Director: Les Blank
Les Blank’s celebration of New Orleans traditions steers clear of the images one might expect of a photographic tour guide—rather than reveling in the debauchery of the French Quarter, Always For Pleasure deals with mostly small, poor neighborhoods, highlighting an unfettered, local charm. The series of parades, including a jazz funeral march and a hypnotic ceremony that honors the Tchoupitoulas tribe, document from a perspective that is simultaneously detached and seduced. That is, if Blank’s ambition is to capture the spectacle and let it speak for itself, his very admiration of the culture is transparent—take, for instance, his thorough fixation on how to cook thirty pounds of crawfish, or the amount of time he invests into exploring the tradition of the aforementioned Native American celebration. Blank avoids the political analysis of the latter, instead focusing on its sensual pleasures—the impressive showmanship, the intricately designed arrays of color. If there are difficulties in capturing the spirit of something that needs to be experienced, Blank’s small snippet of hedonism has an irresistible vivacity that leaves one smiling.
Director: Brian De Palma
Devotees of Brian De Palma’s cinema have treated The Fury as a litmus test for one’s appreciation of the director. It is aggressively confrontational in its approach to many of the elements De Palma is known for—a central metaphor regarding a sexual awakening is delightfully perverse, the violence is sensationalized, and it is marked by contrasts in the most extreme sense of the word. In the first scene, a vacation between father and son is interrupted by the invasion of apparent terrorists, interrupting beachside relaxation with squibs and explosions. Similarly, De Palma’s visual strategy is as rigorous as it gets, obsessing over intricate angles and split diopter shots even in simple, plot-progressing conversations. But the argument that The Fury makes the case for whether one gets De Palma or not seems to reduce the director to a glorified pervert—if it is a quintessential De Palma film in the sense that it demonstrates his technique to the absolute extremes (if this is the argument, Scarface is just as worthy of an example), it ignores the moderation of his previous efforts. De Palma’s great contrasts are all but lost after the first scene, which plunges the film into a never-ending deluge of directorial excess.
Director: Charles Crichton
A Fish Called Wanda pits American brashness against British civility, vulgarity against apprehension. The last film directed by Ealing Studios veteran Charles Crichton (whose The Lavender Hill Mob was a defining masterpiece for that studio), it is a unique artifact that suggests a genre both in transition and one that was battling itself. In the mean-spiritedness of the gags–where humiliation is often key to the humor–Crichton is predicting the Farrelly brothers (a running joke involving dogs being a key example). As a cultural touchstone, then, the film is fascinating, although it often falls short of what one wants it to be. For example, John Cleese’s straight man seems too limiting. His exasperation in Monty Python sketches often generated the biggest laughs, and here he’s reduced to passivity when faced by the biggest moron of all in Kevin Kline’s Otto. And, if Kline’s performance is the most memorable of the film (it is a tremendously accomplished vocal performance–one remembers his exact inflections as much as his physicality), it also comes from a different stratosphere than the rest of the cast. Regardless, there are enough laughs to save the material, and the film’s use of vulgar language is downright masterful.
Director: Édouard Molinaro
At the time of its release, La Cage aux Folles found enormous and somewhat unexpected mainstream success internationally, garnering several Academy Award nominations and for a time becoming the highest-grossing foreign language film in North America. Although a far cry away politically from films like those of the New Queer Cinema movement in the early 90s, it was somewhat of an outlier on this scale for so liberally depicting gay characters (though filmmakers like Kenneth Anger had been making gay experimental films for over a decade at the time of its release). Unfortunately, time has not been so kind to the picture, and the very “otherness” that defines the gay community in this film does ring with a certain condescension. If the film earns some laughs, they are often no more sophisticated than the set up of a man acting effeminately. Problematically, the central relationship (involving Ugo Tognazzi and Michel Serrault) is portrayed empathetically but rather sexless–while the film has the nerve to depict a gay couple as a typically complicated relationship, it bypasses the physicality. The characters not only rarely touch, but they don’t seem very interested in doing so. Serrault, as the flamboyant lover, has a nice sequence when he tries to appear straight by donning a suit. He’s making an effort, but the sense of discomfort of exaggerated. As much as his character is played for laughs, it is this scene that demonstrates that his extravagance is simply his nature, and to rob him of that would be cruelty.
Director: Martin Rosen
Watership Down has the unmistakable feel of a nightmare. Animated in a style that aspires for naturalism, the resulting portrayals of dread and viciousness are rendered all the more disturbing. Furthermore, this very venture in creating a sense of realism draws even more attention to the more expressionistic sequences, which in themselves play as poems reflecting on death. One would be hard pressed to find a film (“children’s” or otherwise) that achieves this desperate sense of melancholy–in fact, if the film somewhat fails on narrative terms, it works completely as a mood piece. Without the Disney technique of distinguishing animal characters through exaggerated features or personalities, the rabbits in Watership Down often become hard to tell apart, and the languid pacing seems at odds with the film’s more traditional action-oriented suspense sequences near the end. That the lengthy shots of nearly-dead, bleeding rabbits feel comparatively more true to the vision tells you all you need to know about this invaluable oddity.
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