October 2008 Survey Results

	1	2	3	4	5	Avg
Days of Heaven	0	2	5	16	14	4.14
Blind Shaft	4	6	2	10	9	3.32
Paths of Glory	1	3	4	18	10	3.89
Cool Hand Luke	1	0	0	9	23	4.58
King of California	0	0	6	13	24	4.42

What films or series themes would you like to see for the 2009 Fall Cinema 100 series?

• Comedy
• Music films like Stop Making Sense and Monterey Pop
• Documentaries, award winners
• The rise and fall of politics
• Another Bollywood film
• Anime (something easier than Paprika like Howl's Moving Castle)
• Something upbeat!

An American in Paris

Gene Kelly is best known for taking shore leave in New York City in “On the Town” and, of course, for dancing and splashing down a street with an umbrella, occasionally twirling around a lamppost. Those are the sort of iconic images that engrave a star in our memories.

“An American in Paris” (1951) doesn’t have such big moments to capture and hold our collective imaginations. It isn’t a film of big moments. It is the type of film that gradually accumulates many little moments. It’s a film that sneaks up on you.

Time has been very kind though to this tale of Jerry Mulligan (Kelly), a struggling American painter in Paris. Jerry falls in love with the tantalizingly aloof Lise (Leslie Caron) and has to fight off rich heiress Milo (Nina Foch) who “discovers” him on a Paris street trying to sell his paintings. And complications abound as with all love triangles.

“An American in Paris” looks better each year for two reasons: it is filled with many delightful little moments that never fail to bring a smile and it understands love and heartbreak better than any other musical I’ve seen, produced in Hollywood.

The delight I find while watching classic musicals comes from the joyful and inventive ways they find to develop their characters using throwaway moments such as Henri (Georges Guétary) trying to describe Lise and finding her a collection of contradictions. Also delicious are the way Jerry walks down a Paris street, checking out his competition, and how Milo answers, “Modesty” when Jerry asks what holds up her dress.

My favorite scene though is the song and dance between Jerry and Henri professing their love for a woman while Adam Cook (Oscar Levant) dribbles coffee down his shirt, painfully aware that both men love the same woman.

More than other Kelly musicals such as the comparatively whimsical “Singin’ in the Rain,” “An American in Paris” locates heartbreak at the center of Jerry’s search for love.

The sadness of Milo’s loneliness and the desperation of Adam’s attempts to write music – not to mention Jerry and Lise’s romantic difficulties – actually find their closest counterparts with Miss Lonely-Hearts, the songwriter, and L.B. and Lisa in Hitchcock’s black comedy “Rear Window.”

The film’s only weakness is Caron, in her film debut. She lacks charisma and seems awkward, although she has no shortage of beauty. Director Vincente Minneli had a challenge, to find an actress who could also handle a very challenging dancing role – and a truly formidable dancing partner.

After watching Caron during her lovely and graceful moments by the river and during the extended ballet – one of Hollywood musical’s finest 15 minutes or so – you’ll have no doubt that Minneli made the right choice and erred on the side of dancing ability.


Cinema 100 selected “An American in Paris” along with the British musical “The Red Shoes” (showing April 16) to offer a fun comparison and contrast.

Minneli clearly had Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s masterful ballet film in mind while making “An American in Paris” three years later: Both films have a keen understanding of an artist’s world, both make stunning user of Technicolor, and both climax with justly famous extended dance sequences.

And both have an appreciation for the pain that often accompanies love. Of course, Hollywood being Hollywood, “An American in Paris” finds a happy resolution – at least for some of its characters. “The Red Shoes” – Powell and Pressburger could pass for Hitchcock’s lost brothers – finds a darker dénouement.

“An American in Paris” was made before the ratings board was established. It is appropriate viewing for all ages.

