Atonement

At the center of Atonement is a much-celebrated, five minute tracking shot following a central character (once a gardener, now a British soldier during World War II) across the evacuation at Dunkirk beach. As he and his companions stride across this landscape, the camera takes in a wealth of visual information, detailing with great efficiency the vast swaths of humanity present at this specific time and place in history. It exposes not just the horrors of war represented by the wounded, dying, or dead soldiers, but also the boredom and esprit de corps of the men waiting to be rescued from military annihilation. I have no familiarity with the book this film is based on, so cannot account for whether or not this is an attempt to capture the density of information from a memorable moment or chapter in the novel, but, while this shot is technically impressive, its use in the film renders it solely a novelty, a technical gimmick for cinematography nuts to discuss as they list the great tracking shots in film history. What occurs during this shot could not be called a "scene" in the traditional narrative sense; it's just a tour. For all of the information the film provides in these five minutes, it neglects to use its wizardry to tell us anything at all about the character it's so laboriously following around.

So much of Atonement resembles this shot, resembles this moving-without-really-going-anywhere mentality. It's a gorgeously shot film with inventive use of movement in the cinematography, a similarly inventive and richly textured score, adequate-to-great performances, and a script with well-wrought multiple perspectives and a broken chronology that pays off superbly in the movie's final moments. Yet for all of these riches, it doles out narrative like a drip irrigation system. The film recounts the destruction of the love affair between the noble, lower class Robbie (James McAvoy) and the upper-crust, mannered Cecilia (Keira Knightley) after Cecilia's jealous younger sister Briony tells a life-shattering lie about Robbie. In doing so, it flails all over the place, apparently unsure of what story it's telling or even why it's telling it. The film is no doubt trying to keep up with the book's breadth and scope, but who cares? There's no spine to be found, nothing holding its pieces together but the title--a title that, it should be noted, is more or less ignored by the structure of the script until the film's final scenes.

Even beyond the famed tracking shot, much of this film's running time is taken up with pointless shots of characters walking through their environs (these walking shots probably add fifteen minutes to the film's length). While this type of thing does convey a welcome specificity about the film's setting, as well as a pleasing visual aesthetic, it amounts to very little as the characters and story don't seem rooted to this time and place in the same way that, say, the characters or story of Barry Lyndon did. After a while, I wished the characters would stop going places and just get there already. I was vaguely interested in the familiar but somewhat surprising story, and these moments were needlessly delaying my gratification for some production design pornography.

For all of these complaints, Atonement actually inspires very little passion (beyond relief that the usually tone-deaf Academy did not reward this middling film at Oscar time earlier in the year). The film is bold and big in a David Lean kind of way, and, though this is very often at odds with the story being told (never more apparent than during that dunderheaded, misguided tracking shot), it helps to offset the slippery, invertebrate nature of the script. While it strides around, gleefully showing off, it's hard not to feel somewhat impressed with its cockiness while knowing that it's overcompensating.

Day 74: The American Astronaut

About half of a great science fiction rock opera with great black and white photography and some really inventive, even elegant ways of overcoming (I assume) a small budget.  The American Astronaut begins and ends extremely well, but somewhere in the middle suffers from an extraordinary, infuriating lag in pacing.  The movie's tone borrows liberally from the work of both David Lynch and Ed Wood and adds a dash of the absurdity from Forbidden Zone for good measure.  It's not bad, not in the least, but never fully gels into an all-around engaging experience.

One of the problems I had with the film was the way it handled some of its musical numbers.  The ones that don't work are stuck into the narrative in ways that, even by the absurd conventions of the musical, feel forced, or (dare I say it) unmotivated.  In these cases, they're also the type of songs that do nothing to further the plot or the characters.  Instead they bring the movie to a dead halt as the viewer's forced to wait (as are the characters) until the song ends.

Having said this, I'd say about 60% of the songs work and well at that.  A number featuring a dance competition in a bar on the asteroid Ceres is so fucking fantastic, I watched it again immediately after the movie was over.  The villain of the film is given an appropriately creepy little song, dancing and rolling around in the ashes of people he's just vaporized with a laser gun, and a too-short impromptu vocal jam session on a long space voyage punctuates the end of the slow middle, bringing the film back into the right pace and tone that it started out with.

