September 26, 2006

Facets is releasing a DVD of Bela Tarr's masterpiece, Satantango. I won't be buying it.

Crimes and Misdemeanors II

I finally saw Match Point last night. While rigorously avoiding any reviews of the film, I went into knowing that

a) Woody has gone on record saying it's his best film, and
b) A large number of self-described 'non fans' really like this movie.

I'll attempt to briefly discuss both points.

1. The film, and Mr. Allen's attitude concerning it.

In my opinion, Match Point is far from Allen's best work. Now, it is indeed a very good movie, but it's hampered in part by poor pacing, clunky dialogue, and a not very good performance by Scarlett Johansson, who is clearly out of her depth in a film of this quality. The film itself is in many ways a retread of Allen's earlier, superior work, Crimes and Misdemeanors. It shares a major plotline with the earlier film, and the film's primary theme is identical. It's so similar, in fact, that I knew within a half-hour exactly what would happen for the next 90 minutes. While not a huge liability, this did render some of the more poorly paced sequences even more interminable.

So, why does Woodly like it so much? Probably because it's the most mature exposition of the recurring theme that the universe has no moral compass, that there is no inherent reason that good should triumph over evil. The New York Times critic AO Scott has written well about this, if you're interested. Also, after being in something of a creative slump for more than a decade, Allen seems to have really enjoyed working in London instead of New York. His films have long been better appreciated in Europe than in America, so it's only natural that he move production to that continent. It is of course somewhat ironic that the filmmaker who most heavily iconizes the city in his films would end up abandoning it, but I have to admit that London has given his films a freshness.

2. The "non-fanboys attitude concerning the film.

For a variety of reasons, the young generation of cinephiles raised on DVDs of Kevin Smith, Quentin Tarantino, and Wes Anderson films have no time for Woody Allen. They proudly claim to be ignorant of his work, and to not enjoy at all what they've seen. Yet, Match Point is a film this group seems to like in spite of themselves. I'm guessing there are two main reasons for this. First, their willful ignorance of Allen's work translates into a genuine ignorance of his work. They know the stereotype of his films (nebbishy New Yorker sleeps with attractive women who find his neuroses sexy, upscale Manhattanites discuss culture at Elaine's, etc) without knowing the content of them. They are unaware that Annie Hall and Manhattan set the mold for adult romantic comedies, that Crimes and Misdemeanors, Deconstructing Harry, and Husbands and Wives are masterpieces of late-20th Century drama, and that Allen's craft, casting, and writing is the equal of anyone's in the last 40 years of cinema, that his body of work matches those of Truffaut, Bertolucci, Chabrol, and other European masters. Then they see a film like Match Point, and are surprised they like it. Well, it should be no surprise. Match Point is a fine film which any cineaste should enjoy.

The second reason is easier to understand. These film nerds lust after Scarlett Johansson. They'll see anything with her in it, and any slight chance of seeing her breasts is enough for them. Sad and pathetic, but it's hard to expect much more from a crowd that loves films like Kill Bill and Clerks.

