Summary Judgements #5: Failed Revolutions

The Peach Girl (Tao hua qi xue ji 1931) Starring the luminous Chinese screen legend, Lingyu Ruan, The Peach Girl, is an histrionic and predictable silent melodrama. What saves it from obscurity is the iridescent beauty of Lingyu Ruan, and the assured direction of veteran Shanghai director Wancang Bu. A young peasant girl and the son of a wealthy widow are star-crossed lovers, and the girl and her family are tragically ruined when she falls pregnant and the boy's mother refuses to allow him to marry the girl. Though the plight of the girl and her family is sympathetically handled, the resolution is reactionary, with a romantic reconciliation between the families. The greater tragedy for the Chinese peasantry is that still after 80 years, a revolution, and the madness of the Great Leap Forward, the baton of class arrogance and corruption has not been destroyed, but only passed from the bourgeoisie to corrupt Party cardres and a greedy economic elite.

Christ in Concrete (aka Give Us This Day 1949) Based on the novel by Italo-American Pietro Di Donato, this powerful leftist denunciation of contemporary capitalism from director Edward Dmytryk, had to be filmed in the UK, and was buried two days after its US release by a reactionary backlash. Telling the story of Italian immigrant building workers and their families in Brooklyn during the Depression, the film is the closest an Anglo-American movie ever got to the aesthetic and socialist outlook of Italian neo-realism. Teeming tenements and residential streets are shot with a provocatively gritty realism and film noir atmospherics. The cast is superb with particularly powerful performances from the two leads, Sam Wanamaker and Lea Padovani, who embody the immigrant experience, which is so imbued with vitality and compassion that the film soars above any other similar work of the period. Enriched by a poetic script, the innovative cinematography of C.M. Pennington-Richards, and a brilliantly evocative score from Benjamin Frankel, the movie is a revelation. The opening scene in a deprived urban locale that follows a drunken man from the street and up the stairs of a dirty tenement building is a tour-de-force. An inspired mise-en-scene and a moving camera that follows the action from below Ozu-style, framed by the drama of the musical motifs, had me enthralled. Film as art, Christ in Concrete is simply a masterpiece.

Guilty Pleasures

After a 20 year hiatus, in 2005 my then 15yo daughter drew me back to television. She wanted me to watch her favorites shows with her. I did, at first reluctantly, and then went on to enjoy these shows immensely. High production values, a continuing story arc, quirky characters, cool contemporary music, and the thriller elements had me hooked. Also recommend for fathers struggling to connect with their teenage daughters :). I will be writing up each show later, and each review will be hyper-linked the show's title below.

• Roswell (1999-2002)
• The 4400 (2004-2007)
• Veronica Mars (2004-2007)
• Prison Break (2005-2008?)

Summary Judgements #1

Frost/Nixon (2008) Revisionist souffle.

The Class (Entre les murs - France 2008) "A little less conversation, a little more action please".

Up The Yangytze (Canada 2007) Heartrendingly sad. The real China.

The Fountain (2006) Profound and mesmerising journey into the unbearable deepness of being.

Trouble in Paradise (1932) Joyous irreverent elegant fun with a delicious erotic playfulness.

The Apartment (1960) Very dated and very tedious. Watch Mad Men instead.

Dracula (1931) The first 20 minutes is magic. Flounders after the count leaves his castle.

Bride of Frankenstein (1935) Camp noir horror - a visual feast.

My Brother is an Only Son (Mio fratello è figlio unico - Italy 2007) A saga of two brothers - one a fascist the other a marxist - in 60s Italy. Powerful and affecting.

Lumet's 12 Angry Men (1957)

Peter Heath Baker wrote of 12 Angry Men in an article for Criterion: "The 95-minute running time of the film is also the duration of the jurors’ decision-making. The camera, like the jurors, cannot leave the room until a verdict has been reached. Faithful to Aristotle’s prescription for classical theatre, 12 Angry Men observes the unities of time, place, and action, which is rare in a film. Sidney Lumet, in his debut as a film director, used the techniques of the theatre to evoke the claustrophobic tension of the jury room. Before shooting, he rehearsed his cast for two weeks, running through the script like a play. With the aid of On the Waterfront cinematographer Boris Kaufman, Lumet plotted the camera’s movements to highlight what developed during the intensive period of rehearsal."

I have served on a criminal jury. I was in my mid-20s and the accused was a guy charged with robbing a bank. 12 Angry Men echoes my experiences in that jury room. In my case the evidence was largely circumstantial and the jury included women, but the terrible fear in most minds was the same: what if we condemn an innocent man? We deliberated and found the guy guilty, though with no great sense of justice. Sidney Lumet's first feature is a powerful movie, where Boris Kaufman's camera is not so much an observer as a participant in the cloistered confines of a jury room on a steamy summer day where the only fan doesn't work. After the opening scene where a weary and visibly bored judge instructs the jurors to consider their verdict in a murder case, we cut to the jury room and in an elegant long take the camera moves at eye level around the room, first observing a man staring out a window, then moving to other men in conversation, and moving on again and again to introduce each protagonist in turn. When the jurors are seated on the first vote around the table one man is holding out for not guilty - the man we earlier saw staring out the window who is played by Henry Fonda. The drama turns on this man's insistence on justice being done, and holding the jury down to a fair assessment of the evidence. A great ensemble cast holds the tension and expertly develops the melodrama of conflict and personality. The camera is often in close-up deftly taking a player's point of view in confrontations.

