7th year straight. Stuff seen on TV/video/DVD denoted with a ^
after the parentheses, shorts denoted with "sXX" for whatever number it
is, repeat viewings have "/ /" around the film title. Reverse
chronological order.
32. (Jan. 22)
/Videodrome/ (1983, David Cronenberg) ***1/2
Comments TK
31. (Jan. 22)
Crimes Of The Future (1970, David Cronenberg) ***
Comments TK
30. (Jan. 22)
Stereo (1969, David Cronenberg) ***
Comments TK
29. (Jan. 21)
/Two Years At Sea/ (2011, Ben Rivers) ***1/2
Comments TK
28. (Jan. 20)
The Adventures Of Tintin (2011, Steven Spielberg) ***
Comments TK
27. (Jan. 19)
Four Nights Of A Dreamer (1971, Robert Bresson) ***1/2
Comments TK
26. (Jan. 17)
A Gentle Woman (1969, Robert Bresson) ***1/2
"There are no flashbacks in the film," Bresson said — and so, Michael
Dempsey rightly noted in Film
Quarterly in 1980, "the images are not being filtered through the
husband's subjectivity; instead, they are elliptical but objective
pictures of what happened between the couple." In a 1999 Film Comment essay, Manohla Dargis
indirectly differs, noting that it's more complicated than that:
"nothing in the film exists beyond the husband's narration, and there
is not a single image of the wife that is not preceded by either his
look or his voice." Either way, He (Guy Frangin) is very
much an unreliable narrator (the title his inapt appellation), and this
is a predictably
unrelenting portrait of oblivious cruelty: of his decision to finally
start buying useless trinkets for more than they're worth, he says he
could tell his wife (Dominique Sanda) was pleased (over an image of him
sinisterly closing the door to the living room, locking her back in).
If the film's depiction of a loveless marriage between a petty male
tyrant and an unpinnable opaque wife grows repetitive towards the end,
there's more than enough compensations: in the terse cruelness,
typically bracing reduction of whole scenes to isolated essentials (a
praying torso and feet at the dead woman's bedside without a face, a
scarf
floating to the ground rather than a suicidally plunging body), but
also in some rather goofy/uncharacteristic indulgences. Culturally,
Frangin and Sanda do their duty: at the cinema (seeing Pierre Clementi
in the long-forgotten 1968 period raunch-romp Benjamin) and in a modern
art museum (Bresson, characteristically, isn't impressed), but most
importantly at a production of Hamlet.
Fortinbras'
final
speech
is cut, and Sanda's aggrieved at the omission, after which she
reads Hamlet's speech to the players and admonitions against overacting
— Bresson speechifying directly about his methods for once. Television
rears its ugly
head — car races, documentaries on World War II — and the opening
bracingly plunges into urban France, yanking Bresson
definitively out of the rural areas he'd so often returned to. I keep
thinking about Ignatiy Vishnevetsky's notes on Bresson's comic
influences and some of that's here as well, especially in a shot of uneasy
husband-wife nighttime life: the jazz Sanda's got on her turntable
drops out and comes back in exactly in time with Frangin opening a
book, making him/us wonder if this woman's strange powers can sync up
his movements with music.
25. (Jan. 16)
A Dangerous Method (2011, David Cronenberg) **1/2
If Keira Knightley wants to act like Laura Palmer in the Red Room —
arms behind her back, convulsions, barely understandable speech — I
don't mind; I even think that's kind of fun. The real problem with her
Sabina Spielrein is that she's the archetypal Hysterical Woman, ticking
off every box of a generic conflation of potential symptoms and
manifestations — too much so for one person to play plausibly, let
alone with dialogue this literal (and endless). The undercurrent of
Meditation Upon Jewish Identity doesn't assert itself definitively
until the end title cards, which unemphatically toss out Spielrein's
final fate in a fashion resembling nothing so much as a less impressive
version of American Graffiti's
closing
cards,
which
is probably not the comparison hoped for. Sporadic
scenes click (Jung's word-association test of his wife; a brief,
notably sexless lake idyll between Jung and Spielrein), but most of
this is just very literal talk, so dull I checked out and started
dissecting Cronenberg's shot choices hoping to find some kind of
framing preference. Indeed, whether indoors (walls) or outdoors
(buildings), he likes to have a crisp vertical line bisecting the
background somewhere in the middle of
the frame, with whatever surfaces are there forming a right angle
roughly cradling the foreground into two crisp segments. See
also Amy
Taubin on his two-shots with "a somewhat wide-angle lens that
flattens space, making the actor in the foreground seem
disproportionately large in comparison to the actor in the background
[...] to reveal something about subjectivity: how one's
self-involvement can dwarf one's perception and comprehension of the
other, or vice versa." True, and it's that kind of visual thinking I
don't do enough of, so it's not like A
Dangerous
Method was a total waste of time: through its general
lack of interest, it forced me to do the visual work. Win?
