by ·Comments Off on We Have a Pope (2011, Nanni Moretti)

I only know Moretti from a couple of cute shorts in different anthology projects. This could’ve been another cute short – I expected something weightier, but it had little to say about the Pope, Vatican, religion, just an occasionally funny little story about an elected pope who disappears, spends some time on his own, and returns to proclaim that he can’t accept the job.

Michel Piccoli (in two of the movies I anxiously want to see from this year’s Cannes festival) is the confused pope and Jerzy Stuhr (star of Kieslowski’s Camera Buff) is a large-faced official spokeman who tries to take care of the situation. Moretti himself plays a psychiatrist hired to visit the vatican and help the new pope, but when the pope escapes (covered up by Stuhr by having a guard hide in the pope’s quarters, eating expensive food and rattling the curtains to indicate his presence) Moretti has nothing to do and isn’t allowed to leave, so organizes a volleyball tournament, dividing the cardinals by home country – my favorite part of the movie. Piccoli meanwhile visits Moretti’s estranged wife Margherita Buy. You’d expect something to come of this, soon-to-be-divorced psychiatrists each treating the same troubled pope, but no. The movie really amounted to a pleasurable afternoon watching the great Piccoli, nothing more.

The Guardian points out that the movie got mixed reviews from Vatican reviewers, then proceed to give it a mixed review themselves. In competition at Cannes the year Tree of Life won.

Moretti quoted in Indiewire: “People may have wanted me to do something different, but I wanted to surprise them actually. Some people thought I’d denounce some areas of the Vatican but that is why I chose not to do that… I wanted the story to be a surprise.”

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White-hatted Gaston is visiting Dr. Maillard’s psychiatric hospital when they’re met at the gate by a loony-acting guard, and I suddenly realized this was based on the same Poe story as Svankmajer’s Sileni, and is going to suffer in comparison. Gaston is welcomed into the asylum, led by the swirly-robed man on the DVD cover, while his red-hatted friend (Martin LaSalle, star of Pickpocket) is attacked in the woods and his woman raped. It just isn’t a bad 1970’s movie unless a woman gets raped.

The guy from the DVD cover:

The girl from Alucarda’s DVD cover – what’s she doing here?

The movie’s in English, which the actors are having trouble getting used to – some words are pronounced differently each time they’re spoken. Gaston’s straight Rod Serling line delivery conflicts badly with Maillard’s strangely-accented rapid-fire drama. It wants to look like Vadim’s Spirits of the Dead segment with the careful posing of actors and scenery before the camera. One of those euro-art films, but from Mexico. Moctezuma also made the Satan-in-a-convent movie Alucarda, which I saw but can’t much remember.

White hat and red hat:

Lunacy:

This one is more masculine than Sileni, less interested in the daughter/prisoner character Eugenie than in Gaston and Maillard (Claudio Brook – Simon of the Desert himself), but really it doesn’t seem too interested in any of them. There are some half-hearted pursuits and mysteries, and even the tarred/feathered “real doctors” in the basement scenes have little explanation (and nothing like the terribly doomed finale of Svankmajer’s version). The “hero” never does a thing; the prisoners escape on their own. It’s a series of crazy scenes, signifying nothing.

Claudio having an epic shout:

Eugenie’s revenge:

by ·Comments Off on What To Expect When You’re Expecting (2012, Kirk Jones)

A happy movie full of good smiling people, including J-Lo, Up in the Air‘s Anna Kendrick and The State‘s Thomas Lennon. Based on a self-help book, which AV Club points out makes it a similar adaptation to Fast Food Nation, building stories from a non-fiction book to convey its general idea. Mostly I looked past the actors and focused on the Atlanta locations (lots of Piedmont Park, the Woodruff Arts center, someplace on/near Highland, and a whole scene at Smith’s Olde Bar). Katy says it makes adoption seem preferable.

At least it was written by women, even if it was directed, produced, shot, edited, scored and designed by men – bland men, if you ask me. One of the writers did Whip It, the other the Jamie Lee Curtis Freaky Friday.

