The women behind the scenes of Scarlett are in up to their elbows with various and sundry tasks at the moment, but do not stray far. We will be back shortly, in the next couple of days, I hope, with more to share. While we wait, we shant sit idly ("Idleness: It is a sin to do nothing," Marlene warns). Ms. Dietrich has ideas about Italy. I dedicate these to my wonderful Italian friend. Salute!
Italia
Beauty everywhere.
Italian Men
Beautiful "hot air."
Hitchcock, Alfred
When he directs it seems as if he didn't. But he does, he does, and how he does!
How could a movie starring Jack Black and Michael Cera, and directed by comedy veteran-of-veterans Harold Ramis go wrong? Somehow, it did. I have decided to withhold all critical judgment because my theory is Year One went through a gauntlet of recuts before it finally made it to the screen (it was cut from an R to a PG-13). The story was choppy and progressed hastily, so much that by as little as 10 minutes into the movie I felt stretched thin in multiple directions. Black's disownership from his home village happened just as we got a feel for his role there. Paul Rudd's Abel is slaughtered by David Cross's Cain a swift few minutes later, which happens in a manner just a hair too uncomfortable to be funny. There are so many cameos (e.g. Bill Hader, Kyle Gass) and side characters (e.g. Ramis as Adam, Horatio Sans as Enmebaragesi, even Paul Rudd) that it's impossible to keep them all footed solidly in a story that's sinking beneath their feet. To say it simply, the movie wasn't whole.
About midway through there is a scene where Black and Cera are invited to become guards in the city of Sodom; it's evening and they exit the room, presumably to go through the next step of being initiated and suited up. But the next scene after the cut is in the broad daylight of the next morning. I call out this section in particular, not because there isn't plausible narrative causality, but because there was a distinct halt in momentum between the two scenes, like something clever had happened in a bridging scene that was left on the cutting room floor. You could literally see the recuts happen. Or, could Year One just be a poorly written and constructed movie? That's altogether possible, I suppose, but Harold Ramis is just too good to accept that theory unquestioned.
I'm at the age now that when I look at a release date of a movie from the 1990s I automatically pause to think of what I was watching at my age then. In the case of Hirokazu Kore-eda's Maborosi that was released in 1995, the movie I think of is Clueless. Being 15-years-old in 1995 there was no way of knowing about Maborosi. There was never even a trace of it on the horizon until perhaps a couple of years ago. 1995 is the year of Clueless and Die Hard: With a Vengeance for me. I think more than any other movies from that specific time, those are the two I know best. Looking now at Maborosi it has a look that seems out of time. The basic, unstylized scenery could be set anytime in the past twenty or so years. The first images came on screen and I stopped to ask myself, When was this made? I was operating under the assumption that this was released, rather narcissistically, within the past five years, as if this cinema did not exist until I came to the age when I discovered it personally. Finally, though, the quality of the image told me it was older. Simpler color schemes and the deep shadows of figures against bright backdrops looked nothing like the digital quality of recent DV movies, but seemed to anticipate them. Maborosi looks like it's on the cusp of that new technology, leaning close to the edge of high-def camera work.
Shadows in digital images don't always look like shadows. Too much light makes dark registers brighter, compensating for film's implacable need for high wattage exposure. Maborosi is a movie filled with a lot of shadows. If compositionally we think of film as literal plays of light and shadow, Kore-eda's film is an overt example of that. Nothing in it is muted or neutral. There is a distinct balance--a real yin-yang--of dark and light. The sea is painted deep blue and black against the auburn and ochre shade of the hillside and the overcast white of the sky. Its characters often move across the screen like deep abstractions of unexposed black in the frame. Or, the inverse: a figure might be illuminated by a slash of light across her face--the only blot of light marked within an otherwise dark frame of film. All of this is not to say there is a lack of depth in the compositions either. There is still a fullness and texture to a shot of a darkened room in which its details are hardly visible. A real film print might reveal many more of those compositional intricacies.
To the point, Maborosi's primary characteristic is its abundance of depth, concerning both its main character, a woman who cannot reconcile her new life with the exhausting mystery of her husband's suicide; and, as detailed above, in its rich visual texture, which is shown most profoundly in an image of the woman's two children running along a lake shore in long shot, their darkened reflections bobbing along at their sides. At the halfway point of the film I struggled to recall a single closeup. This is a movie made in long shot almost exclusively, offering it extra opportunities to display that signature depth of focus. It is structured with a series of establishing shots that introduce us to and remind us of the places these characters have been. It's a simple queue of maybe a dozen or so locations: the house by the sea, the coffee shop, the factory, the stairwell, the alley, the street of the woman's home before her husband's death. It is an effective way to display the interior and ineffable memories she has of her past life. The glance at these locales is a simple reminder that those are places that have personal meaning. That is all, but that is also everything.
But to return to my original thought about its release date, 1995, my impressionable year of 
Clueless, Maborosi has the opposite resonance to me than that movie of my late formative years. Their stories and cultural landscapes are obvious departures from one another. Stylistically and technically these two films are drastically removed from one another too. Maborosi, with its emphasis on long-shot landscapes looks like a painting; Clueless, with its quicker cutting and neon color palate looks akin to a video game (or as Cher says herself, like a Noxema commercial). Marborosi is far less artificially manipulated: a snow storm occurs in real time, commuter trains pass on their tracks, not as simple b-roll footage, but as live components of the frame, as captures of ephemerality that are inexorable from the film's planned texture.
It's a strange comparison, but Clueless is so much the opposite of that. I wonder how two movies so disparate could come out of the same time. As many years have gone by since as I was total years old when I first saw Clueless, Die Hard, and come to think of another one, Batman Forever. Still, it seems, my 15-year-old self's tastes are intact (two-thirds of those movies remain a couple of my favorites of all time), I've just been enriched a little more.
F is for Fourth of July--and I say, happy Independence Day, everyone! Quite appropriate for this day, I give you madame Dietrich's definition of...
Freedom
The execution of self-imposed duties proves freedom.
