criterionforum.org

colinr0380 wrote:A really nice talk through of Spielberg's A.I. at the Shooting Down Pictures blog.

That's a brilliant dialogue. A.I. was already definitely making my list, but this adds a lot of fuel to the fire.

domino harvey wrote:

colinr0380 wrote:I like that feeling of the film too and those slips in and out of consciousness (or persona) as the world suddenly twists around characters who have been 'bumped off the rails' of proscribed behaviour and they end up 'paralysed' (the most obvious example being the early drugging!) while the world remakes itself into something darker and more threatening around them - then the characters are thrown back into this new configuration. The re-orientation they continually have to do after each of these breaks and reconstitutions (recontextualisations?) is part of what I find so entertaining about the film.

And it also makes the use of the gun in a pivotal scene near the end all the more shocking as I was expecting that action to have been omitted somehow, yet this sort of becomes the exception that proves the rule, and a final sanity destroying break with the possibility of contact with a 'normal world', except through a computer screen.

I like your reading and I wish I had that absurdly thick double disc Palm set here with me instead of in storage, because now I want to revisit it!

I just watched this and would agree with colin's assessment as well. I found it interesting how each of the three primary characters - Diane, Herve, and Elise - become much darker as the film progresses and what starts out as a tale of corporate espionage with undertones of the relationship of sex and technology eventually puts the sex and technology relationship to the central focus of the film.

Spoiler

I think ther most important line of the film comes during Diane's dinner with Herve, where she says that nobody sees anybody, they only watch them. I'm still twisting my head around its meaning within the film. It seems rather apparent since with the subject of pornography, but also ties into Diane being unaware of how much more in control Hevri and Elise were - much more so in terms of Elise.

As for the ending, I think people will disagree with me here, but I loved how it took the Hell Fire Club and put it in full view - it was shown and hinted at throughout the film but never in an overt way until the last fifteen or so minutes, by which I mean while there is a scene where Diane does go to the site it is done so in a sort of teasing way and once Karen appears the film changes its focus back to Diane and Karen, but that scene offers a glimpse of the end and plays well into Diane's quote about watching/seeing.

A film I think that will reward rewatching it, something I hope to do soon. It will certainly appear on my list. However, question about the Palm release, I bought it on clearance at an fye ($8!) but is there some booklet that comes with it since mine didn't have one and it must have been pretty substantial to fill that case!

This post is about 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days – DON'T READ IT IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE FILM!

GringoTex wrote:Then what were her reasons for going to the dinner party? She has a new boyfriend who she fucks and who gives her money. He's quite the asshole. And she leaves her best friend bleeding in bed to make an appearance at the birthday of the boyfriend's mother who she's never met. I just can't grasp the motivation, other than to titillate the audience.

He gives her money – only, as far as I remember, on this one occasion - because she needs it to pay for Gabita’s abortion and the hotel room they’re staying in. You make it sound as though she’s a gold-digger, for which I don’t think there’s any evidence. To sum up their relationship as ‘she fucks him’ is not only reductive but inaccurate: in their first scene together, he promises her they’ll go back to his room after a few minutes at the party, which may well mean that he intends to ‘fuck’ her, and that this is what he considers their relationship to be essentially about (to be fair to him, a lot of students are like this, but it doesn’t help that the actors are a little old for their parts); and when they actually do retire to his room, it becomes clear from their conversation that if anyone is ‘fucking’ anyone, it’s him ‘fucking’ her, and not necessarily paying any attention to her request that he not come inside her. There's little or no evidence that she enjoys this aspect of their relationship. It’s strongly implied (if I read this correctly) that she has had to have an abortion before now, and this may well have been due to his irresponsibility as well as hers – but of course, she is the one who has to deal with the consequences, as she knows that despite his veneer of sympathy and understanding, he basically doesn’t want this stuff to intrude on his comfortable existence. (I’m being reductive as well here; I don’t think the boyfriend is just an ‘asshole’, and one of the strengths of this film is that it leaves a lot unsaid about the various relationships it depicts.)

So why does she go to the party? Because she cares about, if not loves, her boyfriend and she knows it’s important to him that she meet his parents. She does not go there to fuck him, or to ensure that he keeps fucking her.

