Cinema Paradiso, and a few more films

Children of Men (2007)

Set in the near future, there are no children in this movie, because an unspecified but perfectly plausible plague has rendered the entire human race barren. How would humanity react, when there's no future for the species?

That's a question that feels increasingly pertinent these days, and the movie answers with terrorism and totalitarianism, in the guise of 'anti-immigrant' enforcement. Crazies are everywhere — "Infertility is God's punishment" and all — so there are a million gunshots, and the ever-present threat of more gunfire.

Senseless violence seems about what you'd expect if the story were true, so it makes sense, and for a flourish Michael Caine wears a preposterous hippie wig.

"A hundred years from now there won't be one sad fuck to look at any of this. What keeps you going?"

NEVERENDING
FILM FESTIVAL
#249  [archive]
FEB. 29, 2024

"I just don't think about it."

It's a very watchable drama, by turns thrilling and sad and exhilarating, but there's surprisingly little to think about afterwards. It's a cautionary tale, without telling us what to be cautious of.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦ 

Chilly Scenes of Winter (1982)

Streaming free at YouTube

Charles (John Heard) is a successful low-management bureaucrat, who meets and immediately falls for Laura (Mary Beth Hurt), working in an adjacent department at the same office. They spark with flirtatious dialogue, but she's hesitant and he's insistent about taking her out. He's insistent about everything, to a level that goes beyond romantic comedy, and made me uncomfortable.

They continue intermittently sparking, but Laura has insecurities, and the more Charles tells her how terrific she is, the more she has doubts: "We go to movies and you say I look better than the movie stars. We go to the best restaurant in town and you say I'm a better cook than the chef. You have this exalted view of me, and I hate it. If you think I'm that great, there must be something wrong with you."

That's a believable response, and these are realistic characters. I've known some ladies like Laura, and men like Charles, who can't take no for an answer.

Laura's been separated, but eventually goes back to her husband — and still, Charles never lets up. He drives to wherever he thinks she'll be, just to watch her from his car. He introduces himself to her husband under false pretenses, and comes to their house. He puts moves on her in her kitchen, tells her husband he's in love with her, and laughs about all this on his way out. This guy needs a restraining-order by the second act. 

Gloria Grahame plays Charles' mom, owns every scene she's in, and I wish the movie had more of her. Most of the other supporting characters are eccentric, which always helps. 

The internet tells me this movie was originally released as Head Over Heels, with a different opening and ending. Can't judge that, but Chilly Scenes is a pretty good movie — if you can get past its treatment of Charles as charming and romantic, not nuts.

I couldn't get past it. I wanted Laura to brain him with a frying pan, and if she had, I'd give it a thumbs up. But she didn't.

Verdict: MAYBE.

♦ ♦ ♦ 

Chimes at Midnight (1965)
a/k/a Falstaff

Streaming free at Internet Archive

Orson Welles was fascinated with Falstaff, a character who appears in several of Shakespeare's plays, so he stitched this flick together from olde Will's famous works, making the supporting character of Falstaff into the leading man. The dialogue is verbatim, but it's Shakespeare once removed.

It's a loud and frequently boisterous production, but as always with Shakespeare, difficult to follow. The plot kept losing me, and through the first hour, I consulted Wikipedia's summary of the storyline every twenty minutes or so, trying to keep up with all the fancy talkers.

Briefly, there's a fat old heavy-drinking man named Sir John Falstaff, and he's buddies with Prince Hal, who eventually becomes one of England's fleet of King Henrys — V, I think.

Welles wears a fake nose and heavy beard, looks very much like Santa and goes "Ho ho ho" a lot. He's a loudly sarcastic joker, and his performance makes the stale prose come alive. In a smaller role, Margaret Rutherford is fun, because like Welles she always owns the screen. Lots of the performances, especially in smaller roles, are amped up to hold the audience's interest, with actors sometimes speaking over each other, and loud or fast or with exaggerated accents. This keeps things lively, although it makes long stretches of the flick sound like funny voices in a sketch comedy show. Amusing insults are handed out often and enthusiastically, and the longer, more philosophical passages are recited like poetry, as required by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and centuries of thespian tradition. 

The camerawork is stellar, the battle scenes are bloody excellent, and Welles is irresistible as Falstaff — even though he's a knight palling around with a prince, so the story is entirely about the kind of people who order my kind of people around. 

Chimes at Midnight might be the best Shakespeare film I've seen, and I've seen most of them, but this will be the last. I listen, try to follow along, but thousands of thees and thous and other archaic words bounce off my ears, and I'm weary of being cheated out of 20% of a movie. It's especially annoying when it's a good movie.

400+ years have passed, English has evolved and left the Bard of Avon behind, but his works are still presented in what's now a dead language. I'm not required to read The Odyssey in ancient Greek, and if I watch Seven Samurai there are subtitles in English, so show me some Shakespeare in the language I speak.

"A good sherris sack hath a two-fold operation in it. It ascends me into the brain and dries me there all the foolish, dull and curdy vapors which environ it; makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble fiery and delectable shapes, which, delivered o'er to the voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit. The second property of your excellent sherris is, the warming of the blood. The sherris warms it and makes it course from the inwards to the parts extreme."

