by ·Comments Off on Friends With Kids (2011, Jennifer Westfeldt)

Adam Scott and writer/director/producer Westfeldt are good people, good friends, but unlucky in love. Will they end up together? Of course they will, but hold on a sec. Their friends (madly-in-lust couple Jon Hamm and Kristen Wiig, and more laid-back couple Maya Rudolph and Chris O’Dowd) are having kids, and Scott and Westfeldt also want kids – everybody does! So they decide to have a kid, but as friends, since they’re not in love obviously, and share parenting duties. And they’re very good at it. Will they end up together? Of course they will, but hold just a sec, movie would only be 40 minutes long.

Scott likes Megan Fox, who doesn’t like kids because she must be some kind of sexy sociopath. And Westfeldt likes Edward Burns, who loves kids and already has a couple of ’em. Things are getting serious, but wait a sec, weren’t Scott and Westfeldt supposed to end up together? Well, they do.

Lightly likeable movie, better than Bridesmaids, with which it shares half its cast. Our writer/producer/director/star also wrote/produced/directed/starred in Kissing Jessica Stein and Ira & Abby.

AV Club:

All three films ask intriguing questions about whether it’s really necessary to stand by familiar models of romance, and whether people are better off writing their own rules. And all three use comedy to avoid getting message-heavy, and emotional stakes to avoid being empty fluff. But Westfeldt has a tendency to go over the top, and Friends With Kids in particular has a shrill, smug edge that kills the comedy and the drama alike. …
The film’s biggest weakness is that their logic is ludicrous, and the script doesn’t justify it, except by depicting them as right at every turn. Nonsensically, and without explanation, their lack of romantic expectations for each other lets them juggle ambitious careers, busy dating lives, and parenthood with the grace and ease that’s escaped all their disintegrating friends.

by ·Comments Off on The Cloud-Capped Star (1960, Ritwik Ghatak)

A family picture: Nita is our beautiful protagonist in love with Sanat, brother Montu is in college, brother Shankar (Anil Chatterjee, the goofy groom traveling with his uncle near the start of Ajantrik) sits under trees singing all day hoping to be famous, and younger sister Gita does nothing much. The family’s father is a schoolteacher, and mother sits around meanly bitching at everybody.

L-R hovering over father: Nita, Shankar, mother, doctor, Gita, Montu

Soon, Montu has failed out of school, gets a factory job and is hurt in an accident. Shankar continues to be a load on everyone, dad has to retire from disability, and while Nita is working to support her failing family, Gita steals away her man.

scheming Gita:

The strain is too much on poor Nita. Shankar is finally the famous singer he dreamed of becoming, but Nita has caught tuberculosis and dies alone in a sanatorium.

Nita: Supriya Choudhury, still acting, recently in The Namesake

Dad: Bijon Bhattacharya also played the director-surrogate character in Ghatak’s final film

Unusually gorgeous and interesting, and with unusually tolerable music for an Indian movie (and more of the pleasingly bizarre sound design that Ghatak used in Ajantrik). The filmmaking is probably a few steps up from Ajantrik, but I preferred that movie’s sadly comedic story to this one’s family misery. Wikipedia says this was the beginning of a trilogy “dealing with the aftermath of the Partition of India in 1947 and the refugees coping with it.” I didn’t realize it took place in a refugee camp outside Calcutta, so might’ve missed other details.

A. Martin on a strange musical scene:

The whole of this bleak scene … is marked by breaks, ellipses, “unmotivated” camera movements, unrealistic pools and speckles of light in a painfully obscure darkness, and above all a wild sound mix that passes from ambient noise throughout song to the echoing lash of a whip that expressionistically conveys Nita’s increasingly manic despair. Every cut, every sound cue is an event in Ghatak: rather than simply “establish” a scene, he restlessly withdraws and redraws it, according to the turbulent pressure of the emotions within it.

by ·Comments Off on Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011, Sean Durkin)

Elizabeth Olsen (hot younger sister of the babies from Full House – god, I’m old) is Martha, renamed Marcy May by the charismatic leader of the commune she joins (played by janitor John Hawkes of Contagion). She leaves/escapes and stays with her older sister (Sarah Paulson of Down With Love) and the sister’s rich, impatient new husband (Hugh Dancy of Rwanda movie Beyond the Gates) at their vacation home. And almost as soon as she gets to their place, I’m thinking she was better off at the commune. She seemed more respected there – besides the rape, obviously.

