Three films a day

#128, 7/30 – Territory (2005) (tofw)

On my way to meet a friend for lunch at Clark and Diversey (Aladdin’s Eatery is pretty tasty; no, they didn’t pay me to say that), someone handed me a flier for Indiefest, an "independent film festival and market" which apparently started yesterday. Intrigued, I headed over to the Landmark after lunch to find out more about it.

Although I was tired I convinced myself to stay for a movie. I’m glad I did. In Territory a couple’s unsteady relationship is slowly revealed after an old friend not-so-briefly intrudes on their quiet, routine night. I have a soft spot for these kinds of movies—perhaps because they remind me of Bergman’s chamber cinema, or maybe I just like things with this level of dramatic intensity. Oh, and it seems I tend to like movies with only three characters. Pure triangles, man. Gotta love ‘em.

After the screening I briefly spoke with Lawrence Levine, the director. Nice guy. Unfortunately I didn’t have anything remotely intelligent to say (I blame it on tiredness), so I just asked him if he’d ever seen two other pure triangle movies, Knife in the Water and Kaaterskill Falls. Of course he had, but only after morons like me walked up to him and asked that same question (which is cool to know: for some reason I like the movie just a little more knowing he wasn’t lifting directly from Polanski). Interestingly, like me, he prefers Kaaterskill Falls. As much as I like Polanski, and I do, all I can remember from his film—besides the general feel of it—was the Jenga-playing scene. Kaaterskill Falls is a lesser movie with a barely plausible ending, but somehow I got more out of it.

He said others had also mentioned Tape when talking to him, and that he really liked it, so I’ll probably rent it now. I mean, it’s Linklater. How terrible can it be? (Yeah, shut up.)

[@ Landmark Century Centre, 4pm]

#127, 7/29 – The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1965) (dvd)

As I started watching this Cold War film, I mused a little bit about how I know a person who essentially never experienced this part of history. She can buy alcohol legally and everything, but she was six when the Berlin wall came down. Six. At first I thought "well, I’m coming to grips with what the people who experienced the depression must have thought of the baby boomers."  And, of course, other examples are endless and there’s no point going through them all. But then something else hit me.

I’ve always thought film was a fairly lousy medium for conveying historical stories. Most films based in history are, if you’ll pardon my uncompromising disdain, glorified costume dramas—an excuse for actors to try to show their "range", because, well, you can only pretend to be mentally ill so many times (of course, if you can pretend to be mentally ill in a costume drama, you are one of the truly lucky).

But while I think film is a terrible medium for history, every film—even the most vapid piece of Hollywood nonsense (more on that in a second)—is history.  The Birth of A Nation and Glory (now, there’s a double feature for you) say much more about the eras in which they were respectively made than the slices of the 19th century they represent. This extends beyond those kinds of movies, of course: The social anxieties evident in Frankenheimer’s Manchurian Candidate morph into something new in Demmes’ remake, for example. And, to get even more current, Stealth with its evil AI which apparently downloads copyrighted music illegally (thanks for telling me about that, Aaron), may well be forgotten before the summer’s over, but it’s still got some historical value to it, however slight.

To me, forty years after its release, the Spy Who Came in From the Cold works mostly as history, a quiet commentary on one of the Cold War’s most glamorized professions: the spy. This story’s underlined by a notion of futility and grim dirtiness about the business which gave us, among others, agent 007. At a certain point, the story seemed to say, the people who are a part of this lose any and all connection to the principles they’re supposedly fighting for. Leamas, Mundt, Fiedler. They’re all grey characters in a grey world, agents for governments that pay lip-service to ideals but which don’t really seem all that interested in following through on them.

#126, 7/28 – Crimson Gold (2003) (dvd)

This film fooled me for a short while. See, it starts with the robbery which also serves as the end of the story. And so I expected everything else to be an elaborate setup to the robbery, an explanation. But that’s not what this film aimed to show. Not by a long shot. My bad, though. The way the robbery was shot should have clued me in, but I wasn’t listening.

