Talk to Her

Talk to Her (2002)

[www.imdb.com/title/tt0287467]

The Gist:

After watching All About My Mother I immediately picked up another well noted film by the director, and about halfway through the film I was pretty sure I didn't like it. First of all, unlike All About My Mother (where depressing things happen, but the audience is carried through it by the Mother's resilience...and here I said I wouldn't say anything about the film's plot) this film wades through its depression, allows itself to sink into the ground, drenches the film with meloncholic melodies, and so on. Then you have one of the main characters turning out to be a sort of stalker who is now the nurse of the comatose woman who he was basically stalking and...it was creepy, it wigged me out. However, once the film stopped fliriting the line with his character and delved into full on delusion, the film saved itself a bit in my eyes. I feel like what I'm left with is a film filled with fascinating moments, overall very powerful, but too odd to connect to. If the film was just about Marco, I think I would have liked it a great deal. But trying to reconcile my feelings with Benigno ended up having too great an impact.

On Another Note:

In retrospect, that silent film in the middle and the ending with the floodlights on Alicia are both completely brilliant.

All About My Mother

All About My Mother (1999)
[www.imdb.com/title/tt0185125]

The Gist:
This is only the second Almodovar film I've seen, the first being Volver. And while Volver was good, it was not exactly a key representation to why the director is such a significant figure in cinema. This film, however, made more sense of the director as an artist for me. The film destroyed me. What impressed me most was just how clean the film is cut together, there are no unnecssary moments, it moves through time with expert pacing, every moment is clear and concise and powerful. The story itself is something that I don't know if I can talk about without spoiling elements of the film. Like All That Jazz, this is a film I think people should just see and experience without me giving too much information. So I won't and you should.

The Birds

The Birds (1963)

[www.imdb.com/title/tt0056869]

The Gist:

Well, there are these birds and they're trying to kill everyone. Of course, you don't get to that immediately. Instead, the film explores an interesting romantic drama between its two protagonists while throwing off centered forebodings of the killer birds here and there. And then at some point the romantic drama is sidelined by the birds trying to kill everyone. The most impressive thing about the story is how the external conflict impacts the internal narrative. It warms the mother up to the young woman (she had previously been very snooty and perhaps afraid of her son finding a woman he loved and leaving her alone) and it makes the two protagonists stop kidding themselves express their true feelings for each other (there had, of course, been a sort of dance of courtship that involved the two being bitterly opposed to each other). And then you have the birds, which work on two levels. One is the absurd, the attacking birds are often inserted into the film with bad special effects super imposition (which I suppose was good at the time) and it gives the film a sort of camp feel. This fits the film very well because I mean come on, these people are getting their ass kicked! They'll just lie on the floor and let the bird snack on them. Grab them by the throat and choke the shit out of them, what the fuck people go down fighting! Thankfully, the film worked in such a way that I didn't have to take these deaths too seriously, instead I just enjoyed that beautiful Hitchcock melodrama. However, on another level, it does work in a more serious way. Not with how they kill the people, that's still kind of funny. However, the film goes through moments that emphasize the terror of an unknown destructive force in the world, some lurking agent of death without any motive or reason behind it. And afterall, isn't that what death is? Don't the birds work on a greater metaphor for life and death as a whole? Or is that a strange read into the film?

Experimental Film Day

Today (not actually today but almost a week ago) I watched a series of experimental films in my film class, which I will collectively count as one film entry. This action will be legitimized in my upcoming post of a definitive set of rules so that I don't cheat too much in this project. Anyway, I'll talk about my three favorite films that I saw.

The Dark Tower by Stan Brackhage (1999)


the dark tower - stan brakhage

a-lex | MySpace Video

I liked this because of its frenetic feel, how the patterns gained personality and rhythm, how the film isn't trying to convey any deep message but simply is just trying to register an emotional response, is trying to musical without music. I think it's beautiful.

Passage à l'acte by Francis Girod (1993)



For some reason I find this film disturbing, but it's one of the films I remember best from the class. It takes moments, seconds in time, and twists and distorts their meaning. It's fascinating, but I don't like the feeling of whatever new meaning is reached through the manipulation.

