“The Shock Doctrine” (2007)

IMDb

peninsula of flowers

As a film lover, the first question regarding this film is what should we make of it: a short? an advertisement to a web site? a raising awareness clip? Maybe if the director was more anonymous, this would definitely fall between the second and the third. But i will consider that Cuarón will have cinematic ambitions in any thing that he puts his mind into. And actually what he tries here is something quite interesting, and it has been achieved with unbeatable perfection 20 years ago, by Jorge Furtado.

This is a short film which, in order to work, has to obey to publicity rules. So, it has a necessarily short message, which has to strike the viewer and stay with him, and leave absolutely no doubts what so ever about what the filmmakers intend to pass. Here that message is simplified to the very minimum, since it is expected that we look for the site, and Naomi Klein’s writings after we see it. So i guess after all this is a commercial.

What problems do we have? It goes straight to the point, perhaps to straight. Everything is delivered to us without the minimum concern about whether we’ll buy it or if we have the grounds to believe it. Listen, i enjoy Naomi. Maybe she pushes a little bit too much on the conspiracy side, which always makes me suspicious – i build conspiracy theories against conspiracy theorists. But generally speaking, i think she’s a lucid person and her ideas are fundamentally honest, i quite frankly, probably very close to the truth. But here in the short, we are supposed to buy everything that is told to us, without making us reasoning about it for a single second. It is an anti capitalism product which works with the same tools as the capitalism system. It is what it is against. Now, i would be willing to believe that 6,5 minutes are not enough to establish a theory, or to convince me to believe it, but in 1989 Jorge Furtado built one with 13 minutes. Watch that film. It is perfect, it is credible, every line, every opinion is given to us, and supported by surrounding concepts. It reasons with us, and appeals to our senses in the process, it’s perfectly balanced. But than again, Furtado was a publicity maker, not a filmmaker, he was experienced in compressing messages.

This won’t fully disappoint you, but watch “Ilha das Flores” to have this one done perfectly.

My opinion: 2/5

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“X” (1963)

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kaleidoscope

I think there was an honest and valuable attempt in this film, at doing something ostensibly visual. The story is literally and uniquely about vision, about what people see, what they might see, and how that will affect their world. So we have the Frankenstein and the monster in the same body, a doctor obsessed with seeing underneath the surface. The metaphor is quite clear and basic, but nevertheless it’s watchable: he who wants to see everything ends up seeing nothing. All the light equals none.

The problem, probably, is the huge gap between the ideas of the writers and the visual solution found by the filmmakers. I know this film is low budget, by the so called master of it, but i also think that money, or the lack of it, can hardly become an excuse for uninteresting attempts at making a film visual. It’s not the cheapness of a set or the poor photography that deviates good filmmakers from trying interesting things. More and more, this film is not that cheap. But the thing is, the shots are conceived in an ordinary way, very by the book, made to deliver work instead of trying to be a little bit imaginative.

However, there is an interesting, yet failed, attempt here. I suppose because this was made in the 60’s, psychedelic rock was appealing to youth, the major target of this film, there is an attempt to place Milland’s x ray eye sight as a psychedelic delusion. So all the POV shots are seen as an abstract decomposition of reality into basic colors, adding to it a kaleidoscopic effect. The moments when those bits are inserted are made as delirious bits by Xavier. I don’t think this is interesting enough for me to pay this film more attention, but i appreciated the effort, that’s the best thing here.

Eyesight and transcendency. Science and religion. In this case, i would let go of that connexion, it’s worthless here.

I appreciated the funny bits, when Xavier watches naked people dancing. It would work properly if they could show the whole thing, not just harmless bits, but that was OK.

My opinion: 2/5

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“Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Triggers in Leash (#1.3)” (1955)

IMDb

you draw and i shoot

Here is an interesting development of the 30 minutes formula that this show approaches. I believe people involved in the show could do anything with the specific episode they were granted. These were exercises in working a short measure of time to develop an idea that, in order to work, would have to be clear, clean, grasping and effective. Or not be any of those but made in a way that made the audiences wonder. It had to work. Actually, as i start digging a little deeper into this, i think one can probably go through all the episodes of the show and get, in the end, an interesting glossary on cinematic narrative bending. Probably not so much in visual terms, which is understandable because: -not many directors of the show did really interesting things with their careers; -this Is television, things were shot and edited way faster than feature films.

