by ·Comments Off on Life During Wartime (2009, Todd Solondz)

“Are you seeing anyone?”
“No, I’m more focused on China. Everything else is history. It’s just a question of time.”

I don’t remember Happiness very well, but saw it twice and gave it an 8 on IMDB so I suppose I liked it. Things I recall: pervy Philip Seymour Hoffman and pervy child-rapist Dylan Baker and Dylan’s unhappy sister-in-law ironically named Joy. Things internet plot summaries are helping me with: Dylan’s wife is named Trish (Cynthia Stevenson), acts superior to Joy. Their writer sister Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle) meets Hoffman then backs out, after which Hoffman meets Kristina, who confesses to murdering their doorman. Ben Gazzara and Louise Lasser are Joy’s also-unhappy separated parents. Joy’s ex-boyfriend Jon Lovitz kills himself.

Okay, a decade later… Shirley Henderson as Joy… Paul Reubens as suicidal Jon Lovitz… Michael Kenneth “Omar” Williams as Philip Seymour Hoffman… Ciaran Hinds as the pedophile… Allison Janney as his wife… Ally Sheedy as the writer sister… now I should be caught up and ready to watch.

Shot by Morristown NJ’s own Ed Lachman, following his great work on The Limey, Far From Heaven, A Prairie Home Companion and I’m Not There, the cinematography alone almost makes the movie worth watching. The actors are excellent too… the plot, not so much. More Solondzist miserablism. He must attract Emil Jannings acolytes who think it’ll be a great acting exercise to humiliate themselves onscreen.

Joy is now married to Omar Seymour Hoffman, which I wasn’t expecting, and is still tormented by her ex. I assumed since his character (now Paul Reubens) was in the movie that it wasn’t a straight sequel, but no, turns out he’s a ghost, and is annoyed with Joy for driving him to suicide (“I miss my room, my laserdisc collection”), suggesting that she join him.

Joy with Reubens, moments before she threatens him with one of those awards:

Joy joins her mom in Florida, where she catches up with the writer sister, now a huge horrible celebrity (Sheedy, below). Dylan/Ciaran is just out of prison but can’t visit his family, because his wife has told the kids for the last decade that their father is dead. After sleeping with a cynical Charlotte Rampling (I watched this the day after she was all over the news for making an unwise remark about racism and the oscars), he does track down his oldest son Billy in college, having an awkward reunion which is admittedly still less awkward than most of Happiness.

Ciaran’s wife/Joy’s sister Trish, now Allison Janney, is beginning to date Michael Lerner and things are moving quickly and going well, until her youngest son Timmy misinterprets something he’s been told about not letting adults touch him, and breaks up the relationship. I think the final scene was him apologizing to Lerner’s son Mark. Overall the movie is singlemindedly concerned with forgiveness.

Billy’s wall posters brought to you by Merge Records. I spotted Spoon, Neutral Milk Hotel, Imperial Teen, The Broken West, Oakley Hall, Daniel Johnston, and I’m Not There – another movie casting multiple actors in the same role.

by ·Comments Off on Rosetta (1999, Dardennes)

Doesn’t seem like my kind of thing, as I assumed it wouldn’t be from seeing L’Enfant, but at least on the HD screen at home it’s easier to take their handheld follow-cam asthetic without feeling ill, and at least now I’ve seen both of their Cannes top-prize-winning films and don’t feel like I’m missing something. I get that it’s empathetic filmmaking, and Rosetta shares with their Two Days, One Night lead character a desperate drive to survive (not some huge success, just to keep a simple, steady job) alternating with bouts of depression – both realistic and moving portrayals. But it’s also just dismal enough (ends with Rosetta unable to commit suicide because she runs out of gas) that I felt more bummed out by the scenario than uplifted by the great humanist filmmaking. Admittedly it grows on you after a few days – and now I’m behind on the blog so it’s been a month, and it has definitely stuck with me.

