Agony. Ecstasy. (Sodomy?)

There are a lot of things to say about an epic undertaking such as The Agony and the Ecstasy, but the thing I saw most clearly when I watched it was how generic it is. Agony is an amazingly enormous film: gorgeous sets, costumes, locations, battles, photography. And the whole thing is impressive.

But Agony has a structure similar to Becket (1964) and Cromwell (1970) and Mary, Queen of Scots (1971), whereby two very important historical figures – Henry II (Peter O'Toole), Thomas à Becket (Richard Burton) / Oliver Cromwell (Richard Harris), James I (Alec Guinness) / Elizabeth I (Glenda Jackson), Mary Queen of Scots (Vanessa Redgrave) – face off and battle one another, while respecting and even loving one another. In Agony the pair is Pope Julius II and Michaelangelo Buonarotti as they work together to make the Sistine Chapel a reality.

I want also to say how much I hated – I mean absolutely loathed – Alex North's score for this movie. It is awful. Alternating between drummed-up marches and chorus-boys singing alleluias, more than once I begged for the soundtrack simply to shut up. 

There is a rather fascinating scene about Michaelangelo's presumed sodomitical tendencies. Charlton Heston talks to Diane Cilento about how he simply can't love her because of how much he loves art, and the camera can't help but capture all of these sketches of naked men while the conversation happens. I watched with mild amusement and slight horror during the whole of it.

Worth a watch? I think so, although I think Becket and Cromwell are superior.

Train Movies: Part 3

Oh yes there is a part three of this business (and I'm pretty sure there will be a fourth).

Also, I understand my selection of train movies is arbitrary and rather absurd, but I am kind of enjoying the silliness of this selection. It makes me watch these movies slightly differently, too: like, I am watching for the trains – the way they are powered, the steam they let off, the way the filmmaker shoots the train – it's fun.

Night Train to Munich is a Carol Reed movie (he of The Fallen Idol and The Third Man – both must-see films noir.) I have been wanting to see Night Train since it was recently released by the Criterion Collection. Night Train is a kind of spy movie about World War II made in 1941. Like, this is some seriously current filmmaking.

But, well, Night Train doesn't quite work, really. There is cool stuff in it. Actually, there is quite a lot of cool stuff in it. The film stars a very young Rex Harrison and the soon-to-become-a-matinee-idol Paul Henried. And there is a plot twist early on in the film that I did not see coming at all: I literally gasped when it happened. In truth, the adventure part of the film is sort of fun once we are on the eponymous night train headed for Munich.

But Night Train is a sort of spy comedy: one of those pictures that has lengthy sequences with comedic characters who – it will turn out in the end – are integral to the plot, but make the film rather silly instead of action-packed or thrilling. This is part of Night Train's charms, or is supposed to be, but I wasn't having it. I wanted train action and intrigue. Instead, this movie has a wisecracking comedian foil the Nazis. And, well, the Nazis had a lot of problems, but I don't think they could have exactly been foiled by a string of good jokes. (This is an ethical question for the filmmaker, too, but I will leave that to the side.)

My other train film was the MGM musical from 1946, The Harvey Girls, which was more of a train movie than I thought it was going to be. The film stars Judy Garland, Angela Lansbury, and John Hodiak. The big number for the movie is called "On the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe" and much of the film takes place on the trains between Ohio and Arizona or somewhere out west. Actually I have already forgotten.

The Harvey Girls is not exactly a great MGM musical. It's not terrible by any means, but I had a lot of trouble figuring out who was who in the actual plot. The side characters are all introduced awkwardly and (this is the most awkward part) the girls all look exactly alike. I couldn't tell them apart, honestly. I felt like my friend Wahima when she says that white people all look the same. These girls really do all look the same. And I guess this makes a sort of sense; they are all "Harvey Girls" after all. It is a type.

