Internet woes

My New Orleans apartment has been without internet for the past week. I hate when my movie build-ups are forced upon me. I am the only one who gets to purposefully neglect the promise I made to myself to write about films, gosh darnit!

I'll keep that promise in the most minimal way possible.

2010:

Piranha 3D was a surprising, trashy, gory blast. Adam Scott might be my hero. Seriously, what can't he do? I can, without any reservation, confirm that this is better than Mirrors.

Winter's Bone featured some fantastic performances, and a couple not great ones, along with some superb direction from Debra Granik. It's too bad the tension she builds magnificently mostly dissipates by the end.

Soul Kitchen is Fatih Akin's new comedy. It's broad and conventional, predictable and silly, but damn if it isn't sincere and heartwarming enough to forgive it everything. The joy of life conveyed in this film is pure cinema-magic at its best.


Japan:

Memories, from 1995, features three different stories from three different anime greats (supposedly). Like any omnibous film, the entries are of varying quality, but at least they're all good. The highlight is the first entry, The Magnetic Rose, from Koji Morimoto and a screenplay from the very recently departed Satoshi Kon (Millenium Actress, Paprika). It keeps with Kon's usual themes of memories and dreams to create a haunting story of eternal love, with the help of a beautiful, classical score that ties in wonderfully with the narrative.

Taboo, Nagisa Oshima's latest film (it's been 10 years), is elegant and visually stunning; but it may be a bit too ambiguous for it's own good. The narrative explores ambiguity in a black and white scenario, featuring a character of possibly ambiguous sex. The narrative itself at a certain point becomes quite ambiguous as Oshima really starts to force the viewer to work things out.


Criterion (and affiliates):

Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie is the final piece to Criterion's Bergman box-set which includes The Silence, Through a Glass Darkly, and Winter Light. It's a TV documentary series following Bergman through the production process of 1961's Winter Light, beginning with the script stage and ending with viewer reactions following the film's premiere. I don't love Winter Light, and the 5 episodes each run a longer than they need to; but it is informative, at least.

The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes is on the By Brakhage anthology. I hear the guy made all kinds of films, even pioneered styles. That's great. I don't like autopsies in their full, unblinking eye glory. It's totally silent, really forcing you to feel whatever it is an autopsy makes you feel. I couldn't take it.

Le Jour se Leve is available on Criterion's Essentials line, a cheap bare-bones brand they use to reprint some of their films and release other acclaimed classics they don't have time to release regularly. Marcel Carne's pre-noir, bleak love story is clunky and awkward, but features some fantastic shots and some palpable atmosphere to make it worth your time. I prefer his earlier Port of Shadows and i absolutely adore his post-war Children of Paradise.


Rivette:

Jacques Rivette has to be one of the most challenging directors whose work I've had the pleasure of viewing. In my limited experience, they are very wordy, very long, and extremely strange. The three I've seen have involved some sort of puzzle and each has treated it's own very differently. Hopefully more of his films become available in The U.S. soon. Come on, Criterion, how are you not all over Celine and Julie Go Boating?

The Story of Marie and Julien ( 2003) is by far the strangest of his films I've seen, but also the least successful. It doesn't quite earn its length, but it does maintain an effective eeriness and ambiance that I enjoyed.

Le Pont du Nord (1981) easily became my favorite of Rivette's films. It features a real life mother/daughter duo as a two mysterious characters with a mysterious relationship over the course of four days. It's something of a female Quixotic tale around the Paris underground. It becomes an engrossing urban fantasy. Rivette purposefully and brilliantly leaves elements of his puzzle hanging at the end of the film because he knows it might not really be important anyway. (This isn't on DVD, but it is on youtube. Search for PDN1 to find it.)


Misc. :

Election. 4th time seeing it. I had to for school. Maybe Alexander Payne's best? I struggle with that one.

Vera Cruz features Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster as the two different types of Western heroes (the classy, John Wayne archetype and the Wild Bunch anti-hero, respectively) forced together to transport a Mexican princess hiding gold in the middle of the Mexican Civil War. It's wonderfully violent and sexual for it's time (1954), as well as great vehicle for the aforementioned screen legends.