Godard and the Oscars

I was surprised and delighted to learn yesterday of the inclusion of two cinematic icons will be presented with the Oscar's Lifetime Achievement Awards. The first is Eli Wallach, one of the best character actors around. He made a career of never stopping to work, Even in his 90s, he's still going strong. Roman Polanski cast him in his "Ghost Writer" earlier this year, it's one scene, but one of the most memorable in the film. Certainly he deserved at least a nomination or even the Oscar for his performance as Tuco in "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly", stealing scenes from Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef.

Perhaps the most shocking announcement came when the Academy announced they were going to present master of the New Wave Jean-Luc Godard with an award this year. Being just a recent convert to Godard's work, I was tickled pink to hear the news, however I started think of the actual reality of Godard showing up at the event.

Godard has been in seclusion for quite sometime, even missing his press conference at Cannes for his latest film "Socialism" which premiered this year; Godard himself has been known to be critical of Hollywood as a whole throughout his career.

Still part of me hopes that the Godard who caused a ruckus in the 60s with his partner in crime Francois Truffaut particularly when the two of them shut down Cannes. It would be great to see that happen at the Oscars (even though this event like last year's will not be televised.) I'm hoping Godard will raise the stakes and perhaps provoke thought at the Oscars this year, but I'm guessing he will stay away from it all. Despite all that, it's nice to see the Academy recognizing such a radical outsider and innovator to the party, here's hoping the Oscars themselves will be full of as many deserving members as these gentlemen.

Taking a Siesta

I haven't written in my blog for the past couple of weeks, I decided to take a bit of a holiday from writing. I've been able to read a few books and watch a few movies I haven't seen before, also there have been a few personal issues that had to be dealt with in the course of this month so for anyone who has missed me I apologize, but I promise to be back at writing right away.

Movie Review: Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World

Finally, in a summer where there seems to be nothing new, nothing original, nothing exciting, a film comes along that reminds you of the word: entertainment.

I'm hoping "Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World" will find the audience it deserves, although something tells me the studio is trying to bury it not knowing how it can be marketed properly. What it did, was get me out of my stupor, I was watching a film in the theatre, and I was aware that I was, it wasn't just going through the motions waiting for the credits to role by, it was being invested in the film all the way through.

"Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World" is based on a series of comic books about a Toronto kid who plays bass for a band. When we meet Scott (Michael Cera), he doesn't seem like the type of guy you would root for. He's a bit of a lady killer, he's currently dating a new girlfriend after a strand of new girlfriends, this one is a cute 17 year old high school student (Ellen Wong) who has the biggest crush on him. Scott's casual dating is a compensation after being dumped a year before by a serious girlfriend who went off to make it big in her own band.

Things change when Scott runs into Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) who he falls for hard. Scott and Ramona begin dating, at the start without him breaking it off with his high school fling. Things get more complicated however, when Scott finds out Ramona has seven evil exes (That's right exes, not ex-boyfriends, she went through a lesbian phase) who are bent on fighting him to the death.

Did I mention that Scott Pilgrim's life is drawn up as if in a video game, where his friends are given stats, he gets Canadian coins when he defeats his enemies, and he can actually get extra lives when he can? This is part of the charm of "Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World", which is really about him learning life lessons.

The film was directed by Edgar Wright, that wonderkind imported from England who is mostly known for his work with Simon Pegg on "Shaun of the Dead" and the more hilarious and underrated "Hot Fuzz". Wright fuses together both comic book and video game elements to create a fun, kinetic world that is fully satisfying.

"Scott Pilgrim" isn't just the most original mainstream film of the year, but it's also the funniest. The cast which includes Cera, Winstead Kieren Culkin, Mark Webber, Brandon Routh, Anna Kendrick, Johnny Simmons, Chris Evans, and Jason Swartzman, go with the spirit of the movie all the way, and deliver great deadpan performances all suited for the film. Cera is often criticized for playing the same role over and over again, however in this he proves just how proficient a comic actor he can be. It's a marvel at what little he actually does, but how much neurosis he can give off, he's like a fusion of Buster Keaton and Woody Allen.

This summer has been lackluster to say the least, in fact I would say it has been the worst summer in a long time. "Scott Pilgrim" comes off as a breath of fresh air, it's pop art at the highest, and even though it's a different genre, it shares a lot with last summer's most original and exciting movie "Inglorious Basterds". It's a film made by a man who wants to give a film experience to the audience, someone who likes making movies and uses the medium to its full advantage. When I watch a movie by people who love movies it inspires me.

