Somewhat-funny comedy with some good moments, but mostly made me wonder when it would be over. Did not leave in a good mood, and things only got worse from there.
Tim Meadows was the funniest part. Harold Ramis funny too. Dewey Cox’s love interest is in the American “Office”. Everyone’s favorite scene was Dewey’s meditation with The Beatles: Jason Schwartzmann, Jack Black, Paul Rudd and Justin Long (of “live free die hard”). John C. Reilly good, but not awards-good.
Katy liked the songs.
“Personally, I wouldn’t marry a man who proposed to me over an invention.”
The biggest MGM hit of its time, featuring original (original!) songs “clang clang went the trolley”, “meet me in st. louis”, and “have yourself a merry little christmas”. With the awesome Judy Garland (of Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy).
Seven-year-old Margaret O’Brien (Tootie) was second and third billed in three major 1944 movies, and won an honorary Oscar for this one. I’ll bet no seven-year-old has done as well in a single year since. Neither has Margaret, who starred in two big pictures in ’49 then disappeared to television.
At least two girls are trying to get husbands (Judy nabs the next-door neighbor at the very end, after trying hard for the whole movie) and, along with little Tootie, are blowing every little thing way out of proportion, as girls tend to do. Some excellent side plots, such as Tootie’s Halloween challenge to “kill” an intimidating neighbor (throw flour in his face). Halloween was much more anarchic and fun back then – the kids build a bonfire out of furniture in the middle of the street. The title refers to the world’s fair, which the family sadly is going to miss because Dad got a big promotion and is moving them all to New York. Happy ending: he picks his hysteric family over job advancement, Judy is to be married, and Christmas is merry after all.
Silent star Mary Astor (Two Arabian Knights, The Palm Beach Story, Maltese Falcon) played the mother. The other sister, who nobody seems to care much about, older than Tootie by a few years, was in Leo McCarey’s The Bells of St. Mary’s the next year. I could swear oldest sister Rose looked familiar, but no she hasn’t been in anything else I’ve heard of. Servant woman Katie became famous as “Ma Kettle” in ten movies over the next ten years. Handsome boy next door John Truett worked through the seventies, when he appeared in The Boy Who Stole The Elephant and A Matter of Wife… and Death. Grandpa Harry Davenport (“Mr. Jarr” in a whole bunch of 1915 comedy shorts) also appeared in William Dieterle’s Hunchback of Notre Dame and a bunch of films with “Heaven” in their titles. And Leon Ames, the father of the Smith clan, was in a bunch of good films by name directors over the next ten years, including Little Women which featured four main St. Louis cast members, had a recurring role on Mr. Ed, and in his eighties appeared with Margaret O’Sullivan in Peggy Sue Got Married. June Lockhart appears briefly. I thought she was a big name, but I guess she’s best known for TV roles in Lassie and Lost In Space, later appearing in Troll and CHUD II: Bud The Chud.
The third feature, and first in color, by musical master Minnelli, who married star Judy Garland the following year. Produced by Arthur Freed, who wrote the song “Singin’ in the Rain”.
IMDB trivia sad note for Katy: “Van Johnson was supposed to play John Truett, but Tom Drake took over.”
More sadness: “The book on which the film is based originally ran as a weekly feature in the New Yorker Magazine in 1942. For the film many of the actions attributed to Tootie were actually done in real life by [author Sally] Benson’s sister Agnes. Also in reality Benson’s father moved the family to NYC and they never did come back for the World’s Fair.”
I liked it a lot.
DEC 2023: Watched again in HD… perfect movie.
N.P. Thompson: “the most numbingly inert movie musical ever made”.
Watched it twice in a week, the second time with good sound.
Barber is imprisoned and wife-snatched by judge, returns years later (with young sailor) for revenge, kills blackmailing rival barber, finds then loses interest in own daughter, starts meat pie business with neighbor, mistreats and tries to kill young assistant, kills judge, neighbor, and (accidentally) own wife, is killed by assistant while young sailor rides off with barber’s daughter.
Loving the songs, especially “not while I’m around,” “pretty women,” “I’ll steal you joanna,” and “these are my friends”. The actors all do wonderfully, and the ol’ Burton goth murk is back with a vengeance. Katy disliked the horror aspects and wished that any character besides the two kids in love was a likeable protagonist, someone she could root for, and not a horrible corrupt monster. I thought the two kids were plenty enough brightness in the black, black. I wouldn’t call it numbingly inert, but for a musical it doesn’t exactly pop off the screen. Maybe Thompson will dig the 3-D re-release.
