Recently Watched Films 2013

[Dan Warburton]

Nanni Moretti, Habemus Papam, 2011

Talking of featured torrents.. But I was disappointed by this one, especially the ending - which feels like it should be the beginning. Won't spoil the story for anyone thinking of watching it, but if you remember Roman Holiday you might be able to guess what it's about. Of course, the idea of a self-confessed atheist making a film about the inner workings of the papacy raises eyebrows - and I suspect even Moretti doesn't know if he ended up with a comedy or a drama. And that wonderful French appellation comédie dramatique won't do here: one feels the film should either be deadly serious, dry, Dreyer-like or wild and over the top, Fellini rather than Pasolini. There's a hint of the latter in the volleyball and card games, but not enough meat or background (what's the Chekhov connection?) to convince elsewhere. Nevertheless, a fine performance from Michel Piccoli. But one wouldn't expect anything less.

[Lao Tsu Ben]

I wasn't in a hurry to watch that. Don't know how they choose their featured torrents. The same goes for Monsieur N. (Antoine de Caunes, really?), or Fresh by Boaz Yakin (Armond White, who may well be wrong, hates it).

In the meantime, I discovered another undeservedly obscure film, about which you already said it all, Dan:



Une Si Jolie Petite Plage, Yves Allégret, 1949

There's something deadly about a seaside town when it's raining, and there are barely five minutes in this film when it isn't. Like in Se7en, that weather gets to you after a while. This is a wonderfully bleak noir in which Pierre (Gérard Philipe) returns to the scene of his miserable early life and finds little has changed. Spied on by a sleazeball who's followed him there from Paris (Jean Servais - what a great performance), recognised by the former manager of the wretched hotel he checks into (but who can't reveal Pierre's identity as he's now wheelchair-bound and unable to speak following a stroke), there's an ominous pre-War Carné / Prévert vibe but also a perverse unwillingness on the part of director to reveal much of the plot. And when it does leak out, Allégret makes it difficult to follow by superimposing dialogue (the real story is infuriatingly masked by the salesman's banal phone call in the background). A decade before Touch Of Evil, too. Henri Alekan's camerawork is wonderful (the last shot of the film is simply stunning: had to watch it two or three times before we figured out how he did it), but the sound design is even more remarkable: mixing ambient sounds - the squeak of the water pump, a broken shutter banging in the wind, the forlorn voice of Piaf on the wind-up gramophone - way up. Lynch would be proud.

The suggestion of despair in this film has almost an over-the-top quality to it, which makes it quite impressive. I'll limit myself to saying that it is really the French Odd Man Out, released two years before, and in lieu of James Mason, you get France's romantic lead of the post-war years, that is Gérard Philippe, which makes total sense (they have the same hair). Odd Man Out, but darker (there's no real love interest to ultimately sweeten the pill) and without the political content. That last shot may be stunning - I haven't really tried to figure out how Alekan did it - but it is a little too in-your-face for my taste, which doesn't detract from the many qualities of the film, as they are exposed by Dan above.

[Dan Warburton]

Oddly enough, that Moretti film has netted me more KG bonus than anything else I've snatched so far. See what you mean about the Caunes and Yakin movies.

An afternoon and evening of cinematic madness -



Luc Moullet, Les contrabandières, 1967

The only decent photo I can find, and the only decent article on Moullet I can find, to boot: http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=16246
This one should appeal to fans of Diego Chamy et al. Read Rosenbaum and you'll understand why. It's a fascinating text, full of intriguing details on Moullet. Essential reading for Godard fans, in fact anyone interested in Nouvelle Vague. Whether you like this film or not – or even if you're supposed to like it (that's where Chamy's concept of the bad performance comes in) – is up to you to decide. It's deliberately and fantastically inept, full of plotholes and potholes, but if you make it as far as the scene where the two girls take LSD – and the subtitles get royally fucked up too – you'll fall off your chair.




Rowland Brown, Hell's Highway, 1932

Milking the same cow as I Was A Fugitive From A Chain Gang - enjoyed this one even more. I see Richard Dix even gets his own blog too (though that isn't him in the pic above) http://richard-dix.blogspot.fr/2010/10/ ... -1932.html




Hal Ashby, Shampoo, 1975

Julie Christie – yes, that is her, honest – needs her head seeing to for getting her hair done like that, and I need my head seeing to for watching this. Pauline Kael liked it more than we did. It has its qualities, notably a strong Robert Towne script, but hairstyle isn't one of them. And in a movie about a Beverly Hills gigolo coiffeur, that might be a problem. Worth it (maybe) for Carrie Fisher's "wanna fuck?" throwaway line, or to hear Julie say the word "cunt". Not worth it for Warren Beatty, hairdo or otherwise.




