Review Roulette: Selection #9

The list:
Night of the Living Dead
Dark City
Raise the Red Lantern
Ratatouille
Children of Men
Yojimbo
Being John Malkovich
La Dolce Vita
Rear Window
Arsenic and Old Lace
Casablanca
Paths of Glory
Only Yesterday
The Conformist
Singin’ in the Rain

The random selection:

Replacing La Dolce Vita on the list:

Pacific Rim

Unlocking Millennium Actress, Satoshi Kon’s Masterpiece (Review Roulette: #8)

“After the full moon it starts to wane. But with the 14th night, there’s still tomorrow. And hope.”

This line of dialogue has resonated with me for years. When I first saw Millennium Actress, I was startled by the places it took me. As a 16 year old starting to fall in love with movies, here was an animated film like no film I had ever seen. At times it’s a frenzied chase through Japanese history, at times a slapstick comedy, and at times like the scene that gives us the quote above: sincere, contemplative, and bittersweet.

The line is spoken by a painter. He is a revolutionary, on the run from a fierce looking army officer with a scar on his eye.  He finds refuge for the night thanks to a teenage girl named Chiyoko Fujiwara. She finds him wounded, takes pity on him, and hides him in the storage shed of her family’s store. Chiyoko and the painter share one night together, one that consists entirely of quiet and earnest conversation. He tells her of the beautiful winters in his home town. He says he will take her there to repay her for her help. He leaves her a key as a thank you present. He is gone in the morning. Their one meeting serves as core from which Millennium Actress derives its boundless energy, as it takes us through Chiyoko’s life. She becomes an actress, and then a major movie star. She marries a successful filmmaker. And she never stops looking for the painter. She holds on to the key like a relic.

The film opens on a documentary filmmaker named Genya and his harried cameraman named Kyoji trekking up a very tall hill to Chiyoko’s home. She is old, her former film studio has just closed, and Genya (an unabashed fan of Chiyoko and her films) wants to get an interview with her for his documentary about the studio. They start to talk, Kyoji films, and the movie begins to unfold.

If this all sounds straightforward enough, buckle up.  Chiyoko’s stories from her life weave imperceptibly in and out of memories from her movies. Scenes repeat themselves, in different eras, sometimes clearly on film sets, sometimes clearly from Chiyoko’s life, often apparently both. Genya and Kyoji are always right there in every jump through time and reality. Genya plays along, sometimes inserting himself as a character, or weeping at how a moment that is clearly from Chiyoko’s real life made him cry thirty times. Kyoji, mercifully for the audience, is confused as he is jerked through time and reality, providing a running commentary of dismay.

Confused? Don’t be. Millennium Actress very quickly reveals itself as a film about feelings, not facts. We are following Chiyoko’s emotional quests, not a linear story of her life. Her search for the painter is not a quest in any traditional sense. It occupies her soul and affects her life time and time again.

I love when films take radical approaches to how we perceive memories. In my piece about The Tree of Life, I mentioned how we don’t recall our pasts in perfect, chronological detail. The Tree of Life presented memories of a childhood in sun-drenched fragments that aimed less to tell a story than to bathe us in feelings. Millennium Actress takes an even more audacious approach, disregarding chronology and realism almost entirely.

But Millennium Actress is not science fiction. Chiyoko is telling Genya her life story. Genya is a huge fan of Chiyoko’s movies. Together, their memories might very well combine create something that looks like this movie. That Kyoji is very much afraid for his life as he is dragged through time is another matter for another time.

Millennium Actress was the second film by animator Satoshi Kon. His first was the psychological thriller Perfect Blue. That film was a hot mess in the best possible way, a headlong tumble into a genre rarely broached by animators. In Perfect Blue, a pop star turned actress deals with a violent stalker who is angry that she has abandoned her music career. The film, like Millennium Actress, deliberately blurred the lines between showbusiness and reality. But while Perfect Blue used this device as a thriller would, to disorient the audience and draw us into the world of a character growing detached from reality, Millennium Actress is more versatile. One montage of Chiyoko’s film career at first simply seems to be an exercise in style (a beautiful one at that) until it suddenly segues into something far more serious.

