slightly carla: day one

a couple of disclaimers before we get started: this week's list is a dream. all you jackals out there, all you bloodthirsty louts, you'll have to get your kicks elsewhere this time around. i know how much you enjoy watching me suffer and rip things to shreds during these li'l experiments. i just wanted you to know that there will be none of that this week. also, i have severely overbooked myself this week so this might extend beyond the usual seven days if i don't have adequate time to make it through carla's list.

that being said, here we go. day one was a program of effervescent classics beginning with ernst lubitsch's trouble in paradise (1932), the rosetta stone of romantic comedy.

if you don't know the work of ernst lubitsch then i recommend you rectify that as soon as possible. his films are among the most witty and elegant of hollywood's golden era and this pre-code jewel is probably the best example of what makes them so great. herbert marshall and miriam hopkins play a pair of thieves who fall in love while trying to swindle one another. realizing they are made for each other, they embark on a whirlwind, worldwide courtship, finally landing at kay francis' doorstep. they insinuate themselves into her household as confidante and secretary and put their plan into action to relieve her of several thousand francs. there's just one hitch - love rears its ugly head. it's truly brilliant. we are given a love triangle in which either option is equally viable, as opposed to the configurations we get today in which there is only one obvious, inevitable choice. at every turn, lubitsch gives us just what we need to keep the story moving briskly but in the least obvious manner. for example, we begin in venice, but instead of the standard opening shot of cityscape and canals imparting that information, we are offered a generic doorway and an overflowing trashcan. the contents are emptied onto a garbage scow that we learn is a gondola only as the shot expands to take in the city. in another instance we witness a pivotal romantic scene of the film with only a clock onscreen documenting the speed with which cupid works and offscreen dialogue. lubitsch never fails to find the least conventional way to tell the world's oldest story. he's never dull and never wasteful, every frame moving gracefully, fleetly along, always advancing the tale, beautiful to look at but never simply ornamental. the comedy itself is crisp and sexually charged, taking full advantage of freedoms that would be severely compromised before too long by the motion picture production code. the two female leads are only onscreen together twice but each scene crackles, their first meeting being a wry sparring match and their second being the inevitable showdown. it may be a little mannered and stagebound for some, but for the early sound era it is quite inventive and sophisticated and its influence is far-reaching. from this wellspring, we get everything from screwball comedy to gentleman thieves. it's lithe, lean and, most importantly, very funny. that lubitsch touch is on full display in this one.

next, we cut loose a little bit with howard hawks' ball of fire (1941).

on pedigree alone, this one is impressive. directed by hawks, written by billy wilder, starring gary cooper, barbara stanwyck, a young dana andrews and a houseful of the era's greatest character actors. cooper heads up a team of eccentric lexicographers who are stuck about halfway through the S's and to get the project moving again he goes out into the real world to do some research on his entry for slang. he meets nightclub singer and gangster's moll stanwyck who wields language like it was a thompson gun. she's the perfect research subject and, to avoid the pesky district attorney, she holes up with cooper and his fellow professors, a bawdy snow white to their newly-invigorated seven dwarfs, turning the house upside down while she teaches them the latest lingo. in the finest opposites attract tradition, cooper's straight arrow falls for stanwyck and counters the advances she made under false pretenses with a marriage proposal. she goes along with it, but only until she can marry andrews, which will relieve her from having to testify against him in court. wouldn't you know it, though? cooper's fresh-faced naivety wins her heart. as opposed to trouble in paradise, this one is more boisterous and offers no surprises. the plot is a bit silly but there are abundant pleasures to be found in the performances. gary cooper might as well own the patent on this kind of character. he can do it in his sleep but i'll be damned if he doesn't get me every time. his earnestness is disarming, his bumbling is adorable and if you don't pull for him then you must just be some kind of a jerk. stanwyck's performance is one of my favorites that she's ever put in, just the perfect mix and tough and sweet. she's a practical girl, and we all know how i like that, and their chemistry works well. best of all, the professors are a riot. you've seen their faces in the margins of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of some of hollywood's greatest films, but putting them all together in one house is a masterstroke. combine all that with dizzying linguistics and gene krupa playing a tiny drum solo with matchsticks and everything is jake.

there's a third film, perhaps my favorite of the bunch, that carla intended to be included in this opening cocktail and i am watching it as we speak, but there is no way i'll be able to finish and write it up tonight, as i have to be up for work at 6 a.m. i will include it in tomorrow's entry and then we'll take a walk at the dark end of the street.

keep one hand on your wallet and i'll see you tomorrow.

that sinking feeling

after fifteen years of blissful ignorance, this week i wandered into my local theater to take part in the 3D extravaganza that is the re-release of james cameron's titanic (1997).

