by ·Comments Off on The Ghost Writer (2010, Roman Polanski)

“Can’t talk – some peace protestors are trying to kill me.”

Kinda silly and obvious as a thriller, but well acted and assembled so you enjoy the ride at least. And man does Ewan McGregor ever blow it, when he finally gets evidence that the prime minister’s wife Rosemary Cross has been pulling the strings all along as an undercover CIA agent, what does he do? He tells her that he knows. He tells her! So she has him killed, end of movie. It’s too bad I watched Dollhouse before this, because I saw her as a schemer all along.

Mouseover to see McGregor’s reaction to the PM’s memoirs:
image

McGregor is taking over the PM’s memoirs from the previous ghost writer who died mysteriously last week on the ferry to PM Pierce Brosnan’s U.S. island hideaway. All is quiet until allegations of torture and other war crimes come out and the press mobs the island, and during the distraction McGregor starts digging up the dirt his predecessor had left clues about. Kim Cattrall is the PM’s assistant, Tom Wilkinson a friend/rival/neighbor, and Eli Wallach an old man who feeds Ewan clues.

This film’s attention to detail is impressive – they’ve noted how the news tends to misspell basic words:

NYTimes:

It would be easy to overstate the appeal of The Ghost Writer just as, I imagine, it will be easy for some to dismiss it. But the pleasures of a well-directed movie should never be underestimated. The image of Mr. Brosnan abruptly leaning toward the camera like a man possessed is worth a dozen Oscar-nominated performances. And the way, when Lang chats with the Ghost — his arms and legs open, a drink in hand, as if he were hitting on a woman — shows how an actor and his director can sum up an entire personality with a single pose.

by ·Comments Off on The Prisoner (1967-68, Patrick McGoohan)

Patrick McGoohan is #6, resigns from some spy organization and is immediately kidnapped, waking up in a prison/town. They want to know why he resigned, and he wants only to escape. Opening credit sequence is three minutes long, and each ep starts with him waking up, dazed, looking out the window towards the title of this week’s episode, giving the impression not of continuity between episodes but that each episode is an alternate reality, or that Pat is caught in a time-loop.

Ep 1 – #2 (Guy Doleman of The Ipcress File) invites him over, has a dwarf attendant (Angelo Muscat, a rare series regular). A girl (suicidal Virginia Maskell of Our Virgin Island) pretends to conspire with him after their mutual friend dies. Escape Method: stolen helicopter, which is remote-controlled back to the island. And there’s already a new #2 (George Baker, an agent in Hopscotch) at end of episode.

Ep 2 – The new #8 (Nadia Gray of Maniac) tells him she’s figured out they’re in Lithuania, and she has friends on the outside. Escape Method: they sail off in a hand-carved boat created as abstract-art project with purchased tapestry as sail, packed by fake #8’s friend into shipping cartons and sent to fake London, revealed by time zone discrepancy. Today’s #2 is Leo McKern of Help! and Finlay Currie plays a chess-playing general.

Ep 3 – Scientist #14 (Sheila Allen of The Alphabet Murders) hooks him up to a mind-reading machine (showing that his mind tends to linger on the show open), gives him experimental drug causing him to dream meetings with three different spies to see his reactions: fabulous party host Katherine Kath (appropriately of The Man Who Wouldn’t Talk), mustachioed defector Peter Bowles (The Legend of Hell House) and former compatriot Annette Carell. Pat takes control of his own dreams to fuck with the new #2 (Colin Gordon of The Pink Panther) in grand fashion. Pat does tell them one definite thing, “I wasn’t selling out. That wasn’t the reason I resigned.” That piece of information won’t keep #2 from getting replaced in the next episode.

Ep 4 – Fake election is held and Pat is voted the new #2 in order to boost his confidence before breaking his spirit and beating the hell out of him. A Canterbury Tale star Eric Portman is the old/fake #2, and Rachel Herbert is Pat’s non-English-speaking personal driver who turns out to be the real #2.

Ep 5 – #6 is made to think that he’s #12, and his doppelganger is now “the real” #6. It’s never explained where they found an identical twin of Pat, but the effects are very well done. Odd to hear mister “I am not a number” emphatically declaring himself to be #6. Jane Merrow (Hands of the Ripper) is his psychic friend, and #2 is Anton Rodgers (a cop in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels).

