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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Blood Diamond
Blood Diamond supposedly takes up the critical issue of buying diamonds from civil war ridden countries where the money is used to buy more misery for the locals. While I don’t think the film actually does much for changing the world in that respect, it still tells a tragically entertaining story of civil war and its business interests or business and its civil war interests.
The story is pretty straightforward I guess. Civil war in black Africa, with all the personal misfortunes associated to it. And with the rulers looking for good money from slave work and diamonds to pay for they weapons and lives. On the other side we have business sense from white Africa doing the best to trade those stones for cash and weapons. And as a third party we have some American journalist chick who does her best stopping the war and stopping the evil trades – or taking some nice photos of it anyway.
Of course things get shaken up a bit and the local Solomon managed to hide a huge diamond (and, well, ‘huge’ diamonds are quite small…) which then everybody wants to get. Weapons dealer Danny hears about it and convinces Solomon to get him back his family once they retrieved the stone. After a lot of troubles that works, and we get a happy end.
So, all right, the main story is a bit lame perhaps. And having Leonardo Di Caprio play Danny probably doesn’t help either because he looks like an ageing chubby boy trying to play a guy who fights his way through the jungle. The small scenes in the film were more convincing. Seeing one of Solomon’s abducted kids being turned into a child soldier was harsh. And picturing the diamond industry as people going long ways to get pretty stones just to safely hide them away was sweet.
El Método
After seeing Die Grönholm Methode in a local theatre, we were thrilled to learn that the story had been turned into the film El Método in Argentina as well which we managed to get hold of (Spanish with subtitles and all).
While the film revolved around the same subject of recruiting techniques and the way participants are treated in them these days, it took a different path than the play we saw. Not only did they start off with more candidates competing for the job in the film and arrive at a different outcome, they also managed to sneak some political realities in there (globalisation protests in town, a bit too much high tech stuff) which made the film a little less intense than the play was and made it less isolated from the ‘real world’ we know out here.
Manhattan Murder Mystery
Manhattan Murder Mystery may not be one of Allen’s greatest films – with him and his wife (Diane Keaton) spying after their neighbour whom they suspect to have killed his wife. But its quite funny with all its paranoia and it’s a must see for that wonderful scene alone where he has to leave the Wagner opera half-way through because it gives him the urge to conquer Poland
. Always gives me a good chuckle.
Kikujiro
Kikujiro is a 1999 film by Takeshi Kitano which I had meant to see for a while. Quite typically for Kitano it ranges from the strange to the absurd . It doesn’t focus too much on its main story which is about little boy Masao who lives with his grandma and wants to visit his mum when all his friends from school go on holidays. He’s then taken on a trip to go there by a somewhat dodgy guy called Kikujiro (played by Kitano) from the neighbourhood.
And that trip is neither planned, nor remotely orderly and they end up in all sorts of strange situations meeting odd people on their road trip across Japan. While there are plenty of amusing moments in the film, only very few of them seem to be in the range of things to do when travelling with a kid who’s wearing a rucksack with angel wings. That makes the film charming. But not great.
The Third Man
Seeing The Third Man again was great. Not just the black and white and the great story and actors. But even more so they tried to re-create the atmosphere of post-war Vienna (not that I knew it first hand of course). What really makes this work for me is how they freely mix languages. So you have the main action going on in English but all the Viennese extras speaking in their local accent.
That’s quite cleverly done as it works really well for the viewer – even those who don’t happen to understand German. Not only because the main character doesn’t understand German himself and thus what they say doesn’t help him either but also because what those people say isn’t essential to what’s going on anyway but it mainly creates the atmosphere and gives the film a firm ‘home’ in Vienna.
Just compare this to English-language films that are currently made. Language just is rarely used as cleverly there. Mostly everything is turned into English – to not ‘scare’ the audience, I suppose. Or sometimes we have actors ‘speaking’ the foreign language who clearly aren’t native speakers. Only recently there seem to have been films again which were prepared to acknowledge that this is a multi-lingual word and attempting to make the best of it by leaving in all the original speaking and adding subtitles where they were necessary – The Science of Sleep and Babel for example.
Tampopo
Call me a food sufferer! After seeing Eat Drink Man Woman again last month I started craving Chinese food. As there is no decent Chinese restaurant in the region I am still suffering from that craving. When discussing that problem with friends, the topic drifted to Korean food and the much cursed and loved kimchi. I have never had Korean food so far, so I feel the need to try that as well. Korean restaurants don’t even exist in the region.
And now I watched Tampopo – a Japanese film about the ultimate noodle soup. And yet another craving arrived. Needless to say that these cravings are additive and don’t simply replace one another.
