Notes from Weekend Viewing (7/30/12)

On the surface, James Bridges' The Paper Chase (1973) has much in common with the only other Bridges movie I've seen to date, Mike's Murder (1984), insofar as that both are constructed around essentially the same conceit: the obsession one person harbors towards a second who can never be known beyond the level of abstract image, and the accompanying path from naivete to disillusionment blazed by this obsession. The later movie is a great, haunting work (plot: Debra Winger attempts to uncover the truth behind the murder of a casual sexual acquaintance who was also secretly a drug dealer) - not a mystery as much as a personal quest for reconciliation, drifting on a wave of nervous, timid energy and unfolding as stretches of inertia punctuated by bolts of epiphany and high suspense. It's easily the greatest performance I've seen Winger give, and there is an admirable directness to Bridges' approach, an open acknowledgement of the great unknowability hanging over everything and the limits of the material in engaging with it, that gives that movie so much of its wallop. If The Paper Chase, easily the more critically and financially successful film of the two, fails to summon anything close to Mike's power, it's at least in part because its obsession - that of a first year Harvard law student (Timothy Bottoms) with his rigid professor (John Houseman) - is instead worked through with a stifling, distanced rigor; lengthy longshots and disembodied voices are a constant, and not two minutes seem to go by without the feeling of some great scramble to grab the artiest composition available. Unsentimental is a word that pops to mind, but A Film of Surfaces seems to be a little closer to the truth, and it's exactly this sense of remoteness that keeps the movie from ever gaining any significant, resonant traction. In Mike's Murder, unspoken feelings dominated the emotional atmosphere, even after they had indeed been spoken. In The Paper Chase, everyone tells everyone else how they feel and the sentiments seem to get swallowed up in all that pretty air. The best scenes (and they are excellent; at the very least Houseman's accolades were well deserved) are the ones that take place in the classroom, where the 2.35 frame and mannered compositional approach transform the space into something resembling a gladiatorial arena - academic pretensions become stripped away, leaving little more than a mass of bodies waging war in a series of petty, personal victories and defeats.

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Also, two first time viewings from one of my favorite directors, Raoul Walsh: Dark Command (1940) carries something of a minor reputation these days, often granted faint praise but made to be carefully mentioned outside of and below the rest of Walsh's 40s work, and that seems about right to me. A big budget picture for Republic, it displays many of the impersonal, uneven qualities one associates with such a determinedly prestigious product - qualities roundly absent from most of Walsh's stunning work for Warner Bros. of the same period - and while it embeds itself deeply in historical facts that are played with fast and loose, there are still pleasures to be found. Though none of the actors turn in their finest hour, the reteaming of Wayne and Trevor only a year removed from Ford's Stagecoach is a lot of fun, if only to watch for the points of convergence and disparity that emerge between the two unique relationships. And though Dark Command is ultimately a lesser film than Pursued, it is actually the more successful experiment with marrying the western milieu with noir stylistics; not bound to cumbersome subtext like the style of the Mitchum film was to its Freudian threads, Command is able to cultivate its moody atmospherics more freely and subtly within Walsh's busy open spaces, evoking a palpable sense of accumulating collective dread.

More notable was Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N. (1951), which struck me immediately as one of the greatest Walsh films I've come across yet. The spectacle of adventure on the high sea and Walshian deep focus breaks down into a personal elegy for the dead and love(s) lost, morphs into an account of loyalty and good humor among professional men on the run: in other words Walsh doing Ford doing Hawks. The patchwork nature of the narrative comes from a screenplay fashioned from three C.S. Forester stories (think Ford's The Long Voyage Home or The Sun Shines Bright), an ideal platform for Walsh to display his flare for fluidly navigating various tones and emotional registers (maybe only LaCava was from the classical Hollywood period was as adept); in this respect Horatio can stand easily beside the likes of The Strawberry Blonde and Gentlemen Jim, but comes off as the more mature film, light on the nostalgia that pervades those great pictures and heavy on the introspection that began tempering Walsh's daring-do as his career entered its later period. Besides mentioning the breathtakingly mounted, almost impossibly intense action sequences, what should also be noted is the careful attention paid to color throughout. At least two moments pop off in the mind for the audacious way Walsh renders the dramatic tensions strictly in terms of color: an early scene with Peck's Hornblower and Alec Mango's rebel leader, where the latter's castle interior becomes bathed in a sinister purple aura as the depth of his mania becomes apparent; and a later scene between Hornblower and Virginia Mayo's aristocratic female passenger, a small culmination of the growing sexual tension between them that sees their outfits reflect the other in a reverse dominant color pattern.

