The Final Take with Parker Mott

4 Stars out of 4
(122 minutes)
REVIEW WRITTEN IN 2008

The Stones take a bow in Shine A Light.

Shine A Light does more than remind us how good the Rolling Stones were. It’s a film that captures every movement, highlight, reaction of a concert alas helmed by venerable director Martin Scorsese. He is not new to the musical genre. He did The Last Waltz in 1978 on The Band’s last concert ever after a 16 year journey. He also did a music video for the song “Bad” by Michael Jackson in 1995, and finally, his well-known documentary on Bob Dylan called No Direction Home: Bob Dylan. After winning his first Best Picture at the Oscars in 2006 for The Departed, Martin Scorsese still is continuing to deliver some of his greater flicks in recent times. (continue reading…)

4 Stars out of 4
(118 minutes)

Andy Kaufman (Jim Carrey): the man in front of the curtain.

“There’s no way to describe what I do. It’s just me.” – Andy Kaufman

But who is “me”? Who was Andy Kaufman? In strict terms he was an American entertainer who amused vast crowds without ever telling a joke. He was the joke. A walking act, a goofy enigma, and never wanting his crowd to easily enjoy themselves. Andy Kaufman is an ambiguous fascination. Whether you love him or not, you have to appreciate him for stripping the conventions of comedy to the point that no one knew exactly what they were laughing at – or with. (continue reading…)

4 Stars out of 4
(103 minutes)

Truman Burbank (Carrey) is a product of his surroundings in The Truman Show.

Before it was made everyone wanted to be in The Truman Show. I’m talking about Brian De Palma, Steven Spielberg, Robin Williams, and Dennis Hopper. I’m sure there are more. The Truman Show has such a value to it. A satire yes but it speaks the truth about the world of media, religion, and American culture without simply mocking it. It poses complicated questions about if it is better to live in a happy artificial world or a mean but real one. We even grow to wonder if they are precisely the same. (continue reading…)

4 Stars out of 4
(159 minutes)

Henry Gibson breaks a smile in Nashville.

“This isn’t Dallas, this is Nashville. They can’t do this to us here in Nashville! Let’s show them what we’re made of. Come on everybody, sing! Somebody, sing!”

Those words are the final cries and pleads of Robert Altman’s Nashville, a tragic musical painted in the facade of happiness. This is a musical that seems nonexistent today, where people sing in a fake cordial tone when actually exposing their inner depression. Every tune in Nashville is a soulful commentary, nowhere close to the likes of Brecht buy layered in its own gap of reality.

Director Robert Altman (Shortcuts) tells Nashville, a sad, enjoyable, long, but breathless and triumphant piece of cinema, through 40 different stories using 24 actors. His films, Nashville most notably, are known for the ensemble to create this semblance of blissful community and friendly interaction. Sometimes Altman goes so far out of his way to unite his actors, he’ll have a car pile up. Nothing like ensemble in a pile up. (continue reading…)

4 Stars out of 4
(93 minutes)

The father and son in Bicycle Thieves.

Bicycle Thieves is a simple masterpiece. To bloat it into a film of big messages, learned-transforming characters, and schematic symbolism would minimize its power. It was released in 1948, by a well-respected director, Vittorio De Sica, most notable for his Chaplinesque comedies. To see Bicycle Thieves then would be a jolting wake up call – it was for De Sica. It defines 1940s Italy as a highly populated tragedy. Sometimes all we have are our cherished possessions. Cue the bicycle.

It was written by a venerable Italian wordsmith – Cesare Zavattini – and starred an amateur – Lamberto Maggiorani, playing the hustling and bustling Ricci, working with a regular queue. This is a story about a man’s transition from loss of property to loss of awareness to loss of happiness to loss of dignity. In case you do not get it, he loses everything. It is a frightening thought for 1948, even though Europe had just been through a cataclysm that did quite just that. (continue reading…)

4 Stars out of 4
(82 minutes)

Maria Falconetti as Joan of Arc.

How old are you, Joan? asks one of the judges around the beginning of Carl T. Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. Joan, cornered in her own (transcendent) world, responds: “nineteen…I think.” Here is a stranded character, Joan of Arc, known in mythology as a hero and legend, but through the film considerably naive and possessed.

