Female

Holy shit.

Look, I know a movie is a product of its times and all, but this seems like the kind of thing you show to a bunch of Reed-graduate women's studies majors to see if you can give one an embolism. The plot basically boils down to: hard-nosed extremely successful career-minded lady is CEO of an automobile company and the only one with the cajones to keep the company afloat through hard times. She blatantly abuses her power as head of the company to invite salesmen and execs and engineers over to her palatial home for dinner and "private business meetings," in order to aggressively seduce them, only to snub them brutally (and in some cases, transfer them to Montreal for not being quick enough to get the signal that they'd been blatantly used by their boss) the next morning at the office.

Before you start thinking this is a pretty awesome role-reversal with a sexually empowered and voraciously predatory woman who knows what she wants and takes it, hear out the rest of the story. All she's looking for is a man who can love her for herself, and when she finds one she not only leaps into his arms, literally transforming her entire personality three times in short order to be what he wants, but she makes repeated attempts to quit her successful job to be his wife. In fact, the story wraps up (very quickly, in about an hour actually) with her having tracked down Mr. Dreamboat Industrial Engineer and promising that she'll never set foot inside the automobile company again; she wants him to run her business now because she's "no good at it," and she's adamant about staying home and raising the nine children she promises to bear him. This is presented unambiguously as a bow-on-the-package ending to the romance movie.

Woman is dominating and kind of a bitch, only successful at the job because she pretends to be something she's not; woman finds the right man for her; woman gives up the powerful, lucrative job (to the man) and declares herself a homemaker, lickety-split. All she wanted was to be a docile wife. She finally got what she wanted. Happy ending! Look, I'm not touching that. I'll just leave it as it lay.

I will say, though, that though there was nothing outright bad about the direction or filmmaking, the performances were all a little hokey and forced in a way that -- if I'm really honest with myself -- makes me re-evaluate some of the characters and performances in Casablanca. But mostly, Female had none of the inspired or inspirational dynamic-energy, shadows-and-light (literally in the camera work; figuratively in the elements the story brings together) that makes Casablanca such magical cinema. This was a weirdly misogynistic treatise posing only barely as a light-hearted not-quite-screwball romantic comedy. The truth is, I think this film might offend more people than Lars von Trier or Gaspar Noé films. It's a weird one.

Forbidden Planet

I am going to go old-school on my comments tonight, keep it very short, because I expected to fall asleep to this and didn't. The story is really talky, and the science is really hokey, but the plot is pretty interesting, the acting better than typical B-movie, and most of the effects really are pretty astounding. It's a very cerebral story and, admittedly, you can see the end coming a mile away, but for the most part they make getting there entertaining and the reveal satisfying.

And oh, young serious Leslie Nielsen, and your proto-Kirkian love affair with the first lady living on another planet that you meet. How earnest you are, and yet how dashing!

Five Easy Pieces

I can see why this is an American classic, because it's got so much to say about class warfare, ivory-tower intellectuals, the nature of roots and the allure of rootlessness (and what is more American than denying one's roots and stomping boldly across untrodden soil?), and it has scenes devoted to workaday traffic jams, senseless inhuman bureaucracy, environmentalism, smug liberalism, art vs. work, the fear of death, the fear of new life, and every kind of existential angst a human adult was capable of feeling in 1970. Bobby is a seething, raging hypocrite, but like all good anti-heroes, he's someone who's darkness comes across as a defense mechanism against a time and place when things seem too crazy for anything else.

But for my money, the movie is a little too meandery and episodic, and the characters that populate the world drawn a little too broadly and simplistically. I like a little more ambiguity in my moral soapboxing, and a little more dimension to my characters and their relationships. Though the story does a good job of showing the good and the bad sides of almost every one of its main characters, the people themselves are still cartoonishly one-sided, more spokesmen for various perspectives and ideologies than rounded-out human beings. To be fair, I am almost positive this was deliberately done, and the number of ideologies that parade in front of Bobby's crosshairs is impressive and wide ranging. Still, I like characters over symbols, so I was left a little wanting in that regard.

On the other hand, I enjoy the end a lot. It's messy and it's preposterous (I mean, it's a perfectly fine ending; it's a preposterous choice Bobby makes) and it's obvious without being telegraphed.

