The Screengrab : wim wenders

Believe It Or Not: Patrica Highsmith's Ripley, On Screen

Phil Nugent — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 16:00:00 GMT

The New York Times recently noted that this year marks the eightieth birthday of Tom Ripley, the favorite antihero of the late novelist Patricia Highsmith, who between The Talented Mr. Ripley (which was written in 1954, and in which Tom was 25 years old) and 1991's Ripley Under Water (published four years before Highsmith's death) wrote five books about him. Highsmith's Ripley is good-looking, well-built, implicitly gay but basically asexual, beyond suave, and sociopathic. When first glimpsed in The Talented Mr. Ripley, he's scuffling out a grifter's existence in New York before being drafted by the rich parents of a distant acquaintance, Dickie Greenleaf, to go to Italy and drag their slumming son back to the States. Instead, Ripley insinuates himself into Dickie's life, kills him, and essentially takes his place. He remains an American expatriate in Europe, where he uses his refined eye to become a formidable figure in the art forgery business.

Highsmith adored her creation. Ripley may be without conscience, but he has his own bizarre code, and he isn't casually murderous--he kills only as a last resort, though that's probably because dead bodies make for a mess. In some ways, Highsmith was the Ayn Rand of misanthropic hard-boiled crime novelists, and she seems to have judged Ripley as a superior sort of creature: he deserved to go undetected and live high on the spoils of his crimes so long as he was wittier, smarter, and had better taste than his victims. Highsmith's genius for plotting and nasty twists made her attractive to Hollywood, but her sensibility was too twisted and nasty for most mainstream filmmakers. One of Hitchcock's best movies, Strangers on a Train, is based on one of her non-Ripley novels, but in the movie, the hero, Guy, is horrified to discover that Bruno, the flirty psycho he met by chance has murdered Guy's estranged wife as a favor to him and now expects Guy to return the favor by murdering Bruno's father. In the novel, Guy is reluctant to fulfill his half of the bargain, but he gets over it. Likewise, there have been five movies made so far based on the Ripley novels--including the most recent, Roger Spottiswoode's 2005 Ripley Under Ground with Barry Pepper, which has yet to see either a theatrical or DVD release in the U.S. How have filmmakers succeeded in their attempts to bring Highsmith's hero to the movies? The results are all over the map:

PURPLE NOON (1960), directed by René Clément and based on The Talented Mr. Ripley, probably remains the purest expression of Highsmith's sensibility to make it to the screen. Shot by Henri Decaë and with a score by Nino Rota, it has a distinctive feel that's both lush and chilly. The movie made an international star of its Ripley, Alain Delon, and Highsmith was publicly approving of the actor as a proper physical match for her character. Purple Noon came out at a time when Americans were used to going to see European movies such as La Dolce Vita and La Notte for the spectacle of glamorous people behaving badly in photogenic locations, and Purple Noon fit right in with that trend, though in keeping with Highsmith's vision, it isn't obviously moralistic. But if you know the novel, you can spot the places where Highsmith's viewpoint has been softened a little: Philippe (nee' Dickie) Greenleaf isn't such an ass that you can think he has it coming to him, and Ripley actually gets caught at the end. That never happened in the books, and it hasn't happened in the movies since.

