Moot Point

1. Brown Sugar (Rick Famuyiwa, 2002): This is one of those movies that the idea of sounds better than the actual thing of. Loosely inspired by Common’s “I Used To Love H.E.R,” it is basically a love story where Sanaa Lathan’s love of hip hop and her love of Taye Diggs are intertwined. Lathan’s character is a music writer and is working on a book; Diggs’ character is a producer who quits his major label job after he’s asked to produce a remake of “The Girl Is Mine” for a black and white rapper duo, called “The Ho Is Mine.” Diggs abandons his shiny suits to start his own label, with Mos Def’s character as his first artist. The whole thing is Diggs and Lathan, childhood friends, realizing they love each other as more than friends, despite the fact that they’re involved with other people. Anyway, the idea is fantastic, and I loved both the lead performances — Diggs is way better than I thought he was based on not really having seen him in much, really charming and funny and like, oozing with charisma, and Lathan has the harder part, needing to seem cool and smart and grounded, and she does a great job — but the dialogue occasionally gets bogged down in the “our love is a commentary on the sad state of hip hop!” stuff. The best bits were the early scenes, where you get a documentary-style section of various hip hop greats talking about when they fell in love with hip hop, and a great flashback scene with, like, Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh.
2. Evita (Alan Parker, 1996): I have had a weird nostalgic obsession with this movie lately. It came out when I was 13, and I bought the soundtrack and listened to it constantly, to the point that I still know most of the words. Seeing the movie again, there was a lot that I didn’t remember about it. Parker has a tendency toward using the songs as opportunities for montages that doesn’t always work. It’s great when you can contrast Eva’s self-glorifying with all the actual horrible things going on, seeing shots of newspapers being blown-up and riots contrasted with the glamour of Eva’s life, but since the whole thing is songs, it occasionally gets a bit MTV-ish for me. I know this is a “rock opera,” not a traditional musical, so the rules about numbers-as-spectacle don’t really apply, but still. At the time, I thought Antonio Banderas was having the most fun, and I still kind of do. Jonathan Pryce is great in this and Madonna is fine, but I still love Antonio Banderas’s performance the most; everyone else is kind of dour and serious and going for naturalistic, but Antonio’s completely giving it 110%, switching from sarcastic to giddy, his brow constantly furrowed with cynical rage. It’s hilarious and amazing. That sequence is still one of my favourites, not just because of how much I liked the use of the film projector in staging it. His character, Che, isn’t really a character, he’s the narrator, so Parker basically has him skulk around in the background, playing servants or whoever happens to fit the scene. The whole play relies on the counterpoint of Che’s cynicism biting through Evita’s celebrity self-myth-making, so having Madonna — generally known for her ambition and sexuality outstripping her talent, an icon before she’s a singer, though she sounds her absolute best here — play Evita is brilliant in a way that I completely missed when I was 13.
   It’s also strangely appropriate to this year, the election being more about theatre and entertainment than ever; I kept thinking about the Emmies and Sarah Palin and Tina Fey and stuff.
