Review of Bad Day at Black Rock

I had to read the screenplay and watch this film for my screenwriting class. I was not too disappointed. The acting was period and the writing was a little to formal from how language is spoken normally but the action, theme, and plot were very well done.

I had not seen a Spencer Tracy movie before and he was very good. Very reserved, very much on the side of justice.

The film follows the script almost to every word. There were, I thought, a few omissions here and there, but it was almost followed exactly. The plot, the action, all were straight from the script. I hadn't seen this film before. The other films we read and watched I had seen at least once or twice. This was the first one which I didn't already have visuals about the movie. So it was interesting to see what my imagination came up with before I saw it in the film. There were some spots that didn't register with my imagination such as the action scenes. I didn't have any visuals about the action sequences. I imagined a lot of sillouhettes, very dark, some black and white, plains imagery, classical Western images. It was interesting to see it on film. I've never been out West so all the images I have are from movies, TV, photos,the web.

This film was very much a classical-style Hollywood movie. It was totally linear. Totally on film with establishing shots, big shots of the train coming and going, a panorama shot of the town. There weren't any hyper close-ups either and the faces weren't too pretty.

It was gritty and Realist and the story was compelling. I don't know of too many films who address the treatment of Japanese- Americans during WWII. They were treated harshly, sent to internment camps, which forced them to give livilihoods, businesses, homes, etc. The film revolves around solving a missing person case which turns out to be a hate crime. In the end the missing Japanese farmer is found to have been murdered by a town bully and his henchmen.

I thought the script wasn't too predictable. The ending had a big twist. Some of the townspeople finally stand up to the bully. Justice is done. Tracy did his duty and brought some peace to Komako. I haven't see so many films set in the West so this was a new experience for me.

Review of Une Femme Est Une Femme

I have gottten through the first hundred pages of Richard Brody's book Everything is Cinema about Jean Luc Godard. So far it is a great read. I should expect nothing less from a writer from the New Yorker which is so reputedly intelligent I should be in awe of every page. I find the parts about the film to inform my watching of the film much more involved and less prone to over analysis which I'm prone to. I watched Breathless and some of the extras on the Criterion disc which I wrote about in another blog post.

I didn't watch Godard's firt post-Breathless film Le Petit Soldat. It has a very interesting back story. The film was banned in France and Godard was under duress of deportation if he released the film outside of France. Godard is a Swiss National, so he had little leverage in what he could do about releasing a film that was graphic in it's depictions of torture on both sides of the Algerian War. I will watch the film, eventually. I really want to see what all the fuss is about.

Godard's second post-Breathless film came at a turning point in the History of the Nouvelle Vague. Many critics at the time had hailed that the New Wave had crested and lost it's force. Truffaut's second film Shoot the Piano Player didn't fair well and other New Wave filmmakers were not doing any better. Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer and others did films that didn't fair well commercially. Jacques Demy and Claire Denis and others weren't considered true New Wave filmmakers because they didn't come from the Cahiers du Cinema background or the Cinemathaque in Paris. So the New Wave was bombing at the box office and critically was becoming fractured.

One of the most interesting points the book talks about is Godard personal politics and his views towards the Cinema. Godard and other New Wave filmmakers were caught in a trap. They saw the traditional French left as too doctrinaire and saw the French right as too much against new art. Godard proposed that the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers would create a new Left which would make new art and change French politics.

For all it's grandeur and talk of new art and changing French politics how much it really did change Cinema and French politics I will have to keep reading.

The film was subpar. It tries to be too much. Like Brody says it combines musical with comedy that isn't really either one. Some of the music numbers are entertaining. The dialogue between Belmondo, Brialy, and Karina is good, but not that memorable. Brody also said that Karina was viewed as an unpolished actress and I agree with him.

It does have a Nouvelle Vague sensibilty about it which I like a lot. The shots, the really quick edits, some of the music, and Belmondo, who plays a secondary role to Brialy, make the film enjoyable. Yet much of the film is about boring, domestic life, much of which is based on Godard and Karina's life together. It's cute when they put books together to say things to each other. There are little moments like these that are portrayed so lovingly you get the impression of how much Godard really loved Karina

It is too bad that after this great send up of Karina by Godard that she miscarried and later on left him for another director which she broke up with and attempted suicide. I haven't read further in the book so I don't know what happened after the attempt of suicide.

As a filmmaker I really admire those little, simple, detailed shots of a couple's personal life. Those little joys must have meant so much to JLG to put on screen with such loving care. They are tender moments, funny and devoid of vulgarity. When I'm trying to write a scene I find it so difficult to portray those little moments that make life not just livable, but filled with love. The stripteases and referrences to fascists are not. Those got JLG into hotter water than he already was, but that's more about his politics which could be the subject of another blog post.

