Shadows in the Cave Digest #04 - April 2010

Features
Charlie Chaplin Month -
Part I - The Life and Times of a Tramp
Part II - The Women
The Kid
A Woman in Paris
The Circus
The Great Dictator
Limelight
Other Films

Director in Focus: Brian DePalma -
Carrie
Sisters
Obsessed
Dressed to Kill

Hypothetical Film Festivals
Ernest Saves The Film Festival
80s Comedies for Grown Ups
Working Class Heroes

Reviews

DocuMondays
Kurt and Courtney
The Nomi Song
Harlan Ellison: Dreams With Sharp Teeth
Dirt! The Movie

Wild Card Tuesdays
Eve's Bayou
Dead Silence
Last Days of Disco
Nightmare on Elm Street

Newbie Wednesday
How To Train Your Dragon
Clash of the Titans
Kick Ass
The Imaginarum of Doctor Parnassus

Import Fridays
MicMacs
Mother (Movie of the Month!)
Lilya 4-Ever
The Lives of Others

Next Month: 
Asian Cinema Month!
Orson Welles!
Movie Musings!
And a very special birthday surprise!

Charlie Chaplin Month - Limelight

Limelight (1952)
Starring Charlie Chaplin, Claire Bloom, Nigel Bruce, Buster Keaton, Norman Lloyd, Sydney Earle Chaplin

During Chaplin's trip to Europe to promote this film, he had his re-entry to the Unites States revoked (he always legally remained a British citizen). It was the height of Red Panic at the time in the US and Chaplin had never been shy about voicing his personal opinions on the treatment of the working class. Chaplin's long standing tensions with J. Edgar Hoover led to his re-entry papers being revoked and he decided to set up his home in Switzerland. This would be where he would live for the rest of his days and this film (while not his last) would stand as his symbolic goodbye to cinema.

Newbie Wednesday - The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009, dir. Terry Gilliam)
Starring Christopher Plummer, Heath Ledger, Lily Cole, Andrew Garfield, Verne Troyer, Tom Waits, Johnny Depp, Jude Law, Colin Farrell, Peter Stormare

After filming the first half of this picture, director Gilliam learned the tragic news that Heath Ledger had died due to an accidental drug overdose. Gilliam is no stranger to films having to overcome obstacles before their release. His 1985 picture Brazil was the victim of an unexcited studio and Gilliam had to break the law to get his version of the picture shown. His attempt to make a film version of Don Quixote at the beginning of the century was ultimately scrapped when financial and natural conditions fought against him. With Imaginarium Gilliam found a way that the film could continue without Ledger's presence and it hinges on the movie's core theme: Imagination.

Wild Card Tuesday - A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984, dir. Wes Craven)
Starring Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund, Johnny Depp, Ronee Blakely

I remember the first time I ever heard about Freddy Krueger. I was 8 or 9 year old and sitting in my backyard in Smyrna where a neighbor kid was describing the R-rated horror films his parents had let him watch. Nothing stood out about Freddy that was too frightening to me, I do remember the description of the glove sounding creepy. Now it is twenty years later and I am finally seeing the film that was described to me all those years ago. So how does Wes Craven's 1980s horror classic stack up?

DocuMondays - Dirt! The Movie

Dirt! The Movie (2009, dir. Bill Benenson, Gene Rosow, Eleonore Dailly)
Narrated by Jamie Lee Curtis

There's is something about the smell of healthy soil that is unlike anything else. My father got his degree in wildlife biology and worked for the Illinois Department of Agriculture for many years so soil and gardening and nature were a big part of my early years, whether I liked it or not. As I have gotten older I've become interested in nature from a global perspective, particularly the way our agriculture has slowly shifted into the hands of a few private corporate interests and away from typical citizen run farms. This documentary focuses on the impact of these practices on our soil and where this practices will inevitably leads us. It doesn't sound all too excitement but the style of the film's presentation keeps your attention.

