Category Archives: Saturday Matinee

Saturday Matinee: Three Thousand Years of Longing

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By Katie Carter

Source: Katie at the Movies

Dr. Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) inhabits the perfect role in a movie that’s a story about telling stories. She works in the equally fictional-sounding position of narratologist, specializing in myths and legends, and while she resides and teaches in London, at the start of “Three Thousand Years of Longing,” she’s arriving in Istanbul for a conference. Writer and director George Miller based his movie on the title story in A.S. Byatt’s 1994 anthology “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” but it’s apparent early on that “Three Thousand Years of Longing” is as much a personal, affectionate tribute to the power of story as it is a fantasy about the highs and lows of love and desire. When Alithea arrives at her hotel in Istanbul, she’s surprised with a stay in the Agatha Christie suite, where the famed mystery writer reportedly penned her most renowned work, “Murder on the Orient Express.” At a lecture, she and a colleague delve into how comic book superheroes comprise our modern myths, a graphic prominently featuring Superman displayed behind her. And at a curio shop in this ancient city from which stemmed some of the world’s most oft-told tales, Alithea buys a pretty little vase she digs out from beneath a pile of knick-knacks.

It’s after she returns to her hotel room that Alithea becomes a part of those stories that so much of her life seems to revolve around. While scrubbing the dirty bottle, she inadvertently pops its top and unleashes billowing clouds of purple smoke that coalesce into an enormous, human-like being: a djinn (Idris Elba). After the djinn gets situated, quickly catching up on the current culture and language by examining Alithea’s laptop and TV, he informs Alithea that she needs to make three wishes— her heart’s desire, with some limitations— because after he grants them he will finally be free. It’s the sort of opportunity most people would leap at, but Alithea is flummoxed. She, ever practical, has no heart’s desire— at least, she doesn’t think she does. In her narration that opens the film, she states that she is alone (no spouse, no children) and likes it that way. We later discover through her conversations with the Djinn that she was married, once, but that she and her husband grew apart and he eventually left her for another woman, a child lost before it was even born implied to be the impetus for their downward spiral.

But moreover, because she is so well-verses in myths, Alithea knows what the Djinn is capable of, and of what follies can come of indulging in his powers. To catch her up on how he came to be her in possession, the Djinn tells Alithea three stories: three stories of love, and how the actions love spurred him to caused him to end up back inside the bottle every time, spanning from three thousand years ago to the time of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (Aamito Lagum), to palace concubine Gülten (Ece Yüksel) in the time of the Ottoman Prince Mustafa in the 1500s, to the intelligent and fiery Zefir (Burcu Gölgedar), a woman thirsty for knowledge and stuck in a passionless marriage to a much older man. Like most anthologies, these extended flashbacks framed as the Djinn telling Alithea stories as they huddle in her room occasionally miss the mark, but it’s difficult not to be drawn in by Miller’s beguiling concoction of fantasy and history, especially when Elba is the storyteller, his low voice conveying the tinges of sadness and regret over his past that provide the emotional beats the narrative sorely needs. The spell-binding visuals don’t hurt either. Some of the computer effects aren’t too convincing, but cinematographer John Seale (who Miller lured out of retirement for 2015’s “Mad Max: Fury Road” and again to work on “Three Thousand Years”) works his magic, whirling the viewer over vast landscapes and elaborate palace interiors and in and out of the Djinn’s perspective. Exhilarating cinema is crafted even from the scenes where the characters are mostly sedentary. He keeps the camera moving even when characters are just sitting in a car, or following Alithea out of the airport. Margaret Sixel, Miller’s wife and frequent collaborator, serves as editor and enhances the camerawork even more with her cuts, a series of match cuts in the aforementioned sequence, for example, tracing the wheels of the plane touching down, to the wheels of Alithea’s baggage cart as she disembarks.

It’s when “Three Thousand Years” turns into its overlong fourth act after the stories have been told that it becomes a much more trying affair. Alithea discovers that she does want to make a wish, as much to her surprise as it is to the viewer. Miller’s attempt to end on a big swing for romance is admirable, but the change in Alithea is too abrupt, and the romantic chemistry between Swinton and Elba, talented performers though they are (I mean, who else could play a a woman named Alithea Binnie but Swinton?), is too flat when it ought to sizzle. The issue of the film’s exoticism of people of color, a problem that haunts the otherwise fantastical images Miller conjures in his imaginings of Middle Eastern countries and peoples throughout, takes on an even more troubling edge in this chapter as well. Perhaps being a magical being like a Djinn means he transcends race, but Elba’s character is essentially repressed by a white woman for an extended period of time, existing to serve her but not able to be his own person because of that. Of course, that’s part of the film’s lesson—that love must grow organically and not be forced, so that by the end of the movie the Djinn spends time with Alithea of his own volition— but the casting of a Black man and a white woman in these specific roles automatically casts a problematic shadow over the relationship.

