Alex de Campi: Gojira!

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1.5.05 Angels + Anatomy

Otto Preminger. He's the Chet Baker of filmmaking. The thing about Chet Baker is he just sings the fucking song. No ornamentation, no emoting, no showing off. This is what confuses a lot of people when they first hear Baker. They expect... more. But the entire point of Baker is that there's just this guy, singing this beautiful song, in this kind of quiet and fragile way. And precisely in singing such sentimental lyrics so simply, he suggests so much more than if he tried to put emotion into them.

Preminger just shoots the fucking film. No screwing about with structure*, no cleverclogs cinematography, he just points the camera and lets the actors tell the story. And because the camera forms no comment or judgement on what is going on in front of it, these hugely morally ambiguous, no-easy-answers stripped down noir scripts he films become so powerful. There are no good guys in a Preminger film. There is also no exposition, and the dialogue is so minimal that every line is pregnant with subtext.

Chet Baker was by all accounts a very nice person, and you can tell from his songs. Preminger was a nasty, bitter man, but he made some wonderful films. Go, all of you, and see LAURA, ANGEL FACE, and oh my god the sheer joy of two and a half hours of James Stewart and George C Scott facing off against each other in ANATOMY OF A MURDER. (And look at the advertising poster for THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM and then the cover of the first SLEEPER trade...)

*except Bonjour Tristesse, which was a weak remake of Angel Face, really, even though it is partially redeemed by being 2 hours of DAVID! NIVEN! and Givenchy dresses.

( 11:17 AM )

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