THE AMERICAN FRIEND (1977): The German director Wim Wenders made this version of the third book in the series, Ripley's Game. In some ways, it's the smartest and richest of all these films, though it also has the sorriest Ripley, hands down: Dennis Hopper, then deep into his drug-fueled freak-of-the-week period. Hopper was either unaware of or indifferent to the whole notion that his character was meant to seem classy enough to pass through the rarefied circles in which he did his business without setting off alarm bells. It's supposed to be a major insult when an art restorer--Jonathan, played by Bruno Ganz--who has heard rumors that Ripley is a shady character declines to shake his hand, but Hopper looks and acts like somebody who should be used to getting driven away from people's establishments at the wrong end of a fire hose. The plot here turns on that strange ethical code of Ripley's: as payback for the insult of the unshaken hand, he sets the wheels in motion that result in Jonathan, who is sick and in need of money, being hired to perform a contract killing. But then the contractor wants Jonathan to perform a second murder, and Ripley, who sees that as out of line, joins forces with Jonathan, first to help him pull off the follow-up killing and then to face off against the murdered man's vengeful associates. Hopper may have been hired not so much because he might be right for the part as for his status as the director of Easy Rider and the film maudit The Last Movie; having a little fun with the casting, Wenders filled many of the roles that called for gangsters and other untrustworthy types with fellow directors, including Nicholas Ray, Jean Eustache, Peter Lilienthal, Daniel Schmid, and Samuel Fuller. In fact, the best performance in the movie is given by Fuller, as a cigar-chomping Mafia boss toting a gun whose barrel is about half as long as he is tall.

THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY (1999): This second go at Ripley's debut boasts strong performances, especially by Matt Damon as Ripley, Jude Law as Dickie, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Freddie Miles, one of the few characters who managed to drive Ripley to overcome his natural aversion to commit murder. Directed by Anthony Minghella, it's a handsome production, and very impressive on its own terms. It's just that those terms are a flat contradiction of Highsmith's. Minghella and company set out to explain Ripley psychologically by emphasizing his inner struggle over his sexuality and the terrible loneliness he feels, which the mercurial, snobbish Dickie exacerbates by first appearing to accept him as a brother and then coldly shutting him out. Ripley here isn't a natural aristocrat rising to his true level but a frightened child in need of a hug, and the murders he commits aren't cold-blooded chess moves but the desperate acts of a cornered animal. The movie ends with him commiting one more murder (that isn't in the book) that leaves him lonelier, more miserable, and weepier than ever. Maybe the filmmakers thought they were making him more sympathetic. Highsmith, who thought her Ripley was already better than sympathetic because he was fascinating, would have wanted to put this crybaby out of her misery with a champagne bottle upside his head.

RIPLEY'S GAME (2002): This little-seen version of the same novel that inspired The American Friend was directed by Liliana Cavani, an Italian filmmaker best known for the godawful Nazi porn fantasy The Night Porter (1974). It doesn't have the brilliant conceits that decorated the Wenders film, or the atmosphere that enriched it, either. What it does have is John Malkovich as the Ripley of a Highsmith fan's dreams: he may not be the eye candy that Alain Delon was in his prime, but he's certainly convincing as an American who's exiled himself partly out of a sense that he's better than his home country deserves. The movie, which also features Ray Winstone, Lena Headey, and Dougray Scott as the accidental assassin, is a straightforward treatment of the story, and the story is a good one. But the best reason for its existence is that it gives Malkovich a chance to preen. At the climax, with a carload of Mafia killers on the way to his Italian villa, he carefully arranges his various death traps and then settles in for a night and a morning of waiting. It's like watching the last reel of Straw Dogs if the Dustin Hoffman character had been played by HAL 9000.

Cannes Rundown, Days 10 and 11- I'd be the screenwriter who speaks Chinese and plays the oboe. That would be cool.

Paul Clark — Sun, 25 May 2008 04:01:00 GMT

As the Cannes Film Festival enters its final days before the announcement of awards on Sunday, here’s one final roundup of reviews. We begin with Charlie Kaufman’s highly-anticipated (by me, anyway) directorial debut Synecdoche, New York. Would Kaufman’s inexperience behind the camera cause him to become timid and soften his edge? If reviews are any indication, don’t bet on it.

AO Scott in the New York Times- “Mr. Kaufman, the wildly inventive screenwriter of “Being John Malkovich” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” has, in his first film as a director, made those efforts look almost conventional. Like his protagonist, a beleaguered theater director played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, he has created a seamless and complicated alternate reality, unsettling nearly every expectation a moviegoer might have about time, psychology and narrative structure.”

