by ·Comments Off on Smiley Face (2007, Gregg Araki)

I think Gregg Araki has nothing to do with Arakimentari, the photographer doc I kept almost-renting a couple years ago. Rather he’s the director of hottt indie films Mysterious Skin and The Doom Generation.

A talked-about hit of Sundance 2007, this predictably turned out to be a breezily likeable little comedy which relies on the idea that watching someone act extremely stoned will stay funny for 90 minutes. It pretty much does. Mostly I liked the bummer ending and the rest was pretty okay, a time waster. Rented it as a palate-cleanser after Redacted, which was rumored to be crappy and which I feared would put me in a bad, bad mood like Road to Guantanamo and The War Tapes did… but I kinda loved it so there was no need.

Anna Faris with her mouth hanging open:
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Watching someone who is very stoned is, of course, hilarious. Anna Faris (who I do not remember from Brokeback Mountain) is very good, but could leave her mouth hanging wide open less often. There are also hilarious cameos by actors I mostly don’t know. In reverse order of how well I know them, they were:
– Danny Trejo, who doesn’t have much to do here
– Brian Posehn, who plays a big pothead on the Sarah Silverman Program
– John Cho, Harold himself
– Danny Masterson (Hyde in That 70’s Show), awesome as Jane’s roommate
– Adam Brody (skydiver in The Ten) as the dealer
– John Krasinski (The Office U.S.), who I’ve never seen before but I’ve heard his name a lot, in a good role as Jane’s duped love-interest
– Jane Lynch (Christopher Guest movies) as an unimpressed casting director
– late 70’s star and Hitchcock actor Roscoe Lee Browne as the narrator

Anna Faris with her mouth hanging open:
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Actually I had a better time wandering the IMDB looking up names than watching this movie. Get this, Anna Faris is gonna star in Kids In America this year. Her co-stars are a different guy from That 70’s Show, a different guy from The Ten, a guy who is playing Hitchcock in a fakey bio-pic, and someone from the previous Gregg Araki film.

Anna Faris with her mouth hanging open:
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by ·1 Comment

Wow, this was a lot better than I thought it’d be. Why did nobody like it… because it was fakey or obvious? Aren’t all B. De P. films fakey and obvious? But they way he puts those fakey pieces together, and their very in-your-face obviousness (or audacity) make for compelling pictures. This seems like an angry, hastily-assembled statement against the war, but at least it is an angry statement against the war, and against injustice, and one which is interestingly different from anything else out there – attention-grabbing, appealingly watchable, and truthful even as it makes stuff up.

Firstly, it does not seem documentary-like, even when the camera work is handheld. Very purposeful movements, good framing, not pretending like this is Really Happening To Real People, and this style is a great success. It’s a nice blend of the Blair Witch / Diary of the Dead aesthetic with some actual professional photography. I guess after YouTube, studios think people want to see crappy handheld home-movies a la Cloverfield, but De Palma, in not making his camera work “realistic,” has made a fakey movie, but an improved one. Also by using this documentary approach, he has a built-in excuse to employ his signature long takes, a stylistic bit that nobody seems to be commenting on.

Angel Salazar unwittingly filming his own kidnapping:
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At most half of the movie is this soldier’s handheld “doc” of his war experiences… the rest is made of leisurely intercut segments from similarly visually-enhanced sources: a French-made documentary on a checkpoint, a security camera, a legal video deposition, news footage, and websites with streaming video (!). It’s an interesting new way of incorporating the scary internet into a feature film… really just a website cut-and-pasted into the middle of the movie. The point being that each of these sources either progresses the story by giving us more information than a single source could provide, or gives us a new view or perspective on events we’ve seen.

Movie ends with “real” photos from the war, which have been censored by order of the cowardly film studio (HDNet/Magnolia)’s legal department, closes with a staged photo by B de P, I don’t know why exactly.

from the French doc:
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BdP: “The US government has co-opted the Fourth Estate. It made the networks buy its spun, whitewashed version of the facts. The government has made sure there are no images that are too upsetting. We don’t see the soldiers being hurt or killed. And we don’t see Iraqi civilians being hurt or killed. I’ve been watching this incursion into the Middle East and, being a director, I naturally wonder: Why are they leaving certain things out, and where are they? Even in the case of my movie, where I tried to get these images in, I got redacted.”

