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Mon Feb 02 2015 09:07 January Film Roundup:
- The Strange Little Cat (2013) - a.k.a. "Das merkwürdige Kätzchen". The museum handout said that the sound design really shines in this movie, and maybe if we'd read the handout ahead of time we'd have focused on that and marvelled. But how groundbreaking can sound design be in a slice-of-life film that takes place in a normal house? I admit I don't understand the technical details, but I hear sounds every day, and the sounds in the movie were what I'd expect from a dull movie where someone fixes a washing machine. Is this the curse of the filmmaker? To have recreated the normal soundscape of life so precisely that philistines don't even realize anything special is going on? Anyway, not recommended unless you're a sound engineer and want to explain to me what the deal is here.
- Hard to be a God (2013) - a.k.a. "Trudno byt bogom". Okay, look. I love the Strugatsky brothers. I know they're not the cheeriest science fiction writers. Judging from the plot summary Hard to be a God is not their cheeriest book. (As far as my reading goes, their cheeriest book is in fact Monday Begins on Saturday.) I don't mind seeing the occasional Russian sci-fi movie that's nearly three hours long. But I don't know what I did to deserve this film. My only clue, once again, comes from the museum handout. Director Aleksei German said that "[f]ilm has turned into something for people who are bored to read the book," so I guess this film is my punishment for not reading the book.
When I try to describe Hard to be a God I come up with words like "shitshow" and "grueling" which also describe the movie literally--there's a lot of shit in this movie and a fair amount of gruel. And there's pretty much no science fiction element. When there is science fiction on the screen, the film is grim but inventive and bearable. The image of a Will Riker-type medieval baron training his serf to accompany his jazz clarinet riff on a crappy medieval tuba. The woman who wants to have a baby by a demigod, but before they have sex she has to hang up the big religious statue of the demigod she inherited from her mother, and then the statue breaks in half while they're having sex and conks them on the head. It's creative stuff. But most of the film is like the first scene of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, except it never ends and King Arthur has to also be Denis the Peasant.
As a viewer guide, to help you decide if you want to see this movie I'm gonna rank the top four bodily excreta featured:
- shit
- blood
- phlegm
- piss
Honorable mention to the technically ineligible but omnipresent "mud". If you like Game of Thrones but think it's not yucky enough to be real medieval, you might like this movie. I will admit there is one hilarious buckets-of-blood sight gag, but you could probably say the same for Cannibal Holocaust. There's someone who will read this review and think this movie sounds great and what's my problem, and if you're that person, I think I can guarantee you will like this movie. I'm laying it all out there! Everyone else, read the book, I guess? I'm interested in reading it just to see what exactly happened in this adaptation.
In a weird twist, many of the characters seem aware of the camera, or the audience, but nothing really comes of this. A Russian on IMDB says that "the main character has a camera on his forehead, that is transmitting back to Earth", but that detail is not in the English subtitles and I don't think it makes sense--who is this supposed "character" and why do they fill exactly the same filmic role usually filled by a non-digetic camera? And would people will never see anything displayed on a screen know how to engage with a camera? I don't know.
- Inherent Vice (2014) - I'm glad they gave it a shot, I think they did as good a job as possible, Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro are really good in this... but as the great Russian director Aleksei Germain has noted, "[f]ilm has turned into something for people who are bored to read the book." And in particular you can't act out what happens in a Pynchon book and call it a movie.
It's an especially bad deal when the film ends up very similar to The Big Lebowski, which not only superficially resembles Inherent Vice but which I've argued translates Pynchon's primary sylistic innovation to film. "[E]ach of his characters is surrounded by a protective bubble of literary genre, which colors the way the narrative is reported and even shapes the plot." It's not too difficult to pull this off when you have multiple-POV, but it's really really tricky when you have an omniscient narrator. That's why The Big Lebowski starts with a narrator who quickly discovers that he's a lousy narrator, and gives up and becomes a normal character.
The narrator of Inherent Vice the movie is also a character in the movie, but she also never stops also being the godlike omniscient narrator, even showing up hallucination-like in scenes she's not really in. The presence of this strong narrator stops the protective bubbles from forming. Doc Sportello is supposed to focus the classic Pynchon conspiracy through the lens of noir (private eye) and Illuminatus! (hippie pothead), revealing the Golden Fang and the 1970s in general as a grand conspiracy of the square against the hip. It shows up in the film if you know to look for it, but it's super confusing because the dominant voice of the film--the narrator, who again is a specific person in the film--isn't involved in this plotline at all.
The Pynchonness is more visible in Josh Brolin's Bigfoot Bjornson, the cop who thinks he's on a cop show, who actually picks up extra roles in cop shows to preserve this fantasy even as his real-life career stalls. That's what I want to see. My point is that The Big Lebowski is not just a better film, it's a better Pynchon adaptation, because it lets the bubbles form.
What to do? You could film different parts of the movie in different styles, but because of that dang narrator it would never be clear why one bit was filmed in one style versus another. Sumana suggested animation, which could work--the different characters could be drawn in slightly different styles.
- Sullivan's Travels (1941) - After those three I had to throw in a ringer. Sumana saw Sullivan's Travels in college and liked it, and it's a movie the Coen brothers ripped off rather than the other way around, so I borrowed it from the library that's conveniently across the street from the library where I work. Oh man, it's great! It's got a really unusual plot structure. I was having a good time for the whole movie, but the third act kicked it up to such a higher level—comedically and politically and emotionally—that I started feeling bad for even liking the goofy butlers and movie producers in the first act. I think Down By Law may have also been ripping this movie off. And why not rip it off? It's funny, it's inventive, and it makes a dark-comedic argument for the value of light comedy.
I thought it was weird that the poster for this movie says "Veronica Lake's On The Take". How is that any way to advertise a movie, accusing your actors of corruption? That statement also has no justification within the movie. Maybe "on the take" meant something different back then.
- Sweet Smell of Success (1957) - A really unusual, or maybe just uncommon, sort of noir in that it deals with the relationship between the upper crust and the pseudo-riche strivers. Instead of heists and gunplay it's all cutting words and breaking up engagements. Very All About Eve. Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis are great. The characters who only show up in one scene are great. The secondary cast is kinda meh. Great movie though, a cut above average popcorn noir.
- The Italian Job (1969): More shallow fun in the form of light comedy. Breaks the rule of heist movies that if you explain how the heist is going to go down, you need to introduce complications during the heist. The ending is obviously fishing for a sequel, but since there was no sequel I'm quite happy with the ending. Not a fan of the way the movie blatantly shuffles characters offstage once they've played their part in the heist.
I was not expecting Benny Hill as the super hacker. Michael Caine was well-cast—you gotta play Bruce Wayne before you can play Alfred—but his character's a pretty bad heist manager and I'm glad the no-sequel ending gave him his comeuppance in a lighthearted way.
- The Godfather, Part II (1974): Bigger, badder, but not better than the original. It's a good movie, it kept my interest despite being long as hell, but at the end the obsession with mirroring the first movie kinda unleashed the Arrested Development farce that underlies the somber seriousness of the Godfather universe. The bit where Connie convinces Michael to forgive Fredo and give him a big hug really needed a Ron Howard "And that's when Michael realized..."
IMDB trivia:
Danny Aiello said that his line "Michael Corleone says hello" was completely ad-libbed. Francis Ford Coppola loved it and asked him to do it again in the retakes.
... ... ...doesn't that ad-lib completely change the main plotline of the movie? Oh well!
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