by ·Comments Off on Ricki and the Flash (2015, Jonathan Demme)

Kinda lightweight family-crisis drama, but that’s welcome after the too-heavy Rachel Getting Married. This one also tweaks the formula in important ways, using music scenes (Meryl Streep’s Ricki fronts a pub-rock band) for emotional impact, letting the entire songs play out. Streep is great, but she’s out-acted (if not upstaged) by daughter Mamie Gummer, who plays both touchingly depressed and comic-caricature-depressed, depending on the scene.

Streep has abandoned her own family, now tries to return and fix things when her daughter is abandoned by her husband. The two sons are having none of this, and Streep loses a power struggle with ex-husband Kevin Kline’s wife Audra McDonald, and refuses to commit to boyfriend/bandmate Rick Springfield, then between the visit home for Mamie’s divorce drama and Streep’s belated invitation to her son’s wedding a few months later, she manages to change just enough for a happy, all-dancing ending.

Written by Diablo Cody, with Kevin Kline as husband/father. Pretty much none of the critics liked it except Scott Tobias: “Against the machine-tooled blockbusters of summer, Demme’s film stands out for its modesty of scale and its abiding interest in the untidy business of being human … Typical of many Demme films, there are no villains here, just the natural conflict between fundamentally decent people whose choices have put them at odds with one another.”

by ·Comments Off on The Devil and Miss Jones (1941, Sam Wood)

Would be a decent enough movie – good concept but plot problems and sometimes clunky direction – but oh, the cast! A few months after The Lady Eve, someone had the smarts to hire a bunch of Preston Sturges players (Coburn, Demarest, and I’m counting Jean Arthur from Easy Living) along with Cuddles Sakall (same year as Ball of Fire) and Spring Byington (You Can’t Take It With You) and throw ’em all together. I was worried that the unknowns (Edmund Gwenn as a cranky boss and Robert Cummings as Jean’s labor-organizer love-interest, both Hitchcock actors) would drag down the cast, but no, everyone was great.

Coburn is supposedly a reclusive tyrant businessman whose response to any trouble is to fire people, but when he goes undercover at his own department store to ferret out pro-unionists he immediately turns into a teddy bear and falls for a fellow worker (Byington) in the shoe department. His new friends, Jean and Robert, are leading the labor fight, and though Coburn easily gets their list of sympathizers, he decides – instead of firing everyone on the list – to have a double wedding and take everyone on a Hawaiian cruise.

Wood made a couple of Marx Brothers movies and writer Norman Krasna did Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Indiscreet and White Christmas. Nominated for two oscars alongside The Devil Pays Off and The Devil and Daniel Webster, a diabolical year.

by ·Comments Off on Life Post-Dissolve

The Dissolve was my favorite film site, and most important resource for news and opinions. Check it in the morning for today’s reviews (always well written and nearly-always giving a good indication whether I’ll like the film in question) and movie news. Check in the late afternoon for a news update, feature articles (if time to read them), and links to important film writing elsewhere on the internet. All of this was cleanly and appealingly laid-out, and chronologically ordered so I can instantly tell where I left off last time.

There seems to be no single replacement, and I need one – in the aftermath of Dissolve shutting down, I didn’t know a new Tarsem Singh movie had opened, couldn’t tell you whether Minions was any good, and almost missed It’s a Mad Mad Mad Max Fury Road. Until a benevolent billionaire re-funds the site, I’m reading this sprawl of daily sources instead:

– Fandor Keyframe Daily for less-frequent links to good articles elsewhere, and the best film festival aggregate coverage.

– Letterboxd activity feed (feat. most of the ex-Dissolvers)

– Shadowplay for the best film writing in the business.

– Screencrush, but only Matt Singer’s articles (because I cannot bear to see things like “10 Facts you might not know about Ant-Man” in my news).

– Criticwire, but not the rest of Indiewire (because they had a series of oscar-prediction articles in August). In case I ever reconsider, here are actual headlines from a recent day’s Indiewire front page: “[some trailer] Will Take Your Breath Away,” “[another trailer] Will Break Your Heart],” “[another trailer] Will Send You Into A Vicious Fit.” They also wrote a review of a banner ad.

Occasionally twitter is useful, and AV Club‘s okay. Still avoiding video content and podcasts because who has time for those? And I’ve got a pile of sites to check weekly, and others to check monthly/occasionally, not worth replicating here since they change often and since nobody is reading this. And there’s always my treasured Cinema Scope paper subscription (thinking about adding Cineaste and/or Film Comment).

 
What else is going on?