So I didn't love it, but I admire and respect it. Years ago I'd started it once and gave up before the bowling alley sequence was over, and I'm glad I finally returned and gave it more due this time (I should thank Jen, who needed to watch this for class... and because it was late when we started it, still needs to). It's a solid piece of Americana, and many different angles and collisions are explored properly. A lot of different worthwhile papers could be crafted out of this film... or so it seems to me, on a single viewing.

The Fighter *

It feels fitting that this is the last movie I'll watch in 2010. In a way it's pretty emblematic of this year in American cinema: it's very good, but it's not really great -- and to be fair, like much of what I saw this year, it doesn't seem to be aiming for greatness. It's got really great direction, but the story is so basic and by-the-numbers that it was impossible not to play along in my head. It's perfectly cast, and really well-directed, there's some really nice sound design and editing choices that help the story rise above the ordinary, and some understated but very intentional camerawork that does the same, but for the most part The Fighter is about as straightforward as the film's title. I know I've said this before, but 2010 seems like a year where Hollywood forwent any kind of ambition or pretense toward excellence, and settled for solidly made, workmanlike, unchallenging fare. The reason there's no lock for "Best Picture" for me is because nobody shot for the stars. To follow that metaphor, they all seem to have agreed to aim collectively for a low orbit. Successful but not transcendent. Worth your ten bucks but that's it.

But enough about the state of cinema. The Fighter feels like it's really Christian Bale's story more than Mark Wahlberg's, or rather Micky (Wahlberg) is clearly our protagonist but like a million stories (off the top of my head, think The Great Gatsby), the guy who the action is about is not always the guy the story is about. I think it's the right choice, letting Dicky (Bale) outshine his little brother the hero, as he's the larger than life character here. The cadre of shrill women led by Alice the mother was almost too much for me to bare, but they made a nice tidal force that showed the character of Charlene and especially Micky's father George, and without them to stand as obstacles the story would have collapsed. Still, I'm glad I'm not stuck in a room with them. Yikes.

The story moves a little fast, but it has to, and other than a couple of overly obvious lines (like Charlene telling Micky that his family runs his life -- yeah, okay, we get that by now, thanks) it's a pretty sharp script. Again, everything about this works, but it doesn't even approach a best-of list for me because it's all so plain. Maybe I'm just not into the kitchen-sink drama approach to filmmaking; clearly I want film to be more and do more, to aim higher. Originally I felt my perspective on this year's films felt more or less objectively qualitative, but maybe the trends of the year are just going against my more personal, obviously subjective expectations and desires. I'll have to talk to some of my friends, like my dear roommate Joseph, who appreciates the more down-to-earth storytelling more than I (of late) do. Stuff to think about.

But I stand by my original comment, that 2010 was a year without ambition for Hollywood and American independent cinema. Well, so it goes. Even without greatness, we've had a large number of good films this year, so maybe I should stop complaining. (Yeah, that'll happen.)

Seen at the Regal Fox Tower.

Fight Club

I had a weird meta moment tonight while watching Fight Club, which sounds more appropriate than it was. I've been sick for a couple of days, all head-foggy and hot-cold flashes, and we put this on as a kind of familiar, non-challenging thing to watch together, my girlfriend and I, and while I watched I had the thought, "Oh man, I don't want to have to blog about this." There was a period where I probably watched this movie once or twice a month, minimum, for about a year or two. I read the book two (or is it three?) times, and I can quote most of the commentaries, let alone the dialogue. Even the soundtrack I've exhausted the ability to hear objectively.

The thing is, Fight Club came out at an appropriate time for a young dude who needed to latch on to a kind of intelligent, retaliatory nihilism -- which is what I was in my early twenties (and clearly I was not alone). The freedom of not caring has always been a powerful idea to me. Until tonight I don't think I've seen the film in six or seven years, but there was a point where it was my keystone. It's difficult to be critical of something so ingrained into you, so crucial to a certain point in your life. It's also a film about which I've read too much supplemental trivia and analysis, and it's hard to separate original thoughts from the mindweb of data I've taken in. All of which adds up to, I don't know what I can say about it, as there is hardly a "first impression" left for me to have.

