Features

When men were men

STEVE VINEBERG — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:02:05 GMT

Sam Peckinpah at the Harvard Film Archive
Since Sam Peckinpah’s untimely death at the age of 59, he has acquired such legendary status that it’s startling to remember that he made only 14 films over a period of 22 years.

THE WILD BUNCH: In contrast with this film’s jackals and vultures, the Bunch act like men and die with honor.

“Sam Peckinpah, Blood Poet” | Harvard Film Archive | September 5-12

In the nearly two and a half decades since Sam Peckinpah’s untimely death at the age of 59, he has acquired such legendary status and his influence has been so pervasive that it’s startling to remember that he made only 14 films over a period of 22 years — and that even now many of them are still obscure. So the long-overdue retrospective that begins this Friday at the Harvard Film Archive, “Sam Peckinpah, Blood Poet,” is most welcome.

There were gaps in Peckinpah’s output owing to his uneasy relationship with the studios: fired off The Cincinnati Kid in 1965, he couldn’t get work again in Hollywood until after he’d returned to television, his original venue, and attracted critical notice with an hour-long adaptation of Katherine Anne Porter’s story “Noon Wine.” Only then did he direct THE WILD BUNCH, his masterpiece — and almost inarguably the greatest Western ever made. (The HFA will conclude the series with a screening of The Wild Bunch on September 12 at 7 pm, pairing it with Paul Seydor’s extraordinary 1996 documentary “THE WILD BUNCH: AN ALBUM IN MONTAGE,” which contains footage of the filming of the Bunch’s last stand that demonstrates how this classic sequence was assembled.) Five years turtled by between the release of Convoy in 1978 and his swan song, The Osterman Weekend. And he spent much of his too-brief career battling studio heads who insisted on dumping his pictures (like the exquisite Ride the High Country, which got relegated to the lower half of double bills) or recutting them. Major Dundee, The Wild Bunch, and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid were all released in versions he did not approve, though the last two can now be seen as he intended them to be.

Devil at the Gate

BRETT MICHEL — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 15:50:58 GMT

Giving voice to Red Heroine
The ensemble has spent the better part of a decade composing and performing soundtracks for silent films, creating their own brand of musical alchemy.

WHERE’S THAT ERHU? You can’t see it here, but you might hear it this weekend.

If the name Devil Music Ensemble conjures an apparition of musicians accompanying Rupert Julian’s adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s 1909-’10 serial Le fantôme de l’Opéra, then you might not be surprised to hear that such an outfit exists. And though Boston bandmates Brendon Wood, Jonah Rapino, and Tim Nylander have yet to achieve the fame of Cambridge’s Alloy Orchestra (or accompany Julian’s 1925 film, as Alloy have), they have spent the better part of a decade composing and performing soundtracks for silent films, creating their own brand of musical alchemy.

This weekend, they debut their latest work, an original score for the sixth (and only surviving) episode of the 13-part Chinese serial Red Knight Errant, Wen Yimin’s 1929 silent Red Heroine [Hongxia], the oldest extant martial-arts film. It will screen on Friday at the Chinatown Gate (on the vacant paved lot on Hudson Street) at 7:30 pm as part of the “Films at the Gate” free outdoor festival, and then on Saturday in Somerville’s Union Square at approximately 8 pm.

So, where did “Devil Music” come from? “Well, there are a couple of stories,” Rapino tells me. The main one has to do with George Crumb’s Black Angels (Images I): 13 images from the dark land. It’s really amazing music, composed during the Vietnam era. ‘Devil-music’ is the name of a piece of one of the movements.”

“That’s the more sophisticated version,” laughs Wood. The “real story,” he confides, involves a lazy afternoon spent cranking Van Halen’s Fair Warning after school. “I was playing the record pretty loudly when my grandmother comes in yelling, ‘What’s that devil music?!’ I knew right then that that would make a great name for a band someday.”

That day came in 1999, when Wood formed the rock band Devil Music with Rapino and Nylander. But the film influence didn’t creep in till a couple of years later. Rapino: “We used to play at AS220 in Providence. Brendon was a fan of Jean Cocteau’s Le sang d’un poète, and he installed a monitor on stage showing the 1930 film “purely as a backdrop to our playing.” In 2002, Devil Music Ensemble (“We added the ‘Ensemble’ after we started playing live accompaniment for films,” says Wood, “since we sometimes bring in more musicians”) performed their soundtrack to René Clair’s 1926 film Le voyage imaginaire during the “Celluloud” series at the Coolidge Corner Theatre.

Kino pravda

MICHAEL ATKINSON — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:03:35 GMT

‘Envisioning Russia’ at the MFA
Because Mosfilm, the subject of the Museum of Fine Arts’ “Envisioning Russia” retrospective, was the Soviet state production studio, any cross-section of its history lays out the entirety of Soviet film history.

THE MIRROR: Tarkovsky’s film is a unique autobiographical testament.

