Moot Point

I keep mostly drafting these and then forgetting to actually post them. I guess the world can handle a delay in the hot news of what movies I watched this week. I haven’t been to the theatre in awhile, but this summer has not been a particularly inspiring one for movies. Plus, thesis. I’m looking forward to that one where James MacAvoy shoots curvy and Angelina Jolie rides the tops of moving vehicles, though.

1. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Pedro Almodóvar, 1989): I was not really looking forward to watching this again; for some reason I remembered finding it to be amongst the more annoying of Almodóvar’s movies, but once I got into it I actually wound up liking it quite a lot now that I have been able to fit it into my critical program. I’m noting I watched it here, because of my obsessive record-keeping, but I actually can’t really force myself to write anything more about Almodóvar these days.
2. The Strip (László Kardos, 1951): I missed the beginning of this, but I had to write it up anyway. It’s a film noir. Starring Mickey Rooney (!). He’s a drummer in a jazz club in LA and he gets this girl he likes who wants to be a movie star involved with some gangsters and things don’t end well — though all the actual violence is offscreen. What’s interesting about it is, it’s kind of good. Like, the band at the club has Louis Armstrong — and if that’s really Mickey Rooney playing the drums, which I think it is, he was really good at it. And I love the real LA locations (something I’ve had an eye for ever since I saw Los Angeles Plays Itself) plus the cinematography is frequently gorgeous. Also, Mickey Rooney does a good job insofar as his actual performance. Unfortunately, he’s still Mickey Rooney, and he still looks about 12 years old even though he would’ve been 30, so you’re constantly aware of watching a noir with Mickey Rooney. It’s still a pretty interesting artefact though.
3. Fast and Furious (Busby Berkeley, 1939): You know that “Fast-Talking High Trousers” bit from Family Guy? That’s what this is like. It’s apparently the third in a series of sub-Thin Man husband-and-wife detective stories, which starred a whole bunch of different people. This one had Franchot Tone, who’s not very interesting, and Ann Sothern does her best with the wife part. I really…don’t have anything to say about it, it’s a 1930s detective movie/screwball comedy. The screwball bits aren’t bad, at that; the bit with the lion is very Bringing Up Baby. As for why Busby Berkeley directed this, I have no idea; maybe they were initially going to do a musical number surrounding the beauty pageant, but it got cut? It seemed weird to have Busby B. directing a movie that involved a performance and many, many women, but not to have an elaborate musical number.
4. The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorcese, 1993): I thought I should watch this since it keeps coming up in books about fashion and cinema — you can see why when you watch it, Scorcese really spends a lot of time doing close-ups of gloves and jewelry and lace and so on. I have mentioned my love of Mad Men several times on this site, so it won’t surprise anyone that I eat this kind of thing up with a spoon. I love the idea that something about a society can be revealed in its day-to-day objects. I honestly didn’t expect to like it very much — I knew it was a movie about the stifling stiflery of 19th century society life, and I expected it to be as much of a challenge as The Leopard, but I was pleasantly surprised by it being actually really awesome. I can’t remember who said it, but I’m pretty sure I’ve heard someone say that Scorcese’s movies are always kind of about making movies as much as they are about the actual story in the movie itself. To my mind, The Age of Innocence seemed to fit that bill: it’s as much about making a “costume movie” as it is about anything that’s actually in the movie. It’s kind of a good thing, because then it becomes about how to represent historical realities to a present audience without sacrificing accuracy or making things too opaque. So it’s presenting the past, but it’s using contemporary cinematic techniques.

So like, my life is getting eaten by thesis and a sudden urge to cook and do nothing all the time. So this one’s short and also late.

The other big time-eater has been my rekindled love of So You Think You Can Dance. Joshua & Katee are my favourite couple so far, but honestly, I keep feeling bad for all the poor contempo boys that are too “twee” or “not masculine enough” or alternately get praise for being a “real man.” There was always an undercurrent of those issues on the show, but I always rationalized it in terms of the dancing being about playing a role, and that part of that role included a fairly conventional kind of masculinity, but this year maybe after reading all this gender-y stuff, it seems totally out of hand.

