Mama (2013) Mini-review

In the midst of January's cinematic dumping-ground comes a solid and well-crafted ghost story, marred only by a few strange aesthetic choices: Mama (2013). Exec produced by Guillermo del Toro, the film was based on Barbara Muschietti 's 2008 Spanish language horror film of the same name in a bit of a dream-come-true scenario ("Hey, del Toro likes your short and wants to finance a feature. Sound cool to you?"). It's a satisfying film overall but with a few flaws that marred the final product.

The set up is fundamentally brilliant: two little girls, aged three and one, are abandoned by their psychotic father in a cabin in the woods. Their daddy's gone crazy and killed their mother, and he's about to shoot the oldest girl when a mysterious, ghostly entity snatches him up, takes him away, and saves the children. The two girls grow up feral and alone, watched over only by the ghostly presence who they call "Mama." When their uncle finally finds them five years later, the older girl is willing to become part of the society of the living, but the younger daughter, who never really learned to speak and is far more savage than her sister, remains attached to her death-mommy. If you happen to be a Freudian, you'll find their ages quite significant. But even if you're not, the dark fairy-tale evocations of the cabin in the woods, mixed in with some of horror's most effective, if well-worn, tropes (the uncanny child, gruesome motherhood) combine to create one unsettling experience.

While the story, lead performances and characterization, are all great, the ghost itself was a bit problematic for me. The apparition was just so badly rendered, the worst of the worst CGI. In the course of the film, certain photographs are used to illustrate Mama's origin story; these look a bit like Victorian spirit photos or death portraits, and are far scarier than the final CGI specter. Visually, a little less-is-more might've saved that ghost. 

Otherwise, Mama was a solid film, with a surprisingly -- and refreshingly -- bleak ending. It was certainly effective enough to give me nightmares: I awoke at 3am with a vague sense of terror over the idea of two little children lost in the woods, but not alone.

Kino

Hi readers,

Today is a bit of a somber day. I went to the memorial service for Don Krim, long-time president of Kino International and my former boss. If you are a movie fan at all, you'll want to have at least one Kino DVD in your house: "Movies without Kino would be like parks without trees, museums without paintings." Do me a favor and check their catalogue out here. If you live in one of those fancy high-priced cities with tiny movie-houses, you might even be able to find some of their theatrical offerings. Kino is definitely holding the torch for a lot of the best foreign, silent and classic films, and in an age when so many distribs are going -- or have gone -- out of business, it's important to show them we care, and that we appreciate Don's service to cinema. If you're short on cash, you can get a lot of their stuff on Netflix, and of course you can like them on FB or follow them on Twitter.

On a personal note, Don was a great boss -- he was always fair and equitable to those who worked for him and with him, and was incredibly generous and kind to me for the nearly four years I worked there. I remember being amazed to learn he actually paid his interns. In a business where this is almost unheard-of, I think it goes to show what kind of person he was. He believed in paying people for their work: an old-fashioned concept from a true gentleman.

Goodbye Student Loan Payments!

Congratulations! You no longer need to go to film school, now that The Dancing Image has curated the world's most comprehensive syllabus of film-related reading! My suggestions are on there, so you know it's good.

Now you can go study something important instead, like science. Your parents will be so relieved.

Reading the movies?

Shahn at Six Martinis and the Seventh Art has tagged me in a "Reading the Movies" meme started over at the Dancing Image. The following, in no particular order, represent five of my favorite books about movies:

1. The "perversely inaccurate" Fun in a Chinese Laundry, Josef von Sternberg's pastiche of a memoir. And when I say pastiche, I mean an amalgam of his paranoid ramblings, some fact, a few self-aggrandizing delusions and lots of apocryphal anecdotes.

2. Who the Devil Made It by Peter Bogdanovich. You'll learn more about writing for the movies than if you read any number of silly books like The Writer's Journey or Save the Cat.

3. What Made Pistachio Nuts? I remember loving this book in grad school, mainly for the way Henry Jenkins irreverently pokes holes in the supremacy of James Agee's adulation of the "silent clowns." Just the kind of contrary thinking I like, plus, a canny appreciation of an undeservedly maligned moment in film history (early sound).

4. Without Lying Down. Frances Marion's biography is overlong and far too full of irrelevant details (like who cares about every single aunt and uncle she ever had?) but an important work nonetheless because it inspired me to learn more about Marion as a writer.

