Saturday, June 30, 2012

The Overlook


Office in a Small City (1953)
Edward Hopper


Case Study #22 (2001)
Dorit Margreiter

The Theme Song


Yotsuya Kaidan main theme (1949)
Chuji Kinoshita



Godzilla main theme (1954)
Akira Ifukube

The Foreshadowing (12)


Yotsuya Kaidan I (1949)
dir. Kinoshita Keisuke



Yotsuya Kaidan II (1949)
dir. Kinoshita Keisuke



The crumpled form of a betrayed man vowing revenge on Naosuke, the crumpled form of Naosuke killed by a man he betrayed.

The Ghost of Yotsuya

The Ghost of Yotsuya is one of Japan's most enduring horror stories. First a Kabuki play, it's been adapted to film dozens of times. Most people hold that Nobou Nakagawa's 1959 adaptation is the best version. It's a hell of a picture, but I've just finished Keisuke Kinoshita's 1949 version, and I'm convinced it's not only the best version of the story, but one of the best Japanese films ever made.

And here's four reasons why:

Kinoshita's skill with the dolly is dizzying. In this, the first shot of the film, we follow a man to his death and leave him to survey the rest of the battle. This shot goes on for a prohibitively long time to turn into a gif. This is just a sample - we watch the man jump from the wall behind him to the ground, free a bunch of prisoners, hop onto this wall, die, and then we track along the wall and watch guards beat down the rest of the prisoners all in a single straight line dolly.

Kinoshita is considered the mentor of Masaki Kobayashi (who write this script), but I see a lot of Kurosawa in it as well. Look at his Kurosawa-like approach to sword violence. People trip, panic, and flail about in mortal terror of the blade. I remind you, this was a year before that famous duel in Rashomon. This has got to be an inspiration - so too is the physical presence of weather which would become a Kurosawa trademark

The little moments are often really touching. Such attention to the small Raymond Carver-esque heartbreak of day to day life.

 And it's also just plain beautiful, of course.

The Colors of the Wind

Did you ever see a she-gator protect her young 
Or a fish in a river swimming free? 
Did you ever see the beauty of the hills of Carolina 
Or the sweetness of the grass in Tennessee?
[...]
Do you like to see a mountain stream a-flowin'? 
Do you like to see a youngin' with his dog?
Did you ever stop to think about, well, the air you're breathin'?
"All I Can Do is Write About It" Gimme Back My Bullets (1976)
written by Ronnie Van Zant & Allen Collins


Have you ever heard the wolf cry to the blue corn moon 
Or asked the grinning bobcat why he grinned? 
Can you sing with all the voices of the mountains? 
Can you paint with all the colors of the wind? 
Can you paint with all the colors of the wind?
"The Colors of the Wind" Pocahontas (1995)
written by Stephen Schwartz
I don't think society has adequately addressed the fact that, structurally speaking, First Blood is a werewolf movie.

Thursday, June 28, 2012

The Royalty (2)

Excalibur (1981)
dir. John Boorman


Ran (1985)
dir. Akira Kurosawa

The Eyes

White Zombie (1932)
dir. Victor Halperin


Father of the Bride (1950)
dir. Vincente Minnelli

The Hand in the Water

Deliverance (1972)
dir. John Boorman


Excalibur (1981)
dir. John Boorman

The Ending

The Graduate (1967)
dir. Mike Nichols


The Long Good Friday (1980)
dir. John Mackenzie


from Dr. Puppykicker

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

The Bike Ride

Late Spring (1949)
dir. Yasujiro Ozu



Musuko no seishun (1952)
dir. Masaki Kobayashi



Is the preponderance of Coke signs in post-War Japan a result of MacArthur's occupation?

Sunday, June 24, 2012

My Top 100

Look, I know best-of lists are the last refuge of a scoundrel.

But I'm gonna give y'all my 100 favorite movies. It's a Sisyphean affair because I'm sure it'll change in a few months, and forever, as I discover and rediscover the cinema. But for now, here we go (in a format I totally ripped off from Esquire):


100. Marty (1953, Delbert Mann)
because Rod Steiger's slouchy performance was as good as Brando.

99. The Blair Witch Project (1999, Eduardo Sánchez & Daniel Myrick) 
because hardly anyone has noticed just how flawlessly it’s constructed.

