I’m going to stop doing the monthly recap posts and instead try to write reviews/reactions more consistently throughout the month. Since I haven’t actually posted on anything I’ve watched since February, I need to do a few catch-up posts, which I’ve decided to separate into film categories (New Releases, New DVDs, World Cinema, Great Directors, etc.) rather than by month. Honestly, the monthly format was more useful for me than it was for any of you - after all, you don’t care when I saw a film, so keeping everything as strictly chronological as I used to do is fairly pointless. A thematic arrangement makes more sense.
So with no further ado, here’s the first of several catch-up posts; this contains all the theatrical new releases I’ve seen since February: Penelope, Leatherheads, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, Iron Man, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
I’m going to stop doing the monthly recap posts and instead try to write reviews/reactions more consistently throughout the month. Since I haven’t actually posted on anything I’ve watched since February, I need to do a few catch-up posts, which I’ve decided to separate into film categories (New Releases, New DVDs, World Cinema, Great Directors, etc.) rather than by month. Honestly, the monthly format was more useful for me than it was for any of you - after all, you don’t care when I saw a film, so keeping everything as strictly chronological as I used to do is fairly pointless. A thematic arrangement makes more sense.
So with no further ado, here’s the first of several catch-up posts; this contains all the theatrical new releases I’ve seen since February: Penelope, Leatherheads, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, Iron Man, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
(Sorry, couldn’t find any good clips with English subtitles, and not even this trailer has them, but trust me, whatever they’re saying isn’t important. The first ten minutes of music and dancing and almost no talking has me charmed every time I watch it. Pretend the colors are about ten times more vivid than they are in this print, too, because they are.)
David Bordwell has a whole chapter on Jean-Luc Godard in Narration in the Fiction Film; I almost returned the book to the library without reading it, but I’m so glad I didn’t. It’s great. And this quote is so right:
Those who dislike Godard’s films may well find the works’ resistance to large-scale coherence incredibly frustrating; those who admire the films have probably learned to savor a movie as a string of vivid, somewhat isolated effects.
I find myself more and more savoring films that are a string of vivid, somewhat isolated effects rather than devoted to large-scale coherence. Perhaps something to keep in mind when you decide whether to take or leave my recommendations. ;)
Haven’t done one of these for a long time, but I defend myself on the grounds that there hasn’t been hardly anything released yet this year worth watching. And Debbie, I promise I will write about American Idol tomorrow.
Baby Mama
Apparently this is the response to all of last year’s unplanned pregnancy movies. Don’t ask me to explain why I guiltily want to see this. Probably something to do with my untold love for 30 Rock. Opens April 25th.
Son of Rambow
This has been knocking around festivals for a year or so, and just because it has a release date now doesn’t mean I’m overly optimistic about it coming near where I am. Ah well. The festival reviews have been glowing, and it looks as endearing as anything. Opens May 2 in limited release.
Speed Racer
So when I first heard about this movie, I wrote it off as another stupid kids-TV-series-to-kids-movie thing. But then I saw the trailer. And remembered that it’s the Wachowski brothers making it. And it looks so totally awesome that it’s pretty much my most highly-anticipated movie right now. Look at it! It looks so gorgeous, like a futuristic 1950s. Opens May 9th.
I love me some movie posters. Especially when they’re either a) beautiful enough to stand as art in their own right or b) depict the film they advertise in a particularly apt or innovative way. Thanks to the Internet Movie Poster Awards site (which is a wonderful resource for posters, award-worthy or no), I’ve been able to look closely at last year’s posters (and previous years, but let’s not push this Year’s Best thing too far–we’re already three months into a new year) and chosen several that I think ought to be recognized.
While narrowing down the choices, I did discover several biases I have–things that generally make me like or dislike a poster. Floating heads of the stars = bad. Selling the film based only on the stars = bad. Lots of negative space = good. Characters depicted facing away from us or in long shot = good. Hand-drawn, cartoony, or stylized quality = usually good. Anyway, here are my favorite posters from last year. (And regarding the order, I’ve changed it many many times even since I started writing this post, so I don’t even know if it’s at all accurate to my thoughts anymore.)
#10: Eastern Promises
Eastern Promises is about people who make their living with their hands - fighting and killing, surviving in the Russian mafia. Highlighting the hands — and the numerous tattoos that identify relationships with specific underworld factions — is perfect, because ultimately what matters in the film is what the characters choose to do with the information they gain. Plus, focusing on body parts other than the face makes for a much more interesting poster than most. The only thing that would’ve improved the poster is to have left off the strip of faces on the bottom, which really adds nothing.
#9: 3:10 to Yuma
Biases alert: character facing away from us, stylized look, focus on story (gunslinger waiting for train, seen between his legs). This was one of my very favorite posters when it came out last year, but I’ve started to cool on it a little bit because I think ultimately, it’s a little too busy. The grunge styling is cool, but there’s too much of it in too many places, too many flourishes, and the director blurb on the right side is indulgent. Still, the monochrome coloring and unusual layout make it heaps better than most posters.
