1. The Torch (1950) Dir. Emilio Fernandez - US
The Banal, the Blah, the Banausic:
1. Paris (2008) Dir. Cedric Klapisch - France
2. Body Snatchers (1993) Dir. Abel Ferrara - US
Astounding Cinema:
10. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983) Dir. Nagisa Oshima - Japan
9. Fiend Without A Face (1958) Dir. Arthur Crabtree - UK
8. Hardcore (1979) Dir. Paul Schrader - US
7. Cleo From 5 to 7 (1962) Dir. Agnes Varda - France
6. From Beyond (1986) Dir. Stuart Gordon - US
5. Nathalie (2003) Dir. Anne Fontaine - France
4. The Comfort of Strangers (1991) Dir. Paul Schrader - US
3. Angel Face (1952) Dir. Otto Preminger - US
2. The Seventh Continent (1989) Dir. Michael Haneke - Austria
1. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) Dir. Luis Bunuel - France
Theatrical Releases:
3. Jennifer's Body (2009) Dir. Karyn Kusama - US 3/10
2. The Burning Plain (2008) Dir. Guillermo Arriaga - US 7/10
1. The Beaches of Agnes (2008) Dir. Agnes Varda - France 9/10
Well everyone, I have about a week and half worth of films for this post due to the interruption of the Toronto Film Festival, so I am sure I will be more brief than usual.
This week's cinema cess pool selection goes to an early 1950's American feature from Mexican director Emilio Fernandez. The threadbare plot concerns a revolutionary, Jose Juan Reyes (Pedro Armendariz) and his minions taking over a small Mexican town, where he falls in love with a ridiculous woman, Maria Dolores Penafiel, played by none other than Paulette Goddard, who was much too old for the role. But what the hell, slap some bronzer on that bitch and no one can tell we have a 40 year American old playing a 20 year old Mexican---it's all a wash. Not to mention Goddard's particularily and transcendentally atrocious acting, including a completely unbelievable romance with Armendariz. Myself a huge fan of so bad it's good cinema, I advise this floppy drivel to be avoided at all costs, unless you want to pretend Goddard is a viperous drag queen and don't mind wasting 90 minutes of precious life, then have at it.
As for this week's mediocre selections, there are two entries from somewhat celebrated, capable directors. Abel Ferrara has directed his share of clunkers (including ill received vehicles with Madonna like Dangerous Game, 1993 or New Rose Hotel, 1998 with Asia Argento) but he's also the man behind Bad Lieutenant (1992) and King of New York (1990). And so, with eager anticipation I finally sat down for Ferrara's treatment of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which Ferrara chose to title Body Snatchers. Except that, it's the third film version of this story. And somehow, the fourth, ill conceived version (The Invasion, 2007, with Nicole Kidman) is better than Ferrara's. Poor Gabrielle Anwar is kind of the film's lead, and she's more like a doe caught in the headlights. Terry Kinney, with some Nicolas Cage locks, is even more bafflingly cast as her father. In fact, the only nugget of interest in Ferrara's treatment is the presence of Meg Tilly (who hasn't acted since 1995) and the controversy over whether or not it was a body double in her full on nude scene. I like Meg Tilly, I'll always love Agnes of God (1985). And then there's Forest Whitaker in two scenes, both horrendous and worthy of the cutting room floor. Overall, a dull rehash, especially considering it sports a screen story credit from Larry Cohen and Stuart Gordon helped write the screenplay.
The next mediocre selection is from Cedric Klapisch, the man behind the excellent Family Resemblances (or Un Air de Famille, 1996) and the international success of L'auberge Espagnole (2002) and its sequel, Russian Dolls (2005), which would turn Romain Duris into a star. But his latest effort, Paris, is sentimental drivel to the extreme. Examining strange intersections between the fluffy lives of a few Parisians, Romain Duris returns as a (heterosexual) dancer who finds out he has a limited amount of time to live due to a fatal heart condition. His sister (Juliette Binoche, who's always a joy to watch, even in this clunker) moves in with her kids to take care of him. One completely awful line uttered by Duris is his response to his sister's question about what he does all day alone in the apartment. "Watch other people live. Wonder who they are, where they go? They become heroes in my little stories." Ugggh. What awful shit. So, then we're forced to watch all these random Parisians---which aren't terribly bad or terribly interesting until we get to a horrendous subplot involving Fabrice Luchini (the despicably ugly and pickled actor/husband of director Anne Fontaine, who disgusted me with his sexual shenanigans with Louise Bourgoin in Fontaine's The Girl From Monaco, 2008) as a professor who text message stalks and beds his student, the ravishing Melanie Laurent (Inglourious Basterds, 2009). I didn't believe a minute of it--what an old, icky man fantasy. The film came across as almost offensively contrived. At one moment, one of Binoche's kids asks, "Why are you telling us all this?" I wished to ask the same of the filmmaker.
