“Doctors, lawters never past 16,000 rupees… he’s at 10 million. What can a slumdog possibly know?”
Director: Danny Boyle, Loveleen Tandan (co-director, India)
Saw in twice in a short week, pulsing, vibrant, a shoulder shake and complete satisfaction. Perhaps it was just the chances but the audiences both nights were strangely responsive, completely engrossed with every up and down, fast paced, drummed tracking shot or eerie, cruel-word reality seemingly caught on film. After I had dabbled in Bollywood and seen The Darjeeling Limited enough times to burn it on my retinas I was pretty resigned to the fact that it is not difficult to produce something aesthetically astounding out of India -- the colors, smells, noises, an assault of energy with the tease and exotics of the east that always gets us -- ying yang tattoos, ruby sticker bindis, etc. etc. The cinematography for Slumdog was really something though, and constantly checked with the AR Rahman soundtrack with flecks of old and new and M.I.A. -- my god. I do admit, the film carries a healthy amount of those movie-style lines and contented twists, but come one people, we need those now and again, we really, really do.
2 Final Points: (1) I love when movies involve an aging character and the multiple actors cast to play the various ages work ridiculously well with grace and conviction. Slumdog Millionaire does this. (2) Despite everything, the end credits involve a full-cast classic choreographed dance, which is just rad.
Director: Guy Maddin Writers: Kazuo Ishiguru (original screenplay), George Toles Starring: Mark McKinney, Isabella Rossellini, Maria de Medeiros, Ross McMillian
Strange and discomforting, a dream of snow and super8 with all the chills and dooms and quirks promised in the title. I could watch this for hours on end, simply staring head tilted at the screen trying to figure out each and every fleck and shadow of this movie.
edit: I decided to add a trailer because if you have not seen this you ought to but my attempts to persuade you with a synopsis would probably just confuse you even more than the movie does at times. Here, friends:
"You know what a love letter is? It's a bullet from a fucking gun, fucker!"
Director: David Lynch Writer: David Lynch Starring: Isabella Rossellini, Kyle MacLachlan, Dennis Hopper, Laura Dern
The repeated lines: What do you want? Don't you fucking look at me! It's a strange world. Now it's dark... Fuck you, you fucking fuck!
What else could you expect from David Lynch? Blue Velvet is noxious and dark beaten together to birth some strange bastard child between film noir and surrealism. And just because it's been lodged firmly in my brain:
"My friend George said that he was gonna live to be 100 years old. He said - He said that he was going to be the president of the United States. I wanted to see him lead a parade and wave a flag on the Fourth of July. He just wanted greatness."
Director: David Gordon Green Writer: David Gordon Green Starring: Donald Holden, Curtis Cotton III, Candace Evanofski
George Washington was low budget, eerie, and a full-blown aesthetic buffet to the eyes. I had mixed feelings at first, as did those who watched it with me. It's definitely grown on me though. In interviews the director explained that in making the movie fresh out of film school he wanted to create the opposite of everything he had learned in Los Angeles, everything he had learned from the 'business'. He has certainly succeeded in that. The film is beautiful (cinematography is out of this world...filmed in Winston-Salem and Spencer, North Carolina), startling, at times very funny, but ultimately just very different.
"Yes, I killed him. I killed him for money - and a woman - and I didn't get the money and I didn't get the woman. Pretty, isn't it?"
Director: Billy Wilder Writers: Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler (Novel by James M. Cain) Starring: Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinoson
Director: Arthur Penn Writers: David Newman and Robert Benton Starring: Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway
I love how I was so completely charmed by robbers, by killers. I was on their side the entire time. LOVED the little bit with Gene Wilder. First film appearance?
"I'm going crazy. I'm standing here solidly on my own two hands and going crazy."
Director: George Cukor
Katharine Hepburn, James Stewart, Cary Grant! Hahahahahahahahah hahahahahahhahahahahah
I swear, this was the most sophisticated, hilarious, wonderful thing. Remarkable, ridiculous, and with OF COURSE my GOD the happiest of endings. It's lighthearted and sharp with a soft focus 'round the edges.