Because Mosfilm, the subject of the Museum of Fine Arts’ “Envisioning Russia” retrospective, was the Soviet state production studio, any cross-section of its history lays out the entirety of Soviet film history — not only in its mainstream, but on its catapulting visionary fringes. Of course, Soviet filmmaking always resounded with the electric tension between state propaganda and individualistic artistry, often within a given film. Sure, the famous dialectic montage experiments from the 1920s salad days of Eisenstein and Pudovkin were motivated by pure Marxist guile, but it’s more difficult to see the extraordinary development of the long traveling shot as being anything but cinema rising to its own expressive level in spite of Politburo politics. Mosfilm was still the empire’s Hollywood, churning out populist fodder for the masses while sometimes conscientiously undercutting the government’s simplistic anti-Westernism to degrees that can make our own industry’s McCarthyite years seem outright pathetic.

The retro serves as a crash lesson in Russian film, starting obligatorily with Eisenstein’s BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925; September 11 at 5:15 pm). For too long now, this one has been reflexive university viewing to such a suffocating extent, American students may be surprised to find that early Soviet filmmaking was not all hammer-to-the-head editing and Marxist cant. In fact, Eisenstein’s position as one of the medium’s looming giants has silently deteriorated; the more time passes, the more mechanical and manipulative his work seems. The limitations were built-in: his entire æsthetic was predicated on his being the omniscient god and the audience his easily controlled minions. (Spielberg and Lucas, it could be said, have demonstrated similar sensibilities.) Free of historical intents or contexts, propaganda art is usually beguiling in its naïveté, but Battleship Potemkin feels bitter, as if revolutionary discontent unconsciously expressed Eisenstein’s outrage that of all the nations in all the eras for this artist to be born into, it had to be this one.

Interview: Ludivine Sagnier

PETER HYMAN — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:24:12 GMT

Nude? Naked?
As sultry French starlets go, 29-year-old Ludivine Sagnier is as advertised.

As sultry French starlets go, 29-year-old Ludivine Sagnier is as advertised. Seductive, clever, sensual, and often at the center of a torrid love triangle, the Prix Romy Schneider winner first bared her soul to American audiences as the skinny-dipping ingénue in François Ozon’s Swimming Pool (2003). Her wide-eyed enthusiasm and fragile sexuality will be on display again next week in Claude Chabrol’s erotically chilling A Girl Cut in Two [La fille coupée en deux], in which she plays a provincial TV weather girl torn between an older author and a rich young dissolute. Now five months pregnant with her second child, Mlle. Sagnier sat down with me in New York to discuss nudity, submissiveness, older men, and American politics.

One of the film’s themes is the question of whether French culture is moving toward decadence or Puritanism. Which do you prefer?
Decadence. But . . . not the hypocritical decadence that we have now, which encourages people to get more and more stupid.

How close are you to the character of Gabrielle Deneige?
She’s more frustrating because she’s desperately looking for a father figure, and she is also very provincial, whereas I come from a very balanced family in Paris. I’ve been much less naive in my life. I don’t fall into those traps. I fall into other traps, but that’s a story for another time.

You’ve been nude in at least five of the films you done, most notably to American audiences in Swimming Pool. Does being naked come naturally to you?
No. That’s a legend, an image you have here in America. I’m not necessarily open to being nude. It’s just a question of performance. And all the times where I play naked, it’s always done with dignity. It’s not like these are lousy movies.

A Girl Cut in Two has little overt nudity, yet it was more sexually charged than anything you’ve done.
Yes, it’s all about sex. Even Chabrol joked that he was doing his porn movie. I was like, “Come on Claude, you don’t even show anything.” And he said, “I don’t need that, I’ve put obscenity in the eyes of the audience, they can put it wherever they like.”

Was that more difficult to do than simply taking off a robe and lounging in the sun with no clothes on?
It was very destabilizing because everything is possible. The only boundary is the imagination, and when you’re playing that, it’s very disturbing. I wasn’t comfortable at all. I felt dirty, much more than I did just being physically naked.

Smoke screens

PETER KEOUGH — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 15:21:51 GMT

Does a surge of stoner movies mean America is going to pot?
What does it say about America that marijuana movies are a hot genre right now, perhaps hotter even than in the heyday of Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong’s 1978 Up in Smoke ?

K.Banks.

I don’t much like getting stoned — it makes me stupid and paranoid (some may say not much different from my usual frame of mind). But I do like watching other people get stoned in the movies. Vicariously enjoying the pleasure of others onscreen, that’s the definition of a movie critic. Though the chances of my wanting to get high after watching, say, The Wackness, are slight, I just might crave seeing more films in which the protagonists inhale. And, as stoner movies might be gateway films, perhaps I’d then want to see movies about harder drugs, such as peyote, LSD, heroin, and crack. I might down a couple of bags of Cheetos and a box of Yodels while I’m at it.

The 16 greatest stoner movies of all time. By Lance Gould.

