Three films a day

#22, 1/28 – Flightplan (2005) (gitn)

The first thing which came into my mind when I considered this writeup was how Flightplan was released maybe five weeks after Red Eye. Add to that the fact that there’s another plane-based thriller coming this summer and all I could say was “Hello, zeitgeist”. For the first time since the 70s, air travel is officially scary. Red Eye tread very softly, never really positing the idea that the plane itself was dangerous. No. Cillian Murphy was dangerous, but he wasn’t a threat to all of the passengers. In fact, that the action on Red Eye happens on a plane, as opposed to say, a high-speed train—or a bus, even—is pretty much down to a writing choice.

Flightplan is very different. While it starts as a flight like any other, the nervous condition of the passengers is soon exposed. And brilliantly so.

(Please Note: I include some relatively mild spoilers in the rest of this writeup.)

At one point, as people are boarding the plane, Kyle (Jodie Foster) looks quizzically at a pair of Arab men. We’re not given an immediate explanation for the beat, but the card had been dealt. The card gets played later on in what was certainly the moment of the film for me, because it underscored the prejudices of many of the passengers. And if this kind of rush to judgement seems heavy-handed or somehow too on-the-nose, may I point your attention to the infamous dry run which wasn’t.

Kyle is looking for her child, you see. They boarded the plane together, but Kyle fell asleep and now her daughter has gone missing. The flight crew haven’t found her, and the daughter’s mysteriously not on the manifest. After searching most of the nooks on the plane and finding nothing, the flight crew are growing increasingly convinced that this child simply never boarded the plane. Suddenly, though, Kyle realizes where she believes she’s seen those Arab men before, and she dashes through the cabin, loudly accusing these two men of spying on her home and kidnapping her daughter. “Yes”, she says, “I saw them last night staring into my daughter’s room”.

Now, wait one fucking second. That’s pure lunacy. (Yes, there is a scene of two men looking into her daughter’s room at the start of the film, but take off the tin foil hat for a second.) Not only does she lack proof of any sort, these men would have to be rather crafty to carry a six-year-old girl and hide her somewhere on the plane without anyone noticing. And, to what end?! Kidnapping a six-year-old child on an airplane would qualify as a fairly stupid act. You can’t get her off the airplane. And if you have no intention of getting her off the airplane, well, there are certainly more effective ways to start a hijacking. And so on. Even by the astonishingly lax rules of the Hollywood thriller, there is no way these men could have done what Kyle was accusing them of doing. (And, thankfully, the film realizes this. It’s just a few of the characters who don’t.)

But. As this all plays out and Kyle throws down her accusation, the passengers murmur. And what does one say? “Something’s not right with those guys”. I actually sat up when I heard that. Sat up, paused the film, rewound it and listened again just to make sure. Yep. Something’s not right with those guys. Hello, zeitgeist. (Or should I say “Hello Annie Jacobsen”?)

Were it not for that one bit, I’d probably be writing about how silly the rest of Flightplan is about now. You know how I am about most thrillers.

#21, 1/26 – Time of the Wolf (2003) (dvd)

I’ve got a strong appreciation for films which deposit us in a bad situation without bothering to tell us why things are happening. That’s because in the midst of an emergency a question like “why?” doesn’t matter much to the people on the ground. If zombies swarm the streets of Chicago tomorrow morning, I’m not going to ask why; I’m going to get away, or die. Sure, the answer to “why?” may lead to the eventual defeat of the zombies. But fixing the problem comes after you survive the problem. (Well, if surviving is even an option. Consider Last Night, which is about the end of the world. No one says why, because, um, who cares? The world is ending, at midnight conveniently enough, so who gives a toss as to why?)

Anyway, don’t let my yammering about zombies distract: Time of the Wolf isn’t a zombie movie. (Nor, for the record, is it a wolf movie.) Well, at least there aren’t any zombies in the movie. I suppose zombies could be part of the overall problem, but that’s highly unlikely. All we really know for sure, and all we need to know, is that civilization no longer exists for these characters. We’re not even told exactly when things started going wrong, or how temporary or local the catastrophe might be. We do get tiny some details, though: Notably, there are still some radio broadcasts, trains still travel, supplies are getting shipped to other areas—suggesting that there is still some civilization outside of this failed area.

