Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Rupert Wyatt, 2011)

Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a fear du jour-updating reboot of the apes-take-over-Earth franchise, has just enough creativity in it that its problematic whole is all the more frustrating. The only actor who genuinely fits into his role comfortably is animated out of the picture, while a good third of the film feels like padding to establish questionable, simplistic motivation for a primate proletariat revolt. Yet when the film clicks, Rise of the Planet of the Apes finds a surprisingly effective tone between the sentimental and vicious.

Swapping out fears of nuclear holocaust for the less definite disease paranoia, Rise of the Planet of the Apes repositions the root of man's fall as the noble but misguided attempt to alter nature. Will Rodman (James Franco) is a scientist for a pharmaceutical firm who engineers a virus to repair the brain, effectively curing Alzheimer's and other brain-degenerative diseases. It's a lofty goal, and one that doesn't particularly need the addition of Will's Alzheimer's-stricken father (John Lithgow, making the most of an almost unwritten part) to sell the importance of such a breakthrough. But when an aggressive test chimp forces the closure of the research, Will secrets away the ape, Caesar, who inherited his mother's altered genes and exhibits intelligence even beyond that of a young human.

This is a mercifully non-mythologizing setup, and while Rise dallies in getting toward any kind of point, the scenes with young Caesar are entertaining for one simple reason: Andy Serkis. Franco portrays the pain of watching his father slip away with all the deep human agony of watching a meter reader assign a parking ticket, but Andy Serkis, rendered by computer animation, creates a broad emotional spectrum for Caesar's development. Though the CG of the ape bodies is noticeably fake —and is it me or has CGI actually gotten worse of late? — Serkis' wonderful captured facial and body progression through childlike wonder to an increasing sense of discomfort and confinement in the cramped San Francisco house is the most thrilling mo-cap performance since, well, Serkis' last one. When Caesar later becomes a revolutionary, Serkis manages to put righteous fury on a chimp's face, even as he never loses that sense of empathy.

In order to transition from this secluded growth to a full-on revolution, however, writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver rely on logic gaps and laughable shortcuts. When the situation of raising a hyper-intelligent but confused and powerful chimp inevitably leads to a sour conclusion, Caesar finds himself in a primate shelter under the mistreatment of a one-note slop-slosher (Tom Felton), who pisses Caesar off into leading an insurrection among the captive apes. This personalization of the rebellion lacks the matching social oppression that made Conquest of the Planet of the Apes more plausible, and I wish the filmmakers had taken a more high-minded approach. Perhaps posit the eventual rebellion as a means of asserting a species' dominance, suggesting that a being capable of great intelligence will not merely carve out a place at the top of the food chain but willfully subjugate other species as conquest. This would be in-keeping with the franchise's slyly satiric exploration into mankind's thirst for supremacy, and at the very least it would offer more thematically rich motivation for a full-on war than "Draco Malfoy sprayed me with a hose."

But then, maybe war isn't really what Caesar wants at all, given how the filmmakers soften him for PG-13 purposes. And therein lies the key issue with the film: it does not appear to know what it wants to say, and because of that the plot starts changing on a whim in the film's second half. The greedy CEO of the pharmaceutical firm (David Oyelowo) does a facile reversal on Will's research solely to allow for a stronger version of the "cure" to be manufactured to both heighten the apes' intelligence further and introduce a human side effect that allows the writers to shift blame for the coming apocalypse away from the poor, misunderstood apes. This adds a number of awkward, disconnected lines that no one even tries to coherently bring together at the end, from the unnecessary second batch of test apes to Caesar's forced mercy. The movie performs such an awkward pivot that it recalls the test-audience-generated ending of the aforementioned Conquest, a film that likewise pulled its punches, at least in the theatrical cut.

