tenco Reviews

Collision (2009)

Reminiscent of 1978 series Accident

[7/10 · 24 February 2022]

Fairly compelling drama with neat concept. Only thing is that the concept is disconcertingly close tothat of a 1978 series, the similarly titled Accident. Same repeated replay from different angles of a horrific motorway pileup, same structure of flashbacks interpersed with present investigation and unfoldng dramas of those affected, samemix of quotidian and high finance characters, even a similar guilty party fleeing into the woods from the scene of the crash. I liked both, the earlier one a bit more soap opera-like (a major incidental virtue being credits and title music from the folks who provided the same for Terry Nation's 1975 Survivors), this one more thriller-oriented. Not at the peak of deviser Anthony Horowitz's powers but good enough, especially if you haven't traveled this tangled wreck-filled stretch of road before.

Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914)

Chaplin and Normand at the movies

[1 November 2009]

Forget the Marie Dressler main plot, elephantine and lumbering as the star (on this occasion: she was great when movies finally allowed her to talk and properly preserve her theatrical identity). Throw out almost everything else, especially the usual Mack Sennett hash joint/beanery-with-continental-pretensions which holds the action and us captive for roughly half the running time, tricking the film out to feature length.

The claustrophobia and boredom these stage-bound scenes induce have the positive effect of making us fully appreciate everything that happens outdoors in lovely underdeveloped 1914 Southern California. The scenes with rascal Chaplin and his lovely accomplice Normand (a beautiful team) hiding out together from the rest of the movie in real locations provide delicious escape and a very different, carefree, style of acting and film-making, which can be reduced to the one wonderful scene (throw the rest away if only five minutes can be preserved) where Charlie and Mabel go to the movies only to find an on screen version of the very scam they've haplessly set into motion and have ducked into the dark to escape. It's valuable documentation of what movie-going looked like in 1914, fascinating in itself, but the comedy raises it higher. Mabel is the kind of audience member who emotes and comments as she watches. The fellow sitting next to her is the stern sort who gets annoyed and says "Shush!" As Chaplin and girlfriend watch further they realize they're seeing themselves, and Mabel can't help but notice and say it out loud (yet silently). As she does so, she and Chaplin, increasingly self-conscious about talking in the theater, notice that the shush-er beside them reveals a sheriff's star as he adjusts his waistcoat. Paranoia sets in and from this moment on klassic Keystone Kops seem to be lurking in the edges of everywhere they dream of transgressing. A lovely vignette and accompanying good bits and pieces.

Bitter Rice (1949)

Marxist Opiate for the Masses

[7 August 1999]

Riso Amaro is bizarrely and wonderfully paradoxical: a movie that decries and deconstructs Hollywood-style escapism at every turn, and ,yet, is itself as pure an opiate for the masses as is known to Italian cinema.

The closest comparison that occurs to me is Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. Both fetishize the technical and narrative magic of classic American films, the boundless optimism of the American dream that only soaring crane shots and panoramic vistas filled with casts of thousands (or at least a few dozen) can convey. Both fondly revisit every last genre movie cliche that can be crammed in edgewise. Yet, both are the work of foreigners asserting their alien and alienated status.

If your sensibility tends to dialectical Marxism, view Bitter Rice as a fascinating demonstration and critique of lumpen-proletariat "double-consciousness". If you could care less about such things, dig Silvana Mangano and Vittorio Gassman doing a rhumba, or the lovely exploited riceworkers hiking their skirts above their thighs and wading towards a watery catfight with non-union laborers ---or all the other delirious and visionary standout sequences that add up to Gone With the Wind as shot by Sam Fuller. Amazing stuff.

In a perfect world, this film would be available in the USA. It isn't at the moment. Slap some subtitles on it somebody, please!

Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

Leone's ultimate film

[16 May 1999]

Sergio Leone's films are all love letters to America, the American dreams of an Italian who grew up at the movies, who apprenticed with Wyler, and Aldrich, signed himself Bob Robertson, and gave us Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Charles Bronson as we know them. Sadly, America didn't always repay the compliment. Leone's were "spaghetti westerns", money makers to be sure, but deemed disrespectful of the great tradition of Ford, Walsh and Hathaway. Many critics and Holllywood insiders called his earlier Eastwood films cynical and violent bottom-line commercial exploitation. By the time that they caught on to Leone's genuine popular appeal, the director had already moved on. And, his Once Upon a Time in the West was damned as pretentious, bloated, self-indulgent: an art film disguised as a Western, the Heaven's Gate of its day. That film's canny blend of pop appeal and pure cinematic genius gradually dawned on the powers that be (or were), and helped give rise to the renaissance of American filmmaking in the early seventies. It is worth noting that The Godfather could have been made by Leone, had he chosen. Leone had been pitching a gangster film that would encompass generations, for a generation or two, himself. Rather than do the Puzo version finally thrown back at him, he waited an eternity, and finally realized this, his last finished project. That ellipse of a decade or so between conception and completed movie is paralleled in the film, itself, by Robert De Niro's ("Noodles'") opium dream of the American twentieth century, its promises, and betrayals. Naturally, Leone was betrayed, once again, himself, by America, and this truly amazing film, with its densely multi-layered, overlapping flashback structure was butchered upon its release, becoming a linear-plotted sub-Godfather knockoff in the process. Luckily, the critics had grown up enough in the meantime to finally get a glimmering of what Leone was up to, and demand restitution. Very few saw it properly in theaters, but the video version respects the director's intentions, more or less. Ironically, Leone had foreseen television screen aspect ratios as determining home viewing of the future, and abbreviated his usual wide screen format for this movie, so this most troubled last project was the first released on video to most properly resemble the true cinematic experience. For diehard fans of the Eastwood westerns impatient with this at first, watch those movies till you want and need more. This will eventually get to you. For art film fanatics who don't get the earlier Leones, travel in the reverse direction, and you will be pleasantly surprised. This is the movie that Leone spent a decade conceiving. It will deliver for decades of viewing to come.

