Viewing Log #83: Moving daze [9/1/11 - 9/8/11]

by Ryland Walker Knight

My summer travels are long gone, crowding the rearview like a bus. I'm back in San Francisco, working, writing, slowly piecing together some more moving images. Not as much fun as galavanting around Europe. But not awful. Truth is, I have a good life. In fact, I missed it quite a bit while I was gone. I did not miss writing the viewing log, but I know of at least one friend (and a certain mom) who did miss reading them/me. So I think I'll start it up again. That said, I've been reading more than watching movies. But I still watch movies. In fact, there's a number I should watch sooner than later. But there's also a ton I won't fret pushing down the line. Especially during a stretch like this when the US Open's going (starting and stopping and starting as it has) and there's all kinds of drama right there along those baselines (not to mention the weather report). But I'll stop boring you with this intro that's only yet another stalling tactic. The important thing is that I cannot recall all I watched since Cannes so I'm starting over since the beginning of this month. So, working backwards as ever, let's count from ten down to zero.

• The Mechanic [Simon West, 2011] West is a pretty lousy action director, forever chopping up things in useless/pointless ways that are obnoxious in their advertising gleam more than any spatial misrepresentation. He gets space fine, as some killings make perfect sense in living room geometry, but he's bad with bodies. Too often we see a body as one limb or another and only for a second. It's not surprising that the big stunt (the fall off the building) is the only time you see Jason Statham and Ben Foster's whole bodies moving through a space; it's annoying that the shots are so fisheyed and seesawing between their perspectives, but props for shooting the fall as their POVs; it's a good stunt, sure, but it's so clearly staged that any verve you get from seeing these dudes do their own stunt is lost in a fit of sped-up frame rates shot on super fast film stock. And yet, these guys are, as the saying goes, "compulsively watchable." I like seeing Statham clench his jaw and shoot guns. I'm looking forward to another Expendables installment. And I like Ben Foster's ability to project hurt in his angry way through roles. I'll always watch him play a psycho.
• How Do You Know [James L. Brooks, 2010] # Flipped over during the rain delay in the Fed-Tsonga match. The scene with the newborn and the proposal is unbeatable. Lenny Venito is the man.


• Bridesmaids [Paul Feig, 2011] # Went to the Castro, which was packed with single ladies and gay boys in pairs and quartets all over the auditorium, and had a blast. It definitely tapers, but it is so fun with an audience. More on Wiig and McCarthy soon.


• War of the Worlds [Steve, 2005] # This is how you make action scenes. The first 70 minutes of this movie are maybe flawless. Or, those contain some truly/typical visionary stuff from good old Steve. Why does nobody talk about how great his master shots are? Because even simple one-take shots/scenes are awesome, like after the lightning when Tom goes through the living room, flipping the light switch and trying the cell phone and tapping his stopped-dead watch, all handheld without shakes and without a cut. Every camera movement is justified in a Spielberg set piece. It's crazy how rigorous and off-handed he can be. Too bad so much of this one stinks.


• Louie "Niece" [Louis CK, 2011] # Hard to follow the Afghanistan episode, so it kind of makes sense to go all serious in this one. Yet another stranger teaching Louie-Louis how he's gotta go with the world, and be in it, instead of only approaching it from outside. But this one was a deep cut since it revolves around a young girl getting abandoned. Still, loving this season. Duh.


• Monkey Business [Howard Hawks, 1952] # Rivette said it better but this movie's interest in where we place intelligence is basically a punchline to the entire search for the bone that is the movie we saw just before...
• Bringing Up Baby [Howard Hawks, 1938] # ...which is just about as good as it gets in terms of zany, fast-as-a-nail-gun screwball ping ponging of plot and characters. Plus all that Cavell stuff. I've said it before. Look it up.


• Curb Your Enthusiasm "Car Periscope" [David Mandel, 2011] Not quite as laugh out loud funny for me as the prior week's "Bi Sexual" but still pretty great. This season definitely seems more bound up in the clever concepts Larry's dreamt up rather than an arc as the last two seasons showed. Basically I want as much Leon as I can get and I'm barely getting any.


• The Awful Truth [Leo McCarey, 1937] # The best. Without a doubt. Okay maybe a little doubt. In any case, there are few movies as fun and smart at the same time. Never hurts to see it with an appreciative crowd and two great friends, either.

