Rust and Bone / De rouille et d'os (Jacques Audiard, 2012, France)

I've loved the few Jacques Audiard films I've seen so I had high hopes for this one. It's about a down and out Belgian guy who's just rescued his son from his junkie mother and moved in with his sister and then he ends up being friends with this Sea World type lady who loses her legs in a freak accident. He's a former boxer and has anger management issues, sometimes to the damage of dogs and children around him. She's naturally depressed about losing her legs, which she had been proud of, and the movie is partially about whether we should judge her for her vanity. It's kind of a strange movie, as far as the plot goes, but it's also strange that it sets up these two as a couple we should root for, even though I'm not at all sure it seems like a healthy relationship. I didn't really get what all the buzz was about after the movie. The friend I saw it with said she didn't feel like she experienced anything different from what she experienced reading the synopsis and that she was generally bored. I wasn't quite as bored as she was, but I didn't really know what people were responding to other than the attractive cast until I read a few reviews later that day, particularly Andrew O'Hehir's, and realized it was a straight people movie... C

Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012, France)

You can't really deny that this film is a pretty pure example of masturbatory filmmaking. The filmmaker here has cobbled together all of these concepts of his in a way that seems very personal, and possibly somehow autobiographical. At the same time, the audience is constantly stroked, exactly like the audience in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris for being hip to what he's doing here or there. It's also pretty easy to say it's like a David Lynch movie, but not as straightforward. For me, there were stretches of the film that I found tedious or insipid, but there were also segments that I found compelling or even beautiful.

Denis Lavant, who played the main character Merde in that annoying middle section of that omnibus film Tokyo! from 2008 or something, is back here playing the same character and about ten others. In the film, he is chauffeured around in a limosine, possibly with bodyguard protection, and taken to different "sessions" or appointments. The almost mystical chaufffeur is played by mesmerising Édith Scob, who is perhaps best known as the girl in Franju's Eyes Without a Face. Like many of the characters in the film, it's hard to know whether to think of them as benevolent or menacing. Perhaps, as in many dreams, the figures are meant maintain the suspense of that mystery. They make nine or so stops and at each stop, Lavant plays a different character: a gypsy beggarwoman, a green screen actor, that same stupid troll from that Tokyo!movie, an emotionally abusive father, a murderous gangbanger, etc.

Man is said to differ from other apes in his propensity to ask why. So watching all these episodes, which end in the chauffuer donning her Eyes Without a Face mask and leaving the cars to themselves, it's hard not to try to make connections. He's clearly working through something about the artist's role, probably about his own life as well, since the protagonist's name is the director's real middle name, and it ends with a photograph of his lost lover. Like any other story about artists, it's easy to see metaphysical themes in the piece. Maybe god is in all these people in all these acts. I don't know, maybe this guy is just self-absorbed and preoccupied with the grotesque. I can't tell if it's because I had lost patience by that point in the film, but I was really surprised by how absolutely bored I was during the entire Kylie Minogue scene. In constrast, I was pleasantly surprised by Eva Mendes in the film. She's in the session with the stupid troll, but for some reason the troll shtick just barely tips toward succeeding in this film while it pretty squarely hit with a thud in Tokyo! Weirdly, my biggest reaction to the film is that my new dream is to enter Paris by car some day. I think I've been to Paris three times, but all three times I entered by train. In fact, I don't think I've ever even taken a cab in Paris, but this film makes driving around Paris look incredibly beautiful, all the while eschewing a lot of the kitsch that that idea is probably conjuring in your mind. In fact, there are all kinds of gorgeous views of the city, particularly as they stand atop the historic Samaritaine department store, which is allegedly being converted into a hotel, according to the interwebs.

I imagine I will probably watch this movie again at some point in the future, but I can't think of many people I'd recommend it to. I'm honestly surprised by the critical reception it's received. It won the awards for best film, best director, and best actor at the Chicago International Film Festival. I wasn't surprised at all to find out at after seeing the film that the director's mother is a long time friend of the festival organizer. Maybe it was nepotism, my cynical side says. Of course, it's also true, as the French say, à chacun son goût. I don't know, I can see making love letters to the movies, but for me there needs to be more than that, and this film didn't really connect to me like it seems to connect to a lot of other people. Oh well.
C

