well. that was….german.

fassbinder’s 1977 film ‘chinese roulette’ just seems so stereotypically german in all of its wackiness. the plot hinges on angela, a sickly, handicapped, diabolical teenager with ringlets and a hint of a mustache over her weird mouth. she thinks her parents hate her, and she’s probably right. i think most parents would. not because she’s handicapped, but because she’s trying so hard to wreak havoc. she also has a ridiculous army of baby dolls that she takes wherever she goes.

over the course of a weekend, angela, aided and abetted by her governess, traunitz (a mute who likes to dance around on angela’s crutches, naturlich), conspires to bring together her parents (a weaselly little father and a dominatrix like mom) and their respective lovers (anna karina with too much eye makeup and a sleazy businessman) for fun and games at their mansion in the country. rounding out the party are the housekeeper, kast, who refers to angela as ‘the nasty little cripple’, and her son gabriel, a creepy man-child who may or may not write long boring treatises on anarchy, but who definitely likes to bite traunitz’ neck. after an initial moment of awkwardness, the parents accept the situation quite jovially, although their paramours never quite seem to settle into the diabolical spirit of things. and so the weekend goes, with everyone either kissing gratuitously or shooting daggers of hatred from their eyes. or both at once.

it is angela who runs the show. although no one except traunitz likes her, they all seem terrified of her, and go along with anything she says. chinese roulette seems to be a family game, although i’m pretty sure i remember playing it in drama school. angela divides them into two teams, quite obviously those she likes and those she doesn’t. one team decides on a person from the other team, and that team has to determine who it is through a series of questions, like what coin would this person be, or, my personal favorite, who would this person have been during the third reich?

the movie was very nice to look at. the austerity of the mansion was a surprise for people who obviously live such grossly indulgent lives in an emotional sense, and it was a nice contrast. and the ending, well, i certainly didn’t see THAT coming.

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.

hey, nosferatu

after reading an article about a new version of the play ‘woyzeck’ featuring music by nick cave, I decided that maybe it was time to watch the 1976 herzog film, based on the georg büchner play left unfinished at the time of his death in 1837(which itself was loosely based on a true story).

klaus kinski is a difficult actor to watch, both because his off-screen persona was so incredible, and because once you’ve seen ‘nosferatu’, it’s difficult to see him as anything else. but he is well suited to the role of franz woyzeck, a poor, ignorant, downtrodden, much-maligned soldier who seems to have no other choice but to lose his mind. we first see an exhausted woyzeck being brutalized by a military superior. he is then subjected to some routine insults by the captain (looking remarkably like a bloated klaus maria brandauer) whose beard he is shaving. “woyzeck,” he says, ”you always have a hunted look in your eye”, and then proceeds to link his immorality(he has fathered an illegitimate child) and stupidity with the fact that he is poor. a visit to the town doctor fares no better in that he is merely performing bizarre experiments on the poor soldier, whom he has kept on a diet of peas for an entire year. on top of all this, the mother of wozeck’s child can barely disguise her disgust with him, and is actively pursuing a bigger, stronger, saner soldier with a much nicer uniform. woyzeck has one friend, andres, who constantly sings and is honestly not an awful lot of help. it’s apparent quite early that woyzeck’s sanity is in danger, as he runs around in the forest trying to figure out what the voices no one else can hear are saying.

woyzeck is weird, wizened, and pathetic. You can’t really like him, but he’s certainly deserving of pity. with the exception of andres, the entire town treats him as little more than a circus animal. in fact, the circus animals in an early scene are probably treated a little better. his fate seems sealed in a remarkable scene that has him running through a field of what appears to be gray tulips, finally putting his ear to the ground to hear the voice that are saying to him “stab dead”. the climactic, slow-motion murder scene ends with woyzeck, knife in his hand and tears in his eyes, maybe grasping the importance of what he has done, but maybe not.

it’s not what you’d call an enjoyable film, exactly, but it does make me feel like watching a lot of other non-enjoyable kinski films.

oh dear

i figured out the reason why i waited so long to see ‘beyond the clouds’, and that is because, lurking somewhere inside of me was the conviction – i don’t really like antonioni. admittedly, i’ve only seen a few of his films, and i suppose i should really leave the jury out until i’ve at least seen ‘blow-up’. but this film didn’t make me feel too hopeful.

released in 1995 with an impressive cast, ‘beyond the clouds’ tells four stories loosely linked by the fact that the narrator is hanging around the edges of all of them, the narrator being john malkovich. and you can tell after about five minutes of this narration that you are not going to like the narrator. he’s annoying, egotistical, and obtuse, and on top of that, he quotes joyce. it’s pretty pretentious.

the stories are as follows – 1. gorgeous yet bland italian pair meet, don’t sleep together, meet again, almost sleep together, part ways. and that’s about it for the first story. 2. malkovich follows sophie marceau to her place of work. she looks angry, tells him that she stabbed her father twelve times. moving on. 3. skeevy, tan american guy meets weird, nubile italian girl in café. they sleep together for three years, oops, he’s married to fanny ardant. he cheerfully lies to them both. fanny moves out and wants to buy an apartment that jean reno (with an unfortunate mustache) is unaware that his wife is selling. 4. jeanne moreau and marcello mastroianni make brief appearances, as if they are aware that they belong in a better picture than this. then vincent perez falls immediately for irene jacob, a pious catholic he happens to bump into. the fourth story is really the only one that i found interesting at all, maybe because the events going on actually had reasons behind them.

the whole thing is just far too impressed with itself and its artsiness. it’s very pretty, i’ll give it that. italy usually is. but the prettiness can’t make up for the vapidity and eventual boredom that this film causes. i found myself wishing that antonioni had let wim wenders contribute a little more, as he apparently was intending too before antonioni rejected all of his scenes. which seems like something malkovich’s character would do. just a very thin piece of filmmaking.

“the can opener/ where could you have hidden it/ enlighten me please”

since i watched a guillaume depardieu film shortly after his untimely death, and worked in a paul newman movie shortly before he died, i thought it only fair to do the same for ken ogata, who died last week. so yesterday was the 1979 film “vengeance is mine”, directed by shohei imamura, who also directed ‘the eel’, which i liked very much.

the film is the story of a serial killer, ehokizu, who, for no discernible reasons, sets off on a 78 day killing spree, managing to elude police through a series of frauds. the film alternates between scenes of police trying to extract a confession after ehikozu’s capture and scenes of his time on the run.

one of the first things that you notice about ehikozu is that he is a very strange guy, to put it mildly. at first adamant that the police will never get a word of confession from him, he turns out not that hard to trick into it. he exhibits problems with violence dating back to his childhood, and grew up to be a generally rotten person who treated his wife abhorrently, although this could be inherited from his father, who comes very close to an affair with ehikozu’s wife on numerous occasions, while ehikozu’s ailing mother can do nothing but look on. (he also at one time buries a dog up to it’s neck in dirt and pours boiling water on his head, which seems like overdoing it.) but ehikozu’s father offers the only real analysis of his son’s behavior near the end of the film “you could only kill those who would never harm you.” it’s possible that the father’s warped christian values (god doesn’t approve of divorce, but he’s okay with you doing your daughter-in-law?) have skewed ehikozu irreparably, but ehikozu clearly has some elements to him that are all his, and completely out of control. what makes the film so scary is the fact that there really is no reason for him to have killed any of his five victims. ogata is wonderful, whether rolling around on the floor for fun or making up impromptu haiku, and the character works because he feels no need to justify any of his actions. the other standout character is the one-time murdereress mother of an innkeeper that enihkozu takes up with, a bad-tempered little woman with a penchant for peeping on guests of the inn.

