Three films a day

So, I have a habit of taking a pencil and paper with me to movie theatres. I could pretend to be a real student of cinema and say that I’m always taking notes, and expecting to take notes, but that’s bunk. Sure, I do take notes during some movies, but in general if I have a pencil and paper with me it’s because I was jotting ideas down before I got to the theatre. I don’t drive so I don’t have anywhere convenient to leave such things.

Anyway, I was "working" at the Borders in Lakeview on Tuesday afternoon, so when I crossed the street to see The Holy Girl, I had a pad with me.   I scribbled some  stuff in the dark about the previews I saw , including "Ingmar Bergman, William Shakespeare, and Dr. Seuss??!" (Really, that’s one of the strangest, most oddly funny movie blurbs I’ve ever seen. I am mildly intrigued by that film’s very existence.) Right below that I wrote "and what’s with that gangster/pianist movie?"

Silly me, I brought the notebook home and completely forgot about the page of movie-related stuff I’d taken down. While glancing at today’s GreenCine Daily "shorts" entry—looking for rental ideas, actually—I saw that Hudson mentioned The Beat that My Heart Skipped and my brain went "oh, yeah! gangster/pianist…". Reading on I found out that said film is actually a remake of Fingers, a James Tobak film from the late 70s which stars Harvey Keitel.

Yeah, I’m renting the original straight away.

#105, 6/28 – The Holy Girl (2004) (tofw)

Sometimes it takes a few hours for a film to settle in with me. The Holy Girl didn’t leave in the "state of awe" A.O. (Tony) Scott  suggested it would. I was more in a state of uncertainty. How did I feel about what I just saw? At first, I was kind of put off. The end caught me totally off guard and I thought it a bit of a mistake.

But then, slowly, the film started to sink in. On the el ride home I wrote a snarky one-sentence (albeit a very long sentence) impression of this movie which I was going to post here. By the time I got through the front door, though, I realized that this film didn’t deserve that kind of disrespect. So, I slept on it. Literally.

When I woke up, I read Scott’s review, and even though I didn’t entirely agree with it (but have I ever fully agreed with someone named Tony Scott?), I started to see why I was so hesitant to push this film onto the "well, that was a waste" pile. It wasn’t a waste. At all. In fact, it’s something quite interesting, even if the rhythm is, at times, a bit off-putting.

The genius of this movie—yes, I’ve really come around—is in how everything in it is played. Softly. Certainly there were opportunities to show big conflict (my initial frustration with the ending was the fact that the expected climax wasn’t shown; now I realize the movie is actually better without it) but the movie avoids them all. Instead there are odd moments, quiet moments, uncomfortable moments, graceful moments. The big and loud are all discarded for these far more interesting pieces. This wasn’t a movie which was building to an inevitable moment. No, it was much more clever than that.

I’m not tempted to call this a miracle. But it’s much better than I originally thought. Much better. In fact, I want to watch it again. If I had time I’d spend another $7 just to catch it again tomorrow.

[@ Landmark Century Centre, 2:10pm]

Update: Right after I wrote this I looked at what critics other than A.O. Scott had to say, and it turns out Wesley Morris of the Boston Globe had an impression rather similar to mine:

‘’The Holy Girl" is a collection of beautifully acted encounters, conversations, symbols, and vignettes woven into an evocative and unforgettably surreal garment. A lot of what’s in this movie is arbitrary but weird, funny, and—in a sideways manner—fleshly and biblical.

Pedro Almodovar is one of the film’s producers, and after two movies, Martel has demonstrated a soulfulness that eluded Almodovar until only the last few years. Her random blend of the divine, the profane, and the bizarre is like Luis Bunuel’s, but without the satirical harshness.

She’s not afraid to make an equation between sexual fervor and religious passion. Like the doomed sisters in Sofia Coppola’s ‘’Virgin Suicides," the girls are inspired to shed their chastity not as an act of rebellion but as a rite of human nature. Where Amalia is able to conflate God and lust, Josefina is conflicted. Their passions are secrets from their parents and provide the source of the film’s emotional suspense.

Bingo.

#104, 6/26 – Jeremiah Johnson (1972) (dvd)

I was actually planning to watch this later in the evening, but I have an appointment in the Loop tomorrow morning so I decided to get my watching out of the way early.

