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The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

We are leaving for the beautiful Austrian Alps tomorrow, so the next days will be busy. Time to kill the backlog of one single movie! Watching “The Hobbit” has become something special. 2012 was a year in which Pip and I discovered a newfound love for movie theaters and watching big screen action extravaganzas on them. In 2013 it was much harder to continue this tradition due to the arrival of O, but happily, we were able to watch “The Hobbit” again shortly after it came out. Continuing last year’s tradition also, this year’s Hobbit is the last movie I would be seeing in this year. (Or rather, blogging in this year.) It is possible, though unlikely, that we will watch a movie in the Austrian Alps. Movie-wise, I predict that next year will actually start with Jim Jarmusch’s newest film, when Loris gets back from his Christmas vacation.

This year, Pixelmatsch also dragged us into the HFR version, and thinking back, I don’t think I remember it very well. Sure the film looked bombastic and beautiful, and I am still such a sucker for the whole Middle-Earth esthetic, but I probably couldn’t tell the difference. Then again, I was actually quite immersed into the story, and that can only be a good thing.

Despite my memory of the film being rather engaging, I was not exactly happy with it. We had an intermission (very randomly, really) after roughly 1 1/2 hours into the film, when they just arrived into Laketown, and very unfortunately, the first 1 1/2 hours were better. For almost every two-parted opera or ballet (Gisèle is the best example!), the second part is better than the first, but for this Hobbit movie it does not seem to be the case. I was happy to see that the film did not have any huge fight scenes with massive armies (as the second Lord of the Rings did), but it got replaced with 10 dwarves running around having Smaug chase them pointlessly. We knew that they were all going to survive it, so what’s the point? How does it make any sense that Smaug can go on destroying a city but somehow he’s not able to get ahold of a small bunch of dwarves?

The wood elves were also a disappointment. I expected to see more of them, and not this mildly silly focus on a single one of them. I remember having facepalmed a few times when, especially when the Kili-Tauriel relationship peaked at that “I am going to save him”-moment. Pixelmatsch and mingoshingo completely forgot that Legolas didn’t even appear in the Hobbit book – this is how omnipresent he was in the movie. Terrible.

Last year, I had really strong feelings for the Hobbit adaptation. It was a revival of my childhood, especially with me re-reading the book in its entirety in preparation to watch the film, and this year, I thought I’d do it again. I watched the first Lord of the Rings film in theaters multiple times, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends (including mingoshingo), and so a part of me expected to relive these childhood memories again. Luckily, the nostalgia made me still feel very fond towards the new Hobbit film, but considering how much I had to say about the first film last year, I guess the experience paled the second time around – much like the second Lord of the Rings film paled in comparison to the first.

Inside Llewyn Davis

I went to a movie theater with Loris for the first time ever. (Is that even true? Haha. I could have sworn we’ve been to the Titania before, but for what movie?) The Passage Kino’s main theater is pleasantly scrumptious and very, very comfortable, but it was also filled with people. So many hipster Berliners trying to see the new Coen, tsk tsk tsk. Loris also says that he doesn’t really have much to say about the film. Well, I guess I don’t have that problem. However, I have put off writing about the film because I am panicked by the knowledge that Loris, this person who writes in a beautiful manner almost effortlessly, will read this posting. Certainly I know of the possibility that he may any of the other posts, but when I know it it’s just so much more daunting. Alright, enough lamenting.