But I will say this. It's interesting to see how many elements of this have bled unconsciously into my stories over the years. My first short film (a trainwreck I won't show anybody anymore; that's a rule) was basically ripping off the pseudo-philosophy from Fight Club and the basic plot outline of Christopher Nolan's Following -- both accidental but undeniable. Another script of mine is about a man and his doppelganger, and a couple of scenes or settings from it feel like they were lifted wholesale out of Fight Club, pushed deep into my subconscious for a while to mix around with whatever else was down there, and brought back out as something like a fresh new concept. I guess that's how ideas form, in lots of cases, but it's curious to recognize the seed. Hopefully I've strayed far enough from the source material that it's not plagiarism (I'm reasonably sure I have), but it's still a strange sensation.

But how about I say something about the movie, instead of myself? I can do that. Fight Club is a good movie. It holds up. It's a curious mix of deadly serious meta-drama and tongue-in-cheek nihilist/fascist rallying cry, and it's got a sort of Looney Tunes quality to the violence, action, and dialogue. It's also a puzzle of a movie, maybe more than a drama (though it still holds up well as a drama), but it's smart enough to justify itself. I'd been putting it off, I think, half out of fear it would come off gimmicky or a little hokey in light of everything that followed, but I am pleased to report that it actually ages pretty well.

Frozen

I've been researching horror and "contained thriller" story ideas for a while now, and in a lot of ways Frozen is just what I'm looking to do, so I knew I'd have to see it. I had no idea, however, just how unpleasant an experience this was going to be.

The characters were unlikable in a really incredible way. I mean, it's a horror-ish film (pleasantly, and for a change, there was nothing supernatural, just man vs. bad situation and vs. savage nature) and I sometimes think they try to give you unlikable characters so you can have fun watching them suffer and die. I haven't seen it, to be honest, but I suspect this might be the Paris Hilton-in-House of Wax Effect. But this was different. These weren't characters I wanted to see suffer and die (nor did I get the impression I was supposed to); these were just three unbearably banal people. They look like and for the most part talk like Bros, but they have dialogue like discount knock-off Kevin Smith characters. On so many levels the dialogue tries too hard -- it tries too hard to remind us of the peril, to tell us what the character is feeling, to provide backstory and development through clichés and generic pop nostalgia, and to charm with references to Lucky Charms and obscure Star Wars monsters.

The problem is, Frozen doesn't try in a lot of places where it needs to. The shots, the editing, and the pacing never seem to know what do with themselves, so I'm probably equally tense from frustration that this experience isn't visceral enough as from anything seen on screen, even when the stuff on screen is fairly gruesome. (I had an almost identical reaction to the should-be-horrific early parts of Awake.)

Plus, it doesn't seem to care to keep track of the perils it inflicts on its three semi-characters. There's a lot of talk of frostbite, and we see some reasonably gross (to think about; not terribly convincing looking but that's okay) frostbite-caused badness; there's a lot of talk of needing to pee as well, and the girl even wets herself. I kept expecting all these things to accumulate into some kind of super gross-out climax, but none of them amount to anything. She peels all the skin off her bare right hand, but when she needs it, she uses it with seemingly no problem. Much is made of Joe's gloves being cut through by the "razor sharp" cable as he climbs across to the pole, but apart from some blood in the snow it doesn't come up again. Most notable of all, though, is (SPOILER) when Dan becomes wolf dinner, I know that Joe was trying to be nice and didn't want Parker to see, but we want to see it. At least a little bit. Tease us. It's gruesome when you tease us. It's boring when I'm watching two not-amazing actors cry at each other for two minutes while the score does a thing. And then? And then Dan's body is just... gone. They never even show us the aftermath. The next morning it's gone -- dragged off? no bloody trail? When Parker finally lands in what has to be the exact same spot, the snow is clean and clear. I mean, ignoring how confused I was when she passed through the bloody remains of Joe because I thought that might have been Dan, it would have been a great visceral reminder of everything they've been through if some part of the body was there off camera right or something. (I think at one point early on we see a perfectly clean hand sticking out of the snow, unmoving. That's our aftermath shot.)

