Criterion Critiques w/ Alex DeLarge

What follows is part of a regular series of reviews on the always wonderful, and quite indispensable Criterion Collection, written by our special guest reviewer Alex DeLarge of the Korova Theatre. 

GODZILLA (Ishiro Honda, 1954)

Released on Criterion Blu-ray 01/24/2012; Spine #594

Caveat: This is the original uncut Japanese version. To fully appreciate this film, you must understand it on its own terms; you must put to rest the campy films spawned by this classic. Godzilla is a parable of the atomic age, a monster awakened by science tainted with moral lassitude; a destructive and dire warning that mankind stalks the nightmare’s abyss.

 

The giant Jurassic creature stirs from its millennial slumber because the United States is testing atomic bombs in the Pacific Ocean: this beast the rises from the murky depths and ravages Odo Island before advancing upon mainland Japan…and laying Tokyo to ruin. It is also a metaphor concerning science run amok: Dr. Serizawa fears that his volatile creation the Oxygen Destroyer, though it will kill Godzilla, will be used as a weapon to escalate the arms race and obliterate mankind, he laments “Bombs versus bombs, missiles versus missiles, and now a new superweapon to throw upon us all. As a scientist-no, as a human being-I cannot allow that to happen”.

 

Dr. Yamane (superbly portrayed by Takashi Shimura!) believes that this creature should be captured alive and studied, even at the risk of total catastrophe: knowledge is more important that human life. While the debate rages, so does Godzilla as millions die in the ensuing firestorm of Tokyo, eerily reminiscent of the Allied firebombing of Japan only a few years earlier. When one woman on a train compares this war with her survival at Nagasaki, the chilling catharsis is finally revealed.

 

The film is deftly directed by Ishiro Honda and focuses upon the characters and their moral dilemmas…not a rubber-suited monster amid crushed dioramas. When Godzilla is filmed in medium and long shot, the towering silhouette is reminiscent of a rising mushroom cloud as the cities fiery tendrils rake the darkening sky. The creature’s nightmarish roar is like Munch’s scream, a discordant reverberation as nature fights back to reclaim the world. But science does not fail us: Dr. Serizawa burns his research and utilizes his desperate weapon to kill the Beast and makes the ultimate sacrifice for Japan…and the whole damned human race. He takes his secrets to his watery grave. But if these nuclear tests continue, Dr. Yamane asks, will another Godzilla awaken? Or something worse?

 

Final Grade: (A)

 

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About Alex: "To state things plainly is the function of journalism; Alex writes fugitive reviews, allusive, symbolic, full of imagery and allegory, and by leaving things out, he allows the reader the privilege of creating along with him." Alex can be found hidden deep within the dark confines of his home theatre watching films, organizing his blu-ray and dvd collection and updating his blogs. Please visit the Korova Theatre and Hammer & Thongs to see what’s on his mind.

 

Criterion Critiques w/ Alex DeLarge

What follows is part of a regular series of reviews on the always wonderful, and quite indispensable Criterion Collection, written by our special guest reviewer Alex DeLarge of the Korova Theatre.

12 ANGRY MEN (Sidney Lumet, 1957)
Released on Criterion Blu-ray 11/22/2011; Spine #591

Sidney Lumet makes a stunning directorial debut with this gritty, sweaty, emotionally charged drama about 12 jurors deciding the fate of an eighteen year old defendant charged with 1st degree murder. They carry the legal burden of deciding guilt or innocence but also understand a conviction would surely lead to the death sentence.

An exceptional cast of now legendary actors fall into character (we never even know their names, only juror number) and don’t miss a beat of dialogue or a camera cue…this film is nearly perfect in its direction. Most of the film takes place in the cramped juror’s quarters, 12 men held prisoner by their own passions and corrupt moralities. Lumet is able to focus his camera into these tight spaces to create immediacy and intimacy, to feel their intellectual and emotional turmoil as they debate the facts and presentation of the trial. This important duty is influenced by their deep-rooted prejudices and convictions, while Henry Fonda advocates for Justice and Reason and for all to consider not only evidence presented at trial…but their own set of facts!

