Live Free or Die Hard/Wiseman (2007)

I don't watch so many blockbusters. I think I find the suspension of disbelief, or even more the suspension of total derision, interferes with relaxed enjoyment of them. But this was a lot of fun, irrespective of the absurdity of it.

John McClane is now older (although not as old as Willis), with a difficult teenage daughter and a separated (unseen) wife. As with the formula of the previous films in the series, he's an ordinary cop, or by now detective, caught up in a mess involving superbright criminals with a grudge.

The film plays on its heritage, with little asides about what it is to be a hero - he's just the guy who's there, who does what he has to do - and ironic echoes of previous catchphrases, but where the previous McClane was flippant, this one is serious. In that change of mood, it imitates Bond's latest outing, where there was a very conscious darkening of the hero. In many ways, Die Hard is similar to the Bond franchise, especially in this case in the clumsy title (abbreviated for British release to 'Die Hard 4.0') The outrageous stunts, and the parkour-practising baddie, are also competing with the most recent Bond.

So the improbable plot is that an ex technical security adviser to the FBI, having had his suggestions for post-9/11 essential overhaul of key systems ignored, and his career abruptly ended, commits a heist on the whole of America to prove a point. And to steal all the money on Wall Street. He stages a 'fire sale', which is an immobilisation of all essential systems - transport, communications, power - and then exploits the panic and misguided back-up systems to access secure financial information.

But, as with Bond films, the plot, and the implausibility of it (apparently one geek with a laptop can access any system in America instantly) are beside the point. The cast is one superbrain baddie (Timothy Olyphant), his geeky assistants, including a high-kicking Asian girlfriend, and Willis and one good geek. The fun is in the very inventive chases, Willis's strong-chinned determination, and completely dumb stunts. I think it pays off.

La Vie en Rose/Dahan (2007)

The problem of this film for a UK audience is unfamiliarity with the life and performances of Edith Piaf. I fact, I can't think of a comparable cultural icon in 20th century Britain - Gracie Fields and Vera Lynn certainly represented something definitively English, at different ends of the social scale, but are not revered by present generations as Piaf continues to be.

This means that the emotional reaction of the intended audience, in France, can't be replicated in England. Most French viewers would be very familiar with the life story of Piaf, and have associations with her songs that I couldn't bring to the cinema. I only know La vie en rose, and the iconic Je ne regrette rien, and had a hazy idea of her rough upbringing, affair with a boxer, and premature death.

All this means that my judgement of the worth of the film is limited. I can't easily assess whether the depictions of real events are conventional, exaggerated or sentimentalised, or whether all the incidents depicted are part of the legend. I can just judge the impact it had on me.

One key problem I had with this, even before I saw the film, is that one of the most famous characteristics of Piaf was her height. She was 4'7", tiny, hence her name, ("piaf" means "sparrow"), but the actress playing her, Marion Cotillard, is about a foot taller. This isn't just quibbling, it's an essential part of Piaf's character that she was the tiny woman with the huge voice and boundless passion, the underdog from the gutter who succeeded despite her drawbacks. Cotillard is above average height for a woman, so that when she's with Marcel, the boxer she has an affair with, she stands beyond his chin height, whereas the real Piaf would have been about chest high to him.

Apart from that, it's easy to see why Cotillard was chosen for the role. She has some physical resemblance, height aside, has a great voice, and can act. I can't judge the accuracy of her interpretation, but the singing impressed me enough, as did the range of her acting.

The direction I found unnecessarily distracting. At the beginning, depicting her early life on the streets, a handheld camera is used, to no obvious advantage - it's not a POV shot, and it only serves to distract rather than energise. The time jumps were also erratic and unnecessary, and more frequent towards the end.

Only once or twice was it shown how Piaf used the experiences of her life to inspire the passion of her performances. Most effective is when she hears of Marcel's death in a plane crash, and becomes hysterical, running round her house until she steps from the hall straight on to the stage and into a performance.