The opening scene took nearly four minutes to play out. The action happened relatively quickly, and then we lingered a little. It was an announcement of sorts: We will be moving through this film at the pace of the central character. Eventually Hussein, our protagonist, makes a decision and the scene ends. The rest of the movie sticks to him in an almost dogged way. In that way, Hussein, a pizza delivery guy in Tehran, becomes our tour guide through some of the social and cultural issues in the city.

It ends, as I said before, where it begins, and by that point you do get some of the why behind the robbery, yes. But you’ve given a lot more, as well. I think this was a rich, well-executed film. The pace will put some off, but I think it serves this particular film well. I’ve been hearing about Iranian cinema for a while now, but this is my first experience with it. I can’t wait to sample more.

#125, 7/26 – I am Curious (Yellow) (1967) (dvd)

I never did any research into why this film was infamous, I simply knew that it was. Since it came from Sweden (and I’ve never been able to shake the meme I grew up with about "naughty" Euro films from the 60s) and it seemed to get mentioned fairly often in the context of erotic works, I figured the controversy was over sex. And, of course, it was. But my first rule for watching film, especially something which caused a stir, is this: Never approach something as if it’s smut, unless you know it’s smut. And, controversy or not, this is not a smutty film. Not even close. In fact, I have no idea why people concentrate on the sex in this movie at all.

I am Curious (Yellow) is a thoroughly political undertaking. It’s so deeply political, I missed a significant portion of its meaning, because, well, I’m not living in 1960s Sweden. In some cases I honestly needed the director sitting next to me, pointing things out,  especially since the film so clearly conflated documentary and pure fiction (in an odd way its structure reminded me of the classic released just a year later, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One). I am Curious (Yellow) is obsessed with the social divisions between people in Sweden (and everywhere else), the doctrine of nonviolence, and, apparently, the fallout of the Spanish Civil War. It strikes me as an ambitious attempt to examine the political climate of Sweden at the time. And, seen as a piece of late 1960s social and political fabric (part of the spider, if you will), the film is intensely interesting (to me, anyway).

Yes, there are some sex scenes. The first of them is really funny, even. There’s also ample opportunity to see the many body parts of Lena Nyman and Börje Ahlstedt. (I do not object.) But this woman and man are not carefully-selected Hollywood stars and this movie is not an attempt at a wank film—in any way, shape, or form. That said, I think Lena is beautiful from head to toe and I’m downright offended that a critic apparently called her "porky". But that’s a whole other set of issues I have no interest in exploring just now. My point is this: If you ever try watching this movie, looking for some sort of tango in Stockholm (or anything even approaching porn), you will be sorely disappointed.

(Odd. So, Lena played the sister in Autumn Sonata? I saw that late last year, and it really left its mark in my head, yet I did not even come close to recognizing her.)

#124, 7/25 – Murderous Maids (2000) (dvd)

We gave the world Leopold and Loeb, the French gave us the Papin sisters. Certain criminal cases catch the imagination, I guess. (I’d initially written my imagination, since I find these two incidents so interesting, but then I realized, duh, people keep revisiting these things, so it’s not just me.)

My first experience with the Papin case was 1994’s British-American production, Sister My Sister, one of those curious little films which burned its existence—if not any actual scenes—into my memory, much like L’Enfer and a few other movies I saw during that period. The idea of sisters’ affection turning carnal, and eventually leading to the murder of their employer, fascinates me. Beyond the uncomfortably voyeuristic angle of seeing two inevitably cute actresses—who are pretending to be the battleground between their personal impulses and society’s mores—make out, I mean. There’s an entire emotional landscape which is so rich and interesting and tragic and creepy. And then there’s the oh-so-obvious class angle. Like I said, certain criminal cases….

Still, going back to my point about the voyeurism of it all, it’s
hard to make a movie about something like this which isn’t
exploitative. Duh. Sisters and sex. And let’s not forget the murder
part. The sex is necessary to the story, but at what point is showing
it pure titillation, or perhaps provocation? I don’t know. I think the director probably crossed
the line, but it’s hard to say, because the sex acts themselves probably
are fundamental to a film like this. But… yeah, I’m gonna leave it at
I don’t know.