A redacted photo:
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I see nothing to complain about here. This movie shouldn’t have died like it did at the box office (I definitely would’ve gone if it hadn’t disappeared so quickly) and it shouldn’t be getting so many anti-American accusations by people who haven’t watched it. It’s specifically a film by an American about American troops killing the people they are supposed to protect, and that’s dangerous idealogical territory to be treading, so who we needed to tell the story was a filmmaker who walks hard like De Palma, who can’t (judging from an interview I just read) seem to tell when he’s being provocative or embellishing the truth, and who is well used to backlash. Not being an actual documentary, I didn’t find it as heartbreaking as The War Tapes (though they have similar endings), watched it with a more artistic remove, but from what little I’ve read in the media and Redacted-related articles and interviews, the story is real and is worth telling. Better to tell it now while it’s still happening (the soldiers were actually just acquitted, no surprise there) than to wait 60 years when it’s safe enough to make a Flags of Our Fathers prestige-pic out of it. It’s too bad the people who haven’t heard the story aren’t gonna see it here. Better luck next time, Mr. De Palma.

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Angel’s helmet-mounted night-cam shoots conflicted compadre McCoy:
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by ·Comments Off on My Night At Maud’s (1969, Eric Rohmer)

Jean-Louis is a Catholic engineer with an interest in mathematics and a dislike for Blaise Pascal (the mid-1600’s scientist and philosopher). JL meets up with old long-time-no-see friend Vidal, who takes him out dancing and then to visit Vidal’s friend Maud, a single mother, at her house on Christmas night. The section at Maud’s house must be at least a third of the film’s running time. Vidal is attracted to her, but she’ll have none of that. He gets drunk and finally walks home, Leaving JL to fend for himself. They talk about life, love, religion and Pascal, JL sleeps next to Maud but they only kiss once. The next day JL meets Franciose, a girl he has noticed at church, and makes a date with her, then joins Maud and Vidal out hiking in the snow, talking like comfortable old friends. Another friendly kiss. JL gives Francoise a ride home, stays over at her place (but in a separate room), flash-forward they are married with a kid, he meets Maud, and we find out that Francoise had an affair with Maud’s ex husband, but all is forgiven and the family goes to romp in the surf.

Like a more fleshed-out story of The Bakery Girl of Monceau, but this time the women have histories and personalities, and the bakery girl (or Maud) is much harder to write off. JL has a deeper character than anyone in the first two Moral Tales – Criterion calls him “one of the great conflicted figures of sixties cinema.”

JL and Maud:
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On the film’s style, Kent Jones says “No one’s films are more ‘written,’ more narrative based, or more logistically tied to particular places and times of year.” True that, an extremely talky picture, and reliant on its snowy seasonal setting. Finely but simply shot in black and white. No real visual or plot excitement, no stylistic heightening of mood or emotion, but a deeply thought-out script and characters evolving before our eyes. This particular week from Christmas to New Year’s is one of the most important in JL’s life, and we see (or hear) his changing and challenged beliefs, principles and decisions, creating the kind of real human complexity very rarely seen in movies.

Came out a decade after its closest (so far) kin in New Wave cinema, The 400 Blows, probably the quietest and most reserved film of 1969, the year of The Gladiators, Mr. Freedom, Topaz, Satyricon and Easy Rider (but to be fair, also the year of Andrei Rublev, Passion of Anna and Army of Shadows). Third of the Six Moral Tales, the last four of which were shot by Néstor Almendros, who also worked with Truffaut and Barbet Schroeder and later shot Days of Heaven.

