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SCREENING LOG
- 3/10-3/16, 2003
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Last week I watched LOVES OF A BLONDE, THE LIFE OF JESUS,
GANG OF FOUR, SO CLOSE, shorts by Chaplin and 'ROUND MIDNIGHT.
In no order:
Loves of a Blonde (1965, Milos Forman)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0059415
One of Forman's earliest films is arguably my favorite of
all that I've seen from this irreverently humanist Czech rascal.
A young woman recounts how she was seduced and abandoned by
her first love, leading her to take a bittersweet journey
of self-discovery. The story is rather simple and familiar,
but Brejchova's performance gives her role a fresh breath
of innocence and charm. Forman's gentle ribbing of humanity
has perhaps never been as sensitive and sharp. Here I find
his characters to be more three-dimensional than they've ever
been, and the spontaneous, small gestures they make register
with the richness of real life.
The Life of Jesus (1997, Bruno Dumont)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0120448
A remarkable film about a young man in Flanders who idles
away his days riding motorbikes with his racist friends, having
sex with his girlfriend and going to the hospital to have
his epilepsy treated. The subject matter seems like a catalogue
for rural ennui moviemaking, but Dumont's virtue is in his
manner of telling: spare, unsympathetic and extremely sensitive
to how environment affects one's way of life. The film finds
its unlikely grace notes when the main character is doing
absolutely nothing but sitting out in an open field, managing
a separate peace with the world; that we share in that peace
makes us culpable when the hero returns to his world of disastrous
violence. A disturbing work but one that offers a unique eye
on the world.
Gang of Four (1988, Jacques Rivette)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0094709
Four young colleagues in an all-female acting school become
entangled in a plot involving a mysterious man who preys on
each of them separately. More conspiratorial fear and games
from Rivette, done as only he can do. For me, as with his
other films I've seen, it took some warming up to -- Rivette's
world demands a certain level of commitment and belief that
you see reflected in these students and the strange school
that seems to cloister them from the world, or else transforms
the world into a realm of dangerous fictions.
So Close (2002, Corey Yuen)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0300620
Two sisters who have inherited their late father's high-tech
surveillance technology wage war on his corporate rivals while
eluding a fierce lady cop. Though at first this film threatens
to be a mindlessly violent cross between CHARLIE'S ANGELS
and THE MATRIX, but the themes of sisterhood and female solidarity
develop rather movingly towards the end. Hong Kong superstars
Shu Qi, Zhao Wei and Karen Mok make for a formidable trio
of ass-kicking feminism, and they show off their stuff in
a number of spectacularly choreographed fights.
Shorts by Charlie Chaplin (1916-1917)
Watched four shorts from Chaplin's days at Mutual Studios,
where his onscreen persona as well as his comedic and artistic
talents really blossomed into the iconic stature we all know
today. The Immigrant, http://us.imdb.com/Title?0008133
perhaps the best regarded of his shorts, makes ingenious use
of a rocking boat stage to get big laughs from the travails
of seasick immigrants making their way to America. His flirtatious
encounter with an immigrant girl in a restaurant shows his
broad slapstick ripening into the sweet and nuanced pathos
of his features. In the hilarious and provocative The Adventurer
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0007613
Charlie plays an escaped convict who saves a wealthy girl
from drowning and is welcomed into her family as a result.
In The Cure http://us.imdb.com/Title?0007832
Chaplin alters the Tramp persona and plays a wealthy drunkard
wreaking havoc at a posh resort -- apparently alcoholism was
a raging problem among the working classes; Chaplin felt it
better to let them laugh at the same problem disrupting a
more "dignified" milieu. Easy Street,
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0007880 my favorite of these,
shows the Tramp becoming a beat cop and cleaning up the city
slums. Chaplin's slapstick is as sharp and inspired here as
you'll ever find, but what's striking is how one might see
this film as an allegory for Chaplin's own artistic vision:
a man caught in the deep divide between the rich and the poor
who has the potential to bring them together in utopian harmony.
It's an idea that recurs in his later, longer work, with increasingly
complicated results.
Round Midnight (1986, Betrand Tavernier)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0090557
Simple but strangely affecting tale of a big and cuddly washed-out
alcoholic jazz tenor, slumming in Paris circa 1959, who is
befriended and rehabilitated by an idolizing young Frenchman.
There's something annoying about how this plays like a Frenchman's
chic cultural fantasy, taking a broken-down black artist off
the streets, washing him up and making him anew, but Tavernier
does plenty to give the story a feel of authenticity; his
obvious reverence for jazz people leads him to make the very
wise decision to give generous time and space for their performances,
such that this film pleases me more as a documentary of the
enduring spirit of jazz music than as a story of a fallen
genius. Jazz great Dexter Gordon plays the lead with barely
intelligible line reading, but then the music plays, and that's
all it takes to see just what Tavernier and his onscreen counterpart
are so obsessed about.
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