The Auteurs

"Life is disappointing." So goes the most common English translation of a famous line of dialogue in Ozu's Tokyo Story. As if to underscore that point, here is a British-released Region 2 Blu-ray disc of Dario Argento's 1977 Suspiria, quite probably the horror director's greatest work, a unique and uniquely deranged visual trip in which every shot seems charged with a near-kitschily elaborate jolt of SHOCK HORROR. A picture I first saw in a once-majestic theater in Paterson, New Jersey, then in its final throes of fleabag-grindhousedom, some time in the late 70s. The projectionist omitted a whole reel from the thing and it didn't matter a bit. The story of an artless ballet student who discovers that the Austrian academy wherein she seeks advanced studies is in fact run by a coven of witches, or something, Suspiria is the greatest of Argento's films for several reasons, the most germane of which is that it really does make an active virtue of its incoherence. (Of all his other pictures, only Tenebre comes within striking distance of this distinction.)

The cinematography of Luciano Tovoli (who also shot Antonioni's The Passenger) and the production design of Giuseppe Bassan provide a one-two punch in the way of near-candy-like primary colors and completely irrational lighting. Every shot is nuts, in its own way. Hence, one is inclined, at first, to cut the new Blu-ray, from a concern called Cine Excess (its mottos is "Taking Trash Seriously," a commendable sentiment despite its inherent contradictions, one supposes), some slack. In a nutshell, the very hot picture of Suspiria gets a too-hot transfer here. It's a little hard to tell at first. Take a gander at that multi-paned ceiling stained-glass window framed by velour or velvet above, and tell me whether or not it's supposed to look like that. Since nothing else in nature or art DOES look like that, it's a little difficult to make the determination.

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Suspiria

Dir Dario Argento

1977 Italy

Called It, Bitches! (Or, Homage To Hammond and Wells): Here's the text of a mass e-mail I sent out yesterday.

"I first saw the Miramax Blu-ray disc of Gangs of New York in the summer of 2008, I guess. June to be exact. This was roughly two weeks before its official release, because Miramax was still sending me screeners then, and there was person (me) in the living room watching it, cause I had been laid off from my office job by then.  I called my wife later in the afternoon to see what she had in mind for dinner. Anyway, back to the DVD. After the initial rush of seeing the 1080p resolution, such as it was, I started to get put off by some things—the flesh tones in the picture looked kind of orangey, the snow kind of blue. The flames of the torches as the Dead Rabbits, or whoever they were, marched through the bowels of their fortress or whatever it was—they looked like they were animated rather than live action, which is the sure sign of bad video compression. Weirdly enough, though, the disc got a rave from Leonard Norwitz at the normally reliable DVD Beaver website; he gave the disc's image quality a rating of "7/9." (Yeah, I know: quoth Norwitz in that review: "[I have a new scoring system for the Image in order to make the first number rationalize with the other scores]: The first number indicates a relative level of excellence compared to other Blu-ray DVDs on a ten-point scale. The second number places this image along the full range of DVDs, including SD 480i." Get it? ) Eventually the main thing this signified to me was to take any Beaver reviews by Leonard Norwitz with a grain of salt."

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Gangs of New York

Dir Martin Scorsese

2002 United States

The two disc set from Artificial Eye called "The Early Works of Eric Rohmer" features two of his Six Moral Tales, the shorts La boulangère de Monceau and La carriere de Suzanne. (In addition it contains Rohmer’s shorts Nadia á Paris and Charlotte et son steak, and his documentary on the Lumière brothers.) The Moral Tales, and much of the other miscellany, are handled quite well in the renowned domestic Criterion box set, so the picture I’d like to concentrate on from this set is Rohmer’s first feature (and his last for almost a decade) Le signe du lion, or The Sign of Leo. Rohmer’s known for his Four Seasons, his Comedies and Proverbs, and of course his Moral Tales. Le signe du lion, its title notwithstanding, would appear to be Rohmer’s sole Shaggy Dog Tale. Read More

