I’m waiting on White from our local library (should have it today), and in the meantime watched two films that were better than I expected–but keep those expectations moderate.
The Matador is a sentimentally black comedy with a great anti-hero in, and a great performance by Pierce Brosnan as, assassin Julian Noble. Washed up and washed out, puffy face bleeding down into his neck, absolutely confident yet supremely obnoxiously aggressive with women… Brosnan has a great time ripping out lines (about, for example, how Mexico City has “the best-tasting Margaritas and cock” in the world) and barely keeping it together. Greg Kinnear and Hope Davis get the straight-arrow roles, a couple whose lives end up intersecting with Noble’s, and unsurprisingly these two actors acquit themselves very well–Kinnear even gets a few very fine emotional moments which surprise us into some reflection past the film’s gleeful seedy surface. The movie manages to juggle its sensibilities, slipping between cartoon and character study. I enjoyed it.
Just as enjoyable and pretty damn successful is Sixteen Blocks. Maybe I expected another fast-cutting incoherent action spectacle with an unhealthy dose of sarcasm from the screen’s greatest 13-year-old, Bruce Willis, so to see something better made me all weak in the knees. But Willis tamps it down and delivers a reasonable (i.e., reasonably quiet and thoughtful but always Willisian) performance as a washed-out cop hijacked into delivering a witness (the good Mos Def) to court, while avoiding many corrupt police baddies (especially the greatly malevolent David Morse). That’s about it: there a few nice wrinkles in the plot, some effective character stuff, and precise timing/editing–the film shows how your unexceptional B-movie thriller ought
I was tempted to do something more extravagant in the post, maybe playing with the vision of the aging action hero — trying to see how these two stack up against earlier versions. Willis seems to be playing off others’ examples, notably Eastwood. Brosnan’s is a better performance, with a lot more oomph given the inevitable comparisons to his work as Bond. But… nah. The best such performance is by a country mile the two leads in Jackie Brown; Pam Grier and Robert Forster are the best late-40s/50-ish action heroes ever. Setting up the comparison might set up too many hopes for these two films.
I’ve been watching a bunch of movies lately, but nothing terribly great, so I thought I’d use Mike’s post to get these out:
Takashi Miike’s The Great Yoaki War (2005) and Yokai Monsters Spook Warfare (1969). Miike decides to remake/resurrect a series of three Japanese monster movies that are based on traditional Japanese spirits / sprites / hobgoblins. An amusing thing about Spook Warfare is that the enemy monster seems to have come from the Middle East, and has no sense of humor, unlike the Japanese turtle/river monster. I really prefer these Yokai films to most of the other rubber-suit Japanese monster movies of the Godzilla variety. Surprisingly good special effects and storylines in all three original films, though each loses a bit of the sense of discovery as you watch them.
Miike’s version is based around a kid dealing with a new town and his parents’ divorce. (the original films didn’t deal with chidren much, if at all; a plus.) That makes it a little annoying, and the fact that the kid spends a good 2/3 of the film just screaming at things get annoying, but it’s got a ton of good stuff going for it also. The female monsters are sexier for one thing. There’s a big anti-consumerist sentiment to it, and it plays out like a live action version of a (poorly written) Miyazaki film. Most of the more popular monsters from the original films are in the new one, so it’s recommended to savor those first before gorging upon Miike’s huge beast of a movie.
The theory that “the more monsters the better” applies to all the films. If monsters aren’t your thing, but creepy Japanese ghost stories are, rent Onibaba, which is excellent.
MODERN ROMANCE (1981). I’d recently rewatched Albert Brooks’ Real Life, and Dayna hadn’t seen this one, so I picked it up while waiting for the relase of his Muslim World film. Still very funny; it’s a shame he didn’t make a few more of these West Coast Woody Allen relationship comedies. But really, he’s insane, and any woman with some self-respect would have put a restraining order against him. I don’t really get all the editing stuff going on in the film. Brooks and Bruno Kirby are editing a
bad sci-fi film starring George Kennedy. It leads to some funny stuff, particuarly a scene with James L Brooks as the film’s director trying to convince himself it’s a good movie, but there’s a lot of talk about how to cut a scene that seems like it should mean something in the context of the film, and I don’t think it does. It’s odd.
Brooks’ real-life brother Bob (aka Super Dave Osborne) has a great scene at a sports store with Brooks selling him jogging equipment. Technically, the guy isn’t half of the filmmaker Woody Allen was, even in his early films, but it’s still funny, and made me laugh out loud a lot.