More Kent Jones:

What are the chances that Jean-Louis and Maud will have a life together? Based on her luck with men and his avowed preference for Catholic blondes, not so great. Based on their immediate affinity for each other, not so small. “You are a happy soul, despite appearances,” observes Maud of Jean-Louis—and the essential rightness of this observation is what makes Rohmer a greater artist than Bertolucci and also points to what gives My Night at Maud’s its special spark and effervescence. … Current fashion would favor Maud as the voice of reason when she tartly dismisses Jean-Louis’ prevarications: “I prefer people who know what they want.” Yet there’s something equally admirable about Jean-Louis’ insistence on adhering to his story and fulfilling his own platonic conception with Françoise, a decidedly unhappy soul. The necessity of choice, the pain of choice: no film is better at illuminating these two ­equally real aspects of living. There are no moments of grace in My Night at Maud’s. … Yet there are intimations of grace in the slow, serpentine movement toward intimacy between Maud and Jean-Louis.

Maud and Vidal:
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Movie picked up a few screenplay awards, but mostly beaten out by the big political films of the era – Lindsay Anderson’s If… for feature at Cannes, Costa-Gavras Z for foreign film oscar and, ahem, Patton for screenplay oscar.

Vidal – Antoine Vitez (a smallish part in Truffaut’s The Green Room).

Franciose – Marie-Christine Barrault (Queen Gueneviere in Perceval le Gallois, also in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories)

Maud – Francoise Fabian (the lawyer Lucie in Out 1 and the mother in Secret Defense)

Jean-Louis – Jean-Louis Trintignant, who worked with (in order) Roger Vadim, Jacques Demy, Alain Robbe-Grillet, René Clément, Claude Chabrol, Costa-Gavras, Bertolucci (star of The Conformist), André Téchiné, Kieslowski (Red), and Patrice Chéreau (Those Who Love Me Can Take The Train).

JL and Francoise:
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by ·Comments Off on Avant-Garde Shorts (1960-2002)

Jimmy came over for an unexpected evening of avant-garde shorts which I kicked off by fast-forwarding through Michael Snow’s Presents to show off its wackyness. Then we skimmed the Index DVD catalogue and I watched some others after he’d left.

–
Structuralist Films By Kurt Kren
I kinda know what structuralism is, though I’d have trouble defining it… so I defer to P. Adams Sitney, who says a “tight nexus of content, a shape designed to explore the facets of the material,” and the films render content “minimal and subsidiary to the outline.” Sounds a lot like Presents.
37/78 Tree Again – stop-motion of a tree, sometimes with cows, sometimes without.
2/60 48 Heads From The Szondi-Test – I liked this one best – heads cut out of newspapers or magazines rapidly edited into a time-montage.
17/68 Green-Red – a meditation on green and red bottles. Not too exciting… hardly up to the meditation standards of Lemon, for instance. Not just green/red, I saw some yellow in there.

Christoph Huber, when asked “What is the greatest movie ever made?”:

“Why, Kurt Kren’s 37/78 Tree Again, of course.” – which usually just raises eyebrows. So then, it’s my pleasure to expand on how a film they’ve never heard of, by a filmmaker they’ve never heard of, embodies the beauty and contradictions of cinema in its essence – and does so in less than four minutes. Kren’s film has an additional advantage, not always the case in that grey zone we shall term for purposes of straightforwardness “avant garde:” It can be described quite vividly in words, and its genesis makes for a good story. For about two months Kren returned daily to the same spot in Vermont to shoot single frames of a tree (using a roll of infrared film well past its expiration date). The succession of frames was not chronological, but Kren rewound the film according to a prearranged plan. The result is intoxicating, miraculously and mysteriously capturing time out of joint. In split seconds, seasons change and leaves are flashing in different colours, animals and clouds rush by, light and weather mutate constantly. In capturing decay and renewal of (and around) this tree Kren communicates the perpetual flux of the entire world, and a central paradox of cinema.

