by ·Comments Off on Heathers (1989, Michael Lehmann)

A movie Katy says could not have been made in the last decade, which is possibly why I enjoyed it so much. You don’t often see a comedy about high school social strata that includes so much gleeful murder. Christian Slater (same year as Name of the Rose) is the dreamy psycho-killer who drifts into town with his dad, and Winona Ryder (between Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands) is a new recruit to the prom-queen-level social class shared by three girls named Heather. Ryder falls for Slater and semi-unwittingly helps him kill some people, but when he plots to blow up the school, staging it as a mass suicide, she fight back and Slater blows himself up instead.

Writer Daniel Waters went on to help ruin the 1990’s with Hudson Hawk and Demolition Man and director Lehmann (also responsible for Hudson Hawk) did his part with Airheads and My Giant, dragging it out into the 2000’s with 40 Days and 40 Nights and Because I Said So. Lately he’s worked on about ten different well-liked TV series. One Heather, the one who made a brain tumor joke, died in 2001 of a brain tumor, and another costarred in Mallrats. One of the murdered footballers appeared in Ghoulies III and the other in Night of the Demons. So, not a supporting cast that went on to fame and fortune. Good to see Otho from Beetlejuice as a preacher presiding over the wave of teen funerals.

by ·Comments Off on La Pointe Courte (1956, Agnes Varda) plus shorts

“They talk too much to be happy.”

Descriptions of this film focus on the blank-faced young married couple in crisis, visiting the fishing town where he grew up, debating whether they should stay together. But the couple seems to appear in about one third of the movie. The rest is about the town itself and its residents – daily fishing, problems with the law and health board, a teenage couple who want to start dating, a jousting competition in the river. Since most of the movie defies plot summary, the married couple gets more attention than they maybe deserve.

He says something like “you change your mind so much, I’m always a day or two behind.” And I’m so glad I never finished watching this with Katy (she made it about 20 minutes in), because most of their conversation is about their failing relationship, whether or not they’re in love and should break up. Katy will take this personally and think I’m trying to ask these questions indirectly myself. Also any movie containing any sadness makes her sad. Best to stick with Hello, Dolly!

Resnais-style camera moves (he was the film’s editor – the same year he made Toute la memoire du monde), some highly posed, French-poetic shots of the couple, which are all the more arresting against the reality of the small fishing village. But Varda doesn’t shoot it like reality. The sea, the clotheslines and nets, the shacks and neighborhood cats all look like an expensive set, arranged for the pleasure of her camera. An unbelievably accomplished debut.

Of the two actors, Silvia Monfort was in a couple movies with Jean Gabin, also a Robert Bresson movie I’ve never heard of, and Philippe Noiret was the uncle of Zazie dans le metro, also in Topaz and Coup de Torchon.

Ydessa, The Bears, and etc. (2004)

I like documentaries with twist endings. There’s a shocker at the end of artist Ydessa’s gallery display of thousands of framed photographs of people holding teddy bears: a bare-walled third room containing only a mannequin of Hitler, kneeling as if in prayer. Ydessa’s parents were holocaust survivors, and some of their family members didn’t survive – the exhibit is dedicated to them. I didn’t warm up to Ydessa very much, but I like the layout of her exhibit, the photos themselves and the film.

Nice Varda-esque touch: Ydessa says she’s created a fiction that looks like documentary: that everybody is happy and has a teddy bear. “Reality and fiction – I’m somewhere in between.” And of course in her montage of photos from the exhibit, Varda sneaks in a photo of herself as a child.

7 P., cuis., s.de b… (1984)

I think the title is real-estate shorthand for “seven bedrooms, kitchen and bath.” Shot in a former hospice during an exhibition created by Louis Bec, who played the older father. So I’m not sure which of the visual ideas came from Bec and which from Varda, but it’s a remarkable little film. Unseen realtor is showing this property to unseen doctor, the doctor moves in, starts a (large) family which grows up fast. They go through a couple maids and their oldest daughter gets a boyfriend and rebels against her father. Older yet, and the father has died. The rooms go from bare to slightly dressed to crazy – the bathroom totally covered in feathers at one point. Characters speak through each other, repeating phrases like in Marienbad.

