You know, I find it a little weird to be watching a sort of biopic about someone who was still a teenager when the film was made. Especially considering the events in the film had happened a good four years before the film was made. In fact, my fascination with the movie really has little to do with what was on the screen, and much more to do with the real lives behind it. After all, real-life Christiane’s troubles with drugs went well beyond the events of this film and, if Wikipedia is to be believed, only finally ended when her son was born.
It’s a puzzling thing to me, the idea of being as notable as she was (for infamous reasons) as young as she was. It seems to me that dealing with such fame would most likely be a very strange and unpleasant thing. And that played through my head as I watched the film (for which Christiane herself was an advisor).
Right after I watched the movie I found a twenty-two-year-old twice-translated interview with Christiane F. on the David Bowie fansite Teenage Wildlife. In it, when she’s asked how many times she’s read the book about her, she says “Perhaps around 3 times. I always tried to think that the girl on the book was not me. I also wanted to know why the others liked the book so much.” I find that such a very interesting answer. Again, it plays into my sense of how bewildering such unintended fame would be. I wonder how many times, if at all, she bothered watching the movie. I wonder if she’ll ever show her son the book or the movie. I wonder little things like that.
I also wonder, to be honest, why the dvd didn’t come with subtitles. My choices were original German or dubbed English. No subtitles anywhere. I’m kind of miffed about it. But the film itself made up for it because the filmmakers decided to drop in completely wrong music for a couple of scenes. Such things just make me smile. Because in many cases I’m sure the folks knew the timing was wrong but they just shrugged and said “99% of the audience won’t notice and the 1% that do will be entertained.” I’m certainly entertained because the David Bowie-related “oh, who cares!” decisions they make are just too funny to me. I mean, the movie is set in 1977 and yet there’s a scene where “Boys Keep Swinging” is playing. When you figure out how that would have been possible, call me.
I put that goofiness up there with the scene in Almost Famous where somehow, even though a particular moment is set in 1969, we see a copy of Blue. (And you know Cameron Crowe knows better—there’s another very wrong detail in that scene, but I’m forgetting what it is—so I chalk it up to again to “oh, who cares!”.) Or the scene in Auto Focus where Willem Dafoe pulls out a Four Tops album which didn’t yet exist. And then precedes to play a song which isn’t even on that album.
Being a pop music geek makes movies all the more fun.
The three Jean-Pierre Melville films I’ve seen to date are all about cops and robbers. Unsurpisingly so, I suppose, since the French love the subject. Seriously, there’s no question in my mind that the three countries which have turned criminal underwold cinema into an artform are (in no particular order) France, Japan, and the United States.
But even by the lofty standards of French crime movies, Le Cercle Rouge is ambitious indeed. Off the top of my head, there’s a fugitive criminal, a jewelry heist, and a ripped off mob boss who wants his damn money back—all plotlines worthy of their own film. Plus, we have little interludes which show us little character moments: for example, we twice see a cop go home to feed his three cats; we’re introduced to an ex-cop sharpshooter while he’s in the midst of horrifying hallucinations; and the cranky head of internal affairs takes every opportunity he can to let us know that all men are guilty… of… something. The only thing missing is a love story (which, given the pronounced lack of female characters is perhaps unsurprising). And I’m not sure that’s missing so much as merely the unseen prelude to one of the movie’s threads.
The heist itself is quite a lengthy sequence (it only occurs to me now that I should checked to see how long) pulled off almost entirely in silence. It’s wonderfully exciting, and it’s almost certainly inspired by the job in Rififi (which is, for my money, the greatest heist scene I’ve ever experienced).
It’s perhaps a little long (nearly 2.5 hours), but Le Cercle Rouge is a perfect example of the French crime movie and a quite enjoyable one, too.
So, getting straight to the point, Talladega Nights is basically a much improved Days of Thunder thanks to its better lead, its more believable scenes, and—all due respect to the wonderful Nicole Kidman—its hotter redhead.
