The Banal, the Blah, the Banausic:
1. The Driller Killer (1979) Dir. Abel Ferrera - US
Guilty Pleasure Cinema:
1. Pontypool (2008) Dir. Bruce McDonald - Canada
Astounding Cinema:
5. She Done Him Wrong (1933) Dir. Lowell Sherman – US
4. Chinese Roulette (1976) Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder – West Germany
3. Peppermint Frappe (1967) Dir. Carlos Saura – Spain
2. Germany, Pale Mother (1980) Dir. Helma Sanders-Brahm – West Germany
1. Red Lights (2004) Dir. Cedric Kahn – France
Theatrical Releases:
4. Stay the Same Never Change (2009) Dir. Laurel Nakadate – US 4/10
3. The Runaways (2010) Dir. Floria Sigismondi – US 7/10
2. Fish Tank (2009) Dir. Andrea Arnold – UK 10/10
1. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009) Dir. Niels Arden Oplev – Sweden 10/10
Rewatched Goodies:
1. The Room (2003) Dir. Tommy Wiseau – US 6/10
1. The Driller Killer (1979) Dir. Abel Ferrera - US
Guilty Pleasure Cinema:
1. Pontypool (2008) Dir. Bruce McDonald - Canada
Astounding Cinema:
5. She Done Him Wrong (1933) Dir. Lowell Sherman – US
4. Chinese Roulette (1976) Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder – West Germany
3. Peppermint Frappe (1967) Dir. Carlos Saura – Spain
2. Germany, Pale Mother (1980) Dir. Helma Sanders-Brahm – West Germany
1. Red Lights (2004) Dir. Cedric Kahn – France
Theatrical Releases:
4. Stay the Same Never Change (2009) Dir. Laurel Nakadate – US 4/10
3. The Runaways (2010) Dir. Floria Sigismondi – US 7/10
2. Fish Tank (2009) Dir. Andrea Arnold – UK 10/10
1. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009) Dir. Niels Arden Oplev – Sweden 10/10
Rewatched Goodies:
1. The Room (2003) Dir. Tommy Wiseau – US 6/10
The Driller Killer (1979): Abel Ferrera is a little hit and miss for me, though I was way too young to appreciate Bad Lieutenant (1992) when I saw it years ago and I’ve never seen the much beloved King of New York (1990). But I have seen and was not impressed with Ferrara’s version of Body Snatchers (1993), and I would add his directorial debut The Driller Killer as a stylistic mess and mediocre at best---it felt like what could have been an un-dubbed Ruggero Deodato film, as Driller made me feel as much in need of a shower as The House at the Edge of the Park (1980)----and let it be noted here as it is everywhere, that like Deodato’s films, The Driller Killer gained most of its notoriety for being labeled a video nasty. While I do agree that the cover art is violently beautiful, I felt Ferrara, casting himself in the lead role, was not a memorable presence in front of the camera. Basically, the plot is about a young painter who slowly goes mad due to numerous social pressures in late 70’s NYC. He has two female roommates he has to ‘care’ for, one of whom he’s romantically involved. Meanwhile, a punk band moves into their dilapidated building beneath them only to play incessant noisy music that would drive anyone insane. But rather than kill them, our young troubled artists buys a power drill and a battery pack and drills homeless, drunken bums to death on the street. While there’s some brilliantly disturbing shots of this, it grows a bit old. The film juxtaposes noisy scenes of band practice, insane shouting from Ferrera (who is credited under the name Jimmy Laine), useless footage of the band performing in grimy clubs, Ferrara’s pissy, snooty homosexual agent harping about the failure of the latest painting while trying to get in Ferrara’s pants, and vicious drill killing. Now, I graduated from a liberal arts college, so I know what that whole scene is like and it got old rather fast, just like this film does in its first third.
