The Masterpiece Test: Ugetsu

Year of Release  1953

Country  Japan

Length  97 min.

Director  Kenji Mizoguchi

Screenwriter  Yoshikata Yoda (adapted from short stories by Akinari Ueda)

Cinematographer  Kazuo Miyagawa

Editor  Mitsuzo Miyata

Art Direction  Kisaku Ito

Costume Designers  Tadaoto Kainosho, Shima Yoshimi

Cast  Masayuki Mori, Sakae Ozawa, Kinuyo Tanaka, Mitsuko Mito, Machiko Kyo

Beauty  Kenji Mizoguchi’s films are famous for their “flowing scroll” visual style, in which uninterrupted lateral tracking shots give the impression of a large image unfolding before the viewer’s eyes.  Ugetsu contains many striking and lovely examples of this distinctive visual language, most notably in a shot that begins with two lovers enjoying a nighttime bath and glides, with no discernable edit point, to show the same two having a picnic in the daytime.

Strangeness  Ugetsu’s camera movements resemble little else in cinema, aside from other films in Kenji Mizoguchi’s oeuvre (many of which were also shot by the great Kazuo Miyagawa).  Whether or not the actual storyline of the film, with its lack of distinction between the spirit world and the real world, will seem “exotic” to the viewer may depend on their geographic proximity to Japan.  In some respects, the environment of Ugetsu, with its ultra-pale ghosts, warring bands of samurai, and ornate brothels, almost seems like a summation of all of the stereotypes associated with “traditional” Japanese culture. 

Unity of Form and Subject Matter  The flowing scroll approach to cinematography adds an extra layer of meaning to Ugetsu’s simple, fable-like story.  While the plot follows two men (Masayuki Mori and Sakae Ozawa) who follow their respective dreams of wealth and stature while ignoring the families they’ve left behind, the camera follows their progress unblinkingly yet from a distance, suggesting the viewpoint of an indifferent spirit who realizes that humans are merely a small part of a large canvas.  Even as the characters get closer to realizing their dreams, the camera reinforces the ephemerality of their lives and makes their abandonment of their families all the more tragic.

Tradition  Because Mizoguchi was making films as early as the silent era, he was able to invent his own style rather than borrowing heavily from others.  In this respect, he is similar to such highly distinctive filmmakers as Fritz Lang and Carl Theodor Dreyer, yet a film like Ugetsu would never be mistaken for the work of those directors.  Later films as diverse as Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966) and Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995) break many of their scenes up into single, poetic tracking shots, but perhaps the only films that precisely resemble Ugetsu’s aesthetic are Mizoguchi’s own.  The style arguably reached its apex in Sansho the Bailiff (1954).

Repeatability  Ugetsu still holds up as a lovely, immaculately crafted film.  Yet today it seems distinctly old-fashioned compared to other films of the golden era of Japanese cinema, including even period-based works such as Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954).  There is a certain appeal to Ugetsu’s traditionalism, but, as mentioned above, it does seem at times to be almost the stereotypical Japanese film of its era, in terms of its setting and storyline if not of its style.

Viewer Engagement  Ugetsu has a nice, cleanly told narrative, with few tangential characters and no distracting diversions from the main characters’ quest for success.  The backdrop of war is vividly felt even though the battles occur almost entirely offscreen, the intrusion of battered, desperate soldiers suggesting the devastation that war can bring to civilian communities.  The camera follows practically every movement of the main characters, yet stays far enough away from the action for the viewer to maintain an observational distance.

Morality  The moral of Ugetsu – don’t let your ambitions distract you what’s really important in life – is as basic as that of any fairy tale.  It isn’t a particularly challenging, life-changing message, and because the wives of the main characters don’t make as big an impression as their spouses (or the ghost that one of the men briefly falls in lust with), the “appreciate what you’ve got” moral doesn’t resonate as much as it otherwise might.  Yet the message of the film is often elegantly expressed through its milky, luminous shot compositions.

Ugetsu fails the Masterpiece Test, but is unquestionably a must-see for aspiring cinematographers.

UP NEXT  A very different film dealing with the effect that war has on ambitious civilians, Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux.

TV on DVD: The Shield (Season Three, Disc Two)

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Understanding Auteurs: The Coen Brothers (Minor Works)

Originally, this post was going to focus exclusively on Intolerable Cruelty (2003), the Coen Brothers' tenth film and the only one of their features that I hadn't seen prior to starting this blog.  But honestly, I can't say that that film is really interesting enough for its own entry. Knowing that the next several Coen projects were also all fairly minor, inconsequential works, I decided to lump them all together in one post, so that we could deal with their "mid-oeuvre crisis" all at once before getting back to their more vital work.

