A Dog's Life

A Dog’s Life; silent comedy short, USA, 1918, D: Charlie Chaplin, S: Charlie Chaplin, Edna Purviance, Syd Chaplin  

The Tramp is homeless, sleeping outside, and is unable to find a job at the unemployment office, but still intervenes to save a stray dog, Scraps, from other dogs attacking it. The Tramp and the dog go to a night club and befriend a girl singer. Scraps finds a buried wallet with stolen money in it, hidden by two gangsters who assault the Tramp to get the money back, but the Tramp outsmarts them. The Tramp uses the money to buy a farm and live there with the girl and Scraps.  

One of Charlie Chaplin’s early comedy shorts, this is a light, a little bit overstretched, but overall still effervescent and charming little film, here with a sympathetic dog as Chaplin’s sidekick. Chaplin’s childhood was marked by poverty, and it is remarkable how far-reaching of an impact it left on his film opus: even here, Chaplin satirizes the incompetent society full of unemployment, economic mismanagement and social inequality that plague and disrupt people’s lives even today—in one actual moment, the nightclub owner orders the girl singer to stand there and attract cutsomers ("If you smile and wink, they'll buy a drink"), a bitting commentary on trying to squeeze money from people at every turn. The Tramp is a symbol for the lower class struggling to survive, and finds optimism even in these bleak circumstances. Some jokes work better, some less (the corny gag of Chaplin hiding the dog in his pants to enter a nightclub), yet the best joke truly is a brilliant highlight: after they stole his money, two thugs sit at a table in a room to divide the spoils, but the Tramp sneaks behind one thug behind the curtain, knocks the villain unconscious and then Tramp’s hands emerge under the thugs’s jacket, feigning they are the thug’s hands, so that the Tramp can take half of the money the other thug gives him. Truly an inspired comic idea, which was later copied in numerous movies or TV shows—even in one episode of “Drake & Josh", where one of them stands on the stage, while the other’s hands emerge behind the curtain to play a guitar instead of him. The dog is underused, but overall the movie has just enough creativity to help upgrade Chaplin’s ideas to the next stage.  

Grade:++

Pickpocket

Pickpocket; crime drama, France, 1959; D: Robert Bresson, S: Martin LaSalle, Marika Green, Jean Pelegri, Pierre Leymarie

Paris. Michel is a lad who enjoys stealing wallets from passerby. He is arrested by a police chief, but since Michel only had money with him, it cannot be undeniably established that it belonged to a woman he robbed, so he is released from custody. Michel meets a girl, Jeanne, who takes care of his infirm mother, and gives her some money. Michel joins a gang of professional pickpockets who teach him the art of stealing: in a bank, on the street, at a bus station, in a train... When Michel's mother dies and the police break the gang ring, Michel leaves his apartment and hides in London for two years. When he returns, he is surprised to find that Jeanne is now taking care of a baby all by herself, which she had with their friend Jacques. Michel decides to support them. He wants to steal money from a man's jacket, but the latter turns out to be a cop who arrests him. In prison, Jeanne and Michel admit they love each other.

One of Robert Bresson's most critically recognized films, "Pickpocket" is a much more intruiging film in his opus due to its theme of pickpockets, yet the director still stubbornly presents the story in his minimalist, ascetic and deliberately de-dramatized edition, which might turn off a part of the audience. Loosely based on Dostoyevsky's novel "Crime and Punishment", but also Camus' "The Stranger", "Pickpocket" is a contemplation on one of the Ten Commandments, "Thou shalt not steal", and its effects on the life of the anti-hero Michel: he could find a job and make a decent living, but he has some sort of a nihilist contempt towards the modern society which he channels in a misguided rebellion in the form of stealing wallets from people; and yet, on the other hand, he avoids seeing his sick mother, probably out of shame of becoming a criminal and disappointing her idealistic vision of him. At one point in the film, he even says: "I believed in God... For about three minutes." Unlike De Sica's "Bicycle Thieves", Bresson here does not show a clear reason for Michel turning to stealing, as if the lad simply is the way he is, though he does hint that Michel feels superior to everyone else when he talks to the police chief and asks if certain special people should be allowed to get away with crimes. 

