狂った!

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On DVD at home with Lucía, on 18 January, 2007, at around 20:00.

For some reason Netflix thought I wouldn’t like this film.

I’m not sure whether this qualifies as a remake of Some Like It Hot. It came close enough that I expected it to end with the same line.

I guess Netflix was right.

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On IMAX with Lucía, Aman, and Ruchi, at the Metreon, on 06 January, 2007, at 23:30.

This film was entertaining enough, and that’s really all I asked of it. That’s all the good I can say about it, and anything bad I might have to say about it would seem pointless considering the fact that I never imagined that it was pretending to be in any way good.

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On 35mm with Lucía, Ben, Miho, and Mariko, at the Century 20 Daly City, on 25 December, 2006, at 22:30.

The film is about as good as I’d expected, and not as good as I’d hoped. It is remarkable that Beyoncé would play a character about whom it is repeatedly pointed out that her voice is less than great and that her selling point is her looks. The film felt too modern in many ways (though the costumes were fabulous), the music was a disappointment (it seems very monotonous for most of the film, with a few exceptional moments), and the film had an uneven texture (in particular, it wasn’t clear to me that the film was a musical until about 20 minutes into it, which came as a slightly jarring realization).

I wish I knew more of the backstory—certainly the history of Motown Records must be fascinating—but I’m not sure I got too much out of this version.

One aspect of the film that I found interesting was the way in which all of the characters were cast in varyingly positive and negative lights as they developed through the film—none of the characters were outstandingly noble, and none of them were unrelentingly bad. Certainly the most despicable character, Curtis Taylor, Jr., had the distinct characteristic of being the only one who really had the vision to bring the whole musical genre to the national stage, and the determination to make it happen, even if he was determined to sell everyone out in the process.

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On DVD at home with Lucía, on 2 December, 2006, at around 21:00.

I get the impression that Andrew Niccol wants us to believe that people born from embryos prescreened for idealized genetic makeup are inclined to behave like Nazi androids. I feel that there’s an implicit idea in the film that genetic imperfections are a large part of what make us interesting as humans.

Less implicit is the notion that we are more than our genetic makeup, and that our genetic makeup is not a pure determination of our potential. In the future that Niccol paints for us, people are broken into two categories: an elite class of people born with optimal genetic makeup and an underclass of people born naturally. On the one hand, the film is very well directed and it plays out with a remarkable narrative economy that matches the cleanliness of the future that Niccol shows us (and the performances, I thought, were excellent). On the other hand, it seems like an adaptation of some unpublished Ayn Rand novel crossed with right-wing propaganda about messing with natural birth processes and giving ourselves over to science.

I can see why this film is mentioned as often as it is—Niccol seems to be big on thought-provoking high-concept stories (The Truman Show being another notable one), and Gattaca is a very pure and carefully laid out example of that. As much as I might dislike the politics of the film, or the propagandistic overtones, or the messages I infer from it, I wish there were more films that so clearly laid out their arguments as Gattaca and The Truman Show.

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On 35mm at the Jack London Square cinemas, with Lucía, on 28 November, 2006, at 19:30.

In The Last Laugh, the main character dies so pathetically that the director steps in with an intertitle and explains that he can’t simply leave us on such a note, even though it is the natural close to the story, and so he must provide for us an alternative ending, however poorly it fits the story. Then we see the main character win the lottery and get to eat all the cake he wants, and we find out that he lives the last years of his life in happiness, or something like that. While it is indeed a terrible ending for the story, it becomes brilliant, because it is now detached from the story and is now the source of hilarity. Above all else, it achieves its goal: the director has produced a pathetically tragic film that leaves you in high spirits.

In Stranger Than Fiction, there is a similar effect. A similarly terrible ending is attached to the film, and we are given an excuse: because the character is, within the context of the film, a real person, the author is compelled to give him a pleasant ending as the starting point for the rest of his life, instead of the pathetic and supposedly brilliant ending she had in mind. This does relieve the pressure off of the terrible ending, as with The Last Laugh, because we now have a humorous context for it, but one of the key differences is that we are given only a quick, superficial pathetic ending to chew on as the “real” ending of the film. This ending is a let down, because within the context of the film, we are made to believe that it is brilliant, and it turns the story of Harold Crick’s life into a masterpiece (so brilliant that it’s worth sacrificing his life for), and yet we are forced to actually see the ending, which is not in any way brilliant (nor could the narration in the film plausibly be a part of such a masterpiece).

