Some Like It Hot

Dir. Billy Wilder
1959
n/a


Risque. Now there's a word I like. Duly indentured to the bygone and “olden days”, it is a word that no longer contains much meaning in a society and film world driven by violence, sex, and one-upmanship. There are certainly still a handful of censorship rules in place although they are largely nominal as the MPAA attempts to ensure that (most) children and adolescents are kept out of (most) overtly graphic films, except of course those films whose physical terror is manageable but whose psychological brutality is particularly scarring. Still there was a time when a conservative attitude toward what could be shown in cinemas was not so largely undermined by the industry itself. This liberalization of cinema has resulted in an inborn viewer desire for spectacle. Where a director like Alfred Hitchcock (whose anecdotal ideal of suspense ran something like: "there's two people having breakfast and there's a bomb under the table. If it explodes, that's a surprise. But if it doesn't...") held his audience in rapt attention because of their ebullient desire for resolution of tension, it is now frequently found that tension and suspense, if not played up to an absurd degree, bore rather than stimulate. It would seem the modern film going audience would prefer the bomb to explode...over and over again. This is not to say that modern cinema is void of dramatic suspense or temperance, or that otiose and otherwise banal action based films were not made prior to 1960. This is not even to imply that the quality of film has declined overall since the Golden Age of Cinema (Citizen Kane through Vertigo). What it does suggest, however, is a change in standards. Fifty years before Katy Perry's “I Kissed A Girl” single shot up the Billboard charts, Billy Wilder made the adulterous and provocative comedy Some Like It Hot. It is likely the most exciting and hysterical film of its time and, ironically, may have paved the way for the debaucherous period in which we live.

Starting out as action thriller based in Chicago during prohibition, the film rapidly switches over from rum running mobsters to two broke musicians, Joe and Jerry (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon respectively). After witnessing a particular brutal massacre the two recognize that the only way to escape persecution by the mob is to flee Chicago. Standing in their way is their lack of transportation and funds. They quickly devise a most ingenious solution: the two will cross dress in order to join a traveling girls band on their tour of Florida. It is here they meet obtuse but gorgeous Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe) and the farce to end all farces begins. With overt themes of sexuality, infidelity, alcohol abuse, and gender roles in combination with Wilder's immaculate sense of comedic timing the film plows forth with towering wit and superb drama. One only needs to dream of the infinite permutations of potential comic scenarios and it is guaranteed that Wilder not only seizes but in many instances improves upon them.

Wilder is perhaps known best not for the enchanting pace and timing of his films but rather for the progressive topical matter with which he deals. In the span of his career he has dealt with suicide (The Apartment), alcohol addiction (The Lost Weekend), pre-meditated murder (Double Indemnity), intense disillusionment (Sunset Boulevard), incarceration (Stalag 17) as well as a host of other difficult topics, including most notably: love. His screenplays are eloquent and his actors (especially Lemmon and William Holden, who are both recurring in his films) take on his roles with miraculous ease as if his characters, so original and well designed, transcend the confines of film and find something analogous with all human beings. They touch on our personal weaknesses and dormant strengths. Some Like It Hot studies the paradox of wishing to help someone while knowing you must first and foremost help yourself. While being brilliantly funny it is also touchingly romantic, balancing the two in perfect symbiosis.

While all this is going on the film still manages to be insatiably irreverent. Some Like It Hot is wonderfully satirical of the very institutions that keep it from being dull. Wilder effectively insinuates what, by the content limitations of the time, he was essentially restricted from showing. It was these very constraints, these hazards to the insipid and innocuous, that encouraged if not enforced creativity in Wilder and other directors. These same barriers simply do not exist in the 21st century. A director can bypass artistry and inventiveness in favor of having their film receive an R or NC-17 rating. If Some Like It Hot communicates any one thing with particular clarity 50 years later it's that intelligent and inspiring comedy and drama must take place on all developmental levels.

With modern resources there is certainly a time and place for action, but without counterbalance this action becomes cessation in and of itself. This laissez-faire attitude and general acceptance by the viewing public is at the bottom of modern cinema's gross dependence on a constant visual impetus. This action driven content is never going to disappear. There will always be a market for Rambo, James Bond, John McClane, and Jack Bauer. Like pop music these action heroes and their respective films exist to progress the technical side of the medium, to enhance the grandeur and visual opulence of cinema. But that cannot be all. Without a rich and thoughtful implicity to balance the corporeal weight of style, film may fall so far left of the dial that it becomes simply something to talk over at a party. There is only the hope that the function of these stimuli-laden films will evolve from mere exploitation to critical examination of values. Objectification. Now there's a word I like.