But not all were so impressed. J. Hoberman in the Village Voice- “Collapsing in sodden self-reflexivity after a promising 40 minutes, Kaufman’s arch, interminable phantasmagoria—with Philip Seymour Hoffman as a Job-like theater director—retroactively improved all but the most miserablist movies I saw at Cannes.”

Other competition titles:

Jeff Wells on Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo- “I knew I was seeing something intensely audacious and stylistically exciting, but the political arena it depicts is so dry and complex and wholly-unto-itself that gradually the film makes you feel as if you're lying in an isolation tank.”

Laurent Cantet’s The Class/Entre Les Meurs, according to Time Out’s Geoff Andrew- “Everything rings absolutely true in this film, and everything is utterly engrossing from start to finish, despite the apparent lack of a straightforward narrative during the first hour… There are no easy answers proffered to the various questions raised about education, schools and society, but the film makes for admirably lucid, subtle and thought-provoking drama throughout. And the kids are terrific.”

Cinematical’s James Rocchi tears into Wim Wenders’ latest, The Palermo Shooting- “After Palermo Shooting ended (with a title card offering the film as a tribute "To Ingmar (Bergman) and Michelangelo (Antonioni)," which made me imagine Bergman and Antonioni saying Uh, thanks, but. ... from the next world), the Cannes press audience booed and laughed and stumbled out into the streets for detailed digressions and discussions on how, exactly, Wenders had, as our British friends say, lost the plot. Palermo Shooting goes fairly off the mark, or fires blanks, or has a damp fuse; I'm not sure about which firearm metaphor applies here, and if Wenders can't be bothered to have any cohesion to his signs and symbols, why should I?... It's still a little sad to see a major filmmaker make such a series of major mistakes in the name of a fairly minor film.”

While I certainly admire Cannes’ devotion to Wenders, perhaps the competition would be better served if, instead of reserving spots for ex-Palme winners past their prime, the selectors would give some love to gifted up-and-comers who deserve a higher profile People like, say, Kelly Reichardt, whose Wendy and Lucy played in Un Certain Regard. Here’s ScreenDaily’s Mike Goodridge- “Reichardt's films are quiet and detailed, and in Wendy And Lucy , she provides an all too believable picture of how fine is the line between getting by and becoming homeless and destitute… Unlike Old Joy, which was a two-hander, Wendy And Lucy is told entirely from the point of view of one character - and her dog, of course. The beauty of the film is not only in telling a story with so few words but in showing the wordless tenderness that exists between woman and dog in a society which has cast her onto its fringes. “

Also of note was the Un Certain Regard prizewinner, Tulpan. Here’s ScreenDaily’s Jonathan Romney on the film- “Shy courtship, stark landscapes and a spirited supporting cast of livestock make Tulpan a vivid, intensely enjoyable debut feature from former documentarian Sergei Dvortsevoi. The Kazakhstan-set film hardly breaks new ground, in both setting and mood pitching its tent very close to The Story Of The Weeping Camel. But it similarly blends intimate, gentle fiction with a strong dose of ethnographic observation, to immensely charming effect.”

Justin Chang in Variety on Albert Serra’s Birdsong- “Patience was no doubt required of the Three Wise Men as they made their way toward Bethlehem, and the same will be required of auds who seek out "Birdsong," Albert Serra's minimalist reinterpretation of the Magi's journey. Hushed, contemplative but often quite droll experiment offers beautifully sculpted images on a black-and-white canvas across its sometimes hypnotic, sometimes tedious runtime.”

Wendy Ide praises Eldorado in the London Times- “This off-beat tragicomic road movie from Belgium is one of the sleeper hits of the festival. Screening in the Director’s Fortnight sidebar, it’s a far cry from the dour, grey perception of Belgian cinema fostered by the work of people like the Dardenne brothers…The landscapes and soundtrack choices evoke American road movies of a bygone era; the sensibility is definitely European.”