More importantly, perhaps, she has a strong sense of her own inferiority in the eyes of her boyfriend’s very middle-class family. The mother’s made her a meringue; she’s expected to be there; if she doesn’t go, these people will think even less of her than they already do. She goes partly out of resentment, in a way, but more because she’s cowed into it. (This is incredibly true to life, from my own experience; the sheer power of the inferiority complex to get people to do things they don’t want to should never be underestimated.) When she gets to the party, she tries to call Gabita, but puts the phone down as soon as the boyfriend’s mother sees her. When she hears the phone ringing, she knows it could be Gabita, but doesn’t answer. This has partly to do with her relationship with her friend – which I’ll come onto in a second – but it's also about not wanting to lose face at the party. Even though there could be an emergency on the other end of the phone, the sheer social embarrassment is enough to keep Otilia glued to her seat – and it’s clear throughout the dinner party scene that she’s walking on eggshells with these people, who can be counted on to shoot her down for the least indiscretion (indiscretions include smoking and drinking in front of her elders, if I remember rightly?). The scene also shows how easily a situation like Otilia’s and Gabita’s can be swept under the carpet; etiquette alone is enough to stop Otilia from addressing that situation.

As to her abandonment of her friend… She’s probably – no, definitely – quite resentful of Gabita, whose carelessness and irresponsibility at all stages of this affair have brought about nightmarish consequences for both of them. She probably wants to teach her a bit of a lesson, and if this makes her seem a petty and vengeful – good. People are like that. They go to extraordinary lengths to help each other and then make up for it by leaving them in the lurch. If you've never had, or witnessed, this kind of relationship with anyone, then you are a lucky man.

Otilia is also traumatised after her quasi-rape experience; maybe if she were in her right mind she would stay, but she can hardly be expected to be in her right mind. Nor is it surprising that she would rather be anywhere but in that room for a little while. And I would suggest that, after this experience, and considering what we learn about her relationship with her boyfriend at the party, she goes there in part because she really really wants to give him a piece of her mind and dump him, which she effectively does. During her conversation with him, she says something like, ‘At least I could rely on Gabita to help me’, which suggests a solidarity between the two women – all the more interesting because it’s ambivalent – and also, perhaps, that Gabita did help Otilia when she needed an abortion.

What part of all this do you think is intended to titillate the audience? You seem to suggest that this has to do with the ‘fucking’ that’s going on between Otilia and her boyfriend, but we don’t see this, and the dialogue concerning it is the opposite of erotic.

GringoTex wrote:By porn, I mean titillation for its own sake. The scene where the girls completely submit to the abortionist's rape fantasy -- where he's given the stage to preach to them, lecture them, dominate them verbally, and then rape them -- I found highly objectionable. The blond is headstrong -- she fights everybody in a position of power -- and then she succumbs to this rape fantasy with barely a protest. It's not logical and no different than a porn film set-up.

I guess it should be clear from what I said above that Otilia does not fight ‘everybody’ in a position of power – in fact, does she fight anybody in a position of power? – and her submission to the abortionist’s demands is completely logical. They need his help, Gabita lied about how long she’d been pregnant, they can’t possibly raise the amount of money he’s demanding, and the only payment he will now accept is sex. With both of them. So they’ve got to. Gabita resists this, but Otilia, ever the realist, knows that there is no alternative.

You’re reading way too much into the doctor’s character. Earlier you called him a masochist, which I don’t think is indicated in the film; nor did I really get the impression that he got a whole lot of sexual pleasure out of shouting at these two women. He seems more impatient than anything else. From his point of view, his request is totally reasonable, and these are just two clients refusing to see sense, wasting his time. After all, he risks being put away for murder – why shouldn’t they just give him what he wants? There was an argument some time ago on this board about the ‘rape’ aspect of the film. But it’s not rape, and we don’t know whether his is a ‘rape fantasy’. These women need him to perform an abortion, and have to prostitute themselves to get it. A rapist is scary enough, but can be written off as sick, psychotic, compulsive, etc – this doctor is a respectable family man conducting a business transaction. The scene is all the more awful because the women have to choose to agree to his terms.

Now I’m not well-versed in porn film scenarios, but I’m guessing this one would be pretty hardcore ‘niche appeal’ stuff. It’s not titillating, except by the most twisted stretch of the imagination. It’s scary and horrible and inevitable – and totally logical.