Ep 6 – The young new #12 (John Castle of Blow-Up) is possibly an actual counter-conspirator inside the organization? Maybe not, I wasn’t paying close attention. The organization controls a professor (Peter Howell of Scum) through his artist wife (Betty McDowall of Time Lock and Dead Lucky), getting him to design a supercomputer (“the general”) to brainwash the already-brainwashed citizens in the guise of speed-learning. #6 blows up the computer, conspirator and professor before an amazed #2 (Colin Gordon again, from ep 3) by asking the machine “why?”

Ep 7 – The town is deserted. Pat builds a sailboat and compass, keeps a log, sails to England. He meets Mrs. Butterworth (Georgina Cookson of The Woman Who Wouldn’t Die), the woman living in his old apartment, borrows his old car from her, and goes to headquarters, tells The Colonel (Donald Sinden of Mogambo) and his man Thorpe (Patrick Cargill of A Countess From Hong Kong) about the village. They figure where on the map he could have sailed from and Pat searches in a jet until he finds it – and the pilot ejects him back into the village, where everyone reappears (including Mrs. Butterworth).

Unhappy birthday:

Ep 8 – Pat finds a radio on a washed-up dead man, tries to drive his observer (Norma West of And The Ship Sails On) crazy. New #2 (Mary Morris of Thief of Bagdad) focuses on convincing him that the outside world is dead to him, and he to them, as she has the dead man sent back into the ocean with Pat’s ID in his wallet. Crazy scene where after a trial on carnival day, the costumed villagers chase Pat through town hall.

Ep 9 – Nice double-cross variation. Pat teaches fellow prisoners how to detect who’s a secret sentinel, recruits an inventor to create a distress signal to summon nearby ships, but because of his confidence and authority, the prisoners decide Pat is a sentinel and turn on him. New #2 is Peter Wyngarde (The Innocents, Flash Gordon) even though Mary Morris claimed she was playing the long game and seemed triumphant at the end of the last ep.

Ep 10 – Pretty straightforward. Pat runs around doing fake spy stuff, having hushed conversations with bewildered villagers, sending coded messages to nobody in particular, to drive #2 (Patrick Cargill from episode 7) mad. As a bonus, Pat has a trampoline duel with #2’s main man #14.

Ep 11 – Trampoline fights are the new padding scenes. This is feeling like the flabby center of the series, with Pat’s goal changing from escaping the village to fucking with various #2s. Outgoing #2 (Andre Van Gyseghem of Demy’s Pied Piper) is going to be assassinated by Incoming #2 (Derren Nesbitt of the 1972 Burke & Hare), or was it vice-versa? – and Pat cares about this supposedly because he fears retaliation against the villagers since a brainwashed watchmaker (Martin Miller of Peeping Tom) rigged the bomb. Pat teams with the watchmaker’s daughter (Annette Andre of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum), turns the bomb against the bomber, ending in stalemate.

Ep 12 – Pat has lost his sunny disposition, is being short-tempered with everyone, so he is declared persona non grata by the town and given the silent treatment. The new #2 (John Sharp of The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu) is into mind control, has a Clockwork Orange-like “aversion therapy” room, but orders instead a mood-improving lobotomy for our hero. Of course they can’t burn his brain with all those valuable memories inside, so they fake it with drugs, leaving Pat meek and defenseless against the striped bullies – for about 20 seconds before he pulls himself together and turns the drugs against his handler #86, then at his “confession” in the town square, Pat gets the townsfolk to rebel, and another #2 goes down.

Ep 13 – Excitingly weird one, in which Pat kinda escapes but decides to use his semi-freedom to rescue/endanger a scientist. Chubby-faced Colonel (Nigel Stock, Watson to Peter Cushing’s Holmes) comes to village, sent by “the highest authority,” and they electrically swap his psyche with Pat’s, then send Pat’s consciousness in Colonel’s body back to Pat’s house, where he dances with his fiancee (daughter of his spy boss – did we know Pat had a fiancee?), confuses his superiors (technically his ex-superiors, since he’s still angrily quitting his job in the opening credits), then leads the Village baddies straight to the mind-control scientist who invented the brain-swap device, though if the device worked so well I wonder why they need him. I also wonder why they keep fucking with Pat’s brain, since in the early episodes they were claiming they didn’t want to injure it. Anyway, back in the lab, scientist pulls the ol’ switcheroo, escapes via helicopter in the Colonel’s body (the Village has brain-swap technology, but not a simple radio to recall a helicopter that has barely lifted off), Colonel dies in the scientist’s body, and Pat’s his smarmy self again.