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The Sign of Leo

Dir Eric Rohmer

1959 France

Movies I Would Have Seen At The Sundance Film Festival, With Bonus Feature Of Movies I Would Not Have Seen At The Sundance Film Festival, Had I Actually Gone To The Sundance Film Festival: Now that it no longer coincides with the Golden Globes, Sundance gives film bloggers some no doubt welcome time off from having to think about awards and such, which must be nice for those who actually go. For those who can't or don't actually go, it's a bit of a pickle, as all they are going to read about on other film blogs is this or that Sundance movie. I suppose I would have had to have gone and seen Derek Cianfrance's Blue Valentine, but I don't know if I woulda liked it. As I get older, I tend more to enjoy films mit a plot. And this appears not to have much of one, just two interlaced accounts of a relationship, its beginning and end, imagine that. And a score from Grizzly Bear. What's with all these bands and such, and the names? Grizzly Bear, Panda Bear, Animal Collective, Wolf Parade. Feh. The only one of the lot I got any use for is Wolf Eyes. I'd like to get a boom box so I can blast that band's collaboration with Smegma next time I'm on a film festival line and some clod says something like "I don't like films about bourgeois people."

Grumble, grumble, mutter, mutter...where was I?

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Blue Valentine

Dir Derek Cianfrance

2009 United States

Cyrus

Dir Jay Duplass & Mark Duplass

2010 United States

Buried

Dir Rodrigo Cortés

2010 Spain

With Peter Biskind's new and largely unfortunate biography of Warren Beatty creating some re-evaluation of the star-producer-director-writer's career, the very-nearly age-old question is coming up again: Is the box-office debacle Ishtar, the largely Middle-East-set romp with Beatty and Dustin Hoffman doing a latter-day Abbott and Costello schtick, really all that bad? It's frequently referred to as the Heaven's Gate of comedies, mostly by folks unaware that Heaven's Gate is experiencing a critical re-evaluation of its own. But never mind that for now.

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Ishtar

Dir Elaine May

1987 United States

Artistic Or Arty? And Is Sundance Splitting The Difference?: In a report, or think piece, or whatever/however the venerable institution's section editors are inclined to refer to such a mess of verbal pottage these days, Brooks Barnes, who will someday soon be cited with the same contempt that latter-day critics of The New York Times reserve for the likes of Bosley Crowther and even, yes, Walter Duranty, contemplates what "might very well be the most important Sundance in years." And it's important why? Well depending on how you look at it, it's important because it will be showcasing an even larger shitload of films that nobody, including Mark Peranson, will ever, ever, ever, ever want to see.

Okay, that's unfair. But let's face facts: The New York Times, besides having smart and excellently-writing critics and such, doesn't give a toss about film culture, or else they wouldn't allow a fresh-faced philistine such as Barnes blather about how newly minted Sundance programming chief John Cooper is shifting Sundance back to its "arty" roots. The Webster definition of "arty" is, pace Anne Thompson, "showily or pretentiously artistic," and I do believe Brooks Barnes, who has shown a pronounced hostility to both actual art and pretentious art whenever his reporting has gotten within several yards of either, means exactly what he's saying. Which begs the question, why does he, or The Times for that matter, bother? If it's all just show and pretention?

I may look to be making a mountain out of a molehill here, but I insist. Unlike another film blogger who insists that spelling is less important than ideas (and who can't spell, and has no ideas), I insist that words matter. And that to define a particular category of film in such a dismissive way when, for better or worse, the Sundance Film Festival still retains a particular patina of diversity is...intellectually, aesthetically, and journalistically dishonest.

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One of the rare moments of grace, refinement and cinephilic interest at last Sunday's Golden Globe Awards was the presentation of the Cecil B. DeMille award to director Martin Scorsese, whose next feature, Shutter Island, comes out next month. Scorsese's career, as multi-faceted and largely exemplary as it has been, did not begin in a way that the great showman DeMille would even begin to understand. That is to say, it began in something called "film school."

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Shutter Island

Dir Martin Scorsese

2010 United States

Executive Decision: Or should we call this one "They Were Expendable?" Early in the week, it was announced that the fourth Spider Man film to be directed by Sam Raimi and star Tobey Maguire was not, in fact, going to happen. Raimi had told the studio he could not deliver the film for its 2011 deadline, and studio head Amy Pascal  and Some Dude from Marvel decided not to replace Raimi but rather to "reboot" the franchise à la Batman Begins, or something. Observe Nikki Finke and Michael Fleming, "Immediately, the news brought celebration and consternation equally to webslinger fanboys who say the reboot plot puts Peter Parker back in high school." I don't follow the ins and outs of studio heads and dealmaking as much as I used to, but it's always kind of interesting to observe the semiotics of such situations. In this case, not much outrage resulted. The Fleming/Finke report implied that Raimi is pretty much capable of writing his own ticket, and that Maguire isn't taking it hard at all. Truth to tell, Maguire did seem to be tiring of the Peter Parker role, and Spider Man 3 was pretty much the worst of the superhero series. As an old-time Raimi fan, I might have liked to have him gone out with a good Spider Man film, but I liked Drag Me To Hell well enough to be looking forward to whatever the heck he does next. So everybody goes away friends, we guess. Things were a little more tense last summer, when Pascal put the film Moneyball, to be directed by Steven Soderbergh, into turnaround mere days before production was to have begun. More than one pundit seemed to think that Soderbergh was getting a deserved, George-Amberson-esque comeuppance, because his ambitious Che didn't make much money. And was ambitious. Where the hell does he get off.

