Hit Me With Your Best Shot, TO CATCH A THIEF (1955)

Este post foi escrito para a série Hit Me With Your Best Shot do blogue The Film Experience de NathanielR, sendo que é aqui apresentado em inglês, ao invés do que é usual neste blogue.

To Catch a Thief is sort of the perfect summer movie. It’s a breezy trifle of a story, spiced up by some electrifying star power in the form of Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, beautifully directed by one of the great masters of mainstream Hollywood cinema and dressed by the most stylish and insanely brilliant costume designer the Golden Age of the Studio system ever produced.

Kelly, Grant, Alfred Hitchcock and Edith Head are the sort of names that, when combined, necessarily result in something insurmountably watchable. It’s true this may be one of Hitchcock’s most inconsequential and least daring pictures, but who cares when we can gaze at gorgeous movie stars sexing it up in the French Riviera under the umbrella of a silly little delight of a plot about jewel thieves?

If I could choose a transition rather than a single shot I would undoubtedly pick something from the famous firework sequence. It’s one of the silliest and steamiest scenes in all of Hitchcock’s oeuvre, a director whose work is filled to the brim of similar moments where one can practically see him spit in the faces of Hollywood’s sanitized morality by injecting as much sexual subtext as he can. Here, his cinematic innuendos reach explosive levels as he intercuts Kelly’s forceful seduction of Grant’s retired jewel thief with colorful fireworks which are presented in an increasingly abstract manner, until they resemble little more than an orgasmic and messy explosion of light and color.

At least I can point out to my runner-up shot as representative of this entire scene’s greatness. 

Runner-Up

Here, Kelly’s character is trying to appeal to the thief’s desire for jewelry and illicit adventure. It’s a moment where this glamourous figure stops being the cold image of an entitled rich woman seeking cheap thrills and actually starts to seem deranged in her plight. Wonderful, powerful, glamorous and surprisingly seductive but a bit deranged nonetheless. Reflecting this, Hitchcock covers her head in shadow, turning her into a faceless gorgeous body adorned by the luxurious trappings of a Hollywood starlet. Her necklace, made of fake stones, glitters as the focal point of the shot showing off the object what she believes to be the key to win this game of passion.

Another great reason to name that particular image as my runner-up shot is the way in which the lighting and framing highlight the mastery of the costuming. This is the second chiffon evening gown Kelly has worn in the film. The first one, a blue work of perfect cinematic couture, showed off the actress’s icy persona and was conspicuously worn without a single piece of jewelry, not even some modest diamonds or pearls adorning her ears. Now, the silhouette, material and technique are basically the same, but there’s no ice blue to distract the eye from Kelly’s figure, no spaghetti straps cutting through the line of her shoulders and delicate collarbone, and, most importantly, there’s that unescapably showy necklace. It’s such a deliberate, studied look that we can almost call it a costume inside the world and narrative of the film, but Head doesn’t get caught up in such intellectualizations. After all, her job is to create the perfect unreachable appearance of a Hollywood movie queen and she does it, creating another breathtaking pinnacle of Studio Age glamour.

Hit Me With Your Best Shot, STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS (2015)

Este post foi escrito para a série Hit Me With Your Best Shot do blogue The Film Experience de NathanielR, sendo que é aqui apresentado em inglês, ao invés do que é usual neste blogue.

This week’s Hit Me With Your Best Shot takes Star Wars: The Force Awakens as its object of study and I must confess this was an assignment I was dreading. This is a film everyone has written about in the past six months, either to praise it, analyze it, deconstruct it, and decry it as a senseless failure of cinema or a new blockbuster masterpiece. Even I have written extensively about it, with a review, several articles about its costumes and, of course, my coverage of its Oscar nominations. In summary, I do believe have nothing new to say about this particular work, and for that I beg the reader’s patience and forgiveness.

In the words of the great Meryl Streep upon being anointed a three time Oscar winner, “whatever”.

Hit Me With Your Best Shot, LA REINE MARGOT (1994)

Este post foi escrito para a série Hit Me With Your Best Shot do blogue The Film Experience de NathanielR, sendo que é aqui apresentado em inglês, ao invés do que é usual neste blogue.

Let’s talk about costume design and painting, shall we?

One of my favorite Oscar oddities is the strange propensity of the Costume branch to give out nominations to films completely off the Oscar radar. When this nomination is graced upon a foreign language film my joy is redoubled, and one of the prime examples for such an occurrence is this week’s Hit Me With Your Best Shot subject, Patrice Chéreau’s La Reine Margot, a dramatization of Alexandre Dumas’ homonymous novel about the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572, where thousands of Huguenots where murdered by Catholics in a wave of mob violence.