But I’m a professional: what about the rest of the country? What does it say about America that marijuana movies are a hot genre right now, perhaps hotter even than in the heyday of Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong’s 1978 Up in Smoke? Knocked Up, Harold & Kumar (both Go to White Castle and Escape from Guantánamo Bay), and Superbad have made piles of green at the box office. Just this past week, Pineapple Express topped the box office at $12.5 million, a record for a Wednesday opening in August. And those are just the obvious offenders; nowadays any film rated above PG-13 flaunts casual toking. This month alone, the list includes Hell Ride, Bottle Shock, In Search of a Midnight Kiss, Tropic Thunder (I think that’s a Thai stick the boy drug lord is smoking), Hamlet 2, College, and The Rocker.

It’s spread from the big screen to the tube, too: Weeds, a series about a suburban widow who pays the bills by dealing (a premise stolen from the 2000 British comedy Saving Grace), is in its fourth season on Showtime. Seth Rogen and James Franco of Pineapple Express also stirred controversy (and hyped publicity for their film) this past June by “pretending” to light up while presenting on the broadcast of the MTV Movie Awards. But for the most part, you’re safer from the FCC and the MPAA these days smoking a joint than smoking a cigarette. (For more info on the recent push to ban cigarettes, see “Outlawing Cigarettes: Beginning Another Hopeless Drug War?” at thePhoenix.com/blogs/freeforall.)

Cock and bull?

PETER KEOUGH — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 22:09:36 GMT

Interview: Not if it’s British actor Steve Coogan
Americans will finally know who Steve Coogan is.

Except for the few who caught him in Michael Winterbottom’s brilliant Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story or 24 Hour Party People, not many in America know who Steve Coogan, is. Other than, perhaps, as the guy who got Courtney Love pregnant, or the guy whom Courtney later accused of driving Owen Wilson to a suicide attempt. Both charges have been denied so often by Coogan that I hesitate even to bring them up.

All this is about to change, however, since Coogan is appearing in two huge movies this month. (Not to mention his performance in the recent Finding Amanda, the only reason to see that movie.) Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder opens this Friday; it’s followed August 22 by the Sundance smash Hamlet 2. By the end of the month, one imagines, he’ll be basking in the kind of adulation he’s received for years back home in Britain, for his TV shows featuring brilliant comic inventions like Alan Partridge and Tommy Saxondale. Americans will finally know who Steve Coogan is.

Or will we?

You’ve got two movies coming out this month. Do you mix them up when you’re discussing them?
Not really, no, ’cause I’m a big part in a small movie and a small part in a big movie, so it’s easy to distinguish, really.

Do you have any preference?
Obviously I like the one where I’ve got the bigger part, but Hamlet 2 is totally different. Tropic Thunder [in which he plays a talentless British director overwhelmed trying to make a Vietnam War movie à la Apocalypse Now] is kind of like a shotgun assault on the senses where you’re dying laughing at the end of it. Hamlet 2 [in which he plays a talentless drama coach in a Tucson high school trying to restart his career by mounting a musical sequel to Shakespeare’s play] is a bit more uplifting in a kind of life-affirming, feel-good kind of way.

So you think Hamlet 2 is more the feel-good movie?
I think so. There’s more warm fuzzy stuff.

It’s the least ironic character of yours that I’ve seen on screen.
That’s true. There’s a lack of cynicism about him, and that’s why I wanted to do it, to see if I could pull it off. Also, I like the fact that it’s smart and it’s got that edginess, but at the end, it becomes the thing it satirizes. It satirizes inspirational teachers and sort of becomes one at the end.

The 16 greatest stoner movies

LANCE GOULD — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 20:03:43 GMT

Our favorite marijuana movies
We’re picking the best 16 stoner films of all time — one for every easily weighable segment of an ounce.

Slideshow: Found in translation

CHRIS WANGLER — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 18:12:34 GMT

A new book looks at the golden age of international movie marketing
As movies began to gain worldwide attention, Hollywood studios tailored their marketing to specific geographic locations, allowing local distributors to create their own publicity campaigns.

Author and gallery owner Sam Sarowitz worked in film development hell before turning his extensive collection of movie posters (now 12,000+) into a lucrative business, and now a book. Translating Hollywood: The World of Movie Posters (Mark Batty Publisher), culled from Sarowitz’s Posteritati Gallery in New York, offers a fascinating look at several golden ages of movie marketing. Most of the posters come from the late 1950s and after. Hollywood classics are the focus, but there’s a nice selection of French New Wave, world cinema classics, and genre pictures (Halloween, Deep Throat), with some telling nuggets thrown in: the US poster for In Cold Blood, for example, used the eyes of the real killers, not the actors.

The way it is

SHARON STEEL — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 20:18:43 GMT

Interview: Talking about American Teen
Nanette Burstein admits that “through the pain and torture” of high school, she was able to come to terms with who she was.

VIDEO: Interview with Nanette Burstein

High-school confidential: American Teen is no wasteland. By Sharon Steel.

Nanette Burstein admits that “through the pain and torture” of high school, she was able to come to terms with who she was. The director of the Sundance award-winning documentary American Teen (opening August 1) sat down with me at the Nine Zero Hotel to reflect on fiction-film archetypes, the social fluidity of senior year, and the circumstances through which an artsy girl with a complicated heart and a sweet yet immensely popular jock can briefly transcend their own pre-determined roles.