Pontypool (2008): The first hour of Pontypool is excellent, uncomfortable, and eerily intense. But once everything is explained, it suddenly seems ridiculous, even though I dearly wanted to find this film’s angle intriguing and ingenious---I just didn’t like it. Stephen McHattie stars in this Canadian production from Bruce McDonald (of The Tracey Fragments, 2007, and the surprisingly good Picture Claire, 2001) as a crusty, bass voiced radio DJ in a wintery Ontario town named Pontypool. Most of the film is set in this radio station (which is the basement of a church). What starts off as a rather boring (though caustic) day with his boss and a teenage assistant, it’s not long before bizarre calls come into the station of strange, bizarre, and eventually homicidal and cannibalistic happenings keep happening in Pontypool. The tension and claustrophobia builds until eventually the three individuals broadcasting from the church basement are told they can’t go inside and that a strange virus is taking over the small town of Pontypool. A virus that may be spread through the English language. As I said, the first hour is virtually brilliant, and then it takes one of the most disappointing nosedives I’ve seen for some time in a film like this. I really wanted to like it more. Garnering numerous accolades and lots of attention, I hear that McDonald is at work on a sequel, Pontypool Changes. I’m sure I’ll see it.
She Done Him Wrong (1933): Nominated for Best Picture, She Done Him Wrong is notable for several reasons—it single handedly saved a studio from bankruptcy, it gave Mae West her first leading role (and from a film she wrote), and made a star out of Cary Grant. It’s the shortest film to be nominated for Best Picture, and darling Mae had to be sewn into most of her dresses. The National Legion of Decency was formed after this movie and cites Mae West as one of the main reasons for its creation---in fact, most of her films from this time period are blamed for the budding censorship laws, and it was 1934 that saw the Hays Code finally begin taking it’s censorship toll. Meanwhile, She Done Him Wrong is a fast and loose little picture and Mae is New York nightclub singer sensation named Lady Lou, who never met a man she didn’t like. One of Mae’s many ex lovers is in the slammer, but escapes to see her, slipping into a jealous, murderous rage upon discovering that she’s been unfaithful to him. Guess he didn’t know her very well. While this film made Mae and Grant a star, the main reason to see it is the ultra salacious West giving us all that’s she got in an endless smattering of seduction, double entendres and eyewinks.
Chinese Roulette (1976): One of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s more obscure titles (one of my favorite directors of all time) turns in a masterful study of mind games and abusive relationships (which I’m certain transcends into a socio-political commentary as well). One of my favorite Fassbinder muses, Margit Carstensen, stars as Ariane Christ, who is married to Gerhard Christ (Alexander Allerson). Their crippled daughter, Angela (Andrea Schober) viciously tricks them into both ending up at their country home with their respective lovers in order to get them all to play the eponymous game, which is like Russian Roulette, except with vicious words instead of bullets. Perhaps meant as a decay of the nuclear family (with reference to aftershocks of WWII to the German psyche----or am I reading into this too much?) the cruel game meant to reveal lies, hidden agendas, and bitter feelings culminates in the virtual personification of bullets and typical brutalities Fassbinder love to explore---the emotionally crippled versus the physically disabled. Sumptuously photographed, Chinese Roulette stars France’s Anna Karina and Fassbinder alums Ulli Lommel as one of the lovers, Brigitte Mira as a perversely faithful housekeeper and Volker Spengler as her strange son.
Peppermint Frappe (1967): Carlos Saura first directed his muse/lover Geraldine Chaplin in this surreal little thriller dedicated to and obviously crafted after the work of Luis Bunuel. Intriguingly similar in plot to films like Vertigo (1958) and Obsession (1976), Peppermint Frappe Jose Luis Lopez Vazquez stars as a very religious and conservative doctor obsessed and attracted to his childhood friend’s newly taken wife. While it seems that many of Saura’s films are also political allegories, the effects of a repressed society are manifested full force in Vazquez, who passively pursues the lust he has for his friend’s wife while also transforming his meek nurse (also played by Chaplin) into looking, dressing and acting like the real object of his affection. But you can never be sure who is screwing with whom, as is often the case in these scenarios, until the very end.
