1. The Wolfman (was apparently directed by someone on purpose, okay his name was Joe Johnston, and it turns out he also directed Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, who knew?, 2010): I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie this deeply bad on purpose. If you like bad movies, it’s pretty fun, in that it features Anthony Hopkins wearing a tiger bathrobe, totally phoning it in, delivering shocking revelations like he’s talking about what he had for dinner last night; it also features a severed arm that is STILL ABLE TO SHOOT A GUN. And an arbitrary romance. And Benicio del Toro, English Shakespearean Actor. No seriously, that is his character.
2. A bunch of more recent John Waters movies: things really go downhill after Serial Mom, huh? Of the later ones, I liked A Dirty Shame the most, and Pecker the least. Pecker is rough, y’all. I still love J-Dub though.
3. Welcome to the Dollhouse (Todd Solondz, 1995): This kind of hurt to watch, almost. I was never really Dawn Weiner in junior high, but there was a year where it was close, and that felt really important in 8th grade. This came out when I actually was that age, and I never could have dealt with it then, never could have had the distance to find it funny as well as painful. Even now, it’s such a great combination of funny and awful: the way the kidnapping turns from this thing where everyone’s almost sincere about the kidnapping — but then it still kind of turns into a triumph for Missy and it’s back to being so cynical. I don’t know if you can really say anything else about this movie. This says it all:
4. Jennifer’s Body (Karyn Kusama, 2009): I actually saw this first, but I put it after Welcome to the Dollhouse because it is clearly a worse movie about the perils of adolescent girldom. This one is more in the horror vein, sort of a pinker, poppier Ginger Snaps. It suffers from a bit of Diablo Cody’s patented adorableness, but I liked it better than Juno. It’s one of those things, like Twilight where I love it precisely because it speaks to such a fundamental thing of how I remember being a teenager. This is a different thing than Twilight, which is fully about the danger of one’s own desire; Jennifer’s Body is about toxic friendships. I don’t where this thing comes from, if it’s a teen girl thing, or a white girl thing, or a suburban high school thing, but I sure had a couple of those incredibly intense teen girl friendships where they’re the main person in your life. It’s the old-time “romantic friendship” thing: it’s not necessarily that you want to bone your best friend, it’s more that you just have all this energy to devote to…something that’s not your family, and you’re not ready for that to be a boyfriend yet, so it winds up being your BFF. And that’s scary, and those friendships always kind of implode. I love horror, and I love when things turn real high school fears into something fantastic and hideous. I’ve been listening to “Live Through This” constantly ever since.
5. A Single Man (Tom Ford, 2009): One word review: disappointing! The press has been so good, and the negative reviews (like at The Awl) complain that the fashion designer director aestheticizes the emotional content of the story too much, which to me, is not really a negative per se. But the problem for me was that the emotional content wasn’t even aestheticized well! You know me, I love a Minnelli, or a Fassbinder. I wrote a whole thesis on Almodóvar. Bringing all the emotion into the mise-en-scene is what melodrama’s all about; there’s a Hollywood tradition to this. But at this point it’s so done that you have to do it well to be effective. The thing where most of the movie’s shot with this yellow-ish gray filter, but then the full spectrum of colour comes in when something nice happens to Colin Firth (who was great despite the general lameness he’s working in) is so bad, and the “I’m a sad man in my meticulous modern house” sequence at the beginning is so laboured. It did get better as it went on and some life was injected (in the form of Julianne Moore and Nicholas Hoult). And the clothes were great: the suits, Nicholas Hoult’s giant awesome sweater, J. Moore’s giant hair; but ultimately it’s not fabulous enough to really transcend its coldness. Tom Ford might be able to make a great movie someday — but this wasn’t it. I keep thinking what an interesting story it is, how great it could have been if Almodóvar or Todd Haynes or someone had made it.
   There are some arresting images though. I’ve woken up with ink all over my bed.

