The Screengrab : the battle of algiers

Set Your DVR!: February 17 - 20, 2009

Hayden Childs — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

To keep you busy through the weekend, cable tv has a few movies worth watching. One is most decidedly not a good movie, but it's a stunning failure. The second has an interesting story behind it, at least, but I don't know if it's a good movie. The third is one of the best movies ever made. Choose wisely! Heck, choose them all.

First up is Spike Lee's Bamboozled (2000) on IFC Wednesday, February 18 at 11 pm central/12 am eastern. This may be Lee's angriest and most shocking movie, but all that fury leads him from one misstep to another. Lee has a good reason to be pissed. The history of entertainment in this country (and abroad, yes) is horribly racist and ugly, and quite a bit of that racism still permeates pop culture. However, Lee intends this movie to be a tribute to A Face In The Crowd and Network, two movies that never stoop to showing their story when they can tell it at the top of their lungs. First misstep! Lee centers all of the action on an extremely unlikeable Harvard-educated black TV executive played by Damon Wayans. Wayans shows his character to be a pretender to his social class with an accent that is, well, to call it effeminate doesn't capture its weirdness, but to call it otherworldly doesn't capture its fundamental prissiness. Second misstep! Then Lee throws in just about every type of black stereotype there is, plus a bunch of unthinking white people, and the whole story loses its message because it refuses to include any characters worth a damn. And that's not to mention the godawful climactic speech. One of the things that made Do The Right Thing so great was that the people in it seemed like real people who acted the way they did for real reasons. This movie is filled with marionettes. Definitely worth a viewing, just to see how and why a good idea from a director with talent (and no quality control) can go so very wrong.

Next up is The Human Comedy (1943) on TCM Thursday, February 19 at 5 am central/6 am eastern. I haven't seen this one, but I did read the novel years ago. And here's the thing: author William Saroyan was hired by MGM to write and direct this movie. But MGM was unhappy that it was running long, and Saroyan refused to cut anything. So he got the axe. He rushed to turn his screenplay into a novel and managed to get it published right before the movie was released. So anyway, I remember reading the novel in high school and thinking that it could use more darkness and despair. From what I understand, the book is much darker than the movie, which stars Mickey Rooney and Donna Reed, among others. But the movie was a hit, winning an Oscar for the screenplay and being nominated for Best Picture and Best Director. It seems to have captured a certain mindset of the mid-century American. And the main reason it's here is that I'm interested to see how it is, and it isn't available, to the best of my knowledge, on DVD. Oh, on more little piece of trivia: according to the IMDB, it features Robert Mitchum's first confirmed film appearance in the uncredited role of "3rd Soldier." Go get 'em, Bob!

Finally, on Friday, February 20, TCM is showing The Battle of Algiers (1966) at 9:30 am central/10:30 am eastern. This movie should be required viewing of all citizens of any nation that occupies another. It has the exact opposite effect of Bamboozled: your sympathies constantly shift throughout the movie as everyone in it is a real person with real motives for their actions. And everyone in it is doing horrible things for reasons they think justified. The French torture captured Algerians for information (side note: as Phil Nugent wrote so eloquently yesterday, Jean Martin, who plays Colonel Mathieu, passed away a couple of weeks ago), while pointing out that they, too, were survivors of Nazi prison camps. The Algerians bomb innocent civilians. It's easy to say, but hard to conceptualize: the battle for freedom is never a simple matter. Recommended for all thinking human beings.

Jean Martin, 1922 - 2009

Phil Nugent — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 16:00:00 GMT

The French actor Jean Martin, who died on February 2 at the age of 86, had a distinguished career in the theater, where he appeared in the original productions of two of Samuel Beckett's plays, Waiting for Godot (as Lucky) and Endgame (as Clov). He also served with the French Resistance during World War II. In movies, though, he was one of those people who achieved immortality largely through his performance in a single role, that of Colonel Mathieu in Gillo Pontecorvo's great political film The Battle of Algiers (1966). Martin was the only professional actor in that movie's cast. Compared to the actors playing Algerian revolutionaries, his role was stylized and trickily conceived: he represented the face of the oppressive French colonial government, yet he was also the director's mouthpiece, explaining the film's view of guerrilla insurrection to the audience in speeches that made it clear that, however the action of the film migh turn out, he knew that he was playing a losing game. Eventually "the people" would emerge victorious; all he could do was postpone the inevitable. Martin delivered a remarkable performance, supplying a theatrical, instructional element to the movie without violating its documentary-style texture. (He might have been hired as much for his politics as for his talent; the actor was a commmitted leftist who, despite his heroic military background with the Resistance as an paratrooper in Indochina, was blackballed as punishment for having signed a petition protesting the French presence in Algeria.)

