Kurosawa's Masterpiece: Seven Samurai

Akira Kurosawa’s 1956 masterpiece, Seven Samurai, is rightfully included on any best-picture list or ranking and has from its incarnation been recognized as one of the greatest films of all time. The story is at once extremely remote and unfamiliar to virtually all (first-time) viewers yet also universal and comprehensible across all cultural divides - which is why SS has been so successfully adapted in the famous American Wester The Magnificent Seven. Story in brief: in the late 1500s in rural Japan a small village of rice/barley farmers fear that once their harvest is in they will be overrun by a marauding team of bandits on horseback. Unable to counter such powerful armed assault, the village sends a team of elders to the nearest “city” (more an outpost or trading post) with the goal of hiring 7 Samurai to defend the village from attack; the 7 men recruited each has his own personality and role within the narrative, which is rich with elements (the youngest of the Samurai falls in love w/ a village girl, with many consequences, for example). To me the coolest of the Samurai has always been the world-expert swordsman who is focused on perfecting his art and a bit reluctant to take on this paramilitary assignment. The most famous is played by the great Toshiro Mifune, is miscreant who creates comic havoc but is always true to his commitments. There are so many great scenes, but to cite just a few: the test that head samurai (Takashi Shimura, another great actor) devices to test each samurai before the recruitment interview; Mifune following the other six on their way to the village, hoping to win them over; Mifune sounding the alarm when the samurai enter the village; the initial attack scenes, which show the brutality of medieval warfare ass well as any other film except maybe Chimes at Midnight; the village girl’s remorse when her father beats her after she’s had sex with the youngest samurai; and the closing moments, of course, with the rice harvest under way and the winds rustle the pennants over the graves of the fallen soldiers. Three + hours - but so engrossing and easy to watch. 

Elliot's Watching Week of 8-1-21: Ronan Farrow, Fassbinder, J.K. Rowling, and a classic Western

 Elliot’s Watching - Week of 8-1-21: Catch & Kill, Despair, Strike, and 7 Men

Ronan Farrow’s 6-part documentary, Catch and Kill (HBO), is pretty much as it says: The Podcast Tapes. If you’ve listened to the podcasts (I hadn’t) there’s not much value added in this cinema/documentary version - almost all of the significant footage consists of the interviews that formed the basis of RF’s reporting on the Havey Weinstein, rapist. That said: This is still a great series for a lot of reasons: RF’s intrepid and brave reporting, the nefarious nature of HW which no doubt was well known and quietly tolerated across the whole entertainment industry, the cowardice of NBC news in ordering RF to kill the report and walking away from it, the boldness of the New Yorker in choosing to stick with RF and to run the story after scrupulous fact-checking, and the frightening attempts to intimidate RF and to dirty him up in fruitless efforts to kill the report or tarnish its veracity. I have nothing but praise for RF, a guy who could have chosen a much easier pathway in life, could have gotten all kinds of jobs and opportunities based on his connection to Hollywood/cultural elite, but who chose to pursue journalism and not in some half-assed, celebrity-kissing way but through the rigors or serious and dangerous reporting over many years and the extreme difficulty of writing a nonfiction book as well. We can see from these recordings that he’s a terrific interviewer and willing to push and probe and follow up on leads to get to the truth. And the truth - the power the HW wielded in the industry and the sense that his criminal behavior was so widely tolerated and the a major media outlet could be bullied by him and his minions into silence - all quite astonishing and depressing, but many kudos to RF for pursuing this path and bringing the truth to light. 

Seldom, maybe never, have such an array of illuminati and the talented been brought together in such a dismal failure as the 1978 film Despair: based on the novel by Nabokov (high literary props), adapted (I’ll say!) for the screen by Tom Stoppard (higher props), directed by Rainer Warner Fassbinder (first English-language film), starring Dirk Bogarde (art-film star) - and finally what a mess. First of all, Nabokov’s novel (1934) is ridiculously inappropriate for a film; like most of his work, this novel was a vehicle for VN to show that he’s smarter than his readers, knows more languages and can write well in any, and he’s a master at creating thoroughly unlikable narrators - all of which says to me, lousy movie. Then, how did Stoppard get involved? He seems to have had no sense in how to build a dramatic plot. The plot such as it is involves a German  Hermann (Bogarde) in Prague (?) on a business trip encounters on the street a man who looks like his double; he concocts a plan to “murder himself” in order to, I guess, start a new life under the now dead man’s ID. Potentially good - but Stoppard was unwilling to break the bonds of VN’s meandering narrative and make this an exciting story of murder and doom. Not much happens; the killing itself is ridiculous; and the film (not sure about the novel, I didn’t finish reading it) ends in some postmodern nonsense: I’m just a character in a movie, wearing for freedom, blah blah. as for Fassbinder, he seems to have been lost in the English language, as the speeches are wooden and strange without being moving or provocative; he does seem interested in the somewhat louche aspects of the novel, in particular the failed artist who hangs around with Hermann’s wife - a chance it seems for RWF to peer, as he so often has in much better films, at the underworld and the eccentricities of temper and tempest in the art scene. How that all hangs together, what type of despair could motivate or drive Hermann to kill an innocent man - no answers lie in this film. Despair? Disaster. 

