Reviews

This is my first non-Bergman Swedish movie but that's not really the point. This film has a story to tell and the Swedish context is relevant. It is the 1950s and Sweden is outgrowing its politics of eugenics and its flirtation with 'white' ideas akin to official racism in France and elsewhere in Europe and an inch from the extremes of German Nazism. Not everyone in 1950s Sweden was social democrat. There was still nostalgia for the old 'Germanic' ways.

Erik is a 16-year old boy from Stockholm brought up to grin and bear the abuse of his violent step father. At school his anger is unleashed in fights at which he's a brutal, merciless expert. He's dismissed from public school and black-listed from public education. This would be it for good, except that his mother has some wealth from her previous marriage and an inheritance she sells to finance boarding school for her son: his only chance at some form of a future.

Boarding school is a cocoon of fascist nostalgia coupled with Victorian/Edwardian notions of honours and aristocratic precedence. Discipline is administered by the senior boys who perpetrate relentless, brutal bullying on the juniors. The juniors have to be the slaves of the will of their elders. That is the rule. That is the tradition. No punishment is too unreasonable or too brutal. The only rectification will be had when the seniors graduate and replaced by the juniors who will have their turn to bully the freshmen.

What makes it especially hard for our Erik, and for us who easily empathise with this masterfully acted character is that we not only understand this boy's suffering at the hands of these bullies but we also know that he has the physical capability to beat these bullies to a pulp. They deserve to be beaten to a pulp but we all know there is no justice in this brutal regime except the grotesque fascistic tradition the school is embarrassingly proud of and that his reaction will only make matters worse, for him especially.

He therefore tries to deal with the bullying by taking a page out of Ghandi's passive resistance. That ultimately the humiliators will at some point realise that their victims have the moral right on their side and there is no need of violence to resist violence: one can and should fight back by turning the other cheek.

In this school, isolated from the political changes of Sweden that out there is outgrowing eugenics and politics of racial ranking, the laws of the land - of right of protection from abuse, of respect for privacy, of basic decency - do not seem to apply. In this school ancient, archaic notions of aristocratic 'honour' are the order of the day.

Erik fights back. And, in the school, and back home under the roof of his abusive step-father Gandhi's advice is not always enough.

A coming of age film that contrasts somewhat from the classical American formula for this genre. Though might is not always right, right may not always win unless it too resorts to violence. Erik had to. Erik could. Erik is therefore not a role model for the average 16 year old victim of bullying or at least not too much of a practical one because few can pull a punch like his.

Still, seriously worth watching.

When my parents use a metaphor for a film too old to watch, they say Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers are in it. Since I watch silent films with relish, Astaire and Rogers singing and danching cheek to cheek are positively contemporary from my point of view though there are many ways one is reminded these swingers were kicking about 15 years before my parents were born.

'Top Hat' is great fun. The two dancers defy gravity in a way that looks improbable to eyes who have seent he making of Hong King wire-fu movies. There is a grace and ease that is not of this world. The smiling and cheering of dancers who should be sweating and panting from the physical exertion is as unreal as everything else about the story that is told. But this is really happen, for a 1935 camera without cuts and edits does not lie.

Beyond the dancing there's very little to write home about. The plot is as silly as they come and probably would not pass the morning conference of script writers of a bad Argentinian soap. What's so dissonant to our post-war (post-several wars) eyes is that everyone seems so damn happy: they have so much to smile and dance and sing about. Don't these people pay bills? In reality that is what this film is meant to do: let us look into a world without worries. Those looking at it first time round in 1935 had much to worry about. They are the people of Grapes of Wrath and of Modern Times: the depressees who lost everything and could afford no luxury but the movies every week.

Musicals gave them a magical world they could escape to and if that magical world was anything like reality it would not be worth paying the ticket for.

I suppose if you wanted to tell a story where people break into song and dance every few minutes, you could not really have much to do with reality even if you wanted to.

