The Screengrab : the movie moment

2008 in Review: Paul Clark's Favorite Movie Moments

Paul Clark — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Starting tomorrow, the writers of Screengrab will be unveiling their lists of the top 10 films of 2008. But before that begins, I’d like to post a different sort of list of highlights from the past year. For those of you who’ve only started reading recently, I used to write a bi-weekly column called “The Movie Moment,” in which I’d explore in depth some of my favorite scenes from movies both old and new. This past spring, I had to put the column on indefinite hiatus for various reasons, but I wanted to bring it back for this week only so I could celebrate some of my favorite Movie Moments of 2008. However, I had such a devil of time trying to narrow down my list that I’ve decided to simply list all of the moments that made me laugh out loud, cry like a baby, bite my nails uncontrollably, or which otherwise rocked my world this past year. This list is by no means meant to be taken as comprehensive, but merely were the moments which readily sprang to mind while I was writing the piece. So without further ado, I give you…

2008: The Year in Movie Moments:

(in no particular order)

The little boy’s confession notes- In Bruges

“No-no-no. I kill the bus driver.” - The Dark Knight

The security guard makes his rounds - Man on Wire

Sidney’s musical vows - Rachel Getting Married

The kiss that launched a thousand lens flares - Silent Light (only one of several transcendent moments in the film- the swimming-hole scene or the epic rainstorm might just as easily have qualified)

Mike’s late-night visit (or really, anytime Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried” is played) - The Strangers

Peekaboo nudity - The Romance of Astrea and Celadon

Harry unveils the machine - Burn After Reading (honestly, who could possibly enjoy THAT?)

Madame Gaudens’ confession - A Girl Cut in Two

Incident at the race track - My Winnipeg

Most hilarious random line of the year: “When it comes to women, you’re Michael Jordan. I’m… Bill Laimbeer.” - Baghead

The new army suits up for battle - Role Models

Alex takes a shower - Paranoid Park

Brandi forgets her cell phone - Stuck

Black Kold Medina puts on a show - Trouble the Water

Runaway penguin - Encounters at the End of the World

Jung-rae Kim diagrams his neuroses - Woman on the Beach

Alex’s sex surprise, both inevitable and strangely erotic - XXY

The director’s big exit - Tropic Thunder

Most unlikely tearjerking moment of the year: Fred Knittle sings “Fix You”, Young@Heart

Three-way fist fight: Seth Rogen vs. James Franco vs. Danny McBride - Pineapple Express

The Richard McGuire segment - Fear(s) of the Dark

Ninjas! - In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (yes, really)

And finally, my five favorite openings and finales of the year:

Perfect openings: “Put on Your Sunday Clothes”, WALL*E; Sunrise, Silent Light; The piano, The Silence Before Bach; The Jean-Claude Van Damme Stunt Spectacular, JCVD; The Legend of Po, Kung Fu Panda

Great final scenes (no spoilers): Synecdoche, New York, The Duchess of Langeais, Shine a Light, The Visitor, Burn After Reading

I would invite all of you to share some of your favorites in the comments section. After all, I’m surely missing at least a couple of really good ones.

The Movie Moment: The Wind Will Carry Us (1999, Abbas Kiarostami)

Paul Clark — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Ambiguity has never been a strong point of narrative cinema. For most directors, film is primarily a literal medium, with the goal of re-creating the real world while conveying all of the necessary information to the audience. But what exactly constitutes “necessary information?” The obvious answer is information that’s directly relevant to the story being told, but for most viewers it goes beyond that, encompassing stylistic considerations that are generally made so that audiences don’t feel lost from moment to moment. But is this information strictly necessary to make the film work? Some directors would say no, and foremost among these directors is the great Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami.

Throughout his career, Kiarostami has become a master of ambiguity in filmmaking, withholding supposedly important information from the audience so deftly that after a while one hardly misses it. In his 1990 film Close-Up the sound cuts out at several key points during a recorded dialogue scene, and in his Cannes prizewinner A Taste of Cherry we are never told why the protagonist wants to commit suicide. 2002’s Ten is composed entirely of dialogue scenes that take place inside a car, with the cameras bolted to the dashboard. In all of these films and more besides, Kiarostami leaves out certain story conventions one would normally expect, but at the same time he imparts everything that’s really necessary for the story. It’s a tricky feat, but Kiarostami somehow pulls it off, and his 1999 film The Wind Will Carry Us finds his style of ambiguity at its most poetic.

In the film’s centerpiece scene, Behzad (played by Behzad Dourani) pays a visit to a young woman with the goal of buying some milk from her. When Behzad arrives at the house, the woman’s mother leads him down to the basement, where he finds the woman, named Zeynab, in complete darkness. Soon, she emerges from the darkness with a gas lamp, which she holds down by her side to light the way. He follows Zeynab to the cow’s stall, where she fills his bowl with milk. Never once do we see her face. But then, do we really need to? If the film was really about her, then we would, but since this is her only scene in the film, so it’s not really necessary. In addition, I believe that by not showing Zeynab’s face, Kiarostami transforms the scene from a fairly standard dialogue into something unforgettable.

In addition, this decision makes perfect sense in terms of the story Kiarostami is telling. Behzad, a filmmaker from Tehran, is an outsider in this small town, finds that the habits and pace of big-city life that he’s grown accustomed to have no place in a rural village. The residents of the village adjusted their lives to their surroundings a long time ago, but Behzad is still an outsider, and he struggles to reconcile his lifestyle with his current circumstances. Perhaps the most famous scenes in the film involve Behzad’s highly irregular mobile phone conversations, which invariably find him asking his callers to hold the line for several minutes while he climbs into his truck and races to higher ground so he can get reception. There are other instances in which Behzad’s expectations are frustrated, and even his reason for visiting the town- to film a strange local funeral tradition- is put on hold while he waits for the woman in question to die.