the music was a bit bizarre, better when they used a peter gunn-type jazz theme than near the end when it morphs into some sort of synthesizer nonsense better suited to ‘sans soleil’ or some such. the flashbacks could have used a bit more clarity, and the final scene is just nonsensical, honestly, and I felt it detracted a bit from the rest of the film.

r.i.p. girlhood

guillaume depardieu, love of my sixteen-year-old life, has passed away. oddly, i seem to have a startling knack of picking favorite foreign actors who die in tragic circumstances. several years back, just days after my brother gave me a poster of sergei bodrov jr., he died in an ice slide in georgia. i still put the poster up though, with purple ribbon draped around it (i didn’t have any black crepe).

so i went through my netflix and bumped up ‘pola x’. i did love ‘the lovers on the bridge’, also by carax. the film is based (quite loosely, i assume) on a story by melville. pierre has just written a hit novel, anonymously, and has a very creepy relationship with his mother, played by catherine deneuve, largely wasted in such a dreary, uninteresting part, in that they refer to each other as brother and sister, and spend a lot of time lounging around inappropriately and smoking. pierre has a pretty fiancée, lucie, who has absolutely no personality. everyone is wealthy and wears beige. pierre has been having some unsettling dreams about a strange dark haired woman, and has an unsettling cousin named thibault, and it is suggested that inappropriate things have happened between him, pierre, and lucie. the family gets even kookier when the dark-haired woman actually shows up, a russian woman calling herself isabelle, and claiming to be the bastard child of pierre’s dead father. things go downhill fairly swiftly from here.

one thing that certainly doesn’t help is the fact that katerina golubeva as isabelle is a painfully bad actress. i suppose she’s mainly just there to look at, although she does bring to mind a compilation of the nightclub pair in ‘brideshead revisited’, that is, death’s head and the sickly child. she looks like a recently exhumed corpse. her french is very bad, and it’s never clear exactly how she and a few fellow refugees (fleeing a genocide?) turned up at pierre’s mother’s house. since incest seems to be the norm in the entire family, neither pierre nor isabelle give their technical relationship a second thought, never even questioning pierre’s mother on the subject, and, once they have made a new home in a warehouse also inhabited by what is either a relentlessly bad experimental orchestra, a paramilitary organization, or both, they embark upon one of the most explicit, icky sex scenes that i have ever had the pleasure to fast-forward through. through the whole thing are various tragedies, some awfully prescient, like pierre in several scrapes on his motorcycle, which is how depardieu came to lose a leg not long after. like all good french films, things go to hell with surprising swiftness. i did like an odd moment early on, when thibault drops a quote from james’s ‘the wings of the dove’ (‘we shall never again be as we were’), but the moment is spoiled when the line is later used as lyrics in a painfully bad french hip-hop song.

i wish that i’d picked a depardieu film that was just a tad more enjoyable, but as he did appear in a number of stinkers, i think i’ll just wait for ‘the duchess of langeais’ to come out.

gloomy is right.

if you’re just reading a synopsis of the 1999 film ‘gloomy sunday’, you would be forgiven for thinking it was a horror movie, as it is the story of a song written in budapest on the cusp of world war ii that inexplicably causes a great many people to commit suicide. i turned it off before the end because i didn’t want to do the same. it was pretty boring.

from the start i was wary, as the framed flashback was fairly heavy-handed, and more than a touch obvious. the story plunges in way too fast, and the characters are one-dimensional. the waitress is pretty, the pianist is melancholy, the restaurant owner is jewish, and the nazi is bad. the main conflict is a ridiculously polite love triangle, until the war thankfully steps in and takes the focus off. there is some laughable dialogue, such as when one nazi says to another “forget the final solution, tonight’s about the beef rolls.” for the waitress’ birthday, the pianist composes a song, which incidentally is the same ‘gloomy sunday’ recorded by ella fitzgerald. apparently when it was actually composed, there was an urban legend running around claiming that it caused a few suicides, but as the nazis were steamrolling across europe, it’s hard to believe that it was just the song. although, the composer did throw himself out of his apartment window in 1968. there are a few scenes of half-hearted passion and a picnic that predictably turns into a ménage a trois, and then, immediately after the waitress has sung the words to the song for the first time, the pianist shoots himself with a nazi gun. and frankly, that’s when i threw in the towel myself.

my final thought is this – it could have been strange and interesting and eerie, but it just didn’t make the effort. maybe there was an explanation at the end, but I didn’t care enough to wait around and find out.

curiouser and curiouser

“the city of lost children” doesn’t hesitate to jump right into the freaky, although it still maintains elements of weird sweetness, more apparent in jeunet and caro’s subsequent films, “amelie” and “delicatessen”. i haven’t seen “alien: resurrection”, however, and cannot remark on its sweetness.

the twisted plot centers around krank, a mad-scientist type that looks like a skull. krank’s numerous cloned brothers (played by the always excellent dominique pinon), dwarf mother, and a legion of cyclops have made it their duty to steal children for krank, for poor krank is unable to dream. the whole thing is overseen by a disembodied brain voiced by jean-louis trintignant. there are gangs of children who roam the consistently nighttime streets stealing for something called the octopus, which is a terrifying pair of siamese twins whose asymmetrical haircuts don’t lessen their resemblance to cnn style maven elsa klensch. the sole little girl of the filmleads her own rag-tag gang, falling in with a dim-witted strong man who has lost a little boy he had rescued form a garbage can. te strong man is played by ron perlman, who sticks out like a sore thumb, and is thus a perfect fit. so the little girl, miette, and the strong man, one, set out to rescue the lost child. although ‘stolen’ would really be more appropriate.

the world of the film is utterly complete, vacillating between nightmare and fairy tale, albeit a grimm’s fairy tale with violence and terror. the mise en scene, reminiscent of “brazil”, is flawless, and even though each scene is weirder than the last, it all gels seamlessly, complete with jean-paul gautier costumes, and ending with a song sung by marianne faithful. nominated for the golden palm at cannes, it was beaten by the yugoslavian film “underground”, so i guess they were on a bit of a surrealist kick that year. this is just a completely wonderful film, and i’m kicking myself for not having seen it sooner. thanks, willem.

for the mayor.

‘nightmare alley’ is the first tyrone power movie I have ever seen. my best friend Emily loooooooooooooooves tyrone power, but i’ve just never gotten around to him. But after reading an article in ‘city journal’ about why black-and-white movies were so great, mentioning that power plays the part of a geek in the 1947 film, well, it went immediately to the top of my netflix queue.

power plays stan, a low-life carnie (thank you, movie, for re-enforcing the stereotype that carnies are inevitably low-lifes) who flirts with pretty molly (thank you, movie, for letting the pretty girl have my name) but is more interested in zeena the fortune teller, because she once made a bundle on a telepathic act with her drunkard of a husband, pete. what he wants from zeena is the code that made the trick a success – by the way, the code seems way too complicated to ever work properly. stan sort of accidentally feeds pete a quart of wormwood, but at least he’s out of the way. he ends up being forced to marry molly by zeena and molly’s strong man boyfriend. molly and stan start an act with the code, and are instantly playing ritzy nightclubs and living in a posh hotel. things go from bad to worse when stan reaches a bit too high, going in with a scary psychoanalyst to con a rich man. things lose all semblance of sense as stan is then transformed into some sort of religious hero. the ending looks like it’s on the fast track to depressing, and the uplifting final twist is a disservice to the grimness of the rest of the film.

