Brandon's movie memory

Co-directed with Vincent Paronnaud. Tied with Silent Light for the jury prize at Cannes.

Beautifully illustrated and well-animated story, alternately light and heavy, following author/director Marjane’s life from the mid-late 70′s to the mid 90′s. I have to grudgingly admit that the people who say the second half of the film isn’t as good are kinda right, but overall it’s such a wonderful movie, the kind that I wish I could make everybody watch: an artistic movie promoting peace, cross-cultural understanding and individual integrity. I love that the phrase “the price of freedom” is invoked not to justify the loss of lives in a “freedom fighting” war, but as a personal cost, that Marjane’s final flight from Iran to France for the sake of her personal freedom will mean never seeing her grandmother again.

Since I don’t know anything about Iranian history or politics, here’s a timeline combining this movie’s events with stuff from wikipedia and IMDB:

1921 – Qajar Dynasty ends, the “good” Shah is in power
1941 – Shah’s son takes control
1950s- new Shah becomes “increasingly autocratic”
1963 – The House Is Black
1969 – The Cow
1969 – Marjane Satrapi born
1970 – Kiarostami’s first short film
1974 – The Traveler
1977 – The Report
1979 – Shah leaves the country, Iran becomes an Islamic Republic under supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini
1980 – Iraq invades Iran
1984 – Marjane goes to Vienna
1987 – Where Is The Friend’s Home?
1987 – The Cyclist
1988 – Iraq/Iran war ends
1989 – Ayatollah Ali Khamenei becomes supreme leader
1989 – Khameini issues fatwa against Salman Rushdie
1989 – Marjane gets married in Tehran
1990 – Close-Up
1994 – Marjane gets divorced
1995 – The White Balloon”
1997 – Taste of Cherry
1998 – The Apple
1999 – The Wind Will Carry Us
2000 – The Circle
2000 – Persepolis book published
2001 – Kandahar
2002 – Ten
2005 – Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is president (still under Khamenei)
2006 – Offside

I hate to be so down on the movies Katy picks, but I can’t help myself any more than she can pretend to enjoy watching “ace in the hole” or “pennies from heaven”.

This felt like an obvious and uninteresting adaptation of an alright story about the partitioning of India and creation of Pakistan as symbolized by a conveniently diverse group of friends in Lahore and as seen through the eyes of a young innocent.

The young innocent is rich-girl Lenny-baby (of a neutral parsee family) whose hindu caretaker Ayah (a cover girl from Fire) is one of the friends. Also in there are muslims Hassan The Masseur (guy from Bollywood/Hollywood) and Dil The Ice Candy Man (Lagaan), a sympathetic sikh whose name I can’t find right now, and Lenny’s cousin Adi who has an arranged marriage to a short old man.

I took it as a history/culture lesson, though I had to ask Katy lots of questions because this movie doesn’t spell out as much as Water did for the uninitiated. Had the feeling of a postcard yearning for old peaceful times, so I didn’t see the violent atrocities of the second half coming… turns into a giant bummer.

peaceful days:

friendly chat:

an ice-candy betrayal, baby:

Movie is set on Sunday Nov. 16, 1981.

The President: “Screw church.”

The Vietnam War was a show for the Russians, which we intended to lose, just to prove that we had the will to sacrifice troops for no good reason. General Burt Lancaster knows this and is going to force the President of the United States to publically admit it on the air. This is our premise.

Wait, it gets better. Burt will achieve this goal by taking over a nuclear missile station and threatening to launch nukes at Russia unless the President obeys.

Burt breaks in:

What goes wrong: Burt doesn’t count on the very evil military (who stay in power because of their legacy of secrets) being willing to kill his hostage, the President (who hadn’t even known about the vietnam conspiracy).

President Charles Durning (Waring Hudsucker, also in The Sting and Hi Mom):

Lancaster’s buds are Burt Young & Paul Winfield. Young gets shot in an almost-successful anti-Burt operation towards the end, and Winfield is mostly on Burt’s side but manages to reason with him a little, convince him of the futility of launching the missiles.

Winfield, of White Dog:

I don’t know a whole lot about Aldrich. This seemed a kinda low-budget effort, with a 70′s TV-movie look to it, except in the hugely stylish split-screens which sometimes divided into three or four simultaneous actions or angles.

But wait, have I mentioned that Thee Great Richard Widmark plays Burt’s nemesis General MacKenzie?

Widmark does go to church, seen below with his wife, one of the only appearances of a woman in the film.

This was the final film of Charles McGraw (below), star of “The Narrow Margin”, appeared in “The Birds” and “The Defiant Ones” and “A Boy and His Dog”, and previously appeared with Burt Lancaster over thirty years earlier in “The Killers”.

Other things:

Paul Winfield: “Jive-ass honky!”

Widmark’s pager goes off in church, back when that was socially awkward rather than business as usual.

Multiple product-placements for Coke.

Burt: “Gentlemen, we are now a superpower.”

Starts with the ending, no opening credits.

Written by Aaron Sorkin, dude who made “West Wing” and “A Few Good Men”. Director of “Closer”. Where have Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts been? Only in one movie each for the past three years. Phil S. Hoffman stole the show just like everyone said. I watched all three of his 2007 movies in a two-week period, and would say he was the most likeable in this one. Tom’s assistant Amy Adams was the princess in “Enchanted” and a naked girl he almost has sex with was Emily Blunt from that fashion comedy.

Story of senator Charlie Hanks Wilson who, with the support of FBI nerd Hoffman and crush christian society woman Roberts, gets congress to eventually funnel a half billion dollars into arms and training for afghani forces to fight back soviet forces and thus turn the tide in the cold war towards the defeat of communism. It’s an engrossing and exciting story even though it’s just a buncha guys talking fast at each other and making phone calls, and the movie gets its reason to exist in the last few minutes. Half a billion for arms, then a year later Charlie can’t get one million approved for rebuilding schools in Afghanistan.

“These things happened. They were glorious and they changed the world… And then we fucked up the end game.”

Another movie with a killer ending. There were a bunch of those this year. Throws a ton of information your way but doesn’t quite connect all the dots for you, and avoids mentioning in postscript anything about our current Iraq/Afghan situation. Okay, so you’d have to be some kinda “August Rush” loving moron to not draw those connections immediately by yourself, but still Katy appreciated its restraint. I think Paul is complaining that it didn’t go far enough in criticizing the American war-waging machine, but I think it’s pretty awesome to drop this movie right before the presidential caucuses, in the middle of award season, starring three huge oscar winners, with an extremely relevant message to our wars in the middle east, and besides I’m not sure that Paul even saw it. I guess “Lions For Lambs” tried the exact same thing, but I hear it sucked. And I know the western union quote about message movies, but this week I’m into the idea that a mass-market movie should have something to say besides “look at all the pretty killing”, which is why I’m starting to think I like “Juno” better than “No Country For Old Men”.

This and “Enchanted” were the first movies I saw in ’08, but I’m behind on my journal entries so stuff like “The Savages” is showing up in January.

Katy liked it too.

BIG UPDATE: I got harshly corrected by the film group on this one, and now have to add that Charlie Wilson’s War (and everyone involved in its making) is fascist. And I’m not so sure that I like Juno anymore either. Bleah.

Less of a feel-good-about-war movie than a salute to war veterans, with Bing Crosby and his partner Danny Kaye (of Secret Life of Walter Mitty) coming across their old general by chance and staging a christmastime salute to him with all the old guys. Movie was pretty okay with good enough music, didn’t feel as lightweight as most of the musicals we’ve seen but also not as exciting / high-quality. Paramount’s first widescreen movie, funny since so much of it takes place indoors on stages.

The guys fall for a sister act that sings about being sisters (like in Young Girls of Rochefort, but the American sister song isn’t half as good as the French) played by glorious Rosemary Clooney (one of her only other film roles besides Red Garters) and Vera-Ellen (of some other Danny Kaye movies, not much else). V-E had to wear high collars in the movie to cover her neck which was gross-looking from anorexia. The ol’ general Dean Jagger played the sheriff in Fuller’s Forty Guns.

Kaye’s part was written for Sinatra to reunite the duo from “Holiday Inn”, the movie that premiered the Irving Berlin song “White Christmas” 12 years earlier. They even used sets from “Holiday Inn”, which I’m starting to suspect might be a better movie. Highest-grossing film of 1954, oscar-nom for Berlin’s new “Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep”. I preferred “Gee, I Wish I Was Back in the Army.” This was Michael Curtiz’s 25th movie since Casablanca – he doesn’t seem a very distinctive or celebrated director. Shot by a guy named Loyal, written by a guy named Melvin and two guys named Norman.

Beautiful Keira K. (domino) lives in a fancy house with her writer kid-sister Briony (globe-nom Saoirse Ronan, appearing in the next Peter Jackson movie) and mom Harriet Walter (from Katy’s Pride & Prejudice, not Wright’s) and older brother (?) Patrick Kennedy from Bleak House. College hottie James McAvoy lives in a little house on their property with mom Brenda Blethyn (Wright’s P&P, Little Voice). The two are in love but (gasp) from different social classes. Will they defy society and marry anyway? Of course.

Wait, no. They’ve long been infatuated with each other, and during the summer when they are completely exploding for each other, a visitor to the estate rapes another visitor, and young peeping Briony tells the cops it was McAvoy, leading to his arrest and getting sent to war to die instead of going back to college and marrying his true love, who also went to war and died, but as a nurse. Briony also becomes a nurse (now played by spooky Romola Garai, Wilbur’s love interest in “Amazing Grace”) then an author. Fifty years later (now Vanessa Redgrave of “Cradle Will Rock” and “The Devils”) she’s on a TV interview show explaining that her new book is an attempt at atonement, the story of the long life the two lovers could have had together if not for her young meddling.

I loved the movie, beautiful and sad. I might just think it’s pretty good if I see it a second time, since my expectations were pretty low before the first time (period literary adaptation starring McAvoy, who was not good at all in Last King of Scotland), but this time I was enthralled. Sound design / music used typewriter key effects as percussion, my favorite part.

Guy from Slate says the epic single-shot at the beach is unnecessary and showoffy. Robbie on Reverse Shot calls it “tonally awkward” and says: “Wright’s grandstanding in this sequence bespeaks of a decidedly disjointed approach, as well as disappoints after his gloriously measured 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, which smartly employed the long take as a coherent, unifying device.” Elsewhere I’d read that the shot is there to show off (even Wright admits he was showing off) the enormity of war, to take it beyond our doomed male protagonist, open up the world of the film beyond the intensely personal closed-off world of the first half. Some part of that latter explanation clicked for me, because towards the end of the shot I’d decided that McAvoy wouldn’t make it out alive. Tonally consistent or not, the shot is terrific on its own.

“Every faction in Africa calls themselves by these noble names – Liberation this, Patriotic that, Democratic Republic of something-or-other… I guess they can’t own up to what they usually are: a federation of worse oppressors than the last bunch of oppressors. Often, the most barbaric atrocities occur when both combatants proclaim themselves freedom-fighters.”

Funny, a riot of a movie, and the most I’ve enjoyed watching Nic Cage since “The Rock” (though I hear he was awesome in Wicker Man remake).

Nic has no morals and neither does the film. Rather than preaching all Hotel Rwanda and Last King Of Scotland on us, the movie takes Nic’s side, making its violence funny and nihilistic, just an unfortunate side effect of business as usual. The downfall comes as expected… Nic loses his uncle (blown to bits), then his brother (shot down trying to destroy some weapons) and his wife (leaves him, takes the kid) and finally gets arrested for illegal arms dealing. But the movie subverts expectation one last time by having a powerful general (based on Ollie North) set Nic free, because the U.S. armed forces need people like him to do things that they can’t be caught doing themselves.

Funny I was thinking how it’s an all-male movie with a token part for the wife when she comes out with this dialogue: “I feel like all I’ve done my whole life is be pretty. I mean, all I’ve done is be born! I’m a failed actress, a failed artist… I’m not much good as a mother. Come to think of it, I’m not even that pretty anymore.”

