One of Coppola’s finest.

Click the image.

1974 was a great year for director Francis Ford Coppola for it saw his mystery movie ‘The Conversation’ come to the big screen.

Set in and around Union Square in San Francisco it’s about a professional sound snooper who makes a recording he wishes he had never heard.

As I remarked to my son:

To which he replied with a wonderful sense of the succinct:

This is a very low key, cerebral movie, one in which little happens, much reminiscent of the style of Antonioni. You can read my interview with the star of ‘Blow Up’ here.

But do not be fooled by the slow pacing of the movie. There are three scenes towards the end, each but a few frames, which are overpowering in their impact, but these are so brief, so shocking, that they are a ‘blink and and you will miss it’ sort of thing. The horrific lost in the banal. Absolutely chilling. If you think that Kubrick did not watch this movie before making ‘The Shining’ 6 years later, think again.

Highly recommended for anyone with an imagination and an attention span.

How great a year was 1974 for the director? The movie was nominated for Best Picture, Best Writing and Best Sound – work by the wonderful Walter Murch. It failed to win in all three categories. Was Coppola to be disappointed? Well, no. That same year he made ‘The Godfather, Part II’ which earned him no fewer than six Oscars.

As good as it gets.

Many actors have tried their hand at Churchill, most recently Gary Oldman whose performance in a horribly fictitious movie (WSC taking advice from a black man on the Underground? Please. …) garnered him an Oscar. But the definitive performance is by Albert Finney, true to the accurate biography by Martin Gilbert. And, truth in biographies of great men is a concept devoutely to be wished, and all the rarer for that.

Click the image for the complete movie, free.

Albert Finney died today leaving a legacy of great performances. None was finer than his WSC in ‘The Gathering Storm’.

Outstanding restoration work.

New Zealander Peter Jackson has made some of the highest grossing movies in history. In 2018 he set his energies to celebrating the centenary of the end of World War I by restoring old film from the conflict. He rid the images of the grain, tramline scratches and dust blobs . and adjusted the playback speed to get rid of the jerkiness. Film of that era was shot at a hand cranked 12fps against the 24fps used in the cinema, so everything looks speeded up unless you interpolate frames to adjust the framing rate. Finally, and best of all, he colorized the results to add interest and authenticity. The sole narrative in the 90 minute documentary is from voiceovers of period writings of the soldiers in the conflict, with the moving images supplemented with the words and sounds appropriate to the time. Amazon has the DVD, titled ‘They Shall not Grow Old’, but be sure that your DVD player is multi-region as the disc is formatted for UK players.

In 1914 the masses could still be suckered into fighting and dying for ‘King and Country’ and King and Country ensured that they did so in droves. Or maybe that should be Tsar and Country. Of the 4.8 million Allied deaths, 35% were Russian, 24% French and 15% British. The Kaiser did a better job of the slaughter, sending 3.2 million to an early grave.

Idealistic Americans were suckered in with the same appeals to patriotism and the Old Country in 1942 but by the time of Viet Nam they had cottoned on to the con perpetrated by the military industrial complex, to borrow Ike’s phrase, with many deciding to stay away. And those who did serve were cruelly rejected by their fellow Americans on their return. Interestingly, as the documentary makes clear, the surviving British soldiers were met with like indifference on their return home in 1918. War is never pretty.

Here are some images from Jackson’s landmark work:

Appropriately, the documentary commences and concludes with grainy, dirty, jerky stock footage making the transition to and from the restoration so much more effective.

A unique accomplishment.

In 1964 the French director Jacques Demy made a unique movie, a story of star crossed lovers where all the words are sung. Not a single one is spoken. This was not an attempt to compete with the great American musical. After all, how do you compete with perfection? No, rather it was a unique approach to telling a story where the quality of the singing is secondary to the narrative of the story in song. And it succeeds spectacularly. The lush score was written by Michel Legrand who passed away last week. Such were his accomplishments that he garnered three best song Oscars with “The Windmills of Your Mind” in the Thomas Crown Affair being the best known to American audiences.

