2000s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 2)

[Michael Kerpan]

It's a very fine film, though very different from The Man Without a Past in tone. Much more cynical and hardly uplifting.

On one level, this might be true -- and yet I (for one) find Lights in the Dusk one of Kaurismaki's most heartfelt and moving films. Very little evidence of his occasional flip-ness here.

["membrillo"]

Rudo y Cursi - The gang behind Y tu Mama Tambien reunite, this time with Cuaron's younger brother taking the directing/screenplay duties. The film smartly doesn't try to duplicate the melancholic depth of the earlier film, but creates its own pathos primarily through dumbass guy screwball on location in Mexico. It's like Landis meets De Sica. The comedic chemistry between Bernal and Luna remains unparalleled in cinema today, and Spanish continues to be a much better dirty-mouth language than English. I hope Apatow and all his disciples watch this.

I cant believe somebody actually liked Rudi y Cursi. It felt so contrived.

[GringoTex]

[quote=""membrillo""]
I cant believe somebody actually liked Rudi y Cursi.[/quote]
Millions and millions of Mexicans loved it. It was a smash down there.

[GringoTex]

Irreversible - Was this made by a 15-year-old? Adolescent morality tale that offers up three sexual fantasies involving Monica Bellucci. Don't do drugs and fool around on your girlfriend, fellas- she might get raped by a homosexual.

[RagingNoodles]

How well did Rudo y Cursi do in America in non-Hispanic markets? Family members and friends from Mexico had all been pimping it strongly for months before I saw it. It was a blast but I had a feeling that it would fail to get recognition in the States, as a lot of the humor and enjoyment of the film might not come across well from reading subtitles. Also, Gael Garcia Bernal's intentionally cheesy cover to Cheap Trick's "I Want You To Want Me" was incredible and it legitimately became a real hit song in Mexico.

["membrillo"]

[quote=""membrillo""]I cant believe somebody actually liked Rudi y Cursi.

Millions and millions of Mexicans loved it. It was a smash down there.[/quote]
So was Transfomers

[ptatler]

Mike D'Angelo and crew are unveiling the twenty best films/performances of the decade Scandies over here. Not sure if you're familiar, but he's been doing these for nearly twenty years. It's a collective of some of the best film writers working in any medium today (D'Angelo, Scott Tobias, Michael Sicinski, Theo Payanides, Victor Morton, etc.) so I always find their stuff pretty fascinating (and more aligned with my own taste than the obscurantist bent here or the populist groove of most film sites). Worth a look.

So far, their top films are:

20. Gerry
19. Trouble Every Day
18. The Man Who Wasn't There
17. Ghost World
16. Zodiac

And performances:
20. Aurélien Recoing, Time Out
19. Peter Sarsgaard, Shattered Glass
18. Julianne Moore, Far From Heaven
17. Q'orianka Kilcher, The New World
16. Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone

They unveil a new award recipient each day.

On another topic, it's been a while since I've checked in. Who do I owe a swapsie for seeing THE AURA?

[GringoTex]

The World - Given his first big budget, Jia dutifully veers to melodrama. I don't think the two big melodrama events actually work (both feel strangely out of place), but I loved the deliriousness of Jia's "bigger" palate (the moving camera, the lighting of broad swaths of night, the transitional music, the musical numbers). But the animated interludes- what the fuck was that all about? Despite the faults, will still probably make my list- that's how much I love Jia.

[Michael Kerpan]

I don't mind Jia's melodrama in World -- but still do scratch my head over the animations.

Eventually, the animations sort of evaporate from my memory. ;~}

[swo17]

In defense of the animation in The World: There is a dramatic moment late in the film that is conveyed through a text message. I can't see this working as well if the camera were just zoomed in on a reallife cellphone. Let's face it, texting is a little silly. So having all the texting segments be sillily animated somehow works for me in context. Also, reallife people cannot fly. Only animated people. So there's also that.

[zedz]

My take on the animated segments was similar to swo's: it's a cute way of representing the significant but desperately uncinematic technology in a more cinematic way (as I recall, Take Care of My Cat had a similarly creative solution for the same problem). It was certainly a WTF moment the first time it happened, but it didn't bother me, and it made sense to me in a film that saw Jia playing around with a broader palette of cinematic and staging effects than previously. It was no less WTF than the found setting of the film, at any rate.

And I think Jia integrated these heightened, unreal, completely artificial moments into his initially realist style even more effectively in Still Life (though I like The World more overall).

[puxzkkx]

Keane - After seeing this and Claire Dolan it is clear that Kerrigan has a far more acute eye for shot structure and tension manipulation than he does for character or dialogue. With a story as based around character and character interaction as this, Kerrigan seems a bit lost. Lewis is committed but inconsistent in the lead, and his character's tendency to vocalize every single thought that pops into his head is a touch that definitely would have looked better on paper. But while it starts off muddled and messy, by the end it morphs into something quite touching. The final third is something special but its too bad that Kerrigan doesn't exhibit the same control of form in the first 2/3s. A 'C' grade for me.

