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Susanne Bier has come a long way since taking her turn at the Dogme table back in 2002. These days she exists as one of the most influential filmmakers in Denmark, and is now, aside from the founders, perhaps the most successful director to take part in the movement. After the immensely successful Open Hearts back in 2002, she went on to be nominated for an Academy Award for the 2006 film After the Wedding. Even on paper it’s clear to see why Open Hearts became as popular as it did back then, and for me it sits neatly beside Lone Scherfig’s Italian for Beginners (Dogme #12) as the most accessible Dogme film on the shelf. Both directors were rightly rewarded for this approach with snowballing theatrical runs that ended up practically launching their respective careers, not to mention Bier’s chisel-jawed favourite Mads Mikkelsen, who found further fame as Bond villain Le Chiffre in 2006 and is soon set to star in the upcoming Warner Bros. blockbuster Clash of the Titans which is to be released later this year. As with most of Bier’s written work, Open Hearts has a touch of the soap opera about it. Her characters are clearly defined, as are their motives, and the film does manage to toe that line between human drama and melodrama rather well. It’s difficult to know, however, whether this approach is an unconscious decision by Bier, or whether she actively sets out to tell such a story, contrived plot turns and all. The feebleness of the title leads me to believe the latter: she’s aware of how implausible some plot points are, and that this is actually part of the film’s charm.

Open Hearts begins with tragedy, as one half of a virile young couple is hit by a car and paralyzed from the neck down. His other half, and fiancé, drops everything in her life in order to be close to him in this time of need, but all he does is deflect this affection with sneering bitterness and sullen anger. In his rage, he appears to be testing her, pushing her to breaking limit with a stream of insults and eventually pushing her away entirely. She stumbles blindly into the arms of a sympathetic doctor, who just happens to be the husband of the woman who was driving the car in the first place. Cue drama. Contrived? Absolutely. Effective? Definitely. While Bier’s sometimes over-emphatic approach – complete with awkward dream-like sequences to illustrate each character’s deeper desires, as well as frequent cuts to their wedding rings just to drive it home – becomes grating later on, the most redeeming feature of Open Hearts is undoubtedly the intensity with which each of the players assume their roles. The camera’s closeness ensures that every action and expression is captured, from the pain of Nikolaj Lie Kaas’s Joachim, lying prone and lonely on his hospital bed, to the crippling guilt of Paprika Steen’s Marie, who will perhaps never forgive herself for that one fatal mistake. Open Hearts is perhaps less affecting that most will have you believe, though it does win more points for ignoring any kind of potential and all-encompassing resolution to end the film with. One would think given the content that Bier might even go this far, but her film instead descends into a third act of ambiguity, one that ultimately leaves everything as it was. Life’s messes aren’t so easy to clean up, you see.

Our Rating:

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The Man with the Golden Arm | Otto Preminger, 1955
American One-sheet by Saul Bass

From the dawn of motion pictures right up until their Hollywood heyday in the fifties, the art of movie posters was very simple: the star or stars of each piece were colourfully painted in dramatic poses, before a fitting font, title, and tagline were thought up to complement this. Despite the effective nature of this art as a form of marketing – which it is, after all – it took until the fifties and the introduction of buccaneering artists like Saul Bass for this to change. The above poster, created for the release of Otto Preminger’s tale of crime and addiction The Man with the Golden Arm, is perhaps the one poster that should be recorded as breaking the mould. It launched the designer’s career, and proved that simple design was not a lost art after all. Bass kept his employer’s happy by including the faces of each star, yet it was his invention – the crooked arm, running down the centre of the poster – that really grabbed audiences.

The Cardinal | Otto Preminger, 1963
American One-sheet by Saul Bass

“Symbolize and summarize” was the motto Bass lived by when it came to design, and his careful choice of bold colours and shapes was an important part of this. Through his methods, Bass showed not only a generation of designers but also an entire industry that posters weren’t just an afterthought; that their design and the film’s design could become one and the same, and that this needn’t be at the expense of effective marketing. Indeed, his work, with its print objects, primary colours and unconventional or broken type reminds one of the Soviet propaganda art and commercial design of the 20′s. A good example of this is the uneven font and large open space (dedicated solely to the colour red) seen here, in his poster for Preminger’s 1963 film The Cardinal. With all the messy, over-photoshopped creations that studios attempt to pass off as posters today, it’s refreshing to see something that is so minimalist and yet at the same time so effective.

In Harm’s Way | Otto Preminger, 1965
American One-sheet by Saul Bass

This poster, designed for the release of Preminger’s In Harm’s Way in 1965, begins to give some hint of the direction in which Bass, or his career, would later go. The pointing hand, complete with general’s sleeve seen in the poster above is essentially a logo for the film, just as the crooked arm in The Man with the Golden Arm came to symbolise the content found in the film itself. Up until that point, this idea of having a visual symbol for each film was unheard of – Bass blazed trails. The golden period that Bass had enjoyed would only last until the mid-sixties, at which point his innovations fell out of fashion somewhat. From there he founded the firm Saul Bass and Associates, under which name he would create some of corporate America’s most memorable logos: United Airlines, AT&T, Quaker, and Warner Communications, to name but a few. This corporate work would slowly give way to a return to poster design in the later years of his career.

