The Tramp suffers a nervous breakdown at breakneck speed, his humanity enslaved by grinding machines and overbearing overseers. Charles Chaplin’s iconic persona is a celebration of the dignity of the human spirit over the mechanical machinations of modernity.
Chaplin discovers humor in the daily grind, as the Tramp is comically inept in his job tightening bolts on an assembly line, failing to keep up with the job. The Expressionist set design is awesome to behold as he literally becomes trapped in the gigantic cogs and gears, devoured by the machine. The film was made during the Great Depression and becomes a homage to the working man, as the unemployed Tramp straggles from one comical mishap to the next. His life is invigorated by the appearance of the beautiful orphan girl, and it’s easy to see why Chaplin was infatuated with Paulette Goddard: her expressive eyes and mischievous smile capture your heart.
Chaplin makes some concession to the format of “talking pictures” though MODERN TIMES remains wonderfully anachronistic (even for 1936). Voice is only conveyed electronically through diagetic means such as a radio or television monitor, until he finally gives voice to the intrepid Little Fellow: a wonderfully poetic nonsensical song and dance routine becomes his final (and only) spoken words. Chaplin wanted his alter-ego to remain transcendent and this film was to be the final appearance of the Little Fellow, knowing that he was living in modern times of new artistic expressions; he retires his avatar on that long road towards the future, walking hand in hand with his true love into the sunset.
Final Grade: (A+)
Cleo’s superficial life is suddenly redefined by the threat of a cancerous affair, twenty-five years compressed to a sublime one and a half hours. Director Agnes Varda reduces her protagonist to the bare essential, a naked mortality where dark shades are as dangerous as rose colored glasses.
Cleo is a rising pop star living a life of empty calories, filling her time with baubles and brief affairs, pampered by her maid and catered to by her songwriters: she is a twittering voice, an elusive intellectual narcotic. But Cleo must face the sum total of her existence, a light confection sweet as sugar…and as quickly forgotten. Her physical sickness awakens an emotional dis-ease: while she waits for the results of a biopsy, this one and a half hours becomes a journey of introspection and extroversion.
The film begins with Cleo consulting a fortune teller, a colorful fantasy that soon becomes the harsh black and white of reality. Cleo is looking for the answers she wants to hear but can no longer manipulate her surroundings and must face the unknown. She tries to hide her fear behind a facile façade as temporary as makeup or a new hat. Her desperate depression soon isolates her from the world: for the first time, she is able to peer at herself from outside, her narcissism abated and transformed into magnanimity. She witnesses the world witnessing her, their attention turned towards her vacuous nature, fleeting lives existing vicariously through her senses.
She is soon lost in a city she knows so well, the natural has become some surreal destination, until she meets a soldier that must face Thanatos, his own tribulations also lost on foreign soul. Varda takes her protagonist to the cinema where she spies a silent one-reel of joy (starring Jean-Luc Godard and his muse Anna Karina!), Cleo’s problem projected outwards at 24fps. She finally makes that human connection and finds happiness in the moment when it could be stolen away forever.
Final Grade: (A)
O, what a tangled web conceived, in an atomic age of no reprieve. A prescient tale of humanity diminished by the looming mushroom cloud, an exclamation point to the brief lives segregated by nuclear holocaust, this final winter of awful discontent. THREADS is a brutally honest representation of a nuclear war and its immediate effects and fallout, gruesome in its portrayal of the millions dead, frightening in its scope of murderous intent.
The story begins innocently enough as two young lovers embrace and talk about future plans, parked on a hill overlooking their town, momentarily lost in the dreams and imagination of youth. The radio’s voice poisons the atmosphere with its noxious newscast, declaring the elevated tensions between world powers. The ubiquitous newscaster haunts the film, a droning soliloquy easily ignored until reality begins to intrude upon their lives. Soon, violent protests and boldfaced headlines lead to heightened awareness, the possibility of war impossible to ignore.
The narrative follows the couple and their families, representing disparate social classes impregnated with fear, showing that all lives are tied together by the thread of human existence. The cinematography utilizes many close-ups and establishing shots in full frame compositions, but when the carnage begins each frame screams with an abundance of suffering, every inch filled with the corpses of the atomic age.
The modern world descends back to medieval times under a blanket of irradiated snow, children of this new age toiling to survive, knowledge replaced by animal instincts. The young mother has survived the holocaust and ten years later ends her suffering in a dilapidated barn, her death an ironic contrast to the birth of an impotent savior two thousand years before. Her daughter struggles ever onward never knowing hope or charity, and the film ends, like Munch’s existential masterpiece, with a silent scream.
Final Grade: (A)
A series of vignettes like words strung together, their meaning altered when assembled in different combinations creating a new message. Jean-Luc Godard’s diatribe against static conventions is a film of its time, creating revolution from disparate and seemingly docile elements.