Before you began filming American Teen, what made you decide to chronicle the lives of teenagers culled from various places on the high-school food chain: a jock, a princess, a nerd, a misfit?
If you watch teen fiction films, you see the same stories told over and over again. There’s basically four of them. The Romeo and Juliet story across class or race of clique lines, like the forbidden love. Triumph over adversity, which often involves sports, but not necessarily. The underdog looking for acceptance, which is the nerd, usually. And the mean girl’s power struggle. And all of those stories, I found, existed in reality.

What prompted you to try to create another narrative of the high-school experience, a period that’s been defined and redefined ad nauseam?
I hadn’t seen a really complicated high-school movie that took a lot of the experiences that I felt or saw around me. High school was a really formative time in my life — I think for a lot of people in both a good and bad way. Through the pain and torture, I realized who I was.

Tell me about your selection and screening process. Why did you choose the town of Warsaw, Indiana, as the setting?
I looked in the Midwest because I think there’s a timelessness and more of an innocence about that part of the country than the rest of America. And I wanted to be in a town that only had one high school because I think that there’s more social pressure that way. You can’t escape — or you’re super-powerful. I wanted it to be economically mixed; I was hoping for it to be racially mixed, but that was hard to find in the Midwest, in small towns, at least. We called, you know, just hundreds of schools that sort of fit this demographic . . . and out of that found the best stories all in one place.

Flying high

PETER KEOUGH — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:19:51 GMT

Is The Dark Knight the best movie ever?
Every summer, it seems like another superhero movie has broken some box-office record or other and made movie history.

Our superheroes, ourselves

JAMES PARKER — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 20:27:29 GMT

What the current crop of comic-book action movies tells us about America's identity crisis
Is there a breed of person more tenderly optimistic, more winsomely hopeful for the best, more loyal to the possibility of good, than the American summer moviegoer?

Shrink wrapped: Gamma rays got you down? The doctor will see you now. By Dr. Robin S. Rosenberg

Is there a breed of person more tenderly optimistic, more winsomely hopeful for the best, more loyal to the possibility of good, than the American summer moviegoer? To put it another way, has there ever been a bigger sucker? Year after year, he stands in line and hands over his money, to receive, year after year, the same treatment: i.e., Hollywood shivering in icy gratification as it pisses on him from a great height. It’s become one of nature’s biorhythms, like the return of the swallows to Capistrano: the dog days come around, the asphalt softens in the heat, and the megaplexes begin to bloat and boom with big-budget idiocy.

And idiocy, being always the sequel to some other idiocy, is never original. You’ve seen it all before! National Treasure 14: Hell’s Gate. . . The Matrix Deionized. . . Son of Son of Fool’s Gold. . . No Way Can You Die This Fucking Hard. . . The product is poor, the contempt is palpable. If you bought it once, goes the thinking, you’ll buy it again. In fact you’ll never stop buying it — why should you?

This summer, however, things are a little different. True, we’re getting the usual rash of run-ons and sequelae — Hellboy II (opens this weekend), a second attempt at the Hulk (from a few weeks back), our seventh installment of Batman (next weekend) — but when you add Iron Man and Hancock (which have earned $312 million and $112 million so far, respectively) to the roster, a more interesting picture begins to emerge. There’s a certain thematic density to these nearly simultaneous releases. We seem . . . preoccupied. Indeed, we may be said to be obsessed. A sensitive interplanetary visitor, alighting at AMC Boston Common and watching a few of these movies back-to-back, might conclude that we are in the middle of a national nervous breakdown.

The lean green schizophrenia machine
Just take a look at the protagonists: Tony Stark (Iron Man) is a repentant billionaire arms dealer; Hellboy is a demon outgrowing his infernal beginnings; Bruce Banner is a cool-headed scientist incorporating a maddened green monster (that would be the Hulk); Hancock is a celestial being descending gnostically through bum-like levels of mortality and despair; and Batman . . . Batman broods on the turrets of Gotham, ears pricked, phobias squashed, dispensing terror to the bad guys. Common to all these movies is a CGI-blowout of an ending, in which the hero faces down his fear, his temptation, his vengefulness, his will-to-power, his not-self. Good Hulk battles Bad Hulk; Nice Iron Man battles Nasty Iron Man; red-and-blue Spiderman battles all-black Spiderman; Hellboy, who has been assiduously sanding down the stumps of his demon horns (see the hell sparks fly!), sprouts a whole new pair . . . and on and on.

Believe it or not

PETER KEOUGH — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:26:48 GMT

Interview: Guy Maddin tells the truth
Even the titles of his films are a little weird.

VIDEO: More from Guy Maddin

Urban myths: Maddin’s Winnipeg is the city that always sleeps. By Peter Keough.

