Youth belongs to youth. Beauty to beauty

Things have gotten pretty dark. Some of these postwar films are vicious. I’m mostly thinking Monsieur Verdoux and A Foreign Affair. They weigh on you. They’re heavy with death. What better to follow them up with than a movie that attempts to return to the silly, exasperated, manic tantrum explosive type of farce where it all began?

     Unfaithfully Yours (1948, Preston Sturges) is a fundamental screwball nightmare warning condemning age-gap romantic entanglements, by showing the requisite jealousy, insecurity, and paranoia they bring; though it also both brings the era of the Golden Age to a close and cathartically resets it.
     As an allegory for jealousy, it’s fitting that the report SIR ALFRED CARTER (Rex Harrison) receives that his wife DAPHNE (Linda Darnell) is unfaithful gradually begins with its unsolicited, unwelcome, unavoidable boring into his conscience. He rips it up, throws it away, kicks the dustbin out of the room; burns it; destroys all copies of it. But it’s spectral-elusive. You can’t destroy something that’s not of this world. It’s sad, the wisdom SWEENEY the detective leaves the great conductor with, that men should just be happy if they get an hour or a week with a beautiful woman, because it can’t last. It isn’t viable. Nature commands that they leave you for someone younger, better looking.
     The cucked conductor imagines three different scenarios to deal with his wife’s cheating—a passage that makes up the middle of the movie. They each comprise parts something like: revenge, moral high ground, and game of fate. The first sequence is the most elaborate. When the conductor takes a straight razor and murders his wife, frames her lover, and gets away with it, after being cleared in court there’s this shot of him laughing belligerently, and I’m laughing right there with him. 
     But in the third fantasy, when the conductor confronts his wife, with deranged delight he tells her about knifing her and that “my dear, your head nearly came off,” murder stops being funny. It’s like Unfaithfully Yours has some psychic connection to Nicole Brown. This movie reminds us that once dark impulses reach a certain point, they’re not even funny in movies. Even worse, the scene after this the conductor keeps trying on leather gloves that are too small for him to fit his hands into.
     So how does Unfaithfully Yours reset the comedy mechanism? The second act at the concert performance was all in his head. Now as the third act begins, he attempts to carry out his plans in real life. But he can’t. To turn real life into the illusion is impossible. What ensues is an inescapable slapstick routine that forces upon him the futility of attempting to leave the illusion. He’s in a comedy. Its tone is incontrovertible. 
     And as we sensed all along, his wife never was cheating. I was kidding earlier. The movie has nothing against age-gap relationships. Nor does it dissuade anyone from finding the woman of your dreams and living happily ever after with her. The joke was on him. And the joke was on us. For the rule of screwball is be careful when jumping to conclusions based on misleading appearances. 

Lubitsch's final film is my favorite

Cluny Brown (1946, Ernst Lubitsch) is a profoundly bleak screwball where the oppressive force of the upper class is no better than the hopelessly stifling plight of the lower class. Concurrent alongside this there’s its basic premise, which introduces a cockney twentysomething orphan whose naivete precludes any instinct she might have to restrain her wanton sexual desperation and her chance encounter with a middle-aged fuckboy whom the narrative deliberately positions on an unavoidable course as a reoccurring mentor to her by way of random events.

