by ·Comments Off on The Girlfriend Experience (2009, Steven Soderbergh)

While Soderbergh’s studio movies with George Clooney and Matt Damon have been humming along at a regular pace, he’s been inconsistent with his smaller, more personal movies: Bubble and Girlfriend Experience were kind of crappy, no fun to watch, but Che was overwhelming. So yeah, Katy and I are glad we didn’t save this one for a hot date movie, since it was neither hot nor very good. A couple of unappealing actors play a story that doesn’t seem to matter, told in random-ass chronology with camerawork alternating between intriguing, decent and appalling.

Bored-looking “bona fide porn star” (as Netflix proclaims her) Sasha Grey (of Grand Theft Anal 11, Meet the Fuckers 7 and Fox Holes) is a professional escort, dating muscle-bound personal trainer Chris Santos. She is into astrology, takes notes on her encounters read to us in voiceover. He is considering going on a trip to Vegas with his work buddies. The only two scenes I liked were when he somewhat awkwardly requests a promotion from his boss and when she reads a negative review of her services online.

From the writers of Ocean’s 13, surprisingly. In fact I’m half-surprised that it had writers at all. At least it was short.

by ·Comments Off on Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (2009, Bromberg & Medrea)

Very good doc on the film Clouzot almost made between La Vérité and La Prisonnière, starring Romy Schneider (of Welles’ The Trial) and Serge Reggiani (just off Le Doulos and The Leopard). The couple is on their honeymoon, or maybe just on vacation, in a small town shot in black-and-white, and Reggiani becomes increasingly wildly jealous of everyone his wife has contact with, his state of mind represented with color fantasy sequences and optical-illusion effects. Decades after the film fell apart (mainly because the writer/producer/director’s overreaching ambition clashed with his own perfectionism for details, wasting time and money and tiring the cast and crew) the script was filmed in the 90’s by Claude Chabrol, which I believe was the first of Chabrol’s movies I ever watched, too long ago for me to compare the finished movie with the Clouzot fragments.

Clouzot got some great cinematographers and effects people, including Claude Renoir, Rudolph Maté (The Passion of Joan of Arc) and Andreas Winding (Play Time). It was also the first credited film work by William Lubtchansky, who is one of the main interview subjects. The documentary is very excellent, showing much of the never-finished film (the color footage in particular looks amazingly vibrant, like it was shot yesterday), and not getting into irrelevant sidetrack stories. Interiors (and therefore most of the dialogue scenes) were never shot, and there’s no surviving sound recording from set, so two actors read from the script on a black stage, providing missing context.

by ·Comments Off on Eccentricities of a Blond Haired Girl (2009, Manoel de Oliveira)

“Commerce shuns a sentimental accountant”

I don’t know what to expect from an Oliveira movie. This one is only an hour long, but not because it’s in any great hurry to tell its story, a fairly simple one which moves at a leisurely pace. Definitely a well-made film, with a respectable look to it, not a work of madcap genius, not tired or haphazard. Mildly enjoyable throughout, then at the end I’m not sure what it all meant.
Adapted from a story by famous novelist Eça de Queirós but set in modern day, so there’s a scene at a literary society with a bust of the author among other displays of his work. Narrated by the lead character to a stranger on a train, played by Leonor Silveira, star of A Talking Picture.

Macario (Ricardo Trepa, the bartender who chats with Piccoli in Belle Toujours) is an accountant for his uncle, sees beautiful Luisa (Catarina Wallenstein of Ruiz’s Mysteries of Lisbon) across the street and falls in love. Conspires to marry her, but his uncle will have none of it, so he sets out on his own, makes a small fortune working in Cape Verde then returns, only to lose it all by vouching for a friend who leaves town with another man’s wife. So he’s about to go back to Cape Verde but his uncle decides to take him back, says he can marry the girl. So they go out ring shopping, she is caught stealing a ring, he tells her to go away, roll credits. In an earlier scene, he lost a poker chip (during a poetry reading by Luis Miguel Cintra, who played the malignant uncle in Pedro Costa’s O Sangue, as himself) which rolled towards Luisa and disappeared, so he must realize she’s a habitual thief. Still, it’s an odd little story.

Trepa and Silveira:

J. Reichert

[The story] occupies the filmmaker’s by-now familiar nether-Lisbon, in which lives are lived simultaneously in 1609, 1909, and 2009. Oliveira’s a filmmaker at which the adjective urbane could be lobbed equally as praise or slight depending on your tolerance for his scarily coherent (especially of late) body of work. …If this tale weren’t so endearing and well told, it’d be more akin to one of those lengthy jokes told by aged uncles lacking in point or punchline.

Luis Miguel Cintra:

NY Times searches for clues:

As his story begins, the landscape outside the train window is snow covered; by the time it ends, it is green. Other tiny mysteries deepen the film’s enigmatic, gently surreal mood. … Macário encounters a strange, agitated man looking for his hat, left at the spot where Macário is standing. Periodically the movie returns to the same long shot of Lisbon but always filmed in a different light. At various points chimes ring from a tower whose clock has no hands. Everything is framed. Macário’s story is framed by the train trip. His dream girl, a full-lipped sensual beauty whose ash-blond hair tumbles over one eye, is glimpsed while standing at a window, seen through another window, waving a fringed Chinese fan. Even when she retreats behind a thin curtain, her silhouette is visible. Behind her is a framed portrait. Art not only seems to watch over life but to preserve it.

