The only Nazi fascist-perversion films of the ’70s that I could stand watching weren’t exploitation fare — Liliana Cavani‘s The Night Porter and Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s Salo. A couple of times I’ve felt a slight urge to see Tinto Brass‘s Salon Kitty (which is now out on Bluray) but I can’t make myself rent it. I just can’t. I keep hearing Peter O’Toole calling this Italian schlockmeister, with whom he worked on Caligula, “Tinto Zinc.”
It’s been a bit more than a year since I saw Radu Muntean‘s Tuesday, After Christmas at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. And now, at long last, it’s playing at Manhattan’s Film Forum until June 7th. It’s another one of those plain but gradually penetrating, long-take Romanian films in the tradition of Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days and The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, which I can’t get enough of.
I love the slow studied atmosphere of these films, and their very subtle pay-offs that seem to strengthen and deepen the more you think about them afterwards. They’re pretty much essential viewing, even when they’re not totally top-of-the-line.
Tuesday, After Christmas doesn’t have quite the undertow or the sink-in quality of 4, 3, 2 but it’ll certainly do for now.
It’s about a paunchy, mild-mannered Romanian husband and father (Mimi Branescu) who’s not only having a prolonged affair with his daughter’s dentist (Maria Popistasu) but has fallen in love with her. On one level the film seems to be about the banality of family life with a threatening undercurrent that doesn’t seem to be growing…and yet it is. The fireworks finally happen when this nice, sensitive philanderer summons the courage to tell his wife Adriana (Mirela Opri?or). Their confrontation scene is so realistic and riveting that I’m thinking of catching Christmas again when I return to Manhattan. (I’ll be there early this evening.)
Here’s an excellent review from Salon‘s Andrew O’Hehir.
The Air France flight to JFK leaves at 4:30 this afternoon, and arrives at 6:20 pm. It’s time to get back into the stateside swing. Several LA screenings and the LA Film Festival, etc. A Super 8 press junket next weekend. I’m returning with an idea that I have to somehow find an affordable scooter that isn’t too dinky-looking. Buzzing around Paris reminded me of the necessity. Scooters are the only way to push through heavy traffic, and LA is the king of that.
I bought tickets incidetnally, to today’s performance of Carey Mulligan‘s Though A Glass Darkly in Manhattan, thinking I could just make an 8 pm curtain. Then I was told it only performs today at 3 pm, and Monday is dark and I’m back to LA on Tuesday. So Jett and Dylan are going today instead; I’ve asked for quickie reviews from each.
Here’s a hand-held, poor-quality video of the European redband trailer for David Fincher‘s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. “The Feel-Bad Movie of Christmas”! Love that Zeppelin.
Roger Ebert has derided The Hangover, Part II for using perhaps the famous Vietnam War photograph ever — a capturing of a South Vietnamese military guy shooting a Vietcong guy in the head — for laughs. He called its appearance during the still-photo section at the end “a desecration.” But Ebert didn’t complain about Woody Allen‘s using the same photo for satiric purposes in Stardust Memories .
Allen’s character, a distracted film director, has a huge blowup of this photo in his living room in the film. It’s obviously a much smarter and more satiric use of the photo but it’s definitely meant to provoke and amuse.
If it’s okay for Allen to go there, you can’t fault Phillips for replicating the same photo, etc. Once a news artifact has been used in a comic-satric context, the toothpaste is out of the tube. Phillips imitated the shot to get an “oh, yeah” reaction from the audience, and Allen used the shot to say to the audience, “Look at how self-absorbed and angsty my character is.” Allen’s humor is on a much higher plane but he and Phillips basically did the same thing.
Couldn’t someone have claimed 40 years ago that Stanley Kubrick‘s using news footage of Nazi soldiers goose-stepping to the rhythm of Beethoven’s 9th in A Clockwork Orange was also a desecration?
So Ebert isn’t complaining about the photo per se being used for comic purposes — he’s complaining about the vulgarity and the coarseness of Phillips’ intent. Which most of us agree with. Phillips is shovelling mulch in this film. But I will defend to the death his right to use that photo for a laugh or whatever. Because he was only following Allen’s lead.
I’ve said two or three times that I don’t have to equate Lindsay Lohan with arrogant entitlement attitudes and self-destruction and drugs, etc. It was clear in Prairie Home Companion that she’s got that X-factor sparked, and it’s easy to believe that she leads a passionate life in all respects. She’s defintely interesting to stare at and contemplate. But until she does something besides go to court and listen to admonishments from judges then I don’t know what.
This video is supposed to invoke Brigitte Bardot and/or Liv Ullman. I would buy LiLo in a remake of Jean-Luc Godard‘s Contempt. I would buy her in a lot of things. She might yet have a chance to act in good films. But now and for the rest of her life she has to stop appearing in crap like Underground Comedy and I Know Who Killed Me and Machete and that whole cheeseball wink-wink thing. She has to go upscale and austere and…I don’t know, get married? Support a cause of some kind? Have a kid?
It suddenly turned cool yesterday. Late May into early to mid October. Jackets, sweaters, scarves. I was hoping that those dark clouds might lead to something because when Paris lets go with a good rainstorm things can get very torrential.
Good clouds facing sixth-floor loft at 9 rue Gassendi — Friday, 5.27, 4:10 pm.
There’s excellent wifi throughout the entire underground Paris metro system.
Joseph Gordon Levitt‘s 50/50 character has cancer, which means if he gets into the usual chemo and radiation he’ll be losing his hair. So…he decides to get a Full Metal Jacket Parris Island buzzcut so he won’t have to deal with it falling out in strands and clumps? I admire the brashness behind making a film with this kind of story, but this bit feels like a resignation.
