The Spirit of the Beehive

Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive is an interesting movie, but not one that fully connected with me. It's about two young sisters, Ana (Ana Torrent) and Isabel (Isabel Telleria), and their parents, in the post civil war Spanish countryside, somewhere around 1940. The whole town goes to see a traveling exhibition of the classic Frankenstein with Boris Karloff. The younger Ana is unable to sleep much that night, but it's more because she's curious about this creature than she is frightened. She also takes as gospel her sister insisting that Frankenstein doesn't really kill the little girl by the river, everything in movies is fake, and that was just a body Frankenstein took for a bit, he's actually a spirit that you can talk to if you close your eyes and say "It's me, Ana."

It's an interesting look into sibling relationships, as even though there's not but a couple of years between the sisters, Ana looks to Isabel as though she knows all the answers. It doesn't help that Isabel is a mischievous, slightly malicious, young girl. Ana is innocent and open to the spiritual possibilities of seeing and feeling spirits. She wants to talk to Frankenstein, with no hesitation or trepidation. Young Ana Torrent's dark brown eyes lend her a certain earnestness and seriousness that makes her feel like the more mature, deeper, person, even as she's taken in by her sister's flights of fancy.

It's a gorgeous movie to look at, full of open countryside, sun bathed fields, honey colored interiors, and beautifully shot contrasts of light and shadow. But I also felt a certain distance from everything, which may or may not have been intentional. The family is never shown together, even when they're all around the dinner table, each is only shown in single shots, visually showing us their isolation from one another. And there's a distracted, passionless, almost hypnotized quality to the performances. I can't imagine the distance I felt was unintentional, but I didn't like it. The movie has a dream like quality I enjoyed up to a point, but ultimately I felt like I was chasing smoke, I could never get my hands around anything.

But the movie is often called the greatest Spanish movie ever made, so I'm sure I'll give it another go some day.

Yi Yi

Taiwan's Edward Yang was one of the most respected filmmakers of world cinema, and most often cited as his masterpiece is his 2000 drama Yi Yi (sometimes translated as A One and a Two). A nearly 3 hour human epic focusing on the Jian family living in Taipei. It starts with a wedding, and a visibly pregnant bride, and ends with a funeral, in between containing everything life could contain: joy, pain, anger, regret, love, and the constant search for the whole truth of it all. It's a truly great movie.

We mostly follow NJ (Nien-Jen Wu), the father of the family, as he struggles with money, disagreements with his partners in the failing business he runs, and a chance meeting with his first love, 30 years after he'd run away from her, making him contemplate his choices and direction in life. We also see Ting-Ting (Kelly Lee), NJ's teenaged daughter, struggle through the mess of being a teenager. Making friends, hanging out, discovering boys (and boys discovering her), her relationship with her elders, and more. We see a bit of the mom in the family, Min-Min (Elaine Jin), but mostly the other person we follow is Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang), the 8-year-old son as he navigates being a kid, a curious, sensitive kid. Writer/director Yang manages all of this and more with an author's sense of detail and character building. Like John Sayles's Lone Star or Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, this is one of the few movies I'd describe as novelic. It is so richly made, and with such care. I've rarely felt closer or more curious about the fates and futures of movie characters than this family.

Yang was a member of the Taiwanese New Wave, alongside one of my favorite filmmakers Hou Hsiao-Hsien. He even cast Hou in his third movie, Taipei Story, in 1985. Nien-Jen Wu, the father NJ, is a celebrated writer/director himself (his 1994 movie A Borrowed Life was named by Martin Scorsese as the 3rd best movie of the 90's), and worked as an actor and writer for both Hou and Yang throughout his career. And he's tremendous in the lead role here, playing a thoroughly good man who contemplates his life while trying to be a good dad, and a good and ethical business man. The kids, neither of whom had ever acted before or much since, are both tremendous. Especially little Jonathan Chang as the son searching for truth in the world. It's a beautiful trio of performances in a beautiful movie.

