Rightwing Film Geek

That the new BRIDESHEAD REVISITED movie will suck pretty hard.

We can already be morally certain that it will be a vulgar reduction of Sebastian in ways designed to pander to contemporary narrowness and sex obsession. Actor Ben Whishaw bluntly says he has played Sebastian as a gay person, in today’s parlance, because he and the others involved in the film needed to give the let’s-pat-him-on-the-head-since-he-can’t-have-been-expected-to-know-better-because-of-the-times treatment to Evelyn Waugh (as in principle any contemporary artiste could have to any other DWEM who needs to be pat on the head since he can’t have been expected to know better because of the times), and so they helpfully filled in the gaps left unfilled by his insufficient enlightenment. The money quotes (oops) from Whishaw:

“Sebastian knows what his nature is and believes he’s going to hell” …
The film … aims to speak to a new generation, in part by portraying Sebastian as unquestionably gay. Waugh left Sebastian’s sexuality somewhat ambiguous, and purists may balk at the inclusion of a kiss between Sebastian and Charles Ryder, his school chum and the story’s narrator (played by Matthew Goode). “The kiss was quite a bone of contention,” says Whishaw of discussions on the set. “But Waugh said as much as he could at the time he was writing [the novel], and it seems fairly clear-cut. He’s a gay character.”

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It’s the film criticism equivalent of Tiger Woods hypothetically retiring next week or of the death of Ronald Reagan. Roger Ebert is walking away from the show that made him certainly the most-famous and arguably the most-influential film critic ever.

In its various incarnations, from PBS to syndication, from “Sneak Previews” to “At the Movies” to “Siskel and Ebert,” his show was the show that put film criticism into the popular consciousness and made stars of him and Gene Siskel, to the point they were commenting on the Olympics, appearing on Carson and Arsenio, and speaking to Harvard Law School and Playboy magazine (one of only three issues I ever purchased). His reflected glory was even enough to make a star of Richard Roeper, who also is leaving the show, and the breakdown of whose negotiations with Disney apparently created the occasion for Ebert’s official leave-taking. People who have seen him since his jaw surgery had told me they doubted Ebert would ever appear on TV again, because of what the surgery had to do to his voice and his face. This statement though seems to imply Ebert may be back on TV:

The trademark still belongs to me and Marlene Iglitzen, Gene’s widow, and the thumbs will return.

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This is my review of the most-anticipated movie of the summer:
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To quote G-Money: “We’ll be seeing a lot more of these.“

Sacha Baron Cohen is working on a BORAT sequel, based on Bruno, a garishly gay Austrian fashionista who is the only one of Cohen’s three principal characters who hasn’t had a movie yet (Ali G had a British-made film ALI G INDAHOUSE that went straight to video in the US). And some MMA fans reportedly were not amused as a supposed fight turned into a gay sex scene. Nor was a Dallas-area audience last month, lured out for a talk-show that turned into public gay passes and a 2-year-old “gay baby.”

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This weekend will mark my annual ritual of playing that role, at the Slapsticon Festival which runs Thursday to Sunday in Arlington.

The festival shows silent (with live piano accompaniment) and early-sound comedies, mostly short films (so even if you’re watching something that sucks, you know it’s not gonna suck for too long), and mostly focusing on stuff that’s not easily available on video and on comedians less known than e.g., Chaplin and Keaton. If you’re in the DC area and have any interest in movies, you should definitely come by and give it a whirl ($30 for a whole day of films; $16 for a half-day); and, incentive or disincentive, I’ll be there for all four days and every program.

This year’s program is here, and while I can truthfully say that with one exception all these titles are unknown to me … if the curiosity factor of what a Cecil B. DeMille comedy looks like doesn’t intrigue you … [VJM tries and fails for a sufficient metaphor of hopeless disbelief]. The biggest primetime “name” attraction is the Three Stooges, but it’ll be a program of “rarities,” rather than the oft-repeated episodes.

There are the annual cinematic acquaintanceships I look forward to restarting here since the video store hasn’t been kind to them: Mr. & Mrs. Sidney Drew (the creator of the family sitcom), Lupino Lane (a great pure athlete), Larry Semon (the most childish and clownish of them all), Lloyd Hamilton (the sickly, prickly stuffed shirt), Harry Langdon’s sound work (much better than its reputation), and 20s Sennett (much better than the better-known primitives from the 10s). And every year, there’s the annual “surprise” discoveries that happen (e.g., Stan Laurel solo, a lost Mabel Normand feature).

And after several years, there’s also the personal acquaintanceships that have started to develop. It’s an intimate enough festival to allow real interaction with programmers, print owners, longtime fans and some of the most eminent scholars in the field. Last year, I shared a couple of beers at the Holiday Inn with Paul Gierucki, the man who compiled the 4-disc Fatty Arbuckle DVD and he said IIRC that the long-thought-lost stuff that’s still turning up in archives around the world suggest that Arbuckle’s run of 1918-1919 work may have been the greatest stretch of work by any comedian on film.

But for now, Arbuckle’s last film, 1933’s TOMALIO will be playing Sunday morning, the last of the six Vitaphone shorts he made for Warner Brothers. Obviously, I can’t judge until I see it, but it’s a matter of historical record that those six shorts were impressive enough to earn him a Warners contract to star in a comedy feature, giving him the shot at both the real comeback he wanted and the vindication he deserved (though he died the day after signing the contract). I. Can’t. Wait.

GONZO (Alex Gibney, USA, 2008) — 6

Former work colleague Stacy and I went to see GONZO together last week, in part so he could review it for the American Spectator. I have long known that Stacy loves Hunter S. Thompson and had written several times for the newspaper on him, so I figured he’d get a kick about at least seeing GONZO.

But it made for an odd experience. Usually, when it comes to movies, I’m the Smartest Guy in the Room. Here, not so. Stacy knows far more about Thompson and his career than I do (most of what I know is filtered through the Doonesbury character Uncle Duke) and so he was uniquely equipped to write the kind of kick-ass review of GONZO that I never could.

The nub of Stacy’s complaint was that the film was too heavily focused on Thompson’s political involvement in “the Sixties,”¹ and thus skrimped heavily on large chunks of material, both from earlier and later.

Gibney … seems determined to force the square peg of Thompson idiosyncrasies into the round hole of contemporary liberal passions. It’s an awkward fit. At times, Gonzo seems more like a celebration of George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign than of Thompson’s journalism career. …

These political choices might be more easily forgiven if they did not result in Gonzo giving short shrift to other aspects of Thompson’s career.