The most memorable element of the film is probably its music. I have to put a disclaimer here. I think I love folk as a genre. In fact, I love love love Beirut not only because Beirut is brilliant but simply because of the folksiness of most of their songs. “Inside Llewyn Davis” essentially starts off with the performance of one song (which is picked up by the end). Maybe it’s the way the song is presented but it’s probably actually; I got a shiver down my spine when I heard it and it gave me the strong feeling that the film would be good.
Nevertheless, I don’t actually listen to it much anymore. Beirut is also nothing like Dave van Ronk’s music because the latter is basically just a voice and a guitar whereas Beirut loves his crazy instruments and the songs sound very produced. Even so, they both produce this physically tangible twist in my chest, it can be that heart-wrenching. (“A Sunday Smile”, “Scenic World”, “The Rip Tide”, “A Candle’s Fire”!) So why do I not listen to it? Well, obviously because I am not particularly interested in heartbreak in everyday life, in which k-pop essentially caters to every of my secular needs – ballads for relaxation, strong electronic beats to keep myself awake for work and sultry songs as porn replacement. But then again, there are days of reflection, where I give myself away to the luxury of experiencing that heartbreak that makes life worth living, and that happens while I watch a movie like “Inside Llewyn Davis”.

The Coens are probably greater than anyone else at making films about life. Amongst all these films, I think that Llewyn Davis is, by far, the most sympathetic character the Coens have ever created, and that is amazing because they created Barton Fink, the Raising Arizona couple and the infamous Dude. His deadpan view on the world, his soft loserdom and the knowledge that he makes absolutely great music is an irresistible combination which absolutely deserves all the critical accolade. Hollywood loves its lovable losers and Llewyn Davis is the most lovable of them all with his unkept locks and puppy eyes.

Almost every promotional picture for the film I see features a scene from the first 10-20 minutes of the movie in which the cat shows up. To be honest, I was drawn to the film originally because of the cat, and it did not disappoint. It’s awesome! The cat does a lot of cat-like things which reinforces the film’s plotless characteric as a slice of life film. Nothing really happens, and nothing happens to the cat either. It is in these snippets of life where nothing really changes that I love so much, and the Coens have mastered the art of making it interesting and meaningful instead of bland and vapid. There is the humor in all those little scenes, especially those involving Mr. Timberlake; there is the interaction with many different characters including the characteristic angry ex-girlfriend but also the benevolent professor or Goodman’s dude in the car we love to hate or the aforementioned cat; and finally, there is the way scenes recall what happened before like the way the beginning and the end tie in or the mention of Jim’s song which was going to generate lots of royalty. Like I said, I find the Coens brilliant.

The movie theater had small promotional posters for the film for grabs. I liked the movie so much that it’s now hanging most prominently in my room. Loris says that he needs time to think about the movie and I feel that it is true because no words can describe the melancholy that the film arose in me.

Bullet points:

• How hot is Oscar Isaac? I want to pretend that I named my son after him, but sadly that is not believable. Considering how different he looks from Llewyn Davis in most photos, I suspect that he is a great actor who pulled off this role brilliantly.

• Thinking about it, this is the first time I am seeing Carey Mulligan with dark hair as I never saw “An Education”. It really makes her look different – somewhat cold and bitter due to her pale skin tone. But perhaps this is just the role and very much on purpose?

• Jean’s kid is probably Pappi’s lol. (And yes of course it’s implied that she slept with him to get Llewyn’s gig but who said she only did that once?)

Universalove

When “Universalove” ran at the Berlinale, I was very interested and I don’t quite remember why we ended up not seeing the film. As it is the case with most Berlinale films I missed out, I want to see them eventually and finally I did with “Universalove”.

Unfortunately, the bottom line is that the movie is pretty bad. Every part of this 85 minute long movie is very slow and contentless. The Marseille part makes no sense (why does time stand still?), the Luxembourg part has virtually no story (dude and dude make out in a swimming pool, that’s pretty much it, so it’s essentially all OMG look at guys kissing!), the Tokyo part kills me with its inaccurate clichés (since when do you randomly get stabbed in Tokyo on the streets?), the Brooklyn part is incredibly lame (creepy stalker boyfriend thinks his girlfriend is cheating but actually she’s just meeting a female friend – eww). Only the Belgrade part was somewhat nice because it had a tender husband-wife dynamic and even if nothing much is being said between them besides the wife’s rant at the beginning, I felt like it was fairly realistic how they got back together.

