German is a lovely language, especially for its malleability. Need to coin a word? Just stick a few together and you've got what you need. Wagner did it all the time. He called Parsifal "ein Bühnenweihfestspiel." Means a Festival Play for the Consecration of the Stage, in case you need to know – super-handy for cocktail party small talk.
I need German to describe Godard's La Chinoise (1967) which is either the funniest movie ever made or the most irritating. I do know that it produces a strong reaction in its audience. Walk-outs, groaning, snoring: Godard gets it all. This made me realize the limits of the English language, for we have no word for "exasperated rolling of the eyes during overintellectualized cinematic discussion of marxism." Ein godardenspiel, perhaps?
I am sure the strong reaction is intended and that's what makes the movie so funny - to the intellectually pretentious sadist with a fetish for watching movie audiences squirm. I might be that sadist, but most people aren't, and so I can't really recommend the film.
Godard's plot is slim. He places five young people with leninist ideals in a Paris apartment and supplies them with plenty of copies of Mao's Little Red Book. He then subjects them and us to a series of lectures/arguments about philosophy, Marxism, and Vietnam. None of the arguments is especially illuminating, but Godard uses a clever visual gambit, a visual paper collage, to make them exciting to watch. In one segment, the five communards dramatize U.S.'s involvement in Vietnam using model airplanes, sunglasses and paper masks, and this is the best part of the movie. It's also the only interesting part.
La Chinoise does have some strengths. The art direction during the first half of the movie is rudimentary, primary colored and fascinating. Once the five leave the apartment for ill-fated sorties into the real world, the art direction is ignored and the movie suffers.
The most fascinating part of the film is how it represents its era in hindsight. Deliberately crude and completely lacking in glamorous, La Chinoise is a child of its time. Right now we're being treated to a spate of highly politicized Hollywood movies (Rendition, Lions and Lambs and the upcoming Redacted from Brian DePalma). The first two get the full Hollywood treatment: big stars, top directors, whispers of Oscar nominations. Put Godard next to Redford and you see the difference between 1968 and 2007. Whether the passions behind the new movies is as strong as Godard's is interesting to contemplate.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Monday, October 8, 2007
Blade Runner Strikes Back
While watching the "Final Cut" version of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), I kept hoping that Sam Spade (in the guise of Humphrey Bogart) would appear and jazz things up a bit. Watching Harrison Ford sonnambulate through this ponderously art-directed sci-fi film-noir made me greedy for a basic of film: star quality. I would have settled for Robert Mitchum or Alan Ladd or even Richard Basehart - anybody with a little flavor - for Blade Runner is ineptly cast and plotted and needs all the help it can get. Maybe Victor Mature even?
The basics of the plot: Deckerd (Harrison Ford) is hired to search for and kill four replicants, androids with murderous intent and a four year life span. Along the way he meets and woos Rachel (Sean Young), damsel in distress and a replicant who sports the (I hope intentional) vocal inflections of a robot. Deckerd's boss (the usually entertaining M. Emmett Walsh, here hampered by nitwitted, repetitive dialogue) orders him to find and kill Rachel as well.
Meanwhile the replicants search for their creator, Tyrell (Joe Turkell) an old man wearing an amazing pair of what look to be quadrifocal glasses. Tyrell plays chess without having to look at the chessboard, a sure sign of cinematic eviliciousness. The replicant leader is named Roy Batty (delightful!) and is played by Rutger Hauer at his goofiest. Batty finds and kills Tyrell because Tyrell cannot extend his life span. Deckerd then has a showdown with Hauer, but not before a spectacular tussle with Daryl Hannah as a punked-out replicant assassin. Deckerd then escapes with Rachel.
Confused? Well, don't blame me, I only watched it.
In most film noirs the hero has at least one showdown with his enemies. The Maltese Falcon has several, cleverly skewing the moral compass of the film. In Blade, Deckerd's search for the replicants has little connection with the replicants search for Tyrell. Deckerd never meets Tyrell, a serious failing because the two strains of the plot never intermingle. Thus the climax of the film isn't the solving of a puzzle but two barely connected bloodlettings.
