Filed under: Guest Blogger, High Museum, Top Picks | Tags: angels, archangel, john travolta, legion, leonardo da vinci, michael, movie trailers, paul bettany, wim wenders
As Leonardo’s angels prepare to take flight (the exhibition ends on February 21), here are a couple of movies to fill the radiance gap.
Wings of Desire
(Linda Dubler)
There are some movies so precious to memory that they are best left there. That’s the way I feel about Wings of Desire, which I saw in a hormone-heightened state (I was pregnant at the time) upon its release in 1988. But just because I won’t go back again doesn’t mean you shouldn’t — and if you’ve never seen Wings Of Desire, what a gift awaits you!
The film opens with an extended, lyrical reverie, in which we are privy to the watchful existence of two angels who listen in on the thoughts and dreams of Berliners as though their combined consciousnesses were a really big party line. The mood of this sequence is tender and ruefull; the angels can tap in, but can’t change whatever sorrow or obstruction they might witness. In his review of the film , Rogert Ebert nails this sequence when he writes, “it moves slowly but you don’t grow impatient, because there is no plot to speak of, and so you don’t fret that it should move to its next predictable stage. It is about being, not doing.”
As I recall, the whole movie becomes more earthbound when one of the angels, played by Bruno Ganz, falls in love with an acrobat in a faded little circus, and trades his wings for human emotions. But even then director Wim Wenders suffuses his work with gentle humor and a sublime combination of appreciation and resignation over our species’ vulnerability and love’s transcendence.
Angels in America
(Linda Dubler)
If you haven’t seen Mike Nichols’s brilliant adaptation of Tony Kushner’s epic, multi-award winning play, add it right now to the top of your Netflix queue or make it your next selection at the video store. A sprawling, furious, inspired epic that opens in October, 1985, the six hour, two-part drama, in the words of Variety’s Todd McCarthy, ” retains all the immediacy of Kushner’s passionate foot-stomping about AIDS, the Reagan years, political and personal hypocrisy, compassion, the Mormons, spirituality and so much more.”
If it now seems like a period piece, it still carries an enormous emotional charge, thanks to the prodigious acting by a cast that includes Al Pacino (and not a scene-hogging, grandstanding Al Pacino either), Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, Jeffrey Wright, and Mary-Louise Parker among others. Make sure you clear your calendar because once you start watching you won’t be able to turn away from the screen.
Legion
(Eleanor Ringel Cater)
Legion s an agreeably cheesy celestial smack-down currently in movie theaters (for now!) Paul Bettany (best known as Russell Crowe’s’s doctor pal in Master and Commander and soon to be seen as Charles Darwin in Creation stars as Michael, a now-fallen angel trying to keep a disgruntled God from having His latest command carried out. Namely, to destroy Mankind!
Michael ends up watching over what may be the new Messiah; that is, defending a pregnant woman and various, um, characters at a remote diner. A lot of it is along the lines of, “This Time, It’s Personal!!!,” but as I said, sometimes that’s what you’re in the mood for: Wrestlemania with wings — and guns. At its best it recalls the cult classic Tremors.
Michael
(Eleanor Ringel Cater)
- John Travolta in Michael
Filed under: Film Series: High, New DVD Release, Top Picks | Tags: at home, danish film festival, denmark, dvds, mads mikkelsen, rent, susanne bier
Keep the Danish Film Festival vibe alive at home with these terrific movies featured in past festivals at the High.
Adam’s Apples
The extraordinarily prolific and talented writer/director Anders Thomas Jensen (who wrote Brothers, After the Wedding, Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself, and Stealing Rembrandt, among other pictures) wrote and directed this wry and subversive black comedy. It explores punishment and redemption through the story of Adam, a neo-Nazi youth who’s sentenced to perform community service at rural half-way house. The program is based in a tiny country church and run by Ivan (Mads Mikkelsen), a blindly optimistic priest who excels at turning the other cheek. With rehabilitation in mind, Ivan demands that Adam set a goal — any goal — for himself. Adam’s snide reply — “I’d like to bake an apple pie” — results in a major commitment: he’s assigned the task of guarding an apple tree on the church grounds until the fruit is ripe enough to pick. As he waits out Mother Nature, he has plenty of time to get to know the two other cons — a kleptomaniac who preys on women and an anti-capitalist Afghani immigrant who robs gas stations belonging to multi-nationals — as well as a homeless pregnant woman (Paprika Steen). A dark comedy, even by Danish standards (where it’s not unheard of for suicide and child abuse to be given a bleakly comic twist), Adam’s Apples won three Roberts, Danish cinema’s highest award.
