The End Of Cinema

Movie Roundup: Woo! Cliff Lee! Edition

2009-12-15T01:33:00.001-08:00

Talk To Her - This was my first Pedro Almodóvar film, and I'm a bit conflicted about it. On the positive side: the colors are beautiful, the actors are excellent (Geraldine Chaplin!), the dance and film within a film sequences are both stunning and hilarious, respectively. On the negative: I don't know what to do with the ickiness at the heart of the story. If we're supposed to sympathize with Benigno, well . . . ew. If Benigno is supposed to somehow represent a generalized idea of how men don't listen to women, or don't appreciate them or ignore them, that's both awfully cynical and insulting, if also kinda funny. Basically, I loved every part of the film that didn't have anything to do with its story. But once Lydia's story ended and it became all about revealing the depths of Benigno's depravity, the movie lost its balance for me. I want to have liked this more. The #6 film of 2002.

Kings And Queen - Novelistic melodrama from director Arnauld Desplechin. Emmanuelle Devos plays an art dealer who's father is dying. Her son (the father of whom is long dead gets along well with her ex-husband (Mathieu Amalric, excellent as always) but not her super-rich fiancee. Ex-husband, is locked up in a looney bin and may or may not be totally insane. Despite the low-grade instant netflix video (I assume) this is a beautiful film, with great performances and a fascinating approach to character. Desplechin actually succeeds in making unlikeable characters sympathetic and sympathetic characters unlikeable, all without any of the characters actually changing throughout the film, if that makes sense. Plus, it's got "Moon River". I love "Moon River". The #7 film of 2004.

Wendy And Lucy - Another location-specific American indie in the same vein as Chop Shop or Ballast, and comparable in quality to those films. Michelle Williams plays a woman traveling through Oregon on her way to Alaska who stupidly attempts to shoplift some food for her dog, and even more stupidly gets sent to jail for most of a day because of it and even more stupidly has had her dog stolen while she was gone. So, those elements, fundamental to the film, didn't really work for me. But Williams and Walter Dalton (as the Walgreen's security guard who helps her out as much as he can, which isn't much) are so good that they almost sold me on it. The direction, by Kelly Reichardt, is what you would expect from this kind of movie: solid, realistic, unspectacular. The ending is sad, but necessary, as Williams finally seems to realize that her plan to drive from Indiana to Alaska in an '88 Accord probably wasn't so wise. The #11 film of 2008.

Far From Heaven - Like Talk To Her, a movie I wanted to like more than I did. It's a pastiche of Douglas Sirk films, with Julianne Moore and Dennis Haysbert recreating the housewife/gardener dynamic from All That Heaven Allows. Except for this film, director Todd Haynes adds the twist that the gardener is black, changing the class issues from Sirk's film to racial ones. And, in a twist too far, he gives Moore a husband (Dennis Quaid, trying hard) who's working on trying to not hook up with other men every chance he gets. Haynes just piles on the social issues, and the humanity gets buried behind the topicality. The movie either needed to be a lot longer, giving it a more novelistic scope (at only an hour and forty-five minutes, surely there was room for greater detail on Quaid and Moore in particular), or a lot shorter, focusing on just the Moore/Quaid or Moore/Haysbert relationship. In every other respect, the film is fantastic. The set designs are wonderful, often putting even Mad Men to shame, but the real star of the film is the lighting: deep reds and blues, gold highlights breaking through the colors, magic hour sunsets and greens for danger, it's all so lovely. The #7 film of 2002.