1. An Education (Lone Scherfig, 2009): So my feeling on this is that Carey Mulligan is delightful, and I walked out with a smile on my face and a skip in my step, since it’s a happy story about Learning Life Lessons and Growing while wearing fabulous 1960s clothes, but it seems a little insubstantial? I guess it didn’t really blow my mind that a teenager having an affair with a much older man who literally picked her up in the street turned out to be not such a great life choice for our hero. I don’t think it’s bad that she emerges more or less unscathed instead of as a ruined woman or whatever, but that combined with the whole glamorous fun times of having a guy take you to Paris and having your first sexual experience be all French cigarettes and Chanel no 5 makes the whole thing seem really awesome and less scarring than it probably should? It’s not so much that I need didactic storytelling here, so much as I think this movie was maybe too light-hearted. I liked the story of a girl, bored and stultified by the pressures of accomplishment and school and normalness, self-consciously making a mistake because it’s more fun and because the Times They Are A’ Changing, but like, pretending that you’re free when you’re letting yourself pretty much be bought, it is not really free. Jenny learns that, and Carey Mulligan’s so full of life that she covers up a lot of the films’ flaws, but it’s all a bit obvious with the life lessons and the Oxford and the so forth.
2. DiG! (Ondi Timoner, 2004): This is a documentary about relationship (friendship turned to rivalry) between the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols, which basically means that I have no idea why I put this on my rental queue, since I don’t really care about either of these bands. But! It turned out to be really interesting. Because the filmmakers spent years filming these guys, you have all this footage of the real stuff that happened. On the one hand you have the well-adjusted Dandy Warhols, who started out indie but signed with a big label and, being moderately talented, eventually found a place for themselves with moderate success. (They never really got big in North America but they’re apparently pretty huge in Europe.) On the other, you’ve got the totally fucked-up BJM, a ’60s revival-type band with like a zillion rotating members, most of whom seemed to be on really a lot of drugs at all times, but who are headed by visionary and asshole Anton Newcombe. It’s totally amazing: you get footage of the two bands partying and performing together in the good old days, and of Anton Newcombe kind of stalking them to try to drum up a kind of rivalry, and of the BJM beating each other up and spoiling their big shot at an industry showcase, and of Anton Newcombe fully kicking an audience member in the head. It’s more or less from the point of view of Courtney Taylor, who narrates the film, and apparently some of the BJM were upset at the way they were portrayed. But I felt like a lot of the choices TImoner makes undermines Taylor. You come away with the sense that the Dandies did kind of sell out, they get really slick and still try to kind of have the Brian Jonestown coolness rub off on them, but you can’t really have it both ways. On the other hand, Anton Newcombe kicked a guy in the head. At some point you have to compromise something to exist in the world. (I was heartened to read on Wikipedia that a lot of the members who left the BJM in the movie had come back after the release, and that they actually played a couple of songs with the Dandy Warhols at Lollapalooza in 2005, so that’s nice.)
3. Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945): So I decided to watch this after reading this lame, hateful list of “overrated directors”. One of the directors he lists is David Lean, whose movies are supposedly overlong, and apparently none of his movies are really masterpieces. Brief Encounter is one hour and twenty minutes of perfect. They meet in a train station, they fall in love, it can never be, he touches her shoulder. The narrator describes falling in love by saying “I never knew such violent things could happen to ordinary people.” The just-too-overwrought piano of the score. Celia Johnson’s breathless voiceover. Absolutely fucking perfect.
   
4. The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, 2009): Wow. We saw this Saturday, and I don’t have a lot to say other than complaints about the people down the row from me who couldn’t make even the simplest plot connections without discussing them. Some movies you can maybe murmur to your seatmate without distracting people. The White Ribbon is not one of them, it’s so quiet it’s almost painful. One thing that surprised me, for such a hard, hard movie to watch, is how much people were laughing at the “light” moments (like a father tying up his adolescent son to keep him from masturbating LOL). It’s not that I blame them — it’s not the way I felt uncomfortable watching Inglorious Basterds, which deals with the spectre of Nazis in a completely different way — it’s more that everyone was kind of grasping for any kind of release, the whole thing was so tense. It starts out in black, black silence and then slowly dissolves to an almost impossibly bright white. It almost hurts to look at for a minute. It’s set in a German village in 1913, and it’s basically about this town suffused by cruelty. Mysterious, awful things start to happen. We don’t really get an answer to who’s doing those things, but I think we mostly know the answer from the beginning, no matter how much we try to deny it. It is actually much nicer than any of the other Haneke movies I’ve seen.

1. Palindromes (Todd Solondz, 2004): I really wish that zip.ca had sent Welcome to the Dollhouse before this one, since it starts with the funeral of the earlier movie’s main character — and I feel like I would have gotten more out of that one if I’d understood the way the two movies interconnected. As it stands, I liked parts of Palindromes: the device with the different performers playing Aviva is really effective, the way it asks viewers to jump barriers of age, of race, of size, even of gender for a second (though I wonder why Solondz only used the boy actor for one, silent, though beautiful scene) in understanding all those actors as a single person. I’m sort of working through how I feel about Palindromes — I liked the way it used the abortion debate to deal with the way that people aren’t just their opinion on one issue, and you can see how that point would maybe not be embraced in 2004 America or even now. But it’s been days since I’ve seen it and I’m still not sure what his point was about identity. Are we palindromes, the same backward and forward? Is it really impossible to change? But then, like, what does Aviva and Otto’s moment in the garden mean?
2. Cry-Baby (John Waters, 1990): This is one of those movies I’ll start watching whenever it comes on TV, and it never gets less good. I still laugh every time Baldwin says: “We’ll get married and live in suburbia!” His delivery is so enthusiastic and horrifying, I like his performance the same way I like Vincent Kartheiser in Mad Men — it’s brave to be such an awful character.
   