     Plumbing is code for sex. In the first act CLUNY BROWN (Jennifer Jones) is introduced knocking on the door of these two men to unclog a drain, her first words, “Should we have a go at it?” They get her drunk. After she’s unclogged it she’s sprawled on her back cooing how she feels chirrupy and like a Persian cat. And when she’s at Friar’s Carmel Manor, the master of the house has that line: “You mean to tell me young girls go in for plumbing nowadays?” to which Cluny replies, “It’s such fun.” And her first night staying there, when the heads of the domestic staff catch her leaving the room of the playboy BELINSKI (Charles Boyer), she exclaims: “I wish I could roll up my sleeves and roll down my stockings and unloosen the joint bang bang bang bang.” The Act II break is Cluny shames the mother of her fiancé at a dinner party at his home because she springs into action with her plumbing skills in the middle of a speech he’s giving. And later, with disdain he reprimands her as being a disgrace because she’s “subject to pipe impulses.”
     How should we take their respective promiscuous tendencies? Is she a slut? Is he a player? Or are they just the way they are by nature and should be free from moral judgment? In Cluny Brown it appears to be all for laughs anyway. Or does it? The theme of Cluny Brown as told to us is: knowing one’s place. With the philosophical implication who’s to say what one’s place is? Who knows what one’s place is? Act II begins with Cluny being courted by the local chaste pharmacist WILSON, played with the same nasal British lilt he voiced the caterpillar with in Alice in Wonderland (1951), Richard Haydn. There’s a scene in his residence where he shows Cluny this picture painted by hand he’s quite taken with hanging on his wall, which she bemoans: “Poor little sheep. He hasn’t much future. Just mutton.” You think the subtext is it’s she who by marrying Wilson will settle for the rest of her life in the same dead end he has.
     Except I don’t buy the ending one bit. It’s atrocious. Are we seriously to believe that after everything we’ve seen, how dutiful the Cluny we’ve come to know is, that she’s to abruptly leave her obligations to both her employer and fiancé? And all because the old lech bought her a pair of black silk stockings? And even if she were to run away with him, what would they live off of? The reality setting in could maybe be a life in poverty grifting a living as Bohemian scenesters. But no. Cut to: he’s overnight a bestselling mystery writer?
     And who could expect him to remain faithful to her? We saw how he nearly sexually assaulted MISS CREAM (great name) in her bedroom. Bolenski’s a chronic philanderer and habitual liar. Methinks the movie really ends in the diegesis point where Cluny is sick to her stomach because Wilson told her she ruined the festivities. And that because high and low class British society are both so cold and ineffectual to treating Cluny as a human, we have to realize how sad reality is. And wonder were she to run off with the only other person who she could have thrillingly satisfying sex is would be using her and throw her away when he’s finished with her, that would be the no future existence, just mutton. Just another piece of meat to him.
     Jennifer Jones as a hot master plumber indefatigably headstrong brimming wide-eyed with joy trying to find her place in life is escapist magic. Cluny Brown is escapist magic. Bolenski gets into the old screwball mistaken identity mixup as a Czech professor war refugee seeking asylum from Nazi occupation. But he’s really just an opportunist out for a good time who’s trying to get laid. This movie is a diversion that isn’t interested in real life conflicts. But Bolenski takes the free ride. And Bolenski forcing himself on Miss Cream is the only way her ANDREW finally proposes. Andrew only recognized his need for Miss Cream out of sexual jealousy and possessiveness. 
     Lubitsch is devious subversive. In Cluny Brown sex shows everything that’s wrong in the world. But just like real life, on the surface it works as an immensely enjoyable farce. And it’s up to us if we want to disregard the ending as a put on or not. I don’t think Cluny ever leaves Carmel Manor. And perhaps more than any other scene I’ve ever seen, when she’s happy having tea with four lumps and crumpets, it’s so perfectly beautiful. Then when they realize she doesn’t belong, that she’s the new maid, it crushes her (and me). “You thought I was somebody else didn’t you? Have I done something wrong?” is when she came to know her place in life. And the movie conveys that feeling. What it’s like to stumble into a point in life where you could be anything you wanted, and then it becomes clear that access to certain areas are off limits. The emotions of processing that. 

Cyberpunk Meets Rock n Roll

Sin City (2005, Robert Rodriguez & Frank Miller) is the one truly great film Charlie¹ has made. Released before 300 (2006, Zack Snyder) both of these movies inaugurated the graphic novel as adapted into chroma key motion picture—shot almost entirely on a soundstage.

Technology moves so fast. Trends evolve so quickly. I indulge in any opportunity I have to bring up what a huge fan I am of George Lucas’ Star Wars prequel trilogy. I really am. The second decade of the new millennium was the end of 35mm being the dominant format to shoot mainstream motion pictures on². And Lucas shot a big studio movie on HD video before anyone else when he captured Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002, Lucas) on the CineAlta³. Then Charlie captured Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003, Rodriguez) on the CineAlta too.

I’m leaving Michael Mann out of this conversation because Lucas and Rodriguez used HD video as a rival to film, but Mann obviously shot on HD exploring some gritty grainy digital noise aesthetic—nothing against him, I love the look of Collateral (2004, Mann), Miami Vice (2006, Mann), and Public Enemies (2009, Mann).

So not only do I love Attack of the Clones and Sin City as movies, but in another way they’re historically groundbreaking CineAlta-shot VFX worlds of escapism that foreshadow the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And I’m a big fan of George Lucas and Robert Rodriguez going all in with the CineAlta at a time when everyone was saying video would never replace film.