I’ve gone back and forth a few times since seeing this.
FOR: the subjective camerawork from a bleary-eyed stroke victim’s point of view for the first 20 minutes is beautiful and avant-garde. The flights of fantasy mix and clash with harsh realities, like Bauby’s ex-wife and current girlfriend fighting over him via conference call, and there’s enough humor and absurdity to keep the whole thing light, even with the clouds of death and disability and shattered families hanging above.
AGAINST: it’s Schnabel’s third bio-pic in a row, and the story of a rich guy in hospital looking back on his life’s mistakes and dictating an autobiography by blinking his one good eye makes for the least essential story of the three. Bauby’s post-stroke struggle is interesting, but his life and character are not.
I feel like I should warn people against watching it, and at the same time, I want to run out and watch it again.
Max Von Sydow played Bauby’s father, and Ghost Dog’s ice cream man played his friend. His hot wife has been in a few Polanski movies (oh, she’s married to Polanski) and his even hotter nurse was in Ararat (the painting-slashing girlfriend, I think). Bauby himself starred in Assayas’s “Late August, Early September” and was billed just below Michael Lonsdale in “Munich”.
A sentence fragment from an IMDB review could be an alternate title: “The Patience of Others”.
Good ol’ Muppet Christmas Carol, just like I’ve seen it twenty times before.
Christmas Past is voiced by a nine-year-old, Christmas Present has Katy’s favorite line “come in and know me better man”, and Future is run by the lead puppeteer from Little Shop of Horrors.
Brian Henson also did Muppet Treasure Island and is supposedly exec-producing a Dark Crystal sequel and Fraggle Rock: The Movie in ’09, ugh.
Michael Caine did pretty well, but I thought Kermit and the hecklers both upstaged him.
Sembene’s fourth feature and his second movie I’ve seen named after a spell/curse.
IMDB: “It is the dawn of Senegal’s independence from France, but as the citizens celebrate in the streets we soon become aware that only the faces have changed. White money still controls the government. One official, Aboucader Beye, known by the title “El Hadji,” takes advantage of some of that money to marry his third wife, to the sorrow and chagrin of his first two wives and the resentment of his nationalist daughter. But he discovers on his wedding night that he has been struck with a “xala,” a curse of impotence. El Hadji goes to comic lengths to find the cause and remove the xala, resulting in a scathing satirical ending.”
Rama the daughter appears in Guelwaar.
“Storyboards are stupid, stupid things.” – Béla Tarr
37 shots (not counting credits) in 145 minutes, so average 4-minute shots, with all but a handful of scenes contained within a single shot. Camera usually in slow, gliding motion. Stark b/w photography.
Same editor as Tarr’s previous films (Tarr’s wife, now also credited as co-director), same composer and same author of the source novel. Similar in look and feel to Satantango for sure, which means it’s long and slow in a beautiful and captivating way. I never get bored watching these movies, and I don’t even have a theory for why that is… they ought to be boring as all hell, especially Satantango, but I’d gladly watch each one again.
From reading the credits you’d think it’s a grand communal project, not a film by one clear artistic voice. IMDB credits six people for cinematography, unbelievable, including a Kansas native (an acclaimed indie filmmaker), a French steadicam operator who worked on Amelie and The Science of Sleep, and unsurprisingly the guy who is sole credited cinematographer for Satantango and Damnation. Must read source novel sometime, “The Melancholy of Resistance” by Laszlo Krasznahorkai.
Opens in a bar at closing time, Janos Valuska positioning the other bar patrons into a model of the solar system, the camera spinning and rotating around them.
Janos walks to uncle Gyuri’s house (how does Tarr manage to make walking scenes the highlights of his films?) to put him to bed. Stops outside to watch a massive truck slowly roll into town, carrying an exhibition with a giant stuffed whale, various curiosities in jars, and “the prince”, a mysterious dwarf.
Next morning, townspeople are all alarmed, talking doom and destruction. Janos delivers some papers, goes back to his composer uncle Gyuri’s house and listens to Gyuri give a strange music-conspiracy speech.
Walks through the town square where groups of people are gathered whispering rumors amonst themselves. Thinking himself less naive and superstitious than the rest, Janos pays his 100 forints (about 50 cents) and tours the trailer. Walks home, sees uncle Lajos, must be tired by now cuz I can’t figure when Janos sleeps… but no time for rest, because his aunt Tunde (Gyuri’s estranged wife) comes with threatening news.
