Month: February 2007

films that don’t hold up

i remember liking lost in translation a lot when it first came out. i watched most of it again last night on ondemand and discovered that i didn’t really care for it at all, that all it is about really is the pan-desirability of scarlett johansson (i think i’ve now spelled her last name 12 different ways in the last year). it would be a much better film if the female lead were not someone who causes everyone’s chest to hurt when they look at her.

however, i am ready for a 10 disc boxed set of scarlett johannson from various camera angles and distances.

The Science of Sleep

I guess we could start with screwball comedy. The film vaguely resembles Annie Hall; albeit one rewritten by Tristan Tzara, directed by Luis Buñuel with sets and props by Joseph Cornell and Mike Kelly. And sure, throw Duchamp, Magritte, Beck, Breton and Dalí into the mix for good measure, but all this name dropping and genre marking simply ignores the singular talents of writer/director Michel Gondry. The Science of Sleep is charming, hilarious, poignant, sad, confusing, glorious, fantastical, inventive, mesmerizing, playful, hilarious, poignant, sad, goofy, silly, serious, beautiful, ethereal. It’s like pixie stix wrapped in cellophane, dipped in chocolate and covered with cloud fluff. This is the first movie Netflix has sent me that I will turn around and purchase. The commentary track alone is worth the price of admission. I love this movie. If I had been smart enough to drive the eight miles to Uptown, it would have been my best film of the year. This is why I like to watch; c’est mon dada.

sherrybaby/maggie gyllenhaal

since people on this blog are clearly bored, here’s a crackling recommendation. in sherrybaby, which is hereby joining my best-of-2006 list with full grades, sherry is an ex-con just out of jail and on her way to the halfway home that is to be her domicile. in the halfway home, she immediately does two things, in the following order: 1) she calls her child, to whom she’s not talked for three years (the child is about four), and 2) she fucks the director. this is pretty much what she does for the rest of the film, too: she attempts to establish a connection with her child, and she has lots of sex. sex seems to be the only way sherry knows of connecting with people and, for a change, these connections are not the abusive, exploitative, violent type films about dysfunctional women tend to portray. the men sherry beds may not all be rescuers, but they are all right. director laurie collyer is hell-bent on not giving us targets for easy judgment. even when sherry gives a matter-of-fact, bored blow-job to an employment counselor who’s understandably reluctant to put her to work in a kindergarten, you don’t hate the guy. he’s got a lousy job, and it’s not like he asked. Continue reading sherrybaby/maggie gyllenhaal

My review of Smokin’ Aces, in bad Portuguese

Aces de Smokin de Joe Carnahan ‘ em suas mais melhores rachaduras um leer Louco-Cão-embebido, meth-abastecido como funciona seus crazies e criminosos assorted com seus ritmos. Chame-o noir carny: frequentemente engraçado, superaquecido, geralmente divertimento. Mas, como o carnival, a película pode ser um bocado muito. Você termina sentir como talvez você não deve ter gastado tudo que dinheiro, consumido todo esse açúcar. Talvez alguns dos passeios não eram realmente divertimento, nem estavam tentando a duramente ter o divertimento. A película desliza, também, em um tipo de (sincere? ao menos) histrionics quasi-quasi-sincere que sentiu silly. Após o quinto close-up da cara puffy de Jeremy Piven e rachado, redrimmed, os olhos rasg-enchidos, ele sentiu mais como prestar atenção a um clown dolorosa sad do que um homem na borda. Ainda, eu recomendo: Jason Bateman sozinho vale a pena o preço da admissão. Mas — Giovanna & Mauer — você sabe que minha recomendação deve absolutamente ser ignorada, e scoffed em, por você, direito? Você odiaria este.

Bring the funny

Another short post: I rarely watch stand-up. I catch snippets on Comedy Central, and remember why. I rent a very rare concert film, like Sarah Silverman’s, which is actually pretty good, and I’m still kind of underimpressed. It’s not a genre that intrigues me–it’s like 70% miss and 30% hit and completely formally uninteresting to boot.

But two recent viewings beat the percentages. Demetri Martin’s standup “Person” is not on dvd, but you can catch most of it on youtube. He’s odd, and his ratio of hits to misses is closer to 65-70 to 35-30, and he tries out a few interesting variations that make the act something a bit more involving, too. His shtick: he looks like he’s 10, and he’s one seriously silly person. My favorite bit involves a large pad with graphs/charts for comedy.

But even better–and a lot odder (in the form of the dvd, which has both stand-up and various filmed bits that aren’t sketches but are not exactly backstage chatter either)–is Zach Galifianakis’ Live at the Purple Onion. His jokes don’t always work, but he delivers them with such strangeness, you get the sense that half of his material is being born on the spot. He’s really intense, and then he’ll pull back for an exceedingly silly self-deprecatory chatter on the stage. I’d even say that I get the sense that the filming of the dvd gives us a skewed, inferior vision of his abilities–he gets a bit caught up in the camera, and while funny I have this feeling he’d be even stronger live. Favorite bit: he has a running series of gags about characters he’s developing. One is the Timid Pimp, and that had me laughing for about five minutes.

Pan

Jeff and I saw the superb Pan’s Labyrinth just over a week ago, and I’ve patiently waited him out, thinking: he’ll put up a good post about it, and I can virtually nod my head. But he’s remiss. So I’ll note quickly a couple things:

I loved the film’s negotiation of the “fantasy” and the “reality”–or, rather, I loved that it both invites our attention to the distinction between its represented worlds and also carefully decenters our certainties about both. One world depicts a young girl grappling with a beyond-evil stepfather, a Captain in the fascist Spanish military brutally quashing the local resistance (even as he sternly seeks control of his new wife’s pregnancy). But the girl frequently wanders off into an old maze on the edge of the property, where she encounters a faun who recognizes her as a long-lost princess, and sets her three tasks allow her return to her rightful royal heritage in the underworld. Continue reading Pan

Ridiculous Good Fun

Quick and dirty recommendation: Stephen Chow’s Forbidden City Cop might be a parody of martial arts films but for its loving deployment of fighting styles and mythologies; it slips into exceedingly silly slapstick but then, effortlessly, shows a formal self-reflexivity that seems far more attentive. And I laughed a lot. Chow plays a secret police agent for the Emperor, circa 1890s China. It’s got about 13 forms of chop-socky, some recognizable from the genre and some dreamed up by Chow for this film (Flying Fairy being one of my favorites). There’s a running set of gags riffing on James Bond, extraterrestrials, Chinese medicine, and crossdressing. Not quite the equal of his Shaolin Soccer or Kung Fu Hustle, but well worth watching–even for those uninterested in martial arts action flicks, you’d dig this.