Coming Attractions: My Night at Maud's

Wednesday, 24 August at 7:00 & 9:10 P.M.

Giveaways: Anatomy of a Murder DVD courtesy of Scarecrow Video and a gift certificate for Cinema Books, respectively.

Coming Attractions: Gilda

Wednesday, August 17th at 7 and 9:10 pm.

Coming Attractions: Laura

Wednesday, August 10th at 7 and 9:10 pm.

Coming Attractions: Mr Smith Goes to Washington

Wednesday, 27 April at 6:45 & 9:15 P.M.

Giveaways: Destry Rides Again DVD courtesy of Scarecrow Video, and a gift certificate to Cinema Books, respectively.

The circle is complete.

Coming Attractions: Night of the Hunter

Wednesday, 20 April at 7:00 & 9:10 P.M.

Giveaways: Dead Man DVD courtesy of Scarecrow Video, and a gift certificate to Cinema Books, respectively.

Fight the power.

Coming Attractions: Seven Samurai

Wednesday, 13 April at 7:15 P.M.

Giveaways: A Bug's Life DVD courtesy of Scarecrow Video, and a gift certificate for Cinema Books.

More holes than Yohei's underpants.

Coming Attractions: A Matter of Life and Death

Wednesday, 6 April at 7:00 & 9:15 P.M.

Giveaways: DVD courtesy of Scarecrow Video, and a gift certificate for Cinema Books, respectively.

And did you know your stairway lies on the whispering wind?

(Solo)

Coming Attractions: In A Lonely Place

Wednesday, 30 March at 7:00 & 9:10 P.M.

Giveaways: Treasure of the Sierra Madre DVD courtesy of Scarecrow Video, and a gift certificate to Cinema Books, respectively.

There's no sacrifice too great for a chance at immortality.

Coming Attractions: Double Indemnity

Wednesday, 23 March at 7:00 & 9:10 PM.

Giveaways: The Apartment DVD courtesy of Scarecrow Video, and a gift certificate to Cinema Books, respectively.

That's a honey of an anklet you're wearing Mrs. Dietrichson.

Hell is Other Movies: Chimes at Midnight

This week we're playing Orson Welles's Touch of Evil, his last studio film.  Welles, of course had a legendarily messy filmmaking career, one that can be fairly divided between his studio films and his independent productions.  The studio films are the most famous, featuring also the consensus all-time #1 Citizen Kane, the butchered masterpiece The Magnificent Ambersons and the too-twisted-for-Hollywood noirs The Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil.  His independent films include this week's giveaway, the dishonest documentary F for Fake, the schizophrenic and multiform funhouse Kane Mr. Arkadin, an adaptation of Kafka's The Trial (which Welles rightly notes is a comedy) and three Shakespeare films: Macbeth, Othello and the greatest of them all, 1965's Chimes at Midnight, in which Welles combines parts of the two Henry IV plays with Henry V to tell one story about the fat, blustery rogue Sir John Falstaff.

His independent films are more famous for their technical shortcomings than anything else, made as they were with shoestring budgets (when there was any money at all) with post-recorded sound (occasionally in sync and often with Welles himself dubbing several parts), thrown together sets (Welles famously set a scene in Othello in a Turkish bath because the costumes for the scene weren't ready) and shooting schedules spanning years (Welles would take whatever acting jobs he could get to raise money for his films).  And unlike his studio films, due to complex rights issues his independent films are difficult to find in anything like their intended form.  The good people at the Criterion Collection have put out deluxe editions of both F for Fake and Mr. Arkadin, but the Shakespeare films have yet to reach DVD in this country in the shape Welles wanted.

I don't think I'm alone in thinking that Welles was the greatest interpreter of Shakespeare in the 20th Century.  While Laurence Olivier was filming Shakespeare like it was a museum, pinning it to the wall with perfect bloodless enunciation, Welles dragged the Bard down to his level, and made the plays come alive as the black, guttural and popular entertainments they really are, which brings their great heights and depths alive for an audience in a way Olivier could never manage.  The part of Falstaff was perfect for Welles, one of Shakespeare's greatest creations: a gluttonous, dishonest, ribald raconteur who befriends Prince Hal, soon to be King Henry V.  Welles had already played a reflection of Falstaff in Touch of Evil:  Hank Quinlan in that film is similarly larger than life, twisted by tragedy into evil, but tragic nonetheless.  Falstaff is never evil: cowardly, thieving and whoring perhaps, but never a villain.  He's the tragic hero of Chimes at Midnight, playing the bombastic fool with a real love for and pride in Hal, whose heart is broken when the young king turns him away after the coronation.  Welles captures all of Falstaff's complexity, the humanity that, to agree with Harold Bloom (a bit of a Falstaff himself, I think) makes him, along with Hamlet, one of the most original and important characters in all of literature.

The film is every bit a match for Welles's performance, hampered as it is by poor sound recording.  The centerpiece of the film is the Battle of Shrewsbury, where Henry IV and Hal put down a rebellion by Hal's rival Henry Percy (nicknamed Hotspur).  Falstaff is the comic figure in the battle, a heavily-armored balloon with little stick legs, running to and fro always a little behind the action.  The battle itself stands with the greatest scenes of medieval action ever filmed.  As viscerally immersive and violent as anything in Braveheart or Ran, but shot through with small moments of beauty colored by the bloody consequences of the chaotic violence.  The rest of the film is of a piece with the rest of Welles's career: dramatic shadows and beams of light, compositions in depth and canted angles conveying real meaning (expansion and diminishment, the twin poles  pulling the narrative and the characters apart) rather than purposeless showiness that infects so many of his imitators.