Premiere Magazine's 100 Greatest Performances

Peter O'Toole as T.E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront (1954)
Meryl Streep as Sophie Zawistowska in Sophie's Choice (1982)
Al Pacino as Sonny Wortzik in Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
Bette Davis as Margo Channing in All About Eve (1950)
James Cagney as George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)
Dustin Hoffman as "Ratso" Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy (1969)
James Stewart as George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
Gene Wilder as Dr. Frederick Frankenstein in Young Frankenstein (1974)
Robert De Niro as Jake La Motta in Raging Bull (1980)
Daniel Day-Lewis as Christy Brown in My Left Foot (1989)
Jack Nicholson as "Badass" Buddusky in The Last Detail (1973)
Katharine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter (1968)
Robert Duvall as Mac Sledge in Tender Mercies (1983)
Tom Hanks as Josh Baskin in Big (1988)
Cary Grant as T.R. Devlin in Notorious (1946)
Denzel Washington as Malcolm X in Malcolm X (1992)
Emily Watson as Bess McNeill in Breaking the Waves (1996)
Paul Newman as Frank Galvin in The Verdict (1982)
Al Pacino as Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II (1974)
Giulietta Masina as Cabiria in Nights of Cabiria (1957)
Johnny Depp as Edward Scissorhands in Edward Scissorhands (1990)
Russell Crowe as Jeffrey Wigand in The Insider (1999)
Humphrey Bogart as Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
Greta Garbo as Ninotchka in Ninotchka (1939)
Maria Falconetti as Joan of Arc in The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
Marlon Brando as Paul in The Last Tango in Paris (1972)
Rosalind Russell as Hildy Johnson in His Girl Friday (1940)
Peter Sellers as Chance the Gardener in Being There (1979)
James Stewart as John "Scottie" Ferguson in Vertigo (1958)
Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles in Ray (2004)
Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)
Dustin Hoffman as Michael Dorsey/Dorothy Michaels in Tootsie (1982)
Buster Keaton as Johnny Gray in The General (1927)
Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote in Capote (2005)
Faye Dunaway as Evelyn Cross Mulwray in Chinatown (1974)
Gene Hackman as Harry Caul in The Conversation (1974)
Carole Lombard as Maria Tura in To Be or Not to Be (1942)
Laurence Olivier as Richard III in Richard III (1955)
Nicole Kidman as Suzanne Stone Maretto in To Die For (1995)
Samuel L. Jackson as Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction (1994)
Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976)
James Dean as Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
Charlie Chapman as a Tramp in City Lights (1931)
Reese Witherspoon as Tracy Flick in Election (1999)
Tom Hanks as Chuck Noland in Cast Away (2001)
Jack Nicholson as Randle Patrick McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
Bill Murray as Phil Connors in Groundhog Day (1993)
Liv Ullmann as Elisabet Vogler in Persona (1966)
Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941)
Henry Fonda as Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
Emma Thompson as Miss Kenton in The Remains of the Day (1993)
Daniel Day-Lewis as Bill "The Butcher" Cutting in Gangs of New York (2002)
Katharine Hepburn as Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story (1940)
Sidney Poitier as Virgil Tibbs in In the Heat of the Night (1967)
Jodie Foster as Sarah Tobias in The Accused (1988)
Max Von Sydow as Lasse Karlsson in Pelle the Conqueror (1987)
Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley in Aliens (1986)
Catherine Deneuve as Severine Serizy in Belle de Jour (1967)
Diane Keaton as Annie Hall in Annie Hall (1977)
Ralph Fiennes as Amon Goeth in Schindler's List (1993)
Gary Oldman as Sid Vicious in Sid & Nancy (1986)
Gena Rowlands as Mabel Longhetti in A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
Paul Newman as Fast Eddie Felson in The Hustler (1961)
Jack Lemmon as Jerry/Daphne in Some Like It Hot (1959)
Holly Hunter as Jane Craig in Broadcast News (1987)
Spencer Tracy as Henry Drummond in Inherit the Wind (1960)
Cary Grant as Dr. David Huxley in Bringing Up Baby (1938)
Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950)
Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Meryl Streep as Karen Silkwood in Silkwood (1983)
Judy Garland as Esther Blodgett, A.K.A. Vicki Lester in A Star Is Born (1954)
John Travolta as Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever (1977)
Madeline Kahn as Lili Von Shtupp in Blazing Saddles (1974)
Julie Christie as Diana Scott in Darling (1965)
Burt Lancaster as J.J. Hunsecker in Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
Morgan Freeman as Leo Smalls Jr., A.K.A. Fast Black in Street Smart (1987)
Toshiro Mifune as Sanjuro Kuwabatake in Yojimbo (1961)
Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow in The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
Jeanne Moreau as Catherine in Jules and Jim (1962)
Kate Winslet as Clementine Kruczynski in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
George C. Scott as General George S. Patton Jr. in Patton (1970)
Hilary Swank as Brandon Teena in Boys Don't Cry (1999)
Anjelica Huston as Lilly Dillon in The Grifters (1990)
Jessica Lange as Frances Farmer in Frances (1982)
Robert Walker as Bruno Anthony in Strangers on a Train (1951)
John Wayne as Ethan Edwards in The Searchers (1956)
Christopher Walken as Nick Chevotarevich in The Deer Hunter (1978)
Gong Li as Juxian in Farewell My Concubine (1993)
Jeff Bridges as Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski in The Big Lebowski (1998)
Jane Fonda as Bree Daniels in Klute (1971)
Clint Eastwood as "Dirty" Harry Callahan in Dirty Harry (1971)
Joan Crawford as Mildred Pierce Beragon in Mildred Pierce (1945)
Peter Lorre as Hans Beckert in M (1931)
Angela Bassett as Tina Turner in What's Love Got to Do with It? (1993)
Judy Holliday as Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday (1950)
Ben Kingsley as Don Logan in Sexy Beast (2001)
Barbara Stanwyck as Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity (1944)
Steve Martin as Navin Johnson in The Jerk (1979)
Malcolm McDowell as Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange (1971)

