Maybe I should post movie reviews twice a week if I'm going to do it for everything I see. Or maybe after this week I'll only review stuff I hadn't seen before.

Anyway, here's a pretty good haul for the week. They're just in the order that I saw them.

Rebel Without a Cause

This week marks my second time seeing Rebel Without a Cause, a film that is hard to separate from the events that surrounded it - both in terms of that point at which the teenager suddenly became a demographic with a culture all his own, and of course in terms of the death of James Dean. It's a little difficult to view this movie simply as a movie, but I don't want to get into a big lecture on the emergence of the teenager or on Dean's cult status postmortem.

Like many other movies, when Rebel Without a Cause is shown in class, the teacher tends to give a disclaimer about the era in which it was made and to exhort the students to take it seriously, even though it may seem dated and certain moments might be unintentionally funny to a modern audience. If I have trouble relating to the characters or the situations, though (and I do), it is less because of the difference in time frames than because I don't really understand most teenagers, especially not movie teenagers. Their lives are full of drama over things that I've either not experienced or didn't find all that dramatic (or at least that I don't remember having found that dramatic), and sometimes I wonder if I didn't miss the boat or something.

That being said, you don't have to be a teenager to appreciate Rebel (though it may help). Jim Stark is less some mysterious teenaged being than simply a young man facing a lot of confusion without much (or anything) in the way of guidance from anyone he feels he can both trust and respect. One of the main themes, expressed repeatedly through compositions that have Jim pushing against the top of the frame. It's less a film about some rock star (or pre-rock star) personality than about the generation gap and tension in a nuclear family.


Rear Window

Rear Window was one of a dozen or so Hitchcock movies that I watched on my own prior to seeing it in a film class, probably on my brother's recommendation. There's really not much one can say about any Hitchcock movie that hasn't already been said (well, you can say "I don't really like Vertigo," but it's not so much that that hasn't been said as that it hasn't been said out loud, much like the fact that it's easy to find a CU student who can't stand Brakhage's films, but very hard to find one who will say so to any of the instructors).

Anyway, Rear Window is interesting because it's technically a single set film like Rope and Lifeboat, even though the action takes place in a relatively large area compared to those films. Where Rope was concerned with the goings-on inside an apartment, though, Rear Window uses an apartment as a private box from which the characters observe the activities of their neighbors. The parallel between cinema and Jeffries's observance of his neighbors through the frame of his window is clear enough, though the point at which the metaphor becomes most interesting is when the basic rules of cinema are violated and the characters begin to look back.


The Return of the Living Dead

I can honestly say that not only had I never seen Return of the Living Dead (Dan O'Bannon, 1985) before today, but I had never even heard of it. It's exactly the sort of movie I would expect to cause a fight between my brother and myself over whether or not to watch it - I would be happy to pass it over without a second glance based just on the cover, and he would beg me to watch it with him. And of course, just like so many movies that caused such conflicts, I did end up seeing it (though this time for my film theory course), and I did end up getting some enjoyment out of it.

Whether or not I even need to include a synopsis is questionable. There's an accident in a medical supply warehouse that leads to some corpses reanimating, the characters handle the situation poorly, and the problem spreads to the cemetery next door (where a bunch of ostentatiously dressed and be-chained punk kids are having a party while they wait for a friend who works in the warehouse to get off work. There's an undertaker involved (this cul-de-sac is like a triumvirate of death-related enterprises), as well as a number of unfortunate paramedics and police officers. The movie is fairly tongue-in-cheek about all this death and zombies business, and outright refuses to follow in zombie flick tradition.

To be honest, the concept of intelligent, talking, tool-using, running zombies (that can function in pieces or without their brains, no less) really kind of pisses me off. It's just not sportsmanlike. And yes, I do realize that that's the point of the movie - where Romero almost always left someone alive, Return of the Living Dead pointedly kills off all the characters. How do they get out of this kooky situation? They don't. Don't get me wrong, it's a pretty fun movie (as bad as it is, it's really hard not to laugh when you see a pair of paramedics get tackled by a huge mob of zombies) and the animatronics are gorgeous, but in the end The Return of the Living Dead is just too sadistic for my tastes.


The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl

First off, for those not familiar with Leni Riefenstahl, the quick answer to the question of who she was is that she was the director of Triumph of the Will, a movie that has been hailed as the best propaganda piece of all time (and, having seen clips from it in this documentary, I have to agree that it is breathtaking), and which just happens to be a documentation of the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg.