Here we have an interesting idea. To build (and hold!) a tension based on nothing. A single set, to prevent distractions, and a dispute that will make us follow the two cowboys, and want to know who of them (if any) will break and draw first. The fact that they use a single space is already important, because it notes already an intention to be tense (and intense). Because this is a 25 minute episode (plus Hitch’s interventions) they don’t have to establish any shots outside the space to allow spectators to breathe. We can be 25 minutes inside the same room.

The interesting thing is to check the narrative devices and modes they choose to build on the tension, or ease on it when needed, and the cleverness of the unfolding. So, tension increases depending on the placement of the cowboys in the space and, more important, Maggie’s position in relation to them. So it’s a very spatial positioning of the characters which i enjoy, and which the camera helps. We fear for Maggie, when she is just behind Del, and we fear for her when she’s in the middle. Comedy; this is a comedy, in the end, and we have a very curious balance between the eminent shooting and the goofiness of having, for example, two fellows who can’t eat properly because they won’t stop starring at each other. Comedy here happens not because they act to be funny, but because the situation implies that. It’s a great type of comedy. And of course, the final twist, when we thought we’d seen something, we are told we’ve being as deceived as the cowboys.

Hitch’s interventions, specially at the end, is again priceless, here enhanced by the really funny nonsense twist. The value of it is that it’s not a mere annotation on what we saw, it’s a continuation of the narrative, after the end of the episode.

My opinion: 4/5

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“Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Gentleman from America (#1.31)” (1956)

IMDb

bad choice

This is not one of the episodes of the series. In fact, the failure of this episode probably highlights how thin is, in this kind of story, the difference between a pleasant awkward episode, and just a cheesy goofy nonsense.

What i do notice as a dominant fact to much of the episodes is that we are always allowed to define the degree of human manipulation or super natural unexplained events that take place (or that is revealed to us). So, in this case, we suspect the American is being manipulated, but we also wonder whether we are being manipulated as well. The plot is predictable, but it leaves some shadows, which might be enough for us to wonder enough to feel in doubt. Is there a real ghost? Would the manipulators fall in their own trap and be caught in the middle of something they didn’t understand? Would the American over top his deceivers and come out with something more clever? Well, apparently they chose the dullest solution. The American does exactly what is intended by the money chasers, everything is according to the book (not the one he reads, i wish it was according to that). We have a minor twist, of finding out what happened to the American after the night in the mansion, but instead of fun irony, they moralize. Bad choice, to me.

So it fails in the plot, and to me it fails in the building of the tension in the ghost house. That has to do with direction, but also probably due to the ghost itself, which is laughable by today’s production standards, so it is badly dated.

My opinion: 1/5

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“Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Case of Mr. Pelham (#1.10)” (1955)

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genre: uneasiness

I have been feeding on these small adventures. Even though i had obviously heard about this show, i had never tried it. Right now i have seen a handful of episodes, and incidentally i’ve been hitting many directed by Hitchcock. This is such one. After having seen these episodes, i consider that they deserve individual commentary, even though it sounds reasonable to consider this a “show”. I mean, quite beyond the immortal generic, the Hitchcock sketch that Alfred himself drew, and the by now inseparable soundtrack, we have a feel to every episode (at least those i’ve seen so far) that binds them together. I’m still not able to properly define what that is, but apparently, and generally speaking, every episode tries to play with the basic notions of the mystery genre (Hitch’s cinematic home), mixed with nonsense and the bizarre. It doesn’t press so hard on these two aspects as Twilight Zone, but it so far i reckon in it higher visual interest, or wasn’t the patron of this show AH. In any case, the episodes are uneven among them, and quite different in their conception, different writers, different directors, different actors. So i look at them as short films, part of a larger universe where they exist together.