GringoTex wrote:At least in a porn film, you only have 5 minutes of set-up before the money-shot. This film gives you 45 minutes of set-up and then cowards away from the money-shot.

First you criticise the film for being ‘no different than porn’, then you complain that it doesn’t even fulfil the most basic criteria of pornography. It would be fair enough to say that Mungiu ‘cowards out’ by not showing the sex, and that this is somehow irresponsible; indeed, when Gabita hangs around outside the hotel room, this is (I think) the only moment in the film where we don’t see things from Otilia’s point of view, so it breaks one of the film’s guiding principles.

One reason the sex isn’t shown is precisely that it would have seemed exploitative, even pornographic. Another, more important one, has to do with the film’s overall aesthetic. I’ve seen very few films that are so good at advancing the plot while making it seem as though nothing is happening. The story told in this film could easily have been the basis for a dour little thriller, which was what I expected it to be, but instead there’s a wonderful feeling of inaction and inertia to the whole thing – the dinner party scene, of course, suggests a political dimension to this atmosphere, but for me it was just a brilliant evocation of what life is really like. Lots of films show nothing happening and call it ‘life’; in this one, a lot happens, but almost imperceptibly, un-dramatically. (I know the scene with the doctor is quite dramatic, but it still has that same directionless, non-narrativised (is that a word?) quality).

GringoTex wrote:As for the political implications of this film: you get a close-up of the fetus staring at the camera but nothing of the sexual pleasure that led to it. It's all very chaste. It's a Republican wet dream.

I’m not sure what your point is. Are you saying that by not showing the sexual pleasure, Mungiu is being overly (and polemically) negative and judgemental about abortion? In any case, I have to say I’m not too interested in, or knowledgeable about, the political side of the film. Mungiu himself has suggested that Romanian directors of his generation have the advantage over their predecessors that they can look back at Ceaucescu and the Romania of the 1980s with a sense of detachment, and tell stories from that period (this is based on a true one) objectively, without polemic. I guess many would say this is a polemical film, but to me it’s just an incredibly powerful, authentic and human story.

As for the shot of the foetus – why not? Gabita’s had an abortion, the foetus is lying on the bathroom floor, Otilia has to dispose of it so she has to look at it – why not show us what Otilia sees? The mere presence of this shot doesn’t mean we have to slap a silly ‘Republican wet dream’ label on it. This is a film that shows rather than telling, and the problem I have with your take on it (and Armond White’s) is that it assumes a political intent behind the story which is actually far from clear-cut. Criticise it on aesthetic grounds, by all means – say that it’s boring or badly acted or technically incompetent, whatever – but it seems to me that if you take issue with it primarily on the basis of its politics, you’re very quickly going to lose sight of what’s actually up there on screen, and will eventually end up talking to yourself.

Murdoch wrote:I found it interesting how each of the three primary characters - Diane, Herve, and Elise - become much darker as the film progresses and what starts out as a tale of corporate espionage with undertones of the relationship of sex and technology eventually puts the sex and technology relationship to the central focus of the film.

Spoiler

I think ther most important line of the film comes during Diane's dinner with Herve, where she says that nobody sees anybody, they only watch them. I'm still twisting my head around its meaning within the film. It seems rather apparent since with the subject of pornography, but also ties into Diane being unaware of how much more in control Hevri and Elise were - much more so in terms of Elise.

As for the ending, I think people will disagree with me here, but I loved how it took the Hell Fire Club and put it in full view - it was shown and hinted at throughout the film but never in an overt way until the last fifteen or so minutes, by which I mean while there is a scene where Diane does go to the site it is done so in a sort of teasing way and once Karen appears the film changes its focus back to Diane and Karen, but that scene offers a glimpse of the end and plays well into Diane's quote about watching/seeing.

Sadly I can't answer the question about the Palm disc - I have the older, poorer quality Lionsgate one.

This film would make an excellent companion piece to Videodrome. Watching it again I’m struck by all the references to voyeurism (especially in those moments where we have seemingly unimportant cutaways to characters waiting for lifts and so on where we the audience are the only ones watching them. It plays into a CCTV'd world as well I suppose, where even the most uninteresting transitional moments of life are now captured on video monitors) and agree on that quoted line being an important one – we watch others put on various ‘performances’ (from business meeting civility through to dress up S&M) but do not really care to understand their motivations or feelings, only what they can do for us.