The aspect of The American Astronaut that impressed me the most, though, was the way it depicted the space travel in the film.  Rather than have spaceships zooming around unconvincingly, the film instead cuts to an illustrated still or a series of slightly animated illustrated stills that depict the intended action, while providing the appropriate sound effects and music for the moment.  It's beautiful, reminding me of the elegant (though much more expensive) simplicity of Kubrick's effects in 2001, and, more importantly, it works.  Somehow I bought this as a representation of space travel more so than the frenetic effects found in the Star Wars prequels.

The photography in the film deserves special note.  It's got the feel of the photography from a silent German Expressionist classic with a larger depth of field.  Consistently good throughout, even on the cramped and ultimately boring cockpit set (though I liked the fact that there was a bookcase in the spaceship) in which the film spends far too much time, at times it creates different, alien environments through its manipulation of light and shadow alone.  And it was a nice choice, indeed, to make the shots of men on an asteroid's surface resemble that of the pictures and film from the Apollo moon landings.  

The movie's gifts overwhelm the missteps that detract from the experience.  The movie begins with narration that resembles the Criswell narration from Plan 9 from Outer Space, but the movie's cleverer than an ironic spin on ultra-low budget camp.  The narrator, it turns out, is the movie's villain, and at times, the character narrates the film onscreen in a way that other people can hear.  A stand-up routine by an elderly man in the asteroid bar would be worth the price of admission if you could pay to see this at the theater.  And this middle section that I've been talking about?  The one that lags?  It's not really that long.

Day 71: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension

If the pulsating synth score and prevalence of toggle switches in the frame isn't enough to clue you into the fact that this movie was made smack-dab in the middle of the 1980s, then the fact that Dan Hedaya and Vincent Schiavelli share screen time (with Christopher Lloyd!) surely will.  A pleasing draught of old-fashioned serial adventure clichés, more square jaw than its retro-pastiche predecessors Indiana Jones or Star Wars yet also an uneven lampoon of these same conventions, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai isn't a great movie, but it has an internal consistency and a rock solid foundation that most other post-Lucas sci-fi/adventure movies fail to bring (Lucas's own post-Lucas endeavors included).  Additionally, the movie's made with an acute awareness of its roots, in a manner befitting the Commando Cody aesthetic.

Centered on neurosurgeon, rock star, physicist and all-around adventurer Buckaroo Banzai, the movie provides the audience with an opening crawl, setting up the various skills of this new kind of Renaissance man, and then plunges ahead with nary a look back.  This is to the movie's credit, since, if it paused to give us too much detail, the whole enterprise would sink under its own improbable weight.  I was confused more than once during Buckaroo Banzai, but the events never seemed to defy the logic of the world that was set up from the get-go, so it didn't matter.  It's admirable that, in as complex an alternate universe as this is, the movie was able to reveal quite a bit without any lengthy exposition at all, even if this revelation happens mostly in retrospect.

I also really liked the way the film was shot.  The action happened most often within the frame, without a great deal of cutting.  This gave it a very appropriate and very cool Howard Hawks-esque feel, and if not quite that good, at least the stately feel of an old film when sound was new and the actors had to stand around a random piece of set dressing in which the microphone was hidden.  It didn't exactly provide any legitimacy to the film, but it did make me sit up and take notice of the style at play and how that style interacted with the plot.

The plot in question is some ludicrous nonsense about an alien bad guy who's taken over the body of John Lithgow, giving Lithgow the chance to do what he does best: ham the fuck up.  He's way over the top, but fun as he speaks in a broad Italian accent, stomps about, and exaggerates his body movements.  Peter Weller, as Banzai, also gets to play to his strengths, though in his case it's an icy-cool deadpan heroism, quiet, calm, and rigid.  But Jeff Goldblum is certainly the most memorable here as a new recruit to Banzai's team.  It's a trademark, bumbling Goldblum performance, and he gets the film's funniest line, "Why is there a watermelon there?"

Though I liked the goony, tounge-in-cheek quality to the film (and the rough-edged special effects), the humor in it is scattershot at best with only a few hits to a bunch of misses.  The movie finds a nice, dryly humorous tone when it plays it straight; it's never explicitly trying for laughs and getting them by taking the idiotic premise seriously.  So when the movie launches into broader, more parodic kinds of jokes, it's disappointing and not really funny.

