by ·Comments Off on Les Misérables (2012, Tom Hooper)

Oh yes it made me cry at least once. Yes I was impressed with the music. Yes some of the acting was really nice, and yes Russell Crowe seemed not to fit in. Same stuff everyone else has said, I’m sure, but two months late.

Hooper is the guy who made The King’s Speech, and has apparently let the big budget and musical numbers fog his memory of how to effectively edit a film. Huge Ackman is the former criminal, pursued unto death by supercop Crowe. Huge’s ex-employee and future oscar-winner Anna Hathaway dies a miserable prostitute, so Huge rescues her little girl Amanda Seyfried from her horrid keepers, welcome comic-relievers Helena Baron Carter and Sacha Bonham Cohen. Seyfried falls in love with Eddie Redmayne, whose doomed compatriots (including some very good young non-movie-stars who make us forget all about Seyfried for a spell) attempt another French Revolution. Huge saves his adopted daughter’s boyfriend, then suddenly dies of old age so they can carry on.

Film Comment:

This movie is by definition hobbled, with no chance of equaling Raymond Bernard’s exquisite and resonant 1934 version of the novel, which unfolded over five luxurious hours. The stylistic elegance and visual coherence of that early French cinema adaptation have been traded in for an all-out sensory assault.

Jim Emerson’s hateful review round-up was pretty hilarious. “The actors are playing to the balcony while the camera (and those wide-angle lenses) push their faces into ours. It’s like Full Metal Jacket: The Musical! with all the parts played by R. Lee Ermey.”

by ·Comments Off on Tabu (2012, Miguel Gomes)

A prologue, long first section, long second section – with only the middle part having sync sound. Bookend segments have spoken narration and certain (probably dubbed/foleyed) sound effects from the scene and seem better/more magical than the talkie half of the movie.

1. In Africa, depressed widower colonialist hurls himself into the crocodile-infested river. “You may run as far as you can, for as long as you like, but you will not escape your heart.”

Ghost of the colonialist’s dead wife:

2. In Lisbon, aging activist Pilar (Teresa Madruga of Silvestre) would seem to be our main character, but the possibly-senile gambling-addicted woman next door takes up much of her attention and curiosity. Aurora isn’t so nice to her maid Santa, is never visited by her children, who support her via a monthly check. Aurora takes a bad turn and sends Pilar to find a man called Ventura (Henrique Espirito Santo, a producer of Doomed Love and Magic Mirror) who arrives too late. After the funeral, he has lunch with Pilar and Santa, begins to tell them his story, after which we never see anyone from the movie’s first half again.

Aurora and Ventura:

3. We spend a year in Mozambique, with month-by-month title cards. Young Aurora (Ana Moreira of Teresa Villaverde’s films) was a famed hunter, a lone wolf who finally married, but soon started an affair with neighbor Ventura (Carloto Cotta, who played Father Dinis’s father as a young man in Mysteries of Lisbon).

Aurora and Ventura:

Their affair gets more passionate and reckless, until finally they run away and she kills the man who discovers them together. She’s dragged back to her husband. Ventura tries to claim that he shot the man, but an anti-colonialist movement takes credit for the murder, so they’re both off the hook – but they never see each other again.

Reverse Shot:

Gomes, even from his earliest shorts (which he’s dubbed musical comedies, though the music is generally piped in rather than sung, the humor dry as a bone, rather than broad) has evinced a willingness to prioritize images over dialogue, songs over the spoken word, and, above all, has maintained a sense of play entirely his own. … Tabu steals its name and chapter titles from the mystical South Pacific feature directed by F.W. Murnau, another filmmaker in thrall to the magic of movies, and produced by Robert Flaherty, the other guiding pole of Gomes’s cinema. That he’s reversed the trajectory of that earlier film, moving from “Paradise Lost” to “Found” suggests that this new Tabu is up to more than just simple homage.

He plays in a band, she listens on the radio, both crying

Slant:

This is a film in which a sullen colonialist transforms into a reptile in a tone-setting prelude. This is a film that answers its hour’s worth of affectingly humdrum urban drama with a lulling, marvelous, deeply dreamy backend. Yet Tabu’s surrealism—like its romance, its comedy, its historicism, its everything—is retained with a light touch. For all its wistfulness, Tabu never feels like a formalist, postmodern, post-cinema put-on. Gomes never feels like he’s trying to pull anything off. And so, in turn, he manages to pull everything off.

