Despite the tuba on the poster I wasn’t expecting this movie to swing so hard. Currently my vote for best Roy movie – I didn’t get it but I don’t especially get any of his movies, and this one had the most fun soundtrack. In Cinema Scope 32 Andersson says he was inspired by Bicycle Thieves to portray people in humiliating moments.
After Paris Texas I was in the mood to watch more people wandering the desert. I’d long assumed this would be a slow-cinema endurance test, but it’s absurd and wonderful. When lost idiots Matt Damon and Casey Affleck ever speak, it’s in-joke code. The movie mocks them, changing terrain and teleporting them from California to deserts in Utah and Argentina, and they make a mockery of their terrain, stranding Affleck on a way-too-tall rock, which he gerries down unharmed.
Apparently a Bela Tarr homage. Gerry-liker Mike D’Angelo only complains about “an abrupt ending that serves up an unwelcome dose of cheap irony,” while the only nice thing Tarr-o-phile Rosenbaum could say is that it’s less phony than Finding Forrester.
I put off watching this for so long, and now I’ll bet we’re on the verge of an unbearably gorgeous 8k remaster, but all I’ve got is the decades-old DVD. In fact I’ve watched this DVD before, and it’s one of the reasons I started the blog. I rented it, put it on, and proceeded to half-ignore it while doing something or other on the computer… marked it as “seen” on some list even though a week later I remembered nothing of it… decided that pretending to watch films to check them off a list is a waste of time. Paying close attention then writing notes afterwards is arguably a much bigger waste of time, but a true passion/hobby should waste as much time as possible.
Set in the present day of the 1905 novel. Gillian Anderson and Eric Stoltz flirt at his flat, possibly setting the record for most charismatic Davies characters. Gil’s aunt Eleanor Bron is rich, but hanger-on Jodhi May (Nightwatching) is better at forming the kinds of relationships that will land a lucrative inheritance. Laura Linney is married (to Terry Kinney of the Ferrara Body Snatchers), is also into Stoltz, so there’s some intrigue about some love letters she’d written. Dan Aykroyd practically kidnaps Gil, who emphatically rejects him. Elizabeth McGovern’s character name is Carrie Fisher, and she has a daughter named Edith, and both these things are distracting. Anthony LaPaglia wanted to marry Gil, not anymore given her situation, but he’d still be willing to see her in private (wink wink). Gil refuses to follow the social conventions, messes up every relationship at every point in the movie, gets fired from the hat factory, and finally drinks all the opium just as Stoltz was coming to rescue her.
House of Mirth crossfades:
Jodie Foster is divorcing a pharma boss, diabetic daughter Kristen Stewart in tow, moving into the Manhattan home of a dead guy with a missing fortune, and nobody here has ever seen a scary movie before. On their very first night, entitled rich kid Jared Leto breaks in with corrupt security expert Forest Whitaker and psychopath Dwight Yoakam, and the standoff begins. I remember this being the most tense movie I’d ever seen in theaters – obviously not as wild the second time around two decades later, but a real good time.
Not the panic room but the elevator:
I’m reading the Adam Nayman book on Fincher and rewatching a couple movies. Production of this one (and all his movies, haha) was difficult. Adam says the cinematography has a “floating, disembodied aesthetic” and he compares it to other apartment movies and contemporary thrillers.
Jodie’s ex Patrick Bauchau (La Collectionneuse) gets involved:
MVP Fred Willard, whose dog show color commentator gets too little screen time.
Runners-up Jane Lynch, John Michael Higgins, and the bloodhound.
Instead of playing The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach alongside another movie from Vogel’s chapter on editing, I followed it with another Bach movie. This one places delicious performance footage within little conceptual scenes, cutting between scenes and eras like it’s no big deal (“juxtaposing past and present as if they were attractions in a theme park” per Rosenbaum).
Player piano rolls and spins slowly around a gallery.
Blind piano tuner goes to work
European trucker tells his story to a rider at a roadside cafe, rider impossibly plays a Bach piece on harmonica.
Wigged pipe organist alone in St. Thomas church, where Bach is buried
Close-up on hands during a harpsichord performance, first-person camera.
Tour guide goes to work performing as Bach – no music in this one.
Another tour – a boat, then a subway car full of cellists.