I mention the costumes for they were a point of confusion for me the first time I watched the film, many years ago. In that time, I already knew of the massacre and was fascinated by its historical significance, and was obviously eager to watch such a high profile film about it. I was also already greatly interested in costume design and fashion history, and, by consequence, when faced with Chéreau’s film and Moidele Bickel’s costumes I was astonished to see the complete disregard for any sort of historical reality. With its mixture of pseudo Renaissance styles plus a heavy dose of baroque-ish elements, the entire thing is closer to fantasy than period.

Costume wise, history flavored fantasy

You must understand that, when I started to get interested in such things, I was quite limited in my points of view. If a film was ostensibly about history, I expected a level of accuracy and recreation, only in a more loose and fictional narrative would I accept the stylizations that, for example, featured in the world of geniuses like Eiko Ishioka. Though I still believed in such ridiculous binary ideas of historical fidelity in costume design, I was immensely fascinated with Bickel’s work and the strange atmosphere it conjured.

As I previously mentioned, the costumes of La Reine Margot freely mix elements of both Baroque, Renaissance and even fantasy fashion, creating a strange hybrid where, curiously, simplicity and symbolic color are the main elements of visual impact. On a simplistic way, one can justify such choices by pointing out how this film is actually based in a romantic reimagining of the historical events, and it’s therefore expected that the design give it a sexy contemporary feeling. The genius in Bickel’s work though, isn’t in the way she catered her designs and, by consequence, the film’s aesthetic to modern sensibilities, but rather created something that is closer to a Baroque, Catholic Counter Reform style.

A dawn lit, cinematographic Caravaggio

To understand what I’m trying to say, think not of the opulent 17^th century churches with altars covered in elaborate golden constructions where the horror of the empty had the consequence of everything being filled with excruciating and dramatic details. Instead, try to picture the paintings of such masters as Caravaggio, Gentileschi and de la Tour, where the carnal, the violent and the shadowy darkness were presented hand-in-hand with Catholic spirituality. Images of striking lighting contrasts, where the sacred seemed to exist in constant communion with the profane, almost feeding from it to gain obscene power and influence.

A dark and ominously bloody version of the catholic imagetic of the Virgin Mary

That same relationship of sacred and profane imagery permeates through La Reine Margot and its costumes, which are, along with the cinematography and the barren set design, inexorably responsible for turning this film in what seems like a Baroque painterly nightmare. A sexy nightmare at that, for there are few period films that so efficiently inject a searing carnality into their narrative proceedings, or that so violently create visual and thematic connections between desire and death. A hedonistic procession through a palace corridor is later reinterpreted as a desperate run for survival through a building filled, not with steamy sexual activity, but huddles of naked corpses. A woman dresses in rich, but simple, bright colored clothing walks through the streets of Paris in search of a lover in one scene, while later, she follows the same path, but in her way stand not potential objects of pleasure, but the remains of monstrous carnage and her costume has changed from rich blue to a dark, sanguine red.

Such costume evolutions are central to the visual discourse of La Reine Margot, whose clothing is the epitome of such ideas I’ve expressed about viscerally and sacred beauty. Unencumbered by the limitations of historical recreation, Bickel created a wardrobe where the cotton damasks are almost constantly infused with either perspiration or blood. Through her designs you can both get the idea of a painting come to life and the sensorial reality of such a world, with its sweltering heat and uncomfortable court rituals. Just by looking at these moving tableaux you can practically smell the sweat, blood and cum.

I’m afraid I might have got a little bit lost in my argumentation, so maybe it’s time to stop with my futile explanations and just present my best shot.

Hit Me With Your Best Shot, THRONE OF BLOOD (1957)

Este post foi escrito para a série Hit Me With Your Best Shot do blogue The Film Experience de NathanielR, sendo que é aqui apresentado em inglês, ao invés do que é usual neste blogue.

I’m sorry if this post is shorter than usual but I really don’t have the time to take any more screencaps or examine the film further. I didn’t even have time to fully rewatch Throne of Blood, but, thankfully, this is one of the film’s I suggested to Nathaniel in one of the posts where our grandmaster of film blogging asked for suggestions. One of the many reasons I suggested it was the fact I already knew which shot I’d choose.

