Catchup from Last Year

I am trying to catch up on writing about films. I usually go off the grid around the middle of December, and being slow and prone to procrastination, especially when it comes to writing, this creates an awful backlog. I usually get back to film watching quickly enough - backlog!

Some films, I'm still brooding over - Shame, A Dangerous Method, Hugo and the Artist - I want to do them justice. They all raise interesting questions - I keep circling them... I'll get there eventually. They are all associated with awards and the like - so they are still somewhat topical - so I feel less guilt about not getting anything posted about them. I will though. They are films to think about.... The films here - it's not so much that they aren't intriguing or important (I mean, hell - one of them is a bona fide masterpiece!) - but - who knows. The masterpiece at least is 45 years old, so I don't feel too guilty about shorting it. Anyway - I want to put something down about these films, most of which I saw at the end of last year...

Week End - 14/15 - rereleased in a shiny new print, one of the great End of the World and None Too Soon flicks... Two slimy bourgeoisie take a trip, suffer traffic jams and Mozart, and are murdered and eaten by revolutionaries with names like Arizona Jules. Perhaps the darkest dark comedy ever made. Godard at his harshest, but also hilarious. Very strange, but the strangeness funny - a string of surreal incidents, violence and murder, pornographic tales and encounters with madmen - St. Just and Emily Bronte; Joseph Balsamo, son of God and Alexander Dumas, who promises to grant their wishes if they take him to London. It's political points are delivered in the same style - a kind of deadpan surrealism, absurdity played dead seriously, kind of - those garbagemen lecturing them on colonialism... It's kind of an absurdist version of Bergman's Shame (or maybe Shame is Week End played straight. I prefer the Godard - I prefer Godard to Bergman on principal, I suppose, but here, I think the absurdity of Week End saves it from the traps that afflict Shame. But that's neither here nor there - it's a great film, and always thrilling to see it - see any Godard, let's not pretend otherwise - on the big screen.

Tales from the Golden Age - 11/15 - anthology film from Romania, 6 stories from the days of Ceaucescu, all written by Christian Mungiu, directed by various filmmakers. The stories are:
1. The Official visit - just that, a village prepares for a (possible) visit by an official - the visit is cancelled, but the lesser officials are partying, and end up taking a ride on a carousel - because the top official ordered everyone to ride, the operator is on the machine as well - they can't get off...
2. The Party Photograph - Ceaucescu meets D'Estaing at the airport, there is a photo - which is subject to constant negotiation on retouching. The party insists that Ceaucescu should be wearing a hat (he'd taken it off for the photo) - the photo editors do so, but aren't allowed to check the photo before it goes to press - they forget to erase the hat in his hand...
3. The Zealous Activist - this one is about a bureaucrat who goes to a remote village to force everyone to learn to read. It is quite conventional, really - standard comedy with yokels and a city slicker...
4. The Greedy Policeman - a very good little film - alternates between 2 kids and their parents (who are neighbors). One family buys a pig for the holidays, but it is delivered still alive - they don't know how to kill it. They end up gassing it - that works, but then they try to burn the hair off the animal with a blow-torch, with predictable results.
5. The Air Sellers - a boy who goes door to door collecting bottles (pretending to be inspecting the water) meets a girl - she needs money, so she joins him in his scheme. She is more ambitious than he is - she convinces him to scam the super at a building for bottles, but they are caught - she runs, he's arrested, but he doesn't really care - his father works for the party....
6. The Chicken Driver - about a man who drives poultry to port, who always stops at the same inn for supper - one day, one of his tires is stolen and he has to stay over - in the morning, he finds he has hundreds of eggs in the truck - the innkeeper convinces him to let her sell them. He tries it again - but he's caught, and ends in jail...

I should find more to say about this - it is a very fine film. Works in the vein of realistic absurdity that is characteristic of Romanian films (at least most of the ones that get released here), well made, amusing and wryly moving.

The Rum Diary - 9/15 - Hunter S. Thompson novel starring Johnny Depp, written and directed by Bruce Robinson - set in Puerto Rico, 1960, with a Thompsonesque writer turning up on a lousy newspaper, getting tied up in a scheme to build hotels and ruin the natural beauty of places, with an array of mad eccentrics around the poor fellow... It's amusing enough, and a fair story, but tends to bog down, and never really delivers on the madness half-promised. Depp is a Thompson figure in the process of becoming Hunter S. Thompson - and thus a bit bland. Better for the set pieces and occasional flights of rhetoric than for the story...

Gainsbourg (A Heroic Life) - 10/15 - very clever bio of Serge Gainsbourg, using puppets and animation to fill out his personality - his mug as a character... A nice film, maybe nothing more - but thoroughly enjoyable.

The Mill and the Cross - 11/15 - A walk through the Breugel painting The Road to Calvary - the painting is presented as a real world, augmented with painted backdrops - the film is a kind of critical essay on the painting, an explanation, as well as a kind of dramatization of it. Begins with a young couple, who are attacked by Spanish soldiers, the man is beaten and put on a wheel and lifted to the crows - later taken down, just the crows left.... This atrocity is repeated in the staging of the crucifixion - the march to the cross, first, with the painting presented as time stopped in the middle of the procession - then the crucifixion, and the peasants dancing, after the time of the painting itself... The film addresses the politics of it - the Spanish, the Flemish resistance, and so on; some of the background of Breugel himself; and the painting, as work of art - its design, structure - the spider's web, with Jesus in the middle, almost obscured, with the mill above, the miller looking down, grinding the bread of life.... All of this is a fantastic idea for a movie - a very effective and intriguing way to work with art. I thought the film came a bit short - but only a bit... it may have tried to do too much, and couldn't quite get all the pieces (the history, art history, art criticism, as well as direct religious and political ruminations of its own) to cohere - or couldn't quite do justice to all the things it tried to do. But still - a great joy to see.

Weekend - 10/15 - a guy goes to a gay bar after hanging with his friends - picks someone up there - the film picks up in the morning, as they are in bed, talking about it. It turns out the pickup is an artist, who interviews the first guy, and as they talk, they start to become friends. The rest of the film follows them around, this weekend - one of them is off to America Monday morning. Etc. It starts out quite casual, but they bond very quickly - and their parting proves to be traumatic.... ends like Lost in Translation - the two men whispering something to each other we don't hear. All this is nicely done - the characters are interesting, the dialogue and filmmaking is all well out together. It's all a bit stagy, but not bad, overall.