Recently Watched Films 2013

[jon abbey]

my Fassbinder rankings here a few years back, In A Year of 13 Moons is another one that maybe should wait until you've seen a handful of others first:

http://ihatemusic.noquam.com/viewtopic. ... 17#p177817

[Dan Warburton]

Nice, thanks for linking that, Jon. I agree with your suggestions in the previous post, too. I think Ali and Fox are both great entry points - also Maria Braun, Effi Briest or Veronika Voss. But those are films I've seen more than three times - there are others I've seen only once that blew me away: Katzelmacher, Third Generation (that film uses sound in most extraordinary way), Mother Küsters.. But, heck, I like just about everything I've seen, with the exception of the Niklashausen Journey, which I found pretty tedious. Whatever happened to some of our other IHF posters a while back? We used to get some great posts on RWF.
(And, er, yes, what did happen to that Lao Tsu Ben post I saw here earlier today?)

[Lao Tsu Ben]

Walkabout, Nicholas Roeg, 1971

Thanks for reminding me to watch this again, with the director's commentary (if I can stomach it). Some extraordinary scenes.. that A.E. Housman poem at the end tears me up every time.

What happened to Lao Tsu Ben's comment? I'd agree that sympathies are with the aborigine and his end is gutting, but for me the twist in the film comes in how I instinctively identified with the girl. Racist is one word for her, but it's racism born of ignorance. She doesn't know any better. The tension in their meeting is waiting to see if her curiosity will win out over her fear.

Yep, sorry for that, I didn't want to confuse you. I deleted it yesterday, planning to elaborate a little later. The problem is I don't remember much about the film, which is, in my memory, disturbing but also rather unambiguous. It's normal that we should share their relief at the end, and their journey with the aborigine never looked too idyllic for me anyway; I must say that I found that Roeg insists a little heavily on the girl's point of view and on her distress. So racist was one clumsy word for it, but what remained in the end, and which is the gist of the film in my opinion, is the disillusionment of the aborigine at the end, his helplessness, which is so paradoxical considering how helpful he was ; so I'm not sure I would agree withyou on these always delicate matters of identification.

Here's my viewing over the last couple of weeks

Que des classiques! (Thin Blue Line perhaps excepted )

I definitely prefer Gates of Heaven and Vernon, Florida over this one. Re-enactments are never good, even when they're deployed to effective ends as they are here..

I saw Tabloid a few months ago. I didn't know nothing about the film and its main protagonist, which made it even more funny. What a character. Armond White hated it, and found the film condescending, and he is, I think, partly right to the extent that you end up sharing the point of view of journalists who are interviewed and whose job is rather disreputable, they seem to be rather bright people who chose? cynically, to make a living from defaming people, so it's a little uncomfortable in a way... Hilarious stuff nonetheless, check it out.
The Thin Blue Line is a little boring and pompous (that Philip Glass score, of course), but at least, it was instrumental in clearing who was falsely accused, and quite incredibly so when you see the film.

And lately:



Traffic, Steven Soderbergh, 2000

I was trying to find out what I wrote about this here last time I saw it (a couple of years ago?) but the search engine didn't dredge anything up. Maybe I didn't write anything about it after all. Anyway, mixed feelings this time. The novelty of using three different film stocks for the three principal locations - bright primary colours for Catherine Zeta-Jones and her glitzy La Jolla mansion, grainy yellow for dusty, dirty Mexico and OAP blue rinse for Michael Douglas's home base in Ohio - soon wears off, and we're left with a rather dull screenplay where the minor characters get the best lines, clichéd to death though they are (Luiz Guzman and Don Cheadle's buddy cop repartee, Tomas Milian's sinister jefe Salazar). Some snazzy filming - the car bomb scene in the car park is terrific - but, to quote Jon on Wenders, the word that came to mind tonight is meh. So Michael ditches his super DC job to sit in on AA meetings with his daughter, the kiddies in Mehico get to play baseball by night, and (we assume) Zeta-Jones and her sleazy hubbie eventually get busted thanks to that bug that Cheadle oh so surreptitiously stuck under his desk? Well, I suppose that's Hollywood for you. Still, wondering what I said about it last time.

