Media: Film
Title: Boy A
Director: John Crowley
Boy A is highly recommended, small British film. It is mostly an impressive character study that displays with great empathy the reemergence of a child locked away since he was 14? for allegedly assisting in the murder of a classmate. Now at 21? Jack must try to start a new life while concealing his past from his colleagues, friends and his girlfriend. The most moving part of the film is watching Jack tentatively put a life together while still being tormented emotionally by his past. Now, while Boy A is mostly an intimate character study, it is also a thriller. Quietly, in the background, there is an angry mob stalking Jack believing he was not punished sufficiently and are out for vigilante justice. There is a tension sustained throughout the film that Jack’s past is about to jump out of the shadows and ruin the life he has pieced back together. If you go see Boy A you will be as enthralled as I was to see if it does.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Sunday, October 7, 2007
Chaplin: The Immigrant
Media: Film and Wurlitzer Organ
Title: The Immigrant
Director: Charlie Chaplin
These 4 weeks of Chaplin shorts were my second favorite Silent Movie Monday series since I first discovered them in 2001. (Only the Buster Keaton series was more enjoyable.
This week we saw The Cure, The Immigrant and The Adventurer. Though not the funniest of the group, The Immigrant was the most significant and the most pointedly political of all the Mutual shorts. It explores the ambiguities and paradoxes of America’s relationship with its immigrants and immigrants’ experience in their new country.
One simple cut powerfully captures the essence of the ambiguity. First, after an awful sea voyage the immigrants’ boat is finally pulling into New York Harbor and we get a stirring vision of The Statue of Liberty standing before 1917 New York. It is an emotionally powerful image to us in the audience, even 90 years later, and Chaplin reflects the emotion on his characters’ faces. (I would like someone to explore the use of the statue before this Chaplin moment.) Then cut to the immigration officers who immediately wall off the immigrants from their liberty with a taunt rope. In this moment the rope causes the characters to go from the highest state of humanity – pondering hope, liberty and possibility – to cattle marked with tags whose fate is subject to the whim of a bureaucrat. And America goes from a country beckoning to all who believe in their worth to enter and contribute, to an America who grudgingly condescends to open the door, threatening to slam it shut if it so chooses. Every ideal of liberty and tolerance, and every urge toward the ugliness of prejudice and fear in America’s twofold relationship to immigration is captured in this simple juxtaposition of scenes. It may be the most brilliant moment in all of these 16 short films and is one of the most powerful moments Chaplin has left to us.
(Watch the most recent version of Hairspray and see a rope used in similarly powerful way - to physically separate the white and black teenagers.\ - proving Chaplin is alive 90 years on.)
Title: The Immigrant
Director: Charlie Chaplin
These 4 weeks of Chaplin shorts were my second favorite Silent Movie Monday series since I first discovered them in 2001. (Only the Buster Keaton series was more enjoyable.
This week we saw The Cure, The Immigrant and The Adventurer. Though not the funniest of the group, The Immigrant was the most significant and the most pointedly political of all the Mutual shorts. It explores the ambiguities and paradoxes of America’s relationship with its immigrants and immigrants’ experience in their new country.
One simple cut powerfully captures the essence of the ambiguity. First, after an awful sea voyage the immigrants’ boat is finally pulling into New York Harbor and we get a stirring vision of The Statue of Liberty standing before 1917 New York. It is an emotionally powerful image to us in the audience, even 90 years later, and Chaplin reflects the emotion on his characters’ faces. (I would like someone to explore the use of the statue before this Chaplin moment.) Then cut to the immigration officers who immediately wall off the immigrants from their liberty with a taunt rope. In this moment the rope causes the characters to go from the highest state of humanity – pondering hope, liberty and possibility – to cattle marked with tags whose fate is subject to the whim of a bureaucrat. And America goes from a country beckoning to all who believe in their worth to enter and contribute, to an America who grudgingly condescends to open the door, threatening to slam it shut if it so chooses. Every ideal of liberty and tolerance, and every urge toward the ugliness of prejudice and fear in America’s twofold relationship to immigration is captured in this simple juxtaposition of scenes. It may be the most brilliant moment in all of these 16 short films and is one of the most powerful moments Chaplin has left to us.
(Watch the most recent version of Hairspray and see a rope used in similarly powerful way - to physically separate the white and black teenagers.\ - proving Chaplin is alive 90 years on.)
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Chaplin: Silent Movie Mondays
Media: silent film with live musical accompaniment
Title: The Floorwalker, The Fireman, The Vagabond (all 1916)
Director: Charlie Chaplin
The first of 4 fantastic weeks of Silent Movie Mondays began at the Paramount this past week. We will see Charlie Chaplin’s silent masterpieces from 1916 and 1917 produced by the Mutual Film Company. The Paramount is presenting these 12 films in chronological order.