Even the titles of his films are a little weird: The Saddest Music in the World, Cowards Bend the Knee, Brand upon the Brain! And then the images: Isabella Rossellini as a double amputee with artificial legs made of glass and full of beer; a girl who keeps her father’s severed hands preserved in a jar; Maddin’s father drilling into the skulls of orphans to extract the “nectar” that keeps Maddin’s mother eternally young — that last filmed like a silent three-reeler with iris shots and intertitles. In short, Guy Maddin makes Luis Buñuel and David Lynch look like Ron Howard. So it makes sense that he not only is Canadian but hails from that most Canadian of cities.

My Winnipeg is, he says, a documentary about his home town, and he insists that everything in it is true. I can believe that 5000 Nazis took over Winnipeg on “If Day” in 1942 and maybe even that his mother starred on a TV show that ran for 50 years called Ledge Man in which every day she talked a man out of committing suicide. But one of the film’s claims I just can’t accept, and when I get a chance to talk with Maddin, I have to ask him about it.

Tell me that the story about the horses freezing solid in the river was a legend, because otherwise it’s just too sad.
It is sad, and it did happen, and you can double-check that one. Eleven horses had their heads stuck for the course of winter above the surface of the ice. But the movie as a whole is about one-third fact, one-third legend, and one-third opinion.

So it’s your basic Michael Moore movie.
It may be looked at that way. I wanted to make it like a film equivalent to a W.G. Sebald book, where he sets out on a stroll and ends up digressing and winds up in a really interesting place. It doesn’t matter whether Sebald really went on the stroll or not, he’s managed to cobble together a wonderful trip, and you realize the landscape that he covered with his feet doesn’t matter as much as the landscape of his heart.

But Ledge Man — this is a landscape of the heart, I’m assuming.
No. It was a TV version of a movie called Fourteen Hours. It was on TV when I was a kid. But it’s not in the IMDB or anything . . .

They always beat Gypsies

A.S. HAMRAH — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:18:52 GMT

Joseph Losey at the HFA
From the beginning of his career in movies, Joseph Losey was persecuted — chased out of town.

THE SERVANT: Self-consciousness and fruity whining — but it still fascinates.

From the beginning of his career in movies, Joseph Losey was persecuted — chased out of town. His films are melodramatic, political, and weird, marked by noirish hysteria or arty creepiness. But it’s unclear whether persecution accounts for the strange combination of outrage and interiority that defines his work.

That’s because it’s been hard to look back over Losey’s œuvre. His pictures are scattered, products of several countries made over 46 years, infrequently revived, rarely grouped together, barely represented on DVD. What is clear is that he had an innate sense of persecution and conflict that initially found expression in the right place at the wrong time — Hollywood in the late 1940s, during the House Un-American Activities Committee’s anti-Communist witch hunts.

Together at last, all of his films are showing in the Harvard Film Archive’s retrospective “The Complete Joseph Losey,” which runs through August 11. He made several shorts in New York and at MGM before embarking on his first feature, and these are included in the HFA series as well. With 1948’s THE BOY WITH GREEN HAIR (July 12 at 7 pm), his first full-length work, Losey established himself as a director of a new kind of socially conscious and hyper-sensitive post-war melodrama — “sensitive” in a child-psychology sense: touchy, prone to violence.

An anti-racist and anti-war parable, The Boy with Green Hair could have been approved only under a studio regime of engaged liberalism like the one headed by Dore Schary at RKO. At the same time, the film was a victim of the increasing right-wing paranoia of its day. Its producer, Adrian Scott, was blacklisted and fired. Losey was cast adrift in the RKO of Howard Hughes, where movies with titles like I Married a Communist became standard.

A film about persecution, The Boy with Green Hair tells the story of a war orphan (Dean Stockwell) ostracized by his town after he wakes up one morning to find that his hair has turned a deep punk-rock green. Right from the beginning, persecution is inscribed into the work of a director who would soon be forced out of Hollywood under the blacklist. The film is a prescient mixture of classroom civics lesson and mass hysteria. By turns sentimental and tough, it shows small-town America as a crimped, herd-like place where the slightest disturbance throws the social order out of whack.

Cherchez les femmes

PETER KEOUGH — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 21:23:29 GMT

Women dominate the 13th Annual Boston French Film Festival
Women have always dominated French cinema — just not from behind the camera.

UNE VIEILLE MAÎTRESSE: Asia Argento’s La Vellini is a kind of a cross between Goya’s Naked Maja and Carmen Miranda.

The 13th Annual French Film Festival | Museum Of Fine Arts: July 10-27

Women have always dominated French cinema — just not from behind the camera. Until recently, the French rivaled Hollywood in their scarcity of female directors. There were, of course, a few greats — Agnès Varda, Marguerite Duras, Claire Denis — but for the most part, French film has meant men mooning over some misconceived image of womanhood. So this year’s Boston French Film Festival, in which eight of the 21 entries (all of them from the past three years) are by women, comes as something of a shock. What’s more, many of these women are actresses making their feature directing debut. Are the prisoners of the male gaze finally breaking free and asserting their independence?