one thing i learned – boy, is tyrone power good at sleazy! especially in a tuxedo, for some reason. and by the film’s end, he was positively demonic. ihe relationship between sleazy stan and adorable, naïve molly is not the most convincing love story of our time, although there is one fabulous scene where her train is pulling out and he jumps up to kiss her one more time. sadly, the images conjured up in my head by the word ‘geek’ (namely the excellent novel ‘geek love’ by katherine dunn) were not fulfilled by the film. you hear the geek screaming, at the beginning, and then every time stan gets a little drunk, but there’s no actual scenes of his….geekiness. it was a decent film, the plot was certainly a little different from the majority of film noir. and that psychoanalyst was enough to scare you off of shrinks forever.

but i was so hoping to see tyrone power bite the head off of a chicken.

well THAT was a disappointment.

i admit without reserve that i like cillian murphy. and part of the appeal is that i haven't yet seen him in anything truly bad. until tonight. "watching the detectives", with lucy liu. i know, not the most likely combination anyway. but it was supposed to be quirky, about a guy who owned a video store and this kooky girl. i thought i'd give myself a break from my usual routine of somewhat weightier subjects.

i should have stuck to weightier. the acting was mediocre, the plot flimsy, and i was just incredibly uninterested. the film geeks were just a little too geeky, and anyway, wrong. in "butch cassidy and the sundance kid", etta goes out with sundance, not butch. i lasted half an hour.

although i will have the elvis costello song in my head for the rest of the night. if you'll pardon me, i'm going to go and watch some more 'brideshead revisited", episode two.

i tried.

to like "see how they fall" (2004). i did. but after, i thought back on two of jacques audriard's other films that i actually enjoyed -- "the beat that my heart skipped" and "read my lips" -- and was reminded that they both had a little too much unevenness to make them really balanced films. and this film was even more so.

simon, played by the always disconcerting jean yanne, is a business card salesman whose friend mickey, a policeman, is shot and subsequently is brain-dead. simon goes off the rails, and sets out to find mickey's killers, who turn out to be marx and johnny, played by jean-louis trintignant and matthieu kassovitz. i will go ahead and confess that i mostly watched this movie because of kassovitz -- i've had a hard time bringing myself to watch his latest directorial efforts, which have seriously slid since the brilliant 'la haine' and 'metisse', but you're usually safe with him as an actor. marx is a crippled crook, and johnny seems to have the iq of a dim-witted five-year-old. he's the type that should never see the outside of a mental institution. there's a healthy dose of police brutality, and homosexual overtones that build throughout the film. simon loses more and more of himself as he gets closer to finding the guilty parties.

the film looks good, i'll give it that, shot in the shadowy, grainy tones of a gritty american crime film from the 70s. at the beginning of the film, there are a few random moments of narration and title cards, which are, at best, distracting, and at worst, pointless. the range of crooked character, from slightly to outrageously skeevy, are not well-defined enough to make anyone but the main characters stand out. simon's progression from meek, successful, married salesman to vengeful, homosexual, car-battery-torturing psychopath is not believable. it's not that the story was bad, it's just that there didn't seem to be enough to merit an entire film. sort of regret not turning this one off before the end.

'i'm a typist, a virgin, and i like coca-cola'

and that's about the deepest thought that the protagonist of 'hour of the star' ever has. i first tried to watch this film years ago at a university foreign film festival, in what was possible the hottest movie theatre on the planet. i didn't last long. several years ago i read the short novel by clarice lispector, called by an american translator "rare person who looked like marlene dietrich and wrote like virginia woolf". which makes it all the more impressive that someone who looked like dietrich could write a character that looked like macabea and be utterly convincing. written shortly before she died in 1977, 'hour of the star' became an iconic piece of brazilian literature, even though lispector lived most of her life away from brazil.

this was the debut directorial effort from suzana amaral in 1985. the first thing that came to mind when watching the film again is the brazilian film of a few years earlier, 'pixote'. and i sincerely hope that's the last time i ever have to think of 'pixote'. i think in america that we have this image of brazil as all ronaldinho and supermodels, when it may be much more 'carandiru' and 'hour of the star'.

everything about macabea is painful and awkward and wrong, like laura miller in my seventh grade year. she's an orphan, she's naive and ignorant, yet for most of the film she is unflappably contented and accepting, whether moving a sheet over the spot where she wet the bed, or thinking that she's seducing what turns out to be a blind man. she lives in what is not quite grinding poverty, but close enough. on sundays, she rides the metro for fun. people she considers her friends regularly make remarks like 'your face doesn't help'. marcelia cartaxo, as macabea, does have a grand moon-face, but with these eyes shining out of it that are otherworldly in their optimism. and it's when she's at her happiest that you want to cry. ridiculously forgiving and completely unaware of herself ('i'm not much of a person'), she happens upon a sleazy, gold-toothed, weaselly non-boyfriend. things turn from bad to worse, and we as the audience can see some sort of catastrophe coming a mile away, although macabea thinks that she may well turn out a film star or the wife of a rich foreigner.

just two complaints about this film - one is the soundtrack. it alternates between a very respectable classical piece, and this keyboard number that you would expect in a mystery science theater 3000 thriller. it sort of jars the pace a bit. an the ending would have maintained the power and devastation that it had in the book if it could have been a bit more subtle.

all in all, lovely. i think i would have liked it better if i hadn't read the book, but it was a pretty masterful translation overall.

explain to me, 'snubbed'

salman rushdie's latest novel, 'the enchantress of florence' was on the 13-strong longlist for this year's man booker prize.  since the shortlist was announced yesterday, there has been a flurry of articles written announcing that rushdie was 'snubbed'.  This, i don't get.  i definitely count him as one of my favorite writers, with 'midnight's children' and 'shame' at the top of the list, followed by 'the satanic verses', 'the moor's last sigh', 'the ground beneath her feet'…all the way down to 'fury', which i confess i hated and gave up on about halfway through.  i read 'the enchantress of florence', i liked it, but….the thing is, if it had been written by anyone else, well.  it's miles better than what most authors are coming up with these days.  but as a book by salman rushdie, it just doesn't compare with some of his other novels.  this is not to say that it isn't beautifully written, but it lacks an emotional interest in the characters, and the plot is more than a little convoluted.  i wonder how sir salman himself feels about it.  i know he's been a little squiffy in previous years that he didn't win. but look, it would be a bit of a bore anyway if he won EVERY year.  and isn't it possible, just a teensy bit possible, that maybe someone else's book was better this go?  no one's shouting that the other poor authors on the longlist have been snubbed.  he's won 'the booker of bookers'.  stop making such a fuss.    

why, oh why?

can't we get properly subtitled movies? why was the 2007 french film 'la question humaine' released here as 'heartbeat detector'? surely, i am not the only one getting a little tired of this?

it's a hard movie. it's not...an enjoyable movie, but i'm glad that i watched it. mathieu amalric, who always strikes me as a better-looking roman polanski (especially with his twitchy performance in 'kings and queen'), has what seems to be a ridiculously cushy job as something between psychiatrist and human resources manager, restructuring the french branch of a german technology company. apparently, psychiatrist is french for 'spy', because his chief task becomes to find out what is causing the slightly irregular behavior of the ceo, a little too cleverly named mr. just. knowing that nazi themes would be rooting around somewhere in the film, i was wondering if it was going to turn out to be a max mosley/nazi kind of secret, but it turns out to be much more serious. the film focuses on europe's continuing collective guilt at the atrocities of world war II. it's a good question, how far away, how many generations away from it will people have to get before the guilt dissipates? none of the characters concerned were old enough to be perpetrators, but that doesn't mean that they feel absolved.

