The Dark Knight
All the press was totally impressed with the new Batman film The Dark Knight which took its fair time to make it over to Germany. And apart from being a tad too long - which was aggravated by the morons at the cinema chain putting an interval in the middle to peddle more processed ‘food’ - it was in fact a good film.
Perhaps a little overdone in places and a little overacted for the Joker, but still interesting to see the Batman hero character being senselessly ‘driven’ by being ‘good’ while the Joker nicely played out the power of being completely arbitrary. Which of course is what makes him so fun and threatening. I’m a fan. And I’m still disappointed that the people on the boat didn’t blow themselves up. But I guess there needed to be some good people as well…
While it won’t change anything, I also found it refreshing that the film made an effort to point out that what Batman does is essentially wrong even if he is ‘good’ and people like the results. Since the Jack Bauer-isation of entertainment that point needs to be made from time to time.
Bottle Rocket
Wes Anderson’s 1996 film Bottle Rocket is fun entertainment about some friends trying to pull a heist. They’re not particularly good at it but they’re mainly in it for the interestingness of being a robber. Not exactly a great or deep film but still fun to watch.
Sairaan kaunis maailma
A rather strong taste of the 1990s is stuck in Finnish film Sairaan kaunis maailma (aka What a wonderful world) about teenagers getting involved with drugs and drug dealers; and having to smuggle some drugs over to Sweden to pay their debts. But it’s not the drug smuggling which brings in the drama but more the broken lives and families of the kids which make the world they live in. And those Finnish names like Ippe and Papu just sound funny/nice to the middle European ear.
Import/Export
Another Austrian film, another two hours of depression. Good depression, but still depression. Import/Export tells the story of Ukrainian nurse Olga who never gets paid her full salary and looks for more profitable jobs. After looking to please foreigners in live video sex via the internet, she decides to go to Austria where she first works as a maid for a rich family. Having to tolerate their nasty kids and their bitch of a mother who eventually fires her to show who’s the powerful one.
Olga ends up working as a cleaning lady in an old aged home where she quickly learns that she’s just the foreigner and being nice to people is not part of her job. The ‘export’ part is done by Austrians Pauli and Michael who peddle stuff in Slovakia and Ukraine after having failed to work in a ‘security’ job back in Austria, all the while Michael can’t see his neighbouring countries as anything but huge brothels.
The film is chock-full of depressing moments and I thought it was excellently filmed, consisting mostly of non moving head-on views of the scenes and indulging in the depressingly bland and straight lines and greyness of both communist and western suburbian architecture of the 1960s. Both of which are just occasionally coloured by blinks of modern capitalism, seen as work uniforms or vending machines.
Conte de Printemps
I thought I’d check out some other parts of Eric Rohmer’s four seasonal ‘Tale’ films, after rewatching Conte d’été recently. The spring part of the series, Conte de printempts still has quite a 1980s feel to it and again it focuses on little could-be romances between people.
The story begins with philosophy teacher Jeanne staying over at student Eve’s place because she has her niece staying in her flat and she feels uncomfortable alone at her boyfriend’s apartment. Then we quickly learn about Eve’s dad’s girlfriend being of Eve’s age and Eve’s boyfriend being the age of her dad. There’s a bit of drama in there and it’s played out in clever but not particularly exciting ways. One comment on IMDB sums it up nicely:
Clever, witty, tasteful, bloodless. Although sex seems to be on everyone’s mind in this post-modern tale, only Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann provide any passion in a film that reminds me more of Satie’s witty piano doodles.
graycat-1 on IMDB
In particular I found it lacked the charme and lightness of Conte d’été. Perhaps because of the lack of sun and beach…
Husbands and Wives
Woody Allen’s 1992 Husbands and Wives explores the marriages of some intellectual Now Yorkian couples break up. With all the intermediate fun and neuroses you might expect. Entertaining but not outstanding.
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Sweet and Lowdown
In Woody Allen’s 1999 Sweet and Lowdown we are taken to the recession area and follow the career and affairs of jazz guitar hero (second only to Django Reinhardt!) Emmett Ray. He loves his music, fancies but doesn’t love the girls and treats them accordingly, tends to be less than reliable, faints when meeting the mighty Reinhard and gains pleasure from listening to trains.
Not a particularly exciting story and a bit slow even, but still fun to watch. I rather liked the way they mocked the current documentary style with close up shots of people commenting on the documented while their credentials are neatly written beneath.
Rushmore
Wes Anderson’s 1999 film Rushmore starts off situated in the posh world of a private school but unlike in Anderson’s newer films, the protagonist Max drops out ouf that framework because he’s too focused on starting new clubs and having a crush on one of the teachers to actually do his homework or behave in the way he is expected.
After being relegated to a run-of-the mill public school, Max takes some time to adjust to the new environment but finally manages to fit in much better. Particularly as he can now own up to his dad being a barber and doesn’t have to pretend being rich. After his crush on the teacher fades, we even head for a happy end.
Also amusing, btw, is the Wes Anderson short film Hotel Chevalier, which can be taken as giving background for The Darjeeling Limited in giving us a little information about Jack’s past. Ah well, and same actor as in Rushmore, just a bit older…
The Anderson Tapes
I have a weakness for old-fashioned films about clever heists. Even more so when, like The Anderson Tapes, they’re directed by Sidney Lumet and when you think the protagonist is James Bond because he’s played by Sean Connery. The bad thing is that - tragically - the police always have to catch the thieves. It seems unrealistic and tragic as well. As some old ladies in the film remark correctly, at least the holdup brings some excitement into their lives.