I work in the local District Attorney’s Office and have experience in many trials including homicide cases so consider this: a jury is only supposed to consider evidence (both circumstantial and direct) and veracity of testimony presented at trial, not their own research and sympathies. Essentially, this group of disparate and desperate men voted for a jury nullification. Did they violate the Rule of Law and let a guilty man walk? Think about it.

Final Grade: (A+)

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About Alex: "To state things plainly is the function of journalism; Alex writes fugitive reviews, allusive, symbolic, full of imagery and allegory, and by leaving things out, he allows the reader the privilege of creating along with him." Alex can be found hidden deep within the dark confines of his home theatre watching films, organizing his blu-ray and dvd collection and updating his blogs. Please visit the Korova Theatre and Hammer & Thongs to see what’s on his mind.

Criterion Critiques w/ Alex DeLarge

What follows is part of a regular series of reviews on the always wonderful, and quite indispensable Criterion Collection, written by our special guest reviewer Alex DeLarge of the Korova Theatre.

ANTICHRIST (Lars von Trier, 2009)

Released on Criterion Blu-ray 11/09/2010; Spine #542

“So the green field To oblivion falls,
Overgrown, flowering,
With incense and weeds
And the cruel noise
Of dirty flies.”
-A Season In Hell, Arthur Rimbaud

Man succumbs to the deviltry of his antithesis, his masculinity replaced by emotional impotency, both victim and abuser of Mother Nature. Lars von Trier’s season in hell exorcizes his own personal demons through the dark glassily; the nameless characters avatars of human conceit, both lost amid their own secret gardens.

The film begins in a monochrome snowfall, the couple making love while their son tumbles like spun clothes. Cut to color and a month later where the woman is hospitalized in a deep depression and her husband is revealed to be a psychologist, a man who seems cold like a hard rain and just as expressionless. He begins aversion therapy with his wife, discovering her atypical fear and confronting it, his relentless ego a brooding shadow upon her senses. She is inexplicably afraid of their summer cottage named Eden, where the previous summer she gave up working on her thesis about the Salem witch hunts. He forces her to confront each aspect of this wicked landscape and it soon subsumes her…and him.

Trier’s maddening narrative remains elusive in meaning and ripe in interpretation: is she suffering from the trauma of her lost son? Does she become possessed by some feminine malignancy represented by Nature? Cause and effect has been erased and reversed blurring the lines between external horror and internal conflict: in this storm only chaos reigns (rains). We begin to suspect that she has loathed her husband for some time, and had begun torturing their son the summer before. In a revisionist flashback, we see her cruel eyes focus upon their son moments before his fall from grace as if she could have saved him…but chose not to. Her passion has transformed into hatred, and sex becomes a violent weapon whose edge cuts both ways.

The lush cinematography imbues this world with a vibrant realism underscored by a damnable crescendo of entropy. The violence is brutal and anarchic, the comfortless man suffering the trials of 17th century women while his wife becomes tormentor. Their roles reversed, she is consumed by her masochistic behavior while his lament blossoms into a spiritual awakening: he is finally embraced by the ghosts of woman past, and becomes a daughter of the dust.

Final Grade: (B+)


To toss my own hat in the ring of this guest review, here is my take on Antichrist.

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About Alex: "To state things plainly is the function of journalism; Alex writes fugitive reviews, allusive, symbolic, full of imagery and allegory, and by leaving things out, he allows the reader the privilege of creating along with him." Alex can be found hidden deep within the dark confines of his home theatre watching films, organizing his blu-ray and dvd collection and updating his blogs. Please visit the Korova Theatre and Hammer & Thongs to see what’s on his mind.

Criterion Critiques w/ Alex DeLarge

What follows is part of a regular series of reviews on the always wonderful, and quite indispensable Criterion Collection, written by our special guest reviewer Alex DeLarge of the Korova Theatre.