Hypothetical Film Festival #12 - Working Class Heroes

Film has had a strong focus on the lives of the working class since the silent pictures and work of Charlie Chaplin. Through fictional stories and hard hitting documentaries cinema has taken a look at the struggles to feed, clothe, and house a family in America and while, the images are not always pretty or uplifting, they are always infused with truth.

The Grapes of Wrath (1940, dir. John Ford)
Starring Henry Fonda, John Carradine, Jane Darwell, Russell Simpson

Adapted from the incredibly popular John Steinbeck novel, John Ford was forced to take the film in a less bleak, but still as honest as he could it make it direction. Tom Joad (Fonda) has just been released from prison and returns to his family's homestead in Oklahoma to find them victims of the Dust Bowl. The Joads pack up and head towards California where they believe their fortunes will change. Ford removed or was forced to remove Steinbeck's more socialist themes which is a shame. The film still tries to look at the hardships of the the Okies and the utter lack of hope in their struggle to stay above drowning. John Carradine has always been my favorite as Jim Casy, the wandering preacher.

Director in Focus: Brian DePalma - Dressed to Kill

Dressed to Kill (1980)
Starring Angie Dickinson, Michael Caine, Nancy Allen, Dennis Franz, Keith Gordon

I have said it many times about de Palma already, but the man was obsessed with emulating Hitchcock. Here in his blatant nod to Psycho, we have a film that stays above water simply because of its stylistic flourishes. While much more entertaining and better at keeping my attention than Obsession, it lacks some of the depth of a picture like Sisters or Carrie. And there are moments that trend uncomfortably into homophobic territory as well as scenes that could be interpreted as heavily misogynistic. While I don't think De Palma hates women (they feature heavily in all the features I've seen so far), I do think is highly attuned to the traditional portrayal of women in cinema as constant victims.

Import Fridays - The Lives of Others

The Lives of Others (2006, dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck)
Starring Ulrich Muhe, Sebastian Koch, Martina Gedeck, Ulrich Tukur, Thomas Thieme

What if we were able to see Big Brother not as a faceless entity, but as a series of human cogs that make up the machine? And, what if we could see each of those cogs, doing their duty in the name of the state, as an individual human being who possesses empathy and compassion. This is the scenario this Academy Award winning German seeks to explore the humanity of a "Statsi Man", one of the grey men who did the dirty work of the German Democratic Republic so that the authorities could successfully arrest and detain suspected dissidents.

Charlie Chaplin Month - The Great Dictator

The Great Dictator (1940)
Starring Charlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Reginald Gardiner

The comparison was all because of the toothbrush mustache. That little flourish is what linked Charlie Chaplin and Adolf Hitler at the time. Chaplin was disgusted by Hitler, and the way the American and British governments tried to keep him happy or ignore what he was doing at the time. It was also noted that Hitler was jealous of Chaplin's popularity during a Berlin visit the actor made. To further rub it in, Chaplin wrote, directed and produced The Great Dictator, a send up of the Nazi actions in the build up to World War II.

Newbie Wednesday - Kick Ass

Kick Ass (2010, dir. Matthew Vaughn)
Starring Aaron Johnson, Nicolas Cage, Chloe Moretz, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Mark Strong

There's a sort of geek wish deep down in those that read comics that somehow, someway they could don a cape and cowl and fight the criminal element of this world. The superhero idea goes all to the mythological heroes and into figures like King Arthur and Robin Hood to the Three Musketeers and the pulp mystery men and finally into comics. So our protagonist proposes a very legitimate question early on "How come no one has ever tried to be superhero?" It's obvious that there are plenty of crazy people in this world and it comes as no surprise that there actually *are* people who have tried this. You can check them out at the World Superhero Registry. So how does the hero of our film try to tackle the nuances of masked crime fighting?