The movie continually informs its narrative during its forays into Chiyoko’s memories. And when Kon makes it clear that a scene is depicting an actual event in Chiyoko’s life, those moments are all the more potent as a result. Consider a wordless scene where Chiyoko finds a gift that the painter left for her in the rubble of her post-war home. Or a scene late in the film when Genya confronts the scar-eyed general to learn more about the painter. The general pops up throughout the film like a specter of Chiyoko’s fears, but he is all too real a person, now broken by a lifetime of cruelty. These scenes are simple but overwhelming in their power. Millennium Actress builds to moments of heartbreak by showing us the contents of Chiyoko’s heart, rather than a point by point rundown of her history. We may not know the precise chronology of her life, but we are fluent in who she is.

Millennium Actress envelops you and then flies. It is a roller-coaster ride through memories and feelings, and it knows that those two things are inextricably linked in ways that movies all too often forget. Its is heartbreaking and uplifting, often at the same time, in ways that only a movie about an entire life can be. Chiyoko looks back through her life, one with seemingly far more regret than triumph. She dedicated so much of it to a chase that seemed destined to be fruitless. And all she can do is smile. It was the chase, she says, that she really loved.

Movie Review Roulette: Selection #8

First, the list:

Night of the Living Dead
Dark City
Raise the Red Lantern
Ratatouille
Children of Men
Yojimbo
Being John Malkovich
Millennium Actress
La Dolce Vita
Rear Window
Arsenic and Old Lace
Casablanca
Paths of Glory
Only Yesterday
The Conformist

The random selection:

I’m genuinely excited about this one. Millennium Actress is a top-five favorite film for me, and I haven’t seen it in a while.

Replacing Millennium Actress in the pool:

Singin’ in the Rain

Jupiter and Venus and The Tree of Life (Movie Roulette #7)

I have always been been kind of obsessed with stars. At night we can see thousands of celestial objects, larger than our world and more distant than I can comprehend. It took Voyager 1 thirty-six years just to exit our solar system. The next closest star after the sun is 4 light years away. It would take Voyager 1 another 40,000 years to reach that distance. All of us share our existence within a system of staggering size and scope.

The human story is, as far as we know, unique in our universe. The story of the universe began roughly 13.8 billion years ago, and from that moment immeasurable narratives burst. Our ability to learn those narratives beyond Earth is contained by the limits of our technology. But even then, slivers slip through space and time and find their way here. When I heard in May that scientists had detected what they believed to be an echo from the Big Bang, I was moved to tears. Another story had found its way to the only audience we know exists. It had taken almost 14 billion years and the rise of humanity and technology to a level capable of detecting it, but the story had made it.

We tend to look at the human story and the story of the universe as separate. One is ours, and one is… out there. But that is a matter of perspective. If you could look through the cosmos, through time, through the history of the universe, why wouldn’t you turn your attentions to a single family on Earth? Is their story not just as worthy of our attentions as any other story to be found in the universe? Echoes of the Big Bang are just one snapshot of the history of existence. And in The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick looks at a family through that lens. They are happening alongside the rest of the universe, and gently, slowly, we realize that that is a sort of miracle in itself.

Despite his reputation for “tone poetry” and whispered philosophizing, I think of Terrence Malick as one of our least ponderous directors. He doesn’t sit around looking for meaning and symbolism in minutiae. He’s not forcing us to listen to his pontifications. He simply observes what his characters do. All of his films have a detached quality, a sense that things are only moving as fast as the characters are willing to. Filmmakers rarely exercise this sort of patience. He lets his characters’ stories unfold at their own speed, and he makes sure it looks damn pretty. His Badlands, in which a film a teenage couple who go on a killing spree, makes no attempt to to provide an explanation for its characters’ actions. It simply shows them. Days of Heaven takes a similar approach to a plot that could just as easily have been made into a soapy Texas epic, a la Giant. Instead murder and romance take a backseat to a movie that views a storm of locusts as its climactic centerpiece. Why? Well, why not? To an impartial observer, the locusts would probably have more effect on your life than the melodrama going on around you.

The Tree of Life  opens on a scene of grief, as a woman  and her husband learn that their son has died. We don’t learn how or why. The movie is not concerned with that. It witnesses their grief, like a bystander suddenly made aware that they are not alone by a cry of anguish. The following scenes are potentially confusing. Shots of the universe, of stars and nebulae and planets. Dinosaurs appear for a brief, strange interlude, only to be wiped out by an asteroid. We see shots of the microuniverse that surrounds us as well, cells and bacteria and blood flowing through veins. Yes, this might seem like the artiest of artsy asides by Malick. They confused me the first time I saw the film, even as I was awestruck by their beauty. When I saw the film again recently, I realized that awe was the point.