I entirely agree with all of that (especially with that bit on Guzman and Cheadle), so I'm not going to add anything except that it was also very entertaining. But what a daft script, when you come to think of it.

[Dan Warburton]

Michael Haneke, Code Inconnu, 2000

Thoroughly engrossing from start to finish (I do wish I hadn't watched the bonus documentary stuff afterwards, though: Haneke has a knack for winding me up the wrong way when discussing his own work), and the missing link between the cute coincidences of 71 Fragments and the later épater les bourgeois Haneke. Nice to see him taking a few risks, too - both in terms of narrative (have fun reading the "what does the ending mean?" threads over at IMDb) and in actual filmmaking (audacious long takes, like the opening on the boulevard and the great verbal harassment scene in the Métro). I was wondering if anyone here knew - or could point me in the direction of - a translation of the closing sign language sequence (not that it's likely to be any great revelation.. just curious).
The word that pops up frequently in discussions of Haneke's work here and elsewhere - and from his own mouth - is manipulation (yawn, sorry, y'all heard this one before, Funny Games, blabla etc), which I suspect might have slightly less negative connotations in German (does it?) than it does in English. Being manipulated as a viewer is not "fun" - nor is it meant to be - in Funny Games, Seventh Continent and Caché but, perversely perhaps, I rather enjoyed being taken for one of Haneke's rides here. The strongest acting qua acting (from Binoche, of course) comes in the three scenes that are obviously not "real" - the closed room in "The Collector", her audition for Twelfth Night and the rooftop swimming pool (melo)drama, each of which is consciously revealed as "only a movie" from the outset; the scenes with the strongest emotional clout, notably the two long takes mentioned above, are no less artificial. You don't have to be an ardent cinéphile to realise that the scene on the boulevard after the opening credits is one unbroken eight-minute shot - the fast dollying up and down the street draws attention to itself just as much as Orson Welles' bravura crane sweeps in Touch of Evil, or Altman's snappy panning in The Player, to cite two other famous long opening shots. And we're just as aware of the camera's presence elsewhere, both when it sits still - in the tense scene in the Métro with Binoche and the two Arab boys - or when it's in motion (the Steadicam wanderings around the supermarket following Anne and Georges's argument). Instead of rapping on about the significance of the title - and the numerous examples of codes in the film - I think I'll go back and watch it a second time this weekend.
Have also appended this post to the Haneke thread, fwiw, in the hope it'll reignite that rather interesting discussion between Surfer and Leroysghost on the film (see page 2 of that thread)

[Lao Tsu Ben]

Sold. You know I've been avoiding Haneke so far, not anymore I guess, beginning with Code Inconnu.

[Dan Warburton]

Sold. You know I've been avoiding Haneke so far, not anymore I guess, beginning with Code Inconnu.

Yikes.. hope you like it.. I hate to think you'll be sitting there cursing me for recommending it to you Meanwhile, you can steer well clear of this one -



Claude Chabrol, Une partie de plaisir, 1975

Infuriating how uneven Chabrol can be. I can only imagine he made this as a kind of favour to his longtime scriptwriter Paul Gégauff, who has the misfortune of playing the starring role (his ex-wife plays his partner and his daughter plays his daughter to boot - and none of them can act). The text might be OK - but even that breaks down incoherently about halfway through - but Gégauff's diction (think of Alain Cuny in Les Visiteurs du Soir) makes it (and him) pompous and ridiculous, and the story, such as it is - man confesses to wife that he's been sleeping around and encourages her to take a lover herself to spice up the marriage and then gets royally pissed off when she does - has been done elsewhere, and better.

[Matt Wuethrich]

Walkabout, Nicholas Roeg, 1971

What happened to Lao Tsu Ben's comment? I'd agree that sympathies are with the aborigine and his end is gutting, but for me the twist in the film comes in how I instinctively identified with the girl. Racist is one word for her, but it's racism born of ignorance. She doesn't know any better. The tension in their meeting is waiting to see if her curiosity will win out over her fear.