A Movie by Bruce Conner (1958)

See Film Here

This was probably the best film I saw. It's a found footage project that explores the relationship of violence and chaos. He begins the film in a comedic and almost jovial fashion but exposes the human individualistic causality of violence by the films end. Cool shit.

Week Eight

Alright, still behind the times, will probably catch up to my normal movie viewing schedule at some point. Queue for the last week of October (sort of):

The Birds - 1963 (check)
All About My Mother - 1999 (check)
Talk to Her - 2002 (check)
Experimental Week (check)

Generally I'm not going to do a lot of same year movies but Away We Go has been a point of curiosity for me for a while so I figure if I don't put more than one really recent (say within the last three years) film on the queue, I don't think it'll be too obstructing of my unwritten project rules.

On Another Note:
The Birds and Frankenstein are kind of Halloween themed, which is unintentional but still cool. The Birds is just something I've been meaning to see and I think this might be the third time I've put it down in my queue. And Frankenstein is because someone at work was talking about the original Frankenstein today and I love me some monster films so uh...yeah.

On Yet Another Note:
Okay so Frankenstein was panned, because my queues are sporadic things that have no fixed presence. I think the only film that remained from the original list was Birds.

Living in Oblivion

Living in Oblivion (1995)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113677/]

The Gist:
Living in Oblivion is one of those films for filmmakers. It is a film about the oft maelstrom of film, what I lovingly refer to as the Murphy's Law of Film, that being of course "whatever can go wrong, will go wrong". That's what this film is, and it shows this through these weird repetitions of one bad day of shooting through the dreams of the director, the actress, and presumably the last segment wasn't a dream but who knows. Anyway, through most of the film its excellent, it has a lot of humor that is given knew meaning through working with film and it does this cool thing where it brings elements from one dream into the other (like the eye patch that the cinematographer is wearing through the whole film, having "hurt" his eye in the second segment). The film as a whole wasn't perfect, it had some muddled moments, it had small tonal issues but for the most part it was solid. That is up until a very anti-climatic ending with a kind of lukewarm sequence of day dreams from the cast and crew. In the end, it still carries a lot of weight in the context of filmmaking but isn't much of a film beyond that.

Sarkar

Sarkar (2005)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0432047/]

The Gist:
I have a time tested rant about film adaptations and the fact that you must deviate from the original source and continue the process of creating new moments or else the story will stagnate. Well Sarkar does so and does so well and it still kind of sucks (not the most academic term I know). Anyway, you know you might be in trouble when you watch an Indian "remake" of Godfather produced through Bollywood but sans all the dancing and singing (because this is a serious film). Note that if there was bollywood singing and dancing this movie could have been awesome in a really weird and strange way. As it is, it almost seems good until you realize it isn't. Why? Part of it is how pervasive the Hollywood style of filmmaking is with this film, the camera is constantly moving, they're trying interesting little compositions, they have a quicker pace of editing. And yet the camera seems to move and frame its subjects without motivation save perhaps that of looking cool. In fact, the whole film felt like it was posturing for stylized greatness, it was indulgent and tried to move so quickly that plot holes plagued every other scene. Also, the film as a whole seemed to be joined together in a clumsy and crass fashion. It just wasn't very good, but the ending re-envisioning of the revenge crescendo of Godfather was still kind of cool.

Anatomy of a Murder

Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
IMDB #209 [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052561/]

The Gist:
This is basically the original badass courtroom flick. And like many things, its contemporary brethren pale in comparison. However, the film is by no means perfect. For one thing it has a slow start and I think just a little could have been cut from the beginning. All the exposition with Jimmy and whoever the old guy was is perfect but after that it's little slow on the uptake. Beyond that, some might take issue with how little the film goes into the actual reality of the murder, though it alludes to there being something beyond what is shown on film. I actually liked this aspect because you have the same vantage as your protagonist, the always awesome James Stewart. Anyway, beyond this its all good. Stewart chews up scenery in the court, playing up one of his more wily characters. But the true soul of the film is the oddities of the character, his playing jazz in a juke joint or how he talks to the judge about the best way to catch frogs with a fishing line. Anyway it's a great film, gives the back and forth in the courtroom very well and manages to please with its character performances too. Well at least with Stewart, almost everyone is else is a predictably two dimensional character. Maybe not George C. Scott or whoever played the judge, they both felt real as well.

