True Stories

For about ten or so years there, David Byrne was pretty amazing. He still manages to pull off some pretty great stuff (see "Empire" from Grown Backwards) although he never has and never will match the consistency of his output from then. True Stories is almost like "The Big Country" from More Songs about Buildings and Food turned hilarious and stretched out into a feature length movie. It pulls off the same feat of being trenchantly of "the blandness of middle America" while at the same time being just as critical of the reflexive nature that criticism has for coastal people (he pulls this off, I think, by having the song/movie be from the perspective of a narrator who is obviously not from the place he's describing (and I think, though I may be projecting my actual knowledge of Byrne onto this, just as obviously from one of the coasts) and having that narrator adopt a faux-naive tone--or he seems to at once know more than he's letting on and not to know nearly as much as a he thinks he knows), but the movie/song isn't just critical. Both manage to also be kind of celebratory of the very differences they exploit to lay their criticisms. Also, they're very funny and moving. Byrne was just kind of brilliant.

12:08 East of Bucharest

Romanian movie I got from Netflix a few days after reading a write-up about Romanian cinema in New York Times Magazine... Gosh the internet age is great!

I watched this twice, and liked it even more the second time. It's deceptively tight: that is, the first time through, a lot of stuff that felt loose and kind of random turned out to all be pretty obviously deliberate and productive (plotwise) while watching it the second time. Which impressed me a lot, for whatever reason. Especially when the station owner guy is looking for his Mythology Dictionary, which I'd completely forgot about by the time it got to the show and he started quoting Heraclitus and discussing Plato's cave the first time I watched it.

I especially liked the way the really long take following the car around the town seemed to go on just way too long, so eventually you start wondering why it's going on so long, and then, cut, we're at the beginning of the show. Very nice touch.

The ending also elevated the movie beyond just being the really enjoyable and likeable little comedy it was: when the voice from behind the camera starts talking (I really couldn't figure out if the voice was supposed to be one of the characters in the film or if it was the director), counting down while we watch a streetlight, getting impatient, then counting down again, and it turns on, and the voice says "It's calm and beautiful. Just like my memory of the revolution. It was calm and beautiful." And more silent shots of the streetlights turning on. One of the most perfect endings for a movie that I can think of, even as I wonder exactly what such a claim might mean to people who lived through that revolution (it's my understanding that Romania's revolution and overthrow of Ceausescu was especially violent as far as Eastern Bloc revolutions went, ending with the public execution of Ceausescu and his wife (I'm not checking my facts here, but I don't think I'm far off), so saying it was "calm and beautiful" seems like it might be kind of bold and maybe even a bit antagonistic? My sense is that, I guess cuz I'm always looking for this kind of thing, just as the whole movie was set in this small out of the way town, this description of the revolution as being "calm and beautiful" is meant to describe the actual environment around the speaker at the time of the revolution, emphasizing that this immediate environment around him--the calm and the snow and the beauty--was more real to him than the violent events going on in Bucharest.)

Also, I really thought, at first, the women at the beginning were maids, since they were all so industriously setting about the housework while the men lazily wandered around their apartments waking up. I have no idea, knowing little about actual Romanian culture, if this was intentionally exaggerated for comedic effect or if this was meant to just be a matter-of-fact portrayal of the way most husband and wife households work.

Days of Heaven

I love Malick. So much that I was kind of shocked after watching this to realize that he's only made four films, and that this is the last film of his that I hadn't watched yet. I mean, I kind of already knew that, but somehow the fact just didn't feel right. Anyway, I wish I could see this in a theater someday. Everything anyone says about the cinematography being amazing is true. It is.

It occurs to me as I'm writing this that part of why I felt like I'd watched a lot more Malick than actually exists is because I was forgetting that I've watched a lot of David Gordon Green's films, and his approach to film-making is to try to make more Malick films. I really can't distinguish between their films, I think, except by being aware of who made what. I feel like I should probably back off my Malick worship until I can tell the difference between his stuff and the stuff of his followers (followers? worshippers? acolytes? copiers?).

As I explained to Elliot, I really don't understand why so many people find Malick boring. I mean, I understand that it's because there's not a lot of dialogue and little plot and stuff, but I get kind of exhilarated watching his films cuz they're just wall-to-wall gorgeous. So I don't really understand how people don't respond to that.

More than "The New World," which is the other most recent Malick film I've seen, the plot seemed really tight in this movie, actually. It was really skeletal, but the scenes that advanced the plot did so incredibly efficiently, often with just a half a line of dialogue. In the end, though, I think kind of because of that swiftly moving plot, I felt like it was kind of short. I definitely wanted it to be longer, with more room to breathe. Which probably makes me very weird, I guess.

