Movie #4: Inglorious Bastards (1978)

When I was a kid more often that not you would find my Sunday mornings spent curled up on the couch with my father watching WWOR 9, a local television station that would specialize in kung-fu and war films from the 60's and 70's. INGLORIOUS BASTARDS feels like a taste of all those afternoons, bringing back the dust slowly falling in between the slats of light from the shades and the icy wetness on my head whenever my father would play around and use my head as a coaster for his beer.

Considered a classic "Euro-Cult" film, it's essentially a lower-budget Italian DIRTY DOZEN, about a group of WWII allied war criminals who are hit by an enemy air strike while being transported to prison. Taking advantage of their predicament they initially make plans to run off and make their way to the Swiss border, but their plans are foiled once they mistakenly kill a disguised American strike force and are involuntarily "volunteered" to take their place on a dangerous mission deep within Nazi territory.

Everything is done on the cheap, but director Enzo G. Castellari knows his way around a film, and shoots everything with an enthusiasm and a skill that rises above the constraints placed by the budget. The use of hand-held cameras following the action bring an immediacy and excitement to the big set pieces and is assisted by the gorgeous Italian location shooting. Castles, waterfalls, small towns and open fields make up the majority of the set dressing, and Castellari knows where to put his camera to make the most of things.

Another wise choice is in the choice international casting, featuring Bo Svenson and Fred Williamson in the lead roles. There's a immediate charm and camaraderie evident when everyone's together. Svenson is saddled with the leader role, and the one criminal who's not really a bastard (he's being court-martialed for using his airplane as a taxi to see his girlfriend one too many times), but he's engaging and honest while also being as hard as he has to keep his "men" in line and get them to safety. Williamson, though, is the real prize - he's in incredible shape in the movie and gets the best of the camera every time, even mugging to the audience after one action sequence. Plus it's hysterical when they have to try to convince the French Resistance how Williamson could possibly pass himself off as a Nazi. A lot of this is due to the script, which is pretty tight and has as its core a solid high concept for a story. Although the idea of a gang of criminals taking on the bad guys has been done before, never does INGLORIOUS BASTARDS feel like a knock-off of more successful war films.

As Svenson leads his motley crew of criminals from one situation to the next the INGLORIOUS BASTARDS lights up in a way that only the most bad-ass films can. Crossbows are fired, people jump in the air and do somersaults just before shooting, a halberd is almost used a weapon. And yes, there is a sneaky Italian thief who manages to hides an entire tool set in his clothes and goes mad for a group of naked German women who just "happen" to be splashing around naked in a lake.

Sure, it's that's kind of movie. And yes, you can see the strings sometimes when an explosion goes off and a soldier "flies" into the air. But INGLORIOUS BASTARDS is just too damn fun and too finely made to really care about any of that stuff.

Movie #3: Semi-Pro (2008)

See? Not everything on this blog is going to be either serious foreign, art-house classics or critically acclaimed documentaries. There's always a little room for Will Ferrell.

SEMI-PRO was one of the "compromise" movies I routinely get from Netflix to satisfy my wife's cinematic desires. Which is not to say I was adverse to the decision - I definitely enjoy me a good Will Ferrell flick. SEMI-PRO doesn't exactly deliver on that - it's no ANCHORMAN, or even THE LEGEND OF RICKY BOBBY. But it's a damn bit funnier than the recent STEP BROTHERS, so in the Ferrell pantheon it gets a passing grade.

Ferrell plays Jackie Moon: owner, coach, player, and promoter for the Flint Michigan Tropics, an ABA team in the waning days of the league, a team just about as bad as can be imagined. Which is the point, considering this is pretty much a by-the-numbers feel good underdog story. When it's announced that the ABA is going to merge with the NBA and that the top 4 teams will be absorbed, Jackie makes it his mission to ensure his team's place in the league. This includes things like attempting a roller skate jump over 47 feet of Tropic Ball Girls, and wrestling a bear. Everything but actually focusing on playing the game. To that end Moon hires bad boy and ex-NBA champ Ed Monix (played by Woody Harrelson in a welcome return to basketball movies) who quickly moves from hated teammate to learned guru, teaching the team to be an actual team using rousing speeches, grueling practice drills and, in one instance, a punch to the jejunum, which if nothing else was a lesson in anatomy for me.