Stylistically, not so much. At least not in Mia Hansen-Løve’s TOUT EST PARDONNÉ|ALL IS FORGIVEN (July 11 at 6 pm; July 12 at 6:15 pm), which resembles the calculated kitchen-sink formlessness of Olivier Assayas’s 1998 multi-character melodrama Fin août, début septembre (in which Hansen-Løve, now Assayas’s fiancée, played a part). Victor (Paul Blain), an aspiring writer much like the protagonist in Louis Malle’s 1963 Le fou follet, can’t kick his addictions to booze, smack, and self-pity — despite the long-suffering loyalty of his wife, Annette (Marie-Christine Friedrich), and the resilient innocence of his six-year-old daughter, Pamela (Victoire Rousseau). Annette gives him the heave-ho, 11 years pass, and the now-teenage Pamela (Constance Rousseau) must come to grips with her long estranged dad. A simple tale told simply, allowing the characters and the commonplaces of life to come to the fore, and thus affording a glimpse into their mystery.

More formally ambitious and certainly more self-conscious is Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi’s ACTRICES|ACTRESSES (July 13 at 5:30 pm; July 18 at 6 pm). Bruni-Tedeschi plays Marcelline, a diva-esque actress who in turn is playing Natalya Petrovna in a production of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country. Her inability to connect with the part might be attributed to her need to have a baby before her biological clock ticks out. Meanwhile, her old drama schoolmate Nathalie (Noémie Lvovsky) is assisting the director, Denis (Mathieu Amalric), and wishing she could dump her husband and kid and have Denis and the glamorous theater life to herself. Bruni-Tedeschi achieves some wry, Fellini-esque moments, such as a scene in which Marcelline’s dotty aunt and mother watch their grand piano get hoisted into a window like a wounded elephant. More such moments instead of fanciful visitations by ghosts or by the spirit of Natalya Petrovna might have brought this artifice to life.

Pole sitter

PETER KEOUGH — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:28:12 GMT

Interview: Werner Herzog ponders the end of the world
Speaking to the legendary German filmmaker is like speaking to God.

Werner's world: Herzog's End justifies his means. By Peter Keough

As Joaquin Phoenix noted after he was in an automobile accident a couple of years ago and Werner Herzog suddenly appeared and comforted him and then just as suddenly was gone, speaking to the legendary German filmmaker is like speaking to God. A crazy and pessimistic God, perhaps, but one capable of such divine films as Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes|Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Stroszek (1976), and Fitzcarraldo (1982), to name a few.

But the voice on the other end of the phone, though unmistakably that of Herzog, sounds downright jolly. Perhaps his renewed productivity and critical and commercial success with Grizzly Man (2005) and Rescue Dawn (2006) have filled him with dour delight. Or perhaps he realizes that after shooting his exuberant and weird new documentary in Antarctica, he’s accomplished something no filmmaker has ever done.

With Encounters At The End Of The World, you’re the first filmmaker to shoot on all seven continents.
I have to stop you right there, because this is kind of embarrassing. [Laughs.] I do not want to end up in the Guinness Book of World Records.

I see this was never a goal of yours.
No, no, of course not, but there’s also something significant about it. Early in the film, there’s a Caterpillar driver, and he comes from Bulgaria, and he has graduated in philosophy and comparative literature, and he says something very beautiful, he talks about his childhood and how he started to venture out into the world. His grandmother read the Odyssey to him when he was a child, and about the Argonauts, and he said, “In my mind, I started to travel and explore, and in that moment I fell in love with the world.” And I thought, “My goodness, that’s exactly what I have done in many of my films.” I ventured out, just being in love with the world.

Even though you’ve vowed not to make a movie about penguins, the penguins do make an appearance.
They do, yes. I swore to everyone I’m not going to do another film about fluffy penguins. However the penguins I filmed were so good, I had to include them in the movie.

Akin talks Turkey

PETER KEOUGH — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 22:09:32 GMT

Cutting Edge of Heaven
Did he worry that it might sound like the name of an undiscovered Douglas Sirk film?

UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY: For Akin, it’s always what’s on the other side; for us, it might be Turkey.

Crossing over: Fatih Akin’s blue Heaven. By Peter Keough.

To judge from Wir haben vergessen zurückzukehren|We Forgot To Go Back (2001), Fatih Akin’s documentary about his parents’ repatriation from Turkey to Germany, his family had less trouble making the transition than, say, the average Latino or Muslim immigrant to the US today. Perhaps that’s why he doesn’t dwell on cultural differences in his films but uses them as a starting point to explore issues common to all.

His breakthrough film, Gegen die Wand|Head On (2004), featured Turkish-German characters as protagonists, but their travails mirrored those of anyone constrained by society’s limitations. Auf der anderen Seite also draws on universal themes; it’s a multi-narrative look at freedom, love, death, and reconciliation. And so Akin wanted to make sure the film’s title in English would appeal to American viewers.

