Into the Vaults

All righty, I ain’t dead, I’ve just been doing a lotta DVD reviewing for Apollo Guide. Here are a few of the titles I’ve tackled. When the full reviews are up at Apollo, I’ll post the appropriate links.

Death in Venice (1971, Italy, Luchino Visconti) AKA Ode on a Grecian God
Strangely beautiful film inspired by Thomas Mann’s highly-respected novel, itself loosely based on the life of the same Gustav Mahler whose exquisite 3rd and 5th symphonies grace the film’s soundtrack. Visconti’s self-conscious artistry emblematic of his later post-realism career’s interest in the complex relationship of art, the artist and his audience. The film centers on Gustav, the ageing protagonist, and his obsession with an androgynous teenaged Adonis, but the real star here is Visconti’s eye with the camera and ear for music. Combining talents with dp Pasquale de Santis, Luchino crafts a film of rare visual magnificence, that is an obvious precursor of Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. Like Visconti himself, Gustav is born into privilege, so the film rings with authenticity. This is, as they say in the thieving business, an inside job. Gustav’s aloof and disengaged attempts to retreat from the harsh realities of a world full of erosion and destruction and into the ideals that this beautiful young boy represents seem doomed to be met with disappointment. A film that is all about ideas and atmosphere, Visconti delivers the goods with seeming ease. Some of the symbolism is a tad pat (the sands of the hourglass) or cute (the backward-spewing black smoke of the steamer), and the performance of Bogarde as an ageing aesthete seems a little stilted and uncertain at times. Still, the film is a sumptuous visual feast, a well-told tale of a tortured artist’s Sturm und Drang.

Score: 80/100

I am Curious (Yellow) (1967, Sweden, Vilgot Sjoman) AKA Am I Blue?

There’s a dark irony to be found somewhere in the fact that I am Curious (Yellow) gained much of its reputation as a community standards-challenging pornographic film, but endures now mostly as a period piece for those who are interested in the chronology of the deterioration of the Hayes studio code that had guided cinematic depiction of sexuality for nearly four decades. However, removed from this intriguing historical context, I am Curious (Yellow) is not particularly riveting or shocking filmmaking. In fact, while there is plenty of full frontal nudity going on here, the movie is much more explicitly pedantic than erotic. The film’s most interesting achievement is the unusual melding of fictional and documentary elements. Sjoman wants to raise class consciousness in Sweden through filming a documentary on the subject, and in a nice bit of meta-filmmaking, while he is making the film, we are engaged in the activity of watching them make the film, until the lines between reality and fiction blur to indecipherability. Our perceptions are challenged, and the uncertainty of the reality of what we are observing is clearly part of Vilgot’s point as he asks us to consider the role that mass media manipulation plays in our understanding of the world. Despite these interesting achievements, I am Curious (Yellow) is not a particularly compelling film, as its self-awareness and proselytizing keep us at an ironical distance, and the full-frontal nudity that once made the film so notorious seems awfully tame by today’s standards. As a result, I suspect that I am Curious Yellow will remain largely, well, a curiosity.

Score: 68/100

American Gun (2002, USA, Alan Jacobs) AKA Jamie’s Gotta Gun

American Gun is a film that makes you feel kind of bad to criticize. It’s intentions are good, at least if you share the film’s wariness of guns, but the execution is so earnest as to be joyless, and so blunt as to be worthy of an After School television special. Rife with clichés, such as the main character, played by James Coburn in his last screen performance, suffering from a crisis of faith when a close family member is shot to death, and burdened by some truly cringe-inducing narrative devices, such as having same said character write letters to this dearly departed individual as he criss-crosses the country looking for all the people who ever owned the gun that did this dirty deed, American Gun is far too self-conscious and self-congratulatory to affect its audience at anything more than the purely political level. Director Jacobs also resorts to the dreadful gimmick of withholding key information in order to manufacture a "potent" climax, but for a film that hints at a Searchers or Taxi Driver-like interest in studying obsession, the final plot twist reveals Jacobs true intent. In the end, he wants to shock us, and drive home his agenda with all the subtlety of a Liberace concert. However, rather than illuminating the issues at play in the film, Jacob’s cheap ploy detracts from our ability to understand Coburn’s character and undermines the themes you’d think he’d want to be promoting.

Score: 53/100