Germany, Pale Mother (1980): An absolutely depressing and devastating portrait of one German woman and her child surviving through the tragedies of WWII. Though you can imagine the trials and tribulations of a woman on her own surviving during and after the war, director Helma Sanders-Brahms gives us a straightforward narrative of a woman holding it altogether and then having it all fall apart during the reconstruction. Actress Eva Mattes gives an amazing performance as Lene, married to Hans (Ernst Jacobi) shortly before he is drafted into the German army, though he staunchly is not a member of the Nazi party). While the subject matter is definitely unpleasant and heartbreakingly realistic, the film is definitely worth a look if you can handle the somber fare.
Red Lights (2004): And this week’s number one film is a highly entertaining little French thriller directed by Cedric Kahn (Roberto Succo, 2001) and stars Jean-Pierre Darroussin (Un Air De Famille, 1996) and Carole Bouquet (yes, everyone’s favorite French Bond girl) as a couple on their way to pick up their children from a holiday camp. However, their marriage seems to be falling apart right before their eyes, and as the tension mounts in their drive away from the city and into the countryside, Darroussin begins to stop at every bar he can for a drink. Bouquet decides that if he stops one more time, she’s going to take the train to meet the kids and leave her husband behind. Well, guess what happens? Bouquet takes off, Darroussin gets trashed, and oh yeah, there’s an escaped convict roaming the area whilst the French police have set up roadblocks to apprehend the menace. One or two subtle twists later and voila! You have one excellent little French thriller on your hands. Screenwriter Gilles Marchand was one of the writers of this screenplay based on a novel by Georges Simenon, and he has teemed up with director Dominik Moll on two stupendous occasions, for With a Friend Like Harry (2000) and the stupendous Lemming (2005). The two have gotten together again for a new thriller starring Melvil Poupaud, L’autre Monde, with Marchand directing (which he also did for the excellent, Who Killed Bambi?, 2002) which is on the hotlist to be announced in two weeks on this years Cannes lineup. I can’t wait!
Stay the Same, Never Change (2009): The feature film debut by visual artists Laurel Nakadate (quite highly esteemed in certain circles) directs an annoyingly trite film about seemingly normal Mid-Western girls dealing with yearning for love with dark forces in their midst. I’m not bothering to try to make it seem more eloquent or complicated than that because it’s not. First off, Nakadate was at my screening to introduce her film, explaining that the film could be frustrating at time and this means people need to ‘read between the lines.’ Ok, so that either gets one in arthouse mode or annoyed. The thing is, Nakadate lines up a lot of striking, and sometimes eerie visuals---but anything she’s trying to do is severely ruined by the less than amateur acting of the non-actors. Instead of issues about violence against women I wanted to critique the film as if it were a grad school film project. Therefore, Nakadate has no business attempting a feature length film at this time. You can’t just paste a bunch of pictures together and call it a film. Oh, sorry, I guess that’s something most people think is ok. My bad.
The Runaways (2010): A fitting double feature, another female visual artist makes her feature film debut with this music biopic about all girl band The Runaways, Joan Jett’s first pet project. There’s a lot to love in this picture, a decent feature debut, but far from stunning. Floria Sigismondi attempts to avoid some of the tropes of the genre, but standard and downright dull newspaper montage scenes, etc, stall the film. The lack of focus on Jett’s backstory doesn’t help anything (though this is based on the book by Cherie Currie) and the biggest detraction is a terrible performance from cinema’s most passive, anti-feminist leading lady, Kristen Stewart. I mean, she’s fucking playing Joan Jett, a bad ass bitch that would have shit all over films that Stewart puts out. What the film does have going for it is the always entertainingly over-the-top Michael Shannon as band manager Kim Fowley, but my favorite part of the whole production is an excellent performance from Dakota Fanning, the only character the film attempts to develop at all. She’s touching, funny, and kind of sad----she made me want to see more. And yeah, she’s portraying a girl that headlined a rock band at the age of 15 and she’s about that age herself. While the film falls into stale mediocrity like a TV special at times, Fanning somehow elevated all this for me, which surprised me.