Consider the set for what is meant to look like Venice in the second half of the film. It looks like something out of a Disney park: an American interpretation of a long-ago seen post-card retold and magnified to seem even more otherworldly in children's eyes than Venice in any case really is.

Though you'll raise your eye brows a few times at the sheer improbability of the plot turns and you won't laugh the second time the characters take a Stan Laurel double-take (today's humour is too fast to leave place for people who expect to be funny because they're slow on the uptake) you can't help smiling when they're dancing. The sheer joy of Astaire and Rogers in their art form is infectious.

Sidney Lumet is a Hollywood careerist whose imprint on his great corpus of work is so subtle as to be almost anonymous. Apart from being engrossingly valid and entertaining films it is hard to draw a thread between 12 Angry Men, Serpico, Equus, Network, Dog Day Afternoon and House of Games. This is a film maker who has that talent that eludes journalists the capacity to make his work look like it is without comment. And yet of course Sidney Lumet wants to tell us something all the time, he just wants to make sure he doesn't look like he is.

This film is uncannily prescient. Decades before Jerry Springer and the other tragic bottoms of barrels American TV managed to reach; decades before the drama of Dan Rather's retirement and the feud with CBS and the ratings shifts before and after he left; before 'reality' television became a genre, there was Network. This is hardly a satirical look at the visceral innards of TV management. This is what today's TV would probably not hesitate to pass as a re-enactment of probable fact. Those last two words are admittedly contradictory but the literary tool of the oxymoron here, I believe, is perfectly legitimate.

The story unfolds at a fourth fictitious nationwide network UBS where veteran newscaster Howard Beale competes for ratings with Walter Cronkite and the rest of the real and existing networks. The ratings keep failing and Beale is staring in the face of his retirement. His depression gives him a nervous breakdown and on live TV, a week before his last broadcast, he announces to his audience that a week later he would blow his brains out on the evening news.

There's a spine-chillingly accurate telling of this scene. While he's speaking out to his live audience, the crew inside the mixer box completely miss this outburst. They're really only interested in the running order of tapes and graphic cuts and that timing is accurate to fit in with the advert breaks of the affiliates. I've been in one of those mixing rooms a few times. That's exactly how it works.

Anyway Beale is being taken off the air but this is a time of changes in network management and the public's obvious interest in the spectacle of a rigid, cheerless newscaster they've known for 11 years parroting the news now gone completely insane on live TV is no reason to remove him for the new kids on the management. The old guard is represented by Max Schumacher who feels sympathy for Beale because he too is on the way out. UBS has been taken over by a new conglomerate and the heavy financial cost of the news-department needs now to be neutralised by the cuts and control of business-minded, ambitious and young Frank Hackett for whom 'the business of management is management' and news needs to fit under management.

Frank Hackett is the new guard. Him and Diana Christensen. Now there are two characters for the movies. From this film everyone remembers Peter Finch playing Howard Beale 'mad as hell': that over-the-top hysteria that flirts with the limits of the audiences' psychological closure. But Robert Duvall and Faye Dunaway are also 'mad as hell'. These are the workaholic, performance-obsessed yuppies we know from every office. In the three-way scene when Hackett fires Schumacher (how well William Holden aged), Hackett's madness becomes transparent. As the prize of promotion to the corporation board is within his sight nothing would stop him: not the need to shout, to bully, even to kill.

But Dunaway's Christensen is the ultimate yuppie. She is so engrossed by work that when Schumacher cannot take her obsession any more and leaves her he articulates the meaninglessness of her existence. 'There's nothing left in you that I can live with. You're one of Howard's humanoids. If I stay with you, I'll be destroyed. Like Howard Beale was destroyed. Like Laureen Hobbs was destroyed. Like everything you and the institution of television touch is destroyed. You're television incarnate, Diana: Indifferent to suffering; insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer. And the daily business of life is a corrupt comedy. You even shatter the sensations of time and space into split seconds and instant replays. You're madness, Diana. Virulent madness. And everything you touch dies with you. But not me. Not as long as I can feel pleasure, and pain... and love.' That's the thing with this film. It's not afraid of words. It confronts the banality of television with the articulation of better cinema. Admittedly this is the world before The West Wing, 24, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under et alia.