The highlights are the highly focused, almost obssesive looking pickpocket sequences, filmed almost entirely without any sound and choreographed like a good ballet—in the first one, Michel conveniently sneaks up behind a woman's back and just stands there, ostensibly watching the horse race, while another gentleman is standing right next to him, observing the track with binoculars. The camera just lingers for almost a minute on Michel, motionlessly standing there, until he makes his move, like a predator, to slowly, carefully open the woman's purse and take the money away from it. It is a highly absorbing moment, and works flawlessly. Other pickpocket sequences, on the other hand, feel too naive and too fake to truly seem realistic—for instance, wouldn't a man notice when Michel steals a wallet from his jacket when the latter placed a newspaper on the man's chest in a subway train, and then folded it on him? Equally of a stretch are other pickpocket scenes, like when a man passes through a train corridor and the robbers take his wallet from the room department; Michel stopping in the middle of the street, grabbing a gentleman by his wrist and pulling him away from an incoming car (how did he know a car was not going to stop?) so that he won't notice he stole his wrist watch; or the moment where a woman wants to put her purse under her armpit, but the pickpockets just put a newspaper under her arm and take away the purse behind her back, handing it to each other. The third act makes for a character arc in which Michel stops selfishly thinking only about himself and starts caring about Jeanne and her baby, causing a transformation and Bresson's "redemption trademark" congruent to the director's Christian themes. For all of his questionable choices—including actors stripped of any kind of emotion or passion; a 'raw' style—Bresson would often compensate in his meditation on spiritual beings trapped in a cruel material world that forces them to suffer until they reach their own nirvana.

Grade:+++

Beat the Devil

Beat the Devil; crime comedy, USA, 1953, D: John Huston, S: Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Gina Lollobrigida, Robert Morley, Edward Underdown, Peter Lorre  

The Mediterranean coast. Billy reluctantly works with scoundrel Peterson and his three henchmen who all want to take a ship to British East Africa to get land rich with uranium, which they later want to smuggle and become rich. While waiting for their ship, Billy meets British couple Gwendolen and Harry and becomes their friend. As she falls in love with him, Gwendolen brags that Harry bought uranium-rich land, which attracts the attention of Peterson and his gang. On a ship, they try to kill Harry, but Billy saves him. The ship sinks and the passengers land in Africa, where they are arrested. Gwendolen tells the police about the uranium ploy, and thus Peterson is arrested. Harry sends a letter saying he bought the uranium-rich land.  

A peculiar film exercise for director John Huston, which Roger Ebert even included in his Great Movies list, “Beat the Devil” is a fun, albeit uneven achievement since Huston has no sense for comedy, playing out almost as if a man educated in classic Waltz all of a sudden decided to dance hip-hop. It is almost Huston’s own “The Big Lebowski” by the sheer amount of deliberate narrative mess found in it. The meandering story is just an excuse for these characters to interact, never establishing a clear structure or dedication to some messages about colonial exploitation of Africa, and thus its episodes and the ending feel arbitrary, not as harmonious as some of Humphrey Bogart’s best films, yet it is overall a satisfying last cooperation of his with Huston and Peter Lorre. Some of the snappy dialogues are of sizzling quality, since they were augmented by writer Truman Capote, and thus the viewers should hear them. One of them is O’Hara’s philosophical monologue: “What is time? Swiss manufacture it. French hoard it. Italians squander it. Americans say it’s money. Hindus say it does not exist. I say time is a crook!” In another one, Billy is direct when confronting Peterson about the latter’s shady business: “You don’t care what my opinion is, as long as I don’t do anything about it!” The subplots come and go, and it is almost as if every of the three locations (the Italian port; the ship on the sea; Africa) turns into a different film of its own, but that may also be a part of the reason of its charm. “Beat the Devil” is an almost ‘hippie’ type of comical movie where the authors wanted to just let go and do whatever pops into their head.  

Grade:++

Hoosiers

Hoosiers; sports drama, USA, 1986, D: David Anspaugh, S: Gene Hackman, Barbara Hershey, Maris Valainis, David Neidorf, Brad Long, Steve Hollar, Dennis Hopper  

Norman arrives to the small town of Hickory, Indiana, to work as the basketball coach in a high school, upon the invitation of the principal and his old friend. Norman falls in love with a fellow teacher, Myrna. He is rejected by the seven-member team for his unorthodox methods, among others because he refuses to rely on the arrogant star-player Jimmy who left the team, but slowly gets their appreciation. They don’t perform well, so they get help from the alcoholic Shooter as the associate coach. They win the championship in the end.  