3. Matilda (Danny DeVito, 1996): I loved this book when I was little. I can’t imagine why I would have adored a book about a smart, bookish girl who proves that small people can be better than big people because they have magic powers in their brains, except, oh wait. Obviously flattering to Roald Dahl’s smart, bookish readers. The other, real reason I loved it was that it had a very dark side; the horrible stuff that could happen was actually horrible, like being locked in “the Chokey,” by the totally unhinged principal of your elementary school. “The Chokey” is this tiny room full of sharp things that poke at you and there’s a dripping pipe and anyway it’s actually really scary, something that the “scary” stuff in kids’ books often weren’t. The movie adaptation was remarkably faithful to the book as I remember it, even keeping the mean principal throwing a little girl by her hair, granted in a cartoonish way. The one choice I question was having Danny DeVito narrate, not because I have a problem with his voice, but he was so good as Matilda’s awful TV-obsessed, used-car salesman father, and the narrator’s voice is obviously the same. He really shouldn’t have decided to do both. While I’m at it, Rhea Perlman is also hilarious as the mom, especially when she tells Miss Honey (Embeth Davidtz, who I spent the whole movie thinking was Sarah Paulson) that going to college was a bad move for Matilda, their insanely gifted daughter: “You choose books. I chose looks.” Picture Rhea Perlman with her hair dyed really bad blonde saying that, and you get the comedy. But getting back to DeVito, he did a pretty good job of getting the feel of the book right without making it too dark; the Wormwoods’ house is unambiguously ugly and awful, but in a tacky way; the school has the right mix of awfulness and, uh, watchability.
4. Trans-Europ-Express (Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1966): So Robbe-Grillet is best-known as the writer of Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad and also of several nouveaux romans, including The Erasers, which plays on the detective novel, but isn’t actually a detective novel. Anyway, he also directed a handful of movies. This was his first, and it’s kind of a slightly less complex Charlie Kaufman thing, about a writer (Robbe-Grillet) writing a movie about a drug smuggler, on a train; the smuggler keeps showing up on the train, and the film-within-the-film kind of reflects the confusion of the friends that the writer is working with. “Wait, so what’s up with the prostitute?” “Uh, I dunno.” But then of course she totally becomes a key part of the story.
5. The Man Who Lies (Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1968): We saw these in a double feature, and this was the weirder of the two, and therefore the one I preferred. This is about Jean-Louis Trintignant, who was the smuggler in the first film, a dude who is getting chased by some soldiers and then rolls into a quiet Slovak town, where he tells a lot of lies to a lot of ladies about his friendship with the town’s resistance hero. It’s a weird movie, because you realize by the end of it that most of the film is literally just Trintignant talking; his voice mostly controls what you see, but slowly the visual track starts to break from the soundtrack. The other interesting aspect of the soundtrack, besides that one male voice, is the fact that it’s scored with a series of weird, hard-to-identify sound effects instead of music, creating this great, confusing, otherworldly effect. These kinds of effects accompany scnes like the otherwise silent scenes showing the resistance leader’s wife, sister, and maid, who live in this female-dominated household, playing these odd sexual games. Robbe-Grillet has been accused of gratuitous porniness in the past, because of his clear bondage fetish, but I think the way these scenes were staged was just wonderful. It showed these three women communicating with each other, in a way that is kind of obscure but at the same time very obvious; it made me think about all those French feminist theories of women’s sexuality as being defined by proximity and closeness, and the idea that conventional language isn’t really appropriate to women’s experience. There was a little bit of écriture feminine in there, especially when contrasted with Trintignant’s almost exhausting verbosity.