The comedy of remarriage was a very popular genre of the 1930's and 1940's. Despite the staggeringly attractive long triangle, constant dialogue on love and marriage (like a horse and carriage), and silly, sometimes drunken, completely shameless flirting, the film is a picture of class -- respectable, polite -- fresh, young, winsome comfort to the viewer. The suggestion is sexy. The innuendo, key. It puts any of the romantic-comedy-wedding-saga-type movies of today very much in its place. (And yes, between my last three or four posts here I did not only manage to watch "27 Dresses" but also "License to Wed" ... hm)
Mrs. Lord: Oh, dear. Is there no such thing as privacy any more? Tracy: Only in bed, mother, and not always there.
...
C.K. Dexter Haven: The moon is also a goddess, chaste and virginal. Tracy: Stop using those foul words.
Also: Hepburn is so pristinely beautiful she doesn't even seem to fit in with reality. Also: It is a Stewart-Grant Charm Festival. Watch out, folks. I'm gone. And a final question: Perpaps this is just because it is still fresh in my mind but the role of Tracy vs. her little sister kept on bringing me back to Cecelia and Briony in Atonement (book or movie, take your pick). There's the age difference -- giving them hugely different perspectives on men and love. There's even the act of little sister witnessing something she shouldn't have (Briony in the library, Tracy's sister at the window when they return from the pool). Granted, Atonement is about fifty times heavier about it, but it just got me thinking. The families in both are rich and lofty, the younger daughter far more than sheltered from things. Ah well.
"Well now, that's a fine man to fall in love with!"
Director: Frank Capra
Brilliant. Brilliant! They don't make them like this anymore. I support the Oscar "Grand Slam" in every shape and form (Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director and Screenplay).
Director: John McNaughton Sneak Reviews Man: Can I help you? Anna: Yes, we're looking for something scary. Creepy. And Scary. It can be trashy, too, if you need. Mainly just, scary. Sneak Reviews Man: Oh. La la la. I have just the thing. Not trashy in the slightest. It's called Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Anna: Yes please. Sneak Reviews Man finds the DVD in question. The DVD is rented. Anna (watching movie ): Oh my.
I'm not a person easily phased by yr average mass/news media explicits. I keep my mind pretty open as well as my eyes and if I haven't seen it, read it, heard about it, or (my god!) experienced it myself it must really be something. This movie sounds (and was) interesting, entertaining. Just like Ripperology sounds (and is) both interesting and entertaining. Or maybe like those shouts coming from your neighbor's window. Or anything you read on snopes.
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is what it is. Meet Henry. Hello Henry. He's young and a desaturated handsome. There is something very void at his surface. I thought of it like watching The Joker in The Dark Knight, knowing somewhere in your retinas that it is actually Heath Ledger under there, but also that Heath Ledger is dead. Let's follow Henry into the late morning, from diner to car to mall to Chicago suburb, cutting frames periodically to reveal the dead bodies of several woman, left in different ways in different places. Back to Henry. Oh, what a nice woman he's tailing. And that's just the opening credits.
If you shoot someone in the head with a .45 every time you kill somebody, it becomes like your fingerprint, see? But if you strangle one, stab another, and one you cut up, and one you don't, then the police don't know what to do. They think you're four different people. What they really want, what makes their job so much easier, is pattern. What they call a modus operandi. That's Latin. Bet you didn't know any Latin, did you kid?
My restless anticipation for this movie to be at my fingertips was probably equal to what I've now simply decided to call a bout of "Watchmen Syndrome". Most anticipatory. When I finally got a copy in the mail, I didn't quite know what to do. You see, friends, my last name is sprinkled about the credits of this film. For the past four years (or more) or so, I've been catching snippets up from Hendersonville, Tennessee where not so distant (and yet quite distant) relatives and their friends have been working arduously on this movie. I'm pretty sure a computer crashed at one point and they fixed it using their own blood.