I'm sure there are other depths to be explored here; it's a dense film in many ways and I can't wait to sit down with it again. Essential viewing.

Three Notes (weekend viewing)

The horror anthology can be a tricky, frustrating subgenre to navigate. The truly great ones are few and far between (and even those are largely more a matter of consistency rather than ingenuity), but the promise inherent in all the others of finding a gem in the rough (a common enough occurrence, in my experience at least) can lead to even the most discerning of horror fans wading through piles of shit in search of a segment smacking of real creativity and ideas, if not out of anything other than the same sense of exploratory pleasure/fervor that any genre adventurer is well acquainted with.

The wraparound is of course an essential ingredient in most worthy anthologies, simultaneously tasked as it is with standing outside of the individual stories and acting as its own mini-narrative, while also providing the context and connective tissue for the tales taking place and, in the best of cases (see: Creepshow, Dead of Night, any of Roy Ward Baker's work for Amicus) establishing the thematic and stylistic trends to be followed. It's not very common that these wraparound framing segments emerge from any given anthology as the highlight, but such is the case with The Theatre Bizarre, a 2011 anthology that I'd been looking forward to for some time given the names involved. It's unfortunately largely terrible, but the framing story, titled "Theatre Guignol" and directed by Jeremy Kasten, is a pretty striking accomplishment: a crazed young lady wanders into a desolate, baroque theatre and becomes the sole audience for a paper-mache Udo Kier, who stands on stage and waxes cryptically on the transformative potentials of fiction. It's a clear homage to the Club Silencio sequence from Mulholland Drive, and even directly apes some of Lynch's mise-en-scene, but is distinctly stylized in its own right (utilizing a mixture of both static shots and jagged handheld, for one) and is able to conjure up its own uneasy sense of mystery, if not quite the same well of deep oneiric emotion achieved in the Lynch. The progression of this framing story - Kier becomes more human as the female audience member takes on his theatre puppet characteristics - relies on the ellipses provided by the other separate stories, but taken as a whole this little film constitutes one of the better horror shorts to roll around in recent memory.

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This Man Must Die (Claude Chabrol, 1969) is a perfect title, clearly and starkly expressing the vengeful mindset that engulfs its protagonist, with the same sense of forceful determination that drives its story ahead. As a dramatist, Chabrol tends towards a lot of open narrative space - his M.O. is generally to establish a milieu and then calmly observe the plots and dualities creep into being. Here however, the inciting incident - a small boy is fatally struck in a hit-and-run - occurs before the title card is even punched onto the screen. The father vows to find his child's murderer, and from there on exists not one sequence that doesn't either up the emotional stakes of the pursuit, or shove it along its course in an almost fatalistic compulsion; it's quite easily the most single-minded film from Chabrol that I've seen to date. One scene in particular suggests the determined tone: the father, leaving the house of the murderer deflated after having his revenge plan foiled, stops off at a restaurant to grab a bite, only to be met by a television with a news reporter who is calling him by name, entreating him to return to the location he's just left. The act of watching television is of course one of the great throughlines in Chabrol's oeuvre, a signifier of empty bourgeois leisure. In this film even the TVs won't let you forget; respite is simply not an option.

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I also watched Source Code (Duncan Jones, 2011) again this weekend. I saw it in theaters when it originally came out and was impressed, but was surprised to see how well it holds up, and I would even venture to say that it's a significantly better film than my initial viewing suggested. It does everything right that the vastly inferior Moon fell well short of - beautifully paced, formally sharp and on-point, and never allows itself to get swallowed up by its silly ideas and obvious genre antecedents. Instead, rhythm, emotional beats and even bits of poetry are consistently foregrounded as the high concept cogs away in the background, rearing its head only to move us from point A to point B (or, given the film's structural reliance on repetition, point A to point A) but otherwise staying the hell off to the side. There's a real quality of gamesmanship evident in the way Jones doles out pieces of the bigger picture while holding others back, and while something resembling a tension/release pattern emerges from within this flow of information and the way it collides with the more immediate suspense of the happenings on the train, it never feels overly schematic in any way and is almost always carried out with a ruthless, lean efficiency. It's in this way that Source Code feels like something more from the school of Anthony Mann or Richard Fleischer than it does the crop of other Hollywood time travelers or beat-the-clockers released in the past decade.

