2012 Movie Challenge #6: The Nights of Cabiria

Some movies have a strange magic to them, I think; they transcend the actors and sets and lights, and what is born from them is a story that seems to exist apart from any time or place, as though it came to us all on its own, like a dream. For me, Federico Fellini's The Nights of Cabiria is one of those movies.

The film takes place in Rome in the 1950s, and the main character of the story is Cabiria, a prostitute. However, let me say quickly that, despite the subject matter, the film is neither puerile nor moralizing. We never see Cabiria about her trade, or at least not beyond her standing by the side of the road and nodding at passersby. Likewise, the film does not feel obligated to teach us the lesson that the life of a prostitute is not all dancing and champagne; it assumes that we have probably guessed that already. Simply put, its purpose is not to shock or titillate us, but only to tell us the story of a fellow human being who is neither good nor bad but some mixture of the two.

We first meet the shrimpy Cabiria upside-down and half-dead, hauled out of the river where her paramour has thrown her after snatching her purse. She bounces back like a cat, however, and her story is full of similar ups and downs, with film stars and magicians and crooks, until a chance encounter seems to offer an opportunity to change her life forever. One might say that for much of the film there is no plot at all; these are Cabiria's days and nights and we simply follow her down and through them. Like most things, however, something deeper lies beneath the surface.

In some ways Nights of Cabiria is the mirror opposite of another movie in the 2012 Film Challenge, namely Black Narcissus; in that earlier film, we see characters who have pledged their devotion to God but who are tormented with thoughts of the secular world; in Cabiria we have a character who would seem to have the basest profession of all but who is haunted by thoughts of the sacred. Though she lives in the moment, Cabiria is reminded of her own bleak future, and she finds herself achingly drawn to those who have devoted themselves to charity, accepted holy orders or renounced worldy things.

The theme of the sacred and the profane echoes throughout the film and on into us, the viewers, no matter what our profession; it makes the us think about what we sell and what we give away for free, what small part of ourselves we lose to make our daily bread, and the prices we put on things that seem as though they should never be measured by the weight of gold.

But, despite that undercurrent of seriousness, Nights of Cabiria is not a grim and doleful movie. Like the rest of us, Cabiria must set aside dark thoughts to make it through her day, and so alongside these bitter truths is a wellspring of joy and humor. Cabiria is a "nut," a free spirit who has both a tough outer shell and a warm, vulnerable heart. The character is played by Giulietta Masina, an actor easily the equal of Chaplin and Keaton in physical comedy, and Cabiria's every gesture and smirk has some little impish sense of fun to it. She is truly one of the most memorable characters in all of cinema.

To me The Nights of Cabiria is a film that will always stand the test of time and be moving and meaningful for as long as people go on watching movies, which I hope is forever.

How did it hold up? Really well. The ending still chokes me up.

Netflixxable? Yes, for disc, no for streaming.


A note about titles: some readers might feel inclined to correct me about the title of the film and remind me that the generally accepted translation leaves off the definite article, despite the fact that it appears in the original title in Italian. Yeah, I know, I did that on purpose. "Nights of Cabiria" always sounded abstract and pretentious to me—as though "cabiria" were some kind of mental or gastronomic funk that a person sometimes has to suffer through after a late dinner. No: Cabiria is a specific person, and these are her specific nights. So there you go.

2012 Movie Challenge #5: The Seven Samurai

This is going to be a short entry, because, really, what else can you say? 


Well, I do have one thing I want to say about it, and here it is: I can sort of understand people dragging their feet on watching The Seven Samurai, because when they hear "this is a really, really good movie" they interpret "good" as meaning good in the way that sit-ups are good, or eating lots of fiber, or putting money into a 401k for retirement. Like, you just have to grit your teeth and bear it, and then when it's all over you'll somehow be a better person for it. 


Well, here's the thing: it's not good because it's like medicine, it's good because it's an extremely entertaining movie. 


Regarding the length...well, I've seen lots of regular-length movies that had me restless and looking at my watch after the first half an hour. The Seven Samurai clocks in at three hours and forty-seven minutes (with intermission), but the time flies right by. I was lucky enough to once see a restored copy of the film on the big screen and it was an fantastic experience. It all went by in a flash. 