“Hoosiers” is a good little film, albeit with a limited appeal: it will be more interesting to sports fans, less so to the cineasts who are indifferent towards basketball. It has a warm, wonderful musical score that gives it a sweet melancholy, but its main highlight is the seemingly always excellent leading actor Gene Hackman, who gives another charming and charismatic performance as the coach Norman, a man with dignity even when things are not going according to his plan. In one notable moment, the six-member team is introduced to the audience in a gym, but the crowd wants to see Jimmy, the main star who quit the team, and thus just chants his name. Norman then steps in and says this on the microphone: “I would hope you would support who we are, not who we are not.” In another, when a player is on his knees, praying during the game, Norman walks up to him and says: “Strap, God wants you on the floor.” Some of the players take after him: “Let’s win this game for all the small schools that never got the chance to get here.” Dennis Hopper was praised as the alcoholic associate coach Shooter, yet few of his scenes stand out, and he generally stays in Hackman’s shadow. The ending is predictable, whereas the running time is overlong, yet there is a certain positive energy in the story that makes it work. But it is still clearly overall a level below the very similar, much more inspired “Breaking Away”.  

Grade:++

Ready Player One

Ready Player One; science-fiction adventure, USA, 2018; D: Steven Spielberg, S: Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, Lena Waithe, T.J. Miller, Mark Rylance, Simon Pegg, Philip Zhao 

In the future, people spend all their time playing VR first-person video games in the platform called OASIS, created by the late Halliday who promised ownership of the platform to anyone who can find three Easter eggs. Nobody had any luck, until teenager Wade Watts, using the avatar Parzival, drove backwards with his car and found the first key. He is persecuted by Nolan, the CEO of IOI who wants to take over OASIS. Teaming up with Samantha, Helen, Zhou and Toshiro, Wade is able to find the last key and take over OASIS, while Nolan is arrested by the police.  

“Ready Player One” is an example of modern “excessive cinema” in which the viewers are bombarded with hyper-CGI and scenes, almost as if the public is treated that they have ADHD, and it is only thanks to the skills of classic director Steven Spielberg that he is able to keep this somewhat grounded, by actually telling a more-or-less coherent story. As an unwritten rule goes, scenes of video games are not that cinematic, and since almost 3/4 of the film plays out in this VR format, it inevitably becomes exhausting and oversaturated. Spielberg was able to secure rights for numerous movies and TV shows, and thus the film abounds with over a hundred movie references (“Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”, “The Iron Giant”, “Back to the Future”, “Jurassic Park”...), while Spielberg again showed that he still has some sense for further innovation in the overwhelmingly genius metafilm sequence where the avatars of the characters find themselves inside one Kubrick movie, with new scenes that almost seem as if they expand said movie and give it new angles. The stakes of the story are unfortunately weak: two sides are competing for the ownership of the video game platform, but if the worst thing that would happen in case the “bad guy” Nolan wins is that there would be adds, then what’s all the fuss about? It simply is too trivial to root for the hero Wade as if he is saving the world. Too much techno-overkill, too little emotions, though Spielberg does give a neat secret message at the end in which the old Halliday admits that spending your entire existence on video games is a waste of a life when he says that only reality is real.   

Grade:++

The Entity

The Entity; psychological thriller / horror, USA, 1982, D: Sidney J. Furie, S: Barbara Hershey, Ron Silver, David Labiosa, Margaret Blye  

Carla is a normal woman living with her two little daughters and a teenage son after her husband died. One evening, something grabs Carla in her bed and puts a pillow on her face, so she leaves with her kids, fearing that a burglar attacked her. However, it is an invisible ghost, an entity that keeps harassing and violently attacking her in the house, even raping her in the bathroom. Carla seeks help from psychiatrist, but nobody believes her. Finally, two parapsychologists go to her house and take photos of a blue beam of light on the ceiling. They make a replica of her house in their laboratory and try to capture the ghost in liquid hydrogen. The ice breaks, though, and Carla hears the voice of the entity at her home, but continues living her life.  

