The Screengrab : forgotten films

Forgotten Films: "Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer"

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 14:30:00 GMT

When your loyal Screengrab culture monkeys were compiling yesterday’s list of the greatest animated features of all time, there were a few that got left out. As the inevitable legions of ‘you-forgotsies’ descended on the site, we were reminded of some of these; but one of them simply didn’t occur to us until after the list had already gone live.

To be honest, Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer probably isn’t one of the greatest animated features of all time. It probably isn’t even one of the best Japanese animations of all time. What it is, though, is a surprisingly good and unexpectedly deep installment of a beloved anime series that came out of left field, surprising – and, to be honest, disappointing – many dedicated fans (and the show’s creator), but finding an audience beyond the normal ‘Japanimation’ devotees who appreciated its daring, its ambition, and its beautiful eeriness.

Directed by Mamoru Oshii (who would later become famous for Ghost in the Shell and his “Kerberos” saga), Beautiful Dreamer, released in Japan in 1984, was the second big-screen adaptation of the wildly popular Urusei Yatsura anime series. Like much of creator Rumiko Takahashi’s work, Urusei Yatsura was gentle, good-humored, slightly subversive situation comedy – in this case, it focused on the flighty, jealous Lum, an alien who begins attending a Japanese high school and constantly disrupts classes with her protective attitude towards her dimwitted boyfriend, Ataru. However, this sort of story – along with the attendant physical comedy that marked the show – no longer interested Oshii, and he decided to take things in a decidedly different – and much darker and deeper – direction.

The story begins the night before the annual school festival, as the various student groups are putting the finishing touches on their themed homerooms. (In a bit of the surreal humor that is to come, the main characters choose “The Third Reich Decadent Café” as their theme.) However, the day has an oddly familiar quality to it, and when work is completed, everyone from students to faculty don’t seem to be able to get home that night, encountering eerie visions and surreal encounters on trains and cars, ranging from a haunting ‘product parade’ that stalks them through the streets to a subway line that never seems to reach its final destination. After some rather unsettling, if hilarious, Groundhog Day-style humor, it becomes clear to Miss Sakura – a teacher at the school and a nascent mystic – that some supernatural force has enveloped them all and is tampering with their realities via their dreams.

The movie gets even stranger from there, becoming, by turns, a domestic comedy, a mystical battle, a post-apocalyptic survival story, and a haunting supernatural fairy tale. It also remains an action-packed movie full of terrific set pieces, and a deeply philosophical treatment of the divide between reality and illusion and the nature of dreaming. It’s not without its flaws; it’s not as meticulously animated as some of Mamoru Oshii’s later work, and it retains enough of the slapstick flavor of the original series that it’s not quite as profound as it would like to be. But fans of the original show hated it and creator Rumiko Takahashi disowned it, necessitating its release through an entirely different production company, and that’s too bad it’s certainly the show’s finest hour, and one of the real high points of the anime boom of the 1980s: a smart, funny comedy that reaches far beyond its origins, and, in doing so, transcends them.

Forgotten Films: Les Anges du Péché (1943, Robert Bresson)

Paul Clark — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Despite having only directed thirteen features in a career that spanned nearly half a century, Robert Bresson is one of the most important and acclaimed filmmakers in cinema history. For example, consider that eight of his thirteen films are listed among the top 1,000 films of all time, as listed by the Web site They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? Since Bresson’s death in 1999, various companies like The Criterion Collection have helped to make most of his work accessible on DVD. However, there are a number of films that are still unavailable in the U.S. Most notably, his 1971 film Four Nights of a Dreamer is tied up in rights issues and is officially unavailable in any format. 1962’s The Trial of Joan of Arc has shown a few times on cable, but it too isn’t available on Region 1 DVD.

But most overlooked of all Bresson’s features is his first, the 1943 film Les Anges du Péché. Like his breakout film Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, Anges is relatively conventional compared to the austere style most people expect from Bresson, utilizing professional actors and constructed sets rather than the “models” of his later work. However, Les Anges du Péché is valuable for the peek it gives us at Bresson’s sensibility- even at this early stage, many of the themes he would become associated with throughout his career were already in evidence. But the film’s fascination transcends auteurist reasons- I honestly think that it’s a masterpiece in its own right.

Les Anges du Péché is set in a Dominican convent in France comprised primarily of former prisoners who were brought into the fold upon their release. The nuns pay regular visits to the local jail, where they offer hope to the imprisoned women and encourage them to join the order when they are freed. A more cynical filmmaker might have portrayed the sisters as taking advantage of the prisoners by preying on the hopelessness of their lives, but Bresson doesn’t see it that way. The nuns clearly believe in their mission, and the newcomers are embraced by their new sisters and treated as equals.