R.I.P. Patricia Neal

Sad to learn that Patricial Neal died. I first saw Neal in "Breakfast at Tiffany's" in the supporting role of George Peppard's mistress. In science fiction, she was immortalized starring in "The Day the Earth Stood Still", which is one of the great sci-fi films of all time.

She had a prominant role in Elia Kazan's "A Face in the Crowd", which is still a film I have yet to see, but I suppose she is best remembered for her Oscar winning role opposite Paul Newman in "Hud". If you have never seen "Hud" I encourage you to do so, it is one of the best "acting" films around.

In the film Neal plays the housekeeper of a Texas rancher (Melvyn Douglas), who has to fight off the violent affections of his selfish no-account son (Newman who may have never been better himself). "Hud" stands today as a classic.

Neal was also one of the great beauties of the silver screen as well, you could fall in love with her sweet husky voice, and her sultry smile, she was one of a kind and she will be missed.

Tokyo Twilight

One of the reasons Yasujiro Ozu is deemed such an esteemed director is his universal take on things. His films were considered “too Japanese” for western audiences when they were first made, it wasn’t till after his death in the nineteen seventies, that American audiences saw his work for the first time. It didn’t matter that his characters were Japanese, they dealt with everyday issues that were important to us, and he remains important because we constantly familiarize ourselves with his world.

One such film of Ozu’s that works with me on this level is “Tokyo Twilight”; though it isn’t one of his best known films or most revered, when I first saw it, I was struck by how much the characters and the situations seemed so familiar to me.

The story concerns a constant thread in Ozu’s films: The disillusionment of the family. When the film opens, it appears that this particular family is already disillusioned, it deals with a patriarch (Chisu Ryu), with two grown up daughters Takako (Setsuko Hara) and Akiko (Ineko Arima). We learn that the girls’ mother had abandoned the family earlier and left with a man who worked for the father, causing him to raise his daughters alone. The story much involves these girls as grown women and their parallel struggles to find happiness; Takako, the oldest has left her abusive husband and has taken her child to live with her father. Akiko has found herself with an unwanted pregnancy, and is trying to track down the father who has been avoiding her. One day while Akiko is trying to track down her boyfriend, she meets a woman who she thinks may be her mother; we learn that it is indeed their mother who has married another man after the one she ran off with had died. She is now an old repentant woman looking for forgiveness, and trying to be a part of their lives.

“Tokyo Twilight” has the elements of an American melodrama, but in the hands of Ozu it remains a subtle sublime work, I was actually shocked to learn that the film was criticized for being too melodramatic, looking at it I can’t imagine why. With this film, Ozu is trying to examine what happens when children are raised without a full family, it’s not what happens to them that I find interesting, it’s the growing resentment of the children, and the bitterness they feel towards their mother. Takako is unable or unwilling to forgive her in the end of the film, which culminates in one of Ozu’s most saddest moments as the mother is waiting at a train station for a daughter who will never come.

Akiko’s circumstances are even more tragic, she is the youngest, and she has taken up with the wrong crowd. She feels unloved by her father who scolds her, but he simply doesn’t know how to communicate with her. Akiko never grew up with a mother figure, and while we see a little bit of maternal instinct in her relationship with her sister, that part of her is never filled. Akiko even questions her own motherhood capabilities when she must decide whether or not to have an abortion.

“Tokyo Twilight” is perhaps Ozu’s darkest film, which doesn’t seem to have a silver lining, however we are left with an image of the father, that leaves it somewhat hopeful, yet Ozu seems to be working on a different level than what he is used to. The world depicted in “Tokyo Twilight” is bleak, usually his films deal with a fully functional family, where the tragedy comes when one of them either goes off to get married or dies, in this film, he’s dealing with a family that struggles to find its footing, it was broken before the movie even started. Ozu is showing us the aftermath of a family that isn’t full, each character is alienated and can’t communicate with the other the way they want.