The past and present come together in pieces – gradually revealing details in a natural way. But what I don’t get is Marcy’s disassociative sense of reality. Other than during her rape-initiation, I didn’t get the feeling that the girls were being drugged at the commune, nor did we get any sense of hypnotism or other psychological conditioning. I figured from the trailer that there’d be some Holy Smoke-style cult-deprogramming going on, but it seemed less like a typical religious-fervor cult than a free-love commune of young people who turn to crime when their farming plans fall through. Nice scare at the end as the unhappy family leaves their vacation house for the city, being followed by cultists – or are they really?

Amother the others in the commune: friz-haired young Sarah (Julia Garner of the illogically titled The Last Exorcism 2) and Brady Corbet (guy who has golf-course sex with the bride in Melancholia, Michael Pitt’s killer bro in the Funny Games remake). Same capable cinematographer as Tiny Furniture. Durkin made a related short called Mary Last Seen, which is on the DVD but I didn’t watch, and helped produce a couple of Antonio Campos movies.

bad option 1:

Lots of good quotes, positive and negative, in the Mubi roundup – I liked this one from K. Uhlich: “A lesser movie might hammer home the idea that the cult squashes Martha’s sense of self. This distinctive and haunting effort implies something much scarier: that there is no self to start with.”

bad option 2:

A. Tracy in Cinema Scope:

[the film’s beginning: a couple commune scenes then Marcy escapes and is caught by Brady Corbet at a diner] neatly throws the viewer off balance a few times over and stakes out the film’s formalist ground: an alternation between distanced observation and intense subjectivity, milking the disorientation and perceptual shifts of the latter to cast a pall of nameless but omnipresent dread over the former. … Omitting any (organized) religious element to Patrick’s bastardized pseudo-philosophy – an immediate red flag for the Blue State audiences that will largely be the ones seeing this film – Durkin allows the horror to emerge gradually, both dramaturgically and formally. …
Despite Olson’s sensitive performance, the frission between the communally indoctrinated Martha and the yuppified Lisa rarely ascends beyond the level of easy caricature … It’s thus that, despite its well-learned manoeuvres, Martha Marcy May Marlene remains solidly within the genre territory that Haneke takes as a departure point in Les temps du loup or Cache, ultimately having little to say about its charged subjects beyond the sum of its largely well-turned effects.

by ·Comments Off on City of Sadness (1989, Hou Hsiao-hsien)

After false-starts with Flowers of Shanghai and Goodbye South, Goodbye, I figured out how to get on Hou’s wavelength with his Red Balloon and Three Times, so now trying something from his acclaimed 1980’s period. I liked it, and could follow reasonably well despite 90% of my knowledge of Taiwan’s post-Japanese-occupation history coming from a blurry bootleg of A Brighter Summer Day. Wikipedia, help us out with context here:

It tells the story of a family embroiled in the tragic “White Terror” that was wrought on the Taiwanese people by the Kuomintang government (KMT) after their arrival from mainland China in the late 1940s, during which thousands of Taiwanese were rounded up, shot, and/or sent to prison. The film was the first to deal openly with the KMT’s authoritarian misdeeds after its 1945 turnover of Taiwan from Japan, and the first to depict the 228 Incident of 1947, in which thousands of people were massacred.

“On August 15, 1945 Japan announced its unconditional surrender. Taiwan was liberated following 51 years of Japanese occupation. The wife of older brother Lin Wen-heung gave birth to a son. They named him Kang-ming, which means Light.” Brief introductions (Wen-heung is a stocky fellow) and a photo shoot, then suddenly a woman is narrating from the mountains, introducing W-H’s brother Wen-ching as a friend of her brother. W-C (Tony Leung 1 of 2046) is deaf/dumb (this was supposedly added to the script because Leung couldn’t speak the dialect convincingly, heh), a professional photographer who communicates to customers with gestures and to our new narrator (Hinomi) with pen/paper. W-C has other brothers besides stocky eldest Wen-heung – one disappeared in the war, and the other, Wen-leung (Jack Kao of a bunch of Hou’s films), came back mad.