My Winnipeg - I might have a new favorite Guy Maddin film. This documentary about his home town is everything I always complain that documentaries aren't. Yeah, it's got a lot of great stories and interesting facts and shows me a world I didn't know all about before (but kind of did), but it does it all from an intensely personal perspective with a unique style that adds something new to the documentary form. To be specific, Maddin adds to the convention of recreations by re-enacting scenes from his own childhood in an attempt to understand his mother, and by extension his hometown (town and mother being equated right off the bat). He hires a bunch of actors to play his siblings except for his mother, who he says will play her self (she is in fact played by actress Ann Savage, from the great ultra-low budget noir Detour). It's a particularly Maddin-esque bit of silliness that nonetheless fits the weirdness of a city that held seances in a city hall designed as the world's largest Masonic Temple and has the highest sleepwalking rate in the world. I have no idea how many, if any of the stories Maddin tells are true or false. It doesn't matter. I want to live in a world where it's all true. The #5 film of 2007.

Movie Roundup: Oden's Depressing Knees Edition

2009-12-13T19:22:00.001-08:00

Still got that Vancouver Film Festival thing coming. In the meantime, these are the films I've watched to try and get my mind off of the Trail Blazers.

Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans - Yes, it's weird. But it takes awhile to get there. I really liked the slow build of crazy, with Nicolas Cage starting as a relatively normal guy and just getting crazier and crazier. Around the point that he starts doing a Jimmy Stewart impression for no apparent reason, the film just takes off. In fact, I loved everything about Cage's performance, from his hunchbacked walk to the bizarre way he totally fails to holster his gun. It's not nearly as ambitious as Herzog's best films, but it's fun, intelligent storytelling and that's good enough. Very comparable in this sense to Star Trek for this year, I think.

Silent Light - As eye-poppingly beautiful a film from director Carlos Reygadas as it's reputed to be. It's about a man who lives in a Mennonite (which is apparently like Amish, but with digital watches) community in Mexico. He's having an affair and can't tell if the affair is the work of the devil (adultery and all) or God (he's found his true love). Mostly he just feels bad. Then something happens and the film somehow turns into Ordet. Not much happens for most of the movie, but the crisp, sharply focused compositions and ultra-realistic soundtrack keep things interesting. The #13 film of 2007.

Funny People - The most ambitious of Judd Apatow's films and one clearly made with a lot of affection. His love of stand-up and the people that practice is readily apparent. Seth Rogen is fine as the wanna-be who becomes superstar comic Adam Sandler's assistant (in another fine, self-deprecating performance). It still feels a bit long, like the rest of Apatow's films, but I don't think it's because Sandler's illness goes away with 40 minutes of film left. It's a portrait of a comedian, not a portrait of a dying comedian. Janusz Kaminski's cinematography makes it by far the best-looking Apatow film to date, at least in the areas of lighting and color. Apatow's framing and editing is pretty much rote, however.

The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu - More clearly a dark comedy than 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days . . ., this film by director Cristi Puiu might be even better than that one at examining the little details of Romanian life. The titular Dante Lazarescu feels sick and calls for an ambulance. When it eventually shows up, the poor EMT (Mirela Cioaba) ends up spending most of the night shuttling him from hospital to hospital as everyone in town is busy dealing with the fallout from a traffic accident. The film's focus is on the details of the case, how hospitals work and how the people who work in them are, for the most part, heroic. Lazarescu has many things wrong with him and for the first part of his odyssey everyone seems to find only one of them (though everyone is sure to scold him for his drinking). It's an epic of a film, certainly not insignificant that at one point a nurse calls for Virgil to take Dante to see Dr. Anghel. The #4 film of 2005.

Mulholland Dr. - I don't know that I can say anything coherent about it right now, but I loved every minute of it. Lynch's surreal mode of filmmaking is ideal for a story about Hollywood, the Dream Factory that's founded on people changing their identities. A world run by gangsters and cowboys where everything is recorded and everything is an illusion. Naomi Watts is as terrific as advertised, just about the cutest girl ever as Betty and then tragic and heartbreaking. The rest of the cast is very good as well (Ann Miller!). Even Billy Ray Cyrus, of all people, is hilarious. And it's always stunning to look at: both the clean bright colors of the first half and the harsh dinginess of the second. I really like Lost Highway, but this is even better. Without a doubt one of the best of the decade. The #3 film of 2001.

