MIYAZAKI HAYAO: FUTURE BOY CONAN (1978), PART II

The conclusion of a two-part review

In the first part of this review, we took a close look at the first eight episodes - roughly a third - of the 1978 anime series Future Boy Conan, and hopefully gained a fairly good idea of the primary themes of the show and how they are explored: the obligations of friendship, the long-term victory of nature over short-term human destruction. That's all the farther I'll be taking such a close analysis of the series narrative, as the remaining 18 episodes are (on the one hand) so broadly similar to what we've already seen that a thematic reading would be repetitive, and (on the other hand) so specifically different that I'd feel like a bastard if I gave away some of the surprises.

So let us leave Conan, Lana and Jimsy to their destiny, and scale back to consider some of the things I couldn't get to in the episode-by-episode framework: the overall aesthetic of the show, its place in anime history, and in the development of the career of its director, Miyazaki Hayao - who is, after all, the reason we're all here.

Viewed with thirty years of hindsight, knowing how staggeringly lush some of Miyazaki's later works would be, it's somewhat hard not to immediately respond to Future Boy Conan with a touch of dismay: it frankly looks a bit cheap. Especially in the character design and animation, where figures are deliberately drawn with a lack of fussy details, so that they can be quickly and efficiently painted in mostly solid blocks of color.



Moreover, the series is consistently animated at a much-reduced framerate: by my reckoning, never more than "on the twos" (a new image every second frame, i.e. 12 images per second), and nearly always "on the threes" (every third frame, i.e. 8 images per second). There is at any rate a definite jerkiness to the movement throughout all 26 episodes of the show that never lets you forget that you're watching a cartoon.

That being conceded, let us not forget the world in which Future Boy Conan was released. The 1970s were a fairly awful period in animation history, in every country; the state of American cartooning I will let speak for itself - SuperFriends, anyone? - and while my specific knowledge of 1970s anime is fairly limited, the scraps that I'm familiar with have suggested that on the whole, the Japanese animation industry had receded from the already uninspiring work being produced in the 1960s - Astro Boy, anyone? A quick survey of Japanese film history can at least confirm that the period was marked by a significant belt-tightening, both on television and in theaters, and this extended to the production of animation like everything else.

(And yes, I recognise that both SuperFriends and Astro Boy have their earnest defenders. Sadly, just because you liked something when you were six, does not mean that it is actually good.)

So even though it was "cheap", obviously produced quickly for television (public television, at that), Future Boy Conan actually holds up better than most of what was being produced around the world in 1978. For a start, the backgrounds are absolutely gorgeous. And, while the characters may not have the richness of movement or design that a bigger budget would have permitted, they've all been drawn with no small attention to developing their personality through facial features and expressions. We might even say that this is the more impressive feat than more outwardly "accomplised" animation would have been: given a small resource pool, the animators and designers - "designers" pretty much means "Miyazaki" - could create simple, instantly recognisable figures that could move through a great many emotions, which all had to be instantly recognisable themselves. That the biggest complaint I can lay against the animation is its framerate says quite a lot about their success: most animators of the same era wouldn't have even tried to do what the Conan team did. It's something like playing a symphony using three guitars and a drum.

It's hardly likely to be the case that Miyazaki was individually responsible for the high quality of this series, but not impossible to believe that his personal stake in the project gave him the passion to lead his animators to do their very best work. Let us not forget that Miyazaki himself was an animator on this series, as he'd been one of the country's premier animators for a decade at that point; as I mentioned before, this is indeed an essentially arbitrary place to begin a Miyazaki retrospective, given the number of projects he'd designed before this, and the number of stories he'd helped to develop. Really, the only point of distinction concerning Future Boy Conan is that it is the first project that Miyazaki largely guided from story concept to completion with only minimal input from others. But by 1978, he was something of an old pro, and the jump from supervising animator to director can hardly have been that pronounced.

So this is, in essence, the work of a seasoned filmmaker, and it shows. There's a certainty to the progression of the narrative, a faith that the audience will follow along without having things explained in tiny detail, and a willingness to put in twists and turns that would bring the whole edifice crashing to the ground if they weren't perfectly executed; the animation bears the stamp of someone with a marked gift for efficiency, getting the point across visually in the smallest number of steps. It's a bizarre thing to say of a 13-hour serial, but Future Boy Conan is a remarkably disciplined work: little is put in that isn't necessary to either further the plot, advance characters and theme, or craft a solid gag. The last of these isn't given any less weight than the other two, by the way: above all things, Future Boy Conan is awfully entertaining, and the goofy slapstick that dominates its humor is never frantic or pushy, as it so often is in children's entertainment across the globe: it too is expressed at a nearly perfect pace.

The show was a hit, and rightfully so: its intelligence, humanism and precise craftsmanship all added up to a very worthy entertainment that never speaks down to its audience or assumes that they can't keep up. Indeed, other than its frequent use of very broad slapstick and its privileging of child heroes as the most able and brightest members of the cast, there's no indication that it's "for kids" at all: it's "for audiences", and it does a damn good job of making sure that nobody of any age is going to be restless. That would in due course prove to be arguably the key element of Miyazaki's cinema, but of course that's in the future. Let us leave him for the moment in 1978, where the bright artist has continued his string of animated successes with his first "authored" work, though I can hardly suppose he or anyone thought of it in those terms at that time...

MIYAZAKI HAYAO: FUTURE BOY CONAN (1978), PART I

Years before he became arguably the most important director of feature-length animated films in the history of cinema, Miyazaki Hayao was an employee of Toei Animation, working as an animator, concept artist, and story man. That's actually under-selling it quite a lot: he was one of the animators and concept artists at Toei, something of a hot-shot superstar. If I were being tremendously and utterly thorough, I'd have sought out every last project with Miyazaki animation; but there has to be some point where we put the brakes on and say, "Sanity first - thoroughness later".

Though Miyazaki was quite well-regarded as a result of his animation, and the manga he illustrated based on Toei's films, he didn't pass up a chance to move up in the world, and in 1971, he left Toei with director Takahata Isao (they'd first worked together three years earlier), to join up with TMS Entertainment. There, the two men co-directed several episodes of the TV series Lupin III, a most popular franchise; and yet Miyazaki's career as a director didn't really take off yet. He designed several more projects for Takahata to direct over the next few years, but eventually he got his next chance, when he joined up with Nippon Animation to develop a very loose adapation of the American science-fiction novel The Incredible Tide. Miyazaki threw out most of the original material and re-shaped it to a more personal vision; he did much of the design work; and I believe it fair to suggest that, while Lupin III was something like hackwork, a chance for a nascent filmmaker to get his feet wet, the 26 episodes of Future Boy Conan that aired in 1978 - all of them directed or co-directed by Miyazaki - are the start of his long and storied career as an honest-to-God auteur.

ONE LOST SOUL LIVING IN A FISH BOWL

Fish Tank boasts one of the most leading, metaphorically unsubtle, and wholly appropriate titles of any film in recent months: perhaps primed by the opening credits, it takes a stronger-willed viewer than I to require more than a few shots to marvel that, by God, it is rather like watching a poor girl trapped in an invisible, polyhedral cage. To make sure we get it, writer-director Andrea Arnold tips her hand a little bit, and early on there's a close-up of a hamster (or gerbil: it's a domestic rodent, anyway) in its clear plastic hamster house, which almost precisely fills the frame - an unambiguous equation of the visual space of the movie with confinement, and while we've already picked up on that, subconsciously or not, I'm amused and pleased that Arnold feels the need to cover her bases like that. Don't worry, Madame Director, it's quite obvious what you're doing, but it's a swell shot anyway. Though I might point out that hamsters are not fish.

I'm inclined to silently look away from this and other moments when Arnold hits her subtext just a bit too hard, on the grounds that Fish Tank is in one key respect a tremendously non-standard movie: it was composed in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio (which is strictly speaking the traditional television ratio, and not quite the 1.37:1 of "full frame" movies, though the difference is virtually impossible to spot with the naked eye), instantly distancing itself from virtually every other theatrically-released project of the last several decades. Arnold has implied in interviews that she did this because that ratio is inherently more claustrophobic than others, which offended me as an aspect ratio snob; but in the particular case of Fish Tank (and really, that's what we're here to consider), she's absolutely right. This is an immaculately-composed film, a box to keep the protagonist trapped in her tiny world, one of the best examples I've seen in a while of a director using the frame to smother any implication of off-screen space. There is no getting out of this fish tank; that is the tragedy of it, or would be if the main character regarded herself as a tragic figure.