The film revolves around ramen cook Tampopo who wants to learn making the perfect soup after truckers Goro and Gun let her know hers isn’t good. They help her in the quest to find a good recipe and we get to see a lot of noodles and noodle soup preparation in the process.
What’s cool about the film is that it treats the issue of food quite seriously – both for the cook and the eater. But at the same time it is very light hearted and the attempts they make to find the perfect recipe range from walking around and dissing their competition’s food to spying on cooks who make the better soup. I really liked that combination. And now I need some lovingly crafted soup with a few thin slices of pork which I can hide beneath some of the noodles.
Days of being Wild
Days of being Wild is a 1991 film by Wong Kar Wai. While being older and not as refined as his newer films, this one is already full of the rich night-time scenes, the lush music and the film trying to convey a feeling, rather than a story to you, that make his films so special.
We are told the story of a young guy (played by Leslie Cheung who also starred in Happy Together) who learns that the woman he grew up with isn’t his mother and refuses to tell him who his mother is. All that while two girls fall for him and he tries to make sense and the best of it without committing to anybody.
While not quite as rich as in later films, the filming is great as well. With rich colours and generous out of focus portions of scenes a good environment is set for the rainy night time scenes and the girls in tight dresses.
François Ozon Shorts
I saw some of François Ozon’s early short films: Photo de Famille, his first short film, starring his family, where a boy kills his family after dinner and then arranges them on the coach for a family photo. Victor who lives with the parents he killed and La Petite Mort about a photographer whose current project involves photos of guys while they are coming – but who gets distracted by the death of his father who never loved him; interesting – and including some dark room scenes.
Quite an obsession with photography in those alone. I’ll have to try and see some more.
Others
Also seen: Le Voleur by Louis Malle with Jean-Paul Belmondo playing a thief who’s in the trade for the kicks. Take the Money and Run old and not so great Woody Allen film. Der Kopf des Mohren (The Moor’s Head), a really strange Austrian TV film where the father of a family is overtaxed by the stress of modern life and wants to go all natural and self-sufficent – ultimately we see him planting corn and raising chicken in his flat. Bitter Moon with Polanski directing and Hugh Grant playing – a bit of a tragedy but essentially dull and bad, the drama went right past me.
And if you managed to stay with me all the way here, let me recommend the short film Cashback that is situated in a supermarket. Apparently there’s a proper film based on this already. Can’t wait until it comes to cinemas here.
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If you didn’t run across it yet, it’s well worth having a look. Basically BMW seem to have given popular but not exactly mainstream directors a bunch of money to use and destroy some of their cars. Well, I guess it wasn’t exactly such a free project, instead there’s the same ‘driver’ in each of the films who drives the BMWs to get someone from one place to another. But it looks like each of the directors could stick to their own style when making their short film of less than ten minutes.
Naturally, the first film from the series was Wong Kar Wai’s, the third one, going by the name The Follow. The plot is dead simple: The driver guy is told to observe some director’s wife, doesn’t like what he sees and says he lost her because of that. While the cars are seen a lot in the film, there is not a lot of ‘car action’ happening. Instead, Wong Kar Wai style, the driver’s off-screen voice tells us about how to follow people – and mostly does just the opposite of what he’s saying.
And further down the Wong Kar Wai road it’s also about two people who are connected (by the observation job) but between which there is no actual contact. The same kind of caring from a distance that you see in Wong Kar Wai’s other films.
It’s quite cool and you might even forget that it’s about cars for a while, although I thought the driver’s rambling might be going a bit too far. He may be a good driver. But he’s a driver and not a philosopher or something. Other cool things include the use of colour, the cinematic aspect ratio, and Forest Whitaker doing a rather good job playing a role that sucks. All of that in an eigth of an hour without any hurry.
While I’m at it, let me mention some of the other films as well. You can probably just go and watch all of them, but I also ended up quite liking Ang Lee’s Chosen which at first looks like it’s just going to be a lame car chase job but ends up having rather cool floatingly dancing cars there. And a suprisingly cool ending as well.
The film Star, directed by Guy Ritchie and starring Madonna as a bitchy pop star might be the funniest in the series. Let’s just say that she’s asking for a shaky ride and gets it… And once you’ve seen that you also have to see Tony Scott’s Beat the Devil which is equally funny and musical, featuring James Brown himself as himself and Gary Oldman as the devil having a race down the strip in Las Vegas. Cool cuts in there. And for the young people with Marilyn Manson as well.
But there are more ‘serious’ films as well. Such as Joe Carnahan’s (never heard his name before) Ticker which is surprisingly cool and good at not focusing on the car too much (although I wouldn’t have used a convertible for that kind of job…) and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Powder Keg which is about the attempt to rescue a war journalist.