now, if you're a regular around here you know it's generally my editorial policy to not spend time talking about movies i don't like. it only really comes up during queue de grâce weeks when what i am watching isn't up to me. i don't do this for a living so i usually have the luxury of only focusing on things i am excited about and want to share and i like it that way. i only make this exception because my other filmgoing experiences this week stand in such stark contrast to cameron's film and illustrate what i find so great and perplexing about the movies.

leaving titanic sunday night, i wasn't feeling much. i didn't like it, but it didn't go much beyond that. i felt disdain for cameron but that's nothing new. i tried to find a way to judge it based on how well it achieved its own aims but i couldn't find very much to acquit it even then. the positives - i love gloria stuart. i have since 1932, figuratively, and it was nice to see her, leo's boyish charm was well-used, unlike almost every other role he's done in the last decade where he looks like a child playing dress up in daddy's overcoat, kate winslet was beautiful and her costumes were immaculate, and it looked expensive. i am not sure that that's an achievement, as it cost 200 million dollars to make, but you could see dollars on the screen. that's about it. walking out of the theater that's all i had - an impressive technical spectacle, perhaps, but little else. as the hours wore on, though, something else crept in. you could possibly chalk this up to only getting three hours of sleep between the movie and going in to work the next morning, but i began to feel worse. the more i thought about the movie, the more i felt, for lack of a better phrase, bereft of hope. alone.

and i can't even attribute that to the content or presentation of the film. like i said, it could have been sleep deprivation. it could have been low blood sugar. it could have simply been a long, dark night of the soul that coincidentally rammed into an existential iceberg. all i know is my mood took a drastic downturn and the catalyst for it seemed to be this movie. slowly but surely, though, everything else i watched this week filled the sick void that cameron left behind. the first thing i saw in the wake of this was michael r. roskam's excellent bullhead (2011).

ostensibly a crime film, it turns out to be something much more poignant. this belgian import begins as a tale about the hormone mafia in the corrupt cattle industry, but quickly reveals a damaged heart built on childhood trauma and the making of a human monster. the hulking brute at the center of the story is sensitive and intuitive, demonstrating instincts his criminal brethren don't possess and a desire for love that is impossible. ultimately, be it because of how he is perceived by others or the result of a life of steroid abuse, he is just too much of a blunt instrument to bridge the gap. the finale reverts to crime film structure, but even that is handled well, as the section is cleverly edited as if he were a literal human bomb. even though the character comes to an end that is inevitable, it was blessedly not obvious. raise a glass to movies in which you can't tell everything that's going to happen twenty minutes ahead of time. titanic could have been exclusively about the two radio operators on board, as much as it was telegraphed. i don't understand why people want to pay for the privilege of knowing everything that's going to happen. why bother? bless bullhead for reminding me that not every film is made with cookie cutters.

the next reinforcements arrived in the form of pjer žalica's fuse (2003).

this excellent dark comedy was part of the austin film society's essential cinema series focusing on films of southeastern europe. this latest program is our local offshoot of los angeles' SEEFest and the screenings on 5.15.12 and 5.22.12 will actually be hosted by that festival's curator, vera mijojlic. set in the years just following the peace accord between bosnia and serbia, it follows the efforts of a small bosnian town to prepare for a visit from bill clinton. tensions between the bosnians and their neighbor serbs, with whom they are forced to put on their best cooperative faces, are never far from the surface. the gift of this film that titanic didn't come within twenty thousand leagues of? subtext. we americans are, fortunately, 150 years down the road from our experience with civil war. as with any subject that far in the dear, dim past, its impact is lessened, its history romanticized. when you have bosnians and serbs appearing together in a political film dealing, even peripherally, with their conflict, the screen almost cannot contain the subtext. filmed just a few years after they were literally committing atrocities against one another, the things unsaid between the characters and the actors portraying them are nearly overwhelming. i am afraid, without such grievous wounds so fresh in our collective memory that we cannot completely comprehend everything this film has to offer. we can certainly give it our best, though. it was a complex and entertaining reminder that we, the audience, have an equal responsibility to rise to the occasion when filmmakers put everything of themselves on the screen for our benefit. it's a mutually rewarding experience. give me something i can dig this deeply into and that offers me something new to think about every time i consider it. it was the antithesis to cameron's blockbuster, in which the only thing below the surface was leo in the final reel.

finally, we go tragic for tragic with werner herzog's complicated rumination on the death penalty, into the abyss (2011).

much like everything herzog does, it is not your garden variety examination of the subject. instead of overtly politicizing the already volatile subject matter, he instead traces the course of pain reverberating outward from a triple homicide in conroe, texas. his approach succeeds where titanic absolutely fails - putting an honest, identifiable human face on extraordinary tragedy. as just one example, when lisa stotler-balloun, whose mother and brother were two of the three victims, recounts how her family was essentially wiped out over the course of six years it is heartbreaking. relating the simple detail of how she got rid of every telephone she owned because she couldn't take another call that was bad news was better than anything james cameron is capable of writing. titanic's dialogue was written on a level just above catchphrase, obvious and clumsy, truly terrible. the performances weren't much better. by pointing his camera at regular people and giving them room to tell their stories, herzog captured ten times the emotion and a raw honesty that cameron can only dream of. it's truly a shame, because the story of that ill-fated ship is fascinating and rife with potential but when you dilute your story to the point that it's geared to appeal to the largest number of people as possible what you are left with is so bland and dumb as to be embarrassing. confident storytellers offer something unique. if it's done well the audience finds themselves in it, rather than having everything spelled out. i am grateful for an artist that has enough faith in himself that he refuses to pander and enough faith in his audience that he sees no need in making his message remedial.