This Mr Pelham is a very good and balanced example of the different genres they use. Maybe that’s why i’m starting my comments here. Hitch’s direction is quite low-key. It’s competent, of course, fully detached from any ordinary television values – which 50 years ago probably didn’t exist so rooted on people’s minds as they do today – but apart from some dolly shots, exquisitely executed, the camera work is normal. Those dolly shots are actually remarkable, so check them, they usually start a scene, with a certain framing, that indicates a certain environment, and that framing is corrected through camera movement to make us find something that matters, like when Ewell gets the first time in the club, the camera adjusts our focus to Ewell, and puts us in the action. This subtlety is remarkable.

But the interest is in the narrative, the story itself. I have the feeling the idea here was deceiving us into believing we were watching a criminal identity swap case, only to make us fall into the awkwardness of the inexplicable. In the end, we really don’t know what that was all about, and may be led to mistrust what we see. Who was the real Pelham? Who was the real Hitchcock, in the end? Like this is a kind of short “being malkovich”.

It works, it’s not fascinating beyond the taste of the mood, but it’s good. Ewell… i don’t know how could he be the man peaking under Monroe’s skirt. His acting is so noisy and denounced it aches. Hitch’s interventions are priceless.

My opinion: 3/5

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“House M.D.: Broken (#6.1)” (2009)

IMDb

over the TV’s nest

This is a pleasant detour from the linear, well known, and unchangeable path of the series and its main character. This is the problem with series that develop the same characters throughout a huge number of episodes: they can’t really “develop” characters, they have to give us the impression that characters are changing, that characters have an arc of evolution, but they can’t take the fundamental characteristics that made the audiences go with the show in the first place. So, this guy, House, will always have to be brilliant, bitter, unfriendly, yet likable and with a “good heart”. I mean, how many possibilities do you have with this? They found a formula, like the majority of the shows, something like: each episode features a rare medical case, House and his team have to find the solution, while working out their personal and collective lives. After 4 and a half seasons, they thought it would be enough, so they start to put the medical mysteries on House himself, eventually leading to the breakdown where we find him at the beginning of season 6. So, this (double) episode is like opening the window and letting fresh air in. We have House, and we actually have some (very) basic character development. In order to do that, we are fully taken away from the usual environment of the previous seasons. So, this is like a TV film centered around a character we already know. we can watch this one with a degree of autonomy that no other episode has. This episode (almost) stands alone. I suppose it is supposed to, and that’s why they’ve put Franka Potente, a real cinema actress, in a major role, to make it believable, as an autonomous piece. They conceive a few ordinary but watchable nut cases, and so they use the formula of “cuckoo’s nest”.

For this double episode alone, they raised the production values, and gave a special care for photography and lighting, and in some points framing. This confirms my idea. But the thing is, Katie Jacobs is not a real filmmaker, she frames and edits everything with the mundane feel of TV shows, which work as production lines, not like real art. This “film” is worthless as a film, despite the efforts. And even though Hugh Laurie is believable and has the sympathy of the audience, his character is a TV character, born for TV. Transposing House to cinema is as goofy as a genius drug addict doctor been placed in an insane institution.

My opinion: 3/5

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“Frenzy” (1972)

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London eye

Hitchcock is one of the most visual directors ever. His imagination was absolutely rooted on visual development. Like him, as attached to the visual understanding and interpretation of the world, we only have a few handful of other directors. By visual i mean that he envisions worlds where the visual, the framing, the mood, everything depends on what we see, and how we see it. That’s the basis. The story, plot, etc only comes later, in the exact measure that is needed to fit the visual concept.

