Recently Watched Films 2012

[Dohol]

I can definitely recommend the book it's based on by Charles Willeford, one of the best non-Jim Thompson noir books.

Hell yes....Willeford's best book in my opinion...

[Gaendaal]

The Secret Of Kells (Tomm Moore, 2009)

Not the most complex of tales, but nicely told and with some quite stunningly effective animation in parts.

[savantgarde]

I don't think it nails very much at all. I like what Žižek had to say about Children of Men on the DVD bonus, but I find this review pretty lite.

One cannot but recall here a witty formula of life under a hard Communist regime: Of the three features–personal honesty, sincere support of the regime and intelligence–it was possible to combine only two, never all three. If one was honest and supportive, one was not very bright; if one was bright and supportive, one was not honest; if one was honest and bright, one was not supportive. The problem with Dreyman is that he does combine all three features.

Nicely put (but replace "under a hard Communist regime" with "as a visiting star professor at NYU" and "Dreyman" with "Žižek", and it seems to make sense too), but we are talking about a film here, not a documentary. It's perfectly possible to make a film that depicts life in a particular place and time very honestly while being peopled with characters who are either larger than life or even two-dimensional - think of the yuppies in Mike Leigh films. And I think Žižek's reading too much in with his idea of a "secret homosexual undercurrent" - the impression I have is that Wiesler is more affected by the Brecht book and the music he overhears than by Dreyman himself.
Anyway, as regards the script, the acting, the cinematography and the music (and I'm not the world's biggest Gabriel Yared fan), I thought it was a fine piece of work. If you really want to "throw up in your mouth" try The Reader (see several pages back).

I agree wholeheartedly with what you're saying about Zizek's criticism here. I like Zizek, but I thought his criticism of Das Leben der Anderen was completely pointless and tendentious. It's fiction for Christ's sake, it doesn't have to play out in a certain way. Maybe we're taking him too seriously though, in this case? He certainly has a history of analysing films in a tongue in cheek way (cf. In Defense of Lost Causes).

[Wombatz]

I like Zizek, but I thought his criticism of Das Leben der Anderen was completely pointless and tendentious. It's fiction for Christ's sake, it doesn't have to play out in a certain way. Maybe we're taking him too seriously though, in this case?

Wow. He is dead serious. He's trying to explain why that was a political movie whose contents would be distasteful to those with leftist leanings. For an international audience, he's partly simplifying things in a manner I wouldn't subscribe to, but I appreciate the attempt, futile as it is. To a German audience with any political interest the agenda of the film has been glaringly obvious (hey, it figured in a Pollesch drama).

Aesthetically the film is a perfectly made calling card that would allow the director to make shitty Hollywood movies (I won't go into the politics of that, but to subscribe to Hollywood aesthetics in the land of Autorenfilm is again a very real cultural political choice); and what to an international audience might seem fascinating issues is heavy propaganda (especially about the morals of having had any contact with the Stasi at all, see the allegations on the dvd commentary track about leftist politician Gregor Gysi).

What Zizek gets exactly right is that the hub is placing the responsibility in the individual and not letting circumstances count. That was how after reunification the dissident faction tried to do away with all those elemnts who in 89 had originally hoped to make their own better state.

I'm not saying that you should care for these things. Some prefer their art without context. Just that you can believe it's serious.

[Dan Warburton]

He's trying to explain why that was a political movie whose contents would be distasteful to those with leftist leanings.

Would or might? I consider myself to have "leftist leanings" (not that there's much left left in the world to lean towards these days) and I didn't find the film distasteful at all.

Aesthetically the film is a perfectly made calling card that would allow the director to make shitty Hollywood movies (I won't go into the politics of that, but to subscribe to Hollywood aesthetics in the land of Autorenfilm is again a very real cultural political choice); and what to an international audience might seem fascinating issues is heavy propaganda (especially about the morals of having had any contact with the Stasi at all, see the allegations on the dvd commentary track about leftist politician Gregor Gysi).