Marked a "Rushmore meets the Exorcist... Weekend at Bernies meets Solaris."
Here is a list of things to say because I can only think in list right now. --I thought it was brilliant. --Most quotable. --Most Ridiculous Soundtrack. --Grand Jury Award at the 2008 Atlanta Film Festival --Ron Tibbett Excellence in Filmmaking Award at the Memphis Indie Film Festival --Most Best.
Okay, I'm biased. But if you know me and you do not feel creepy contacting me (and by that I mean, you have the means to do so and would feel comfortable doing so) you better do so so I can show you this movie. Or you should contact them. Here. Or here. If you are a distributer you should buy it for as much as your heart tells you to and spread the awesome to the masses.
"I almost came as a shark actually, but then I realized an eagle's slightly better."
Director: Taika Cohen
If this movie asked you out on a date, you would say yes. It would probably have a blog, and blog about you and the date afterward. You could graph your giggles and cringes on a sinusoidal graph.
We all saw witnessed the pubescence of the bright, quirky romantic-comedy awk-fest, shuffling down the hallway of movie high school, aware of its hair and lips and mannerisms. I'm talking over-saturated color, 80's fantasy t-shirts, bold wallpapers, mumbled slang.
Of course, Eagle vs Shark was really entertaining. Really. Really. Obviously. Of course! It made me laugh, made me uncomfortable, made me hurt, made me smile. (I will confess, the hardest I laughed was when Jarrod reveals his mother died because she was "kicked in the head by a cow"). Really, the main thing that kept the film from slipping into "another Napoleon Dynamite" or "funny like Juno" or "bizarre like Me and You and Everyone We Know" was the accents, the culture. God bless New Zealand. Oh, and the soundtrack is beach-day catchy-nice (whatever I mean by that, it's positive). And the sleeping bag stop-action is great. And the animated apples. Ha-ha-ho-hum.
Terrible quality, but:
Oh. And it really doesn't help that yours truly has an entire ventricle of her heart reserved for Flight of the Conchords.
"New lovers are nervous and tender, but smash everything. For the heart is an organ of fire. "
Director: Anthony Minghella Adapted from The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
It has been a while since I have read a truly beautiful novel -- poetry disguised as non-linear, adventure dream-fiction. It has been a while since I have watched a modern blockbuster, especially one so romantic and Oscar-popular (9, including Best Picture, mister). The English Patient certainly quenched the drought of both. The novel came to me through several adamant recommendations, and I finished it over the course of three or four sleepless nights, head propped up by pillows in an empty bathtub. For some reason this detail adds considerably to my experience with the novel--strangely comfortable, cold, and cushioned in from all sides. The experience was delicious, delirious, a culmination of all the qualities I adore in reading fiction. The novel was romantic and tinged with darkness, but strayed from details and a general tone that could warp it sappy or hackneyed. It's books/films like this that keep the cynic in me at bay, at least to the point where it can sleep nights. Similarly, the film tugged at the heartstrings and the mind. In the context of war, where every win means a loss for someone lands away or hiding next door, no character is simple, shading solely good or bad. The characters are accurate adaptations, possessing both real and fantastic qualities. As it is 92% of the time, while I preferred the book leaps and bounds over the movie, both works were truly enjoyable.
I'll spare summarizing the book's plot because it's far to lovely and intricately blanket-weaved to get anywhere in a modest paragraph without stripping it of what it's worth. Of the movie I'll say that the author's presence on set certainly maintained the idea well, but significant plot points have been both cut and added to make the film more filmy ( I suppose to relate the four main characters a bit more, in a cyclic-like manner). Aesthetically, my god. It's gorgeous. DVD Director commentary described the film in two ways, half of it being the work of a watercolorist and the other half the work of a graphic designer. This contrast was established in changes in time, between the 1944 scenes at the monastery and the earlier Almásy memories in the desert. It was recorded that editor Walter Murch made over 40 time transitions in the film. Minghella wanted to "make the past urgent" because it holds the central significance in the film, and the bright, crisp heat of the desert enhances this effect startlingly well. The Italian countryside, drifting on the other end of the color scale, honestly appears as if the violets, greens, and browns melt water-like into one another. This use of a shift in color and tone is a break from tradition, given that the usual method is to make the past more iridescent and dream-like and the present more clear and dry-crisp.