98. Make Way for Tomorrow (1937, Leo McCarey)
because it ripped my heart right out of my body.

97. The Invisible Man (1933, James Whale)
because Claude Rains would’ve made a great Bugs Bunny.

96. Ordet (1955, Carl Th. Dreyer)
because miracles are terrifying.

95. Shaun of the Dead (2004, Edgar Wright)
because it’s so excited to be on screen.

94. Dog Day Afternoon (1975, Sidney Lumet)
because we have to shout to be heard.

93. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972, Luis Buñuel)
because it understands what it hates.

92. Detour (1945, Edgar G. Ulmer)
because it was no accident - if you’re good enough, you can make a masterpiece in a week.

91. Deliverance (1972, John Boorman)
because it captures the terrible power of nature.

The Fight in the Rain

Floating Weeds (1959)
dir. Yasujiro Ozu


The Good, the Bad, the Weird (2008)
dir. Kim Ji-woon

Saturday, June 23, 2012

The Delinquents

Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
dir. Nicholas Ray


The Delinquents (1957)
dir. Robert Altman
THE ONE HUNDRED GREATEST MOVIE THEME SONGS:


1. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three






end of list.

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

The Crucifixion

Massacre Mafia Style (1978)
dir. Duke Mitchell



The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)
dir. Martin Scorsese

The Shore

Our Neighbor, Miss Yae (1934)
dir. Yasujiro Shimazu



Lovers & Lollipops (1956)
dir. Morris Engel

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

The Summary of Qualifications

I have an M.D. from Harvard. I am board certified in cardiothoracic medicine and trauma surgery. I have been awarded citations from seven different medical boards in New England and I am never, ever sick at sea.
Malice (1993) 
Screenplay by Aaron Sorkin and Scott Frank, story by Jonas McCord and Aaron Sorkin  


I've advised and armed the Hellenic Army. I've neutralized champions of communism. I've spent the past three years learning Finnish! Which should come in handy here in Virginia.  And I'm never, ever sick at sea.
Charlie Wilson's War (2007) 
Screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, based on the book by George Crile 






from Scott M.

Sunday, June 17, 2012

The Pod House

Dodes'ka-den (1970)
dir. Akira Kurosawa


The Bugs Bunny/Road-Runner Movie (1979)
dir. Chuck Jones/Phil Monroe


from Peaceful Anarchy

Friday, June 15, 2012

The Barrier

Girls in Chains (1943)
dir. Edgar G. Ulmer


Pickpocket (1959)
dir. Robert Bresson


Eclipse (1962)
dir. Michelangelo Antonioni


2/3s from Dr. Puppykicker, who astutely points out that: "It's also worth noting that Antonioni's characters willingly place that barrier between them, which kind sums up his whole canon."

Thursday, June 14, 2012

The Kubrick Stare

The Shining (1980)
dir. Stanley Kubrick


Boogie Nights (1997)
dir. Paul Thomas Anderson

from TrixRabbi

The Facepaint

Kwaidan (1964)
dir. Masaki Kobayashi


Blade Runner (1982)
dir. Ridley Scott


from Apes-Ma. Apes Dad must be proud.

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Monday, June 11, 2012

The Film

Blade Runner (1982)
dir. Ridley Scott


Mad Men "The Phantom" (2012)
dir. Matthew Weiner

The Hands

Ghostbusters (1984)
dir. Ivan Reitman


Day of the Dead (1985)
dir. George Romero


Labyrinth (1986)
dir. Jim Henson



Labyrinth still from sales on film

Friday, June 8, 2012

Lessons in Filmmaking #1: John Ford

This ol' blog is always about a hair's breadth away from becoming THE OFFICIAL JOHN FORD APPRECIATION STATION. (That is the first and god willing the last time I ever use colored text.)

John Ford is the greatest director who ever lived. He was born John Feeney in Maine in 1894, he died in California in 1973. His older brother Francis Ford was also a very good director, a contemporary of Griffith's. Francis appears in many of John's films, and vice versa. John directed 140 films and won more Best Director Oscars than anyone else - four. He deserved more. He went to war. He had an eyepatch. He once punched out Henry Fonda. He's on a postage stamp. 