I can easily forgive weaknesses when I have strong feelings for something. In the case of “Universalove” this stems from the music. I thought it was so brilliant that I ended up listening to it on Youtube for another hour or so. Strangely, however, I have not been able to get into other works by Naked Lunch. So either the “Universalove” soundtrack is just better than the other stuff they made, or the movie itself – the way it’s directed and shows those different relationships – contributes to the greatness of the soundtrack as I perceive it. If it is the latter case, then it means that the movie did manage to make a meaningful contribution to the music, and that alone is worth a lot. Out of the top of my head, I can name 3 other music videos which were able to do that.
Coming back to irrational and often nostalgic feelings for otherwise weak works, just today, we started watching “Doctor Who” and I instantly fell in love with it. The immensely stylish design of the TARDIS is a strangely superficial but powerful reason. Similarly, I have always loved Peter Rabbit, because I owned a metal pencil box with Peter Rabbit illustrations as a little child. Amongst all Disney franchises, besides “Beauty and the Beast”, my favorite was “Winnie the Pooh” because I thought the characters looked cute. (I always hated Bambi.) It was only much later that I learned that said cuteness is due to Shepard’s design. In any case, though, sometimes the feelings a work transports can become greater than the work itself. I don’t actually think that neither “Doctor Who” nor “Peter Rabbit” nor “Winnie the Pooh” nor “Universalove” are great works, but all of them can be very lovable in a more or less nostalgic sense.

I can’t wait for next year’s Berlinale. If it has more movies like this, I will certainly enjoy it.

The wind will carry us

The movie ends with an extremely sappy monologue of a doctor about the beauty of life. While I love musings about life and death, in this case I felt like it ruined the extreme subtlety of the film a little bit. By making its intentions explicit and summarizing the whole film in a few words, it’s literally destroying all these little details that one has to piece together beforehand to try to understand the film. All of a sudden it’s been served on a silver plate after all. Odd.

Until then, “The wind will carry us” is wonderful. Whenever I watch a Kiarostami, I am doubtful of whether I would like it. This is mostly because I find all his films to be very different, and liking “Copie conforme” or “Close-up” will tell you nothing about whether you will like “The wind will carry us”. But with every single Kiarostami, without fail, it will take me 20 minutes to figure out what is going on and by the time I got into the story, I would be so immersed into the world Kiarostami is presenting that I can’t stop until I saw it all the way until the end, I go from “what the heck am I watching?” to “I want to see more!” This effect completely caught me by surprise when I saw “Close-up” and now I feel reminded of it.

Surprisingly, “The wind will carry us” is also the funniest Kiarostami I have seen so far. Nothing in the scene is explicitly funny, but his encounters with the villagers leads to a lot of deadpan humor; his dialogue with the pregnant woman (who then gave birth to the child) is the best example, and his repeated driving out to get cell phone connection becomes increasingly funny with repetition. While the old woman gets better and better, the film also becomes more and more uplifting even though the main character is getting more and more frustrated. He mistreats that poor tortoise by flipping it over, but the tortoise turns back on his feet. (Go tortoise!) Kiarostami’s love for the simpler things in life is heart-warming, as is this story of a man’s slow redemption. Nothing in the film is particularly meaningful – neither the restless life of the main character nor the boring life of the villagers, but it is probably life itself that is meaningful.

Apparently people from Iran don’t really like to watch Kiarostami’s films. I can see where that is coming from, Chinese people are typically not that into the Zhang Yimou/Chen Kaige etc. group either. After all, Kiarostami’s films are sooooo slow and they are always set in poor villages. But as a foreigner, I love all four of the Kiarostami films I saw, including this one.

The Trial

I am progressing well on my quest of watching more films on Monolith – and of blogging about them all. (No, I still don’t know whether I ever will watch Satantango.) “The Trial” is perhaps the last movie I ever expected to find amusing, but it really was. At least for the first part of the film, anything K said made me want to laugh, just his intonation makes anything he says absolutely ridiculous – and ultimately it was. He was accused in a rather ridiculous manner and reacted just as ridiculously. When I read the book, I was much younger and easily convinced that K did nothing wrong, but now I see things a little differently. How can anyone be sure that one is not guilty? I certainly am guilty of lots of things, and sooner or later I will die, though the two are likely going to be unrelated. Anyways, Wikipedia claims that Welles wanted the movie to be understood as a black comedy, so it seems like I am not alone in my amusement of certain scenes in the film.