I enjoyed The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, but I didn't love it.  It had a weighty feel to it that was much welcome, since some movies set in the "real" world have a hard time establishing this kind-of well-observed tone.  It's definitely one of the best projects that emerged in the post Star Wars/Indiana Jones boom for both its sincerity and the way it eschews populist, audience pleasing concerns by going forward without waiting for us to catch up with it.  Even so, the material's just too slight and the increasingly jokey tone intrudes on whatever elements of dramatic tension there are.  

Day 66: Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

A marvelous, understated film about an unlikely love affair between an elderly German woman and a much younger Arab man, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul reminds me of why I like movies.  The way it's so matter-of-factly and economically shot and cut, it feels like peering into the lives of these people through some kind-of magic, rectangular window.  The movie's efficiency never makes it feel so insular that the characters have no lives outside the frame, indeed, that's one of its strengths, but it certainly lends a feeling that the camera has captured the moments that matter, the most important moments in the story of how these two people came to love one another.

They're both residents of a German town, one that seems sapped of happiness.  The movie's opening scene takes place in a bar where people are drinking, but seem to find no enjoyment in it.  The elderly woman, Emmi, enters, and is regarded with suspicion and reproach.  She clearly doesn't belong there, has only stepped in to get out of the rain, and doesn't know whether she wants a cola or a beer.  Everyone, Emmi included, looks drained, worn down by life, photographed in such a way that wrinkles and runny mascara defy any notions of glamour.    

Among a group of Arabs in the bar, Ali is encouraged to dance with Emmi in order to make her feel more comfortable.  He agrees and the two engage in an awkward dance, talk to each other about their lives, connecting on a level of loneliness and a desperate desire for empathetic human contact.  When the dance is over, they continue talking, he goes home with her, and stays the night.  Despite the fierce racism of Emmi's associates, friends, and family, they continue seeing one another and eventually get married.

These early scenes are inspiring, charming, and almost overbearingly sweet.  It's wonderful to see these two lonely souls find each other and rousing to watch them flaunt social convention in defense of their love.  The hangover of Nazi Germany is omnipresent (Emmi was a member of the Nazi party and speaks of Hitler in the same reserved, yet non-denouncing way that some former Nixon supporters do) as is the prejudice against Arab people due to the events at the 1972 Munich Olympics.   Everyone who disapproves of the relationship claims, "It won't last," and, yet, the happiness that Emmi and Ali bring to each other and the contrasting misery the other people live in is so well delineated, you can't help but need their relationship to last.

For a while, it seems that the movie may be a simple fairy tale about the way integrated relationships invariably produce more harmony between people of different races, but it's got better, more complex, more interesting things to say.  The relationship hits a snag when the two no longer have anything to fight against, and both begin drifting apart from one another, returning to the loneliness that brought them together in the first place.  It's difficult and frustrating to watch, seeing these two people who once communicated so openly and simply with one another unable to speak to each other.  But, ultimately, when the film brings the two back together in the place where they met, the movie's point is that lasting relationships require their participants to reeducate themselves about who they're paired with.  It's a beautiful, touching thing to watch, fantastically captured by all involved.  

I loved this movie with every fiber of my being.  It may be one of my personal all-time favorites, something further reflection will no doubt illuminate.  I'll know in a year.
  

Day 46: L’Age D’Or

The followup film to Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un chien andalou, L’Age D’Or is made in the same semi-narrative style, a stream-of-consciousness collage of images and ideas which build sequentially as the movie plays out.  It’s a way of filmmaking that works in a similar fashion to the way poetry works, taking the representations of a language (in poetry it’s words; in film, photographic representation) and putting them to use in novel ways.  

It’s a lot like a piece of music, too, since it is often dealing in purely abstract messages (the film medium’s concrete representational qualities notwithstanding) and in the way it moves from idea to idea in sequential, temporal fashion.  Additionally, as in some pieces of music, there are themes that reoccur throughout (religion and child-murder featuring most prominently in my memory of the film), commenting on one another and, eventually colliding to form a conclusion.  

Since, like music or poetry, everyone who experiences it will come away with a different impression of what it “means”, I think the experiential aspect of seeing this film and the reaction one has while watching it is, in many ways, more important than further reflection.  It’s eminently interpretable, due more to the human being’s almost insatiable desire to connect two dots than to any ostensible meaning in the film’s text or subtext.  This isn’t to detract from the film, though, because there’s a consistency guiding everything and it’s smart enough to know that the real importance in doing an experimental stream-of-consciousness piece like this is an undercurrent of dramatically satisfying “stream-of-emotion.”