It occurs to me while reading through these reviews that I really did love the film for about the first third and it gradually kind of wore on me. Like Roger Ebert apparently, it brought to my mind the Walt Whitman line, "I contain multititudes." I guess I'd also agree with Ebert that the film is exasperating and sometimes funny, though I didn't really sop it up as much as he did. It's amazing how all these reviews keep talking about how exciting and not boring this movie is, since I was more or less bored for much of the second half of the film. The sessions in the latter half become increasingly more dour and confounding, I thought. In reading these reviews though, it's surprising how many people, like myself, seem to have forgotten about one of the more enjoyable scenes in the film, the entr'acte, in which a band of hipster accordionistes rampages through an old church.
I've also discovered that the title refers to old film cameras and the movie, shot on digital for financial reasons, seems to be about the death of film in some ways, though the director says allegedly that this movie isn't about film at all. I feel as gypped as the next guy when it comes to seeing a movie in digital projection, but I don't know how thrilling a two hour lament on the subject is.
It's funny as I read through the reviews listed at mrqe.com, everyone seems to agree that this movie will elicit all these possible responses from the audience. It's a unique film, but it's not as unique as people say it is. It can be touching, it can funny, and it can be frustrating, but I really don't see why people react so strongly to it. There was one review somewhere that said that the film says most of what it has to say in the first few episodes. I'd agree with that. My own experience of the film is that it would have benefited from some trimming, since like I said before there were some significant dull patches in the second half of the film.

Something in the Air / Apres Mai (Olivier Assayas, 2012, France)

Here we have a well made bit of nostalgia. If you've ever spent much time in Europe you'll know that the spring of 1968 is as deep a well of nostalgia for Europeans as Woodstock is for Americans. The actors are nice, the filming is nice, the music is nice, but overall I didn't find the story or the characters terribly interesting. It felt too much like a bit of navel gazing nostalgia. Some priveleged artists play at bourgeois revolution.
C+

happythankyoumoreplease (2011) / The Illusionist (2010)

happythankyoumoreplease reminded me of those indie comedies from the 90s that dealt with various creative New York people and their romantic goings on. It's about a short story writer who wants to be a novelist but who lacks the maturity for that and he finds a lost boy on the train who doesn't want to go back to foster care and ends up keeping him for a while. He also picks up this bartender named Mississippi and they amble towards couplehood while his best friend and his cousin (stepsister?) work through their own emotional hangups. It's not groundbreaking and its pretty slight and periodically very cheesy but it was generally entertaining. C


I found The Illusionist to be a film of real grace and a beauty that was at once complex and simple. An elderly French magician in what I assumed to be the late 50s travels around the UK working thankless jobs for an audience that has moved on from his old-fashioned amusements. A young girl attaches herself to him and she seems to believe he's a real magician who can supply her with all the things she desires. They live together. He tries to please her. Life goes on. There was this intense authenticity running through every scene and watching it was an experience of aching beauty and wonder. It's really amazing how affecting all the little details and background characters are. It's definitely the best animated film I've seen in the last year. Maybe in the last ten years. One of the best I've ever seen, I think. It's a little sad that Toy Story 3 is going to win this year just like whatever bogus nonsense beat The Secret of Kells last year. A

catching up...

I've been too slow to pick this thing up since my little road trip and my move decreased the time I spent online or watching movies. I'll probably hurriedly try to catch up with some of what I've watched in the past few months, just so I can continue to have a record of all that.

Last night I watched Storm, a German movie about a war crimes trial that played last year at the Chicago International Film Festival. I skipped it then because the reviews seemed rather tepid but I ended up enjoying it. It's basically about the how and why that all these unstable places like Bosnia are getting packed into the EU and what some of the costs are. I thought it was acted and produced well and as to the reviews that damned it for looking like a German made-for-TV movie, I'd say that German made-for-TV movies are often a lot better than what gets put into theaters. B+

Prior to that I had watched a 2007 German comedy called Mein Führer. It's basically about how Goebbels gets this Jewish actor out of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp so he can work as Hitler's acting coach. It's not quite as distasteful as it sounds but it didn't quite win me over either. It was all right. B-

I also watched this documentary called A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash. Unsurprisingly it was about the coming oil crash. Like most of these documentaries it suffers for being a sort of introduction for people who don't know anything. As such, I thought it did a pretty good job and I felt like I learned a few things as well. C

The Silent Star is an old East German science fiction movie about this international team of scientists who head out to Venus after a mysterious cylinder is found at what was believed to be a UFO crash site. The lady physicist is naturally responsible for making sure everyone eats and aside from looking at a microscope a few times mostly just chases people around with jars of liquid nutrition. The main point is that that Americans are like the Venusians who destroyed themselves while trying to take over the world. Hiroshima is invoked about a half dozen times. It was interesting as a Cold War artifact. C-

After years of trying, I finally made it through Godard's overrated film Breathless without falling asleep. I'm not sure I really get Godard. I'm never sure of how I feel about the morality of his films and I don't often find myself caring about his characters. C-

I'm not sure why I enjoyed Claude Chabrol's A Girl Cut in Two, since it seemed kind of empty. I like Ludivine Sagnier and she was good in this movie, though not particularly mesmerising. I watched it while I was starting to come down with something so I could have been a little scrambled in the brain but I feel like there is something there worth liking that rises above the lurid subject matter. And I'm sure there's something to the ending but I was too tired to piece it together. B

Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam is yet another Nick Broomfield documentary that manages to be fascinating even while it makes you uncomfortable because there's something incredibly slimy about Broomfield. Aside from the fact that he's kind of gross, I felt like the film lacked a certain scope. He's always leading you down the garden path and fixating on one thing and ignoring a few other things. Instead of focusing on Fleiss's personal life so much, I guess I'd have liked to know more about her prostitution ring and her trial. C

Mary and Max is sort like Muriel's Wedding crossed with 84 Charing Cross Road and blended with Wallace and Gromit. I really liked it, though the second half lost a little steam for me. It's another movie I skipped at the film festival last year because of negative reviews... B+

The first time I saw My Winnipeg I had accidentally gotten drunk at lunch and I ended up passing out during it. I was really sad. What I saw coincided really well with my drunken feverishness but my good friend Mark, with whom I saw it, said it was just all right or something. I finally got the chance to revisit it the other day when I noticed Netflix had added it to their instant viewing selection and I really loved it. I love that deranged blend of fantasy and fact. A

This isn't going so well. I think I have the flu or something.

Lourdes (Jessica Hausner, 2009, Austria/France) A

I thought this movie lived up to the hype but it's another one of those movies that's almost universally inaccurately described. The movie takes place during a sort of pilgrimage to Lourdes where a group of people with all sorts of disabilities and afflictions go with some clergy folk and sundry volunteer candy striper sorts in search of miracles. The main character is relatively quiet woman with MS who wants to live a better life. Will she find her miracle? Does she? What happens and how does what happens affect all the people with her. There's so much going on in this film and I found myself relating to it not in my typical cerebral manner but instead in this sort of emotional and spiritual way. By the closing credits I truly felt like I wasn't in a movie theater at all but had been sitting in a church praying for some time without even knowing I had gradually teleported to a fantasy cathedral. Of course, the fact that I saw this film in the main theater at the Music Box may have played a large part in creating that sensation. Anyway, I'm not a religious person and I can't say I'm any less of an atheist now than I was three hours ago but I quite liked this film and will likely see it again some day. There was so much going on in that last scene. I was riveted to my seat until the last frame of the end credits... A

Around a Small Mountain / 36 vues du pic Saint-Loup (Jacques Rivette, 2009, France)

When people talk about quirky French movies and roll their eyes or shake their heads or screw up their faces they're talking about movies like this. It's an essentially pointless, empty, quirky, romp around a mountain with a little circus that seems kind of lame and run down and surprisingly intimate for a production that has such a caravan... A woman breaks down on a mountain road. A mysterious businessman in a sports car stops and silently fixes her car in like three seconds. Then all this boring stuff happens where he insinuates himself into the circus community, which seems to be about four people, and tries to fix all the issues. It was dull. I dozed off for a few minutes. I read a review that said Jane Birkin was horrible but she was the only thing that made this movie at all interesting for me, not that her character or acting were too interesting, just her voice and her presence, I guess. I'd give it a lower score but feel like my dozing off for a few minutes could have made me miss something worthwhile, unlikely as that may be. I'm really surprised that this movie made it on a few critics' ten best lists last year. C

Hadewijch (Bruno Dumont, 2009, France)

Shortly after our story begins, our protagonist, a novice at a convent, is dismissed for going overboard with the abstinence and mortification. Her story is interwoven with the story of a bricklayer and petty criminal but I'm not entirely sure I know why. The mother superior says to go put herself to use in the world and she goes back to live with her wealthy parents in their majestic Ile Saint-Louis residence. She hooks up with some Arab guys at a cafe one day and goes with them to this MAJESTIC concert on the quay; it looks like punk but it's all accordion with itself. She ends up being friends with one of the boys, who has the hots for her, but she tells him she's with Jesus and that while she can ride around on stolen scooters with him and her dog, she's not going to put out for anyone but Jesus. She meets the kid's brother, who leads religious meetings upstairs from a shawarma place. There's all this religious crap that follows, including them suddenly being in the middle of a war zone in the middle east and then back in Paris seemingly up to no good. I didn't really buy it. I didn't buy the ending. I thought it was okay if you read it as a criticism of religious fervor that might indicate the thief has more to do with the main man in their fairy tale religion than anybody else. Or not. The music is lovely. The images are lovely. I liked the actors. I found the story a little cheap though. C

Disengagement (Amos Gitai, 2007, France/Israel)