Throughout the film, Behzad is contrasted with the people of the village, and so it is in his scene with Zeynab. Having already met her boyfriend, he’s eager to meet her as well- “to see what his taste is,” in Behzad’s own words. Yet although she never actually says so, Zeynab’s behavior as she gets some milk for her guest is an attempt to deny him this pleasure. As she milks the cow, the more educated Behzad recites poetry to her and repeatedly asks her her name, but she continues to resist his efforts. It’s not that she’s afraid of him, merely that she sees no reason to show herself to him, especially when he could have gotten milk from anyone in town. The scene even finds a perfect punch line when Behzad has left the house, and Zeynab peeks her head around the corner to watch him walking away.

The title The Wind Will Carry Us was taken from the final lines of a poem by the great Iranian poet Foroogh Farrokhzaad, part of which is recited by Behzad during the scene I’ve described. The poem itself is romantic, but taken both in the context of the poem and on its own, the final lines exist as a philosophy for living. Life doesn’t always run according to our personal timeline, nor is it possible for us to always know what we want to know. So sometimes we need to acknowledge this and allow the winds of life to carry us along wherever they want to take us. It’s a philosophy that Behzad would be wise to heed every once in a while, and in Kiarostami’s eyes, so would we all.

The Movie Moment: Taxi Driver (1976, Martin Scorsese)

Paul Clark — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Of all the great films I’ve written Movie Moment pieces about thusfar, Taxi Driver is almost certainly the most celebrated. In fact, it’s been a canonical classic for so long that it’s hard to imagine what it’s like to see it fresh, to say nothing of trying to describe what exactly makes it great to those who haven’t seen it. As with all the great masterpieces of cinema, there’s a temptation to shrug and say that it exists on its own terms, but that would be selling the film, and director Martin Scorsese, short. Taxi Driver is made from many of the same components as a number of films from the period, but what distinguishes it from more routine violent dramas of its time is that it’s primarily a character study. Paul Schrader's screenplay and Scorsese’s direction follows Travis Bickle (played by Robert DeNiro) almost every step of the way so that we feel like we’ve walked in his shoes.

Scorsese uses a number of techniques, both subtle and obvious, to convey this feeling. At various points in the film, we hear Travis in voiceover, reading his letters or discussing his plans with no one in particular. Scorsese also uses numerous shots taken from Travis’ point of view, as he silently stares at suspicious characters. But Scorsese finds a way to return to Travis even in the scenes that aren’t necessarily focused on him. There’s an early scene in which we meet Cybill Shepherd and Albert Brooks in a campaign headquarters. The two of them talk, joke around, and obviously enjoy each other’s company. But eventually the conversation turns, as Shepherd notices a strange man parked in a taxi outside the building. Of course, it’s Travis, who’s been watching them the entire time.

Just as interesting is the way Scorsese shoots the conversations in which Travis is actually involved. On first viewing, it appears that Scorsese uses a lot of shot-reverse shot setups to shoot these dialogue exchanges, no different than most other Hollywood movies. But look again at the way these shots are framed- while the shots of the other people talking are invariably positioned over Travis’ shoulder, the inverse is rarely true. Travis is almost never absent from the frame, and although the space he’s given by Scorsese is usually entirely his own, he also intrudes on the spaces of the other characters.

It's because of this that a late scene between the 12 ½ year-old prostitute Iris (Jodie Foster) and her pimp Sport (Harvey Keitel) comes as such a surprise. Prior to this scene, we’ve only seen Iris and Sport through Travis’ eyes, and our experience with them echoes his. We see Iris merely as a poor young girl stuck in a miserable life and yearning to be rescued, as when she runs into Travis’ cab one night and demands to be taken away. Similarly, we only see Sport as an irredeemable monster who handles her roughly and sells her underage body to the johns with a filthy salespitch.

And then the scene begins. Sport and Iris are alone in Iris’ room, shortly after Iris has had breakfast with Travis. She begins to express doubts about her life, and talks about maybe wanting to get out. Rather than flying into a rage as one might expect from a street corner pimp, Sport instead tries to comfort her. He tells her, “I don’t want you to like what you’re doing. If you like what you’re doing, you wouldn’t be my woman.” He then puts on some music and holds her close to him, softly whispering in her ear.

It’s a pretty good scene, but what really makes it work is the point where the viewer begins to wonder, “where’s Travis?” And for good reason- this is the first and last scene in the movie in which Travis is not present. So what’s going on? It’s hard to believe this is all in his imagination- Travis is the sort of person who sees himself as a white knight, and no white knight would think to imagine his target as a gentle comforter and protector of young girls.

If anything, this may be the closest the film comes to feeling objectively “real”- that is, unfiltered through Travis’ mind. In Travis’ simplistic worldview, there are women crying out for him to save them, and men who stand in his way. This exchange between Iris and Sport stands in sharp contrast to his worldview. Granted, this is probably as good as it gets between them, but their relationship isn’t nearly so simple as Travis imagines them to be. When talking to Iris over breakfast, Travis insists that Sport is a scumbag and a killer, whereas Iris seems amused when she talks about Sport, like he’s a big brother to her. But Travis refuses to believe any differently than he already does, and it’s fitting that the tender moment between the two comes to an abrupt halt when Scorsese cuts to Travis firing his gun directly toward the camera.

