Film is Truth 24 Times a Second

Today is Quentin Tarantino’s birthday. Yay!

Too much - both wrongheaded and right-on - has been said about he and his work, so I’ll try not to fuel the deluge. I will say that Jackie Brown is surely his best film, and one of the best American films of the 1990s, for any number of reasons. It’s as much a film about growing old as a crime film, and its resolutely restrained style (long takes, very still camera, etc.) and unusually warm and sympathetic content totally belies the popular misconception that Tarantino is an “MTV” director whose entire career is nothing but a gimmick. He certainly hasn’t done himself any favors with much of his other output, but if this were the only film he ever made, he’d still be remembered years from now and even be considered an anomaly in the strip-mall of awful, awful 1990s “indie” crime flicks (which, admittedly, his success helped usher in).

Anyhoo, I wish he’d make more films like Jackie Brown and fewer like Death Proof, his half of the upcoming Grindhouse double feature with Robert Rodriguez (no, I haven’t seen the latter yet, but… c’mon).

I guess that’s all.

That’s right kiddies, I have returned to FIT after my globe-spanning search for enlightenment. It was only through my travels that I found the one true truth…

Yes Yes, you heard it here folks. Film is Truth is actually a dietary supplement! Yes, bask in its awesomeness, as you simply watch film after film and lose those excess pounds. The best part? ALL NATURAL! It is suggested to watch 3-5 films a week to build and support a metabolism that would eat through an entire horse.

But don’t take my word for it, take Merv Griffin’s.

Which one of you pukes left this jelly donut on the pillow of my bunk?! Was it you, Pvt. Joker, you silly little birthday-boy? I am sorry to inform you that your birthday is over! Today is your DI’s birthday and you maggots will all help me celebrate the occasion by dropping and giving me twenty! Thank you very much, now can I be in charge for a while?

Happy birthday R. Lee Ermey, Sir! On the periphery of the film business since serving as a consultant for (and appearing as a helicopter pilot in) Apocalypse Now, to bullying his way into the role of Gny. Sgt. Hartman in Stanley Kubrick’s classic recruiting film Full Metal Jacket, to the many gruff performances that follwed — we salute you!

Among his credits:

• Willard
• The Salton Sea
• Run Ronnie Run
• Taking Sides
• Toy Story 1 & 2
• Prefontaine
• The Frighteners
• Dead Man Walking
• Seven
• Leaving Las Vegas
• Naked Gun 33 1/3

Today we celebarate the birthday of a filmmaker - Michael Haneke - who himself celebrates the joyous beauty of life: look at the jolly, dancing man in the picture above and imagine what lighthearted romps issue forth from his hands and mind onto celluloid for the enjoyment of all! With movies bearing impish titles like The Piano Teacher, Benny’s Video, Time of the Wolf and Funny Games, and his frequent utilization of teen-aged actors, you’d be right to expect his corpse - er, excuse me - corpus of work to be the Austrian equivalent of John Hughes’ charming, knowing American Brat-Pack Rom-Coms of the 1980s.

And if the four Haneke titles above don’t exhaust (or break!) your funny bone, try these at your next get-together:

• The Seventh Continent
• 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance
• Code Unknown
• Cache

Several of the above movies offer quirky, hilarious observations of family dynamics - universal themes, to be sure - and who better than America’s favorite little fart, Opie hisself, Ronnie Howard, to appreciate, translate and glaze such work for stateside audiences? So, if you want to enjoy Haneke’s Cache and its story of comically mismatched brothers, but worry that the exotic locales, complex history and ambiguous ending are too daunting for casual viewing, you’ll be thrilled to find Howard’s remake re-examining the antics of the estranged (and strange!) siblings in a more familiar setting and in a language that you actually understand! “Ayyyyyyyy — Sit on it!”

So happy birthday Michael Haneke. Make a wish — but let’s all hope (for our sakes) that it doesn’t come true, because God only knows what might happen if it’s granted… and all the candles are out… and we’re all in the dark… FOREVER!

(Forgive the fact that I have not yet mastered nor apprenticed the art of blogging. Pictures, links, emoticons, very soon!)

