Oklahoma Film Critics Circle

The Movies I Love: Doug Bentin on "The Blue Angel"

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:43:00 -0500

A couple of words: The Blue Angel is over 75 years old so a few spoilers will probably slip by. Also, the film was released in 1930 in both the original German language and an alternate version with the same cast but spoken in English. I prefer the German version.

The Blue Angel has long been seen as a metaphor for the plight of intellectuals in Germany between the wars. Defending that reading is easy and I’ll do a little of that myself.

But the more human story is of a self-destructive and obsessive passion leading to the downfall of a once respected man. On one level, the sexy cabaret singer Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich in the role that made her a star) represents the lowest common denominator siren song that seduces the masses, and on a more visceral level she’s everyman’s slightly kinky wetdream.

Der Blaue Engel was directed by Josef von Sternberg and released by the famous German film studio UFA in 1930. In it, Emil Jannings (who had won the first Best Actor Oscar for The Last Command two years previously) stars as Prof. Immanuel Rath, teacher of literature and languages at the local high school. When he discovers that some of his boys have been attending the Blue Angel cabaret at night to see the seductive singer Lola Lola, he visits the café to ask Lola to send the young men home.

She flirts with him in the same way she does with all men. During his visit, a drunken sea captain tries for force his attentions on the chanteuse, who is encouraged to be nice to him because he buys champagne. Outraged at this obvious attempt to prostitute the woman, Rath causes a scene.

He returns the following night, by now completely under Lola’s spell. Some of his students see him go backstage with her, and they don’t see him go home that night. The next day in class, his authority shattered, they belittle him in front of the principal. Rath is forced to resign.

He asks Lola to marry him. Although she thinks this offer is hilarious, she accepts it.

From there, Rath’s life goes to hell. He discovers that Lola carries on with all men the way she did with him. In one scene dripping with clammy sexual masochism, Rath drops to his knees before his wife and slides her stocking on her leg before going out into the audience to sell sexy postcards with her picture to strangers.

Rath’s final breakdown on stage—he’s by then replaced the sad-eyed clown in the company, in more ways than one—is one of the screen’s great moments of terror and pity. Rath is destroyed by his own weakness. I was about to write that you won’t know whether to laugh at him or weep for him, but that’s wrong. You’ll know.

The film is loaded with visual delights. Von Sternberg learned his craft with silent movies so he knew how to convey information with pictures. Watch the background during Lola’s famous songs. The chorus girls drink and light cigarettes, as if they were bored in the audience and not onstage in backup positions. Notice the number of fat people in the film, representing the fact they are of the flesh rather than of the mind. Even Dietrich is positively chunky, although not nearly as heavy as the other girls in the show.

And the director is already adept at the use of sound. The movie begins with a cacophony of honking geese being thrown into a cage, herded and trapped by creatures larger and more powerful than they, another metaphor for what was about to happen to the German people.

Jannings is brilliant as Prof. Rath. In 1924, he’d played a similar character, the hotel porter so proud of his uniform in The Last Laugh. Once again, he was a petty tyrant. In the earlier film, his authority came with his clothing; in the later one, it rested in his position in the community. In the silent film, his pride is stripped from him by others; in the sound movie, his fall originates in his own weakness.

When sound arrived in Hollywood, where Jannings had been working for years, his heavy German accent drove the actor back to his fatherland, where he became an enthusiastic Nazi after Hitler came to power in 1933. He appeared in numerous pro-German and anti-Semitic films and was named “Artist of the State” by Josef Goebbels in 1941. Like Prof. Rath, Jannings was a man brought down by his own worst nature. He died in 1950.

Marlene Dietrich went the other way. Despising the Nazis, she fled to America and became one of Hollywood’s chief spokespersons against Hitler. She sang and danced at UFO functions, made several war bond trips, and entertained Allied troops in Europe during the war. For someone who dismissed herself as being a typical German haus frau, she displayed as much moxie as any movie star ever has.

But post-film history aside, The Blue Angel is a masterpiece of world cinema, brilliantly acted and directed, and as unsettlingly erotic as any film ever made. When Dietrich pauses in a doorway to adjust her costume, running her fingers up under the bottoms of her shorts to straighten them out, she does more for sex on screen than any dozen gyrating full-frontal starlets. This is the real deal, boys. Line up to buy those postcards now.