Yes, SEMI-PRO is predictable. Tone-wise it moves all over the place and doesn't quite settle anywhere. And it's Will Ferrell doing pretty much exactly what he always does. All that being said, I still laughed. The scene with the bear wrestling is pretty hysterical, if only for Ferrell's ridiculous warnings once the bear gets loose in the stadium. Everyone else does their jobs well, especially a brief appearance by Jackie Earle Haley as a hippie who makes a once in a lifetime free throw. So, as much as my senses tell me that SEMI-PRO is a bad movie, in the end I laughed a lot more than I anticipated, and that can't be a bad thing.

Movie #2: Man On Wire (2008)

"Why? Why is he doing it?"

The question of why is asked by a passerby to Annie, who is on the street in New York City pointing and shouting at her lover who is seemingly floating high in the air between the newly constructed Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. As she relates this portion of the story in the amazing documentary MAN ON WIRE, she expresses her utter bafflement to the question. Her answer is, simply, why not?

What director James Marsh has done is taken the story of Phillippe Petit, a French tightrope walker obsessed with the idea of performing a high-wire act atop the towers and created a documentary both beautiful and magical, an artful balance of different tones and styles that mimic the ethereal actions of Petit and his crew. He's helped by the fact that Petit is a born performer, charming and enthusiastic in his interviews, who also had the foresight to extensively film much of the planning and practice that went into his eventual triumph in New York. Marsh takes this footage and skillfully combines it with interviews and narration not only by Petit, but most of the people involved in executing the plan.

Although "plan" doesn't do justice to the events that transpire to get Petit up in the air. Some of the posters advertising MAN ON WIRE call it a "heist" film, and that's as good a name as any. The structure of the movie could have been lifted from any number of 50's crime films, and Marsh uses this to his advantage, blending the real life footage with dramatic reenactments, shot in black and white in an often surreal, film noir style perfectly matched to the music of composer Michael Nyman, much of which had been used in the films of Paul Greengrass. These sequences, such as when Petit and one of his crew are forced to sit under a tarp for hours as they wait for a security to leave the floor so they can begin to lug their equipment to the roof is blends an equla does of suspense and humor, and work better than many similar works that are straight dramatic fiction.

All of that is put aside once Petit sets his foot upon the wire, and the actual footage coupled with his own account during his performance is breathtaking. There's footage taken from the time of one of the arresting officers who states, "I don't think I'll ever see anything like this again."

It's his words that I'll take away from MAN ON WIRE more than anything else. He gets it. Phillippe Petit's display doesn't require explanation: it is a pure act of magic, done with wires and poles, a gift to himself and a gift to those able to witness something none of them could possibly have imagined when they woke up that morning and got ready to head into work.

Some are always in need of an explanation, of the "why". Others are content with the simple existence of that which they see.

Movie #1: Breathless (1959)

BREATHLESS may not have been the movie to "officially" kick off the French New Wave, but after its release there was little doubt it would be the standard bearer for the movement. Written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard based off a treatment by Francois Truffaut, BREATHLESS leaps off the screen and tears into its story with a youthful exuberance that embraces its roots in American genre films while gleefully tearing apart the staid tenets of how those films are structured.

This was my introduction to Godard, and watching it for the first time I was amazed at how fresh and exciting it feels almost 50 years after its initial release. Roger Ebert hails it as the beginning of the modern movie, and the most influential debut since Orson Welles and CITIZEN KANE, and it's hard not to think the same. The story centers on Michel, a small time gangster who idolizes Humphrey Bogart and the materialistic freedoms of America - the cars, the movies, and the women. BREATHLESS opens with Michel nonchalantly stealing a car, and as he tears through the countryside Godard demonstrates what makes this a "modern" movie - Michel's mouth motors as quick as his car, and as he goes from topic to topic Godard's "jump cutting" technique is introduced - the editing almost seems to stutter, catching the dialog just after it begin only to clip just before it ends. The technique forces the viewer to become a participant in the conversation, desperately trying to keep up with what Michel is saying - a hopeless cause. For a brief moment he even turns to the camera, breaking the fourth wall and even more directly drawing the viewer into his world before he's off again, daring us to catch up. Soon he's stopped by the police and, having found a gun in the glove compartment, suddenly kills the patrolman in what looks to be a quick, gut reaction to getting caught. This sets up the rest of the story as Michel attempts to collect enough money to leave the country with Patricia, an American girl he fancies after a brief fling some time before.