Extra brownie points for clever suspicion about surveillance technology and the protagonist John opening the film with
What’s advertising but a legalized con game? And what the hell’s marriage? Extortion, prostitution, soliciting with a government stamp on it. And what the hell’s your stock market? A fixed horse race. Some business guy steals a bank, he’s a big success story. Face in all the magazines. Some other guy steals the magazine and he’s busted.
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Conte d’été
Eric Rohmer’s Conte d’été (aka Summer’s Tale) is part of his four ‘Tale’ films which span all season. But it’s the only one I saw so far. Just now I watched it again on a VHS tape which I recorded from telly back in the 1990s.
It’s a nice film telling about a guy named Gaspard spending his summer at the beach, being into music and flirting with the girls. He means to meet Lena, a girl he’s in love with. But he first meets Margot instead and gets along well with her and who introduces him to Solène, so Gaspard ends up in a bit of a messy situation. And only after he leaves it becomes clear that some opportunities may have been missed.
The film’s end is almost tragic, but in total I liked the lightness in it. People don’t actually do anything. They enjoy their summer, and they get themselves into a little mess.
The Darjeeling Limited
Highly lauded last year and only seen by me now The Darjeeling Limited was a fun film to watch. Just like Wes Anderson’s Royal Tenenbaums and Life Aquatic it’s a bit weird and quite colourful. And somehow these films manage to have a very similar and distinct ‘feel’ to them which gives away the director right away (with my bad memory for names I actually had to head over to IMDB whether it’s from the same guy who made The Royal Tenenbaums).
In the film we see three rich brothers travelling through India on a luxury train with a whole load of personalised baggage. Slowly you learn about their relationship to one another as well as the whole point of the journey. Things don’t go smoothly, but they don’t fuck up too badly either. It’s weirdly entertaining that way.
And the Technicolor India the film presents is amazing. Everything is very colourful
Don’t Drink the Water
I think with Don’t Drin the Water I’m reaching a point where I arrive at the lesser Woody Allen films in the interminable quest to see all of them. Set in the cold war, Woody Allen is caught in an Eastern Bloc country and has to flee to the U.S. embassy because he tried to take a photo and was then pursued. There he has to stay for a while rather than being back home at work and of course he doesn’t see what the fuss is all about. Obviously he’s also neurotic vis-à-vis the foreign food he may have to eat or the the Arab dignitary who comes visiting.
With the ambassador being over in the U.S. and his son (Michael J. Fox) taking his place not all that competently, more room for laughter is created.
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One of those ‘out-of-print’ videos is called Macintosh or Windows?
It was made in 1996 and I received it after finding some Apple evangelism web site - and happily telling them about the enthusiasm I had for the platform at the time. Which probably came from me not having become as cynic as I am today and Apple’s products being much more amazing at the time. Amazing in that they could do plenty of cool stuff which other machines couldn’t do. I also hadn’t seen a Mac break down at the time. Neither in hardware, nor in software - which was quite remarkable compared to the self-destructive habits of DOS and Windows seen on the machines of the few remaining non Mac-using friends in those days.
The video is rather amusing. A guy stands in front of a Mac and a Windows machine and illustrates how the Mac is a superior machine. The film is made with a bit of humour as the guy keeps tapping the ‘other’ machine in a friendly but ever so condescending way. And in how they show all the hardware and installation horror people had to (still have to ?) suffer through on Windows machines.
Of course the comparisons are grossly unfair as well. For example attaching an external hard drive was mentioned. On the Mac one could simply attach it via SCSI. And the Windows machine didn’t have a SCSI connector, so it was about opening the machine, installing some card, getting it to work and so on. I am fairly sure DOS machines with built in SCSI cards existed as well in those days.
Obviously price isn’t mentioned in the film and the fact that the presumably generic ‘Mac’ in the comparison was a not-exactly-cheap PowerMac 8500 may have played a role there. The machine happened to have built-in video capturing logic. And thus a further test was to compare videoconferencing. Hilarity ensued as the DOS machine needed to have a bunch of cards (networking, sound, video) installed to match the features.
Another inadequate test won, hooray. Then came speech recognition. Which I even considered a somewhat risky topic back in the days. Because the Mac’s built-in speech recognition always sucked for anything you tried to do with it beyond the wonderful Knock, knock
script. Actually it frequently failed on that as well. I guess we don’t speak the right American accents…
While there is some humour in the film, I felt a bit disappointed that they elaborated so much on the hardware aspect - i.e. more expensive hardware having more features and requiring less fiddling. Then - and all the more today - the main value is the OS. Its advantages are more subtle and probably difficult to express in such an advertorial film, so they get left out. The only such subtlety the film features is the Finder’s ability to just let you drop control panels and system extensions on the System Folder and file them away appropriately. A feature so nice that it was killed when the Unix overlords took over the Mac platform a few years later. Now we’ve got installers, yay!
More than a decade later the focus on rather superficial advantages also makes the claims in the film look extra silly. Even in software - rather than focusing on a clean and consistent design - they went for the latest and greatest features. And thus we see stuff like AppleTalk printer sharing, QuickDraw 3D and even the wonderful Cyberdog in that film. Those actually were great technologies and at least AppleTalk and Cyberdog haven’t been outdone by their successors yet.
Ugh, and the architecture. A diagram - made back in the System 8 days! - which I found highly amusing and quite possibly correct.
Lord of War
Lord or War is a film about weapon trade. We hear the story of Yuri, child of a family of Ukrainian immigrants to the U.S. who gets into the weapons business and finally hits big time there after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc which releases gazillions of weapons that are guarded by underpaid and dissatisfied soldiers. Eldorado for arms dealers.