Going through a current trend of watching films from the early days of Hollywood, I thought I would take a short break…and watch Hollywoodland.

It had first grabbed my attention being about George Reeves, the Superman I knew the least about. It was kind of awkward to see Ben Affleck portraying the man I used to watch on Nick-at-Nite, but luckily, he wasn’t the real focus of the movie (odd?). Yes, the plot rotates around Reeves’ apparent suicide/murder, investigated by Adrian Brody’s character Lou Simo, but it is more about the falling apart of this actor and the rebuilding of Simo’s life…supposedly. After the credits rolled, I checked out the extras, and a particular 5-minute snippet about Hollywood during the 40’s and 50’s actually made the movie a whole lot more defined, and I almost wanted them to try another film dealing with those issues more directly. Hollywoodland really hinted at a lot of the politics and socioeconomic landscapes of Golden Age Hollywood, but never really had a clear, concise way of relating this to the audience, leaving the featurette to tie up all loose ends.

All in all, it was interesting enough (accompanied with the featurette) and at least got me interested in learning more about the things this movie only began to nod at. If you liked L.A. Confidential, this should be up your alley.

Also, look out for some Deadwood familiars, I counted me three o’ them.

On Baby Jesus’ birthday, there was a magic show; today is Matthew Modine’s birthday — our celebration consists of this pathetic little twinkle-toe blog entry. Private Joker has been in many movies, among the finest being our beloved Full Metal Jacket. The others (most of which are nothing but unorganized grabastic pieces of amphibian #@%!) are available in our local PX and are too numerous to catalog here. I suggest you cross reference this list with this one, if you’ve got the guts.

“Good night, ladies.”

Happy Birthday, James Coco. You’re no Frog, but you’ll do. Okay, not a lot to choose from, here - Coco (not to be confused with Zero Mostel) will be more remembered for his dozens of television appearances - but these four films are all worth watching.

• A New Leaf
• Man of La Mancha
• Murder by Death
• The Muppets Take Manhattan

He’s particularly unforgettable in A New Leaf. And who can dislike a man who played opposite a Styrofoam pig?

I am not a Claude Chabrol expert, although I’ve liked all of his films that I’ve seen so far. The newest of his to reach these shores is The Bridesmaid. It’s pretty easy to call it “Hitchcockian” — I believe it is denoted as such right on the box, in fact — but I think most of Chabrol’s films mention Hitchcock’s name somewhere on the packaging.  (It might actually be required by law.)

In The Bridesmaid, a young man named Philippe — whose main romantic interest appears to be a stone bust in his mother’s garden — meets that bust’s fleshly doppelganger, a bridesmaid at his sister’s wedding. (She is played by Laura Smet, daughter of actress Nathalie Baye and rock star Johnny Hallyday.) She attaches herself to him with disconcerting rapidity, but it is difficult for Philippe to know exactly where he stands and where she is coming from; she has perfected the art of appearing ravishingly passionate and terribly bored simultaneously. For this reason, when she begins expounding on her somewhat — let’s say — “outside the box” ideas on what constitutes “true love,” Philippe isn’t sure whether he should play along or run away.

The Bridesmaid is good: taut, engrossing, and there’s always the feeling that something very bad is happening around the edges. I will mention that it has an ending that I found unsatifying at the time, but which becomes less so after some reflection.

Here’s a list of all the Chabrol films that we have at the store. It’s only a fraction of his total output — he’s been making films since 1958’s Le Beau Serge — but I think it’s pretty much all his stuff that’s available here in the USA.

Betty (1992)
Color of Lies, The (1999)
Cop au Vin (1985)
Flower of Evil, The (2003)
Innocents With Dirty Hands (1975)
Inspecteur Lavardin (1986)
L’Enfer (1994)
La Ceremonie (1995)
La Route de Corinthe (1967)
La Rupture (1970)
Le Beau Serge (1958)
Le Boucher (1969)
Les Biches (1968)
Les Bonnes Femmes (1960)
Madame Bovary (1991)
Masques (1987)
Merci Pour le Chocolat (2000)
Nada (1974)
Seven Deadly Sins, The (1962)
Six in Paris (1965)
Story of Women (1988)
Swindle, The (1997)
Ten Days’ Wonder (1972)
This Man Must Die (1969)
Unfaithful Wife, The (1969)

This week the store acquired the DVD of filmmaker Sergei Parajanov’s inscrutable 1968 masterpiece The Color of Pomegranates, which is rightly heralded for its extraordinary use of color and creative, theatrical tableaux which relate - in an almost incomprehensibly abstract way - the life of the Armenian poet and “troubadour” Sayat Nova.

