#curiousproductions

[spinthebottlemovie]

INFLUENCES FROM FAR OFF PLACES

As I inch ever so closer to shooting my first feature film, Spin The Bottle, a voice has whispered to me, from some far off place, to watch movies I love that I haven’t seen for awhile.

I tend to watch a group of about 30 movies at least once or twice a year.  I never tire of them as an audience member let alone a moviemaker.  

But, this voice whispered, maybe re-visiting some of the movies that opened up the cinematic world to you as a teenager and movie student might bring you back in contact with that buzzing feeling you had when you realized all the possibilities.

When you hear such a voice, you should give it its due so it doesn’t go away frustrated and unappreciated.

So I trudged to my local library and rented Luis Bunuel’s 1963 surreal masterpiece from Mexico, The Exterminating Angel, and Andrzej Wajda’s 1958 Polish masterwork, Ashes and Diamonds; two movies I loved when I saw them years ago.

The Exterminating Angel is one of my three favorite Bunuel movies (Viridiana and Los Olvidados  are the other two).  It tells the hilariously surreal tale of a group of rich Mexican city-dwellers who meet one night for a dinner party. At the beginning of the movie, all the servants, save one Butler, feel strangely compelled to leave the Hostess’s house.  After the dinner, all the Rich Dinner Guests feel strangely compelled to stay in one room.  Slowly, to their horror, they realize that some unseen force is keeping them from leaving (and the Servants, By-Standers outside from coming in) and the Dinner Guests slowly descend, across several days, into barbarism, homicidal thoughts, suicide-love pacts, and assorted dark comic hilarity as they try to observe societal manners in a totally surreal situation.

The Exterminating Angel’s underlying subconscious logic is perfect like an unflawed diamond.  You laugh as the Rich Dinner Guests start to snipe at each other.  Resentments surface. Affairs are revealed.  The illusion of the Rich being the “civil class” is comically slammed down.  Yet, the movie is stranger and more mysterious than that. It gets at deeper human truths through a comically non-sensical and nightmarish situation.  I always laugh (like big guffawing belly laugh type laugh) when an unexplained bear appears in the mansion walking up and down the stairs.  Since the guests can’t leave their room, they can only watch the bear in confusion.  What does it mean? Who knows. Does it work?  Completely.

Andrzej Wajda’s 1958 Polish movie, Ashes and Diamonds, was the third in a trilogy of movies dealing with Poland during World War II.  It all takes place across one roughly 24 hour period from the botched assassination of a Communist Minister through the night when the Assassins work up the nerve to try again to the aftermath the next morning.

Ashes and Diamonds achieves something miraculous for me.  While it brilliantly, ironically, intensely examines all the cross-currents that were affecting Poland at the end of World War II-Communism, poverty, the ravages of the war, social ladder climbing, what kind of country Poland would be after its liberation-it is also a deeply moving story about two young people who, against their natures, fall in love across one night.  I think the best movies have a simultaneous clarity and mystery about them.  You feel, subconsciously, that they work and yet you don’t feel beat over the head by a “message”.  Ashes and Diamonds is one of the best examples of this kind of small miracle.  You sense that the young couple (the amazing actor Zbigniew Cybulski, a beatnik Polish powerhouse actor burning with the same modern incandescence as Marlon Brando or Toshiro Mifune, who plays the Assassin, and Ewa Krzyzewska who plays Krystyna, a hardened guarded bartender) represent the frustrated potential of young Poles in the 40’s and 50’s, victims of their country and continent’s brutality.  And yet they are also living breathing young people who have an amazing affair across the night.

Ashes and Diamonds is also one of those rare movies where the amazing atmospheric style, camerawork, cross-cutting, editing completely supports, enhances, and deepens the story.  It is one of the proof positives that content and style can weave together into a wholey unique magical fabric.