The six degrees of Jean Renoir

http://reel.com/reel.asp?node=features/interviews/criterion

"Recently in our newsletter we had a six-degrees-of-separation quiz where we challenged our newsletter subscribers to connect two people using only directors and actors involved in films that were only in the Criterion collection. You could get anywhere you wanted, but you had to go through Jean Renoir."

Some notes

Big Fish (Tim Burton, 2003)



This was another film I watched at my wife's request. Blasphemous as it may be, I've never been much a fan of Burton's work, or at least what little of it I've seen. Still, Big Fish was a fine enough movie, with a wonderful cast and an appropriately fantastical ambiance. The story was hackneyed and predictable, and the general theme, that we should accept our loved ones as they are, was simple enough to not be lost on the general audience, I suppose. For me, probably the most interesting aspect was the casting of a Scotsman and a Mancunian to play the younger and older versions, rtespectively, of an American southerner.

Weeping Meadow (Theo Angelopoulos, 2004)



A work of massive scale and breathtaking, almost heartbreaking beauty. It's only flaw (for me) was the difficulty I had in achieving any sense of empathy or understanding of the characters. Perhaps this wasn't Angelopoulos' intention; it's hard to say. Maybe if I knew more about Greek history... What's certain, however, is that this film boasts some of the most stunning visuals and one of the loveliest soundtracks of any film I've ever seen. This is definitely one I need to see again.

Caché (Michael Haneke, 2005)



Now this is a film everyone should see. Rare is it that I would declare a film a masterpiece after having seen only 30 minutes or so of it, but after the first half-hour I was confident that Haneke had pulled it off, that he had finally realized his full potential after several mis-steps and close-but-no-cigars. By the end this was abundantly clear. This is really the film that brings it all together for him, a stunning work of visual brilliance, thematic genius, and yes, even edge of the seat quality suspense. (one of the reasons Caché works so well is that it's massively entertaining as well as being just plain brilliant.) I should probably write at length on this later; a paragraph or two does it a great disservice. But by all means, see this film as soon as you can. Go to whatever lengths it requires. You will not be dissapointed by this, one of the handful of genuine cinematic masterpieces of the 21st century.

Hmm...

Film Comment's best films of 2005

1. A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, U.S.) 775 points
2. 2046 (Wong Kar Wai, China/Hong Kong/France) 668
3. Kings and Queen (Arnaud Desplechin, France) 549
4. Caché/Hidden (Michael Haneke, France, etc.) 501
5. Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, U.S./Canada) 490
6. The Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach, U.S.) 474
7. Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, U.S.) 470
8. Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand) 458
9. The World (Jia Zhangke, China) 401
10. Capote (Bennett Miller, U.S.) 384
11. Good Night, And Good Luck. (George Clooney, U.S.) 330
12. The Holy Girl (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina) 314
13. Saraband (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden) 289
14. Land of the Dead (George Romero, U.S.) 276
15. Head-On (Fatih Akin, Germany/Turkey) 259
16. Last Days (Gus Van Sant, U.S.) 256
17. Munich (Steven Spielberg, U.S.) 251
18. The Intruder (Claire Denis, France) 223
19. Me and You and Everyone We Know (Miranda July, U.S.) 217
20. Syriana (Stephen Gaghan, U.S.) 208

Notes

Frank Miller's Sin City is one of the worst movies I've ever seen. I can't believe I actually forced myself to finish it. I had to watch it in 20-30 minute segments because it was so violent and offensive. However interesting the visuals were, the novelty of the film's 'look' wore off by the end of the first hour. It was also exceedingly misogynistic.

Watching The Umbrellas of Cherbourg on the small screen is no substitute for watching it in a theater, but the magical effect it has is still the same. I didn't remember the ending to have been quite that tragic. It's still, IMO, just about the most charming movie ever made.