Yolande Moreau, who’d play a chef in Micmacs:

You’ve Got Beautiful Stairs, You Know (1986)

A celebration of the Cinematheque and its front steps, intercutting with famous film scenes set upon steps. Some semi-re-enactments – I liked the buggy tossed down the steps, Potemkin-style, and the mildly concerned man at the bottom who leaned over to check that nobody was inside.

by ·Comments Off on Santa Sangre (1989, Alejandro Jodorowsky)

This was pretty incredible. Nude man in asylum thinks he’s a monkey. Flashback to when he was a young boy in a false mustache in the circus, watching a tattooed hottie force a deaf-mute girl to walk a burning tightrope. The boy’s mom is chief priestess at the santa sangre temple, which is torn down after being disavowed by the church, claiming the armless woman they worship is not a saint. Later she catches her awful drunken husband with the tattooed lady, and he cuts off her arms then kills himself, and the young mime tightrope walker is driven away from the traumatized boy.

Then after that first 45 minutes, the unthinkable happens: the movie got boring. Later I changed my mind about this, figure it just changed mood and speed and I wasn’t able to follow along, because retracing the story through the million screenshots I took, it sure doesn’t look boring. Anyway, now the boy and his armless mom have a stage act where he hides behind her, being her arms, imagining himself invisible. A bunch of people, including the tattooed woman and a cross-dressing wrestler, get brutally murdered – mother commanding son to kill with his/her hands. He hooks up with his midget best friend from the circus, who may have never existed. Only when he finds the mime girl does he stand up to his mother (and stab her to death), then he and the girl walk outside to start a new life together. No just kidding – they walk outside to find themselves surrounded by police.

Too old to play the young lead himself, Alejandro has his son Axel play the lead, with younger son Adan as young Axel, Blanca Guerra (also in Walker) as his mother and Guy “Dean’s brother” Stockwell as his father. It’s possibly the most coherent Jodorowsky movie I’ve seen, a true horror bursting with ideas and excellently filmed. I hope all the dead or dying animals were just special-effects this time.

D. Lim (who also makes a howler mistake, calling La Cravate a lost film years after it was rediscovered and issued on DVD):

Psycho is hardly the only cinematic influence on Santa Sangre. The circus grotesquerie suggests Fellini, though Tod Browning’s big-top movies Freaks and The Unknown are perhaps even more relevant. James Whale’s The Invisible Man is glimpsed on the television at one point. Also apparent is the lurid imprint of the film’s producer and co-writer Claudio Argento, brother of schlock-horror maestro Dario. But for all its sundry inspirations, Santa Sangre never seems derivative. Jodorowsky’s anything-goes alchemy has a cumulative power, as does the documentary energy of his location photography. It’s a movie bursting with life — interrupted frequently by processions and pageants, shot in actual slums and red-light districts.

You can’t tell from the dim screenshot that this is a white bird rising from an open grave:

by ·Comments Off on Gothic (1986, Ken Russell)

“Poets are for each other.”

Lord Byron (Gabriel Byrne, between The Keep and Miller’s Crossing) has four friends over to his mansion. They stay up late drinking just tons of laudanum, having sex and challenging each other to write scary stories.

Lord Byrne:

Supposedly this one night spawned Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as well as the first vampire story published in English, so dramatists and horror historians love to revisit it. I haven’t seen the others, but for sheer imagery and inventiveness, it’s hard to imagine anyone topping Russell and this great movie. The actors are into it, throwing themselves histrionically into the fantasy. Fun music, even cartoonish at times, by Thomas Dolby. Things get increasingly traumatic and dreamlike as the night wears on, with apparent murders and accidents and Mary Godwin’s (she hadn’t yet married Shelley) visions of her dead child. Strange ending, as they’re all perfectly fine in the morning, then a present-day tour boat gives a rushed narrative postscript.