Network

Network (1976)
IMDB #226 [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074958/]

The Gist:
I thought I had Network pegged before I watched it: your potent cautionary film about the dangerous path media is traveling down, away from authentic journalism and toward profit obsessed sensationalism. In a sense, it is that movie, but it manages to be more than that. Its soul is an odd thing, it takes on almost unnoticeable surreal tone (except toward the very end were it becomes very obvious that that is there intent). And at the same time, you have a fascinating protagonist (who is not Peter Finch although you would never know it going into the film) who seems to have no real purpose being in the film past the first half. At least on a surface level he has absolutely nothing to do with the plot, he just sticks around and has an affair with the woman who takes over his job. However, the film succeeds because what happens on the surface means a great deal when it comes to everyone except the protagonist and absolutely nothing when it comes to him. After all, he's the only one who escapes television without being consumed. So not only does his lack of purpose work all on its own (and it does), but it fits on a thematic level too. Pretty cool.

On Another Note:
Peter Finch's rants in this film are all awesome.

Week Seven

Oi, so behind this week. I blame midterms, even though I've been procrastinating with them too. I can probably blame Uncharted 2 more accurately. Anyway, the new week's queue which will get finished at some point:

The Anatomy of Murder (1959) - check
Living in Oblivion (1995) - check
Sarkar (2005) - check
Network (1976) - check

Cache

Cache (2004)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387898/]

The Gist:
Cache (or Caché) is a film with a Hitchcockian style of suspense, only with this film the threat is extremely abstract. It is simply videotapes of someone watching their house, then a videotape of the husband's home as a child, then a videotape of the husband's vague conversation with another man, and so on. These tapes fill the opening moments with a feeling of dread, but that slips away as the film goes on. In its stead is the mystery of who is sending the tapes, the mystery of the husband's past, the mystery of the wife's potential affair, and so on. In fact, the film has a tendency to take something severe and then soften the blow. One example is the resolution of their son being kidnapped, another is the explanations of the husband's past (you kept waiting for something more to be revealed, but soon find that it was all there was). And then the tapes... This film defies all expectations of wrapping things up neatly, which might be off putting to some but does add to the overall experience in the long run. In any case, where the film truly succeeds is taking an unknown, external threat and exerting pressure on its characters, watching the honest pathos of a frightened and conflicted couple emerge.

All That Jazz

All that Jazz (1979)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078754/]

The Gist:
A dizzying, frenetic film of great ambition and vision. Easily on my top five of favorite musicals of all time. Possibly on my top two of favorite musicals. I'll have to watch it again. Why is it so good? Because of its weird structure, its fascinating use of repetition and how the repetition evolves new meaning as the film goes on, the great character study of an artistically obsessive Broadway directer who is apparently on the brink of death, and so on. Through these weird little exposition scenes with a woman that represents some aspect of the afterlife, we get insight into the man's thoughts and actions, all his anxieties and his truthful feelings of different relationships. Outside of fantasy we get a portrayal of man who is a god in his own world but is incessantly plagued by artistic insecurity and an inability to connect with others. I could go on but I don't want to spoil the film. I feel like with some films you should just go into it with very little background information (which is how I went into this one).

Juliet of the Spirits

Juliet of the Spirits (1965)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059229/]

The Gist:
So I'm apparently going through a small Fellini phase. This is the fourth Fellini film since my blog's inception. Here we find a couple of interesting deviations for the director: the use of technicolor and the use of surrealism. This was Fellini's first color film and it also become a sort of bridge between his earlier style of filmmaking (more traditional narratives) to his later style (more surreal). However, through all this experimentation with new forms the picture takes on an unwieldy presence. The picture is filled with strong moments and powerful themes that Fellini has touched on before with similar effect (the subject of trust and infidelity for one). And throughout most of the picture I was frequently astonished with one scene or another. However it becomes one of those films were it can be broken down into individual pieces and be declared genius but when you try to view it as a cohesive whole it falls apart. It reminded me of watching Inglorious Basterds, only with that film it sort of worked. You had all these genius, insane little moments that got slapped together and took on an unruly, enjoyable pace. In point, the spontaneity and disorder of the effect fit the form of the film. With Juliet of the Spirits it doesn't come off as well. Instead, you get the feeling that Fellini bit off too much, was trying to say too much, and undermined his film because of it. The result is a pretty great film, but a very flawed film, something that wouldn't be able to hold up to his better work.

