Lorna's Silence / Anvil / Sunshine Cleaning / Gomorrah

It's true, I watched another four movies last night. There's something really satisfying about looking up from your movie to see the sun is rising and the falling snow is being lit by a soft, blue morning.

We started off with Lorna's Silence, oddly enough the first movie I've seen by the Dardenne brothers. Somehow I never got around to seeing Rosetta despite that it sounded up my alley. The story is basically that this Albanian woman is in a sham marriage to a Belgian junkie so she can gain citizenship, get rid of the junkie, and marry a Russian crime boss so he can gain citizenship and use the money she earns to open a snackbar with her boyfriend. She starts to have second thoughts when the junkie husband cleans up his act and she wants to get a divorce instead of killing the guy but the shady guy brokering the deal is not so keen on that idea. Hilarity ensues, as it were. It's a really engaging and beautifully shot film. I like the way it leaves the most dramatic episodes of the story out of the film so it doesn't ever feel like you're being distracted with fireworks or anything. The reviews I read suggested that the film is about the position of real people in international commerce. The effect currency has on people and what they'll do to get it. That actually seems to be a big theme for a lot of the movies I've been watching lately. I've also been reading Uncle Tom's Cabin and I guess I've been seeing everything through that lens, where people are trapped in their ugly situations and what choices they make when they don't really have any real and viable choices to choose. I sort of liked the ending, perhaps, which is kind of ambiguous and not quite literal but it didn't really gel for me. The only thing that didn't seem to make sense in the story was why the crime boss didn't just marry a Belgian woman: a junkie, perhaps. Perhaps I'll have the opportunity to watch it again some time. B+

Then, I fell prey to the hype surrounded by Anvil: The Story of Anvil. My boyfriend liked it. He said I'm too cynical. I'm not sure if he was teasing or not. I thought the movie was kind of sad and silly at the same time. Perhaps I'm too arrogant for these people. Maybe they're too much like the people I grew up around to have the same kind of trailer park tourist appeal that they must have for many of these professional film critics. It's hard to say right now but it probably warrants further consideration. The movie is about some heavy metal band from Canada who purportedly did what they did before Metallica and Megadeth did it. I grew up surrounded by white trash heavy metalloids and I can't say I've ever managed to nostalgize that scene. I admit to feeling some kind of pity for these people, who mostly seemed detached from reality and kind of ridiculous but I also thought they were annoying, unlikable people who belonged on one of those self-help type reality shows. It was interesting though, perhaps in a kind of emotional pornography way, though it was also interesting to watch the behind the scenes reality on their tours. The making of the album was sort of interesting but I could have done with less petty squabbling. It made me think of those people who attach themselves to a certain mythology and then live entirely in the tropes and the cliches of their myths. I kept feeling that each episode in the story started out interesting but overstayed its welcome. C-

Sunshine Cleaning was something I thought looked promising but stayed away from because of tepid reviews from friends as well as from critics. As I sort of expected, I kind of liked it. I mean, it's the kind of movie that 3.5 on a scale of 5 was made for but in this case that's kind of a good thing. I enjoyed it and would watch it again. Basically, Amy Adams and her sister Emily Blunt are a couple of beautiful women with working class troubles. Amy works as a maid and her son is more or less kicked out of school so she needs to find time inbetween cleaning houses and boffing her high school sweetheart Steve Zahn, a married cop, to make a way to get her son into a private school of some sort. Emily, on the other hand, is a deadbeat who gets fired from her job as a waitress in a cheap restaurant. Add an eccentric patriarch and some issues surrounding the departed mother and the pieces are in place. The cop hooks them up with these lucrative jobs cleaning up crime scenes and things and it's engaging and sweet and intermittently funny, if also intermittently annoying. A pleasant surprise, since I hadn't paid attention to the opening credits, was the appearance of Mary Lynn Rajskub as a sapphic phlebotomist. Me likey. I always think the sudden appearance of Mary Lynn Rajskub is a jolt of 'good' in any film. There were really only two things that bothered me about the movie, Alan Arkin and an explosive sort of deus ex machina that propels the story forward. I guess Alan Arkin seemed too Little Miss Sunshine and his zaniness was tiresome to me. The event that mixes everything up seemed dishonest and silly. Nonetheless, I felt like it was a really winning film. I liked some of the emotional/psychological bits and I thought the ladies turned in good performances. B/B-

