Taking requests from Mrs. Wilberforce.

I admired the Tom Hanks performance in the Coen Brothers version, for the way he twanged and tingled his lips around his words about waffles forthwith and whatnot. But here Guinness manages to be as absurd and silly and yet not make the whole enterprise about him (the whole supporting cast in the Coen Brothers version were On!, and not in a particularly good way). Here, everyone falls into certain archetypes, sure – the muscle oaf with transient parental figures, the hard-edged criminal hesitant to Do the Deed, the mastermind who intellectualizes listlessly in the face of a dissolving plan, etc. The real star, of course, is the little old lady, Mrs. Wilberforce (Katie Johnson). Always doting on the young men she lets her room to (they plot a heist under the ruse of a practicing string quartet), she delightfully encourages the boys in their soulful performances of andante passages and pizzicato.

When she finally does find out what’s going on under her nose, she turns into a stern, trusting parent sure that the boys, as lead by Professor Marcus (Guinness), will ultimately do the right thing. As they squabble under her nose once more, they each draw straws in an attempt to bring about their escape from the lock and key of Wilberforce, and attempt to navigate the lull of the cello case filled with their loot. They achieve varying degrees of success.

Peter Sellers, in one of his first big roles as Mr. Robinson (Harry), is fairly restrained but possesses an explosive energy and natural affinity for physical comedy, which he would make great use of from Dr. Strangelove through the diminishing returns of the Pink Panther films.

The Blu-Ray disc for this film is great. The format really shines with older films that have never really looked good because of poor prints and lackluster restoration. A Blu-Ray film restored properly, such as this one, adds layers to the film that were barely recognizable before. Buildings and roads achieve a texture in detail that was only fuzzy, soft incoherence on AMC in the past. The DVD is probably just fine, but if you have the opportunity, you should see this on Blu-Ray. Additionally, the disc is packed with alternative language tracks and subtitles, so if you have anyone attempting to learn a foreign language but hesitant to sit down and see some criminals face off against an old lady in 50′s bone dry English comedy, then perhaps you can entice them with the Norwegian subtitles.

I literally just found myself tapping out a paragraph ruminating on the ridiculous nature of this kind of thinking. When did I become such a luddite? Isn’t the great part of this film that it actively engages us in these kinds of thought experiments? It’s a film about humanity at its most base level, and if you abstract yourself out from the “plot,” you have a perfect everyman in the shape of Caden Cotard that is successful because he’s the “director”, which is the role we all take in our lives. Sometimes we wish we had someone to give us notes that tell us how to feel, but if you want to be Cartesian about it, it’s just us. Usually stories about writers bother me, and while this isn’t a story about a writer, it is ostensibly about the insular creative world – but Cotard’s problems are universal, and the play he’s putting on, as it gets larger and more ‘real’ and more about the lives we look back on and the regrets we had and still have, becomes less about the director than the directed. Caden frequently phones Hazel’s cell, and even though she is now 60, 70 years old, the voice on the voicemail never ages. Does this suggest that Caden is constantly calling deeper and deeper into the nested warehouses, to the point where Hazel and he had a chance? Or does it suggest that regrets do not age and that to be over them, we must simply let them go?

The biggest flaw in the film for me is the burning house of Hazel, which is a detail that makes me recall what I thought of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and a Charlie Kaufman script being directed by Michel Gondry: It’s a little like adding sugar to coke for flavor. And while there are a couple of funny moments with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Samantha Morton acting while the house burns down around them, there’s just something a little too present (or if you’re looking for a Manhattan-bound 4-train ten-cent word, “centered”). It’s meant to suggest that choices we make early in life vibrate throughout our whole lives (when Hazel states her worry about the fire to the real estate agent, she tells Hazel it is difficult to choose how we die). A better metaphor to this in the film is the suggestion that every choice we make is connected to a thousand threads, and when you pull just one, everything shifts to accommodate.

This is well beyond the post-modern games that Kaufman plays so freely with in the last third of the film. Things really start to bog down as we see Cotard and Hazel trailing Sammy and Tammy (the second Cotard and Hazel) trailing the third ones, with them acting out a scene rife with gauche artifice. At this point, we see Cotard coming to realize who he is, with the gender swap with Ellen, whose bedmate is Eric which makes us recall Olive’s death scene and has the issue of pulling us deeper into the warehouses, since it doesn’t appear as though this switch has happened yet, so it must be “above”. The gender swap seems to suggest the animus, which comes just before self-identification in Jung, but also corresponds to the ‘mirror’ stage in Lacan, and so it makes sense that the narrative becomes uncontrollably slippery (10¢), disjointed and senile.

