Films CXXIX-CXXXII
Falling behind...
CXXIX: Die Welle (The Wave, Dennis Gansel, 2008)
Based on a true story of an educational experiment - but relocated to Germany for fairly obvious reasons. Rainer Wenger (Jürgen Vogel) is the cool teacher - lives on a houseboat, wears a leather jacket and Ramones t-shirt, and wants to teach anarchism during the school's activities week. Instead he is lumbered with Autocracy, and a class that says obviously it was terrible in the 1930s but it Couldn't Happen Here. By rearranging the furniture, insisting on protocol, giving them a uniform (albeit white not brown shirt) he moulds the class into an effective unit, that more and more children want to join - although none of them seem to say, yeah we get what it is we're being taught more forcibly.
The production of a gun part way through heavily flags a melodramatic ending, and again it's easy to think that people would not so easily have gone along with it. But school is full of peer pressure, even without his exclusion of those not wearing the shirt. Wenger is ultimately ambiguous; it's not clear how far he is carried away by the experiment and the ego-boo - and the sense that by scratching a liberal you find an autocrat. Recommended.
CXXX: Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977)
Hey, I was convinced I had seen some of this - I knew I hadn't seen it all the way through - but I'm not convinced I've not just seen stills. Printer Henry Spencer (John Nance) drops into a postindustrial landscape where every woman seems to want to seduce him, whether it is the woman across the hall, his girlfriend, his girlfriend's mother or the woman who lives in his radiator. After the meal with in-laws from hell (the 4 inch whole chickens bleed copiously and dance, despite being roasted) he is told that his girlfriend has been pregnant and they take the baby home. The baby is little more than a crying head, on the end of a long neck which disappears into a bandaged body.
It might be the use of black and white, but Spenser seems like a cross between Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, and much of the acting style would feel more at home in a silent film. The narrative - such as it is - seems to invite but not be satisfied by psychoanalytic readings: Spenser's repression of desire and his haunting by the return of the repressed. The large worms that fall on the stage in the radiator seem like giant sperm, as does the baby but with a body, and Spencer's beheading ("To decapitate = to castrate" (Freud)) gives him a very phallic head as he stands as if one trial. It doesn't seem to be enough.
It is, however, one for the seventies project so no doubt I'll be back with it.
Quantum of Solace (Marc Forster, 2008)
It might well be an authentic Fleming title, but Quantum is here an ultra secret network and a little bit (although my understanding of what a quantum leap is such that it could have been called Light Year of Solace in measuring terms). Following on literally from the previous film, Casino Royale, but less obviously gritty, it is a post-Bourne Bond (note both are JBs, of course), Bond (Daniel Craig) is seeking revenge for the death at the end of the last film. M (Judi Dench) is concerned that he's not objective, that he's gone rogue, and stops all his passports and bank accounts, not that that seems to slow him down. Of course, even if he appears to be rogue (or rouge), it could be part of a cunning plan.
In the era of big screen comic book heroes, and the cold war having been left behind, Bond struggles. The original books were wish fulfillment fantasies for an author who wanted more field experience as a spy. The intelligence network is rather different today. The sixties and seventies films were thrillers, with a cold war ideology - although even the realist end of the spy market (the Harry Palmer trilogy) was hardly filmed realistically. Bond is the evil supervillain, the secret base, the litany of toys provided by Q, the interchangeable chases - but Bourne does the cynicism about there being no one to trust (even whilst clinging to the few bad apples theorem) whereas Bond had patriotism and heavy handed irony. We're left with the interminable chases and a no star cast, aside from Craig, Dench and an underused Jeffrey Wright (as Felix Dexter) who deserve better.
I wonder how much of Paul Haggis's script remained? The bit with Bond licking a boot?
Performance (Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, 1970)
Something else perhaps best left in the 1960s? If editing is what film has to offer, then this deserves its Top 100 placing; continuity editing is not abandoned entirely,m but there is a freedom to cut through time and space more widely, so the associations are wilder. I can't but help that this gives a profundity to something that would otherwise be rather thin, and dissolves the differences between perception and drug trips.
Gangster Chas (James Fox) has to disappear from his gang and takes over a flat owned by Turner (Mick Jagger) who'd rather he left. It's no Rising Damp.
I've associated Fox with dignitaries, ambassadors, ministers and officials, so it is odd to see him in a rile that would demand Danny Dyer today. He is suitably violent, and in control, at the start of the film, but is rather less able to deal with the hippies, although he does manage to stay with Turner for a while. Jagger is hardly called on to act, as a washed up rock star with big lips, but it is a shock to be reminded how pretty he once once. One of the females, who beds Chas, is easily mistaken for him, although the androgyny and the blurring of sexual boundaries is not really explored. (Fox left acting for nine years after making this).
I confess to being somewhat resistant to this - it feels somewhat self-indulgent in the end.I need to watch The Man Who Fell to Earth (for more of the same style) and Jubilee for the counter culture.
