SCREENING LOG - 10/2/2006-10/8/2006

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Near Dark (1987, Kathryn Bigelow)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093605/
The more I reflect on this one, the more I like it. I forget what my reservations were originally -- maybe it was a lack of a more specific application of the vampire myth to its contemporary context -- could it have been something more than just bad guys luring an innocent young man into a realm of darkness? See BLUE VELVET as a point of comparison. But the romanticism of the film is undeniable and some of the images literally burn themselves into the mind.
yes (#7 for 1987 between WINGS OF DESIRE and BLIND CHANCE)

Lacombe, Lucien (1974, Louis Malle)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071733/
TSPDT #891
Well-acted and coldly effective, Malle offers a persuasive illustration of a young country boy being lured from an unappreciative French Resistance movement to happily working as a Gestapo thug during World War II. There are plenty of shades of gray going around as the boy falls in love with the daughter of a Jewish merchant and throws his weight around on their behalf, with complicated outcomes. This movie explores the banality of evil in showing the rather humdrum operations of the Gestapo and the eerie sense of soothing security and purposefulness that it has to offer for a troubled youth looking for a place to belong. The emotional effect is both understated and hauntingly unsettling.
YES (#11 for 1974 between THE CONVERSATION and A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE)

I Remember Mama (1948, George Stevens)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040458/
Felt pretty conflicted about just what I felt abou this one. Its sentimentality can be bludgeoning at times, but I expected as much. On the other hand, there are some genuinely moving moments, like when the mother impersonates a hospital floorwasher in order to visit her sick daughter. And the director achieves some lovely moments with staging, especially one scene where a key dialogue takes place offscreen as family members bustle through the main hallway. But what ultimately weighs the film is its ponderous pacing, the same thing that sunk the director's more famous coming of age literary adaptation ten years later. The framing device of the adult narrator directly addressing the camera had me thinking of Ingmar Bergman, which is interesting given the Scandinavian connection. Oskar Homolka's broad, yammering immigrant nearly sunk it for me -- significantly, his most touching moment comes when he shuts up for good. Reading the IMDb user comments on this one, I wonder if a treacly sacrificial matriarch story is what it would take today to turn people's heads around on the immigration issue.
mixed

Jackass Number Two (2006, Jeff Tremaine)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0493430/
Not as life-affirming as the first one -- the stunts here are more extreme, some to the point of the being vile and desperate, with the participants openly complaining at times. Such is what happens with sequels that have no choice but to raise the stakes. I don't recall in the first JACKASS ever feeling a sense that a line had been crossed, but here I did; not so much in the sense of taste (though there are some truly tasteless pranks, mostly involving excrement from humans as well as horses), but in the sense of life endangerment -- watching a couple of stunts I simply couldn't believe that the participants had gotten away with their lives, and I found it truly unsettling, like my moral sense had been assaulted. All the same, there's still simply no other cinema like this in existence, other than some of Pasolini's 70s movies. My favorite bit is probably the first where a man puts a mouse puppet on his penis and sticks it into an aquarium to arouse the interest of a snake -- it's pretty harmless compared to much of what follows. The stunts in this film tend to be more scatalogical in nature than the first, but it's nice to see men so comfortable with their bodies (and bodily excretions).
yes (#20 for new films seen in 2006 between I AM A SEX ADDICT and OLD JOY)

From the New York Film Festival:

Gardens in Autumn (2006, Otar Iosseliani)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0494239/
The prime minister of an unidentified European nation is deposed and finds a new life living in a hovel with immigrants, drinking and carousing to his heart's delight. There are heavy hints of Tati and comic Godard in this semi-surrealist floating world of people and objects, though its meaning strikes me as being plainer than either of those masters. There are a number of charming moments that poke fun of the petty pomp ceremonies of dignitaries, the shallow self-importance of the bourgeois, and the dissolute lustiness of the working class, but at times it veers on spitefulness and the main points of this carnival seem less than the sum of its parts. Women are generally depicted here as being fickle and shrewish, not the least being the prime minister's ex-wife. In fact the most charismatic female performance is given by Michel Piccoli in drag, playing the minister's mother.
mixed

Private Fears in Public Places (2006, Alain Resnais)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0498120/
Winner of the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, 84-year old Resnais' latest offering feels boldly experimental in its structure yet unassumingly conventional in its story. Based on the play of the same title by British playwright Alan Ayckbourn, it's another one of these fashionable ensemble pieces about lonely middle-class characters seeking love and fulfillment, though thankfully it's less pretentious and more lively than Todd Field's LITTLE CHILDREN. Resnais shifts the story between seven different characters each connected to another, forming a kind of circle that the narrative wheels through, alternating scenes with one or two of them at a time. The scenes themselves are connected by dissolves into an endless snowstorm that gives the film a pervasive sensation of chilliness, against which Resnais presents his affectionate depictions of these lonely hearts with a grandfatherly blend of affection and detachment. There are a couple of gorgeous sets, shot with a frosted lighting that oddly recalls 80s Spielberg movies. It kind of breezes by and with the blend of quirkiness, human sexual dysfunction and loneliness, really it doesn't seem that dissimilar from a European version of a Sundance indie, with the attendant silliness that would seem unthinkable in Resnais films of 40 years ago. It's light and nowhere near his greatest work, but has its own fascinations.
yes

