by ·Comments Off on The King’s Speech (2010, Tom Hooper)

Nominated for an ungodly number of oscars, winning picture, actor and director (over four of my longtime favorites: Fincher, Russell, Aronofsky and Coen). I smelled another inconsequential Shakespeare In Love and was prepared to be offended, but was crestfallen to discover that I really like the movie. It’s superbly acted, as we’ve heard over and over, but also very well written and even interestingly shot. Damn. At least Social Network got (adapted) writing and editing, both of which it richly deserved (sorry, Inception).

Simple story, really, with a built-in, historically accurate underdog triumph ending. The duke (who becomes king a couple years later) stutters horribly during any attempt at public speaking, so his wife turns to an uncredited speech therapist with unusual methods in a last-ditch attempt to help her husband, culminating in the new king’s first major radio address, declaring war on Germany in 1939. My favorite scene is when Geoffrey Rush’s wife discovers the king and queen in her husband’s grimy study, revealing to the king (and the audience) that Rush’s speech therapist has faithfully kept his famous student’s secret even from his own family for years.

Colin Firth, a longtime Katy favorite, did not disappoint (I thought he was better in A Single Man). Guy Pearce played a very convincing Brit. Good to see Helena B. Carter and Michael Gambon, too. I don’t know what the movie had against Winston Churchill, casting him as a toady Timothy Spall. Hooper previously made soccer movie The Damned United and the John Adams miniseries. Writer David Seidler worked on a couple of not-well-liked 90’s cartoon films and something called Kung Fu Killer. Shot by Danny Cohen (This Is England, Dead Man’s Shoes) with production design by Eve Stewart (Topsy Turvy).

by ·Comments Off on South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut (1999, Parker & Stone)

Ha, I didn’t realize that Mike Judge played the voice of Kenny.

Still one of my favorite movie musicals ever.

And I still haven’t watched any seasons of the show since this came out…

EDIT NOV 2020: Showed this to Maria because she wanted to watch all the quotable 90’s movies… she did not seem to enjoy it much, but then had “Uncle Fucka” stuck in her head afterward, so mission accomplished.

by ·Comments Off on And Everything Is Going Fine (2010, Steven Soderbergh)

Soderbergh made a sort of Spalding Gray autobiography, stitching together monologues and interviews from across Gray’s career into a new monologue – not one Gray would have scripted himself in precisely this way, but thoroughly captivating. The picture is nothing special, lots of 4:3 video sources – Gray’s story is everything.

The open is perfect, revealing the out-take nature of the film, a rough videotape of Spalding sitting down, attaching his microphone and beginning a story. Lots of talk about death – maybe that was always present in his stories, but you really notice it now.

Topics: childhood, christian science, his parents, his mother’s suicide, beginnings in acting, sex, conversations with audience members, his movies (three of them anyway – nobody ever mentions Terrors of Pleasure), his two wives and his children, and the car accident a couple years before he died, with mentions of R.D. Laing, Gray’s work in pornographic film, “poetic journalism,” dancing to Tubthumping and the meaning of life. It’s like the best Inside the Actor’s Studio episode, with no interviewer.

I don’t know why, but for a whole segment he is holding up a Playboy.

by ·Comments Off on I Saw The Devil (2010, Ji-woon Kim)

I enjoy a good horror movie, and have looked forward to this follow-up to The Good, The Bad and The Weird. It’s a well-shot cops-vs-serial-killers story. But beginning with the first murder, I got the increasing feeling that this would be less an enjoyably thrilling horror flick than a torturous bit of nastiness.

Then I got another steadily increasing feeling, that of a massive migraine which would knock out my ability to function for the rest of the day and keep me home from work the following day from its after-effects. So I spent a half hour of this movie willing myself not to have a migraine, hoping maybe at least I could finish the movie before it got too bad, taking breaks, sitting in dark rooms, then returning. Finally I figured it’s a bad movie and there’s nothing I can do to help myself anyway, so I might as well watch the second half under the sensory-distorting influence of a brain-crushing headache. Better to try and enjoy the glowing HD picture of a stylish slasher than sit bored and useless in the bedroom all evening.

