Month: October 2006

the damnation of oliver o’grady

a woman filmmaker has made a documentary about a famous pedophialiac priest, using footage she obtained when she went to visit him in ireland and discovered to her surprise that the priest was more than happy to chat away about his deeds and desires. she filmed him for eight days.

i could write this as a comment in the free-for-all that follows the alternet post i link to above, but i don’t have the energy to duke it out with the death penalty invokers and the castration advocates. so excuse me as i take this blog out of the purely filmic and into the political.

witch-hunt/lynching: from the description of the film, the priest sounds totally deranged. he brags about what he did, gets lascivious, indulges in details. now how cool is that? how easy is it to put a deranged man in front of a camera and allow him to crucify himself without the benefit even of a miranda warning? no wonder the man had to flee ireland. judging from the small sample on alternet, there are a lot of people out there who would like a bloody piece of him. Continue reading the damnation of oliver o’grady

The Prestige

An enormously-pleasurable melodrama about duelling magicians, told in a manner that while fractured into a complex time (and mindfuck) structure is never less than coherent and compelling. I’m a sucker for the lore and legend surrounding the heyday of magic (and I’d note that Ricky Jay, a real expert on those subjects, turns up too briefly onstage)–it was a cutthroat business, as interesting for the backstage infighting as for the strange ‘exoticism’ and confidence tricks of the shows. The movie captures that feel very well, even though zeroed in on the story of two rivals. Every actor is quite wonderful, particularly David Bowie in a small turn as Nikola Tesla. Much hay is made about the ‘twist,’ but I wasn’t terribly surprised–and the energies of the plot do not hinge entirely or even too much on that surprise. (As with magic, the “Prestige” may be the showy flash at the end, but the pleasures are all in the getting there. Which brings me back to my theories on narrative, but you all know them, so insert here.)

And I’ll forego further conversation so as not to ‘wreck’ anyone’s surprise. But at some future date I’d love to talk about this. And how the best films of this year have been/are crowd-pleasers–from Lee’s Inside Man to Scorsese’s Departed. Screw the serious?

I Want Candy

Saw Marie Antoinette yesterday, and I’ll say off the bat I was a little disappointed. I’m tempted to blame my fondness for Lost in Translation, but I think Sophia Coppola’s new film is just okay. It has its moments, most of which are carried by Kirsten Dunst who gives a really terrific performance. And Jason Schwartzman’s Louis Auguste is great. When crowned the new King of France after his grandfather (played by Rip Torn, who like Molly Shannon, Shirley Henderson, and the massive Marianne Faithfull, is underexploited) suddenly dies of smallpox, Louis Auguste bows down, turns his head upward and prays “God help us, we are too young to reign.” Continue reading I Want Candy

Bonaddiction

I need a sponsor. Sunday evenings, Max babbling to himself in his room, I head downstairs and flick on the tv before doing some prep work for Monday’s classes. Or that is always the plan. Invariably I flip around the empty gestures on every network until I hit VH1 Celebreality. Every week I forget that it’s on, put it out of my head–as if to ease the addictive behavior once I’m back in front of Bonaduce, sick to my stomach that I’m watching but unable to turn away.

Help me. I’m not at all suckered in by the advertising; I don’t believe for a minute that this is unfettered breakdown. I see it as so much self-destructive vanity, strutting rooster-boy preening for the cameras and an imagined public. What I don’t get is why I watch it. Someone give me a clue. Be my sponsor, and help me shake that red-goateed, gravelvoiced, ropy-muscled, narcissistic monkey off my back.

But at least it’s better than Studio 60.

Guy Maddin’s Cowards Bend the Knee

Guy Maddin’s been talked about on the blog here , and michael at least had talked about getting some of his movies over Netflix, which hopefully he has. This one was made the same year as his amputee beer baron with glass legs (and Kids in the Hall) epic Saddest Music in the World. It only recently came out on DVD.