The formal precision of Fish Tank isn't just a matter for visually-attentive cinephiles to notice and approve of with knowing erudition - it's a key element of the film's meaning, even if you only pick it up subliminally (which, in this case, you certainly would). That close, cramped world is all that 15-year-old Mia (Katie Jarvis) knows at the beginning of the story, and she wants to get the hell out, but she's young and confused enough that her every attempt to change her life is tentative and halting, mired in her emerging awareness of her own sexuality. She has no other models, really: one of the first things we see in the film is her watching a group of girls her age, maybe a couple of years older, dancing to show off for some boys (the dancing, naturally, looks rather more like pantomimed intercourse than anything else). Nor does her mother Joanne (Kierston Wareing) offer any better example: she's just taken up with a man named Connor (Michael Fassbender), and the couple makes no effort to hide their largely physical relationship from Mia or her younger sister Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths), having noisy sex with the bedroom door half-open, and the like.

There's a plot to give away, and I'll refrain from doing it, but really Fish Tank is in its soul a character study: watching Mia struggle with her rapidly evolving self-identity as she tries to find some tiny measure of happiness, whether it comes in the form of practicing for a dance competition, or crushing hard on Connor (as well she might: after proving his talents beyond a shadow of a doubt in Hunger and Inglourious Basterds, Fassbender now gets to show off that he's gorgeous, too), despite also kind of viewing the older man as a brother/father figure. Certainly, he's the only person in the movie who's especially nice to her, ever, and it cannot help this poor, messed-up girl that his kindness is obviously based at least somewhat in his physical attraction to her.

Jarvis had neither experience nor formal training when she was cast, and one must wonder if she's just playing a version of herself, as certainly seems likely (she comes from exactly the same background, and one of the scenes in the film was taken from a moment in her own life). And then in the next breath, one admits that it doesn't matter. This is a stunning performance, better than hundreds of professionals have ever been able to muster after years in the business: unsentimental and refusing to beg for sympathy on Mia's behalf, but at the same time so earnest and real, leading us in to see the frightened adolescent hiding beneath the feigned bluster, violence and vulgarity of adulthood, that we can't help it: we care about her, deeply. It is necessary that Jarvis should be the key element of the cast, although everyone is good (even Griffiths, failing entirely to be a precious little brat-child), and Fassbender in particular gives another in his chain of miraculous performances that should be triggering his major period of stardom right about...

If there is a flaw with Arnold's miraculous study of adolescence, it's that, like I suggested up top, she doesn't quite trust herself, and so there are a few too many symbols, executed with the wincing clumsiness endemic to cinematic symbolism (including, I am sad to report, the very last shot). The worst is the heavy-handed use of a chained white horse that Mia keeps trying to free - can you begin to imagine that that might represent? - and generally, Arnold is on surer footing when she uses visual metaphors, like the oppressive use of red light in one scene, yellow in another (you'll understand the whys for both if you see it), or a real corker of a tracking shot near the end that watches Mia in a series of disjointed mirrors, fragmenting and coming back together as she walks away from what she thought was her future. At any rate, the story doesn't need all of these obvious signifiers, and it takes away a bit from the effectiveness of the film that the director keeps popping up to insist on it. As though her outstanding framing of the magnificent performances she pulled out of the actors didn't do that already.

It is both uncomfortable and even terrifying, but Fish Tank is a rewarding and vastly rich movie; putting honest, raw, pained humanity before our eyes without apology. In this it is a direct contrast to a certain pair of movies to which it bears more than superficial resemblance, both competing for the Best Picture Oscar; 'twould be déclassé to name them, but I think it points out a certain truth: there are movies that want you to like them, and they are given popular acclaim and mainstream acceptance, and there are movies that don't really exist for you at all, and this makes them much less sexy - but if you can find them, the rewards are all the greater for it. Fish Tank hasn't gone under the radar, exactly (it has picked up a chunk of festival awards, and a BAFTA), but the relative invisibility of its tiny U.S. release proves enough which category it belongs to. It's just too good for its own good.

9/10

STRAW POLLS

Sorry that there was no new review today. I had one all planned and everything, but this Blogger contretemps took up most of my mental energy, and it honestly slipped my mind.

On that subject, I have a couple of polls, and it would mean the world to me if you, oh loyal readers, could weigh in on some questions that dictate what happens to this blog after Monday.

poll by twiigs.com

poll by twiigs.com

poll by twiigs.com

Thanks again for your patience in this massively irritating time. I'll actually get back to being a film blogger tomorrow, I promise.

PLUS ÇA CHANGE

A service advisory:

Last night I was noodling about and discovered, quite by accident, that something awful has happened to my archive; namely, most of it is missing from the front page, and nothing I can do will bring it back. Long story short, the same thing seems to have happened to some - not all - of the monthly archive pages on the blog proper, nor is it correctly displaying the last ten days, the way it's supposed to. Hunting around on the Blogger help forums seems to indicate the this is what happens to people who use six-year-old blog templates. There are potential fixes that would involve an asinine amount of work and inelegant HTML, but the easiest thing seems to be dropping the old template.

Unfortunately, I'm not remotely good enough with HTML to do it myself, and I'm certainly in no position to pay for a web designer, so that pretty much leaves me with switching to "layouts", nuking a lot of the little customised tweaks I've put in, and doubtlessly screwing around with it a bit until I'm happy with the look of it again. And then maybe switching out a couple more until I find something I can live with. The change is going to happen late Sunday or early Monday, and I'm going to put up an open thread at that point for people to chime in with opinions. This, at the moment, is just a heads-up that things are very abruptly going to be chaotic and possibly ugly here for a few days. Thanks in advance for bearing with me through these difficult times.

Added: Apparently this is actually a known thing involving a new pagination policy, except that Blogger is going out of their way to not make a deal about it. It might not be so dramatic a fix. Still, Sunday and Monday might be rocky.

RETROSPECTIVE: THE JAPANESE WALT DISNEY

Way back all the way in July, you might recall, I made the idiotic choice to have an open poll for the director who'd get a retrospective next. Things got unscientific awfully fast, with supporters for both Alan Pakula and Miyazaki Hayao unabashedly cheating to inflate the numbers for their candidate (seven months later, and I still can't understand where the Pakula fanbase came from). Anyway, my Solomonic wisdom drove me to announce Pakula the winner (he was in the lead when the really heavy-duty ballot-stuffing kicked in), and that I'd launch into a Miyazaki retrospective just as soon as I had some free time. And that time has now finally come.

Therefore: Antagony & Ecstasy is proud to announce our fourth Director Retrospective, dedicated to the work of one of the most beloved animation auteurs in world history. Following the lead of a friend, I toyed with the idea of calling it Hiyo, Miyazaki! A Look Back at the Master of Anime, but I'm not sure if I'm quite that terrible.

The fun starts tomorrow, with a consideration of the 1978 series Future Boy Conan.

THE OSCAR-NOMINATED ANIMATED SHORTS, 2009

Once again, the Academy Awards have at least had the good effect of making some short-form animation available on the big screen, and even though I have adopted the official position that I eschew all Oscar talk here on this blog, I figured that reviewing shorts didn't count.

French Roast (Fabrice Joubert, France)

If you dropped me in front of it, I'd have sworn that this was a student film: the whole thing has the overdetermined feel of a thesis project where an overly ambitious filmmaker wants to show of the full gamut of his skills. But it would appear that Joubert has been animating professionally for over ten years, so I guess I have to scotch that theory.

The film depicts a prim businessman realising that he doesn't have his wallet and can't pay for coffee one afternoon, causing him to stall for time by ordering cup after cup until a solution presents itself. Thinly amusing, with an even thinner overlay of class commentary, the story's really neither here nor there, but you can arguably get away with that in eight minutes. Visually, though, now that's a bit thorny. The design is pretty fantastic, all in all, but the animation itself is a bit stiff, and a bit overacted: it feels like a cheesy silent melodrama enacted by people with unnatural plastic skin. As for the effects and camerawork, that's where I really got that "student project" vibe, especially because of the prominence of a mirror on the back wall of the café - the film uses only one angle, directly parallel to that mirror - which proves that Joubert had a lot of thoughts about layers and depth and and different planes of storytelling, but doesn't necessarily prove that his thoughts were particularly clear or developed. It's amusing enough, but there's not much gas in it, and the look of it slips from memory too easily.

5/10


Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty (Nicky Phelan, Ireland)

The first film in a hoped-for series of shorts about a borderline-insane old lady and the demented bedtime stories she tells her grandchildren. In this case, it's a variant on the Sleeping Beauty myth in which the wicked fairy who curses the princess is treated like a second-class citizen on account of being too old and feeble, so she exacts screaming revenge on all the thing, pretty, young fairies who are more popular.

