La Dolce Vita

La Dolce Vita (1960) dir. Federico Fellini
Starring: Marcello Mastroianni, Yvonne Furneaux, Anouk Aimee, Anita Ekberg, Alain Cuny, Walter Santesso, Magali Noel, Annibale Ninchi, Nico, Valeria Ciangottini, Alain Dijon and Lex Barker.

****

By Greg Klymkiw

It has been said that in death we all end up alone.

If we are alone in life, bereft of love, is existence itself then, not a living death?

For me, this is the central theme of La Dolce Vita, Federico Fellini’s great classic of cinema – a film that never ceases to thrill, tantalize and finally, force its audience to look deep into a mirror and search for answers to questions about themselves. This is what makes for great movies that live beyond the ephemeral qualities far too many filmmakers and audiences prefer to settle for - especially in the current Dark Ages of cinema we find ourselves in. It’s the reason why the picture continues to live forever.

What makes La Dolce Vita especially great is that Fellini – as he was so often able to achieve – got to have his cake and eat it too. He created art that entertained AND challenged audiences the world over.

On its surface, La Dolce Vita is cool – cooler than cool, to be frank.

The title, translated from Italian into English means "The Good Life", or more appropriately, “The Sweet Life”. The movie plunges us headlong into a spectacular, decadent world of sex, sin and indulgence of the highest order. Against the backdrop of a swinging post-war Rome, the picture works its considerable magic beyond those surface details and Fellini delivers yet another magnificent entertainment that explores the eternal divide between men and women.

My poor daughter; she’s only ten years old and her Daddy has been showing her more Fellini movies than any ten year old has probably ever seen anytime, anywhere on God's good, green Earth. About halfway through La Dolce Vita – after an umpteenth sequence where Marcello Mastroianni indulges himself in the charms of yet another woman whilst his faithful girlfriend waits home alone by the phone, my daughter (who recently watched I Vitelloni, that great Fellini male layabout picture) turned to me with the sweetest straight face I will always remember and she said, “Dad, when I get older, remind me never to date Italian men.” I reminded her it wasn’t only Italian men who behaved this way. After all, had she not also recently seen Barry Levinson’s Diner? “Okay,” she added, “remind me not to date American men either.”

For those from Mars (and/or anyone who has NOT seen this movie), La Dolce Vita tells the episodic tale of Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni), a journalist in Rome who covers the society and entertainment beat of a major tabloid newspaper. He spends most of his days and (especially) nights, hanging out in clubs, restaurants, cafes, piazzas and parties covering the lives of the rich and famous with his trusty photographer sidekick Paparazzo (Walter Santesso). (The word paparazzi, used to describe annoying news photographers came from the name of this character.)

Downright ignoring and/or paying lip service to his beautiful, sexy long-suffering live-in girlfriend Emma (Yvonne Furneaux) whilst dallying with an endless parade of gorgeous women he’s writing about, Marcello is as much a celebrity as those he covers. Though he lacks the wealth his subjects are endowed with, he certainly wields considerable power.

It would seem that Marcello is living the sweet life to its fullest – at least on the surface.

It is, of course, the surface details of La Dolce Vita - both its cinematic style and content - that made it one of the biggest Italian films at the box office worldwide.

Of course, though, what audience would NOT be susceptible to the stunning form of one of the picture's ravishing stars, Anita Ekberg? As Sylvia, the Swedish screen sensation visiting Rome to make a movie, Ekberg squeezes her to-die-for curves into a series of fashionable outfits. Ekberg is style personified. From her spectacular entrance from within a private jet, posing willingly for hordes of slavering reporters to her gossamer movements round a huge luxury suite as she throws out delicious quips during a press conference and then, to her lithe, gazelle-like bounding up the endless St. Peter’s staircase until she and Marcello, who follows her avidly to the balcony, enjoy a quiet, magical, romantic interlude, perched in a holy nest towering above the Vatican.

It is the Ekberg sequences that everyone most remembers – possibly because they appear so early in the film and serve as the most sumptuously sexy introduction to Marcello’s world.

Granted, prior to Ekberg’s entrance we’re treated to the famous opening sequence of Jesus Christ in statue form being airlifted into Rome on a helicopter as Marcello and Paparazzo follow closely behind in their own whirlybird, snapping photos and hovering briefly over a bevy of bikini-clad beauties to try and get their phone numbers.

Following closely behind, we’re indulged with the ravishing beauty of Anouk Aimee as Maddalena, the bored heiress who whisks Marcello away from a nightclub, drives him through the streets of Rome in her swanky Cadillac, picks up a street whore, hires her to provide a dank, sleazy, water-flooded basement suite – a sordid love-nest, if you will, for a night of lovemaking with Marcello whilst the whore waits outside for the rest of the night - arguing with her pimp about how much room rent to charge the kinky couple.

To cap off the shenanigans we're further tantalized by Marcello’s gorgeous, heart-broken Earth Mother girlfriend Emma, writhing about from a dangerous overdose whereupon our duplicitous hero races her madly to the hospital professing his love to her all the way into the recovery room until he steps out to telephone Maddalena.

These stunning episodes not only provide insight into Marcello’s stylish rakishness, but also careen us to and fro within a veritable roller coaster ride of pure, unadulterated hedonism.

There’s no two ways about it, Marcello’s a cad, but we love him.

And seemingly, so does everyone.

By the time we get to the aforementioned Anita Ekberg sequences, it’s as if Fellini had structured the movie to luxuriate us in ever-more potent fixes of pure speed-ball-like abandon:

Jesus flying above Rome; screw it, not enough.

Gorgeous heiress banging our hero in a whore’s sleazy digs; nope, still not enough.

Lonely sex kitten girlfriend pumped on drugs and near death; uh, yeah, we still need more.

What act could possibly follow any of this?

Anita Ekberg, of course.

Fellini ups the ante on overindulgence to such a degree, that as an audience, we’re as hyped up as Marcello and those who populate this world.

As if this wasn’t enough, Fellini manages to get Ekberg to out-Ekberg Ekberg with MORE Ekberg. From airport to press conference to the Everest of Rome above the Vatican, he plunges us from the clouds of Heaven deep into the bowels of a party within the ancient walls of the Caracalla Baths. Here Marcello gets to dance arms around waist, cheek-to-cheek and chest to breast with La Ekberg until all Hell breaks magnificently loose with the arrival of the flamboyant Mephistophelean actor Frankie Stout (Alain Dijon). Marcello is banished to a table with Ekberg’s sloshed, thickheaded beefcake boyfriend Robert (played hilariously by the genuine B-movie idol Lex Barker, RKO’s Tarzan and star of numerous Euro-trash action pictures) while Frankie and Ekberg heat up the floor with a cha-cha to end all cha-chas.

Fellini continues topping himself. The next sequence of Ekberg-mania is cinema that has seldom been matched.

Can there be anything more sumptuous and breathtaking in Rome, nay – the world – than the Fountain of Trevi?

Yes, the Fountain of Trevi with Anita Ekberg in it.

I can assure you this beats any wet T-shirt contest you're likely to see.

As Fellini has incrementally hoisted us to dizzying heights, we are only one-third of the way through La Dolce Vita .

Where can the Maestro possibly take us from here?

We go where all tales of indulgence must go – down WITH redemption or down with NO redemption. Fellini forces us to hope (at times AGAINST hope) that Marcello will see the light or, at the very least, blow it big time and gain from his loss.

What we come back to is what I feel the central theme of our picture is – that if living life to the fullest is at the expense of love and to therefore live life alone, then how can life itself not ultimately be a living death?

For me, one of the fascinating ways in which Fellini tells Marcello’s story is by allowing us to fill the central character’s shoes and experience the seeming joy and style of this “sweet life”. For much of the film’s running time, we’re along for the ride – not just willingly, but as vicarious participants.

The magic Fellini conjures is subtle indeed. The whole business of getting the cake and eating it too plays a huge part in the proceedings. So often, great stories can work by indulging us in aberrant behaviour – glamorizing it to such a degree that we’re initially unable to see precisely what the protagonist’s real dilemma is. Not seeing the dilemma in the early going allows us to have some fun with the very thing that threatens to be the central character's potential downfall.

For Marcello, it eventually becomes – slowly and carefully – very obvious. He is surrounded by activity, enveloped by other people, the centre of attention of those he is reporting on, yet he is, in a sense, an island unto himself.

Marcello is, in spite of those around him, truly alone.

His real challenge is to break free of the shackles of excess in order to love. Alas, to love another and, in turn, accept their love, he must learn to love himself. On the mere surface, Marcello is all about self-gratification, but as the story progresses and Fellini places him at the centre of yet more sumptuous and indulgent sweet-life set pieces, we see a man struggling with the demons – not only of excess, but those ever-elusive opportunities to gratify the soul.

