by ·Comments Off on Le Plaisir (1951, Max Ophuls)

“Still, it’s very sad.”
“But, my friend, happiness is not a joyful thing.”

Three filmed short stories by Guy de Maupassant, reminding me of Quartet. It wasn’t great and made me not want to seek out any of the author’s books… there it also reminds me of Quartet. Not narrated by the author like Quartet was, since the author is dead, but rather by a sort of author character who shows up as an active participant (the artist’s friend) in part 3.

So, Lola Montes and La Ronde, and even Letter From An Unknown Woman would have been wonderful, but I chose to show Katy Le Plaisir instead and now she thinks I enjoy stodgy period pieces. Sure it had some sparks of life in it, but even the documentary extras on the DVD wanted to talk up the difficulty in finding locations and in making the film rather than giving a reason why people seem to like it. Stanley Kubrick once called it his favorite film, so surely there’s something there.

Movie starts out weird, kicking it into high gear with a creepy-looking masked man dancing gaily at a fancy ball, then quickly passing out. It is discovered that he’s an old man trying badly to recapture his youth and hit on young girls, to his wife’s patient dismay.

Centerpiece segment seems like it wanted to be the entire movie, but wasn’t quite long enough so they tacked on the other two bits… it must be over an hour long, about a whorehouse that the camera can never bring itself to go inside. Fortunately, the whores all come outside, closing up shop to take a trip to the country for an unexpectedly moving wedding, before returning home to the glee of the townsfolk.

Last bit, a model and artist fall for each other, but when things get rough and he might leave her, she tries to kill herself… they end up together forever, she in a wheelchair.

Haven’t seen a Max Ophuls movie yet that takes place in modern day… guy liked to create ornate depictions of times past. Some fantastic shots made the whole thing worth watching, incl. the artist meeting the model in the start of segment 3, and her suicide later, which switches fluidly from an objective to a subjective camera, climbs the stairs with her shadow cast before us then crashes through the window and down.

I am so bad at recognizing people, because Simone Simon played the model and I didn’t know it. Jean Gabin was unmissable as the friend/host in the country in the middle segment at least. Claude Dauphin (President of Earth in Barbarella) was the doctor in the first segment.

by ·Comments Off on To Each His Cinema, part 1 (2007)

A program of shorts that played at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival to mark its 60th anniversary. Pretty terrific bunch of 3-5 minute shorts by possibly the best group of directors ever assembled… worth watching more than once. Each is about the cinema in some way or another, with a few recurring themes (blind people and darkness, flashbacks and personal stories). Katy watched/liked it too!

First half of shorts (second half is here):

Open-Air Cinema by Raymond Depardon
image

One Fine Day by Takeshi Kitano, continuing his self-referential streak.
image

Three Minutes by Theo Angelopolous is a Marcello Mastroianni tribute starring the great Jeanne Moreau.
image

In The Dark by Andrei Konchalovsky
image

Diary of a Moviegoer by Nanni Moretti
image

The Electric Princess Picture House by Hou Hsiao-hsien
image

Darkness by the bros. Dardenne
image

Anna by Alejandro González Iñárritu
image

Movie Night, the first of two gorgeously-shot outdoor movie starring chinese children, by Zhang Yimou.
image

Dibbouk de Haifa, annoying business by Amos Gitai.
image

The Lady Bug by Jane Campion.
image

Artaud Double Bill by Atom Egoyan.
image

The Foundry, comic greatness by Aki Kaurismäki.
image

Recrudescence, stolen cell-phone bit by Olivier Assayas.
image

47 Years Later very self-indulgent by Youssef Chahine.
image

by ·Comments Off on Triplets of Belleville (2003, Sylvain Chomet)

“Is that it, then? Is it over, do you think? What have you got to say to Grandma?”