Despite issues that make for an underwhelming experience, I kind of love that “Three Thousand Years Longing” is the movie Miller chose to make in between his acclaimed— and dare I say, revolutionary?— “Fury Road,” and his upcoming prequel to that film, “Furiosa.” Proving over and over throughout his career that he is as adept at creating charming family fare (“Babe,” “Happy Feet”) as he is gritty dystopian action movies, Miller marries the two here for a story that, for all the tragedies it contains, is too in love with love and with the creation and telling of tales to ever feel cynical. And it’s a real family affair as well; in addition to Sixel, Miller collaborated on the screenplay with his daughter, Augusta Gore. That affection that exists in the very fabric of the film’s creation is reflected on screen, because for all its faults, “Three Thousand Years of Longing” above all makes it clear that it is never too late to open up to love.

Watch Three Thousand Years of Longing on tubi here: https://tubitv.com/movies/100046863/three-thousand-years-of-longing

Saturday Matinee: Network

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By Roger Ebert

Source: RogerEbert.com

Strange, how Howard Beale, “the mad prophet of the airwaves,” dominates our memories of “Network.” We remember him in his soaking-wet raincoat, hair plastered to his forehead, shouting, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.” The phrase has entered into the language.

But Beale (Peter Finch) is the movie’s sideshow. The story centers on Diana Christiansen (Faye Dunaway), the ratings-hungry programming executive who is prepared to do anything for better numbers. The mirror to which she plays is Max Schumacher (William Holden), the middle-age news executive who becomes Diana’s victim and lover, in that order.

The movie has been described as “outrageous satire” (Leonard Maltin) and “messianic farce” (Pauline Kael), and it is both, and more. What is fascinating about Paddy Chayefsky’s Oscar-winning screenplay is how smoothly it shifts its gears. The scenes involving Beale and the revolutionary “liberation army” are cheerfully over the top. The scenes involving Diana and Max are quiet, tense, convincing drama. The action at the network executive level aims for behind-the-scenes realism; we may doubt that a Howard Beale could get on the air, but we have no doubt the idea would be discussed as the movie suggests. And then Chayefsky and the director, Sidney Lumet, edge the backstage network material over into satire, too–but subtly, so that in the final late-night meeting where the executives decide what to do about Howard Beale, we have entered the madhouse without noticing.

The movie caused a sensation in 1976. It was nominated for 10 Oscars, won four (Finch, Dunaway, supporting actress Beatrice Straight, Chayefsky), and stirred up much debate about the decaying values of television. Seen a quarter-century later, it is like prophecy. When Chayefsky created Howard Beale, could he have imagined Jerry Springer, Howard Stern and the World Wrestling Federation?

Parts of the movie have dated–most noticeably Howard Beale’s first news set, a knotty-pine booth that makes it look like he’s broadcasting from a sauna. Other parts, including the network strategy meetings, remain timeless. And the set that Beale graduates to, featuring soothsayers and gossip columnists on revolving pedestals, nicely captures the feeling of some of the news/entertainment shows, where it’s easier to get air time if you’re a “psychic” than if you have useful information to convey.

Most people remember that Howard Beale got fed up, couldn’t take it anymore and had a meltdown on the air. It wasn’t quite like that. Beale is portrayed as an alcoholic doing such a bad job that he’s fired by his boss (Holden). Then they get drunk together and joke about him committing suicide on the air. The next day, in a farewell broadcast, Beale announces that he will indeed kill himself because of falling ratings. He’s yanked from the air but begs for a chance to say farewell, and that’s when he says, the next day, “Well, I’ll tell you what happened: I just ran out of bull- – – -.” His frankness is great for the ratings, Diana convinces her bosses to overturn Max’s decision to fire him, Howard goes back on the air, and he is apparently deep into madness when he utters his famous line.

Lumet and Chayefsky know just when to pull out all the stops. After Beale orders his viewers to “repeat after me,” they cut to exterior shots of people leaning out of their windows and screaming that they’re mad as hell, too. Unlikely, but great drama, and electrifying in theaters at the time. Beale’s ratings skyrocket (he is fourth after “The Six Million Dollar Man,” “All in the Family” and “Phyllis”), and a new set is constructed on which he rants and raves after his announcer literally introduces him as a “mad prophet.”

Counter to this extravagant satire is the affair between Max and Diana. Dunaway gives a seductive performance as the obsessed programming executive; her eyes sparkle and she moistens her lips when she thinks of higher ratings, and in one sequence she kisses Max while telling him how cheaply she can buy some James Bond reruns. Later, in bed, discussing ratings during sex, she climaxes while gasping about the “Mao Tse Tung Hour.”

That’s her idea for a prime-time show based on the exploits of a group obviously inspired by the Symbionese Liberation Army. In a secluded safe house, she negotiates with its armed leader, has a run-in with a Patty Hearst type, and uses an Angela Davis type as her go-between. This material is less convincing, except as an illustration of the lengths to which she will go.