the look of the film made me think of fritz lang's 'metropolis', all angles and shadows and blacks and whites and greys (and a very obvious nosebleed). made me think, also, of a certain paperback version of paul auster's 'the invention of solitude', with identical men in suits sat round a table. the simple, clean camera work very soon starts to seem cold and distant. the soundtrack plays a huge part. there's no 'background' music, pieces are often played in their entirety, with little or nothing else transpiring, much to the viewer's discomfort. there are two seemingly interminable and melodramatic spanish songs, some classical pieces, and a few indie rock ballads which seem like they should feel more out of place.

the thing about this film is that it is trying to make a very big statement, and while i appreciate the attempt to show that, i'm not entirely certain that the film isn't drowning in its own artsiness.

a quickly pulled shower curtain is always a crowd pleaser

i absolutely cannot remember if i have seen 'the conversation' before. 1974, directed by francis ford coppola -- his deceased son gian-carlo actually appears uncredited as the boy in the church. for a film about private detectives, it's a little slow-moving, although there's a bit of pick-up by the end.

gene hackman is the ominously named harry caul, a real cliche of a detective -- he's a quirky bachelor with very few possessions, ever so secretive about himself, constantly wearing a hideous, cheap raincoat, offended by any sort of blasphemy, and with a penchant for playing the saxophone all alone. maybe this sort of character seemed more original in 1974? the big job involves taping a conversation between a young couple that insists in walking in endless circles around a public square, which takes three detectives at different points. there's a nice scene of caul blending all of the tapes together and sorting out the background noise. after a convention for private investigators (which looks like something maxwell smart might have appreciated -- oh, how i loved the beginning of that show!) there is a raucous after-party at harry's cage of an office, during which it comes out that he had once done a job that may have led to three deaths, and this case seems to be pointing in the same direction. the rest of the film deals with the dictates of harry's conscience, and whether or not he wants the information in the hands of the 'director', or his dirty little underling, played with plenty of lip-curling by harrison ford, and what to do about the fallout of his actions.

there is a dream sequence that could have been lost at no detriment to the story -- dream sequences always make me think of movies like 'oklahoma', and i was vaguely hoping that gene might break into a neat little song and dance. there are a few great scenes during which you are no longer sure whether caul is being paranoid or these things are really happening, and one terrifying moment that could compete with any tartan asia extreme release. the end is reminiscent of the charlotte perkins gilman short story "the wallpaper" in more ways than one. and i have to say, the movies big twist completely took me

i'm guessing it was more enjoyable when it first came out, but thirty four years on, the story seems a bit familiar.

"he used love like most men used money."

what a great tag line.

Ah, tennessee williams. elvis presley was offered the lead role in the 1969 film 'sweet bird of youth', and boy, am i glad he didn't take it. much of the script revolves around the character of chance knowing exactly how good-looking he is, and, well, elvis would have added a much more sneery dimension to it than paul newman did. paul really was perfection in those days. i adore the fact that his lady love's name is heavenly, because there is a series of books by v.c. andrews starring a character named heaven leigh. heaven leigh casteel was a bit of an inbred, heavenly finleyis the daughter of a thoroughly corrupt politician. the only thing you can really say about shirley knight as heavenly, sadly, is that she is not a particularly good actress. she has the coloring to play the somewhat bland character, but that's about all she's got.

moving on, geraldine page ventures a bit too close to mommie dearest territory for my tastes. but, tennessee has a thing for 'sunset boulevard' types, so i guess it all works, except it might have worked a little better if we actually felt some sort of empathy for princess. i think my favorite character in the whole thing (yes, more favorite than paul) was madeleine sherwood, whose shrill shriek 'gooper!' resonated horribly throughout all of 'cat on a hot tin roof'. she plays dim-witted mistresses just as well as pregnant harpies. speaking of 'cat', though, they could have shifted over even more of the cast, as i would have loved to see burl ives do his big daddy all over boss finley.

so it really does just seem like a vehicle for paul newman, and paul newman alone. which is fine by me. i hate to say it, but the character of chance is not all that bright. you want him to be, on top of his having good intentions, and being in love with the girl that doesn't seem all that spectacular, but he's just not too smart. and mighty free with his sexual favors, if he thinks it might get him somewhere. he's a more subtle gigolo than the guy in 'the roman spring of mrs. stone', but a gigolo nonetheless. i was a bit confused by the apparent reticence to discuss the abortion issue for most of the film, since it was a full three years after the film version of 'suddenly, last summer', which tackled homosexuality, pedophilia, and even cannibalism pretty openly, but, sure enough, at the big political event, the whole thing blows up. i didn't actually find the film quite as enjoyable as 'suddenly, last summer' or 'cat on a hot tin roof', the story just isn't as compelling, and the secrets not quite as big. but if you're in the mood to watch newman strut around in the full bloom of his....everything, then you could certainly do worse than spend a couple of hours on 'sweet bird of youth'.

certainly more sex than your average bollywood picture

but then, there is considerably more politics in the film 'earth' as well, the second movie in deepa mehta's trilogy. the story takes place in lahore on the eve of partition, framed by narration from the woman who was the little girl at the story's center, who went by the nickname of 'lenny-baby'.

the film could have easily slid into melodrama, but even the stark contrast between happy, sunny, pre-partition india and crazed, bloodthirsty post-partition isn't so heavy-handed as to appear simplified. one drawback is that if you don't have some sort of knowledge of the events going into the film, nothing is really explained. several times the love story threatens to overwhelm the historical background, but, apart from that reeeeeeaaaaaally drawn-out sex scene, it balances well.

one nice thing about indian films is that you can always count on someone you've seen before. i have to say that the transformation of dil navan from clowny flirt to murderous bastard might have worked better, though, if played by someone other than aamir khan. or maybe i can just never think of him as anything other than the daring villager from 'lagaan', a film which could well hold the dubious title of 'most exciting film ever made about cricket'. and nandita das was in 'fire', as well as what seems like too many other films for one person.

there are a number of truly unsettling moments, such as dil navan boarding the train his sisters were on, which arrived twelve hours late and filled with corpses. then there is hasan's horrid death. the worst, though, was the little boy that lenny-baby and her friend happen upon, whose entire village was murdered, his mother raped, killed, strippped, and hung up by her hair in the mosque, and on top of all of that, no one will play marbles with him and he doesn't know what cake is.

the characters, unfortunately, tend towards the one-dimensional. shanta is sweet, dil navan is goofy, hasan is the strong silent type, lenny has a leg brace, her parents are wealthy. everyone seems to have one distinct character trait and then their religion. it's hard to grasp what's going on apart from violence. but that might just be because it is far too big of a story to tell in a two hour film -- suketu mehta's excellent book 'maximum city' gets the job done with plenty of time to explain things. it's hard to even fathom the sheer size of the catastrophe, with over a million people left dead.

rohinton mistry summed it up succinctly in his novel 'a fine balance' -- "a foreigner drew a magic line on a map and called it the new border; it became a river of blood upon the earth.'

