REGULAR LOVERS (2005)

The same 1968 Paris riots that cap Bernardo Bertolucci‘s goofy & lyrical THE DREAMERS/’03 are used as the starting point in Philippe Garrel’s doleful look at the same era. The director's son, Louis Garrel, stars in both films but this time he loses rather than finds himself. Filmed with a panoply of Nouvelle Vague tics, Garrel père structures this long film as a series of extended vignettes spread around a loosely knit group of artists, poets, students, competing leftists & dilettantes. When the electric atmosphere that's so much a part of the initial revolutionary furore dissipates, the group settles for a mere similitude of the societal apocalypse they hoped to generate. Friendships fray, undying love waxes & wanes, drugs give off a diminished kick and life/career choices won’t stay on hold forever. It’s a fine set up, but Garrel’s film peters out by its third hour, adding up to something less than the sum of its often exquisite parts. Hmm, just like the ‘60s.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: We all know that life is unfair, but in the ‘60s, so was hair. Check out just how fabu & stylish the guys look with their dirty tresses compared to the poor gals.

REDSKIN (1929)

Of all the features made during the two-strip TechniColor era (1922 to 1932), this is the film that stands out for turning the limitations of the inherently flawed system into something artistically positive. Richard Dix stars as a Native American who gets the chance to go to college in the East (the only part of the film shot in standard b&w), but finds that when he returns from the all-White world, he has become a stranger to both cultures. Not, admittedly, the most original storyline, but the familiar contours are amply fleshed out with a tribal feud between Pueblo & Navaho (naturally Dix’s girl is a member of the ‘wrong’ tribe), some irreplaceably beautiful location footage and even a climactic race to register an oil claim for 'his people,' before things wrap up a bit too neatly. And it's all nicely packaged, by Victor Schertzinger, Hollywood’s only director/operetta composer. But what really makes the film stick in your mind is the way the Red/Green TechniColor tints of the combined picture element transmute a good, but unexceptional silent feature into something with the delicate appeal & beauty of a traditional sand painting. What luck to have a decent surviving print!

A THOUSAND CLOUDS OF PEACE (2004)

In what amounts to an apprentice/art-house debut pic, Mexican writer/megger Julián Hernández follows a few days in the life of a young gay drifter as he searches for sex, affection, tru-love, the works in a series of artfully designed vignettes. The film is indebted (that’s the polite word) to debut films like Gus Van Sant’s MALA NOCHE/’85 with a few sideways glances at Pasolini’s nauseating mix of Bach & violence. You can’t miss seeing Hernández’s multiple talents behind the camera, he’s a natural working with his young cast and his eye for apt street locations throb with life & anxiety. But with the exception of a lovely sequence spent looking for an old soundtrack album, Hernández seems oblivious to just how threadbare his modest plot & character lines have become.

MONSIEUR VINCENT (1947)

Though he helmed forty-plus features, this well-regarded bio-pic about a saintly French priest during the age of Louis XIV is the only credit Maurice Cloche is known for Stateside . . . and barely that nowadays. It’s a solid piece of work, handsomely shot in stark B&W by lenser Claude Renoir, that honors its subject by refusing to play down not only how difficult it is to live the life of a saint, but also how difficult it is to put up with having one around. Pierre Fresnay doesn’t overplay with priestly gravitas, but let’s us see the his spiritual development thru a refusal of comfortable positions and a straightforward manner of confronting the problems of the poor and of ignorance. And even then, as he expands his ministry beyond any ability to sustain his task, he knows that sometimes goodness alone isn’t enough. He’s more Don Quixote than Mother Teresa.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: As the years go by and the aging make-up goes on, Fresnay seems to morph into Trevor Howard. Or is it the other way ‘round?

THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES . . . (2007)

. . . BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD. Heck, even the title’s too long! The umpteenth Jesse James bio-pic takes a painterly & poetic approach to its well-trod themes of lawlessness, psychosis, fraternal loyalty and hero worship. WATCH: as megger Andrew Dominik, in his sophomore outing, drowns the film with majestic landscapes, glowering clouds, fish-eye distortion and a whole pantry of cinematographic overkill from lenser Roger Deakins; LISTEN: as he holds raptly still while painfully micro-managing his terse dialog; GROAN: as he adds a patina of solemnity with wistfully ripe narration right out of a Ken Burns documentary. There’s something terribly depressing in watching a promising newbie like Dominik fall into so much self-indulgence & unearned hollow grandeur, as if Michael Cimino had gotten another shot at the big time. Please, someone, stop this talented man before he destroys himself. Fortunately, the acting choices are not without interest. As the weasely lout who initially worships Jesse James, Casey Affleck affects the raspy, unsettled voice of adolescent sexual confusion. Brad Pitt relaxes into his Jesse James, using his typical self-regarding manner as a key to every personality trait. And if they can’t quite find the depth or variation to withstand Dominik’s extended running-time, leave that to the always amazing Sam Rockwell who, as older brother Charley Ford, shows how it can be done.