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KIT KITTREDGE: AN AMERICAN GIRL (Patricia Rozema, USA, 2008) — 8

One measure of the strength of KIT KITTREDGE is that I never once guessed that it was based on a doll and could thus in principle have been as easily dismissed as a marketing exercise a la THE MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS.™ Since I am neither a 10-year-old-girl nor the father of one, the “American Girl” series of dolls was something that I first learned about researching to write this review. I’d have sworn blind this movie was based on some new Young Adult literature series, or the equivalent from the 1930s.

Another measure is that I should not like KIT KITTREDGE at all, given how specific it is in terms of sensibility — not only am I am not one now, but I have never been a 10-year-old girl; when I was a 10-year-old boy, you couldn’t have paid me to read “girl books” in case I catch coodies or something (”Encyclopedia Brown” was my favorite); I have no 10-year-old daughter to share a Daddy’s Movie Day with; I generally despise “chick flicks” (see, SEX AND THE CITY; or rather, I didn’t) or anything that strikes me as sentimental (see, SON OF RAMBOW). But KIT KITTREDGE won me over very quickly because Kit herself is so appealing and lovable as a character and Abigail Breslin perfectly embodies her — plucky without being obnoxious, as matter-of-fact as a child who hasn’t yet learned what a heartbreaker the world can be because she is herself still innocent and gentle-spirited. And since your humble writer is a curmudgeon who sympathizes utterly with Mr. Grant’s hatred of Mary’s character and who once (really and truly) said to a colleague, “everyone’s got a right to be perky, but you abuse the privilege” — that’s saying something.

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Spike Lee contributes more material for the Canonization Process:

“When that happens, it will change everything. … You’ll have to measure time by ‘Before Obama’ and ‘After Obama,’” Lee said during the panel.
…
“Everything’s going to be affected by this seismic change in the universe,” he said.

I’ll say this for the terms “B.O.” and “A.O.” … they refer to a real person and thus easily kick the asses of “b.c.e.” and “c.e.”

(via Dirty Harry)

The cinematic gods took away SILENT LIGHT, but they have given us back METROPOLIS. According to Die Zeit magazine, Fritz Lang’s original 1927 German release cut has been found in Argentina (I am not kidding … maybe it fled there after World War 2).¹

After examining the film the three experts are certain: The find from Buenos Aires is a real treasure, a worldwide sensation. Metropolis, the most important silent film in German history, can from this day on be considered to have been rediscovered. …
Among the footage that has now been discovered, according to the unanimous opinion of the three experts that ZEITmagazin asked to appraise the pictures, there are several scenes which are essential in order to understand the film: The role played by the actor Fritz Rasp in the film for instance, can finally be understood. Other scenes, such as for instance the saving of the children from the worker’s underworld, are considerably more dramatic. In brief: “Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s most famous film, can be seen through new eyes.”, as stated by Rainer Rother, Director of the Deutsche Kinemathek Museum and head of the series of retrospectives at the Berlinale.

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(I initially wrote this as part of the post above, but it just became too long for an aside.)

As I noted, METROPOLIS was the first silent film I can really say I saw, in the form of the video version released in the late-1980s with a Giorgio Moroder soundtrack. It’s common to deride that score, especially among purists, but it didn’t bother me for a bunch of reasons. METROPOLIS is a futuristic sci-fi movie anyway even now and not the remotest bit realistic, so period-music purists, with whom I’m in theoretical sympathy, don’t even have a prima facie case.

As for the use of songs with words, easily Moroder’s most controversial choice — first of all, if memory serves only about half the running time had vocal accompaniment; Moroder just as often used synthesizer music. And anyway, I don’t think you listen to nondiegetic rock-music lyrics that closely anyway, at least in a non-musical. What you remember, at least while watching a movie this singular, is a few hooks and the singer’s voice as pure sound. I remember as if it were yesterday my neck tingling to Bonnie Tyler’s “Here She Comes” and Tyler’s raspy voice ripping into the chorus as the false Maria enters the frame.

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HANCOCK (Peter Berg, USA, 2008) — 8

I hate you, Kyle Smith … even took the title I wanted to use (though I would have had the balls to include the “u” and the “c,” ya big wuss).

For about an hour, HANCOCK is one of the best summer popcorn films I’ve ever seen¹ — it’s basically GULLIVER’S TRAVELS, the tale of a giant among small men, only reconceived as a modern superhero movie with a heaping helping of pomo sarcasm. It’s also one of the few movies with an identifiable political subtext (it’s hardly “sub”-text in fact) that is unapologetically pro-war. Or more precisely, unapologetically anti-the-(purported)-reasons-many-claim-to-be-anti-war. The details in this movie — the eagle on bumbling, nasty superhero Will Smith’s cap; complaints about collateral damage; civil lawsuits; carping TV reporters and talking heads ranting about “lawless”; encounter groups and the phrase “conflict resolution”; the Woodstock concert poster in Jason Bateman and Charlize Theron’s bedroom; a bully who (a) is French, and (b) is played by Daeg Faerch, who played the boy Michael Myers in the recent HALLOWEEN remake; a Greenpeace boat — there are just too many signifiers here for it to be a coincidence, or one or two eager-beaver conservatives overinterpreting a detail. And it’s surely relevant that Peter Berg directed last year’s THE KINGDOM, which gave the usual liberal-critic suspects the usual fact-free vapors.

Just read what Kyle Smith had to say … he really did say it all and I have nothing to add on the point except my word that I did catch much of it myself. And the title of his post refers to exactly what came to my mind in this discussion here: TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE²:

Let’s just say there is a speech at the end of TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE … that is … well … MASSIVE WARNING ABOUT … weeeeellllll … keep in mind that it’s by the SOUTH PARK guys, and read the first direct quote. If you can read through the vulgarity (and know the movie’s plot), it’s one of the greatest defenses of Foreign-Policy Hawkishness in movie history. (I am quite serious.)