Despite their oddball surfaces, the Coens’ films have generally been based around fairly clichéd, if not outright banal, sitcom ideas.  The romantic comedy Intolerable Cruelty, the brothers’ first film literally based on someone else’s idea (the script is a rewrite of a never-produced screenplay by Robert Ramsey, Matthew Stone, and John Romano), reveals what a Coen film would look like without that oddball surface, and it isn’t pretty.  The plot revolves around divorce attorney George Clooney’s growing attachment to Catherine Zeta-Jones, the estranged wife of one of his clients.  This isn’t a terrible setup for a farcical romantic comedy, and Clooney at least is an ideal leading man for modern-day screwball.  But sadly he has no chemistry with Zeta-Jones, possibly because she isn’t asked to do anything other than be a shrew, and the Coens pile on so many inane plot twists, pointlessly flamboyant supporting caricatures, and shrill “observations” about the incompatibility of men and women that the main storyline has no room to breathe.  It is a mark of the film’s lack of wit that the line “we’re gonna nail his ass” is its major recurring joke.  And since Intolerable Cruelty is essentially “Coens light,” we don’t get the usual vibrant setpieces or distinctive dialogue to distract from the emptiness at the film’s core.

If Intolerable Cruelty is the nadir of the Coen Brothers’ career, The Ladykillers (2004) represents at least a slight step up.   Remaking Alexander Mackendrick’s popular Ealing Studios comedy (1955) by transplanting the action from rural England to Mississippi is an odd choice, since the original is so thoroughly British that its value to the American viewer is questionable (to my mind, Kind Hearts and Coronets {1949} is the much funnier Ealing Studios film), though the Coens deserve some credit for at least attempting to make the material their own.  A band of thieves led by Tom Hanks plot to steal the money from a riverboat casino, but are foiled at every turn by no-nonsense churchgoer Irma P. Hall, whose basement they are using as a headquarter.  The actual storyline of The Ladykillers falls mostly flat; by the time major part of the plot kicks in, with the crooks attempting to kill Hall but accidentally killing each other or themselves, it feels like too much of an afterthought to get invested in.  But the energy level is up considerably from Intolerable Cruelty, largely because the cast is clearly having a lot of fun (Hanks, in particular, is very charming in one of his increasingly rare comedic roles) and the story isn’t weighted down with too many tangential characters.  T-Bone Burnett, working with the Coens for the first time since O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), provides a fine gospel and Southern hip hop soundtrack, though it isn’t as well-integrated into the film as their past collaborations were.  It would be a stretch to call The Ladykillers a return to form, and it is certainly one of the Coens’ weakest films, but it does have its moments.

Perhaps recognizing that they’d hit a dead end with their recent, relatively conventional feature films, the Coen Brothers next worked on two different short films.  Tuileries (2006) is their six-minute contribution to the anthology film Paris, je t’aime, while World Cinema (2007) is a three-minute piece commissioned as a pre-film short for the Cannes Film Festival.  Tuileries follows tourist Steve Buscemi as he is tormented by a hostile couple whose language he doesn’t understand, a child shooting spitballs at him, and a tourist manual that suggests all of the terrible things that could potentially happen to him while on vacation.  World Cinema has cowboy Josh Brolin torn between seeing Rules of the Game (1939) and Climates (2006) at an indie theatre.  Neither short transcends its one-joke premise, but they each make good use of their stars’ put-upon demeanors, and it is somewhat refreshing to find the Coens doing something simple that they aren’t pretending is complicated.

UP NEXT  No Country for Old Men

The Masterpiece Test: L'atalante

Year of Release  1934

Country  France

Length  85 min.

Director  Jean Vigo

Screenwriters  Albert Riera, Jean Vigo (story by Jean Guinee)

Cinematographers  Louis Berger, Boris Kaufman

Editor  Louis Chavance

Set Designer  Francis Jourdain

Original Score  Maurice Jaubert

Cast  Dita Parlo, Jean Daste, Michel Simon

Beauty  L’atalante’s visuals are an unusual mixture of grainy, jumpy location shots and lyrical, carefully composed surreal images.  As the film goes on, it becomes harder to draw a distinction between the “realistic” imagery of dirty streets and rusty boats and the “magical” imagery of cats playing records and lovers’ faces appearing in the sea.  It’s as if director Jean Vigo is unveiling a hidden layer of reality that reveals that the world is more delightfully anarchic than it usually seems.