I got to watch the Mk2 DVD of Double Life of Veronique last night. I haven't been able to control the grin on my face since. What a masterful, awesome work of cinema.

Hotel Rwanda (Terry George, 2004)

The other night my wife and I watched Hotel Rwanda (Terry George, 2004) on DVD. It was in no way a bad film. It was well written, acted, and photographed, and at no point was the pacing off in any way. It was also utterly predictable, and from the very beginning it grabbed you by the neck and screamed, "THIS IS IMPORTANT STUFF, DAMMIT! YOU WILL PAY ATTENTION AND YOU WILL FEEL GUILTY AFTERWARDS, YOU FAT, RICH, AMERICAN DEVIL!!!" And if the motivation - comparisons to contemporary Sudan - weren't so glaringly obvious, there was a special message from star Don Cheadle telling you the same thing is going on right now.

All in all, very earnest stuff.

In the film there are two groups of bad guys, the Hutu militia bent on annhilating the Tutsi minority, and the (white) western world, personified by the UN and the foreign press, who let it happen. The motivations for the Hutus' attempted genocide of the Tutsis was never adequately explained. "Hatred", yes, due to longstanding animosities perpetuated and exacerbated by Belgian colonial rule, but I don't see simple hatred as a sufficient explanation to why one group of people was able to massacre between 500,000 and 1 million of another group of people in the space of a few months, especially when using machetes to do it. Even though this really happened, the numbers just seem too over-the-top to be understandable anyway, but with the rationale (such as it is) for such a brutal undertaking so completely glossed over, it becomes (dare I say it) unbelievable.

So, the film treats one group of bad guys as less than cartoons. They'e almost completely faceless hordes of murderous animals. This strikes me as overtly senseless and covertly racist. Once you've reduced half a nation of black Africans to senseless, automatonic killing machines, you've reduced them to, at best, the level of dumb beasts.

White Europeans (and Americans) come off a bit better - at least they have a face, if not a motivation (beyond apathy, that is). There are four whites with important enough roles to select out: an American Colonel in charge of the UN forces (Nick Nolte), who is rendered impotent by orders not to shoot at anyone, an American photographer (Joachim Phoenix) who helps supply backstory by asking dumb questions, a Red Cross nurse (Cara Seymour), and an uncredied Jean Reno as the president of Sabena Airlines, the parent company of the hotel run by Cheadle's character. All of these rich white people are sympathetic to the cause of the Rwandans, but all are ultimately powerless to change the situation dramatically.

But the real faceless enemies are the UN leadership and the governments of nations like the US, Britain, and France. If the victim's weren't black we'd have cared, the movie tells us, and to some degree I suppose that's true. But western Europe didn't really get involved in Yugoslavia until it was too late to prevent genocide there, and the last I looked, most Bosnians are white. And current UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who is himself a black African, has been widely criticized for not doing more to prevent current-day genocide in Sudan. So, racism seems a conveniently facile, yet overblown reason for such global apathy. My own personal (and horribly cynical) theory is that, since the end of the Cold War the third world has become irrelevant to most of the world, as it no longer serves as a place to fight 'satellite' or 'proxy' wars.

Having been a fan of Cheadle for many years, I was glad to see him get a starring role in such a major, Oscar-bound film. He did not dissapoint. The rest of the cast preformed at the same high level. On every technical benchmark the film ranks as highly proficient, if uninspired. However, the insistent, omnipresent background music was jarring during suspenseful scenes, detracting from the mood in almost every instance. I tend to hate all incidental music in films, and Hotel Rwanda does nothing to change that view. This probably sums up the film fairly well - a work made by intelligent, insightful people, who couldn't trust their audience to be equally intelligent and insightful.

Interesting (but I can't read French)

Jean Eustache's son has a blog.

Metacritic

Looking at the Metacritic site for the highest rated films of 2001, two are tied for the top spot, The Fellowship of the Ring and Werckmeister Harmonies, two films which couldn't be less alike. The first an overblown, turgid mess of adolescent fantasy wish-fulfillment, and the second a masterpiece about faith, superstition, fear, and totalitarianism.

Naruse

So far I've caught three of the four films shown so far in the Mikio Naruse retrospective. Of the ones I've seen, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs is my favorite. It stars Hideko Takamine as a the chief hostess in a Ginza nightclub, c. 1960. It's kind of a bizarre cross between Douglas Sirk (thematically) and Billy Wilder (stylistically). I hope to write a review.