A blond-haired girl:

The DVD holds a press conference with the director and lead actors which is longer than the movie itself… might watch that another day.

by ·Comments Off on For Your Consideration (2006, Christopher Guest)

A Jewish family drama called Home For Purim gets oscar buzz for three of its four lead performances. The distributor wants a hit so they tone down the Jewishness and rename it Home For Thanksgiving. Finally the nominations come out and only the fourth, buzzless actor gets nominated, the others returning to their low-profile pre-fame existence.

Seems like this would be a good framework story for some jokes. But Guest didn’t think so… he thought those were the jokes. He reads the above paragraph and he’s already laughing, so why add more jokes? So there’s a jokeless parade of good actors in minor roles. To be fair, I laughed twice – at a sidetrack joke about bad breath and a bit of wordplay about Latin restaurants. Guest knows he’s good at gently skewering eccentric, mostly entertainment oriented subcultures, so after twenty-some years in the movie business (and with ringer cast member Ricky Gervais) I’d have hoped he could make a Hollywood satire with some bite, at least enough to rival Mamet’s State and Main.

Besides Ricky, I was glad to see Catherine O’Hara and Parker Posey as the rival stars, Harry Shearer as their good-natured co-lead, clueless rich producer Jennifer Coolidge, a lezzed-up Rachael Harris, regulars Michael McKean and Bob Balaban as the writers, 30 Rock‘s Scott Adsit in a small role on set, and especially Fred Willard and Jane Lynch (above) as co-hosts of an obnoxious TV morning show.

by ·Comments Off on Steak (2007, Quentin Dupieux)

This seems like a good idea. Mr. Oizo (seriously, the guy with the sock puppet music video from like 1997) writes and directs a movie about two maladjusted nitwits in a wacky future, casting a comedy duo who have been in at least three movies together. A good idea, but an especially underwhelming movie. I mean, I’ve seen some underwhelming movies lately, like The GoodTimesKid, but at least that one featured the wacky kitchen dance scene as something memorable to hold onto. I watched Steak last night and it’s already starting to fade. And the trouble is I don’t think that was intentional, to make a lightweight wispy mumblecore film. It’s mostly set seven years in the future, but even its futuristic society details seem stolen from other movies. For instance, plastic surgery has run rampant (Brazil) and schoolkids form exclusive, violent clubs and drink only milk (A Clockwork Orange).

It’s not totally clear how much has changed in the future, since we mainly see one town’s high school, and still more specifically, a five-man gang called Chivers (urban dictionary: “group of people dedicated to alleviating the stress of an otherwise hectic day with daily afternoon randomness”). When Blaise gets out of psychiatric hospital for shooting up some bullies (a crime actually committed by his friend George), George wants nothing to do with him, finally beginning to fit in with the super-cool Chivers. Blaise adjusts to the new social life faster than his now-ex-friend and gets himself into Chivers just as George is kicked out for smoking (a no-no in the future). Then they kill a fellow gang member by sorta-accident and run off together. The whole thing is played for absurd comedy – few laughs, just a low-key sense of weirdness. Pleasant Oizo music runs throughout, naturally. Only technical detail I noticed was the camera’s very shallow depth of field – always some part of the shot that isn’t in focus. A nice enough waste of time, but doesn’t get me too anxious to see Oizo’s new killer-tire movie Rubber.

by ·Comments Off on Standard Operating Procedure (2008, Errol Morris)

It’s Political Documentary Month! We will see how long that lasts. Katy asked if all Errol Morris’s films are about death (as far as I know they are) and commented that the square photos within a widescreen strip within our square TV across the room made her feel blind, so I brought up stylistic differences between Morris and Ken Burns, figuring we’re being punished for watching a theatrical feature in the same way we’d watch a television program. Afterwards, I showed her In The Loop, which I thought worked much better than S.O.P. on the TV screen. I was psyched to revisit it but she didn’t like at all, since it doesn’t count as satire on government if it’s exactly the way she imagines government works, and anyway it’s not funny.

S.O.P. was surprisingly tame. As one of the former prison guards points out, it’s not like they were beating prisoners or killing them, although that happens when the CIA bring in their own prisoner, a guy who they’re told “was never here.” Unfortunately for the CIA, photos of that incident leaked along with the rest – the ones with prisoners tied up in “stress positions” with panties on their heads, handcuffed into simulated sex scenarios and stacked in naked pyramids, all with Lynndie England flashing a thumbs-up in front. The prison holds a confusing number of military and government groups and private organizations – it would’ve taken a whole other movie to get it all straight. The guards certainly weren’t clear about it themselves. A side-effect of Morris’s technique here is that he’s made the opposite of The Road to Guantanamo, which was told from the prisoners’ point of view. This movie is an analysis of the photographs, of the circumstances behind them, but only from the guards’ points of view. The nameless prisoners, degraded and objectified in those photographs, remain anonymously dehumanized in the film, enigmatic vessels of suspicion (they are, after all, “enemy combatants”) and sympathy (for the torture/s.o.p. depicted).

by ·Comments Off on The Bourne Ultimatum (2007, Paul Greengrass)

A quality ending to the trilogy. I liked the timely references (waterboarding, gov’t using Echelon to track keywords spoken over cellphones) and new actors – David Strathairn (Good Night and Good Luck) as the new evil bureaucrat and Paddy Considine (same year as Hot Fuzz) as an intrepid reporter. Unfortunately, by Strathairn’s orders, Considine gets a bullet in the head.

