'Hit Me', Rocco!

Boxing BrothersOnly 3 episodes of Hit Me With Your Best Shot left and here's one of the three! Please join us with your own "best shot" choices for Aliens (July 13th) and Rebel Without a Cause (July 20th) as we close out the second season in the next two weeks.

Those films will be easier tasks than Luchino Visconti's ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS (1960), mostly because they're more familiar properties. Visconti offers up so much to ponder in his novelistic film that one viewing might not suffice.

Rocco and His Brothers, which charts the sad aspirational lives of the Pardoni family -- they're country boys who move to the big city (Milan) -- is structured loosely by chapters named after and focusing on each brother from eldest to youngest: Vincenzo (Spiros Focás), Simone (Renato Salvatori), Rocco (Alain Deloin), Ciro (Max Cartier) and Luca (Rocco Vidolazzi). But this family is so codependent that that shifting narrative focus wouldn't be all that obvious without the title cards.

In fact, the brothers are rarely separated physically. They sleep in the same rooms, chase the same dreams (boxing), train and shower together, and even share women (albeit tragically). Visconti often films them in clumps, particularly in the first chapter, as the entire Pardoni family moves to Milan on the night of the engagement party of the eldest son.

They're never separated emotionally, as in this late shot in the film, when Rocco struggles to make a toast and the weight of his entire family hangs over him -- quite literally given the set decoration!

Rocco is a fascinating lead character because he's held up as an ideal in some respects being loyal, hard-working, and unencumbered by greed... but his tragic flaw is his own saintly martyrdom. The patriarch of the Pardoni clan is dead before the film begins (the matriarch is still wearing black) but he left five sons behind. You'd never know it from Rocco's savior complex. Does he fancy himself "the only begotten" what with the way he continually lays down his own blood, body, spirit and dreams for his wayward brother? 

But Rocco is no Christ. His love for his fellow man, or at least this one brother Simone, is so great that it's actually sinful. And it's not his own life he is willing to sacrifice but his woman's, Nadia's (a terrific Annie Girardot who you'll remember as Isabelle Huppert's crazy mother in The Piano Teacher).

Which is why the following two shots moved me the most.

Midway through the film Rocco dumps Nadia for love of his brother Simone (if Rocco and His Brothers weren't already considered a classic film, it'd have to be considered at least a classic soap opera) but his tears are impotent and this generosity of spirit hugely conditional since Nadia isn't exactly getting a good deal. In the end, it's Nadia who has to be crucified and she's not the one with the savior complex. 

"If I wanted a sermon, I'd go to mass."

Nathaniel and His Blog Brothers...  
Thanks to the following who also watched the movie for this Hit Me episode. Go read this great posts.

• My New Plaid Pants Hot Bros Before Hos
• Movies Kick Ass Iconic Roles
• Film Actually The Seductress
• Awww The Movies loved the movie, too

"Rocco and His Brothers"

Hit Me With Your Best Shot is a series in which we capture what we think of as the best shot -- and best is in the eye of the beholder whether that be for reasons thematic, aesthetic, intellectual or personal. Next Wednesday night for the multi-blog celebration of the 25th anniversary of James Cameron's Aliens (1986). This week's topic is... Luchino Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers.

Our Blog Brothers...  Go read them. Yay, blog brothers!

• My New Plaid Pants Hot Bros Before Hos
• Movies Kick Ass Iconic Roles
• Film Actually The Seductress
• Awww The Movies loved the movie, too

My piece will be up tomorrow. Why the delay? True story: I had a very unexpected visit just as I sat down to write today and they just left! Craziness.

Personal Canon #86: T2: JUDGMENT DAY (1991)

For the 20th anniversary of the James Cameron classic Terminator 2, Judgment Day a reposting of the Personal Canon essay on the film, easily one of the best actioners of all time with a performance by Linda Hamilton which rivals Sigourney Weaver's Ripley badassery ...and that's a nearly impossible feat.

T2: Judgment Day (1991)  Directed by James Cameron | Screenplay by James Cameron and William Wisher Jr | Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Robert Patrick, Joe Morton, S Epatha Merkerson and introducing Edward Furlong | Released 07/03/1991

Once the big profits for the small budgeted The Terminator began rolling in in October of '84, James Cameron became a hot commodity. He wasted no time on the follow up. Twenty-one months later the release of the much larger sci-fi spectacle Aliens (1986 -- to be celebrated here very soon) catapulted him from "filmmaker to watch" to the real deal. His long absence from the multiplex -- Avatar's December 2009 bow ended a 12 year drought -- made it easy to forget this basic truth: the director once moved swiftly through the stages of filmmaking if never quite as rapidly as his movies moved through their action. After Aliens, he left outer space for the deep seas with The Abyss (another hit) and having proved himself thrice over, returned to the killer robots that made his name.

"Model Citizen"
The Terminator cost 6 million to make, Terminator 2: Judgment Day would cost 100 million plus. The budget wasn't the only thing exploding: salaries, visual effects, setpieces, ambition, and public reaction were all supersized. Yet for all of this exponential external growth, Cameron smartly kept his focus tight and intimate.