I really thought that I’d be able to get a bunch of reading and writing and movie-watching done, but mostly I have just been being bored and very broke.

1. Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968): You guys, this movie is amazing. I didn’t really realize, but this is in the grand tradition of paranoid-lady Gothic stories, like Rebecca and Suspicion. Rosemary’s bedroom even has yellow wallpaper. Most of the film is set in the apartment. She even tries to tell her doctor what’s up, and he assumes she’s crazy, so she’s trapped by the people who are supposed to be caring for her. But it’s interesting because her suspicions of her husband are…totally founded. He actually lets the devil rape her. It’s really disturbing the way they do it too, because she has this weird kind-of dream sequence that’s actually real, and then when Rosemary wakes up and finds scratches all over herself, her husband is just like “Yeah, I may have had sex with you while you were asleep, I hope that’s cool, lol.” Horrifying. I love it. Also all the aging-actors playing the coven. It’s kind of interesting when you read it against the usual texts of female hysteria, because this time Mia Farrow’s crazy paranoia is completely justified by the crazy reality of her situation, being then, not crazy at all. There is also an interesting argument to be made that you could place this movie in the context of more specifically political masculine conspiracy movies of the 1960s and 1970s; plus you know, the growing importance of second-wave feminism making marriage and family kind of feel like a conspiracy against women. So, interesting!
2. Birth (Jonathan Glazer, 2004): I remain unsure why I decided to watch this this week. I think Rosemary’s Baby reminded me of it. Because look: Other than the leading ladies with short haircuts who live in New York apartments with wallpaper, this movie’s kind of the exact opposite of Rosemary’s Baby, in that it tries to make you believe in something supernatural (in this case reincarnation) in order for you to make a weird, not really complete moral leap to seeing this little boy as more than a little boy, but then it pulls the rug out from under you. I’m not saying the film really makes people accept that this ten-year-old boy is somehow Nicole Kidman’s husband, and it certainly makes that impossible to actually be on board with the whole thing when you see a grown woman kiss a young boy on the mouth. The thing is, it kind of plays with making you think this kid is somehow magically reincarnated, but then it does stuff like the kiss or the scene where Nicole Kidman’s grown-up fiance, Danny Houston, totally attacks the kid and spanks him, to remind you forcefully of his childhood. It’s hard to be totally sure what it’s trying to say, the whole thing is so tense and mannered and upper-crust, but those things all make it really fascinating. Plus it’s gorgeously shot.
3. Burn After Reading: I feel like I read a comment by someone who said that although the tone is completely different from No Country For Old Men, the way it sees the world is very similar. I think that’s true, and I want to tell you why. Diary of an Anxious Black Woman (whose movie posts I always really like) talks about how cynical and sadistic a film it is, but I would read the film with a different inflection. It’s a film against the grand conspiracy, against the myth — this time it works against the Cold War version of a political world where there’s a Big Brother watching at every turn. That’s why Linda and Chad make the patently ridiculous decision to take their CD full of documents to the Russians. That’s the world it seems to be setting up, but it slowly breaks down, as a few things happen by coincidence (like Linda and Harry meeting) and others turn out to be brought on by the characters themselves (like when Harry realizes the car following him isn’t a shady government agent, just a PI for a divorce firm). The film begins with a familiar kind of zoom, from a map-like view of the country from space, to the CIA headquarters in Langley, and then ends by pulling back out; at the beginning of the film, it seems to be narrowing things down, promising us something important, but by the end it’s clear that we’re pulling back out because we’ve just seen a random, messy sample out of the random, messy world. I’m a big fan of the melodrama, of which the whole point is to give people’s everyday stories grand moral significance. I find films like this so compelling because they are the exact opposite of that. They’re also not really tragic, because tragedies are all about the fates and the restoration of order and the value of catharsis. The Coens certainly don’t give us that. They give us all this fun, kind of sweet, spy farce, but things never resolve into any kind of narrative logic. I have sort of been having an argument with this post on things what things. I like the way she describes it, but her argument that basically “The movie is intended to be fun to watch,” and I don’t really think it completely is. There’s too much that’s unsettling about it — the failure to meet any kind of generic expectations makes the whole thing kind of uncertain, the total shocking sudden brutality of the violence, how indifferent the camera is to the deaths of the characters — for me to think that the Coens want me to just have fun and go with it. But I do think they want me to have fun; I don’t think the “What did we learn?” “…” ending should negate the whole rest of the movie, because the fact is it was fun: the whole cast is pretty much a joy to watch, from McDormand meta-ing that they wouldn’t have her in Hollywood if she doesn’t get a bunch of surgeries; to Brad Pitt’s adorable dancing; to Clooney’s weirdly tan, running-obsessed womanizer; to Tilda Swinton’s performance as the World’s Worst Pediatrician; to Malkovich’s dissolute CIA analyst and self-parody; to Richard Jenkins’ sweetly affecting performance as the gym manager who Frances McDormand just doesn’t see. ¹ So, I don’t know. It’s kind of an unanswered question — like if it’s an occasionally fun movie that has no point, why did we just watch it? It kind of gets back either a) the meaning of life or, more answerably and more interestingly b) the meaning of entertainment.

I am still out of blog practice, apparently, so you get two weeks of movies in one.

1. Hamlet 2 (Andy Fleming, 2008): I’ve read some very positive reviews of this and some very negative ones, so I have to conclude that is kind of a love or hate piece. I definitely fall on the positive side, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say I loved it. I did like it, though I did have a few complaints — mainly relating to the pacing and the Catherine Keener character’s fun-to-boring ratio. I think the movie needed it there to make Steve Coogan’s character’s emasculation super-clear (she is mean, and there is a fertility clinic involved) but I feel like having it in the movie instead of just being background info. is kind of a waste, especially since the class stuff is so much funnier. It’s sort of a twist on the “inspirational teacher” movie, with the twist being that the students don’t need the teacher, he needs them. Plus, the climax of the movie is the performance of Coogan’s masterwork, Hamlet 2, which inolves pop music, Jesus, a time machine, and an Elton John song, so you know I loved it. That aspect — the lauding of an amateur production with the sense of its badness being so great that it is transformed into amazing, which is made crystal clear when they have a character in the audience basically say exactly that — reminded me of Be Kind, Rewind, a connection I probably also made because the lovely Melonie Diaz is in both, bringing a wonderful sense of being game and the smartest person in the room.
   