I was also quite struck this time around by the ending, which played to me originally as something of a cop-out, an unnecessary extension towards conventionality after a darker, more resonant closing point had naturally presented itself minutes earlier. On further reflection though, there is something bold about the way the movie seems to press the parameters of the cliched happy ending, how it must move completely out of the movie we've been watching and jump into an alternate one in order to appropriate the veneer of optimism. It's tonally much more complex than I'd given it credit for, and I'm now not sure I'd change a thing about it. This is a great movie.

Off the wall

There's something kinda beautiful about the way shadows are used in Silver Lode. They're a constant striking presence; not the distorted, oppressive exaggerations of a Nic Ray, but balanced, sharper, given real weight within the frame and often hung in the center, reducing their human counterparts to equivalent compositional elements, like in Tourneur (though more utilitarian than in either of those directors, it should go without saying). Two-shots become three become four as dusky patsies and collaborators and witnesses splinter off from the corporeal main players, all but diminishing the rare moments of privacy afforded by the rather hectic thrust of the narrative.

Opening sequence from Allan Dwan's Driftwood (1947)

Capsule Reviews 5/31/12

The Gunfighter (Henry King, 1950) 
The pitfalls of auteurism: no one has much use for Henry King these days it seems, so I've been long content to throw him on the backburner and leave it at that. The Gunfighter has me seriously doubting the merits of that decision. It's a wonderful film, one I'm very sorry to have not seen much earlier, and while there are numerous remarkable things about it, what struck me most on my first (and certainly not last) viewing is simply the delicacy and intelligence with which King depicts realization of the end of a way of life. The way the camera (and thus the world) subtly collapses in and smothers Peck's Ringo between cuts of his confrontations (or what amounts to variations on the same, ceaseless Confrontation); the way Peck's figure is placed contrapuntally in crowded shots that often and quickly disperse, leaving not the image of a lone man but the ghost of a myth, barely tethered to his surroundings. When Peck asks Helen Westcott to run away from it all with him, it registers with so much emotion precisely because it's not the result of some vague, sudden epiphany, but rather the logical endpoint of this series of weary, fleeting impressions, all not so much screaming as whispering this is no way of life. The depth of feeling here is present in nearly every scene, and there's a terse compactness to the way King lays out and maneuvers the geography and population of this contained community that ensures the emotional vibrations of any given moment are constantly spilling over into the next, a quality that reminded me specifically of some of the work Gerd Oswald would do in the genre a little later in the decade.

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Her Man (Tay Garnett, 1930)
In a film that could in a sense be defined by its offhand details and tangential nature, Tay Garnett's dizzying pre-coder starts off with a doozy: a hard luck case (Marjorie Rambeau) is caught ticketless onboard a ship while attempting to sneak into the States and is sent back to Havana, the camera first following only her feet and then finally her full distanced figure in one beautifully sinuous tracking shot as she makes her way through the smoky, stylized Cuban alley corridors before arriving at her destination - a slug of liquor from a gruff bartender who informs her that she "ain't no bargain." All this before the story proper kicks in, which has to do with Helen Twelvetrees (here displaying a saucy, jittery way of throwing her entire body into her words that suggests she learned a thing or two from Jeanne Eagles) running a con racket in this same saloon with her pimp boyfriend, and eventually falling for one of the American sailors who wisens up to her scam.