And, anyway, it’s this tendency to connect the unconnected that allows us to understand the language of cinema in the first place, to understand that a cut does not necessarily constitute the beginning of a new movie.  What Dalí and Buñuel have done in both movies is to apply this concept of juxtaposition to the literal meaning of their films.  The way ideas and narrative streams flow one from another is, really, no different than the way all movies move from one geographical location to another.  

The movie’s hilarious too.  After being introduced to a city, a title card informs us, “Sometimes on Sundays…” and then the film cuts to shots of buildings collapsing.  A character in the film is prone to such bouts of anger, he slaps an old woman when she spills a drink on him and knocks a blind man down for absolutely no reason (this despite being honored by the National Goodwill Society [or something like that]).  Additionally, before this movie, I never realized how funny it is to see a cow in a bed. (The movie also features what has to be the funniest use of Jesus in a movie, ever, ever, ever.)  All of these absurdities are used to good effect, beyond simply busting the gut of the viewer.  

I could quibble about a few things.  The ending (featuring the Jesus moment) is a little abrupt, like a rude punchline at the end of a great shaggy dog joke.  The images in the film aren’t exactly beautiful with much awkward framing and mediocre camera work (though it’s hard to know how much of this is due to the image quality on the DVD. It seems they could only find a print of the film archived by Scratchy McCactushands).  But I can’t really work up the passion to dwell on the movie’s faults.  What’s great about this film is how much sense it makes within itself.  In polite society, it wouldn’t make sense for a man with a gun to shoot a kid who’s angered him.  Here, because of every single thing that’s preceded this moment, nothing else would.

Day 44: L’Avventura

Why?

In L’Avventura, the question “Why?” is asked by most of the main characters, usually in a fit of frustration.  In all cases, there is no answer forthcoming.  Still, the question remains and repeating the question in a mocking tone is the only response the character being asked can muster up.  It’s the only answer that makes any sense.

This is the kind of movie where characters walk around and talk to each other about life, love, and pain.  The conversations the characters have with each other on these topics are honest, and the movie’s funny in the way it never misses an opportunity to cut one character down by using another to contradict them.  The characters lead listless lives (triple alliteration word score!) drifting from location to location with few worries and, seemingly, fewer responsibilities.  It’s appropriate, then, that the movie opens with its characters on a boat trip.  They’re not going anywhere in particular, and they’re not really having any fun.  When they arrive at a remote island, one of their party, a disillusioned woman named Anna, disappears.  Her boyfriend, Sandro, and her best friend, Claudia, obsessively search for her, but there’s no trace.  A few boats may have passed by during their search, and it’s hinted that she was abducted by smugglers or maybe she even left of her own volition on one of these boats.

It doesn’t matter because she’s not as important as the effect her disappearance has on Claudia and Sandro.  After they’ve searched for a few days, Sandro begins putting the moves on Claudia.  She’s resistant to his advances at first, but eventually gives in and they begin an ill-fated affair.  The ghost of Anna remains between them and Claudia, who was once the most ardent advocate of searching for Anna, now fears that her friend will show up and take Sandro away from her.  Her fears aren’t unwarranted.  Sandro is clearly distracted, but it’s not exactly Anna that occupies his thoughts as the movie demonstrates in its closing sequence.  He’s bored, a man who had dreams of being a poor genius, but ended up being rich and unappreciated for whatever skills he thought he had.

All the characters are like this, people inhabiting roles that don’t seem to suit them too well.  A husband constantly berates his wife for being silly and frivolous, but when she flaunts an affair with a young painter (the kind of guy who’s painting, it seems, just to see naked women) he isn’t too much disturbed.  The people at the center of the movie go from hotel to hotel so much, I realized late in the film that I had no idea where any of them lived or what, exactly, it was that most of them did to earn all this money.  They all seem miserable and annoyed at everything around them.  