The climax of Taxi Driver has a sad inevitability, as Travis decides to “save” Iris by brutally killing Sport and his associates. In the middle of the carnage, all Iris can do is recoil and scream out for him to stop, but Travis can’t see the horror in her eyes, merely the mission he feels he has to carry out. How does she feel about what happens? The film never says. But I think it’s telling that once she’s been returned to her parents, it’s her father who thanks Travis for what he’s done, and not Iris herself.

Famous Last Words: Round 1, Week 10

Paul Clark — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Longtime Screengrab readers may recall that back in the day I wrote a Movie Moment column on William Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A., the source of last week's quiz. However, part of me couldn't resist using it again here, not least because that final line really is perfect. Friedkin's 1985 policier is in many ways a West Coast equivalent to his Oscar-winning The French Connection, highlighting the sunlit horizontally-sprawling landscape of Los Angeles in much the same way its prdecessor captured the feel of seventies New York. To Live and Die in L.A. is a model of brutal efficiency, up and and including that classic final line. Congrats to those who got it.

Admittedly, last week's quote was fairly easy. By contrast, this week's could prove to be a little tricky:

“Come on, you’re hanging up the parade!”
“Get rid of those things!”

Kind of an odd quote to end a movie on, wouldn't you say? Submit your guesses to famouslastwords@nerve.com. For the rules of the game, click here. And remember, all guesses must be submitted by Wednesday at 11:59 PM Eastern. Good luck!

The Movie Moment: Make Way for Tomorrow (1937, Leo McCarey)

Paul Clark — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

When most film buffs discuss Hollywood classics from the 1930s, what types of movies do they mean? Westerns come to mind, as do musicals. Comedies, certainly. Less remarked upon are the dramas from the period. Many have not aged all that well — many of the important issues of the day don't translate to our time, and the storytelling can often come off as quaint. But there were a number of truly masterful dramas made by Hollywood studios in the 1930s, and one of the greatest was Leo McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow. It's a film to treasure, and I honestly believe that if it was available on Region 1 DVD it would be considered one of the crowning classics of cinema.

In its premise alone, the film is as current now as it was then, telling the story of an elderly couple who are sent to live with their children and find that their lives don't fit with those of younger generations. To make matters worse, Barkley and Lucy Cooper (Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi) are forced to move into separate homes because none of their children has room to house them both. So while Barkley (better known as "Pa") lives with daughter Cora, Ma moves into the New York City apartment of eldest son George (Thomas Mitchell) and his wife Anita (Fay Bainter).

From the start, there are problems. Ma is treated coldly by teenage granddaughter Rhoda for moving into her bedroom. Rhoda's friends stop coming by the apartment after growing tired of Ma's stories. And George's housekeeper despairs of the longer hours she must now work because Ma prefers to stay home in the evening. All the while, George and Anita try to make it all work out, attempting to make Ma feel as comfortable as possible while trying to live their lives.

To bring in some extra money for the family, Anita teaches bridge classes in the evenings in the apartment. One night, Ma comes out of her bedroom to check out what's happening, and Anita introduces her to the class. After trying to socialize with some of the students, Ma decides to sit in her rocking chair. Unfortunately, the chair has a noticeable squeak, which is just loud enough to distract the class from their games.

From the description of the scene, one can probably imagine several ways in which it might play. It's easy to think of the same bit being played for laughs, and indeed many of director Leo McCarey's best-loved films, such as The Awful Truth and Duck Soup, are comedies. But McCarey is up to something different here. He makes the squeak just loud enough to be realistically distracting, and only keeps Bondi in the chair long enough for the scene to make its point.

Even more important, however, is how evenhanded the scene is. Most movies would concentrate solely on how Ma has intruded on the bridge class, but McCarey focuses just as much on Ma's feelings. After all, she's been enjoying quiet evenings in her rocking chair for years without any problems, and besides, would you want to be cooped up in your bedroom all night? In Make Way for Tomorrow, the new arrangement is hard on everyone, Ma most of all. At least everyone else is near the person they love most, but Ma has to make do with the occasional phone call. Little wonder that she only really enjoys herself in the film's final third, when she and her husband spend a day alone together in New York City.

A few weeks ago my grandfather passed away. As I grew up, I found I had less time to spend with him and my grandmother, and when I visited them it sometimes felt like an obligation. It wasn't as though I didn't love them, but they had their lives and I had mine, and as the years passed it felt more and more like we had little in common. I kept thinking about them when I watched Make Way for Tomorrow, not just my relationship with them when I was alive, but also my grandfather's passing and the difficulty my grandmother has had in adjusting to life without him.

There's a scene near the end of the film that takes place after Ma agrees to move into a "home for aged women," in which a mover comes to the apartment to take Ma's furniture and suitcases away. As he picks up her rocking chair, it starts squeaking again, but when he carries it out the front door, there's a bare spot where it once sat. It's the first time we've seen the apartment without the old chair, and the room looks empty without it. And I couldn't help but think that the death of my grandfather was a lot like that. Sure, our lives didn't always fit together, but my life feels much emptier without him in it.

The Movie Moment: Do the Right Thing (1989, Spike Lee)

Paul Clark — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

This afternoon, Spike Lee will be awarded the Wexner Prize by the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. The festivities include a month-long retrospective of Lee’s work, which enabled me to finally see Do the Right Thing on the big screen. I was too young to see the film in theatres on its first release, but I’ve watched it dozens of times on VHS and DVD in the intervening years. Lee's masterpiece has been one of my favorite films for a long time, but it never had nearly as much of an effect on me as it did on this most recent viewing. As much as any widescreen epic or special-effects spectacular, Do the Right Thing practically demands to be seen on the big screen.