2009 Winter/Spring Series

Jan. 29 - An American in Paris - USA - 1951 - 113 min - rated approved

Feb. 5 - Happy-Go-Lucky - UK - 2008 - 118 min - rated R

Feb. 12 - Trouble the Water - USA - 2008 - 90 min - Unrated

Feb. 19 - My Winnipeg - Canada - 2007 - 80 min - rated PG in Canada

Feb. 26 - The Sea Hawk - USA - 1940 - 109 min - rated approved

Mar. 5 - The Counterfeiters - Austria - 2007 - 98 min - rated R

Mar. 12 - Taxi to the Darkside - USA - 2007 - 106 min - rated R

Mar 26 - Man on Wire - USA - 2008 - 90 min - rated PG-13

Apr. 2 - Frozen River - USA - 2008 - 97 min - rated R

Apr. 16 - The Red Shoes - UK - 1948 - 133 min - Unrated

Apr. 23 - The Snow Walker - Canada - 2003 - 103 min - rated PG

Happy-Go-Lucky

If this review ultimately turns into an advertisement for the Cinema 100 Film Society, please forgive me. It just saddened me to watch easily the best movie of the year in an empty theater. Hopefully, when you read this, the superb “Happy-Go-Lucky” is still playing at the Carmike.

The movie is the latest character-driven masterpiece by British director Mike Leigh. His work is in the “kitchen sink” genre – movies that look at day-to-day activities of the British working class. And Leigh’s methods are quite unique. He doesn’t write a script. He casts interesting actors, interesting faces. He then has them improvise and let casual things happen and natural words spill out of their mouths. When all are happy with the results, a script is transcribed.

Leigh has a great sense of dramatic and thematic necessity and constantly keeps these improvisations on track. “Happy-Go-Lucky” is tightly constructed with everything revolving around the perpetually positive Poppy (luminously played by Sally Hawkins). She makes it her mission to cheer people up and never let anyone bring her down. It is also a movie about teachers, good ones and bad ones and bad ones desperately trying to be good ones, teaching being an occupation Leigh feels requiring of a positive outlook more than any other.

The results are frequent scenes that have that truth-is-stranger-than-fiction quality usually associated with documentaries. You’ve heard the saying, “No writer could’ve come up with that.” Leigh’s movies are filled with those moments like the way a scene suddenly pauses for the characters to hold a staring contest, to see who’ll blink first. There’s a scene where Poppy and her roommate Zoe curl up together on a bed and twirl each other’s hair that’s so touching it aches.

The movie opens with Poppy riding her bike up to a bookshop and entering to browse the shelves. She cheerfully attempts to start a conversation with the taciturn clerk, finally asking him if he’s having a bad day. He replies, almost startled, “No.” She wishes him well and departs to find her bike has been stolen. But not even that can remove her smile.

The rest of the movie plays like an expanded version of that bookstore encounter as she engages in a relationship with an unpleasant driving instructor (Eddie Marsan). Their every lesson has him doing his best to tear her down while she holds tightly to her cheerful world view, and high-heeled boots. Their final lesson is simply the most painful and remarkably revealing movie scene in recent memory. It is award worthy. It is another scene that couldn’t have been written; it had to emerge from the actors in some way that’s more direct, more primal.

As I walked up to the Carmike, I saw no poster for “Happy-Go-Lucky.” The girl at the ticket window seemed surprised when I asked if it was even showing. At 1:40 – when the show was supposed to start at 1:30 – I asked an employee filling a popcorn order if the movie was ever going to start. It did soon after. Were they ashamed to be showing “Happy-Go-Lucky?”

When I noticed the movie listed in the Carmike ad, I thought “bad news for Cinema 100 and good news for Bismarck/Mandan.” While planning the upcoming series running from January 29 through April 23, “Happy-Go-Lucky” was at the top of our list. Now we’ll have to re-think a slot. It may not be “good news” for anyone though if only a handful of people see it. Over 300 lucky moviegoers would have seen it in the series – and they would’ve all left very happy.

King of California

I once had a dentist with a huge map of Santa Barbara, California on the wall. Not from the present day, but from the days of Spanish missionaries. The only evidence now of life in those days is the town’s gorgeous mission with its twin bell towers. I spent many visits under the drill day-dreaming about what used to exist in Santa Barbara where my house, my school, and the grocery store then stood.

