trailer tuesday

christmas comes early to vitagraph with this week's entry! rare exports (2010) is a promising bit of scandinavian oddness that is currently generating a fair amount of interest at the toronto international film festival. forget everything you thought you knew about santa claus.

blood and thunder

one of my favorite novels, and one that has been perched atop the list of unfilmable books since its release in 1985, is cormac mccarthy's blood meridian, or, the evening redness in the west.

i've been re-reading this book lately and thinking about the notion of anything being unfilmable. i don't believe in the idea. it's cowardly. it reduces all that is potentially great about cinema to a paltry financial equation. if what it contains is so reprehensible as to be unfilmable, why, as a novel, was it also not as equally unwriteable or unreadable? i am simply unconvinced that there is not a group of talented people who are as willing to be as ruthless, cinematically, as mccarthy is with his pen. what these people mean when they say unfilmable is that it isn't good business. it would take an awfully bold patron to bankroll this one. when you cease worrying about a return on your investment, nothing is unfilmable. not one damned thing.

and it's a book full of damned things. damned things, damned people, a damned country. its savagery and brutality are unrelenting. if you make this thing, and you make it correctly, you would be setting a standard for subversive cinema that it would take a lot to eclipse. you could combine salò (1975), irreversible (2002) and antichrist (2009) and still not come close to the fury of what would be depicted in a film version that adhered closely to this source material. todd field is currently attached to the project as director. ridley scott was previously at the helm, but he jumped ship, which i am grateful for. scott would have made it an oversized spectacle, i fear. it seems, of late, that he is unable to do anything else. this is something that will be more frightening the more intimate it is. smaller is better. when the inhumanity is this boundless, your scale doesn't have to be. an example:

"everywhere there were horses down and men scrambling and he saw a man who sat charging his rifle while blood ran from his ears and he saw men with their revolvers disassembled trying to fit the spare loaded cylinders they carried and he saw men kneeling who tilted and clasped their shadows on the ground and he saw men lanced and caught up by the hair and scalped standing and he saw the horses of war trample down the fallen and a little whitefaced pony with one clouded eye leaned out of the murk and snapped at him like a dog and was gone. among the wounded some seemed dumb and without understanding and some were pale through the masks of dust and some had fouled themselves or tottered brokenly into the spears of the savages. now driving in a wild frieze of headlong horses with eyes walled and teeth cropped and naked riders with clusters of arrows clenched in their jaws and their shields winking in the dust and up the far side of the ruined ranks in a piping of boneflutes and dropping down off the sides of their mounts with one heel hung in the withers strap and their short bows flexing beneath the outstretched necks of the ponies until they had circled the company and cut their ranks in two and then rising up again like funhouse figures, some with nightmare faces painted on their breasts, riding down the unhorsed saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar bandylegged trot like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows. and now the horses of the dead came pounding out of the smoke and dust and circled with flapping leather and wild manes and eyes whited with fear like the eyes of the blind and some were feathered with arrows and some lanced through and stumbling and vomiting blood as they wheeled across the killing ground and clattered from sight again. dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair below their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming."

good luck with that, todd.

to be fair, he has made a couple of fine films, but nothing i have seen suggests to me that he has this in him. a couple of difficult domestic dramas are not the same as unleashing hell on earth.

casting is the other fly in the ointment. i can think of contemporary counterparts for most of the dreadful band of cutthroats we follow throughout the novel but i can think of no one that could inhabit judge holden. besides me, anyway. it's crucial that they get that right. those of you that have read the book feel free to play "who would you cast?" in the comments section. it's always fun and i'm always curious about other folks' ideas about this sort of thing.

judge holden action figure tie-in possibilities abound!

of course, all of these are moot points as the film remains stuck in development and i am sure no studio would take a chance like this right now. that doesn't make it unfilmable, though. it just means no one has both the money and the guts. it's a shame. someone stands to make film history.

a summer place

well, the summer is winding down and that always brings with it the bittersweet news that the paramount summer classics series is drawing to a close. it goes through sunday but, due to a busy schedule, i have visited the old girl for the last time this season. a long summer tour with the band and a busy work schedule made time pretty tight but i managed to see quite a few great films. here is a poster gallery of what i managed to take in. the earliest film represented is wings (1927) and it goes up through lone star (1996). they are arranged in chronological order of original release.