Some other things I liked were that the druggings in the final act as Diane is transported further on in the 'game' tie in nicely with the early chat between Karen and Elise after the first plane ride about taking Valerian pills to get through the long trip. Everyone’s drugging themselves just to get by even before it becomes part of a nefarious organisation’s entry procedure!

It would also seem to be a film paen to the glorious but cold hotel lobby. There are a number of extreme wide shots of characters walking through various high class hotels, transitioning from one space to another and leaving few physical traces behind them.

Perhaps my favourite sequence is the final one in Japan, when the Japanese assistant Kaori is shown showering in the bathtub after a night spent with Herve against the early morning Tokyo backdrop. Then she again walks out through the hotel lobby and off into the new day. It is both a sordid and strangely empowering moment.

That seems to be the central theme of the film: powerful versus submissive depictions of women, and the idea the obvious dominant trappings of power (powers suits and various other forms of uniform; the use of weapons) may actually conceal more passive versions of women, while quieter seemingly more submissive and fragile types have a greater hidden strength.

Spoiler

It is interesting to note that Diane herself watches the two different types of anime – the first ‘old school’ 2D one is full of classical ‘young girl’ characters screaming out as they get tied up or tentacle raped, tears streaming from their eyes as they have various orifices probed. Of course Herve responds most strongly to that one!

Then there is the ‘new style’ 3D anime, which has little to do with sex in conventional (or even tentacle based!) terms but instead features a feisty, more grown up figure using a sword to cut zombies in half, all while in lingerie with obviously far more attention paid to the breast bouncing physics than on any other part of the animation! This then segues into various other ‘empowering’ versions of women, but empowering within an extremely narrow, and kind of patronising, range. Diane is given a reaction shot in which she responds seemingly more favourably to this second type of animation.

Interestingly Diane seems to be bouncing between these two superficial modes of representation: submissive and defensive or feisty and powerful. Neither role seems to quite fit her, which is perhaps the most telling aspect. But she is trapped far more than any other character is – they continue to reveal hidden depths, while she just seems more at sea with every new twist.

Which brings us to the ending – people (or more correctly the marketers of products) do not want purely submissive women any more. There needs to be a little fight before they are taken, which makes the pleasure of the taking greater. Which is why all the women getting tortured on the website are clothed as powerful females like Storm from the X-Men or Lara Croft. I couldn’t quite see the photos Diane looks at when she eventually gets leather clad but they seemed like they could be Diana Rigg in The Avengers.

So we want her to escape and have an exciting, empowering chase, but at the same time we do not really want her to truly escape because that would be the end of our fun. She still has to be under our control.

Then there is that brilliant coda where we finally get to see the fabled consumer that all of this energy, shady business dealing and murderous activity has been performed in the service of – and he’s a teenage suburban kid just fooling around half watching the screen while he does his homework at the same time! But he's got his father's Gold Card, so what the heck, money's money and the show must go on!

The Palm case didn't come with a booklet, making its largeness all the more ridiculous

The entire time I watched this I was thinking of Videodrome, however I think Assayas approaches the subject with bemusement and more condemnation:

Spoiler

Notice how the only sex scene in the film is the violent rape, and also when both Diane and Elise appear naked in the film they are either covered by bedsheets or shown at a camera angle so as not to "reveal" anything, while the nudity in the animated pornography is shown in full graphic display. Assayas seems to be teasing the audience who after seeing the animated porn expect a good sex scene between actual people to take place, but instead we are given a rape that ends with Diane killing Herve. While Herve and Diane stroke and gently rub one another while clothed and act the part of loving partners, Herve becomes violent once they are nude and forces himself on Diane, while in Videodrome the sex scenes are only violent to fulfill the fantasies of both parties involved - Nikki asking Max to burn her with the cigarette.

I like what you said about powerful versus submissive depictions of women, and Assayas plays with this idea in a great way. Elise, at first the frustrated secretary becomes the dominant manipulator, while Diane goes from powerful company executive to the pawn of both Elise and Karen, while Karen asks as a mysterious figure who disappears in the first segment only to appear sparingly throughout the film as a sort of all-seeing ghost.