Actually, the real trouble with The Harvey Girls is the songs. "On the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe" won an Academy Award, and it is memorable, certainly, but most of the songs in this film are totally forgettable. Others may disagree, but I felt myself rather bored by the musical sections in the film, whereas I sort of found the plot and the acting delightful. Part of this has to do with the inimitable Angela Lansbury as a kind of Mae West character in flamboyant showgirl drag (although it sounded to me like they dubbed her singing voice for some reason.) Anyway, if you like old movie musicals you've actually probably already seen this one, and if you don't like movie musicals, I can recommend about 20 others that you should rent before you get to The Harvey Girls.

Judy Garland – it needs to be said – was obviously fabulous in the movie.

Noir, Neo-Noir & More Coming-of-Age

I liked Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol a lot better than I liked The Third Man (which he made a year later in 1949), and I would venture to say the reason is that I think it's a better piece of film noir than The Third Man is. Sure, The Third Man is about murder and intrigue in post-war Europe and all kinds of consulates and things like that, and The Fallen Idol is really the story of a little boy's attachment to a servant, Mr. Baines. But as I complained about before, The Third Man isn't really in black and white: it's a gray film more than anything, if you get my meaning. And though the topic of The Fallen Idol is less typically noir than you'd expect, Reed shoots entire, riveting sequences like a master of German Expressionism. The plot, too, becomes more and more gothic as the film plays on and a true villain emerges in the form of the evil Mrs. Baines.

I saw The Fallen Idol in its limited re-release down at the Rialto theatre yesterday afternoon, and though I thought the sound quality left quite a lot to be desired, the movie is great: exciting, never obvious and definitely thrilling. And because the center of the film is an irritating, unpredictable young man with good intentions to burn, one never knows what will come out of the little tyke's mouth and how much damage he can do.
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Then it was off to see Rian Johnson's debut feature Brick, about which I've already raved. I wanted to add one thing, though. I read (was it in the L. A. Times?) a review that called Brick long on style and panache but extremely short on substance. I totally disagree with this, and I don't think I would've liked the picture as much if it had been true. (I do love movies solely because of style, but there aren't too many of them.) At Brick's noir-ish center is a group of young people who don't care one solitary bit about education, but who, in a godless world, are looking for a way to become important, to make their lives matter. Brick is a portrait of often drug-addicted, always self-important youth who establish hierarchies among themselves and move in circles of their own creation. Authority is always in question and re-negotiated on a daily basis through means violent, intellectual and monetary. But the motivating purpose behind these young people, we find by the film's end, is a desire to last longer: immortality through parenthood and/or the creation of a legacy (biological or not.) It's a fabulous film, definitely long on style and panache, but also a fascinating description of America's youth.

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This morning's movie was Louis Malle's 1971 Le Souffle a Cœur (Murmur of the Heart). It was alright. Challenging, I suppose, in it's day, but more coming-of-age stuff... and to tell you the truth I'm a little burned out on that. Plus it's all about sex. Sex, sex, sex. Which is interesting, to be sure, but it's Louis Malle, so it's heterosexual sex. Which, I am bound to say, is rarely interesting to me. The film is similar in subject to last year's Ma Mère, and Murmur of the Heart is far superior to that film, though that really isn't saying much at all.

Quick Reviews I Haven't Posted Yet

I'm behind on telling y'all what I've been seeing lately. All of a sudden I have things to do and projects to work on and friends who want to spend time with me. So here we go

Theatre:

Swan Lake, in a fabulous, completely thrilling production by Matthew Bourne returned to Los Angeles and is at the Ahmanson now (or will be until Sunday night). I saw it in the highest seats in the theatre and in a packed house last Thursday night. I totally loved it. Matthew Bourne is a genius, if a bit self-conscious, and the production is superb. This show is awesome and not to be missed. Thankfully, you can all get it on DVD since the show is almost ten years old.