I was tickled with joy and laughing my butt off for the first hour as Hancock blunders around and is taken in by a liberal-yuppie suburban couple concerned with improving Hancock’s image and making him a more sensitive hero, a la John Kerry, who remembers to say please and thank you, and agrees to submit to international law a prison term. Predictably, Hancock has to be called in in a crisis (and ask permission to lift up a wounded policewoman from fear of traversing sexual harrassment rules). But that scene was obviously the climax of the HANCOCK I’d been expecting, but I looked at my watch and the movie was less than an hour old. “It can’t be over yet … where is this gonna go.” And in a few minutes, I found out and my mouth was literally agape — first in “ohmigawd, where can THIS be leading??? I believe this will be awesomest thing ever if they can pull it off” mode (I was thinking it could go in the direction of a certain TV show — SPOILERS!!! if you click). But then my mouth was agape in “ohmigawd, is THAT where it’s led. I can’t believe they pissed away some much awesomeness” mode.

I will tread vaguely — suffice to say that the last half-hour is just a routine “origins” story that isn’t particularly germane to this mode of representing a superhero; it doesn’t continue, deepen or even (explicitly) take back the satire of the first hour; it goes for warm and fuzzy pathos in a movie that should have a cold, pitch-black heart; and the feeble stab at “explanation” for how Hancock gets his powers are literally insulting in its desultory lameness (”some say gods, some angels, some superheroes”). It just feels tacked on, and curiously Kyle Smith barely mentions it in his formal review of HANCOCK. It’s been reported that the end was being reworked at the very last minute, and boy does it show.
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¹ Yes, I don’t see them all or even many because I am a snob, etc.
² Unsurprisingly, TEAM AMERICA occasioned maybe the worst review Roger Ebert ever wrote, admitting that he couldn’t figure out what has been perfectly obvious even to non-critics to the right of Hubert Humphrey.

Orson Welles once said (I can’t find the exact quote very quickly) that anybody who writes or talks about movies without writing or talking about money is a fool. Never has it been more obvious to me than what has happened to a couple of great movies that will probably never see a commercial release in the US because their distributor has financially collapsed.

Tartan Films shuttered its US video division last month and a few days ago it went into receivership itself. My interests have been the artistry and morality of the movies; the business of them not at all. But two of the films that Tartan had the rights to distribute were Carlos Reygadas’s SILENT LIGHT and Roy Andersson’s YOU THE LIVING.

I saw both films, and great ones they are, for the second time at FilmFestDC. SILENT LIGHT got even better and was upgraded to “10″; YOU THE LIVING not so much, but easily stayed a “9.” Both would be cinches for my year-end Top 10; neither are now on it because there is now essentially no chance that either will see the inside of a non-festival American theater. They will probably both go straight to video some time around 2010. That’s cruel to any great movie, but doubly cruel for these two, both of which create whole (very different) worlds and so need the sense of envelopment that being in a theater produces. In fact, SILENT LIGHT’s famous opening shot absolutely depends on being surrounded by the theater’s darkness. I am not a film-only purist and have often butted heads with them, but is any film ever NEEDED to be seen in a theater, it’s SILENT LIGHT. And now it won’t be.

Sitting in my draft folder now is a 80-percent-done lengthy appreciation of SILENT LIGHT that I worked on shortly after seeing it for the second time, at FilmFestDC this spring. And it’s been sitting there because I can’t find the wherewithal to convince myself that anything I have to say can be relevant to a film that can never be seen. And so finish it haunted by the knowledge that I am a fool.

Roger Ebert devoted his Great Movie column last weekend to TRIUMPH OF THE WILL (and I’ll return to that in a day or two), after teasing that fact in his journal. I commented a couple of times on the narrowly vulgar issue of whether she and Hitler were lovers.

But I made another comment that wasn’t posted and I can pretend neither to be pleased nor understand. This is the moderator’s prereogative, of course, but I don’t know what about what follows is objectionable or unpublishable, particularly since a comment about the glories of Soviet Communism did pass the offense test. I flattered myself that perhaps Ebert was gonna make the exact same point in his piece (though I still would have published it; it’s not a blindingly original point that could form the basis of a cribbing charge). But he didn’t.

And here is what I wrote.
———————————————–
Mr. Urquhart:

The answer is that TRIUMPH OF THE WILL neither is nor isn’t a documentary, but rather, it created its own category in a kind of Hegelian synthesis, and it’s a synthesis that news coverage and politicians since have not been able to do without: The Photo-Op.

That is, “reality” that exists in order for itself to be photographed. When the American president goes for a visit to the flooded parts of Iowa, a significant part of the reason (after all, he can sign aid bills or disaster declarations sitting in DC) is so he can be seen doing it for public consumption, just like all the Nazis marched through Nuremburg in history’s grandest and greatest photo-op. TRIUMPH was something new for politics. And what I said of the Iowa floods is true of any president of any party; I’m not making the childish “Bushitler” arguments of some above.

While TRIUMPH is in no way a “pure” documentary in the way that cinema-verite purists insist, it is just as clearly not fiction — the Nuremberg Rally really did happen as Leni Riefenstahl showed it; and significant events that did not appear in the film happened anyway.

Every time you turn on CNN or Fox News or the BBC, etc., you are watching something that Leni Riefenstahl and TRIUMPH OF THE WILL made possible. Rinse and repeat with ESPN and OLYMPIA (though the details are a bit different), and you have the greatest and most-influential documentarian (and female director) of all time. No doubt about it.

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL (Jean Luc Godard, Britain, 1968) — 7

Does it count as a good movie if you hate an artist with a passion and he makes a film that so perfectly embodies all his myriad flaws that you find it enjoyable as an exercise in critical chuckling? In the “this is exactly the sort of crap that this fraudulent, pretentious pseudo-intellectual quack and his cult of windbag-enablers thinks is good” sense? Is there a film-criticism equivalent of Schadenfeude?

Honestly, if SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL¹ (aka ONE PLUS ONE) had been directed by (just a “for example”) me, as a parody of Godard’s work, I would consider that film one of the greatest of all time. Everything that I hate about this man’s films is here with a vengeance — the stupid pseudo-puns on the title cards,² the indifference to coherence, the desultory editing, the lengthy takes that mostly fill themselves with their own emptiness, the radical chic, the rambling on-camera preaching, the Maoist politics, the slapdash plotting rhythm.³ But I found myself … not exactly “engaged,” but critically amused in ways not unrelated to Mystery Science Theater 3000, and sometimes even interested in the material in spite of Godard’s best [sic] efforts. Honestly … if you reject Godard and all his works and all his empty promises, this is your film — it could almost be retitled SYMPATHY FOR GODARD.

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Yeah, yeah … it’s the Huns, playing Zenit St. Petersburg for the UEFA Cup in Manchester shortly (I’m out the door as I finish this).