This memory came back to me while watching King of California starring Michael Douglas as Charlie and Evan Rachel Wood as his daughter Miranda. Charlie is fresh out of a mental institution and returns home to regain his place in Miranda’s life. In his absence, she has dropped out of school and is supporting herself by working at McDonalds. She prizes her independence and sees his return as an annoyance.

And that feeling is understandable. Douglas’ Charlie is a humorously nutty man with long scraggly beard, no visible means of support, and still tenuous grasp of reality. His failure to make payments on a third mortgage – she didn’t even know he had a second – even costs her the Volvo she earned by dealing with thousands of thankless customers. She wakes up one morning to find Charlie has hawked it to finance his latest venture.

And it is that venture that caused memories to flood back to me about that fascinating map on my dentist’s wall. Charlie is obsessed with the notion that a long lost treasure, once belonging to a Spanish explorer, is buried somewhere in their suburban California neighborhood. The money from her car was necessary to purchase such essential treasure hunting items as a top-of-the-line metal detector and a stack of treasure hunting books.

Out of love for him, Miranda goes along with his quest. Together, they wander about strip malls and get ejected from private golf courses that are snooty as only California golf courses can be – trust me, I worked at one. And it is during these wacky stops along their search and the accompanying puzzled stares from onlookers – stares that bother Miranda but leave Charlie undaunted – that King of California best secures its goofy comic footing.

Things turn serious when Charlie feels he has finally, fully deciphered his treasure map and realizes that his ancient Spanish fortune lies six – or maybe seven – feet beneath the floor of Costco. They must turn their, until then, relatively harmless adventure into breaking and entering and destruction of a concrete floor, first dragging several pallets of merchandise out of the way, of course.

How it unfolds from there takes twists and turns that are sometimes expected, such as a real re-connection between father and daughter, and other times surreally unexpected, involving much daring-do, Miranda being bound with rope, and some SCUBA gear.

The movie has a wonderful sense of two time periods overlapping. It even has a nice animated sequence where one of Charlie’s aging Spanish maps comes to life and he enters it like a time-traveling cartoon explorer. It’s a perfect way of depicting his frame of mind.

Of course, all of this is really just a light-hearted and entertaining way of looking at a subject that’s not so light, a subject we’ll all have to deal with, perhaps with the help of our own daughters. As we age, it’s the recent memories that are first to go, essentially leaving us walking about in the present while living in the past.

Cool Hand Luke

My wife and I often talk about writing a book about the films you need to see to get the jokes. When I actually start work on it, the first subject will likely be Cool Hand Luke starring Paul Newman. The famous line, “What we have here is… failure to communicate,” has permeated all aspects of pop culture from the song “Civil War” by Guns ‘n’ Roses to CSI’s “what we’ve got here is… failure to coagulate” to Internet commentary on a recent vice presidential debate.

That famous line also articulates the major theme of Cool Hand Luke. Like James Dean’s rebel without a cause, Newman’s Luke is a man struggling to express himself. And he never does quite find the words, although he comes close during a moment of despair while strumming a guitar and singing, “Well, I don't care if it rains or freezes, long as I have my plastic Jesus riding on the dashboard of my car…”

Cool Hand Luke opens with Luke cutting the heads off of parking meters. He doesn’t seem to be after the measly pocket change they hold though. They just topple off their posts and clank to the sidewalk. And when the police inevitably appear, he simply welcomes them with a smile. It’s his first of many attempts to communicate. What he is trying to communicate is wisely left to our imaginations.

There is only one character in the film that succeeds in the art of communication. The bulk of the film takes place with Luke behind bars by night and on work detail by day. During one particularly hot day, the inmates are sweating and sweltering by a roadway when a very attractive blond woman emerges from her house and starts washing her car. One of the inmates complains, “Doesn’t she know she’s driving us crazy?” Luke replies, “She knows exactly what she’s doing.”

From there, Cool Hand follows Luke through three similar but escalating failures to communicate. Made in 1967, writers Donn Pearce and Frank Pierson and director Stuart Rosenberg were likely using the film and the inarticulate Luke to express the frustration felt by many after the assassination of JFK and during the Vietnam War. And Luke suffers greatly for their cause.