One important element of the film that can’t be fully appreciated at home is the way Lee re-creates the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in which the film takes place. In Do the Right Thing, this isn’t simply the backdrop for the story, but a vibrant place. Lee presents a flurry of human activity, both seen and heard, and he’ll sometimes foreground characters in one scene only to put them in the background in the next. Lee’s Bed-Stuy always feels like a place where people really live. But as Samuel L. Jackson’s Mister Señor Love Daddy asks, “are we gonna live together? Together, are we gonna live?”

On the hot summer day during which most of Do the Right Thing’s action occurs, the answer to Love Daddy’s question is in doubt. With so many people living on top of each other, there’s already plenty of tension in the air. There’s friction between the African-Americans and the Puerto Ricans who live in Bed-Stuy. Nobody seems happy about gentrification, personified by the Celtics-loving Clifton (John Savage). And there’s some lingering resentment towards the local business owners, a Korean family that has recently opened a convenience store, and even Sal (Danny Aiello), who for years has run the pizzeria with his sons and employs the film’s audience surrogate Mookie (played by Lee himself) as a delivery boy.

Meanwhile, smaller bits of tension pile up on top of each other. Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito) makes a stink about the “American-Italians only” pictures on Sal’s Wall of Fame. Sal’s son Pino (John Turturro) can’t keep his racist tendencies in check, and occasionally rails against the neighborhood and its residents. Radio Raheem’s (Bill Nunn) Public Enemy-blasting boom box antagonizes many of those he meets, especially Sal. And then there’s the NYPD, who occasionally drive through, casting suspicious eyes in everyone. Lee shoots many of these moments at tilted angles to create unease in the audience, and the tilts grow ever more extreme as the film progresses. All the while, Lee is saying that these conflicts are a reality in our country, and all it takes is one small spark to make them explode, as they do in Do the Right Thing’s climactic sequence, in which Radio Raheem is killed by the cops and Sal’s store is burned to the ground.

Yet watching the film again, amid all the violence, I was drawn more than ever to its most empathetic character, an elderly seen-it-all drunk called Da Mayor, played by Ossie Davis. Da Mayor is the most ubiquitous supporting player in the film, often hovering over the action when he’s not actively taking part in it. Several times in the film, he’s disrespected by others, but he’s kind to everyone. Even as the tension at Sal’s comes to a head, Da Mayor calls for a peaceful resolution, and eventually he leads Sal and sons away from the rioting to (relative) safety.

Most moving of all are his scenes with Mother Sister, played by Ruby Dee, Davis’ real-life wife. At first, Mother Sister puts him down, proclaiming him “a drunk fool.” Their early scenes together are shot at the same severe angles as the other arguments in the film. But after Da Mayor brings Mother Sister some flowers as a peace offering, the shot composition of their scenes changes. As the sun begins to set, Mother Sister thanks him for saving a young boy, and from this scene onward, their conversations are shot with a level frame, indicating that the friction between these two has given way to a deeper understanding for each other. As if to punctuate his point, the shot of Da Mayor reacting to Mother Sister’s thanks is framed with a streetlight in the background, and as his face brightens, the light flickers on.

At the time of its release, many critics interpreted Do the Right Thing as an attempt to incite racially-motivated violence. Perhaps they were confused with the film’s final quotations, one from Dr. Martin Luther King advocating understanding, the other from Malcolm X arguing about the intelligence of violence in self-defense. But it’s clear to me that Lee sees them as two sides of the same coin: empathize if you can, fight back if you must. Now more than ever, the film plays less as a incitement to violence than to empathy, as set forth in Dr. King’s quote:

“[Violence] is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding… It destroys a community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue.”

Throughout the film, characters are so intent on shouting each other down that they won’t step back and listen, and this as much as the sweltering heat finally leads to the climactic tragedies. It’s for this reason- among many, many others- that Do the Right Thing remains the crowning work of Spike Lee’s fascinating career, and one of the greatest and most important American films ever made. And that, to once again quote Love Daddy, is the quintessential truth, Ruth.

Links to previous Movie Moment posts can be found by clicking here.

The Movie Moment: The Holy Mountain (1973, Alejandro Jodorowsky)

Paul Clark — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

People have many reasons to watch movies. For many, the reasons can be fairly basic: to laugh, to cry, to be scared, to get turned on, and to make their pulses quicken, all within a safe and socially-acceptable environment. Some viewers want to be spurred to thought, others to action. But for those who truly care about cinema, there are few moviegoing pleasures more profound than to discover images that are unique and unforgettable. Such images are the stock in trade of director Alejandro Jodorowsky.

The early seventies were a time of spiritual exploration, when many people attempted to broaden their minds through drugs, sexual experimentation, Eastern mysticism, and art. In this respect, Jodorowsky was a quintessential filmmaker of the period, not only because he dealt with all of these things, but also because he was a seeker himself. A true renaissance man, Jodorowsky has worked as a director, a composer, a philosopher, a novelist, a religious scholar, a mime, a comic book writer, and a psychotherapist. Like fellow director and seeker Werner Herzog, Jodorwsky is forever in search of new worlds to explore. But unlike Herzog, whose films have taken him all over the world, Jodorowsky’s worlds reside primarily within the mind.

The most vivid cinematic distillation of Jodorowsky’s gifts obsessions is his 1973 film The Holy Mountain. The film tells the story of an alchemist (played by Jodorowsky himself) who leads nine disciples on a spiritual journey to the legendary Holy Mountain of Lotus Island in a quest for immortality. But even if you’re not down with Jodorowsky’s spirituality, it’s still easy to appreciate the film from a purely visual standpoint, as The Holy Mountain contains some of the most wonderful and horrifying sights I’ve ever seen in a movie. A shot of Christ-like figure wailing in agony as he’s surrounded by a warehouse full of hundreds of papier-mâché Christs molded in his image. A man, shot dead, with tiny birds flying out of the bullet hole. A traveling toad and chameleon circus re-enacts the landing of the Spanish in Mexico- a creation so bizarre that I wouldn’t be surprised if Jodorowsky took it from real life.