Much more persuasive is Holden’s performance as a newsman who was trained by Edward R. Murrow, and now sees his beloved news division destroyed by Diana. At the same time, Max is fascinated by her, and deliberately begins an affair. For him, it is intoxication with the devil, and maybe love. For her–it is hard to say what it is, because, as he accurately tells her at the end, “There’s nothing left in you I can live with.”

Beatrice Straight’s role as Max’s wife is small but so powerful it won her the Oscar. It is a convincing portrait of a woman who has put up with an impossible man for so long that, although she feels angry and betrayed, she does not feel surprised. The meaning of Max’s decision to cheat is underlined by the art direction; he and his wife live in a tasteful apartment with book-lined walls, and then he moves into Dunaway’s tacky duplex. It is clear that although she cares how she dresses (costumes by Theoni V. Aldredge), she doesn’t care where she lives, because she is not a homebody; her home is in a boardroom, a corner office or a control booth.

The film is filled with vivid supporting roles. Ned Beatty has a sharp-edged cameo as a TV executive (he’s the one who says the famous line, “It’s because you’re on television, dummy”). Robert Duvall plays an executive who, when murder is suggested, insists he wants to “hear everybody’s thoughts on this.” Wesley Addy is the handsome, gray-haired executive in the network’s display window; he looks good at stockholder meetings. (If you look closely, you can spot a young Tim Robbins as a revolutionary assassin.)

One of Chayefsky’s key insights is that the bosses don’t much care what you say on TV, as long as you don’t threaten their profits. Howard Beale calls for outrage, he advises viewers to turn off their sets, his fans chant about how fed up they are–but he only gets in trouble when he reveals plans to sell the network’s parent company to Saudi Arabians. There’s a parallel here with “The Insider,” a 1999 film about CBS News, where “60 Minutes” can do just about anything it wants to, except materially threaten CBS profits.

Sidney Lumet, born 1924, a product of the golden age of live television, is one of the most consistently intelligent and productive directors of his time. His credits are an honor roll of good films, many of them with a conscience, including “12 Angry Men” (1957), “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (1962), “Fail-Safe” (1964), “Serpico” (1973), “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975), “Prince of the City” (1981), “The Verdict” (1982), “Running on Empty” (1988) and “Q and A” (1990).

Because he works in many different genres and depends on story more than style, he is better known inside the business than out, but few directors are better at finding the right way to tell difficult stories; consider the development of Al Pacino’s famous telephone call in “Dog Day Afternoon.” His book Making Movies (Knopf, 1995) has more common sense in it about how movies are actually made than any other I have read.

In “Network,” which is rarely thought of as a “director’s picture,” it is his unobtrusive skill that allows all those different notes and energy levels to exist within the same film. In other hands, the film might have whirled to pieces. In his, it became a touchstone.

Saturday Matinee: Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat

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By Robert Daniels

Source: RogerEbert.com

To see the archival footage of Patrice Lumumba, which serves as the backbone to the forceful documentary “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat,” is to witness a daring future that, due to the rot of colonialism, tragically never came to pass. The foil to the film’s incisive use of newsreels, excerpts from biographies and political speeches is the kinetic wielding of jazz music.

On October 28, 1960, for instance, Louis Armstrong jubilantly arrived in the Congolese capital of Leopoldville (renamed Kinshasa in 1966) to perform. He came to a country that has always mystified the Euro-centric imagination as part of a U.S. State Department-sponsored tour of Africa. Four months earlier, the Republic of the Congo’s bid for independence had become a living reality. Three months after Armstrong’s performance, with the murder of Lumumba, the dream had already died.

Belgian director Johan Grimonprez’s dense, encyclopedic film “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” does more than tell viewers about the downfall of a revolution, one that conceived of a pan-African movement composed of a dozen countries that gained independence from their colonial overlords. It tells viewers how industrialist countries, primarily in the West, are still picking the bones of a broken promise decades later. 

It’s difficult to watch Grimonprez’s intuitive telling of history without feeling the sinister truth of world history: the major powers of the world only see countries like the Congo as an exploitable resource, not as a sovereign state. To tell this reality, Grimonprez takes a similar path traversed by Raoul Peck, whose documentary “Lumumba: Death of a Prophet” is an incredible portrait of a defiant man. Grimonprez dives into the immense span of available footage and writing about Lumumba and that brief period when the idea of a United States of Africa, as coined by Marcus Garvey, to tell how the Congo gained its independence and lost Lumumba. 

