Friday, September 28, 2007

Have You Seen the New iPod Campaign?

Hotel Chevalier (2007)
directed by Wes Anderson
rating: no cravats
downloaded from iTunes

I may have been forced to watch that American Express commercial every time I went to the movies last year, but at least it was two minutes long.

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Maurice, Marooned (3)

Pauline à la plage (1983)
directed by Eric Rohmer
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

The central conceit of Pauline - that kids are more honest with themselves than adults, and therefore happier in romance - is a rehash of the sublime last minutes of Le Genou de Claire. The same trip around the block is never as much fun the second time, especially slower. It's a sweet take on youth, but also (here, anyway) naive and not very thoughtful.

Oddly, Rohmer not only lionizes Pauline - she is in control of every one of her encounters - but he does it by being vicious, something he almost never is, with the adults. They flirt and prattle on, bore each other and us, but inhabit too much of the movie to ignore. Rohmer's best films are never about subjects that might be mistaken for a light-hearted Scenes From A Marriage-by-the-Sea, or any one of thousands of dramas about infidelity or divorce. His worst are still beautiful (you can watch the season end just by watching the hydrangeas), but they read like someone else wrote them.

This is one of his worst.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Yes a Woman, Yes & Yes (2)

Le Beau Mariage (1982)
directed by Eric Rohmer
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

"There's some will, even in love," says Sabine, confirming this new eon of the great film heroine. In all of Rohmer's movies, it is always hard to discern what a character thinks about herself, whether she is right in her own eyes, deceptive, assured. Rohmer himself said that any of his protagonists could wake up just after. His movies could always be dreams.

Sabine, more than Anne in La Femme de l'aviateur, is difficult, even exasperating. But she is true to her honest impression of the heart she carries. Unlike Anne, Sabine is not left behind as the movie concludes. Her suitor, instead - the male - is summarily dismissed (his last act is stooping outside his office door to scrape together the spilled contents of a client's portfolio), and Sabine finds resolution, a good seat on the train to Le Mans, and even, at the very last, a smile.

Rohmer thinks in pictures. When Edmond tells Sabine he wrote a letter she should get today, we know the contents, the gist. We can imagine Edmond writing it, or the room where Sabine might sit to read. But Rohmer keeps Edmond there, let's him stammer and hem, and then explain. We get Sabine's tears, but also her moment of assertion, her grace note, and her exit. When she meets Edmond for the very first time, they come in from outside, and a breeze follows them through the door. Shots through the windows of cars and trains, rain on the streets and awnings of stores, the light in a frame we pass but will surely return to: the most natural beauty you can imagine.

"If I get married, it'll be with a man I like right away."

Batman & the Mona Lisa

Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964)
directed by Byron Haskin
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Easily the fastest horse in Criterion's stable of B-grade science fiction and horror. There is weird splendor to the Martian landscapes; an eeriness in the dreams of a traveler through ancient atmospheres; jittery, unearthly stealth to the alien antagonists; and, staple of sixties success, a rough charm to star boy's banter.

Of course, it's a no-brainer to imagine director Byron Haskin borrowing Friday from the Western set a soundstage over. "Listen, retarded, I don't what you're trying to tell me, but we're not budging from this spot until you learn some words. A-okay?" American habla, no doubt.

But then the spaceship that Kit abandoned orbits above him one more time, like a clock (or a calendar by then), and the pilot, so lonely, shoots it down.

The Way Out of the Forest

Death Proof (2007)
directed by Quentin Tarantino
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

I'm fortunate to have two friends with the right takes on Death Proof. In the movie's first half, says Sam, we're told that no one remembers stuntmen anymore; in the second half, we meet a stuntman. She gets herself on the hood of a car and stays there. The girls say her name about a thousand times. Zoë Bell. Zoë the great.

Andy's post is here. David Thomson (sorry) wrote that Godard divorced Anna Karina because he only saw her - like everything - through movies. No Anna but the face in the dark. I think Tarantino is just the opposite. The overriding impression at the end of a movie like Death Proof is that women like this are everywhere, Tasmania to Texas.

So there's not much I can add except to triangulate. When Rosario Dawson realizes that the man behind the counter at the gas station in Tennessee has an issue of Italian Vogue to sell, she asks the cheerleader outside to go halfsies. Vogue is best passed back and forth; Death Proof is best with friends. Best of the year, sincerely.

