About Chocolate Parfaits

The Godfather

I am obsessed with things. Old films, Tumblr, research, summer dresses, doing something with my hands, men (in some sense)… I am mostly obsessed about my own awareness of being obsessed. “Obsession” is my current favorite word, because love is supposed to be pure and beautiful and when you call it obsession, you do not have to feel as bad about it. You don’t have to ask myself whether this feeling to have towards something (or someone) is pure enough to be called love.

Currently, at this very moment, I am obsessed with “The Godfather”. How can one not be? It’s possibly the best movie ever made, especially since I know perfectly well that neither Hitchcock’s movies nor “Citizen Kane” take that spot, in my opinion at least. “The Godfather” is something like the incorporation of a well-made movie: Awesome actors, wonderful style both in terms of interior décor and clothing, an intriguing story making the film feel like 1 1/2 hours rather than 3, an impressively well-placed soundtrack and of course, an amazingly hot Al Pacino. Like everybody else, I only know Al Pacino from when he was relatively old and badass looking, so I probably was caught by surprise. How in the world can somebody like that look so cute when he was young?

Apart from that, nothing. I am agreeing with the consensus here. It’s not a smart film or anything, there is nothing to analyze. Certainly the women in the film are weak and strange and kind of boring, and don’t really add very much to this film which is just oozing manliness. But I enjoyed the film so much I could totally see myself watching it again. Now I am looking forward to the second part.

Le scaphandre et le papillon

It’s been a long time since I have had such mixed feelings about a film. They are mostly feelings, of course, but I cannot help it. I found it extremely odd that the girlfriend in the film never saw Bauby because she was afraid. Somehow it just feels like an unlikely thing to happen. It also came across as unlikely that the “wife” would take care of him that way. In reality, of course it was the true girlfriend who stayed by his side, and the “wife” who disappeared into nowhere. To top it off, the true “wife” was the person who made the film deviate from reality and Bauby’s book, solely to put herself into a better light and deprecating the girlfriend. On a human level, I find this so incredibly disgusting that it destroyed the mood of the film’s most crucial scene. It also didn’t help that the “wife” was beautiful and blonde, and the girlfriend had darker hair and a generally less pleasant face. Goodness.

Enough complaining for now. Ignoring the appalling background to the story, it is hard to deny that the film itself is fairly brilliant. Directing, style, storytelling, everything is extremely well done, and so naturally poetic. I am sure the book itself is also a great ode to what makes a human alive – his imagination and memory indeed. I like the premise of the film and enjoyed the encounters with his friends very much. It makes me wonder whether, if it had happened to me, who would stay next to my bed every day. Bauby, this seemingly unlikable bon vivant, actually had a lot of true friends. I feel deeply impressed by that, and it makes me wonder why. On the other hand, I wonder how many people in this world I would visit every day if this happened to them. (12.)
With that said, the best scene in the film was actually the one with the father. That one is likely to be not obscured by filmmaker’s politics, and I thought that it was absolutely beautiful. Ah, the poor father.

I am also a huge fan of Anne Consigny for no apparent reason. She always plays the same kind of role, but somehow I always find her very lovely with this worried face of hers.

I heard the members of “Explosions in the Sky” like movies. I think this is absolutely awesome, and I wonder how they’d feel about this particular film, especially since they used “Your Hand in Mine” for the trailer.

Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole

Of all people, this is a film that my cousin has recommended to me. Her tastes and mine typically don’t match (and it makes me actually wonder about what my other cousins like), but this was the first time she actually talked about a movie, and I was intrigued. More than anything, I liked the looks of the owls. They really are amazingly cute, especially since I normally don’t like anthropomorphic characters. But here, I am amazed at their cuteness.

The visuals are definitely the film’s main appeal – the designs are absolutely wonderful, the flights look so beautiful that you don’t mind that they might be a bit stretched out and the landscapes in the film are more beautiful than Ghibli’s. Anime needs a budget like this, for real. Except for the fact that the owls’s mouths are a little weird, I’d say that the film is doing everything in the department of looks. I am deeply impressed.

