by ·Comments Off on Of Time and the City (2008, Terence Davies)

I can’t remember if I finished watching this. I know I watched the first hour, but can’t be sure of anything after that. Or was it only an hour long? Anyway I know two things: one, that I was under the effects of dramamine at the time of the viewing, and two, that I found it disappointingly plain after the advance hype of Davies’ big festival comeback and the nostalgia poetry of his previous features.

I guess it wasn’t universally loved. The Telegraph: “Rarely have I had the misfortune to sit through such a relentlessly maudlin drool of clichés and sentiment. … As a poet of the proletarian past, Davies is no Bill Douglas or Dennis Potter. He has nothing of any profundity to say about time except that it passes.”

by ·Comments Off on The Informant! (2009, Steven Soderbergh)

Sodie’s fifteenth film of the 2000’s. I like a filmmaker who can be good and productive, and there aren’t many of those left. And this was good for sure. Steven and the actors and production designers and music composer Marvin Hamlisch all seem to be having a good time, turning a low-key piece of mid-90’s corporate intrigue into a light comedy – the comedy being provided by Matt Damon’s character Mark Whitacre, his odd behavior and agent Scott Bakula’s incredulous reactions, as set forth in the trailer. We never do meet the “real” Mark, figure out exactly what’s going on in his mind – I suppose that’s because of the non-involvement of the real Mark, now out of jail and president of a biotech firm. The filmmakers taunt us by offering a voiceover of Mark’s thoughts, but only the most irrelevant non-sequitur thoughts.

Damon with wife Melanie Lynskey, who played one of George Clooney’s sisters in Up in the Air – and I didn’t realize she also starred in Heavenly Creatures:

The payoff is when the movie strays from the light tone at the very end. Whitacre is prosecuted for embezzling and lying to the feds, and ends up serving far more time in prison than the executives he had been working to successfully convict. The sleight-of-hand here at the end makes the movie more interesting than the straightforward hero story of Erin Brockovich (or Flash of Genius, I’m guessing). The supporting cast is peppered with comedians (Scott Adsit, Patton Oswalt, Dick Smothers, the little lovesick poet from Waitress) – strange, since there doesn’t seem to be any improv and no one gets to be funny except for Damon.

Paul F. Tompkins:

D. Kasman:

To hit a target as broad as a barn – American corporate atmosphere – Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns (who adapts Kurt Eichenwald’s book) narrow the subject as much as possible, getting just so the exacting blandness of 1990s corporate culture. … But a brief picture of The Informant!’s genre parody does little justice to the closet character study that emerges from Damon’s performance and the story’s deadpan plot twists. The crackling humor of the film—which comes from a myriad of sources—then builds off the inane, if not legitimately surreal impossibility that someone so high up and so well off would ever dare expose the horrible mechanisms behind their success and others’ suffering.

Good to see Scott Bakula, even if he’s under some very silly hair:

by ·Comments Off on Sweetgrass (2009, Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Ilisa Barbarsh)

For a few minutes I was mad at the Tara for projecting the film out of focus, not an unreasonable thought given previous disasters at that theater, but then I realized the movie was shot on low-grade DV – probably a good financial choice for a two-person three-year project, but less than ideal for landscapes, which the camera turns into mud. A would’ve-been-lovely shot of pack horses parading before distant mountains ended up looking like a blurry painting. K Uhlich agrees: “As subcultural anthropology, it’s unassailable. Yet the often ugly-looking DV aesthetic dilutes the cumulative effect. For every gorgeously low-res image (a blobby, white sea of sheep racing heedlessly toward their pen), there’s a correspondingly ineffectual visual or vista that one wishes had been captured with higher-end equipment and a keener cinematic eye.”

Jimmy wasn’t bothered by the camerawork so much as the editing, saying that each shot lingered too long, which became cumulatively frustrating. But we agreed it was neat overall, even if most of its value was in teaching us city folk how ranching works.