Even the roller coaster ride of Marcello’s relationship with Emma, the one constant person in his life willing to die for love of him, is a story element that keeps us with his journey. When he is annoyed and/or even disgusted with her, so too are we – and yet, we have the ability – one that Fellini bestows upon us by alternately keeping us in Marcello’s perspective and at arm’s length from it to see just how unconscionable and even wrongheaded he’s being. Most importantly, we begin to feel for Emma and understand her love and frustration. We see how brilliant and charming Marcello is also and a part of us craves for him to find peace.

Finally, what is especially poignant and tragic is that Marcello can only admit to both Emma and himself that he does love her when he is alone (or as in one great scene - seemingly alone) with her. Strangely, these are the few times in the movie when Marcello is truly NOT alone.

When Marcello is together with Emma in the presence of others, it's a different story altogether. When he brings her along to cover a Madonna-sighting which turns into a wild carnival of Catholic hysteria, he withdraws from Emma and she finds herself caught up in the craze of this "miracle". The miracle is, however, false. The two young children who have been put up to claiming they can see the Madonna by their fortune-seeking family, run to and fro - hundreds of the faithful following madly in their footsteps - even Emma, who begs God for Marcello to be with her exclusively and forever.

When Marcello seeks solace in his old friend Steiner (Alain Cuny) a man who has filled his own life with art, literature, culture and most importantly, a sense of home and family, Marcello sees a potential way of escape. Alas, further set pieces involving Steiner dash Marcello’s hopes.

During a vicious argument that eventually ensues between Marcello and Emma, Fellini once again proves that – in spite of his excesses as a stylist – he is ultimately a filmmaker endowed with considerable humanity. Though the bile rises and invective is hurled violently from both parties, we are placed squarely in front of humanity at its most raw and vulnerable.

The final sequences in this film are laden with excess, but they’re certainly no fun anymore. Nor is Marcello. After a pathetic failed attempt at instigating an orgy amongst an especially ragtag group of drunks (climaxing with Marcello riding on a woman's back horsey-style), the party goers (included here is a cameo from the iconic rock legend Nico) stumble out in the early morning onto the beach.

Caught in the nets of some fishermen is a dead sea creature - a strange cross between a stingray and coelacanth, its eyes still open and staring blankly into the heavens. It's the first of two images Marcello encounters on the beach which he bores his own gaze into.

This one is dead - surrounded by many, but finally, ultimately and unequivocally alone.

He then encounters, from a considerable distance across the sand and water, the angelic figure of Paola (Valeria Ciangottini), a pure, youthful young lady he met much earlier in the film - one of the few times when beauty and innocence seemed to touch him far deeper than surface fleshly desires. They look at each other - as if they can see into each others' eyes. The stunningly beautiful young woman, with her enigmatic smile, tries in vain to communicate with Marcello, but the wind drowns out her words and Marcello, his eyes at first bright, turn blank like the dead leviathan. He gives up, turns and joins his coterie of losers.

There is, however, hope in Paola's eyes - perhaps even the hope of a new generation.

Finally, though, Fellini offers no redemption for Marcello.

All that remains is the inevitability of a living death in a sweet life lived without love.

The sweet life, such as it is, proves sour, indeed.

A gorgeous restored film print of La Dolce Vita is being presented in Toronto at the TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) Bell Lightbox as part of the phenomenal programme entitled “Fellini: Spectacular Obsessions”. The film screens August 13, August 28 and September 2. On August 28, there will be a special pairing of both film and food. Following the screening, moviegoers will feast on delectable morsels prepared by Executive Chef Jason Bangerter. The three-course Italian menu, inspired by La Dolce Vita, will be accompanied by Italian wine via sommelier Anthony Demas. While this seems like a perfectly good idea, I have to admit that a movie that so powerfully and provocatively explores the emptiness of decadence in a world without love might not best be served by bourgeois indulgence. Oh well, ‘tis to be expected, I suppose. It is Toronto, after all. That said, upon experiencing any great work of art, the last things I usually want to do are stuff my face and guzzle wine. But, hey! That’s my trip. You’re welcome to yours. La Dolce Vita is, frankly, a trip enough for this fella’.

The Name of the Rose

The Name of the Rose (1986) dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud
Starring: Sean Connery, Christian Slater, F. Murray Abraham, Michael Lonsdale, Ron Perlman

**½

By Alan Bacchus

This movie was kind of a big deal back in the day – a high-profile big screen adaptation of Umberto Eco’s celebrated 1980 book. It’s a medieval mystery linking biblical analysis, history, and medieval and literary studies under the blanket of a whodunit. In many ways it was an intellectual Da Vinci Code, as it involves a pair of monks solving historical puzzles and murders while avoiding the infamous Papal inquisition. Unfortunately, despite the acclaimed source material, it’s not much more than a disguised and disposable Sherlock Holmes story with little intellectual resonance.

Sean Connery plays a progressive and rebellious Benedictine monk, William of Baskerville, who is sent with his aide, Adso (Slater), to a Northern Italian monastery to participate in a theological conference. When they arrive they discover that a monk has recently died after falling from the top of a seminary. William is sharp and senses a cover-up from the shifty-eyed Abbott (Lonsdale). His application of sharp logic and deduction uncovers a plot to hide a library of outlawed books by the ultra-conservation monastic order.

Later to arrive is William’s rival Bernardo Gui (Abraham) of the Spanish Inquisition. You know those cloaked god-fearing despots who killed or imprisoned anyone that threatened the power of the Church. But with monks and priests dying left, right and centre, clearly there’s something in that library worth risking being burned at the stake for.

Connery seems perfectly cast. He has a naturally bald head, a commanding cinematic presence and a large amount of charisma. He plays a typical Sean Connery character, a whip-smart cocky leader who often goes against the grain, but is so superior to everyone around him that he’s practically ‘untouchable’ (pun intended). His dialogue consists of asking questions of his protégé, Adso, and then confidently stating the exact opposite to Adso’s answers.

The Name of the Rose works best as a 'semiotic' puzzler, an anthropological discipline which connects signs and other forms of communication across time and cultures. It’s a popular field in the present, popularized by the Dan Brown novels and dumbed down even more in the National Treasure series and even to some degree in the Harry Potter series. Unfortunately, the discoveries and revelations made by William and Adso in the monastery never connect in a satisfying way to the present or to our understanding of religion as a whole.

The conflict with the Inquisition is frightening. It’s an organization that for hundreds of years held the Western world back from scientific progress. F. Murray Abraham is deliciously villainous as the nasty lead inquisitor, and the other monks, who because of their faith remain mostly silent, represent a creepy, malign presence in the opening scenes. James Horner’s sparse but effective score helps create a tone of dread.

The plotting of the narrative fits into the whodunit mold. Thankfully, the film mostly avoids the ‘Scooby Doo’ moment when in the third act the villain reveals himself and tells us exactly how he committed the crime. This doesn’t happen, but the filmmakers do resort to a rather shamefully explicit sequence of exposition telling and showing the audience what William has solved in his head.

By the end we are moved and barely even intellectually stimulated. Instead of a revered, enlightened novel, The Name of the Rose feels like disposable, airport paperback fiction.

The Name of the Rose is available on Blu-ray from Warner Home Entertainment.

High and Low

High and Low (1963) dir. Akira Kurosawa
Starring: Toshiru Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, Kyôko Kagawa, Tatsuya Mihashi, Isao Kimura

****

By Alan Bacchus

This is my favourite Kurosawa film, without question. Perhaps I appreciate it so much because it falls outside the feudal period – a Samurai picture. Here, it’s the present, and Mr. Kurosawa executes the procedural crime thriller to end all procedurals. High and Low is more than just an exercise in style. Kurosawa expertly plugs distinctly Japanese themes of honour, pride and the class system that has been in existence since the feudal period into Ed McBain’s American crime novel (the original source material).

Toshiro Mifune plays Kingo Gondo, a ruthless businessman who is introduced along with his fellow company directors arranging pieces on a chess board of sorts to engineer a hostile takeover of their shoe company ‘National Shoes’. When Gondo doesn’t comply with the other directors’ demands his colleagues storm out of the house sowing the seeds of corporate warfare. Later that night, Gondo receives an anonymous phone call demanding a ransom for his kidnapped son. Coincidence?

That set-up would be dramatic enough, but Kurosawa twists the scenario to create an even more complex problem. Soon after Gondo agrees to pay up, his son shows up at the house, which means it was his friend, the son of Gondo’s limo driver, that was the kidnap victim. Now Gondo is put into an even tighter vice. The ransom money is enough to ruin him. Does he sacrifice this for another man? The ethical question is difficult enough, but as a business owner, what about the public opinion against Gondo if he doesn’t pay up?