   His bunny hop gets me every time. He’s just so gleeful about violently maintaining the social order. (Screencap source.)
3. (500) Days of Summer (Marc Webb, 2009): This has exactly the flaws and exactly the great points you expect it to, which is fine. J G-L (oh my GOD look at the picture he has on wikipedia, it’s like the funny photo I would put on my Facebook profile as a JOKE) and Zooey were both good. J G-L was, honestly, pretty great, but the issue was more with the writing and it’s lean towards preciousness, and the fact that the first time director was basically like “look at all my techniques! Split screens! Montages! LOOK AT THEM!” (Actually he’s made like a million music videos, but that’s a really different medium and every minute maybe doesn’t need to feel so worked-over in a feature length film). Some of them worked — I thought the split screen bit (expectations on one side, reality on the other) was a bit on-the-nose, but fine in terms of the tone and themes of the story — but he didn’t need all of them. He did do a wonderful job of capturing a lot feelings, but I’m just saying he maybe could have done it more subtly. The main thing with this movie is the main thing with all these movies — it wants to have it both ways. This one does a better job than most of making it clear that Tom, our hero, is totally deluding himself the whole way through the relationship, but it still paints a really pretty, far too seductive picture of indie girls and holding hands at Ikea for us to be very cynical about it. Which brings me to the manic pixie dream girl problem — sometimes this works (Annie Hall, which this movie totally wants to be), but mostly it doesn’t (Garden State). Like, it’s fine to have a girl who is pretty and has a complicated personality, but you know, it would still be nice if Summer had, like, any life outside her relationship with Tom.
4. Les Chansons d’amour (Christophe Honoré, 2007): Oh man, so good! It’s an Umbrellas of Cherbourg-style musical about love and life and death and it’s really beautiful despite the hero being a bit of a dweeb. The Cherbourg comparison is one I think everyone would have reached for even if Chiara Mastroianni (Catherine Deneuve’s daughter) wasn’t in it. She is pretty great though.
   
   As I wrote on my tumblr right after I watched it: They’re French! They have angst! Angst they express through song! The hero wears a striped sailor sweater and a charming yellow shirt. I loved it so.
   David Edelstein said this about it: “Honoré has proven you can make a movie musical in which style doesn’t upstage content–a movie musical that blossoms from the inside out,” which is a nice way of putting it if a bit insulting to the grand tradition of ridiculousness in movie musicals, but it is remarkably short on spectacle.

1. The Reader (Stephen Daldry, 2008): Eh. It was okay. It’s a really interesting story, and I had high hopes for the complicated intersections of history and memory and erotics that the whole thing ran on — but the whole thing was a bit mawkish and slow. It’s sort of too high-toned melodrama and Oscar baity to be as good as it could have been. Kate Winslet’s wonderful, don’t get me wrong, as is the kid, but the whole thing drags once you get into Ralph Fiennes territory. Daldry spends way too long telegraphing stuff that he then presents as shocking — like, I’m sure this will come as a surprise to you, but Kate Winslet’s sexy concentration camp guard? She can’t read. That’s why she always wants people to read to her! Oh, you got that from the trailer? Uh, then I have nothing for you.
2. Adaptation. (Spike Jonze, 2002): It will probably surprise some of you that I actually, uh, hadn’t seen this movie before. It’s kind of weird to see this now, post Synecdoche, NY, because they’re obviously both Kaufman doing variations on a theme. It’s easy to see why this one was more popular, since it’s faster and funnier and chooses to solve the problem of the impossibility of making real art that’s not totally solipsistic through satire, eventually devolving into the kind of cheesy thriller Kaufman’s spent the whole rest of the time mocking, whereas his solution in Synecdoche is to eventually have his hero-alter ego fade away into oblivion, letting someone else take the helm. The ending is always a problem for Kaufman, because tying the mess up in some kind of tidy narrative bow is really the opposite of what he wants to/ tries to do, so his ending is always going to gesture to that impossibility. I’m not trying to knock Adaptation. (I don’t think it’s a better or worse movie, but I do think Spike Jonze is a better director than Kaufman, more kinetic and funny, but Adaptation. is in general a more kinetic and funny movie. Because it’s got an easy meta hook (no, you see, it’s a movie about the making of the movie itself! and Nicolas Cage is actually a really funny guy), it’s a lot easier to swallow the existential horror parts. I don’t think that’s a bad thing though, necessarily. If we have to have existential horror, we should at least get to laugh about it.
3. Moon (Duncan Jones, 2009): What a strange, strange little movie. The obvious points of comparison are other intense space isolation films, like 2001 and Alien, but this is much less scary and much, much kinder. The story’s really similar, but the tone is much less ominous, and the ending, much more upbeat about human nature. I can’t really talk about the ending more specifically without giving away the whole game, so I will leave it at saying that it sort of goes in an unexpected direction that feels very natural, but is ultimately short of action. There’s all this menace built up that’s never totally released. As an aside, it’s kind of weird to have watched two movies in the same week where an actor plays two characters who have to interact with each other on a regular basis, actually. They’ve gotten so good at it now that it feels pretty seamless. Anyway, it’s hopefully Sam Rockwell’s chance to shine, since he’s great and kind of chameleon who’s attractive enough to be a leading man. I also want to mention the amazing production design, since I feel like I sound more down on the movie than I actually was when I was watching it. They do a great job of making the moon station look like it was once pristine but it’s all grimy and dirty and lived in and grubby. I also love having the scary HAL computer have a smiley face.
   

