Month: October 2014

By Joe Bendel. Never ask a sideshow somnambulist when you will die. It is simply too easy for him to make his prophecies come true, especially when he is commanded by a psychotic Svengali with advanced psychiatric training. It is a mistake people still repeat in horror movies. There are a great many such genre motifs that can be traced back to this silent German classic, but the inferiority of public domain prints made it difficult to fully appreciate its feverish vision. Happily, Robert Weine’s ground-breaking The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari has been digitally restored to its original German expressionist glory, or as close to it as humanly possible. After playing to a packed house as part of MoMA’s annual To Save and Project film series, Weine’s restored Caligari opens this Friday at Film Forum.

Like the Ancient Mariner, Francis has a story that will disturb his elderly listener, but it needs to be told. It involves his rather distraught-looking fiancée Jane Olsen, and his best friend Alan. Like the German equivalent of Jules and Jim, both men openly courted Olsen, but resolved to remain friends regardless whom she chooses. Unfortunately, the choice will be made for her when the two friends attend the annual fair.

This year, Dr. Caligari has been granted a permit to exhibit his somnambulist, Cesare, by the soon to be deceased city clerk. According to Caligari, Cesare exists in a state of uncanny slumber, but can be temporarily roused to predict the future. “When will I die,” asks Alan. “At first dawn,” replies the zombie-like Cesare. Late that evening, a hulking figure roughly Cesare’s shape makes the prediction come true. Distraught over the death of his friend, Francis starts pursuing his killer, quickly focusing his suspicions on Caligari and Cesare.

Hans Janowitz & Carl Mayer’s screenplay is considerably more sophisticated than most silent era potboilers, but the ironic framing device was not their idea. In fact, it is largely thought to subvert their ideological intentions. Nevertheless, it is hard to feel comfortable with the authority Caligari represents, despite the eleventh hour twist. Indeed, Cabinet can be seen as an early example of subjective reality achieving equal standing with objective reality.

Regardless, Cabinet is a thoroughly otherworldly environment that only vaguely approximates the forms of our world. Aside from that titular box, you will hardly find any right angles in this town out of time. Instead, everything is made out of jagged lines and slanting diagonals. Janowitz and Mayer’s screenplay was conceived out of aesthetic notions of film as a truly collaborative, inter-disciplinary endeavor, where set designers would be as creatively engaged as actors, writers, and directors. Cabinet might the greatest realization of their egalitarian ideal.

Visually, it is an absolute wonder—and a disorienting horror show. The 4K restoration went back to the incomplete camera negative and the best extant prints available, adding footage typically not seen in PD cuts. The original inter-titles have been reinserted and the seemingly abrupt cuts have been augmented with previously missing frames. Gone are the hiss and scratches, replaced by a close approximation of the 1920 color tints and washes. It all looks great on the big screen—and the bigger the better.

Rather inconveniently, it is Werner Krause’s performance as Caligari that holds up best for contemporary viewers. He chews the scenery with villainous relish, shifting gears on a dime when necessary. Despite Cabinet’s lineage, Krause would become an outspoken supporter of the National Socialists and star in Veit Harlan’s notoriously anti-Semitic Jew Süss. On the other hand, Conrad Veidt would play Major Strasser in Casablanca, but he sleepwalks (in a literal sense) through the picture as Cesare. Still, the physicality and theatricality of his work have helped make Cabinet so iconic.

This is a true classic film that has lost none of its power to mesmerize, but the restoration makes it a much smoother and more lucid viewing experience. Almost a century later it remains vastly influential, even though for years it has not been shown in its true glory. Very highly recommended, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari opens Halloween Friday (10/31) in New York at Film Forum.

LFM GRADE: A

Posted on October 28th, 2014 at 5:07pm.

By Joe Bendel. Jean-Luc Godard might be using the latest in 3D technology, but it is in the service of his decades-old ideological and aesthetic program. He will strip away bourgeois affectations, like plot and characterization, in favor of wordplay and collage. However, all viewers are left with is Godard’s dog Miéville (playing Roxy) in Goodbye to Language, which opens this Wednesday in New York.

