End of Days (1999, Hyams) - Live-Tweet!

The next Live-Tweet will take place on 11/21 at 3pm EST (9pm Polish time). We will be watching Peter Hyams' End of Days (1999). It will be hosted by me and the honorable @simonsaybrams Join us two weeks from now! #hyamsdays

Prepare, indeed!

The Perils of Pauline (1947, G. Marshall)

Much more than just a poor man’s Singin’ in the Rain (1952) – but still not a great musical about the silent-to-sound Hollywood transition – George Marshall’s The Perils of Pauline (1947) makes for a pleasant enough distraction.

In a movie that’s so packed with wonderful entertainers – you cannot beat the Sturgesian duo of Betty Hutton and Bill Demarest, with Constance Collier as a bonus – one painfully misses a single thing: a leading man to match Hutton. Maybe not to match her folly (you’d need Eddie Bracken for that, no less), but at least her energy. Alas, John Lund comes off as a gravely impaired bore: a terminal square. Small wonder he later on played George Kittridge in the musical remake of The Philadelphia Story (1940)…

Hutton was a great comedienne; nowadays only Anna Faris is a proud heiress to her reckless brand of self-mocking irony and physical bravado. When her character comes up with an idea, all that’s missing is a big light bulb springing up over Hutton’s head – she’s cartoonish to the point of rapture, and it comes as sort of a shock when she falls off a rope near the end and actually gets hurt. Shouldn’t she bounce off the stage and keep on prancing around…?

Here’s one for your delight, by the way:

Live-Tweet this Saturday!

Here's one you've all been waiting for. This Saturday (11/7) at 3:00 PM EST (9:00 PM Polish time), I'm hosting a Live-Tweet on The Last Man on Earth (1964). Be there.

twitter.com/michaloleszczyk

End your posts with:

#lmearth

Stalag 17 (1953, Wilder)

A sort of Inglourious Basterds (2009) of its day, Billy Wilder’s Stalag 17 (1953) is the closest thing to a masterpiece that I watched in recent months. I’m a big Wilder fan and yet I never got to watch this particular movie until yesterday. I ended up absolutely stunned.

A very untypical P.O.W. camp movie – I wonder if Andrzej Munk saw it before making his Eroica (1957)! – this is an outrageous comedy and a dead-serious war drama at the same time, with some Red Scare overtones to it, too (it was made two years after the second series of Hollywood HUAC hearings, one year before On the Waterfront [1954], and it’s all about finding out who the barrack stoolie is). The film is a masterful balancing act; it merges comedic irreverence towards its subject matter with an ability to convey all its weight at the same time. The inmates’ loneliness, the shortages of every possible good, the constant fear of betrayal – it’s all there, and the comedy serves both us and the characters: they use it as a desperate measure of keeping their wits (funny how similar MASH [1970] is its strategy). In a scene of incredible directorial audacity, Wilder even pulls off some slapstick involving splashing paint into a Nazi soldier’s face – this is a P.O.W. camp that becomes a three ring circus and then comes back to being a death trap again.

And in another scene of rare beauty all the guys are dancing with one another. This is not your contender for a Derek Jarman award for a Gay Shot of the Year – there’s no indication of any queer sensitivity at play. Rather, it’s a gentle indicator of longing for human touch and a measure of graciousness in a life defined by scarceness and fear.

William Holden (bearing an uncanny resemblance in this particular role to a Polish film critic Jakub Socha, by the way!) is great as the lead, and yet he rarely takes the center stage – he’s a marginal and yet vital presence.

A great movie, which galvanized me back to my cinephile life after suffering the deplorable depths of a Polish Copernicus cartoon, The Star of Copernicus (2009). This one is not going off my emergency DVD shelf for a long time.

Boomerang! (1947, Kazan)

A taut police-procedural thriller in the G-Men (1935) tradition, Elia Kazan’s Boomerang! (1947) is a complex and compelling portrayal of the ways politics and violence interrelated in post-War America. Made in the year of the first series of HUAC hearings, it’s a conflicted movie – Dana Andrews’ state attorney is first willing to join the mass hysteria and convict a man charged with murdering a local preacher: even though evidence is dubious and the incriminating statement was clearly induced by psychological torture. Andrews plays an ultimately benign authority figure, willing to commit to a just cause as soon as he recognizes it as such. But what’s one left with, is the overwhelming sense of corruption running deep in American power structures – as embodied by Lee J. Cobb’s stubborn and spiteful mug, as he confesses (falsely, but honestly to his mind) that the accused confessed guilt “of his own will without any violence”.

The movie doesn’t have the visual texture or moral complexity of On the Waterfront (1953) and it isn’t as franticly paced as Panic in the Street (1950), but I appreciate Kazan’s ways of stepping back from the conflicted crowd of characters, so that his movie truly becomes an austere snapshot of a society at large.

Just Write (1997, Gallerani)

A dud in every other way, Andrew Gallerani’s Just Write (1997) at least succeeds in getting together two very alert performers: Sherilyn Fenn and Jeremy Piven. The latter, in his pre-Ari Gold days, leaves you smiling – mainly because he proves incapable of being blank. Even in scenes that require of him to play “tired” or ”resigned”, he seems eager for a next chance to flaunt his incredible energy. That corresponds just fine with Fenn’s receptiveness (and her character’s awe at having this guy thrown at her by fate). Fenn was wonderful as the confused bisexual woman in Yurek Bogayewicz’s unjustly-forgotten Three of Hearts (1993), and here she reprises her earlier role in a way.

It’s a shame that the screenplay takes the path of a rather crass satire on Hollywood crowd’s emptiness (again: pre-Entourage, but with more than four mentions of Sunset Blvd. [1950] in the dialogue). What you’re left with is a joy of the few moments when Fenn and Piven meet for the first time: his puppy-like enthusiasm at meeting a Hollywood star and her relief at speaking to someone she shares a language with. Apart from that scene, the movie is inept; it's failure symbolized by Wallace Shawn’s mechanical turn as a big-shot literary agent.

Empire of the Sun (1987, Spielberg)

Steven Spielberg’s cinema of consolation has an unusual way of dodging all my usual defenses, which is just another way of saying that I’d buy more schmaltz from Spielberg than from any other director. But in case of his Empire of the Sun (1987) I remained more resistant than usual. The story of Jim (Christian Bale), a British boy who gets separated from his parents in WW2 Shanghai, had some very strong points, but I think Spielberg was trying too hard to avoid hopelessness the material ultimately provokes. The result is very strange: a downhill slide towards moral numbness caused by war, played out like a boy’s adventure tale (Jim’s father wears Captain Hook’s outfit at one point: a prelude to a movie that will come 4 years after).

What I consider Spielberg’s biggest talent, and what comes off well even in this movie, is his ability to desexualize child's imagination to the point of reaching a moral clarity that belongs purely to the mythical. Puerility is Spielberg’s big theme, yes, but it’s never contaminated by sexual confusion. When Jim sings a song late in the movie, his falsetto isn’t broken by any signs of mutation – even though he matured in every other way in the course of the action.

It’s not an accident that Spielberg sanitized so much of Bob Zemeckis’ and Bob Gale’s raunchiness when he was making 1941 (1979). What’s wonderful about him, though, is that his shrinking from sex doesn’t feel like bailing out on adulthood as such – it’s not a neurotic denial. His drive towards what’s pure is genuine and has a religious dimension to it that I deeply revere, even though it takes him far away from any territory one would label as realistic.