The emerging consensus seems to be that this is the weakest of the five nominated films, which is hard to argue against - taste, always taste - but I really don't see it at all. For one thing, even if there is really just the one joke (grandmother shrieking invectives at the young, and scaring the piss out of her granddaughter in the process), it made me laugh, something that two of the other films (all five are comedies) absolutely failed to do. It's also the only one of the bunch that really attempts to play with the medium at all, combining admittedly routine CG animation with quite striking primary color 2-D animation (which is also computer-generated, but that's where using labels gets you). I'd be a lot happier with it if I thought that the CG half was better done, for it has the definite tang of being rushed a bit: there's an inconsistent amount of detail to the characters, and there were moments when it seemed like theoretically adjoining surfaces were floating atop one another. But it amused me, and coming third in a generally middling slate, I badly needed amusement.

7/10


The Lady and the Reaper (Javier Recio García, Spain)

Cartoon-physics chase scenes in the Tex Avery style are like sex and pizza: even when they're bad, they're still pretty good. And this is very much the saving grace of The Lady and the Reaper, a weird story about an old lady who dies and meets the Grim Reaper, who promises that she'll be reunited with her husband - but then she gets revived in the hospital. The Reaper wants her soul, the doctor wants to keep her alive, and she (though she has little say in the matter) just wants to die already.

The character design is quite delightful, especially the Reaper; the gag at the end of the plot is pretty funny (and there are some bonus jokes during the credits that are even funnier), so what's the problem? There's one thing that I really can't stand in animation (nor in live action, but it's more important in animation), and that's when a movie doesn't play by its own rules. In a nutshell, we have two spheres: the spirit world, and the hospital room, and the humor of the first two minutes consists of the contrast between them. Then, in a heartbeat, the Reaper pulls the doctor and his nurses into... Hell? No, that's not it. But some terrain that obeys no law of physics and is very red, and in this place occurs the very high-energy chase that involves the old woman's soul getting tossed around like a football. It's very Avery, though of course nowhere near to his level of achievement; but it's so damn arbitrary, and that is absolute death for this kind of non-real action. The Looney Tunes had a very clear and very consistent set of rules, they just weren't our rules; that is what kept that series from spinning into the grotesque. For all that it's fun, The Lady and the Reaper is a bit grotesque.

6/10


Logorama (H5 Group, France)

The first time I saw this one, at the Chicago International Film Festival last October, I was hugely excited for it and then found myself absolutely crushed by the result. A second viewing has not materially changed my perspective, unless it be that that the film didn't seem so godawful long this time.

It has an absolutely irresistible hook: it's set in a version of Los Angeles where everything - everything - is a corporate logo given three-dimensional form. Over 2500 logos appear, from Ronald McDonald as a criminal to the Lacoste crocodile in a zoo to the pistol that forms the 7 in the classic James Bond title as, well, a pistol. Just by existing, the film is a victory for fair use and parody rights, even irrespective of any pointed satire in the narrative.

Which is good, because there's not pointed satire in the narrative - in fact, I think that once you came up with that wonderful, amazing concept for a universe, you could not possibly come up with a worse story than this. It's basically a shoot-out that turns into a car chase that turns into a disaster movie, written with the excited vulgarity of a 14-year-old who still gets a visceral thrill of saying "fuck" and talking about sex (and making dumbfoundingly inappropriate gay jokes, but that's just one bad moment in a field of them). It looks pretty decent, thought not tremendously inventive (it has a definite Flash feel), but the go-nowhere story and the tedious juvenile humor altogether ruin what should have been the best of these films in a walk.

5/10


A Matter of Loaf and Death (Nick Park, UK)

No words to quicker stir the soul of we who love clay stop-motion animation: "The new Wallace & Gromit short". And damned if that's not just what we get here. In fact, that's a bit too much what we get here. For the first time in five adventures, something seems awfully stale about this one; frankly it's not much more than a retread of their last theatrical short, 1995's A Close Shave. Wallace and Gromit have a baking business that's prospering as a serial killer is targeting bakers, and Wallace falls in love with a woman who used to be the center of a baking company's ad campaign, while Gromit warily eyes her poodle.

Formulas become formulaic because they work, and I certainly don't want to imply that A Matter of Loaf and Death somehow fails to be entertaining. It still has the same warped sense of humor, Gromit is still a golden triumph of animated pantomime, the animation itself still has that proud, hand-made feeling, where you can see the fingerprints in the clay (this is Aardman, after all, the studio that invented a technique for simulating fingerprints on CGI models). If you've loved any of their previous films, it's a dead certainty you'll thoroughly enjoy this one. But it's fairly insubstantial, and I hate to say it, but it's decidedly the weakest of the series, even after the feature-length Curse of the Were-Rabbit proved that 25 minutes is the ideal. It's a hit, but it's no home run.

7/10


What of the Oscar, then? Ever since 2005, there's been a nifty pattern wherein my least favorite of the nominees ended up winning, so part of me wants to say Logorama and be done with it. But there's just one thing: the crushing tide of history. Nick Park has been nominated for directing all four previous Wallace & Gromit films, and he won three times. The time he lost, it was when A Grand Day Out came up short against Creature Comforts - which was also directed by Nick Park. Put it another way: he has a perfect record in four trips to the Academy Awards. Only a fool would unthinkingly bet against that kind of precedent. Still, pretty much everyone agrees that Logorama is the likeliest runner-up, and some pundits are even suggesting it might win; and so I'll go ahead and say that eventually, Park has to lose. Why not this year? No guts, no glory, they tell me.

Will Win: Logorama
Dark Horse: A Matter of Loaf and Death
Should Win: A Matter of Loaf and Death


The theatrical slate of shorts has three bonus films, "highly commended" (i.e. the first three runners-up) works to fill out the program to feature length. Which means that I have three bonus reviews!

Partly Cloudy (Peter Sohn, USA)

I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that if you care enough about animation that you've read this far, you've already seen this one: it played theatrically before Up.

It's no secret that Pixar's short films are sliding in quality a bit: their last rock-solid masterpiece was For the Birds way the hell back in 2001, and only last year's Presto has come especially close to that mark. Let us not even speak of their dire made-for-DVD shorts, spin-offs of the features that are generally unwatchable, except for the stunningly inventive Your Friend the Rat (no points for guessing which feature it accompanies).

My point being: if Partly Cloudy doesn't do much to reverse that slide, neither does it continue. It's just sort of a holding pattern movie, very sweet and cute with a charming little message about friendship, and really handsome animation. But I've seen it five times now and it just doesn't hold up as well as their best work without drifting into Banalville, and while that's maybe my fault and not the film's, I would still say that its greatest value remains that it actually proves, more than Up did, that Pixar can do really cunning things with 3-D.

7/10


Runaway (Cordell Barker, Canada)

Another one I saw at the Chicago Film Fest, and I really loved it there. Seeing it again, I can't really figure out why. Oh, it's still fun, no doubt, but "love"? No, I can't do it, not even with the kicky music by Benoît Charest, who scored The Triplets of Belleville, not even coming from the mind that gave us the brilliant 1988 short The Cat Came Back. It's very slight, and it's almost not even a one-joke short; it's closer to a half-joke short, in places. A train is speeding because the conductor is putting the moves on pretty lady passenger, it hits a cow, the desperate coal man tries to save the day, and a weird little bit of class warfare ensues.

Well, at least it has a really cool look, probably the most distinctive of any of the eight pieces shown in this collection. I don't even really know that I can describe it: it's like a pencil sketch made in pen, and colored in slightly sickly tones. It's striking and memorable, even if you don't particularly respond to it positively (I do). The film is offbeat enough to warrant a look, but this represents neither the best of Canadian animation, nor of Barker's work as a director.

7/10


The Kinematograph (Tomek Baginski, Poland)

Maybe I just don't know what "commendable" means, because I found this staggeringly bad; as I described it to my viewing companion outside the theater, it looks like the cutscenes from a video game about the steampunk adventures of the Lumière brothers. It's hard to say whether the design or the story is more bothersome; the design I think, since the story is mostly just clunky and far less clever than it thinks it is. Somewhere in Europe in the 1890s, an inventor toils on making a motion picture camera, which has already come as far as sound, but he wants to figure out how to add color. Meanwhile, his wife encourages him, while COUGHING IN A WAY THAT DOES NOT AT ALL SUGGEST THAT SHE WILL END UP STONE DEAD RIGHT AT THE MOMENT THAT HE PERFECTS HIS INVENTION.

It took me virtually all of the movie to realise that she was his wife: at first I just assumed she was his daughter, and the markings all over her face that proved to be old age wrinkles were rather proof that she'd been carved out of wood, or was a Na'vi. I'd been leaning towards the latter interpretation, in light of her defiantly inhuman features- oh, for fuck's sake, it's a horribly ugly movie and I'm not going to sit here thinking about it any longer than I've already done. I made my steampunk joke, I can move on.

3/10

WHERE OH WEREWOLF?