Well, we have a lot of astounding selections in this week's roundup.
Finally, I was again impressed with one of auteur Nagisa Oshima's more "minor works" (I have yet to see Empire of Passion, 1978 or In the Realm of the Senses, 1976). One of Oshima's two features from the 1980's, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983) stars David Bowie as a POW in the early 1940's. Moving and heavy, the film is quite good and seemingly realistic, with several memorable moments, including Bowie being buried up to the neck in sand. The only disconcerting moments of the film happened between Japansese characters that only spoke their language while we were not privy to subtitles, lending an isolated, POW point of view, that worked for the narrative and sometimes against it.
Oh, those crazy Brits. Genre entry Fiend Without a Face (1958) is quite the entertaining little jaunt---if you can make it through the B-trappings of silly acting, stale plotting, and overall hamminess to get to the "special effects" pay off when the beastly creatures created by telekinesis and energized by a militaty radioactive power plant become visible to the human eye, which resemble large brains that crawl along with the use of a spinal cord, that somehow, also permits them to fly short distances. I am curious to get a copy of previous works by Arthur Crabtree, who also directed Madonna of the Seven Moons (1945) and Death Over My Shoulder (1958). If you enjoyed the original The Blob (1958), you'll love Fiend Without a Face.
After recently rewatching Paul Schrader's strange but interesting remake of Cat People (1982), I realized there were a ton of old films helmed by Schrader that I'd never taken the time to see. Hence, he is responsible for two entries on this week's 'best of' list. The lower on the list is an excellent little gritty film called Hardcore (1979), which stars George C. Scott as a midwestern Calvinist in Grand Rapids, Michigan, whose teenage daughter runs away into the porn pits of LA while on a Calvinist retreat. A gritty story (that perhaps has too happy of an ending), this beats the shit out of re-tread material like 8MM (1999), which borrows heavily from Schrader's film. Rumor has it that George C. Scott did not get along with Schrader, at one point only agreeing to get out of his trailer after making Schrader promise he would never direct a film again. Peter Boyle costars as an oily, seedy LA private dick, and Season Hubley (once the wife of Kurt Russell) brightens the dialogue as a prostitute Scott hires to help find his kid. The creepiest rumors tend to circulate around Ilah Davis, who plays Scott's daughter, who may or may have not been actually involved in the sex trade herself, until after this film, when she joined a hippie cult called Rainbow Family. Yeah.
After catching Agnes Varda's excellent new film, The Beaches of Agnes, a sort of documentary/memoir, I made an effort to sit down and begin watching her films that I've owned forever. Starting with Cleo From 5 to 7, which focuses on French singer, Cleo (Corinne Marchand), and two hours of her life during which she's been waiting to find out the results of a medical examination that may reveal she has cancer. Rather than be as heartbreaking as it sounds, the film is instead, realistic, and therefore, even more powerful as it shows the spoiled and naieve young star as she drifts through several episodes during her day. Convinced that as long she stays pretty she won't die, she becomes more and more terrified, forcing her to seek solace with her friend, a nude model, and eventually we find her bonding with a soldier in a park, himself about to be deployed in the war against the Algerians. Lyrical and epidsodic, Agnes Varda is indeed vintage New Wave.
While it may not be as good as Stuart Gordon's previous work which also starred Jeffrey Combs (Reanimator, 1985), From Beyond (1986) may perhaps be loosely plotted, but it's an entertaining grand guginol adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft. Revolving around a genius scientist, Dr. Edward Pretorious (an homage to The Bride of Frankenstein, 1935) who creates a resonator that stimulates the pineal gland which also happens to bring wicked creatures from the 4th dimension into our own. His head bitten off by one of these creatures, his assistant, played by Jeffrey Combs is arrested. A young doctor is called in for her opinion (a fresh faced and entertaining Barbara Crampton) who decides that Combs should be released to her so she can duplicate the experiment and find out what happened. Though the course of events are utterly unbelievable, the gross out factor is actually quite surprising. It turns out that when stimulated too long, the pineal gland takes on a life of it's own and expands, shooting a phallus-like tendril out through the center of your forehead (apparently Descartes called the pineal the third eye). Creepy and disgusting, From Beyond is worth the watch.