The first two films, The Floorwalker and The Fireman, are more Mack Sennett (whom Chaplin worked for at Keystone) than Charlie Chaplin. Basically a situation is set up, Charlie works in a fire station for example, and the film explores every slap-stick situation Charlie can get into in a fire house. It is all hilarious frenzy.
Then by film three, The Vagabond, something happens and you get Chaplin’s full genius, perhaps for the first time. Actually it is even more interesting than that, the true Chaplin genius kicks in half way into the film after an initial Sennett-like chaotic chase through a neighborhood with city toughs in pursuit of Charlie. The genius that will mark Chaplin’s best films arrives with Charlie in the country where he has fled. Added to the surface slap-stick is a deep inner core of real emotion, often manifest in the form of that little tramp Charlie, loving a woman who is his social better. In The Vagabond, as in other Chaplin films, it is made clear the love is mutual and would persists if the two were able to remain alone in the world, but crumbles when exposed to society’s eyes. A superior woman cannot be allowed to love a little tramp.
There is a perfect scene in The Vagabond. Charlie who has rescued a young woman from a violent relationship washes the country grime from the woman’s face. On the surface it is pure hilarity as he sticks the washcloth in the pliant woman’s ears and nose to get the wretch clean. Simultaneously it is beautiful, lovely and filled with genuine care, like a mother washing a child. It is as scene as sweet and moving as it is crude and hilarious, and it is that combination of a hilarious surface mixed with deep genuine feeling which will remain Chaplin’s greatest gift for many years to come.
Title: The Floorwalker, The Fireman, The Vagabond (all 1916)
Director: Charlie Chaplin
The first of 4 fantastic weeks of Silent Movie Mondays began at the Paramount this past week. We will see Charlie Chaplin’s silent masterpieces from 1916 and 1917 produced by the Mutual Film Company. The Paramount is presenting these 12 films in chronological order.
The first two films, The Floorwalker and The Fireman, are more Mack Sennett (whom Chaplin worked for at Keystone) than Charlie Chaplin. Basically a situation is set up, Charlie works in a fire station for example, and the film explores every slap-stick situation Charlie can get into in a fire house. It is all hilarious frenzy.
Then by film three, The Vagabond, something happens and you get Chaplin’s full genius, perhaps for the first time. Actually it is even more interesting than that, the true Chaplin genius kicks in half way into the film after an initial Sennett-like chaotic chase through a neighborhood with city toughs in pursuit of Charlie. The genius that will mark Chaplin’s best films arrives with Charlie in the country where he has fled. Added to the surface slap-stick is a deep inner core of real emotion, often manifest in the form of that little tramp Charlie, loving a woman who is his social better. In The Vagabond, as in other Chaplin films, it is made clear the love is mutual and would persists if the two were able to remain alone in the world, but crumbles when exposed to society’s eyes. A superior woman cannot be allowed to love a little tramp.
There is a perfect scene in The Vagabond. Charlie who has rescued a young woman from a violent relationship washes the country grime from the woman’s face. On the surface it is pure hilarity as he sticks the washcloth in the pliant woman’s ears and nose to get the wretch clean. Simultaneously it is beautiful, lovely and filled with genuine care, like a mother washing a child. It is as scene as sweet and moving as it is crude and hilarious, and it is that combination of a hilarious surface mixed with deep genuine feeling which will remain Chaplin’s greatest gift for many years to come.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Let's Get Lost
Title: The Best of Chet Baker Sings: Let's Get Lost
Media: audio CD
I go to this CD again and again as one of my top 10 favorite vocal performances. Chet Baker's vocals are in the same category as Billie Holiday's. Neither Chet nor Billie are going to knock you out with pure talent like Sinatra or Sarah Vaughn, but they possess a haunting quality that enters your gut, your emotional center, your imagination. I want to describe Baker's vocals and trumpet playing as ghostly and sensual, if something can be both immaterial and caressing simultaneously.
Media: audio CD
I go to this CD again and again as one of my top 10 favorite vocal performances. Chet Baker's vocals are in the same category as Billie Holiday's. Neither Chet nor Billie are going to knock you out with pure talent like Sinatra or Sarah Vaughn, but they possess a haunting quality that enters your gut, your emotional center, your imagination. I want to describe Baker's vocals and trumpet playing as ghostly and sensual, if something can be both immaterial and caressing simultaneously.