First season (Lethal) of the British (based on J.K. Rowling detective-novel series - I guess she needed the money?) C.B. Strike breaks no new ground - private eye, wounded war veteran, setting up his business in a rented walkup, takes on temp as his secretary, she thrills to and excels in the business as the form a good working partnership with of course the tension being do they fall for each other or remain simply professional colleagues - we’ve seen this before (think: X-files for ex.) - but it’s reasonably entertaining, as Strike ushered to find out whether a London supermodel’s death was suicide or murder and as of course it’s gonna be murder: Who dunit? Like so many detective or police procedurals, the probability of the entire search and research is based more on plot convenience than on any possible reality, so if you can acknowledge from the top that all the stupid clues and leads don’t really matter, that this is a series about a developing relationship/partnership, then it’s OK if not great. If nothing else, Rowling is a total all-star at developing a plot into a series, so this may be worth watching beyond Season 1, though I probably won’t persist. Also worth noting that many of the key lines/important dialog is delivered in a mumbled South London accent that was extremely hard to discern, at least for this American viewer - but if you get only 80 percent of what’s said you’ll get enough to follow along. 

To my chagrin, I’ve never been a fan of Westerns; as a kid, I couldn’t follow the plot lines and never understood the whole mythos of the West. Who were these people in covered wagons, where did they come from, where were they going? Why was everyone so afraid of the “Indians”? Who were the sheriffs and deputies and other “lawmen”? So I’ve pretty much ignored this genre of film except for the absolute highlights such as The Searchers and High Noon. But this week a watched a 1956 Western. Budd Boetticher’s Seven Men from Now,  that’s not on the 100 greatest list by any means, but it totally held my interest and attention - proving once more that a B-movie that accomplishes its goals is better to watch than an A-movie that falls short. Without going through the whole plot line - which holds together far better than most B-movie scripts (thanks, writer Burt Kennedy), it involves a theft of gold from a Wells Fargo branch, an attack in which a woman clerk is killed - and she’s the wife of a out-of-favor lawman, who proceed to search for the 7 robbers who killed her; in the process, he’s called upon to help a totally feckless wagoner who’s heading for California with his young wife. En route, among those whom they cross, is frightening, evil guy - the young Lee Marvin! More than most Westerns, this one game me the sense of the risks and difficulty (and sometimes stupidity) of heading out in wagon without knowing the requisite skills. You get from this film a real sense of the dangerous landscape and the need for grit and independence to get cross-country, let alone to succeed in the West. Among other notable aspects, the score (Henry Vars) captures the mood of the film without overwhelming us with bathos, and of particular note it’s one of the few films of the era,  I think, in which the protagonist seems to understand and sympathize with the soon-to-be oppressed native cultures. It’s not the greatest Western of all time, but it’s an entertaining diversion that carries both a wallop and a message. 

Elliot's Watching week of 7-28-21: Godard's Breathless

 Elliot’s Watching - Week of 7-28-21: Godard's Breathless 

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 debut, breakthrough film, Breathless, remains some 60 years later as still total fun to watch - all the more impressive in that the moral stance of the movie is despicable. But how can you not enjoy free-wheeling through Paris (in the days before traffic and tourist jams) in a stole American car? The adorable French with accent American of the young Jean Seberg? The super-cool demeanor of the young Jean-Paul Belmondo, cigarette dangled from lip a la Bogart, the weird caressing of his own lips a la … Belmondo? The fast pace of the film, relentless, except there in the middle is the scene in Seberg’s tiny apartment and Belmondo spends what seems like days struggling to get her into bed with him - one of the longest scenes in film at that time, I would imagine? The hilarious news conference with the famous visiting novelist (played by Melville) whose ambition is “to become immortal, and then to die”? Belmondo’s take on a poster of a Picasso: “J’ai dit pas mal!”? Or his choice between grief and nothing: Rien. And so on. And yet … we know nothing about the back story of either of the two leads, except that Belmondo uses 2 names and has been involved in some shady deals in Nice and that Seberg is in Paris for as long as her parents will foot the bill for the Sorbonne. So she’s bright and ambitious, landing a p-t job, partly on basis of her looks, writing for (and also hawking) the NY Herald Tribune. But we do know that she “makes bad choices,” linking her fate to this obviously criminal careerist who has shot and killed a police officer w/out regret or remorse. How can we like or pity either of them? So it’s a film into whose moral ambiguity, at best (nihilism at worst) that viewers have to buy into, at least for 90 minutes - not hard to do, while watching the film, but not a world we’d want to inhabit or have our kids inhabit for a second. 