The key player in the story is Anne-Marie (played by Renée Faure), a young girl who joins the convent near beginning of the film. Unlike most of her fellow novices, Anne-Marie has never been to prison, and indeed she comes from a wealthy family. But while she doesn’t have the hard-luck past that drew many of her sisters to the Lord, she has something most of them lack- pure, unblemished faith. She takes to heart the mission of the convent and makes it her own as well.

However, this faith also gets her into trouble with her sisters. Sister Anne-Marie is so intent on carrying out her mission that she becomes blinkered to practically everything else in her life. She neglects her day-to-day duties in favor of what she believes to be her higher calling, and for the sisters in charge this just won’t do. Like Bresson’s later films The Diary of a Country Priest and The Trial of Joan of Arc, Les Anges du Péché deals with the struggle between worldly necessity and one’s spiritual mission. Sister Anne-Marie’s powerful faith makes her almost childlike, and in an adult world, even one bound by religious beliefs, this can be difficult to take.

Yet as difficult as she can be, Anne-Marie’s sisters are also fascinated by her, and so is the film. She’s a great character- “good, but stubborn; simple, but proud; intelligent, but impassioned,” says another sister- and indeed what makes her so compelling is the contradictions that arise from her seemingly one-track personality. To quote the Reverend Mother, “is it the well-behaved or impossible child St. Benoit says we should heed?” Bresson also explicitly connects Sister Anne-Marie with St. Francis of Assisi, another who left the lap of luxury to devote himself to God. If St. Francis can achieve sainthood in this way, why shouldn’t Anne-Marie try to do so as well?

Sister Anne-Marie’s mission becomes explicit when she visits the prison one day and meets the troublesome inmate Thérèse (Jany Holt). With the help of Reverend Mother, she tries to rescue Thérèse, but Thérèse resists. But Anne-Marie persists, always remembering the maxim by Catherine of Siena, “If you hear the word of God binding you to another soul, heed no others, for they are but its echo.” Eventually, the day after her release, Thérèse changes her mind and joins the order, but she has a secret- she has killed the man who put her behind bars, and is using the convent to hide out from the law. Throughout the film, Bresson contrasts the two characters. First Thérèse is mostly loyal to Anne-Marie, but as Anne-Marie’s headstrong nature gets her into more trouble with the other sisters, they drift apart. There’s a certain irony in the fact that the saintly Anne-Marie has such trouble fitting in while the sinner Thérèse finds a niche with little problem.

But then, true believers of any stripe have always been outcasts. Indeed, by living entirely for God- she doesn’t even pray to the saints, addressing her prayers directly to Him- she willfully separates herself from the lifestyles and concerns of those around her. It’s just her nature, and to compromise herself simply to avoid rocking the boat just isn’t consistent with her character. As his career progressed, Bresson’s work became increasingly uncompromised, and it’s clear when watching Les Anges du Péché that Bresson was more than a little in awe of his heroine. Perhaps as Sister Anne-Marie yearned to be as good as St. Francis, so Bresson was always striving to be as passionate and unyielding as Sister Anne-Marie. If that was his goal, I’d say he succeeded marvelously.

Forgotten Films: Mr. Jealousy (1997)

Peter Smith — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Noah Baumbauch, the writer-director of the new Margot at the Wedding, first made a splash in 1995 with his Gen-X comedy Kicking and Screaming. Ten years later, that film and Baumbach's name had slipped so far into neglect that a major studio thought nothing of recycling its title for one of Will Ferrell's more negligible vehicles. That same year, Baumbach enjoyed a comeback with The Squid and the Whale, and since then Kicking and Screaming has enjoyed the honor of being issued on DVD as part of the Criterion Collection. Meanwhile, his sophomore effort, the 1997 Mr. Jealousy (available for home viewing in a no-frills DVD) remains largely unknown. Which is a shame; it's a near-perfect modern screwball comedy that uses Baumbach's favorite subject — the way that intelligent, literate people screw up their relationships — as the basis for some smart satire.