Review of Documentary on Breathless

 I started reading Brody's Everything is Cinema about Jean Luc Godard. It turns out he had a very up and down background before making Breathless which was his breakout hit and most remembered film of the French New Wave. After reading the first few chapters of the book I decided to re-watch Breathless. I had already seen it several times, but now the details became so much more obvious. The references to Switzerland, the characters names, the details of the story it was based on after reading the book and watching this film made the film more enjoyable and more understandable.

The film goes into how Godard didn't use a script which as an aspiring screenwriter I find interesting. It turns out he wrote the scenes for the day on the day of the shoot which caused his producer to become agitated. There was even a fistfight between JLG and his producer. Turns out he was shooting so short a time that the producer got nervous about how much money he was wasting.

The film talks about the buzz that started to surround the film. People; critics and others started to talk about Godard's film. Soon enough people said he was doing something great and all of Paris wanted to see his film.

 Godard refused to be interviewed for the doc film. The rest of the film concerns getting Jean Seberg to star in the film. At first she was attached to a major studio. Eventually they agreed to let her do the film for a small fee. At first she didn't want to do the film. At the time Godard was an unknown and she didn't think much of the role. She came around and, of course, the rest is history.

Review of Fassbinder's Love is Colder Than Death

This was the first film that I watched in the eclipse series of early Fassbinder films. In fact it was his first feature. I really liked this film. It was simple but complex, raw but stylish. I saw a number of similarities in this film that it might have inspired in other films. The opening sequence reminded me of Reservior Dogs or the Usual Suspects in parts. It is not as grand as those two films, but it has a style that resembles them.

The film is very tight. It is a film-noir picture with much borrowed from American crime films. Fassbinder was not remiss about how he borrowed from American crime movies for this picture. The film isn't long, it runs about 90 minutes. Yet it moves fast, there is a littel violence, a little sex and a great ending which I will not spoil by writing about it in this post.

I liked the dialogue. The opening is great when one guy asks Fassbinder's character for a cigarette and he beats him up. There is a lot of interesting dialogue. It's very understated, but always delivered cooly, directly, and simply. The shots of dialogue are also presented visually in a very simple, but creative way. The headshots on the train or in the gun shop or in the apartment are all done well.

Perhaps more arresting than the dialogue are the tracking shots. Those shots, the one in the police department, in the street, and on the train moving are all great. It totally distorts a viewer's impression of movement. I also liked what the cinematographer did with mirrors in car sequence shots. The image at the end of the film; Fassbinder and his girlfriend driving away, and in the mirror you see Fassbinder, just his eyes with sunglasses on.

I have seen the BRD trilogy and those films are very complex and elaborately produced. They must have had much larger budgets than this film. But this film shows Fassbinder's promise as a filmmaker and the great films he was to produce later in his short life.

Review of Indochine

I remember seeing ads for this film on HBO and Cinemax when I was in Middle School. I was hoping it had some type of pornography, how wrong I was! How perverted I was in my adolescent hopes!

This film is anything but pornographic. It is a big Lawrence of Arabia or Schindler's List style of a film. It has big events that intertwine the characters and brings them heartbreakingly into conflict with each other. The characters don't end well. They join the Communists, they are forced to flee, or they end up assasinated.

The film is about 2 hours 40 minutes. I wonder if there is a longer cut. There probably is and it do the film justice if it were released in some kind of Criterion collection edition. They should also make a documentary about the film Too bad they haven't already. Perhaps I'm the only one of this opinion?
Well my study of the film dovetailed with my study of French, neocolonialism, and scriptwriting. Those three subjects come across in the film in great amount.

I really like Catherine Deneuve in this picture. I adored her Belle du Jour. She is perfect. I'm planning on watching more of her films because they are mostly in French. So I will be able to watch films and learn French. The other character I really liked in the film was the French intelligence guy. He was serious and comical at the same time. When he goes in to rescue Deneuve from the Opium Den I thought that was couragious and a great thing to do for a friend. I had never seen the insdie of what an Opium Den looked like back in those day, but it was revealing.

The story is great up until the young Vietnamese girl shoots the French officer. It lags a bit afterwards, but the action picks up after awhile. I like how the story starts to go into flashback towards the end with Deneuve trying to find her adopted daughter. I thought it made the film more creative and lended some non-linearity to the story. The shots of the country where the film was shot were amazing. Totally great.

I have been reading about post-colonialism and I think Asia is a place that awakened after WWII to a new status in the World. Many countries, India, Vietnam, Burma, China they all had new paths to traverse after the fall of Imperialism throughout the World. I'm learning that politically Imperialism or Colonialism is dead. Yet, economically the system of neo-colonialism was still in effect after the war. It's interesting reading for me. I have a deep interest in the World System and current trends in World History