There is something about the film’s execution I certainly must compliment, though: I can’t express how much I like it when a film doesn’t have a score. Many, many more movies should go this route. Yes, in the hands of the right filmmakers,  the music becomes a very important, wonderful, and powerful part of the production. But with great power… well, you know the rest. Far too many use the score as a blunt instrument, especially during big emotional scenes.  It wasn’t until the final moments, when nary a violin piped up to tell me "hey, isn’t this sad?!", that I realized there hadn’t been any music. Anywhere. The murder is that much more intense and frightening thanks to this. See, silence is powerful, too. A great choice by the filmmakers.

I wanted to have Sister My Sister (which I’m told was an all-woman production) here as a comparison point—and because I honestly don’t remember a frame of it—but Netflix foiled me. I’d put both movies, each claiming to be available now, at the top of my queue. So, when I sent back two DVDs on Thursday I thought I’d get to
spend the weekend watching different renditions of
the Papin case. But, no. Instead, Netflix skipped Sister My Sister
(even though its availability still says "Now") and sent me Bright
Leaves. I don’t mind: I liked Bright Leaves, obviously. But I’m wondering if Netflix’s shipping computers didn’t think it appropriate, all that incest. Of course, since I haven’t seen the 1974 filming of Genet’s The Maids, there’s at least one more chance for me to have a Papin double feature.

#123, 7/24 – Bright Leaves (2003) (dvd)

Maybe it’s just because I saw these two films within a few weeks of each other, but Ross McElwee’s Bright Leaves reminds me of Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation. Both show the director/central figure examining their lives and their family history and how those things intertwine with a troublesome portion of the American psyche. With Tarnation, the larger issue which comes into play is mental illness and our treatment thereof (full disclosure: I consider ECT very close to barbaric. So, yeah). Bright Leaves, on the other hand, gives us the tiny issue of tobacco, from the perspectives of those who grow it, those who smoke it, and those who deal with its side effects.

I’ll be the first to admit the similarities I’ve raised really aren’t that deep at all. Stylistically, McElwee’s film certainly does not have the bombastic multimedia roller coaster ride quality of Tarnation. More importantly, the key event in the McElwee family history, as our hero presents it, was not initiated by someone inside his family. That’s extremely important, because it means the family scenes tend to be more wistful than, you know, unreservedly painful.

Still, I couldn’t resist making a Google search on Tarnation and Bright Leaves as I was writing this. Nothing on the first page of results turned up quite what I was hoping to find, but a comment to Chuck Tryon’s wonderful piece about Bright Leaves did me one better. Dig:

And of course I’m reading your review thru the lens of having recently seen Tarnation, which aptly demonstrates the addictive quality of filming things—and then revisiting them. JC’s film is interesting partly as a kind of visual capture of the memory path and the scrapbook . . . as your thread on Capturing the Friedmans points out, this decade’s films are full of interesting explorations of the technologization of memory—esp as that technology continues to expand to "ordinary" individuals, not just film enthusiasts . . .

First off, I hadn’t thought about Capturing the Friedmans (though that’s slightly different, since Jarecki was not central to the movie’s narrative, obviously—the meta-narrative? that’s a different story) as one of these films. Moreover, yes, the technologization of memory. What a great way to put it.

That’s exactly what struck me dumb about Egoyan’s Calendar. Say what you want about the film itself, it was the first thing I remember seeing that really centered itself around this idea of "the addictive quality of filming things—and then revisiting them". I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: From a structural standpoint, Calendar was one of the most beautiful films of the 90s, because the idea of a man unintentionally filming his own marriage’s collapse, and then watching the key events obsessively, is simply too brilliant for words. (I admit Egoyan’s execution is not necessarily top of form, but I hardly care. The idea of the movie makes me love the movie.)

Back to Bright Leaves... While I think the movie sacrifices its power and focus for bits of personality, I don’t really mean that as a put down. That is, there are times when weird things just happen and we’re dragged along—but that’s OK.  In the most obvious example of odd, film theorist Vlada Petric straps McElwee into a wheelchair and then pushes him around, backwards, while we watch the interview—from the director’s vantage point. Why? "I wanted to be kinesthetic"^*, Petric tells the camera. Ooooo-kay.  Absolutely pointless. But, well, it’s also probably the coolest documentary interview shot I’ve ever seen, because the movement makes it visually interesting. Too bad there really wasn’t anything to the interview itself.