*** Watching these movies again, I awakened to a sense of cinematic potential that had been slumbering, probably too long, in the darkened rooms of my consciousness.  Thank you voice for recommending I see these.  Now I hear you whispering about mid-60’s Fellini like Juliet of the Spirits and Toby Dammit. . .

[curiousproductions]

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) - The pods open

You ain't gonna be talkin' about the bbq or the martini in a few minutes bud. . .

[spinthebottlemovie]

SPIN THE BOTTLE JOURNAL, JANUARY 1st, 2015

We're going to go dark for a few months as we gear up to shoot SPIN THE BOTTLE.  Please stay on the look out.  We'll post new content as soon as we can.

[curiousproductions]

William Holden: Ballad of the Unsung Superstar Actor

William Holden is a great actor. An amazing actor.  Yet I don't feel we praise him enough. Or pay enough attention to him.  

He somehow managed to be in one or two all-time classic movies for each decade of his working career starting in the 1950's; a record for which any moviemaker, behind or in front of the camera, would feel blessed. 

His style almost seems to be like that of certain great directors-John Huston, Howard Hawks, Jean Renoir-who often adjusted their approach to the material so that the material, the story, the overall impact is what you would take with you.  Not just one amazing shot or special effect.  

Holden always seemed to understand what the story needed in terms of performance and he would make sure to give just that performance. That's a talent. That's the greatest gift any moviemaker can give to a movie. 

Holden started the 1950's starring in Sunset Blvd (1950), arguably director Billy Wilder's greatest masterpiece and possibly the best movie ever made ON the movies.  An acidic, gothic insider's look at the corrosive effects of Hollywood and fame on the psyche. This is a movie that David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, and countless other great moviemakers revere.  Here Holden plays down on his heels screenwriter, Joe Gillis, who ends up becoming a gigolo lover to faded and deranged movie star, Norma Desmond (played in a screen-scorching performance by real life faded movie star, Gloria Swanson). 

Holden went on to star in a string of hit 1950's movies but finished the decade with the crown jewel, The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), the epic World War II action-adventure movie that, along with Lawrence of Arabia (1962), is considered director David Lean's best work. Here Holden plays Shears who escapes a Japanese prisoner of war camp then has to lead a team back to it to stop crazed British Officer, Alec Guiness, from completing a bridge that will help the Japanese in the war effort. 

Now after this, we don't hear from Holden for awhile (in terms of classic movies) but suddenly, out of nowhere, he shows up as the star of The Wild Bunch (1969), often considered director Sam Peckinpah's greatest movie.  Holden plays Pike Bishop, the leader of a group of ultra-violent bank robbers in the waning days of the dying Wild West. This savage, brutal western is the Rosetta Stone of the modern action movie. It introduces slow-motion bullet ballets, anti-heroes, and buckets of blood.  Holden also gets the movie's most famous line right at the start: "If they move, kill 'em." 

You might chalk all this up to just the way the industry worked.  A certain chancy movie needed a decent leading man and Holden was always willing to take a chance.  But I don't think you can really stop there.  Holden nailed black comedy (Sunset Boulevard), escapist comedy (Sabrina),  action-adventure (Bridge on the River Kwai), westerns (The Wild Bunch).  

But if you need any proof that Holden was an actor, that he could turn in a performance that could be, at turns, hilarious, solemn, outraged, vulnerable,  you can go right to the masterpiece he made in the 1970's, Paddy Chayevsky and Sidney Lumet's satire on TV, Network (1976).

Again Holden plays one of the leads, aging TV network news producer, Max Schumacher.  But here, Holden is required to deliver two to three page monologues, sometimes within one shot, full of complex ideas, emotions, humor, and he totally delivers.  Along with Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, Network is arguably the greatest American satire ever made.  And William Holden stars in it.

Sometimes great moviemakers do such great work it doesn't get noticed because it's so baked into the cake of the entire piece.  William Holden was always one of those chefs. He delivers each and every time. I highly recommend you check out some of the plates on his menu.