As for Kaori, Assayas uses her to act as another powerplay between Diane and Herve, Diane uses her to assert control over Herve when Diane says she slept with Kaori, and Kaori thus becomes part of the play for power that has been going on throughout the film even though she isn't even present in the scene.

And the photos on the floor were of Diana Rigg, which added this perverse humor to the film of seeing her run away dressed as one of the Avengers and steal a truck, something right out of an action movie featuring a sexed-up femme fatale!

In the end Diane is shown as the Storm or Lara Croft of the film, she is presented as the strong female heroine who maneuvers herself through the realms of corporate espionage, even shoots someone, steals a car, gets into a car chase! So she herself plays the part of the independent heroine who could act as a fantasy for those who visit Hell Fire Club.

Wow, writing about the film has just made this film grown on me even more, and I already liked it! Splitting this off into its own thread may be a good idea if this discussion continues.

edit: thanks, domino. Jeez, what a ludicrous package then!

I think you got it right for the most part, Sloper, but I think you have to balance Otilia's scene with the phone at her boyfriend's parents' house with the fact that Otilia goes through all this just for Gabita. She could have given up then. That's where I think Vasiliu's fatal performance flaw is - the film shows us Otilia's unwavering devotion to her friendship with Gabita, but Vasiliu never gives us a clue what makes Gabita so magnetic to, or such a 'good friend' to, Otilia. There should have been some charisma there, or some rapport, but Gabita was just a blank slate.

GringoTex wrote:

colinr0380 wrote:A really nice talk through of Spielberg's A.I. at the Shooting Down Pictures blog.

That's a brilliant dialogue. A.I. was already definitely making my list, but this adds a lot of fuel to the fire.

This is something that only clicked with me due to the coincidence of it playing on television tonight, but I think that the pairings of the two sci-fi films (A.I. and Minority Report) followed by the two Tom Hanks films (Catch Me If You Can and The Terminal) in Speilberg's chronology slightly obscures the way that Catch Me If You Can works best as an interesting companion to A.I.

Catch Me If You Can (which is the other Spielberg film that I would attempt to defend for the decade) also features a young man who takes cues from his environment but instead of remaining a vulnerable child in search of love, he instead exposes the adult world as a sort of confidence trick, with an emphasis on the ‘confidence’! He also has a surrogate father figure to frustrate, upset and grudgingly earn the respect of with his individuality and tenaciousness in Hanks’ policeman. Perhaps with Catch set in the past and A.I. in the future there is the sense that the past is rose-tinted while the future is bleak, which might be a facile approach to analysing them, but they certainly seem to make a good contrasting pair.

Cargo 200 – Some other people have alluded to the rewatching problem with this leg of the project. Almost all of the films on my shortlist I’ve seen only once, generally because I’d already seen them in optimal conditions (i.e. 35mm) and, even if I’d picked up the DVD, hadn’t revisited them, since I’d rather see something new. Looking back at the shortlist now, there are a lot of films that I suspect will have dropped in my estimation when I see them again, just as I know there are others that will climb. I happen to have see Eugene Green’s Le pont des arts three times, for various reasons, and each time it’s more impressive. My top-ranking Denis films for the decade, L’Intrus and Vendredi soir, are, probably not coincidentally, the two I’ve seen more than once.

So when I decided to watch this film I didn’t know which way it would go, and it seemed a sitter for radical re-evaluation, either up or down. When I saw it the first time, I was impressed and somewhat stunned, but much of the film’s impact was strictly down to its subject matter and I wasn’t sure if I’d seen a great film or just an especially impactful one. Second time through (and having seen Balabanov’s subsequent Morphia, which is a great film and will be making my list), I was surprised to be in about the same position as the first time.

This is one of the grimmest films I’ve seen, and it’s briskly matter-of-fact in its grimness, shifting from character to character without pausing to evoke sympathy or pity (horror, yes), but relentlessly spiralling down into the darkness with each shift. You can see early on that things are going to go from bad to worse, but Balabanov plays with genre in such a way as to keep us guessing about just how things are going to turn nasty.

