction is a bit weaker, the intent is the same. Life may give you lemons, and you don't even have to make the damn lemonade, just take the vitamin c.

Soon enough they revel in the sentiment with some very Shirley Mansonish thoughts in She Damned if She Do: "She come alive when she's dying/ ...some of them left in one piece/and some she damn near broke". They are not afraid of singing about life in the material crap shoot, or the romantic version.

Inspirational stuff for those cynics among us. Fun, head rocking stuff for those concert rats among us. It's even singable -- if you aren't afraid of projecting.

My tension's higher already.