Sadly, Yi Yi was Yang's last movie, as he contracted colon cancer around the time of its release and fought it for years before finally succumbing in 2007. Though his movies tended to be long, his other most famous movie A Brighter Summer Day is 4 hours long, this movie is so filled with depth and attention and soul that I will definitely be checking out more from yet another towering figure in world cinema that I have found in this wonderful quest I'm on.

Stroszek

Werner Herzog is unlike any other filmmaker. His movies couldn't have been made by anyone else, so singular of an artist is he. 1977's Stroszek is one of the odder movies of his I've seen. Roger Ebert described it as "one of the oddest films ever made", but it's not THAT weird. He goes on to use the word I'd use to describe the movie, which is peculiar. It's not "quirky", it may be eccentric, but peculiar feels right. Much of that credit goes to the movie's star, Bruno S, a former mental patient with whom Herzog made 2 movies, this and 1974's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, which I haven't seen. Bruno gives an extraordinary performance of great focus and intensity, playing a man for whom the world may be a little overwhelming.

Herzog, not from the movie

We start off in Berlin, with Bruno getting out of a kind of mental institution (there's a lot of autobiography to his character), promising the warden he'll not touch a drop of alcohol again, and while carrying all of his possessions before he even gets home, stopping at a bar for a beer. Bruno isn't an alcoholic, and that's not what this movie is about. It's just kind of a funny little thing. He hooks up with prostitute Eva (Eva Mattes), who after evading her abusive pimps and along with friend and neighbor Mr. Sheitz (Clemens Sheitz) moves away from the troubled world of Berlin and to Sheitz's nephew's place in Wisconsin. The movie follows them as they come up against the expected language issues present to immigrants (though helped by Eva's English speaking ability) and also against the facts that maybe America isn't any easier of a place to live than Berlin was. "In Berlin they physically kick you down. Here, they do it to your spirit, and that's worse" Bruno says to Eva.

There are a lot of metaphors and themes and issues you could look at if you wanted to, Herzog's movies never hurt for their ability to be read into. There were the usual Herzog striking images, whether the rising buildings above Bruno as he plays his accordion in the streets, Bruno standing watching the empty lot where his mobile home used to be, or a doctor cradling a prematurely born baby as Bruno looks on with a look of intense and impenetrable depth.

Herzog has said that despite Bruno's past (being in mental asylum's from 3-26) Bruno wasn't mentally ill, and he certainly doesn't appear to be here. He seems peculiar, but not "weird". He seems particular. There was only one of this guy made, and he's infinitely fascinating to watch. There's a laser like focus to his every movement and look, he's completely magnetic to look at. I really liked this movie a lot, mostly because of Bruno and Herzog's particular brand of Herzog-ness. I feel like The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser must be added to the list of this foreign film quest because I want to see what else these two did together.

Andrei Rublev

Legendary Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky's biopic of legendary Russian icon painter Andrei Rublev is a most unusual movie. Epic, but intimate. Lengthy, but not overlong. Insightful, but enigmatic. Tarkovsky set up the movie as an 8 sectioned look at the monk's life at different stages. There are 2 versions of the movie, the original 205 minute version (which is what I watched) and the 186 minute version Tarkovsky was forced to cut down due to studio pressure, and which ultimately Tarkovsky said he preferred. But either way, Andrei Rublev is a fascinating movie that is often cited as one of the best ever made.

I won't bother with a plot synopsis, since the movie isn't exactly plot driven. But Tarkovsky explores a lot of things here through Andrei's journey. Andrei ponders the place of the artist in society a lot. What is the point of painting religious icons when there's so much violence, death, chaos, and sin around us? Andrei has that crisis of faith, even taking a years long vow of silence at one point in his life. But Tarkovsky also views things through the lens of some of the other people in Andrei's life, including the monks that are his mentors in his early years, as well as a Greek painter who served as a later mentor, and eventually a young man taking on the huge task of casting a bell for the Prince. This movie is populated with fascinating characters more than just our title protagonist.