People like Yuri then do their best to acquire those (and other) weapons and to sell them to whoever needs them most. While doing this Yuri starts making friends among the world’s finest dictators but he’s damn good at the job and knows somebody else would step in once he stops doing it. So he continues, particularly as it’s a rather lucrative business as well.
Eventually tragedy ensues and his family is destroyed by both the violence of his business and the police chasing him. Yuri himself gets away with everything because the government needs people like him to do the dirty work for them, but he ends up being fairly alone. Emphatic types might feel sorry for him.
I was a bit undecided about seeing the American remake of the brilliant Funny Games in cinema. On the one hand it is said to be not worse than the original because Michael Haneke painstakingly stuck to the original, on the other hand the whole idea of Americans being too stupid to simply watch a film that’s dubbed or subtitled and not using their ‘own’ stars and interiors makes me sick. I also suspect that even though there is an American re-make it will not be seen by the people who need to see it most. By the time I decided to see it anyway the week that it run in local cinemas was over. So instead I settled for some other Haneke.
Le temps du loup
Unlike in Funny Games where a family arrive at their posh holiday home and the horror starts slowly dawning on and then happening to them, Haneke’s 2003 film Le temps du loup starts with a knockout. Family arrive at their not quite so posh holiday home, another family is there, their daddy shoots the owning family’s daddy. Two minutes into the film you see mum and her kids running away and trying to find people who can help them.
But the horror only comes slowly here as well. Not only do the mom and kids take the loss without too much effect at first, there also seems to be some kind of strange situation in the country or the region they are in which means there is nobody to help them, there is nobody to call who will bring them home. Something bad has happened - which is never shown in the film. They end up in a place where others already wait for a train that may or may not come by to take them back to the city. Food and water are scarce and the crust of civilisation wears thin.
I didn’t really get the situation presented in the film, but it surely helped present the fragility of people’s good manners as well as how priorities shift once you have to make sure you survive the next day. Many question arose as well: To which extent did the mother do a good job looking after her kids - how deep did the killing of her husband touch her really? How relevant would that be in the situation they are in? What kind of discipline and organisation does a group of people need to get along? How do you react when the people who killed your husband/dad come to stay in the same camp you are in? And so on. As usual, this isn’t light fare and it was somewhat hard to grasp.
Code Inconnu
And while in the Haneke mood I also caught up on his 2003 Code Inconnu. It’s not as shocking as his other films and doesn’t have a similarly tight story. Rather, it weaves a number of different stories together which touch modern life, urban life, rural life, immigration and how they all fit together and at times don’t. Throw in some métro photography and you’ll have me pleased.
While the film isn’t as spectacular as Haneke’s other films and doesn’t give you the absurdly evil, nihilistic, whatever elements, it manages to keep you at that level of ambiguity which comes from everybody behaving sort-of OK but not quite. You can sympathise with people but you wouldn’t say they’re totally right.
Funny Bones
One of the more amusing stories in my history of film watching is that the real reason why I first watched Funny Games was that I had seen a film which I quite liked on telly at some time in the 1990s. I remembered that its name began with funny and when looking for it, I ended up getting Funny Games instead. Of course my error became clear rather quickly after starting to watch the film as this one wasn’t about comedians. This error wasn’t a loss, but it was a little irritating.
Only later I found out that the film I remembered was Funny Bones, a slightly touchy but well told story about the son of comedian Las Vegas who fails to become a comedian as well and returns to the origin of his family in Blackpool when searching for inspiration. There he quickly meets the past of his family, along with the guys his dad stole his act from and his half-brother who really does have ‘funny bones’.
De Noorderlingen
I finally got round to seeing the early 1990s Dutch film De Noorderlingen (The Northerners) after just 15 years. It plays in a new 1960s village with a single road and we follow the fates of the people there and their society as a whole. It’s a somewhat sterile road but in the living rooms and the nearby forests everybody has their little secrets and bits of drama.
The very strict concept of everything happening along the single road of that small but modern village reminded me a bit of Dogville. While the styles and storylines differ significantly, the concept of that remote place with all its secrets seems similar.
Git
All right, the film is called Feathers in the Wind in languages I understand but the Korean title ‘Git’ certainly would make a good film title in English as well. So that’s exciting. The film itself was so-so; A writer retreating. To work on some script but also because he promised a long ago girlfriend that they’d meet there ten years later. She doesn’t come (but we don’t have hard feelings in the end) and he gets to know the girl working at the motel… agreeing to meet her later on back in the city. It works.
Lust, Caution
Ang Lee’s 2007 film Lust, Caution wasn’t mind blowing, but good looking - fantastic colours, light, dresses - and rather intense as well. A group of students in the drama society decides to kill Mr Yee, a collaborator of the Japanese. They want to get close to him by having one of them become Mrs Mak, another rich lady, and become friends with his wife. And they fail for the simple reason that Mr. Yee departs before they see an opportunity.
A few years later, resistance against the Japanese still needs help and they get another opportunity. They play the old game again, Mrs Mak reappears and eventually starts having an affair with Mr Yee. He, in turn is doing some dirty prison work and is quite paranoid - never relaxing, and desperately needing to be in control at all times. He’s quite cruel to her but the ‘politics’ of the situation cause things to go on until their plan is found out. And because Mr Yee is good at his job, they are shot.
Keywords: mahjong, You could have done it three years ago
, nipples, diamonds.
Let me add that I thought the English title was an excellent match for the film because lust and caution really describe the central feeling in the scenes with Mr Yee well. The German title, unfortunately, was Gefahr und Begierde
- danger and lust - which seems just the wrong way round.
