Birds of Passage

 Birds of Passage (2018) is an ambitious crime film set in Columbia between about 1969 and 1980.  The film's narrative traces the rise of the Waayu people, an indigenous desert-dwelling tribe, from an impoverished nomadic people into something approaching modernity and, then, their fall as well.  This all occurs within the span of about a decade, the Waayu's meteoric rise and fall jet-fueled by their increasingly fatal involvement in "selling weed" -- bales of industrial strength weed, cultivated from San Marcos seeds obligingly supplied by Peace Corps volunteers.  An enterprise that begins with burros ends with late model SUVs and battles fought with machine-guns and rocket-launchers.  The movie has an intriguing premise, but it has complex plot and some of it wasn't clear to me.  Nonetheless, this film directed by the Columbian filmmaker Cirro Guerra and his wife, Christina Gallego (she seems to have the contacts with the indigenous people), has compelling characters and a gritty, raw texture -- at times, the film is "magic realism" of a sort that would seem contrived if it wasn't so ethnographically motivated by the visions and customs of the Waaju.

At first, viewers may think that they have stumbled into a film nicely shot and edited for a college anthropology class.  A young woman, Zaida, has been in isolation in a hut made of branches and wattle for a year.  We don't why but she is commended by her formidable grandmother, Ursula, for her patience and fortitude. (The Waaju are apparently matrililneal, with matriarchs establishing the traditions by which the tribal people regulate their lives; the film is like The Godfather if all the "men of honor" weren't elderly Sicilians but old Indian women.)  Zaida dances with potential suitors, wearing a bright kimono-like garment with winged sleeves.  The dance seems to imitate the mating rituals of birds -- the bride struts in her plumage and the male darts backward as she advances toward him.  At first, Zaida dances with a boy called Leonidas.  Although we don't understand this until much later, Leonidas is the male heir of one of the leading matrilineal lines and his grandmother wants him to be the war chief, or male leader, of tribe.  Leonidas is just a kid and he embarrasses himself by falling over backward as the bride chases him.  Another man, an older youth called "Rapayet", dances with her -- she can't cow him and he announces that he will make her "his woman."  This sets up a fundamental conflict in the tribe between Rapayet who aspires to leadership and the ostensible heir to power, the ineffectual Leonidas.  

Rapayet has to acquire a prohibitively expensive dowry to marry Zaida.  (The dowry seems to have been designed to deter him from the match.)  Rapayet, who is not to be deterred, goes into the mountains with his best buddy Moises, an Aljuna (someone not in the tribe), a half-black hoodlum with ties to the drug trade. Moises, who is a shady guy, has a Landrover and he is smuggling contraband coffee.  Rapayet buys up Moises' coffee and the two of them negotiate with Anibal, an Uncle who lives in a Western-style house in the hills.  Anibal is a dope farmer.  Trading the coffee for marijuana, Rapayet sells the weed to American Peace Corps volunteers, seen sybaritically frolicking half-nude on a beach.  He raises enough money for the dowry, paid in goats and cows, and is allowed to marry Zaida.  A series of evil omens presage trouble:  there's a huge green locust that appears creeping through the desert gravel and sand  and a longlegged crane of some kind (we see only its insect-like and unearthly feet as it stalks through the sleeping quarters.). Rapayet and Moises eliminate some middle-men and begin trading with Americans who transport the weed on small airplanes.  There's s double-cross and Moises, who is a hotheaded thug, shoots a couple of Americans.  They dig huge holes and bury the dead men in their planes.  A third plane is allowed to depart to send warning that the Columbian Waayu mobsters are not to be trifled-with.  The Americans, apparently with Moises' connivance, retaliate by killing some Waayu.  As we have expected for a good fifteen minutes, Rapayet must take revenge on the man who was his best friend.   Rapayet goes to Moises' village where the Narcos are partying -- Moises' gang of crooks all speak Spanish and not Waayu.  Rapayet finds Moises having sex and guns him down