Among others, Bergman, Eisenstein, Spielberg, Satyajit Ray, and Scorsese all fell to pieces for Ford. Orson Welles famously prepared for Citizen Kane by watching Stagecoach forty times. He later declared the great masters of film, "John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford." Akira Kurosawa hero-worshipped the man, saying "when I'm old, that's the kind of director I want to be." He called My Darling Clementine "a model of what cinema should be." I agree.

I just can't help it myself - I love the man. I love him for saying in his last printed words: "I am not a poet, that's horseshit" and I love him because with all due respect to ol' Pappy (it's appropriate that he and the equally complicated Hemingway had such similar nicknames), John Ford was a poet, and he knew it, and that quote is horseshit. He printed the legend on himself, marking himself as a simple and unremarkable workingman director who just got lucky, and he did such a good job the film community half-believes him now.


I have seen 55 of John Ford's 140 films, from his 1917 Straight Shooting and Bucking Broadway to his broken-hearted posthumously-released 1976 documentary Chesty: A Tribute to a Legend. There is a might to the work of Ford that you rarely see elsewhere. It's some kind of physical effect - John McPhee would call it "a sense of where you are." Not all 55 are successes, but nearly every one has at least one such mighty scene, a moment of utter unity when the characters, setting, and story all hum in a perfect harmony. This is the poetry of Ford, what Robert Frost once termed "a momentary stay against confusion."

Spielberg approaches it in those moments when his camera assumes consciousness (what did Deleuze call this? The movement image?).  Ridley Scott nailed it a few times early in his career, like when 1982 Pinewood Studio and 2019 L.A. become inseparable. And Jack Arnold, of all people, got there when the Creature danced beneath Julie Adams in the Black Lagoon.



We can't codify it and we can't force it but maybe if we take a long look at the man and how he worked, we can get a glimpse into just how John Ford got there so many times.


Now without further ado, I present:

Lessons in Filmmaking from the Old Masters:
John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford




Pilgrimage (1933)

It's all about where you put the horizon.
Maybe that's all it takes.

That's how the song goes: "It's all about where you put the horizon, said the great John Ford to the young man rising."

That's a true story - the "young man rising" was a 15-year-old Steven Spielberg, whose War Horse is an object lesson in the continuing influence of John Ford. Young Mr. Spielberg visited with Ford and was gifted with one of his only documented pieces of advice: 
“When you’re able to distinguish the art of the horizon at the bottom of a frame, or at the top of the frame—but not going right through the center of the frame—when you’re able to appreciate why it’s at the top and why it’s at the bottom, you might make a pretty good picture-maker.”
Look at these shots from She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Wagon Master, identical in nearly every way except the placement of the horizon:

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)

Wagon Master (1950)

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon's big sky bears down on the cavalry - God-like and unconquerable. Wagon Master's high horizon line (which rises in gentle, surmountable steps) is hard but manageable. The characters aren't crammed into the bottom of the frame, they stretch across it majestically. 

It's an optimistic image, and the horizon is key here, but in a general sense what he's really talking about here is that magical harmony between setting, character, and story. Coordinate your frame to tell your story visually. In this instance, Wagon Master's more comfortable left-to-right motion, orderly placement of wagons, and calmer weather all tranquilize while Yellow Ribbon upsets.

After his Murnau period in the late '20s and early '30s, Ford rarely used rain or wind effects in the way of Kurosawa or von Stroheim; but when he did it was always a meaningful and powerful moment. Look at that lovely moment in How Green Was My Valley when Maureen O'Hara's wedding veil flies up:

How Green Was My Valley (1941)

It's such a small and idiosyncratic gesture that most people assume it was merely a stroke of luck. It wasn't. It was three carefully placed wind machines targeted right at that veil.

The Long Gray Line (1955)

In this quiet moment from The Long Gray Line, the artificial horizon of useless cannons is a sad compliment to the old soldier Marty Maher, weighed against the pastoral majesty of West Point.