The main good thing about this movie is that Liron Levo, who plays Juliette Binoche's adopted Israeli brother, is a heroic hunk of sex on a stick in it. It seems well-shot, too. I'm just amazed that this film has such a talented, attractive cast, a promising idea, and an acclaimed director and this movie is so off. I feel like a lot of it is that the pacing feels really off but I also don't know if I like the way it deals with the issues by the end of the movie. The movie begins with Uli (Liron Levo) on a train to Avignon. He meets a Palestinian woman and they get along well and end up making out on the train after schooling the passport guy about the nature of national identity in the modern world. Hiam Abbass, who was so fabulous in Amreeka, is also fabulous here as the Palestinian lady but she's only around for like three minutes. Uli makes his way to his father's deathbed in Avignon. The dad is dead. There's a black lady singing arias over the dead man. Juliette Binoche is the dead man's daughter and she's acting like a sort of spoiled lunatic. She tells her brother she wants to leave her husband and she dances around naked. All of this felt very dull and plodding. Juliette Binoche learns from the will about the identity of the daughter she had given away as an adolescent in Israel and that her father had had a secret relationship with her. She needs to go back to Israel with her brother to find her daughter in the Gaza, which is about to be evacuated. This movie had good moments but overall I found it tiresome. I also found these lunatics Jews in Gaza tiresome and felt like the movie was too kind on them. I mean, they were told to evacuate in advance. The issue requires a certain finesse and this movie didn't have it. Give me Eytan Fox over Amos Gitai any day of the week. C-

Bluebeard / La barbe bleue (Catherine Breillat, 2009, France)

I guess you probably know this is Catherine Breillat's interpretation of the fairytale Bluebeard, which I've never read. The story is intercut with a story of two young sisters in the 1950s in an attic, the younger daughter reading the story to the older sister. The movie is definitely engaging, particularly on the strength of the cast. The girls in the contemporary story are particularly beguiling, especially the younger one, who is preternaturally adorable. No matter how many glowing reviews I read of this movie I can't seem to stop feeling like I wanted more from it. I didn't like the ending. I mean, I've defended the ending of Fat Girl but I'm not sure this one seemed justified and I haven't seen any of the critics address it at all. Oh well. C

Edit: The upside to writing about all the movies I see right away is that I don't find myself needing to write an update about 15 movies at a time. I'm really happy that I've been able to keep this going for a while because it seems like a nice habit. The downside to writing about them right away is that I haven't had time to think about them beforehand. It occurred to me when I was getting out of the shower today (I have no idea why) that the ending here might be about the end of childhood innocence. I'm not sure if that's what she meant but it worked for me. I guess I was so engaged in the story I couldn't really think about it abstractly. I don't know. I'm still not sure I liked the ending. It seems to have kept my unconscious mind interested at least twelve hours after seeing the film though since it just sort of popped into my head an hour ago and all.

Not on the Lips / Pas sur la bouche (Alain Resnais, 2003)

Pas sur la bouche, or Not on the Lips, is the eleventh film I've seen by Alain Resnais. I loved nine of them but this one and Same Old Song were just kind of okay. Like Same Old Song, it's a musical and although it seems kind of hollow it thankfully has a few high points to balance out the low points. It's based on an operetta from 1925. The plot concerns a woman who's married to a wealthy businessman and discovers her first husband, who her current husband doesn't know about, is her current husband's new business partner. Aside from a regular cast of frequent Resnais collaborators, the film also stars Audrey Tautou and Isabelle Nanty, the latter of which you'll remember as the cigarette lady in Amélie. The previous husband is a sort of broad caricature of the 'ugly American' and I guess the humor in general is a little too broad or just doesn't travel well or I don't know what. The high points are generally boisterous moments in the musical numbers, though the strong cast certainly buoys the dusty material. The opening titles are wonderful and so are the sets. C

A Prophet / Un prophète (Jacques Audiard, 2009, France)

What serendipity that I happen to watch a movie like this when only this morning I had been revisiting Pauline Kael's "Trash, Art, and the Movies.". (Note her use of the Oxford comma!) This is quite an exhilarating film. At times the sustained tension is almost maddening. The film certainly created a tone and held me transfixed for the duration of the running time and although the character is certainly not a hero in any moral sense I certainly found myself pulling for him and feeling elated at his triumphs. Jacques Audiard is a director whose name I had not previously been familiar with although I watched his 1996 film A Self Made Hero almost ten years ago and I remember quite liking that film. His 2005 film The Beat That My Heart Skipped has been chilling on my Netflix queue for quite some time now and I'm certainly anxious to get around to watching that now.