W-C: happy, deaf

W-L: mad

But Wen-leung gets over his condition, joins organized crime, gets himself arrested and gets the straight Wen-heung in trouble. Eventually, W-H is killed and W-L terribly beaten, other characters disappear or escape to the mountains, and W-C ends up with Hinomi – but in the epilogue, after showing him with new wife and baby, even he is arrested again, and the titles tell us “December 1949. Mainland China is lost,” when the ROC moved to Taiwan (maintaining martial law, torture and execution for 40 years) and communist PRC formed in mainland China. So the movie takes place over four years, during which it doesn’t always seem like such sadness, but it sure turns out that way in the end.

IMDB:

As revealed in scriptwriter Chu Tien-Wen’s book, the original premise of this film is the reunion of an ex-gangster (which Hou Hsiao-Hsien intended to cast Chow Yun-fat for the role) and his former lover (supposedly played by Yang Li-Hua, the top Taiwanese Opera actress in real-life) in the 1970’s. Hou and Chu then extended the story to involve substantial flashbacks of the calamity of the woman’s family in late 1940’s (where the woman was the teenage daughter of Chen Song-Yong’s character). They then abandoned the former premise and instead focused on the 1940s’ story.

from an excellent essay by K. Lee for Reverse Shot:

Any given scene in City of Sadness has its own internal history informing the logic of its characters’ behaviors. Hou’s sense of dramatic conflict—one that’s unique in cinema—arises when the recurring presence of the past collides against an unfolding present unknown to both the characters and the viewer. …

City of Sadness envisions a massive shift in a tiny island’s social fabric caused by forces well beyond the scope of any person, or even a community. Everyone is overwhelmed. No less than five languages are spoken in the film: Japanese and four forms of Chinese. Even Chinese viewers require subtitles when watching this film. … Perhaps due to being the first movie to deal openly with the “2-28 Incident,” or perhaps because of the Golden Lion it won at Venice, City of Sadness was the top grossing domestic film of its year. Nonetheless, there was public dismay at the oblique nature of Hou’s storytelling and the fact that the atrocities of the “2-28 Incident” are never depicted directly onscreen (despite that there are more fight scenes and onscreen killings in City of Sadness than in all of Hou’s other films combined). …

Scenes pass like clouds, loosely connected, the overall story arc not clearly in sight, and only in retrospect, with a final shot of an empty room that once held scores of family and friends, does the sum total of the film materialize, narrative, historical, emotional. Hou’s aim is nothing less than to enact how people live history—not as something happening right in front of them, but around them and beyond them, the same way then as now. In City of Sadness the horrors of the world occur almost always out of view, but it makes their presence all the more unsettlingly palpable.

by ·Comments Off on Past and Present (1972, Manoel de Oliveira)

The earliest Oliveira movie I’ve seen by three decades – and he was making movies three decades earlier than this. That would explain why this already feels like the work of an old master, even though I was considering it “early Oliveira.” The camera’s not as exactingly positioned as in Resnais films like Melo and Love Unto Death, but it has a similar feeling to those, the masterful European period dramas that seem at time to be filmed plays but with a mysterious sense that there’s always something more going on.

The Silent Gardener:

According to the wikipedia, Oliveira fell afoul of the government in the mid-60’s, accused of surrealism, then was silent for years until this film’s release. More: “With its lyrical surrealism and farcical situations, the film was a shift from his earlier work about lower class people. Based on a play by Joao Cesar Monteiro . . . Past and Present was the first of what has become known as Oliveira’s “Tetralogy of frustrated loves”. It was followed by Benilde or the Virgin Mother, Doomed Love and Francisca. Each of these films share the theme of unfulfilled love, the backdrop of a repressive society, and the beginning of Oliveira’s unique cinematic style.” It’s got that mannered surrealism typical of Bunuel’s late career – you can see how the two filmmakers got tangled together. Couldn’t tell if Oliveira was abusing the film’s soundtrack in various ways or (most likely) if the broadcast source of my video copy was a bit wonky. Second movie I’ve seen recently to use music by Mendelssohn. There’s not much written about the film online – even my most reliable Oliveira-advocate Rosenbaum had not seen this one, as of his writings circa Christopher Columbus, The Enigma.