Oh, but come to think of it there is a zombie angle to all this, after all. As I watched Flightplan (which obviously isn’t a zombie movie, but bear with me) Saturday morning I marveled at how, in film, air travel has become menacing again. But it wasn’t until just now, though, that I realized it’s bigger than that. What’s becoming menacing, actually, is, well, people. Under what circumstances might the guy next to me slit my throat? Could the guy in the seat in front of me have a bomb? Will my next door neighbor break in one night and steal my food?

Or, if I want my point to actually be kind of coherent, I’ll have to quote someone else. While talking about the recent glut of zombie pictures, Scott at schizzes and flows wrote:

It doesn’t take much background reading to recognize in these gory situations our own insecurities regarding privacy and spatial separation. The suburbs, to pick on them yet again, often resist communal relations through carefully maintained landscaping to outright gating. In many ways, good fences make good neighbors, though maybe not in the way Frost really hoped. Many of us don’t know our neighbors’ names, let alone who they are, what they do, etc. It may be an oversimplification to say that this unfamiliarity results in greater suspicion, nevertheless “fear of the other” seems central to life in ‘burbs. In many zombie flicks, the greatest chills come when those we recognize but don’t necessarily know suddenly turn ravenous, transgressing the real or imagined boundaries established between “us” and “them.”

Precisely. And while the neighbors have always been scary, they’re getting scarier. It’s bad enough if the guy you passed in the grocery store the other day dies and comes back as a flesh-eating creature. But the only blame you can put on the poor fella is that he wasn’t fast enough to escape whoever bit him. Things might be much, much more frightening if that same guy chooses to harm you once civilization collapses. And he might, you know. When the illusions and perceived comforts of the First World go away, what might that guy do? If civilized society dies, do the memes which permeate it (racism, classism, sexism, etc) die too? Add to that, of course, the standards like “Who do you trust?”, “Why do you trust them?” and “Who will let you down?” and you’ve got an idea of the questions Time of the Wolf asks.

I’ve now seen all four of the pictures Haneke’s done since 2000, and I think very highly of each. True, I wasn’t so hot about The Piano Teacher when I first saw it, and it’s still my least favorite of the bunch, but it’s definitely started to grow on me. I wonder what Haneke will do next. Whatever it is, I very much look forward to seeing it.

#20, 1/25 – Brokeback Mountain (2005) (gitn)

Egoyan one day, Ang Lee the next. There was a time, not too long ago, where if you’d asked me to name my three favorite contemporary directors they’d have both been on the list. Now? Not so sure. Folks like Lynne Ramsay, Arnaud Desplechin, David Gordon Green, Michael Haneke (more on him in the next writeup), and Laurent Cantet all come to mind now, along with Lee and Egoyan. How much do I like Ang Lee, though? The only feautre of his I haven’t seen is Sense and Sensibility. The only feature of his I haven’t given at least four stars to, besides Sense and Sensibility, is The Hulk (and I gave that three).

Yes, that means I gave his other western, the little-mentioned 1999 film, Ride with the Devil, four stars. And that’s despite the fact that I couldn’t look at Tobey Maguire in his long hair and Western getup without giggling. In fact, I consider the admittedly spotty Ride with the Devil nothing less than a great western, and I think Brokeback Mountain, its spiritual cousin, is even greater.

Brokeback Mountain proves me wrong, because it presents to me the very thing I keep saying Hollywood can’t make anymore—a solid, quiet tragedy. A tragic romance. A sad and lonely western.

It is gorgeous. And that’s down to Rodrigo Prieto’s cinematography, and the Larry McMurty/Diana Ossana screenplay, and, well, just about everything else. In it, you have the lyricism and beauty of Lee’s earlier Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon added to the quiet pain of so many people. In fact, even more than a romance I’d consider this a study in the ripple effect of pain and disappointment. It starts, and is at its strongest, with Ennis and Jack, but it pushes out to Alma and Lureen and Cassie and even Alma Jr.

And that it worked for me is down to the actors. All of them. Yes, Ledger and Gyllenhaal both do what I consider a wonderful job (especially Ledger), but I think Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway especially help make this movie what it is with interesting performances in (literally, in Williams’ case) tiny spaces.