^*As soon as those words came out of his mouth I laughed out loud. And I kept laughing. For like a minute. Yep, I’m a geek.

(Like the fact that I footnote my posts—  or, uh bother to document every film I’ve seen this year—doesn’t make my geekiness clear enough.)

#122. 7/23 – Ikiru (1952) (dvd)

As the week is ending and my unintentional mini-Japanese film festival draws to a close, it seems I saved the absolute best for last.

I may not have been tracking my movie-watching then as meticulously as I am now, but I’m dead certain the last time I saw three Japanese movies in a week was September of 1999, when Turner Classic Movies honored Kurosawa. That was a very important month for me, because up until then—since my experience with Kurosawa’s films was limited to things like Yojimbo, Rashomon, The Hidden Fortress, and Ran—I thought he was something of a genre director who set all his movies in feudal Japan. Not only did High & Low (the first DVD I ever bought, for whatever that’s worth), The Drunken Angel, Dreams, and Madadayo knock that notion out of my head, they so impressed me that Kurosawa gently nudged Kubrick aside and took over as my favorite director. (He now shares that position with Bergman and Cassavetes.)

I wasn’t sure I could still be floored by something from Kurosawa, since I’ve seen a good bit of his work. But, well, I was silly. And wrong. Ikiru hit me just right. It’s not overly sentimental or unrealistically cynical. It’s not about a saint. It’s joyous and painful and… just… perfect.  Absolutely perfect. It’s the film I’ve always wished Frank Capra could have made. (And maybe he did make such a film, and I just haven’t seen it yet)

I’d been joking with myself before I put this in the DVD player that I couldn’t say which of Kurosawa’s films was my least favorite. In fact, that was going to be how I opened this writeup, regardless of how I felt about the movie. But then it had to go and be utterly divine. 

Seriously, though, I’ve never had much of a  problem identifying my favorite Kurosawa film. First it was Yojimbo, then High and Low.

I’ve just found myself a new one.

#121, 7/22 – Cat People (1942) (gitn)

Like many who grew up in the 80s, I’m sure, my first exposure to the title Cat People (I swear, I keep wanting to type "Cat Power") came in the 80s with Paul Schrader’s remake. In fact, I didn’t even know there was an original before I noticed the name in a Turner Classic Movies schedule seven or eight years ago.

I won’t equivocate here: I think Schrader’s remake is a spectacular failure, a movie which is memorable only for an Annette O’Toole topless scene. Allow me to digress just a second to note, at the risk of you thinking worse of me, that I believe Ms. O’Toole’s shirtlessness is exactly the one memorable thing about the dopey late 80s Martin Short vehicle, Cross My Heart, as well. (I had a definite weakness for Ma Kent in the 80s.) Going further off the path, I’m pretty sure that if I’m ever asked for an example of a movie which is rightly not on DVD, I’d nominate Cross My Heart (well, at least if I’m suffering from some benign form of amnesia which makes me forget The Further Adventures of Tennessee Buck ever existed). Obviously, I really have a bad impression of Cross My Heart at the moment, though, I think I may have liked it when I first saw it. That happens, you know.

Right, back to Cat Power People. The original is a funnier movie than I expected, with such goofy lines (delivered straight, thankfully) as "You’re Irena. You’re here in America. You’re so normal you’re even in love with me, Oliver Reed—a good, plain Americano! As if that wasn’t chuckle-worthy enough, the film makes sure you understand that Ollie loves his apple pie. How could any self-respecting plain-old Americano not?

But don’t let my laughing fool you. I didn’t like this film. And of course I’ll tell you why.

It’s a horror/romance rooted in concerns about the "danger" of female sexuality. Worse, the danger of "foreign" female sexuality. Irena, the Serbian woman our good-plain-Ollie falls for, has tried her entire life to keep her sexual desires in check lest she tear her lover limb from limb. (Her village was cursed, you see.) Her unwillingness to engage in the pleasures of the flesh presents a problem, especially since good-plain-Ollie is so drawn to Irena, he urges her to marry him. And she does. Yes, despite the fact that they’ve never embraced, or kissed—and this is Hays Code Hollywood, so never mind the rest of it.