Watched this again because Katy had never seen (and the mime sequence in Paris je t’aime put me in the mood). Had never seen on video – still just as good as it’s always been. Last-minute before the picture I tried to mislead Katy into having low expectations, so surely she would come out of the movie ecstatic with joy because it is surely one of the best animated features made in our lifetime, but the ploy didn’t work and she told me it’s okay, watchable but a little slow. Poo.

image

I love the parts about the tortured psyche of the dog and his awful lifelong relationship with trains. Love how, when the dog is little, he just looks like a full-size dog hit with a shrink-ray. Love the sad look that a disguised gramma gives the biker when she finally finds him (below).

image

A newspaper refers to the French Mafia as the suspects in a biker’s death, which is the clue that leads gramma to their lair… I’d forgotten that bit. I guess our biker was never going to win the tour de france anyway… he’s way in back when he is captured (even though he always outruns the others during the mafia-inflicted games). The DVD comes with a silly music video for M, the performer of the title song (lyrics written by Chomet himself).

image

IMDB users have sleuthed out some details in the Tour de France scenes and determined that the movie takes place in 1957.

image

by ·Comments Off on Paris, je t’aime (2006)

Wonderful anthology film, bunch of episodes connected with unexceptional cityscapes shot by one of the producers. I don’t know anything about the neighborhoods of Paris, but I guess each short is supposed to have its own local tone to it.

Montmartre
Man is cursing traffic, cursing everyone, alone and angry, then woman walks by and passes out next to his car. He acts the husband to other onlookers and lays her down in the backseat. She wakes up, they kinda like each other, she’s off to her tobaccologist (?) but they’ll meet up later. A nice opening piece, more like the kind of short that plays the film festivals than most of the other segments turned out to be… they were more episodes, excerpts, not stand-alone stories.
Director Bruno Podalydès starred himself, along with Florence Muller of Resnais’s Coeurs.

Quais de Seine
Boy’s friends are yelling insulting things to every woman who walks by, so boy gets away from them and helps up muslim girl. They like each other, it’s cute, her grandfather is nice to him, awww.
Director Guriner Chadha made Bride & Prejudice and Bend It Like Beckham.

La Marais
Jokey bit where dude helping artist Marianne Faithful at a press falls immediately for guy sitting on floor. Dude talks to him forever, tells him how they were destined to meet, gives his phone number, walks off, turns out guy on floor speaks no French, har!
Director Gus Van Sant lovingly photographs Gaspard (the boyfriend in A Very Long Engagement) and Elias (Elephant) in mostly long takes.

Tuileries
American tourist Steve Buscemi is waiting for his subway train and breaking the rules in his tour guide (“don’t make eye contact”), getting himself involved in the power games of two young lovers across the station and leading to his being beaten up with his souvenirs dumped all over him. Poor guy.
Directors Joel & Ethan Coen almost make up for The Ladykillers with this one. Katy was defeated by too-high expectations.

Loin du 16ème
Girl puts her own baby down at the babysitting place, then rides public transit to her job taking case of some rich lady’s baby, sings the same sweet song to both babies. One of the more obvious message-movies, but nice.
Director Walter Salles (Motorcycle Diaries) cast Catalina Sandino Moreno, of Fast Food Nation and Maria Full of Grace.

Porte de Choisy
Okay, Barbet Schroeder is a bald hair-care product salesman who goes to hardass Madame Li’s place to sell her stuff. First meeting doesn’t go well but she tries the stuff and calls him back, delighted. Sort of a choreographed musical comedy. Makes no damn sense. Best part is when he’s between meetings, bowling at a monastery and monks take away his cell phone.
Directed by Christopher Doyle, who I see is shooting a Rufus Sewell thriller and Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park next.

Bastille
Guy meets his wife for lunch, intending to tell her he’s leaving her for his mistress, but first she hands over a doctor’s note saying she has terminal leukemia. So he “rises to the occasion”, dumps his girlfriend, and spends the rest of his wife’s life doing things they used to love to do together, falls back in love with her and is destroyed when she dies. The only piece with a 3rd-party narrator, and one of my favorites.
Director Isabel Coixet made The Secret Life of Words and My Life Without Me… stars a guy from Va Savoir as the husband, the girl in a coma in Talk To Her as the mistress, and Miranda Richardson as the wife.

Place des Victoires
Kinda crappy despite two fave stars Willem Dafoe and Juliette Binoche. Her son died a week ago and she follows his phantom voice out to the plaza where Dafoe is a cowboy on a horse who lets her see her son once more. Katy liked it, I thought it was David Lynch-derivative.
Director Nobuhiro Suwa made some well-regarded Japanese movies I’ve never heard of before.

