Stuff I've Been Watching This July

[Currently listening to Streetcleaner by Godflesh]

In addition to my "Examples of Excellent New (ish) Music" (which I've decided will be a monthly column on this blog), I will be posting a 'Stuff I've Been Watching' feature, where I'll list the films I've watched over the period of a month, and talk about them in an article/essay format. So here is 'Stuff I've Been Watching' for July:

FILMS WATCHED:

• The Orphanage (2007) directed by Juan Antonio Bayona
• The Dark Knight (2008) directed by Christopher Nolan
• Standard Operating Procedure (2008) directed by Errol Morris
• Salute (2008) directed by Matt Norman
• Wonder Bar (1934) directed by Lloyd Bacon
• Black Sunday (1960) directed by Mario Bava
• Ask Me if I'm Happy (2000) directed by Alberto Giacomo
• Lady of Burlesque (1943) directed by William Wellman
• The Man With A Movie Camera (1929) directed by Dziga Vertov
  
• Strike (1925) directed by Sergei Eisenstein
  
• Batleship Potemkin (1925) directed by Sergei Eisenstein*

*with a live score by Quaoub, Kenny Davis Jr and Toy Death

Short films:

• The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa (1977) directed by Caroline Leaf
  
• Self Service (1975) directed by Bruno Bozzeto
• Take Off (1972) directed by Gunvor Nelson*
• The Stripper (1960) directed by Siew Hwa Beh*

*There are no IMDB listings for these short films. For more information on Gunvor Nelson, please click here and/or here, and for information on Siew Hwa Beh's The Stripper please click here for an outline of a program which featured this short film.

FILMS RENTED:

• Batman (1989) directed by Tim Burton
• Batman Returns (1992) directed by Tim Burton
• Batman Forever (1995) directed by Joel Schumacher
• Batman & Robin (1997) directed by Joel Schumacher
• Forbidden Planet (1956) directed by Fred Wilcox
  
• Prom Night (1980) directed by Paul Lynch
  
• House of Wax (1953) directed by André De Toth
• A Nightmare on Elm Street (1985) directed by Wes Craven
  
• A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2:Freddy's Revenge (1985) directed by Jack Sholder
  
• Land of the Dead (2005) directed by George Romero
  
• The Hunger (1983) directed by Tony Scott
• The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976) directed by Nicholas Roeg
• Alien (1979) directed by Ridley Scott

FILMS PURCHASED:

• Mario Bava Collection (Umbrella Entertainment)

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Joel Schumacher should never have touched the Batman franchise. Sorry, I had to get that out of the way. With the release of Christopher Nolan's critically and commercially successful The Dark Knight, we see a return to the attempt to bring back Batman's dark, gothic and film-noir roots that started with Tim Burton's 1989 Batman and continued in the 1992 sequel Batman Returns. I have to admit that I'm not too big of a Tim Burton fan, but his two stabs at the Batman franchise were well-considered pieces of work, but with obvious drawbacks and flaws being its almost-appalling cheesy dialogue. But that is nothing if not a trifle when the film is compared to either Batman Forever (which is a bad, but still tolerable film to watch) and Batman & Robin (which is an incredibly painful film to sit through), which were both step-backwards for the Batman franchise. A return to the comic's camp phase following the publication of Seduction of the Innocent, Joel Schumacher's two Batman films contain two-dimensional and poorly-constructed characters, little-to-no aesthetic appeal and absolutely horrible dialogue, which is exemplified in the following:

Mr Freeze: [Freezes the Batmobile and upon thinking he has killed Batman bursts into a somewhat manic laugh. Then, as he turns his head upwards and sees Batman coming down from above in a sort-of childish voice:] Uh oh!

Christopher Nolan has created a worthy follow up to his brilliant Batman Begins, and has crafted an excellent piece of work that, while still containing a few Hollywood cliches here and there, is easily (without any doubt in my mind) the best Batman film ever made thus far, and possibly even the best comic book film made. Whether it's going to be another Batman, or another great film like The Prestige, whatever Christopher Nolan's working on next, I'll be there to see it when it gets released. To date, I've seen all bar one of his films, and he strikes me as one of the most exciting people to be working in Hollywood at the moment.

I must state that I go to a really strange video store to hire my films, one that has an odd selection of rare/foreign/cult films and one where the clerks do not know how to spell "Bill" nor understand the word "competitor" (go figure). For the past couple of weeks I've gravitated to the horror section (which is tiny) and have been watching classic horror films like A Nightmare on Elm Street, Prom Night and House of Wax. This phase also coincided with a screening of Mario Bava's wonderful 1960 film Black Sunday, which coincidentally ran on World Youth Day. The screening sparked a self-interest for Bava, which led to tracking down (upon recommendation) a box-set of his work. While we're on the topic of horror, I was really looking forward to seeing The Orphanage after hearing rave-reviews about how radically different it was as a film of its genre. OK, content-wise I couldn't disagree, but it was the fact that it was constructed on the well-worn horror/suspense conventions that made me somewhat dislike it (a dislike based on my expectations, perhaps).