   Moon

Anyway:

1. A Woman of Paris (Charlie Chaplin, 1923): So what happened is, several years ago, I had a passing urge to be more of a Chaplin completist, so I went to zip and added a bunch of movies to my queue. Then, I went to grad school, put my account on hold for two years, and then reactivated the account. Now that I really don’t care that much about Chaplin (City Lights is still my favourite but seriously I don’t think I need to know his whole career), zip sent me three Chaplins in a row. Limelight I saw a couple of weeks ago in the “lost months,” and thought was okay. I really wanted to see it because it’s the only time Chaplin and Keaton still worked together, and I thought it would be all poetic and lovely and stuff, but it had too much of Chaplin’s maudlin side to be much fun. This one, well it’s Chaplin’s first “serious dramatic film” as the title card at the beginning explains. UGH, I thought. It’s about a poor village girl (Edna Purviance) who leaves her true love through a misunderstanding and goes to Paris and then starts seeing this rich engaged playboy type (Adolphe Menjou), but then her true love comes to Paris with his mom and he’s an artist and his mom can’t stand her son wanting to marry someone like her, since she’s basically a whore. Blah blah suicide. Let’s put it this way. It was not as bad as you’d think. It’s briskly paced, the roaring twenties party setpieces are goregous, it’s well-acted — clearly Chaplin knew how to put together a film. The biggest problems were that it failed as a moral drama. It made being the mistress of a rich Parisian playboy, something I actually think would be pretty boring, look like a really sweet deal. You get cool clothes and a great apartment, and Menjou seemed like way more fun than the artist dude she really loved. He never really got mad at her; he seemed to find everything she did delightful. All in all, it really seemed like the way to go. But, more importantly, it just seems like Chaplin was wasting his gifts. His silent comedies are really great — combining visual poetry with sentiment, cuteness with social conscience. Honestly, if you’re Charlie Chaplin, why would you make a better-than-average melodrama when you could make a comedy that no one else could even touch?
2. I Want To Live! (Robert Wise, 1958): I did unreservedly love this though, at least at the time. Susan Hayward won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance as Barbara Graham, a real woman who sort of drifted around being a petty criminal, then, according to the movie, was unjustly implicated in the murder and robbery of an old lady. There was a whole media circus and her lawyer and this one journalist tried to get her sentence commuted, but in the end, she went to the gas chamber. The movie shows the whole thing and basically portrays her as a fun-loving lady who passed bad cheques, but was wholly innocent of murder. The whole thing rests on Hayward’s portrayal, and she makes Barbara funny and likable and sympathetic — though after the movie Robert Osborne said that Hayward actually believed Graham was guilty. Which, for me, made the way the movie totally sold me on her side of the story more interesting. Other things that were good: contemporary jazz soundtrack, the Academy-Award-nominated-but-awfully-unsubtle cinematography, and the bit at the end where (Pulitzer Prize-winning) journalist Ed Montgomery turns off his hearing aid to drown out the roar of horns honking in apparent celebration of Graham’s death (a bit that Revolutionary Road apparently stole from this).
3. Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, 2008): I finally saw this this week when I realized I’d only seen 2 of the Best Picture nominees this year. Then I realized Doubt didn’t actually get the Best Picture nomination, so I had only seen one (Milk, natch). Anyway, post-Oscar hype (I saw this Thursday), it’s still not a bad movie. If it had been a better year for movies and there was a No Country For Old Men up instead of a bunch of boring middlebrow stuff, I might feel like Slumdog took the award from something greater, but it’s not like Synecdoche, NY or My Winnipeg or Let The Right One In were going to win any more than The Dark Knight or Iron Man was. Of all the nominees, this movie felt the least like it was produced solely to win awards (though its promotion did nothing but position it that way) and the most like it was made for people to watch and enjoy. Its form was pure, pure melodrama, from the children in peril to the last-minute rush to pick up a cell phone — but it still felt fresh. The cinematography and editing were bright and modern, the music is actually relevant to the setting as well as sounding current (MIA was involved!), and most of all, I loved the way the media played a role. The fact that Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, which gives normal kid Jamal a kind of reality show pseudo-fame, is the centre of the story and the device that brings him and the girl together. Plus, you know, it ends with a dance number.