Coming to the story, I also don’t agree with the general critical opinion, saying that it’s too dark for little children to watch, and too predictable and stupid for older children. Maybe the film is actually for adults who are into small, cute things – like me. I don’t mind a predictable story; in fact, most stories are predictable. This movie is no more and no less predictable than, say, “Alice in Wonderland” was. Now you might say that “Alice in Wonderland” had better characters, but this film had its charming characters too. Plus, think of 50 years of Disney movies – how many great characters were there? Really, in terms of storytelling, direction, creativity and design, I don’t think any of those common criticisms apply to this film. I have no idea what it is that made people dislike this film, or give it a bad review, because my own problem with the film has never been mentioned at all.

I guess what I did not particularly like about the film was indeed how it portrayed the two forces, and its hypocritic idealism. This movie is just as ‘bland’ as “V for Vendetta” was, with this strangely communist system as the “good system” and the nazis (along with their uberowls and unterowls) are the “bad ones”. Curiously enough, the motto “Aid the weak against the strong” – well that is precisely what fascism did too – applies to both of them, if you dig just a little bit deeper into the story. Incidentally, Kludd was the weak one who felt finally accepted by… the nazis. Also, in the supposedly good world, we have a leader couple and the population is divided into workforces doing different things. Just like with the nazis, the best ones are allowed to be fighters. How belligerent is that? I was so pissed off when the hero of the story starts talking about how war is not heroic or glorious (very good!), but then goes onto saying “being a hero means to do the right thing”. Who says it’s the right thing? For quotes like this I truly think that the movie bringing children onto a bad moral path in which they believe the world is black and white. When it comes to that, “How to train your dragon” is the way to go here.

Personally, I liked the film a lot. I found it extremely beautiful, the characters were charming and, at times, very funny, and everything about the film was awfully well-made. I just hated its social system and the rotten morals that come with it. Educational this is not.

127 Hours

The story is based on a book, and therefore, even before watching the film, you know two things: The guy will spend 127 hours in agony and he will survive. But how does it happen? Can you really tell a simple story like that in 90 minutes? More than anything else, this film is a proof of concept. There is no such thing as a story too thin to make a good movie out of it (a criticism that goes towards many stories, like Igor Stravinsky and Coco Chanel’s love story, or Julie Powell’s “Julia” project to make all recipes from Julia Child’s book in one year). Under the hand of a skillful director and screenplay writer, every story can be turned into something great. As long as humans are involved, there is humanity in it.

This film’s greatest strength is indeed its focus on the main character. The way he reflects upon his own life through those hallucinations are amazingly gripping, and when it comes to the question of cutting off that arm, I felt… alive. It was a feeling of blood rushing through my veins, beautifully orchestrated by the fitting music. I kept wanting to look away, but it’s a bad idea to run away from such an experience. And I know that, if it happened to me, I would have given into the pressure. I also liked how the guy is just a simple, normal human being, a little weird (like we all are, right?) but ultimately from a fairly normal family with a normal life, running into the biggest experience of his life. It’s brilliant.

I think that James Franco did a good job, but considering how everybody hails him as the new star in the acting world, I was perhaps less impressed than I could have been. There are not many young actors who could have pulled off this role, that is for sure, and he is very believable indeed, but I thought he was even better in “14 Actors”. And oh God! I think he looks like Joseph Gordon-Levitt. XD

Note that I have updated my “current top 30 movies” list. Since the previous lists were from 2005 and 2008, this year marks the date of the next list. So far, there is 1 movie from the 20’s, 3 from the 40’s and 50’s respectively, 2 from the 60’s and 70’s respectively, 1 from the 80’s, 4 from the 90’s and a total of 14 from the new millennium. The majority are still American films, with 14 films, followed by Japan with 4 films. Instead of Jarmusch and Wilder, Lubitsch is now the only director with 2 films in the list. In comparison to those, “127 Hours” has no chance to figure on a list like my personal favorites, even if I do think that the film was very good and preferred it over Black Swan. At this point, a movie has to make such an impact on me that I have obsessed about it for awhile before it can appear there. But when it comes to the other important criterion for the list – whether a film tells us something about humanity (and why “Some like it hot”, of all films, has fell out of that list) – as I mentioned before, “127 Hours” absolutely excels at that.