Nevertheless, director Rupert Wyatt stages some impressive shots that find a richer balance of the gentle and violent than the script, from a shower of leaves falling in ironic beauty as apes swing menacingly through trees to the clever use of San Franciscan fog in the climax on the Golden Gate Bridge. Furthermore, Caesar's interactions with other apes, from his initial suffering for genetic differences to eventual leadership of enhanced primate warriors, are so transfixing that the fluff that fills the second act no longer feels like tedium when the camera stays in the cage with Caesar after dark. The impressive degree of communication exchanged between these mo-capped actors through body language and grunts makes the long stretches of technically wordless sections as gripping as the action setpieces. A late exchange of looks between Caesar and a fallen comrade attains an ephemeral poignancy that will make you mourn the loss of an ape.

These moments, great and small, offer a tantalizing glimpse into a potentially great film, one that unfortunately gets consumed in bet-hedging and plot-convenient rewrites. And if the film ultimately feels pat and trite, it has enough ideas to make the idea of a sequel more appealing than any other franchise-starter this year, save Captain America. Perhaps, like the retrovirus-exposed apes, the intelligence of the writing will have grown exponentially by then to match the potential.

Capsule Reviews: Cronos, Smiles of a Summer Night,

Cronos (Guillermo Del Toro, 1993)

Admittedly more of a primer for Guillermo Del Toro's career to come than a great work in its own right, Cronos is nevertheless a delightfully wicked and kooky spookfest that introduces recurring objects (bugs, gears), actors (Ron Perlman, Federico Luppi) and themes (fantasy's co-mingling with the real and not-as-concrete-as-it-seems in such a way as to expose humans as both the purest heroes and most terrible monsters) in an original vampire story. Intriguingly, Del Toro uses an aged lead and does not transform him into a younger man, instead showing the device that gives cursed immortality to its users only marginally turning back the clock, further demonstrating the futility of this dark quest for eternal life. The film boasts some wonderfully macabre moments, especially an autopsy of the undead man, who revives before cremation with his mouth sewn shut. The scene is all the more darkly funny for the issues the undertaker has with the crematorium's gas line. Perlman steals the film as the put-upon nephew tasked with finding the alchemical device for his loathed, dying uncle, a performance that is as petulant as it is sneering an brutish. Del Toro's camerawork isn't as hauntingly elegant as it would later be, yet his inventive manipulation of existing sets into fantastical sub-realms presages his later gift for grandiose set design. An embryonic work, perhaps, but when you're watching the birth of a filmmaker as good as Del Toro, there's plenty to please the viewer. Grade: B-

Smiles of a Summer Night (Ingmar Bergman, 1955)

Bergman's breakthrough hit is a light comedy that initially seems so unlike the director's later experiments in spiritual vacuums. But even its tone of jaunty, theatrical aestheticism (aided greatly by Gunnar Fischer's trademark cinematography of cinematically skewed stage framings) reveals the darker impulses within Bergman, who makes farce of the psychological mire of a love triangle between a father, his son and the lad's stepmother even after the pressure bursts the dynamic and spills into other characters. Yet if this is a sex farce, it must surely be the most lyric and graceful one ever put to film. The men deal with confusion, insecurity and and hormones they cannot control, while the women's hushed plotting is less misogynistic scheming than a show of their dark amusement at the follies of men and their attempts to, as ever, sort everything out for their hapless lovers. The mixture of Wildean wit and Bergman's despair works magnificently, and lines like "How can a woman ever love a man?" imbue the mired sexual relationships with an overarching poetry. And only someone capable of such bottomless depression as Bergman could spin a positive, warm ending out of a climax of Russian roulette. Grade: A

(P.S. Criterion's new Blu-Ray is one of their best transfers this year along with Pale Flower.)