Inland Empire - Yeah, I didn't like this as much. It has a lot of great things about it: the low-grade video gives the whole thing a samizdat quality that only amps up the creepiness, Laura Dern is terrific (I never really considered Lynch an "actors director" but he consistently gets outstanding performances in his films, he should get more credit for this), I love a good Gypsy curse as much as the next guy and I like how the movie makes a kind of sense, even when I have no idea what's going on (a Lynch trademark, I suppose). Basically, my complaint about it is that's it's essentially a horror movie and really good at being scary which means it's so terrifying that I'll probably never want to watch it again because really scary scary movies really scare me and I usually don't enjoy being scared. Basically, mystery whores doing the Loco-Motion: Yay! Crazy deformed screamy mouth: Nay! The #16 film of 2006.

Movie Roundup: Winter Break Edition

2009-12-04T17:37:00.000-08:00

The eighth Metro Classics series came to an end this week with a resounding success. Our first ever sold out showing made this our most profitable series ever. We're taking a break for a couple of months, but plan to be back just before Valentine's Day. In the meantime, we'll continue to have new content up at that blog every week, some end of the year lists and even a combined Top 72 films of the decade. For now though, I'm going to try to get back to writing here at The End. First up is a round-up of the movies I've seen recently, hopefully followed by the wrap up of what we saw at this year's Vancouver International Film Festival which has been sitting here in draft form for over two months. After that, I'd like to get back to the Movies Of The Year countdowns, which I'm aghast to realize I haven't updated in over a year.

Wild Reeds - A very nice coming-of-age movie and an interesting contrast with American Graffiti. Both films take place at the same time, roughly 1963, but Lucas's film is an elegy, haunted by the war and social change that'd be coming a few years later. Wild Reeds though, is haunted by the past, both the war in Algeria that comes to an end during the course of the film, but also WW2 and the factionalism of France's postwar politics. The end of American Graffiti leaves us with the sense that this time was the best night of its characters lives, that everything would go downhill from there. Wild Reeds leaves us with the sense that the characters lives are just beginning, that the whole world has opened up to them. The two movies use some of the same rock songs on their soundtracks ("Runaway", "Barbara Ann", "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes"), which I think had to be intentional on director Andre Téchiné's part. The #14 film of 1994.

Where The Wild Things Are - The Marie Antoinette of 2009. Like that film, it looks pretty, has a wacky "indie" score and is totally self-indulgent and self-aggrandizing. Unlike that film, it is suffused with what appears to be an attempt at conveying the frustrations and melancholy of childhood, but which instead comes off as self-pitying whininess. Despite all that, the thing that irritated me most about the film was fairly minor: the film's sense of time is utterly confused. It opens with the main character outside in the snow. Later in what is apparently the same day, he runs out into a completely snow-free night. His journey to the land of the Wild Things seems to take place entirely at dawn and dusk, with no day or night in-between. And once he gets there, we follow him through the night to dawn, when he goes to sleep. When he wakes up, it is apparently dawn still, as we follow him throughout the day time. Essentially, director Spike Jonze sacrificed all notion of temporal continuity for the sake of filming only at the magic hour (and the only reason I can think of for the weirdness at the beginning is he A. wanted the main character to build a snow fort as a precursor to his later actions while B. didn't want the audience to worry about a little kid alone in the snow at night). I know it's a nitpick, but it drove me nuts trying to figure out when things were supposed to be happening. Sometimes, I think I'm the only person in the world who can't stand the Spike Jonze-Sofia Coppola-Charlie Kaufman-Michel Gondry brand of hipster solipsistic aestheticism.