"she's never wunk at you?"

the first thing you think once 'who's afraid of virginia woolf?' has started is 'lord, what a cackle that elizabeth taylor has!'

edward albee of course wrote the play, and it is a much more delightful play than old edward himself, whom i met several years ago when appearing in a production of his one-act play 'the death of bessie smith'. i shook his hand and told him i was playing the lead role. he said "it's a very difficult role." charming, just charming. he then gave a talk in which he mainly bad-mouthed his adoptive parents for half an hour.

in 1966, it was the most expensive black and white film ever made, due to the astronomical (at the time) salaries of taylor, burton, and albee. taylor won her second oscar, while burton lost out to paul scofield in 'a man for all seasons'. i would have had a hard time deciding that one myself.

for most of the film, george is the only character it's possible to feel much sympathy for, and i feel this is largely due to the fact that everything he says sounds vaguely shakespearean in that rich welsh voice of his. yes, even during the roadside cafe when he calls honey first 'angel boobs' and then 'monkey nipples'. he's the only actor i can think of who can come off dignified saying 'monkey nipples'. he's got that devilish little laugh, which will suddenly break and he'll give martha that look, and he's suddenly as sad as his grandfather cardigan. martha and nick can keep up with his steady stream of verbal brutality (honey is simultaneously too stupid and too sloshed), but neither can match his eloquence.

the thing that always astounds me about elizabeth taylor is her ability to look either beautiful or trashy, or a weird combination of both. last week i watched 'a place in the sun', in which she is about as porcelain and untouchable as a girl can be. but in this film (thanks in part to the weight gain?) she looks cheap and vulgar and used. she throws around that raspy, sex-infused voice, and you find yourself wondering why george doesn't just go ahead and kill her. (burton and taylor were only on their first marriage at this point.) it's pretty incomprehensible that he could still love her at all, but when he finds her clothes on the stairs and the door chained, you believe that he does. the best scenes, for me, aren't the yelling and the screaming, or the not-even-thinly veiled barbs, but the episodes of genuine camaraderie, like when they team up in humiliating nick, or the moments immediately following the rifle turned umbrella.

sandy dennis provokes her own sympathy, partially due to the fact that she really does look like the mouse they refer to her as (especially when crawling around drunk in a fur coat), and also because she is truly pathetic, defenseless, ridiculous, and unaware of how pathetic, defenseless, and ridiculous she is. sadly, i couldn't rid my mind of the mental image of george segal as the magazine editor on 'just shoot me'. his character comes across as the worst -- out for himself and hypocritical to boot. george and martha may have their moments of extraordinary cruelty, but even though it seemed to be aimed at each other, helping someone else destroy you is tantamount to self-destruction.

it really is a great, great film, and at a little over two hours, is not at all too long, and in fact ends at just the right moment, with george and martha finally having to face up to the fact of what their lives have been, and what they will have to be.

(the picture is from the george and martha series by james marshall. when i was a kid, i thought maybe the reference was to george and martha washington, but now i'm not so sure....)

maybe it sounds better in chinese?

the title 'lust, caution' is a bit off-putting, at best. on the other hand, it's an uncomfortable title, and that certainly matches the rest of the film. ah. i just read that the chinese title is an unstranslateable pun. makes sense.

it starts off with a little mahjohng, always nice. four catty, wealthy chinese ladies trading veiled barbs under the guise of leisure. joan chen, perfect as usual. leave it to her to snag a husband like tony leung. although i suppose it wasn't exactly a marriage built in heaven, so i'll try not to hold a grudge. like the title, the mahjohng doesn't translate, as some of those tiles seemed to be pretty ominous, and that last one was apparently hilarious.

it's a beautiful film. everything looks like those vintage haruki murakami cover designs. the lead actress' sideburns are quite impressive. tony leung gets in a fair bit of eye-raping in the first half an hour, and wei tang gives it right back to him, morphing from innocent schoolgirl into dragon lady with the puff of a cigarette. it's really just one step -- co-ed to spy. and lest you think it, this is not a 'fun' spy movie. this ain't julia child. (as to that, though, i was under the impression that we all knew that already...)

really, the film moves along at a nice little clip, not feeling at all like it clocks in at well over two hours. there's action, violence, romance...well, sex. i can see why a few feathers were ruffled over the sex. am i the only one to whom it all seemed a bit...donald sutherland and julie christie? but ickier? the thing is, i'm not sure that it added anything to the film. his behavior in these scenes certainly didn't clarify why she felt the way she did about him, if anything it made it less clear. he seemed very much to be a bad bad man.

there were a number of things that detracted from the film overall besides the explicit sex -- such as the mildly slapdash ending and lack of much character development.

for years i've thought i was a big ang lee fan, but he's just a bit too hit or miss. 'the wedding banquet', 'eat drink man woman', 'sense and sensibility', 'the ice storm' -- immensely enjoyable. i turned off 'brokeback mountain' five minutes before the end, because, whatever was going to happen to the characters, i didn't care. they were bland -- this may have come from the short story, but i don't see how stretching it into a two hour film made things any better. 'hulk'....i can't see that. 'crouching tiger, hidden dragon' -- unfortunately, it pales in retrospect because of the immediate influx of copycat films.

i'll see what he does next. but given my track record with his films, he's simply not a director whose work i will see simply because he directed it.

but man oh man, those sex scenes are somethin' else.

"poop-poop!'

no, i'm not using bathroom words, as my sisters would say. the past few weeks i've had my afternoon coffee with www.dailylit.com installments of kenneth grahame's "the wind in the willows". i know i read it/had it read to me as a child, but honestly didn't remember all that much about it. it's lovely and quaint in a way that children's literature just isn't anymore. and ever since the first episode of toad's motor-car madness, i find myself wanting to shout 'poop-poop!' an awful lot.

(side note -- at disney world as a child, i went on toad's wild ride with my father, and literally burst into tears, first at the bit where it seems like a locomotive is rushing headlong at you down a pitch-black tunnel, and then with renewed terror when you go to HELL. i'd have hated to work at that ride, with sobbing children coming at you every which way.)

and maybe i even saw the 1983 stop-motion animation, but maybe the disney nightmare erased that from my memory as well. the first thing i thought as the film began was that no child in this day and age would sit through it. well, maybe a thoughtful child who only got to watch public television. be that as it may, i quite enjoyed it myself. it's very...gentle. gentler even than the book, i think, where badger seems ever so stern, and you're not really sure if toad is joking when he calls someone an ass. mole's short-sighted little face is inexpressably sweet, and i found myself looking forward to his blinks, in which his eyes don't open and close quite in sync. toad is appropriately madcap and decadent, especially when wearing his very smartly checked suit. the car scenes were much my favorite, as toad seems to go quite drunk with happiness when he crashes, shouting 'bbbbbbrrrrrrrrrr' and 'poop-poop!' and kicking his legs upside down in the hay.

quite a few scenes are unfortunately left out, but i suppose that it would have made for a very long movie, or tv show, at is was originally in britain. i have to say i found the punk-rock weasels a bit unnerving and out of place, but the band of tiny singing field mice more than made up for that.

it is nice, now and then, to watch something that you enjoyed, or might have enjoyed, when you were five, as i would have been when this came out. i was that child that only watched public television, shows like the man who would tell a story while drawing the pictures with oil pastels -- what on earth was that called?

it is....a very....comforting film. i can have the most wonderful time analyzing the most obscure little film from 1976 that even the director has forgotten, but sometimes you just need a comfort film, like sometimes you just need macaroni and cheese. i do think that turning it into a ballet, though, may have been going several steps too far.

poop-poop!

"don't ask a cobbler to make hats."

oh, michael haneke, what is to be done with you?

"benny's video" came rather early in the grand scheme of things, and i suppose in 1992 it may have seemed a different film entirely. before "cache", before "funny games", both german and english (may i just take this opportunity to say that, in my opinion, if english speaking audiences are too lazy to watch a subtitled film, then they do not deserve their own shot-for-shot translation?), before "the piano teacher" (my favorite, which could owe to the fact that elfriede jelinek was the author). before the seemingly never-ending acts of ever-more-shocking violence by teenagers.

but if you detach the fac tof all of that, there still remains that one thing which makes haneke's films so different -- someway, somehow, he always catches you off guard. you've momentarily relaxed, forgotten that you're supposed to be tense and watchful because you know that something repugnant is going to happen. i was completely unprepared for the 'moment' in this film, even though i knew exactly what i was getting myself into, i had relaxed. and it doesn't hit you until a moment after, when you think, 'wait, did that just...?' i confess, i always suspect that he's going to pull some sort of trick, beat takeshi rising at the end of "battle royale". no in "benny's video".

apart from the rather gruesome event that occurs early on in the film, the main terror comes from watching benny's parents quite calmly decide that they will take care of the situation, not necessarily out of love for benny, although good ol' dad does muster an unconvincing 'ich liebe dich' at the end, but because they could be rounded up for, gasp!, child neglect. and that horrific thought alone is enough to convince them that the solution to the problem isn't jail for benny, but rather an eritrean vacation with mom while dad chops up the poor unfortunate victim of benny's curiosity and shoves her down the drain.

i don't care. i don't want him to start making comedies. michael haneke suits me just fine.