#19, 1/24 – Where the Truth Lies (2005) (gitn)

It’s a little sad that the first film to disappoint me this year—although I still liked it, kind of—comes from one of the directors I’m always championing, but that’s just how things go sometimes. It’s a double shame to me since I’ve often thought an Egoyan-made whodunit would rock my socks. His love of repetition and shifting context seem like good fits with the genre, after all. But I didn’t really think it through. That is, I’m not sure straight genre pictures suit many (any?) of my favorite directors, and I think this whodunit lacks the oomph it might have had if the director didn’t conform so tightly to convention.

A bias alert may be in order, I think: I’m pretty sure if this very film had been done shot-for-shot by another director (I know such a thing isn’t possible, but…), I would probably be even harder on it than I’m being now. But even when the things I consider Egoyan’s strongest virtues are muted I still manage to take something from it. Yeah, I think I’m biased. Well, film watching is a personal business, though, so how can I not be biased?

In any event, I chalk up my displeasure with this film to Telefilm Canada. That’s right, I’m blaming Canada.

I pay a fair amount of attention to English Canadian film. Egoyan was my entry drug in the early 90s, but I slowly discovered I had an interest in the themes and ideas Canadian filmmakers explored throughout the 90s. I could probably ramble on about this for a while, moving from Lynne Stopkewich’s Kissed to Don McKellar’s Last Night, but I’m pretty sure I’d just delete the section just before I pressed the “publish” button anyway, so consider yourself spared. Besides, my adoration is tangential to the real point. (Yes, sometimes I have a real point. Be patient with me, though.)

I’ve been fascinated with the crisis north of the border sparked by Richard Stursberg, a recent head of Telefilm Canada. See, the Canadian government subsidizes some of the country’s cinema (and then, for some fucked up reason, leaves these films to languish in indie theatres in big cities so that positively no one seems them). Stursberg came in and decided that Canadian films needed to make a bigger financial impression in the country; in 2002, I think it was, English Canadian film accounted for 1% of Canada’s box office receipts. Aiming to up that share to 5%, Stursberg mandated more commercially-focused features. Of course, and this is the silly part, they only have $100M a year to dole out to the nation’s filmmakers. That’s chicken feed. Were he asked to film a third grader’s five-minute dance routine with a 1987 Camcorder, Michael Bay would probably bring the finished product in at about 100 million dollars (while Peter Jackson would spend twice as much money and somehow make it four hours long). And yet Stursberg thought, with that kind of money, they could make films which would compete with the things churned out by Hollywood?! Good. Fucking. Luck.

It didn’t work. Of course it didn’t work. And Where The Truth Lies was created in this environment.

Right after he finished shooting this film—and soon after Stursberg had left Telefilm Canada, actually—Egoyan said: “When I was starting out, [Telefilm Canada] helped develop a whole generation of filmmakers who were able to export a sense of the Canadian identity to the rest of the world. In the past few years, we’ve been obsessed with the notion of box office, often to the detriment of what we so carefully built.” Now, as a plain old Yankee I couldn’t define “the Canadian identity” if I wanted to, but I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that Where The Truth Lies is certainly more concerned with box office than Egoyan normally is.

I’m not saying something which aims for broad appeal is instantly bad. But, well, looking through the movies Egoyan’s made, he doesn’t have (or seem to want) too much broad appeal. Yes, I said “or seem to want”. Really. As he once told Saturday Night magazine “My fantasy was to get into the festivals where the films I adored were feted. My entire ambition was based on that, as opposed to the box office.” And when he aims for the commercial side of things, I think he’s going against his own strengths.

Back to the general idea of Canadian filmmaking, I think it’s Don McKellar who really nailed the issue in a 2004 interview with CinemaScope. Sure, he’s basically saying exactly what I quoted Egoyan as saying above. I just prefer the way he says it:

scope: [Childstar] also comes out of a time when, as you said, you were having all of these conversations with Richard Stursberg about Telefilm Canada’s new policies.

mckellar: Oh yes, the film clearly comes out of my feelings about Telefilm or what national cinemas should do, or the response that national cinemas can make, or the situations they are put in. And obviously I feel that it’s pointless and naive to take on American films head on. Or to condescend towards a perceived audience expectation. It’s pointless and humiliating. I tried, and lots of people have been trying, to change that policy. It’s a policy that Australia and England had, and then they were embarrassed about their national cinema, and then they reversed that policy. We’re behind by about five years. I was trying to explain to Stursberg that it’s not elitist. It’s actually the most practical policy is to do personal films; it’s what Canada’s always been able to do, and it’s why people would and should remain in Canada.