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Perhaps I’ve suffered my own bout of amnesia because I already can’t remember much of this movie. I remember it wasn’t as rapid-edit-afflicted as I’d heard, but then I realized that’s the two Paul Greengrass sequels that people have said each contain so many edits as to render the entire film a work of abstraction. I don’t see how that would be desirable, but I’m willing to give it a go. This one is by Doug “Swingers” Liman, who somehow pulled off a very competent, not over-stylish, gripping action movie before immediately falling under Greengrass’s shadow when Liman’s follow-up Mr. and Mrs. Smith was a critical bomb. Co-written by Tony Gilroy, all of whose movies I’ve been enjoying lately.

Matt Damon wakes up on a fishing boat after apparently having a change of heart about killing an African leader. The CIA doesn’t need an ex-superkiller roaming around, slowly regaining his memories along with a newfound conscience and thirst for vengeance, so bosses Chris Cooper and Brian Cox send bunches of faceless assassins (silent badass Clive Owen stands out just because he is Clive Owen) to stop him and hapless co-traveler Franka “Run Lola Run” Potente. Even with no memory (or because he has no memory: discuss) Damon is a super-effective instinctual ultra warrior who outthinks and outfights many assassins and possibly kills either Cooper or Cox, I don’t remember, before earning his Shawshank island retirement scene at the end.

by ·Comments Off on Izo (2004, Takashi Miike)

First time I watched this, I thought of Miike as a provocative ultraviolent action and horror director, based on Dead or Alive and Ichi the Killer and Audition. Most people still do, of course, since his quieter films (Bird People In China), his children’s films (Yatterman, The Great Yokai War) and his oddball art films (Gozu, Big Bang Love) don’t get as much attention. It turns out Izo is one of the art films masquerading as an action flick, and with that in mind, I enjoyed it much more the second time around. There are accepted ways of shooting action scenes or dialogue scenes, and these are not they. Miike uses strange and varied techniques to suit his strange, upsetting movie.

Tom Mes:

Taking the final scene of Hideo Gosha’s Hitokiri – the execution of homicidal 19th-century samurai Izo Okada – as its starting point, this was never meant to be any old chambara, but a meditation on mankind’s eternal propensity for violence and destruction.

From the oft-repeated plot description:

We learn that among Izo’s various guises was a doomed soldier who had to leave his lover (Kaori Momoi) to fight in World War II. He spares neither Buddhist monks nor schoolchildren, and eventually, Izo confronts Mother Earth (Haruna Takase) herself.

“Acid-folk” singer Kazuki Tomokawa is incredible, even if I’ve no idea what he’s singing – I have the old Cannibal King version of the DVD with no subs during the songs. Izo is crucified at the start of the movie, and born at the end, so I’m afraid a simple plot description won’t cut it, even if the songs were some sort of commentary. Lots of fun along the way, as he destroys hypocritical institutions, slaying religion and government (Beat Takeshi Kitano plays the prime minister and Ryuhei “Nightmare Detective” Matsuda plays the emperor), and a big fight with muscular black samurai Bob Sapp (a former Minnesota Viking) is an oft-cited high point. But he also spends lots of time killing innocents, moving down the weary ghosts of WWII soldiers, getting badly hurt and slow-morphing into a red-eyed demon as the frequency and repetition of the fight scenes start to wear on the audience.

That repetition is why many people seem to hate this movie. It’s accused of being slow and overlong, which I would partly agree with, but it’s more varied and interesting than the also-slow Sukiyaki Western Django – and even that one I expect will improve on a second viewing. Tons of cameos significant to people more familiar with Japanese cinema than I am. Learned from Midnight Eye that the soldiers stabbing Izo to death in the opening scenes are Kenichi Endo (father in Visitor Q) and Susumu Terajima (Takeshis’).

Ben Sachs:

To begin with the obvious: Izo is one of the most difficult works of art to be made in recent times. . . . The film is pure theme and variation, deliberately lacking consistent rhythm or sense of progression that would allow you to enjoy it casually. Still, nearly every sequence boasts some fascinating juxtaposition—between character and decor, between dialogue and action, in the way images are ordered—that makes it consistently striking to watch, if something of a slog to keep up with.

by ·Comments Off on In Praise of Love (2001, Jean-Luc Godard)

“The resistance had its youth and it had its old age, but it never went through adulthood.”