Evil David Strathairn:

Julia Stiles and Joan Allen take Bourne’s side, and a wide-mouthed Albert Finney plays a haunting evil from Bourne’s past, proving that all women are friendly and craggy-faced old men are wicked.

Evil Albert Finney:

An informant in Madrid is blown up by a CIA hit man. Bourne fights two of those guys but only kills one, at most. He’s like Arnold in Terminator 2 now, a killing machine that doesn’t want to kill. The action is surprisingly comprehensible except for one hand-to-hand fight edited for maximum headache potential.

by ·Comments Off on Brandon’s Favorite Movies from the 2010 Decade List

At the start of the year I read an awful lot of critics’ best-of-decade lists and built my own list of must-see titles from those lists, collecting eighty of them here. But after watching thirty (more specifically, after watching Godard’s In Praise of Love) I rebelled against the list and watched no more. These are the ones I loved – so, not my faves of the decade (those are here) but my previously-unseen faves of other people’s faves of the decade. Whatever, right?

1. Inland Empire (2006, David Lynch)
Already broke a rule, since I watched this in theaters when it came out. But have you really “seen” Inland Empire until you’ve seen it twice? Who cares – I studied it closely this time, watched all the bonus material, and thought it was tops.

2. Colossal Youth (2006, Pedro Costa)
The only movie on the list (of the year?) to which I devoted more time than Inland Empire – because I figured to appreciate what critics were calling Costa’s masterpiece, I should first watch all his previous films. Can’t say I enjoyed them all, but I appreciated Colossal Youth much more for having seen them in order.

3. Va Savoir (2001, Jacques Rivette)
I limit myself to a couple Rivette films per year so he won’t take up my entire year-end list. If I only watched one this year, it’s because I wrongly assumed I’d also be able to see his latest, Around a Small Mountain, which played festivals in late 2009.

4. Syndromes and a Century (2006, Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
So fascinated was I by A.W.’s films this year, I can now spell his name without having to look up how.

5. Three Times (2005, Hou Hsiao-hsien)
Had to try watching this super-slow mood piece a few times, but it finally paid off. Completely transcendent – wish I could see it on the big screen.

6. Fat Girl (2001, Catherine Breillat)
Always assumed I’d dislike Breillat, and especially this movie, so maybe it gains extra points from being such a surprise favorite.

7. The Tracey Fragments (2007, Bruce McDonald)
McDonald’s second straight appearance on year-end lists. To think that in ’08 I’d never heard of him. Can’t wait to check out his early rock & roll road movies.

8. The Intruder (2004, Claire Denis)
It’s boring to say that I need to watch this again, since I’d love to watch all these movies again, and since the shuffled chronology and dreamlike narrative causes everyone to declare that they need to watch this again, but truly I need to watch this again. Denis is my favorite discovery of the year, even though I’d already discovered her.

9. Birth (2004, Jonathan Glazer)
Currently my favorite Nicole Kidman ghost story. She has starred in a few movies that question reality in interesting ways.

10. Frontier of Dawn (2008, Philippe Garrel)
One more ghost story to round things off. Colossal Youth is definitely one, and for all I know, Inland Empire, The Intruder and Syndromes would count too. Tracey Fragments has a haunting death, but I wouldn’t call it a ghost story.

Honorable mentions from the decade-viewing project: Kings and Queen (esp. the first half), The Bourne Trilogy (esp. part three), and Miike’s underrated Izo.

by ·Comments Off on Joyeux Noël (2005, Christian Carion)

Such a joy, and such a well-executed feel-good multi-lingual message movie that I’m surprised it didn’t win an oscar. Guess it’s tough to beat a redemptive picture about African slum violence.

Based vaguely on a true story: on a Christmas eve during WWI, officers from the German, French and Scottish trenches meet up in dead-man’s land and negotiate a temporary truce, talking, drinking and celebrating together. The bummer ending (first poor Dany Boon is shot by a vengeful Scot, then when word gets out about the truce, their superiors are embarrassed and punish everyone involved) can’t completely spoil the mood.

I should know who Lucas Belvaux and Daniel Brühl are, but really only recognized priest-turned-medic Gary Lewis (of Gangs of New York and Yes) and Inglorious Basterds star Diane Kruger. Playing her opera-singing husband was Benno Fürmann, who has an awesome face. I hope to see it again in Speed Racer, Jerichow and Carion’s follow-up, Farewell.