Time stood still (1959)

Ermanno Olmi is the director of one of my favorite movies, the gloomy coming-of-age story Il posto in which an office boy is introduced to the drudgery of work. But to me, his films seem very under-appreciated. I very rarely hear people talk about them or write about them.

That's why I haven't heard anything about one of his early films, Time stood still, a small gem of a movie about two people, a middle-aged man and a boy, who have to endure one another's company. These two guys are caretakers of an isolated working site in the Italian Alps. It's winter, and the conditions are harsh. The boy is a newcomer, replacing another guy who is having a vacatin. Time stood still explores the tension between the two using quiet humor and unhurried takes. We see them in their hut, huddling over books (the boy is trying to prepare for an exam) or preparing food. The boy marvels at the older man's habits and the simplicity of this life in the Alps. He likes to play his rock n' roll records and have a merry time. One day there is a storm, and their quiet habits are disturbed. The story could easily have become cartoonish: the boy with his youth culture and the grumpy oldtimer. But youth culture is not derided, nor is the robust ways of the mountainside romanticized. Olmi breaks down the clichés and lets us see the small nuances of human interaction. A twitch of the mouth, a displeased gesture, a rebellious swag - all of these everyday elements matter. One could say that the mastery he shows in doing this bears a similarity to a movie from a different time and place, Nuri Ceylan's Uzak. The last segment of the film shifts its tone a bit, introducing what might be called a religious dimension. These scenes take place in a church, and even the church is imbued with the same earthy qualities as the rest of the film.

Atlantic city (1980)

Atlantic city was made in 1980, just before American movies started to be more about glitz and stocks than about seedy streets and dingy bars. Louis Malle makes Atlantic city look not only seedy but also, well, human; a city full of casinos and gambling and corrupt types looks like it is inhabited by real human beings, living on real streets. We get the sense that the city is changing quickly, the old is destroyed and brutally exchanged with the new. One of the central location is a shabby apartment house, a slab of concrete about to be demolished in which human dramas play out. The film makes us care about its equally seedy characters, an elderly gangster, Lou - great, great Burt Lancaster! - and woman, Sally (Susan Sarandon), who works in an ugly-looking oyster place. Lou who used to be a gangster but is now a numbers runner - when he is not taking care of an old widow - he is bossed around, submissively doing his chores. At some point, Sally and Lou meet and some sort of friendship/romantic affair arises between them. Atlantic city is wistful film where the olden days hover as a hazy memory about crime and perhaps a bit of romance - Lou wants to revive the old times when he (supposedly) was a big and important crook. A complicating factor is  Sally's ex-husband who comes into town with his new gf, Sally's sister. He is a drug dealer and it turns out that all sorts of criminals are after him and there's hell to pay. There's a tangle of drug money, violence and erotic liasions. Malle as I said emphasizes the wistful and the decayed in what I see as a rather good movie that really makes its characters come alive - not to speak of the city itself, which is the main character. Burt Lancaster's stunning performance as the aging man who dreams of his youth is a reason alone to watch it.

Louis Malle's American production is a varied set. I liked his take on Chechov, Vanya on 42 street, but was not overwhelmed by the philosophical My dinner with Andre. Atlantic city was a surprising viewing experience for me because I had no expectations. It is by no means a great film but a small gem when it comes to the type of movies that was made in the 70's in the USA.

The Martian (2015)

I consider The Martian to be an utmost offence to humanity as a whole. The plot is so, so, so indulgent that I feel embarrassed to be an earthling. This is the deal: an astronaut called Mark, all-American guy, goes on a mannet mission to the red planet. Shit happens and the rest of the crew dies. The NASA folks back home assumes Mark is dead, too. SO: he must reach out to the home base and tell them that he is alive .... so that he can go home somehow. THEN when it finally dawns on the NASA crew that the guy is actually alive they collect a GIGANTIC mission to fetch the kid back through space to our planet. Mark himself is a master of inventiveness. He shows that all problems can be solved with a strong-willed "let's science the shit outtta this". He is the survivor-type, who doggedly goes to Work, that is, when he is not musing about Life and Science in his video diary. The Martian is of course little more than a fairy tale for adults that uses space travelling and science as ploys. The message is that you can do whatever if you just put your mind to it. So, shame on you, Ridley Scott, this film is in the worst possible league of individualist celebration of the very white, very male do-it-yourself-American. Poor Matt Damon tries to act the part, but well, I don't think anyone could save this kind of bad story.
The ONLY kind word I have to offer here is that terrible, terrible music from the 70's is used in a way that is simply brilliant and actually a bit moving at times.
Compared to The Martian, I realize why a film like Gravity shines forth as a far superior rendition of space-stuff. The latter film makes space seem, well, scary. The former film makes Mars seem as boring as a shopping mall on Friday night.