3 women

no, not THAT '3 women', although the film 'lovely and amazing' does seem to be aiming for an equivalent level of discomfort.

mother brenda blethyn (who is sadly underused here) and her three daughters have some problems, to say the least. blethyn's character begins the film with a liposuction surgery, which quickly goes wrong. the oldest daughter, played by catherine keener, would garner more sympathy for her lackluster marriage and dismal 'art' career if she didn't have a penchant for ending each and every conversation with 'fuck off!'. it's funny the first two times. emily mortimer, as the middle daughter, is the most likeable train wreck of the group, an excellent example of someone who should never have embarked on an acting career. she oozes poor self-esteem, from her constant pleas to her boyfriend for approval, to her painful self-aware walk. the youngest daughter is annie, adopted as an afterthought. annie is everything that could go wrong with childhood -- fat, aggressive, adopted, nothing in common with the rest of her family, not even skin color.

it's great that the characters are prickly and imperfect, but they're so dreaful that it's awfully hard to dredge up any sort of sympathy for them. the middle daughter is likeable enough, and annie may someday come out of her hard shell, but the oldest daughter is just a hair shy of completely irredeemable, and the mother replaces any character she may have with straight vanity.

the film veers back and forth between genres, from an indie project bent on shock and pain to an embarrassing chick flick. maybe if it could make up its mind what it was, i could make up my mind as to whether or not i liked it. yesterday after watching it, i thought maybe i did. today, writing, i'm not so sure.

i never thought i'd say this, but i would have rather watched '3 women' again.

finally, someone gets what they deserve

in the majority of gritty, uncomfortable, foreign thrillers ('13 tzameti' and 'the vanishing' come to mind), characters do not get what they deserve. bad guys escape with large sums of money, good guys are left to deal with the aftermath or get buried alive. well, just in 'the vanishing'.

i've meant to see 'alias betty' for several years now, but my difficulty in tracking it down was due to the fact that when i first heard of it playing at the irish film centre when i lived in dublin, it was using a much more accurate translation of it's french title -- "betty fisher and other stories" ("betty fisher et autres histoires"). i fail to see why american titles for foreign films have to be consistently dumbed down, often until the meaning is completely obscured (i.e. "nightcap" for "merci pour le chocolat"). "alias betty" puts one in mind of a 1950's women's prison shocker.

whatever you call it, this 2002 film is a nifty version of a ruth rendell novel, "the tree of hands". starring sandrine kiberlain, ever sad-eyed and long-necked as in "apres vous', and 'un héros très discret', has a best-selling debut novel, a quiet toddler, an absent ex-husband, and a mother out of your worst nightmare, played with cheerful selfishness by nicole garcia. the film's major drawback is the fact that you must perpetually suspend your disbelief -- would a woman whose mother stabbed her hand to a train doorway as a child really invite her to stay for a few months? would a woman whose mental illness had supposedly improved really see nothing out of the ordinary about nicking a young child to replace the grandson who'd died three weeks earlier? would that many men really be after mathilde seigner?

but as long as you can convince yourself that these events are feasible, the film is highly enjoyable. tense, but not too tense. in the middle of all the craziness, there are surprising moments of comedy, and the best part is that, bar the exception of one or two characters, everyone gets exactly what he or she deserves. it may not be nice to think that just desserts can involve such nasty things for some people, but you do feel a quiet sense of satisfaction when they happen.

one more thing -- i have to say that the artsy direction and half-hearted division of the film into the stories of different characters served only as a distraction to a story that was complex enough to begin with.

a thousand miles

i wish that this post was going to be step-by-step directions for how to eradicate a cloud of black hatred in your heart, but it's not.

i have an overabundance of hatred inside of me. for many things -- there's the justifiable hatred, for people and things that are easily defined as very very bad. the ones that make you feel good because you hate them. i have a probably less than (or more than?) healthy degree of self-loathing. i get that particulary new york blend of madness when it comes to the tourists who get in my way when i'm late for work, people who walk in front of you slowly, weaving back and forth like drunkards so you can't pass them. loud, obnoxious, pretentious hipsters, with their fedora hats and 80s vests.

most of my hatred these days, though, focuses on one person. i've tried everything to talk myself out of it, pretend that it's all her fault, that i'm blameless, that she drove me to it, but the fact remains -- as a friend once misspoke, "i hate her with the white hot intensity of a thousand miles." i know it's irrational, and i know it's too much, and i know i should just put her out of my mind. i always think it will make me feel better to tell people about WHY i hate her, the horrible, inane, ignorant things that she does and says, but it generally just makes me feel nauseous and ineloquent and crude.

why do i hate her? i think you must know that feeling -- someone you would rather have never even met. you think that the two of you can't be more different. you pride yourself on being their polar opposite. and then they say something -- 'oh, that's MY favorite movie too!' it's more than a cringe, it's like an emotional seizure. you don't want them to like what you like, you don't want them to have even HEARD of the things you like. those are YOUR things, not theirs. i hate hearing her talk about MY things in such possessive, pseudo-intellectual tones, thinking no one will notice that she's quoting straight from the new york times movie review. she passes herself off as the things that i'd like to be, and when i hear her say them out loud, i want to run up and pull away the curtain, expose her as lying and preening and flattering and most of all...less than me.

that's what makes me ashamed. i want it proven. i want to win. i want a certificate that says i'm better. i try to convince myself that i want good things for everyone in the world, but i don't. i want her to fail. i want her to fail. and i want to succeed in all that she failed in, and then succeed in things that she would never even try.

it's a horrible way to live. and it's a horrible way to be, to feel all kindness and generosity in you is corroding like a smoker's lungs. i'd like to think that someday she will not even cross my mind, or, if she does, that i will think kindly of her. but if my soul is a pair of smoker's lungs, then i am still smoking a pack a day.

was julia even IN venice?

cause I don’t think that she was. and that is just ONE of the many reasons that i wholeheartedly oppose the new production of ‘brideshead revisited’.
as a four year old, i was not allowed to watch an awful lot of television. But i WAS allowed to watch ‘masterpiece theatre’. i was probably one of the few kids who understood why it was so funny, on ‘sesame street’, that the host of ‘monsterpiece theatre’ was named alistair cookie. ‘brideshead’ was wonderful. And not only for the fact that it secured me a good ten hours of tv time (i don’t say the full thirteen because there were definitely a few episodes during which i did have to stay in the other room.) oh, how i loved Sebastian and his teddy bear, and weren’t he and charles such good friends? charming. sunbathing nude. SUCH good friends, really. i grew up lutheran, i had no idea what was going on.

everything about the entire miniseries is just as it should be. the soundtrack is sublime, the casting, the locations, everything staying true not just to the details but the spirit and style of waugh’s heavenly book. it doesn’t matter if i’m reading that first chapter or hearing jeremy irons when he realizes where he is, just give me ‘it was if someone had switched off the wireless…’ and i’m all a-shiver.
which brings us to the preview i saw the other night. it’s a good thing that ‘tell no one’ was as good as it was or i would have stewed in my seat all evening.
now, i love emma thompson. however. claire bloom she is not. And if the preview is any indication, she’s in the film far more than lady marchmain has any right to be. the one clip with lord marchmain, no lawrence olivier himself, gave the distinct impressions, along with a few other shots, that the filmmakers are trying to put forth the idea that there’s a bit of incest going on.

