"Halliwell's Hundred" and Hellzapoppin

Leslie Halliwell was an inveterate curmudgeon, but he certainly had a sense of humor. A great many - perhaps a majority - of the entries in his 1981 collection "Halliwell's Hundred" are comedies. The British programmer and film critic, who was quite pointed in his dismissal of virtually everything that followed the 1950s, cherished memories of afternoons spent in the local cinemas or at student theaters or even in a cozy den at home (or, for that matter, a barely-sheltering hotel room, surrounded by a hostile American city just out his window). In these spots he would reel in the dreamlike atmosphere and lighter-than-air concoctions of Hollywood or British classics.

They Were Expendable, A Canterbury Tale, & Hail the Conquering Hero

Watching three films from 1944-45 back to back to back I was struck by World War II cinema's variety of flavors. Hail the Conquering Hero, an all-American Preston Sturges comedy, takes place far from the battlefield, on the homefront where all eyes are on a war which remains somehow elusive, even imaginary. They Were Expendable, on the other hand, is mired in the muck of war; it's one of John Ford's most Hawksian films, the male camaraderie (even featuring a "one of the guys" tough gal, played by Donna Reed) mostly untouched by sentimentality or mythologizing. Meanwhile, Powell and Pressburger, that eccentrically flamboyant yet surprisingly un-escapist duo, negotiate between these two spheres. A Canterbury Tale is set on a "home front" which is also at times a battlefield, a British countryside fundamentally transformed by modern warfare, with its troop transports, blackouts, and women at work. Together, the three films convey a fascinating triptych view of how movies presented the war while it was still unfolding.

Sullivan's Travels

This review was an inadvertent entry in the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die Blog Club, and was reviewed by "Squish" for the site which started this club.

There's an intriguing irony to the story with which Sullivan's Travels delivers its anti-message message. First, that story: Sullivan's Travels follows John L. Sullivan (no, not that one - this one's a director played by Joel McCrea), who wants to shoot O Brother, Where Art Thou (no not that o- never mind), a serious drama focused on war, fascism, and the Great Depression. He wants to capture the times, speak to the masses, deliver a message - but yes, he placates the worried moguls who try to deter him, "with a little sex."

The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys

In the film The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, Francis Doyle (Emile Hirsch) and Tim Sullivan (Kieran Culkin) stumble across a dying dog. The two middle-schoolers are stoned, returning from a visit to the drug dealer, from whom they've also purchased some animal tranquilizer, part of an elaborate plot to steal a cougar from a wildlife center. They hope to set it loose at their parochial school, an idea that seems as outlandishly cartoonish as anything in the comic books they illustrate in their spare time.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High

Perhaps even more fascinating than the way our world changes is how the eyes that perceive it change too. Take, for example, the teen movie. It's been exactly thirty years since Fast Times at Ridgemont High hit multiplexes. Culturally a lot has changed, even to the point of coming full circle: the 80s fashion sense (brand new but fully blown in '82) went way out-of-fashion and then rather remarkably came back, albeit cloaked in irony and nostalgia. Meanwhile, those pixelated arcade games in the Sherman Oaks Galleria (itself a fallen victim of history's merciless march) have morphed into slick computer graphics that are close to convincingly emulating the very flesh-and-blood of the bored high-schoolers who play them. Meanwhile, those original teenagers, of course, are now well into middle age with kids the same age as they were in this movie.

Rosetta

Rosetta is about 30 now.

When the Dardenne brothers released their second feature in 1999, their title character (Emilie Dequenne) was a teenager saddled with more responsibility and less comprehension than many of her peers - at once an adult (more so than her own mother) and a child, prone to temper tantrums and exasperated confusion as she's asked to play by rules she doesn't even understand. In the end, it appears Rosetta may not even make it to 30, and the raw immediacy of the Dardennes' style and pace (both the character and the viewpoint - trying to keep up - never stop moving, as if they're playing a sort of neorealist video game) make such questions seem irrelevant while you're watching.

October (and beyond)

From now on, I will post steadily - usually Monday, Wednesday, and Friday - so you can expect a consistent output from this blog. I'm not talking short-term, I'm talking long-term, at least a year if not more. I'm already building up a substantial backlog.

This begins in the coming month with three reviews a week. After writing these pieces, I accidentally discovered that they neatly fell into four groups, and so each week has a theme: teenage struggles, forties films, movies about Africa, and fantasy entertainment from the eighties. A discussion of two idiosyncratic Spalding Gray works, which (appropriately enough) didn't fit in with any of the themed weeks, will wind things up, along with (maybe, maybe not) a horror film for Halloween. All of these reviews will be relatively short and focused - a new approach I want to take in my written work. But that's just the beginning.

Movies I watched in 2012

Capsule reviews of 15 films viewed since January 2012

(This post originally went up on Monday morning, but was quickly bumped. I fear it's been overlooked since, so I'm re-posting it now; I'd really like to hear back from readers on what they thought of these particular films; also I'd like to highlight "Who's Killing Cinema - and Who Cares", my response to the fascinating David Denby article; it went up middle of Saturday night because I couldn't wait, but deserves a bump now too...)

Histoire(s) du Cinema • The Long Day Closes • Madchen in Uniform • Me and My Gal • Melancholia • North Shore • Road to Morocco • Savages • Shoah • The Story of Film • Super 8 •  Tangled • Tanner '88 • Ways of Seeing • The Wind in the Willows

Great minds think alike? (Dance of the Criterion Collection)

It don't rain but it pours. All summer, I've taken my sweet time in updating this blog, yet in the past four days, I've put up four posts, all (I think) worth reading. This is the second post in three hours but time was of the essence, and not just because the subject is a Criterion flash sale (good till tomorrow morning) - or rather the video Criterion is using to promote said sale.

