Category: Movies

Six Shooter

Loris noted that he wasn’t explicitly mentioned in my posting for “Leviathan”, which is surprising since we watched it together. That made me realize that I don’t explicitly mention people much at all, not even O who is doing very many interesting things these days, now that he talks and talks.

So, to make up for “Leviathan”, it so happens that “Six Shooter” is the kind of film I would have expected Loris to have seen already. It’s short, it has Brendan Gleeson in it and it’s a movie by one of the McDonagh brothers. However, Brendan Gleeson wasn’t even all that interesting in this particular film. He was kind of an everyman, much unlike the guy he met on the train, who kind of reminded me of the main character in “Trainspotting” (though this may be a somewhat unfair comparison).

In fact, that guy is rather intriguing and most definitely the main attraction of the film. I read an article on matricides and how incredibly rare they are. I discussed it with Loris and told him that I thought all the mother murderers described in the article seem much more crazy than the guy I saw in the film. I wasn’t actually able to explain why. Certainly the guy is quite crazy and most definitely a psychopath, judging by the way he spoke to the couple, but there is something strangely relatable about him (or otherwise Brendan Gleeson’s last scene with him wouldn’t be so emotional) that made him human, whereas your typical mother murderer seems like a total monster. Many things fit his description: He killed his mother in a cruel manner; he said that she was essentially abusing him verbally every day; he has no empathic feelings for anybody whatsoever. But there was no indication that his mother wouldn’t let him go, or that their relationship was so sick that he had to resort to the most absurd murder of all times to get out of his suffering. In fact, he seemed like he didn’t have a single worry in the world, and that nothing could ever disturb him. Maybe that is it that ticked me off, I don’t know.

Of course, “Six Shooter” isn’t really supposed to be an exercise in realism or psychoanalysis or whatever, and there is more going on in the film than just the young kid, so the way he is being portrayed makes a lot of sense to drive the plot and perhaps the film was also a little funny in a dark and twisted way.

Leviathan

The idea of blogging “Leviathan” is so painful (just like the film) that I almost skipped it to move with the rest of my backlog. To me, it feels like way more than 10 days have passed since I last wrote a blog posting (but then again the last few days felt rather eventful as well) and I had the impression that I am in a huge writer’s slump. In reality, there were 9 days between my postings of “Fitzcarraldo” and “La Ricotta”, and that just shows how much I have been dreading to write about “Leviathan”.

Just like “Biutiful” and a fair number of films I never watched because I thought they would be too painful (“Lilja 4-ever”, “Tess”, and others that I have surely forgotten by now), “Leviathan” follows the formula: “Protagonist leads a terrible life. Then everything gets worse. And worse. And worse. And then it ends in the worst way possible.” That sums up these films pretty perfectly, and it’s only a matter of how we are being hit in the guts throughout the film.

Besides being so… incredibly… sad, I think “Leviathan” also actively makes me uncomfortable, though in this case it’s a sign that the film does an incredibly good job at ripping your heart out and throwing it right in your face. To be honest, I don’t even want to think about the film or discuss its storyline for that reason.
I could also tell that “Leviathan” was even more ambitious than “The Return”, and even though I still vividly remember how awestruck I was for its beauty and lovely religious symbolism, I would say that “Leviathan” fulfilled my high expectations. It was pretty much everything I expected the film to be, and it’s one of these films which has no weakness at all, or so it seems to me. Direction, acting, story-telling, costumes – everything is absolutely perfect. Next to “Melancholia”, it also wins my personal award for the most beautiful interior design of a post-2000 film.

In this respect I am happy that I saw the film in theaters. Its astonishing cinematography makes it absolutely worthwhile, and it actually helps to watch a film of this type in a movie theater because it forces me to focus on it during its 2 1/2 hour run. With that said, we were in the Cinema Paris and it felt like we were there forever. They failed to show the film with subtitles and then they had to start it twice (!) all over again just to realize that the subtitles were still not showing up. At some point they finally made it work, but it made us get out of the theater really late.

This might sound weird, but one of the most memorable scenes in the film was how Dmitri told Lilya he wants to take her to Moscow and she responds by putting a hand on his arm (or stomach?) and saying “Dima” (and then perhaps something else). Even though I don’t remember that scene well, I can still recall how desperate I felt in that moment, even more so than in some of the other more explicitly desperate scenes, like every single time something bad happens yet again to Job… errr, Nikolai, especially the last scene with him when he was already imprisoned.