3 WOMEN (Robert Altman, 1977)

Released on Criterion Blu-ray 9/13/2011; Spine #230

A dreamlike tale of two Mildreds, subsumed by one another’s identity while their life is delineated in violent murals created by Janice their pregnant landlord, each slowly drowning in liquid nightmare. Director/Writer Robert Altman again shuns typical narrative form and creates an atmosphere of emotional complexity between Millie and the naïve waif Pinky by focusing upon their idiosyncrasies, as they become quickly dependant upon one another.

Pinky immediately attaches herself to the talkatively social pariah Millie, an awkwardly lonely girl who hides her quiet desperation behind meaningless conversations and consuming need for attention. Shelly Duval is sadly beautiful as Millie, her gauche relationships creating an uncomfortable and genuinely depressed environment where we laugh while cringing in embarrassment at her nonplussed attitude: she is seemingly oblivious to the chatter and rude insults, but deep down, the loneliness is like a torrent of pain. Sissy Spacek as Pinky (a nickname: her real name is also Mildred) appears as a tiny girl not yet a women, a child who fixates upon Millie and begins to mimic her every move. They eventually become roommates and soon a tragedy leaves Pinky in a coma, and when she wakes she has become her alter ego Millie…though more socially adept.

Altman foreshadows Pinky’s intentions and we must decode these subtle clues and decide if she is truly suffering trauma or acting out a well formed plan of deception. Edgar Hart is the common tile in this confused mosaic, Janice’s husband who is cheating on her with both Mildreds. He vows never to get involved with a woman who shoots better than he does…but falls victim to his own vices and discards his cautionary moralizing.

3 WOMEN is about identity and it becomes a psychological study of its protagonists, where Altman’s camera is once again a detached observer probing every scene with slow pans and utilizing minimal edits. Gerald Busby’s score evokes a haunting theme of ghostly premonition, like a spirit who waits just beneath the surface tension of a dark lake to claim the next victim: though coming 3 years before THE SHINING, this evokes the same feeling of dread like Wendy Carlos’ fantastic soundtrack.

The dénouement of stillbirth is allegorical, the three women stuck in the scorching desert of Dissociative Fugues while alluding to the murder of the cheating husband. Altman’s final shot remains intentionally vague like a scintillating image, where the midden of discarded tires is reminiscent of a static life, a broken vehicle unable to travel beyond a perilous boundary.

Final Grade: (B+)

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About Alex: "To state things plainly is the function of journalism; Alex writes fugitive reviews, allusive, symbolic, full of imagery and allegory, and by leaving things out, he allows the reader the privilege of creating along with him." Alex can be found hidden deep within the dark confines of his home theatre watching films, organizing his blu-ray and dvd collection and updating his blogs. Please visit the Korova Theatre and Hammer & Thongs to see what’s on his mind.

Criterion Critiques w/ Alex DeLarge

What follows is part of a regular series of reviews on the always wonderful, and quite indispensable Criterion Collection, written by our special guest reviewer Alex DeLarge of the Korova Theatre.

LIFE DURING WARTIME (Todd Solondz, 2010)

Released on Criterion Blu-ray 7/26/2011, Spine # 574 

He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations. (Exodus 34: 6-7)

Todd Solondz’s cinematic allegory is as depraved as the archaic Torah, anchored in the cold hard fear of modernity’s unholy scripture to reveal people lost in contradiction and religiosity.

A tale of three sisters who live in the worst of times, echoes of war like a hard rain thrumming upon a collective consciousness, drowning in a thick morass of denial and guilt. The film focuses it’s penetrating gaze upon Trish, whose husband is serving State Time for child rape (though she has told her two youngest children he’s dead); her sister Joy who is mired in an abusive relationship and carries the dead weight of the past on her back like an addiction; and the witch-like Helen who has transformed her family’s pathos into a successful career. Ironically Helen is the mot independent character in the story, both from her sisters and their melodrama, yet she is the most superficial and neurotic, awash in the depths of Lethe. But Joy and her Moaning Myrtle persona becomes tiresome and rather annoying, her helium voice penetrating the talky narrative like shrapnel through the audience’s eardrums. And Helen is too static and unbelievably needy to reflect upon, a woman who speaks of her sexual gratification to her 12 year old child. I suppose it’s meant to be shocking but it reveals no insight or desire into her skewed expectations. Helen remains a squeaky door (hiding skeletons, of course) that is more interesting left closed.