It's also, like Tarkovsky's other work, visually wonderful. Tarkovsky just had a special way with framing, camera movement, and meditative narrative. This movie is long, there are extended periods of silence, and often episodic movies lost their steam as inevitably some episodes are more interesting than others. But not here. Because Tarkovsky gives us snapshots of these times, most of the sections are in the 20-30 minute range, none outstay their welcome, and something about the way Tarkovsky shoots it, I was always interested by what was happening on screen.

Weirdly though, I don't think it's an out and out great movie. I liked it a lot, but I didn't love it. I was interested in each section, but I wasn't fascinated. I don't find anything about it bad in any way, but it's not exceptional either. I suppose it is exceptional that Tarkovsky made a 3 1/2 hour movie that I don't think was too long, but I also don't wish it was longer. An odd reaction, but we'll see how this one grows in my mind.

The Killer

John Woo's The Killer is like the epitome of the 80's action movie while also being the father of many a 90's action movie. The story concerns Ah Jong (Chow Yun-Fat), an assassin who accidentally blinds lounge singer Jennie (Sally Yeh) during a shootout at one of his hits. He tries to help her with surgeries to get her failing sight back, and agrees to take on one last hit to pay for her surgery. He's double crossed by the people that are supposed to pay him, while also crossing paths with Detective Li Ying (Danny Lee) who's on the case of the contract killings. It's a textbook late 80's thriller, with all the ridiculous cliche that accompanies such action fare. And it's also completely awesome.

And when I say cliche, I mean the super believable kind like how the hero never has to reload his pistol because it magically has a clip capacity of a thousand. It's sometimes comical to see Chow Yun-Fat unload on a bad guy with 8 or 10 shots, only to keep going with innumerable more shots afterwards. The body count on the movie is supposedly 120, and the movie is less than 2 hours long. But there's also the 80's music, freeze frames, slow-motion, guys wielding double pistols, cheap sound effects, a screaming woman who won't just stay down and hide, quick flashbacks to things we haven't had time to forget yet. Seriously, the first flashback is like 8 minutes into the movie, flashing back to something that literally happened 3 minutes ago. It almost feels like a parody of these kinds of movies because it's done so well and has so many of the cliches in it, but that just lets you know where a lot of these came from.

Still, even with all that seemingly negative stuff (which aren't negatives here), this movie is awesome. The church finale is particularly over-the-top, bloody, unbelievable, ridiculous, amazing, and one of the high points of action cinema. And heading the whole thing is Chow Yun-Fat at his coolest. Even as cheesy 80's-ness is happening all around him, the dude is just badass and magnetic. What a wonderful ride this movie is.

Katyn

 "It's not over till it's over" is a famous saying, but a movie like Katyn shows that it's not even over at that point. During WWII, the Soviets massacred thousands of Polish citizens, both soldiers and civilians, in the Katyn forest in April and May of 1940. The estimates on how many were murdered is between 12,000 and 22,000 people. The Nazis, as the relationship with the Soviets turned south, exposed the genocide and used it as propaganda against them. When the Soviets took control of Poland after the war, however, they turned and claimed the Nazis were the culprits, committing the crimes in 1941. In post-war Poland, to even suggest that your brother died in Katyn in 1940 was considered treason, as the Soviet backed government propagated the lie covering up their actions in Katyn.

Among those murdered was Jakub Wajda, the father of 14-year-old Andrzej, who would go on to be the most important filmmaker in Polish history. Andrzej has said he knew he needed to make a movie about the Katyn massacre, but he wasn't able to tackle it until 2007, at the age of 81. What he gave us is one of the most powerful war movies I've ever seen because, although the movie takes fictionalized characters to tell the story, it sees the reality of how war spreads over people like a plague. Once the war is over, it's not really over because now we have to live with the consequences of war. And that's how we see this story, often playing out through the women: wives, mothers, sisters, daughters of those killed. Some holding out hope, some trying to move on, some just wanting the closure that truth brings. Katyn is a powerful movie that plays on us like no other WWII movies have.

The movie is gorgeously made, Wajda is obviously a master filmmaker of the highest order. But what I keep coming back to as this movie grows in my mind is the complexity of everything. Wajda has said he wasn't sure how to approach the subject, whether to make it about the massacre (his fathers story) or the aftermath and the lie continued afterwards (his mothers story), ultimately settling on both, which I think was his own story.