2. Pleasantville (Gary Ross, 1998): I caught a bunch of this on TV last weekend, and, wow, this movie is way weirder than I remembered. The whole thing where Pleasantville — the idealized black-and-white nuclear family past — starts breaking down and turning to colour when confronted with real feelings about sex and art and books, that part is still great. The love scene with Jeff Daniels and Joan Allen where he takes off her grey makeup and sees the full-colour skin underneath is still absolutely beautiful. But things go bizarrely off the rails once that has happened. The division between “coloreds,” who listen to rock n’ roll and have to sit on a separate balcony in the courthouse in an obvious racial parallel, and generally have access to real authentic feelings, and the normal people is so, so weird. I’m not sure what it’s supposed to mean either about race or about racism, since the “colored” people in Pleasantville are not actually people of different races, they are glowingly white people like Reese Witherspoon and Joan Allen and Jeff Daniels. (Also, poor Reese apparently learns that sex is good, but whoring isn’t actually fulfilling, so she decides to stay in the ’50s and go to college? And her mom doesn’t seem to notice she’s gone when Tobey Maguire comes back?)
   
3. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (Adam McKay, 2004): I actually had managed to go the four years since this came out without seeing it, and to be honest…I am not sure if I can endorse Anchorman. It has some great moments, like “Afternoon Delight”: …and jazz flute! I also loved the way it captured the ugly 1970s aesthetic. And I have to admit that, more than most of those other “frat pack” comedies, this one was really very self-aware of the inherent sexism of dude humour. In the negative column is the fact that Will Ferrell, he tends to overdo it; shouting something doesn’t necessarily make it funny. Of course, on the other hand, it seemed to be set in the 1970s so that they could get away with lots of “funny” sexual harassment jokes. I kept comparing it to the way Mad Men handles similar issues — there’s the constant reminder that we’re in the past, and that things are different now — but Mad Men obviously has time to explore what that all means in way more detail, and is obviously working in a very different genre. Anyway, I know that a lot of this stuff is funny because it breaks rules, because it’s inappropriate, but I kind of grit my teeth when I think about why certain aspects of it are funny. I just keep coming back to the fact that it retells the story of women’s liberation — from an almost exclusively male perspective. And sure, it’s clear that it’s wrong when Tim Robbins is like “I’m totally for women’s lib” and then pushes Christina Applegate into a bear pit — but it’s also funny. The thing is, if comedy is a social release valve, then what exactly is Anchorman releasing? Because my instincts about that are not particularly generous.
4. In Bruges (Martin McDonagh, 2008): I’m not sure how much intelligent commentary I have about In Bruges, but, so good! I didn’t really know that much going in, just “dark comedy” and “Colin Farrell.” But, the great thing is, I forgot that Colin Farrell is a really good actor! There are three great performances here, actually: Farrell’s, Brendan Gleeson’s (who I just realized is Mad-Eye Moody in the Harry Potter movies), and Ralph Fiennes. Farrell and Gleeson are gangsters who go to Bruges to wait for the heat to die down after a hit, and then they meet a dwarf on a movie shoot, and there’s all this hilarious self-aware play around dwarves and art movies and so on. It’s very funny, but there’s also an aspect of tragedy to it. Plus it’s lovely; Bruges seems like a beautiful city, and the cinematography does a commendable job of emphasizing all its old fashioned, fairy tale beauty, which is in marked contrast to all the murder and suicide in In Bruges.
   

I’m back! Things might still be slow for the next little bit, as I still haven’t actually defended my thesis, plus I have a lot of stuff going on in the next couple of months, but there will be updates.

Anyway, I kept a list of the movies I did manage to see since I went on hiatus. It is long. Continue Reading »

1. Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (Pedro Almodóvar, 1990): You know? This is, more and more, still not my favourite Almodóvar. There are parts of it I like, but the main story is still: boy likes girl, boy kidnaps girl, girl eventually validates his kidnapping attempt by falling in love with him (!). The thing is, yes, it exposes how lame most love stories that have this kind of plot are by making his actions the product of actual psychosis, so there’s that. It’s obviously meant to make the spectator question the heroine’s choice, but it still is the least fun for me to watch. However, it is important that there’s a whole meta-story where she’s an actress and they’re making a movie and the director of the movie-within-a-movie (whose name, “Maximo Espejo,” means something close to”Great Mirror” in Spanish) — and he says something about how hard it is to tell the difference between a love story and a horror story, which is obviously the point here. It always comes down this question about where the parody line ends and the glamourizing line starts, and that’s obviously going to be different to different viewers. I dunno. I don’t think it’s a resolvable question.
   
2. Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (Sara Sugarman, 2004): This was…surprisingly good. I think it has been established that I will watch anything with Lindsay Lohan, so when this came on, I decided to watch it. It’s about a 15-year-old girl whose mom moves her from NYC (obviously Toronto) to a smallish town in New Jersey. Immortal voice-over line, paraphrased: “Your parents tell you to have hopes and dreams, and then they make you move to New Jersey.” The thing I loved about it is, it’s kind of a treatise in favour of self-invention. The heroine’s birth name is Mary, but she randomly changes it to Lola; her mom keeps calling her Mary though…until (spoiler!) the end of the movie, when she is starring in a modern reinvention of Pygmalion as Eliza Doolittle (another story about self-invention, of a sort), and her mom’s like “You are a Lola.”
   
   Anyway, all her clothes in the movie are like these elaborate costumes. Like, she goes on a hunger strike when her mom won’t let her go to a rock concert, and she dresses as Gandhi. And she has this amazing mourning costume when her favourite band breaks up, with like, black balloons. The word for this is camp, and it is glorious. Better still, in the movie, she suffers basically no negative consequences for any of her actions: she does feel bad about telling her friend her father was dead to seem “more interesting,” but other than that, nothing! When she gets arrested and her dad has to come to the police station to get her out of trouble, he then lets her go to a loft party at a drunken rock star’s house. When she goes on a hunger strike, it works! She changes her name purely through the power of her own will! Lola’s awesome: she sees reality as negotiable.
   
   I have to come back to the spectacle of contemporary My Fair Lady again. Okay, so the school “orchestra” plays on laptops. And the songs are reworkings of “Living For The City” by Stevie Wonder and “Changes” by David Bowie. It’s hilarious. The cast is pretty solid too: her best friend is Allison Pill, who was in Pieces of April and Dear Wendy, and seems to billed pretty high in Milk, the Gus Van Sant Harvey Milk project that’s supposed to come out this year. And Megan Fox is the villain: Lohan’s triumphs over her getting the lead in the school play, meeting this rock star, and beating her at Dance Dance Revolution.
3. Wanted (Timur Bekmambetov, 2008): I have a whole bunch of different opinions about this movie, and they mostly conflict with each other. I won’t pretend I didn’t enjoy the hell out of it as an action movie, but ideologically, I had some problems. It’s been (justly) compared to Fight Club and The Matrix a lot, which is completely fair, in that the aspects I loved about it were the same that I liked about those movies. As an action movie, it’s successful because the stunts are all spectacular and ridiculous and wonderfully stylish. Like, curving bullets! Flipping a car and totally shooting someone through their sunroof while your car is in midair! I was giddy with glee at this stuff. It’s a really fun movie to watch, and I did enjoy it. But, uh, I had some ideological problems with it, in that it’s basically a wish-fulfillment fantasy about reclaiming your masculinity and not being a put-upon office worker. (Mildly spoilery stuff follows.) Continue Reading »

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 »

1. Sixteen Candles (John Hughes, 1984): I have to confess, I kind of hated this. I wanted to like it, I love The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink, so I kind of figured I’d like this. But…uh, there is some rape in it? That is not portrayed as horrible and ugly but as though it’s like somehow nice that the rich popular dude “gives” his passed out drunk girlfriend to a nerdy virgin to drive home. And then she wakes up in the morning and is nice to him, and tells him that she “enjoyed” it. Uh, ew.
   Also that whole Long Duck Dong thing is also kind of racist? It could have not been, but it so, so was. The Molly Ringwald can’t catch a break bits are actually pretty funny, as are the John Cusack and that other guy geek chorus, and I get the whole Bakhtinian carnival thing¹ but the whole thing, it’s kind of gross. I realize it’s supposed to be a classic for our times, but it has not aged well at all.
   