Solondz distances the viewer with formal dialogue and clockwork conversations, capturing melodrama dominated by talking heads. He develops a boorish pace as dialogue is vomited between annoying characters, flickering between close-ups and reaction shots to the “subversive” content. Solondz reduces a very interesting story into a process that is as exciting as watching amoebas reproduce, always keeping the audience distant from any revelation or self-discovery. These are people who do not exist, avatars created to spout inane (though sometimes funny) dialogue with robotic routine. Solondz doesn’t offer any closure to their artificial wounds and that’s fine, actually preferable, but the characters are so disingenuous that they fail to breath and live as human beings. Stuck between forgiveness and forgetfulness, they are too blind to see the third option. A very human fault lost in the hardwired script.

Final Grade: (C-)

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About Alex: "To state things plainly is the function of journalism; Alex writes fugitive reviews, allusive, symbolic, full of imagery and allegory, and by leaving things out, he allows the reader the privilege of creating along with him." Alex can be found hidden deep within the dark confines of his home theatre watching films, organizing his blu-ray and dvd collection and updating his blogs. Please visit the Korova Theatre and Hammer & Thongs to see what’s on his mind.

Criterion Critiques w/ Alex DeLarge

What follows is part of a regular series of reviews on the always wonderful, and quite indispensable Criterion Collection, written by our special guest reviewer Alex DeLarge of the Korova Theatre.

SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957)
Released on Criterion Blu-ray 2/22/2011; Spine #555

A powerful journalist recreates reality by manipulating text, reducing morality to the black and white of the printed word, language a scalpel that cuts to the bone. Director Alexander Mackendrick swims with sharks amid this vicious feeding frenzy where politicians and celebrities alike are chum for the predatory journalist. The meaning of a man’s life is gossip not truth worth only a shred of green paper backed by the Federal Reserve.

Falco is an agent short on luck, his last hope of success in the dirty game of show business is to “do a favor” for the ubermensch columnist J.J. Hunsecker: Falco must secretly undermine the romance between his own client Dallas, a jazz guitarist, and Hunsecker’s little sister. Tony Curtis' ice-cream boy good looks are disarming, his piercing eyes and sly grin a mask of greed and self-indulgence, prostituting his friends (and himself) for a shot at the Big Time...whatever that may be. He plays against type by eschewing humor for greed, hiding behind a verbal barrage of insults and accusations: Falco is a true Grade-A Asshole. Curtis' sublime performance makes this very unlikable character too human, imbued with just enough self-reflection that we hope he can change and put this terrible lie behind him. But there is no redemption for Falco, only the clockwork of success and failure.

Burt Lancaster portrays the powerful Hunsecker without compassion, a Nietzschean prototype who judges his success by the trail of dead in his wake. He hides behind patriotism and justice, words and meanings bastardized and bowdlerized to support his opinions: he is the modern equivalent of Tea Party ethics, redacting history for his story. Hunsecker’s emotionally (and physically?) incestuous relationship with his younger sister is challenged by Dallas, an ordinary young man with no ulterior motive except love, and Hunsecker sets out to destroy Dallas just to satisfy his own agenda: power and control over everyone and everything. Dallas stands up to Hunsecker’s bullying but suffers the consequences: emotionally castrated, framed for drug possession, incarcerated and his jazz career likely over.

Mackendrick’s direction is superb as he moves the camera through busy New York City streets and nightclubs, crowding the frame with movement and suffocating anxiety. Though the film is verbose, it’s whipsmart dialogue breaks the sound barrier and pops with intensity. The cool jazz music and Elmer Bernstein score create the perfect soundstage, both as diagetic and diaphanous narrative instruments.

There is no justice in this seedy egomaniacal melodrama where the pen is indeed mightier than the sword. 