Timothy Spall (in his second Frankstein-related film in a row, after appearing in The Bride with Sting and Jennifer Beals) is Dr. Polidori, commissioned to write a biography of Byron. I never quite figured his character out (though I love watching Timothy Spall, so it’s not important), but reading later that he became famous for his vampire story gave new meaning to this scene where he’s harmed from touching the cross on his wall.

Miriam Cyr (only in a few movies, but three are Frankenstein-related) is Claire Clairmont, stepsister of Mary Godwin/Shelley, who had a child with Byron the following year. Miriam may have been cast for her ability to open her eyes unusually wide.

Boyishly energetic Julian Sands (year after A Room With a View) plays Shelley, and Natasha Richardson (Asylum, The Handmaid’s Tale) is Mary. Sands kicks things into high gear early in the night, running naked onto the rooftops trying to catch lightning (definite Frankenstein reference).

Shelley, Mary, Polidori:

They summon a creature during a seance, Sands goes out to the shed and gets spooked, Polidori goes to bed early then appears as a dismembered head on the floor. Goblins, giant snakes and living suits of armor roam the house. There are swords, guns, torches and hangings, and somehow they all end up in the basement covered in filth.

“We’re dead. It’s shown me the torture it has in store for us. Our creature – it will be there waiting in the shadows, in the shape of our fears, until it has seen us to our deaths.”

Ivan Passer filmed a version of this story two years later, with Eric Stoltz in the Sands role, Alex Winter in the Spall role, and Laura Dern as Claire. Also in ’88, the same year he was in Ken Russell’s Lair of the White Worm, Hugh Grant played Byron in yet another version, with Elizabeth Hurley as Claire.

by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 007

Oh look, netflix streaming has a whole bunch of James Bond movies. I never watched them consistently, saw a couple all the way through and a bunch more in fragments on cable. So this is an attempt to figure out which Bond is which, and which movies were halfway decent.

Thunderball (1965)
Sean Connery is not-so-excitingly rescued by a helicopter, yells some exposition that I didn’t quite catch. Underwater harpoon battle! Black team vs. orange team, heavy casualties. Everyone except Bond is wearing pants. The movie harpoons a shark, booo. I hope the movie ate that shark. Bond catches up with grey-haired eyepatched Largo (Adolfo Celi of Diabolik and The Phantom of Liberty) aboard the Disco Volante – aha – slaps him around while the boat accelerates to Benny Hill speed. He escapes with a girl named Domino (Claudine Auger of A Bay of Blood), who also has no pants. They ditch the Peter Lorre-like fellow who helped rescue her, and escape into a bluescreen sky. Director Terence Young’s third Bond movie – he’d later make Wait Until Dark.

You Only Live Twice (1967)
Connery fails to escape Donald “Dr. Evil” Pleasence by shooting a guy with his cigarette. Lots of men (ninjas, according to IMDB) fight in different-colored outfits. Bond knocks an unpunchable tough guy into a pirahna pool and pushes the button that makes a spacecraft on TV blow up. Pleasence blows the whole base, but every single person escapes anyway, and the same planes drop the same lifeboats as in the last movie. Bond ends up in one with a girl named Kissy (Mie Hama of What’s Up Tiger Lily).

Diamonds Are Forever (1971)
Jill St. John (of Tashlin & Lewis flick Who’s Minding The Store?) is making a mockery of clothing in her purple/red flag swimsuit. Connery does acrobatics in a suit, while helicopters explode into optical stills. Baddy Blofeld (Charles Gray of the Rocky Horror movies) enters a toy submarine held by a Bond-controlled crane. Connery gleefully wrecking-balls the toy into the control tower until the whole derrick explodes. Nice finale featuring one waiter on fire and another exploding mid-air.

