The Big Sleep (1946)

*Howard Hawks *114m *Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall *

Movies generally had stories and a rounded ending those days and keeping you glued was the litmus test. This is a tasteful thriller with a liberal punctuation of murders and infusion of sizzling romance. The plot has too many twists and turns and I basically followed it as a roller coaster of pungent dialogues, every line a punch line with a double entendre. American crooks, gangsters and cops never smile and the humor is dead-pan repartee. Guns seem as much needed an accessory as cell phones today, and gunning down a guy an unpleasant but unavoidable routine. With those quaint cars and blackmail demands in grands of dollars, the well dressed goons with hats worn at rakish angles are lovable and nostalgic. The shadowy, misty, trasluscent camera work is black and white to which noire is aptly suited.

Bogart, who I know only from Casablanca, is able to fill the movie with his trademark persona and mannerism. His walk is ponderous and deliberate like a rhinocerous, as he loosely dangles his arms from side to side, the hat aslant. Unhandsome, short, he is the quintessential ordinary guy, everyman's idol, rough carved and hiding a heart that is chivalrous, as decent as is practicable for a sensible man of this world, a boozer on and off the screen. He must have been the guarantor of a movie's box office success.

Among the mysteries you are left dangling with is the meaning of the movie's title.

Through the Olive Trees

*Kiarostami*1994*103m*Iran*Zire darakhtan zeyton

Another gossamer web of a film from the Persian director. It is the third and last of the Koker trilogy, films about the hamlet of Koker in the mountains of  Iran, situated in the region struck by a great earthquake in 1992. The first, Where is the Friend's Home? (an unforgettable and simple story of the friendship of two school-children of Koker) and the second, Life and Nothing More (a film director visits Koker immediately after the calamity to contact the two buys whose friendship was the subject of the first film), have also been reviewed here. The earthquake (zalzala in Persian) is now at the time of the present third film two years in the past but we can see it's footprint in the ruined dwellings and the  simple, god fearing hill folk who with philosophical diligence re-assemble the shards of their lives.

A film crew is here in the village to make a movie and the movie is about the rather slow snail-pace process of  movie making . There is the efficient and somewhat authoritarian burqa clad assistant director Mrs. Shiva. The society doesn't come out looking puritanical or restrictive. The genders interact in a very natural and uninhibited way within the culture and ways of a country with a common unquestioningly accepted system of faith. Far from distorting it serves as  an invisible binding thread of culture and humanitarian values.

In the film in the making, Hossein and the beautiful Tahereh got married the day after the quake, spending their honeymoon in a dwelling improvised from a large piece of plastic, and now, a week later, have managed to collect some pots and pans and occupied what is left of a devastated dwelling. In real life Hossein is a relentless suitor of the lovely damsel. But he is illiterate, a lowly mason, and doesn't have a house. Neither the girl's grand-mother nor the girl will have him. The girl will not even look at him, or utter a word, or even give a sign as to her intentions, for all his importunity. Neither is he the one to give up and he keeps on like a true romeo, as he literally follows her over hill and dale. Truly an unusual courtship and love story.

And the film within the film goes on amidst the re-construction activity and the life processes of these survivors of a great natural calamity which in a stroke decimated the families and wiped out their means for survival. Kiarostami belongs to a minuscule breed of humanistic film-makers at one with their soil  who speak an easily understood language of the heart. He has been faulted for being slow and for lack of depth and complexity. As a contrast, Charlie Kaufman's movies have complexity with out depth, making them needlessly cerebral. I certainly don't find Kiarostami boring. His direction lends tension and drama  to the most ordinary objects and incidents of life and one is left inwardly smiling. This is a movie about a recent tragedy of monumental scale yet the tone is overwhelmingly joyful and affirmative. A great Oriental film.

To quote a Greek reviewer meleftheirou-1: "My heart responded, the hairs on the back of my neck responded, my being responded. No matter if my brain wasn't fully au fait with what came before. Superb doesn't begin to cover it. How he captured these (non)performances from his actors is beyond me: perhaps, unfamiliar with the conventions of film-making, they were uniquely equipped to sidestep them."

It's a simple and beautiful film about a less known, misunderstood and beautiful country. Some suggest that Kiarostami operates under constraints of censorship, and must project a rosy picture. In any case, the authenticity and creativity which characterize his films can be as little curbed as manufactured.

Above all, it is a film about that life which goes on, on and on.

Postscript: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Seeing the formidable reputation and the overwhelming positive critical reaction (not to mention friends' opinion), I was induced to re-view the movie, particularly since I had admittedly failed to make much less than 100% sense of it the first time. At least I had definitely got the feeling that it was not quite my cup of tea.