Ep 14 – Pat wakes up in a Western movie, thinks nothing of it. So it’s his stubbornness and moral character transplanted into a drifter who becomes town marshall. Nice Western sets but I think this was underlit because it’s not sunny enough in England. Pat is in prison when the brother of some girl (Valerie French of Jubal) is hanged, then he fails to save her from a loony, obsessed redshirt (Alexis Kanner, who later directed a film starring Patrick McGoohan). Final shootout, then Pat wakes up and realizes it was all a multiplayer dream-RPG. In two weird postscripts, the sets are are real and filled with cardboard cutouts of the other players, and redshirt remains obsessed with the girl leading to both of their deaths in the “real world”. New #2 David Bauer had a small part in a Sean Connery Bond film.

Alexis Kanner #1:

Ep 15 – So right after the episode that gives Pat a backstory and a fiancee, we get two in a row that turn him into an interchangeable spy. This is a really weird one, but fun, as Pat’s in London on the trail of a mad bomber, a resourceful woman who calls herself Death (soap star Justine Lord) and leads Pat into trap after trap, each of which he escapes, up to the lighthouse from where her Napoleon-wannabe dad is planning some kind of attack. The whole thing turns out to have been a story he’s freewheeling for some Village kids. Not entirely sure what #2’s theory was: that Pat would tell the kids his own life story, ending with his reason for retirement?

Ep 16 – An intense #2 (Leo McKern from the second episode) returns to the village, reviews clips from previous episodes to see what he has missed, then resorts to his ultimate solution to get Pat to confess: regress him to childhood via a magic lamp then lock them both in a room with the butler (Angelo Muscat, who may have appeared in every episode) for a week of intensive role playing/interrogation. Leo’s theory is that only one of them can survive this. There’s some 1984 number-play, Pat refusing to say the number six for a while, and Leo slips the retirement question into every scenario, but finally Pat makes him crazy, turns the tables, and Leo falls dead. It’s one of the more boring, shouty and unsatisfying episodes, with Pat being bonkers for most of it, but it’s all setup for an even weirder finale, as Pat is given his desire to see #1 at the end.

Ep 17 – Of course we don’t see #1 – this show makes nothing easy. Instead, Leo #2 is shaved and resurrected and put on trial as a nonconformist, along with Pat and a young mod who never stops singing “dem bones.” Nothing ends a thrilling spy series like a good, slow courtroom drama, amirite? It’s hard to explain what happens, and apparently fans have been trying for years, but Pat seems to escape and/or become #1, and “All You Need Is Love” is played over a machine gun battle and the village is given a specific location in the opening credits and the guy singing “dem bones” is the same actor who died three episodes ago. David Lynch could hardly have done better.

Angelo Muscat made it through the final episode!

Alexis Kanner #2:

Episode directors include McGoohan himself, Don Chaffey (Jason and the Argonauts, One Million Years B.C.), Pat Jackson (Don’t Talk to Strange Men), Peter Graham Scott (Into the Labyrinth, Night Creatures), Robert Asher (Maid for Murder) and David Tomblin (Return of the Ewok). Wonder if the remake is worth checking out? After all, prisoner torture, personal freedom and intrusive searches for information are still making headlines.

by ·Comments Off on Out 1: Spectre (1972, Jacques Rivette)

Finally out on video, I got to watch this seven years after seeing Out 1 in theaters.

Rosenbaum calls the two films “radically different,” but to me, it often felt simply like a shorter version of Out 1. Of course, having seen the longer version, I can’t help noticing major differences. The two theater groups’ rehearsal footage is almost entirely gone. Renaud’s disappearance with Quentin’s money is obliquely shown, and the ensuing city-wide hunt for him is even more obliquely included, in the form of black-and-white stills from those scenes inserted between regular scenes, accompanied by a low buzzing noise. There are other appearances of stills, some from deleted scenes from the longer version, sometimes callbacks or flash-forwards to scenes within Spectre.

