Category: Movies

My Own Private Idaho

I have seen quite a few Gus van Sant’s films, exactly 7 out of 14 of the feature films he has made until today. Starting from “Mala Noche”, his first, all the way up to “Milk”, one of his most recent endeavors, I’d say I have a good picture of his career, starting with the very rough simple gay stories to more subtly gay mainstream films to biopics about a gay politician. His insertion of a scene of “Tosca” will probably his most memorable contribution to my film enjoyment, yet at the same time, I have pretty much liked all his films despite or maybe rather because of the gayness. But from all I have seen, “My Own Private Idaho” stands out.

First of all, I have never seen anything with River Phoenix before. Of course he is infamous for dying a young death and that probably made him immortal – one of the biggest ironies of being famous, I suppose. But apart from that I had absolutely no idea he was just that good. How can a young kid who probably has seen nothing in life be such a good actor? Maybe the drugs did it; they created the misery that brought out this incredible character in him. Thinking about it, I wonder if Rooney Mara is also going to turn crazy.

The other pleasant aspect is to see Keanu Reeves actually being a great actor. He might have been heavily overshadowed by Mr. Phoenix there, just like Brad Pitt is practically overshadowed by his co-stars in any given film he has ever acted in (unlike Leo <3 who stands for himself), but this film proves that Keanu is more than a pretty face. And what a pretty face! Back in the day when everybody saw “The Matrix” he has never striked me as so attractive.

It’s not that the rest of the film is bad – it is very far from that. It’s just that if I had the film before I told other people to watch it, I would have been much more careful about it. I mean, hey… the film is a mix out of an unrequited gay love story which doesn’t really make much sense, another story that doesn’t exactly come to a conclusion (we haven’t actually learned anything about Mike’s mother nor much about Scott’s family), a street hustler who randomly falls asleep and finally, Shakespeare?

Note: Another bonus, yay Grace Zabriskie! I never imagined to see her in a movie again, she is just such a strange character?

I know that this is one of Shii’s favorite films and 6451 explicitly said that he liked it (he made me feel so guilty for giving him that movie without watching it! like catholically guilty you know). In consequence, my expectations for this film were extraordinarily high. In some sense it was fulfilled, because this film might just as well be Gus van Sant’s masterpiece in terms of storytelling and directing, but on the other hand, it also left me trailing in metaphorical ether… as if I was figuratively floating in an empty universe of thoughts and ideas. Perhaps he could have taken these three ideas – a street hustler who randomly falls asleep, a rich Shakespearean boy who decides to go back to the “good ways” and a lost boy looking for his mother – in order to fleshed them out and made three movies out of it. But the way it is right now, I thought the film was really strange and I probably failed to see its point.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

Oh wow. It took me years to finish watching this movie (although this is nothing compared to the Decalogue which I have partially rewatched and am still thinking of very often, or Inland Empire which is another film I cannot get myself to see in its entirety), but “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” is just particularly painful. For the first hour or so, probably the most boring movie I have ever seen in my life, except for Kevin Spacey’s lovely display of arrogance and John Cusack’s oblivious character. If this is the movie about Savannah, or even the South, then it tells you a novel about how soporific it must be.

Okay, maybe the South is not exciting, and maybe it is funny to make in-breed jokes about them (just thinking about it makes me want to laugh, though I have personal reasons for that), but there is a charm to this place which I have visited several times, and it’s not that people are eccentric and strange, but that they are – most of all – very welcoming.

Amazingly enough, the second half of this way too dragged out film was surprisingly better. I wouldn’t necessarily say that I care for what happened, or what the truth really was – because whatever turned out at the end did not warrant a 2+ hour film nor somebody spending their whole life following them and writing a bestseller out of it. What made the second part bearable was the simple fact that the happenings at least pointed towards something – the resolution to the film, that is. I thought it gave the film a rather interesting end and a twist that has been there all the time. I also like how that twist ended up being indeed on the verge between good and evil. But that highly praised first part of the film, especially its strange characters and whatnot, is probably much better in the forms of a book, where such things can be detailed out and actually feel alive. Instead we are served a lukewarm, pointless not-really-love story and encounter a bunch of characters who, except for Lady Chablis, do absolutely nothing in the film.

