by ·Comments Off on Goodbye First Love (2011, Mia Hansen-Løve)

Paris, 1999: Sullivan and Camille are young and in love. He moves to South America, letters arrive less frequently, and flash forward to 2003, Camille has a serious haircut and is taking architecture courses. We see scraps of her life as the years go by, trying to get over Sullivan, dating married professor/architect Lorenz, moving in with him. When Sullivan finally returns to Paris, they get together, but not for long. “I’m leaving you because it’s too late or too soon to start again.”

My first Hansen-Løve movie and it’s a good one, with the beautiful Lola Crèton (Justine in Bastards) made ever-more beautiful by regular Jacques Audiard cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine. The look sometimes made me think of Rohmer, but the way the story and the scenes moved was something else, which I’m apparently not smart enough to describe accurately (Peter Labuza says “sensually naturalistic yet carefully calculated frames“).

In fact I have a hard time defining what makes this a great movie, but I’m convinced that it is. The talk about light in building design reminded me of La Sapienza, a movie I rated more highly than this one on a year-end list, but they could easily switch positions. Ben Sachs’ article in Mubi is a good one:

The movie seems to advance by intuition … Nothing happens comfortably or predictably: Hansen-Løve will devote several minutes to a seemingly mundane action, then advance the plot several months into the future with a simple, unassuming edit. (The greatest elisions, usually skipping over a few years at a time, are denoted by slow fade-outs that suggest the line breaks in a poem.) … The film ends abruptly, and yet at exactly the right moment. Hansen-Løve doesn’t sustain Camille’s final epiphany, which only makes it feel more true to life. The character, now a grown woman capable of elegizing her youth, hasn’t experienced a lifetime of love and regret – she only thinks that she has.

by ·Comments Off on The Prophet (2011, Gary Tarn)

The soothing voice of Thandie Newton reads us soothing philosophy from The Prophet.

From the description, Tarn “traveled around the world with his 16mm and HD camera and filmed people, situations and places that resonate with, rather than illustrate, the text’s themes.”

Watched to get in touch my my Lebanese roots. Actually I planned to double-feature with the animated version but didn’t get to it. I didn’t usually love the photography, but the cumulative effect of it with the voiceover worked for me.

by ·Comments Off on The Big Short (2015, Adam McKay)

“Seeds are gonna be the new currency.”

Another Brad Pitt movie explaining the math and business behind the scenes of things, so soon after Moneyball. This one follows separate groups of financial people who realize the banking system is ultimately built on bad loans, so they bet money on its collapse. Along the way, financial concepts are explained to the audience via Anthony Bourdain metaphors and Margot Robbie monologues (and the Polyphonic Spree appears for some reason). And we watch some of the world’s most charismatic male actors not trying to keep the global market from collapsing – that’s not their job – but hoping to profit from its destruction.

Pitt plays a light Ron Swanson type guiding young John Magaro and Finn Wittrock. Steve Carell plays some asshole, Ryan Gosling plays a smooth-talking dude, and Christian Bale gets to be the hard drummin’ socially awkward numbers guy who figures the whole thing out.

by ·Comments Off on Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter (2014, Zellners)

“I am like a Spanish Conquistador. Recently, I’ve learned of untold riches hidden deep in the Americas.”

A strange idea, obsessing over the “this is a true story” opening titles of Fargo, putting a degraded VHS tape of that movie into the hands of an already disconnected-from-reality Japanese woman whose hobby is treasure hunting, and setting her loose in Minnesota. However this movie, which opens with those same Fargo titles, is at least loosely based on a true story of a Japanese woman found dead outside Fargo.