Early shots give you the color scheme: fiery reds|steel blues. (Michael Edwards as JC.)

Sarah Connor's opening narration and the imagery of post-apocalyptic LA it plays over, both review the first movie and download Cameron's game plan for the sequel.

The computer which controlled the machines, Skynet, sent two terminators back through time. Their mission: to destroy the leader of the human resistance, John Connor my son. The first terminator was programmed to strike at me in the year 1984 before John was born. It failed. The second was set to strike at John himself when he was still a child. As before the resistance was able to send a lone warrior, a protector for John. It was just a question of which one of them would reach him first.

In other words, it's more of the same... only bigger which we notice immediately by way of shinier effects and massive fireball explosions. This repeat template is familiar but it won't be comfortable. We're also going deeper. The story structure is varied only enough to reflect the passage of time. But what has that passage of time wrought?

Upgrade U: The origin T-800 (Arnold) and the leaner meaner T-1000 (Robert Patrick)

As before... two naked men arriving from the future are introduced first. Once clothes are violently procured, their target is immediately identified by text (a phone book in the first film, a police car monitor in the second). Cut to target: John Connor (Edward Furlong). He's even introduced with a shot of a motorbike just like his mother was in 1984. So far so remarkably similar. This makes the slight tweaks stand out all the more. First, the film is more self consciously "funny" (the "Born to Be Bad" accompaniment to the T-800's intro). Second, both visitors from the future are instantly portrayed as formidable threats rather than as a David and Goliath mismatch. Third... where the hell is Sarah Connor?

Click to read more ...

Yes, No, Maybe So: "War Horse"

I didn't think we'd be getting this trailer so soon but I guess the year is getting on. Wowee - 2011 is half over tomorrow... should we do a "best of"? Herewith, the first trailer for Steven Spielberg's Christmas-time presumed Oscar frontrunner spectacle War Horse. We'll decide how excited we are with our yes, no, maybe so treatment.

Can you imagine flying over a war, and you know you can never look down? You have to look forward or you'll never get home. I ask you: What could be braver than that?

YES If there's any director who excels at capturing the spirit of (boy) wonder, it's Spielberg. The first shot of the lead (Jeremy Irvine as Albert) brings to mind both E.T. and Empire of the Sun in particular as a boy is amazed at the wonderment he beholds ...in this case, a horse rather than an alien or an airplane. The trailer also reminded me of something totally off-topic but that warmed my heart. Do you remember those old ads about indie movie making starring Jesse Eisenberg's little sister Hailee. Remember those? I forget what they were for. She played the world's youngest movie director or something?

My movie is called Horses Are Pretty because horses are pretty.

That they are. Don't think Spielberg won't know how to exploit their innate majesty.

NO "RUN FORREST ALBERT RUNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN" [trailer and Oscar commentary after the jump]

Click to read more ...

One Take Wonders

Though I don't recall when it began -- maybe with Rope as just discussed? --  I've been obsessed with one-take scenes for what seems like forever. You know the kind. It's that thrilling moment when the editor seems to go out for a smoke break and the director allows the film and/or performances to fully breathe. That free breathing is probably an illusion since the scenes must be rigidly corseted by the technical and performative choreography required to get it all without "coverage".

When you see a great one take scene or film, even if that "one" take is partly a matter of film trickery (examples: Atonement, Children of Men basically the entirety of Alfred Hitchcock's Rope and Aleksandr Sukorov's Russian Ark and a scene we just discussed from 25 years ago in Peggy Sue Got Married) it can be hard to return to the world of "regular" filmmaking with its generic one and a ½ second cuts composed of plentiful coverage. Over the shoulder. Close up. Over the shoulder. Repeat for billions of converszzzzzzzzzz  

I'm sorry I fell asleep.

So why do so few film directors trust in the highwire potency of long or single takes? Are they too difficult to pull off? Are film actors that unable to sustain themselves throughout emotional hairpin turns the way stage actors can 8 shows a week for hours at a time? Do people think the audience will get bored (a falsity since these scenes are usually THE talking points of their movies)?

If they're so hard to pull off why do music videos with significantly lower budgets than movies keep selling them so well?

The latest one I saw was the low budget but high entertainment "Party Girl" by XELLE 

Absolutely hot. Think of the rehearsal time required just to time things like that glitter blow? But it works, don't you think?

And I've already expressed my love for both Robyn's "Call Your Girlfriend" - just her dancing in a gym but with all the lighting tricks it's just totally a great watch --  and Cosmo's Jarvis "Gay Pirate" which is both sing-a-long fun and actually moving.

Although it's NOT a one take video, this REM "üBerlin" video starring rising actor Aaron Johnson (directed by his partner Sam Taylor-Wood) breathes enough to suggest that it wanted to be one and would have been a classic video instead of just a frisky uninhibited one, if it were. 

So I ask in full sincerity...

  Why are today's directors so afraid of letting a moment play out without zillions of edits? If music videos -- which were once blamed for shortening the average shot length in movies -- can ironically use them so often now, why can't today's full length pictures?