This ending also is somewhat open to discussion and interpretation. The synopsis on Wikipedia, for example, is quite explicit in its interpretation and it differs from mine. In fact, I would almost say that you can tell how cynical a person has become depending on how bad they think the characters in the film really are. (You have the choice between somewhat bad with some good characteristics or just purely very, very bad.) I thought that was interesting, and considering that I interpreted the characters’ actions in a milder manner than whoever wrote that Wikipedia article, it seems that hope is not yet lost for me, hehe.

Unlike “Slumdog Millionnaire” or a bunch of other Chinese or Iranian films, I think that “Leviathan” is the good kind of film that has been made for the Western audience. I would say the film is ultimately not very Russian, but there is this nagging feeling of “Damn, this could happen anywhere”, and that makes it feel like a special kind of horror movie that haunts me till today.

La Ricotta

I currently have a list of things to do before Pip arrives, and everyday I am working on this list because there are only a few days left! On days like these, I don’t actually feel like watching movies at all, and that actually reminded me of the fact that I was in a similar situation when I watched “La Ricotta”. It was basically the result of an optimization problem: How can I spend the least time watching something with the least effort while feeling very accomplished (i.e. having seen something I wanted to see for some really good reason)? Well, “La Ricotta” was shown at the Berlinale this year and it was on Youtube and it was short and a pleasant film. All of these made it the perfect choice – it satisfies my desire for a short film which also made me feel successful (in having seen another Berlinale film).

The danger of this kind of almost utilitarian thinking is that I tend to not take these films for what they are, and just focus on what I get out of them. I wasn’t emotionally open to let “La Ricotta” make me laugh or cry or even think too much. In concept, the film is absolutely fantastic, and I remember that I was amused while I saw it, but the movie is actually so much more. It’s comical and tragical at the same time, its humor is very black but there is also so much humanity in the absurdity of its sad ending scene. While I was most unimpressed when I saw the film, thinking about it in retrospect and about how the film crew made fun of our lovable, bumbling protagonist who is protecting his family, I am overcome with sadness and distaste for humanity. I thought the story was very memorable. As I said, I think the concept of the film is an amazing gem, but I am not sure if I was just personally not so fond of its execution (there is so much going on in this short little film) or if I simply was not in the mood for it.

I don’t like Pasolini enough to go to the exhibition on his life at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, but I certainly always am interested in seeing his name and indeed, “La Ricotta” was a worthy watch. Perhaps I should check out his Decameron? He he he.

Fitzcarraldo

There are a few opera tourism things I want to do. I want to see La Scala, La Fenice and the Opéra Garnier from the inside, and attend Glyndebourne, but most of all, I want to see the opera house in Manaus. For someone like me who has never been to South America, Manaus is a great representation of everything that fascinates me in one. To be honest, I watched “Fitzcarraldo” just because of that (and because I feel ashamed that I had never seen a Werner Herzog film before when 6451 is a fan).

I am seriously disturbed by Klaus Kinski and that is why he works amazingly in this role. He is totally not likable, and manages to create a character that we find sympathetic and repulsive at the same time. There is something fascinating about how this character walks the thin line between passion and obsession – I think it’s an intriguing kind of madness, and puts “Fitzcarraldo” into a string of films with more or less lovable outsiders who would be absolutely unbearable in real life, but work great as protagonists in a film because such people simply are interesting. He overshadows Claudia Cardinale in a mostly boring but rather pleasant role, and I was positively surprised that she is not treated as a sex object here. I can accept that.

To be honest, some aspects of the film (mainly due to Klaus Kinski’s crazy face) made me uncomfortable, but the end was so utterly satisfying and grand that I realized the movie is a big feat. If I were ever to fail in life, I would want to fail this way.

Pina

In Vienna, Loris and I had a discussion about what kind of art we are not particularly into. For me, it’s theater (it makes no sense, but I rarely go out to see a play). For him, it was dance and ballet especially. Well, I love dance and ballet especially, but there are some limitations to that. Most of all, I don’t really get modern dance. For classical dances, I simply love the beauty of how it looks. Mostly it’s an esthetic appreciation – I like to look at beautiful bodies moving, I am in awe at the excellence of primaballerinas and how they execute these movements. I like how a ballet tells a story in movements, especially “Onegin” is simply wonderful when told in movements instead of words, and that is even more amazing considering how much I love Pushkin’s text. I love Giselle’s madness scene and found it incredibly intense last time I saw it. But that is where it ends. I think that dance can be great at evoking emotions, but only when I see them. For most modern choreographies, I simply have no idea what it’s supposed to mean, what the dancers are trying to express and it puzzles me how all those raw emotions going into them largely escape me.