Consider how Malick treats the scale of all things. Nebulae, the massive interstellar clouds that give birth to stars, resemble cloaked figures here, almost humanoid. Planets are shown against stars, pinpricks in their appearance. Cells dividing and consuming one another appear like prehistoric sea creatures, seemingly huge and imposing. The scenes with dinosaurs are shot against the rivers and trees that seem recognizable later in the film. The sequence has a binding effect, tying all of history to the main story. A moment of personal grief resonates against the history of time. Whole histories of the world have come and gone several times over. Humanity is barely a blip on the scale of the universe. Think of Carl Sagan talking about the “Pale Blue Dot” photograph. There are so many stories to be told just on our planet, a planet that is so tiny compared to what surrounds it. Of all those stories, Malick has latched onto this one, this moment of human sadness. And he takes us back, back to the beginning, where we can learn where the sadness comes from.

The second act of The Tree of Life is a seemingly free-form depiction of the childhood of a boy named Jack O’Brien, the oldest son of the grieving parents. The parents in the first scene are Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien, played by Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain. Young Jack’s story is inter-cut with moments from the adult Jack’s life as he grapples with own grief from his brother R.L.’s death, and from his broken relationship with his father. The movie is not really so formless. It’s only as fluid as actual memories. So many films show adult narrators describing their childhoods with perfect, plot-point by plot-point detail. That’s not how memories work. When telling stories we inevitably fill in gaps. Good writers fill gaps with humor, with prose, with other anecdotes. But Malick isn’t concerned with filling those gaps. The Tree of Life shows us memories as we actually remember them. We don’t remember a perfectly plotted childhood. We remember specific times we were scared, when we laughed, when mass wouldn’t seem to end and staring at how the light came through the stained glass window was a surprisingly good way to pass the time.

My most vivid memory of childhood is this one time I walked out of a grocery store with my mom and into the sunlight, and then back into the shade of another building. The sunlight felt so good that I ran back into it and basked for a few more seconds, my eyes closed and my arms outstretched. I don’t remember what else I did that day, or even exactly how old I was. But that feeling of that sunbeam against my skin in that moment has never left me. If I was writing a novel, I might use that moment of truth to color my fiction. If I was writing a memoir, I might ask my mom for some more detail, to see if she remembers it the same way, or at all. The Tree of Life isn’t concerned with making a plot out of those moments. It cares more about how sunlight feels on your face.

We don’t get a traditional plot out of these moments, but we get a vivid picture of a childhood, of a boy grappling with a strict, at times terrifying father. Mr. And Mrs. O’Brien are less fully formed characters than towering figures in Jack’s life. That’s accurate. To a child, parents can seem life the Old Testament God, all powerful and occasionally confounding and even frightening.

Chastain delivers the films opening words via voiceover: “The nuns taught us there were two ways through life – the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you’ll follow. Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it. And love is smiling through all things.”

It’s tempting to see this quote as a thesis. Whoever wrote the film’s Wikipedia page uses the quote to quite literally categorize Mr. O’Brien as “nature” and Mrs. O’Brien as “grace”. While this interpretation of the quote is a bit too obvious and literal for my taste, it is not entirely off-base. Mrs. O’Brien loves unconditionally and shows it. Mr. O’Brien loves his kids too, but expressing it always plays second fiddle to establishing his authority. He reacts to even slight defiance from his sons with absolute rage. The film seems to make a point that a man as square-jawed and intimidating as Brad Pitt needn’t be so desperate to assert dominance over kids a third his size. Mrs. O’Brien is shown at first as an angelic figure, the advocate for her children, a saint in Jack’s eyes (one memory shows her literally dancing in the air, floating as she does). But she cedes to her husband’s authority, leading to a moment where Jack, full of fire and venom, rages at her that she never stands up to their dad when it counts. She is hurt. The scene ends. The emotion has been registered, and it’s time for the observer that is Terrence Malick’s camera to turn its eye to something else.