Friday, September 21, 2007

Les Nuits de Eric Rohmer (1)

La Femme de l'aviateur (1981)
directed by Eric Rohmer
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

Free at last of Gus Van Sant, I needed to wash my hands; how better than Maurice Scherer? Rohmer's Comédies et proverbes sextet, and not the Contes moraux, are the central artifacts of his fundamental romantic philosophy. The Contes moraux, after all, are religious anecdotes, and despite their naturalism, unerringly reward self-involved male protagonists with closure for choices Rohmer insists were well-made - cluckish reinforcements that none of them deserve. The victims of this Jansenist cold shoulder are us, who wonder why this director has a reputation for his actresses, and for the women they play, infinitely rich in their inner lives but passed over by Rohmer in his quest of Percevalian perversity.

With Perceval le Gallois, Rohmer got that nonsense out of his system and grew up (at sixty-one!) to make La Femme de l'aviateur. It stars Marie Rivière (with Beatrice Romand, the director's definitive "she"), who is similar in some ways to the eponymous temptress in Ma nuit chez Maud. Here, unlike Maud, Anne wins not only our sympathy, but Rohmer's, too. The ostensible protagonist, François, is a good enough sort; he wants to do right by Anne. But Anne is the only character to really think the film's many love affairs through (for Lucie, the girl in the park, her afternoon with François is, simply, a nice distraction). Maybe Rohmer just needed an everyday relationship, complete with scheduling conflicts, to transition from the inhuman remove of - well, even Le Genou de Claire - to the real world.

"Do you believe me?" asks François.

"What difference does it make?" replies Lucie. "I'm sure there's truth in what you say, but you tell a good story, too. So do I, but only to people who don't. Some talk and others listen." I think Rohmer finally listened, and I think, with time, that method became one of the transcendent few in movies.

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

The Road Warrior



Boone remembers his visit back in time to meet the Feral Kid

Monday, September 17, 2007

The Anagrammatical Animal

Irma Vep (1996)
directed by Olivier Assayas
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on VHS from the vaults

My first impression of Irma Vep four years ago was the movie's film critic ideas: art with an "A," authorship (another "A"), et cetera. I was in love with Maggie Cheung because I'd just seen In the Mood for Love, and I liked the way Jean-Pierre Léaud drank Coke from the big bottle - three liters minimum. But films about movies aren't what they used to be, at least to me. In Paris this spring, Day for Night barely caught my attention at a theater in the Latin Quarter; Elizabeth and I might honestly have watched Music and Lyrics first, if there wasn't so much David Lynch in town. Irma Vep is still a find, but feels smaller than it used to. I admire the movie now more for the even temper of a central love affair that isn't ever more than a well-placed question or two, a disappointment when time runs out, and the modest drape of winter to encourage nearness, if not intimacy.

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Lost Lost Lost

Gerry (2002)
directed by Gus Van Sant
rating: no cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Gerry, for me, is almost without worth, a film that devalues landscape, scriptwriting, acting, editing, and direction by never exercising a choice. When a camera is allowed to pan indefinitely, or an actor to sit staring off to the right of the frame for minutes at a time, the director abdicates his claim to authorship, and makes instead a collection of images that are rudderless, without intent, and, subsequently, without consequence.

The movie occupies three dramatically different landscapes (filmed across multiple continents); each place, in itself, is too unique to be anonymous, but Van Sant reduces all of them to the sounds of either wind or silence, to the mere color gradations of sunset or sunrise - to metaphors for isolation that clarify nothing, whether Matt Damon and Casey Affleck take their hike through Utah or Argentina. When Van Sant isn’t lobbing tumbleweeds at his actors' backs through a canyon (has a tumbleweed ever seemed more out of place in a movie?), he reminds us that terrain is not profound simply because someone thought to bring along a camera.

In Lawrence of Arabia, of course, the point in the desert rides in towards the camera and becomes a man on horseback. The scope of the heat and sand frame his narrative, his personality, his philosophy. The scene is wordless because the vision says volumes. In Gerry, the desert is a space and the characters two people. It is either a comedy about Will Hunting lost outside of Cambridge, or nothing at all. Not even pretty pictures, considering the wilderness they're working with.

And still, somehow, someone like Stephen Holden (a man who is paid for his opinions about film) references the movies of Abbas Kiarostami - a director whose relationship with environment could not be more different - in a review. Somehow Beckett is invoked, when I was reminded instead, in Damon and Affleck's endless repetition of the word "gerry," of two Vermont cops daring each other to say "meow" on a routine traffic stop in Super Troopers.