Fish Tank (2009): Andrea Arnold’s excellent followup to Red Road (2006), Fish Tank stars newcomer Katie Jarvis as in impoverished teen from the projects as she struggles to grow up in squalor (yeah, I call that squalor) with a white trash bitch of a mother and her inappropriate boyfriend (who has some secrets of his own, and in a damn good performance from Michael Fassbender). While it’s interesting to see how this received such a muted reception while another UK film about a British middle class girl growing up in the 60’s received so much more attention (An Education), Fish Tank could just as well have been called No Education. While the modern British projects don’t look terribly different from Thatcher era British films, at its core, Arnold’s film is just how damn hard it can be growing up, and I would say seemed more realistic and timely than Scherfig’s more celebrated film. Jarvis is every bit as good as everyone’s been saying since the film premiered at Cannes 2009.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2009): The Swedish sensation, this film has everything you could possibly hope for in a mystery thriller and more – a decades old unsolved mystery, a tortured and spurned male protagonist, and a tough, strong female lead that’s survived some harrowing life experiences. Niels Arden Oplev directs this first part of the “Millenium” trilogy based on the novels by Stieg Larsson (Daniel Alfredson directed the next two films) while David Fincher has been rumored to have signed on to the American remake in the works (bleh) and worst of all, Kristen Stewart has been rumored to be the lead played by the alluring and strangely sexy Noomi Rapace in the Swedish productions. Beyond the mystery solved in this film, the real attraction is Rapace and her bedeviled character---I couldn’t get enough of her. Co-star Michael Nyqvist shares some interesting chemistry with Rapace, and as they struggle to uncover the mystery surrounding a Swedish girl that had disappeared decades ago, the real mystery still happens to be about Rapace, the girl with the dragon tattoo.
The Room (2003): Yep, had to show it to my mom. She got into it.
Pontypool (2008): The first hour of Pontypool is excellent, uncomfortable, and eerily intense. But once everything is explained, it suddenly seems ridiculous, even though I dearly wanted to find this film’s angle intriguing and ingenious---I just didn’t like it. Stephen McHattie stars in this Canadian production from Bruce McDonald (of The Tracey Fragments, 2007, and the surprisingly good Picture Claire, 2001) as a crusty, bass voiced radio DJ in a wintery Ontario town named Pontypool. Most of the film is set in this radio station (which is the basement of a church). What starts off as a rather boring (though caustic) day with his boss and a teenage assistant, it’s not long before bizarre calls come into the station of strange, bizarre, and eventually homicidal and cannibalistic happenings keep happening in Pontypool. The tension and claustrophobia builds until eventually the three individuals broadcasting from the church basement are told they can’t go inside and that a strange virus is taking over the small town of Pontypool. A virus that may be spread through the English language. As I said, the first hour is virtually brilliant, and then it takes one of the most disappointing nosedives I’ve seen for some time in a film like this. I really wanted to like it more. Garnering numerous accolades and lots of attention, I hear that McDonald is at work on a sequel, Pontypool Changes. I’m sure I’ll see it.
She Done Him Wrong (1933): Nominated for Best Picture, She Done Him Wrong is notable for several reasons—it single handedly saved a studio from bankruptcy, it gave Mae West her first leading role (and from a film she wrote), and made a star out of Cary Grant. It’s the shortest film to be nominated for Best Picture, and darling Mae had to be sewn into most of her dresses. The National Legion of Decency was formed after this movie and cites Mae West as one of the main reasons for its creation---in fact, most of her films from this time period are blamed for the budding censorship laws, and it was 1934 that saw the Hays Code finally begin taking it’s censorship toll. Meanwhile, She Done Him Wrong is a fast and loose little picture and Mae is New York nightclub singer sensation named Lady Lou, who never met a man she didn’t like. One of Mae’s many ex lovers is in the slammer, but escapes to see her, slipping into a jealous, murderous rage upon discovering that she’s been unfaithful to him. Guess he didn’t know her very well. While this film made Mae and Grant a star, the main reason to see it is the ultra salacious West giving us all that’s she got in an endless smattering of seduction, double entendres and eyewinks.