Spring In A Small Town - From 1948 and directed by Fei Mu, the Hong Kong Film Academy voted it the best ever Chinese language film a few years ago. I don't know about that, but it is really good. A love triangle plays out in a bombed out post-war space, the pacing is deliberate and the compositions are simple, beautiful and rarely call attention to themselves. I don't know if it's this film's influence, or simply a matter of a national style, but it obviously has a ton in common with later Chinese and Taiwanese films. The #7 film of 1948.

7th Voyage Of Sinbad - Totally entertaining film full of great Ray Harryhausen monsters. Kerwin Mathews is serviceable as the hero who is blackmailed into stealing a lamp and an egg from a cyclops in order to return his girlfriend (the stunning Kathryn Grant) to the correct size. A weird mixture of Arab and Greek mythology that is always fun. The #19 film of 1958.

Road House - Pretty good, but still trails at least Commando on my Totally Awesome 80s Action Movies list. Great cast for a Rowdy Herrington film. Patrick Swayze plays a surprisingly short bouncer brought into to clean up a small town bar and runs afoul of the local tycoon/villain played by Ben Gazerra, of all people. Fortunately his old buddy Sam Elliot shows up to give him support. I like the idea of a world wherein bouncers can become nationally famous for their bouncing skills. The #25 film of 1989.

Godzilla - The original Japanese version which I'm surprised I'd never actually seen before (I think I might have seen the version with Raymond Burr once). So much better than I thought it would be. Surprisingly nuanced it the way it deals with the main theme of so many Cold War sci-fi movies: the unintended consequences of scientific advances. Both Takashi Shimura as the scientist who wants Godzilla to live so he can be studied and the eyepatch-wearing scientist who has invented the only weapon that can save Tokyo but doesn't want to use such a destructive discovery are compelling: the film doesn't have a reductive view of science but rather embraces its contradictions. All that and giant lizard mayhem! The #10 film of 1954.

Fantastic Mr. Fox - I'm having a hard time thinking of anything I didn't like about Wes Anderson's new film. The stop motion animation is excellent, and Anderson's fastidious attention to set design and detail is perfect for this kind of filmmaking. The adaptation and expansion of Roald Dahl's novel is completely in keeping with Anderson's thematic obsessions (it's about oddballs trying and failing to fit in with society, and their coming to grips and celebrating their own inner wild animal) and visual style (his 2D planar framing has never been more appropriate to his material). It's fun and funny throughout, in that Anderson way that doesn't necessarily make me laugh out loud, but instead leaves me smiling for an hour and a half. He's most definitely my kind of hipster.

Woman Is The Future Of Man - The third Hong Sang-soo film I've seen, and the most imperfect. Once again, there's a love triangle involving a film director, but the scenario doesn't multiply as much as in Like You Know It All, nor are the repetitions as symmetrical as they are in that film or Woman On The Beach. It's bleaker than those other two films as well. While Beach had a strong sense of melancholy, this film at times seems downright hopeless. Perhaps my problem was that the film didn't, like those other two, focus on the film director character as much as his friend (a professor in this film). I really like that director character. The #12 film of 2004.

Team America: World Police - Too much of a mess to be more than halfway great. The puppetry and set designs are fantastic though. The film's really only good when it's parodying action movies: all the political, anti-actor stuff is either obvious or obnoxious. Same goes for the music. A huge letdown after all the brilliant songs in the South Park movie. But hey, who doesn't love crazy puppet sex? And the cats, the cats were great. The #30 film of 2004.

The Brothers Bloom - Something's missing here, but I don't know what it is. This story of con artist brothers on one last caper should be a much better movie. I like a lot of it, but the prologue and narration are ultimately unnecessary (I hate disappearing narration) and I'm not sure that the end really makes sense. The film plays with the notion of life as performance and being written/unwritten, but I don't know that it has anything really interesting to say about it. Director Rian Johnson shows some promise, but like with his first film, Brick, this ultimately feels like less than the sum of its parts. Rinko Kikuchi almost saves it though. She's fabulous. The #36 film of 2008.