Day of Wrath

Dir. Carl Dreyer
1943
n/a


There is something quite radical about Carl Dreyer's filmography. His most well known pictures are remembered for their grossly upsetting scenarios and visuals, as well as their severe undertones. Unlike fellow Scandinavian filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, who builds steadily towards cathartic philosophical climaxes, Dreyer works within a tension/release system, one that gives poignancy to quieter moments in which subtext takes up a prominent but subtly inferred position and lends significant terror and volume to the rawness of human suffering and the bitter contemptibility between persons and institutions, mainly the church. Religion is a reoccurring topic in Bergman's films but while he tends to deal with the motif by smashing it into his beautifully designed, forlorn and misguided characters, Dreyer takes a more theatrical angle. Dreyer sets his stage dramatically and invites skepticism but ultimately draws the viewer in so deeply to his remarkably flawed characters who breathe humanity that any element of disbelief is paralyzed. He deals with difficult Judeo Christian subject matter through a lens of radicalism, bordering sometimes on the absurd, but uses that same radical gaze to reveal the deeply convoluted discrepancies between piety and morality. His films are particularly unnerving not because they show doubt in religious figures (such as in Bergman's Winter Light or its pseudo-contemporary Doubt) but rather the lack thereof. The church is portrayed as a coldly decisive body of misanthropes whose highest priority is to decimate all forms that do not congeal with their own narrow reading of the Bible. The film Day of Wrath is a punctual critique of narrow mindedness. While commenting on the rigor mortis state of Christian dogma, the film also picks up where The Passion of Joan of Arc left off in developing themes of women's liberation from an oppressive, male dominated world and their subsequent role as independents.

Explaining Day of Wrath's plot without making it sound like a second rate horror/thriller but rather a subliminal, religious familial drama is a challenge. Taking place in a Danish village in the throes of witch-hunt paranoia in the 17th century, the film's narrative is divided into two segments. In the first an old woman, Herlof Marte, is accused of being a witch and is hunted down by village officials, a rather direct allusion to the Nazi occupation of Denmark during the 1940s. She seeks refuge in the home of Anne, a newly married young woman whose husband, Absalon, is a local pastor involved in the persecution of witchcraft. Herlof Marte knew Anne's mother while she was alive and reveals that she was a witch. Soon after this revelation Herlof Marte is captured and tortured until she confesses to practicing witchcraft. She is burned at the stake, but not before she swears death upon the responsible clergy members.

The second portion of the film is a twisted, diabolical romance. Absalon's son, Martin, returns home and quickly falls in love with Anne. Anne, whose transformation from sweet subordinate to manipulative seductress is both physical and psychological, falls passionately in love with Martin and confesses her terrible anger at having her youth stolen away by Absalon whom she does not love and even later admits to hating. While he performs the last rites for a fellow priest, Anne wishes death upon Absalon. In a scene of furious malevolence Absalon pleads forgiveness from Anne, who refuses and curses him to expiration. Terrified by her supernatural powers Martin is caught between wishing to abandon her and his irrational fear of the cabalistic occult. She dogs after him in a perverse attempt to convince him of her innocence but as the final portion of the film reveals Martin's faith in God is stronger than his trust of anything temporal or secular.

It is not altogether clear what final conclusion Dreyer was coming to in Day of Wrath. Perhaps it was that although women were gaining a foothold in modern societies around the world at the time the film was being made, they were still ultimately damned to apologize and atone for their own instinctual and righteous desires for independence. There is a rather open deriding of the “old ways” in Dreyer's films (matriarchs, abstinence, arranged marriages), but there is also a sense of shallowness in the callow confidence of his younger characters. It is as if both sides are arrogant and ignorant simultaneously. Perhaps Dreyer's ultimate objective was to reconcile the young and old, men and women, tyrant and laborer. It is possible that in his constant probing of institutional branches of society and their dated doctrines that Dreyer was not simply trying to agitate people into action but rather express some fundamental concern about the way humans treat each other. Using history and religion as his road map Dreyer successfully modeled a paradigmatic world. Of course this can only be viewed through the lens of antithesis, as Dreyer's films are quite dystopian in their own right. They advertise humanitarian goals in and through their use of negative imagery and self relexivity. Day of Wrath concludes not in favor of the protagonist or the antagonist, the subjective good or bad side, but rather in favor of humankind. It is a bold cause and one that cannot be achieved simply or by very direct means. It takes a skillful communicator of which Dreyer stands as a sterling exemplar.

