With Steve Spielberg speaking to children, and inner-children, everywhere in theaters this weekend, let us look back at his earliest days, doing something just a wee bit different.
Cinematically speaking, the halcyon days of the 1970s are in many ways unrecognizable from the current decade. But disposition of the films and quality aside, one of the more tactile, tactical ways that the nuts and bolts of filmmaking was different – something almost never mentioned in the popular sphere – is that the discreet world of television cinema was, if not quite up with the big boy leagues of silver screen darlings, a rather respected, and in some cases stylistically radical, little cottage industry for aspiring craftspersons and savants alike. The progeny of the omnivorous TV-movie-of-the-week stylings of ‘60s cultural icons like Playhouse 90, this television movie industry was, well, more or less a playhouse for workaday journeymen talents to direct sharp if straightforward, crafty but not really cunning films for hire. I mean, hell, Robert Altman did it, and if he didn’t use it as a stepping stone to emerge as the greatest American director of the whole 1970s, then I don’t know what else could make the early days of TV cinema more respectable. Continue reading
Roland Emmerich is going back to the chop-shop of his past this week with an Independence Day sequel. Let us chop up his part as well with his two worst films. 
If we were being prickly, we could say that David Lynch’s debut feature Eraserhead has set the director down a 40 year path of trying, and failing, to recapture the cinematic mayhem and malfeasance of his coming out party. That’s not entirely true – Dune, The Elephant Man, and The Straight Story don’t bother as much with explicit disruption, but they are failures of ambition all the more so for that very reason, effective films though some of them may be anyway. But Lynch’s greatest works – Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive– have all been formalist fever dreams that, if expressively advancing the terror of Eraserhead’s self-censuring dreamscape, also rein the Lynchian-id beast in ever so slightly so that they are perhaps less fully capable of exploring the broken-edges of experience. Their relative – and I emphasize relative, for this is Lynch we are speaking of – formal sanity in envisioning a world bent out of shape makes them feel less honestly afflicted with the terror of the world they depict. To some extent, all of these films are commentaries (fantastic commentaries), but only Eraserhead achieves genuine embodiment. While other films strive to “mean” something about discombobulated terror, the formally spasmodic Eraserhead is discombobulated terror. 
The whole “early sound masterpiece” line, de rigueur for some when discussing The Informer, is misleading and beside the point. Bluntly, it is Ford’s visual craft that is the linchpin of The Informer, and its mise-en-scene and editing rhythms are obviously the work of a director who had been toiling away in the silent cinema nexus for years. Furthermore, they are specifically the progeny of a director who had mayhaps seen the Universal horror pictures popping up and taking the world by storm in the early ‘30s and taken to investigating their connection to the silent German masterworks of chiaroscuro and terror that American horror cinema was grafted from in the first place. The voluminous expressiveness of the human face, the foggy mist of human underbelly, the no-exits-allowed editing that sabotages the characters and encases them in the frame? All are the stomping ground of many a silent masterwork to come before, but that doesn’t make Ford’s first weltering sidewind into the big leagues any less effective as a duel between the devilish and the divine. 
Primeval as a statement of boundless agelessness rather than failure to modernize, 1933’s King Kong is not only a pugnacious B-picture but a semi-tragic story of showmanship begetting exploitation, ostracization, and essentialization, a film carnival-barked with the panache of a showman. 85 years of technological advancement have streamlined and committee-scripted and audience-tested film form to within an inch of its life. But none of it replaces the personalized terror and fabricated glee of discovery in this original motion picture, which unfolds almost in an imaginative stupor, liberated from the inhibition of pleasing the maximum number of people. Even its broken patches, it mistakes, its tentative hunger for more than it can achieve all make it feel like a wistful construct of the collective imagination and desire for adventure, a work trying to discover something new even if it can’t achieve it. That ambition, in a modern era where all films must be tested so that they don’t feel fake, reminds us of a dream or a nightmare rather than a pragmatist’s admittance of defeat by having to conform to its audiences’ conception of reality. 
Effervescent without being schizophrenic, smutty without being smug, deliciously nasty and provocative while also intimating a deceptive, lithe maturity about sex as a simple fact of existence rather than a puritanical capital-O Occurrence, Ernst Lubitsch’s Hollywood acme may be the most suave film in existence. Perilously intimating both the value of external pleasures of the world – which for Lubitsch includes the vices we imbibe in and the identities we wear – and the peril of self-satisfying excess, Trouble in Paradise is a smorgasbord of misconception and perspiration. 
Another short-time series that is more or less the utilitarian progeny of me needing to review more old films. Over the next couple of weeks, a review (or two half-reviews) for each year between 1920-1935. Because I’m me, don’t expect a chronological order. Things will be more impulsive. 
Let’s just say I think the reasoning for this one speaks for itself. 
The Black Dahlia
Warcraft
The Long Take 