Vertigo | Alfred Hitchcock, 1958
American One-sheet by Saul Bass

Despite working with Otto Preminger on almost all of his output during this period, the most impressive partnership Bass formed in the fifties and sixties was with British filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock. Bass not only created the posters for Hitchock’s most famous works – Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho – but also used these designs to craft the opening title sequences for each film. For the opening of Vertigo in 1958, he used a Spirograph motif to evoke the film’s dizzying sensations, also seen above on his poster for the movie. Such sequence designs were seen by Bass as a chance to create the right climate, and to plunge the viewer into the film’s atmosphere from the very beginning. He loathed the idea of these opening credits being a tedious afterthought, or more “popcorn time”, as he called it. An important note to be made here is the lack of interference by Paramount Studios on the work of Bass. He was given a free rein, and full credit for his work, which wasn’t the custom until that time.

Bunny Lake is Missing | Otto Preminger, 1965
American One-sheet by Saul Bass

Bass continue to work on posters (but not opening sequences) throughout the late sixties and seventies, though with a limited output. The above poster for Preminger’s eerie psychological drama Bunny Lake is Missing being but one of these. While concentrating more on his corporate work, he still found the time to dabble in filmmaking with a short documentary film entitled Why Man Creates, which won an Academy Award in 1968. Bass followed this up with a full length science fiction feature in 1974 called Phase IV, which wasn’t such a success. To younger directors, Bass was something of a legend, so it was only a matter of time before he was coaxed back into the world of title design. This came along in the form of James Brooks’ Broadcast News in 1987 and then Penny Marshall’s  Big. In 1990, Bass found a new long-term collaborator in Martin Scorsese, whom he worked with until his death in 1996, on films such as Cape Fear, GoodFellas, and Casino.

Thank you for reading, and be sure to look out for new editions of Magnificent Movie Posters! Meanwhile, please feel free to list your own “magnificent” examples. Who knows? Perhaps we’ll use your choices as inspiration.

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First of all, thank you very much for taking the time to respond. I guess my initial question would be to ask where the story for Can Go Through Skin came from. Is the Marieke character based on anyone at all?
No, Marieke is purely fictional. Though yes, because she represents so many women (and men) who go through the rehabilitation process on their own, in silence. The writing process was a chronological one. I wrote what happened to her day by day, and started by writing about what to do when your steady relationship ends unexpectedly. I never planned to write about an assaulted woman, it just so happened that the pizza delivery guy decided not to leave. For me that was just as big a surprise as it was for Marieke. I didn’t ‘research’ crime victims at all. I got some books about the subject but after half a page i realised it was not good to read about how my Marieke was supposed to react. I decided instead to consider how I would react and to write that down instead. So in that way you could say Marieke’s decisions and reactions are very much my own.

The techniques used to create atmosphere in the film is one thing that many critics have praised. What steps did you take to ensure that the audience could best experience this psychological instability and paranoia that Marieke was succumbing to?
I think the most important thing was to never leave Marieke. To always show her point of view. I was much more interested in showing what she looks at, instead of showing her looking at something. I think this creates a tense atmosphere. And this also adds to the confusion about what parts of the film are real and what parts are fantasy. If something isn’t clear or important to Marieke, it isn’t clear or important to us either. The only exception to this is in the very end, where for the first time we see things through the eyes of John. We see Marieke a bit more objectively and we see her loose her battle.
A second thing is how we worked as a crew. We had a very small crew, that on most days consisted of no more than five people on the set – including the actress and myself. There were three reasons for this: one was the level of concentration, which can be much higher when you surround yourself with fewer people who all know exactly what to do. The second was the amount of trust shared between each of us, and that none of us were afraid to make mistakes. Finally, because a five-person crew is much cheaper to finance, giving us the opportunity to film for a grand total of 70 days. This way, we didn’t have to rehearse. We started each day on set, looking for the right camera angle, the right takes, or the right location. Each day building further on what we worked on the day before. On top of that we also had an excellent composer in Dan Geesin, who was with us during filming. When we were on the attic, he was working in the shed, or anywhere on the farm, making musical ‘instruments’ such as drums or cellos out of bits of the house.

You mention that shooting Can Go Through Skin was a process with little rehearsing involved. Does that also mean a lot of it was trial and error? What can you tell us about the symbolism in the film? Particularly the use of water, and how it relates to Marieke’s healing process.
It was definitely trial and error. Since we were shooting for a whole year (we needed the 4 seasons) there were big breaks in between shoots during which all we could do was edit the material. This allowed me to take things a step further, because I could see what worked and what didn’t. This also gave me the time to rewrite certain scenes. Then Dan Geesin would come by and give me his tests, allowing me to use them during these early edit sessions. This is another reason why the music works so well, that it was integrated into the filmmaking process as it evolved. Just as the photography, script and everything else was.
Concerning the use of water in the film, I can only say the following: this film was made out of instinct, or perhaps association, or whatever is the opposite of theory. Therefore the symbolism wasn’t so much intentional, but created itself. Everyone can make up their own minds about it, and none of these theories are wrong. If you understand what I mean.

