The Big Parade (1925)

USA
directed by: King Vidor
written by: Laurence Stallings, Harry Behn, Joseph Farnham
starring: John Gilbert, Renée Adorée, Karl Dane, Tom O'Brien
comment: 27th August. 2017

-"Am I dead yet?"

The Big Parade offers a typical hollywood fairy tale "friendship, love, war" in such a pure and given the circumstances non-over-emotional extract that it's impossible to hold grudge against it. The distribution of events through the time line corresponds more with reading a novel than today's understanding of film stucture, but that's the case with many of the original blockbusters.

The machinery of war is depicted rather monumentally. The double exposures of the troops and explosions make the still alive marching soldiers already look like ghost who have no business with the world of the living and who will stop only after they reach the afterworld. The most heartwarming character for me was Karl Dane's Slim. I shed a reall tear or two reading the actor's actuall biography.

My favourite silent films tell different stories differently, but I will not go as far as my younger self to directly condemn this "other" mainstream point of view.

Moonlight (2016)

USA
written and directed by: Barry Jenkins
starring: Alex R. Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, Trevante Rhodes, Naomie Harris
seen: 20th August, 2017

I was so happy during the few opening minutes, believing that what's to follow truly is the best film of the year. A big man comes to check on his subordinate. They exchange some seemingly friendly words. A complex context and ironclad chain of command can be sensed behind those words. A man covered in sores and scabs begs for some dope and is both pitifuly pathetic and junkie-like apathetic. A little boy crosses their path, followed by silent bullies who throw stones at him. The boy hides in a derelict house, he's alone, he's in the dark, he can only hear the outside world. Two strong hands pry the boarded window open. The big man came to pull the boy out into the open and into the light.

The dynamics of this sequence is so captivating and alluring it almost hurts. And it also hurts because almost nothing that comes later in the film is nearly as good and definitely nothing tops it in its impact on me. It got me ready to see a strong story and instead I got the usual struggles of films with a passive protagonist (and devolved between three actors on top of that). Naomie Harris represents the only true constant and she gets so litte time and is so isolated from hero's life she has no space to properly cast her magic.

And my personal problem is that when I more or less adjust to the slow build-up to painful points of acts one and two and accept it as a norm, act three comes along and is build completely differently. I don't understand it so much that it doesn't influence my experience of the film in any way. I should go and watch Happy Together again.

Downfall (2004)

Der Untergang
Germany/Italy/Austria
directed by: Oliver Hirschbiegel
written by: Bernd Eichinger + Joachim Fest (book), Traudl Junge (book), Melissa Müller (book)
starring: Bruno Ganz, Alexandra Maria Lara, Corinna Harfouch, Ulrich Matthes, Christian Berkel,
comment: 13th August, 2017

"All there is to know about Adolf Eichmann:

Eyes: medium
Hair: medium
Weight: medium
Height: medium
Distinguishing features: none
Number of fingers: ten
Number of toes: ten
Intelligence: medium

 What did you expect?
 Talons?
 Oversize incisors?
 Green saliva?
 Madness?"

-Leonard Cohen, Flowers for Hitler

La La Land (2016)

USA
written and directed by: Damien Chazelle
starring: Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, John Legend
seen: 11th August, 2017

My oh my, when was the last time I thought Ryan Gosling might be the most talented leader of his acting generation? It was some good ten years ago and since then he's been picking the most puzzling projects to appear in. His expression completely lost the spectrum and depth of emotion I fell in love with in small art films like "The Believer" or unambicious blockbusters like "Murder by numbers".

Emma Stone, on the other hand, reminded my of a particular sequence from "Mulholland drive". Lynch also presents a struggling actress practising for an audition as his heroine. The viewer sees her in her kitchen with a script in her hand, overacting and overemoting in hopes of being convincing enough. Then she goes to meet the casting director and delivers such a concentrated, mature and intimate performance that everyone's jaws just drop and she gets the role immediately. In my eyes, Emma Stone stays overacting in the kitchen throught the whole La La Land. Maybe it's because she has to sing during most of her emotion-related plot points instead of acting in them. If the director wanted those two proceses to happen simultaneously, maybe he should have hired a performer comfortable with singing as much as with acting because Stone looks like someone who's been training just to imitate singing.

And I also thought that the lovers didn't really click together with ther acting approaches. Stone is being sarcastic and self-doubting while Gosling stays dead serious the whole time. Their shared scenes, even those where they're supposed to be in love with each other, seem to me like nervous conversations between two people who hardly know each other and won't talk about something real or deep out of fear of embarasing themselves. I miss some chemistry and intimacy between them, because elaborate dance numbers shot from afar cannot substitute closeness as a proof of love. And I don't understand the epilogue at all. It seems to show that neither of them grown emotionaly during the five years and that her marriage and motherhood means nothing to her since she would trade it in a second for a fantasy she herself proclaimed unfeasible.

One of the classic musical-related questions is "but normally people don't burst into song and dance, do they?" and this is the film where I'd say the question is relevant. Perhaps if it was a unique way of communication between the two I'd be satisfied, but the film opens with a musical number by a bunch of strangers unrelated to themselves or the story so it only indicates we are about to witness an exercise in futility. Exposition and details moving the story forward are usually revealed in dialogue (and that's my least favourite way of doing so) and all of the other formal whatnot is far from being functional in at least some way. And I am confused as to why are the songs of sadness and displeasure almost the same as the song of joy and exultation.