charles is portrayed as something of a deviant with little more than sex and social climbing on the mind. And poor sebastian is played by the actor who portrayed the murderer in the film ‘perfume’, which was also something of a miserable adaptation. it looks like charles and julia are going at it from the start, and sebastian seems like nothing so much as an afterthought, the kooky brother who’s upset when his sexy sister takes the boy that, honestly, he doesn’t appear all that interested in. i saw neither hide nor hair of aloysius, and he seems nothing so much as completely devoid of character. there’s a far too dramatic scene of sebastian yelling about charles wanting julia, when, in the book and the original production, by the time that charles and julia actually embark on a poorly executed affair, sebastian has for some time already been off in morocco with kurt the lisper, off his head on who knows what. i’ll wager they’re even taken out the delightful vomiting scene! and come to think of it, where have bridey and cordelia gone? moreover, if they’ve reduced anthony blanche’s part by so much as a stutter, they’ve done him a terrible disservice. my mother still shrieks when i do my anthony impression (‘she’s a b-bloodsucker, my dear, an absolute b-b-bloodsucker.’)

in the end though, it all just looks far too slick and exciting. there’s none of the subtlety which it actually requires. and anyway, if the original film has john gielgud in it, do you honestly think it can be improved? (we’re not counting ‘caligula’….)

don’t even get me started on the new ‘a room with a view’.

and just so you know...

...i gave up on 'moll flanders'. damn if she wasn't the most boring character i have encountered in a long long time. she was completely colorless! i stuck with her through to her, what, her FOURTH marriage? or was the last one just another affair? i lost track of the number of children she didn't seem to bother about, none of them had names. the incest, while admittedly a surprise, was a bit contrived.

so, i gave up.

another thing i give up on? the show 'house'. i mean, really, it's way too convoluted and far too pleased with it's own tiny bizarre details. as for hugh laurie, i prefer 'jeeves and wooster'.

i can't move my arms.

i can’t move my arms.
i moved yesterday. and now i fully understand why people used to stay in one house for their entire lives. it’s also probably why a lot of people stay together even though the relationship is plainly over, because a little tension is preferable to taking all of your worldly possessions out the door and somewhere else. in fact, i’d say a LOT of tension is preferable.
the moving van one has to drive is scary as well. it’s heinously noisy, and not really what you’d call a smooth ride, although one does get the feeling that, as the biggest thing on the road, everyone else is going to have to get out of your way. this may be an erroneous feeling, but, since my day with the truck is over and i didn’t hit a thing, i’m going to keep feeling it.

packing is brutal as well. i repeatedly hit these walls while packing where i think, ‘that’s it. i’m finished. i can’t do one more thing. i’ll just have to go like this, with only a fraction of my stuff.’ i would do that every year going back to college. when i went to school in dublin, flying over, british airways made me unpack my trunk in line, because it was too heavy. i dunno, i’m a pretty small girl and i’d managed to heft it around so far. they were nice enough to give me a free duffel bag, though.
by far the worst part of yesterday, and this includes driving the 12-foot truck on the bqe in a violent rainstorm, was ikea. i developed a theory yesterday while there. we had to wait in line for forty-five minutes, it was as good a time as any. ikea is like childbirth. soon after the event, the actual memory of it fades. if you could remember the whole thing clearly, there is no way you’d do it again.
they didn’t have the mattress i needed. or any mattresses the correct size, for that matter, that weren’t laughably out of my price range. i asked an employee if i could order an out-of-stock item for delivery when it came in. he smiled and said no, but i could always come back tomorrow and check. i then said a very bad word not-so-under my breath. delivery charges for purchases made on the internet carry a fee of at least 110 dollars. my only choice, apparently, is to come back, either with a rented conveyance or with 50 bucks or so for home delivery. BUT I’D HAVE TO GO BACK.

there was a lady in the line next to ours, a line that was actually moving, that had bought hot dogs for her family. she’d bought an extra and was asking to see if anyone on-line wanted it. apparently, i need to hone my skills of looking as hungry as i feel. She forced it on a little girl who very plainly stated that she did not want it.
i encountered one poor lady in bed linens who just couldn’t work out what was going on, and why didn’t the sheets say whether they were for deep pocket mattresses? she said she felt like her brain was going. i told her that that was completely normal for ikea.

it always seems like such a good idea before you go. even driving up, you feel this surge of affection for sweden that it usually only felt by actual swedes. and at the beginning, with naught but your empty yellow bag slung jauntily over your shoulder, it seems totally doable. you just need a few things, right? some sheets, curtains. and you can get a cart at the end in the warehouse. but then you realize how heavy 2 sets of sheets and 4 sets of curtains can get. and a duvet cover. and oops! you picked up a queen size that was in the full size rack so you have to trot back over there. and you have to carry it all back upstairs to the extremely unpleasant children’s department, where you need fourteen sets of heavy metal wall fixtures. and someone keeps intermittently yelling “olivia!” and would it really be all that hard for an engineer somewhere to come up with a cart that doesn’t list severely to one side? it’s hard to go straight when you’re constantly aiming to the right.
i would have felt sorry for the huge number of pregnant ladies who were walking around, but then, it seems to me that they had the perfect excuse to stay at home.

sitting at work, reading 'moll flanders', as one is wont to do.

that might be the actual opposite of the true definition of what you’re supposed to be doing at work. but. it was what i was doing.

here’s the thing. every day i dream of this life, this life wherein i don’t have to work in an office. most importantly, where I don’t have to answer the phone. that is my biggest and stupidest phobia. i can’t even explain how nervous i get when faced with a time slot when i know i have to call someone, or someone will call me. ior days, my stomach gets churny where i see it written down.

but i dream of this officeless life free of telephone commitments. i have all of the time (and money) that i need to write all over the stories and essays that i’ve ever wanted to write. i can go wherever i want with a trusty laptop, or a notebook and a pen, and write to my heart’s content, everything spilling out that has been building up while i sit in my cubicle, day after day.

but then. when i DO have free time, do i write? sometimes. but by no means always. and as i sit here in the slow season for academic texts, i could be writing in the down time. i could have filled pages upon pages every day. i haven’t. i’ve done a lot of crossword puzzles. i’ve read the bbc news site until my eyes crossed. i started at the bottom of the arts and letters daily website, and worked my way quickly to the top. today i happened upon classic literature in free e-book form. i’ve read two guy de maupessants, a really good robert louis stephenson, and realized that i really DON’T like chekov, it wasn’t just a hunch all these years. and now i’ve started ‘moll flanders’.

maybe it’s the workplace environment. the constant fear that your supervisor is standing just behind you, or that i.t. is compiling a report of the numerous websites that you shouldn’t be looking at. no music, no pajamas. no chance watching tv for half an hour.

i suppose i might just have to dream about this life until that inevitable day that someone gives me a massive cash advance to write my epic novel all….day….long…..

just by the way...

no matter how many times i watch this film, i can't take my eyes off of it.

what to do when it happens, because it will...