I found myself, having recently listened to a podcast on identity in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, thinking a lot about how our conceptions of ourselves form our identities. Cotard really likes to clean, and while he doesn’t necessarily think all of his organs have gone missing or that he’s a walking corpse, he doesn’t really appear to get much self-awareness until he meets Sammy (who knows more why Adele left than Cotard himself). But even if Cotard isn’t in a warehouse at the beginning of the film, there’s plenty of evidence that suggests he’s only one in a line (Hazel is reading Proust in the box office, where a Dr. Cottard makes several appearances). So there is a Cotard that came before, several that will come after, and at each level life is written and knowable, but at the same time uncontrollable because it has already happened.

And yet, the coming of age aspects of this film are handled exactly such as they are: a little droll, pretty typical which provides a lot of space to maneuver the moral murkiness of Jenny’s predicament. The film makes no bones about the symbiotic relationship that exists, though Jenny’s side of the relationship is what’s privileged – she a budding francophile with all the trimmings: she yearns for jazz, good food at restaurants (her father crumbles with anxiety about appetizers), art expositions & concerts–a free spirit devoid of prejudice. And yet the price she pays is to rigidly point her moral compass to the corrupt and go along for the ride. When Jenny is gossiping with friends at school, and she realizes that she will lose her virginity to David, she is taken aback but not surprised. And when David confronts her about the map, or his clients, his argument (to a 16 year old) is: well what did you

What makes this film work so well is that she is not an oppressed character, and its clear the memoir scribe (Lynn Barber) values this relationship as a key to her childhood (it “cured” her, she says), and so that colors the tenor of the narrative. Yes, David is creepy, beyond creepy, but he’s also charming and carefree (look at how carefully the moment when David reveals he, himself, has gone to Oxford is played, and Jenny’s reaction to this revelation – is she in on it, like she was in on Clive? Or is she as surprised as her parents?). But his creepiness never overtakes the film until he is fully revealed (and even then, the film may go too far to the left of Hollywood Blvd in castigating him), with the exception of one scene at Oxford after receiving the news that Jenny thinks it prudent to wait until she turns 17 (a very good idea, he concurs). And an early look in the film between David’s friends, which signals an understanding with the audience – yes, this relationship is weird to them – is later cast in a different, more confounding light.

The other side of her education is a little less engaging – Miss Stubbs, her teacher, is an honorable and likable woman whose life may not have turned out the way she wanted, but at least she has a firm understanding of her experience, which having mastered Heathcliff’s Otherness, she sorely lacks.

The ending of the film is unfortunate, but I guess pasted together in the way we come to expect these kinds of things – and the montage is a little surprising, but for all the churning music, couldn’t they have played some Chubby Checker?

A couple of things to like: the iguanas, which seems uniquely Herzogian, but beyond there drug-implied presence, there isn’t much meaning there. Perhaps that’s just the way Herzog operates. Hey, he’s addled so let there be iguanas.

This film is a sheep in wolf’s clothing – there’s nothing here that hasn’t been done ten thousand times before in terms of a police procedural, and (yes, iguanas included) Herzog and Cage bring nothing new to the craft. Cage is good, but there’s nothing good about what he’s doing. He’s just trying to keep everything from spinning out of control, and if that’s the tether to a post-Katrina New Orleans, then it’s pretty pathetic, don’t you think?

I wish I could understand the connection between this and the previous Ferrara film from 1992. I suspect there isn’t much of one, apart from the name: Bad Lieutenant. Did Hollywood just decide it was about time an R-rated version of the NC-17 film be made? If ever there was an example of a film documenting the fact that filmmakers need to start looking elsewhere for their ideas, then this is it. This movie came out in the 90s, this “re-imagining” contains nothing original. Yes, Nicholas Cage has spoken in that nasally way before. I’m not sure he’s walked around like that, but I guess you get one thing new with the 99 old.

This movie is worth watching for one thing: Cage’s performance, and to see how exactly he holsters his gun. But does that make the film worth watching? Herzog is capable of so much more, and if his fiction trajectory is from Rescue Dawn to this, then I’m afraid he needs to sit down, eat his other shoe and either resign himself solely to documentaries or find another mountain to put a ship on top of – but then again, they’d probably do it with computers these days and that would be ruined too.

Evidence the control of the original text: terrible eyes, terrible teeth, terrible everything gnashing this and that and yet it’s playful and imaginative, an escape thoroughly within the guise of Max’s experience. The monsters don’t even look sad, and the saddest Max gets is boredom. Aren’t these more interesting than the rote childhood-sucks motif? It’s probably true that a temper tantrum can’t sustain a whole movie (especially one as long as this one), but do we really have to get so bent out of shape about it? How much of the yard stick are we willing to give up until we ask why?