Animal Farm (John Halas and Joy Bachelor, 1954)

More noteworthy today as the first released British animated feature than as a great work, John Halas and Joy Bachelor's Animal Farm is a dated work but not particularly a failure. It's most telling flaw is its substitution of the melancholy of Orwell's book, which realized the folly of Communism with regret for its impossibility, with a more propagandic sense of victory over the authoritarians who seize control of the supposedly egalitarian society. (It is now believed that the CIA itself funded the film as a piece of anti-Commie propaganda.) That robs the work of a great deal of its power and the satire of its bitterness, leaving a film that, to use the old saying, knows the steps but not the rhythm. And while I understand that the budget for any British production will not compare to the Hollywood or Disney machines, but the lack of visual dynamism holds back the film. It would have been clever to show a transition from a utopia to an autocratic nightmare, but instead the narrative moves through a flat, unchanging background. Nevertheless, the animation of the animals themselves is a briefly redeeming flash of light, allowing them more sophisticated movements while still maintaining their proper forms, only fully anthropomorphizing the pigs for thematic purposes. Grade:C-

Love Exposure (Sion Sono, 2008)

The warped Catholicism of Sion Sono's four-hour epic Love Exposure is fitting, given how the director clearly seeks to kill aesthetic gods. Known in some circles for referring to Japanese legend and humanist director extraordinaire Yasujiro Ozu as, quote, "the anti-Christ," Sono clearly wants to provoke and carve out his own name. On the basis of this film alone, he has succeeded. This film chews up everything — manga, pink films, J-horror, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Buñuel, the Japanese New Wave — and spits out an unholy mess so sloppy and overstretched that it can't help but work without a hitch. My unfamiliarity with modern Japanese cinema precludes me from making any sweeping statement about its greatness compared to its peers, but I must admit I haven't seen as aesthetically revolutionary and explosive a film since another Japanese work, Yoshishige Yoshida's Eros + Massacre.

Like Yoshida's stupefying masterpiece, Sono's film tells its story with an off-kilter aesthetic: de-centered compositions cant and distort the image, faces rarely fitting entirely into the frame. Sex is also central to the narrative, but in the opposite manner that it proved crucial to Yoshida's late-60s work. Eros + Massacre was informed by the sex-positive revolution against repression that played a bigger part in youth movements across the world than we are typically taught to day. Love Exposure, on the other hand, is the product of a porn-saturated, pink film-inured society where even the cartoons are doing it. If the bifurcated timeline of Yoshida's film hinged (and ultimately came apart) on the freedom to explore one's sexuality, Sono's shows a young man trying to find sense and sanity through chastity, at least until he can find his own Virgin Mary to make his wife. That he essentially wants to have sex with the Blessed Mother, who also contains symbolic memories of his own deceased mom, instantly plunges this tale of Catholic guilt beyond the realm of Scorsese and into Buñuel territory.

The mother is the film's only out and out decent, kind, fully lovable person, and she dies less than five minutes into this 237-minute feature. That leaves Yu Honda (J-pop singer Takahiro Nishijima) to grow up with only the memory of her devout Christianity to steer him on the right moral path. Still wracked with grief years after his wife's death, Yu's father, Tetsu (Atsuro Watabe), becomes a priest, but the contentment he finds in doing something his wife would have admired soon becomes chaos. The source of that storm is Kaori (Makiko Watanabe), a middle-aged woman so inspired and overwhelmed by Tetsu's sermons that she begs to be a Christian, her spiritual desire manifesting as physical attraction and plunging the man into confusion. To get out his own shame, he begins to ply Yu, still innocent as a teenager, to confess his sins, but the pure-as-the-driven-snow lad has none to confess. Yet so great is his sense of filial duty that Yu begins to act out solely to have something to confess to his father.

Soon, Yu has taken up with a ragtag gang of ruffians to engage in fights, vandalism and theft, and before long he's taken to upskirt photography so that he might have a sexual sin to confess, even though he does not get off on the task. At the hour mark, Yu, made to dress as a girl and kiss a lady in town by his friends, stumbles across Yoko (Hikari Mitsushima), a girl who prefaces a vicious beatdown of a threatening gang with a prayer that makes her into the Virgin Mary that Yu has always fantasized about. So after an hour's worth of establishment, compounded shame, incestuous fantasy and despairing sin, Sono finally reveals this to be, amazingly, a simple story about boy meets girl, a surprisingly chaste film that merely visualizes the frothing sexual desire at work on those who abstain from physical contact.