In most films where we have a work that is, within the context of the film, life-changingly brilliant, we are kept from the work itself, essentially making it a MacGuffin. In this film, however, that’s impossible, because the film is itself intricately tied into the work. This forces the filmmakers into the same position that the other filmmakers are trying to avoid: the fact that it is impossible to dish out for the audience the work that is agreed upon as a world-changing masterpiece. Kieslowski (and some other directors) tackles the problem head on (in Blue and in The Double Life of Veronique), and in my view encounter the same disappointment (I hated the music in those films), but that hasn’t prevented his films from being masterpieces themselves in the eyes of many (some even accept the music as masterful in its own right).

Another approach is to be ironic: to make the work obviously lame to make a comment about the state of modern art. Daniel Clowes hit this one on the nail, though he’s certainly not the only person to take that approach. In Stranger Than Fiction I almost feel that Forster is going for that effect, I have some sense that the brilliance of the work is as much a caricature of the people holding that opinion as Kay Eiffel is a caricature of a writer (and Will Ferrell is a caricature of… an antisocial IRS agent?). But I’m not sure that that’s really the effect that the director is going for, because among other things it seems like a point made in an impossibly subtle way in an otherwise totally unsubtle film.

I really enjoyed the pop-up numbers in the beginning of the film (and sprinkled a little bit throughout), and I really wished that the director had had the guts to keep it up through the rest of the film. Unfortunately, it seems like one of the rules of such items from the Hollywood book of tricks. The rule being followed seems to be that such gimmicks are invaluable in engaging the audience in the film, but once the film has hit its dramatic stride, it becomes an unworkable distraction that will prevent the person from being sucked fully into the story. I had the same feeling about the comic-booky, frames-within-frames effect in the editing of the earlier scenes of The Hulk.

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On DVD at home with Lucía, on 27 November, 2006, at around 20:00.

It’s nice to see this film again after so long. I can’t really sympathize with Henry Hill in any way, but he does appeal to some of my worst sensibilities, which really contributes to the sense of excitement I feel as his character develops. Once it hits the midpoint, the film fills me with dread as I see everything collapse. What I missed the first time around is the motivation behind Henry Hill’s betraying his friends. When I first saw the film, it felt like he was just trying to protect his own interests, but the second time around I got a stronger sense of his own sense of betrayal, as well as the sense that he had realized that the game is only interesting and friends only matter when you’re on your way up, and on the way down it all becomes nothing.

More than anything, however, I wish that the scenes from the 50s wouldn’t come to an end. It is my favorite part of the film, and it’s over so quickly.

(**)

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On 35mm at the Century City Centre, with Lucía and Ben, on 20 November, at 19:20.

Much like Syriana, Babel was an incredibly ambitious film, seeking to create a set of very realistic-looking narratives in various parts of the world and edit them together into a semi-cohesive mass. Unlike Syriana, however, Babel didn’t seem as involved in trying to create some over-arching view into the mechanics of any particular aspect of world politics. Instead, it was a series of hyper-dramatic narratives—all relating to culture clash and miscommunication—connected together like a chain, and intercut into a false chronology. Specifically, each narrative has some amount of overlapping chronology, and each narrative is presented with its own internal chronological order intact, but the cutting between the narratives disrupts the chronology of the film as a whole, leaving the viewer to stitch it together in his mind like a puzzle.

Iñárritu can stitch a scene together like few other Hollywood directors. Individually, I found most of the scenes very gripping, and a few stood out in particular—the club scene, the wedding scene, the scene where Santiago is driving back across the border. I also found it enjoyable to try to piece stitch together the narratives to see the larger narrative that Iñárritu was building.

