Sullivan's Travels

Preston Sturges, 1941, bw (8.8*)
[Our post of the top ranked films of Preston Sturges]

A Hollywood director of escapist films decides he needs to experience real life instead of his Hollywooden one. He pretends to be a hobo and hit the road without money or any identity, and of course, with an assumed name, and see how life really is in America at the true grass roots level.

Of couse, he experiences far more than he imagined beforehand, and suffice to say it’s a life-changing experiment. The men he meets give him a new perspective on America and on himself as well. Joel McRea shines in probably his best performance as Sullivan. Veronica Lake (see photo above) provides welcome eye candy, she's quite attractive when she "puts on her face".

I think what Sturges adds is a kind of unabashed honesty that doesn’t seem forced - ok, maybe it is a little corny. That in itself is refreshing, so this film endures as a classic today. It’s also a film about a filmmaker making a film, there aren’t many better that come to my reputed mind. Perhaps only Robert Altman’s The Player (1992), with an altogether different feel, as it’s a serious film with sarcasm, a murder mixed with romance and heavily tinged with cynicism regarding Hollywood and the film industry, where the prime concern is to find a mega-profitable ‘project’, something the public will gobble up.

Writer-director Sturges makes this type of film like no one else except Capra, where comedy, or at least looking at life in a humorous way (it doesn’t have to be gut-busting, insane comedy) is used to get us into a story that then teaches a valuable lesson learned through experience, something you can’t find out any other way, which is your relationship to society and the world.

The Coen Brothers have often cited Sturges as influential on their work. There are similarities of a chase in Raising Arizona (1987) to one in Sullivan’s Travels. The title O' Brother Where Art Thou is the name of the movie that Sullivan wishes to direct in Sullivan’s Travels. There’s a terrific scene of people watching a movie that was repeated with variations in Italian Guiseppe Tournatore’s Oscar®-winning Cinema Paradiso (1988), so the Sturges influence is worldwide, as it should be.

This is a highly underrated comedy at #296 all-time, it’s certainly better than many ranked ahead of it. See the full poll in our 2011 update of the Top Ranked 1000 Films on the Net, all polls. I’m sure it’s among the top 100 comedies, however.

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The Tree of Life

Terrence Malick, 2011 (9.2*)
Palm D'or, Cannes

Rated only 7.3 at IMDB by fans, received much higher 8.5 from 43 critics at Metacritics. I'd say it's even better than that, worthy of at least a 9.0; it's more a work of art than a film. I believe this film will take more than one viewing.

As it is now, it really seems like two films. There's a short one of cosmic creation that looks a lot like weaker, but still effective versions of Jordan Belson’s short art films (from the 60’s forward), the man Stanley Kubrick wanted for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), but who refuses to work on commercial films. His 'non-object' films defy description -suffice to say they are the most metaphysical ever made.

The other film is a story of a dysfunctional 50’s family in Waco, Texas led by a strong-willed Brad Pitt, who appears to be a loving father of three sons, but who in reality is alienating all three and his wife, newcomer of the year Jessica Chastain, by being too stern and demanding, and basically robbing the boys of their grace of childhood, of the innocent joy they feel just running in the yard with each other and their mother.

He seems to be a typical American materialist, making a comment to the effect that the world operates on trickery and if you don’t take your own share, you won’t have anything. On the other hand, he’s an industrialist who holds several U.S. patents, they just don’t seem to be enriching him, a fact that he shows bothers him in small ways, as he's often mentioning richer men in town.

The film doesn’t follow a straight narrative, sometimes jumping to one of the sons played by Sean Penn as an adult – which son is not clear, and is really not important. (Leading Penn to criticize Malick for his role in the final film; he claims the script was more touching than the result). The film is really more of a series of images, and the story will be largely up to the viewer. In this respect, the film attempts what Michaelangelo Antonioni perfected in L'avventura (1960), a film whose story is told more pictorially and less with dialogue, action, or plot. In fact, that film won a special jury prize from Cannes for “cinematic beauty and giving us a new way of looking at films.”

Though this was is a very creative endeavor, it did remind me visually of Jordan Belson’s films in the cosmic scenes (though those did feature some entirely unnecessary and confusing dinosaurs at one point!) and then Antonioni’s in the family story, but an homage to the influence of each. Throughout all, there is a strong classical music score, used in much the same way as 2001, and others have brought up comparisons to 2001 as well, as Malick sought technical advice from Kubrick's special effects director Douglas Trumbull for this film, since he used more traditional (non-digital) film techniques. Some say having planets doesn’t make it similar, but they’re ignoring the use of classic music along with those images, and also that each film basically deals metaphorically with creation and evolution of life. So it’s more similar to Kubrick’s classic than even I realized while watching it.