Live and Let Die (1973)
Heroin dealer Yaphet Kotto (of Bone, Alien and the show Homicide) has stolen Roger Moore’s inflation gun, shows off all his silly bad-guy toys (a monorail, waterproof heroin canisters) then threatens Bond and Jane “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” Seymour with death by shark. Every movie so far has featured watery deaths. In the most WTF moment of any movie so far, Bond shoves a compressed-air pellet into Yaphet’s head, turning him into a balloon. The last-minute assassination-attempt is back, and Moore tosses a metal-claw-handed Julius Harris (of Black Caesar) out his train window.

The Man With The Golden Gun (1974)
The great Christopher Lee (year after The Wicker Man) is TMWTGG, but Moore shoots him dead before he’s got any lines – shame. Nice scene, all rotating mirrors and neon triangles. Criminals used to put such style into their lairs. Britt Ekland (also of Wicker Man) tosses a guy into subzero liquid (another watery death), then triggers self-destruct with her ass, the least competent of any bond girl so far. He and the girl sail away in an ancient Chinese ship, pausing to dispose of an angry Hervé Villechaize (soon after Greaser’s Palace). These last three were directed by Guy Hamilton, who’d go on to make Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins.

The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
A boat is blowing up – more water, and oh look, more sharks. Moore is aboard the evil aquatic base, shoots boring Curd Jurgens (star of both a Blue Angel remake and a Threepenny Opera remake), sics Jaws on a shark (a funny joke in the mid-1970’s) and escapes with lovely enemy spy Barbara Bach – codename Triple X, another joke. It all seems rather inert, the least-exciting Bond finale I’ve seen despite Jaws and explosions.

Moonraker (1979)
Oh god, laser gun battles. Moore ejects Michael Lonsdale (!) into space then watches some Star Wars models out the window. Jaws is in love with a girl with pigtails and it’s sweet. He even gets dialogue, helps Bond and Lois Chiles (of Broadcast News) into a shuttle where they play high-stakes space invaders then celebrate with zero-G sex. These last two and You Only Live Twice were directed by Lewis Gilbert, who helmed some thrillers in the 50’s and more recently an Aidan Quinn ghost story.

For Your Eyes Only (1981)
Moore is in a decidedly low-tech mountain hideout, with a full team for once. Punch-out in a church, people thrown through stained glass windows, and another one of those tough guys who just smiles when Bond punches him in the gut. It’s all for some Texas Instruments-looking device which Bond hurls off a cliff so the Russians won’t get it. Not nearly as exciting as the others, with an unsexy PG version of the gag ending from the last few, then a dubbed macaw to close it out. John Glen, editor of the last couple Bond films, is promoted to director and takes the series through License to Kill.

Octopussy (1983)
Hooray for gypsies, acrobats, dancers and sad clowns. This makes up for the drab brownness of the last movie. The title character (Maud Adams, returning from Golden Gun) has a gun and Bond is nowhere to be found. Oh here he is, in a hot air balloon of course. Some Goldeneye-(the video game)-style first-person machine-gunning. Bond on horseback chases down the Afghani/Indian villains’ plane and just rides around on top of it. Louis Jordan (star of Letter from an Unknown Woman) flies his plane into a cliff after Bond and the girl jump to safety. They’ve toned down the sexy ending even further – this is getting out of hand.

Never Say Never Again (1983)
Weird, a non-canonical Bond film from a rival studio, a remake of Thunderball from the director of The Empire Strikes Back featuring the return of Sean Connery. Never having cared about the 007 series, this is not something I ever suspected existed. Connery has a jetpack! He and partner Bernie Casey (of Cleopatra Jones and The Man Who Fell To Earth) scuba into a paper-mache fortress where Max von Sydow reigns, a less-iconic Largo. Bond, as in the original, can be easily recognized as the one without pants. An underwater battle ensues, with worse lighting, much less harpooning, and slightly more Kim Basinger than before. In the would-be sexy postscript scene, Bond dumps Rowan Atkinson into a swimming pool – so, less Benny Hill, more Mr. Bean.