Abel Ferrara’s Chelsea on the Rocks, according to Dennis Lim in the Los Angeles Times- “Abel Ferrara's new film, "Chelsea on the Rocks," represents a kind of homecoming for the Bronx-born director and longtime chronicler of the New York City underbelly. Ferrara, best known for urban tales of damnation such as "Bad Lieutenant" and "King of New York," moved to Italy several years ago, fleeing a city transformed by the Rudolph W. Giuliani regime and the Sept. 11 attacks, not to mention a cultural and economic climate that had grown more hostile to maverick filmmakers.”

Finally, here’s a link to Karina Longworth’s live-blogging of Quentin Tarantino’s Film Lecture at Cannes. I’ve seen how fast that dude talks, and my fingers are hurting just thinking about it. Bang-up job, Karina.

No, But I've Read the Movie: THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Like a handful of the better noir and pulp writers, Patricia Highsmith has undergone a bit of a positive critical reappraisal of late, although one has to wonder if critics and casual fans are more interested in her actual writing than her bisexuality, alcoholism and often-controversial personal life. Whatever the case, the rediscovery of Highsmith's books in recent years was followed by a spate of interest in adapting her works for film. Naturally, the most attention was focused on the so-called "Ripliad", her series of novels featuring the amoral, cynical trickster and killer Tom Ripley; while 2002's Ripley's Game, bouyed by a tremendous performance in the lead role by John Malkovich, was the better film, 1999's The Talented Mr. Ripley got far more attention and made far more money. This was thanks largely to a successful marketing campaign, a coincidental tapping of the zeitgeist, and the fact that several of its stars were at their peak of popularity. There have been other Ripleys (Highsmith herself loved Alain Delon in Rene Clement's Purple Noon) and other filmed versions of Ripliad novels (Wim Wenders made a memorable, if confused, version of Ripley's Game as The American Friend in 1977), but none has stayed in the public consciousness as the one that teamed the recently deceased Anthony Minghella with Matt Damon.

In most ways, The Talented Mr. Ripley is the best of the Ripley novels, and one of Patricia Highsmith's best novels overall. It was the purest expression of her fascination with anti-heroic figures who carried around a silent delight in their defiance of law and propriety; it also featured some of her most coolly murderous prose, the quality of her writing that critics most admire. Her deliberate, incisive writing seemed almost subversive at times, so plainly and nastily could she capture those who circumvented decent society. But it was not without its flaws, most noticably her writing of female characters: Highsmith seemed either incapable of writing female characters as deep and dark as her male characters, or uninterested in doing so. Anthony Minghella's filmed version, with a solid cast and a big budget, had a chance to to capture all the strengths of the book while addressing its weaknesses.

WHAT IT HAD: Minghella was riding a peak of success at the time The Talented Mr. Ripley was filmed, having won widespread popular and critical acclaim with his previous movie, The English Patient. His lead actors were equally hot: Matt Damon was as popular as he'd ever be, as was co-star Gwyneth Paltrow, and Jude Law was enjoying some level of success in the U.S. for the first time. Cate Blanchett scored a key role that helped launch her big-screen career, and Minghella staffed the picture with solid character actors like Philip Seymour Hoffman and Philip Baker Hall in supporting roles. It's also a gorgeous film, with breathtaking locations, beautiful cinematography (by John Seale) and stellar set design and period costumes. Whatever its flaws, Ripley takes no shorts with its look and feel.

WHAT IT LACKED: The script, also by Anthony Minghella, is an absolute mess. Even leaving aside how completely wrong Minghella gets the whole point of Ripley's character (about which see below), he doesn't even seem to know what he wants to do with the story. He has no feel whatsoever for the tone of it -- it seems to veer moodily from character study to thriller to romantic idyll -- and he puts so much effort into how it looks he doesn't have much time for how it reads or sounds. There's almost none of Highsmith's vicious, precise dialogue, and the characters are clearly more creations of Minghella's sensibilities than they are Highsmith's, which wouldn't be a problem if this was an entirely different movie. As it is, it comes across as a total mismatch of source and adapter.

