Moot Point

I didn’t see as many movies as I’d planned to this reading week.

1. Persepolis (Vincent Paronnaud & Marjane Satrapi, 2007): I am a pretty big fan of the books, so I was kind of pre-sold on this one. I loved the way they translated the art style: everything still looked drawn, but it all moved three-dimensionally. It’s such a personal story and I love that they weren’t afraid to mix unabashedly cartoony sequences (like the “love” stuff where she’s running around in fields of flowers and then it just…breaks) and also to be serious about the Bad Things big and small that went on around the revolution and the Iran-Iraq war and so forth. It’s hard to place stories about people’s lives against the background of big historical movements (see Forrest Gump) but Persepolis gets it right.
2. Jamón, jamón (Bigas Luna, 1992): So the first thing I should tell you about this movie is that Javier Bardem’s giant penis is a major plot point. The second this is that so are Penelope Cruz’s breasts. It’s very…Spanish. Matadors and ham and tortillas (the omelet kind, not the flatbread kind). And lots of mother issues: Penelope Cruz’s mom is a prostitute with a pet parrot and the male hero’s mom has a creepy Oedipal attachment. I did enjoy watching it — it’s delightfully weird and the parrot scene was almost out of David Lynch — but at the end i just kind of felt confused.
3. Sex and Lucia (Julio Medem, 2001): So they weren’t kidding about the sex. The first half of the movie is like borderline pornography. You even see erect penises, and they are treated as sexy, not as, giant phallic penetrators of women. The sex does kind of seem to have a point, as it gets increasingly disturbing (a girl masturbating to porn starring her mom?) until it more or less kills someone (KIND OF A SPOILER). In the end, I found myself just kind of shrugging. The main character (Lucia’s boyfriend) is a novelist, and it does that cute art film thing that happened a lot in the late 90s and early 2000s where the whole movie turns out to just be a narrative game turning in on itself, and it was a little too cute in the end for the depths of weird that it was in the middle.
4. All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999)
5. The Flower of My Secret (Pedro Almodóvar, 1995): I still love you, 1990s Pedro Almodóvar! I kind of have nothing new to say about these movies, except that I’m glad I’m still enjoying them.

Oh, and the Oscars: I was psyched for No Country and the Coens and that Once song, but man, it was a boring show except for Tilda Swinton.

My top 10 movies of 2007; I’d written it out with links to my post on each one, but then my browser ate it, so we’re trying to get it up just in the nick of Oscar. This is obviously a totally subjective list, but I think for the first time in almost ever my actual favourite movie of the year might win the Oscar. (That I wrote that this means Juno will probably win.)

1. No Country For Old Men
2. There Will Be Blood
3. Lust, Caution
4. Persepolis
5. I’m Not There
6. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
7. The Darjeeling Limited
8. A Mighty Heart
9. Superbad
10. Grindhouse

Best movie I saw in theatres that wasn’t actually a 2007 film but finally got the theatrical release it so richly deserved: Killer of Sheep.

Honourable mentions: Waitress, Sunshine, Juno, Atonement, Eastern Promises, Across the Universe, Sweeney Todd, Rescue Dawn, 28 Weeks Later.

Big movies I didn’t see and so have been left off my list: American Gangster, Away From Her, The Savages, Margot at the Wedding, Michael Clayton, Gone Baby Gone.