 
– The BBC polled “62 international film critics” to make a top-hundred list of American films, which is mostly more of the same so I don’t feel like tracking it too closely. The eight I haven’t (fully) seen: Imitation of Life, Birth of a Nation, Marnie, A Place in the Sun, The Shop Around The Corner, The Right Stuff, The Shanghai Gesture, Heaven’s Gate. Little White Lies list of 100 Great Movies by Female Directors looks more exciting. Also found some best-animation and best-horror and best-chinese lists, and there’s still the Criterion collection, and recommendations from my books and magazines and the Anthology Film Archives list and the Sight & Sound poll and Cahiers lists and all the new movies coming out daily.

 
– Auteur Completism Update: In October 2005, I finished watching all the Sam Fuller movies I was able to find (later found and watched four more, and rewatched a bunch in improved DVD and bluray copies), then decided to tackle Fritz Lang movies next. In March 2007, I finished watching all the Fritz Lang movies I was able to find (later found and watched four more), and had since added Rivette, Resnais, Marker and Bunuel to the auteur-completism stack.

That was over eight years ago! I’ve continued to add new directors: Bresson, Chaplin, Sternberg, Polanski, Fellini, Bergman, not to mention keeping up with old favorite directors and discovering new ones all the time. Lately I’m always starting film-watching projects and never finishing any, making a hundred must-watch lists (see above) and trying to make gradual progress on them all at once. I miss the sense of accomplishment, saying “there, I’ve seen ALL the Lang movies I can find – here are my faves, here are the ones I need to rewatch on bluray” or whatever. So back to that 2007 list: I’ve averaged one Bunuel per year since then, still missing five (sort of) Resnais, one or two Rivettes (plus the extended Joan the Maid), and it’s hard to tell how many Markers are available these days – they’ve been steadily surfacing on video. Either way, I could reasonably watch the remainder of these by the end of 2015 – and there’s another big list I’m almost through, assuming I can find the energy to watch Shoah sometime.

 
– I’m building a list of movie write-up traps – here are three:

1. “It’s good, but flawed” (pref. with no elaboration on “flawed”).

2. “This movie from the past/present could never be made in the present/past because these/those days movies are/were like ____.”

3. Any mention of “explosions and car chases” re: a movie that lacks these things.

 
– An Adrian Martin phrase I liked very much:
“harnessing our hard drives as our outsourced memory banks”

 
– Since it has become sport to ask me how many movies I watch per year, I’ve accessed my outsourced memory banks to come up with an answer: 238, on average.

Number of movies watched per year:

by ·Comments Off on Down Terrace (2009, Ben Wheatley)

Aging couple has run a close-knit drug operation for many years. The week after patriarch Bill and emotionally unstable son Karl get out of jail, Karl finds out his girlfriend is pregnant and Bill shakes up his friends, ends up killing most of them, trying to determine if someone ratted. Low-key movie with nice gradual escalation into ultra-violence. Cowriter Robin Hill plays Karl, his dad Robert Hill plays his dad, his wife Kerry Peacock plays his girlfriend and the great Julia Deakin (Marsha from Spaced) is his mom. Good supporting cast including Wheatley regular Michael Smiley and Tony Way (Edge of Tomorrow, Nine Inch Nails-shirted guy in Dragon Tattoo).

Twisty ending as Karl and gf kill the parents and make their escape. A family and friends affair – Wheatley and Robin say on the commentary that it was even shot in Robin’s parents’ house. They say the concept was to write a dark drama then cast funny people in it (there’s a fair bit of improv in the dialogue).

I guess I’ve seen all Wheatley’s films until High-Rise comes out in a few months. He also wrote for Time Trumpet, directed special-effects sketch show The Wrong Door and some episodes of drug-dealer comedy Ideal. Robin Hill edited Poldark, which I think Katy was watching downstairs while I watched this.

by ·Comments Off on Damsels In Distress (2011, Whit Stillman)

The structure is bizarre, and scenes suddenly fade out. If that means there’s a longer cut somewhere, bring it on, because I could live inside this movie for another hour or two. Four girls with flowery names solve all problems on their college campus – smelly fraternities, suicide threats, the lack of a dance craze for their generation, and so on.

Flower girls: fearless/fragile leader Greta Gerwig (between House of the Devil and Frances Ha), logical Megalyn Echikunwoke (new The Omen TV series), Carrie MacLemore (Stillman’s TV pilot The Cosmopolitans), and new girl Analeigh Tipton (Warm Bodies).

