dir. Babbar Subhash
India, 1983
WONDERFUL Bollywood film about the trials and tribulations of Jimmy, a street-kid from Mumbai who becomes a star!
Great bad editing, music editing, acting, camera work, great great music. MIA sampled parts of it:
This was my fave:
Monday 10 January 2011
Mammoth
dir. Lukas Moodysson
USA, 2009
Stars Michelle Williams and Gael Garcia Bernal.
This film appeared as if Moodysson had been given themes - sex trafficing, Western economic imperialism/exploitation, banality of consumerism, lack of family/time etc - and had a bit of a freak out and clumsily put them together. This film was BAD, but there were moments of accidental (and totally not down to Moodysson's choices, I don't think) power - like the cut from Williams opening the garage-sized fridge in her SoHo loft to the tiny Phillipines kitchen of her nanny's family. That is a vulgar fact and maybe actually was helped by its communication in the clumsy vulgar way that Moodysson does it - to make it subtle is to misunderstand the very nature of the thing you are trying to communicate, which is quite possibly the least subtle, most vulgar thing possible: people have a lot and others have not much at all.
The film was full of these moments, making it a very strange proposition indeed. It really was BAD, don't get me wrong, but it was bad in a very, VERY odd way. The weird spiritualistic mammoth/elephant metaphor running through it, complete with ominous-sounding droney music; the first cut to the nanny's boys growing up in the Phillipines, when you realised that as well as a semi-Lost in Translation it was also a semi-Babel; the bemusing choice of Williams' character's profession (a ER doctor) when the seeming point of this couple's existence in the film was to show the vacuousness of Western life. The strange non-relationship that Williams' and Bernal's characters had - no amount of time was spent establishing what it was like, so one got the impression it wasn't that bad not that good either, and one wondered that in a better film this relationship would have been fleshed out more but also maybe in the process too-determined, too causal, too subtle, really, thus making it less realistic, that maybe the point of this relationship was that it was not "in crisis" nor "perfect".
Perhaps "not subtle, but in which clumsiness performs the same functions as subtle" would be a good way to describe this odd film. Perhaps not. Either way, Lilya 4-Ever is MUCH better.
USA, 2009
Stars Michelle Williams and Gael Garcia Bernal.
This film appeared as if Moodysson had been given themes - sex trafficing, Western economic imperialism/exploitation, banality of consumerism, lack of family/time etc - and had a bit of a freak out and clumsily put them together. This film was BAD, but there were moments of accidental (and totally not down to Moodysson's choices, I don't think) power - like the cut from Williams opening the garage-sized fridge in her SoHo loft to the tiny Phillipines kitchen of her nanny's family. That is a vulgar fact and maybe actually was helped by its communication in the clumsy vulgar way that Moodysson does it - to make it subtle is to misunderstand the very nature of the thing you are trying to communicate, which is quite possibly the least subtle, most vulgar thing possible: people have a lot and others have not much at all.
The film was full of these moments, making it a very strange proposition indeed. It really was BAD, don't get me wrong, but it was bad in a very, VERY odd way. The weird spiritualistic mammoth/elephant metaphor running through it, complete with ominous-sounding droney music; the first cut to the nanny's boys growing up in the Phillipines, when you realised that as well as a semi-Lost in Translation it was also a semi-Babel; the bemusing choice of Williams' character's profession (a ER doctor) when the seeming point of this couple's existence in the film was to show the vacuousness of Western life. The strange non-relationship that Williams' and Bernal's characters had - no amount of time was spent establishing what it was like, so one got the impression it wasn't that bad not that good either, and one wondered that in a better film this relationship would have been fleshed out more but also maybe in the process too-determined, too causal, too subtle, really, thus making it less realistic, that maybe the point of this relationship was that it was not "in crisis" nor "perfect".
Perhaps "not subtle, but in which clumsiness performs the same functions as subtle" would be a good way to describe this odd film. Perhaps not. Either way, Lilya 4-Ever is MUCH better.
Le Deuxieme Souffle (Second Wind)
dir. Jean-Pierre Melville
France, 1966
Great piece of Melville cool, lots of macs, hats, guns held at right angles to the body. A good heist scene in the chilly scrub of hills above Marseille, and a strange pronouncement on the police's moral code in a title card before the film starts. And Lino Ventura's stubby face...