Martin would remain better known for his stage work than his movies, but The Battle of Algiers assured him of continued employment in European TV and films, often typecast as a villain. His most notable credits include Jacques Rivette's The Nun (1966), Jules Dassin's Promise at Dawn (1970), Fred Zinnemann's The Day of the Jackal (1973), the Sergio Leone-produced Western My Name Is Nobody (1974), Otto Preminger's Rosebud, and Roberto Rossellini's Jesus movie Il Messia (1975), in which he played Pontius Pilate. Legend has it that when he and Pontecorvo argued on the set of Algiers, the director was known to complain, "Just because he was in Godot doesn't mean he's a good actor." He was, though.

Screengrab Presents: The Top 25 War Films (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 21:30:00 GMT

10. FULL METAL JACKET (1987)

The big rap against Full Metal Jacket has always been that it peaks too soon – that the episodic second half of the movie doesn't live up to the tight, intense and brutally funny boot camp sequence it follows. (The other knock on Jacket is that it was filmed in England. Please. You people don't think 2001 was actually shot in outer space, do you?) Despite countless homages and parodies of R. Lee Ermey's indelible drill instructor Sgt. Hartman (many of them courtesy of Ermey himself), however, it is the Vietnam portion of Full Metal Jacket that has proved most influential on war movies of recent vintage. Efforts ranging from Jarhead to Redacted to HBO's recent Generation Kill have drawn on its loose structure, black humor and profanely poetic dialogue (much of which is ripped directly from the pages of Gustav Hasford's novel, The Short-Timers). The complaint has never made much sense to me anyway, as it seems clear that Kubrick is deliberately contrasting the regimented structure of basic training with the free-form chaos of actual warfare. None of this is meant as a knock on the movie's endlessly rewatchable (not to mention quotable) first half, but merely to suggest that Kubrick's film as a whole has held up far better than many of its contemporaries, and deserves a spot on any list of the greatest war movies.

9. THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (1966)

This epic by the late Gillo Pontecorvo, deals with the French-Algerian war and is made in a black-and-white, pseudo-documentary style. It's actually black and white in more ways than one, and is in fact a brief for the necessity of the war and the tactics of the Algerians who resorted to urban terrorism, an argument that is given weight by the movie's cunning appearance of documentary realism. It even serves up a surrogate for French audiences, a "Colonel Mathieu" (played by Jean Martin), who despite doing his job of fighting to suppress the revolution makes speeches explaining why he's on the wrong side of history and all he can do is postpone the moment of reckoning. (Finding just the right tone for the movie to work on a propaganda level did not come easily to the filmmaking team. Their original plan called for the central figure to be a French paratrooper who no longer believes in his country's cause; Pontecorvo hoped to attract Paul Newman for the part.) The Battle of Algiers' status as a classic of its kind was recertified in 2003 when it was widely reported that the Pentagon had arranged a screening to brush up on its understanding of how to wage war against an insurgency.

8. HOPE AND GLORY (1987)

The entity of war can take on vastly different appearances (and meanings) depending on the perspective of the observer. For politicians and generals, it’s all about pins in maps and cold, pragmatic calculations about strategic advantage and acceptable losses. For a soldier in combat, those pins and calculations manifest as potential death from above, while for a child growing up in the suburbs of London during the Blitz (like the autobiographical protagonist of John Boorman’s home front epic, Hope and Glory), all the rockets and bombs can seem like scary but exciting fireworks. With his father away fighting the Nazis, young Bill (Sebastian Rice-Edwards), his two sisters, his flawed, brave mother (Sarah Miles) and all their friends and neighbors face the absurdities, hardships and occasional tragedies of life during wartime with uniquely British pluck and humor in this charming reminder of the precious humanity both endangered and protected by the brutality of combat.

7. THREE KINGS (1999)

Based on hearsay and direct evidence, David O. Russell is a giant asshole. According to Hollywood lore, he literally came to blows with Three Kings star George Clooney, who later said, “Will I work with David ever again? Absolutely not. Never. Do I think he's tremendously talented and do I think he should be nominated for Oscars? Yeah.” And while Kings didn’t ultimately receive any Academy Award nominations, it earned its spot on this list as both a great action/heist flick and also (arguably) the best and most accessible Iraq war movie to date. True, the story (about Clooney’s rogue Special Forces officer enlisting three Reservists in a plot to steal Kuwaiti bullion -- gold, not the little cubes you put in hot water to make soup) is set during the first Iraq War and not the current quagmire, but the details of desert combat, the pop cultural self-awareness of Today’s Army and the cultural disconnect, muddled motives and moral ambiguity of U.S./Iraqi relations are sadly even more topical now than when the film was originally released. Three Kings also receives bonus points for the surprisingly sympathetic performance of Saïd Taghmaoui (currently costarring with Don Cheadle in Traitor) as an Iraqi interrogator, one of the most layered and fascinating depictions of Muslim rage in recent American filmmaking.

