by ·Comments Off on It Felt Like a Kiss (2009, Adam Curtis)

Different from the other Curtis docs I’ve seen in that it’s not assembling semi-obscure facts to analyze human/political behavior, but assembling well-known facts to create a mood, and lead to an understanding through experience. Of course I’m missing part of this experience, since the film was part of a multimedia show inside a deserted office building set to music by Damon Albarn and the Kronos Quartet.

Traces a semi-chronological historical path through key events (chimps in space), tragedies (kennedy assassinations, manson family) and future tragedies (WTC construction) but mostly uses pop songs as history, letting artist bios (tina turner, lou reed) and the lyrics themselves tell the stories of disenchantment.

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What results has Lynchian overtones with its dark seeds beneath 1950’s suburban pop, and shades of Craig Baldwin, using newsreel montages to create new stories, to confuse and not inform. But it’s still got Curtis written all over it, in the pacing and clip selection, that old familiar typeface, and the sense that the film makes your brain understand things in ways not explicitly told by the narration, making covert connections. Most importantly, when it was over I had the same urge to immediately watch it again that I got after The Power of Nightmares and The Trap.

C. Brooker:

Where his preceding works have occasionally been a touch eccentric, this one takes the piss. It is completely and utterly demented – in a positive way. I’m not saying it doesn’t make sense; if anything, it forges its own new brand of coherence whether you like it or not. This is a documentary running on alien software. I’m at a loss to describe it. For starters, the trademark Curtis voiceover has gone completely, replaced instead by occasional, simple captions. Music is at the forefront. Ominous soundscapes and bubblegum pop weave their way around the images: archive news, Hollywood movies. It’s hypnotic.

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Brooker also gets us some Curtis quotes. I’ve brutally edited so as not to copy his entire article:

I wanted to do a film about what it actually felt like to live through that time … Where you could see the roots of the uncertainties we feel today, the things they did out on the dark fringes of the world that they didn’t really notice at the time, which would then come back to haunt us. … The politics of our time are deeply embedded in this idea of individualism, which is far wider than … consumerism or anything like that. It’s how you feel. … But it’s not the be-all and end-all. It’s not an absolute. It’s a way of feeling and thinking which is a product of a particular time and power. The notion that you only achieve your true self if your desires, your dreams, are satisfied … It’s a political idea. … What you desire is the most important thing. But a great paradox of our time is that what you desire may not be coming from within you. … The iPhone is a good example. People really feel they want one – to express themselves. But they all want one, at the same time. Where does that come from? From within or without? Because we live in an age where the individual is paramount and everything is seen from the perspective of ‘you’, we’ve lost sight of the bigger forces at work. Which has limited us. Not only in our understanding of the world; it’s made us very powerless. I think that’s what I’m really trying to get at in this.

Curtis keeps a blog, which I need to start reading, and I’ve been watching Mr. Brooker’s own TV series, to which Curtis has recently contributed.

by ·Comments Off on The Box (2009, Richard Kelly)

The Box (I)
by Richard Kelly, director of Donnie Darko

Cameron Diaz and Cyclops from X-Men are happily married with a kid in the 1970’s. Cyclops is a rocket scientist. They get The Box delivered to them by a fire-scarred Frank Langella. Should they push the button, winning themselves a million bucks and dooming a random citizen, “someone you don’t know,” to death? They do. Someone, somewhere, shoots his wife. The Box is then given to a new family, “someone you don’t know.” Movie should obviously end here, but now their son is kidnapped, made blind and deaf, and Cy can only save his son by shooting his wife. He does, as someone new pushes the button. Okay.

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The Box (II)
by Richard Kelly, director of Southland Tales

Over at NASA, Cyclops takes time out from astronaut training to make his wife a false foot. He finds out Frank Langella was hit by lightning years before and replaced by a psychic alien from a society big on punishing the selfish and forcing people to make arbitrary, life-changing decisions, like the series of watery doors (cue The Abyss/Darko effects team) which lead to either hell or Cy’s own upstairs bedroom. NASA seems unconcerned with investigating any of this. Movie seems unnecessarily complicated and expensive, and parts make no damned sense.

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Donnie’s dad!
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I way did not notice that Arcade Fire did the music!

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by ·Comments Off on Avatar (2009, James Cameron)

The adventures of a tall blue cat man on a blacklight-mooned planet climbing fluorescent disco trees. How appropriate that the film follows a preview for Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland.

Katy and I liked it!

by ·Comments Off on The Hangover (2009, Todd Phillips)

From the director of Road Trip and writers of Ghosts of Girlfriends Past!