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This is the fifth post-’68 Godard movie to put me to sleep, after Letter to Jane, Histoire(s) du Cinema (in installments), In Praise of Love and Notre Musique (in a theater). In this case, I was tired and angry at the movie and fell asleep on purpose, to make the movie feel bad about itself (assuming Godard doesn’t take it as a compliment when you sleep through his movies, like Guy Maddin does).

techno-rasta godard:

Tried to watch it without paying heed to the stories surrounding its production, which turn out to be more interesting than the film itself. Godard signed the “contract” on a bar napkin, over a year later got calls from the “producer” asking where’s our film?, JLG read the first few pages of King Lear and got bored with it, hired a bunch of overqualified actors and pissed them off. Writer/actor Norman Mailer walked out after one day, and Godard put this and his voicemails from the producer into the final cut. Something like that, anyway – I can’t be arsed to look it up.

Shakespeare Jr. or whatever:

Burgess Meredith (in his follow-up to a Dudley Moore Santa Claus movie) is apparently the King, talking some nonsense with Molly Ringwald (her inexplicable follow-up to Pretty In Pink) in a hotel room. Downstairs in the restaurant, a wiry, spike-haired Peter Sellars (dir of something called The Cabinet of Dr. Ramirez) is real interested in what everyone else is doing. As I drifted awake again later, Godard (with RCA cables wound through his hair and indecipherable English speech) and Woody Allen caught my attention for a few moments each. Might be a nice-looking movie – the DP had shot the last couple of Eric Rohmer movies – but you can’t tell from my VHS copy. And I doubt it, anyway.

Molly:

from Canby’s original NYTimes review: “a late Godardian practical joke . . . as sad and embarrassing as the spectacle of a great, dignified man wearing a fishbowl over his head to get a laugh. . . . After making what is possibly the most lyrical film on language in the history of the cinema (Le Gai Savoir), Mr. Godard has now made the silliest.”

Rosenbaum would disagree: “It may drive you nuts, but it is probably the most inventive and original Godard film since Passion,” and he talks about the complex surround-sound mix, which again, I’m sadly missing on my VHS version.

Typically, JR has put more thought into the film than anyone else, his analysis revealing the film’s fundamental link to the spirit of the play.

Excerpts:

Sellars “introduces himself offscreen as William Shakespeare Jr. the Fifth, and roughly describes his job as restoring what he can of his ancestor’s plays after a massive cultural memory loss was brought about by Chernobyl.”

As the film proceeds . . . we get snatches of Shakespeare’s Lear, snatches of what appears to be Mailer’s Don Learo, and snatches of what appears to be an earlier, unrealized Godard project, The Story, about Jewish gangsters Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky in Las Vegas. (Three Journeys Into King Lear, as one printed title puts it. But does “King Lear” in this case refer to the play, the character, or the Cannon Films project?)

For Godard, it’s a legitimate source of pride that he won’t film anything to illustrate a scriptwriter’s point or provide continuity; his disdain for ordinary filmmaking practice becomes a creative challenge, and, in terms of his limited capacities for story telling, a calculated risk. . . . This originality often seems to be driven by hatred and anger, emotions that are undervalued in more cowardly periods such as the present, just as they were probably overvalued 20 years ago. It is a source of energy that remains crucial to much of the avant-garde.

by ·Comments Off on Seisaku’s Wife (1965, Yasuzo Masumura)

Okane (Ayako Wakao, star of Red Angel) comes from a poor family, is the young bride of a gross old man. So she poisons him to death, claims her inheritance and returns to her mother’s village, where the people completely ostracize her. When her mother dies from illness, Okane agrees to watch her retarded cousin Heisuke, and they live in their rich, lonely house.

When golden boy Seisaku (Takahiro Tamura, murdered husband in Empire of Passion) returns to the village, he gets the opposite reaction – constant praise and a parade in his honor. He takes to ringing a bell every morning to awaken the whole town and inspire them to get to work. He enlists people to help with Okane’s mother’s burial, chastising them for being terrible to her. Inevitably the two get together, but brave Seisaku returns to war, and everyone goes back to being shitty towards Okane for the next six months.

