paris sure was dreary in the 80s

although i suppose that could have just been from roman polanski's viewpoint.

'frantic', 1988, starring harrison ford, betty buckley, and emmanuelle seigner in her debut role, is the story of a doctor and his wife visiting paris for some sort of medical conference, although they never actually make it there. shortly after checking into a ridiculously grey hotel, they realize that the wife has accidentally picked up the wrong bag at the airport. she steps out of the room while he's in the shower, and never comes back, which is kind of an awkward thing to have to report to the hotel management. paris seems to be full of unflappably unhelpful people, from dominique pinon, who wants cigarettes or cash in exchange for information, to john mahoney as a supremely uninterested embassy worker. harrison has cottoned on to the fact that she's been kidnapped, although no one seems to care or indeed believe him. the pace picks up once he's met the real owner of the suitcase, michelle (seigner, who dresses like a member of the village people.) it turns out, yes, she was kidnapped, by a bunch of arabs who wanted what michelle was smuggling in the suitcase, which is some sort of nuclear detonator.

it was all just a bit...slow. michelle makes some half-assed attempts to seduce the good doctor, who responds just as half-heartedly. betty buckley should consider herself lucky that she got to be kidnapped and excused for most of the film. the odd thing is, it really all should have been very exciting, it just...wasn't. even the ennio morricone soundtrack was flat. and to be honest, he never really gets all that frantic....

that was just...unimaginably bad.

i can't even muster the adjectives to express my dislike for "the pillow book". granted, i wasn't that keen on peter greenaway to begin with. but when a movie is so god-awful boring that even ewan macgregor prancing about naked can't inject a little life into it....it certainly wasn't improved by generous helpings of vivian wu's incredibly grating narration. characters devoid of personality. painfully 'artistic'. and even though it was touted as being overtly sensual, all i wanted was for it to end. i won't even dignify it with a picture.

"when you're in love with a married man, you shouldn't wear mascara."

and that's just one of the fabulous lines from "the apartment"; no no, not the freaky french film with vincent cassel, which i nevertheless enjoyed, but the 1960 billy wilder gem starring shirley mclaine and jack lemmon. i've meant to see this for ever so long -- i had an ex who had the poster in his apartment, and my mom always talked about it as something that she and my dad liked. so, happy birthday daddy.

poor pathetic jack lemmon (is it just me, or does he have an air of camp that he just can't seem to shake?) is bud, who works as an insurance drone. he's hoping to move up though, and gets himself on the fast track by renting out his apartment (85 dollars a month in manhattan!) to various higher-ups in the company for quick indiscretions. apparently all of the top insurance men in the 50s ran around on their wives. kind of magnifies ones loneliness when you have to wait in the rain for someone to finish having sex in YOUR apartment. and you have to clean up, too. he's a bit of a pushover. it becomes apparent that the object of his affections is one fran kubelik, sassy elevator girl in his office building. i think i would have liked to be a sassy elevator girl, actually, especially in an era when men in suits would make quips like "would i like to get her on a slow elevator to china!"

everything seems to be moving sweetly, if slowly, in bud's favor, until it turns out that fran was actually AT bud's apartment with a certain mr. sheldrake from personnel, the very night that she was supposed to be at 'the music man' with bud, with tickets given to him as a bribe BY mr. sheldrake. how sad to be stood up at 'the music man'. but yes, mr. sheldrake is played by fred macmurray -- macmurray and lemmon...not much of a choice with the two of them. sheldrake is an absolute cad, actually giving fran a hundred dollars as a christmas present. and this is where things take a surprising turn -- fran attempts suicide in bud's apartment. after the initial scare and a visit from the doctor next door (who's annoyed at what he thinks is bud's caddish behavior -- "buy now, pay later, diner's club!"), the whole thing is sort of glossed over -- no ambulance, no one refers her to a therapist. her patheticness starts to match bud's, with great lines like "i wonder how long it takes to get someone you're stuck on out of your system." me too, sister, me too. fran, rather stupidly, decides to forgive sheldrake for his philandering ways, and what with the fact that his wife chucks him out, prompted by the delightfully nosy and vengeful secretary, the two seem to be ending up together when fran finally comes to her senses. i think one of my favorite things about this movie is that there's no big kiss at the end. the romance is clinched with a game of gin rummy.

