movies for the week

[godthedog 0]

so my schedule for the last month or so has been murdering me: on a typical day, i'll leave home at about 8 in the morning, go to class, walk downtown to eat and run errands, go straight to work, and not get back home till 10 or 11 at night. this past tuesday it came to a head when i had to cash a check at the bank, talk to a couple people in directing class about helping me with my 10-minute project (NONE of whom i got to talk to, as my teacher just would not shut the fuck up & kept showing us an incredibly boring scene from 'blue' over and over again, scrutinizing every detail down to what brand of sugarcube juliette binoche was holding [i shit you not, he started rambling on about how louis malle was born into a family fortune based on a sugar company, and how this somehow meant that kieslowski used that company for his sugarcube that juliette binoche held in her hand in this scene]), leave class early to study for an insanely hard midterm, take said midterm, have lunch with ashley (which was supposed to be a prep meeting with everybody i needed for the 10-minute project, but only ended up being her since i couldn't talk to anybody else), get a 15-minute nap at home, and go to my first of many GRE night classes. exactly 2 things went right this day: the bank was open, and ashley showed up for lunch. after having a day like this (and a monday that was very similar to this), i decided to rent a bunch of movies & take the next day off: no class, no errands, just movie goodness. i watched 4 1/2 movies in 2 days, and will pass my newfound film knowledge on to you:

 

hearts of darkness, fax bahr/eleanor coppola/george hickenlooper - documentary about the personal hell that francis ford coppola went through in the process of making 'apocalypse now'. the story of how 'apocalypse now' was made has a legendary status now (and is actually more interesting than the movie itself), and it's fascinating to see how things somehow manage to continually get worse. the movie mostly tries to paint coppola as some cursed visionary, and is mainly about the shades of grey between genius and madness, but i got the impression that coppola was more of the latter, bringing many of the hardships on himself (many times not even knowing what he will shoot on any given day, not having an ending written, taking days to film scenes only to hate them and scrap them later) and basically flying by the seat of his pants for 200+ days. i couldn't really empathize with coppola or feel sorry for him, but the balls with which he took the hardest road possible to get AN done make it pretty mesmerizing to watch. i'm not even a fan of AN, but this was good stuff.

 

following, christopher nolan - DAMN good little suspense movie about the trouble a man gets into from his fascination with following random strangers around. nolan has an amazing talent for continuing the tradition of the best film noir of the 40s: taut stories with constant twists, desperate and/or conniving characters trying to outsmart each other, and managing to say something larger about the darker side of people. not only is the script amazing (with taut, pulpy dialogue that has none of the cheesiness of old noir), but i love the way this movie looks: nolan himself was holding the camera most of the time, handheld, almost always using available light, and the result is a combination of the thick shadows that noir is so famous for & a nice roughness that makes it even grittier. even better stuff.

 

the road home, zhang yimou - when i saw 'raise the red lantern' a while ago, i thought it just might be the most gorgeous movie i'd ever seen, and i became an instant fan of zhang yimou, gulping up everything by him i could get my hands on. i now stand corrected, and say that THIS is the most gorgeous movie i've ever seen. the story is simple and beautiful: a man comes back to his hometown because his father has died and his mother wants to have an impossibly large funeral procession; we spend most of the rest of the movie in flashback to understand how the mother and father got together. zhao di, of 'crouching tiger hidden dragon' fame, plays the mother in flashback, and i never knew she could act this well. yimou makes her look like a goddess, and there is one image of her running through a forest in a pink jacket that i will never forget: the features of her face, the color of the jacket, the color of the trees around her...there is no way i can do it justice. as i said before, the story more than holds up its end of the movie as well, and finds the perfect tone with the images: sincere, strong, folksy, and almost mythic. best movie i've seen in a long time.

 

the merchant of four seasons, rainer werner fassbinder - speaking of mythic, fassbinder has that status in some circles, and after seeing this i think it has to do more with the story of fassbinder himself than the movies he made. he made scores of movies in a very short period of time (example: he made six features in 1970), would go to ANY lengths to get them made, often prostituting his actresses (and himself) for money, and died at 37. i don't really know what to say about the movie, it didn't really have that much of an effect on me either way. i won't even bother trying to recount the plot, cause it's all over the place and every 20 minutes the movie seems to get bored with itself and decide to be about something else. i suppose fassbinder was trying to reveal something intense about the human condition, but it just seemed like cheap melodrama to me. the main character beats his wife 10 minutes into the movie, and then proceeds through the rest of the film as if i'm supposed to care about him. it's very simply made, very reliant on emotions, but none of the emotions registered with me. a pretty ho-hum experience.

 

akira kurosawa's dreams, akira kurosawa (duh) - i can't honestly review this entire movie, as i didn't watch all of it, but i can say that the first 20 minutes are crap. as the title suggests, the whole film is an anthology of dreams, not really being "about" anything, other than the magical nature of dreams. this is all fine and good, IF you can capture the magical nature of dreams, but kurosawa just couldn't do it for me. the images weren't particularly striking or powerful (especially after seeing 'the road home' the same day), and the rest fell flat on its face. this is the second strikeout i've seen by kurosawa in a row (the first being 'drunken angel').

 

additional fun fact: last night i also got turned away from my local video store for trying to rent too many movies. the 5 from tuesday were still sitting at home (not due till sunday), and since i'd seen them all, i figured i'd go back and pick up some others. so i stop by the video store on the way home and pick out 5 more movies ('tape', 'tokyo drifter', 'shock corridor' and a couple others that i can't remember), but when i try to check them out the guy at the counter says "no, you can't have any more than 6 movies checked out at a time." so i go home empty-handed, and decide to go to the theater with my roommate to see...

 

***bonus movie: school of rock, richard linklater - this was supposed to be part of my big movie bonanza last weekend, where i would see 'kill bill', 'lost in translation', this one and 'intolerable cruely' in 3 days, but i ran out of money after 'lost in translation'. anyway: the premise is ridiculous and the story is completely formulaic, but it's so funny and well done that i didn't really care. it takes a certain special kind of talent to make the standard hollywood formula work & get real emotions and characters out of it, and linklater does it really well. good, clean fun.

[ArkhamGlobe 0]

From what I gather Fassbinder's kind of an acquired taste. I've only seen Love is Colder than Death myself, which I thought was more interesting than good, and I've got a couple more of his films around that I've never gotten around to seeing.

 

And Tokyo Drifter rocks, shame you didn't get to rent it.