Witness the Eggersized moments of confusion and childhood despair: Carol tells him to destroy the house while all the other Things watch on, and then when he does it, they get all bent out of shape. Max stepping on KW’s head seemed particularly straight out of a “This American Life” vignette and may as well have been scored to Yann Tiersen’s La Valse D’Amelie. And then there’s the music that’s actually in the movie: it is beyond cloying and desperate, so tamped down and tinkly and seems in place purely to drive the film further into its indie roots. This Songwriter Present motif worked really well on Into the Wild and sure, maybe even There’s Something About Mary but here I found it entirely too present and distracting. Only a Philip Glass soundtrack could have been more misplaced and Less Intentional.

It’s also telling that instead of taming “wild things” (what Max called himself in the book), he’s stepping into a role that other boys have previously sunk their teeth into. But don’t the metaphors stop working when Max is stepping into a pre-existing mythology? The book is magical because it is so simple: the boy finds fantastical monsters akin to the rebellion and resentment he feels, and he tames them only to try and exact a parent’s control over his new play toys. This bores him, and he’s hungry after all. So wouldn’t it be easier to just go home?

So enough about what annoyed me – the monsters looked great. Here’s technology that doesn’t get in the way of what’s happening. The combination of giant muppets and computer animated crying really helped convince you that something was actually there, taking up space. It makes everything around it seem more tangible. And despite the depressive nature of every one, the voice actors really helped give these things a lot of character. Particularly James Gandolfini, who has a childlike curiousity in his voice, even when tempestuous. Ultimately, a movie that never really rises above an experiment where a writer and a director decide to see if they can turn a 10 page children’s story into a movie.

An excellent write up of it by Todd Alcott begins by questioning the role of Gopnik – apparently many people find him to be a little too passive, in that a lot of uncontrollable things happen around him as he struggles to make sense of it and react (his most decisive reaction is a dream, it turns out).  But interestingly , Alcott’s main point is that the protagonist isn’t so much Gopnik as it is God Himself, and the question of agency becomes a lot more difficult to grab onto all of a sudden. There’s no doubt among any of the characters whether or not God exists, but the notion that Joel and Ethan Coen, as the writers, believe he’s there is less clear (and, ultimately, doesn’t matter).

But Gopnik and friends struggle with this question of meaning – is his brother Arthur truly indecent, reveling at the North Dakota (soliciting sodomy, they say), or was he just playing cards? They wouldn’t even let him play, according to Arthur. So he gets caught, and decides that being brought home to a family would look better, rather than being brought back to the hotel Larry and Arthur are holed up in, but look better to who? The family, or to God? The family would judge Arthur harshly, but does God forgive because he’s part of a family? (The notion that Arthur, a brilliant something or other — did he develop an invention, a mathematic formula? — could pull a fast one over on God by being brought ‘home’ by the police is hilarious, particularly given the brutal embarrassment he’s going to suffer at the hands of his relatives.)

The boy’s search for a good F-Troop signal could very easily be mapped to the quest for God (and who does Larry see from the rooftop?), and this is ultimately why Larry goes to the Rabbis who proxy as his faith’s faltering aerial (and often it isn’t so clear, as in the case of the goy’s teeth).

But even though a lot of A Serious Man felt unknowable to me, it’s an incredible film with a lot simmering under the surface. And the search for God here can just as easily be a search for meaning and morality in a secular life.  The last few sequences of the film are a little baffling, to the degree which Mother Nature begins to insert herself into the frame. We have no way of knowing what exactly the prognosis of Larry’s final conversation is, or what exactly is riding on the wind, but it does firmly suggest that something is coming, and it isn’t very good.

Someday I’ll check out the rest, but in the mean time, I’d rather watch Deadwood or The Wire again.

The Hurt Locker is a story, on the other hand, driven entirely by character. There are a few scenes that are a bit familiar involving alcohol and stomach punching but then again, the whole picture is imbued with the sense of showing you something real and fantastically dangerous (or unimaginable) so maybe those familiar scenes are a good anchor for us. What we see vets as “realistic,” but it is utterly psychotic. The film posits in the beginning that, simply, ‘war is a drug’, a simple fact not necessarily cogently backed up by reality, but certainly proved beyond reason within the context of the film. And yet the characterizations are grown throughout, by characters ignoring each other, standing beside each other, and offhand glances. There’s no awkward exposition or backstory beyond a few minor details.

There are, however, two scenes that deserve to be chided. The first is the heroic (and granted, reckless, so its in character) night trip off the base to find a boy’s family and attempt to get some answers as to why he’s seemingly been used in nefarious ways. It’s filmed in a way that’s a little gratuitous in its indulgence to Hollywood (perhaps ironically), with its lone star gunman bashing down doors, triceps ready at a moment’s notice to absorb the kickback of his big gun. So, it’s a little ridiculous, and beyond William James’ accepted recklessness and need for adrenaline, it just doesn’t make much sense. Or it hinges on an accepted sentimentality that is wildly out of context (and smacks a little bit more of something akin to The Blind Side). James’ recklessness better demonstrated at the end of the film where there are more unsavory outcomes with a bit more meat on the bone than that skinny kid has/had/has/had/who-cares.