The second bloodletting - Ford and Hauer battling it out in a futuristic Miss Havisham's - is a serious contender for most egregious use of inane symbolism, an award I christen The Ninnybot. Near the end of their fight, Hauer suddenly grasps a white dove, an amazing sight - such a clean bird in a such a grime-encrusted movie! Where did it come from? Maybe Hauer was hiding it in his form-fitting shorts, or maybe it's Stevie Nicks white-winged dove on holiday. Does the dove get its own trailer? All I know is that it's the movie's only moment of humor, intentional or otherwise.
Blade's art direction is, admittedly, stupendous. Scott and his designers created a Brueghel-like vision of the future. That vision is Blade's most pungent characteristic and all I remembered from 1982. I'd certainly forgotten Vangelis' music, dreadful, insipid and endless. None of the actors, with the exception of Hauer, can overcome the bad dialogue and the overpowering visuals to connect with the audience. There's also the film's lazy-minded misogyny. Women are dimwitted robots, either killers or lovers. I longed for Mary Astor or Jane Greer - they might have been standard femme fatales but by comparison with Scott's women they were epitomes of nuance.
Blade Runner has acquired a cult following and a reputation that far exceeds the movie's merit. Most of this is due to the visuals, which influenced rock videos and sci-fi films for the next twenty years. But it clearly touched a devoted audience. I was impressed to see that the Ziegfeld, the last of Manhattan's grand movie theaters, was almost full. That the audience was mostly male and about 35 years old is something for future anthropologists to decipher.
The basics of the plot: Deckerd (Harrison Ford) is hired to search for and kill four replicants, androids with murderous intent and a four year life span. Along the way he meets and woos Rachel (Sean Young), damsel in distress and a replicant who sports the (I hope intentional) vocal inflections of a robot. Deckerd's boss (the usually entertaining M. Emmett Walsh, here hampered by nitwitted, repetitive dialogue) orders him to find and kill Rachel as well.
Meanwhile the replicants search for their creator, Tyrell (Joe Turkell) an old man wearing an amazing pair of what look to be quadrifocal glasses. Tyrell plays chess without having to look at the chessboard, a sure sign of cinematic eviliciousness. The replicant leader is named Roy Batty (delightful!) and is played by Rutger Hauer at his goofiest. Batty finds and kills Tyrell because Tyrell cannot extend his life span. Deckerd then has a showdown with Hauer, but not before a spectacular tussle with Daryl Hannah as a punked-out replicant assassin. Deckerd then escapes with Rachel.
Confused? Well, don't blame me, I only watched it.
In most film noirs the hero has at least one showdown with his enemies. The Maltese Falcon has several, cleverly skewing the moral compass of the film. In Blade, Deckerd's search for the replicants has little connection with the replicants search for Tyrell. Deckerd never meets Tyrell, a serious failing because the two strains of the plot never intermingle. Thus the climax of the film isn't the solving of a puzzle but two barely connected bloodlettings.
The second bloodletting - Ford and Hauer battling it out in a futuristic Miss Havisham's - is a serious contender for most egregious use of inane symbolism, an award I christen The Ninnybot. Near the end of their fight, Hauer suddenly grasps a white dove, an amazing sight - such a clean bird in a such a grime-encrusted movie! Where did it come from? Maybe Hauer was hiding it in his form-fitting shorts, or maybe it's Stevie Nicks white-winged dove on holiday. Does the dove get its own trailer? All I know is that it's the movie's only moment of humor, intentional or otherwise.
Blade's art direction is, admittedly, stupendous. Scott and his designers created a Brueghel-like vision of the future. That vision is Blade's most pungent characteristic and all I remembered from 1982. I'd certainly forgotten Vangelis' music, dreadful, insipid and endless. None of the actors, with the exception of Hauer, can overcome the bad dialogue and the overpowering visuals to connect with the audience. There's also the film's lazy-minded misogyny. Women are dimwitted robots, either killers or lovers. I longed for Mary Astor or Jane Greer - they might have been standard femme fatales but by comparison with Scott's women they were epitomes of nuance.
Blade Runner has acquired a cult following and a reputation that far exceeds the movie's merit. Most of this is due to the visuals, which influenced rock videos and sci-fi films for the next twenty years. But it clearly touched a devoted audience. I was impressed to see that the Ziegfeld, the last of Manhattan's grand movie theaters, was almost full. That the audience was mostly male and about 35 years old is something for future anthropologists to decipher.
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