I won’t bother going any further.

Although I think this version is vastly superior to the remake, I’m still not very fond of it.

#120, 7/21 – The Man Without a Past (2002) (dvd)

I am probably the one guy on the planet who thinks John Frankenheimer’s best film was Seconds. Although I think Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life, I’ve been acquainted with Arthur Hamilton/Tony Wilson a little longer, and maybe that’s why I prefer his story, ever so slightly. I saw Seconds for the first of many times in my senior year of high school—in fact, it was shown during my English class—and I connected almost instantly with the premise.

There’s a certain strain of speculative fiction which makes me hot, you see, and the idea of a dissatisfied middle aged man (someone who has long since died inside) being offered a new life of his "choosing" just hits all my buttons. And it’s simple, they say in the story: We fake your death. We find out, through hypnosis, what you really want to do with your life. You undergo extensive plastic surgery, and after you recover we move you to a community suited to your new lifestyle. Cool, huh?

Of course, things don’t go nearly as smoothly as our protagonist might have hoped, and he finds some terrible things out along the way. The message was pretty clear by the end of the film: Science may offer a lot of things, but it won’t solve your core dissatisfactions.

What if, however, you were completely divorced from your old life? The new face, new name, new career angle offered by the shadowy company in Seconds is all fine and good. But what if you don’t remember who you are, and you’re in a place where nobody knows you? You literally have died, then. Died and reawakened.

Such is the new life given to the central character in The Man Without a Past, probably the wryest film I’ve seen this year. Here, before we even get to know our protagonist, he’s robbed and beaten nearly to death, and when he comes to he finds himself in a small, quirky community near Helsinki. And in the course of the film we see him grow into a person who is quite different, it turns out, from who he had been.

A second chance, but not by choice.  A change of the interior, instead of the exterior.

These two films couldn’t be any more different (one is a 60s thriller, the other a small-stakes comedy), but still, somebody ought to screen them back-to-back. (Didn’t I say something last week about wanting to watch another pair of movies back-to-back?  What’s gotten into me?)

#119, 7/20 – The Pornographers (1966)  (dvd)

"What kind of fish is that, and what’s it doing there?"

You hear someone ask exactly that during the opening credits of this insane movie, which I think may have blown out a couple of my tired brain cells last night. I was not ready for this one at all (a couple of times I thought I might have been slipped an episode of Worker and Parasite), but I’m glad I saw it. Yes, glad. Even if there is one scene which, while kind of… funny, will disturb me the rest of my days. Actually, come to think of it, there are two scenes I can say that about. Oh boy.

As with Crazed Fruit I rented this one thanks to a single image. Filmbrain posted the still you see here back in May, but, well, I’m so far behind on my blog-reading, I didn’t see it ‘til Saturday night. I’m weird enough that I rented the film without hesitation (popping it to the top of my Netflix queue like I often do when I get a feeling about some film I’d never heard of… thanks to a single still image posted in somebody’s blog).

It was not what I expected. But, well, what I expected would have been a lot more boring.

A lot less odd, too.

For the record, the fish in question was a carp.

#118, 7/17 – Crazed Fruit (1956) (dvd)

Once I find out about a movie I usually decide whether I’m going to watch it in seconds. And most of the time my choice has nothing to do with the premise of the movie, because most of the time I don’t bother reading about it. In the case of Crazed Fruit, I rented it as soon as I saw the cover image because there’s something about the look on  Mie Kitahara’s face that got to me. Well, that and the movie was named Crazed Fruit, for crying out loud. It intrigued me.

Here’s the funny coincidence part. It’s an interesting followup of sorts to Kurosawa’s Stray Dog, which I watched only a couple of weeks ago(and it also serves as a kind of lead-in for/contrasting piece to High and Low). Here we see members of the so-called Sun Tribe generation, a group of idle rich kids who are lost in the mess of the post-War world. Their summers off from school go by a script: They sleep in, they sleep around, they get in fights, they spend most of their time enjoying themselves at the beach or in nightclubs, they act very rudely and Americanized—all to the chagrin of the barely-seen older folks. Oh, and they look down on everything. As these kids walk into a nightclub in Yokohama, the following exchange happens:

"What the hell? [This place is] like the Adolph in Tokyo, down to the velvet on the walls."
"Japan’s the same all over."
"Two-bit country"
"A wasteland for the young."