After the Wedding
Susanne Bier is a brilliant director of actors who excels at bringing complex, contradictory characters to the screen. She followed up her gripping drama, Brothers (remade in English by the British director Jim Sheridan, with Tobey Maguire and Jake Gyllenhaal as the warring siblings) with After the Wedding, a haunting exploration of love, deception, and responsibility. At the story’s center is Jacob (the ubiquitous, charismatic Mads Mikkelsen), a Dane living in India who manages a cash-strapped orphanage there. Jacob’s single-minded devotion to the children, including his adopted son, is tested when a potential donor, Jorgen (a dangerously hale and hardy Rolf Lassgard) offers a desperately needed donation only on the condition that Jacob travel to Copenhagen. Reluctantly he agrees, but once back in Denmark discovers that courting Jorgen will involve more than a simple meeting. Pressured into attending the philanthropist’s daughter’s wedding, he dons a tux and drives to the party, where events unfold that will profoundly reshape the future for not only Jacob, but Jorgen and his family as well. In his Los Angeles Times review, Kenneth Turan wrote that “Susanne Bier mainlines emotion. She has a connection to feelings and passions that is as direct and potent as an addict’s needle piercing a vein. Her fierce and compelling dramas . . . serve it up straight, no chaser, and dare anyone to flinch.”
The Monastery: Mr. Vig and the Nun
If the portraits of cranks and obsessives made by documentarists Werner Herzog and Erroll Morris are your cup of tea, then check out The Monastery, an oddly endearing, seriously funny film that offers definitive proof that truth is stranger than fiction. It’s the story of an ornery retired parish priest and confirmed bachelor named Mr. Vig who nurtures the dream of turning the crumbling castle he calls home into a monastery.
The Monastery
This mission leads him to contact the Russian Orthodox Church, whose officials are intrigued but not entirely sold on the offer. They decide to send out an exploratory force of nuns, led by Sister Amvrosija, a vigorous, determined woman half Vig’s age whose take charge attitude quickly sets her at odds with her host. The battle of wills is on, and director Pernille Rose Gronkjaer captures it in what Eye for Film’s Andrew Robertson called “a wonderful little film, a delightful portrait of two very different characters . . . a meditation on the nature of faith and desire.”
Just Another Love Story
Of course it’s not. Just Another Love Story is a deliciously convoluted romantic thriller that explores the allure of the unknown and the thrill of assuming a new identity. Its protagonist, Jonas, is a crime scene photographer who is happy enough with his career, marriage, and fatherhood. Then he’s involved in a car crash. Jonas and his family are unharmed, but the other driver, an emotionally distraught woman named Julia, falls into a coma. When Jonas turns up at the hospital for a visit, her family mistakes him for Julia’s mysterious boyfriend, Sebastian, who she met recently while traveling in Vietnam. Jonas doesn’t correct them, and when Julia awakens, amnesia-ridden and partially blind, she takes Jonas to be her lover, a role he hungrily embraces. But the past has a way of catching up, and as in any noir worth its shadows, it has a bloody grip.
Linda Dubler
Filed under: Uncategorized
Our annual Danish Film Festival begins this Friday. Learn more here or check out reviews by Curt Holman in Creative Loafing this week:
Slick suspense defines Danish Film Festival
During the mid-1990s, a vow of chastity turned up the heat on Danish cinema.
In 1995, the Dogme 95 movement called on filmmakers to reject cinematic artifice and work under 10 aesthetic restrictions, including only using natural lighting, locations and hand-held cameras, etc. The movement essentially required directors to focus on the story and acting, rather than special effects and other narrative distractions. Whether or not the Dogme vow made films more inherently “truthful” remains an open question, but it clearly provided for a vibrant, creative period and sense of shared endeavor.
Dogme films tapered off by the early 2000s. Today, Danish filmmakers seem to revel in throwing out their chastity rings and embracing the slickest aspects of the cinematic craft.