Anyway, movie plays like a sequel to Se7en – 20 minutes in, a detective sees his wife’s head in a cardboard box. Her dad is in charge of the violent crime unit, and you’d think he’d be into solving this particular crime, but it’s the obsessed husband (Byung-hun Lee, The Bad in Good/Bad/Weird) who gets results, by going on an illegal rampage against all the lead suspects, getting into the killer’s head and swearing to torture him in return. Halfway through he finds the guy (Min-sik Choi, star of Oldboy), a school bus driver, and tracks him, beating the shit out of him every couple of scenes, finally beheading the guy in front of his estranged family. It’s a dark and torturous movie, which was extremely difficult for me to sit through, though that’s not completely the movie’s fault.

by ·Comments Off on Night at the Crossroads (1932, Jean Renoir)

Opens with a great mix of music mixed with machine sound effects and wildly stylish titles, but it gets quieter and more (Re)noirish from there.

Guy’s car is stolen, replaced with another. He blames his Danish neighbors. Cop checks out the Danes’ garage, finds the guy’s car with a dead jeweler named Goldberg inside. The Dane seems innocent of the crime, but suspicious on another level. He wears a villainous-looking black-eyepatch monocle and has a slinky young sister Else with a pet turtle, who claims she asks to be locked into her room when her brother is away, but the inspector finds a key hidden in there. If one goes looking for Renoir connections, the inspector walking around the Danes’ living room playing with all their little machinery is reminiscent of the Rules of the Game. On the other hand, this movie features a car chase shootout, something I never thought I’d see in a Renoir film.

Turns out the crossroads (a garage, a butcher shop, the Danes’ house, couple other buildings) is a den of corruption. Else is actually wife to her so-called brother, and ex-wife of the killer, who’s in league with Oscar the mechanic and insurance man Michonnet – so pretty much everyone we meet is involved. Gangsters arrive, just blasting away at the garage where the inspector has been cracking the case, which leads to the aforementioned car chase.

A nice twisty and foggy detective story. The first adaptation of a Georges Simenon novel. There would be over a hundred more, including Magnet of Doom, Red Lights and The Man From London. Starring nobody who would seem very famous, besides Renoir’s older brother Pierre (later in La Marseillaise) in the lead role. His assistant Lucas was George Terof of Whirlpool of Fate.

D. Cairns:

Renoir’s [camera] does move with a … sense of narrative emphasis, but what he chooses to emphasize in this story often seems quite eccentric. And by his staccato editing, directly zapping from scene to scene, sometimes interrupting scenes with glimpses of mysterious activities elsewhere, he also seems very modern. … The film has in common with Vampyr a feeling that much of the action is taking place elsewhere, while we’re not around.

“I tried to give you the feeling of mud sticking to your feet, and of fog obscuring your sight.” —Renoir

by ·Comments Off on Auteur Shorts watched mid-2011

Plastic Bag (2009, Ramin Bahrani)

An American Beauty plastic bag, dancing with me for twenty minutes. Only this bag’s journey is very well filmed and the bag has the voice of Werner Herzog – two innovations that would have greatly helped the last plastic bag movie I saw, The Green Bag. A blatant environmentalism screed, but I really enjoyed it. I thought it’d have the same ending as Children of Men, but it had the same ending as AI: Artificial Intelligence instead.

The Dirk Diggler Story (1988, PT Anderson)

An actual fake doc, but not a polished one. I thought it was rigged to look amateurish until I read online that it was actually edited on two VCRs by young Anderson. Narrated by PT’s father Ernie Anderson, a big-time TV announcer. It’s nice that he was willing to participate in his 18-year-old son’s movie about pornography, homosexuality and drug addiction. The most fun part of the movie is hearing this straightlaced announcer pronounce titles like “White Sandy Bitches” and “Bone To Be Wild”.

Dirk is explicitly bisexual in this one, but otherwise it hits some familiar plot points from Boogie Nights: Dirk’s drug addiction, his ill-advised recording career, his buddy Reed. There’s less nudity in the short, and it ends with an on-set fatal overdose for Dirk. My favorite bit that didn’t make the feature was a group prayer for God to protect us against premature ejaculation.

Horner (Burt’s character) is played by The Colonel in Boogie Nights, the only actor who returned. Well, Michael “Diggler” Stein had a cameo as “stereo customer”. He turned writer/director after that – his last film starred Andy Dick and Coolio.