Okane, hated:

Seisaku, loved:

Seisaku returns wounded, and as full of honor as ever, promising next time he’ll die for his country. The two are unofficially married, sleeping together but nobody in town (and certainly not Seisaku’s family) takes her seriously. He’s all she has, and life is horrible without him, so she pokes out his eyes with a giant nail as he prepares to leave again.

Okane with Heisuke:

Okane with nail:

She’s sentenced to two years, and since Japan doesn’t understand logic, the whole town hates Seisaku for dishonorably failing to return to war, figuring he was in on the plot with his wife – a woman none of them ever trusted. During that time, he understands how it feels to be an outcast, and after Okane returns, they go away together. “Without you I would have stayed a stupid role model soldier.” Good story, but I was sick of the hateful villagers and wished for a Carrie ending: punishment for all.

Written by Kaneto Shindo, who also made the great Onibaba and died a month ago at the age of 100.

by ·Comments Off on I Love You Again (1940, W.S. Van Dyke)

It’s been a month since I watched this amnesiac comedy so I’ve forgotten most of it, but IMDB says “Boring businessman recovers from amnesia and discovers he’s really a con man… and loves his soon-to-be-ex wife.” Starring Myrna Loy (with never enough screen time) and William Powell (better at playing amnesia/gangster than he was at playing nuts in Love Crazy).

Besides the love plot, Powell has to keep up appearances in town, running a pottery business and other organizations. It turns into a big swindle with he and his new buddy Frank McHugh (part of Cagney’s company in A Midsummer Night’s Dream) getting the local rich folk to bid against each other for some worthless land on which they’ve planted an oil spill.

I spotted Preston Sturges regular Harry Hayden at the bar in the first scene, then nobody else for the whole rest of the movie, though the children included future Lost Highway creep Robert Blake.

by ·Comments Off on Voyage to Italy (1953, Roberto Rossellini)

R.R. places a deteriorating family amongst lovely scenery, like a proto-Eclisse or Climates. Ingrid Bergman and husband George Sanders are a bored rich couple in Naples waiting for an inheritance sale to come through – the first time they’ve been alone without friends and distractions since their marriage began eight years prior, and the solitude immediately reveals that they’re not very good together. Bergman is troubled and questioning, the titular voyager, taking meaningful tourist trips, while cruel drunken Sanders fucks off to Capri, hangs with some old acquaintances, tries to hook up with one of them then drives around with a prostitute. Finally back together, the couple admits it’s not working and plans divorce (in between two death scenes – Pompeii then a funeral), but a minute later they’re separated in the streets and run back into each other’s arms. This seems like an unhappy ending to me, but I’m not Italian so I wouldn’t know.

We visit Pompeii and unearth dead lovers, while Vesuvius lurks in the background, where I imagine Bergman’s clone is running from her husband Stromboli-style. Much mention from the locals about Bergman’s uncle Homer, late owner of the inherited property, how loved and respected he was. Our modern couple couldn’t seem to care less about love and respect, these small-town people and their concerns and customs.

Bergman is led around the area by Leslie Daniels, later of The Brain That Wouldn’t Die while Sanders hits on Maria Mauban, later of a Chabrol movie called Code Name: Tiger. Sanders had recently won an oscar as the gossip columnist narrator in All About Eve, and had as little respect for this film as his character had for his own circumstances, saying “the story of the film was never understood at any time by anyone, least of all the audience when the picture was released.” Ross nicked DP Enzo Serafin from the last few Antonioni films and had long stretches with no music, but it was brother Renzo’s most pleasant whenever it arrived. I liked it much more than Stromboli, not as much as Europa 51. For all R.R.’s supposed realism, I’ve been lately feeling that his movies’ endings ring false.