Meanwhile, the cops are on the case – remarkably thorough and thoughtful cops, mind you. They’re cops that can sleuth out and analyze the details as good as anyone in CSI or a Michael Mann film, but remarkably decent human beings with impeccable bedside manner. The Chief Detective Tokura’s devotion to serving Gondo is as engaging as the procedural compilation of the evidence behind the crime.

This relationship is key to serving Kurosawa’s theme and defining this procedural genre he’s practically inventing. In the best genre films, we discover character and theme through action, in this case, the work assigned to Tokura. As Tokura and his team meticulously pour over every detail, however insignificant or minute, we come to appreciate the work ethic and pride he has for his job. Gondo echoes the same attitude when wrestling with the prospect of losing his job. For Tokura (and for much of Japanese society), he is defined by his work, the loss of which is worse than death.

The setting and location supports another key theme – class. For half of the picture we’re exclusively in Gondo’s magnificent house perched atop a hill in Tokyo, which looks down upon the rest of the town. It’s a literal representation of Gondo's superiority over the lower classes. The specific Japanese class definitions are expressed chiefly through Gondo’s relationship with the limo driver, who despite losing his son, is obliged by the nature of his job and position in society to feel sympathy for his employee before himself. It’s enlightening but truly sad to see the poor man grovel and plead for the money to save his son, a sacrifice we know is most painful.

This is the guts of this wonderfully rich and layered potboiler. And if there wasn’t enough depth on the page, Kurosawa’s cinematic instincts elevate the work even higher. I can’t think of another film that uses the widescreen frame better than High and Low. Shot in true anamorphic 2:35:1 ratio, Kurosawa populates the scenes by maximizing every inch of the frame. In almost every scene we see a dozen or more characters working or reacting to the events in play. Even in the opening scenes in Gondo’s contained hilltop house we see Tokura’s men dotted in the foreground and background. In the magnificent ‘evidence’ scene when Tokura solicits the results of the investigation there are more than 20 people in every shot, the effect of which supports the theme of work and provides terrific visual compositions. Even when there are 24 people or more, Kurosawa’s mise-en-scene knows how to draw our attention to his intended subject. He never needs to frame a close-up or reaction shot.

High and Low is available in magnificently pristine high definition Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection. It was Kurosawa’s second last B&W film (before Red Beard) and was at the tail end of his remarkable association with Toshiro Mifune. It showcases a great filmmaker at the pinnacle of his career in absolute command of the medium, a film accessible to all audiences, Japanese or American, mainstream or art house.

High and Low is available on Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.

Naked

Naked (1993) dir. Mike Leigh
Starring: David Thewlis, Lesley Sharp, Gina McKee

**½

Guest review by Blair Stewart

The international breakthrough for Mike Leigh, David Thewlis and British kitchen-sink drama, Naked took home the Best Director and Best Actor Prizes at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival with a bleak journey into London's lower-class depths.

Johnny (David Thewlis) is an embittered creation that steps out of the pages of a Malcolm Lowry screed as we join his stifling presence in post-Thatcher Britain. Stealing a car after drunk alley sex becomes a rape, Johnny flees Manchester for the big city to reunite with his ex, Louise (Lesley Sharp). After spurring Louise and seducing her skid row roommate Sophie (Katrin Cartlidge), Johnny stalks the back streets with a prophecy of doom and seeks release through pleasure and/or pain. He passes through encounters with various characters living on the fringe while the depraved landlord of Louise's flat lurks in the periphery of the story.

Sharp-witted and depressive, an idealist on a nihilistic jag, Johnny is the most memorable character either Thewlis or Leigh have been involved in during their careers. Leigh has even said it’s the great tragedy of Thewlis's career that he hasn't found a role on par with his role in Naked.

Suffering from headaches and mood swings, Johnny makes acquaintances with a lost Tourettic drifter played with relish by a young Ewen Bremner and a night-watchman Brian (Peter Wight) loafing through a steel and glass complex containing 'empty space'. Enjoy the following exchange between Johnny and Brian:

Johnny: And what is it what goes on in this post-modern gas chamber?
Brian: Nothing. It's empty.
Johnny: So what is it you guard, then?
Brian: Space.
Johnny: You're guarding space? That's stupid, isn't it? Because someone could break in there and steal all the fuckin' space and you wouldn't know it's gone, would you?
Brian: Good point.

Johnny wanders off in pursuit of various women for comfort before the skies darken, and after searching for it, he is beaten up twice by toughs. Meanwhile, Jeremy the landlord skulks into Louise's flat and ruthlessly exploits Sophie before many of the characters come crashing back home.

Although made by a former theatre/TV director and having a protagonist spot-on for an existential novella that might have hindered it in other hands, Naked’s success on the screen is due to the confidence of the actors’ time spent on improvisation and rehearsal before filming. Also benefiting the film is Dick Pope's lighting, capturing the zombified pale faces of Londoners in winter and the grey concrete of their uncompromising city. And of course, as mentioned, David Thewlis is excellent as that loud cock-eyed man you have likely avoided looking at on the subway while he's stared intensely at you.

I hadn't seen Naked in 10 years, and I loved it on my first viewing. But after watching it again certain issues arise. First, Jeremy is a lousy antagonist whose bouffant hair and tantrums I interpreted as commentary about the class disparity between his acceptable upper-class sadism and Johnny's invisible working-class instability. In hindsight, Jeremy doesn’t come across so much as a privileged, systemic monster, but as an unruly, spoiled child.

Another problem is the overwrought nature of the characters with the actors and script playing up the emptiness of their lives, the Armageddon of a generation saying "fuck it" and the creators trying too hard to capture that voice. There is nothing wrong with a film engaging the company of unpleasant humans, but after hearing many of Johnny's rants the movie often slips from truth into pretension.

These issues aside, Naked is worth seeing for the early ‘90s urban decay, the chemistry between the actors and the push it gave Mike Leigh towards the likes of the great Topsy-Turvy and Secrets and Lies. And if you would like to spend the night with one of God's angry children, give Travis Bickle a pass and eavesdrop on this lone British madman.

Naked is available on Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (another opinion)

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) dir. Rupert Wyatt
Starring: James Franco, Andy Serkis, Freida Pinto, Brian Cox, John Lithgow

***

By Alan Bacchus

Revolution is in the air – Apes revolution. It’s hard to believe this Apes franchise continues to fascinate people and have legs. The original film was high-concept science fiction at its best – metaphors for our own human frailties in the real world at present. The concept here, of course, is a future world turned upside-down, where apes have replaced man as the dominant species. Rupert Wyatt’s take on the series has him going back in time for an origin story, something we were first exposed to with 1972’s Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, but with little resemblance other than the setting in the past. Here, the depth and complexity of the CG-enhanced Apes characters tips the scales past the uniformly cardboard human characters resulting in a surprisingly absorbing, exciting and fresh invigoration of this series.

Of course, the first film based on Pierre Boulle’s original novel was the best. Nothing will take away from the power of Charlton Heston’s discovery of apes riding horseback wrangling up human slaves, or the astonishing revelation of the Statue of Liberty lying collapsed on the beach at the end of the film. There are no moments or twists as such in this picture, and the film doesn’t need them. We know the story, we know where it leads and the thrill here is showing the tragic irony of hundreds of years of man’s blind arrogance playing with science, and the catharsis of having animals fight back against a lifetime of subjugation by their higher intelligence ‘superior beings’.

In this case, all the blame falls on James Franco’s character, Will Rodman, a biological scientist looking for a cure for Alzheimer’s disease. Of course, he’s experimenting on chimps and when one of them starts to exhibit signs of intelligence his superiors in the corporate office take notice and encourage it. But after the experiment fails and the chimps escape, they’re all put down with the exception of one cute little infant named Caesar (Serkis). Will brings up Caesar like a child in his home along with his Alzheimer’s-stricken father (Lithgow) and lovely girlfriend (Pinto).

The ethics of raising a chimp with humans never enters Will’s mind, but the subjugation of his animal instincts are offset with his broadening intelligence. All the while, this internal conflict simmers within Caesar. After an anger-fuelled attack on a neighbour, Caesar is forced to go to an animal shelter managed by a heartless and cruel Brian Cox and Tom Felton. Here, Caesar uses his intelligence to communicate with his fellow simian prisoners and plot escape, revenge and ultimately the takeover of the world.

Admittedly, the human characters are uniformly forgettable and sometimes laughable. Franco, in particular, should never have been in this film. It actually takes a special kind of actor to make pseudo-science and other expository stock dialogue sound believable. Franco’s lazy acting style, which works in comedy and other stoner-persona performances like Milk, is not a good fit here. In fact, he seems to be in the same funk as his Oscar hosting gig. Everyone else is a cardboard characterization in the extreme. Brian Cox and Tom Felton as the cruel animal shelter caretakers are low-grade comic book villains at best, and the money-grubbing corporate suits are similarly one-dimensional.