I’m amused that a movie which clocks in at just under two hours has an intermission, but I’m actually quite thankful it does because it’s a very useful marker in this case. Before the intermission? Boring. It reminded me of Dances with Wolves, albeit less god-awfully pretentious (most actors shouldn’t direct in the first place, but it’s worse when they make "significant" movies. Yeah, I’m talking about Mel Gibson and Clint Eastwood, too). After the intermission? Tense, action-packed, and a little sad. The second part almost redeemed the first entirely. Almost.

#103, 6/25 – The Twilight Samurai (2002) (dvd)

"However the world might change, if you have the power to think you’ll always survive somehow"

Two quiet gems in one day. I’m a lucky boy.

Without giving too much away, near the end of this one, in the prelude to the movie’s wonderful second fight scene (both fight scenes are brilliant, actually), I caught a visual cue that made me say to myself "this looks a little like the end of Apocalypse Now." Honestly, I hadn’t thought through the actual parallels (and they’re definitely there), it was just a quickly noted visual similarity that simply had to do with lighting. Not three seconds after I thought it, though, the phrase "errand boy" was brought to the table. No mistake about it, then.

I’m not a student of mid-19th century Japan. I don’t know how much of the script was more contemporary than it probably should have been (some of it did strike me as a bit too modern), but I’m not a stickler for "historical accuracy", anyway. I’m more interested in the language of film itself (which might be why I visually caught the Apocalypse Now thing just before the director made his nod) and so I relate this to other movies, not the "reality" of the history books. 

Alas, I’m also not a student of Japanese cinema (I haven’t even seen one thing from Ozu yet), so I don’t have too, too much to go on with direct samurai movie comparisons, anyway. In fact, the last samurai-related movie I can remember seeing was Oshima’s interesting Taboo (my hatred of Tom Cruise keeps me away from his little venture into this territory). Other than the fact that neither film deals with your standard "hey, let’s grab our swords and fight those guys over there!" plot, the two seem rather dissimilar to me at the moment.

What I can say about the film is this: It’s a well-crafted piece of work, which concentrates itself on the personal life of someone we would normally define as a fighter. But a person’s professional skills often aren’t at the core of who they really are. It’s how they relate to the world around them which matters, and which is interesting. This film realizes that, and it spends its time showing us what there is to appreciate about Seibei.

And fortunately for me, both the character and the movie built around him are worth appreciating.

#102, 6/25 – Secrets & Lies (1996) (dvd)

I’ve seen maybe half a dozen or more Mike Leigh movies now, and this may well go down as my favorite of the lot.

Frankly, I think unpredictability is overrated. It’s the surprises in The Village that almost destroy it and again expose M. Night Shyamalan’s weaknesses (though, as I said right after I watched it, I choose to ignore the shocker and concentrate on the part which actually works). I’d rather a predictable movie which satisfactorily shows a little world which makes sense.

That’s exactly what we get here. Despite its title, the only people really in the dark about these "secrets and lies" are the characters themselves. An attentive viewer should pick up on just about everything that comes out in the film’s revelatory scenes within the first fifteen minutes. This isn’t a movie played for cheap thrills, though, so seeing the cards before the characters do ruins absolutely nothing. This is, like most of Mike Leigh’s films, just a little something about everyday people getting on.

Although there is plenty I could rave about, I just have to note how much I love the character of Maurice (played by Timothy Spall, an actor I’ve come to adore almost as much as I did the late Katrin Cartlidge, another person who regularly appeared in Leigh’s films). He works as a photographer who does weddings and studio portraits and the scenes of him doing his job are shot so perfectly. "You’re under no obligation to me," he’d say as he tried coaxing smiles out of his customers, implying ever so gently the simple truth of his profession: He gets to see them as they are, but he wants to capture them in a moment where they show off who they want to be seen as. Like the Kinks once sang "[p]eople take pictures of each other and the moment could last them forever, of the time when they mattered to someone". That’s what most of his customers want, and that’s what Maurice wants to give them. And he does it quietly, patiently, observantly. How could you not love a character like that?