Anyway, onto movies:

1. Sawdust and Tinsel (Ingmar Bergman, 1953): I really probably should know Bergman better than I do at this point. I liked this, mainly for the classic Bergman raw nerve school of acting, and Sven Nykvist cinematography. This was his first film for Bergman and I feel like you could really identify him in the way the images have this sort of flatness to them, sort of two-dimensional? I don’t think there’s much you can say about Bergman, but this starts out with a sweet semi-silent portrayal of a clown whose woman humiliates him which was really interesting.
2. Motel Hell (Kevin Connor, 1980): It’s like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, only without all the actual scary parts, and with Rory Calhoun playing a farmer/butcher who, uh…there are people in the sausages. Reading the wiki page and looking at the post reproduced there — “You might just die…laughing!” — it was apparently supposed to be a comedy, so that’s a plus, because it kind of failed at being scary. The weirdest thing about it was how much better an actor Rory Calhoun was than everyone else in the movie, so there was sort of an unintentional (or intentional?) John Waters casting effect where the styles of acting are so different that it’s immediately distancing.
3. The Leopard (Luchino Visconti, 1963): So despite the fact that I am the film studies major in the relationship, Alex was actually the one who picked this. It’s a three-hour long historical drama about the slowly fading aristocracy in 19th century Italy, and I think how much you enjoy the movie is directly related to your response to that sentence. It does a really great job of evoking how stifled and stilted aristocratic life was for the characters, but that atmosphere means you wind up with a really stilted and stifled movie. So I certainly appreciated it, in the way that I appreciate historical museums full of insanely detailed costumes and objects, but I don’t know that I liked it. It’s not really my favourite kind of movie; neorealism’s great, but it’s just not my thing. (This isn’t neorealim per se, but Visconti was a neorealist and you can certainly see the influence in the long takes and the emphasis on everyday life over grand historical moments.) I did appreciate the metacinematic touch that the patriarch who is aware that he is on the way out is played by classic Hollywood star Burt Lancaster, and the young folks who represent “the future” are played by new wavey Euro stars Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale.
4. Zero Patience (John Greyson, 1993): So I am a little bit in love with this movie. It’s a debunking of the whole story that this one Air Canada flight attendant brought AIDS to North America (“Patient Zero”) and there’s a lot of didactic “educational film” stuff in there and it’s really pro-AIDS activism, but it also is a musical with a love story between Patient Zero’s ghost and Victorian sexologist Sir Richard Francis Burton, who is still alive and living in Toronto and trying to make a sensationalistic museum exhibit about Zero in the movie. Dick sings my favourite song in the movie, “Culture of Certainty” which includes a “Let’s all be empiricists” chorus. There is also a song about gay sex that is actually sung by assholes. What I love is that the whole movie’s such a goofy pastiche, but by the end, there is still something sweetly touching when Patient Zero’s finally able to disappear, with the water and the smoke and the video machine and Sir Richard Francis Burton (who also apparently can’t disappear since his “unfortunate encounter with the fountain of youth) obviously touched.
5. C.R.A.Z.Y. (Jean-Marc Valée, 2005): Another gay-themed Canadian movie this week. This is in a lot of ways your standard coming-of-age story, with a whole thing with him (the gay son that the dad couldn’t accept and he also couldn’t really accept his own gayness) needing to go to Jerusalem and find himself and everything, but what I really liked was that it’s also a movie about record collections as a way of marking time and also father-son bonding. It’s also a very well-done coming-of-age story; I’m not really a fan of the Bildungsroman thing, but I like when movies about childhood skew heavily subjective, so you get that sense of how everything is really big and scary and little moments turn into huge traumas.

Weekly Movies is incredibly late this week because my whole life kind of got taken over by Big Academic Conference, which came to my town, and then I apparently forgot to actually publish the post. So sorry on both counts!

1. Jesus Christ Superstar (Norman Jewison, 1973): Oh, I’m in love with this movie I could write a book about it. Jesus movies aren’t usually really my cup of tea, but this one gets it right by making the Jesus story work in terms of politics and history without really diminishing the whole son-of-God thing. It kind of leaves the God part open to interpretation: it doesn’t suggest Jesus didn’t perform miracles or wasn’t the son of God, but it also doesn’t actually show any of those miracles or anything, and in fact takes a bunch of time to acknowledge that what we’re watching is a performance, so you could either take it as a retelling of hugely important historical events or, you know, the actual God parts.
   Also, how gay is Judas for Jesus in this movie? Pretty gay, is the answer. I thought I was reading too much into the way they were acting with each other, like the way Jesus takes Judas’s hand and is all “Think while you still have me, move while you still see me” and they totally seem to communicate with their eyes what Jesus is getting ready to do, not to mention how jealous he is of Mary Madgalene. But Judas’ reprise of Mary Magdalene’s big ballad “I Don’t Know How To Love Him” is pretty much the clincher.
   
   FYI I talk about the endings of recent movies that aren’t from the Bible (wherein: yes, Jesus dies for our sins) after this. Continue Reading »