Conrad Rooks, Chappaqua, 1966

There are wilder acid trip films out there - Ira Cohen, Pierre Clementi, et al. - but you probably won't find William Burroughs, Moondog, Ornette Coleman, Allen Ginsberg, Ravi Shankar, The Fugs, Jean-Louis Barrault (!) and Swami Satchidananda in them. As you can imagine, it's dated rather badly but if you can, try and make it to the end - the final shot is fuckin' awesome (not saying any more). Meanwhile, an interesting article on Rooks here http://carlabrahamsson.blogspot.fr/2012 ... eyond.html

[Lao Tsu Ben]

Oddly enough, that Moretti film has netted me more KG bonus than anything else I've snatched so far.

Damn, good to know ! I had some problems with my ratio recently.



Getting Straight, Richard Rush, 1970

l've been looking for you.
Hey, what's the rush?

(God knows why, that line made me laugh).

According to The Rough Guide To Films (as I said, some book that I downloaded on the internet) 'Ingmar Bergman called the campus comedy Getting Straight (1970) “the best American film of the decade”. Why not, honestly? Such an assertion implies a certain amount of bad faith but the film is so little known, why be afraid of superlatives? There was just one problem, it dawned on me that I don't really like Elliott Gould. He's constantly shouting throughout the film, it becomes tiresome, even if he's supposed to play some sort of caricature (of a male chauvinist, for instance). In The Long Goodbye, in which he's grumbling most of the time, he gets on my nerves too. But it doesn't matter since everyone loves Gould I suppose; the movie is frequently hilarious even if it drags a little (it lasts a little more than two hours), and the end, where he's presenting his PhD Thesis and one professor stubbornly tries to convince him that Fitzgerald was gay, is great in that regard.

Here's Orson Welles about physically disliking a person (note that Henry Jaglom is trying to reason him), from an excerpt of a book of conversations between him and Henry Jaglom which will come out next month:

O.W.: No, no charm. To me, he was just a hateful, hateful man. I think Katie just doesn’t like me. She doesn’t like the way I look. Don’t you know there’s such a thing as physical dislike? Europeans know that about other Europeans. If I don’t like somebody’s looks, I don’t like them. See, I believe that it is not true that different races and nations are alike. I’m ­profoundly convinced that that’s a total lie. I think people are different. Sardinians, for example, have stubby little fingers. ­Bosnians have short necks.

H.J.: Orson, that’s ridiculous.

But it's not Gould's physique that I dislike, I have issues with his voice and, let's say, his cockiness.

[Dan Warburton]

Nice post. Love the Orson quote. You can imagine him saying that to some gaggle of giggling groupies huddled around an ice bucket in Le Grand Véfour. As for Elliott Gould, well "sometimes there's a man who, wal, he's the man for his time'n place, he fits right in there". Gould is the early to mid 70s for me.
Rush.. After reading your post on Freebie and the Bean, Ben, I snatched it but have yet to see it. Wife and son moaned they couldn't understand anything without subtitles (kinda habit forming, those titles..). So I'll have to watch it alone sometime. Meanwhile, you can probably give this one a wide berth



Gary Sherman, Raw Meat (aka Death Line), 1972

though I admit I enjoyed Donald Pleasence's overacting and his bouncy interchanges with Norman Rossington. Another instantly recognisable face from British TV comedy is



James Cossins (Mr. Walt in Fawlty Towers "Hotel Inspectors" episode, though you might remember him from cameos in Man With The Golden Gun, Privilege and The Anniversary), who once more plays that classic English stereotype, the respectable bowler-hatted city gent who trawls the strip clubs of Soho for sleaze after dark. Except this time he ends up looking like this



when he becomes dinner for the last remaining cannibal living in an abandoned underground tunnel under the British museum. Neither the hero nor the heroine can act for toffee (though you might have expected better from David Ladd, son of Alan no less), and Sherman's camera dwells on his gory decor far too long - one tracking shot lasts over five minutes - seriously disrupting the flow, such as it is. Fun in places, but ultimately a bit of a disappointment.