Movies about the ennui of rich people are often uninteresting to me, being the solidly middle-class bloke that I am.  But this one is more interesting than most; it cuts through the wealth and the privilege and finds the heartache inherent in a life of coasting from task to task, from one lover to the next.  When Claudia says that her mother was “sensible” and is asked what that means, she replies, “It means she had no money.”  She’s joking, but there’s a truth behind the way she says it, a yearning for some kind of stability.  When later, in yet another hotel room, she lies down on her clothes, still stuffed into her open suitcase, it’s as if the suitcase is the only home she’s ever had.  At the end of the movie, Sandro is weeping and Claudia puts her hand on him to comfort him.  As she does, the score swells in contradictory, ominous tones, seeming to say that whatever joy the two find in one another will be short lived.  

It’s well acted, well observed, and well written, though it’s a bit too long in the beginning.  The search for Anna is intriguing at first, as mystery always is, but it occupies three or four scenes too many, especially when it’s clear the whole time that the movie has other things on its mind.  Still, it’s always interesting and always honest.  I liked the way the movie sets the investigation aside to show how the characters fill the holes she’s left behind and how, even with a newfound purpose in finding Anna, Sandro and Claudia are so easily distracted from this purpose.  They don’t really seem to know why it’s so important to find her.  But there’s that question again: Why?

Day 25: Alphaville

My interest in seeing Alphaville was two-fold. It often comes up on lists of the best science fiction movies, a genre that’s been dear to me for most of my life, and it’s a Godard film. I’ve always been curious to see more of Godard’s films. Up until last night, I’d only seen Breathless, a movie that I enjoyed on a purely intellectual level. It’s been a long time, but I remember feeling that it was, basically, a movie about other movies searching for an identity of its own.

So, here’s the deal: Alphaville is a good science fiction film, but that’s not saying much considering the way the genre is often cheapened in films by a reliance on special effects and pretty lights. The story focuses on a film noir-ish secret agent who, sometime in the future, journeys to Alphaville with orders to kill an evil scientist living there. The film jettisons the standard trappings of sci-fi. Everything in the movie looks contemporary with the time the movie was made. This is an interesting choice, visually, since the landscape is so familiar, but the attitudes and structure of the society of Alphaville are not.

The whole time I was watching it, I was delighted by how the movie played with (and put the emphasis on) language. The whole movie is about the power of language: the way it shapes our worldviews, the violence found in the logic of scientific language, the illogic of poetry (and by extension, the illogic of emotion). The residents of Alphaville refer to the dictionary as The Bible (and words deemed too challenging are stripped from it on a daily basis). They are sort-of ruled by a computer, but the computer is really just an Internet-like compilation of information that makes decisions for the populace based on mathematically derived projections of how to create the greatest good for the greatest number of people. The citizens adhere to these decisions with apathetic obedience, even when other members of the population are killed for disobedience. Yeah, we’re firmly in Orwell-lite territory, but I enjoyed the way this movie sought to examine more deeply the effect of language control on the population. Godard’s random, chaotic style also makes this one of the only science fiction films (the original Solaris being another) that actually plays as strange as the otherworldly events it depicts. The film sometimes feels as if a foreign influence has infected it and it’s working hard to rid itself of the intruder, mirroring the plot.

But, having said this, Godard’s style makes watching Alphaville akin to being prodded in the ribs with a pointed stick every few minutes. Godard’s filmic digressions from the plot are rewarding when he focuses on poetry and language since these are thematically consistent, less so when the digressions are incidental to the internal concepts of the movie itself. The movie has an obnoxious score that has to be a (not funny) joke, punctuating everything in the first twenty minutes with loud, overbearing horns. There are random cutaways to blinking neon lights and other, even more contextless, meaningless insertions throughout the movie, the intentions of which I wouldn’t begin to guess. At times, the sound of the film erupts into beeps for no discernable reason. A fight scene staged in stills and a wildly cut-up car chase are as inept and misguided (and unintentionally funny) as anything in Zombi 3. There’s a mania to the film as it seesaws wildly from conventional plot mechanics to bouts of pretension.

Alphaville is a frustrating film. It’s occasionally great but often dull. I’m left, again, feeling intellectually satisfied by a lot of the movie, but angry at the idiocy with some of the choices here. What’s particularly frustrating is the fact that this incompetence gets in the way of some really fertile material. In addition, there are moments where the movie really connects with the illogic that must exist in a society founded on logic, solely due to Godard’s chaotic and ill-advised choices. Call it a wash. Anyway, I’m done thinking about this movie for a few days.