Tour Eiffel
Kid describes how his mime parents first met. Awesome, funny, features identical twins, imaginary cars and lots of miming… the one short that the whole movie would be worth seeing just to catch.
Director Sylvain Chomet’s follow-up to the perfect Triplets of Belleville.

Parc Monceau
In a single shot, father Nick Nolte walks down the street with his daughter to where a friend is watching her son. He takes over babysitting and the friends go off together. Jokey because the dialogue at first makes it sound like she’s cheating on her husband (actually the son) with Nolte.
Director Alfonso Cuarón is into long takes now. I told Katy I was waiting for something to explode but she didn’t get me.

Quartier des Enfants Rouges
One of the better ones… Maggie Gyllenhaal has a kinda cute encounter with her drug dealer, then calls him up to order more (really to see him again), but he sends a flunky instead who steals her watch.
Director Olivier Assayas has apparently completed his new Asia Argento / Michael Madsen thriller.

Place des Fêtes
Another great one, man gets stabbed and as he’s dying, a girl he recognizes is trying to help him. He flashes back to his not-so-easy life in Paris and all the times he’s tried to talk to her. Sad movie.
Director Oliver Schmitz has made a buncha German films. The girl is Aïssa Maïga, the lead (bar singer) in Bamako and also appeared in Caché.

Pigalle
Guy is trying to have a role-playing night out with his wife – it doesn’t go as planned but they’re still alright.
Director Richard LaGravenese made Freedom Writers, seems a weird choice for this. Bob Hoskins stars with Fanny Ardant, whom Katy recognized from 8 Women.

Quartier de la Madeleine
On a creepy street with desaturated colors except for bright-red blood, model Olga Kurylenko is devouring Wes Craven when Elijah Wood interrupts her. Vampire love ensues.
Director Vincenzo Natali made Cube and Nothing, and has seen Sin City more than once.

Père-Lachaise
Spacey, businesslike guy’s on a pre-wedding honeymoon with cute girl, she kisses Oscar Wilde’s grave then decides he’s not romantic enough for her and storms off. He talks to Wilde’s ghost briefly then runs after her and quotes her some Wilde, which idiotically makes her fall back in love with him.
Director Wes Craven isn’t known for this kind of thing. Rufus Sewell and Emily Mortimer are the couple, Alex Payne plays Wilde.

Faubourg Saint-Denis
Blind boy gets phone call from girlfriend, apparently breaking up with him. He flashes back in high-energy Lola-style through their relationship, how he first met her thinking she was in trouble, falling for her rehearsal performance (she’s an actress). He’s fallen for it again and she’s not really breaking up with him. One of my faves.
Director Tom Tykwer made Perfume. Natalie Portman is the girl. This apparently existed as a separate short back in 2004.

Quartier Latin
Gena Rowlands and Ben Gazzara get together at a cafe to talk over their divorce at the end of a long marriage. Good one, Rowlands wrote.
Director Gérard Depardieu is probably a big John Cassavetes fan, appears himself as the waiter.

14th arrondissement
Another really nice one, American woman is narrating to her French class (?) about her trip to Paris. She’s kind of lonely and jetlagged, but everything falls into place for her at the end.
Director Alexander Payne made Sideways and Election, and actress Margo Martindale is in Rocket Science and played Swank’s mom in Million Dollar Baby.

Katy liked it, too.

by ·Comments Off on Mondovino (2004, Jonathan Nossiter)

Second-and-a-halfth time I’ve seen this. Next time I’ll have to find the longer (miniseries?) version.

image

Still my favorite wine documentary. Unnervingly unsteady handheld digital camerawork, wandering obsession with wine people’s pets, sudden shifts from one country to another, and interviews that give subjects plenty time to make their views clear or to make fools of themselves.

image

Movie starts (but does not end) in Brazil, which is apparently a difficult place to make wine. For the most part, the ol’ stickler traditionalists come out looking good (Mondille family, the guy below), the big-money company owners come out looking not so good (Michel Rolland, Mondavi, Antinori), and some other characters add flavor and remain neutral (critic Robert Parker, new york distributor Neal Rosenthal).

image

I read a great magazine interview with Jonathan Nossiter – was it in Cinema Scope? Will have to find that again. I love how idiosyncratic the movie is – the way the camera restlessly looks around instead of watching the interview subjects, the inclusion of scenes and dialogue that the subjects probably thought (knew!) would be thrown out, the rich v. poor, worker v. owner and globalization arguments stated or implied in every scene.