Couldn’t agree more. Here’s hoping, now that Stursberg has left, that the Canadians get back to making those crazy films involving deviant sex, utterly absurd bets, personal loss, and body changes, among other things (the fun thing is I could have put Crash under three of the four). I’d put my favorite of the demented (and more than a little frightening) institution that is Canadian cinema up against any other nation’s output.

#18, 1/23 – Bullitt (1968) (dvd)

OK, I’ve not said anything profoundly stupid in a while, so let me throw out a real humdinger: Steve McQueen was something of a national treasure. Actually, I don’t even believe that myself. I know nothing about the man beyond his on-screen charisma (and boy did he ever have charisma), but I like his films immensely. Even Bullitt. It’s almost incomprehensible at times—or maybe that was my own fault for watching it with the French subtitles on for a lark—but it’s still damned enjoyable.

Bullitt is famous for one reason, of course: the chase. And, well, the chase is absolutely worth the time if you ask me. Steve McQueen racing around the streets of San Francisco in a Mustang. For more than nine and a half minutes. Dude. What’s not to love? Then again I love the five-minute scene Tarkovsky has of highway driving (just driving; no talking, no chasing, no weird sex… just driving) in Solyaris, so apparently I am predisposed to like long driving sequences. As long as they weren’t done by Michael Bay.

Yes, I really watched it with the French subtitles on. Yes, I had my reasons. See, after noticing how little expressions weren’t being translated in a French film I’d watched recently (which one? I don’t remember) I figured I’d turn on the French subtitles to see if I noticed the same issues. And boy did I ever. Ah well, translation just works that way. I wish I was comfortable enough with French (and Spanish and Portuguese and Russian and Japanese and … ) so that I wouldn’t need these damned subtitles. Ah well.

#17, 1/22 – Transamerica (2005) (tofw)

I’m having trouble finding proper words these days, which is probably part of the reason I’ve been so behind in these writeups (the other reason, frankly, is I’ve been busy). While walking from the theatre to the Davis el stop with my local movie buddy the first word that came to mind to describe Transamerica was… “sweet”. The first and only word, actually. Sweet. Alas, it’s been nearly a week and I haven’t found a better word yet. Except perhaps “human”, which, in my mind, is pretty much what I most want from a movie.

[@Century 12 Evanston]

#16, 1/21 – Portrait of Jennie (1948) (dvd)

I really don’t understand why I’m a sucker for certain kinds of romances. Hell, I can’t even tell you which qualities work for me and which don’t. I just don’t know.

But I really liked this one, and again it’s at least partly down to the screen presence of the actors. I’m not going to say something bold and ridiculous about Jennifer Jones, because I know I’d regret it. Especially since I’ve only seen two, or maybe three (I can’t recall if I’ve seen Love Letters), of her pictures. But in Song of Bernadette Jennifer Jones made me believe she was, in fact, a saint. Though I doubt I would be satisfied with the story were I to watch it again, I’m sure I’d still be taken with Jones’ incredible luminescence.

I consider her perhaps even more powerful in Portrait of Jennie, which is saying a lot. But it wasn’t just her. I thought the entire film was quite lovely and engaging and beautiful. Really. Beautiful story. Beautiful photography. My goodness. I was so impressed with the look of the film I found the name of the cinematagrapher, Joseph Arthur—a legend in the field, only to discover he actually died of a heart attack while shooting this film. Such a shame. I hope he loved what he was doing, because what he left us with is some of the most lovable stuff I’ve ever seen.

#15, 1/20 – Kings and Queen (2004) (dvd)

It’s been an enjoyable January. 18 (or 19… I’ve lost count) films in (yeah, the other writeups are coming), I still haven’t seen something I’ve regretted—sure, I’m still not entirely certain I got what 9 Songs was all about, but it wasn’t the train wreck I was warned it would be.