And at long last sitting down to watch Anne Fontaine's Nathalie... (2003) (which, if you've been following my blog, was remade as Chloe, 2009, by Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan), I was impressed by each screen treatment for different reasons. The remake remains almost the same for the first 3/4 of each film, but both differ more than enough in strangely interesting ways. There's nothing inherently wrong with Fontaine's film, which concerns a gynecoligist (the wonderful and radiantly beautiful Fanny Ardant) who confirms that her husband (Gerard Depardieu) is cheating on her after he misses a surprise birthday party she throws for him. Listening to his voicemail, Ardant discovers that he has cheated on her a few times, but as he says, these episodes meant nothing. Hurt and confused, she hires a prostitute from a sex club to seduce her husband, to catch him in an intense affair. Enter Nathalie, played wonderfully by a psychotic and sexy Emmanuelle Beart---it is here where Nathalie holds the greatest advanatge over Chloe---Beart is an excellent actress and her counterpart in the remake is played by Amanda Seyfried, who is much too young, and altogether unconvincing. The husband, played by Liam Neeson in Chloe, is rather a non sequitor in both cases. But it is the dark, and more frank sexual tension that develops between the women that gives Chloe an advantage--Fontaine's film is a bit more ambiguous, which, depending on how you look at it, might just reduce the Nathalie character into a headcase when really, still waters run deep. Both Fanny Ardant and Julianne Moore, respectively, are reason enough to see either picture.
Paul Schrader's other selection is the strange and perverse The Comfort of Strangers (1991), a creepy, little picture in the tradition of classic Euro-art-house creep fests that either irritate you with subtlety or get lodged under your skin. Strangers is set in Venice, which is quite appropriate for its tone and distinct foreboding atmosphere. It is no wonder that the film seemed to channel Visconti's Death In Venice (1971). Focusing on a young couple played by Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson that are on vacation, it seems, to repair their crumbling relationship (he hates kids, she has two from a previous relationship), weirdness takes center stage when they run into the last man you'd want to see in the shadowy crevices of Venice -- Christopher Walken. Taking them under his wing, Walken spouts strange, and at first, vaguely sexual stories about his life growing up with a tyrannical father. Eventually ensnaring the couple into visiting his home, we meet Walken's even more off-center wife, played delightfully by Helen Mirren. You can predict something delightfully creepy is going to happen, but you just don't know what---a strange little psycho-sexual exercise, this sordid little treat is definitely worth discussion.
Expert filmmaker Otto Preminger's film noir masterpiece, Angel Face (1952) gets third place this week, starring Robert Mitchum as a paramedic who falls for femme fatale Jean Simmons on an emergency call concerning her rich stepmother. Quitting his paramedic gig (and his nurse girlfriend) to take a job as the chauffeur for Simmons' stepmom, he discovers that Simmons had more in mind than just having him drive her around. What plays like your standard noir takes a jolting turn towards the end that had me shaking my head at this cold hearted broad.
Michael Haneke's first film feature rounds out the number two slot, with The Seventh Continent (1989), a reference to Australia, and several other things, once you start to think about it. It's several frames into the film before we discover who has been talking, or conversing, as Haneke at first chooses to focus on the character's hands, feet, and mundane activities a middle class Austrian family engages in. The effect is indeed alienating, clueing us into perhaps how this family feels as they suddenly decide to pack up and leave Austria in order to emigrate to Australia, as they tell employers and parents, when instead they commit familial suicide after destroying their home. Definitely difficult to get into, and understand, but the film is about the emotional deadness of contemporary society---why should we feel fuzzy or sad about the eventual outcome? It merely seems inevitable. And therefore, disturbing and brilliant.
And the number one spot goes to master filmmaker Luis Bunuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), which, as the plot outlines tells us, is a quite plotless film about six middle class people and their continually interrupted attempts to sit down and eat together, which results in a the latter half of the film being mostly a continuum of unrelated dreams of these people as their frustatration and anxieties come to the fore. Much like his next film, The Phantom of Liberty (1974), Bunuel is critiquing, as always, social hypocrisies, focusing a great deal on religion, and social politics (and here one of the characters, played by Fernando Rey, is an Ambassador from Spain, I believe). Jean-Pierre Cassel and Paul Frankeuer round out the men, while the three actresses are some of my favorite French actresses of all time, including Bulle Ogier, Stephane Audran, and Delphine Seyrig (though Ogier gets the funniest role as the alcoholic sister of Seyrig). A definite must see (and must own on my part!), there just isn't quite anything like sitting down to watch a Bunuel feature.
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