A ridiculous documentary. A pair of twins got into the news because they preferred speaking in their own invented language to English. After TV and newspaper reporters are done with the story, Gorin (a Godard collaborator in the 1970’s, codirecting Tout va bien and Ici et ailleurs) shows up to make a movie about the twins, seeming the whole time to be out of his element. My favorite scene was at a library, with cameraman Les Blank (the same year as Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe) following the twins as they run around acting like themselves, while Gorin stands by impotently trying to get them to pose for him. Finally at the end does a linguist get some input, as the story and the movie peter out. Katy hated it so much.
Author: Brandon
Brandon's the guy who runs this site.
Beauty and the Beast (1946, Jean Cocteau)
Hard to know what to say about a movie I’ve seen a bunch of times and read a whole book about. Looked gorgeous in the theater. To the IMDB!
Belle’s dad was in Tumultes, which I just found a copy of.
Cinematographer Henri Alekan later shot at least two Ruiz movies and La Belle Captive.
Josette Day retired soon after this, but not before costarring with Marais again in Cocteau’s Les Parents Terribles.
One of the sisters I’ve seen in both Les Anges du peche and Rules of the Game and didn’t recognize. The other was in Les Biches and the finale of City of Lost Children (Miette, age 82). Belle’s brother Ludovic starred in a Clouzot movie a couple years later.
The movie puts much faith in its makeup effects, lot of Beast close-ups.
JC during production: “I wonder whether these days of hard work aren’t the most delicious of my life. Full of friendship, affectionate disagreement, laughter, profiting from every moment.”
The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014, Wes Anderson)
The story of Tony Revolori, who loved Saoirse Ronan and grew up to be F. Murray Abraham, told his tale to Jude Law, who grew up to be Tom Wilkinson, whose book inspired many. Zero worked with Ralph Fiennes, who slept with Tilda Swinton, who was murdered by Willem Dafoe at the behest of Adrien Brody, who framed Fiennes by threatening Mathieu Amalric and later murdering Lea Seydoux and Jeff Goldblum (and his cat). Fiennes escapes prison with help from Harvey Keitel, runs into cop Edward Norton and military concierge Owen Wilson, clears his name but sacrifices himself to nazi authorities to save Revolori and Ronan. Jason Schwartzman is a Jude Law-era lobby boy, and Bill Murray, Bob Balaban and some others are shoehorned in.
See also: what I wrote on The Wind Rises.
Stefan Zweig (Letter From an Unknown Woman) gets an “inspired by” credit. Cowritten with the guy who drew the paintings at Eli Cash’s house in Royal Tenenbaums.
Katy liked it alright. My mom did not.
Tim’s Vermeer (2013, Teller)
Penn & Teller’s inventor friend Tim is an art appreciator, reads how artists in Vermeer’s era used mirrors and light tricks as tools to paint in photorealistic style. So Tim – not a painter – decides to paint a clone of a Vermeer using these tools, along the way finding new, better mirror techniques. Tim is more extreme than most people would be, first creating the room within the painting down to the finest detail, having to buy machine tools and build some of the furniture himself. Teller is no great filmmaker, and the guys weren’t following every single step of the process, but it gets the job done. Tim and his project are more than entertaining enough.
The Wind Rises (2013, Hayao Miyazaki)
Emotionally similar to Grand Budapest Hotel, romance and work-obsession interrupted by WWII, with a sense of loss that doesn’t really hit until the movie’s final scenes, or a couple hours afterward.
Good movie, except when I am 100% distracted by the voice of Werner Herzog!
Atlanta Film Festival 2014 Animated Shorts
The Scarecrow (Limbert Fabian & Brandon Oldenburg)
Seen this before online, because it is an ad for Chipotle. It’s a great ad, but still, ads do not count as movies. Checked out the codirectors’ follow-up, a Dolby ad called Silent, on Vimeo when I got home, a cute piece to show alongside that Mickey Mouse Get a Horse movie. The directors previously worked together on Spy Kids 2.
Strange Wonderful (Stephanie Swart)
Inside the psyche of the school monster, whose fishbowl helmet goes unappreciated in the recess yard.
Confusion Through Sand (Danny Madden)
Daaaaamn, drawn and photographed on differently textured recycled paper, wild perspective-jumping desert battle scene.
The Magnificent Lion Boy (Ana Caro)
Explorer finds feral boy, brings back to London, tries to make feral boy comb his hair and sit still for church while a freak show operator hopes to capture him. Tragedy ensues. If you need a stuffy british guy you get Hugh Bonneville and if you need a guy who acts like an animal you get Andy Serkis, so they did. Animation looks like they erase part of the frame and redraw, fascinating. Funny to watch this right after having seen Feral.
