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Fearful Symmetry (1998)
A rambling, unfocused mess. A wasted opportunity.
This documentary about the making of To Kill A Mockingbird is -- in a word -- TERRIBLE.
It's available on the 2-Disc DVD, and you'd think that at 90 minutes in length, it'd be a pretty comprehensive account of the film's production.
But it's a rambling, unfocused doc in which half of the time is spent interviewing random people from the South who have no connection to the book nor the film.
And even though Robert Mulligan, Alan J. Pakula, Gregory Peck and some cast/crew members are interviewed, it's always in bits and pieces. No exploration whatsoever into how Harper Lee first wrote the book (of course, she wasn't one of the interviewees), and we aren't even told how Mulligan and Pakula first became aware of the book, why they wanted to make it into a movie, etc.
The documentary could have used a narrator to more carefully guide us into understanding how the movie was made. Instead, the entire doc is badly narrated by someone attempting to mimic Scout's narration from the book.
I also have a big problem with that part towards the end where a lawyer is interviewed (again, somebody with no connection to the book or film), and he chimes in on Tom Robinson's murder by blaming Tom for his own death, solely because Tom -- he argues -- was mistaken for losing hope. What this lawyer disregards is that while the film kept the circumstances behind Tom's death ambiguous (the police claim to have accidentally killed Tom with one warning shot - and Atticus, incredibly, seems to believe the police's story), the book was much blunter, with Atticus learning that Tom had been shot by the police seventeen times (a clear act of murderous racism). So, I would argue that the moral of the story is *not* that Tom was mistaken to run, but that the events escalated into something which was tragically beyond both Tom and Atticus' control.
The filmmakers who made this mess of a doc could've done well to study a Ken Burns doc, to better understand how these things are supposed to be put together.
Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1973)
Hall Bartlett's Masterpiece.
For the first time ever in his career making movies, Hall Bartlett knew exactly what he was doing. He was adapting a best-selling novella by Richard Bach about a prophetic seagull, and he was going to turn it into a major motion picture. It was going to be an independently-financed film with as little studio interference as possible. And by the end of the ten-month shooting schedule, Bartlett had mortgaged his home and invested every last one of his savings into the film's $1.5 million budget; he was willing to do anything to make his dream project a reality. "I was born to make this movie," he declared. He was absolutely right. In his entire 30- year filmmaking career, Bartlett helmed a series of flops, misfires, close calls, small gems, and at least one masterpiece: Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1973).
The film was absolutely reviled when it came out. Reviews were terrible. Then there were the lawsuits. Richard Bach sued Bartlett when Bartlett refused to honor Bach's right to final cut. Neil Diamond threatened to sue Bartlett if he didn't incorporate more of the music from the soundtrack into the film; Diamond was also upset when composer Lee Holdridge requested to share credit with Diamond over the music. Ovady Julber, the director of 1936's La Mer, sued over suspicions that Bartlett's film might have plagiarized his work. And toes were stepped on. Associate Producer Leslie Parrish had worked hard to hire the crew members and help take care of the real seagulls being used for the production (these seagulls were trained by Ray Berwick and Gary Gero, and stored in a room in a Holiday Inn), but in the end, Bartlett demoted Parrish's credit from Associate Producer to "Researcher".
In spite of the tension which occurred behind the scenes, Jonathan Livingston Seagull belongs right up there with Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) as one of the great surrealist films released in the later half of the 20th century. It is a rich, liberated celebration of a writer/director's artistic sensibilities, free of any constricting narrative rules, enhanced with the help of the cinematography by helicopter photographer Jim Freeman and veteran cinematographer Jack Couffer (the latter of whom was hired after his impressive work on Walt Disney's True Life Adventure series). That Couffer's cinematography netted the film one of two Academy Award nominations is not surprising in the least: it remains one of the finest examples of natural footage ever captured on celluloid.
Neil Diamond and Lee Holdridge's score for the film has often been dismissed as "overbearing", but I've always begged to differ. Among the other songs used on the soundtrack, "Be" represents Jonathan's independence, while "Dear Father" epitomizes his self-doubt and "Skybird", his liberation. To me, the film's soundtrack remains exhilarating, and it is also a reminder of Hall Bartlett's often- overlooked talent for juxtaposing the right kind of music with his cinematic stories.
Jonathan Livingston Seagull was not embraced by critics or audiences, but I have a feeling that Bartlett himself always knew, deep down, that he had left the public with a masterpiece. Maybe he knew that he wouldn't live to see the film get the attention it deserved. Maybe he was aware that the film's mediocre reception would outlive him. After this film, he would only go on to make two films, The Children of Sanchez and Love is Forever. Neither was particularly impressive. But I wish he were alive to know how much I love this film. I wish he knew how much it has changed the way I look at movies. And I wish he knew how much I cherish the way he ends the picture with Jonathan's immortal closing monologue: "Look with your understanding. Find out what you already know. Use it, Fletcher. Teach it
show it forth. And you'll know the way to fly."