Nevertheless, the use of music sets Grimonprez’s film apart from Peck’s survey. Similar to the improvisational spirit of jazz, “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” isn’t a linear film. It hops and it bops from 1961 to contemporary ads for Tesla and Apple. The same could be said about the murderer’s row of Jazz legends: Nina Simone, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, and Armstrong—who take center stage. Grimonprez isn’t terribly interested in laying the biographical groundwork of these figures; they’re iconic enough to allow their aura to provide the documentary with an inherent mood and presence. That built-in tenor is necessary in a film that requires plenty of reading with excerpts from Maya Angelou’s The Heart of a Woman, Hugh Wilford’s The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, and In Koli Jean Bofane’s Congo Inc.: Bismarck’s Testament (Bofane reads passages from his book that speak to world powers’ desire to command the country’s uranium supply).

It’s the latter angle that forms the film’s central thesis. True independence for former territories turned countries was always going to be a fraught proposition in the face of colonial powers afraid to part from the unchecked wealth they gained through ultra-violent oppression. Grimonprez, in fact, looks toward Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s 1956 nationalization of the Suez Canal from the British as a potential parallel for the kind of reclaiming of natural resources that other African countries like Congo would’ve sought. Nasser is just one of the many predictions Grimonprez bridges as he crafts a comprehensive view to demonstrate how world powers used Cold War fears to justify assassinations and coups. 

The film examines the burgeoning rebellion by these newly independent countries from many angles. For instance, through the analysis of Malcolm X, we find that Asian and African countries possessed outsized power in the UN, whereby anytime they stuck together as a coalition, they could vote down countries like the United States, Belgium, or Britain. And even before she became Lumumba’s chief of protocol, Andrée Blouin, whose home movies and book My Country, Africa are referenced in the film, mobilized African women for political change. As the film informs us, this sense of collective mobilization further frightened world powers. 

That anxiety, posits the film, is why music, specifically jazz, became a conduit for political purposes. Grimonprez can be winking, especially when he introduces the Cabinet of Jazz; he and editor Rik Chaubet can also be spontaneous, weaving in and out from any given performance into a narrativization of history that often recalls a late-night setlist. Ella Fitzgerald’s “Lullaby of the Leaves,” for instance, becomes a playful way to pose Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s 1959 visit to the U.S. to meet President Dwight D. Eisenhower as a meeting between two kindred spirits. On the other hand, Nina Simone visiting Nigeria in 1961 on behalf of the American Society of African Culture, a group whose connection to the CIA was unknown by Simone, demonstrates the underhanded ways these artists were pitted against regimes they supported by menacing imperialists.   

Even when “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat,” which runs at a chunky 150 minutes, struggles to maintain a snappy rhythm, this documentary has an enthralling boldness. This film pushes its audience to absorb every note, clip, and quote that crams an entire study of information into an elegant, slick package. “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” succeeds as an intense piece of reclamation and rejuvenation, giving breath to Lumumba’s spirit by sporting the same kind of defiance the political leader espoused.

Watch Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/kcls/video/14940555

Saturday Matinee: Double Take

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Alfred Hitchcock Meets Jorge Luis Borges Borges in Cold War America: Watch Double Take (2009) Free Online

By Colin Marshall

Source: Open Culture

In 1962, while shooting The Birds, Alfred Hitchcock gets a phone call. Or rather, he’s informed of a phone call, but when he makes his way off set he finds not a call but a real live caller, and a thoroughly unexpected one at that: himself, eighteen years older. Beneath this encounter — in a room the London-born, Los Angeles-resident Hitchcock recognizes as a hybrid of Chasen’s and Claridge’s — runs a current of existential tension. This owes not just to the imaginable reasons, but also to the fact that both Hitchcocks have heard the same aphorism: “If you meet your double, you should kill him.”

So goes the plot of Johan Grimonprez’s Double Take, or at least that of its fictional scenes. Though feature-length, Double Take would be more accurately considered an “essay film” in the tradition of Orson Welles’ truth-and-falsity-mixing F for Fake. As Every Frame a Painting’s Tony Zhou reveals, Welles’ pictureoffers a master class in its own form, illustrating the variety of ways cinematic cuts can connect not just events but thoughts, even as it expertly shifts between its parallel (and at first, seemingly unrelated) narratives. Double Take, too, has more than one story to tell: while Hitchcock and his doppelgänger drink tea and coffee, the Cold War reaches its zenith with the Cuban Missile Crisis.

We call Hitchcock “the master of suspense,” but revisiting his filmography exposes his command of a more basic emotion: fear. It was fear, in Double Take’s conception of history, that became commoditized on an enormous scale in Cold War America: fear of the Communist threat, of course, but also less overtly ideological varieties. Hollywood capitalized on all of them with the aid of talents like Hitchcock’s and technology like the television, whose rise coincided with the embittering of U.S.-Soviet relations. Even for a man of cinema forged in the silent era, the opportunity of a TV series could hardly be rejected — especially if it allowed him to poke fun at the commercial breaks forever quashing his signature suspense.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents, its namesake announced upon its premiere, would commence “bringing murder into the American home, where it has always belonged.” But along with the murder, it smuggled in the work of writers like Ray Bradbury, John Cheever, and Rebecca West. Double Take also comes inspired by literature: “The Other” and “August 25th, 1983,” Jorge Luis Borges’ tales of meeting his own double from another time. Its script was written by Tom McCarthy, whose Remainder appears with Borges’ work on the flowchart of philosophical novels previously featured here on Open Culture. However many different Hitchcocks it shows us, we know there will never truly be another — just as well as we know that we still, in our undiminished desire to be entertained by our own fears, live in Hitchcock’s world.