Seriously, this was a magnificent film. One of my favorites from the last decade, I’m pretty sure. It may not have been unpredictable, but it caught me completely by surprise.

Having just moved to Chicago after spending eleven years in Atlanta I’m sometimes shocked by all the available options for movie-nuts here. Sure, an interesting series would pop up here or there in Atlanta, but the constancy of interesting stuff on offer here is kind of bewildering. (I can’t remember which of Atlanta’s movie critics once said that it’s not a movie city—Eleanor Ringel in the mid 90s, maybe—but boy were they ever right.)

With that in mind, I wish I had the time and money to take in some of the series at the Gene Siskel Film Center. May gave us Greek Cinema Now, which happened to coincide with my recent Cacoyannis fascination; alas, while I had the money then, I most certainly didn’t have the time. This month, it’s Korean Cinema: The Next Hot Thing, and goodness knows I’ve been getting my kicks from that country’s cinema, recently. And while I don’t mind missing the Kubrick feature^* next month, I’d really like to see the series on contemporary Mexican cinema.  Yes, I would actually pay $9 to see Amores Perros again. That’s love. Or, insanity.

^*Don’t get me wrong: I am big Kubrick fan, but I’ve already seen and obsessed over the movies they’re showing; yeah, it’d be nice to see the beautiful photography of Barry Lyndon on the big screen, but it’s not essential. And my hatred for Artificial Intelligence: AI—which I don’t think should be included in a Kubrick retrospective, anyway—  continues to grow.

#101, 6/20 – The Princess and the Warrior (2000) (dvd)

Certain directors put an identifiable rhythm into their films, a pace which comes from their decisions about how long scenes should be, how the dialogue should work, etc. There are starts and stops to film, after all, and some directors have learned to use this to their advantage. Tarantino, for all his faults (and I could go on and on about them), has always had an exquisite sense of rhythm, and he brings it out most clearly in his dialogue ("Yes, but you are aware that there’s an invention called television, and that on this invention they show shows, right?").

In fact, Tykwer may well be the only filmmaker on earth with a better rhythmic sense than old Quentin. Run Lola Run was a rhythmic masterpiece. His shots, his transitions, his dialogue….  They’re all brilliantly in service of the rhythm.

He knows full well what he’s doing, too.

When I did a google search {tykwer rhythm} I ran across this indieWire interview. In response to a question about clocks,

Tykwer said:

I like the fact that a ticking clock always reminds of us two things: that there’s a rhythm to life and that rhythm is very constant. We have decided that time has several units—a second, a minute—and of course, that’s something that very much operates inside the cinematic system. We organize time within films. I am so fond of that fact that music can organize time in a way that time becomes a subjective factor. You can slow down time, you can make time become what it is: something totally unprecise and subjective. It’s a very globby system. Sometimes a second is endless and sometimes months pass by and it feels like a split second. This is what I like to capture with film; this is what I like to capture with the combination of film and music—the musical pacing that influences the rhythm and pace of the film and the other way around. There’s this amazing communication between all the elements of film that can recreate this subjectivity of experience. In "The Princess and The Warrior," in that moment under the truck, is she lying there for 15 seconds or 15 minutes? You don’t know, because she doesn’t know. I love that. I think it’s the most exciting part of filmmaking. Subjectivity, that’s all what it is. And the ability to transport subjectivity to such a high degree, and relate it to other people. I really want films to throw me into someone else’s subjectivity. That’s what we always want when me meet people and fall in love with them: we want to share what they see. (emphasis mine)

He gets it. And he does splendid things with it.

Things I hope to catch in the theatres this summer.