The film is a portrait of expressions, with a predominant use of closeups to emphasize Joan’s inner pathos and her arbiters are knotted in closeups bringing out their moles and warts. They curse loudly, lambaste Joan in tirades of religious rhetoric. She’s a blaspheme of God and a work of the Devil. Is she? Joan is played by Maria Falconetti, a role deemed to be the greatest female performance in all of cinema. Falconetti embodies Joan in which it is impossible for us to feel deepest sympathy for her, but Dreyer never discourages us to have a dry cry for her. Falconetti’s performance is so brilliant because she is one of few actors to convey “the passion” with a blank face. (continue reading…)

4 Stars out of 4
(115 minutes)

Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall: the classic pair.

The Big Sleep awoke at a great year for movies (The Best Years of Our Lives, It’s A Wonderful Life) – 1946. The war had ended and cinema was no longer associated as war-aspiring propaganda. Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep has no context to the war and is a series of murders and a case of blackmail with very few results. The film is so clever yet there is no payoff needed. It was one of those movies that kept you laughing even when the protagonist, Detective Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart), was staring down a gun barrel.

It was based on a 1939 novel by Raymond Chandler. I’ve read most of that book. It is a thick read, high on the mood and quick on its toes. When we think of The Big Sleep, people associate it as the film noir where little happens and nothing is resolved. Welcome to the world of Howard Hawks. This director is known for past films like Scarface and he would later direct his glorious swan song Rio Bravo. Known for his hang-around style, The Big Sleep is a murky bit of conversation. Characters trying to take control through their words and Marlowe always coming out on top. (continue reading…)

4 Stars out of 4
(122 minutes)

The hilarious trio in Some Like It Hot.

When it released in 1959, Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot did not have much going for it. Its story springs from a real-life mass murder, the script was unfinished upon shooting, it was too damn long, and men were dressing as girls. Those just weren’t the rules. Fortunately, Some Like It Hot defies generic comedy and inspired the risqué sexuality and dark humour that 1950s America would frown upon. But the film was beloved then, maybe as an anomaly, and is appreciated today as a screwball emblem.

The Galacian-American Wilder was fresh off the wild success of his adaptation of Agatha Christie’s play Witness For The Prosecution. Since he was a writer in Berlin for the tabloids, Wilder had the dexterity to embellish classic stories. It was no surprise his penmanship elevated his modestly shot films to great heights. Wilder was hailed as a writing virtuoso and his audiences and critics expected nothing less. (continue reading…)

The happily married Hepple's in Another Year. A brilliant film.

4 Stars out of 4
(129 minutes)

Another Year is about happy people, and then some sad ones. About some delightful seasons, and then some gloomier ones. Very little happens in Another Year but it conveys so much. This is a story about humans, not “characters”, with emotions that are natural not contrived to fit the story.

Another Year directly implies that there is nothing special about this moment. These characters (I’d rather say people) react and treat each other how they have their entire lives. There is a husband Tom Hepple (Jim Broadbent) and wife Gerri Hepple (Ruth Sheen) who reside in a comfy, established house with a fertile garden in the back. Tom “digs holes” for a living, and is married happily to his wife. They are fine. They have a thirty year-old son, Joe (Oliver Maltman), who is content but single. (continue reading…)

4 Stars out of 4
(77 minutes)

The Illusionist performs to his sparse crowd.

There’s something rather beautiful about The Illusionist. In its 80-minute bit of silence and tiny character grumbles, so much melancholy and humour is conveyed. It is like a ballerina dancing on a coffin. The film is narrowed to a selective audience, so it will not find its way through the mainstream crowd. But I was riveted. It shames the predictable emotions of Toy Story 3 and its overpacked story (which, of course, won the Oscar for Best Animated Film). While The Illusionist, it has the delightful subtle energy of a bunny bursting out of a magician’s hat.

So majestic is The Illusionist. Its laughs are so modestly clever you could miss them. The comedy is much to do with the characters’ enchantment and fascination with their world and ultimately their rejection of it – and themselves. In a world developing itself off the commercialism, exploitation, and subterfuge of pop culture, there is just no place for magicians anymore. This reminds me of the tragic state of cinema itself nowadays. The Illusionist, I thence found, spoke so much. (continue reading…)