Like so many early talkies the drama is hindered by the stilted, awkward dialogue delivery, but the camera displays a restless sense of creativity that's consistently exhilarating, prone to experimentation in its static shots (a lie told during a hug in front of a mirror - two isolated faces in an embrace allowed expression within the same frame, animating the power structure of the relationship) just as often as it is bobbing and weaving in and out of the ragged crowds, capturing the behaviors and movements of a particular time and place with an almost blatant disregard for the presence of narrative. Andrew Sarris said that critic Ray Durgnat preferred Her Man to Hawks' similarly themed A Girl in Every Port because of, rather than in spite of, its period sentimentality, and it's an easy position to sympathize with; much as I like the Hawks (and believe me there's no one here to stand toe-to-toe with Louise Brooks), there's a certain richness forsaken in its insulated world that's opened up here by acute attention to detail, such as the protracted swing of the saloon door (a character itself), or the tactililty of the bowler hats everyone wears, constantly being passed around and pulverized and, in the film's funniest bit, rescued instead of its drowning owner. Everything leads to a massive barroom brawl worthy of some choice Walsh pre-coders to come, and then to a traditionally happy ending that manages to subvert itself by returning back to the Rambeau character for the final words, bookending the story with the presence of this almost totally annihilated person and insisting on a sense that within this loose, playful atmosphere lies something of a prison.

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My Name Is Julia Ross (Joseph H. Lewis, 1945)
Nina Foch emerges from the proto-Gun Crazy rain of the introduction and reads a letter from the one that got away, is then hired for a non-existent job by a crazed bourgeois household and is systematically stripped of her identity and molded to take the place of a dead person. Names like Mankiewicz and Penn would years later take the essential ideas here and refashion them with campy excess and melodramatic trappings to varying degrees of success, but Lewis's effort is the real deal: swift, sharp and sinister to the core. A carousel of hoax spaces and harsh negations (a suffocating pattern emerges in the editing where Foch's reactionary expressions of pure terror are stamped on-camera just long enough to register before being brutally snuffed out by a fade or dissolve) that conjoin with the mercurial logic of the narrative and pronounced expressionism to produce an anxious nightmare on par with anything an Ulmer or Brahm were churning out at the time, and a sopping, rocky beach climax points the way towards many later Lewis denouements that almost ritualistically careen into the hallucinatory. While the director would go on in future films to tackle bigger, more topical themes and develop a more sophisticated formal touch, Julia Ross can stand next to any of them in terms of raw verve and the forcefulness of its vision - which is I guess a way of me saying that despite its undeniable comparative slightness this very well might be my favorite Lewis to date.

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Unlawful Entry (Jonathan Kaplan, 1992)
I wasn't surprised by a recent and long overdue rewatch of Jonathan Kaplan's '92 thriller to find that I still liked it; what did surprise me was to discover a much more frustrating, frustrated and complex film than the one I remembered. It'd be tough off the top of my head to point to many films more exemplary of the conditions forged from the head-on collision between imposed commercial conventionality and an arsenal of deeper artistic impulses. Which is to say that before Unlawful Entry decides in its second half to be merely another relatively well executed entry in that momentarily flourishing late-80s/early-90s subgenre we'll dub the Obsessive Terrorizer (see: Fatal Attraction, Pacific Heights, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Single White Female, etc. etc.), it is something far more brooding and difficult and could be called, in spots at least, one of the great films Nic Ray never made. The key to the excellence of the first hour (or so) is the balance Liotta's performance strikes between mounting instability and the intense, quiet sadness from which it springs (and really there isn't enough praise for Liotta in this section of the film; suffice it to say he's one of my favorite actors and this is right up there with his greatest work). It's an undeniably grey shaded character during this time - a cop who reeks of genuine loneliness but whose penchant for poor decisions and reprehensible violence ensure he'll never find or hold onto the intimacy he seeks (needless to say Robert Ryan would have slayed this role) - and the film is all the more fascinating for it.

The culmination of this opening half comes in a superb night club sequence set to Rozalla's moving house anthem "Everybody's Free", a first true stand-off between Kurt Russell and Liotta that toys with identification and emotional depths in ways that other Obsessive Terrorizers - whose baddies are almost always portrayed as essentially abstract entities with the psychological complexity of a rock - would never do. There's a real sadness coursing through this sequence, in what it seems to tell us about Liotta's character merely through looks, but also a non-diegetic sadness at watching a movie reach a point where it can no longer be what it wants to be. After this excellent and emotionally intricate scene you can literally feel a producer mash his Thriller 101 emergency button; the next thing shown is Liotta with a textbook psycho-glaze in his eyes beating up a hooker and, soon after, murdering a fellow cop, and with that all of the nuances evaporate in an instant; the character's previous deeper yearning for what seemed like a more communal companionship is twisted into a purely malevolent sexual obsession towards Madeleine Stowe which quickly becomes the driving force. And while this second half works fine enough as a potent study of pure helplessness in the face of corrupt, abusive power (Rosenbaum called it "an excellent corrective to the shameless celebrations of LA police power and brutality in Lethal Weapon 3"; that's to say the least), the awkward and curt shift from the complex earlier dynamics to those more black-and-white and palatable for the masses is quite lamentable, and ultimately what we're left with is an unfortunate case of a very good film threatening to burst at the seams with a truly great one.