Gates Of Heaven - People are weird. The wife asked if he (director Errol Morris) was making fun of those people. I said I didn't think so, he was just allowing them to dig their own graves (so to speak) and was reveling in their zaniness. Of course, she and I were making fun of them through most of the film. Even our dog was silently mocking them (during the scene where the woman is trying to make her dog sing, our dog had the exact same expression on her face as the wife and I did listening to the insurance salesman talk about motivation and positivity). And we really don't like the guy from the rendering plant: "recycling" indeed. Cinematically, it's nice to see Morris's style almost fully formed: mostly static shots, no narration, people for the most part talking directly into the camera with little apparent prompting. My favorite scene was with the woman sitting in front of her house rambling for what seemed like ten minutes about whatever popped into her head (mostly about her grandson who is either "hauling sand" or "working at the office"); I loved how Morris just let her go on and on. It wasn't malicious (how could you not like her?), but affectionate and playful. The #5 film of 1978.

Ballast - This year's Chop Shop: a low-budget realist indie drama about poor people trying to survive in a very specifically realized location. Whereas that film was cramped by its urban setting, this one allows the rain-soaked beauty of its wintery Mississippi Delta locations to infuse the film with a powerful sense of loneliness and desolation. Despite all that, and like Bahrani's film, there's a strong undercurrent of hope as the film depicts a broken family fitfully reconstructing itself. Michael J. Smith Jr is exceptional as a man who seems too smart for his world and finds this thoroughly depressing, but keeps trudging on despite it all. The #10 film of 2008.

Gone With The Wind - My second time watching this, the first was on VHS almost 15 years ago. Needless to say, high-def on a big screen in a sold out theatre was a much better experience. I liked the movie a whole lot more as well. The first half, up to the intermission, is pretty much perfect, paralleling Scarlett's decline with that of the South during the war. The second half is solid, but less engaging. Because it's stretched out of a greater length of time, it feels more disjointed, but also because the plot doesn't have the clear structure that the war brought to the first. Instead it follows Scarlett's ups and downs in her relationship with Rhett, the impossibly perfect Melanie and the totally lame Ashley.

The acting is uniformly excellent, Gable and McDaniel are exceptional and Vivien Leigh gives what I'm convinced is one of the best performances ever (I always really liked her Blanche DuBois, but she's better here). Fleming's direction is much more fluid than I would have expected, or remember from his other films. The camera is constantly tracking along the massive sets, or swooping in on the characters to heighten the melodrama. It helps keep a four hour movie from ever feeling like a slog.

The biggest eye-opener for me, though, was the Technicolor. I didn't think anything could top what Jack Cardiff and Powell & Pressburger did with The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus, but this film is at least a match for those, and was made almost a decade earlier. From the sunny greens of the open, through the fiery red in the films heart to the icy blues and grays at the climax, the film is never less than stunning. This is moving way up my 1939 list, all the way to #5.

2009-12-02T19:00:00.000-08:00

Self-Justification Of The Day

2009-11-30T17:08:00.001-08:00

Umberto Eco in Der Spiegel:

We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That's why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It's a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don't want to die.

2009-11-25T18:50:00.000-08:00

Birthday Of The Day: Gene Tierney, PGOAT

2009-11-20T10:34:00.001-08:00

2009-11-18T19:00:00.000-08:00

Movie Roundup: MIA Edition

2009-11-16T15:54:00.000-08:00

Things have been quiet around here lately, as most of my blog-related free time has been spent over on our Metro Classics website. In the past few months I've written the following articles there:

Why Charlie Chaplin Is Better Than Buster Keaton

A Filmography Of Wong Kar-wai In Eighteen Images (Or, Yay! Pretty Pictures!)