I haven't seen The Tourist, and don't particularly want to. Nor does my DVD have the bonus docu you mention. But perhaps you could expand on that "Hollywood aesthetics" bit. Do I detect a faint whiff of pro-auteur snobbery here? Maybe after all young Florian was just following the money, which is what his family has been doing very well for centuries http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henckel_von_Donnersmarck

Meanwhile, last night's entertainment was



Curtis Harrington, Night Tide, 1961

Odd little film shot in and around Venice and Santa Monica (the DVD trumpets that it was shot using the same sets as Welles's Touch of Evil, but I didn't recognise any of them), with a vaguely surreal Poe-inspired plot - shades of Carnival of Souls, but not as weird - a chattery, jazzy score by David Raskin (ah, happy days when bebop was hip - check out Paul Horn on flute) and a touching but decidedly B-movie performance from Dennis Hopper as the simple sailor boy (tongue in cheek).

[Wombatz]

Dan, I btw didn’t react to your previous comment because that was on the film and you can read the film as you please. Just when somebody said that Zizek and the German posters here weren’t serious, that’s a bit much. But since you ask:

Part of my comment about Hollywood aesthetics vs auteurism wasn’t levelled at finished films and their aesthetic values but actual cultural politics. Simply put the background is this: in Germany there is still funding. So obviously the conservative faction wants that to go into large Hollywood-style films that can compete internationally, and more alternative types would want to support local scenes, grassroots culture. It’s really a decision who you want to hang with/get your entertainment at the local arthouse from, bankers or wannabe artists (which can be frustrating also). So yes, Henckel von Donnersmarck says it all.

The commentary track has been prohibited by court for slander or unjust allegations or whatever they call it.

Somehow I don’t feel you’re too deeply interested in this part of the story, but here goes criminally simplified: For a delirious moment in89 it looked as if the DDR might try to make their own state, but then these factions lost to the simpler path of reunification and the D-Mark. So after that the dissidents on the East German scene, who seemed free of all entanglements with the regime, stomped those that had tried to realize projects during earlier times (who were often among the driving forces helping to open up the scene sufficiently for the whole thing to start coming down in the first place). The dissidents often had been spied on by the Stasi, and they used evidence of any kind of contact at all with the Stasi (which was hardly avoidable in certain jobs) to put politicians, artists etc on a kind of effective black list now.

If this all sounds too ominous, no, it’s ugly souls shouting me me me in tabloid headlines. Some Elia Kazan situations for sure. And mudcaking a pretty awesome moment in history by almost everybody involved. But it was not just about the past. Gysi (of the alleged Stasi connections) had in the meantime become the only leftist politician of calibre in Germany, speaking out against the Kosovo War, speaking for social security ... so he was both political enemy of the moneyed classes and somebody who refused to look back and sort out the guilt thing, which was really all that many of the East German artists and politicians of the time of transition etc still had—we even have that nice term Vergangenheitsbewältigung for a full time job of coping with the past.

Anyway, this is why it was such a political move to describe the situation as one of personal conflict and individual choice. I fear it takes a beer-drenched evening to explain this kind of thing to a foreigner. One would have to start with one of Zizek’s simplifications: DDR society was not just about a hard regime leaning in, but about how a repressive system is carried by the interplay between bureaucrats and those stooges who really want to make things a little better ...

If I had none of that context the film probably wouldn’t be more distasteful than the average Western. Except I hate that one piece of modern script machinations, that all must center on one single individual conflict and resolution, that one moral decision by an individual (or one couple trying to start anew) makes all natural catastrophes, alien invasions, or Stasi crimes you can throw at the screen suddenly oh so very meaningful a happy ending in the larger scheme of things (and here god and the viewer share a tear). That makes me throw up every time, no matter how drably you dress it up.

[Dan Warburton]

Thank you for taking the time to post at such length - I really appreciate it! If I didn't have to rush off to work I'd spend the best part of the afternoon discussing this with you. More later - cheers

[Eyjafjallajökull]

Also bear in mind that the film was released during heightened critical discourse on and scrutiny of the neoliberal restructuring of the welfare program into a workfare social security (Hartz IV), debates about the former leftist East German party PDS, German backing and subsidy of the Iraq war (which dissidents such as Wolf Biermann endorsed), and increasing regulatory dismantlement of the left-wing public sphere by means of commodification of alternative venues in Berlin.