The film starts out like a Eastern European domestic drama set in the recent past, possibly circling around a generation gap, rather like something by Jan Hřebejk. Then the (80s) Afghanistan war appears as a referent, and we suspect some kind of veiled commentary on contemporary events. Then the narrative splits into parallel strands, and we think we’re in for one of those convenient irony-fuelled narrative spaghetti junctions all about fate, or globalisation, or something - though Balabanov’s cruel trick is that the parallel narratives never interlock in a reassuring or resolving manner, just lots of blind near-misses (they’re divergent and entangled rather than convergent). Then we find ourselves involved in an unlikely theological debate at a backwoods still – Beckettian absurdism, anyone? Wait a minute, that guy leaves and a couple of teenagers take his place: maybe it’s a 4 Months 3 Weeks style period political paranoia flick? Nope, it’s a Lynchian thriller. Or a very dark fairy tale. Oh no - it’s actually a Texas Chainsaw Massacre-style horror film. Or is it?

By this point we’re only about half an hour in, and the badness has only just started to take its grip. Ultimately, the film ends up being all of those things and more. Fundamentally, it’s all about picking the scab on the everyday horrors of the twilight of the USSR, and, if you’d forgotten the opening title, the closing one reminds you that the nightmarish, outrageous sequence of events you’ve just witnessed all actually took place in 1984.

The film is ruthlessly efficient and deftly assembled, built upon a sturdy network of visual repetitions and echoes (the same grimy industrial vistas seen from different characters’ windows, the same journeys taken by different characters at different times), but without any of that patterning taking the form of self-conscious flourishes.

There are no heroes in the film, just villains and victims, but the film’s view of character is interesting in the way its many villains encompass the full range of moral culpability, from the merest blind-eye-turning to Aleksey Poluyan giving what might be the decade’s most chilling portrait of unregenerate evil.

I still don’t know if this film is going to end up in my top 50, but, like the last time, I know it’s going to burrow into my head and refuse to leave for months.

Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow – This is surely on the shortlist of the most visually compelling movies of the decade. It’s almost a compendium of Angelopoulos’ previous features and he constructs a number of sequences that are outrageously indelible. It’s very consciously done, you see them coming and just have to ride the wave. There are numerous examples of dream-like mise en scene (often involving large expanses of water) and gorgeous Breughelesque shots that document the movements of dozens of figures through their settlements. I’d love to have seen this in a good 35mm print.

The film also exhibits from time to time the clunky storytelling that mars Angelopoulos’ other recent films. There are three scenes of horrendously artificial expository dialogue. One hits within the first ten minutes (two women go over stuff they both already know for out benefit: “You know, it’s a good thing that. . .” “Oh, but what about when. . .”) and you fear that the whole film is going to be hobbled with this kind of nonsense. Another follows soon after, but then the worrying tendency vanishes until the end of the film, when one of the main characters conveniently fills in a whole lot of plot points while babbling in a supposed delirium. It’s particularly egregious, since the scenes she’s annotating have just unfolded before us in a series of magnificent ellipses which reminded us that Angelopoulos used to be one of the grand masters of oblique storytelling. At least the blatant, over-explained symbolism of Ulysses’ Gaze and Eternity and a Day is largely absent, partly because the film’s format – a 20th century fable - is quite simple and stripped-down. That fable-like aspect also means that the bland leads are not as big a problem as they could have been.

I’m keen to see The Dust of Time now, but that Europudding cast makes me fear the worst. The solid starless Greekness of The Weeping Meadow helped keep it in the realm of his best films, it seemed to me.

Thumbsucker – I picked this up for a couple of bucks having enjoyed the soundtrack album (which I also picked up for a couple of bucks, several years back). Innoffensive, I guess, but while watching it I couldn’t help thinking of the opportunity cost of spending an hour and a half with this film rather than, I don’t know, filing my toenail clippings. As I feared, it’s the kind of generic indie quirkfest (with slumming actors, which seems to be de rigeur) that I’ve been trying to avoid for most of the decade.

Saint-Cyr – I only knew Patricia Mazuy’s work from her contribution to the “Tous les garcons et les filles de leur age” series, Travolta et moi (one of the lesser entries, to be sure), and missed this on the assumption that nine out of ten French costume dramas are missable. For my partner, the proportion is roughly inverse, so I’ve spent most of the decade being chastised for missing a rare gem.

