Wednesday Double Feature

by on July 15, 2015 at 11:38 am
Posted In: Test

I was leant a copy of Orson Welles‘s adaptation of Franz Kafka‘s The Trial. So I figured that Kafka films would make for a good theme for this week.

TheTrialDVDCoverI’m embarrassed to admit that what I knew about Kafka’s The Trial where the accused, Josef K is woken up in the middle of the night by some men in black arrested for a crime he didn’t commit (not made any easier since nobody says what the crime actually was) and dragged to a monolithic darkly lit trial room (presumably in The Castle) where he is inevitably found guilty. Turns out I was mostly wrong.

Josef K, played with brilliant innocence by  Anthony Perkins, is indeed woken up by the Men in Black and arrested but from there it is completely different as K travels around the city looking for people to support and defend him and in the process getting an in depth study of human hypocrisy.

I’m not sure what I thought of this film. Technically Welles is on the top of his game, despite doing this on a shoestring budget, and watching his craft is always a pleasure to watch. But otherwise I couldn’t follow it… It was probably to esoteric for my tastes and I don’t think I’ll ever be part of Kafka’s target audience.

220px-Kafka_filmI was looking forward to my next selection Kafka mainly because it was a who’s who of some of my favorite talent led by Steven Soderbergh. It turned out to be one of the films that is a fictionalized version of the artist’s life with an ongoing plot with elements that inspire them to create their works. These movies included The Raven, about  Edgar Allan Poe and Shakespeare in Love about Shakespeare.

Here Kafka, played as a complete stuffed shirt by Jeremy Irons, is working as a clerk in an insurance firm in a dark monochrome version of Eastern Europe in the turn of the century. When the murder of a coworker pulls him into a web of government conspiracy and an anarchist movement.

I’m afraid this is hardly Soderbergh’s best work but I certainly enjoyed it for the most part. I’m sure it would be more entertaining for a fan of Kafka’s work since all but the most blatant Easter eggs in this film was lost on me. The most fun I had was watching people like Joel Grey, Ian Holm and Alec Guinness  do their job well, even if it was by the numbers work. My favorite part was the final act of the film where Kafka leaves reality completely to infiltrate the castle with the monochrome of the rest of the film turning to muted color.

└ Tags: , , ,
Comments Off on Wednesday Double Feature

Continuity’s a Thing.

by on July 13, 2015 at 8:06 pm
Posted In: Test

There is nothing more embarrassing than catching a mistake several hours after posting. Spelling and grammar are bad enough but the absolute worst is screwing up is continuity mistakes. Technically today’s strip should have been about three weeks ago. The “current day” had been going too long for Kate and Laurel to be having Breakfast together and this couldn’t be the next “day” since there were still a few plot lines to close up before the day was over.

I hate retconning, even for little fixes, since it’s a very dangerous habit to get into. Fortunately for this one time all it took was a single word change but still it’s embarrassing.

I definitely plan to have Laurel and Kate having proper breakfast together in the future.

└ Tags: , ,
Comments Off on Continuity’s a Thing.

Wednesday Double Features

by on July 8, 2015 at 9:30 am
Posted In: Test

This week I returned to caper films. Since nearly all of the previous films of this genre I had watched had been British films I decided to see what the French had to offer.

220px-RifififrenchposterThe first of my selection was Rififi by Jules Dassin. it starts out with many of the familiar tropes with Tony “le Stéphanois”, a hardened professional played by Jean Servais, fresh out of prison after five years and is offered the opportunity to do a job, in this case robbing an exclusive jewelry store with a state of the art safe and security system.

The planning and execution robbery itself is a study in meticulous precision taking a nail biting half hour in near silence with a level of precision and accuracy to the point I have heard that actual thieves have used it as a reference.

Things start going badly when a rival crook who is the current sugar daddy of Tony’s mistress (who Tony had brutally beaten because of this) finds out about this when the team’s safe cracker makes the mistake of passing a ring from the store to a barmaid at the crook’s club. The team gets hunted down one by one until the son of Jo “le Suédois”, Tony’s partner, is taken hostage, which leads to a tragic finale.

This is a dark, cynical bit well crafted It amazes me how a film that is technically less violent than most crime films I’ve watched is more gripping because of all of the terrible brutalities that are merely suggested off camera.