Of course, Ford also exercised such tight control over interiors. In fact, for a man (rightly) known as a pioneer of rugged location shooting, Ford may have been at his best working in small rooms. Look at this shot from My Darling Clementine, in which Wyatt Earp faces his enemies:

My Darling Clementine (1946)

Tag Gallagher calls them "feathers on a arrow." Elsewhere in the film, the geography of the same bar is used to envelop Doc Holliday in the Earp clan (the mirroring of families is used to great effect in that film). What a clever and natural way to exploit that setting! He turns the very form and shape of the space into a character, or at least into an editorial.

One of Ford's innovations was the concept of shooting up into a room, revealing the ceiling (this is one of several Ford innovations falsely attributed to Citizen Kane - Welles was a true genius and contributed greatly to film grammar, but ceilings and deep focus were Ford's game first). He dismissed the importance of this true to form - something like "I didn't invent the ceiling" - but it really was a breakthrough. Why do you think John Wayne was so commanding? Because in Ford's films, he didn't just occupy a room, he filled it from top to bottom.



The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

Light your actors' eyes.
As Ford told John Wayne on Stagecoach - you don't act with your mouth, you act with your eyes. "I like to keep my audience's attention on eyes," he told Alex Madson in 1966. In a 1935 interview he claimed lighting as his strong suit, bragging that he could "take a thoroughly mediocre bit of acting, and build points of shadow around a ray of strong light centered on the principals, and finish with something plausible." Film actors lead with their eyes. Montgomery Clift knew it, Marilyn Monroe knew it, and Ford was one of the first directors to take advantage of this.

It's effective on bad acting and it's simply radiant on good. Look no further than the haunting finale of The Grapes of Wrath, that long monologue (more on that next) held in medium close-up, with a few pinpricks of light dancing in Fonda's sad eyes. Or that lovely moment in Stagecoach when Ringo and Dallas's simmering romance comes to a boil with a look.

Stagecoach (1939)

Which brings me to my next point:


Bucking Broadway (1917)

Don't speak until you have something to say.
That same 1935 interview tells us that 40% of the time, Ford uses a silent camera and doesn't bother recording sound at all. This is phrased as a revelation, but it's really no surprise. "A good picture," to Ford, "is long on action and short on dialogue."

Fort Apache (1948)

Look at his underrated 1929 The Black Watch, his sound debut. Unlike so many filmmakers coming into the sound era, he doesn't overload his film with useless chatter (I'm looking at you, Tod Browning). The Black Watch is practically a musical. Beautiful Scottish and Indian tunes swell on the soundtrack, at times even drowning out unnecessary dialogue.

We don't need words to communicate, and oftentimes (as in the case of Lincoln's fumbling speech at the beginning of Young Mr. Lincoln) they merely complicate a beautiful, instinctual impulse. After all they've been through, what more can Wyatt say to Clem at the end of My Darling Clementine than "I sure do like that name, ma'am."

The Informer (1935)

But unlike, say, Sergio Leone's heavy and self-conscious silences, Ford has a light touch. The quietude in a John Ford film is not the creak of a rusty windmill and the buzz of a fly, it's the lazy hum of a Sunday morning. It's that Tarantino bit about "comfortably enjoying the silence."

He was famous for ripping dialogues pages out of his scripts, but I don't think he just removed those lines, he replaced them with a set of gestures and the intimacy of the small moments in between speech. Small gestures are of the utmost importance to John Ford. There's a great deal of visual repetition in his work, a private lexicon of revealing poses:

Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)

Tobacco Road (1941)

The Horse Soldiers (1959)

These gestures take the place of that petty speech Ford jettisons.

Common consensus on Ford, there: Actions matter. Music matters. But in his usual coy manner, I think in all this talk of "short on talk," he's deliberately underselling the power of speech when it does occur in his films.

Monologues and speeches are a great occasion in Ford, probably because they're surrounded by so much thought. Words tend to come slow and measured - Will Rogers turning over every syllable in Judge Priest, Henry Fonda speaking like he's uncovering some holy artifact in The Grapes of Wrath and Young Mr. Lincoln, or Jimmy Stewart and Richard Widmark rounding the same topic two or three times in that wonderful, elliptical, languid dialogue scene in Two Rode Together.

I believe words matter to John Ford, and I believe that's why he features so few of them.




Wagon Master (1950)

Take time for the little moments.
Now we're getting to the bone.