What crocodile tears were shed were for Pascal! "It's never an easy decision when a studio head has to pull the plug on a big movie," sniffed Patrick Goldstein, before allowing Pascal to aver "I'd still work with Steven in a minute." From the way so many had been talking, you'd think that Sony had bankrolled Che. (It did not.) And while the Spider Man lineup shift is occurring in a "we're all still friends" atmosphere, you'd think that, given the way Spider Man 2 saved Sony's bacon after the disastrous year of Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, you'd think that just a little scheduling flexibility might have been in order. But no. Instead, Peter Parker is going back to high school.

Which leads to the question, just how many millions of dollars do you have to make for Hollywood, and how often, before things such as this stop happening? Maybe that's a rhetorical question. In fact, I'm certain that it is.

Personal To K.O.: Dude, I know you're going to want me on the show for backup when you name you-know-who as the day's "Worst Person In The World." So call me, why doncha?

Related Films

Drag Me to Hell

Dir Sam Raimi

2009 United States

I first thought of featuring this film in the Foreign Region Report a couple months back, when my friends Fahran Nehme Smith, largely known as The Self-Styled Siren, and Lou Lumenick, a film critic for The New York Post, announced that they would be co-programming a January 2010 series on TCM entitled "Shadows of Russia." The series is devoted to well-known and not-so-well-known pictures, made in Hollywood, about Russia. In many eras. There’s von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress, about Catherine the Great, on the one hand, and the multi-Barrymore-starring Rasputin and the Empress, on the other. And then there’s 1943’s Mission to Moscow, starring Walter Huston, which will play on TCM on January 20^th but will be screened at BAM’s Rose Cinema this very evening, January 12, at 7 p.m., followed by a panel discussion featuring Lou, The Siren, myself, and film historian Ed Hulse. Come around, if you are around.

In any event, this film was one of the films that Lou and Farran were not able to program for the series, but which was accessible on foreign-region DVD (albeit in an out-of-print, but not egregiously expensive, edition). There were rights or accessibility issues, I gathered. What I got was an odd picture, for sure.

Related Films

The Iron Petticoat

Dir Ralph Thomas

1956

Ninotchka

Dir Ernst Lubitsch

1939 United States

The Politics Of Avatar: Do They Matter?: The year is new, and there's not much to talk about, we suppose, so we also suppose it's only natural that this topic is what you'd call a hot one. Various critics and bloggers were noting the left-leaning politics inherent in the putatively allegorical content of James Cameron's Avatar from the very start; heck, your correspondent was one of those folks. The subsequent discussion of them on his own blog was fiery, and sundered at least one virtual friendship. Since then, commenters of all stripes have weighed in, expressing dubious notions. One argues that Avatar's success means that audiences really aren't turned off by anti-Iraq-war sentiments. Another—a fellow who should have learned a long time ago to never, ever, ever write about films—mourns that the slaughter of American military personnel (hired or not!) is now apparently your best entertainment value. And so on, my own fave being the fellow who's unhappy with the way Avatar "frames" its argument—what a card.

The only thing we find genuinely interesting about Avatar's politics is the extent to which they actually matter to the film itself and what it really puts across, and which we think is really not so much. Which is to say that its politics are not prescriptive.

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Avatar

Dir James Cameron

2009 United States

The Birth of a Nation

Dir D.W. Griffith

1915 United States

Unlike some directors who give up on a bad script or else send it up, one senses that you always try to play fair; but in some of those early British films, one also sense a kind of irony behind their worst excesses. Is this so?