Godard already in his mournful history/memory/holocaust phase (of course, I keep forgetting this was made after Histoire(s) du Cinema). Very nice black-and-white photography and lovely, sad string music, then after an hour it turns to super-saturated color, very unique and wonderful looking. Story/character/intent-wise, though, I didn’t get the movie at all.

Part of it is self-referentially about making a film, trying to cast it. There are mentions of Henri Langlois, Robert Bresson, Hannah Arendt, Juliette Binoche, May ’68 and Max Ophuls. Didn’t feel any more like a proper narrative film than Notre Musique did. I’d say that maybe the small-screen experience wasn’t cutting it and I needed to see in a theater, but I saw Notre Musique in a theater and fell asleep. Maybe I’m not smart enough, or wasn’t prepared enough to tackle this one… it’s the kind of thing I’d be better off reading a bunch of articles before watching. I never figured out the love story, or the flashback structure, and even the filmmaking story seemed elusive. But probably it’s just because I’m an American, and it’s not for me.

“Americans have no real past. They have no memory of their own. Their machines do, but they have none personally. So they buy the pasts of others, especially those who resisted.”

There’s some anti-U.S. business, a character hating on the fact that U.S. residents call themselves “Americans,” textually taking ownership over both continents, and a slap at Spielberg (“Mrs. Schindler was never paid. She’s in poverty in Argentina”). Godard reportedly took time at Cannes to attack Spielberg further… guess he’s not thrilled that the current Cahiers crowd voted War of the Worlds as their #8 pick of the decade. C. Packman at IMDB says: “The film is a critique on Hollywood and how capitalism is destroying cinema and love. … The film succeeds in offering a philosophical problem, but demonstrates philosophy’s inability to enter into any realm other than the abstract. Godard here follows Marx’ dictum: ‘Philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it’.”

“When did the gaze collapse?”
“Before TV took precedence over life.”

No actors I’ve heard of before, and the one I liked best (Audrey Klebaner, above, as Eglantine) has never been in another film. Shot on 16mm b/w film and color video by Julien Hirsch (Notre Musique, Lady Chatterley) and Christophe Pollock (Up/Down/Fragile, Class Relations), but I can’t figure out who shot which. Punctuated by repeated title cards and blackouts.

Salon is ruthless:

Godard’s artistic deterioration has been particularly heartbreaking because, as his sensibility has atrophied, his visual gifts have matured. … The burnish of the images in First Name: Carmen, combined with the flow Godard shows in the editing rhythms and in the use of Beethoven string quartets to underscore the images, can lull you into thinking that something is actually going on in the film. … What it adds up to, though, in In Praise of Love as in the films that have preceded it, is a retreat, a shutting out of the world.

Slant calls it “an inscrutable rumination on memory and history that only Godard is meant to fully grasp.” I’m looking for raves, not pans – I watched this because it was on multiple best-of-decade lists. Reverse Shot goes gaga over the use of images, touches lightly on the story, and complains that the original title Éloge de l’amour (WordNet defines “elegy” as “a mournful poem; a lament for the dead”) has been translated to In Praise of Love.

by ·Comments Off on Kings and Queen (2004, Arnaud Desplechin)

Halfway through this movie I paused for an hour – or was it a day? Either way, I spent some time away from the movie just loving it, thinking so this is why people love Desplechin, this is great, not like A Christmas Tale which I thought was just so-so. Then I got back to the movie and the second half felt exactly like A Christmas Tale, not in terms of plot or character, but in that I just liked it pretty alright. So either the second half is disappointing, or I should not pause movies in the middle.

Large-mouthed Emmanuelle Devos is our star, who manages an art gallery, tends to her ten-year-old son, and is engaged to Olivier Rabourdin. Elsewhere, the ever-dependable Mathieu Almaric is introduced saying fuck you to the IRS on his outgoing answering machine message before he is taken away by men in white coats. I love that guy. Drama: Almaric is Devos’s crazy ex-husband who she contacts because her dad is dying. Is that what happened? I watched this a couple months ago now, so I’m not sure.