For all the advances made in special effects in the last ten years, werewolves have had a really tough go of it. We've had any number of tremendously convincing screen zombies, and marvelous vampires of both the sparkly and non-sparkly varieties, but for some reason, representations of lycanthropes have been miserably wanting. Neil Marshall's otherwise sterling Dog Soldiers suffers badly for having detailed but inflexible body suits, and even that film at least has the benefit of textured, physically convincing wolves. The scattered CGI werewolf movies of the past decade, from Underworld on to The Twilight Saga: New Moon, have perpetrated one garishly unconvincing monster after another, with graphics that wouldn't pass muster in a middleweight computer-animated cartoon. And let us not speak of the apparent impossibility of creating a convincing man-to-wolf transformation in a digital environment: nearly three decades after The Howling and An American Werewolf in London, those films are still the standard-bearers for that particular effect.

So we should at least thank The Wolfman for giving us the first all-around credible movie werewolf in recent memory: the practical make-up, courtesy of the justly renowned Rick Baker, is both expressive and unearthly, disguising the actors just enough that you can still tell who the character is under all that fur, and the CGI models used in action shots and the transition scenes are blissfully realistic.

We have nothing else to thank The Wolfman for. Maybe its costume and production design (provided by the also-justly-famous Milena Canonero and Rick Heinrichs, respectively).

We sure as hell can't be particularly grateful for its terrible screenplay. Theoretically a remake of the 1941 genre-defining Lon Chaney, Jr. vehicle The Wolf Man (please note the subtle distinction between the titles), the new film, written by Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self - the former man at least has some respectable credits, while the latter vomited out Thirteen Days and the 1999 remake of The Haunting - borrow little from Curt Siodmak's original scenario besides character names and the set-up that a prodigal son has returned to his ancestral home in Great Britain on the event of his elder brother's violent death (the remake doesn't even leave the action in Wales). It's cheap and unfair to compare two films just because one is a remake of the other, but I'm in the mood to be unfair for a bit: Siodmak's Wolf Man is a much smarter movie than you probably remember or assume, not least because that writer found a way to make Chaney's essential inability to act a strength, by devising his Larry Talbot as a likable lug Everyman, who suffers immensely just because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong moment. There's no denying it's a B-movie, but it's the kind of B-movie that proves just how much mileage good filmmakers could milk out of the limitations of cheap genre filmmaking: it tells its story simply and effectively, does what it can to hit the audience on a gut level, and doesn't take time to run down any blind alleys.

This new Wolfman... to be altogether honest, I can't even really figure out what motivates the plot at all, other than the crude desire to extract money from the wallets of those poor souls who will swallow any load of crap covered in enough stage blood and convincing prosthetics.* In this rendering, Lawrence Talbot (Benico Del Toro) is a great Shakespearean actor who has lived in America for years and years, now returned to late-Victorian England to present his celebrated Hamlet. While in London, he gets a letter from his brother's fiancée Gwen Conliffe (Emily Blunt), informing him that his brother has been found dead in a ditch. With reservations, Lawrence - you just can't even begin to think of him as a "Larry" - returns to the village of Blackmoor (not a leading name, not at all; a pity that "Deathswamp Mire" was already taken) and his family's home, there to attempt, haltingly, to reconnect with his father Sir John Talbot (Anthony Hopkins), and to figure out what happened to his brother.

It goes to a lot of bent and twisty places along the way, but of course one of the first places is a Gypsy camp where something big and hairy kills a couple people in immensely bloody ways before taking a bite out of Lawrence; then in due course, Scotland Yard Inspector Abberline (Hugo Weaving) - at first I thought this was a clumsy but cute reference to the historical investigator in the Jack the Ripper case, until dialogue establishes that he is the historical investigator - comes along and concludes, not unreasonably, that Lawrence has some violent secrets, and may well be responsible for the deaths in the camp, a conclusion given added weight on the next full moon, when several people are savagely killed and Lawrence is found coated in blood, hiding under a tree. Of course we know the truth: he's got the wolf in him, and while Scotland Yard might think he's just a garden-variety loony, the truth will out.

But I have not begun to hint at the intrigue that pokes its nose about in the first half of the movie and dominates the second half: nor shall I, because it's stupid. I won't spoil the ending of the movie (why bother?), except to say that there seems to be very little need to have some kind of half-assed conspiracy of one at the bottom of a werewolf movie; it reminds me actually of Walker's script for Sleepy Hollow, which similarly decided that a murdering ghost horseman just didn't make sense without having a human handler bent on destroying the local community.

The clumsy and ineffectual story doesn't do anything but stand in place, whirring: The Wolfman doesn't even pay more than lip service to the idea that werewolves are a metaphor for masculine brutality. That's right, it's so lazy that it can't even be bothered to indulge in the mustiest cliché of its own subgenre. Meaning that Del Toro is horribly squandered on a role that serves no purpose other than to facilitate scenes of carnage; for not even he can pull something human-sized out of this cynical exercise. I'd hoped that Hopkins might have been enough campy fun to be decently watchable, but except for a few scenes, even that pleasure is denied to us; mostly, he's just stern and mysterious.

Nope, it's just a horror film product, the movie version of that sliced American cheese in the plastic wrapper; nor can the magnificently hacky director Joe Johnston (who made such passionate works as Jumanji and Jurassic Park III earlier in his career) do much of anything to give the material some juice. It's not even effective as a gore dispensary: there's plenty of gore, sure, but it's presented in a staggeringly flat, disinterested manner. And everything is so damn dark that you can't really be certain what you're looking at in some of the exterior scenes, anyway. So much for a noble brand name: there are too many awful horror films to give this one special score on that count, but it is at any rate unforgivably disposable.

3/10

*Of course, I am not among these. Not at all. I saw this movie for professional obligations. Absolutely no other reason at all.

ONCE ON THIS ISLAND

(After experimenting this way and that, I've realised that I can't really write any kind of analysis of Shutter Island that addresses exactly what makes it such an irritating, dispiriting and above all unsatisfying experience, without making pretty damn free with the spoilers for the film's massive, easily-guessed third act twist. So easily-guessed, in fact, that there's something of a growing consensus that we're actually supposed to figure it out, but if this is enough to keep you from reading the whole thing, and you still want to know my "capsule" thoughts, they are: a visually handsome movie that lacks any stakes, emotional or intellectual; and Leonardo DiCaprio hasn't been this bad since at least Gangs of New York).

Martin Scorsese is a better filmmaker than puzzle boxes. His best films are lusty and visceral, not because of their literal viscera but because of the pulsing urges which drive them: think upon his last truly great work, Goodfellas, with all those heaving moments pushed by their rock soundtracks and breakneck camerawork and off-the-wall editing into a state of exhausted cinematic bliss, or the raw presence and fleshy immediacy of Raging Bull, forever his reigning masterpiece. These are intense films, momentous films, films that strike you right in the glands. Nothing could be farther from this than Shutter Island, a film stuck deep inside its own head - a less generous reviewer might name a different part of the body - where it can only really function as an intellectual exercise: either you're trying to figure out what's going on, or if you know what's going on, and you're trying to figure out what it means in terms of human sanity and the nature of moral behavior, or something along those lines.

"What's going on". The big twist ending of Shutter Island is so absurdly easy to guess that I don't half-wonder if that's the whole point. It's a movie about an isolated psychiatric hospital; they can only have two possible twist endings, that the asylum has been taken over by the patients, or The Other One. There seems to be absolutely no reason to assume that the very articulate, un-twitchy people we see running the asylum are insane, so it pretty much has to be The Other One. Of course, there could have been no twist at all, and wouldn't that have been a brave, bold statement to make: that this story of a federal marshal named Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) who travels to the remote Shutter Island in Boston Harbor in 1954 to help in the hunt for a missing patient is precisely what it looks like. Poof, you've got the set-up for exactly the "lost in a dark, creepy place" movie that was promised by the absurdly misleading marketing campaign (Did you see the trailer? Did you love it? Did you look forward to seeing Scorsese return to psychological horror? Oops, because there is not a single goddamn thing about Shutter Island that comes within shouting distance of "horror"). Then, of course, this wouldn't be an adaptation of Dennis Lehane's 2003 novel, but that would be a small price to pay for making it a good film (I'm not trying to slam the book, which I haven't read).

So yeah, Teddy is, of course, a patient at the asylum; he killed his wife and went nuts and created an elaborate alternative personality. I'm 95% positive that I was far from the only person who assumed all of that before I set foot in the theater. And knowing that information makes Shutter Island both a bit easier to take and a lot harder to take seriously.

