Gremlins.
The
classic anti-Christmas horror comedy, still as bitingly satirical as
ever.
“Now
I have another reason to hate Christmas.”
Joe
Dante might very well qualify as one of the most talented American
directors currently working, but his consistently intelligent,
sharply satirical, and hilariously funny output might paradoxically
be enabled by the marginal position he occupies within the film
industry, having fun digs at all of its conventions while providing
hugely entertaining films. Gremlins,
his most famous film and one of the greatest spoofs of the Christmas
spirit ever made, displays the characteristic combination of human
warmth and savage critique that makes him one of the greatest
satirists working in Hollywood today.
The
story follows a young man who receives a cute creature for Christmas
but breaks the three rules of raising it, only to let loose a bunch
of monsters who wreak havoc on his small town. This is little more
than an excuse for wrecking all the traditional institutions of
small-town America, gleefully bringing to the surface all the
neuroses and hidden tensions between the memorable cast of secondary
characters. Yet it is central to Dante's vision that there is rarely
such a thing as a villain in his films: some of the most sympathetic
characters are the gremlins themselves, and Dante clearly has more
fun observing their hedonist debauchery than the moral uptightness of
some of the human characters. A sharp anti-Christmas comment that
reconfigures traditional feel-good movies as horror, and a gleefully
liberating destruction fest that rejoices in tearing down the
American cultural unconscious, Gremlins
still stands as one of the best popcorn films of all time.
A Man
Escapes.
A patient
examination of the efforts called for by freedom, in one of the
greatest films ever made.
“To
fight – fight against the walls, against myself, my door.”
Jean-Luc
Godard once said of Robert Bresson that he is “French cinema, as
Dostoyevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music.” No
small praise, coming from the man who is French cinema as Tolstoy is
the Russian novel and Bach is German music. One of the greatest films
ever made, Bresson's A Man Escapes
is also the best introduction to his work, which stands as one of the
most original and daring that cinema has produced.
Drawing
on Bresson's own wartime experiences, as well as on the true story of
Resistance fighter André Devigny, the film follows a man called
Fontaine's escape attempt from the Nazi gaols of Lyon. The first shot
of the film, showing the man's hands, sets the tone: the excitement
and suspense of the film reside in its patient, unflinching
observations of the very concrete problems that stand in Fontaine's
way, and of the perseverance required he displays. Freedom is the
central concern of the film, and Bresson complements his sparse,
crisp imagery with a soundtrack that consistently plays on the
dialectic of freedom and captivity: the slightest noises indicate
menaces or opportunities, comradeship or oppression, and constantly
expand the realm of possibilities by reminding us of a world outside
the prison cell. With its very concrete sense of resistance, A
Man Escapes is one of the few truly
existentialist films: a work of art that exhibits a true sense not
only of the difficulty, but also of the uncompromising necessity of
freedom.
Two-Lane
Blacktop:
The cult
road-movie, which stands at the peak of 1970s American cinema.
“You
can never go fast enough.”
Like
many great artists, Monte Hellman might have had great trouble
getting his projects off the ground, yet one need only watch the film
for which he is most famous to verify that he is one of the most
essential American film-makers of the past forty years. For all those
who consider that the 1970s were a golden age of American cinema,
Two-Lane Blacktop,
both the greatest road-movie ever and the absolute anti-road-movie,
is one of its most enduring miracles.
The
film follows a set of four unnamed characters, as their shifting
interactions and rivalries bring into question their entire way of
life. Theoretically, the story is the classic set-up of a race
between two drivers, one a smooth talker constantly building up his
own mythology, the other one quiet and ruthlessly focused on racing.
Yet Hellman continually undermines the notion of rugged virility and
masculine affirmation which usually form the genre: conflicts are
observed in a coolly detached way, and characters stop in squalid
diners as often as they cross lush landscapes. By the infamous ending
(one of the most memorable in American cinema), the two conflicting
visions of masculinity (and of the actor's craft) have exposed as
equally false, empty codes whereby men prove themselves to each other
but become incapable of genuine contact, so that the very idea of
“winning the girl” becomes a dead end. Two-Lane
Blacktop takes the road movie ever faster towards its
culimation in absolute stillness. Run, run, as fast as you can...
Children
in the Wind.
An
masterwork of unassuming spontaneity by one of the great forgotten
masters of Japanese cinema.
“You
only have freedom when you're young.”
The
films of Hiroshi Shimizu, one of the supreme (and unjustly neglected)
masters of Japanese cinema, offer a blast of fresh air to anyone
seeking worthwhile portrayals of childhood on film. Whereas most
attempts either portray children as annoying idiots or as cloying
creatures so irritatingly cute as to be devoid of any reality,
Shimizu pays close attention to their interactions and aspirations,
letting them exist as multi-faceted beings as worthy of interest as
the adults around them. Nowhere is the generosity of his vision as
evident as in one of his best films, Children
in the Wind.
Sanpei
and Zenta are two brothers who see their position in the group of
village children undermined when their father meets with trouble at
work. Shimizu attentively follows the reverberations of this, first
in the family, then in the wider frame of society, carefully drawing
parallels between the economic struggles of the adult world and the
discord it creates within the children's society. A master at
integrating human figures in landscapes, Shimizu effortlessly creates
compositions all the more stunning for their simplicity, and has few
challengers in the art of contriving scenes that are both funny and
intensely moving. His children are intelligent and funny, eager to
discover the world, and Shimizu adopts their posture of patient and
ever-renewed exploration to chart the transformations of the slowly
modernizing Japanese rural community. Beautifully simple and
effortlessly rich, the communal vision of Children
in the Wind is one of the most
compelling portrayals of children ever seen on screen.
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