Tag Archives: Wikipedia

Les Carabiniers [1963)

Iskra.  И́скра.  Spark.  Good film criticism requires a spark…something which separates it from run-of-the-mill recounting.  Our society is so impoverished.  Apparently Wikipedia didn’t put any of its recent fundraising money towards their article on The Caribineers [sic].  Nay, I had to stray to the rival IMDb to find what I was looking for.  I know how Wiki works (more or less).  People contribute information, at various levels of veracity and artfulness, to topical articles about which they feel at least an interest if not an expertise.  Perhaps IMDb works the same way.  I’m not sure.  One thing is sure in my book:  Wikipedia is the more powerful tool and, just as importantly, it is artfully austere–the Bauhaus of digi-pedias.  IMDb is not lacking in breadth (as concerns film), but it is clunky and feels like a really shitty version of amazon.com.

Business.  Amazon has owned IMDb since 1998.  I’ve gotten some great stuff from Amazon…some of it at a good price.  But Wikipedia does has a different feel, and for that it is to be commended.  It is the utopia ideal at work.  And that tangent brings me to the name.

Odile Geoffroy.  IMDb claims she was in Vivre sa vie as well as Les Carabiniers.  Perhaps.  It appears to have been quite a small role.  I do not recall it.  But at least IMDb (Amazon) gave me her name.  The same cannot be said for the woeful, woeful Wikipedia article titled The Caribineers.

Why Ms. Geoffroy?  Because her part in Les Carabiniers is anything but trivial.  Iskra.  Spark.  Из искры возгорится пламя.  From a spark a fire will flare up.  Yes, the brutes of Les Carabiniers really have a tough time offing Ms. Geoffrey’s character…even with a white handkerchief over her perfect, blond visage.  It’s the only way.  Her beauty is too strong for the base, lecherous soldiers tasked with shutting her up.  And then she begins to speak…

Yes, she has a mind.  She is not a mindless Venus–nor a venal Cleopatra.  But they shoot her anyway.  In fact, it takes a magazine full of bullets to finally keep her synapses from firing; her limbs from moving.

And so we have another political film from Jean-Luc Godard.  Again, like Le Petit soldat which preceded it by release but not creation, the political slant is not really towards a particular faction (as far as I can tell).  In other words, the Marxist-Leninist spark is just that:  a quick, tentative reference to something which was perhaps still taking hold in Godard’s mind.

What we do get is an anti-war film along the lines of Renoir’s La Grand illusion, but with the gritty realism of Rossellini’s first post-war films.  Roberto’s spirit is inextricably woven into the fabric of Les Carabiniers.  Albert Juross portrays the idiocy of war as well as Catharine Ribeiro portrays the pretty spoils of mo-bil-i-za-tion.  The latter (Ribeiro) would enjoy a long career as an iconoclastic singer.  Which brings up another point:

where was Anna Karina?  Belmondo?  It might have seemed at the time that the Karina-Godard synergy had abated.  Nothing could have been further from the truth of what followed.  Some of her best starring turns for Godard lay ahead of her, but this strange film served as a bit of punctuation for Godard…almost a continuance of Le Petit soldat.  It bears mentioning that of his first five features, only Une Femme est une femme had been in color.  This from the auteur who was to yet shortly give the world Pierrot le Fou and Le Mépris.

Les Carabiniers is really rather a dense film to dissect.  I think Pauline Kael and Susan Sontag would be aghast at having been cited on such a paltry Wikipedia article as The Caribineers.  It is to Godard’s credit that this seldom-mentioned classic from his oeuvre poses a problem in breadth for being even beyond the scope of a time-on-my-hands blogger like me.

-PD

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Winter of Frozen Dreams [2009)

What a beautiful title…like Bashō, Li Po, or even François Villon.  In this age of over-medication, we hear of new disorders every day (accompanied by ridiculous commercials we have to endure with relatives at Christmastime).  Of special note in these cold days is seasonal affective disorder.  It’s legend as something independent of general depression lives on as most people do not have the DSM-IV or DSM-5 by their bedside.

And so, “with seasonal pattern” there are many of us who struggle especially in the wintery days of the year…especially if we feel our dreams have been suspended.  Ah, suspended animation…it can be beautiful…like insects caught in amber (that Greek touchstone which lends our word “electricity” an etymology).  Static electricity and ēlektron (the classical name for amber)…  Such irony that flies and gnats would meet their demise drowned in the same substance…and countless days later we wonder at the beauty of their death.  It is one of the few times death can be generally agreed on as beautiful.  In the spider frozen in amber, we marvel at the beauty of the creature.  Their life is preserved.  While they have ceased to exist as a living creature, their form lives on through the sepia light which attests to them having existed.  Grammar becomes difficult in such a state of was/is/will be.