Most magical of all is a flashback scene involving one of the disciples. In this scene, an artist called Klen takes his mistress and chauffeur to see his most treasured creation, a “love machine.” The machine is a large robotic cube with a mechanical vagina on one side, designed to be stimulated with a long metal cylinder. After the chauffeur’s half-hearted attempts fail to stimulate the machine (“frigid!” he complains), Klen’s mistress’ stimulation is far more successful. The box expands, it sways back and forth, and arm-like appendages extend from within the machine. Finally, a white goo spills from the cylinder, and shortly thereafter the machine produces a smaller machine that makes crying and cooing sounds.

Reading the above paragraph, I realize that words probably fail to do the scene justice, but if you haven’t seen the film, rest assured that it’s one of the funniest pure sight gags I’ve ever seen. Yet there’s more on Jodorowsky’s mind here than comedy. The love machine is certainly impressive, but it’s also pretty pointless. As such, the scene indicative of the sometimes counterproductive ways that people can channel their creative instincts. Yes, Klen can build a functioning “love machine” on which people can simulate stimulation, but to what end? Little wonder that, like all of the film’s seekers, Klen ends up turning his back on his life and his creations to search for spiritual fulfillment with the Alchemist, atop the Holy Mountain.

The Movie Moment: High School (1968, Frederick Wiseman)

Paul Clark — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

My father, a much more avid reader than I, once told me that “the more books you read, the more you need to read.” In my experience, that’s just as true for movie watching, and every year I find myself with more directors whose films I feel compelled to seek out. This year, one of my biggest moviegoing resolutions has been to acquaint myself with the work of Frederick Wiseman, who over the past four decades has become one of the most celebrated documentarians in film history.

Wiseman was an early proponent of a style called “direct cinema.” During the 1960s, the availability of handheld 16mm cameras and portable sound recorders afforded filmmakers to chronicle their subjects relatively unobtrusively. “Direct cinema” capitalized on this technology, and its practitioners attempted to overturn the traditional documentary style. By doing away with such artifices as narrators and talking-head interviews, directors like Wiseman, D.A. Pennebaker, and the Maysles brothers told their stories primarily through footage shot on the fly.

Wiseman’s 1968 film High School was only his second feature after 1967’s Titicut Follies, a muckraking portrait of a mental hospital. In High School, the surroundings are much more mundane, but the students are in their own ways just as institutionalized as Follies’ inmates. The world of High School is a place of learning, not just about academics but also about the traditional order of things. If Wiseman’s greatness as a filmmaker lies, to paraphrase Film Comment’s Kent Jones, in his portrayal of how institutions work rather than how they fail, then High School is as relevant today as it was forty years ago.

Consider an early scene in the Dean’s office, in which the Dean speaks with a student named Michael about an incident involving Michael and his teacher. Michael protests his assigned detention because he believes he was falsely accused of the initial infraction, plus in his words, “I don’t feel like I have to take anybody screaming at me.” But the Dean isn’t about to excuse Michael from his responsibility in the incident, for having stormed out of the classroom. According to the Dean, Michael needs to respect those in authority even when he disagrees, and to accept the detention he’s been given. “We have to establish that you can be a man and that you can take orders,” says the Dean, and Michael acquiesces, saying that he’ll take the detention, “but under protest.”

It’s scenes like this that play to the strengths of direct cinema. Rather than taking sides in the argument, Wiseman allows the scene to play out more or less in real time, with each party making his own points. A lesser film might have cut away from the scene with Michael speaking his mind, but Wiseman also shows us the Dean's side. Here’s a man who deals with disciplinary issues all day long, who’s there primarily to preserve the order in the school by upholding the authority of the teachers. It’s nothing personal- it’s just the job.

For all the talk of “objectivity” in direct cinema, the truth is that all documentaries impose to some extent their own agendas and theses on the footage they shoot. Time and again, Wiseman shows us scenes in which teachers and school administrators impart traditional notions of morality and behavior to the students: Do the work that’s assigned. No using the pay phone without a pass. Don’t have sex until you’re married. Walk tall. Type what’s on the page. Don’t jump up and down unless Simon says. As a principal tells a student, “we’re gonna do in this school what the majority wants.” Fair enough, but which majority does he mean?

The Movie Moment(s): Notable Moments of 2007, Part 2

Paul Clark — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Seth's secret shame, Superbad

2007 was a great year for dark and despairing cinema, but less so for really good comedy. But if nothing else, it can lay claim to at least one comedy sequence for the ages, even while it's so raunchy it would've made Curly Howard blush. In the scene, Seth (Jonah Hill) confesses to his best friend Evan (Michael Cera) his longstanding compulsion to draw penises. Of course, Evan has a hard time believing it (2007's funniest line in a walk: "Dicks? Like a man dick?") but the wonder of the scene is that Hill plays it completely straight. Seth is clearly ashamed of himself, angered by the trouble it's brought him, and annoyed that no one seems to understand his plight. In addition, screenwriters Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (note the first names) make the details in the scene so specific that I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't drawn from real life. Which, of course, only makes it that much funnier.