If Janos doesn’t get Gyuri to help her efforts gathering a town decency committee (presumably to eject the whale exhibition), she will move back into Gyuri’s house and make his life hell. So Gyuri and Janos get right on that.
They get some lunch, carry on, finally part and Janos goes back to the square, where he is accosted by the ever-more-restless townpeople gathered there. I’m starting to wonder if all of these are townspeople, or if some are outsiders drawn by the exhibition (which nobody but Janos is ever seen entering). Janos visits aunt Tunde to report, but she is with a raving police chief and Janos is sent to put the chief’s rowdy kids to bed. Okay, by now Janos has got to be tired, but he walks back to the square (sees uncle Lajos on the way) and sneaks into the trailer, hearing the trailer guy talking with the Prince (seen only in shadow) raving about chaos and destruction. Janos escapes and runs, hearing explosions in the distance behind him, presumably caused by the Prince’s riot-provoking megalomaniacal speech to the crowd.
Janos hides while the townsfolk smash up the trailer (off-camera) and tear up a hospital for some reason, terrorizing the people within including a very sad naked old man. Aftermath of that, everyone files slowly out of the hospital, Janos walks around and discovers uncle Lajos dead, and army men interview Tunde.
Back home, Janos sees aunt Harrer looking for her husband Lajos. She tells Janos that the army men are looking for him and he should flee town. He does so, running along the train rails until a helicopter catches him.
Gyuri is visiting Janos in a hospital. Is Janos mad? “Nothing counts. Nothing counts at all.” Gyuri leaves, walks through the square, examines the eye of the whale laid out on the destroyed trailer in the middle of town.
Main actor (Janos) is german Lars Rudolph (The Princess and the Warrior). His uncle Gyuri Harrer is Peter Fitz (Au revoir, les enfants) and aunt Tunde is Hanna Schygulla (star of Marriage of Maria Braun and other Fassbinders). Guy who played Petrina (Irimiás’s sidekick) in Satantango shows up as a hotel porter, and Janos’s neighboring aunt and uncle (I’m unclear whether these people are all actual aunts and uncles) played Halics and Mrs. Kráner in Satantango. I recognized Mrs. Schmidt in a scene as well.
Visual themes of space, shadows, enormity, eclipses, light disappearing.
MovieMartyr: “The film’s title gains meaning when János overhears his uncle György, a cooped-up music theorist, talk about tonal scales. He explains that the Werckmeister scale, upon which the musical octave is based, is a false construct, and is not true to natural sound since it cannot convey the full range possible in nature. He elaborates, stating that since all music is based on this faulty foundation, it is all inherently false. With his description of these musical concepts, György seems to tap into the film’s undercurrents. Certainly, the defective musical scale is roughly analogous to the broken political state of the country that the film is set in. His suggestion that all music is unnatural seems to set up a competition between the natural and unnatural (light and dark) that runs throughout the work. That he’s driven his wife Tünde out of his house with his obsession toward his out of tune piano doesn’t bother him in the least.”
Scope: “The climactic storming of the hospital, and the formation of the mob, is given more significance in the film than the novel. And although such an alteration suggests that Tarr intends Werckmeister Harmonies to be read as an allegory of fascist violence, the film does not offer any specific political causes for the violence. Rather, Tarr situates the violence as a function of modernity and industrialization, and, more abstractly, as having a cosmological basis.”
Sight & Sound: “The one truly identifiable centre of malevolence is Tünde, a reactionary opportunist exploiting superstition to gain power in the name of order. It may even be that her musicologist ex-husband Eszter, obsessed with the theories of 17th-century German composer Werckmeister, has himself contributed to disturbing the harmonic order of things by withdrawing from any active involvement; at the very least he is a representative of an enfeebled intelligentsia, vainly fiddling with abstractions while the world burns.” … “In the end the defeated thinker Eszter finally visits the whale, now beached and exposed in the wrecked square and more inscrutable than ever. It’s hard to imagine a more downbeat ending the complete triumph of entropy and reaction yet this conclusion derives a profound grace from the extremity of its pessimism. Explaining the cosmos to his drunks, Valuska pleads, “All I ask is that you step with me into the bottomlessness”, and that is essentially Tarr’s invitation to the viewer. The enigmatic harmonic preoccupations alluded to in the title suggest that this film rich in movement, low on dialogue aspires, as the old phrase has it, to the condition of music. But Tarr’s true achievement is to attain the condition of silence, and of bottomless, awesomely inscrutable nightmare.”