Rosetta lives in a trailer park with her drunk mom, has stomach pains, and is seriously pissed at having lost her job in the opening scene. Soon she takes another girl’s job making waffle batter, loses it almost immediately when the boss decides to hire his son instead, so she rats on her only friend Riquet (who has been selling his own homemade waffles on the sly) and takes his job. Yes, it’s a Belgian movie with a serious emphasis on waffle making. Being stalked by Riquet, she phones in her resignation and goes home to kill herself and her mom, which she hasn’t managed to do by the time Riquet shows up, so I suppose it’s a happy ending?

Waffler confrontation:

Slant:

What makes Rosetta unique, though, is its lead character’s determination to reveal and destroy any hint of surrounding weakness threatening to subvert her singular direction in life. Rosetta would rather risk Riquet physically retaliating against her than be linked to his illegal operation—or die trying to save her mother from the bottle instead of sticking her head in the sand. Both scenarios prove the character’s fundamental need to exist within a state of hardened reality, not soft fantasy.

Ebert, who mentions Mouchette and Vagabond:

It doesn’t strive for our sympathy or make any effort to portray Rosetta as colorful, winning or sympathetic. It’s a film of economic determinism, the story of a young woman for whom employment equals happiness. Or so she thinks until she has employment and is no happier, perhaps because that is something she has simply never learned to be.

Rosetta: Émilie Dequenne was later in a Téchiné movie and Brotherhood of the Wolf. Her semi-friend Riquet: Fabrizio Rongione has been in most Dardenne movies since, also La Sapienza. As the waffle boss: Olivier Gourmet, which sounds like a French name I’d make up as a joke, who has been in every Dardenne movie since La Promesse, also Time of the Wolf (not Brotherhood of the Wolf). This won the palme and best actress at Cannes (up against All About My Mother, Pola X, Kikujiro, Ghost Dog) but the Césars preferred Venus Beauty Institute.

Those Dardennes:

The documentaries that we used to make, you go to film a reality that exists outside of you and you don’t have control over it — it resists your camera. You have to take it as it is. So we try to keep that aspect of documentary into our fiction, to film something that resists us … We want to remain on the level of the things as they are and not impose on them.

by ·Comments Off on Lumière! chapters 1 & 2

Holy shit, the Lumière films have been remastered in HD and look incredible. I understand no spoken French, so played the music-only track on the blu-ray, though I’ll bet the narration is super interesting. Hope this comes out in the U.S. eventually.

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Sortie d’usine III (1896)

Sortie d’usine II (1896)

Sortie d’usine (1895)

Three takes shown in reverse order (and with declining picture quality). There are dogs (the same dog?) in all three, and dudes who need help riding their bikes.

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Débarquement du congrès de photographes à Lyon (1895)

The first self-reflexive movie? A photographer notices he’s being filmed, his own camera aiming towards our camera.

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Repas de bébé (1895)

This baby would be 120 years old now.

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Forgerons (1895)

Hammering and cranking – right as the film ends the anvil guy is being poured a drink. Can’t help but notice how clear the scene looks even with the fast hammer motion. I wonder what (approx) framerate this was shot at. Reportedly a remake of an Edison kinetoscope from 2.5 years earlier.

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Arroseur et arrosé (1895)

Classic hose gag, ends in a spanking.

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Partie d’écarté (1896)

While drinks are poured, cigars are smoked and cards are played, the waiter in the background is overreacting to the scenario, single-handedly inventing silent-film ham acting.

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Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat (1897)

It’s coming right at us!

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Démolition d’un mur (1897)

I’d like a hand-cranked wall-demolisher. Everything was hand-cranked those days – construction equipment, cameras, fireplaces. Afterward this film is played in reverse, which is apparently a thing projectionists did to blow minds, a post-post-production effect.

