Three films a day

I haven’t been well. I’m not getting any better. This doesn’t please me.

I had been hoping to see three movies in the theatres during the most recently-passed weekend but, much to my dismay, I simply wasn’t up to it. Shame. I really wanted to check out Benoît Jacquot’s latest, but its run ends tomorrow night, and there’s just no way I’ll be able to catch it. And it doesn’t get any better as far as this week goes: I wanted to see The Constant Gardner soon (as in today), but that’s going to have to wait, too.

I have seen movies since last I posted, though. Four of them. I just haven’t been up to writing (plus, I had some computer issues over the weekend.) The cataloging geek in me won’t let these films pass by unaccounted for, though, so I have to write something about them. I’ll be brief. You’re probably happy about that, aren’t you?

• #140, 8/26 – Double Suicide (1969) (dvd)

  I’ve never seen a bunraku production, but now I feel like I kinda have. Double Suicide is a staging of famous playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s 18th century “ripped from the headlines” story of star-crossed lovers who decided they’d rather die together than live apart. Possibly the most interesting part of the film is that Masahiro Shinoda (yeah, the guy who blew me away with Pale Flower) did not divorce the story from its form. We didn’t get an adaptation so much as bunraku show where humans actors took the place of the puppets. It was pretty cool, actually.

• #141, 8/27 – Tokyo Drifter (1966) (dvd)

  Although I’m tempted to call this my favorite Godard of the year, two minor details stop me. 1) It isn’t by Godard. 2) Even if we ignore #1, which I’m more than happy to do, it still doesn’t quite rise to the level set by Jean-Luc himself in January. Director Seijun Suzuki is famous for making colorful, audacious basically incomprehensible movies and this was my first encounter with him and his very effective style. (Well, that’s not true. I TiVo’d Branded to Kill a few years ago but I never found myself in the right mood to watch it, so I couldn’t get past the first five minutes. This wasn’t the fault of the film, by the way, and I plan to watch it very soon now.)

• #142, 8/28 – Suspiria (1977) (dvd)

  #143, 8/28 – Inferno (1980) (dvd)

  Lying in bed for much of your Sunday? Why not have a Dario Argento double feature? Pretty crafty of me, huh?

I have Oldboy here with me. I might watch it tonight. We’ll see.

#139, 8/20 – Red Eye (2005) (tofw)

I’ve been itching to see a silly Hollywood movie for a while now, and something about the three seconds I caught of the Red Eye trailer (while browsing the web, no less) made me choose it. Everybody needs a change of pace, I guess. Or, to be more specific: Man cannot live on foreign films and independent features alone. Of course, to be fair, it’s been a dismal summer, and there’s a darn good reason I haven’t seen anything blockbuster-y since the Batman movie. With the possible exception of—dear god, I can’t believe I’m about to say this—Michael Bay’s The Island (which I simply couldn’t make myself go see), every major studio production has looked cynically insipid.

I honestly don’t mind dumb, but make an effort while you’re being dumb, at least. Although I can say many not-too-flattering things about Wes Craven’s movies, the guy almost always tries. Even Scream 3, as lousy and uninspired a film as that was (I didn’t really care for any of the Screams, but that last one hurt me), still had a hint of effort in it. So, yeah. Red Eye is typical Craven. And, at that, typical Hollywood thriller.

As I’ve said many times before, I get no thrill from thrillers, but today I just sat back and enjoyed the formal exercise of it all. See hint. Guess where hint will become relevant. See unexplained element. Guess the backstory. It can be entertaining. I had my fun. What’s not to like about a movie with a useless character who says things like “I downloaded it off the internet myself!” and “I could get asthma!”? Like I said, typical Craven.

The strange thing, though, is I realized just before the film started that I was actually in the mood for something a bit more action-y than what I was about to get. And as the trailer for Aeon Flux came on my eyes got wide and I said “yes! that’s what I want to see right now! Action-packed, shameless nonsense.” I can’t understand my enthusiasm at all, though. I had absolutely no desire to see Aeon Flux before today. None. And the trailer is cookie cutter and reminds me of Underworld. Ugh. Yet now I’m here wishing it was already out. I’m sure it’s a temporary thing and my desire will recede back to non-existence before long. Still.