For that matter, both this film and Aronofsky's The Fountain (2006) use a tree of life metaphor, and that film was also spiritual in nature, questioning the nature of god and life and the apparent fragility of individual human lives, which is a major theme of Malick's film. Aronofsky's was even more complex than this, weaving together three stories, from a mythical past, a present, and a visionary future.

This is certainly one of the most beautifully shot films in recent memory, with stunning cinematography from Emmanuel Lubezki - look for an Oscar® here. Though many of the space images are really just Hubbell telescope photos (and one I’m using as wallpaper currently of my favorite nebula), some are abstract and in motion slightly (some special effects were added) and those resemble the Belson films most closely.

A Malick film is like a Kubrick film in another way, since he has made only five, and Kubrick only made 11 in his lifetime, so he’s on a similar pace. All of Malick’s films are very good, but he’s still about three masterpieces short of Kubrick however: 2001, Dr. Strangelove (1964), and A Clockwork Orange (1971). And one short of Antonioni, L’avventura. But he’s getting closer with efforts like this one, his best film yet, though Badlands was a very good debut film.

Winner of four awards so far, out of 7 nominations, I'm sure there will be about 30 more to follow.


Note: Several of Jordan Belson’s short art films are available on one dvd now, online, for around $35. Most were award winners, and they are like nothing else on film, created frame by frame by hand, taking years for a few minutes of length. He also created the soundtracks himself, sounds which changed as the images changed as if they were co-dependent. Wikipedia calls them “non-object films of spiritual content”.

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The Player

Robert Altman, 1992 (9.2*)
[This is an updated repost of one of my favorite films about films]

Tim Robbins portrays a film producer looking for that next major hit project, who, through an anonymous blackmailer that sends him threatening postcards, becomes involved in a mystery, and his character degenerates into one who may actually stop at nothing to protect his ego and his wallet, and perhaps find love as well.

With the always delectable Greta Scacchi in his sights, who could blame him? He inadvertantly gets involved with her, with completely unforeseen events, through a screenwriter whose script he rejected. I liked the performance of Cynthia Stevenson as Robbins' low-key girlfriend within the studio, who often travels with him 'on business' - and who seems to be the perfect cynical match for her boss.

The Player is a perfect modern complement to Sunset Boulevard, as each presents the cynical and parasitic side of Hollywood and its shallow, self-centered denizens. Robert Altman's best film (for me) includes dozens of famous cameos (around 75), including 16 Oscar® winners, the most of any feature film (of course not including clip films like That's Entertainment). In fact, the dvd has a special menu of all the cameo scenes so you can quickly jump to the one you're seeking.

As another homage to cinema, the opening tracking shot is one of the longest in cinema history as a couple of film buffs argue in one shot of that about the longest tracking shots in cinema history. That has a pleasing circularity to it that will likely go over the heads of most viewers.

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Mao's Last Dancer

Bruce Beresford, 2009 (8.6*)
Based on the autobiography of Li Cunxin, a dancer who was plucked from his mountain village in China at age 11 by members of the cultural revolution, and trained in classical ballet from that point on. Criticized for being weak, he added extra weights to his legs and spent many hours developing strength to go with his natural agility and long-limbed grace. He is played here by actor Chi Cao.

In 1979, he is sent to the Houston Ballet in a cultural exchange with the U.S. He often struggles with his conscience, on doing what he feels is right, or acting like a good diplomat for the Communist ideal in China. Eventually he falls in love with a dancer in Texas, and this then becomes his biggest personal challenge.

This could have been a movie of the week but for the touch of veteran director Beresford, director of best picture winner Driving Miss Daisy (1989), and the military trial film Breaker Morant (1980). The dance sequences are wonderfully shot, some of the best in cinema. For me, these carry the film, though for others it may drag it down. I think for a dancer, his story can well be told through his dancing, and for me it seems natural here, not strained like in many musicals.

I was genuinely moved by this film in several places. I've read online posts by other Chinese immigrants who say it's a very accurate portrayal of someone from that part of China, Qingdao I believe. For lovers of dance films, this one's almost up there with The Red Shoes.