This is a dense web of guilt, repression, desire, satire and affecting drama, and we're still not even halfway through the first hour. From these manic yet condensed threads springs a story that will encompass such themes as upskirt photography (or "tosatsu"), castration, first erections,  the pornography industry, child abuse, and a cult that bears more than a minor resemblance to a certain author's giant tax shelter. The beginning of the film, which mostly careens around churches and religious icons, has stuffy lighting that is at once an ironic framing of holy light and an apt mood summary of the suffocating density of its character and thematic dynamics. But even when the film opens up into these larger ideas and moves through some bewildering sequences, it maintains the sense of intimate frenzy, always compacting the epic feel into the small scale.

Reflective of modern filmmaking, Love Exposure is rapidly edited and action-centric. When Yu's attempts to sin lead him to taking photos of women's panties, he learns from a sort of martial arts guru who teaches all kinds of athletic moves for hysterically unsubtle picture-taking techniques. In a flashback for another character, the psychopathic young woman Aya Koike (Sakura Ando), we see her exact revenge upon her abusive father via J-horror castration that somehow manages to never show the offending appendage outright even as it also never once cuts away. For what is, when stripped bare, a love story that wouldn't seem out of place in the average Sundance lineup, Love Exposure boasts such an aggressive style and such uncompromising extremity that the film becomes its own microcosmic innovation, fusing its narrative and aesthetic so fully that attempting to unpack the film requires almost endless summary.

Indeed, Love Exposure is one of those movies that is so odd and constantly upturning that it takes effort not to get caught simply relating what happens. I mean, how can the reviewer even hope to give an idea of the film if one analyzes certain aspects of the film without saying how one even gets to that moment? If I wish to focus on the unexpectedly pained and poignant scene between Yoko and Yu in a bus parked on a beach, I must quickly elide over Yu's kidnapping of the girl after she is brainwashed by Aya and after Yu becomes a pornographer and is recruited by the authorities to bring down the Zero Church. All these weird twists and turns, so unimportant to the ultimate "point" of the film yet so vital in expressing Sono's atmosphere, style and sense of humor, may all be ostensibly random as they unfold, yet they outlandish trials placed before Yu make his desperate confrontation all the more heartfelt, while Yoko's powerful retorts, which draw upon Bible verses and a vicious awareness of hypocrisy, sears all the more painfully because it serves as an intimate but overwhelming encapsulation of her previously shown misanthropy and undirected loathing. It is necessary to see all of Yu's farcical actions in the name of his faith and sense of morality so that Yoko's repudiation of Catholicism's own brand of brainwashing can shatter rather than merely sneer.

That scene, like the rest of the film, demonstrates Sono's skill in disorienting the simplest action and clarifying and contextualizing the extremities, a feat he could not pull off without assured performances. He places a great deal of faith on his three acting newcomers, and all of them perform exceptionally. Nishijima never plays Yu's innocence as ironic even when Sono is clearly wrenching out the inadvertent hypocrisies, contradictions and implications of that innocence. When he confesses his sins early in the film, Yu smiles broadly, his grin visible even through the confessional screen. Nishijima smiles in such a way that he makes clear he does so not sarcastically or even in relish of his sins; no, he's just so happy to be able to fulfill his duty to his father. Nishijima is prevented by the narrative from having any proper chemistry with Mitsushima but sells his love for Yoko so sincerely that his constant rejection by the confused and manipulated girl devastating. For her part, Mitsushima juggles the most emotions in the film, moving from tough-girl detachment to warm, self-discovering quasi-lesbian crush on Yu's cross-dressing alter-ego to mentally broken cult victim without losing her basic sense of character.

But it is Ando as the utterly insane villain Aya who steals the show. If Yu's entire arc is a thematic exploration of the effects of religious repression, Ando shows how the violence of religious abuse begets more broken, sociopathic individuals. Drawn to Yu by a recognition of his own brainwashing, Aya uses the seemingly infinite resources of the Zero Church to monitor his every move and begin sabotaging his life to force him to come to Aya. Ando's incessant schoolgirl smile and giggle is off from the start and downright terrifying by the end. She's so resolutely evil in every gesture, every gently forceful line of suggestive, manipulative dialogue and every sneer that one eventually forgets the depictions of her horrible adolescence and simply gives in to hating her with every fiber of one's being.