[Dan Warburton]

To me, he was just a hateful, hateful man. I think Katie just doesn’t like me. She doesn’t like the way I look. Don’t you know there’s such a thing as physical dislike? Europeans know that about other Europeans. If I don’t like somebody’s looks, I don’t like them. See, I believe that it is not true that different races and nations are alike. I’m ­profoundly convinced that that’s a total lie. I think people are different. Sardinians, for example, have stubby little fingers. ­Bosnians have short necks.

That's a fun interview, thanks for linking (love the Carole Lombard plane crash story, and the Woody Allen putdown) - just wanted to point out for folks who haven't read it that the hateful he above is Spencer Tracy, and Katie is Hepburn. Fortuitous link from Orson via Thalberg to Fitzgerald to



Jack Clayton, The Great Gatsby, 1974

I haven't seen the Baz Luhrmann remake yet - and I can't say I'm all that tempted - but from what my nearest and dearest tell me it sounds like he's making a huge mistake in thinking the movie is actually about Jay Gatsby (not surprisingly Leo DiCaprio rides roughshod over everyone else in the cast, it seems): it's about Daisy and Tom, with their voices "full of money [..], the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it." I'd forgotten how good Bruce Dern is here - and Mia Farrow too. Coppola's script sticks pretty close to the book, but Clayton and DP Douglas Slocombe get a tad carried away with the beauty of their images (like Fitzgerald's prose, everything glows or glitters) and the last half hour, particularly from the car crash to the funeral, drags a little. Still, a fine and honest adaptation. But the book's so much better (they often are).

[Lao Tsu Ben]

I don't remember much of that adaptation, save that the actors always looked as if they were too hot. Considering how much make-up they had on their face, especially Mia Farrow, it was a pretty dismaying sight to see them all sweaty and clothed in those rather ridiculous suits that we see in the screenshot above.

I haven't seen the Baz Luhrmann remake yet - and I can't say I'm all that tempted

Not for the whole world, I'd see it. It just looks too loud (says the guy who saw Man of Steel yesterday AKA the new Superman- it must be sheer masochism on my part, I always find those superhero movies extremely tedious).

On to something more satisfying:



Allonsanfan, Paolo & Vittorio Taviani, 1974

The Night of the Shooting Stars (Taviani, 1982) - Not awful, but not good. I'm giving up on the Tavianis.

I trust you on that one and on Padre Padrone but don't give up on them already! My first Taviani, Allonsafan, which from what I'm told is supposed to be their masterpiece, is admirable from end to end (except maybe for a superfluous zoom at the end which lasts no more than two seconds - a pity, but let's not get finicky). It's one of Mastroianni's best performances, which is saying something. Oddly enough, there is a scene a little similar to that of John Cazale's death in The Godfather Part II, which came out the same year. The dubbing is at times a little off the mark, but quite well done overall. To be frank, I've grown accustomed to Italian dubbing, while a few months ago I would have been prone to rant against it. Not that it is an issue here, really. It's one of these films in which every act, every gesture seem relevant, which is a very clumsy way to describe it. There is, without ponderousness, a kind of solemnity in every shot, while no irony is lost (also thanks to Ennio Morricone's score). Check it out. So much better in my opinion than Barry Lyndon which came out one year later.

[Dan Warburton]

I don't remember much of that adaptation, save that the actors always looked as if they were too hot. Considering how much make-up they had on their face, especially Mia Farrow, it was a pretty dismaying sight to see them all sweaty

Given Clayton's attention to detail, one can only assume the sweating is deliberate. Perhaps he'd read "The Romans in Films" -

"to sweat is to think—which evidently rests on the postulate appropriate to a nation of businessmen, that thought is a violent, cataclysmic operation, of which sweat is only the most benign symptom"

It just looks too loud (says the guy who saw Man of Steel yesterday)

Can't have been as bad as this:



Joseph Losey, La truite, 1982

As a teenager, Frédérique and her girlfriends vow to get as much as they can from men and give them nothing in return. The film opens with her - Isabelle Huppert, once more seriously miscast - squeezing sperm out of a trout. And that's about as subtle as it gets. It's absolutely amazing and seriously depressing how a (once) great director can take a great cast (Jeanne Moreau, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Jacques Spiesser, Isao Yamagata..), a great cinematographer (Alekan) and a great designer (Trauner) and totally fuck up. Faced with a truly appalling script ("so how do you like Tokyo?" "There are a lot of Japanese.." WTF), Moreau and Cassel choose to overact terribly (now I see where his son got it from), while Huppert and Spiesser do quite the opposite. It's a bloody mess. Roger Vaillant's novel was considered ahead of its time when it appeared in the mid 60s, but Losey's film already feels way out of date in 1982. Terrible music too, from awful tacky disco (Richard "Rocky Horror Picture Show" Hartley) to, gagbarf, The Köln Concert. About as appetising as a metal dish of cold fish eggs.

[Dan Warburton]

David Lynch, Mulholland Dr., 2001

I love reading some of the wacky interpretations in the forums http://www.network54.com/Forum/213433/ - the one that makes most sense as far as I'm concerned is http://www.franksreelreviews.com/reviews/mdexplain.htm
But why do you want it explained? Seeing it again for the fifth time and knowing the above didn't make it any less mysterious and moving.

[Lao Tsu Ben]

Smiley Face, Gregg Araki, 2007

Perhaps my favorite stoner comedy, a genre I'm very partial to at times but responsible for quite a number of worthless movies (not that it is bad but for instance I didn't think that The Big Lebowski was anything special the one time I saw it; but it was a long time ago). Anna Faris' performance here is pure genius, a claim which causes circumspection among some of my friends, but I couldn't care less, I just have to see her saying these lines:

- An old college professor of mine lives there.
- Really?
- Yeah.
He was a pretty good dude.
- What'd he teach?
- Marxist studies.
Yup.
He introduced me to some pretty out there concepts.
Some pretty radical ideas.
- So, were you, like, seeing him?
- What do you mean,''seeing him?''
- Were you seeing him?
- Do you mean like dating him?
- Yeah.
- Ew! He was a fucking Marxist, man !

[jon abbey]

as far as stoner comedies go, I highly recommend the first 'Harold and Kumar' one, Big Lebowski I have always thought was wildly overrated, like almost all of the Coen brothers output.

[Lao Tsu Ben]

There are some funny moments but it doesn't look nearly as good as Smiley Face (it's rather ugly to look at actually). Granted that that aspect is secondary in a comedy, it's nonetheless interesting to note a few differences.
Smiley Face is a rare case of stoner comedy in which the heroine is a girl. That allows, I think, for a subtler humor, while Harold & Kumar's is more of the frat-boy variety (or of the tall tale sort). Stoner comedies often play on a supposed connivance between the characters and the audience while Gregg Araki's film insists on the solipsistic aspect of being stoned (but can't do away with that connivance obviously), and on how it transforms the perception of the character (not too mention the way one perceives him), so the course of events is not unbelievable, as in Harold & Kumar, but everything comes with a fresh look, if I may say so. In addition, there is a breezy, west coast atmosphere (the film ends in Venice) which makes it very agreeable. But I may exaggerate its qualities (I love this scene for example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZT1cB8KU_I). What is also disappointing in Harold & Kumar, if I remember correctly, is that the two characters make it to White Castle after an extraordinary series of events while being barely high.

[Dan Warburton]

Fritz Lang, The Blue Gardenia, 1953

Interesting cross between woman's film and newspaper noir, which Lang was probably too quick to dismiss as a mere contract filler. True, the dénouement is so abrupt it's almost derisory - the clue to the enigma is musical: attentive viewers will recall it was Nat King Cole on the gramophone and not Tristan und Isolde - but there's plenty of crisp, catty dialogue (Ann "Letter to Three Wives" Sothern gets most of it) and always something rather unsettling in the background. "A particularly venomous picture of American life," sez Peter Bogdanovich. Nothing venomous about the great Nat King Cole title track though.

[Wombatz]

Three films randomly picked from the library, which is never a good idea.

We started with Michael Mann's Public Enemies, but I couldn't get past the surface. The digital sheen is awful, and generally Mann doesn't seem to know what he's after, some sort of fake verity (the camera shakes so heavily it reads like steadicam satire) or the big widescreen. A quick google shows that there are phd theses written about Mann's digital realism, instead it strikes me this a problem interestingly similar to 150 years ago, when academic realism got too glib for convincingly rendering historical figures:



They become guys sitting around in pretend garb. The film was less fun than this painting, though, so we switched to the 1944 Robert Stevenson version of Jane Eyre, which ran along perfectly ok until Orson took over looking very unhealthy and not doing much else. Probably it was an awkward moment in his career where he had yet to embrace his future flabbiness, but it's not fun to watch. (It did remind me of Olivier's oily-skinned performance in Wuthering Heights, which was similarly like watching the attempted suppression of a midlife crisis).