Las Hurdes/Land Without Bread (1933, Luis Buñuel)

A half-hour documentary that has been discussed to death – how much of it is real? Can it be considered surrealist? Etc. Taken at face value as a portrait of an extremely poor mountain community, it’s well made, interesting, and too vibrant (and even humorous) to blend in with your average educational short. I still can’t believe they had a donkey killed by bees, and shot a mountain goat then hurled its body off a cliff, all to make points about the difficulty of life in this place. At least they didn’t kill any people on camera, although the narrator may have exaggerated (or undersold, who knows?) their conditions. Was released in ’33, had a French voiceover added in ’35 then a newsreel-toned English voiceover in ’37 – I saw the French version. I assume the bombastic music was on all three versions.

Senses of Cinema calls it “a documentary that posits the impossibility of the documentary, placing the viewer in the uneasy situation of complicity with a cruel camera probing the miseries of the urdanos for our benefit.”

The Old Lady and the Pigeons (1998, Sylvain Chomet)

This 20-minute movie gives me inexpressible joy. It’s a good antidote to the world-weary realism of The Illusionist, back way past the anything-goes surrealism of Triplets of Belleville into a pure comic cartoon world. A starving policeman dresses as a pigeon, barges into a bird-feeding old woman’s house and demands a meal, then does the same all year until she tries to eat him for Christmas dinner. Full of delightful little details (and at least one sad bird death).

The Italian Machine (1976, David Cronenberg)

“Let’s figure it out, Gestapo-style.”
A series of betrayals leading to an obsessed mechanic gaining ownership over a unique motorcycle. Made for TV, so people call each other “meathead” and “turkey”.

Beardy Lionel (Gary McKeehan of The Brood) hears that a collector’s-item motorcycle is in the hands of a collector. This will not stand, so he grabs his buddies (Frank Moore, second-billed in Rabid, and Hardee Lineham who had a cameo in The Dead Zone) and heads over posing as reporters to figure out how to free the bike from the boring rich guy (played by Guy Maddin’s buddy Louis Negin). Lionel sucks at pretending, though, so they’d be screwed if not for Ricardo, a dull cokehead hanger-on at Negin’s house who helps them out. Cronie’s fascination with automotive machinery peaked early with this and Fast Company, then came back with a brief vengeance with Crash.

Our beardy hero first meets Louis Negin:

Bottle Rocket (1992, Wes Anderson)

Cute sketch, with the Wilson brothers and Bob from the Bottle Rocket feature, plus the gun demo scene shot exactly the same way (just in black and white). They’re budding criminals, robbing Luke’s house then a book/video store, taking one guy’s wallet. No Inez, Futureman, Kumar or James Caan.

Something Happened (1987, Roy Andersson)

An AIDS lesson with didactic narration, illustrated with Andersson’s expertly composed setups of depressed-looking white people. One particular pale balding guy is seen a few times. It ends up less depressing than World of Glory, at least. Commissioned as an educational short but cancelled for being too dark

Within The Woods (1978, Sam Raimi)

Ah, the ol’ Indian burial ground. “Don’t worry about it,” says Bruce Campbell, “You’re only cursed by the evil spirits if you violate the graves of the dead. We’re just gonna be eating hot dogs.” Then he immediately violates a grave of the dead. Nice test run for The Evil Dead, with many elements already in place, like the the famous monster’s-pov long running shot, girls being attacked by trees, evil lurking in the cellar, knifing your friend as he walks in the door because you thought he was a demon, and of course, “JOIN US”. Hard to make out the finer points of the film since this was the grossest, fuzziest, lowest-ass-quality bootleg video I’ve ever seen.

Clockwork (1978, Sam Raimi)

Woman at home is stalked by jittery creeper (Scott Spiegel, director of From Dusk Till Dawn 2). He sticks his hands through her crepe-paper bedroom door, stabs her to death, but she stabs him back, also to death. It’s not much in the way of a story, but Raimi already has a good grip on the editing and camera skills for making decent horror. How did 19-year-old Raimi get his lead actress to take her clothes off in his 8mm movie?