Filed under: Guest Blogger, Review | Tags: Atlanta Jewish Film Festival, comedy, dysfunctional family, film, high museum of art, latin american film festival, Review
Nora's Will
If you missed Nora’s Will at the High’s 2009 Latin American Film Festival, here’s your chance to catch it. It screens at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival on Sunday, January 17 at 1 p.m. (introduced by Linda Dubler) and Friday, January 22 at 3:40 p.m. (introduced by Eleanor Ringel Cater).
Visit www.ajff.org for more information, and read on for Eleanor’s review of the film.
Filed under: General, Top Picks, Watching Now | Tags: comedy, documentary, dr. zhivago, drama, ice, iceland, inuit, movies, nanook of the north, snow, snow day, weather, winter
As we collectively emerge from the recent deep freeze, let’s not lose those afghans, Snuggies and warm couch companions just yet. Here are a handful of snow films as chilly as any Hitchcock blonde.
McCabe and Mrs. Miller.
Robert Altman’s revisionist western is notable for all sorts of reasons, from its Leonard Cohen score to its brilliant pairing of Julie Christie as a savvy, opium-smoking madame and Warren Beatty as her smitten business partner, a gambler and a romantic fool. The film ends in an extraordinary gun battle during a blinding snowstorm, a masterpiece of choreography and cinematography.
Nanook of the North
Enormously popular when it was first released in 1922, Robert Flaherty’s landmark documentary about an Inuit hunter and his family has been restored and released with a new score by Criterion. The film, which was financed by a French fur company and shot near Hudson Bay, isn’t a pure work by any means–(Nanook’s wives and children were played by people who weren’t his wives and kids; a scene in which Nanook fights to land a harpooned seal was completely staged)–but as Ephraim Katz observed in The Film Encyclopedia, “What made Nanook so remarkable was not its validity as an anthropological study of an exotic ethnic group but its success in capturing the essence of primitive man’s struggle for survival against the hostile forces of nature.”
Noi the Albino
If you felt stir-crazy after being cooped up for a day or two in Atlanta, (where a recent glimpse outside revealed greenery frosted with snow) try trading places with Noi, a poster boy for teenage alienation hailing from the bleak, colorless end of nowhere otherwise known as Iceland. This very deadpan comedy about a Nordic rebel is for those who prefer absurdist situations to jokes, and who like their humor espresso dark.
Dr. Zhivago
Who knows how many animals sacrificed their skins so that women around the world could wear fur hats like Lara’s in Dr. Zhivago? Or how many human nerves were frayed by the tinkling of music boxes playing her theme? Dr. Zhivago was roundly booed by critics upon its release in 1965, but the public ate it up.
When it was restored and revived for its 30th anniversary, Roger Ebert declared that it was “an example of superb old-style craftsmanship at the service of a soppy romantic vision, and although its portentous historical drama evaporates once you return to the fresh air, watching it can be seductive. ” Ebert observed that “the story, especially as it has been simplified by [director David] Lean and his screenwriter, Robert Bolt, seems political in the same sense Gone With the Wind is political, as spectacle and backdrop, without ideology.”
And like Gone With the Wind, it’s the epic sweep, and all that snow, that impresses. Lean built an ice palace out of wax, and resorted to simulating snow with marble dust and plastic during filming in Spain at the height of the summer.
Still yearning for a polar blast? Consider Fargo, March of the Penguins, Encounters at the End of the World, or the Turkish film Climates. And here’s a great YouTube video:
Have any favorite snowy movies? Post them in the comments!
Linda Dubler
Filed under: 5 Questions, Film Series: High, Top Picks | Tags: film, gone with the wind, hemingway, independent films, latin american film festival, Murphy NC, public library
Julie Chautin is an avid film viewer who programs films for the Murphy, N.C. Public Library and writes about them for local publications. She and her husband Jerry are longtime supporters of the High’s annual Latin American Film Festival.
Julie Chautin
Is there a film that changed your life?
I don’t know if it changed my life, but I nearly shouted out at a screen in a crowded theater when I saw Alfonso Cuaron’s film, A Little Princess. Near the end of the story, the father returns from war and doesn’t recognize his daughter. Thanks to Cuaron’s direction, I was so pulled into that film that I had to stop myself from yelling, “Look at her! That’s your daughter.” My reaction shocked me.
