Palette Cleansers: Canyon Passage

I debut a new feature this week at Movie Mezzanine that elaborates on the use of color in a film in establishing mood, character, narrative, themes, and the like. The feature will be called Palette Cleansers, because puns. Anyway, our first selection is Jacques Tourneur's superb, somewhat neglected Canyon Passage, his first Western and first color film. The film has many qualities worthy of recommendation, from its sparse storytelling that belies a dense plot of character relationships and racial politics to the terrific performances it gets from its cast (especially Dana Andrews, who gives one of his finest here). What stands out most, though, is Tourneur's use of color, every bit as subtle but showy as his shadow work and capable of deftly delineating the multiple leaps in perspective and POV. The handful of stills featured are only a fraction of the aesthetically beautiful but meaningful shots in the film.

My full piece is up now at Movie Mezzanine.

Yossi (Eytan Fox, 2013)

Yossi starts so powerfully that the frustratingly stiff, unvarying approach of its camera makes the eventual slog all the more disappointing. In reconnecting with the older, flabbier and unhappier protagonist of his Yossi & Jagger, Fox instantly establishes a sense of quiet agony through his lead's soft expressions and hollowed eyes. But as Yossi inches toward self-liberation, the camera telegraphs his eventual retreats, robbing moments of suspense and, more importantly, the emotional connection of this man's dreams of acceptance and honesty of self.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Netflix Instant Picks 1/25/13—1/31/13

Apologies for the lateness of this post, but last Friday's Netflix picks can be found at Movie Mezzanine. For this installment, I promote the birthday of one of the great American independents, the densest work of another, and a crackerjack new French thriller that made my honorable mentions for 2012.

My full post is up at Movie Mezzanine.

The Long Day Closes (Terence Davies, 1992)

This is my unforgivably late Blind Spots entry for last November. December's pick, Feuillade's Judex, will likely not receive a write-up until next month. However, this month's scheduled Blind Spots piece will appear on time.

The Long Day Closes opens like a classic movie, with the credits appearing before the picture instead of after and playing over a styled image. In this case, it is a still life of some flowers off to the left as credits appear in flowing cursive in the right two-thirds of the screen. When the movie proper begins, it is to the 20th Century Fox fanfare blared over a brick wall with a plaque announcing the film’s setting on Kensington Street. The juxtaposition deftly pre-summarizes the film, in which the still life recreations of postwar Liverpool are enlivened by the joys of cinema that not only give its child protagonist some kind of escape in a dreary community but are internalized and re-emitted to make that world livable.

The boy in question is Bud, an unassuming chap whom Davies regularly places directly in the center of the frame, surrounding him with symmetrical arrangements of people and objects. The dank, dirty brick walls of this industrial port town lend the film shades of neo-realism, but as with the more brutally forthright Distant Voices, Still Lives, such mise-en-scène adds a lyrical, formal quality to what might have been kitchen-sink aesthetics. The falsity of the image is blatant, but that also informs so much of the film’s deeply felt approach to memory.

Something Old, Something New: The End of Evangelion / It's Such a Beautiful Day

I watched Don Hertzfeldt's masterpiece and Hideaki Anno's nihilistic OAV within days of each other, and I could not help but be drawn by each. Not simply for their respective demonstrations of avant-garde, uncompromising animation, but for the cosmic sense imparted through mental illness in each. They are great films, among the greatest works of modern animation, and I jumped at the chance to write more about either.

My full piece is up now at Movie Mezzanine.

Graveyard of Honor (Takashi Miike, 2002)

For this week's Shelf Life piece at Movie Mezzanine, I took a look at the Takashi Miike film that, more than the few others I've seen, makes me want to really explore his vast filmography. A stylish but muted yakuza thriller, Graveyard of Honor leaves the criminal element choking equally on its own blood and hypocrisy as they bring into their fold someone who shows just how absurd their codes of honor really are. One of the best gangster films ever. My full piece is up now.

Something Old, Something New: The Last Temptation of Christ / Lincoln

I knew I'd forgotten to link to something this week. Last Monday, my second Something Old, Something New piece went up, this time on the similarities that link Lincoln with another subversive, empathetic portrait of an abstracted icon, The Last Temptation of Christ. I'm quite happy with this piece, so I hope you read it. It can be found at Movie Mezzanine here.