Film Ignorance # 29: The Kid

Film: The Kid
Rating: A Good Movie
Director: Charlie Chaplin
Stars: Charlie Chaplin, Jackie Coogan
Year: 1921
Reason for Ignorance: Not the hugest Chaplin fan
Ignorance Rating*: Pending

Charlie Chaplin was never one for subtlety. The first scene of The Kid is a woman leaving a charity hospital with a child. As the nurse and doctor watch her leave with a mixture of pity and disapproval, a title card appears: "The Woman - whose sin was motherhood."

Ah, thanks Charlie, I get it now: this is a single mother, alone in the world, oppressed by society's mores and forced to travel the cruel world bearing the burden of her sin.

Charlie's not sure you got it, though, because the next shot is just a few seconds of a statue of Jesus weighed down by the cross. "See, she must bear the burden of her sin! She's like Jesus! Get it?"

Ah yes, we get it Charlie, we get it. But he's still not sure, so the next scene is The Woman sitting on a park bench, holding the child. In case you hadn't noticed it yet, this woman is alone and has nowhere to go. And what is the title card that appears to make sense of this shot of a lonely woman, sitting by herself, alone, with no one else: "Alone." Thanks.

Once the little tramp himself shows up, the picture picks up a great deal. The Woman tries to leave her child with a rich family, but the baby is accidentally kidnapped by a pair of car thieves, who leave the baby near where the tramp lives. Once The Tramp picks up the baby, he's stuck with him; a cop prevents him from putting him back down on the ground. And so Chaplin is left to raise a little boy, who quickly grows up to the tender age of five.

This movie is very funny, stringing together a series of hilarious vignettes that would have been all or most of a Chaplin film just a few years earlier. The kid breaking windows for the tramp to fix them, a cop catching on to their racket, the tramp flirting with the cop's wife after fixing her windows (if you know what I mean), the kid beating a local bully, the tramp beating the bully's enormous brother with the aid of a brick, and other sequences are very funny. And Chaplin, directing his first feature, has done his best to provide a story that holds all of the gags together, a story that mixes his trademark sentimentality with his trademark social conscience.

Unfortunately, not everything quite comes together. Although the movie is only an hour long, it actually runs out of plot elements and throws in a pointless and unnecessary dream sequence near the end - just, I guess, to make it "feature" length. And the ending is rushed and a bit forced, lacking the pathos that Chaplin would develop in his later 20s and 30s film.

The Kid's historical importance is incalculable: as Chaplin's first feature film, it was a risky studio endeavor that paved the way for Chaplin and his many successors and contemporaries (from Keaton to Fields) to make feature-length comedies with enormous creative control. As a film, it's merely pretty good. I enjoyed it very much, but it's a long way from mature Chaplin, and even at 60 minutes, feels a bit too long.

*The "Ignorance Rating" is the percentage of people who voted "Yes" on the poll for this film. If ten people vote in the poll, and 5 of them have seen the movie, I give it an ignorance rating of 50. It's just a ballpark way for me to know how egregious my ignorance was in this case.

Film Ignorance #21: Tom Jones

Film: Tom Jones
Rating: A Good Movie
Director: Tony Richardson
Stars: Albert Finney, Susannah York, Hugh Griffith
Year: 1963
Reason for Ignorance: Never Heard of it
Ignorance Rating*: Pending
“We are all as God made us and many of us much worse.”

I would love to say that Tom Jones is a charming little movie. And it is certainly charming. But its 2 hr+ runtime, its unprecedented (for a British film) production budget, its status as an important literary adaptation, and its sweeping social critique make it a big film. And if I did find it quite charming, I also found it to drag frequently.

The film, like the novel it was based on, is a picaresque, and as such is more than a little uneven. It follows the diverse adventures and sexual conquests of the foundling Tom Jones (Albert Finney) as he journeys from his country home to London. And many, many of these vignettes are very funny, starting with the first of them, which is a silent sequence, complete with title-cards, in which Squire Western (Griffith) finds a baby in his bed and decides to adopt him. As a grown man, Tom dallys with the gamekeeper's daughter and romances the neighboring squire's heiress, and eventually, through some complicated maneuvering by his evil stepbrother, is driven away from home.