Crime (Alix Lambert & Sam Chou)
Episode of an animated series in which a Hartford CT resident has trouble with car thieves and then bigger trouble with the police.
Fingers Tale (Luca Schenato & Sinem Vardarli)
Time stops at noon and people’s fingers and toes detach and go on adventures, alongside other objects like knives and spiral-cut coke-can monsters. Tragedy ensues. From Turkey!
Dji Death Fails (Dmitri Voloshin)
Grim Reaper accidentally resuscitates the guy whose soul he was coming to take. Fun from Moldova, wherever that is.
Snowdysseus (Evan Curtis)
Stop-motion must be difficult in the snow. I didn’t totally get it, but it involved an astronaut and skeletons.
The Wanderer of Saint-Marcel (Rony Hotin)
Subway bum goes inside the gigantic colorful posters at night, cavorts with babes, swims, finds food, all while trying to avoid a giant black beast, which catches him in the end.
Monkey Rag (Joanna Davidovich)
Girl meets top-hatted tree, bottom-pinching ensues. Looked great all finished and up on the big screen.
Olive (Harriet Ngo)
The second movie in a row in which a girl meets a tree. In this one she falls into hole and the tree helps her find her way home.
Rabbit and Deer (Péter Vácz)
Rabbit and Deer are best friends, but after an obsessive search, Deer finds his way into the third dimension, and now the two are having trouble interacting. This is the one I most want to show Katy, but there’s only a trailer online so far.
Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933, Mervyn LeRoy)
After all his latest musical theater projects have fallen apart due to shaky financing during the Great Depression, fast-talkin’ producer Ned Sparks (in Imitation of Life the following year) has an idea for a sure-fire hit, a musical about “the forgotten man,” the unemployable Depression masses, a dour march through the grim realities of today. When we finally see the play, bankrolled by the secret millionaire/composer down the hall, it looks suspiciously unlike what we were imagining, full of naughty love songs and massive Busby Berkeley numbers in glittering costumes. This isn’t a plot twist or ironic commentary on artistic intentions vs. end results once money gets involved – it’s just an inconsistent movie.
The movie opens with Ginger Rogers, but she turns out to be just a friend of the main characters Polly, Carol and Trixie. Polly is Ruby Keeler (Mrs. Al Jolson, just off 42nd Street), a round-faced innocent cutie. Carol is Joan Blondell (later Mrs. Dick Powell, a successful actress through the seventies), the scheming beauty. And Trixie is Aline MacMahon (mostly a stage actress), the smartass. Polly falls for Dick Powell (star of Christmas In July and Susan Slept Here), the millionaire/composer, and the show is cast and everything is gonna be fine.
Conflict! Powell’s millionaire family finds out about his distasteful dabblings in showbusiness and brother Warren William (Caesar to Colbert’s Cleopatra) comes to town with lawyer Guy Kibbee (noble newspaperman in Power of the Press) to stop all this nonsense and threaten to cut off his fortune. But due to a fake gold-digger plot by Polly’s roommates, William and Kibbee end up falling in love with them, triple-wedding is planned and the show goes on, with a last-minute “forgotten man” musical number to remind us of an earlier point.
LeRoy directed the year after I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, and musical scene director Busby Berkeley was on a roll after 42nd Street, and would helm the 1935 sequel himself. Also appearing: Sterling Holloway (Remember the Night) as a messenger boy, Eric Blore (The Lady Eve) as a stuffy rich guy, and Billy Barty (a little guy known for playing babies and hobbits and creatures) as a leering, naughty kid during a big dance scene. Songs include “We’re in the Money” (not exactly in keeping with the Depression theme), the catchy “Pettin’ in the Park,” and a waltz featuring a dance of neon violins, and of course the musical numbers and fun performances are the entire point of the movie, not any of the crap I’ve written above.
Oblivion (2013, Joseph Kosinski)
March 2077: I’ll be on an airplane, so I grab the dumbest-looking movie I can find at work to watch through a dramamine haze. A Tom Cruise actioner from last year that I already have no recollection of: that’ll do nicely. I’m playing a feature-length game of “spot the reference,” as it seems to have been concocted from scraps of sci-fi thrillers past. It’s all a bit silly, but undeniably strong-looking, and its sleek production design (and the face of To The Wonder‘s Olga Kurylenko) lingered in my mind afterwards.