Pilar and Santa:

Gomes:

I think I make films to play music. For instance, Tabu starts with Pilar watching a movie. But that sequence was only put at the beginning in the editing room. That story of the explorer and the ghost was like a radio soap that Aurora was doing. I shot her in the studio doing Foley effects (sounds synched to the action) and the sequence was supposed to come in the second part of the film. I didn’t know where, because we didn’t have a script for the second part. I shot many sequences not knowing if they would fit in the film or which part they would fit into. In fact, when Pilar was going to the cinema—and in the script, she went three times, in the film only two—it was intended that you would never see the screen but would hear a song. Maybe this is my emotional link with cinema, that I wanted to materialize it by not showing whatever Pilar is seeing, only portraying it as a song. For me as a viewer of cinema and a listener to music, I wanted to have the same response to the sequence as I would if I were hearing a great song, not being moved by the lyrics but by a more abstract feeling one has in response to music.

by ·Comments Off on A Horrible Way To Die (2012, Adam Wingard)

A Horrible Movie To Watch

Okay, I’ll try a little harder. Sarah (Amy Seimetz of Joe Swanberg’s Silver Bullets and Alexander the Last) meets a nice guy (Joe Swanberg himself) at an AA meeting. Turns out he’s in a group of serial killer super-fans, and they want revenge on Sarah for turning in her serial killer boyfriend (AJ Bowen from Marietta, murderous son in House of the Devil) – who I think kills them all, having just been released from prison. I dunno, slept through the middle third, sick with the flu and angry at the movie for looking so terrible. At the end of certain shots and scenes, the cameraman appears to get confused then pass out, adding the only stylistically unique element to the movie. I actually came to enjoy those moments, to look forward to them, wondering if one of the two cameramen is narcoleptic or if this is an effect anyone would plan. Wingard (from Alabama) contributed to recent horror anthologies The ABCs of Death and V/H/S.

Joe:

NY Times liked it, calling it “commentary on our willingness to tune out evil for the sake of emotional connection.”

by ·Comments Off on Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997, Johan Grimonprez)

Watched this during the site’s month-long hiatus. Any recollection of it? Not really. I know it’s by the guy who made that meta-Hitchcock movie. Let’s see if scrolling through the DVD sparks any memories.

Oh yeah, a narrated collection of stock footage, largely about hijackings, plus some random period clips, sidetrack stories and poetry by the narrator (aha, it’s inspired by two Don DeLillo novels) and segments about airport security. Not as gripping as the Hitchcock movie since it has no through-line plot or characters, but the history of airplane hijacking would earn the movie more interest a few years later.

R. Jones calls it “Grimonprez’ sensible indictment of art’s failure to produce a meaningful impact in Modern culture comparable to terrorism.”

by ·Comments Off on Berberian Sound Studio (2012, Peter Strickland)

Squeamish British sound engineer Toby Jones arrives in Italy to work on a movie called The Equestrian Vortex, not realizing it’s an extra-bloody horror film. Supposedly he was hired because the film’s director Santini holds him in high regard, but nobody else in the studio could care less, and his requests meet with blank stares and insults, as over the weeks of work he gets more shaken by the company and his work stabbing and snapping vegetables as torture-foley.

Like the 1970’s and 80’s Italian horrors Berberian claims to be recreating (we never see a scrap of footage from the film-in-a-film except its opening titles), this movie cares much more about atmosphere than anything else, and does a great job creating that through image and sound. With Jones playing a foley artist and sound recorder, they knew we’d be paying close attention to the soundtrack, and it’s wonderful. But while the Argento and Fulci movies have overstuffed but ultimately empty stories submerged in their gothic atmosphere, this one mostly dispenses with story and lets its atmosphere do all the talking. In fact, they seem to have forgotten to give the movie an ending. It has a neat build-up, as Toby’s letters from home bleed into his work, a story of a birdnest rampage paralleled in the inner film’s carnage and in editing-room chaos after a wronged actress takes out her frustration upon the audiotapes, but then it peters out after that.

Very nice touch that sound equipment is activated by a black gloved hand in close-up. Shot by Nic Knowland (Institute Benjamenta, Piano Tuner of Earthquakes). I must find Strickland’s earlier feature, a Romanian revenge drama.

by ·Comments Off on The Blind Owl (1987, Raoul Ruiz)

“That’s the sickness that comes from thinking about film.”

Some notes I took:

He cuts up some woman and puts her body in a trunk. On a train, a man tells stories about a mysterious rider with a companion speaking to him from inside a small suitcase.
Mentions of Grenada and Marrakesh
Middle-east parody?
Communicating by dance
Protagonist tends to wail
The subtitled part is the movie our protag is watching
White-robe is the Sailor? from Three Crowns? Yes he is.
Very good string music, reminiscent of Three Crowns
Protag has no memories.

Some of this will be wrong, and much will be left out. I will happily watch the movie again, hopefully from some glorious high-res copy released in the future, not a fan-subtitled compressed file made from a two-decades-old beta videotape.

To start with, our guy gets a job at a movie theater. “The films we projected, I never knew who chose them, but I think that nothing that was shown was ever watched.” He and erratic coworker Kasim sleep in the projection booth, living there with Kasim’s girlfriend Fatima. Our guy meets an unknown uncle, then an unknown nephew, then goes on a journey (see note above about cutting up and trunking some poor woman).