[leroysghost]

Werner Herzog - God's Angry Man (1980)


John Cassavetes - The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie (1978)

an old favorite followed by a first viewing of a classic. watched the '78 cut of Killing in deference to late great Ben Gazzara, and although the cw is that the '76 version is better, the '78 cut is perfection through and through. i'd love to see the theatrical cut at some point, but right now i'm at a loss to think of anything that needed improving upon.

[Dan Warburton]

I don't recall the differences between the versions, LG - can you send a link to somewhere that might remind me?



Agnès Varda, Les Plages d'Agnès, 2008

[leroysghost]

according to wikipedia the theatrical version was longer and had some different takes in a different order. beyond that i wouldn't know having not seen both

[Dan Warburton]

I need to win a lottery and buy the Criterion set with both versions. Looks like the only solution. Meanwhile, o friendly ghost, my copy of Missouri Breaks has just arrived from up the Amazon so I'll be checking that out pronto. Hooray!

[MRS]

Iguana (Monte Hellman, 1988)

Everett McGill is Melville's Oberlus perverted. Half his face is mutilated. He is an outcast among like surly privateers, swims off starboard in the night only to found his own micronation on an uninhabited island and scrape off his tattoo: "Welcome to my kingdom." Hellman is credited as director and editor in the title cards. Indeed crisp, immediate cuts are in your face through the first half at least. Magnificent shots from distance see our iguana zigzag across rugged rock into and out of tiny caves. The plot of the island is interspersed with scenes of romantic Spanish mainland, even in colonial v. animal context very weird. I can dig the Catholicism analogue to island gigantism's idols, watch in the end as the royal daughter's saviors gawk upon Oberlus' savagery via brass telescope. After a point every other shot is an inexpensive classical reference and/or allegory. Astute nevertheless how Carmen's Tyrian purpled gown is brought up (sorry) time and again, ancient Phoenician murex trade and such. And we're not on Majorca but glossy, razor igneous black rocks up against the waves, this was filmed in the Canaries.

An extended, brutal rape sequence featuring only Carmen's face does little to boost the protracted feel of the whole. Speaking of faces Oberlus is countlessly shadowed in either that Roman/human or that deformed and shriveled, annoyingly so, each to denote kindness or petulance. Terrific how he sneaks back on to the boat as quietly as he crept off though, and I wonder what they ate the whole time. A treat how hierarchy subsumes back into Spain toward the end, along with humanity into the water. Hellman's Cobra Verde? Michael Madsen is in this as is Robert Culp's son Joseph, who at one point is forced to decapitate his best friend. Virtually zero music throughout, a memorable salvage. This movie is deeply fucked. After Cockfighter. . .a hardly literate Oberlus begins reading Homer atop a hill, and one of his few myrmidons is of course mute.

"FOR WARREN"

[Dan Warburton]

Ah, I need to see this too. Meanwhile, even Missouri Breaks had to wait last night (I was outvoted by wife & son):



Richard Fleischer, Compulsion, 1959

The French title for this is La Génie du Mal, not a million miles from La Soif du Mal (aka Touch of Evil), and Orson Welles' overweight sweaty lawyer Jonathan Wilk indeed looks and sounds more like Hank Quinlan than Clarence Darrow, who the character is based on - the story sticks very close indeed to the facts of the notorious 1924 Leopold Loeb case, right down to the hinges on the eyeglasses left at the scene of the crime. Which leads to one of those chicken-and-egg kind of games.. Patrick Hamilton's 1929 play Rope was clearly inspired by the Loeb case, and there's a clear homage to Hitchcock's 1948 film here in the form of a very prominent "natural wipe" (fade to black and fade back up with close-up in on the actor's back - which Hitch did throughout Rope to give the illusion of one continuous shot). But telltale glasses also figure in Strangers on a Train, and Bradford Dillman's diabolically scheming spoiled upper class brat Artie Strauss is strikingly close to Bruno Anthony in the Hitchcock film adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel. Meanwhile, Dean Stockwell's nervy, twitchy Judd is well along the road leading to the Bates Motel. But it's Orson who steals the show with his barnstorming closing speech - is this still the longest monologue in cinema history? looks like it. Every Welles trick in the book, and some smart editing too - Orson stormed off the set early, sulking that his hefty fee had been gobbled up by the taxman to pay off outstanding debts, and left Fleischer and his editor William Reynolds with several stretches of un-postsynced dialogue, which Reynolds stitched together from unused words and phrases lying about on the tape (this years before ProTools - ha!).