Yep, sorry for that, I didn't want to confuse you. I deleted it yesterday, planning to elaborate a little later. The problem is I don't remember much about the film, which is, in my memory, disturbing but also rather unambiguous. It's normal that we should share their relief at the end, and their journey with the aborigine never looked too idyllic for me anyway; I must say that I found that Roeg insists a little heavily on the girl's point of view and on her distress. So racist was one clumsy word for it, but what remained in the end, and which is the gist of the film in my opinion, is the disillusionment of the aborigine at the end, his helplessness, which is so paradoxical considering how helpful he was ; so I'm not sure I would agree with you on these always delicate matters of identification.

I see where you're coming from, and I also think that ultimately the film is pretty unambiguous (excellent point on the irony of the aborigine's helplessness, which emerges only once they enter some semblance of Western civilization. That mating dance scene is absolutely heartbreaking) but maybe it was the girl's own arc that I expected to be different. In other words, she never really changed. In a more conventional film narrative she might've had some sad goodbye with the aborigine, but it's clear she didn't really feel anything. She just goes blank. So if that's an indictment of her ignorance/racism or just a consequence of her distress, I can't say. The flash-forward conclusion only enhanced the uncertainty for me.

I definitely prefer Gates of Heaven and Vernon, Florida over this one. Re-enactments are never good, even when they're deployed to effective ends as they are here..

The Thin Blue Line is a little boring and pompous (that Philip Glass score, of course), but at least, it was instrumental in clearing who was falsely accused, and quite incredibly so when you see the film.

I wonder if this is the only way we can judge the film. If it hadn't resulted in the freeing of an innocent man, we could pick it up. But obviously it had enough of an impact that it did something really right.

Traffic, Steven Soderbergh, 2000

I was trying to find out what I wrote about this here last time I saw it (a couple of years ago?) but the search engine didn't dredge anything up. Maybe I didn't write anything about it after all. Anyway, mixed feelings this time. The novelty of using three different film stocks for the three principal locations - bright primary colours for Catherine Zeta-Jones and her glitzy La Jolla mansion, grainy yellow for dusty, dirty Mexico and OAP blue rinse for Michael Douglas's home base in Ohio - soon wears off, and we're left with a rather dull screenplay where the minor characters get the best lines, clichéd to death though they are (Luiz Guzman and Don Cheadle's buddy cop repartee, Tomas Milian's sinister jefe Salazar). Some snazzy filming - the car bomb scene in the car park is terrific - but, to quote Jon on Wenders, the word that came to mind tonight is meh. So Michael ditches his super DC job to sit in on AA meetings with his daughter, the kiddies in Mehico get to play baseball by night, and (we assume) Zeta-Jones and her sleazy hubbie eventually get busted thanks to that bug that Cheadle oh so surreptitiously stuck under his desk? Well, I suppose that's Hollywood for you. Still, wondering what I said about it last time.

I entirely agree with all of that (especially with that bit on Guzman and Cheadle), so I'm not going to add anything except that it was also very entertaining. But what a daft script, when you come to think of it.

I always felt the same way about all those early-mid 2000s "issue" movies (e.g., Babel, Syriana): I liked the ambitious, wide scope they tried to take but the effect couldn't help but come off as superficial, pompous and, finally, dismal.

[Matt Wuethrich]

Akira Kurosawa, The Bad Sleep Well, 1960

Everything I love about Kurosawa is present in the opening wedding scene: the beautifully composed group shots, the satirizing of various social spheres, the set-up of a plot that takes a while to unravel and just the patience to let a scene play out on many levels.




Monte Hellman, Two-Lane Blacktop, 1971

So it was possible to make a movie about a subculture in the 70s without having a) drugs, b) crime or c) sex (OK, so there's a little of that last one). This movie is so subdued that I can see how it divides opinion somewhat: it's either got depths or it's empty. I vote for the former. It doesn't romanticize and it doesn't judge (at least overtly). Sure Laurie Bird's comes to her own conclusion at the end ("No good") but it comes so fast and so off-handed that you have to watch the scene a few times to make you realize she's skewering the whole lot of them and their competitiveness. Elsewhere on the board there was a comment that she disappears after she has sex with the Mechanic but I think that's the point. These guys are so far up their own asses I'm surprised they even noticed her. Not even G.T.O. (Warren Oates) seems to notice her much. He's too concerned with impressing other guys.