Oh yeah and there’s Weta Digital—Peter Jackson’s VFX co. that sometime around Gollum became the foremost technical leaders in MoCap. Weta is responsible for Avatar (2009, James Cameron) and Avengers: Infinity War (2018, Anthony Russo & Joe Russo) among others.

Like Sin City, Charlie has adapted a graphic novel into something his own with Alita: Battle Angel (2019, Rodriguez); although Alita is a different kind of graphic novel—a manga. And it works. Also how characteristically manga is the premise of a middle-aged man finding a teenage cyborg girl in a garbage pile and restoring her back to life? DR. IDO (Christoph Waltz) is noble though. He wears glasses, repairs cyborgs, and matches meekness with altruism.

Alita gave me goosebumps and had me crying empathizing with the innocent girl born again, operating on my emotions and moving me with its fairytale of discarded humanity moral social class-conscious underdog journey all the way up unitl…

…that’s right, I forgot: hi-tech VFX action, battles, weapons, berserker suits, motorball, bountyhunters, and umm, a little parkour.

The plot weaves together an arc encompassing several of the supporting cast and their backstories wonderfully: Ido’s ex-wife CHIREN (Jennifer Connelly), her partner VECTOR (Mahershala Ali), and ALITA’s love interest, HUGO (Keean Johnson). And because Alita takes place in Iron City—much like Sin City—everyone is scheming, the streets are populated with criminals and lowlifes, and is “no place for innocent people.” You know like Neuromancer (thanks, Fat) or another James Cameron script he produced but didn’t direct, Strange Days (1995, Kathryn Bigelow), which was also produced by 20th Century Fox. Strange Days is so rad. The VFX world of Iron City is spectacular and mainly why I chose to see Alita in 3-D, but also because it was shot in 3-D and not post converted. Charlie had his directors monitors playback in 3-D on set. Iron City is the trash infested type of dystopia depicted in Idiocracy (2006, Mike Judge), Thor: Ragnarok (2017, Taika Waititi), and Ready Player One (2018, Steven Spielberg), but so much more detailed, imaginative, elaborate, and fun.

Also thanks to Weta, the VFX of inside Alita’s shell is so cool, especially her heart.

And man Jennifer Connelly is stunning, so gorgeous, serious Hollywood glamour and Nina Proctor’s costumes on her are sci-fi chic mostly monochromatic, her presence really elevates the whole thing.

I could go on praising Alita: Bill Pope’s camera moves, Charlie’s casting of his stock company of cool Mexicans like Eiza González and Michelle Rodriguez. But I have a few minor gripes. Like the deep voiced Centurions just reminded me too much of Idiocracy, I kept waiting for them to add after “wanted for the crime of murder,” “brought to you by Carl’s Jr.” I mean, yeah I realize from Forbidden Planet (1956, Fred M. Wilcox) to Lost in Space robots talk in that kind of deep voice though.

The motorball sequences didn’t really engage me with their action like the other fights did. Maybe because there were just too many different characters and I’d just never thought Rollerball was cool. Also with the cheesy sports announcer it felt basically like the podrace from The Phantom Menace.

And most of the time I was really into Alita, but times like the moment after she shows Hugo her heart and says, “that was intense, right?” with that childish laugh felt off—like NOMI from Showgirls (1995, Paul Verhoeven).

However, major gripes start with the Alita having a main character wail "nooooo" at the film's climax. That's the worst thing a movie can do, see Spider-Man 2 (2004, Sam Raimi) or Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005, Lucas) for other examples. And in addition, the film's ending is setup to launch the franchise built around a serialized cliffhanger. Another thing I love about the Star Wars prequel trilogy is that even though we know it's a trilogy, its installments are self contained and clearly resolved at their respective finales.

¹Robert Rodriguez’s nickname, I have no idea why.
²Since Skyfall (2012, Sam Mendes) most movies shoot on the Arri Alexa HD video camera.
³Sony’s HD cinema-quality motion picture camera.

Trivia:

• Hugo's custom leather jacket and black bandanna/dewrag bear strong resemblance to what Charlie wears in real life. 
• The bartender with the eyepatch is the film's stunt coordinator, Garret Warren, who was shot four times, including in his right eye, by a man hired by Warren's ex-wife in real life.