Day 19: All That Jazz

Joe Gideon: Sometimes I don't know where the bullshit ends and the truth begins.

I don’t know anything about Bob Fosse. I’ve seen the movie Chicago and a stage version of Cabaret, but that’s the extent of my knowledge of the man and his work. I rented this movie because I’d heard that it was an autobiographical film about his life and I knew it starred Roy Scheider (who will hereby be referred to as Roy (Jaws) Scheider) as Fosse. The idea of Roy (Jaws) Scheider playing an influential choreographer seemed odd, to put it mildly. I was familiar with his work from Jaws, of course, as well as The French Connection, and Sorcerer (not to mention The Curse of the Living Corpse, but that’s a story for another day). I thought this was something different for him, because I always had this association in my mind of Roy (Jaws) Scheider in roles of sweaty manliness. Well, I was wrong and kind-of stupid. Why I didn’t think the world of dancing would lead to a similar form of sweaty manliness can be attributed to several cultural blind spots that I labor to remove every day of my life.

But about the movie: All That Jazz can best be summed up by two montages that open the film. The first details the morning ritual of Joe Gideon, by all accounts Fosse’s fictional stand-in. He listens to classical music in his bathroom, takes Alka-Seltzer, showers, and pops some Dexedrine. Ready to face the day, he looks himself in the mirror and intones, “It’s showtime.” This montage is used throughout the film, and to good effect. The bathroom is unclean and disordered, gritty and real. It’s edited quickly and economically, telling us all we need to know in a matter of seconds. The second montage in the film is a tiring, endless depiction of a cattle call audition for dancers. It goes on and on, using nearly the entire length of the song “On Broadway” as the large crowd is thinned out to Gideon’s final selections. It’s fun at first, watching the crowd slowly thin, but the whole montage wears out its welcome long before it ends. The conflict between these two types of story telling goes on for the entirety of All That Jazz, up until the final moments of the film. At the end of the movie, Gideon/Fosse performs in an overlong rock-operish musical number saying goodbye to his life and then the film cuts to his lifeless body, zipped up into a body bag.

The movie has one of those confessional tones that is endearing, yet superficial. The movie cuts periodically to Gideon discussing his life and attitudes with an angelic figure in an empty theatre and he’s blatantly honest about hurting others for his own purposes. This allows Fosse/Gideon to confess his many sins to both the angel and the audience, but the movie often winks at us and says of Gideon, “He can’t help it…” or “Ain’t he a stinker!” The result is that the confessions feel like an insincere apology, nice on the surface but fundamentally empty. The movie does effectively present Gideon’s self-hatred and how it feeds off the way he’s worshiped by the people he hurts. (Jaws) Scheider shines in the role as the conflicted, womanizing director. One scene in the movie has Gideon’s girlfriend and daughter performing an awkward dance routine for him and Scheider conveys a response that is at once embarrassed (at the bad dancing) and appreciative.

And then there are the musical numbers. The numbers are well choreographed, shot and edited with flair, and have an energy to them that is hard to deny. Generally, the set pieces depict an interior state of the main character’s mind, even when they aren’t hallucinations or dream sequences, and this is smart, but most of them go on way, way too long. They interrupt the flow of the narrative and pad the movie’s running time into overlong territory. One of them, in which dancers flop about in sexual poses, peel off their clothes, and cavort around, veers terrifyingly close to the ending dance sequence in Stayin’ Alive, a land no movie should wander near. The ending number goes on for ages, repeating the same emotional beat over and over again. It was hard to sit through, especially since some of the costuming would be more at home in a deliberately campy movie like Barbarella. It’s too bad that the dance sequences outstay their welcome because they are otherwise dramatically smart and, up until the overlong point, very fun to watch.

This movie is indulgent to its core. It wants to show us the flaws of the Gideon/Fosse character, redeem him, and then kill him. It hits all the tortured artist clichés that have been with us since the first caveman couldn’t finish his wall painting. But, for all these shortcomings, it’s surprisingly good. A lot of the credit must go to Scheider, but there’s a real intelligence to the editing for about half of the movie. When Gideon wanders the hospital in a drug-induced fervor, the movie cuts in segments of a stand-up comedy monologue we’ve seen throughout the movie. The way the stand-up routine (which we’ve seen so many times that we almost know it by heart) comments on the action in front of us is clever and poetic. One scene foreshadows Gideon’s health problems with shock cuts that is as effective at conveying the premonitions of bad health as anything in memory. It’s a fascinating, layered movie, but a deeply flawed one, not unlike Fosse/Gideon himself.

