Screening Log: Weekend of 20 July 2012
1. Easy Money (2010, Daniel Espinoza) Fine, I guess, although it’s one of those thrillers that seems complicated until you realize it’s actually painfully simple. Also, dumbest student ever. (“I’ll just embroil myself in the drug business so I can continue bro’ing down with rich assholes.” BAD IDEA JEANS.) Full review forthcoming. [critics screening]
2. Topaz (1969, Alfred Hitchcock) Not one of Hitch’s best, as advertised, but it reconfirms the maxim that he was incapable of making an uninteresting film. This is really more of a wack experiment, with the director not only going full-on spy intrigue — films like Torn Curtain filter the genre through his sensibility, but here he’s trying to impress his sensibility upon the genre — but trying to tell a complex, globetrotting, shapeshifting story without his usual strong lead. Frederick Stafford is a bewilderingly uninteresting performer, and that’s a problem, but he’s really more the center to a story that goes all over the place and is often fine not featuring him at all. And though it’s pretty evident that Hitch is uninterested in quite a lot of this picture, given that most of it is stiff exposition, there are still several kickass sequences during which he springs to life. The opening, the Roscoe Lee Browne stretch, the catching in Cuba of Juanita’s spies and Juanita’s [spoiler] are all worthy of the Hitch canon. It does peeter out rather unspectacularly in Paris, but I’ll still take it over Torn Curtain, Spellbound and To Catch a Thief. [DVD]
3. /Allures/ (1961, Jordan Belson) [YouTube]
4. /Enigma/ (1973, Lillian Schwartz) Above. You’re welcome. [YouTube]
5. /Breakaway/ (1966, Bruce Conner) [YouTube]
6. Hamlet (1964, Grigori Kozintsev) Grigori Kozintsev makes the best Shakespeare films. His take is maybe not the “greatest” in terms of a performance, but it is the most quote-unquote cinematic. Kozintsev shapes the material for the camera, not the other way around, yet always maintains an equilibrium of technique and content. One of the best edited adaptations, too (by Boris Pasternak!), in that it includes such usually chucked-aside elements like Fortinbras, whose presence tends to make the plot seem bigger than just an intimate tragedy. Every ‘scope B&W image is a stunner, the rustic castle sets are grimy and cavernous, the staging (e.g., Hamlet’s father conceived as stop-motion animation) playful and inventive and the production manages to out-gloom the Olivier. In general, it achieves the rare effect of making a very familiar and oft-adapted work seem fresh and new. And Kozintsev only got better when he got to tackle King Lear in 1971. [DVD]
7. Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story (2012, Jonathan Gruber & Ari Daniel Pinchot) Not much to say about this, which is a shame because I had to conjure up 350 words about it. Perfectly adequate Great Man Doc spliced with an account of Operation Entebbe (during which our subject died). Mostly Ken Burns-style (pictures + interviews + letters read aloud + sappy music), which I personally find a touch annoying, because I’m a jerk. Full review forthcoming. [screener]