Torture Ship (1939)
Jack London would've laughed out loud at this
The last 15 minutes are interesting, when the criminals take over the ship and become the new villains, but the rest of the film is pretty shoddy and can hardly be called a legit adaptation of "A Thousand Deaths".
The filmmakers' first mistake was changing the relationship from a father killing and resurrecting his own son to... an uncle merely performing obscure experiments on his nephew. No real tension there.
For whatever reason, the filmmakers care more about the nephew falling in love with a woman onboard than they do his complicated relationship with his uncle (something that is never really explored). Personally, I think that including female characters in this film was a mistake. The story is meant to be very Freudian and Oedpial, in the sense that a son is terrified by his domineering father; London allegedly wrote the story as a revenge fantasy about William Chaney, an astrologer who was probably his real father but forever denied it. Regrettably, no trace of that amusing autobiographical context is present in this film.
London's original story was concise and simplified: a son is frustrated from being killed and brought back to life by his father over and over again. By comparison, this film is difficult to follow because there are too many characters and way too many individual stories being crammed into the 50-minute running time.
Here and there, you can sense the screenwriters struggling to keep some of London's original dialogue in their convoluted script. "A chance one must take" = "Take the chances, since the affairs of men were full of such."
The mad scientist's deathbed scene (which is not in the original story) could have worked better in the film had it not been so glossed-over. Seems like the nephew hardly cares.
Ending was corny. We have no reason to care that the nephew fell in love.
I kind of feel sorry for the orchestra that was hired to compose the music, considering that the music isn't memorable for a second. Seems like a big waste of talent.
Of course, not every adaptation can be faithful, and sometimes even the loose adaptations still make for great films. What works against this film is that, aside from being profoundly unfaithful to London, it is also a crushing bore.
Edvard Munch (1974)
Edvard Munch (1974)
Peter Watkins' Edvard Munch is a bitter, difficult, brutally honest portrait of an artist who had a life and enjoyed liberty, but in the pursuit of happiness reaped nothing except mental and personal instability and misery. Entrapped in the middle of a Norwegian society that was traditional and unforgiving, he hung out in clubs with intellectual anarchists, experimented with contemporary art mediums, and sought sanctuary in whorehouses as a last resort for his sexual frustrations. By the age of 30, he was still without a wife, still moving like a parasite from one gallery to the next, having each time to endure the stinging criticism of those who did not appreciate his risky, pessimistic subject matter. Through it all, he was haunted by the memory of a married housewife, the provocative Mrs. Heiberg, who temporarily fulfilled his amorous longings before ultimately disposing of him after his eerie demeanor became impossible to tolerate. Edvard Munch was a brilliant artist who left behind dozens of wonderful works of art, but he had a life that does not inspire envy.
A lesser filmmaker would have thought to tell Munch's complete story in one big compaction, but Watkins wisely focuses on the earlier, more important years, when Munch was in the twilight of producing works that were potent, vague, and sometimes controversial beyond all reasoning. Supplements on the Special Edition DVD hint that Munch's later years were happier and that his work grew more optimistic, but Watkins pays no attention to them- he doesn't even mention Munch's date of death, 1944, which occurred at a time when the Nazis had almost completely overtaken Norway. To be sure, I am uncertain if Watkins' refusal to display these facts for modern audiences works for or against the movie's effect.
Munch is played by Geir Westby, in a performance that is stoic for the most of the picture; as a visual artist, Munch's purpose in life was to observe, not to orate, and so Westby's lines of dialogue are reduced to a minimum. In light of how Westby is filmed, Watkins takes a uniquely European approach, alternating between immense close-ups of Westby (a la Dreyer) and more ordinary shots in which he is filmed from the waist up (a la Bresson). It allows Munch as a character to become less static and more flexible; one minute his facial expressions are worthy of camera attention, the next minute he's a wandering clone of his society like everyone else.