I wish Savannah – or any other city in the world – had a better film to represent them, and I am glad to get it over with. This film is largely a waste of time, unless you have some explicable reason to watch it. (A strange fascination for Kevin Spacey perhaps? I couldn’t fault you on that.)

That Lady in Ermine

The statement “this is a Lubitsch” does not necessarily mean that it’s a good film. Despite my undeniable love for Lubitsch, who would easily be my favorite director if all his films were like “The Shop around the Corner”, I did not actually like all of his films. “Die Bergkatze” was amusing but rather silly, “Die Ehe im Kreise” is a little bland, and this film is in a similar warm-hearted style like “Heaven can wait” but worse. I do not know what it is (the choices of colors and costumes perhaps?) but Lubitsch in color always looks so strangely dated. Black and white definitely suits him better.

I don’t think anybody ever mentions this film apart from the fact that it was Lubitsch’s last, and I am not surprised. Despite the fact that two great directors worked on this, the master himself and Preminger (who is pretty amazing as well), the silly plot doesn’t quite allow a great direction anyways. It feels like just anybody could have turned this into an acceptable film, and that is basically what “That Lady in Ermine” is – acceptable. It’s a musical (that’s a minus), but it also has a few funny scenes (despite the negative-sounding quantifier “a few” that is a plus). The film definitely picks up when the story turned into a full-blown, triangle story. I especially enjoyed the dream sequence in which Angelina turns all manly and does her little leg dance.

Hollywood likes its silly stories, and the same are worked over and over again. While nowadays, people are into producing bad sequels, back in the day you just made the same film again. On the one hand, we have “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Orpheus” and the like, classics which are reinterpreted over and over, but on the other hand, something like this silly operetta story is being remade again and again as well, first as a silent film, then as a 1930’s talkie and then by Lubitsch. The other two are lost, but from the synopsis it seems that the countess ends up with the count at the end of the original story.

Maybe, when Lubitsch grew older, he kept parts of his boyishness, yet at the same time his sense of esthetics turned into the one of an old man. The style of the film is beautiful (Angelina’s white/golden dress is dashing) but oh wow it’s so painfully cliché.

Sylvia Scarlett

With “Bringing Up Baby”, “Holiday”, “The Philadelphia Story” and this film, I think I have seen all Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant cooperations, making them my most watched couple of their time. And boy they are great together. When Gorp recommended “Sylvia Scarlett” almost a year ago, he never said it was going to be with Cary Grant. Well, that is not surprising. The whole story was not supposed to be about her and Grant’s character, and you can still see how Cary Grant wasn’t as developed as an actor at the time. Their chemistry is okayish at best, very different from “Bringing Up Baby” and “Holiday”.

In fact, just like Gorp said, the highlight of the film is definitely Katharine Hepburn’s cross-dressing, and she is indeed even more fierce than she was in “Bringing Up Baby”. It’s probably her best role yet, and this boyishness suits her perfectly. Just for that, the film was worth seeing.

On second thought, however, the film was not all that special. Its silly singing-and-dancing scenes were very reminiscent of “Holiday” – it seems like the film lives in its own little bubble in which characters can break into laughter and jest at all times, and entertain the audience purely by doing so. Of course the film is lovely, but it is strangely lacking the Lubitsch or Schnitzler smarts in its dialogue. The characters are a lot of fun, but quite one-dimensional and dumb, mostly either purely good or purely bad, leaving no identification potential whatsoever.

As a Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant fan, the film was an obvious must-see, and it did not disappoint. In general, however, I think “Bringing Up Baby” was still their best film together.

Nashville

When I go to a city, I have a tendency to want to see films about it. In fact, this is why I finally watched “Walk the Line”. Where “Mystery Train” is the perfect Memphis film, I expected “Nashville” to be the Nashville film, and that expectation did not disappoint. After touring the city and learning about country music in the fairly well done Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, I felt sufficiently prepared for the film (apart from the fact that I thought the museum was surprisingly well-designed and popular, it also is the only way to visit the historical RCA Studio B).