What can you tell us about the actress, Rifka Lodeizen? Her performance is outstanding. Was it difficult to find the right actress for such a demanding role?
Rifka is amazing. I knew her from another casting, but unfortunately for that film we are looking for another type. Still, she stayed in my mind. I can’t say that I wrote the part for her, but she wasn’t far away either. She was just as eager as me to find Marieke, and was willing to go anywhere to portray her as honestly as she could. She said herself that working on this film meant letting go of one’s ego: she wasn’t thinking about how ‘Rifka’ would end up with this film, but it was all about ‘Marieke’. An incredible and rare quality, I  think. She was one of us, there was no distinction between cast and crew, as there so often is. She helped the sound man out, if needed. She cooked for us, if needed. She would make a fire, anything. There was no one for her to hang on to: most days she acted alone, did her own clothes, no make up, her ‘dressingroom’ was an unheated corner in an old pig shelter. I trusted her, she trusted me. During editing I watched her, all alone in the dark, and after over a hundred days I was still hugely impressed by her performance, her diversity and her honesty. Not a lot of actors are that powerful.

Finally, I wanted to ask what the future holds for you. Are you working on anything at the moment, and could you see yourself working outside of the Netherlands in the future?
You’re saving the most difficult question for last! No, I’m joking, but I hardly ever think about the future, I mostly just let things happen. The one disadvantage of doing the editing, the  production and the writing myself, is that finishing up the one film and starting up a new one takes up a lot of time. About working outside the Netherlands: certainly, I’m very interested in that. The very small language territory is still a problem for international release outside the Festival scene. The next film I’m looking at working on will probably take place in both the Netherlands and Germany, so hopefully that will increases the possibilities for a wider distribution. Plus, I’m a sucker for nature, and the world is just full of beautiful landscapes. Another big reason to want to film abroad.

Esther Rots’ latest film, Can Go Through Skin, won the Golden Calf award for best actress and best editing at the Netherlands Film Festival.

Official Website: http://www.cangothroughskin.com/
Review: http://tobatheinfilmicwaters.com/review-can-go-through-skin/
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5iohh7c698

In his piece written for the Chicago Sun-Times, film critic Roger Ebert compares Kristian Levring’s The King is Alive to such memorable tales as William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. While not quite as innocent or savage as the former, nor as political or thrilling as the latter, The King is Alive indeed takes on and gives new life to this idea of a group of people, stranded, who are forced to come together in order to survive. The site of our group’s struggle is not upon an endless blue ocean, however, but in the middle of the desert: the Namibian desert, to be precise, in an abandoned diamond mining town known as Kolmanskop. Left to the desert winds in 1956 after crippling post-war decline, Kolmanskop has recently taken the curious status of a tourist location and had already been featured in one or two motion pictures before being used here. The King is Alive was the fourth Dogme 95 film – the fourth of the four founding filmmakers – and the first shot outside Denmark. Unlike these earlier Dogme efforts that were an all-Danish affair, The King is Alive boasts an international cast made up of American, British and French actors, who together play a coach-load of squabbling tourists that are forced to cross the desert rather than fly over it. Of course, the coach doesn’t quite make it to its desired location and the group must come to terms with the fact that they not only are stranded in a godforsaken place but that nobody knows where they are – including themselves. Marooned and bickering, the group are encouraged by an Englishman named Henry (David Bradley, who later found some fame playing Argus Filch in the Harry Potter series) to stage a rough version of Shakespeare’s King Lear.

An important theme that can be found throughout the Dogme movement is this idea of different people being put in the same place and then made to interact. The King is Alive presents a slightly more theatrical – even Shakespearean – version of this, but an important one nonetheless, where our characters share a common and unenviable position. Unlike the dysfunctional family meltdown found in Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen (Dogme #1) and the confused faction-bondage of Lars von Trier’s The Idiots (Dogme #2) this is disintegration on a different scale. All the characters are in the same boat, but will they come together for warmth or throw each other out of it? The only other passenger in this boat, or abandoned town, is an old African who watches the group impassively from under his crinkled brow. The man, who seems to spend his days sitting still enough to become part of the scenery itself, is a conscious and important addition by Levring. Not only does the group’s ignoring of this man help illustrate the self-absorbed nature of today’s society (perhaps, if he was considered for a moment, he could lead them to safety) we also later come to resemble him as impartial onlookers, silently judging these newcomers as their newfound companionship is so violently tested. Ultimately the group’s callow new bonds are eroded, just like the ancient desert sand upon which they walk, talk, and copulate. While The King is Alive doesn’t quite come to represent Shakespeare’s tragedy (as I was led to believe beforehand), there are certainly some parallels to be found among the characters and their relationships. It is more an homage of sorts, and one that stands on its own as an important addition to the Dogme movement.