I can’t bring myself to wear a Rangers shirt to the broadcast of the game (reading this last night can really pound in the ambivalence I’ll always feel). But your country’s clubs are one team in Europe; I have a Protestant father and two Protestant grandparents; and this is one of the biggest games ever played by a Scottish club. I have played over and over this clip, of Rangers’ penalty shootout victory in the semi-finals over Fiorentina …

… and I get goose bumps every time, as the commentator yells “Manchester brace yourself; Rangers are coming. Scotland will have its big night as well. The Scots are heading for Manchester and you know what, Manchester may not be big enough.”

The thing is though, that the Huns have won their way through to the final playing anti-football. I well understand that when it’s your team and your country, only results matter, and I’ll be cheering my head off if they win (good for the coefficient and all). But Rangers are not an attractive team to watch, in Europe anyway. I think they’ll manage it though — Zenit are the kind of attack-first team Rangers are built to frustrate and defeat (though a team that can beat Bayern Munich 4-0 and Bayer Leverkusen 4-1 away needn’t fear anybody).

But history is on the Huns’ side. The other time Rangers won a European trophy (the 1972 Cup Winners Cup), the final victory was over a Russian team. And the victories in the three previous rounds were over teams from Portugal, Italy and Germany (Sporting Lisbon, Torino and Bayern then; Werder Bremen, Sporting and Fiorentina, in order, now).

As long as nobody at the bar sings “The Billy Boys” song, and the victorious Rangers fans don;t get their team banned from Europe as happened last time.

LOST MOON — Sudhir Mishra, India, 6

I don’t know that “discovers” is the right word, but I want to say this is “Bollywood discovers post-modernism” — taking its original title, KHOYA KHOYA CHAND, from a classic song (available here; hopefully that’ll work, leaving you to choose the player) and essentially telling a behind-the-scenes story that has some parallels to the stories of Hindi pop cinema from the mid-50s to the mid-60s, including the making of the original movie that contained that song (imagine a fictionalized Donald O’Connor in a “Behind the Music” biopic titled “Make Em Laugh” covering the MGM 1950s for the general idea). The performances are appropriately broad for their archetypal characters — Saurabh Shukla as a fretting money-conscious producer (”it will be a hit”) and Sushmita Mukherjee as a middle-aged actress-vamp (”if you can’t have the wedding, who says you can’t have the wedding night”) are both total hoots. As Camille Paglia has noted on more than one occasion, Bollywood is the only place in the movie world where unapologetic glamor, beauty and sumptuousness-for-its-own-sake can still be found. LOST MOON not only has Soha Ali Khan and Shiney Ahuja as its leads, but its “movie-set” premise uses every excuse to indulge in escapist frippery in the sets and costumes — flowers garlanding a bed and petals spread over sheets: that sort of thing. However, Bollywood movies are like Toyota Corollas — consistently enjoyable and watchable (i.e., “functional”) while rarely being great (i.e., “exciting”). In the case of this particular movie, as I implied, Khan and Ahuja both have glamor to spare, but neither can really act. I also got a strong sense that the plot of LOST MOON would have been at least more fun (if not exactly “more sensible” or “less rambling”) for Indians, who can get all the movie in-jokes than any “firangi” like myself who, though obviously a fan of the genre, has seen fewer than 50 “Hindi pop” movies. But while the fun songs are playing … really, who cares?

TAKVA: A MAN’S FEAR OF GOD — Ozer Kiziltan, Turkey, 8

This film is teetering on the edge of a 9, held back only by my utter ignorance of the details of certain (apparently) small Muslim sects. Like with LOST MOON and Bollywood history, it’s the kind of “mother’s milk” stuff for a film’s domestic audience, but which went over the head of this Polytheist Crusader and seems vital to understanding what this film is “saying,” though it’s a tribute to TAKVA that it did make me want to find out and never left me in doubt that I was watching a great film, albeit one I couldn’t quite grasp as firmly as I’d want. A small (in several senses), late-middle-aged man, Muharrem is shown to be one of the most devout members of a Muslim group in Istanbul that seems (sorry for these comparisons, but I can only speak “Christian”) to be a kind of Pentecostal or Charismatic Shi’ite sect, with prescribed liturgies. He performs regular ablutions, greets everyone with prayer formulations, prays before every meal and clearly lives only to please God. His very faithful naivete, the sheik decides, makes him the ideal man to handle the group’s worldly goods (”the wise try to trick”) and he moves in to the seminary and becomes a rent collector, and is given clothes and baubles to look the part, even though the threads are rather ill-fitting no matter the body sizes. A kind of existential crisis comes, though it’s not resolved exactly as I’d expected. And TAKVA is richly and minutely observed for its entire length — moments like Muharrem’s ex-boss telling him to get coffee (I’ve heard more than one priest note how people act differently in the presence of a collar, for good and ill) and attitudes that can only come from an honor culture with contempt for worldliness. Erkan Can is like a Semitic Paul Giamatti in build and gait and schlubiness, and, like a man who knows God’s greatness lies in his nothingness, he gives Muharrem not an ounce of self-regard (look at something as simple and second-nature as how he repeatedly handles, or rather mishandles, a cell phone). By the end of the film … speaking vaguely but SPOILERS … Muharrem the humble pious man is destroyed like Norman Bates at the end of PSYCHO, but this is not a Turkish Dawkinsism, because the manner in which this happens is a kind of Satanic (temporary) victory.

THE POPE’S TOILET — Cesar Charlone and Enrique Fernandez, Uruguay, 5

Forget it, Adam … not only does the Pope not take a dump, but there’s hardly even any scatology in the film (none that I recall specifically right now), though the title does make it mandatory for me to say that the Digital Video used here looks like crap — all blurry and muddy and primary-color-free (I thought the film was out of focus several times), as if this movie was for posting on YouTube. An oddly uncompelling movie because it never really settles down into either “black comedy” or “caper movie” or “small town pluck” or “family drama/dramedy” territory, instead kinda falling in between all the chairs. POPE’S TOILET is certainly watchable, never really boring and occasionally funny. Lead actor Cesar Troncoso, as the man with the idea to make a fortune by charging tourists to use an outdoor toilet that he’ll build, and lead actress Virginia Mendez as his reality-principle wife are both credible and inhabit the roles quite well. My favorite bit was the family rehearsing “the pitch script” for how they will deal with the customers. And I enjoyed hearing some of the Pope chants that find their way into every language (”Juan Pablo, amigo / El pueblo contigo”). The film has a bit of an Ealing vibe, like a TITFIELD THUNDERBOLT, PASSPORT TO PIMLICO or WHISKY GALORE, also about small plucky communities with plans to get ahead. But it’s neither as featherweight as the first two (there are scenes of domestic violence and drunkenness) nor as venal as the third (the people of Melo are more naive than anything) — so the comedy never consistently takes off.