Bonus
And if you could be fooled to think that maths and geometry and cool, be sure to look at the Dimensions films. Some good ideas and visualisations in there. And even tri-lingual, endlessly subtitled and with licenses that will be considered politically correct by the hipsterati.
Before the Devil knows you’re dead
Sidney Lumet (* * * * * *) is still directing films and Before the Devil knows you’re dead is his latest one. A story about a simple plan - two brothers robbing their parents’ jewelry store so they can restart their lives with the cash while their parents won’t have to worry because of the insurance. Such simple brilliant plans usually go a single way - wrong. And this one does in all possible ways.
People die, family tragedy ensues, even more people die. It’s all quite tragic, but there’s just no way the boys can go and apologise to their father for having caused the death of their mother.
Extra kudos to Philip Seymour Hoffman. Not just for having an amusing drug dealer and who’s at the receiving end of his killing frenzy eventually. But also for becoming older and fatter. In quite a few scenes during the film I had to think that if he progresses this way for another decade or two, he’ll be perfect to play Helmut Kohl in a film. Perhaps someone comes up with a good film featuring the ex-chancellor by then…
Yella
Christian Petzold’s (*, *, *) 2007 film Yella is another decent one one. Yella manages to get out of her home town and away from her ex by getting an accounting job in a bigger town. Just that the job is gone when she arrives and the situation seems mostly dire and corrupt. She meets a financing consultant in her hotel and starts working with him. Several cool scenes of negotiations are featured with Yella both playing the psychological games they studied on their way and doing a good analysis of the situation.
While she is good at the job - too good and ambitious eventually - it never looks like it’s going to be a permanent thing which keeps the film in a certain floating imbalance that allows Yella’s past to catch up with her again.
Paranoid Park
Another teenager film by Gus van Sant: Paranoid Park. This time with a possibly even younger and more troubled boy being the protagonist: Alex enjoys skating and does so at a place called Paranoid Park right next to the railway line where all the cool kids hang out who don’t even have middle-class homes to return to. One day when hitching a ride on a passing train with a guy he got to know there, he kills a guard who’s trying to stop them.
Which means we end up with many shots of Alex worrying about how to handle this, looking at us fuzzily with big eyes all the while he has to figure out how to handle growing up, dealing with the skating, his overly-eager cheerleader girlfriend and the new more understanding girl he gets to know who suggests he writes things down so they get out.
Perhaps not as dramatic as some of van Sant’s other films but still amazing how Alex’ situation is transported in such a simple and straightforward way.
[More a red shirt than a yellow film, though.]
Also seen
Helen Levitt’s short film In the Street with 16 minutes from the streets of New York in the 1940s. She’s getting quite close to people in there, is great with the kids and not too shy to look into people’s windows or film them picking their noses. Almodóvar’s 1980 film Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón is a bit overdone for my taste in its mix of everything between punk and masochism in wedlock.
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No Country for Old Men
From time to time good films even win Oscar awards and No Country for Old Men is one of them. While the story could just be a poor guy runs across a crime scene with a load of money that just wouldn’t do the trick. Add a highly competent manic killer with a faible for air pressure to the mix and things become much more interesting. Where I don’t mean ‘interesting’ in a tacky way. Up to the killing everything is done in moderation.
The good actors, the clean shots and the typically Cohen-like colour style completed the enjoyment.
Git - Feathers in the Wind
After liking Kim Ki-Duk’s films I thought I should try other Korean stuff and was pointed to Git, a.k.a. Feathers in the Wind by Il-Gon Song. It is also a film that doesn’t need many words and includes a stunning skyscape or three. We follow a film-writer to an island where he wants to write and is supposed to meet an ex of his on a date they agreed on a decade ago. Instead he just finds the girl looking after the hotel who is into tango. Then a piano arrives as do sad news.
Actually things don’t seem as absurd as they sound in the film itself. But still I only thought it was an ‘OK’ film, not a brilliant one. Somehow it couldn’t keep the tension for me.
Eros
I like short films, I appreciate Michelangelo Antonioni’s work, I love Wong Kar-Wai’s films and Steven Soderbergh made a few good ones as well. And yet, Eros, three short films by these directors didn’t impress me too much. Particularly the first film by Antonioni went straight past me. But unlike with L’Avventura or Il Deserto Rosso, I believe this time it wasn’t my fault. While this film was the most generous with nudity of the three, it would have needed much more to make it ‘worthwhile’.
The Soderbergh film was in fact rather cool and cheeky. What else could you say about a film that features snooze buttons and an analyst throwing paper airplanes from his office window. You’ll be very vulnerable now.
The final part by Wong Kar-Wai around a taylor and one of his clients was most likely the most on-topic for the film’s sujet but it didn’t quite do it for me.
Be Kind Rewind
I just like Michel Gondry’s films. [Or rather I am very tempted to think that the guy is a one of the very few creative people who are allowed to make films.] And Be Kind Rewind (to be seen here as Abgedreht
which is exactly the kind of clever/funny translation advertising people should be shot for) was no exception. Videos get erased in an old-fashioned video store; the guys decide they have to simply re-film them; they do it - and people love the results, particularly when they can participate in making the films. That doesn’t save the video store in the end but is a great experience for the community around the video store.
The whole re-filming idea certainly evoked a cringing ‘just like YouTube’ feeling in me. And perhaps the film shows the lost opportunities of such web-2 video. Unlike most of the stuff you see online, the re-makes were done shabbily but still with a light-handed style and playfulness that is usually missing online. From Ghostbusters to 2001 to Driving Miss Daisy many films are re-created and we get a little side-note on racism here, a little Hobbes quote there and of course some copyright lawyer turning up to destroy the fun in the name of the movie business - without making any fuss about it.