Our Rating:

Drawing a handful of comparisons to Lars von Trier’s majestic Breaking the Waves when it was released in late 2001, Kira’s Reason (En kærlighedshistorie) is Ole Christian Madsen’s third full length feature and the twenty-first title produced under the Dogme 95 banner. Madsen has since gone on to national and international acclaim, thanks largely to his most recent film, Flame & Citron, which, with a budget of over $10 million, is a far cry from the earlier television work in his native Denmark. The star of Kira’s Reason: A Love Story (to use its full title) is Stine Stengade, who plays the film’s titular and mentally ill protagonist. Kira is a wide-eyed outsider; a rapt child trapped in an adult’s body who wants nothing more than to find happiness again, despite being unable to care for herself, let alone her two beautiful blonde boys. At the beginning of the film we witness her happy homecoming after some time spent under observation in a mental hospital, and while this initially seems like a warm moment it soon becomes clear that Kira is far from “fixed”. Even in the course of this opening sequence her manner passes through several different shades of emotional instability; her painted grin and over-exuberant happiness quickly giving way to an unhesitant questioning of her husband’s loyalty. The husband, Mads (played by Lars Mikkelsen) seems entirely unmoved by it all, obviously used to – even attached to – Kira’s violent mood swings that make normal family life so unlivable. Stengade, who was seen more recently playing the temptress in Madsen’s Flame & Citron, is definitely the shining light that makes Kira so interesting. Her performance here is pitch-perfect.

This idea of innocent, somehow mentally impaired characters being cornered by a mistrusting society is a common theme to be found in the Dogme movement: both Åke Sandgren’s Truly Human (Dogme #18) and Søren Kragh-Jacobsen’s Mifune’s Last Song (Dogme #3) include characters of this nature. Lars von Trier’s The Idiots (Dogme #2) takes the idea of society’s reaction to the inappropriate behaviour of such people to new and more crass levels, and just as with The Idiots it is the public swimming pool that is used as the stage. Here, in one of the film’s more memorable scenes, Kira takes her children for a swim in an obvious attempt to capture the normalcy of the past. She jumps into the kid’s pool and immediately begins an over-enthusiastic bout of splashing and screaming, unaware of the frightened children and increasingly angry parents that look on. The sequence, as you can imagine, ends badly for all involved – especially a particularly brutish Danish lifeguard who feels the full force of Kira’s unrestraint. As previously mentioned, the film does owe a lot to Breaking the Waves – particularly in the traits shared by each female protagonist – and also, more recently, Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman, which is a portrait of a woman on the edge rather than a woman being chased by her own demons. The difference being that neither of these aforementioned films dwell upon the reason, or rather, the cause of these demons. Kira’s Reason, as the title hints and admittedly at the very end, not only attempts to explain the character’s problems but also offers up some kind of resolution. It is a move that, in its triteness, undoes much of the good work achieved up to that point.

Our Rating:

Just the idea of discovering a stranger in our own homes is a terror that most people cannot bear to imagine. What happens, then, when this fear becomes reality, and we are confronted not only by an uninvited guest, but  someone who also wishes to do us harm? Esther Rots’ Can Go Through Skin, which centers on a young woman who is assaulted while taking a bath, home alone,  maintains that the physical scars from such an encounter should be the least of our worries. The woman, Marieke, has just broken up with her boyfriend and is looking to drown her sorrows in copious amounts of red wine, but soon enough she is outside on the street, naked and trembling, after having been rescued by a quick-thinking friend after a man enters her home and attempts to drown her in her own bath. Unable to face life as she once knew it, Marieke seeks out a shell into which she can retract, impulsively settling on a dilapidated farm-house in Amsterdam’s surrounding countryside as a place in which she can be alone with her demons. From here, we are taken on a jarring trip of Marieke’s mental state – with director Rots using different methods (with varying success) to portray her character’s psychological instability and unsteady recuperation. Every flaking surface of Marieke’s crumbling new abode is meticulously covered by Rots’ camera, heightening the already stifling sense of claustrophobia that the film’s jangly background score does rather well to create. This claustrophobia eventually gives way to paranoia, as inward struggling gives way to voiced concerns, and as the film’s music becomes even more abstract so as to reflect Marieke’s fractured self. Soon, however, the house begins to take shape, and the camera retreats a little to show us wider shots of rural Holland. The seasons change, blowing away the overhanging greyness, and somewhere, a piano tinkles into life, as Marieke finally begins to understand and overcome her grief.

