Sunday, December 28, 2008

December in Review

PRO:

The Strange M. Victor (Jean Gremillon, 1938)
My first Gremillon, and an amazing movie. He’s a first-class filmmaker: even extra-narrative shots contain remarkable background-foreground tension. He’s also a dramatist to rival the Dardennes, with daring and effective narrative ellipses, and a central character whose burden lies suspended between benevolence and guilt.
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (Preston Sturges, 1944)
The Man in the White Suit (Alexander Mackendrick, 1951)
My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946)
Blood Relatives (Claude Chabrol, 1978)
8 Million Ways to Die (Hal Ashby, 1986)
Stands out like a sore thumb from Ashby’s filmography, but he’s a natural at the redemptive thriller: his trademark self-deprecating, hedonistic sense of humor inflects a rather sincere representation of Alcoholics Anonymous, and Andy Garcia’s laid-back, wise-cracking drug lord (“The white stuff? Isn’t that a movie about… astronauts, or something?”) is a perfect villain.
99 River St. (Phil Karlson, 1953)
Prelude (Michael Snow, 2000)
Fascinating: perplexing, yet graceful. Snow’s films are like a very skilled ongoing argument with Bazin, and this short is no exception.
Sex Is Comedy (Catherine Breillat, 2002)
A Life of Her Own (George Cukor, 1950)

pro:

Sarabande + Winter + Alaya (Nathaniel Dorsky, 1976-1987)
I mused during this screening that there’s perhaps no other director, avant-garde or no, so readily identifiable by looking at a single shot as Dorsky. (Tsai?) His intuitive method is constant and aggressive, especially in the later works: give the viewer complex visual information indicative of some connective relationship, but obscure just what that relationship is. I asked Dorsky if he considered this process unique, and he name-dropped The French Connection (!!), Shoah, Joseph Cornell, Warren Sonbert, Bruce Conner, the poems of John Ashbery, and perhaps most emphatically, Dziga Vertov, which made me wince, although Dorsky himself acknowledged that Vertov’s politics were unsatisfying. (Dorsky is generally a pretty brilliant speaker, by the way, and I think the real answer to my question, albeit unstated, is “Yes, I do.”) Anyhow, as much as I enjoy his films—and these ones are just about as gorgeous as Song and Solitude—I enjoy them so much on the basis of each individual shot that any kind of meaningful editing scheme tends to elude my comprehension.
Night Moves (Arthur Penn, 1975)
Diane (Alan Clarke, 1975)
Milk (Gus Van Sant, 2008)
After the somewhat vague, arty aloofness of Paranoid Park, I was surprised by the precise, unresolved tension between private and public spheres Van Sant derives from Milk’s campaigning methods, particularly his imploring for others to come out. Although GVS’s allegiances are clear, a surprising amount of energy is expended giving homophobes dignity and our hero crassness.
Night Train (Yinan Diao, 2007)
Beloved Enemy (Alan Clarke, 1981)
The most audaciously prosaic movie I've ever seen.
Age of Consent (Michael Powell, 1969)
Adieu Philippine (Jacques Rozier, 1963)
A good movie that I can’t quite revere, and one of the more commercial exponents of the French New Wave, with a jazz-laden soundtrack and cross-cutting that uneasily treads the line (or perhaps intends to bridge the gap) between broad, comic effect and contemplation.
Sirens (John Duigan, 1994)
Moloch (Alexander Sokurov, 1999)
The Night of Truth (Fanta Regina Nacro, 2004)
Hotel Imperial (Mauritz Stiller, 1924)
Adua and Her Friends (Antonio Pietrangeli, 1960)
Allonsanfan (Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, 1973)

mixed:

A Tree in Tanjung Malim (Tan Chui Mui, 2005)
Tan is a pretty good director: she usually puts the camera in the right place, and clearly enjoys long takes in service of her material. A few scenes are promising: the iffy way characters express themselves is Bujalski-esque. Unfortunately, she occasionally breaks concentration on mode of expression, apparently trying to enter into some direct, Joe-esque communion with the audience. (E.g., the sing-off.)
The Seagull’s Laughter (Ágúst Guðmundsson, 2001)
The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, 2008)
Martel’s compositional obliquity is omnipresent, as is an inscrutable relationship between narrative and performance. Some will say it’s beguiling and mysterious; I say that with a few faint exceptions, it’s unrewarding and deliberately unobservant.
The Southerner (Jean Renoir, 1945)

con:

The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008)
Ledger is the sole point of interest here; Nolan is pretty much a non-entity in terms of directing actors, emphasizing action in an interesting way, etc.
Changeling (Clint Eastwood, 2008)
Did the 1920s-era LAPD kill Clint’s cat or something? A promising movie in the first reel: perhaps a better director could have made a bit more out of making Jolie unsympathetically emotional, and the police surprisingly rational.