Luke and a big, burly leader of the inmates called Dragline have a fist fight. Luke gets in his licks, but he’s no match. Every time Dragline knocks him down and every time another inmate pleads with him to stay down, he just wordlessly gets back up and keeps swinging. He’s filled with resigned desperation as if trying to express something inexpressible.

Urgency mounts during the famous scene where Luke boasts he can eat 50 eggs, the gastronomic suffering feeling unbearable. And then the final escalation follows his repeated attempts at prison escape, and the ensuing punishments. More than anything, Luke seems like a child as he gradually presses closer and closer to his parents’ limits, as many young people in America were similarly questioning authority.

Being saddened by Newman’s recent passing, there is a montage near film’s end that had me in tears. All of the moments from the film where Luke is caught smiling – and there are many – are spliced together. It’s a beautiful series of moments. As if Newman through Luke was communicating directly to me from the beyond. It is a fitting farewell to a great American icon.

Paths of Glory

Watching a bug scamper past his last meal, a soldier laments, “Tomorrow I’ll be gone and that cockroach will have more contact with my wife and kids than I will.” Another soldier reaches over and squishes it saying, “Now you have the upper hand.” This scene neatly encapsulates the absurdity and dark humor that is Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory.

Kubrick entered new territory with Paths. He’d dealt with war before in his little seen first feature Fear and Desire and he’d already started exploring man’s dark alleys in the films noir Killer’s Kiss and The Killing. But here, he had a new challenge – working with a major star. I’ve seen Paths many times, but watching it the other day was like seeing it anew, as is always the case with Kubrick’s films. They seem to morph to match each new age.

This time, Paths felt like a game between Kubrick and Kirk Douglas just as the generals (chess masters) and colonels (knights) and soldiers (pawns) of the film are engaged in a great game of chess. (Kubrick was a chess master and used this metaphor often.) Douglas is determined to be “the movie star” and he gets his glamour shot moments and big speeches. But Kubrick effectively counters his every move. It’s as if Kubrick is saying, “It’s a dirty world, Kirk. Stop trying to redeem it.”

The story centers on a mad general who orders Douglas’s Col. Dax to lead soldiers in a suicidal attack on a German position known as the “Ant Hill.” (That’s short, of course, for “worthless objective.”) When the men fail to make it beyond the wire – their wire, not the enemy’s – the mad general ponders the scar bisecting his cheek and then orders three men to be made an example. They are to be court-martialed and executed for cowardice.

Col. Dax is appointed their council and the trial offers Douglas what would ordinarily be his star moments to shine. But he is clearly out-classed. Who are three soldiers or even a righteous colonel next to a general? And who are any of them next to the powerful and faceless people who waltz around the edges of Paths? Douglas sputters his defense while the mad general sits idly rolling his eyes and checking the time.

Paths struck me as a great first chapter in the richest vein in Kubrick’s oeuvre. During Barry Lyndon and Eyes Wide Shut, the words “all the best people” can be heard, referring to the type of people who can get away with murder. The social elite of Paths are their prototype. Barry Lyndon asks: “What is a common Irish man next to the rich and powerful?” Eyes Wide Shut repeats the class hierarchy of Paths only with hookers in place of soldiers, Doctor Bill in place of Col. Dax, the rich Mr. Ziegler in place of the general, and the masked party-goers in place of faceless, waltzing party guests.

I remember asking, “Why are so many scenes in Paths set in rooms adorned like the 18th century?” (I would later ask the same question about the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey.) And why does Paths take a time-out to show us rich people waltzing at a party? Then Barry Lyndon showed us the 18th century as a lair for “all the best people” and Eyes Wide Shut opened with all those best people dancing the waltz at a decadent party and my questions were answered.

Paths of Glory plays like Kubrick’s entire oeuvre rolled into one film. Maybe Douglas slipped one in on Kubrick though. Paths has an emotionally powerful ending unlike anything else Kubrick ever touched. You won’t soon forget it.