Adventures in Netflix #5-Gabriel Ricard
Adventures in Netflix #5
By Gabriel Ricard
Editors Note-The following opening rant was written in the summer of 2007 but was never published. It’s being kept in because the author spent entirely too much time writing it. The author is also aware that this obituary of sorts seems a little odd to insist on publishing, while saying virtually nothing about the recent death of actor Heath Ledger. And to that end, he promises to go into his thoughts on that with next month’s column. Granted, it’ll be a good month late. But with a little luck, no one will notice.
As you may or may not know, Ingmar Bergman passed away recently at the age of eighty-nine. I have to admit that as much as I’m aware of his career, his work, and the incredible mark he left on cinema, my actual intake of his films has not run through his entire filmography. Call it one of those of things I’ve been planning to get around to. Because it’s nothing against him. The films I have seen stand as some of the best I’ve ever been exposed to. It’s just something I haven’t made my way into just yet. But again, I have seen a few. And I think with a director as remarkable as Bergman, I think that entitles me to speak as highly of his work as someone who’s seen it all. Woody Allen and other iconic filmmakers have repeatedly cited him as a major source of inspiration and influence. That doesn’t surprise me at all. I think I can tell, pretty confidently, about his remarkable ability to move from the bleakest nightmare to the most absurd comedy, all the while never making it anything less than a visual dreamscape that represented everything film was capable of. For example, I don’t think anyone who’s seen The Seventh Seal is ever going to forget the image of Max Von Sydow’s war-weary knight locked in a game of chess with Death itself. His eyes fixed on the board, the moment itself and its inevitable conclusion. All the while, Death showing nothing but a thin, knowing smile. I don’t think a scene like that can be anything but memorable, a classic shot we remember when we remember classic moments in film.
Speaking of Max Von Sydow, who worked with Bergman on a number of films and plays, and his knight (Antonius Block) from The Seventh Seal, I think I can pretty accurately talk about Bergman’s ability to create characters who accurately represented the cosmic playing field Bergman’s films crafted and existed on. Bergman got his start in the theater, and that mind set translates obviously into his films. In his films, every character had an important part to play. There was nothing in the way of wasted motion. No one was there just to be there. As a writer myself, I can only hope to one day be capable of creating the kind of characters he did. Immortals who could face the world we live in, with all its horror and beauty and the way it forever runs side-by-side.
And that’s one more thing about Bergman I’d like to mention. The hope of any good director, especially one who doubles as screenwriter, is for people to feel the same way about the material as they do. They’re sharing with us an image of the world, of the things and people that fascinate them, drive their passion to work in the first place, and the idea is that we at least give it a shot. Whether the intention is to simply entertain, terrify, stir us into a delightful rage, create some public debate and get us thinking about things we usually don’t give a lot of thought to, or just show us a moment as they see it in their mind’s eye, with the end result being left up to what we take from it. But it’s that passion and love of the medium that’s the most important, to me. Many of the films I love the most are the ones where I can watch them and get a sense of how much the director loved the material, how much it truly meant to them to share that love with anyone who might stop long enough to give up a moment of their time.
To that end, I think I can safely say that very few filmmakers loved the medium as much as Ingmar Bergman did. Very few directors are as committed to their visions, their obsessions and their loves as he was in his peak years. And fewer still were as committed as he seemed to be to the idea of tapping into film as a means of art as important as any piece of literature or painting, of pushing the medium to its fullest creative potential. And it is on that note that I can easily recommend films like The Seventh Seal, The Virgin Spring, The Magic Flute, Cries and Whispers, Scenes from a Marriage. Namely, the ones I’ve seen. But by the same token, I also feel like I can pretty safely reccomend everything else he’s done. His work just kind of brings out that sort of confidence in me. To many, he was the ultimate foreign film director, one of the fresh alternatives to the stale machinations of Hollywood in the 50’s and 60’s. He still holds a place in that regard today, though that can be a turn-off to some. Pretentious is a word that sometimes gets thrown around in conjunction to his name. Is it deserved? Possibly. But that really only depends on how you look at it. If you’re new to Bergman’s work, don’t step into it as a potential scholar, looking for subtext and hidden meaning in the words and images. If you want, there’s time for that later. Instead, approach Bergman as you already are. Someone who just loves film and wants to see some of the best in that field.
In that regard, you can’t possibly go wrong.