The movie is divided into cantos and the saga is represented as being sung by a lone Waayu shepherd tending his herd of goats in the barren desert badlands.  Each canto represents a shift in time.  In the next canto, Rapayet lives with Zaida, his son, and his daughter, Indira in a Hollywood-style modernist house incongruously set in the middle of the empty desert.  The old women are having nightmares that prophecy doom.  Rapayet and most of the desert tribe go to a "second wake" at his uncle Anibal's place in the hills.  The "second wake" is a ritual in which the casket of a dead leader is opened and the bones, ragged with strips of rotting flesh, are lovingly washed anointed with liquor spat out by one of the old women with magical powers, the, disarticulated skeleton, then,, bundled in white linen to be buried again.  This custom isn't viewed as morbid by the tribe and, in fact, is an occasion for a lavish party at Anibal's place, a nice hacienda now equipped with a swimming pool. (This lengthy and ornate scene is the equivalent of the wedding in The Godfather which, in turn, derives from a similar scene in Visconti's The Leopard) The old women are conducting some sort of puberty ritual with regard to Anibal's nubile daughter.  The men all get drunk and there's a horse-race that Leonidas, who can't do anything right, loses to Rapayet's son.  Leonidas who is now a teenager offers to marry Anibal's daughter but he is rejected.  In a rage, Leonidas humiliates one of Anibal's bodyguards by paying the man to publicly eat dog shit.  (He funds the exhibition with a big bundle of cash he was going to use for his dowry payment.)  This leads to a big quarrel that the elderly women are unable to mediate.  Leonidas gets drunk again and returns to Anibal's hacienda where he rapes the man's daughter (and, possibly, kills her).  Anibal sends his men out to ambush a group of Waayu drug mules and slaughters them.  Anibal's dope fields have been burned and he has lost many of his men. A "speaker" or mediator is sent with a talking stick to try to buy-off the feud but Anibal, who is a furious rage, shoots the man violating the rules of the tribe.  (On Rapayet's side, there are simiilar breaches of ritual protocol -- Rapayet and his henchmen are storing weapons in caskets in their graveyard supposed to be full of corpses awaiting their "second wake." Anibal sells the last of his marijuana in Medillin and uses the money to recruit some mercenaries.  They attack Rapayet's lavish modernist home and blow it up with grenade-launchers.  Apparently, Zaida and Rapayet's son are killed.  Anibal all alone now, and leading a burro, representing the last of his wealth, comes to Rapayet's ruined compound and kills Rapayet.  Indira, Rapayet's daughter, wanders off herding a couple of goats -- the nomadic tribe has returned to poverty and shepherd's work after their decade-long and disastrous foray into drug-dealing.  The shepherd singing the last canto says that he made the song because he had met a young woman herding a few goats in the desert and observed that no one had taught her the shepherd's trade -- she didn't seem to know what she was doing.  (He is referring to Indira.)

Birds of Passage runs 125 minutes but because of the abundance of action packed into the picture, seems to be a longer film. My summary is probably inexact and inaccurate.  Parts of the movie are hard to follow and it's difficult to determine who, if anyone, has any agency in the plot.  Rapayet seems rather passive and is acted upon as opposed to acting.  The old women, rival grandmothers, apparently are controlling the action, although, obviously, things spiral into chaos.  Notwithstanding the rather Shakespearian level of violence, the killings mostly take place off-screen and are depicted only by their outcomes.  The movie doesn't dwell on violence but shows it in a matter-of-fact way.  The Waayu are fiercely proud and have never been subdued by outsiders.  But they are prone to internecine blood feuds.  Rapayet is named after a forebear who was the sole survivor of a feud.  In the end of the movie, the film's Homer, the shepherd seen in profile against a setting sun, sings mournfully that their gods no longer speak to the Waayu through dreams as was once the case.  It's not outsiders (the despised aljunos) that destroy the Waayu but their own rivalries and inter-clan feuding -- all driven to a fever-pitch by the easy money involved in the drug trade.  The picture is elegantly made and extremely interesting.  The subject matter is exotic to the point that I wasn't able to identify with the characters, but I am able to see that the picture is epic in scope and recommend it.  But it's hard to follow:  at one point, one of the formidable grandmothers goes to Anibal's compound to retrieve a corpse wrapped with a white sheet -- this is clearly a key scene, but I didn't whose body was in the tightly wrapped bundle.  (I think this confusion was intended, but I'm not sure why -- from reading plot summary, I now know the wrapped corpse was that of Rapayet's son.)  I wasn't able to reliably distinguish between the grandmothers in their colorful batik gowns and this may have led to my confusion as to this scene.  Although there's a lot of exuberant gangster movie stuff in the movie, the things that will stick with you, I think, are the opening scenes involving the dance imitating birds and, then, the "second wake" at Anibal's hacienda -- although the tropes of a gangster film are obviously employed in the picture (particularly in the assassination of  Moises' episode), the movie suggests something strange and incommunicable on the basis of its ethnographic detail.  This picture is far better than Cirro Guerra''s 2015 Embrace of the Serpent, a highly acclaimed movie but one that I thought was overwrought and simplistic.  Guerra was hired by Amazon to produce a mini-series with an all-star cast called Cortes about the fall of the Aztec empire.  Covid intervened and the film was never made.  Guerra's Tv series Green Frontier (2017) was beautifully shot but impenetrable to me -- it was another movie about indigenous people living, this time, in the Columbian jungle.  Guerra doesn't seem to have made a film since 2019 when he released Waiting for the Barbarians, a movie with a distinguished cast that was poorly received.  

Another Year

 Another Year (2010) is a two-hour film by Mike Leigh, the celebrated British director.  In recent years, Leigh has specialized in comedies of humours, that is, dramas in which the director illustrates with didactic vigor the way in which people afflicted with a temperament governed by anger, or melancholy, or manic joy interact.  Although Leigh's urban Brits don't think in terms of black bile or excess of blood (if you are sanguine), they act under the influence of these humours even in the context of efforts of modern-day counseling and psychoanalysis. In Happy-go-Lucky (2008), Leigh shows a woman in the grip of manic exuberance; everything makes her happy, including events that are disastrous.  Hard Truths (2024) shows us the inverse case -- the heroine in that film is afflicted with anxiety and interprets everything as a personal insult.  Naked (1993) shows us a case of intellectual logorrhea with a co-morbidity of sexual sadism.  Life is Sweet (1990) is about an existence dominated by an eating disorder.  Another Year follows the seasons on their diurnal round:  a couple who are phlegmatic and sanguine (nothing troubles them much) interact with characters who are doomed to desperate, unremitting sadness.  I have called these films "comedies" because the extremity of monomania shown in the pictures is grotesquely comic -- but the pictures are mostly about very unhappy people.