it's not all bad news, though. october, my favorite time of year, is just around the corner and one summer classics series ending just means i get to look forward with anticipation to when they announce the schedule for the next one. so long, row q. i'll see you in may, 2011.

trailer tuesday

this week's entry is for sergio leone's last western, duck, you sucker! (1971). also known, in some quarters, as a fistful of dynamite, this thunderous epic has one of ennio morricone's greatest scores. though it is often overshadowed by his earlier work with clint eastwood, this is one no leone fan should miss.

you can always count on mom

i come from a long line of okies. we're hardy plains folk. my forbears were always too busy making sure locusts didn't eat everything they owned and choking on dust to have existential crises, much less cash in on them to the tune of millions of dollars.

my mom went to see eat pray love (2010) this week and she sums it up better than i ever could.

"i can't get with that 'finding yourself' bullshit. now, the finding food, james franco and javier bardem part, i'm totally down with."

elizabeth gilbert's net worth is approximately 25 million dollars. if there were any justice in this world my mother's would be at least double that and this is what we would all be going to see instead...

swinging london

the low budget horror gem death line (1972), which is known here in the u.s. as raw meat, has a lot of things going for it.

most of them are are not actually accurately depicted in that poster, but i like the poster all the same.

death line tells the story of an ongoing series of disappearances in london's underground. a long-forgotten tunnel accident left a group of workers trapped, assumed killed, and they were forced to resort to cannibalism to survive. now, in 1972, the inbred, plague-ridden descendants of the survivors subsist on a steady diet of unlucky subway passengers. it's deftly handled, as exploitation fare goes, with a dose of black humor and pathos ("mind the doors!"). the decay of our antagonist's "home" is a grim sight. the putrefaction comes right off the screen and the film indulges in it with some beautiful long takes. the rapid-fire editing that we have, unfortunately, become accustomed to has no place here. the monster, as the best monsters often are, is a tragic figure, ultimately. who knew ian anderson from jethro tull was so talented?

ok, so it's not ian anderson. it's hugh armstrong.

at any rate, it's quite a good B picture, and its ambition and skill certainly place it head and shoulders above most of its cannibalistic brethren. i recommend it for just about anyone but it's especially full of treats for genre fans, because...

the filth and gore are effectively creepy.

the inspector in charge of the case is none other than donald pleasence.

and christopher lee drops by!

plus, if you are a devoted follower of fashion, you are offered a feast of 1972 styles via our juvenile leads.

and, if all that isn't enough to sell you, i saved the best for last. the real reason i even started this post was as an excuse to show you guys one of my favorite opening credit sequences. we meet our first victim, james manfred (o.b.e., no less) in a haze of dirty bookstores and peepshows. the score cranks up the sleaze factor as we take a four minute spin through london's seamier side with our knighted, and benighted, tour guide. we are spending his last evening on earth together, in and out of red light shops, in and out of focus. check out this clip then check out the film.

shadows and fog

i just started digging into the new 3 silent classics by josef von sternberg box from the criterion collection this week. the set contains underworld (1927), the genesis of the gangster film genre, the last command (1928), one of emil jannings' greatest performances, and the film i wanted to talk about today, the docks of new york (1928).

the plot is simple, pure melodrama. bill roberts, a stoker on overnight leave from his ship, has it in mind to prowl the docks of new york for an evening's revelry. almost as soon as he sets foot on land, though, a wrench is thrown into the works. mae, a denizen of the docks with a less than savory reputation, throws herself into the drink in an attempt to end it all. bill rescues her, finds her shelter and they begin a whirlwind courtship that ends with them getting married in the sandbar, a dive if ever there was one. jealousy enters the picture in the form of andy, third engineer on bill's ship and bill's superior. andy is enamored of mae, even though he is married, and, in the final act, makes unwanted advances on her. lou, andy's long-suffering wife, follows him to mae's room and puts a couple of slugs in him. bill, his leave at its end, goes back to his ship but can't get mae out of his head. he jumps overboard and swims back to shore just in time to find mae in the dock (get it?), up on charges for stealing the clothes she is wearing. it turns out, bill actually swiped them for her so she could have something dry to put on after he pulled her out of the harbor. he confesses and gets tossed in the clink for six months but not before mae says she'll wait for him.