A single man and a married woman commence an affair. It is passionate at first, but eventually turns violent. It is a familiar story, but still promising dramatic grist in the right hands. Of course, Godard cannot be bothered to develop it. Instead, we will simply dole out fragments of the mercurial relationship, in between episodes of linguistic gamesmanship.

As is usually the case with recent Godard films, viewers had better come prepared to read, because the auteur will explicitly tell them just what and how they should think. That might sound problematic in a 3D film like Language, but Godard uses the effect to privilege certain words above others. It might be the only clever aspect of the film.

Much has been made of the superimposition of 3D images in one sequence, in which different scenes can be seen out of either eye. Unfortunately, neither is particularly interesting. Indeed, the film’s drably pedestrian visuals are arguably its greatest sin. For all of its gamesmanship, it looks stylistically similar to early 1980s experimental films, like Joan Jonas’s Volcano Saga or Double Lunar Dogs, but without similar hooks for the audience to grab onto.

Arguably, we are not supposed to luxuriate in lush imagery, because that too would be bourgeois. Godard would rather goad us with dashed off would-be profundities, such as the observation Hitler fulfilled all his promises (except, presumably that 1,000 year Reich thing), which only a Parisian Maoist could find provocative. There is so little in Godard’s kit bag this time around, he frequently resorts to the oldest, cheapest trick in the book: sudden deafening blasts of noise.

Frankly, this film has no reason for being, because Godard and his fellow traveling poststructuralists won the philosophic day decades ago. Language represents the state of critical and aesthetic thinking in today’s academia, chapter and verse. They just never had a plan for winning the peace, so the old discredited forms still hold sway over the popular culture. As if on cue, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Mary Shelley (she wrote Frankenstein, get it?) pop up as representatives of the old order to be swept away. Yet, each has more currency to the lives of ordinary proletarians than any of Godard’s films have, since at least the 1980s.

3D aside, there is nothing in Language that has not been done before and done better. It is possible to jettison narrative and still produce something intriguing. Whether they speak to readers or not, the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet are impressive, because he removes narrative and character, yet they still retain the form of mystery novels. In effect, he pulls the tablecloth out from under the place settings, without upsetting a glass. In contrast, with Language, Godard simply kicks over the table and then takes an ostentatious bow.

As a work of cinema, Language is dreadfully slight, but that is not really how it should be judged. It is really part of a wider piece of performance art, in which Godard keeps testing the limits of how little he can give the film festival intelligentsia while still maintaining their adulation. You’re being punked, so stop encouraging him. Not recommended, Goodbye to Language opens this Wednesday (10/29) at the IFC Center.

LFM GRADE: F

Posted on October 28th, 2014 at 5:06pm.

By Joe Bendel. When two movie brothers go off to war, it is a lead pipe cinch one of them is not coming back. The questions will be which one and under what circumstances. The answers will be revealed in a series of flashbacks throughout Pat O’Connor’s WWI drama, Private Peaceful, which opens this Friday in New York.

Adapted from the novel by War Horse author Michael Morpurgo, Private will incorporate the themes of Paths of Glory and Saving Private Ryan within the trenches of Flanders, but Simon Reade’s screenplay scrupulously takes its time establishing the Peaceful family dynamics before reaching that point. Charlie Peaceful is the older, brasher brother, who always looked out for the shier, more sensitive Thomas “Tommo” Peaceful. Poor Tommo will become increasingly withdrawn, first blaming himself for the death of their gamekeeper father and then watching Charlie marry Molly Monks, the childhood friend they both love, after getting her in the family way.

Initially, Tommo Peaceful volunteers as a way of escaping his broken heart, but he quickly learns the bitter realities of trench fighting and chemical warfare. Soon his brother enlists, despite his parental obligations, in order to keep Tommo alive. Naturally, Charlie Peaceful clashes badly with the gung ho Sgt. Hanley, ultimately leading to the court martial seen in deliberately cagey snippets throughout the film.