As someone with a degree in Theatre, my heart has a special place dedicated to William Shakespeare, with Macbeth in a position of utmost reverence. For its brevity, its atmospheric verse and its difficult, and often complexly confusing, characterizations, I have always loved the damned thing. One of the main focuses of my adoration is Lady Macbeth, one of the Bard’s most celebrated characters, as well as one of his most controversial ones. Many interpretations of her have been brought to both stage and screen (and perhaps other mediums), and Shakespeare’s original intentions have been endlessly scrutinized, subverted and reinterpreted in academic texts, so much so that it’s very easy to let Lady Macbeth turn into something of an abstraction. Sometimes, she’s more idea than person, more conceptual experiment than an actual human presence.

This can be both used to a film’s advantage or not. For example, Kurzel and Cotillard’s recent interpretation is one that grounds the character into a very viscerally human sense of interior desolation, while Judi Dench’s TV version is an example of someone completely dominating the Shakespearean text and managing to present her as both concept and woman. Still, having all of this into account, my favorite take on the character, and on the play as a whole, has always been and, I suspect, it will always be Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood. With that said, here’s my choice for best shot:

 

 

Best Shot

While he strips his film’s screenplay of Anglo-Saxon linguistic lyricism, Kurosawa injects into the tragedy of Macbeth an incredible sensorial expressiveness of poetic dimensions by placing it in mystic version of feudal japan. This is one of Shakespeare’s plays where the author most exacerbates and refers to the lighting conditions, the sounds of nature, or the weather that rages on the outside of the interior settings, so it makes sense that the great Japanese master would take this opportunity and run with it And run with it he did, with glorious consequences.

In this shot, Lady Asaji is seen going into the shadows, and latter returning with a vase of wine, with which she will drug the guards that stand in the way her husband’s homicidal mission. In this very moment, this master of suggestion and matrimonial puppeteering is becoming an active accomplice of the evils she’s been germinating in her husband’s mind. This is no longer a game of theoretic intentions, but one of murderous deeds, and she looks amazing while doing so, like specter of doom coming from hell itself.

 

 

Runner-up

She is the one that opens the door from which the darkness comes as you can see in the previous shot. The shadows of deadly ambition are almost magically summoned by her will, and then, after bringing them into her fold, she immerses herself in them, she glides purposefully into their dark oblivion. Almost immediately after her pale figure has been wholly consumed, she appears again. Once more she glides, elegantly positioned right at the center of the shot, for she may be bringing chaos into this world, but she does it from a standpoint of unnatural order and demonic certainty, with her eyes almost piercing the audience with their intensity directed at the camera.

Still, I would be lying if I said I only picked this shot for its visual splendor. Actually, more than the immersion and subsequent emergence from the shadows, what completely seared this moment into my mind, since the first time I watched the film many years ago, was its sound. Along the film, Lady Asaji’s presence is always announced by the sound of her many silks brushing against each other, her movements bringing with them a serene storm of subtle, but menacing little sounds. As she comes out of the darkness, the frame is filled with her whiteness once more, and with the vitality of her movement, but in Isuzu Yamada’s perfect poise and expression and in the menacing sound, such image cannot be taken as anything but an ominous nightmare coming in our direction.

I know it’s not the most complex view of this iconic character, it might actually be one of its most simplistically evil, but it sure is memorable and it has haunted me since the day I first laid eyes (and ears) on it. It might have actually been this moment that turned me into a devotee of Japanese cinema. How can I not love it then, I ask you?

Hit Me With Your Best Shot, WITNESS (1985)

Este post foi escrito para a série Hit Me With Your Best Shot do blogue The Film Experience de NathanielR, sendo que é aqui apresentado em inglês, ao invés do que é usual neste blogue.

Like Zardoz before it, Witness was a film I’d never seen before Nathaniel assigned it for an episode of Hit Me With Your Best Shot. Unlike that tortuous experience though, Peter Weir’s Witness was a film I was immensely glad I got to experience. Before I watched it last weekend, I knew very little about this movie from 1985. I knew it starred Harrison Ford as a man that was forced to hide amongst the Amish, that it was the only film for which he had been nominated for an Academy Award, and that the film had actually managed to win 2 Oscars, one of them being Best Original Screenplay. 

Despite my great enjoyment of this lean thriller, I must confess that, after I watched it twice, I was immensely baffled by that last win. I can understand some admiration for the film’s sinewy, even elegant, structure, but, aside from that, I think the screenplay is clearly Witness’s greatest problem. For one, it’s full of strangely undeveloped characterizations, which becomes especially troubling when it applies to the protagonists, not to mention an undeniable incapacity to emphatically portray anyone that’s not a white, urban male. That the film’s screenplay was originally much more focused on its female lead’s perspective seems unbelievable, for example.