#8: Spider-Man 3
Another tendency I have: a strong preference for teaser posters over the final one-sheets. Regardless of how good Spider-Man 3 turned to be (or not be), this teaser is near perfection. It’s simple, it’s iconic, and he’s wearing a black suit. Which I know, I know, is evil, but it’s SO HOT. The later posters made the conflict between good/red Spider-Man and bad/black Spider-Man more clear, but for pure visual impact, none of them match this one.
Click through for reactions to Them!, The War of the Worlds, Superbad, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, The Assassination of Jesse James, Sunshine, Vanity Fair, Bleak House, Call of Duty 4, and more.
Orpheus France 1950; dir: Jean Cocteau
starring: Jean Marais, María Casares, Maria Déa, François Périer
screened 3/1/08, Criterion DVD
“The death of a poet requires a sacrifice to make him immortal.”
Unrelated to Orpheus, but a milestone nonetheless, this is the 500th post on this blog. Woohoo! Okay, back to the business at hand.
Previous Viewing Experience: Have never seen it before.
Knowledge Before Viewing: I know absolutely nothing about the story; but it forms a sort of trilogy with two other Cocteau films, Blood of a Poet and The Testament of Orpheus. I have actually seen Blood of a Poet, but a LONG time ago, and I mostly didn’t get it because it’s on the surrealist side. But I’m looking forward to Orpheus (despite the appearance of having put it off for, like two months), at least in part because Cocteau’s La belle et la bête is one of my all-time favorite films.
Brief Synopsis: Orpheus, a poet in post-war France, finds himself caught up with Death in the visage of a beautiful woman and her minions. When Death takes his wife Euridyce, Orpheus follows them into the underworld–but is it really Euridyce he desires, or is it Death herself?
Initial Viewing Response: Jean Cocteau was as much a poet as a filmmaker, and his films are poetic to their very core. The acting, writing, narration, music, visuals, and effects all come together to create a heightened mood — not realistic in any normal use of the word, but hyperreal. Or you could say surreal, I suppose, though Orpheus is much more closely aligned with the fairy-tale mood of La belle et la bête than the surrealism of Blood of a Poet. Although I should probably rewatch Blood of a Poet because I could be misremembering it horribly (in fact, I tend to get it mixed up in my head with Buñuel’s Un chien andalou, which may be a disservice to both of the films).
In any case, as you may have guessed, the story transplants and modifies the Greek Orpheus myth, in which the poet/musician spent so much time with his music that he ignored his wife, Euridyce. When she died, he went into the underworld to get her, and Hades allowed Euridyce to return to life with Orpheus on the condition that Orpheus could not look at her until they reached the world of the living. Impatient, Orpheus turned to look at her as they came near the exit of the underworld, and she was reclaimed by Hades. In Cocteau’s version (which may be another version of the myth, I’m not sure), the stipulation said that he could never look at her again, ever. And in any case, by that time, Orpheus was too infatuated with Death to be much interested in Eurydice at all. Another layer is added by the character of Herteubise, Death’s chauffeur and messenger, who falls in love with Eurydice while Orpheus is obsession over Death.
I won’t say I completely understand the film (did Death change her mind somewhere in the middle about what she wanted, or was the entire thing an elaborate plot on her part to balance Orpheus’s poetic obsessions with his domestic life?), but it was mesmerizing and beautiful to watch. And if you don’t know by now, I might as well say: I appreciate films more for the experience I have while watching them and the images they engrave on my consciousness than for pretty much anything else, and usually, the more ambiguous the point of the film, the more beautiful I find it. Cocteau’s special effects are simple and obvious, but they’re some how much more effective (and affective) than more elaborate, realistic effects would have been. Orpheus’s difficulty walking in the no-man’s land between the two worlds, the double-exposures revealing Death’s entry into this world and the glimpses of the other through mirrors, the filmed-backwards shots of Orpheus putting on the underworld gloves which suggest that time may not be working as we expect–all are clearly heightened, obvious effects, but they fit in perfectly with the poetic tone of the film.
There are a lot of things to think about; many quotes and ideas could be followed down philosophical rabbit trails, from the quote I used about about the immortality of a poet depending on a sacrifice (isn’t it in some ways true that poets must die before they can live forever–very few great artists are recognized as such during their life), to the connection of mirrors with death (Herteubise suggests that every time we look in a mirror, we see death). The problem with thinking TOO much about the film is that I’m not sure it makes logical sense, at least not in our normal definition of left-brained, linear logic. The motivations of Death and Orpheus aren’t aways clear (much less so than the more realist Herteubise and Euridyce, which is actually probably intentional now that I think of it), nor is the process for moving between the two worlds. Yet it somehow manages to make mystical sense, if you don’t try to impose propositional logic onto it.
Reflective Response: I think I’m going to ditch the reflective responses. A few days isn’t enough time to process these films, so the experiment in comparing immediate to reflective responses was flawed in theory.
If you follow the film blogosphere at all, you’ll have probably seen this, but if not, here you go. Dozens of film clips are edited together according to contentual and contextual shot similarity to the music “Complex City” by Oliver Nelson. It’s quite captivating. The film is by Jonathan Lapper, and originally appeared on his blog, Cinema Styles, which is always worth a read. The full list of films used, as well as the thinking that went into the editing choices, is here. I get tired just thinking about all the work he had to have put into capturing and editing this. Great work, Jonathan.
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