About Chocolate Parfaits

Being There

I expected something like “Harold and Maude”. In fact, it was nothing like “Harold and Maude”, but perhaps they share some glance of oddity as well as social commentary that is almost unique to Hal Ashby.

At first, I wasn’t really sure what the film would be about. Without having seen too much, the story first made no sense (who is the old man?) and it seemed to take a direction into the tragedy “Of Men and Mice”, with Chance being thrown out of his house. It was only afterwards that I realized this would be a comedy, and quite a dark and satirical one at that. Chance is too strange, too otherworldly to be somebody you can relate to, unlike Forrest Gump or the main character from “Of Mice and Men” or even Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin. But Peter Sellers easily makes up for that by giving one of his greatest performances. Chance is an incredible enjoyment to watch. He is a plot-driving comical relief at the same time. So awesome.

I was surprised at how good the main female character was, and did not realize it was Shirley MacLaine… at all. How did I manage to overlook that? She is so great in the film! Her “relationship” with Peter Seller’s character is the best thing in the world!

Oh the controversial end. It makes no sense, that is for sure. But there is something strangely beautiful about it. It’s a scene worthy to become cult, so memorable. Life is a state of mind indeed.

“Being There” did not hit my heart like Beirut’s newest album did (I have been listening to the title song, “The Rip Tide” on repeat today, and oh God, it’s crushing me almost as strongly as Phoenix’s “Armistice”), but instead it’s touching my intellect. Politics are one fine ridiculous circle-jerk, and there aren’t enough sophisticated movies about it.

Arsenic and Old Lace

Considering that “Arsenic and Old Lace” is such a classic and two of my favorite actors are in it, Cary Grant and Peter Lorre, it is surprising how long it took me to watch the film. It was on my Netflix to-watch list for ever and when I finally started watching it, I had to interrupt my viewings more often than I ever did before. Now, something like two weeks and a paper deadline later, I finally was able to finish it.

What can I say, the film was so different from what I expected. It’s obvious how the film originally was a play, but strangely enough I don’t quite like the elements of the play in the film. Most characters, especially the old aunts and Teddy, who incidentally are just the actors from the play, sound like they are from a theatre play, but sadly the film still looks like a movie. With Cary Grant doing nothing much but panicking throughout the entire film, that combination of a play in the film doesn’t work for me.

Certainly the film is interesting, certainly it has some great funny scenes, but most of them didn’t click with me. With a story like that, even the greatness of Cary Grant or Peter Lorre cannot help. It is also undeniable that the film looks great, with its horror-like style and references to silent cinema, and that everything in the film is perfectly timed and written. No doubt about that. But is it really funny when a lot of suspense in the plot comes from the stupidity and ignorance of the characters, or the fact that they just don’t turn around their head in danger? Awesomely enough, however, the end of the story was awesome. When everything was almost good, the plot escalated into a fast-paced sequence of great scenes. It’s too bad Elaine ruined the last 30 seconds just a little bit, but apart from that, I was strangely reminded of “Singularidades de uma raparinga loura”, in which the last minute also was extremely crucial to the story.

In general, I recommend “Arsenic and Old Lace”. I can see how someone can enjoy this film very much, and it’s good on many levels. It just didn’t really mesh with me, I suppose?

Stagecoach

I finished a proof and am secretly proud of myself. (The advisor™ did not seem to think so, at least he didn’t say explicitly it was good.) Normally, when I finish something, the first thing I do is to watch a film. Which one should it be today, I wonder?

Two days ago, I spent a day with one of my professors from 2 years ago, and of course I talked about movies most of the time. Since everybody watches them, I tried to find out what he has seen. It turns out he grew up with all these movies that are considered classics today, including western and some spaghetti western. We had some minor overlap, mostly war movies (Jarhead! Letters from Iwo Jima!) but most of the times he saw movies I have never even heard of. The only film he mentioned that I knew of was “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”, everything was just completely obscure to me. I didn’t even know ménage à trois French movies he saw. It was probably the strangest conversation of film I have ever had. I am also too forgetful to remember any of the titles he mentioned, but it probably wouldn’t have been my type of movie anyways. Who knows.

Most western I have seen were old, I saw some old silent John Fords (and loved them!), and now “Stagecoach”. I don’t recall the situation in which I heard of the film for the first time, and despite its title, I didn’t even suspect that the story would be similar to “Boule de Suif”. I used to hate the novella, because I hated its characters, but I remember it well. That probably means that the novella was actually good, because it was capable of producing such a hatred against the “established bourgeois class”. “Stagecoach” has a much more accessible plot where most characters are at least comical and when they were not likable, at least they were entertaining. I read that it was John Wayne’s first major role, and for that, he was already surprisingly good.

I should be able to say more about the relationship between “Stagecoach” and “Boule de Suif” as well as my happy surprise to have found a film version of the novella, but really, there’s nothing deep about it. A stagecoach is a fitting place to bring these different people together and provides a great backdrop some of the best characterizations, and both the novella and the film are doing an impressive job at implementing it. But apart from that general premise, there aren’t that many similarities.