Day 16: At the Circus

J. Cheever Loophole: I bet your father spent the first year of your life throwing rocks at the stork.

This is a definitely a lesser entry in the films of the Marx Brothers. The jokes are pretty stale, the plot is excruciating to sit through, and there’s a reliance on old tricks that worked better in previous movies. And yet, after sitting through Dr. Goldfoot & the Bikini Machine, it was clear that even a lesser Marx Brothers movie is still worth watching. At the Circus relies on a lot of the same tricks that Goldfoot did; it contains plenty of the same kind of mugging to the camera and contains a similar style of slapstick. But where Goldfoot felt like Carrot Top was nudging you for an hour and half and begging you to laugh, At the Circus feels more like spending time with an aging relative who is genuinely funny, but tired.

Full disclosure time! I watched this movie in about 20 minute increments as I worked on various things that needed to be done in my non-blogging life. I was also extremely tired when I watched it. I think both of these factors contributed to my liking the movie a lot more than I would have otherwise. As a straight-through 90 minute experience, I think the movie would have dragged on a lot more than I felt it did. And the second rendition of the song “Two Blind Love”, sung by the very boring non-Marx male lead, would have driven me to fits of violence.

I’d describe the plot, but it’s a Marx Brothers movie. The plot of a Marx Brothers movie is as irrelevant as the outfit a stripper wears at the beginning of its routine. Yeah, it sets the context for everything, but what lies underneath it all is what we’re here for. What matters is whether or not the three have the material they need to shine. As said, here they don’t. But there’s enough to keep one’s interest (if only in 20 minute increments). Groucho has a wonderful number in Lydia, the Tattooed Lady. The song is written with plenty of wit and staged (somewhat cheaply) with an anarchic fervor; it’s reminiscent of the musical numbers in Duck Soup. There’s a scene where Chico and Harpo search the living quarters of a strongman while he’s sleeping in them that builds nicely. By the end of this scene, after the two spend several minutes trying to be quiet (so as not to disturb the strongman), feathers from a pillow are flying around the room and Harpo is pretending to be Santa while ringing a bell. Additionally, Margaret Dumont makes a welcome appearance toward the end of the film, giving Groucho the opportunity to flaunt the high-society dame (and all the decorum she stands for) yet again. Oh, and special mention must go to this joke: After Harpo balks at going into the strongman’s room, Chico calls Harpo a coward. Harpo nods, pulls a gun out of his coat, and points it at his head.

It was somewhat depressing to watch several lengthy bits not work. There’s a scene with Chico preventing Groucho from boarding the circus train that felt like it was made up of bits that were cut from a much funnier scene from A Day at the Races and is so illogical in its placement in the film, it made the whole scene uncomfortable to watch. Groucho narrating the climax of the film (which features a gorilla and trapeze) as a sports announcer is the same joke as the one used at the end of Monkey Business with nothing any funnier added to it. Too much of the movie is taken up in adherence to the dud of a plot. This movie also continues a trend in the later Marx Brothers movies (started with A Night at the Opera) giving Groucho a sort-of Mad Max character arc, where he begins the movie caring only about himself, but he eventually starts working to help the young couple win out over adversity. This diminishes Groucho’s anarchic appeal, giving him some characters he won’t blithely insult.

But, you know, I don’t’ really care that this movie isn’t really any good. I can honestly say that no matter my mood, if I watch just a snippet of one of their movies (well, the snippets that contain at least one of the brothers [and not Zeppo]; the actors they cast as the young couples in love are always so bland as to make me prone to fits of violence) I come away feeling better. Even at their worst (Love Happy). There’s a scene in Hannah and Her Sisters in which Woody Allen, depressed to the verge of suicide, decides that life is worth living in a world where there are Marx Brothers movies. This is a sentiment I agree with wholeheartedly. I was tired while I watched this, cranky, and a little overwhelmed by the whole “movie a day” thing. I really watched this movie because I’d never seen it, it was already on my shelf, and it was short. By the end of the movie, when Margaret Dumont gets shot out of a cannon and a symphony orchestra floats out to sea, I was much happier. About pretty much everything. Take that for what you will.