I kind of feel bad that I’d seen so few of the Oscar movies this year? I still might see The Reader, I guess, but I am really just not particularly interested in all the middlebrowness of it all. After reading the the Film Experience’s Oscar symposium that pretending the Oscars are really supposed to honour the “best” movies of the year is completely insane. It’s never going to be that, it’s always going to be a record of what seemed the biggest and the most movie-ish that year, and I’m kind of okay with that now and I just wish they could get through it in less than three and a half hours. (For the record, though, I loved the totally irrelevant cracked-out Baz Luhrman-stravaganza which I’m guessing will not be well-remembered, but only because it was so insane. They just kept adding in songs! Songs that don’t go together! Some of which are not really from musicals! (“At Last”?) And placing High School Musical 3 in the same context as West Side Story!)

Oh Jackman!

1. Changeling (Clint Eastwood, 2008): Changeling definitely isn’t a great movie, but it is well-made and interesting. Eastwood does an exacting job of recreating 1920s Los Angeles, starting with a black-and-white image that dissolves to colour, and ending the same way, but this studied pastness doesn’t really seem to have a point. Other than that, it’s a good movie: it’s well-paced, the story is structured in a way that you want to find out what happens next, the performances are strong. Angelina Jolie has a few big Oscar-baity scenes, but mostly just has to radiate quiet strength and resolve, which she does quite well. The most surprising thing about Changeling to me was that Clinton Eastwood Jr. made an explicitly feminist movie. There’s a little boy that goes missing and a serial killer, but the crux of the drama is in how the man (the police) use a supposedly authoritative discourse (medicine, psychiatry in particular) to keep down the uppity women who cause them trouble. Oh, and the heroine plays a single mom who’s really successful in her job and completely impresses in a position usually occupied by a man. Even after the loss of her son, we see her thriving, having graduated to her own office at the phone company. It even passes the Bechdel test: in the sanitarium, Angeline Jolie talks to Amy Ryan (who plays a prostitute who’s in there because she complained about a cop who beat her up) about how unjust the system is, and how the man uses stereotypes about women being emotional to keep them down. It’s all a little on the nose, but it’s kind of nice to see such unambiguously feminist rhetoric in what’s otherwise a capable thriller/drama.
   
2. Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006): I finally got caught up on all the big Oscar movies…from 2006. Heh, maybe next I’ll get Michael Clayton! Seriously, this was so good, but I had completely glossed over how gory it was supposed to be by the time zip¹ mailed it to me. Imagine my surprise when all the fairytale creature our young heroine Ofelia encounters are totally horrifying. They’re not fairies! They’re bugs! Plus big ol’ no eyes! And that’s just the fantasy world. Who can forget the fascist captain getting his face cut open Joker style and then sewing it shut himself. Oh my god. I had sort sort of conflated this movie in my head with Spirit of the Beehive, which is similar in a lot of ways (and to which it has often been compared) — little girl with overactive imagination, Spanish civil war, countryside — but is a quiet, contemplative work that uses elements of fantasy to hide its political meaning from Franco’s censors. This movie — it’s not un-political (come on, you know me better than that), but it’s political in a different way; its use of history is kind of blunt and fantastical, with the fascists being almost perfectly evil, and the republicans, almost comically good. But, you know, it’s a movie about imagination, not about historical facts. It was ridiculously well-reviewed, and I was totally in awe of it the whole time I was watching it: Del Toro never has an off moment in terms of mise-en-scene or framing or effects, but I kind of have nothing left to say. It’s weird for me, I guess, having spent so much time watching Spanish films from around the transition, so seeing Spanish filmmakers who were there deal with the same kinds of issues, whereas Del Toro’s got enough distance (being as young as he is and being Mexican) that Spain’s past becomes myth.
3. Synecdoche, NY (Charlie Kaufman, 2008): I don’t quite know what to say about this movie. I really loved it — well, I really admired it and found it fascinating and mostly enjoyed watching it. I’ve seen it compared to Ulysses a lot, which makes it sound pretentious and inpenetrable (maybe it is?), but it’s also the same kind of movie in spirit: bawdy, scatalogical, poetic, huge. Obviously Ulysses ends on a much more hopeful, afirmational note than Synecdoche, though (“…and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes”). Kaufman both reaches for and self-consciously mocks the ego necessary to reach for a work so expansive it’s able to sum up all of life somehow. Cotard’s project (a play about his whole life) eventually balloons totally out of his control, and Synecdoche, NY is always threatening to do the same to Kaufman. Eventually, Cotard cedes control of his project to someone else, a woman who quietly talks into his earpiece until he goes to sleep. The whole movie changes the minute Cotard steps away from the director’s chair, and we realize the whole thing’s been slanted from the beginning. And in a way the ending is hard to watch, now that you’ve lost Cotard as the “director.” As much as he’s unlikable and frankly unpleasant to look at, now that he’s fading away, you feel a bit impoverished. The whole thing still seems more a question than an answer.
4. Funny Games (Michael Haneke, 1997): Meanwhile, Haneke’s answer to every question a viewer asks him is pretty much “Fuck you.” (I’m assuming people know the story because of the recent remake: basically, two weird boys in white torture this normal bourgeois family in their palatial lakehouse for no apparent reason). This movie’s amazing, I can’t even believe I waited this long to see it. Sure, it’s violent and nihilistic and deliberately alienating (in a Brechtian way — the villain straight-up addresses the viewer and at one point actually rewinds the movie so he can get a second chance, just when you think the family’s getting somewhere). But it’s viscerally affecting. You know exactly what you’re getting into when you hear (but don’t see, Haneke only shows like, the roof of their car and hands) this boring couple (one half of which is the late Ulrich Muhe, who’s probably best-known for the Oscar-winning The Lives of Others) playing “guess the classical music”. Partway through their conversation, this crazy-loud metal comes on, and you can still see their lips moving as it plays, way too loud, through the credits, for really too long. It’s so unsettling, and it only gets worse from there. You never really see anything, despite it being kind of a horror movie (it follows that same slasher-y calm-before-the-storm thing, where you get bored waiting for the bad stuff to start), but then it kind of asks you why you’re so interested in seeing violent things a lot. It came out in 1997, but in the era of Saw V (which I don’t plan on seeing, the first two were enough, thanks), it still feels very vital. Here’s that opening scene (dubbed in Italian, but the effect’s the same):
   
