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.