Sat 26
LOST MOON — Sudhir Mishra, India, 6
TAKVA: A MAN’S FEAR OF GOD — Ozer Kiziltan, Turkey, 8
THE POPE’S TOILET — Cesar Charlone and Enrique Fernandez, Uruguay, 5

Sun 27
MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS — Wong Kar-wai, USA, 7  (technically out of festival)
SILENT LIGHT — Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/Holland, 10 (upgraded from 9) R
THE SHOW MUST GO ON — Han Jae-rim, South Korea, 6

Just before I leave my pad to start watching, these are the films I’ll be seeing over the next week (days off work being the primary constraint).

Sat 26
300pm LOST MOON (aka KHOYA KHOYA CHAND) — Sudhir Mishra, India
630pm TAKVA: A MAN’S FEAR OF GOD — Ozer Kiziltan, Turkey
930pm THE POPE’S TOILET — Cesar Charlone and Enrique Fernandez, Uruguay

Sun 27
300pm THE NIGHT JAMES BROWN SAVED BOSTON — David Leaf, USA
500pm SILENT LIGHT — Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/Holland
745pm THE SHOW MUST GO ON — Han Jae-rim, South Korea

Mon 28
630pm BUDDHA COLLAPSED OUT OF SHAME — Hana Makhmalbaf, Iran
830pm UNFINISHED STORIES — Pourya Azarbayjani, Iran

Tue 29
630pm LA ANTENA — Esteban Sapir, Argentina
815pm YOU THE LIVING — Roy Andersson, Sweden

Sat 3
700pm PVC-1 — Stathos Stathoulopoulos, Colombia
930pm ELITE SQUAD — Jose Padilha, Brazil

When I went to pick up my tickets at Olsson’s Books, the man chuckled after I finished the first Saturday order and said “wow … three films in one day.” I told him I’ve done seven at festivals where the scheduling allows that (FilmFestDC’s scheduling doesn’t really; I think four is the most you could do on any one day, and on most it’s just two)

Here is the Washington Times obituary, a second-day piece for Monday’s paper. Heston died so late Saturday night, that all the late-night crew could get before the last print run was a four-paragraph brief noting the bare facts. (I insisted Sunday that if the Washington Times ever needed a staff-byline on an actor’s obituary, it would be for Charlton Heston, and I’d have written it myself if I’d had to.)

Heston was a political figure and by design, we had a lot of that material up high. But there also was a Newsbusters account, the basis for the following paragraphs:

Such devotion offended liberal firebrands, however. Filmmaker Michael Moore sprung what many considered an unfair on-camera interview on Mr. Heston at the actors home in the 2002 film “Bowling for Columbine.” Mr. Heston was starting to display neurological symptoms at the time.
Yesterday, some progressive bloggers offered less than flattering comments about Mr. Heston’s passing.
Warner Todd Huston, who monitors liberal media for the conservative watchdog Newsbusters, yesterday drew attention to the Daily Kos, citing dozens of contributors who called Mr. Heston a “gun nut” — that’s one of the printable epithets — shortly after his death was made public.
“Too often people confuse the politics with the man and the passion for the issues overwhelms civil behavior,” Mr. Huston said.

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I’ve been tagged by two different friends — Dale Price and Steve Skojec — for the same meme  — the “Top-Five Critically-Lauded Movies I Simply Detest.”

Since I generally only see movies that have at least some critical acclaim, I could probably do this for any given year. For example, in 2006, none of the films that won the world’s three top juried festivals were IMHO worth recommending — GRBAVICA (Berlin, 5), THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY (Cannes, 2) and STILL LIFE (Venice, 3).

Since Dale and Steve are both papistbuds who have named some truly detestable films, and often on grounds I’d choose (see Dale on CHOCOLAT and DEAD POETS SOCIETY), I’m gonna restrict myself to “Religious or Moral/Spiritual Films” that are widely liked in St. Blogs; several are on the Arts and Faith listing of 100 Spiritually Significant Films. Some of these films would not be considered critically praised in some of the FilmSnob circles I hang around, but well …

(1) A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS (Fred Zinneman, USA, 1966) — This is the sort of film that causes many religious people to confuse the subject matter with the movie. Thomas More is a saint; this movie is a sin. It’s all respectable and britcostumey and sincere and stiffupperlippy, a lengthy episode of Masterpiece Theatuh (I can’t decide whether Orson Welles as Cardinal Wolsey is brilliant or just a kitchen sink gesture, SOUTLAND TALES avant la lettre). Robert Bolt never found a way to make this play into a film. And while I have a high tolerance for lengthy intellectual debates, A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS just bogs down in them because that’s all there is once the basic situation is set up — there isn’t any real drama until the trial, just a lot of talk, staking out positions. And when we get to the trial, Paul Scofield’s performance is far too voicy and Zinneman’s direction far too stagy.

(2) PICKPOCKET (Robert Bresson, France, 1959) — Just about any Bresson, the cinematic Jansenist, would do here (COUNTRY PRIEST, JOAN OF ARC, BALTHAZAR, L’ARGENT) — the same somnambulent, inexpressive and unpsychological style that the uncharitable heathen (that would be me) insists on seeing as just plain empty tedium — events without drama, behavior without character. The acting would disgrace a middle-school play, even one about zombies, which is how Bresson deliberately gets his “models” to “perform.” For example, the police catch our so-called Dostoyevskian hero in a crime (imagine Crime and Punishment with Raskolnikov as an obscurely interior mumbler for a sense of how bad this is), but then immediately drop the charges **in the next scene.** He escapes a police crackdown at another point by going abroad and making a fortune and losing it all on gambling and women — we learn all that in a voiceover introducing the very next shot after he leaves Paris, which is of him returning to Paris. He doesn’t act (sic) any differently or make any reference to his foreign sojourn — so wtf is the point of our learning of it?

