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Matewan (1987, John Sayles)
What was that? Did anyone else see that? (Probably not, I’m watching the Canadian widescreen DVD).
Sayles actually ripped off the looking at the camera bit from The 400 Blows. He actually did it–while having the character’s future self narrate the epilogue. I’ve been dreading watching Matewan for over a year, since April 2004 in fact. I thought the dread came from my having only seen Matewan in school, but I guess I was just being smart. Matewan is easily Sayles’ worst film. It’s also one of his only “bad” ones. Matewan isn’t that bad, of course (get to that in a second), it’s just propaganda. Sure, it’s historically accurate, but it’s also propaganda. Management abusing labor is a fact and it’s a crime and Matewan is accurate in its depiction of it. But. Sayles presents one agent of management as a human being. The rest are not. The rest are villains. So, if there’s a shoot out with the villains, it’s impossible to care about them, impossible to think their deaths are at all a tragedy. Their deaths are weightless. Even Lethal Weapon 2 made excuses about its level of violence. It’s a disappointment, but Matewan is also Sayles’ first “big” film and it obviously got away from him.
There are signs of the Sayles goodness, of course. There are lots of interesting characters, but he doesn’t know what to do with them. There’s still too much of a story, instead of all the little stories that usually propel his films. There’s the Sayles cast, Chris Cooper and David Straithairn and Mary McDonnell are all excellent, Cooper the most. It’s hard to believe he didn’t become a vanilla leading man after Matewan.
I’m incredibly upset about this film… I was off movies because Stripes was so shitty, because an Ivan Reitman/Bill Murray picture was so painfully mediocre (and unfunny). What is a bad John Sayles movie going to do to me?
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The Spies (1957, Henri-Georges Clouzot)
I’m not all that familiar with Clouzot, or maybe I am. I’ve seen Wages of Fear and Diabolique. I didn’t even know The Spies was one of his, I was just queuing a Peter Ustinov spy movie. Apparently, Topkapi didn’t teach me anything.
I’m kidding. About The Spies, not about Topkapi. Topkapi is pretty shitty. The Spies is not.
It’s actually one of the lowest 3.5s I’ve ever given. Usually, I score throughout the film, just after the first act, I keep an active count (invariably, my internal dialogue questions itself about the rating and it just pops in–wow, we’re really getting Castaneda about film ratings tonight, must be the lack of sleep). I’ve been thinking about integrating star ratings into the Stop Button experience, but it’ll have to wait. The Spies final rating actually rings in and out in the last scene.
Problematically, Clouzot sets up The Spies as a comedy. If you’ve seen Les Diaboliques (which I remember being okay, nothing more), you know Clouzot likes to mess with the viewer. He likes to trick you, even more than Hitchcock, because Hitch never really messed with you. He messed with his characters and let you watch. Clouzot does both. It’s frustrating in The Spies because he wants the viewer to appreciate how much he’s messing with the characters, but he’s also messing with the viewer.
When you finally figure out what’s going on in The Spies–which takes a while, because Clouzot structures every conversation, every glance between characters, to mislead… or inform–you can begin to appreciate how good the film really is. It’s beautifully shot, of course. Clouzot’s a fabulous director. There’s also not a bad performance in the entire film and the lead is quite good, but I can’t name him because of all the accent marks. It’s 11:45 and I’m really lazy.
What I’ve seen of French New Wave never impressed me and a lot of Truffaut’s stuff embarrassed me (there’s a digital record I rented The Story of Adele H. out there somewhere), but between Renoir, Cocteau, and Clouzot, there appears to be a good thirty years of French cinema I need to check out.
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Versus (2000, Kitamura Ryuhei)
So, watching Versus, I realized a few things. First, Kitamura is probably the best action director… ever. Second, he can’t write his way out of a hat. Third, he’s also a great director of actors. Versus, for the superior first forty minutes, has a lot of characters in frame, doing a lot of things, not just action, but also just exuding personality. Kitamura does a great job with it.
It’s not just his shot construction, of course. It’s the way he moves the camera. He only does it in the first forty, but it’s a fantastic system for informing the viewer of what’s going on–where people are standing, where they’re moving. There’s so much good in Versus, which is incredibly hard to believe considering it’s described as Evil Dead meets The Matrix. Unfortunately, like I said, all that goodness is technical (some of the performances are excellent, however).
The writing falls apart, but then it breaks down more and more. Whenever Kitamura feels the pace slowing, he introduces more characters. We start with eight, which quickly becomes six, then he introduces three more, then another, then another two. The last additions are these asshole cops who are supposed to be funny, and to some degree they are–and it’s really interesting that one makes the (intentionally) geographically incorrect remark that he grew up in Yellowstone National Park in Minnesota, but the American DVD company subtitled it to Canada. Not surprising, that Japanese people have a better awareness of U.S. geography than American DVD aficionados.
Kitamura, as a writer and somewhat as a director (he keeps twirling the lead’s leather trench coat), is seemingly obsessed with “cool.” Versus is a film dictated by “wouldn’t it be cool if…” which is no way to tell a good story, but there wasn’t one anywhere in Versus, thankfully. It just got worse than it needed to get.
Had I seen Versus before Azumi, I might have shut it off (though probably not, as the opening forty are incredibly well-directed), but I certainly would never have found Azumi. Azumi is a good movie.
All Kitamura needs is a good script–which means he shouldn’t touch it.
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Olga’s Chignon (2002, Jérôme Bonnell)
I think this film is the one of the best films Woody Allen never made.
I don’t talk about it much, or ever, since I watched all of Allen’s films long before The Stop Button, but there are some distinct Allen formats and he never seems to mix them. Olga’s Chignon mixes them a little–it’s never as depressing as Allen’s depressing films–and it’s never as playful as his most playful entries get.
Except for the end, which sort of stops, leaving a number of characters unresolved simply because the third act concentrated on two of the four main characters. The conclusion is well-handled enough, however, that I can forgive some of it. It’s just when you introduce your thesis at the last minute, it makes a lot of the previous story setting instead of important.
Bonnell’s young, twenty-eight, and Olga’s Chignon is an impressive debut for someone that age. As much as he concentrates on the writing, his directing is the most important part of the film. He holds scenes a few seconds longer than you except, giving the viewer time to reflect on what he or she has just seen. It’s a literary equivalent to ‘white space’ in short stories, expect ‘white space’ is sometimes used to display change in time, and fade outs are the traditional film device. Except fade outs don’t let you reflect. The only other film I can think of that does this is Horse Thief.
Olga’s Chignon is also my first French family drama and it’s set an incredible standard. Bonnell’s got a new film this year, but Olga never made it to the US (thankfully Nicheflix has it), so I’ll have to track that down somehow. Based on this film, of course, getting slaughtered with a UK exchange rate would likely be worth it.