Evan Derrick Review: The Dark Knight

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 09:53:00 -0500

As filmgoers we are often asked to choose between films that entertain and films that stimulate thought, but rarely are we given both in the same package. Few have accomplished this in recent memory (No Country For Old Men, The Lives Of Others, and The Mist all come to mind). The Dark Knight, however, is an epic achievement on both counts.

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Cory Cheney Column: Urban Tulsa, 8-6-08

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 09:51:12 -0500

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I don’t need to be preached to by a damn movie. That’s what I have Bill Maher for.

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Michael Smith Review: Pineapple Express

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 09:48:15 -0500

So autobiographical were the hormones and humor of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s teen characters in “Superbad” that the men simply had to name them Seth and Evan.

With the pals’ follow-up, “Pineapple Express,” one has to wonder how often the boys used to pretend they were a certain bong-powered comedy film team and fought over this question: Who gets to be Cheech, and who gets to be Chong?

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George Lang Review: Pineapple Express

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 09:45:35 -0500

Despite their chronic condition, Cheech and Chong weren’t exactly aiming high; they were midnight movie fare for people who were halfway to a laugh before the joke. While “Pineapple Express” owes a deep debt to their movies, it earns its laughs fair and square. Clear-eyed and tack-sharp audiences with a taste for the willfully stupid should enjoy it as much as sedated ones.

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Michael Smith Review: Swing Vote

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 16:18:19 -0500

One man, one vote, one pretty amusing election-year comedy.

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Michael Smith Review: The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 11:04:45 -0500

See whether this sounds familiar: An aging adventurer is called back into action, is joined by his son for this adventure, and he must again stop a force intent on world domination.

If you’re thinking of Indiana Jones, you would be correct about his return to big screens this summer. The description is also a fit for “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor,” the third in the series, which opens Friday.

If this is the best the franchise has left to offer, hopefully it will be allowed to rest in peace, entombed for eternity.

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James Cooper Review: The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 11:03:30 -0500

In a climatic battle sequence late in “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor,” Michelle Yeoh and Jet Li face off, swords drawn and wits matched. We know this fight will be memorable for two very important reasons. First, early in the film during extended flashback sequence, the narrator informs us that the Dragon Emperor killed Yeoh’s lover in a violent act of revenge and jealousy. This act pales in comparison with his earlier display of brutality and power: In order to build a tangible testament to his newly acquired position as emperor of the world, he orders thousands of slaves to work tirelessly to construct a great wall (yes, that Great Wall) in his honor. He seeks out Yeoh, a powerful witch said to possess the secret knowledge of immortality, and when she falls in love with one his generals, the Dragon Emperor has the general quartered in front of her. Heartbroken, Yeoh enacts her own revenge, cursing the Dragon Emperor and his massive army and imprisoning them beneath the earth.

In other words, these two characters have quite the bone to pick with each other.

Yet, when director Rob Cohen finally reunites them, an army of computer generated mummies and skeletons fighting only a few feet behind them, he never manages to keep up with either actor. Li and Yeoh are simply too fast for Cohen’s camera, a camera much more concerned with capturing the supposedly witty one-liners spewed forth by any number of the characters present on screen. A fight sequence between these two iconic actors should elicit excitement and wonder considering their legendary martial arts skills and speed. Instead, the camera struggles to keep up with them, resorting to odd slow motion techniques and sometimes completely refusing to frame either actor properly.

And so it goes with “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor,” a disastrous and unnecessary film.

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Gene Triplett DVD Review: The Mummy: Special Edition

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 11:01:40 -0500

With another “Mummy” set to bust out at the box office, Universal Home Entertainment figured the timing was right to resurrect the original 1932 classic in a special two-DVD box set that’s loaded with a tomb-full of treasures in the bonus-features department.