Tom and Gerri are a happily married couple who have been together for 37 years.  They have one son, Joe, who is a lawyer or paralegal with a legal aid society.  Tom is a geologist who assesses the soil conditions for tunneling projects.  We see him inspecting core samples with a jeweler's loupe.  Gerri is a psychologist and counselor.  (In the first scene, we see her meeting with a gloomy insomniac played by Imelda Staunton -- she was the protagonist in Leigh's Vera Drake.  The woman is hostile and sullen and we are given the clear impression that nothing can be done to help her.  She is invested in her misery.)  Gerri's secretary is named Mary.  Mary is an attractive woman in her late forties.  She is desperately needy, searching for a boyfriend.  She drinks too much, becomes morose, and throws herself at men who aren't interested in her.  Tom's friend, Ken, is a fat alcoholic who smokes too much and is also hopelessly miserable -- he seems like a heart attack waiting to happen and he is also desperately searching for companionship.  Although Ken is interested in Mary, she is repulsed by him and, when he tries to embrace her, she beats him off and tells him that they can't even be friends.  The film has little plot.  The picture basically chronicles Tom and Gerri's interactions with their friends, particularly, the morose Mary and poor Ken.  Mary flirts with Joe; he is certainly much too young and cheerful for her.  Midway through the film, Joe turns up with a pretty, vivacious girlfriend.  This torments Mary who is overtly cruel to the young woman.  In the film's last third, Tom's older brother, Ronnie, loses his wife.  We see the funeral service of Ronnie's wife, whom he seems to have mistreated, and, then, a catastrophic encounter with Ronnie's son who is enraged by his father and, in general, mad at everyone.  Ronnie is too grief-stricken to care for himself and, so, the ever- generous Tom and Gerri take him into their comfortable London home.  While Tom and Gerri are cleaning up the tools and harvesting the last vegetables at their allotment, Mary appears at their home.  Mary has previously been neatly dressed and attractively made-up.  Something terrible has happened to her and she wears no make-up, seems pale as a ghost, and, since it is winter-time, is half-frozen, trembling with the cold.  Ronnie is suspicious of Mary, but warms to her slightly when they smoke outside the house.  Tom and Gerri return to find Mary desperately flirting with Ronnie who remains half-comatose with grief.  Tom is outraged at Mary's impudence at showing up at their house uninvited.  Apparently, there has been some sort of falling out with her, although we don't know exactly what has happened.  Nonetheless, Tom and Gerri make food for Ronnie and Mary and, then, Joe and his girlfriend appear as well.  The film ends with happy banter at the dinner table while the camera focuses on Mary who seems miserable to the point of suicide, grimacing in agony as she sits with her glass of wine and her food before her.  In many of Leigh's pictures, the characters are given an enterprise as a subplot that exemplifies their emotional dilemma -- most notably, in Life is Sweet about bulimia, there is a subplot involving a character's attempt to start an upscale restaurant; Timothy Spall plays the grotesque restauranteur whose business fails hopelessly.  In Another Year, Mary scrapes together all her resources to buy a car.  But she has purchased the car from two crooks and the vehicle doesn't work and her efforts at upkeep of the vehicle destroy her.  By the end of the movie, she has sold the car for the cost of towing and twenty quid; thieves have broken into the car and she is emotionally ruined by the experience.

The melancholy events in the story are moderated by the wisdom and nonchalance of Tom and Gerri and the happiness of the couple, Joe and his girlfriend.  Leigh's longtime D.P., Dick Pope shoots the movie unobtrusively.  The film is exceedingly subtle and, I think, would repay several viewings.  One aspect of the film's sadness involves the inevitable round of the seasons and how the passage of time is reflected in the activities of the gardeners at the allotment.  Tom and Gerri, and Ronnie together with Ken are all at the ends of their lives.  Tom, reading in bed with Gerri, says that, when he was younger, he never cared much for history but now history interests him.  Gerri says that this is because they are becoming "historical".  We have the sense that Tom denies his interest in history when he was younger to make a point about time passing -- actually, he probably was always interested in history.  Gerri is attuned to his sadness and makes explicit what he has implied.  I highly recommend this movie but it's not for all tastes -- nothing happens and the film ends without any sort of climax or, even, resolution.  That's the essence of most lives and their tragedy:  nothing much happens. 

Shy People

 Director Andrei Konchalovsky has made films in the Soviet Union, the United States, and Russia.  He is highly respected but, with a few exceptions, seems to never have achieved the excellence to which he aspires.  In the United States, he was largely the victim of low budgets and bad scripts.  However, his 1987 film, Shy People is based on his own screenplay and seems to represent on film his intentions.  (The movie was conceived years earlier when Konchalovsky was directing his magnum opus, the Siberiade in the Soviet Union.)  The film's somewhat primitive and simple-minded premise is that of a City Mouse (played by Jill Clayburgh) visiting her Country Mouse cousin (Barbara Hershey); the contrivances required to set the plot in motion don't really work and many aspects of the film are implausible -- but the situation is sufficiently rich for Konchalovsky to engineer a compelling, if histrionic, story that allows for its actors to deliver "over-the-top" performances.  The film bears certain resemblances to one of Konchalovsky's masterpieces Runaway Train (1985), an action film based on a similarly ludicrous and overwrought script by no less than Akira Kurosawa.  Both movies exploit a ridiculous premise executed with no irony and total conviction -- both movies feature an exotic location (Louisiana bayous in Shy People and the Alaskan wilderness in Runaway Train -- and both films end with a final quote somewhat pretentiously displayed before ending credits.  