So we didn't make it to the end but tried Michael Winner's The Mechanic, which could have been very good had it been (even) more gay and less Bond. Don Johnson must have closely modeled his smirk on Jan-Michael Vincent. We watched this to the end as it's utter pointlessness evolved slowly with the plot.

[Dan Warburton]

Yikes, that's one picture I wouldn't have hanging on my bedroom wall!



Marcel Carné, Juliette ou la Clé des songes, 1951

Yet another of those great KG FTs, that's been sitting in the queue for far too long. Magnificent! Once more, it's hard not to feel animosity to the Cahiers crew who dumped on post-WWII Carné with a vengeance. If this had been signed Max Ophüls they'd have sung its praises to high heaven. And it's not too far from Ophüls, either - same typeface for the intertitles for starters - all right, the camera moves aren't as daring (whose are?), but Henri Alekan's framing and lighting are immaculate - the forest is almost Rashomon-like - and Alexander Trauner's sets stunning (to think these two both got roped in to doing that ropy Losey I slammed above). I often wonder what Gérard Philipe would have gone on to do if liver cancer hadn't wiped him out just before the Nouvelle Vague broke. There was a hell of sight more there than Fanfan la Tulipe, that's for sure. Best of all here though is the story, which (if I had several hundred million dollars and a film studio) I'd love to see a remake of: prisoner serving time for swiping money from the petty cash box to take his Juliette to the seaside nods off and wanders out of his cell into dreamworld where nobody can remember anything (and people go as far as buying others' cast-off jewelry and photograph albums to re-imagine a past they've never had). Two of the characters he meets there - the plain-clothes cop who beats him up (Kafkaesque!) and Bluebeard (kinda overplayed by Jean Roger Caussimon, but never mind) - pop up, Oz-like, in real life. For the rest, I won't spoil the story. For the remake, I'll settle for Michel Gondry. Hell, I'd even take Leo DiCaprio too.

[Dan Warburton]

René Clément, Paris brûle-t-il?, 1966

"Isn't that.. Orson Welles, Alain?" Sure is, playing the portly Swedish consul Raoul Nordling, that sweaty brow (see Barthes quote above) right out of the courtroom in Compulsion. Most of the fun watching this - all 170 minutes of it, and it manages to hold your attention - comes from playing Spot The Star. Delon pouts deliciously, Glenn Ford goes into raised eyebrow mode as Bradley, Kirk Douglas (Patton) makes sure we get plenty of that noble profile, Gert "Goldfinger" Frobe is particularly good as Von Choltitz and Claude Rich can barely suppress a smirk as Leclerc behind that silly moustache. One senses scriptwriters Gore Vidal and Francis Ford Coppola had fun taking the piss, out of war films in general and the French in particular. As soon as Tony Perkins starts rapping on to his buddy about how he's always dreamed of seeing the Eiffel Tower, you know the poor bugger's going to get gunned down by an evil leering sniper just in front of it (his own bloody stupid fault for stopping off for that ballon de Bordeaux with his new-found French pal). Eh oui, all the good old Frog stereotypes are out in force, from the berets to the baguettes to the buxom barmaid (Simone Signoret, bien sûr). There's plenty of authentic footage of battle action intercut, but the shooting must have been quite an adventure too (haven't got to the second three-hour bonus Making Of disc yet). Originally planned as a trilingual affair - we had to wait until Inglourious Basterds for that - there are several amusing differences between the English and French versions (I juggled between them - no way was I going to hear Orson or Glenn dubbed into French). Could have done with a bit less of Maurice Jarre's Leningrad Symphony rip-off soundtrack though.