If you're still on the fence, let's make a deal: just watch an hour—sixty minutes—and if you still don't like it, then we'll call it quits. Okay? That's not so hard, right? You could probably watch an hour of TV just by accident. 


Anyway, if you're a fan of things that are awesome, you should do yourself a favor and watch this movie.


How did it hold up? Of course it held up, it's the Seven damn Samurai.


Netflixxable? Yes, for disc, no for streaming.

Bonus Movie Review: "Fur"

Note: this is not part of the 2012 Film Challenge, but rather a sarcastic movie review that I had sent around to family members a couple of years ago. My mother suggested that it be saved for posterity here. I do not recommend that anyone actually watch this movie.

I watched the movie Fur on a recommendation from a family member who shall go unnamed, and I feel inspired—nay, compelled—to share this powerful experience with the rest of you.

It's only natural to be curious about the lives of the great artists. What were they like? What of their world? Did they trod the earth like us mere mortals, or was their existence as if on some ether plane, with naught to eat but heavenly ambrosia, every day a kaleidoscope of color and delight?

More specifically, one might wonder what it would be like if photographer Diane Arbus had a romantic affair with a genetically challenged man who was covered in hair like some kind of afghan hound. The movie Fur sets out to tell this story, and it tells the hell out of it.

The movie begins with poor fictionalized Diane (portrayed by the graceful Nicole Kidman) having not yet found her muse; she spends her days assisting her average-looking husband in his photography studio, raising her two daughters with good-natured indifference, and conveying her artistic and sexual repression to the world by keeping her collars tightly buttoned and sighing in bathrooms. Her life is thrown into turmoil, however, when a mysterious masked man moves into the apartment upstairs. Her curiosity is aroused, and after some minor stalking she discovers the stranger to be a colossal mop of hair piloted from within by an invisible Robert Downey Jr. What woman would not be intrigued by such a man? The stranger lives in a magical world of whimsy and knickknacks, his apartment full to bursting with beaded curtains, tame animals, incunabula, portraits of famous circus freaks, antique personal irrigation equipment and quill pens. His friends are giants, dwarves, Siamese twins and a woman with no arms who plays the cello with one foot and a chin. Thankfully we only see this armless musician playing pieces which are not very demanding, otherwise she would be obliged to bob her head up and down the strings like some kind of out-of-control chicken. One might well wonder why she din't just take up the drums instead.

Soon Diane's hubby is getting neglected and the children are wearing potato sacks to school. He tries to entice her back into his arms by growing a beard, but it's too little too late. Finally in a moment of rapture the dog-man neighbor instructs Diane to shave off his pelt so that the two can be intimate without lapsing into coughing fits or choking on hairballs. She tackles this Herculean task with aplomb. The viewer is treated to the unforgettable and magnificently unerotic sight of Nicole Kidman shaving a man's hairy ass. Thanks, movie!

Unfortunately, Cousin It's strange genetic condition is also turning his lungs to Swiss cheese, and his days are numbered. As a parting gift to Diane, he blows up an air mattress with the last of his strength and presents it to her as a gift (no, seriously). Later, after he swims off into the sunset, we see her taking little fugitive whiffs of her hairy boyfriend's diseased final breaths from the air mattress. Rhett Butler, eat your heart out.

I would like to thank the anonymous family member for lending me this movie, and I will return it as soon as possible so that others can borrow it for their own edification.

2012 Film Challenge #4: Black Narcissus

Black Narcissus is a British film from 1947, written and directed by the filmmaking team of William Powell and Emeric Pressburger and based on a novel written eight years earlier by Rumer Godden. Though the title has an artsy-intellectual sound to it (before I saw it I always had it confused with Camus's Black Orpheus), the storytelling is pretty straightforward. "Black Narcissus" is just the name of a perfume mentioned in the film, but of course whether there is any greater meaning beyond that is up to the viewer. 