If you want to restore your sense of childlike wonder, drop your tech-toys and watch this film instead.
Ensemble, C’est tout
Ensemble, C’est tout - or rather Zusammen ist man weniger allein, as the film was called in Germany (apparently going by the name of Hunting and Gathering in English) - was quite popular at least in the small cinemas here recently but it took a long time before I got round to seeing it. Apart from the charming Audrey Tautou, the film features the story of three people who end up living together and following their rather distinct lifestyles.
And thus we have a stutterer going by the funny name of Philibert, a cook who needs to look after his mother and their poor neighbour. Add some some love and caring in the form of well intentioned kitsch, add a bit more until it’s more than necessary and there you are. Amusing but a bit too sweet and kitschy for me in the end.
Story of a Beautiful Country
The South African TV documentary Story of a Beatiful Country sounds a bit clichéd: A guy drives all the way through the country in a minibus and films people from all walks of life with a hand-held camera while they sit in the back of the minibus. However, the different people he interviews give a broad picture, with the common theme that, yes, things were bad, problems aren’t solved, quite likely many new problems are coming - but at the end of the day all of them love their country and are positive that they’ll make it.
Encouragingly, I got the impression that this attitude is very common in the country. Sure, people will bitch and complain. And then they’ll try to make the best of it. It’s their country after all.
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
I quite like films where people are stuck in a dire situation and develop into some sort of drama or tragedy. And thus They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? was recommended to me. And deservedly so. A fantastic film set in the Recession era U.S. around a ‘dance marathon’ in which the couple lasting the longest wins. The ‘competition’ lasts week after week and the participants get to know each other, from the old sailor to the couple expecting a baby to the main protagonists Gloria and Robert who actually joined up just for the dance.
While everything starts fairly upbeat, things become depressing as people wear out and are submitted to additional ‘competitions’ and races that make them suffer just ‘because we can’™ and because it’s fun to watch. Seeing this in a film from forty years ago about an era eighty years ago suggests that today’s humiliating ‘reality’ shows are more an ‘acquired taste’ than a result of modern cynicism.
What also fascinated me was the question on what’s actually happening in the film and what the protagonists think for really. Gloria is world weary and presumably doesn’t care about anything. Yet, she is hurt by her dance partner Robert being seduced by another girl. Robert, on the other hand, is picture as the naïve youth who can dream staring at the ocean or into the sun but who’ll get himself locked up in a dance marathon for weeks. A guy who at the same time seems to be oblivious of the girl he’s dancing with for weeks and stares at her with huge eyes which seem like he’s going to eat or at least kiss her the next minute. Yet none of that happens. Yowza, yowza, yowza!
Hafið
Hafið (aka The Sea, aka Die Kalte See, but I really wanted to use the ð) is a 2002 film by Baltasar Kormákur who also directed 101 Reykjavík. With Festen at the back of my mind I am tempted to classify it as ‘Scandinavian Family Tragedy’ - however wrong that may be once you think about it.
The film’s main topic is the sea and fishing. A family-owned fish filleting business that’s a part of the village, that’s tied to fishing quotas, that stopped being profitable in comparison to ‘modern’ fishing vessels with their own fish processing just on board the ship. And there the past and the present clash and the boss and father calls his children home from whereever they are to sort out the situation after he had written down his memoirs. The kids don’t care for his business, he detests his kids, people get drunk, fires start and tragedy ensues with their stepmother-slash-aunt keeping the countenance.
Naqoyqatsi
Despite its 1980s-ness I was quite impressed by Koyaanisqatsi when I saw it last year. The composition of all those situations and the people really seemed to catch something. Unfortunately Godfrey Reggio’s 2002 film Naqoyqatsi continued the same idea with a slightly darker mood and much less of the fascination. Perhaps because the scenes used in the film seem much more anonymous. Or perhaps because the film has been overly treated with what were considered ‘amazing’ colour, morph and 3D effects around 1995.
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Leaving Las Vegas
Leaving Las Vegas is one of those ‘classics’ that I hadn’t seen so far. In the film we see Ben (Nicholas Cage) on track to drink himself to death in Las Vegas. He performs rather well at that and gives a sorry sight of alcoholism. He also hooks up with Sera (Elisabeth Shue) who works as a prostitute. And we get a strange love affair between both of them who live together in an agreement to just tolerate the other’s shortcomings.
A bit depressing, but quite a good film.
Ansel Adams - A documentary film
I’m not the biggest fan of landscape photography because - even though potentially beautiful - I find it mostly boring. If there’s anyone who could change my opinion on that it’d be Ansel Adams whose photographs can be downright stunning. Reading his series of books on photographic technique (which it seems I failed to write about so far) I was also impressed by the fact that indeed there can be photographers who give a qualified, detailed, helpful and down-to-earth account of the subject. No hyperbole, no self-glorification but plenty of explanations [Web-2 frigtards eat that!].
Ansel Adams - A documentary film pays homage to Adams, his love for Yosemite, his difficult and slow beginnings, his eventual success and his great service to the national parks. All of that is excellent but as a film I found it a bit too much of a homage with too much classical music and floating around.
The film was also a great reminder that they have a huge and beautiful country on the other side of the Atlantic. A shame that they’re making an effort to just show their nutty reborns and war machinery to the rest of the world.