The movie isn’t trying to paint a depressing picture. There’s nothing here that suggests that the O’Briens live a particularly unusual or sad life. We do see Jack learning the wrong things from his father’s harsh lessons, taking out his confusions on his younger brother. We see a moment where he hurts his brother and immediately regrets it. He snaps out of his growing pains and back into reality. These are the types of moments that we remember in our own lives, from our childhoods. The times we wish hadn’t happened, that we would give anything to do differently, even years later. Mr. O’Brien says as much at the beginning of the film, as he mournfully regrets all the times he was needlessly harsh to his now dead son. Later on, we see a moment where an adult Jack calls Mr. O’Brien to apologize for an argument they had as adults, unseen in the movie. The movie isn’t trying to pinpoint the moment their relationship broke, or provide a cathartic moment of regret in the relationship between Jack and R.L. It’s a movie that hears a cry of grief at the beginning and traces the history of the source. It then settles in and starts to learn about these people. It takes a fleeting moment and humanizes everyone involved by showing them as they were, how they came to be. We don’t need every aspect of Jack’s relationship with his parents to be spelled out in melodramatic sequences to spoonfeed us their meaning. So much is said in a brief exchange when Jack tells his father “I’m more like you than her”.

The Tree of Life is particularly lovely, even by Terrence Malick’s standards. The spacescapes and microcosmos of the opening give way to scenes in small town Texas that are achingly beautiful without seeming to try. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki is one of the great film artists of our time. You probably last saw his work on Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity, which won him his first Oscar. If the Oscars knew a damn thing, Lubezki would have won an Oscar for this film too, as well his nominations for The New World, Children of Men and A Little Princess. His skill lies not in painting everything lushly, but in tailoring his work to the story at hand. In The New World, the story required smothering greens of the uncut 17th century American forests, of the senses being completely overwhelmed. In Children of Men, he filled the screen with sinister grays and always managed to find something interesting or menacing to linger on the edge of the frame. In The Tree of Life, Lubezki crafts memories in the little ways we remember details. The way light comes through a window, just a bit brighter than in reality, in child-eye view closeups that mimic how children study their surroundings, and in the dry earthinesss that seems embedded in every home in the neighborhood. “Hypnotic” is rarely the most exciting way to describe a film, but The Tree of Life induces a reverie in me. Its beauty is not just cosmetic, it is embedded in the movie’s soul, constantly reminding us what it feels like to remember something from years long ago.

 

The ending of The Tree of Life is one of Malick’s most audacious sequences, a vision of the afterlife, heaven, the end of time, whatever you wish to call it and perhaps all those things. Jack’s memories meld in one another as the dying sun consumes Earth, and he sees his mother as she was as he remembered her from his childhood, before he knew how to be cynical about her. He hears her finally, at long lost, accept his brother’s death, relinquishing her grief. Emotions are some of the most minute realities. They are deeply personal. But here Malick gives grief, love, acceptance, and forgiveness the scale they deserve. When we die, the emotions we evoke in those left behind are what remains of us. It’s why so many cultures place such significance on funerals. Funerals aren’t for the dead, but for the living. It’s how we begin the process of remembering the dead. What will happen when there is no one left to remember? The end of The Tree of Life seems to be Malick’s answer to that question. As the earth burns at the end of The Tree of Life, bits and pieces of everything still remain, unaltered from our memories, to finally provide closure for the scenes of pain that open the movie. This is a movie that quietly, gently, takes us across the entire span of existence before finding its final notes of love and acceptance at the end of time. In that sense it is Malick’s most human film, his meditation on the scale of individual existence. It’s easy to be cynical about the significance of any given person, of humanity itself, against the sheer size of the universe. But The Tree of Life considers the life of a boy in Texas to be as significant as any fleeting moment in a universe full of them. Its ending is the closest thing it has to a statement of its purpose. Despite criticism to the contrary, this is not a pretentious or pseudo-intellectual film. It is a spiritual one.

One last anecdote, and I’ll let you go. Recently I looked out my window in the wee hours of the morning. I noticed that Venus and Jupiter were incredibly close together, and for a moment I marveled at the novelty of it. And then I realized something: I wasn’t looking at two dots against the sky. I was on Earth, looking at Venus and then Jupiter behind it. The sky took on three dimensions, and I suddenly felt dwarfed by how small I was compared to what I was looking at. The scale astonished me.  Here I was, one person staying up far, far too late, looking through our solar system, through hundreds of millions of miles of space, for the first time realizing with my naked eye how vast it actually was. The Tree of Life is like that. It isn’t simply gawking at the beauty of the stars and then dipping back to earth to tell the story of a family. It is in awe that they inhabit the same universe. It is about a family, yes, but the stage is all of space and time.

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Movie Review Roulette: selection #7

Here’s the pool of candidates:

Night of the Living Dead
Dark City
Raise the Red Lantern
Ratatouille
Children of Men
Yojimbo
Being John Malkovich
Millennium Actress
La Dolce Vita
Rear Window
Arsenic and Old Lace
Casablanca
Paths of Glory
The Tree of Life
Only Yesterday

Into the random choice machine they go… and we have a winner!