Mostly, it makes it easier to take in the first scene, which is otherwise a cinematic barbarism that would make you despair that Scorsese and a whole lot of extremely talented collaborators had all regressed to their first year at film school. The setting is a boat, where Teddy, besotted with motion sickness, and his brand new partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo), are traveling towards Shutter Island, which is otherwise inaccessible. Two things leap out during this sequence: some extremely lousy rear-projection, and arguably the all-time worst continuity editing in any Scorsese movie ever. About the first of these in particular, it is worth noting that Scorsese has claimed a Hitchcock influence in making Shutter Island, and it's certainly not beyond belief that someone with his somewhat impish approach to moviemaking would use deliberately shoddy rear-projection as part of an homage to Hitchcock. About the second, discontinuous editing has always been a trademark of Scorsese's films as cut by Thelma Schoonmaker, not I think because either of them craves discontinuity, but because it rather suits their purpose to privilege performance and visual rhythm over what is ultimately a fairly shallow concern. But even that doesn't really explain the awful cutting going on here, which is arrhythmic to the point of distraction, or even physical discomfort if you're a real editing fiend.

But! There is a but! Since the movie is about Teddy's mental break, cannot it be said that these seeming weaknesses are in fact our first clues to his fractured state? That the film is beginning its inquiry into psychological stability in these very first moments by breaking apart its own formal coherence? Sure, that can be said. But in that case, the distinct lack of any such particularly obvious stylistic quirks later in the movie (after this scene, the only time that I'd argue that any technical element of the movie can be said to represent "insanity" is the infrequent use of whip pans) is hard to explain, and I'm forced to wonder if I'm just trying to make excuses for Schoonmaker, who used to be my favorite editor of them all before she started gently getting worse with every film she cut after Gangs.

There's a hell of a lot that Shutter Island tries to get away with using the "but he's insane!" card: crappy editing, some very peculiar logic leaps in the story and in the locations of some scenes, and arguably DiCaprio's performance, which manages the neat trick of being both stiff and broad at the same time (he also boasts a compellingly bad Boston accent that mostly disappears after the ten-minute mark; and so soon after doing such a fine job of it in The Departed, too). So conceded. Let us then take a look at his insanity, and what it does for the movie:

Not a fucking thing.

I'm actually willing to spot the movie on some bits and pieces of elegant craftsmanship: it certainly looks sleek and almost impossibly atmospheric thanks to cinematographer Robert Richardson operating at his very peak (I should qualify that: he is not, as in The Aviator or Kill Bill, Vol. 2, doing especially innovative things with the camera or film stock, but his control of lighting and composition are nearly divine here). Sandy Powell's costume designs are all at once perfect for evoking 1954, suggestive of character, and have a certain abstract quality that gives them an emotional charge. And Dante Ferretti's production design gives the whole thing an otherworldly, almost Gothic feeling, that does probably more than any other element of the whole film to really legitimise the idea that we're watching a world filtered through a madman's eyes. I never consider it a sign of good things when I'm reduced to praising the costumes and sets, unless the film in question is an outright exercise in sheer style, which Shutter Island certainly isn't; but let's go ahead and say that we've got half of a successful movie here: it looks darn good.

The other half... what the hell. The story, in brief: we follow a man for two hours, watching as his paranoia seems increasingly justified while he finds it harder and harder to deal with his post-WWII trauma. Then, in the last twenty minutes, we find out that the man we've been following never existed. If the film had been nothing more than a shabby little shocker, this would be just fine, if a bit shallow and trite. But it's never, ever shabby, nor very shocking. It's a psychodrama with some overlaid thriller elements. Scorsese may want this to be his Hitchcock film, but we spend most of it in Bergman Country, what with the symbolicious dream sequences involving Dachau (the appropriation of Holocaust imagery is dubious, at least) or water and fire, and the otherwise-pointless casting of Max von Sydow in what amounts to a cameo role - everyone besides DiCaprio, Ruffalo, and Ben Kingsley as the asylum director has what amounts to a cameo role - that gives the film some unearned Scandinavian gravitas (anyway, even Hitchcock's films are primarily psychodramas, they're just a bit more genre-driven than artsy). My point being, it's hard for a story to be a psychodrama when everything it tells us about the main character turns out to be a lie or a misdirection. It's a "gotcha!" film, and if you can see the twist coming from a mile away (which I'm going to assume you could, especially if you're reading this before you see the movie), that makes for a lot of irritated waiting for the gotcha to hurry on its merry way and getch.

There are, in essence, no stakes: there's absolutely no reason to give a damn about Teddy Daniels or what happens to him. A great performance might have overcome this, but DiCaprio is a dead fish, as is most of the cast - the smaller the role, the better the performance, in general, though only Patricia Clarkson, snarky and lively and wired, and Ted Levine, gaudily menacing, stand out in my memory - and the film generally lacks any human element worth talking about. I at least cannot even say what Shutter Island is "about" (I have encountered reviewers who have praised the film for its insights into the mind and how broken people cope or fail to cope; as they did not specify what they meant by this, I can't begin to imagine what they're talking about), so wholly does it fail to engage me in any way. Maybe it's not about anything more than Scorsese's well-established delight in finding coy ways to reference classic filmmakers - it has perhaps more quotations from more movies than any of his other films - but I really hope not. Still, I'll be switched if I can tell you what the film has to say about identity or personal morality, though it certainly seems to be something (I also can't tell you why it suffers from a soundtrack largely made up of avant-garde 20th Century classical pieces applied with the subtlety of a jackhammer, but that is another issue). Leaving us with something not remotely as fun or or playfully gauche as its genre trappings imply, and an experience a bit like eating a heavy meal and then being hungry again right away.

5/10

TEN FOR MONDAY: AUTEURS AND HORROR

With Shutter Island tearing up the weekend box-office, it seemed like a good time for a list of

Ten Great Horror Films by Non-Horror Directors
(Arranged chronologically)


Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1932)
It's hard to pin down exactly what kind of filmmaker Dreyer was throughout his legendary career, but we can at least say that none of this other films was as explicitly paranormal as this one: an atmosphere-heavy nightmare that is more uncanny than scary, but since most vampire movies can't manage either of those things, I'm not inclined to quibble. It remains amazing to me that even dabbling so heavily in a genre and a style (borderline Surrealism) totally alien to the rest of his work, Dreyer still made a film wrapped up in his private concerns, like no other filmmaker in history could have dared.


Ugetsu (Mizoguchi Kenji, 1953)
At least some of you are currently wondering whence I had the gall to call this a horror film. Let's see: ghosts trick a man into staying where he had ought not to be, bringing him near to ruin. It's not "madman with a knife and sporting equipment," but it's horror by any measure I know, and particularly haunting, uncanny horror, too: the kind that sticks with you for years after you've seen it. Probably the best film by one of Japan's all-time greatest filmmakers.


Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956)
The 1978 remake directed by Philip Kaufman fits this list even better, but I frankly prefer the original: in which a tough-guy B-movie directed noted then mostly for his crime and war movies, and now mostly for his run of iconic Clint Eastwood vehicles oversees the creation of cinema's first great paranoia thriller, a Cold War parable so bent by its time that even now nobody knows what side of McCarthyite divide the film is supposed to come down on. And the message about losing your identity to conformity remains bone-chilling.


Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960)
A film that makes Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, released the same year, look like a dress rehearsal crammed in between tea parties. Coming from the director who, partnered with Emeric Pressburger, had overseen some of the most visually sublime, wonderfully theatrical movies in British film history, this story of a man who gets sexually excited by filming women's death spasms was - let us say - unexpected. Enough that it more or less ended his career (at any rate, he was forced into the hinterlands till he retired 18 years later), and that it's still shocking and uncomfortable a half-century later.


The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963)
He started his career in Val Lewton's sphere of influence, so it's not altogether fair to call Wise a non-horror director; but that was years earlier, and this film was tucked into his career in between two Oscar-winning musicals (West Side Story and The Sound of Music). The Haunting won no Oscars, just as many as it was nominated for, but it's far better than either of those: a movie that gets virtually all of its many legitimate scares from nothing but well-designed sound, great production design, and the canny position of the camera.


Hour of the Wolf (Ingmar Bergman, 1968)
Of course, all of Bergman's films are horror after their fashion: the horror of God's silence, of sex, of isolation, of death. Nor would you ever mistake this for, oh, Lucio Fulci or a slasher movie: it's pretty straight-up Bergman. But instead of examining some existential fear of religious emptiness, like so many of his movies, this one is actually about the most elemental fear of them all: when you're in the dark, and you can imagine anything filling up that space. That the protagonists greatest fear is his own self, and not zombies or tentacled werewolves... well, it is a Bergman picture.


Don't Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)
Psychological terror par excellence in this, the most adult horror movie of all time. Sure, at the end it takes a turn into ArgentoLand (and thanks to Roeg's pre-established gift for poetically fervid imagery, a tremendously gratifying turn it is), but that's just the nightmare revving into overdrive before you wake. Before then, we've already had a full, long movie of the most horrifying thing that there is: being a parent with a dead child, wondering if you'll ever be able to put together enough of the pieces of your life to function as a human being again.


