by ·Comments Off on Metropolitan (1990, Whit Stillman)

It’s debutante season (Katy had to explain to me what that is) in Manhattan, so a group of friends home from college for the holidays get dressed up and hang out every night, mostly just the seven of them – but they pick up a “downwardly mobile” red-haired outsider named Tom early in the season and rope him into joining them for the whole two weeks of party games, dancing, jealousy and highly literate conversation.

Tom claims to be too much of a radical socialist to participate in such old-fashioned upper-class nonsense, but is easily enough convinced to buy a secondhand tuxedo and join in, especially when he finds out his ex-girlfriend Serena is a friend of the group. Molly Ringwald-looking Audrey crushes on Tom, while Charlie (a more intellectual Max Fischer) crushes on Audrey – as the others fade away over the second week, these three will remain from the core group.

Sally is the group’s host, who ends up with a gross record producer, Cynthia an easily-annoyed argument-baiter, Fred a tired guy who drinks too much then decides the group’s no fun anymore once he sobers up, and Nick the self-aggrandizing center of attention until he returns to school early. Nick’s at war with ladies’ man Rick who is currently dating Tom’s ex. Oh and there’s Jane, whom I already can’t remember.

After Tom hurts Audrey’s feelings pining after his ex, Audrey and Cynthia disappear to Rick’s house. Charlie and Tom are concerned enough for her welfare that they take a two-hour cab ride to rescue her. Audrey seems to be in no danger, but every girl likes to be rescued, so she goes with them, walking back to Manhattan talking vaguely about their futures. I kinda loved the movie, and especially the ending.

Beaten by Ghost for the screenplay oscar, Chameleon Street for best picture at sundance, and To Sleep With Anger (fair enough) for indy awards screenplay. Looks like half the cast appears in Last Days of Disco. Audrey (Carolyn Farina) was in The Age of Innocence as a relative (sister?) of Daniel Day-Lewis. Nick (Chris Eigeman) in a bunch of indie movies including Kicking and Screaming. Cynthia (Isabel Gillies) is billed just under David Lynch in the Nadja cast and Charlie (Taylor Nichols) appeared in Jurassic Park III.

L. Sante:

The dialogue is ostentatiously written; every character wields subordinate clauses and uses words like however and nevertheless. The combination of stilted speeches and deft behavioral acting sometimes seems peculiar, but it is also peculiarly apposite. Like Austen, Stillman wears his irony lightly and deploys it affectionately.
…
Urban haute bourgeoisie… is a term coined by Charlie, who is obsessed with the ongoing failure and imminent doom of his class. Stillman obviously thinks something of the sort himself—the movie’s title is subtle in its archly irrelevant grandeur, but you wonder if Twilight of the Gods didn’t cross his mind. (At one point, Tom’s bedside book is shown to be Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West.)

Speaking of the low-budget resourcefulness of the movie’s production, Sante says “a picture about the rites of passage of the urban haute bourgeoisie might be expected to appear as impeccably composed as The Earrings of Madame de…“. Having just watched that film, I thought of it in a different respect. At the beginning of both movies, as we’re being introduced to the characters I groan inwardly: not another movie that expects me to care about the minor problems of privileged rich people. At the end of Madame de… the minor problems have become major and I still don’t care (actually I came to respect General Charles Boyer somewhat), but Metropolitan made me love its overeducated rich-kid protagonists.

by ·Comments Off on Beau Travail (1999, Claire Denis)

A simple story with just a few main characters, which Denis lovingly photographs, obscures and abstracts. Unlike many of her others, it’s almost immediately easy to grasp this one’s character relationships, which may account for its higher reputation than her later films, or probably it’s just this one’s timing, exploding her international festival/critical reputation. Not that I mean to be ungenerous to Beau Travail – it’s terrific, and must have one of the best film endings of the 90’s.