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Panorama de l’arrivée en gare de Perrache pris du train (1896)

Looking out the side of a train, with nice view of a horse-and-wagon bridge. “Panorama” apparently meant “moving camera”.

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Arrivée d’un train à Perrache (1896)

Another train arrival (possibly the train we rode in the previous film). The behavior is what’s odd here. Bunch of uniformed mustache fellows waiting anxiously for the train to arrive, motioning at it, grabbing its handles seemingly in an effort to make it stop faster, then opening all the nice-looking cushioned side doors as a Napoleon-hatted man in the distance slowly paces.

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Place des Cordeliers (1895)

Nice angle on a busy street. Horse-drawn double-decker bus!

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Place Bellecour (1896)

Some of these are probably really special if you’re familiar with the corner today. Wonder if that hotel being built in the background is still standing. Unexciting until right at the end, a car reading “Absinthe Premier” appears on the right side. An advertisement like we put on tops of cabs and sides of buses, or – still my heart – an absinthe delivery truck??

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Quai de l’Archevêché (1896)

It must have been unusual that this street would be flooded, given the huge audience of people watching from the sidewalk as cars pass by. But maybe not, since there’s also a boat. Don’t these people have somewhere better to be? Ah, “floods of the Saône river during the first week of November, 1896” says IMDB.

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Place du Pont (1897)

Camera glides beautifully down a trolley line, but Lumiere didn’t have great timing with this one, as we stop to allow a rubble truck to pass. I guess those are simply bus ads for alcohol after all, since here we’ve got “Dunoise liquor exquise” and “Alcool de menthe” (probably De Ricqlès). My new theory is that these are party buses full of college students, who hop from one to another when they want to try a different spirit.

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Concours de boules (1896)

A pretty damned exciting game of boules with a big crowd of suit-wearers, who are apt to dash into the middle of the court right when someone’s about to throw.

by ·Comments Off on Bend of the River (1952, Anthony Mann)

A damned good western. I’ve now watched six Anthony Mann films from the 1950’s, and all six have been terrific. Further exploration is needed. Here we’ve got guilty ex-criminal James Stewart leading a group of settlers through increasingly hostile territory. Stewart meets kindred spirit Cole (Rancho Notorious star Arthur Kennedy) and they deal with arrow-shooting natives early on… rest of the hostility comes from white men in a gold rush who’d like to murder the settlers and/or steal their supplies, led by a mutinous Cole.

The group stops in Portland (which looks different these days) to buy supplies, drops off the arrow-wounded Laurie (Julie Adams) to recover. She seemed fond of Cole earlier, and when Stewart returns to Portland months later to find out why their supplies haven’t arrived, she’s shacking up with gambler Rock Hudson. Stewart causes trouble and they have to make a quick escape on a steamboat run by Chubby Johnson and Stepin Fetchit. Eventually Stewart has proven himself again and again, earning the trust of wagon train leader Jay Flippen and the love of his daughter Laurie (Rock barely seems to notice she’s gone, making eyes at her younger sister).

by ·Comments Off on Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992, David Lynch)

I have mixed feelings about this one. Felt like Lynch already reclaimed Twin Peaks for himself in the final episode of the series. Sheryl Lee is great, and it’s a good movie about her increasingly troubled youth, dodging her upright boyfriend James to hang out with drug-supplying Bobby (who kills a guy in the woods), and grappling with her realization that her tormentor “Bob” is actually her father. Lynch’s heart may have been on poor Laura’s side, wanting to spend time with her while she was alive, but it comes off as a redundant prequel, full of fan-servicing cameos by the show’s cast and decisions based more on actor availability than artistic concerns.