It's in the eyes

Cornelius (Wolfgang Preiss) from The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse and Prof. Lodz (Patrick Bauchau) from HBO's Carnivale

Salty

Tucked into the crevices of Raoul Walsh's most prodigious decade, Salty O'Rourke doesn't boast the crackling pace or deft mood shifts that characterize so much of the great director's work from the period, and while it will likely never be talked about in the same breath as a White Heat or They Drive by Night - which is probably fair enough - it still stands perfectly well on its own as a coherent piece of personal expression, with a set-up as pure Walsh as anything you'll find: Alan Ladd as the title character, a passive, cunning gambling man whose past has caught up with him in the form of a deep debt to Bruce Cabot's gangster (Cabot, as amiable as ever and all the more malevolent for it), and who naturally comes up with a quick and supremely over-the-top plan to raise the needed scratch: buy an untamable horse on the cheap, hire an ostracized, uncontrollable jockey, and win the biggest handicap of the year.

Walsh was of course an avid horse owner/bettor throughout his life, and it's no surprise that he would request a loan out from Warner Bros. in order to do this modest project for Paramount, a chance to harmonize two of his greatest passions. Appropriately it's one of the more intimate Walsh films I've seen to date, leaving behind much of the capacious visual experimentation he was engaging with at the time in favor of a somewhat more pointed and inhibited form, comprised often of closed spaces and medium shots observing folks entangled in all sorts of duping and wooing, and in that respect it winds up coming out closer to something like The Strawberry Blonde than, say, the more superficially similar High Sierra. The deep focus and open spaces here are reserved for the glory of the horse track, where the bustling, indifferent masses that so often pack the background of Walsh's frames - a compositional motif established as early as The Big Trail, and an integral part of his art from thereon - are for once united by the energy of a central spectacle.

There are certainly some issues abound. The screenplay, for one, is kind of a double-edged sword, loose in structure as much of the best Walsh is, but also rife with the kind of deathly trite dialogue that any actor would be hard pressed to do a damn thing with. And the nicest possible thing to be said for Ladd, whose stone mug here seems to evaporate on-screen time and again before he can barely get a word out, is that he's just no Bogart. All in all though, Salty O'Rourke is a pleasant treat for those willing to plumb the depths of 40s Walsh - relaxed, peppered with personal touches, and displaying instances where it feels like Walsh just couldn't be having any more fun, such as Stanley Clements (something of a poor man's Cagney, nevertheless equally epitomizing what Farber called Walsh's "little big shot") fluffing his pillow in frustration only to have it puff out dollar bills, or a woozy late-night montage which vigorously carves through assorted New Orleans hotspots, or what is easily the biggest hoot in the film, and probably the most honest moment as well: the introduction of the first racing horse, the shot opening on its enticingly crossed front legs, before a sexy pan up to fill out its figure. Not even a Lupino or Mayo ever received such an entrance.

Strange Loves

top: No Time for Love (Mitchell Leisen, 1943)
bottom: The Strange Case of Angelica (Manoel de Oliveira, 2010)

All of this has happened before...

From Erich von Stroheim's first directed feature, Blind Husbands. The intense floridity and exacting detail, the madness, hadn't set in quite yet, and so while some see fit to dub this "minor von Stroheim" and move right along, it's still an extraordinary film, and if it's not at least occasionally mentioned alongside the likes of Breathless and Badlands et al. as far as directorial debut coups go, it should be. The melodramatic crust is fairly thick, yes, but there is also something haunted and elemental floating around the center of this story, which climaxes with a pair of men dueling over a woman atop a mountain where decades earlier, according to lore, a pair of men dueled over a woman; a death game played out in a state of perpetuity, like Vertigo or HBO's Carnivale (our avatars here - a doctor and a lieutenant), people running around with impulses they can't explain, looking a thousand years old, trying to break the chains and seemingly succeeding until an unknowable pair of hands yanks a few strings and things fall where they must, ensuring that the shadow of death and its necessity hangs over our happy ending.