The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
Kubrick's usual method of filmmaking - if it's at all right to accuse him of having a "usual" anything - turned out to be serendipitously perfect for horror: slow pacing, long takes, and lingering wide shots trained on objects we can't quite discern for certain make for one of the few genuinely terrifying movies in history. And for that matter, the most artistically perfect English-language horror movie ever.


The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991)
Whenever I'm particularly depressed about the Oscars, I always can perk up by reminding myself: "yes, but they gave Best Picture to a cannibal movie." Not an especially gruesome cannibal movie, of course - but it's far and away the most fucked-up nominee of all time, let alone the 81 films to take the big prize. Nothing in Demme's hopscotching, chameleon-like career is at all like this, before or since, but he really ought to think about returning to it: not many people have the talent to make a scene of two people talking the most hair-raising moment in a film with a man who turns young women into clothing, but that scene with Jodie Foster telling Anthony Hopkins about the spring lambs still freaks me out whenever I see it.


28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002)
Technically, Boyle is right: it's not a zombie movie, but a "bio-crazy" film, a well-established genre with a good pedigree. Also, 28 Days Later is stylish as hell with some truly eerie footage of a depopulated London, great sound and lighting effects that imply way more than we see, and some truly revolutionary digital photography that still ranks as one of the best arguments in favor of video that anybody has made yet. So he can call it any damn thing he wants to. Third act? I do not know this "third act" that you speak of.

ALTERNATE REALITY HISTORY

And who among us doesn't love squirrelly old romantic melodramas altogether? he asked tentatively, well knowing that in fact many people do not love them, that many people find this kind of overdetermined, overworked combination of unlikely stories and garish emotional displays to be exactly the proof that old movies from 70 years ago are quite tawdry and disposable, thank you very much, and we'll stick to our contemporary movies with some grounding in the way real people actually act, thank you very much (meanwhile, Avatar sets financial records every single time a human being pays money to see it).

I shall point all of you, whether a lover of that particularly pre-war breed of romantic weeper or its enemy, to History Is Made at Night, a 1937 film directed by the excellent and still underexposed and under-appreciated Frank Borzage, a film that will either confirm or confound your existing ideas about that genre, and either validate or completely revolutionise your feelings towards that genre. I understand that what I just wrote is perhaps the least helpful single-sentence review of a movie in history, but that's sort of the difficulty of History Is Made at Night, which is above all else really damn weird, unarguably weirder than any other mainstream 1930s romance that I have personally seen. I don't want to say that it plays like a parody of contemporaneous melodramas; that's overstating it fiercely. It's more of an exaggeration of those melodramas, pushed to absurdist heights... but even then I feel that I'm underselling it. Do you know what the screwball comedies of the same period did to the typical delicacies of the romantic comedies of the age, nor more nor less than injecting a viscous strain of uncut psychosis into the heart of those nice young girls and handsome young men? Kind of the same thing, so maybe we could even say that History Is Made at Night is an example of the extraordinarily rare "screwball drama". I'm not going to come up with a better way to describe it - fuck it, it's just completely awesome, all right? In both the common "impressive and pleasing" and biblical "instilling a fearful sense of awe"definitions.

Like a lot of love stories, it begins not by introducing either lover, but the individual who'll be driving the plot by keeping them apart, or trying his damnedest to. This would be Bruce Vail, a tremendously wealthy Englishman, who is not taking his divorce proceedings very well. Now, Vail is played by Colin Clive, who appeared in just a small number of films between 1930 and 1937 (he'd make only one more film before dying of tuberculosis that same year), and yet that was quite enough to leave him with one completely iconic character, who was recognised as such already even by the time History Is Made at Night was filmed: Clive, of course, played the mad, impassioned Dr. Henry Frankenstein in Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein. I mean no disrespect to a talented actor to say that he can't open his mouth (or stand silently, fuming in anger) without reminding you at least slightly of his most famous role; and does this film get a certain benefit from having its villain call to mind a mad scientist with a God complex? Yes it does, and I belief Borzage was too intelligent a filmmaker not to understand that and use it to his benefit. In a film that is shortly going to go crazy itself, we're already primed to understand that Vail is probably a bit nuts himself, and it takes just a scene or two to start paying that impression off.

Vail's soon-to-be-ex-wife Irene (Jean Arthur) is the subject of his paranoid ravings about her phantom unfaithfulness, but he also wants her more than any other woman. Learning that the terms of their divorce settlement are nullified if she is intimate with another man within the next little bit of time, he sends his chauffeur Michael (Ivan Lebedeff) to Paris, essentially on orders to rape her, and Vail will storm in just in time to see her "cheating", and all will be happy in his life again. Luckily for Irene, the hotel room next door happens to have, at that moment, a man standing in it who has just brought his drunk friend home to sleep it off; that hero is Paul Dumond (Charles Boyer), who overhears the struggle and jumps in from the balcony, knocking Michael unconscious. Just then, of course, Vail and the detective (Lucien Prival) come in, and hey, one strange man in Irene's room is as good as another, but Paul heads off Vail's scheme by pretending to steal Irene's jewels and then kidnap her as his ticket out of the hotel. With his plans foiled, Vail does the only thing he might do, that any of us would do: he murders Michael and plots to blame Paul for the crime.

We are, at most, ten minutes into the movie right now, and it has already escalated from "jealous ex-husband wants to win his wife back" to "jealous ex-husband arranges his wife's rape" to "jealous ex-husband murders the crap out of his chauffeur to frame a fake jewel thief". Which is why I've quoted the plot at such length; because that level of jam-packed narrative incident for all 97 minutes of the film's running time. And at this point, mind, we have absolutely no damn idea of where the plot is going; there are at least three different mini-narratives over the course of the one greater love story. Anything I say for the next while might count as a spoiler, depending on how much you want the intensely delightful experience of watching the film to be pure and untainted, so tread carefully. First, Paul and Irene head over to Château Bleu, the finest restaurant in Paris, where the head chef Cesare (Leo Carrillo) agrees to make them a lovely dinner, but they're too busy falling in love to eat it. This is, by the way, the only moment in the whole movie where it feels at all like you'd expect a 1930s romance starring Charles Boyer to feel. The next morning, Vail tells Irene that her new boyfriend is in trouble with the police, and if she won't come back to America he - Vail, that is - will explain every incriminating thing he knows. So they head back. After a little bit of schmooping about, Paul learns that the Vails are reunited, and so he goes to America to find them taking Cesare (we've learned by now that Paul is Cesare's headwaiter, the finest head-waiter in Paris); and here's where the movie goes off the rails completely, in the best way.

Paul's perfectly reasonable scheme to find Irene in the teeming mass of New York City is to bully the owner of a shithole restaurant to hire Cesare and himself, and when they've made it the hot place in the city (for after all, the finest chef and the finest headwaiter in the world ought to be able to do that without a hitch), the Vails will surely come in, being important wealthy people. It takes a while, but they do, right on the same night that they're meant to head to Europe on the Hindenburg to greet Vail's new ship, the Princess Irene, when she lands. Don't let the name-dropping fool you: the movie opened more than two months before the Hindenburg explosion, which actually makes subsequent events all the crazier. Paul convinces Irene to stay, and Vail is pleased to announce that he'll inform the Paris cops everything - then he darts off to the airship. Paul decides that he must go to France and face the music, so he and his love hop on her namesake boat and settle in for a romantic sea voyage, perhaps their last moment of happiness together. Finding out that his ex and his hated rival are together on his boat, Vail makes a last attempt to beat them both, and it's a doozy: he orders the ship's captain to go to full speed, to set a crossing record; but of course the real reason is that he wants the Princess Irene to go full-on Titanic in the north Atlantic. And it does - but there's a solid 20 minutes of movie to go yet, and you can't stop a good love story that easily.

This... this is not a movie that was actually made, in the 1930s, is it? The mind rebels against the thought. Even if it had never gotten out of the first act, there would still be enough crazy bends in just that scenario to make History Is Made at Night one of the silliest and therefore most magnetic of all '30s romantic melodramas. But in the subsequent hour, the movie goes so far off the deep end in terms of what contrivances it expects the audience to swallow and how flat-out goofy it allows the plot to get along the way, that I can't imagine even an indulgent producer allowing Borzage and writers C. Graham Baker and Gene Towne to get away with all that they do. Yet here it is! A film in which virtually nothing plausible happens after the first scene, and which we're either going to accept or reject purely on our desire to see movie stars in love. That's the film's most impressive achievement as far as its genre goes, without a doubt: it sacrifices story logic, bloodily, in favor of its love story - the film repeats the basic pattern of a lot of romantic dramas (divorced woman falls in love, the ex gets in the way, she has to go with him, the new guy is sad, he finds her, they run off, the ex has one last trick), but it has been tarted it up in such far-out situations that the filmmakers almost seem to be playing a trick on us, presenting the maddening impossibilities of their scenario with so little inflection, so little "ha, isn't this CRAZY?" posturing, that we can't help but reflect on how every other movie with the same basic arc is at heart just as impossible. Or maybe I have it exactly wrong: maybe they're trying to say that the basic core of a love story is so potent and durable that even the most insane chain of events can't keep two lovers down. Hell, maybe it's supposed to be both at once. I will say only this about History Is Made at Night: it's never, ever boring, though it is one of the least plausible films of its whole decade.