Lynch practically writes Agent Cooper out of the show, replacing him with Chris Isaak (and wonderful sidekick Kiefer Sutherland) in a long opening segment about the disappearance of Laura’s associate Teresa Banks and her mysterious ring, but he can’t write out Laura’s best friend Donna. Lara Flynn Boyle was a superstar in 1992, appearing in Wayne’s World and Matthew Modine identical-twin thriller Equinox, so Moira Kelly (With Honors, The Cutting Edge) is the new Donna. The whole Horne family is missing too (Sherilyn Fenn was costarring with Danny Aiello in a movie about the JFK assassination from Jack Ruby’s point of view) though they’re mentioned in the deleted scenes.

Peaceful domestic scene:

Rewatched this the night Bowie died. He has a tiny role in the movie, but fits into Lynch’s netherworld perfectly. I forget some of the Twin Peaks mythology (planning to rewatch some episodes before the new one comes out), but I’m into this brigade Lynch was building of dimension-hopping special agents: Kyle, Bowie and Isaak. Re-reading a Cinema Scope article from when the deleted scenes came out, there are plenty of interesting connections to the series that I missed from not having watched it in 14 years.

Who can identify all the people in Whatever Lodge This Is? There’s Bob and MJ Anderson up front, then we’ve got papier-mache-face, cane fella, old woman, suit kid, and the fake beard brothers. According to a Twin Peaks-dedicated wiki, the old woman is Mrs. Tremond and “her intentions are unclear”.

Thanks, Wikipedia… so the red-curtained, zigzag-floored place is The Black Lodge, and that’s one-armed Mike sitting with MJ Anderson (who refers to himself as “the arm” in the film) facing Bob and Leland.

Same ending as Orlando?

by ·Comments Off on The Wonders (2014, Alice Rohrwacher)

Coming-of-age movie with good reviews. I preferred The Spirit of the Beehive. Older and younger girl work on the family honey farm, compete on an awful traveling reality show hosted by Monica Bellucci (last seen in Shoot ’em Up), but don’t do very well. Also the family gets a mute foreign criminal kid to work for them, part of some rehab program, and he and the oldest girl (terrific Maria Alexandrea Lungu) have a weird kinda-friendship. Lungu has a trick where she puts a bee in her mouth and lets it crawl out, which only reminded me of the superior Limmy version. Spoiler: boy escapes, family loses the farm.

T. Charity in Cinema Scope:

Rohrwacher deftly sketches the stress points within the family, but the film’s real focus is the bond between eldest daughter and father. At the beginning of the summer Gelso is appreciative of her role as Wolfgang’s most trusted helper (as well as default child-minder), even if she’s also dimly apprehensive of her dad’s short fuse, his coercive methods, and obsessive personality. He’s the patriarch, but also an outsider in a house overflowing with women and girls (literally: he sleeps on a mattress out under the stars). Over the course of a couple of months, the film traces how the balance shifts from admiration towards a more nuanced understanding of Wolfgang’s shortcomings, a trajectory from daddy’s girl towards the first stirrings of Gelsomina’s emancipation and womanhood.

M. Sicinski’s letterboxd review is my favorite, but harder to break into quotable pieces.

by ·Comments Off on Jeff Scher shorts

Was in the mood for some Jeff Scher after running through my Len Lye DVD… watched the rest of the shorts on his great Reasons To Be Glad collection and searched around for more. Also a sweet film festival trailer and a 10-minute Pip Chodorov doc about Scher’s techniques. Jeff rotoscopes, using sort of a low-powered film projector on pause and tracing the projected image, with diffent color schemes on each frame. He says he spent up to an hour per frame on Garden of Regrets. Started using less labor-intensive techniques for Yours, combining different film images and rotating color techniques. Fun to take stills from these while watching because you never know what you’ll get.

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Postcards from Warren (1998)

Cuts between different hilarious postcards from Warren (Sonbert, I assume), panning across some.

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Bang Bang (1998)

Drums and flickering ink blots. My eyes were tired from a long week at work, and this was just the thing to hit their reset button, making them much better or worse – I can’t tell. The kind of thing that makes me wish I had a movie theater to show it in.