Oh, right… back to Red Eye. Cillian Murphy plays the baddie again, just as he did in that little Batman thing, and I’ve gotta say there’s something about him I kinda like. And how come Brian Cox is in like every other Hollywood movie I bother seeing?

[@Century 12 Evanston, 11:30am]

#138, 8/19 РMa m̬re (2004) (tofw)

I once joked with a friend that the best and worst time to see a French film was in the middle of a very bad day. And since I was having a fairly awful Friday it was only natural that I would trek off to the theatre to torture myself with a little bit of NC-17 French cinema. Yeah, I’m almost as masochistic as some of the people in this movie.

In my eyes, Ma mère isn’t a very good film. And if its IMDB rating doesn’t clue you in, Ma mère is certainly not a crowd pleaser, either (though there was a crowd. Seriously, there were easily ten times as many people as there usually are for a Friday matinee.) But still I liked it. Kind of. Well, I didn’t hate it.

It’s a film which, I think, posits among other things that the line between teenage confusion and plain old nihilism isn’t very wide. It’s not an argument I’d considered before, and if that’s what they were aiming to show me, I believe the filmmakers may have a point. (It would explain some things, actually.) It’s just that the idea is dulled by, well, the movie itself—dull being the keyword here.

Do I think the movie is drab? Yep. Dreary? Pretty much. Boring? Sometimes. A fucking pretentious mess? You better believe it. Over-long? Oh yeah, by twenty minutes. And still I liked it. Kind of. (Well…)

But it’s NC-17, which immediately brings up another question. Is it smut? Hell. No. Not even close. If you watch this movie solely for sexual kicks, you’re stupid. And not a little stupid, I’m talking 13 on a scale of 1 to 5 stupid. If you’re really looking to be offended (and I know some people are), you probably will be. I hope that works out for you. But, to be blunt, the movie takes itself so seriously it can’t be bothered to exploit anything other than your time.

Yeah, now we talk Huppert (you knew it was coming). Ever since I first ran across her, when she played Emma Bovary, Huppert has played her share of fascinating characters who engage in deviant sex. (Her co-star, Louis Garrel, last seen in another recent NC-17 movie about incestuous longing, may well be building a career in the same little subgenre.) It is one of her calling cards, and thank goodness, because she seems genuinely interested in conveying human characters, not sideshow freaks. Unfortunately, I think one of Ma mère’s greater failures is that it doesn’t really show any of the characters outside the film’s happy triangle of nihilism, confusion, and deviant sex. (Yeah, 110 minutes of that is too much for even me.) Sure, it’s a nice triangle for a film (hell, I can half-jokingly argue that it’s the basis of nearly every French movie except Amelie), but it needed something else. Badly.

[@ Landmark Century Centre, 4:40pm]

#137, 8/19 – In My Skin (2002) (dvd)

This one had been sitting in the middle of my Netflix queue for months, but I’d completely forgotten about it until its trailer caught my attention one recent morning (it was one of the films promoted on the Crimson Gold DVD) . There was something about the preview that made me suddenly rather interested in it, so I bumped it way up.

I’m certainly a fan of this sort of movie, where the central character slowly starts to lose any connection they may have had with the people around them. The most obvious example in my head right now is my beloved Repulsion, though if I had a little more time to think I’m sure I could run off a few other titles. That said, this film reminds me most vividly of Cronenberg, but I guess any movie which so graphically explores an obsession with changing one’s body will remind me of the guy who built his career on this very motif.

And, like most Cronenberg features, this movie—to put it as scientifically as I can—gave me the willies.

(I’d write more, but I’m running late as it is.)

More coincedental discoveries. While reading Green Cine Daily today I just saw a post regarding an interview with Chantal Ackerman (who, by the way, directed Tomorrow We Move).

