Film: Bringing Out the Dead
Studio: Paramount Pictures
Cast: Nicolas Cage, John Goodman, Ving Rhames, Tom Sizemore, Patricia Arquette
MPAA rating: R
First date: 1999
US Release Date: 1999-10-22
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Bringing Out the Dead
Director: Martin Scorsese
“Saving someone’s life is like falling in love. The best drug in the world. For days, sometimes weeks afterwards, you walk the streets, making infinite whatever you see.”
— Frank Pierce
When speaking about the relevance of Martin Scorsese’s film-making at large, Bringing Out the Dead becomes one of the least revered of the bunch. Scorsese has always been a master at character utilization, but Bringing Out the Dead is easily on par with the likes of Mean Streets and Raging Bull. Nicholas Cage’s character Frank Pierce, a paramedic that strolls through the New York night saving lives, leads a life of little hope and candid regret. Scorsese and Cage click with great precision, finding the subtle qualities that express the human condition. Instead of utilizing heavy portions of dialogue for Cage’s character, Scorsese let the people around him — such as the co-pilots, people on the scene of the incident, and hospital employees — describe the basic elements of the plot. In quite possibly the finest acting job of his career, Cage signifies with facial qualities and hallucinations of a girl he failed to save (Rose), the amount of misery his life is buried in. Hands down one of the bleakest films in American cinema, Scorsese finds an obsession in the struggle of the common man, much like he did in Taxi Driver and Raging Bull.
Most importantly, Robert Richardson’s cinematography work is arguably some of the best in the world of American Cinema, complementing Scorsese’s ideals of mood evocation with elegance and ease. The lighting puts the characters in the middle of a visual nightmare in Hell’s Kitchen, while the fluidity of the camera movement runs slow to complement the sluggish nights on the job. Being the mastermind behind the likes of JFK, Natural Born Killers, and Kill Bill — Richardson has provided himself with quite the resume over the past couple of decades.
Also not unlike Scorsese, this is quite possibly the best musical direction ever put together for one of his films. Combining elements of doo-wop, early rock ‘n’ roll, and punk (two Clash songs in fact: “Janie Jones” and “I’m So Bored with the U.S.A.), music may be the only element that distracts from the grief (well, that and a little help from John Goodman as a co-pilot always focusing on his next meal). The opening song of the film, “T.B. Sheets”, written and performed by Van Morrison, is about a girl in her hospital bed dying, drawing a parallel to Frank’s anguish over the death of Rose. Leave it to Morrison to parallel emotional hell the way Scorsese and gang does.
It’s interesting to look back ten years, considering this was the last film released on the Laserdisc format, and here we are converting into Blu-ray. As many of the films with large budgets of the day fall flat in comparison of today’s special effects, Bringing Out the Dead is a testament to working on the big bucks tastefully. Due to the emotional rollercoaster it takes you on, while not screaming for repeated sittings, this may not go down as one of Scorsese’s masterpiece. However, Scorsese newcomers will dig it up for years to come, serving as a testament to a man’s diversity in filmmaking. John Bohanonn
Film: All About My Mother
Studio: Sony Pictures Classics
Cast: Cecilia Roth, Marisa Paredes, Penelope Cruz, Antonia San Juan, Eloy Azorin
MPAA rating: R
First date: 1999
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All About My Mother
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
It would be easy to misread Pedro Almodóvar’s1999 film All About My Mother as nothing more than a playfully transgressive romp, in which absurd characters misbehave with wild abandon for comic effect. This is, in fact, what Almodóvar seemed to be after in several of his earlier movies, such as the wonderfully madcap Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, or the nuns-and-drugs farce Dark Habits. On the surface, All About My Mother is no different: it tells the story of Manuela (Cecilia Roth), a grief-stricken woman who moves to Barcelona in order to stalk an aging actress (Marisa Paredes) who played a role in the accidental death of her son. Meanwhile, Manuela renews her decades-old friendship with a transvestite prostitute (Antonia San Juan) and also becomes the caretaker and adoptive mother for an ailing, pregnant nun (Penelope Cruz). It’s an improbable, even ridiculous premise, and it becomes even more so as the plot piles on absurdities on the way to an unlikely and highly melodramatic ending.
Yet at the same time, All About My Mother is an uncommonly moving film, and it contains moments of rapturous beauty and genuine power. As Manuela searches for her old friend Agrado (San Juan) in Barcelona’s seamy backstreets, the camera rises up into the sky in order to look down on a group of prostitutes being circled by johns in their cars. The shot is a grand gesture, fit for a moment of great triumph in a sweeping epic—and in the context of Almodóvar’s comically gritty premise, it comes off as audacious in its unexpectedness, and also outrageously beautiful. In All About My Mother, Almodóvar brings all the emotionally lush grandeur of cinematic art to bear on characters and subject matter that many artists would treat only with pity or laughter. Although the film often is funny and absurd, Almodóvar imbues every shot with passionate artistry and a deep-running, non-condescending affection for his characters.
All About My Mother closes with a loving dedication: “To Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider…To all actresses who have played actresses, to all women who act, to men who act and become women, to all people who want to become mothers. To my mother.” Almodóvar is the all-too-rare male filmmaker who makes movies about women. His female characters are far more than just objects of desire for male protagonists; instead, women’s lives, wants, and stories are the central concerns of nearly all of his films. All About My Mother contains several rich, multi-dimensional, and meaty female parts, all of which Almodóvar presents with the self-conscious intention of paying tribute to great women of cinema’s past. The movie’s title is an explicit allusion to All About Eve, and Almodóvar also borrows much of its plot, while at the same time weaving in extended allusions to A Streetcar Named Desire and passing references to artists, writers, and filmmakers ranging from Mark Chagall to Oscar Wilde.
Almodóvar’s point here is not to prove his self-conscious postmodern cleverness. Instead, he treats his allusions with the same intense affection that he directs toward his characters. Almodóvar understands that love for art is at its core an expression of love for life and for all of humanity, and he wants to show us that every woman—every grieving mother, every transvestite prostitute, every pregnant nun—deserves the same kind of boundless, overflowing love that movie audiences routinely offer up to stars on screen. All About My Mother is a great film because it uses its self-conscious allusions not to create cold, sophisticated ironies, but instead to provide audiences with a passionate, open-armed reminder of art’s power to transform our small lives and desires into grand-scale collective visions of beauty and love. Ryan Williams