Interesting trivia about John Ford: he was in Birth of a Nation. He loved to tell a little story about the time he fell off a horse mid-scene. D.W. Griffith ran over and called for some whiskey. Ford said he didn't drink (a decision that he would reverse with a vengeance), and Griffith replied: "it's for me." For all his life Ford would cite Griffith's incendiary original sin of cinema as the best movie ever made. He liked it for the little things, the way Griffith keyed in on small details to allow the scenes time to breathe.

Ford tended to start his scenes a beat early, the way Fassbinder ran them a beat long in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Remember that scene in The Searchers when Ethan Edwards agrees to ride off with Ward Bond? (Incidentally, I'm sorry I'm mixing character and actor names so unprofessionally, but sometimes you're Ethan Edwards and sometimes a man is just always Ward Bond, ya know.) Most of the scene is just little Debbie goofing off at the table and the troops scarfing down breakfast. Our goal is to get Ethan out of the Edwards homestead so they can get murdered, but that's just plot mechanics. Plot isn't the same thing as story, and that's rarely more evident than in John Ford's films. Our plot point here may be getting Ethan to the Jorgenson spread, but our story is about a community and how they interact with one another.

Our story is always about a community.

And our story always takes precedent over our plot. This is kind of a line in the sand between casual movie-goers and... well, I don't have a word for us because I sure as hell will never call myself a "buff." Thing is, though, what does the A-B-Cs of our plot really matter? It's just a blueprint - one of Ford's more famous quotes: "a film director is like an architect" - and if we don't share this wonderful breakfast and get to know this community, what's the point?

We all live in these moments between, so why shouldn't movies?

Prisoner of Shark Island (1936)

Cinema is in the present tense.
Something is coming together here. "John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford," declared Orson Welles. He continued: "With Ford at his best, you feel that the movie has lived and breathed in a real world."

Of John Ford's non-documentary sound-era work, all but a handful of films, most deliberately un-anchored like The Fugitive, are period pictures. These reach back as subtly as the short hop The Grapes of Wrath takes from 1940 to the Great Depression (an indistinct line which I calculate as about 4 years) to the 350 year gulf between film and subject Mary of Scotland. Most are set about 60-100 years prior, in the era of Western expansion and the Civil War.

Trolling around the IMDb and Amazon reviews, I've seen Ford's stuff dismissed because it's historically inaccurate. This misses the point so much it practically becomes the point. History isn't history for Ford, it's not even really legends - it's the gentle, ordinary day-to-day rhythms that define us.

The Horse Soldiers (1955)

Recently I posted an excerpt from Leland Poaguem's "That Past, This Present: Historicizing John Ford, 1939" which studied Ford's ability to turn history into an "eternal present." I love the double meaning of this phrase. The past is deeply alive in Ford's work because the past is a present - it is an event which occurs before us as we revel not in the currents of history (as we do Eisenstein, who himself volunteered Battleship Potemkin and Young Mr. Lincoln as a valuable pair), but the silly excitement of a new barber's chair or a new church unspooling itself over the desert.

But the past is also a present as in a gift. For example, there's a wonderful moment in Young Mr. Lincoln in which soldiers of the Revolutionary War march past Lincoln, Stephen Douglas, and Mary Todd. History meets history then, the past interacting with the past, in a film which hinges entirely on the dramatic irony of the viewer knowing the future. Past and future tense blur together into one long present, a direct and traversable story of the nation as the story simply of people and the little things they do. “Your forefathers rest their honor in your keeping," we are told in The Black Watch, as we are not shut out of history but stewards to and an essential element of it.

My Darling Clementine (1946)

This isn't just a way to look at films set in history, though. This concept of film as something occurring instead of something occurred is not only the Achille's heel of a stodgy death march like Revolutionary Road, which has all the vivacity of a daguerreotype, but of the non-historical yet totally identical death march American Beauty. Welles is right - films must live and breathe. Contrary to popular opinion, the worst films are not the spectacular crash-and-burns like Plan 9 from Outer Space, they're the everyday dull quota-fillers and Oscar-grabs clogging up the screen. Passionless films like Pirate Radio or Fanboys, too afraid to succeed or fail on their own terms.

Cinema cannot be history, it cannot be paperwork. Cinema is alive.