But the complexity of the ape characters more than makes up for these deficiencies. Andy Serkis, who by motion capture portrays Caesar from birth to his ascension as leader of the Ape revolution, is phenomenal. The technology has little to do with the performance. I bet if Serkis were put into the old make-up style of the original series, he’d give the same quality performance. The fact is we can see the development of intelligence in his delicate facial movements. As we see Caesar grow up in the company of Will, a prison of its own sorts, sequestered from his own kind, we can’t help but identify with him. The need to be free is a universal quality of all living species, but self-determination is distinctly human. And the discovery of this trait within Caesar occurs gradually and with subtlety. That said, it also helps that the apes actually look like apes. The Weta-Digital CG technology achieves this in spades.

Despite the shameful characterization of the animal shelter, these scenes sufficiently put us on the side of the apes and by the end we desperately want Caesar and his growing army of prisoners to throw some beatdowns on the humans. There’s very little action in the film until the third act, and even when the intensity is ramped up there’s more logic than we would expect from the big scenes.

And at the end of the day, Apes accomplishes its goal as a continuation of its high-concept antecedents. Without overwhelming proselytization, we can’t help but think twice about the effect of keeping animals as pets, or using them to experiment with in science, or as beasts of burden. And at the very least we will recognize the precariousness of our place in the bio-lifecycle of the planet.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) dir. Rupert Wyatt
Starring: James Franco, Andy Serkis, Freida Pinto, John Lithgow, Brian Cox, Tom Felton, David Oyelowo, Tyler Labine and David Hewlett

*

By Greg Klymkiw

I have absolutely no knee-jerk prejudice against remakes, reboots, sequels or prequels as the number of good and/or even great ones is impressive. I do, however, have a problem with bad and/or mediocre and/or (worst of all) unnecessary movies - whatever they may be.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes - save for the millions of dollars it will bamboozle out of moviegoers in its first week - has no real reason to exist.

The movie is about NOTHING.

It is rife with long, dull scenes that go nowhere.

The screenplay, such as it is, has not (I suspect) actually been written, but assembled with alphabet blocks by chimpanzees - not very bright ones at that. The chimps deserving the blame for their less than stellar work are Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver whose credits include - ahem - The Relic (a watchable monster movie), An Eye for An Eye (a watchable vigilante movie) and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (a watchable thriller). The accent here is clearly on "watchable" - an achievement not quite attained by Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Not only have these two simians delivered an inconsequential plot that's about nothing, but they've populated the landscape with the dullest roles imaginable. Oh, and if anyone thinks I'm merely picking on the writers - I am. They're also the producers of this thing.

Bottom line: This movie is not worthy of the Original Five. It'd be a tough act to follow. In contrast to the work generated by the writers (and I reiterate - producers) of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the collective writing talents behind the five original Planet of the Apes movies wrote screenplays for the likes of Frank Capra, George Stevens, David Lean, Martin Ritt, William Wyler, Sidney Lumet, Franco Zeffirelli, John Frankenheimer, Roger Corman and Martin Scorsese.

This alone should be enough to rest my case.

But I won't. Let the flagellation of Rise of the Planet of the Apes continue.

What a cast has been assembled to render this monkey house of purported characters.

Leading man James (127 Days) Franco sleepwalks through his part as a chemical manufacturing scientist who creates a drug meant to cure Alzheimer's that instead kills humans whilst creating a new super species of ape.

John Lithgow goes through the motions of delivering a professional by-the numbers performance as Franco's addled Dad who is briefly revived by Sonny-Jim's chemical discovery before he plunges into further madness and finally death.

Frieda Pinto parades her vacuous beauty about whilst exuding intellect as blank as an unformatted floppy disk in the role of Franco's zoo veterinarian girlfriend - a real stretch unless one believes veterinary colleges are in the business of graduating animal doctors with less intelligence than their patients.

Delivering exceptional work in spite of nothing resembling writing employed in the creation of his role as an animal shelter administrator, Brian Cox, one of the world's greatest living actors, might have actually benefited if something as unimaginative as a recognizable archetype might have been devised to allow for some virtuoso scenery-chewing.

Playing the least compelling corporate villain ever committed to celluloid, the non-entity that is David Oyewolo is so bland that not even good writing would have saved him as a pharmaceutical company baddie who - wait for it - is more interested in profits than science.

Then there are stellar supporting performances from actors playing scum-buckets so well that one wishes they either had a better movie to be in (like Tom Felton as the vile animal shelter attendant) or David Hewlett as Franco's nasty next door neighbour who hates monkeys and berates old men with Alzheimer's. He really should have been cast as the central corporate baddie instead of the aforementioned bland loser they DID cast.

And Lest We Forget - Andy Serkis, the somewhat overrated CGI body double who previously and famously aped (as it were) the character of Gollum in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. Here he gets to play Franco's pet chimp Caesar who is more intelligent than Albert Einstein and leads a grand monkey revolt. Don't get me wrong, Serkis IS a good actor, but what he delivered for Jackson finally works as well as it does because the writing is great and the CGI is stunning. In Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the non-writing, ho-hum direction and obvious CGI gives us so little to root for that the gymnastics of Serkis's apery is all for naught.

While a solid, simple plot can have considerable merit in providing a perfectly manufactured coat hanger to adorn with cool shit, this pathetic new sequel/prequel/remake/reboot or whatever the fuck it's supposed to be is so lacklustre that I struggled in vain whilst waiting for something - ANYTHING - of any consequence to happen.

It didn't.

In a nutshell, here's the plot - or rather, grocery list:

Scientist discovers miracle drug to cure Alzheimer's.

Said drug turns chimp into Super Chimp.

Alas, same drug kills scientist's Dad.

Scientist raises chimp as own child.

Girlfriend pops in and out of movie to smile stupidly.

Chimp gets into all manner of shenanigans.

Chimp bites finger off next door neighbour.

Chimp is incarcerated in animal shelter full of apes.

Chimp leads ape revolt on San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge.

Chimp leads apes to freedom amongst ancient Redwood trees.

Next door neighbour - afflicted with deadly virus - casually goes to work as airline pilot, finger miraculously intact.

Spreads virus worldwide.

What, I ask you, is this movie actually ABOUT?

The original 1968 Arthur P. Jacobs production of Planet of the Apes was dazzlingly directed by the great Franklin J. Schaffner (Patton), superbly adapted by Michael (Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia) Wilson and Rod (The Twilight Zone) Serling from Pierre Boulle's brilliant novel "La planète des singes" and featuring a stellar cast that attacked their roles with relish.

And what roles they were! The makers of Rise of the Planet of the Apes might have thought to take their cues from the original source for the necessary inspiration. In addition to having a great square-jawed hero in the form of the cynical, no-nonsense astronaut Taylor (Charlton "GOD" Heston) the original movie boasted a terrific array of colourful supporting characters that great actors like Roddy McDowell, Kim Hunter and Maurice Evans played to the hilt. The only thing the Rise team might have been influenced by was the role of Nova in the original, a staggeringly beautiful, but equally blank leading lady. Smartly, this character in the original was mute whereas this awful new reboot chooses to allow Freida Pinto to open her mouth - thus forcing the already leaden lines she's been given to thud to the floor with greater force than a body hitting the pavement from the top of the Eiffel Tower.

Planet of the Apes was, still is and always will be a great picture. (Let's forget, however, that the moronic Tim Burton remake even exists. Though dreadful as it is, it's fucking Rembrandt compared to Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

The first time I saw Schaffner's Planet of the Apes was as a nine-year-old lad, sitting in the front row of Winnipeg's long-shuttered picture palace the Metropolitan Theatre (where Guy Maddin eventually shot Isabella Rossellini in the stunning My Dad is 100 Years Old). It was the first time I got gooseflesh in a movie. So profound was my experience that it was, indeed, the movie that compelled/condemned me to a life of servitude under the pleasurable shackles of motion pictures.

I have seen the picture well over 100 times since and most recently, watched it with my 10-year-old daughter during an Ape marathon prior to seeing Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I was, in fact, really excited to see the new picture which, I suppose adds profoundly to my disappointment.

Schaffner's picture is a genuine classic. It holds up as powerfully as any great piece of superbly executed populist cinema should. Mysterious, thrilling, funny, intelligent, propulsive in all the right ways and a movie replete with thought-provoking thematic elements about religious fanaticism suppressing science and new ideas, the topsy-turvy look at humans fulfilling the role of "dumb beast", notions of time and time travel and the devastating effects of war, it's a picture that has not dated.

I always have maintained that its cinematic storytelling techniques are so classical and finely wrought and its technical virtuosity so ahead of its time that the movie could be released virtually untouched and I suspect it could/would be as big a hit NOW as it once was. Most tellingly to me was just how compelling the movie was for my little girl. She remained stapled into the chesterfield, her eyes transfixed upon my hi-def monitor and nary one bathroom break. The discussion we had about the movie afterwards centred on the IDEAS as much as it did about the story and how entertaining it was.