Well, a wasteland for the rich young, anyway.  As one of them put it, "we make boredom our credo". Only one of the kids we get to know—the "innocent" Haruji, the younger brother of the hip, velvet-throated Natsuhisa—tries to look at the world differently. He wasn’t present for the discussion I just mentioned, but he chimes in during an earlier sequence:

Natsuhisa: Look what the older generation tries to sell us. You find anything exciting in that?
Unnamed Sun Triber: I’ve given up trying. We’ll find our own way to live.
Haruji: And this is it? Aimlessly killing time?
Natsuhisa: We do the best we can.
Haruji: It’s all just a bunch of bullshit. You guys have no idea what you want to do. That’s why you’re always so bored. They call people like you the Sun Tribe. I’m not gonna live like that.

Poor, misguided Haruji. You have such good intentions, but things will not go well for you, my boy. Especially if you fall for someone who may not be exactly who you believe she is. You went looking for your own definition, something better than what the others have, but maybe you went looking in the wrong place. (Please note: I’m not blaming the woman here. I’m saying Haruji erred in trying to define himself through another person.)

An excellent film.

#117, 7/16 – Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) (dvd)

I’m going to talk about how this one ends, so if you have any interest in seeing it, you should skip the rest of this.

***Spoilers Ahoy***

A woman trapped at home, thanks in part to some impairment to her mobility, finds herself under threat.  That describes at least three movies I can remember seeing, including this one (and you can make it four if you want to be flexible and count Fincher’s Panic Room, which obviously changes the formula a bit). In 1964, Olivia de Havilland was a Lady in a Cage, a woman who couldn’t walk who was subsequently stranded in her house’s elevator, thanks to a power outage. Three years later, Audrey Hepburn played a blind woman set upon by Alan Arkin and his fellow drug-smuggling criminals in Wait Until Dark. The latter film is exceptionally modern: The cornered woman puts up a fight worthy of Jodie Foster, and the director used little tricks that thrillers still employ today.

Sorry, Wrong Number, on the other hand, goes right against what I have come to expect from movies and that’s both bad and good. I think the narrative structure is actually kind of brilliant, even though the narrative itself isn’t. Yes, you could look at it as straightforward piece of noir, unfolding itself to us through the little, convenient expository pieces we’re given by the various supporting characters. But, there’s another layer to it. A bed-ridden woman, calling around to find her unexpectedly tardy husband, accidentally overhears a murder plot on the telephone. Nice. Then she uses her phone to collect the fragments of the story going on around her (she’s looking for the story about her husband, of course, but she gets more than she wants or expects), without realizing—perhaps until the final seconds—that she’d actually overheard the plot to her own murder. That’s almost worthy of Bradbury. (I say "almost" because the narrative isn’t up to snuff. If we had been surprised about the target of the plot, I would drop the almost. But it’s obvious from the start.)

The problem is simple: It’s too flat, too direct. Stanwyck’s Leona is shrill and helpless and whiny. She’s too normal, too mundane. Of course she never figures out that the murder plot is about her. She had no reason to. Still, it almost feels like a betrayal that Leona doesn’t have the wits to figure it out, to fight, to overcome her disabilities at just the right moments. We spend 80-some minutes with her, and she’s just a punk? Unfair! But it’s also the only possible way to resolve the story, given the character.

Leona is a goner because bed-ridden heiresses with psychological problems don’t have too much in common with Sydney Bristow. She’s not resourceful, not strong. And the film never tries to tell you that she is. Never. But, as a media consumer who always expects those in jeopardy to find their inner strength when pressed, the end feels so wrong to me. She dies in record time. Boom, here’s the murderer coming up the stairs. Bam, she’s dead. Compare that to the struggle Grace Kelly put up in that great scene from Dial M for Murder. One of the most unforgettable moments in film history, if you ask me, is Kelly reaching behind her—into our faces (that scene was shown in 3-D in the theaters!)—frantically searching for something to save her.