This is one of the most psychologically vicious portrayals of a villain I've ever seen, so powerful that Ando seems to un-moor from gravity after a time and float around the other characters like a mocking ghost passing through them, whispering to their subconscious rather than truly existing and interacting like a person. Where Nishijima is in deliberately dissonant conflict with the film and Mitsushima is swept along by its whims, Ando is the only one who is perfectly attuned with Sono's deconstructive and destructive style, and also the only one who seems to exert some form of control upon the frame, manipulating the camera as she messes with the minds of those inside the movie. Heath Ledger's Joker and Christoph Waltz's Hans Landa have deservedly won immense acclaim recently, but Ando, frankly, is on a whole other level. This is like Iago if he flat-out told Othello his intentions at the start and still managed to twist and mold everyone to his will. That sneering giggle has haunted more than one of my dreams since I watched the film but one week ago. Oh, and speaking of Waltz's Landa, one of his most unexpected, brilliant and sinister gestures was stabbing out a cigarette in a strudel. Ando douses her own in a puddle of blood.

The question that arises, even among those who eat their "cultural vegetables," for films of this length is "Does the film need to be this long?" to which I would say "Probably not" even as I argued for every second to be left unperturbed. Its seemingly unwieldy running length and bewildering narrative progression belies just how well it flows, and the space allows for the layering of jokes and subtlety where it might not exist crammed into a tidier movie. For example: Sono stresses that Yu's upskirt photos are not an outgrowth of any perversion on his part, yet when he catches a glimpse of Yoko's panties after she dispatches the gang, and at last he is truly turned on by what he sees, thus rooting the manifestation of perversion in true love, a suggestion Sono lets the audience work out. He also allows for such deepening of character as Kaori's visibly positive influence on Yoko when she becomes the girl's foster mother, the same wildness that was so overpowering at the start now seen as a stabilizing force in the out-of-control nihilist's life. But even then, she can turn on her daughter in the name of religion, responding to the confused Yoko's clearly suggestive moral questions on whether it's OK to be a lesbian with a casual bit of offense like, "Dykes are perverts. Watch out for them."

Of course, the size and scope of the film also allows for grandiose moments as well. The climax in the Zero Church headquarters is a bloodbath, complete with a hysterical editing rhythm that constantly juxtaposes Yu's frantic search for Yoko with shots of her and the other main characters in a room, creating the illusion that each time Yu opens a door he's finally found her, only to then show the boy still looking. And even Hitchcock might have admired the "oh come on" suggestion of Yu hiding an erection matched to a shot of a cross being erected, about as good a summary of the sexual-religious confusion of the film as one could hope to see.

In Yoko's establishing flashback, she watches old news footage on TV, black-and-white shots of what appear to be the 1968 youth riots that hit Japan just as they did in the United States, France and elsewhere. The moment suggests a kinship to that old ideological struggle captured in films like Eros + Massacre even as it also demonstrates the quaintness of the time compared to the over-saturated world of today. Love Exposure is a frenzy of desire, confusion, even ennui, a black comedy with genuine pain and longing not merely between teenagers exploring new feelings but adults trying to reignite love after years of isolation. After laughing and shouting along with Love Exposure for so long, I found myself enthralled by an ending I would have said the film did not earn had it not been such a vast work seemingly capable of anything. Sono's final shot is at once cheeky anticlimax and beautiful affirmation, a small gesture of affection that ends the film on a note of purity that counteracts so much of what came before even as it strengthens that material. It also confirmed that I'd just watched one of the great works of contemporary cinema.

Comment Ça Va (Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville, 1976)

Despite the blatant reflexivity of the film's premise, Comment ça va might have been a remarkably straightforward film about a newspaperman making an instructional video about the paper business with his partner. But as much as Godard has always been fascinated with process, the single question out of the journalistic "Five Ws" that is truly addressed here is "Why?" The complexity that will eventually push the film into some of the director's most challenging work to this point (no mean feat) is prompted by an almost childlike simplicity on behalf of the radical woman, Odette (Miéville), who oversees this project with the Communist newspaper editor (Michel Marot). Though her questions are complex, political, philosophical and aesthetic, they ultimately boil down to that simplest yet most agonizing of queries.