I wasn't as engaged by this as I felt I should have been, partly because of the lack of association I mentioned above, and partly because I thought it was a film of some good scenes, but not a great whole. Cotillard's performance was excellent, others were passable or forgettable.

Dreams (Journey into Autumn)/Bergman (1955)

I've seen nearly all of the Bergmans available on DVD, except notably Fanny and Alexander, which has been sitting here waiting for a special occasion. So when I saw there was a mini Bergman season on BBC4, with 2 films not available on DVD, I was delighted. The timing wasn't good - it coincided with me going to a festival, but I managed to get the first night's programmes - one film plus two documentaries - on to one tape, and I hope I have another tape with the second film coming from a friend.

This film stars Bergman's favourites from the period - Harriet Andersson, who broke out in Summer with Monika, Eva Dahlbeck, who was a fine comic actress in A Lesson in Love, and the peerless Gunnar Bjornstrand, who was in over 20 of Bergman's films, and is always excellent, whether in comic or serious roles. It comes in the middle of his best comedies - A Lesson in Love and Smiles of a Summer Night, and just before his serious period starts - The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries were both made a couple of years later.

It has a dual plot - Dahlbeck and Andersson are agent and model, and they travel together to a photography shoot. Dahlbeck tries to pick up a previous affair with a married man, whereas Andersson, having split with her boyfriend back home, is picked up by a rich old man, played by Bjornstrand. The latter leads to some light comic scenes, but then the film turns darker. Bjornstrand's wife has been hospitalised since she gave birth to her daughter, who she rejected. The daughter is headstrong and free-spirited, rejecting her father's discipline, and the father pursues young girls who look like the wife he still loves. A casual flirtation turns into something more sordid as the daughter humiliates Andersson.

Similarly, Dahlbeck's potential tryst is interrupted by her lover's wife, as they're planning to elope to Oslo. Both meetings start full of flirtation and hope, and end in disillusion, with a final scene emphasising the solidarity of rejected women, and the fortitude of working women. Bergman is famous for his sympathy to women throughout his career - there are few directors who present such strong women so consistently - and this is again seen through the eyes of women. There are 6 characters - 2 men and 4 women - and it's the men who are weak and pathetic, while the women divide between the betrayed and the pursued, but all, apart from Andersson, who's a child, are strong characters.

I enjoyed this a lot, it was one of Bergman's best that I've seen, and I don't know why it's not yet available on DVD - perhaps it's in the huge boxed set.

El Topo/Jodorowsky (1970)

This is the cult film to top all cult films. Full of allusions to the occult, obvious religious symbolism and gratuitous obliquity, it is by turns gory, sexy, funny, pretentious and infuriating.

I can't say I followed this all the way through. I wasn't prepared to do the work required, nor was I sure that the effort would be repaid. But there's plenty enough to enjoy, and it's plainly a work of some intelligence and great personal investment.

Jodorowsky plays an elite gunfighter, dressed in black, who in the opening scene avenges a slaughter committed by a small gang. He's accompanied in this by a naked 7 year old boy, presumably his son.

He sets out on a mission, to find and kill the four best gunfighters, each of whom has their own philosophy. So far, it's a parody of spaghetti Westerns, or rather a tribute to them as many of them were parodies themselves. Jodorowsky adopts the genre to pursue a spiritual quest, which wasn't clear to me (because I didn't care enough), but it includes lions, lesbians, dwarfs enclosed in a mountain, and rabbits.

I can well see that this was popular with stoned students in the 70s, attempting to decipher the allegories, some of which are obvious - Jodorowsky as Christ is hardly subtle when he shows stigmata. I'm not concerned about seeing more of his films, although my vid store has the boxed set.

Imdb

Idiocracy/Judge (2006)

This film, by the maker of the wonderful Office Space and King of the Hill, was suppressed by the studio and only released on DVD. Watching it, it's hard to see why it wasn't released - it's rubbish, but surely no worse than other films of the genre of recent years.