This is the wrong Tom Jones

As I said before, the film is full of charming moments. 18th century novels were frequently metafictional, and this film carries on that tradition - the narrator, and Tom himself, frequently address the audience directly. One of Tom's ladyfriends has a large and obviously fake mole; it's no surprise that it ends up on different sides of her face in different scenes. And the film is also full of slapstick moments, sped-up, Chaplin style chase sequences, and tons of wordplay. And its finale, in which all of Tom's allies, enemies, and paramours are thrown together in London and reveal some (damn predictable) plot twists, wraps the film up in an appropriately cheery and cheeky manner.

But along the way, I was frequently bored. Sure Finney is great - this is by far the earliest Finney movie I've seen, and although I could never recognize the Finney of Miller's Crossing or The Bourne Ultimatum, his distinctive voice seems not to have changed over the years. But there are too many vignettes, too many encounters with the ladies, and too many plot elements swirling about. What Richardson should have done is cut the film's running time (which he did in its 1989 rerelease, which I was unable to acquire), further emphasize the meta-moments, and deliver a less weighty but considerably more fun experience. It probably wouldn't have won a whole slew of Academy Awards, but it sure would be easier to sit through.

(Note: if the ideal version Tom Jones that I sketched out appeals to you, Michael Winterbottom made it a couple of years ago. It's called Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, and it's roughly 10 times funnier than Tom Jones)

*The "Ignorance Rating" is the percentage of people who voted "Yes" on the poll for this film. If ten people vote in the poll, and 5 of them have seen the movie, I give it an ignorance rating of 50. It's just a ballpark way for me to know how egregious my ignorance was in this case.

Film Ignorance #19: The Killing Fields

Film: The Killing Fields
Rating: A Good Movie
Director: Roland Joffe
Stars: Sam Waterston, Dr. Haing S. Ngor, John Malkovich
Year: 1984
Reason for Ignorance: Dunno...
Ignorance Rating*: Pending

The Killing Fields is a highly disjointed movie, largely plotless, with no clear protagonist. I can't tell you whether or not this was intentional (I can tell you that this was director Joffe's first film and that he never made another film with an allmovie rating above 3). I can also tell you that it doesn't serve the film well. It's divided into roughly three portions: the first is a journalist in wartime tale, ala Joe Sacco's Palestine, the second is a story of hopeful and fearful waiting, and the third is a prisoner-of-war tale that finally introduces us to the titular fields.

But if the film's lack of cohesion doesn't serve it well, its story of friendship is almost overwhelmingly moving. Sam Waterston plays Sydney Schanberg, a New York Times journalist who is reporting on the Cambodia conflict with the aid of a Cambodian journalist, Dith Pran. Schanberg and Pran's collaboration resulted in a number of awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, but the film de-emphasizes their success in favor of examining their relationship.

The two men are a study in contrast: Waterston, as Schanberg, is fierce and principled, a lanky figure with a left-wing beard who intimidates US and Cambodian figures with his passport and his prestigious credentials. Dr. Ngor, a Cambodian refugee who was not a trained actor, plays his earnest sidekick, whose life is in danger for most of the film; as a Cambodian citizen, he's never certain of respect from the Cambodian military or of aid from US or European officials.

What drives these men is their desire to share the atrocities committed against the Cambodian populace with the world. When Sydney gets Pran's family out of the country as the US pulls out, the Cambodian is insistent that he's remaning. "I'm a journalist too!" he repeats, over and over. This desire to tell the truth, and by doing so help the people of Cambodia, unites Sydney and Pran. Ultimately, the film turns on the fact that Pran must suffer for doing so, while Sydney receives nothing but accolades. Although others suggest that Syndey didn't act in Pran's best interests, Pran will hear nothing of it. He, unlike the naysayers, knows that they were in it together. The film reflects this - although we see Pran suffer immense physical and psychological torture, it's Sydney, helpless to aid his friend, who seems most emotionally burdened by it.

Ultimately, The Killing Fields is exactly the right kind of historical message movie. I didn't know that much about the Cambodian conflict or the horrors of the Khmer Rouge before I saw the film, and I didn't emerge from it with some sort of didactic understanding of the "issues" at hand. I emerged instead with a ground level of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge and those that opposed them. Both Dith Pran and Dr. Ngor (both of whom are no longer with us) devoted their lives to shedding light on and alleviating the suffering of the Cambodian people. The Killing Fields is a document worthy of their lives, and of their service.

*The "Ignorance Rating" is the percentage of people who voted "Yes" on the poll for this film. If ten people vote in the poll, and 5 of them have seen the movie, I give it an ignorance rating of 50. It's just a ballpark way for me to know how egregious my ignorance was in this case.