All in all, “Stagecoach” is a very typical Western, overloaded with clichés (especially those about Mexicans and Indians), but beautifully crafted. I love John Ford.

Phone Booth

Considering that, by 2002, I had a cell phone which did not look like a black piece of brick, the movie is probably horribly outdated. Cell phones are nothing new anymore and were not at the time. Granted, The Matrix was only 3 years old but that was style; people still use screensavers with these green, vertically running Japanese letters just because it looks good, not because any of the screens nowadays need it. (Do you remember why screensavers were there in the first place?)

So parts of Phone Booth just looks ridiculous. In terms of “artistic vision”, Phone Booth has practically none. It’s pretty cool how it’s focused on just a single street and a single phone booth, but the beginning and the ending sequence were just too ridiculous for their own good. Bad directing could have screwed up the film, but luckily it didn’t.

In fact, Phone Booth was much better and much more suspenseful than you’d think from a generic Hollywood title. The makers were inspired by a Hitchcock idea of having the entire film play in a phone booth, and the implementation of the sniper who threatens him is quite awesome. The story of the film, i.e. Larry Cohen’s screenwriting, is surprisingly great. Having to base the entire story about the phone booth and make it sound believable is not that easy; Hitchcock, the master himself, gave up on it. Sure, the sniper is a psychopath who has a double morale by killing an innocent person and it would have been nice to get to know more about him, but ultimately this wicked character made for a good story. The main character, Stu, is also fairly interesting. From the beginning when we meet him as the wife-cheating, arrogant publicist until the point when he breaks down, he made through quite a bit of character development while staying believable. I even liked Forest Whitaker’s character who was comparably more bland but quite likable.

Instead, Phone Booth was a huge box office hit. It cost 10 millions to make and returned 97. Deservedly so, because the thing Hollywood really needs the most are fresh ideas like these. We started watching Phone Booth with the expectation that it’ll be a silly Hollywood film which we will be able to predict easily. Boy were we wrong.

Alien

…just like “Alien” has ruled them before. Okay, not really. The one most pivotal science-fiction movie in history is actually “2001”, but if Kubrick had died of measles as a small child, the spot would probably go to “Alien”. I mean, “Star Wars” is a mainstream space soap opera, I have never seen “The Terminator” but assume it’s the same, “A Clockwork Orange” (which, incidentally, also would not have existed in the hypothetical Kubrick child death case) does not really look like a space film, I don’t like “Solaris” that much and “Stalker” also doesn’t look like science-fiction at all. That leaves us with “Alien”, a film which takes place in a spaceship and where humans and aliens actually come into contact.

Two people I know count “Alien” among their favorite films of all times, so my expectations for the film were already very high. Just like with “Blade Runner”, a film I didn’t like as much partially because of high expectations, I went into “Alien” with the hope of a scientific revelation, something along the lines of “Brave New World” and “1984”, the two books that revolutionized my youth more than Horváth, Ibsen or Shakespeare ever did. “Alien” is less than that, and I am beginning to suspect that – when it comes to science-fiction – movies are generally less grand than books are.

“Alien” comes quite close to what I’d say is an epic film, and in many ways it reminded me of the first time I saw “Moon”. Not very much variety is given in “Alien”: It’s really all about the discovery of a malicious alien lifeform which then proceeds to trying to kill everybody. Nothing more than that. Unlike “Moon”, it doesn’t even have a lot of existential theory behind it, it doesn’t really ask any questions about life and beyond. But that would be a too easy way to dismiss “Alien” whose qualities lie elsewhere: Direction, style and especially the characters. Somebody mentioned how “Alien” differs from your typical science-fiction of horror film in how old the characters are. Indeed, the characters are not action types, they are smart and logical thinkers who don’t overreact to what is happening to them, but who deal with the situation in a level-headed way. (Except for Lambert, whose great fear of dying represents the audience’s fear and heightens the suspense.) For that reason, the characterizations are quite brilliant and the entire cast displays awesome acting skills.

All in all, “Alien” is a breathtakingly beautiful movie, revolutionary in its own way and totally recommended to everybody who doesn’t have an aversion against science-fiction films or menacing aliens. It’s almost the best horror movie besides “Shining” and is definitely up there in the realms of superior science-fiction films. I also think it’s better than “Blade Runner”, even though the latter might be more influential to contemporary science-fiction.

Lust, Caution

The main reason why I ended up watching this film was because of Joan Chen who plays the utterly unimportant wife of the main character. She works pretty well in this role, but really, she didn’t have to do very much.

Instead, the main female character is this youngster upon whom the entire story is lying on. (Of course there also is Tony Leung, but not even his brilliancy could have saved the film if the main actress was bad.) And what can I say – she is pretty amazingly cast for this role as well. I don’t think I can imagine any of the established actresses to properly play this role simply for the reason that there is this little bit of innocence and tragedy, and this huge amount of sex that comes with it. I just can’t see Zhang Ziyi do a sex scene like that in any believable way.