“everybody has a box.”

this line is spoken by the more attractive but morally seedier of two main characters in christopher nolan’s 1998 film ‘following’, and he refers to a little box of photos and mementos that everyone supposedly has. the two characters, bill and cobb, know this because they are burglars. sort of. bill is a greasy unemployed writer who is so bored and lonely that he starts following random strangers. cobb is a well dressed stranger who notices and confronts him, and it turns out that cobb likes following people too. they start breaking into apartments and houses together, not even necessarily to steal, but to mess things up a bit, for instance, cobb steals lingerie from one apartment and leaves it in another. cobb doesn’t seem like a very nice man. bill’s just pathetic and goes along with it, even helping cobb break into his own apartment, which makes him seem even more pathetic than usual. this is all very well and good until bill meets an odd blonde and it all goes to hell in a handbasket.

the style of the film is very much like that of ‘∏’, albeit less twitchy. black and white, I think the word ‘spare’ sums up the atmosphere pretty well. it’s pretty painfully low-budget, but that wouldn’t really matter so much but for the fact that the acting is just not particularly good. the flash-forwards and backs are hard to follow, and you can only really tell because bill gets a haircut halfway through the film. you really shouldn’t base a timeline on a haircut. the story, though, is very good, with a couple of terrific twists, although you can see the last one coming just a bit too soon. more than anything, this film seems like a dry run for ‘memento’…..

"nor was there any escape from the horror of my decayed teeth."

what a line! really, if you didn't know that jane campion's 1989 film "an angel at my table" was based on autobiographies before you'd seen it, you'd have a hard time believing it.

new zealand author janet frame lived a life out of a tragic novel. the first part of this three part film is frame growing up in poverty with a mass of siblings, unpopular, desperately unattractive, a fat, rather filthy little girl with an amazing cloud of red hair. very quickly she latches onto poetry and fiction as refuges from the world, both reading and writing them. even though friends are scarce, she's not unhappy in her jolly, if weird, family. the tragedy begins when her older sister drowns, and builds in the film's second part as frame heads off to university. social graces are not her strong suit, and feeling cornered as she heads into a teaching career, a professor is alarmed at a short story she writes detailing how she got out of a sticky situation by making herself sick. very quickly she is cajoled into a psych ward, and then taken to a mental hospital that doesn't joke around, doing electroshock therapy in the open ward. she's slapped with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and it's around this time that another sister drowns. the next eight years and 200 electroshock treatments were enough to make her crazy if she wasn't before. the film's a bit hazy on the details of how her short stories are published and win a literary prize, but they're enough to save her from invasive surgery, and she's soon sprung from the hospital.

somehow, the third part seemed to me the saddest, although it's when she travels to europe and begins to receive some real notoriety as an author. but it's only too evident how much was taken away from her, she cries at the slightest provocation, and you want to look away every time she faces a new social situation, because you know it's going to be cringe-inducing. somewhere in all of that it's decided that she was never schizophrenic to begin with. the movie ends with janet living in a tiny caravan out the back of her sister's house. it doesn't seem enough. but i suppose some lives are like that.

the film is visually sumptuous -- it's a shame new zealand is so far away, it's awful pretty. the trio of actresses playing janet are spot-on and there are seamless transitions from one to another, although the youngest janet you want to hug, and the oldest janet (kerry fox), well, you want to hug her too, but you'd also just like to cross the street.

ultimately, it's a fascinating story, and that's what makes the film.