"There was, but it was a desperate irony because I was so badly in need of work and under such extreme pressure. This can be dangerous, because Tennessee Williams, for instance, had been told by all sorts of people who are not qualified to comment—people with whom I've never worked and who therefore don't know how I work—that I'm death on writers, that I cut ruthlessly, that I have no respect for a script. This couldn't be more untrue. Of course if I get a script which is a piece of nonsense, I will say that I'll do it only if it is rewritten; of course if I get a script from a writer I've previously worked with successfully, and the script isn't right, I will start all over again with another script. But once there is a script, one I believe I can do and is right, I never make a change without consulting the writer. And when I say consulting, if he's available, he makes the change himself. I don't make cuts or even line changes, and this can be testified to by the two writers I have worked with most, Evan Jones and Pinter. The only line changed in Accident was changed by Pinter's wife, Vivien Merchant, with his consent and my approval—a very slight change. I believe in the writer's contribution and I foster it. It annoys me, these judgments passed by people who are presumably colleagues and who have no basis for making them; it's like all the people who said Charles Laughton is impossibly difficult, Wilfrid Lawson is hopelessly irresponsible; absolutely untrue in both cases, though maybe true in other circumstances. Like the man who said to me last night, 'I've dealt with people who are terribly difficult, almost as difficult as you'—and he'd met me fifteen minutes before, didn't know a damn thing about whether I'm difficult or not. I'm not difficult. I'm obstinate; I'm insistent on quality; and I fight like hell for it. And of course this is very inconvenient for some people."

Thus spake Joseph Losey to Tom Milne, for the interview book Losey on Losey, just as he was embarking on Boom!, which his new collaborator Tennessee Williams was adapting from his failed stage play The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore. Not to be glib about it, but the piece can be most succinctly described as being of the subgenre in which the Gay Male Artiste casts a gimlet eye on the haughty, aging, much-divorced (perhaps former) socialite who's possibly going a bit batty. That this female character is named Sissy Goforth is indicative of the problems of the text—it's both gimlet-eyed and symbolic, aieee. Sissy lives in splendid-morphing-to-decadent isolation on a Mediterranean island, dictating her memoirs to a younger woman and entertaining the likes of "The Witch of Capri." An intruder named Chris, a one-time poet whose visits to various patrons and such seems to invariably lead to their deaths, shows up at Sissy's estate, and a somewhat diffuse battle of wills and lusts ensues.

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Boom!

Dir Joseph Losey

1968 United States

Some Coal For Your Stocking?: Get a load of some of the icons of Christmas anti-cheer below the fold. Above, Martin Short proves he actually can do wrong, as Jack Frost.

If there are still any poor souls out there today trawling the blogosphere who happen upon this post, do let me know what you'd like to see from "Topics" in the next year. And Merry Christmas! Read More

One of the most unusual putatively-hoiday-themed pictures ever made, Robert Siodmak's 1944 Christmas Holiday features beloved child/teen songstress Deanna Durbin in pretty much her first real adult role, and a doozy it is, too. Herman J. Mankiewicz—he of Citizen Kane screenwriting fame—here whittles down Somerset Maugham's novel (a tale of self discovery with the more far-flung tales of its secondary characters folded in, which begins with its hero's titular getaway to Paris, where he meets a mysterious prostitute)—into something more anecdotal and possibly personal. Read More

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Christmas Holiday

Dir Robert Siodmak

1944 United States

Your Avatar: The journalist and opinion columnist Charles Lane has been getting a lot of smack from various progressive political blogs and bloggers for his criticism of some rhetorical flourishes made by Ezra Klein in wake of Joe Lieberman's...well, we're not really interested in all that at the moment. Anyway, he was recently awarded Atrios' coveted Wanker of the Day award by the influential lefty blogger Atrios, and if you are interested, that blog post will take you where you need to go. Anyway. With all this talk about Lane I got to thinking the same thing I did when I first saw Shattered Glass, and the below photos, I think, competently illuminate my question: "Was there ever a real life figure done more of a favor in his motion picture depiction than Charles Lane?"

So the question here, I suppose, should be two-fold: What are your favorite portrayals of journalists—real life or fictional—in motion picture, and what's the biggest difference between an actual person and his or her fiction film depiction you've ever seen? Read More

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All the President's Men

Dir Alan J. Pakula

1976 United States

What is it about the very scrupulous DVD collector, or, maybe what we might call the very scrupulous DVD librarian? What is it that drives him or her—but let's face it, more often than not it's a him—to pursue various iterations of a particular title in an obsessive fashion, so as to finally arrive at the closest thing at that moment to a platonic ideal of pictorial perfection? This week, we look at two versions of Fritz Lang's 1945 thriller Scarlet Street and try to arrive at an answer. Read More

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Scarlet Street

Dir Fritz Lang

1945 United States