24. (Jan. 15)
B.S. I Love You (1971, Steven Hilliard
Stern)^ ***
Would-be counter-cultural statement from future TV-movie hack Steven
Hilliard Stern, starring fellow Canadian/The Graduate reject Peter Kastner
(trivia: while the Toronto Star's
obit
circumspectly notes that his one-man show long after his acting
career's demise "attacked his
mother," the ingratitude and hubris making him "an updated Canadian
male
incarnation of Norma
Desmond," his IMDB bio
page [apparently heavily written by his widow] more directly states
he was a "proud survivor of [...] mother-son incest"), flashily edited
in early '70s style by one Melvin Shapiro, who strobes between the end
of one scene and another's beginning Easy
Rider
style. Not
sure if comparisons to The
Graduate are earned — it takes more than an older woman, a young
man and her daughter imo, especially when it's handled as a cheap twist
— but the singer-songwriter score (from one Mark Shekter) makes
you long for the comparative rigor of Cat Stevens' Harold and Maude songs (not really,
but they're very generic early '70s lite-rock confessional). It doesn't
help that the Netflix version (the same length as Fox Movie Channel's
print, which is missing 10 minutes, making it hard to tell what might
be missing and if it'd help) is full-frame and from a terrible print;
it comes out looking like so much poorly-preserved grindhouse fare.
Still not without its inadvertent period charms, e.g. schmuck hero
fretting over why his plane conquest is now stalking him in his
building: "Why didn't you make it with the super instead? He's a
beautiful man."
23. (Jan. 14)
Love
Like
Poison (2011, Katell Quillevere)^ **1/2
22. (Jan. 14)
Belle
Epine (2010, Rebecca Zlotowski)^ ***1/2
21. (Jan. 13)
That Summer (2011, Philippe Garrel) ***1/2
Familiar Garrel terrain, all peeling walls and charmingly dilapidated
housing (mostly shot in Rome, but you wouldn't know it from the
interior world; this is a city captured far away from familiar tourist
sites). Louis Garrel's once again unamused by other people dancing in
the Regular Lovers redux
moment, a similar unalloyed joy — but the fallout's not just Garrel
glaring within the sequence but him calling Monica Bellucci a whore
when it's over. The younger Garrel's stone-faced
"acting" is still amusing, never more so than when he cries out in
would-be show-stopping pain during a lovers' quarrel, then promptly
politely apologizes for the overemphatic gesture. Father Garrel's
politics are still hilariously unreconstructed (much talk of the
revolution, the bourgeois, etc.) and amusingly blunt: not just a
sequence of cops chasing dark-skinned minorities ("Fucking Sarko,"
Louis fumes) but also a dinner guest emphatically underlining how
important immigrants are to France's ongoing cultural vitality ("Italy
hasn't done anything since the Renaissance"). A nice unexpected moment
demonstrates how to break up a scene when — in the middle of Bellucci
and Celine Sallette trying on clothes — a mouse suddenly appears and
Bellucci shrieks, sending the audience into what-the-hell laughter
(also hilarious: Garrel's version of a World War II drama, complete
with heroic machine-gun firing on the Germans; cf. also Bresson's fake
gangster film in Four Nights of a
Dreamer). Warm, enveloping, allowing room
for laughter either with or at the characters; Garrel won't dictate.
The final death scene is a lovely send-off for Maurice, but the whole
film has the same glow. "Will appeal to Garrel completists, if such
people still exist," sneered Boyd van Hoeij in Variety; we're right here dude!
20. (Jan. 12)
Case
Depart (2011, Lionel Steketee)^ ***
19. (Jan. 12)
Lancelot Of The Lake (1974, Robert Bresson) ***
Not proud of nearly giggling several times during one of Bresson's
most-universally-lauded cornerstones, but there are things here that
made me laugh that aren't really his fault; Arthurian mythos is
always this close to self-parody, and even when the intent is to
undermine would-be valorization, it's hard not to get distracted when
the opening arterial blood-spurts from a body whose head has been
chopped off are reminiscent of nothing so much as the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Emphasis on sound compromised by the use of the exact same horse
neighing sound some 30 or so times, which is just sloppy (if there's an
argument justifying the repetition I'd be curious to hear it). Joust
sequences ace, but the combination of Bressonian modeling/uninflected
dialogue pushes this to the brink of self-parody. On the other hand,
nearly losing it when hearing "Sir Marmaduke will find him" is entirely
my fault as all of a sudden a vision of a CGI Great Dane with Owen
Wilson's voice running into the frame was just too much.
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