I didn't enjoy this much. The central conceit - that the US in several centuries will have evolved to the lowest common denominator, because of the greater tendency of idiots to reproduce - is one gag, then there are some jokes about how that will manifest itself, and the consequences of not having enough intelligent people to run the country. But it's mostly weak stuff. The concept of the average joe being frozen and waking up in several centuries is a direct steal from Woody Allen's Sleeper and Futurama (although of courseThe Time Machine is the original), and Judge doesn't do anything sufficiently new with it to justify the film.

Imdb

Fitzcarraldo/Herzog (1982)

This is a hugely ambitious film about a hugely ambitious man. Fitzcarraldo is an obsessive, an engineer and trader in Peru who wants to build an opera house so that he can invite Caruso to perform, as he has done in other South American cities. He doesn't have enough money for the project, and, unsurprisingly, can't find backers for it, so he conceives a money making plan - he'll buy the rights to an as yet unexploited area of land that is rich in rubber, and use the proceeds from that.

This land is inaccessible as it's beyond the rapids on the main navigable river, and the other side of a mountain from another river, so his plan is to sail a steamship up the second river, through an area with hostile natives, then drag the ship over the mountain to the first river, where it can be used to ferry the rubber.

Klaus Kinski, Herzog's long time collaborator, plays Fitzcarraldo with the energy and mania you expect, and which is appropriate to the character. The shoot itself was as extraordinary as the film - the ship was dragged for real over the mountain, there were the usual bust-ups between director and star, and accusations of exploitation of the natives used in the film, which Herzog denies.

Herzog's films are always about people on the margins of society - the eccentric, or mad, or excluded - and through these he hopes to either illuminate what it is to be human, or just to show great passions. In Fitzcarraldo he definitely does the latter, showing how the grandeur of human endeavour can be magnificent, just for its own sake. And, typically, there are some wonderful shots, particularly one of Fitzcarraldo and his assistants atop a tree in the jungle, surveying the land he wants to develop.

Imdb

Even Dwarfs Started Small/Herzog (1970)

Nope, didn't get this one. Supposedly it's allegorical, but I'm not sure what two blind dwarfs hitting each other with sticks over a dead pig symbolises. Maybe the commentary, with Herzog and Crispin Glover, will illuminate it. Although Glover's incoherent liner notes don't give me confidence that he'll have anything to contribute. Don't think I'll rewatch it for a while. On to something lighter, like Woyzeck...

The Enigma of Kasper Hauser/Herzog (1974)

The legend of Kaspar Hauser is well-known in Germany, and has a continuing resonance. A young man was discovered in the town square of Nuremberg, barely able to walk or speak, carrying a note. He wasn't able to say where he'd come from, and it was later established that he'd been imprisoned in a basement for many years. He became a curiosity, especially to the educated and fashionable, who attempted to deduce theories of natural behaviour and intelligence from this specimen. The Romantic fallacy of the child of nature was indulged in Kaspar.

The idea of the 'holy fool' has existed for centuries - the most famous literary example being in Lear - and still appears in culture now. Forrest Gump is the most recent successful example of the genre, but Peter Sellers in Being There was a precedent. The thesis is that our civilisation has led us away from natural truths, and simple people, detached from society and unaffected, are closer to them than we are. It's attractive, but no more true than the pastoral fallacy.

Herzog plays with the story, and puts Kaspar at the centre of it. People react to him, revolve around him, he is the physical and moral centre. The effect of this is not just that we sympathise with him, but that we see his views as correct and those of society as frivolous or absurd. Kaspar endures religious, social and intellectual tests, and subtly rejects or subverts them, to comic effect. Most amusing is the logician, who rejects Kaspar's alternative answer to his conundrum, then ties himself in knots justifying it.

Throughout, Kaspar has great dignity, and this is due not only to Herzog's script and direction, but to the extraordinary performance by Bruno S. Rarely has there been such a coincidence of experience between character and actor, especially to such an extreme - Bruno had been kept in brutal institutions for more than 23 years; this was, Herzog said, his story.