1. The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937): I always forget how much I like this movie. It’s Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, who I think might be a better match for him than almost anyone ever, and they’re rich witty New York people who decide to get a divorce but of course they still love each other. But first off, who knew that the word “rebound” is over 70 years old? True story. I love this kind of screwball comedy (though this is fairly low-key in terms of “screwiness”) because it kind of disproves a lot of assumptions about the “ideal woman”: Irene Dunne is witty and smart and so much fun in this. The downside is that the implication at the beginning is that Cary Grant’s having an affair, and that’s okay, but if Dunne actually was having an affair (which she maybe was) that would be wrong. Or something.
2. The Company of Strangers (Cynthia Scott, 1990): Despite my best feminist, anti-ageist intentions, I was pretty prepared to hate this, a fiction-documentary hybrid about old ladies whose bus breaks down. But lo! It is actually very charming. Think of a non-competitve version of Survivor or Big Brother: it’s just about these women being themselves in a completely artificial environment, and it’s very charming.
3. Funny Girl (William Wyler, 1968): Okay, so somehow despite my love of musicals, melodramas, and camp icons, I somehow had never seen this movie. Oh man, so great! I actually missed the beginning, but I think I came in early enough it counts as me having seen the movie, since I certainly got a sense of it’s glorious-ness. Also, I realized that basically everything I liked in Carrie Bradshaw was Sarah Jessica Parker doing Barbara Streisand doing Fanny Brice. Seriously, this has a lot of A Star Is Born (Judy Garland version, one of my favourite movies ever) in it, what with the celebrity and keeping a brave face up even as your marriage is falling apart. I always love a lady who starts at 11.
4. Of Freaks and Men (Aleksei Balabanov, 1998): This film is completely unexpected. It’s set in turn-of-the-century Russia, and it’s about…uh Siamese twins and pornographers and the cinema and photography and depravity. It’s all sepia-toned, and uses extensive intertitles even though the movie’s not silent. It got the film theory nerd in me all fired up, what with all the issues of representation and media it brings up.
5. Brother (Aleksei Balabanov, 1997): After Of Freaks and Men, I was really looking forward to more of the same, and I was kind of disappointed. It’s more a Russian retread of Le Samourai with more CDs. It’s certainly not a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it really wasn’t my thing.
6. The Diving Bell and The Butterfly (Julian Schnabel, 2007): This is the sort of movie that just has to be competent and well-acted to get nominated for the international awards (especially with the Max von Sydow pedigree) but this movie was really exceptional. It’s fucking gorgeous. The cinematography does unbelievable things: there’s all this crazy steadicam work, and there’s all this pale blue which is actually the beautiful art direction, and I’m basically gushing at this point. (Me and everyone else.) Love!

Bonus pseudo-movie: Battlestar Galactica: Razor (Félix Enríquez Alcalá & Wayne Rose, 2007): I feel weird counting this as a full movie, since it’s a TV movie, and it’s really part of a TV series, but we finally got around to watching this, and I have thoughts about it. The TWOP recap actually made me think I like it more than I did at first. I loved with the fires of a thousand suns all the Pegasus flashback parts — I thought retelling those parts of the story from the other side was absolutely brilliant especially given the way things have gone for Galactica since then, what with the trial and all the living with having done horrible things everyone’s doing now. But I could have done without most of the Apollo commanding Pegasus parts; I realize you need to have the flashbacks there, and you need the hybrid to call Starbuck the Harbinger of death, but frankly I just was not feeling Stephanie Chaves-Jacobsen’s performance. I realize that she has this quality of quiet and stillness that they wanted for this character, but I really would have preferred if they had cast someone who could do more with the stillness, given that she is supposed to be the anti-Starbuck and all. It’s cool though, I will take whatever Battlestar I can get until April. I wish there were more non-Adama series regulars in it though; I’d love to see more retrospectively Cylon Tigh and the Chief and stuff.

1. Kika (Pedro Almodovar, 1995): I liked this better on second viewing, mostly because I didn’t have the weird expectations for it I did the first time. I still think the ending’s too long though: most of Almodovar’s movies are at the very least fun to watch.
2. Cria Cuervos (Carlos Saura, 1976): The use of pop music in this was really interesting. Also, everything else. The acting, the way the little house seems completely cut off from the city outside. Ana Torrent’s really good, though I wonder if she got tired of playing little girls traumatized by fascism.
3. Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (Alanis Obamsawin, 1993): Holy hell, this was hard to watch. It’s a record of the Oka Crisis, much of it shot from inside the barricades. Like I said, it’s really difficult to watch and to realize how bad shit got in Canada in 1990. It’s hard to say anything else about the movie, it’s like impossible to talk about anything but my white guilt when I see it.
4. Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa, 1957): My lack of Kurosawa knowledge is one of those giant holes that I’m not proud of. Like, most people who have spent as long in film studies as I have have seen at least the basic Kurosawas, but I’ve seen Ikiru…and this, now. It’s pretty embarrassing. Anyway, I’ve got to admit, this was pretty excellent. It’s a Macbeth adaptation that starts with mist and ends with the Macbeth character going down in a hail of arrows, eventually taking one right to the throat. AWESOME. Also awesome were “Lady Macbeth” and the creepy spirit who told the prophecy instead of the witches.
5. Little Otik (Jan Svankmajer, 2000): I’m not sure how I hadn’t heard of Svankmajer before: this was right up my alley. It’s this retelling of an old (Czech, I guess) fairy tale about a couple who can’t have babies, so they make a baby from a tree stump, and then it eats them. It’s set in a modern apartment block and features a young girl who kind of draws straws to decide who to feed to the monster. Svankmajer kind of pairs the tree baby eating people with a kind of grotesque treatment of regular food: he keeps shooting soups and eggs and pancakes in these extreme close-ups that make it seem entirely unappetizing. Almost as if he were making people food “strange” so we would think differently about how Otik uses people as food.
6. Faust (Jan Svankmajer, 1994): Yay surrealism! This is also Svankmajer, about a man who somehow gets wrapped up in a puppet show performance of Doctor Faustus (the Marlowe, I guess). He eventually kind of turns into a marionette himself. The film keeps showing the hands working the puppets and switching between theatrical sets and “real” locations. There’s still some weird treatment of food, which maybe stands out because I saw this right after Little Otik.