(3) LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy (Peter Jackson, USA/New Zealand, 2001-3) — Neither Tolkien nor swords-and-sorcery fantasy are things I’ve ever been able to get into — never had either a Dungeons and Dragons or a comic-fanboy phase as a boy. Yeah … I’ve been a stuffed shirt for 35 years, all right. I’ve tried to read the Middle Earth novels, but not gotten past 40 or 50 pages because Tolkien is too in love with coining names and inventing creatures and laboriously laying out a whole universe, as if the real one isn’t good enough, so the artist-god has to create ex nihilo, that my mind’s and eye’s reaction — film and book — was just to let it pass through me like prune juice. The first film was eye-popping, but spectacle doesn’t last in my mind, and the symbology felt childishly obvious, and without a “reality” to anchor it, it could only function as symbology. The second was just “ehhh.” I couldn’t even drag myself to see the third.

(4) WINTER LIGHT (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1963) — Homer nods — maybe if I could believe a depressive collapse into suicide because China has the bomb, I could halfway credit this overschematicized whinge (though typically brilliantly made and acted). The faithlessness of Gunnar Bjornstrand’s pastor isn’t convincingly dramatized — if it’s ever shown how he got that way, I’ve forgotten it (plus GB usually played a skeptic in Bergman’s movies and so his ever being a priest didn’t convince me). With some notable bravura exceptions — Ingrid Thulin’s teacher reading her note to the camera being the most obvious example — the film feels cinematically static as though this material would work better as a play or novella.

(5) SONG OF BERNADETTE (Henry King, USA, 1943) — Typifies everything wrong with Hollywood studio-era religious movies, offensive in its calculated inoffensiveness — full of what Flannery O’Connor called “the pious voice” and what St. Josemaria Escriva derided as plaster saints. Also see above re A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS and subject matter — as long as neither holiness nor sainthood is imputed through a camera lens, subject-matter per se will never impress me. Seeing this movie is not a pilgrimage to Lourdes and the notion that it is, or relatedly, that a work of art can be judged on the basis of its subject matter is one I frankly find morally offensive. Add to that the typical dramatic shapelessness of the biopic, which gets deadly at 160 minutes, and a 25-year-old woman playing a 14-year-old girl (though that is actually kinda funny)

I tag James Frazier, Adam Villani, Donna Bowman, Barbara Nicolosi, and Peter Chattaway.

FilmFestDC released the program of movies for this year’s festival, which runs from April 24 to May 4. , though as I type this Monday morning, they don’t seem yet to have up the schedule, with dates and times. I’ve already seen five of these films, at Toronto, and here are my reviews of them:

THE EDGE OF HEAVEN, Fatih Akin, Germany/Turkey, 8
THE FALL, Tarsem, Britain/India, 7
ONE HUNDRED NAILS, Ermanno Olmi, Italy, 4
SILENT LIGHT, Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/Holland, 9
YOU, THE LIVING, Roy Andersson, Sweden, 9

Despite my already having seen them, I hope, schedule-permitting, to be able to see SILENT LIGHT and YOU, THE LIVING again, simply because I doubt they’ll see commercial releases outside of New York and maybe Los Angeles. And as the grades suggest, I’d recommend four of these five films, with THE EDGE OF HEAVEN probably being the one that the most people would like, with the other three having in their different ways a very high eccentricity quotient.

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Dith Pran’s life and tale of survival under Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge government became a movie. That movie THE KILLING FIELDS became a worldwide success, its very name coming to symbolize that vile China-backed Romantic-Communist regime, and Dith Pran used his celebrity to educate the world about that regime and become a constant burr in its saddle (he was quoted in the AP’s Pol Pot obituary, for example).¹ Dith Pran died yesterday.

THE KILLING FIELDS was one of the few serious movies made in the West from the late-60s until the end of the Cold War that can unabashedly be called anti-Communist. It’s primary subject was a Communist genocide and it’s the only “Vietnam War” film I can think of (it’s certainly by far the most significant) that is about the hell that US withdrawal created despite the assurances of peace-loving liberals at the time that US leaving the field in the Iraq Vietnam War would bring end the bloodshed. Oh, there’s a couple of asides in the film where characters say, close as I can recall, “after what the US did to them, I don’t think the Khmer Rouge will be very forgiving” or “the US underestimated the fury that tons of bombs can create” — lamely trying to suggest that the US created the Khmer Rouge.²

But the events that Dith underwent, and the magnitude of the Khmer Rouge genocide, are simply too overwhelming to withstand such spin. Nobody who’s seen the movie will ever forget — I will be vague to keep the surprise — a scene of Dith falling into an irrigation ditch. Apparently, according to this Dith obituary from AP (that I edited down from 35 inches to 15 to fit a hole), it was Dith who invented the term “killing fields.”

It was Mr. Dith who coined the term “killing fields” for the horrifying clusters of corpses and skeletal remains of victims he encountered on his desperate journey to freedom.
“That was the phrase he used from the very first day, during our wondrous reunion in the refugee camp,” Mr. Schanberg said later.

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Last week, David Mamet wrote a piece in the Village Voice called “Why I Am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal” (really … THAT headline got into the Village Voice). It’s lengthy, but well thought-through … RTWT. But here it is distilled in its essence:

But my play, it turned out, was actually about politics, which is to say, about the polemic between persons of two opposing views. The argument in my play is between a president who is self-interested, corrupt, suborned, and realistic, and his leftish, lesbian, utopian-socialist speechwriter.
The play, while being a laugh a minute, is, when it’s at home, a disputation between reason and faith, or perhaps between the conservative (or tragic) view and the liberal (or perfectionist) view. The conservative president in the piece holds that people are each out to make a living, and the best way for government to facilitate that is to stay out of the way, as the inevitable abuses and failures of this system (free-market economics) are less than those of government intervention.
I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.
As a child of the ’60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.
…
And, I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.

The best part here is his setting up the ideological conflict as one of the worldviews — the tragic and the perfectionist. I’ve always thought that a taste for Greek tragedy (and distaste for the secularized Christianity that is much of the contemporary liberal implicit worldview) contributed to my conservatism by immunizing me from the four-letter f-word liberals like to toss around: “fair.”

I’ve noted Mamet’s politics once here before, and the crack about “National Palestinian Radio” makes it clear that the left’s increasing anti-Semitism (masquerading as anti-Zionism or opposition to this or that Israeli ius in bello violation) is a prime motivator. I also think his work has made it reasonably clear for some time that he was no exponent of pc-orthodoxy — e.g., OLEANNA could only have been written by a man who thinks feminism turns women into grievance-mongering robots, and GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS could not have been written by a man who believes man is perfectable (to call the play/film anti-capitalist simpliciter is reductive and flattening).

