Here's More Random Stuff; Or, I Suck at Titling Blog Posts

Windows on Monday (Ulrich Kohler, 2006)
Decidedly desultory, and sometimes vaguely quirky to the point of evoking Tati more than Hong, but no matter: it continues to grow in the memory, and contains the single most inspired take I’ve seen all year, a sort of inversion of The Wayward Cloud’s bittersweet reconciliation that is hilariously audacious in its blunt, albeit measured pessimism. I initially found star Isabelle Menke (pictured above, on the left) a bit of a blank, but Kohler unleashes her when necessary, and I can’t think of another movie character whose personality so closely mirrors my ex’s.

Light is Waiting (Michael Robinson, 2007)
Good for a laugh, but so is this. Being engaged with a text and being able to fashion grotesque abstraction out of it are not the same thing, and Robinson doesn’t even strike me as particularly aware of the little that Full House has going for it formally.

The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941)
The poster gives away the best bit, in which Fonda and Stanwyck, huddled closely together, flirt in a way that suggests the possibility of genuine aversion. I guess I buy Stanwyck’s series of internal transformations, but there’s a big contradiction between that degree of internal conflict and her extroverted personality that isn’t quite fully explored, in my view.

Haut les coeurs! (Solveig Anspach, 1999)
Anspach is obviously a born filmmaker, utterly committed to concision, contrast, and structure, and an unerring sense of where to put the camera and how to end a scene. Characterizations are almost too intelligently drawn: one doctor is admirable without being nice, another nice without appearing adequately sensitive. More impressive is Anspach’s control of atmosphere, which gives the impression of a world that is basically ideal—contented, yet sensitive—but oppressive to her protagonist anyway.

A Cry in the Dark (Fred Schepisi, 1988)
I will never forgive my Australian Cinema class for choosing to watch this instead of Sirens, but concede that they may never forgive me for giggling at Streep’s misery.

High Heels (Pedro Almodovar, 1991)
Barely remember anything about this a mere few days later—the melodrama is more theoretically “subversive” than finely tuned, a recurring problem with Almodovar—although Letal’s initial seduction of Rebecca is unassuming sexual confusion at its finest.

The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton, 1905)
Impressionistic in a way that doesn’t intensify emotion so much as particularize it, which works for me. Wharton’s worldview is like Austen + malice, tortured rather than bothered by a learned preoccupation with luxury. That said, her mastery is to never fully embrace contempt: character descriptions bordering on hateful are tempered by behavior anything but.

Nick Drake – Bryter Layter (1970)
I had trouble consistently enjoying Drake when I first started listening to his work, but in retrospect the problem was one of distinguishing between the Five Leaves Left period and this album, which now seems to represent a big leap forward in songwriting. I read somewhere that legendarily shy Drake was in awe of John Cale’s work on his records, which baffles me, since I hold Drake in much higher esteem than Cale. I would, however, be curious to have seen what Drake’s face looked like upon watching Richard Thompson play guitar on “Hazy Jane II.”

The week (well, past few days) in review.

U.S. Go Home (Claire Denis, 1994)
I’m not a huge Denis fan, but this might be my favorite of hers. She likes diffuse tangents, not for contemplation of drama so much as willful disengagement from it. In other words, every once in a while, her inner Warhol takes over. This can have a really satisfying effect: when Gregoire Colin rocks out for three solid minutes to (The Animals’ (?)) “Chevrolet,” for example (pictured above), is the otherwise constricted character’s necessary moment of private glory. And there’s lots of well-considered character stuff here: in this supposedly autobiographical work, Denis ruminates on her own passivity and the sorrow of men she let down, whether handsome and rakish or decent-looking and spirited. Her own (i.e. protagonist Martine’s) sorrow is expressed in a half-laugh, half-cry, and an attraction to Vincent Gallo at his most whiny. Not all of it works for me, but I’m glad I saw it.

Keep It for Yourself (Claire Denis, 1991)
… which I can’t say for this one, in which self-effacing Denis either lets things get excessively vacant or lets Gallo shtick carry the day. Didn’t help that the print was burnt, and that the burn looked like a vibrating, Antonio Gaudi-designed UFO gracing the top of each frame, especially apparent against blacks and dark grays.

Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson, 1994)
I’m watching this again in a couple weeks. That’s right, I’m in two separate classes screening Heavenly Creatures. (Not to mention two separate classes featuring The Castle of Otranto.) Jackson’s overemphatic style is just as painful to take as it was a few years ago in the LOTR movies, and I don’t have much to say about him besides that I’m baffled he’s taken seriously in some circles.