Final Grade: (B+)

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About Alex: "To state things plainly is the function of journalism; Alex writes fugitive reviews, allusive, symbolic, full of imagery and allegory, and by leaving things out, he allows the reader the privilege of creating along with him." Alex can be found hidden deep within the dark confines of his home theatre watching films, organizing his blu-ray and dvd collection and updating his blogs. Please visit the Korova Theatre and Hammer & Thongs to see what’s on his mind.

Criterion Critiques w/ Alex DeLarge

What follows is part of a regular series of reviews on the always wonderful, and quite indispensable Criterion Collection, written by our special guest reviewer Alex DeLarge of the Korova Theatre.

THE KILLING (Stanley Kubrick, 1956, USA)

Released on Criterion Blu-ray 8/16/2011, Spine # 575
 

Stanley Kubrick gives the film-noir genre a new twist with a jigsaw narrative layered with quick tough dialogue penned by crime aficionado Jim Thompson. His classic tracking shots and low angle photography are works in progress here but the potential is unmistakable.

Sterling Hayden as Johnny Clay is tough and likable as the gang leader but we’re never allowed intimacy with him or any other character, a device that Kubrick later perfected. Though we are shown some insight into the lives of the participants such as the bartender whose wife is dying of cancer, George and his femme fatale wife, and Johnny and his adoring girlfriend, the camera gives them too much distance for the viewer to make any real connection.

The non-linear timeline pieces the robbery together, sometimes reliving the same event from other perspectives. What makes this interesting is that we are never privy to the plot; we watch it come together like a puzzle until a coherent picture is formed. Kubrick uses a voice-over to keep us on schedule and to explain timing of events but the narrator is imperfect: we are told at 7:00 AM “Johnny began what could be the last day of his life” during a scene between he and his cohort Marv. Later Johnny arrives at the airport and the narrator announces the time as 7:00 AM. I believe Kubrick was breaking with convention by purposely conveying false information from what is typically a neutral omniscient voice. This ominous “mistake” foreshadows the violence and betrayal soon to follow.

Per film-noir expectations, the wicked woman leads the men to destruction with her conniving, greed, and sexual manipulation. The pounding score ups the ante and creates suspense as the tragedy unfolds. Does anyone else think that Timothy Carey was a greatly underrated actor? Finally Clay's dirty deeds are scrubbed clean by propeller wash. 

 Final Grade: (B+)

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About Alex: "To state things plainly is the function of journalism; Alex writes fugitive reviews, allusive, symbolic, full of imagery and allegory, and by leaving things out, he allows the reader the privilege of creating along with him." Alex can be found hidden deep within the dark confines of his home theatre watching films, organizing his blu-ray and dvd collection and updating his blogs. Please visit the Korova Theatre and Hammer & Thongs to see what’s on his mind.

Criterion Critiques w/ Alex DeLarge

What follows is part of a regular series of reviews on the always wonderful, and quite indispensable Criterion Collection, written by our special guest reviewer Alex DeLarge of the Korova Theatre.

SOLARIS (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972)
Released on Criterion Blu-ray 5/24/2011, spine #164

Kris Kelvin travels millions of miles to combat an alien consciousness…his own. Andrei Tarkovsky’s existential masterpiece is an introspective journey into a foreign world, where the cold sea can wash away sin or drown the victim in its sentient embrace.

Tarkovsky begins the story as Kris Kelvin wanders contemplatively around his father’s farmhouse, focusing upon the rippling waters and green spindly tendrils, the rich abundance of life and energy on Earth. He argues with his father and burns his past, its ashes drifting away into the ether…but regrets always write their indelible text upon our psyches. Tarkovsky’s narrative dichotomy to Earth imparts a sense of longing and loneliness for Kelvin: he is isolated and disheveled upon arriving at the neglected space station, its gray and foreboding interior a reflection of Kelvin’s dejection. The surviving scientists are caught in their own traps, their dire warnings too vague and obtuse for understanding. Sleep soon brings the deep-rooted fears and bitter anxieties to flesh, to once again be opposed, a divine torture gifted from the tumultuous seas below, a watery intelligence who grasps at their minds attempting to communicate. But the scientists want to destroy what they fail to understand.