Admittedly the 13 group felt like a much bigger deal in Spectre, more of a central conspiracy to the film, and I was able to follow the relationships and stories of offscreen characters Pierre and Igor much better, but I can’t tell if they’re really more sharply in focus in Spectre than Out 1, or if during Out 1 itself I was too busy trying to keep the many onscreen characters straight to follow much Igor drama. But looking through articles I quoted in my original Out 1 writeup, Rosenbaum said Out 1 was shaped by “the successive building and shattering of utopian dreams” and Lim says it “devotes its second half to fracture and dissolution,” and that theme and structure didn’t feel as true of Spectre.

The buzzing stills interrupt and fragment primary scenes, and there appears to be more cross-cutting between scenes than in the long version. Conversations sometimes cut off in the middle and never return. The stills appear in greater frequency at times, and disappear for long stretches at others – for instance, when Thomas first visits Sarah at the beach house and convinces her to return to Paris, the whole scene with its long shots plays out without interruption. Sometimes the editing is telling different stories than the dialogue – when Rohmer’s Balzac scholar says “secret societies,” it cuts to the Prometheus group, not returning to Rohmer for a long while.

Obade is far, an 8-hour drive southeast from Paris

Rivette:

They aren’t single frames, but simply production stills. When we tried a shorter version, our first montage ran five and a half hours. Then to make a commercially feasible length, we used the stills to tighten the editing, much the way that Jean-Luc uses titles more and more in his films, as in La Chinoise. Every time there was an editing problem he had recourse to a title. But finally we spent more time on these photos than on anything else, because there were a priori so many possibilities. We wanted the relation between the film and the stills to be neither too close nor too distant, so it was very difficult to find just the right solution. Then we added the sound to the stills. They didn’t work without sound, because the silences interrupted either noises that were very loud or others that were just murmurs. Silence didn’t produce the effect we wanted. I wanted something purely artificial: what we have is just a meaningless frequency, as if produced by a machine, which interrupts the fiction — sometimes sending messages to it, sometimes in relation to what we’ve already seen or are going to see, and sometimes with no relation at all. Because there are stills from scenes, especially toward the end, which don’t appear in the body of the film and are frankly quite incomprehensible.

Hand-off:

At the halfway point, after Colin, Frederique and Emilie/Pauline just appeared in the same scene, it lets loose with a whole montage of the buzzy stills. When Rivette says “there is a moment, one single shot even, in which almost all the fictions intersect, as if all these lines had to pass through a ring. This shot we put squarely in the middle: it comes just before the intermission,” is this the scene he means? There was no intermission in the DVD version, but it seems likely.

Ten of the 13: Thomas, Lili, Sarah, Pauline, Lucie (legal advisor), Warok, Etienne (chess player), The Ethnologist, Igor (never seen), Pierre (never seen). Four more whom I suspect: Elaine (because she discusses Lili’s disappearance with Lucie), Marie (because she gives Colin the letters), Iris (because Pauline speaks freely about Igor and her blackmail plot in front of her) and Georges (unseen character I mentioned in my Out 1 writeup, though I can’t recall who he is).

But let’s not read too much into the conspiracy. Rivette again:

In Out, I was already more careful, because the idea of the “thirteen” came rather late. For a long time we thought that the characters might never meet; perhaps there would be five or six completely different stories. We just didn’t know. Still, I had the idea that something should bring them together, and so it was Histoire des treize. But it was just a mechanism. In Paris and, even more, in Out, I don’t take the whole idea of the search for meaning seriously. It was a convenience to bring about the meetings, but it didn’t work with either film, because they were taken to be films about a search. I tried and failed to make people understand, as the film progressed, that this search led to nothing: at the end of Paris, we discover that the Organization doesn’t exist; and the more Out progresses, the more evident it becomes that this new organization of the thirteen which appeared to have been formed never really existed. There had only been a few vague conversations between completely idealistic characters without any real social or political roots. In each case there was a first part where we assembled a story of a search, and a second part where little by little we wiped it out… When I decided to use Histoire des treize, it was as a critique of Paris, which tried to show more clearly the vanity of this kind of utopian group, hoping to dominate society. It begins by being fascinating and tempting, but in the course of the film comes to be seen as futile.

equipage equipage equipage equipage equipage equipage equipage:

“Listen baby, I’m not Marlon. Marlon is on the waterfront.”

Lili and Pauline are somehow connected in running the shop (which advertises Bob Dylan bootlegs for sale in the window), and Sarah sneaks in and out. I thought Sarah was hanging out in the basement, but when they knock out Lorenzo’s man and drag him downstairs, it doesn’t look like much of a place to spend time. Lili is later said to have stolen a million francs and disappeared – but from Lorenzo or from the cases full of important-looking papers beneath the shop, I’m not positive.