Grizzly Man

Dir. Werner Herzog
2005
7.1



There is a thin line between obstinately living out adolescent and childhood fantasies far into adult life and being on the brink of mental illness. Children do not draw distinct lines between reality and fantasy. Instead they allow permeability between the two worlds causing them to coalesce to form something fantastic and surreal. With children this lifestyle of illusion is acceptable if not encouraged. There is an unspoken assumption that the child will eventually “grow up” and develop a sense of reasoning that will allow them to distinguish between their fantasies and the real world. This reasoning permits adults to make sacrifices and cope with tragedies; mentally overcoming cognizance of strife and pain. It also deepens relationships. The film Grizzly Man (dir. Werner Herzog) is a documentary on Timothy Treadwell, a young man who spent 13 summers living amongst wild grizzly bears in Katami National Park and Reserve in Alaska. It shows the tragic disintegration of Treadwell's ability to function in society and his death by the animals he has sworn to protect. While not without significant psychology of its own, the film's ultimate undoing is Herzog's insistence on the magic of Treadwell's life and work, eschewing a cause and effect line of reasoning for an abstracted interpretation that leans closer to child-like innocence than debilitating mental disorder.

Grizzly Man's 100 minutes are made up in part from distilled hours of Treadwell's stock documentary footage that he shot over his 13 summers in Alaska amongst the bears. Herzog expertly picks and chooses certain scenes of chaos and reflection to enhance his own overtly romantic narration. The serenity of the Alaskan landscape is juxtaposed with Treadwell's wildly oscillating personality. Much of the time he spends raving like an idiot about his duty as a protector or knight or spirit of the bears and their habitat. At times he becomes so caught up in his own specious delusions that the viewer watches him literally unhinge to the point of violence. Treadwell exhibits no sense of self control and his views are disorienting and often terrifying. His very presence on the reserve is in fact illegal, and his relationship with its native bear species is at the very least amoral.

Throughout the film Treadwell constantly claims to “love these animals” but his actions speak to a much larger sense of delusion. During a particularly uncomfortable series of scenes in which a terrible drought has struck the area Treadwell finds himself cursing God and attempting to intervene on behalf of the Higher Power. He builds a makeshift route for the local fish population to traverse in order to move upstream to spawn; thus providing the bears with a much needed source of nourishment. It is in this moment that Treadwell's self assumed position as philanthropist of nature reveals itself as sophism incarnate. Treadwell suffers because of the bears, not for them. He lives vicariously through them, while simultaneously deconstructing their very existence in order to make it more hospitable to his fragile psyche. Treadwell, so disenchanted by his time spent amongst the vicious human population, is incapable of viewing his actions objectively. He supersedes on behalf of experienced (but potentially Fascist) wildlife experts and nature itself, striking out more as a disinformed enthusiast than a passive protector. Like so many pitiable romantics Treadwell would rather see nothing bad happen than accept the harshness and impassive cruelty of fate as dictated by the uninterrupted course of nature.

Though a naturally flawed character it is not this fact that keeps Grizzly Man from fully succeeding as a film. Herzog, like Treadwell, is manipulating a hapless population; not of ferocious, fur covered giants of the wild but rather the comparatively tame film audience. He massages a sense of mysticism into the pores of his documentary and his objective is in many ways identical to Treadwell's. He is here to convince the viewer of his good intentions. Rather than utilize a sense of detachment that would have given a fair portrayal of Timothy Treadwell and his exploits amongst the bears, he coerces the viewer into the unmistakable realm of pity and awe. It is not wrong to have an objective, just like it is certainly not wrong to want to assist an animal population that is being threatened by both natural and unnatural antagonists. In fact most documentary's contain within their midst an unspoken (or sometimes fully declared) intention. However, Herzog himself intercedes throughout the film to guide it, just as Treadwell intercedes to “help” the bears. While listening over the sound byte of Treadwell's death Herzog, who is never so much seen on camera as he is felt, an invisible presence just beyond the lens like the man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz, becomes overwhelmed by the sound of Treadwell being mauled by the creatures he loves. To the woman he is interviewing, a former girlfriend of Treadwell's, he tells “I don't think you should ever listen to this.” Herzog, in his blind ambition to show only the altruistic traits of a man whose internal psychology was so terribly confused and damaged, has reduced a fascinating character study to a two dimensional rendering. Though the cinematography displays an aged an adept understanding of provocative and sublime visual stimuli, the narrative is all too eager to reveal an infantile grasp of the ways in which people interact with each other and with nature.