Saturday Matinee: Delicatessen

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Les temps difficiles

By Tim Brayton

Source: Alternate Ending

There is a minor contradiction secreted away in the production history of Delicatessen. The 1991 film exists mostly so that Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro could prove they had what it took to write and direct a feature, and thereby secure financing for the screenplay they really wanted to make, The City of Lost Children. And that’s exactly what they did, using Delicatessen‘s impressive critical, commercial, and awards success to leap into making the far more ambitious, higher-budget movie, with Jeunet continuing on as a solo director to keep it up, sometimes having more resources and sometimes fewer, but never having to return to such a low-scale production as his feature debut. And yet for all this, I’m not sure that any of the films that Delicatessen‘s success enabled are actually as wholly satisfying on their own terms. It really is the perfect version of itself, barring a few errant shots or cuts here and there. Nor I do not think that the lack of resources is entirely coincidental. There are the films like Amélie that get made when a filmmaker has the ability to run wild and indulge himself, and while that can be exhilarating, just as easily it can be exhausting and annoyingly solipsistic. Delicatessen is a perfect demonstration of the idea that great art needs some constraints: everything Jeunet and Caro did in the film, they did deliberately and with focused intent, and the resultant film is just way the hell tighter than anything else the filmmaking team, or Jeunet solus, have ever put their names to.

Generally speaking, Delicatessen is described as “post-apocalyptic”, which I think is a little too cut-and-dry. From a production design standpoint – and everything in the film, up to and especially including the acting, needs to be understood from a production design standpoint (which was, for the record, provided by Caro himself) – the world presented in the film is a polyglot of elements from mid-20th Century France and America, with most of the props having the vague sense of ’60s home goods invested with untold years of decay and corruption (this is a perfect example of the “restraints create art” ethos: many of the objects seen in the film were scavenged on account of the small art direction budget). The sense that results isn’t that we’re watching some hideous future, but rather a nightmarish alternate version of the recent past, where everything went terribly wrong. More than anything, Delicatessen feels like it takes place just across the Channel from the bureaucratic hellhole England of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil a 1985 release set pointedly “somewhere in the 20th Century”.

Which makes sense, given that Gilliam’s work was a state influence on Jeunet and Caro, and Brazil looms particularly large over their body of work: beyond Delicatessen, both The City of Lost Children and Alien Resurrection (Jeunet’s third feature, and first without Caro co-directing) are fairly obvious in their borrowings from Brazil, though neither goes so far with it. Delicatessen doesn’t just share aspects of its design mentality with Gilliam’s film, it shares a very distinctive strategy for cinematography, with wide-angle lenses creating a sense of bug-eyed closeness that manages to avoid the edge distortion typical of wide angles, while exploiting their tendency to make objects in the center of the frame uncannily, uncomfortably present. It’s one of the two most obvious ways that the film visually puts across a feeling of thoroughly unnerving otherness, the other being its tightly constrained color palette – this is an outstandingly yellow movie, introducing its central location emerging from a thick yellow fog like the ruins of a medieval abbey, and never letting us forget about it through all of the shots of locations that appear to be permanently stained in ochre soot. It’s overwhelming and also subtle, but also cunning in its way: the payoff to all that yellow is the film’s solitary use of blue (yellow’s opposite in the RGB color system) is all the way in its final scene, when it is specifically used to counterbalance the diseased feeling of the whole movie up to that point. Among the film’s other points of interest, Delicatessen was the first film of major lasting significance shot by Darius Khondji, and it’s very much in line with his later triumphs: tightly constrained in color, marked with a certain filthy texture to the stock, and instantly effective at creating a very specific atmosphere.