Juno
Juno has been the hype over in the US of A. And it finally made it over here. It surely is an entertaining film and the character of Juno with her cool- and wittiness is simply brilliant. Perhaps the general spirit is a bit too cheerful for the somewhat serious topic of a teenage pregnancy, but that’s more than made up by the perfectly picked characters from the soon-to-be dad to the best friend to the parents to the carefully picked rich adoptive parents for the baby.
What really made the film for me, though, is the music. Hooray to the Moldy Peaches and Kimya Dawson. Who would have thought that we’ll enjoy their music so publicly again? So publicly that they even made it to Oprah - which seems absurd or at least ironic when you think about it. If you want to do yourself a favour, get the soundtrack. And then listen to Antsy Pants’ song ‘Tree Hugger’ all day.
The Little Shop of Horrors
The Little Shop of Horrors is a little gem from back in the 1960s with a hungry plant that likes humans. An easy-going absurd horror comedy. Even with a very very young Jack Nicholson in there enjoying some dental treatment. I am amused.
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Le Charme discret de la Bourgeoisie
In Le Charme discret de la Bourgeoisie a bunch of well-off, bourgeois, friends try to dine together - but it’s not going to happen throughout the film. Because of dates being wrong, sex being preferable or the army dropping in for a visit. Whatever happens may raise an eyebrow, but is taken with reasonable contenance and we get to see the real ‘worries’ these people have instead. Like how a good martini is made or selling the drugs they smuggled in their diplomat luggage.
As you might expect with Buñuel, things are slightly absurd and in numerous scenes we follow the protagonists’ dreams rather than ‘reality’. With - as dreams and the bourgeois life go - the difference being unnoticeable at first and only becoming apparent ‘with a bang’ at the end when people wake up.
While this may seem a bit outdated from today’s point of view, I found that at least the dream scenes still worked rather well, catch you by surprise and reveal the absurdity of the story you see.
Belle de Jour
A rich housewife spending her days under the name of Belle de Jour as a prostitute. Séverine (played by a beautiful Catherine Deneuve) lives as the wife of a caring and wealthy doctor, Pierre, but she seems a bit frigid at home. After rumours of some other friend of theirs being a prostitute comes up, she becomes interested in the idea and starts to work at a discreet brothel while her husband is at work.
She gets to know different kinds of customers and seems to like her job there. All that while hiding it from Pierre of course. Eventually she becomes a bit too friendly with one of her clients who in turn can’t seize to see her and who tries killing Pierre in the end, adding a bit of drama.
As you might expect with Buñuel, there are also a few dream-like scenes in the film which naturally take us on an alternate, less desirable, track of events and from which the film cuts back after a while. Yet, the film isn’t overly ‘surrealist’ but rather an interesting game of thoughts.
Viridiana
Perhaps time has rubbed the scandal off Viridiana, but it still remains a thought provoking film. I am tempted to say it’s a little subversive as it doesn’t really approve immoralities. It just lets us witness them as facts of human life.
And thus we meet the nun-to-be Viridiana who stays over at her uncle’s. Her uncle in turn fancies her and wants her to wear the wedding dress of his late wife which she refuses. He wants to force her to stay with him by saying he slept with her while she was passed out, she decides to leave nonetheless, he kills himself, tragedy. Well, other family members coming to inherit the house, anyway. Where Viridiana takes care of a bunch of beggars and lets them stay to make up for things. And while her guests appreciate her generosity, they don’t exactly reciprocate it.
Drama, with many more details there in the film. At first I found it a bit boring, but once all those details come together, it ends up being quite compelling. And depressing perhaps.
Control
Let me be frank here: I am not a huge Joy Division fan - not because I think they are bad but because their music was never particularly relevant for me. And yet, I knew I had to see Anton Corbijn’s film Control about Ian Curtis right away. It’s the poster that did it. What a great shot - black and white, the posture, the look, of course the cigarette and just the right angle of the face. Combine it with the the unlikely appearance of pink Helvetica Neue Black and you have me salivating. Just seeing the film advertised on the front page of the cinema programme made me know I had to go and see it.
Of course the film being a music documentary, in black and white and shot by a photographer also appealed to me. Even better, the film itself was quite good. It outlined the rise of Joy Division and how the music, the touring, the girls and the whole lifestyle around it were too much for Ian Curtis to cope with and eventually led to his suicide. Quite tragic in fact as his situation wasn’t even particularly desperate from an outsider’s point of view. He just wasn’t the person for that kind of life.
Oddly I found the things which initially attracted me to the film strange after seeing it. In my mind the late 1970s aren’t black and white. They use colour film. Perhaps with slightly faded images. The film also didn’t look authentically black and white to me when seeing it (a bit of an obsession of mine, I can’t really nail how to see it, but mostly I simply do) and checking in the internet afterwards confirmed that (it was shot in colour and then copied to black and white).
In addition to that, a Black Helvetica - as gorgeous as it looks on the poster - wouldn’t be the typeface I associate with that time. And, finally, I wondered whether the film’s excessive use of wide aperture and hair thin depth of field and way in which it was played with was really a good thing for a film. Ah, well, it’s sexy anyway…
Permanent Vacation
Permanent Vacation is the first film Jim Jarmusch directed way back in 1980. As its title suggests it follows a guy around who is on a ‘permanent vacation’, that is a bit of a slacker. He tries to make sense of the things he encounters and his life in general. But that doesn’t really work out. Plenty of scenes with hopeless/ugly backgrounds as well.
While the idea for the film sounds quite cool, I didn’t think it was particularly good. Perhaps it’s my dislike of the 1980s, perhaps we’ve seen too many filmed slackers on YouTube by now. Or perhaps it’s just the first film which wasn’t too revolutionary.