Online articles mention 39 shots, so one of us has mis-counted.
Béla Tarr: “We never use the script. We just write it for the foundations and the producers and we use it when looking for the money. The pre-production is a very simple thing. It takes always a minimum of one year. We spend a year looking all around and we see everything. We have a story but I think the story is only a little part of the whole movie. I have to tell you I absolutely hate the movies that I can watch at the theatres. They are like comics. They always tell the same stories. We don’t like these stories because for us every story is always the same old story from the Old Testament. After the Old Testament we have no new stories.”
Interviewer: “I just think there is a trend in world cinema towards this sort of existential terror and chaos.” Tarr, being awesomely elusive: “No, I just wanted to make a movie about this guy who is walking up and down the village and has seen this whale.”
“If you want to make a colour movie, and you go out onto the street, and you want to create the right atmosphere, you must paint the whole street, because every house is red, blue, green and so on. And you have no colours, you just have some colour chaos. For me it’s a kind of naturalism, the colour movie. With black and white you can keep it more stylistic, you can keep more of a distance between the film and reality which is important.”
same 2001 interview: “Do you know Georges Simenon? After the New York Film Festival one American producer called us. He wants to work with us. And he sent us a script which is full of shit and we said no, no, no. And afterwards he had another idea which we also said no to. And finally we proposed to him this short story by Simenon. The title is L’homme De Londres (The Man from London). And now we are working on this project. The script is ready. And this American producer founded this European company in Denmark and he moved from New York to Copenhagen. And we will start this project now which I hope we can complete.”
“You know the final cut took just half a day!”
May 2024: Watched the new restoration and read the novel… slowly. Fortunately there are only a few characters, with verbose tangles of thoughts, so it’s hard to find a paragraph break to put the book down but easy to pick up later. As always, Lasz-Krasz’s books in English seem like impossible feats of translation. The book has multiple perspectives including dim postman Valuska, while the movie entirely follows Valuska, who seems less dim. A different person dies in the riot (V’s mom in the book, Mr. Harrer here). The movie’s advantages include gorgeous photography and music, a compelling Valuska performance, and his unknown fate at the end. Replaced some screenshots above – more:
Boring movie about two white guys competing to be the first white guys to find the source of the Nile. Richard Burton (Bergin of nothing major) and John Speke (Glen of the last two Resident Evil movies) are on an expedition together in the 1850’s which is badly thwarted by angry Africans. They eventually return, Burton is injured and has to return home early, so Speke gets the glory for discovering the source. The two of ’em fight it out back at home for a while, plan a public debate to settle their stories, but Speke shoots himself on the day of. Burton was later a diplomat, knew a ton of languages, snuck into Mecca and translated “Arabian Nights” and the “Kama Sutra”… interesting guy. Fiona Shaw (H. Swank’s horrible mother in The Black Dahlia) plays his love interest/wife, and Richard Grant (How To Get Ahead In Advertising) plays someone or other.
Burton writing:
Speke in trouble:
Grant:
Another quizzical music biography by Mr. Haynes. Someone said that any of his music movies (“Karen Carpenter Story”, Bowie doc “Velvet Goldmine”) could be titled “I’m Not There”. Dylan is actually there, playing harmonica in close-up at the very very end.
Dylans:
Rimbaud / in interview room giving evasive answers / guy from “Perfume”
Woody / train-hopping authentic-sounding blues kid actually a runaway / Marcus Carl Franklin from “Be Kind Rewind”
Billy / quiet recluse living in a western town of his own imagination / Richard Gere
Robbie / guy playing Dylan in typical hollywood bio-pic / Heath Ledger
Jack / fame-shunning Christian folk singer / Christian (heh) Bale
Jude (also heh) / the well-known “don’t look back” 60’s dylan who cavorts with the Beatles and flippantly defies fan and media expectations / Cate Blanchett in one of my favorite performances of the year
Aaand Charlotte Gainsbourg is Robbie’s estranged wife, who is the heart of the movie, the only character with actual human emotion and understandable actions. She barely belongs except to keep the thing reigned in a little.
Fascinating movie, amazing music (Dylan of course) and b/w/color cinematography (Ed Lachman – The Limey, Far From Heaven, A Prairie Home Companion). Must see again and again.