Katy liked the movie, I think.

by ·2 Comments

image

Sooooo bleak. Not the normal kind of resistance movie. Their struggle is necessary but hopeless. Movie opens with our main guy escaping from a camp, then having the guy who ratted on him killed. Many small triumphs and large defeats later, we end with the gang shooting one of their own then driving away as the titles tell us how each of them later got killed in the struggle.

image

Hardly any non-diegetic music, superbly shot, dark and dreary but not in a tiring way, more of a matter-of-fact “this is how things are” straightforward way.

image

These are not heroes in the regular movie sense of the word. Theirs is not a glorious fight… it’s hardly a fight at all, more a struggle for survival. The problem is that it would be easier to survive by living ordinary lives, by cooperating with the nazi regime, by ratting on their fellows, by doing any of a number of things they refuse to do, by giving in. The movie is about how much it can suck to be moral, to stick to your convictions. While those in the resistance who survived the war can’t have much to be proud of… unlike most residents of their country, they also can’t have much to be ashamed of. A great, great movie. Nice contrast to the portrait of resistance to nazi occupation in Black Book this year.

image

by ·Comments Off on The Valet (2006, Francis Veber)

Still shocked that I liked this, after the awful cheesy trailer. It’s well-played light comedy, a story of little consequence, but kept on a high enough level that I even recommended it to people. The director is well known for quality (The Dinner Game), but I’d so grown to dislike that trailer that my enjoyment of the movie was as surprising as if I’d ended up liking The Italian or the last two Pirates of the Carribean films.

Anyway, valet is standing next to fabulously rich dude arguing with his supermodel girlfriend when a photo is shot by tabloid journalist. In order to keep his fortune from a wife who’d love to catch him cheating, the rich guy has to pretend the supermodel wasn’t with him at all, but with the other guy, the valet. So he and the wife hire competing teams of spies to follow the two around, one group trying to prove the valet and supermodel are not together and the other trying to make it look like they are. Fun premise, and it’s carried through well. Valet ends up with his childhood girlfriend after they get plenty jealous of each other’s new lovers, and model gets her revenge on rich guy, with the closing shot having the same photographer catch him in a trap standing next to a transsexual.

The Farrelly brothers are supposed to helm the U.S. remake in 2008.

by ·Comments Off on Play Time (1967, Jacques Tati)

Wow, this is one of my favorite movies now. I was right about watching it in the theater (on film)… really helped see everything properly. More important, possibly, was seeing it for a second time, already knowing the pace and the organization of story (such as there is a story), being able to sit back and enjoy.

First third (?) of the movie is an architectural dream, all buildings and structure and angles, beautiful and disorienting. Whole movie is concerned with structure and glass.

Funny, but not punchline-funny so much as enjoyable and light, building up towards the end of the crazy restaurant sequence when suddenly humor’s flying from all directions.

I feel like I “got it” this time, but also feel like I missed a lot. Not in a bad way, more in a “could see this again and again” way.

I’d thought Mr. Hulot wasn’t in this one but of course he is. What was I thinking of… Parade?

Katy, Jimmy, Misty, even Adam liked it.

by ·Comments Off on Muriel, or The Time of Return (1963, Alain Resnais)

Resnais at the Venice Film Festival described the movie as “recording the anger of a so-called happy civilization. A new world is shaping. My characters are scared of it and can’t deal with it. We witness a real impregnation of the world. Muriel invites us. The movie grows like a plant. The characters start to live away from us. Imagine a letter on a piece of blotting paper. The movie is this blotting paper. The audience is that mirror that allows the image to be seen. Muriel appeared in the middle of the ink stains.”

Helene to Alphonse: “Well, did we love each other or not?”

Bernard is the nephew, Marie-do is his girlfriend, Robert is his war buddy.

Italian movie Hands Over The City beat this one at Venice, along with Marker’s Le Joli Mai, Kurosawa’s High & Low, a Louis Malle, Billy Liar and Hud.

image

image

image