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦ 

Chinatown (1974)

Los Angeles in the 1940s is thirsty, and needs a new dam. That'll cost big money, though, and where there's big money there's big corruption.

Jake Gittes seems like an unlikely guy to unravel such a sprawling scheme — he's a private eye who's made his reputation by spying on philandering husbands. Hired to investigate yet another cheating spouse, he follows the clues. The mystery winds and turns and wanders, from farmers who don't have enough water to rich folks who have lush lawns with ponds and fountains.

Chinatown is nearly flawless, with a complex story that fall plausibly into place after red herrings and fist-fights and the famous slicing of Gittes' nose. The look and feel of it is old-time film noir, but in color and with cuss words. The ending is appropriately bleak, with no sign of good government on the horizon. 

Closest I can come to a complaint is that in movies made in the 1940s, Los Angeles was usually pronounced with a hard g, not the more modern soft g.

The cast: Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston, John Hillerman, Burt Young, Diane Ladd, Rance Howard. Written by Robert Towne, music by Jerry Goldsmith, directed by Roman Polanski.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦ 

Chris Packham: Is It Time to Break the Law? (2023)

Streaming free at YouTube

If you're wondering why Chris Packham gets his name in the title, it's because he's a big name in British ecology and climate activism. Me not being British, I'm not sure I'd ever heard of him before this one-hour TV special from the UK's Channel 4, wherein he wonders whether, after generations with no meaningful governmental response to climate change, it's justifiable to violate the law.

He talks with Andreas Malm, author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, and of course Greta Thunberg, as well as some British turd politician who calls himself a "global lukewarmist" and thinks everything's fine. 

It's more common sensical than 'radical', but nothing half as bold would be allowed on American TV. I'll break my 'no spoiler' rule and tell you Packham's answer to his own question:

"If you're an activist that's already made a decision that, yes, you're going to break the law, so long as no-one is hurt, and there's no lasting environmental damage, then you'll have my support. Personally, I think I've reached a point where I now consider it the ethically responsible thing to do."

Well, yeah. That answer seems obvious, even without the TV special.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦ 

Cinema Paradiso (1988)
a/k/a Nuovo Cinema Paradiso

"Life is not what you see in films. Life is much harder."

How could this not be a favorite film for anyone who loves movies, especially movies in theaters? It's an epic poem to the cinema. 

Salvatore, nicknamed Toto, is a boy in a small Sicilian village during World War II. There's only one theater, and he sneaks in as often as he can. The projectionist (Philippe Noiret) is a lovable old duff who tries to shoo Toto away when he wanders into the booth, but the kid's relentlessly cute and cannot be shooed. They both love movies, like me and maybe you.

There's more to it, of course — a plot and all, with laughs and loves and kissy-kissy, people you'll care about going through events that matter in their lives. Really, though, this movie is about the movies. When photography and projection and the shared audience experience in a crowded theater are mixed together just right, it's indistinguishable from magic.

Ennio Morricone's score is such a match of movie and music, it had me crying with the first notes, even before the opening credits. Of course, that's because I'd seen this movie a dozen times before, and knew what was coming.

"Whatever you end up doing, love it, the way you loved the projection booth when you were a little boy."

Written and directed by Giuseppe Tornatore, Cinema Paradiso has no stars Americans would know, and you'll have to read subtitles. It's manipulative, inarguably corny, blubberingly sentimental, and contains nothing to offend anyone, but God, I love it. Bring a big box of Kleenex.

Verdict: BIG YES.

To squeeze in more screenings and make more money, the studio severely shortened Cinema Paradiso on release. The full version, the one you want to watch, is two hours and 53 minutes. 

 2/29/2024  

• • • Coming attractions • • •      

Cocoon (1985)
The Company of Wolves (1984)
Compliance (2012)
Cornbread, Earl, and Me (1975)

 ... plus schlock and surprises

There are so many good movies out there — old movies, odd or artsy, foreign or forgotten movies, or do-it-yourself movies made just for the joy of making them — that if you only watch whatever's on Netflix or playing at the twenty-plex, you're missing out.

To get beyond the ordinary, I recommend:

Alter • Cineverse • Criterion • CultCinema Classics • DocsVille • Dust • Fandor • Films for Action • Hoopla • IHaveNoTV • IndieFlix • Internet Archive • Kanopy • KinoCult • Kino Lorber • Korean Classic Film • Christopher R Mihm • Mosfilm • Mubi • National Film Board of Canada • New Yorker Screening Room • Damon Packard • Mark Pirro • PizzaFlix • PopcornFlix • Public Domain Movies • RareFilmm • Scarecrow Video • Shudder • ThoughtMaybe • Timeless Classic Movies • VoleFlix • WatchDocumentaries • or your local library. 

Some people even access films through shady methods, though of course, that would be wrong.

— — —

Illustration by Jeff Meyer. Reviews are spoiler-free, or at least spoiler-warned. Click any image to enlarge. Arguments & recommendations are welcome, but no talking once the lights dim, and only real butter on the popcorn, not that fake yellow stuff. 

 

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