Suddenly: “Here begins the story of Aba Yahyar ibn Abu Bakhra as recounted by Ibn Abas may it please Allah”. A riddle-spouting djinn sets a crazily fake-bearded young man searching for his crazy uncles, then he finds the “seven sleepers of ephesus” inside a giant mouth (flashback to the giant teeth in City of Pirates). Also, twin brothers (“the only thing that distinguished them was that one drank more water”) love the same woman. Took me a while to realize that all this is the film-within-the-film.

Bearded man seeks uncle:

Giant teeth:

Back in the projection booth, Fatima eats and drinks sound and images by grabbing them off the projector beam with her hand, and our guy gets into a bloody fight with Kasim. Back in the inner film, more uncles and twins starts to jumble together. “Thus I discovered I no longer needed to watch the film. Henceforth, it would be part of me. I would see it projected on the walls of my room, on the face of my nephew and on the sheets of my bed. I could discern it in a dog’s bark, a man’s groan or a bird’s song, all of them telling me one grand tale of my two fathers, my two uncles and my mother, the dancer.”

Sailor:

The Sailor says he collects the decapitated heads of thieves, shows off his heads and one removed eye to Rosalia (the inner film’s fascinating mystery woman). Back at the theater, our protagonist comes to some final realization (“I’ve never had any memories, and in the space of that day I had aged some fifty years”) and leaves the building, ghostlike.

From (the only) IMDB review:

So not a fiction film but about fiction, immortal stories without particular author or answer, that always seem to begin by their narrator with “I heard a story”…

Based partly on a Persian novel by Sadegh Hedayat. A plot summary of the 1975 film version sounds twisty and surreal, and almost nothing like the Ruiz version except that it involves a young man fixated on a memory of a glimpsed “ethereal” woman.

Hard to tell which actors played whom, but Jean-François Lapalus is the lead, and Jessica Forde (star of Rohmer’s Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle) was in there somewhere.

Maybe right here:

“It is at once an enormous joke and a cosmic, existential work on the human condition.” There’s little writing on this obscure Ruiz feature online, but Rouge has published an essential Luc Moullet piece.

by ·Comments Off on Two Years at Sea (2011, Ben Rivers)

Watched this because Rivers is one of Cinema Scope’s 50 Under 50, and because I get him confused with Ben Russell. Rivers thanks Russell in the credits, and when this opened with the long follow-cam on a man trudging through snow I had to remind myself again that this was a different Ben. Now I hear they’ve got a collaborative film in the works. Think I’m gonna keep getting them confused.

Sometimes I don’t know how much advance reading I should do before watching a movie. In this case I did none at all, and was annoyed and bored through most of the movie, thinking it a pretentious, wordless pseudo-doc about a beardy hippie-turned-survivalist, but I retroactively appreciated it upon reading that it’s a real doc about a real hippie-turned-survivalist. So, after Mekong Hotel, this is the second movie I’ve watched this week that I didn’t realize was supposed to be (at least partly) a documentary.

I also appreciate the movie’s utility in putting me to sleep about three times while I had the flu.

Especially during this scene:

The physical film (on my digital copy) lets itself be known through flicker, grain and the occasional messy edit. Whole thing is blurry and indistinct, with a Begotten-processed feel. Natural sound with occasional Indian-sounding music plus one folky song.

Seattle Weekly:

The hand-cranking accounts for the wavering of light and shifting tempo of motion within shots; the homemade processing accounts for the amoeba-like chemical puckers that dapple the image. The lone, almost expeditionary nature of Rivers’ operation matches his involuted subjects, for his is a cinema of privileged moments and stubbornly private people.

Sometimes seems like the documentary equivalent of The Turin Horse, with even the same ending, as a campfire burns out and the scene is gradually enveloped by darkness. But let’s not overuse the word “documentary” here. A half hour in, while the man sleeps, his trailer ascends into the treetops – then stays there, with no explanation. Reminds me of the random rocketship/tightrope scenes in Still Life, but more well-integrated.

Rivers explains the title: “Jake is seen in all seasons, surviving frugally, passing the time with strange projects, living the radical dream he had as a younger man, a dream he spent two years working at sea to realise.”

H. Guest:

Rivers’ major works include a series of hypnotic films – This Is My Land (2006), The Origin of the Species (2008), I Know Where I’m Going (2009) and Two Years at Sea (2011) – that offer sumptuously cinematographic portraits of extraordinary lives lived out of time, lands stubbornly resistant to the turn of the century. Featuring ragged self-made men living in worlds entirely of their own creation, Rivers’ quartet, like Costa’s Fontainhas trilogy, gives cinematic form to the private visions and incantatory fantasies of untethered characters who have floated far from the known mainland. … They reveal Rivers’ neo-Romantic search for a kind of sublime, for lives defined by the danger of rapturous annihilation by a vast indifferent Nature.

by ·Comments Off on Up, Down, Fragile (1995, Jacques Rivette)

Weird and delightful movie with a Gang of Four/Va Savoir feel, but more so, made with the usual suspects: Pascal Bonitzer and Christine Laurent on script and Nicole Lubtchansky editing, plus Christophe Pollock (Class Relations, In Praise of Love) shooting.