“Yeah. I chose it,” he says over the phone from the west coast of Turkey, where he’s vacationing. “I wanted to give the film its own identity for the commercial market. I didn’t like so much On the Other Side as a translation. It’s a very beautiful title in German, but when you translate it word for word, On the Other Side, it sounds like another German film, The Lives of Others [Das Leben der Anderen]. Also, I thought it lacked a certain poetry. I asked native English speakers, and we discovered The Edge of Heaven.”

Did he worry that it might sound like the name of an undiscovered Douglas Sirk film?

He laughs. “I consider that a compliment.”

Akin is used to having his films compared to those of other directors. Fassbinder is a name that comes up a lot in discussions of his career. That didn’t stop him from casting the German genius’s muse Hanna Schygulla to play a pivotal role in his new movie.

“I met her at a film festival in Zagreb. I fell in love with her. It [the film] was written for her. I wish I was older or she was younger and we could have a love affair or something like that.”

More elements for the film sprang from his experiences on the feature-film jury at Cannes 2005. The deliberate pace and long takes of such Asian films as Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Three Times impressed him. He also befriended Guillermo Arriaga, screenwriter for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 Grams and Babel, films whose multi-linear narrative structure resembles that of Auf der anderen Seite.

Interview: John Cusack sounds off on War, Inc.

PETER KEOUGH — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 22:16:47 GMT

Say everything
Most filmgoers recognize John Cusack as a brooding sexy, sometimes sardonic leading man.

Company man: War, Inc. cuts its losses. By Peter Keough.

Most filmgoers recognize John Cusack as the brooding sexy, sometimes sardonic leading man from such mainstream movies as his most recent, the 2007 Stephen King adaptation 1408. Many, however, also celebrate him as the subversive maverick starring in and sometimes making ambitious films ranging from Tapeheads (1988) to Say Anything (1989) to Grosse Pointe Blank (1997). And then there’s Max (2002), one of his personal favorites, in which he plays the Jewish patron to struggling young artist Adolf Hitler in Adolf’s pre-Nazi Party days. (“Come on, Hitler, I’ll buy you a glass of lemonade” is one of its quotable lines.)

With his new War, Inc. (which he co-scripted), a rollicking, surreal satire of recent US foreign and economic policy with an A-list cast including Marisa Tomei, Ben Kingsley, and (no doubt ending her career with Disney) Hilary Duff as a Middle Eastern version of Britney Spears, plus Cusack himself as a mercenary for a corporation much like Halliburton in a country much like Iraq, he goes way beyond Max. Beneath its black humor, bad taste, and explosive action, the film also explores such pressing issues as neo-con warmongering, the privatization of government, and the murderous consequences of both. These are subjects, I can tell, that Cusack is eager to talk about when I get him on the phone. But first I want to ask him a question that’s been bugging me since I saw the movie.

Is it true that you dropped a scorpion down Hilary Duff’s pants?
She dropped it down her own pants.

How can you do that?
I don’t know, there wasn’t any law against it in Bulgaria [where the film was shot], and Hilary read the script and she knew she wanted to do it. She’s really game. She’s like a pretty spirited wild woman. She’s pretty great.

How do you avoid getting stung?
Well there’s a scorpion wrangler in Bulgaria, which is a good job if you think how many scorpion wranglers could there be in Bulgaria. He’s probably got the market cornered there. But he had these scorpions and he took off the poison stinger, or he somehow neutralized the poison stinger, and Hilary put that scorpion down her pants.

The awful truth

STEVE VINEBERG — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:46:57 GMT

Leo McCarey was better in the ’30s
Among the signal directors of 1930s comedies — one thinks of Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, Ernst Lubitsch, and George Cukor — Leo McCarey’s name has been largely forgotten.

THE AWFUL TRUTH: A screwball comedy reimagined as a comedy of remarriage.

“Leo McCarey, Screwball and Beyond” | Harvard Film Archive | June 8-16

Among the signal directors of 1930s comedies — one thinks of Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, Ernst Lubitsch, and George Cukor — Leo McCarey’s name has been largely forgotten. Yet he was responsible for three of the greatest comedies of the Depression era: Duck Soup (the most sublime of the Marx Brothers movies), Ruggles of Red Gap, and The Awful Truth. He was an odd duck, though, as fond of melodrama as he was of romantic comedy and farce. The retrospective hosted by the Harvard Film Archive beginning this Sunday, “Leo McCarey, Screwball and Beyond,” is long overdue.

McCarey was brought up in the Hal Roach school of silent comedy, which means that by the time he made his first talkie, INDISCREET (which the HFA will screen a rare print of), he’d learned how to work quickly and economically, he’d perfected a kind of visual shorthand, and he’d developed a light, sure touch with actors. The series begins with a program of his comic shorts — three late silents starring Laurel and Hardy (including one of their most famous two-reelers, “Big Business”) and one with Charley Chase called “Dog Shy.” “Dog Shy,” the earliest of the quartet, was released in 1926, and it was the 40th short McCarey directed, so he was a veteran long before 1929, when he began to make features. His physical work with Chase and with Stan and Ollie bears fruit in sequences like the astonishingly poetic (and uproarious) human-mirror bit in DUCK SOUP, where Groucho encounters Chico and Harpo dressed up to look like him, or the classic scenes in THE AWFUL TRUTH involving Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, and an expressive wire-haired terrier known as Mr. Smith — played by the same canny canine performer who kept showing up as Asta in the Thin Man pictures. (In “Dog Shy,” Chase is continually being bested by a frisky dog; their charming interchanges are a warm-up for the Mr. Smith episodes.)