Chase in the rain, We Own the Night

A lot of people would claim that the chase sequence at the end of Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof is the year's best action scene, but I'd go to the mat instead for James Gray's We Own the Night. Tarantino's was well-choreographed and nicely sustained to be sure, but it couldn't match the pure visceral impact of Gray's. For one thing, there's real urgency in the scene- Joaquin Phoenix's Bobby has just learned that his former Russian mob associates have not only figured out where he's hiding but are planning to kill his police chief dad, and he's racing through the rain to stop this from happening. In addition, the direction is almost unbearably tense, as Gray shoots the scene entirely from inside Phoenix's car, with brutal violence glimpsed through his windshield as the wiper blades whoosh back and forth. Gray has never been known as an action director, but he shows a gift for it here, which makes me all the more grateful that he's refused to sell his talents short by making a string of mediocre thrillers. Instead, he's done his own thing so far, and although his three films haven't won him a mass audience like Tarantino, he's remained an interesting filmmaker in his own right, and We Own the Night is his best film to date.

Little Anton Ego, Ratatouille

By now most of us expect greatness from Pixar, especially when Brad Bird is directing, but like any truly great filmmaker, Bird is still capable of surprising us with his talent. Nowhere in Ratatouille is this more true than a scene near the end of the film where the dreaded food critic Anton Ego (the inimitable Peter O'Toole) drops in at Gusteau's to review the food prepared by its celebrated new chef, Remy, a rat voiced by Patton Oswalt. Counter to popular logic, Remy serves him the relatively low-class dish ratatouille, the quality of which blindsides Ego so much that he briefly flashes back to the meals of his childhood. The beauty of the moment owes largely to its brevity, as Bird executes the flashback so suddenly and in so few brush strokes that it blindsided me with its simple perfection. Rather than coming off like a cheap Freudian reading of Ego's character, this scene speaks to something more universal, and it's Ratatouille's most vivid illustration of the idea that great food truly belongs to us all.

The Movie Moment(s): Notable Moments of 2007, Part 1

Paul Clark — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Keeping with the year-end theme of looking back, I've decided to post some brief thoughts on some of my favorite movie moments from 2007. These aren't necessarily my five favorites, nor are they from my five favorite movies of the year. However, they're all treasured cinematic memories from this past year, each for its own reason. I'll be posting two today and three more tomorrow, and I encourage all of you to give a shout out to some of your favorites in the comments section.

"If You Want Me", Once

Once was one of the year's best surprises, a movie that had few of the trappings of the big-budget musical but many of that genres pleasures, plus more than a few of its own. Most critics singled out the getting-to-know-you number "Falling Slowly" as the film's best, but for me the one that really captures the charms of Once was "If You Want Me." The scene is simplicity itself- the film's female lead (played by Marketa Irglova) walking back from the corner store in her pajamas and slippers, while she tries out her freshly-penned lyrics to a backing track given her by male lead Glen Hansard. It'd be a gross oversimplification to say that Once's triumph is due primarily to what it lacks- no elaborate production numbers, no fancy orchestration, and definitely no polished direction or gorgeous cinematography. But I think it's important to remember that director Glen Hansard is the bandmate of Hansard in The Frames, and because of this he was more inclined to trust the music to bear much of the movie's emotional weight, which a more experienced director might not have done. More than any scene in recent memory, this scene boils a musical number down to a character and the song she carries inside her.

Giant tadpole gone berserk, The Host

The creature feature has fallen on hard times lately, with most multiplex audiences preferring their villains in humanoid form. Who could have predicted that the best monster movie to hit American screens in 2007 (sorry, fans of The Mist) would bypass the big chains and take up residence in the arthouse? But The Host is no genteel latte-swilling night at the movies. Director Bong Joon-ho has made a full-blooded throwback to the genre movies of yore, easily the best movie of this kind since Jaws. Few films of 2007 delivered more pure thrills than The Host, beginning in an early showstopper of a scene. With a flair for crowd-pleasing suspense equalling that of a young Spielberg, Bong masterfully shows us a day by the river gone very, very wrong. As more people realize there's something in the water, they begin to gather by the river bank. And then the creature appears in the distance, charging at the people, and all hell breaks loose. The scene is tense as all hell, and a big reason why it works so well is the way Bong shows the creature approaching. The creature itself is a marvel, less a graceful killing machine than a gigantic amphibious St. Bernard. It's an inspired creation- detailed enough to be frightening, but so lovingly rendered to be just as endearing as the classic movie monsters.

The Movie Moment: The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944, Preston Sturges)

Paul Clark — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

For years, Hollywood’s Production Code was the last word in regulating the decency of American movies. If a movie’s subject matter, content, or intent didn’t meet with the approval of the Production Code Administration (PCA), a movie had to be tinkered with until it did. It was a formidable obstacle for filmmakers, and such limits forced them to get creative. This was especially true of Code-era comedies, which often hid dicey material just well enough by playing it for laughs.

For my money, no one did it more successfully than Preston Sturges, who made a string of hilarious, outrageous comedies during the 1940s, at the height of the PCA’s power. Sturges’ best work is full of questionable material that he somehow snuck past the censors- think the Freudian snakes of The Lady Eve, or the husband plotting his wife’s murder in Unfaithfully Yours. Most outlandish of all was his 1944 farce The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, which had so much risqué material that it’s a miracle it was made at all, let alone released.

How risqué, you ask? Look no further than the film’s premise. Betty Hutton plays young Trudy Kockenlocker (Kockenlocker!), who goes out dancing with some soldiers leaving for the war, only to have no recollection of what happened the next morning. She later discovers that not only did she get married, but she can’t even remember the groom’s name, aside from it being “something like… Ratzkywatzky.” Not only that, but she’s pregnant, so she enlists her hapless admirer, Norval Jones (Eddie Bracken) to help her out of her predicament. That’s just in the first half-hour or so. After that, it’s off to the races.