C’était un Rendez-vous
Usually I’m not a fan of car racing - or racing games for that matter. It just seems pointless. But if it’s real? Quite a different story. And racing a car through Paris early in the morning makes it worthwhile. Which is all that the eight minutes of Claude Lelouch’s C’était un rendez-vous is about. And meeting the girl, of course.
It’s breath-taking, isn’t it? Particularly because it seems so real and the car Passes some of those pedestrians more closely than I’d consider comfortable. It’s a fine line between reckless and cool. And it’s hard to tell whether it was crossed here.
Der Rote Kakadu
Der Rote Kakadu (The Red Cockatoo) was quite a successful German film two years ago. It plays in Dresden just before the Berlin Wall is built. And in a story of young people - love triangle, nights out in the club Der Rote Kakadu where Western music is played, trying to get cash in the West to sustain that lifestyle, poetry - we see the less favourable aspects of the GDR kick in. People are asked to spy on their friends, you can’t publish your own poetry and of course you’ll be beaten up for listening to Western music. At the end, most of them had been convicted in court and some manage to flee to West Berlin before the Wall is built.
Not a bad film. A bit too long and with what seems like a bit of a romantic view on the 1950s, perhaps.
Text in many places of the film looked very Helvetica-like (at the spirits factory, in the courthouse, even stencilled on a bus with an alternate Ü). Even with back history of the typeface I’d guess that 1950s GDR is neither the place nor the time for it. In fact a Motorway sign looked quite Arial-ish. And it’s definitely never the right place or time for that…
Der Felsen
Another film by the same director, Dominik Graf, is Der Felsen (aka The Map of the Heart in English) with grainy low quality image that makes you think of home movies. It follows a middle aged woman, Katrin, around Corsica where she stays with her lover. It’s their last time together as his wife is having a child back home in Germany. That looked a bit like a dull romantic tragedy coming on and I was about to turn it off.
But things ended up being more twisted and Katrin meets young Malte who, it turns out, is on the island as a part of his sentence for crimes he commited back home in Berlin. At first he just steals things from here, but he wants to see her again and - just having been left - she isn’t entirely uninterested either. Things end up being a bit messy then with Malte’s criminal past, the people looking after him and reality catching up with them. Throw in Maltes sweet kid brother who really wants to find some new parents for himself and you have a turbulent mix with a less-than-happy end.
If they had cut another thirty minutes or so from the film - preferably from the beginning - it could have been quite good. The way it is, it seems a bit lengthy.
Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios
In Pedro Almodóvar’s Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) we see what the title promises in an amusing way.
Actress Pepa cannot reach her lover Iván. And in what follows everybody is a bit tense and yet hilarity ensues. Let’s just say we also get to meet Iván’s ex-wife, their son and his new lover. Throw in a few terrorists, a cab driver with a supermarket in his cab, a Jehova’s wittness porter (played by Chus Lampreave who is in many of Almodóvar’s) films and a jug of gazpacho spiked with barbiturates and you get something that isn’t mind-blowing but quite entertaining.
Der Siebente Kontinent
Michael Haneke’s 1989 film Der Siebente Kontinent (The Seventh Continent) is another sign of his brilliance and possibly brutality. It’s a film about an upper middle class family who live their life day by day. It’s an orderly and proper life. It seems incredibly boring. Which you get right into as a viewer in the film’s opening scenes where you sit in the car while it goes through the car wash and follow the family’s getting up routine, getting to know their toothbrushes, their crockery, their electric garage door but not actually seeing any of their faces.
Despite their success at mastering the death of family members and the husband’s carreer progressing, things seem bland and sad. Something seems ‘wrong’ about the family. And, strangely, they know it. They consider their life to be a sorry affair and want to end it. Which they do in an orderly way, destroying all their belongings first - a task which sounds easier than it is - and then killing themselves.
This is totally depressing. It moves you from someone thinking what a sorry life
to someone thinking ah stop, it wasn’t that bad
. Haneke really has a good hand for these things. And cool steady shots of the items in the family’s life as well. A great film, but just like Funny Games one that can darken your mood.
Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes
Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski were a bit of a team. And a highly lauded one. In their 1972 Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Aguirre, the wrath of god) Kinski plays Don Lope de Aguirre who is on a trip to conquer South America in the age of colonisation and in pursuit of gold. Even when they are lost too deeply in the forests and river on their float, Aguirre doesn’t want to return to the rest of their expedition but continues to pursue his goal until pretty much everyone is dead. He does remain determined though and the insane stare remains in his eyes throughout.
A bit similar to Fitzcarraldo it’s an interesting film, particularly in how the tension is built over not much happening. Not really my type of film though.
Eastern Promises
David Cronenbergs 2007 film Eastern Promises is situated in London’s Russian Mafia. Throats are cut, tattoos are had, big Mercedeses are driven and Borschtsch is had. Probably this is playing a bit high on the stereotypes. And midwife Anna finds herself amidst all this when one of her patients dies while giving birth and a diary in Russian is found in her bag. She tries to find out about the girl’s history and unpleasant things uncover one by one.
Not one of Cronenberg’s strongest films I think. The gore is there but the subtlety is missing.
Paprika
Some people absolutely dig Japanese animated films and go great lengths to see them. And while I consider myself Japan-o-phile, those films never really ‘clicked’ for me. I can appreciate the drawings. I can appreciate some of the cool and absurd ideas in the films and the lightness with which they find their place there. And yet I have never become a big fan, more a collateral watcher to be honest. And the recent film Paprika didn’t change that. It looked amazing in places. It had an interesting story about dream machines that connect to the brain and then go out of control. And it had fantastic parades of machines, cuddly toys and fridges marching through the dream scenarios. But still I wasn’t thrilled.
