Two Films

There's hope, suddenly - assuming I get this post up here in a reasonable amount of time. (I don't know if watching the Celtics is helping or hurting. What a depressing spectacle. Again, they're teasing - showing signs - like a nice little run, a couple shots by Wally, a couple nice defensive stands - but wait a few minutes....) Movies! back to movies!

Stranger than Fiction: Will Farrell, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Emma Thompson and Dustin Hoffman in a likable metafiction that fails for various reasons - Gyllenhaal's character is a blank and hardly worth caring about; Thompson, on the other hand, is spectacular, but given nothing important to do; Queen Latifah is in the cast but does she play a character? I don't know.... the story itself is awkward and half done - it plays like a short story idea, stretched out with a bunch of fake Charlie Kaufman stuff to look like it matters. It's too bad - Thompson is so good, and Farrell is very good at this sort of thing - everything he does is so understated and guileless, and he plays everything so close to straight, even in his wilder roles. His "straight" performances never feel strained like Jim Carrey or Robin Williams do when they essay drama. A lot of opportunity is wasted, but it is wasted.

Scream of the Ants: so new (or obscure) it doesn't even have an IMDB entry! New film by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and a very strange one. Two Iranians (man and woman) travelling in India, looking for a guru, the Complete Man, or, The Perfect Man. Along the way they find a chatty journalist; a cripple who is forced to act as a holy man, stopping trains; they talk about sex, and the man goes to a prostitute leaving the woman alone; they have an encounter in a taxi cab, then finally find the perfect man - who proves to be a Buddhist, basically - they are god, god exists when you believe in him - and you can travel the world and find god in a drop of dew; he's not enough so they then go on, and meet an old woman who wants to die in Banares and a German who has become an ascetic. They go to the Ganges - there is more footage - then the woman bathes (with a host of naked men), and the man attends a class - don't listen, smell.... then it ends.

Strange as it is, it's pretty consistent with Makhmalbaf's work. He's always had a surrealist streak, combined with his neo-realist streak, a combination fairly common in Iranian cinema (going back, say, to The Cow.) Here, it's as if Makhmalbaf has split himself in half, and stages a dialogue between his political, skeptical, secular side (the man), and his mystical, religious, humanist side (the woman). For all that, all the philosophical and political seriousness, it's surprisingly funny, contains moments of breathtaking grace (like the opening sequence - a couple kids tracing a shadow with rocks), as well as a good deal of political edge, and a certain amount of mystical nonsense - which is, in keeping with the dialectic structure of the film, treated like both mystical nonsense and a beautiful lie... And - full frontal male nudity, and almost full frontal female nudity - from the first shot, a woman's hair, it violates Iranian standards - and keeps escalating, eventually showing both a prostitute and the lead actress nude, and later, several Indian women. Given Iranian laws - very transgressive. That and its ecumenical approach to religion - which is both respectful and mocking - make it very radical for an Iranian film.

(Celtics, by the way, made it close, but gave it away in the last couple minutes. I could have written that an hour ago with complete confidence.)