In Shy People, a pampered lady journalist (she writes for Cosmopolitan) contrives a trip to the remote bayous of Louisiana to write a story about her country cousins.  (Her grandfather was brother to the grandfather who is the progenitor of the primitive clan in the swamps.)  The journalist, named Diane, has a daughter who is about 17 and a spoiled brat.  The daughter uses cocaine and flaunts her promiscuity -- her boyfriend is a forty-year old junkie with whom the Diane may have had a fling.  Diane is surprised that her daughter Grace is willing to make the trip (it involves flying first class) to Louisiana to visit the country cousins.  It's obvious to the viewer that Grace is a ticking time-bomb.

In Louisiana, Diane hires a backwoods boatman to ferry her into the swamps to place where her cousin's wife lives -- a large Victorian house nicely appointed on a levee in the middle of nowhere.  There was once a town around the house but a flood has swept everything away but the big, airy manse.  The family living in the house is an example of the Southern Gothic carried to a hysterical extreme:  Ma, Ruth, was a 12-year old bride to the sinister Joe, a patriarch of the kind that Burl Ives used to play in his vicious villain mode.  Joe has vanished, but not before brutalizing everyone in the family.  Ruth has four sons:  one of them Mike runs a strip club and bar in the nearby town, a nasty place dependent on trade from oil rig roughnecks -- he has a pencil moustache and looks like smarmy small-town used car dealer.  Mark has his own child bride, the plump and pregnant Candy.  He's a swamp rat, fishing for crabs and shrimp in the muddy backwaters of the bayou.  Tommy is some kind of psychopath that Ma keeps locked in a shed.  He's handsome and friendly but something is wrong with him and he seems to be glad to remain out of trouble in his barred cell out in the yard.  The youngest son, Pauly, is a half-wit, the product of his father, Joe's well-placed punch (or two punches) to his mother's belly during the flood that swept away the town around the house.  Pauly is slavishly loyal to his mother and the baby of the family.  Joe has fled from the revenuers into the inaccessible swamps and is either dead or a malign spirit hiding in the lagoons; he is represented in the movie by a lurid surreal portrait showing his glaring white face emerging from the black canvas.  The portrait hangs over his empty chair at the dinner table that is kept vacant for him.  Joe had the habit of hanging ma upside down and beating the hell out of her and the sons, needless to say, are a bit ambivalent about him.   

A poacher named Jake has assaulted Mark in the spectral swamp, draped in fog and vines and with stumps standing in water like tombstones.  Ma is encouraged to make a complaint to the law in a nearby town.  With Diane and restive, discontent daughter-in-law, Ruth makes a trip to town, using her boat's outboard motor to power her way through a vast colonnade of opposing concrete columns -- it's the underpinning of an enormously long bridge crossing a tidal lake: the image of the boat making its way between the columns, lit by slanting sunlight is the film's signature image, a scene that illumines the rather squalid proceedings with classical splendor -- it's as if we are seeing a Greek myth unfold.  In town, a hellscape of trash, men toting alligators like sacks of potatoes over their shoulders, detritus of beer cans and candy wrappers and junked cars inexplicably being dumped in the lagoon, Ma reluctantly appeals to the sheriff.  He refuses to do anything for her.  So, while the daughter-in-law and Diane are shopping for a battery-powered TV, Ruth goes to the local strip club, a decaying barn-like building, and shoots off Jake's hand.  The strip club is run by her son, Mike, and, when he remonstrates with her, she goes berserk, becomes a temperance crusader, and trashes his bottles of booze, terrorizing the hapless strippers.  Meanwhile back at the ranch, Grace has twisted through the bars to Tommy's cage and seduced him.  Pauly reports the transgression to Mark.  Mark is enraged and threatens both Tommy and Grace.  So Grace decides to soothe the savage breast with copious doses of cocaine offered to all three  boys.  This leads to what Maurice Sendak called "a wild rumpus" including Mark's rape of Grace in thick puddle of spilled honey.  (Konchalovsky goes for supersize effects.)  There's lots of fighting, grunting and shouting and Grace departs from the orgy in a canoe which gradually sinks in the alligator-filled swamp.  Ma returns and tells Mark to discipline Tommy with some kind of iron rod.  Tommy is beaten to a pulp and ends up comatose.  Now, Diane, horrified at the enormity of the "wild rumpus", flees the compound and also ends up marooned in the swamp with her pontoon boat spinning around in forlorn circles.