5. Quantum of Solace (Marc Forster, 2008): Not in love with this, but better than the reviews led me to believe. I was kind of even mostly okay with James Bond having a relationship with a girl based around talking about their feelings. Lots of pretty and stylish and people getting shot, to the point that even M was like “Wow, James Bond is kind of a bad spy, he keeps killing people instead of figuring out what they’re up to!” I liked Forster’s Stranger Than Fiction quite a bit, but I don’t think he has much of an eye for action: the opening chase is between two black cars. I did like all Daniel Craig’s Tom Ford suits (especially the one he pulled out of some random opera waiter’s locker), the big Tosca set piece with all the conspirators meeting at an opera to plan the overthrow of the Bolivian government and duping the CIA, and the huge denouement action sequence set at Bolivia’s most explosive hotel.
6. The Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954): I never know what to say with Kurosawa. This one, it’s tough because the story is so slow-moving and so familiar (both because of its influence on the action genre in particular and because I’ve seen The Magnificent Seven) that you mostly wind up just admiring it. Like, there are those long, slightly off-kilter but still normal-looking shots, and you just kind look at the lovely compositions and the telephoto lens photography and it’s all very soothing and lovely, but it’s hard to imagine watching it with fresh eyes at this point. I kept retroactively comparing it with the Westerns that came later. It has a lot of the same structure, but the action, and how much it depends on the town finding the courage to stand up to the bandits, as opposed to the American version, where civilization can only be…civilization if it can keep the violence at arms’ length. In the Japanese version of basically the same story, I feel like it’s more about everyone having a role to play? I’m not trying to be gross about how “different” Japan is or whatever, it’s more that it’s interesting to see a story that I think of as quintessentially American play out in Feudal Japan and how that national mythology changes things.
   

Well, I was unemployed and kind of depressed (colloquially speaking, not clinically), I went to Texas, and then I got a full time job. The job thing is pretty exciting and it is a good job, but I’m maintaining my don’t write about work on your blog policy, brought to you by my modicum of good sense.

But the thing I will write is, I have basically a totally different schedule than I did before, and I haven’t yet figured out how the whole thing is going to work, in terms of blogging and working and sleeping. It’s not that I don’t have the time, it’s just that the routine’s still getting fine-tuned a bit. Streamlined, let’s say. In other words, things might be a bit weird, like, a long stretch of no posts followed by a bunch of posts all one after the other.

I’ve got a couple of things coming — check back for more Gossip Girl stuff (I missed the Yale episode, and the Dangerous Liasons episode, and Jenny’s downward spiral), a more current weekly movies soon, my conflicted feelings about Privileged, and maybe even my new love of Designing Women. I am also thinking about stealing Ashley’s format for a fall TV roundup type post.

So anyway, I saw a bunch of movies that I never wrote up. Well, I wrote them up, but I never polished the post or added pictures or anything. Some of these are pretty dated, since it’s like a month’s worth or something. This is for…since my last weekly movies til this week. There were some no movie weeks in there, what with pilot season and all.