A dude gets lost during a bachelor party weekend in Vegas, and it’s up to good friends The Bland One (Bradley Cooper of Midnight Meat Train), The Reluctant One (Atlanta native Ed Helms of The Daily Show) and The Socially Maladjusted One (Zach G. of The Ballad of G.I. Joe) to retrieve him. This is hard because Zach (via drug dealer Mike Epps) slipped them all roofies. While under the influence, Ed yanks out a tooth (my vote for funniest moment, even though it was just a still photo, Ed smiling maniacally) and marries Heather Graham, Zach steals Mike Tyson’s pet tiger, and I can’t remember Cooper doing anything of note. Not a good movie, but it’s always nice to see Jeffrey Tambor. More importantly, since I watched this, Paranormal Activity and Avatar all in the same week, I can now feel like I’m caught up with the rest of America until the next wave of summer flicks come out.

by ·Comments Off on Paranormal Activity (2007, Oren Peli)

Handicam horror, but not all blair-witch super-shaky (or cloverfield or whatever). Dude hears that his girlfriend has been haunted since she was little (she rolls out the backstory gradually since there’s not much else in the way of plot development) so he gets the camera and tries to document her hauntings. Psychic tells them it’s demons not ghosts, shows them a clip from The Exorcist and skedaddles. Doors open themselves, chandeliers shake, footprints appear. The dude escalates things by buying a ouija board, spoiling things for everyone, including the viewer who’d been enjoying the general lack of hackery up to that point.

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Movie is as great as advertised for the first half – I was scared to death. The ouija thing takes it from convincing-fake-doc into clearly-scripted territory, where it remains as she reveals more backstory and discovers a long-lost family photo in the attic of the boyfriend’s house. Then the ending (one of a few, apparently) didn’t do it for me. She sleepwalks downstairs, screams until he comes running, then slowly comes back upstairs holding a bloody knife. No problem there, and apparently the theatrical version ends into “she was never seen again” title cards, but mine had the cops come in and shoot her dead when they saw the knife. Halfway worth the hype, then… still impressive for indie horror. Let’s see if its sequel can avoid the Blair Witch 2 trap.

by ·Comments Off on The Romance of Astrée and Celadon (2007, Eric Rohmer)

Astree loves Celadon and vice versa, with the kind of suicide-pact love that mainly exists among 17-year-olds in tragi-romantic plays. His parents don’t approve so the young lovers make a public show of dating other people… but Astree believes the show, feels betrayed and tells Celadon to piss off, so he goes and drowns himself in the river. Not quite dead, he’s rescued by nymph Galathée and her gang. Gal wants hunky Cel for herself but he escapes and hides away in the forest, eating berries, refusing to approach his beloved because, after all, she ordered him away. Meanwhile, Astree and Cel’s brother alternate (“he must be dead!” “he must be alive!”).

I guess I see the Rohmer moral theme at work here. Cel loves his girl so he must remain faithful to her and do as she says, staying away even if she doesn’t know he’s alive. But as Jimmy said, breaking into a giggling fit after hearing Celadon echo his simple emotions for the thousandth time, “he’s SO dumb!” It’s hard to disagree… they are all so dumb, and the movie is so straightforward and simple that it gets frustrating. Some nice imagery though, I thought (Katy said it looked made-for-public-television). Best not to get into the ending, in which Celadon pretends (not convincingly) to be a girl in order to get closer to his beloved.

Astree is Stephanie Crayencour and Celadon is Andy Gillet, neither of whom have shown up elsewhere yet. Jocelyn Quivrin who played Celadon’s brother died in a car crash two months ago. Nominated for the golden lion in Venice along with six movies I’ve loved (and also Sukiyaki Western Django) but they all lost to Lust, Caution, which I thought didn’t get good reviews.

M.J. Anderson:

Adapting Honoré d’Urfé’s novel of 5th century Gaul life, The Romance of Astree and Celadon claims to reproduce less the period depicted than its 17th century readers’ imagination of the earlier period. Commensurate with this goal, the director features canvases painted in the seventeenth century, a castle built well after the novel’s setting and importantly a grafting of the Christian faith onto the Druid-themed source material.

by ·1 Comment

Wow, for years I thought I would hate this movie, but it popped up on best-of-decade lists so I gave it a shot and enjoyed the whole thing. It’s even a genre I dislike, the youth coming-of-age story, but this one’s aimed at adults (creepy adults maybe, all NC-17 for underage sex).

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Anaïs (henceforth Anais) is the fat girl (French title was something like To My Sister!) on vacation with her parents and hot older sister. After some frank sex chat (younger Anais: “If I meet a man I love I’d want to be broken in. The first time should be with nobody.”) the girls meet roguish Italian Fernando, who’s making out with older sister Elena in a restaurant within minutes. Anais barely seems to pay attention, kills time the whole movie singing and talking to herself, imagining multiple boyfriends, chanting about being bored.