I’d actually wanted Kings and Queen to be the first movie I saw this year, but clearly things worked out differently. Regardless, my joy with the film is down to Arnaud Desplechin and his cast. Desplechin makes the sorts of character-centric movies I can’t seem to get enough of. And he works with actors like Mathieu Amalric and Emmanuelle Devos (who co-starred together in this, and in Desplechin’s earlier My Sex Life) and that’s another solid bonus. I’m no judge of acting talent. But there are actors (and combinations of actors) whose screen presence I like. And Amalric and Devos, together or apart, have that odd something I like in my actors.

Anyway, it’s a film about finding a measure of freedom. Of shaking loose of ghosts and guilts. And what I appreciate so much about Desplechin is that he can spend two and a half hours exploring these people honestly and never once does he get to judging them.

What’s more, there’s a scene where Mathieu breakdances.

No, really.

#14, 1/20 – Different for Girls (1996) (tivo)

I looked at my TiVo Friday evening to see which movies I’d recorded in 2004 and not yet watched. There were six of them: September, Sex in a Cold Climate, Unconstitutional: The War on Our Civil Liberties, Different for Girls, The Navigators, and Mildred Pierce.

What made me choose Different For Girls? Well, I sincerely believe that when in doubt, one should always go for a movie whose title references a Joe Jackson song. (Funny, I don’t get to use that solution very often.) And, as a bonus, Jackson’s “It’s Different for Girls” even shows up in the movie. As does Wreckless Eric’s “Whole Wide World”, another song I quite adore.

And speaking of adoring things, I love romances. A sweet, hopeful romance is sometimes exactly what I’m looking for, and Different For Girls certainly fit the bill. Better still, it’s a sweet, hopeful romance which asks some questions about gender along the way. Oh, and it features just a shade of self-discovery as well. It’s not an airtight piece of filmmaking, but I don’t really need romances to be more than what they are. You know?

#13, 1/19 – Withnail and I (1987) (dvd)

For reasons I probably won’t be able to articulate well, Withnail & I strikes me as the brilliant, wittier British cousin to Kevin Reynolds’ rarely-admired but strangely impressive (to me, anyway) Fandango. Here I go trying to explain the whole connection. I probably won’t be able to get as deep as I want, but indulge me. See, on the surface it’s easy. Both are, essentially, about the end. The end of an era, of a state of being. The end of college in one case, the end of the 60s in another. More importantly, they’re actually about the ends of friendships. Of a unit coming apart.

You can call it coming-of-age if you’d like, but I think that term’s a tad condescending to the characters involved. You may think Fandango’s Groovers a bit childish (except, perhaps for Judd Nelson’s oh-so-serious Phil), as twenty-something (or thirty-something, for that matter) men tend to be. But one has to wonder what’s so wonderful about leaving the happy bubble of university life to fight, and perhaps die, in an imperial war in Southeast Asia? (Hmmm, there I go again.) And in the case of Withnail & I, well, they certainly weren’t living responsible late twenty-something lives, but then, the murder and all-bran and rape is sometimes a bit much to wake up to. So there’s drinking and drugging.

But the connection in my head is stronger than just the growing apart angle. Alas, here’s where I lose the trail. I mean, there are tons of movies about this sort of thing (Ghost World is a more recent example, for instance), yet as the end credits rolled only Fandango jumped into my head. (Fortunately for me, nine times out of ten, it’s only after the film has finished that the comparisons start getting made in my head.) Why only Fandango? I don’t know. It may take me weeks or months to figure it out. It may take a rewatch of Fandango, which is probably in my future, anyway.

It’s there, though. There’s a genetic connection I can’t pinpoint, but I feel it.

(A special thanks to Edna for gifting this to me. It’s fantastic, and I know I’ll enjoy watching it again.)

#12, 1/18 – Fear and Trembling (2003) (dvd)

Amélie: When I was little, I wanted to become God. Later, I lowered my goal and settled for Christ. When I realized it was impossible, I resolved to become a martyr. But that didn’t work either.
Fubuki: Then what?
Amélie: Now, I’m an accountant at Yumimoto. I can’t sink any lower.