It’s not a bad film, really. It’s just not what one comes to expect from this kind of scenario in this day and age.  In a way, I admire it for that.

After all, it was honest with itself, and us. It’s surprising that even though I love movies that try to be honest, I’m a little put off by this one. When’s the last time you saw a thriller with an even remotely realistic ending? Actually, maybe that’s it. The thriller is all about moments of improbability. This one had those, of course, but not at the end. It’s almost incongruous to have the thriller end in the most probable way possible. Of course she died. What else should you expect?

#116, 7/15 – The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005) (tofw)

Let’s get one thing out of the way. There was no way I was going to prefer the original to this movie. I hate Toback’s work. Only if this movie had been a shot-for-shot remake (and it wasn’t, thank god, though they kept the ball-grabbing maneuver; I don’t deny the efficacy of such a tactic, by the way, but in Toback’s testosterone-filled movie, it had a definite symbolism to it) would I have come down hard on it. That’s my prejudice and I have to live with it. No, I’m not saying I instantly favor foreign remakes of American films (not that I can think of, um, any other than this at the moment) but my dislike of Toback is so strong there was no way I was going to give him any sort of credit as a filmmaker. Duh. I don’t  even hate most of those Hollywood filmmakers I love badmouthing. Toback’s stuff I hate.

That said, my noting that this is a better film than the original completely misses the point, anyway. These two films are no more comparable than the Insomnias. In the original, Jimmy is "on the edge", a loner who thinks women are currency (and, to be fair, the rest of the men in the movie agree with him), except for his mother, who can’t find it in her heart to approve of him.  Tom, on the other hand, might be a thug, but he’s not an entirely isolated character. Sure, sometimes Tom would separate himself, by choice, putting headphones on to listen to some electro—but Jimmy would impose himself on others with his radio.

I don’t usually talk too much about performances (or, at least, I don’t remember saying too much about such things) but Roman Duris deserves mention. His Tom is layered in just the way such a premise demands. He’s a thug, and a man who commits acts of brutality out of greed. But he believes in the power of the piano. And he thinks it can save him. Tom is a rich, fascinating character, one of the most interesting I’ve seen recently. I think, of the movies I’ve seen in the last couple of months, only Amalia from The Holy Girl has been more interesting to me.

Anyway, as I was saying, with the central characters so different, there’s no point in trying to look at the newer film in terms of the older one. This version is better, though.

[@ Landmark Century Centre, 2:40pm]

#115, 7/15 – Yes (2004) (tofw)

First, a few words about the trailers I saw in the theatre today…

• The trailer for The Edukators makes it look dumb, but I hold out hope for it.
• Asylum has "skip me, please!" written all over it.
• I’m a bit torn about Crónicas but my instincts tell me to stay away.
• Happily Ever After looks weak, now that I’ve seen a trailer, but I might gamble on Attal.
• Isabelle Huppert rules me completely. I don’t care about the quality of Ma mère. I will see it.

So, I may not be making too many trips to the theater in the coming weeks. Only Ma mère, which comes next month, is something I want to see in the theatres for certain.

As to Yes, my first experience with Sally Potter… I’m conflicted.

I am wary of topical movies.

Moreover, very stylized movies have to work very hard to win over my surprisingly conservative tastes about film technique. Yes is styled to the hilt: Its characters speak in verse; the frame speed slows at various moments; Sam Neill plays air guitar….  wait, did I mention that the characters speak in verse? I know, I know. Shakespeare.  Whatever, man. You have to be ballsy to try it in this day and age and you have to be great to make it work.

And it wasn’t great, but perhaps I was in a forgiving mood  because I actually enjoyed a lot of it. Not all. But I could see her intent, and certain moments were just good enough for me to go along with. Were there half stars on Netflix, I’d probably opt for 2.5 rating, but it’s gonna get a full 3 for me, because I admire the effort. Even if the effort was a bit… fucked up.