Letters From Iwo Jima (2006)
Directed by: Clint Eastwood
Starring: Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Shido Nakamura
**** out of ****
Here’s the thing: I’m a huge Clint Eastwood fan. As an actor, he’s just one of those guys that I can always watch and enjoy immensely on even the slowest rainy day. I’ve seen all five Dirty Harry repeatedly; I’ve seen such western classics as The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly and Fistful of Dollars and count them amongst my all-time favorites. Hell, I’ve even seen Any Which Way You Can and Any Which Way But Loose. As a presence, I like having the guy around. We don’t expect a lot of acting talent out of our movie stars, but I like to think Mr. Eastwood has been one of the exceptions to the rule for almost forty years. So, obviously, I like the guy’s work as an actor. As a director though, it gets a little trickier. Mostly, it’s been hit or miss. I loved Million Dollar Baby, but I didn’t care for Midnight in The Garden of Good and Evil. I thought Unforgiven was a powerful final word from Eastwood on the genre. But I also think Mystic River, save for Tim Robbins performance, was a giant piece of crap.
So, when it came down the wire that Eastwood was going to do two World War II movies, one from the Japanese side and one from the American side, I was somewhere between mild interest and flat-out indifference. It might be good, it might be crap, I thought. I didn’t get terribly excited about it, even when overwhelmingly positive reviews poured in for Flags of Our Fathers and notices still better than that came in for Letters from Iwo Jima. I knew I’d get around to them eventually. I just wasn’t in a big hurry. And when both films were finally available on DVD, I decided to start out with Letters, hearing that it was the better of the two. Given that hit-or-miss thing I mentioned before, I wasn’t sure what to expect from Eastwood. The critics loved this thing, but they also loved Mystic River. So, I sat down, expectations minimal, thinking I had a decent chance of seeing a good movie, but knowing it could also go in the other direction just as easily, given Eastwood’s penchant for overdoing the drama. To say that I was pleasantly surprised would be a gross understatement. A better way to put it would be to say that with Letters from Iwo Jima, I am more convinced than I ever could’ve been before that Eastwood’s reputation as a filmmaker will one day hold a place of immortality alongside some of the characters he’s portrayed through the years.
And whether or not Eastwood depicts the WWII battle between American and Japan on the small island of Iwo Jima with a hundred percent true-to-life is almost irrelevant. It very nearly doesn’t matter at all, although I haven’t heard a lot of arguments against the film’s historical accuracy. What’s important here is that this is just a flat-out amazing piece of filmmaking. Eastwood’s take on the Japanese side of this infamous battle is one of the most unique projects I’ve ever seen from a mainstream American filmmaker. I was curious to see how Eastwood would do with what is essentially a Japanese film, given my own particular love of Japanese cinema. Although the film is very much in his style, it still manages to have some of the sensibilities and approaches that many Japanese films employ. This very much evident in the performances, which gives the film the strength to run alongside the beautiful cinematography and flawless pacing. Ken Watanabe, the sole saving grace of The Last Samurai and one of the best foreign actors working today, is brilliant and compelling as the general who knows that the Japanese’s chances of winning are in the range of slim to none, and yet moves forward with every intention of somehow coming out the victor anyway. One of the things he’s great at is acting without saying a word. Just looking at things like his eyes or the way he moves his hands gives as good an indication of what his character is thinking and feeling as any words could hope to be. He has once again proven why he’s become a fairly in-demand character actor for a number of American films. I sincerely hope to continue seeing him around. The same goes for Kazunari Ninomiya, who nearly steals the whole movie away as Saigo, the baker separated from his wife and unborn son to fight in the war against The Allied Forces. Instead of being just another solider with a sad story to tell, and believe me, in this film, there’s several of those, Ninomiya, a pop star in Japan, captures the confusion of remaining loyal to both his country and cause and his own feelings with a quiet intensity that’s impossible to ignore. Between him and Watanabe, you’ve got two performances that even under the worst circumstances could hold this whole show together. But thankfully, we don’t have to look at it like that.
There is very little about this film that doesn’t work. With Watanabe, Ninomiya, visuals that deftly hold up the balance between beautiful and horrible, and an overall approach that manages to avoid the war-movie pitfall of turning into a blood and guts spectacle with little remaining in the way of depth, Eastwood has the crowning achievement of his directing career. Nearly eighty, we have to believe that there are only so many more films he’s going to bring us. And if he never makes another film, he can be secure in the knowledge that he ended his directorial career with a movie that accomplishes as much as Letters From Iwo Jima does. Hopefully, we will in fact get a couple more movies out of the guy. He’s one of the best directors working today, with a talent an attention to humanity and detail woefully lacking in many of his peers. Hollywood could use a few more like him, and I personally hope to see something else. If nothing else, just to see if he can top this monumental achievement.