THE GIRL FROM MONDAY (2004) Hal Hartley’s latest film; for the most part disappointing. Hartley made an excellent string of film in the 90s. From his PBS movie Surviving Desire to Simple Men and Trust. Then a string of pretty big arthouse films, Amateur and Henry Fool. Brought back to earth by the rather bad No Such Thing and this current sci-fi parable. It’s treading Alphaville’s plot territory, and it’s shot in annoying DV, which seemed to work OK in his last decent film, The Book of Life, but here it just annoys. It’s also anti-consumerist / anti-corporate, but without much resonance for our world.
I think Hartley’s strengths were many at his peak, and among them was casting. He discovered – or gave acting breaks – to a big batch of fine actors, notably Martin Donovan, James Urbaniak, Robert Burke, but also Edie Falco, Michael Imperioli, and Elina Lowensohn.
I saw a play he wrote and directed a few years ago about the Waco, TX massacre, and it was very good. I wonder why his writing has been so weak of late in his films when that one was good, but, who knows? He’s making a sequel to Henry Fool (a film I love) starring Parker Posey, so I still hope that he’ll return to form.
UNFAITHFULLY YOURS (1948) Preston Sturges – No one’s favorite Sturges film, right? i have to admit I wondered during the extended conducting scenes and the way-too-long slapstick section what Dudley Moore’s take on this would bve like. It’s not terrible, and I like the way it ends, but I know there are some big Sturges fans here. What do you folks make of this one?
ELECTRIC COMPANY (1971-77). I’m skipping around episodes, of course. But this show taught me to read, and had a great sense of humor, and I’m impressed re-watching some of it now. Morgann Freeman and Rita Moreno, of course. Spider-Man, Letterman (with Gene Wilder, Joan Rivers and Zero Mostel doing voices), sure. But my favorite then and now is Judy Graubart. She played Jane of the Jungle, (With Paul the Gorilla) and she had a great voice that could go in all sorts of directions. I can’t imagine there’s anything this clever and eductional on TV these days is there?
I have to re-see Modern Romance, but the scene about cutting scenes–I think it’s one major joke is that the movie enacts a failure to cut while discussing the need for cuts. I recall loving it; I saw this film before any other Brooks’ films, in fact before knowing who the hell Brooks was. I must have been 12? 13? I had no idea what to make of how aggressively awful his character was, but I recall loving it…
I also need to re-see Unfaithfully; that’d be a nice double-bill. But, yeah, the collision of styles and tones works less well in this film than most of his others, I think. (Although it may be that Rex Harrison wears less well, for me, than Joel McCrea or Eddie Bracken.) My favorite is Miracle at Morgan’s Creek.
just got done with 16 blocks. quite enjoyed it and don’t have a lot to add to mike’s take. god, my first movie in weeks, it feels like (and probably is). enjoyed it despite the annoying voice mos def was asked or chose to use.
I got the Wonder Showzen DVD after reading Reynolds’ comments, back on the 12 oz mouse thread http://www.highlyirrelevant.com/movies/2005/06/21/12-oz-mouse/#comments and … he’s right on all counts. It’s funny, joyously blasphemous, and then it gets tired after a little while. I find this to be an interesting comparison to the Electric Company DVD set, which I saw recently. Electric Company was a real kids show, geared towards learning to read, and was made in the wake of Sesame Street’s success. One on the things I really liked about watching the old E.C. episodes was that while there was a group of kids in the cast, they were almost never the focus of the show or sketches; it was the adults who were the focus (Cosby, Morgan Freeman, Rita Moreno, etc). Wonder Showzen is aping Sesame Street more than Electric Company, and frankly the weird premises of Electric Company sketches would already be too far out there to be parodied.
I’ll again wish that Liam Lynch’s old MTV puppet show Sifl & Olly would be released on DVD, and agree that for pure inventive humor, Aqua Teen Hunger Force beats out Wonder Showzen.
This is a minor, minor pleasure but I watched C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America last night. For those unfamiliar a professor (film studies?) at the University of Kansas made this clever though ultimately repetitive pastische/parody of a Ken Burns documentary adding breaks complete with commercials for genuine consumerables like Coon Chicken Inn and Darkie Toothpaste (the former a popular restaurant chain in America during the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s; the latter a brand of toothpaste sold overseas well into the 1990s–both brands utilize minstrelsy iconography). Anyway, the film, using talking heads, renactments, and historical still photography, tells an alternative history of America based on what might have happened if the South had won the Civil War (for one, Lincoln puts on blackface and attempts to escape to Canada but he and Harriet Tubman are arrested–Lincoln serves five years and is released while Tubman is executed). Again a minor pleasure, but the idea that a slave-trading America would end up with absolutely no culture whatsoever is amusing (as is Canada’s cultural hegemony due to the influx of slaves crossing the border to freedom). The filmmakers also argue–and perhaps I’m stretching things here–that a slave-trading America obsessed with racial purity ultimately leads to its own implosion. Reading between the lines, the film seems to suggest that the America we live in right now–given all its faults and its painful racial/ethnic tensions–is still a pretty damn good place to live; that we are much more forthcoming and ideologically progressive when it comes to racical, ethnic and cultural diversity than most everywhere else on the planet (think France, Germany, Israel, Lebanon, China, Russia, Afganistan, etc., etc.).