Hulka Burning Love

Stripes (1981)
directed by Ivan Reitman
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Less the source of Stripes' dramatic tension than an excuse to somehow throw Warren Oates into the mix, Bill Murray's stint in the US military is a time capsule more than a movie - a nervous patchwork of episodic Second City/Caddyshack hijinks, itchy Egon Spengler cool, lots of random nudity, and a racist John Candy played for laughs. These days, girls don't show their breasts in movies, Army films aren't funny again, and Warren Oates is dead. Anyway, I was past due on this one, so here it is.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Paris Landmarks, Eiffel Tower

Brigitte et Brigitte (1966)
directed by Luc Moullet
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

Nothing makes me as appreciative of professionals as a movie from the French New Wave rendered meaningless by Facets' sloppy authoring on their release for Luc Moullet's A Girl is a Gun. You can imagine the appeal for me in a title like that, but apparently no one bothered to make sure that subtitles would actually appear on the DVD release. They're supposed to, but they don't. Angry, I burned the second disc of The Luc Moullet Collection instead, hoping to one day find some satisfaction in the director's first feature, Brigitte and Brigitte.

I'm happy to say I did, although, when they do appear, Facets' translations are one high school essay away from incomprehensible. But Claude Chabrol, Samuel Fuller, and Eric Rohmer (not looking a day over 65) make funny cameos. Both heroines meet at the Austerlitz train station and become roommates; they tour Paris, make jokes about Alfred Hitchcock, and, like the director, don't take their stories too seriously. A friendship from the page of my old movie daydreams.

As a critic at Cahiers du Cinéma, Moullet wrote a lot of wonderful things about Fuller - among them, that Fuller "pretends to adopt all points of view, and that's what makes his humor sublime." Brigitte is a far cry from something really special like Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle. Sometimes it's even tiresome, but I can imagine Rohmer watching this in 1966 and thinking, "maybe I ought to make women my heroes, and not just the philosophical quandaries of self-involved protagonists." Maybe this was the movie that made my favorite director just that.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Hello, Newman

To Die For (1995)
directed by Gus Van Sant
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Nothing about this movie is exceptional, except for one dramatic shot (agents marching into the surf to arrest a kid while he harvests clams with his dad) and one funny dramatic resolution (the Italian family really does have mob connections). Nevermind any real-life inspirations: the whole conceit for the crime Nicole Kidman and Johnny Cash commit together is ludicrous from the start. Her husband is what? Crimping her style? Certainly he isn't any real impediment to her career, and her voraciousness in offing him goes above and beyond any relation to the tone and narrative of the movie itself.

And what's with these kids? These one-note stereotypes abused by their mother's boyfriends and ignored by their teachers at school? Didn't they get the memo that Gus Van Sant understands teenagers? Maybe I'm being hard on the guy, but it's hard to see the positive reviews for To Die For as much more than a generational crush on Mrs. Keith Urban acting out too many critics' self-loathing fantasies. Unless everyone just loves Matt Dillon's early, hammy audition for There's Something About Mary. Honestly, he might as well be wearing the mustache.

More importantly, if Psycho wasn't proof enough, Van Sant doesn't understand the pliable nature of filmmaking's fundamentals. When Kidman wows the producers of her small-town television station with a speech she stole from a newscasters' convention, the camera is tight on her face (presumably to show the dramatic effect of a TV close-up). Later, when Dillon suggests she quit the biz to help him with his restaurant, the camera is far away (from her angle, I guess, to show how little she thinks of him). But if this is really a comedy, like the reviews say, why not do the opposite - let Dillon and his absurd pep talk get the dramatic framing, and use the long shot to make Kidman, well, funny.

At least To Die For shows a nice side of New Hampshire Ontario!

Monday, September 10, 2007

Lyrics by Michael Pitt

Last Days (2005)
directed by Gus Van Sant
rating: 1 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix



on the road to Big Pink

I'm amazed to discover a critical consensus in praise of Last Days, ranging from the ridiculous (comparing Michael Pitt's Blake to Elliott Gould's Phil Marlowe) to the embarrassing (the movie acknowledges "everything that remains unknowable in other people's souls"). What, exactly, does a wordless screenplay say about addiction? What does a guest appearance by Harmony Korine say about Van Sant's sincerity?

Cameras are capable of incredible images, and Last Days is full of them - a walk at twilight in blacks and blues, for example. Van Sant relies on images and time to make his points: long takes and beautifully saturated forest climes. But this is the film laureate of the Pacific Northwest, right? Why did he shoot Last Days in upstate New York? Shouldn't that matter in the way people talk about it? Isn't it sort of like CGI for the teenage girls in love with River Phoenix?

