Moot Point

Subtitle: “I know three kinds of karate: jujitsu, aikidio, and regular karate.”

1. Lonely Boy (Wolf Koenig & Roman Kroiter, 1962): This might just be my favourite Canadian movie. It’s a documentary examining the stardom of Paul Anka in 1962, when he was 19 years old and still a mega teen idol. It’s like a revelation for its time in the way it acknowledges the total constructedness of Anka’s image. I love it when his manager says: “We had a nosejob.” It was also hugely influential in the verite movement, in that it never pretends that what it’s shooting is really “verite”: it constantly reminds you that the camera is there; the filmmakers even ask Anka to “redo a scene.” So to sum up: revolutionary in its form, and also really prescient in its subject matter. They shot this thing before the Beatles.
2. Nobody Waved Goodbye (Don Owen, 1964): This might be my least favourite Canadian movie. One of my students said it was “like Catcher in the Rye but less good.” Like, I get why it’s historically important: it’s a very early Canadian feature, it had commercial success, it would have been very timely. But seriously, it’s really hard to watch. The “realistic” acting style with the improvised dialogue hasn’t aged well, nor has the whole whiny “I don’t want to be just like my parents” line. (Speaking of which, how sad was it on Project Runway when they made prom dresses and one of the designers asked the girls what they wanted to do when they grew up and like eight of them were like “Nothing! I just want to sit around.” and one of them chimed in with “Public relations.” Youth of tomorrow, I fear for you.)
3. Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007): I was seeing this mostly out of duty, because of the whole Oscar nomination. I adored the book, so I was really worried about how they would translate a lot of it to film, and I didn’t really think it would make a good movie. I was wrong! The movie plays as much more of an old-Hollywood melodrama than the book did, but I mean that in the best way possible. I loved the typewriter sounds that morphed into music cues. I loved Keira Knightley’s costumes. I loved how Briony had the same haircut for like 70 years. Also, while I wasn’t totally blown away and I think it was a bit showy, I have to give Joe Wright props for that endless Dunkirk evacuation tracking shot.
4. Deep Red (Dario Argento, 1975): Oh man, Dario Argento, where have you been all my life? This movie’s awesome. It goes from graphic murder scenes (with bright red 1970s movie blood, it always looks like paint) to these wacky romantic comedy sequences with the plucky girl reporter. So skillful, and so completely strange.
5. Suspiria (Argento, 1977): But not as strange as Suspiria. It’s got the gothic fairy tale aspect of I Know Who Killed Me, completely with insanely unmotivated red and blue light and stained glass all over the place, only amazing. What clinches it is when Suzy goes to see the psychiatrist Frank Mandel (played by Udo Keir, who was at that time as far as I can tell best known for playing Dracula) who helpfully tells her that the supernatural is totally just the result of feminine hysteria, and they meet in front of the most modernist building ever. It is obviously a real building, also, which contrasts with the crazy expressionist artificiality of the dance school where the movie takes place. So awesome, so scary. There are maggots! Nothing’s scarier than maggots.
6. Don’t Look Now (Nicholas Roeg, 1973): I weirdly didn’t remember the end of this movie when I suggested Alex and I should watch it. I seriously remembered “their daughter dies, they go to Venice, have sex, get lost, get separated, and then something deeply disturbing happens.” I guess I must have repressed the ending? This is such a classic. The sex scene is the most famous, but I couldn’t find it online. Here is the opening sequence, equally awesome:
7. Vanishing Point (Richard C. Sarafian, 1971): The best way I can start to tell you about Vanishing Point is how awful it was that it got remade as a TV movie in 1997 with Viggo Mortensen and Jason Priestly (in the role of the deejay who in the original is named “Super Soul” and gets beat up by racists), but instead of him just racing across the country on a bet, he is doing it because his wife is in labour. Anyway, in the amazing 1971 version that we watched, he is a Vietnam vet and becomes a counter-culture hero as he constantly outdrives the cops, but checks to make sure everyone’s okay after every accident he causes. (This is one of the car movies that was a big inspiration for Death Proof.) What’s incredible is how there’s like 40 minutes of the movie that is almost like avant-garde, just him driving and all these side-long zooms in on his profile that go superclose. I was pretty sure that Super Soul was in fact a manifestation of Kowalski’s soul until like, halfway through. Honestly, you could still argue that he is, but the movie gives you enough of a sense of the world outside the car that basically everyone else in the movie would also have to be a hallucination or magic or something. Still, his radio station is KOW. Come on!
8. Hard Eight (PT Anderson, 1996): I honestly had no idea that PT Anderson had made a movie before Boogie Nights until the guy in the video store recommended it to me like two days ago. Who knew? It’s pretty great: I forgot when Gwyneth Paltrow was a good actress. It’s got this quiet tension that I couldn’t place, but I completely got what it reminded me of when I saw that Anderson cited Jean-Pierre Melville as an influence. The static shot compositions, the muted colours. He’s definitely still Anderson though: imagine John C. Reilly delivering the karate line I quoted at the top of this post. See? It’s like the ultimate John C. Reilly role: he’s a good guy, but kind of stupid. Everyone in this movie is, really, which keeps you at a distance, but it works. It creates sympathy, it doesn’t alienate you.

I was going to be all “How did I see 8 movies this week?” but one of them is 26 minutes long. This week the goal was to see some movies that don’t involve entrails. Maybe next week I’ll get to some actual comedies or something.