I Love You, Man

Dir. John Hamburg
2009
6.0

Before I begin I should probably account for a certain pretension which may also be simply a viewing trend, one that I find tolerable although perhaps not entirely excusable: I don't go to see too many soon-to-be-blockbuster films. I am somewhat intimidated by the modern cineplex with its blocky 50s bomb shelter aesthetic. Rather I find myself in the would be smoky dens of indie cinema. Its not that I'm indifferent to the visual depiction of subconscious desires fulfilled by the big names and recognizable faces of Hollywood, it's more that I am a young and prone to idealism. Having limited time and funds I'd prefer to shell out nine bucks for a movie that expands my understanding of humanity rather than one that makes me giggle and drool (although it's a plus if both happen). Having said that I did go see I Love You, Man mostly of my free will. As Hollywood material goes it looked promising. I love Paul Rudd and am in support of any former Freaks and Geeks character getting what's owed to them (I'm looking at you Seth Rogen). The problem is that I Love You, Man was just what I hoped it wouldn't but nonetheless assumed it would be: a formulaic comedy. Still, it is important to recognize that this formula works and is in almost every way more suitable to the appreciative tastes of a wide audience as compared to many of the films projected upon the silver screens of modern indie cinemas.



The premise of the film is textbook with a few promising but ultimately subverted footnotes. Promising young suburban yuppie Peter Klaven (Paul Rudd) is all set to marry adorably banal sweetheart Zooey (Rashida Jones) when he realizes that he doesn't have a best man for his wedding. Introduce caricature family: loving but sometimes painfully blunt mother, dry droll father, and understated gay brother. Gay brother, Robbie (Andy Sanberg), who beyond this appropriately bland title displays almost no homoerotic tendencies, sets up Peter on a series of “man dates” in an attempt to find a best man. This scenario allows for a few guffaws, but rapidly switches genre gears to reveal that Peter is having difficulty marketing himself as a Realtor. Enter casual, mostly unbelievable d00d-guru complete with basic psycho-babble on latent desires that most first year college students, having breezed through a few paraphrased readings of Freud, have at the ready: Sydney Fife (Jason Segel). Segel plays his character as if Sydney was a predestined archetype rather than a vapid bro; his laziness in acquiring a relationship with his character is not only obvious but embarrassing. Paul Rudd, known for his characters with twisted, dark humor and fierce Independence plays his role like a well dressed man whose shoes don't quite fit. Despite the fact he has acquired the rest of the outfit, it is the discomfort and on screen awkwardness that gives away his own reticence to play such a lifeless character. It is here that too many critics have confused miscasting and misplaced actor empathy with originality.

While the plot moves forward aptly given its tendencies towards the obvious and predictable, screen writer Larry Levin develops something resembling a platonic drama by way of a homoerotic comedy. While many great opportunities for developing this narrative are lost he does capitalize on the congenital irony of heterosexual brother Peter getting mixed up in so many insinuatingly homoerotic scenarios while homosexual brother Robbie struggles to find a suitable relationship while simultaneously exerting a strong hetero influence in the gym where he works as a personal trainer. However, this more subtle (I use this term very loosely) humor is overpowered by Levin's over reliance on tried and true formulas for easy laughs. For instance the reoccurring homogenization of The Office-like awkward and immediately regrettable comments made by Peter, Sydney's jejune topical humor, and Sarah Burns (as Zooey's friend Hailey) regrettable choice of wearing thin a Saturday Night Live skit that wasn't all that funny to begin with.

The film makes a few good passes at drama and few more at humor and finishes up with everything in its right place. Technically speaking the film is an excellent example of pure comedy. However, that is precisely its problem. Being aware of a genre's modus operandi is one thing; following it without embellishment is quite another. I Love You, Man encounters plenty of opportunities to utilize more sophisticated and engaging humor but instead willingly delegates itself to that ever growing collection of forgettable films that are too busy reproducing current social values and comedic/dramatic standards to recognize that they are dated almost as soon as they are released.