Deep Crimson (Arturo Ripstein, 1996)
Not exactly riveting, but I sort of enjoyed this. Ripstein’s sequence shots, which might have some Ophuls or Sirk influence behind them, given the melodrama theme, actually feel less like either of those guys to me than Gaspar Noe on downers, roving miserably about rooms at random. The acting is too big for my taste, but there’s an inherent sense of mystery to the material. What remains unspoken—what the killers can’t say to the victim and Coral’s mistrust in Nicolas—blurs the traditional boundaries of killer/victim identification, particularly because the killers have a sorrowful, insecure streak and their victims, however doomed, get righteously vindictive.

Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1949)
Lean and sometimes expressive, but I can’t help but feel that Lewis’s commitment to the dichotomy between nervous, trigger-happy Annie and sensitive Bart is limiting. He also lets genre conventions blunt characterizations: what, for instance, is up with the third act’s cheery amusement park montage, in which neither Peggy Cummins, screaming joyously in the same way an actor in a Six Flags commercial would, nor Lewis, editing smoothly and playing happy music, shows knowledge of the tormented, murderous Annie we know?

The Thing From Another World (Christian Nyby [Howard Hawks], 1951) [third viewing]
Albeit anchored by an efficient, terse protagonist, I find this an exemplary Hawks lesson on how to use a crowd: everyone, even the effete, anxious scientist, is trying to contribute, which means engaging in the art of contradiction, and to observe them crowd the frame is to take in an overload of rational energy.

Waverly (Walter Scott, 1814)
Very enjoyable, even if I had a hard time keeping up with the background material. As historical novelists go, I think Tolstoy’s better at avoiding generalizations or phraseology, keeping things human and making drama stem organically from situations rather than ideas, but Scott is better at resisting the impulse to toot his own apolitical horn, and even goes to the point of ending on a note of near-embarrassing humility. He (Scott) is a bit like Edward Waverly himself, actually, who often makes strained attempts to express big emotions with tact.

Sister Carrie (Theodore Dreiser, 1900) [second reading]
This feels more like a masterpiece than it did the first time. Dreiser is an amazing writer of dialogue: his characters’ speech is wholly independent from their inner lives. Hurstwood, whose fall from grace leaves him a self-loathing, desperate fool, musters extraordinary strength in resisting alliance with strikers or policemen; Carrie, talented, modest, and kind, is avaricious in a way invisible to everyone but herself. Perhaps Dreiser explains too much of these contradictions away, but they’re also evidence of a sensibility forever fixed on the contrast between the workings of the mind and the body.

Adam Elk – Labello (1999)
Not as good as the two preceding Mommyheads albums, but few LPs are. First two tracks are terrific, as well as “Ripple Effect,” in which Cohen “runs away from the ripple effect” with a chord mimicking a sudden distance from natural progression.

Marshall Crenshaw – Downtown (1985)
Crenshaw is always at least a little interesting, and terrific about a quarter of the time. Highlights here are “Little Wild One (No. 5),” “Yvonne,” and “Lesson Number One.” “(We’re Gonna) Shake Up Their Minds” has a nice melody, but it’s also exactly the same one Crenshaw would use in the 1991 Kirsty MacColl song, “All I Ever Wanted,” which I prefer.

Jackie Greene – “About Cell Block #9” (Somewhere Sweet Bound, 2004)
This song is vivacious and dynamic and really pleasing, but all the other Greene stuff I’ve heard is pretty bad.

The dB’s – The Sound of Music (1987)
It’s no Stands for Decibels, but it’s still a masterpiece anyone interested in pop music should seek out immediately.

Graham Parker – “And It Shook Me” (Struck by Lightning, 1991)
A lot of later Parker suffers from smugness, so perhaps this song is an anomaly for making vague, residual pain its subject.

Sirk x 2; Sturges x 2; Praise; oh yeah, and Muriel's Wedding

I'm watching a lot of films for school, hence repeat viewings that I'd otherwise put off, or, in the case of Muriel's Wedding, happily do away with altogether.

Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956) [2nd viewing]

Usually I'm not a screen-cap kinda guy, as I suspect were Andre Bazin to blog, neither would he be. But check out the above composition, expressive of everything that's great about Sirk: nostalgic pleasure (i.e. the etching), sorrowful defeat (i.e. Dorothy Malone hunched over), the evocative location (i.e. water), all quiet, all together, all simultaneous. Earlier on, we have Lauren Bacall's introduction to the suite: gaudy, lush production design fills the frame, swelling music fills the soundtrack, and Bacall looks downright nonplussed, at a standstill between the surrounding beauty and the knowledge that she's being duped. Even minor characterizations are really satisfying, like the bartender who persistently sides with Robert Stack in action, but never in emotion, suspended in dubious loyalty. The "happy" ending, a bit of a lift from Notorious in my opinion, significantly shifts emphasis away from the few who prevail back to Malone. A quibble: the camera ominously rests on Stack's dad's portrait, shortly before [SPOILER]. Sirk is too good for superfluous foreshadowing.

Muriel's Wedding (P.J. Hogan, 1994) [2nd viewing]

Just godawful, but it presented a challenge to my descriptive abilities when trying to slam it in a class discussion. (Yes, apparently this is more representative of quality Australian cinema than Praise or any film by John Duigan.) I was tempted to write: "Hogan reduces adult interaction to middle-school terms"--but s/he (sorry, too lazy) fails to even capture the social repercussions of the latter. Yes, the social persecution of Muriel is exaggerated. BUT, yes, Muriel is herself a pitifully inept outcast. That said, I'm not seeing any graceful attempt to juggle levels of heightened realism here, just a disengaged wash of cartoon and soap opera impulses.

Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959) [2nd viewing]

It's no Written on the Wind, but it has its pleasures. Liked how Annie is intrusive but well-meaning; liked how, a la the above image, Sirk gives us at least one striking composition in which latent ugliness underlies catharsis. (I'm referring to Annie's deathbed speech to Lora, in which Sarah Jane's smiling photograph is sandwiched in between the two. This drew audible laughter from my audience, and it is funny in the sense that no other director would dare draw such sharp attention to the thorny contradictions of melodrama, for fear of falling into camp.) Didn't like boyfriend's sudden, unnatural transition from lover to oppressor, which is inexplicable apart from giving the audience a cheap jolt; didn't like Sirk's deficient understanding of the typical ego of a teenage girl, or perhaps people in general. (E.g. Sarah Jane's earnest admission of "you've been wonderful" after humiliating her white friends.) I have subdued affection for this: Sirk's mastery is evident throughout, but he can't quite find a satisfying way into the material.

The Great McGinty (Preston Sturges, 1940)

Sturges's debut, but it seems he'd had everything figured out. There's a dialectic here between McGinty's laconic pragmatism and his wife's admiring intellectualization that nearly functions as an allegory for the relationship between early Hollywood auteurs and auteurists, even if the latter had yet to come along. McGinty has vague aspirations to greatness, but he also laughs incredulously when earnestly called decent. (Hawks, anyone?) Sturges derives a lot of humor from the way motivations are naturally obscured in real life: loved the way McGinty's future wife shyly disguises an earnest marriage proposal as a business transaction; also loved the way McGinty shamelessly glances at her legs and she weakly retorts with the barely credible, “What’s that got to do with it?” And I laughed very hard at the chauffeur's vague, boring, and rather endearing one-sided conversation.

The Great Moment (Preston Sturges, 1944)

Lesser Sturges, but a singularly dry biopic all the same. Token romance is played so casually it barely exists; Morton, the ennobled discoverer of ether as an anaesthetic, is also a belligerent psychopath who orders his patients to open their mouths and abruptly begins smashing glasses at a store. The crudity of 19th century dentistry, rather than merely representative of past blunders, is played for derisive comedy, and Sturges doesn't fail to temper exaggerated tributes demanded by friends (“every hospital should be named after him!”) with low-key ones made by others ("maybe one or two hospitals...") A lesser film might have portrayed Charles T. Jackson as a "sarcastic drunkard" and an incompetent failure alongside our hero Morton, who in Sturges's film merely looks humorless next to Jackson's funny, credible resignation. And then there's this film's equivalent of the chauffeur's platitudes: a hilariously mundane series of intertitles detailing every stop Morton makes while thumbing through a medical encyclopedia. Why? Why not! It seems the running theme I'm getting from this Sturges double-header is an analysis of the ways in which essentially noble men are dangerous and immature...

Praise (John Curran, 1998)

As embarrassed as I am to link here, I guess I just did.