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.

Hit Me With Your Best Shot, DAREDEVIL, Season 2

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. 

SPOILER WARNING: Be warned that there are many spoilers in the introduction and, obviously, each of the individual best shot texts of episodes you haven’t watched should be avoided if you wish to remain spoiler free.

Daredevil’s second season was, for a lack of a better term, overambitious.

The first season was, in many ways, an origin story, introducing us to our hero and letting us watch him deal with his past, his father’s legacy, his catholic guilt and his desire to see justice in the world, and then watch as he emerges fully formed, as the brutal and heroic Daredevil. It was both simple and curiously streamlined for a comic book narrative, bringing a certain modesty and street level drama to a genre that usually seems to be constantly enraptured in tales of cosmic battles and apocalyptic conflicts.

This second season, on the other hand, is increasingly bigger in scope, as well as much more interested in challenging its hero’s beliefs in his own legitimacy and heroism as well as the legitimacy of his violent methods. For this, the show brings in, two very different characters to act as reflections of Matt’s darker sides, Frank Castle and Elektra.

We are first introduced to Frank, and spend the first four episodes focused solely on his storyline, only to put it in the background, as Elektra’s presence dominates de following four episodes. By the ninth episode, the season has introduced a mountain of new plotlines, and the show starts to show severe marks of stress under the weight of all that information. I would even say that, despite several great episodes, by the end of the season, the entirety of it seems strangely overstuffed with plotlines it really didn’t know how to fully explore. It’s not that any of them are particularly bad, but the fact is that putting them all together in this single season of television was a catastrophic idea.

This is never more evident than in the last three episodes where the entire show seems to go off the rails, while the showrunners desperately attempt to force some sort of conclusion upon the season’s numerous narrative threads. Also, despite my praise of the show’s willingness to actively question its central character's beliefs regarding his morality, heroism and use of violence as a tool of justice, by the last episode the showrunners seem to have forgotten the thematic backbone of most of the season they have conceived until then.

While this season is infinitely more ambitious, both structurally, narratively and thematically than season 1, it also is incredibly less elegant and streamlined. The visuals, which are the main focus of this article, are still of amazing quality, but I couldn’t write this article without mentioning the way in which this season was, in many ways, a great disappointment to me.

Anyway, I propose we forget those narrative fragilities and examine each of my best shots for each separate episode. By the way. If you’re more interested in knowing which shot is the one I would consider the best of the entire season, that’s the one from episode 9, while the runner-up is the best shot from episode 5.

Hit Me With Your Best Shot: ATONEMENT (2007)

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. 

First of all, I’d like to apologize for the length of the text, but Atonement is a film that means a lot to me (as any Portuguese readers can attest in my review) and I couldn’t pass the chance to talk about my appreciation of it, and especially my love for the shot I picked, the film’s ending and one of my favourite actresses. Before all that though, here are 10 runner-up shots in chronological order:

As you can see, Atonement is a gorgeous film, beautifully shot by Seamus McGarvey under the direction of Joe Wright and designed by Sarah Greenwood and Jacqueline Durran, whose sets and costumes are an essential part of the film’s overall success. I have to confess that despite their brilliance, I chose a shot that features neither sets nor costumes. I know this may be considered an obvious choice for best shot but here it is:

My Best Shot

I understand many fans of Ian McEwan’s novel truly despise the ending conceived by Tom Stoppard and Joe Wright, which allows Briony to publically confess the crimes that have consumed her life, while in the novel such unwavering and unexpressed guilt follows her unto her grave, with the book, posthumously published, acting as her titular act of atonement. While it’s true that the film drastically changes this finale, by ending on an interview where Briony explains her intentions with the publication of her, Cicely and Robert’s story, and confesses both to the world and to the audience the way in which she destroyed their lives through lying, I would like to believe that such changes don’t perniciously affect the film or make it a less complex work, rather the contrary.

You see, to me, Atonement is not a film about a love story, and not even about guilt, but rather a film about storytelling itself, its powers, and the personal tragedy of this particular author. That’s why I’m never bothered by the extremely self-conscious construction of so much of the film’s mise-en-scéne, since that same construction is part of the film’s thematic centre. The finale exacerbates this but also becomes, in its own special way, a celebration of happy endings as a narrative mechanism. Is it wrong to show kindness and forgiveness to one’s own fictitious characters? I find it’s precisely in that artificial construction and falseness of the final narrative coup that Atonement finds its most transcendent and human dimensions.

Considering such a heartfelt defence of happy endings it seems fitting that the film’s authors decided themselves to show generous empathy and forgiveness towards their protagonist, a fellow storyteller, allowing her to find some solace in life. And it isn’t as if this conclusion to Bryony’s story is of particular joyfulness and absolute catharsis, after all she’s slowly succumbing to dementia and it’s quite clear that she has spent her entire life under the strenuous and crushing burden of her guilt.

I’ve talked about the ending of the film’s narrative, but I’ve not even mentioned anything about my specific pick for best shot, that gorgeous close-up of Vanessa Redgrave’s face.