DVD commentarian Laura Mulvey calls it the last of the three “major” Rossellini/Bergman films, and the last of their marriage, “a story of social contrast and cultural shock,” and says that Renzo uses Neapolitan folk songs in his score. I can’t believe I didn’t catch this: the couple’s last name is Joyce, and Bergman tells a story of an admirer from her youth similar to the climax of James Joyce’s The Dead.

by ·Comments Off on This is Not a Film (2011, Jafar Panahi & Mojtaba Mirtahmasb)

Set up to be a doc of house-arrested filmmaker Panahi by his documentarian friend Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, with Panahi explaining and roughly staging the next film he would have made if the authorities had let him (coincidentally[?] to be filmed inside a house, concerning a girl who is not allowed to leave). But Panahi cuts off the play-acting and gets philosophical, showing scenes from his work and telling us that if films could be explained, they wouldn’t have to be made. He then takes over the not-film, finally picking up the camera, following a maintenance man outside to a small-scale replay of Offside‘s finale. Throughout, there are definite signs that either this movie was much more cleverly planned than it’s meant to appear, or that Panahi’s life is full of happy coincidences and unplanned art. Either way, I’d been afraid that this would be a movie solely acclaimed because of its subversion, its very existence as political protest, which would’ve been enough, but was delighted than the entire work justifies its Cannes-acclaimed reputation.

Panahi’s daughter’s pet iguana provides the special effects, an unseen neighbor who needs a dog-sitter so she can participate in the celebratory new-year fireworks provides humor, and Jafar’s phone conversations with his attorney provide context on the project.

Panahi attempts to use the internet inside Iran. “Wherever you go, it’s blocked. Most websites are filtered. The rest don’t say anything.”

Mirtahmasb: “Take a shot of me, so in case I’m arrested there will be some images left.”

Panahi’s next film was going to be made with Mohammad Rasoulof, who now suffers the same political fate as Panahi and filmed his own response while out on appeal, Goodbye, which hasn’t made it to video yet.

M. Peranson in Cinema Scope:

Of special note… is Panahi’s bootleg DVD collection, which features the Ryan Reynolds-in-a-coffin film Buried facing us, clearly placed there to make a point.

The work feels completely effortless but my money says it’s an elaborate sound and image construction: though it claims to be a day in the life of Panahi, Mirtahmasb explained in interviews that the film was shot over four days.

by ·Comments Off on Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (1939, Kenji Mizoguchi)

I got this confused with Naruse’s later film entitled Late Chrysanthemums, so I watched his When a Woman Ascends the Stairs to get an idea of Naruse’s style and point of view before watching his Chrysanthemum movie. Unfortunately, I learned that I enjoy Naruse’s movies more than Mizoguchi’s. Still, it’s the earliest Mizoguchi movie I’ve seen by over a decade, and I figured perhaps he hadn’t fully developed his theme of depressed women, fucked over by life, dying sad and alone. The premise had promise, but sure enough, halfway through, the main couple is coughing, crying, broke in the rain. The man recovers, becomes famous, but there’s no saving the woman.

Kikunosuke (Kiku) is the rich, spoiled son of a master actor, who keeps fucking up on stage. Not knowing a bloody thing about Japanese theater, I can’t tell the difference between a good and bad performance (any more than I could figure why The Puppetmaster was considered a master) so I took the movie’s word for it. He falls for Otoku the maid because she’s the first person to tell him outright that his performances are bad.

Kiku leaves town for a year, then comes back for Otoku and she faithfully follows him to a travelling troupe where he gradually improves. Poverty kinda turns him into an asshole, but he’s still devoted to his woman – to a point. When his family takes him back to the respectful theater in Tokyo, they’re easily able to separate the two, and he only returns in time to see her die.

The high-def picture was pretty beat-up looking. Kiku is often tiny in the frame, facing away from the camera, but I can still recognize his Sherlock Holmes hat. Also, at one point there was a monkey.

The Guardian on Mizoguchi:

He was nicknamed “the Demon”, and it was often said that he only made films in order to have enough money to entertain geishas. He was fascinated all his life by demimondaines [“a class of women on the fringes of respectable society supported by wealthy lovers” aka prostitutes], and some critics have suggested there was something suspect about his compassion for the often tragic fate of such women. However, in Late Chrysanthemums he remorselessly shows the selfishness of the actor and the innate snobbery of the kabuki world.