Elliot's Watching week of 7-18-21: Bergman on TV

 Elliot’s Watching - Week of 7-18-21

Ingmar Bergman’s 6-part TV series, Scenes from a Marriage (1973), was a precursor to the many great series that everyone in the world watches today - a true innovation and a daring experiment in its time (Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz may be the only equivalent - though that was based on a famous novel, whereas Bergman’s was his original script - in essence, a 5-hour drama. SfaM focuses closely and intensely on one couple, Johan and Marriane, played brilliantly, through some extremely difficult and challenging scenes, by Liv Ullman and the less-well-known Erland Josephson. We follow these two - with only a few isolated scenes involving others - over the course of about ten years and through all the tempests for marriage, affairs, break-ups, divorce, reconciliation. The film is in its way typically Swedish: A lot of repression and social nicety, with problems “swept under the rug” (the title of one of the episodes), and then with sudden sometimes violent explosions of feelings and pent-up rage or tearful remorse. The cinematography (Sven Nyquist of course) is exquisite, almost all at full or close focus - very few exteriors, tracking, or panning shots. It’s a troubling and demanding 5 hours but a landmark for both cinema (one of Bergman’s early forays into color and into a study of contemporary life - though often criticized for its focus on only one social class, the comfortable Swedish professionals) and, years later, television. 

Elliot's Watching week of 7-11-21: Godard et al

 Elliot’s Watching - Week of 7-11-21

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 film, Band of Outsiders (Bande a part) must have been, at least in part, a response to Truffaut’s sweet and sentimental story about a threesome, Jules et Jim. Godard’s is also about a 3-some, two guys and a girl (Anna Karina in a great role!), that is not in the least “sweet”: the 3 meet up in an adult-ed English class (one of the men presciently notes that he’s going to drop English and study Chinese, as that will be the dominant culture in the future), where the Karina (Odile) lets slip that in one of the other tenants in the suburban house where she’s rooming has a huge stash of francs - and the two guys, Arthur (he tells the naif Odile that has last name is “Rimbaud, one of several literary in-jokes) and Franz, hatch a robbery plot. But these guys (and they seem a bit too old for the part) are dopes and their entire plan is cock-eyed from the start; for most of the movie the robbery scheme is played as a high comedy of blunders, but in the end, no surprise, things go radically wrong in every imaginable way. We don’t watch this film, today, for its plot; rather, for its highly imaginative use of cinematography - most notably in the dash through the Louvre (how did they get permission to film that? Maybe they didn’t) and the terrific scene in the diner, with the great dance sequence and the surprising minute of silence. Also, we watch this film to see a Paris that is no longer - mostly grungy and not at all scene or touristic (scars of the war seem still evident), yet in some ways an idyllic setting - esp. the rooming house in one of the Paris suburbs; lots of scenes involving driving - easy to do in Paris and environs back in the day, no traffic jams, parking everywhere - it seems many lifetimes ago, and not at all the way we think of Paris on film - it’s the dark flipside of the record. 