Based on Herman Melville’s story Billy Budd. Commandant Michael Subor (The Intruder) leads a French foreign legion camp in Djibouti. Denis Lavant (Lovers on the Bridge) is training a bunch of men. But Lavant feels that he’s losing authority to new guy Gregoire Colin (35 Shots of Rum), so he looks for an opportunity to strike back. That was my interpretation anyway, but looking through comments of other filmed versions of Billy Budd, it seems that his motivation is never quite clear. Either way, he sends Colin on a doomed hike through the desert. Presumed to have killed the recruit (we later see Colin gettin rescued), Lavant is dismissed from the armed forces and set to be court-martialed. And just when you’re wondering why cast the great Denis Lavant as an immobile authority figure, he breaks out into a crazy awesome fantasy-sequence dance.

Doesn’t seem to follow the novel’s plot too closely – in the book, Budd is executed for accidentally killing a superior officer, while here he saves a man and kills nobody. The book was turned into a famous opera, and Denis uses songs from that instead of her usual Tindersticks. Mostly, she turns the story into an abstract dance of bodies in the desert, with emotions felt rather than explained.

J. Rosenbaum:

The fact that [Subor] is named after the hero of Jean-Luc Godard’s Le petit soldat and played by the same actor almost 40 years later adds a suggestive thread… Most of all, Denis, who spent part of her childhood in Djibouti, captures the poetry and atmosphere — and, more subtly, the women — of Africa like few filmmakers before her.

by ·Comments Off on Dollman (1991, Albert Pyun)

I never especially wanted to see Dollman or Demonic Toys, but I definitely want to see Dollman vs. Demonic Toys, and you gotta start at the beginning. It’s a cheap and stupid little direct-to-video sci-fi flick, but it’s got its moments. The lead girl is introduced beating the hell out of a local drug dealer, and the hero is a tiny detective from another planet chasing down an evil disembodied head. And there are occasional moments of hilarity, some of them intentional (like the dialogue on Dollman’s home planet). Also, Dollman has angry violence issues, so there are bunches of bodies including an exploding henchman.

The floating head is Sproog, played by something called Frank Collision, the rogue alien doll man is Tim Thomerson, best known from the Trancers series, and the girl got a plum role in Born In East L.A. Jackie Earle Haley plays a henchman. Director Pyun has been “much vituperated against” according to his IMDB page.

by ·Comments Off on I Can’t Sleep (1994, Claire Denis)

Beautiful Daiga (Yekaterina Golubeva, mysterious sister/lover of Pola X) has emigrated from Lithuania to Paris and is looking for a place to stay and work. Theo (Alex Descas, father in 35 Shots of Rum) is a struggling musician, and his brother Camille (Richard Courcet) a transvestite dancer. One of these three people might be connected to the serial “Granny Killer” who has been terrorizing Paris for a while.

Theo is from Martinique, married to Mona (Beatrice Dalle of The Intruder, also an intruder in Inside). Their relationship issues provide a solid center to the murder mystery plot – turns out Camille and his lover Raphael are the wanted criminals, killing old women and robbing their apartments for money to party.

Sort of like 35 Shots of Rum, following a few characters, you gradually realize who they are and how they know each other, more grounded and straightforward than The Intruder or Trouble Every Day – only instead of ending with a wedding, it ends with two guys being locked up.

Senses of Cinema provides a handle on many of her films: “Denis continues to explore the legacy of colonial and post-colonial societies by concentrating upon shared experiences of displacement – through an ensemble of characters who are struggling to find, return to or willfully create a sense of home, possibility, passion, belonging.”

I also watched her nine-minute segment from A Propos de Nice the following year, tragically entitled Nice, Very Nice. Young Denis regular Gregoire Colin is snatched off the sidewalk by some guys he knows, given a gun and an apparently convincing speech (we don’t hear it – there’s no spoken dialogue). Colin stops at the beach to think, then heads through a parade to a restaurant, where he finds and kills his man. The plot seems like an excuse to film the parade.

by ·Comments Off on Forgotten Silver (1995, Peter Jackson)

I didn’t let Katy see the box, and didn’t tell her it was fake, to see how long it took her to figure it out. But she didn’t ever, so I told her over the end credits. She is still mad.

