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.

by ·Comments Off on Le Plaisir (1951, Max Ophuls)

“Still, it’s very sad.”
“But, my friend, happiness is not a joyful thing.”

Three filmed short stories by Guy de Maupassant, reminding me of Quartet. It wasn’t great and made me not want to seek out any of the author’s books… there it also reminds me of Quartet. Not narrated by the author like Quartet was, since the author is dead, but rather by a sort of author character who shows up as an active participant (the artist’s friend) in part 3.

So, Lola Montes and La Ronde, and even Letter From An Unknown Woman would have been wonderful, but I chose to show Katy Le Plaisir instead and now she thinks I enjoy stodgy period pieces. Sure it had some sparks of life in it, but even the documentary extras on the DVD wanted to talk up the difficulty in finding locations and in making the film rather than giving a reason why people seem to like it. Stanley Kubrick once called it his favorite film, so surely there’s something there.

Movie starts out weird, kicking it into high gear with a creepy-looking masked man dancing gaily at a fancy ball, then quickly passing out. It is discovered that he’s an old man trying badly to recapture his youth and hit on young girls, to his wife’s patient dismay.

Centerpiece segment seems like it wanted to be the entire movie, but wasn’t quite long enough so they tacked on the other two bits… it must be over an hour long, about a whorehouse that the camera can never bring itself to go inside. Fortunately, the whores all come outside, closing up shop to take a trip to the country for an unexpectedly moving wedding, before returning home to the glee of the townsfolk.

Last bit, a model and artist fall for each other, but when things get rough and he might leave her, she tries to kill herself… they end up together forever, she in a wheelchair.

Haven’t seen a Max Ophuls movie yet that takes place in modern day… guy liked to create ornate depictions of times past. Some fantastic shots made the whole thing worth watching, incl. the artist meeting the model in the start of segment 3, and her suicide later, which switches fluidly from an objective to a subjective camera, climbs the stairs with her shadow cast before us then crashes through the window and down.

I am so bad at recognizing people, because Simone Simon played the model and I didn’t know it. Jean Gabin was unmissable as the friend/host in the country in the middle segment at least. Claude Dauphin (President of Earth in Barbarella) was the doctor in the first segment.

by ·Comments Off on Shockproof (1949, Douglas Sirk)

“Stop being melodramatic” – Harry Wesson to Jenny Marsh… in a Douglas Sirk movie!

Did I even have to be told that Samuel Fuller wrote this, when the lead character is named Griff?

Jenny Marsh (Patricia Knight, Cornell Wilde’s wife of 14 years, career fell apart after their divorce soon after this movie came out) is a bad girl just out of jail. She went there covering for her boyfriend Harry Wesson (John Baragrey, appealingly slimy, pretty much a TV actor except for this movie). Gets out and meets parole officer Griff Marat (Cornell Wilde, kinda big star in the 40’s). Trouble ensues.

To keep an eye on the girl, Griff naively hires her to live/work at his house and care for his blind mother. She still visits Wesson on the side and schemes to fake falling in love with Griff to corrupt him and ease her situation. But of course they really fall in love, and she shoots Wesson in a struggle. She’s back in trouble, and Griff will be in trouble if he’s found out for marrying a parolee, so they escape to an oil town to start a new life (leaving behind blind mom and super-irritating younger brother). “But the strain of poverty and fear of apprehension begin to corrode” and they turn themselves in. In a suspiciously happy twist ending, a recovering Harry Wesson lets them both off the hook and they live happily etc.

Tight little 80-minute noir drama. I don’t know much about Sirk, but the Fuller element is there in traces. Fuller’s own debut, I Shot Jesse James, came out the same year.

IMDB reviewer points out: “The title, by the way, seems basically meaningless but to have been chosen for its purely abstract, noirish resonance.”

by ·Comments Off on To Each His Cinema, part 2 (2007)

Second half of shorts listing from Cannes 60th anniv. celebration (first half is here):

It’s A Dream by Tsai Ming-liang
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Occupations by a hatchet-wielding Lars Von Trier
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The Gift, more weirdness by Raoul Ruiz
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The Cinema Around The Corner, happy reminiscing by Claude Lelouch
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First Kiss, pretty but obvious, by Gus Van Sant.
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Cinema Erotique, a funny gag by Roman Polanksi with one of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s large-faced actors.
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No Translation Needed, almost too bizarre to be considered self-indulgent, first Michael Cimino movie since 1996.
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At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World in the Last Cinema in the World by and starring David Cronenberg, one of his funniest and most disturbing movies.
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I Travelled 9,000 km To Give It To You by Wong Kar-Wai.
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Where Is My Romeo? – Abbas Kiarostami films women crying at a movie.
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The Last Dating Show, funny joke on dating and racial tension by Bille August.
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Awkward featuring Elia Suleiman as himself.
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Sole Meeting, another gag, by Manoel de Oliveira and starring Michel Piccoli (left) and MdO fave Duarte de Almeida (right).
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8,944 km From Cannes, a very pleasurable musical gag by Walter Salles.
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War In Peace, either perverse or tragic, I don’t know which, by Wim Wenders.
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Zhanxiou Village, supreme childhood pleasure by Chen Kaige.
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Happy Ending, ironically funny ending by Ken Loach.
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Epilogue is an excerpt from a Rene Clair film.
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Not included in the DVD version was World Cinema by Joel & Ethan Coen and reportedly a second Walter Salles segment.