Winner of 6 awards and 14 nominations

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Meek's Cutoff

Kelly Reichardt, 2010 (8.6*)
Independent filmmaker Kelly Reichardt makes sparse and esoteric films that will appeal to the more artistic and discerning cinephile rather than the average cinemaniac. This is not your typical western.

In this western taking place in 1845, a small wagon train of three families on their way to farm in Oregon has hired a mountain man named Meek (Bruce Greenwood) as their guide. Promising them a shortcut to a pass in the Cascade mountains, the group basically becomes lost in the high, arid eastern Oregon desert. With their water running out and food low, the group becomes increasingly split over which direction to proceed, whether to continue trusting their guide or simply head north toward the Columbia River.

Along the way they begin to see a lone Native American almost stalking them. Fulfilling their stereotypical paranoia, some men go capture him and bring him back. Meek especially seems to keep inferring they are little more than animals, and are much better dead, and the living are much safer with them gone. However, deferring to the women, especially a gun-toting and headstrong Michelle Williams, the men decide to keep him alive, but tied up as their prisoner.

Now the group has another dilemna – can this wilderness survivor help them survive? For a western, this is a pretty existential story, from Jonathan Raymond, who often pens Reichardt’s films – and who has also used the name Slats Grobnik. Yo, Slats!

This story won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s still a beautifully shot western, subtle and tasteful, with ethereal and sparingly used music by Jeff Grace . The cast is perfect, they all even look like dirty, smelly western pioneers, even veterans Bruce Greenwood and Will Patton.

Director Kelly Reichardt

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The Spiral Staircase

Robert Siodmak, 1945, bw (8.8*)
Even though this now looks like a film of scary movie cliches, back in its time, it was one of those few films that made true cinema suspense and made it artfully. You might call this film an archetype of the modern psycho-killer film, and now it's been remastered.

A serial killer is targeting women around town that have various types of afflictions. A very young Dorothy McGuire, in the performance of her lifetime, plays a mute women, who, alone in a large house during a storm, begins to feel a hidden menace, as if she is perhaps the killer’s next target.

This is Siodmak’s best directing job to me, as it’s a beautifully shot early film noir, with lots of darkness and shadows casting eerie shapes across the living, as if the darkness itself is somehow grasping at the innocents. It’s not often that a film can maintain fear and suspense with any veracity, yet this film manages to and to also be re-shown often over 60 years later and after perhaps a hundred-thousand less artistic imitations.

The entire film was shot on a soundstage, which makes it even more amazing. It had the look of a small film, but it wasn’t - this was a David O. Selznick Production (Gone With the Wind), and co-starred George Brent and Ethel Barrymore.

It’s more often what you don’t show that is more menacing, our greatest fear is the unknown. I think Siodmak’s film is a very good example of that for most of these modern ‘horror’ filmmakers.

It's amazing to me that this film didn't make any of the film polls in our compendium, at all. At IMDB, it's average rating is 7.6, about .4 away from the top 250, so it's likely in the top 1000 there, which they don't post. Our compendium came up with almost 2300 films mentioned in all the polls put together and this wasn't listed once.

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The Third Man

Carole Reed, 1949, bw (8.6*)
Grand Jury Prize, Cannes
[Our 800th film review]

Classic mystery-suspense film from an often overlooked director, who also directed the classic films Odd Man Out, the Oscar®-winning best picture Oliver! (1967), and my favorite, Joseph Conrad’s Outcast of the Islands, a moody and emotional existential drama about white men among tropical Pacific islanders in a hard to reach eden surrounded by ocean reefs.

In this story based on a Graham Greene novel, Joseph Cotton travels to post-war Vienna after hearing of the death of a friend, Harry Lyme (Orson Welles). In his search for exactly what happened, he begins to uncover a web of deceit, and perhaps finds out more than he bargains for when first starting out.

Beautifully shot in noirish black-and-white, it features a chase in the sewers that is reminiscent of that in the novel (and subsequent films) Les Miserables. I can’t reveal too much without spoiling an important part of the mystery for new viewers.

Probably the only negative here for me is the incessant zither music that is more akin to an outdoor café in Istanbul than a mystery – I found it totally intruding on the suspense of the film and also totally unnecessary, not adding anything positive to the experience of this film.