If you know how much Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou means to me, you’ll know how much I love this quote. She is so right on. I’ve been wanting to further explore the various new wave cinema movements recently (which is why I got Loves of a Blonde, actually), and this reminds me that I should update my queues to reflect this mood. Anyway, Ackerman said:

I come from a family that was not interested in cinema, literature or music. When I was fifteen, I was walking on the Anspach avenue in Brussels and there was a film theatre “Marivaux”. In Flemish Pierrot de gangster! was announced, in French Pierrot le fou! I liked the title. I wasn’t sixteen yet so I wasn’t allowed to get in. I was very small, even smaller than now. I said to my friend: we’ll try anyway. And I saw a film, for the first time in my life. I had only seen things like Le Gendarme de Saint-Tropez or The Guns of Navarone. But I didn’t enjoy those things. There was nothing to that kind of cinema except ice cream and making out. And then I saw something like this, as beautiful as a literary work, a poem. I went outside and decided I would make films. It didn’t happen at some kind of festival. There was a girl that didn’t know anything, walked into a film theatre on a Saturday night and met Godard.

What an odd coincidence. Since Cineaste is quarterly, I take my sweet time going through each issue. I usually just read one article at a time and then leave it sitting around for later. This morning, while taking a very brief break from working, I opened it up to an interview with Pawel Pawlikowski, director of My Summer of Love. In it, he mentions Loves of a Blonde as “the film that showed [him] what cinema was capable of.” Odd timing.

But wait, there’s more. After I’d finished Loves of a Blonde, I watched the disc’s sole worthy extra, a roughly fifteen minute interview with director Milos Forman. In it, he talks about how the film was largely made up of non-professional actors and how he got the best he could out of them. And it made me realize that many of my favorite moments from recent film, including some of my favorite parts of Ratcatcher, came from actors who aren’t professionals (and come to think of it, Kathleen McDermott of Morvern Callar wasn’t a professional, either). And I thought to myself, “when I have things to shoot, I’d really prefer to work with people who haven’t had training.”

Something related to this comes up in the interview, too:

Cineaste: But you seem to retain from Neorealism the idea that it’s interesting work with either non-profressional actors or professionals who don’t have that much experience.

Pawlikowski: Yes, I’m looking for actors that stimulate me and photograph interestingly, who also can provide me with some sort of believable inner life and paradoxes—who are a bit mysterious, in other words, who are not types. Most of cinema is heavy with “types,” who serve the purpose of the plot. In landscape as well as actors, I’m always looking for something contradictory that reminds me both of my past and of literature and can bring some energy to the process.

I think that’s a great point. So many actors are, well, we already have a word for it: typecast. Part of the standard language we have for talking about film, in fact, is this very understanding of these types. For just one example (it may turn out to be a bad one, because I haven’t thought it all the way through): When we see that Sean Penn’s in a movie, we usually have an idea of what’s going on with his character, because Sean Penn plays tortured… it’s what he does. He has, on occasion, played blissfully ignorant—or, um, retarded—characters but in general Penn’s type is the gritty brooder. Occasionally I even like Penn’s gritty brooder thing, but it gets tiresome after a while. I wouldn’t be surprised if this type is a reflection of Penn’s own personality, and I think that’s great and cool, but surely there are other currents within his actorly soul which have gone underexplored on screen?

Anyway, neither Nathalie Press or Emily Blunt are types yet. Both are professionals who (at the time My Summer of Love was made) didn’t have much experience. Both are rapidly building their resumes and I hope to see them more often, partly because I hope they continue not to be types, but also because they sure do photography interestingly. (None of this really changes my opinion of the movie, which I still think falters somewhere in the final reel.)

#136, 8/13 – The Loves of a Blonde (1965) (dvd)

I saw this a few days ago, but haven’t had the energy and time to sit down and write about it. In fact, I still don’t.

Take my word for it, through: Miraculous little piece of filmmaking. One of the finest little comedies one might ever see. A sad little comedy, maybe, but also very touching and real.

Right, did I mention being tired? I’m completely spent even now, but I need to record this one before I forget.

Since I didn’t give you many words: I’ll leave you with a picture. Nice shot, this. I smiled when this scene happened. Largely, I think, because I’ve always gotta giggle when filmmakers strategically avoid exposing body parts. When done right, such a shot is both a nod to we, the audience, and very funny. This shot was done right.