The second scene, perhaps only because I found it a little difficult to relate to, works a lot better but is still awkwardly raw. When Sanborn confesses that he finally understands what he wants in life, he’s like an alien specimen to James, who already has a family and child whom he finds difficult to disarm. There’s one of those countdowns going on throughout the movie, and this scene happens right around with one or two days left. The countdown gives the movie a shape, since every scene is shaped as a sort of vignette, with its own tensions, characters, bomb-makers, etc, and in that sense each scene is more or less structured like a videogame level where the characters have a goal and an ever-increasing amount of pressure/danger coming their way (with exception to one scene, where the tension mesmerizingly bleeds out of the scene over minutes).

I’m frequently amused by movies that attempt to undercut the “Oh Hey, It’s that guy!” syndrome. In summer movies and those that are bound to Chekovian motifs, you can always spot the bad guy and/or traitor by the famous actor in the seemingly unimportant role (yes, this applies to Law & Order, and only recently that I can think of did Gone, Baby Gone have an interesting slant on it). Here, it appears there’s real Hollywood talent that’s stationed in Iraq, and handled to good effect when, shortly after the first irAqt, the film mildly threatens a more typical plot. There are some “blackwater” type dudes out in the desert with a broken down truck pulling in some guy with a bounty. Kathryn Bigelow throws out all kinds of Hollywood signals about this developing into something, only to let them slowly settle back down into the sand while the audience patiently waits for someone to lose an eye in the whole affair.

Last Year at Marienbad is Alain Resnais’ follow-up to Hiroshima, mon Amour, and its beguiling quality at first turned me off, seeing it as nothing but the predecessor to the aimless, unfocused meandering of David Lynch’s insufferable Inland Empire, which too, repeats phrases and scenes relentlessly and has shifting points of view. But the great part of Resnais’ work here (Alain Robbe-Grillet, the writer, likely bristles at the notion of this being Resnais’ work, given the outlandishly detailed script he provided, noting music type, camera movement and cinematography leading Resnais to call himself a “robot” early on, according to Criterion’s accompanying essays) is the relaxed and studied ways he’s able to merge elements of a play (long, repetive and retrospective monologues and Eugene O’Neill’s still players, for example) seamlessly into the concept of a film, without losing their effectiveness or losing the sense of closeness (which is something that’s really alarming with most filmed plays). Here is a piece of film-making that would be an absolute sin to see in any other format than 2.35:1. It is completely stunning. The drifting camera lends the proceedings a dreamlike quality that never achieves the “dark underbelly” pathos of Lynch’s approach to the same techniques.

The interplay between the film and the dialogue is also fascinating, as the film circles around the same relationship (at different points, at different times, replaying the same conversation, the same encounter) but subtley switching and undercutting the narrative, which – at least in my case – brought me deeper into the questions it asked. The painting above the fireplace was what, exactly, when we saw the foreplay take place, but in reality seems to be a recreation of a scene from later in the film. That this duality can exist and not seem forced is a marvel, and it’s recreated over and over again.

Resnais has said that the whole film is a recreation of “rape”, and there are no doubt several more interesting interpretations of the film that both take into account his wry sense of humor and swing with all their might at its coy reversals and shifting narrative (dare I use the word diegeses?). But look at the scene in particular when finally it seems these two characters are going to join together, and the way the mirrors are placed to give you a sense that you’re standing right in the room (Pasolini did this in Salo), and how the film seems to grind to a hault while she raises her arms up and cannot speak.

What this film is to me is the burrowing into memory that Proust does, and that’s probably the reason why it ultimately was so effective (I’ve been on a summer project to reread all of the new Penguin translation; it’s not going well). But just to witness the same narrative circling, the same chipping away at what could be memory spliced and splintered together into a seamless dream is a marvel, and I can’t believe I had to wait 28 years to see it.

“You know, they just want your money, right?” She needed help cleaning her room. She offered him 50 dollars to help. The weight of money apparently comes late. So it with begrudging admittance I concur to having been sold The Day the Earth Stood Still.

It was a confluence of two things that made me add it to my Netflix queue: 1) some blog mentioned something along the lines of: ‘Once people stop comparing this to the original, they’ll still be talking about it!’ It’s with an eye-opening accord I realize this blog poseses a kin perpicacity to my own (or else I’m in trouble) and 2) a commercial prior to some other ill conceived Netflix rental I haven’t written about yet where Eugene’s ears perked up with a “what’s that and why haven’t I heard about it?” Unfortunately, I did not read the second half of his expression properly.