There Will Be Blood
The two driving forces of the USA as we know it: Oil and christianity. Both of them seem to provide a fertile playground for people to fulfill their ‘vision’ mostly at the expense of others and - if they do well - in a somewhat destructive way. So when an upcoming oil baron and a growing up nutter priest meet, hilarity ensues. All that in dark tones, slightly ennerving music and at great length.
Possibly the main idea of There Will be Blood is an ever-so-slightly different one, but this struck me as ‘very American’.
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L’Avare
Louis de Funès remains one of my favourite comedians and I just loved watching his films on telly as a kid. While his nervous acting is occasionally on the silly side, it always seems much more graceful and subtle to me than what you usually see in today’s comedies. His 1980 film of Molière’s L’Avare seemed an odd thing at first.
But seeing Louis de Funès as the greedy old Harpagon protecting his fortune and making his children’s and servants’ lives miserable with his stingy scheming just seems totally natural and in-character for de Funès. The film, the only one in which he did some directing, is set with very limited decorations, almost like in theatre. What struck me as odd was that there are pictures of Molière and his book placed on the walls in some scenes.
All These Women
You grab a random Ingmar Bergman film and end up with All These Women which seems pretty un-Bergman. A bit of a comedy with serious undertones on a music critic who wants to write a biography on a cellist. He invades the cellist’s mansion and meets the various women living there to ‘support’ him. The ultimate point of this being that the critic-biographer mainly writes this for his own benefit and ruins things for everybody else.
The whole film just seems a bit ridiculous and silly. Particularly when compared with Bergman’s other films, their profound storylines and fantastic imagery.
P.S. The film should really be named All These Beautiful Women
.
P.P.S the notorious Air from Bach’s third suite (BWV 1068) is played all over the film.
War of the Worlds
H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds is a classic. And it’s impossible to re-create the awe that the 1938 radio show of the story caused. But still, it remains an interesting story: Earth is being attacked by more powerful Marsians. They seem to win. But Earth’s bugs and bacteria come in as a handy deus-ex-machina to kill the invaders before it’s too late. When overlooking the religious undertones in the film’s abrupt end, it’s highly amusing and certainly one of the better ways to end a story.
The 1953 film based on the story keeps the sweet irony but is a bit more modern and ruthless in throwing whatever weaponry people can find at the invaders. The invaders, by the way, look quite cool and realistic for a 1953 film. That’s quite amazing. Certainly beats the 2005 adaption.
Rosen für den Staatsanwalt
Many old German films are a bit boring and my expectations for Rosen für den Staatsanwalt (Roses for the prosecutor) weren’t too high. But it turned out to be an excellent film. The film begins in World War 2 where soldier Rudi steals two tins of chocolate from the army provisions. He is caught and the efficient administration promptly sentences him to death for that atrocious crime making him think: I wouldn’t have shined my shoes, had I known this
when he is led to the fields to be executed. He evades that fate thanks to an air attack and manages to escape.
Many years later he travels Germany peddling things in the street. And one day he encounters the judge, Dr. Schramm, who so eagerly sentenced him to death in the war. He remained in state service and is a prosecutor for the state now despite his Nazi-era past. Both of them know they ‘know’ the other person but can’t figure out why. Over time things transpire and even though Rudi doesn’t long for revenge, the efforts of Dr. Schramm to cover things up and make Rudi leave town lead to him stealing some more boxes of chocolate.
A great story, I think, and told really well both for the drama within it and the issue of Nazi administrators and other persons of influence going straight to similar positions in post war Germany in which they made an effort to cover up history, help their old friends and keep up the old values.
My Blueberry Nights
Even though some pop star was starring, I was looking forward to Wong Kar Wai’s My Blueberry Nights coming to cinemas. But the film was a bit disappointing in the end. Not only because the drama in the mainly romantic film seemed rather shallow - both on its own and compared to WKW’s earlier films, but also because it didn’t look right. Well, the film certainly does have a WKW look - with most scenes shot in the dark, with public transport in the night, with shots through café windows that have type on them. Just compare this shot from My Blueberry Nights
with this one from Happy Together
The similarity is obvious but in My Blueberry Nights any subtlety - the profoundness if you wish - is lost. It sometimes looked like film students were told to make a film in WKW style and they went on to open their apertures, paint letters on glass, shoot half the film through glass, in the dark with blurry colourful lamps in the background and introduce non-smooth time-flow in the filming. For my taste that went too far - beyond the right measure.
And the story with a café owner meeting a girl who got dumped by her boyfriend and then travels the through the U.S. to change while being all nice and trustful along the way, just ended up being a tad too wholesome for my taste. I suppose it’ll at least enable Starbucks to peddle the DVD when it comes out. My prejudices suggest their customers will jump for the whole Norah Jones angle alone.
I also found that the German synchronisation wasn’t great. Quite frequently sentences sounded like the stuff PR departments translate. I.e. we got to hear expressions from which you could tell they originated from English, something that easily gets on my nerves.
Bonus note: The café’s name seems to be КΛЮЧ which I considered strange because I don’t think that lambda is used in Cyrillic. While I won’t claim I to know all - or any - languages using Cyrillic writing that mixing seemed strange and Google didn’t give any results for the term. Replacing it by Cyrillic el, though, gives КЛЮЧ which means key and seems like a logical name for the café in the film. There are even Films with the name.
Bonus question: What’s the typeface used for posters and credits? Impact? Folio? Did the on-screen version differ from some of the posters?
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