| Mister Lonely (Harmony Korine, 2007) |
[Jul. 11th, 2009|11:26 am] |
Diego Luna looked familiar but I didn't know why. Then I searched and realized he was in Milk and Y tu mamá también.
I was surprised by how gentle and pretty this was for a Harmony Korine movie. Werner Herzog as a prist was a nice touch. In a really fun and breezy way the movie looks at a death and celebrity obsession. It comes up with no conclusions, really, and makes no sweeping judgements. All that is certain is that inspiration is powerful but fleeting while death and loss and disappointment are inevitable. Jackson's retirement home Michael Jackson routine is disturbing: "Don't die. Live forever! Live forever!!" It's interesting that this denial of death makes death even more obvious. It's also here that Jackson meets the Marilyn Monroe character, who appears to be the only person who means anything to him.
Impersonation in Mister Lonely seems to have many functions: refusal to grow up, cliinging to an idea of someone else as a way to escape reality, a means to harness inspiration, a caricature of our celeb obsession society. I liked how meandering it was at times. How un-story-driven it was. How it dared to try things out without fear of failure. Like an impersonator. |
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| Jules et Jim (François Truffaut, 1962) |
[Jul. 5th, 2009|12:12 pm] |
Things I noticed on second viewing:
The part in which Jules, Jim, and Catherine rent that country house and they're walking to the beach. They keep finding objects on the ground which they then pick up, examine, and then throw: a shoe, a pack of English cigarettes. Coutard's camera frantically surveying the scene. Not sure what was happening there. Showing how young and without history they are compared to others who have passed through the place?
The role of Goethe's Elective Affinities in the film.
The scene in which Jules sees Jim and Catherine acting like a couple for the first time and he speaks (quotes Goethe, I think) German and makes Catherine translate. I can't find the quote but that was nicely done. The direction was incredible: shifting from floor to floor, from window to window. The isolated country houses and the roaming, airborne camera.
Georges Delerue's score seems to play a few bars of "Lili Marleen" as Jules retreats from the frame alone at the tragic end. I really nice touch because Jules and Jim represent both the German and French side and that song became popular on both sides of the WWII conflict. Further it points to the fact that, although love is tragic, the true horror is yet to come. It's intense that the last time the Jules, Jim and Catherine happen to run into each other it's in a cinema watching newsreels of Nazi book burning.
"Did you like her?" Erika asked after the movie and I think I said no. But I wonder if maybe I do? I did stop to ponder the amount of misogyny in Truffaut's characterization of Catherine as "a real woman": instable, prone to hysterical fits of irrational behaviour, a "force of nature". Yet Truffaut allows her more complexity than that. When Jules is quoting sexist passages from books and writers (including Baudelaire pondering why women should even be allowed in churches) she admonishes Jim for not protesting.
"I do not agree with everything Jules says at 2 in the morning."
She throws herself into the water in protest. |
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| His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940) |
[Jul. 1st, 2009|07:03 pm] |
I really should have created a Ben Hecht tag.
This one always puts me in a good mood. I love old Hollywood class and cynicism. The America in it is corrupt and theiving and fun. I like when Grant and Hildey are on the phones drowning each other out. the way the voices overlap.
I like the silence when they show the gallows. The use of shadow. The certainty of death and the cold detachment of the reporters who just want the story. What fun. |
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| Godard in America (Ralph Thanhauser, 1970) |
[Jun. 19th, 2009|09:23 pm] |
I hope it's not a sign of aging that I find the frenetic, cinephile Godard more of a revolutionary than the revolutionary Godard. It bothered me when he dissed Antonioni. But as he walked the group through the notebook that would one day become Ici et ailleurs I was pretty stoked. His drawings and handwriting I recognise from Pierrot le fou. Very enjoyable.
I grew up in a bourgeois family and in order to escape it I went into show business which turned our to be an even bigger bourgeois family.
Although I liked the look of Thanhauser's 16mm photography I found that I didn't get a very useful picture of either Godard or the radical student movement in the states of that time. Just a glimpse. |
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| The Man with the Golden Arm (Otto Preminger, 1955) |
[Jun. 16th, 2009|11:19 am] |
I think this was my favorite one yet. What I liked best was Preminger's enjoyable way of creating cinematic space within the frame. When Frankie gets off the bus in the beginning and is looking in through the window of the tavern and watching the action take place in the bar. And even more so, later on, when Frankie and Kim Novak's character are looking at the bourgeois kitchen display in the department store.
In the first instance Frankie's reality is projected looking in on the bar scene: addiction, need, scams, and cruelty. In the second instance it's fantasy: marriage, gender roles, material wealth. In both cases we observe character's phsychological subjectivity articulated through the act of looking.