The editor considers himself a radical but, as Odette points out, he pays little heed to the process of his video editing beyond utilitarian and populist concerns; what's more, he also routinely comes into conflict with the more commercialized and tepid mainstream media, which always finds a way to soften and bury his more radical stories. He shows her a workprint, and immediately Odette asks why the film cut over information, demanding to see all of the footage first. Naturally, this results in a flood of imagery and explanatory text, but even that is soon challenged by the silhouetted Odette as she criticizes the imagery of Portuguese and French worker uprisings shown within the educational film Marot put together. After all, can text really break down an image, or can it only propose one interpretation, usually prompted by a narrow focus on but one aspect of the image?

Godard and Miéville, through Odette and a slowly contemplating Marot, delve into that theme with exacting analysis of the primary film stills of the workers. For the editor, he believes that showing such scenes while cutting out the fluff hones his statement into its clearest form. Odette, however, uses the still images to point out how one's interpretation is often formed by preconceived notions, and that to edit together only these striking images only serves to make the meaning more ambiguous. For example, Odette asks, is the gesture of raised fists a show of solidarity or a precursor to violence? For already-converted radicals and leftists, a glance at such an image would provoke the former interpretation. But what of the conservatives? Would they not view the fearsome collection of angered workers as a mob? But even then, Godard moves beyond dialectics to show even more observations that arise from the image: Odette points out that, without any context, the one worker with his mouth agape looks almost like a pop singer in gesture and body language.

And once text gets placed over the image, the meaning only further obscures. Marot, by now wise to what Odette is arguing, types "To go on strike, that is joy" onto the screen, the word "joie" making him view that same worker's open mouth as a smile or laugh. Then, he muses about removing the letters r-e-v-e from "grève" (strike). In French, "rêve" is dream, suggesting that Marot just robbed his interpretation of its optimism. This being 1976, the primitive computer equipment that allows for Godard and Miéville's image manipulation throws up text via a giant pixel of a cursor, a block that darts over the screen as it types out the letters and simply moves according to the whims of the computer operator. Perhaps this signifies the movement of the eye over the image and how importance of the mise-en-scène is subconsciously imparted to the viewer, that same ordering of importance defining meaning for the viewer before he or she truly has time to think about it. Godard had pursued a democratized film image since at least 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, and here we see a refinement of the philosophy and motivation behind that push, a desire to parcel out how we perceive images, and indeed whether auterial intent, however intellectually reasoned and intricate, matters at all the second someone else views the product.

Complementing this obsession with perspective and interpretation is Godard's pointed critique of the gap between ideological beliefs and commitments to those beliefs. Marot and his estranged son believe themselves to be radicals, but we see the son primarily getting his news through half-heard newscasts in the morning when he eats breakfast in his comfortable apartment with his lover. Meanwhile, Marot's aforementioned ignorance of the full power of his editing and film construction blinds him to the potential impact of his sloth. For him, he wants to edit the shortest distance between two idea-affirming images, but Odette demonstrates the folly of his approach.

She (and by extension the filmmakers) also subtly critiques the repression of women among these so-called radicals, showing how they assign stereotypical roles to women: the son's lover appears almost solely as a homemaker, while Odette herself gets roped into stenographer work typing out print copy, something that annoys her almost visibly (amusing, since we never see her unobscured by shadow) to the point that she slowly types and even later replays the scene in an attempt to get the man to see the error of his ways. But by then Marot's already dropped a line about women being "copying machines," effectively spitting out genetic duplicates of, erm, let's call it input data.

