Monthly Archives: March 2011

In Review: 3/13–3/19

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I really am writing about The Dust of Time; I’m just slower than I used to be. I hope to have it up within a week. If not I’ll certainly lose interest. Following last week’s heavy load, this week was much lighter…

03/13/11 Get Crazy1 (Allan Arkush; 1983; DVD-R)
I thought I had seen this before but if I did it certainly wasn’t in its entirety judging by how much of it I felt as if I were watching for the first time. Get Crazy is silly, but it’s also pretty great in it’s parody of parodies. Also, it has some great characters including:

Electric Larry…


Piggy played by Fear’s front man, Lee Ving…
 
Lou Reed as Auden the Metaphysical Folk Singer, who is introduced in the frame below…
 
Malcolm McDowell reprising the codpiece as Reggie Wanker

03/14/11 The Keep1 (Michael Mann; 1983; Netflix)
This was serviceable enough. To my memory, Michael Mann’s 80s movies all still look good enough, but they are severely dated by their soundtracks.

03/15/11 Hamilton2 (Matthew Porterfield; 2006; Netflix)
Seeing this again only confirmed that I wasn’t blown away by it. I still like his influences and am looking forward to Putty Hill.

03/18/11 Adventureland2 (Greg Mottola; 2009; DVD)
What a great soundtrack, especially in the same week as Get Crazy.

03/19/11 Rango1 (Gore Verbinski; 2011; Regal Cantera 30)
I saw this with my daughter and nephew, both more or less four and half years old. I enjoyed this much more than they did. Neither of them picked up on the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas gag or had seen Chinatown, but I think they still enjoyed it, at least until the popcorn ran out.

In Review: 3/6–3/12

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03/06/11 The Double Life of Veronique1 (Krzysztof Kieslowski; 1991; DVD)
Oddly enough my week began and ended with Irène Jacob. I watched this to keep up with Filmspotting’s Kieslowski “marathon.” While I’m generally a sucker for doppelganger movies, I was left a little wanting with this one. I suppose on the simplest biographical level it could have something to do with a Polish director moving to France to find recognition, thus the death of the Polish Weronika and the survival of the French Véronique. No doubt given more attention there’s more there, but if I watch this again it will be for the Irène Jacob.

03/08/11 Lovers of Hate1 (Bryan Poysner; 2010; SundanceNow.com)
The main character of this movie reminded me way too much of myself…the bitterness, not the intelligence. I saw this for $4.99 via SundanceNow.com. I had trouble downloading the movie during the day, but when I woke up at 3AM it downloaded in about 15 minutes.
03/09/11 The Hole1 (Tsai-Ming Liang; 1998; DVD)
03/10/11 What Time Is It There?2 (Tsai-Ming Liang; 2001; DVD)
03/11/11 Goodbye, Dragon Inn2 (Tsai-Ming Liang; 2003; DVD)
Why? Tsai doesn’t so much work in sequels as in one long continuing story. So viewing his movies works best for me when the preceding movies are more fresh in my mind. Even though it was The Hole I was watching for the first time, the title I was meaning to watch was Goodbye, Dragon Inn.

I was watching it to ask the question: Are we to believe that the theatre really is haunted only because the Japanese character says it is? The only evidence I can see that it might indeed be haunted is the appearance of Tien Miao, who frequently plays Hsiao Kang’s (Lee Kang-sheng) father who happened to die in the beginning of the previous film What Time Is It There? where he does in fact put in a seemingly postmortem appearance again in the end. I might assume Tien Miao to be the ghost of Hsiao Kang’s father, but just before the end, Shih-Chun, playing himself, meets Tien Miao’s character in the lobby and addresses him as “Teacher Miao” suggesting that he too was playing himself. It’s worth noting that in The Hole, Tien Miao plays a customer in Hsiao Kang’s shop and the two appear to be strangers rather than father and son; however, even as father and son they always did have a strained relationship.

My question remains unanswered, but I think this is one my favorites by Tsai next to Face.

03/12/11 The Dust of Time1 (Theodoros Angelopoulos; 2008; DVD)
Also starring Irène Jacob, this is only the fourth movie I’ve seen by Theo Angelopoulos, and it is my least favorite even though I still think it’s pretty great. The title alone brings up an image of a nonlinear time where if time is stuff like dust then its parts are always interacting randomly and settling palimpsestically so that non-sequential units are constantly interacting with one another. I’m going to plan on writing more about this in the next few days, especially after listening to a recent podcast where the host kept referring to single-takes as happening in real-time, but here as he did in The Traveling Players, where a shot began in 1951 and ended in 1939, Angelopoulos continues to challenge this assumption…but more of this at length, as one who dealt in time said, is to-come (a-venir), when I might even get really pretentious and open with Joyce’s line, “Jewgreek is greekjew.”