DID IT SUCCEED?: If all you're looking for is beautiful people in beautiful surroundings, sure -- but if you want the deadly playfulness and black-hearted gamesmanship of Patricia Highsmith's books, you won't find them here. At heart, Anthony Minghella was a steadfast romantic, while Highsmith -- and Tom Ripley -- were bloody-minded cynics. Minghella wants to turn Tom Ripley into a tragic and heartbreaking figure, which is a complete misreading of the character and a tin-eared understanding of why he's so appealing to begin with. He also takes Ripley's subtly implied homosexuality -- the least interesting thing about him, in the book -- and makes it explicit and paramount, to the point of absurdity: the movie ends with Ripley murdering his lover with tears in his eyes, something that the grinning sociopath of the book would never think of doing. There are plenty of tragic romantics in the annals of crime fiction; to turn the almost joyfully manipulative, supremely cunning Tom Ripley into one of them is such a disastrous choice that it sinks the whole movie.

Roland Emmerich: Not a Big Wim Wenders Fan

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Say what you will about the 10,000 B.C. director (and we have), but at least the man knows his station in the movie universe. “I'm making movies for the masses,” says Roland Emmerich in a recent interview with The Guardian. “These movies are expensive. A lot of people have to see it, like it and come back. If you start making movies for film critics, you've lost.”

If there’s one thing nobody has ever accused Emmerich of doing, it’s making movies for film critics. But of course, everyone is a critic, including Emmerich’s own mother, who did not particularly care for the director’s breakthrough hit, Universal Soldier. “She was just upset with me that there was so much blood in it - and she was right…I can't say that I like it. But I'm comfortable with it now. When you're not loved by the critics, it's very hard for anyone to say anything good about your movie.”

Although he was a film student in Germany during the heyday of Fassbinder and Wim Wenders, Emmerich doesn’t pretend the New German Cinema was ever an influence on his work (and again, it’s not like anyone is saying otherwise). “Everybody is always so careful about these things. I mean, I'm good friends with Wim Wenders, but it doesn't mean I have to like his movies. Some of them, I like. Most of them, I find boring. And I would tell him that to his face.” We’re still awaiting Wenders’ thoughts on The Patriot and The Day After Tomorrow.

Still, even though he’s always loved the big-budget Hollywood blockbusters that are his bread and butter today, Emmerich would appreciate a little credit for following his own path. “Emmerich has yet to make a sequel or tackle a popular comic-book franchise, preferring instead to collaborate with other writers on his own ideas,” Guardian writer Steven Goldman insists, apparently forgetting that Godzilla was rampaging through Tokyo before Emmerich was born. “Rather than presenting himself as a director for hire, he has increasingly sought to maintain creative control over his own fare by selling his scripts at auction.” You see that, Hollywood? Roland Emmerich doesn’t need your big, dumb ideas! He has plenty of big, dumb ideas of his own!

Screengrab Q&A: Eran Kolirin, Director of The Band's Visit

Peter Smith — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 22:30:00 GMT

Eran Kolirin's first feature, The Band's Visit, opened in New York and Los Angeles last Friday. A poignant story of an Egyptian police band lost in Israel, the film has won a host of awards worldwide. That the film has done well internationally is fitting, since for all its apparent evocation of local politics, its themes are existential — can we connect with other people, or even with our own pasts? The Band's Visit makes the political personal, capturing perfectly the homesickness that can strike even when you're still at home. And if I'm making it sound grim, it's also got some great jokes. When I reached Kolirin on the phone last week, he sounded weary and lonely, stranded in the middle of a two-week press tour — probably the perfect position from which to promote this wry, bittersweet film.

What was your initial inspiration for this film?
It began with an image of the main character, of Tewfiq, a man in uniform who sings an Arabic song. [Then] part of what you do is to research within yourself why this story interests you. It has my own private nostalgia for Egyptian cinema — part of my lost youth or childhood. I share this incomplete feeling that all of the characters share, a feeling of living beside life and not really touching. A movie is a kind of mirror of your own self.