–
Actionist Films By Kurt Kren
A contemporary of Peter Kubelka, who made the irritating short Pause, Kren is also known for his “actionist” films. Actionism was an Austrian movement of artists who rejected “object-based or otherwise commodifiable art practices. The practice of staging precisely scored actions in controlled environments or before audiences.” (wikipedia). A precursor to performance-art, this mostly meant that people like Gunther Brus and Arnulf Rainer stripped naked and threw paint on each other, and people like Kren and Kubelka filmed it. Not as exciting as the structuralist works.
7/64 Leda and the Swan – Leda is covered in goo and acts as the main course in a feast, but the actionists stopped short of actually eating her. Eli Roth might’ve seen this before filming Thanksgiving.
10b/65 Silver Action Brus – Brus is in a tent, painting the walls, I dunno, looked like something high school kids would do as an art piece (because of the cheapness and easy shock-value) then edited to bits by Kren.

Leda and the Swan:
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–
Peter Tscherkassky
One of my new favorite people! His “Cinemascope Trilogy” (first three titles below) is mindblowingly awesome. I hope to watch it over and over again… it joins the ranks of Heart of the World and Life Wastes Andy Hardy and Dog’s Dialogue in my short-film hall of fame.
L’Arrivée
2 minutes, train arrives and happy woman disembarks, film itself “arrives” on the screen too after fluttering about for the first half.
Outer Space
10 minutes of terror, as a girl in a haunted house movie gets brutally attacked by film editing and multiple exposures.
Dream Work
11 more minutes of sheer awesomeness taken from the same film as Outer Space, but not as terrifying.
Manufraktur
Super-multi-exposure remix of some TV ads.
Motion Picture
All light/dark white/black flicker with no distinguishable image, short
Get Ready
A trailer for the 1999 Vienna film festival using PT’s exposure techniques

L’Arrivee:
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Outer Space:
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Dream Work:
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–
Today (1997, Eija-Liisa Ahtila)
“Today my dad’s crying. Last night a car drove over his dad who died instantly.” First part, Tanaan, a pretty girl tells us about her sad dad. Second part, Vera, an older woman, says some stuff but it doesn’t last long and before I’ve gotten my bearings we’re on to Third part, Faija (dad). First we see grandad lay down in the shadows of a dark road, then the pretty girl’s dad talks about being a dad. Movie wasn’t what I was expecting after sitting through all that Kurt Kren, but it’s actually pretty good, really nicely shot, some kinda associative pondering of three generations (going from the girl to her dad to vera/grandad, back to the dad and girl) maybe? Music by 22-Pistepirkko! Ahtila is Finnish. I found art gallery websites spouting off about her methods, but it’s all fancy-talk for “she tells stories about people.”
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–
Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998, Martin Arnold)
Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland and Fay Holden are trapped in the moment, rewound, slowed down and turned into robots, their every subliminally sexual movement revealed. I can not watch this enough times… so happy to have it on DVD now.
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–
Le Film a Venir (1997, Raoul Ruiz)
Yay, more wacky short fun from my man Ruiz. Black and white and mysterious, once more about hidden meaning and light sources and repetitions, abruptly shifting mood and plot, either surrealistic or beyond my comprehension. I’ve watched it twice and I’m pleased to say that I can’t manage a plot description. More play with narrator voices and narrative shortcuts, like in Hypothesis and Dog’s Dialogue. And Ruiz has a hundred movies – a hundred movies! – to explore. I could not be more excited.
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–
Letter to America (1999, Kira Muratova)
Disappointingly not half as wacky as the Ruiz. A dude is being filmed by his friend, sending a video message to new york, but the dude has nothing to say. So dude goes to the place he rents and tries to get some rent money out of the woman staying there. She’s being a jerk about it, but gives him a little money. He wanders back to his video friend and recites a triumphant poem before the camera. Apparently had some Crime & Punishment references I didn’t catch. J. Taubman: “Muratova’s film is itself a letter to America. One of its not so hidden messages is an ironic self-commentary on Muratova’s own situation, an example of what talent can do even in poverty.” She won a $50,000 award in Berlin, which helped fund her next feature. I liked it alright, but rather than seeming like a new cinematic voice, it kinda seemed like an american indie short that speaks Russian.
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by ·Comments Off on Equinox Flower (1958, Yasujiro Ozu)

This came right in between the two other Ozu films I’ve seen, around the same time as The Hidden Fortress, Underworld Beauty and Giants & Toys.

