Action Movies Used To Be Better, True Lies of Ingmar Bergman, "The Three Stooges" are Funnier Than Jerry Lewis, and The Dude Still Abides - My Week in Movies 1/23-1/29 (Part 2)
(1/23/21 - 1/29/21) Alright well, that wraps it up for last week. Enjoy.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
Director: Steven Spielberg
Writer: George Lucas, Menno Meyjes, Jeffrey Boam
Cinematography: Douglas Slocombe
Music: John Williams
Like what I wrote about Hard Boiled (1992) last week, what’s left to really say about this one? It’s a banger and still a ton of fun even a decade after my first viewing. There’s no reason at this point to go over the plot or the themes, so I’ll just make a few points:
This film looks spectacular at all times. I had trouble picking a screenshot to represent The Last Crusade because it’s so consistently good looking. He worked on Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Temple of Doom, so he certainly had a hand in keeping each film so stylistically coherent. Perhaps his absence on the famously despised Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) can partially explain its disconnected feeling from the rest of the franchise.
Both the action and comedy is ramped up in this compared to previous Jones outings. Much of the humor relies on the remarkable chemistry between Harrison Ford and Sean Connery. Quite frankly, the jokes and dialogue felt cornier than I remembered but are saved by the actors. I think they went too far into comic relief territory with Brody, though it still mostly works. Much of the action relies on Indiana Jones being looser with the bullets this time around. I forgot how violent this movie is, especially the famous tank chase scene, and wonder why they stopped allowing blood in PG-13 movies.
Speaking of the tank chase sequence, man, does this movie have some solid set-pieces. Right off the bat, you get Young Indiana Jones hopping across train cars in his first attempt to reclaim sacred artifacts from profiteering bandits, which cuts to an even wilder set piece where he battles bad guys on a sinking ship. The Venician catacombs give us a few classic cobwebs and skeletons before a boat chase ensues. Then, Jones Junior and Senior's reunification leads to a German castle being burned down and a high-speed motorcycle chase. Then Indy gets Hitler’s autograph at a Nazi book-burning party. Then he throws the Main Nazi Bad Guy out of a blimp, and there’s a dogfight, then Jones Senior takes down a German fighter plane with a flock of seagulls. Another quick gunfight, and we arrive at the tank scene. Shockingly, that mass of action is actually very well-paced and basically makes sense.
The consensus opinion seems that Marion (Karen Allen) is the superior Indy Girl, but I’ll argue that Elsa (Allison Doody) is at least her equal. There’s some great complexity to her character as an academic who lusts after the Grail and just rides with the Nazi’s because, well, look at the money and manpower they’re willing to throw at it!
I want to see blockbusters like this again—wild adventures with magnetic leads and a story that takes itself seriously while also having fun. I want to see action sequences that pack a real punch without being sadistic, and I also want to see movies that take a break from the action for a while to let us get to know the characters, thereby raising the emotional stakes for when they get guns pointed at them. It’s not like this is a perfect movie or anything; it’s just that I can’t imagine anything like it being a hit today. Not to sound like an old man or anything!
So that’s what I think of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, a movie I watched 100 times when I was 12 and once in the past decade. Nostalgia and practical effects are powerful drugs, folks!
Persona (1966)
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Writer: Ingmar Bergman
Cinematography: Sven Nykvist
Music: Lars Johan Werle
Throughout this movie, I kept thinking to myself, “So that’s how David Lynch happened!”
—Spoilers Follow—
Alma (Bibi Andersson) is to Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive (2001) as Elisabet (Liv Ullman) is to Laura Harring. The (seemingly) innocent nurse and the glamorous woman with a mysterious mental illness. Then there are the opening shots of a projector lighting up and a film reel playing that runs directly parallel to the opening of INLAND EMPIRE (2006), with its projector’s light cutting through the darkness and the Axxon N. record spinning. Another example: the cut to Bergman and the cameraman towards the end and the slow pullback towards the end of EMPIRE to reveal the camera filming Laura Dern’s death scene. I’m not saying that Lynch plagiarized Bergman at all, but his (best) work is in direct conversation with this film. This makes sense seeing as both films deal with the idea of playing a part in life and onscreen/onstage.