Herzog is using the convention of the fool to lampoon society's absurdities, turning the examination of the freakish outsider inside-out, so that we are being examined, but the subtlety of his work exceeds others. For example, Kaspar's life as we know it is defined by paper documents. There are four of them, at the beginning and the end of the film: the one on which he is forced to practise writing his name, the anonymous letter he holds in his hand in the town square, the anonymous letter he has at his fatal assault, and the history of his life written by the old town clerk.

All of these documents have analogues in our lives - the signature that defines our identity, our birth and death certificates, and the story of our existence, as written by a third party, that is what is left to posterity. The joke at the end, that the curiosity of Kaspar is explained by the shape of his brain and his liver, is at how history is told, how our lives will be remembered. The clerk is writing down notes throughout the film, and trriumphantly has the answer at the end - this is the story people will read, but it's not Kaspar's story, which is the one Herzog has told.

Kaspar Hauser is closer to The Elephant Man than to either of the films mentioned above - I've no doubt Lynch acknowledges the debt. But whereas in the Elephant Man the contrast between the grotesqueness of Merrick's appearance and the refinement of his character highlights the prejudice in favour of beauty in society, Kaspar's exclusion by his ignorance of social conventions, making him little more than the circus freak that Merrick once was, condemns society's superficiality.

Herzog apparently does a very good commentary on this DVD, which I'll watch some time.

IMDb

Little Dieter Needs to Fly/Herzog (1997)

Another brilliant documentary from Werner Herzog. One more, he finds an engaging subject and lets him tell his story, but again Herzog's skill lies in drawing it out, and the composition.

Dieter Dengler was a USAF pilot in Vietnam, and was shot down over Laos in 1966. He was captured by Laotian forces, and held in a prison camp on the Laos/North Vietnamese border for 6 months. He escaped with another American, who was murdered in a skirmish with locals, and eventually managed to get west towards the Thai border, where he was spotted and rescued by US forces. He now lives up in the mountains in California, where he feels free, although the persisting influence of his experience is evident in his hoarding of emergency supplies under the house.

His story is extraordinary, and Dieter is a remarkable man - highly articulate, funny, resolute. Herzog takes him to various places to reenact his history - the town in Germany where he grew up during the war, the Laotian jungle where he was shot down, and even gets him to portray himself running through the jungle with his captors.

Herzog intercuts archive footage discretely and relevantly, including that of Dieter's press conference after his rescue and some rehabilitation. It's plain that he was exceptionally articulate and engaging even then, and 30 further years of being treated as a war hero would have helped him polish the story.

Herzog's use of music is subtle and complementary - one recurring theme is Dvorak's New World Symphony (Dieter left Germany aged 18 to go to the New World)

Dengler died in 2001, aged 62.

Rescue Dawn, a dramatized film of Dengler's story directed by Herzog and starring Christian Bale, will be released soon. Bale is making a habit of playing starvation victims, it seems.

IMDb

[edit] For the sake of SpoutBlog , the Mark Kermode interview, during which Werner Herzog was randomly shot at, and hit:

Herzog interview

The White Diamond/Herzog (2004)

Werner Herzog is surely the most interesting and intelligent filmmaker alive. This is a beautiful, stimulating film, of great wit, depth and awe.

The set-up is that Dr Graham Dorrington, an aeronautical engineer, wishes to build a balloon in order to float above a jungle canopy and film the wildlife below. Dorrington is haunted by guilt over a previous expedition in Indonesia 10 years before, when a noted wildlife cinematographer crashed his balloon into a treetop canopy, and fell to his death from it. This expedition to Guyana is partly his attempt to atone, in his own mind, for the mistakes made in that tragedy.

Dorrington is highly enthusiastic and engaging, and also very articulate, about his ambitions, regrets, and his spiritual search. One of Herzog's distinctive methods is to find interesting subjects, then let them tell their tale, and Dorrington is a very good narrator - obsessive, vulnerable and humorous.