I feel like this has been a long weekend. I feel like going to sleep. School feels like giving me a lot of work. I feel like I have a precalc exam on Tuesday. I feel like I have an extensive presentation on The English Patient due Wednesday (the book aaandd movie, so keep yr peepers open for a post on that ala Rashomon in the near future). My feelings told me that The English Patient was pretty good, book better than the movie but thats the way most of the time.
I feel tired, and a bit like somebody's shot me in the arm.
Exhibit A:
Le Samouraï, Jean-Pierre Melville
I feel like my mind is going.
Exhibit B:
2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick
I feel like a vegetarian in Ukraine.
Exhibit C:
Everything Is Illuminated, Liev Schreiber
I feel like once I get my act together this place will be thrivin' again.
I'm not actually really going to write about this. I can't. Not now at least. Now at 2 am or so which hasn't been "too late" for me in a good long while. I have this nasty habit of getting into these periods where I watch a lot of war movies, read a lot of war books, poems, etc. I stick to 20th century, mostly. The rise of killing devices. It seems so much more tragic, so much more outrageous when 1,000 lives are taken with the push of a button, rather than with 4 days of grueling combat. Old War to me is too textbook, too wrapped up in the ideals and emotions we want to remember. There's heroes and pride, dignity and betrayal. All those Edmund Dante-style intangible words and archetypes..does that make sense?
20th century war is about descent, it seems to me most times. Dehumanization. Dirt. I mean, that sentence can stand without the "20th century" of course, but not at this moment to me.
Cameo Appearance
by Charles Simic
I had a small, nonspeaking part
In a bloody epic. I was one of the
Bombed and fleeing humanity.
In the distance our great leader
Crowed like a rooster from a balcony,
Or was it a great actor
Impersonating our great leader?
That’s me there, I said to the kiddies.
I’m squeezed between the man
With two bandaged hands raised
And the old woman with her mouth open
As if she were showing us a tooth
That hurts badly. The hundred times
I rewound the tape, not once
Could they catch sight of me
In that huge gray crowd,
That was like any other gray crowd.
Trot off to bed, I said finally.
I know I was there. One take
Is all they had time for.
We ran, and the planes grazed our hair,
And then they were no more
As we stood dazed in the burning city,
But, of course, they didn’t film that.
"I am become death" look it up
Not many people have really seen the Slaughterhouse-Five adaptation. I liked it. Might've been my default love for Billy Pilgrim (seemed well-cast to me). The Dresden parts are really...well good, but not good obviously. Though it's been a while since I've seen that one.
Stalingrad? There's another.
Though these past few days I've just been flipping through everything Tim O'Brien there is on my shelves and looking up scenes from Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now.
The latter we are studying in my lit/film class alongside Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"
A bit from that: “It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—the suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend. And why not?”
In terms of the adaptation, Congo to Nam it is pretty cool to see. The general mood is what matters I think, in both. And that's most definitely what carries.
Really what initially made me want to put anything up here at all was the first bit of the movie. I swear its on repeat. My head is filled with The Doors.
Wasn't surprised in the slightest to see that details for Apocalypse were inspired by Aguirre, the Wrath of God. I did the Herzog/Kinski dive last summer, and this one was definitely my favorite. Here's the last scene because it's killer and you should watch it regardless if you're worried about a spoiled end or not. The theme of all this is definitely shitshow so inevitably:
Grass
by Carl Sandburg
PILE the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo,
Shovel them under and let me work--
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
The tramp fights the gears and switches, assembly lines and general mechanization of the modern world. Rich with the expected Chaplin humor, this powerful social and political commentary was one of the films that convinced HUAC of Chaplin's supposed "communist" involvement, leading Chaplin to move to Switzerland, vowing to never again return to America.
