Rebecca (1940) – Blu-ray Disc
****/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, George Sanders, Judith Anderson
screenplay by Robert E. Sherwood and Joan Harrison;
adaptation by Philip MacDonald and Michael Hogan, based on the novel by Daphne Du Maurier
directed by Alfred Hitchcock
by Walter Chaw
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
–“The Idea of Order at Key West,” Wallace Stevens
Let’s take a moment to talk about water.
by Walter Chaw
by Walter Chaw
by Walter Chaw
by Walter Chaw
****/****
by Walter Chaw
by Walter Chaw
by Walter Chaw
by Walter Chaw The easy thing is to say that Tomas Alfredson has followed up his tremendous vampire flick Let the Right One In with another vampire flick, a story of Cold War British Intelligence as men in shadows, exhausted, living off the vibrancy of others. Yet Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the Swedish director’s adaptation of John le Carré’s seminal spy novel, is something a good deal more than a clever segue from one genre film to another. Less a companion piece to the latest Mission: Impossible than a bookend to Lars von Trier’s end-of-the-world Melancholia, it’s a character study, sure, but more accurately it’s an examination of a culture of gestures and intimations, where a flutter of an eyelid causes a hurricane in another part of a corrupt, insular world. Naturally, its timeliness has nothing to do with its literal milieu (all Russian bogeys and ’70s stylings)–nothing to do with recent world events that have an entire CIA cell blown up in Iran and Lebanon–and everything to do with its overpowering atmosphere of feckless power and utter resignation. It’s a spy thriller that Alfred Lord Tennyson would’ve written–the very filmic representation of acedia.
by Walter Chaw
by Walter Chaw
by Walter Chaw
by Walter Chaw
2011 was a turning point for me. Two films–Red Cliff and The Tree of Life–did it, the one returning to me a measure of my identity, the other giving me a sense that I’d avoided asking ultimate questions about my relationship with film from the start. My stances that there are right and wrong answers in the liberal arts and that people are only entitled to an educated opinion held steady–but I’d never asked why it was that the things I liked were the things I liked. Around this time, I read Jonathan Lethem’s monograph on John Carpenter’s They Live and was consequently inspired to write one of my own, on Steve De Jarnatt’s Miracle Mile. I chose that movie not because–perhaps I should say, not only because–of its relative obscurity, but because it was a movie I’ve been evangelical about since first seeing it in 1989. The process of writing that monograph consumed much of the last half of 2011. I skipped screenings because of it, and found myself incapable of reviewing the films I did see very well, if at all.