But he also doesn't shy away from showing the massacre itself, in fact ending the movie with it. Roger Ebert said it was "a scene of relentless horror, showing the assembly line of execution." Because these people weren't murdered in mass, but one at a time. Wajda leaves us with the senseless brutality of bodies falling and being thrown into mass graves, the sickening dull thud as they hit either the dirt or bodies already down there. It's not a numbing downer of an ending as much as it sounds. It's emotionally powerful and driven because we know that death didn't give any of these people peace, and all sides used them over and over again (the graves were dug up multiple times) as propaganda pieces. Their families weren't given any peace, they couldn't even talk openly about the truth of what happened until Poland's independence was gained in 1989.

Katyn serves as a powerful emotional experience, and a fascinating study on how the horrors of war don't go away once one side "wins". The war is over halfway through the 121 minute runtime, but I hope some peace was gained through the making of this movie. At least the truth, both factual and emotional, is able to be out there now.

Cafe Lumiere

The joy of people watching. That's what Hou Hsaio-Hsien's movies are about at their core. His movies have been called minimalist, meditative, slow, boring, and many other things. But he pretty much takes the same languid approach to all of his work, and I find him fascinating. His stories may change, but the feel is the same. You know you're going in to see a Hou Hsiao-Hsien movie and know what you're gonna get. Impeccably framed shots, whether inside homes, in the countryside, or even in the bustling city. His movies are gorgeously filmed, even when they're not extravagant.

Cafe Lumiere, Hou's first movie outside his native Taiwan, is a tribute piece in honor of the great Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, whose Tokyo Story is often cited as one of the best movies ever made. It concerns things important to Ozu, like the subtle clash between the new and old, children and parents, and also trains. There are a LOT of trains in this movie. We follow our heroine as she goes home to visit her parents, informing them that she's pregnant and steadfastly refusing to marry the father, something that would've been unheard of to anyone of her parents generation. But the story is never the star in a Hou movie, the long, slow takes and deliberate pacing are.

Which brings me back to the joy of people watching. There are those of us who enjoy becoming a momentary voyeur in big crowded areas and watching people who don't know we're watching them, for no reason other than to see what they do. I find myself performing a much more intimate version of this when watching Hou's movies. It's like we've been dropped into these peoples often unexciting lives (just like our generally unexciting lives) and we watch them live. Something about it gets me every time. Or at least every time I'm in the mood. Watching a Hou movie when you're not in the mood for slowly paced, unconventional, movies will bore you to tears before the 30 minute mark is up. But if the circumstances are right, and you're in the mood. I find few filmmakers more consistently watchable than Hou.

Alphaville

Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville is one of those movies, like Kurosawa's Rashomon, that I find more interesting to talk about than to watch. It's not boring to watch, but it's not particularly engaging either. It's fascinating to think about and talk about, but I found myself rather disengaged from it as a viewing experience. It's neat to see how Godard turned present (well, 1965 present) day Paris into a futuristic dystopian city without any special effects, but I felt a distance from the movie as a whole.

The movie isn't that much new in its basic plot, it's a dystopian "one disillusioned man, finding love, saves the world" kinda thing we've seen and read a million times. But Godard's fresh take on creating his world, and since it has no SFX it has a real lived-in, tangible quality that a lot of sci-fi misses with its sets and effects. The grounding performance from Eddie Constantine as our hero Lemmy Caution also helps this. He's kinda like Bogart, but a little older and tougher and no nonsense. It works well. Sci-fi and noir have always made a great combination, and Alphaville is no exception.

But again, the movie didn't engage me like I wanted it to. Perhaps I was just in the wrong mood for it, I'm not sure. Since I need to delve more into Godard's work, of which I'm painfully ignorant, I'm sure I'll revisit this again some day. For now, it's admirable and I didn't think it a failure, but it did leave me a bit cold.

