Category: (by verdict)

Why Obscenity Matters

I walked out of The 40-Year-Old Virgin pleased but also unblemished. The film is unremittingly sweet-natured about its scatology, not unlike Anchorman or Farrelly brothers’ goofiness. (This isn’t really a post about verdicts, but: I’d recommend it, but the film is never as delirious as Ferrell or Farrelly can get, and far from the exuberant heights of Parker & Stone or The Aristocrats.) But I’m curious about unpacking a little of the alleged return of the hard “R,” or the (now decades–or is it centuries?–old) “return” to the irreverently bawdy.

But rather than the neat either/or that pops up in so many reviews (is crude, or is compassionate, and on rare occasions like Carell’s movie is both) I was wondering if we could get at a bit broader range of options for examining the games obscenity lets us play. I’ll start. Continue reading Why Obscenity Matters

Last Days

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.

The Five Year old Darwin & March of the Penguins

I took the kids to see March of the Penguins yesterday. I have no freakin’ idea why I didn’t realize Bad Things were going to happen in a Nature Documentary, and I’ve scarred another five year old for life. (The 4yo was more freaked out by the trailer for Corpse Bride, and I cannot for the life of me think why the MPAA thinks that trailer is “approved for all audiences”.)

The movie moves at a glacial pace. The penguins trek to their mating spot 70 miles from the sea, often staying awake for two weeks to make the hike. I felt like I had stayed awake watching for two weeks. Of course, all drama is provided by mother nature. Freeman’s voice is soothing, but not comforting enough that the kids Continue reading The Five Year old Darwin & March of the Penguins

Double Features

Someone (Frisoli I think) mentioned a few posts back how the New Beverly in Hollywood sucks. To this I think we all agree. But let’s for a moment champion the idea of the intelligent double feature, depsite the fact that the New Bev provides few, if any. This is a simple exercise: what would be an ideal double feature? Forget, for a moment, the typical New Bev 2x (such as The Godfather and The Godfather, Pt. II) and let your imaginations run wild. If you were in charge of booking at the New Bev, and you had an unlimited budget, what double features would you show? I’ll start things off:

Monsieur Beaucaire (1946) and Love and Death (1975)

The Graduate (1967) and Donnie Darko (2001)

The Ladies Man (1961) and Tout va bien (1972)

Mean Streets (1973) and Bad Lieutenant (1992)

If you want to suggest a double feature, I encourage you to provide a sentence or two that explains how each film complements the other. I’m too tired right now. Maybe I’ll do that later.

Broken Flowers

Nothing revelatory here. Jarmusch’s trademark minimalism without the visual flair his previous collaborator, Robby Muller (with an umlaut), brought to Dead Man, Ghost Dog, Down By Law and Mystery Train (as well as Until the End of the World, Barfly, Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark) . Then again Flowers‘s cinematographer, Frederick Elmes, shot Blue Velvet, The Hulk and Kinsey so the production team must have been working on a low, low budget as the film just doesn’t look good (perhaps it was the Landmark Cinema I visited). It has also been lauded about that Jarmusch wrote the screenplay in two weeks, but to me the film feels underdeveloped and tossed together (straining for poignancy without really achieving anything). Bill Murray has certainly been riding a fine wave over the last couple of years and he has lovely moments in this film, but if he keeps stripping away the artifice from the craft of screen acting he’s going to altogether disappear from view (perhaps that’s his plan). Broken Flowers, however, does come to life whenever a woman enters the frame. And what women: Jessica Lange, Sharon Stone, Francis Conroy, Tilda Swinton, Julie Delpy and Chloe Sevigny (who deserves special mention as she accomplishes the most with her character in the least amount of screen time). Not bad but nothing to drive out of your way to see.

Rancho Deluxe

This was an old favorite, a film that hit me when I saw it (at 10? 11?) as something strangely funny in some kind of adult way that I sort of comprehended, ‘though I could feel the whoosh overhead as innuendo flew by. And that’s something, ’cause the writing in this film is bone-dry, almost all the humor coming from some collision of the laconic manly cowboy-talk, iconic Western conventions, and irony thicker than a seed bull. I seriously loved the movie, saw it again in my teens, and tracked down other work by its writer, Tom McGuane, who subsequently became one of my favorite novelists. (Admittedly, however, his film work–the interesting Missouri Breaks, the pretty funny Tom Waits-including Cold Feet, and the execrable Ninety-Two in the Shade which was very poorly adapted by McGuane from his own excellent novel–is middling.)

Would it hold up? Mostly. Continue reading Rancho Deluxe

Murder By Death (1976)

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)

Robert Drew’s Primary — and some more thoughts on political films

Other films –

Robert Drew’s Primary is an early—even foundational—version of cinema verite; the camera follows JFK and Hubert Humphrey around Wisconsin over the course of about 36 hours, splicing together representative scenes but avoiding (mostly) voice-over and talking heads, instead trying (as Drew says in commentary) to ‘find’ the drama of events. The long, long scenes of candidates shaking hands, after or around events—really still impressive. Continue reading Robert Drew’s Primary — and some more thoughts on political films

3 by Alan Clarke: Elephant, Made in Britain, The Firm

Alan Clarke may well be the anti-Leigh. They made movies at the same time, both primarily for British TV, and they covered a lot of the same bases; that is the lower, and working classes of Great Britain. Clarke seems to focus more on big problems, and characters that typify those problems, while Mike Leigh creates characters that are less intertwined with those problems, and instead just live their lives depite them.

Clarke, who is dead, was a much more action-oriented filmmaker, and, like Leigh’s TV work, the scenes are very well composed and blocked, though they’re not showy or flashy. Reynolds will therefore call them bland. A new box set of Clarke’s work is out in the US and this marks the first time most of these have been seen here.

Continue reading 3 by Alan Clarke: Elephant, Made in Britain, The Firm

The Aristocrats

This film, by Paul Provenza and Penn Gilette, opens tomorrow in New York, and a few weeks later in select cities. Can someone go see it and report? Fat chance it ever comes to Charleston, but if anyone thinks it’s worth the 90 minute drive, I can see it when it opens in Columbia on (believe it or not) September 9.

I think Mauer first mentioned this documentary in a comment a few posts back. I first heard about it when I read this piece by Frank Rich: