"Get Real" (1998) Trailer

Stumbled upon this by complete accident. My favourite moment is the attempt to muzzle the worrying homophobic tension with an inappropriate blasting of "R-E-S-P-E-C-T". Also, an Adele clone as the requisite hag. Ah, late nineties U.K. comedies! May your indifferent DVD packaging fill my shelves for years to come.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ok9u7ws6ec

Aug. 29th, 2011: "Loulou" (1980) dir. Maurice Pialat (DVD)

Rented on a whim after reading a brief discussion about Pialat - - - having no real idea of what to expect outside of said conversation and a quick glimpse of the opening 90 seconds, I was surprised at the movie's rather casual visuals. The opening shot is possibly the most engaging: a backwards-facing tracking shot that watches a pretty but withdrawn young woman stalking through a rainy Parisian street, her path directly aligned with the dark, rigid shadow of an overhead bridge. She abruptly peels off from this seemingly unshakable path, and exits the shot. Within seconds, she is at the leather-studded slacker Loulou (Depardieu)'s apartment, desperately seeking out the hungover lothario's spasmodic attention and affection. The bridge's shadow I took to be a suggestion of the echoes of a nourishing, though generally more austere, French social structure, the one that Isabelle Huppert's character, Nelly, timidly attempts to put to one side as she pursues a seemingly unexpected romance and swift engagement to Loulou, separating from her financially reliable, jealous, sub-sexual husband (Guy Marchand). Another cumulatively gorgeous piece of camerawork is the boozy handheld shot set in the club that brings together the three members of the film's central triangle as Nelly dashes off from hubby and into the arms of Loulou, who seconds before had been dancing with another girl. Nelly knows she's replacing another girl, and could be easily replaceable herself, but for her it's a break from what gives her no real sexual or psychic pleasure, as her husband is the chief breadwinner (and also seems to be her boss, though I wasn't really clear on this). An early scene where he throws her out ends with him demanding that she stay for a little while longer as she still has to pack all her belongings. It's less to do with any real romantic attachment, and more to do with a spiritual and psychic dominance. But in such a relationship, someone ultimately has to be in the inferior position. With Loulou, Nelly covers the finances (chiefly, paying for the hotel room where they reside for the first few weeks). When she becomes pregnant and decides, after witnessing the real heartbreak and spiritual breakdown caused by another couple's affairs, as well as becoming more and more aware of Loulou's refusal to commit to the kind of life that she had wanted to escape from, Nelly aborts the baby. And then, suddenly, Loulou is hers, completely, and the final shot has them retreating down a rigidly narrow alleyway, Nelly supporting the drunk stud.  The movie's visuals call little attention to themselves; they depend mostly on pairings and general blocking, with Pialat keeping affairs from coming under any artificial Parisian haze. Forgive the rambling, awkwardly phrased nature of this particular post. Expect edits.

Fri. May 20th - "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides" dir. Rob Marshall (2011)

Propped up by nothing but profit logic, the movie tries, like the second and third entries, to re-create the big-budge spontaneity of the original film, and again, fails. But while nos. 2 and 3 seemed, upon their release, to be far too easily distracted by tangential adventures which over-stuffed a plot that, with a smarter prep period, could have been smoothed out and made coherent, part of the tedium of this stand-alone installment is in its total straightforwardness and lack of surprise. Once everyone's decided that they're looking for the Fountain of Youth (after an opening half-hour that acts as an enjoyable extended fight scene interspersed with agonizingly witless character introductions and tete-a-tetes), they go off to do just that, and it's a total chore. Cruz is respectable, but her character is simply fiery and nothing more, and the reasoning behind her ambivalent relationship with McShane's Blackbeard is left unclear (and not in a cool way). Rush is equally fine, but again, his character is never given anything really interesting to do. Whereas the screenwriters, having realized after the first movie what Depp could do, subsequently overwrote for Jack Sparrow, they seem to expect Rush to just bring some amusing gravitas to the role and be done with it, and dammit, he sort of tries, but there's ultimately no real reason for him to be there, except to survive to the end, and thus promise to return yet again in the next fucking movie (to be fair, I can remember very little of his actual performance, though that perhaps speaks more for my argument than anything else I could say). The new batch of sleazy crew members are given just enough to make you wistful for the comic duo from the original trilogy, which is an accomplishment (though they get to participate in one of the sporadic high-points: the excellently paced mermaid sequence).
The romantic sub-plot is so cynical in its roteness and so barely related to anything else that's going on that it could have been cut and all we'd really lose is a mermaid tear. It also highlights the absence of Orlando and Keira, who, it has to be said were genuine fun onscreen together (and Knightley managed pretty well on her own, as well). Depp does his thing, and it occasionally comes to life (though definitely NOT in his first scene, which is, in conception, a star entrance, and which, in execution, falls totally flat - - -"Best. Entrance. Ever." intoned the enthusiastic patron sitting behind me. NO-if the actual scene is lacking in any directorial or verbal dexterity than it just sucks, as it does here). Marshall has ditched his DP Dion Beebe for the usual Pirates cameraman, Dariusz Wolzki, and if I hadn't known, I likely wouldn't have guessed that Verbinski had stepped down from the franchise (though I like to think I would have known had this movie been a sequel to the original). There's a generally hazy pacing to the movie, and the tone is often miles off, but this was a frequent affliction of the second and third movies (and even, occasionally, "Curse of the Black Pearl").
Bizarrely, this is the second consecutive film to feature a central female character who loses her father, and than ends the movie stranded on a remote island. Is this an allusion to something?