Mother Courage and Her Children at Cal Poly Pomona's Theatre Department (my alma mater and on-again-off-again employer) was dreadful. It's a shame, too. Many of my former students were in the show and there is a lot of talent in the department: it just needs to be trained and tapped in the right ways. Letting the actors loose with little to no direction and giving them Brecht to speak is no way to teach a group of young actors anything, unfortunately, and that is just what happened with this production. It's closed, now, thankfully, so let's all start putting it behind us and move on to something more closely resembling good theatre.

Old Movies:

Terrence Malick's Badlands, his first feature film, is a really good film about disaffected youths (there are so many of these). I saw this movie after seeing Malick's other three (later) features, so I can only really watch it through the lens of Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line and The New World. So to me, Badlands is a fascinating piece about the loss of innocence and our ability to be controlled by forces around us; led, if you will, by those who are stronger than us. I don't necessarily mean forced or raped or anything like that, but just influenced, by will perhaps, by those we love and those who wish to affect us (and maybe even those who don't want anything from us.)

Carol Reed's film noir piece The Third Man is widely considered one of the best in the genre. It stars Joseph Cotten mostly with Orson Welles appearing eventually. Most everyone has seen this movie and I know I'm sort of late to the game on this one. I liked it, and it's rather good film noir, but not quite black and white enough for my taste (too much happens during the day). I kept wishing someone slightly stronger than Cotten was leading me around that the script was a little more hard-boiled. It's written by Graham Greene, so I should've expected it to lean toward the Romantic, and perhaps that's placing an unwanted requirement on the film. I don't know; once you've seen Robert Siodmak's The Killers, I don't think there's anywhere to go but down. Still, Welles is great, there are some really cool lighting moments and the chase scene at the end is awesome.

Movies from 2005:

Zhangke Jia's The World is a slow-paced Chinese movie that reminded me a lot of Tsai Ming-Liang's Goodbye Dragon Inn. The World is not quite as slow as that, but it sure takes its time. It follows several people around a theme park in Beijing that (get this) has replicas of monuments and buildings from all over the world. The main character performs in these huge extravaganza shows that are not like anything so much as those enormous dance shows staged by Lorenz Ziegfeld in the early part of the Twentieth century. It's mostly about consumer culture and how Capitalism is ruining China, but it's often touching and powerful. The end is awful and a huge letdown, but I liked it more than I disliked it. #63 out of 85 films.

And this morning I finally got to see Hayao Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle, which everyone should go see. It's easily the best animated film that came out last year and should undoubtedly have won the Best Animated Feature at the Academy Awards (but then, they didn't hand out Best Picture correctly, either, did they?) I loved this movie. It's absolutely bursting with awesome vistas and new-fangled magic. It's powerful and moving and it had stolen my heart after the first twenty minutes. It also features the voices of Jean Simmons, Lauren Bacall, Christian Bale and (!) Billy Crystal. Rent this one for sure. Miyazaki is the mastermind behind Spirited Away and I think I may like Howl's Moving Castle even better than that film and that's saying a ton.

Movies from 2006:

Christian Carion's Joyeux Noël (Merry Christmas), which was France's entry for Best Foreign Language Feature last year, totally sucks and it shouldn't have even been nominated. It's a cheese-ball pile of silliness with few redeeming qualities. It will probably be one of the worst movies on my list for 2006. Joyeux Noël is full of hokey laugh-out-loud sequences that require all suspension of disbelief but ask to be taken with complete seriousness. More than once I said "Give me a break!" out loud in the theatre and had to be shushed by strangers. This film is allegedly based on true events, but I didn't believe a bit of it.

Thankfully, I followed up Joyeux Noël by going to see last year's winner of the Oscar for Foreign Language Film: Gavin Hood's Tsotsi. And let me tell you, this movie deserved its award. It connects to the audience immediately and never looks back. I couldn't help but love the anti-hero at the center of the film and I wanted him to succeed more than anything. Presley Chweneyagae, who plays the main character is mesmerizing and compelling. There is no way to watch this movie and not fall totally in love with him. Go see it.