Speaking less about narrative and more about form, I do believe this is one of Atonement’s most beautiful visuals. It’s true that the film is filled with gorgeous images, like those countless shots of a summer afternoon where the bodies seem to irradiate heat, those almost operatic landscapes of wartime devastation, or the severe and purposeful shots of Briony swiftly moving through white hospital corridors. Nonetheless, it’s difficult to deny the power of the human face as an image. My favourite director, Ingmar Bergman, for example, built great part of his style on that very same understanding of the visual power of a human face, shot in close-up and confronting the audience with its humanity.

Speaking of Bergman, this shot reminds me a great deal of the final image of Harriet Andersson in Summer with Monika, one of the best films of the Swedish master’s early work. Like in the 1953 film, the audience is confronted by the direct look of the film’s protagonist as the space around her disappears into shadows, leaving the public with no escape but to confront those piercing eyes. Despite this visual similarity, the effect of both shots is quite different, mostly due to the work of its actresses. While Andersson turns that look into something like a defiant confrontation of her audience, Redgrave is doing something much more akin to a tender plea for empathy, understanding and mercy. In Briony’s eyes we don’t see defiance, but a need for forgiveness, for some sort of absolution before her sickness drowns her in the waters of oblivion. There’s something seismic about the simplicity of such an image, something powerful that transcends the film’s artificial construction, justifying it at the same time it explodes the entire edifice of the narrative with a moment of searing painful humanity.

Hit Me With Your Best Shot: GHOST BUSTERS (1984)

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. 

Despite its place on the pantheon of contemporary pop culture, I confess I never responded to 1984’s Ghost Busters with the kind of adoration so many seem to feel for this particular movie. I certainly enjoyed it, but I never really loved it, not even when I was a child.

Part of this Ghost Busters’ agnosticism comes from the peculiar fact that, even though I’ve watched the film several times, I can hardly ever remember any image from it. The only visuals that have had any sort of staying power have been some of the ghostly apparitions, conjured by a marvellous achievement of Oscar nominated Special Effects, and, of course, the glittery glamour of Sigourney Weaver’s possessed self in the second half of the narrative.

Perhaps this had less to do with the film’s considerable formal modesty and more with my usual lack of focus on its more cinematic aspects. For this time around, I actually watched it through the prism of my search for a best shot and I was delightfully surprised by the film’s subtle accomplishments in the imagery department, not counting with the supernatural elements which I’ve always admired (with one glaring exception, but let’s try to stay positive).

It’s fair to say that Ivan Reitman is certainly not the reason for this newfound appreciation. While his ability to mix wildly different moods and tones, from family friendly horror to black humour, to a relaxed buddy comedy, is admirable, his formal sophistication is severely lacking. The compositions of the shots being of particular note with its uninspiring prosaicness. No, the people responsible for the relative visual panache of the movie are these two talented gentlemen:

As I said before, the management of wildly different tones is Reitman’s greatest achievement in the director’s chair but this directorial feat owes much to the fabulous work of Laszlo Kovacs and John De Cuir.

With the exception of the building that turns into a gateway to another dimension by the film’s third act, the spaces of Ghost Busters are realized with a wonderful eye for detail and subtle opulence, with innocuous objects and architectural lines filling the frame with a visual richness that give the world of the film a strange but pleasing dramatic realism. With a filmography filled with lavish period pieces that garnered three Oscars, it’s no surprise that De Cuir’s work would be admirable (this was his last film, by the way).

The sets’ visual power is only exacerbated by the beautiful lighting, creating an elegant look for the film. This formidable symbiotic relationship allows for a certain cinematic elegance, conjuring sequences like the opening of the film where the camera glides through the shelves of a library in such a way that it’s difficult to think we’re watching a comedy and not a horror film.

Or the entire scene inside Dana Barrett’s apartment where we see her arriving at a shadowy home, only illuminated by the ever-present lights of the city at night. The darkness is suddenly substituted by light that reveals the set’s comfortable atmosphere. Then, when she starts a phone call, the camera circles her, with a light coming from the kitchen becoming increasingly threatening, until all hell breaks loose and she is careened into a blinding light, ready to be possessed by an ancient entity.

And so, despite my best efforts, we return to Sigourney’s enchanting presence. It’s useless to try to deny my love for her and it’s inescapable that my best shot features her in sexy demon mode. Without further ado, here’s my best shot:

Best Shot

To me, here’s a shot that unites everything I most appreciate in the film. Kovacs beautiful lighting that suggests both a noir and a horror piece, and highlights Bill Murray’s facial expressions (the greatest comedic asset of the film). The set design is brilliantly featured with that strange little head (is that a lamp?) injecting a welcome beat of idiosyncrasy into the scene’s imagery. And lastly, Sigourney Weaver in all her seductive glory, standing in the shadows but luminous nonetheless, dressed in bold colours and covered in drag queen levels of war paint, moving with a delicious mixture of farcical sexiness and sincere demonic threat. How could I resist?