Sunday, March 22, 2009

Half of February and Most of March

PRO:

Day of the Outlaw (Andre de Toth, 1959)
Edouard et Caroline (Jacques Becker, 1950)
Return of the Living Dead (Dan O’Bannon, 1985)
The Crying Woman (Jacques Doillon, 1978)
Choose Me (Alan Rudolph, 1984)
Lightning (Mikio Naruse, 1952)
Dottie Gets Spanked (Todd Haynes, 1993)
La Chienne (Jean Renoir, 1931)

Duplicity (Tony Gilroy, 2009)
One adjusts to Gilroy’s visual anonymity, save bits like the final shot, which is every bit as good as Michael Clayton’s. Can’t say I cared for the beloved opening credits sequence. I did, however, enjoy the Ray-Claire repartee without fail, Roberts especially striking the right note of dignified coldness again and again.

Catastrophe (David Mamet, 2000)

Two Lovers (James Gray, 2008)
I yearned for a movie more expressive of Leonard’s bipolar disorder–here intrusive, there a non-issue, and the two sides distributed without particular attention to emphasis. The unusualness of feeling suicidal one hour and laughing at work the next doesn’t seem like part of this movie’s game plan, but I eventually reconciled myself with it anyway. Michelle and Vinessa are like a more strictly dichotomous Mother and the Whore, and well-balanced, and pieces like the encounter with Michelle’s lover are mercifully throwaway.

Rendezvous at Bray (Andre Delvaux, 1971)
The Days (Wang Xiaoshuai, 1993)

Wesh Wesh, qu’est-ce qui se passé? (Rabah Ameur-Zaimeche, 2001)
RAZ’s first movie has rocky production values, but the nuances of his later work are fully intact: he never lacks an eye for the transparency of his characters’ resolutions: the way a vow to quit dealing drugs easily collapses, for example, or how his own character’s brutal, unsympathetic nature reflects a sensible desire for papers of residence, in the middle of a fairly anti-government (and anti-cop) movie.

pro:

Wee Willie Winkie (John Ford, 1937)
Graham Greene’s essay about this movie, and the sexualization of Shirley Temple, surely has a point regarding her bizarrely intense relationship with Victor McLaglen’s character, who goes as far as asking to see her at his deathbed. Her friendship with coolly unapologetic villain Khoda Khan, however, is striking because she has such naïve, simple affection for an unrepentant savage, not for any libidinous undertones.

The Tuner (Kira Muratova, 2004)
Alice in the Cities (Wim Wenders, 1974)
Who’ll Stop the Rain (Karel Reisz, 1978)
Contact (Alan Clarke, 1985)

mixed:

Dillinger Is Dead (Marco Ferreri, 1969)
Whisky Galore (Alexander Mackendrick, 1949)

Iles flottantes (Nanouk Leopold, 2001)
A routine art movie with some really subversive bits—a pointedly blasé ambivalence towards domestic violence—that suggest why Leopold is an art movie director in the first place. Interesting career trajectory: the arty tropes were always there, but she gets a lot more unabashedly chilly, as well as more interesting, once Guernsey comes along.

con:

Vodka Lemon (Hiner Saleem, 2003)
I feel weird saying this about such an ostensibly remote filmmaker, but Saleem’s problem might actually be an excess of heart. He’ll precisely outline the contradictions of a woman’s pride in one scene, and yet fully relents to sentiment and slapstick by the film’s end.

Literature:

PRO:
Some Do Not… (Ford Madox Ford, 1924)

pro:
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (Carson McCullers, 1940)

mixed:

Delta Wedding (Eudora Welty, 1946)
Somehow reductive in its omnivorous brand of texture-over-content, apparently finding a world of interest in every raindrop, like a lesser Hou Hsiao-Hsien film. Also, sometimes ravishing, like a lesser Hou Hsiao-hsien film.