The peak of the script’s fragilities is its portrayal of the Amish communities, which, both in text and execution, never seem to be anything but an exotic other, to be gawked at, in wonderment, superiority or confusion. This particular aspect isn’t the sole responsibility of the screenplay, since it wouldn’t be nearly as conspicuous were the film directed by another person, other than Peter Weir. In his hands, the Amish communities seem quite distant from any sort of understandable humanity, rather they seem to be more of a beautiful living painting, a purely aesthetic phenomenon that Weir, with the considerable help of the masterful John Seale, captures in all its visual glory.

This is where I start to have issues with my own argumentation, because, while Weir’s direction only contributes to the inherent representational problem as of the screenplay, it’s also the film’s most obvious saving grace. Simply put, independently of any ideological and conceptual fragilities, Weir is a great director of cinema, and it shows. He gives Witness an elegance that it otherwise wouldn’t possess, as well as a formal magnificence that completely took me by delighted surprise.

I was completely hypnotized by the images Weir conjured, taking full advantage of having a film mostly focused on a group of people dressed in dark, similar simple costumes, in the middle of pastoral landscapes and underlit interiors. He apparently took plenty of inspiration from Flemish and Dutch painters of the 17^th century, and that is quite obvious from the film’s first scenes, where an Amish funeral is presented as a Rembrandt come to life. And I may be overreaching and even projecting (art history student alert!), but a few of the most beautiful nocturnal scenes brought to mind some of George de la Tour’s work, and it was quite impossible not to think of Millet during the outside sequences spent tending to the fields, or building a barn.

Hit Me With Your Best Shot, ROMAN HOLIDAY (1953)

Este post foi escrito para a série Hit Me With Your Best Shot do blogue The Film Experience de NathanielR, sendo que é aqui apresentado em inglês, ao invés do que é usual neste blogue.

This double feature episode of Hit Me With Your Best Shot is meant to be, I believe, a sort of celebration of Gregory Peck, today being his centennial. I must confess I’m not a particularly ardent fan of Mr. Peck as an actor, with some special exceptions (one of which is in this double-feature). To me, he belongs with Gary Cooper in the list of Old Hollywood stars who were as astonishingly handsome as they were dull. Also like Cooper, despite his often tedious acting, Gregory Peck had an undeniable star quality that permitted him to have a strong onscreen presence, even when he seems to be impersonating a sermonizing cardboard picture.

Having already established my agnosticism regarding Gregory Peck, the actor, I must confess I was thrilled with this week’s assignment, for it gave me the opportunity to revisit one of Hollywood’s most frothy and endearingly silly fairy tales, Roman Holiday, the story of a European princess that during a visit to the Italian capital, escapes for a day of adventure in the city, accompanied by a mysterious man, Joe, that rescued her from a night slept on the streets.

While I can objectively recognize the problems of the film, with its exoticization or complete ignorance of the Italian population, its weird central romantic relationship, its clichéd story that bears no resemblance to any sort of reality any human has ever lived in, some peculiarly rough editing choices, and a sort of mindless romanticism that can be easily grating, I just love it.

To me, Roman Holiday, in all of its touristy postcard glory, is the pinnacle of Hollywood escapism in the 1950s, and I can’t help falling into its simplistic love spell every time I watch it. Despite this love, I have to point out that, regardless of his charm, Gregory Peck is not one of the main reasons I’m so helpless to the film’s romantic allure. If we’re speaking of actors, Miss Audrey Hepburn’s debut Hollywood performance, for which she won an Academy Award, is much more to blame for my love. Do I think she deserved an Oscar for what is one of the most bidimensional efforts ever rewarded with that particular Best Actress statuette? No. Do I love her in it? Yes.

Love her!

It’s, in a way, the perfect introduction for Hepburn. Princess Ann is a role that showcases her youthful, almost childish, naiveté with moments of chilly elegance, all while allowing the filmmakers to alternately use her as a mannequin for fashionable ensembles or a little burst of uncomplicated joyful energy, with almost no shadow of psychological complexity or complication. Trust me, that this is not a backhanded way of complementing her, for I dearly admire Audrey Hepburn, and not just as a movie star (I defy anyone to watch The Nun’s Story and still believe she had no acting chops).

With all of that said, let’s take look at some of my runner-up choices:

Runners-up

While it was not unheard of to shoot a big studio picture on location, William Wyler’s decision to shoot Roman Holiday in the titular city itself, was quite unusual. As a consequence of this directorial choice, the film has a unique look mixing Hollywood romanticism with a strangely authentic sense of place and time. The specific city of Rome was, at the time, the great capital of cinematic realism, with the city being the background, and almost the protagonist, of many Italian masterpieces of neorealism. To see such a place being used as a setting for one of the frothiest and most joyfully inconsequential of all Hollywood romantic stories, is decidedly weird. In many scenes, we see our protagonists walking around the city, acting out the fairy tale pageantry of Dalton Trumbo’s script, while, in the background, Rome’s life goes on, with a disquieting sense of authenticity that is in direct conflict with the escapist artifice in the narrative foreground. In these runner-up shots, that strange relationship is quite inescapable, and while I agree that this stylistic conflict doesn’t always work in benefit of the film, it’s still fascinating to observe.