Sorry, I couldn’t pass up an opening like that. Yes, I’m being slightly facetious, at least about the scenes. OK, and the redhead thing isn’t particularly true either (though I do find Amy Adams wonderfully attractive). But I’m being somewhat serious, too. And the connection goes beyond the subject matter for me. Days of Thunder was the movie which proved to me that Tom Cruise deserved to be hated. Talladega Nights proves to me, once and for all, that Will Ferrell deserves to be loved. Or as Dana Stevens writes:
There are some comic actors—Vince Vaughn and Adam Sandler come to mind—whose appeal is subject to debate. They’re acquired tastes, capable of veering from charming to annoying within a single film. But Will Ferrell’s funniness exists in a territory beyond dispute. If nothing else, the man wins through effort alone. No one else tries so hard to make us laugh, tossing out dignity, taste, and restraint like so much ballast along the way.
In my book, “[n]o one else tries so hard to make us laugh…” translates right into “Ferrell deserves to be loved”.
Anyway, I may love Will Ferrell, but I didn’t love Talladega Nights. I enjoyed it, but the jokes have mostly faded from my memory and soon all I’ll be left with is the good impression. Which is fine enough, of course. It was a fun two hours.
McKay and Ferrell really like making (and I seem to like watching) films which are as busy mocking the overused plot devices of Hollywood as they are making jokes about the subject matter. This isn’t a new approach to comedy, of course, but they’ve got a pretty good sense of it. And though I would hardly call Talladega Nights wall-to-wall hysterical, it’s the undoubtedly the best only Hollywood comedy I’ve seen in the theatres this year.
Recently I’ve been searching YouTube to see if scenes I’ve always wanted to point to from movies are showing up. And they are. Try as I might, I can’t resist the urge to point them out.
Here, for instance, was a scene I first saw when I was in high school. I’ve never been much a sleeper, and I had a habit of waking up at three in the morning. Thankfully, by the late 80s we had cable, so I often found something interesting to watch. (I’m pretty sure my love for movies came from all this early morning watching.) On one particular morning I was skimming the channels and I saw this interesting-looking thing on WNYW of all channels. It had already been a strange ride—and I’d caught the thing in progress—when this scene started. I was no stranger to band performance scenes by then, but this one was simply very weird to me. Almost everyone was standing still; they looked like an army of mannequins. And then I said “Wait, that was Jimmy Page!” I knew it wasn’t Led Zeppelin so I thought “This must be the Yardbirds. And the guy taking out some anger on his guitar must be Jeff Beck.” But… why? Honestly, I still don’t know. But boy what an impression it left.
The movie, of course, turned out to be Blowup, a thing I now look on with incredible fondness but which really left me confused for quite a long time. It would take me a couple of years and the help of resources I didn’t have in high school to confirm that the group on stage was The Yardbirds. I’m not sure why, but that’s always blown my mind.
(And in case you’ve never seen the film, here’s the trailer:)
Yep, this was my first time seeing it. (And here’s another shocker: I still haven’t seen Peckinpaugh’s The Wild Bunch, another western from 1969.)
I had a blast. Two great on-screen personas, a fun script, and solid direction from the guy who brought us Slap Shot and an admirable adapation of Slaughterhouse-Five, among other things. What’s not to love?
It’s absolutely no wonder why George Roy Hill worked with Newman and Redford again four years later for (my favorite of his films) The Sting. When those two were on the screen together, they were perfect.
Last year I found myself intrigued but not always pleased by the work of Korean filmmaker Kim Ki-Duk (creator of films like 3 Iron & Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring) because of how he worked with silence. Sometimes it felt forced, but it was always interesting. I just have this ever-present fascination with the use of silence in talkies, which also explains my consistent attempts to watch Tsai Ming-liang’s films, even though I find them frustrasting.
Le Samourai is exquisitely quiet and in just the way I like, too. Alain Delon barely wastes a syllable; in fact, often the only character with lines in Delon’s scenes in is his pet bird—and while I’m not fluent in cheeps and chirps, I think the bird is be ad-libbing.
It is quite clear that Jim Jarmusch rather liked this film because its influence is all over Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. You know, it would be quite something if 1999 Forest Whitaker and 1967 Alain Delon could have teamed up for some weird reluctant pairing where they never actually speak to one another.