The use of water is an important part of the Can Go Through Skin‘s symbolism – symbolism that runs through the film like veins, sometimes overwhelmingly so.  Marieke’s horror story both opens and closes with her being held under water, against her will, as everything we see slows down: it is a neat bookend from the director that, rather than convince us that the healing process has been a success, only tell us that Marieke may never truly be “cured”. This recovery process, however successful it may be, is actually put in motion by another interesting plot point: that of a Marieke’s drain, which is put out of use by her new neighbour John, meaning that she can’t shower as often as she’d like. Do these water-less months represent a period of healing for Marieke, or do they merely delay her or even prevent her from washing this trauma from her mind? There’s also something vaguely Dardenne-esque about Can Go Through Skin: it resembles the 1999 film Rosetta both in the way it is shot and in the use of a particularly strong-minded female protagonist, though lacks the same feeling of despair. There are, however, one or two moments when the unflinching realism of Can Go Through Skin is given up in favour of fantasy or imagination – these scenes range from the well-realised to the slightly bewildering, but go some distance in showing us exactly what is driving Marieke. It’s also refreshing to find a film that isn’t afraid dwell on the life-changing influence of the Internet in such a situation, as well as its importance in today’s society. When in solitude, Marieke uses chat rooms as a way to contact the outside world, though, rather than help this seems merely to add fuel to the fire of revenge that still burns inside her. Can Go Through Skin is a comprehensive documenting of one woman’s struggle, complete with what is perhaps the finest performance from a female I’ve seen all year, and is even more impressive when considering the relative inexperience of the person who made it.

Our Rating:

Earlier Wallpaper Wednesdays can be found here.

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Please feel free to request a particular size or image from the film by commenting below, or alternatively suggest a film to be featured on next week’s Wallpaper Wednesday! Thank you.

The word Tetro, in Francis Ford Coppola’s non-native Italian, means dark, bleak, sombre. Words that are reflected, perhaps somewhat unintentionally, in the director’s new titular character: the long-faced Angelo “Tetro” Tetrocini, played by Vincent Gallo. Both as an original script – Coppola’s first since 1974′s celebrated The Conversation – and as a character, Tetro’s reputation precedes itself. For the director, this must only exist as a reminder of tougher times, but times when the film world held its breath whenever he entered the room. Things have gotten easier in recent decades for the portly Detroit native, who has carved out quite a comfortable position for himself  producing  movies under his own American Zoetrope banner, and without the oppressive studio involvement that so plagued some of his more famous titles. The difference being that these days there seem to be fewer people left in the room who are willing to give him the time of day. For Vincent Gallo, on the other hand, Tetro’s towering reputation conjured up by Coppola’s writing seems only to work as a stimulant, inspiring him to the kind of glint-in-the-eye performance we’ve seen before in Buffalo ’66. Indeed, Tetro is one cagey and confused individual, though less feral than Gallo’s memorable Billy Brown character, despite producing the same trademark New York whine. His whine here helps give the impression of a lost rich kid, or alternatively, as his long-suffering partner Miranda (Maribel Verdú) puts it: “like a genius, but without enough accomplishments…” The highlight of Tetro, however, comes not in its titular character, nor in the aged pen that brought him to the screen, but in a newcomer called Alden Ehrenreich whose infectious performance as Bennie, Tetro’s younger brother and the film’s protagonist, is quite wonderful. He is an actor who was apparently discovered by Steven Spielberg, and  one who I expect to see a lot more of in the future.

Tetro is a story of two estranged brothers who know little of one another but who share a certain common hatred towards their family – more importantly their father – and perhaps, on top of that, some kind of common artistic gift. This main premise helps evoke strong memories of Coppola’s Rumble Fish, which not only centered on a story between two brothers but also helped unearth no small amount of young acting talent in the likes of Matt Dillon, Diane Lane, and Nicolas Cage. As with Rumble Fish, Tetro is shot in sumptuous black and white with a dash of consciously placed colour, in this case to signify those scenes in the film that depict the past – just as we view our own memories in colour, whether they be in the form of photographs or home videos. The other colour comes in the form of a handful of over-exuberant fringe characters, who manage, along with the film’s theatrical encounters, heightened emotional drama, and underlying humour, to give Tetro the sense of a stage play or theatre piece. That is without mentioning the abundance of spot-lights in the film, a motif of sorts: those that Tetro runs every week at the local theatre club,  and those that eventually come to symbolise the car headlights of his pained past. While a neater effort than Coppola’s last film, Tetro suffers once again from the director trying to do too much. Not only does he not know when to stop, but Coppola also manages to take a warm, humble idea – a gentle stroll through downtown Buenos Aires – and turns it into a work of grand scale that lacks all kinds of foundation. An epic family drama that almost immediately spins out of the director’s control, resulting in a deeply flawed third act that does nothing but drag. While it’s easy enough to appreciate Coppola’s ambition here, I don’t imagine Tetro will receive much fanfare when it’s released stateside in the near future, and is more likely simply to be remembered as the film that introduced us to a fresh-faced future star.