[Dan Warburton]

Claire Denis, S"en fout la mort, 1990

More cockfighting, clandestine this time, in a sweaty backroom in the Halles de Rungis industrial estate south of Paris. Outstanding acting all round - Jean-Claude Brialy thoroughly detestable as the sleazy owner of the run-down disco, Alex Descas a ball of pent-up fury - and great, compact direction. Cool Abdullah Ibrahim soundtrack too.

[grisha]

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, The Kid with a Bike, 2011

[Dan Warburton]

Jacques Rozier, Du côté d'Orouët, 1973

A delight, assuming that is you're a Rivette / Rohmer fan and don't mind spending over two and a half hours watching three giggling girls on summer holiday in the tacky seaside resort of St Gilles Croix de Vie on the Vendée coast. So light, yet so deep - the shift from lighthearted chitchat to melancholy and tension is so masterfully handled you don't even notice it. The dialogue feels improvised but I suspect it isn't. As with Adieu Philippine, our man Ed Howard has already been here before and written a fine piece here http://seul-le-cinema.blogspot.com/2011 ... dorou.html
Alors, Ed, have you seen Les naufragés de l'île de la Tortue yet? That's the next one in the box!

[Lao Tsu Ben]

Jacques Rozier, Du côté d'Orouët, 1973

A delight, assuming that is you're a Rivette / Rohmer fan and don't mind spending over two and a half hours watching three giggling girls on summer holiday in the tacky seaside resort of St Gilles Croix de Vie on the Vendée coast. So light, yet so deep - the shift from lighthearted chitchat to melancholy and tension is so masterfully handled you don't even notice it. The dialogue feels improvised but I suspect it isn't. As with Adieu Philippine, our man Ed Howard has already been here before and written a fine piece here http://seul-le-cinema.blogspot.com/2011 ... dorou.html
Alors, Ed, have you seen Les naufragés de l'île de la Tortue yet? That's the next one in the box!

Rather mean and childish young women actually. I remember someone saying that there was some kind of Big Brother feeling in Du Côté D'Orouët, a vision that was both voyeuristic and sadistic. I couldn't agree more.

[cheerios]

The Color of Paradise dir. Majid Majidi


Been watching Iranian films lately

[Dan Warburton]

Jacques Rozier, Du côté d'Orouët, 1973

A delight, assuming that is you're a Rivette / Rohmer fan and don't mind spending over two and a half hours watching three giggling girls on summer holiday in the tacky seaside resort of St Gilles Croix de Vie on the Vendée coast. So light, yet so deep - the shift from lighthearted chitchat to melancholy and tension is so masterfully handled you don't even notice it. The dialogue feels improvised but I suspect it isn't. As with Adieu Philippine, our man Ed Howard has already been here before and written a fine piece here http://seul-le-cinema.blogspot.com/2011 ... dorou.html
Alors, Ed, have you seen Les naufragés de l'île de la Tortue yet? That's the next one in the box!

Rather mean and childish young women actually. I remember someone saying that there was some kind of Big Brother feeling in Du Côté D'Orouët, a vision that was both voyeuristic and sadistic. I couldn't agree more.

Yes, it gets curiously disturbing as it progresses, doesn't it? The grainy 16mm film and the ever-present sound of waves breaking add to the effect.