Monday, August 27, 2007
Alias Mr. Alden
Title: Alias Mr. Alden from The Whistler
Media: CD
I am certain this half hour radio show from 1952 is as good or better than any half hour of television on today. This show could easily be padded and turned into a fine film noir. It is a classic double - double cross with a femme fatal to boot. Both characters are after the safety deposit key of the recently murdered Mr. Alden and neither can be trusted. In the end the woman ends up with the money and kills the man pretending to be Mr. Alden. Finally, in classic Whistler style, a seemingly insignificant act, in this case the man typing the woman's name on a check on a new ribbon, becomes the guilty party's undoing. In this case her name typed on that new ribbon was plain for the policew to see. "I'm sure something in this room will tell us why your name was typed by the murdered Mr. Alden!" (Key whistle, thank you Signal Oil.)
Media: CD
I am certain this half hour radio show from 1952 is as good or better than any half hour of television on today. This show could easily be padded and turned into a fine film noir. It is a classic double - double cross with a femme fatal to boot. Both characters are after the safety deposit key of the recently murdered Mr. Alden and neither can be trusted. In the end the woman ends up with the money and kills the man pretending to be Mr. Alden. Finally, in classic Whistler style, a seemingly insignificant act, in this case the man typing the woman's name on a check on a new ribbon, becomes the guilty party's undoing. In this case her name typed on that new ribbon was plain for the policew to see. "I'm sure something in this room will tell us why your name was typed by the murdered Mr. Alden!" (Key whistle, thank you Signal Oil.)
Friday, August 24, 2007
Belle De Jour
Media: Film
Title: Belle De Jour (1967)
Director: Luis Bunuel
Belle De Jour is the second masterpiece of French cinema I have seen this year. (Rules of the Game being the other.) Looking as beautiful as any one you have ever seen on film, Catherine Deneuve plays Severine, an emotionless, young, upper class wife suffering through the most intense case of ennui. In a way she is similar to Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate (also 1967). She seemingly has everything (wealth, beautiful doctor husband, ski vacations) and her whole life before her, but she is paralyzed with a feeling of emptiness; and like Hoffman’s Benjamin, she turns to illicit sex to feel something, anything in her barren life. This movie also contains one of the greatest screen thugs in all film. The thug is Severine inversed. He too is young, disillusioned and disconnected from society. But where Severine is inert the thug is perpetually on the knife’s edge of violence. Despite being different in every societal aspect they share at their core a feeling of estrangement from the world, and this draws them to each other.
Belle De Jour deserves multiple viewings and much conversation to fully explore all the themes and ideas saturating this work of art.
Title: Belle De Jour (1967)
Director: Luis Bunuel
Belle De Jour is the second masterpiece of French cinema I have seen this year. (Rules of the Game being the other.) Looking as beautiful as any one you have ever seen on film, Catherine Deneuve plays Severine, an emotionless, young, upper class wife suffering through the most intense case of ennui. In a way she is similar to Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate (also 1967). She seemingly has everything (wealth, beautiful doctor husband, ski vacations) and her whole life before her, but she is paralyzed with a feeling of emptiness; and like Hoffman’s Benjamin, she turns to illicit sex to feel something, anything in her barren life. This movie also contains one of the greatest screen thugs in all film. The thug is Severine inversed. He too is young, disillusioned and disconnected from society. But where Severine is inert the thug is perpetually on the knife’s edge of violence. Despite being different in every societal aspect they share at their core a feeling of estrangement from the world, and this draws them to each other.
Belle De Jour deserves multiple viewings and much conversation to fully explore all the themes and ideas saturating this work of art.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Chet Baker
(Now that I'm getting back into the work routine, let's see if I can get back into the blog routine.)
Media: CD
Title: Chet Baker: Complete 1952 Fantasy and Pacific Jazz Sessions
Tonight I listened to Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan playing on "The Complete 1952 Fantasy and Pacific Jazz Sessions". Loved it, especially 'Lullaby of the Leaves' and 'My Funny Valentine'. Close your eyes and listen to the sections where Baker and Mulligan play together, Mulligan low and out front and Baker with his high ghost-whisper playing behind him. Just beautiful.
Media: CD
Title: Chet Baker: Complete 1952 Fantasy and Pacific Jazz Sessions
Tonight I listened to Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan playing on "The Complete 1952 Fantasy and Pacific Jazz Sessions". Loved it, especially 'Lullaby of the Leaves' and 'My Funny Valentine'. Close your eyes and listen to the sections where Baker and Mulligan play together, Mulligan low and out front and Baker with his high ghost-whisper playing behind him. Just beautiful.
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