The Fisher King (1991)

I have never really fallen in love with Terry Gilliam's cinematic worlds. Even though his films in some way epitomize what "imagination" is, they have still never spoken to me as imaginative in the sense where imagination is something beyond mere playfulness. Brazil and Life of Brian are classics of course, but to me, it never caught me in the way for example Jacques Tati's movies move me. The Fisher king belongs to these imaginative and eccentric feats as well: a mundane world of stressed-out New Yorkers is intermingled with ... knights! And loonies. I can't quite make up my mind whether the film is just a plodding mish-mash of elements or whether there is a core of the film that bears an emotional resonance. The story turns on the encounter between Jeff Bridge's world-weary radio host and a homeless guy overplayed by Robin Williams. Perhaps its not so much Gilliam's eccentric leanings that disappoint me but rather Williams' terrible acting. Or a combination of eccentric stuff that just don't work and sloppy acting. Still, there are a few funny moments in here that involves drunken looting and gritty New York, so the film is not a complete disaster.

La bete humaine (1938)

The whirling and thundering train ride in the first images of Renoir's La bete humaine (based on a novel by Zola) a stunning introduction to an interesting, yet at times rather questionable, movie. These images of the speeding train are so vivid (nice tracking shots) that I am tempted to use the expression of "feeling as if you were there". The roaring sound and the almost sea-sick cinematography conveys a sense of a dangerous path. This is also what the film is about, a dangerous path. It is not strange that La bete humaine, with its doomsridden story, is considered to be a sort of noir-before-noir .

Jean Gabin plays a train engineer, Lantier. He loves his trains, he loves his work. When he meets the beautiful Severine something is awoken within him - something dangerous. It turns out that he is driven by dark impulses - rendered as veritable forces - that he cannot handle (these impulses are coupled with some shady ideas about hereditory character traits; his father was an alcoholic). Severine is married to a stationmaster. The husband is jealous because of an affair Severine is supposed to have had with her uncle many years ago. Much plotting takes place, some of it murderous. The stationmaster kills Severine's uncle and Severine tries to make Lantier kill the stationmaster.

La bete humaine chronicles a series of events where men are driven to violence against women, or driven to violence because of their jealousy. In one scene, we see the stationwagon talking to his wife about her uncle. It's a frightening scene that portays psychological violence. But La bete humaine treats its subject in an extremely problematic way. Violence is here almost an expression of a fatalist path; the violence we see is an expression of uncontrollable powers. Lantier is described as a man whose relation to women is necessarily violent. In an early scene, we see him together with a young girl. A romantic moment by the train tracks is suddenly transformed into a murder attempt - the women's scream is droned out by the sound of a roaring train. When Lantier meets Severine, we have the feeling that this will not be a cozy little affair. But strangely, Renoir still tries to infuse their relation with a bit of glossy and even melodramatic romance. The effect is very strange when this glossy romance turns into - well, something else entirely. This mix of the romantic/the foreboding is encapusated in a scene taking place in a dance hall. The music pounds, we see Lantier, increasingly strange-looking. Something weird is happening with the cinematography - the haze Lantier is in is magnificently conjured up.

La bete humaine is rewarding as a film precisely because of its strange perspective. Renoir seems to have been on a roll in his career; a year earlier he made the war movie The Grand Illusion and the year after he made the excellent The Rules of the Game.

Milk (2008)

Milk is the second part of Semih Kaplanoglu's autobiographical trilogy. The films are loosely related, and a ideosyncratic aspect of the trilogy is that the story is told backwards - the first film is about a grown man, the second about a teenager, the third about a child. The main character, Yusuf, we saw in Egg is here an aspiring poet. He lives in a small child with his mum and as he did not make it in the entrance exam for the university he has to settle for another kind of life. This is not easy. He makes a little money selling milk. He's in love with a girl who is also having an affair with another man. The film deals with the young person's ordeals in trying to get clear about the future. A political dimension of the film appears when it is evident that Yusuf is supposed to do his military service. Yusuf seems to loathe the idea of joining - this is not the life he wants. Anyway, he is not forced to go because he is an epileptic. He is a dreamer, a loner. But somehow, the film manages to dodge almost all clichés about dreamy young men - Kaplanoglu offers us a gentle, yearning perspective that perceptively captures what it is like to worry about the big choices one has to do in life. One of the central relationships here is the one between Yusuf and his mother, whom he adores - he even writes poems about her. Oedipal drama? Well, not in the way you expect it, I think. The boy is eager to be the good son, the worthy son - and seems to fear that he is failing also in this respect. The mother has met a new man, an official - this changes their relationship and we see some kind of resentment in the son. The son feels rejected, perhaps humiliated.

The visual style of Milk is stunningly beautiful, but not in an overwrought way. Kaplanoglu's film is at times so striking that it is difficult to watch. The first scene is so eerie that one is almost jumping out of one's chair - I will not say more about it here. I know nothing about rural Turkey so I cannot say anything about that, but it is the surroundings that stand out. One segment that is hard to forget is a visit that Yusuf pays at his friends job. The friend work in a mine. But also he is a poet. The two talk. It's a scene full of sadness - crushed dreams, longings, fears.