To be perfectly honest, I’ve seen this movie about half a dozen times and I don’t have the slightest grasp of its meaning, but the images have a powerfully indelible quality: dreamlike, hallucinatory, otherworldly. Arcane rituals are choreographed in ancient courtyards, rare fabrics and tapestries are shot in closeup and ornate costumes paraded by characters, animals slaughtered and parsed in startlingly edited sequences, etc. There’s a memorably surreal scene where dozens of waterlogged books are spread across a tiled roof to dry, their pages turning in the wind.

This might sound like the deliberately impenetrable project of a pretentious film student, and while it is difficult (if not impossible) to resolve any purpose behind the cascade of bizarre imagery, the film’s inherent parable-like logic and consistent visual elegance convinces you of its genuineness. And though I would never encourage anyone to be deliberately ignorant of an artist’s intentions or an artwork’s history and context, I will say that neither are required to enjoy and appreciate this lovely film. It is as much a sensory experience as a vehicle for any particular message or agenda.

Parajanov did not make many films,and even fewer of them are currently available in the US; we do, however have his Ashik Kerib (on VHS only) which is similarly beautiful and strange.

David Thewlis, had he played but one part in his career - that of “Johnny” in Mike Leigh’s Naked (above) - would surely still be remembered through the ages as one of the finest film actors of the 1990s. Fortunately, his twenty-plus year experience as a thespian has yielded dozens of roles for viewers to appreicate, all as finely rendered if not necessarily as durative or profound as his infamously scabrous performance in that film. Working with directors as well-regarded and varied (or in some instances at the nadir of their craft) as Alan Clarke, Paul Greengrass, Louis Malle, Agnieszka Holland, Henry Selick, John Frankenheimer, Joel Coen, Bernardo Bertolucci, Alfonso Cuaron, Ridley Scott and Terrence Malick, in projects both brilliant and ill-fated (The Island of Dr. Moreau? Hello?) Thewlis seems interested in occupying interesting characters, however brief or unlikeable their manifestations on screen. Among his film and TV appearances:

• The Singing Detective (’86)
• Life Is Sweet
• Naked
• Prime Suspect 3
• Total Eclipse
• Restoration
• James and the Giant Peach
• American Perfekt
• Seven Years in Tibet
• The Big Lebowski
• Besieged
• Gangster No. 1
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
• Kingdom of Heaven
• The New World

If you must choose just one to watch, let it be Naked — it’s a nearly perfect film with a central character as diamond black and as ferociously knowing as A Clockwork Orange’s “Alex,” requiring Thewlis to be as poetically articulate as any Shakespearean protagonist, as verbosely witty and erudite as any of Woody Allen’s urbanites, and as craftily venemous as a young Jack Nicholson. Some have called it one of the most depressing films ever made; I find it endlessing invigorating in its clear-eyed, hilarious and ultimately tender observation of the broken, displaced and unwanted (many more of us than is readily admitted).

There is a twenty-minute segment at the film’s middle that is, by itself, one of the best written pieces cinema of the last quarter century. Johnny, homeless and wandering, is let inside an empty office building by a sympathetic nightwatchman. What begins as a wary, inarticulate respect between the two is eventually ratcheted up to lacerating, Mamet-esque back-and-forth about duty, ambition, family, education, economics, politics, conspiracy and ultimately Our Place In The Universe and the true nature of the Cosmos — all without an ounce of pretension or condescension from the filmmaker or actors. I’ve watched this bit of the film a dozen times, and can’t imagine anyone wanting to be an actor - or a human being - without having seen and studied it as often.