Chinese Roulette (1976): One of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s more obscure titles (one of my favorite directors of all time) turns in a masterful study of mind games and abusive relationships (which I’m certain transcends into a socio-political commentary as well). One of my favorite Fassbinder muses, Margit Carstensen, stars as Ariane Christ, who is married to Gerhard Christ (Alexander Allerson). Their crippled daughter, Angela (Andrea Schober) viciously tricks them into both ending up at their country home with their respective lovers in order to get them all to play the eponymous game, which is like Russian Roulette, except with vicious words instead of bullets. Perhaps meant as a decay of the nuclear family (with reference to aftershocks of WWII to the German psyche----or am I reading into this too much?) the cruel game meant to reveal lies, hidden agendas, and bitter feelings culminates in the virtual personification of bullets and typical brutalities Fassbinder love to explore---the emotionally crippled versus the physically disabled. Sumptuously photographed, Chinese Roulette stars France’s Anna Karina and Fassbinder alums Ulli Lommel as one of the lovers, Brigitte Mira as a perversely faithful housekeeper and Volker Spengler as her strange son.
Peppermint Frappe (1967): Carlos Saura first directed his muse/lover Geraldine Chaplin in this surreal little thriller dedicated to and obviously crafted after the work of Luis Bunuel. Intriguingly similar in plot to films like Vertigo (1958) and Obsession (1976), Peppermint Frappe Jose Luis Lopez Vazquez stars as a very religious and conservative doctor obsessed and attracted to his childhood friend’s newly taken wife. While it seems that many of Saura’s films are also political allegories, the effects of a repressed society are manifested full force in Vazquez, who passively pursues the lust he has for his friend’s wife while also transforming his meek nurse (also played by Chaplin) into looking, dressing and acting like the real object of his affection. But you can never be sure who is screwing with whom, as is often the case in these scenarios, until the very end.
Germany, Pale Mother (1980): An absolutely depressing and devastating portrait of one German woman and her child surviving through the tragedies of WWII. Though you can imagine the trials and tribulations of a woman on her own surviving during and after the war, director Helma Sanders-Brahms gives us a straightforward narrative of a woman holding it altogether and then having it all fall apart during the reconstruction. Actress Eva Mattes gives an amazing performance as Lene, married to Hans (Ernst Jacobi) shortly before he is drafted into the German army, though he staunchly is not a member of the Nazi party). While the subject matter is definitely unpleasant and heartbreakingly realistic, the film is definitely worth a look if you can handle the somber fare.
Red Lights (2004): And this week’s number one film is a highly entertaining little French thriller directed by Cedric Kahn (Roberto Succo, 2001) and stars Jean-Pierre Darroussin (Un Air De Famille, 1996) and Carole Bouquet (yes, everyone’s favorite French Bond girl) as a couple on their way to pick up their children from a holiday camp. However, their marriage seems to be falling apart right before their eyes, and as the tension mounts in their drive away from the city and into the countryside, Darroussin begins to stop at every bar he can for a drink. Bouquet decides that if he stops one more time, she’s going to take the train to meet the kids and leave her husband behind. Well, guess what happens? Bouquet takes off, Darroussin gets trashed, and oh yeah, there’s an escaped convict roaming the area whilst the French police have set up roadblocks to apprehend the menace. One or two subtle twists later and voila! You have one excellent little French thriller on your hands. Screenwriter Gilles Marchand was one of the writers of this screenplay based on a novel by Georges Simenon, and he has teemed up with director Dominik Moll on two stupendous occasions, for With a Friend Like Harry (2000) and the stupendous Lemming (2005). The two have gotten together again for a new thriller starring Melvil Poupaud, L’autre Monde, with Marchand directing (which he also did for the excellent, Who Killed Bambi?, 2002) which is on the hotlist to be announced in two weeks on this years Cannes lineup. I can’t wait!