Compared to a great many of Borzage's films, this one doesn't have a particularly bold aesthetic, though certainly it looks lovely (the IMDb suggests that the great Gregg Toland did some uncredited work as cinematographer, alongside David Abel). The best thing I can think to say of History Is Made at Night is that it is elegantly-crafted boilerplate, a film done in precisely the standard visual mold of all Hollywood movies of that time. Which is not, I think, undeliberate; no less deliberate than casting Charles Boyer as the romantic Frenchman - Boyer, who is certainly charming and continental, is also generally a bit stiff and mostly just serves to be swooned at (compare Love Affair, where he must do very little else and is great, to Gaslight, where he must do a great deal more, and fails). Boyer's presence grounds the film, makes it seem like, hey, just another European love drama, and the entirely undemanding visual style of the film does the same thing, in contrast to all the ways that film goes loopy as hell on us: the loony plot, Colin Clive's slimy, screaming performance, and even Jean Arthur, who hadn't yet made most of the comedies that we still remember her for, but who always had a strange screen presence combining beauty and with with a certain desperate, nervous edge. I, for one, can never be completely at ease when I'm watching her, and that works outstandingly well in a film like this, where I'm never at ease anyway.

So my point being: Borzage was a damn smart man, and he carefully layered the routine and the simple with the outlandish and bizarre, making History Is Made at Night a more or less perfect combination of the outrageous and cartoon-like, with just enough details to keep it planted on Earth that it doesn't zip away into flat-out surrealism like, just to grab a latter-day comparison, the films of Baz Luhrmann (not that I don't love his movies, too, but in 1937, they would have broken cinema). At any rate, coming when it does, near the end of a period when Hollywood was unusually open to mashing up genres and breaking rules in the wake of the tempestuous arrival of sound, History Is Made at Night is something of a last burst of manic energy, before the '40s came and nice movies had to behave according to nice generic conventions. It's one of those borderline-forgotten films that comes from nowhere and hits you like a semi-truck; but damn me if it isn't just about the most perfect thing, all the same.

VD: THE MOVIE

If we're to believe the permissions notices at the end of the closing credits - and if we're not to believe them, then the very idea of movie credits is a sham and we're all rocking on the brink of anarchy - then somewhere within the movie Valentine's Day, though I didn't notice it, there is a poster for the movie Love Actually. This represents something close to an heroic level of honesty on the part of the filmmakers, who do not merely feel safe in ripping off a popular film but pointing at it and saying, "look, it's that movie we're ripping off!" For this, they have my absolute respect.

Superficially, the two films are of course identical: against a holiday backdrop (dawn till midnight on Valentine's Day, in this case - we're specifically told that it's a Monday, which was last true in 2005 and will be true again in 2011, which makes Valentine's Day either a period piece or a science-fiction movie), an interwebbed cast of many people explores different facets of love. On closer inspection, there's not quite so much overlap; only one of the plotlines in the new film, about the little boy with his first crush, seems to map directly onto one of the plotlines from the old film. But the intent is obvious. The two biggest differences are not plot-based at all: compared to Love Actually, Valentine's Day is almost completely devoid of sex (and what appears is almost exclusively centered on one character), and compared to Love Actually, Valentine's Day is not very good. Screenwriter Katherine Fugate and director Garry Marshall jam a staggeringly over-loaded cast through what feels like a dozen different plotlines - I won't even bother to start recapping them, it would take a cross between a flowchart and a Venn diagram to capture every nuance of how the 21 main characters interrelate - with an end result that is quite manic and "big", in the worst conceivable sense of "big". So eager are the filmmakers to include as many different characters and plot points as they can, the overall flow of the film is like an especially jerky game of hopscotch: first here, then over there, then way over there, and you're really not sure how on Earth you got from A to B to C.

There's actually one other big reason why Valentine's Day is different from Love Actually, and while it's somewhat more subtle and subjective, I think it points to the only really interesting element of the American film. Both movies are full of instantly recognisable faces, but where Love Actually is mostly full of famous actors, Valentine's Day is full of celebrities - like I said, a subjective difference. In the British film, you have Colin Firth and Liam Neeson and Alan Rickman and the like; people who are really quite talented, and that's why the film can sometimes shock you with a really powerful moment like Emma Thompson's quiet breakdown when she realises her husband is cheating on her. Valentine's Day has a couple good actors, but mostly it has been cast with an idea towards covering the broadest possible marketing sector, and this means matinee idols and other famous people. So we have: pin-up girls for the lads (Jessica Alba and Jessica Biel - a combo that gave me a slight headache given my tendency to get those two actresses confused as "the bad one" and "the bad one who sometimes has a smackeral of ambition"); pin-up girls for the intelligentsia (Jennifer Garner and Anne Hathaway); a pretty-boy movie actor (Bradley Cooper); two pretty-boy TV actors (Patrick Dempsey and Eric Dane); teenybopper idols (Taylor Swift and Taylor Lautner); a few people who could be better but often don't try to be (Queen Latifah, Jamie Foxx and Topher Grace); and the inevitable Ashton Kutcher, whose appeal and continued ability to be cast in things remains an enigma to me.

Since most of these people are, by and large, famous for being famous, Valentine's Day turns (quite unintentionally, I am certain) into something of a referendum on celebrity. The appeal of a movie like this one is obviously that it is defiantly comfortable and familiar, and to a certain degree, one casts people like that precisely because the audience wants to see them being the famous people we know already. That's mostly just what's going on, but in weird little ways, the movie keeps commenting on and messing with the exact nature of their celebrity. So we have Dempsey, playing a dreamboat doctor, except that he proves to be a complete asshole. Lautner gets an overt moment (the only one where the movie seems to be aware of its own game) when he grouses that he doesn't like to be seen with his shirt off. Garner, in one of the film's two largest roles, is playing an uninspired variation on every other character she's played for several years, but Kutcher (the other largest role) seems to be playing more of a parody of a Kutcher character: his character enjoys over-the-top love and respect and "wow, what a great guy!" sentiments from pretty much everyone else in the movie, which seems like nothing so much of an exaggeration of his tendency to play theoretical nice guys who can't overcome the actor's natural party-boy smugness. Julia Roberts - the only real movie star in the film - is cast completely against type, as a somewhat dour soldier flying home for just one night before she has to be shipped back to whatever combat theater she's coming from (she also gets the other most overt meta-gag in the film, but it doesn't come until the outtakes at the end credits, and thus doesn't really count). And Shirley MacLaine (who used to be a movie star) spends one of her two big scenes standing in front of herself, at a screening of 1958's Hot Spell. Of course, that the film is set in Los Angeles is itself a commentary on celebrity; the whole damn town is predicated on the concept of fame.

Now, the fact that Valentine's Day spends an awful lot of time commenting on the star identities of its large cast is not a sign that it is at all successful; the film never comes remotely close enough to embracing this possible reading to rise above its lifeless romantic comedy shell. I just thought it worth mentioning that it seems weird and intriguing, to me, that the movie spends so much time putting its famous cast in front of a funhouse mirror. That doesn't change the fact that only two people give good performances, Roberts and Hathaway. The former because she's obviously more relaxed than anyone else onscreen and seems to enjoy finding something new to do, even if it's in the most apparently disjointed of all the plot threads (I say apparently because it does tie in, although I'd bet almost anything you can figure out where it's going by the end of her first scene). The latter because her radiant earnestness is back in full force, a year after her last dismal appearance in a movie (the disastrous Bride Wars), and she also gets one of the only hard-edged characters to play (a part-time phone sex operator trying to hide it from her new boyfriend); at any rate she has a certain strength of will that doubles as charisma, and you can almost see her straining to keep the whole project aloft on her back.

It doesn't work, of course, but nothing would. This is pablum. Garry Marshall doesn't do anything else, but make the simplest kind of movies in the world not because they are interesting but because they are soothing (already I can't remember a single noteworthy thing about the film's visual aesthetic, either for good or ill). Well, soothing it is; soothing enough to leave you catatonic. Me, I like my romantic comedies when it was still a war of the sexes and not a series of easily buffed-out quibbles, but obviously not everyone shares my taste. At any rate, it's a perfect date movie: you'll miss absolutely nothing of merit if you make out in the back row instead of watching the film.

