Movie Catchup

It's a posting frenzy! what's this, 4 in 3 days? ANyway, here's a roundup of films, most in brief, but a couple expanded.

Talledega Nights - finally got around to seeing it, and very happy I did. Will Farrell as a Nascar driver.

La Moustache - a neat little French mind-bender about a man who shaves the mustache he's had for after 15 years - or did he? Starring Vincent Lindon and the ever magnificent Emmanuelle Devos, sleek and intriguingly made. It makes explicit something about fiction, and especially about film - that there is no necessity that what happens next in a story needs to proceed logically from what happened before. In a film, the only rule is the flow of images - everything can change from shot to shot, and it will be assimilated into the story. It's a very intersting movie.

Half Nelson - good solid indie drama about a young white guy (Ryan Gosling) teaching at a mostly black brooklyn school. He is a fine teacher - popular, funny, challenging - but otherwise, he is a fuckup - a dope fiend and an asshole. He interacts with a dope dealer (Anthony Mackie, who's damned good), who is, in his personal life, together and responsible - and with an 8th grade girl (Shareeka Epps) who watches them both, and thinks about her life. Gosling's teaching is based on dialectics and the film is too - the tension between good teacher and fuckup, between Mackie's loyalty to his friends, his general decency to people - and the fact that he is a dope dealer, who wants to recruit a 13 year old girl into it. The irony of the mother who works, but works so much she loses her daughter, and so on. That's the biggest problem - that the film slips from dialectics to irony too often, and it's a preachy irony... But it is, basically, what Crash wanted to be, and does it right. Twisting cliches, turning scenes inside out - it's a nice piece of work.

Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles - a strange case: Zhang Yimou film coming out (which is good, the benefits of being Zhang Yimou, I guess) with almost no fanfare at all (which is bad: the disadvantage of making more than one kind of film, maybe). This is in Zhang's neorealist soap opera mode, like the Story of Qiu Ju or Not One Less or The Road Home - this follows the same general shape, someone stubborn marches off across the miles to do something sentimental. Comic relief and officious pricks are encountered and overcome, and then help the hero reach his goal. Tears are shed on screen; the music swells: tears may be shed in the audience. This one has an old Japanese guy (Ken Takakura) filming folk opera for his dying son. Comic peasants, annoying officials and cute kids appear on cue. These films (Zhang is a major perpetrator, though world cinema seems overrun with them) are as predictable and efficient as a Ramones song, and in the right hands work as well as a Ramones song. Zhang knows his business, though he can't seem to help throwing in the string section, which has the same effect here it would have in a Ramones song. That's all I can really say against him: his eye, his sense of pacing, putting together a film, getting acting from pros and amateurs and everything in between, are all outstanding. Sometimes his films feel like he is trying to hide the soap opera material until it's time for the tears to flow - this time, he seems a bit more willing to acknowledge the contrivance of the whole thing. He seems constitutionally incapable of telling a story straight - in place of the layers of plot and narration in his recent martial arts epics, he comes at this one through a host of images of translation. Translators themselves (Takakura has a girl guide who is a real translator; a village guide who knows a smattering of Japanese and English - she leaves, but the man stays to help him, but can't translate - he writes things down then calls the girl...) - plus video, letters, voiceovers, and all the doubles, masks and mirrors you could ask for. Takakura wants to connect to his son through opera - the opera itself is a mask that frees the emotions - he is Japanese in China, dependent on translators, who need to translate for one another - he wants to film the opera, and makes videos arguing his case to the officials. When he gets close to what he wants he decides to effect a reunion between an opera singer and his son, a transparent mirror of his own desired reunion with his own son. I hope I'm not spoiling too much to say it works, though it requires more mediation. And oh yeah - technology: cel phones, with and without without signals, video, opera, digital cameras, Chinese banners, etc., all serve as communication devices.... Doubles and substitutes and compensations abound...

Something Like Happiness - one of two films I caught from the Boston Museum of Fine Art's new Czech film series. The other is Lunacy, the latest film by legendary animator and director, Jan Svankmajer. Judging from these two films, and the posters for the ones I didn't see, this was almost a Pavel Liska film festival - he stars in Lunacy, is the second lead in Something Like Happiness, and seemed to be in all the other films as well. Who is he? An actor, bearing an uncany resemblance, in looks and sometimes performance, to Matthieu Amalric - a bit of a sad sack, who still comes off cooler than anyone around him... In Something Like Happiness he is opposite an actress named Tatiana Vilhelmová, who bears a certain resemblance to the young Holly Hunter - they play childhood friends (more than friends, when they were children) trying, as adults, to get along in a nasty looking town somewhere in Bohemia. He is living in the family manse - in fact, a crumbling farm house next to a factory; she lives with her parents, works at a supermarket, and waits for her boyfriend in America to call. They both get sucked into the disaster one of their friends, a single woman with 2 children, has made of her life... The film works, intermittantly - there are some wonderful scenes, drunkenness around Christmas - some moments when Liska and Vilhelmova are together - but there's also a lot of melodrama, some of it quite improbably - and a kind of slogging confusion about a lot of it. It does not add up to more than the sum of its parts - the parts are often wonedrful; overall, it's a somewhat tedious soap opera.

Lunacy, meanwhile, is a somewhat disjointed gloss on Poe and DeSade, but full of dark humor and some striking imagery - and funny, clever animation (meat, brains, tongues, crawling into skulls and the like...) Quite fun.

Finally - one of the local theaters is running an Almodovar retrospective - I finally saw Women on the Verge of Nervous Breakdown, wonderful high camp melodrama - a great delight.