Wild Card Tuesday - The Last Days of Disco

The Last Days of Disco (1998, dir. Whit Stillman)
Starring Chloe Sevigny, Kate Beckinsale, Robert Sean Leonard, Mackenzie Astin, Chris Eigeman, Tara Subkoff, Matt Keeslar, Jennifer Beals

If watching the burgeoning yuppies of early 1980s Manhattan sitting around vapidly waxing philosophic about the inanities of their lives doesn't sound appealing to you then you may want to skip this film. Despite its title its not at all about disco really. Its about a generation of people who came of age in the 1970s and are focused on self-gratification and the hierarchies and status related to social life in New York. Another of way of looking at it, and how director Whit Stillman was thinking when he made the film, is that this is contemporary take on the comedy of manners genre.

DocuMondays - Harlan Ellison: Dreams With Sharp Teeth

Harlan Ellison: Dreams With Sharp Teeth (2008, dir. Erik Nelson)
Featuring Harlan Ellison, Robin Williams, Neil Gaiman, Peter David, Ronald D. Moore

One of the first things you learn about Ellison in this documentary is that once he was so pissed with a television executive that he boxed up a dead groundhog and mailed it to the man. Ellison made sure that he paid the cheapest postage possibly so that it would take upwards of a week to reach the man and be sufficiently bloated and rotting. This is tempered with his friend Neil Gaiman saying that Ellison's entire life's work is one large piece of performance art. That it is not about his 1000+ short stories or numerous award-winning teleplays, but its about the cultivation of this quick-witted curmudgeonly persona.

Hypothetical Film Festival #12 - 80s Comedies for Grown-Ups

A major part of 1980s cinema were high school comedies. From Fast Times at Ridgemont High to Ferris Bueller, teens were a prominent element of the successful comedy films. However, there are a lot of comedies, often overlooked, from the 1980s that stand as some of the best ever made. This film festival is devoted those movies:

All of Me (1984, dir. Carl Reiner)
Starring Steve Martin, Lily Tomlin, Victoria Tennant

Roger Cobb (Martin) is a successful lawyer who is called in to help with the final arrangements of the eccentric, dying heiress Edwina (Tomlin). Through a mystic mix-up Edwina's dying soul ends up taking over the right side of Roger's body. The rest of the film hinges on Martin's excellent physical comedy chops. While Tomlin provides the voice in Roger's head, there are moments where Martin must switch back and forth between Edwina and Roger in an argument, and then have them physically fight. All of this takes place with just Martin on screen. It was also the fourth teaming of Martin and director Carl Reiner, and the two work wonderfully together.

Director in Focus: Brian DePalma - Obsession

Obsession (1976)
Starring Cliff Robertson, Genevieve Bujold, John Lithgow

Throughout his early career, de Palma was either referred to as a director who made homages to Hitchcock, or was blatantly ripping the master director of thrillers off. And its a very fine line de Palma walks, particularly in this melodrama that is an obvious reference to both Rebecca and Vertigo. In fact, Hitchcock himself was reportedly furious that de Palma's Obsession was so incredibly close to Rebecca. And its interesting to note that Hitch's trademark composer, Bernard Herrmann, once again composes the score to a de Palma thriller. So how does this furiously melodramatic Hitchcock knock-off stack up?

Import Fridays - Lilya-4-Ever

Lilya-4-Ever (2002, dir. Lukas Moodysson)
Starring Oksana Akinshina, Artyom Bogucharsky, Pavel Ponomaryov

A young girl, face swollen with bruises, cut across her lip, runs through the overcast streets of an anonymous European city. The streets are littered with refuse; broken bottles, crumpled and empty chip bags. She stops on an overpass and stares down at the cars zooming by below. This is how director Lukas Moodysson introduces us to Lilya, an 16 year old Estonian girl trying to overcome a hopeless existence she was born into and unlikely to get out of. Moodysson is grabbing the audience by the scruff of the neck and forcing them to watch this very real tragedy unfolding before their eyes.