Awhile ago, I read an article on how Wong Kar-Wai thinks that the main characters from “In the Mood for Love” are perverse and screwed up. (He probably did not use these words, but it’s close enough.) I was a little surprise because ultimately I thought they were very normal and viewed their restraint as something quite high and powerful. I can probably get behind the idea that there is something wrong with those characters, completely obsessing about this love they cannot attain. But “In the Mood for Love” completely pales next to “Lust, Caution” when it comes to perversion. I’m not talking about the sex scenes; they are rather bad but it’s sex, not violence. I don’t think super-bloody slashings happen in real life, but that kind of sex does happen in real life, and what goes against showing something like that in a film? The perversion in the film is in the relationship of the characters. The first time the guy ever sleeps with Tang Wei’s character, he practically rapes her violently. And by violent I mean he rips her clothes, throws her onto the bed, whips her with his belt, ties her hands with the belt and then takes her from behind. There is no way a sane woman in her right mind would proceed onto having a relationship with this man unless she is masochistic. Indeed the main characters did not wish for such a treatment in the first place, she slept with him because of her political motivation to assassinate him. This is almost a plot hole, because if she cannot convince him that she wants that kind of sex, she is practically confessing that she has other motives for sleeping with him, i.e. trying to kill him. But it was not that way, and it could just as well be that the main character was so big of an asshole that he assumed she’d like it. How screwed up is that?

There was another thing which is almost even worse – there is another scene in which the guy tells the story of how he had to torture another man who he knew from before, they went to school together and he could not stand having to torture and kill him. But then he produced this image of how that man in front of him gets on top of the female main character, so he got enraged in jealousy that he started hitting the man and killed him. How unbelievably sick is that?

There is yet another scene in which they are in this Japanese restaurant, and Tony Leung’s character tells her how he hates Japanese songs, because they sound like scared, crying animals. Indeed the Japanese are portrayed in a horrible fashion in the film (probably not too far from how it really is), and all of their atrocities are explained with “fear”. It was the one scene in which the unusual circumstances of life during WWII comes to light the most clearly in this film and it made me wonder – if the aggressors are so bad, isn’t it even worse to collaborate with them? Certainly it’s a tough situation, but really, the mere concept of opportunism is perhaps more perverse than anything else. You are not really aggressor, you are not really victim, it’s the something in between that makes it so despicable. Passive-aggressiveness, that’s pretty much it.

The last scene I would like to mention is how the key of the entire film relies upon a… diamond. She realizes his love when she saw what a beautiful ring he bought for her. Can a diamond, no matter how large, possibly ever be the crucial display of a man’s love? In that respect, I am all with Nora – I want that men would be willing to give anything I would have be willing to give them, and if it’s something as ridiculous as “honour”. I should a poll asking what is the sickest part of the film – the SM sex scene, the torture story or the diamonds.

I am almost shocked at how the film reflects myself. It’s the incredibly eroticism of qipao, the mix of Chineseness and Westerness in 1940’s Shanghai and finally, the female main character. She’s a young student, extremely willing to learn, passionate about love and – to some degree – politics and she made the two most important decisions in her life because of her love for (two different) men. Smart yet emotional to the point of being masochistic and suicidal, I don’t think such a character exists anywhere else in film world. I shouldn’t even have to mention that her favorite hobby is to watch movies. She could have been me, and that makes (this horribly perverted!) movie even stranger. It took me awhile to reflect upon it, I needed a little distance from it.

All in all, I don’t think Ang Lee reaches the greatness of Wong Kar-Wai with this film, and in general, I thought it was a weaker film than “Brokeback Mountain”, both in terms of the story and directing. But it was definitely worth a look, and it hit me hard.

Man with a Movie Camera

Oh wow. I have been meaning to watch a Russian silent for awhile and pretty much randomly ended up choosing this one. I don’t know very much about Vertov and I was intrigued by a film about film-making.

Now, “Man with a Movie Camera” is much less about film-making but much more a slice-of-life type film in the veins of “Berlin, Sinfonie eider Großstadt”, even though it partially depicts the filmmaking process. Unlike Ruttmann’s portrait of Berlin, there is no special interest of mine in the topic of “Man with a Movie Camera”. Instead, I am just amazed at how it’s made. Just as Wikipedia describes, Vertov uses an absolutely shocking amount of filming techniques, such as “double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, footage played backwards, stop motion animations and a self-reflexive style”. How in the world is it possible that the 20s (and beginning of the 30s) were just so incredibly creative in terms of avant-garde? Literature, fashion, music, visual art, architecture, cinema – everything was so fruitful in between the wars. I bow my head in front of expressionism in cinema which is probably my favorite style of all times. I love the experimentally of the times and wonder when we will ever come to such a point of creative outburst again.

With a little over an hour, “Man with a Movie Camera” was really short and as such, a nice look into Russian silent films. Next thing I want to see is a Dovzhenko. On a side note, I think I definitely prefer Russian films that are not overtly political in any sense. “Man with a Movie Camera” only is in a very limited way (in the sense that I barely see it), and that was awesome. More than anything else, the film is a self-reflective on the interaction of movie makers with city life. I have no idea where they got all the money to make a film like this, but I certainly will not complain.