Day Is Done

The images above are from Frank Borzage's lovely contribution (one of three he would make) to the "Screen Directors Playhouse" series, entitled Day Is Done (1955). As so often in Borzage, we are presented with a simple love story, played out over a hazy, perilous social backdrop. The backdrop in this case being the Korean War, and the love story being, atypically, not of the romantic male-female variety with which Borzage is so commonly associated, but rather the love of music that is shared by and binds together two male soldiers: a distant, dispirited sergeant (Rory Calhoun) and a green, eager-eyed private (Bobby Driscoll). The pair, each a musician before entering the war, find a bugle on the body of a slain Korean soldier while out on reconnaissance patrol one night, and as they each take turns with the instrument, eyes become glazed over, piercing time and flooding them with memories from what might as well have been a previous life, memories that literally melt onto the screen as the sergeant fondly recalls the crisp pride with which the job of the bugler was once carried out, and it becomes clear that the music produced from the bugle is providing for these men an intimate refuge no less than that of the apartment in Seventh Heaven or the hovel in Man's Castle. 

It would make sense to assume that the restrictions of the half hour television format would do no favors to a director who by this point was considered (barring Moonrise) long past his prime, but this is very much a deeply felt piece of Borzage, with his spare, compressed mise-en-scene, his commitment to foregrounding human drama at the expense of supplemental space translating pretty much untouched, as does, more surprisingly given the length, the air of unhurried leisure with which moments and events are normally allowed to play out in his worlds. Though in this world, alas, the reality of the situation does not ultimately give itself over to the transcendent; here a death is a death is a death, with grief finding expression only through a weary, impromptu performance of "Taps", both an act of solemn farewell and the solidification of another memory.

Niagara

There's something poignant about a movie that sees fit to acknowledge the death of its own aesthetic. Such is the case with Niagara, the frothy 1953 Technicolor noir not so much directed as assembled by Henry Hathaway. Assembled, literally, around an icon in the form of Marilyn-just-as-she-was-becoming-Marilyn; assembled in the sense that the chief stylistic preoccupations on display -- hot, lurid colors in movement and ever-furtive window slat shadows; a simultaneous rebuke and embrace of genre -- are barely allowed to exist without her presence. She is very much the engine for these elements, the sole expressive nexus that swirls them together, giving the film so much of its visual personality. And even if Marilyn wasn't much of an actress at this point, she still slinks around the dusky crevices of this world in her bright pinks and yellows (even shifting into pure shadow at times) with every bit the force and presence of the natural wonder that provides the backdrop, while the likes of the great Joseph Cotton and Jean Peters struggle to do a damn thing with their lots, and it's very difficult to say that the movie does not belong completely to her.

And so after the sheer ludicrousness of the script has guided Monroe's character to the top of a bell tower*, and after she's been murdered by her husband in said location, we are given the relatively loaded compositions shown at the top of this post: the aesthetic spirit of our film, now lifeless, bathed in the features that constantly surrounded her, except now given a decidedly mournful appearance. Giant slat shadows within a splayed container of light that may as well be an exaggerated coffin. An outfit one might wear to a funeral. Color in the form of a bright yellow kerchief, which Monroe had absurdly held onto and flailed throughout her final doomed chase. The kind of kerchief that one could clutch in their hand as they wave goodbye to a loved one. And that's what this moment is, a movie waving goodbye to itself. Sure, there's another act left to go, with Cotton and Peters perilously trapped aboard a gasless boat drifting towards the edge of the raging falls, but the movie's style as it had been established --- having already been given a proper farewell -- all but evaporates, giving way to dingy brownish earth tones and misty, bland blues and a general blah atmosphere of predetermined redemption. This stretch may have more "action" and "closure" than anything that preceded it, but it feels at best like a forced and prolonged coda, and at worst like something stripped from some other, far less interesting film. We have already been given the real climax, and it's easy to sense that the movie agrees.