General Themes: Streamlining of society to the point where life is stripped of quality and value, the terrible rise of machinery over man, labor undercurrents in America, the mechanization of man, dehumanization in general
My favorite scene-- Chaplin has landed a job singing at a restaurant but oh: he has forgotten the words. This scene is actually the first ever in which the tramp speaks, and Chaplin wanted him to say something "universal" so the song he actually sings is a giberish mix-up of Italian and French, understandable only in the silly-slightest because of Chaplin's motions:
A PLEA FOR THE ART OF THE MOTION PICTURE / We do not fear censorship, for we have no wish to offend with improprieties or obscenities, but we do demand, as a right, the liberty to show the dark side of wrong, that we may illuminate the bright side of virtue - the same liberty that is conceded to the art of the written word - the art to which we owe the Bible and the works of Shakespeare.
"I'm not just an entertainer. I'm an influence, a wielder of opinion, a force... a force!"
Director: Elia Kazan
I can hardly call these reviews if we're going to consider by definition that to mean feedback with a healthy mix of praise and aversion. Everything I've watched thus far is gold.
In my lit/film class we were talking about how Jean Shepherd's short Red Ryder Nails the Hammond Kid” (what "A Christmas Story" was adapted from) presents an honest portrait of American times (in that case, of the later years of the Great Depression, told with quite the somber charm). So the same is the case for "A Face in the Crowd", done with the same dualistic quality of being both entertaining, lighthearted, and charming but also sad and disquieting in the overall tone it contains.
For starters, Lonesome Rhodes gets his start on the radio, participating as "a face in the crowd" which plays off finding interest in ordinary people. As a devoted follower of "This American Life" on NPR it was all I could do to keep from swapping Marcia's face for Ira Glass's and Lonesome's for some Tom Waits-infused David Sedaris or Sarah Vowell.
Marcia Jeffries: You put your whole self into that laugh, don't you? Lonesome Rhodes: Marcia, I put my whole self into everything I do.
More Animal, More Hungry Ghost (After Rashomon and A Face in the Crowd)
The Bandit Tajomaru and Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes jump from the greatest Kyoto Hotel.
the airplanes go fast faster than you would expect the air tastes of dirt
"It looked like they were rising in reverse," one witness said.
he's lost all patience for chord and sword sales and where is Marcia
"Rising and rising."
she answered the door the whole place was a shitshow but she let me in
"Laughing the whole way."
tell me of her legs you said the light made them snow some elegant bull
The Bandit Tajomaru and Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes take the elevator to the fortieth floor.
think the smell of pine that is what I saw of them just a lighted glimpse
The Bandit Tajomaru and Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes have a drink, grappa and whiskey, respectively.
I can't remember if she even noticed me she was on a horse
They share the whiskey.
They share the women.
They chase both.
Marcia was gone then and there I was with her name back in Arkansas
"It was like making love to something borrowed, something with a wig," said an anonymous woman of Rhodes.
and what were you then I could make do without her so what about you
Little is known of the Bandit.
I'm not a crime man couldn't take the big time game monsoon mobster shit
The Bandit Tajomaru and Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes work a two-man show about giving and receiving. Their hook is the atom bomb.
I should have lost thumbs or given up this dry life who knows what I did
The Bandit Tajomaru and Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes meet in the greatest Little Rock hotel. They have a drink and talk about the people they have been.
"The crowd laughs with you always... but it will cry with you for only a day."
Director: King Vidor
They certainly don't make movies like this anymore.
imdb fact: King Vidor shot nine different endings before settling on the one used in the finished film, because MGM did not like to release films without a positive ending.
