by ·Comments Off on Merci pour le chocolat (2000, Claude Chabrol)

After playing the hellraiser in Le Ceremonie, Isabelle Huppert is back to being classy and restrained in this one. She’s the first and third wife of pianist André Polonski – he had a son by his second wife, who died in a car crash. In another part of town, Jeanne (Anna Mouglalis: Coco Chanel in the Jan Kounen film) learns from her mother that she was nearly switched at birth with Polonski’s son Guillaume. Since Jeanne is an aspiring pianist and looks up to Polonski, she takes this as a sign and visits his house, where he offers to give her private lessons.

Huppert and Dutronc:

It’s gradually revealed that icy Huppert, who runs a chocolate company, puts sedatives in the family’s chocolate every night, and drugged Guillaume’s mom the night of her car accident years ago. Jeanne drives off to the store at night with Guillaume in the car, knowing very well that she’s been drugged. Why does she do this, other than to offer us a climactic suspense scene? Huppert ends up like Sandrine Bonnaire in Le Ceremonie and Jean-Pierre Cassel in La Rupture: caught red-handed as the credits roll.

Mouglalis and Pauly, born on the same day:

All sorts of parallels and doubles – each kid is missing a parent, they were (nearly?) switched at birth, Huppert and Polonski were married twice, Jeanne dresses up as Guillaume’s mother – I’m not sure what it all adds up to, but it kept the movie from feeling thin even though very little happens, plot-wise, over 100 minutes. Guillaume is Rodolphe Pauly, who played the soldier who dies and swaps identities with Audrey Tautou’s beloved in A Very Long Engagement, and sharp-featured Jacques Dutronc was Pialat’s Van Gogh, also costarred with Huppert twenty years earlier in Godard’s Sauve qui peut (la vie).

Chabrol:
“Perversity guides its adept (or its victim) to a form of relative solopsism that leads us to provide other examples of relative solopsism; that of the musician, for instance, with infinitely more benign consequences that are nonetheless real. We have tried to illustrate this idea by the slow dissolution of the most definite certainties of our society – here, filial descent, and so the family. The main aim is to get across the idea that all certainties melt away as the story progresses.”

by ·Comments Off on Wild Grass (2009, Alain Resnais)

J. Reichert in Reverse Shot described it best: “The characters’ constant behavioral irrationality makes the first half of Wild Grass a frustrating watch, but these rougher waters, in which Resnais schizophrenically navigates through genres (thriller, romance, comedy), eventually calm somewhat and the film enters into a groove where possibilities become expansive and the discontinuity becomes the subject in itself.”

Halfway through the movie, it became definitely better than Private Fears and even Not on the Lips. Maybe it’s because Resnais deviated from the novel here, allowed improvisation to shape the script, and reportedly based his humor on Curb Your Enthusiasm. It felt a hundred times more free than those previous two movies – especially over Not on the Lips, which felt like it was being performed by ancient ghosts locked in the same performance for eons (hence the fading-out as they walked offstage). Not sure that I approve of the plane crash idea, and I already know I was paying attention to some of the wrong things so will have to watch it again, but that point halfway through when I realized that the irrationality of the lead characters has spread virus-like into the rest of the movie was my most thrilling moment in theaters this year.

by ·Comments Off on Micmacs (2009, Jean-Pierre Jeunet)

Jeunet has made his brownest film since Delicatessen. Surely City of Lost Children and A Very Long Engagement were very brown indeed, but this one wins the brownness prize of the decade. I was very pleased with this overall – nevermind the haters, it’s more mad Jeunet fun, junkyard contraptions and insane plot contrivances help one obsessed individual win out, yay. Until the minute after it ended… then the whole thing felt kind of empty. I guess Dany Boom (My Best Friend, The Valet) had a valid reason for going after the two big arms companies in town (run by Nicolas Marié, who I’ll only recognize again if he wears those same glasses, and the great André Dussollier of Coeurs and Wild Grass) and I guess the junkyard denizens can help him out, because that’s the sort of thing that happens in movies, and I suppose he sort of succeeds (one CEO goes to jail and the other disappears). But it feels like all the thought went into the mechanisms and mannerisms, and not enough was put into the big picture. If I sound like a cranky newspaper critic, so be it – I felt like one. Maybe it’ll improve on repeat viewing – Engagement did.

More cast. Marie-Julie Baup plays Calculator, a diminutive, bespectacled number cruncher who reminds of the female lead in Delicatessen (and in case you weren’t thinking of Delicatessen, Jeunet drops a non-sequitur reference to that film in the middle of a spy sequence, just like he drops references via highway billboard to Micmacs itself). Michel Crémadès is a junk artist with a smiling, elfin face that seems like it should have appeared in Jeunet movies past, yet somehow hasn’t. Dominique Pinon gets to be his merry self. Omar Sy has a thing for turns-of-phrase sayings that doesn’t really translate (or just isn’t funny, don’t know which). Then you got cutie contortionist Julie Ferrier and parental figures Jean-Pierre Marielle (Coup de torchon, The Da Vinci Code) and chef Yolande Moreau (Amelie, Vagabond).

by ·Comments Off on JCVD (2008, Mabrouk El Mechri)

A very grey-brown movie (because it’s so “real”) about the “real” Jean-Claude Van Damme (“really” named Jean-Claude Van Varenberg) in his “real” hometown, who gets caught in the middle of a “real” action adventure when “real” thieves are robbing a bank (or is it a post office – I didn’t get that part). Not done mockumentary style (in fact, there are some impressive showoff long-shots), although JC does have a talk-to-the-camera monologue in the middle, where he gets real with his fans.

I’ve got nothing against JC (Steven Seagal, on the other hand…) and could’ve enjoyed this if it was more what I’d expected – a fake-reality situation in which JC kicks some righteous ass while getting real about his career. But after a not-much-happening mistaken-identity hostage situation is shown again and again from multiple perspectives, JC finally does kick a dude… in his imagination! Really he’s saved from the thieves by the cops who then arrest him for extortion, haha! It’s so real. Kind of depressing, really. I’ll take the first ten minutes and leave the rest.

Indy Week: “What could have been a crisp little concept movie (how do you say Phone Booth in French?) is instead a limply paced, murky-looking attempt to state the obvious: that big action stars are not, in fact, invincible.” But Cinema Scope calls it remarkable: “By pitting JCVD the axiom against JCVD the person, JCVD deconstructs and deepens the understanding of both. It is nothing if not a triumph of humanism.”

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.

by ·3 Comments

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.