Like I mentioned before this film speaks to me on a personal level, I feel I’ve seen these scenes played out in real life even though I can’t say for certain, I can believe a family like this exists, and perhaps is even more common than the ones in Ozu’s other more familiar films. Broken families are always a heartache, and Ozu is relentless in showing their bitterness, sadness, and isolation in this film. It isn’t a pretty picture, but because Ozu has such a light humanist touch, he’s able to make it beautiful. I think it has something to do with the fact that he truly loved his characters; we understand what everyone is going through, there isn’t anyone who doesn’t get our empathy.

Ozu was a man who understood human behaviour perhaps better than any other director, and he understood the tragedy in everyday lives, he never had to overdramatize it, he didn’t need to, his films dealt with universal stories of family, love, loss, and loneliness, I don’t thing anyone understood these themes better than Ozu.

8 and a half

I would say one of the trickiest things a person could try to film is the creative process, the work in progress, or when an artist just can’t make up his mind about what his next work should be. Federico Fellini’s “8 and a half” is perhaps the one film that fully creates the world of an artist and his struggle with his own art.

“8 and a half” is a film that is usually one of the first art house films studied by film students, probably along with Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai”, and Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal”. The film came along in the early sixties back when going to art houses was the trendy thing to do. “8 and a half” was exposed to a lot of people; it won the Oscar for best foreign film of 1963, and is probably still considered the most Felliniesque of Fellini’s films.

I first saw the film as a young boy who haunted my local video store every weekend, for me it was the first Fellini film I ever saw, and I discovered him the same time I discovered others like Kurosawa and Truffaut. When I saw the film I was entertained, I didn’t quite understand it, and it was probably the first film I saw that used dreams vs. Reality so liberally. At the end when it got to the circus like procession on an abandoned set, I was at a loss, but I wasn’t bored. I felt perhaps what other people felt after seeing it for the first time, that they were experiencing something new and original, and personal. Maybe I didn’t get the fact that it was personal, nor had anything to do with Fellini, but I was effected by it.

It wasn’t until just recently I saw “8 and a half” again at a film festival earlier this year, this time I was moved by it in a more profound way, and I viewed it as one of the most truthful films about an artist there has ever been.

“8 and a half” concerns the life of a famous film director Guido (touchingly played by Marcello Mastroinni) who is in a creative block. He’s in charge in making an epic science fiction film, only the plot is never explained. His producer is getting impatient with him, his writer criticizes him, and he is flooded by actresses who want to be in his films. The film actually starts with Guido having a nightmare suffocating inside a car being swarmed with other people and vehicles around him. In reality he is swarmed, swarmed by his friends, his colleagues, and people who just want to get a piece of him.

Guido’s love life isn’t all that stable either, he carries on an affair with a married woman who he treats as a tramp (Sandra Milo), but he is still in love with his wife Luisa (Anouk Aimee) an intelligent woman who is finding it hard to live with her philandering husband.

The film goes back and forth from Guido’s imagination, to his reality. He visits nostalgic places of his past sometimes involving women he fantasizes about sleeping with. Perhaps the most vivid image of these women is Saraghina, a prostitute who lived by the sea when Guido was young. She danced the tango for him and his young friends, but the church tells him she is the devil. Guido struggles with his catholic upbringing, which was a running theme in many of Fellini’s films.

Guido seems to move further and further away from his film, he becomes disinterested in it, he seems to be searching for truth, something that is eluding him through the whole film. Guido is suffocated by both his talent and shortcomings as a filmmaker; he doesn’t seem to know where to go from there.

It has been said that Federico Fellini made “8 and a half” when he didn’t know what do to. He had just had his great success with “La Dolce Vita”, a film which would be difficult to top, what was to come next? “8 and a half” seems to come out of desperation, almost as a fever dream, the remarkable thing about it is Fellini was able to put all the pieces together to make a work of art, about working on your art.

The film pulls no punches in making Guido a wonderful man, especially when his bitter wife confronts him, and turns on him, in one of the most truthful moments filmed between a husband and wife. Luisa has just been through an embarrassing sight as she sits through screen tests by Guido of women who are obviously supposed to be her. She berates Guido for only doing this film to pet his own ego, it’s not honest, although Guido meant to be.

The film is very much about the women in Guido’s life, as it is about his art, they are both things that are attainable and not. His love of women culminates with his muse Claudia (Claudia Cardinale) who is both a real and imagined person who he just can’t quite get to; when he finally does, she turns out to be just as real as all the others.