On Another Note:
Giulietta Masina, many years later, still awesome. And a great part of the reason the film works so well, she keeps the film grounded in moments where it could have drifted too far into the abstract. Without her presence, this goes from a great but flawed film to a few grades beneath.

Battle of Algiers

Battle of Algiers (1966)
IMDB #210 [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058946/]

The Gist:
French Occupation of Algeria is fairly uneventful. They exploit the people of Algeria in subtle ways, sure, but are mostly benevolent rulers. That's until a well organized terrorist rebellion against French rule provokes dirty things like torture and setting off bombs that kill small children and so on. Of course its nothing that the terrorists don't answer in kind, and technically they started it right? Killing officers in the street, bombing public places, so on. So who are you supposed to root for? No one, of course. No matter that the film was made by a supporter of Algerian revolution and that the story focuses more on that side of the narrative. For that reason alone, the small tendencies toward picking a side instead remaining completely neutral, the film becomes weakened. This is a shame because it really is incredible filmmaking for the most part, it moves with fluidity and grace and its off beat structure keeps the audience engaged. However, I couldn't help being plauged by the idea that I'm following one side of the struggle more than the other, I'm subtly being nudged to one side over the other. This would have been fine except the film doesn't provide enough background to make me empathize with their plight. I do not see the cruel French rule firsthand that would lessen the shock of some chick killing cute kids licking their ice cream cones with handbag full of explosives. I feel sorry for the French policeman that waves the kid off before the kid comes back and guns him down from behind. I, of course, also feel bad when in retribution policemen set a bomb outside a building in the Cazbah (or however you spell that) and they pull a child out of the rubble. Violence turns everything into unintelligible ugliness, good men become monstrous beasts, and whatever noble intentions there were to begin with are lost. Perhaps this is the film's point, in fact I assume it is. If so it is a point that is obscured and contradicted by small lapses of neutrality.

Y Tu Mama Tambien

Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0245574/]

The Gist:
Two young, immature, adolescent boys who are obsessed with sex go on a road trip with a young woman named Luisa. They are trying to get to the ocean but secretly the two have no idea where they're going. The trip also seems to be an excuse to try and sleep with Luisa, though you get the feeling that neither of them would really have the courage to try and seduce her. What you would think would soon follow is your basic roadtrip breakdown, a liminal experience transitioning into adulthood, thick with nostalgia of lost youth and innocence. And the audience does get that to a point. However, the film deviates from this in a couple important ways. For one, its fixation with all this sexuality with its characters seems almost meaningless at first. However, once Luisa has sex with one boy and then the other,the film plays into this immaturity perfectly, revealing stark insecurities. What follows is an incredible, bizarre film that has one of the strangest twists on the iconic Annie Hall ending that I've ever seen. Also you have strange voiceovers reminiscent of something out of French New Wave, like Band of Outsiders maybe. Along with this is Cuaron's incredibly expressive camera work that I am personally obsessed with. His films seem to make the camera feel like another character. In fact, the cinematography breathed life into a vaguely sluggish opening act when the film hadn't revealed yet what it wanted to be. As soon as it did so, it became very poignant. However, I still felt like I was being dragged along for no reason up until then.

Week Six

Technically I'm not done with week five yet, but I've less than an hour to finish on Y Tu Mama Tambien and I'm watching Battle of Algiers today in class which will go to my new week so I'll just start it off. Also I think I'm going to make my week start new on Wednesday instead of Tuesday. Granted by that system I'm still late in finishing my last week, but what can you do? Sometimes homework intervenes. Anyway:

Battle of Algiers - 1966 (check)
Juliet of the Spirits - 1965 (check)
All that Jazz - 1979 (check)
Cache - 2004 (check)

Nights of Cabiria

Nights of Cabiria (1957)
IMDB #152 [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050783/]

