A LETTER TO ELIA (2010) Martin Scorsese and Kent Jones Documentary

 

An important documentary on cinema and the ideals of how a radical push to something "New" in movies can make an impact on a person; if nothing else, it strikes me that this is rare as a white elk level mention by Scorsese of his older brother, who almost never comes up in conversation. It is in contexts that hit him as a teenager regarding the car scene in On the Waterfront and the repetance scene in East of Eden - and reading in between the thick-black lines it says to me things were... rough between them.

Anyway, Letter to Elia, which I've been meaning to see for years but has been unavailable outside of the giant Kazan box set with all of his films (a good box set by the way), is a quality tribute more than a documentary, and the (interesting) interview footage with Kazan himself you wish went on longer. Even as the director didn't make quite as many films as his contemporaries, you want to get deep into the thick of it with Face in the Crowd or Baby Doll (which he doesn't touch on at all, crazy), or oddly enough not much at all on his signature film (to me, even more than Waterfront), Streetcar.

But you're in class with Professor Marty and the value comes in the film scenes and how Scorsese analyzes just as he did with the Personal American Movies Journey doc and My Voyage to Italy and (to an extent) Val Lewton, and when that happens you sit up and pay attention regardless of how you feel about Kazan as a person (and Scorsese seems *kind* by calling what he did in HUAC as "self destructive" and leaving it at that). After all, Martin Scorsese talking about Cal trying and failing to give his dad the money in East of Eden is worth it alone!

Frankly, what Scorsese talks about in that specific case and right after - "thinking you've done something good and instead being told you've done something terrible without realizing it... most movies I'd seen didn't deal with private feelings like that... it felt like the people who made the movie knew me better than I knew myself... the brothers exhanging identities, it all became reall full life horror - no one's good, no one's bad, and I knew from experience it could happen like that," to an extent that's what I've felt at times with Scorsese's own films (or as he also puts it: you project onto a 'father's figure as him). So it was wonderful to see how the most personal has to hit you past the technique, as just... this is the voice.

So ok, not that comprehensive, but who cares when this acts as film history *and* in its way Film-as-Confession. Still don't love America America, though.

Pier Paolo Pasolini's THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST MATTHEW (1964)

 MERRY CHRISTMAS!  (or I should say Cristomas)

And... this largely lived up to the hype as a remarkable work of art.

Gospel According to St Matthew is so fulfilling and kind of in its (at times) unassuming presentation so awesome to experience from Pasolini as about Jesus Christ and his times that not only is he steeped in making this a full-bodied CINEMATIC experience of this man's life and teachings, writing with the camera much more than just working off of a script, but that it needs to be so rooted in the reality of people who live in the world of the poor and downtrodden so that the idea of understanding, the poetry of it and those faces, rings so strongly.

Look it, I don't believe in the God of Christianity or do the whole "Jesus is my savior" thing (us lapsed Jews have a thing about that), and I am closest to Agnostic. Yet personal belief doesnt matter to me so much with a film about a subject like this so long as a) the filmmaker doesn't rub my face in the muck of spectacle (I'm looking at you, Mel Gibson), or b) try to overpower me with spectacle. What matters to me is if the filmmaker can use ideas through technique, location, and empathy, and one need not to be a believer to feel something about what Jesus spoke of to mean lots of things. In fact, it takes a cinematic treatment precisely like this to make those teachings of be enlivened.

I think if you take much of what Jesus said, at least of what Pasolini presents here as a word for word translation of this part of the Bible, it is so much about seeking what is both good and in reality potentially good (will you be the rich man trying to get into Heaven? Fat chance, pal). 

It is about the message of simple while not being so simple (or I should say not dumbed down for an audience like in a Sunday School presentation); compassionate while also not acquiesing to the structures of power (hence the whole, you know, "sword" talk); and that at the core if you have real love for humanity, for those that do and even dont deserve your love and compassion, and don't take for granted the time you have on this plane of existence then you'll not be taken for granted yourself (and that's putting aside the, you know, heaven business).

But all those messages are redeemed by the frank style; this is stripped down to not be this bombastic spectacle, and while all in Italian the atmosphere feels closest to what raw and unfettered existence it might have been like at the time of Jesus and his group's existence. That sounds like it could potentially be drab, but that's far from the case.

Thanks to Tonino Delli Coli's precise camerawork, Irazoqui's laser focus through mostly his eyes but also his soft and equally ferocious voice, it is breathtaking to watch many times - even when it's operated and presented in hand-held, in some moments like a documentary crew was there listening in on his speeches, there are many others like when Jesus delivers the "thy kingdom come... lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil" trip, something about how he is lit and framed, how this man Irazoqui plucked from a college and made to be Pasolini's 'Cristo,' gives this figure grandeur but never with prevention - and this performer is surrounded by scores of unique, unvarnished, working-class, young and old, faces. Souls.

These are not faces most other filmmakers of Pasolini's time or I'd wager even years before with the core Neo Realists like Rossellini would consider for any film, and that's what makes it extraordinary to me. They're locked in like us into a world that is unkind and rocky and rough and dry as a desert, and there's no escape into the fantasy that so many movies usually give us. Even Last Temptation of Christ, which is still for me the more substantial and unique and formally daring of films about this person and idea of this person as a character, still shows us Actors from an industry and faces we recognize somewhat. Pasolini gives no such recognition; he's saying through these scenes of Jesus and his apostles meeting and talking with the citizens of his world *this is it.*

Dont avert your eyes. And thus the miraculous Walking on Water moments are no less "real" in feeling than those parts where he is among others or in the villages. Jesus is a guy who is too focused on saying his Word to pluck that unibrow to do much else. In other words, this is serious as a heart attack, but it's not a dry sermon or something that is Eating Your Vegetables homework. It's a rousing intimate epic because it prioritizes how an "Average" person living off the land is not so Average, he or she is worth much more than that. Yes, there are many shots showing Jesus talking and preaching to the masses, but more often he shows those people listening to him, surrounding him, filling out the frame around him and surrounded by those real locations and structures.

Gospel According to St Matthew is forceful and, sure, didactic, but alwayd wonderful because it is a radical film (shot with clarity and poetry hand in hand), made by a Radical about a Radical... and so what if not everything he says you or I believe in? What matters is that the film stays true to the subject and is as passionate as it is honest about the point of view. 

And when the film branches out from Jesus to cover, say, the saga of John the Baptist, notice how Pasolini builds up a scene like with those wealthy women and the girl who says so deadpan (I am paraphrasing) "bring me his head on a platter." These are also shot more locked down while those with Jesus and the disciples are more immediate and in-your-face. This is before it became a "style" choice or affectation.

I could go on, but you should just go watch it, preferably in its new 4K restoration via Criterion channel. It's pure.