L-R (I think): Tipton, the suicidal girl who steals Gerwig’s boyfriend, Echikunwoke, MacLemore, Gerwig

Noel Murray:

Whatever mode he’s working in, few filmmakers have ever been as attuned to the way we cheerfully lie to ourselves, right up to the point where the truth is exposed, and we’re left with a choice between breaking down or soldiering on. Or, as so often happens in Stillman’s films, both.

Dana Stevens on the ending:

In Shakespearean-comedy fashion, the various couples partner up and skip through the wooded Seven Oaks campus, dancing and singing to the Gershwin brothers’ song “Things Are Looking Up,” (which was first performed by Fred Astaire in a 1937 musical called A Damsel in Distress).

Stillman:

I like the idea of bringing period into a present-day film. It’s period as a way of solving our problems. The things that worked in the past have been tested a little bit, while the solutions to the future have not been tested. We know that people taking showers is going to have good results. Up to a point.

by ·Comments Off on Tale of Springtime (1990, Eric Rohmer)

“Simple conversations engender complicated human interactions,” says the IMDB plot description. Copy/paste to every Rohmer film.

Restless Jeanne doesn’t want to stay at her boyfriend’s place while he’s out of town but she has lent her own place to a cousin (wearing major shoulder pads), explains this to random teenage girl Natacha (Florence Darel, Joan the Maid 2) Jeanne meets at a party, ends up coming home with her. Natacha’s busy father (Hugues Quester, a crazy person in City of Pirates) has a nice place in town and another in the country, but young Natacha is usually left alone while he stays at his new girl Eve’s place. So after initial meetings, the rest of the movie is the four of them meeting in various combinations in those two locations. Natacha is not fond of Eve, would like dad to date her new friend Jeanne instead, despite both their protests. It ends the way you would expect a Rohmer movie to end, with the main character making a decision, declaring their values and the reasons for this decision aloud. I don’t know why I love these movies but I do, and am very glad the whole Seasons series is playing Filmstreams this month.

IMDB says no award nominations. Link must be broken.

by ·Comments Off on Mad Max 4: Fury Road (2015, George Miller)

Matt Singer: “Fury Road is an incredible achievement, one that strains so hard at the leash of the possible that it eventually breaks free and barrels headlong into the realm of insane genius. … They’ll keep making car chase movies after Fury Road, but there’s really no need.”

I loved the movie, but was maybe not as bowled-over by its lunatic intensity because was prepped by reviews. What I wasn’t prepared for was the plot twist when the movie’s first-two-thirds nonstop car chase finally stops, and with nothing but salt wasteland in front of them, Max proposes The Worst Idea Of All Time, to drive straight back through the armies that they’d just escaped and attack the citadel.

Tasha Robinson:

These are some preposterously tough people, and yet they’re perpetually at the end of their rope, and yet they perpetually keep going. That’s a very fine emotional place to keep a film pitched to for two straight hours, but the action is so well choreographed, so solid and visceral, that it works fine.

Charlize Theron stars as Furiosa, her team of escaped wives including Zoe Kravitz (Angel in X-Men 4). Max is Tom Hardy (Locke), constantly being threatened and/or helped by “albino maniac” Nicholas Hoult (Beast in X-Men 4). The main gas-masked villain played someone called Toecutter in the original Mad Max, which I should really watch sometime.

The movie was so beloved that even Cinema Scope gives it their breathless Tony Scott treatment, explaining Miller’s filmmaking techniques to keep his action scenes visceral and legible at once. “Advances in data processing and motion capture are rendered moot by Fury Road‘s proof that a basis in reality still adds a sense of weight to the proceedings impossible to recreate artificially.”

EDIT JUNE 2017:

Watched again at home,
in beautiful black and chrome.

“We are not to blame.”
“Then who killed the world?”

EDIT OCT 2020:

Showed to dad… he liked it.

by ·Comments Off on Senso (1954, Luchino Visconti)

Sometimes I watch what I damn well please (The Zero Theorem, On Top of the Whale, Master of the House) and sometimes I am a slave to lists. The lists said it’s time to watch Senso, even though I hated The Leopard and this sounded similar. Since that last Leopard screening almost a decade ago I’ve come to terms with the Italians’ ignorance of proper on-set dialogue recording, and some of my new favorite filmmakers are Italian. I even gave ol’ Pasolini another chance after hating Salo in college, and was blown away by his Teorema this year. But Senso‘s a period melodrama about people who do dumb things for love, a tragedy about the downfall of the upper class, so it had a lot of strikes against it.