Strangeness  It isn’t enough to say that L’atalante is original – it is also one of the most unpredictable, bizarre, and impossible-to-imitate films in the entire history of cinema.  The film was butchered by unsympathetic studio editors (and then more or less put back together in a 2001 remaster), yet it seems to have leapt directly out of the filmmakers’ heads, like a wonderful dream that the whole world can share.

Unity of Form and Subject Matter  The story of L’atalante could hardly be more basic – two newlyweds (Dita Parlo and Jean Daste) take a boat trip for their honeymoon, accompanied by an unruly, perpetually drunk sea captain (Michel Simon) – but the way it is told, through a series of vividly weird digressions, allows the film to mimic the young lovers’ sense of wonder about the world that they are only beginning to explore.

Tradition  With its combination of realism and surrealism, L’atalante unites the two basic strains of filmmaking, documentary (Lumiere) and magic (Melies).  In doing so, Vigo had an unmistakable influence on the French New Wave of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, though not even the best of Truffaut or Rivette can match L’atalante’s elegant stream-of-consciousness.  Though Vigo was undeniably a singular filmmaker, directors ranging from Leos Carax (whose The Lovers on the Bridge owes an unmistakable debt to L'atalante) to Apichatpong Weerasethakul have picked up on his signature grounded lyricism.

Repeatability  Because no film has ever managed to duplicate L’atalante’s unique tone, it still feels as strange and revolutionary as it must have in 1934.  Michel Simon’s endlessly inventive performance as sea captain Jules (one of the finest pieces of character acting available on film) never wears out its welcome.  The same could be said for Maurice Jaubert’s lovely, romantic score, or the felines who seem to jump out of every corner of the ship, or pretty much any other aspect of the film.

Viewer Engagement  L’atalante may simply be too strange and too charming to watch passively.  And since the audience is basically following the shipmates as they sail around France, it often feels as if the viewer is part of the voyage.  It’s easy to get sucked into L’atalante’s world, which has its own incomprehensible logic yet resembles our own.

Morality  If L’atalante is indeed revealing a hidden, magical layer of reality then it is doing all of us a great favor.  But even if it is simply a poetically offbeat love story, it is one of the most evocative, open-hearted depictions of romance in all of cinema.  The messy, unruly romance of the central couple animates everything around them, and the film's love for the oddities of the world is palpable in every frame.

L’atalante passes the Masterpiece Test.

UP NEXT  Another film known for its lyricism, Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu.

TV on DVD: The Shield (Season Three, Disc One)

Episodes covered:  Playing Tight, Blood and Water, Bottom Bitch, Streaks and Tips

After two seasons of breathless, intense action, The Shield has become a little boring.

Which isn't to say that any of the early episodes of season three are bad, per se.  The things that worked for the show in the past are all still here – the shaky-cam, cinema verite style that puts the viewer right in the middle of the action; the skillful ensemble acting; the dynamic interplay between police officers with different motivations and different detecting styles.  And if The Shield is ever going to produce a "bad" episode it hasn't done so up to this point.

But the problem is that nothing has really changed since the end of season two.  There are hints that Vic and the Strike Team are going to start feeling some payback for their Armenian Money Train heist, but that storyline seems to have mostly been put on the backburner for the time being.  Tavon, the intriguing new member of the Strike Team – and a potentially interesting foe to Vic if he were ever to get wind of the rest of the Team's extracurricular activities – is (apparently) dead by the end of "Streaks and Tips," when he gets into a car accident.  Aceveda has decided to stick around and continue heading up the Barn until his city council job seat takes effect, leaving he and Claudette in the same stalemate that the end of last season seemed to bring to a head.  Claudette and Dutch are still basically acting as partners.  Danny, fired at the end of season two, is already back in uniform by "Bottom Bitch," and she even has brief appearances in season three's first two episodes, basically negating a major plot development from last year's finale.  And in "Streaks and Tips," Danny and Julien are once again assigned to be partners.  In other words, we're pretty much back at square one.