Erich von Stroheim's FOOLISH WIVES

Firstly.... As much as I can always dig and be completely absorbed and entertained by a committedly melodramatic and beautifully ironic (without being that comic) Con-Man story like this one with Erich von Steoheim as the "Count," a fake aristocrat posing to get money off of a diplomats wife and the ups and downs he has in getting closer to her in the backdrop of Monte Carlo - and Stroheim himself as a performer understands what vicarious thrill an audience has not only in seeing him get very deep into this debonair POS but that he is going to go further into being a total scoundrel in his attempts to seduce and get closer to this wife (sometimes with her not being awake for his advances!) - there is one curious element about it to

There is a book in this world titled "Foolish Wives" written by none other than... Erich von Stroheim, and when we are shown a page of this book, it is a section admonishing uncultured Americans in comparison to Europeans and caring little for decorum in their practices of commerce. And.... it is just a very odd thing for von Stroheim to do, frankly kind of distracting. Like, imagine if in, I dunno, Paper Moon the characters were sitting around at one point reading a book called "Paper Moon" written by Peter Bogndanovich. It'd be a little batty!

Anyway, as for the rest of Foolish Wives it is moment to moment a film directed with a sensitivity to nuances in behavior and how what we know of what this man is capable of (and the couple other ladies who really know him and want in on the money potentially at hand) was surely ahead of its time, whether that was due to von Stroheim as an actor himself knowing how to milk every moment and drawn out piece of self-created theater from this character (his suave air and severe manner can be two sides of a coin, and eventually the begging) and his cast, not least of which Miss Dupont as the Naive and lovable mark err wife Mrs Hughes, but also others like the old lady at the Inn or the one maid who is on pins and needles about when this suave Russian Count will marry her, or that he knew what was going on in theater with the early Method and tapped into that.

It's also difficult to fully appreciate what is going on in the entire scope of the film's story because it is a truncated and cut-into work; to Stroheim/the studio's credit, you actually don't *quite* notice compromises until that scene with the Count and the desperate Maid as she begs him to marry (once he has the black armband on his uniform is the visual cue), but it's clear a lot of time has passed with reels missing, and one is not fully lose solely because of the framing snd context of this "Count" being a ruthlessness crook who may be going so deep into his Con he won't be able to get out so easily.

And yet, despite some jumps in the story, I am still enamored in the exquisite attention to details on screen in Foolish Wices, how vast Monte Carlo looks and set pieces like the casino games, while the filmmaker doesn't lose sight of this being about how such a setting was, and still probably would be today, ripe and rife for exploitation of trusts in the world of the upper crust and well to do; what's remarkable is how you do feel for Mrs Hughes all the more as the story goes on, part of that from Dupont playing her as someone more vulnerable and sweet natured (but not so that we necessarily want her to go down, at least the whole time) - and even with Sergius, even as he is so cruel and conniving you still sense his humanity in there, somewhere.

It's a richly drawn and textured crime melodrama where tragedy is just around every corner - and one helluva twist in the last act.

Albert Brooks' MODERN ROMANCE (1981)

Roger Ebert said in a review of a movie called She's Out of Control (it's a fiery review between him and Siskel, of course) that an exhibitor told him once that if a movie isn't any good after the first reel, it isn't going to improve after that. I'm not sure that is always true, but on the opposite end there are absolutely times when you are at around the end of Reel 1 (to use the editor speak of the Albert Brooks character Robert here) and you realize... oh, this is truly a great, unendingly perceptive and massively funny movie about many things, but especially how "Stuff" and physical fitness and other things we give ourselves to do wont solve ::taps the brain::.

It'd be a sort of anti-miracle for Brooks to fuck this up, and thankfully it's totally not the case. By the time he is talking to himself in the mirror, it's hard not to see that Brooks and cowriter Johnson understand this man so intuitively - and that is that this guy won't understand himself.  Or the woman he professes to love - for a while, anyway. Maybe (no, definitely) not even after the movie is over.  

But we also don't understand ourselves or the way we set events into motion some/most of the time, so it's hard not to relate to Robert, despite the fact that maybe you or I haven't had a break-up like this. 

And every time, for example, Robert picks up the phone or makes a call (especially to Mary), you cringe thinking that it cant get much more relatable and... oh so true in its human misery and self sabotage. Even the telephone itself becomes the Medium of Anxiety and a tool of perpetual dissatisfaction.  In other words, the slope to be our own worst selves is slick and illogical. 

I mean.... 😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬x100

At the center of it is Brooks in this titanically funny performance that is like a feature length version of those sections of Taxi Driver where Travis creates his own problems and then deals with (or actively doesn't deal with) the break-up, both over the phone and on his phone (incidentally Brooks was there, where he was a very different character, normal compared to everyone else), only here it's instead of an unstable loner dumped for being a fool, it's a needy, neurotic man someone who initiates a break-up and knows as soon as he does it that it was a mistake. 

And like in TD, Kathryn Harrold is a beautiful and active partner for Brooks to play off of, sympathetic, equally understanding and totally bewildered by Robert's actions, and eventually completely in "IVE HAD IT" mode, and plays everything so straight that it makes Robert's horrible self so much worse/funnier.

The break up is the set up that Brooks sails into an ocean of conflict and dramatic possibilities, of "Let's make up" and then screw things up again, and as a performer/director he takes Robert into beats that are howlingly funny and all based on mounting feelings of contradictions and self recriminations (or in simpler terms, what if Travis Bickle was a nicer person, but still kind of a headcase). 

Notice the scene in particular where he takes Ellen out to the date and that car ride where the Michael Jackson song comes on, and he immediately turns around and takes her back to her place. Everything he does in that scene is perfectly calibrated for us to laugh, but it doesn't feel false or like it's going for an easy comic moment. It's... yikes, man.

One more thing: I still recall when I took a screenwriting course in college that one of the "rules" we were told is that a character talking to themselves is inherently unrealistic and is always hanky because, well, we don't talk to ourselves in daily life so having a character do that is a way to get around making things more visual.

 That may be the case in other films, but Brooks can and does sell Robert talking to himself because a) it's mostly comedic and the laughs come without it being too shorthand and b) it fits how he overthinks things and talks and talks things to himself (but not always as he does with others) - and he has control as an editor and can solve problems, but with himself it's bupkis - but to my earlier point he doesn't understand what he should (or to rationalize things like, say, jealousy).  

The longer the movie goes on and the more Robert has in his mind all of his doubts and insecurities, the more it becomes something different and special, and so sharp a satire you feel cut up by the end. 

Wonderful, wonderful film. See it before it leaves Tubi end of November 2023.

RW Fassbinder's WOMEN IN NEW YORK (1977)

 (Rarely screened, on a double feature no less, with "Fassbinder's Women," at Anthology Film Archives NYC as part of their "Narrow Rooms" series)

The lifestyles of the Rich and Miserable! Stupid patriarchy!  Stupid Stephen!  Stupid men! 

So, this is rare to see and find (much less in a theater screening) and possibly for good reason; aside from it being one of the handful of made for television films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder in the 1970s that was made primarily because he wanted to get something from stage to screen, so it is so completely stagebound almost by default that it is transformed into something like a dream of a theater production (a very twisted and catty dream), it's based off of a popular play and I suspect the makers of the program didn't have any rights. It is also, even among *everything* Fassbinder ever made, one of his most off-kilter films.

This isn't to say this isn't massively entertaining as far as bitchy-camp that is more often than not a legitimate dramatic spectacle. This is prime soap opera material - well to do woman discovers her man has been cheating, it blows up her entire life, and when she finds a way to bring payback onto the younger and still cheating Other lady ditz who did her wrong she takes it and makes a fruitless pursuit to just torpedo everything - and it is performance wise nothing short of incredible (only Hanna Schygulla seems missed, if this really should mark a Fassbinder-Ladies-All-Star get-together), with Margrit Christensen only at first a stand out until later usurped by the actor playing one of the truly Breakdowniest rich ex-wives on New York by way of Germany.