We follow three women: Louise (Marianne Denicourt of La Belle Noiseuse), Ninon (Nathalie Richard, “Madame” in Never Let Me Go, also Irma Vep), and Ida (Laurence Côte of Gang of Four). Louise just got out of a hosiptal of some sort and inherited a house from her aunt. Ninon has short blonde hair, works in moped delivery. An hour in, both of them have met Roland (Andre Marcon, king in Joan the Maid), a slightly mysterious (but not too mysterious – he runs a business making theater sets down the street) stalker who knew Louise’s dead aunt and has knowledge of a secret club (of course he does). But the club really exists, and seems honestly sinister, and I’m impressed that Rivette has finally given in to his secret-society teases (though come to think of it, the one in Don’t Touch The Axe was pretty effective), but then it turns out to be kind of a joke. Meanwhile Ida just creeps about, or sits at her library job trying to remember the title of a song in her head.

A girl (Louise) and a gun:

Intrigue: Louise has a stalker, actually a bodyguard named Lucien (Bruno Todeschini, thief of Va Savoir) hired by her dad. Ninon steals cash from work and gets away with it, though her coworker who was manning the register gets fired. Roland has secret papers proving that Louise’s dad is a crook. There seems to be a lot of wordplay that isn’t translating in the subtitles. And halfway through, the movie becomes a musical!

Ninon and Louise find something to dance about:

The girls visit a nightclub called Backstage, where Vivre Sa Vie star Anna Karina is a singer (and Ninon is an electrifying dancer). It’s here that Louise gets pulled into the secret club, where she is chosen to kill another member, then given a gun filled with blanks. Bodyguard Lucien is falling for Louise, Ninon is involved with Roland, and Ida has a weird connection with Anna Karina – I’m afraid I missed the point of Ida’s role besides the joy of watching Laurence Côte. Actually that might have been the point of the entire film.

Adrian Martin on the first musical number: “Haut bas fragile is about the dream of everyday life metamorphosing – via only the slightest nudges of stylisation – into the idealised realm of art, and specifically popular-musical art. Rivette’s films, with their obsessive walkers and mannered talkers, have frequently circled this moment of ignition, but here he goes all the way: love expresses itself in ironic, playful postures and swooning falls.”

J. Rosenbaum:

All three actresses created their own characters – a procedure Rivette also followed in Out 1 and Celine and Julie Go Boating. And just as Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Berto are solitaires in Out 1 and Julie is one in Celine and Julie before she meets Celine, Ida in Up Down Fragile might be described as someone who’d like to be in a musical but can’t because she doesn’t yet know who she is. The adopted daughter of provincial parents whose letters she doesn’t answer, she’s obsessed with fantasies about who her real mother might be and with tracking down a song from her early childhood, of which she remembers only fragments. (Eventually her obsession leads to a meeting with Sarah, a cabaret singer, played by Anna Karina, whom we’ve already seen in scenes with Ninon and Louise.) Narratively and musically, Ida’s in a perpetual state of becoming – the only creature to whom she’s attached is a cat. Meanwhile the other lines in the fugue are the processes by which Ninon and Louise acquire romance and friendship and thereby work their way into musical numbers, all of them various kinds of duets.

A rare director cameo:

June 2024: Watched again in HD. Some points I’d forgotten: Ida is sad that she doesn’t know who her parents are, and Roland is trying to hide the fact that Louise’s dad is a scumbag.

Lately… Nathalie Richard became a Michael Haneke regular, then a Bertrand Mandico regular, costarring in his new Conann movie… Marianne Denicourt was in a bunch by Claude Lelouch and an Agatha Christie miniseries by the Martyrs guy… Laurence Côte was just in a Virginie Efira identical twins melodrama that played Cannes… and we’re still mad at André Marcon for leaving Isabelle Huppert in Things to Come.

by ·Comments Off on Favorite New Movies of 2012

1. Holy Motors (Leos Carax)
2. Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan)
3. This is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi)
4. Cabin in the Woods (Drew Goddard)
5. Wreck-It Ralph (Rich Moore)
6. Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg)
7. Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson)
8. Keyhole (Guy Maddin)
9. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
10. Prometheus (Ridley Scott)

Honorable mentions go to Looper, God Bless America and Mission: Impossible 4

Late-breaking unranked addition: Tabu

Best 3D of the year: Pina (Wim Wenders)