One of the definitive “love it or hate it” films. My stance is firmly in the former category. I’m going to do my best to convince you that this is not a boring movie. Can’t wait!

Oh, and replacing The Tree of Life in the pool is… The Conformist.

 

 

 

Movie Review Roulette #6: Jaws

Almost three months past due, here’s Jaws.

39 years later and it’s still arguably the greatest summer movie.

I don’t mean “summer blockbuster”, per se (although there’s an argument for that too). I mean the movie I most indelibly associate with the season of summer.

The most wintry of movies for me, for example, is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It’s far from the most snow-covered film, but its moodiness, and its willingness to bask in both the gray misery and gentle beauty of winter make it my favorite film to watch in the January cold.

Autumn for me means Halloween, and the ultimate Halloween movie is, well, Halloween. It’s not my favorite horror film, (it ranks behind The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Suspiria, and 28 Days Later in my personal list) but it is the movie that brings to life the twinge of fear that comes with the chill in the October air.

Spring for me is liveliness and cheer. I will watch The Princess Bride any time of year, but it is best paired with the first warm evenings of April, when the snow has melted and you just want spend some time with a cheerful old friend.

And so it is with Jaws and the summer. Part of it might be regional bias. The film is set in the fictional town of Amity Island, clearly a stand-in for Martha’s Vineyard, where it was filmed. It is the most New England of summer movies. The locales will still feel familiar to anyone from coastal Massachusetts, where kinship to the ocean has never faded from the region’s seafaring days of yore. You can almost smell the salty air in this movie, the rusty musk of boats in harbor, or feel the ever present sand that tracks near any building close enough to the water.

And then there’s Quint. I hail from New Bedford, Massachusetts, the saltiest of New England sailing towns, and let me tell you dear reader, the only problem with Quint is that there is only one of him. I suppose that in a tourist haven like Amity Island, there might be more shark-crazy posers than actual fishers of very big fish. But Robert Shaw’s assuredness, the way you can tell that he knows more about the sea than he does his mother by his gait alone, is one of the crucial details this movie gets right.

I have spoken of Jaws so far as if it is a documentary about life in a coastal Massachusetts town, when you no doubt came here to read a take on a movie about a huge shark eating lots and lots of people. Trust me, I will get there. My dawdling on salt and sand is for a reason: salt and sand and crusty sailors are what separate Jaws from traditional monster fare. A lesser director could have taken this story, followed it beat for beat, and ended up with a forgettable b-movie.

It is well known that the mechanical shark constructed for the movie was a nightmare, so prone to malfunction that director Steven Spielberg made sure the audience saw as little of it as possible. While John Williams’ immortal score has rightly been celebrated for its function as a stand-in for the shark for much of the film, equally important is how Spielberg established a town where this story can to be told, and characters who live there. A monster movie can work just fine with without thinking about its setting as a place needing to be saved, or its characters as people with lives and motivations. But Jaws is a classic not just because of the shark, but because we actually care about the people chasing it.

Consider Roy Scheider’s performance as Brody, Amity Island’s police chief. Scheider had one of my favorite faces in acting, so easily shifting from quiet weariness to steeled anger, the weight of his burdens always just behind his eyes. He is not just a functional protagonist, serving his purpose in providing us someone to follow so the movie can move from point A to point B. He is a man who hates the water who gradually realizes that he has no choice but to face his fears to keep his town safe. It’s a subtle hero’s journey, conveyed as much through Scheider’s performance as the script.

Consider Richard Dreyfuss as Hooper. Again, this is a functional character in a typical monster movie: the scientist, there to spout exposition and geek out when he sees the shark in person. The film gives him just a bit more depth than that, at it makes all the difference. Hooper is a rebellious kid from a rich family, devoting his life to studying sharks much to the shame of his parents. Dreyfuss’s performance is winning and energetic where so many actors portraying similar characters wilt and die on screen as their purpose is served.

Jaws is an uncommonly quotable thriller. Scheider’s immortal delivery of “you’re gonna need a bigger boat” is a killer line of dialogue. But it also provides a terrific moment of contrast between two characters, as Brody’s sudden terror upon seeing the shark contrasts with  Quint’s unaffected gaze.

And the USS Indianapolis scene, with its hypnotic monologue by Robert Shaw, is an exercise in patience in a genre that so often has none. It’s a masterfully filmed, written, and acted scene, generating tension without a single shot of the water, and elevating Quint from an archetype to a haunted, tragic character.