Hit Me With Your Best Shot, ZARDOZ (1974)

Este post foi escrito para a série Hit Me With Your Best Shot do blogue The Film Experience de Nathaniel Rogers, sendo que é aqui apresentado em inglês, ao invés do que é usual neste blogue. 

Let me tell you something. Despite having only started participating in this series last year, I’ve been following The Film Experience’s Hit Me With Your Best Shot since its first season and I’ve mostly tried to watch all the films that were featured in it. Consequently I had to suffer through some bad ones like 1966’s Batman, Mommie Dearest, Can’t Stop the Music, Barbarella and Showgirls. None of them were as difficult to watch as the cinematic catastrophe that is John Boorman’s 1974’s attempt at making a low-budget sci-fi epic, Zardoz. Some of those previous works were intelligently subversive in their mainstream movie incompetence, while others were stupidly terrible and amazingly fun to watch. Zardoz isn’t intelligent and it certainly isn’t fun.

The film follows Z, an Exterminator in a post-apocalyptic future, whose purpose in life seems to be simply to kill everyone in sight, at the orders of a god, called Zardoz, that manifests itself in the form of a giant flying stone head. One day, he enters the monumental statue, and is transported to the Vortex, a place where life still seems to thrive, unlike the barren land he inhabits, and where the Eternals live. From then on, the film explores the way in which eternal life might perniciously affect humanity, as well as constructing around Z a somewhat classic narrative of a messianic chosen one that is there to save the human species gone astray because of their unnatural hubris. Only instead of love, Z’s gift to humanity is hatred, violence, death and sex.

Zardoz is, as many of its defender’s claim, an ambitious project full of ideas. I have to agree with this, but I must also add that ambition doesn’t necessarily imply quality, and that while it may be full of ideas, they’re often offensive and juvenile, if not downright stupid. Despite that, the main problem is the way in which it seems everyone involved in the project made it with the sincere belief that they were creating a deep, thoughtful and insightful work of art with meaning and importance. The result is a joyless mountain of suffocating pretentiousness, the likes of which are usually exclusive of Philosophy students’ drunken ramblings on their first year of college.

The tragedy of all of this is the fact that most of the people involved in Zardoz aren’t particularly untalented. After all, John Boorman is the man that directed Excalibur, Geoffrey Unsworth shot Kubrick’s 2001 and Charlotte Rampling is a goddess of screen acting, just to name a few. Consequently, despite its abject stupidity, its invariable joylessness and its soporific rhythm, Zardoz is full of surprisingly enticing images. Therefore, picking a “best shot” was much more difficult than I was originally expecting.

For a while, I was thinking of choosing a shot from one of the film’s best sequences. One of them is its ironic introduction that features two ridiculous floating heads, the immortal line “guns are good, the penis is evil” followed by a waterfall of guns being vomited out of a giant stone mouth, and Sean Connery shooting the camera, in a vain attempt to destroy the film before it can go on or to kill the audience in an act of mercy.

The second sequence that captured my attention was the film’s most widely celebrated one, where our protagonist is gifted with humanity’s knowledge and history in a psychedelic sequence that utilizes naked bodies and projections. The technique reminded me of some of James Bond’s best intros and thus transported my mind to a much happier place than Zardoz.

Thirdly, there’s the scene where Boorman decides he’s going to make an homage to Welles’ Lady from Shanghai, peppered with some hilarious visual details like Sean Connery’s red high-heeled shoes that are probably there to give us another reference to The Wizard of Oz. Sean Connery as Judy Garland mixed with Rita Hayworth, who would have thought?

Quickly I rejected the idea of picking a shot from the film’s best scenes. After all, they almost suggest a mildly amusing experience, and Zardoz is anything but. My next possible choice came in the form of the film’s most hilarious moment, where Boorman constructs an entire scene around his protagonists’ capability to have an erection, which is prompted by the cold magnificence of Rampling’s Consuela rather than an array of pornography he’s showed. There’s no other scene that better encapsulates the film’s relationship to sex. Unerotic, cold, ridiculous and terribly juvenile.

Alas, that didn’t completely satisfy my snarky intentions. So we come to my best shot and runner-up.