No similar discussion occurred after watching Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Because, frankly, it's really about NOTHING. The stakes for the characters in the original film were always tied to the issues it explored, whereas the stakes for all the characters in Rise are rooted in not much of anything - save for James Franco's selfish, whiny and somewhat unconvincing need to prove that his new drug will work.

As a kid in the years between 1968 and 1970 when the first sequel Beneath the Planet of the Apes finally appeared, one of the things that haunted me - nay, OBSESSED me! - was a lingering question I had at the devastating ending to the first film. When Chuck Jesus H. Christ Heston rides deeper into the "Forbidden Zone" and discovers (thanks to the writing genius that was Rod Serling for coming up specifically with the ending) that he is NOT on another planet, but a nuclear-war-devastated Earth in the future, I was chomping at the bit to learn what our astronaut would find in the wasteland AFTER he discovers a half-buried Statue of Liberty in the sand.

What Heston finally discovered (along with James Franciscus, a new astronaut who follows a rescue-mission trajectory to the monkey planet) was a crumbling Manhattan beneath the desert populated by Doomsday-Bomb-worshipping mutants with telepathic powers who were about to be attacked by an army of war-thirsty gorillas.

Jesus Christ Almighty, indeed!

Just the plot alone as penned by veteran screenwriter Paul (Goldfinger, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Murder on the Orient Express) Dehn was original enough to keep one riveted. More than the plot, though, was that - AGAIN - the movie was actually ABOUT something.

Even though the picture is a tad perfunctorily directed by stalwart hack Ted (Hang 'em High, Magnum Force and the genuinely wonderful Go Tell The Spartans) Post, Dehn's superb screenplay challenged us with notions of blind militaristic rage (including a peace march as reflective of the Vietnam War, which could have - in parallel contrast - provided a backdrop to the new picture with respect to America's idiotic "War on Terror"), religious fundamentalism justifying war (from both the apes AND the humans) and most terrifyingly, the whole notion of peace through superior firepower.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes has no such ideas. Though it's set in contemporary times and could have explored terrorism, blind militarism, rising fascism/fundamentalism, the financial crisis, the oil crisis - any manner of issues facing the world today, it chooses Instead, to focus upon the corruption inherent in pharmaceutical companies, Alzheimer's disease and cruelty to animals. These issues are not without merit, but they're just there to serve the non-plot, almost as a necessary evil to be touched upon and dropped quickly in favour of dazzling CGI.

Escape from the Planet of the Apes appeared a year after Beneath the Planet of the Apes and even at the tender age of 12 I remember thinking, "What is this shit? A sequel? They blew up the fucking Earth!" (I had a salty tongue even back then.) When I saw the picture - as a kid and even now after umpteen viewings - I was dazzled.

The real star is again screenwriter Paul Dehn as opposed to actor-turned-competent director Don Taylor who, in fairness, DID direct a fine’ 70s version of The Island of Dr. Moreau with Burt Lancaster and the cult sci-fi classic The Final Countdown. But what a GREAT script! What first-rate sci-fi!!!

From a plot standpoint, Dehn delivered a perfectly plausible twist via a new character called Dr. Milo who, like Cornelius and Zira, was an ape scientist who defied the "law" of fundamentalism, resurrected and repaired Chuck Heston's spaceship and then all three simians of science followed a backwards trajectory just before the Earth is destroyed and wind up BACK in time. This was also a clearly fascinating way to utilize the notions of time and space and, in its own way, delve into quantum physics and the early postulations of parallel universe theory.

This third official Apes sequel delivered up clever satirical goods, explored issues of women's' rights (plus animal rights - far more effectively than Rise), immoral interrogation techniques and most importantly studied the world of fanaticism/militarism within higher levels of government bureaucracy and how THIS is where the true power often lies and where sick, corrupt values run rampant.

What it does here so magnificently is how it offers up a great villain in the form of a German-born scientist/political advisor (a la Henry Kissinger) played by the wonderful actor Eric Braeden (who had a hugely successful career as a soap opera TV star, but most notably appeared in the great ‘70s sci-fi thriller Collosus: The Forbin Project from screenwriter James Bridges and the underrated director Joseph Sargent). Braeden is such a nasty, vicious, homicidal government bureaucrat and his great performance and superb characterization thanks to Dehn's writing puts the lacklustre aforementioned villain in Rise to complete and utter shame.

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, is as sharp a sequel as the third instalment - replete with great writing from Paul Dehn and the added bonus of thrilling direction from J. Lee Thompson, the man who gave us the brilliant, original, utterly chilling Cape Fear as well as some of the greatest action epics of all time like North West Frontier, Taras Bulba and The Guns of Navarone. This particular sequel tells us about the rise of Caesar, the ape child of Cornelius and Zira who leads the simians in revolt against their human oppressors.

Conquest is the film Rise of the Planet of the Apes most closely resembles, yet pales most mightily against. Conquest deals head on with the issue that plagued (and continues to plague) America most doggedly - that of slavery and, includes good dashes of America's susceptibility to right wing government rule. A thoroughly effective repellent performance from Don Murray as the fascist California governor racing to eventually become President of the United States (he and his minions always wear black-coloured uniforms hearkening to both Nazism and Italian Fascism) is so politically charged - not just for its time, but like all great classics, resonates in a contemporary context.

Rise has no such villain and virtually NO political context. I'll not speak too much about Battle for the Planet of the Apes, the fifth official sequel and perhaps the weakest entry in the series, but even still, in its exploration of the early beginnings of the fundamentalism that eventually grips even the apes, it makes the new film look so puny in comparison.

Rupert Wyatt is a dreadful director. The pace of Rise is herky-jerky and the final action set piece on the Golden Gate Bridge - which should be spectacular - is yet another madly constructed action scene from a director who couldn't helm action to save his life.

The worst element of Rise of the Planet of the Apes is in its over-reliance upon CGI. The effects are relatively effective, but they're not there to serve the story, but to merely serve themselves. The stunning makeup effects for the apes designed by John Chambers in the ‘60s blow ALL the CGI totally away. The makeup allows great actors - throughout the original Apes series to actually deliver real performances and, thanks to terrific writing, inject considerable life into the proceedings.

Rise from the Planet of the Apes is, in contrast, moviemaking at its most dreadful - bereft of ideas, good writing and direction from someone who has a vision and/or the virtuosity to create popular cinema of the highest order.

Perhaps the most disgusting thing about the new film is that it fails to acknowledge the author of the original novel and the screenwriters (primarily Paul Dehn and Serling) of the original series in the head credits.

This is ultimately a disgrace.

Do yourself a favour and either skip Rise of the Planet of the Apes or, if you feel you must see the picture at all, try to watch the original films first.

You'll see the difference!

Black Moon

Black Moon (1975) dir. Louis Malle
Starring: Cathryn Harrison, Therese Giehse, Alexandra Stewart, Joe Dallesandro

By Alan Bacchus

New to The Criterion Collection is this oddball film of monstrous proportions, part Alice in Wonderland allegory, part late-period Luis Bunuel surrealism. And it's a Louis Malle film I've never heard of. Giving a 'star rating' seems completely inappropriate in this case, employing a convention to a film that treats convention as poison. Black Moon is an unexplainable and unquantifiable piece of art that isn't meant to be enjoyed, understood or commented on - simply experienced.

The film opens up showing Malle's version of 'Alice' (named Lily here) driving down a rural highway observing some kind of near-future warfare going on. Then, while escaping the clutches of one of the soldiers, she sees a unicorn. While sleeping on the grass she then becomes fascinated with snakes and large millipedes crawling over her body. At one point she thinks a flower is talking to her in another language.

While wandering the landscape she stumbles upon a large country mansion inhabited by a dying matriarch who speaks an unknown language, two twin models with the same name as our hero, Lily, and a team of naked boys wearing only flip-flops running through the woods herding sheep.

The rest of the film takes place within these confines to no substantial effect other than to confuse and titillate us. Malle's purposeful spacial inconsistencies confuse us. Inexplicably, Lily has difficulty trying to reach a glass of milk on the counter, especially when disturbed by a talking baby pig lounging on the countertop. Random jump cuts create even more hallucinatory effects. If we can appreciate Malle's attempts to laugh at our expense we're free to laugh along with him.

To find other cinematic comparisons, in many ways this endeavour feels like a Kubrick journey. The '70s cinematography, near-future world and the distinct outsider point of view links up with sequences and tones in 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut. We can also feel little bits of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo: The 120 Days of Sodom, that utterly strange yet riveting sexual, social and historical commentary on Nazism. Strange compositions inside the vast country mansion create some of the same eerie tension as the debaucherous aristocratic prison in Salo.

