by ·Comments Off on The Beguiled (2017, Sofia Coppola)

Three great actors (Nicole, Kirsten, Colin) plus Elle leading the up-and-comers. Colin is an enemy soldier brought to their boarding school for medical help, then as he recovers his strength, things get increasingly tense until he plays an ill-advised trick on Kirsten, and the women murder him with poison mushrooms.

Lovely movie, great twisted fun. I have few deep thoughts, because my post-film reverie was interrupted by the sight of a guy wearing a Battlefield Earth t-shirt – the novel, not the film.

by ·Comments Off on The Virgin Suicides (1999, Sofia Coppola)

“Most likely Bonnie died while we were waiting in the living room.”

Narrated by the neighbor boys, still obsessed with the Lisbon girls who committed suicide 25 years earlier. I finally watched this because Coppola has a new movie in Cannes this week… I’d skipped it when it came out, because I was busy watching boy movies like Fight Club and Sleepy Hollow and Wild Wild West and 8mm. Heard it was good, meant to catch up with it, just another movie on the must-see list, never realizing it’s a stone-cold masterpiece, and now I want to watch it 100 more times.

And so we started to learn about their lives. Coming to hold collective memories of times we hadn’t experienced, we felt the imprisonment of being a girl – the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing what colors went together. We knew that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them. We knew that they knew everything about us, and that we couldn’t fathom them at all.

The Lisbon Girls: youngest Cecilia (the first to attempt suicide, and later, the first to succeed) is Hanna Hall (young Robin Wright in Forrest Gump, Michael Myers’s older sister in the bad Halloween). Lux gets the most screen time, because she is Kirsten Dunst. Older Bonnie is Chelse Swain (The Mangler 2), then Mary is AJ Cook (Final Destination 2, Wishmaster 3), and oldest Therese (Leslie Hayman). Their parents Kathleen Turner and James Woods seem protective, but not unreasonably strict, at least not until they pull all the girls out of school and order them to destroy their rock LPs after Lux stays out all night with prom date Josh Hartnett… things go downhill quickly after that.

The girls:

The parents:

Coppola does her Marie Antoinette thing, with perfect period costume design, gorgeous grainy photography, lively performances and good music, whether period-appropriate or not (Sloan songs, Air score). What I never would’ve guessed is that this movie is partly a comedy, and frequently hysterical. Doesn’t appear to have been taken very seriously at the time, only winning awards from MTV and a Casting Society, but it made the Cahiers top ten, at least.

The boys play them music over the phone:

Manilazic on letterboxd:

The boys keep on looking for clues as to what pushed Cecilia to suicide, but end up collecting objects belonging to the girls that only aggrandize their mythology: their answer is right under their noses, but their blossoming teenage male minds can’t see it. Even though the girls themselves attempt to communicate with their worshipers several times, they are always met with nothing but a blind fascination. Too mystified by the women in those girls and by the changes they see in all things as they grow up, the boys can’t connect with the Lisbon girls as human beings and see that they need help.

by ·Comments Off on TV Specials from the Tail End of 2015

A Wish For Wings That Work (1991, Skip Jones)

First time I’ve watched this since its highly anticipated TV premiere. It’s like Rudolph but with Opus – he helps Santa with a problem and is rewarded with a fly-around by the ducks that used to laugh and call him names. Highlight is when Opus is injected into a scene from Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon after an ad break.

Opus was Michael Bell (Duke in G.I. Joe), neighborhood pig and ducks were Joe Alaskey (Plucky in Tiny Toons, Bugs and Daffy in Looney Tunes: Back in Action), and uncredited appearances by Robin Williams (botching a NZ accent) and Dustin Hoffman (goofing on Tootsie). Director Skip Jones was a Don Bluth animator.

Breathed was not happy with the final result, and I can see his point. Still the only appearance of Bloom County characters on TV – technically Outland characters at this point – though Breathed’s Mars Need Moms book was adapted as a crappy-looking flop feature film, and his story Edwurd Fudwupper Fibbed Big was adapted into a short the author called “an unmitigated technical disaster – unfinished and unwatchable.”

Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno Live (2015, Jody Shapiro)

A weird hour-long mash-up of scenes from Rossellini’s Green Porno live tour, behind-the-scenes tour footage, coverage of the book tour, the original short films, and related stuff, like following a scientist to observe mating seals. “It is essential that what I say is scientifically correct. Otherwise I’m a nut – and who needs another nut?” I didn’t realize she’s done two other series called Seduce Me and Mammas, and an hourlong documentary called Animals Distract Me. Jody Shapiro also shoots and produces Guy Maddin films.

A Very Murray Christmas (2015, Sofia Coppola)

In which a bunch of our favorite actors who cannot sing very well, and a handful of actual singers, congregate in Coppola’s underlit Lost In Translation hotel to act sad, goof around and gradually cheer up. The band Phoenix was the best part, with Chris Rock’s off-time backing vocals a close second.

Chris Isaak Christmas (2004)

Watched in hotel while getting ready for the family Christmas. A million times more festive than the Bill Murray one, with more upbeat music.

Charlie Brooker’s 2015 Wipe

Funny look at a depressing year. Good bit on the media’s changing attitudes on the humanity of refugees, and Brooker finally got to address his spooky Black Mirror PM pig-sex prediction on the air. Stanhope got cut for being too controversial… hope his segment turns up sometime.

Shaun The Sheep: The Farmer’s Llamas (2015, Jay Grace)

Like the movie, but shorter, and with troublemaking nihilist llamas which are even worse than the pigs.

by ·Comments Off on Marie Antoinette (2006, Sofia Coppola)

With no backstory, Kirsten Dunst (Austrian Marie) is married off to the prince of France, Jason “the director’s cousin” Schwartzmann. The two of them soon come to bigtime power when king Rip Torn dies, and run around doing whatever they like. Jason sure doesn’t want any sex with Kirsten, but finally agrees to consummate in order to get everyone off his back about an heir. Kirsten lazes around, has at least one affair and two baby heirs, and ends up with her own custom-made house in a custom-made garden with all her friends and fancy fancy food and clothes. Meanwhile, people in France are poor and angry and something is happening with Austria but nobody cares about that until it’s way too late and the people are storming the castle and beheading people.

Kirsten’s always seeming totally out of her element as an actress finally works for the part, as Marie is an awkward princess who becomes an awkward queen, then once she realizes she can do anything, runs around doing anything. The movie sort of lets her off the hook, because really, she knew hardly anything about her position and had no reason at all to try and find out more. The king apparently had policy meetings but they were kept simple and short (and both of the ones they showed us involved sending money to America, maybe Sofia’s little rebuke for the freedom-fries thing).

Who else? Molly Shannon from SNL is a snippy friend with a possibly fake nose, Asia Argento is King Rip Torn’s slutty & improper (natch) girlfriend, and Alan “Steve Coogan” Partridge is Queen Marie’s ambassador to her family and/in Austria.

Beautiful scenery, clothing, sets, everything… nice low-light photography. Kirsten Dunst is pretty. Fine idea, this whole showing off Marie’s life from inside, as if she’s just a carefree teen who won a neverending shopping spree at the mall. Nicely paced, as Katy says, slow but purposefully so, following Marie’s languorous lifestyle. But the movie never gets around to proving itself necessary or rewarding me for watching it, besides the odd beautiful shot or good use of a Bjork song as mood music. Feels somewhat flat, though I can’t point at just why. Double Life of Veronique a few days later confirmed the feeling… Marie is missing something big. If I knew what it was missing, I suppose I’d be writing this someplace other than here. Katy liked the movie pretty well but feared the hype.