The notion that the officers and war boosters were blithely anticipating previous wars is hardly a new insight, but Private adds a clumsy element of class warfare in the person of the corpulent Colonel, who owns the estate employing the Peacefuls’ father and subsequently exploiting the Peaceful mother and brothers. “Guns and horses, that’s how we beat the Boers,” he blusters. As great as the late Richard Griffiths was (we prefer to remember him in Withnail & I rather than Harry Potter), his turn as the Colonel is total caricature.

On the other hand, the fraternal drama is rather honest stuff, quite nicely turned by two of the UK’s fastest rising stars. Private technically predates ’71 and For Those in Peril, clearly showing why Yann Demange picked Jack O’Connell as the young face of war’s chaos in the former, while George MacKay demonstrates an affinity for guilt-tormented brothers that would also manifest in the latter.

In fact, O’Connell is considerably more dynamic here than he is convincingly portraying Demange’s overwhelmed fresh recruit. Indeed, it is the young cast members who carry Private, including the smaller supporting players, such as Eline Powell, who is terrific as Anna, Tommo’s potential French love interest.

While it lacks the tragic sweep of Galipoli, Private is an effectively micro-focused period anti-war film that should be considered a cut or two above standard PBS Masterpiece programming. O’Connor balances the familial drama with the horrors of war well enough in the third act, but tarries somewhat in the mid-section devoted to the difficult days following the senior Peaceful’s death. Earnest and respectable, Peaceful Private is recommended on balance for fans of British literary adaptations when it opens this Friday (10/31) in New York at the AMC Empire.

LFM GRADE: B-

Posted on October 28th, 2014 at 5:05pm.

By Joe Bendel. It was the very last film ever screened at the late, lamented Two Boots Pioneer Theater. Obviously, they had no intentions of going quietly. It was also one the few films broadcast on MTV at the height of its 1980s cool cachet and now holds a richly deserved spot on the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry. Yet, the auteur who would inaugurate the zombie genre spent years whipping up commercials for Pittsburgh television as one of the principals of the Latent Image production house. Rightly and necessarily, George A. Romero’s The Night of the Living Dead screens together with a selection of his commercial work as part of Anthology Film Archive’s Industrial Terror film series.

Somehow this film is just as potent the twentieth or thirtieth time around. As you really ought to know, at least according to the LOC, the original Living Dead follows the plight of a group of strangers stranded in a farm house during a mysterious zombie apocalypse. Yet, despite the peril outside, they end up turning on each other.

It is a simple formula many have tried to replicate, but never with the same success. Romero masterfully doles out information via the unreliable media, using zombies sparingly in the second act. Instead, he relies on human nature to build the tension. Of course, he delivers the zombie cannibalism when he is good and ready.

On yet another repeat viewing, a few things jump out about Living Dead. After witnessing her brother’s death, the character of Barbra spends the rest of the film in a state of shock, which we rarely see in horror movies, but it is a much more believable response than dropping a series of ironic pop culture references.

While it has been said before, Duane Jones really should have become a much bigger star. He immediately instills viewer confidence as Ben and the subtle manner in which he takes a protective interest in Barbra is quite touching. A few more of him and things might have turned out better.

Keith Wayne’s Tom also serves as an effective audience surrogate. He is the sort of conciliator you want in your life boat and he is handy with tools. Yet, it is probably Bill Hinzman who truly made the film. As the first zombie in the cemetery, his gaunt face has become an iconic image of cinematic zombies.

Decades later, Living Dead’s conclusion remains the same stinging slap in the face. Indeed, it all holds up remarkably well. You have seen it before, but this is the perfect venue to see it again, along with some apt commercial selections, including a groovy riff on Fantastic Voyage for Calgon and a racially-themed presidential campaign spot, which should scare the willies out of everyone with the prospects of a McGovern administration. Highly recommended under any circumstances, the original black-and-white (non-colorized) Night of the Living Dead screens this Saturday (10/25) and Tuesday (10/28) at Anthology Film Archives, as part of Industrial Terror.

LFM GRADE: A

Posted on October 23rd, 2014 at 3:50pm.