There are many films that have been written about Hollywood, but none have done a better job of exploring the relationship between the film viewer and the film than the absolutely brilliant 1954 Rear Window.The story has James Stewart (playing L.B. "Jeff" Jefferies) as a photo-journalist with his entire left leg in a cast, toe to hip, stuck for two months in his Greenwich Village apartment during a hot summer. Day by day he sits, bored, watching his neighbors through his window with binoculars, from the barely-clad ballet dancer Miss Torso to the sad Miss Lonelyhearts, to the songwriter and newlyweds.
More ominously, however, is Lars Thorwald (played perfectly by Raymond Burr) as the angry man across the courtyard who gets into fight after fight with his wife and then she mysteriously vanishes. Did he finally get fed up and kill her? Did Jefferies witness a murder?
In Rear Window, Stewart plays both the armchair detective, the nosy neighbor and a surrogate for all of us sitting in the theater watching the screen and sneaking into the lives of the people up there on the big screen, the flickering shadows on the wall.
Of course, it doesn't hurt a bit that Grace Kelly (as media darling and cover girl Lisa Carol Fremont) is his fianceé and is an absolute vision of loveliness. In fact, the scene where we first see her is, in my mind, one of the most beautifully filmed moments in all of cinema. She's breathtakingly stunning, and director Alfred Hitchcock and cinematographer Robert Burks both know it.
When we watch a film, do we see what we think we see, or do we see what we want to see? Are films a peek behind the scenes of reality or are they their own reality?
As Jefferies' housekeeper Stella (as played by the great character actor Thelma Ritter) says early in the film: "Mr. Jefferies, we've become a race of Peeping Toms. What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change."
Indeed.
Michael Bay is one of those film directors that people seem to either love or hate. I know of many film aficionados who cringe when they hear that Bay is involved in a project. His signature style is certainly big, loud, flashy, with big, big special effects and, too often, a weak or completely incoherent story line.
What the heck? What am I doing reviewing a film that was released before I was born, and, probably, before you were born? Sunset Boulevard was released in 1950 and, directed by the great Billy Wilder, ranks as one of the very best films made, particularly if you're interested in the self-referentialism of films about the movie industry like I am.
Whenever I review a remake I like to start out saying whether or not I liked the original and in this case, I definitely need to disclose that I loved the original 1974 version of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, with Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw as the protagonist and antagonist, respectively. It ranks as one of the best crime dramas of the mid-70s, with a story line that surprises the viewer more than once, an ingenious escape for the subway kidnappers, and a beautiful denouement that ends the film.
If you like films about cons like The Italian Job (either the recent remake or the wry original) or The Spanish Prisoner, then you'll love this Spanish-language film set in Argentina, where nothing is what it seems. Or is it?
This is a guest review from my friend Steve Oatney. Generally, I run guest reviews of movies when the critic has a strongly divergent opinion to my own or when it's a movie that I just know I'm not going to see (like a scary horror film or chick flick). Anyway, here we go!
There is no greater compliment that I can pay modern animated fare than to say that the best of them are now most properly viewed as films, not as animated films. 25 years ago we talked about "feature-length animation" but in the last few years we've seen such landmark achievements as Wall-E and Spirited Away, films that let us stop looking at how they've achieved the visuals, stop thinking about how much work it was, stop contemplating texture mapping, and just enjoy good storytelling.
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