by ·Comments Off on Dog’s Dialogue (1977, Raoul Ruiz)

Colloque de chiens is the real title, Dog Symposium is the title on the subtitles. The movie is a story told to each other by dogs through a series of stills, La Jetee-like, with quavery synth music and dry narration. The dogs are shot live-action with natural sound.

Dogs on a vacant lot bark at each other over the credits.

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“The woman you call mum isn’t your mother” Monique turned pale on hearing those words from a school friend. Madame Duvivier tells little Monique that Marie, the woman who often comes by, is the real mother. Marie tells Monique that she doesn’t know who her father is. Monique flees Bordeaux. “From now on, sex and domination shall rule Monique’s life.” Monique is a nurse, has illicit affairs with her male patients. Christmas eve 1966 she dances with rich, 65-year-old Hubert, intends to seduce him for his money. Monique becomes a “cold and dry voiced whore” with “an urge for revenge”.

Dogs bark in apartment windows and balconies.

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Monique falls for the TV repairman, Henri, who she remembers from her hometown. She starts a new life, opening the Joli Mont cafe, but “in fact she’s buying her own death”. Henri helps her run it. Alice, a friend from home, comes to visit, blackmails Monique to not tell Henri about her sad past, has an affair and falls in love with Henri. When the three are in the park, Monique kills herself and her 3-year-old son Paul-Henri. Dogs.

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“Henri’s only option is to marry Alice, his wife’s intimate friend, who dominates him. In a way, Alice was buying her own death.” Alice tells about both women’s pasts on their wedding night. Henri has an urge for revenge. He grabs an empty bottle of wine, which turns into a knife on the images, and kills her. Dogs. Henri cuts up Alice’s body and hides the parts all over town, which switches to live-action for a bit, with no dogs but the sound of children singing.

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Back to stills. Henri goes to Marseilles and falls into some shady dealings with gangsters, is jailed for 5 years. Nurses a sick cellmate with whom he has an affair. The police draw a map of the body parts they’ve found, which form a circle, the Joli Mont cafe at the center. “The universal geometric laws gave him away”. Live action street shots, adults singing.

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Stills. Mr. Benami tells Henri about sex-change operations in Casablanca, “the perfect disguise”. “Henri Odile has become a charming young lady.” Christmas eve 1974 she’s invited out by a rich, 65-year old man, intends to seduce him for money. Odile becomes a prostitute. Goes back to Montsouris, sees the Joli Mont is for sale, buys and runs it, adopts young Luigi. One evening, 18-year-old Fernand comes to the bar with a bottle of wine / knife / empty glass, kills Odile. Dogs barking. At school, Luigi is pestered by his friends. “Your mother was killed by her lover.” “That’s not true. The woman you call my mother wasn’t my mother.” Credits.

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This movie is as old as I am. I watched it three times in one weekend… it is fantastic.

The editor and composer both still work with Ruiz (That Day, Klimt, etc), the cinematographer is now with Olivier Assayas, and the actress (!) who played Henri is now a press agent. Everyone involved still alive and well, including Ruiz, who has a euro-art-meets-quentin-tarantino cast of actors lined up for his next film.

by ·Comments Off on Gang of Four (1988, Jacques Rivette)

Netflix says: “Art and life intertwine when four aspiring actresses study with a renowned film instructor in this acclaimed psychological drama … Assigned to analyze the play Double Infidelities, the women – who also happen to be roommates – soon find themselves caught up in a web of suspense and scandal as the script spills over into their offstage lives.”

EDIT: you know I’ve got a horrendous writeup when it opens with netflix’s envelope plot description… need to watch this again and update.

Half of this one takes place in Bulle Ogier’s theater, where the girls are practicing a play we never see performed, and I’m watching, all “ooh, that’s just like in Out 1 and Paris Nous Appartient” but I’m not really paying attention to the text of the play, so whether the Netflix blurb is accurate I cannot say. Then we’ve got a secret conspiracy, the train rides from Secret Defense (done very differently here, brief and abstract), a direct reference to La Belle Noiseuse, throw in Bulle and you’ve got Rivette 101.

The careful compositions and slow unveiling of story and character flow like a Rivette film, but otherwise I can’t say it was similar to his others that I’ve seen… the experience of watching them was very different. I guess it’d be most similar to Secret Defense.