The use of sound on this fantastic, too. No music except for diegetic music. What you mostly hear are the sounds of the cars (love that rhythmic ticking inside the Chevy).

[Dan Warburton]

Is it just me or is your Hellman image in the previous post not showing, Matt?

A mixed bag over the weekend -



Konstantin Lopushansky, Pisma myortvogo cheloveka ("Dead Man's Letters"), 1986

Cheery little tale of survivors of a nuclear apocalypse huddled together in the cellar of a museum dying of radiation poisoning, lack of food and general existential ennui. Pretty bleak but with a possible glimmer of hope at the end, if you can stand a moderately heavy dose of religion.




Takashi Miike, Koroshiya 1 ("Ichi the Killer"), 2001

First Miike film I've seen, and probably not the best one to start with, but whatever. Not knowing much about the manga culture this derives from, I'm not sure how I'm supposed to react – those squelching and slurping noises as intestines are splattered around are pretty hilarious (though if it's laughs I'm after, I prefer going back to Braindead again), but I felt numbed, even a little bored, by some of violence depicted – including that directed at women, though it is more shocking by dint of its plausibility (suspending a bloke from the ceiling on meathooks and pouring boiling oil on his back isn't something that happens all that often in the world out there, I imagine, but punching a woman in the face is, sadly). The humour, such as it is, is pretty lame, and I doubt there's much in the way of meaningful dialogue you can't pick up on a first viewing. I guess some smart essay could be written about the use of colour and costume (stylish), but goodness knows who's prepared to watch this over and over again to research the subject.




Groupe Dziga Vertov, Le vent d'est, 1970

Struggled through this, more as an exercise in Godard completist masochism on my part than out of any abiding interest in the subject – that Marxist-Leninist soixante-huitard rhetoric has dated badly – though it's perhaps worth it to just to see Gian Maria Volonté strangling Anna Wiazemsky while she's being spattered with ketchup.

[MRS]

Peter Yates, The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973)

No questions here, just a great, great film. Everything worked for me on this: the pacing (measured but not leisurely, every scene and shot takes the time it needs), the cinematography with all the natural lighting (fall in New England has some awesome light), the performances (Mitchum is great but so is Richard Jordan as Eddie's police contact and Peter Boyle as the bartender), and, of course, the dialogue (which was the star of movie without drawing attention to itself as being particularly witty or authentic).

All movies about the mob should be about the middlemen. It's more human that way, so any tragedy is more sharply felt.

First time last night, wanted to be more moved after hearing so much and poring through 70s crime so often but what Matt says otherwise. I've complained re: Mitchum's bogus Night of the Hunter accents but flawless here. The brief episodes with his wife Sheila (in that apartment kitchen) reminded me of family. "But it's MORNING!" Richard Jordan might have a more impressive turn than Mitchum, what happened? Great to see another sinister James Tolkan cameo. The head of the first bank whose family was held hostage (what a cut to the anterior of the dining room as the other two masked goons are revealed on the flanks) had my better half and I perplexed for hours. . .he played the obstinate, check writing father in Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo. Add the diner where Foley meets Coyle to the list, backlit yellow menu boards w/red font. And Alex Rocco actually grew up in Somerville.

[Dan Warburton]

Alan Clarke, Scum, 1979

Absolutely sensational (though thoroughly brutal and deeply distressing) study of life in a borstal - Clarke works wonders with a tight script, a handheld camera and a cast consisting largely of child actors, many of whom had little or no acting experience. Not the case for Ray Winstone, though, whose performance as Carlin is simply stunning.

[Lao Tsu Ben]

Alan Clarke, Scum, 1979

Absolutely sensational (though thoroughly brutal and deeply distressing) study of life in a borstal - Clarke works wonders with a tight script, a handheld camera and a cast consisting largely of child actors, many of whom had little or no acting experience. Not the case for Ray Winstone, though, whose performance as Carlin is simply stunning.