Massive multinational corporations are occasionally funny. Fear and Trembling, which is at least partially about working inside a massive multinational corporation, is occasionally hilarious.

Although it would be easy to compare Fear and Trembling with another 2003 westerner-in-Japan film featuring another actress I adore I’m not going to go there. And, of course, since the text of the film is clearly a clash-of-cultures sort of thing, I could spend a lot of time going on about cultural differences. But I didn’t read the film that way, because it’s dangerous business indeed to extrapolate much of anything from one westerner’s narrative of life in another culture.

Instead, I took it at the level where it resonates with me the most: One person trying to fit in. Well, it’s more than that, actually. One person trying to reconcile their ideas about work with the reality of what it’s like to work inside a massive corporation. (This is also ground covered by that wonderfully goofy musical, How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.) As Amélie notes at the beginning of the movie: “Yumimoto was one of the largest corporations in the universe… At Yumimoto money went beyond human comprehension”. I can totally relate. Just before I started college and then later, shortly after I graduated, I worked for a massive multinational corporation at a level comparable to Amélie’s. And while her experiences may have been different in some key ways, many of her problems originated from tensions I understand all too intimately. No matter how low down the ladder you may be, life inside a very, very big corporation is a very, very special kind of insane.

So, yeah. I can’t tell you if the characters shown in the film are sticking to stereotypes, or if they betray some other limitations in the author’s vision. But I can tell you that the situations in the movie are funny. And they ring oh-so fucking true to me. (I’d not used the word “massive” in this space before today, so it seems I’m filling my quota now. Massive. Massive. Massive.)

I know my Sylvie Testud worshipping must be getting old, but fact is I kind of love her. She’s a supermagnet, my favorite new-to-me actor since I stumbled across Ludivine Sagnier in 2003. Like Jessica Winter wrote in the Village Voice, “Sylvie Testud may well be cinema’s successor to Isabelle Huppert”. Let’s hope. (And I also hope we find a successor to Katrin Cartlidge. Please world.)

#11, 1/16 – Au hasard Balthazar (1966) (dvd)

Sometimes my stupid jokes come in handy.

Several years ago I was talking with a friend and she asked me if I remembered the name of a particular movie… “you know, the one with the donkey that’s about the true meaning of Christmas”. My response, unsurprisingly, was “every movie featuring a donkey is about the meaning of Christmas. Every last one”. Seeing this as an opportunity, I preceded to outline what I called Christmas Donkey theory, and I was, I’ve been told, quite persuasive. I’m one for relating to movies in silly ways and this predates the genre another friend and I defined in 2002 or thereabouts: the ever-popular, and ever-funnier, “I’m With Chimp”.

Anyway, when I dropped Au hasard Balthazar into the DVD player, I knew nothing at all about it, except that it was directed by Bresson. But I’ll be damned if Christmas Donkey theory doesn’t apply. Well, almost. Balthazar, the donkey in question, can be taken as a Christ figure most certainly, if you’re in the mood for that kind of analysis. And wherever there’s a Christ figure, you’re just a hop, skip, and a hee haw from finding out about the true meaning of Christmas. There are even moments which make the movie seem a tad like the passion of the Balthazar (which, yes, I can hear you say would make it more about the true meaning of Easter. I hear you. And I’m listening. Really. I am.)

Bad joking aside, I think the power in the movie comes from seeing Balthazar deal with the film’s different human characters. I found it all strangely compelling, even as I struggled to hold the film at the center of my attention because I had a headache the first time I watched it. Yeah, like with Pickpocket, I watched it on consecutive nights and certainly had a greater appreciation for it on rewatch. And, now, three days after I last watched it, I’m considering watching it again. That’s often the sign of a movie that’s going to have a lasting effect on me.

#10, 1/15 – Caché (2005) (tofw)

Possibly the biggest mystery about Caché is whether Michael Haneke actually wants us to figure out the mystery in Caché . I’m not sure he does. From the opening moments of the movie certain questions come to mind: Who is doing this? Why are they doing it? What is their goal? And so on. We get characters with motive and opportunity, but we never get a conclusion. Do we need one? No, clearly not. The point of the mystery, in my opinion, was to show how guilty the protagonist felt about things he’d done long in the past. Still, even without a resolution, did Haneke think he’d given us enough to piece together the mystery? Or did he not care about the mystery at all?