#135, 8/12 – Secuestro Express (2004) (tofw)

Fast. Loud. Stylish.

From what I can tell, that’s what director Jonathan Jakubowicz was going for, and he certainly succeeded on those counts. What else he was going for eludes me. Maybe if I knew, I could tell you more than “eh.” I mean, I wasn’t entirely bored, though it really only held my interest for a couple of scenes here and there. In fact, though I can’t believe I’m going to compliment Tony Scott again, this movie made me realize just how much of a minor achievement Man on Fire really was.

Ow. I’m going to be recovering from the pain of saying that for a good several months.

Alas, for me, the most interesting moments came from the trailers: First off, I am somewhat intriuged by a movie which manages to get Keanu, Tilda, and Vince Vaughn all together. Yeah, Keanu and Tilda have worked together before (how could I ever forget?), but Vince Vaughn? Like I said, I am intriuged. I expect disaster. Total, unbelievable disaster. But I can hope.

More importantly, the preview for Ma mère notes it got the dreaded NC-17 for, get this, aberrant sexual content. Aberrant. Sexual. Content. There may not be a combination of words in the English language which will get me to the theater faster. Plus, said Aberrant Sexual Content may involve Huppert. The very thought is nearly too much to bear. (Note: No, no. I am sorry. The actual phrase is strong and aberrant sexual content. I stand corrected.) Look, I know the movie is probably gonna suck. I know it, you know it, and everyone around here knows it. Still. Allow me a week to just mull over those magical words and imagine just what I would do to get a film rated so.

[@ Landmark Century Centre, 4:40pm]

[nb: Soccer fans sing. All game. They stand and sing. I think it’s one of the most beautiful things in the world to hear thousands of people singing together. Of course, these fans tend to sing mostly when things are going their way. When one team scores, usually the supporters of the scoring side get louder while the other fans gets noticably quieter. And the dejected side are sometimes serenaded by their happier counterparts with a song that notes, simply, “you’re not singing anymore”.

Apparently, I’m in an expository mood today. Apologies.]

So, yesterday afternoon I was talking to the owner of memarati.com, the domain that used to be this blog’s home. He mentioned that the registration for memarati.com was expiring in a couple of days and he was considering letting it die and taking up someplace new. Since I’d been wanting to get my own domain for this blog (and other things), anyway, I mulled it over for a while and then decided, fuck it, I’ll make some changes. And that’s exactly what I’ve done. (Thank you, B-, for hosting this for a year. That was most excellent of you. I don’t know that I would have ever bothered with a blog like this one if you hadn’t invited me to use one of yours.)

A lot of little things have changed, but I’m hoping most of them won’t be apparent. The one change you may notice is the name.

“Shout From the Rooftops” was the perfect title for this blog when I created it last year, because I had very particular ideas for what I was going to write about. I just… never really got around to dealing with those ideas. Maybe some day. Just not right now. Ever since January this blog has been the dumping ground for my everpresent obsession with film (and a manifestion of my penchant for keeping lists). Some of you even seem to like reading my short, quarter-baked ramblings on what I thought about this or that little movie. Thank you, by the way, for reading. I like that you do.

Anyway, I should leave the new title as unexplained as I did the old, but I won’t. “Three films a day” is not a challenge I’m setting for myself, nor is it my preferred method for keeing the doctor away. No, it’s a phrase I lifted directly from Francios Truffaut, who wrote the following when he was seventeen:

I like the Arts and particularly the movies; I consider that work is a necessary evil like excreting, and that any person who likes his work doesn’t know how to live. I don’t like adventures and have avoided them. Three films a day, three books a week and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die, which will surely occur one day soon and which I egoistically dread.

If you allow for the fact that I do not, exactly, dread my eventual death, I concur: Three films a day, three books a week, and records of great music would be enough.

Just about, anyway.

(Welcome to my new home.)