The movie stars '90s indie stalwart Eric Stoltz as Lester Grimm, who's locked in a pattern of gumming up his love life with displays of obsessive jealousy. Stoltz thinks that his current girlfriend, Ramona (Annabella Sciorra), might be the one, which makes it all the more intolerable when he lays eyes on her ex, a cool-stepping novelist named Dashiell (Chris Eigeman), and can't stop wondering about Ramona's past. Lester ends up joining Dash's encounter therapy group, the better to find out whether the guy is obsessing over Ramona and to learn choice details about their past together. Of course, in order to disguise his identity, he has to refrain from talking about his own problems in therapy, so he borrows the problems of his best friend, played by Carlos Jacott. Then, when the process inevitably leaves him feeling more confused than ever, he winds up getting Jacott to join the group so that Jacott can pretend to have Stoltz's problems. Jacott just about steals the movie, especially when, taking on the assignment of pretending to be someone else with the deranged commitment of an idealistic Method actor, he turns up in the group earnestly discussing Stoltz's self-perpetuating neuroses in an outrageously bogus British accent. Mr. Jealousy is much lighter than Bamubach's more recent film, but it could be his funniest work. — Phil Nugent

Forgotten Films: Masked and Anonymous (2003)

Peter Smith — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Bob Dylan re-wrote the rules about what was allowed of a famous singer, songwriter, and public figure, but it turned out that he did have one normal thing about him: he liked the idea of being a movie star. Dylan was a movie star whenever he got to be himself in caught footage, as in D. A. Pennebaker's 1967 documentary Don't Look Back, but his first several attempts to pass for an actor, or to capture his magnificence himself, tended to be kind of, well, disastrous. The music he produced for the soundtrack of Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973) yielded a triumph in "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," but Peckinpah's attempt to incorporate Dylan into the cast, as a mysterious, knife-throwing hombre known as "Alias", only resulted in a smirking blank space on the screen. Dylan's own 1978 Renaldo & Clara, a four-hour mixture of fantasy and documentary sequences threaded through with performance footage from the 1975-76 Rolling Thunder Revue, inspired print seminars, in places like the Village Voice, on the theme, "Dylan: What Happened?"; long unavailable in its complete form, the movie will probably be seen again around the time that Jerry Lewis's The Day the Clown Cried is released as part of the Criterion Collection. Then there's Hearts of Fire, a misguided 1987 rock-'n-roll love story with Dylan as the sage old music legend who plays smitten mentor to the uni-named cupcake Fiona. The barely-released film was the last work by its director, Richard Marquand (Eye of the Needle, Return of the Jedi), who had a fatal stroke before signing off on the final cut.

After a long lay-off from movies, Dylan re-emerged in 2003 as the star of Masked and Anonymous, directed by Larry Charles. (It was the first movie directed by Charles, who was then best known for his TV work, as a writer on Seinfeld and a director on Curb Your Enthusiasm. His second movie would be Borat.) Dylan and Charles co-wrote the script, under the pseudonyms "Sergei Petrov" and "Rene Fonatine." It was made fast — principal photography was reportedly completed in twenty days — and relatively cheap; a lot of well-known people agreed to be paid scale on it because, like the various celebrities who appeared in Renaldo & Clara, they just wanted to work with Dylan. The cast includes Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Jessica Lange, Ed Harris, Val Kilmer, Mickey Rourke, Angela Bassett, Penelope Cruz, Giovanni Ribisi, Luke Wilson, Fred Ward, Bruce Dern, Cheech Marin, Tracey Walter, Robert Wisdom, Chris Penn, Christian Slater and Susan Tyrrell, as well as Dylan's longtime touring band (including guitarist Charlie Sexton and bassist Tony Garnier) and a little girl named Tinashe Kachingwe, who brings down the house with her a-cappella version of "The Times They Are A-Changin'." The reward they get for their participation is that they all get to be characters in a new Dylan song — one of the really long ones, like "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again," full of imagery and puns and symbols and throwaway jokes. That's how the movie is conceived.

The setting is America as a junta-led dictatorship, with government-controlled media and street executions, and with Dylan as a legendary troubadour named "Jack Fate" who's spent the last several years locked away in prison. An Albert Grossman-like manager figure — Uncle Sweetheart, played by John Goodman — gets him sprung so he can perform at a big televised benefit concert, and he tours the back country on his way to the performance site, serving as witness to the perversion of the country's ideals, and playing straight man to a succession of ranters and weirdos. The movie has its dead spots and its puzzlements, and it rambles, as you might expect. But it's not just some vanity project. There's real pain and a lot of humor in it, and its vision of an entertainment-sated America in lockdown is politically sophisticated in a way that was guaranteed to go over like a lead balloon when it was released during the summer of "Mission Accomplished!" Part of the movie's strength, and part of what may cause many to regard it as dismissible, is that it pictures this nightmare of where we may be headed but doesn't have any ideas of how to slay the dragon once it plops its ass down in the seat of power. Dylan doesn't dismiss the power and value of music, but he knows damn well that it doesn't stop jackbooted thugs in their tracks.

