Author: arnab

looking for shylock

last night: william shakespeare’s “the merchant of venice”

this is a handsome production which will likely finally be remembered only for pacino’s against all odds, restrained performance as shylock, giving us a hint of what might have become of him had scarface never happened. the film, of course, has a higher ambition than that and that is to take the play and make it about anti-semitism rather than a play shot through with the racism of its time from which only its poetry somewhat ambivalently rescues it (which is how i read it when i read it last). this sort of shift of emphasis in production is, i suppose, par for the course in the theater and i don’t really have a huge objection to it. but there are specific things that happen at the very beginning of the film that are not in the play, and which, while not huge, make me question if this is william shakespeare’s the merchant of venice. (and there are larger problems too–of which, more below.)
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noir (film, not drakkar)

watched lang’s “the big heat” last night and was struck by a couple of things:

(spoiler warnings apply for those who haven’t seen it)

1) michael’s right about the gloria grahame/annette bening thing

2) this is such a tautly shot/narrated film–the camera literally leads the viewer through it; lang’s use of slow zoom-ins and outs and pans works almost like a manual for the beginning filmmaker. i think mike mentioned earlier a connection between kubrick and lang–can see it in this film as well.

3) i am not as knowledgeable about noir’s generic narrative elements as some of you doubtless are but this film’s juxtaposition of corrupt public life with the possibility of an autonomous private life (which is then destroyed utterly by the public) seems to make it darker than most.

Continue reading noir (film, not drakkar)

kingdom of heaven

we watched this last night. i went in expecting to dislike it–the previews and reviews mostly made it seem like a whitewashing of the crusades and i thought its politics would offend me. to my surprise i quite liked it. in a way this is scott’s “anti-gladiator”. that film was far more stirring cinematically and narratively–i enjoyed it tremendously in the theater–and it wasn’t until i thought about it later that i realized that i found its “strength and honor” politics quite repellent. “kingdom of heaven” on the other hand doesn’t provide the visceral jolts or narrative releases that “gladiator” does–there’s no great revenge or other motivational plot and the action sequences are often confusing (as in “blackhawk down” i had trouble keeping track of people during the fighting)–but it is a more thoughtful film.

(some spoilers ahead)
Continue reading kingdom of heaven

for me to poop on

last night i watched “national treasure”. why, i don’t know. i have nothing to say about this film except that it may be time to put nicholas cage out of his misery.

last week: “blade: trinity”. entertaining enough i suppose, but really worth seeing only to see parker posey play the role she was born for: an anorexic vampire with a bad attitude. there’s a super vampire in this movie who is apparently unbeatable in battle but who runs away from blade at their first meeting, even though he’s supposed to kill him. it isn’t clear either why super vampire, the first vampire even, does what anorexic vampire with a bad attitude wants him to do. there is, however, an amusing scene in which said super vampire goes into a store replete with vampire kitsch, including a vampire dildo. i really hope they lay this franchise to rest with this film–the second and third ones have made the original seem like a masterpiece. or perhaps there will eventually be a crossover between the “blade” and “underworld” universe. maybe even in space.

michael, i’m guessing you’re the only other person here likely to have seen either of these–am i missing anything of note?

closer

we watched this some weeks ago. i didn’t blog about it then because i thought sunhee–who liked it more than i did–would; but she didn’t. then yesterday we were at a party where a number of people raved about it. i heard what they had to say but remained largely unmoved. has anyone else seen it? it is about four (beautiful) people in london who fall in and out of love over the course of a few years. i found parts of it funny and touching and it is a stylish production (in the way that mike nichols’ films are) but other than clive owen’s performance there’s nothing here i would recommend to anyone. beautiful people fall in love, are shallow, cheat, swap partners, get back together, have control issues and deal with them differently. on the whole i had a hard time caring about any of them or any of it. in many ways it goes over a lot of the same ground as “we don’t live here anymore” (did we discuss that here?) but i preferred that film (which i didn’t like that much either).

someone want to convince me otherwise?

fritz lang–“m”, “metropolis”

watched the criterion disks of these in the last week. i’d seen “m” a long, long time ago and if you can believe it i’d never seen “metropolis”.