CON:

The Devil’s Backbone (Guillermo del Toro, 2001)
Wolf Creek (Greg McLean, 2005)

DNF:

Australia (Baz Luhrmann, 2008) [0:40]
As if I’d ever have finished this. That said, not as painful as I’d suspected—Luhrmann is many things, but pompous is not one of them, and while as far as tonally jarring goes he’s no Bong c. Memories of Murder, at least this doesn’t quite fit the traditional mold for these sort of projects.
Birdsong (Albert Serra, 2008) [0:10]
The beauty of Serra’s compositions is a hushed, abstracted, plastic thing that doesn’t seem worth trying to penetrate. On the bright side, I’m now more comfortable knowing that Serra is an asshole in person.
Gran Torino (Clint Eastwood, 2008) [0:10]
The Quarterly Balance (Krzysztof Zanussi, 1975) [0:45]
Baal (Alan Clarke, 1982) [0:40]
Clarke’s most overtly distanced movie, understandably suited to the Brecht material but lacking the vigor of his better work. Bowie’s deliberately bland “songs” are in keeping with a sense of muffled creativity in service of the play.
Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc. (George Landow [Owen Land], 1966) [0:02]
This is something like 5 minutes long, and still I could not finish it. Some kind of imperceptible shift in hue seems to occur along the filmstrip, which wasn’t quite pleasurable enough for me, I suppose. I may revisit Landow, as I’ve heard his other works are more dynamic. (Why is it that I have such an easy time with some a-g artists, e.g. Dorsky or Kyle Canterbury or Bruce Baillie, and such an impossible time with guys like Landow or Michael Robinson or Bruce Conner or, much of the time, Brakhage? Perhaps I’ll have to write my own history of avant-garde cinema one day…)

And as for literature...

PRO:

Jude the Obscure (Thomas Hardy, 1895) [2nd reading]
The Eternal Husband (Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1873)
The Charterhouse of Parma (Stendhal, 1839)
Far From the Madding Crowd (Thomas Hardy, 1874)
The Wings of the Dove (Henry James, 1902)
Late James, for me, is the literary equivalent of Akerman: rough going, and at times outright dislikeable, but astonishing anyway. One unfortunate extreme of James’s personality is blind adoration of social tact (i.e. unironically time and time again labeling composure "wonderful"), and the other is inconsistently employed narrative obscurity, in which the reader is called upon to dig through pronouns for clues. On the other hand, he’s totally adept at reshaping the reader’s moral perspective.

pro:

Joseph Andrews (Henry Fielding, 1742)

Monday, December 1, 2008

Scattered Notes on 2006/2008 Catch-Up, + Various Auteurist Excursions

Bled Number One (Rabah Ameur-Zaimeche, 2006)
Outsider from France adopts an attitude of casual resistance—“Do you not know how to pray?” “No, I don’t know how to pray,” he answers—but ultimately cracks yet again under the pressures of living in his homeland. Depiction of religious violence is electrifying: Ameur-Zaimeche doesn’t downplay threat or even victimization, but transforms the surrounding terror into a cacophony of conflicting impulses, rendering disunity monstrous. Le Dernier Maquis was so uninflected I couldn’t catch on, but then I was spectacularly disengaged during that screening—perhaps more on that someday.

Lucy (Henner Winckler, 2006)
My first encounter with Winckler, who seems assured and certainly immune to cheap pathos, even if this film leaves a rather vague, bland, slice-of-life taste. Maggy’s slight recessiveness is almost always interesting, and Winckler is good at blending cross-currents of conflict ((a), Maggy’s attempts to balance motherhood with a social life and (b) Gordon’s apparent maturity that ultimately leaves one wanting). Sometimes he seems content to turn the burner off entirely on one when another is at a boil—it’s hard to accept the idyllic phase of her relationship with Gordon, for example, and sure enough Winckler doesn’t seem to buy it himself.

Two Friends (Jane Campion, 1986)
Like Sweetie, curiously muted and strikingly composed, but I like this one more—the sharp structure lends import to a withholding style. Somewhat hindered by a (likely autobiographical) impulse to include borderline-meaningless anecdotes, though. I also watched and enjoyed her shorts Peel and A Girl’s Own Story.

Love Affair (Leo McCarey, 1939)
So similar to McCarey’s 1957 remake that it barely registers as a distinct film.

Ni d’Eve Ni d’Adam (Jean-Paul Civeyrac, 1996) [DNF]
Not at all like Civeyrac’s last two films. Along with the short Life According to Luke, his early work strives to poeticize the lives of irredeemable whores and thieves… and to my mind, fails, as Civeyrac’s definition of “poeticize” amounts to a brief moment of introspection sandwiched in between scores of juvenile theatrics. There is, however, a documentary looseness here that occasionally works to his advantage, and my not finishing the film might merely speak to my impatience w/r/t sifting through an undeveloped sensibility for good bits.