First scene is a gathering of friends attending the funeral of Vanda’s ex-husband Ricardo. She abuses current husband Firmino, forbids him from attending. I don’t think Ricardo has just died – this is “the burial of his remains” two years later? “A year after his death, she married Firmino, and a year later, she fell in love with the former husband. An unhealthy passion for the deceased husband, the same that bothered her in life, and, at the same time, what an anger for poor Firmino!”

Firmino with hateful wife Vanda:

Also at the party: Fernando (sideburns, glasses) and Noemia (light hair, pulled back), a divorced couple with a better, more loving relationship than when they were married. Honorio (balding) and Angelica (reddish hair) are married, but slightly-shaggy, Depardieu-looking Mauricio is in love with Angelica. And finally there’s Daniel, the deceased Ricardo’s identical twin brother. Firmino is caught considering stabbing his wife to death, but holds back.

A year later, Firmino writes a suicide note then leaps from the window (comically avoiding being caught by the silent gardener). It takes him days to die, days his wife Vanda spends cursing his name and ordering a coffin – and the friends all gather at the house again. Angelica has been living with Mauricio, but he tells her to return to her husband (“This adultery will make you appreciate more the virtues of fidelity, just as a trip abroad reveals the sweetness of the homeland”) because he’s now in love with Noemia.

Cheaters Mauricio and Angelica:

Moments before her husband dies, Daniel reveals to Vanda that he’s really Ricardo, that the brothers had swapped clothes before the fatal car accident and he swapped his wedding ring afterwards.

“Vanda, your husband is dead”
L-R: Noemia (Manuela de Freitas of some Joao Cesar Monteiro films), Honorio (Duarte de Almeida of Magic Mirror, The Convent), Fernando, Angelica.

Another year – A judge has declared that Vanda and Ricardo are still married, so she’s now in love with the dead Firmino. Angelica is back with Mauricio and getting dumped again.

Ricardo spies Vanda hanging pictures of deceased Firmino around the house:

Daniel/Ricardo:

A friend is getting married, so the friends gather again, and the movie ends with the exchanging of wedding vows and Mendelssohn’s Wedding March.

by ·Comments Off on Borders (2001, Mostefa Djadjam)

Story of six Africans trying to emigrate illegally to Europe. They go from Senegal to Mauritania to Algeria to Morocco via boat then trucks (one of them refrigerated) then camels then by foot through the desert, truck again, then they’re stuck in Tangier for a while.

I don’t remember what happens to Arvey the stingy old guy in the end. Someone gets sick along the way and is left to the authorities, his bag stolen by Kadirou (Dioucounda Koma of A Screaming Man). Kadirou goes off with his cousin, Moussa the teacher, making their own way to Tangier.

Second half of the movie mostly follows the others: Joe the dreamer (Ona Lu Yenke of Code Unknown) who says his girl is waiting across the strait, Sipipi the sailor, and Amma the wronged wife (latter two end up together). I thought it’d be one of those endings where Joe doesn’t really have a girlfriend waiting for him in Spain, but she turns out to be real – instead it’s one of those endings where he drowns trying to escape when the police boat grabs them.

Pretty good movie, watched a very poorly-attended screening at GA Tech. The director also acts, was in Munich and Three Crowns of the Sailor. Katy probably has more to say about it since she is talking about teaching it next year, but I’m running behind on the movie blog so didn’t ask her input.

by ·Comments Off on Tideland (2006, Terry Gilliam)

I’d long put off watching this because of reports that it wasn’t any good. But of course it is good . . . it’s just maybe not GREAT. The lead girl (Jodelle Ferland, currently playing the one-armed undead girl in Cabin in the Woods), a playful innocent surrounded by grotesque adults, is captivating and manages to carry the movie. But despite all the darkness and death, the movie manages to feel slight. Maybe you need to see it in theaters – I would’ve liked to, but never got the chance.