It was very helpful to learn about the music genre itself before seeing this film, because the movie has a LOT of country music in it. Among the almost 3 hours of the film, perhaps 1 is entirely dedicated to some music performances, one more ridiculous than the other. Luckily there were also a few good songs and some characters who actually could sing.

Altman is probably most famous for his black comedies. Yet if one considers that my favorite Altman film is the comparably less funny “Gosford Park”, which I prefer over “MASH”, “Short Cuts” or “A Wedding”, I was not too surprised that I didn’t quite find this film very funny either. It is more an amusing film than it is a funny film, which is expected as all black comedies are not laughing out loud funny. Since such black comedies also never have any likable characters (well, if they have a likable character, he or she must suffer or die), the enjoyment from such films must come out of something else. I can’t put my finger on what it is, and in a similar vein, I don’t know why I thought “Nashville”, this strange and slightly confusing amalgam of characters and events, was actually enjoyable. Perhaps it is the characters, of which the racist ‘yellow fever’ BBC lady was probably my favorite. Or it’s the perfectly constructed end, where no questions were answered, but it brought all the characters together in a tumultuous scene.

For some reason, “Nashville” was wildly popular and perhaps it still is. At least Roger Ebert included it in his selection of “Greatest Movies” a few years back. I can definitely see where the sheer love for the film is coming from, but somehow I still find it rather dated.

Shadows and Fog

There is this rule of thumb that I like Woody Allen films with Woody Allen and Diane Keaton the most, followed by the 2000’s Woody Allen movies without any of his favorite actresses, followed by older films without Woody Allen. That leaves only one category of his films, which is those that include him and Mia Farrow. Normally, I rather dislike those, but “Shadows and Fog” presents a rather surprising exception even though it did not reach my favorites.

I didn’t know from the beginning that Woody Allen was the type who pays homages to other movie-makers in his films a lot. It was also no surprise that I came to appreciate his films the most which were mostly his own, like “Manhattan” or “Match Point”. Luckily, I ended up seeing “Wild Strawberries” before “Deconstructing Harry”, “8 1/2” before “Stardust Memories” and, in this case, a few Pabst, Murnau and Lang movies before I saw “Shadows and Fog”. Pip stated quite aptly that an homage can only be a good movie if it can stand on its own feet and be enjoyable to somebody who does not know the original. If my memory doesn’t fail me, Woody Allen’s tendency to “copy” other filmmakers and make references both to himself as well as to others is something critics have disliked about him, saying he isn’t creative enough on his own. As for me, since I always saw the originals first, I must admit that I cannot judge upon these films separated from the homages anymore. I love homages, and considering Woody Allen’s yearly output, I’d say he is amazingly creative.

For me, “Shadows and Fog” was a wonderful nod to 1920’s silent film, and has almost all its elements. A lady in distress, dark streets, a circus, dirty bars, a doctor who can do strange things, prostitutes, killers, a little bit of supernatural phenomena and finally a mob chasing the protagonist at the end of the film. This imagery is so complete that Woody Allen’s character almost feels a little out of place here – his typical exasperated, complaining little man who is cowardly and hypocritical, yet honest about himself. But then again, Mia Farrow is even worse here – who would ever want to believe that somebody would pay 700 dollars to sleep with her? Ignoring the mildly unpleasant clash between the atmosphere of the film, which is almost as intense as in “Stardust Memories” and Woody Allen’s openly sexual trademark humor, this film was mostly an enjoyable story, and not too much more. My favorite was the “I don’t know what I am supposed to do” joke, which I thought was almost as memorable as “the product of my loins” from “Scoop”.

Miller’s Crossing

This film was a little bit of a surprise. When Loris told me about “Miller’s Crossing”, he mentioned it with “Barton Fink” which he really liked and “Fargo” which he didn’t. I have never been a great fan of “Fargo” and thought that “Barton Fink” had quite a few lovely scenes I am still talking about – in fact I just quoted the film today. Nevertheless, “Barton Fink” did not really excite me, so I started “Miller’s Crossing” with relatively low expectations. Boy was I wrong. Usually, films by the Coen brothers are interesting to me on a rather intellectual level, but “Miller’s Crossing” hit a nerve somewhere, and I have no idea where it is.

