list/discuss/rate - your recently watched movies

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 The T wrote:

^Much more than those you mention, I like:
- Space Cowboys; very light and fun. One of those movies I have to see when they're showing it on tv

I don't even know what to say to this.

Top 5 Eastwood directed films:

1. Letters From Iwo Jima
2. The Outlaw Josey Wales
3. High Plains Drifter
4. Bird
5. Unforgiven

Gran Torino is a film I should hate: it's dull, horribly acted (and in an Eastwood movie, no less! He gets the best from his actors!), and so transparent and heavy-handed I could wretch. But it's also Eastwood's way of tearing down the Dirty Harry mythos just as Unforgiven did The Man With No Name. And Eastwood is so magnetic. It's really a bad film that, like so many American features, slips into stereotypes to make a commentary about racism without doing anything to subvert them, and the Christ imagery at the end is about as subtle as the rat scurrying across the windowsill in The Departed. But like The Departed, I love it for its flaws because of a solid cast and some wit. Unlike The Departed, I think it lacks any replayability (it's one of Scorsese's weakest films in terms of character, but damned if it isn't his most fun).

Touch of Evil - Now here's racism in American films done right. Welles' playfulness, wordplay and general dark wit allow him to play up the camp of noir and ethnic stereotypes even as he humanizes not a few central characters but all of his grotesque creations. Much has been written of Welles' martyrdom, but Touch of Evil is the ray of hope, as historians and editors (they actually got audio/editing genius Walter Murch to help) re-cut the film according to a detailed memo Welles sent to Universal after they took control away from him and butchered the film (the memo itself is an invaluable look into Welles' creative process). The restored result is equal parts '50s Universal B-movie and Wellesian character study. Its combination of masterful formalist composition (particularly in the Renoir-inspired deep focus photography and long tracking shots) and the hand-held docudrama feel that the low budget forced upon the director sets up the dichotomy well: this isn't a thriller with a message, it's a politcally revelent arthouse picture with moments of suspense worthy of Hitchcock. 

It should be noted, actually, that Hitchcock borrowed liberally from the film to make his own Psycho. Both feature Janet Leigh, specifically Janet Leigh in a motel suffering horrors. As I watched Dennis Weaver's skittish, sexually repressed "night man" stammer his way through conversations with Leigh, I thought of how much I'd love to see a film just about him (the same can be said of most of the film's characters, so interesting and well-defined are they), only to realize that I did: this nervous bellboy became Norman Bates but two years later. Hitchcock even tried to outdo Welles' opening tracking shot, but you can clearly see different takes in Hitchcock's still impressive helicopter dolly shot that opens Psycho.

Touch of Evil was filmed shortly after the Supreme Court ruled on Brown v. Board of Education, a ruling many Southern policemen refused to enforce. Welles re-wrote the script upon being hired as a director (thanks to Heston, who rightly saw that the opportunity to work with such a talent would likely never present itself again), and his lines contain several explicit mentions of his idea of the role of the lawmen ("A policeman's job is to enforce the law, not write it"). But Welles do not deal in simple black and whites, or even simple noir grays. The reveal that Quinlan lost his wife to a "half-breed" strangler is a typical Hollywood rationing and lessening of a character's racism, but we can see that Quinlan's prejudice runs far deeper, that his racism in endemic of a racist society. The real humanizing elements of his character are his interactions with a gypsy madam who may be an old flame. Vargas, on the other hand, is no simple hero: he neglects his wife, indirectly places her in harmful situations, and turns to illegal evidence of his own to expose Quinlan's fraud. Welles does not play up Vargas' fascistic machismo in the name of "gettin' the job done", nor does he forgive Quinlan for his own tyranny: there's the uneasy note at the end that Vargas is the next spiral of the cycle that begat Quinlan.

Touch of Evil has been called the last film of noir's golden age, but it's so much more than that. Great and important as noir was, it hadn't featured this kind of depth since Fritz Lang invented the genre with pictures like Dr. Mabuse or M, which revolve around commentaries of Weimar Germany and the rise of Nazis. Even its edited versions are triumphs, but the restoration is a balls-out masterpiece, a Citizen Kane of genre films.