oh, anthony.

i was sitting on the a train today for what seemed like years, and i suddenly noticed a smell that made me think instantly of someone, but i couldn't remember who. after concentrating for a few minutes, i realized that it smelled of my friend anthony, whom i haven't seen in, oh, ever so long. it smelled of him, of his parents house in kilkenny where i spent the night after the halloween party, where we stayed up until 4 eating bananas and frozen pizzas. it smelled like his clothes in the back of the tiny theatre. i never liked the smell. i always thought that it was a drawback, just a funny, slightly sour, pungent smell. maybe it was his hair gel? i don't know. but i remember not liking it.

but today when i smelled it...i wanted to chase it around the subway car, pounce on it and force it into a jar so i could keep it with me. in the film "the holy girl", amalia takes shaving cream and rubs it into the fabric of her collar, periodically sniffing it. i wish i could have done it with that smell. and i don't know where it came from today -- was it the wet? does anthony really smell of rain?

anthony was my best friend for a short period of time. it's been five years since i've seen him, at least one since we've talked, and then only via email. it's not that we had a fight, or decided we didn't really want to be friends. sometimes you are just no longer friends with someone and that's just the way it goes. maybe it wouldn't work to stay friends with everyone anyway. it's just one of those things, but it doesn't mean that i love him any less. it's sad, but it's not. he was a time in my life, a time and a smell. and i'm happy enough to just remember what a time it was.

i don't know where anthony is now. last time we talked i think it was oxford. he won't read this. but i hope someday soon he might come across something that reminds him of me. and that will be enough.

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.