What’s more, I almost didn’t see it at all. Eleanor Ringel wrote an item in the Atlanta Journal Constitution to go see A Little Princess before it left the local theaters. She added something like “You’ve trusted me before, haven’t you?” It made me laugh, but trust builds up between a reader and a movie reviewer. And they open doors you may not even see.
What’s the first movie you remember seeing?
My parents used to take my brothers and sister and me to the movies at the Fox Theater in downtown Detroit. And sometime in the 1950’s, Gone with the Wind was re-released. I remember sitting wide-eyed as Scarlet walked among the wounded soldiers. I also loved old movies on television. Marx Brothers movies like A Night at the Opera. My sister and I would watch It Happened One Night whenever it came on.
How has programming films for audiences in Murphy, North Carolina, changed the way you view movie going?
It’s a lot of fun to program movies, and I do look at movies wondering if the Murphy audience might also enjoy them. The weekly newspapers publish my movie reviews and that has made all the difference in getting the word out.
Film Movement, an indie film distributor has a special program for libraries. Their film A Simple Curve used woodworking as the framework for a story. Murphy is about ten miles away from the John C. Campbell Folk School where they teach arts and crafts. So the film got a lot of attention.
A Simple Curve
Sometimes I’ve been able to add another dimension to the movie going experience. When we showed Sideways I brought a bottle of Pinot Noir and everyone had a little taste. My friend Nora King, a former Atlantan who now lives in Murphy, brought over a special snack when we showed Babette’s Feast: fried quail. After watching Babette cook for two hours, we had a taste of what she had been serving.
In a small town library you often can get a sense of people’s own stories. Recently for the 9/11 anniversary I showed The Guys, the film about a fire chief writing eulogies for his men lost in the Twin Towers. A local fireman came with his daughter to see the movie and at some point he had to leave the room when his emotions got the best of him.
You’ve been part of the High’s Latin American Film Festival for many years. Would you share a favorite moment or memory of the festival?
Anyone who’s attended the Latin American Film Festival knows it’s full of great films. The friendships that grow among the moviegoers are the added bonuses.
One of LAFF’s early films was Hello, Hemingway about a young girl in 1950’s Cuba. She lived in the beach area where Earnest Hemingway had his house. After the film a man, a stranger, told me his family had emigrated from Cuba decades before. And just like in the movie, they had lived down the road from Hemingway! He was so excited to see his old neighborhood in that film. His name is Marcus Maya and he comes every year to the festival. He’s not a stranger anymore – he’s family.
Hello Hemingway
And, Linda, another of my favorite memories is opening night about ten years ago. After you’d been studying Spanish awhile, you gave your welcoming speech in Spanish. I thought the audience would clap. I was wrong. No one clapped. They were too busy cheering! They already appreciated the festival bringing cinema from their native countries to Atlanta. And now you’re learning their language? Everyone was touched.
Five movies that Films at the High audience members should see this year?
I loved The Visitor; The General with Buster Keaton. Film Movement films, Arranged, A Simple Curve and Adam’s Apples.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Eleanor Ringel Cater picks:
The Belly of an Architect
The Belly of an Architect
This is Peter Greenaway’s (The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover) disquieting examination of tummies, tumors and artistic turmoil. An American architect, played by Brian Dennehy is invited to Rome to organize an exhibit in honor of an obscure French architect. Once there, this self-deluded, arrogant man is taught a lesson or two straight from the Book of Job. Some may find the movie both hard to stomach and hard to fathom — it’s a haughtily oblique art film, preying on our fears of mortality and decay while at the same time giving us a connoisseur’s architectural tour of Rome. Luckily Dennehy is on hand. His risky, opulent performance gives a crucial emotional core to Greenaway’s cold vision of death among the ruins. Watching him go belly up is what anchors this demanding, uncompromising film.
The Towering Inferno
This time the architect is a very sexy Paul Newman, but guess what he’s designed? That’s right: a towering inferno, aka, a very big but very badly-built office center. Before you can rattle off the name stars, ranging from Steve McQueen to Faye Dunaway to Fred Astaire to William Holden to Jennifer Jones to O.J. Simpson, the damn thing’s on fire. This was sort of a gold standard for disaster films in the ‘70s. The Poseidon Adventure may have opened first, but how can Shelly Winters compare to Fred Astaire?