So Frozen toys with graphic dismal slow death but it opts out of actually showing you anything or resolving its many sub-crises along the way. It puts three people I couldn't find less interesting in a ski lift and fills their interminable wait with conversations that mean nothing, go nowhere, and are totally artificial. It lacks sensationalism but it also lacks realism. It lacks supernatural terror but it also doesn't really sink its teeth into natural terror. On the one hand, I think to myself, maybe if I react this poorly to most similarly-styled contemporary horror films I should rethink attempting the genre. On the other hand, if the bar for writing is this low, maybe writing a smarter-than-average one is going to be easier than I thought.

I totally wanted to make some kind of bunny slope analogy there, but it's 1 AM and this movie didn't garner the kind of goodwill that encourages clever quips, to be honest. It's an energy-sucking movie. It gave me a lot to think about, because it is a contained thriller after all, but too much of it was unpleasant, and not all of its unpleasantness was the intentional horror-movie kind.

Is all of this arrogant? I know it's arrogant, but what do you want? It just doesn't feel like Adam Green put any thought into the reality of his story here. It doesn't probe very deep externally into the film's world or internally into these cardboard characters. It just doesn't feel like it's trying very hard. At the very least, I hope nobody will ever say that of my works. "What a lazy film."

Per qualche dollaro in più (For a Few Dollars More)

Compared to the roughness around the edges of A Fistful of Dollars, this film feels much more the work of a skilled director working with a crack team. The photography is crisper, the performances feel more assured, the characters more fleshed out, and the story and dialogue (while a little hurky-jerky in terms of motivation) feels light years ahead to me. Fistful is a movie you can appreciate with a caveat. For A Few Dollars More pretty much doesn't need one.

My one criticism is, the story feels needlessly complicated at times, and is a little too willing to indulge in novelistic side-stories. It takes its time getting into the heart of the action, as well. But many moments stand out, and many images and scenes feel iconic, which makes the slow pace worthwhile. There's even some nice dramatic moments from Lee van Cleef and the actor playing El Indio.

It's been a long time since I've seen all of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and obviously I'll be watching it again, soon, to complete the trilogy, but so far I might like this one best. The world feels the right kind of lived-in and historied, and there seems to be a good balance between darker and lighter moments. Again, if the pacing weren't quite so full of fits and starts, and maybe if they'd cut the movie by about twenty minutes runtime, I'd call it nearly a perfect spaghetti western. As it is, and based on memory, this might be my favorite of the Man With the No Name films.

La Planète Sauvage (Fantastic Planet)

It's hard to think of a more surreal, alien approach to a story about aliens than this. It opens in media res on a silent, terrified human holding an infant and racing away from nightmarish, dangerous things (animals? plants? geometric oddities?) on an endless plain. She thinks she finds safety in the high ground, but a massive blue finger prods her roughly back down the hill. She races up again, looking to be safe, but the finger prods her once more. This continues, a sort of inverse Sisyphus, until the finger grows bored. It lifts the woman into the air, high high into the air, and drops her. She tumbles and dies. The baby is alone and scared. We pull back to reveal the hand belongs to a strange blue creature (a Traag) that looks like Dr. Manhattan bred with a humanoid fish. The story then shifts perspective to these massive, psychic mysterious creatures, and a child named Tiwa who adopts the baby. We watch for a while as she dresses it up in preposterous humiliating outfits, but the baby is a tiny pet, no bigger than a hamster. The baby doesn't know any other way of life.

Traag time moves slower than Om (homme, or human) time, which gives the story a really novel arc as Terr (the baby, whose name is apparently short for terrible but also evokes the word Terre, the French word for Earth) grows into a boy and eventually a man, while Tiwa and the other Traags don't age much at all. In typical future-dystopian fashion Terr escapes and lives among the wild Oms (living in the park!), and his unique skills (knowledge and education) first cause strife within the group but eventually turn the tides and help them win the war. Of course, things are much, much stranger than that when you watch it.

Apart from a surprisingly abrupt conclusion (and some cheating narration throughout which is mostly forgivable), Fantastic Planet is an inspired story. It belongs in the same camp as classic science fiction like Dune and Solaris. It's maybe the smarter, artsier cousin of Planet of the Apes or The Matrix. I'd actually have liked to see them go further with many aspects (I had this same reaction to another kindred spirit: TRON) but overall, I'm totally impressed.