5. Preston Sturges: Five Screenplays. Not so much a book about film as a book with films in it, if that makes sense. Another invaluable tool for the writer who wants to be funny, or entertaining, or even both if you can manage it.

Movie Roundup

This is exactly what screenwriters look like

So I've been out of commission for a while, finishing the revisions on my script about the sassy retro stewardesses, but I've managed to catch a few movies here and there, and finally finish the Masterpiece Theatre version of Little Dorrit. First things first.

Little Dorrit
Dickens' fraught relationship with the Marshalea Debtors' Prison created some of his most complex characters. All the main players in Little Dorrit are nuanced, layered and fallible, from the prideful and pretentious -- yet pathetic and vulnerable -- patriarch William Dorrit to the smug but sweet do-gooder Arthur Clennam to Little Dorrit herself, a rather ghoulish young lady who seems to thrive when those around her are in need of saving. She and Mr. Clennam both have slight martyr complexes, which makes them such a dandy match for one another.

Century-old societal critique doesn't always hold up, but Dickens' eye for hypocrisy outlasts social trends, and Little Dorrit's narrative of financial ruin tells a story as old as the moon and cyclical as the tides (I believe we're in the midst of some sort of slight financial crisis now, aren't we?). From a modern perspective I must admit I don't see the logic behind debtors' prisons.... how on earth are you supposed to pay back your debts if you don't work? Baffling.

The minor and peripheral characters are the broadest, silliest and most delightful. I was especially fond of Edmund Sparkler and his funny little turns of phrase: "Dad wasn't a bad old stick" and, of course, "No begod nonsense about her." As always, there's a great big lovely happy ending in which Mr. Clennam and Little Dorrit are married, and nothing solves everyone's problems forever like a wedding.


Brothers Bloom

While the concept had potential, I suspected there might be third act problems when I read the script, and was disappointed to see the final (filmed) product confirm my suspicions. The first two thirds are an amusing romp peopled with outlandish personae; by the end, though, the repetitious heist/con pattern grows wearying (didn't McKee warn you about the law of diminishing returns? he actually was right about that, you know), and humor is sacrificed to mawkish drawn-out fraternal histrionics. It should have ended in Mexico ("I don't want to impugn an entire country, but Mexico's a terrible place"). More proof that tonal shifts can be pulled off by only the most delicate of touches.


In A Lonely Place

A master class in dramatic writing. Seriously. Besides adhering admirably to Aristotle's unities, and showing all action arising logically from character, and never permitting any disruption of the narrative, and showing-not-telling, and, well, the list goes on. Let's just say this script does everything a good screenplay should, and every aspiring writer should watch it. An added bonus: the source novel was one of the few hardboiled noirs written by a woman, and was reprinted by CUNY's Feminist Press in 2003. Bogart, good writing, genre, woman authors, and CUNY? Why, it's simply got everything. Oh, and some guy named Nick Ray directed it. He isn't bad either.


Moon

This just in: David Bowie's son has written and directed an intelligent, original, low-budget sci-fi indie. Seriously. He goes by the name Duncan Jones, precisely to avoid being written about as he is here, and he just made a really, really good movie. It opens in select theatres on June 12, and if you're even remotely intrigued by sci-fi you won't be disappointed. Both an elegant homage to classic genre milestones and a highly original, conceptual foray into identity and loss, plus! actual legitimate science, technical mastery, and a super-strong performance from Sam Rockwell, Moon is a refreshing indie experience that schools us all in what you can do with talent, brains, imagination and five million dollars.

PSA: Warner Archive

We've already got three of these in our household, and it will likely become an addiction.
So far, speedy shipping and decent quality transfers mean I can recommend this service to my fellow cinemaphile spinsters, and this Marion Davies movie intrigues me, since I've long been meaning to watch her comedies (my poor reaction time to various TCM airings has shut me out thus far). So get thee to the Warner Archive, now -- even if only to spend the better part of the morning procrastinating.

Midinettes!

Learn more about William Wellman, Joan and James, and Maude Fulton -- my favorite latest discovery -- here. Although I'm thrilled to think of all those lovely William Wellman movies waiting in my DVR, it's the story of Maude Fulton that really grabbed my attention:

"Raised in the Kansas newspaper biz by her Dad, the editor of the local daily, she wrote a novel by the age of 15, “whose theme was ‘The Curse of Rum’”. She bounced from job to job, including singing pop songs at a department store, until she learned stenography and was hired by a railway office, where she likely soaked in the bravado of the train engineers that suffuses Other Men’s Women. Bored with office work, she soon lit out for the stage in NYC. She was performing in Mam’zelle Champagne on the roof of Madison Square Garden in 1906, when the millionaire Henry K. Thaw shot and killed architect Stanford White for fooling around with his young wife, Evelyn Nesbit (who was also romanced by John Barrymore). Thaw’s trial was the first to be dubbed 'The Trial of the Century.'"