“Pina” explains that a bit, but while I was very interested in these people’s stories, I couldn’t quite see what they meant. For the most part of the film, I was just enjoying the imagery, the beautiful choreographies and the incredible comfort of watching a visually stunning 3D film on a big screen sitting in Pixelmatsch’s living room. Pixelmatsch, the biggest Lokalpatriot this world has seen, also loved all the shots in Wuppertal. The only thing that irked me a little bit was the way everybody spoke about Pina Bausch. They treat her like a saint, which is a little disturbing to me. I agree, however, that she was a wonderful choreographer, and I liked many little details in her choreographies. My favorite choreographies were the “Seasons” (The part illustrating winter is the best!) and “Café Müller”, with its very lovely repetition of couple interactions. All in all, it was an awesome experience.

Ida

Every year, I am always very interested in the Foreign Oscar. Considering how much crap populates the Academy Award every year, the foreign one boasts some really good titles (“Departures”, “The Lives of Others”, “No Man’s Land”, “La strada”, “8 1/2”, “Derzu Uzala”, “Fanny and Alexander”, “Life is Beautiful”, “All about my mother”, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) so every year I am most interested about this category than any other one. Of course not all of them are great and some of them I will never watch (“Nowhere in Africa” uh), but my expectations are typically pretty high, just as they were for “Ida”.
Since “Leviathan” got the Golden Globe for this category, it was also the favorite for the Oscar. Well, did “Ida” deserve to win? Now that I have seen both films I think the two films are simply not comparable whatsoever. No two films could be any more different – they are both stylish in their own way, and they tell a story of humanity but about completely different topics. “Ida” looks at the past and how it affects us, “Leviathan” is (amongst others) a commentary about how the future of our society is in danger. In that respect, I am glad that both films got one award each.

Ironically, I will also say this about “Leviathan”: “Ida” was hauntingly beautiful. Every black and white shot looked meticulously composed, and its contemplative slow pacing struck a chord with me. Ida’s identity crisis is one which I can strongly identify with, even if mine is not the result of a horrifying past. Unlike “Leviathan”, the story in “Ida” is very simple and we spend more time focusing on Ida’s face and what she does than what actually happens to her. Even though she mostly goes along with her aunt and we don’t get to see her do a lot, she feels like an active character because of how the happenings in the story affect her later actions. I could strongly sympathize with Wanda, her sloppy lifestyle and her inner struggles as well, and she had quite a few great lines which believably made an impact on Ida.

I should watch “My Summer of Love” – I have been wanting to do that forever, and I have a certain affinity for Emily Blunt.

Reservoir Dogs

Even though I spent an important part of my youth in love with “Lord of the Rings”, I actually like things small. I lived in a 8sqm room for the longest time when I was a child, spending almost all my time in it, and besides small housings, I like small orchestras, small stages and, most of all, a small amount of characters in my stories. Chamber opera, orchestra, play – anything chamber – is totally up my alley, and Sartre’s “No Exit” was my favorite amongst all of them for quite awhile. As I watched “Reservoir Dogs” without knowing anything about it besides that it was an old Tarantino movie, I was elated to see that this was (mostly) a chamber story revolving around people talking.

Tarantino is definitely best at people talking, at least for me. I saw “Pulp Fiction” before I started this blog (probably in 2003 or 2004), and I loved every part that had people talking it, and hated every part that had people shooting or fighting or generally not talking. Despite liking most of Tarantino’s films, I definitely am not a fan of all that violence (or rather, I don’t care for it), but almost every time, there is a character so witty that he makes up for that action boredom. “Reservoir Dogs” is like all the good aspects of Tarantino, and almost none of the bad.

In fact, “Reservoir Dogs” is so talky that they were able to have a reading of the film with black actors. You couldn’t do that with “Kill Bill” for sure. With that said, I think the idea of bringing black actors doing the roles makes so much sense, because that’s what Tarantino totally should have done in the first place.

Of course “Reservoir Dogs” never provoked the emotional response that I had when I watched “Inglourious Basterds” (which is why the latter is in my top 30 films and “Reservoir Dogs” isn’t), but there is everything to love about the film: its amazing acting, its wonderfully witty dialogue, its absurd yet very human characters… and the fact that Tarantino didn’t have much money, giving the film its much needed focus on the people involved. (Heck, there is a reason why low-budget indie films become cult, because more often than not, money actually seems to distract from the good stuff.)

To be honest, I doubt Tarantino will ever make a movie as good as “Reservoir Dogs”, just like Polanski never made a movie as good as “Knife in the Water” (if you ask me), but the film is so good that I am totally fine with that.