The film is indeed worth tracking down. It looks great, features an strong Isabelle Huppert performance and also manages the tricky feat of finding a feminist argument in historical events (rather than imposing one on it). The film revolves around a school established for the daughters of impoverished noblemen under Louis XIV, and Mazuy’s trick is to keep an eye on how the changing profile and purpose of the establishment reflected the shifting politics of the time and societal anxiety about the role of women. It skirts Devils territory when it dips into religious hysteria, but also has a bit of Picnic at Hanging Rock in there, which is an interesting mix.

The Tracey Fragments - Really outstanding and inventive visual design make this an interesting watch, but the script and direction are firmly mired in emo, woe-is-me teenage self-obsession territory. Ellen Page is definitely a capable actress but here her worst tics are on display. With a better and less shallow script and a more refined performance from Page this could have been fantastic, but as it is now it is merely a curio with really good visual and sound design.

Elephant - I thought I would hate this (I'm not a Van Sant fan), but I was very pleasantly surprised. All these highschool tropes defined by nothing but movement and the gaits of its characters. Will definitely make my list.

puxzkkx wrote:The Tracey Fragments - Really outstanding and inventive visual design make this an interesting watch, but the script and direction are firmly mired in emo, woe-is-me teenage self-obsession territory.

Spoiler

Yeah, I can't believe that whiny bitch cares so much about how her brother disappeared while she got raped in a car

domino harvey wrote:

puxzkkx wrote:The Tracey Fragments - Really outstanding and inventive visual design make this an interesting watch, but the script and direction are firmly mired in emo, woe-is-me teenage self-obsession territory.

Spoiler

Yeah, I can't believe that whiny bitch cares so much about how her brother disappeared while she got raped in a car

I was talking about the overall mood of the direction itself. The stuff that Tracey goes through in the film is traumatic, but it isn't even treated as anything that would create rational emotion in a teenage girl. The script focuses on Tracey breaking the fourth wall to talk to the audience about how "fucked up" she is - as far as I remember there were no scenes that focused on her specifically reacting, in an emotional way, to her situation (despite screaming "Sonny! Sonny!"), except maybe

Spoiler

the scene where she flees Lance's flat after killing/wounding the dealer

. McDonald just seemed more interested in surface emotion (my life suxxxxx omg lets lisn 2 evanesence lol!!11`) than in actually exploring the effect these traumas would have on his main character. In a better film, her guilt over the entire car/brother scene would have been fully explored and thought-provoking - here it seemed like something tacked on to justify McDonald's stream of tears & fears (while really having nothing to do with the main character's 'emotions' whatsoever).

I'd like to hear your thoughts on the film in more depth.

puxzkkx wrote:I'd like to hear your thoughts on the film in more depth.

Sure thing

I found the film very entertaining but, for me, the split-screen device was one of the only things in the film that adequately reflected Tracey's emotional state - for me, the script skimmed over what should have been the focus of the film (her guilt and confusion) and Page's performance didn't dig deep enough. But the visual design was great and, suprisingly, never detracted from the story. I think it had the seeds of something really, really great - and there were scenes and moments that did leave me stunned (such as the whole thing with the scene 'dissolving' into a murder of crows, and some of the small touches in earlier scenes such as Tracey's imaginings of her romance with Billy Zero), but I think the film could have completely done without the 'bus monologue', which took me out of the film entirely. For me it just didn't deliver on all levels.

I think Ellen Page is an unfairly maligned actress - her instinct for cadence and banter made her performance the best thing about "Juno" (which I hated), and she understood that character (the wit covering up insecurity, the emotion she tries hard to conceal and her complete immaturity when it comes to adult relationships) in a way that very few actresses her age would have. It's, in my opinion, a great performance - doesn't make my personal ballot but its in my Top 15 for 2007. Her work in "Hard Candy" was far too calculated and controlled, but at the age at which she made that film her poise is impressive, and it shows a talent that could be breathtaking if it isn't directed to be so brittle. And her victim in "An American Crime" is the best thing about that film... Sue me, but I think she looks good in the trailer of "Whip It!". She's a great actress but her biggest enemy is typecasting, right now. I just happen to think that "The Tracey Fragments" is one of her weaker performances.

puxzkkx wrote:The Tracey Fragments

What a coincidence- this was on StarzHD yesterday and I watched it never having heard of it before.