Viewing Log #44, SFIFF53 #5: The chairman dances in nets and tiles [5/3/10 - 5/9/10]

by Ryland Walker Knight

• Les plages d'Agnes [Agnès Varda, 2008] Collage, mosaic, whatever: a full life that spawns new life sans cesse in any form imaginable. Only an old person could make it and only Agnes Varda could make it and only a old person like Agnès Varda could make it so full of joy, which isn't only (or simply) happy but a complex affirmation that this life is and was and will continue to be worth living. The pacing's wrong. But then so is the word "wrong." Waves change sans cesse aussi.
  
• L'opera mouffe [Agnès Varda, 1958] The affective weight of all those "quelqe uns" is surprising, given how goofy the music is, or how random-fire the short feels.
  
• Du côté de la côte [Agnès Varda, 1958] Not quite a documentary, not quite a catalog, not even a travelogue, but always a rush through things on its coastal tour; the Riviera is a joke of fashionable colors and body fat. Though it calls tourism exoticism flat out, it still made me want to go there, get a tan, and run around my own brand of Eden like anybody else. Summer's near, ain't it?
  
  
• Iron Man 2 [Jon Favreau, 2010] Doesn't mean much and isn't exactly "entertaining." Mickey Rourke's from another planet. A tad more at Thought Catalog.
  
  
• Twentieth Century [Howard Hawks, 1934] Hawks is Hawks and film is film but I fell asleep on purpose I was so tired and it got so silly.
  
• Ruggles of Red Gap [Leo McCarey, 1935] True charity. Made the claim in the car that, of all the classical Ho'wood dudes, McCarey is the closest to Renoir. I stand by it.
  
  
• Lourdes [Jessica Hausner, 2009] As Danny wrote, the tone's the biggest curio, not whether miracles occur. Faith is an afterthought, or not entirely revered here, and some jokes come at its expense (or at the expense of dogma kool aid, made literal in the sanctioned spring's bottled water), which troubles me as much as makes me laugh. The real joy, though, is Sylvie Testud's performance, which seems to start and end at her face but, despite Testud's silent smiles and the oft-alarmed or oft-angered eyes (both subtle, both withdrawn), Hausner's not interested in the face as much as bodies and the MS'd vice we find our little lady within to begin determines a lot more. And it's not just Testud's body that matters, but also how Bruno Todeschini is rigid, near encased in his role by his uniform; or how Elina Löwensohn's gestures are the worst mask for fright this side of adolescence, which colors every bit of Léa Seydoux's unfit-for-this-outfit brand of brat huff-and-puffs. This particular interest in bodily humor, and listening to the body, is all too rare (or, I need to see different movies) so when I see a party of wounded shuttling about "destinations" I immediately think of Tati, though Hausner uses a "real place" unlike so many Tativille pictures. In that, it's more akin to Jour de fête, with all those rituals and all those recurring faces and places redetermining interactions (or actions) and expectations (or sensations). However, it's not all comedy. There's plenty of nerves and anxiety and Hitchcock toying. Danny said Haneke, but that points at an overdetermination from my eyes and there's a lot of room for possibilities in this film that feel more like Suspicion before the reveal (Fontaine's all eyebrows the way Testud's all dimples) than any blunt-brow-beating by the Austrian.
  
• Hadewijch [Bruno Dumont, 2009] There's skill, to be certain, and an interest in the lead's face, but it seems like boring storytelling to push that grace note so late, and so strongly so late, so that it doesn't hold any of the weight it'd like to or like you to think it does. As with another Euro "thinker" I don't like, Haneke, the "reserve" comes off as lazy thinking.
  
  
• Lost "The Candidate" [S6E12, , 2010] A thoroughly satisfying hour of television.
  
  
• Le Bonheur [Agnès Varda, 1965] # One of the beautiful things. Makes me miss other beautiful things. But not so much that I seek a river to jump into.
  
• The Portuguese Nun [Eugene Green, 2009] An axial cinema that makes order a source of interaction, which is nearly synonymous with interpretation as every conversation seems to negotiate terms as much as exchange information. Great cameo by the director, too, playing a director and dancing poorly. More elsewhere in a few.