Ozu’s first color film (in a very nice looking print at Emory) and the handout told us to watch for the red teapot but didn’t say why. The teapot was often anchored in the corner of the shot, a helpful indicator of which way the camera is oriented in the room. Not too familiar with Japanese traditional housing so it confused me that there was a giant opening on both sides of the living room until I noticed the teapot. That probably wasn’t the intention.

Music is nice for the most part, but turns into an icky music-box score sometimes in the home scenes. Reading what I wrote about Tokyo Story, it says Ozu’s signature line is “it’s a beautiful day”… I remember it in this movie, though I don’t know if it was during the family outing at the lake or another time, because I wasn’t listening for it.

Stars Shin Saburi (from a few other Ozu films) as Hirayama, a man to whom everyone turns for family advice. He claims that happiness for the children is the most important thing, but when it comes to his own oldest daughter (Ineko Arima from Tokyo Twilight, The Human Condition and Late Chrysanthemums) he backs down and refuses to let her marry who she wants. Hirayama’s wife (Kinuyo Tanaka, star of Life of Oharu, Flowing, The Crucified Woman, Sansho the Bailiff) patiently waits it out as he wrestles with his daughter’s decision to marry without his consent, agrees to attend her wedding at the last minute, and finally goes to visit her new home in Hiroshima to make up for having never smiled at the wedding (final shot is his train leaving).

Hirayama’s younger daughter was Miyuki Kuwano, only 16 when this came out, starred in Oshima’s Naked Youth two years later. The family’s giant-mouthed friend from Osaka with health problems, Cheiko Naniwa, appeared in Mizoguchi’s The Crucified Woman. Hirayama’s good friend (whose daughter leaves home and marries against his will, working at a bar which Hirayama visits) is the great Yoshiko Kuga, main guy from Tokyo Story and everything else, appearing in 180 films, 32 of them by Ozu.

Everything works out in the end. Hirayama is on the train, his friend is seeing his own daughter again, and the big-mouthed woman’s daughter is thinking of marrying. All the men have lots of daughters in this film – there’s a theory presented for that, but I think it was just meant for laughs. The scenes at the bar with Hirayama and his employee are pretty funny, too – I’d forgotten that Ozu was sometimes a humorist. Ozu had a co-writer, and it’s based on a novel – not trying to credit the director with every line of dialogue, but he embraced it at least.

Senses of Cinema explains the style: “There are no long takes or are there any very brief shots in his films. Each character’s contribution to a dialogue is delivered in a single shot. This technique is not however, to be confused with television dialogue where one actor looks left to the other actor looking right. Ozu’s performers are centrally placed, looking at the listener, and, at the audience. Between each dialogue scene, there is an establishing shot. These are held longer than establishing shots are in other filmmaker’s works, and they contain very little movement, or if movement is present, it occurs in the distance, often at the junction in a long corridor framed either side by the walls.”

And: “Ultimately Ozu’s films are observational. The Osaka woman may be the most annoying and irritating individual in Equinox Flower, yet she is not judged by the film. Hirayama, in his stubbornness towards his daughter and in excusing himself to escape another conversation with the Osaka woman demonstrates his human fallibility. Ozu easily identifies his characters faults, but he readily understands and forgives their foibles. Along with Renoir, he is one of the great humanists of the cinema.”

by ·Comments Off on Presents (1981, Michael Snow)

At first I read the title like “Alfred Hitchcock Presents…” but now I think it’s more like Christmas presents. PREH-sents. We’ll never know for sure.

A line sloooowly twists itself into an image of a room with a naked woman on a bed, slooowly twists itself back into a line. The soundtrack is a terrible drone noise and I’m getting worried, watching the time pass on the DVD player face and asking myself whether Mr. Snow would approve if I watched his movie on fast-forward, or at least played some nice music and silenced his drone noise.