John Dower’s true-crime documentary Sophie (2021, on Netflix) is a three-part examination of the death of the eponymous Sophie (Toscan du Plantier  in remote West Cork, Ireland, in 1996 and the failure of the Irish police to come up w/ sufficient evidence to charge and convict anyone of the murder - though not without arresting a villager who aroused many suspicions through his bizarre and at times self-incriminating behavior (he was a known eccentric even in the small, highly tolerant community in which he lived). The series gives us a great sense of the small town of Schull and a pretty good portrait of the late Sophie, through interviews with her family members and friends, although mystery surrounds her throughout the series: Who was she? Why did she retreat to Ireland sans family? Why did her prominent husband make no appearance in the film? The film will keep you thinking and guessing, and the crew knows well how to end each of the first two episodes at a cliffhanger or crisis point. On the other hand, like so many t-c dox, the film could be cut by about 25 percent - like, we know already that this is a town with great diversity and with tolerance of artists and others with “alternate life styles,” one might say. Still a good film - and spoilers will occur right here so skip this if you haven’t seen the film: Although the film does everything possible to build toward a satisfying conclusion with the trial in absentia of the local suspect,  it’s impossible to think that the case was really closed. Yes, there’s a lot of behavior (and hearsay) about the suspected killer, but none of it comes close to conviction beyond a reasonable doubt; the cops came up w/ no forensic evidence, and no witnesses - and I can’t imagine an American jury convicting him on the basis of suspicion - yeah, he seems like a self-important oddball and would-be writer, w/ a violent streak, but that’s not a enough to convict a guy, I would hope - at least not in the U.S. In my view, he was railroaded and the Irish cops, who’d never encountered a murder investigation!, screwed up big time. 

Elliot’s Watching - Week of 7/4/2: Lupin and Bunuel

 Elliot’s Watching - Week of 7/4/21

Luis Bunuel’s 1972 film, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, is far from this best work, but it has its moments of weirdness, maybe too much weirdness and not enough charm. Posing as a social satire - in which the wealthy lead corrupt lives of selfishness and dissolution while maintaining throughout a strangely courteous and acquiescent demeanor, the social commentary is mild rather than biting and obvious rather than subtle (or discreet, for that matter). The film begins as two well-to-do couples arrive at the country house of another couple for an expected dinner party - but the hosts are nowhere to be found. When they turn up, it seems there’s been a confusion about the date - so the 3 couples go out for dinner. At the restaurant nearby, it seems that they’re open, but no food is available. Profuse apologies, but their founder has just died and he is lying in state in just off the dining room. And thus begin a series of missed connections - and the 6 never really get a chance to eat anything (some repulsive appetizers aside). This apparent reality mixes with many scenes that seem and feel realistic and vivid, at least within the established terms of this film, but turn out to be dreams - usually involving shootings and death (one of the sextet, played by the great Fernando Rey, is an ambassador from Latin America and involved in Rx-running). The film ends with the six, still hungry I guess, walking down a long, flat stretch of (Normandy?) highway, aimless and confused. I’m not really sure what any of this amounts to, though it’s worth watching once for the dark humor and for the depiction of a group of the privileged who get what they deserve. 

The George Kay Netflix series Lupin Season 2, based on the detective stories about the eponymous Lupin from early 20th century and set in present-day Paris, is a great star vehicle for Omar Sy and is entertaining but also totally preposterous, so much so that the unlikelihood of any of Sy’s escapades and schemes working out becomes part of the humor. Just to imagine Sy himself - a distinct and massive star - going unrecognized on the streets of Paris when his face is on every screen as the most wanted man in France - well, it’s all part of the joke. His schemes are so outlandish, elaborate and dependent on every step along the way going right as to be comically absurd. The episodes are well-paced, even frantic, with a dominating score (I enjoyed watching some of the chase and fight sequences while imaging no background track - and without the music they were for the most part mundane and boring. Bring it on!) So, OK, yeah, quite binge-able, but in the end you’ve feasted on froth and air. 

Elliot's Watching week of 6-27-21: Golden State Killer doc

 Elliot’s Watching week of 6-27-21

Liz Garbus’s true-crime documentary I’ll Be Gone in the Dark (2020), based on the posthumously published book by Michelle McNamara, is a harrowing account of MM’s pursuit of the murder/rapist known as the Golden State Killer who terrorized California communities through a string of unsolved house invasions in the 1970s and 80s that involved extreme cruelty and weirdly morbid behavior. I won’t give everything away, though it’s important to note three aspects of this unique project: First, MM, a young mother married to well-known actor Patton Oswalt, devoted most of her life to trying to track this killer, who had been largely (and criminally I would say) ignored for much of his reign of terror, mostly because police departments notoriously fail to cooperate across jurisdictional lines and also because the communities want to downplay violent crime in their midst to protect property values (!) I guess; second, writing her book actually cost MM her life, as she felt pressured on deadlines and expectations and eventually addicted to Rx that killed her - her editor and agents have some soul searching to do; and third, this can be an extremely upsetting film, as many of the dozens of victims cooperated with the filmmakers and told their stories in horrifying detail. With those warnings, it’s a brave and necessary documentary that still may have some repercussions, as amateur detectives are at present seeking info on a string of unsolved murders in the Chicago area - where MM was raised and where her interest in a frightful killing near her home led her to her career as a crime writer and case solver.