After Sunshine Cleaning, I felt like something serious and foreign and although I was in the mood for something more lyrical I decided it was high time to get around to watching Gomorrah, which, it turns out, was kind of lyrical, just like what review I read before watching it said it was. It really is a well-made film and it has this sort of epic quality to it where the characters seem to represent the everyday people who live those sorts of lives. There are multiple characters and story lines that mostly revolve around this certain housing project in what I believe is Naples. There's a mafia war going on between two warring factions. There's a high body count. Narcotics trafficking. Loan sharking. Extortion. Illegal disposal of toxic waste. Rigging the textile industry in the world of haute couture. The film definitely wants you to believe that everything it shows you is true and representative. It also has that theme I was talking about with Lorna's Silence where you have these people living in impossible situations with no good choices, the daily reality of millions of people I think. Like so many films a friend of mine might disdainfully refer to as ghetto safari films, I really think it's about what people do when the closest thing you have to a noble goal is making sure you're not the next to fall beneath the wheel. A/A-

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

favorite movie list of 2009

There are some things I haven't seen yet which I will probably like, The White Ribbon in particular, but as it stands this is my Top 25 list, roughly ranked with Summer Hours at or near number one.

Summer Hours
A Woman's Way (Strella)
Raging Sun, Raging Sky
Cherry Blossoms
Who's Afraid of the Wolf
Hipsters
Avatar
Gomorrah
A Woman in Berlin
Still Walking
The Baader Meinhof Complex
The Beaches of Agnes
A Serious Man
Lorna's Silence
Mother
Julia
Backyard
You, the Living
The Headless Woman
Two Lovers
Fish Tank
An Education
Broken Embraces
Flame & Citron
Precious


Honorable mentions: Antichrist, Drag Me to Hell, Easy Virtue, Every Little Step, A Frozen Flower, Half-Life, Jerichow, The Rapture of Fe, Ricky, Vincere, Women in Trouble

Most overrated would be The Hurt Locker, with A Single Man and Star Trek right up there and a nod toward Inglourious Basterds.

Tyson (2008)

Everyone's been saying this movie was good even if you don't like boxing and it certainly is a fascinating movie. I kind of loved that it's all just Mike Tyson telling his own story from his own perspective. It's a wonder Don King and the woman who charged him with rape haven't sued over this movie, if they haven't. I was tired when I watched it. I guess it was a mostly passive experience. The only thing I really thought during the movie is that it would skip from one event to another event two to four years later and I wanted to know what happened in the interim time. I also wanted to know what Robin Givens had to say about it. That scene where she's sitting next to him and telling Barbara Walters how awful he is is something else. It's nice he doesn't hold a grudge though.

This doesn't really have to do with this movie but people always say that the parade of celebrities is one of the bad things about the movie The Hangover. I have to say, I thought it was one of that movie's few redeeming qualities and I actually kind of liked Mike Tyson in the movie even though the movie itself was pretty bad.

I could see myself watching this movie again just to examine more closely how it's put together.

B

The Detective (1968) / Tokyo! (2008)

I have to say, however blah the movies were last night, I'm really blown away by the quality of the video I've been getting. I don't know if I mentioned that I finally got a blu-ray player and it's hooked up to my roommate's projector in the living room. I've been told that we need a new cable to get the full blu-ray experience so I haven't even watched the blu-ray disc that was given to me with the player (There Will Be Blood). We've been playing with the Netflix streaming feature and I just can't believe how good the playback is through the projector. I'm sure someone more technically savvy would talk about how it isn't sharp enough or something but from my perspective, the colors are amazing and it's kind of awesome to be able to sit down in your living room and have the option of projecting any of the 350 movies on my Netflix instant queue.