If it is so off kilter it's because of the theatrical devices and extremely long takes Fassbinder implements here. There's one scene in particular here, as one of the housemaid continues, and this to me is not an accident, in total robotic almost under hypnosis form to rub a plane of glass that has in front of it separate streaks of like a continuous waterfall going on in this woman's home, and as the women talk and a major revelation about what has been going on with this Crystal Allen (Barbara Sukowa in an early role, taking on a young and frustrated pack of misery with aplomb) and another man who has been stepping out on one of the ladies present, and the camera just...keeps... going.

And Fassbinder doesn't go in for close ups either, so as this massively intense series of dramatic beats unfolds, including Christensen at one point flinging herself in motions that can't help but be comical, it has this trance-like state. It is... a lot.  It feels like Fassbinder is channeling a social commentary on the Uber rich, like they are all encased in this hell where a maids work will keep going despite all reason, the slivers of waterfalls that are in this house will keep on going, and the Melodrama that has reached operatic heights about the total dearth of a woman's agency in marriage in the 20th century (Reno be damned), is remarkable as it is frustrating.  Just, like, go in for one tighter shot, Rainer! 

I should note in full disclosure I havent seen the other adaptations of the play to screen (even in a lighter Hollywoodized version it is easy to see Joan Crawford, star of the 38 film, eating a few of these roles like, well, me at Thanksgiving buffet next week), so I am going on what is here before me. 

Suffice it to say, coming to this after swimming through dozens of other films by this artist, Women in New York feels like an experiment on the filmmaker's part to merge his Theater roots with his Petra von Kant immersive Caught-in-a-Throrbush-of-Despair emotional landscape with some knowing and quite funny camp theatrics, not to mention some Brechtian distancing with that Peer Raaben score that is so mournful and bizarre it distracts.

While I don't think it is as successful as Von Kant and I flat out didn't care for the young actor playing Mary's androgynous daughter, you do get caught in the spell that is cast. The ending, scored to the Blue Danube Waltz, ties everything together perfectly though.

Nicholas Ray's WE CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN (1973-2011)

 "Dont expect too much from a teacher."

More aptly earlier in that scene: "Hey, you wanna get a beer and a pizza?" 

That eyepatch can't hide the fact that deep down Nicholas Ray is just a dude from Wisconsin, USA.   

Sigh. I think if I tried to make my wife watch this it'd be the kind of film that could end a marriage 

One of the things that strikes me immediately and for very long stretches of We Can't Go Home Again is the presentation. This is a film shot on a variety of formats - 8mm, 16mm, I'd be surprised if 35mm but why not, maybe an old bolex or a Viewmaster at a few points I'm sure - and it's shown on the screen inside of a frame that takes up 80% od the 1:33:1 square screen we are watching the film as a whole (it is framed on three sides by like an image of a city landscape and then it moves to a barn once or twice). Inside of this frame there's lots of split screen and other times it's just one scene or image or splinter of a scene in a side of the frame. In other words, it is a splintered and disorientating experience to watch this by design, as this is a filmmaker in Nicholas Ray in his 70s who had less than zero fucks to give.

At the same time, the daring of the approach is tiring, not to mention that this has only the vaguest sense of a narrative as it involves Ray as a film teacher of some note (a "version" of himself with an eyepatch, because it adds to the personality of a persnickity director I suppose) who is leading his students through an experimental film production where they gave to grapple with the turn of the late 60s into the 70s (Chicago in 68 of course is a touchstone for Ray, whether he was actually there I don't know and the movie is cagey about it), and we also get to see some of the relationships of the cast and crew, together and with Ray, as life and art bleed together. And when I say bleed, I mean it's the kind of jumble that will make anyone who isn't already a die-hard, long in the tooth cinephile the sweats.

(I picture myself during times like these like Tim Meadows in Walk Hard watching this on Tubi in my underwear as you come in and I bellow: No! You don't want no part of this!)

And the thing is, I dig an experimental quagmire of a production if a) it has some self awareness of itself to not take itself top seriously, and b) it can stop for just a minute to let the audience breathe. Of course it's hard not to think of the experiments Orson Welles was concocting at the time like with Other Side of the Wind in particular - a film, like this one, that only screened vaguely in one unfinished form before it's director's passing and then completed years later, as this came out officially in 2011 - which also had Dennis Hopper and who, according to trivia, was in contact with his former Rebel without a Cause director while he made The Last Movie (which looks like a classical Howard Hawks Western by comparison). But I also thought of Brian de Palma and his experiments both before (Greetings, Dionysus 69) and after (Home Movies) Ray was making his miasma with his class.

Actually Home Movies (1979) is a good basis of comparison because that was also an attempt to push filmmaking into a more collective and wholly educational effort (De Palma at Sarah Lawrence, Ray at Bighampton SUNY for two years), where instead of learning the same theory and having exercises that might not be seen anywhere after a semester, to come together and actually go through the process of making a full film. But where De Palma managed to get his crew and writers to come up with a....coherent plot, even in the scope of a cheeky satire, there is so much in We Can't Go Home Again in the visual information that you can't get a handle on things.

This leads me back to my earlier Presentation mention and an odd moment midway through the film (49 minutes to be exact) where suddenly... the frame holding in the main box we have been seeing the fragments of film and dual-and-triple screen projection goes away and we get a simple full screen image where Ray and a student walk and talk together (asking for the beer and pizza and talking some various things). The sound is screwed up and not synced right, which is also a problem at other points where it's not intentional and seems more sloppy than like a statement, but it feels like a real moment between two people, which is very scattershot in the rest of the run time. It made me wonder why Ray, whether he had full control over the edit we are even seeing or not, went the route of the multiple images within the frame to start with.

Maybe it is meant to reflect how we see things in our memory, or how splintered the turn of the 60s into the 70s made life for young people especially against an establishment of "pigs" (a group Ray made several films about over his years, about holding on to that youth and how that act can tear people apart to borrow James Dean's phrase). The film isn't without some arresting moments like the flashes of graphic nudity, or the guy cutting off his beard hair and the ugliness of that act. And when Ray tries to keep focus on a scene with interactions between the film students and/or himself, the editing within these scenes you can actually follow things moment to moment.

But so much of the film is preachy when it makes any sense, except for Ray (who carries this natural weariness on film), none of these actors are not much to write home about and I can't stress enough how confounding the way 90% of this film is presented makes me wonder if it is a genuine push for radical explorations of images and ideas or if Ray just didn't think the shots looked good enough mostly in full frame and this obfuscated it.  Maybe if it had simply been a short film, even as a longish short at 40 minutes, Ray could get to explore in a tighter frame of mind.  So much of this is rambling nonsense, and not much fun.  You feel like these young people (and/or Ray) are coming up with things to say and bits of business with nowhere to go. 