"We all want to forget something, so we tell stories. It's easier that way." Thus a single line of dialogue encompasses the mighty column that supports In a Grove by Ryunosuke Akutagawa and Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film adaptation, Rashômon. Clearly related although altered slightly to suit the varying mediums, the story and film each present an intricate whodunit scenario far before its time, crafted with meticulous elegance and understated mystery. I was initially drawn to In a Grove because of its structure. It is a story built from seven different perspectives on the same twisted event, and that appealed to me, drawing my thoughts back to discussions of cubism before reading Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Add that to a guilty love for crime drama and the thrill of jury-style debate and there was no question to what I would choose from the anthology. Treating In a Grove like a typical story makes analysis rather peculiar. Each testimony recalls an incident, brief and personal, that exists for each witness standing alone in his or her memory. That incident is of a mysterious crime that occurred unplanned in a secluded grove of bamboo and cedars. The greater story, the one that the reader contemplates as the book is closed, is the collective testimonies and the underlying essential questions of truth and the shady condition of human nature. In a Grove presents for questioning the significance of honor and reputation, pitting words against words for the objective and unsuspecting reader to consider. The revelation of what really happened would be earth-shattering, confirming terrible qualities in one or more of the characters involved, so at least some of the witnesses choose to tell and live the lie -- for honor, for reputation, to protect themselves, or perhaps to protect others. The seven testimonies in the story of a woodcutter, a priest, a policeman, an old woman, a bandit, a wife, and a spirit are on a rape and murder involving the just mentioned bandit, woman, and spirit of the murdered man. The bandit, Tajomaru's, testimony seems most powerful to me, especially because it is one of the four carried on to the film. He certainly faces the most pressure from the court. From the text (and in the film from his words and disheveled appearance) it is suggested that he was tortured or at least threatened with torture. This undoubtedly is what pushes him to tell a "good story". “No torture can make me confess what I don't know," he says. "Now things have come to such a head, I won't keep anything from you." Perhaps the violence worked too well, and the words Tajomaru feeds the court have been stretched beyond the truth. The story that follows lives up to his apparent notoriety as a bandit. Another motivation to bear false witness would be to uphold his infamy, to go down in history if he were to be found guilty and executed. This provides justification for the information he chooses to reveal, possibly explaining the vagaries in his story. How could he have tied up a sword-bearing samurai? How did he so easily become equal to the samurai in the eyes of the woman? The warrior's story is similarly strange. First of all, how far can we trust the medium? Forced to assume her connection is real and her words are those of the slain warrior, what of them? They contradict like all the others. Perhaps the warrior lied in the embarrassment of so easily being lured and slain by Tajomaru and of breaking the Bushido code. Why does he ultimately praise the bandit and degrade his wife? And where does the wife's testimony come from? Exploring her words, explanations for dishonesty range from shame and dishonor, blocking of the memory, and further covering of an unhappy marriage and an attempted suicide. Beyond these three core characters, the other testimonies are equally believable and yet contradictory, but were cut from the film (although some of the characters were not). In the story, the inflections and tone of voice in the delivery are impossible to detect beyond the pace and diction of the writing. These are details that usually make testimonies and inquisitions much more effective in determining guilty and innocent. In order to maintain the same sort of ambiguity, Kurosawa needed to be very particular in manipulating the words for his adaptation. Set as flashbacks in an exchange between a commoner, the priest, and the woodcutter, the testimonies in court are from Tajomaru, the wife, and the warrior's spirit and they are perfect. Symmetrical in frame, each person sits before the voiceless court, speaking and responding to the unseen group while the focus is kept solely on them. Tajomaru does have a guard bound to his side though and shots of both wife and medium have a figure sitting in the far right background, as if to distract the eye only slightly, interfering with or weakening the strength of the focus they are receiving. Outside of the court, all the exchanges at the gate are heard with the distracting ambient sound of pouring rain. My favorite part of Rashômon and what really is most notable in terms of cinematography is the lighting. Kurosawa's use of natural light, enhanced by mirrors and the trees themselves in the forest scenes, establishes each shot under the rawest circumstances, reflecting how human