I loved the use of music here, both on the score and the song that plays in the final moments of the film which is too surprising and fitting and perfect and fantastic to name here since I shouldn't like to ruin that surprise for anyone who might happen to read this. Tahar Rahim makes what seems most certainly to be a breakthrough performance as Malik, a 19 year old man who is being incarcerated for six years for some kind of violent incident involving a cop. The film sort of chronicles these six years. He has no friends on the outside and seems to have grown up parentless in assorted institutions. Shortly after he arrives in prison the Corsican gangster who seems to run the place informs him that if he doesn't kill this guy who's about to go to trial and make trouble for the Corsicans, he's dead. It's a great performance and the plot is exquisite with its connections and surprises. I'm not sure what to say here about it but I really loved this movie. I don't know if The White Ribbon is the best of the nominees in the foreign film category this year but, having seen three of the nominees, I'd probably rank it second or third, with A Prophet being my favorite. I think I'd even put Ajami in second place because it showed me some things I didn't know about the world. A+

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)

In Roger Ebert's 2000 review he said that while the original audience would have seen this film as an attack on others a modern audience would see it as an attack on itself. I feel like he means the audience when he says 'itself' but I think it's more accurate to say the film is an attack on itself. I found it smug and dated. The movie itself seemed bourgeois. It made me want to watch The Third Generation or The Madwoman of Chaillot instead. C

35 Shots of Rum / Comedians of Comedy / In the Loop / The White Ribbon / Matador

I went to see 35 Shots of Rum the other night. I'd like to watch it again and I'd like to watch more of her films. I came pretty close to squealing a big gay squeal when Ingrid Caven's name came on the screen. She was fabulous in it but the sudden trip to Germany was one of those dramatic sections of the movie that didn't completely make sense to me. I feel ambivalent about the film. I liked the way the movie seemed to be alive. I mean, it had this magical quality to it. My feelings haven't come to rest on this movie. I don't know if I'll have a chance to see it again while it's still playing here at the Music Box though. A-

Also, in a mood to lighten up a little, I watched The Comedians of Comedy: The Movie on Netflix.com. It was all right but kind of dull. It was meandering and could have done with longer, more cohesive stand-up sets. They mentioned Sarah Silverman at the beginning and I couldn't help thinking how much better this would have been with her in it. I liked the lady with the voices. I liked some of the political humor, even though it was a lot of cheaps shots for the benefit of the choir. C-

I actually thought that In the Loop was pretty great. It was really funny but more than that it also came across as so brutally accurate. I know some people thought it was kind of blah and all I could think about that is that maybe they didn't know very much about the run-up to the Iraq war. For someone like me who started off as an NPR-fanboy before graduating to C-Span and ultimately shutting it all off to preserve my sanity, it was really great. Not only was this satire therapeutic, it was also pretty great because it seemed so honest and in this mendacious age a little bit of honesty feels like a sudden burst of oxygen to a slowly asphyxiating man. A

Then yesterday we went to see Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon. My first thought was that as a student of German it was beautiful to watch because of the language. It's crisp and somewhat poetic. I kept thinking it'd be a great film to show German students because most of the speech in the film is pretty much standard German the way you'd learn it in school. Based on the trailer and my past experience with the director I was expecting something less controlled. More dramatic, more deranged, more painful to watch. It almost seemed light and airy compared to my expectations. I think what I wrote on Facebook after seeing it was that it was like a Herzog movie where the audience and the characters could breathe. It's beautifully shot. Lovely and atmospheric. The performances are great. The writing is great. I found myself wanting something more dramatic but I think that's a result of all the hype. I guess I was desperate for this to be the one big powerhouse film this year but I'm starting to think there just wasn't one. I'll definitely be watching this one again. B+

I keep thinking about how last year I loved so many movies it was hard to think of what my favorite might have been. This year though it's more that I really liked a lot of movies but there aren't so many that I loved and the ones I did love are semi-obscure foreign movies. I didn't expect to be here scratching my head and wondering if Raging Sun, Raging Sky or Strella might really have been the best movie of the year.

EDIT: I almost forgot. I watched Pedro Almodovar's Matador last night. I had only seen it once, like ten years ago, and I don't even think I saw the whole thing. Now I've seen all of his films from start to finish at least once and I'm going back and rewatching them all, I think. I just watched the first three and now the fifth one. I have What Have I Done to Deserve This? on VHS so I'll be watching that in the next few days and then I'll move forward from there. As to the film, it seems like one of his weaker efforts. I liked it, I guess, but it seemed dated and I don't really relate to the ideas in the movie. As usual, the acting was good. In some ways it seems better than Dark Habits but it might also be less interesting. I guess he's doing some interesting things here reflecting back at cinema and playing with thriller genres but it didn't quite gel for me. B-

Wild Side / Wanda Sykes / Kings and Queen / Bukowski

It's been a while since I updated. I was feeling under the weather so I had this combination of falling asleep during everything and then not being sure if or what to write about anything.