Slavoj Zizek calls this "cinematic art at its purist."
On the way out Robin said that he didn't consider the film to be pure film noir. Although the ending was dark, he said, there was too much redemption. |
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| The 13th Letter (Otto Preminger, 1951) |
[Jun. 14th, 2009|12:31 pm] |
Weird, I Confess wasn't the only Hollywood movie of the decade set and shot in Quebec. This was fairly nice. It did a good job of blurring the lines of right and wrong. I liked the scene on the (I assume) St. Lawrence River. Also the image of the hanging lamp that sways back and forth. i think Godard used that same image in King Lear. The ending is really nicely unsatisfying.
The funeral scene is really well shot. A great sense of motion to it. When the poison pen letter falls out of the casket and lands at the feet of the passing procession it's brilliant the way its foreboding hang over everyone, yet, in a public scene sunch as that no one could pick it up.
I love Quebec and sometimes I miss living close to it. |
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| The Moon is Blue (Otto Preminger, 1953) |
[Jun. 9th, 2009|09:31 pm] |
All we could talk about after the movie let out is how elegent and sensible William Holden's bachelor apartment was. 1950s design is perfect because it's classic in a way but also modern and forward thinking at the same time. His coffee table that turns into a table, the chairs that are more like rotating love seats, and his wallpaper were so nice.
Man I'm so looking forwatd to the Cinematheque's Summer program. Not to mention this". Ought to be very enjoyable. |
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| The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Tony Richardson, 1962) |
[Jun. 6th, 2009|04:24 pm] |
Smith says "It's not that I don't like work. It's just that I don't like the idea of slaving me guts out so the bosses can get all the profits. Seems all wrong to me."
This is a story about Northern England and it's an appeal to socialism. Tony Richardson was part of the British Free Cinema movement and was associated with the British New Wave.
In the 60s there seemed to be a lot of exciting filmmakers that came out of documentary traditions. I kept thinking about how much Long Distance Runner reminded me of the early films of Québécois filmmaker Michel Brault. Like Richardson, Brault came from a documentary tradition, the Cinéma direct group. The Free Cinema group believed in making films outside of the industry, that films should be personal. The Cinéma direct group believed in objective reality at all costs with minimal intervention on the part of the filmmaker. But for both of them light weight 16mm cameras and innovations in sound equipment meant making better, more personal, and more natural documentary films. But in the 60s these documentarians moved to fiction film and the documentary influence is evident. The films have an ax to grind. Brault's films hinted at separatism and racial and class tensions in Entre la mer et l'eau douce while Richardson makes a point about class stuggle. Maybe it's a documentary impulse that makes Long Distance Runner feel like it's presenting evidence to you as it unfolds. Colin smith is not an ideological young man. He seems to know nothing about the Communist Party, makes no mention of unions, says he wants to make the world a better place but doesn't know where to begin. In his youth detention centre the house leader tells him that the authorities have the whip hand. He replies, "Do you know what I'd do if I had the whip hand? I'd get all the coppers, governers, posh whores, army officers and members of parliament and I'd stick them up against this wall and let them have it 'cause that's what they'd like to do to blokes like us." He comes to this outlook based on his surroundings. I like that Rchardson starts with the image. The shot of Colin burning the dollar bill. Or the boys pranking the Prime Minister's address on the TV by shutting the sound off and mocking it. Even the use of running as Colin's natural talent: it's a sport that the working class have access to. It doesn't require loads of cash. Yet running is also a response to being cornered.
Hmmm. I was describing this film to Amy earlier and I was sounding much more lucid and erudite. Now I'm not sure what I want to say. Oh well. |
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| Anything Else (Woody Allen, 2003) |
[May. 30th, 2009|09:54 pm] |
Went shopping today. I don't like to shop. I don't enjoy it and I'm not too good at it. But I was feeling ambitious and wanted to take care of a bunch of things. So I went to the Dufferin Mall and dropped by the watch/shoe repair place and gave them my stopped watch. The dude put a new battery in and looked at it and said, "your watch has a problem" and handed it back to me. Then I went to the glasses place to get my glasses tightened. The first place wouldn't do it. The dude said, "these are very old and I'm afraid of breaking them." So I went to the Hakim on Bloor on the way back home and I gave them to the lady in the empty store. She said, "I won't be resposible if they break." Confused, I said, "Why would they break?" "The plastic is terribly old. Did you buy these as vintage glasses?" "Yes," I said, "they're from the 70s". "Well the plastic is old and dried out and I'm afriad of snapping them, but I'll give it a shot. These are very Woody Allenish" she said. I liked that. |
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| Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946) |
[May. 28th, 2009|04:48 pm] |
I watch this again and again. And everytime I forget how painful it is watching Cary Grant send Ingrid Bergman into a marriage with a Nazi in exile in Rio. Also Cary Grant's character's demands are too proud and cruel. He doesn't even want to know how she feels. He assumes the worst and punishes her for it again and again. That's what's great about Notorious. Their love is putrid and hideous but indestructable at the same time. But my favorite scene is the very end when Sebastian (Claude Rains) is sent back up the steps of his house where death awaits him by the Nazi agents. There's something really dark about the certainty that he's going to die and Grant's just like, "that's your headache." Yeah. |
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| Notorious (George Tillman Jr., 2009) |
[May. 21st, 2009|06:06 pm] |
I hated Biggie and Tupac when they came out. That's because their biggest fans in my school were goons who knew nothing of Erik B. & Rakim, KRS One, or say anything that wasn't top 40 radio. So I always sort of equated them with lameness. Basically the people who loved them best seemed to be poeple who weren`t fans of hip hop, knew nothing about it, and didn`t care. My little sister had a framed portrait of Tupac in her bedroom. In it he stood, shirtless, sneering at the photographer, his boxers showing, hand flipping the bird. Her second favorite recording artist was Ricky Martin.