Sonata For Hitler (1979, Aleksandr Sokurov)

Music video of stock footage from pre-WWII Germany stuck inside a ragged-edged frame surrounded by numbers and sprocket holes. Halfway through, the music mostly fades away, replaced with foreboding sound effects.

Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers (2001, Simonsson & Nilsson)

Drummers break into an apartment, play catchy beats in the kitchen and bathroom, with a slow bedroom number in between, then a destructive romp through the living room. But just as they finish, the inhabitants return. Clever and fun, and just the thing that probably should not have been extended into a two-hour feature.

by ·Comments Off on Sylvia Scarlett (1935, George Cukor)

Not the most lighthearted comedy in the world, beginning with the death of Katharine Hepburn’s mother, following with the death of her drunken crook father. Hepburn (already in her third film with Cukor) lives in France with her father Edmund Gwenn (the so-called bodyguard in Foreign Correspondent who keeps trying to kill Joel McCrea, also Santa in Miracle on 34th Street). They escape to England with her disguised as a boy for cover from dad’s embezzling crimes.

They meet con man Cary Grant (in his 20th film in four years) on the boat, and he teams up with the couple – which was our first complaint with the movie. When we meet Grant, he’s smuggling diamonds inside his shoes, which has got to be more lucrative than running con games in public parks with a busted drunk and his “son.” Grant (with a fun cockney accent) introduces them to an acquaintance named Maudie, a maid at a house where Grant hopes to steal some jewelery. Hepburn (very funny in her hat and suit) foils the heist, her dad ends up marrying Maudie, and the four go on the road as a vaudeville act.

Family portrait:

Kate falls for an artist (mustachioed Brian Aherne, title characters in Captain Fury and The Great Garrick) who’s being chased by some rich-looking Russian girl named Lily. The artist finds himself falling for Kate as well, much to his own confusion. Dad falls off a cliff while drunkenly searching for his cheating wife, and the same morning Lily tries to drown herself, rescued by Kate. After a brief sidetrack in jail, Kate and the artist escape on a train, running into Cary and Lily. My Katy thought it unfair that Kate didn’t get Cary Grant at the end, but he didn’t deserve her.

The artist and the princess:

The movie flopped so hard that Cukor was fired from RKO Pictures over it. It’s said that audiences thought Hepburn was awful as a boy, that they walked out in droves after Maudie tries to make out with her, but nobody ventures that crowds found the plot stupidly implausible – especially after the vaudeville bit. It’s all in good fun, I know. If Some Like It Hot was daring for messing with gender roles in 1959, I imagine it was completely unheard-of in films 25 years earlier. I thought that aspect and lots of the character and acting were much more successful than the overall story – it’s a good movie strapped onto a mediocre plot.

Grant’s noirish introduction:

TCM:

The role seemed a natural for [Hepburn]; she had already set tongues wagging as one of the first women in the U.S. to wear trousers in public. Not only did she make a very convincing young man with her hair cut short, but Time Magazine’s reviewer would quip that “Sylvia Scarlett reveals the interesting fact that Katharine Hepburn is better looking as a boy than as a woman.”

by ·Comments Off on The Tree of Life (2011, Terrence Malick)

This completely lived up to expectations. I’ve been a big Malick fan since The Thin Red Line, and this movie showed plenty of his current style (whispered voiceovers about pained relationships as the camera pans up through the trees) while forging a whole new one, had the boldness to turn a man’s memories and inner life into a visual montage of the history of the planet Earth. It shows small moments, real and imagined, and becomes almost completely untethered to plot. It’s almost unbelievably gorgeous in the way it looks and moves through time. But all this is what I expected, from reading vague reports of the film’s genesis as Malick’s intended follow-up to Days of Heaven, to its winning the top prize at Cannes last month, to the rapturous critical acclaim it’s been receiving upon release. I expected the best, most ambitious movie of the year, by a long shot, and that’s pretty much what I got, so I’m gonna have to process it for a while.