As the tension mounts and the personal dramas of the jurors take on as much significance as their deliberations, the camera moves progressively down to a lower angle to reveal the room's ceiling, adding to the volcanic emotional tension as the last hold-outs on a guilty verdict come under attack.

While the strength of the direction and the cinematography are integral, it is the tight script by Reginald Rose and the telling dialog that underpins the drama. Each protagonist is profoundly human - each with his own emotional baggage and differing characteristics.

When the jurors finally leave the jury room, the camera lingers and muses over the empty chairs and table. There is a palpable sense of melancholy for something memorable, important, that is now gone forever. The final scene shows the jurors descending the steps of the court-house, each returning to their separate lives. The oldest of the jurors, a canny old man played beautifully by Joseph Sweeney, makes a touching attempt to talk to the Fonda character, to hold on to something that he doesn't want to lose, but the short exchange goes nowhere, and he shuffles away down the steps a little bewildered, and suddenly very old and very tired.

Slumdog Millionaire

The ‘quiz show that stopped the nation’ trope is imposed and corny, the resolution clichéd, the genuine pathos of the older brother Samil’s sacrifice lost, the drama undermined by the love conquers all ending, and the dance number as a final coda misplaced and even repugnant. But the movie is still a dazzling cinematic experience: the cinematography, the editing, and the sound production as integral as the inspired direction. The acting of the young people and the kids is as solid as you could wish. In a scene that deals with the mother's death, the visual terror and the cacophony is loud and intense, and the adrenalin that fuels the kids' flight is palpable, with the fast editing, the angled and off-center shots, all amplifying the brutality of what is happening on the screen; the abrupt stop as the kids' escape is blocked by a car with an annoyed and indifferent better-off passenger cocooned behind the closed windows; then the boys are off again until the final soaring aerial shots that move from the particular to the general - this is not a single story but one of many. A Hollywood movie is not going to save India, but it can bring an immediacy to the plight of people living marginal lives in dire poverty, and perhaps widen awareness and understanding. The blinded kids don't escape their fate. Jamal and Latika escape only because Samal has a gun and uses it. A background story on the writing of the screenplay by writer Simon Beaufoy is of interest.

A disturbing post-script: According to a recent newspaper report, the kids who played the young boy and girl who grew up to be the young lovers are still destitute and living in a Mumbai slum.

Mr Deeds Meets Slumdog: Who wants to be a millionaire?

I often wonder how it feels to be at home in your country of birth. As a child of immigrant parents, and though an Australian by birth, I have never been confident that I ever will. There is a discontinuity, and bridging it is as unlikely as me flying to the moon. It is a strange feeling that I am in a place but not of it - a stranger in the only home I know. Perhaps it is me and not my situation, but the feeling of estrangement is always there under the surface, dormant, but ever-ready to puncture that rare sensation that I may have found that elusive threshold to a life unhindered by a feeling of not belonging. I imagine this is how Slumdog Jamal feels. A Muslim in a hostile Hindu nation, first as an orphan eking out an existence on a refuse heap, living little better than a dog, later as a hustler on the edge of society, and then as a lowly chah-wallah in a Mumbai office tower. He has no home and belongs nowhere. This is how Longfellow Deeds feels in New York City. A fish out of water. A decent man surrounded by conceit and deceit. At least he has a home in Bedford Falls to go back to, where he truly belongs - a place in the world that is inviolably his - a very part of his being. I grew up in a tenement behind my parent's fruit store. There was love and we struggled together, but my life was different from the other children I knew. My brother and I between school and homework toiled with ours parent in the store seven days a week. We had no vacations and no lawn, or a shiny car. And we were seen as different: dagoes who didn't amount too much. My dreams of what life could be were shaped by Hollywood. Andy Hardy and Frank Capra were the stuff my dreams were made of. Mickey Rooney, James Stewart, and Gary Cooper populated my imagination. They belonged and they knew who they were - their lives were magic. Jamal wades through a cess-pit to get a glance of his Bollywood idol. Shit: the stuff that slum-dreams are made of. The conceited quiz show host tries to set Jamal up for failure, and when that stratagem fails, he accuses Jamal of cheating and delivers him to police brutality. Longfellow Deeds suffers humiliation at the hands of his literary idol, he is manipulated by a cynical young reporter, and finally his shyster lawyer, who is after his dough, tries to have him declared insane when Longfellow decides to give his inherited millions to the needy. They each overcome by their essential decency and natural intelligence. Jamal says he didn't want the quiz show prize, he wanted to find his girl- and he does - just like Longfellow Deeds. Bollywood meets Hollywood. Jamal's millions may buy him a measure of comfort and respect, but Longfellow Deeds doesn't need the money - he has something more precious and inviolate - a place in the sun.