it was insisted to me that i would like titanic. all i can figure is that somehow, inexplicably, my friends still don't understand what i go to the movies for. i don't go to waste my time on the obvious. i don't go to just "turn it off" and kill a couple of hours being mindlessly entertained. i don't buy the myth that thinking and fun are mutually exclusive. it may have hit all the right beats and functioned just like a blockbuster is supposed to but why do you want that if it offers you nothing beyond expensive clockwork? i know i don't. i don't find obvious inspiring. as bad as cameron's extravaganza made me feel, though, my week was saved by artists doing complicated, challenging, entertaining work.

no thanks to titanic, my heart will go on.

the first queue of spring

spring arrives with its promises of rebirth and revitalization and that seems like as good a time as any to get the ol' queue de grâce up and running again.

it's been a while so, as a refresher, here's how it works: for one full week i relinquish control of my streaming netflix queue to one of you fine folks. during the week, barring visits to actual theaters or screenings i host, i only watch what you have selected for me. no other films, no other television. i do not see a moving image unless it is one that you have selected. i then report back daily, detailing the ups and downs of a week in which i am buffeted by the winds of your cinematic inclinations.

our next guest programmer is miss carla shiflet. say hello, everyone.

i must admit, this is one that i am really excited about. carla and i share a fondness for bygone eras, language (archaic and otherwise) and we would both probably rather be in a movie theater than anywhere else in the world, though she would probably like hers a little warmer. growing up in that part of east texas where time stands still, it paid to be an imaginative kid and she was weaned on cassettes from the golden age of radio and louis l'amour books. she wasn't allowed to go to the picture show, which is actually what her folks called it, but has since made up for lost time. during the day she is an editor at houghton mifflin, though i suspect that is merely to fund an off-hours, non-stop bacchanalia of dusty 45s, vintage summer dresses, trips to the planetarium and, most importantly, movie tickets. i cannot wait to see what she has in store for me and i invite you to follow along as she takes the reins starting monday, 4.16.12. it should be a good one.

trailer tuesday

hey! the blog turned two yesterday! therefore, i am giving myself this present - this week's entry is for arthur hiller's the in-laws (1979). serpentine, shel!

these old houses

a few nights ago i went to the austin history center for their new exhibit, taking a walk down austin's cinematic memory lane.

to kick off their exhibit, the first picture shows: historic austin movie houses, they held an opening reception featuring a panel discussion with jay podolnick, jim maloy and john stewart. between the three of them, there is over a century of experience running family theaters and combined lifetimes spent in projection booths. we were treated to reminiscences of drive-in playgrounds, fireproof projection booths from the days before safety film, the desegregation of austin theaters and the ins and outs of keeping our town's moviegoers happy and entertained for the last few decades.

the exhibit itself is packed with hundreds of photographs, documents and blueprints from long-gone venues like the hancock opera house, the yale, the crescent, the varsity, the majestic (which later became my beloved paramount), the queen and the chief drive-in, tracing austin's moviegoing history from 1896 to the present day. combined with the personal, occasionally rambling panel discussion, the exhibit underlined for me a vital component that is too frequently missing from the moviegoing experience these days - community. a lot of these places were mom and pop joints and the excitement you can see in the faces of the people in the auditoriums, box offices and ticket lines goes beyond just having something to do to get out of the house. saturday nights were an event for these folks, and not because an unceasing media machine told them so. these theaters were hubs of activity with real ties to the community, gathering places. they weren't anonymous googleplexes with interiors designed like miniature casinos. they had true personalities.

we are fortunate in this town to still have theaters like the paramount, the violet crown and the alamo drafthouse - locally owned and operated, unique houses that are dedicated to bringing special, interesting cinema to austin's moviegoers. they still attempt to foster that sense of cinematic community, providing events you can be excited about, opportunities to get together with like-minded cinephiles and cinematic fare that goes beyond the everyday. if you'd like to celebrate that feeling and see how we got here you should drop by the austin history center and see this fine exhibit. it is free, open to the public and runs through 8.19.12. highly recommended.

trailer tuesday

this week's entry is for walter hill's the warriors (1979).

no hands!

two of vitagraph's favorite things - vincent price and rollercoasters. this would have been a perfect summer day.

trailer tuesday

this week's entry is for philip kaufman's adaptation of milan kundera's the unbearable lightness of being (1988).