Jeliza-Rose (great name) lives in an apartment with her junkie parents. When mom Jennifer Tilly overdoses, dreamer dad Jeff Bridges (the same year he was in some Full Monty-meets-Zach and Miri-sounding movie called The Amateurs), always going on about Jutland (part of Denmark?), takes her to the family’s abandoned, unsafe house in the country.

Tilly, following her second Child’s Play sequel:

J-R and her late father:

Soon he’s dead as well, stinking up the place, but J-R never loses heart, has fun narrating events to her troupe of doll-heads. She befriends an idiot boy named Dickins, and runs into his (mother? sister?) Dell, an amateur taxidermist who stuffs Jeff Bridges. The lunacy increases until Dickins finally manages to blow up the “monster shark” (passing train) and J-R wanders onto the crash site, mistaken for a surviving passenger and presumably taken off to a more normal life.

A nice family dinner. In background: mummy-dad Jeff Bridges

by ·Comments Off on Walkabout (1971, Nicolas Roeg)

I probably put off watching this for so long because I’d written down years ago that I’d already seen it, in the dark days of the pre-blog era. No recollection of any scenes while watching, so that must’ve been in error. Based on a novel, though I wonder how much of the original writing is left after Roeg got through with it. Roeg’s first movie with a solo directing credit. Jenny Agutter (“the girl”) went on to star in An American Werewolf in London and Child’s Play 2, Nic Roeg’s son Luc (“white boy”) is now a producer, worked on Spider and We Need to Talk About Kevin, and David Gulpilil, only 18 when this came out, became the most reliable Aboriginal actor from The Last Wave to Ten Canoes.

The kids are on a picnic with their father, when he starts shooting at them then torches the car and kills himself. Hardly fazed, the kids walk off into the wasteland. But we know from Man Who Fell To Earth and Insignificance that human emotion isn’t Roeg’s strong suit, so we focus on the visuals and editing, which are amazing and strange. For instance, mid-film there’s a page-turn transition giving the brief impression that the whole thing is a storybook. And in the middle of a cross-fade, one of the two overlapping scenes cuts to a different shot – you don’t do that!

Plenty of wildlife. Cool lizards, parakeets, cockatoos, hawks and things I don’t even know what they’re called. But it’s not a good movie to watch just for the pretty wildlife, unless you’re prepared to see David G. spear some kangaroos.

All sorts of extras on the Criterion release, which I need to get sometime. Meanwhile I’ve got P. Ryan’s essay from the website:

Toward the film’s end, it is the turn of the young aborigine to display, by means of a sexually charged ritual dance directed at the girl. The girl’s fearful rejection of him leads to another major change from the novel. There, the native boy dies from a virus to which he would not have been exposed if not for his encounter with these outsiders; in the film, the young man takes his own life. A film with two suicides and a delicately sensual nude scene was never destined for the label of “children’s classic,” and yet one can sense that Roeg has trust in the reaction of an adolescent audience, for he is speaking the truth of adolescence to us all.

Not that I’m a brilliant postcolonial scholar over here, but I saw more to David’s death than sexual rejection. When he finds the stupid white kids, they’re desperate and dehydrated. He shows them how to find food and water, leads them on a days-long hike to the place where he thinks the girl is asking to be led. She just wants her own civilization, but he bypasses roads and houses, leaving them to an abandoned farmhouse. Once there, she stops acting as his equal or follower, goes inside and cleans up, leans out the window with a bucket asking him for water, which he fetches. Now she’s in her element, and his role is to be her servant. Then a few scenes contrasting his traditional hunting methods with the shooting massacre of a rifle-toting white man – with jarring freezes and reverse photography. The mating dance seems like he’s defensively embracing his traditions and manhood, too late.

Afterwards one of the great endings, Petulia-reminiscent, as she’s back in her high apartment listening to some man talk about boring business, having a flashback to when she swam naked and free with a stranger in the outback. More from Ryan:

Much has been written about the “fragmented” style that Roeg has employed in so many of his films — Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and Bad Timing all play with linear narrative, setting subtle traps for the viewer and commanding our close attention. In Walkabout, this style serves to enhance the sense of memory that pervades the film. All coming-of-age stories are fundamentally memory stories, rooted in recollections of a time of great intensity, of growing, of puzzling, of understanding. We look back at that stage in our life and find memories of the pain we felt and the pain we inflicted, unthinkingly, because we did not understand ourselves and our burgeoning relationship to a new, strange adult world. The strangeness of that world for the girl in Walkabout is deepened by the landscape; for the aboriginal boy, it is deepened by his encounter with people for whom his lifelong training has ill prepared him.