First I watched Sebastien Lifshitz's Teddy Award winning Wild Side and I quite enjoyed it. I mostly watched it because I was curious about the Antony Hegarty performance, which it turns out I could have seen on Youtube and which is in the first few minutes of the movie. I ended up quite liking it. I mean, I didn't love it. I don't know what it is about this particular film template but I don't really love it. This was kind of enchanting though and I really am keen to watch it again. B+

Wanda Sykes's stand up movie Sick and Tired was funny but I dozed off. I guess it wasn't anything other than I had expected. B-

Since I wasn't a particular fan of Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale, I was really interested in checking out Kings and Queen. They both reminded me of My Favorite Season, I decided. There's something more mature and adult about them than most movies but I'm not altogether sure I buy completely into the world they present. I like though the way you're primed to want this man to take care of this boy and you're primed to empathize with the protagonist and then the movie turns on you and says, GROW UP YOU'RE BEING STUPID. I don't know. Again, I feel like I need to watch it again. B

The problem with Bukowski: Born Into This is that I don't buy into the central premise of the movie that Charles Bukowski is a great artist worthy of frothing over. D+

more later...

Summer Hours / Of Time and the City / 9 / Peter and the Wolf

The other night I watched Olivier Assayas's Summer Hours. It's been on all these critics' lists but it always sounded dull or severe or heady or, mostly, like it would be one of those off-putting movies that expect us to get all worked up about the petty concerns of people with too much wealth. Fortunately, it wasn't quite what I feared it sounded like. The story is basically that the matriarch of a French family has a birthday party with her three children and their families there and there's a lot of talk about her uncle, a late famous artist, and the art collection, housed in the country house where she lives, because she's getting older and so forth and recognizes she's going to die. Once she dies, the children need to decide what they'll do with the house and the art. Whether they keep things or sell them. And it's really about how you have the one son (Charles Berling) living in France who's still attached to these things, then the other son (Jeremie Renier) who's working for PUMA in China, and then Juliette Binoche as the daughter whose life is in America now. I mean, it's really about the way the French have to come to terms with their heritage as they're moving toward the future. And, as an American where most things are so new, where my pre-War apartment building seems older than most things anywhere you go, I kind of identify with the grandchildren in the movie who don't have a choice about holding on to their heritage. I guess one of the questions is about the value of heritage. I feel like the movie doesn't really put forth a strong opinion on the subject. That it's more a document of a transition from one era to another. It's really lovely though. I particularly love the scenes with the matriarch and with the housekeeper. I also feel like the cinematography is amazing. The light in the movie is exquisite. And I like the way the light has such a different quality based on where they are. It kind of seemed to change after the mother died. It was like things felt so lyrical and then came to feel more modern, and then at the end there's this party with some grandchildren at the house and it almost makes you think of children playing about in some old ruins or something. I guess this movie made me feel very present in the passage of history. A

As for Of Time and the City, I don't think I was in the right mood to watch it. It's sort of an experimental documentary about Liverpool, England. I've heard it described as a film essay, so maybe that's what it is. Aside from the feeling that I might have already seen it before on Sundance in my last apartment where I had cable television, the main thought I had while watching the movie was, "I could be watching Derek Jarman's The Last of England instead." I think I'll have to watch it again but I'm not sure it worked for me, aside from it being fun to pick out the literary quotes and things. C

Then last night we watched 9, the animated science fiction thing produced by Tim Burton. My boyfriend thought it was cliché and that there wasn't enough plot or character development. I think my roommate agreed with him. I really didn't though. I liked that it was kind of spare. It reminded me of when I saw The Bourne Ultimatum with my old roommate and I said it was the best one and he said it didn't have enough plot, whereas I felt that it was the best one precisely because it didn't waste time with all these plot conventions which aren't usually ever that interesting anyway. In most cases, I'd rather be spared unconvincing dialogue and phony relationships. I liked this movie. I thought the original short was kind of nice as well. B

After that we watched the Oscar winning animated short film Peter and the Wolf (2006). It's the music and the story by Tchaikovsky. It was nice. Cute, right? The music was nice. The duck was darling. The cat was funny. It was charming. I didn't really connect to it though. C

Two Days, Six Movies: Humpday, Half-Life, Paris 36, Taken, Strange Culture, Funny People

So, keeping up with my renewed commitment to keep track of the movies I watch this year I have six movies to post about from this weekend: Humpday, Half-Life, Paris 36, Taken, Strange Culture, and Funny People. I also watched the first episode of the British series Skins, which my roommate put on because a mutual friend was a fan of it and we were waiting for my boyfriend to come over after work so we could play with my new blu-ray player/Netflix player, which is currently hooked up to my roommate's projector and is just about the most heavenly thing I've acquired in some time, I guess.

Five of the above listed films were rented from a video store where I had a bunch of credits because I had a friend spend an extra night in Chicago and it was too cold to do much of anything else than have a movie marathon. Strange Culture is what I watched via Netflix streaming with my roommate and my boyfriend last night. By the way, there's something really fun about going through the movies on the blu-ray player which is way better than using the queue online. It also feels more movie-ish to not watch them on a computer monitor so I feel like this development will finally get me to watching some of the hundreds of foreign films on my instant queue...