Factotum (2006)
Directed by: Bent Hamer
Starring: Matt Dillon, Lilli Taylor, Marisa Tomei
** out of ****
As a long-time fan of Bukowski’s brutal, ugly take on the down-and-out loser at the edge of Desperation Town, I viewed Factotum with the kind of suspicion that you usually reserve for any adaptation of a favorite book. I couldn’t picture Matt Dillon in the role of Bukowski’s thinly disguised perennial outcast Henry Chinaski. The only thing I could ever recall hearing about director Bent Hamer was that he was a director of pretentious European films. And even worse, I found that the film was going to take place in the current age, effectively stripping away the search-for-a-place-to-belong vibe the book had, as its story starts out towards the end of WWII and ends at some point in the early 50’s. I didn’t see much hope in getting a good film out of this essential book. But when the end credits rolled, I had to admit that it was slightly better than my expectations. Not much, but more than I was guessing.
The first thing that surprised me was Dillon’s performance as Chinaski. Dillon is one of those actors’ who’s managing to get better as he gets older. Maybe, it’s the type of roles he has to take at that stage of his career. I’m not sure. What I do know is that over the last couple of years, I’ve come to appreciate his acting much more than I ever have at any other time. And here, I think I can honestly list this as some of the best work of his career. To know Chinaski is to know anything about Bukowski himself, since they’re pretty much one and the same. If you’ve seen the documentary Born Into This, you have a pretty good idea of what Bukowski is like. How he moves, how he reacts to things, how he gets by. If you know that, and you see Dillon in Factotum, you see an actor capturing Bukowski and his literary character perfectly. To play the character is to take part in a very difficult exercise in restraint. There has to be something relentlessly weary, sick of the world at large when it comes to a character whose chief concern is making just enough money to have a roof over his head, a pack of cigarettes in his pocket, and a bottle of wine in his right hand. You might not think Dillon capable of pulling all this off, but Factotum proves that he’s good for a surprise or two. It showcases, if nothing else, that Dillon is capable of much more than he sometimes gets credit for. As sedate as the character can be at times, one thing you can never call him is boring. And that’s the key to this movie. Because once you get past Dillon’s great work and the strong supporting performances like Lilli Taylor as his on-again/off-again girlfriend and Marisa Tomei as a quick fling between bars, the rest of the movie sadly falls short.
The set design and locations are good, as is the very appropriate, very nicely done soundtrack, and Hamer certainly seems to know how to set up a shot. But you have to wonder if he understood the material. Especially when several crucial scenes from the book are nowhere to be found in the film. Again, you’d probably have to have read the book for this to actually bother you. But even taken as a film and nothing else, there is a sense at the end of it that they rushed through scenes that demanded a moment’s time and lingered on the parts that could’ve moved a lot faster. The pacing is all over the place in this, and for a movie like this, where the story itself and how it moves is all the more important, a flaw like this can be severely damaging. It doesn’t kill the movie, but it definitely holds back its potential. Which is too bad, since it’s easy to see that Hamer has a clear fascination and appreciation of Bukowski’s work. You do get a sense that he wanted to do the story justice. But in the end, he’s a filmmaker and the filmmaker that can pull of a book to movie translation is a rare one indeed. Very few can truly balance the aesthetics of a film and a book, bringing the two together enough to make as many people from both camps as happy as possible. Hamer tries, but in the end, he falls short of the mark. Taken only as a film and nothing more, you might enjoy it. But if you’re like me, you won’t find much beyond the cast and the dives they seem condemned to haunt forever.
Cowboy Bebop (Series) (1997)
Directed by: Shinichiro Watanabe
Starring: Steven Jay Blum, Beau Billingslea, Wendee Lee
**** out of ****
Ten years down the line since this twenty-six episode series hit the scene, and while technological advancements in animation have forced many classic anime series to sadly show their age, this is one series that looks and feels as fresh as it did in 1997. One of the great examples of the potential Anime has as a means for storytelling, character development, and a visual approach unique unto itself, Cowboy Bebop is essential viewing for not only Anime fans but just anyone looking for some good entertainment to sink their teeth into. This is as good as anything you could find on network television these days. Or even in most films.