It all turns out okay once the two women learn life-lessons from one another.  Diane learns that she needs to discipline Grace, albeit not with an iron rod, and become her mother and not her best friend.  (Konchalovsky, like most Russians, I think is very conservative as to family and domestic matters.)  Ruth comes to terms with the malign influence of the ghostly Joe, who has been hanging around and watching the affray through the fog.  The movie is lurid nonsense but beautifully made and effectively acted.  Konchalovsky wrote the script for Andrei Tarkovsky's first movie, Ivan's Childhood, and much of the imagery from that film has seeped into Shy People -- most spectacularly, the wilderness of water and forest in which there seems to be no solid ground and people and objects appear to float in the misty chaos.  (This is the landscape where the boy-soldier, Ivan, spends his hellish childhood.)  The swamp in Shy People has an enormous foggy menace and Konchalovsky suggests that his "shy people" (a local euphemism for wild critters who engage in murderous blood feuds) are formed by the chaotic watery soup in which they live.  The movie has a strange moral that makes no sense to me, but I'm not a Russian.  In the Book of Revelations, the Messiah says that he will save those who are hot and cold but will renounce those who are lukewarm.  Being hot and cold here means possessing strong and savage emotions of love and hate.  The film suggests that true humanity resides in the passions and that reason and civilization are merely veneers that we use to persuade ourselves that we are not nothing more than beasts.   

The Yellow Canary

 Not all films that have been lovingly restored are worth the effort.  Consider The Yellow Canary (1963), a low-budget crime movie directed by Buzz Kulik, carefully restored under the auspices of Eddie Mueller's film noir foundation.  The movie sounds promising and had gone missing until a camera negative was discovered about a year ago -- in 2024 or 2025.  The film stars Pat Boone, the crooning pop star from the late fifties and early sixties, the epitome of straight Christian virtue and as far from the burgeoning hippie and beatnik scene as imaginable.  (There's a rumor that is said to be true that Pat Boone baptized Bob Dylan in his Hollywood swimming pool --reported in the New York Post in February 1979).  Boone is playing a misanthropic cad, again acting against the wholesome type that his publicity projected, a crooner very much similar to the star himself but meaner and more callous and sexually unfaithful to his wife, a thankless role acted by Barbara Eden.  (She was later to disport herself in a harem slave costume on the TV show I Dream of Jeannie.)  What's more, the movie was written by Rod Sterling, the reliably cynical and ingeniously effective creator of the Twilight Zone and the author of a number of respectable film noir including Requiem for a Heavy Weight.  With this kind of cast, a director who proved himself later in the TV market, and Rod Serling as screenwriter, The Yellow Canary was optimistically imagined as a lost masterpiece.  It's nothing of the kind and has nothing, except novelty, to recommend it.  Furthermore, the movie was made cheap and looks cheap.  In fact, the money ran out and Pat Boone, who hoped the vehicle would be his ticket to serious roles in Hollywood, had to finance the completion of the film with his own money -- the weird credit telling the audience that Cooca Mooga Productions made the film is a cover for the fact that "Cooca Mooga" is really just Pat Boone funding the movie with his own money.  

Pat Boone playing a glorified lounge singer, Andy Paxton, is a bad man.  He despises his thousands of teenage girl fans, cheats on his luscious wife, and ignores his infant son.  He bullies his assistant, Bate, a weakling with whom he grew up, and, even, taunts his muscular bodyguard, Hub, who, in turn, despises him.  At a show, Paxton is planning to cheat on his wife, but, when she attends, with his 11-month baby boy, someone snatches the child, killing the infant's nursemaid.  Paxton is asked to pony-up $200,000 for return of the kidnapped infant.  A detective, well played by Jack Klugman, is assigned to the case.  There are various poorly staged twists and turns as Paxton tries to figure out who has snatched his child.  (Klugman is left with very few things to do other than to bemoan Paxton's refusal to cooperate with the cops.) It turns out that the kidnapping is an inside job.  The long-suffering Bate gets strangled and, then, picturesquely hanged from the back wall of Paxton's Hollywood mansion.  A money-launderer who has nothing to do with the kidnapping has to be found.  The loathsome Hub, the muscle man, tortures a prostitute to find the money-launderer.  But when Paxton and the cop go to the man's apartment, he has been stabbed to death.  (Why? he had nothing to do with the kidnapping plot.  And by whom?)  Paxton finally figures out what the audience grasped about two reels before the climax.  The crooner is spectacularly dim-witted and his wife is even worse.  The crooner rescues the baby and tosses the kid to his waiting wife.  Then, the script (or the script girl responsible for continuity) forget all about the baby who mysteriously vanishes from the end of the movie -- kidnapped again?  The happy ending is Paxton whispering sweet nothings to his wife and shaking hands, at last, with Jack Klugman's dogged, but ineffectual, detective.

The movie is cheap and its economy shows.  Things go to hell about 10 minutes into the movie when there is very long scene, all dialogue, and staged as a motionless master shot in which all the characters are visible.  The scene is horribly dull.  When something goes wrong with the shot, Kulik cuts away to an optically printed close-up from the master shot.   The movie is made in cinemascope black and white, and the inserted shot isn't adjusted for the anamorphic lens -- the image doesn't even remotely match the scene in which it's embedded and seems oddly squeezed in dimension.  Sets are flimsy and seem ready ready to fall over.  A juke box is made of cardboard and when Pat Boone brushes against it, the thing almost topples.  Boone slips and falls or trips himself about four times in the movie but the errors are not corrected.  Barbara Eden has next to nothing to do other than loudly wail and bitch at her useless husband -- her part is severely underwritten.  With the exception of a few hardboiled lines and exchanges, Serling's script is awful -- it starts out okay but collapses in the long scene, presumably shot after the movie lost funding, in one continuous, if botched, take.  The acting is very bad.  Boone himself has no idea what he is doing and can't even hit his marks without stumbling over his own feet.  The only bonus to the film is that we do get to see the performance by Boone of a couple of songs, morose tough guy ballads, that sound like Frank Sinatra as sung by a twerp.  Boone has a pretty voice and his singing in the mode of a callow punk Sinatra is the best thing in the movie.  In film noir, there's always a scene in which a tough guy is thrown in jail to cool his heels until someone bails him out so that he can continue to get used as a punching bag by the bad guys.  These jail shots are characteristically showy, filmed with moody bars shadowing the imprisoned man.  The cameraman in The Yellow Canary can't figure out how to light the jail scene and its falls completely flat.  Indeed, the whole movie is shot in the sourceless, slightly surreal and indistinct white light that characterizes TV shows from the early sixties -- somehow, light, which is the agent and protagonist in film noir has been stripped of its glamor.   

