Against The Hype

Perhaps it is inappropriate that G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box will be the last movie I watch before flying 18 hours to the University of Chicago, and into a new chapter of my life. After all, the movie depicts characters who can barely understand or avoid the impulses they chase, even though this inevitably leads them into situations ever more dire. Indeed, in the shot above, Lulu (Louise Brooks) thinks she’s just ensured that things will go back to the way they were. Spoiler alert: they will not.

But I would like to think that I have a better grasp on my future than Lulu does, and the movie also works as fitting emblem for some of my hopes and resolutions. Take this very shot: as she gets dressed for her stage debut, assistants decked out-of-focus around her, you might think the reasons for Lulu’s glee are entirely professional. In truth, she’s just netted a very personal triumph, but you wouldn’t know this if I hadn’t said it (unless you’ve watched the film, of course). Take it from me too, then, that this blog is going to get a lot more personal from now on, since its pegging to my ups and downs as a film-studying undergrad means that my relationship to the movies will advance beyond the occasional rental and formal critique.

Then again, I don’t mean to understate just how far my pre-college cinephilia extends, since I bought Bordwell and Thompson’s magisterial Film History: An Introduction for a bit of enjoyable reading more than two months ago. Thus I can’t see how Pandora’s Box is anything but appropriate for this moment: not only did Nathaniel R fortuitously delay its episode in his inspiring Hit Me with Your Best Shot series so it coincided nicely with my departure; not only does it belong to the silent era, an area of expertise for my university’s film studies department; it also fits into one of the biggest gaps in my movie knowledge that I’m already most eager to fill.

What follows, then, is a list of movies that I’m hoping to catch for the first time (or would like a proper new look at) while in college. They’re divided into the sections of Film History that I’ve read in which they turn up, and Pandora’s Box lies crossed out among them, giving you a glimpse of the kind of tweet-length response that follows when I’ve watched one of them. And of course I’m expecting this list to grow—not least because you might have some to recommend!

(more…)

A Face in the Crowd asks Andy Griffith to embody Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, a sort of barnstorming hick that rouses the nation over the airwaves (first by radio, then by TV) with his lack of pretense. But it’s hard to know what’s more condescendingly offensive: that his schtick works as it does, with all these fawning reaction shots of “aw-shucks” Americans in their old-fashioned living rooms and kitchens, smitten with a voice that finally speaks for them; or that Lonesome finally succumbs to corruption, like all star-is-born types inevitably do (or at least the males, those power-starved horndogs!). Worse, in order to fell him, the movie resorts to the cheap trick of having him learn to despise the masses who love him, and spout his disdain just when he thinks they aren’t listening. One would think he, of all people, would know how they hang onto every word. (more…)

These screencaps probably evoke more delight for those who’ve watched Bring It On than for those relying on the isolated evidence above. Which is partly my fault, since the shots I chose don’t bring out the best in director Peyton Reed’s striking colour and composition choices. But it’s also an inherent flaw in choosing shots from this movie for the Hit Me with Your Best Shot series, since Bring It On‘s unflagging momentum is aided by its brisk editing, and it gathers an ensemble gifted with expressive physicality. (And what’s a cheerleading movie without either of those?) So not only do these single frames fail to do justice to the giddy movements that the lead actors (Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Bradford, Eliza Dushku) each contribute to these respective scenes, but they are cut together with so many unmissable reaction shots of shared joy that it’s more accurate to say that, rather than shots, these are my favourite sequences of Bring It On. (more…)

Black Narcissus‘s acclaim as a “colour masterpiece” doesn’t quite nail its fascinating austerity, especially when it closes up on Deborah Kerr’s face. Why explore the movie’s odious take on Oriental exoticism, which is where much of its “colour” lies, when it is far more interesting to watch Kerr’s Sister Clodagh as she struggles to establish a school isolated in the Himalayas? (No knock on cinematographer Jack Cardiff, who fully deserves his Oscar.) Without any guidance but her resolve, the young Sister Clodagh has to steel herself against her own insecurities, the pervasive sensuality, a local agent’s religious skepticism and raffish charm, the natives’ linguistic and cultural barriers, her fellow nuns’ weaknesses and falterings. These troubles shape a rare, compelling portrait that illuminates why she wears such hardness in her demeanor, as do so many other Sister Superiors before and since.

Oh, and here’s another: the flood of her memories. When we first encounter Sister Clodagh, she is framed in her off-white nun’s habit, already abstracted to her role. It is only a full hour in that she begins to dissolve (quite literally, in the visual sense) into flashbacks of her days prior to making her vows. These slow dissolves are my favourite parts of the movie, forging our impressionistic sense of Clodagh’s various psychological states:

What’s especially brilliant about these flashbacks is that they are never explicitly presented as part of Sister Clodagh’s troubles, unlike nearly every other plot point. Or at least initially: (more…)

I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist. When that topmost shot appeared, it instantly triggered the latent Lust, Caution part of my brain. Not to suggest that Roy Cohn (Al Pacino) and Joe Pitt (Patrick Wilson) share an… acrobatic relationship like Mrs Mai and Mr Yi’s, of course, but they are quite similar in other ways:

The title Lust, Caution fits their situation aptly. In Angels in America‘s multi-protagonist narrative, Roy and Joe take the parts of conservative, anti-gay Republicans forced to face up to the realities of the people they’ve demonised: Roy contracts AIDS through one of his illicit, off-screen encounters, while Joe finds himself losing the battle against his desire. Playwright Tony Kushner, who adapted his own script for the screen, conjures a few other such doublings across political lines. By this point, Joe has fallen for and cohabited with his out gay co-worker Louis; both have spurned their lovers of a few years for each other. The spurned lovers, Joe’s wife Harper and Louis’ ex-boyfriend Prior, meet via some sort of arcane telepathic corridor, and acknowledge that they signed into their failed relationships mostly due to erotic attraction. And both Prior and Roy, stricken with AIDS, start having rather different visitations upon them of an afterlife-y sort.

They’ve made their choices about power. The framing says it all. (more…)