1. Elegy (Isabel Coixet, 2008): This was kind of a disappointment. The trailer was hella deceptive, and made it look like the filmmakers changed the story from the novel a lot more than they actually did. What happened instead was that the original novel kind of got all the dirty stuff drained out of it. This is based on a Phillip Roth novel called The Dying Animal – and I think the shift from the reference to man’s true animalistic nature to a reference to a literary response to death is a good indicator of the film’s relationship to the novel. The whole thing is about an aging professor (Ben Kingsley) and his affair with a young student of his (Penélope Cruz, who did a good job but at 34 is too old for – and too much of an international icon and force of nature for – lines like “she still didn’t know what to do with her beauty”), and how it makes him confront his own mortality. The novel turns a pretty cynical eye on the bourgeois intellectual pretensions of the protagonist, but in the film, well-made but ironically too caught up in those same art-film pretensions, kind of just makes them look kind of glamourous. I did like the moody music and a lot of Coixet’s choices, especially the casting of Dennis Hopper and an almost unrecognizable Debbie Harry as aging yuppies (which went well with the whole treatment of the 1960s as this time of rebellion and how those counterculture people still kind of aged and turned respectable). And the performances were great all-round, especially Kingsley. I always forget how good he is. But ultimately, it’s missing a lot of the corporeality that makes the novel so great. In the novel, Consuela, the girl, tells the professor about how when she was a girl she let this boy watch her have her period — like, she took out the tampon and stood over him. So of course, the professor wants her to do this for him. Then the professor’s other lover finds the bloody tampon. In the movie, Consuela still tells the story, but instead of being all like, morbidly fascinated, the professor just laughs it off. The lover still finds a tampon, but it is bloodless. I think that’s a pretty telling alteration. If you take away the adaptation, it’s a pretty average, well-made art film, but it’s not going to set the world on fire. Especially with Vancouver standing in for New York. (The big tip-off for me was when they went to see a play and Gaeta from Battlestar Galactica was one of the actors.)
2. Last Year At Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961): There’s not really much to say about this movie that hasn’t already been said, since it’s one of those New Wave classics people always come back to. I watched this right after I saw all those Robbe-Grillet movies, since he wrote the script for this one too. Resnais is a better filmmaker than Robbe-Grillet. His narratives maintain the same sort of disturbing game-like quality, but it’s combined with a much richer, much more artificial mise-en-scene, which really suits the story’s intricate, game-like nature.
   
   
3. Yentl (Barbra Streisand, 1983): You guys? This movie, you guys. It’s amazing. For those not familiar, it’s the tale of Yentl, a young girl who’s dissatisfied with the options available to her as a young Jewish woman, so after her father dies, she dresses up as a man so she can study the torah. She sings songs to herself about how great it’s going to be, until she succumbs to the Semitic charms of one Mandy Patinkin. Who is surprisingly attractive in this film. It’s a sort of weird version of a musical, since Babs is the only one who sings, and half the songs are weird voiceover monologues that she starts lipsynching partway through, and the songs play much more like traditional soliloquies than the way musical numbers usually work in these films. Uh, oh yeah, the best part is the sort of manic screwball plot that’s still full of sadness – Yentl’s in love with Mandy Patinkin, but he only has eyes for Amy Irving. Meanwhile, Amy Irving’s dad won’t let Mandy marry her (because his brother committed suicide), so Mandy’s brilliant plan is to have Yentl, who he still believes to be a man, marry her, so no one else will have her. It’s not the best plan because of course Amy Irving totally falls in love with Yentl, not realizing that the reason Yentl is so cool and respectful is because she is a lady. Anyway, it’s fabulously overwrought with emotional conflict and hilarity and the weirdest love triangle ever, because everyone loves everyone else, but in slightly different ways.
   
4. Jeanne Eagels (George Sidney, 1957): This is a sort of okay actress melodrama – where you learn that women having ambition is bad, because then they will kill people – with a scenery chewing alcoholic awards-bait performance from Kim Novak. Oh, but it gets better! Jeanne Eagels was apparently a real actress in the teens and twenties, and the film is based on a muckraking biography of her, which explains why she spends so much of the movie having fights with Actors Equity. Anyway, it’s not a great movie, but George Sidney makes the whole thing visually interesting, and Agnes Moorehead is involved, so you know it’s not all bad.
5. Once Upon a Honeymoon (Leo McCarey, 1942): This is kind of a bizarre WWII dramedy obviously designed to stir up patriotism about fighting the Nazis. Ginger Rogers plays this lady who denies her American-ness by pretending to be a British aristocrat, then she marries a Nazi, who she follows around Europe as countries keep falling. She eventually realizes that he is, in fact, a Nazi (a “fifth columnist” who pretends to be for the resistance, but screws them over by selling them bad weapons); so she runs off with Cary Grant. Once the war breaks out in earnest the tone suddenly shifts from charming screwball comedy to somber drama, as Ginger and Cary get mistaken for Jews (because Ginger selflessly traded her passport with a hotel maid to help said maid avoid getting shipped off), and get put in some kind of camp for like, five minutes. Anyway, it’s sort of weird to see now, because Nazis are always taken so much more seriously these days.
6. Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (Peter Sollett, 2008): Was utterly delightful. A lot of people started complaining about the basic sameness of Michael Cera’s characters in the last few movies he’s done, and they certainly have a point, but that is okay because of the total revelation that is Kat Dennings’ performance. The movie’s kind of set up as an ensemble piece, switching between the various threads of the story – which follows the novel, which apparently actually switched narrative POVs – but I pretty much came out of it thinking of it as a movie about Norah. Not amazing – there were some definite gross-out comedy moments that played weirdly manic and probably turned a lot of people off – but really, so very sweet. And, as Nathaniel at the Film Experience pointed out a while ago, the way the movie treats gay characters – ie, that their gayness is not a big deal and that Nick can be best friends with two gay dudes without it being a big deal or being threatened by it – is refreshing.
   But seriously. Dennings.
   