Jack and his brothers live in a quiet Texas town with proud, hardass father Brad Pitt (representing Nature in the film’s mythology) and pure, uncritical mother Jessica Chastain (representing Grace), both of them loving in their own way. Years later, Jack is Sean Penn working at a giant, modern architecture firm, looking world-weary. He chats with dad on the phone (we don’t get to see Brad pull out the Ben Buttons old-age makeup), but Katy guesses that mom has died, maybe recently. Oh, also there’s the history of the universe and of life on earth, with CG dinosaurs. The movie scatters its narrative for so long, it’s like a two-hour trailer for a life-length feature (or perhaps just the rumored six-hour cut). It’s like nothing else, ever, not 2001: A Space Odyssey or Malick’s earlier movies or anything else it’s being compared to.

Production design by “man in the planet” Jack Fisk (all five Malick features, four by Lynch plus There Will Be Blood and Phantom of the Paradise), shot by Emmanuel Lubezki (The New World, Sleepy Hollow, all the Alfonso Cuarón movies), music (very good, sometimes too large and overpowering) by Alexandre Desplat (Fantastic Mr. Fox, Birth) and edited by a bunch of guys (including, counterintuitively, Jarmusch’s buddy Jay Rabinowitz).

It’s not hard to find people walking about Tree of Life, but it’s surprisingly hard to find film critics as unhesitatingly impressed by it as I was. Suppose they’re doing their job, hesitating to fully recommend the most narratively unhinged major film of the year. I haven’t been recommending it around much myself. P. Bradshaw in The Guardian calls it “a rebuke to realism, a disavowal of irony and comedy.” The movie has no built-in defense against people who snicker at the cartoon dinosaurs and the whispered voiceovers and the biblical metaphors. It takes itself very seriously and demands that you do the same, or the whole thing could fall apart.

–
EDIT 2021: I watched this again – the extended version – and the only notes I took were:

– I don’t remember the abusive mustache neighbor
– too much high-pantsed brad pitt looking disappointed in this version

But at the time of viewing, I felt the full glory and splendor of the Malick, which is what I needed. I’ll revisit this post again when I get to the blu extras.

by ·Comments Off on The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend (1949, Preston Sturges)

A late Sturges flop, co-written with Earl Felton (The Narrow Margin) and starring Betty Grable (How to Marry a Millionaire) at the height of her fame, declared the highest-paid star in America just two years earlier. And it’s not a bad movie, about as enjoyable as Lady of Burlesque, the best of Capra, even Unfaithfully Yours. The trouble comes when you compare it to earlier Sturges features – it lacks their humor, energy and perfect screenwriting.

As a little girl, grandpa taught young Betty Grable to shoot straight, then at some point en route to becoming a saloon singer she acquired a violent temper. Attempting to shoot her philandering man Blackie (Cesar Romero) she plugs a judge in the ass (twice), so grabs her friend Conchita (Olga San Juan), skips town, lands in a new place pretending to be a schoolteacher (named Hilda Swandumper, ha). She attracts the fond attention of upright local Rudy Vallee, helps tame the wild Basserman boys, and all is going well until Blackie tracks her down and apparently shoots and kills the Bassermans (somehow they’re fine at the end), leading their dad Richard Hale into a town-wide shooting spree, at the end of which he tries to hang Blackie and poor Rudy. Things settle down, Betty returns home and, despite Katy’s protests, the movie ends with her shooting the judge in the ass a third time.

Betty Grable is no Betty Hutton when it comes to comedy, but she always looks good in a dress, and acquits herself nicely in the lead. A few of the ol’ Sturges players show up (besides Rudy Vallee, of course), including Esther Howard (mayor’s wife in Hail the Conquering Hero) and Porter Hall (The Great Moment) as the bullet-magnet judge. I wouldn’t have guessed that Margaret Hamilton (also of The Sin of Harold Diddlebock), the judge’s jealous wife, was the Wicked Witch of the West, but there you have it. I didn’t recognize Sheriff Al Bridge, though he’s been in more Sturges films than anybody. We especially liked Hugh Herbert (Hellzapoppin’) as a nearly blind doctor who attends to the judge, but best were the two brothers, bursting with energy and stupidity, played by Sterling Holloway (Remember the Night) and Dan Jackson, who looked so remarkably like his movie-brother, I’d figured they were actually related.

From the original Times review:

Apparently Mr. Sturges, devoted to the old-time slapstick school, tried to do as they did in the old days to the point of shooting his picture “off the cuff.” That is the kindest explanation for the feebleness of story in this film and the jerkiness of the continuity.