Then I was thinking that Snow probably wouldn’t approve of my watching “Presents” at home on a TV with afternoon light from the windows glaring off the screen in the first place. So I’m better off not worrying about it.

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Suddenly the lines stop mutating into boxes and I cry out loud, “The camera moved! I am in heaven!” but it turns out the camera did not move. The whole set moved on a truck and hydraulic lifts while the camera stayed still. The naked woman gets up and puts on a robe, answers the door and lets in some guy. They look everywhere for something, while a record plays (and scratches and skips because the set keeps moving). Finally she finds whatever they were looking for, and the camera rolls up onto the set housed in some unseen destruction vehicle with a plexiglass front (you can see reflections which I’m pretty sure were not part of my TV glare) and clumsily mangles the set. Finally drives through the back wall, which falls down to reveal sky…

Drum hit!
camera pans down a waterfall
Drum hit!
we are creeping through the underbrush
Drum hit!
camera follows a line of buildings sideways
Drum hit!
I fall asleep.

A few days later I watched a bunch more avant-garde films (shorter than this one) and started P. Adams Sitney’s avant-garde book, then returned to this, beginning when the wall falls and the montage part begins. I fell asleep again! Seen most of it by now, and I get the point, so I am quitting.

The short shots in the montage section continue, camera always panning (note: camera mostly pans, not moves, but there’s clearly some movement in there), one shot cuts into the next with a drum hit, sometimes matching the same motion as the previous shot, sometimes changing direction, but always in motion, imitating the gaze of the human eye, oooh. After an hour and thousands of pans, the last cut is to a pink screen that fades to red then black.

A film camera attacks and destroys a TV set:
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Don’t have it with me, but in the Sitney book the author says he uses the term “avant-garde” instead of “experimental”, because experimental implies that the artist is still messing around with his technique and doesn’t intend his film as a finished, planned piece. Can’t say that’s true of Presents, which was clearly planned, but it does feel experimental to me in that it’s an “investigation” of camera/eye movement which is actually interesting but I’ve found hard to watch. Snow bemoans that people’s attention spans for this kind of film aren’t what they used to be (hence his time-compressed reissue of Wavelength) and I guess I’m not helping matters by saying I thought this was too long.

Snow says he used a “Quantel analog effect” to stretch and squeeze the image in the first ten minutes.

Distributor calls it “an investigation into representation, process and material and the nature of camera movement.”

P. Monk:

The apparent vertical scratch in celluloid that opens Presents literally opens into a film within the film. When its figure awakens into a woman in a ‘real’ unreal set, the slapstick satire of structural film begins. It is not the camera that moves, but the whole set, in this first of three material ‘investigations’ of camera movement. In the second, the camera literally invades the set; a plexiglass sheet in front of the dolly crushes everything in its sight as it zooms through space. Finally, this monster of formalism pushes through the wall of the set and the film cuts to a series of rapidly edited shots as the camera zigzags over lines of force and moving fields of vision in an approximation of the eye in nature. Snow pushes us into acceptance of present moments of vision, but the single drum beat that coincides with each edit in this elegaic section announces each moment of life’s irreversible disappearance.

S. Liebman:

A major work, even when measured by the standards of Snow’s most impressive achievements. The title is a complex, provocatively ambiguous pun. The first section is a play based on the slipping and colliding senses of the word ‘presents,’ its homonyms, synonyms, and related concepts …. In the last section, assisted by the drum beat accenting each cut, the editing insists on the separateness of each shot and by doing so it constructs a vast inventory of different things and events. This extraordinary concluding montage sequence poses the most concerted and comprehensive challenge to the discourse of presen(ts)(ce) mounted by the film.