Charlie Chaplin Month - The Other Films

While I am giving in-depth reviews to the Chaplin films I haven't seen, I would be wrong in leaving out films of his I have seen previously, especially because they are some of his best work.

The Gold Rush (1925)
Starring Charlie Chaplin, Mack Swain, Georgia Hale

Made after the box office failure that was A Woman of Paris, Rush has Chaplin conjuring up some of his most iconic comedy moments. The dancing rolls bit, which has been referenced continuously in pop culture since. At one point starving miner imagines Chaplin transforming into a human sized turkey. We also have Chaplin boiling and eating a shoe. Chaplin originally intended to shoot the film on location in Alaska but nature had other plans. There is one on location shot in the film and its a gorgeous one. The rest was filmed on Chaplin's United Artists sound stages. If you are looking to make a list of must see films for historical significance, this is a must for that list.

Charlie Chaplin Month - The Circus

The Circus (1928, dir. Charlie Chaplin)
Starring Charlie Chaplin, Merna Kennedy, Al Ernest Garcia, Harry Crocker

This was to be the last true silent film made by Chaplin. The era of the Talkie had begun and audiences were no longer content to have their actors speechless. Chaplin's following films would have elements of silent pictures in them and could easily be categorized that way, but make use of sound. Chaplin leaves the silent era with a bang, though. He pulls out all the stops, referencing the theater acts of his youth and adding the trademark Chaplin twist to them.

Newbie Wednesday - Clash of the Titans (2010)

Clash of the Titans (2010, dir. Louis Leterrier)
Starring Sam Worthington, Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, Gemma Artherton, Jason Flemyng

When I was 8 years old I went through the entire Webster's Dictionary so I could catalog the Greek gods and monsters listed therein. Afterwards, I got the idea the library might have books on these things, and from there I devoured the stories of Greek mythology. Once, while visiting Nashville's local to scale replica of the Parthenon around the age of 10, I began telling my mom and visiting aunt whom all the figures in the statues and carvings were. An man touring the structure began following and listening and remarked to my mom "Your son knows a lot!" I tell you these things to show that I am onboard when I hear about films based around Greek myths. How does director Louis Leterrier's (The Transporter, The Incredible Hulk) remake of the 1981 fantasy film stack up?

Wild Card Tuesday - Dead Silence

Dead Silence (2007, dir. James Wan)
Starring Ryan Kwanten, Amber Valetta, Donnie Wahlberg

There is just something frightening about facsimiles of humans (i.e. dolls, dummies, mannequins). They have been fodder for horror since the 1920s when both Lon Chaney and Erich von Stroheim played ventriloquists using their wooden cohorts for nefarious purposes. This film seeks to find itself amongst the best of this style of horror and is helmed by the creative team behind the Saw franchise. It begins with a promising opening sequence that evokes a strong atmosphere, but eventually falls into the same chasms contemporary horror can't seem to help but seek out. A lot style and technique over any substance.

DocuMondays - Kurt and Courtney

Kurt and Courtney (1998, dir. Nick Broomfield)
Featuring Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, and a cast of thousands...of junkies

I was thirteen when Kurt Cobain killed himself, and honestly the front man for Nirvana existed on my periphery. The whole grunge scene has never been a music genre I enjoyed, I'm more of a 90s BritPop fan (Oasis, Blur, The Verve). But I can understand why the movement was so big, as it was a big deviation from the musical norms of the time. This docu, by Brit filmmaker Broomfield seeks to stir up some of the conspiracy theories surrounding Cobain's death and in the end isn't really about Kurt or Courtney, but about famewhoredom.

Hypothetical Film Festival #11 - Ernest Saves the Film Festival

Yes, it's a film festival dedicated to one of the greatest thespians of the late 20th century: Mr. Jim Varney aka Ernest P. Worrell. KnowhutImean?