“business or pleasure?” “oh, yes.”

the first thing i noticed about ‘hopscotch’ was what a strange little cast it has. maybe it didn’t seem so in 1980, but looking at it from 2008, it’s hard for me not to associate each actor with a distinct character that they subsequently played, or played before, but i had to catch up, being only 2 in 1980. there’s walter matthau, who just screams ‘hello, dolly!’ (yes, i watched too many musicals as a child.) herbert lom can’t be anyone by inspector dreyfus from the pink panther movies. i kept expecting a very dapper young sam waterston to start blustering his way through a death penalty case. glenda jackson i think i’ve only ever seen in ‘marat/sade’, which actually goes nicely with the shivers that i get whenever i see ned beatty. ‘deliverance’. shudder.

it’s sort of a dippy little story, with matthau as miles kendig, a cia field agent whose renegade ways have relegated him to desk duty until retirement. rather than take that, he immediately mixes up some files (should it be that easy to screw with things in the cia file room?) and heads for salzburg, where his mannish (sorry, glenda, but it’s true) lady-friend waits with her guard dog. someone mentions off-hand that he should write his memoirs, so he immediately dashes them off and sends them chapter by chapter to the cia, fbi, kgb, and any number of other international covert agencies that identify themselves with initials. the rest of the film plays out as a cat and mouse game with matthau merrily dropping clues across the world that a whole slew of bumbling agents just can’t seem to pick up in time to catch him.

walter matthau is pretty cute, in his crusty, hunch-back, droop-eyed way. he seems to be having such an awfully good time. final verdict is that it’s a pretty goofy little movie, but very charming, and if ned beatty didn’t keep dropping the f-bomb every five minutes (why is he the only one swearing?) then you could even watch it with your mom.

as my social life hasn't exactly been at fever pitch...

...i watched 5 movies this weekend. it's a little sad, i know. first was 'get carter'. although i was not personally a fan, a little too brown and grey and not as good as 'the long good friday', i think i can safely say that this is the type of film that guy ritchie has consistently found himself unable to make. he keeps tryin', though.

second was 'band of outsiders', which has already had quite enough written about it, so i'm not going to try and add anything other than the fact that i thought it was sublime, especially the dance scene in the bar.

the third film i mightily regret, and wish i could get my twelve dollars back. i should have known, reading the overly effusive new york times review of 'synecdoche, new york', that something was up. namely the fact that i'm not sure the reviewer and i even saw the same film. i mean, it started out so strong, but just disintigrated into being painfully pleased with itself. there were some great moments, most notably tom noonan's final lines, but seriously. i was in pain by the end. you want to like it, you do. but all of the characters were reprehensible and spent all of their time making pretentious dialogue and navel-gazing. it leaves a bad taste in your mouth. and your wallet.

the fourth was a surprise. i'd just happened to read a blurb on 'dear zachary' and decided to see it. the thing is, i have only ever cried at one movie, and, given the number of movies i've seen, that's impressive. or maybe i'm just a cold fish? (that one movie was 'broken english', with a screechy parker posey and a mouth-watering melvil poupaud -- there's a scene when a fortune teller calls after posey's character "your father misses you." her father was dead, my father is dead, and i completely lost it.) this is not to say that i cried at 'dear zachary'. i was wearing a ridiculous amount of black eyeliner and mascara, and the ensuing scene wouldn't have been pretty. but i certainly had to fight it. it was one of the most depressing things i've seen in a long time -- a filmmaker sets out to make a film, through interviews and clips, for the almost-born son of his childhood best friend, who was murdered by the almost-born child's mother. and then things get so much worse. but it's a beautiful film about resilience, and the impact that one person can have on a small corner of the world, or several, as it turns out, and how tragedy doesn't always have to end there.

number five was a documentary called 'girl 27', about a cover-up of a rape at an mgm party in 1937. maybe if i hadn't watched 'dear zachary' so soon beforehand, this would have had a bit more of an impact. it seemed a little heavy-handed, honestly, and a little tacky somehow to track down the woman who lost the case against her rapist so many years before. maybe some would consider a 'vanity fair' article 70 years after the fact vindication, but it seems a little thin to me.