Both theater groups begin with “rehearsals” that seem more like acting warm-up activities, then into vague explorations of theme and character. Each group gets a shot in the arm from the entry of a new member – Sarah to Prometheus and Renaud to Thebes. But Renaud’s ideas don’t work for Lili, and she begins to retreat from the group. In the end, both groups have dissolved because their most recent members have left, followed soon by leaders Lili and Thomas to Obade.

More important differences in the ending: Thomas doesn’t have his beachside breakdown, and Frederique doesn’t die (not sure that she even meets Renaud).

Shortly before Pauline’s lover Igor reappears (in the form of a phone call to the beach house), this maybe-strangely-translated conversation – Lili: “Why do you imagine Igor’s in a room here?” Pauline: “Imagine someone is a half, or a full year trapped in a house. No one notices. In the basement, on the floor, in a room.” Lili: “But this is a dream.” Then they agree to search the house for him, but there’s one section to which nobody has the key, and later when the key mysteriously appears, Pauline searches the unoccupied rooms beyond, staring into the infinite mirror. I find this piece of the film interesting since Bulle Ogier (Pauline) would appear in Rivette’s next film as a ghost trapped within a dream house.

Rosenbaum: “The coded messages Leaud intercepts are significantly different in the two films.” Different how? Also: “Much as Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow bears witness to mid-century paranoia by turning imaginary plots into real ones and vice versa, Rivette has a chilling way of both suggesting explanations and dispersing them in this monumental, maddening epic.”

Rivette:

There are some sequences which I think are failures, but after a certain number of hours, the whole idea of success and failure ceases to have any significance. Some things that I couldn’t use in Spectre are all right in the longer version. The whole actor-spectator relationship is totally different in Out, because there the actors are much more actors than characters. There are many more scenes where the sense of improvisation is much stronger, even to the point of admitting lapses, hesitations, and repetitions. There are some of these in Spectre, but relatively few, because we treated it much more as a fiction about certain characters. In the longer version, the dramatic events are a lot more distant from each other, and between them are long undramatic stretches… contrary to what most people believe, one doesn’t learn any more in the long version than in the short one.

On the meaning of the opening title “Paris and its double”:

I wanted the two titles to indicate that the film was shot in April and May 1970 – that, for me, is the important thing, since there are many allusions in the dialogue to that period. It should be evident that the group of thirteen individuals had probably met and talked for some time until May 1968, when everything changed and they probably disbanded.

David Thomson:

Out 1: Spectre begins as nothing more than scenes from Parisian life; only as time goes by do we realize that there is a plot — perhaps playful, perhaps sinister — that implicates not just the thirteen characters (including Léaud, as the mystery’s self-styled detective), but maybe everyone, everywhere. Real life may be nothing but an enormous yarn someone somewhere is spinning.

by ·Comments Off on Room 237 (2012, Rodney Ascher)

I can’t believe people took this movie as serious criticism of The Shining and complained about its arguments instead of reveling in Ascher’s technique. He wastes no time showing us the Shining obsessives and conspirators on-camera, or obtaining rebuttals from people involved in the original film’s production – just uses these stories and fantasies to spiral further inside the movie, revisiting and altering footage to suit him, bringing the rest of Kubrick’s films into the mix (one speaker is visualized using Tom Cruise from Eyes Wide Shut). It’s a clear progression from his short The S From Hell to this – can’t imagine where he’ll go next.

Noel Murray says it best:

The Shining can’t be a coded confession by Kubrick that he helped fake the moon landing and a metaphor for the Holocaust and a symbolic representation of the American government’s slaughter of the Indians and a subliminal-message-filled exploration of deviant human sexuality and a complicated structuralist film that’s essentially 2001 in reverse. Or can it? Room 237 joins the ranks of classic documentaries like Rock Hudson’s Home Movies and Los Angeles Plays Itself that encourage cineastes to take a closer look at the secret messages that movies send, and to ask whether they’re intended or not—or whether it matters. What makes Room 237 work so well is that Ascher shows the same Shining clips over and over, with different interpretations, letting only the voices of the theorists and the images from the film (plus a few other relevant movies) tell the story. The effect is intense: a deep dive into the rabbit hole of semiotics, which leaves viewers more alert to what’s really on the screen.