In daily life music is usually part of other activities, from dancing to to housework to sex to gossip to dinner. In critical discourse it’s as if the only action going on when music is playing is the activity of evaluating music. The question becomes, “Is this good music to listen to while you’re making aesthetic judgements?” Which may explain what makes some bands critics’ darlings: Sonic Youth, for instance, is not great music to dance to, but it’s a terrific soundtrack for making aesthetic judgements. [...] Celine Dion, on the other hand, is lousy music to make aesthetic judgements to, but might be excellent for having a first kiss, or buying your grandma, or breaking down in tears.

It’s book review week!

I’ve been reading Carl Wilson’s 33 1/3 book about Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love. I mentioned it a few weeks ago, but I’m really thrilled to report that the book really lived up to the hype. It’s remarkable because it’s such a tiny book and Wilson manages to do at least three distinct things:

1. Explain Celine Dion to the kinds of people who like “music to make aesthetic judgements by.” He does a great job of tracing Celine’s specific Quebecois cultural context, her musical influences, her relationship to historical schmaltz, and also what makes her so good at what she does.
2. A brief exegesis of the history of philosophies, from Kant to Bourdieu, basically in that we use our tastes to save up cultural capital.
3. Bring his own experience as a critic (and person) into the book. It’s jarring and lovely to see a critic’s relationship to both the theoretical material and the object at hand being brought back to his own life and love and feelings and doubts.

I loved it because I’m sort of at a point where I get angry when I see any criticism of anything that assumes that people who like it must be stupid. Also because he winds up finding the feeling in “My Heart Will Go On” by relating it to Gilmore Girls, my TV kryptonite (You know the one with Michel’s dog’s funeral? And Zach plays “My Heart Will Go On”? And then Lorelai goes and breaks up with Christopher?).

It also really made me think about what taste means to me.

For me, it’s not about music, so much, but I’m in one of the few worlds where your taste in movies actually is something upon which you’re judged. I am completely on board with the premise that my tastes are informed by the cultural and social institutions and values that surround me, but it’s not really something I can do anything about. However, I realized I’m sort of an oddball in academia in that I really pride myself on liking basically every kind of movie and generally enjoying most movies that I watch. I even like torture porn! No one likes torture porn! (Okay, so that is totally my perverse desire to “rehabilitate” a culturally detested object, and that is absolutely a learned response. My reaction to those movies would have been way different five years ago. Maybe my gorno essay would have been better if I’d written it like Carl wrote his book? As a first-person oddyssey to unravel what the deal is with those movies that have everyone so pissed off.)

Wilson quotes Valery who says “Tastes are composed of a thousand distastes” and goes on to tell us that when he was 12, he liked “all kinds of music, except disco and country.”¹ And, I do have a “but.” It’s right there in my About page on this blog: “I like movies of all kinds (except those in which someone bets someone else, My Fair Lady-style, that they can make someone over for some kind of annual formal ball, and then they fall in love/befriend with the makeoveree, and the makeoveree inevitably finds out about the whole cruel wager and then stutters “Tell me I was a bet”).” What I really mean by that “except” is really just “bad romantic comedies,” and you can bet your ass that is a distinction about cultural capital: I am saying certain very specific things about myself when I say this, things about my gender and how cool I am. I don’t think knowing this will make me enjoy things that I don’t enjoy, nor do I think there’s no room in the world for aesthetic judgements on a semi-objective level, but I guess it’s good that I know this.

PS It is impossible to hate Celine Dion after watching the highlight reel on fourfour. Impossible!

1. Why is it always two genres? When I was that age, I liked everything but rap and country, both of which I — of course — love now.