Beauty and the Beast

"Children believe what we tell them. They have complete faith in us. They believe that a rose plucked from a garden can plunge a family into conflict. They believe that the hands of a human beast will smoke when he slays a victim, and that this will cause him shame when a young maiden takes up residence in his home. They believe a thousand other simple things. 

I ask of you a little of this childlike sympathy and, to bring us luck, let me speak four truly magic words, childhood's "Open Sesame":

Once upon a time..."

So opens Jean Cocteau's 1946 take on the classic French fairy tale, Beauty and the Beast. The earliest screen take on the tale, Cocteau's movie is magical in every sense of the word. He created a fairy tale real world, where Belle comes from. And he created a darker, slightly creepier, but also whimsically fascinating world for the Beast's castle. The basic outline of the movie will be familiar to most people thanks to the famous Disney take on it, so there's no need for plot description. I'll say that Cocteau took me to a world I wanted to see more of, and told me an engaging and delightful tale while I was there.

Although Belle (Josette Day) is probably thought of as the main character, it's the Beast that's the star of the show. The Beast was played by Cocteau's long time lover, Jean Marais, who also took on the villainous role of Avenant (this movie's equivalent of the Gaston character from Disney's movie). And it's amazing the kind of magnetic charisma he radiates as the Beast, and the back stabbing sliminess we feel of his Avenant. When the Beast is ultimately transformed into a prince looking like Avenant (it makes sense in the dreaminess of the movie), we, like Belle, are disappointed. Reportedly, at the premiere, when this happened, Marlene Dietrich, while holding Cocteau's hand, yelled out "Where is my beautiful beast?" And I have to agree with her. It kinda left a bad taste in my mouth, but it really points to how terrific the Beast is here.

I would still recommend this movie to anyone who thinks they might be interested in it. It's not the big showy crowd pleaser the Disney version is. This one is a tad darker, filled to the brim with symbolism one could spend hours dissecting But it's also magical and romantic and wondrous It's also got great imagery and sets and costumes. When the Beast is carrying Belle up the stairs is my personal favorite sequence, and that's not taking into account the creepy human arms holding candlesticks, the statues that watch Belle (are they a victim of the same curse as the Beast? Is the whole castle haunted? Is the castle the origin of the magic? Many questions to think about since Cocteau lovingly gave so much to this world creation) It's just like a fairy tale movie should be. Not shiny and sanitized, although I wouldn't accuse the Disney version of being that either, but filled with as much depth as you want it to be, so that it can appeal to everyone at any age. A wonderful movie.

Alice

 I had previously seen Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer's short film Jabberwocky, adapted from the Lewis Carroll poem. So I knew what to expect when diving into his Alice, based on Carroll's most famous work. Heavily surreal, impressive stop motion animation, general disregard for plot in favor of image, and that's pretty close to what I got here. I'm not sure how much of a fan I am, but it's undeniably impressive viewing.

The movie is silent for a good portion of its runtime, as the familiarity of the Alice story unfolds when she follows the White Rabbit down the rabbit hole (or down the desk drawers in this case). Alice is the only human character, other than the narrating mouth that shows up annoyingly when anyone talks, adding "Alice said" or "The Queen demanded" or whatever. All the other characters are animated, in stop motion form, from various starting points. The White Rabbit is a taxidermied white rabbit that has come to life, and there are others done this way as well. The King and Queen of Hearts are like living cards, there are dolls for some characters and many other things brought to life through what must've been painstaking and terrific animation by Svankmajer.

The problem, as it always is with Alice, is that there aren't really any characters. There are impressions, dreamlike of many characters, and Svankmajer captures that in his creepy stop motion work. But there's nothing but a set of weird things that happen, and we then move on to another weird set of things that happen, and then it's all over and none of it mattered or meant anything or really makes much of an impression. Honestly, if I'd just read the book instead of seeing the countless adaptations that've been made of it, I would have almost no memory of the story because there really isn't one. It's just kinda weird and dreamlike and then Alice wakes up. I don't find it very engaging. I was hoping that Svankmajer's supremely odd sensibility would bring something new to Alice for me, and while his imagery is certainly new, I simply didn't care.