Divided Heaven

 "When lovers are separated, they promise to fix their eyes on one star each night so that they will be united, at least, in their vision.

"The Heavens can not be divided.

"To the contrary, the heavens are the first thing to be divided."

Thus, dialogue in Konrad Wolf's 1964 The Divided Heaven and film based on Christa Wolf's famous East German novel of the same name.  (When I was in College, German majors were required to read this sober, earnest East German book -- considered to be diagnostic of East Germany's aspirations as a political system and, also, a feminist novel to boot.  I never read the book because I wasn't really a German major and didn't feel I needed to know anything about the DDR.  As usual, I regret that arrogant and presumptuous opinion, but now 50 years too late.)  Wolf was the best of the East German filmmakers and he has a staggering visual gift -- his movies look stunning and they are incisively constructed with excellent acting. The Divided Heaven (Der Geteilte Himmel) is a dogmatic and partisan film disguised as an exercise in anomie influenced by the pictures of Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard.  Godard and Antonioni were Leftist film directors (Godard was a pretend Maoist); Konrad Wolf is the real McCoy, a committed German Communist of the Old School given big budgets by DEFA to produce and direct movies espousing East German ideals half-concealed by advanced film technique in prestige pictures designed for the Film Festival circuit at Cannes, Berlin, and Moscow.  There's no doubt that Konrad Wolf is a great director; there's also no doubt that this picture, at least, is tendentious, irritating, and, quite possibly, evil.  It's inferior to Wolf's later picture Solo Sunny but, nonetheless, worth a look, if only for its graphic beauty and stylish trappings.

A naive young woman, Rita, lives in some soulless East German city, possibly Leipzig or Dresden -- the town has an impressive cathedral-like tower with two spires and a dam that looks like the place where St. Anthony Falls cascades over the Corps of Engineers concrete apron in Minneapolis.  There is also a very high aqueduct like bridge with soaring masonry arches over which tiny trains pass to and fro.  These images are visual motifs to which Wolf refers again and again and seem to be correlates for the love affair between Rita and her boyfriend, the chemist, Manfred.  Rita is admitted to a teacher's college but drops out for some reason that I wasn't able to understand.  She, then, joins the proletariat as a worker in a factory that makes train cars.  East German factories are not heavily automated and Rita with her comrades literally screws the train cars together with torque wrenches and powered screw drivers.  The factory is organized like a unit of the army and Rita works with the famous Ermisch brigade, a collective of laborers who are famously productive.  When a comrade shows that you can assemble one-frame (a unit of production in the train passenger cars) in a mere 17 minutes, the boss increases the production quota to reflect this innovation -- an increase in production that the movie seems to applaud.  Everyone agrees that building more trains more quickly is a good thing for the East German worker's republic.  The increase in production leads to some sort of controversy in the workplace -- whatever it is, remained unclear to me.  (I don't think that Wolf wanted to suggest openly  that workers might be disgruntled about quota increases -- the dispute is postured as a power struggle.)  One of the foremen crosses over to West Germany hampering the plant's efficiency.  The movie, although released in 1964 portrays a period before the border between the divided Germanys was closed, particularly in Berlin by the Wall.)  Rita goes back to teacher's school, possibly under pressure because she backed the wrong boss in the train factory.  (The story is told very elliptically with flashbacks and flashforwards and it would require a second viewing to figure out exactly what is going in the narrative.)  Rita is sleeping with the chemist, Manfred, and lives with him in the garret of his parent's luxurious house -- his father is some kind of retired director of an East German business.  Manfred has developed a wonderful chemical process of great commercial value -- we are never told exactly how it works or what it is.  Rita has a friend named Sigrid whose father has left East Germany for the West.  She is back in teacher's school where a dogmatic Marxist teacher, Mangold, persecutes her and Sigrid for the father's defection to the West -- the guy seems to teach a class in Marxist dialectics and he is the movie's villain.  Pushed out of teacher's school for the second time, Rita returns to the factory, building trains.  Manfred's chemical process is not adopted by the local industrial concern, apparently due to a cabal of conspirators who want to entrench their chemical procedures in the industry.  This upsets Manfred and, with his lab assistant, Martin, he defects to the West.  Rita is torn and doesn't know whether she should accompany her boyfriend or stay in dear, dirty old East Germany.  Manfred comes back for a visit and goes with Rita on a test drive of one of the trains that she and her comrades have constructed.  The train's emergency brake is pulled on the tracks in the country and it fails to pass specifications which are rigorous and exacting and enforced by the dignified older boss at the factory, a hero of East German productivity called Meternagel.  Someone announces enthusiastically that the Soviets have put a man in orbit.  There is a quote that the cosmonaut was a farmer's son who sees the blackness of outer space as a furrowed field where seed corn is scattered like the stars in the sky.  (The movie responds to this with bombastic snatches of music, played as if in a Godard film in disconnected fragments, accompanying shots of the cloudy sky overhanging the level fields of the Brandenberg Mark -- it's an impressive sequence.) Rita is tempted and goes with Manfred to West Germany (West Berlin) where there are lots of people scurrying around in a square to a sound track of blaring traffic horns.  The traffic is never shown and Wolf subscribes to the idea that the less he shows of West Germany, the better.  Standing, ala Godard, next to a huge Persil advertisement covering a whole city wall, the two lovers debate the situation.  Rita isn't impressed by West Berlin which she describes as shiny with lots of cellophane, but, also, very warm.  She returns to East Germany where the noble Meternagel is dying, all worn out by decades of hard labor.  Rita has a nervous breakdown at the factory and falls supine onto the railroad tracks as a locomotive is approaching.  She is picked up and taken to a sanitarium where she recovers.  The film ends with melancholy shots of the great masonry bridge with its soaring arches, the church or fortress with its proudly separate twin towers, and the dam on the river, an empty frame after the manner of Ozu, in that the two lovers who previously frequented this place are no longer present.