M. Snow in a 2002 interview:

Presents has something like three different modes in it. There is pushing and stretching, the tracking of the set, which because of convention you think of as camera movement, but you can see that the set is moving, then there is the smashing up of the set, followed by almost an hour of hand held pans which are from all over the world. Each one the pans is a different reaction to the scene with the camera. So that if the camera was moving in one way you might follow it or if the shape was round you would shoot it in a round way. One of the things I wanted to do was to cut each pan so that there would be no continuity from shot to shot, so they were isolated in time and space as these little instants taken from life. Pans are obviously much different from dollies or tracks. They are a glance. And they also reinforce a certain ephemerality, so there is a sadder aspect to the glance. It is recorded but then it is gone and then there’s another glance and it is gone. So that part of Presents is a particular thing that I have not done that much, a montage of things that have a tremendous variety, not in terms of the world itself but in terms of what you can gather from the world.

by ·Comments Off on Youth Without Youth (2007, Francis Ford Coppola)

“And the third? Where do you want me to put the third rose?”

Starts out like Diving Bell and the Butterfly (man awakens after traumatic accident, can barely communicate in hospital) but ends up like The Shining (our hero frozen to death outside). Has some striking shots and scenes but does not have what those two movies do – a unified look, a consistent tone, a sense of sanity. Coppola veers briefly into Lynch-land then comes thudding back to earth with long dialogue scenes only to pop off again a few minutes later. On one hand, it is always refreshing to watch a movie that isn’t quite like any other because it is nuts. On the other, it is attempting to be a narrative film, to present some characters and tell a story, so I wish it would go ahead and do so. Either it makes a load more sense if you’ve read the book, OR the book is mysterious and ambiguous so the film tries to preserve that.

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What the movie does right: casting the always awesome Tim Roth (above), being likeably insane, playing with time and memory and sci-fi elements without putting the scenes out of order like everyone else does nowadays (there are flashbacks, but there have always been flashbacks). Opening with classic-hollywood-style credits and closing with a simple “The End” title card. I have to admit that made me happier than anything else.

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I don’t think the movie was as beautiful as it intended to be. The shot above (captured from the trailer) is very nice, but most of this underlit blueish photography was just sort of dull. Themes of love and religion are touched upon but not tied into the time and language focus of the plot. Whenever the movie wants to get philosophical it gets interrupted and bogged down in more story. Movie is crazy, but it’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula crazy, or Apocalypse Now crazy, an affecting crazy that makes you feel a little crazy yourself, not a stupidly faux-cult sort of Buckaroo Banzai crazy. I wouldn’t want to sit down and watch it again tomorrow, but I enjoy that feeling from time to time. Lots of dubbing. Uneven sound mix. Makes much better use of its Romanian locations than, say, Man With The Screaming Brain did. Uncredited Matt Damon cameo (but he’s in the trailer and the promo stills so it’s no secret).

I’d like to thank the Tara for mis-framing the film AND projecting it out-of-focus. Few people knew this was playing, even fewer cared, and still fewer got out to see it in the one week it lasted… and we had to watch it out-of-focus. This is why it’s okay to watch movies at home on DVD.

Oh, story, let’s see. Tim Roth is 70 years old in 1938 when he’s hit by lightning and nursed back to health by Dr. Bruno Ganz (Hitler in Downfall, one of the angels in Faraway, So Close). Tim starts aging in reverse, can remember everything and learn instantly, has to hide out from nazis during WWII then moves to Switzerland. Remembers his 1890’s lost love, now dead, finds a girl who looks just like her, she gets hit by lightning, starts flashing-back to previous lives in ancient civilizations and speaking ancient languages. This helps Tim greatly since he’s a master linguist writing an ultimate linguistics book which will be a rosetta stone for future generations and teach them something important about humanity which isn’t quite explained. Tim had given up on the book previously, was gonna kill himself when the lightning hit. Anyway the woman (Alexandra Maria Lara, also in Downfall) starts aging rapidly because of her proximity to Tim, so Tim leaves her despite their mutual love, sees her years later married with kids. Tim has been talking to his other self/selves, apparently schizophrenia but one time the girl saw it too. One day (mid-50’s?) young Tim returns to his hometown in Romania and smashes the mirror in which another self appears, then goes to his old favorite bar and is back in 1938 with all his old friends, aged 70 again, a few minutes before he goes out and freezes to death.