Film Ignorance #10: The Killers

Note: This post represents counterprogramming to MovieZeal's entry for Noir Month. Head on over to MovieZeal for another review of the same movie - odds are good it's by a better writer.

Film: The Killers (1946)
Rating: A Good Movie.
Director: Robert Siodmark
Stars: Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner, Edmond O'Brien
Year: 1946
Reason for Ignorance: Never heard of it
Ignorance Rating*: 33 (3 Votes)
"Don't ask a dying man to swear his soul into hell."

The Killers has a premise so strange and, frankly, so unwise that it's remarkable that a good movie emerged from it. Ernest Hemingway's 1927 short story "The Killers" covers only a couple hours and barely makes it to double digits in page count. It's a taut story of a pair of hitmen who invade a small town diner looking for an ex-boxer, a big Swede, before eventually leaving the diner to kill him in his apartment. One of the diner customers reaches him first, but the Swede is unwilling to run, electing to remain in the room and accept his punishment for past misdeeds.

I can only imagine the session that led to the creation of this movie:

Hack 1: You know that Hemingway short story, The Killers? I think it would make a good, whatchamacallit, noir movie.
The Voice of Reason (probably the uncredited John Huston): It's only 10 pages long. It couldn't be a movie.
Hack 2: Yeah, but we could, ya know, just fill in some stuff. Like adapt the story for the first 15 minutes, and the next 90 minutes could be a detective finding out why they wanted him dead in the first place, like in one a them Bogart pictures.
Reason: But the original story succeeds in large part because it leaves those events vague. It's a masterpiece of economical storytelling, of tension building, of the evoking of a moment. It's possibly the purest artistic expression of the finest living American author - possibly the finest American author who ever lived. How could we ever make a film that didn't obviously and disastrously fail to live up to the original story, while simultaneously demonstrating how far we fall from Hemingway's genius?
Hacks [in unison]: Nah, we'll figure something out.

Strangely enough, the hacks are actually right on this one. I didn't find The Killers to be a great film, and its best sequence is the opening fifteen minutes or so. That sequence depicts the events exactly as Hemingway described them, with almost every word of the original dialogue retained. But it is a good film, a solid detective film in the classic noir tradition.

The film bills Burt Lancaster (in his debut) first as the Big Swede and Ava Gardner, as the Swede's old flame, second. Burt probably has about 20 minutes of screentime; Ava 15 or so. These are weird billings. Our hero is played by Edmond O'Brien, an insurance investigator who thinks the Swede's death might have an interesting, and potentially relevant, story behind it. This hunch doesn't make too much sense, but of course it pans out, and our intrepid gumshoe turns out to have been right all along: the death of an obscure prizefighter did, in fact, have something to do with his insurance company. Go figure.

Undoubtedly, The Killers' plot, with its femme fatale, heist gone wrong, hitmen out of the past, and melodramatic love story was not terribly cliched in 1946, at least not in film. But its take on all of those familiar noir elements feels, in retrospect, like the filmmakers were going through the motions. Its best elements by far are the production values; the film uses both negative space and shadows brilliantly, with whites glowing and blacks fading into nothingness.

The Killers is a pretty good movie with a fantastic opening sequence. It's also got a great coda which deflates the movie's aspirations in a refreshing way. After the mystery is solved, the wrongdoers punished, and the insurance industry saved, O'Brien's boss congratulates him, noting that 1947's insurance premiums will go down "one tenth of a cent." When O'Brien responds that he's tired after such a hard case, the boss needles him again: "Why don’t you take a good rest? I must say you’ve earned it. This is Friday; don’t come in till Monday."

O'Brien's boss apparently didn't take his heroic and nigh-psychic solving of the case of the Big Swede too seriously. I didn't either.

*The "Ignorance Rating" is the percentage of people who voted "Yes" on the poll for this film. If ten people vote in the poll, and 5 of them have seen the movie, I give it an ignorance rating of 50. It's just a ballpark way for me to know how egregious my ignorance was in this case.

Film Ignorance Guest Blogger #4: Dr. Strangelove

If a space alien landed out of the sky and asked me to take him to my leader, one of my options would be to send him to Blog Cabins, where Fletch, the fearless leader of the Large Association of Movie Blogs, makes his online home. Well, today Fletch is stopping by Movies et al as our Film Ignorance Guest Blogger. Hope you enjoy his review.


Film: Dr. Strangelove
Rating: A Good Movie
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Stars: Peter Sellers, Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Peter Sellers
Year: 1964
Ignorance Rating: Pending


Bring on the hate mail.