Judging from the blu-ray alternate scenes, it seems the Zellners are inclined towards absurd comedy but dialed it down for the feature, so we’re left with a character study of a nearly mute, mostly unsympathetic (she rips off everyone she comes across) woman with a singleminded need to find something that we know doesn’t exist: the briefcase of money a wounded Steve Buscemi buried in the snow on a roadside twenty years earlier. Rinko Kikuchi (Pacific Rim, Norwegian Wood) is engrossing to watch, and it’s fun to see the Minnesotans vainly try to culturally connect with Kumiko (asking at a Chinese restaurant if anyone can translate Japanese, giving her a copy of Shogun, offering her a ride to the Mall of America). I appreciated the concept and performances but wasn’t feeling it overall.

Bedtime for Bunzo:

This pet store had an owl, a parrot and a monkey, and the combination of their sounds stunned my two birds into silence:

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Black Something (2016, Zellner Bros.)

Found on Filmstruck: the directors’ new homage to Malle’s Black Moon. A short burst of weirdness, and the first thing I tried to watch on that site, so I can’t tell if the barking dogs sound was out-of-sync on purpose or if this is gonna be a problem. A girl picks flower petals, centipedes wriggle, plants drip with goo, and frilly collar-wearing dogs attack a bear.

by ·Comments Off on Joy (2015, David O. Russell)

Joy (J. Lawrence) dreams of being an inventor, but then her life gets sidetracked with a husband (E. Ramirez), two kids, a divorce, a lazy mom (V. Madsen), an erratic dad (De Niro) and a spiteful sister. One day she hits on a new idea for a miracle mop, and sets to producing and marketing it, bringing the whole family along with dad’s rich girlfriend (I. Rossellini) and Joy’s supportive grandma (D. Ladd) and best friend. Then there are pricing and patent disputes. Then after everything has been pretty lousy and hopeless for Joy for an hour and fifty-eight minutes, she wins a major victory against a crooked business partner then becomes wildly successful in postscript.

It feels like Russell builds overcomplicated situations in American Hustle and Silver Linings Playbook, shoots the scenes with his trusted cast, and figures out how it’ll all work in the editing room, relying on energy and instinct to carry him through – and this time, he didn’t have it. The scenes and sporadic voiceover and transitions and characters often felt half-assed, and if I hadn’t known a distinguished filmmaker was behind the whole thing, I rarely would’ve guessed.

The cast gathers ’round to watch NAILED on cable:

T. Robinson:

Every character feels like a half-sketched first draft, awaiting development that never comes … The excruciatingly literal dialogue also feels like first draft material. “I feel like I’m in a prison,” Joy sighs about her house. Later, she and her supportive best friend Jackie reminisce about “all the things we used to dream about,” and Jackie introduces a flashback with “Remember the party where it all started?” Exposition inevitably comes either via Mimi’s gushing voiceover, or “As everyone here already knows…” speeches. Joy’s own emotional development consists of a recurring nightmare in which her childhood self scolds her for abandoning her ambitions.

M. Singer:

Lawrence is too good of an actress not to be watchable in the part, but she’s totally miscast as a divorced mother of two who’s been repeatedly beaten down by life’s disappointments. This part was meant for the Jennifer Lawrence of 2025, not the one of 2015.

by ·Comments Off on Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010, Banksy)

Catching up on recent true-falsey docs in prep for True/False. To be fair, nothing here can be proven false, but with all the identity-hiding, illegal activity, perspective-switching and popular suspicion that the whole thing might be a put-on, it totally counts.

First half follows obsessive videographer Thierry who becomes fascinated with street artists (including Shepard Fairey, who I just saw in The Color of Noise) and starts following them around, recording their work, claiming to be assembling a documentary about the scene. Thierry finally meets his legendary hero Banksy, gains his confidence and documents some of his projects. Then after Thierry’s idea of a street art documentary is revealed to be very different from everyone else’s, Banksy takes over the footage and turns the camera back on Thierry, who rebrands himself Mr. Brainwash, launching his own art career with an overly ambitious solo exhibit.