For a film this strange and Brechtian, it’s surprisingly simple to follow. There’s no narrator explaining everything or some neat and tidy Psycho (1960) ending, far from it. Persona leaves the overwhelming majority of its secrets to the viewer’s personal investigation. But it’s certainly nowhere as bewildering as INLAND EMPIRE or even Kaufman’s I’m Thinking Of Ending Things (2020), which I discussed briefly in my last post. The mystery of Elisabet’s silence is a compelling one, and one finds themselves almost merging mentally with Alma as she tries to work it out. Is it just another performance, a cry for attention? Or is it the result of trauma and a cry for help? As The Doctor (Margaretha Krook) asserts, is it an attempt to strip away all the performances of life? The white lies and the real ones, the fiction she brings to life on stage, and the demeanor she must adopt in public in private life to fit a star's persona.
Again, not unlike Lynch’s work, Persona seems to work primarily on an emotional level. There’s a certain unnerving undercurrent that flows through it, a sense that something is wrong, and it has to do with reality itself. The nurse meant to heal the mentally damaged patient is maddened by the job, driven to beatings and self-harm. She desperately tries to get Elisabet to talk. Only when she nearly douses her in boiling water does she break her silence: “No, don’t!” As a viewer, I felt like this was a breakthrough of some sort. I felt that now I’ll be able to understand. But the silence resumes, and the frustration as well. When Elisabet laughs at Alma, is it because she’s insane? Or because her performance is so resolute?
Not too long after the boiling water incident, Alma asks:
“Is it really so important not to lie, to tell the truth, to speak in a genuine tone of voice? Can a person really live without babbling away, without making up excuses and evading things? Isn’t it better to just let yourself be silly and sloppy and dishonest? Maybe a person gets better by just letting herself be who she is.”
What persona is genuine? If you are naturally a liar, then are the lies genuine? Acting is a form of lying, of course, as one presents themselves as something they are not. In fact, the more convincing the lie is in a performance, the better the performance is! So perhaps these periodic reminders by Bergman that we are, in fact, watching a movie is his attempt to reach a point of cinematic honesty. If we all agree this is a film, then the lie is rendered powerless. And yet, Alma and Elisabet remain so real as you watch, so true that the Brechtian honesty appears fruitless.
Maybe we just like the lies better than reality?
The Big Lebowski (1998)
Director: Joel & Ethan Coen
Writer: Joel & Ethan Coen
Cinematography: Roger Deakins
Music: Carter Burwell
On Christmas Morning four or five years ago, my parents gave me a copy of The Big Lebowski script, probably due to my constant declaration that it is the best-written comedy of all time. Like all Coen Brothers movies, the characters are so well-drawn and distinctive that you understand them within their first minute of screentime. This can be said ten times over regarding their free-flowing psychedelic masterpiece. The Dude. Walter. Maude. Donny. The Nihilists. Bunny. Jesus. Some dominate the runtime, and others have no more than five minutes onscreen. But you remember them all.
I’ve loved this film for many, many years, and it has been a staple among my friends when we get together and want to put on something familiar. That said, I will hold off on my deeper thoughts about Lebowski for another piece that I will post shortly. You see, last Thursday a local bar was running a movie night and chose to screen this very film. So, my girlfriend, two of my friends, and yours truly got to go to some approximation of a movie theater for the first time in over a year.
The White Russians were flowing, the company was good, and everyone had a great time. The next night, I enjoyed another style of communal theater-going when Justin Decloux of The Important Cinema Club podcast hosted a double-bill live screening of The Ladies Man (1961) by Jerry Lewis and Arahan (2004) by South Korean director Ryoo Seung-Wan on Twitch. I'm currently working on a piece about how communal "theatergoing" can happen during this pandemic we're all wrapped up in, and will expand on my love for Lebowski in that post.