In hindsight I guess you can say that they cracked some sort of code in the business because they were able to sustain the degenerate misogeny of their more hardcore peers (Ice Cube, Ghetto Boys, et al) but at the same time aspired to some kind of superstar royaly status. They wanted to be 2 Live Crew and Elvis at the same time. I remember hearing that Toronto rapper speaking on some panel at Ottawa U, what`s his name - K-Os - he said something like this: the trajectory of rap can be compared with rock. If Rakim is like - I dunno - Chuck Berry or something - then Puffy and all them could be considered hip hop's glam period. Where it`s all about flashy clothes, babes, and jewlery. There you go. Biggie = Gary Glitter.
 
Don't worry. I'm already undergoing treatment for my acute playa-hating disorder. |
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| Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2009) |
[May. 17th, 2009|11:25 pm] |
You could drive a truck through the gaps in my knowledge of the IRA and it's history. In fact you could say that when I think of the IRA I think of: The Crying Game, In the Name of the Father, Breakfast on Pluto, and The Wind that Shakes the Barely.
Hunger is brilliant and incisive. McQueen's direction was so good it made me think that the only thing that can save cinema might be if more people from a visual art background turned to feature filmmaking becuase it seems that McQueen understands cinema better, by his first film, than most of today's filmmakers do. A lot of Hunger goes by with little dialogue. Like Kim Ki Duk he tells the story in images alone and like Antonioni he understands space and the frame in telling a story. There's a real sense of the space in which the drame plays out and, on a more political sense, McQueen pays much attention to processes and job functions. Each horrifying thing that the British prison system does is shown as a routine and practiced exercise. Yet at the same time he acknowledges their humanity. Like the prison guard who visits his morther at the nursing home, or the riot cop who sobs in the next room as his buddies savagely beat and forcably seach the naked prisonors.
The scene with the priest - that goes by for nearly 20 minutes in a single shot - is mindblowing. The story and the reasoning and dialogue in it is so tight and smart.
That's all. |
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| Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (Martin Scorsese, 1974) |
[May. 13th, 2009|09:42 pm] |
I liked Jodie Foster as Audrey. Androgynous, scary, but reassuring. I liked the cinematography and the crane shots. Sometimes it was like an early Wenders film: wandering across the landscape, characters roaming in and out. Boredom, despair, banality and then explosions of violence. But for what?
Now I can't remember how it ends. Does she hook up with Kris Kristopherson? Or is it ambiguous at the end? I don't know.
I don't remember how it ends. |
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| JCVD (Mabrouk El Mechri, 2008) |
[May. 11th, 2009|05:04 pm] |
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Oops. This was really dumb. When I was 10 I thought Bloodsport was the best movie ever. Today, I’ll accept the consequences. |
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| Sex, Lies, and Videotape (Steven Soderbergh, 1989) |
[May. 3rd, 2009|11:19 pm] |
This did absolutely nothing for me. I don't understand how it is that this film made Soderberghs careers. It was like...like perversion for boring people.
On the bright side hot docs is here!! They won't hire me but at least they've programed their fest with exciting-looking films. Dog help me if I don't get out to at least one. |
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| Laberinto de pasiones (Pedro Almodóvar, 1982) |
[Apr. 26th, 2009|12:20 pm] |
Spanish people talk too damn fast. How the hell do they expect us to read their subtitles?? Especially when the transfer is this bad. This is an early film by Almodovar and while it's unmistakably him thematically, visually there's nothing going on at all. The really detailed and aesthetically pleasing visual scheme is not there. Nor the inovative directing. Although what you get is a trashy, low budget story that involves the queer Iranian monachy in exile, nyphomania, muslims, punky glam bands, and jokes at the expense of people being assaulted by their delusional fathers.