I so want to be like Maude Fulton!

White Pages

Screenplays have gotten shorter in the past half-century or so. A modern screenplay averages 100 pages in length, and a sign of good writing now is leaving plenty of "white on the page."

It wasn't always so. In the '40s, as talking pictures began to hit their stride, screenplays were rather lengthy and wordy, or at least they would seem to be by today's standards (I don't have any screenplays from the earliest talkies, but I might update this later if I get my hands on one).

This Preston Sturges script for The Lady Eve clocks in at 200 pages. Now, it's a shooting script, so it contains scene directions and other things which wouldn't be in a spec script, or even an earlier draft. But it's still fairly representative:


The sluglines look different, but otherwise the formatting is still basically the same. The major difference one notices when reading a Sturges script is how detailed the scene descriptions are.

In Chinatown, we see something much closer to what we're used to. Again, this appears to be a shooting script, so some of the scene description is allowable in a way that it wouldn't be in a spec, but still, it's very, very detailed: In case it's too small to see, the paragraph says, "Gittes stares at her. He's been charged with anger and when Evelyn says this it explodes. He hits her full in the face. Evelyn stares back at him. The blow has forced tears from her eyes, but she makes no move, not even to defend herself."

In a contemporary script, 40-Year-Old Virgin, we have scene description in its current incarnation :
This is what is now considered an acceptable amount of prose on a page.

I'm not sure I have an opinion one way or another -- I'm a skimmer rather than a reader myself, so I actually enjoy not having to read a lot of description -- but I just find it interesting to chart the evolution. There's a fine line between overwriting and trying to get a prose style to convey your story ideas, and the line seems to be getting finer and finer, as we strive to use the fewest words possible. It kind reminds me of the old joke, "Brevity is ... wit."

Termite News!

Check out R. Emmet Sweeney's latest brilliance over at the TCM blog. Unlike me, he actually knows stuff about the movies he reviews, so you might even learn something.

Gems from the ash pile

As per my resolution -- for I never falter when it comes to resolutions -- here are some sparkling gems from My Man Godfrey (La Cava, 1936) and Easy Living (Leisen, 1937).

My Man Godfrey has the special privilege of showcasing Carole Lombard at her most utterly bonkers as socialite Irene Bullock, and as a special treat, Alice Brady as her mother Angelica Bullock, who resembles no one so much as the Mad Hatter (come to think of it, Irene's a lot like the March Hare). It almost makes me get over my lack of fondness for William Powell. I'll tell you who I do love, though: Eugene Pallette, who also played Henry Fonda's dad in The Lady Eve. No one played put-upon patriarchs better than he.

A few choice quotes:

Angelica Bullock: You mustn't come between Irene and Godfrey. He's the first thing she's shown any affection for since her Pomeranian died last summer.

Alexander Bullock: Life in this family is one subpoena after another.

Irene: Godfrey loves me! He put me in the shower!

Irene: Stand still, Godfrey. It'll all be over in a minute.

Godfrey: Opportunity is just around the corner.
Mike Flaherty: Yeah, it's been there a long time. I wish I knew which corner.

The story in Easy Living revolves around a $58,000 sable coat. Can I even fathom a coat that costs more than I ever made in a year, in my best years, selling at this price in 1937? No, no I can't. It breaks my brain. Cracks it right in half. But without the coat, the gossip of the milliner Van Buren wouldn't be half as funny:

Van Buren: The bull of broad street... with a girl... in the sable-est sable coat they ever sabled!

The hat salesman is on the horn with a Winchell-esque gossip columnist, spreading rumors that innocent Mary Smith (Jean Arthur) is the mistress of financier J.B. Ball. It's all a crazy mix-em-up, of course, all the better to deliver this incendiary line:

Van Buren: Where-ever there's smoke, there must be... somebody smoking.

Nobody orchestrates chaos better than Sturges (who wrote the screenplay), ably assisted by Leisen (sorry, fella, you have to play second banana to my hero). Subtle commentaries on wealth are also appreciated (by me), like the scene in which Jean Arthur finds herself in a princely hotel suite but is bitterly disappointed to find it has an empty fridge, and wears her $58,000 fur coat to the automat, where all she has to spend is two nickels.