I just browsed the schedules of my favorite local theatres. My schedule isn’t entirely predictable at the moment, so I have no idea if I’ll be able to see any of these in the coming months. But these are things I didn’t know were here/coming around and they caught my interest, so if time and money permit…

• The Holy Girl. I might not care for A.O. Scott’s criticism, but how can I stay away from a film he was "tempted to call… a miracle"? According to him, "[y]ou leave the theatre in a state of awe." I’m usually not one to see a film based on a blurb that got placed on an ad. Worse, the blurb from a critic I don’t like. But going on the principle that I would hate myself if I missed out on something wonderful purely out of my disdain for the New York Times’ man, I’ll give it a shot. Besides, when have the Argentines done me wrong? Remember, they gave us Burnt Money, one of the greatest homoerotic bank robbery movies ever made. (Yeah, that may sound a bit flip, but I truly regard Burnt Money as a minor classic.) [now playing @ Landmark Century Centre]
• Murderball. I like watching documentaries about things I know nothing about and which strike me, on the surface, as a bit strange. I walk in willing to listen and watch. I walk out, usually, enriched by the experience. Kate Davis’ Southern Comfort, a documentary which certainly fits that description, is one of the best movies I’ve seen this year; if Murderball is a third of that movie, I win. So, let’s do it.  [stars July 15 @ Landmark Century Centre]
• Happily Ever After. Yvan Attal is OK with me. My Wife is An Actress was a pretty lightweight film, but I got to look at the faces of Charlotte Gainsbourg (Attal’s wife) and the underrated Ludivine (pictured here in a still from My Wife is an Actress; she’s the one on the right) for much of the movie. Where’s the harm in that? I expect much the same from this movie and I’m all for it. [starts July 29 @ Landmark Century Centre]
• The World.  I am sometimes oddly compelled to see movies I know absolutely nothing about. Someone, probably DW Hudson over at GreenCine Daily, brought my attention to this one and I’ve been wanting to see it, even though I realize I might hate it. I’m kind of strange. [@ the Music Box from July 29 to August 4]
• Ma Mere. Isabelle Huppert. I know absolutely nothing about the movie, but I’ve loved watching Isabelle Huppert since Madame Bovary. I don’t even know why but even when she’s in a movie I don’t entirely care for (like, oh, say The Piano Teacher, Huppert somehow makes it worth watching). [@ Landmark Century Centre from August 19 through August 25th]
• 9 Songs. I’ve heard bad things about Winterbottom’s sexually explicit feature (and I still haven’t come around to forgiving Winterbottom for the completely misguided 24 Hour Party People), but it’s a just something I have to try for myself. [@ the Music Box from August 26 to September 1.]

It’ll be a good summer if I see at least two of these and I manage to stick to my guns and avoid that awful-looking Spielberg movie. My autumn plans will probably be more concrete and will have a lot to do with the Chicago Film Festival. We’ll see.

Oh, yeah. I’m not ashamed to admit it: I thought about Happy Endings despite its truly unfortunate trailer. I mean, it’s got Maggie. You know how I feel about Maggie. But… I think I’ll wait for DVD.

Breakin’ 2: Electic Boogaloo is playing at the Music Box this August. Wow.

#100, 6/18 – My Summer of Love (2004) (tofw)

I’ve promised myself I wouldn’t look at any criticism of this film before I finish getting my own impressions into this blog. But I have a hunch. People will mention Heavenly Creatures in relation to this movie. It’s almost an inescapable comparison. Dig: Two disaffected teenage girls from different social classes fall in together and form an intense friendship. Where each film goes from there is immaterial; the two films have a strong similarity at their base. Moreover, Tamsin and Mona have Edith Piaf and Caetano Veloso (I never thought I would hear "Três Caravelas" in a film. I sang along to myself) where Pauline and Juliet had Mario Lanza and Orson Welles. The similarities end there, though. P- & J- lived together in a startling consensual hallucination ("The Fourth World", natch), but T- & M- never really leave this world. To put it another way, the bond b/w P- and J- was much more than romantic; it was elemental (yes, I’m saying that while romantic love is itself a kind of shared insanity, the madness of Pauline and Juliet in Jackson’s film trumps it).

I can’t say exactly where this movie let me down. It was worth seeing, certainly and I’m very glad I took the time to watch it. But something in the final reel didn’t agree with me. I’ve been puzzling over it all afternoon, but apparently I need to think it over some more. Maybe when I post this and look at what others have said I’ll find the words.

[@Landmark Century Centre, 12:40pm]

Update: This was, for the record, my first trip to Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema. I’d passed it a number of times on my travels up and down Clark, but I’d never bothered to try a movie out. Shame, too: I’d wanted to see Oldboy and a few other movies they had. Anyway, I like it. I suppose it’s fitting that my 100th movie of the year was also my first trip to a theatre I’d been interested in checking out.