Malle establishes such a crazy world of inane gibberish we come to expect both everything and absolutely nothing to come of this venture. It's the equivalent of a nonsense poem. At one point the twin sister version of Lily attempts to nurse the strange old lady back to health by offering her breast to suckle. The film could cut to black at any second or a character could spontaneously combust into flames - anything is possible.

There might be some kind of social commentary going on, and indeed the extensive liner notes outline in detail one rationale of significance for this stuff. But sadly, none of it ever stuck with me.

No bother though. We are left with a stunning and lasting final image, the exterior ground of the mansion engulfed by turkeys and hens. Well, that's not exactly the 'last' image. After the turkeys we see a freeze-frame of Lily massaging her nipple preparing to suckle the unicorn. And that is probably the most laughably perfect ending for this zany slice of celluloid.

Black Moon is available on Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.

Sleepers

Sleepers (1996) dir. Barry Levinson
Starring: Jason Patric, Brad Pitt, Kevin Bacon, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman

**1/2

By Alan Bacchus

Back in 1996, in the weeks prior to the film’s fall theatrical release the excitement was palpable. Going by the all star cast, the fantastic director and the promise of a crime saga in the tradition of Once Upon a Time in America, or Goodfellas, this film had the makings of a classic. Sadly the film failed to live up these expectations, resulting an epic too self-conscious of its intended legacy with these other films, in effect dying under it’s own sword.

Now 15 years later (has it been THAT long?) the new Blu-Ray release of Barry Levinson’s Sleepers is as sparse and no frills as can be. Special features include only one trailer, the cover art features the theatrical photo, wasting no time or money on expensive designs, and even the menu screen is a plain still image, bare bones work, the absolute minimum to get this onto the shelves.

The original source material comes from Lorenzo Carcaterra’s book of the same name an autobiographical tale of he and three other Hell’s Kitchen boys who in the 60's go to juvie prison after an innocent prank goes wrong. Barry Levinson seemed the right choice of director. His ensemble work with new actors in Diner launched his career. His nostaglic work in Avalon seemed the right fit for Carcaterra’s recollections of youth in New York.

Yet, Levinson’s lazy screenplay and direction is shamelessly on-the-nose. At every turn the film’s themes and metaphors are thrown in our faces. Bruno Kirby’s character for instance seems to be acting in a different movie, through Carcaterra’s (Patric) father we’re supposed to see the domestic abuse pervasive in the community, but at the same time the lessons of hard work and American dream. Instead Kirby’s stories of revenge pride and revenge of the neighbourhood gangster King Benny telegraph the entire path of this film. Same with the prison metaphors of The Count of Monte Cristo which Carcaterra reads with in prison.

The first half of the picture featuring the four main characters as ikmpressionable young kids learning life on the street seem to recreate the opening acts of Goodfellas and Once Upon a Time in America. Levinson showers us to dreamy nostalgia and earnestness. And sadly, the kids are only just passable. The adult versions of these kids are even less interesting. Brad Pitt looks handsome as an older Brad Renfro, and Jason Patric is mostly dull as the brooding alter ego of Joseph Perrino. The best of bunch are then newbies Ron Eldard and Billy Crudup who have grown up to be the neighbourhood gangsters. Anchoring both eras of the picture is Kevin Bacon as the dittling pedophile in the Juvenile prison who is effectively terrifying.

What fails the picture though are the enormous plot holes in the present – that is, the court case wherein Brad Pitt’s character choosing to represent the prosecution despite being childhood friends of the accused. We’re told that no one would make the connection since ‘juvenile records’ are destroyed after the children leave, but after painting the picture of Hell Kitchen as a place where everyone know each other, this notion just doesn’t tread water.

With this domino falling so does the rest of the film. The only bright spot is watching Robert De Niro, effective as the streetwise priest and Dustin Hoffman, as the drunken defence lawyer, sharing the same space and acting together. Wait for Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog a year later to see these guys in action in a far superior film.

Sleepers is available on Blu-Ray from Warner Home Entertainment

Under the Sun of Rome: Sotto il sole di Roma

Under the Sun of Rome - Sotto il sole di Roma (1948) dir. Renato Castellani
Starring: Oscar Blando, Liliana Mancini, Francesco Golisari, Maria Tozzi, Ferrucio Tozzi, Gisella Monaldi and Alberto Sordi

***½

By Greg Klymkiw

At one point in Renato Castellani’s strange neorealist comedy-drama Under the Sun of Rome, the layabout teen hero Ciro (Oscar Blando) and his hard-working beat cop Dad (Ferrucio Tozzi) are sleeping not-so-soundly during the day for very different reasons.

Ciro busily toils day and night doing nothing – save for occasional forays into mischief with his equally lazy pals. Pops, on the other hand, is on perpetual night shift – patrolling the dark streets and punching in tediously at the requisite check-in points. The son is only at risk getting caught for petty thievery. Pops is at risk every night keeping the eternal city as safe as possible.

One works, the other doesn’t – but as the sun of Roma beams through the windows of their tiny walk-up – both men on this particular morning, are getting no sleep.

Roly-poly Mamma (Maria Tozzi) is multitasking like only a mother can and berating both of them – at the top of her considerable lungs.

In a brief moment of respite from her justifiable haranguing (she works harder than the two of them together – multiplied, no doubt, to infinity), bleary Ciro calls out to his equally groggy Dad asking if ALL married women are like his mother.

Dad sighs with resignation and replies, “All.”

Ah, the eternal chasm ‘twixt man and woman.

Luckily, for the not-so-gentle sex, they have each other.

Under the Sun of Rome unfolds its episodic coming-of-age tale during World War II, but for a good portion of the picture, we’d never know it. Ciro and his buddies busy themselves with the fine rituals of doing nothing. Our hunky hero, adorned in a sporty new pair of white shoes and to-die-for shorts that outline the supple form of his delectable posterior and swarthy gams – Yes, GAMS! They’re that gorgeous – is supposed to be getting a presentable haircut for his new job.

Ciro has other plans. He rounds up his buddies for a day of slacking. Wandering through the crumbling Coliseum they come across Geppe (Francesco Golisari) a lad of the streets who makes his home there. Ciro and Geppe hit it off immediately and the new pal joins the layabouts for a dip in a secluded creek on railway property.

When rail company bulls show up to intimidate trespassers, Ciro loses his new shoes and the money Mamma gave him for a haircut. Nor has he bothered to go to work as promised. Terrified with the severe beating he’ll receive, Ciro does what any young lad would do – he doesn’t go home and instead, spends the night with Geppe in his magical little Coliseum hideaway.

This affords both young dreamboats the opportunity to gaze intently at each other’s fresh, lean man-boy perfection – replete with gentle digital gesticulations. Here Castellani directs veteran cinematographer Domenico (Ossessione) Scala’s camera in loving compositional directions to highlight the bountiful facial and physical attributes of both actors. (Larry Clark – eat your heart out.)

As time moves on, the picture recounts several entertaining incidents in the life of Ciro – stealing shoes from a shopkeeper (the great Alberto Sordi of The White Sheik and I Vitelloni fame), an on-again-off-again relationship with Iris (Liliana Mancini) the proverbial girl-next-door, dabbling in black marketeering once the German army enters Rome, dallying gigolo-like with the BBW-splendour of Tosca (Gisella Monaldi) a married-woman-cum-streetwalker and eventually crime that leads to the expected tragic ending.

Castellani’s storytelling technique and, in fact elements of the story itself, are delicately odd. I suspect his approach is intentional, though it is, at times slightly off-putting.

First of all, there is the first-person narration, which I think, IS exceptional. It’s literary AND literal. Often the voiceover will describe a physical action just before or during its execution as well as describing characters whom we see as described during said descriptions. Further to this, we will often hear narration to the effect of “So-and-so said…” and we’ll then hear the character recite the line of dialogue. The basic tenets of Screenwriting 101 suggest you should NEVER do any of the above. This, of course, is why the self-appointed scenarist gurus the world over are so often wrong. If it works, it works and IT does so splendidly here.

Secondly, I’m not so sure Castellani’s perspective on his female characters is as deep and sensitive as it could and should be. Even in I Vitelloni, the pinnacle of all male layabout films, Maestro Fellini is able to render strong female characters without turning them into borderline harridans as Castellani does with Mamma or worse, Iris – a harridan-to-be. (Not that the performances of the actresses are bad though – they’re as good as can be expected within the shallow dimensions they’re given to work with.)

Strangely, the female character that seems the most well rounded and lavished with the greatest degree of sensitivity is that of the plump, whorish Tosca. Even Scala’s cinematography of the women – save for the latter female character – is certainly competent, but lacking the loving detail and care so copiously drenched upon the young boys. One could argue this is intentional, but to that I say – argue away. Larry Clark rests MY case on this one – boys AND gals need equal cinematographic love. (In fairness though, there is ONE boner-inducing close-up of Liliana Mancini slowly opening the door.)