Interestingly, McQueen was originally offered the role of the architect but after reading the script, he decided the fire chief had more heroic possibilities. He also counted each character’s number of lines of dialogue and, upon finding that Newman had a few more, demanded the amount be made equal. It was.
Dead of Night
Martin Scorsese recently named this one of the 11 (yes…eleven) scariest movies of all time. Made in England in 1945, it’s an anthology horror movie, with five spooky stories all revolving around an architect’s recurring dream. Unfortunately for him (and the rest of the cast) it re-occurs while he’s visiting an isolated country house. As they say, déjà vu all over again. Some segments are better than others, the most celebrated one starring Sir Michael Rennie as a ventriloquist who starts having trouble with his dummy. Real trouble. Chucky trouble…
Filed under: High Museum, Top Picks | Tags: architects, artists, ayn rand, genius, kirk douglas, robert osborne, steve mcqueen, the fountainhead
Ever notice how the default profession for artistic, but not completely cuckoo, characters in the movies is architect? As TCM’s Robert Osborne has observed, “With architects, you have an image of someone above reproach and not damaged, the way lawyers and judges and even doctors have been. There are very, very few professions that still have a ring of heroism about them, and architecture is one of the few that does. If an architect is portrayed going off the deep end, it’s always because he is so committed to what he’s doing that it’s an honorable thing. And it’s one of the last manly professions — you’re building something outdoors.” The High’s current exhibition, John Portman, Art and Architecture, on view through April 18, has us thinking about the way the practice of architecture is shown on screen. Here are a few noteworthy films to sample.
Strangers When We Meet
Strangers When We Meet
Made during the era when the Playboy lifestyle defined hip masculinity, Strangers When We Meet stars Kirk Douglas as Larry, a self-employed architect with a bad case of the My Ways and Kim Novak as Maggie, an affection-starved housewife determined to honor her marriage vows. Larry’s wife thinks he should stick with safe projects sure to pad their bank account; Maggie’s husband is a withholding stick-in-the-mud who makes her feel like a tramp for wanting sex. When Larry spies the platinum-haired goddess disguised as a suburban mom at the school bus stop, he falls hard. Soon he’s inviting Maggie to visit the construction site of a signature house he’s building for a womanizing, best-selling author (Ernie Kovacs), and wooing her in dimly lit cocktail lounges. The film’s sexual politics hint at the feminist revolution to come, as well as the dawning of the Swinging Sixties, while the set design and costumes will delight fans of mid-century Modern style. Not satisfied with constructing a mere set, Columbia Pictures built a house in Bel Air that was renovated in 2003 and stands to this day.
The Black Cat
Apart from its blazing campiness, The Black Cat is worth watching for its stunning Bauhaus-inspired production design (as much a part of the action as the battling protagonists played by Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff). Director Edgar Ulmer, affectionately known as the King of the B’s (as in B movies) sets the action in the fortress-like home of a demonic architect (Karloff, in a role inspired by the Satanist Aleister Crowley), who has built his retreat on the graves of thousands of Hungarian soldiers whose lives he intentionally sacrificed during World War I. The plot owes nothing to Poe, and the acting is absurdly over the top, but oh those chrome railings and shining expanses of curved white wall!
The Fountainhead
Any mention of architects on the screen has to include The Fountainhead (based on Ayn Rand’s novel), and no one has written about it more deliciously than Pauline Kael. In 5001 Nights at the Movies she rhapsodizes, “Can people who see this picture ever forget the sight of the silvery-blonde columnist Dominique (Patricia Neal) galloping up on her black horse and slashing her riding crop across the face of the tall, mocking stranger who has looked at her impertinently while he was using a pneumatic drill in the quarry? He’s the genius architect Howard Roark (Gary Cooper). . . King Vidor directed this paean to the individualism of “superior” people, made in a sleek, hollow, Expressionist style that owes a lot to film noir. It’s an extravaganza of romantic, right-wing camp, with the hyper-articulate Roark standing in the wind on top of a phallic skyscraper, and the fierce, passionate Dominque rising in an open elevator to join him there.”