Quintín:

The manipulation of the film material, the juggling of meanings, the associations connecting truth, memory, and film in Room 237 add up to something very enjoyable, as a kind of a fresh pleasure in film viewing, which is not exactly the same as the essay-film format, nor the usual patchwork in the found-footage genre. Made with no clear tradition behind it, Room 237 invites us to a dance with a cinema that is daring and free.

by ·Comments Off on Hanna (2011, Joe Wright)

Saoirse Ronan is raised by her rogue-spy dad (Eric “Hulk” Bana) in the woods with emphasis on survivalism and attack skills – specifically the skills to attack Cate Blanchett, who killed Ronan’s mom. Was she Ronan’s mom, or was Ronan genetically engineered to be a supersoldier in a lab somewhere? Not important. What’s important is Joe Wright has remade himself as a slick-ass music video director and filled the movie with pumping Chemical Brothers music to distract our minds from the implausibility of the story. Even the implausibility of each individual scene – for example, the one where Hanna is in a manhole, army trucks are driving over her without slowing down then suddenly she’s hanging from one Cape Fear-style, when it seems like the move required to get her into that position in a split second would’ve ripped her arms off. Oh, and she’s never seen electricity before, but sits right down at a computer and within 15 seconds she’s reading up on her mom’s death from google news. In many respects, Attack the Block was the more realistic movie.

Rushmore‘s Olivia Williams plays the hippie mom of Jessica Barden, who steals the show for a while as Hanna’s first friend. But apparently Hanna’s superspy dad never emphasized secrecy, because Hanna tells the kids where she’s supposed to meet her dad, ultimately getting him killed. The movie is just as violent as PG-13 will allow, so he’s killed offscreen, and we never see what happens to the Olivia Williams Family after their interrogation by rogue spies.

Katy didn’t watch the whole thing but rightly points out that the more interesting movie would’ve been about what happens after Hanna has killed Cate Blanchett. A girl with no friends or family, few social graces, no sense of empathy and mad fighting skills who is probably still being hunted by the government – what now?

by ·Comments Off on Chinatown (1974, Roman Polanski)

The most brightly-lit and also most pessimistic noir shown in Emory’s series. Nicholson is very good at acting natural, which he does too seldom, and John Huston is haunting as the villain, a human monster in broad daylight. I remember Faye Dunaway as being hysterical in this, but apparently I was only recalling the “she’s my daughter AND my sister” scene. Polanski himself plays a dwarf thug who cuts Jack’s nose open near the beginning of the investigation, forcing Jack to wear facial bandages through most of the movie.

Huston plays Dunaway’s father – he and her husband Mulwray ran the water department for years before selling it to the city, and now Huston is running a water/real estate conspiracy, stealing water from farmers and dumping it into the river. Jack is a nobody detective taking pictures of cheating husbands when he’s used as a pawn in Huston’s schemes to discredit his former partner and recover his grand/daughter – though Jack is plenty smart enough to keep up with the plot. He almost gets ahead, too, but loses his evidence against Huston, and loses Dunaway when the cops shoot her through the head.

Nominated for all the oscars, but really, what chance have you got against the likes of Godfather 2, The Towering Inferno, Earthquake and Art Carney?

by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 6

Netflix Streaming has got a bunch more movies I would never pay to rent, but which I might watch for free if I was sick or something. I’m sick today, so here goes.

Prince of Persia (2010, Mike Newell)
I see ropes and swords and Lord of the Rings fire-sculptures, and holy crap is that Ben Kingsley?? Donnie Darko has a fake british accent, and he just let his girlfriend fall into the pit of hell before unleashing a crazy amount of ‘splosions and triggering a muted montage of flashback snippets. Then Donnie, who long ago became less cool than his big sister Maggie Darko, discovers that the movie was just a dream he saw in the handle of his magic dagger. All I remember from the video game is that your little man had a more human-like gait than was usual for video games, and it was incredibly hard to avoid falling into pits. As I type this, Donnie is telling a beardy fellow to “listen to your heart.” So it’s safe to say the movie isn’t much like the game, except when the girl fell into that pit.