The plot of the film centers on Sister Clodagh, a sister of the Convent of the Order of the Servants of Mary of Calcutta—beautiful & headstrong, natch—who despite her young age is tasked with heading up a new mission deep in the Himalayan mountains; they are to provide education and medicine to the local Indian people, and of course to convert them to Christianity if time permits. 

Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "Yeah yeah yeah, nuns, 1947. I know how this plays out: standard-issue fish-out-of-water story. The nuns don't understand the locals, the locals don't trust the nuns, both sides are a little arrogant and stuffy. Then there's a common crisis, the two sides have to come together to overcome adversity, and with hard work and a pinch of God's love everyone learns a lesson about getting along. We're out in an hour forty-five and everyone's uplifted. The end." 


Ha ha ha! No. Not even close.

Black Narcissus is not an uplifting movie, though neither is it a depressing or "serious" movie, and truth to tell it's not even a particularly Christian movie. It does deal with spirituality, however, or maybe better to say that it deals with the conflict between our ideals and our animal nature—our intellect versus our emotions, our compassion verus our neediness, the world as it should be versus the world as it actually is. 


The sisters soon find out that the convent donated to them by the local rajah was formerly the residence of the harem of his father, a place known as "The Palace of Women." It is a strange, forbidding compound halfway up the face of a cliff, a place where the air is "too pure" and the water "too good," a place where the wind always blows and the rooms seem to be haunted by the lushness of days gone by. High above them on a peak sits the Indian holy man, one who was once a creature of the world but who now neither moves nor speaks, while beneath them is the valley teeming with life and the ordinary people—particularly Mr. Dean, the rugged, handsome, irreverent and occsaionally shirtless British agent. 

The sisters find themselves suspended between these two extremes in a strange, isolated otherworld that slowly begins to affect them in ways they can't control. Thrust upon them are a half-mad caretaker who used to serve the harem girls, a young noble dressed like a dandy, and an orphaned teenage girl spilling over with sensuality. Meanwhile, Sister Clodagh is visited by memories of her past, while the high-strung sister Ruth gets a little squirrelly.


Whatever you're expecting, the film is probably not that. Perhaps most surprising to those who pay attention will be the perverse sense of humor that pervades it; again and again it seems as though the film is leading you towards a cliché only to grab your nose and twist it hard. Meanwhile the rascally Mr. Dean has a habit of scandalizing Sister Clodagh with comments which, if taken at face value, could be piously quoted in a Sunday sermon. Back in real life, the Catholic Order of Decency actually requested that scenes showing Sister Clodagh's life before the taking of her vows be cut out, no doubt because they are filled with a vitality and beauty that bleach her present pale by comparison; and yet they are scenes that portray only a beautiful, simple innocence. Only Black Narcissus could make the church want to censor such G-rated material!


In the end what's remarkable about the movie is that it throws us and the nuns in the same boat: we all have our preconceived notions of how things are going to go in this story, but we are all presented with something much, much more complicated and weird, and both we and Sister Clodagh have to stumble through and make sense of it all. 


How did it hold up? Well, I think a sign of a great movie is that every time you watch it you find something new you didn't see before, and this time around there was a short simple moment towards the end that made me think "holy crap, life really is like that, isn't it?" Maybe that sounds a little James Lipton-y, but what are ya gonna do. 


Netflixxable? Yes to both disc and streaming. 

2012 Movie Challenge #3: Duck Soup

Duck Soup isn't some masterpiece of film art, but I always put it on my top-whatever lists because I love the Marx Brothers and this is my favorite of their movies. It was their high-water mark, I think; their very early Paramount movies had too much of an old-fashioned Broadway vibe, whereas the MGM films tried too hard to make sense and have plots and stuff. Duck Soup is special because it's basically insanity from beginning to end. It all centers around the embattled nation of Freedonia (home of the brave and free) and its ambassadors and spies and whatnot, but who cares? Certainly not the Marx Brothers.


Lots of the jokes are corny, and some of them are borderline offensive, but there is also stuff that is just so damn funny you can hardly believe it.

Mrs. Teasdale: Oh, your excellency! We've been expecting you! As chairwoman of the reception committee, I extend the good wishes of every man, woman and child of Freedonia.
Rufus T. Firefly: Never mind that stuff, take a card. 
Mrs. Teasdale: Card? What do I do with the card?
Rufus T. Firefly: Keep it, I've got fifty-one left. 