nature is both open and light-hearted, but also spotted with heavy tones of obscurity and evil. Natural light exposes but also readily hides. Because of this, all the cut-away scenes portraying each testimony are definitely most memorable. Intricate and creepy, the shifting, inconsistent light is ominous and makes the viewer rather uncomfortable. In these scenes, the camera manages to capture bandit, warrior, and wife all as most powerful and most vulnerable. Some shots are close-up detail shots of their emotion-filled faces caught in conflict while others pull back so that the light riddles their frames with layers upon layers of distraction. In terms of editing, the clean and patient cuts from still and dramatic court to figures talking with a heavy rain backdrop go quite smoothly. The contrast of just that is striking. A technical and creative success, Rashômon successfully captures the motives of crime and the qualities of man that encourage lies and deceit. There are the pressures of honor and reputation--the obedient wife, the fearless warrior, the cunning and infamous bandit. Akirugawa ends his story completely hanging, with no real conclusions or directions in terms of resolving the crime. While Kurosawa keeps this open ending, he adds a glimmer of hope in the condition of man when the Commoner, however half-heartedly, takes in an abandoned child as one of his own. Having read the story first I found this addition to the plot in the film's final minutes slightly distracting. It just seemed out of place. I think this is just because of how familiar I was with the text at that point though. I can understand it as a choice in direction. That little moment of compassion leaves a hope for mankind, appealing to audiences by showing a fine quality of man muddled in with all the lesser qualities presented beforehand. Rashômon is an excellent adaptation of an excellent, albeit troubling short story and left behind the quiet air of sad satisfaction that comes when presented with life’s unanswerable questions.
Because the short story is written from an objective perspective in the form of various testimonies, I was curious how the transition to film might be done. Below is the opening scene, establishing well how Kurosawa made a time, place, and story out of the conflict and dialogue presented in Akutagawa's words.
Mozart, sunflowers, a matching quartet of mother, father, daughter and son. The vibrant colors of costume and setting in a synthesis almost too dulcet to the eye. Possessing the sort of clean, blithe attitude you'd find on expensive stationary or Toile fabric, the film opens in scenes of pastoral picnics and quiet small-city days, following the family life of a young carpenter named François. With honest labor and an overall honest life (watch out, François), he is blessed with a simple, continuous happiness, marked by close family, adorable and obedient children, and all the domestic pleasures a man could be given from his very beautiful wife.
With luck expanding exponentially, François soon meets another woman of equal beauty and begins an affair with her with a boyish exuberance that finds love, joy, and perfect satisfaction in the relationship almost immediately. What's more, this woman, Émilie, is alright with his wife and children and his relationship with his wife only gets better. Here's where the spoonful of sugar gets hard to swallow though. Honest and drunk with happiness, François reveals the affair to his wife, using a silly metaphor about adding another blossoming apple tree to the orchard in order to explain his thought that “Happiness works by addition.” She seems to accept her husband's infidelity calmly and with an open-mind, until a scene later when the floral print of her sun dress is soaked and mingling with the grass where her drowned body was pulled from the nearby lake. Autumn approaches and François grieves, but soon returns to Émilie who is quickly accepted as wife and mother in matching sweaters, carrying flowers and walking in the afternoon sun with her family.
The film is all-around beautiful and sweet to the eyes from the opening shot of approaching family to the mirrored end as they depart. With organized shots and color fades, its not only nice to watch but easy to watch. I know it's a bit obvious, but I kept thinking Wes Anderson in all the strange quick establishing shots, bright colors, and symmetry that Varda chose to use.
Le Bonheur is a tryst into the meaning of happiness, honesty, family, and love. It focuses on the fragility of happiness, how it might be as fleeting as the summer months--rich and slow when they are there, but sour and cold in their departure. François and his wife live happy, nice lives but everything seems very routine and dry, almost too lovely to stand. Summer needs to end. Even still though, the autumn is still beautiful, just in a different way, and summer is faithful in its return.
grin and bear it, welcome to happiness:
It was great, but I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it yet. Perhaps I consider myself a little too cynical to be head-over-heels charmed by the color and beauty and love-making of French stunners in the 1960s. Psh. No. It was great, it was beautiful
“Doctors, lawters never past 16,000 rupees… he’s at 10 million. What can a slumdog possibly know?”