But alas, as they say, this film is not really a poetic tour de force.  It is, however, a time capsule which presents a haunting portrait of the northern U.S. in the late-’70s.  One wonders whether the props department of Boogie Nights was lifted whole-cloth (!) as the action unfolds during this strange movie.  Indeed, it is more strange than haunting.  It is not frightening or repulsive like a Silence of the Lambs, but rather disjunct like a lesser cousin of Mulholland Dr.

I do not want to disparage this film because it is actually quite good, but I must admit that my sole reason for watching was to see Thora Birch act.  Thora was the first actress I ever fell in love with.  We all have our celebrity crushes.  She was/is mine.  Her trio of films American Beauty, Ghost World, and Homeless to Harvard (a Lifetime “joint”) was really an acting triumph which I can only compare to Bob Dylan’s trilogy of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde.  I know it sounds ridiculous to say so, but Birch directed those three films as much as did their auteurs/metteurs en scène.  Call it la politique…in reverse…unlike King Midas…

This film presents a problem in its representation on Wikipedia.  After viewing a film, I like to recall what I’ve just seen.  Wikipedia is good for that, but not in this case.  It’s as if this film was a Falconetti one-reeler from 1916 and not an American feature from 2009.  In this dearth of information, one begins to suspect that Thora’s claims of having been forgotten and overlooked after Ghost World might just be right on the money.  That’s where film critics step in.  Though it be five years late and $991,679 short, I can (with my little voice) once again assert that Thora is an acting genius.

Poor Eric Mandelbaum…his name isn’t even a hypertext link on Wiki, but he did a fine job here painting a snow-drift picture of the not-so-old, weird America.  Dan Moran at least has a dead link (empty page).  The trouble with Harry, that!

All jokes aside, Brandon Sexton III is very convincing as the bearded, lonely Jerry.  His stoic visage becomes as much a motif as Birch’s radiant beauty over the film’s course.  Poor Jerry gets duped into some accessory to murder business…we think.  None of it is very clear.  Based on the true story of Barbara Hoffman, this tale plays with time and the facts like Lynch directing Pynchon.  I can’t help but wonder if PTA’s Inherent Vice might converge with this film in some way…no doubt at a locale with an angry cropduster.

Keith Carradine is good here (resembling Burt Lancaster in Field of Dreams).  Also good is Colleen Camp in the small role as Jerry’s mother.  There are scenes of unspeakable sadness and ennui at the dinner table and near the end as she takes the phone call.  We sense a connection to Ellen Burstyn’s performance in Requiem for a Dream (with the mise-en-scène of a Harmony Korine).

One thing is certain: my little piece of shit website shall always sing the praises of one Miss Thora Birch.

-PD

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Action in the North Atlantic [1943)

Where to start…  This is a time capsule from another world and, most of all, a damn good film.  It might be argued that this picture proves a certain fallibility of the French auteur theory, but only insofar as director Lloyd Bacon never having been canonized like, for instance, Howard Hawks.  Sure…this is a propaganda film, but it’s hard to argue with gentle optimism.  We were even allies with Russia (Soviet Union) back then!

I hadn’t seen a Raymond Massey performance in a long while and it was good to remember his excellent acting skills.  Bogart is great the whole way through, but what else would you expect?  Ruth Gordon does a fine job in her small role as Massey’s wife.  Not many female roles here as the majority of the film is at sea during wartime (in the 1940s).  Julie Bishop is likewise lovely as Bogart’s new bride (though we see very little of her too).

The ensemble acting is really remarkable and vivid…particularly aboard the oil tanker at the start of the film.  Dane Clark has a strange role–a sort of “doubting Thomas” who finally sees the light of patriotism.  Truly, this film is not just American propaganda, but also proto United Nations perception management.  But like I said, this was a different age and the whole thing comes off as quite the opposite of heavy-handed.

Alan Hale, Sr. is pretty hilarious the whole way through as O’Hara:  the guy who never shuts up.  To be fair, none of these salty dogs ever shut up.  Only Bogart and Massey retain any sense of distinguished cool.

Of particular note are the action sequences.  What a huge undertaking!  This is truly a movie which gives a glimmer as to the breadth at issue in WWII.  The aerial shots of the maritime convoy are astounding!  Amid all of this bombast I failed to notice Robert Mitchum’s one line appearance, but if Wikipedia claims it’s so then it must be.  Ha!

The specific topic of recruitment (as per propaganda) is for the U.S. Merchant Marine and their Academy.  Like I said, none of it is too terribly offensive to logical thought.  Of particular interest is the dialogue of the German U-boats.  All of it is in German and without subtitles.  We also hear different tongues throughout the film (such as Russian).  No “foreign” character is ever made to speak English.

Speaking of mixed messages…Wikipedia also credits Raoul Walsh and Byron Haskin with directing this film.  Now what the heck is that all about?  No wonder Lloyd got the auteurist shaft!

 

-PD

 

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