Don’t Worry, I’m Fine (Philippe Lioret, 2006)
A cleverly structured melodrama whose sense of loss and stasis is at odds with its almost Mamet-like plotting.

The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short (Andre Delvaux, 1965)
In retrospect, Delvaux uses a strong undercurrent of infatuation in order to dissolve it, but you wouldn’t guess that by watching, oh, the first 85 minutes. Lead performance = tic-laden, but it’s interesting how sometimes he seems to have a neurotic aversion to grandiosity surrounding him and other times lifts it. (He’s of mediocre, unassertive intelligence, but this weirdly works to his advantage and perhaps results in Fran’s unexpectedly sympathetic reaction.)

A High Wind in Jamaica (Alexander MacKendrick, 1965)
The secret of this “kids” film is to make the wonder of children both innocent and unseemly, e.g. the boy who retorts, “really? Wish I’d seen!” upon hearing that the schoolmaster on board has nearly been burnt to death. Bumbling Villain Anthony Quinn, meanwhile, is curiously noble, at his worst when the kids seem to be making fun of religion. The Ladykillers (1955) is less visually impressive, but pulls off the curious trick of deriving suspense predicated on the remaining intelligence of a woman well on her way into dementia.

The Savage Innocents (Nicholas Ray, 1959)
Badly staged at times, but Ray redeems it by pitting Our Morality in such direct opposition to Theirs. Dance sequence at the trading post is lots of fun.

How Green Was My Valley (John Ford, 1941) [DNF]
I tried, but kept putting on Prefab Sprout instead, “When Love Breaks Down” vaguely synching up with Ford’s unusually direct mood, other songs not so much. I’d be curious to watch a version without the score, which is quite bad and intrusive. But there’s lots of misjudged emphasis here: even when the doe-eyed protagonist might have worked to the film’s advantage—as when he looks dolefully on as his sadistic teacher is given a pounding—Ford overwhelms this subtle moral development with low comedy. Also watched (and finished) The Last Hurrah (1958) and The Horse Soldiers (1959): the former polemicizes but keeps its cool, and the latter is prime Ford: Wayne’s “humanizing”-moment-as-drunken-rant is a highlight.

Burn After Reading (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2008)
I sometimes find the Coens’ sense of humor kind of repulsive, sometimes too ready to mythologize, e.g. just about anything said about Chigurh in No Country, and also ready to shunt minor characters in a rather blasé way, like Richard Jenkins’s loser in this film. It seems their best moments occur when caricatures clash together, e.g. Clooney’s encounter with Pitt, in which the former’s alarm is just as comically inflated as the latter’s grinning, gee-wiz adieu.

My Brother Is An Only Child (Daniele Luchetti, 2007)
The “other side” of (decent) Italian cinema opposite Garrone, where catharsis isn’t deliberately obscured by a harsh artistic persona so much as distended into a confused aria of emotion. Could have been really insufferable if the fraternal shenanigans and political oppositions weren’t so interwoven.

Poor Boy’s Game (Clement Virgo, 2007)
I can easily imagine Virgo making a bad film, given this one’s occasional sops to easy sentiment. It’s redeemed by a powerfully muted performance by Rossif Sutherland, which takes the Ed-Norton-in-American-History-X character to the inevitable conclusion that reformed racists endure genuine shame from all sides, rendering redemption a hazy concept.

The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)
Homages to Hawks abound: a character says “easy, easy” to a dog; MacReady (get it?) is posited as a model of unfeeling but necessary efficiency. And yet Carpenter’s horror-film impulses are in many ways the reverse of Hawks’s original, decidedly focused on amplifying disunity, panic, and unease among the crew, and removing the love interest that gave Hawks’s otherwise manly protagonist an inferred soft side. I vastly prefer the Hawks, and it seems those who love the Carpenter seem to be expressing a preference for disunity over unity, when Hawks forges a dialectic between the two.

Middlemarch (George Eliot, 1874)
A staggering masterpiece, which I don’t have much to say about besides finding it fascinating that some find Dorothea hypercritical and pretentious, and others a triumphant feminist heroine. (She’s both, of course.)

The Lower Depths (Jean Renoir, 1936)
If this is weaker than other ‘30s Renoirs—well, it is—it’s because Renoir encourages us to take pleasure in the melancholy contemplation of characters, rather than letting us do the contemplating ourselves.

Lemming (Dominik Moll, 2005)
Shame that Gainsbourg’s characterization, impressive and nuanced in the film’s first half, pretty much gets annihilated for gamesmanship’s sake.

Still hate Heavenly Creatures and Whale Rider.