Alida Valli (The Third Man, The Spider’s Stratagem, mad doctor’s assistant in Eyes Without a Face) is a wanton countess in 1866 Venice whose cousin (Massimo Girotti, the father in Teorema) is involved in the rebel movement against the occupying Austrians. He gets in an argument with Austrian officer Farley Granger (Rope, Strangers on a Train), she intervenes and falls for Granger – though she’s married to a clueless count (Heinz Moog).

Clueless count:

As the war escalates, Valli betrays the revolution and Granger betrays his army – then betrays Valli, so she reports him and the film ends with his execution. Before the inevitable unhappy ending, I admit the photography could be quite dreamy. Mark Rappaport on the film’s beauty: “You don’t want to hang the images on the wall. You want to live in them.”

Rappaport:

The sets and costumes bespeak wealth, privilege, and especially the casual acceptance of them in a way that no dialogue could adequately convey. If decor is as important an element as characters, camera work, and plot in many films, in Visconti’s, the ante is upped — decor is destiny.

From the extras: aha, it’s pronounced Lu-KEE-no.

Farley cheerfully unveiling his lover:

Valli reporting on him:

Played at Venice Film Festival (obviously) alongside Seven Samurai, Sansho the Bailiff, La Strada, Rear Window and two by Bunuel, but somehow Romeo and Juliet won.

by ·Comments Off on Z (1969, Costa-Gavras)

Greece 1963: leftist protesters against a supposedly democratic government invite guest speaker Yves Montand. Then he and another guy from the opposition party (Jean Bouise, Warok in Out 1) are clumsily killed, and it’s a race to see if the prosecuting attorney (My Night at Maud’s star Jean-Louis Trintignant) can uncover witnesses and prove it was a murder conspiracy before government-sympathist thugs kill all the witnesses. My first Costa-Gavras movie since hating Mad City in ’97, and it’s way more exciting than his plot descriptions sound, with quick, responsive camera and editing.

Trintignant kinda wins, manages to prosecute army big-shots and prove they were at least complicit in not helping to protect the murdered men. But this is bad news in the long run as the country spirals into authoritarian rule (which is why the film was shot in Algiers), getting bloody payback in postscript upon the leftists who dared to fight back – except the actual prosecuting attorney played by Trintignant, who’d return to Greece and become president 20 years later.

Montand widow Irene Papas (Mother of the River in Inquietude), standing in front of Clotilde Joano (Chabrol’s Wedding in Blood):

Doomed men in back seat, driven by Bernard Fresson (La Prisonniere, The Tenant), with shotgun Charles Denner (The Man Who Loved Women):

Warok-killer Gerard Darrieu (The Elusive Corporal, Mon Oncle d’Amerique) makes an accurate statement about birds to attorney Trintignant:

Montand-killer Marcel Bozzuffi (Le Deuxieme Souffle, Altman’s Images) tries to sneak past helpful journalist Jacques Perrin (Prince Charming in Donkey Skin):

Informant Jean Daste hides in an Elvis photomat:

Oscars for best editing (have I mentioned the editing? it’s great, with sudden flashbacks in the middle of conversations, illustrating thoughts of the people on screen) and foreign film at the oscars (vs. Midnight Cowboy, Hello Dolly), best film from the USA film critics society (vs. Stolen Kisses, La femme infidele), a couple prizes at Cannes including actor for Trintignant (vs. his own My Night at Maud’s and best-picture winner If…).

Cowritten by Jorge Semprún (The War Is Over), of course, and shot by Raoul Coutard (post-Weekend), also of course. Editor Francoise Bonnot would continue to work with Costa-Gavras as well as Michael Cimino, Roman Polanski (The Tenant) and Julie Taymor. Trying to figure out why C-G has a hyphenated name I came across a MOMA press release saying he added the dash “to create confusion.”

Armond White, throwing out the titles of some movies I should really watch:

Carrying on the tradition of the politically informed films of Francesco Rosi (Salvatore Giuliano, Hands over the City, and The Moment of Truth), which turned recent politics into complex, engrossing cinematic myths, Costa-Gavras would proceed to advance the political thriller toward a popular mode. His work paralleled that of Gillo Pontecorvo (The Battle of Algiers) and Elio Petri (The Tenth Victim, We Still Kill the Old Way, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion), whose political exposés were also accessible as action films. This trend was distinct from such earnest, earlier cultural movements as Italian neorealism and Russian formalism in that it permitted socially conscious, politically motivated artists to pursue personal causes, infected with the excitement of the era’s post-New Wave aesthetic.