I could go on about the animation style and the music -- both feel dated but perfectly suited to the piece -- but I feel I've run on long enough. Suffice to say it's a great film, maybe a genius one. If you've never seen Fantastic Planet but you like science fiction -- I mean real science fiction, not just robots and aliens being used as a delivery system for explosions and chase scenes -- I think you owe it to yourself to see this film.

Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars)

It's interesting to note that in this, the film that made Clint Eastwood, the actor looks just a little too pretty-boy to be believed as the badass stranger he's meant to play. Because he went on to embody this archetype so absolutely over the next two decades, there's a kind of cognitive dissonance in watching him here. It's like watching a man in an ill-fitting suit, even though you've seen that man in the very same suit dozens of times and you know it's a perfect fit.

A cursory glance through Wikipedia tells me that this was Leone's first spaghetti western, and that it was early in the genre's life, which makes sense. Like Eastwood it feels like the genre and the director are both finding their footing here. It's a little rough around the edges, but it's definitely got something. I wonder how we'd view Fistful if it hadn't been followed by For a Few Dollars More and of course, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, among so many others. If Leone and Eastwood hadn't gone on to be the defining names of this type of storytelling. Taken on its own merits, it's a western remake of Yojimbo (itself an adaptation of Hammett's Red Harvest, such an awesome road from mobsters to samurais to the old west), and it's got a lot going for it but it's also clearly a b-movie in a b-movie genre; it doesn't quite transcend. It's impossible for me not to see this through the eyes of someone who's seen later, greater works in the genre, not to mention who's acutely familiar with the source materials that led us here. Trying to view it as a stand-alone piece, I think it's fine, but that's about it.

Also, this film influenced more than just the stylistic choices of Leone's later films and spaghetti westerns in general. Eastwood would later direct two films of his own, High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider, about a stranger who rides into a corrupt town, fights the forces that be with cold brutality and shifting allegiances, and then rides back out at the end. In fact, if memory serves, he remains nameless in both films and they're implied sequels to The Man With No Name. More to the point, though, I found both of them to be stronger films than A Fistful of Dollars, definitely the work of a man with a firm grip who'd found his voice and his style. But I guess it all started here.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox

When this came out in theaters, I had been snarkily (but also seriously) accusing Wes Anderson of making cartoony films with flat, two-dimensional characters for years (all the way back to The Royal Tanenbaums, which I like quite a bit), and I remember saying I had more hope for "that Roald Dahl film" he's working on than I did for Darjeeling, because live-action cartoons are kind of annoying and animated cartoons are obviously less so. Although The Darjeeling Ltd. isn't unwatchable, and like all Anderson's film (even The Life Aquatic) it has charm in its creation and a handful of pretty excellent moments, it's not what I'd call an excellent film.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox gets away with a lot more, though, for the reason stated above, and because Anderson's stilted art direction and choreography gives the very, very good stop-motion animation a fun, kind of experimental feel. The film really plays on some meta levels, teasing you and your expectations or understanding of the genre of kids' action movies, using a visual shorthand to rush through some stuff in a flat, perpendicular-to-the-camera tableau that (literally) any other filmmaker would have turned into an interesting and dynamic setpiece of its own. Chases, the fox ball-game, tunneling montages -- they're delivered more like dioramas than staged dramas (how's that wordplay? it was the best I could come up with). And yet, because the tone is so clever and the stakes remain high and all of the characters are likable, intelligent, and flawed (credit where its due: Anderson excels at likable, intelligent, and flawed characters), I'm never bored. I actually like this movie. In fact, I actually like the stiff, undynamic approach and the "you know what we mean" setpiece shorthand. The film is incredibly fun and wants you to have fun, too. The stuff that in a live action Wes Anderson picture I sometimes roll my eyes at or wish wasn't sticking out like a sore thumb in the place of genuine action or drama or pathos, in this it feels like a strength. And as to the animation itself, and the set design and cinematography, its all just hand-made gorgeous. I could watch that waterfall scene a million times and never get tired of its beauty.