The almost infuriating bureaucracy in the book looks and feels completely different here. I remember the very exact and dry style of Kafka’s writing whereas Orson Welles is very… elaborate? I can’t find the right words for it, but it’s just not as concise and exact. It’s not like Kafka’s style can possibly directly translate onto film, but the film looked very splendid and grand to me, kind of like the Magnificent Ambersons did. I am absolutely in love with the scenes at K’s work place, that huge almost architectural grid of desks – grand truly is the only word I know to describe it. The film also sports some dramatic music and a good portion of horror especially with those kids staring at K when he was at the artist’s place. It’s definitely a piece of beauty, and much better than I could have hoped, considering how much I like Kafka’s original.

It’s important to distance yourself from the original when looking at an adaptation. It’s way too easy to say: “The book is better”. It may be true, but that would completely disregard the greatness of the film – its absurd dialogue, its masterful scene composition and last but not least its immensely skilled actors. I am glad Welles got to adapt the film.

A short hail of bullets:

• I have to admit that I was very intrigued to see Jeanne Moreau again. Even though she has a strange face, I think that she has an amazing stage presence and she certainly is one of the reasons I saw the film.

• Little did I know that Romy Schneider had a much larger part in the film, and she actually works really well as Leni. Considering how bad of an actress she is, I am surprised to see that she pulled off this role rather well.

• If there was something much like Kafka’s book, I would say it’s the fable. That is kind of what I imagined Kafka’s style would be – an image that break the story down to a simple black and white illustration with a voice-over of what I assume is an exact translation of what Kafka wrote.

Paris nous appartient

For the longest time I believed that “À bout de souffle” is Godard’s most acclaimed movie, and TSPDT seems to agree with me, but there are quite a few lists which prefer “Le Mépris” and “Pierrot le Fou”. For Truffaut’s “400 Coups” it’s the same time – there something about these very young Nouvelle Vague directors that start off making low budget but wonderful movies and then move onto comparably less interesting stuff. Maybe this is just those magical years of 1959-1961 where people just looked awesome, and Paris was the most beautiful city in the world. Actually Paris still looks like that, and “Paris nous appartient” is a rather unknown film. So what I just said may not apply to all Nouvelle Vague films.

I am surprised by how unknown “Paris nous appartient” is. Sure, it doesn’t really make sense but I already said that about “Céline et Julie”. In terms of storyline though, I don’t think it is anymore confusing than, say, “The Big Sleep”. Rivette is trying to put a lot into his first movie – existentialism, film noir atmosphere, drama, love and murder – but to me, it never felt like too much. Maybe sometimes I would get confused about who is who in the film, but by focusing rather strongly on the Gérard-Anne-Terry triangle, it’s actually not that bad. Most of all, though, I thought that the film looked perfectly Nouvelle-Vague-ish – a little imperfect, very stylish and rather playful in the way it approaches filmmaking. You can clearly see how strongly they influenced each other in their Cahiers du Cinéma Gentlemen’s Club before they all diverged into doing different things (Truffaut especially, I mean “Le Dernier Métro” had nothing to do with “Les 400 Coups”), and I love witnessing these influences. Except for Truffaut’s first movie, all of the others seem to be very obsessed with life and death (mostly death); it is no different here, and all of them effortlessly combine a lightness in leading their lives with the heaviness of potential death.