So, when watching any Hitchcock film, it is important and indeed fascinating to reflect and guess what was he thinking exactly. Better put, Why did he want to make each film? Here in Frenzy, i can think of a few reasons:

-maybe the most important one to Hitch: the sense of (real) location. This is his first film where the majority of the scenes were shot in real locations, all in London, mainly around Covent Garden. This the film where he went back to London. He wanted to soak the film with London, so we relatively few plot points that take place on inner locations, quite the opposite of the usual Hitchcock, to whom exteriors were fake cardboards which worked merely as establishing shots. Here we have for the first (and only?) time in Hitch’s career a real city pulsing. Indeed it was a relatively new concept, that of capturing real cities, real people, and put them into fiction. I do think Hitch made a competent work and above all, an honest one. He chooses the Garden, related to his childhood, before it became what it is today. We have a genuine feel to it. Apart from the multiple shots in the market, i enjoyed the initial scene, it feels like going back home. The aerial absolutely establishing helicopter shot, where we start distant and go down to the city, until a closeup of a crowd, where Hitch makes his usual cameo. This one sounds tender, it is a homage to London, i’m sure hitch thought about that. The music here helps. Generally it is competent, but i missed Herrmann;

-the two more celebrated sequences are as well the more visually pure Hitchcock conceived for this film. The “goodbye Babs” shot is brilliant, a pure piece of the visual cinema hitch makes. He knew he wanted to have a camera going down the stairs and backwards, after having gone up. He knew that would tell us more than any explicit scene he could make. So that’s brilliant, how the sequence starts with the closeup of Babs eyes, the door of the killer’s house, we know we see Babs alive for the last time, we come down, we get to the street (through the “rope editing device”), and we feel devastated. And it’s all visual. See? The potato truck sequence is less effective and pure to me, but still a sweet humorous exercise of the Mcguffin, black humor, and that beautiful suspense, that will not allow you to think beyond vision.

This film is, however, less focused than others. The visual imagination no longer falls upon the whole film, only intermittent bits. It’s nice Hitch opened the possibilities of exploration of a city, of a mood through real locations, these last films of his are sweet, but no longer perfectly conceived like his most deep experiences.

My opinion: 4/5

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“Driven” (2001)

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nascar, not F1

Car racing and films. Sports and films. Of you let go your imagination, these are powerful mixtures. Sport is about movement, it’s like a dance, and that’s cinematic, indeed it is one of the most rich cinematic fields. It has live emotion, which means you will not no what to expect, despite taking sides. There is a strong aspect of suspense that surrounds every game, every sport, and racing isn’t an exception. But than there is a huge catch: no one (supposedly) knows where it will go. Anything can happen in sports, it lives on the moment, more than any live or filmed performance, musical theatrical or any other else. So, this means that in order to keep the fuel of sports emotion true and alive, you can’t stage it. And you can’t make a feature film without having nearly everything staged. So that’s the difference. Dance, music, theatre, it’s all a performance, it’s all about delivering something that has been preestablished. Cinema inherited this. That’s why we need interesting minds to have interesting art, where the most talented of the sportsmen can perfectly be an intellectual schmuck. And it’s also because of this that i personally find it impossible, at least with the tools we have so far, to successfully create a film (not documentary) that binds together sports (any sport) and film. That’s probably why the Wachovsky explored racing relying on technology, because they knew the ordinary tools were useless (i haven’t seen ’speed racer’ yet). And yes, we have Chariots of Fire, but sport is only incidental there, and works as a frozen performance, which the music enhances. Pure sports films, i don’t know any that is remotely interesting.

Even less when we have the attitude of this film. This is such a mess, way beyond the problems of sports and film together. So here we have Reynolds, playing a crippled ex macho racing hero, which is probably the only role he ever played. We have Stallone, playing the old war hero, coming back to action, to save the day where he is needed. And we have a couple of other cliché characters, uprising stars, guys struggling to be themselves, and to feel free. Anyway, check this: every pseudo dramatic arc that is intended here exists in a different world of relationships. Love over Success, Pride, personal affirmation. Dull, vulgar, done below the watchable. Not even a single try at filming the races in an interesting way. All explosion and injuries, coins grabbed by the tires, spectacular collisions, boring, useless.

Oh, the rescuing scene by the two leaders of the championship still can look ridiculous in the middle of this ridiculous film

My opinion: 1/5

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“Suknickár” (2005)
(Skirter)

IMDb

tissues

This is a film created by a guy who is not actually an assumed filmmaker. He likes to try different media, ranging from radio to film, collage to written word. So, one should expect a certain freedom, or detachment from ordinary cinematic codes, that real filmmakers would follow. That’s something that makes me wanna try it.