Above: JR muse Bulle Ogier as a great actress turned acting instructor.

The titular four are Joyce, Anna, Claude and new roommate Lucia, who is replacing ex-roomie Cécile, who has started acting strangely and disappearing, caught up in her boyfriend’s criminal trial. In a mystical storm scene, Lucia finds some keys that Cécile has hidden in the apt., keys which could clear the boyfriend’s name while taking down someone powerful. Thomas is out to stop this at all costs, following each of the girls (mostly non-threateningly) and asking them questions, finally getting sometime-lesbian Claude to fall in love with him, gaining him access to the house so he can search for the keys. Cécile has also come back looking for the keys, and even Constance (Bulle Ogier) gets involved, getting arrested at the end for hiding Cécile’s boy after he escaped prison.

Some occasional Celine and Julie antics (see mock trial above). What movie has most in common with Out 1 is its split between the easily-summarized plot (above) and the theater scenes.

Irene Jacob of Red and Double Life of Veronique had a small part, as one of the actors I think.

Above: the Four, left to right:
Lucia – Inês de Medeiros – in movies by João César Monteiro and Pedro Costa
Joyce – Bernadette Giraud – later in Secret Defense and Joan of Arc 1
Claude – Laurence Côte – in Up Down Fragile, Thieves and Godard’s Nouvelle Vague
Anna – Fejria Deliba – in an Olivier Assayas movie

And:
Cécile – Nathalie Richard – Up Down Fragile, 2 by Assayas, 2 by Haneke
“Thomas” – Benoît Régent – lead dude in Blue, died a month after Red opened
Constance – Bulle Ogier – of Out 1 and everything else

Jan 2024: watched again in lovely HD. No men onscreen for the first half hour, and you forget you’re watching an ’80s movie until the moment they appear. Bernadette nails the snooping cop in the head at end after he assaults Portuguese Lucia for the key they’ve been hiding. Not an improv movie like I half-remembered it, proper blocking and editing within scenes. My 2007 writeup is bad but Reverse Shot concurs that it “reeks of Rivette from the very outset… really, what could be more Rivette?”

by ·Comments Off on The Ten (2007, David Wain)

Not in order: 1. Guy (Adam Brody) gets stuck in ground after bad parachute dive, achieves short-lived fame / 2. Woman on Mexican vacation (Gretchen Mol) has passionate affair with Jesus Christ (Justin Theroux) / 3. Guy (assistant chef in wet hot) skips church to stay home naked, invites over lots of other guys / 4. White mom confesses to black kids that their real dad wasn’t white, hires impersonator (Oliver Platt) / 5. Doctor (Ken Marino) leaves scissors inside patient “as a goof” / 6. Woman (Winona Ryder) leaves new husband for ventriloquist dummy / 7. Animated rhino (Jon Benjamin) lies until no one trusts him, then town is wiped out after not believing his warnings / 8. Prisoner (Marino again) being raped by cellmate wishes to be raped by a new cellmate (Rob Corddry) / 9. Neighbors (Liev Schreiber & Joe Lo Truglio) have rivalry over who owns more cat-scan machines / 10. Couple from framing device (Paul Rudd & Famke Janssen) meet years later and get back together

What humor there is gets stifled by the endless unfunny parts, a pained grin on my face, wanting to enjoy the movie but being horrified instead by its lameness. Parts 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10 and the entire overlong Paul Rudd framing device pretty much suck, and that’s most of the movie. The others would be funny web sketches that I’d watch on YouTube (but probably turn ’em off before they were over) but they’re not movie-worthy… the thing doesn’t feel like a movie, like W.H.A.S. did, just a rough draft of a failed sketch show.

Jessica Alba and Janeane Garofalo and Michael Showalter and Michael Ian Black knew better than to get deeply involved – they all have bit roles. Either replacing Showalter with Marino as co-writer was a bad idea, or the whole thing was doomed from the start. The trailer was funnier. Just glad I saw it for free.

by ·Comments Off on Goya’s Ghosts (2007, Milos Forman)

A pretty well-composed movie, not bad overall. The artistic look, good framing, lavish sets & costumes all put indie-hack fare like “last king of scotland” to shame, so it’s a fine movie to watch, if nothing great is playing. No doubt that this one isn’t “great”… it’s too even, regular, plain… nothing daring, original or transcendent, just a big pretty movie. Director Forman only pops up every 4-7 years to make another biopic (amadeus, larry flynt, andy kaufman). IMDB says he’s working on another one already.