It pains me to give this a low rating the final (solo) completed film by such a great director of films of the 1950s, one of the mavericks who worked in the system and smuggled in a whole darker and richly melodramatic sensibility into his work, but I'd be lying if I said I enjoyed watching this.  Fascinating in spots, perhaps, but the ending especially left a sour taste in my mouth (even as it finally does open up again to full frame one more time).

William Friedkin's RAMPAGE (1987)

 

(Special screening in 35mm at IFC Center for Friedkin retrospective)

Whoa. Talk about an underrated (or mostly underseen and under-distributed) gem of ambivalent subject matter directed with the eye of someone who tells is as straight as he (mostly) did with The Exorcist; a Documentarian turned "Professional" filmmaker with collaborators like (a young) Robert Yeoman and composer Ennio Morricone (relying a bit more on electronic synth-scoring that I can't recall he did outside of the Thing). This is often jaw-droppingly effective and scary when it shows this killer on the run, and is quite good (if a little less than great) as courtroom drama.

Rampage is kind of like William Friedkin's "Joker," or at least that's what it seems like it could be leaning towards except with more legitimately on its mind and less bullshit about its craft. But it may also help to see this now as one of a piece with Friedkin's (now final) film of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, which is also about the question of "knowledge" of a crime and sane vs insane.

Maybe he wanted to revisit the sort of ideas he had explored in Rampage in a setting that is more, what's the word, Officious where the ideals of what it means to be a commander become clouded by ego and instability. Charles Reece is like the bastard child of a Captain Queeg, no less prone to and somewhat a captive to the fucked up dimensions of his mind, only with Reece there is the far more insidious and less comparable element of... Nazism and Satanism and drinking blood because that might do something to make the DRINK THE BLOOD NOW NOW NOW voices go away. Yikes.

This is all to say this is a satisfying and disturbing "ripped from the headlines" crime drama that features one of Michael Biehn's greatest turns in front of the camera as the prosecuting attorney and still-grieving father, though due to slightly less dramatic circumstances if no less tragic (I have to wonder if it was somewhat disorienting post Terminator to have another character named 'Reece' to contend with, but that's just conjecture to use this film's legal-speak), a somewhat forgotten-today character actor Alex McArthur delivering the kind of Ted Bundy performance that no other actor has achieved without actually portraying Bundy (as in he is more "attractive" conventionally as an average white male while containing that *look* of a serial killer that is equally calm and menacing), and Grace Zabriskie showing why she's one of the greats in just a few scenes as the killer's long abused mother (by the dead dad, and it's a flaw she doesn't have more screen time or development considering especially what happens near the end).

Why is it disturbing is not only for the depictions of the crimes, which is so devastating and revolting for how equally much and little Friedkin shows - we see not so much the full acts themselves but the aftermath, the kind of blood-splattered crime scenes that make Kill Bill look tame - but for the questions it raises that it cant possibly answer.

I mention Joker earlier, maybe an easy reference, but the other film I couldn't help but think of was Dirty Harry; this is almost like the "well, OKAY, let's see what happens if we actually try this sick motherfucker in court" scenario, and you almost wonder (what, me worry) at first if Friedkin will argue via the Biehn character that, well, Callahan might have had a point in just blowing Scorpio away (!) But that is still, as meaningful as that film is, Hollywood Escapism compared to the moral quandaries here, and it's all down to the question of "legal" insanity, and it's good that Friedkin features a scene, albeit brief, of the jury deliberating over the case. I'm not sure where I would lean either, albeit I too am staunchly anti-death penalty, and yet as the film goes on what's absorbing about it is the film doesn't even quite know where to stand.

(there is also a point to be made, which I wish the filmmakers grappled with a little, looking beyond the lines so to speak about what kind of whack mental health system we have that someone could be conceivably let out "free" if found not guilty by reason of insanity, like why not just commit for life if that's the case, but I don't know California law in the 80s and don't feel like looking it up)

This is all to say Friedkin, via his characters speaking with conviction about both sides (and Biehn is a bit more moving in his turn than the other fine-but-standard character actor players so that could color it a bit for some watching), but especially in the final ten minutes or so after the verdict coming to some last-minute findings that turn things back into the apprehension that was founded earlier in the story, makes Rampage so memorable because I get the sense he isn't sure where to come down by the end on the questions he's posing.

He did this too in Caine Mutiny, and while I don't think I'll be having to grapple with this film as much morally as I did that one, the faith in letting an audience come to terms with everything so diabolical and horrible and yet still, at the end of it all, human (even in his mania), is fascinating - and it comes with added weight after recent years of, of your know, mass murderers fuelled by Nazism and Fascism and so on.

William Friedkin's THE CAINE MUTINY COURT-MARTIAL (2023)

 

RIP William Friedkin and...

"I don't recall any cheese business!" And RIP Lance Reddick, who could deliver that line as convincingly as anything on the Wire. And what goes great with 🧀? 🍓 of course.

Keifer Sutherland's finest twenty some odd minutes. What an overwhelming performance of a man who talks himself into being who he really is in front of a court martial. And keeping in mind Friedkin's no less than masterful command of performances (no less an accomplishment because he shot this in *14 days* and often in one or two takes, as was his method) and the grace in his and his collaborators simplicity in moving the camera with an assurance that comes from 60 years of doing it and a preternatural sense of framing for Power and Isolation ideas...

(EDIT NEXT DAY - I can't believe I didn't think about the more personal connection that this filmmaker may have had with this story and the character of Queeg, given that it's about power and temper, and seeing Sorcerer again, luckily in a theater no less, I suddenly was reminded of this trivia on the making of that film: "Because of William Friedkin's explosive temper and the scene where he used helicopters to create the storm during the rope bridge sequence, this was the film that earned him the nickname 'Hurricane Billy."  And... yeah, this plays as a complex film because, frankly, Friedkin probably dealt with a lot of shit himself!)

My initial impression/assumption (and you know what they say about people who make those) going into this was that if a storytellwr is going to make a new Caine Mutiny Court-Martial adaptation in 2023, then it is nigh impossible for it to not be about the last President - specifically the idea of the "Stable Genius" who is completely in control and yet has no control and makes life all about walking on eggshells for those under him (and in this case the eggshells have to contend with cheese and strawberries too! OK, too corny, let's move on). And another part of this was that this was made after Trump left office and post January 6th, a day where a particular kind of "order" came and caused chaos and panic. And watching big chunks of this film, it's easy to make a connection, especially once it gets to *that* speech but even before as others on the stand comment about perceptions and personality disorders.

... And then that last scene comes, one that I *thought* at first came from Friedkin and not Herman Woulk though according to a review from Bilge Ebiri it turns out it was the epilogue from the original book, and for Greenwald the conflicted or nay regretful thoughts come tumbling out as a defense attorney (quite drunk but clear of mind) and says that what happened in court was a shame and "Queeg deserved better," drink in the face and cut to black, and it is really not quite what I thought it was about at all... and like any compelling art, I had to sit with it a few extra minutes go sort out my reaction.

The movie ends on the subject (one I maybe thought in my basic-B liberal or just common sense mind was about the figure currently who makes everything about himself) that becomes more complicated and thorny: the secretly shaky but on the surface Proud and Firm ideals of Men in Power, the precarity of chain of command, and how it can be so easy to take someone down many pegs if you try. It leaves me with this uncertainty that is unsettling and it makes me admire the film on some bone deep level. It's not what you expect, how it takes this turn into recontextualizing what we have seen (one of those scenes like one has at the end of a Law and Order episode, only full of regret and reproach), because one might think Friedkin means for this to be him talking through the Clarke character.  