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Must’ve been more spoken languages (real and created) in this movie than any other I’ve seen. IMDB says the first cut was an hour longer… this makes sense. Look for Youth Redux on disc, I guess. Only award nomination was an Indy Spirit for best cinematography, appropriately beaten for the prize by Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

I must’ve missed the line when Tim Roth said he was gonna eat poison that day in ’38. So that’s what he does in the end… that is why he spits blood when leaving the bar. Makes the ending much more Donnie Darko than The Shining.

Note, a few weeks later I’m starting to like this movie more and more. Its age/time/youth themes are obviously deeply-felt by Coppola, and the movie takes the time to explore them during those slow parts, no slave to regular movie pacing. Maybe should be seen more as a Romanian film than an American one. Plus, I mean, it is way crazier than There Will Be Blood or anything else out right now. Gotta see again someday, in focus this time.

Slate: “Coppola, describing his first reading of the Eliade novella that inspired him, has said, ‘I loved the way one darn thing after another kept happening.’ If nothing else, his film has certainly captured that feeling onscreen.”

AV Club: “It’s somehow both incomprehensible and not experimental enough; the more Coppola hangs onto his stilted narrative, the less vibrant his free-wheeling ideas become.”

FF Coppola: “I’m offered projects where there are five directors I can think of who can do it as good, or better, than me. I want to make movies that only I can make. Youth Without Youth, maybe I’m crazy, but I am the only one who would make that movie. It would not be a movie if I had not existed. I was offered Thirteen Days, and I had some wacky ideas about how to do it. But they didn’t want wacky ideas. And in the end, the guy [director Roger Donaldson] did it fine. I want to make movies with the same attitude as if I were going to fall in love with something. And if I don’t, there isn’t enough money on earth to pay me to do it.”

“I think most people today are imprisoned by what they have been told movies have to be.”

by ·Comments Off on Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001, John Cameron Mitchell)

Some shots from the ending:

Hedwig-Hansel as Gnosis-Corgan. It’s complicated.
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That’s songwriter Stephen Trask on the left.
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Yitzhak unleashed! I will look out for her next time I watch Shortbus.
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An Emily Hubley moment:
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edit August 2011:
I finally got Katy to watch this, after five years of trying.
I don’t think she hated it, either.

edit March 2017:
Well, she didn’t like it enough to watch again with Maria.

by ·Comments Off on The Divorcee (1930, Robert Z. Leonard)

Norma Shearer won best actress for this part, beating out Garbo and Swanson.

Conrad “Paul” Nagel is an overly-made-up stagy-acting dude, later starred in Tod Browning’s The Thirteenth Chair. Paul broods lamely for Norma the night she gets engaged then drunkenly crashes his car disfiguring Dot, whom he’s coerced into marrying.

Chester Morris, later to star in The She Creature, with black hair slicked down to his skull, is Norma’s new husband Ted, cheating on her with his ex. Norma finds out, Ted tells her it doesn’t mean a thing. So she cheats also. Doesn’t mean a thing, right Ted? They divorce, but Norma learns her lesson and restrains herself from breaking up Paul’s marriage, getting back together with Ted in a new-years-eve finale.

Robert Montgomery, later to star in Lady in the Lake and Mr. & Mrs. Smith, is their comic-relief friend.

Pre-code raciness: divorces and married couples kissing, ooooh. Promiscuity! “From now on, you’re the only man in the world who my door is closed to.” Only reason this movie wouldn’t be rated G today is the car crash scene when Dot’s sister sees Dot’s disfigured face and screams “oh, I hope she dies, I hope she dies!” Terrible!

The sound quality wasn’t too great. Movie is pretty okay, but I expect to have forgotten it by the middle of next week. Ten minutes later the TCM documentary on the Hays code showed all the good scenes from this movie in a quick montage… could’ve saved me some time.