But anyway … welcome aboard, David. To the actual home of free thought, without smelly orthodoxies.

… or Films Seen Recently roundup:

THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL (Justin Chadwick, Britain, 2008, 6): Quick test that determines what you will think of this movie: “what do you think of THE LION IN WINTER?” Neither film can even be called historical nonsense, since they deal with periods or stories in the lost recesses of history. But as long as you understand that and resolve not to mistake anything before your eyes for real events, the films are disreputably enjoyable as well-polished camp exercises in Machiavellian scheming and soap-opera bitchiness. Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman as the sisters deserve comparison with Joan Collins and Linda Evans on “Dynasty,” with exchanges over Lorenzo Lamas Eric Bana like “While in the king’s presence, I did nothing but sing your praises and talk about my husband”/”Really? You must show me how you did that some time.” Also intriguing in showing Catherine of Aragon (too briefly) as the moral hero of the film, eschewing the Papiophobia of ELIZABETH I II.

Correction: LORENZO LAMAS was never on Dynasty. My memory was playing tricks on me — LORENZO LAMAS was on Falcon Crest (with the sounds-like-a-porn-star character name of “Lance Cumson.” I. Swear. To. God.). I was trying to think of “whoever played the dumb hunk of beefcake” role to Alexis and Crystal’s drag-queen bitches, and my mind alighted on LORENZO LAMAS. It should have alighted on John James. My deepest apologies for putting LORENZO LAMAS in your head thar, dalebud. Particularly since it wasn’t necessary for me to put LORENZO LAMAS in your head.

CJ7 (Stephen Chow, Hong Kong, 2008, 5): Intermittently intriguing and sometimes inspired (Skandie plug: The Roach Game), but the ET template makes it hard for the film to develop much surprise, and the sloppy plotting makes it hard to develop much momentum (characters are just kinda whisked in and out, way too neatly and pat at the end). Chow, a supporting character in his own movie as the poor father with the poor son (played with some personality by Xu Jiao) in a rich school, hits hard on the idea of how children learn to be parents via pets, and sometimes outgrow the very faults as children in the process. And the “silly” special effects are very funny in a sequence of all the special powers that alien dog CJ7 gives the misfit son at school, like Buster Keaton turning into Superman in the second half at all the activities he failed at in the first half. The alien dog looks like a Pokemon creature, only with a little more personality, but it’s really not very convincing as the Christ figure the narrative eventually makes him. And there’s fun touches like giving a behemoth the squeaky voice of a little girl, but nothing as consistently awesome as the landlady in KUNG FU HUSTLE (that film, and SHAOLIN SOCCER, are where Chow really shines).

CITY OF MEN (Paulo Morelli, Brazil, 2008, 5): Really pales in comparison with the masterpiece movie that inspired it, first as a TV series, and which I watched again right afterward to reassure myself. But even if I didn’t know it, I would know that CITY OF MEN was a TV series, just from the framing, the frequent montages, the way naughty subject matter was skirted, and the way the film segmented in such a precise and linear way. Still, no TV series has this much hack music, telegraphing the proper emotional reactions like an onscreen cue card. Undeniably gripping in spots, though, and with a strong theme on the cycle of fatherlessness. And the two lead actors have an easy chemistry and naturalistic credibility. But to the people like Wesley Morris of the Boston Globe, who detested CITY OF GOD for being exploitative, supposedly for tarting up a story of misery with stylistic fireworks for cinematic consumption, I say with all heartfelt sarcasm: Is this wan film any better? Actually no, as Morris recognized: “it’s the wall-to-wall electricity of Meirelles’s moviemaking, unclean as it was, that you miss.”

FUNNY GAMES — Michael Haneke, USA, 2008, 5

Rarely does a single number so poorly sum up my reaction to a film as this one. It doesn’t mean, as “5″ usually does, that I think the film is passably mediocre, with good points and bad points in about equal proportion. I’ll be writing about two such “5-grade” movies next. Not this time — FUNNY GAMES is a brilliantly done thesis that frankly flirts with moral depravity (and in a certain sense, it simply IS depraved). But there’s one big honking question that I never got satisfactorily answered:

Why?

Haneke himself, who I count as one of my three favorite foreign directors (the Dardennes and Von Trier being the others), made this movie 10 years ago, when he was still a barely-known director in Austria. And I don’t mean that he made another movie titled FUNNY GAMES; I mean that he made, to the extent that one can, the exact same movie, with nary a change in the shots, in the angles, in the decor, in the story details. I’ve seen the Austrian movie twice — it’s #4 on my 1998 list, though it only moved up on a second retrospective viewing.¹

But FUNNY GAMES, whether 1.0 or 2.0, is a deliberately repellent movie — a couple of well-mannered and -dressed teens insinuate their way into a bourgeois family’s vacation home and proceed to play a game of tormenting them, unto death. And the point … well, there isn’t one, and that’s the whole point really (which is ultimately what makes this morally-indefensible film morally defensible; it’s as morally ugly as pointless nihilism should be). Haneke denies all meaning, all narrative logic, all social criticism, all context to its violence — in fact, the film explicitly mocks those very ideas.

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… just for Theo:

Salam Maria umejaa neema Bwana yu nawe umebarikiwa kuliko wanawake wote na Yesu mzao wa tumbo lako amabaliki wa.
Maria Mtakatifu mama wa Mungu utuombee sisi wakosefu sasa na saa ya kufa kwetu. Amina.

THE BAND’S VISIT — Eran Kolirin, Israel, 2007, 4

Why on Earth is a sometimes entertaining, but by-the-numbers bit of Cultural Contact Melts The Hearts Of Enemies twaddle scoring a 97 percent at Rotten Tomatoes? Is it just the subject matter — don’t answer that one.

THE BAND’S VISIT starts off well, opening with comic gags that remind me a bit of Elia Suleiman’s DIVINE INTERVENTION, with the deadpan wit (”this event was not that important”), comically misleading framing, stiff formality of movement and the way the Egyptian band is repeatedly lined up in formation like toy soldiers. I was thinking this might be a real clash movie about the elaborate formality of an honor-based culture amid the informal bluntness of Israeli society. I’ve talked to more than one Israeli scholar who’s told me that this gap in communication style has often harmed Arab-Israeli talks quite apart from the gap on the underlying issues. There is some of that for a while, particularly in the first meetings between the band and the bored Israeli villagers — “would you be so kind, in light of the circumstances in which we find ourselves / how can I help you.”