So anyway, all of that visual presence is in service to something, after all, and here’s what that is: wherever and whenever we are, there is a solitary building on the outskirts of what used to be civilsation. On the bottom floor of this building is a delicatessen, run by by a rubbery, fat butcher named Clapet (Jean-Claude Dreyfus); he’s also the landlord for the apartments which occupy all of the upper levels, all of them populated by a visually grotesque menagerie of idiosyncratic characters: such as Marcel Tapioca (Ticky Holgado) and his wife (Anne-Marie Pisani), grubby impoverish sorts; the Interligators, Aurore (Silvie Laguna) and Georges (Jean-François Perrier), she dressed like a ’50s schoolchild’s idea of a society lady and plagued by a voice that only she hears, urging her to commit suicide; the nameless man (Howard Vernon) who lives in a watery dungeon full of snails and frogs, looking a bit slimy and frog-eyed himself; and Clapet’s own estranged daughter Julie (Marie-Laure Dougnac), a birdlike young woman with a thin face and sharp eyes. We learn pretty damn quickly that this building houses some kind of horrible secret, given that the opening scene features Clapet laughing broadly as he plunges a cleaver into the skull of a terrified man (Pascal Benezech) hiding in a garbage can; it’s no real surprise that the denizens of the building are all in on a conspiracy to entice drifters with the promise of a job, and then murder them for their meat, distributed evenly among all residents. It’s all part of the world of absolute social collapse and near-total privation that the film sketches out; cannibalism, it’s implied, is the only way to get any meat in this place.

The plot, such as it is, begins when ex-clown Louison (Dominique Pinon) takes up Clapet’s job posting, and turns out to be a skilled enough hand that the butcher is reluctant to kill him right away. Worse still, Julie takes pity on Louison, and starts feeding him a powerful soporific tea to keep him asleep and safely in bed at the times that Clapet waits in the stairwell to kill whoever ends up crossing his path. Naturally enough, Julie and Louison fall in love, because as you can no doubt tell from everything I’ve written so far, Delicatessen is first and foremost a romantic comedy. That’s not me being even a tiny bit sarcastic: after the florid design of the thing, which I broadly use to include the peculiar timbre of the cinematography and the physical distortions of the actors, the most notable thing about Delicatessen is its indefinite use of genre. I could not, if you forced me to, state with absolute confidence if this is mostly a horror film that happens to be so quirky and funny that it’s not even a tiny bit scary, or if it’s mostly a comedy that invests so much in violent death and a despairing culture in the midst of collapse that it becomes horrifying. What I can do is to approvingly note of the fact that as it moves towards the end, it abandons either to become a live-action Tex Avery cartoon: the nerve-wracking physical anarchy and use of slapstick as a murder weapon is entirely in the spirit of a Screwy Squirrel short, and the film even gets away with the old “bathroom fills up with water until somebody opens the door” bit at the end, having spent most of its 99 minutes building exactly the kind of demented anything-goes universe where that feels like a perfectly reasonable thing to occur, in between the attack by separatist vegetarians who live in the sewers and the Rube Goldberg suicide machines.

Whatever mode it’s occupying, what dominates Delicatessen is shocking: this is as dewy-eyed and sweet in its outlook as anything in Amélie. Even while indicting them all as willing cannibals, Jeunet and Caro and co-writer Gilles Adrien portray the residents of the apartment with an essential affection and whimsy, using a playful sequence early on (the residents all creating musical interludes to the accompaniment of Clapet having sex with a certain Mademoiselle Plusse (Karin Viard) on squeaky bedsprings) to set up the idea that the apartment is a living organism, an ecosystem in which every emotionally aberrant figure within has their key and necessary role in the proper functioning of the whole. Given how frankly evil they are, and how joyfully the starts knocking them off, it’s a bit surprising and pleasant how much Delicatessen openly loves its cast.

Most of all it loves Louison and Julie, who are the aspect of this film that looks forward the most clearly to Jeunet’s solo projects: childlike innocents playing at a beatified, sexless version of romance, set against things like the circus and tea sets to accentuate just how much they’re too lighthearted for this corrosive place and this corrosive world. It is a bent, weird, ugly, and menacing film in so many ways, but it is entirely driven by the sweet charms of its central pair; in turn, the saccharine sentimentality of that plot (that thing which ruined Amélie for those – I am not one, by any stretch – who consider it to be ruined) is counterbalanced by the savage nastiness of the setting and plot. It’s a perfect balance, and while there’s the odd moment here or there where the directors fluff the timing of scenes or repeat concepts once too often, Delicatessen is something close to a miracle of style and tone and narrative all slashing at each other from odd angles to produce a flawlessly unified whole. Lord knows that this isn’t for everybody, but if we take the idea of a romantic comedy set in the ruins of a dead society and dressed up with cannibal horror seriously at all, it’s hard to see how it could turn out better than this.

Watch Delicatessen on tubi here: https://tubitv.com/movies/308310/delicatessen

Saturday Matinee: Beside Bowie The Mick Ronson Story

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“Beside Bowie-The Mick Ronson Story” Is a Flawed But Essential Documentary For Every Bowie and Mick Ronson Fan

By Michael Fremer

Source: Analog Planet

Filmmaker Jon Brewer’s Mick Ronson documentary tells the truly sad story of the wholly under-apprecriated guitarist/arranger Mick Ronson, who is of course best known (if he’s known at all) for his work with David Bowie. That being the case, Brewer spends a great deal of time (too much time) at the beginning of the 101 minute film on the rise of David Bowie before getting to the fall of Mick Ronson, better known to his friends as “Ronno”.