Torturing Munch's fantasies and deepest regrets is the memory of the woman who may have been the soul mate who got away. Mrs. Heiberg (Gro Fraas) meets Munch through Hans Jaeger, and, for some strange reason, takes an instant liking to him- the first ninety minutes of Edvard Munch are devoted mostly to this affair. When Munch first spends time alone with her, he is noticeably nervous; he kisses the back of her neck, and then asks if that was the right thing to do. He is careful not to make any sudden advances on her. They have sex, but Watkins doesn't make their relationship feel sexy in the least, and we sense that Munch is desperately trying to release a carnal side of himself that might not even exist. It isn't long before he realizes that he is only one of many male lovers that Mrs. Heiberg has wrapped around her finger, and soon Munch is stalking her, whining about how she passes him by on the streets every day with another man at her arm. In her own docudrama interview, Mrs. Heiberg complains to the camera about how it is commonplace for extramarital affairs to be held by men, but not by women. Munch finds the break-up tough to cope with; there is a drawn-out scene in which he checks in at a whorehouse for the night but awkwardly waits for the hooker to make the first move. He and Mrs. Heiberg would never meet again, and Watkins ends his film on a movingly somber note, with Munch writing: "I felt as if there were invisible threads between us. I felt as if invisible threads from her hair still twisted themselves around me. And when she completely disappeared there, over the ocean, then I felt still how it hurt, where my heart bled... because the threads could not be broken."
It is, yes, a remarkable film. It pulses and echoes with the poetic love of the people who made it. There is brief hope at the end when we learn that although Munch's career in painting may be coming to an end, his new career in engraving is just beginning. That may be true, but how can it ever erase those painful preceding years, when he sweated and almost died over a profession that would have driven others to suicide? The performance by Westby asks us to care about a cold, unstable genius, and it is no easy task. But we do. Sometimes the most gifted geniuses in this world live sad lives. Edvard Munch lived a sad life, and Peter Watkins knows it.
A Timeless Call (2008)
Respectable Propaganda on Spielberg's Part
Grade: 3 out of 4 stars
It wouldn't be news if I told you that the term "propaganda" is more commonly used by people these days in a derogatory sense. When did people start doing this? Was it after the rise of Fascism? The Red Scare? The Watergate scandal? The Whitewater affair? The films of Michael Moore? We now live in an age where it's criminal to manipulate anybody. After all, that is the purpose of propaganda: to manipulate.
Shortly after he finished "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull", Steven Spielberg was hired to make the short film "A Timeless Call" for the 2008 Democratic National Convention. In a way, the Democratic Party was making an odd choice in hiring Spielberg, since he had originally been a supporter of the presidential campaign of Senator Hillary Clinton and not that of Senator Barack Obama, whom the video was essentially made for. But overall we are left assuming that Spielberg has jumped ship and is now rallying behind Obama's cause. "As we watch this Steven Spielberg film," announces Rep. Chet Edwards, "let us remember that in the 21st Century, we are the land of the free- because we are still the home of the brave."
This film is, yes, propaganda. But people need to stop complaining about how evil propaganda is in itself and start thinking about the good things it has done in the past. Take for example John Ford's "The Battle of Midway" or Frank Capra's "Why We Fight" series. Both of these were made with the best intentions, which were to inspire American soldiers to carry America through a monumental war. There are other times when propaganda can be admired simply for its style while disregarding the substance at the same time. Leni Riefenstahl's films were great examples of these, as was Stanley Kubrick's "The Seafarers", a sailor propaganda film that can be praised for its camera shots, if not for what the film is actually about.
Hence, "A Timeless Call" mostly succeeds on both fronts- as effective propaganda and as an experiment on the part of the filmmaker itself. The subject of the film is the War in Iraq and the toll it has taken on some of the soldiers who have served in it. One particular soldier, Baldwin Yen, remarks on how he was abruptly sent to Iraq on the eve of Valentine's Day, while others, such as Jeremy Bennett and Melissa Mills, chillingly recall the horrors that they encountered by the time they reached Iraq- a country that they initially believed would be easy to weather and liberate.
The only problem with Spielberg's film is that it tends to go off-topic. There are several relapses in which veterans from past wars are interviewed, from World War II veteran Charles A. Graves to Clinton-era veterans like J.D. Henderson, who says he thought himself obliged to serve his country, to John Ramos, a Mexican who proudly recalls his satisfaction at being treated equally among his fellow white comrades. It seems as though Spielberg merely includes them in this film to portray the Democratic Party as a party that supports the troops as much as the Republican Party does. What the film should have done instead was show why the Democrats support the troops, but also what the Democrats would want the troops to do differently.
Despite the flaws of its content, however, "A Timeless Call" is stunningly well-made. Spielberg has wielded an impressive technical team in the making of this film. John Williams is back, and with an original musical score that is powerful enough to shake the heavens. It is similar to his score from "Saving Private Ryan", but sounds darker at times, as well as more modern and relevant to contemporary issues. Whether or not Spielberg's film can persuade voters to send Obama to the White House is besides the point. Democrats are often so obsessed with calling for an end to the War in Iraq that they forget how important it is to support the troops nevertheless.
"They lay down their lives for the land, and the dream that is America", says Tom Hanks in the closing scene, "a dream that is lifted on their shoulders, and one that lives always. That no matter how different we appear from one another, we are there for one another. One nation, one people living in freedom, freedom that is won and protected by these ordinary, extraordinary Americans."