#134, 8/12 – Tomorrow We Move (2004) (dvd)

I’ve had a powerful interest in certain French actresses since I saw Virgine Ledoyen own the screen in Benoît Jacquot’s A Single Girl. We are with Ledoyen for almost every second of that film, and she does her absolute best with the time. She is, I still think, one of the most magnetic actresses of this era. In fact, I’m going to dare mentioning her in the same sentence as Natalie Wood and Audrey Hepburn; yes, that magnetic. If there’s one reason I miss cable, it’s for little discoveries like A Single Girl which I stumbled across on Cinemax in the middle of the night—it changed my life for the better.

In the time since I came across Ledoyen, my Isabelle Huppert fascination blossomed fully and now she’s in that same class as well. And then came Ludivine Sagnier. As fate would have it, I first saw the marvelous Ludivine in Ozon’s 8 Women, a movie with Leodyen and Huppert and she outclassed them both! Hell, Ludivine holds her own with Charlotte Rampling, one of the most magnetic actresses ever (IMHO), in Ozon’s Swimming Pool. That’s amazing.

Anyway, I don’t get it, really. It just happens. There are just certain French actresses I can watch all day, whose movies I must rent. And it’s not about looks, either. As much as I’m attracted to Emmanuelle Seigner, Emmanuelle Béart, and Juliette Binoche, for instance, I do not seek out their movies at any cost. It’s a simple test, really. Name a fairly high-profile English language movie the actress has been in. If I’ve seen it (e.g. The Beach, Peter Pan, I Heart Huckabees), it’s a clear sign. If I refuse to watch the movie under any circumstances (e.g. Mission: Impossible, Chocolat), I’m, uh, just not that into that particular French actress. (Seigner is the exception. I saw The Ninth Gate, and I regret it far more than I will ever regret The Beach.)

I knew the second I saw her in Murderous Maids that Sylvie Testud might be another actress I have this sort of thing with. And boy is she ever. I didn’t even know she was in this film since I rented it simply because it showed up on someone’s top ten films of 2004 list. (Like I said, arbitrary rental habits. Yes, this list also inspired me to rent both Crimson Gold and the coming-to-my-mailbox-soon Springtime in a Small Town.)

In a way, Tomorrow We Move is more stage than screen, and that gives Testud an opportunity to really show off (yeah, like playing a mentally disturbed, sister-loving murderess wasn’t enough of a showcase for her). She doesn’t disappoint. She is electric, neurotically pushing her way through the movie as she types bad “erotic” fiction, smokes, eavesdrops on others’ intimate situations, compulsively moves furniture, and occasionally yells “C sharp!” (while others are playing the piano) for reasons I have yet to figure out. She is brilliant in ways I cannot even express—consider that Testud’s fellow force of nature, the always wonderful Natacha Régnier, the woman who owned Dreamlife of Angels, seems downright docile—and the film ain’t half bad, either.

The screenplay is lightly comic on the surface, but rather dark deep down on the inside, with its references to the holocaust and the potential treachery of memory, among other things. It’s not the sort of movie which will move people to tears (well, I don’t think it is), but I love that underneath its slightly goofy exterior is this troubled little half-story about people who just want to find happiness. Or, at the very least, peace.

#133, 8/9 – Good Bye Lenin! (2003) (dvd)

Sometimes I actually want a film to be unembarrassedly heartfelt, to present an almost puppy-ish view of the sad, violent world. But it has to sneak up on me a little. It has to hide its intentions, at least a little bit. I don’t like films which are so direct in their approach that the whole movie becomes a device to get us to a "powerful" ending. If I think it’s really trying to get to me, I’ll resist. And at a certain point, I’ll snap and say, roughly, "this is a shitty excuse for a movie." In other words, there’s a fine line between genuine sap and Grade-A manipulation.

Good Bye Lenin! is genuine sap. Hollywood used to make films this like this. Hollywood still could, if they wanted to. I guess they don’t.

It actually took me a while to realize what I was experiencing, even though I should have seen it from the first. That ever-present piano score, beautiful as it was, is also not subtle. (Let’s not forget: Sap is manipulative. It just doesn’t cross the previously-mentioned line.) And there’s also the voiceover. Dead giveaway when combined with the quiet piano. And still, I didn’t notice either thing until I was completely wrapped up in the movie. Which, I should add, came as a surprise, too.