But while the actual plot points of BREATHLESS are ripped directly from the Western gangster films of the 40s and 50s, the execution of the plot is anything but a retread. The editing is wonder at both ends of the spectrum - the jump cutting is continuously used to great effect, acting as a visual companion to the pace and tone of Michel's comments and eyeline. During a cab ride he tells Patricia how beautiful she is; the editing not only clips the dialog into brief, aural impressions but visually accents her face, her neck, wherever his eyes roam.

But what also stands out are the long, uninterrupted takes that echo the languid, bored moods of Michel and Patricia, especially in one particular scene up in her apartment. Michel spends the majority of the time trying to convince Patricia to sleep with him, but the movement and pacing betrays his boredom by not cutting away and focusing on his slow body movements and the endless little bits of distractions between them. The lighting is mostly natural, sunlight filtering through cigarette smoke in a haze that further enhances the feeling of emptiness insider the characters.

BREATHLESS also plays with unconventional methods of communicating the story. Michel walks down a street and the camera lingers on a passing sign that reads, "Live Dangerously Until the End!" Rather than show the police closing in on Michel, Godard uses newspapers and scrolling marquee signs flashing bulletins as Michel coincidentally drives by to signal their progress. And in perhaps the most ironic moment of the movie, a passerby who recognizes Michel and points him out to police is none other than Godard himself, thus directing the course of the film simultaneously in front of and behind the camera.

Would this movie have worked with different actors? It's hard to say, because what Jean-Paul Belmondo brings to Michel is an oddball electricity that would be hard to replace. Big, pouty lips and a broad nose, up close he looks far from the typical matinee idol, but his lithe movements and boundless charm make it easy to understand why he was a top drawer in France for so many years. His Michel is all sheen and bravado up front with a frightened kid just below the skin, and nowhere after the first five minutes of the film is it believed he's as tough as he claims to be. Even his tough guy actions - the initial murder, the muggings and bullying threats, betray a scared indecision, a life purposely without direction.

And the first moment Jean Seberg appears on-screen, walking up and down the street selling newspapers with her New York Herald t-shirt, it's impossible to look away. She's gorgeous and enigmatic and in her own way just as empty inside as Michel. There's a weird detachment to her actions and words that speaks to a coldness Michel never recognizes until it's too late. She announces she's pregnant, but the way she says it feels clinical, as if looking for a reaction from Michel. Is it true? She speaks to a friend and potential lover earlier where her condition is perhaps obliquely referenced, but that may have been a lie as well. Later, she coldly manipulates Michel's capture because, her thinking goes, if she can do something bad to him, it proves that she doesn't really love him. This sets up the wonderfully iconic ending, and one of the best last lines in movies, as Michel meets his end and maybe gets a glimpse of reality before the movie ends.

All together, BREATHLESS works to create a fresh and clear starting line for many of the things taken for granted on modern films. It celebrates American cinema even as it makes a case for the new wave of French cinema. The plot, characters, and style all coalesce into something where, for once, the reputation is less than adequate.

Welcome. What's Celluloid Moon?

Hi. Don’t mind the mess.

Celluloid Moon is a branch of Geek Monkey, your one-stop-shop for ruminations, reviews, and general revelry concerning all manner of geeky things. I wanted to take something from scratch that I can use to focus on film: specifically my growth as a film watcher and writer.

So throughout 2009 I’m going to keep a record of the movies I see, both in the theaters and on DVD, with the hopes of better expressing my thoughts and views on how and why these films either worked or didn't work for me, with the ultimate goal being two-fold:

1. Improve my overall writing with regards to film criticism.
2. Expand the breadth and scope of the films I see. I made a promise that for 2009 I would make every attempt to see as broad a range of films as possible, and try my damnedest to erase the enormous stockpile of DVDs I have lying around the house.

Some reviews will be long (and quite possibly ramble - I won't deny my faults as a writer), some I'll try to be as brief and concise as possible. Hopefully anyone stumbling across this blog will leave a comment, engage in some discussion, and point me toward some great films out there waiting to be discovered.

And that’s about as strict a Mission Statement as I imagine I’ll ever put out.

Thanks, and see you around.