Were my expectations too high? It's hard to say. Probably yes, as Dr. Strangelove is considered one of the best comedies (and films) of all time - nominated for four Oscars, firmly entrenched in the IMDb Top 25, #3 in the LAMB's rankings of the Top 10 Comedies.

And I should have loved it - Kubrick, Sellers, a great topic, black comedy - all up my alley. But...it just didn't connect for me.

Now, as you can see in the rating given above, I definitely think it's a good movie. There's brilliance aplenty, from the Presidential phone calls to the Russian Premier to Slim Pickens' wild ride to Sellers' multiple (varied) roles. The opening credits were a marvel of simplicity, and it was eye-opening to see George C. Scott in such a wild-eyed, loose role (just as it was almost as jarring to see the young James Earl Jones at all).

I just didn't laugh much - instead, I spent much of the time trying to put myself in the shoes of someone watching the film in 1964, with the Cold War a very real threat, wondering if the film was seen as taboo or "too soon" at the time of its release. It's easy to watch the film today and laugh at the things children were taught ("Hide under your desk!") in fear of a nuclear attack, but I'm left somewhat in awe that the film was received well in 1964 at all, thinking perhaps that the audacity of the film's mocking of the situation was a key ingredient to its success.

I'm sitting here trying to think of ways to delicately put this, but it's really of no use, so I'll just come out and say it: I prefer Strangelove's spiritual child to the original. That's right - if I were given the choice of watching only one of two films about mutual assured destruction between the United States and the former Soviet Republic...I'm choosing Spies Like Us every time.

BOOM!

Fletch's Film Rating:

"Darn tootin!"

The Dark Knight: Film Ignorance Guest Blogger #2: Batman Begins

I've decided to devote this entire week to The Dark Knight - that's why there was no Western Star of the Week yesterday. It's a countdown between my review and this Friday, when I'm going to see the film again, in IMAX, again.

You can imagine my joy when Dreamrot of 7 Dollar Popcorn asked if I could use a Film Ignorance entry on Batman Begins. Boy, could I ever. Here it is, kicking off A Week of the Dark Knight: Guest Film Ignorance #2, Batman Begins:

Film: Batman Begins
Rating: A Good Movie
Director: Christopher Nolan
Stars: The Best Cast Ever Assembled
Year: 2005
Ignorance Rating: 90/100 (22 Votes)

I'm not sure if you've noticed or not, but it seems like the interweb is abuzz with excitement over a recently released movie. Bloggers, movie fans, comic book aficionados and, according to at least one 7dp commenter, even grandmothers are in a tizzy over the release of The Dark Knight, aka the new Batman movie.

Conversely, here at $7 Popcorn Industries, Inc, LLC...there's been nary a word. In fact, the only mention of it here prior to today was to comment upon how indifferent I was about it! And do you know why? I'm not a big Batman fan, that's why. The Tim Burton Batman and it's sequels did very little for me. I liked the first one enough, but found the sequels to be, simply put, shitty. As a result, I never watched Batman Begins, and it's hard to get excited about a sequel to a movie you never saw.

Well, never saw until now. That's right. After 3 years, I finally watched Christopher Nolan's franchise reboot, Batman Begins. Like I said, I'm not a huge caped crusader fan. I find the concept of a man in a mask, fighting crime kind of silly. I mean, who does that?

Bruce Wayne does that. So, the question is, who does Bruce Wayne think he is?

As a young boy, he watched his parents get shot on the street. He grew up feeling guilty and angry. And, when the chance came for him to get his revenge, the opportunity was denied him. His parents' murderer was gunned down by someone else. A woman hired by Gotham's crime lord, Carmine Falcone. Falcone, to Bruce, epitomizes the seedy underbelly of Gotham City. He knows everyone's price and has paid it. No one would willingly go up against him. As Sgt. Gordon says 'there's no one to rat to', Falcone has paid them all off.

Disgusted, Wayne leaves Gotham, ending up in an Asian prison, it's here that he is given the offer to train under Ra's Al Ghul, head of the League of Shadows. Wayne is too compassionate though. And in a show of compassion, he kills a number of the league's members and burns down their base. All of this because he couldn't kill a murderer. It's complicated, but I guess it's what makes Batman a good guy.

So, Bruce returns to Gotham City and becomes Batman. Fighting crime and trying to turn the city around. In his way though are a corrupt police force, a doctor who works to instill fear in people and his former teacher. And in all of this, he must work not to lose himself.