Alright, truthfully, I can't remember a lot of funny quotes from this movie, but here's one I can recall -- a marriage proposal to beat the band:

John Ball Jr.: We both have jobs! I'm going to work for my father --
Mary Smith: And what will I do?
John Ball Jr.: You're going to cook my breakfast.

How can a girl say no to that?

Snappy Pre-Code Dialogue Is Always in Fashion

I've been amusing myself at Film Forum's Breadlines and Champagne series this week but regret not having brought a notebook to any of the shows. What use is all that fabulous, snappy pre-code yammering if it slides out of my grasp as soon as I hear it? So from now on I'll not only jot the stuff down, I'll transcribe it, too, since the only thing worse than my memory is my handwriting.

A few dillies from last night's Warren William letch-fest:

Employee's Entrance (1933)

William's cold-hearted department-store boss gets a number of good lines off, but my favorite is this exchange with local hussy, Polly:

Kurt: When did YOU develop principles?
Polly: Oh, I saved a couple out of the crash.

Skyscraper Souls (1932)

A jeweler and a clothing model with loose morals are in a crowd of people buying bank stock. While pressed up against the broker's counter, the following exchange occurs:

Jake:You shouldn't gamble.
Jenny: No? But what are you doing here?
Jake: Well, I can afford it. I'm established;
I'm in a very old business.
Jenny: Yeah? Well, so am I.

(Update: I just remembered my dream! I was trying to draw Loretta Young's face. I remembered just now when I looked at her eyes and eyebrows and realized I was trying to draw those perfect arches in my sleep. Also: why doesn't *my* hair do that?)

Saute Ma Ville

Saute Ma Ville channels all the despondency, destructiveness and enraged obnoxiousness of teenage girls into a tight thirteen minute sequence consisting of our heroine (below) destroying a kitchen as she attempts to cook, clean and polish her shoes (and, as she attempts to feed and care for it, kill one cat). A miniature Ackerman gem of hostile domestic surfaces and combustible (literally) female energy, it does indeed "vibrate ... with a sort of David Lynch-ian menace," as Dan Callahan writes in his brief interview with Ackerman here.

Rotterdam, Rain, Movies

Any married Spinster worth her salt knows better than to let her husband gallivant around Europe unchaperoned, which is how I come to find myself in Rotterdam. While Rob makes with the art talk over the next four days, I plan to amuse myself with a haunted house, a maritime museum, walks in the rain, and, of course, movies. The most delightful so far is Send Me To The 'Lectric Chair, Guy Maddin and Isabella Rosselini's tribute to Thomas Edison, electricity, the movie camera and all their attendant thrills.

Update: I saw an old Chantal Ackerman film, Saute Ma Ville (more on that later), and part of a Russian teen-angst movie called Everybody Dies But Me, which was average. I walked to the Boijmans van Beuningen museum in the driving wind and rain, only to realize I'd left my student card in my hotel room -- and I'll be dammed if I'm paying 12 Euros -- so I trudged over to the Maritime Museum where I shivered in my soaking socks and learned a lot about the Dutch East and West Indian Companies (fact check: the museum claims the Dutch West Indian Company ran the colony of New Amsterdam for a time ... and they're right! Bonus points awarded to any reader who can tell me the name of the company man they put in charge of the operation). Why am I obsessed with maritme museums? I can't tell you that. But it's the same part of me that simply *had* to wander along the canals in the January drizzle and look at the boats. That folly was richly rewarded, though, since I wandered my way to the cube houses, which are strange and delightful enough to merit the hike.

Finally, I visited one of the Festival's more whimsical installations, the Haunted House featuring rooms by Wisit Sasanatieng (“Tears of the Black Tiger”, “The Unseeable”), Amir Muhammad (“Susuk”), Lav Diaz (“Death in the Land of the Encantos”) , Nguyen Vihn Son (“The Moon at the Bottom of the Well”), Garin Nugroho (“Opera Jawa”) and Riri Riza (“Eliana, Eliana”). Wisit's room, "Close Encounter With The Ghost" made me jump, Lav Diaz's "Manila's Dark Room" made me really not want to be alone with my thoughts, and Garin Nugroho's "Transformation: Ghosts in Garin's House" was strangely inviting. My apologies to Riri Riza for stepping on the flowers in his "Purificaion Pod."