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

The Maltese Falcon is of course a classic noir film and as usual with these films, the story itself is secondary - the most important thing is how the characters view what is going on, how they perceive a very complex chain of events, how they are dragged into something, lead into something or are investing themselves. The concrete plot (based on some novel by Dashiell Hammett) is about a private detective who is immersed in the search for a statuette. A dame (Mary Astor!) with some phoney tale is, of course, the reason why he ended up in the mess. In this film, the main character is not the usual anti-hero in the sense that Humphrey Bogart's Sam Spade seems to have far more insight into what is going on compared to most of the manically driven noir types. Then again, this movie was made in 1941 and there was barely such a thing as film noir. But Spade is otherwise the sort of weary-looking guy that hundreds of noir films rely on: the tough, sometimes violent, man who talks in muscular idiom.

John Huston focuses on the cravings, the hostility and the lust - and perhaps also a sense of "honor", code of morals: a sense of what one has to do, despite one's personal feelings about it - a very interesting form of conventional morality where the question arises: what does Spade really care about? Obviously, it is not the murdered partner. The Maltese Falcon is thus a violent film, even though it does not show that much explicit violence. There is more an air of violence that never leaves. There is for example a brilliantly filmed conversation between Sam Spade and a shady crook called Gutman. The camera swirls, Gutman offers Spade a drink, they talk, Spade drinks - and passes out. There are many scenes like this, vigorosly built, where tough talk and tough dealings make one thing lead to another, double-crossings and triple-crossings.

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970)

Even though I am no connoisseur of Dario Argento's films (having seen only one or two, many years ago), I highly enjoyed the utterly stylish and stylized horror sleaze of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. The standard fare story involves a bystander in a labyrinthine quest - its unclear what this quest is, but at first he sets out to find a murderer, then he is accused of the murder himself, and then he is chased by the murderer. The images evoke a world of cat-eating weirdos, stuttering pimps and dark alleys. Cheap tricks are used to great effect. The main character, the American bystander, has the sort of innocent mania that is propulsive in this kind of context. During the first dramatic part of the film, we see him witnessing a horrifying scene in an art gallery, where a man is trying to kill a woman. The American enters the gallery by breaking the window, but is then trapped. The images immediately create a splash; colorful, kitschy and evocative. Argento knows his craft and plays on the viewer's worry about what will happen the next second. Some argue that The Bird with the Crystal Plumage hints at broader social topics and that it contains several references to patterns of social domination. I must admit I did not pay much attention to such undercurrents. I just noticed that cages were an important image (birds kept in a cage, a lunatic artist keeping cats in cages, the apartment that becomes a leathal cage), and is also mentioned in the title. The ending scene shows a boxy television and on the screen we see a cheesy studio, in which a murder is transformed into sensationalism - a sort of entertainment cage.

Color me Kubrick (2005)

A film about bad impersonaters of famous directors sounds like a lousy meta-movie. Color me Kubrick is intentionally lousy, a farcical film about a guy who says he is Stanley Kubrik, the director of 2001, A Clockwork Orange and Judgement at Nurenberg. John Malcovich is of course a good choice for this kind of role - Malkovich is good at dry, dead-serious people with blank faces. Color me Kubrick is absolutely no cinematic masterpiece, but it is quite funny to watch how the rather drab story about a guy who tries to fool people gradually turns into a carnival of, well, very, very bad acting. Malkovich's con artist is savvy and outlandish and tries to impress everyone from tough guys to big shots in the entertainment business. It is this savviness that rescues this otherwise quite, quite shaky affair.

Her (2013)

A guy in love, the classical storyline. A guy in love with a silky-voiced operative system - a not so likely plot for a romance movie. Or maybe Her is not a romance, more a leathally funny dystopia of what we might become. Spike Jonze created a beatifully crafted and restrained movie that uses its crazy but still eerily recognizable story as a leverage for social critique. But the basic level of the tensions developed is the deep loneliness felt by the shy main character, a drab newly divorced office worker, Theodore, brilliantly played by Joaquin Phoenix. His job consists in writing emails for other people who cannot express their emotions. Theodore acquires a new operative system, a kind of electronic assistant. Voice and all. The assistant develops from mecanic task manager to ... well - every description depends on Theodore's attachment. So basically this operative system bears a resemblance to Theodore's office job - a function that stands in for emotions. The world of Her revolves around attempts to make emotions calculable. Theodore's romantic "partner" is his friend who always reasserts him, boosts him, always has a soothing word. But, oh, then it's this thing about "learning" algorithms. Theodore's OS has a, erm, life of her own. Her muses on the familiar image of the expanding and dangerous machine. Instead of HAL, we have a silky-voiced OS that teams up with her ... friends. The film works because it uses its sci-fi-leanings not as a detached thought experiment but rather as an emotionally grounded investigation of loneliness and social awkwardness. Theodore's OS is the perfect image of wishful thinking - and of course it turns out that there are more to us than our simple wishes, even those wishes are not that simple. Her shows the brittle character of a world that we try to construct and manage, and it also show, to toe-curling effects, what happens when things fall apart. Some of the most memorable scenes portray Theodore's interaction with "real" people - Jonze masterfully mixes the comical with the sadness that these human encounters express. Hoyte van Hoytema's cinematography frames these moments in minimalist, almost claustrophobic settings and lets them bathe in a worrisomely clean-looking light.