Maybe that would be a lesser filmmaker's tact.  It could be that he means to put a turn on what we expect, that we need to make up our minds for ourselves about what seems to be "crazy" in the world. Or is it, despite what we just saw in the courtroom minutes ago, a man coming unglued and hoisted on his petard, there was (proverbially in the Luke to Vader sense) a decency at one time, that just because a Captain like Queeg did do something abominable it doesn't mean he wasn't a sturdy Captain for years (though in a time post 9/11 when the Military went bananas themselves into overdrive against enemies that didn't always, say, deserve it).

And the irony is Greenwald, the Clarke character, didnt *have* to take this case (he mentions he is only here due to medical leave with little prep time), and yet not only does he take it on, he tells his client he wants to "win it." Has he damned himself by doing so, or was there some kind of pride of his own to do this that is part of that drunken tirade at the end? There's also the element of all the other officers of the Caine, except for the man on trial (an ill educated man he even admits when under cross examination), who are privileged and haven't spent the decades in warfare.

Maybe serving for so long on *any* ship will drive a man completely crazy, or all that time brings out the worst in a person. The point is, this ending is quite different if you've only seen the 1954 film, and if it doesn't ask the audience to have some empathy for Queeg, which is a very difficult think to ask, then it does ask for us to understand him *despite everything completely unhinged we have seen.* Ballsy.

Does it recontextualize everything that came before? It does, but not at the same time - it rather deepens the moral and ethical implications, especially in the framework here of a trial that appears to be so Stern and about the System and wherr, like in the military but in any system of power, people actually don't come forward about this or that when they should until it explodes (on further thought with trump, come to think of it, so much is about his many many crimes that we tend to forget or overlook those under him who don't say shit until it's time for a sweet book deal). Would Queeg have gone for as long as he did if no one just, I dunno, said something earlier? Does it matter?

This is a remarkable piece of work at the end of the day, and it knocks you for a philosophical loop even after you think things have been tied up. I don't mind that. William Friedkin's Caine Mutiny Court-Martial is one last breath of dramatic fire from the man who forever implanted the sight of Fellatio on a chicken leg in my brain (re Killer Joe).

Oh, and Jason Clarke is having a spectacular year between this and Oppenheimer for pointing a finger, eyes Blazing, and getting full of indignation at a subject in questioning, only this time he's on the side of the defense. It speaks to his superior skills as an actor under equally confident directors that I can't tell which performance is the one to enshrine.

NEON GENESIS: EVANGELION (1995) + THE END OF EVANGELION (1997) - Full Series and Film Takes

 

Ok, I'll have a cookie... 

Yep, I finally got this one in my system, and I think I'm partially glad I waited as long as I did.  Not because I like feeling left out of intensive Anime discussions with friends (I didn't always realize I was left out until a title like this came up and I would have to declare ignorance), but because of the radical approach to storytelling mixed with harrowing haunting and affecting emotional landscape conjured by Hideko Anno and his team of animators and writers.  This is all about self doubt and crippling low self esteem, directly in spite of Shinji's incredible and seemingly one-of-a-kind abilities with fusing with his Eva (there's... a lot to how this work, it might become cumbersome to explain how it all works here in the framework of high-concept science fiction/fantasy/action based Anime). 

So, as I watched the show and then the movie (I saw the final episode right before the "The End of Evangelion," as you do), I wrote as I watched piece by piece.  So... here goes:

Oh boy, Shinji, here it comes again... inside the not-at-all fractured and disturbed parts of your mind and heart...... 

(FIRST FEW EPISODES)

"This is Tokyo-3. This is our city. And... it's the city that you protected."

Well, guess I gotta do this right (before I get to the "End" of Evangelion, which is some hours of viewing away), and it's been mildly on my radar for quite a long time - not least of which thanks to my students in my Animation Cinema class who have hyped this up a bit.

I'm more overjoyed than anything that I can log this on here; somehow feels a little more legit in my scattered OCD consciousness. Oh, and it is pretty dope right off the bat we get to see this Young Man Shinji get the Hero's Call to Action be... operating a giant Eva, because who else can (what is an Eva? To a layman it's kind if like a more organically designed Jaeger from the Pacific Rim movies... wait, you don't even know what a Jaeger means, do you - or some of you are shaking your head like "Jack, no, just....no, stop," and okay I will). Point is, my introduction to the "Nerv" organization is off to a promising start!

I will just say that right off the bat I'm immediately taken with the art style that emphasizes the vast scale of these super beings that withstand the efforts of the horrible militaristic governing forces at wiping it out though nuclear means. 

I'm sure more will be revealed as to the true intentions on both sides, but my instinct is to distrust those government characters who have turned the cities we are shown into dilapidated rubble - and their "Ace in the Hole" is a big bust - and to see the creature as someone protecting itself. Not to mention, the character designs and color palettes are wonderful. When Shinji is facing off against one of "the Angels" in episode 2, his suit is colored mostly purple with a little green, and it's an excellent contrast with the dark black night sky and harsh gray buildings. And my goodness, that edit from the battle to Shinji alone in that white hospital room is ::chefs kiss::

Also impressive, though in a way that makes me kind of cock an eyebrow: when Shinji goes over to her ("Ma'am" as Shinji calls her and she doesn't like) apartment and everything gets big and broad with the comedic interactions - there's a big nude joke involving the discovery of a, uh, sort of pet penguin but with lots of stuff all over its head and face, and I had to smile but didn't laugh - that I was not expecting. On the other hand, it is good that not everything is dark and dire right away. The show had a good sense of how to make things tonally varied. At the same time, what's so striking are images of pain and trauma, like the injured girl that Shinji keeps seeing.

And for episode 3... Shinji gets his ass kicked by that one-eyed tentacle-whipping Angel fierce. Good. The writers on this show know well that he's got to start from somewhere, and that's from a position of not being able to handle a giant weird-ass Angel alien beast - and when he finally flips out and gets *mad* it is... wildly satisfying in a kind of primal level.

I think I have a good little project ahead for myself this summer....

"I'm sorry, I don't know how I should act like this."

"Smiling would be a good start."

Episodes 4, 5 6 and 7 - actually I watched 4 and part of 5 on Sunday, but I was so baked on a gummy I had to rewatch 5 from the start, TMI but whatever, I share what I can for you good Letterboxd people. I will note that what I saw of 4, even high as a kite, was an even greater stylistic, surrealistic leap from even the first three episodes. The precise direction and patience in telling parts of the story that other shows or creators might have sped through was a small revelation.

Then 5 and 6 brings us even more into Shinji's confrontation and eventual bonding with a young female pilot, Ayanami, and I like how the show portrays that he can barely communicate with her at first - shy and awkward and all that - until he gets hurt badly and is brought back from the Brink of death. She is a terse, tough young person (and she has to be, or has been trained to be such). It's a splendid couple of episodes because of the mission at hand that the characters have to do just right, and that the emphasis is on how the characters may or may not get through it, not every particular of the plot itself (though that is well executed with tension and taut visuals).