A View to a Kill (1985)
Opens with a disclaimer about baddie Chris Walken’s character name “Zorin” – I wonder what prompted that. Anyway, very excited to see Grace Jones with new wave hair helping out Roger Moore. She explodes while a slick blonde Walken watches from above, as does the proper blonde love interest (Tanya Roberts of The Beastmaster and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. Bond dangles from a zeppelin line as Walken tries to shake him loose in the city, accompanied by corny dialogue. Punch-out atop the Golden Gate bridge features lots of bluescreen backdrops, Chris Walken with an axe, and an angry old man with a cartoon stick of dynamite. Postscript involves a camera-equipped robot, chuckling Russians and somehow an even less sexy finale than the Rowan Atkinson one. Come on now, 1980’s.

The Living Daylights (1987)
Roger has been retired to a closet at MGM, and was never heard from again. Tim Dalton is flying a plane around with Maryam d’Abo (of Shootfighter), blowing up a bridge while Arabs wage war below. Hmm, they drive out of a crashing plane in a jeep. Warfare afficionado MITCHELL is blasting away at Bond – thought I remembered him as a good guy in the later ones. Mitchell is dead, so never mind. Ash liked all the whistling in this one.

by ·Comments Off on Insignificance (1985, Nicolas Roeg)

A theatrical, dialogue-heavy movie with occasional bursts of appalling 1980’s music. Four iconic celebrities meet up in a hotel room (I don’t think all four are ever in the room at once, though). A Cherokee elevator man (Will Sampson, memorable as the Native spiritualist in Poltergeist II) provides a guilty American grounding to it all.

The four leads are playing the popular image of their characters, not aiming for a rounded, realistic portrayal. Hence, Einstein (Michael Emil, mostly in movies by his brother Henry Jaglom) is brilliant but down-to-earth and funny, able to explain his work in everyday terms – Marilyn Monroe (Theresa Russell, who married Nic Roeg the following year, star of his Bad Timing and Eureka) is flirty, never stops using her breathy screen voice, intelligent and somewhat tortured – Joe McCarthy (Tony Curtis) is relentlessly trying to get everyone to admit they’re a communist – and Joe DiMaggio (Gary Busey) is hot-headed and jealous (even of Einstein).

I didn’t find the play interesting at all – maybe I’m too young for it. The idea seems like a good one, but the only parts I enjoyed were the bits of Roegian collage – some visual explosions at the end, an insert shot which goes back in time, each character’s childhood flashback. I did also enjoy Marilyn’s explanation of the theory of relativity using balloons, flashlights and toy trains. Afterwards, the balloons anchor each shot, giving me something fun to watch instead of the actors.

Also worth mentioning: the movie ends with Albert envisioning Marilyn being killed in a nuclear blast. Kind of intense after all the dialogue scenes that precede.

J. Rosenbaum:

The film is less interested in literal history than in the various fantasies that these figures stimulate in our minds, and Roeg’s scattershot technique mixes the various elements into a very volatile cocktail — sexy, outrageous, and compulsively watchable. It’s a very English view of pop Americana, but an endearing one.

The trouble with Blu-Ray: in the full-size version you can plainly read that the wall calendar in this shot says June 1954…

But in the insert shot, it’s been changed:

In fact, it’s such an obvious mistake that maybe it was done on purpose. The close-up is shot from the perspective of DiMaggio, a man who lives so firmly in the past that he can’t even register the current date – his eyes are still processing what they saw three months ago.

by ·Comments Off on Carlos (2010, Olivier Assayas)

Wire! The Feelies! A long three-part series/feature about a so-called terrorist who operated by a strict moral code can’t help but get compared to Soderbergh’s Che, but the strong use of quality 1970’s and 80’s music throws a Marie Antoinette comparison into the mix.

Watched in nice widescreen over netflix streaming on the TV. Despite its epic length, the movie felt small and far away. Lots of political and historical touchstones that I didn’t recognize, because I have no education or sense of history. Carlos’s motives weren’t clearly explained (something about the Palestinian Struggle), nor were his origins (“It’s no longer Ilich. It’s Carlos”). But his battles, his public terrorist acts, his relationships, hideouts and escapes are all laid out in glorious detail. I’m generally a fan of Assayas films, but didn’t connect with this one at all. I’m thinking netflix is to blame.