See, it actually didn’t grab me in the beginning. At all. I sat through the first forty or so minutes only half-interested. But then I realized how much they were concentrating on one of my big weak spots—illusions—and I perked right up. Much like Kagemusha, this film is about elaborate attempts to protect something or someone by creating and maintaining false perceptions of reality.

I love that the misrepresentations at the heart of this film (misguided as they may be) were undertaken with sincerity and humanity. This is not a French sex farce (seen one, seen ‘em all) where the participants are trying to protect themselves. No, the people here honestly believe that what they’re doing, or have done, is for the good of someone else. And there’s a beauty in their incorrectness (and is there a point where they might even have been more right than wrong?), and that’s important.

I think good, genuine sap comes from moments when the melodrama, despite itself, shows flashes of beauty. And Good Bye Lenin! certainly has some beautiful moments.

#132, 8/7 – Pale Flower (1964) (dvd)

The daily life of an assassin interests me more than assassination. The daily routine like coming home and daydreaming or sitting still and thinking what you’ll do next. I wanted to capture these daily routines in Pale Flower.

- Masahiro Shinoda

I add movies so arbitrarily to my rental queues I sometimes can’t remember what made me choose a certain title. Sure, most of the time I’ll recall the recommendation, the mention, the still image, or the whim that made me say "yeah, let’s get this." Occasionally, though, when a movie shows up in my mailbox I’m a little perplexed about why I rented it.  (Only once in a very rare while has the answer been so simple as, say, "Oh, right. Of course. Tilda Swinton".)  So, when I say I have no idea how Pale Flower got on my queue, or why another Masahiro Shinoda film will be coming to me soon, please take me on my word. Honestly, I’ve no idea what possessed me. [note: After thinking about it a little, I believe Pale Flower is relatively new to DVD, so I bet GreenCine brought it to my attention by listing it as a featured release on their front page. That’s the theory I’m going with for now, anyway.]

I wish I knew, though, because I’m thankful to whoever brought this movie to my attention. Pale Flower floored me. I watched it twice—once in the wee small hours Sunday morning and again today—and I’m simply in love with this thing.

I don’t think I’m one for Yakuza stories, usually (though with at least a couple Seijun Suzuki movies sitting high in my queue, I may have to change my opinion soon enough), but this wasn’t really a Yakuza story anyway. Instead I think we’re seeing an exploration of a man who lives without anything to believe in. (And after seeing the interview with Shinoda on the disk, I now know it’s a Cold War allegory which also explores the day-to-day life of a killer.  As I’ve said in the past, I’m more interested in the torturer than the torture, so of course I liked it.) The opening voiceover to film sets the tone perfectly, with the protagonist, a man just released from prison, musing on existence and the value of human life. He does not have a cheery point of view.

Muraki, the protagonist, soon becomes entangled with the gorgeous Saeko, a mysterious woman who lives her nights recklessly in the hope of beating back her overwhelming boredom—a strategy which succeeds intermittently. The two become gambling buddies, playing in an illegal high-stakes hanafuda game for kicks. I never really got a sense, throughout the movie’s various gambling scenes, just how much money they may have won and/or lost during these nights out (they might show up for a night with 1-2 million yen, but how much did they leave with?), because that’s never really the point. They don’t care, and neither should we. They gamble either for a thrill (in Saeko’s case) or because they can’t think of anything else to do (Muraki: "I gamble… what more is there?"). Either way, the money is irrelevant.

And so, my dear friends, is the plot.

But that’s part of what I love about this film. If you ask me, more often than not, rigid A-to-B-to-C plots get in the way. Or, in the case of character-exploring movies, they’re often too convenient. This movie escapes that problem simply by refusing to bring the story into focus. In the interview extra on the DVD, Shinoda notes that the guy he wrote this with hated that story was obscured, if not obliterated, by all the gambling scenes. In fact, according to Shinoda, "[r]ight after the first screening [the writer] spat words of hatred" at him.