But it’s the raw visual appeal of the movie, photographed by Jean Rabier, which is a standout. The very high contrast rendition – think Kodak Ektar on steroids – coupled with the bubble gum colored sets makes for a special visual statement. And throw in a very young Catherine Deneuve in what would become her breakout movie, and the no less lovely Anne Vernon as her mother and you have the makings of something very special.

Here is a collection of favorite images from this masterpiece:

You can turn on subtitles but why when you can listen to the glories of French instead?

For the follow up musical of 1967, click here.

Compelling.

First Man is a biographical portrait of a special man, Neil Armstrong.

Director Damien Chazelle used a mixture of three film formats in making the movie, hand held 16mm for some of the domestic scenes, 35mm and 65mm IMAX for the HD sections, including the heart-stopping image of the Apollo 11 attached to von Braun’s faultless Saturn V rocket on the Houston launchpad at night. The 16mm work captures the look and feel of 1960s American middle class domesticity well. The 65mm sections harken back to the 70mm film used in the big magazines attached to the Hasselblad 500EL used by the astronauts. (The wonderful moment when Mission Control reminds Armstrong of the correct exposure settings as he prepares to step on the moon is correctly repeated here).

Candidly, if you do not catch this movie in an IMAX theater then the effects of a launch – be it the earlier Gemini or the later Apollo capsules – will be lost. The raw violence as the rockets ignite at blast-off, the sheer physical terror from the unleashing of over 7 million pounds of thrust to release man from the powerful grasp of gravity, these are things which dictate IMAX technology.

Two aspects of this fine movie stand out.

One is Ryan Gosling’s rendering of Armstrong. While the natural tendency of American directors is to opt for sentimental schmalz in biopics, Chazelle largely avoids this temptation, opting for schmalz-lite in securing continuity through the repeated mention of the death of Armstrong’s daughter at a young age. Gosling shows us the man we so little knew. Self-effacing, tightly wound and, above all, very serious. This is a very serious movie in the best possible way. I would hate to think what Spielberg would have delivered, other than better returns for his investors and sales for the makers of Kleenex.

The other is the no-holds-barred renderings of the hardware. There’s nothing glossy or high-tech about the look here. These are machines clearly seen to be bolted together by hand, poorly finished and utterly functional in intent. You wonder, time and again, why parts are not falling off during the brutal first few minutes as von Braun’s fires of hell are unleashed below the occupants, mostly mere passengers with little control over their fate.

Other performances of mention are Corey Stoll’s Buzz Aldrin, ever spiky and opportunistic. Not a man you would have a beer with. And a low key yet courageous Claire Foy as Armstrong’s wife. As the widow of another of the astronauts reminds her, she could have married a dentist and, yes, he would always be home by 6pm. Not an option for this woman.

Catch First Man at your local IMAX soon because box office returns suggest that it will not be there long, the audience’s interest about as long as Americans’ attention span for the very short lived Apollo program which remains – after the Louisiana and Alaska Purchases – one of the most lucrative investments the US taxpayer ever made. Indeed, had Apollo not existed we would have no microchips today and you would not be reading this.

A note on Wernher von Braun, the German engineer who made it possible for Apollo to escape earth’s gravity. His biography is objectively reported by Wikipedia including much detail on his sordid past. The OSS, forerunner of the CIA, did a masterful job of snatching him from a defeated Germany in 1945 along with many of his scientists, beating the (presumably intoxicated) Russians to the punch. We got the A Team and they crafted the Saturn V. The Russians came later, copied our tactics, and got the B Team. (“Here’s the good news, Hans. You are being liberated. Here’s the bad news. Moscow.”) They never successfully fired their copy of the Saturn V. All four exploded on the launch pad. No moonwalk for Ivan.