The co-star of the film, apart from Herzog himself, who is always present as narrator or off-screen participant, is Marc Antony, a local with a mischievous smile and wit, who labels the ballon the white diamond (one of the principal industries of Guyana is diamond mining, and Marc Antony was a miner) He represents the spirituality of Guyana, but also a Rastafarian indolence, and Herzog indulges him. He knows the local herbs which can have medicinal properties, which is one of the justifications for the expedition - biologists consider the jungle canopy to be one of the last unexplored habitats in the world, which may well yield useful pharmaceuticals, not to mention previously undiscovered flaura and fauna.

The expedition is to a waterfall in the jungle, behind which is a cave that is home to over one million swifts. Although they manage to film into the cave, a sight no human can previously have seen as it requires being suspended from a rope beside the falls, Herzog respectfully doesn't show this footage, as a local tribal leader says that the myths about the cave are potent in the local culture, and to expose the reality is to destroy a little bit of that. This is a typical Herzog touch, putting himself into the story, engaging with the indigenous culture, and maintaining himself as the gateway to a mystery. He does something similar in Grizzly Man, when he films himself listening to a recording of Treadwell's death, but daren't play it to the audience. It's a little bit of gamesmanship.

There are some remarkable shots in the film, notably of the falls as viewed through a suspended raindrop, and the closing shot of a million swifts flying into their cave behind the falls.

My enjoyment of this film, which was immense, was slightly altered by my mistaken belief, due to a misreading of a post before I saw it, that the Graham Dorrington might have been acting (someone had said that a secondary character was a bullshitter, but I didn't know then which character it was) This meant that I was watching some of the most affecting scenes, of him relating the death of his previous colleague, on a dual level, uncertain whether it was a true revelation or a performance. As Herzog is known for tricks like this, blurring the distinction between factual documentary and storytelling, it pays to be wary. But, having researched it since, it appears that Dorrington is genuine, although he does admit that some of the things he said on camera were scripted, and the argument with Herzog was a set-up - it didn't feel convincing on screen, it was just a pretext to allow Herzog to be in the balloon for the first flight. No matter, that didn't substantially alter the veracity of the film, or the visual impact of it.

Graham Dorrington Interview

IMDb

London to Brighton/Paul Williams (2006)

Nasty, British and short, but better than I was expecting, this taut gangster thriller pays off, even though the ending was predictable, thanks to a sharp script, slick editing, and some good performances.

Kelly, a prostitute, and Joanne, an 11 year old runaway, hurriedly escape from London to hide in Brighton after an incident in which a man has died. They are pursued by Derek, a pimp, who has been sent to find them under threat of death by Stuart Allen, a notorious gang boss. There is a sense of seedy menace throughout, and it felt a bit like Mike Leigh directing The Long Good Friday. It's hard to avoid cliche in this sort of film - the emotionless and efficiently brutal gang boss, for example - but the theme of child prostitution pushes this into uncomfortable viewing.

The redemption of the ending was a bit pat, but the performances, particularly of Georgia Groome as Joanne, raised the film above the average.

IMDb

The Lives of Others/Donnersmarck (2006)

I missed this film when it was first released earlier this year, so was pleased to catch it now upon a short rerelease on the back of recent awards. It will certainly be one of my films of the year.

Set in East Berlin in the mid 1980s, it concerns a notable playwright (Georg) and his actress girlfriend (Christa-Maria) who come under Stasi surveillance because a Party Committee member wants the actress. Georg is favoured, is a friend of Honecker's wife, and has always produced works of impeccable GDR ideology, so has until now been above suspicion. Careful in public and private, he maintains friendships with often impulsive and tactless artists, whose work is restricted while his is, so far, untouched. But when one of them commits suicide, he feels impelled to act.