What's so hilarious about it all is that the Marx Brothers are forces of pure anarchy but no one else in the movie seems to notice. All the other citizens of Freedonia (home of the brave and free) are trying their damndest to perpetrate espionage and arrange formal parties, and they only barely comprehend that four escaped mental patients are wrecking up the place. The absurdity only escalates as the film goes on, until by the end the movie itself seems to have slipped a gear and gone insane.

It's also worth mentioning that if you've only seen the later Marx Brothers movies, you're probably more familiar with the gentle and sweet version of Harpo's character. In the early movies Harpo is crazy—walleyed, batshit crazy. Like, light-a-stick-of-dynamite-and-throw-it-at-stuff crazy.


Anyway, what else can I say? It's funny. Go watch it. And remember—it's all about the anarchy. 


Netflixxable? Yes for DVD and streaming.

2012 Movie Challenge #2: M

I love movies. Well, everyone does, right? We all like to be told a good story; that's just part of being human. I think I love movies beyond even that, though; I love the unique way that movies are able to tell stories, and I love all the subtle tricks that filmmakers use to convey ideas and emotions to their audiences. It excites me when a movie tells a story in a new and unexpected way, and my favorite movies of all are those that tell stories in a way that only a movie could—to try to translate what's cool about such a film into a play or a novel would be missing the point, like trying to play tennis by morse code.


That's all the background context to why I think M is such a kick-ass movie. 

M was made in Germany in 1931, and was directed by Fritz Lang. Lang had spent the previous decade making big-budget spectaculars in the genres of fantasy, science fiction and espionage, and of course he was also the director of the previously mentioned Dr. Mabuse der Spieler. M was something completely different, however; instead of dragons, rockets and supervillains, the film is about an ordinary city and the people who live there. 


Specifically, it is about a serial killer. Serial killers would have very much been on Germans' minds in the late twenties because of two notorious and gruesome cases, that of the cannibal Karl Denke and the then-unsolved crimes of Peter Kürten, "the vampire of Düsseldorf." In Lang's film the murderer is a child-killer who has baffled the police and driven the citizens of the unnamed city into a state of near-panic. The movie opens with a ring of children singing a ghoulish rhyme about "the man in black," little suspecting that one of their absent playmates will be the next to fall.


M is not a gruesome movie, however, and in fact it dwells very little on the crimes themselves. It's actually a fairly unusual movie in that for the first half we are not necessarily focused on a specific group of characters; there is the killer, and the wonderfully memorable Kommissar Lohmann, and other lesser characters that we come to know, but most of that time is spent with anonyms who tell only some fractional part of a larger story. 


What's particularly remarkable about all that is that despite its Godlike remove, M is still compelling, human and entertaining. There is not one story but a hundred little ones, and the movie is jammed full of life and details. There is tension and fear and action and mystery and yes, even humor. The film moves through all these moments with the fluidity of a figure skater, and it's only boring if you're not paying attention. 

The film's relative distance also gives it a kind of freedom, and Lang's camera takes full advantage of this. We see the action from rooftops, around corners, down stairwells and up from beneath grates. The camera prowls through a submondane café like a cat, it scales up walls and through windows, and every frame is packed with things to see. Freedom also means speed, and Lang is able to bounce back and forth around the city by using sound as a transition; a character mentions something and we are there, and conversations flow across scenes like a connecting thought. In time, however, the freedom ends and the circle begins closing in; the second half of the film is devoted to the chase and capture of the killer...but the final end may not be quite what you expect.


Basically the movie is as clever as hell, and the cinematography is fantastic to boot. I even once watched it with the subtitles turned off just so I could enjoy the images without the distraction of the words.


How did it hold up? Still a favorite. Every single minute of it feels inventive and cool. It's a movie-lovers movie, and if you're a movie-lover too I highly recommend it.


Netflixxable? Yes for disc, no for streaming.