[MRS]

The Last Detail - Hal Ashby, 1973

The direction is messy and often feels a little too improvisational, but it doesn't matter, Robert Towne's screenplay is enough to hold the scenes together, and the actors do a great job at delivering the lines. I agree with Phillip Lopate's appreciation of Ashby when he says in an homage to Kael:"her insensitivity to formalist rigor and precision is her greatest limitation as a film critic. It causes her to overpraise certain visually muddy directors, like Hal Ashby, and then express disappointment later on when their mediocrity becomes undeniable." The potential "muddiness" isn't interfering here. By the way, I don't know who is Phillip Lopate. It would be interesting to compare it with Scarecrow, Midnight Cowboy, and other films, road movies that are so typical of this period - greyish, moody, conventionally pessimist, and serious in a middlebrow way. That's not meant in bad faith- I would heartily recommend The Last Detail. Decency, that's what the filmmakers are after in this kind of film, and this one is very decent.

Really long, the odd left turns and extemporaneous movement of every part keep you involved. So cold out. What about Buddusky's recurrent Hitler countenance and hair with the hat off? Jack complains and sends back food at a diner. Very quotable, you could really get pedantic with it but I'm not in a hurry, not necessarily my brand of virile sleaze. The final corny hot dog picnic in the snow act wrapped up everything convincingly. Ferris Bueller doesn't get made without this film.

[Dan Warburton]

Jerzy Skolimowski, Moonlighting, 1982

You wouldn't think a film about four Polish builders working illegally in London in December 1981 (during which time Jaruzelski proclaims martial law back home) could be so gripping - but it certainly is, thanks in no small part to Jeremy Irons, whose performance and narration is masterly. Forced to hide the truth of events back home from his three non-English speaking co-workers, for fear they'd down tools (Irons' loyalty to the "boss" who's probably banging his wife while he's away is both admirable and pathetic), he becomes a little Jaruzelski himself, locking the men inside the house they're doing up and depriving them of sleep. Amazing ending, won't spoil it for you, though the conclusion of this fine article might, so watch out http://sensesofcinema.com/2009/cteq/moonlighting/

[Dan Warburton]

Chris Marker, One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich, 1999

Quite simply the finest documentary on a filmmaker - Tarkovsky in this case, of course - I've ever seen (and that includes two more Markers!). I agree with Rosenbaum quoted here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Day_in ... Arsenevich

[Lao Tsu Ben]

René Clément, Paris brûle-t-il?, 1966

Saw that when I was a child, so I feel compelled to say that, save for that star-studded cast, an aspect which was almost completely ineffective at the time, it's not a very good film. Or do I have to watch it all over again? I had forgotten that Gore Vidal co-wrote the script for it. Caligula looks more entertaining.

The Last Detail - Hal Ashby, 1973
Ferris Bueller doesn't get made without this film.

That seems a little far-fetched and adamant, but why not? That said, there's no doubt that I prefer Ferris Bueller's Day Off to The Last Detail but I don't think the two films are really comparable.



Afterglow, Alan Rudolph, 1997

Because of its ridiculous soap-opera premise, I wasn't in a hurry to see this, but recently a blu-ray came out, which made me decide to watch it, and it turns out to be one of the best films by Alan Rudolph; all of his trademarks are there, the score by Mark Isham, the sophisticated camera movements, the coincidences, and a few snippets of French dialogue casually delivered now and then (it's sort of justified for once, since the film takes place in Montréal). At one point, for instance, Nick Nolte answers with a plain "oui" to a "merci beaucoup", and it's kind of hilarious.
To a certain extent, I like that film for the same reasons that I like Hal Hartley, the characters often speak to each other as if they were thinking out loud, or talking to themselves, you see them striving toward some sense of self-understanding. Lara Flynn Boyle's character, who has something of Parker Posey in Henry Fool, is almost too stupid, to be frank, as she plays a sexually unsatisfied woman who throws herself into the arms of her plumber (who is named Lucky and is played by Nick Nolte), but that goes with the premise, and with how funnily Rudolph undermines it (with, when Lucky is asked what his idea of an ideal woman is, such lines as "There's a certain type that I am careful with. But I trust the ones that never sleep around but who feel like getting lucky"). I wonder if it would sound terrible if English were my mother tongue. Great performance by Jonny Lee Miller, whom I didn't know, and who looks completely crazy here, as if there were almost nothing that he didn't loathe. Add to that that the film ultimately brings Sirk to mind, and succeeds in being repeatedly quite moving. It ends, like Prénom Carmen, with a Tom Waits song, and guess which is the better film...
I wouldn't really recommend it, though, it's too much of an acquired taste, I imagine.