Check out Beatrice Straight's Oscar winning 5-minute performance as the scorned wife of Max Shumacher. Aided by competent writing, she brings out the complete arc of a character married for 25 years and abandoned for another woman within seconds of our first introduction: and we feel we've known her for ever.

Sidney Lumet did it again.

The most admirable thing about this Billy Wilder masterpiece is the courage it took to make this film. 1950 is exactly in the middle between the self-imposed production code and the anti-American pogroms. In that narrow window comes this scathing satire of Hollywood glam in the same year as All About Eve. Both 1950s are an indictment of the soulless packaging of the movie business. Both take the point of view of the ambitions and the frustrations of leading ladies that lived long enough to witness their fading. Both were nominated for best film. All About Eve, perhaps because it was more direct and less metaphorical about its subject manner, won the day. It is no doubt a good film but today we recognise Sunset as the superior work.

Many people play themselves in this film. Buster Keaton leads a team of vaguely recognisable 'wax works' whose wrinkling bodies are dying monuments to their glamorous silent movie pasts. C.B. de Mille plays himself as a survivor that transcended the transformation of the movie business.

But Gloria Swanson and Erich von Stroheim are also playing themselves in this roman-a-clef where all their change about this autobiographical performance is their names.

Gloria Swanson was Norma Desmond: in shared historical experience if not in personality traits. She had been a great star of the silent movies, her face known and admired world-wide. A 17 year old girl 'discovered' by Hollywood, placed on the front row of a joy ride into fame and fortune, only to be discarded when the pictures 'became too small' for her to fit in. That phrase is how she is introduced to us. William Holden's Joe Gillis vaguely recognises the dark dame in her desolate temple. 'You're Norma Desmond. You used to be big.' 'I'm still big,' comes to retort, 'it's the pictures that become small.' The butler in this palace of regret and memory is Max played by von Stroheim. Half way through the film, when in an exposition scene the history of the relationship between butler and dame becomes clearer to us, Max tells us there were three young directors in the early days of Hollywood that showed much promise: D.W. Griffith, C.B. de Mille and himself, the butler. If he said the third man was the actor who played the butler he'd have been perfectly accurate.

Have-beens are a fact of life in every industry but there is, or at least should be an inherent sadness, in the cynicms of an E! special about one-hit-wonders or what ever happened to that forgotten child-star. Gloria Swanson and Better Davies (in the other 1950 Hollywood-themed movie) are representative of what must happen all the time. That in itself is no bad news. I suppose cabin crew, athletes or whoever else relies on their appearance for their living all have the inevitably early sunset ahead of them in their minds.

What is particular about the movies is that persons - their appearance and more importantly their capacity to incarnate in their acting the emotions and ambitions of those who watch them - are packaged as a product that is valuable only while it waits for the next best thing.

That's the theme of the film. Consider now its quality. The movie uses the device of a narrator but with the knowledge, revealed very early in the film, that our narrator has died a few hours ago and he only exists because we need to be put in the picture of understanding why he is dead.

We also need to understand how he came about to meet this one particular end. He's floating, face down, in the swimming pool of a huge mansion on Sunset Boulevard. And the curiosity is awakened by the odd perspective with which we see the corpse, looking up at its face from the bottom of the pool.

This is the particularity of the cinema, which allow us to look and see from corners and angles impossible in the physical world. But cinema is the subject of this film. Consider now therefore the concluding scene as Norma walks down the staircase of what is physically her house from which she is to be taken away but in his mind is the set of C.B. de Mille's great new production starring her.

First we see the cameras. They are newsreels hungrily shooting this new juicy scandal. But Norma wants to believe they are C.B. de Mille's cameras. 'I'm ready for my close-up now Mr. de Mille.' And she looks straight in our eyes as she addresses us who are guilty of her tragic existence. It was our hunger for glamour and success that thrust upon her the role of a star. As our boredom as an audience sets in and we switch to younger stars she is left knowing nothing better but her need for attention.

