by ·Comments Off on Clean (2004, Olivier Assayas)

Maggie Cheung won best actress at Cannes in May 2004, and it didn’t open here till June 2006, then left in a week. I was busy that week so rented it, damn it all.

Maggie’s rocker husband ODs in a hotel room and she’s off to prison for a few months. The rocker’s Nick-Nolte dad watches the kid while she’s away. She uses all her old connections to try to get back on track, ending up with a bunch of crap jobs and a vague hope for a future in music, while Nick is dealing with his dying wife and a grandkid turned against his mom. Maggie sort of lets Nick down at the end, but he doesn’t throw it in her face. Interesting characters, great looking movie.

by ·Comments Off on The Yes Men (2003, Price & Smith & Ollman)

I don’t get how talented filmmakers, having a high level of access to a couple very interesting subjects, can make a boring movie. They managed though, for the most part. Gets better towards the end, as the Yes Men schemes actually get less well-planned and more last-minute.

The guys run a website similar in look and address to the WTO site, so get called to speak at conferences. First time they devise gold jumpsuit with inflatable penis TV to monitor third-world employees while on the go. Then in conjunction with McDonalds they announce new recycled-food burger program at a classroom. Finally they disband the WTO completely, saying it’s completely failed to meet its stated objectives. Subversion is fun and they’ve got some particularly hilarious ideas, so movie was worth watching even if I complained about the editing all the time.

by ·Comments Off on Heaven Can Wait (1943, Ernst Lubitsch)

Not really a comedy like I’d thought, except for the parts with Grandpa in ’em.

Heaven Can Wait

Guy marries girl he likes, then when he dies, insists he deserves to go to hell but is wrong. I kinda don’t remember much already.

by ·Comments Off on Benny’s Video (1992, Michael Haneke)

Benny spends a lot of time in his room, given money but not attention by his parents, watching rental movies, news reports and homemade movies of his sister’s pyramid-scheme and a family-vacation pig-slaughter. Eventually, inevitably, he invites another girl home and kills her with the pig gun. Parents find out and help Benny hide the evidence. And Benny turns them in!

So apparently Haneke has been making this movie for years. Comfy rich family meets unexpected bursts of violence, shocking them our of their complacency. And we, the audience, who attend Austrian art movies… we are they! Their violence is ours! Or something, I dunno… Senses of Cinema is smarter than me, and has actual Haneke quotes:

Says the three movies just out on video are a trilogy, “reports of the progression of the emotional glaciation of my country”. “My films are intended as polemical statements against the American ‘barrel down’ cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus.” Mattias Frey points out echoes of Benny in Wes Bentley’s American Beauty character, which I should’ve thought of myself.

Benny's Video

by ·Comments Off on X-Men (2000, Bryan Singer)

Same ol’ good ol’ movie. Gets better every time. This time paid close attention to: Halle Berry’s acting (not great), Rogue’s hair (you can kinda see it turn white if you pause on the statue of liberty scene), overall pacing, Magneto’s costume. Waffling on seeing X-Men 3 in theaters or at all.

X-Men

by ·Comments Off on The Eel (1997, Shohei Imamura)

Watched on the night Imamura died. Thought it was the right time to expose myself to a great new filmmaker. Imagine my surprise when I didn’t like the movie.

Dude kills wife. Eight years later, out of prison, opens barber shop. Has pet eel. Girl works for him. Bunch of obvious stuff happens, but not so obvious that I can remember the details two weeks later. That’s why I write in this thing… to write about movies I didn’t like right after I see them, so later I’ll remember why I didn’t like them. Too late now. Oh wait, I remember complaining about a dream sequence when someone jumps out of the water and grabs the dude’s boat and says… something…

by ·Comments Off on Little Girl Who Sold The Sun (1999, Mambéty)

Cute fable about a crippled girl (with blind mom) who wants to sell newspapers. Gang of boys makes throat-slitting gestures at her, shoves her off pier and steals her crutch, but never sells any papers themselves. Very good looking movie. Katy had seen it before.

Girl Who Sold The Sun

by ·Comments Off on Delicatessen (1991, Jeunet et Caro)

Watched on porch with passing traffic and marauding cockroaches and j0sh0rZ. Still great, though cluttered. Was thinking that it might be better if the whole underground rice-eater group from the sewers wasn’t in the movie at all. Useless to try comparing the Jeunet movies… is this “better” than City of Lost Children? Are the new ones “better” than the old ones? Why does nobody like Alien Resurrection except me? Katy liked this pretty well, I think.

Delicatessen

by ·Comments Off on Broken Flowers (2005, Jarmusch)

I still enjoy watching the whole journey, but still not quite sure about myself afterwards. So Julie Delpy might’ve written the letter? But probably not? Is that completely beside the point? I again failed to recognize actresses. Julie Delpy leaves, Sharon Stone sleeps with him, Frances Conroy lives in a model home, Jessica Lange talks to animals and Tilda Swinton has him beaten up. Got it. Hmm, the guy who directed Habit and Wendigo might’ve punched him out. And Sun Green gets him a bandage, which makes me wonder why I haven’t watched Greendale yet.