Under director Shinichiro Watanabe, who’s also given us Samurai Champloo and portions of The Animatrix, Cowboy Bebop has everything you could ever want under the pretense of something that’s as simple as just being really freaking cool. Interesting, immensely likable characters is just the start of it. The series also runs well on its fast-paced, compelling stories, which center around a team of mismatched outcast bounty hunters in the not-too-far-off future. And then, of course, there’s the endlessly wonderful soundtrack provided by one of the greatest session bands of all-time (known as Yoko Kanno & The Seatbelts). The fact that it also has a sense of style that’s tough to find an equal to under any circumstances is just, to use a cliché, icing on the cake. This is my personal favorite in all of Anime, and a must-watch for anyone who wants to understand what all the fuss is about as far as Anime is concerned. Like some of my other Anime picks in this column, this is even worth a look for anyone who knows without any doubt in their mind that Anime is the bane of all things decently produced and well dubbed in this world.
To those types, Cowboy Bebop will be one hell of a wonderful surprise. To the rest going into it with an open-mind, I really have to admit I envy you getting to be in the position of seeing this for the first time. It’s one of those rarities of a classic that doesn’t feel the least bit old. If you haven’t gotten a hold of this yet, you’re truly missing out.
Days of Wine and Roses (1962)
Directed by: Blake Edwards
Starring: Jack Lemmon, Lee Remick, Charles Bickford
*** ½ out of ****
Although he was primarily known for his comedic work on the great Pink Panther series and other films such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Switch, writer/director Blake Edwards was just as adept at brutal drama. Days of Wine and Roses was and remains an excellent case in point. Based on a teleplay by the prolific television writer J.P. Miller, the film manages to remain as striking as it did some forty-five years ago. Credit for that has to go to the script and story itself. Although it’s about a public-relations guy (Lemmon, in one of the great dramatic roles of his career) whose life and career are destroyed by a long, slow battle against alcoholism, a battle that eventually extends to his wife (Remick, who’s also fantastic), you really could make the addiction itself anything.
Because the strength of the story isn’t from alcoholism specifically. It’s from the nature of addiction itself, the destructive effect it can have on anyone from any walk of life. More than that, it’s a story of human life at its lowest point of despair and self-destruction. And really, if the cast and script come together, it can be about nearly any drug of choice you want. Miller and Edwards seem to understand this perfectly, and as a result, we’ve got Edwards attention to black comedy and the ability to make every moment feel like it could go in a thousand possible directions, and we’ve got Miller’s ability to make the endurance of a human being under trying circumstances transcend any details that usually bog up a story like his. Add in Edwards ability to keep the movie going at the perfect pace from start to finish, moving things along when they need to go and holding us in place when we must witness something well past our normal level of comfort (the greenhouse scene remains as powerful today as it did nearly fifty years ago), and the two make for a perfect combination.
You’d almost think the screenwriting and directing duties were handled by one single person. But as important as the script and direction are, in the end, it’s almost nothing without a great cast to support it. Both Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick scored Oscar nominations for their respective portrayals as the husband and wife whose lives are soon pushed to the brink of oblivion by a disease that starts as simply as Lemmon’s character having a shot here and a cocktail there at this party or that one, and it starts as simply as Remick’s character taking up the habit because she’s tired of not being able to relate to her husband and his steadily worsening problem. Their transition from casual to addict is powerful stuff indeed. Lemmon would play the once great on their last legs sort of thing again throughout his career, but this is one of his best moments in all his long, brilliant career. And Remick, who is probably best known as the mother from the original Omen film, flawlessly maintains a certain degree of sympathy for her character even during her absolute worst moments. Even today, I can’t think of many actors who could essentially perform in perfect sync to the approach Blake Edwards took to the story. The way he seamlessly moves from humorous to wretched in the blink of an eye, while all the while keeping a thousand possibilities up in the air. That’s the best way to describe Remick and Lemmon’s poignant, harrowing performances, and it’s certainly a high compliment.
Add in the memorable title track by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, and you’ve got one of the great classics of old-school Hollywood cinema. As much back then as now, the great movie-making empire rarely keeps its human drama free of glitz and pretentious nonsense. This was and still is one of the few times they got it right. And really, credit for that goes to Edwards, Miller, Lemmon and Remick rather than any studio. All four had long, terrific careers, and this remains a highlight for all of them.