6. THE THIN RED LINE (1998)

The classic novel Guadalcanal, written by the restlessly brilliant James Jones, had been brought to the screen once before, in a generally mediocre 1962 adaptation by Andrew Marton. It was some fifteen years after that when Terrence Malick announced his interest in a remake; those familiar with his career – inchoate, fitful, but inspired almost beyond comprehension – would not have been surprised if you’d told them in 1978 that it would be twenty more years before it ever hit the screen. When it did, though, as Malick’s first movie in two decades, it reminded everyone who saw it why they were willing to wait so long: it’s a breathtaking film, blending Malick’s twin obsessions of casual human violence and the mystical immortality of nature with what turns out to be a stunningly profound understanding of Jones’ novel. A young James Caviezel, in his breakout role, almost painfully reflects Private Witt’s agonies over the rightness of his actions, and it’s through him that we are made to realize the brutal disruption war makes in both the human psyche and the exterior world. As with his other works, Malick here almost overwhelms you with the sheer intractable power of nature, only to completely disrupt that mood by showing how casually people are willing to destroy it. The film, gorgeously shot by John Toll, featuring a hugely powerful soundtrack by Hans Zimmer, and starring a powerhouse cast (including terrific performances from Ben Chaplin, Sean Penn, Adrien Brody, John C. Reilly and Elias Koteas) that does its job well without drawing movie-star attention to itself, is simply the finest war film of the 1990s.

Click Here for Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Five, Part Six & Part Seven

Contributors: Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent, Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

The Rep Report (March 26 - April 2)

Phil Nugent — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

BERKELEY: "The Clash of '68" (March 27 - April 23) at Pacific Film Archives commemorates the fortieth anniversary of May 1968, a time of intense political unrest across the globe and, what seems even more remarkable now, a time when those tensions were reflected in a series of high-profile movies. In its efforts to convey the full range of "revolutionary" political cinema at the time, the programming mixes some especially choice examples (including Alain Tanner's 1975 comedy Jonah Who Will be 25 in the Year 2000, from a screenplay by John Berger; Bertolucci's Before the Revolution and Godard's La Chinoise; Costa-Gavras's torn-from-the-headlines thriller Z, which rewrote the rules on packaging political content in a commercial form; and Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers required viewing at the Pentagon for those trying to learn how to fight an insurgency, and its controversial follow-up, Queimada! (better known here as Burn!) starring Marlon Brando) with such obscurities and oddities as The Revolutionary (1970), an allegorical look at campus activism starring young Jon Voight as a fellow called "A." (Attention, Steve Ditko!) Especially notable: A Grin without a Cat, one of the documentarian Chris Marker's obsessive yet playful meditations on where the heck we've been and how we all ended up here. Show up twenty minutes ahead of screening time and listen to Pacifica Radio's "Revolution Rewind Moments", aural montages of high points from 1968 as captured by news radio microphones. (The program is presented in conjunction with the exhibit Protest in Paris 1968: Photographs by Serge Hambourg", at Berkeley Art Museum.)

Also at PFA: "Heinz Emigholz: Architecture as Autobiography" (April 1 - April 17) brings together five of the German filmmaker's "Photography and Beyond" documentaries, focusing on such architects as Louis Sullivan, Bruce Goff, and Rudolph Schindler. Emigholz will be in attendance at several of the screenings.

NEW YORK: Starting March 26, the Anthology Film Archives dusts off two of the early comedies of writer-director-star Albert Brooks. Like Woody Allen's earliest stuff, these movies are spotty, erratic, and not always so easy on the eyes, yet keep hitting wild streaks of comic inspiration that could have come from nobody else. Brooks's first film as a triple threat, the 1979 Real Life, in which he plays a documentarian who invades a "normal American family" household, was once a parody of the PBS series An American Family and now looks like a prescient vision of a time when it would seem as if nobody could walk to the bathroom without tripping over a camera cord. 1981's Modern Romance, about a malfunctioning love affair (between Brooks and Kathryn Harrold) that proves too dysfunctional to simply die, features a Qualuude-fueled routine by Brooks that's as funny as any five minutes of footage from the '80s.