The weekend's movie binge started off with Humpday, which I was very skeptical about and only got because it was on a few critics' best of the year lists. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. I mean I won't get into the end because that's kind of a spoiler thing to do and I don't know whether it's possible to make a cut on here and it's conceivable that someone at some time might actually read this thing. What I liked about it though was the dynamic between the husband and wife. It sort of reminded me of me and my boyfriend when we're fighting about something. I thought it was interesting though, the way it played with masculine psychology, though being a man with scant masculine psychology I can't say if it's really that accurate or only seems so to me the way that The Hurt Locker seems realistic to people who lack a fully formed notion of realism, in my opinion. I also liked how it deals with that phenomenon where we lose track of parts of ourselves and find ourselves doing pretty silly things to recapture those neglected fragments. I mean, it's not a great film but not every film needs to be a great film. I like the indie aesthetic. It kind of seems to blend the 90s independent film with a more contemporary sensibility. B

Next up was Half-Life. Of the movies I watched over the weekend, this is the one I wanted to watch again. (Unfortunately I won't have time to do so.) It's another movie that picks up the neglected thread of that spirit of independent filmmaking that had me so fascinated in the 1990s. It's this movie about these Korean Americans in some ostensibly Californian city in what seems to be the near future or alternate present where global warming has led to various problems including an explosion of the jellyfish population which is destroying the fishing industry. All this quasi-apocalyptic stuff happens in the background though and is made more a part of the setting than the plot and I really liked that. The story is basically about this family of a mother, her boyfriend, and her two daughters and the family of said eldest daughter's gay adoptee best friend (His mother is played by LA Law's Susan Rattan!). There are animated sequences periodically and the whole thing leads to a surreal, dreamlike quality which I naturally adore. I was kind of distracted but I really enjoyed it. B+

Paris 36 (aka, Faubourg 36) is a French movie about this theater in a Parisian suburb (I think) in 1936. It gets taken over by some gangster developer who wants to tear it down but somehow he decides he wants to be beloved by the people so he lets the theater put on their variety show. Beyond that it's sort of blah blah blah plotwise. A friend of mine who hosted one of those Sunday morning screenings of it last spring told me it was a mess and looking back on it, I guess it kind of is a mess. It's kind of a dull mess though so it doesn't really come across that strongly as such. I rated it three stars on Netflix though because it was pretty and engaging, even if I was reading blogs and things online during the last third. It's the kind of thing I wanted to like but I guess it didn't really do enough for me. Maybe I'll watch it again and see if it's any better if I'm paying closer attention. I'm not sure it will be. C

I thought Taken looked all right when it came out, based on the trailer, but the reviews weren't that great so I stayed away. I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed it. I mean, there's no pretense at art here but it seemed somewhat original in its tone. The things that make other films of this genre kind of cheesy were implemented with a lighter touch here, despite shootouts with gangsters and lurid sex slave stories. I'm not surprised that the director is French. There's something not quite American about this film and I quite liked it. I mean, I don't know if I'd watch it again but it kept me engaged from start to finish and I had a smile on my face through most of it and that counts for something. I mean, I guess the whole sex slave thing can be viewed as opportunistic or exploitive but I liked that it tried to inject some contemporary relevance into a genre film. I felt like the theme of governments and criminals colluding for financial gain was very topical. It's an age of corruption but the movie never got sanctimonious about it and there's no big scene in the movie where Parisian sex slave trafficking gets wiped out, you know, like in those movies where the primary victim is rescued and then there's music and slow motion and sombre faces as bad guys get arrested and countless victims are taken into the arms of the good guys. So, while my appreciation for this film is mostly for executing a tired genre in a fresh and engaging way, I also appreciate the moral ambiguity and the realism that doesn't try to redress the world's calamities in 90 minutes so that we don't have to worry about it at night anymore. B

We streamed the documentary Strange Culture via Netflix.com through my roommate's projector and while the quality wasn't really what you'd get from a DVD, perhaps, it was really kind of impressive, given that you're projecting a movie streaming from the internet onto a screen that large. I mean, I'm not sure how big the actual projection is but it's probably around six feet squared. As to the film, I quite enjoyed it. The story was fascinating to me. It has also those liberal pet themes like government overreach, big business, the dark side of the food industry, man versus the machine, speech. It's about a guy who was part of an art collective that tries to educate people about things like genetically modified foods. One morning, this guy, Professor Steve Kurtz, discovers that his wife has died in her sleep. A paramedic sees science equipment and suspects terrorism. Homeland Security gets involved and tries to paint Mr. Kurtz as a terrorist, despite that all the bacteria in the petri dishes are completely harmless things he ordered from the internet. FBI agents find an invitation to an art show that has some Arabic writing on it and decide that it's proof he's operating as part of a terror cell or something. Eventually, they realize he doesn't have weapons of mass destruction and charge him with mail fraud because he didn't submit a requisition form to the universtity for the $256 worth of supplies he bought. This case went on for four years and the movie doesn't stick around for the verdict, which is one of the things I really liked about this movie, because if you finish with the trial it becomes about the court case and not about something much larger. I think that aspect is particularly fantastic. I also quite liked the way they use actors (including Tilda Swinton) to reenact certain events, particularly at the beginning, and then it switches to a more conventional mode with the real people, then switches back and forth between interviews and reenactments until it goes a little meta and the actors speak as themselves and so forth. I thought it was great. It's experimental and innovative. It tells an important story. It has Tilda Swinton in it being fabulous as Hope Kurtz and fabulously zany as herself. A