France, 1966
Great piece of Melville cool, lots of macs, hats, guns held at right angles to the body. A good heist scene in the chilly scrub of hills above Marseille, and a strange pronouncement on the police's moral code in a title card before the film starts. And Lino Ventura's stubby face...
Wednesday 5 January 2011
Partir (Leaving)
dir. Catherine Corsini
France, 2009
Kristin Scott Thomas in impressive form as a bored bourgeois wife to a doctor husband who is the sort of man who thinks of his wife as part of a portfolio of what makes him a successful/upstanding/etc man who has an impulsive affair with a Catalan builder, which soon turns into more: they fall in love and she leaves her increasingly odd/threatening/violent husband, which in turn leads him to increasingly baroque forms of punishment/attempts to get her to come home, including getting his friend the mayor to arrest the builder...
Particularly impressive in Scott Thomas's performance are the moments when she's alone, in a park or in her car, where she giggles or smiles to herself, the excitement and naughtiness of her affair making her appear as a teenager...
The tension ratchets up (despite, as the Guardian pointed out, the film begins and ends with a bang of a gun, though to be fair we hear and don't see who the shot is aimed at) to the point where we see who gets shot...
Rather a good companion piece to the very good I've Loved You So Long, with Kristin Scott Thomas again given the sort of well-written role she wouldn't get in the UK or Hollywood. Some have thought this film more emotionally raw than I've Loved You... but I'm not sure. This
is perhaps less hard-hitting for being stretched across the whole film, whereas I've Loved You...'s emotional hit comes right at the end.
France, 2009
Kristin Scott Thomas in impressive form as a bored bourgeois wife to a doctor husband who is the sort of man who thinks of his wife as part of a portfolio of what makes him a successful/upstanding/etc man who has an impulsive affair with a Catalan builder, which soon turns into more: they fall in love and she leaves her increasingly odd/threatening/violent husband, which in turn leads him to increasingly baroque forms of punishment/attempts to get her to come home, including getting his friend the mayor to arrest the builder...
Particularly impressive in Scott Thomas's performance are the moments when she's alone, in a park or in her car, where she giggles or smiles to herself, the excitement and naughtiness of her affair making her appear as a teenager...
The tension ratchets up (despite, as the Guardian pointed out, the film begins and ends with a bang of a gun, though to be fair we hear and don't see who the shot is aimed at) to the point where we see who gets shot...
Rather a good companion piece to the very good I've Loved You So Long, with Kristin Scott Thomas again given the sort of well-written role she wouldn't get in the UK or Hollywood. Some have thought this film more emotionally raw than I've Loved You... but I'm not sure. This
is perhaps less hard-hitting for being stretched across the whole film, whereas I've Loved You...'s emotional hit comes right at the end.
Monday 3 January 2011
The Front
dir. Martin Ritt
USA, 1975
Hitherto unknown (to me) film starring Woody Allen as a front for a group of TV writers blacklisted during the McCarthy era. Unexpectedly stirring to see Allen tell the HUAC committee to "go fuck yourselves"...
USA, 1975
Hitherto unknown (to me) film starring Woody Allen as a front for a group of TV writers blacklisted during the McCarthy era. Unexpectedly stirring to see Allen tell the HUAC committee to "go fuck yourselves"...
Departures
dir. Yôjirô Takita
Japan, 2008
Rather OTT story of an ex-chellist who moves back to his country home and becomes a "professional encoffiner" as the subtitles dutifully told us, and deals with his troubled relationship with his father...
Japan, 2008
Rather OTT story of an ex-chellist who moves back to his country home and becomes a "professional encoffiner" as the subtitles dutifully told us, and deals with his troubled relationship with his father...
Heartbreaker
dir. Pascal Chaumeil
France, 2010
Very silly but fun film with the lovely Romain Duris and Vanessa Paradis about a group of professional relationship breaker-uppers. Guess what happens when Duris's seductor-for-hire meets Vanessa Paradis's rich girl who is about to get married to Egg from This Life...
France, 2010
Very silly but fun film with the lovely Romain Duris and Vanessa Paradis about a group of professional relationship breaker-uppers. Guess what happens when Duris's seductor-for-hire meets Vanessa Paradis's rich girl who is about to get married to Egg from This Life...
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