Gesuzza the Garibaldian Wife (1933)

Pioneering Italian Cinema

[22 April 1999]

1860 is a minor masterpiece, and it exerted a fundamental influence on Italian made epic films that came afterwards: Visconti's Senso, Bertolucci's similarly titled 1900, even Sergio Leone's westerns, all owe something to director Blasetti's feel for sweeping popular spectacle somewhat underscored and undercut by irony and melancholy ambivalence. The story charts the desperate attempt of a Sicilian partisan to reach Garibaldi's headquarters in Northern Italy, and to petition the great revolutionary to rescue his besieged land. Along the way, the peasant hero encounters a full spectrum of Italian regional types from all social strata, and holding political opinions of every stripe. A long scene on board a train forces many such folk into close proximity, and is memorable for its humor, and densely packed sociological observation: this uneasy coalition of people who barely speak the same language reminds the viewer of Italy's continuing fragility as a nation. After many picaresque episodes, 1860 resolves with an extended and exciting battle. The style of the film is an interesting, eclectic, and fairly successful mix of techniques learned from the likes of Eisenstein (quick cuts, and odd angles abound), Westerns of the Raoul Walsh variety, All Quiet on the Western Front. 1860 is also one of a very small batch of movies from Thirties Italy that are easily available on tape (in the US), and, though somewhat dated, is definitely worth a look.

Aldebaran (1935)

Obscure Italian fascist escapist entertainment

[18 April 1999]

Aldebaran has been described as lost -or missing- by a number of writers. This extremely obscure Blasetti navy film is probably only known to a few insomniacs in Italy, who have seen it on late night television. That's where Aldebaran belongs. It is enough like a dream in its vaguely compelling but thoroughly senseless way to make one wonder the next morning if it ever really existed. For awhile, we seem to be watching an almost neorealist account of Fascist sailors shipping out for manouevres in the colonies. Documentary techniques prevail, a real ship is used, and many non-actors included. But, then Aldebaran suddenly becomes a rousing desert adventure like Gunga Din, and then, a Grand Hotel style glossy romance. The ship is parked somewhere between Abyssinia, and the isle of Capri, close enough to either that the hero can instantly doff his navy gear, don his tuxedo, and arrive at one or the other romantic subplot...by means of the telegraph, or the ship to shore radio? Blasetti never apologizes or explains, but rushes onward, with a lively Django Reinhardt-like score to help things along. Is Aldebaran speaking a known cinematic language? Did it seem any less strange, then? Blasetti was at the height of his flirtation with Il Duce, when this was made, but the two couldn't see eye to eye over what fascist film entertainment ought to be, and I suspect this movie is a schizoid compromise between the director's vigorous realism, and Mussolini's desire for "white telephone" escapist entertainment. Luckily, Blasetti got over his infatuation, and back to making good movies. This isn't one, but Aldebaran remains weirdly fascinating, and one of a kind.

Compañeros (1970)

Excellent Italian Western

[17 April 1999]

A great time-capsule of the kinds of mildly subversive escapism you could enjoy at the movies, back in 1970. Revolution was in the air, and (Cuban-born) Tomas Milian adds the necessary Castro/Che/Bob Dylan charisma as a peasant turned freedom fighter. Franco Nero is the super cool James Bond-like foreign agent. The two form a wary partnership to rescue the Professor (Fernando Rey) from the clutches of various bad guys, including Jack Palance at his twitchy best playing a cartoonish psycho, who feeds his beloved hawk the flesh of the peasants. A seriously attractive radicalized woman leads up her own gang of rebels. More a Mel Brooks, or Mad Magazine, spoof than a serious political tract, this Italian Western nonetheless has a lot of style, and much to recommend it. Morricone's music is like his Leone scores, but in comic overdrive...and satisfying. There's much inventive (mild/comedic) cruelty: Franco Nero maintaining his cool while buried up to his head and threatened by horses' hooves is both disturbing and very, very funny. And, director/writer Corbucci riffs expertly on Spaghetti Western conventions. You get the pleasure of a director who knows his genre, and knows that you do, too.