Too bad Inside Job won the oscar, because I would’ve liked to see Banksy’s acceptance speech.

by ·Comments Off on Swiss Army Man (2016, Daniels)

Insane movie full of Michel Gondryish handcrafted whimsy plus whatever great combination of acting and makeup went into Daniel Radcliffe’s multi-purpose corpse.

Much of the wonderous fire-farting, boner-compass, kung-fu-chop, grappling-hook-vomiting details had already been given away by the trailer (but if they hadn’t been, I would’ve written off the movie as a Sundancey quirk-fest and skipped it). So my happiest surprises came from the plot twists as Paul Dano becomes best friends with the dead body and as Radcliffe becomes more alive we start to take Dano’s view of reality, which crashes when he finds his way back to normal civilization (the yard of his crush, Mary Elizabeth Winstead of Scott Pilgrim).

Fart recordist Steve Nelson:

One I remember was Paul Dano, who cut one loose right before a take. He just grabbed the boom mic right out of the air and delivered it … We needed farts that were not cartoonish, that were realistic but at the same time expressive. I know — my career. Mom’s really happy I went to art school.

by ·Comments Off on The Nice Guys (2016, Shane Black)

Watched this after the great Killing Them Softly. It passed the time – kind of a mismatched buddy cop movie along the lines of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang but with half the chemistry and humor of that one – or else I wasn’t in the most receptive mood. Can still appreciate the effort though, a fun, throwback action comedy with more careful work put into the characters and jokes than the twisty conspiracy plot.

During a 1977 smog epidemic, Russell Crowe is hired to break private eye Ryan Gosling’s arm when Gosling has been snooping around on behalf of a client searching for her dead niece. Gosling’s surprisingly capable teenage daughter (Angourie Rice of the next Sofia Coppola movie) tags along, and I think Matt Bomer (Magic Mike) plays a hit man threatening Crowe’s client Margaret Qualley (The Leftovers) who is hiding out from her mom Kim Basinger, a sold-out politician whose dirty secrets are hidden in a porn film.

My favorite shot: Gosling fighting with a guy on the roof, one falls into the pool, the other just misses

R. Collin in The Telegraph:

Both leads aren’t playing to type, exactly, so much as types gone halfway to seed. Crowe is 52 years old now, and has warmly embraced the dramatic possibilities of middle-aged spread … Gosling, meanwhile, plays the kind of moustachioed bro who — for want of a better way of putting it — thinks he’s Ryan Gosling, giving Holland a loose-swaggering confidence that amusingly exceeds his practical abilities.

by ·Comments Off on Killing Them Softly (2012, Andrew Dominik)

“America’s not a country. It’s just a business.”

First movie I watched post-election. I only picked it because I liked Dominik’s Nick Cave movie this year and was looking for something that wouldn’t require much emotional energy on my part, so a Brad Pitt hit-man flick seemed to fit the bill. Turned out to be the ideal pick for my mood, full of perfectly cynical characters, using Obama’s hope-filled election speeches as ironic counterpoint.

Affleck ally Scoot McNairy and Aussie Ben Mendelsohn (Slow West) are hired by Sopranos regular Vincent Curatola to rob a card game run by Ray Liotta, assuming that Liotta will be blamed since he has admitted to robbing the game himself in the past. During the ensuing period of gangster and gambler mistrust, Richard Jenkins hires outsiders Brad Pitt and James Gandolfini to come down to New Orleans and kill whoever robbed the game (and kill Liotta too, just in case).

It’s usually not a visually dynamic movie, just excellent actors having serious conversations, but whenever Dominik gets a chance, he throws in an amazing setpiece – entracingly chopping editing in the opening titles segment, a freaked-out heroin scene, and Liotta getting shot in extreme slow-motion. Reminds of the Nick Cave movie, which mostly looks like a realist behind-the-scenes interview doc, but every once in a while the camera escapes through a knothole and into outer space. Based on a novel by The Friends of Eddie Coyle writer, and shot by Greig Fraser (Spider, Bright Star, the next Star Wars movie).