I believe that most of it was part of an art installation Maddin did where parts of the ten chapters were viewed by individuals looking through peepholes. Here, each chapter is silent, black and white, about 6 minutes long, and with a jittery editing that makes it feel like you’re hand-cranking the film along backwards and forwards to re-watch little bits over and over again

It involves hockey, abortion clinics/hair salons/brothels, murderous hand transplants, wax museums, ghosts, the Soviet Union, male and female nudity and a kind of tribute to Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks that really I don’t think anyone expected to see. Continue reading Guy Maddin’s Cowards Bend the Knee

Lady Vengeance

So has anyone seen this apart from Reynolds? Sun hee? It is very strong indeed, and departs in a couple of ways from Chan-wook Park’s approach to the first two movies in the trilogy. I should say right away that I found ‘Sympathy for Mr Vengeance’ far weaker than ‘Oldboy’ and I was prepared to feel that ‘Lady Vengeance’ was more like the former than the latter. ‘Oldboy’ seemed to move well beyond revenge as a motivation, and the central performance was so strong it carried the movie. Anyway, as one would expect, the cinematography is superb with great use of color (flame red eye shadow, a drop of blood on flour, snow swirling overhead), and some wonderfully composed shots. Park just sets the camera up and has his characters walk around, in and out of the frame. It captures interaction – or rather the way in which characters simply talk past each other – better than having the camera shift from one character to the other (there is probably some technical name for this approach but I don’t know what it is). In one remarkable scene a couple eat dinner silently. The man gets up, brutally pushes the woman onto the table and rapes her. Then he returns to his side of the table and they both begin eating again.
Continue reading Lady Vengeance

The Tenant – Polanski (1976)

I feel like a pig shat in my head. And not because I had too much fun drinking last night. Nope, not a thing to drink – just the normal blinding, incapacitating headaches that come with a life of fear and paranoia in the big city. Still, my apartment is a relatively safe haven, what with its bountiful reserves of candy and bed. Such peaceful abodes seem to have eluded M. Polanski who should have taken the presence of Shelley Winters as concierge as a bad sign from the get-go. Continue reading The Tenant – Polanski (1976)

Halloween

In grade school, every Halloween was marked by a showing of Abbott and Costello Meet the Wolfman (and then playing it in reverse, to the tune of “The Monster Mash”). Now I just do horror films, trying to snatch up recent or older releases for the weeks leading up to 10/31. So…

I started with Lucky McKee’s The Woods, an ultimately-too-predictable take on the gothic: schoolgirls, families both redemptive and corrupted, the dangers of nature, and hints and allegations of sexualities outside of respectable range. Set in 1965, it follows a young, psychically-gifted rapscallion (Agnes Bruckner), sent away for pyromania to the strangely tree-infested academy run by Patricia Clarkson and a bevy of odd-bird women. What’s good about it: McKee has a gorgeous eye (and ear) for the spooky, and the film works despite itself in many instances. The cast is keen, especially Clarkson (and even has a very restrained Bruce Campbell), and there are touches of adolescent sarcasm and sexual agency that were smarter than your average bear. Continue reading Halloween

The Departed

During the first hour or so the film is all about the cut as Scorsese and Schoonmaker juggle a lot of heavy exposition, three complex central characters and three integral secondary characters. There are plenty of pleasures to be had–it is a return to form–and the way we move from scene to scene and character to character is handled with the kind of craft we expect from Scorsese (the intricate temporal and spatial shifts seem effortless and Scorsese uses pop and rock songs, once again, to hold everything together). Still, something was missing; the film felt a bit rushed and I wasn’t as invested as I thought I would be. And then Scorsese slows the train down a bit, tightening his focus and racheting up the suspence as the “cat and mouse” narrative kicks in. There is a set piece I won’t spoil by describing, but it is a blistering, anxiety inducing, white hot sequence in which the dramatic action takes its inevitable turn for the worse. For the next 75 minutes, the film is an unrelentless yet highly entertaining masterclass in cinematic, edge of the seat, tension. The acting is excellent; DiCaprio, in particular, is a marvel and Alec Baldwin and Mark Wahlberg accomplish a lot in very small bursts of energy. Jack does his best, but I think a scene or two explaining a turn to oddball behavior ended up on the cutting room floor. Still, it was a damn fun, ugly, brutal, bloody ride. I probably need to see it again.