Thurs. May 19, 2011 - "Bridesmaids" (2011) dir. Paul Feig

The typically Apatowian running time (scenes of a leisurely length that are nevertheless often paced frenetically) is on display, though the only person who really benefits from such luxurious story time is Wiig. She is the film's center, literally, with every other character orbiting around her and being spasmodically pulled into her sphere. The "Bridesmaids" don't really spend much time operating as a unit (almost every scene featuring the six of them together is previewed in the trailer), and two of them are near-peripheral (Kemper and McLendon-Covey). Byrne, Rudolph and McCarthy all are given fun stuff to do, but their character arcs ultimately come about from explicitly articulating their problems in a pivotal scene, which often occurs after they've been marginalized for the last while. Only Wiig, who appears in every scene, is allowed to approach genuine three-dimensionality, with her character almost never articulating her issues; instead, we watch her slowly collapse under the burden of past failures and the resultant lack of confidence as a bridesmaid, as she tries to be the maid-of-honour that Rudolph's character would most appreciate, which leads to their brief estrangement. She also has to two love interests to contend with, an overabundance of characters that would would normally threaten to overwhelm the enterprise. However, with Wiig's increasingly empathetic performance pitched as the guiding light, everything else more or less falls into place. The sex tape with McCarthy's character, however, closes proceedings on a sour note. Not only is it a slap in the face to the character and the audience's understanding of her, it's just not funny.

P.S. I realize that there is an ironic lack of humour in this post. Let me be clear: For the most part, the movie WAS really funny.

Tuesday May 17, 2011 - "Source Code", dir. Duncan Jones (2011)

In terms of structure, the first hour unwinds in the vein of most high-concept actioners, with the minimal number of locations (for the most part limited to: train, CAOSN offices, and the darkened underground area of Gyllenhaal's consciousness, or what's left of it) allowing for a satisfyingly tight development and revelation of the whole 'Source Code' business (though, as a 90 minute entry in the genre, the background details on the development and rationalization of the project are kept appropriately vague). But then the case itself is then resolved with comparative ease, with fewer twists than I had anticipated (Jones even skips through a few replays) and the movie gives over the final half-hour to some (admittedly fairly light) expansion of the central themes of free will and of taking pleasure in the few truly satisfying moments we are granted in life. After the blackout I felt a little peeved by the failure of the film to take full advantage of its premise (a friend and I both predicted Wright's character would be revealed to be somehow responsible in order to allow his life's work to be recognized, which we both realized would make the film bizarrely similar to "Unbreakable"; we also thought that the Sean character was himself somehow involved), and inexplicable ability of Gyllenhaal's vessel to have the entire geography of the train, as well as knowledge of all passengers' comings and goings stored in his short-term memory to be explained by the final revelation of the extent of the Source Code's power. In retrospect, however, the off-kilter structure is kind of lovely, and that Jones was able to maintain writer Ben Ripley's fundamentally humane tenants of the script is laudable. All actors extremely watchable; Gyllenhaal solid, and very moving on the phone at the end; Wright moving with scary seamlessness into older crackpots; Farmiga, as has been noted elsewhere, expertly illuminates a character who is, on paper, bursting with exposition and little else; and Monaghan does a nice job with a character whose dimensionality is, on paper (again), mostly limited to her brief opening spiel (which, admittedly, gets a few repeats).

May 14, 2011 "The Illusionist" dir. Sylvain Chomet (2010) -DVD

Re-visiting "Triplets of Belleville" last year, I was surprised to note the high-level of combing that accompanied every pan and tilt, as well as the fuzziness that accompanied the outlines of characters. My memory of the theatrical release isn't strong enough to say with any certainty whether this is an effect of Chomet's animation process at the time, or simply the result of a poorly handled DVD transfer. In any case, the surface similarity of the two films' aesthetics meant that the discovery of "The Illusionist"'s smoother, richer compositions allowed me to feel as if I was being re-introduced to Chomet's style. It's a style whose  unhurried tempo can be easily construed as mournful or leisurely, and in this film, both adjectives feed off each other to illuminate the sense of exhilaration and ultimate resignation that makes up the spotty, often embarrassing, and always deeply felt lives of performers. The story is even more muffled than "Belleville"'s; a constantly traveling French magician in 1959 is followed to Edinburgh by a young barmaid whom he comes across while doing a gig somewhere in North Scotland. The girl may very well be his daughter. They stay together in a hotel room; the older man looks for work, and the younger woman strikes up friendships with the other artists in residence (a ventriloquist who of course communicates only through his dummy; an exhausted, distinctly unenthusiastic clown). The magician buys the girl a lovely white coat, and then a pair of similarly virginal heels. Concluding that he's fulfilled his duties in shepherding her into adulthood, he observes her on a date with a handsome, unthreatening Romeo, and quits the hotel room and the city for work elsewhere, leaving behind flowers and a note ("Magicians are not real").  Suffice to say that my favourite moment, wherein the middle-aged, out-of-work clown listens to a well-worn record of a treasured circus overture, was quickly replaced by the proceeding scene of the estranged father and daughter sitting down to another mostly silent meal while the joyous, regretful tune filters through the walls of their hotel room. The performer's search for that feeling of triumph, when they have re-created an imagined past and at last turned it into their present once again is ironically brought up against the genuine object from the past (the daughter) which has presented itself, and which simply cannot be understood, because the artist hasn't encountered it before, and will know it and long for it only when it is gone again, like a rabbit in a hat, or a piece of music.


-tableaux in both films - - -in "Belleville", the last two acts are more plot-driven, but they still share equal space with the side-stories and pieces of ephemera that are dominant in the more languid "Illusionist"

-Tati, of course; I've only seen "Playtime", and the clip from "Mon Oncle" that appears towards the end of this film, but it's easy to see why the film is mostly given over to little vignettes - - - and there is the scene where the magician helps the three acrobats put together the advertisement, and the boss observes from a room on the second floor with floor-to-ceiling glass windows  - - - definite shades of "Playtime"