If Sturges’ inversion of the Biblical Christmas story seemed objectionable, that’s nothing compared to the film’s portrayal of pregnancy, a taboo subject under the PCA. The word “pregnant” wasn’t even uttered by a Hollywood release until 1953’s The Moon Is Blue. What’s amazing is how well Sturges navigates around his restrictions while getting his points across loud and clear. In the film’s final reel, Trudy is in her final days before giving birth. Unable to show her pregnant belly, Sturges instead films her obliquely, with the camera behind her head while she sits in a chair or outside a car while she sits in the backseat. Rather than denying Trudy’s condition, the camera angles are so contrived and awkward that they become a subversive joke unto themselves.

Yet what comes through most clearly in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek is its warmth. A prevailing theme in Sturges’ films is what it means to do good, and Norval is one of his sweetest characters. He loves Trudy so much that he’ll suffer anything for her. But Trudy’s goodness is just as important. She makes some big mistakes, but she learns from them, and along with Norval’s unconditional love they make her a better person. It’s because of this that we care about these two crazy kids through all of the bizarre hairpin turns of the plot, leading up to the final miracle on Christmas Eve, the outcome of which I wouldn’t dream of spoiling for you.

Previous Movie Moment posts can be found here.

The Movie Moment: Killer of Sheep (1977, Charles Burnett)

Peter Smith — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Of all the films to be reissued in 2007, the most important was Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep. The film finally arrived in commercial theatres after thirty years, having been withheld due to music-rights issues. Killer of Sheep was made while Burnett studied at UCLA's film program, and not having the money to buy the rights to the songs, he included them anyway. With a soundtrack including Dinah Washington, Paul Robeson, and Louis Armstrong, Burnett wanted to reflect the diverse history of African-American music in the United States.

Thirty years later, it's as easy to appreciate Burnett's musical choices as it is difficult to picture the film without them, had Burnett decided to cut or change them in order to make the film releasable. One scene that's unimaginable without the music finds young Angie (played by Burnett's niece Angela) playing with her doll while Earth, Wind and Fire's "Reasons" plays on a nearby turntable. Once the song starts, Angie sings to the doll, cheating her way through most of the words. Occasionally, she comes upon a lyric she knows for certain, and once she arrives at the song's refrain, she sits up straight and smiles widely, proudly singing the "la-la-las" with the utmost confidence.

The characters in Killer of Sheep are poor, living in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, but poverty doesn't stop the children from having fun in their way. Angie sings her song while playing in a closet, but she couldn't be happier. She looks to be four or five years old, and she doesn't feel a bit self-conscious about her surroundings, or not knowing all the words to the song for that matter.

Throughout the film, Burnett juxtaposes the simple pleasures of the children's games with the harsher realities faced by their parents. In particular, Angie's father Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), the titular sheep-killer, is afflicted with a deep despair. Stan's loving wife (Kaycee Moore) tries to help but can't seem to ease his pain. At one point Stan and his wife dance to Dinah Washington's "This Bitter Earth," and Stan's solemn expression throughout this scene sharply contrasts with his daughter's wide smile when she sings, illustrating the capacity for joy that can be lost once the responsibilities of adulthood take root.

Killer of Sheep isn't about a plot so much as exploring the lives of its characters. A film like this only works if it feels perfectly natural, and Burnett gives us one scene after another that feels like it's unfolding before our eyes. At least half a dozen moments in Killer of Sheep might have provided fodder for a Movie Moment column: the shot of half a dozen kids piling out of a hole in an abandoned house, a man who smack-talks in rhyme but quickly runs out of words, Stan's wife checking her makeup in a pot lid, and so on. Killer of Sheep is a film to treasure, and its recent arrival on DVD is cause for celebration. — Paul Clark

The Movie Moment: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

Peter Smith — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

When I first saw Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg about ten years ago, I was blown away. So much about the movie transfixed me — the glorious Michel Legrand song score, the candy-colored visuals, and of course Catherine Deneuve as Genevieve, the picture-perfect embodiment of innocence, and later, of innocence lost. But one aspect of the film I wasn’t sure of was the jewelry salesman Roland Cassard, played by Marc Michel. After Genevieve’s boyfriend Guy is drafted to fight in Algeria and Genevieve discovers she’s pregnant with his child, Roland proposes marriage to her despite her pregnancy, and after some pressure from her mother she eventually accepts.

One moment involving Roland that I’ve always loved comes when he first asks Genevieve’s mother for her daughter’s hand. As Roland sings a song about his first love, Lola, who spurned him for another man, Demy cuts to a shot in which the camera dollies around a promenade with a balcony. The first time I saw The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, I assumed it was a stand-alone story, and so I interpreted this shot simply as a poetic image to accompany the story Roland tells.

I discovered my mistake a few years ago, when I first saw Demy’s debut feature Lola. Roland is the principal male character in that film, which finds him a few years younger and living in Nantes. As it turns out, the promenade we see briefly in Umbrellas was actually where Roland and Lola said their goodbyes to each other before they each left town, with the camera movement in Umbrellas tracing where they had once walked. In addition, the tune Roland sings during the scene in Umbrellas is the musical theme associated with his character in Lola.

It wasn’t until I saw Lola that I was able to make up my mind about Roland. Previously, he had always come off as something of a sadsack — not someone who willfully swoops on Genevieve at her most vulnerable, but the kind of stable gentleman who a woman in need of a husband will sometimes settle for. But after seeing Roland lose his own first love, it dawned on me that the two were better matched than I’d originally thought. I’ve seen enough of Demy’s films to recognize lost love as a prevailing motif in his work — heck, Lola turns up again in his 1969 film Model Shop — and I’ve grown to sympathize with Roland, one of Demy’s most archetypal characters.