Filed under: High Museum, Review, Top Picks | Tags: 1941, barton fink, bringing up baby, bucket of blood, coen brothers, david cronenberg, eve, genius, hunter s. thompson, johnny depp, las vegas, leonardo da vinci, peter weller, sullivan's travels, william s. burroughs
Some artists ––– oh, say, Leonardo Da Vinci —— are known for their discipline and concentration. Consider the number of sketches he made for a horse statue that was never completed. Others, however, have taken the tack that to be an artist or an intellectual, you must somehow be undisciplined, clueless, and/or completely self-absorbed. THOSE are the kind Hollywood likes. After you’ve been awed by Leonardo at the High’s Hand of the Genius exhibition at our 12-hour artfest Go All Night, why not visit with some of his lesser brethren?
Eleanor Ringel Cater’s picks:
Barton Fink
Barton Fink (1991)
Leave it to the brothers Coen to come up with something as hilariously berserk and mind-teasingly perverse as this surreal black comedy about (of all things) writer’s block. A High-minded New York playwright, Barton Fink (John Turturro) is lured to 1941 Hollywood to give “that Barton Fink feeling” to a Wallace Beery wrestling movie. On one level, the film is about Fink’s Day-of-the-Locust encounters with moguls, producers and washed-up self-loathing Southern writers who’ve sold out to the flicks. But then there’s also the Earle, the hotel where Barton is holed up to write his masterpiece. A hotel worthy of The Shining, it’s also home to genial traveling salesman, John Goodman, who’s got stories to tell. LOTS of ‘em. The picture is a brainy goof, fleshed out by the brilliant performances, the rich production design and the Coen’s ever-clever camera. It’s as bleakly funny and tantalizingly obtuse as a Beckett on-act. I’ll give you the life of the mind…..
Naked Lunch (1991)
It will eat you alive if you’re not well-versed in the coded cool of Beat junkie icon, William S. Burroughs, or the insect-infected visions of director David Cronenberg (The Fly). And even if you are, this mercilessly exacting black comedy will leave its teeth marks on you.
Part biography, part literary adaptation, the film is less a literal rendering of the writer’s scandalous 1959 novel than a jazz-riff interpretation. Turning down the role of Robocop 3 (!), Peter Weller is the Burroughs surrogate who travels from 1953 New York to the Interzone — a kind of surreal Tangiers of the mind, populated by sweaty addicts, decadent ex-patriots and typewriters that mutate into giant talking bugs. However, those less than enthralled with Burroughs’ masturbatory self-infatuation may find this daring demanding picture something of a Pyrrhic victory. That is, more worthily done, perhaps, than worth doing.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)
Too much is never enough for fabled gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson and director Terry Gilliam. You could almost say they are a match made in excess heaven (or hell). This is Hollywood’s second attempt to translate Thompson’s 1971 book about his drug-drenched trip to Vegas, the first being the rather abysmal Where the Buffalo Roam, starring a game Bill Murray.
Here, it’s the ever-unpredictable Johnny Depp who takes on the role of Raoul Duke (Thompson’s alter-ego) and a chunked-up pre-Oscar Benicio Del Toro plays Dr. Gonzo, Duke’s lawyer/companion-in-chaos. The assignment — as if it matters — is a dirt-bike race. Their true quest is to ingest every kind of “uppers, downers, screamers, laughers” they can find. Plus several oceans of booze. However, like most drug experiences, the film has a downside, too. Barely making it out of Vegas alive the first time, they’re dragged back in (like Pacino in Godfather III) for another round of the same thing.
Still, Depp is astonishing, Joe Coker by way of John Belushi and pure pandemonium on the prowl. The movie isn’t exactly a success, but it’s the most glorious kind of failure: Imaginative, uncompromising and true to itself. A tip: if hearing Debbie Reynolds tell a Vegas crowd, “Let’s rock and roll!” doesn’t crack you up, you don’t want any part of this movie. Not even the good parts.
Linda Dubler’s picks:
A Bucket of Blood
A Bucket of Blood (1959)
With its lurid title and down at the heels production values, A Bucket of Blood is a sterling example of legendary B-movie producer/director Roger Corman’s talent for entertaining, inspired schlock. The film’s central character, Walter Paisley (Dick Miller), is a bus boy at a beatnik coffee house who is so inept he makes Maynard G. Krebs look like Jackson Pollock.