And yes, that score by John Williams is one of the most important in movie history. Spielberg knew that what we imagine can be far more frightening than what we see. John Williams filled that gap with the simplest but most haunting of scores. Its effect reminds me of John Carpenter’s theme for Halloween, both cases of musical minimalism hinting at terrors in the deep recesses of our imaginations.

Jaws was far from the first blockbuster to succeed by scaring audiences out of their wits. But it’s rare that it does so in broad daylight, in the heat of the summer, out on the water. There’s something primordially frightening about the ocean, something inherently eerie about small coastal towns that try just a bit too hard to be perfect. HP Lovecraft knew this. Spielberg’s take on this very New England brand of scares is less cosmic than Lovecraft’s but the source of the fright is the same, exemplified in the movie’s nightmarish, nighttime opening (where a skinny dipping young woman becomes the shark’s first victim) : there’s something lurking in the water. Have fun swimming.

Movie review roulette: Selection #6

Here’s the current pool:

Night of the Living Dead

Dark City

Raise the Red Lantern

Ratatouille

Children of Men

Yojimbo

Being John Malkovich

Millennium Actress

La Dolce Vita

Rear Window

Jaws

Arsenic and Old Lace

Casablanca

Paths of Glory

The Tree of Life

The random selection machine selects:

Replacing Jaws in the pool: Only Yesterday.

I will honestly try to post these every two weeks at least.

See you then!

Movie Review Roulette #5: The Princess Bride, in 5 quotes

Sorry for taking so long with this (especially you, Nicole). The Princess Bride is one of the most quotable of films. Its wonderful dialogue needs to take the center stage of any look back at it. So I give you my review of one of my favorite films, inspired by its own words.

Is this a kissing book? You bet your bedridden ass, kid. This is a kissing movie based on a kissing book and by god, there will be kissing. And the romance is one of the reasons this movie holds up so well. For all its tomfoolery and silliness, The Princess Bride never gives in to the temptation to be a full-blown farce. This could have worked as a Mel Brooks-style celebration of vulgarity or even a Shrek-style sendup of the fantasy genre. But underneath the humor, The Princess Bride never views its story as a joke, least of all the love story.

The romance between Westley and Buttercup is delivered with the starry-eyed earnestness of Robin Hood courting Maid Marion. It would be easy to dismiss as maudlin, but instead it’s a confection, a welcome dose of sweetness that reminds us that the movie has enough self-awareness to both tease its material and embrace it with open arms.

I love when movies are unpredictable and challenging. But predictability needn’t be a pejorative. At times, we simply want and need to be entertained, and great entertainments are an art form unto their own. Sometimes, we just need a movie to give us what we want. When I see films that bore me to tears with mindless sequences of movement passing for action, thrusting characters on screen and expecting me to care about them without once giving me a reason to, I think of The Princess Bride.

Here is a movie that gives us, not just what we want, but what we didn’t expect to want and yet quickly grow to love. It’s like a surprise birthday party planned by a friend who knows you better than anyone else. Of course we expect sword fights, revenge,  and stormed castles. But what we really love are this take on those things. This story could have been told any number of ways while attempting to cater to the masses and featuring none of this movie’s charm. The story wants to please. The characters and the dialogue, however, aren’t content to stop there. They want to be remembered.

The best comedy is well aware about how much life can suck. Some days you’re just going out on a voyage to make some quick dough and boom, the most feared pirate in the world captures you. Great comedy often ventures into dark places just to find the light again, because comedy is rooted in truth, the truth isn’t always good, and good always feels that much better when been through worked hard times to get it.

“The Princess Bride” embraces its more mature material, which often playfully dances just off the edge of good taste. There is some PG-level violence, but far more memorable are Westley’s threats of violence towards Humperdinck are so beautifully gruesome that “to the pain” conjures the exact same imagine in everyone’s mind, even though we never actually see what it means. Westley is tortured until he is (mostly) dead, but the procedure itself is bloodless. Still, he screams in agony. So loud, the entire kingdom can hear him, and Inigo Montoya can identify his scream entirely from the purity of its anguish (“My heart made that sound when the Six-Fingered Man killed my father; the Man in Black makes it now”). It’s that kind of movie. It digs up some dark material for its story and then mines every last bit for potential jokes.

