SCREENING LOG - 8/13-8/19, 2001

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Last week I watched Careful, The Heart of the World, Rushmore, Paisan, Caro Diario, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Drek, er, Shrek, and You Can Count on Me. In order of preference:

Careful (1992, Guy Maddin)

One of the best films of the '90s? Quite possibly. Certainly the most fun I've had watching a movie all year. The plot involves a mountain family whose bouts with extreme repression lead to all sorts of outrageous disasters, from unlabeled toothbrushes to incest and murder. It's ostensibly a campy send-up of both 1930s movies and straight-laced Canadians. Manitoban prairie dog Maddin utilized every trick in the 1929-1930 cinematic textbook (deadpan cheese dialogue, expressionistic mountain sets, and a stunning visual texture captured by an outdated print process using two-strip technicolor). The film sure looks like a lot of passion went into recreating the look and feel of a early Sound Age movie, including a scratched up soundtrack. But it transcends both camp and nostalgia to become more than an opulent fetish object; its otherworldliness offers meaning to go with its aura, and promises more depth with subsequent viewings. The Coen brothers could learn much from this Guy.

The Heart of the World (2000)

Guy Maddin's most recent work, a 7 minute short that won the Best Experimental Film award from the National Society of Film Critics. Heck, I can't even begin to describe it without being kicked into subliminal flashback state, fingers paralyzed. If you ever see it around, See It.

Rushmore (1998, Wes Anderson)

Anderson and Maddin share a knack for building their own cinematic worlds from the ground up. And like Maddin's canny evocations of vintage cinema, the world of Rushmore, while not perfectly realized (it brings up the issue of class but has no clue how to deal with it), has a spirit that has been sorely missing in Hollywood films since the 30s or 40s. I watched this sublime film for the umpteenth time primarily to compare it with the recent release Ghost World. I find that they make a lovely pair: they both share a vivid sense of composition and color, and a great ear for dialogue, but while Rushmore has a masculine sense of grandiose ambition and an idealistic yearning for community, Ghost World has a more feminine, less razzle-dazzle sensibility, and a cynical, guarded approach towards relationships. Focusing on Rushmore, this time around I was even more impressed by Anderson's talent for filing the frame with detail and activity. Only a couple months away until The Royal Tenenbaums...

You Can Count on Me (2000, Kenneth Lonergan)

Still the best American film of 2000. Seeing it again I was even more impressed by Kenneth Lonergan's directing and writing talent. His script is TIGHT -- full of lovely quiet moments and extreme perceptiveness of character. I noticed that last week someone posted an objection to the implausability of Laura Linney's character kicking her brother out of her house. I think it is plausible, but I also think it gives the story an easy way to wrap things up (Wonder Boys had a similar cop-out way with dealing with its characters' chaotic lives). Nonetheless, the film is great, in no small part to the acting of Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo. Ruffalo comes off a little too much like a young Brando early in the movie (and is it a coincidence that his character's name, Terry, is the same as Brando's in On the Waterfront?), but he hits his stride real soon and commands a presence all his own. I found it a fascinating thought that Linney was basically playing both the Annette Bening AND Kevin Spacey characters from American Beauty, and doing it better than both. She definitely deserved the Oscar for this role, yes, even above Ellen Burstyn for Requiem for a Dream. Burstyn deserves pity for the role she played, while Linney deserves the prize.

Caro Diario/ Dear Diary (1994, Nanni Moretti)

Paisan (1946, Roberto Rossellini)

Two Italian films that I regard as flawed but beautiful "experiments". Moretti makes a kind of "cinejournal" a pseudo documentary in three parts, detailing, in succession, Moretti meditating on dancing, Moretti on an island boating expedition, and Moretti trying to find a cure for a mysterious ailment. What could have been a shameless ego-trip is saved by a sense of honesty, a feeling of being offered genuine thoughts and feelings from the filmmaker. I guess that makes him the Italian Kevin Smith. I am also not sure how to react to Paisan -- six stories each taking place at different stages in the Allied advance through Italy during WWII. Some stories I liked, most I found cheesy, but again, I felt the director had the best, most sincere intentions in making some kind of statement on humanity. The last story, following a gang of GIs and Italian compatriots dueling with the Nazis along a riverbank, is told with almost no dialogue. It manages to capture the same sense of combat anxiety as Saving Private Ryan without resorting to horror show effects.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000, Ang Lee)

Watching this movie for the first time last year on opening night was a huge disappointment. Two screenings later, I am still, if not more disappointed. The threadbare plot is utterly blown away by the distracting, and somewhat troubling "Taming of the Shrew Mongolian style" interlude, which would have been unnecessary if Lee knew how to give the other scenes a pulse. It's even more frustrating to see the thematic content take shape as a muddled tract on post-Confucian feminism, concluding as a neo-conservative cautionary tale of what happens when girls try to do things on their own. The fight scenes maintain their breathtaking power, though the missteps in editing rhythm become more visible with each viewing. A majestic triumph for James Schamus the producer (and not James Schamus the screenwriter), it's a handsome production piece, hollow in meaning -- give me Peking Opera Blues any day.

Shrek (2001, Some corporate hack with a big hard drive)

I watched about five minutes of this on the plane but that was enough to remind me of how generic this so-called revisionist fairy tale was. Lacking any real emotion or artistry in animation, this computer-generated "product" features both the most nightmarishly plain-looking renderings of classic fairy tale characters and the annoying banter of Mike Myers in full faux Scottish brogue and Eddie Murphy as a jackass, both literally and figuratively. I can't believe this movie did so well, but that's what you pay the marketing team for, I guess.

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