Kris must confront a simulacrum of his ex-wife Hari, who killed herself because she could not live without him. This façade is plucked from his mind and she is created in his mental image, with all of her flaws and weaknesses…as remembered and imagined by Kris. I think this is an important distinction and why Kris ultimately fails: Hari is form to his own biased and anxious emotions, so when she committed suicide Kris believed it to be his fault. He spirals deeper and deeper into depression and remorse unable to reciprocate her unconditional love; time after time redemption trickles through his fingers like water. But this automaton is becoming human in its own way, and makes the one final selfless decision for love, revealing Kris’s egocentrism because he can’t believe she would make that sacrifice for him, proving that Kris didn’t understand the “real” Hari at all.

Tarkovsky’s beautiful cinematography varies between color and black and white to show Kris’s mental state, his gradual loss of sanity: the past, present, and delusion becoming one continuum. The detail to the set design is magnificent and adds an unused and hebephrenic disorder to the visuals and subtext that creates an absolutely realistic environment. Ironically, Kris willingly becomes a prisoner to the garden of Earthly delights, a Boschian purgatory given substance on Solaris. 

Final Grade: (A+)

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About Alex: "To state things plainly is the function of journalism; Alex writes fugitive reviews, allusive, symbolic, full of imagery and allegory, and by leaving things out, he allows the reader the privilege of creating along with him." Alex can be found hidden deep within the dark confines of his home theatre watching films, organizing his blu-ray and dvd collection and updating his blogs. Please visit the Korova Theatre and Hammer & Thongs to see what’s on his mind.

Criterion Critiques w/ Alex DeLarge

What follows is the first in what will be a regular series of reviews on the always wonderful, and quite indispensable Criterion Collection, written by our special guest reviewer Alex DeLarge of the Korova Theatre.

KISS ME DEADLY (Robert Aldrich, 1955)

Released on Criterion blu-ray 6/21/2011, spine #568

Mike Hammer is as hard and lean as a railroad spike driven into concrete, seduced by mystery and a dark poem of remembrance. Director Robert Aldrich's debut is a brutish noir transformed by cloak and dagger thrills, an explosive algorithm of cold war ethics. Aldrich turns the genre upside-down like the opening credits (read from bottom to top!), a cinematic excursion where a femme fatale whispers a nuclear polemic.

Mike Hammer lives in the subconscious, the penumbra of the Id, always racing like a jaguar towards the fulfillment of his pleasure principle. He is the prototypical anti-hero, dressed to kill with a temper to match, raping women with only a sideways glance. But Hammer is soon made impotent, victim of a faceless "they" who seek the great "whats’it", his good deeds never seeming to go unpunished. He is forced to pick up a voluptuous hitchhiker and soon embroiled in a thermonuclear winter of discontent, and stalks the nightmarish truth for his own vengeful purposes, an ignoble purpose of National insecurities. A whispered epitaph becomes a steel key, a violent travelogue that leads to an irradiated treasure locked away, ashes and brimstone of the new atomic age.

Aldrich captures the film with skewed angles and a creeping malaise, as men in black consume the night with a biblical fury, summoned by a government bureaucracy to stand guard like demonic sentinels, harbingers of a world without hope: these are men who are much worse than the petty evils of Mike Hammer. Aldrich utilizes film noir gumshoe tropes but advances a scientific element, a Periodic Chart to fuel this explosive admixture. In this monochrome world, no one is pure but an amalgam of intents and desires, prostituting themselves to the highest bidder. The film ends with Hammer and his moll fleeing into the crashing surf while the world burns down.

Final Grade: (A)

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About Alex: "To state things plainly is the function of journalism; Alex writes fugitive reviews, allusive, symbolic, full of imagery and allegory, and by leaving things out, he allows the reader the privilege of creating along with him." Alex can be found hidden deep within the dark confines of his home theatre watching films, organizing his blu-ray and dvd collection and updating his blogs. Please visit the Korova Theatre and Hammer & Thongs to see what’s on his mind.