It seems a fairly safe bet that 50/50 not My Life with Michael Keaton.
The pre-trailer intro explains that the story is based somewhat on the experiences of screenwriter Will Reiser (i.e., the little guy standing between costar-producer Seth Rogen and John Candy-sized producer Evan Goldberg).
The Summit marketing people are, of course, white-knuckle terrified about this thing, and about taking the blame if it under-performs or bombs. “You acquired the damn thing…it’s your fault!” “No, it’s yours…your marketing instincts are pathetic!” “Fuck you!” “No, fuck you!”
I’m With Cancer is a brave and rather cool title. Live With It is on the dull and depressing side. Filming ended in March 2010. It was probably finished in August 2010. So they’ve probably been test-screening it and biting their nails and pacing the boardroom for the last nine months. Hommina-hommina-hommina.
For me the funniest part of Todd Phillips‘ The Hangover was the photo sequence at the very end. That’s because it (a) revealed what had specifically gone down during the blind-drunk debauchery in Las Vegas, which looked funny, and (b) let us imagine the minute-to-minute action that happened before and after the snapping of each still. Nothing the movie depicted could match our imaginations in this regard.
It’s the exact same deal with The Hangover, Part II, which I saw this evening at the Pathe Wepler at Place Clichy. The insanity-depicting series of photos at the very end are way funnier than anything in the film itself. Except that’s damnation with faint praise because none of the acted-out material in this Godforsaken sequel is funny. Nothing. I sat there like a tombstone through the whole thing. But the photo montage is cool. It didn’t make me laugh but I smiled a bit.
Imagining funny stuff is always…okay, often funnier than showing it. An example I’ve used before is the starving lion and the tail sandwich. A lion who’s dying for a meal is chasing a monkey around the jungle so he can eat him. Somehow there’s a lull and the monkey sneaks up beside the lion and puts the lion’s tail between two slices of bread and hands it to him. Scenario #1 shows the lion eagerly biting into the sandwich and roaring from the pain and chasing the monkey again. Not terribly funny. Scenario #2 shows the monkey handing the sandwich to the lion and then creeping away and hiding behind a tree, and after two or three seconds we hear the lion roar. Funny as hell.
The Hangover, Part II shows the lion biting into the tail and roaring really loudly and then pissing into somebody’s half-filled beer glass and then screaming “wait, what’s happening?” and then shouting “Teddy! Teddy! Where are you, Teddy?”
It’s not funny to repeat the same bits and jokes from the first film. Massive amounts of production funds are never funny, and wasting dough on a project like this is double-unfunny. Bradley Cooper isn’t funny. Ed Helms was funny in The Hangover but not here. It’s not funny when Zach Galifianakis‘s moronic man-child drives a speed boat up onto a beach at full throttle. In fact, it’s not funny to watch Galifianakis do or say anything in this film. Ken Jeong‘s cashew-sized penis isn’t funny. It’s not funny to see Paul Giamatti, who needs to grow some hair so he can return to his Miles look in Sideways, with a shaved head-top. (And looking fat.) Bangkok, which looks like a cesspool-choked combination of Jersey City, Newark and Dubai with a big canal running through it, is a deeply unfunny place. The whole film is about as funny as a preferred stock offering.
A few days ago several fanboy bloggers were shown JJ Abrams‘ Super 8 (Paramount, 6.10) and allowed to tweet their reactions. With this many cats out of the bag I guess I can say I’ve seen it too. An “almost there” version, I should add. I signed a non-disclosure form but surely at this stage I can say two brief things: (a) tonally it’s definitely a ’70s Spielberg trip through and through (although that was obvious in the first teaser), and (b) Elle Fanning, who turned 13 last month, is a real movie star.
Elle Fanning, Joel Courtney in JJ Abrams’ Super 8.
There’s a moment when Fanning, who was good but mostly passive and nonverbal in Sofia Coppola‘s Somewhere, begins performing some dialogue for a super 8 zombie movie that her friends (one of whom is played by newcomer Joel Courtney, who’s also quite good) are shooting. And something just clicks when she lets go with that special vibe or deep-well charisma or whatever it is that some actors just have. The instant she begins saying the lines…pocket drop. A feeling of being anchored and practiced and on a certain level older than her years, and the camera knowing this. I said to myself, “Wow, she’s getting there fast.”
Kenneth Turan and Marshall Fine‘s dismissal of Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life, despite almost everyone falling for it in Cannes and a very strong 85% Rotten Tomatoes approval rating, tells me it may not figure that strongly in the Best Picture race.
And so what, right? Malick has never made an “Academy film,” and Life is probably, as Turan complains, too “opaque” for mainstreamers. It’ll be their loss at the end of the day. History will not look kindly. “Meh” was the farthest thing from my mind as I watched the first 40 minutes’ worth, and yet I knew, deep down, that the lack of a narrative through-line would be a stopper for more than a few.
“Look, I get it,” Fine says. “Malick makes the movies he wants to make in the way he wants to make them. He communicates visually and through indirection (as opposed to misdirection). In doing so, he summons surprising emotion, given how ephemeral his actual story-telling is. But impatience does accrue – not so much a feeling of ‘what’s the point?’ as ‘get to the point.’ The Tree of Life is a film that’s too precious and wispy, too insubstantial in its artiness, to be satisfying in virtually any way.”
I was more on the fence in my initial Cannes review. Life “does lose itself in its own impressionistic quicksand after the first half-hour,” I wrote. “It begins to drown, sink, swallow itself. The center cannot hold. But it’s entirely worth seeing (and praising) for the portions that clearly and unmistakably deliver. I’m especially referring to what people will soon be calling the 2001/Douglas Trumbull section. Who in the big-budget realm is even trying to make pure art films like this except Malick?”
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