Mendelsson’s man goes to the market in 1829, the apocryphal backstory of how some of Bach’s compositions were discovered being used as wrapping paper.
Evoking the Holocaust, “music hurts,” a piano silently falls into the sea.
Connections start getting pieced together: a cellist goes on a trip to St. Thomas and speaks with a female descendant of Bach, while her husband is calling the trucker to set up a difficult crane delivery of an antique piano.
Manohla Dargis:
The film demands engagement and a kind of surrender, a willingness to enter into a work shaped by correlation, metaphor and metonymy, by beautiful images and fragments of ideas, a work that locates the music in the twitching of a dog’s ears, in the curve of a woman’s belly, a child’s song and an adult’s reverie. Like the music it celebrates, this is a film made in glory of the world.
Marina stumbles around the backyard of a party, later realizing she’s cut her leg open, then she keeps fucking with it so it can’t heal properly. Becomes increasingly obsessed with her skin and what’s underneath – at a business dinner she’s too distracted by her own arm, has to go to a nearby hotel and cut herself up. She stages the arm injury as a car crash so her boyfriend won’t know it was done on purpose, and he acts appalled by all this, but we know actor Laurent Lucas loves it since he’d later get his own leg torn up in Calvaire then play the dad in Raw. Marina’s journey ends in disappointment that the skin she’s been removing can’t live its own life without her.
Marina also made a bodily possession movie with Monica Bellucci and one about someone’s furniture coming alive and attacking them. Her jealous coworker-friend here is Léa Drucker, the aging-backwards wife of Incredible But True.
Dennis Lim, who ties this to Cronenberg’s Crash:
Without deploying reductive backstory or simplistic psychology, this fearless movie illuminates Esther’s pathology as an extreme response to the mind-body split. Her destructive dislocation arises from perceiving her body as an external object that she also happens to inhabit … Esther recoils into herself, and the film unflinchingly follows. De Van again uses close-ups – this time split-screened – for the climactic bout of mutilation. By this point, the images are wholly abstracted and disembodied – they evoke a trancelike oblivion, a state of self-immersion so complete that all perspective vanishes.
Family on vacation, local hunters unhappy at family for hitting a deer they’d been tracking, pink hat Otis will get his revenge – my second Otis movie of the week. Though afraid of the deer hunter, the family settles into their vaca home and gets settled: Patricia Clarkson here between The Green Mile and a Carrie remake, dad would appear in Jennifer Lynch’s Chained and the Dawn of the Dead remake, and their son, Middle Malcolm’s little brother.
The kid is given a wendigo figurine by the Phantom Indian of a store intown, then there’s a gradual ramp-up of displaced-Indians imagery. Both parents intended a getaway but have work stuff come up. Some sweet stop-motion/photo-montage scene transitions keep the movie lively and mysterious, then Otis shoots dad and kills the sheriff with a hammer, glimpses of deer creatures and antler mazes as the camera rushes the doomed people.
I was wondering if you could make a whole week of Malcolm in the Middle horror movies… Malcolm’s in teen gamer flick Stay Alive, Reese starred with Dee Wallace in Invisible Mom II, Francis did a kidnapping thriller, the mom did a Manson family thing, and dad was in a haunted novelist story and sci-fi horror Dead Space… so Dewey here is the champ.
tfw malcolm in the middle isn’t on TV:
Follows through nicely on its opening Psycho reference, not just a fakeout joke. Appalling CG is something I’m getting used to this month after Final Destination 4. But oh no, the first scene was a first-person murder fantasy by an ugly doll, and this is a meta making-of a Chucky movie. Jennifer Tilly as herself: “I’m an oscar nominee for god’s sake and now I’m fucking a puppet.”
Young Seed is trans, feat. a nice Glen or Glenda reference, and voiced by Pippin himself. Cool-looking movie with good dollwork, but Bride hit the horror-comedy sweet spot and this one is just cheesy. John Waters plays the paparazzo stalking Tilly, whom the adult dolls are trying to knock up, while their messed-up doll-baby protects/threatens them. Feels like a lot of British people were in this. Seed finally boxing-helenas Chucky’s limbs before beheading him, but let’s see, Chuck will be back – Curse comes next, then Cult, then I am not watching the TV series.