One of the most disturbing movies of the 20th century, “The Entity” was briefly shown in cinemas during its premiere, but was so unsettling that it was later on rarely shown on TV, since many female viewers were simply too traumatized by its concept of a ghost rapist. Having a human villain is awful, but at least comprehensible; a monster as a villain is much more disturbing—but an invisible ghost that can strike anytime, anywhere, and one cannot know what it wants, that is intolerable. It is a meditation on the human fear of helplessness, done through the allegory of society ‘silencing the victim’ to suppress the uncomfortable truth: the heroine Carla (an effective Barbara Hershey) is a victim of rape of a higher power, but nobody believes her, or they tell her that it never happened. This phenomenon happens when some people are afraid of some higher power, and thus ignore or whitewash its crimes out of fear. Also worth noting is that at one point in the film it is mentioned that Carla was sexually abused as a child by her father, and thus the entity might be her father’s ghost, a symbolic stigma of the bad memories plaguing her. An alternative interpretation of the story could be the human fear of unexpected, sudden health problems—seizures, a stroke, a heart attack—from which there is no adequate cure. 

In one of the most frightening sequences, Carla goes to take a bath, when the entity attacks her, and puts the shower curtain over her head. In another one, her boyfriend shows up at her home and gives her a present, and he then goes to refresh himself in the bathroom, brushing his teeth and putting some mouth spray, but as he opens the door of the bedroom, he spots Carla lying naked on bed, screaming for help, while the invisible entity is squeezing her breasts, shown only as lumps on her chest. This even goes so far that the entity pushes the gas pedal while she was waiting in her car at a red traffic light. Unfortunately, the writing of the film is limited, since the dialogue is banal and routine, while the characters are one-dimensional (the psychiatrist, for instance, has only one feature: he doesn’t believe Carla no matter what; teenager Billy is just confused all the time); the one-note “heavy pounding truck” score is effective at first, but cannot carry the same old tune for all of the six attacks throughout the story, making it repetitive; whereas the open ending is unsatisfactory, though it did offer a fascinating little forerunner to “Ghostbusters”, since the parapsychologists try to capture the ghost. Not as scary as much as it is haunting, “The Entity” is a weird hard-core horror in its concept, yet still seems serviceable today.   

Grade:++

The Great Escape

The Great Escape; war drama, USA, 1963; D: John Sturges, S: Steve McQueen, James Garner, James Donald, John Leyton, Hannes Messemer, Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson, Donald Pleasence, James Coburn, David McCallum

World War II. Stalag Luft III is a special POW camp in Upper Silesia run by the German forces, established to keep all the highly skilled escape artists at one place for maximum security, mostly British and American officers. Among them is Captain Hilts, who provokes the guards and lands in a solitary confinement on his first day. In the meantime, British officers Roger and Ramsey start a plan of digging three tunnels under their barracks, hoping to free all 250 inmates and send them into the nearby forest. When the German officers discover one of their tunnels, the inmates rush to complete the second tunnel. Even though the tunnel is 20 yards too short of the forest, 76 still manage to escape during the night, before the prison guards start a search party. Hendley leads the almost blind Blythe on a plane to try to fly to the Swiss territory, but they carsh. The German soldiers capture and shoot 50 of the escaped convicts. Hilts is returned back to the camp alive.

One of the most popular war movies of the 60s, excellent "The Great Escape" by the sometimes surprisingly versatile director John Sturges ("Bad Day at Black Rock", "The Magnificent Seven") is an unusually optimistic and upbeat story despite its nominally depressive topic of inmates trapped in a POW camp, a one which holds up even today. Kudos goes to the director's eye for details, since almost every little scene plays a role later on in the story, as well as a wide range of interesting characters, many of which have a great sense of humor: in one sequence, the inmates quickly hide the tunnel on the ground, while the digger Welinski (Charles Bronson) conveniently rushes to the shower, to clean away any signs of dirt on him—when the prison guard asks what they are doing, Welinski just goes: "Shower. I need a wash!", whereas Sedgwick, who is observing Welinski, says: "I'm watching him. I'm a lifeguard." Numerous ideas and solutions are innventive, such as when the inmates carry a rope from one side of the tunnel until its end, to measure how long it is, or when they have a problem of how to get rid of all the ground from the tunnel, since they put it on the table to compare it with the yellow ground of their compound, realizing that the tunnel dirt is much darker and is thus visible if they just throw it outside. All this is directed with a lot of passion, displaying the ingenuity of the inmates in order to find ways to escape. While the film's music theme is kind of naive and too cheerful, it is still highly memorable, nontheless. Among the flaws are the lack of an emotional engagement of the characters, whereas the film loses a lot of its energy in the last third when some inmates escape and roam the trains and cities, which is simply not that suspenseful nor inspired. Despite a tragic ending, it is almost as if Sturges sends a message that trying to achieve one's freedom or a dream of a better life is never a waste of time, regardless of the outcome, creating a movie monument to these people. 

Grade:+++