I like what has been tried here. A kind of sensuality, achieved through partial views of the female body. That’s probably the very definition of sensuality, and it was taken quite literally here. The fact that this is a short film, and does not obey a linear or full bodied script protects this vision, since there are no actual (female) characters to be developed. The result is that you can imagine anything you’d like, and it will always be more perfect that the actual reality (no matter what that would be) of having faces to match those legs so carefully photographed, half covered by also carefully shot tissues, of different textures and seen with different levels of detail. Skin is tissue, it becomes tissue in many moments.

So the basic idea was good. But i’ve seen it better done, by this same director. “spittin kiss”, which i saw 2 years ago on a big screen, was far more effective, and i think that was because of two things: -the basic story was more tender in kiss, because he centers things on a guy, who incidentally looks for love, in the legs of women passing by. So, he eases on the leg obsession, and that highlights the sensuality. -here he films live action, short shots, sometimes abstract, but real action. In “kiss” what we have is stop motion. Real scenes shot with a photographic camera. Not 24fps, instead bits of reality, which gives us even less to see, and more to imagine. It’s an effective trick, which we don’t see here, and that cuts the effect, to me.

My opinion: 3/5

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“Being John Malkovich” (1999)

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voyage to your (other) self

Some films define what your dreams will become. Others help you understand what your dreams are made of. Maybe these two ideas are more close to each other than i’m willing to admit. Anyway, this film is the second type. At least to me. I am a romantic, incurable. I cry over love, uncorresponded love, true love. More and more, these last months have been a difficult hard period in my life, a time of change, indecision, not about love, but everything else. So i feel immediately like Cusack’s character, someone who is not allowed to puppeteer. All i said so far would make this film special for me.

But this is cinema, and that’s what breaks things for me here. So, in what concerns cinema, what we have here is the mix between an inspired and competent director, two of the best actors working these days (Cusack and Keener), one really interesting mind, which actually borrows himself to be the film stage, quite literally (Malkovich), and one of the best screenwriters ever.

Kaufman’s writing is, to some extent close to that of Medem. Both envision the world as a black sky filled with shiny star dots. Than, out of that sky, they take a magic marker and unite dots, until they shaped their own personal constellations, until they’ve put their souls into the sky. If you are willing to track down what they mean with every dot they choose to make their own, you will know that you are in a different world, not at all separated from our own, because it intersects it, but truly, you’ll be “inside” someone’s head. You will not control it, you will not puppeteer it, but you’ll be blessed. The difference, though, between Medem and Kaufman, is that the first one directs what he writes, always. So we have always a coordinated vision, that strikes every bit of what we see. Kaufman collaborates, and in the process gains what the directors have to give, but takes the chance of being misunderstood. In this film, all the compensations and personal interpretations by the main creative intervenients seem perfectly balanced to me. This is a sweet experience, something you will not forget.

Spike Jonze has a career as a video clip director, and that shows, he takes the visual representation of Cusack’s dramatizations to a high level, and that’s a fundamental piece of the metaphor. Puppeteering, the illusion of a created life on stage, taken to staged lives, in the real world. How Schwartz has to become another person in order to become himself, in order to freely express. In order to get the illusion of true love! What a true drama that is. How Maxine bends the benders, deceives the deceivers, manipulates everybody, even those who are supposed to be the manipulators; only to find out she shouldn’t. How Lotte is the ultimate manipulated woman, and because of that is the only uncorrupted. How Malkovich, ultimately, doesn’t exist. How Lester is the closest to God that we have on film.

Undecisions, half way between places, half floors. Channels between people, people as vessels which can contain multiple selfs. Creating literally your own reality, by blurring the definitions of self. This is as much about love as it is about the process of living that love. This is as much about truth as it is about what truth means. This is as much about a story as it is about how to tell stories. This is as much a film as it is an essay about making films, about cinema. This is a master piece of self-reference.

My opinion: 5/5 probably “eternal sunshine..” tops this, but this will be a part of you, if you’ll allow it.

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