the flimsy, sad future of bartholomew's song

IMDB.com estimates that Bartholomew's Song cost $2,500, a figure that's been rattling around in my head while I've been thinking how damn good it is. The short is only about 10 minutes long, but the directors, Lowell Frank and Destin Daniel Cretton, have made a virtue out of a low budget and a brief run time.

B.'s Song takes place in a dystopia where workers sleep in cell-like rooms and assemble little cubic things at an absurdly slow rate. Life for Bartholomew 467 and his fellow Bartholomews (it seems that every man is named Bartholomew) is monotonous and comically repetitive, but their blank faces suggest that this isn't generally a problem.

This is a good world to set a cheap short in, because that basic premise can be established in only six static shots that begin Song. The simplicity of the shots echoes the mechanical, modular quality of the Bartholomews' world, where everything is as discreet and functional as the cogs of a pocket watch.

mirror mirror: shrek with (too much?) ambition

I watched another movie by Tarsem Singh this week, Mirror Mirror. He also directed Immortals, which I wrote about a couple of months ago. I like to write about outliers, and Singh's movies are vivid and cinematic in a way that most modern Hollywood directors don't bother with. Think Avatar but with arty intentions and even richer detail.

Mirror Mirror is a retelling of Snow White, which saves me the trouble of summarizing the plot. Suffice it to say that in this version the seven dwarves are thieves with a hideout. To get what I meant by "vivid" above, take a look at this screen grab of their den:

Check out the meticulously arranged mess in the front there. It looks like the perfect still life, and I suspect it's a visual reference to some classic painting I don't know, but in any event, the shot gives you a sense of what the movie is like: lots and lots of texture. This is a film where the bandit hideout has elegant, patterned wallpaper. (Look at the background of that screen grab and you'll see a sort of Japanese engraving sort of motif.)

hats of the damned: pasolini's oedipus rex

I suppose I came to Pier Paolo Pasolini's film version of Oedipus Rex hoping that it would work with the meaning I had gotten out of the play, which I analyzed in some depth a few weeks ago. My conclusion was basically that Sophocles' original play works best if we think of it as a parable about the sin we do unknowingly and the dangers of knowledge.

Pasolini's film, however, doesn't really focus on these aspects, or at least not in any way I can tell, and I'm kind of unsure what to make of it overall. The movie's major innovation is that it begins and ends in 20th century Italy. In some early part of the 20th century (I can't figure out what year exactly this would have been), Pasolini shows us a young military man who is jealous of the attention his wife pays to their infant son. Shortly, the setting changes to ancient Greece and tells us the traditional story of Oedipus in chronological order (as opposed to the play, where Oedipus is already king and we only learn of his true back story through exposition). Then, where the play would end with Oedipus blind and shamed, the movie magically transposes the same actor to 1970s Italy, making him a blind beggar.

the cinematography of la dolce vita: that's deep, man

I've got an essay coming on La Dolce Vita for the Brattle Theatre Film Notes blog — I'll add a link when they put it up. The Brattle Theatre's Film Notes blog just posted my essay about La Dolce Vita, but I also wanted to post these great screen grabs that show how damn satisfying the cinematography is and the incredible use of depth.

If you want the tl;dr version of this post, just look at these two compositions, which are the opening shots of their respective scenes:

Either one of these shots is near-perfect on its own, but they're even better put side by side like this, because you can see the echoes: The top one is almost all white, the bottom almost all black; the top shot has a vanishing point somewhere on the right half; the bottom's is at approximately the mirror point on the left.

i need to stop writing this post before i convince myself that sucker punch is actually brilliant

Man of Steel, Zack Snyder's new Superman movie, is coming out this weekend. I'm going to use that as a reason to write about Sucker Punch, his last movie, because I've been wanting to write about this hot mess ever since it came out two years ago.

Although it's probably not very good in the final analysis, Sucker Punch plays with a lot of smart ideas, including an ironic self-awareness that most blockbuster action directors never mess with. In case you're wondering if I'm just trying to find something complex about this movie, worry not: This self-consciousness is plainly implied by the movie itself, and even if Snyder can't really figure out what that means or what to do with it, I like that he tried.

We're immediately put on notice by the first image, a slow crawl forward through a theater that moves toward a curtain with the Warner Bros. logo on it. That curtain opens up onto another curtain with the production company's logo, which in turn opens directly onto the first scene. In this very first image, then, we are being given a staged scene that is patently artificial, since of course we don't normally watch the action of a movie take place on a theater stage unless it happens to take place in a theater. It's the film equivalent of breaking the fourth wall.

don't be turned off by raccoon mario: a very half-hearted case for immortals

I'm sure a lot of people saw the trailer for Immortals and dismissed it as a sword-and-sandals deal that would be about the joy of spearing your enemy and not much else, but this one is significantly more artistically ambitious than the average Conan movie. I like that Immortals takes risks, even when it results in costumes like this, which I think of as "Edgy Raccoon Mario":