*The matter of the bell tower, along with a handful of other shared cues, has led some to ponder the possibilities of Hitchcock drawing upon Niagara for inspiration while conceiving Vertigo. I don't see much there personally, but who knows. It is more than a tad interesting to think of Hitch's masterpiece and its boundless obsession as being, in some subconscious measure, a reaction to Niagara and the frank treatment given to the murder of its blonde femme fatale, its sober formal acknowledgement of the loss and of what it means.

(Updated) TAKE TWO: Tarkovsky Blu-ray Giveaway

The winner of the drawing was Brian B. from Massachusetts. Congrats, Brian! I've sent you an email to work out the shipping arrangements.

Let's try this again, and don't worry, no plethora of screencaps to plow through this time. I have one brand new, factory sealed copy of Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice on Blu-ray, released by Kino International, to give away to someone. If you would like a chance to win it, ALL YOU NEED TO DO is send me an email at tosh500@gmail.com. The subject line of your email should say TARKOVSKY and the email itself should contain your first and last name, as well as your state of residence. Only one entry per person please. I will accept entry emails for 48 hours. The cutoff will be 12:00 noon EST, Saturday, January 14. At that point I will have a random drawing to decide the winner, and will be in prompt contact with that person to arrange shipping details. I will update this post with the winner's name at that time. Once again, please enter only if you reside within the continental U.S., otherwise I will not be able to ship you the disc. Good luck!

The Sacrifice Blu-ray Giveaway / Screencap Contest (UPDATED)

(Updated 1/10/12: I've gone ahead and listed the actual movie title that the screencaps are from below. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to give away the blu-ray, because I didn't receive a single entry! I guess either twenty caps was a bit too unwieldy of a number, or maybe they weren't quite as easy as I thought many of them were. Probably both? Either way, I'll try and think of a different, better way to give the movie away.)

I was recently fortunate enough to come into possession of an extra copy of Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice on Blu-ray, released by Kino International. It's one of my very favorite movies, and Kino has done an excellent job with this release, and I would like to give it away on this blog to someone. It is brand new and factory sealed. Below, I have posted twenty anonymous screencaps from twenty different movies. To win, all you need to do is be the person who correctly identifies the most screencaps by the title of the movie. A few things:

1) Right now, I can unfortunately only afford to ship the disc to someone living in the continental U.S. So please only participate if this applies to you.

2) All entries should be sent to my email address: tosh500@gmail.com. Please do not post your picks in the comments section of this post. The subject line of your email should say CONTEST, and along with your twenty guesses in order (only the movie title is necessary), it should include your full name, as well as your state. Please do not send me your address. I will be in contact with the winner after they've been determined to work out shipping arrangements. Only one entry per person please!

3) The deadline to submit your picks by is 11:59 pm EST on Sunday, January 8th. I will post the winner, along with the correct answers to all 20 movies, sometime on Monday.

4) Be sure to include the tiebreaker with your picks. The tiebreaker is listed below the twentieth screenshot. If there are two or more who are tied for the highest number of correct guesses, this will be used to determine the winner.

Here are the twenty screencaps:

Screencap #1
(Strangers on a Train)

Screencap #2
(Dogville)

Screencap #3
(L'enfant)

Screencap #4
(Rebel Without a Cause)

Screencap #5
(Man with a Movie Camera)

Screencap #6
(Helas pour moi)

Screencap #7
(The Ox-Bow Incident)

Screencap #8
(The Yards)

Screencap #9
(Ivan's Childhood)

Screencap #10
(Intolerance)

Screencap #11
(Park Row)

Screencap #12
(Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)

Screencap #13
(Minnie & Moskowitz)

Screencap #14
(Window Water Baby Moving)

Screencap #15
(Moonrise)

Screencap #16
(A.I. Artificial Intelligence)

Screencap #17
(Vengeance is Mine)

Screencap #18
(Traffic)

Screencap #19
(Ghost in the Shell)

Screencap #20
(Les bones femmes)

Tiebreaker question: I have used a random number generator to select a number between 1 and 1986 (the year Tarkovsky died). Guess this number. In the event that two or more people tie for the most correctly guessed screencaps, then the person who comes closest to guessing the random number will win.

If you have any additional questions or comments about the contest, or anything, you can feel free to either leave them in the comments, or send me an email. Good luck!