Then, finally, we watched Funny People. I actually watched the first half hour before I went to bad that morning and I thought it seemed all right. Like it might have potential. Sadly, I soon discovered last night that the potential was quickly disposed of and it went on for way too long. I'm going to get all SPOILER here because it was a bad movie and it doesn't seem like I shouldn't. Anyway, this movie would have been better if Adam Sandler stayed sick. Or, even if it ended shortly after he found out he was going to live. Instead it sticks around for another hour or three with this dull story of him trying to get back his ex-girlfriend, who has been married for 12 years to Eric Bana, with whom she has two children. The bits with Seth Rogen and his friends are slightly entertaining but there's too much about this irritating comedian and his irritating movies which look somewhat worse than his actual movies. I sort of like the way the movie shows us these clearly awful movies and shows how people are still fans of them. I think it's great that people in California can be that in touch with reality. I could go on about how stupid this movie is but, like Jewel Mayhew indicated of Miriam Deering in Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte, I'm not prepared to give another minute to this movie. D

PS- I'd love to know if the words "full-throttle body shock" are in the press release for The Hurt Locker. Every bit of praise I see for that movie uses that phrase or something similar about an adrenaline rush. Puke. Also, I kind of liked Police, Adj. but why in the hell does every review of it refer to the climactic conversation as "exhilarating"? I can't imagine that's the word for it. Watching it when I did, I felt like it was clunky but that I appreciated idea enough to like the movie as a whole. I feel like most journalists must have IQs of 115, give or take seven points.

Chicago International Film Festival recap

Saturday, 10/10
Raging Sun, Raging Sky, Mexico, A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAvW4I6lMFs

Sunday, 10/11
A Frozen Flower, South Korea, A-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvG4rvI8HBw
Mother, South Korea, B+
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rDeNM-M8p8

Monday, 10/12
Vincere, Italy, B
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69f_Z4i_Vj8
Case Unknown, Poland, C-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6fzvHyq4uY

Tuesday, 10/13
Police, Adjective, Romania, B
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpAbFoWwjJY
Eastern Plays, Bulgaria, B-
http://cineuropa.org/ffocustrailer.aspx?lang=en&treeID=2015&documentID=112248

Thursday, 10/15
Hidden Diary, France/Canada, C
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPKNZimsQBc

Friday, 10/16
Who's Afraid of the Wolf?, Czech Republic, A
http://vimeo.com/3005565
Women in Trouble, USA, B+
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5-UoltzDBk
The Rapture of Fe, Philippines, B
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBh5jYaVmmQ

Saturday, 10/17
Made in Hungaria, Hungary, B
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSz3QKQR0Fo
Backyard, Mexico, A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMeBfNAAnvQ
A Woman's Way, Greece, A+
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30vAhfZ53F4

Sunday, 10/18
Eyes Wide Open, Israel, B
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnKfBvlZAcM
The Thank You Girls, The Phillipines, C
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwyQ6Bjdfgw

Monday, 10/19
Will Not Stop There, Serbia, B
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4b168J3SfA
A Single Man, USA, D
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tCxRO67gyk

Tuesday, 10/20
Ricky, France, B+
http://www.francois-ozon.com/en/videos
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, B-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jU3AimFaz0

Wednesday, 10/21, Best of the Festival
Fish Tank, UK, A-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gg1yMOdjyp0
Hipsters, Russia, A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5Geb5zO4co

Man on Wire (James Marsh, 2008)

I'm watching this thing again because the first time I saw it I thought it it seemed like everyone in it was irritating, melodramatic, and a little stupid. Also, these people filmed all of this practice and preparation but nobody thought to film the actual event. I was not surprised when one of the guys started talking about how much pot he used to smoke. They all talk like people that have spent a little too much time hitting the weed. Lunatics are often compelling and I wanted to find beauty here but in an effort to overinflate all of this the filmmakers only served to obscure whatever value may be inherent in the story. I like that they don't mention the WTC attack though. The one thing I found effective was the silent ghost of September 11th which sort of suggests something that was probably lost before 2001 but that the events of 2001 probably rendered irretrievable. C-