The Ladies Man (1961)
Director: Jerry Lewis
Writer: Jerry Lewis, Bill Richmond
Cinematography: W. Wallace Kelley
Music: Walter Scharf
NOTE: I wrote more about this than the next two films because I felt the need to weigh in on someone as Big as Jerry Lewis. Read the next two entries to understand why I mentioned that.
I must admit that this is the first Jerry Lewis film I’ve seen besides The King Of Comedy (1982), but that doesn’t really count. That was a Scorsese picture through and through, with Robert De Niro at the center and Lewis playing it as straight as it gets. But Lewis never entered my field of vision. Perhaps it’s because The Ladies Man is older than my parents, but then again, I sought out films like Sunset Boulevard (1950) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940) years ago and on my own. And I still crack up watching “The Three Stooges” shorts just like I did when I was ten years old, so it’s not like I don’t enjoy slapstick, funny faces, and wacky voices. Somehow, Jerry Lewis’ work just never felt like something I needed to engage with.
Apparently, Jerry Lewis was a pretty big deal back in the day. Such a big deal, in fact, that for his follow-up to 1960’s Cinderfella, he had a $500,000 ($4.3 million in 2019) dollhouse of a set built for himself. It’s really a stunning creation, one of the most inventive and perfectly executed cinematic go-for-brokes that I’ve ever seen. The camera floats freely over the vast collection of three-walled rooms that fill the mansion-turned-boarding-house of kindly widower Miss Helen Mellenwellen (Helen Traubel), allowing long takes and furious chases to unfold seamlessly. In Part 1 of my weekly roundup, I noted that the sausage factory office set in Tout Va Bien (1972) was clearly influenced by The Ladies Man, though it was done for very different reasons. Watch a film like Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), and that same influence is absolutely undeniable.
Here’s the thing: the craft, direction, and cinematography are great. The supporting cast turns in great performances. I laughed out loud more than once, with my favorite scene being Herbert H. Hebert (Jerry Lewis), reducing the intimidating Willard C. Gainsborough to a quivering wreck using only a flattened hat and an Olympian level of incompetence. There’s a lot to appreciate and admire in this movie; I just had one problem.
Jerry Lewis.
I don’t really find him funny, I suppose. He has his moments in the film, but so much of his shtick fell flat for me. For every good joke, there was a bit that went on for far too long. For every flawlessly choreographed piece of slapstick fall-down-break-stuff comedy, there was a scene that was simply bizarre and jokeless (Ms. Cartilege comes to mind). Jerry can be deeply grating at times, and it’s impossible to imagine anyone would even like him, much less want him to stick around as desperately as the women do at the end.
Maybe that’s the joke? Ok, sure, but I didn’t laugh.
Arahan (2004)
Director: Ryoo Seung-Wan
Writer: Ryoo Seung-wan, Ji-hie Eun, Yu Seon-dong, Lee Hae-young
Cinematography: Lee Jun-gyu
Music: Jae-kwon Han
I’ll be brief about this movie for two reasons. Reason One: read why my writeup on The Big Lebowski was brief. Reason Two: I truly don’t have a whole lot to say! In an introduction during his Twitch screening, Justin Decloux linked this film to The Ladies Man by saying it’s basically a flying swordsman epic with a Jerry Lewis-esque character thrown in the middle. I was very impressed by some of the fight scenes, especially the one pictured above (spectacular and invigoratingly dramatic) as well as the final showdown between corrupted Master of Chi Heuk-Woon (Doo-hong Jung) and (the Jerry Lewis type guy) Sang-hwan (Seung-bum Ryoo). Visually extravagant, long enough to really feel those final punches, and choreographed wonderfully.
It’s just that I have the same problem as I did with The Ladies Man, at least for the first half. Sang-hwan is just so annoying and aggravating at times that it becomes a bit of a chore, and the action slowing down doesn’t help a damn bit on the “retaining interest” front.
Still, it was a fun watch overall and an interesting counterpoint to my experience with The Big Lebowski. I’ve been working on it for a few days now, so you shouldn’t have to wait long to read it!