Originally I saw the film because it said somewhere Rivette was filming it at the Cité Universitaire. Well, I did not see a single shot in the that looked like the Cité U, but it matters little. I suppose the film was all about being a student. Actually we did lead lives like that when we were in Paris. Luckily none of it involved suicides, but the small student-ish rooms, the talky parties – it’s a pretty good portrait of student life with its many voices and thoughts. I kind of miss these conversations in which people talk way too much but even if 10% of it is worthwhile I would still feel like I learned something new.

Much like “Céline et Julie” I suspect that all of Rivette’s movies are strange, almost surreal pieces that are essentially unwatchable unless you are into this kind of stuff like me. To my sense of style, “Paris nous appartient” is the second most esthetic Nouvelle Vague film after “À bout de souffle” and that certainly means something. It’s totally underrated.

Some bullets:

• I tried to pay attention to people’s style here. (After all, Patricia’s boyish style in “À bout de souffle” is rather relevant.) Somehow Anne seems to dress differently than all the other girls – her top/skirt combination has a somewhat different cut and make her look less… sexy? In any case it establishes her as an outsider, I feel.

• Terry is probably the least active femme fatale I have ever seen in a noir. Sure, this is not really a film noir, but unlike Anne who is at least actively looking for cues, Terry seems awfully passive. All she does is being a little mean.

• I really liked seeing Jean-Claude Brialy here. As another Jean-something of the Nouvelle Vague, I enjoyed him in “Une femme est une femme” immensely. Too bad his character Jean-Marc never really got to do anything.

• I knew that the film features a lot of cameo appearances of Godard, Demy and the likes, but I couldn’t find them. After all, I don’t really know how they look like.

• Is Shakespeare’s Pericles actually any good?

Céline et Julie vont en bateau

I am finally tackling some more of the Monolith movies! Only like 5 to go… Unfortunately one of them is Satantango, and I may die without ever seeing the movie. Since I had “Céline et Julie” readily available, I felt motivated to see it first.

Despite their very different appearances, it took me for awhile to remember which one of the girls was Céline (dark-haired) and which one was Julie (red-haired). That tells us something about the almost complete lack of characterization of the film. Rivette is not really about characters as much as he is about stories. I barely remember anyone in “Va Savoir” besides the (rather exchangeable) main character and in “La belle noiseuse” I had more interest in Emmanuelle Béart’s butt than what happened between the characters. More than anything, I would say you can describe Céline et Julie both as rather childish – and that’s pretty much it, you don’t need to know much else about them. The magic scene shows us that Céline is ver vy good and Julie is very bad at doing magic tricks. Otherwise even their role in their little story is exchangeable.

Where the movie shines is the Rivette-ness of it – you don’t know what is real, nothing is really explained and everything is left in a gratuitous ambiguity that you cannot really understand, only enjoy. The idea of plunging them into a story they invented (maybe?) and reliving it day after day but changing little bits of it almost sounds like Hong Sang-soo, but it’s entirely different. We can only suspect that Rivette just took a bunch of drugs to produce the movie, just like Céline and Julie seem to be entering their little dream world through rather questionable means as well. This dream world is a silly melodrama involving two women being in love with the same man and a little child caught up in it. It would be a drab story if it wasn’t for Céline and Julie’s intervention, and the girls’ playfulness is certainly addicting. This is one of the most playful films I have ever seen, involving magic, references to Alice in Wonderland and a fun make-believe story that the girls get into. It’s all about imagination. It is the reason why I love “In the mood for love” so much, and while it took awhile for me to get into it, I was drawn to the film’s imagination and the ensuing fun.

The movie also shines through its impeccable style – so stylish that those 70s pants look silly to us. It’s kind of like how Hana Yori Dango (the manga) looks dated to us because everybody goes out of their way to look stylish in that dreadful 80s style. Nevertheless, everything in the film is so immensely beautiful. Have I ever mentioned that I am totally hot for Marie-France Pisier? I thought Colette (the only other role I saw her in) was Antoine Doinel’s cutest girlfriend amongst all of them.

All in all, “Céline et Julie” is a strange film to watch, but if you keep a little distance to whether it all makes sense, it’s unadultered silly fun with a touch of moodiness.