2012 Movie Challenge #1: Dr. Mabuse der Spieler

Note: This is one of the more obscure and difficult movies on the list and there's no chance in hell that you're ever going to watch it, so you might as well skip this post and wait for the next one.

Dr, Mabuse der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse the Gambler) is a two-part epic thriller, made in Germany and released in 1922. The plot revolves around the sinister & mysterious Dr. Mabuse, a psychopathic psychoanalyst who lives a double life as a master criminal and gambler. He is a kidnapper, counterfeiter, stock market manipulator, and master of disguise who toys with the lives of others through the power of hypnosis and mind control. 

I first saw Dr. Mabuse der Spieler in college twenty years ago. I was taking a class on the golden era of German silent film, and it was one of the first movies we watched. I really enjoyed it, and I remember being surprised at how entertaining it was for a movie that was almost seventy years old. I wrote one of my papers on the film, re-watching it and taking notes, and if anything I enjoyed it even more the second time through. The paper turned out really well, and by the end of it all I too had fallen under Dr. Mabuse's hypnotic spell. I became so fascinated with the film that its story took on the quality of a myth for me, except instead of gods and minotaurs there were bombs and gambling dens and car chases. I made my own copy from the AV department's dark, grainy tape, and over the years I would bring it back out when I was in one of my film geek moods or I wanted to recapture some feeling of my bygone college days. 

What's particularly neat about the movie, I think, is that it features an early instance of the classic "supervillain" idea, but with a twist. Dr. Mabuse is a bit different from your garden-variety evil overlord in that he doesn't want to take over the world, he wants to set it on fire and laugh as it burns. He is a grim, determined anarchist, and who doesn't love a good anarchist? Movies have also taught us that supervillains are always ice-cold and as stolid as snakes, but Mabuse is not quite that. We see him seethe with lust and malice; he holds drunken orgies in his moments of triumph and explodes with rage when thwarted. Though he has the mind of a genius, he is also a man, and a pretty loopy one at that. 

The movie is also fascinating to me because it represents a huge step forward in filmmaking art. Mabuse has an incredible kinetic energy and confidence in its storytelling for its time; D.W. Griffith's 1919 film Broken Blossoms is practically like watching a painting in comparison. There is also a famous (possibly apocryphal) story that the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein was so impressed by the film that he obtained a copy, cut it up into its constituent shots, and then put it back together to better understand how it worked, much in the same way that a student mechanic might take apart a motor and reassemble it. Luis Buñuel was also an admirer.

How did it hold up? I enjoyed it, like always; it's interesting from a historical perspective, there's lots of neat camerawork, and whenever I watch it, it feels like I'm revisiting an old friend. The question is, is it a movie I'd recommend to other people? Well...certainly I would say that it's important viewing for film scholars. For the average moviegoer, though...no. Definitely there is great stuff in there that anyone would enjoy, but the film is four and a half hours long and silent, and even if it was faster-paced than any other film of its day, it's still going to feel draggy to a modern audience. 

Netflixxable? Yes, but it looks like they have the Image version, which is not nearly as good as the Kino on Video version.

2012 Movie Challenge

Earlier this year I thought that it might be fun & interesting as a project for 2012 to watch all my favorite movies and see how they hold up for me. The list I came up with is as follows...

Dr. Mabuse der Spieler (1922)
M (1931)
Duck Soup (1933)
Black Narcissus (1947)
The Seven Samurai (1954)
The Nights of Cabiria (1957)
Psycho (1960)
La Dolce Vita (1960)
Yojimbo (1961)
Viridiana (1961)
The Exterminating Angel (1962)
Dr. Strangelove (1964)
Simon of the Desert (1965)
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
The Conformist (1970)
The Shining (1980)
Blue Velvet (1986)
Miller's Crossing (1990)
Ed Wood (1994)
Boogie Nights (1997)
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
Spirited Away (2001)
No Country for Old Men (2007)

...not counting Star Wars, which I had watched recently, and Underground, which I had watched recently enough. 

So far I've gotten through six of the twenty-four, and I've posted short reviews and screen captures on a different forum. I'll start copying those reviews over in the next few days and then going forward I'll cross-post. For science!