I dislike the word “witty” as it is typically used to describe films. It’s usually used to describe speed of dialogue more than humor. Wit is far more than that; it’s the speed of critical thought and the execution of a perfect verbal delivery of that thought. The battle of wits scene is both a beautiful parody of this concept, and in being that, a demonstration of wit as well. Vezzini is nowhere near as intelligent as he makes himself out to be, something both Inigo and Westley figure out rather quickly.

And yet what he lacks in critical thinking skills, he makes up for in his ability to overstate those skills hilariously. Westley playing along, clearly three steps ahead of his adversary? Another beautiful example of the script’s wit and Cary Elwe’s wonderfully deadpan performance. It would have been funny for this scene to be a genuine battle of wits. For it to take a farcical approach was braver, and funnier, and significantly more memorable. More than that, it shows what fun the movie is having scene after scene. Nothing in this scene is dictated by the requirements of the plot. There’s an almost episodic quality to the film that adds greatly to its sense of fun. It’s like (director) Rob Reiner sized up every scene on its own terms and thought “what kind of fun can we have with this?”

If The Princess Bride was all parody, it would not be as beloved as it is. One of the reasons I love it so much is that it is a rare film that captures that sense of losing myself in my imagination as a child. Films rarely achieve that sensation. Hayao Miyazaki does it effortlessly. Guillermo Del Toro as well. Films like Hellboy, Pacific Rim, and the fantasy sequences of Pan’s Labyrinth pulse with childlike exuberance at the limitless possibilities for fun in the worlds they inhabit.

The Princess Bride is aware of the tropes of its genre, but it resists openly mocking it. Its humor is derived more from its characters being odd types for this sort of earnest old-fashioned material than from outright satire. The only character from old Hollywood central casting is Buttercup. Everyone else is their own brand of strange. But when the story calls for it, the film lovingly embraces its roots in old Hollywood classics like The Adventures of Robin Hood. Yes, Westley will stop Buttercup from killing herself by lamenting the potential damage to her breasts. But when time comes for kissing and swordfights, he can turn full Errol Flynn without missing a beat. And when castles need to be stormed, it’s going to be fun. It’s going to be the most fun you’ve ever had.

This is perhaps The Princess Bride’s most enduring and beloved line, and really, it sort of exemplifies everything this movie does so well. On its own, it’s a platitude of revenge. Depending on the situation, it can be funny, or moving, or thrilling. The movie is all of these things and then some. It’s usually dangerous for a movie to try to be most things at once, lest they end up playing themselves into a death waltz.

But The Princess Bride manages it with nary a moment of tonal dissonance. Why? Because of characters like Inigo. As I said before, the humor in the movie isn’t Shrek-style parody. Its plot is straight out of an old Hollywood fantasy. Its characters come from almost everywhere else, and are well-defined, their motives clear and personalities vivid. And none perhaps are quite as defined and vivid as Inigo, a man who has devoted his life to one purpose, who through the course of the movie stumbles multiple times on his way to achieving it, before finally emerging victorious.

The Princess Bride is a sandbox, and every corner of it was sculpted into something delightful. Yes, the main plot is in the center, but in the far corners, you spot an impressive clergyman here, a cowardly gatekeeper there. There’s room in this sandbox for all sorts of stories, and swordfights, and kissing. Hey, want to include a subplot about a Spaniard seeking revenge for his dead father? Let’s put that in there, but don’t just throw it in. Sculpt it. Craft it. Make it just right. Every little detail has got to shine. There’s no room for throwaway dialgoue and pointless scenes in this movie. Every moment, from the first glance to the last kiss, needs to be remembered.

It’s easy to chalk up the enduring appeal of The Princess Bride to nostalgia. But nostalgia cuts out the bad memories and leaves us only with the good. We latch on to that good to return to another time and place we want to remember well. But we return to The Princess Bride for another reason altogether.

There’s a special feeling that comes when something is just just right. A perfectly prepared meal, maybe, or when the balance of the temperature perfect matches the weight and warmth of your blankets (my personal fave). That is The Princess Bride.

“My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die”.

Just right.

Movie Review Roulette #4: Au Revoir Les Enfants

“I will remember every second of that January morning until I die.”

The last shot of Au Revoir Les Enfants is a closeup of the face of its lead character, Julien Quentin, a boy of about 11 attending a Catholic boarding school in Nazi-occupied Paris in 1944.

But the voice delivering those lines is that of Louis Malle, the film’s director.

War films are rarely this personal.

Scratch that. A lot of war films, about both combat and civilian life, are personal. Personal is a wide-spanning word, really. From a literal perspective, Platoon drew largely from Oliver Stone’s experiences as a soldier in the Vietnam War.