Ernest Goes to Camp (1987, dir. John R. Cherry III)
Starring Jim Varney, John Vernon, Iron Eyes Cody, Gailard Sartain

The Ernest character got his start as a pitchman for various local businesses in the Middle Tennessee and Kentucky areas. Eventually there were a series of straight to video skit compilation films that made way for this first theatrical endeavor. Ernest is a camp handyman, who wants to be a counselor. He gets his chance with a group of juvenile delinquents which leads to a series of slapstick sight gags. Meanwhile, an evil mining corporation wants to buy and shut down the camp to get to a rich vein of the fictional petrocite underneath it. Ernest rallies the juvies together for a big showdown with the corporate head, where our hero displays the Native American combat skills he learned along the way. A great start to the Ernest franchise.

Director in Focus: Brian DePalma - Sisters

Sisters (1973)
Starring Margot Kidder, Jennifer Salt, Charles Durning, William Finley

Sisters is director De Palma standing up and yelling, "I love Hitchcock!". He got Bernard Hermann, Hitch's composer and most famous for the the slashing string crescendo of Psycho, he gives us murder enigmatically glimpsed from an apartment window, he gives us crazy camera tricks such as split screen wherein figures meet between both views, and many more flourishes that express his admiration for the great suspense director that Hitchcock was. And this film is as disturbing, if not more than Hitch at his most macabre.

Import Fridays - Mother (2009)

Mother (2009, dir. Joon-ho Bong)
Starring Hye-ja Kim, Bin Won, Ku Jin, Yoon-jae Moon

The premise of Joon-Ho Bong's Mother doesn't seem to be anything out of the ordinary from any other murder mystery flick: A concerned mother whose mentally disabled son is accused of murder decides she will pursue the case the police refuse to and find her son innocent. In the hands of Joon-Ho Bong, whose 2006 film The Host similarly played with genre expectations, this becomes a taught Hitchcock-style thriller.

Charlie Chaplin Month - The Women

Charlie Chaplin had a very tumultuous relationship with the women in his life, and seemed to be frozen in a moment from his youth when it came to them all. The woman considered to be his first love was a dancer named Hetty Kelly, whom he met when he was 19 and she 15. Eventually, he worked up the courage to ask her to marry him and she refused causing Chaplin to become despondent and never see her again. It was reported that in 1921, when he learned she died from the influenza epidemic that devastated the globe, he was  heartbroken. That 15 year old girl seemed to be an image in Chaplin's mind that guided all his relationships. He would become involved with many a 15 or 16 year old looking to get her break in Hollywood through the actor and more than not these relationships ended in publicly sour notes.

Charlie Chaplin Month - A Woman of Paris

A Woman of Paris (1923, dir. Charlie Chaplin)
Starring Edna Purviance, Carl Miller, Adolphe Menju, Lydia Knott

This is not the sort of film you expect to see in a series on Charlie Chaplin. The main reason being Chaplin only makes an uncredited cameo, face away from the camera as a bellhop. The second reason being this is a very straight drama, with a few moments of humor woven into it. A Woman of Paris was Chaplin's first production with United Artists, an independent film production company founded by he, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffith. Because there was no studio pressuring Chaplin to make a slapstick comedy, he decided to write, direct and produce a film for his longtime romantic interest, Edna Purviance.

Newbie Wednesday - How To Train Your Dragon

How To Train Your Dragon (2010, dir. Dean DeBlois, Chris Sanders)
Starring Jay Baruchel, America Ferrara, Gerard Butler, Craig Ferguson, Jonah Hill, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, T.J. Miller, Kristen Wiig

In 1981 we got Dragonslayer, which was a step up in the medieval film genre in terms of effects. In 1996 Dragonheart was released, and while its hard to dislike a film with both David Thewlis and Sean Connery, the picture never stuck with me as a re-watchable one. In 2002, the movie was Reign of Fire...and well, lets try to forget that one. The latest dragon-centric film is Pixar Animation's How To Train Your Dragon, from the writer/director team behind Lilo and Stitch and Mulan. And how does this flick stack up against its fire-breathing brethren?