In Review: 2/25–3/5

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In the absence of something longer and more substantial here is a brief review of what I watched last week, well, from Friday, February 25 to Saturday, March 5. But I should mention that the week before, I watched Season 8 of BBC’s MI-5, and that show just continues to get better. Peter Firth is great. And the writers impress me with how willing and able they are to deal with turnovers in the cast. Also, this season had some real stand-out direction, especially from one Alrick Riley.

02/25/11 Drive Angry 3D (Patrick Lussier; 2011; Classic Cinemas Charlestowne 18)
This is is a movie that’s easy enough to put down from it’s preposterous stupidity to it’s, not unrelated, red herring of a reference to John Milton as Nicolas Cage’s character’s name. But the fun in watching Cage and William Fichtner, who I have given the benefit of the doubt ever since The Underneath, and even Amber Heard is undeniable. Also, this is, I think, only my fourth movie to see in 3D since Avatar, and this may be my favorite use of the format, especially in the way the images in dissolves, frequently faces, are layered on top of each other; to exaggerate, picture The Wrong Man‘s Fonda–Robbins but with each face on a distinctly different plane. I also seem to remember a great dissolve of a headlight into the moon. In other words, I like the 3D in the still quiet moments as much as I like it when severed hands are flying at me.
02/26/11 Devil (John Erick Dowdle; 2010; Blu-ray)
Considering that this came “from the Mind of M. Night Shyamalan,” it was much better than I was expecting. If Shyamalan truly does consider himself the Hitchcock heir, this story with it’s sense of Catholic guilt is closer than anything of his since his first two.
02/26/11 Hall Pass (Bobby Farrelly and Peter Farrelly; 2011; Regal Cantera 30)
I enjoyed this movie, in spite of about a 5 to 10 minute nap at the end of the first act (I fell asleep right after Joy Behar introduced the idea of a “hall pass” and woke up at the scene that caused Christina Applegate to give Jason Sudeikis his pass…which is a really strange sight to wake up to. Other than that, I have very little to say about this other than to say that complaints about pedanticism are not unmerited and that I wish it took as many chances ideologically as it took with its sight gags; that is, I don’t think it says anything about marriage other than an uncomplicated affirmation of monogamy.
02/27/11 Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (Oliver Stone; 2010; DVD)
This was a serviceable and entertaining-enough movie. Shia LeBeouf is growing and improving as an actor. Carey Mulligan is completely wasted. Was surprised the movie didn’t end with Josh Brolin nibbling on the end of a quail-hunting riffle or whatever type of gun rich people in movies commit suicide with.
02/28/11 Image in the Snow (Willard Maas; 1952?; DVD)
I’ve been holding on to Avant-Garde 3: Experimental Cinema 1922-1954 since last October. I had to watch this beautiful 26 minute “film poem” one more time before returning it. “…the disinherited who have each others’ aloneness and, therefore, are not alone.”
03/01/11 Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (Shane Black; 2005; Blu-ray)
This movie continues to be a lot of fun, but I do have difficulty finding great substance behind the surface-level meta-ness from the breaking-the-fourth-wall narration to the Kael inspired title.
03/02/11 Never Let Me Go (Mark Romanek; 2010; DVD)
Perhaps overly-influenced by Filmspotting but I really liked this movie. I’ll need to watch it again before commenting.
Dreams (178K)
03/03/11 “The Peach Orchard” from Dreams (Akira Kurosawa; 1990; DVD)
March 3 is the Japanese holiday of “Girl’s Day,” and this has become standard viewing for the occasion.
03/03/11 Nostalghia (Andrei Tarkovsky; 1983; DVD)
It was over 10 years ago that this was my first introduction to Tarkovsky. Marks the director’s first collaboration with the great writer Tonino Guerra, and according to an interview on the BFI Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow DVD it was Tarkovsky who introduced Guerra to Angelopoulos; so if Nostalghia did nothing more than to make that introduction possible, it would be historic. But this movie is strong enough on it’s own merits.



03/04/11 The Adjustment Bureau (George Nofli; 2011; Regal Cantera 30)
The strength of this movie is bound to the relationship between the characters played by Matt Damon and Emily Blunt; because together they work so well, the movie works okay. The agency part of the story is too incoherent. I imagine that Dick’s story, which I haven’t read, is more unified or singular in its ideology. I don’t mind the genre mixing, but I did have a problem with the inconsistent tone, whether or not the angency is or isn’t a good thing, a necessary evil, or whatever.
03/05/11 Blue Velvet (David Lynch; 1986; Music Box)
This was my first time seeing Blue Velvet theatrically; it’s also my first time seeing it in its entirety in nearly 10 years. These grabs really contain the whole of the movie.


Next week’s in review will cover Kieslowski, 3 by Tsai Ming-Liang, and Angelopoulos’ Dust of Time.