As to the films, The Detective was all right. I put it on mostly because I had always meant to watch it and I felt like getting my Lee Remick on. Unfortunately Lee Remick isn't put to very great use here. It's a sort of cop drama with Frank Sinatra and it's about him trying to solve this grisly murder of a homosexual and also all this stuff about a cabal of businessmen playing real estate and development games that defraud the citizenry and lead to any number of social ills. There are a number of flashback sequences that show his life with his wife, Lee Remick, and his life as a New York police officer and so forth. I think these are the parts I found most interesting. The movie deals with several controversial subjects of its day and it's definitely interesting as a historical artifact. On the one hand, the film's attitude toward homosexuals seems much more humane than some of the other films of the sixties and seventies. It sort of shows the darkness of their lives and the torment they're subjected to by the world and it shows the hero Frank Sinatra being all compassionate about it. On the other hand, it also shows them as generally silly and deranged. I was actually a little surprised at the frankness of some of the dialogue, particularly the scene where they talk about what the victim might have had a bottle of mineral oil for and how one guy says it's not for the butt sex because you need something thicker, like Vaseline, and responds to the shocked comerades that men and women also use such lubricants. The film also tries to wrestle with drugs and addiction, if not in an all too serious manner. There's a guy giving a lecture about the benefits of LSD usage, which Sinatra chooses not to stick around for, and there's this bit about a teenage junkie prostitute that leaves Sinatra making a snarky comment about it being part of the Great Society and then later attributing that sort of thing to the kind of housing available in the city. There's also this whole other story about how Lee Remick, the ex-wife, is a nympho and how they couldn't stay married because Frank can't abide no whoring wife, although they still sleep together from time to time. The movie is really very fascinating as an artifact that stands between the production codes of the past and the deluge of more adult content that was loosed upon America in the late 60s and in the 1970s. Looking at the reviews from its time, it seems that a lot was made of the realism of the film, from the gritty realism of police work to the naturalism of the dialogue. The dialogue is really interesting because it is more naturalistic than in a great many previous films but it also seems sort of interstitial, a kind of missing link or something. Maybe that's what makes it feel like it's from the Isle of Misfit Films or something. I'm also surprised to discover that the movie is based on a novel whose sequel was filmed as Die Hard. Go figure. As I'm typing this it occurs to me that this film seems to be one of those that is more fun to consider than to watch. Perhaps I'll watch it again some time. C

The other movie I watched last night, Tokyo!, was less interesting to me. It's three short films set in Tokyo by three non-Japanese directors: Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, and Joon-ho Bong. The only one of these shorts I really cared for was the one by Michel Gondry. It's about this couple who have come to Tokyo and are trying to find jobs and apartments while living with a friend. The welcome wears thin. The girlfriend can't find a job, the car is towed. Things take a turn for the surreal. I didn't love it but I enjoyed it pretty much. Then is the Leos Carax piece which I didn't get at all. A few times I thought I might have figured out something that made it interesting or worthwhile but then I just got irritated by it again. It's this weird, grotesque business about a trollish man who comes out of the sewers and wreaks havoc, is arrested, is defended in court by a weird trollish lawyer from France, and is executed. It all came across as pointless and off-putting and I just didn't dig it. I actually decided to watch it because of the Joon-ho Bong thing but I was so alienated after the Leos Carax film that I couldn't really focus. Either that or it was kind of blah. It seemed all right. Like I said, I just couldn't focus... 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.

Baby Jane, My Mother, Your Mother, Bashir, J.Lo

This last week my boyfriend has decided to mix things up by going and renting old DVDs of his own choice. Early in the week he rented a bunch of sort of classic films he'd never seen: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, All About My Mother, Waltz with Bashir, and Y tu mama tambien. Then last night he picked up Out of Sight with George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez. In effort to keep a better record of the films I watch in 2010 than I did in 2009, I feel like I should begin by noting down my feelings about the movies I just mentioned. You see. I actually feel more interested in talking about the various books I'm trying to read right now but as it falls outside the scope of this blog, we'll stick to the subject at hand. Or what have you.

Watching What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? again after all these years confirmed my belief that Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte really is quite superior. I mean, I enjoy What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? well enough but it's not like I'd ever really need to possess a copy of it and return to it like with Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte. I actually dozed off halfway through so I can't really give too many thoughts about the movie itself, except they be memories of previous reflections. One thing I've noticed about watching these digitally mastered DVDs of things you've only ever seen on VHS or on TV is that sometimes it seems like a revolution of some kind and other times, like in this case, it seems to alter the mood of the film in a somewhat alienating way. I guess I preferred the dark and murky quality to the VHS version, which is kind of a weird thing to find myself thinking. I feel like I'm getting nostalgic about VHS (even though I don't even have a fully functional VCR) ever since I discovered the rich assortment of out of print movies my local video store has on VHS. I guess the most I have to say about this movie is that it made me nostalgic for any number of other Bette Davis movies, most of all the one mentioned above. The BF didn't really see the big deal about the movie but I don't know that it's really his kind of movie. He didn't believe me that he should watch Now, Voyager instead... B