Shaw business

PETER KEOUGH — Wed, 28 May 2008 16:01:46 GMT

The HFA proves there’s more to Hong Kong than kung fu
The Shaw Brothers dominated Hong Kong film production in the ’60s and ’70s, and they produced not only martial-arts epics but also musicals, ghost stories, and melodramas.

KING BOXER: Chung Chang-wa’s film kicked off the international martial-arts-movie craze.

“Shaw Scope: A History of the Shaw Bros. Studio” | Harvard Film Archive | May 30–June 7

As can be seen from the summer blockbuster movies, the Hong Kong film industry has made its mark on Hollywood. For better and worse, its martial-arts genres have influenced moviemakers from Steven Spielberg to Quentin Tarantino — so much so that they’ve drawn the ultimate studio tribute: parody, with the release next week of Adam Sandler’s Don’t Mess with the Zohan and the DreamWorks animation Kung Fu Panda.

But Hong Kong cinema means more than kung fu, as the Harvard Film Archive series “Shaw Scope: A History of the Shaw Bros. Studios” demonstrates. The Shaw Brothers dominated Hong Kong film production in the ’60s and ’70s, during which time they produced not only their share of martial-arts epics but also, especially in earlier years, musicals, ghost stories, and melodramas. Neither did they always feature macho male warriors as heroes; long before Kill Bill or Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers or Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, women starred in some of the most successful Shaw Brothers martial-arts movies.

True, they would often be disguised as men, as in King Hu’s COME DRINK WITH ME (1966; June 6 at 9 pm). Zheng Peipei (who would play a major role decades later in Crouching Tiger) dons a rather unconvincing male disguise as “Golden Swallow,” an agent assigned to rescue a government official —her brother, and the governor’s son — who’s been kidnapped by a gang of hoodlums. Her first encounters with the gang, a colorful bunch of Dick Tracy–like oddballs with names like Jade Face and Smiling Tiger, go well, even a high-flying showdown in a tavern. (Tarantino might be planning a remake.) But perhaps out of a need to overcompensate for her gender, Golden Swallow finds herself in over her head. She has spurned the solicitations of Drunken Cat, the annoying barfly who keeps popping up at the most inopportune moments; it turns out, however, that she’s not the only one whose appearance is misleading. There’s a lesson to be learned by everyone, and the meticulous and authentic fight choreography, even four decades later, still thrills, even as the deliberate, operatic pacing provides a welcome respite from the neck-breaking pace of today’s action movies.

Darkness visible

MICHAEL ATKINSON — Mon, 19 May 2008 20:39:00 GMT

The HFA’s ‘Unseen Noir’ unveils America’s post-war gloom
Welcome to the dark territories again, the republic of bitterness and bile known as noir.

PITFALL André de Toth’s film teems with electric dialogue and potent real-life details.

“Unseen Noir” | Harvard Film Archive: May 23-26

Welcome to the dark territories again, the republic of bitterness and bile known as noir, as we square our jaws against an amoral universe and roam the rain-wet, lightless American City as if it were a Circle of the Inferno, where backstabbers, goldbrickers, and unfortunates march in closed patterns and puzzle over their fate. What can noir mean to us now? It’s not quite as easy to moon over the existential remarkability of the genre as it once was, when critics like Raymond Durgnat and Paul Schrader were busy specimen-boxing it as if it were a breed of black butterfly that had lived on our streets long ago and yet escaped our notice. Nowadays we’re somewhere near post-retro-neo-meta-noir; the original tropes (visual, gestural, thematic) are no longer recyclable even as TV commercials, and the Jim Thompson–rediscovery school is garnering yawns on the straight-to-video indie shelf. Sin City — please.

But the beauty of noir has always been its cultural specificity — the genre is bound wrist and ankle to the unexpected, untamable social malaise that arose during WW2 and exploded in the post-war era. The films are modern anthropology, as wickedly expressive of its context and anxious historical moment as Goya’s aquatints or Faulkner’s novels or Walker Evans’s photographs — but emanating from a kind of American-pulp unconscious, not from the conscientious perspective of a single artist. Suspicion and dread were in the air. As such, the original noirs are timelessly pertinent, and they remain the most resonant school of movie to have emerged in America. Consider that a half-century or more after the fact, the then-disregarded classics of the genre sit high on our trophy shelves and our archival-DVD rosters while the huge, big-budget hits of the ’45-’60 period — think Forever Amber (1947), Jolson Sings Again (1949), The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), The Robe (1953), White Christmas (1954), Guys and Dolls (1956), Around the World in 80 Days (1957), etc. — are forgotten like the blundering, uninsightful junk they were. Against the odds, film noir just does not get old.