Otoshiana (Pitfall)

It actually took me a long time before I got into the mood of seeing a film like this. It goes well with my late tendency of watching films which might not be the most accessible or obviously enjoyable to watch; obscure modern titles but also something avantgarde like this. At least the music was certainly very, very avantgarde – you’d think it’s some random noise until you start discovering some sort of pattern in the atonality of the music.

Among Criterion’s 3 films by Teshigahara, “Pitfall” clearly stands out as a ‘beginner’ film. It’s less crazy, less stylish, a little less existentialist and much more funny than any of the other Teshigahara x Abe cooperations. There is something very down-to-earth about this story, even to the point of being extremely realistic – if you consider the existence of those ghost a plausible thing. Within the universe of “Pitfall”, they perfectly make sense. The realism of the story comes from the characters who, except for the child, never behave in an absurd way. Even the mysterious man in the white suit makes sense somehow, and one could consider that he is just some corporate goon with a very perfidious plan of destroying the unions. Why not?

The child is the true mystery of the film, and where the existentialism of the film culminates. Sure, there are the dead characters asking themselves why they died (which is very human). But the kid is much more interesting, because everybody completely ignores it. It is as if people lived in a world in which sex is pointless and there is no future (i.e. no children to take care of), and the true ghost is actually the child who sees everything but doesn’t say anything. It is no surprise that the last take of the film indeed shows the kid running through the meticulously geometric looking ghost town.

On top of that, there are some politics involved… As to be expected from Abe, almost every aspect of humanity can be found in this film, death, relationships, the aforementioned politics, work and money, crimes and morals, even your predictable rape scene of the day. Maybe the movie is not as visually striking as “Woman in the Dunes”, or as elaborate as a story like “The Face of Another”, but personally “Pitfall” might even be my favorite. I think it’s a forgotten gem with so much potential as an exposé to existentialist questions.

Tout est parfait

They don’t say “Jesus” or even “Jeez” but they say “Christ” instead. It makes sense, “Jésu” does sound too weird for kids to pick it up. Canadian is such an incredibly weird, distant language.

Perhaps distance yet familiarity is what makes this film so fascinating for me. Even though I never had to grieve for anybody, it is a sentiment that, nevertheless, is very familiar to me. Even though I used to be a somewhat suicidal teenager, I have never been into drugs nor any type of clichéd teenage activities. And finally, even though I understand both English and French, the Canadian medley feels close yet far away, just like the entire movie.

Here is where the appeal of this movie lies: It might indulge itself in clichés and take itself very, very seriously, but at the same time, it feels incredibly truthful. Nothing really happens in there, yet whatever happens feels much more real. People kiss in the movie like I did 10 years ago, they drive their parents crazy exactly the same way I did, they have a boring life like most of my life used to be as well. Apart from the suicides, which are shown in a way reminiscent of realistic novels from the 19th century, nothing is dramatized in the film. It is also realistic not to find answers to everything. Even so, the film manages to end on a positive note.

Sure, the film leaves questions open. Except for Sacha who had a sad childhood, it is not truly revealed why the kids did it, but it makes sense that they might even tell the reason in their suicide video letters. It might just as well be for the beauty of the tragedy, who knows. But the real tragedy is that Josh lived on, and the revelation about that is so much more impressive and touching than giving out some satisfying ‘reasons’.

By the way, the girl in the bus from the beginning is such a beauty?

I don’t think there is any right way of dealing with grief, especially in a movie. I thought that “Six Feet Under” did a great job but especially the Nate/Lisa thing got a little over the top dramatic, and “Trois Couleurs: Bleu” was great but for most of the film, we barely saw anything besides Juliette Binoche swimming. This film, in comparison to that, shows so many aspects of the main character’s coping with his world, and despite the slowness of the narration there is a strange richness to it that I liked very much.

The music here is the exact opposite of “Les amours imaginaires”. While that one is primarily ironic and a device to a ridicule scene, the music in this film actually manages to enhance its mood successfully, which I would say is fairly unusual for a rather uncomplicated film like this. It is another sign that shows how well the film plunges into the character’s world, admittedly a world full clichés of teenager-ism where music is its main element.

Another Canadian film with lovely music that I thought I wouldn’t like but ended up enjoying very, very much – that pretty much sums up my impression of “Tout est parfait”. It’s a typical underrated, badly distributed film and I am glad that they exist. How am I going to find the next one?