SCREENING LOG - 9/11/2006-9/17/2006

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fro from the Toronto International Film Festival:

I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (2006, Tsai Ming-liang)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0855824/
I dunno, I could appreciate it, but nothing about it really surprises me, it feels tame after the shock and awe of THE WAYWARD CLOUD. From what I understand, Tsai was commissioned by some Mozart festival in Austria to make a film in tribute to Mozart -- but the only Mozart in this movie is in one scene in a hospital room with his music playing on a radio. The rest is a largely wordless exploration of love and loneliness (what else in new in Tsailand), this time taking place in Tsai's birth country of Malaysia, which he presents in as unsavory a light as possible. Though there are a few visually stunning scenes (that's pretty much always true of his films), namely a very tender moment between Tsai regular leading man Lee Kang-sheng beat up and convalescing next to a Malaysian good samaritan, their supine bodies thinly veiled by mosquito netting in a hovel; and the last image, which has Andrei Tarkovsky written all over it -- at long last, given that the two directors are probably drawn to water more than any other filmmaker in history, Jacques Cousteau notwithstanding.
mixed - upgraded from a "no" after the repeated praise of peers...

Back home, a sudden strike across the bow of the They Shoot Pictures Don't They 1000 Greatest Films (www.theyshootpictures.com) -- thanks to MoMA for the first and last of these (and for The Gap for motivating me to watch the third):

Fat City (1972, John Huston)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068575/
TSPDT #887
This could very well get my vote as Huston's greatest film, even though it also strikes me as very untypical. It's a fuzzy, hardscrabble look at a world rife with cheap desires and cheaper self-destructive impulses. Desire and self-destruction are of course mainstay themes throughout Huston's career, but this time he achieves a level of genuine humanity that I just haven't seen elsewhere in his work. No one here is terribly bright, but they nonetheless retain a core element of dignity, that somehow they don't deserve to suffer so much; it's something that they don't ask for and that they just can't help. The only thing wrong with Stacy Keach's performance is his perfect diction, otherwise he plays the lead, a washed-up boxer bouncing back and forth between recovery and waste with diminishing returns. His character is counterpointed by a fresh faced Jeff Bridges who seems perilously close to following his mentor's footsteps. Great performances all around as salty as a good slab of bacon. MILLION DOLLAR BABY may still be my most personally affecting boxing movie, but this one is quite possibly the best, it goes as deep into the yawning pit of human despair as RAGING BULL without the cinematic flash and filigree -- here, the rage of the boxer doesn't explode, it just sags like a heavy load.
YES (#6 for 1972 between SOLARIS and ROMA -- though it has the potential to go much higher)

The Childhood of Maxim Gorky (1938, Mark Donskoy)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0030055/
TSPDT #888
I really wish I had a better version available to me than the bleary VHS I had from the library - in any event I was still able to glean much enjoyment from this episodic coming of age story. Could this be the very first entry in the "episodic coming of age story" genre, years before THE APU TRILOGY and TIME TO LIVE TIME TO DIE? There are some great scenes that feel ahead of its time, a certain way that Donskoy is able to hone in on a close-up or a painterly composition to get at the essence of a scene. Hope I can revisit this again in better shape.
yes (#5 for 1938 between HOTEL DU NORD and YOU AND ME)

Funny Face (1957, Stanley Donen)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050419/
TSPDT #889
I took the new Gap ads as a sign to finally get around to watching this one. I can see why they chose to swap in "Back In Black" for her beatnik dance number (even though it wasn't much of a better choice of music). This film starts off with a pretty engaging argument set up for the role of a woman caught between mindless fashion vs. intellectual ambition. Watching it, I myself am caught between denouncing it as condescendingly misogynistic or just unpretentiously celebrating the possibilities and contradictions and joys of femininity circa the 1950s (though really not much seems to have changed). And such is the wonder of Audrey Hepburn to be able to ride with those contradictions and just keep us watching and waiting for what will happen next, even if the film amounts to a kind of taming of the bookworm. The movie makes much out of both mocking and celebrating haute couture, with some eye-popping compositions, especially in the first half, helped to some extent by Richard Avedon as a photographic design consultant. My girlfriend remarked on the proclivity of Hepburn movies that feature her starring with someone 6 times her age, and few if any of them generate convincing chemistry. Also had us wondering how many musical romantic comedies actually do present persuasive romantic chemistry between their leads. This ain't one of them, but at least there are other compensations. Did people really think Audrey Hepburn looked odd for that era -- four years after her debut?
yes

L'enfance nue / Naked Childhood (1968, Maurice Pialat)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065695/
TSPDT #890
Wow this movie kicked ass. Unflinching, unsentimental and as powerful as a kick in the gut. Pialat's debut really shows off the years he spent doing documentaries -- using non-professional actors, he gives a hard realist look at the travails of an 10 year old boy shipped from one foster home to another. This kid is the holy terror of holy terrors, though through some miracle of acting and directing we feel for him every step of the way, as if Balthazar the donkey were re-incarnated as a provincial brat who keeps biting the hands that feed him. Counterbalancing his bad behavior are the sweetest and most authentic foster family one could ask for, who are bewildered but not entirely surprised by the failure that results from their offerings of kindness (with the odd bitchslap here and there). This movie gives a big fat middle finger to the idea of redemption, making the Dardenne Brothers look like Disney.
YES (#8 for 1968 between GOLDEN SWALLOW and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD)

When the Levees Broke: A Tragedy in Four Acts (2006, Spike Lee)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0783612/
Finally caught up with parts 3 and 4 -- part 3 kind of sagged a little bit with a somewhat perfunctory account of the cultural legacy of New Orleans, but that was more than compensated by some really thought-provoking commentary on how Hurricane Katrina may have given the land developers, gentrifiers and other menaces to the Black community the fattest Christmas present they could have asked for. What impressed me the most was the documentation of how hundreds of thousands of black people were dispersed across the country in the wake of the hurricane, many of whom are unlikely to return to their hometowns, not out of lack of desire but lack of the economic wherewithal to resume their lives. The film leaves you with a gut-sticking impression that the Black community in New Orleans, one of the Blackest major cities in the country, will never be what it was before... on the one hand, one of the most crime-ridden cities in the country will become cleaned-up, gentrified and touristified beyond recognition, on the other hand, the substantial underclass that populated it will be driven further into destitution, dispersed across the country, a symbol of a much greater socioeconomic divide that may threaten to tear our country in half. The scene that got me the most was the Extreme Makeover-esque story of how a Utah community adopted a black family into their melanin-challenged fold. The image of this southern black mother and children weeping tears of gratitude for their new four bedroom home as a crowd of the whitest people you could imagine stand around cheering is downright eerie -- eerie because it really should be a moment of compassion and joy, but the subtext being the cost of all this comfort -- removing this family from its own community to be absorbed like an amoeba and become something else entirely. This moment of triumph is also a moment of cultural obliteration. Moreso than MALCOLM X, this film is Spike Lee's national epic.
YES (#4 for new releases seen in 2006 between WOMAN ON THE BEACH and THE HOST)

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