The central relationship between Tewfiq, the reserved bandleader, and Dina, the woman who takes him in, feels very real. How did you develop it?
No big secret to this. Some of it was developed while working with the actors. Sometimes in a good cast you get this kind of magic, and at least as far as I'm concerned, between Sasson Gabai and Ronit Elkabetz, this is what happened. During the rehearsals we rewrote the scenes. For example, the whole scene of them on the park bench was written through rehearsal.

That relationship encapsulates the whole subtext of the film—the question of whether it's possible to connect with another person. Even though it's about people from different cultures and different languages, there's a universal quality to that struggle.
I never thought I had these characters who are very different and this movie kind of brings them together — not at all, not for a second. It's the very starting point, I never doubted it: they're all the same. And this is why sometimes when people describe the movie as different cultures coming together. . . I never thought about it this way.

As you show in some of the family scenes, it's perfectly possible to feel lonely and isolated even within your own family — never mind different cultures.
Yeah. I kind of have this thing with loneliness. [laughs]

What are some of your favorite films?
Mike Leigh's High Hopes. Down by Law by Jarmusch. I like very much Jean-Claude Brisseau, Sound and Fury. With this movie, I was thinking also of Jacques Tati and Aki Kaurismaki, and I guess there are a lot of others — I like Wenders a lot, I like Bresson and I like Ozu.

There's a very sharp sense of place in this movie. This outpost town, Bet Hatikva, feels very real. I have very strong childhood memories from those places. Since I have asthma, they sometimes would take me to small towns — not where we shot, but towns not far away from there — what they would call in Israel development towns. And I have memories of these concrete buildings — this kind of monumental communist architecture in the desert, and this feeling of distance and emptiness.

I tried to shoot it more like I remembered it than the way it is. It took me a lot of time to understand how to get this feeling. I realized that what makes a difference is the sound of those places. Sometimes in the desert the wind blows in your ears and you go deaf for a second. We tried to somehow capture this feeling in the whole sound of the movie.

If you just told somebody you were making a film about Arabs lost in Israel, they might expect an obvious political statement, which this film isn't.
I know those expectations. In some ways it's kind of a colonialist approach. You're expected to be in this theater play they wrote. And you know, I live in the Middle East, and I'm aware of the politics. This is a political movie as far as I'm concerned. There are questions of culture, there are questions of the connection of Israel to the region, and how it's lost its connection through the process of capitalization and modernization. There's a very specific connection between the Israeli side and the Egyptian side in the movie. They share this same feeling of loss, nostalgia. If you listen close enough and you're acquainted with the cultural conflicts of the region, you would see the movie raises a lot of political questions. Not just the obvious ones about the conflict — I'm not saying those questions are not important, but it doesn't have the character saying, you know, "My brother was killed in the war," and then everyone can sleep comfortably in their beds having been reassured about what it was all about.

How has the film been received in Israel and Egypt?
Unfortunately, it cannot be shown in Egypt, formally anyway, but I've been reading quite a lot of articles from the Arab world about the movie, and I've gotten some good reactions. It's been reviewed quite well in Israel, and again, the nuances, they differ from place to place, but at the end of the day, the proportion of people loving it and not loving it is about the same all over.

Israel couldn't submit this film for an Oscar, because over half of it is in English. Were you disappointed?
I would like to say thank God, because without the Academy Award I've been flying all over the States for two weeks now and I miss home. If I had been a nominee, they would take me here for two months. I would kill myself.

Whither Wim?

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Over the past decade and a half, Wim Wenders has been responsible for one of the most peculiar filmographies ever assembled by a big name director. While Until the End of the World will always have its passionate defenders (including a few of us here at the Screengrab), it’s harder to make a case for such white elephants as The End of Violence and The Million Dollar Hotel. The director’s 2005 attempt at recapturing the spirit of Paris, Texas by teaming up again with screenwriter Sam Shepard for Don’t Come Knocking resulted in yet another moody, cryptic and meandering melodrama stuffed with oddball characters and dazzling visuals but short on narrative sense or recognizable human behavior.

