34th Five Films, 2007
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Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard) at MoMA. I've now seen more of the pre-1968 films than not. Around the end of the second act the group comes out of a cinema where Jack Palance has been scouting a mermaid for the film-within-a-film he's producing, Odysseus or something, and the marquee reads "Viaggio in Italia," which explains less flashy parts of the movie. The unhappy couple is constantly looking at statues, appearing tiny against the Mediterranean landscape, and exploring infidelity.
The things this film is most about, though? The colors blue and red, frequent and feverish flashbacks, a constantly swelling string section, Hollywood/America, European intellectualism, language and translation (Fritz Lang speaks English, French, German, and Italian within a single scene), the ridiculous villa built on a promontory at Capri. There's also a lot of contempt for one another among the characters, excepting Fritz Lang.
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The Assassination of Jesse James (Andrew Dominik) might be great but I had a hard time deciding with so many distractions. I didn't much care for the voiceover narration until the end; mostly it was, or should have been, pretty redundant. The film looked very good, with interesting long-held close-ups, and effective saturation of browns for an old west color scheme. I liked Casey Affleck a lot, wondering how much of the uncomfortable obsessive character was in the script and how much was his own contribution, so I'll almost certainly try to see Gone Baby Gone over the next several weeks. There are a lot of small touches, like with food, for example, that I think I could pick up on a second time through.
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The Mission (Johnnie To) at the Walter Reade Theater. This is my fifth Johnnie To movie in a theater this year. I rank it below Exiled but not terribly far.
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Lars and the Real Girl (Craig Gillespie) at Clearviews Chelsea. This multiplex is possibly my favorite in the city. The facilities aren't quite as nice as, say, Lincoln Square, but it's also never that full. It's comfortable in a way that's almost a little bit tacky, but not really. My other option was the Angelika, where the screens are small, the seats uncomfortable, and it's on a really gross stretch of Houston.
The cast is just really solid across the board. Probably my favorite part of the film is the way Lars' "real doll" eventually becomes more and more of a character, particularly when Gillespie makes use of carefully lit reaction shots, such as during an argument in Lars' beat-up Toyota Tercel. Like a lot of indie (romantic) comedies, this is a bit of a quirkfest, but for me it feels like a slightly odd version of one possible version of believable reality, rather than some bizarro world that shares only superficial similarities with our own. I suppose when arbitrating the artistic worth of stuff like this, personal taste is basically the final criterion. There are probably people out there who would wholeheartedly support, say, The Station Agent or Me You and Everyone We Know but not this movie.
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Hot Fuzz (Edgar Wright) at home on DVD. So, this was fun but I don't imagine I'll ever need to watch it again. I was pretty interested until Simon Pegg's character discovers the dark secret of the NWA. To me it felt like from that point forward Edgar Wright, who could have gambled by attempting to make a truly great cop movie, decided to cash in and go the easy route, by making the ultimate cop movie. Which was kind of weird, considering it was at least part splatterfest, though maybe that's just his own thing. Maybe this worked better in Shaun of the Dead because the genre he's deconstructing/memorializing there is in many ways just as outlandish as his own film. On the other hand, the best cop movies tend to maintain a certain sobriety. Maybe I've just been spoiled by the Hong Kong and Korean films I've been seeing lately, cf esp. Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder.
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Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard) at MoMA. I've now seen more of the pre-1968 films than not. Around the end of the second act the group comes out of a cinema where Jack Palance has been scouting a mermaid for the film-within-a-film he's producing, Odysseus or something, and the marquee reads "Viaggio in Italia," which explains less flashy parts of the movie. The unhappy couple is constantly looking at statues, appearing tiny against the Mediterranean landscape, and exploring infidelity.
The things this film is most about, though? The colors blue and red, frequent and feverish flashbacks, a constantly swelling string section, Hollywood/America, European intellectualism, language and translation (Fritz Lang speaks English, French, German, and Italian within a single scene), the ridiculous villa built on a promontory at Capri. There's also a lot of contempt for one another among the characters, excepting Fritz Lang.
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The Assassination of Jesse James (Andrew Dominik) might be great but I had a hard time deciding with so many distractions. I didn't much care for the voiceover narration until the end; mostly it was, or should have been, pretty redundant. The film looked very good, with interesting long-held close-ups, and effective saturation of browns for an old west color scheme. I liked Casey Affleck a lot, wondering how much of the uncomfortable obsessive character was in the script and how much was his own contribution, so I'll almost certainly try to see Gone Baby Gone over the next several weeks. There are a lot of small touches, like with food, for example, that I think I could pick up on a second time through.
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The Mission (Johnnie To) at the Walter Reade Theater. This is my fifth Johnnie To movie in a theater this year. I rank it below Exiled but not terribly far.
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Lars and the Real Girl (Craig Gillespie) at Clearviews Chelsea. This multiplex is possibly my favorite in the city. The facilities aren't quite as nice as, say, Lincoln Square, but it's also never that full. It's comfortable in a way that's almost a little bit tacky, but not really. My other option was the Angelika, where the screens are small, the seats uncomfortable, and it's on a really gross stretch of Houston.
The cast is just really solid across the board. Probably my favorite part of the film is the way Lars' "real doll" eventually becomes more and more of a character, particularly when Gillespie makes use of carefully lit reaction shots, such as during an argument in Lars' beat-up Toyota Tercel. Like a lot of indie (romantic) comedies, this is a bit of a quirkfest, but for me it feels like a slightly odd version of one possible version of believable reality, rather than some bizarro world that shares only superficial similarities with our own. I suppose when arbitrating the artistic worth of stuff like this, personal taste is basically the final criterion. There are probably people out there who would wholeheartedly support, say, The Station Agent or Me You and Everyone We Know but not this movie.
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Hot Fuzz (Edgar Wright) at home on DVD. So, this was fun but I don't imagine I'll ever need to watch it again. I was pretty interested until Simon Pegg's character discovers the dark secret of the NWA. To me it felt like from that point forward Edgar Wright, who could have gambled by attempting to make a truly great cop movie, decided to cash in and go the easy route, by making the ultimate cop movie. Which was kind of weird, considering it was at least part splatterfest, though maybe that's just his own thing. Maybe this worked better in Shaun of the Dead because the genre he's deconstructing/memorializing there is in many ways just as outlandish as his own film. On the other hand, the best cop movies tend to maintain a certain sobriety. Maybe I've just been spoiled by the Hong Kong and Korean films I've been seeing lately, cf esp. Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder.
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Posted on Friday, October 26, 2007
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