Codirected with Costa Botes, who I think made the Lord of the Rings making-of docs. I’d forgotten all about “Stan the Man,” the unfunny comic who attacks people then runs away, with Colin filming on hidden cameras.

by ·Comments Off on Pola X (1999, Leos Carax)

Not at all surprised when the end credits told me it’s based on a novel. The novel was Herman Melville’s follow-up to Moby Dick, which according to wikipedia was “a critical and financial disaster… universally condemned for both its morals and its style.” The movie plays like a piece of tragic literature without feeling uncomfortable in its present-day setting. I mean that as a compliment, but it also means the plot, as strange as it initially seems, has a feeling of inevitability. It opens on a rich couple, happy, alive and in love, so I know things won’t end well. Maybe it would be interesting to someday make a movie that opens on a loving couple who manage to stay that way.

Anonymously bestselling author Pierre (Guillaume Depardieu, star of Don’t Touch The Axe) is engaged to marry Lucie, but already a weird incestual vibe is creeping in when he calls his mom “sister” and gets all clingy around her. His best friend Thibault returns from travels, congratulates Pierre on his engagement to their mutual childhood friend Lucie, seems sincere about it. But Pierre is distracted by a stalker, and when he finally catches her, she claims to be his long-lost sister Isabelle, hidden away and raised in Bosnia. So Pierre visits some good places to die: the highway at night, a massive unstable rock, a waterfall, then tells his fiancee and mother that he’s moving to Paris by himself.

Pierre and mother:

Pierre tells Isabelle (Yekaterina Golubeva, sinister stalker in The Intruder): “for the world, you’ll be my wife,” even though nobody in Paris knows who he is so it shouldn’t matter. They immediately run into trouble on both sides of the law, Thibault throws him out, and newly-disillusioned Pierre is having trouble with his follow-up novel. His agent: “The need to spit the world’s sinister truth in its face is as old as the world itself.” Another woman and a little girl travel with them – I was never sure who they were, exactly, but the girl dies after being smacked in the head by a passer-by, and the couple moves again.

Now they’re in a warehouse run by a drums-and-feedback noise conductor and his all-black-clothed orchestra – just the kind of thing people assume goes on in Paris – and now their public/private roles seem reversed, as they sleep together when nobody is looking, but stay in separate beds. Back in the country, Pierre’s distraught mom (Catherine Deneuve, the same year she did Ruiz’s Time Regained) gets on his motorcycle and dies on the highway at night – so it beats the massive rock and the waterfall as the movie’s foreshadowed death monument. Lucie tracks Pierre down and stays with them (“we’ll say you’re my cousin”).

More troubles: Isabelle jumps off the winter ferry trying to die, Pierre publicly identifies himself as the author of the bestselling novel but is called an impostor, nobody wants his new book (“a raving morass that reeks of plagiarism”), Thibault is harassing them, and Pierre is getting shit from his conductor/landlord, whose musicans apparently also double as his private militia. So Pierre grabs some guns, goes into town and blows Thibault’s head off, is packed into the police van as his women both run after him, then Isabelle walks in front of a speeding ambulance.

It struck me as ironic that Pierre is trying to write a great, tortured novel, seeking the ultimate truths, while all his relationships are full of lies. Watched this because I enjoyed the unhinged awesomeness of Carax’s Lovers on the Bridge and his Merde short, and I’m hearing that his new one is bananas. But this was apparently the grimly serious piece between features of transcendent weirdness, despite a blood-soaked dream-sequence or two. I was looking forward to the Dirty Three score, but it’s actually by Scott Walker – what was I thinking of?