P.S. While VLC is really quite good at playing videos as these which are in strange AVI or WMV formats, it’s not exactly easy to use it to make screenshots of the films on my (slow) computer… there’s quite a delay before the shot is taken or the film is actually paused. And useful reversing isn’t possible either. ]]>
And if your knowledge of Chinese names hasn’t made this clear already, both of them are guys. But that’s just a fact which is quite explicitly introduced in the opening scene but isn’t too important for what follows.
In the Wong Kar Wai films I’ve seen so far I was left with the impression that they’re mostly about people not having relationships with each other. But that’s quite a coarse way to look at it. Of course those people do have relationships but they mostly center around them not coming or being ‘together’ but always avoiding that. In a way Happy Together differs from this as we start off with a couple. But it also fits perfectly into that style as they split up and everything that happens afterwards is about the interaction of two people who could be together but don’t want to.
What’s quite extraordinary in this film is the use of colour. There are scenes which are (almost) black and white. And there are others which almost burst for the colour they contain. I found this both, a bit overdone and rather cool. I might need to see the film again to make my mind up on it. Tracking down whether and how colour is used to reflect the current situation in the scene, say.
But there’s much more to the film. Starting with Po-wing and Yiu-fai’s wish to visit the Iguazú falls, which they fail at intially and only Yiu-fai manages to see them before his return to China. Including the oddly exotic – at least from a European point of view – mix of Asia and South America which works rather well. And not forgetting the whole subplot with another Chinese guy, Chang, who is a colleague of Yiu-fai and who will travel to the southern tip of America before returning home to Taiwan. He’s a refreshingly non-tragic person in the film and the actor Chen Chang is known from other films as well.
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Compared to In the Mood for Love and 2046, Chungking Express looked really aged by now. Both because I taped it from TV and because of the film itself. Perhaps a technical point. But also one of aesthetics I think. It seems that films have become shinier and smoother in the past years. It also makes use of music a lot. In the same repetitive way as the other films. And even with a bit of dancing, which reminded me a bit of Pulp Fiction (which was apparently made a year after Chungking Express).
There are two stories in the film. Each of which centres around a policeman and a woman. The first two just meet while they’re in a bad mood and more or less and up being drunk and passing out. While the other policeman (played by Tony Leung Chiu Wai, who’s also the lead actor in the other two films) tries hard to deny that he might like the new girl behind the counter at his favourite takeaway place while he’s trying to cope with the fact that his girlfriend dumped him. While he’s sort-of ignoring her, she starts to be obsessed about him and goes around to and into his flat while he’s working, changing things there. (Quite freaky but rather cool!)
While I’m probably far from appreciating all the details, I like it that the three films have many parallels. In particular the stories that are told aren’t very action laden, but rather revolve around the theme of a guy meeting a girl, them sort-of liking each other, but not much happening. Not only is this fantastically sobering from the kitsch-laden things you get to see otherwise, it also leaves a lot of room for sidenotes and quirks.
What I don’t ‘get’ about these films is why there are several stories woven together to make a single film. Sure, there are some parallels and overlaps in the stories, but I keep thinking that there’s no particular need to merge them to give a single film as they remain essentially separate und whatever overlap there is doesn’t seem particularly relevant.
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Both films deal with the life of a man, Chow, who is a writer, in the 1960s. In In the Mood For Love he moves to a room in a flat with his wife while another couple is moving in next door. He starts being friends with Su, the woman from next door, and they spend some time together while their spouses are away for business trips. While their spouses are having an affair, they are just friends spending a lot of time together and doing some writing after Chow moves to a hotel – room 2046 – to have more time for his writing. At the end of the film, Su moves away, leaving Chow devastated and causing him to move to Singapore.
2046 continues many aspects of that story. Just that Su remains gone and Chow’s relations with four other women are told. He seems to keep looking for aspects of Su in them, but won’t commit to any of them. So it’s not entirely happy. During all this, he lives in room 2047 of a hotel and writes a novel going by the name of 2046 which is in the future reflects some of his experiences.
To be honest, I didn’t quite get the futuristic bits of the film and didn’t see how they are relevant besides looking cool. 2046 was fun to watch – a bit long perhaps – but I thought In the Mood for Love was better, having a simpler story and not trying to force all that many things into a single film (which 2046 apparently does by featuring references to plenty of Wong Kar Wai’s other films as well).
Ignoring the story, these films are well worth watching and re-watching. A lot of effort must have gone into finding 1960s clocks and other electric devices. And even more effort must have gone into getting good looking high-collared dresses in different fabrics for the female roles. There are loads of those. All the pattern and colours go along really well. Just like in Almodóvar’s films. And when it comes to the way Chow dresses, another director, Tarantino comes to my mind with old fashioned suits, white shirts and narrow ties.
Next I’ll have to re-watch Chungking Express which I taped ages ago but forgot everything about.
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