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George Lang DVD Review: In Bruges

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 11:00:46 -0500

It’s hard to imagine the Belgian Tourist Office being thrilled with “In Bruges,” a magnificently coarse, pitch-black comedy about hit men hiding out in what is portrayed as the most boring city in Europe. Playwright Martin McDonagh, who won an Oscar for his short film “Six Shooter,” makes his feature-length debut with a film that doesn’t stop with its host city. So if widely cast insults and buckets of blood are your cup of Stella Artois, “In Bruges” is the ideal destination.

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Phil Bacharach DVD Review: Baby It's You

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 10:59:29 -0500

Writer-director John Sayles has the ability to take the most cliché-riddled formula and — voila! — skirt cliché. Such is the redemptive power of full-blooded characterization and a keen understanding that people are nothing if not especially unpredictable. The overdue DVD release of Sayles’ third (and only studio) feature, 1983’s Baby Its You, presents a modest story of young love, but it nicely illustrates the filmmaker’s knack for wringing genuine complexity from what otherwise could be a tired exercise in genre.

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George Lang Review: Swing Vote

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 10:58:12 -0500

Well-meaning but suffering from severe mood swings, the tone and sensibility of “Swing Vote” veers wildly from touching family drama into broad political satire. It works best when writer-director Joshua Michael Stern stays close to his salt-of-the-earth characters, but when it tries to land ham-handed jabs at political advertising, “Swing Vote” takes a hit at the polls.

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George Lang Review: The Wackness

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 10:55:51 -0500

“The Wackness” is a state of mind in which the glass is always half full of something bad. Jonathan Levine’s film about a young man grappling with the end of childhood, a love affair he doesn’t believe he deserves and a codependent relationship with his therapist, plays like a downtown take on “The Graduate,” with Notorious B.I.G. subbing for Simon and Garfunkel.

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Brandy McDonnell Review: Brideshead Revisited

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 10:55:15 -0500

A lonely, working-class British teen falls under the thrall of an odd, aristocratic family in “Brideshead Revisited,” the film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s acclaimed 1946 novel, which also has been made into a respected 1981 miniseries.

Stellar performances and magnificent period details help the movie overcome some directorial miscues and a jarring score.

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Michael Smith Review: Brideshead Revisited

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 10:51:33 -0500

In terms of bringing British literary classics to the big screen, “Brideshead Revisited” was always going to be a challenge.

Besides the novel itself, there’s the spectre of the 1981 miniseries hanging over any film adaptation, as that 11-hour event has been regaled as one of the best of the medium, starring no less than Oscar winners Jeremy Irons, Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud.

That the new film version of “Brideshead Revisited” — an epic drama of love and loss for an artist who finds himself intertwined with British aristocracy — gets so much right is a triumph in itself.

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Michael Smith Review: The Wackness

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 10:50:12 -0500

Witty and warm and weird, “The Wackness” treads some familiar ground with its coming-of-age concept, but this satirical version is so charming and perceptive that you buy into its hero being a drug dealer with a heart of gold.

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Phil Bacharach Review: The Love Guru

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 10:29:00 -0500

(Oklahoma Gazette, June 25, 2008)

A checklist for lowest-common-denominator comedy:

Characters with naughty-sounding names that would elicit smirks in a seventh-grade classroom? Check. Pop-culture references sure to be dated long before the movie even appears on cable? Check. Mean-spirited routines ridiculing dwarfs, obese people and various non-Americans? Check. Lame jokes involving farts, penises, elephant dung, urine-soaked mops, penises, nose hairs in beverages and even more penises? Check, check, check.

“The Love Guru” is all that and less. Its movie posters should bear a surgeon general’s warning that prolonged exposure to this film can cause dizziness, drooling and incontinence. Then again, all that would be grand fodder for a “Love Guru” sequel (shudder).

The movie attempts to launch a new franchise character for the once-gifted Mike Myers, but the comic actor is a long, long way from the halcyon days of Wayne Campbell and Austin Powers. His Guru Pitka, a spiritual guide enveloped in flowing robes and Myers’ signature smugness, is not so much a fully developed character as he is a collection of tired shtick. Pitka is Myers doing his “Cat in the Hat” bit for the self-help sect. Spasmodically unfunny, this self-satisfied guru mugs with the shamelessness of your most obnoxious uncle and cracks jokes that likely were lifted from the walls of public restrooms.