And episode 7: maybe trying to program an Eva with just remote controlling is... going to not work.

Episodes 8 to 15

Well, Asuka time! She is quite a handful, or is it just me (at first)? She does become more entertaining the more time you spend with her, like you strangely cant stand her and then perk up when she is on screen - just like getting used to a person in real life, all their anger and complaining makes for a not always enjoyable experience to be around... until it becomes clear Asuka can back up her "You're too stupid" talk with her action.

It doesn't make her my favorite character or anything, but I can give it time and see where she will go with Shinji and Rei and the rest of them all. There's some "wait, I'm a junior high schooler, don't see me naked" um "jokes" (I assume if you are in junior high school, as many were watching it and have been that age at the time, it makes some more sense), and a lot of braggadocio and complaining about Shinji's straight ahead mind set.

(EDIT: Thinking back on their relationship, this is... really endearing and extra touching, given where the characters end up.  Their bickering is the brash romantic-comic heart of the show).

But putting the main story aside, what I actually appreciated oddly enough was the recap in episode 14, which, it may seem like why recap things we have just seen, but if one steps away from the show for a month or two (as I did), it serves as a useful reminder of all the various Angels and what damage they have wrought so far.

And then the second half of that episode is this more dreamlike encapsulation of Rei recounting right before the Interoperability Test, and it is a riveting and brilliant example of how the makers of the show can break from what we have seen already and transform their subject into something about the damage that happens to the mind and soul.

These kids are very brave and lucky and reckless and Doncha just love those kids?

That bit with the penguin in episode 15 is as perfect a bit of comedy you could ever want.

Episode 16 to... maybe the end?? (Okay I'll stop at episode 25 tonight, final episode tomorrow, and then, at long last, "The End" film!)

"Do you want to become one, body and soul?"

Episode 18-19-20, especially 19 and 20 when Shinji finally has his break with dad and Eva-01, and then the swift return, the revelation of what an Eva actually is, and then the inner-vision montage of Episode 20 and the exploration of the unbearable weight of responsibility put on Shinji's entire body and mind... Holy shit. It's daring, unbridled, confounding and audacious surrealism as Shinji experiences full-blown consciousness expansion and the key question of what he is to "become" is at center. And sometimes the boldness in this is what we are *not* seeing, like when we see that bedroom scene and the shot stays on the beer glass and the cigarette as that goes on.

Just when I think the series has hit a peak in pushing the boundaries of what this kind of storytelling can do, it goes further. At the same time, it's still television, and I don't know if Episode 20 would be so affecting and challenging and profound in its implications of what's come before, the perils of growing up, and what's to come, if not for the episodes leading up to this. 

The core conflict between a son and his father, Gendo Ikari and that gosh darn moral and caring about the lives of others Shinji, which is this painful beating wretched thing that keeps going throughout even if we aren't shown what's going on between them, keeps this show into a high level.  

Shinji doesn't have that kind of umbilical cord connection a child has for a parent because the parent severed it before it could take shape.  One can feel the pain coursing through the spirit of the show, it's open and vibrant and about becoming so disillusioned and fucked-up that you don't know what to do with your capabilities anymore... Unless you are Gendo and an unflappable monster that is all about "the plan" (it's not called that, but you get the drift).

And then there is Asuka in episode 22 (and 24)... 🥺 It's almost like, a crazy thought but, perhaps the people in charge at Nerv could or should get these kids some therapy sessions... long, intensive, possibly pharmaceutical in addition, therapy (or a person to tell them Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting style it's not their fault). The boldness of the intricate and introspective montage of the previous episode is inverted in that 53 second long (!) Elevator shot - what faith in what we know about these characters, off the charts - where Asuka and Rei have this unfathomably awkward silence, and when Rei punctures it its like a release valve (but not quite enough, as it turns out later for this episode) for Asoka's rage and pain to come out.

Asoka, case in point, when feeling like she has a "Daddy" (or just any grown up to make her feel like she is worthy of affection):

And then when she has... had some issues:

As powerful and destructive as an Angel can be, they're no match for crippling trauma and disillusionment.... and episode 23 is also heart shattering. This show knows how to twist the knife and splinter you away (poor Rei!) This is a series that gets much stronger the more you're seeing these characters pushed past their psycho-spiritual breaking points, about their place in the world, in what life on earth even means if God is attempted to be "resurrected" by man. You know - stuff children watch. Do the filmmakers top that Elevator moment with the very long shot, scored to Beethoven, that becomes this nexus of existential quandary in fiction? Maybe!

Episode 25, meanwhile, feels... oddly like we finally do get to this bleak and sparse therapy session for many characters, and.... yes, I can absolutely see why fans were not happy. I find it slightly confounding, like the very convention-breaking inner-space ideas and approaches to narrative and experimentation, throughout, backfired.... 

If I was following this week to week, as it aired, and the penultimate episode moves away from resolving what is going to happen story-wise with the daddy Ikari and everything with that organization-council of talking black monoliths in that room, and it instead sent into this esoteric and even metaphorical exploration of what this world, all the pain and loss and heartbreak (and what idea taking another life does to Shinji especially) and has done to these characters... I'd be miffed!

Episode 26 (final)

So, episode 26... the Manic-Depressive immersion tank into existential and emotional anime a spin on... Duck Amuck I didn't know I was looking forward to in Neon Genesis: Evangelion. 

It is, quite easily, even more than Twin Peaks, the most uncompromising, deconstructive surrealist art in modern television. I love it as a creator Anno took more than half of the runtime of the finale to use dissociative
even poetic storytelling technique (another thought with all of the still images over the helpless tone of the narration is La Jetee, only for angst addled teens), and then he does finally get us back to the nearly combustible likability of the characters we've grown to know among the pilots, and... tonally, it is and it isn't consistent. Like, it does work in and of itself, but connecting it all together... not so much.

I can see why the fans were frustrated. And I can see why Anno got depressed enough when it was panned that he almost did himself in. When an artist puts themselves on the line, it can be a vulnerable position. On a more technical complaint front, it worked to have the still images of the characters in the first half, but in the second half it feels more like they ran out of money for animation and had to go to longer shots on stock images. This is all to say if it were a mid-season episode where Shinji learns, mentally kicking and screaming, to love himself or at least very kinder to himself in a consciousness-ripping event, I think me and everyone else would be much more understanding. As a finale, It's.... a lot.

But my rating still stands as this series overall is a landmark of science fiction storytelling and, in my not very deep but still appreciative knowledge, strikes me as an important moment for the development of animation in Japan. You have a story involving kids being trained to fight aliens in robots and, yeah, pretty straightforward. Then, at so many places and in these grandiose spots, Anno and his company upend the expectations by throwing in the unruly spectacle of charting what the characters' (forgive the phrase) inner landscape wrought for them.

"You won't always be who you are now. You'll learn that you make mistakes and regret them. That's me in a nutshell. A cycle of false elation and self Loathing. But each time, I made a little more sense. ... figure out who you are now. And when you've worked it out, make sure you come back." 