#99, 6/18 - L’Eclisse (1962) (dvd)

Curiously, while I think Michelangelo Antonioni is one of the Great Directors, my first impression of almost every film of his I’ve seen has been, at  best, "eh". Here are some of the more interesting examples:

Blow-Up. Sure, it had the threesome in the photo studio and the almost bizarre Yardbirds performance. But I first caught it on very early morning tv when I was a teen (It was on WNYW one morning, at like 3am, and I swear they didn’t cut the historically significant frontal nudity out. Trust me, I was 16 or 17: I noticed these things) and my film-watching chops just weren’t up for all that silence. The mime scene at the end was particularly off-putting. It was only years later, when I was talking to someone about The Conversation and she mentioned its similarity and its debt to Blow-Up that I realized "holy cow, Antonioni’s was actually a brilliant film." A rewatch on Turner Classic Movies (without the frontal nudity) a few years later confirmed. And it shows my pecking order of directorial talent: Antonioni > Coppola >> De Palma (who, of course, took the idea and turned it into the 80s political thriller Blow Out. Blow Out shares the distinction, along with Phantom of the Paradise, of being a De Palma film I don’t hate but it’s still a pale imitation of the films which preceded it.)

Zabriskie Point. This is the one Antonioni movie I still don’t care for. I know: How can I not like a movie which features an orgy in the desert? I am an engima, am I not? Pink Floyd contributed some fairly decent music ("Careful with that Axe, Eugene" and so forth), sure. Thing is, and I don’t mind saying so: I think this film is a mess. A pretentious, unbearable mess at that. Well, OK, I only saw it the one time and maybe I’d feel better about it now. But that house explosion at the end made me want to throw up. The only other time I can remember having such a bad reaction to a scene was, uh, that Polanski film with Johnny Depp: I usually don’t recoil at gratuitous sex scenes, but something about that Depp/Seigner thing in The Ninth Gate made me want to toss mashed potatoes at everyone involved in that production. Speaking of gratuitous sex, I think I will watch Zabriskie Point again since, hey, seven-minute desert orgy. But, really, I doubt my opinion of this movie will ever change.

L’Avventura. Clearly the most interesting example because after I saw it in 2001 I pretty much shrugged. I gave it three stars on Netflix. Months later, though, images from the movie were still dancing in my head. That’s always a sign. By 2003 my opinion had really changed, as I wrote: "I always forget to give praise to L’Avventura.  When I saw it  I wasn’t that impressed.  But now I think [it’s] a brilliant movie." I gave it a fourth star in 2004 and rented it again. I watched it three times in one day, giving it that fifth star afterward. Without a doubt it is currently my favorite film. Of all time. These things can change in me right quick (remember when The Red Shoes was my favorite film of all time? Of course you don’t), but each and every film which has ever made it there is something I hold dear. Kind of odd that I love it so, given that I really didn’t think it was anything special at first. I’m not the only one who didn’t take to it at first, though. It was booed at Cannes and it won the Grand Jury prize, anyway. Yet again: Brilliant films aren’t always audience-pleasing (in fact, if you listen to cranky ol’ Ray Carney, they never are.).

All this to build up to the fact that, yeah, L’Eclisse continues the trend. Even though I love meandering, plotless movies, they’re not always very easy to get into. And this film just isn’t easy at all. But I can tell already that in the weeks and months coming this film will grow on me. Why? Well, Antonioni uses silence brilliantly (and we know how I feel about that), the film is shot very well, and he’s got a certain rhythm I really appreciate. I might as well just give it four stars now, even though I only have a three-star feeling coming out of it.

OK, I gave you the night to see the movie. And I know most of the people who are reading this either 1) have seen it now, 2) aren’t that interested in seeing it, or 3) already know what I think.

Anyway, if you still don’t want to hear me go on about it, stop reading now.

So, not a great film. I consider both Spidermans and the second X-Men movie great. This one? Not so much. It’s not a great summer film (X2 was). It’s not a great comic book film (both Spidey movies were). And it certainly is not a great exploration of Bruce Wayne and Batman.