The video, a delightful and enticing montage featuring brief clips of every single DVD in the Criterion Collection, bears more than a passing resemblence in construction and spirit to a video I posted last fall though it's probably just a coincidence (I am hardly the first to employ the "in ... seconds/minutes" concept, though most seem to focus on a single film). See 'em both here for yourself:

Who's Killing Cinema - and Who Cares?

I've just finished one of the best essays on film I've ever read. It's called "Has Hollywood Murdered the Movies?" and it's by David Denby in The New Republic. Denby's essay is about the effect that over-digitalization and informal formalism have on movies: how the narrative art has been pruned to the point of poisoning the tree, how a concern with fleeting impression over deep-seated effect has destroyed the relationship between the spectator and the spectacle. In six pages, Denby effectively conveys things I've been feeling and saying for years. I don't necessarily agree with all of Denby's examples (some of the films he sees as exceptional I think are endemic, and vice-versa) but his overall point seems irrefutable. Movies are no longer made, marketed, or (especially) received the way they used to be, not in an evolutionary sense (these goalposts are always shifting) but fundamentally. This passage in particular had me shouting "Yes!" aloud as if I was watching the Patriots score a touchdown:

"The glory of modernism was that it yoked together candor and spiritual yearning with radical experiments in form. But in making such changes, filmmakers were hardly abandoning the audience. Reassurance may have ended, but emotion did not. The many alterations in the old stable syntax still honored the contract with us. The ignorant, suffering, morally vacant Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull was as great a protagonist as Julie Marsden. The morose Nashville was as trenchant a group portrait and national snapshot as the hopeful Stagecoach. However elliptical or harsh or astringent, emotion in modernist movies was a strong presence, not an absence." (emphasis added)

Fragments of Cinephilia, Pt. III

Short thoughts on: The Honeymoon Killers • Forbidden Games • Tout Va Bien & Masculin Feminin • Moby Dick • Robert Bresson • Yasujiro Ozu and Early Spring • My Dinner with Andre • Stanley Kauffmann • Sweet Movie

As I prepare a batch of fresh posts for the fall (a dozen new reviews are already written, with dozens more on the way), here are some more oldies but goodies. These sporadic notes and musings were originally comments on IMDb. Many of these thoughts led to longer conversations, and you can click on the date to see the original thread. Some of the responses are pretty interesting; in fact under the final fragment, on the extremely controversial Yugoslavian film Sweet Movie, I actually included some samples of the ensuing discussion (most of which I didn't see until now). And if you've viewed the film in question, I'd be really interested in your own opinion on the matter.

(See here for Pt. I and Pt. II of this archival project.)

Time Travel and Pretty Pictures (and a Fall Forecast)

New to The Dancing Image? An old friend? Either way, there are probably a lot of posts or features you haven't seen yet. If you're like me, you're always discovering new blogs and saying to yourself: "Wow, this site has an extensive backlog. Some of this stuff looks great. I'll have to go back and check it out sometime!" And then of course, we never do.

Well, this is my invitation to break that trend! Visit (or re-visit) these two central pages and you can navigate easily and entertainingly through all this site has to offer. You can also just enjoy these pages without following any links; they are both directories and features in themselves:

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The Movie Timeline

Year by year, from the silent era to the present, I've linked every single film discussed in original essays or through quotations from other critics, illustrated with screen-caps or sampled in appetizing clips. This is the best route for those who have a particular favorite era in movie history, or who, like me, just love surveying the whole crazy chronology, from silent slapstick to the glamorous Golden Age, from sexy black-and-white to dazzling Technicolor, from the raw "cinema verite" of the Sixties to the computer-generated universe of today. It's all there, with plenty of pictures to illustrate the incredible journey. Power up the flux capacitor.

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The Picture Gallery

This one's ALL pictures, for those who think a visual medium deserves a visual approach. Generally alphabetized by title of the film (or sometimes painting or actor, if it's a promotional still), each image doubles as a link. You'll be led back to the post originally featuring any image you click on. This is a great way to let your eye guide your mind and imagination. (Fair warning: there's a bit of NSFW stuff in the form of some very mild nudity and generally cartoonish carnage.) If your browser is slow, the Picture Gallery may take a little while to load - but it's worth the wait, I promise!

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And of course you can always visit Top Posts for my highlights from four years of blogging, The Directory for a straight-up list of all the reviews I've written, or, my personal favorite, the Video Gallery for a guided audiovisual tour through the movies - with uninterrupted 30 to 60-second clips from my DVD collection as your guide. I hope if you find things you like along the way, you'll let me know. I always enjoy hearing back from readers, especially on older stuff.

As for the new...

With summer ending and my priorities shifting, I'm hoping to hunker down soon and create lots of fresh content for this site. That means short essays (and occasionally long ones, though this summer's marathon essays were mostly exceptions to the approach I want to take!). But it also means, hopefully, pictures, multimedia posts, video essays, interviews with young independent filmmakers and perhaps even a short film or two of my own within the next year. The more ambitious projects, of course, hinge on finally getting a computer again (I've been working off library monitors, friends' PCs, and my iPhone for a while now). I want to create at least a hundred or so fresh posts before returning which shouldn't take long if they're short, so wish me luck.

And in the mean time, enjoy exploring The Dancing Image!