Edgar Ramirez can’t be blamed anyway, was magnetic, as they say, as Carlos.

The movie was so long, and petered out in such an energy-depleting way, that I can’t bring myself to write a whole lot or even to read a bunch of articles. So I took to D. Hudson’s great notebook summary and cut out three points I would’ve made if I’d given it more thought (or took better notes).

G. Andrew:

Certainly, the film doesn’t feel anything like television. It’s shot in Scope, boasts the fleet way with narrative, camera movement and cutting that are characteristic of Assayas at his best and has a sense of scale, depth and seriousness of purpose that is essentially cinematic.

M. Dargis:

He lacks substance. He doesn’t have much to say, and his rhetoric gets cruder as the years pass (as does his treatment of women). He’s a man of action, not ideas. Mr Assayas, by contrast, is a director of ideas. … Carlos isn’t Che slogging through the jungle for the cause: Carlos is a mercenary, a thug.

T. McCarthy:

One element that vividly pops out from the film’s vibrant fabric are the numerous scenes in which government officials from Arab and Eastern bloc countries directly order, sponsor or otherwise facilitate terrorism and mayhem in other nations…. I can’t recall ever seeing scenes quite like these in any movie, and they are bracing.

by ·1 Comment

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“A tourist.”

I was planning to watch this anyway, but not as a memorial screening. Low-quality copy of this three-episode miniseries. You can see through the dubbed videotape murk and the MPEG blocks that much of the lighting and composition is probably wonderful (and the music score too good to be consigned to a lost TV-movie) – hope there will be an official release some day. This shows no compromise to the commercial requirements of television, just as twisty as the great City of Pirates, and similarly featuring featuring ships, pirate ghosts, islands, children, plot paradoxes and murder.

Part 1: Manoel’s Destinies

A narrator sets up the time-travel theme right away.
“I’m called ‘long ago.’ This story took place in the past, but I’m sure it will happen again soon. That’s why I chose to tell it to you in the present.”

Seven-year-old Manoel is on his way to school the morning after his family’s jewelry was stolen in the night, when he hears whispered voices, sidetracks into a courtyard and meets himself, six years older. Older Manoel says six years ago he was on his way to school, sidetracked into the courtyard and met a fisherman in a cave, went boating with him, came home and his life changed. His parents’ hopes in their son were shattered, his mother died, and he went off to work after dropping out of school. But he sidetracked into a courtyard, met the fisherman again, and boated backwards through time, retrieved his family’s jewels from the sea, and met his seven-year-old self.

So, young Manoel continues to school, follows the advice of older Manoel, becomes an extreme overachiever, and a few years later his father dies. So he visits the fisherman, goes back and yells at his young self. “This time he chooses caution: he must ignore the fisherman’s call, but he mustn’t succeed at school.” At the end of the day, his parents are fine, but the townspeople find a dead boy on the beach: older Manoel.

Part 2: The Picnic of Dreams

More tense-twisting from the narrator, and Manoel’s class is on a field trip, literally to a field, where the teacher wants them to attempt to fall asleep and dream a hospital, which might become real. This doesn’t work, and Manoel walks through the dream forest and meets a large man who talks to trees.

The giant takes a coin from Manoel, and with it they swap bodies. Now Manoel in the man’s body must reclaim the coin, breaks into his own house at night and grabs it from his piggybank. A more straightforward story than the other parts.

Part 3: The Little Chess Champion

After his mother dies (guess he failed to save her through time-travel) Manoel is sent to live with his aunt, who lives with her son and two nephews in a museum. “The staff had moved out because of ghosts.”