...and of course, the 'it' of which i speak is the day on which your regular coffee-cart man finally asks you out.

i have always enjoyed popularity with the numerous coffee-cart men of my acquaintance. i don't know what it is, i show up to the same one twice and they smile broadly and yell 'my friend!' when i was a nanny on the upper west side, i was sick with strep throat one week. my coffee-cart man said he had been so worried he didn't know what to do, and if i was sick, why didn't i call hime? he would have brought me chicken soup! i mean, other than the phone number logistics, the fact that i didn't know his name, me being in brooklyn...apart from that, it honestly just hadn't crossed my mind. i almost wish it had. waking up horrifically ill, unable to drag myself too far from my bed, suddenly realizing, 'wait, i can just call my friend at the coffee cart!'

i've been worried about this one for a while, though. things quickly progressed from 'my friend', to 'sweetheart'. he's been awfully attentive to my schedule, and definitely chastises me when i'm late. he can't seem to fathom those days when i get tea instead of coffee, or, horrors, a bagel.

but last week. he asked me what i was doing at the weekend, and i said, well, i'm not really doing anything. he wanted to know, didn't i go to parties? i said no, i really prefer reading (and believe me, if i wasn't fully aware of the fact that i am a total loser, dork, etc., i would have realized it with that statement). he said, 'what, don't you like the movies?' i didn't think it was the time to get into the fact that i actually have a master's degree in film studies, so i just said, 'yeah, i really love movies.' that's when he said, 'why don't we go to the movies?'

it was really incredibly embarrassing. luckily, there was a line behind me, so i did a sort of a charlie chaplin-esque exaggerated shrug and waved goodbye for the day.

even more awkwardly, circumstances were such that i didn't go the next day, but when i did go back, he didn't mention it, and believe me, neither did i. i mean, it would be horrendous to have to change coffee cart allegiances at this point.

and it's right there on the corner....

more city, less sex, please

i just read the review of the 'sex and the city' movie in 'the new yorker'. it's always nice to know that there are other people that express the same unpopular views that you do. i'm tired of hearing about how it's really not about the clothes or the shoes, but the RELATIONSHIPS.

two points. one. much is made of the fact that these women are simply doing what men have done for years, being free with their sexuality, free to do and say and sleep with whoever the hell they want to. but...isn't that why women usually hate men? because they do and say and fuck whoever the hell they want to?

two. if you ever had the incredibly poor luck of being cornered by these four aging whores with expensive shoes at a cocktail party....you would run screaming out of there. i have a pet theory that they are the kind of women that are only friends so they can keep an eye on one another, and make sure that they aren't all sleeping with the same guy.

also, with the spectacular amount of work that the writer one doesn't do, how does she afford anything more than shoes on a payless sale?

shower thoughts

i have some of my best thoughts in the shower. sometimes i wonder if i should stay in there full-time, like that episode of 'seinfeld'. but the other day my thought was this -- every one of those directors that make those shit blockbusters should be sat down and made to watch krsysztof kieslowski's 'the decalogue'. then maybe they would think twice about the way they all love to bandy about the word 'epic'.
just another thought, courtesy of the shower.

zero comments

i have been lonely. very lonely. not very, so recently, but i have been. read something in a book the other day: a woman looks at her answering machine to see if there are any messages. there's a big red zero. she presses play anyway.

i have been that lonely.

and it strikes me that, if several years ago, i had looked at this thing of mine and seen '0 comments', i might have cried. the kind of crying that gets the tears smeared all over your face, and you try to take a huge breath in through your nose, but you find that your nostrils are completely blocked. the kind of crying that always makes my forearms feel empty. and i would keep checking and checking, obsessively, many more times than the already pretty obsessive once an hour.

but. i don't think i care now. is anyone reading this? hello? maybe i would have once thought, it's like being the invisible man. but NOW i think, it's like...being the invisible man. whereas before i might have though, oh, poor invisible man, woe is him! no one can see him, no one loves him, he can't even collect himself a houseful of cats and become a crazy cat lady, because the cats would be afaid of him, and he's not a lady. but now i am more inclined to think, oh, the joy of the invisible man! since no one can see him, he can sneer derisively! he can stick out his tongue at ugly children and mean people! he can leer suggestively! he may never get seen, but he will never get laughed at. he will never get caught.

i don't like cats anyway.

they're makin' a film about midgets

the only real downside of the film 'in bruges' was the mentally deranged lady who sat next to me, picking her nose, muttering non-stop, occasionally hurling obscenities and come-ons to the actors on the screen, and generally smelling like the devil himself.
brendan gleeson is a big fat fuck, and that's his charm. he's a bit colm meaney these days though, and by that i mean he's in every single movie that comes out of ireland. i have to say that the idea of a sweet, gentle, cultured hitman is more than a bit tired, but i put that aside for brendan.

colin farrell's eyebrows served their usual purpose. i think he gets bad reviews too often. obviously, he's been in some real shit. but, in 'tigerland' especially, he can actually move beyond the puppy dog eyes. his character in this film is a few points up in intelligence from the one in 'intermission', which i think helps. he's good at kind of dumb, but if he's playing too dumb he turns into a caricature.

ralph fiennes...didn't show up till late in the film. and his voice on the phone during the early parts of the film sounded not a bit like him. he's always scary good as a bad guy ('schindler's list', obviously) although i think some colored contacts would work wonders. bad guys don't have such pretty eyes.

the script was pretty delightful, especially several throwaway comments by farrell's character of such ridiculous impropriety (my favorite is about a retarded black girl on a see-saw) that the entire audience (my mad seatmate included) seemed to cough nervously and wait for someone else to say something. martin mcdonagh proves that he can pen a good screenplay without the classic playwright problem of coming off as too stagey.

bruges is a lovely city. i don't know why farrell's character finds it so vile. themes of hell and death and purgatory blend in nicely with a healthy dose of hieronymous bosch, which sadly turns a bit heavy-handed at the end. there's a gorgeous, if highly unlikely chase scene through the wet moonlit streets that made me feel like booking a ticket for belgium (which is probably the first time that phrase has been said). well. i suppose it's as good a place as any for an existential dilemma.

several bit players are memorable, especially a bad-tempered canadian tourist played by the little bald guy who was on 'law and order' for years. and ciaran hinds is far too brief as a doomed priest.

one thing...not that this bothered me, but i can see how it might...there are several scenes of intense violence towards the end. the black jollity of most of the movie is of such a chatty, kickabout nature, that when things start exploding (heads, big fat fucks) it's a bit shocking.

all in all...the film makes no grand statements, and it doesn't really do anything that hasn't been done before. but the quirky juxtaposition of disgruntled characters amid 'fary-tale' bruges seems somehow really fresh.

and it always helps to have a midget.

now we are six.

why couldn't i have enjoyed being six when i actually WAS six? why do i hate things that are happening until they are over and then i cry because they're gone? it would be nice to be able to actually live in the past, and then the present would be the future, and the future would be...the WAY future, like when you're little and you call it the 'way back' in the car. i wish that i lived in a present where i could still ride in the way back. now my legs would get all crampy and i'd probably get carsick.

i always loved the 'choose your own adventure' books. but i never read them the way you were supposed to. i was a big cheat. i would see what happened with either choice, and sometimes i would go a few choices farther, if i wasn't convinced. sometimes it was easiest just to start at the ending and work your way back, like in mazes they put in kids activity books. backwards is so much easier than forwards.

maybe the reason it is all so difficult is this...you can never completely know anyone. you can never know their every thought. you can never know every memory they have. you can't see into their dreams at night. you'll never really know what they think of your shiny blue shoes or your new haircut. like in movies, when they have the camera acting as someone's 'eyes', and they make it look 'realistic' by putting glasses around the lens or something. you know it's not quite right. it just comes off pretentious and cheesy and fake.

maybe i shouldn't get so disappointed with people. i too often expect that they truly know how i feel, that they feel things in the same way that i do. i am constantly taken aback by friends who...suddenly reveal how very different they are. sometimes it's okay, sometimes it's not. maybe the best thing to do is just cut your losses and move on.