It's reputation is either as a light comic romance or as a look at the workings of the mind using the pseudo-scientific ploy of induced selective amnesia. The sadness of losing one's memories is poignantly portrayed because loss of memories is a kind of death, whether one's own or other people's. The slow fading of good and bad incidents as synapses snap and neurons implode as good Dr. Murray presses the erase buttons, is a series of sad miniature deaths and it is mournfully captured. (Sorrow is perhaps Kaufmann's favourite emotion, going by the yet to come Synecdoche.) Ebert has aptly compared memory erasure to the tragedy that is Alzheimer's disease. (It is an interesting question whether complete erasure of the past is possible even in Alzheimer's or even in death. Theologies emphatically maintain otherwise.) The ending is indeed a ray, if not eternity, of sunshine. The couple have learnt from their suffering, accepting each other for what they are. They transcend superficialities of compatibility, travelling beyond crutches of  plastic surgery, cerbral or otherwise. They have discovered  human bonding at a deeper stratum. Perhaps love is after all an inner resolve to love. In that sense I would prefer, given a choice, to interpret the film, as a satire on over dependance on technology, rather than as a neurological masterpiece. The film concludes by people back on the saddle, where they need to be, and rightfully belong. And this conclusion is delicately wrought. (Maybe reading too much between the lines.)

It looks as though I have talked myself into liking the film, but there isn't a third time, because it's not my brand of caffeine (or is it now), though it places Synecdoche, a deeper film, which I have seen twice and written about once, squarely on the focus of my periscope sights.

And come to think of it, it's quite touching to see kids, even grown-up ones, moving away from the sad emptiness of their lives. Literary Dreamer Greg Salvatore is right about the triumphant note on which it concludes.

A vignette of worldly wisdom from Ebert: "The secret of communicating with another person, I suspect, may be in communicating with who he thinks he is. Do that, and you can kid a great man and treat an insignificant one with deep respect. They'll credit you with insight."
James Christopher's review

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

*Michel Gondry (director) *Charlie Kaufmann (writer) *108m *2004 *


This is a film built around the idea of "targeted memory erasure", the eradication of some specific things in our life we would like to completely forget about. Joel (Jim Carrey), the hero, is undergoing this procedure to forget all about his affair with Clementine (Kate Winslet), who has earlier got the same thing done to herself vis-a-vis Joel. Joel is a dazed inwardly drifter and Clementine an insecure self pushing and over expressive woman, and their interaction provides comic fare of the tired and sickly kind. They are mentally fractured to start with, in little need of further injury which they seek to self-inflict through the aforesaid procedure. The staff of Lacuna Corporation, which has discovered the erasure technique, in their inept and callous handling of the "subject", provide material for a couple of sniggers, as well as the only solid ground in a film which never finds it's own feet in the precarious crumbling quicksands of the subconscious. For the better part of the film, Joel is lying on the couch, capped with a helmet with electrodes leading to a computer. The film itself probes his mind ricocheting back and forth in time, and we see a salad of his. memories, dreams and fantasies. The main characters themselves are adult size babies, self centered pleasure seekers who are conspicuously unsuccessful in finding the satisfactions they seek. They seem to be like floating weeds adrift in a murky pond. The pettiness to which life is reduced is one of the big problems of our times.

The film would probably need a second view for a more informed analysis but one wonders whether there are any meanings to be discovered. It will cater to those who love complexity for it's own sake. It is befuddling without being profound. It appeals as little to the mind as to the heart.

The caverns of the mind are dark and frightening but the film certainly does not see any lamp to illuminate this darkness. It is yet another litany of despair, lacking even in melancholy relief.

The nicest thing in the movie is the title, taken from Alexander Pope. And it's the only thing with a bit of sunshine in it.
Roger Ebert's review
NY Times review by Elvis Mitchell
Review: Todd McCarthy

Precious 2009

A message of hope for troubled times. Love, in this case by the teenage overweight Afro-American teenager from the unprivileged sections, for her two children, is a force which can generate the will to overcome adversities, in this case a childhood of physical and emotional abuse.

Hitchcock once said he had done his best to put murder where it rightfully belongs: the home. The kind of psychotic domestic inferno described in the film, where life itself may be constantly at risk, objects flying and blows suddenly raining for no reason (a home is an arsenal of lethal weapons), is a reality and the author of the novel may have based herself on such a real life experience. To have emerged from this in one piece physically and spiritually would be an extraordinary and rare victory of a human being in a stormy voyage of life.

For the rest, it is pretty much staple twice told melodrama, for all it's edifying qualities. The dilineation of characters resorts to garish primary colors, and the stereotyping of the good, bad and ugly is tiresomely familiar. The film virtually orders you to have the expected responses (or else) placing few demands on your intelligence and  imagination. It has little to add to the discourse on the human condition. One can but dutifully exclaim, "How sad! How brave!".

Gabourey Sidibe in the main role does her assignment with  restraint and dignity. Mo'Nique as the mother also gives a powerfull histrionic performance, leaving one somewhat dumbfounded by a fluency of invective or self-justification. The final encounter of mother and daughter where the mother is stripped of irrational defenses and the daughter has traveled far beyond, is a memorable one.

A sentimental run of the mill film destined for a short heyday of commercial success. It will serve a purpose by hopefully inspiring people in comparable dillemas. After all it is not fair to fault a product for that which it never claimed to be or have. And you can't fault it for being obscure or over-subtle.

It makes me salivate for the novel.