Lucie, in happier times:

Senses of Cinema:

If compared to Jean-Luc Godard and later Philippe Garrel in his first works, in Pola X we find a Carax closer to Jacques Rivette – who, not in vain, has declared that for him this is the most beautiful French film of the ’90s. The Rivettian airs can be found, for example, in the importance of the ideas of conspiracy, secrecy and masks; in the shots of large interior spaces like factory buildings and chateaus; and, above all, in the treatment of time: so many meters of film are used to follow the characters’ journeys, living the process with them – at the beginning of the film we follow Pierre all the way from the chateau where he lives to Lucie’s home, including the ferry ride; similarly, at the end of the film Carax spends a lot of time following Pierre’s journey to Thibault.

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The sweetest end-of-the-world drama. Likeably lopsided Don McKellar (also writer/director) visits his family (opening nostalgia Christmas presents and having a homey diner) claims that he’s comfortable with his plan to spend the (unexplained but universally accepted) apocalypse in six hours alone in his apartment. Don is really super-depressed over the recent death of his wife, ends up helping an increasingly desperate Sandra Oh, who still thinks she can go shopping and catch taxis in the midst of societal breakdown, attempt to reunite with her intense latter-day boyfriend. This is probably David Cronenberg, a gas company manager who completes his goal to personally phone every customer and thank them for their business, before going home to await Sandra, leaving employee Donna in charge.

Sandra has car trouble:

Don and Sandra get grudging help from Don’s playboy car-collector friend Craig, who is rapidly going through a list of sexual conquests – both acts and partners (Lily, a black woman; Don, who refuses; and their high school French teacher, Genevieve Bujold).

Bujold with Callum Rennie:

Cameo by Pontypool director Bruce McDonald (with the bat)

The midnight hour approaches, but the sun is still up – apparently it hasn’t gone down in weeks. Don’s sister Sarah Polley and her boyfriend attend the final countdown celebration in the middle of town. A nerdy guy named Menzies holds a solo piano concert in an otherwise-unused theater. Cronenberg is shot by marauding youth. His employee Donna, a virgin, is Craig’s final visitor. And Sandra, losing her dream of last-second double-suicide with her beloved, ends up in the arms of Don. It seemed like a generic-indie-looking unexceptional drama in the first ten minutes, but totally hooked me and proved amazingly touching by the end. I can’t stop thinking about it.

Cronenberg gets a taste of his own horror-makeup medicine:

Polley party:

by ·Comments Off on Brainscan (1994, John Flynn)

Not a bad little virtual-reality teen horror movie. Well, okay, it’s quite a bad little virtual-reality teen horror movie, but Trevor and I have sentimental attachment to the stupid thing. So how could we pass up watching the edited-for-television version (“I’m in deep stuff”) at Dolly’s house?

Edward Furlong continued frittering away his Terminator 2 goodwill after Pet Sematary II and before his brief 1998 resurgence, appearing as a troubled (dead mom, metal albums) video gamer who gets a demo disc of an immersive VR experience, a shoddy Existenz starring a punk clown called Trickster. In first-person, Eddy stalks then knifes a sleeping neighbor. His gaming buddy Kyle knows too much, so Ed goes back the next night and wakes up hearing that his friend has died (we don’t watch this part). Next he tries to rebel against Trickster and stop the killing, but Tricky wants Ed to take care of his crush Kimberly. Another killing spree ends with a vigilante neighborhood watch group shooting Kyle’s dad, I think. But Ed wakes up and everyone’s still alive – it was all part of the game experience. So he trashes his room a bit, then hands off the disc to a hated authority figure, and all ends well.

Written by Andrew Walker, who specializes in convoluted serial killer stories (Se7en, Sleepy Hollow, 8mm), mostly pretty tame but with a few scenes that seem like inspirations to later works (Lost Highway, an Aphex Twin video). The actors who played Furlong’s friends Kyle and Kimberly would go on to appear in nothing much, and nothing much, respectively, but the killed dad was in Scanners, which is the movie people always think you’re talking about if you mention Brainscan.

by ·Comments Off on Nouvelle Vague (1990, Jean-Luc Godard)

I have a rocky relationship with late Godard, but was determined to watch this because of its appearance on Rosenbaum’s top-hundred list, so I watched a few others to prepare: from the pre-’68 Weekend to the Criterion-issued Tout va bien to a couple more Rosenbaum-approved films, Ici et Ailleurs (hit) and King Lear (miss). Even with all those and Histoire(s) and In Praise of Love under my belt, I don’t feel like I understand or appreciate post-’68 Godard sufficiently, but I reluctantly watched this one anyway, sure that it’d be a flop. Sure enough, it’s completely impenetrable, possibly even pretentious. But I loved it.