Writer dude needs to chill.

#131, 8/5 – The Edukators (2004) (tofw)

I’m going to hold this up as an example that Hollywood-style scripts aren’t instantly doomed in my eyes. Yes, I prefer movies that don’t have very much cause and effect, that don’t move on a well-plotted course. But sometimes I can enjoy being pulled around (hell, I wrote in my notebook before Broken Flowers started "I need a good [big budget] science fiction film about now"), and this was certainly a time where I enjoyed being directed. The Edukators is an entertainment which reminds me of Fight Club, pure and simple (not directly, and certainly not in terms of style). This is not a bad thing.

Again, I’m too tired to give this all the words I probably should right now. I might revisit it.

[@Century CinéArts 6, 7:00pm]

#130, 8/5 -  Broken Flowers (2005) (tofw)

My thoughts are kinda scattered. Let’s get one thing out of the way and then jump into the chaos: I really liked this one. I think it’s a very good, quiet character study. Anyway…

I’ve never seen a Jim Jarmusch movie in the theatres. I never expected to see one in a crowded theatre, but there seriously weren’t many seats to spare in Evanston’s CineArts A6 auditorium yesterday afternoon (strangers sat on either side of me—not an experience I’m used to). That I was, it’s fair to say, one of about a dozen people in the place under 50 just added to the oddity of the experience. But, hey, this is Jarmusch—shouldn’t my experience of a Jarmusch movie be odd? It seems only fair. And besides, I’m kind of weird about Jarmusch in the first place. My favorite movie of his is Ghost Dog, after all. Yes, really.

It seems Bill Murray could easily start becoming film’s de facto long-lost father (not that he wants to be). Hot on the heels his role as a man united with a son he never knew he had in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Murray again plays a man who may have fathered a child without knowing it. Of course, that’s as superficial a similarity as one can find and the differences between these movies is so tremendous I hope you understand I’m not trying to compare them in any way.

There are some comparisons to be made, though I’m not equipped to actually make most of them. For instance, the  film was dedicated to the late Jean Eustache, but since I haven’t seen any of his movies (I have desperately wanted to see The Mother and the Whore for four years now; I just haven’t made it happen. I keep hoping it’ll find its way to DVD) I can’t really say if there’s any stylistic connection. Interestingly enough, though, Broken Flowers reminds me of a film from another late French director film: Truffaut’s The Man Who Loved Women. Yeah, I should elaborate, but I don’t have the energy.

Oh. And while I’ve often conceded I’m no judge of acting talent, I now wholeheartedly believe Jeffery Wright is one of the greatest actors walking the face of the earth.

And while I’m on the subject, let me just ask: How amazing is Tilda Swinton? How freaking amazing is Tilda Swinton?

[@Century CinéArts 6, 4:45pm]

I caught a pair of movies in the theatres yesterday (my thoughts on them are forthcoming), and so I saw a good number of trailers. Most of them? Crap. No interest in them whatsoever.

In fact, the only preview I saw yesterday which caught my interest in any way was The Constant Gardner, and that had nothing to do with quality (because I think it looks dumb), oh no no. See, it reunites Sunshine co-stars Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz. I’ve not written much in here about Hollywood star pairings but I honestly wish they happened more often these days. I just like it when a couple of actors end up in a series of unrelated movies together. And Weisz and Fiennes (two last names I always misspell, so forgive if I’ve cocked them up again) are just about the second-best pairing I can dream up. Those of you who know me in real life have heard me go on and on and on and on about the pairing I’d consider best, so I’ll spare you the added verbiage and just show a picture.

I can’t explain it. I just love seeing them on screen together and want to see them pair up again.

And, yes, despite my issues with his ubiquity, I admit that Jude Law is a fine idea for one half of a pairing, too. Weisz has been in a couple of films with him, too, yes, but one of them was Bent. Not much of her in that. Winslet and someone would be a good idea, too. Hell, I think Winslet-Depp would be a formidable recurring screen partnership indeed. And this despite the fact that I refuse to watch the one movie they have done together.