1. Mon Oncle Antoine (Claude Jutra, 1971): Canadian cinema and I aren’t getting along so well these days. This was admittedly a really well-made film, very 400 Blows for French Canada, and I can really see how something like this–about the hard life in an asbestos mining town in the pre-Quiet Revolution era–would have played so soon after the FLQ Crisis (it was shot before, released after). But honestly it was kind of dull: preteen boy loses innocence, sees dead body. Religion is presented ambivalently. Let’s all come of age! There’s definitely some interesting stuff in here — like that weird unmotivated zoom from the tavern to the church, or the naked lady in a coffin dream sequence — but it’s just not my scene. I think it’s the male coming-of-age story that I just generally don’t respond to very well.
2. La Semana del Asesinos (aka Cannibal Man) (Eloy de la Iglesia, 1972): This, on the other hand, was fascinating. It’s a horror film designed for international distribution made when Franco was still in power, but it’s not really a traditional horror movie at all. There is a lot of killing, but it’s all from the perspective of the (really sad, economically oppressed) killer. He lives in this depressing little shack right next to a new highrise complex in Madrid, and works in a slaughterhouse, and then he like, tries to cover up the smell of the rotting bodies in his bedroom with air freshener and perfume. Anyway, there is lots of indications of repressed homoerotic desire and proletarian rage, so you know I was into it.
3. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (Stanley Donen, 1954): You guys, this might be the most sexist movie ever made. I have searched high and low for irony embedded in the text, and unless you count a strenuous attention to rigid gender roles that borders on desperate, you really can’t find any. To wit: And yet. I love this movie more than words can say. Some people see this as reflective of the Eisenhower era and all its attendant gender baggage, but I have a problem with seeing old movies purely as “an historical record of the misogynist antecedency of modern patriarchal thought, a reference manual to the canonized idols, saints, and gods of 21st century oppression.” The problem is simply this: the movies reflected an ideology that the man (the military-industrial complex, whatever you want to call it) wanted people to buy, but I don’t think there’s any reason to think that everyone actually bought it. I’m sure 1950s viewers were as aware of the absurdity (if not the antiquarian contempt for ladies) of the plot of Seven Brides as you and I are, and if nothing else, the ridiculousness of the whole thing can’t really have reinforced anything. Plus the pleasures of that film are so caught up in non-story elements: it’s really still famous because of its choreography, not because of its deft psychological portrait of young manhood. The barn-dance scene is justly famous, and “Lonesome Polecat” is equally fabulous, in a much more restrained way. Part of what makes it so beautiful is that the dance work and the stunts are so clearly authentic, and there’s something fascinating watching it done in what’s such an otherwise goofy production.
4. Viridiana (Luis Buñuel, 1961): This was also made in Franco’s Spain, but it pissed a hell of a lot more people off. The Vatican denounced it! Always a good sign. I don’t really know how to explain Viridiana: it’s about an almost-nun (she’s ready to take her vows, there’s probably a Catholic word for it, but I sure don’t know it) who goes to see her uncle and kind of eventually has to come to terms with the crap that is the outside world. It kind of presents her relgiosity as at least partly to do with a desire to keep the messiness of the world out, but it might be better understood as just implying that her isolationism gives her the high moral ground to look down on everyone else. I really loved the Last Supper scene with the motley beggars and then the lady’s vagina (not shown) as a camera.
5. Spirit of the Beehive (Víctor Erice, 1973): You’ll notice a pattern: this is another subtly subversive Franco-era film, but this is an award-winning art film, not a schlocky horror movie that no one took seriously at the time. It’s absolutely gorgeous. I love how their house has these gorgeous honeycomb windows (like a beehive) and how big the space around them is. It’s a great example of how cinema doesn’t need to be political to be political. From Paul Julian Smith’s Criterion Essay:

The question of how political The Spirit of the Beehive is has been hotly debated since the film’s premiere, when leftist critics attacked its lack of overt commentary. Yet to equate Franco and Frankenstein as twin masters of horror is too crude. By focusing not on national conflict but on domestic distress, what one reviewer called “the war behind the window,” Erice gives a much more subtle and moving take on the historical trauma suffered by Spain in the twentieth century.

That trauma is signaled in coded references. The village may be a playground for heedless children, but its unpaved streets and ruinous buildings are scarred by conflict and deprivation. The father, Fernando, listens in secret to a shortwave radio (surely it is to the BBC, forbidden by the regime), while his wife, Teresa (Teresa Gimpera), writes letters to an absent loved one (an envelope is addressed to a Red Cross camp in France, where Spanish refugees were interned). The character known only as “the fugitive,” whom Ana visits in an abandoned barn, is presumably a member of the maquis, or anti-Francoist resistance. More generally, the insistent melancholia, approaching catatonia, of the household marks it out as one inhabited by members of the losing side in the war. As the innocent Ana leafs through the family photo album, we glimpse her father in a snapshot with Miguel de Unamuno, the famous intellectual who was a brave critic of Franco’s rebellion.