The Men Who Stare At Goats (2009, Grant Heslov)
“Larry’s dead,” are the first words I hear… guess I won’t be seeing Kevin Spacey. Still holding out hope for Stephen Root, though. Oh wait, there’s Spacey now, wtf. Directed by an actor who played “guy in big suit” in Bug. There’s an LSD prank then all the army base’s goats and prisoners are set free. I’m not detecting much comedy in this comedy, so I guess it got dark and turned into a drama halfway through. Jeff Bridges and George Clooney escape in a chopper, Ewan provides poignant, anti-corporate-media voiceover, and it ends on a dud of a joke. Glad I didn’t sit through the rest of this.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2009, Niels Oplev)
A pierced punk rock girl (a “rebellious computer hacker” according to the Netflix description) talking with her mama seems sad. Later, some blond woman is talking about being raped by her dad, cue spazzy flashback with bland music. Punk girl visits hospitalized boyfriend, drops off secret financial records, he writes an article causing a mogul to commit suicide, and punk girl steals a lot of money and escapes to a tropical paradise. Whole thing seems anticlimactic and unengaging. But I guess if The Da Vinci Code can be a huge success, so can this. Still, at least Da Vinci had a big ending (the codex is shattered! Amelie is Jesus’s daughter!) to justify all the dreary exposition. This one wasn’t even exciting enough for me to check out the last ten minutes of the sequels.

Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl (2009, Nishimura & Tomomatsu)
Dubbing!! The fakest CGI ever. Oh, this is one of those direct-to-video Japanese teen movies full of awful music where everyone wears school uniforms. It’s not even as good as Tokyo Gore Police (they share a director). “When you gave me that chocolate, I had no idea how you really felt about me” should not be one of the final lines of a movie with this title. Oh, and Vampire Girl decisively wins.

Factotum (2005, Bent Hamer)
Hooray, Lili Taylor! Long takes + poorly furnished rooms = gritty realism. Poor Charlie Bukowski is having money issues and lady issues. Matt Dillon gets life advice from “Old Black Man” (according to the credits) in the unemployment office, finally gets one of his stories published. I don’t find Dillon’s poetic voiceover very compelling. From the dude who made Kitchen Stories.

Ondine (2009, Neil Jordan)
She is telling fisherman Colin Farrell that she’s not a magical water creature, but just a girl who almost drowned while escaping from something or other. Uh oh, some fellows with pistols and strong accents. What is happening? Colin and the girl live, are getting married at the end. Jordan made a bunch of movies that always look somewhat intriguing but not quite essential.

The Day The Earth Stopped (2008, C. Thomas Howell)
If you start watching a movie ten minutes before the closing credits, the hero and villain are always in the middle of some revelatory exposition scene. All movies are the same. Should you really entrust the remake rights of The Day The Earth Stood Still to one of the teen actors from Red Dawn? Earth starts shaking (I’d hardly say it is standing still) and sepia-toned CGI versions of major world monuments (and a ferris wheel) are falling rapidly towards the camera. I was excited that Judd Nelson is in this, but I’d gotten him confused with Judge Reinhold – who is Judd Nelson? There is yelling and guns and terrible camerawork, then something really stupid happens and I guess the aliens don’t destroy Earth. Shame.

2012 (2009, Roland Emmerich)
Here’s a movie that isn’t afraid to let the world end, or to cast Oliver Platt! I don’t see world monuments crumbling, just a big Titanicky iceberg adventure (Roland must’ve had some ice left over from The Day After Tomorrow) with people yelling and swimming through tunnels to close or open portals and machinery. Oh, surviving mankind lives on arks now, and Africa turns out to be the future, or the home of the our civilization or something.

Salt (2010, Phillip Noyce)
Another movie with a third-billed Chiwetel Ejiofor, and more awful camerawork – only this time it’s awful in a big-budget extreme-cutting sense, not the give-an-idiot-a-camera awfulness of The Day The Earth Stopped. Ooh, the president is down. A. Jolie, handcuffed in FBI custody, still manages to kill Liev Schreiber, whoever he is. The backstory exposition comes a couple minutes late in this movie, then noble Chiwetel lets Jolie escape to kill again. From the writer of Equilibrium (and Ultraviolet, yuck) and director of Rabbit Proof Fence (and Sliver).

