SCREENING LOG - 8/14/2006-8/20/2006

Back to 2006 Index

Charade (1963, Stanley Donen)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056923/
TSPDT #883
Saw this at my first ever venture to the famed Summer Outdoor Screenings at Bryant Park near Times Square, and there was quite a crowd on hand. Donen has a remarkable ability to exploit Audrey Hepburn's persona to generate both lighthearded romantic comedy and genuinely scary thriller moments straight out of the Griffith-Gish imperiled nymph playbook. It moves very well between dialogue-heavy scenes and knife-twisting plot developments. Cary Grant picks up where he left off with SUSPICION, milking his beguiling enigmatic qualities for all their worth. I think this film is ultimately about the fantasy of female submission, which is something I'm ambivalent about. Hepburn was actually a little annoying at first as the ingenue -- but as the intrigue thickens among an ensemble of male creeps, her forthrightness becomes an oasis. But as Grant's trustworthiness becomes increasingly suspect, I became aware of just how helpless the film paints Hepburn -- she really has no choice but to trust Grant, not because Grant deserves it but because Hepburn has nowhere else to go. At first this seemed rather misogynistic to me. But if I'm to believe what another person said, that this is ultimately a woman's film that touches on certain woman's fantasies about finding fulfillment through submission, then I concede that it makes a lot of sense. The question then is what I feel about that... reminds me of something that Slavoj Zizek said, that if a woman wants to fantasize about being raped, she has every right to do so -- but to actually rape her doesn't fulfill her fantasies, quite the contrary, it robs her of the self-empowerment of her fantasies. So then the question I have, is to what extent is CHARADE an enactment of a collective female fantasy about an ingenue submitting to an all-powerful, Shiva-like male authority figure, and to what extent is it a reflection of real life that women actually buy into?

The Big City / Mahanagar (1963, Satyajit Ray)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057277/
TSPDT #884
Housewife rips shit up at home when she takes a job outside to bring extra income for the family. As far as representations of women circa 1963 go, I'll take Madhabi Mukherjee over Audrey Hepburn. Unlike Hepburn's character, Mukherjee's role is self-possessed, increasingly comes into self-awareness, and stands firm by her own principles. But perhaps this is as much a fantasy of progressive feminism as Hepburn's is regressive. I found this film to be more soap opera-ish than Ray's other films, though the glimpses of class and cultural hierarchies in India were sharp and trenchant, and I loved the way the dialogue makes deft use of English, Hindi and Bengali.
yes

World Trade Center (2006, Oliver Stone)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0469641/
I quite liked the first hour or so -- the unfurling of events, the sense of something huge happening but not quite knowing what it is, the reflex emergency reaction, rushing downtown through the streets (loved the shot of the commandeered bus passing Caliente's in the village), it all felt authentic and brought back memories. Too bad the second half is high-toned TV movie fodder -- the only thing interesting about it was the way Nick Cage's be-rubbled face was lit like a Thomas Kinkade painting, fuzzed out to the point that the debris on his cheek looked like an infestation of lichen. His 10-year process of Gary Cooperization is pretty much complete. Other revelations: Maria Bello looks great with blond hair and blue eyes, Maggie Gyllenhaal's seems to shut off when given a lame women in waiting role, it's like watching a lobotomized Katherine Hepburn. We must take revenge on whoever did this to her.
mixed

Signs of Life (1968, Werner Herzog)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063218/
TSPDT #885
Would make a great companion piece to BEAU TRAVAIL (or NAPOLEON DYNAMITE)-- an essay on wartime ennui with quiet passages of inaction and even quieter desperation waiting to explode, momentarily mitigated by activities such as trapping a roach, hypnotizing a chicken and lighting a rocket while holding it in one hand. The long wordless landscape sequences probably look great on the big screen -- on DVD the images don't have as much impact to punctuate the longeurs. Amazing how Herzog has made the same movie about human beings losing it on the stark outposts of civilization his whole career -- this is basically GRIZZLY MAN with Greeks instead of grizzly bears.
yes

Musical musing of the week: Caught the New York Dolls for the third time this year, making them the only band I've seen thrice. They played a free concert at South Street Seaport. Happy to report that they get better each time, their reconstituted band sounding sharper and more tunefully complex than ever on some cuts. They also played more songs from the new album and as impatient as I was to fall back on the oldies, the new stuff does sound great live. It's amazing to see old fogies David "Buster Poindexter" Johanssen and Sylvain Sylvain rock as hard as they do now, and the songs are as bitching as they've ever been.

Their debut album is one of the most underrated rock albums. Each song has more personality and flair than can be found in some bands' entire discography. It has all of the wild mood swings and loopiness of a Looney Tunes cartoon, or something like NIGHTS OF CABIRIA set in the Lower East Side starring Daffy Duck as a drunken prostitute spouting his beak off beak well past midnight. So brazen and streetsmart, and yet the lyrics boast eloquent turns of phrase worthy of Oscar Wilde. "Everyone's going to your house to shoot up in your room / Most of them are beautiful and so obsessed with gloom". Definitely one of my alltime favorite albums.

But my favorite NYD song -- the one that contains their credo -- comes from their next (and last) album:

Well if you don't like it
Go ahead, find yourself a saint
go ahead now,
Try to find a boy
who's gonna be what I ain't
now what you need is
A plastic doll with a fresh coat of paint
Who's gonna sit through the madness
And always acts so quaint
Said yeah yeah yeah...

And If I'm acting like a king
Well that's cause -- I'M A HUMAN BEING
and if I want too many things
don't you know that -- I'M A HUMAN BEING
and if I've got to dream
baby baby baby yeah -- I'M A HUMAN BEING
and when it gets a bit obscene
Wooah! - then I'M A HUMAN BEING

Back to 2006 Index