Clint Eastwood And The Myth Of The Last Golden Age

A Short History Of The Musical Genre, Towards Defending As Essential The Arguably Extraneous Dance Sequence At The End Of Singin' In The Rain

A Short History Of The Western Genre, And Why The Wild Bunch Was Ahead Of Its Time

Movie Year Showdown: 1938 vs. 1939

All About Bette

Check them out if you haven't already. If you have, read them again and see if they hold up over time they way classics are supposed to. We've only got a couple weeks left in this fall's Metro Classics series. After that, I should be able to get back to posting over here, including a wrap up of what I saw at the Vancouver Film Festival that I've been wanting to write for over a month now.

2009-11-11T19:00:00.000-08:00

2009-11-04T18:40:00.000-08:00

2009-10-28T18:40:00.000-07:00

2009-10-21T19:00:00.000-07:00

2009-10-14T19:00:00.000-07:00

2009-10-07T19:00:00.000-07:00

2009-09-30T19:00:00.000-07:00

Movie Roundup: Vacation Cleanup Edition

2009-09-28T15:25:00.000-07:00

With only three more days until I finally get to go on vacation (we're going to the Vancouver International Film Festival again this year), I thought I'd quickly clear out the most recent additions to the various Big Lists. If you want to see some actually writing about movies, check out the Metro Classics website. There's lots of good stuff over there, lately most of it not written by me (though I did have a History of the Western Genre a few weeks ago.)

Anyway, between work and various things falling apart around my house and rewatching the last seasons of The Office and 30 Rock, I haven't actually watched a movie in three weeks. But this is what I saw over the weeks before that, and where each film ranks for its year:

A Time To Love And A Time To Die: 9, 1958
Inglourious Basterds: 2009
Dakota Skye: 35, 2008
Virginia City: 22, 1940
Jeanne Dielman: 2, 1975
The Private Life Of Henry VIII: 11, 1933
Stalker: 7, 1979
They Drive By Night: 20, 1940
Silk Stockings: 14, 1957
A Chinese Odyssey 2: 51, 1994
Murder By Death: 13, 1976
Royal Tramp 2: 38, 1992
If You Could Only Cook: 13, 1935
Visions Of Light: 32, 1992

Metro Classics Returns, Again!

2009-09-24T00:25:00.000-07:00

Perhaps because we watched way too much geeky TV as kids, Mike and I have been inspired by the great James Burke to have our next Metro Classics series be based on Connections, with each film connected to the next film in the series in some nefarious way. The shows will once again run every Wednesday night, from October 07 through December 02. Here's the lineup, along with how the movies are connected:

Oct 07: Singin' In The Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952) (elaborate choreography)
Oct 14: Enter The Dragon (Robert Clouse, 1973) (action stars wreaking havoc on islands)
Oct 21: Commando (Mark L. Lester, 1985) (actors who became politicians)
Oct 28: The Outlaw Josey Wales (Clint Eastwood, 1976) (westerns)
Nov 04: Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959) (musicians who act)
Nov 11: Chungking Express (Wong Kar-wai, 1994) (urban romances)
Nov 18: City Lights with The Immigrant (Charlie Chaplin, 1931/1917) (silent comedy double features)
Nov 25: Sherlock Jr with The General (Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman, 1924/1926) (civil war films)
Dec 02: Gone With The Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939)

That's eleven films in nine weeks, six of them in high-definition. It will also be our eleventh musical, our seventh and eighth Westerns, our fifth, sixth seventh, and eighth silent films, our sixth Howard Hawks film, our fourth and fifth double features, our fifth Best Picture winner, our third Asian film, our second Gene Kelly film, and our first film that is so long we can only show it once.

Handsome fliers will be available within the week.

2009-09-23T19:00:00.000-07:00

RIP Henry Gibson

2009-09-17T01:37:00.000-07:00

2009-09-16T18:45:00.000-07:00

RIP Patrick Swayze

2009-09-15T00:03:00.001-07:00

2009-09-09T18:45:00.000-07:00

2009-09-02T18:45:00.000-07:00

2009-08-26T18:45:00.000-07:00