I agree with that. Ray Winstone's mix of cockiness and fragility (not to mention his physique) in that one also reminded me very much of the young Depardieu.

Takashi Miike, Koroshiya 1 ("Ichi the Killer"), 2001

First Miike film I've seen, and probably not the best one to start with, but whatever. Not knowing much about the manga culture this derives from, I'm not sure how I'm supposed to react – those squelching and slurping noises as intestines are splattered around are pretty hilarious (though if it's laughs I'm after, I prefer going back to Braindead again), but I felt numbed, even a little bored, by some of violence depicted – including that directed at women, though it is more shocking by dint of its plausibility (suspending a bloke from the ceiling on meathooks and pouring boiling oil on his back isn't something that happens all that often in the world out there, I imagine, but punching a woman in the face is, sadly). The humour, such as it is, is pretty lame, and I doubt there's much in the way of meaningful dialogue you can't pick up on a first viewing. I guess some smart essay could be written about the use of colour and costume (stylish), but goodness knows who's prepared to watch this over and over again to research the subject.

Couldn't make it to the end of that, despite my deep affection for Tadanobu Asano, who plays Ichi. It's boring. I can't understand the hype.

I always felt the same way about all those early-mid 2000s "issue" movies (e.g., Babel, Syriana): I liked the ambitious, wide scope they tried to take but the effect couldn't help but come off as superficial, pompous and, finally, dismal.

Why is it that I don't remember anything about Syriana? Ok,
Funny that you should mention Babel, which I have not seen. But when I saw Code Inconnu this week-end, it made me think of Iñárritu, whose work I know, to say the truth, essentially through hostile reviews (though I saw 21 grams, which didn't much encourage me to persevere in making up my own mind about him). I'll have to drop a few words about it later, but in the meantime, be reassured Dan; if I didn't find the film as engrossing as you did, that was certainly interesting. Perhaps I shall have a second look at it before saying anything stupid about it, which, I'm sure, will come in due time.

[Dan Warburton]

Nicholas Ray, Bitter Victory, 1957

Jean-Luc Godard liked it - this was the film that prompted his outrageously hyperbolic "the cinema is Nicholas Ray" quip - but I feel there's something slightly askew here. And not only the daringly expressionistic Maurice Le Roux score (sometimes it works nicely, sometimes it's plain intrusive): Ray's original idea was have Richard Burton playing the cowardly Major Brand and Monty Clift the idealistic archeologist Captain Leith, with Curd Jürgens as the Nazi captain they take hostage after a daring raid on a Libyan town to steal secret war plans. But his producer overruled him, and Jürgens was cast as Brand - they explained that noticeable German accent by pretending he was South African - and Burton as Leith. (Clift chose to do The Young Lions instead, and Ray's second choice, Paul Newman, was not approved.) Ray's instincts were right; Jürgens is uncomfortably wooden, but Burton gives a fine - and appropriately Clift-like - performance. The brutality of the story might have been better served if the film had been made a dozen years later, in garish colour too: the attack on the German barracks needs a bit of Wild Bunch splatter, and I reckon Peckinpah would have had a ball with scorpions running up trouser legs, dying prisoners being shot in the mouth, camels being disembowelled and sentries' throats slit.

[Dan Warburton]

Carl Theodor Dreyer, Vampyr, 1932

Before you go racing back to the shop with the deeveedee moaning about a fuzzy, washed out print, be informed that it was Dreyer who wanted it to look like that, after a batch of rushes came back from the lab looking that way. Honor thy error as a hidden intention. You can excuse the rather primitive dubbing and the odd technical goof, as there are so many sensational moments elsewhere (the dancing shadows, the death of the doctor drowned in flour, wow..). If the leading man looks a bit too smartly dressed for the part, and gives you the impression he can't act for toffee, you're right on both counts: Count Nicolas de Gunzburg financed the film on condition he could star in it himself and show off his snazzy suits (he later settled in NYC and became mentor to fashion gurus including Calvin Klein. No shit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_de_Gunzburg). All adds to the hypnagogic mystery of the whole affair.. awesome.