From the studio where the Rolling Stones are recording their now legendary album Beggar’s Banquet to a junkyard where Black Panthers spout revolution, or a bookstore filled with comic books and pornography to Eden where Eve Democracy exhales a monotonous soliloquy, Godard combines these surreal elements and like an ancient alchemist, discovers gold. Godard doesn’t explain, he leaves the meaning up to each viewer to discern the larger picture from the construction of its tiny parts.
The studio sequences with the Rolling Stones are extraordinary, showing talented musicians at the height of their creative power, as Mick Jagger and Keith Richards begin writing Sympathy for the Devil and Charlie Watts struggles to develop the proper cadence. This is the imaginarium of creation, the painful birthing of the abstract into concrete. The scenes espousing Black Power are a rant against urban Vietnam, the ghetto mentality of modernity, juxtaposed with the Stones taking blues riffs and rhythms and making them their own. The bookstore condemns the populist propaganda, depicting comic books, dime store detective novels, and men’s magazines as one and the same, bought with the currency of Fascism. Godard relegates democracy to its basic ingredients, two words that empower any action depending on the question. A narrator cheerfully vomits exploitation as he reads a cheap pornographic novel which often overlaps and obliterates the dialogue.
Godard puzzles the viewer with the nature of his cinematic game.
Final Grade: (B+)
Two outsiders raise hell with the devil but must bury their past to embark on a journey of self-discovery. Director Ang Lee tells a tale of brotherhood concerning two disparate Southerners, an emotional civil war experienced between the violent pages of history.
Set during the War Between The States, a group of Missouri Patriots decide to take matters into their own hands and liberate their homeland from Northern aggression and sympathizers. This ragged group fights a guerrilla war against their enemies but soon finds themselves exiled to the periphery of their own country. Ang Lee begins the film with an ensemble cast that soon dissolves into a character study of Jake Roedel, son of a German immigrant whose loyalty to the Cause is often questioned. Portrayed by Tobey Maguire, he imbues Roedel with naïve impertinence, a young man who says an acts upon what he believes but isn’t ignorant as he reevaluates his politics and judgments. The beautiful cinematography vibrates with lush colors and deep shadows, which stands apart from the mediocre score. The film suffers from a cast of actors who look too modern, their perfect teeth and long hair more 20th century boy than 19th century citizen soldier: I call this the YOUNG GUNS syndrome. Jewel’s appearance as a widowed Southern Belle almost sinks the film by embracing a romantic interest, her character and actions just not very believable, her acting bland and her part seemingly written solely as a plot device for the denouement.
Lee has the cannon(balls) to write a Civil War film that eschews action for the cadence of poetic lyricism, and asks the audience to sympathize with a Secessionist and a slave…who fights against a government that emancipated him! Lee even turns Western convention on its head with the final confrontation, leading the audience to expect a violent showdown and instead delivering a verbal barrage. This is not a war film in the general sense; it is a war film about internal conflict, as Roedel gains self-awareness through understanding the ex-slave Holt, embracing him as a human being, reflected in the parting act of finally calling him Daniel.
Final Grade: (B)
Eros and Thanatos subsume two star-crossed lovers whose crime begins with adultery and ends with murder, their conscience haunted by a presence that walks alone through a fog of denial. Nagisa Oshima directs a forlorn tale of corrupting passion, an empire of sand, a temporary respite that becomes a fatal attraction.
Toyoji becomes infatuated with Seki, a beautifully mature woman who is married to the local litter carrier who taxis customers about the village. Their relationship begins in a very frugal manner until it reaches a violent crescendo of murder, as both participate in a gruesome strangulation and dispose of the husband’s body down a forgotten well. Their secret affair becomes even more distant after the act, and they become unable to quench their sexual thirst as they now have a greater secret to conceal. As village life goes on, rumors spread about Seki’s missing husband, and she becomes a pariah, excised from the social graces. But in that sleep of death dreams do come, and Seki receives nightly visits from her dead husband while Toyoji fills the well with dead leaves, or stares into the gaping abyss of his guilty conscience.
Oshima begins the film by focusing upon a turning wheel and this circular theme remains a constant image. Or the circular maw of the well, seen from the bottom with the sky overhead, faces peering over the edge. Like the wheel of life, what goes around comes around: years later, Seki and Toyoji find themselves digging in the muck of the well to end the spectral haunting, to give the corpse a proper burial. This scene is eerily resurrected in the modern Japanese horror film RINGU. Though the film is richly textured, the fault of the story lies in motivation, where the sexual act becomes a mere substitute for passion. On the other hand, people have killed for less. Finally, the need to bury the past leads to their torturous confessions at the hands of the police; till death do they part.