Brewer seems afraid that his film would not find an audience if he didn’t push the Bowie connection, including the cover credit “Voice over by DAVID BOWIE”, which grossly overstates Bowie’s narrative contribution.

Nonetheless, the film does a good job covering Bowie’s early years, his casting about to find his musical identity, his dress-wearing sexual identity swapping, which, according to first wife, American-born Angie, featured onscreen then and now, was more exploitative play-acting than genuine and his connecting up with Tony Visconti who was instrumental (literally) in helping Bowie to fashion his sound.

Visconti, on camera, in an interview that appears to have been filmed some time ago, bemoans noisy recording tape, which you’ll no doubt find amusing, while discussing early recording efforts. The movie moves on to Ronson’s early musical years (he was born in Hull, England, 1946). Ronson was classically trained and played piano, violin and other instruments. Like Visconti, he also could read music. He got the “rock bug” in the early ’60s and began playing local clubs as a member of various groups before setting off for London in 1965.

After kicking around London for a few years and making little headway and less money, he returned to Hull and became a municipal groundskeeper. One of his band mates in a group called The Rats returned to Hull to try to convince the contented gardener to travel back to London to become a member of David Bowie’s backup band. Though hesitant after his previous experiences, Ronson made the trip and the rest, as they say, is a history in desperate need of telling, which this film manages pretty well so I’m not going to further synopsize it.

It’s clear that Ronson was a masterful guitarist with a unique sound that’s in part created by a partly open “Wah Wah” pedal that he matter of factly demonstrates on camera and that by the time Bowie’s semi-breakthrough album Hunky Dory was recorded, he’d learned from Visconti the art of arranging and had become a brilliant one.

Rick Wakeman, who plays piano on that Ken Scott-David Bowie produced classic, says in his on-screen interview that Ronson, not Bowie, was the real co-producer and that his string arrangements on tracks like “Life on Mars” were, as all listeners know, nothing short of brilliant. While “Michael Ronson” receives arranging credit, it’s kind of buried. Unfortunately, Brewer did not get the usually accessible Ken Scott’s input on all of this.

Ronson contributes mightily to the breakthrough album Ziggy Stardust… and again, though he gets arranging credits, he apparently doesn’t get paid for that work. Angie narrates much of what went on during this period when the group first toured America by bus building an audience and spending more money than it took in. Despite his critical contributions to the record and the live performances, Ronson was basically paid a stipend by MainMain Management run by Tony DeFries, who comes across in this film as one of the villains both because he reputedly made more money from Bowie than Bowie himself earned, and because once Bowie moved on from Ronson, DeFries pushed Ronson, almost against his will, to become a “front man”. Ronson could easily have built a successful arranger/producer career. The under-appreciated album Slaughter on 10th Avenue (RCA APL 1-0353) featured a cover shot of Ronson playing a part, but it could very well also sum up his true feelings being pushed to the front when he was really a great side man.

Meanwhile Ronson’s contributions to Lou Reed’s breakthrough album Transformer were also undervalued. There are crucial interviews with Mott the Hoople’s Ian Hunter. Ronson joined his group for a while, later playing with Bob Dylan’s band.

The movie skips over the second Ziggy tour, which was not by bus but rather by airplane. That’s the segment on which I was on the plane, covering the legendary Carnegie Hall concert, Detroit (where I sat next to Iggy Pop) and Chicago. It’s also where I got to meet Mick Ronson, easily the most friendly, approachable, unassuming and charming rock star you could ever hope to meet.

So yes, DeFries comes across as a villain in this story and as is often the case with super-talents, Bowie comes across looking like a user, sad to say.

Speaking of airplanes, I watched this on the flight back from Amsterdam so I can’t get into the technical aspects of the film or the sound, though I did listen on my Jerry Harvey Layla in-ear phones, which are amazing. My conclusion is that while this is a somewhat flawed presentation, it’s one every Mick Ronson fan should see as should every Bowie fan. In fact, It’s indispensable. When it was over, having “met” onscreen, Ronson’s wife and family I was left beyond sad by how this super-talented man, who was never a money-grubber, left this planet too young, under-appeciated and with little money to leave his family.

Watch Beside Bowie: The Mick Ronson Story on hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/movie/beside-bowie-the-mick-ronson-story-david-bowie/17400506

Saturday Matinee: Dark Waters

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Film Review: “Dark Waters” — Poison and Passion

By Peg Aloi

Source: Arts Fuse

Todd Haynes proffers a richly diverse palette as a filmmaker. Yet he revisits certain themes reliably, whether it’s via an experimental narrative that combines lyrical visuals and magic realism (Poison), or an exploration of the dark underside of fame (Superstar, Velvet Goldmine, I’m Not There), or the struggle to accept one’s homosexuality (Poison, Velvet Goldmine, Far From Heaven, Carol). With a background in semiotics, Haynes deploys an intricate but classic visual style (especially in grandiose period pieces Far From Heaven and Carol), often expressed through complex color designs, exploring truths both psychological and metaphorical. Working closely with his cinematographer Ed Lachman, Haynes crafts films that are unspeakably beautiful stories about pockets of American life.

