More Films Watched Recently

As with the last "Movie Round-Up," I'm gathering notes I've posted in web fora in recent months, with some revision and added material.

Closer, Mike Nichols, 2004 -- If ever a movie was calculated to make one (well, me) feel good about having withdrawn from the romantic and sexual arena, that movie would be Closer. And a mighty impressive film it is, too, possibly the best film that Mike Nichols has ever directed. The generally embittered (and, I believe, quite realistic) tone about relationships is one which Closer shares with Bad Timing, Short Cuts, Nichols's own Carnal Knowledge, all versions of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, many Bergman films, all Fassbinder films, and (in somewhat disguised form) most Woody Allen films. Closer, adapted by Patrick Marber from his own acclaimed play, is particularly savage and formally rigorous. Although other people are visible in many scenes, and one or two of them get a line to speak, essentially the movie plays out as a series of getting together and/or breaking apart scenes between four individuals in various permutations, played brilliantly by Jude Law, Natalie Portman, Julia Roberts, and Clive Owen. (Owen and Portman had more acclaim because their roles are showier, but Law and Roberts are equally good; I don't think Roberts has ever been better.) We never get to see how these four are with other people or during relationships; we can only base our reactions to them on the limited slices of behavior we do see. Of course that is true in a sense of all drama, but Marber doesn't pretend to give you more than he does.

Rather than give more away, I'll just urge you to see this film, if you haven't. It's a very fine movie.

Ju-on: The Grudge, Takashi Shimizu, 2003 --Not to be confused with two earlier Ju-on movies; one subsequent and another planned; and American remakes of this one and its immediate sequel -- all linked, all directed by Takashi Shimizu. If you're not confused enough already, this film is narratively fractured and the scenes are completely out of chron order. It winds up being like a modernist take on Poltergeist. The house in this movie is not merely haunted, but seriously messed up, just like the house in Poltergeist. (Remember Zelda Rubinstein's spurious pronouncement: "This house is clean!" Ha!)

Panic in the Streets, Elia Kazan, 1950 -- Here is a film noir whose concerns are so strikingly contemporary that I am really puzzled as to why someone hasn't remade this. Not that there's anything wrong with the original, mind, but the scenario is still both thought-provoking and commercial. Criminals smuggled into New Orleans are carrying highly communicable pneumonic plague; can the Public Health Service and the NOPD avert a crisis by finding them all in time?

The film benefits from strong performances (Richard Widmark, Paul Douglas, Barbara Bel Geddes), sharp location filming in New Orleans, and a crackerjack Oscar-winning screenplay. A very literate touch which I just love is that the plague carriers came aboard their ship at Oran in Algeria -- the plague-ridden city of Albert Camus's great novel The Plague (which appeared in French and English a few years earlier).

Widmark has a great moment late in the film as he tussles with officials about the risks to the New Orleans community. He points out that within ten hours the disease carriers could be anywhere in the US; within a day, in Africa (or, by logical extension, anywhere):

"Then think of that when you talk about community. We're all in a community. The same one."

Anyone who has read The Hot Zone or similar books will see exactly what Widmark is driving at, but it is startling for a character in a 1950 movie to be so amazingly prescient about the nature of future world health crises, and the way that air travel creates a "global village."

Terrific movie.

The Curse of the Cat People, Robert Wise / Gunther von Fritsch, 1944 -- There is absolutely nothing puffed-up about the reputation of the nine "horror" films that Val Lewton produced in the Forties; they are that good. The Curse of the Cat People is a most unusual sequel to Cat People in that it launches into an entirely different direction while still being carefully grounded in the events of the earlier film. It is a delicate, thoughtful film about the sensitivities of childhood, and finally very moving: this guy was in tears during the final scene.

The Palm Beach Story, Preston Sturges, 1944 -- The other nonpareil series of the Forties is the sequence of eight films that Preston Sturges wrote and directed for Paramount. I have seen The Palm Beach Story more times than I can count, and it still cracks me up: during one of Claudette Colbert's and Joel McCrea's lightning-fast bits of repartee I did a beer spit-take all over my pyjamas!

This is perhaps the frothiest of these eight Sturges films; it's as if Preston added egg white and shook vigorously. But that doesn't mean it's without its own kind of depth. McCrea and Colbert are one of the great married couples on film, so much so that, like Bob Newhart and Suzanne Pleshette in The Bob Newhart Show, they provide a stealth model of how a successful marriage could be conducted, assuming that there was anyone out there who was interested in doing so.