I’m beginning to wonder about Christopher Nolan. Yeah, yeah… Memento.  But Following, which is basically a rough draft for Memento, is a great idea which Nolan walks away from for no good reason. I mean, dig, you’ve got a guy who follows people as a hobby of sorts. Cool. But instead of exploring this character and his voyeuristic tendencies, Nolan manipulates us into a pat thriller. Yawn. (Here’s the thing  filmmakers have got to start understanding. Thrillers are boring. They just are. It’s no one’s fault, really, it’s just that after we’ve seen thirty of them we know the tricks. Every thriller is the same. It’s plug and play. No life, just mathematics. Not even pop music is so obsessively formal.)

And then there’s Insomnia, which is worse. Here Nolan is handed one of the great scripts of the last fifteen years, a crackling, harrowing study of a terribly flawed detective. And what does he do with it? He walks away from it. I could lie and tell you that I don’t understand why Nolan and his screenwriter made the changes they did from the original Scandanavian film. But I do understand each change. Every single move they made was cynical ("What won’t American audiences like?" "Oh, they wouldn’t like this guy killing a dog. " "Nope, can’t have him making a sexual advance on a minor." And so on. They made Dormer—they even got obvious with the guy’s name!—a somewhat sympathetic guy caught in a bad situation. A guy who flirts with the dark side, maybe, but who is ultimately redeemed, and who saves the goodness of another while he’s at it. Because Americans can get with that.) Nolan gutted the film, turning it into a well-executed, but soulless thriller. A perfect movie for people who think Pacino is special, maybe, but a dry, completely perfunctory effort. And that’s the core of my problem with Christopher Nolan: the man’s movies, Memento included, have no soul. 

This should have been my first clue that Nolan was the wrong guy to direct a movie about Batman’s origin. It wasn’t.

It was only last night, when I chatted with one of my friends, that I realized our major complaints were about this movie’s soul. The study of Bruce Wayne is so undercooked, so unsatisfying. I think Nolan explored the wrong things and left far more interesting things almost completely untouched.  And it’s not just the character. Making Batman use prototypes disregarded by the military is, well, lame. It doesn’t have the right poetry, it doesn’t strike the right notes. And we’re not the only ones to pick up on it. Zacharek may be a little cheeky when she says "[y]ou know you’re in trouble when a movie can’t even get the Batmobile right", but she has a point. She came right out and said later that "Batman’s stuff has no soul". Exactly.  Problem is, the movie as a whole doesn’t, either.

Now, this isn’t to say I didn’t like it. I actually did. Typical as it was, I still found myself enjoying certain parts of it, just because. (Though, to quote the Voice’s Michael Atkinson, "That it more or less succeeds hardly calls for drinks on the house.") I swear I wanted to stand up and applaud the first Batman scene because Nolan’s impulse, to shoot it with horror movie language, was absolutely perfect. Plus, Liam Neeson, Gary Oldman and Morgan Freeman each make almost any movie better (Honestly. Freeman almost salvaged Along Came a Spider with the sheer force of his personality; and Kinsey’s failures should not be blamed on Neeson; and we’ve, uh, covered Oldman, haven’t we?). Even some of the eyerolling moments were mildly entertaining.

Yes, I would certainly rather see this a second or third time instead of ever again dealing with the sexist, sadistic mess that is Sin City (even though Nolan and Goyer use Katie Holmes as a completely pointless damsel device).  But in no way is this a great movie. This didn’t even approach great.

#98, 6/15 -  Batman Begins (2005) (tofw)

Some of you know how much I try avoiding the talk about a film before I see it. In the case of Batman Begins, I was extremely successful. I hadn’t seen one frame of it (did the movie even have a trailer? I guess it did, since I see trailer-supplied quotes in IMDB). Plus, beyond Christian Bale and Michael Caine I didn’t know who else would be appearing (completely intentional: I will watch a movie for who’s in it, but until it comes out I couldn’t care less about casting). Hell, to be honest I forgot who was directing it. In my opinion this is the best way to experience a film. Completely and totally blind, with no one else’s opinion tampering with your experience, telling you what to watch or who to watch. That sort of talk is for after the film.