Not included in the program at all was Absurda by David Lynch (reportedly he submitted too late, so his short was shown separately). I saw a download copy… some digital business with crazed sound effects and giant scissors.

by ·Comments Off on To Each His Cinema, part 1 (2007)

A program of shorts that played at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival to mark its 60th anniversary. Pretty terrific bunch of 3-5 minute shorts by possibly the best group of directors ever assembled… worth watching more than once. Each is about the cinema in some way or another, with a few recurring themes (blind people and darkness, flashbacks and personal stories). Katy watched/liked it too!

First half of shorts (second half is here):

Open-Air Cinema by Raymond Depardon
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One Fine Day by Takeshi Kitano, continuing his self-referential streak.
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Three Minutes by Theo Angelopolous is a Marcello Mastroianni tribute starring the great Jeanne Moreau.
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In The Dark by Andrei Konchalovsky
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Diary of a Moviegoer by Nanni Moretti
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The Electric Princess Picture House by Hou Hsiao-hsien
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Darkness by the bros. Dardenne
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Anna by Alejandro González Iñárritu
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Movie Night, the first of two gorgeously-shot outdoor movie starring chinese children, by Zhang Yimou.
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Dibbouk de Haifa, annoying business by Amos Gitai.
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The Lady Bug by Jane Campion.
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Artaud Double Bill by Atom Egoyan.
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The Foundry, comic greatness by Aki Kaurismäki.
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Recrudescence, stolen cell-phone bit by Olivier Assayas.
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47 Years Later very self-indulgent by Youssef Chahine.
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by ·Comments Off on Gran Casino (1947, Luis Bunuel)

First movie Bunuel directed in 14 years, beginning his Mexican period with producer Oscar Dancigers.

Guitar guy in the prison in opening scene glances at the camera a couple times. Not on purpose, was it? Guess I’d have to hear the lyrics to know for sure. Damn cheap Lionsgate paid for an audio commentary but didn’t subtitle any of the songs. Why? It’s a musical. Lyrics might be meaningful. I can understand about half of the spoken Spanish dialogue but hardly any of the song lyrics. Wotever.

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Dreamy Gerardo and his mechanic friend Demetrio break out of prison and go looking for work… meet up with Heriberto, who introduces to Jose Enrique, owner of The National oil field, under siege from evil oil barons who threaten the workers. G & D are naive and need work so they recruit people easily and get the place running again. all is fine until baddie oilman Fabio has owner Jose Enrique killed.

Demetrio takes over the National next. The night before the oil is to start pumping, he goes to the casino and falls for Camelia, same girl J.E. was last seen with, and he too disappears courtesy of Fabio’s goons.

Well, Gerardo isn’t gonna take this anymore. When the beautiful Mercedes, J.E.’s sister, arrives from South America, she gets a job as a singer at the casino in order to find out more. Initially thinks G. is in on the plot, but belatedly teams up with him and helps foil Fabio. In the end she sells the National to the big big oilman, knowing that G has rigged the whole place to explode if he doesn’t make it back on time (and he doesn’t). Poor Heriberto and his kleptomaniac girlfriend Nanette are presumably left back in town with no work, as Mercedes and Gerardo ride the train outta town.

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A few, very few, possibly Bunuelian touches through psychologically meaningful shots… a drunk Gerardo stares at Nanette’s distorted, fading reflection in an ice bucket… a pane of breaking glass is superimposed on the image when G. knocks a guy out. Other than that, this is a very straightforward little studio movie. Looks awfully cheap for a musical, but not in a shoddy way, just in a non-Hollywood scaled-down way. We mustn’t blame Bunuel for the trite flicks he made in order to get by… it’s films like these that got him back in the director’s seat again, directly leading to Los Olvidados a few years later.

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by ·Comments Off on Becoming Jane (2007, Julian Jarrold)

From the director of Kinky Boots and a whole lotta tasteful literary adaptations comes this tasteful literary adaptation.

Katy liked it. I didn’t mind it because I was floating on having just seen Sunshine.

Jane Austen = Anne Hathaway (whom I half-saw when I half-watched half of The Devil Wears Prada).
Mrs. Austen = Julie Walters (mrs. weasley in Harry Potter)
Mr. Austen – James Cromwell (of I Robot and Star Trek First Contact)
Love Interest = James McAvoy (boring dude in Last King of Scotland)
His Uncle = Ian Richardson (Mr. Book in Dark City, Mr. Warrenn in Brazil)
False Love Interest = Laurence Fox (Gosford Park)
His Mom = Maggie Smith (Gosford Park, Harry Potter)