Knife in the Water (1962). I’m not a big Polanski fan. I like Chinatown naturally, and Rosemary’s Baby is excellent, except for the terribly corny drug-rape scene (“This is no dream!”), but i’ve not seen many others (or remember many others) besides those.
Knife is quite good. Three very believable perofrmances, particularly the woman. Nice juxtapoistion of the claustrophobia of being on a boat while at the same time the wide-open vistas of being on a lake. I kept remembering Dead Clam while watching it, with the pre-glam Nicole Kidman. But this film avoids the traps of several cliches that 30 years later films like Dead Clam were still gleefully falling into.
It’s intersting to see what passes for wealthy/successful in early 1960s Poland. We’re a bunch of materialistic, spolied brats – that’s the big lesson I learned here, and – re-learn every day.
And I think I’ll leave my typo of Dead Clam in there, since I made it both times and I really like how those two words look together.
I’ll put Lemming here, a slow-paced, suspenseful thriller by Dominik Moll, who made (what I thought was) the outstanding With a Friend Like Harry. In this one a young couple get entangled with the boss and his spouse to at first George & Martha-ish discomfort then increasing tension and violence. It’s great early on, but as the story settles into event, it loses the dread of its title metaphor (a rodent seriously out of its home environment) and the stunning presence of Charlotte Rampling, as the boss’ unnerving bundle of nerves wife, Alice. The first thirty minutes are golden, but….
When Rampling steps out of the picture, the film then is reliant on the great but subdued Charlotte Gainsbourg and leading man Laurent Lucas. Lucas is an interesting guy–kind of looks like a caricature of Montgomery Clift, with a little too much nose and chin–who is excellent at being besieged and out of his depth (witness his reactions to the force of nature Sergi Lopez in Harry), but when he’s carrying the picture, such weakness actually drains some of the tension out of the film. (I prefer him reacting to some strong other, rather than reacting to events and being the primary actor.) But… it’s worth a look; entertaining, if not as strong as I’d hoped.
Oh–meant to comment on Polanski, too. Mark, check out Repulsion which is probably more impressive than engaging, but its depiction of madness is claustrophobic and intense. But I also really like The Tenant and his Macbeth–he’s great at dread, and these films (like Knife, or his best) are a lot of fun.
your favourite movies, re-enacted by bunnies.
I may try to write something more lengthy about this later, after i’ve seen more, but are there any fans of the films of Charles & Ray Eames?
They are furniture designers primarily, and I’ve never picked up their film DVDs until I got Vol 5 at random last week, and it was one of the best, most exciting things I’ve seen in a long while. I’m anxious to see more now, and want to stay away from their iconic “Powers of 10” so as not to overshadow other less “major-statement” films. Still, if Vol. 5 is any indication, it will all have its charms. And hey – Only some of it is about furniture! I frankly wished more of it had been.
has any of their stuff been re-enacted by bunnies yet?
I watched Lemming and enjoyed a bit more than Reynolds. Once Rampling disappears from the screen (well, there is a sighting or two as the character metaphysically hovers over the entire narrative), the film transforms itself into a Buñuelian ghost story where what appears to be and what is are slippery distinctions at best. It is slow-paced–much more French than the Kubrick-inspired energies of With A Friend Like Harry–still, it’s worth a look.
my favorite furniture is Kim Novak.
why are all these in-depth reviews/discussions being hidden in “minor pleasures”? if you have so much to say about it it probably deserves a top-level topic of its own. i am exercizing my dictator powers and breaking v for vendetta and duck season into topics of their own.
Just watched ‘Sixteen Blocks’ and echo Reynolds. It is remarkably good for late Willis. I would have skipped it without the recommendation, not least because the original Eastwood version was itself pretty weak. The one thing I would emphasize from Reynolds review is that we get another wonderful performance from Mos Def. He mumbles his way through the movie, filling up all the empty space of Willis’ silences. You can just see Martin Lawrence playing the same role and just coming over as the embarrassing, wise-cracking black sidekick. But Mos Def gives the role real dignity. After this and ‘The Woodsman’ I’d love to see him get some real acting roles. He is a gem.
Mos Def has gotten some real acting roles; you just have to get to NYC and pony up good money for Broadway tickets. His reviews for Suzan-Lori Park’s Topdog/Underdog were stellar.
Oh, I had no idea. Serves me right for thinking that every bit of information I need is on Imdb.
Check out http://www.ibdb.com. The Broadway database isn’t as meticulous as the movie database, but it’s not bad. Unfortunately, it doesn’t list off-Broadway work.