Most of the film is a silent relationship between the Stasi surveillance operative, Wiesler, and his unwitting targets. Wiesler is an expert interrogator, highly professional, cold, detached, but in his surveillance he comes to connect to both Georg and, particularly, Christa-Maria. The writing and acting of this relationship is exceptional, very understated, and the emotional development of all the characters is utterly convincing. The tone, of ever-present threat and suspense, is maintained throughout, and there are some exceptional scenes, of tension and depth.

I wasn't sure that the coda would work, but it clearly does - it pushed me over the edge a bit at the end. It's hard to know what effect this film would have had in former East Germany, but some resonance is added by the fact that the actor who plays the Stasi spy took part in anti-GDR protests in Berlin in 1989, which presumably would be known by a German audience.

This won the Best Foreign Language Oscar, which is good, but has been optioned for a Hollywood remake, which is pointless.

Note: the lead actress (Martina Gedeck) is due to play Ulrike Meinhof in a film of the Baader-Meinhof gang.

IMDb

2007 so far - DVDs

The importance of being earnest - Parker
M - Lang
Thank you for smoking - Reitman
Hard Candy - Slade
All the King's Men - Rossen (1949)
Welcome to Sarajevo - Winterbottom
Limelight - Chaplin
Le Plaisir - Ophuls
Lift to the Scaffold - Malle
Destiny - Lang
Oh! What a lovely war - Attenborough
Letter from an unknown woman - Ophuls
Sir Henry at Rawlinson End - Roberts
The Last Laugh - Murnau
Double Indemnity - Wilder
Pandora's Box - Pabst
Fahrenheit 451 - Truffaut
The Passion of Anna - Bergman
Burnt by the Sun - Mikhalkov
Shame - Bergman
Girl Shy - Newmeyer
Leon Morin, pretre - Melville
Spione - Lang

That's 23, about half of my target.

There's plenty of great films in there - the best of them are M, Burnt by the Sun, Le Plaisir, The Last Laugh and Pandora's Box. 4 Germans (one working in French) and one Russian.

2007 so far - cinema

Perfume - Tykwer
The Last King of Scotland - Macdonald
Ghosts - Broomfield
Infamous - McGrath
Venus - Michell
The Science of Sleep - Gondry
Hot Fuzz - Wright
The Phantom of the Opera - Julian (1925)
The Unknown - Browning (1927)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Worsley (1923)
Half Nelson - Fleck
This is England - Meadows
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Robertson (1920)
Jindabyne - Lawrence
Joe Strummer: The future is unwritten - Temple

That's 15, of which 11 are new releases in 24 weeks, which is poor, but I think the year hasn't had so many compelling films.

Of the new releases, the best were Venus, with a stunning performance by Peter O'Toole, Hot Fuzz, just great fun, Ghosts and Infamous. The most disappointing was Joe Strummer.

The rep films were a lot of fun. The first three were a Lon Chaney season at the Barbican, with varied musical accompaniment - one had a live pianist, one had a live DJ providing beats and samples to the film, which was a novel and exciting experience, repeated at the Rio in Dalston with Jekyll and Hyde. Definitely something to be tried again.

Preamble

I watch a lot of films. My target is generally 3 a week, one in the cinema and two on DVD. I made that in 2006, thanks to some periods of unemployment. I'm well behind in 2007, although I'm not intending to take time off work to catch up. I have about 100 unwatched DVDs here.

My recent obsessions have been Kurosawa and Bergman (watched nearly all of their films), French golden period - Carne, Renoir, etc - plus Melville and Clouzot, lots of European independent films, and some American indie too - Coen brothers. Also Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder, Buster Keaton...

Currently I'm working my way through German expressionists (Lang, Murnau), and need to polish off Fellini, get deep into Herzog, and assorted other temptations such as a Keaton boxed set, lots of films noirs, Louis Malle... Future projects include Japanese (Ozu, Mizoguchi), more Italian and French, Spanish, and Russian - Tarkovsky, Eisenstein, etc.