And why is the title Gus Van Sant's Last Days (and where's John Carpenter when you need him)? So many questions! It isn't much of a point, maybe, but great art should clarify, not obscure. It should recast the world around you, not reduce it to the relief you find in a swim in the woods. Last Days is as sentimental as Forrest Gump, and I'd have preferred seeing Blake blow his brains against the greenhouse wall to his spirit's ascension from the window frames. A moment like that renders any critic's claim to the film's small graces moot. I just don't know why so few critics saw it.

RS

Drugstore Cowboy (1989)
directed by Gus Van Sant
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Reverse Shot's next symposium is on filmmaker Gus Van Sant. He's a director I have an opinion about, but looking through his filmography last week I realized I hadn't actually seen enough of his movies to argue my position fairly in an honest-to-goodness public forum. For the next few days I'll be amending that; since I'm writing about Drugstore Cowboy for the issue, it seemed as good a place to start as any.

Drugstore Cowboy reminded me of an aside in William Eggleston in the Real World. That documentary begins by following Eggleston on assignment in Kentucky, where Gus Van Sant has commissioned the photographer to take portraits of Van Sant's hometown. In Drugstore Cowboy, Van Sant takes time to shoot the same locations in different light and different weather. He films the sky above an apartment complex like a photograph, framed meaningfully, like a still. There are moments in the rain and shots through car windows, and even a shot of a car on the road taken from a helicopter, so that we see the landscape of Oregon.

Van Sant has an eye for images, but as a storyteller he's burdened by a sentimental streak. In 1989, Drugstore Cowboy was praised for not moralizing its heroes' plights; hindsight says otherwise. The narrative is burdened by too many fictional coincidences, and its "objective" take on drug culture in the seventies is romantic more than it is removed. The thing with beautiful frames is even a cheap apartment looks good. Which is fine; there are worse things. Drugstore Cowboy is fine, just dated.

PS - Is this the movie that made David Lynch fall in love with his Annie of Oregon? Did Grace Zabriskie introduce them?

Thursday, September 06, 2007

Checkered Past from a Checker Cab

Night on Earth (1991)
directed by Jim Jarmusch
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix



It's strange that Jarmusch, who in Stranger Than Paradise seemed so interested in place, is attracted to taxi cabs for the sense of privacy they entail - the anonymous contract of conversation between driver and fare. The five locations on display in Night on Earth appear at their most superficial - the only tracking shot from the taxi in Los Angeles films two identical businesses in a row - without any insight into the universality of Jarmusch's ostensibly global narrative. Worse, the camera notices so little in five cities that contain so much.

The inclination is to like the movie's meandering mien, like the last shot that ends on the sentiment of "nothing's free" as the winter sun softens Helsinki. But Coffee and Cigarettes retroactively exposes the warmth in Night on Earth for an uneasy masking of having too little to say. Here, as there, Jarmusch is interested in contrivances, and not in really noticing the world. From a taxicab at night in a city like LA (or Paris or New York), that's the last thing the audience should be thinking. Cities were made for watching at night. And from a car? Forget about it. Otherwise it might as well be Meg White wasting our time in a colorless room.

15052 Ventura Blvd

Valley Girl (1983)
directed by Martha Coolidge
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix



Valley Girl was, famously for me, the dearly beloved favorite of Alamo Heights High School alumnus Patricia "Patootie" Tate, who mocked me a lot in a good-hearted way and lashed out at everyone around her with such consistent, deliberate "offbeat" hilarity that she apparently had no choice after college but to go straight to work as a bank teller, the most boring job in the world.

As far as Valley Girl is concerned, Patricia almost certainly had a thing for Julie Richman's friends, for the clothes they buy and the time they spend at diners eating fries and burgers. Probably Patricia was in love with Randy, or, knowing P, Randy's friend Fred's blue hair. Valley Girl is the smart sort of teenage movie you fall in love with and swear by until, I guess, you have kids of your own to pass it on to. It isn't great but I'm not a teenager.

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Women Like That

I Shot Jesse James (1949)
directed by Samuel Fuller
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

I look into my crystal ball and see the imminent hype for Andrew Dominik's Too Much Title (of course Sam Shepard's in it, and of course it's two-and-a-half hours long). The me in the crystal ball is wiser than the me writing this entry (ah, time), but we both agree that you don't need to tell stories that were already told so well by someone as adept and romantic as the Sam it's always nice to have around. I Shot Jesse James is 81 minutes of heartbreak, action, honor, and generosity - and unlike the legends of Brad Pitt and Morgan O'Mally, this one's all about a girl.