Fallen (2006, Barbara Albert)
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0016475/
Here's yet another dysfunctional ensemble piece, from Austrian ubercineaste Barbara Albert, whose previous dysfunctional ensemble piece FREE RADICALS played like a Bavarian MAGNOLIA with fragmented glimpses of several people behaving badly. Here, Albert attempts something more cohesive, charting a 24 hour period between five high school friends now grown up and at various stations in their lives. Reuinted at a funeral, they wend their way to a friend's wedding and revel in near-non-stop drinking, dancing and other debauchery mixed in with an occasional heart-to-heart, cat fight or nervous breakdown. Albert mixes in some stylistic elements like an occasional freeze frame to capture the essence of a moment or a memory, and she has a gift for picking the right music to punctuate the dramatic essence of a scene. Unfortunately, Albert doesn't quite achieve the sense of organic unfolding of events that the timeline of her story requires; she still relies on revelations and sudden turns to punch up the drama. While she was able to get away with this in the fractured narrative of FREE RADICALS, here it doesn't feel of a piece -- here the strings being pulled show a little too much. Her characters aren't handled with a lot of subtlety and resemble the sitcom caricatures of LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE, though there is one great moment (without dialogue of course) where two women literally reveal their true natures on the dance floor and the effect is one of touching vulnerability and momentary liberation. On the opposite end, Albert throws in some anti-US-in-Iraq editorializing here and there, as if to reassure us that this is The Movie that Speaks For Our Time.
mixed

Election 2: Triad Election (2006, Johnny To)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0491244/
There can be little dispute that the reigning leader of the Hong Kong auteur triad is Johnny To, if only by default. With the likes of John Woo and Wong Kar Wai focusing their attention on more cosmopolitan topics, To has emerged as the unlikely chronicler of Hong Kong's life and times under the specter of mainland Chinese rule - though of course he does so strictly within genre trappings - with the Triad Trilogy: ELECTION, ELECTION 2 and the recently released EXILED. In this installment, Louis Koo is a businessman who has thrived under triad protection, but finds himself squeezed by both the triad leaders and the mainland authorities to campaign for leadership of the triad. In doing so he comes to loggerheads with his former mentor, who is gunning for an unprecedented second term as triad head. Much double-crossing and murderous conniving ensues, not the least of which includes literally feeding a recalcitrant captive to the dogs. There are more than a few brilliantly executed set pieces, as is come to be expected with To, and his stock company has become as familiar and pleasurable to watch as John Ford's, but on the whole this is a cold, brutal experience. The moral outcry that emerges by the end seems to have less thought put into it than the elaborate procession of orchestrated deaths that prompted it.
yes

Inland Empire (2006, David Lynch)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460829/
Sometime after MULHOLLAND DRIVE, David Lynch started playing with a prosumer quality digital camcorder to produce videos for his website, and since then he has sworn never to shoot on film again. An improvisational video piece with Laura Dern has germinated into his first full-length video feature, a three hour opus, three years in the making, that is perhaps his most complicated and borderline incomprehensible work to date.

I won't even attempt to describe the plot, whatever there is of it. Something about the making of a movie, cutting into what might be dream sequences involving L.A. hookers, mysterious Polish people, and a stage set of a living room inhabited by humanoid rabbits. For me, it can best be seen as a referendum on his entire career to date and the start of a new chapter. It's an unapologetic refutation of old conventions such as the film medium and three act storytelling, and a headlong embrace of the opportunities that video affords him; more impulsive, intuitive shooting approaches, more improvisation with actors, and the discoveries of the rugged visual beauties to be found within digital video.

There's much that's good and bad about all of this. Laura Dern comes off best with this project, having the opportunity to play what are either several characters or several variations of a character in a constant process of evolution. There's something exciting about this, but also something kind of amateurish, like watching a child learn to walk or reinvent the wheel. Lynch achieves some harrowing effects in post-production, but his shooting leaves something to be desired. He's overly dependent on extreme close-ups, and with the often banal, oddly arrhythmic line readings and overly portentous synth soundtrack, it often feels like a parody of a Lynch movie, straining really hard for effect.

I certainly miss the sexy fluidity of his earlier films, which in all likelihood was courtesy of his longtime editor/lover and now estranged wife Mary Sweeny. This is the first film in years that Lynch has edited himself, and I'm not sure that's a good thing. Time will tell whether this marks the beginning of a bold new direction in Lynch's career, or the start of a downward slide into excessive self-indulgence.
mixed/yes

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