The Gist:
This marks the third film I've seen of Fellini's through the span of this project, the second featuring his wife Giulietta Masina. Unlike La Strada, which I still feel is an overrated film, I cannot deny Cabiria's genius. Like La Strada, secondary characters seem to come and go in Cabiria. You have the deadbeat boyfriend in the beginning of the film, the famous filmmaker, the man who gives small items to the homeless holed up in "the caves", the wandering priest, the accountant (who actually plays a pretty prominent part toward the end). It gives the film a wonderful feeling of the chance encounters of someone's life, and how these small moments define who we are. It also seems to be a fascinating mutation from the tendencies of Neorealism, proceeding this film by a little more than a decade. These characters interact with the lively Maria (or Cabiria), the main character. It took me a little while to figure out that she was a prostitute. The fact that it took me a little while has to do with not knowing anything about the film going into it and a deft subtly about the character, slowly hinting at the fact but never outright saying it. However, the effect of her station in life moves the drama of the story nicely, be it seeking religious sanctification or love. She moves through the film in a brash and contentious way, but underneath she is vulnerable. Fellini's ability to draw on that vulnerability through minute gestures throughout the film instead of crudely hammering them into his audience, shows how much he had matured as a filmmaker at this point in his career.

Umberto D.

Umberto D.
IMDB #188 [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0045274/]

The Gist:
Umberto is an aged Italian fellow living off his measly pension during the economically challenged post-war Italy. However, he is in debt to his landlady, who is trying to evict him for her own selfish reasons. He tries to scrape up the cash to pay his debt, while catching a fever, while trying to feed his dog, while loosing his dog and having to go to the pound to find him before he is euthanized, while wrestling with his pride and his refusal to pan handle, and that's before the really depressing stuff hits. And yet this is a beautiful film, a warm film, and his connection with his dog Flike serves as the emotional heart. There are many beautiful moments in the film, and like Bicycle Thieves (more commonly known as The Bicycle Thief, which was De Sica's earlier effort with the same screenwriter) this film manages to take a character through one day of his life and make the audience feel wholly connected to him before the end. In The Bicycle Thief I found myself leaning forward, empathizing with the character's moral dilemma. In Umberto D, I felt a similar feeling toward the end. However, working up to that moment, Umberto struck a nerve where the Bicycle Thief did not. In this film, Umberto is a man near the end of his life, seeking dignity and peace. Moments like when he tries to sleep in his shitty little room that his landlady is trying to kick him out of, and he's running a fever, and he can't sleep because the landlady's guests are singing opera until the wee hours of the morning (apparently they're all opera people)...the moment feels too real, too vulnerable. It reminded me of moments that have happened in my life. Only I was young, so is the main character in Bicycle Thief for that matter. If there were more of these moments, the film would probably be too much for me. As it is, it strikes a good balance, giving the protagonist a healthy sense of vitality for much of the film. Without that, the film would have lost me.

On Another Note:
Did I mention I thought the film was genius. I don't think I used the word genius once. ...Well it is. Especially the end.

The Grapes of Wrath

The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
IMDB #149 [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032551/]

The Gist:
Henry Fonda is Tom Joad, the immortal protagonist of John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. Tom gets out of prison for manslaughter and finds himself smack in the middle of the Great Depression. His family's farmland has been stolen out from under their feet, along with everyone else in the dust bowl, and the family leaves for California and the promise of work. California isn't quite the promise land its purported to be though. And thus drama ensues. For me, the film is a powerful representation of the disparity of poverty and the gut wrenching acknowledgment that every human being should have the right to eat, that no one should need to suffer the fate of slow starvation. The film doesn't hit this point too hard home though, and it doesn't need to. Today, our films would have and the result would have been a movie that "made you think" but you'd end up never seeing again because it depressed the hell out of you. The Grapes of Wrath has depressing qualities, but it has hope too, and a beautiful noir influenced aesthetic and Henry Fonda's incendiary performance and perfect adaptation screenwriting that all begs for repeated viewings.

One Month

Today marks the first full month of the project. The top five films of the month:

1. The Bicycle Thief
2. 8 1/2
3. Shoot the Piano Player
4. The Lives of Others
5. Singin' in the Rain

Honorable Mention: A Fistful of Dollars