220px-LecerclerougeHigh end jewelers seems to be the proffered target since that’s what the two thieves in the second film on my list Le Cercle Rouge by, Jean-Pierre Melville, go after.

We start the film by following the two in two separate but parallel stories one, Corey who has been told about the job by a corrupt prison guard a day before he is going to leave prison. The other Vogel was being escorted from Marseilles to Paris. He manages to escape from the moving train. By sheer chance he manages to hide in the unlocked trunk of Corey’s car and get’s driven through the police parameter hunting for him.

Later Vogel and Corey(who saw Vogel crawl into his trunk) strike up a friendship with Vogel saving Corey from a group of thugs who had been hunting Corey.

From here the film goes back and fourth from the manhunt led by Commissioner Mattei and our two protagonists planning and finally carrying out the heist (which involves being able to shoo out the alarm system with a sniper rifle (it’s best not to think about it too much))

Regrettably while this film was very well done it really didn’t work for me. It was very slow paced with a weird existentialist streak which I had trouble following.

 

└ Tags: , , , ,
Comments Off on Wednesday Double Features

Inside Out

by on July 6, 2015 at 11:37 am
Posted In: Test

Inside_Out_(2015_film)_posterThere are times I think that Pixar’s marketing department makes a point of underplaying a lot of the films they are advertising as if to say yes this is a silly idea, sometimes to the point of misdirection. The Incredibles comes to mind where the early teasers seemed to sell it as a superhero parody rather than what was one of the best examples of the superhero genre on film ever.

This was my initial reaction when I first started seeing the teasers for Inside Out. It didn’t help that it that the premise of the film, the adventures of anthropomorphic personifications of the human psyche, while certainly not a bad idea didn’t seem particularly original either. I enjoyed Fox’s Herman’s Head in college and Cranium Command was my favorite ride the one time I went to Epcot. On top of this there was Disney’s classic wartime short Reason and Emotion and there’s a Japanese comic that has just been made into a movie called Poison Berry in My Brain that I very much want to check out.. I was more than a little worried that this was more proof that Pixar had been loosing it’s way since it had been purchased by Disney.

So When I finally got to around to seeing Inside out I was very pleasantly surprised just how good it was. As I said it involved the life of a young girl named Riley as seen through, Joy, Anger, Disgust, Fear and Sadness. For most of her life she’s been happy led by her dominant emotion, Joy, but when her family moves to San Francisco she starts to lean to Sadness and from there depression.

What I found myself loving about this film is while what I just described would serve as the basis for some dull but inspiring afternoon drama, in the mind of Reilly all metaphors are literal with Joy and Sadness literally getting separated from the control tower where only a frantic Anger, Fear and Disgust are left in charge while Joy and Sadness are lost within Riley’s long term memory and subconscious trying desperately to get back and fix things… Meanwhile back in reality the result is a young girl on the verge of nervous breakdown.

This is sad on it’s own, but in the Pi that is our principle location it is epic. The metaphorical architecture of Reilly’s hope’s, dreams, sense of morality and greatest loves begin to literally collapse and slip into oblivion making the sense of urgency almost visceral.

There is so much I liked about this film as a lover of animation I loved it’s craft. Everything about it is beautiful. The script is so smart I know I have to go see this again just to catch all of the things in it that I know I missed simply because there was so much of it. The cast was great. This is the first Pixar film I would consider an ensemble piece with Amy Poehler, (Joy) Phyllis Smith (Sadness), Bill Hader (Fear), Lewis Black (Anger) and Mindy Kailing (Disgust) acting as a well-oiled machine. I would definitely watch the situation comedy starring them in a similar working environment.

I also liked the psychiatry of the film. I confess I haven’t kept up with much theory about the mechanics of personality since the 101 course I took in college but the complexities of the various emotions. The story makes it clear that the “bad” emotions are just important as the one “good” emotion Joy who ironically in making sure Reilly is always happy has actually stunted a lot of the Reilly’s development. At the same time Sadness who has been mostly repressed throughout Reilly’s child starts the plot as her influence begins to increase much to everybody’s surprise including her own. As the film moves to it’s climax it becomes clear that Sadness is a necessary ingredient of maturity as it includes not just pain but empathy.

└ Tags: , , ,
Comments Off on Inside Out