Our Rating:

Before watching Humprey DeForest Bogart in Nicholas Ray’s A Lonely Place, a few years ago now, I had never been wholly blown away by any of his performances. I could see the charm and the way he suited such Noir-ish roles as Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, but it took until Ray’s film for me to truly appreciate his talent. With  In a Lonely Place Bogart is actually handed meat to go with his skeleton role, meat he goes after with twenty years’ worth of appetite to create one of the more intriguing characters in memory. Dixon Steele is a tired and laconic screenwriter whose disdain with the movie industry is matched only by his sharpened wit. Cash dwindling, Steele is roped back into the arduous task of adapting the latest trashy bestseller. Instead of taking the proposition seriously, he proceeds to invite a young hat-check girl home to sum up the story, a girl who is later found murdered with our hero as the prime suspect. Steele, however, is quickly cleared by mysterious blonde neighbour Laurel Gray (played by Gloria Grahame) and a whirlwind romance between the pair commences. As mentioned previously, I’ve always admired Bogart’s carving out of a niche for the strong silent type, indeed most of the characters he has portrayed have certain similarities. As an actor he is a man’s man, and this personality is strongly upheld in the roles with which he dealt. The character of Steele seems to deviate from this mean, and Bogart seems glad to be able to play with such layered personage.

Of course, there is still the wise cracking character trait for which Bogart became known, and who could do it better? His one-liners here are particularly keen, ensuring that the audience is immediately won over by Dixon Steele despite his contemptuous antics. As the film wears on, however, and the writer becomes embroiled in scribbling away at his plot, aggressive cracks appear in his previously calm nature, allowing both his companion Laurel and ourselves as the audience to question the earlier certainty of our man’s innocence. Steele is a fervidly imaginative storyteller and Bogie channels this nature quite expertly, in the end even we ourselves are unsure whether or not he is indeed capable of such a crime. In a Lonely Place shrugs off some pacing issues thanks to a remarkably incisive script, one that also aids in building our lead man’s staggering performance. This is less a film about the process of writing movies and more about the lonely place within one’s own psyche. We come to realise that Dixon Steele knows this place rather well, and this is exhibited vigorously through his increasingly destructive personality. This, in itself, leads In a Lonely Place to a well-placed twist to the man-alone ideal, riding an explosive Bogart performance to create one of the most layered and unconventional examples of the noir genre to which I have ever bared witness.

Our Rating:

Leading lady Nicole Kidman has had many ups and downs in her career. Perhaps the downs outweigh the ups, but I’m sure the lady herself would quite rightly argue that she has kept two feet firmly in the Hollywood spotlight for many years now. Even today at 40 she is still heralded as one of America’s most bankable female performers. All of this tends to distract from the point I’m attempting to make – that Kidman has talent as an actress. It’s only six or seven years since her acclaimed show in The Hours scooped a best actress Oscar, though people seem to have already forgotten this feat. It was a performance that I believe was perhaps eclipsed a year later with her role in Lars Von Trier’s overlooked experimental effort Dogville. In To Die For Kidman easily matches these two renditions; she plays aspiring TV girl Suzanne Stone, a driven and dangerous young woman who will do just about anything to make it in the industry. The character is an extremely colourful one that makes an impact using a confident, almost arrogant attitude , that is offset with some well placed femininity to seduce if not intimidate entirely. Kidman plays this role perfectly, creating a ravishing woman of the world whose naivety is shown with the kind of subtlety I previously thought to be beyond the actress.

Kidman is backed up by the equally impressive and fresh-faced Joaquin Phoenix in one of his earlier roles. He plays Jimmy Emmett, an oppressed adolescent who falls for Ms. Stone and whom she eventually uses thoroughly to get what she wants from life. Namely the killing of her own husband Larry (Matt Dillon) who she believes is standing in the way of her own blossoming career. With To Die For, Gus Van Sant chose the curious and risky process of splitting up the storytelling into direct-to-camera rants from each character: an insightful choice, but one that ultimately falls flat in creating any kind of dramatic suspense whatsoever. Thus, we find it difficult to become embroiled in the plot – something not helped by the largely confused motives exhibited also. Despite the decent performances all round (look out for a young Casey Affleck as Jimmy’s oafish friend), To Die For fails on many levels thanks to a lack of truly involving the audience in the central character’s plight. Yes, she is a diabolically watchable personality, but one whose motive is truly lost thanks to Van Sant’s fumbling. Hence, while entertaining, her position is also rather a shallow one. An interesting overall concept that tries vainly to employ some kind of black comedy to distract from a conceited plot, in the end rendering it quite pointless.

Our Rating:

Rome-born Alberto Moravia is a largely unmentioned novelist who was responsible for much of the narrative content seen towards the end of Italian cinema’s golden era. Moravia wrote a number of popular books that were picked up for adaptation during the sixties and seventies, including: the aforementioned Two Women (La Ciociara), The Conformist (Il Conformista) and the 1963 film The Empty Canvas (La Noia) by Damiano Damiani. “La Noia” , literally translating into “Boredom” in Italian, follows a wealthy Roman bachelor named Dino as he falls for young local girl Cecilia. Their attraction is born in an unconventional fashion, for they furst encounter one another as Dino is snooping around the house of a recently deceased neighbour and renowned womanizer. Cecilia was clearly the muse that sent this artist over the edge, in turn sparking the initial curiosity that draws Dino towards her – perhaps hoping that his own uninspired painting will benefit from her appearance. Cecilia becomes his drug of sorts, but such affectionate feelings aren’t reciprocated by the leggy seventeen year-old blonde. Her indifference to their “love” and admittance of seeing another man pushes Dino into a downward spiral of obsession and self-loathing, until he eventually breaks down entirely. The Empty Canvas is the perfect example of the kind of racy, romantic films that littered the sixties: involving an extremely unlikeable male protagonist that questions life through his various woman-shaped crusade, somehow eventually ending up on the wrong side of love. As with most of these films, romance is over-dramatised to a fault and the actors appear selected for their looks rather than anything else. Thanks to an unrelenting focus upon Dino and his obsession the plot moves sideways rather than forwards, but – thanks to some strong direction from Damiani – never stagnates.