Stay the Same, Never Change (2009): The feature film debut by visual artists Laurel Nakadate (quite highly esteemed in certain circles) directs an annoyingly trite film about seemingly normal Mid-Western girls dealing with yearning for love with dark forces in their midst. I’m not bothering to try to make it seem more eloquent or complicated than that because it’s not. First off, Nakadate was at my screening to introduce her film, explaining that the film could be frustrating at time and this means people need to ‘read between the lines.’ Ok, so that either gets one in arthouse mode or annoyed. The thing is, Nakadate lines up a lot of striking, and sometimes eerie visuals---but anything she’s trying to do is severely ruined by the less than amateur acting of the non-actors. Instead of issues about violence against women I wanted to critique the film as if it were a grad school film project. Therefore, Nakadate has no business attempting a feature length film at this time. You can’t just paste a bunch of pictures together and call it a film. Oh, sorry, I guess that’s something most people think is ok. My bad.
The Runaways (2010): A fitting double feature, another female visual artist makes her feature film debut with this music biopic about all girl band The Runaways, Joan Jett’s first pet project. There’s a lot to love in this picture, a decent feature debut, but far from stunning. Floria Sigismondi attempts to avoid some of the tropes of the genre, but standard and downright dull newspaper montage scenes, etc, stall the film. The lack of focus on Jett’s backstory doesn’t help anything (though this is based on the book by Cherie Currie) and the biggest detraction is a terrible performance from cinema’s most passive, anti-feminist leading lady, Kristen Stewart. I mean, she’s fucking playing Joan Jett, a bad ass bitch that would have shit all over films that Stewart puts out. What the film does have going for it is the always entertainingly over-the-top Michael Shannon as band manager Kim Fowley, but my favorite part of the whole production is an excellent performance from Dakota Fanning, the only character the film attempts to develop at all. She’s touching, funny, and kind of sad----she made me want to see more. And yeah, she’s portraying a girl that headlined a rock band at the age of 15 and she’s about that age herself. While the film falls into stale mediocrity like a TV special at times, Fanning somehow elevated all this for me, which surprised me.
Fish Tank (2009): Andrea Arnold’s excellent followup to Red Road (2006), Fish Tank stars newcomer Katie Jarvis as in impoverished teen from the projects as she struggles to grow up in squalor (yeah, I call that squalor) with a white trash bitch of a mother and her inappropriate boyfriend (who has some secrets of his own, and in a damn good performance from Michael Fassbender). While it’s interesting to see how this received such a muted reception while another UK film about a British middle class girl growing up in the 60’s received so much more attention (An Education), Fish Tank could just as well have been called No Education. While the modern British projects don’t look terribly different from Thatcher era British films, at its core, Arnold’s film is just how damn hard it can be growing up, and I would say seemed more realistic and timely than Scherfig’s more celebrated film. Jarvis is every bit as good as everyone’s been saying since the film premiered at Cannes 2009.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2009): The Swedish sensation, this film has everything you could possibly hope for in a mystery thriller and more – a decades old unsolved mystery, a tortured and spurned male protagonist, and a tough, strong female lead that’s survived some harrowing life experiences. Niels Arden Oplev directs this first part of the “Millenium” trilogy based on the novels by Stieg Larsson (Daniel Alfredson directed the next two films) while David Fincher has been rumored to have signed on to the American remake in the works (bleh) and worst of all, Kristen Stewart has been rumored to be the lead played by the alluring and strangely sexy Noomi Rapace in the Swedish productions. Beyond the mystery solved in this film, the real attraction is Rapace and her bedeviled character---I couldn’t get enough of her. Co-star Michael Nyqvist shares some interesting chemistry with Rapace, and as they struggle to uncover the mystery surrounding a Swedish girl that had disappeared decades ago, the real mystery still happens to be about Rapace, the girl with the dragon tattoo.
The Room (2003): Yep, had to show it to my mom. She got into it.
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