4/10

VAMPIRE STORIES

Part of the Film Preservation Blogathon co-hosted by Self Styled Siren and Ferdy on Films - a fundraiser to benefit the National Film Preservation Foundation.

The National Film Preservation Foundation is the independent, nonprofit organization created by the U.S. Congress to help save America’s film heritage. They work directly with archives to rescue endangered films that will not survive without public support.

The NFPF will give away 4 DVD sets as thank-you gifts to blogathon donors chosen in a random drawing: two copies of Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934 and two copies of Treasures IV: American Avant Garde Film, 1947-1986.

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Casting about for an idea for my contribution to this most excellent fundraiser, I eventually hit upon the inevitable: vampires! For it cannot be denied that vampires are a bit like movies: both look like they're alive, but they actually aren't; you see them both in the dark; and both are susceptible to spectacular and often highly destructive fires. Also, the movie BloodRayne is bad enough to make you wish that neither one of them had ever been invented.

What can vampire movies teach us about film preservation? you may be wondering. Isn't film preservation about saving old newsreels and avant-garde shorts from 1912? Sure, and we need those things, too (the essential Treasures from American Film Archives DVD box sets are proof enough of that). But age, decay, and human indifference know neither genre nor art. So let's visit with three film vampires, and see what they can tell us about three different faces of film preservation.

The first adaptation of Bram Stoker's definitive vampire novel Dracula was born in an act of law-breaking. When the great German Expressionist F.W. Murnau adapted the story for his 1922 Nosferatu, the production company Prana Film elected not to secure rights from Stoker's widow, Florence; instead, the film hides its obvious debt to the novel by changing character names (later adaptations would flip this around entirely: most Dracula films keep the names and abandon everything else). Florence Stoker was not fooled, and as the film enjoyed no small success in Europe, she sued Prana Film for copyright infringement. By 1925, the case had been decided in favor of the Stoker estate, and the judge ordered all copies of the film to be destroyed.

Luckily for film history, by this point the movie had been distributed to enough corners of the world that it wasn't a simple matter to find every last print; luckier still, one of these copies ended up in the hands of Henri Langlois, the patron saint of film preservation if ever there was such an individual - though his print was a French-language version, lacking the detailed title cards of Murnau's original. But it is still a boon that even though most prints of Nosferatu were destroyed in short order, enough remained - many of them in heavily re-edited forms - that the film never truly dropped out of sight.

Because Prana Film did not survive the lawsuit in 1925, Nosferatu has been a public domain film nearly everywhere in the world for more than 80 years now, and this means two things: the first is that there are a great many prints floating about, many of them copies of copies (of copies of copies of...). The second, which is partially a result of the first, is that a lot of versions of Nosferatu look pretty damn awful, with God knows what snips or re-ordering or added footage for whatever specific theater rented that print back in the 1920s.

In 1995, a massive reconstruction and restoration of the movie was completed by the Cineteca del Comune di Bologna - restoration because it involved finding the cleanest versions of shots from three different prints (all held by the Cinèmatheque in Paris), reconstruction because the film was freshly re-tinted according to extensive scholarship, with newly-drawn intertitles which attempted as much as possible to re-create the appearance of the original German titles (which had been found in the early 1980s). The result is not exactly Nosferatu precisely as it was in 1922, but it is the closest we are ever going to come; this resoration has been the source for new distribution prints as well as a number of DVDs throughout the world; by most accounts, the Region 0 DVD put out by Kino in the U.S. in 2002 is currently best way to see it, though it lacks the German titles or the music composed for the film's original release.

(For a comprehensive and absolutely fascinating article by Enno Patalas, a member of the restoration team, as well as a comparison of DVD versions, check here).

Every step of the way, the story of Nosferatu is a triumph of film preservation: its rescue from the flames in 1925 all the way to its restoration in 1995 to something that looks as good or better than any other European silent nowadays. And all this is in service to a movie that unquestionably deserves it, as one of the most prominent films made by one of 1920s cinema's finest visual artists, and as arguably the most influential and beautiful horror movie of all time. Stop and think about it: if not for the work of so many people along the way, it wouldn't exist. Now's a good time for me to shill again:

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Not faring quite so well as Murnau's stunningly lucky silent is Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1932 Vampyr, a silent film turned into a sound film midway through its production. Arguably, Dreyer already used up his quota of luck; the 1981 rediscovery of The Passion of Joan of Arc is perhaps the most famous story in the annals of lost silent cinema.

Directed by one of the most inventive men who ever set foot on a movie set, it's not hard to argue that Vampyr is the most beautiful and artistic mood pieces ever filmed; a waking nightmare given celluloid form. It is also a film that, until very recently, could not be seen in anything approaching an acceptable form.

The first thing to note is that Vampyr was originally shot simultaneously in three versions: German, French, and English (this was common practice in the early sound era). If the English-language version was ever completed, history has swallowed it up completely, leaving us with only the German and French cuts; and they are in the most dire state. The original negatives are long since gone, and the distribution prints that remain available to us are badly scratched, incomplete, or have essentially unusable sound; often all three at once. That's to say nothing of the fact that many of the surviving prints were badly re-cut even before age and poor archiving entered the picture. At one point, the best that an English-language viewer could do to see the film was a battered print that was restored a well as could be in 1991, though nothing could be done about the Danish subtitles other than to cover them up with a black bar, and print English subtitles over that. Hardly the right way to appreciate one of the finest, moodiest horror films in existence, but better than not seeing it at all.

In 2008, a reconstruction and restoration was done, and two DVDs released: by Criterion in Region 1 and by Eureka in Region 2. Both include only the German-language version (even the best French print apparently being in such appalling shape that even as a DVD extra, you couldn't possibly charge money for it), cleaned up as well as possible with what is believed to be all the missing footage restored. Now, judging the "cleanliness" of Vampyr is made a bit difficult, given the deliberately washed-out look of the 1932 cinematography, but I think it can well be said that the new DVDs, though a damn sight better than anything available before them, aren't as polished and clean as one might wish for; there are a lot of scratches and stains even now that can only be regarded as blemishes, and the soundtrack remains a bit murky. The effect of early recording techniques, no doubt, but other European films from the same period have been released and sound better.

But I do not want to sound like a complainer! The current restoration of Vampyr still looks much better than we could reasonably expect, given the state of the existent film prints. There's the rub, though: barring the discovery of a long-lost print kept in a climate-controlled room somewhere, this is the best it's ever going to look: those prints are just going to keep rotting and deteriorating, and there's only so much that a future restoration can do to combat that. At some point, the French version of Vampyr will be lost outright, and the German version will likely exist only in digital form. Which is better than nothing at all, but it is, nonetheless, a distinct pity that such a noteworthy, gorgeous film has so little hope of being restored to its former glory.

Still, it could be worse. Let's meet our third subject:

That's the mysterious, unnamed gentleman played by Lon Chaney, Sr. in Tod Browning's 1927 film London After Midnight. It's the only time in his career that chameleonoid actor ever played a vampire - okay, a fake vampire - but still, he got to dress himself up as a sharp-toothed bloodsucker for the first and last time in his estimable career of creating the greatest screen makeup in history. Why not let's take another look?

By all accounts, London After Midnight isn't all that great - virtually everyone who has seen both has declared that The Unknown is a far better Chaney/Browning effort. But, I mean, look at that make-up! That is some genuinely creepy stuff, and from 1927 at that. Doesn't part of you really want to see what a feature-length movie with that vampire is like?

Well, you can't. The last known print of London After Midnight was destroyed in an electrical fire at MGM in 1967.

That's the sort of thing we're up against. There came a point when there was one and only one print of London After Midnight, and it was being archived in such a way that it could be lost in an accident - a freak accident, but not an impossible accident: it's not like a meteor struck the MGM vault. (That fire, by the way, destroyed quite a few last known prints).

Obviously, film preservation isn't a panacea: some films are just going to be lost, and some are going to be beyond recovery. But if there's a chance to make backup copies of a film with just that one last print, or to raise awareness of proper archiving techniques, isn't that important? The cinema is the most important cultural record of the 20th Century, and a truly unfathomable number of films of every stripe - from horror to comedy, from the silliest fairy tale to the driest documentary - are gone. Just gone. That's an ongoing process, dear reader. It can be slowed down and stopped, but not just because. It takes will.

And this isn't just for us, to be able to enjoy these old movies. It's for the next generation of scholars, and the next, to be able to go back 100 or 120 years the same way we can go back 70 or 90. Digital home media help a lot, but it's not the same; the privilege of seeing an old film print is one of the most satisfying things in the world, and I don't like the thought that my children might never have that chance. I'm pretty much certain you don't either.

Sorry to get preachy, folks. But it is a call to action, after all.

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