Despite its clear flaws, The Empty Canvas is certainly one of the sexiest, steamiest pictures I’ve seen from this period. The performances aren’t stellar by any stretch of the romantic imagination, yet Horst Buchholz and Catherine Spaak manage to conjure a dangerously effective chemistry as the on-screen couple. Her innocence is betrayed by darkened eyes, something that we’re sure Dino can sense but can’t help falling head over heels. Indeed, the better scenes in the film are those where Dino and Cecilia are interacting, scenes that seem almost improvised at points. It makes one wonder just how much was lost by dubbing over their originally English-speaking performances. An aging Bette Davis also makes an appearance here as Dino’s haughty and overbearing Mother – an actress that adds American influence to the already packed international cast comprising of Belgian, French, German and Italian members. This cultured cast means that the film doesn’t particularly channel any breed of Italian lifestyle, and oher than a brief appearance by The Spanish Steps, such a tale of romance and lust could have easily taken place in any one of Europe’s cosmopolitan cities during the sixties. The Empty Canvas relies a little less upon the comedy aspect and instead dives headlong into overblown melodrama that is too pushed to be believable and too poorly written to be ultimately engaging. There are snatches of sexiness to be found though, especially in one iconic scene where Dino covers Cecilia’s body with banknotes from his Mother’s safe. Such scenes do well to provide some much-needed distraction, but by all accounts the film rather sums up Damiani’s career as a filmmaker: longer than perhaps expected and driven by scenes of empty sexuality.

Our Rating:

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Stop motion animation is one of those long-standing facets of film history that, thanks to a handful of important people, will never be lost to the winds of change. The concept itself seems utterly oblivious to the march of technology and computer-generated graphics, seeming only to benefit from these advancements rather than finding itself buried beneath them. Of course, without the likes of Henry Selick, Nick Park, Tim Burton, and all of those who precede them, things could be very different. As it is, we have these artists to thank for inspiring the likes of Adam Elliot – an Australian animator whose work with clay on the 2003 short film Harvey Krumpet won him and Academy Award and who returns here with his first full-length claymation feature, Mary and Max. Thanks largely to the international exploits of messrs Burton and Park, not to mention a relatively successful festival run and the involvement of two big names in Philip Seymour Hoffman and Toni Collette, Elliot’s new film is now poised to take on America. Critics around the world already appear fond of the film, and at this point it seems increasingly likely that we will see it lining up alongside the likes of Up and perhaps Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo in the Kodak Theatre when award season finally arrives – three different breeds of animation, if you will. Mary and Max follows the lives of two people: a young Australian girl whose eccentric parents and odd appearance make her the subject of school bullying, and an obese, jewish New Yorker who enjoys collecting cigarette butts from the city streets and devouring chocolate hot dogs. Both have one thing in common – a lack of friends.

Rather than tell a story in the traditional sense or “weave a fable” as films of this kind normally do, Mary and Max merely gives an account of these two rather unimportant lives. This is done through Barry Humpries (also known as Dame Edna) who provides the brilliant narration here and whose reflective, classic British/American tone lends the film much of its charm. As for the aesthetic, Mary and Max certainly doesn’t break the mould when it comes to creating a new and exciting world using the stop motion technique in the way Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas did. In fact, with its oddly misshapen gothic look and exaggerated way of capturing realism, Elliot’s film owes quite a bit to this earlier work. Other than existing as an ode to the importance of friends, Mary and Max isn’t particularly concerned with teaching us anything at all, or indeed offering a traditional narrative that involves innocence, discovery, wonder; the alternate realities found in the likes of The Nightmare Before Christmas or Henry Selick’s Coraline. The story itself, that of two people who find solace in each other’s long-distance companionship, is wonderfully written, particularly the parts involving letters sent from Mary to Max and visa versa: every word carries weight. Part of the reason for this is the voice work  behind the film. Toni Collette and Eric Bana do well enough with their handful of lines but, as usual, it is Philip Seymour Hoffman who shines: his portrayal of Max is particularly excellent – despite a New York drawl that at times seems a little forced – so that by the end of the movie his voice and Elliot’s character are very much one and the same.

Our Rating:

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Please feel free to request a particular size or image from the film by commenting below, or alternatively suggest a film to be featured on next week’s Wallpaper Wednesday! Thank you.