On Wikipedia, it was stated that the Coens produced “Barton Fink” in a somewhat quick and dirty way because they were stuck on “Miller’s Crossing”. Indeed, the film has an intricate plot, but it’s not like it’s hard to follow it. There is this aspect of this film which I felt a surprising excitement for, yet on the other hand I seem to hit the same writer’s block in the process of reviewing it like the Coens did when they wrote it.

Overcoming aforementioned writer’s block was hard, and I am still not sure whether I did at all. In the end, I came to the conclusion that I was mostly mesmerized with the plot. The premise started off somewhat similar to “Blood Simple”, at least when it concerns the quasi-love-triangles, and then proceeded to becoming a complicated fight between the many characters who all have different interests and plans. I can totally see how it can be hard for such a plot to make sense, and I thought it was almost as gripping as “L.A. Confidential”, the film I consider the unattainable benchmark for a great, intricate thriller. Perhaps it was also the form – the meaning of the title “Miller’s Crossing” was only revealed halfway through the film, and it was perhaps the most brilliant scene, thanks to John Turturro’s wimpy sobbing. “Miller’s Crossing” did not have a single extraordinary scene like “No Country for Old Men” did, but the story itself had many more interesting elements. Everything about the film is a double-entendre, and every character has a second face – of course I loved that.

On a side note, I think the femme fatale of the story looks like Hilary Swank, and Hilary Swank probably wins the prize for being the least attractive actress I know. Then again I am kind of used to femme fatales in film noirs who are not attractive in a traditional sense, so Marcia Gay Harden did quite a great job with Verna in my opinion. She seemed believable despite her lack of pleasing character to my eye – that should be a compliment to her acting. Everybody else is pure brilliance. I loved John Turturro as the crying, pleading coward and laughed out loud when he begged for his life for the second time. I thought he was almost better than as Barton Fink even. Maybe the only thing this film lacks is John Goodman, but there was no rule suited for him so it is all forgiven.

I wrote this posting with the attempt of defending the film in my mind, but I found myself incapable of doing so. But all in all, “Miller’s Crossing” was an entertaining Coen for me, with pseudo-philosophical gangsters, a mysterious protagonist, a rather vicious femme fatale and other characters who are all, in their own way, very human. The fact that it is only no.4 in my Coen brothers ranking right now is already an indication that I really, really love their films, almost with no exception.

Walk the Line

Many years ago, my parents got the film with Chinese subtitles and saw it without me. Afterwards they told me that they really loved the film. That was a time when I had no idea who Johnny Cash is and why I should care about him. In fact, the last film I saw about a country singer, namely “Crazy Heart” didn’t impress me all that much. But now that I have been in the city of country, Nashville, and learned a few things about Johnny Cash, I naturally became interested in seeing the film. Incidentally, I also have not seen Altman’s “Nashville”, but maybe I’ll see that one soon. This trip has been adequately accompanied with music and movies, by rewatching “Mystery Train” and seeing “Walk the Line”, and I think that’s a way of travelling I should pursue in the future as well.

As a film, there really is nothing special. Direction is pretty average and the storywriting is typical at best. Even the ending annoyed me a little bit, because parts of the characters were just not that believable. Johnny Cash is something like a legend, and it is obviously impossible to tell his entire story crammed into a film. Nevertheless, I thought the film did a good job, mostly thanks to Joaquin Phoenix’ and Reese Witherspoon’s impressive acting. Especially June’s character came to life here, and Joaquin Phoenix reminded me of Philip Seymour Hoffmann whose marvelous treatment of Truman Capote’s strange way of talking is the benchmark for these kinds of performances.