Pitka is known as the “love guru” for his series of self-love books (with hardy-har-har titles like “I Know You Are but What Am I?”), but he bristles at playing second fiddle to self-help heavyweight Deepak Chopra. Pitka’s shot at the big time arrives when the owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs (Jessica Alba, “The Eye,” “Awake”) seeks his counsel.

It seems that the team’s star hockey player, Darren Roanoke (Romany Malco, “The 40-Year-Old Virgin”), has fallen into a slump because his estranged wife (Meagan Good, “Stomp the Yard”) is shacked up with Los Angeles Kings goalie Jacques Grande (singer Justin Timberlake), a Quebecois dubbed “Le Coq” for reasons you can probably deduce. If Pitka can use his spiritually enlightened wiles to reunite Roanoke and his lady love, the Maple Leafs have a chance at winning the Stanley Cup and Pitka is certain to land a coveted guest appearance on “Oprah.”

Then again, the plot is of little consequence. Director Marco Schnabel, who did second-unit directing on the third “Austin Powers” picture, seems aware of the script only occasionally, as the movie drifts in and out of consciousness and coherence. For the most part, the story line serves as a toilet seat on which Myers can make himself comfortable and let loose with a torrent of you-know-what.

And so we get ostensibly funny names, book titles and a tiresome riff on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” star Mariska Hargitay. Scatological humor takes center stage in the most unimaginative ways, but particularly noteworthy is the sheer volume of penis jokes that Myers and co-screenwriter Graham Gordy have managed to fit into a 90-minute running time. Don’t expect any inspired penile humor on the order of, say, “Superbad” or “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.” This is more along the lines of Pitka mistaking a corn dog for a dog’s weenie. “The Love Guru” is a cinematic convention of bad penis jokes in which all the conventioneers wear name tags reading “Dick Richards.” Hey, Myers, I just gave you a freebie!

While the flick is an unequivocal Myers vanity project, no one gets out of this unscathed. Sir Ben Kingsley slums as Pitka’s severely cross-eyed spiritual mentor, Guru Tugginmypudha. Alba continues her streak for picking bad movies, while Jessica Simpson, Val Kilmer and Kanye West make ill-advised cameos (Stephen Colbert from TV’s “The Colbert Report” fares slightly better as a drug-addled sportscaster).

Then there is poor Verne Troyer. The actor, forever branded as “Mini-Me” from the “Austin Powers” franchise, shows up here as an excuse to deride little people. (Look! He’s little!) And if you think that’s funny, just wait till he farts, belches or shoots across a rink after being shocked by defibrillator paddles. Comedy has a place for crassness and cruelty, make no mistake, but generally it helps if you throw some humor in, too.

Brandy McDonnell Review: The Flight of the Red Balloon

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 12:50:36 -0500

With “The Flight of the Red Balloon,” Taiwanese writer-director Hou Hsiao Hsien creates an arthouse film meant to evoke emotion through improvised dialogue, minimalist plot and lyrical shots of the nontourist parts of Paris.Unfortunately, the emotion his film most consistently prompts is frustration.Click to read the rest of the review …

George Lang Review: The X-Files: I Want to Believe

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 12:48:16 -0500

“X-philes” cannot help going into “The X-Files: I Want to Believe” with enormous expectations. The 1993-2001 television series gave birth to a vast mythology filled with characters and details that continue to haunt fans’ daydreams and nightmares.

But creator Chris Carter’s decision to resist unearthing that mythology with the second “X-Files” feature film should come as no surprise, since the series always zigged when everyone expected a zag. “The X-Files: I Want to Believe” stands alone — Eugene Tooms, Flukeman, the chupacabra, and the Lone Gunmen are not riding again. But fans will enjoy a depth to the portrayals of Dana Scully and Fox Mulder that newcomers will likely miss.

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Michael Smith Review: Bigger, Stronger, Faster

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 12:46:03 -0500

It has long been the American way to think that we are “Bigger, Stronger, Faster” than everyone else, and that if our competition is catching up, or even passing us, we will do what is necessary to stay ahead.

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