It’s a odd choice, as the only other music I remember in any Reed film was in the actual musical Oliver!, in which someone had the crazy idea of setting Charles Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist as a Broadway musical! (“One boy, one boy for sale!”) It worked in a bizarre modern psychosis kind of way, but did win a directing Oscar for Reed himself, long overdue for better films. Still, all his work is worth seeing, he’s a master.

This is now 23rd all-time on our top 1000 in our 2011 update of the Top Ranked 1000 Films on the Net, all polls, and is #68 on the IMDB top 250 (so the critics liked it even more than the public, it's higher on our compendium of polls).This was the Grand Prize winner at Cannes, and won an Oscar® for the cinematography of Robert Krasker.

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The Fireman's Ball

Milos Forman, Czech Republic (Czechoslovakia back then), 1967, bw (8.2*)
I found Fireman’s Ball to be hilarious, it’s like the “fireman’s ball from hell”. A small town fire department decides to have both it's annual ball as well as an 86th birthday celebration for the former fire chief at the same time.

One main attraction is a big group of door prizes, as one's entrance ticket is also a raffle ticket for these. However, as the film progresses, the door prizes slowly go missing one by one. Another big attraction is the annual beauty pageant. Unfortunately there are no beauties, and even those few are unwilling and flee. The elder firemen resort to drafting reluctant participants from the dance floor.

Nothing really goes according to plan in this comedy of errors. There's a hilarious climax that I can't reveal here, but suffice to say it's more irony-laced humor in this early comic classic from Forman. It's not a big-budget major film like his Oscar® winners shot here (Amadeus (1984) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)), but it was a nominee for best foreign language film in 1969.

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The General

Buster Keaton, 1927, bw, silent (9.2*)
For me, Keaton was the real silent film master of comedy, not Chaplin. Keaton’s ingenius stunts and nearly constant movement defined the word pace, his films seemed to speed by like the title subject in this film, the famous Confederate locomotive known as The General, stolen by Union troops in this story based on a true incident. Keaton the engineer is determined to get his train back and the real winner is the audience in this perfect example of a brisk silent comedy.

A classic of the decade and one of the best comedies of all time. Ranked #35 all time on our 2011 update of the Top Ranked 1000 Films on the Net, all polls.

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The Beaver

Jodie Foster, 2011 (8.2*)
I liked this bizarre psychological study, that starts out funny but soon turns serious. Mel Gibson is at his best here, if you can get over his personal issues, and there is some gallows humor in the beginning for those who hate him, they will be smiling. He is also allowed to use his real Aussie accent, or maybe what he thought Americans would like to hear as a smart-ass Aussie, in this case speaking as a character called simply The Beaver.

He plays a chronic depressive, married to an exasperated Jodie Foster. Somewhere along the way he manages to get a beaver toy on his hand and it starts talking back to him but in Mel's Aussie voice, rather than his character Walter's real American accent - and he actually makes sense, so this intelligence is within Walter somewhere. Jodie even asks "and what's with the accent?", which alone was pretty funny. The two worked well onscreen together, likely due to both her professionalism and her direction here.

This story is hard to describe without giving too much away, but there is a sidebar story with Walt's unhappy and distant son (Anton Yelchin), who's becoming friends with local high school beauty and class valedictorean Norah, played by Jennifer Lawrence, who was Oscar®-nominated for lead actress in last year's crime mystery Winter's Bone (2010). They become friends in an unexpected way that I won't reveal, only that this part of the film was perhaps a little disjointed from the rest of the story, it seemed to have very little to do with Walter and the Beaver, while the rest of the film revolved around little else.

Still, this film didn't make me angry at times like Forrest Gump did, which I felt was taking advantage of someone's mental state. The difference is that in this film Walter is the CEO of a toy company with a sharp business mind, who seems down for little reason, or at least reasons we aren't privy to know - it's something from his past and his parents that we can only guess at. Foster's delicate direction (this is her best at the helm) kept this from going overboard in any direction.

Even if you're a Mel hater, you may be surprised by his acting here, it's far better than all the revenge films, where he's out for vengance on some criminal that kidnapped his kid or wife or killed one or more - that seems to have been at least half his storylines from Mad Max to Braveheart to Payback to Ransom to Edge of Darkness, maybe even The Patriot. At least this is a psycho CEO with a beaver puppet on his hand doing all his intelligent talking. Were this a little funnier, it would be a cult classic like Heathers (1989) or Repo Man (1984).

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