The picture is divine, shot by the great William Lubtchansky (the year before La Belle Noiseuse) with art direction by JLG’s Ici et ailleurs partner Anne-Marie Mieville. The camerawork feels closer to the Straub/Huillet movies I’ve seen than to anything by Godard (maybe if I remembered In Praise of Love better). Sound design draws attention to itself (music cutting on and off abruptly), as do the editing and camera. The complete soundtrack to the movie (dialogue and all) was released on CD, and I think the music of both Nouvelle Vague and For Ever Mozart was compiled from the works of the ECM label – have to check them out sometime.

There’s as much voiceover as onscreen spoken dialogue. The characters, if that’s what they are, talk past each other in quotations and philosophy. There’s very little direct story that I was able to decipher, but apparently there’s a plot going on with Alain Delon playing identical twin brothers (or possibly not), one of whom drowns (or possibly he doesn’t). Delon hangs with rich Helene (Domiziana Giordano, the guide in Nostalghia), whose maid Cecile (Laurence Cote of Gang of Four) keeps getting hit by people. That’s all the overt class warfare I found – Helene visits a factory she owns at one point, but no Tout va bien-style uprisings occur. Oh, maybe there’s more class warfare than I realized, since apparently Delon was a drifter taken in by Helene. I caught that at the beginning, but after seeing him in all the nice suits later on, then the identical twins thing, I got thrown.

Rosenbaum on theme: “In part a sustained reverie on what it means both to be rich and not to be rich, and the contrapuntal role played here by the wealthy characters and their servants is part of what makes this film so operatic in feeling.” Elsewhere he’s called it “a meditation on the end of the world.”

M. Sooriyakumaran on plot:

While driving along a stretch of highway in the Swiss countryside, a wealthy industrialist, Helene Torlato-Favrini, finds a drifter, Roger Lennox, lying by the side of the road. They instantly become lovers, but it’s not long before they start bickering with one another. One day while swimming, Helene (accidentally?) pulls Roger into the water and then watches from her boat while he drowns. Several months later, Roger’s twin brother Richard (or perhaps Roger himself, pulling a Lady Eve) turns up at Helene’s mansion, driving a convertible and wearing a fancy suit, to ask for a job in her company. He and Helene also become lovers, but this time it’s Richard who wears the pants in their relationship.

G. Santayana:

Although Nouvelle Vague has more of a story than many recent films by Godard, it is his most rigorously composed. It is his most insistently citational. With texts drawn from William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Baudelaire, Jacques Chardonne, Rimbaud, Dante, Dostoievsky, Howard Hawks, and innumerable other sources, everything in the film comes from somewhere else.

I’d heard this – an interesting idea, making a movie using only stolen dialogue. But the dialogue is all really great, and I couldn’t identify any of its sources, so the thought that it’s stolen hardly matters. Ah, the recurring dead bee query comes from To Have and Have Not, and Helene’s last name was nabbed from The Barefoot Contessa.

Santayana again:

If Passion is about light, Nouvelle Vague is about time. It is about waves ever returning – and the gift of empty hands. Indeed, the outstretched hand is the recurring visual motif in the film. … It is the natural world to which the characters aspire – to be at one with the cyclical rhythms of nature, mute in their magnificence, like the horses ever-present beside the cars. … For all their playfulness and outstanding inventiveness, [Godard’s] late films are, however, mournful in tone. They seem like products of a civilization that is coming to the end.