Faces

Cassavetes is a special kind of filmmaker, whose stories move with rough, invisible act breaks that are still act breaks. The dialogue sounds like -- it is -- dialogue about nothing, but so much is in there, not being said. Sometimes the characters are struggling desperately to communicate, unable; other times they are trying in vain to subsume or conceal some thought, or impulse, or reaction. Often they speak in non-sequiturs and sloppily brutal, confrontational ways to each other. Often they laugh or sing too hard, too loud, a weird unsettling hysteria edging in on their joyful sounds. This is what people do. Human beings are messy when they are emotional. Cassavetes films are about human beings and their emotions.

Faces is well named. It draws immediate attention to the number of times the camera finds a face and pushes in too tight on it, holds too long on it, forces you to look at what's going on in there. This isn't a movie of close-ups; it's a movie of extreme close-ups. Not just the cinematography, either: this movie stands far closer to its characters than most movies ever do. This is a film you either love or hate -- with characters you either love or hate -- warts and all.

Myself? Personally, I love the film -- and its messy, raw-nerved, desperate and self-destructive characters.

Jeux interdits (Forbidden Games)

On the one hand: this was a good film to watch for "research," as I try to think about adult storylines through children's eyes. Especially their strange obsession with death and ritual as a way of exploring the meaning behind things by extracting that meaning. A bit deconstructionist, maybe; simulacra and simulation, all that. Also, and on a more basic, less pedantic level: pretty amazing performances from those two kids. Twenty-two years later the little girl, Brigitte Fossey, would star in Altman's Quintet, something I've been considering watching as research for the other project. These two kids really sold complex emotional scenes that adult actors would have trouble with. Goes to show what a good director can do with the right cast. Gives me hope for (wince) working with children myself.

On the other hand: I'm too much a film geek not to immediately recognize this as a film bridging European realism into French New Wave. (I got that without any pointers, and then looked it up to see that scholars back up this claim. My film teachers would be so proud.) The story has that great subversive social attitude of Renoir's wonderful films (I'm thinking The Grand Illusion, The Human Beast and of course The Rules of the Game) but it's also a deliberate tone-shifter (every time it ought to be sad, it's actually quite funny), with obvious music cues and many scenes not about anything in particular. It's letting style carry it, just a little, and it feels just a little bit punk about the whole thing.

For All Mankind

I need desperately to be in bed, but I have to say something about the film I watched. For anyone who doesn't know, For All Mankind was a documentary made in 1989 collecting all the footage shot by and around astronauts and engineers during all the manned missions to the Moon and back, edited as though one long, seamless journey there and back again and set mostly to diegetic sound and recordings of the astronauts and engineers discussing their experience. It's captivating.

I don't know what else to say. I've seen it twice now, and it's just hypnotizing. Clearly I watched it this time prepping myself for some astronaut writing, but the incidentally abstract, gorgeous photography of the actual journeys... I know that one day I will shoot my astronaut love story (and if not that, another astronaut film), and this will be my prime reference material for the DP. It's just casually intimate in a way no fictional film has ever tried. Real space remains so much more mysterious and magical than all of science fiction's space somehow.

I'm betraying my bias here, clearly, but to anyone passingly curious about or excited by astronauts or the journeys to the moon, this film is the number one must-see. (And if that's you: it's on Criterion, so it's easy to get.)

Fargo

What a pleasure. It'd been probably five years since I sat and watched this, though there was a time where I'd watched Fargo and Hudsucker Proxy too many times for my own good. Now that I'm familiar with more than just two Coen films, this is such a natural companion piece to No Country For Old Men, I'm shocked I never saw the connection before.

Three protagonists: one a cop, one a crook, and one ambiguously a crook. A suitcase of money. A deal gone wrong. A chase, madness, chaos, many deaths, and not a very happy ending for anybody. Both films even end with the cop not so much winning as playing clean-up to the trail of bodies, and lamenting the state of things. Tommy Lee Jones has a couple of wonderful monologues in No Country, including the opening ("[The boy] said he knew he was going to hell. Be there in about fifteen minutes.I don't know what to make of that. I surely don't."), and Marge Gunderson here in Fargo says to Gaear Grimsrud, "There's more to life than a little money, you know. Don't you know that? And here you are. And it's a beautiful day. Well... I just don't understand it."