Wild Card Tuesday - Eve's Bayou

Eve's Bayou (1997, dir. Kasi Lemmons)
Jurnee Smollet, Samuel L. Jackson, Meagan Good, Lynn Whitfield, Debii Morgan, Diahann Carroll, Vondie-Curtis Hall, Branford Marsalis

The thesis statement of Eve's Bayou is declared early on in the main character's voice over as an adult, recalling the events that transpired in her 10th year. "Memory is a selection of images, some elusive, others printed indelibly on the brain". This is a story told through the filter of years gone by and originally seen through the eyes of a child. Adult Eve tells us that when she was 10 she killed her father and the film gives us a couple explanations for this, emphasizing the distortion that occurs as a result of experiencing time passing.

DocuMondays - The Nomi Song

The Nomi Song (2004, dir. Andrew Horn)

In 1963, author Walter Tevis wrote the novel The Man Who Fell to Earth, and 13 years later David Bowie starred in the film adaptation. Little did anyone realize that the premise of the story: an alien being appears out of nowhere and goes on to achieve fame before dying prematurely was to be copied by a fellow Earthling who would lose his identity in the alien persona. Nomi's story was much like the operas he loved, very beautiful at its heights, but destined to end in tragedy.

Director in Focus: Brian DePalma - Carrie

Some pre-conceived notions about Brian DePalma: Before I get into the review of this first picture in the DePalma series, I will address some ideas I have about this director. Of Mr. DePalma's films I have seen are Phantom of the Paradise, Raising Cain, Mission: Impossible, and Mission to Mars. I wouldn't say DePalma is a director I actively dislike, I just have never been overly impressed with him. Without further ado, my first review:

Carrie (1976)
Starring Sissy Spacek, Amy Irving, Piper Laurie, Betty Buckley, Nancy Allen, John Travolta, William Katt, Edie McClure, PJ Soles

I was homeschooled through my entire elementary, middle, and high school grades. So, I was never subject to the sort of direct bullying I've seen in countless films and television shows. I definitely was raised in a sporadically religious home and was a quiet kid, so I felt some connections to the character of Carrie White. My ideas about this film from its osmosis into popular culture was that Carrie is a "weirdo" character. I found myself pleasantly surprised by the depth actually brought to her in the film.

Import Fridays - MicMacs

MicMacs/MicMacs a tire largiot (2009, dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet)
Starring Danny Boon, Andre Dussollier, Nicolas Marie, Yolande Moreau, Julie Ferrier, Omar Sy, Dominique Pinon, Michel Cremades, Marie-Julie Baup, Jean Pierre Marielle

Very few directors working today have as strong a sense of visuals than Jean-Pierre Jeunet. He is as influenced as much by the French New Wave as he by Golden Age Hollywood, and this mash up creates aesthetically clever cinema. But does Jeunet tell interesting stories with well-developed, fleshed out characters? That is a good question.

Charlie Chaplin Month - The Kid

The Kid (1921, dir. Charlie Chaplin)
Starring Charlie Chaplin, Jackie Cooper

The experience of being taken from his mother and placed in a home for destitute children had a profound effect on Charlie Chaplin, and its apparent that those traumatizing childhood experiences had a strong influence on The Kid. Chaplin also seemed to always identify more with the people living at the bottom rung of society's ladder and that can be seen here as well. At time maudlin and over sentimental, The Kid withstands being simply a mushy film by delivering strong laughs and telling an honest story.

Charlie Chaplin: The Life and Times of a Tramp

Everyone knows the image. Derby, toothbrush mustache, bamboo cane, tattered tramp clothes, the penguin-like waddle. He was the world's first "movie star" and the first actor to ever be paid a million dollars. His life was an uneven one, to say the least. The American public fell in love with him in the 1910s, only to blacklist him forty years later. He is arguably the great comic actor of all-time, and he has influence comedy on film ever since.