   I still love you, Molly Ringwald!
2. What Have I Done To Deserve This?! (Pedro Almodóvar, 1984): This holds up really really well; it’s Almodóvar’s fourth film and the cinematography and storytelling are leaps and bounds above the first three. It’s not as polished or bright as the stuff that came after and that really made him famous, but I found it surprisingly enjoyable to watch again.
3. The Law of Desire (Pedro Almodóvar, 1987): I’ve probably said contradictory things before, but this is my favourite Almodóvar. Things I like: it is beautiful, visually daring in cinematography and fantastically overwrought in mise-en-scene, with ’80s fashion and kitsch altars; you get gay love treated as just part of life, without any kind of weird stress or hysteria, that may not seem like a big deal now, but it sure as hell was in 1987; young, crazy Antonio Banderas, in repressed gay love with Eusebio Poncela, seduced by his movies; Carmen Maura’s performance as the transsexual Tina is still one of the best things I have ever seen, she seems so aware of her body and she seems to feel everything so unabashedly. This was the movie that made me fall in love with Almodóvar.

There is actually only one weekly movie this past week, because of a brief trip to exotic Ottawa (and actually exotic Gatineau as well) for family stuff.

1. Matador (Pedro Almodóvar, 1986): This one’s really grown on me since the first time I watched it. I think my problem was that I was looking too hard for stuff below the surface when obviously the surface was the whole point. So instead of doing a capsule review and image (which I could do, I promise, I’ve been writing my ass off about this movie), here are my top 5 Matador frame grabs in the giantest files ever: Continue Reading »

Weekly Movies is probably going to be short on detail this week. I hurt my back and it still hurts to type a little. I did watch movies and not spend the whole week being obsessed with Gossip Girl, I promise. (Oh, but while we’re on GG: an entire (awesomely detailed) tumblr devoted to the greatest episode of TV ever.)

1. Labyrinth of Passions (Pedro Almodóvar, 1982): This is Almodóvar’s second film, when he still was a wacky, trashy punk. How many Academy Award-winning directors have appeared in their own films, in drag, performing a New Wave song that if I’m not mistaken is partly about having sex with rats in the sewer? I’m guessing not very many.
2. Waiting For Guffman (Christopher Guest, 1996): I had never seen this, but I had seen Best In Show. This is better. It actually really reminded me of the best episodes of The Office, because you have the mockumentary factor, the fact that these are people whose lives you don’t necessarily envy and whose denials you can see through, but there’s still something really beautiful about them. I really loved the one guy on town council or whatever who was just completely enraptured with Corky.
3. Southland Tales (Richard Kelly, 2007): Okay, I’m not going to lie. This isn’t (as I’d hoped), a secret masterpiece. It’s not a good movie. Some parts of the story still don’t make sense, and not in a “man, this movie’s so complex” way, in a “there is no explanation for this chain of events” way. I was kind of okay with that, because all the porn stars and Marxists and WWIII and the oil running out and the scary government internet surveillance and the Rock being wrapped up in this big, sprawling messy narrative where everyone in the movie ends up riding a zeppelin kind of captures something real about the culture, even if I do think it was at least half accidental. But, more importantly, it’s a hell of a lot of fun. Every scene with Sarah Michelle Gellar is comedy gold (I’d really forgotten ho funny she is); and obviously all the Amy Poehler and Cheri Oteri stuff was also actually funny, because Richard Kelly was all up with the political satire, but he still seemed to get that a lot of “Marxists” are really lame. For me though, the highlight was definitely Justin Timberlake, scarred and on drugs, lipsynching to “All These Things That I’ve Done” and pouring beer all over himself. Don’t ask me why.
   
4. Romance & Cigarettes (John Turturro, 2006): This is another neo-musical (which Southland Tales almost is), with actors singing along with old songs that express their feelings, and the ways that the musical sections, which start out clearly coded as fantasy, kind of seep into the world of the movie a bit. This one is strange, but it’s actually worth seeing. There’s an amazing cast (James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet, Steve Buscemi, Mandy Moore, Mary-Louise Parker, Amy Sedaris, etc), it’s set in a working-class neighbourhood, it’s really depressing, and I have been thinking a lot about pop cultural nostalgia, of which this movie is a really interesting example. It’s like Woody Allen movies, in that it’s apparently set in the present day, but all the references are about a generation too old for everyone.