Poor, talentless Walter longs for the limelight, so when his landlady’s cat dies accidentally, he covers the stiff feline in plaster, a la George Segal, and presents the critter as a work of art. The hipsters are wowed, and soon the would-be-genius is trolling for additional bodies to receive the Paisley treatment. The lively script was written by Charles Griffith, screenwriter for The Little Shop of Horrors. Corman mentored Scorsese, Coppola, and Jonathan Demme among others, so even if you’re not a B-movie fan, consider taking a look.
Sullivan’s Travels (1941)
The grass is always greener – even for those who’ve successfully made it to the other side. Such is the case for Sullivan, a sought-after Hollywood director known for hits like Ants in Your Pants of 1939. Yearning for the gravity and respect that genius endows, this would be Steinbeck declares he’s finished with fluff and ready to undertake his masterpiece, a gritty, relevant opus called Oh Brother Where Art Thou? But before he can write about the common man, it would help to meet a few.
Sullivan and his fetching, hold-the-hooey secretary (Veronica Lake, famous for her peek-a-boo wave) take to the road in a luxuriously appointed Airstream in search of America. Preston Sturges, a treasure of American cinema and the writer/director behind The Palm Beach Story and The Lady Eve, mixes comedy with melodrama in this delicious satire of self-importance and fame.
The Lady Eve (1941) , Ball of Fire (1941) , and Bringing Up Baby (1938)
The movies are full of evil geniuses (Dr. Frankenstein and his many peers), troubled geniuses (viz. any standard issue artist bio pic, from Lust for Life to Basquiat), even idiotic geniuses (e.g. Austin Powers), but my favorite variety are the clueless intellectuals, beloved by the makes of classic screwball comedies. Invariably men, these champions of book learnin’ are short on smarts and easy marks for women who either thing or two about the world, or are so ditzy they defy comprehension.
In The Lady Eve, Henry Fonda is a herpetologist (a snake specialist to be precise) who makes an appetizing victim for slithery card-sharp Barbara Stanwyck. Stanwyck shows up again in Ball of Fire as Sugarpuss O’Shea, a nightclub singer who knows her way around a colloquialism, who ends up hiding out in a house full of lexographers, among them sexy language specialist Prof. Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper). And in what’s probably my favorite American comedy, Katherine Hepburn is as untamed as the titular leopard Baby, driving poor paleontologist Cary Grant around the bend and into her waiting arms. After a lousy day or a lousy week, any one of these gems will help to chase away the blues.
Filed under: 5 Questions, General, Top Picks | Tags: Atlanta Jewish Film Festival, cinema club, emory university, graduate studies, Jean Renoir, leo frank, matthew bernstein, michael caine
Matthew Bernstein
Matthew Bernstein is professor, chair and director of the Graduate Film Studies Program at Emory University. For twelve years he has introduced and led discussions as host of the Cinema Club, which now meets at the Midtown Art Cinema on Sunday mornings. He is active in the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival and is the author of Screening a Lynching: The Leo Frank Case on Film and Television (2009) and Walter Wanger, Hollywood Independent (2000) among many works. He recently answered five questions for us.
Linda Dubler: Is there a movie that changed your life?
Matthew Bernstein: Too many to count. But Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game really made me realize how amazingly complex and profound movies could be. My first movie date with my wife, shortly after we met, was Last Tango in Paris.
Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game
Linda: What’s the first film you remember seeing?
Matthew: The Ipress File. I was scared to death by the torture scenes with Michael Caine at the end.
Linda: Who’s the most underrated director of the past decade?
Matthew: Hmmmm. Todd Fields. Todd Haynes? Susanne Bier?
Linda: Would you share with us your favorite reviewers/critics/blogs/movie resources?
Matthew: A.O. Scott, Manola Darhgis, David Denby, Kenneth Turan, Eleanor Ringel.
Linda: Five movies that Films at the High audience members should see this year?
Matthew: District 9 (if they can stand it); Up; Lemon Tree; Food, Inc.; The Wave; Everlasting Moments.