I can't tell if that's brilliant or horrendous. |
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| Milk (Gus Van Sant, 2008) |
[Apr. 13th, 2009|08:08 pm] |
I'm pretty sure that Gus Van Sant knows better than I do all the criticisms you could throw at Milk.
Milk looks best in the parts where Gus Van Sant seems to have artificially aged the film. Made certain colours fade. But I'm conflicted about my enjoyment of those images. I wonder if this is more style over substance fakery. But what about Rosilini who used newsreel filmstock for Rome, Open City? Or Godard who overprocessed his filmstock to the same effect for Les carabiniers? Would you question their motives as aesthetic over substance?
What ax do I have to grind against Milk? Because it's a big film? Because it's a big opera of triumphant individualism? Because it's not a radical film and doesn't celebrate revolutionary culture?
I feel like a nap. |
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| Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974) |
[Apr. 7th, 2009|07:32 pm] |
You know what I like about this movie? The clerk in the city records office. He looks soooo pissed off Jack Nicholson when he asks him for certain records, and later, when he asks for a ruler. I think that's great because everywhere J. J. Gittes goes he gets assaulted, punched, flooded, or slashed in the face. It's only too perfect that when he just wants to look at the county property records he gets treated like garbage.
I got nothing. |
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| Éloge de l'amour (Jean-Luc Godard, 2001) |
[Apr. 4th, 2009|11:32 pm] |
I'm reading Bolano's 2666 and I came across this passage which struck me as similar to something he wrote in an earlier book:
There was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist...who clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a said paradox, though Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters...when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.
I thought that was a good starting point for talking about the films of late Godard in general because the later films seem to blaze a path into the unknown and result in imperfect works but works that dive wholeheartedly into a void where there are no pre-existing structures or formulae. At least I haven't seen anything between the spectrum from avant garde to Hollywood that prepares you for an easy reading of these films.
I saw Éloge de l'amour when I was in university and just discovering Godard. I has seen À bout de souffle 3 times and wanted to see what kind of films he was making now. Éloge totally baffled me. I felt sick after seeing it. It wasn't fun. It wasn't emotional in a way that I was used to films being emotional. In short I was left unsatisfied. Seeing it again tonight, and having seen a read more about Godard I think it is still a difficult film but one that I can at least enjoy.
The film follows Edgar who is embarking on a project (a novel, a play, a film, or an opera) about the four stages of love: meeting, passion, separation, and reconciliation. What we get through Edgar's undertaking are various points of departure on memory, history, the state, and the appropriation of memory by Hollywood. Godard takes on topics such as the tragedy in the former Yugoslavia but frames them in the context of far reaching memory.
"Our time will be seen as crazy as 1900."
"But will it be remembered as charming?"
A cleaning attendant says, "Who remembers Vietnam's resistance?"
Edgar says, "Do you remember Langlois?"
A character holds a book by Simone Weil.
On the Spanish Civil War they say, "People remember Man's Hope but not Blue of Noon."
The black and white portion of the film is stunning. So well framed as Edgar coaxes a nameless working class woman to work on his project, walks through shadowy movie halls advertising The Matrix and, according to imdb at least once American Beauty can be heard in the background. Godard feels that we have responsibility to memory. To dig back and see it's contradictions but also to work to remember suffering that may go forgotten. To remember the bits that were swept away before your time. "I was born three years before May '68." This may be why he lashes out at Steven Spielberg for buying up survivor's memories and turning them into Hollywood films (Spielberg made millions from "Schindler's List" while Mrs. Schindler lives in Argentina in poverty).
There's more to say. I wanted to write about the crashing waves that come up again and again in his films from Le Mepris to First Name: Carmen to this one but I need to get outside. |
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| Away from Her (Sarah Polley, 2006) |
[Apr. 2nd, 2009|08:22 pm] |
Three things I have learned from watching Away From Her:
1. Aging is "a clusterfuck".
2. The upside of Alzheimer's would be forgetting all your spouse's marital indiscretions but unfortunately it doesn't work that way.
3. Our lives never turn out the way we plan them and people either accept this or stay angry forever.
I went through a lot of different feelings about this small Canadian film. At times I felt that it was like a lot of English Canadian cinema: self-conscious, dull, domesticated, and boring. But the sense of loss at the heart of the film developed slowly and sweetly against a wintery landscape got to me a bit. I was also won over a little bit by the fact that this film was shot in Paris, Ontario. It also helped that Gordon Pinset and Julie Christie were really charming, dapper old folks. |
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