On a more interpretive front, it’s no surprise to anyone upon seeing Apocalypse Now that it nearly broke Francis Ford Coppola while he directed it.

No, films about life during war are rarely this vivid a snapshot of life during war, away from the battlefield. Au Revoir Les Enfants is film as autobiography. Louis Malles directed, wrote, and produced it. He recounts one winter of his childhood. It opens with notes of chilly remembrance and ends with sad whispers of long-held regret.

This not not a nostalgic film. Some films about World War II are. Hope and Glory comes to mind. They attempt to find room for warmth and celebrations of the human spirit in the context of something that is objectively horrific. Whether or not they succeed is a topic for another post.

Many other films that look at civilian life during war are about its horrors. Grave of the Fireflies and Come and See are the two best examples. Theirs are stories of suffering and the senseless death that war inflicts upon non-combatants.

But Malle, for the most part, seemed to live a comparatively privileged life during the war, and he knows it. Malle seems to have no sepia-toned glasses about his childhood, not when he was attending school in the middle of a war. He is establishing a time, a place, and people. Compared to many in Europe, Julien is safe. The war seems distant to him. He is free to get into squabbles with his classmates, to trade jams for valuable stamps on the fly, to surreptitiously read books by flashlight at night. He can live a relatively normal life. And he is free to get to know the new kid in his school, a quiet, kindly boy named Jean Bonnet.

It is obvious to us that Bonnet is Jewish, and that the priests at the school are hiding him, along with two other boys. This is not mined for melodrama. The film’s storytelling consists simply scenes from a child’s life. Every day, in class, in church, in those spare moments when he can read his books and observe his surroundings, Julien gleans information. He slowly pieces together than Jean is Jewish. He realizes this as a fact. On one hand, it’s heartening that this realization changes nothing for Julien. On the other, he doesn’t seem to grasp why it’s so crucial that Jean keep his religion secret. When Julien tells Jean what he has discovered, Jean fights him. Every day for Jean is a matter of survival. Julien doesn’t grasp this.

For Julien, his classmate’s religion is not much more than a fact. He can’t grasp the anti-Semitic sentiments of some of this classmates. Prejudice is learned, after all, never innate.

But he does not immediately become friends with Jean, either. Julien plays the part of a schoolyard tough, with a mean streak that is amusingly forced, but an accurate depiction of how some kids climb to the top of the schoolyard food chain. Their relationship is icy at first. Julien sees Jean as an annoying new kid, and Jean keeps his head down, avoiding conflict and spending time with his own friends. Julien and Jean become friends the way friends often do. They slowly find some common interests, mainly books and playing piano. They begin to spend time together. They get to know each other innately, without trying. Some friendships are almost immediate. Others are grown into.

I often praise films for getting the rhythms of life just right. Au Revoir Les Enfants at times feels like a documentary of life in a school in 1944. We infer the drama involving Jean’s religion, because we know the stakes. Julien doesn’t comprehend them. And that’s what makes the film’s ending so heartbreaking.

The ending begins on a familiar note, with the students in class getting an update on the war effort. Then a German soldier enters the classroom, followed by a Gestapo officer. The rhythm is broken.

Au Revoir Les Enfants is reminiscent of the Catholic sacrament of Confession. Catholics making a confession are expected to desire repentance, and to make a full examination of their conscience before confessing their sins. Most of Au Revoir Les Enfants plays out like that examination, a series of scenes that lack much plot connectivity but together construct a narrative. It’s a narrative full of silly, childish sins (stealing from the pantry, fighting with other students), similar to the type that Julien confesses to a priest in a scene early in the film (“I fought with my sister over break, and that is all” he says to a gently skeptical Père Jean, the priest who runs the school).

When making a confession, part of the deal is that you make an honest effort to change your ways after the fact. And there was nothing Malle could do to change what happened that January morning. All he could do was tell the story.

Movie review roulette: Selection #4

All right! Time to pick a new film to write about!

First off, here’s the pool:

Raise the Red Lantern

Ratatouille

The Princess Bride

Children of Men

Yojimbo

Being John Malkovich

Millennium Actress

La Dolce Vita

Rear Window

Jaws

Arsenic and Old Lace

Casablanca

Au Revoir Les Enfants

The Tree of Life

Dark City (new)

And here’s the random selection (to be reviewed next week):

Replacing Au Revoir Les Enfant in the pool: Paths of Glory