The Coens' worlds are always based in a strong sense of place. No Country has Texas, and Fargo has of course Minnesota/North Dakota. But the real contrast between the two is that all three protags in No Country are hardened pros and all three protags in Fargo are rank amateurs. Although No Country has its famous third-act "missing reel" (we never see Llewelyn's fate), Fargo has several plays on that, including first the fate of the parking lot attendant and then the fates of Lundegaard's wife and Carl Showalter (in all three cases, we see the build-up and then the aftermath, but not the act itself).

I'm telling you, these movies are twins. Definitely an excellent double feature, two works that really speak to each other and about each other. I love you guys, you crazy Coens. Never stop.

Fish Tank *

On the one hand, the protagonist here is hostile, aggressive, petulant, and generally kind of unlikeable. On the other hand, she's amazingly easy to sympathize with, because she has dreams -- and partially because her dreams are just so pathetic. I challenge anybody to watch Mia's dance moves and not cringe a little inside, but she is so earnest, she wants it so bad, you want it right along with her. She's chasing idiotic dreams with all her heart and she still kind of looks like a poser who doesn't really get it; she's right up there on the screen being what every human being fears they are. Of course she's got our sympathy!

Jon pointed out, Andrea Arnold never goes quite as far as you think she will or feel like her world is capable of going. It occurs to me that this is actually more challenging to the audience than if the events were more extreme or dark. Coming to that precipice and backing away just before the tipping point deprives her stories of any easy moralization. Nobody faces dire black-and-white life-and-death consequences, so instead the story hovers in a moral limbo where sometimes bad deeds go unpunished, but good ones don't. It's messy and it makes you decide for yourself what was too far, or who was to blame, or if people acted rightly or not.

Mmm, that's good ambiguity!

Seen at the Whitsell Auditorium as part of the Portland International Film Festival.

La fille du RER (The Girl on the Train) *

I think I've set the bar pretty high lately, especially for contemporary French films. It's not so much that this was bad -- it wasn't -- but that it was only okay, whereas everything else I've watched lately has been no less than great, and a couple have been inspiring, game-changers.

Some of the characters in this were very real to me, and many were likeable (unfortunately, not our protagonist, but I've sat through less winning characters, so I won't grip about that too much). None of the complex action feels unmotivated, not even the somewhat outlandish centerpiece of the story, in which Jeanne half-heartedly fakes an anti-semitic attack on herself. The problem isn't characters and motivation; for my money, the problem is that it never seems to amount to anything bigger than a collection of scenes. It's based on a real event, and maybe it falls into the all-too-common still-inexcusable trap of so many other films based on real events. That an event really happened isn't enough justification to build a film around. You need to have a reason to tell me this story.

In the end, I left very much with the reaction of "okay, so that all happened." And frankly, that's the worst reaction of all. Deadened, unmoved, unprovoked, and ready to turn away and talk about something else or go do whatever's next. Hate's not the opposite of love, everybody; indifference is.

Seen at the Broadway Multiplex as part of the Portland International Film Festival.

Le fils (The Son)

Not to say this wasn't very good, but I'll always remember this movie as That French Film About The Back Of The Balding Man's Head. What a tight, claustrophobic way to shoot every shot. Obviously to a purpose -- one thing I'm liking about the Dardennes is that for all their pseudo-realism everything is to a purpose -- but still, that's a lot of the back of a man's head. Subjective viewpoint or opaque perspective? I guess they're pretty much the same thing here.

Boy, first Police, Adj., then Lorna's Silence, then Under the Sand and now this. I've been on a real roll with slow, observational, procedural-style storytelling. It's been good for me, after so many bigger, broader Hollywood style films, to watch this stuff and see the same levels of artifice and careful construction now sublimated into a story that at least feels like the real world. Whether or not that's how my writing comes out, it's inspiring to see it done.

For the record, though, both films explored very unique and difficult emotional terrains, but I liked Lorna's Silence quite a bit more than this one on an aesthetic level. I guess I still like my crime stories more than my slice-of-life dramas. No surprise there, huh?

Fahrenheit 451

An interestingly stiff film from Truffaut, and I can't decide if that's deliberate or incidental. Part of me wants to follow this up with some Doinel and Day For Night; another part of me wants to follow it with 1984 and... I don't know, The Running Man or Logan's Run or something. This film is the venn diagram of French New Wave mastery and by-the-numbers dystopian sci-fi.

But the truth is, it's not the very best of either category.