RAUNCHY SIGNIFICANCE

Sorry to Bother You is about important matters.  It looks at societal trends which affect us all  —  and to which we knowingly or unknowingly contribute.  Telemarketing and the invasion of privacy that it entails.  The influence of corporations on our daily lives.  The numbing of sensibilities by the televised repetition of horrors.

Central to the plot is an appalling television show  —  insensitively viewed by millions.  A central feature of the show is the beating up of contestants, then bathing them in excrement.  America watches, enthralled.

The moments about privacy  —  and its lack  —  which suddenly put  the telemarketer in the room with the called victim, is cleverly achieved through visual/technological means which are exclusively cinema’s.  Boots Riley sets us up for accepting anything,and we move from our black hero at a party leading whites in a racist rap chant to Frankensteinian fantasy;  and he has us believing it all.

LAKEITH STANFIELD
photograph by Rachael Wright, used with permission

The acting is admirable.  Sorry to Bother You is superbly cast down to the smallest roles.  Lakeith Stanfield is outstanding.  He is a real charmer, dirty mouth and all.

Sorry to Bother You
Boots Riley
2018

NEXT Friday POST December 14

Until then,
See you at the movies,
Rick

SHORT TAKES – EARLY THIRTIES HOLLYWOOD

QUOTE FOR THE WEEK:

There were years when I went to the cinema almost every day and maybe even twice a day, and those were the years between ’36 and the war, the years of my adolescence. It was a time when the cinema became the world for me. (“A Cinema-Goer’s Autobiography” in The Road to San Giovanni by Italo Calvino.)

Rick’s Journal    –  MY FILM CAREER

Baby  Face
Alfred E. Green
1933

I never look forward to any film featuring Barbara Stanwyck  —  except The Lady Eve, Double Indemnity or Meet John Doe.  But this is a gripping story, visually presented.  The camera climbs up the building in which our “heroine” continually reaches for and achieves success.

She is believable in the role and gives the sex scenes  real punch.

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Stingaree
William A. Wellman
1934

Set on an Australian cattle ranch this period piece is a silly melodrama, but the direction and the performances makes us believe it.

Director William Wellman

There are fine moments.  There is a scene of Richard Dix and Irene Dunne exploring a trunk of clothes that has a magical light.  And in an at-the-piano scene in which Dunne sings to Dix’s accompaniment, their exchange of amorous glances is potent.  More than once in the film  Dunne’s thoughts in the form of unspoken flashbacks are superimposed over her face on screen.  The common silent technique is used to advantage here in 1934.

Unfortunately, the supposed Australian setting is warred against by a typical-then  Hollywood mix of accents.

SPOILER ALERT:  The ending is a 1934 shocker as Dunne rides off, on horseback, with Dix who is fleeing the police.

My Halliwell guide says that the film has a color sequence, but there was not one in the Turner Classic Movies print I viewed.

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ADDENDUM TO FABULOUS DUO (Rick’s Flicks 10/26)

CINEVENT comment on the sequence in which Sascha plays his New York-inspired composition:  “The scene opens as Sascha is playing…As Gaynor runs down the fire escape, the music surges forth with a pulsating rhythm that could only be Gershwin.  For this complex mixture of curiosity and awe turning to alienation and depression, Butler created a wonderful montage full of Germanic images, including spirits rising from a graveyard and the skyline metamorphosing into clutching hands, as Gaynor runs through the city, each block bringing more terror than the last.  Gershwin’s score goes on to capture these images with a piece of music so reminiscent of his Rhapsody in Blue that he initially called it Rhapsody in Rivers.”  (Eventually New York Rhapsody.)    —    (From CINEVENT notes 2007 by Dave Snyder and Steven Haynes.)

THE LEGENDARY DUO _____________________________________________________________

AND A FINAL QUOTE:

Director Jim Jarmusch on photographer Robby Müller:  “He really taught me how to make a film:  how to avoid the obvious in locations; how to use beauty in the service of the story and characters; and how black and white can stimulate the imagination by a reduction of information  —  that it can be more dreamlike and evocative than color.”

Müller, who photographed Jarmusch’s Dead Man and Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas, died this past summer.

(Quote from the New York Times obituary for Robby Müller by Richard Sandomir, 8/11/18.)

NEXT FRIDAY POST November 30

Until then,
See you at the movies,
Rick

 

 

 

 

TWO FROM 2017

Mary Shelley
Haifaa Al-Mansour
2017

This is a romance, loosely based on the lives of Mary Shelley and her husband poet.  Playing the Mary Shelley of this script Elle Fanning is excellent, and Douglas Booth is good as the poet and looks remarkably like the drawings and paintings we have of him.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

The photography (David Ungaro) and production design and art direction (Paki Smith and Nigel Pollock, respectively) are outstanding and achieve a decided sense of period.  But the concept of the film and its characters derive from a modern sensibility.

But the unflattering portrait of Byron rings true.  Another point of historical accuracy is sustained by the performance of Bel Powley as Mary Shelley’s stepsister Claire  —  throughout the Shelley’s marriage and throughout her life a royal pain, and not in the neck.

Contrary to the near-alcoholic of the script, poet Shelley was a teetotaler.

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King Arthur:  Legend of the Sword
Guy Ritchie
2017

King Arthur is ridiculous.  The court of Arthur’s father Uther (Pendragon) fight not just prehistoric monsters but mythological prehistoric monsters who carry veritable cities of warriors on their backs.  They do this to strangely contemporary music.  Meanwhile, back in  the city, Arthur and his gang of smuggling thugs, steal and kill and plot.  Are they supposed to be speaking in rap?

How Jude Law became involved in this preposterous film would seem a mystery, but he must have known what he was letting himself in for.  He manages to be believable, and this is much more than can be said of Charlie Hunnan’s Rocky Balboa version of Arthur.  Or is it 007 on horseback?

Example of King Arthur caption:  Metal Clanging…All Men Yelling and Grunting.  (Indeed)

Example of King Arthur dialogue:  “Come on you guys.”

A further example:  “F— me!”

If we’re going to replace Arthur’s honor, nobility and purity with something else, the something else needs to be better than this.

NEXT FRIDAY POST November 16

Until then,
See you at the movies,
Rick

The romance of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. Abridged from Malory’s Morte d’Arthur by Alfred W. Pollard. Illustrated by Arthur Rackham. Published 1920 by Macmillan in New York.