Manoel plays violent games with the servant’s sons Pedro and Paulo, and visits the funhouse on Elephant Island with his cousins and a mysterious sea captain – but that may have been a dream. He meets seven-year-old Marylina, a genetically-engineered super-child who’s now the world chess champion and has a fiancee named Rock who has exchanged brains with a famed pianist.

There’s levitation, shadow plays, and my favorite visual effect, a bit of perspective-play with a hand coming through a keyhole. The captain takes Pedro into the shadow world, so Manoel visits the chess girl for help. But she and her fiancee have been discovering secret codes hidden in the structures of things. My favorite: “The Eiffel Tower is an iron code that translates French body odor into perfume.” The Captain comes and steals more children into his shadow world. It’s a completely insane episode.

The Captain and his demise:

“Now after all these years, when I remember my childhood, I think these things were just my imagination.”

This has played in different forms (a four-episode version, a theatrical film) in different places, including at Cannes. The acting credits are listed without character names, but someone figured out that Teresa Madruga (of Joao Monteiro’s Silvestre) plays Manoel’s mother. Fernando Heitor and Diogo Doria (an Oliveira regular, also in Love Torn in Dream) may play his father and teacher. The rest is a mystery to me.

F. Daly:

Writing or filming for children can sometimes bring a person straight to the source of their art. Having to perceptibly adapt their style confronts them with what must be included. Manoel leaves us with the essential Ruiz, the audio-visual companion to his extraordinary book Poetics of Cinema. Its dizzying narrative fold-over-fold methodology creates a labyrinthine temporal structure.

Also watched a TV episode called Exiles from 1988, which provides a nice career summary, focusing on Ruiz’s relationship with Chile and identity as an exile within his film stories.

The Great Man:

And something called Screen Pioneers (episode 3) from 1985 – an eccentric biography program, purporting to be from the future (like Time Trumpet) looking back on our present, and on this semi-unknown character named Raoul Ruiz. Written by Michael Powell expert Ian Christie – I’ve listened to some of his Criterion audio commentaries.
It’s only ten minutes long, plays like an extended intro to…

Return of a Library Lover (1983)

A first-person travel essay about Ruiz’s first return to Chile in ten years. Everything seems the same as when he left (it’s first-person narrated), except he notices a single pink book is missing from his shelf, a book he decides holds “the key to what happened on that night of Pinochet’s coup.” He interviews friends (including a “renowned library constructor”), and checks the bars. He talks to a bookseller. “I deduced that he couldn’t speak Spanish anymore and constantly had to check his own subtitles and translate them laboriously back.” What started out as a personal slideshow has turned into a full-fledged Ruiz movie. The book is discovered at the end, by contemporary Chilean poet Juan Uribe Echevarria.

My favorite line, a casual, matter-of-fact note on subjective memory: “Apart from having shrunk a little, the house was still intact.”

“From the Mayans I’ve inherited the knack of changing my childhood
just as one changes one’s native country.”

by ·Comments Off on Withnail and I (1987, Bruce Robinson)

One of those cult movies that you have to see over and over, or drunk, or high, or with the right friends, or at the right time in your life. I met none of the qualifictions, but sill enjoyed it quite a lot. Seems it was the Big Lebowski of its time, with the massively devoted fanbase. And I can see that now, having watched the half-hour bonus feature on the DVD, playing key scenes and lines again, giving me a second look. Certainly the performances and dialogue (when I could make it out) are absurdly good, which probably makes this an endlessly rewatchable movie.

The key performers are Richard E. “Kafka” Grant and Paul McGann (Alien 3, Ken Russell’s The Rainbow) as unemployed actor roommates who go on holiday, Richard Griffiths (Harry Potter‘s uncle) as Grant’s homosexual relative who lends them his cottage then shows up with designs on McGann, and Ralph Brown (played a stoner again in The Boat That Rocked, also in The Hit) as the ultimate pothead, a dubious friend of the two leads.

Robinson dropped off the face of the earh after the early 90’s, but is reportedly back with Johnny Depp in The Rum Diary – from working with Ralph Steadman on Withnail to adapting Hunter S. Thompson.