Many uneducated film-lovers may believe that the bearded writer/director came to fame with the groundbreaking release of Star Wars in 1977 but he had become a big name years before this, mainly due to the release of American Graffiti, which pulled in five Oscar nominations and placed his name firmly on the map. With much the same theatrical entry into fame as Richard Linklater had in 1993 with Dazed and Confused – at least similar when considering the nostalgic values behind their respective efforts – Lucas littered his film with young and unheard-of actors/actresses, many of who would go on to greatness, including a cameo from a bright-faced Harrison Ford (an actor who would go on to star under Lucas so memorably, four years later). Just as with Dazed and Confused, American Graffiti takes place during one long and exciting summer night, and really helps invoke a spirit of a young and carefree time for America. Curt Henderson (played by Richard Dreyfuss) is an intellectually-charged individual who is, like most of his peers, worrying about the future. We open on a conversation between him and fellow graduate Steve Bolander (Ronny Howard), who seems, unlike Curt, to be looking for some kind of preamble to college life. He has a steady relationship with his girlfriend Laurie and can’t quite justify throwing this away, whereas Curt in comparison wants nothing more than to escape the home life he has since grown tired of.

This initial introductory exchange sets the tone for American Graffiti and helps construct an arc upon which the story can then weave. We are very much observing a coming-of-age tale here; as the night melts away our two characters swap their respective viewpoints, showing exactly how confusing and daunting such a time can be. Much of the film is split between the varying fares of the young gang: from meeting at the roadside diner, they go off into the night seeking differing fortunes. Curt looks to relive the life he has witnessed thus far by visiting his favourite haunts, whereas Steve attempts to go out with one last bang – and not lose his girlfriend in the process. John Miller, the jock of the piece, cruises the “strip” looking for a means to vent his anger, while his good friend Toad attempts to wow passing fillies with a stunning new set of wheels. American Graffiti presents all these characters as specific personalities with which we can relate to a certain degree. Lucas is clearly intent on simply emulating this feeling of dawning independence, impending adulthood and the loss of youth: his film paints a nostalgically fun and insightful portrait upon such a life, one that is less concerned with messages and more with creating this feeling of adolescent wilderness. All of this is complemented by the pleasing sixties’ aesthetic, making American Graffiti a rewarding seventies homage to sixties America.

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Terry Gilliam should be cherished. There, I said it. Such a statement certainly won’t endear me to the man’s detractors, of which there are many, but I firmly believe that filmmakers of his kind – that is, those who aren’t afraid to follow their vision – are part of a dying breed. Considering the near-universal failure of his two most recent titles – The Brothers Grimm, Tideland – one can be forgiven for wondering just how Gilliam now finds himself in such a position; not only did he manage to secure a $30 million budget for his new film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, but it also boasts what is surely the most impressive cast we will see all year. It is a star-studded cast that was, of course, born out of tragedy: the death of leading man Heath Ledger on the 22nd of January 2008, around a third of the way through filming, suspended the project indefinitely. However, the tragedy provoked such A-Listers as Colin Farrell, Johnny Depp and Jude Law to sign up as replacements, who in doing so (also forwarding their wages for the role to Ledger’s young daughter, Matilda) practically guaranteed the completion of the film – something that Gilliam must have thought was beyond the realm of possibility at one point last year. While Ledger’s death was a tragic loss, not only to the world of film, it must also be noted that such huge setbacks are not unknown to Gilliam, who has encountered production problems alarmingly frequently throughout his career – his longstanding project about Don Quixote being the foremost example.

Fans of Gilliam and his unique approach to movie making will undoubtedly find something to love here. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus follows a travelling theatre troupe through a grey, unforgiving version of modern London as they unwittingly stumble into a deal made between the Doctor and the Devil some centuries previous. Parnassus, whose pious form is portrayed by the brilliant Christopher Plummer, has recently lost a longstanding bet to the snide Mr. Nick (Tom Waits) and must now pay up by handing over his teenage daughter Valentina (Lily Cole) once she turns sixteen. All seems lost until the troupe stumble across a mysterious man who they find hanging from his neck beneath a London bridge – placed there by the Devil in order to instigate what is to be the very last chapter in the tale of the great Parnassus. This is the first collaboration between Gilliam and screenwriter Charles McKeown in around twenty years; the pair last worked on what was one of Gilliam’s most successful films in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, which was nominated for four Academy Awards in 1988. The script isn’t a particular strong point, however, and neither are the visuals. Visuals that, coupled with the film’s London setting and Father-Daughter plot point, quickly bring to mind Dave McKean’s 2005 film MirrorMask. Like MirrorMask, and despite the huge budget, Parnassus lacks polish: it is understandably messy and suffers terribly from some  awful faux-English accents, particularly Ledger’s, yet good work can be found in the film’s supporting cast. With Waits, whose devilish voice is enough to make blood curdle, giving the standout performance.

Our Rating:

Earlier Wallpaper Wednesdays can be found here.

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Please feel free to request a particular size or image from the film by commenting below, or alternatively suggest a film to be featured on next week’s Wallpaper Wednesday! Thank you.