[puxzkkx]

Memories of Murder - My my, how fun is this? Massively entertaining, beautifully stylized and the direction is excellent - Bong mixes and matches different genres like a pro. An 'A' grade from me

[Michael Kerpan]

As to the animation in The World -- I don't know that it _bothered_ me at all, just that I found it a bit disconcerting. The way text was used in Take Care of My Cat seemed more "natural" somehow (don't ask how, though).

As to Memories of Murder, as great as I consider this, I can't view it as the least bit "fun" -- I found it too distressing (maybe I over-identify with the city policeman).

[puxzkkx]

Well, it was definitely troubling, and the way Bong balanced slapstick comedy and really visceral violence and disturbing subject matter was jarring (in a good way), but the film definitely keeps your attention over a 130-minute time frame, it is an addictive watch and one that I didn't want to end. I'd definitely watch it again.

The character of Song Kang-ho's police partner really annoyed me, though - I was waiting the entire film for him to get his comeuppance.

[Michael Kerpan]

The character of Song Kang-ho's police partner really annoyed me, though - I was waiting the entire film for him to get his comeuppance.

If you mean the urban policeman, then you really DO need to watch this again soon. He gets his "comeuppance" in all too many ways.

[knives]

That was a terrible way, in a good sense, to end his character arc. Reminded me of Wayne in The Searchers a bit, but with the negative side of the coin being given to him.

[puxzkkx]

The character of Song Kang-ho's police partner really annoyed me, though - I was waiting the entire film for him to get his comeuppance.

If you mean the urban policeman, then you really DO need to watch this again soon. He gets his "comeuppance" in all too many ways.

I meant the dunderheaded guy who had his leg amputated after getting tetanus from the rusty nail that Kwang-ho stabbed him with. Clearly he did get his comeuppance, and to be honest I was thrilled! No more high jump-kicking prisoners for him.

Black Book - another excellent melding of genres. Not as well-done as Memories of Murder but also immensely entertaining, and featuring a wonderfully old-school movie star performance by Carice van Houten. Kind of surprising that the director of Showgirls could do something this un-self-consciously "classical". I loved it. I agree with GT that it goes far beyond anything Inglourious Basterds could achieve (not that that's hard). A 'B' grade from me.

[zedz]

Coeurs / Private Fears in Public Places – This has been waiting to be watched for a while now, but I wanted to get through that set of Resnais’ 80s films first, primarily to see if I could get over my aversion of André Dussollier and Sabine Azéma. This aversion makes for quite an obstacle in appreciating late Resnais, since his films are positively infested with the pair! (I don’t have any problem with the similarly ubiquitous Pierre Arditi, for the record.)

Well, I tried and I failed. La vie est un roman seems to me to be a bad film, period. Interesting structural conceit(s), but by turns clunky and smarmy in execution. Dussollier and Azéma were the least of my worries. L’amour à mort was much stronger, but Azéma is one of the most insipid actresses I’ve ever come across, and she was hopelessly outmatched by the demands of the role, given that her range runs from simpering to simpering with a frown. Dussollier was in the background and relatively innocuous. With Mélo, the best film of the bunch, the inadequacies of these two performers are front and centre dragging it down. Even with a big dramatic role, Dussollier continually resorts to the same vacuous grin (that spells “I have no idea what’s going on”) that characterised his excruciating turn in the epically dumbass The Model Couple. But with all that he’s less of a liability than Azéma, who does l’amour fou like a pre-teen beauty queen trying to impersonate Joan Crawford. It’s not entirely their fault though: I Want to Go Home didn’t feature either actor but was by some distance the worst of the 80s films – a senile, grotesquely broad stab at Rules of the Game that I wanted to like for its generally astute comic strip references.

Anyway, onto Coeurs. This is a very interesting auteurist case study, because I can appreciate the mastery of Resnais’ direction even though the material and about half the performances leave me cold. Resnais is clearly smitten with Alan Ayckbourn. I haven’t seen Smoking / No Smoking, but in this instance the romance seems more like a mismatch. There’s a sniggering, prudish Englishness to the sexual politics (including a horribly tired “ooer, vicar” moment with a lewd video) that doesn’t seem at all French despite the retooling, and the play’s overcooked structural ironies seemed fussy and shallow. The actors did their bit, but nobody seemed to be able to bring much depth to the proceedings, and Resnais’ considerable visual elegance and eloquence just seemed like lavish window dressing for a middling Play for Today.

[domino harvey]

La vie est un roman seems to me to be a bad film, period.