The movie is very dogmatic and seems to be an apology justifying the construction of the Berlin Wall and the closing of the border.  The people with deep heart and souls opt to stay in East Germany despite the hardships and the fact that everyone, as shown by the movie, is informing on everyone else,  West Germany is portrayed as overcrowded, possibly due to a surfeit of East German defectors -- there's one really absurd scene with the young lovers in the foreground and five people to the rear of the shot comically pressing themselves together on a single bench; it's clearly intended to be farcical but I don't know the director's intention as to this gag.  The acting is good, if Brechtian in it schematic and abstract quality -- the good people are really good, the bad people (including the Party apparatchik Mangold) are really bad.  It's hard to make a successful movie with a purely passive protagonist.  Rita is a doormat and you root for her to depart for a real life in West Germany, an emotion that the director certainly didn't want to induce.  But she's too passive to do much of anything and can't really carry the movie.  The elliptical style feels unnecessary to the relatively clear story that I have narrated sequentially -- the movie fragments the story into bits and pieces and presents them, more or less, randomly.  In fact, the elliptical aspect of the movie feels dishonest as if Wolf is trying to hide scenes that might stir up problems for the movie with the East German censors -- and, in fact, the movie was repressed from time-to-time, particularly during the waning years of the regime.  It's a deeply irritating movie but has the courage of (some) of its convictions:  at one point, someone says that the "people of the future depend upon countless people now alive" -- a true statement, as far as I see, and, perhaps, something important to keep in mind.  

Things Change

 Shel Silverstein and David Mamet wrote the script for Things Change, a sweet-tempered 1988 movie that Mamet also directed.  The film is a fairy tale that, once its premise is established, is wholly predictable although in a satisfying way.  The picture stars Mamet's surrogate and stand-in, Joe Mantegna, and Don Ameche, playing against type as a humble, dim-witted shoeshine man who speaks with a vaudeville Italian accent so broad and stylized as to be marginally offensive.  Ameche's dignified appearance, contrasted with his caricatured speech, is perfect for the part, the role of an unassuming urban peasant who is taken for the capo of capos in the Chicago mob.  

Ricky Jay, a fixture in all Mamet's movies, summons the shoeshine man to a meeting with a Chicago gangster.  The gangster promises to buy a fishing boat for the shoeshine man (Ameche) if he will agree to take the fall for a gangland shooting and serve three-years in prison for the crime.  The shoeshine man, reluctantly, agrees and gives his word to accept the frame-up the next Monday after a weekend.  Joe Mantegna, playing a minor thug who is on probation for bungling an assignment, is told to keep the shoeshine man in his company for the whole weekend so he doesn't back out of the gig.  The gangster has the civilian sign a confession and leaves him under Mantegna's supervision.  Mantegna, feeling sorry for the man, decides that they will spend the weekend in Lake Tahoe.  And, so, they fly out to Reno.  While checking into a Tahoe resort, another apprentice gangster played by the great William Macy, mistakes Ameche for the big boss in gangland Chicago.  The odd couple, Mantegna and Ameche, are lodged on the Criterion floor of the resort in palatial surroundings with the lodge's promise that "(their) money is no good in the establishment."  They gamble and Ameche wins $30,000 in a fixed game, but, then, loses in the next game that is not fixed.  They gambol with some showgirls who are touched by Ameche's grandfatherly gravitas.  Ameche and Mantegna are invited to the mansion of the Vegas boss where the shoe-shine man and the crime-lord, played effectively by the fearsome Bob Proskey, bond over drinks and cigars.  Everything that Ameche says is interpreted in light of his presumed status as the big Boss from Chicago.  In fact, Ameche doesn't have much of actual interest to say -- he utters gnomic remarks about shining shoes which are taken as profound apothegms from a terrifying organized-crime boss.  (The film bears more than a passing resemblance to Being There, the 1979 Hal Ashby film in which Peter Sellers as a moronic gardener is accepted as a political wise man, his statements about weeding and planting and pruning all interpreted as oracular wisdom.)  There are some close calls and misunderstandings, but this being a fairy tale we anticipate that everything will be worked-out in the end.  When Mantegna and Ameche miss their plane back to Chicago, they hijack a car and drive to the Windy City, apparently in one night -- by this point, the fairy-tale aspects of the story are obvious.  The attentive reader will be able to guess the innocuous plot twists engineered by Silverstein and Mamet for the climax.