Cruise plays a Wall-E type named Jack Reacher, left behind to clean up earth after everyone else has moved into space. But he’s also a Moon type, since it turns out Cruise is thousands of clones of himself (maybe that’s more Galactica), and it turns out humanity survives underground and the “people” in space are evil aliens (who blew up the moon in an obvious Mr. Show reference) using fake video images of Melissa Leo to interact with their clone slaves. But Cruise is not a slave, likes to read classic literature and builds a rustic nature shack and nurtures a potted plant and watches Hello Dolly on a creaky old tube TV. No he doesn’t, but it’s funny how the human stuff Cruise salvages for his shack is already old now – classic rock LPs and antique-looking refrigerators.
Clone Cruise has a Clone Wife (Andrea Riseborough of Happy-Go-Lucky) but dreams of Olga, and when she crash-lands after being in orbit for however-many years, they team up with the undergrounders (led by Morgan Freeman) to nuke the mothership, threatened by spherical alien drones with great bassy doom-growl voices (clearly the presence of flying death orbs in a film called OblIVion is a shout to the fourth Phantasm movie).
“Copy 4-0-9, tasking 1-8-5 to grid 2-2.” The movie likes saying numbers aloud, and its mix of all-knowing and easily-fooled technology is nearly plot-hole-worthy – for instance, after Cruise goes for a walk the robots can track his DNA from the air at speed, a light-up trail tracing his exact path, but they always take ten seconds of him yelling his name at them before they stop threatening him with guns. And the planet seems to be all mapped into robot-patrolled grids within alien-drawn neighborhoods, each manned by a Tom Cruise, but his entire Walden shack goes unnoticed for years, and when he follows a homing beacon all the way from base, he doesn’t even know what kind of structure the signal is coming from until he walks right up to it. So they’ve gotten both better and worse than google maps. But I like the all-white Apple-like alien tech with its triangular motif, and the effects are cool and the M83 music pretty great.
We have the technology. The time is now. Science can wait no longer. Children are our future. America can, should, must and WILL blow up the moon! And we’ll be doing it during a full moon, so we make sure we get it all.
Secret of the Grain (2007, Abdellatif Kechiche)
I didn’t really get it. The guy introducing the film said that Blue is the Warmest Color was unusual, a departure in Kechiche’s (apparently pronounced keh-SHEESH) cinema, so my first thought was that’d mean the entire movie wouldn’t be handheld extreme close-ups of its characters faces, but apparently the guy only meant a departure in terms of the amount of lesbian sex on display, because the whole first two-thirds of Grain was handheld extreme close-ups. At least in Blue I came to accept the handheld closeups because it’s about the raw emotional state of its lead actress, but this one was more about family relations, so why can I only ever see one person at a time?
The ending cools down with the aggressive close-ups for a while (though they are welcome when Hafsia Hersi starts belly-dancing) in order to show off Slimane’s boat dinner party and to distantly track his run around the harbor after three boys who stole his scooter. But the style changes only to enable the plot to say “fuck you” to those of us who expected a climactic, triumphant meal bringing the feuding family members together. Instead, the troubles we noted in the first half (Slimane isn’t in the best health, his girlfriend’s family and ex-wife’s family don’t get along, his son Majid is a cheater) destroy the dinner and kill Slimane.
Sometimes Kechiche lets a complainer complain, just rant until you can’t bear it anymore, but for the most part it’s enjoyable company, and I agree with some reviews about the great acting, the naturalism of the characters. Loved when perspective suddenly turns to other hotel dwellers, a bunch of old musicians gossipping on the family drama.
60-year-old Slimane lives with girlfriend Latifa and her daughter Rym in Latifa’s hotel, provides food for the rest of his family when he can, but doesn’t eat with them, having a complicated relationship with ex-wife Souad. She ends up cooking for his restaurant, but when the giant pot of couscous goes missing at dinnertime, Latifa, who’d been reluctant to join the party, slips away during Rym’s bellydance distraction and comes back with a pot. If its her own couscous, which is rumored by the musicians to be awful, how did she cook it in time? The movie doesn’t show us what happens when the dance ends because it’s busy killing off Slimane.
W. Morris:
Once that belly starts undulating, the restaurant’s white faces look up, drunk and delighted. In this complexly conceived and realized moment, the dancer uses sex and cultural exoticism to distract tables of formerly civilized but suddenly restless white natives. Slimane’s daughters watch with a mix of personal envy and ethnic shame. But Kechiche invites us to acknowledge a fundamental truth about Arabs—or any people of color—in the history of the movies: stereotypes sell. It’s an astounding scene, even aside from the suspense that inspires it in the first place. Kechiche’s ideas of ethnicity, enterprise, and canny self-exploitation are conscious.
Won awards in Venice the year Lust, Caution got gold and took the film and director Cesars (over Diving Bell and the Butterfly, La Vie en Rose and Persepolis!). Hafsia Herzi (Rym) later costarred in House of Tolerance.