It's easy to take shots at this movie, but actually the willingness to embrace unique visuals pays off in some beautiful moments. The single best part from this perspective is probably the climatic battle between Zeus's cohort of gods and their nemeses, the Titans. (Titans, like all creepy things, stoop a lot for reasons that are unclear.) It begins when Zeus and the other four Olympian gods arrive on earth by dropping in as clouds of gold dust — very heavy gold dust, apparently, because they come in at a fast rate — and they materialize upon hitting the ground. Each landing makes a sound like a metal door being clanged shut, as if they were iron statues dropped to earth, and the camera even shudders a little bit, as if being shaken by the impact. It's a great effect.

the opaque camera in boudu saved from drowning

I've seen three films by Jean Renoir at this point, and I'd rather not say it, but to tell the truth I don't get why he's revered among directors.

The first two that I saw were the ones he's best known for, Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game, and I didn't dislike them so much as I didn't understand why I needed to watch them. I'll use a painfully vague term on the condition that I promise I won't get in the habit: Both movies seemed a bit unfocused to me.

And so it is with this most recent film of his that I've just seen, Boudu Saved From Drowning, from 1932. Boudu is homeless and living in Paris. After losing his dog, he wanders a bit, seeming not particularly to have any emotion about the loss. And then, wandering across a bridge, he walks to the railing and jumps off into the water. With a telescope, a Monsieur Lestingois sees this and rushes from his nearby bookstore to jump in the river and save Boudu. After a kind of CPR that looks suspiciously like forcing the victim to do calisthenics, Lestingois succeeds in reviving the tramp, and now the bourgeois bookseller feels compelled to look after him. Boudu effectively becomes an unwilling member of the household, joining the aging Lestingois, his wife, and their maid — who is also the older man's mistress.

the six dollar fifty man messes with expectations you didn't even know you had

In my post on Tuesday about the awesome New Zealand short The Six Dollar Fifty Man, I didn't get into some of the neater storytelling sleight of hand used by the directors for fear I would scare off some people. But the movie has two great ploys that it would have been sad to forget about just because they're a little hard to describe.

First, a great switcheroo, though you might want to check out the video before you read on to make the following more comprehensible. You'll see at about the 2:00 mark (and in the above screen shot) that our little hero Andy, dressed in red, has just jumped off a roof. This creates an immediate tension — what the ef is this kid thinking and is he going to be okay when he lands? — and the next shot is of the ground below at a blank spot where we think he'll arrive any second, probably disastrously. And then, suddenly, dropping into the frame ... is a doll, in a pinkish outfit that looks like Andy's, and, wait huh? Then the kid alights gracefully in the background.

the six dollar fifty man: being a superhero without being obvious about it

The Six Dollar Fifty Man from NZ Shorts on Vimeo.

I swear I was planning on digging in and perusing several shorts to find one worth posting, but The Six Dollar Fifty Man happened to be the first one I looked at under Vimeo staff picks. It's from a couple of years ago but only seems to have been posted to Vimeo a couple of months ago, and besides, it would have been completely worth posting anyway.

I admit off the bat that there are probably too many close-ups, but that's true of loads of films, and this has some stellar compositions that make up for it. Check out this peach of a shot, from about 9:50:

more waltz: why are parallels so satisfying?

That scene I blogged about last week from early in Take This Waltz? Totally referenced later in the same film. To the screen shots!

The top shot is the early nighttime scene, and the bottom is the later daytime scene that comes near the end of the movie. The compositions are a near match, and by starting the second scene this way, director Sarah Polley is practically telegraphing to us that we should be on the lookout for parallels (which are even easier to spot if you've already written a blog post about the earlier scene).

take this waltz has at least one great scene

I'm as guilty as anyone of not paying enough attention to the use of sound in movies. From Take This Waltz, a movie I'm frustrated at for sociological reasons, here's a really nice little sequence:

the last picture show and the creepiness of faces

I don't know what I thought the The Last Picture Show was going to be about, but I didn't think it would be about how sex is used like power. But, yeah, that's one of its major thematic riffs, and it's pretty ruthless about it, in that good, artistic way of being ruthless. This movie and even just this element are worth more explication, but here I'm just looking at one sub-motif about sex in this movie: the straight-on close-ups of certain faces.

To begin with, there's the prostitute, Jimmie Sue. First, we only see her in the darkness, but we hear her castrating, real-time mockery of Billy, the mute and possibly developmentally delayed teenager she's deflowering in the backseat of a car. Finally, after she's kicked him out, she emerges, and it's positively unnerving.

We're finally seeing her face for the first time, and she's a fuming monster, looming closer and looking us right in the eyes, which is where a lot of the effect of this shot comes from. In theory, this could be a POV shot, but it doesn't seem set up that way, since whose view it would be isn't at all clear. So instead it seems like this sly manner of half-breaking the fourth wall, and makes us get how callous she is.