American Cinema: The Last time I Saw Paris (1954)

(contains spoilers)  I don't know what it is with me, but I hate films where the main characters are doing something or saying something stupid, which seemed to happen a lot in this film.  It made me want to turn it off, and with a certainty I expect this is that last time I'm going to see "The Last Time I Saw Paris."

 In this film, America's boy next door, Charles Wills (Van Johnson) is in Paris soon after its liberation in 1945 and meets and falls in love and marries Helen Ellswirth (Elizabeth Taylor).  She is a fragile and flighty minor heiress living in Paris with her wealthy father. In time they have a child. 

Johnson and Taylor

He is there trying to write the "great American Novel" and gradually discovering that he sucks at being a writer and that he drinks too much.  He engages in a minor infidelity with the glamorous blonde Eva Gabor while Helen goes off in pursuit of a very young Roger Moore.  Nevertheless it is clear they love their little girl and love each other, sort of.    Meanwhile while the VHS tape I was watching was track-able, the color would go off occasionally at the critical moment in the dialogue and Van's or Elizabeth's face would turn green. Somehow this seemed appropriate considering the dialogue.  Somehow things go from bad to worse when an oil well that was the wedding gift of his father in law strikes oil. 

Taylor and Moore

He quits his job and goes on as before partying harder and racing his sports car with Eva Gabor's character as passenger with a reckless disregard for safety, his or others.  In one sequence he is driving at top speed through a curvy course and ends up in a ditch when some local yokel herds his cattle across the road. 

Then on that inevitable night when he gets a bit too drunk and too bitter he and his wife have a fight in the midst of a party and he goes off in the night into the rain on a toot.  He ends up in drunken unconsciousness on the stairway of his own house while his wife who arrives later in the rain is pounding on the door and asking to be forgiven.  He of course is unavailable for such duty since he was at the time unconscious on the staircase.  She goes off disconsolate and cold and wet to her sister and her husband, who hate him, and considering his behavior why not?    Things get rapidly worse from there and she catches pneumonia and ends up in a Paris hospital. 

Helen, wet and dying

This leads to the single most unbelievable moment of the film.  It didn't seem that bad a case of pneumonia to begin with and it took a while for it to dawn on me that she was actually dying.  Charles and Helen tearfully make amends while she asks him to take good care of their little daughter, now maybe 8 years old.  A bit more of this and she is silent.  I thought maybe she had just drifted off to sleep or something, but no.  The nurse comes in and scolds him for sitting there so long with his apparently now-dead wife and pulls the sheet over her face.  It was only then that I realized that Helen had died. Why was the nurse so brusque?  Well it is supposed to be France and her shift must have been coming to an end. 

This might have been the end of the film, I was kind of expecting it to be, but it wasn't.  He now had to deal with the fact that Helen's sister had taken custody of the child and had him declared an unfit parent.  He leaves and goes back to America and then after an interval comes back.  He wants his little girl.  And so the last few scenes get played out.  He is once more apologising for being such a drunken ass for so long to Helen's sister, and after things hang in the balance for a while, well you can guess the rest.  

F. Scott Fitzgerald

This film was loosely based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel "Babylon Revisited".  How loosely I don't know.  All I know is that Fitzgerald, by the time this film was made, had been dead for a dozen years or more  and presumably could not object.  

Bottle Rocket by Wes Anderson (1996)

It took me a while to warm to the theme of this movie, which is about a bunch of screwballs trying to pursue a career in crime.  It is of course a comedy.  Owen Wilson is Dignan who has grandiose plans literally projecting out 50 years and outlined neatly in a notebook, but is basically clueless.  Luke Wilson is Anthony who is in real life Owen's brother but in the film no relation.  Robert Musgrave is Robert Mapplethorpe or Rob as he is known.*  His family seems to be quite well off traveling in the Far East and has two brothers who pick on him.  One wonders what his parents do for their money, but they are nowhere to be seen, having left the home in the custody of the brothers.  

*Exactly why they chose this name for this character that is the same as the famous gay photographer, is never revealed either in the film or in the commentary.

They are unusually methodical and do a practice run robbing Anthony's parent's house.  Then they rob a bookstore, which is successful and they go off to hide out at a motel in the desert, a dreary looking place with a pool.  At the pool Anthony falls for a young senorita who is working as a hotel maid.  And even though they scarcely know each other's language they hit it off.  Meanwhile Rob takes off with their transportation.  Clearly these guys are not ready for prime time and you can kind of see where this film is going, and it does, but I'm not going to spoil it for you.