The BF did however quite like All About My Mother. I like it, too, but watching it again after several years has taught me that people are perhaps right that Talk to Her really is the better film. I remember watching this one for the first time though and thinking it felt like a revelation. It spoke a lot to who I was at the time it came out: who I was, what I liked, what I was up to. I've been going back and watching some older Almodovar movies lately (like the High Heels, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and the underrated gem Kika) and I kind of feel like I still prefer his less mature 90s era films even though I can honestly say I've never seen a Pedro Almodovar film that I didn't like. I've seen all of them except the first three and The Flower of My Secret and I'd rate them all at least four out five stars. Strangely, the one I've felt least enthusiastic about is his new film, Broken Embraces. I've heard I need to watch it again. I'm sure I will. What's funny to me about watching All About My Mother again is that it doesn't seem as powerful or relevant or moving as it did ten years ago. I guess the things that were shocking or surprising then are no longer shocking or surprising and that I'm nearly ten years older as well. This movie made my best of the decade list, which wasn't really numbered but it was probably at about number five. Watching it again, I don't know that I'd keep it there and it's caused me to want to go back and watch everything from the last ten years all over again. B+

The other night was the first time I watched Waltz with Bashir since I saw it in the theater the night of the Super Bowl, which must have been in January (?). I wonder if the difference in the way I experience it comes from the lack of surprise and suspense that comes from a first viewing or if it's more to do with the difference in scope of watching a movie on a large screen in a multiplex and watching it curled up with my boyfriend on his couch. Maybe the trouble with watching movies in our homes is that we're too comfortable in our own space. Maybe it's just me. Maybe I was just too cozy for this movie. Or maybe it just needs to be seen large or maybe it just doesn't warrant repeated viewings like I thought it might. I remember being surprised and enchanted by the scene from which the film pulls its title but when I watched it again on DVD it didn't really seem to have the same surprising poetry. I think I wept a bit when I saw it in the theater. The moment where it switches from animation to documentary footage hit me like a boot to the stomach the first time around and it's still a relatively powerful part of the movie. I guess movies are also like drugs in the way they keep you trying to reproduce the same highs you've had before. B

I was actually glad he got Y tu mama tambien because it's on SOOO MANY of these best of the decade lists I've been going over and I wanted to see it again because I didn't really get the big deal when I saw it the first time around. I'm still not sure I do. I think one problem is when the film came out it seemed to have this reputation that it was this very risque, homoerotic film. It didn't seem all that risque to me then and it certainly wasn't as homoerotic as I wanted it to be. I guess I had really gotten excited to see a gay movie that wasn't completely terrible. Oh, well. In any event, my expectations this time were completely different than when I first saw the thing and I kind of appreciated it in some ways. I kept thinking to myself: This movie seems to be doing a similar sort of thing as The Headless Woman so why am I reacting so indifferently? I guess I felt like the only thing that seemed to interest me about the movie very much were the relief shots of daily life for the hoi polloi in Mexico. Maybe I should have tried watching it again and see if the information at the end of the film made what came before it any more meaningful. It was pretty, I suppose, but essentially it just seems like a soap opera about some privileged boys in an underprivileged country. Perhaps I've sat through too many Wes Anderson movies to care much about privileged young people and their exploits? I mean, I guess the characters aren't completely uninteresting but shouldn't a great movie be beautiful or show us some new insight or anything? What makes this movie better than Marie Antoinette? B

That brings us up to last night when we watched Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight. It was all right. I mean, it was bad, but it was entertaining. I appreciate that some of the things that make that sort of movie so annoying sometimes were very understated here. The movie sort of has potential but it just didn't do it for me. I noticed when I looked it up beforehand that it was nominated for Academy Awards for editing and for adapted screenplay and I couldn't help but smirking at the dialogue sometimes but I can kind of see what's good about the writing. The cast was kind of good, even though it seemed like George Clooney was playing himself and like Jennifer Lopez was kind of miscast. Maybe that's what didn't pull off the movie enough for me, that she doesn't really seem believable here. She's not strong enough or serious enough and she's too pretty. It's like, her lipstick was a little too perfect, you know? I sometimes have felt that growing up in the 80s and 90s we got the short end of the stick culturally. Maybe it's just that now, in this moment of decline, America is kind of the pits. It really seems like a sort of dead culture. I hope there will be life in the world, yet. Maybe someone will figure out a way to make Erich Fromm or Joseph Campbell fashionable and we'll all write poetry and stop buying so much crap. I don't think so though. C

Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes Back

I thought I really liked these movies. I mean, I loved them when I was a child. They're okay now. But the dialogue is funny and the acting is funny and Mark Hamill's accent is funny. I still feel like R2D2 is the most compelling character. Maybe Princess Leia, who knows? Watching it, I can't tell which silly looking bits were silly from way back or are silly because of revisionist tinkering. C

I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco

My boyfriend put this on last night. It was sort of interesting but not what I'd call a great documentary. It wasn't satisfying on a narrative level and it seemed not so well constructed and it had too many shots with fisheye lenses and so forth. I was surprised how sort of unremarkable the music seemed. C

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