Finally, the strange element I find most appealing and flawed is the manner in which Ciro is portrayed – not in Blando’s performance, which is excellent within the parameters provided by Castellani, but the odd turns the character takes. When he is at his rakishly appealing, Ciro is a character we’re completely rooting for, but often he does and says things so abominable (for example, the way he continually professes love to Iris, kisses her passionately then hurls some invective that clearly hurts her feelings) that we turn on him so violently that it occasionally threatens to wrench us out of the drama. That said, what may feel like a storytelling flaw might well be completely intentional. In retrospect, Ciro’s eventual coming-of-age, his redemption if you will, has even greater force. The problem for me is that it’s in retrospect and not within the drama as it unfolds. Perhaps this is the film’s literary quality working, as it should and if so, I applaud Castellani’s brave choice in making such a bold series of moves.

What I love most about this picture is the craft employed in the forward thrust of its episodic narrative. The movie never feels like it’s overstaying its welcome at any point and yet, very often, it has a rhythm not unlike that of a lazy day and as such, is easily in the same sphere attained by Fellini in I Vitelloni. In fact, the slicing and dicing of editor Giuliano Betti is not only exceptional, but at times it is utterly breathtaking. Among many spectacular cuts, the one that stays with me is a gorgeous cut to a foot-level shot on the stairs in the walk-up when Ciro and Iris go into the hallway from his flat. Not only is this a cut of exquisite beauty, but also it leads us into a shot that is equally stunning (followed by a move that’s richly evocative and romantic.

Wow! This is rare cutting indeed.

Many of the cuts are suitably "silent", but only when they need to be. On occasion they knock you completely on your ass and force you to almost re-focus your gaze IN to the action on screen.

I have to sadly admit to having seen only one Castellani picture before (a weird English-dubbed public domain VHS tape of Hell in the City during the mid-80s - issued I think, to capitalize on Chained Heat and other babe-in-prison flicks starring Linda Blair and rented pour moi to satisfy my babe-in-prison fetish). Because of my Castellani-deprived state, I couldn't begin to claim that these cuts are a DIRECTORIAL trademark style of his and can only assume they were made in collaboration with a brilliant editor.

The credited editor is one Giuliano Betti. I have scoured the Internet quite extensively - including Italian sites, and found virtually no information about him. In fact, this appears to be his only editing credit (along with a bunch of assistant directing and continuity credits). Go figure. Whoever was responsible is a genius.

Under the Sun of Rome is a tremendously entertaining picture and even if it occasionally feels like a Diet Chinotto precursor to Federico Fellini’s I Vitelloni (made six years before the Maestro’s masterpiece), it’s a worthy entry in the Italian neorealist sweepstakes.

The movie is playing Saturday August 6 on 35mm in the Toronto International Film Festival’s home at TIFF Bell Lightbox (as part of the delicious series “Days of Glory: Masterworks of Italian Neoralism”). Under the Sun of Rome will be a rare treat for those who make the effort to see it on a big screen as the picture still does not appear to be available on DVD other than as a non-subtitled Italian import. I Vitelloni will, by the way, screen in the same venue on Monday August 8 on a cool double-bill with Barry Levinson’s Diner. If you’re interested in reading several thousand words on the TIFF Bell Lightbox series and the Fellini-Levinson double bill, feel free to read my article at Electric Sheep Magazine.

The Music Room

The Music Room (1958) dir. Satyajit Ray
Starring: Chhabi Biswas, Padmadevi, Pinaki Sengupta, Gangapada Basu, Tulsi Lahiri

****

By Alan Bacchus

I have to confess that this was my first film from Satyajit Ray, the revered Indian director who is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest film directors ever. In the middle of his famed Apu Trilogy (Pather Panchali, Aparajito and The World of Apu) he made The Music Room, a glorious meditative character study of an Indian aristocrat clinging to his outmoded, feudal way of life. Even if the Indian culture is too alien for lay-audiences, Ray’s visual style is distinctly Hollywood and wholly accessible, reminding us of a rich and textured studio system of noir films from the 1940s.

Biswambhar Roy (Chhabi Biswas) is a 'Zaminder', a traditional Bengali aristocrat and landowner who rents his vast tracts of lands to be worked on by peasants and farmers. He’s 'old money', and at this period in his life he spends his time absent-mindedly listening to music and organizing lavish recitals instead of looking after his finances.

After a series of floods and a tragedy with his family, Roy is suddenly alone, his lands nearly wiped out and his finances ravaged with debt. Little by little the riches of his once great family palace are sold off leaving both the carcass of a kingdom and the carcass of a man laying in wake.

Roy’s only solace is his Music Room, a lavish room dedicated to throwing parties to showcase the best music and dance the country has to offer. Ray stages a number of fine musical sequences featuring traditional Indian instrumentation and dance. Now, I admit I'm not a fan of Bollywood musicals or even Indian music in general, but when used in this tragic melancholy story with Ray's superb eye for cinema, it’s a sublime and intoxicating combination.

Ray’s strong themes of class, family legacy and pride resonate as a form of disdainful imperial slavery. His main source of conflict comes from Mahim Ganguly, a self-made business man, who, at Roy's worst moment, hosts his own recital, thus stealing Roy’s thunder. Since Ray has put us in the point of view of the old-world aristocrat, we see Ganguly as an unsophisticated opportunist looking to usurp Roy and best him at the only thing that keeps him alive – his appreciation for music. And yet, we have no reason to sympathize with Ganguly, a man considered a lesser human being by the mere fact that his family does not come from title. Our awareness of this contradiction, the experience of being in Roy’s shoes and identifying with his shameful outlook of life, is wholly complex and intriguing.

Ray’s strong sense of cinema is of the highest order in this picture. The brooding gothic compositions and interior art direction remind us of a classic Hollywood mystery or potboiler. Ray’s camera is constantly moving, following his character through the massive, yet cold and desolate palace. Like the great studio master, Michael Curtiz (Casablanca), Ray pushes his camera in and out of his characters frequently as a silent way of expressing and highlighting their moods and reactions without using words.

The Music Room set is especially brooding. The opening and closing shots feature a chandelier swaying in the wind, as if it has a life of its own. The motif complements the key beat, when, in the final act after the candles of the chandelier appear to shut off in succession, Roy goes mad and falls off the deep end for good. And helping set this mysterious and melancholy mood is Subrata Mitra's delicious high contrast black and white, reminiscent of something Orson Welles would have shot.

In fact, The Music Room has much in common with Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, two gothic noir films about patriarchal autocrats and their self-propagating fall from grace. It’s no exaggeration to put The Music Room in their company.

The Music Room is available on Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.

There's Something Wrong with Aunt Diane

There’s Something Wrong with Aunt Diane (2011) dir. Liz Garbus
Documentary

***½

By Alan Bacchus

You may have heard this story already, as it made the press rounds a couple of years ago. It’s a strange case of a seemingly normal, well-adjusted middle-class mom travelling home from the cottage with her two young kids and three nieces. She inexplicably loses her sense of direction and starts speeding the wrong way on the highway before tragically killing eight people, including herself and all but one of her passengers.

So what happened to Diane Schuler? According to the autopsy her blood alcohol level was well above the legal limit and there were strong traces of marijuana. Diane’s husband, Daniel, appeared on Oprah, Larry King and other shows to vehemently deny the allegations. But science doesn’t lie, does it? Liz Garbus’s haunting documentary on the subject follows Diane Schuler’s husband and sister-in-law as they fight to clear her name and search out the truth about what happened to Diane on that fateful drive home.

Director Liz Garbus, fresh off her absorbing Sundance-screened doc Bobby Fischer Against the World, sympathizes with the family, who, because of the alcohol and drug tests, has had Diane’s name dragged through the mud as a drunk-driving irresponsible mother. As Garbus goes through minute-by-minute details of the four-hour journey from the New Jersey campsite to the Taconic State Parkway, we get to know the intimate details of Diane Schuler’s life.

We hear accounts of Schuler’s oldest niece calling home from the car on Diane’s cell phone alerting her parents to her aunt’s mysterious ailment. A migraine maybe? An embolism? We’ll never know exactly what happened in that car.

As important as the investigative details are, the details of Garbus herself and the life she led up until that point are just as interesting. Garbus expertly draws a thorough character sketch of Diane, who at nine years of age, traumatized by her parents divorce, grew up developing a subconscious urge to be in control. This trait helped her succeed in her career and raise two kids virtually on her own while Daniel worked nights. But it was a trait that also may have contributed to her death.

In legal terms this is called character evidence, and it feeds precisely into the objective of the film, which is to exonerate Diane and explain to the world what kind of exceptional circumstances must have contributed to the accident.