It was an entertaining film once you get past the seemingly unlikely event that everyone would follow Dignan who is lovable but clearly a raving idiot. Well they are all idiots to varying degrees: a sort of three stooges of crime.   Not the best or most even comedy I have ever seen, but it does kind of come together in the end.  It was Wes Anderson's first feature film which he co-wrote with Owen Wilson.  It perhaps isn't the best of his films, but it has led to everything that has come after, such as "Rushmore", "The Royal Tennenbaums", "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou", and most recently "the Hotel Budapest".  It was because I've come to like Wes Anderson's offbeat style of humor that I sought this one out. 

Night and Fog by Alain Resnais (1955)

It is hard to know where to begin with the subject of the holocaust.  The cruelty of totalitarian regimes is legendary and what is sobering and depressing is that it could happen again, has happened again, and only the victims and perpetrators have changed.  

The Nazi work and death camps were planned and their objectives realized with all the scientific precision of a meat packing plant.  Millions of men, women, and children whose only offense was to be Jews or some other unwanted nationality were slaughtered, their hides collected, their hair made into fabric, and whatever fat was left on their bodies rendered into soap.  What was left, their bones, their bodies, were burnt in massive ovens, or piled into trenches, mass graves and covered with soil.  And what is more, there are photographs and films made while this was happening as if this process was to be remembered by the SS men and women who committed these atrocities.  

It is not as though the motive to mass slaughter one's fellow human being has only been a recent phenomenon, but modern technology and the advances of science have made it much more efficient.  If it happened today there would be bar codes tattooed to skin rather than numbers on a forearm, and the data would be on a hard drive, not in ledgers compiled in neat handwriting.  And of course, if necessary even hard drives can be destroyed so that only God knows (if indeed he wished to remember) what went on.  

But it is a trick of the mind that acts that are unimaginable when you are looking into the eyes of the people subjected to such ghastly fates, can calmly be contemplated in an office somewhere accompanied by a secretary, a filing cabinet, and full pot of coffee.  Bureaucracies thrive on statistics and reduce all life to a number or a demographic category.  Mass death is just an abstraction we the living can somehow live with, like statistics on auto crashes and other horrible things that one merely reads about in newspapers.   It is very human to summarize an ethnic group or a life to a mere idea.  The world has become much less humane thereby.

This was a short film in which surviving footage taken during the war is interspersed with the color photographs of the lonely buildings and weedy landscape of today.  The barbed wire the mute testimony to what went on.  It is painful to remember, but in many ways necessary to remember, alas.

American Cinema: World's Greatest Dad (2010)

This is a story of a man whose life is coming apart at the seams.  He has a lovely girlfriend who is ashamed to be seen with him and seems to be drifting off into the arms of another man.  He teaches an elective class in poetry writing (shades of Dead Poet's Society) which his high school principal warns is in danger of being dropped owing to its lack of popularity and he is a failed writer who seems to get nothing but rejection notices.  And if that is not enough his teenage son, Kyle, is ashamed of him, hates him, is on academic probation and seems only interested in life as a voyeur, a lover of internet porn, and most ominously experiments with asphyxia as a way of enhancing solitary sex.    Kyle's only friend is Andrew, who perhaps has befriended him only in order to escape a worse home life with his alcoholic mom. 

Kyle, played by Daryl Sabara

Then in the full flower of his adolescent awfulness Kyle accidentally strangles himself to death while masturbating.  His Dad is stricken because despite all the shit he's taken from his son he still loves his son, and to save his son postmortem embarrassment, pulls his trousers back up, concocts a suicide note, and makes it look like a suicide.    Then by ghost writing his dead son into something more noble and sensitive than he really was in life he creates a groundswell of public sympathy for the person Kyle never was. 

This is a black comedy.  You take a subject that is pretty gruesome, like death, and then satirize the mass condolence that follows, and never mind that in death many people take on a saintly patina they never had in life.  In that sense it is a great film.  I knew that somehow the truth would have to come out in the end and all the well-intentioned falsehood perpetrated in the charade kind of made me cringe, but not so much that I did not keep watching.   The ending was upbeat, against all expectations and the moral of the story was that it is far better to be true to yourself than to be false to the world.

The fact that Robin Williams, who plays the lead,  killed himself in early August 2014 in much the same way and probably WAS committing suicide adds a note of pathos to the role.   Williams does not do any impressions or any of his trademark improvisational humor in the role.   He plays the sad, long suffering father and teacher very well, too well.  I for one will miss him.