pretty standard stuff in 1928. pretty standard stuff now, for that matter. melodrama doesn't tend to change an awful lot. we're not here for the story, though. we are here for how it's told. there is an intersection of talent here that resulted in what is possibly the last great film of silent cinema. just a year prior, the jazz singer (1927), ushered in the era of the talking picture. al jolson's voice sounded as the death knell for the silent form. unfortunate, in a way, because if you look at the list of silents produced in 1928 it is painfully evident that these filmmakers were just beginning to hit their stride. in a number of ways, craftsmanship went out the window for a while with the introduction of sound and people seemed to be settling for the novelty of it without caring about much else. the docks of new york certainly provides a stunning document of what was sacrificed.

practically every frame is masterfully composed. cinematographer harold rosson and set designer hans dreier complemented von sternberg's vision of the docks by shrouding it in a nearly impenetrable fog and providing expressionistic backdrops that combine to make it almost otherworldly.

that's no mean feat, to pull off this level of artistry and still maintain the reputation for realism in social drama that von sternberg had. i don't think i can overemphasize just how much there is to look at in almost every shot. it's all done with great economy and style. what would be overly busy in less talented hands is rich with necessary detail here. even the scenes in the sandbar, riotous and calamitous as they are, take advantage of the little details.

in this pivotal scene, which revolves exclusively around the two principles, you can observe what is happening in the room via the mirror. it's action that would have been easy to imply with sound, but vital to portray in silent cinema. nothing that will allow you to immerse yourself in the experience is left out or half-done. there is a staggering amount of technique on display but it never feels like an exercise.

all of that said, though, you can't sell melodrama without a fair dose of humanity and the cast also transcends the material as written. george bancroft is fine as bill. you never have any doubt that he is, as he puts it, "just a dirty stoker". barrel-chested, not exactly refined, he enjoys nothing more than squeezing all the life out of an overnight leave. olga baclanova inhabits lou's skin about as well as a woman could. she can booze and brawl with the best of this lot and she's had just about enough of you, buddy. and then there's betty compson. every glance is shot through with resignation. every breath is a capitulation. she is carrying the weight, to be sure.

but it's not just her. it's everyone. every single character that lives, drinks, fights and loves on the docks carries that weight. they don't want pity for it. it's their lot. maybe, for mae, bill is her brass ring. the kid's got to take her shot, right? so they get married, why not? like light on water, throughout this seventy-five minutes, you see these glimmers of hope, even though everyone down here knows better. you see it when the pastor performs the ceremony in spite of himself because he sees how much it means to mae. even though every movement is rough and brusque, there is tenderness in the way they talk to each other forged out of a shared desperation. the characters lack the sophistication to even express it but somehow they manage. the fact that we all know it's going to come to nothing, most especially mae, only makes it that much more poignant.

it's a shame it all had to end.

another iron in the fire

i apologize to you folks that are getting this news multiple times with all of our cross-pollination here but we're kind of excited about getting the word out about our new enterprise.

my friend, bobby munoz, and i are starting a new podcast called criterion by the numbers. it will be an examination and appreciation of the films in the criterion dvd library starting with spine number 1, jean renoir's the grand illusion (1937) and, honestly, just going as far as we can. as of this posting, they are at spine number 534 and are releasing titles at a steady clip so we doubt we'll cover the whole thing but we will do our damndest to get as far as we can.

the goal is pretty much like what we do here at vitagraph, american. we'd like to encourage discussion among the folks who are already familiar with these films. revisit them with us, discover something you might have missed or confirm suspicions long-held, check in on old friends. for people who might not have had a chance to see them we hope our enthusiasm for these films encourages newcomers to find out exactly what is so great about the work the criterion collection does. with any luck, there will be a little something for everyone.

episode 000 is up now. it's just a little introduction so you can get to know us a bit. give it a listen if you have time and please feel free to pass it along to any friends you think might be interested. comments and email, as always, are encouraged and appreciated.

thanks for tuning in.