Is there a quick fix that might set Wenders back on the path of relevance? This article in The Independent makes the case that getting the hell out of America might be a good start. It’s true that the U.S. has been the setting for some of Wenders’ least compelling work of late (the short jaunt to Cuba for 1999’s Buena Vista Social Club sure seemed to work wonders), and the director seems to have taken the hint with his new work-in-progress The Palermo Shooting, a “romantic thriller about a photographer that bounces between Germany and Sicily” that reunites Wenders with retirement-fund hawker Dennis Hopper. Still, it may not be fair to blame America for his follies; as the Independent piece hints, it might be about time for him to lose Bono’s phone number, too.

The Thirteen Greatest Long-Ass Movies of All Time, Part 1

Peter Smith — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 18:00:00 GMT

There are long movies, and there are really long movies. But there's also that notorious third category: The Long-Ass Movie. You know them. Usually they have to be split into two or three parts. Sometimes they have to be released as mini-series, with abbreviated versions put out in theaters. Occasionally they're hacked to pieces by studios and distributors, and become founts of controversy. More often that not, they're made by Germans. (We're not kidding. Check the list.) And most of the time, though sadly not always, they're great — ambitious, sprawling, uncompromising, and riveting. There's something really special about a long-ass movie, which, for our purposes, we're classifying as a film over four hours long. You never forget the experience of sitting through it. We certainly didn't. Here's our list of the Greatest Long-Ass Movies of All Time.

HAMLET (1996) Running time: 242 mins.

It's highly unlikely that anyone in Shakespeare's time actually saw Hamlet in full. As many critics and biographers have noted, the full text of The Bard's masterpiece would run over four hours if performed — a prohibitive length even today, despite such modern conveniences as lighting, electricity, and weekends. Clocking in at a limber four hours and two minutes, Kenneth Branagh's full-text version of the play struck a remarkable balance: an uncompromised performance that was also relentlessly cinematic. Some called Branagh's camera tricks show-offy, but he was simply following in the footsteps of one of the great linguistic show-offs of all time. The film's baroque visual style complemented the verbal gymnastics of Shakespeare's sweet tongue, and the result is not only the most faithful adaptation of Shakespeare ever filmed, but also, for our money, one of the absolute best.

UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD (1991) Running time: 280 mins.

Don't laugh. The two-hour, thirty-eight-minute U.S. theatrical release version of Wim Wenders's insanely ambitious sci-fi epic romance was a messy, albeit fascinating, journey through an ultra-globalized millennial world, with William Hurt and Solveig Dommartin bouncing around the planet recording with a revolutionary camera designed to help blind people see, accompanied to snippets of songs from the director's favorite rock acts (Nick Cave, R.E.M., U2, etc. — the soundtrack CD for this thing was a mainstay in many a contemporaneous college dorm room). The full, nearly-five-hour version, it turns out, wasn't nearly so messy. Rather, it was a sober, compelling, and visionary lament for the ways in which the oncoming technological transformation of society would transform human contact; Wenders's portrait of a hyper-connected world predated the Internet revolution. More importantly, it had even more of that awesome music.

1900 (1976) Running time: 315 mins.

Unjustly tarred on its initial release as a disaster, Bernardo Bertolucci's epic, a highly personal film despite its five-hour running time, has withstood the test of time far better than anyone would have expected. Its big-name cast, surprisingly, doesn't hold up particularly well — thanks to a sometimes shaky script and a not insignificant language barrier. But as an epic of great scope and a continuation of Bertolucci's tremendous visual-storytelling techniques, it's a raging success. Five hours fly by in the presence of such gorgeous filmmaking, thanks to the sensual, earthy tone of the film, the solid pacing, and the director's extreme care. Bertolucci apparently envisioned 1900 as his own response to the success of The Godfather — he would tell the modern history of Italy, just as Francis Ford Coppola had told the modern history of Italian-Americans, with a similar sense of range and scope and sweep. At the time of its release, no one would have credited Bertolucci's film as successful on that level, but if he'd had the foresight to do as Coppola did and release it as two separate films telling a single story, it's easy to imagine that 1900 would have enjoyed a much better critical reception.