Final Grade: (B-)
Tony Stark is a cool Exec with a heart of steel: unfortunately, his hardened heart is stealing his life. Jon Favreau directs this heavy metal sequel that is poisoned with clichéd characters and mind-numbing CGI sequences that are as difficult to follow as a speeding bullet, but he fortuitously allows Robert Downey, Jr. enough screen time to resurrect the boring narrative.
I won’t repeat the awful intricacies of this trite and predictable plot, but Stark must battle a poorly written racial caricature in a larger suit of armor…hey, didn’t we see this already? The movie only becomes interesting when Downey takes over the scenes, filling the empty spaces with quick-witted quips and witticisms, imbuing Stark’s enormous ego with just the right amounts of bravado and compassion. Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper his Advisor/CEO/Love Interest perfectly contrasts his machismo with her dominant femininity, a woman whose skin is much stronger than his iron sheath. Sam Rockwell turns in another great performance as Justin Hammer, an industrious wannabe who indirectly challenges Stark’s empire, a tough-talking nerd who isn’t quite smart enough to figure it out…but wants all the credit. He is the antithesis of Stark, declaring moral bankruptcy for the big payday. Scarlett Johansson’s overdeveloped beauty belies her aggressive physicality but her character is underdeveloped and laughable: the whole Avengers subplot frays the already threadbare plot until it unravels. Ms. Johansson is given dialogue more apt for the typical dumb-blonde than a fiery redhead, and Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury vomits cringe-worthy exposition. Don Cheadle is respectable (as always) but relegated to the periphery of a story that overflows with characters.
Once again, the movie becomes less interesting when the action begins which reveals no new ground or exciting climax. Eventually, Stark discovers that Pepper is nothing to sneeze at, and this embrace makes the finale transcend the mundane mayhem. But the final scene is as subtle as a hammer blow.
Final Grade: (C-)
From the gutter to the glitter of city lights, a lonely vagabond discovers that love is blind. Perhaps Charles Chaplin’s greatest achievement, CITY LIGHTS is an ode to silent pictures, satirizing the use of spoken dialogue, proving that his universal appeal transcends the barrier of language.
The Little tramp is once again low on luck but full of pride, and through a good deed finds the good life. After saving a wealthy man from suicide (a hilarious gag with a stone tethered to a rope), our poor hero becomes a companion to his benefactor: caveat, the man only recognizes the Tramp when he (the man) is dead drunk. Now that the Tramp has money, he seeks out the flower of his obsession and begins to take care of her, convincing her that he is a rich man. When his benefactor leaves the country and the girl is being evicted, the little fellow takes any available job to earn money for her rent. This includes a side-splitting boxing match that is choreographed like a violent ballet, a pugilistic prance that bruises the funny bone.
The story is full of human grace and humor, much more that a series of slapstick vignettes strung together. This is a love story with moments of comedy and tragedy, a simple tale easily understood by all because we are able to connect with the characters and circumstances. Chaplin unearths the bare bones of the narrative, stripped away of mere melodrama until only the raw emotion remains. With a soft touch, the bedraggled benefactor finally confronts his girl, and the film ends with his apologetic smile and her tear stained revelation.
Final Grade: (A+)
A prescient folktale of American virtues, absolute values that corrupt absolutely, a manifest destiny of celestial destruction. Director Alex Cox begins the film with a declaration of verity, a satirical and astute reference for an Auteur who knows that cinema itself is a lie, that reality is altered by the film process itself.
Cox’s polemic is focused upon the historical William Walker as an icon of US hubris, conjoining the past with the present to create a symbiotic nexus of noxious Nationality. This is guerilla filmmaking, ignoring convention and recasting reality into deadly satire. Ed Harris as the skewed renegade contributes an excellent mixture of both compassion and absolute madness, this grey-eyed man whose destiny was a road to Hell paved with good intentions (at least from his perspective). Cox’s style is an homage to Peckinpah with slow motion bloodletting and grand guignol violence. His use of hilarious anachronisms pinpoints capitalistic greed and yellow journalism, from a well placed soda bottle to magazine headlines. The legendary Joe Strummer adds a soundtrack full of rhythmic clash contrasted with gentle guitars that fits each scenario, both evocative and emotive.
WALKER is volatile condemnation of American Foreign Policy and his execution a shot heard ’round the world. Unfortunately, there’s always a revolution in need of exploitation. Final Grade: (B+)
A father and son live moment by sickly moment in the now here, but listlessly wander the damaged path to no where. Director John Hillcoat’s apocalyptical vision is as ephemeral as the ashes of human beings drifting like snowflakes upon the thick poisonous air, and as solid as a vacant house ravaged by time, a skeletal ode to the passing of a species.