I immediately respected Haneke the day I finally got through Code Inconnu, which (as I think I’ve mentioned before) is a film I kind of worship. Maybe it’s Stockholm Syndrome, though, since I had a very hard time with it the first two times I attempted to watch it. On the third time of asking, though, I adapted to its shocking rhythm, and became a huge fan of its approach. See, here’s the thing about Code Inconnu: We don’t see the scenes finish. The camera pulls away from every scene jarringly, prematurely. Many conversations are simply abandoned. Maybe this is why I think Haneke doesn’t care about the mystery in Caché . He’s shown a blatant disregard for filmmaking conventions before—though he’s willing to stick to them if he’s got a rich character to work with like, oh, The Piano Teacher—so maybe he thought the whos and the whys of the mystery were, in effect, as irrelevant as those discarded bits of conversation in Code Inconnu.

Oh, I’m not sure. I enjoyed it, though, and I’ve enjoyed talking to one of my friends about it, too. Good enough, eh?

[@ the Music Box Theatre]

#9, 1/14 – The Exorcist (1973) (dvd)

It’s true. I hadn’t seen The Exorcist before, well, this past weekend. And I’ve finally caught it a mere 13 months after I first saw (rather, after I first stayed awake through) Friedkin’s other well-renowned piece of 70s cinema, The French Connection. And it’s interesting to me that both of these films, coming in the pre-blockbuster era, strike me just as much for what they aren’t as what they are. The reputations of both these movies precede them, and it’s nearly impossible to go through life as a film-addict without having seen clips of Popeye Doyle racing an elevated train or the possessed little Regan MacNeil doing that thing with her head.

But what’s amazing is how calmly and slowly these movies build themselves up. And how the director does not put in action scenes just to have them. After all, two of the key deaths in the Exorcist happen off-screen! Imagine! Possessed girl, people dying, and we don’t actually get to see it all.

I know it’s very easy to say “they don’t make them like they used to”, which is precisely what I just did. (And what I’ve done quite a few times in this blog.) Moreover, I know it’s just as true for the people who caught the Exorcist in 1973, some of whom were probably scandalized by language and images which make 1956’s The Bad Seed look like an ebullient little Disney movie with singing birds and talking rabbits. But I’m not making a value judgement here. They don’t make them like they used to, and I find the differences interesting.

I’m amused, more than a little, by the time Friedkin took to show the flailings of medical science. Ritalin. Invasive procedures. (Update: Yes, clearly I saw the version with the extra footage. I didn’t know which scenes weren’t in the original until just this moment.) Psychological diagnoses. Lots and lots and lots of flailing around, trying to get a handle on something they simply couldn’t understand. This, to me, is the most impressive part of the movie, if only because sure, demonic possession is something of a strawman (that’s my new catchphrase, I think), but modern medicine often is a guessing game.

(That thing about staying awake through the French Connection was not a slam, by the way. I tried to watch it once in college with my roommates, but I wasn’t feeling so well and I fell asleep about fifteen minutes in. I rather like The French Connection, actually.)

Weird coincidence: I saw The Exorcist the same night I caught the premiere of The Book of Daniel, which features Ellen Burstyn, the mother in The Exorcist, as an Episcopal bishop. Weird, huh? I wish I could say I liked The Book of Daniel, since it’s treading on ground I’ve always found interesting, but I don’t. I love the cast pretty much from top to bottom, but that’s not enough. See, it feels to me kind of like a Desperate Housewives-style riffing on Seventh Heaven. Since I dislike Desperate Housewives quite a lot, I’m not going to react well to any show I feel is picking up its cues from that show.

#8, 1/13 – La Captive (2001) (dvd)

I need to see more things directed by Chantal Ackerman. I’m pretty sure I’ve only seen two of her films now (both involving Sylvie Testud), and I’m now very curious to see more of what’s she done in her career. This may seem slightly odd since I only barely liked La Captive, but there’s something about her approach and choices which make me eager to keep digging through her catalog. I don’t have much more to say about this one right now.