Where the film fell flat for me, however, was in overwrought drama towards the end of the film, the more unnecessary elements of the film that seemed to detract from it and anyways made it longer (such as the scene where Amelia makes out with the creepy older widower away from the wedding party), and the unplausible nature (or what felt like it, anyhow) of a lot of the film that kept nagging at me (the couple’s children are taken on this crazy adventure at the same time as they are caught up in these life-threatening events at the center of international attention? These same events are caused by a kid that takes pot shots at a bus?).

I felt that the film had nothing to say, however. So much painstaking effort was spent in creating this worldly epic just for a couple hours of entertainment? I guess I don’t mind painstaking efforts for entertainment made in a studio or by a digital effects team, but when such a painstaking effort is made to create a sense of realism that feels cheaply undermined by the driving need to create a simple, very Hollywood dramatic arc, I get annoyed, because it feels like a waste; Iñárritu could have made a much better film if he had spent as much effort on creating a worthwhile story as he did on filming each scene.

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on DVD at home with Lucía on 11 November, 2006, at around 22:30

An enjoyable film set in very appealing French Riviera with some very unappealing main characters involved in some very intriguing intrigue. This film was very clearly intended to capture a nostalgia for the free time of childhood, and in that it mostly succeeded. It also seemed clear that the father was looking for a lover as much like his own daughter as possible, giving the film some kind of reverse Oedipal complex that I couldn’t quite fathom.

I love technicolor.

(**)

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on DVD at home with Lucía on 9 November, 2006, at around 23:59

This is about the most formulaic Hitchcock film I’ve seen. At every turn and every plot twist, you could future plot twists gathering ahead just around the corner. This is certainly one of those archetypical thrillers that is at the apex of its genre and does absolutely nothing to transcend it or otherwise deviate from it (compared to, say, Vertigo or Psycho).

Cary Grant was in top form and looking quite old at 55. Eva Marie Saint was also a pleasure to watch. Their behavior in the film seemed intended to push the limits of the Hays Code without ever violating it—I wonder if it came across that way to a contemporary audience.

(**)

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on DVD at home with Lucía on 6 November, 2006, in the evening.

In comparing this to The Science of Sleep, I felt that this film had a more intriguing story, but the other one was much more imaginative, inventive, and visually engaging. In fact, The Science of Sleep bowled me over so much, that it was tough in a way to watch Eternal Sunshine as a follow-up, but it was still such a pleasant departure from the normal stuff of Hollywood that I can’t really complain. Kudos to Jim Carrey for twice setting aside his buffoonery for serious roles (this and The Truman Show). I feel that this film further confirms my suspicion that no H0llywood actor, no matter how annoying, is incapable of being turned into a powerfully compelling tragic figure in the hands of a capable director. And Michel Gondry is nothing if not a capable director. I consider this “casting actors against themselves,” in that those very details of Carrey’s (and in the case of Punch Drunk Love, Adam Sandler) behavior that make him a delight to some and an irritation to others can add a touch of irony that really packs a punch in the right film (in an obvious way in The Truman Show and Punch Drunk Love, and in much subtler ways in this film).

The premise of the story is pretty dumb, and this is a large part of the reason that after seeing the trailer I had no desire to see the film whatsoever. Nevertheless, Michel Gondry is able to explore all sorts of nooks and crannies around the premise in totally idiosyncratic ways. By this I’m referring to the more endearing scenes, such as when Carrey is hiding from the sitter under the table, or when he tries to punch another kid that’s mocking him, only to be knocked over (both scenes felt Woody Allen-ish to me, but in a good way), as well as the more tragic scenes where Carrey and Winslet are desparately clinging one another in anticipation of imminent obliteration.

The Science of Sleep was a lovely film, mostly sunny with darker patches, that ended in a predictably bittersweet way with tragic connotations (nothing good could happen after the final scene, though thankfully Stéphane is able to inhabit is own pleasant dreams). Eternal Sunshine, on the other hand, is a suffocatingly tragic film that ends rather happily, all things considered. Kirsten Dunst, who is given a pretty nothing character, is able to bring together our heros to give them another chance (though it’s somewhat unclear whether they would have gotten there on their own).

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