[Lao Tsu Ben]

The Stepfather, Joseph Ruben, 1987

Truffaut has said that "the bully" is the essential Ray protagonist and this film meets that definition as well as any film possibly could. It's a fascinating idea to consider because Bogart's Dixon Steele from In a Lonely Place uses both his acidic wit and physical dominance to constantly cut down everyone around him. If that's actually a running idea with Ray, then I'm with it. For what it's worth, watching Bigger than Life I was reminded again and again of one of my favorite cinematic bullies: Terry O'Quinn in The Stepfather. Working a fantastic script by the perpetually underrated Donald E. Westlake, Terry O'Quinn embodies all of the subversive cultural critique, razor-sharp humor and genuine sense of terror generally attributed to Ray's film. He's the personification of suburban pressures of family and class bottled up too tightly and ready to blow – in Terrence Rafferty’s words, "He's just another nuclear family reactor." It's a resourceful and clever film that uses its genre to spin incisive commentary out of laughs and horror. In other words, The Stepfather actually is what critics clam Bigger than Life to be. I'll tell folks to check out Bigger than Life, but warn them that "It's pretty stupid." I would recommend The Stepfather without disclaimer.

My interest was triggered by this review of Bigger Than Life. If I certainly get his point about the eventual silliness of Bigger Than Life, The Stepfather is, for my money, slightly less interesting. There is no need to compare the two films, really, but both of them have a great cinematography, typical of their respective era, Bigger Than Life having that particular Technicolor gloss, while The Stepfather looks almost excessively lush and hazy. But as for the story itself, the latter resembles more Shadow of A Doubt with a bit of Psycho thrown in (Terry O'Quinn looks like a thinner Robin Williams and like Anthony Perkins). In passing, the actual mass murderer on whom the story was based was arrested two years after the film's release. Like Bigger Than Life, it's quite a disturbing movie (perhaps with a subtler humor), made even more so by the presence of a 24-year-old Jill Schoelen who plays the rebellious teenage stepdaughter and whose seemingly unselfconscious sex-appeal is arresting.

[Dan Warburton]

Thanks for that link there, Ben. Have a few issues with this bit, though:

the film contains what is inarguably the worst visual metaphor in all of le cinema: our hero, realizing he is losing control of his life, of his very sanity, gazes with wild eyes into a cracked mirror.

Odd he feels the need to pop the French definite article in there. If he wants to show off his French chops though he should put an acute accent on the "e" in "cinema" too.. and not misspell "metteur" later in the article I get the impression he's got more bones to pick with Truffaut than with Ray. But I wouldn't say it's "inarguably" the worst visual metaphor in cinema (ha, there's a good subject for a thread - what is the worst visual metaphor in cinema?). He might have backed up his "irrefutable" claim by citing a few films that feature the shot. Offhand I can think of just one, in Clouzot's Le Corbeau, but I guess there are more dating from the good old UFA expressionist days. Maybe The Mirror Crack'd is one, which he mentions later. Haven't seen that.

This one is particularly egregious because Mason embraces himself and strokes his own shoulders at the same time.

I wonder why that makes it particularly egregious..

Also, early on, I thought the film had successfully avoided employing one of my pet peeve tactics: someone opens a door with a mirror on it and when they close that mirrored door – surprise! - there's now someone visible in the mirror. Bigger than Life sets up such a moment in one of the first scenes where Mason is rifling through his medicine cabinet, jonesing for a dose. When he closes the mirror and there is no one visible, I actually thought, "Oh, wow, I'm glad they didn’t pull the ol' sneaky mirror." But then at the end of the film, when his son is rifling through some drawers looking for the cortisone, he moves a mirror on top of the dresser and oh my God, Mason is standing right behind you, dude! Oh, well.