The one message that does come through loud and clear is that the sixties have been over a long time, they aren't ever coming back, and they may not have been everything that nostalgic boomers and post-boomer dreamers want to think they were in the first place. In one of the movie's funniest and most pointed scenes, Goodman reads a long list of songs that the government would like Jack Fate to perform for the national television audience: it's a string of rebellious sixties classics ("Street Fighting Man", "Masters of War"), now toothless but still good for making the listener imagine that he must be a part of something daring. (Dylan's deadpan response: "I dunno, Sweetheart. It seems like a whole lot of songs.") And the movie's villain is a self-hating blowhard of a rock journalist (Jeff Bridges) who "interviews" the Dylan character by suggesting that he's a has-been and a sell-out while reeling off the names of rock heroes such as Hendrix who had the decency to die young. Dylan seems to hate this asshole more than the dying, dictatorial "president" (Richard C. Sarina) or his replacement — Mickey Rourke, who caresses the screen with his sweetest pussycat smile while promising, "We will empty the prisons, and fill the football stadiums!" Masked and Anonymous was part of a general comeback for Dylan that began with his 1997 album Time Out of Mind; since then, his autumnal renaissance has included a couple more albums (Love and Theft, Modern Times) and his memoir Chronicles, Volume One, as well as the belated official release Live 1966 and the Martin Scorsese documentary No Direction Home. (He also won an Academy Award for the song "Things Have Changed" from Wonder Boys.) In this unexpected surge of critically garlanded work, Masked and Anonymous (which also yielded a superb soundtrack album) may have gotten lost in the shuffle, but in its own eccentric way, it's as intriguing a statement about Dylan and his myth as any yet caught on film. At least, until the imminent release of Todd Haynes I'm Not There, which addresses the problem of summing up Dylan by dividing the part among six different actors. You can bet that Dylan is kicking himself for not having thought of that before.

— Phil Nugent

Forgotten Films: Halloween Hangover Edition

Peter Smith — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Most low-budget, independently produced horror movies are cheesy gross-outs designed for the straight-to-video market, and that can make it even harder for a real movie maker who's decided to dip a toe into the scare genre; his work may end up tainted by association. When the writer-director Michael Almeda decided to make Nadja (1994), his oddly poetic comedy about a vampire princess in Brooklyn, he had an additional problem in that the children of the night were becoming so goddamn overexposed; Almeda, who has since become best known for his amazing 2000 Hamlet and his documentaries about the creative process (This So-Called Disaster, William Eggleston in the Real World), was competing for attention with Anne Rice and Francis Ford Coppola, with Jess Weldon and lesser pretenders coming up fast. Seen today, Nadja is a flawed but strikingly inventive, great-looking, and sometimes very funny riff on the mythology of the undead. It's also very evocative of a specific time and place, and I don't mean Transylvania. Almeda cast it with what you might call the Mid-Nineties Indie Film All-Stars: The stunning Elina Löwensohn in the title role, Martin Donovan, Suzy Amis, Jared Harris, Karl Geary and, on the comeback trail, Peter Fonda as the vampire killer Van Helsing. (Fonda, who's just arrived in town after finally dispatching Dracula, is especially funny explaining that staking the old Count was no great challenge: "He was like Elvis at the end. . . The magic was gone, and he knew it.") There's also a cameo by David Lynch, who was one of the movie's producers, as a security guard at the morgue. One line in particular also time-stamps the picture, when Jared Harris, as Nadja's brother, describes an ESP message from his sister as "a psychic fax." If the picture had been made twenty minutes later, he would have said "e-mail."

The 1988 ghost story Lady in White was made in Wayne County, New York, on a budget of less than five million dollars, by the writer-director Frank LaLoggia. Unlike Nadja, it has no special pretensions to artistry; LaLoggia, who had earlier made a horror movie called Fear No Evil that he felt had been mangled by the releasing studio, simply wanted to make a good, commercial movie that was true to his conception and wasn't subject to meddling from a bunch of suits. He succeeded: it's an entertaining, stylish little spook story, with a terrific lead performance by the eleven-year-old Lukas Haas. Ironically, though, the movie ended up getting good reviews and considerable attention as an indie-filmmaking success story but failed to achieve much distribution; just because you make your film your way without interference from the suits doesn't mean the suits have to show it. (LaLoggia didn't get to make another movie for more than twenty years, and that film, The Haunted Heart, hasn't received theatrical distribution.) Luckily, both Nadja and Lady in White have been preserved on DVD to entertain and scare audiences that never knew they existed during their brief tour of our nation's movie theaters. — Phil Nugent