But I began to suspect THE BAND’S VISIT would run dry on inspiration when the Egyptian band winds up in the middle of nowhere based on a mispronunciation. They were supposed to go to Petah Tikva, but improvised bus tickets to Bet Hatikvah … ho ho ho. Once you realize what the film’s architecture is (the Egyptians are stranded, they will get to know the Israelis, and vice versa, and hearts will be melted) absolutely everything that follows was completely predictable, including critical praise like “the bridge-making capacities of hospitality and the way music serves as universal language that draws people together … the cause of peace is nurtured in such soulful moments” (come off it, I want to say).

Sure enough, the little lessons come — they find their common humanity by singing “Summertime” and discovering a common interest in Chet Baker (quelle coincidence for me), wordlessly showing how to hit on a chick (actually a pretty funny scene), reminiscing about Omar Sharif (”my life is an Arab movie”), and looking at artifacts of broken families (”we are all alike”) etc. About the only narrative question I really had while sitting through the last hour was whether the liberated Jewish woman (the terrific Ronit Elkabetz) would bed the grieving widower (Sasson Gabai, very strong) or the ladies man (Saleh Bakri).

Like DEFINITELY MAYBE’s succeeding at not being terrible, THE BAND’S VISIT is probably a better film than MEDITERRANEO or THE WAR, but that’s the best you can say about it.

DEFINITELY MAYBE — Adam Brooks, USA, 2008, 3

In the same vein as below, terrible movies can sometimes make bad movies in the same genre look tolerable. What can be said about DEFINITELY MAYBE after Scott Tobias said “Put simply, the film excels most at not being awful.

“DEFINITELY MAYBE is not head-thumpingly awful, but it’s also so thoroughly mediocre and predictable throughout that it hardly makes a difference. I was hoping from the trailer to get something like THE PRINCESS BRIDE (or maybe a less-trippy version of the upcoming THE FALL) but it’s played pretty straight up, more like a TV episode than anything else.

Ryan Reynolds has no charisma or charm that I can detect and really cannot play anybody over the 20 in body and 15 in soul. Of course, a girl of 8 (in body, that is; 30 in soul) has to be the wisest character in the film cuz it starts with sex ed day, you understand. Once the three women the father is telling about, as the women he dated seriously, have had their characters set up and you know from the film’s opening scene that the marriage in the flashback storytime tale is gonna end in divorce in the film’s present-tense … well, all you have to do is remember that Hollywood values are those of bohemian anti-traditionalism (now calcified enough to be its own tradition), and it’s obvious.

Still, DEFINITELY MAYBE is notable for two firsts in current movies. First, it’s an exercise in 90s nostalgia, and not nearly as didactic as I’d feared when the plot makes Reynolds a volunteer with Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. BTW, this is one of those movies that takes place over 15 years and nobody ages noticeably. But nostalgia for a decade that I was already an adult when it began? I feel old.

Second and far more interestingly, like all movies now, DEFINITELY MAYBE takes place in the routine-divorce culture. That can’t not affect the romantic comedy genre, and I alluded to one of the ways here last year. But still, never have I seen in a conventional romantic-comedy, a child spend the movie’s last reel trying to get her father back together — not with her mother — but an old girlfriend whom the child had never met. And not because her mother is abusive or somehow “out of the picture.” Now, we consider divorce so routine (a reason for the one in this movie is never even hinted at, as if there’s no need) that we consider it an acceptable fantasy for a child of divorce to express, not the natural wish about her parents, but about a step-parent. If there’s been a conventional romantic-comedy with that rather self-rationalizing-for-adults premise (”it’s what the kids WANT”) — I’m unaware of it.

LET’S GET LOST — Bruce Weber, USA, 1989, 8

Bad movies can sometimes make good movies in the same genre look even better in retrospect than they might have otherwise. LET’S GET LOST is a documentary about jazz trumpeter/singer Chet Baker whose life seemed to follow the same trajectory as Ray Charles or Johnny Cash. Or rather, the trajectory of RAY or WALK THE LINE …. the early success, the multiple marriages/family crises, the drug addiction, the out-of-favor period, the comeback.

But LET’S GET LOST doesn’t follow that template at all, and really profits by that comparison. Director Bruce Weber does something curious and refreshing with the life story, which is to basically ignore it, though admittedly that means the film works better the second time around, as I did, or with someone who already knows the basic Chet Baker bio. This late-80s documentary, which I saw at the time and liked fairly well, is apparently making the theatrical rounds of America’s bigger cities (I can’t think why … unless it’s the 20th anniversary of Baker’s death). I wasn’t even looking out for it, but it was a welcome surprise to see it suddenly listed in a commercial theater, rather than a repertory.

Instead, Weber made a film that’s less like a documentary and more like a piece of Romantic fiction. LET’S GET LOST, like Coleridge’s Xanadu, feels like the opium haze that Baker’s life apparently was, overripe Romantic decadence as it falls from the tree (Camille Paglia would love this movie). Though it’s never really “difficult” to follow, LOST jumps around in time without too much concern for telling a story. Instead, Weber goes for a reverie feel, for a collection of moods and feelings, with montages from the past drifting in and out as if trying to erase the sense of time itself. Baker doesn’t really “go” from being a hip jazzman to a derelict; it’s more like he’s always both. Read more »

8 WOMEN — Francois Ozon, France, 2002, 9

Paul Clark has been writing an intermittent series with the Truffaut-inspired title “The Movies of My Life,” the second entry being 8 WOMEN. If you imagine an Agatha Christie one-act play like “The Mousetrap” reimagined as a French musical¹ directed by Douglas Sirk (the opening shot is a nod to ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS — the deer in the snow), you have the basic idea. I’d already seen 8 WOMEN twice in 2002, but not since, and Paul’s writing tickled enough memories to make me look at it again this afternoon.

At first viewing at a festival, I simply relished the film as a silly, confectionery lark, and 8 WOMEN is about as enjoyable on those terms as a movie gets — the candy-colored sets and costumes, the bitchy dialogue, the hammy acting, the perfect coiffes, the cheerfully amateurish music, the whole well-perfumed ambience, the absurdly “on the nose” plotting, the outrageous “secret revelations.”

Here’s my favorite musical number from the film, and it cracks me up every time I see it. When I’ve watched 8 WOMEN with audiences, the scene quickly split the viewers into those who were gonna go with the film and those who weren’t (please forgive the muddiness … this is the best repro I could find on YouTube that had English subtitles).

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