It is important to note that the profession Godard uses to prompt this film is journalism, a profession nominally dedicated to publicizing the truth. But religion was quick to teach the concept of lying by omission, and Godard wishes to show how casual editing for the sake of legibility and flow can undermine the power of journalism even as it makes the profession more esoteric and unappealing to the common reader. He does let on an understanding for the complicated, self-defeating position in which that places everyone, and he wryly notes "Language is the place where the executioner transforms the victim into another executioner." But if Godard finally works out that success in his quest to democratize the film image will obliterate meaning in the flood of interpretation, he suggests a path back to full directorial control by having Odette say, "What is unseen is what directs." However slowly, Godard is working his way back to narrative cinema even as he consolidates his more radical experimentation of the decade.

The first text of the film, projected on a black screen, dubs Comment ça va "A film between active and passive," and Godard shows how easy it is to lean back into passivity. Even Odette notes how she can switch her brain off while typing up copies of polemics, arguing that even a blind man can do this job. Godard shows how life itself gets in the way of full dedication to one's beliefs: can a mother be a full-time radical if she must worry about the health and progress of her children? Can someone in even the most liberal profession not devote a portion of his time to ensuring some form of paycheck to survive? It is, however, unclear whether Godard has fully accepted the truth he has uncovered, for he still suggests irritation with passive commitment. Still, the fury and autocritique of the DVG years is cooling into more a measured response to his frustrations, and if Comment ça va is not as stunning a work as Numéro deux, it is at least a refined insight into Godard's thought process as he navigates ever headier waters.

Fearless: So x Such

This is an intriguing film. I used this scene to practice the use of so x such, activity which is adapted from the awesome blog If the Ship Sinks, We Have the Survival Kit, by Vania Rodrigues and Vinicius Lemos. Thank you, Vania and Vinicius, for providing us with such great and creative activities.

Vânia Rodrigues has been an EFL teacher for 20 years, 15 of which at a Binational Center in Brazil, Casa Thomas Jefferson. She has been a teacher, a Course Supervisor and is currently a Deputy Academic Coordinator at CTJ. She holds an M.A in Applied Linguistics from the Universidade de Brasília. Vinicius Lemos has been an English teacher for 15 years. He holds a B.A in Letras-Inglês (English Language and Literature) from Universidade de Brasília (UnB) and has been an EFL teacher at Casa Thomas Jefferson, Brasília, Brazil, for 9 years. He was a presenter at the 2010 TESOL Conference in Boston, USA and the 2011 ABS International Conference in Montevideo, Uruguay.



I. Imagine that you are in the plane accident that you see in the movie segment. Work in groups of three students. Somehow you know you will survive and be lost on a desert island with the other students in your group. Select 6 objects that you see in the airplane to carry with you to help you survive on a desert island. Choose the objects wisely.







II. Now that you have chosen the 6 objects, you have a surprise. You will not be able to use these objects for what they were originally designed for. So, it means you will have to find new uses for them in order to survive. Your objective is to convince your teacher that you are the ones who will survive. Use so or such to describe the object and its new use.

Ex: Glasses.


Glasses can be so useful that we can use the lenses to start a fire. / We may use glasses to start a fire in such a dangerous situation.


III. Your teacher will decide who will have more chances of surviving with the choses objects and how you will use them. The winning group gets a chocolate bar.


WORKSHEET. - Be careful - the worksheet may give away the surprise of the exercise.

MOVIE SEGMENT DOWNLOAD - FEARLESS

The Music Room (Satyajit Ray, 1959)

My review for Satyajit Ray's breathtaking The Music Room is up now at Cinelogue. A story of tradition and modernity clashing in egotistical microcosm, The Music Room never forces its point but always makes clear that the battle in question is really only a matter of shifting supremacy in the types of haves who have power over have-nots. But this, despite its dour ending and constant sense of foreboding, is not an altogether pessimistic film, for Ray at all times finds the humanity within his imploding landlord and even in the arrogant capitalism represented by the moneylender's heir. Filled with non-intricate but nevertheless stunning shots (which look all the more gorgeous in Criterion's incredible restoration, one of the most remarkable restorations they've ever done), The Music Room made for a great and utterly enticing introduction to a filmmaker I've long meant to sample. Highly recommended.