That's the quick answer. The long answer involves her career first as a dancer before she became an actress/mountaineer in Arnold Fanck's mountain films, the other, less Nazi-oriented films she made, such as Olympia, her documentary of the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, her banishment from the German film industry after the end of World War II, her later photographic work with the Nuba tribes of Sudan, and late in her life, her romantic involvement with Horst Kettner, her cameraman and later SCUBA buddy, who was forty years her junior.

The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl is a three-hour-long documentary that attempts to take an unbiased look at Riefenstahl's life story and address the questions that surround her involvement with the Nazi party. The filmmakers go to great lengths to chronicle the parts of her life before and after the rise and fall of the National Socialist Party in Germany in an attempt to provide context for her actions and to present her as a human being with a life outside those terrible events. The viewer is never lead to a solid conclusion as to either her guilt or her innocence, but left to ponder the contradictions between the defense she gives in response to these questions and written historical accounts. Upon locating outside information on Riefenstahl, one quickly realizes that this documentary, comprehensive though it may try to be, simply can't provide all the pertinent information (not to mention that Riefenstahl was not always cooperative with the film crew about topics that apparently hit too close to home). And, too, even if Riefenstahl is telling the truth in the numerous interviews that dot the film, one has to wonder where disinterest ends and criminal negligence begins (a line that it's nearly impossible to deny that Riefenstahl crossed somewhere along the way, even if one believes her protests to accusations of having been a staunch Nazi supporter).


It's a Wonderful Life

Whenever I tell people that I never saw It's a Wonderful Life when I was growing up, they react with disbelief - how could I ever have lived without seeing this movie? For a few years now, I've had it on my list of movies to see, figuring that anything that famous should be seen at least once, if only so that one can catch references to it in other movies and shows. With that in mind, I picked up a copy from my library this week, and yesterday Ben and I sat down and watched it together.

I think that It's a Wonderful Life is perhaps a film I might have found more endearing as a child. Yes, we did both enjoy it, despite knowing at least the gist of the story going in, but to be honest (and I might piss some people off here), it was kind of sappy in parts. I like the idea of it, and I liked George and the other characters (except of course Mr. Potter, who reminds me of the Penguin from Batman - "wah wah wah, I'm going to put you out of business, Bailey!" *wiggles flipper-hands*), but I could have done without the lengthy opening with the talking galaxies, for instance. Still, though, I cared about the characters, and the ending was really uplifting.

The Nostalgia Critic presents a very good point about Mary's fate without George in his Christmas special countdown, though. Oh noes, she never got married?!?! That's so much worse than Harry drowning or an entire military transport getting sunk!!! Come on, 1946, I didn't think you were that sexist. Guess I was wrong.


101 Dalmatians II: Patch's London Adventure

"Your harsh words strike me like blows from the fists of a large dockworker...I would cry now, were it not so bourgeois."
Lars

The sequel to Disney's original animated version of 101 Dalmatians looks on the surface to be yet another of those straight-to-DVD, lower budget, low quality sequels Disney has pumped out over the years to cash in on the popularity of their more worthwhile films (see Brother Bear 2 for a prime example - or rather, don't). It's unfortunate that Disney has put out so much in the way of sub-par videos that are little better than ripoffs of the work of the great writers and animators who have served the studio in the past, as it means that the discerning viewer is likely to skip seeing any of their straight-to-DVD output at all, despite the fact that there are a few gems to be found (see The Lion King II: Simba's Pride, or, to a somewhat lesser extent, The Lion King 1 1/2 - and no, I don't think it's a coincidence that both showed up in the same franchise).

101 Dalmatians II: Patch's London Adventure tells the story of, you guessed it, Patch, one of the puppies from the first movie. Disturbed by his apparent anonymity even to his parents due to the sheer number of dalmatian puppies living in their townhome, Patch runs away when moving day comes in favor of seeking out Thunderbolt, the star of his favorite show, who happens to be in London for a publicity event. Meanwhile, Cruella De Vil is out on probation and full of obsessive angst. She meets an eccentric painter named Lars, who easily makes the entire film worth viewing all on his own, and commissions him to make a special painting to "soothe her tortured soul."

This is really where the film takes off from what might have otherwise been nothing more than a mediocre story about some cute animated dogs. Don't get me wrong - Patch's adventures with Thunderbolt are plenty of fun on their own, but it's only the sort of stuff you would expect to go on in a Disney movie about canines. The interactions between Cruella and Lars come completely out of left field, and never stop bringing the laughs.

Fans of the original movie may have difficulty initially with getting into this sequel, as the voices are different (understandable, considering the forty-two year gap between the releases of these two movies) and the animation doesn't have quite the same look as the original for reasons both of budget and of differences in personnel, but it's worth getting into. For those with children, there are a lot worse things a kid could be watching, and I would recommend this film at least as a rental for anyone who enjoyed the original.