I thought the movie would center around Devos, but Almaric takes over for a long time, with his drug-addict lawyer, his superstar psychiatrist, new psychiatrist Catherine Deneuve, his family and a suicidal friend in the asylum who’s studying Chinese. In the second half it flashes all over through time, Devos breaking up with Almaric and driving her first husband to suicide. Energetic, emotional editing, not going for any sort of classical continuity, with very decent handheld camerawork. In the end, Almaric decides not to adopt (or be some kind of insurance-policy guardian for) Devos’s kid.

by ·Comments Off on The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005, Cristi Puiu)

“Are you still feeling nauseous?”
“I’m feeling melancholy.”

Right off the bat I’m regretting the decision to finally watch the 2.5-hour Romanian movie about the slow death of an old drunk due to failures in the national health care system. One of the top ten most critically acclaimed films of the decade or not, the DVD subtitles are blocky white with a light purple filling, the not-quite-static handheld camerawork is irritating, and the first 50 minutes are set inside Laz’s underlit apartment. I hope with the success of this movie, the director can afford a tripod.

It definitely gets better. Once they get to the ambulance/hospital(s), the handheld camera has some reason to exist, panning in response to characters and situations, like a dopey, late-night In The Loop. The paramedic who first picks up Laz feels responsible for him, wheels him from one condescending doctor to another, waiting in long lines for the use of scanning equipment and dealing with overcrowded emergency rooms and surly staff. Laz has a “subdural hematoma” (a brain cloud) and his condition rapidly and seriously worsens over the course of the night, until he can barely speak or control himself.

Seemed like a useful movie, but I’m not seeing the great work of art within. I preferred The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein as far as rambling 2.5-hour politically-charged budget-shot best-of-decade picks go. It made me angry towards the end, so there’s that, and I was pleased at the beginning that Laz and his neighbors are allowed some intelligence (not a given for movies about poor people). An article I can’t find right now says any Romanian would realize that all the times hospital personnel ask if Laz has any family with him, they are looking for a bribe, and the director says the movie is about the love of your fellow man.

by ·Comments Off on The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein (2001, John Gianvito)

1. A deep-voiced white kid Rafael is the only peacenik in his New Mexico high school, spurred on by a hippie teacher. His parents will hear nothing of it (“There was a time for national debate. It’s over”) so he leaves home.

2. Fernanda’s kids are abducted and killed on the first day of school by local racists. The cops are unhelpful jerks, and the kids aren’t found for a month. Fernanda herself is held for two months under suspicion of murder, disappears when released, goes wandering, is found by a woman with a house full of finches.

3. Ex-Marine Carlos returns from war, finds his job gone, is full of uncontrollable lusty rage.

So, a indie film over two hours long, shot on 16mm, full of 1990’s politics but released soon after September 2001. This was destined to be ignored, but accidentally destined to be extremely relevant to the decade that followed.

Freeze frames, long refreshingly unscripted-feeling dialogue scenes, and of course some scenes of trees and the whispering wind. Plus extended concert segments by Naseer Shemma, an Iraqi musician who performs his celebrated composition dedicated to civilians killed when American planes bombed a shelter.

Michael Sicinski in Cinema Scope:

Mad Songs is a political film that encompasses multiple stories, but does so following a film historical road less travelled – beginning with DW Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat and leading most recently to Fast Food Nation. The stories never intersect; instead they examine the problems of a time and place (the suburban US during the first Gulf War) almost geologically, by taking samples from discrete layers of American life.

Part of what makes Mad Songs so poignant, and at the same time incredibly strange, is the hope and earnestness with which it concludes. No film I’m aware of has given so much space to peace activists, sitting in meetings and testifying about the transformative power of nonviolent resistance. To a generation of critics and cinephiles reared on post-noir cynicism, Gianvito’s treatises surely sounded like transmissions from another planet.

Gianvito:

When I first began to conceive the project that became The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein, around 1993 I believe, it grew purely out of seething rage over the events of the 1991 Gulf War, the mainstream suppression of those events, and concern over the continuing support of lethal sanctions and military “containment” of Iraq. By the time I saw the film to completion the entire situation had only grown graver and more infuriating.