I really hoped that I wouldn't like Batman Begins. I didn't want to like it. I wanted to hate it the way a good friend of mine does, a friend who's taste in movies I typically trust, but now I need to ask him what it was that he didn't like. Sure, the whole premise is a little goofy, but no goofier than any other comic book movie. Batman was never bitten by a radioactive spider or born with the ability to read minds. Batman's power is from training and some high tech gadgets. Batman is more human than any other super hero, really. He's more like the Punisher than Superman.

The casting was fantastic. Rutger Hauer, Morgan Freeman, Liam Neeson...all perfectly cast. Cillian Murphy didn't really work for me, and I'm not a huge Katie Holmes fan, but for the most part the casting was terrific. And, truthfully, Christopher Nolan's decision to go in a darker, more 'realistic' direction really pays off. There isn't a lot of joking around. Batman's business is dead serious. Most of the lighter moments come from Bruce Wayne, Batman doesn't have time for many silly one liners.

Is Batman Begins a great movie, destined to become a classic? No, probably not. It is, however, a good movie and a fun movie. As Batman movies go, it's one of the best. I guess this means that I am now ready to see The Dark Knight. Maybe this time I won't wait three years.

Batman Begins gets 8 million dollars worth of damage to the city to save one person's life out of 10.

Film Ignorance #4: Laura

Film: Laura
Rating: A Good Movie
Director: Otto Preminger
Stars: Gene Tierney, Clifton Webb, Vincent Price
Year: 1944
Reason for Ignorance: Never Heard of it
Ignorance Rating: 18/100

Otto Preminger was apparently a major Hollywood director at the mid-century, but I've never seen any of his films. I did know his name, however, because he directed Anatomy of a Murder, a courtroom drama starring Jimmy Stewart that I have wanted to see for a while. Now that I've seen Laura, I can't say I'm interested in finding anything else by him and watching it, besides the afore-mentioned Stewart picture.

Laura is a pretty straightforward film noir/mystery picture from this period of Hollywood: a beautiful dame is murdered and a tough-talking gumshoe has to work out the truth of the matter while receiving lies from everyone who knew her. There are two main variations her on the noir theme, neither of which serve the picture that well. First, the femme fatale, who's frequently murdered in the final scene, is murdered before the film begins. Secondly, the femme fatale in question is actually a wonderful person. This is what irked me - everyone has fallen in love with Laura: the fallen Kentucky gentleman (Price in a pre-horror role), the painter of her portrait, the urbane newspaper columnist (Clifton Webb) and, most nonsensically, Mark McPherson, the police detective. He never met her, but he fell in love with her anyway. But although she exerts this powerful spell over everyone, everyone also agrees that Laura was the kindest and gentlest woman they'd ever met. This removed the magic of the film noir for me; sure, we're frequently treated to a detective who's above suspicion, but besides that, everyone's supposed to be wading through the muck. Laura floats above it.

It would have been very hard to talk about the plot of Deliverance without mentioning the anal rape, but I was free to do so since everyone already knows about it. Since I don't think it's cultural common knowledge, I won't reveal the big twist that takes place halfway through Laura. Let's just say this: I was pretty sure who killed Laura about 15 minutes into the film, and, although the twist threw me off the scent for a while, I was back on track well before the film revealed all of its secrets. This made the final revelation of the murder un-revelatory.

The only truly positive thing I have to say about this film concerns the acting. The acting generally ranged from competent to slightly wooden, with Vincent Price's dissolute southern gentleman standing out. But Clifton Webb's columnist, Waldo Lydecker, was a revelation. I don't think I've ever seen Webb in anything before, but he's fantastic. His Lydecker is distasteful and regards everyone else with distaste. He's fantastically arrogant, following McPherson wherever he goes, questioning his methods, interrogating his witnesses, and trying to make it clear that he's the smarter and the classier of the two of them - the more worthy of Laura's posthumous love and the better able to solve her murder. His performance is the only thing about this film that is truly excellent. Otherwise, it's mostly a bit dull.

In other words, this is certainly not a bad film, but it didn't strike me as a special one. Sure, if you want your noir fix you can watch it and enjoy it, but it's not going to wow you. Before watching it, I'd recommend The Third Man, Touch of Evil, Out of the Past, The Lady from Shanghai, The Big Sleep, The Asphalt Jungle, Double Indemnity, and even Manhattan Murder Mystery, Woody Allen's charming noir homage that I only now know references Laura as well as many of those other films I mentioned. If you still want more after that, check out Laura.