Adapted from the Cormac McCarthy novel, Hillcoat delays the narrative tension with the use of superficial flashbacks that intrude upon the urgency of the situational drama. Though Hillcoat doesn’t sink to the lower depths of trite exposition to explain the world-changing disaster, he unfortunately feels the need to explain the father’s emotional world, to peer inside his head to relive the past and use voice-over to propel the journey: both are disjointed functions that become condescending and unnecessary. The power of the story is in the never-ending drudgery of survival, in drawing each thick breath because of an inherent will to survive while retaining their humanity. Instead of utilizing long takes with minimal editing to take us along on this heart wrenching travelogue, the editing is fractured until the film plays like small vignettes pieced together without care.
The soundtrack is horribly melodramatic and typical, with swelling strings for sad moments and pounding percussion for action sequences. The look of the film is interesting, with a washed out color palette that contrasts with the vibrant colors of memory that relies too much on CGI and becomes too digital: the computer enhancement is a detriment. Hillcoat fails to use the eerie murk, the absence of all light in this dark night of the world, to full advantage, magnifying sounds into monstrous imaginings. When the “bad guys” wander into the story, they look like recycled antagonists from a Mad Max flick.
Viggo Mortensen’s face is a roadmap of destruction, wearing the weary determination of a dying father like a badge of honor upon his stoic countenance. Pain is the currency of this new world order, and Viggo is less effective as he speaks; Hillcoat has failed to imbue the characters with a subtle mimicry, conveying emotion without dialogue because words are limitations. The child actor Kodi Smit-McPhee is neither good nor bad as the son, he merely is; that’s really all that is required for the role. This could have been constructed as a silent film and been much more effective. The main fault that cracks the narrative foundation is that it isn’t depressing enough; it only carries the illusion of tragedy because the audience isn’t given enough time to care. Michael Haneke’s TIME OF THE WOLF is a much better post-apocryphal allegory.
Overall, THE ROAD is a film that has lost its path, detouring into the realm of the conventional and clichéd. Final Grade: (C)
A British schoolgirl and her young brother escape to the outback where they meet another wandering soul in search of adulthood. Director Nicolas Roeg contrasts different cultures to reveal the naked truth: we’re all alike beneath our skin’s illusory variations.
The young protagonists remain nameless, prototypes of the self-absorbed and crumbling British Colonialism, children of a psychotic god. Taken to the desert, their father attempts a murder/suicide but only succeeds in the later respect; frightened, the children race towards the unknown, lost amid the jagged mountains haunted by a distant life as mysterious as their new environment. These are civilized children, raised in the steel and concrete valleys with no understanding of their predicament; they only plod ever onward, afraid to retrace their footsteps which lead to a ghostly father sheathed in flames. They fortuitously stumble upon a tiny oasis where they are discovered by a young Aboriginal boy, and together the three of them embark upon an adventure of self-discovery.
Roeg’s cinematography captures the beautifully dangerous Outback, the parched and scorched earth or the verdant grassland, a world inhabited by a host of uniquely adapted denizens, as these strangers must struggle in a strange land, a battle against both Nature and human nature to survive. Communication becomes a pantomime of deeds since language is a barrier to understanding though their needs are the same. The Aboriginal boy is a skilled hunter and Roeg magnificently films him killing and skinning his meals, the ubiquitous flies always buzzing around fresh blood. He cross-cuts with a modern butcher shop, comparing the act of slaughter for food, of potentially needless suffering, a lesson for those quick to judge. As the young girl and her brother are led to comparative safety, Roeg shows the taint of civilization upon this virginal landscape, raped by businessmen for self-fulfilling profit .
The magical journey ends with a danse macabre, a paved road leading towards salvation, and though she will live a life of static virtues, she will never return to the land of lost content. Final Grade: (B+)
A group of vacationers is shipwrecked on an isolated atoll with an exiled Nazi and his undead legion. Director Ken Wiederhorn resurrects the Third Reich to complete its thousand year rule, the master race once almost human rising from the dark waters to advance their insidious holocaust.
Ken Wiederhorn imbibes every horror cliché, bookending the film as a survivalist tale of insanity, relying on the generic to create the narrative spark. His characters are lifeless zombies…an I’m not talking about the creatures. Each represents a specific trope; the good looking guy, the complaining egoist, the tough guy, the fat dude, and the women who are fuel for frisson. But the film doesn’t wallow in the shallows, it moves a bit deeper and begins to treads water. Wiederhorn doesn’t lower the film with slasher techniques, instead focused upon the mystery and pursuit, choking the audience with palpable tension. He doesn’t shy away from the gore but realizes the suspense is in discovering how the nubile protagonist survives, and doesn’t descend into a feeding frenzy of murderous delights. It’s actually a breath of fresh air to discover a horror film that sustains its namesake, if only briefly. Peter Cushing’s obligatory role expounds exposition but not much else, lending a credibility for genre aficionados. Though Wiederhorn fails to cover any new ground the film remains eminently watchable and shockingly enjoyable despite today’s corrupting genre standards. Final Grade: (C+)