Totals: 132 (Cinema: 59; DVD: 68; TV: 5)
CXXIX: Die Welle (The Wave, Dennis Gansel, 2008)
Based on a true story of an educational experiment - but relocated to Germany for fairly obvious reasons. Rainer Wenger (Jürgen Vogel) is the cool teacher - lives on a houseboat, wears a leather jacket and Ramones t-shirt, and wants to teach anarchism during the school's activities week. Instead he is lumbered with Autocracy, and a class that says obviously it was terrible in the 1930s but it Couldn't Happen Here. By rearranging the furniture, insisting on protocol, giving them a uniform (albeit white not brown shirt) he moulds the class into an effective unit, that more and more children want to join - although none of them seem to say, yeah we get what it is we're being taught more forcibly.
The production of a gun part way through heavily flags a melodramatic ending, and again it's easy to think that people would not so easily have gone along with it. But school is full of peer pressure, even without his exclusion of those not wearing the shirt. Wenger is ultimately ambiguous; it's not clear how far he is carried away by the experiment and the ego-boo - and the sense that by scratching a liberal you find an autocrat. Recommended.
CXXX: Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977)
Hey, I was convinced I had seen some of this - I knew I hadn't seen it all the way through - but I'm not convinced I've not just seen stills. Printer Henry Spencer (John Nance) drops into a postindustrial landscape where every woman seems to want to seduce him, whether it is the woman across the hall, his girlfriend, his girlfriend's mother or the woman who lives in his radiator. After the meal with in-laws from hell (the 4 inch whole chickens bleed copiously and dance, despite being roasted) he is told that his girlfriend has been pregnant and they take the baby home. The baby is little more than a crying head, on the end of a long neck which disappears into a bandaged body.
It might be the use of black and white, but Spenser seems like a cross between Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, and much of the acting style would feel more at home in a silent film. The narrative - such as it is - seems to invite but not be satisfied by psychoanalytic readings: Spenser's repression of desire and his haunting by the return of the repressed. The large worms that fall on the stage in the radiator seem like giant sperm, as does the baby but with a body, and Spencer's beheading ("To decapitate = to castrate" (Freud)) gives him a very phallic head as he stands as if one trial. It doesn't seem to be enough.
It is, however, one for the seventies project so no doubt I'll be back with it.
Quantum of Solace (Marc Forster, 2008)
It might well be an authentic Fleming title, but Quantum is here an ultra secret network and a little bit (although my understanding of what a quantum leap is such that it could have been called Light Year of Solace in measuring terms). Following on literally from the previous film, Casino Royale, but less obviously gritty, it is a post-Bourne Bond (note both are JBs, of course), Bond (Daniel Craig) is seeking revenge for the death at the end of the last film. M (Judi Dench) is concerned that he's not objective, that he's gone rogue, and stops all his passports and bank accounts, not that that seems to slow him down. Of course, even if he appears to be rogue (or rouge), it could be part of a cunning plan.
In the era of big screen comic book heroes, and the cold war having been left behind, Bond struggles. The original books were wish fulfillment fantasies for an author who wanted more field experience as a spy. The intelligence network is rather different today. The sixties and seventies films were thrillers, with a cold war ideology - although even the realist end of the spy market (the Harry Palmer trilogy) was hardly filmed realistically. Bond is the evil supervillain, the secret base, the litany of toys provided by Q, the interchangeable chases - but Bourne does the cynicism about there being no one to trust (even whilst clinging to the few bad apples theorem) whereas Bond had patriotism and heavy handed irony. We're left with the interminable chases and a no star cast, aside from Craig, Dench and an underused Jeffrey Wright (as Felix Dexter) who deserve better.
I wonder how much of Paul Haggis's script remained? The bit with Bond licking a boot?
Performance (Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, 1970)
Something else perhaps best left in the 1960s? If editing is what film has to offer, then this deserves its Top 100 placing; continuity editing is not abandoned entirely,m but there is a freedom to cut through time and space more widely, so the associations are wilder. I can't but help that this gives a profundity to something that would otherwise be rather thin, and dissolves the differences between perception and drug trips.
Gangster Chas (James Fox) has to disappear from his gang and takes over a flat owned by Turner (Mick Jagger) who'd rather he left. It's no Rising Damp.
I've associated Fox with dignitaries, ambassadors, ministers and officials, so it is odd to see him in a rile that would demand Danny Dyer today. He is suitably violent, and in control, at the start of the film, but is rather less able to deal with the hippies, although he does manage to stay with Turner for a while. Jagger is hardly called on to act, as a washed up rock star with big lips, but it is a shock to be reminded how pretty he once once. One of the females, who beds Chas, is easily mistaken for him, although the androgyny and the blurring of sexual boundaries is not really explored. (Fox left acting for nine years after making this).
I confess to being somewhat resistant to this - it feels somewhat self-indulgent in the end.I need to watch The Man Who Fell to Earth (for more of the same style) and Jubilee for the counter culture.
Totals: 132 (Cinema: 59; DVD: 68; TV: 5)