Kiss Me Deadly

Holy shit!

I cannot believe I didn't know about this movie. I can't believe I sat on it for so long, either (I got it in the mail from Netflix several weeks ago, maybe over a month ago, and just didn't get around to watching it...) The Netflix description on their little sleeve says:

"Shortly after sleazy detective Mike Hammer picks up a scantily clad hitchhiker, his car is forced over a cliff. He awakens from unconsciousness to find his passenger dead -- but it wasn't the fall that killed her. As Hammer sets out to uncover the woman's deadly secret and find her unknown assassins, he ignores explicit signs that he should mind his own business. This classic film noir was adapted from Mickey Spillane's novel by the same name."

Well, I guess that's not technically wrong in any way, but wow does it undersell the movie. In a way I suppose I'm kind of glad that I didn't really know what to expect when I went into it, because I probably wouldn't have been quite as floored by it, but how is it that I've never seen superlatives being thrown around w/r/t to this movie before?

Anyway, even before the ending it's amazing. Hammer is such a total sleazeball, and the way every woman just throws herself at him is almost surreal, especially with his complete lack of interest it. And there was actually a lot of really well-written dialogue throughout, mostly being spoken by women. And. And. And.

Okay, I don't really have a lot to say about this right now, except that I think that lots of parts of this movie must have been the source for various scenes in Lost Highway, and there were shots from this movie being watched in the background throughout Southland Tales, so apparently the movies known in certain circles.

I want to buy it.

The Long Goodbye

I absolutely loved this movie. Robert Altman seems to be a frustratingly mixed bag. This movie in incredible, and from what I remember I liked Nashville a lot, but it's been years since I saw that. Three Women was okay, but not even close to this, I think. Short Cuts was kind of interesting, but not only in a TV movie on a Sunday afternoon kind of way.

The camera is almost never still in this movie, but it's not jerky the way non-stationary cameras usually are on contemporary movies. The camera floats around outside of every scene. It's beautiful. I especially liked the way the camera sometimes would float backwards out of the scene, to the point that the actors seemed to be performing in the background, although there was nothing in the foreground. It's such a weird little touch that I can think of very few movies doing, and it would be really hard to do it, I think, without it becoming annoying. Maybe a lot of people would find it annoying here, too, but I, obviously, loved it.

Elliot Gould is really what makes the movie, though. His performance just might be one of my favorite film performances ever. The way he basically mumbles every line, to the point that it sometimes doesn't seem possible that the other characters actually hear anything he says. The effect of that little quirk is the viewer feels closer to Marlowe than any of the other characters, because it is almost like we're getting to hear his private thoughts--without any voiceover narration or any actual private thoughts being aired.

The cat in the first scene really acted like it lived in that house. I wonder how they did that. Was it actually the cat of the house? The cat also seemed really familiar with Elliot Gould, which makes me wonder if it was Gould's cat, if that was Gould's house. I doubt it, but however they did it, the cat looked really naturally at home, which I think is kind of amazing.

My favorite shot in the whole film came when the husband and wife were talking to each other and they sent Marlowe outside. So the scene is their discussion, which you see through the giant window, and in the reflection of the window you can see Marlowe strolling around on the beach, throwing stones or whatever. It is really a beautiful shot. It did seem a little out of place, though, only because it's the only time in the movie, I think, where there's a significant amount of time spent with Marlowe not as the focus of the scene, or not really present. There are small moments of that throughout, so it's not like it violates any precedent really, but the length and seeming significance of the shot did seem sort of out of place. The shot was so pretty, though, that it didn't really matter.

The chicks, though, who live in the apartment across the way from Marlowe, seemed like a total misstep by Altman. They were far enough outside the realm of normal human behavior that they bordered on surreal, which made them seem as if they must be there for some kind of symbolic purpose, but I don't think they really were supposed to be. I assume that simply the weird surreal thing is what Altman was going for, but they just didn't really bring anything to the film aside from the funny couple of lines by the guy who was supposed to be following Marlowe.

Also, from a plot standpoint, Marlowe tracking down his old friend in Mexico seemed closure enough. The fact that Marlowe then shot him was really jarring, and frankly I think it shouldn't have happened. Based on the little bit of the interview with Altman I watched, I assume this was supposed to be Marlowe's ultimate giving in to the new morality or lack thereof. It almost seemed like some sort of following of the dictum that the main character of a story must be a protagonist, which means he must undergo some kind of change. But the change seemed completely forced. It was not consistent with Marlowe as he was at any other point in the film. It seemed kind of like adding an exclamation point tacked on the end of an ellipsis. I have this idea that that's the sort of thing you have to deal with in Altman films, though: sometimes really misguided things put in that he probably thought were really smart or cool but are actually just kind of stupid.