Generally, Haynes is interested in the toxicity that lies beneath a pleasing surface. His 1995 film Safe is the story of a woman (Julianne Moore) who becomes ill when exposed to chemicals and discovers that she has a condition only beginning to be understood. In addition to portraying the very real impact of various substances (fabric, carpeting, cosmetics, food), the film looks at the more subtle poisoning that comes when emotions are repressed in an unsatisfying marriage, when someone is unable to ask for what they want. With Dark Waters, based on a story written by reporter Nathaniel Rich for the New York Times (and adapted for the screen by Mathew Michael Carnahan and Mario Correa), Haynes trains his sensitive eye on how chemical contamination impacts a small West Virginia town, delving into the layers of corruption that shroud corporate crimes. Like Safe, Dark Waters occasionally has the feel of a subtle, but unintentional, horror story.

Mark Ruffalo plays Robert Bilott, a Cincinnati lawyer who, as the film opens in 1998, has just been made partner in a law firm that specializes in defending corporate clients. Prior to this scene, we see a brief prologue, set in Parkersburg, West Virginia: a group of teenagers is having a beer-fueled frolic at a local swimming hole on a balmy summer night. They enjoy the water’s weird foamy texture. A boat comes near them, holding two men who are spraying a dispersant on the water’s surface. They yell at the trespassing teenagers to get out. A yellowish-green light shines on the surface of the dark blue water. Thus Haynes establishes a color schematic that pits the evil greed propelling the contamination against the hard working residents whose lives are destroyed.

Bilott is visited at his office by two men who bring videotapes that prove that their farm is being poisoned by DuPont, which owns a chemical plant in Parkersburg, Bilott’s hometown. These men have traveled over a hundred miles to see the lawyer because they live next door to his grandmother. Bilott tries to get them to contact a different lawyer because his professional role, defending large chemical companies, is at odds with their needs. But he is moved by the story of Wilbur Tennant (Bill Camp), a cattle farmer who has lost nearly 200 cows to strange illnesses. Bilott confers with his boss (Tim Robbins) and grudgingly gets the go-ahead to pursue action against DuPont.

In a saga that lasts a decade and a half, Bilott works tirelessly, and at the expense of his own health and domestic stability, to find justice for the residents of Parkersburg. His wife, played by Anne Hathaway, keeps the home fires burning, but becomes frustrated with her husband’s singular focus on his work. That work is solitary and grueling, as shown in scenes where we watch him digging through papers in hundreds of cartons, or trying in vain to find research on the dangerous PFOAs that are among the most deadly contaminants in question. Not widely known in the 1990s, PFOA contamination of municipal drinking water is now a familiar phenomenon (including here in upstate New York where I live). As a result of DuPont’s illegal dumping and poorly managed waste disposal, as well as exposure to chemicals at the plant itself, town residents and employees of the plant have experienced a range of serious problems, from birth defects to cancer, caused, apparently, by the city’s biggest, and thus well-loved, employer.

And therein lies one of Bilott’s biggest challenges: fighting to expose the wrongdoing of a corporation that, as far as many residents are concerned, is the only reason they have jobs. But the difficulty goes beyond Bilott being glared at in the local diner, or sneered at by DuPont’s in-house corporate counsel Phil Donnelly (Victor Garber). Tennant is diagnosed with cancer, as is his wife, and they are still shunned by some of their neighbors. Other residents who have brought lawsuits become the targets of arson. Paranoia begins to hound Bilott as he realizes the object of his lawsuit is a deeply dishonest and sociopathic entity (shades of Silkwood here). Unlike the passionate journalist Ruffalo plays in Spotlight, Michael Rezendes, his Bilott is a quiet and calm workaholic, not given to emotional outbursts. But his dogged devotion to the cause is apparent in his exhausted face, his trembling hands, his wordless sobbing. It’s a mature performance from Ruffalo, who is also a co-producer. His steady presence anchors the large cast, largely composed of lawyers in suits and working people in flannel and wool.

The visual opulence one expects from Haynes is subtly rendered here: the interiors appear somewhat drab, the exteriors rather ordinary. But a definite style comes through, once a viewer notices the way yellow and blue tie the film’s visuals together. Along with the color scheme, exquisite lighting and letter-perfect design elements are hiding in the plain sight of this real-life narrative. The music by Marcelo Zarvos is moody, spare, and evocative, an effective counterpoint to the secrets and fears lurking just beneath this story’s surface. Dark Waters may not be Haynes’s most beautiful film, but it may yet prove to be among his most important.