L'Amour en Fuite (Love on the Run): I had glimpsed a snippet of this on TCM and hunted it down, and though it's a pleasant enough movie, about an overly earnest young author figuring out what relationships are about, I don't know why I was so het up to find it. It's the 5th in François Truffaut's series about his alter ego, Antoine Doinel, and I got the sense that I'd have enjoyed it a lot more if I'd seen the previous movies. The film had a lot of clips, presumably from those previous movies, that felt intrusive after a while; maybe if I was familiar with those films, they wouldn't have seemed so extraneous. Still, it's pleasant; Jean-Pierre Laud as Antoine Doinel is fun, and the females who confound him are well-developed characters rather than stereotypes.
Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood): the kind of film that gives French movies a bad name. A lot of sullen people smoking fiercely and staring impassively for long periods of time; what little dialogue exists is elliptical at best. I turned it off after 15 minutes -- I'll sit through Corky Romano, but life is just too short for this crap.
Safe: I'm not sure I completely understood this odd movie from Todd Haynes. Julianne Moore stars as a typical suburban housewife who falls ill suddenly and mysteriously. Despite her husband's skepticism, she becomes convinced she's being poisoned by environmental toxins and flees to a retreat in Arizona that promises to, if not cure her, at least isolate her from irritants. The retreat, though, is quasi-cultic, run by hippy-dippy love-cures-all types. It's a good movie, far better and more engaging than I expected (I though Haynes' work would be more cryptic and dull), and nicely ambiguous -- you never really figure out if Moore's illness is in her head or is real. I understood the first part of the film to be a critique of society's ills, but given the way the movie is resolved (or rather, not resolved), I couldn't figure out what Haynes was suggesting the cure or solution was. Moore seems content at the Arizona retreat, even though it's fairly obvious to the viewer that the place is just a notch above fraud, and if she's comforted by all the squishy talk about love, then the message is that the type of platitudes sewn onto samplers or printed on Celestial Seasonings boxes have curative powers, which, again, isn't the sense I got from the movie. Maybe it's about the placebo effect.
Cherry Falls: supposed to be something of a spoof of teen horror films. In the town of Cherry Falls, a serial killer is murdering teenagers... but only those who are virgins. Which, predictably... uh... climaxes (so to speak) in a school-wide orgy so the kids can take themselves off the endangered species list. It's reasonably entertaining, although the perpetrator and the motive are not at all plausible, and it turns into the standard slasher flick at the end. But Scream is still the gold standard of horror spoof films; this is the poor man's runner-up.
The Third Man: Wonderfully restored DVD version of the classic movie. That final chase sequence in the sewers is fantastic, and it looks better than ever in the crisp, vibrant black and white. Golly, it's a shame Orson Welles got fat.
Dead Man: Jim Jarmusch takes on the Western. I'd heard Dead Man was deadly boring, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that it's hilariously funny. As is generally true of Jarmusch movies, if you like his stuff, you'll like this; if not, it's not going to win any converts. Johnny Depp is William Blake, a foppish Easterner who travels to a rough Western mining town under the misapprehension that he has a job there; he is quickly disabused of this notion by the cantankerous owner of the factory where he reports to work, marvelously played by Robert Mitchum in his last film role. As he tries to drown his sorrow with drink, he falls in with a young woman and gets into a bad situation that ends with the woman and her previous boyfriend dead, and Blake with a bullet next to his heart and on the run, wanted for murder. He's saved from dying by an outcast Indian, Nobody (the terrific Gary Farmer, also of Powwow Highway and Smoke Signals), who thinks he's the poet William Blake. The two flee together, and it becomes increasingly apparent that Nobody is subtly preparing Blake for his final journey.
It's not really a comedy, but for the most part, the humor is its best quality. Farmer gets most of the good one-liners, and the usual assortment of Jarmusch eccentrics fills in the rest of the humor: a trio of gunslingers hunting Blake (one of them, Michael Wincott, never shuts up; another, Lance Henriksen, never talks and is suspected of doing unspeakable things to his parents and then eating them) and a trio of bizarre travelers (including Iggy Pop and Billy Bob Thornton). The black-and-white cinematography is gorgeous, and the dreamy quality of Jarmusch's filming works very well. It gets a little spacy toward the end, but it's thoroughly enjoyable up to that point if you have the right twist of mind. Besides, Robert Mitchum in the same movie with professional freakshows Iggy Pop and Crispin Glover? That's gotta be worth something.
Face: A low-key, gritty heist film from director Antonia Bird, who did the superlative Priest and nothing decent since -- excepting this movie. It stars Robert Carlyle and Ray Winstone, both of whom are excellent as long-time buddies spearheading a daring robbery that nets less than they expected. Amid their disappointment, they realize someone is killing each member of the gang and stealing his share of the cash. The film is so darkly lit that some scenes are a bit hard to make out, and some of the accents can occasionally be tough to decipher, but it's a well-done film, and Carlyle and Winstone both are terrific.
Genghis Blues: Unique documentary about a blind bluesman, Paul Pena, who by chance hears Tuvan throatsinging on his shortwave radio, teaches himself how to throatsing (more than one note is sung simultaneously), and travels to Tuva (just north of Mongolia) for a throatsinging competition. I'll be honest, I slept through parts of it, but the parts I was awake for were interesting in a Discovery Channel kind of way. The Tuvan culture is completely new to me, so it was cool to learn about that, and the throatsinging is fascinating. Pena is a terrific guy, too, and his Tuvan hosts are clearly friendly, genial people.
Damage: Jeremy Irons' tortured performance as a high-profile British politico sleeping with his son's girlfriend makes this movie worth watching, but it's really pretty unpleasant stuff. Juliette Binoche is the girl, tormented by her own demons and finding comfort only in sex, apparently. I can't say I had a great deal of sympathy for either one of them, and the fate the son (Rupert Graves) eventually meets is insulting to the audience and to him.
Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes): Alejandro Amenábar's movie upon which Vanilla Sky is based. I wish I'd seen this one first, because I think I might have liked it better if I hadn't had the sour taste of Vanilla lingering. (Still, it employs the same sci-fi device that I thought was ludicrous in Vanilla Sky, so I probably would have been let down by the ending no matter what.) Eduardo Noriega is far better than Tom Cruise as the irresistible, spoiled hero; Penélope Cruz plays the same role, but in a vastly different way (here she is her slightly melancholy, serious, angelic persona, which I far prefer to the ditzy character she's played in all her Hollywood movies); and Najwa Nimri in the Cameron Diaz role is more plainly psychotic and imagines a relationship where there clearly isn't one (in Vanilla Sky, you can see how Diaz's character could have seen a relationship that Cruise's character didn't). Those all help make the film better than its remake (no surprise), and most refreshing of all is the absence of Tom Cruise, which, more than anything else, makes this version superior. If you're interested in this story, see this version. If you're interested in Amenábar's work, see The Others.
Some Mother's Son:
Standard
movie about the Irish
"Troubles." Helen Mirren and Fionnula Flanagan (who played the
housekeeper
in The Others) are both excellent as mothers whose sons are
involved
with the IRA, captured, and sentenced to prison. While in jail,
they
participate in the hunger strike led by Bobby Sands, and when they slip
into comas, both mothers are faced with the choice of letting their
sons
die or allowing medical attention.
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