First, to get it out of the way, the bad. It’s one of those movies where you can play “spot the reshoots”, as newly-dubbed lines show up when characters’ backs are turned and they weren’t supposed to be speaking, or during another actor’s reaction shot, then they’ll cut back to the speaker (in long shot, preferably) and his lips don’t match up. It’s not like I’ve read that this was a troubled production that required reshoots… they’re right up there on the screen. That, and our theater smelled like Windex.

Then the good. I told Katy I hadn’t seen Javier Bardem since Before Night Falls (2000) but I forgot his small part in Collateral (and I missed Live Flesh at the Almodovar retrospective). Fun to watch him croak out his lines with that serious look on his face, but even more exciting is Michael Lonsdale (THOMAS from Out 1) as Bardem’s superior. That shouldn’t be so thrilling, since he’s in Munich and Ronin and other stuff, but maybe that should tell me something about “goya’s ghosts”, that the most engrossing moments were when I was imagining scenes from “out 1” instead.

Funny thing about Randy Quaid (played the king). He’s in nothing but the dumbest movies for twenty-five years, then he gets cast in Brokeback and now suddenly he’s “and featuring academy-award nominee randy quaid” in studio prestige pictures. the Oscar nom was from 1974, not from Brokeback. Heh, from Pioneer Press: “Swedish Stellan Skarsgard plays Spanish painter Goya and where a key theme is that the Spanish people hate their new king because he’s from France. Which is weird, because he’s played by Randy Quaid, whose accent evokes not Baroque Spain or France, but Houston, circa today.”

Yeah, uneven accents and just a not very great movie full of tragedy with sad ending, but there’s even more Natalie Portman torture/imprisonment than in “V For Vendetta”, so if that’s your thing, here’s your movie.

by ·Comments Off on My Best Friend (2006, Patrice Leconte)

One of those breezy, happy, lightweight French movies that attracts elderly people to the Tara. I didn’t think I’d be watching stuff like this, but “The Valet” was good and I needed a comedy, so…

Probably liked it better than The Valet, too. Movie about friendship, or more accurately about people who have no friends and why that is. Climax is a maybe-overlong segment of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire with the French Regis.

Rich guy from Valet plays antiques dealer, and lead Valet’s valet friend plays a talkative trivia-obsessed taxi driver who is friendly with everyone and friends with no one. There’s a significant, expensive vase, a daughter who doesn’t love her dad (awww), some jaded girlfriends and coworkers, a cruel bet, and two concerned parents. PG-13, 90 minutes long, better than it sounds, and already due for an American remake.

Okay, just read a Reverse Shot article calling this movie out for being completely uninventive, almost entirely unfunny, and having not a single realistic character or situation, catering to oldies who can’t handle today’s profane American comedies, giving them this “Gallic piffle” that seems highbrow because of the subtitles. Probably true, but I was in the mood for it at the time.

by ·Comments Off on The Gay Divorcee (1934, Mark Sandrich)

A light and funny musical about trying to ruin a woman’s reputation, sort of the opposite of the end scene of Buster Keaton’s College.

Supposed to be “the first film that featured Astaire and Rogers in equal billing”. I kinda recognized Rogers from Monkey Business, and Astaire from those cartoon caricatures where he has a giant head and big hands. Hmm, now I’ve seen his first (Flying Down to Rio) and second movies, and none of the other 40+ he made through the years. Who else?

Alice Bracy as the almost-annoying Aunt Hortense was also in My Man Godfrey and Young Mr. Lincoln before dying of cancer in ’39.
Edward Evertt Horton, Fred’s posh-looking straight-man sidekick (the lawyer who arranges the divorce at a resort), appeared in other Astaire movies incl. Top Hat and Holiday
Erik Rhodes is Mr. Tonetti, the amorous fake-beau who pretends to cheat while his wife cheats on him for real, was in the Broadway version of this, and later appeared in Top Hat.
Eric Blore, the waiter, was also in Top Hat, jeez.
Betty Grable, the most famous pin-up girl of WWII and star of The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend, had a featured dance, but I didn’t recognize her.