La Nuit du Carrefour (Jean Renoir, 1932)

La Nuit du Carrefour is so atmospheric and vague that the absence of an entire reel is scarcely noticeable unless you've been alerted to the fact. Given how much is already left out in the impenetrable fog hanging over the titular crossroads, an inadvertently excised 11 minutes of footage likely would not have cleared things up much. As a noir, Renoir's adaptation of pulp author Georges Simenon's novel appropriately occurs mostly at night, but even in daylight the cramped area where the director situates his film is bleak and misty. Like the air station in Howard Hawks' Only Angels Have Wings, the three houses and filling station that make up the crossroads are isolated to the point of solipsism, where even the sound of cars buzzing and humming all around seems merely a projection of the night and fog.

Made in the infancy of film noir, La Nuit du Carrefour preemptively deconstructs the genre to its most atmospheric tropes, beating the analytical takes of some pop-minded New Wavers of various nationalities by a good three decades. This is not an insensible film, certainly not on the level that, say, The Big Sleep is one long shaggy dog story, but Renoir turns each element of the genre into expressive abstraction. That fog turns straight, level roads leading out to other towns into ominous, finite stretches, paths leading off a world that seems flat. The detective can piece together everything solely through a few words and a quick survey of a room. And everyone, to some extent, is guilty of the whodunit. And as for Else (Winna Winifried), Renoir seems to have taken apart the femme fatale and ice queen before it got properly established by the likes of Hitchcock. Winifried digs into the image of female innocence, speaking in light chirps and flirting with ostensible clumsiness; her face even has a roundness to it that suggests the baby fat hasn't melted off yet. But under that amusingly cherubic facade is a steely glare filled with Teutonic sturm und drang that betrays darker intent, a giveaway not lost on the genius detective who cannot help but court her anyway.

Renoir's sense of satire is evident even within this genre exercise: a patrolling police sergeant stops by the filling station to get his motorcycle repaired, and when news comes through that a car has been stolen and that a local gang of thieves is suspected, the local constabulary is baffled at the existence of thieves in the area despite how freely everyone talks about them. And when a local discovers his car has been stolen, blame immediately falls upon the "Danes," the Andersen siblings who live in one of the crossroads' three houses. Even when the car (complete with corpse) is found in Carl Andersen's garage, his arrest seems more a matter of xenophobic convenience than proper procedure.

From there, things get murkier, not particularly as a result of plot mechanics but by Renoir's loose, suggestive camerawork. When the famed Maigret (Renoir's brother Pierre) arrives, Renoir switches to a use of gentle zooms and close-ups to show how the inspector picks up on details as he casually moves around a room. Rather than wait for the Sherlock Holmes-esque expository explanation at the end, Renoir pieces together clues even as he leaves the ultimate connections hanging in the air mysteriously. Elsewhere, Renoir employs cheeky methods of figuring out the movie's skewed sense of spatial and temporal relations. The police hold Carl for questioning for 17 hours, the static vacuum of the windowless room punctuated by cutaways to low-angle shots of a newsstand as the day's papers change from morning editions to afternoon versions, finally settling on a crumpled, waterlogged evening edition being swept up at night by a cleaner. And the hazy yet skillfully plotted geography of the area is central to the climactic car chase, a murky POV rumble through the streets illuminated only by headlights and muzzle flashes even as is moves in a clear trajectory around town.

"I tried to give you the feeling of mud sticking to your feet, and of fog obscuring your sight," Renoir later said of the picture. La Nuit du Carrefour certainly feels mucky and grim, and more than a little absurd; it's no wonder that the one song that the local, accordion-toting musician can play is a tune he learned at the circus. "It's not safe anywhere," says the mechanic Oscar near the start of the film, a preemptive rejoinder to the xenophobia about to set upon the desolate area. By the end of the film, the sense of doom that confirms that assessment stems less from the revelation of mass culpability than the suffocating fog closing in on the crossroads. By that point, the rolling mist seems less condensed humidity than mustard gas fumes. Even the final show of humanity and love only truly serves to lock these people within this poison cloud.