With that in mind I’m not going to say what I thought of this film. Not yet, anyway. It’s opening day, and since I could take time off in the middle of the day, I had a chance to see it before most of y’all could. If you’re interested, watch it for yourself. I’m around. We can talk about it later.

[@Century 12 Evanston, 11:00am]

#97, 6/12 -  The Assassination of Richard Nixon (2004) (dvd)

Way back in January I noted my fascination with Samuel Byck, the man who (unsuccessfully, of course) attempted to kill Richard Nixon by hijacking a commuter jet and flying it into the White House. What seemed outlandish and just plain wacky to me in the mid 80s seems chilling now, and that’s probably why a film about this relatively obscure event got greenlighted.

And, naturally, the filmmakers tried to explore just what kind of person would, in 1974, formulate a plan to steal a DC-9 and fly it  into a building. Their answer? A nut. Duh. But the power of the film is that while there is never a 2 plus 2 moment where I thought "yeah, I’d try to kill Nixon about now, too", I only completely lost my connection to Bicke (the film’s spelling) near the end of the film, right after he stole his friend’s gun as part of the hijacking plot. Until then, there isn’t too huge a gulf between how the character Bicke sees himself and how he’s portrayed. Sure, Bicke doesn’t understand how deranged he becomes, and that’s the source of his undoing—not Nixon, not his ex-wife, not the SBA, not all the liars in the world. Still, he understands himself to be a little man trying to find his happiness in a world where what he values is, in practice, devalued routinely—and this conception is not far off. (I have no idea how far off it might have been in Byck’s case, of course.)

He wants respect, mainly because he’s not getting any. Sure, you can call him a loser, or a pathetic figure, but he’s still a person. And a person who actually tries to deal with people honestly and respectfully. It just doesn’t go right for him (although I have to imagine the script is a bit heavy-handed on this point). In his taped monologues (did the filmmakers have access to all of Byck’s mailed-off recordings?) Bicke—who is a cinematic offspring of Travis Bickle—holds forth in ways which progressively move from bitter ("slavery never really ended in this country") and exasperated ("what am I supposed to do about the people who don’t respect me?") to vengeful ("I am an honest man. If that is to be my undoing then so be it, but I shall not go quietly").

Speaking of Travis Bickle… you know, I’m beginning to wonder if Paul Schrader used Samuel Byck’s story as a template for Taxi Driver. That would be interesting, especially given the debt Bicke owes to Bickle…

#96, 6/11 – The Story of O (1975) (dvd)

We might as well call this a return to my roots.

I’m part of that first generation of kids whose sexuality was at least partially defined by late night cable. I only slept four hours a night and I had my own tv, after all. So, yeah, I spent my share of time watching badly-dubbed European movies like Ready, Willing and Able and porn re-edited for the mainstream like Up and Coming (aka Cassie).

I honestly didn’t know The Story of O was going to be badly-dubbed softcore very similar to The Joy of Flying, but, well it was.

I should have known when I saw it was done in the mid 70s. Anyway, you know the drill: the annoying lack of sync, the poorly-selected voice actors, that curiously 70s Euro softcore soundtrack, lots of breasts, some beating.

Not quite the psychological film I was looking for.

I like smut. Most of you know this about me. And this was smut, but it somehow didn’t quite hold my interest. In fact, I fell asleep three times. I was really tired, though.

#95, 6/9 – Laura (1944) (dvd)

My film noir period kicked off eight summers ago when AMC (back before it became a very bad channel) showed a noir marathon one weekend. One of its showcase films was Laura, and it was hard to avoid the constant ads about how great it was (and how Carly Simon had recorded a CD of songs including the stirring theme to Laura and blah blah blah).

I don’t remember how, but for some reason I missed seeing Laura that weekend. I believe I caught a number of interesting films during that marathon like They Drive By Night, Phantom Lady, The Big Clock and  The Killers, but somehow no Laura. Assuming I’ve got this right and I saw all those movies in one very short period, let me tell you how influential those few days were. Wow.

Anyway, so, Laura. Turns out, I didn’t miss much. (Or maybe I’m just not in a noir phase anymore. Whatever.) Is Out of the Past (another movie I missed that weekend and caught some years later) the last of the noir films I will ever appreciate?  Hmm.