Pretty stylin’ movie, nice CG-assisted intro following a bullet from factory to a shocking war-zone head-shot. The movie is amoral to make its point, but it doesn’t expect its viewers to be.

You hear about “cult films” and films with “a cult following” a lot, but where are these cults? Is there a basement in Des Moines where ten or twelve people get together monthly to watch Richard Elfman’s Forbidden Zone? Maybe a club in Montreal that meets at a different member’s living room every wednesday night to watch a different Mario Bava movie from one guy’s prize collection of DVDs and bootleg cassettes? An Alejandro Jororowsky society in Mexico City that watches a 16mm print of El Topo once a year followed by a ritual sacrifice of farm animals?

If these movie cults literally exist, I just hope there’s one for Werner Herzog.

“Little” Dieter Dengler was about seven when WWII ended. He lived through the rebuilding of Germany, when people were boiling and eating wallpaper to get the nutrients that were supposed to be in the glue. Later became a blacksmith’s apprentice and worked at a machine shop. Got toughened the hell up by all these experiences and finally left town for the first time ever to head to America and become a pilot at age 18. Joined the air force, worked shit jobs for a few years, then quit to get a college degree, become a citizen and join the navy where he finally started flying, which is all he ever wanted to do. Got sent right away to Vietnam, and first mission he’s shot down and captured over Laos. It gets hairier from there, with deadly escapes and all the adventures that Herzog’s upcoming Rescue Dawn will be recreating. Died in Feb 2001, and there’s a “postscript” scene of his funeral on the DVD.

Dieter lived an exceptional life, went through very extreme ordeals, and had a single driving obsession (to fly), all making him such an obvious Werner Herzog protagonist that, a decade after shooting this documentary, Herzog is returning to the same story with Rescue Dawn.

Never one to make a “straight” documentary, interviewing Dieter and his war buddies at a neutral location, zooming in slowly on old photos and showing stock footage… no, Herzog does all that, but he also takes Dieter back to Laos. Herzog “helps” Dieter re-enact his own capture and imprisonment with props, locations and some willing Laotian men. What a terrible, wonderful idea. Dieter seems totally up for it, never breaks down into post-trauma sobbing sessions, just reports his history matter-of-factly, with Herzog’s voice occasionally coming in to ask questions or observe in his godlike way.

(Grizzly Man connection) Dieter: “Duane, my friend, he was gone, and from then on my motions, my progress, became mechanical. In fact, I couldn’t care less if I would live or die. But then later on, there was this bear, this beautiful bear that was following me. It was circling me in fact sometimes. It was gone and I missed it. It was just like a dog, it was just like a pet. Of course I knew this bear was there, he was waiting to eat me. When I think about it, this bear meant death to me. And it is really ironic. That’s the only friend I had at the end, was death.”

But… Herzog: “Dieter took an early retirement from the armed forces and became a civilian test pilot. He survived four more crashes and flies to this day. Death did not want him.”

Completely awesome movie, short and gripping and moving. I might not join the Herzog cult (they’d never stop talking about the relationship between man and nature, and they probably all have dangerous and bizarre obsessions) but I’ll sure watch more of his films.

Sooooo bleak. Not the normal kind of resistance movie. Their struggle is necessary but hopeless. Movie opens with our main guy escaping from a camp, then having the guy who ratted on him killed. Many small triumphs and large defeats later, we end with the gang shooting one of their own then driving away as the titles tell us how each of them later got killed in the struggle.

Hardly any non-diegetic music, superbly shot, dark and dreary but not in a tiring way, more of a matter-of-fact “this is how things are” straightforward way.

These are not heroes in the regular movie sense of the word. Theirs is not a glorious fight… it’s hardly a fight at all, more a struggle for survival. The problem is that it would be easier to survive by living ordinary lives, by cooperating with the nazi regime, by ratting on their fellows, by doing any of a number of things they refuse to do, by giving in. The movie is about how much it can suck to be moral, to stick to your convictions. While those in the resistance who survived the war can’t have much to be proud of… unlike most residents of their country, they also can’t have much to be ashamed of. A great, great movie. Nice contrast to the portrait of resistance to nazi occupation in Black Book this year.