“m” first: i can’t remember what my original response to “m” had been–i wasn’t a very engaged film-viewer then and in any case was probably too aware of its status to register a genuine response. watching it now i was struck by all the things that make it such a landmark film–the use of voiceover, the use of music as narrative device, the camera-angles, all the noir devices that would soon become mainstays of the genre etc. etc.. but i was most struck by the fact that exactly because it has been such an influential film these things don’t really have an effect anymore (not on me anyway). now that every crap film and television show uses all these devices it seems, to me anyway, hard to register “m” as anything but a historically significant film–it didn’t surprise me the way “the testament of dr. mabuse” did. i’m interested to hear your takes on this both in relation to this specific film and in general. (by the way, i can see what welles took from lang for “citizen kane”, but again i have to say that while i recognize “kane” as a historically significant film the welles that remains fresh for me is “touch of evil”.)
Continue reading fritz lang–“m”, “metropolis”

the incredibles

watched last night. doubtless some threshold in animation has been crossed but after the “sin city” backlash i am hesitant to praise technical innovation and cartoony violence (even if it is cool when the dad rams two hover-craft with men in them together, causing them to explode, in front of his adoring kids). the underlying premise seems to be to attack the cult of mediocrity/self-esteem pandemic in the u.s: the superheroes have to pretend not to have powers and not show that they are really special, because now everyone is special (which, one of them grumbles, means “no one is”). the problem with the film is that it hasn’t really thought this through in the social context it is placing its characters in: the everyday. the superheroes have done nothing to earn their powers, which are entirely physical. against these lucky freaks is a young man who is spurned by the naturally powerful and responds by applying his brain and becoming a technological whiz. the jocks vs. the nerd–but it turns out we’re supposed to root for the jocks. perhaps it is my long conditioning as a nerd that makes this a problem for me

star wars

so, in preparation for the upcoming instalment of in the “star wars” saga i’ve been re-viewing all its predecessors. i have come to the conclusion that it is only nostalgia that makes us think that the original trilogy was very much better than “the phantom menace” or “attack of the clones”. yes, “the empire strikes back” is better than the others but only in the way that stepping on a dog turd is better than falling into a giant vat of cow feces. all of them have lame stories, all of them have excruciatingly crap acting–though a special place must be given to “the return of the jedi”, which must be up there on the “bad acting in a high-profile movie” scale; an edited montage of harrison ford’s performance, in particular, should be placed in a time capsule.

i am forced to agree with roger ebert in his review of “the phantom menace”, where he notes that the only thing any of these movies have going for them is visual effects and imagination and that in that sense there is no difference between “the phantom menace” and anything in the first trilogy (though he does note in his review of “clones” that the dialog in that movie is particularly bad and drags everything else down). nevertheless, i’ll be in line on the first day to see the final piece of tedious shit in this series.

upgrade

all,

partly to combat the growing “comment spam” problem i will be upgrading the version of wordpress our blog runs on (i just deleted about 50 ads for cialis etc.). the look of the site and some functionality may therefore suddenly change–if this happens and you have trouble just email me. no content will (hopefully) be lost.

arnab

hotel rwanda

one of the more effective sequences in hotel rwanda involves an apparently real radio broadcast: a number of rwandans taking shelter in the hotel listen to an u.s state department spokeswoman dance around the word “genocide”–she will say that “acts of genocide” have happened but she won’t use the word itself as a descriptor. the film to some extent is negotiating a similar problem in its own medium. it says “genocide” loud and clear but it shies away from actually showing too much of it. we get a few scenes–never close-up–of people being hacked to death and shot, we see the bodies of the recently killed but the enormity of what happened–close to a million dead, a staggering refugee crisis–largely eludes us until a screen-caption before the end credits tells us about it.

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