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June 14, 2007
THINGS ARE WHAT YOU MAKE OF THEM
Its been a while since I posted and I can’t claim that I have been attacked by the busy bees or anything, it’s just that I need some enthusiasisizng of my blog project – I have no idea whether or not anyone is reading. But I will try to return to my normal, every two-day schedule. In exchange for the emptiness in your (plural) lives, here’s a pretty long, erratic post that encompasses everything I did this last week.
SATURDAY, I watched Mississippi State win their Super Regional at Dudy-Noble Stadium, advancing to the College World Series for the first time in 10 (11?) years. It was a glorious (hot) day, and the shade was only for the folks with the money seats. I sat in the bleachers and ended up looking like those poor saps from ROAD WARRIOR who were trying to tunnel for gasoline. But the win was beautiful – one of the few really exuberant, unironic memories from my alumni years as a sports fan. Unlike all the basketball wins, which were tainted by later shortcomings, I’m not expecting anything from the Bulldogs in the CWS. They’re there and that’s all that matters.
OVER THE WEEKEND, I watched two movies in my foreign film series™ (aka: dash into pretensia). These are films by directors who loom large in the history of film, but whom I know next to nothing about. Rather than list the films, here are the directors: Bunuel, Jodorowsky, Fassbinder, Truffaut (I know a little about him).
Luis Bunuel’s BELLE DE JOUR has to be one of the most repulsive movies I’ve ever seen, only boosted by how well-made it is. Showing obvious contempt for marriage and anyone who ascends classes, the story centers on a rich young wife who becomes bored with life and decides to become a prostitute. What follows is a gallery of grotesque perverts and amoral bitch-goddesses who signify that star Catherine Deneuve (thoroughly humiliated as an actress in the film) has entered a hell that is still better than her comfortable middle-class existence.
Bunuel clearly has arrogant contempt for his characters, the world they inhabit, and their curiosities. Film is, of course, about exploring curiosity, but I think what makes it for an audience is the degree of compassion or sympathy a director shows for his characters in their journey. By showing none, Bunuel pulls off a neat trick: his film is at once fascinating in its approach and unique in its subject matter. Therefore, it’s an art film and, like most of those films, shows an equal contempt for its audience (in terms of narrative, style, and fooling around with reasonable expectations). Some, Martin Scorsese among them, have hailed it as a masterpiece of sexual exploration. I felt sorry for everyone involved.
According to a thousand sleep-deprived lunatics, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s EL TOPO is “The First Midnight Movie!” The film opens with a bearded, black-clad figure, holding an umbrella (El Topo, or “The Mole”), and a naked seven year old boy on a horse in a desert. El Topo tells the boy to bury his toys and a picture of his mother, which the boy does while El Topo plays on his flute.
From here it only gets weirder.
The film becomes a bloody, absurd spectacle populated by kooky Buddhist mantra-spouting hippies hopped up on mushrooms, er . . . zen. At one point, El Topo buries a man in a grave made from the corpses of dead rabbits. Another master attacks him by throwing butterflies from a butterfly-net. When this series of trials is over, El Topo drops the beard and adopt a dwarf as his Sancho Panza and, after much humiliations, tries to dig a tunnel toward the sun.
Its fans (John Lennon called it his favorite movie) claim its absurdism is merely a puzzle for cryptic messages about war, violence, film, heroes, and the meaning of life. Its director claims it is a masterpiece that marks a new age of film. I claim it is a stupid mess redeemed only by the beauty of several shots. Jodorowsky is obviously a master craftsman; he is also a cinematic charlatan who makes up for his inability to grasp a conventional narrative or make a real movie by throwing a lot of crap into a pot together and making no attempt to make it a soup. It’s only for the die-hard film fanatic. Liking it is probably a litmus test for where you stand as a film liberal or a conservative. I might have liked it more if I were on acid, as has been recommended as the ideal state of mind for watching the film.
HOT FUZZ joins KNOCKED UP as the most I’ve laughed in a movie theater in ages. It has the energy and sheer ridiculousness of THE NAKED GUN and AIRPLANE, but uses a story that’s not so much parody as inspired imitation. I thought SHAUN OF THE DEAD was pretty good, but my utter boredom and confusion for the Zombie genre made it little more than a funny curio that I’ll probably never return to. Parodying POINT BREAK and BAD BOYS II, among others, HOT FUZZ succeeded with me by playing on conventions and creating a few of its own. The film is thankfully unironic in its admiration for the movie its imitating – and the film often works as the same kind of crackerjack cliché entertaining that makes those fun forgettably fun. It’s one of the best movies of the year.
BREACH is a minor success, which makes it, personally, a mild disappointment. Director Billy Ray’s first film, SHATTERED GLASS, is the best film of its kind besides THE INSIDER: the ultra-professional corporate thriller. What this film has that GLASS lacked is espionage, and this element is the most poorly handled. The stakes in GLASS were the respect of a magazine and a presumed public trust in journalism. The Robert Hanssen story offers the standards of the spy/mole genre, and Ray handles it subtly, which doesn’t always work. I’ve read academic journals that were more suspenseful.
And yet, the movie is a success because of the intimacy we get with its characters and the inside baseball that its unafraid to depict. Chris Cooper, for all his wonderful gifts, is a little too steely and proper as Hanssen: every line seems rehearsed, and this seems unrealistic for a man who is falling apart. But Cooper does manage to leave an impression as a certain kind of moralistic, repressed, confident evil. He does amazing things with his eyes and his patience with dialogue. Laura Linney is awesome, investing each scene with subtle characteristics that the script, unfortunately, later spells out for us.
Ryan Phillipe is actor I continually grow more impressed with. Unlike Ben Affleck , Jake Gyllenhaal, or Josh Hartnett, he is able to play an intelligent character, who has gone to college, or gone through military training, or knows how to do things that the average person doesn’t. I was so hesitant to like Phillipe because of his now-forgotten association with the abhorrent I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER. That movie, and the SCREAM trilogies, created a forgettable new brat-pack who lack the fun nostalgia of the John Hughes 80s bunch. They played iconic (if broad and dumb) characters, while Phillipe and his gang starred as teen sexpots and scream queens. These actors include, but are not limited to (last names only): Gellar, Hewitt, Prinze, Phillipe, those dopes from DAWSONS CREEK, Gayheart, Reid, Walker. Of them, only Phillipe and Michele Williams have anything resembling a respectable career. Phillipe was easy to write off at the beginning because of his brooding attempts to play tough guys and rebels and his seemingly fake marriage to Reese Witherspoon (which, last time I checked, was still valid). But he’s knocked off a quiet string of impressive, unflashy roles in the last seven years in films like THE WAY OF THE GUN, GOSFORD PARK, IGBY GOES DOWN CRASH (the movie sucked, he was good), FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS, and now this. Nice recovery.
Tomorrow at 6 PM on ESPN2: Bulldogs vs. North Carolina!
| By Andytown | 04:15 PM
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