Chimes at Midnight was part of the first batch of VHS tapes I rented from Scarecrow Video when I moved to Seattle almost 13 years ago, but I hadn't been able to see it since then.  But freshly arrived in my mailbox today was a DVD version from the UK.  It's a poor transfer (might actually just be that old VHS version on disc), the image is often blurry in motion, the sound is at times inaudible (though that may be unfixable) and it isn't formatted for 16x9 televisions.  But for all its faults, the greatness of the film shines through.  Touch of Evil is still my favorite Welles, but Chimes at Midnight is #2.

Coming Attractions: Touch of Evil

Wednesday, 16 March at 6:45 & 9:10 P.M.

Giveaways: DVD courtesy of Scarecrow Video, and a gift certificate to Cinema Books, respectively.

Es muy bueno.

Coming Attractions: Vertigo

Wednesday, 9 March at 6:45 & 9:15 P.M.

Giveaways: Rear Window DVD courtesy of Scarecrow Video, and a gift certificate to Cinema Books, respectively.

Don't look down!

Hell is Other Movies: Irma Vep

A couple of years ago, we came close to running, over a nine week series, Louis Feuillade's 1915 serial Les Vampires about a gang of high-tech, proto-surrealist criminals terrorizing pre-war Paris.  Each night would have paired part of the serial with a feature (this was our "Liars, Cheats and Thieves" series, with Charade, L'Avventura and The Sting, among others).  We would then transition into the next series with Irma Vep, Olivier Assayas's 1996 film about an attempted remake of Feuillade's serial with Maggie Cheung (star of this week's In the Mood for Love) playing the starring role.  Alas, the cost of securing Les Vampires proved to be too great, so we abandoned the idea (and ended up running Singin' in the Rain to start the next series).  It's a shame, because running a 95 year old serial would have been cool in itself, but also because Les Vampires is one of the great works of silent cinema, with immeasurable influences not just in film but art in general.

It's also a shame because Irma Vep is a pretty great film in its own right.  An homage not just to Feuillade but also François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard (whose Day for Night and Passion, respectively, it joins as one of the great French films about filmmaking), it's a scathing indictment of the 1990s French film industry.  New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud plays the director who used to be great but now seems to be washed up who got the idea of casting Maggie Cheung in his film after seeing her in what appears to be Johnnie To's The Heroic Trio, a kind of Hong Kong version of Charlie's Angels.  Ms. Cheung shows up for the part, but doesn't speak any French and finds that none of the crew have any idea who she is (though she had, by this point, done amazing work in Wong Kar-wai's Days of Being Wild and Stanley Kwan's Centre Stage, as well as many a kung fu girlfriend role dating back more than a decade) and none of them can figure out why a Chinese woman would be playing such an iconic French part.

The provincialism and condescension of the French towards Cheung is part of Assayas's critique, as is its general cheapness and lack of professionalism.  The director has a nervous breakdown (he seems to have only the vaguest idea what he wants to do with the film), the costume designer (played by Nathalie Richard, seen in last year's Never Let Me Go) develops a crush on Cheung and tries to hook up with her, the line producer seemingly hates everyone (after Cheung oversleeps one day, she is interrogated mercilessly about whether she has a drug problem).  Even Cheung goes a little bit crazy, donning her skintight latex costume at night for some method training in sneaking into hotel rooms and stealing jewelry.

Unlike most every other film about filmmaking, including the Godard and Truffaut classics mentioned earlier, and also Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 and Tom DiCillo's great film from the year before about making an indie film in America, Living in Oblivion, Irma Vep doesn't really have a happy ending in which everyone experiences the transcendent joy of making cinema.  Instead, Léaud and Cheung are replaced and when the footage they shot is screened, it turns out to be a really cool-looking bit of avant-garde lettrism.  Turns out, the film they were making might have been great, but they couldn't even get it finished.  And there's nothing more depressing than an unfinished film.*






*Lots of things are more depressing than an unfinished film: war, famine, the fate of the Sonics, etc.

Coming Attractions: In the Mood for Love

Wednesday, 2 March at 7:00 & 9:10 P.M.  Now on film!

Giveaways: 2046 DVD courtesy of Scarecrow Video and a gift certificate to Cinema Books, respectively.

Welcome to Hell!

Coming Attractions: The Rules of the Game

Wednesday, December 1st at 7 and 9:15 pm.

Giveaways: A Gosford Park DVD courtesy of Scarecrow video and a Gift Certificate to Cinema Books, respectively.

Coming Attractions: Serenity

Wednesday, April 28 at 6:50 and 9:10 PM.

Giveaways: A Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along-Blog DVD courtesy of Scarecrow Video and a gift certificate to Cinema Books, respectively.

Last show til August!

Coming Attractions: Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan

Wednesday, April 21st at 6:50 & 9:10 PM.

Giveaways: Galaxy Quest DVD courtesy of Scarecrow Video and a gift certificate for Cinema Books, respectively.

See you there!

Coming Attractions: Aliens

Wednesday, April 14th at 6:40 and 9:20

Giveaways: Alien DVD courtesy of Scarecrow Video and a gift certificate for Cinema Books, respectively.

See you there!

Coming Attractions: Barton Fink

Wednesday, April 7th at 6:50 & 9:10 P.M.

Giveaways: Miller's Crossing DVD courtesy of Scarecrow Video and a gift certificate to Cinema Books, respectively.

See you there!

Coming Attractions: Who Framed Roger Rabbit

Wednesday, March 31st at 7:00 and 9:10 P.M.

Giveaways: Chinatown DVD courtesy of Scarecrow Video and a gift certificate for Cinema Books, respectively.

See you there!