Spirit of The Beehive (1973)
Directed by: Victor Erice
Starring: Ana Torrent, Isabel Telleria, Fernando Fernan Gomez
**** out of ****
Widely regarded as not only one of the best Spanish films of the 1970’s, but one of the greatest Spanish films of all time, Spirit of The Beehive finally got its due in a beautiful two-disc Criterion release in late-2006. You almost wonder why it took them so long to give this beautiful film its long overdue moment to break through to an audience who has likely never even heard of it before. Although the movie moves around its characters a little, the bulk of the story focuses on six-year-old Ana, who lives in a small Castilian village during Spain’s war-torn 1940’s. With her older sister, Ana attends a screening of James Whales classic Frankenstein. The film’s result on Ana’s mind is immediate, almost hauntingly so. And as Ana’s family and life moves around and very often past her, the little girl is increasingly drawn into a world of fantasy, led by her own vision of Frankenstein’s Monster. At a hundred minutes, it sounds like a painfully slow-paced journey into the heart and mind of a child. And at times, it is. This is not a movie for people who like things to move and keep moving. If the word leisurely doesn’t fit into your idea of a good film, this may be a tough one for you to sit through. But if the word does come up in your personal definition, or if you’re willing to take a chance, you really are in for one of the great films of Spanish cinema. Guerellimo Del Toro has repeatedly listed Spirit of The Beehive as one of his personal favorites. After watching his smash hit Pan’s Labyrinth, which clearly drew a lot of its inspiration from this film, it’s easy to see why.
The movie centers on a horror film, and even includes certain moments you might expect out of the genre, but in the end, it’s anything but. Much more than any simple genre, the movie is a story of innocence, the lengths a child will go to for escapism from the casual horror and confusion of day-to-day life in the name of subconsciously maintaining the innocence that keeps one from having to truly face these things. You watch a child like Ana and you can already imagine the kind of adult she will grow up to be. There’s a good chance that some of us weren’t much different in our own childhoods. Director Victor Erice seems to have an insight into this realization that I’ve rarely seen in other films that focus on children and what’s going on in their neck of the woods. Ana is a distinctive character, with her own clear-cut personality, but there’s somehow a certain amount of ambiguity left over for us to put something of ourselves into her, as her life increasingly relies on fantasy to hold on. I think I could count on one hand the number of films that achieve this feat. Perhaps, the fact that it’s so well done comes from the way Erice also drops us into the lives of some of the people in Ana’s life and gives us a rounded perspective of the world of the film. Her father (the great Spanish character actor Fernando Fernan Gomez), in particular, who matches Ana’s innocence with the hard-won experience of a man who has seen the best and worst of life at the expense of that same innocence Ana maintains. The same innocence most of us will inevitably surrender as we stumble on into adulthood.
Erice, who set the film in 1940, the year of his birth, a good few years into General Franco’s forty-year grip on Spain, was clearly in a position similar to Fernando’s. He had seen the best and worst of his country, and his film reflects the mind of a man who does not want future generations to forget. While at the same time, he also remembers what it was like to be a child during these times. He remembers how appealing and easy it was to escape into the workings of his own mind. How it was nearly impossible to maintain that as age pushed things along. That’s what the story is about. And against the beautiful cinematography of Luis Cuadrado, whose career would later by cut down by blindness, it’s a story that has almost never been better told than it is here. The cast is extraordinary, especially young Ana Torrent in the main role and Isabel Telleria as her older sister, and lends essential weight to Erice’s power as a storyteller and filmmaker. The end result is a film well worthy of bearing the Criterion stamp.
Erice has made only three full-length films in his career. But for the man who brings us this movie, three could just as easily be three thousand. With a movie like Spirit of The Beehive, it really doesn’t matter how many films he has made. This is the one he will be remembered for. And rightfully so.
And that’s gonna do it for this latest and potentially (emphasis on potentially) greatest edition of Adventures in Netflix. I apologize for running on a little longer than usual, and promise to keep things a little more brisk when I come around again.
So, take care of yourselves, drop me a line at magazine@feeltheword.net to tell me how much I suck, and join me next time, as I promise to reveal why John Gibson is going to Hell and Heath Ledger isn’t.
Copyright C. 2008 Gabriel Ricard
February 6th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
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