This one looks like Donnie Darko:

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Sid (1998)

Playing with the dog from the rubber-steak’s-eye-view, complete with Eugene-in-Bob’s-Burgers-style dog-bark-sampling keyboard music.

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Turkish Traffic (1998)

All flickering, transforming shapes and patterns set to (Turkish, I assume) happy horn music.

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Garden of Regrets (1994)

More rapid rotoscoping magic, shots from a wide variety of sources, sometimes repeated later in the montage.

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Pretty, Dead (2010)

Noirish scenes given the roto-color treatment, with a dramatic string score.

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More reasons to be glad: Scher has an iBook with videos which I need to order, more movies online (including a live video of Toog) and a blog series at NY Times.

by ·Comments Off on The Revenant (2015, Alejandro Iñárritu)

The movie that blew up my twitter the most in December, from “bear rape” to “movie pussies”. And it won the golden globe over Carol, Mad Max, Room and Spotlight. But it’s by Iñárritu, who I haven’t trusted since the putrid 21 Grams, and I was ambivalent to his oscar-winning Birdman. So surely the question on everyone’s mind is: did I enjoy The Revenant? Yes!

This one’s not done as a fake single-take – and who told me it was? – but rather shot with a grotesque wide-angle lens by the great Emmanuel Lubezki and edited by Soderbergh’s man Stephen Mirrione. I guess Leo DiCaprio is the gone-native white dude with a half-breed son and the two of them are well-paid to guide and protect a crew of trappers under siege by a group of natives looking for a kidnapped girl, rival French trappers (who kidnapped the girl), snow, bears, and worst of all, their own greedy compatriots. After Leo is half-destroyed by a bear, trapper Tom Hardy murders Leo’s son and abandons Leo to the elements, returning to camp to collect his reward for valiantly trying to help (Tom’s word against nobody’s). But Leo survives a million horrible things, makes it to camp and gets Captain Domhnall Gleeson (having a good year with Ex Machina and Brooklyn) to go after the villainous Hardy.

So yeah, I was convinced by the film, went along with the ride, edge of my seat like a disgusting, frozen, bloodied Panic Room, and didn’t even feel bad about it afterwards. Some folks weren’t as persuaded.

J. Christley:

That The Revenant is egregiously overlong is almost beside the point; audiences will manage their expectations in that regard. What pushes the film, at long last, into the icy river, is its very design, as a monument to slick, mercenary grandeur.

He makes a good point about The Big Sky being a more efficient film, but did The Big Sky have characters named Trapper Hatchet In Back and Dave Stomach Wound?

by ·Comments Off on Carol (2015, Todd Haynes)

I knew this was based on a Patricia Highsmith story, but when I saw the opening scene I thought “oh no, is this a remake of Brief Encounter?” Fortunately it goes in a different direction pretty quickly, and while Brief Encounter may have a perfect ending for the 1940’s, Carol has the perfect ending for right now.

Carol (Cate Blanchett) is the interesting rich lady who makes eyes at young department store cashier Therese (Rooney Mara) one Christmas shopping season, and eventually they’re in love, vacationing across the country, not realizing they’re being pursued by private investigators hired by Carol’s husband Kyle Chandler. Not much to say about the movie, plot-wise, since it’s all about perfectly chosen moments and a beautiful visual atmosphere.

F. Zaman in Reverse Shot:

It doesn’t engage with questions of why or how its protagonists are gay, or create simplistic dynamics between homophobic villains and damaged queer heroes. It lets the characters just be, as they are, a defiant act of passive resistance against the assumption that queerness needs to be justified – and that it is the primary quality of the queer person. Just as Haynes is reinvigorating the melodrama genre in films like Carol, Far from Heaven, and even Velvet Goldmine, he is also reframing history to include others — people of color, counterculture figures, queers — in a meaningful way. Carol is also full of visceral pleasures, capturing subjective but universal experiences, like the way the world seems to blur when that certain someone touches your wrist for first time.