NOTE: The poster seen here is from 1927, 80 years before this film, and shows how malleable the idea of Jesse James has been since Fred Thompson was a cowboy star (and husband to the legendary Hollywood scripter Frances Marion) who only played decent men who could serve as role-models for the youth of America.

MICHAEL CLAYTON (2007)

Apparently, writer/megger Tony Gilroy saved up a ton of dialogue while writing those laconic scripts for the BOURNE Trilogy. Suddenly, he can’t shut up! This one’s a tricked up, American business morality tale, with corporate killers who really are killers!, and studded with ‘gotcha’ plot hooks meant to pass as dramatic epiphanies. It's like mixing the worst of David Mamet with the worst of Paddy Chayefsky. At least, George Clooney plays it smart and hangs back as the high-powered ‘fixer’ at a top Manhattan law firm, but there’s so much on his plate the script reads like a ‘plot bible’ for an ‘80s NBC drama series. He’s in hock to the mob, his law firm is not so secretly on the selling block, his ex & kid are cause for agita, his firm’s top lawyer is off his ‘meds’ and about to throw his big case over to the ‘little people,’ et al. It sounds like fun and there’s certainly a bevy of acting talent on board, but Gilroy thinks he’s made something serious simply because he hasn’t supplied a laugh in two long hours. He’s too busy slicing & dicing the linear continuity so we can’t see just how simplistic the action is. Or resorting to hoary plot devices (over-explicit, overheard phone messages, bombs that miss their mark when nature calls, taciturn killers-for-hire who are ‘just doing a job’) to sort things out. Yet, when a spark of real dramatic menace stares him in the face (as when Clooney leaves his kid in the car at a critical junction), Gilroy doesn’t seem to notice the possibilities.

ESTHER KAHN (2000)

Add Arnaud Desplechin onto the list of French autuers who have come to grief working in English. An intriguing story about a poor, but quietly headstrong Jewess who opts out of her family’s tailoring business and lands on the London stage circa 1900 is partially refreshed by Desplechin’s concentration on the times, bohemian mores & physical details of living & working conditions, rather than the usual backstage trials & triumphs. Alas someone (nervous producers?) laid on excessive narration to draw our attention to details we ought to be noticing all on our own. And though the film is generally well cast, Summer Phoenix proves hopelessly over-parted as Esther. Oh, she’s handsome enough, especially in the nude, but a lack of push or energy, along with her flat line readings make a mockery of her speedy success, especially when she wins the title role in a daring production of HEDDA GABLER. Talk about lambs to the slaughter. Phoenix’s career all but evaporated after this.

A FACE IN THE CROWD (1957)

Elia Kazan & Budd Schulberg’s follow-up to ON THE WATERFRONT/’54 was this wildly uneven tale about mass media, Populism & the political ties that join them to Ultra-Capitalist / Proto-Fascist Americanism. The young & shockingly raw Andy Griffith is the guitar picking layabout who catches the public fancy & goes bad while Patricia Neal is the reporter who lives to regret her discovery. But Kazan & Schulberg don’t trust their audience or their instincts in detailing Southern archetypes and provide a safe & sane Northerner (Walter Matthau in a career-making perf) as our guide to all the hysteria. Try this one as a double-bill with Frank Capra’s MEET JOHN DOE/’41 which trods similar terrain but with contradictory impulses. There’s a sense of terrified discovery in the Capra film, he barely seems to fully comprehend all the untidy implications he uncovers whereas Kazan & Schulberg know all too well what they’re up to; shooting clay pigeons.

DICK TRACY VS CUEBALL (1946) / DICK TRACY’S DILEMMA (1947)

RKO never got in gear with their abbreviated Dick Tracy feature series. Morgan Conway, who stars in the first two (CUEBALL was #2; DILEMMA was fourth & last) is a pleasant, but rumpled actor, without the appropriate Dick Tracy profile or dash. Ralph Byrd, who did the last two (he’d been Tracy in serials @ Monogram) has the snappy profile, but little else. CUEBALL tries for a bit of visual flair with some nifty framing devices, odd camera angles & even some cute life-at-home stuff, but is stymied by a dud villain. It’s just the opposite in DILEMMA where the film only comes fitfully alive when ‘The Claw’ is on screen. Maybe entries 1 & 3 marry the best elements seen here. The real surprise is seeing just how nasty the violence is. How’d they get away with it? Comic-book license or sheer indifference from the Breen Censorship Office?