NAPOLEON (1927) Running time: 330 mins.

Abel Gance was one of the towering French directors of the silent era, one of those pop-eyed geniuses whose only reservation about the movie medium was that it would be a shame if it turned out to have any boundaries at all. The massive epic that is now Gance's best-known work was originally intended to be only the first chapter in a multi-part historical epic consisting of six enormous features. You get a taste of what Gance hoped to achieve at the end of this picture, when three different projectors are used to show contrasting images on three screens, achieving something like a split screen image to the nth degree. Unfortunately, this silent landmark was completed the same year as The Jazz Singer, and Napoleon was released in America in a savagely truncated version that didn't even attempt to preserve the triple-projection imagery. Gance would continue to work, but most of his wildest ambitions would go unfunded and unfulfilled. He didn't become fully appreciated until the film historian Kevin Brownlow assembled a restored version that, with live musical accompaniment, played to ecstatic responses in packed theaters in 1980 and 1981. (Thankfully, Gance lived to see it — he died late in 1981.) That initial restoration ran five minutes short of four hours, but Brownlow kept going back, and by 2000 he had extended the film by another thirty-five minutes. It remains a thrilling mixture of audacious filmmaking, charming corn, and some very strange politics: Napoleon is so thrilled by the French Revolution that he sets out to bring democracy to other countries by invading them — evidence that the French, of all people, created the Bush Doctrine.

LA COMMUNE (PARIS, 1871) (2000) Running time: 345 mins.

As huge fans of Peter Watkins, we found that the number of Watkins-related items on Screengrab has been shockingly low of late, so we'll take any opportunity we can to plug his work. La Commune, his epic film about the Paris Commune of 1871, which in its full form runs five hours and forty-five minutes, is in many ways a summing-up of Watkins's career that tests the methods and techniques he'd developed over the course of more than thirty years. The Commune was a group of intellectuals, students and workers who took over a section of Paris in 1871 and formed an experimental government. True to form, Watkins took over an abandoned factory and staged the rise and fall of the "Commune" as covered and reported on by modern TV crews, who take turns interviewing the non-actors who represent the political leaders, the common people, the military forces working to smash the Commune, et al. He even tosses in a dandyish news anchor who spreads anti-Commune sentiment on a competing network, "Versailles TV." Ever the iconoclast, Watkins refuses to consign the fervor of Communards to the distant past, and by doing so he celebrates the revolutionary spirit both past and present, as when a discussion between the characters gives way to a contemporary debate about globalization. It may be the crowning achievement of one of the strangest film artists of his time — a man who sees himself as trying to bring history alive in order to educate the masses, but who has no apparent ability to make films in a way that might entice the masses to want to see them.

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Hat on Film

Peter Smith — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 18:00:00 GMT

The fall issue of The High Hat, a quarterly online journal of arts and culture, debuted on Wednesday. I'm one of the magazine’s editors, and my fellow Screengrab stalwart Phil Nugent is a regular contributor. Each issue of the Hat is built around a theme, and this time it’s "Places"; some of the current issue’s articles on how geographical space informs film include Erica Jahneke’s piece on the depiction of post-9/11 New York in film and television, film critic and Hick Flicks author Scott Von Doviak on Stephen King’s Maine on screen, and Shauna McKenna on Fellini’s Roma and Wenders’ Tokyo-Ga. Elsewhere, in the High Hat’s regular "Nitrate" film section, Gary Mairs discusses cinema’s 2007 "Summer of Loss"; Hayden Childs looks at Gerry, Grizzly Man and other recent films featuring man at the mercy of nature; Kevin Fullam reviews the treatment of mental illness on screen, and our own Phil Nugent pays tribute to George Segal, the "forgotten actor" of '70s cinema. — Leonard Pierce