🎶 Well, I guess this is growing up 🎶 

Love sure is destructive, yeah. Meanwhile, when Asoka got her smash-all-in-sight MOJO back, I did a little applause break for myself. How I grew to love that character over the run of a show and into this movie that I initially found annoying- that's the power of engrossing character development, that's for sure. Tear that alien bastard into pieces, girl! And just as if not more impactful is when she hits (inevitably, I think) the point where her Eva can no longer go on the arrack and her mind and spirit get broken down...oh my God, what a crushing moment (with the sight of the Angels pulling away at the Eva like birds on a carcass).

Wow. This whole movie... what a gigantic meal of apocalyptic depth and earned ostentatious moves - by earned, I mean this could only fly after the filmmakers put in the work of the majority of the development (or annihilations) of the characters in the series. I would think if someone comes to this without the context of the show, it is bound to be while I would not doubt somewhat riveting on a visceral visual scale it could confound someone into a kind of delirium. 

The End of Evangelion is like having someone's entire mixed up, sex-baffled and abused, traumatized consciousness flowing out like a gaping wound of pain and frustration at a life lived in pain and the intractable and contradictory notion that one can feel like there is no point in being happy with oneself while the world ends around you. This is a film overflowing with unique, troubling, sorrowful, monstrous and sensually alluring images, the End of the World where we know the end is not something that can be avoided, so the question for Anno is personal: who are we going to ve when this ending comes? 

'Does it feel good?'

It is a furiously rousing, profound and deliriously action-packed acid trip of broiling and unstoppable feelings, and you really don't get the scale and scope and total don't give a flying fuck about what an audience is going to accept as any kind of conventional appeal - while at the same time truly improving on and expanding on the story conclusion that is cosmic. And by the time it gets to showing us the live action audience uh "watching" this creation from their theater, the dream has taken on this metatextual dimension that I have to think inspired... Ari Aster (?) Think Beau is Afraid only less Jewish and more about giant robots fusing and destroying the world...gulp.

I don't think I can properly *explain* what goes on in the last half hour of this except that if you have any kind of affinity for dreamscapes, giant women overpowering a giant organic-robot with psychic interrogations, and lots of blood. It approaches subjective perspective like it's a prospector digging even deeper to find that psychedelic-by-way-of-fantastical core of the universe. So, why do we live on? I dunno. But reality is found in places unknown, as the show says. 

All I can figure from this is it is close to impossible that this film (and the series in general) didn't help save someone's life at some point, probably more than a few  If you're a teenager with a particularly fragile and broken spirit, this series isn't one to make you despair, on the contrary it's like a very fucked-up series of embraces, like "It's okay, we know, I know.  It can be... tough being your age."

 This an epic work about keeping yourself alive... yes, even in the face of The End thanks to that darn effective Rei. I don't know if I made much sense in this write up, but there is so much to what Anno and his brilliant collaborators present here that I can't try to unpack it in a single review. I can only hope to go back to it some day, like with Twin Peaks and the Sopranos, as there are so many secrets to discover that Anno throws within shots or beats.

And... that's it, for now!

THREE films by THREE Italian masters (De Sica, Rossellini and Visconti)

So, this was in some planning for a short time to revisit these three directors (one of whom, Rossellini, I just saw again last December), and it is part of a "Top 100 Directors Challenge" project I have been working on the better part of this year on Lettetboxd.  It also turned out that a) one of these was due back at my library today so I didn't want to make something late on account of procrastination, and as timing would have it b) today is the start of the San Genaro festival in Little Italy in Manhattan.  So... yeah, kind of flimsy stuff for a blog, but it makes some sense to me to collect all three of these titles - Vittoria De Sica's Miracle in Milan (1951), Roberto Rossellini's General Della Rovere (1959) and Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice (1971) - in one place.  And there is lastly some sentimental value with these filmmakers for me as not only were they all supreme in my burgeoning film-loving college years, I ended up writing about all three of their post-war films for a major paper at the tail end of my undergraduate time.  

So.... here goes!  How did this pan out?  As well as one can expect: you win some, you lose some.  A few spicy auteur-balls! 

"I'm not anything. I'm just Toto."

Math isn't always so difficult for some people, Toto.  Just take a leap of faith - like the idea that a cop can start singing uncontrollably for his men to "Charge" - and then the other cops sing their songs too - at the poor citizens all because of a miracle.  If cops only were more like that.  

Miracle in Milan is an inspired, sometimes funny and captivating series of comic vignettes that is like a buffet of metaphors, though it is all about just one or two or maybe three of them (the cabbage patch, the dove, the smoke on the ground, the figures in black suits, take your pick).  Even a shot where a man is running away from a few dozen spinning top hats (symbols of the rich and elite) is meaningful as an act of defiance/a satirical 'screw you' against the ruling classes.  Maybe I'm reading too much into the class aspect of it all, but I don't know how I can't not see it, and as a Big Fat Fable it maybe gets at some societal truths Bicycle Thieves couldn't (albeit that is the greater and more impactful/tighter film).

It sometimes comes off like De Sica and screenwriter/novelist Zavatini mean for all this to be concerned more with the entire group of people in this situation of "Will they all have to leave" than even Toto (a constantly impassioned Golisano), the hero of the story, a young man who was found as a baby in a cabbage patch (he's a Cabbage Patch Kid(TM) before there was such a thing as trademarks) and after leaving an orphanage takes the lead in bringing together these despaired shanty-town poor people into a group (but lest no forget his dead grandmother will come help him in his time of need). 

 But it also feels like a grand Socialist parable/fable, about the collective so to speak, like if some of the more fantastical tones (and Townie aspects of us vs then) of It's a Wonderful Life crossed paths with the shanty town from My Man Godfrey, not to mention the Biblical Moses overtones (only instead of plagues it's... cops being forced to sing instead of violence and top hat shenanigans).    

This is all to say Miracle in Milan is pretty wonderful, even if it largely takes off by the second half; in the first, there is beautiful direction throughout, even a moment or two that made me extra emotional (salty discharge alert, damn you eyes), as De Sica makes it seem so easy when it took great lot of empathy and care for many of his non-professional but still brilliant players.  It may feel like it takes some time to cohere since it is fairly episodic in building up many of these side characters; even a bit like when the shanty townspeople have a little contest with a drawn number for a whole chicken for someone and the older guy who wins and sits and eats it in front of everyone (not sharing), while everyone else stares and there's this tension of inequality that they are (whether they all realize it or not) having to constantly fight against, is revelatory.  

And by the time we get to the scenes with the dastardly (but relatively commonplace) Capitalist Mr. Mobbi, it's amazing how simply the filmmakers show him to not be some mustache twirling a-hole, but just another in a long line of middling fat-cat men who see a piece of land as a game to win.  This doesn't mean some of the socio-political commentary isn't, uh, a *lot* like when the one black guy asks Toto (in his Peak Miracle Granting period late in the film) to become White and does, and then sees a girl who has on Blackface (eegh), or that there isn't a more powerful (yet painfully true) provocation in the commentary about how the miracles become all about getting Stuff and material things for the Poor folks, and what else can Toto do at a certain point.  

But Miracle in Milan is so satisfying precisely because De Sica and Zavatini love the people they have in this story, despite their foolish actions or how much they like having their stuff or their plot of land, anytime there is a close up it can hit you like a wallop (or a very tight hug, or both).  Toto is a memorable character, mostly because of his goodness being his attribute and his crutch, and even as things look bleak for everyone down the line he keeps up his enthusiasm and good cheer (until, well, he can't).  There's also a lot of batty ideas and visuals that make it so idiosyncratic and special, like Capra on steroids.  I liked it a lot.