7. Blindness (Fernando Mereilles, 2008): There was kind of a conflict between substance and style here. Stylistically, it was exquisite, from the acting to the art direction. The cinematography was especially amazing. The screen would frequently “fade” to a bright white or become obstructed or he’d open a scene blurry, essentially blinding the viewer and making them really aware of vision in a really powerful way. But the actual story was really frustrating. I’m not sure if it was just that the pacing of an allegorical novel didn’t work in the medium of film. The rape scene was so hard to watch, and while I personally have an incredible amount of patience for film violence, you are going to lose a lot of other viewers with something like that, especially when I mean, that was obviously the point, to make you wonder how it took so long for Julianne Moore to do something given the insane position of power she was in as the only lady who’s not blind in, possibly, the world. Anyway, the people I saw it with liked it even less than I did, and one couple in the theatre (in Texas, BTW) walked out. I personally thought all the stuff in the quarantine was great, but the long section after they get out – walking through the devastated city and then going “home” – dragged and felt anticlimactic. I do think that that’s what they were going for, but it’s not something that I really enjoyed, and the whole thing never really resolves into a clear, like, point. Like, if it’s exhausting and meaningless and that’s the point…then I am not quite sure why I should be excited about the movie. Like, it certainly has a right to exist and be this movie, and I could possibly see how others would like it, but I was kind of meh. In short, it had potential, and Julianne Moore is hardcore in this, but on the whole something doesn’t work.
8. The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (Nicolas Gessner, 1976): This is a “thriller” that was shot in Canada around the same time as Jodie Foster made Taxi Driver. In this movie, she’s a 13 year-old girl who lives all alone in this huge house, and freaks out every adult there is by being preternaturally serious and also by lying about the presence of her dad (actually dead, apparently of natural causes). The whole thing just goes on, with Martin Sheen and Alexis Smith are mean WASPs who are against Jodie’s immigrant cop friend and her boyfriend, his nephew, who is a crippled magician; they are also anti-Jodie because she is Jewish in the movie, except Martin Sheen wants to bone her because he is a scary villain who actually has a crazy cape at the end of the movie, which makes sense in context. Anyway, it would probably not be that interesting if not for Jodie’s eerie performance, which makes it seem unclear whether the girl is just lying all the time. The movie ends with this really long close-up of her face, which is sort of just impassive, with a fire burning behind her.
9. Tropic Thunder (Ben Stiller, 2008): I think a lot of the comedy in this was in the ideas, less in the execution, if that makes sense. Like, the idea of Robert Downey Jr. in blackface, offending the hell out of the actual black actor on the set? Funny. But a lot of the time, the joke was more in the concept than in the actual performance adding anything to the thing. My favourite part was the trailers at the beginning. Oh, and remember all the controversy with regard to various oppressed groups? I think that was probably good for the movie. It’s clear in context that the intent is satire of Hollywood, and the ignorance of society generally, even if in execution it wasn’t always the most effectiveness. I think it’s tough to satirize Hollywood…in a big budget Hollywood production that’s packed to the gills with stars. When Nick Nolte is billed, like, fifth, and Tom Cruise and Matthew McConaughey are tertiary characters, I think you lose any sense of the movie being an outsider, poking fun at those in power. Not that I’m complaining, I actually thought that all three of them were really funny and that Cruise dancing to Flo Rida was one of the most layered bits in the film. But seriously. Access Hollywood is product-placed! It just loses some bite.
10. Take the Lead (Liz Friedlander, 2006): This is like Dangerous Minds, with dancing. With Antonio Banderas. It’s about as good (and bad) as you would think, but add like 5 points for how Antonio is totally charming in his goofy role as the completely selfless dance teacher. It turns out he’s just a really nice guy. This is mostly notable (to me) as the movie that put a fake staircase in front of UTS and that my friend saw Antonio Banderas during the filming of. Seriously, Banderas’s character doesn’t really grow or change or have flaws; most of the growth and conflict is between the Troubled Teens. I think the various little romances between the Troubled Teens are handled really lightly and managed to be a bit surprising, given the relative by-numbers-ness of the movie. I thought for sure the troubled rich girl who was slumming it would end up hooking up with the, like, fiery hispanic dude, but instead she just made friends with this really fat kid no one else would dance with and he took her to her cotillion and it was really sweet how she gained confidence by giving him confidence. The cast is really weird. There’s a Top Model runner-up from before I started watching, Elijah Kelly who was Seaweed in the Hairspray remake, the kid from Finding Forrester, and that girl from Degrassi who always has bitchface on that show, but doesn’t seem to in this movie.
    

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.