Funderbergs are go! Hm, maybe it's just that I'm just a little wary of the overuse of "dude", but this smacks a bit of smartypants hipper-than-thou film snobbery. But I don't know anything about Mr Funderberg. I wonder what his top ten films are.
I have to say I agree with Truffaut's choice of Bigger Than Life more than with Godard's éloge de l'amour for Bitter Victory. The whole point about BTL is that it really is bigger than life, with its crazy low-angle shots, garish colours and Sirky faux happy ending. And I think it can stand proudly alongside A Face In The Crowd and Le notti di Cabiria (both of which also have their flaws). I don't know if anyone has upped a rip of the BFI DVD of BTL somewhere, with the fascinating conversation on the film between Rosenbaum and Jarmusch, but I'd recommend that. As well as Bernard Eisenschitz's Ray biography, which I picked up dirt cheap secondhand on Amazon.

[Dan Warburton]

Jan Troell, Nybyggarna, "The New Land", 1972

[..]those crabbed, morose Swedes. They seemed to be living in the Dark Ages. they were so monotonously stolid they didn't even talk to each other; the closeups of sealed faces made me impatient, and I began to think the Swedes should leave Sweden just to get away from the other Swedes though, of course, when they got here, they stuck pretty close together). [..]Swedish family life is cheerless, and the thick, doomy Protestantism austere.

Actually, Pauline was writing about Utvandrarna, "The Emigrants", which tells how Karl Oskar and Kristina got to the backwoods of Minnesota in the first place (Nybyggarna is the sequel), but the remark still applies. Von Sydow and Ullmann are, as you might expect, terrific, and Eddie Axberg delivers a fine performance as Robert, the brother who heads out to pan for gold in California and finds only deceit, disease and death. Things only start dragging in the last half hour - not bad for a film lasting over three hours - when a few local Indians start getting nasty and Kristina dies of childbirth-induced exhaustion (!). Troell's eye for detail, framing and use of sound (love the percussion masking the dialogue in the Wild West sequence) is subtle and strong. Reminded me of Rivette. File next to Kazan's America America, and maybe with Malick's New World, though that's a skittery glittery affair in comparison.

[Lao Tsu Ben]

Thanks for that link there, Ben. Have a few issues with this bit, though:

And about all the points that follow, I agree with you Dan (except that I still have to see Bitter Victory., but since I've seen The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, I'm a big Richard Burton fan, so it's only a matter of time) And in fact, all those points that Funderberg is making seem rather petty to me. But I agree with him on the campy aspects of the movie.

the film contains what is inarguably the worst visual metaphor in all of le cinema: our hero, realizing he is losing control of his life, of his very sanity, gazes with wild eyes into a cracked mirror.

It's not even true, we realize that he is losing control of his life, contrary to him, hence the awkwardness of the scene.
However, I came across this website while looking for something to read about Miami Blues (as I've already said probably), and by the way, there is a text that looks interesting about The Friends of Eddie Coyle (in a rubric which is called "COMPARING FILMS TO THEIR LITERARY COUNTERPARTS", in case you would want to know - I'm speaking of Matt and MRS). I rather like how he writes even if I'm often completely at odds with him (it's because of him that I watched the dreadful Happy-Go-Lucky).

Jan Troell, Nybyggarna, "The New Land", 1972

Thanks for the review Dan, I have to find the courage to see that. I rarely watch films that last three hours. I'm also told that his first film, Here's Your Life, is some kind of masterpiece (his Citizen Kane, I even read I think), I also have it, but it's almost as long.

And to conclude, a quote about Chabrol by crime novelist Jean-Patrick Manchette, whose reviews about cinema are collected in a wonderful book (in French) entitled Les Yeux de La Momie:

pour découvrir ensuite quelle sarcastique perversion lui fait composer un plan d'autant mieux que son contenu dramatique est plus insignifiant, et inversement. Je schématisme abusivement, d'ailleurs.

[Dan Warburton]

pour découvrir ensuite quelle sarcastique perversion lui fait composer un plan d'autant mieux que son contenu dramatique est plus insignifiant, et inversement

Nice line

[Lao Tsu Ben]

Damn, I love Jean Yanne (his films are a quite funny take on French culture (the only one really worth seeing being Tout le monde il est beau, tout le monde il est gentil). Nada by Chabrol, which is an ok political thriller but nothing special was adapted from a novel by Manchette, who is one of my few cultural heroes, more for the persona than for the novels, actually, which are still very good.