“The happy highways where I went and cannot come again” – the closing poem is also the source of the phrase Blue Remembered Hills. And as Roeg borrowed, so was he borrowed from – one kid saying “I don’t suppose it matters which way we go” was used in the Books song Be Good To Them Always.

by ·Comments Off on Tout Va Bien/Letter To Jane (1972, Godard & Gorin)

Oh whoops – I planned to watch Weekend first, to go from the end of Godard’s beloved 60’s period, skip over his purely political post-May-’68 work with Gorin as the Dziga Vertov Group, and resume with Tout Va Bien and Letter to Jane. But I forgot, and watched this before Weekend. No matter, probably. But as I’d heard, the Godard of the 60’s never returned after ’68. This is so similar to his 60’s movies, despite the bright pop color, the custom-built sets, meta-movie voiceover, married-couple storyline and (especially) major stars. No, it’s as talky as The Owl’s Legacy.

Long-Distance Singer Yves Montand and newly-oscar-winning Jane Fonda were both known to be politically-engaged, and both were hugely popular at the time, so it was perfect casting for Godard and Gorin – plus an opportunity for them to gripe about Montand’s previous “problematic” political films. But G & G really want to polemicize at length, so they note in the voiceover that the stars were cast and given a jaded love story out of commercial necessity.

Unwitting pawns in Godard and Gorin’s political agenda:

Boss Caprioli:

Opens with JLG’s most cinematic-illusion-shattering move yet, close-ups on all the checks he’s cutting for the film’s stars, technicians, sets and so on. The juicy center of the film (shot in nice loooong shots, many of them motionless) consists mainly of dudes giving long speeches about union labor, class divisions, the political system.

“Under a calm surface, everything’s changing. Everything’s changing within every class. And She and He, swept up in it, also change.” Yves is a formerly-idealistic filmmaker (“a screenwriter during the New Wave”), now doing commercial work. Jane is a radio news reporter, and the two are at a factory office when the workers hold a major strike and lock the boss in his office for five days. So we get interviews with the boss (Vittorio Caprioli of Il Generale della Rovere): “the glaring injustices of Marx’ and Engels’ day are over,” and the shop steward: “our salaries haven’t kept up with increasing production, and even less with corporate profits.” It’s weird for a leftist, pro-workers movie that I can easily find who played the company manager, but not which actor played Stacquet the shop steward.

Some business in a supermarket that I didn’t understand because I wasn’t paying close attention anymore, but the long back-and-forth dolly shot reminded me of the factory scene in Manufactured Landscapes. Yves and Jane at their day jobs. Scenes of the factory in operation, of struggle in the streets. A token love-story-resolution ending in a cafe, which seems extraneous even as a joke, since the couple never got any development.

Great cross-section of the factory offices:

Yves, disillusioned:

From an interview with a wide-eyed bathrobe-clad Godard: “It’s quite striking. When workers are interviewed [on TV], these people are given 15 brief seconds when they haven’t opened their mouths all year. We give them 15 seconds, or even three minutes, to speak. ‘What do you think of the strike? What do you think of your lot in life?’ Who can answer when he’s had his mouth sewn shut?”

Letter To Jane (1972)

An hour-long photo-essay posed as a letter to Jane Fonda, analyzing a newspaper photo of her in Vietnam talking (or, as Godard & Gorin rightly point out, listening) to some unidentified men. She’d visited the country after the filming of Tout Va Bien but before its release, starting the ridiculous “Hanoi Jane” controversy, during which the press took the actions of a movie star more seriously than the war itself.

Godard and Gorin take turns narrating (in English), and each takes pains to avoid any interest in their voice, so the movie becomes a didactic lullaby. I got bored almost immediately.

See also: Every Revolution is a Throw of the Dice and Farocki’s Workers Leaving The Factory