It is that odd relationship between stars and audiences that Billy Wilder sets up for us in Sunset Blvd. This is not a one-way affair and when we abandon our stars, they have a right to feel betrayed. We should not be surprised that artists whose function is to magnify several times over human emotions (this is especially true of the silent pictures) deal with this betrayal with this sort of drama. Who has a better right to be a drama queen than a professional drama queen?

I enjoyed the first one. The second one was probably the best film based on a comic book character ever made. This one: I think the word is over the top. Don't get me wrong it's a fun night out but half way through the film new threads of the plot line were opening up and I was wondering how long it would take to tie up all the loose ends. I remember feeling that way three ours into Return of the King but that was after some 11 hours of film and character and story development. And to be honest Spidey is not worth the complexity.

If it wasn't because by the end of Spider-Man 2 I had come to admire this franchise so much, my rating would not be so negative. This time though I felt that the writers were too worried they would not manage to sign up the main actors to make three more films so they squeezed three major plot lines into one film. This is Spider 3-4-5 and none of them are very good.

They look fantastic though.

And no one screams like Kirsten Dunst. Even if Peter Parker's eyes may wander sometimes, his ears are hooked for good.

There was a high-brow filmic tribute in the film. The crucial turning of the story when Peter Parker realises he needs to tear himself away from the alien symbion stuck to him that is bringing out his dark side, makes him a great jazz/tango dancer and hit his girlfriend across her pretty face. He's helped by coincidence. It is fortunate that he happens to be on top of a church tower when he literally stumbles on the knowledge that the resonance of the ringing bell annoys the symbion stuck to him. The view down from the tower (and the view up from the bottom as seen by one of Spidey's many nemeses) is not too vaguely reminiscent of the church tower in Hitchcock's Hispanic church tower in Vertigo. Looks good too.

The real tribute in the film is given in the other cameo appearance: the one by Stan Lee, the creator of this most real of comic book super heroes.

Well Sam Raimi seems to have been overwhelmed by the oft repeated line: 'with great power comes great responsibility'. The end of Spider-Man 2 gave Raimi the responsibility of delivering yet again the 'best comic book movie ever made' and sadly the aim was so high overshooting was almost inevitable.

But this film is more in the Oscar Wilde line of lingo then in Shakespeare (who wasn't that brief after all).

Give Kevin Spacey a role and he gives you back a character. That's an actors job, but few do it so well. From the role of a mid-career ambitious salesman confronted by the beginner and the tired veteran, Spacey produces a wit who provokes without basking in attention.

Spacey's character is a facilitator for the other two characters in this film. In his eccentricity the plain ordinariness of a novice and a veteran is revealed for what his colleagues really are: a naive Christian fundamentalist, and an exhausted suicidal divorcee.

If you have no problem with watching a stage play on film (the real problem with this production) get ready for some good thinking about life.

I know I flatter myself instead of the film, and I honestly don't mean to, but this is one of those rare films I felt were written for me. Szabo hit me directly by telling me a story of a family of five generations of fathers and sons. The last in the line comes across a letter from his great-grandfather loaded with advice that was ignored by his father and his father yet: 'Politics is the ruin of our lives'.

A family of committed imperialists, fascists, communists and nationalists had left behind their real identity: they were Jews of Budapest who could 'breathe freely'. A secret for life for all of us. See Ralph Fiennes climb to the category of the best male living actors on screen today and tell the story of contrasting generations of Sonnenscheins/Sorses who look uncannily similar (being played by the same actor) but make different choices in pursuit of self-fulfilment.

Personally I don't believe politics to be the ruin of our lives -- or hope it isn't anyway. Perhaps I haven't learnt to 'breathe freely' yet. Still I was not offended by the film's position, on the contrary I was moved.

If you've ever thought about the excesses of the twentieth century and about the real lives of individuals who lived through them in Central Europe as they went through their own personal struggles, then this is is really your film.