If I wanted a real actualization of a classical Hollywood musical, I would watch "Dancer in the dark" again. It uses nostalgic admiration with a modern perspective and formal experimenting to come up with something new and radical and the song and dance represent an actual communication amongst the characters (whereas in LLL it's a time filler without another purpose).

If I wanted a film set in a film studio lot that is an educated homage to "the golden age of cinema" actually acknowledging that time has passed betwen the golden age and the world of today, I'd watch the Coen brothers mastepiece "Hail, Caesar!" a hundred times more.

La La Land, as I see it, might work for audiences that ask for nothing else but simple entertainment (and have no genre-specific musical preferences), but it doesn't work for someone acquainted with history of cinema and familiar with a few classic films and a few revisons of said classics as well. Praise it with awards and call it a milestone is misleading at best.

-"How are you gonna be a revolutionary if you're such a traditionalist?"

Braveheart (1995)

USA
directed by: Mel Gibson
written by: Randall Wallace
starring: Mel Gibson, Angus Macfadyen, Brendan Gleeson, David O'Hara, Tommy Flanagan
seen 6th August, 2017

Through the whole screening I kept wondering: Do I think this is a good or a bad film? And I didn't find a definitive answer except that it's a bland one. I am thinking about it now, but by tomorrow or the day after tomorrow it will be gone from my mind and all will be well again.

Braveheart is insufferably long and goes into some spectacularly stupid soap opera details. Gibson said in one of his interviews that they had to make someone a good guy and someone a bad guy, to romanticize it a bit for the camera to handle the matter. And I am stating right here that camera can handle anything, if they only had the courage to not romanticize it. I am glad that they included a scene where we see people making a legend out of Wallace by manipulating the story with each telling. It would be even more swell if they could somehow voice the fact that they (the film-makers) are doing the same thing.

The film also seems to suffer by putting Mel Gibson (who was always too fanatical looking for my taste and seems too old for the way the character has been written) in the spotlight and keeping everybody else in shadows, with a few lines of dialogue and no screen presence of their own. That makes me sad because I find Brendan Gleeson, Tommy Flanagan and David O'Hara much more likeable and would like to see more of them. And there is nobody on the other side of the barricade to carry the film with his charisma. The actor portraying Edward. I seems too weak and fragile to be believably throwing people out of windows and imposing threat into hearts of men in general. The only one showing any potential is Angus Macfadyen, because he was born for crying and moral dilemmas, but thanks to the films overpopulation with so many characters he really has no proper space to shine.

Braveheart might have carried some kind of value in the time of its release, but I was four years old then and therefore can't evaluate it. Today the film seems worthless and rightfully placed amongst the worst to ever be awarded an Oscar.

Whiplash (2014)

USA
written and directed by: Damien Chazelle
starring: Miles Teller, J.K. Simmons
seen: 4th August, 2017

It starts as a story about details, but it turns out it's being told by someone with a short attention span. Or I don't know how to pay the kind of attention this film requires. A big minus on my part probably is that I don't have a musical ear and I can find pleasure even in out of tune music as somebody once explained to me. Just this already means that a lot of the film's content goes past me. And maybe all of the film's content and its meaning goes right past me. Or I feel like it's a film about sticklers that wasn't made by a stickler and that makes me, a stickler, somewhat confused. Or maybe it's a film obout sticklers made by a stickler completely sticking with screenwriter's and film-maker's guidelines and that makes me, a non-stickler, miss a moment of real surprise and the courage to not engage with trivialities and show only the stuff relevant to the chosen theme. But it's the directors first big film so it's possible to have hopes that he learns to avoid cliches like anything with a girlfriend that an ambicious and callous bastard can be ambicious and callous towards or footballer cousins that mock him during a family dinner where nobody understands him and apparently nobody likes music.

An actor, who's obviously not nineteen, plays a nineteen year old kid. How am I supposed to believe those naive tears during an apology call to the girlfriend when they're being shed by a man obviously closer to being thirty that twenty? Sometimes the actuall age of an actor doesn't matter but this is the time when I believe it's quite important. And despite my nearly undying love for J.K. Simmons I have a big problem with his performance. Either the role of the teacher is just badly written (and it probably is, those wtf switches between talking sweet with a little girl in the sunset and twating in a cold room with blue overtones two seconds later are put together so clumsily I can't even laugh about it - and a sense of humour is something this film misses quite essentialy). Or it's just badly cast and acted (Which is probably also true, because J.K. has the same expression in his eyes in both modes and his voice and body language reminds me of someone following instructions rather than someone giving a performance worthy of praise and prizes. I was confused during my first showing of the film, because sometimes it felt like a too much of a parody to be taken seriously and I wasn't sure what was I supposed to feel according to the author. When I played some of the practise scenes and the final confrontations without sound I couldn't tell what was emotionally going on. He looks the same when intimidating his student and being swept away with the music. To me, that's not a sign of a good performance nor a good supervisor.)

In my ideal world, given that owning a time machine is a thing, this movie would be directed by Steve McQueen during his "Hunger" days. That was also a debut. His movie would consist of like six informational story scenes and the rest would be made of FLESH. That would be a movie I could respect.