Between the raininess, the wateriness, the ghostiness and the viewing of some vintage Ackerman, I'd have to say it's been a pretty dreamy day so far ...

Top "Ten" (UPDATED, with asides)*

1. The House Bunny (They let girls be funneeee!!!!)

2. Happy Go Lucky (Sally Hawkins portrays a character whose manic joy is a conscious choice -- look at that scene with the schizophrenic when he says, "You know?" and she says, "I know." I'm telling you, that girl's been through some shit, you can see it all there under the surface)

3. Wendy and Lucy (I never wanted to take care of a fictional character as badly as I wanted to take care of Wendy)

4. The Flight of the Red Balloon (alchemy -- I don't know how this director made me feel the things I felt watching this movie; it can only be magic)

5. A Christmas Tale (Oh, I just want to live in that big house with Catherine Deneuve!)

6. Wall-E (the first forty minutes are divine)

7. La France (the last scene made me realize that WWI really was the war to end all wars -- nothing was ever the same again, not for nation states, not for this couple, not for anybody ... oh, and I liked the songs)
8. My Winnipeg (hilarious and nostalgic and wonderful -- I'll never forget the interlude about tearing down the hockey stadium and I don't even like hockey ... also, Ledge Man? Awesome)
9. Headless Woman (A disturbing psychological mystery with a specific sense of place, and utter fragmentation)

10. Stepbrothers/Gran Torino (Richard Jenkins and Clint Eastwood duke it out for my favorite male perfs this year -- funny and bitter and who knew Jenkins could improv like that?)

Bonus Round:
11. Sparrow (That umbrella sequence? My stars!)
12. Be Kind Rewind (Made me feel more in love with the cinema, know what I mean? I just left the theatre happy!)
13. The Romance of Astree and Celadon (a visual petit-four)

14. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button


Honorable Mentions:
13. Still Life
14. Silent Light
15. Ballast
(The last three all gorgeous films, but I tend to go for belly laughs, sweetness, whimsy and froth, so maybe these were a bit austere for me, though they're still undeniably great)

Still Want to See:
Duchess of Langeais
Milk
Man On Wire
Rachel Getting Married
You The Living
The Class
Of Time and The City

Overrated, I Think:
Reprise (what am I missing? Maybe I spent too much time ogling the cute blonde boy and not enough time paying attention to the movie)
Dark Knight (good but not that freaking great)
Let The Right One In (not that I didn't like it, but ...)
The Last Mistress (ARGH!)
Synecdoche, NY (blah blah blah ... and visually ugly)
Paranoid Park (meh)

*Please note: all lists are unranked.

Old Timey Movies!

I've also been on a 1930s kick lately, which I can only imagine has been prompted by the worldwide financial collapse I've been convinced was coming most of my adult life (yes, I'm one of those people that has an irrational Depression-phobia and is convinced the next Big One is coming in her lifetime -- perhaps there's a word for that?) and what better to go with a downturn than Jimmy Cagney ... and Al Jolson!

Last week I watched a strange little musical called Hallelujah, I'm A Bum! starring Jolson, Frank Morgan and Harry Langdon as a communist trash-collector who berates all the bums living in Central Park. Frank Morgan plays the mayor of New York who loses his girl to amnesia when, distraught after a lovers' spat, she jumps off a bridge in the park. The girl is promptly saved by Jolson, who fishes her out of the drink (and who happens to be buddies with the surprisingly egalitarian mayor). The girl and Jolson fall in love, but complications, of course, ensue. Aside from its very unusual class consciousness, the film is distinguished by tinny musical numbers and a very sad penultimate scene which every guy who's ever lost a girl to a mayor can understand. It's unremarkable for its casual 1930s racism, which made me feel sorry for poor Edgar Connor who played Jolson's sidekick, Acorn, and the inevtiable facial cramps one must get from all that damn grinning.

My other noteworthy 1930s comedy was Jimmy the Gent, starring James Cagney and Bette Davis, pre-code goodness that's eminently quotable, including such gems as:

"What would you do for $500?"
"I'd do my best!"

One of the film geeks in my shabby little office likes to say that James Cagney is one of the few actors that justified the use of sound in motion pictures, and I'd like to respectfully agree with her.

****** ****** ******

Stay tuned for further posts in which I talk about the unmitigated delight of reading Chelsea Handler's latest opus, "Are You There Vodka? It's Me Chelsea," and Josef von Sternberg's utterly insane memoir, Fun In A Chinese Laundry. Plus pictures!