Aside from the movie (which was pretty bad), the whole frames conceit played like a parody of short attention span design we now see on cable news and internet sites. I didn't know whether to choose my own camera angle or choose my own adventure.

Los Muertos - Spectacular. I'm not sure I've seen a 2000s film with more integrity. He films real people in real surroundings and never once cheats his setting with his camera until the final shot. Zero psychology and zero shaky-cam. Like mana from heaven. I think the gringo critics have been misreading this film, seeing it as a Heart of Darkness journey into mysterious nature. This man is just returning to familiar home. There is no struggle against nature.

This is England - A great cast tries hard, but the direction veers towards the maudlin, the script is absurdly wordy and the entire thing is pretty rote.

GringoTex wrote:Los Muertos - Spectacular. I'm not sure I've seen a 2000s film with more integrity. He films real people in real surroundings and never once cheats his setting with his camera until the final shot. Zero psychology and zero shaky-cam. Like mana from heaven. I think the gringo critics have been misreading this film, seeing it as a Heart of Darkness journey into mysterious nature. This man is just returning to familiar home. There is no struggle against nature.

Glad you liked this, Gringo, and couldn't agree more. Fantasma is perhaps the best treatise on the (widespread) misunderstanding of Los muertos - only Vargas is prepared to sit in the dark, experience his own journey, and not worry about formulating a "psychological" response...

foggy eyes wrote: Glad you liked this, Gringo, and couldn't agree more. Fantasma is perhaps the best treatise on the (widespread) misunderstanding of Los muertos - only Vargas is prepared to sit in the dark, experience his own journey, and not worry about formulating a "psychological" response...

I'm tempted to by all four of his films off ebay for $160. This is type of contemporary cinema Criterion should be presenting, not the Oscar-nominated stuff that's going to get released anyway.

Made it halfway through Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself and, repulsed, gave up.

Lone Scherfig makes pretty much every directorial mistake possible in this film. Faking out the audience with misleading cuts in a really crude and lowbrow manner, directing her actors to speak lines rather than create characters, focusing on the "BIG PICTURE" of the story while forgetting to include details that should be intrinsic to the plot. The script is ridiculously bad, the performances are all over the place and, for a film that claims to be "celebrating the importance and sanctity of life" it fails to even realize the magnitude of what Wilbur is trying to do and actually treats his attempts in a rather flippant way - playing them for laughs most of the time. And it is probably more the fault of the writer than Sives, but never once does he seem truly depressed and the

Spoiler

"guilt over mum's death"

thing is far too reductive to explain a trend this longstanding. As far as this film is concerned, he's an everyday, ordinary, happy bloke with a strange obsessive compulsion to kill himself. These plot points aren't explored at all.

Geez, I hope An Education is better than this! Taking the films back to the store today so someone let me know if I should renew this and watch the 2nd half.

puxzkkx wrote:Made it halfway through Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself and, repulsed, gave up.

Good lord - I remember seeing this in a cinema for some reason, and it was fucking awful (or, simply, lacking anything of interest). Films like this usually disappear into the ether - I'm amazed to see it dredged it up here!

3-Iron - Holy shit this is a horrible film. Did he have to pay WKW royalties for ripping off Chungking Express?

foggy eyes wrote:

puxzkkx wrote:Made it halfway through Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself and, repulsed, gave up.

Good lord - I remember seeing this in a cinema for some reason, and it was fucking awful (or, simply, lacking anything of interest). Films like this usually disappear into the ether - I'm amazed to see it dredged it up here!

Lately I've been trying to beef up my Best Actress ballots for the 00s, and saw that Shirley Henderson got a few awards/nominations for this, so I picked it up. All of the three principals have been good elsewhere, but in this film they were completely wasted.

GringoTex wrote:3-Iron - Holy shit this is a horrible film. Did he have to pay WKW royalties for ripping off Chungking Express?

I think that's a bit of a stretch, honestly. The context, tone and significance of the home invasion motif is very different here from that in Chungking Express. Maybe I'm missing more blatant allusions to Wai, but do you care to go into more depth about why you feel it's derivative/horrible?