But beyond getting more familiar with Roland as a character, I think in the years since I first saw Umbrellas, I’ve grown to appreciate the sort of man he is. In Demy’s films, life has a tendency to get in the way of the passions of the young, making them sadder but wiser. When I first saw the film, I rooted for the young lovers Genevieve and Guy, but I’ve grown to accept that life is rarely as simple as we’d hoped in our youth. The great films grow with us, and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is definitely great. — Paul Clark

The Movie Moment: Audition (1999, Takashi Miike)

Peter Smith — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 19:00:00 GMT

SPOILER WARNING: If you haven’t seen Audition, stop reading and rent it. Like, right now. We’ll still be here when it’s over.

Halloween and horror have always gone together, and it took some time to choose the scary movie to spotlight here. Should I write up an old standby, I wondered, or something more modern? But in the end, there was only one logical choice — Takashi Miike’s Audition, made in 1999 but already a horror classic. I first heard about Audition in 2001, during its American release. A certain amount of hype had risen around the film. I was skeptical — genre fans are prone to hyperbole, praising every buzzed-about title like it’s one for the ages. But in the words of Joaquin Phoenix, "the nerds were right," and Audition has become one of my Halloween traditions.

Audition starts slowly, taking its time to get to the scary stuff, as Miike takes care to establish his characters and the plot. This is the story of Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi), a middle-aged widower working in the entertainment industry. Deciding to marry again, he contrives a process to "audition" women as possible mates, masquerading as a movie casting call. Here he meets Asami (Eihi Shiina), a demure twentysomething who makes a strong impression on him. When I first saw the film, I wondered what direction the story might take. Would this become a stalker thriller? Would it turn psychological? Or was Miike going for slow-burn horror?

But all my thoughts of classifications and subgenres flew right out the window about forty-five minutes into Audition. After a promising first date, Asami disappears for a few days, and Aoyama finally calls her for another date. After Aoyama dials the phone, Miike cuts to Asami’s small, sparsely decorated flat, which appears to contain only a telephone and a large canvas duffel. She kneels silently, intently, as the telephone rings — four, six, eight times. Finally, on the tenth ring, the mysterious bag suddenly lurches and emits an unnatural roar.

"What the hell was that?!" I thought. Had I been eating popcorn, it would’ve gone flying. All of a sudden, I saw what the fuss was about, and I realized what Miike had been doing up to that point. Setting up the story and establishing the characters was about more than delaying the scares; it was softening us for the kill. And kill it did — I was hooked.

Thankfully, the rest of Audition didn’t let me down, with Miike taking the horror to even more twisted places. The only reprieve comes near the end of the film, during an already famous scene in which Asami tortures Aoyama with acupuncture needles. Suddenly, Miike cuts to the couple in bed, in a hotel room where they vacationed before everything went wrong. On that first viewing, I feared the worst — had Miike wussed out with an it-was-just-a-dream ending? But I needn’t have worried. No sooner has Asami proclaimed to Aoyama her love and devotion than the soundtrack is flooded with Asami’s chillingly girlish mid-torture taunt, "kiri-kiri-kiri-kiri…" ("deeper, deeper"). If horror is about toying with the audience, then Audition is undoubtedly a masterpiece. — Paul Clark

Older Movie Moments here.

The Movie Moment: The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974, Joseph Sargent)

Peter Smith — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 19:00:00 GMT

Over the last few weeks, we have repeatedly bemoaned the idea of remaking Joseph Sargent’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. But at a time when even the most revered genre films get remade (e.g. Halloween), why fret about this one, especially when it’s already been remade for television? It’s hard to say. Perhaps it has something to do with the stripped-down style of the film, which never calls attention to itself. Sargent, a Hollywood veteran who worked mostly in television, foregoes flash for detail, portraying the subway hijacking more or less realistically, with an invaluable assist from the New York City Transit Authority.

Then there’s the cast. Today, the only leading roles available in Hollywood for men who look like Walter Matthau, Robert Shaw, and Martin Balsam would be in lowbrow comedies with the word "grumpy" in the title. But these actors were perfectly suited to the style of the film, playing not hotshot heroes and villains, but men doing a job primarily for the money. Given the usual visual pyrotechnics of remake director Tony Scott and the leading-man appeal of his star, Denzel Washington, it appears that the only thing left over from the original film is the subway hijacking. If that’s all that’s left, you might as well be remaking Money Train.

And no matter how good the remake is, it would be hard to come up with an ending that works even half as well as the original. After his partners-in-crime have been killed, Balsam’s disgraced ex-subway engineer takes his share of the loot back to his apartment, and Matthau and his fellow transit cops set about finding him by questioning former transit employees in the area. After a few false leads, Matthau and his boss (played by Jerry Stiller) drop in on Balsam, who appears nervous as the transit cops question him. After they look around the apartment, Matthau and Stiller start to leave the apartment, on their way to interview the next possible suspect.

Then Balsam sneezes.

Earlier in the film, when the hijackers called in their demands to the Transit Authority, Balsam could be heard sneezing twice in the background, to which Matthau absentmindedly would always respond "gesundheit." Now that same sneeze, which Matthau thought almost nothing of before, gives away Balsam’s identity.

It’s also just a good bit of suspense, with Balsam (the most sympathetic of the hijackers) worrying that the transit cops will find his money hidden in his oven or see through his alibi. In addition, there’s the way the scene ends the film long before we expect it to. In most films, Matthau would question all of the suspects on his list, go back to the station and hash out his clues. Here, it’s one sneeze and it’s over.

But most of all, it’s Pelham’s final shot that makes the scene great. Who else could have sold that closeup like Matthau did?

"Gesundheit." Gotcha.

— Paul Clark

We're working on getting the old Movie Moment columns into the new Screengrab admin; for the meantime, you can find them at Paul's own site. — ed.