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First-time sex scene follows between Elena and the boy. She tries to back out, but he counters, not about to give up. “All the girls take it the back way. That way it doesn’t count. It’s a proof of love.”

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Excellent, unique in its shots and pacing and general outrageousness. I’d watch more Breillat for sure. I get the feminist label for the most part – it’s told completely from girls’ perspectives. The ending worries me, where the older sister and her mom get killed by a maniac who then rapes Anais. Doesn’t seem too feminist, that. Maybe the very end is feminist – Anais insisting to the cops and medics that she wasn’t raped. She can’t mean she wanted it, so maybe she’s making comparisons to her sister’s experience (Anais was in the room at the time). All sex is/isn’t rape, that sort of thing.

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The most interesting part is really the relationship between Elena and the boy. He steals a ring from his mother and gives it to Elena, leading to parental intervention and the abrupt end of the vacation. The boy tricked Elena into having sex, but it didn’t ruin her life; she’s still crazy for him. The director doesn’t talk plot in the DVD features, just metaphor – pressing forth, climbing mountains, doing something that is beyond me. Film should be a tormenting experience! She presents herself as an actor-torturing sadist, but the actors all seem happy in behind-the-scenes footage. Breillat seems the stereotype of an arty Euro filmmaker, but her great movie proves otherwise.

Older sister Roxane Mesquida later starred in two more Breillat films. Mom Arsinée Khanjian is Atom Egoyan’s wife so she’s in all his movies as well as Code Unknown and Irma Vep. Dad Romain Goupil is a director, has worked with Chantal Akerman. Our D.P. Giorgos Arvanitis shot films for Theo Angelopoulos, and Breillat made the movie Romance (X), which I skipped in Barcelona to see either Wild Wild West, Happiness or Judas Kiss.

by ·Comments Off on The Lady and the Duke (2001, Eric Rohmer)

“You’ll be your own downfall.”

The Lady of the title is Grace Elliott, a Brit in France during the 1789-93 French Revolution. Actually the French title is L’anglaise et la duc but Grace is Scottish, claiming English nationality for simplicity when it’s suddenly very dangerous to be a French aristocrat in France. The movie’s intertitles and much dialogue are taken directly from her diaries.

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The Duke is one of my favorite Jean-Pierre Jeunet actors, but I didn’t recognize anyone else. Star Lucy Russell has failed to break into the Hollywood mainstream (landing such roles as “female restaurant guest” and “classy shopper #3” in recent big films). Ach, I missed Alain Libolt (Renaud in Out 1) as the Duke of Biron.

Renaud plus 30 years:
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Grace is pure aristocracy, the very target of the revolution, and her sympathies lie with her friends whom she sees being rounded up and killed by the brutish masses. Steadfast in her devotions (though lying to stay alive), she’s contrasted with her friend the Duke, who changes with the times and ends up voting for the execution of the king. Plays like one of Rohmer’s Moral Tales only with more action, more heads on stakes, and more awesome digital backdrops of period Paris standing in for the usual stifling production design and avoidance of outdoor shots (except by filmmakers with Scorsese-budgets). Slant, in fact, called it an “economical antidote to the bloated costume drama.” Grace tries to negotiate the changing world without compromising her belief in the class system, while the Duke either adapts his morals or never had any to begin with. The main thing this movie has over the other Rohmers I’ve seen is historical interest… I delighted in the details of the revolution, about which I know very little. I thought the movie rather anti-revolution, which seems shockingly out of fashion, and one “Grunes” confirms that this was a problem:

Rohmer pitches the action from Elliott’s perspective, with which his own Roman Catholic penchant for order prompts him to identify—hence, the controversy the film engendered in France. Thus the street mobs are unwashed, grisly, barbaric, obscene; poor Louis XVI!

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It’s hard to know what to make of the movie’s politics. There’s also a long scene where she successfully hides a Marquis from the police. We don’t get to know the guy very well, but he’s not made out as a man who deserves to die, so bravo, I guess. When Grace is finally arrested and held for two days for possession of a letter from an Englishman, the letter ironically turns out to praise the French revolution to the heavens. These examples and the duality in the title make it seem relatively even-handed, despite being adapted from Grace’s own horrified writings.

Duke Jean-Claude Dreyfus:
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Watched this the night the director died. It got mentions on decade-end lists, with some screenshots that got stuck in my head (like the one below, peering into a painting with a telescope), so I’d planned to watch it soon anyway. I didn’t hear much when it came out, probably because of the timing (sept-oct, 2001). Beaten out for its only two César nominations by Amelie and Brotherhood of the Wolf.