I love writing about movies. Sometimes it's quite easy to write about films, or a particular film. I've found that writing about Godard's works is quite easy, probably because Godard is an intellectual using film as the primary medium with which to explicate his philosophy and ideas, as opposed to someone who seeks primarily to entertain or to express emotional content in some way. I know that's a gross generalization, but there you have it. In contrast, I can't even begin to describe how I think and feel about Ozu's work, and not just because it's all so subtle that thinking about it too hard almost makes it fly away in the breeze. For as feeble a writer as I, descriptions of Ozu's films become reduced to dry analyses of his unique approach to camera angles, the positioning of actors, 'dead space', and his frequent use of offscreen time in which he propels forward his plots. This is all quite fascinating to those of us with brain defects that predispose us to such things, but I would surmise the mass audience would find more enjoyment reading over the minutes of an urban planning conference.

What prompted this little soliloquy was the jarring of my memory of an older Olivier Assayas film, L'Eau froide (Cold Water) a masterpiece which remains unavailable on DVD w/English subtitles anywhere in the world. I caught this film a couple of years ago as part of an Assayas retrospective, and the gentle yet insistent quality of the film eventually left me breathless by its end. The genuineness of the writing and the performances and the unobtrusive grace of the photography combined to create a portrait of late adolescent freedom cum desparation that I've never seen portrayed with the same degree of honesty in any other film.

My frustration lies in the fact that the feelings engendered by L'Eau froide are so palpable that I can almost feel them in the same way I'd feel a rock in my shoe, yet I can't possibly find words to describe them. Adding to this frustration is that I know almost as a fact that these feelings must be universal to anyone who was ever a teenager, so why can't I form the sentences that would connect the reader with this film? Is it my inadequacies as a writer, or is it the elusiveness of the subject matter that is the obstacle?

All this is a quite long-winded way of explaining to myself why I'm having so many problems writing about La Regle Du Jeu, which I have long believed to be the greatest movie ever made. My strong belief in the greatness of that film is built upon my attitudes that it contains as close to the totality of human experience as any film possibly could. Included in its words and images are love, jealousy, grace, compassion, duplicity, weakness, strength, bigotry, and ultimately, forgiveness. On one hand I think that I can't possibly explain all this, but on the other hand, how can I not at least try?

Oddly enough I have no such problems writing about La Grand Illusion, Renoir's other accepted 'masterpiece'. While I won't deny it's greatness, and even though it has more depth and subtlety than almost every other film ever made, compared to La Regle Du Jeu it's as plan and obvious as a streetwalker. Accordingly I have no problem explaining why I think it's so great. Each character, each event, each major scene, these are all rather obvious metaphors for the state of Europe pre-World War One. That Renoir was able to make this, the greatest of all war films, without showing a single battle, and indeed, without even providing us with even one unsympathetic character, let alone an actual villain, testifies to his majesty among all directors.

In the meantime, my little essay about the Rules will have to wait.

Cannes news

Wong Kar-Wai to head Cannes film festival jury

30 minutes ago

PARIS (Reuters) - Director Wong Kar-Wai will head the jury for this year's
Cannes Film Festival, making him the first Chinese chairman of the panel in the event's history, organisers said on Wednesday.

The Shanghai-born director of "In the Mood for Love" and "2046" won the Cannes festival's Best Director prize for "Happy Together" in 1997.

Wong made clear he saw the job as a challenge.

"Each city has its own language," he said in a statement. "In Cannes, it is the language of dreams. Yet it is difficult to judge a dream, much less compare it to another one."

Wong, who will preside over the 59th Cannes Film Festival from May 17-28, follows in the footsteps of directors such as
Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese and David Cronenberg.

The president of the 2005 jury, Yugoslav director Emir Kusturica, cast a shadow over the annual cinema extravaganza in the French Riviera resort city last year, saying the quality of movies at the festival had fallen short of expectations.

"There is an old Chinese saying: One can never expect the wind, but should always keep one's window open," said Wong.

"Along with my fellow jurors, I look forward to sharing the dreams created by some of the most gifted talents in contemporary cinema. And our goal will be to keep our windows open as wide as possible."