Won best song at the Oscars for “The Continental” but lost out best picture to It Happened One Night and best art direction to The Merry Widow (also with edward e. horton). I’m not sure it should have been in strong contention for best art direction in the first place… not exactly a huge production with lights and mirrors, sort of small-scale simple dancing and singing. We liked it.

by ·Comments Off on Big Night (1996, Stanley Tucci & Campbell Scott)

The producers (Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott) chose an interesting script (written by Stanley Tucci and his cousin) then hand-picked directors Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott, who cast Stanley Tucci, Tony Shalhoub, Minnie Driver and Campbell Scott.

So a vanity project, and an obvious one (for everyone other than Ian Holm, who is too shouty and shifty and will hopefully not use this on his actor’s reel).

Italian brothers Tucci and Shalhoub (who is actually Lebanese via Wisconsin) have a restaurant that is failing because the food is too authentic for the locals and the atmosphere is dead. They have time for one final feast, their “big night” if you will, with special guest of honor Louis Prima (so movie is maybe set in the late 40’s), invited by their across-the-street rival Ian Holm who is suddenly all buddy-buddy with them. But Holm lied (to get the restaurant to fold, so the brothers will come work for him) and the bank will be foreclosing soon. Before that though, we must have a raging party with the best food anyone has ever tasted, and the brothers must fight then make up in the end, their futures still unwritten.

Such a typical 90’s indie movie. Really nothing to complain about, we enjoyed it pretty well, but it’s also no more groundbreaking or artistically exciting than Shalhoub’s directorial debut (written/starring his sister-in-law) eight years later Made-Up.

Isabella is here, but with too small a part to liven up the movie… it’s really all about the men.
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Cinematographer Ken Kelsch (an Abel Ferrara regular) here tries to emphasize the fact that Ian Holm has a mustache, without actually showing the mustache. A risky artistic move that pays off. Holm does, it is later revealed, have a mustache.
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The anticlimactic ending (all serious indie movies have anticlimactic endings):
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by ·Comments Off on Alternative 3 (1977, Christopher Miles)

Hosted by an actual BBC personality, this was a special episode of a (made-up?) show called Science Report that aired on April Fool’s Day. Plays it very straight, a well-made fake documentary. Can’t scare people with it anymore because of the dated 70’s look, but it would be fun to re-stage today, especially with global warming so big in the news.

The premise is that scientists discover global warming has passed the tipping point and the planet is doomed. The space race is a ploy, and subsequent moon landings after the first few were faked on a studio lot. Really the shuttles are delivering parts for a new ship that will be launched from orbit to send some hot scientists and a representative group of people from different specialties to live on Mars, where they have recently discovered life, to begin a new society. All of this has been hidden from the Earth public to avoid panic. The BBC has carefully uncovered hints of the truth over the last six months but hasn’t learned everything. The movie ends with questions, and a challenge to the people involved in this secret project to explain themselves on-air.

This movie is as old as I am. Cool spacey music by Brian Eno. Some of the same crew later worked on Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected, including producer John Rosenberg, who died of cancer in ’91.

by ·Comments Off on Guys and Dolls (1955, Joseph L. Mankiewicz)

Worst part: at no point did the whole cast sing “guys and dolls… we’re just a bunch of crazy guys and dolls!” The Simpsons has misled me again. It had better not happen again… I wanna hear Lee Marvin sing “gonna paint that wagon / gonna paint it fine / gonna use oil-based paint / ’cause the wood is pine”.

Movie was really good… colorful and fun, full of cops and robbers and action without getting too serious, and swapping off the super-corny dancing segments with some slightly (slightly!) more dignified ones.

Frank Sinatra is a sorta wussy and slimy guy who sets up craps games, Marlon Brando (whyyy cast him in a musical, exactly?) is the tough super-gambler, Jean Simmons (Spartacus, Black Narcissus) is the cute missionary Brando falls for while taking her to Cuba to win a bet, Vivain Blaine (of nothing special) is Sinatra’s off-again actress girlfriend who can’t stand him but wants him to marry her, and Robert Keith (sheriff in The Wild One) is the cop trying to catch everyone involved.

After a buncha fun musical numbers, movie ends with a double wedding, so what else matters, really? Katy liked it too. Good night, everyone.