The Shield works best when the characters are getting in way over their heads, escaping from entanglements in such a way that they create even more problems for themselves and others.  Shawn Ryan & co.'s reluctance to meaningfully change up the series' dynamic does a dramatic disservice to the show and to its fans.  The promise that a righteous, anti-Strike Team Claudette would be running the Barn in season three was exciting, suggesting that the noose would tighten around Vic's neck to a previously unseen degree, bringing The Shield to ever more intense peaks.  But so far the writers seem afraid to take the risks necessary to keep The Shield as edgy and exciting as it has been in the past.

Quick Thoughts:

- Not too much to say about Shane's new girlfriend yet, since it isn't clear where her storyline is going yet.  I can't say I'm too excited about the hints that she might be crazy, though, since crazy girlfriend plots are usually not terribly interesting.

- The battle between the Strike Team and the Decoy Squad could potentially become interesting, but so far the latter group seem like they'll simply be cannon fodder for whatever this season's major storyline turns out to be.

- The beating that Julien received at the end of the second season seems to have unleashed a violent streak in him.  In "Playing Tight," Julien breaks the arm of one of the former officers involved in the beating, and in "Bottom Bitch" he gets unnecessarily rough with a man he's arresting.  Plus, Danny and another officer respond to a domestic disturbance at Julien's house in "Streaks and Tips."  Although Julien is mostly in the background in these first several episodes, and it isn't clear where his storyline is heading this season, he remains arguably the show's most compelling character.

Understanding Auteurs: The Coen Brothers (The Man Who Wasn't There)

The Man Who Wasn't There (2001) finds the Coen Brothers returning to their favorite genre, film noir.  Where Blood Simple (1984) and Fargo (1996) offered up fairly simple pastiches of the genre, The Man Who Wasn't There zeroes in on the tone of world-weary tone of classic film noirs by keeping its focus almost entirely on Billy Bob Thornton's sad-sack protagonist.  Thornton's mild-mannered, cuckolded barber is less a take-off on the typical noir antihero than he is the living embodiment of the desperate, frustrated feeling lurking around the edges of every film noir.

Thornton is married to Frances McDormand, an employee at Nerdlinger's department store.  The barber suspects that his wife is sleeping with her boss, James Gandolfini, who is married to the Nerdlinger heiress.  Thornton uses Gandolfini's precarious position to his advantage, sending an anonymous letter to the boss claiming that he will reveal the affair if he doesn't receive $10,000 – the same amount that the barber needs to serve as the silent partner in sleazy salesman Jon Polito's new dry cleaning business.  Naturally, all sorts of complications arise from there, with numerous cases of mistaken identity leading to the arrest and/or deaths of all of the main characters, all of whom are guilty but none of whom are punished for the correct crime.

For once, the Coens' plot convolutions revolve less around the characters' stupidity than their tangled emotions.  The Man Who Wasn't There boasts what is arguably the most complicated plot of any of their films to this point, with the possible exception of Miller's Crossing (1990), yet the events play out so methodically that they don't seem contrived (though it does take a certain amount of suspension of disbelief to believe that Thornton would fall into Polito's obvious scam so easily).  Thornton's mesmerizing performance, which never fails to convey the subliminal emotions buried underneath his character's stone-faced exterior, keeps The Man Who Wasn't There grounded and makes it the saddest, most humane, and most elegant of the Coen Brothers' career up to this point.

Yet there are problems whenever the film strays too far from Thornton's character and the labyrinthine complications caused by his suppressed rage.  Throughout The Man Who Wasn't There, the Coens balance Thornton's understated character against their more typically flamboyant caricatures, an effect that simultaneously makes the protagonist's disconnection palpable and offers the supporting players a chance to stand out with some funny moments in the middle of all of the sadness.  Gandolfini's heavy-breathing motor-mouth, Polito's sweaty conman, and Tony Shalhoub's over-confident lawyer (basically a reprise of his routine from Barton Fink) each play off of Thornton's meek everyman nicely.  But after Gandolfini, McDormand, and Polito are all dead, essentially wrapping up the plot, the film just keeps going and going, throwing in an extraneous UFO subplot and a quasi-affair between Thornton and young piano prodigy Scarlett Johansson.  The Coens have never been great self-editors, which isn't necessarily a problem in madcap comedies like The Big Lebowski (1998) and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), but if ever one of their films demanded an extremely tight focus, it's The Man Who Wasn't There.