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NY Times:

The moral dilemmas that Grace and the Duke face are diagrammed, in Mr. Rohmer’s inimitable fashion, with equal measures of clarity and complexity. The director manages to evade both the stuffy antiquarianism and the pandering anachronism that subvert so many cinematic attempts at historical inquiry. His characters are neither costumed moderns, just like us only with better furniture, nor quaint curiosities whose odd customs we observe with smug condescension. They seem at once entirely real and utterly of their time. And the time itself feels not so much reconstructed as witnessed.

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I’ll close by outright stealing an entire blog post by from Glenn Kenny, only because I want to always be able to find this Rohmer quote.

My films, you say, are literary: The things I say could be said in a novel. Yes, but what do I say? My characters’ discourse is not necessarily my film’s discourse.

There is certainly literary material in my tales, a preestablished novelistic plot that could be developed in writing and that is, in fact, sometimes developed in the form of a commentary. But neither the text of these commentaries, nor that of my dialogues, is my film: Rather, they are things that I film, just like the landscapes, faces, behavior, and gestures. And if you say that speech is an impure element, I no longer agree with you. Like images, it is a part of the life I film.

What I say, I do not say with words. I do not say it with images, either, with all due respect to partisans of pure cinema, who would speak with images as a deaf-mute does with his hands. After all, I do not say, I show. I show people who move and speak. That is all I know how to do, but that is my true subject. The rest, I agree, is literature.
—From “Letter to a critic [concerning my Contes moraux]”

by ·1 Comment

Refreshing to see a period (early 70’s) flick that relies only on props, fashion and speech with no TV news montages, shouts-out to topical issues or drenching the soundtrack in pop hits of the time. Unfortunately that’s the only thing refreshing about this movie, in which Peter Jackson seems to be Taking Himself Seriously and not having any fun anymore. He’s got himself a serious, dark dramatic novel and damned if he’s going to do anything to dilute it with his own manic energy and kooky camera angles. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be pleasing anyone, not the reviewers, not the fans of the book sitting near me who complained that the film turns the rapist/murderer into just a murderer (though Stanley Tucci gets a rapist-mustache so I thought it was implied) and not me, who wished I was tired enough to fall asleep through the interminable digital “heaven” scenes in which Saoirse Ronan from Atonement pulls faces (surprise! sadness! delight! ennui!) while the sky turns colors, tree leaves turn into a flock of birds, mountains part, gazebos crumble, fields turn into swamp and other murdered girls throw a picnic. Sometimes she tells us “it’s so beautiful,” which failed to convince me that it actually was. I dug the Super Mario Galaxy-looking planet effects, but Jackson’s swirly heavenly skies seemed significantly less beautiful than every single shot in the A Single Man trailer, which I’m gonna punch myself if I end up missing. The real sadness, sadder than the death scenes and the grieving parent scenes (The Sweet Hereafter or In The Bedroom this ain’t), was that nothing happened in the heaven scenes. They weren’t beautiful or terrible. Saoirse didn’t do anything, the eskimo girl she befriends didn’t do anything, nothing happened at all. Okay, so she touched the hand of creepy loner girl Amanda Michalka causing Ronan’s almost-boyfriend Reece Ritchie to kiss her, and she made dad Marky Mark (not half as convincing on his obsessed search for the truth as Jake G. in Zodiac) see flickering candle reflections and dead roses bloom.

For all its dragged-out length, certain parts seem too skimpy, like mom Rachel Weisz skipping town to pick fruit in California while working through her grief. Susan Sarandon has fun as hard-drinkin’ gramma in the movie’s only comic relief. It’s little sister Rose McIver who gets the best scene, pure tension as she breaks into the killer’s house searching for (and finding) evidence before making her narrow escape. Second-best would be Tucci’s random demise, year(s)? later trying to pick up a girl in a parking lot he’s hit by a supernatural icicle and tumbles horribly down a cliff, Jackson’s cartoonish gruesomeness making a late appearance in the PG-13 movie. PG-13 is how it felt overall, not through lack of swearing or smoking (Sarandon does) or blood or sex but lack of anything challenging. I got the early speech about obsession and hobbies, the parallels between Marky/Saoirse and Marky/Tucci, the snow-globe penguin in his perfect isolated world, and the goofy director cameo in a camera shop but didn’t get any sense of wonder or sadness from what’s supposed to be a splendorous film about mourning, just some pretty pictures.

Reverse Shot calls the movie “profoundly disingenuous,” accusing Jackson of being primarily interested in Tucci’s killer, not the victim and her family. Also: “Even Jackson’s celebrated CGI wizardry feels off; his color-saturated vision of the afterlife has all the visual dexterity and emotional weight of an iTunes screensaver.”