Category: likey

Brilliant. Better than Elephant. A poetic mediation on celebrity, consumerism, nature, industry, purity, creativity, loneliness, youth, beautiful boys, disaffection, Mormons and death by misadventure. And Ricky Jay is in it. And so is Kim Gordon. There is no narrative, so to speak, and what little there is circles in and around itself. The soundscapes, as in Elephant, are multi-layered and complexly expressionistic. The cinematography is less showy than in Elephant, but I’d watch anything Harris Savides shoots (for a couple of minutes he simply shoots a television playing a Boys to Men video and its riveting). Worth the drive and much better than watching a bunch of people kick the ass out of a larger bunch of people (no matter how much style may be on display) for an hour and a half.

Last night on TCM they showed Murder by Death . I was 6 when this came out, and there’s no way I could have understood much of what was going on, but it quickly became one of my favorite films, up there with Snow White and TV’s Laugh-In. I know I must have seen it three times at the movie theater.

Even at 6, it featured some of my favorite actors at the time: Peter Sellers, the Bounty paper towel lady, Peter Falk, David Niven (who I knew from other Peter Sellers movies), James Coco (who in retrospect I must have thought was Dom DeLuise), Truman Capote in a rocket-powered chair… (whom I probably recognized from Dinah Shore’s show) Wow, if it’d had Paul Lynde and Jonathan Winters in it, that would have sewn it up for me.
Continue reading Murder By Death (1976)

Flipping channels the other day, I came across Johnny Depp on In The Actor’s Studio. He was talking about Sleepy Hollow, and how he was certain that he would be fired from the movie after it had been shooting for two weeks. When asked why, he said, here’s this very expensive film, with a lot at stake for the studio, and I am playing the lead character as a 14-year old girl. Why wouldn’t they fire me? Depp says Burton ran enough interference for him with the studio to keep it going, but yes, looking back on it, he was playing Ichabod Crane as a fourteen year old girl. Continue reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

What a double bill.

Solaris – reams have been written about it, and I don’t need to add more really, but it was an interesting reaction to 2001, which Tarkovsky apparently thought was “cold and impersonal.”

I had trouble with the reactions of the characters to the events taking place – they just didn’t seem to be plausible. Especially since the pilot who had originally seen the manifestations years earlier, and tries to tell Kelvin about them on earth, seemed very believable in his reactions, both in the archive footage of his report and his meeting with Kelvin. Continue reading Solaris / Trials of Henry Kissinger

Thai film–well, Thai director, ultrahip Japanese star (and cameo from Takashi Miike), played out in English, Thai, and Japanese. Shot beautifully by Christopher Doyle, which made me half-expect another Wong Kar Wai knock-off, but director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang has his own absurdist approach to narrative and imagery despite some nods toward WKW’s obsessions. Like so many films of the last few years (or narrative, always?), the movie plays around with issues of life & death, coincidence and meaning, romance, violence. Japanese expat protagonist Kenji (Asano Tadanobu) seeks to off himself at the beginning of the film–but, he takes pains to note, not for reasons most people commit suicide, although he never names the explicit reasons. Instead he gets mixed up with a local woman Noi (Sinitta Boonyasak) and… well, there’s a couple murders, an accident, a jealous boyfriend, Yakuza. But things never heat up, never boil over into plottedness.

Instead, the film seems willfully even derisively dismissive of explicit reasons. “Big” things occur offscreen, out of frame, or just out of the narrative; there’s a sly humor to the displacement of expectations, replacing our focus on the subtle interplay of the two lead characters. And they’re a joy to watch. The film’s enthralling.

Has anyone seen “Rescue Me”? We talked tv some time ago, and no one ever mentioned this — his show about firefighters. We caught an episode last night, and … it’s good. I had been a fan of his short-lived “The Job,” where he played the same character but as a cop, and that show too is often superb, ‘though pitched more directly as a comedy. “Rescue” seems (from one episode) to have a broader set of objectives, pushing dark comedy but also some of the bleaker portrayals of working-class men destroying themselves which Leary tackled in the film “Monument Ave” some time back.

I ordered it from Netflix, but I’m curious if others have any opinions.

This is easily the best film I’ve seen in some time. A French comedy–and lo these many years I’d assumed that beast to be mythical–about tastes aesthetic and romantic. Every character displays some worldview or some kind of love which collides with some other character’s, and the film is a dry sometimes cruelly blunt evocation of how we don’t understand one another. But it also studiously avoids taking sides–almost no character is simply mocked for bad taste.

In my favorite scene, a crass businessman is trying to woo an actress he’s fallen for, sitting in a crowd of her artsy friends, telling crude jokes which all involve shit or vomit. He completely misses their scorn, so rapt in his infatuation…. And although the actor never betrays the crassness of the character, never seeks our sympathies by softening his character’s faults or making him more likable, there is such compassion for his desire, such appreciation for his appreciation.

I also loved the speed of the film–scenes of 2 minutes, or less, and crosscutting between a host of characters. It feels like a farce in form, but plays much more subtly as a character study.

Highly recommended.

Batman Begins:
Unlike Mauer, who practices his anti-blockbuster sneer in front of a mirror every May, in preparation for quick scornful dismissals in every conversation he has all Summer, I actually continue to dream the dream of the grand great Hollywood extravaganza. I get suckered in every year, or, rather than suckered, I willingly suspend my scorn thinking–well, at least one of these previews has to portend something marvelous. And, of course, like Saturday morning cartoons and burritos at Taco Bell, the preview hype and expectation is almost always better than real life.

This film isn’t the holy grail. It is, though, what a blockbuster ought to be, could be: generally exciting, often surprisingly moving, smartly executed. Fun.
Continue reading Summer

I’m going to jump-start Mauer–I want to hear what he has to say about this flick.

My own thoughts: certainly it’s recommended. If for no other reason, to see Christian Bale, who couples the stunt starvation with some interesting performance choices. Sure, he’s got the sunken, haunted look down pat, but I was even more surprised by the strange smarmy falsity of his interactions with a waitress who might (or might not) be a romantic interest… it was an odd and off-putting bit of swagger, that seemed way out of keeping with the character–but, like much of the movie, made sense as it went on. (And it reminded me of Nicolas Cage, of lore–the Vampire’s Kiss Cage whose weirdness amplified a film’s potential surreality.) But the flick is also well-structured, well-shot, and always pretty gripping. (Even if not all that surprising, and not as spooky or disruptive as Brad Anderson’s last sort-of-ghost-story, Session 9.)
Continue reading The Machinist