“8 and a half” is a magical film, Fellini was one of those who always had something up his sleeve, he was in love with what film could do and with images that could be perceived as both real and imagined. I’ve only seen a handful of Fellini’s films, but “8 and a half” has had an enduring impact on me, and has affected me the most, every time I see it, I am entranced by its beauty, and moved by its honesty, it’s a majestic work of art.

Sex, Lust, Passion: Jennifer Jones and "Duel in the Sun"

I suppose a boy never forgets his first time, no matter what the experience is, some things are just embedded in your memory. Now this blog isn't about my sexual exploits, if it was I wouldn't have as many entries as I do right now, but I've spoken a lot about what movies can do, yet I've failed to mention what it does quite often, and what it did so well back in the golden age of cinema, not so much now; and that thing is sex.

It's easy to depict sex now in movies, but you know what I don't get in the movies today, there's no mystery, there's no seduction, it's just gotten so easy, we miss the chase of it all.

I'm not being prudish saying that the old movies did sex better than anyone else, it's just the plain truth of it, it was just better. There's more to sex than just naked bodies, I don't think that's what gets men so hot and bothered. I think men like the allure, the female body, the desire most of all, I mean to be honest, the real sex can be down right disappointing.

As a boy I think the movies were a way into this forbidden world, my parents were weary as to what I was watching all the time. They didn't like it when I would watch violent movies or explicitly sexual ones either (although to be honest I got my fair share of both). When it came to classic movies, I don't think my parents were worried, to them classic movies meant wholesomeness, non-violent, non-sexual fantasy worlds, but of course what would the fun be if that was the case?

My parents didn't know how much I was really exposed to, you just had to name any type of Billy Wilder comedy like "Some Like it Hot", or "One, Two, Three", where he uses sex as humour. I would watch Marilyn Monroe movies, and she was the dream girl for everyone, but I suppose because she never took off her clothes it never bothered anyone.

But the one I remember, my first time if you will that is burned in my memory has to come from Jennifer Jones in "Duel in the Sun". I must've been 12 or 13 at the time, I had a hankering for westerns, but nothing really prepared me for this erotic, raunchy epic western.

"Duel in the Sun" is one of the most bizarre movies ever made in old Hollywood, I learned years later by Martin Scorsese that it was actually banned by the catholic church, which was the reason his mom took him to see it at such a young age as well. The film is auspicious to say the least, it's not subtle, it's quite glamorous, and grand, it starts with prelude music, that after has overture music. It was directed by legendary King Vidor who was one of the giants of silent cinema particularly with his revolutionary film "The Crowd", it was written and produced by David O Selznick who was trying to top himself after "Gone with the Wind". It's legendary cast consists of Gregory Peck, Joseph Cotton, Lionel Barrymore, Walter Huston, Harry Carey, and Lilian Gish to name a few.

But at the forefront of this film, which was dubbed "Lust in the Dust" in its initial run is Jennifer Jones. Jones stands like a mirage through the dessert heat, her whole performance is brimming with sexuality, the way she moves her body and tilts her head, you can feel the sweat on her face whenever she's on screen. For a small 12 year old boy, she was a wet dream in full technicolor.

I don't remember much of "Duel in the Sun" other than Jones, whether it was the scene where Gregory Peck bursts in uninvited and kisses her passionately for the first time, or the one where he catches her skinny dipping in a pond, or the one where she's bent over scrubbing the floor, and he sees her and she can no longer with hold her passion for him.

Throughout the film Jones is bathed in beautiful technicolor, Vidor and Selznick seemed to want the same thing when you looked at her. But she was also tough and strong, she made everything she did sexy, even in the bizarre finale where she after being fatally wounded, she crawls to her dying lover.

"Duel in the Sun" plays like a dime store novel of the period, it's all about sex and violence, and does a bad job hiding the fact. All through the film Jones plays a girl who is trying to be good, but just can't help but give into temptation, even at the end, she chooses Peck's ruthless killer over the nicer, and sturdy Joseph Cotton.

The film isn't deep, but it's so enjoyable to watch today, it's over the top melodrama, brimming with sexual heat. I'll always remember it for awakening a certain feeling inside of me I didn't know existed in movies until that time, I became just a little bit more grown up. Every now and then I still think of Jennifer Jones bent over scrubbing those floors and sweat dripping from her face, as for myself I may perspire a bit at the thought as well.