The Man Who Wasn't There would almost certainly be better if it was closer to 90 minutes than two hours, but fortunately there is plenty to praise in the movie's better moments.  By now it goes without saying that Roger Deakins is the Coens' ideal cinematographer, but his crisp black and white work here is on an even higher plane of achievement than anything we've seen from him in the past.  The tense, deadly fight between Thornton and Gandolfini, complete with glass that slowly cracks and separates seconds after its hit, is as vivid a setpiece as the Coens have ever delivered.  And it's impossible to overpraise Thornton's lyrical, career-best performance.  When Thornton delivers his character's final death row narration, wondering whether he'll be able to reconnect with his wife and tell her "all the things we don't have words for in this world," he achieves something that seemed out of the Coens' grasp in their previous films – truthful, heartbreaking elegance.

UP NEXT  Intolerable Cruelty

The Masterpiece Test: Aguirre, the Wrath of God

Year of Release  1972

Country  Germany

Length  94 min.

Director  Werner Herzog

Screenwriter  Werner Herzog

Cinematographer  Thomas Mauch

Editor  Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus

Original Score  Popol Vuh

Cast  Klaus Kinski, Helena Rojo, Roy Guerra, Del Negro

Beauty Aguirre begins with arguably the most stunning shot in the frequently gorgeous filmography of Werner Herzog, as a mid-sized army of conquistadors and slaves descend down a winding, cloud-covered mountain. Throughout the film, Herzog and cinematographer Thomas Mauch show the glorious yet inhospitable Andean terrain engulfing and overpowering the foreigners who attempt to traverse it. This style holds up through the final shot (also a candidate for best shot in Herzog's filmography), as the mutinous tyrant Aguirre (Klaus Kinski) is surrounded on a sinking raft by a gang of monkeys.


Strangeness Much of the power of Aguirre comes from its combination of narrative and documentary elements. The storyline, about a group of 16th-century conquistadors traveling over the Andes in search of the fabled El Dorado, is pretty straightforward, but the fact that it plays out against actual jungle backdrops gives the film a palpable sense of nature's daunting oddity that simply wouldn't be possible on a controlled soundstage. Kinski's over-the-top yet controlled performance is one of the most convincing depictions of insanity on film. His titular character is as unpredictable as the jungle terrain.

Unity of Form and Subject Matter The obsessive narrative focus on Aguirre's single-minded pursuit is frequently contrasted with shots that emphasize the grandeur of nature compared to the puniness of Aguirre and his crew. The natives who attack the conquistadors remain almost entirely offscreen, which enhances the feeling that nature itself is battling against the expedition.

Tradition Aguirre's focus on men attempting to conquer an indifferent natural world recalls F.W. Murnau's Tabu (1930), as well as Anthony Mann "landscape westerns" such as The Naked Spur (1953), though Herzog's prominent use of actual uncontrollable forces like raging rivers and wild animals makes his film more visceral than Murnau's or Mann's. Herzog's film is a clear visual and tonal influence on Apocalypse Now (1979), though the idealogical confusion of Francis Ford Coppola's epic makes it feel more bloated and less focused than Aguirre. With Fitzcarraldo (1980), Herzog attempted to recapture the energy of Aguirre, but that film largely feels like a pale imitation of Herzog's earlier work.

Repeatability Aguirre has held up over nearly forty years as Werner Herzog's most compelling look at a man in the grips of madness. Though we know that the film was made in the early-'70s, it feels strangely timeless. Since it is unlikely that a filmmaker other than Herzog will take the health and safety risks necessary to capture the feeling of being stranded in the jungle, Aguirre will likely continue to hold up as cinema's most vivid depiction of man's battle with nature.

Viewer Engagement The documentary elements of Aguirre give it a you-are-there feel that keeps the film engaging from first frame to last. Herzog's films are usually filled with odd tangents and scenes that go on longer than is strictly necessary, but Aguirre is unusually taut and focused by any standard. Since the viewer is placed in the position of one of Aguirre's crew members (or slaves), and because the film is as single-mindedly focused on the quest as Aguirre himself, Aguirre gets us on the side of the conquistadors to an extent, making the film much more than a simple anti-imperialist screed.

Morality Aguirre is simple enough in its narrative and elemental enough in terms of its scenery to have the feel of a timeless fable about human arrogance. Yet, while there is no question about whether the film finds Aguirre and his goals contemptible, Herzog's you-are-there approach doesn't let the viewer stand at a completely superior position to the imperialists. Aguirre offers an unforgettable lesson about the folly of men attempting to conquer nature.

Aguirre, the Wrath of God passes the Masterpiece Test.

UP NEXT A very different film about an arduous voyage, Jean Vigo's L'atalante.