Red Dragon (2002, Brett Ratner)
Emily Watson is in a super intense burning-house scene, then a big fake explosion knocks down Ed Norton. This movie marked the end of my needing to see everything Norton was in (Keeping the Faith and The Score had already lowered expectations). Ed’s in the William Petersen role (WP’s on a cop show now). After he and Raiff Fiennes shoot each other to death, we see ol’ Hopkins (in the Brian Cox role) writing letters, and oh Ed isn’t dead actually, and it ends with a cheese-headed transition into an early scene from Silence of the Lambs. Doesn’t look bad, really, but as with all Ratner movies it is not to be taken seriously.

by ·Comments Off on The Power of Nightmares (2004, Adam Curtis)

Another 3-hour Adam Curtis documentary (no Yo La Tengo songs this time) and again it’s one of the most amazing, revelatory things I’ll watch all year. This time I didn’t take notes like I did with The Trap, so I’ll just have to take my word for it. I do remember that the founder of neoconservatism was a huge fan of television, especially Gunsmoke and Perry Mason. And that Al Qaeda doesn’t exist – or it didn’t until we invented it – I remember that. I wish I’d watched this when it came out. But however depressing it is that I’ve spent the last five years not knowing most of this stuff, that’s balanced by the joy of watching it when neo-cons aren’t in power in the U.S. at the moment.

SEPT 2021: Watched again, shortly before 9/11 XX – it holds up. Katy showed the third hour to her students and blew some minds.

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by ·Comments Off on Gang of Four (1988, Jacques Rivette)

Netflix says: “Art and life intertwine when four aspiring actresses study with a renowned film instructor in this acclaimed psychological drama … Assigned to analyze the play Double Infidelities, the women – who also happen to be roommates – soon find themselves caught up in a web of suspense and scandal as the script spills over into their offstage lives.”

EDIT: you know I’ve got a horrendous writeup when it opens with netflix’s envelope plot description… need to watch this again and update.

Half of this one takes place in Bulle Ogier’s theater, where the girls are practicing a play we never see performed, and I’m watching, all “ooh, that’s just like in Out 1 and Paris Nous Appartient” but I’m not really paying attention to the text of the play, so whether the Netflix blurb is accurate I cannot say. Then we’ve got a secret conspiracy, the train rides from Secret Defense (done very differently here, brief and abstract), a direct reference to La Belle Noiseuse, throw in Bulle and you’ve got Rivette 101.

The careful compositions and slow unveiling of story and character flow like a Rivette film, but otherwise I can’t say it was similar to his others that I’ve seen… the experience of watching them was very different. I guess it’d be most similar to Secret Defense.

Above: JR muse Bulle Ogier as a great actress turned acting instructor.

The titular four are Joyce, Anna, Claude and new roommate Lucia, who is replacing ex-roomie Cécile, who has started acting strangely and disappearing, caught up in her boyfriend’s criminal trial. In a mystical storm scene, Lucia finds some keys that Cécile has hidden in the apt., keys which could clear the boyfriend’s name while taking down someone powerful. Thomas is out to stop this at all costs, following each of the girls (mostly non-threateningly) and asking them questions, finally getting sometime-lesbian Claude to fall in love with him, gaining him access to the house so he can search for the keys. Cécile has also come back looking for the keys, and even Constance (Bulle Ogier) gets involved, getting arrested at the end for hiding Cécile’s boy after he escaped prison.

Some occasional Celine and Julie antics (see mock trial above). What movie has most in common with Out 1 is its split between the easily-summarized plot (above) and the theater scenes.

Irene Jacob of Red and Double Life of Veronique had a small part, as one of the actors I think.

Above: the Four, left to right:
Lucia – Inês de Medeiros – in movies by João César Monteiro and Pedro Costa
Joyce – Bernadette Giraud – later in Secret Defense and Joan of Arc 1
Claude – Laurence Côte – in Up Down Fragile, Thieves and Godard’s Nouvelle Vague
Anna – Fejria Deliba – in an Olivier Assayas movie

And:
Cécile – Nathalie Richard – Up Down Fragile, 2 by Assayas, 2 by Haneke
“Thomas” – Benoît Régent – lead dude in Blue, died a month after Red opened
Constance – Bulle Ogier – of Out 1 and everything else

Jan 2024: watched again in lovely HD. No men onscreen for the first half hour, and you forget you’re watching an ’80s movie until the moment they appear. Bernadette nails the snooping cop in the head at end after he assaults Portuguese Lucia for the key they’ve been hiding. Not an improv movie like I half-remembered it, proper blocking and editing within scenes. My 2007 writeup is bad but Reverse Shot concurs that it “reeks of Rivette from the very outset… really, what could be more Rivette?”