 

A strong and at times profound and always good drama that has a few sketchy visual effects (the rear screen projection is pretty poor), and it runs a little long.  But my goodness, Vittoria De Sica gets the kind of writing and character that a thousand other actors would sell their kidneys for. 

 You get to see a full arc with Bardone, and it unfolds with enough time for the change to happen gradually: man who is quite charming and effective as a con-man in the first half who is, as a kind of emotional salesman, selling locals on the hope of seeing their loved ones again (for a price).  When one of these deals goes bust, he's arrested and given an "opportunity" to pose as a dead general that no one knows is really caput, and is put in jail to suss out who is so and so for a deal to get safe passage.  But that darn thing called humanity and not being a snitch bastard comes into play, and Bardone realizes he can't go *that* far into what the Nazis want.

It's an engrossing morality play, and if one can notice some of the lower budget this time - and I mean that as a mark against it, not something that adds to the verisimilitude and documentary-dramatic value like Rossellini's post war trilogy or Flowers of St Francis - that doesn't take away from how formidable, sometimes even humorous and tragic De Sica is in this role.  

What it comes down to seems to be this question: who are you when Fascism is crushing everyone around you, and who will you be if you don't stand up for those around you?  And there's some powerful dialog late in the film where a bunch of the Partisans (and Jewish resistance) facing certain Doom talk about doing "nothing" being the problem - what is the value of "something" - and while Bardone isn't part of this talk you can still feel him in the background, a witness to all of this. 

I'm impressed by the layers of actor-ly surface (one could say protection that De Sica pares down the longer the story goes as Bardone is beaten down (literally and figuratively), and by the end you almost forget what a charming talker Bardone was earlier in the story.  And it's not because he makes a grand speech or gets highly emotional, on the contrary the restraint is oddly palpable.  All that's left for the character is... solidarity in the demise.  Maybe not one of Rossellini's masterpieces, but so what?  It accomplishes much of what he sets out to do, despite some parts that are focused mostly on conversations and monologue.  

And you know what else?  Fuck Fascism wherever it is.

 "Do you know what lies at the bottom of the mainstream? Mediocrity."  

Okay, maybe Death in Venice isn't mediocre.  It's just supremely unsettling to be in this man Gustav's point of view.  Christ, I mean all those wandering shots from Gustav on that beach looking around with zooms in and out at all those happy beach goers and not one shark in sight? Boo.

For real though, I come to this film after seeing and loving the majority of the Luchino Visconti works before; when I was becoming more immersed in world cinema in my college years and since then, his operatic, melodramatic, fully grandiose and movingly It's-About-Then-AND-Now immersive style and approach to character and setting, not to mention evocative costumes and lighting and an entire world that felt all his own, marked him as a major talent and craftsman (whether in black and white and more "Realistic" like La Terra Trema or Rocco and His Brothers, or the intensely romantic/tragic La Notti Binachi from Dostoyevsky, or the giant color epics of love and loss and decay in The Leopard and Senso).  Even in the works I thought were just "good" before (L'Innocente or The Damned), there was a lot to chew on thematically.  Death in Venice is the first one of his to outright not only let me down but frankly bore me.

Maybe some of that could go back to the original source of Thomas Mann's novella (I might have even tried to read it at some point, I don't know, I know I had one of his somewhere in my collection), but perhaps in a first person introspective narrative is where this story has more room to engage someone.  The whole central thesis of this project seems to be to get one into the mind-set of an aging man who sees himself as over the hill, only to have some new perspective when, on holiday, seeing a young (much too young) foreign teen and having an infatuation with him ignites a longing for... him, or something.

 That can make for a dense character tale, on paper.  If you're a filmmaker taking on that kind of material, you have to be careful to keep it engaging not just on the level of lush colors and good lighting and locations, but also to make us care a little about the people we are seeing.  Or... care isn't even the word necessarily.  Look, this is fucking leering stuff; the POV is the key thing, as Gustav is looking on a this boy, on the beach, in the restaurants, walking with his family, and so on, and sometimes he is looking at others too but mostly it is at him. 

 A minor (ahem) spoiler but it is important to note he never acts on all of this.  One can almost picture the straight-on porn version of this being unreleasable past an Epstein party or something.  At the same time, maybe making this really sleazy and hardcore would have added... something to this (?)  But because we are kept at a deliberate distance and there is never even a moment where we get to learn at all about this boy past that he likes to play on the beach and has to listen to his mother lecture (in Polish), it leaves him as a story device... for over two hours (!)

At a point in the last quarter of the film, there is a turn where Gustav tries to make himself look younger through lots of hair dye and even a make up job that makes him look (I'm sure intentionally) like a clown almost.  There's even a beat - to make another timely icky reference - where the dye runs down his sweaty head and he looks Iike Rudy Giuliani in that one photo you've all seen.  In other words, that is an interesting angle for the story, that this guy's vanity and sense of wanting to impress this young man, not to mention in the midst of what is actually happening in Venice which is an outbreak of a virus that is making everyone sick and much less able to make it so inviting a city, and if the film had been more about that I could see myself at least finding it watchable as more about the decay of this man on his introspective road to middle aged ruin.

You might say to me "well, Jack, that's not the book."  And yet that wouldn't hold water since, as many reviews have noted, Visconti and his writer changed it already from the character being a writer to a composer and conductor in the film version, and frankly in a movie you should have license to do *whatever you want* with your story if you're already going that route anyway (ironically, from what I've read, the make up on Dirk Borgarde was not successful in Visconti's plan to make him look like Mahler, which was the whole intention behind the change and inclusion of his compositions, and instead he looked more like *Thomas Mann* the author, to which this whole story was largely based in something that happened to him while he was on holiday).  This is all to say that what we end up getting is a lot of Gustav walking around, or sitting, and looking on in awe (he later calls it love) and.... okay, so?!

I started this review off saying this film is unsettling, and while there are a few beats where I felt my skin crawl it is not necessarily that for the whole run time.  I'd even say Visconti does a decent (but nor great) job at making this infatuation ambitious inasmuch that we can't even be fully sure he wants to be even closer to this boy but cannot, and that it is all about seeing a young person and projecting a life of failures and problems on to the next generation that has more promise and energy and general allure and beauty.  

But at the same time, what's on the page makes this man to be a cold stuck up aristocratic kind of turd - the kind of figure of upper mobility this director already made much more compelling in the Leopard anyway - and Borgarde, while trying his best, can't make him all that interesting to watch for this amount of time. Maybe with someone else, ie Lancaster wanted the part or even James Mason as a turn on what he did in Lolita, at least we could attach to a great actor.  But Borgarde isn't, not to mention the intrusions of another actor to (in flashback) yell and berate Gustav that doesn't do much to illuminate us past that the guy sucks, and... I don't know, man. 

Maybe it just isn't for me.  Is it an icky sad-song for a would-be kid toucher/fucker?  I don't know if I can go *that* far.  But is it, for all of its lush cinematography and gloriously felt music, a wash as a drama?  Yeah.