Things Change is minor Mamet, an amusing exercise in the writer's extreme stoicism transplanted into the narrative machinery of a Maerchen.  The dialogue is characteristically clipped, laconic, and repetitive.  The picture is droll, but, not really funny.  The film's ending is satisfying.  Ameche's performance as an honorable dullard is notable and the rest of the cast is excellent as well.  The film is a successful divertissement.

Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds

 Co-directed by Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer, Fireball:  Visitors from Darker Worlds is a bit like an essay by Montaigne.  The ostensible topic of the documentary, meteors and meteorites (called "meteoroids" often in the film) quickly is absorbed into a larger, discursive context that strays, as in a stream of consciousness, far afield.  The structure of the movie is associative -- one thing leads to another.  Ultimately, the picture ends on an ecstatic and somber note:  the subject seems to be death and man's accommodation to that fact.  Here death is viewed both individually as well as collectively, that is, the fate of each of us and the fate of the world as well.  The movie is Wunderkammer filmed as rhapsody, with lush and ominous choral music and astonishing visuals.

Herzog met Clive Oppenheimer, a volcanologist, in Antarctica when he shot a documentary in that place.  In this film, Oppenheimer stands in for Herzog as interviewer and enraptured witness to the various things on display.  Herzog contributes, off-screen, his characteristically dead-pan, acerbic, and witty narration and, in one instance, his voice is heard off-camera making a mild joke -- something about being from Bavaria (I didn't exactly catch it).  The movie begins with indigenous people in Mexico juggling balls of fire for a Day of the Dead ritual, then, shows us a dash-cam footage of a fireball blazing across the skies somewhere in Russia -- the fireball bleaches the screen white and yellow.  We see pictures of a woman actually hit by a meteoroid -- it left a loaf-sized bruise on her upper thigh.  In the black-and-white photographs we see her staring in a baffled way at the camera.  There is a Norwegian jazz musician (we meet him strumming his guitar on the roof of a stadium amphitheater where he collects micro-meteorites with a magnet in the sandy detritus in the gutters.  Viewed under magnification, the micro-meteorites are beautiful, like collages of stained glass.  There are meteoroids stored in cabinets in Arizona -- I've seen the display in Tucson of some of these objects.  (The barren wastes of deserts are good places to collect meteorites.) Various talking heads opine and Herzog lingers on their faces after they have ceased talking for uncomfortable lengths of time -- it's as if the camera is seeking the essence of the person speaking in some transcendental way.  (This technique is typical of all of Herzog's documentaries dating back, at least, to Brother Huey's Sermon).  Herzog and company travel to a place in the Yucatan where an immense meteor blew open the Caribbean Sea, created the Gulf of Mexico, and, incidentally, slaughtered the dinosaurs making room in the world for the small, gnawing rodents that then existed. (The town marking the location of the surmised meteor impact is so "forlorn it makes you want to cry", Herzog says, showing us a desolate set of scarcely inhabited ruins on a desolate stretch of beach.  There are two mangy dogs sniffing a third that may be dead but is probably just sleeping:  Herzog says the "dogs are too stupid to understand what happened here."  In Australia, Herzog's drone flies over a huge, sinister impact crater, the hole at Wolf Creek, and, then, we meet an indigenous woman who is an artist and who features the crater, although in a highly abstract way, in her paintings.   Meteors are both the destroyers and givers of life:  Herzog reviews the "panspermia" thesis that meteoroids "seeded" life on earth.  He tours a temple in India where a meteor fell although no one knew this until recently -- the temple is sacred to Shiva.  He reproduces footage of a scrum of pilgrims in Mecca at the Kaaba, fighting one another to plant their lips on plexiglass over a black meteor in the corner of the house-high square monument.  In Antarctica, Oppenheimer and five men march in a line across the level ice of a high plateau looking for rocks fallen from the sky.  Oppenheimer finds a large meteoroid, about the size of his fist and the Japanese leader of the expedition goes into an ecstasy of joy, falling onto the snow and flailing around -- this is the sort of ecstatic image that motivates Herzog's documentary movies.  We see children painted as eerie skeletons marching in a parade for the Day of the Dead, clips from Deep Impact that Herzog praises as "very well done" showing a meteor smashing into the sea and raising a tsunami two-thousand feet high and the picture ends on a beach in Papua or some island in Oceania where indigenous men are relearning an ancient ritual to release the souls of the dead.  They beat torches together while dancing and intoning a song and the sparks, which represent dead people's souls, burst upward into the sky, the whole thing filmed at the golden hour with the sun elegiacally setting into the sea.  

The movie is as good as documentaries get.  It's the sort of film that you mourn a little when the closing titles appear.