This film really is terrible in a way few films ever are. Every so often I remember something idiotic from the picture and have to pause to confirm that it really came from an actual film and not some half-remembered dream.

I must admit that I liked Couers' stubborn resistance to be anything more than a brief peek into a non-eclipsing narrative reality though

[Gropius]

Anyway, onto Coeurs. This is a very interesting auteurist case study, because I can appreciate the mastery of Resnais’ direction even though the material and about half the performances leave me cold.

I still haven't got round to Coeurs, but the one that probably will make my list is Pas sur la bouche (2003), an extremely stagey and old-fashioned period musical farce, with some usual suspects plus Audrey Tautou. Maybe it's a bias towards Resnais (or your point about residual auteurism - see The Academic Hack's article about how it caused a meltdown in his numbering system), but somehow, after initially disliking it, I ended up loving this film, something I can't quite say about any late period Godard. It's that perverse appeal of a cold formalism peeking through the surface jollity. Annoyingly, though (at least in the version I saw), the subtitles are translated into forced rhyming English, which often distorts the sense of the French.

[Zazou dans le Metro]

I wanted to get through that set of Resnais’ 80s films first, primarily to see if I could get over my aversion of André Dussollier and Sabine Azéma. This aversion makes for quite an obstacle in appreciating late Resnais, since his films are positively infested with the pair! (I don’t have any problem with the similarly ubiquitous Pierre Arditi, for the record.)

Well, I tried and I failed. La vie est un roman seems to me to be a bad film, period.

You are going to have problems with Les Herbes Folles for sure in that case. I don't have such an aversion to Le Duss like yourself but agree he does seem to respond better when spurred on by Arditi than his dalliances with Azema. Maybe it's his reticence about getting it on with the guvnor's Missus that holds him back ? Arditi on the other hand doesn't seem to share the same dilemma. Curiously enough I have just come out of consecutive evenings working my way through the Resnais MK2 box and found that with the exception of Melo the films post Mon Oncle Amerique were nigh on disasters culminating in the emetic 'I wanna go home'. If you think Dussolier's range is limited, what about Adolph Green? Someone whose spectrum covers the expressions of a toad pre and post enema.
I lasted nearly an hour with this in both english and french, that was ultimately (given the Stranger in a strange land subject matter) even more imbecilic than in english.
Agree totally about La Vie. What a smug silly film. And the person who yanked my chain most and who hit 5 on the slap-o-meter was Geraldine Chaplin's tiddly nickered anthropologist .
I don't know enough about Resnais to understand what derailed him around this time (marrying Azema?) but if nothing it else has inspired me to find out. Still I do quite like the clips I've seen of Herbes and will get round to seeing what will most likely be his swan song.

[zedz]

If you think Dussolier's range is limited, what about Adolph Green? Someone whose spectrum covers the expressions of a toad pre and post enema.
I lasted nearly an hour with this in both english and french, that was ultimately (given the Stranger in a strange land subject matter) even more imbecilic than in english.

Green is indeed awful in that film, but I have to cut him a lot of slack because a) he's not an actor; b) he is a genius, and there's always The Band Wagon to scurry back to when this abomination gets too much; c) he's not cast again and again in Resnais' films.

I Want to Go Home is like the pilot for a really bad American sitcom (the early 80s variety, with airbrushed life lessons around every corner and not an uncanned chuckle for miles and miles). But what do I know? Its producer claims it's the Rules of the Game of the 80s, both in terms of its abject commercial failure and its secret achievement.

[GringoTex]

La Commune (Paris, 1871) - I'm not a Marxist. Normally, I wouldn't offer such a qualifier in commenting on a film, but this one demands it! I haven't seen any Watkins films between this and Edvard Munch, so it was a bit tragic to see that Watkins had completely lost interest in certain formal qualities of cinema. Rossellini also claimed to have lost interest in cinema when he began his own didactic telefilms, but he was a liar. Watkins is telling the truth.

That doesn't mean that Watkins doesn't use his considerable talent to tame what should have been a completely disastrous exercise: namely, gathering 200 individuals of wildly varying acting talent and scholarly skill, and have them research their own parts and write 6-hours worth of dialogue/diatribes. The curious effect of this is that my empathy for any particular character had nothing to do with politics or narrative, but was almost solely dependent on the personal qualities of the performer. This can't be possibly be what Watkins intended?

On one hand, the film convinced me that the Commune martyrs were heroes. On the other hand, if I ever had a doubt by the workability of a proletariat revolution, I certainly don't now. This film dissects with almost-scientific precision the impossibility of a decentralized government.

A mass of contradictions, which is what makes it fascinating.

[Michael Kerpan]

Gringo --

Have you seen Kozintsev and Trauberg's New Babylon (in proper form with Shostakovitch's original score)? A melodramatic but very impressive film about the Paris Commune.