Next to the horror section in my video store is the wonderfully-bizarre Science Fiction section where anything goes! I thought that David Bowie's roles in The Hunger and The Man Who Fell to Earth were wonderful. In the former--a different take on the classic vampire film--Bowie plays a vampire who continually ages, and is drawn to a sort of femme-fatale who he is drawn to out of human, err... vampiric necessities. I found The Man Who Fell to Earth a subtle, beautiful and haunting film, that is definitely something original in the Sci-Fi genre. That's not to say I don't enjoy classic Science Fiction films like Forbidden Planet (which was a gorgeous, thought-provoking film somewhat based on the plot of Shakespeare's The Tempest), but I throughly enjoy films that set themselves apart from films of their genre, and the deep-set expectations that a viewer has when watching a genre film. This was something that I didn't find in Tony Scott's brother's film Alien, which I was a bit disappointed in, especially after loving Blade Runner. Adapt another Phillip K. Dick novel, Ridley.






















From top to bottom: Panels 1 and 2 are David Bowie as John (a vampire) in The Hunger, Panel 3 is Bowie as Thomas Jerome Newtown (a humonoid alien) in The Man Who Fell to Earth.

In a program on Burlseque at the Chauvel Cinematheque, the screening of William Wellman's wonderful 1943 Lady of Burlseque was accompanied by the even-more interesting short films Take Off, directed by Gunvor Nelson, and The Stripper, directed by Siew Hwa Beh. While both of these short films brought a "feminist perspective to a striptease act by confounding conventional voyeuristic expectations with an unexpected twist" (National Film & Sound Archive), the really interesting thing here is Nelson's Take Off, a "metaphysical striptease" (in Nelson's own words). A description from B. Ruby Rich of Chicago Art Institute is that it features "Ellion Ness, a thoroughly professional stripper, [who] goes through her paces, bares her body, and then, astonishingly and literally, transcends it." B. Ruby continues to state that "[w]hile the film makes a forceful political statement on the image of woman and the true meaning of stripping, the intergalactic transcendence of its ending locates it firmly within the mainstream of joyous humanism and stubborn optimism." Also somewhat connected to burlesque is Lloyd Bacon's 1934 Wonder Bar, an excellent example of raunchy, sinful and explicit pre-Hayes code film, which was likewise screened as part of the Chauvel Cinematheque.

Film poster for Ask Me If I'm Happy

Barrie Pattison, film historian and entrepreneur, had returned to the Chauvel Cinematheque for a presentation on the "Other Italian Cinema" (i.e. not people like Fellini, but other lesser-known Italian directors) shedding some well-needed light on a totally unappreciated side of their cinema. This was followed by a series of Italian films that fit this "category", including Ask Me If I'm Happy, an example of popular contemporary Italian comedy.

I saw two documentaries this month: Matt Norman's interesting documentary Salute on Peter Norman's life and involvement in the 1968 Mexican Olympics and Errol Morris' equally difficult (in the sense that it was challenging film to sit through) and fantastic Standard Operating Procedure. Salute focused on a specific aspect of the 1968 Mexican Olympic protest in that it saw the events through Peter Norman's perspective, which was very interesting. However, its documentary style was completely eclipsed by Errol Morris' film, which is a gut-wrenching difficult-to-sit through look at the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse. While the actual images (and a bit of video footage) were horrific enough on their own, it was the stuff--sometimes patriotic right-wing, other times downright immoral--that some of the people involved in the Abu Ghraib events said during the interviews that made it all the more disturbing. Errol Morris' new film, which is scored by Danny Elfman, is an excellently directed and calculated piece of documentary.

A special screening of Eisenstein's brilliant and timeless classic Battleship Potemkin scored by three distinctly different performers; Quaoub, Kenny Davis Jr and Toy Death was an interesting, refreshing take on the notion that Eisenstein wanted his films to be re-scored every so often, thus offering a fresh outlook on the celluloid that the music is accompanying. Also screening around this time was the also-brilliant Eisenstein film Strike, which prominently features a scene wherein the slaughter of animals in interspersed with the slaughter of strikers, later becoming the inspiration for the presentation of the climatic murder of Willard in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalyspe Now. Also of note is the classic Man With A Movie Camera, screened at the Art Gallery of NSW (in addition to Strike) as part of the Biennale of Sydney's "Revolutions - Forms that Turn" theme. Live music accompanying film is a theme getting picked up towards the beginning of August at The Chauvel, with what seems to be an interesting series of performances, spoken word, and performance art accompanying (or together with) experimental film in a program entitled "Machine 1".

Stuff I've Been Watching is a monthly feature on adrian-clement.com. For older/newer entries, a list will be compiled below every entry to archive everything nicely.