“Divorce is an abomination” is going to become a winged word for me. The film, despite its blandness, is especially strong in these kinds of elements which are so true to life in their simplicity. I thought it was great to learn about Cash’s life, and the film felt very believable depicting the respective characters. They even turned Ginnifer Goodwin into a southern belle, which I thought is quite surprising after I saw her looking like a silly country bum in Mona Lisa Smile.

I think my parents mostly saw “Walk the Line” as a good love story, or rather as a realistic story about a relationship which had to overcome 13-year-long hurdles for them to finally get together happily. For me, there was the added bonus of all the country music and the Johnny Cash persona. But the film is no more than that, and perhaps that is perfectly enough for a Hollywood love drama/biopic.

The Ides of March

As my 2011 ranking indicates, I actually saw this film last year. “The Ides of March” is one of those films which I wanted to see because people were talking about it, very differently from “Dick” which I saw based on, well, gut feeling. I haven’t seen all that many George Clooney films, and I was curious about his first directional attempt. After all, this is the guy who is soon going to make a movie based on a script by the Coen brothers.

Somehow my feeling that random choices can be better than watching well-known films did not let me down. I liked “The Ides of March” but while I thought it was quite interesting and rather enjoyable, I can’t say that I feel like I learned anything from it, or that I gained all that much in life by having seen the film. Compared to “Dick” which is a film I still think about, “The Ides of March” is a more or less interesting story wrapped in pretty gift paper.

I do think that George Clooney did a good job. There are some details I like, for example how the main character does the same thing at the beginning and at the end of the film, but his voice and his expression have changed, an evidence to how he gradually has stepped into the darkness of politics during the film. I also thought that pacing and dramaturgy were pretty well-handled, and I am pretty much a fan of everybody in the film. I think that George Clooney is good, Ryan Gosling is brilliant, I love love love Philip Seymour Hoffmann and I got a great impression of Marisa Tomei ever since “The Wrestler”. The star in my heart is Rachel Evan Wood, who got a rather bland role here and did the best you could with it. Unfortunately, this stellar cast cannot hide the fact that the film itself fails to contribute, somehow.

Maybe my expectations were just too high, maybe I just want films dabbling in the realms of politics to be more dramatic or more realistic or more sophisticated. It’s not like “The Ides of March” is a bad film, it’s just not a particularly good film and it leaves me wondering why all these great people could not have spent their time working on something greater. So I am looking forward to what George Clooney is going to do next.

Dick

“Movies in Frames” is one of my favorite sources for movies. By just seeing screenshots, I might not get a good idea for what the film is really going to be about, but I got intrigued by something showing up in these screenshots which does not come from somebody else’s opinion. At most, it is somebody else’s random choice to use these screenshots to describe a film, but it is largely the film itself which has drawn me to it. In the case of Dick, it was obviously Michelle Williams’ and Kirsten Dunst’s girlish faces in American flag fashion. Words cannot possibly describe how awesome that looks, only a screenshot can do that.

It turns out that “Dick” was neither a commercial nor a critical success. The political incorrectness of the film seems to touch a nerve both for the audience as well as for the critics. They probably failed to find an audience – cult films only become cult amongst young people but these young people seem to not really care about those old Nixon stories anymore. For the people old enough to remember Nixon, “Dick” is probably too stupid and based on jokes for kids. The result is that this film will probably become forgotten within any audience I can imagine.

Not for me. I was looking forward to seeing “Dick” for a long time, and now that I finally saw it, I thought it was an incredibly enjoyable ride. It might have a bunch of silly jokes, but which film does not? As long as I have had a good laughter, I don’t care. I even thought the film was educational, it prompted me to find out about all those details about Watergate which the film has care- and playfully worked into the story. Detail is something that, in my opinion, this film does marvelously. The two girls might never really gotten much character development, and remain oblivious and ditzy throughout the entire film, but their character seemed wonderfully fleshed out to me. Each girl has their own trashy clothing style, which changes towards a more mature style in the case of Michelle Williams’ character because she, uh, fell for Nixon, and everything down to the design of their rooms is full of color and energy. Personally I think this should be more appreciated.

“Dick” might not be a masterpiece of film-making, and it will never make it into the history books. But it’s a great 2 hours spent on a film which I totally loved.