Right after the movie I had about forty minutes to blow, so I sat down and read the free magazine the theatre has at the box office. Potter contributed a piece about how the movie started as a short. I rather like what she had to say:

I was obsessed by the idea of looking at the protagonists’ feet as they pounded the Paris streets, the gutters flowing with water, though the film was to be filled with text; we were to hear their thoughts as well as their spoken words in a continuous overlapping stream [note: surprisingly, this was one of the truly excellent things about the film, -n]. The two characters were walking towards a rendezvous (in the Jardins de Luxembourg) each holding an imaginary argument with the other in their heads; a bitter conflict of misunderstanding. I had started writing the text on September 12, 2001, in direct response to the terrible events of the previous day; but these two characters, a woman from the West and a man from the Middle East, though locked in conflict, were to be lovers, and the film would end in the triumph of love over hate. And it was written in verse.

Topical movies make me itch. That’s why Crash had one strike against it from the get go (It’s Haggis’ direction, and worse, his screenplay, that sank the movie, though). Yes is much better than Crash, even if it too sometimes stumbles on its attempts to handle the tough stuff.

And, you know, I would have forgiven Crash some of its sins if there’d been a dying communist aunt character in that movie who said (roughly. Sorry that I wasn’t quick enough to get it precisely):

Communism died, but what came in its place? A world of greed. A life spent longing for things you don’t need.

[@ Landmark Century Centre, 12:00pm]

n/a, 7/15 – L’Enfer (1994) (dvd)

Up until this point every film I’ve written about has been something I’d seen for the first time. I’ve decided, for better or worse, to also write about movies I’m watching again. Why not, right? I just won’t number them, for my own silly reasons. Honestly, I think this is only the second film I’ve re-watched this year (the first being The Apartment, a film I’ve said too much about in the last 14 years) so it’s not really a big change.

Anyway, there’s a creepy song from the pen of my man Merritt (and sung by my man Chris Knox) called "When I’m Out of Town" which goes like this:

Where do you go when I’m not around?  Who do you love when I’m
out of town?  The butcher, the baker, the thin undertaker who
makes not a sound?  Who do you love when I’m out of town?  Have
all my dreams come tumbling down?  Who’s in your arms where I
used to drown?  The old money-lender, the lonely bartender, the
carnival clown?  Who do you love when I’m out of town?  Don’t
say.  It doesn’t matter anyway, because it doesn’t matter what
you say.  All of our pages are turning to brown.  We’re breaking
up, and I’m breaking down.  The man in the forest, the dashing
young florist, the nurse musclebound?  Who do you love when I’m
out of town?

The obsessive gentleman at the heart of this song is a soulmate of L’Enfer’s Paul, a hotel owner who at one point says to a doctor: "I know it’s not [my wife’s] fault. She loves me, in her own way. But she does it with everybody! The guests, the mechanic, the barman… She’s sick."

Now, in Merritt’s song we’ve no solid evidence that the suspicions voiced by Knox are off-base, but I read it as paranoia gone too far all the same (the "it doesn’t matter what you say" line being the kicker for me). In L’Enfer, there’s really little doubt that Paul is off his rocker. In a way, that weakens the film for me, because I like my ambiguity, but it’s still a pretty nice piece of work, really.

I first saw this in 1996, just months before I saw The Wild Reeds, the film which made me realize I had a strong affinity for French filmmaking. I was still in a phase where I didn’t quite know what interested me about film, and I wasn’t that up on the history of foreign cinemas—I just knew I had to keep watching, because every now and again a film would hit me just so. This wasn’t one of those movies, but it left an impression all the same, so I thought I’d revisit it.

Back when I first watched this version of L’Enfer—it’s a remake of a 1964 film I’ve never seen—I also hadn’t yet encountered any of the other films written by Henri-Georges Clouzot (though I was a few months away from seeing the original version of Les Diaboliques), so I didn’t know his fingerprints. They’re in this movie, clear as day, even if he functionally had nothing to do with the making of it (seeing as how he was long dead when this was created). At the moment my favorite Clouzot script (of the three I know) is Wages of Fear, which would probably be my favorite movie about greed, if The Treasure of the Sierra Madre didn’t exist.  Wow, I should rewatch both of those.

Back-to-back, even.