The final moments of the eyewitness accounts describing the accident are haunting and confounding. The images and descriptions of true blood-curdling horror have stuck in my mind for over a week since I saw the film. But the strongest lingering effects are the contradictory actions of Diane in these last moments of her life compared to the righteous decency and high level of responsibility she had shown as a wife and a mother. There was indeed something wrong with Aunt Diane and sadly we’ll never know what.

There's Something Wrong with Aunt Diane is currently playing on HBO as part of the HBO Documentary Films Summer Series.

Five Minutes of Heaven

Five Minutes of Heaven (2009) dir. Oliver Hirschbiegel
Starring: James Nesbitt, Liam Neeson

****

By Reece Crothers

Oliver Hirschbiegel, director of Downfall, once again blends fact and fiction to great effect in one of the year's most overlooked films. Working on a smaller canvas here than on the Oscar nominated Hitler picture, German filmmaker Hirschbeigel tackles "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland with an intelligent and challenging screenplay from Guy Hibberts, who collaborated with Paul Greengrass on another film about the plight of Northern Ireland, 2004's Omagh, a worthy film that was also mostly ignored.

Over black, the voice of Liam Neeson tells us, "In order to understand the man I am, you have to know something about the man I was," and so the part of the film that is fact is a meticulously recreated 1975 murder of a catholic boy by a young U.V.F. "soldier". The hit is lead by 17-year-old Alistair Little, who has volunteered with the hope that killing one of the enemy will make him a big man with the other lads, the higher-ups, who will then march him into the local pub as a hero, a force to be recognized. It's not personal for him. He doesn't see the enemy as a person. For Alistair there is only "us" and "them". As Alistair prepares to assassinate the Catholic boy, we are treated to scenes of the boy's family life and meet his little brother Joe, who spends all day kicking the football against the bricks of his row-house, trying to break his own record. When Alistair murders Joe's brother, shooting from the street into the bedroom window, he spares little Joe only because he mistakes the boy for a neighbour.

The boy grows into James Nesbitt as the adult Joe Griffen, a husband and father teetering on the precipice of a nervous breakdown, and we wonder how much life was really spared, how much of the little boy actually survived. Joe is a man hollowed out over years of guilt and grief and, most of all, rage. Nesbitt plays him as a bundle of nerves that could kick off an explosion at any minute. Liam Neeson plays the adult Alistair Little as a broken man, living a lonely empty life – a melancholy, lost soul haunted by the murder he carried out three decades ago, and about to face Joe Griffen for the first time since the night of the killing. A television reality program has brought them together ostensibly in pursuit of reconciliation. But with a dagger hidden in his belt, adult Joe has more than reconciliation on his mind. He's going for retribution and revenge for his "five minutes of heaven".

This is the part of the film that is fiction, the imagined meeting of two men who "bare the legacy of" the true story. "Do I shake the man's hand or do I kill him?" That question drives the first half of the film, where the journey of each man toward the TV set is plagued with painful memories played out in flashbacks. The two leads are a great match, and one of the picture's strengths is the thrill of watching two actors at the peak of their talents play against each other, whether in the same scene or through the clever editing of their parallel stories and flashbacks.

Both actors have given some of their best performances in films about the Troubles before: Neeson in the title role of Neil Jordan's excellent Michael Collins and Nesbitt in the lead of Paul Greengrass' pre-Bourne breakout Bloody Sunday. Here Nesbitt is electric. He careens wildly from composed family guy full of charm to raging would-be killer. It's an impressive tightrope that he walks. Equally good in his restrained, sorrowful performance as the repentant killer, Neeson's face, handsome in a slightly broken way, perfectly emulates melancholy and regret and gives Alistair Little a dignified grace that would not usually be afforded a character who has committed his crime. And while the film works as a revenge thriller building towards the two men's reunion, and we are reminded by Neeson that Nesbitt "...doesn't want to hear me say I'm sorry. He's here to confront me!", it evolves beyond the limitations of the genre. Most revenge pictures work on the notion that we all want the hero to kill the bad guy. Look no further than Neeson's recent blockbuster Taken as an example of that, as well as Tarantino's comeback picture Inglourious Basterds, Mel Gibson's Payback (admittedly, good fun), Charlie Bronson's Death Wish, Michael Caine's Get Carter or most of Clint Eastwoods’ films. What sets this apart is that it takes its time setting up the murder, the events preceding it unfolding with the white-knuckle suspense of a great ‘70s thriller, so that we are emotionally invested in the fates of both Alistair and the little boy kicking the ball against the bricks. The film doesn't allow us the luxury of writing the young Alistair off as "the bad guy". We experience his fear, his resolve, his desire to prove himself to his peers and elders. We understand that he thinks what he is doing is right and true. And the killing is all the more horrific for it.

When the smoke clears the ending is more complex and provocative than the revenge thriller aspects would lead you to expect. This is a film that never claims to offer easy answers, nor does it attempt to provide any. In the end we pray for mercy, for both of them, and wonder along with the filmmakers another question, a more difficult one: after so much violence and suffering, "is reconciliation even possible" for men like Joe and Alistair? This question drives the second half of the film with just as much tension as the first but with much deeper drama. We don't root for Joe Griffen's revenge; we wait with knots twisting in our guts for his reckoning.

Further recommended viewing: Paul Greengrass' "Bloody Sunday", Pete Travis' "Omagh", Neil Jordan's "Danny Boy (Angel)" and "Michael Collins", Ken Loach's "Hidden Agenda", Carol Reed's "Odd Man Out", John Ford's "The Informer", Jim Sheridan's "In The Name Of The Father" and "The Boxer", Alan Clarke's "Elephant".

Boyz in the Hood

Boyz in the Hood (1991) dir. John Singleton
Starring: Cuba Gooding Jr., Ice Cube. Laurence Fishburne, Nia Long, Angela Bassett,

***½

By Alan Bacchus

John Singleton's landmark slice of South Central gangsta life, which reached international acclaim after its Cannes debut and garnered two Oscar noms for writer/director Singleton in 1991, still stings today. The emotionally powerful morality tale of how youth in the marginalized, poverty-stricken African American "ghetto" of Los Angeles can turn to gang life in place of their absentee parents feels as poignant now as then.


Singleton's point of view into this world is Tre (Gooding Jr.), whom we first see as a naive kid goofing around with his equally impressionable friends Ricky (the all-American athlete star destined for a college scholarship) and Doughboy (the fatherless miscreant). Fast-forwarding, we see how some significant life decisions caused Doughboy to go to juvenile prison for the murder of a fellow homeboy and Tre and Ricky growup up scuff-free. But when the trio are reunited, Tre finds himself inescapably drawn into the neighbourhood gangster wars and drive-by shootings.

Watch the deftness of Singleton's writing. As Doughboy, Ice Cube is more than the aggressive firecracker of violence he could have been characterized as. Instead, Singleton and Cube create a complex, layered young man, both aggressive and spiteful of the world, but also sincere, comforting and understanding of his place in the culture. This can be seen in the final goodbye between Tre and Doughboy, a tearjerker of a scene. Doughboy and his crew drive to the mall to find the rival gang to avenge the death of their friend, but when Tre tells him to stop and let him out, Doughboy puts up no fight, quietly acknowledging that the violent path of revenge is not Tre's job, but Doughboy's. With few words, Gooding and Cube quietly acknowledge this complex, streetwise code of honour.

In addition to the race and social issues at hand, Boyz in the Hood also feels like a time capsule of early '90s pop culture that so greatly influenced style and trends throughout the decade. Again, look at Ice Cube, then a hardcore rapper in NWA, with his distinctly curled eyebrow, wearing all black, slurring his n-words with a snarling lip. He's badass L.A.-gangster personified and a walking fashion statement for legions of hip-hop fans.

If the film didn't paint such a vivid picture of a small but fascinating subset of American life, and if it wasn't a pop culture, trendsetting touchstone, it would still work as a universally poignant father-son story. The process of educating one's son to be a "man" is referred to a number of times, but it's more than just corny hyperbole; it's at the absolute heart of the violence. Laurence (then billed as Larry) Fishburne commands the screen, a strong guiding force for Tre, keeping him on the path of righteousness despite everything pulling him the opposite way towards violence. This is the stuff of classic storytelling and when acted with such strong, believable conviction, films like this last forever.

The 20th Anniversary Blu-Ray contains featurettes and commentary from previous DVD versions, but the new stuff, and the treasure of this disc, is the newly produced anniversary documentary featuring the cast and crew looking back on their work and the influence on their careers. Ice Cube, Gooding Jr. Singleton, Fishburne and more provide intelligent, articulate ruminations on the film. Singleton candidly describes the somewhat negative effect his success had on him as a 21-year-old. Being put in the company of Orson Welles can give a cinephile a big ego and Singleton admits this. Sadly, Boyz is still the high water mark for Singleton, as he has yet to match the creative inspiration of this picture, a profoundly mature work from such a young person.

This review first appeared on Exclaim.ca