—Yipee

Viewing Log #40: On earth as it is [4/5/10 - 4/11/10]

by Ryland Walker Knight

—How it falls, plays, waves

• Alamar [Pedro González-Rubio, 2009] This one's playing SFIFF53, and I watched it on a screener with headphones. That seemed okay to me. It's a quiet, small thing. But it's also impressive photography of a world I'll likely never know but through this magic medium. It further impresses me that González-Rubio is his own cinematographer and that he barely gets in the way of these three generations and their time with water, and an egret. More in my festival preview, I promise, which should probably hit the webs this week.
  
• Read My Lips [Jacques Audiard, 2001] Supremely entertaining and ingratiating quasi-thriller. I think it's more interesting than Beat That My Heart Skipped, too, though its aural effects are only employed when it suits the filmmaker, not the story; or, though it's clearly Devos' movie (and what a joy that is!), the forced perspective registered by the soundtrack is inconsistent. Which is to say that Audiard has a lot of ideas, no doubt, but he's not exactly rigorous and he's not exactly free-wheeling. Will be interesting to see how this flux plays in Un Prophète, which I expect to like, as I've liked the other two I've seen. In all honesty, it'd be great to make something this accomplished, sturdy and engrossing. There's even a few jokes.
  
  
• Dodsworth [William Wyler, 1936] Nice to see something with a happy ending after the bittersweet, brush-the-edge finale of the McCarey. Walter Huston is a little loud, but still nuanced, and Mary Astor's calm makes me somersault with hope that, yes, life is long and I'll be presented plenty of opportunities to find a real help meet some day down the line. Also, Wyler's got some chops, duh, and a penchant for playing with focus in key moments. Brian already tweeted about the pivotal phone, but I'd also like to point to the mirrors, specifically the one in Vienna that keeps fantasies "outside" or "off" the real world.
  
• Make Way For Tomorrow [Leo McCarey, 1937] Lived up to the hype, and the precedent set by the other McCarey films I love. But I don't have anything to add to what Danny wrote here, or what Tag Gallagher wrote for the new Criterion disc, which I'd urge anybody to enjoy with or without a lover. Also, I'd urge you watch The Awful Truth directly afterwards. And then I'd urge you to keep your job.
  
  
• Greenberg [Noah Baumbach, 2010] As Dan Sallitt said to me last week, I don't get why Baumbach has to make everybody so nasty. But I laughed a lot, and loudly, in that almost-empty theatre. Hiring Harris Savides was a wise choice, as was casting Greta Gerwig, whose seemingly natural élan turns preternatural next to Ben Stiller. I don't know how she sold that attraction so well, but it's got a lot more to do with lust and loneliness than with true chemistry. And the movie seems to get that, too. But I don't think Ben Stiller can play that as well as Gerwig can, and everything she does masks that in the ways we all mask those impulses. A curious picture that's almost something; if it weren't hilarious, it'd be nothing.
  
• Micmacs [Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2009] As far as festival openers go, this is fine. Will probably make everybody exiting the Castro on the 22nd smile a lot, and desire company. That is, its capricious (arch?) proclivity for goofy gears at work is amiable enough and the filmmaking is Jeunet's least expository, to say swiftest, if forever ostentatious/ornate. Great final shot, though.
  
  
• The Sopranos "Made In America" [S6E21, David Chase, 2007] # Nearly every single line makes me laugh, but it's dry and dire, too; nothing's as outlandish as it could be. Some of that's the performances, too, but a lot is the writing and the directing. It's the best kind of surrealism that matches "the world" to dreams' fluid, deft, associational tilt on actions—or that possibility in formal arrangements—be they sounds, like the ring of a door opening, or accidents, like a car in neutral rolling over a dead head, or anything else, like the aphasia one faces in a sea of others or like the absurdity of a cat staring at a dead man's cheesy portrait.
  
  
• Plastic Bag [Ramin Bahrani, 2009] Finally got around to watching this because a good friend said he liked it. Doesn't "side firmly with things" in the end, as Ignatiy wrote here, and it's only the quality of Herzog's voice (and what kind of intentionality that brings) that gives the little ditty anything. It's pretty, I guess, but it's still about human desires, not a bag's. (Similar problems as with that Pixar paean to bathos and trash.)

—I should look for leaves?

Viewing Log #4: Tastes like the tap [7/20/09 - 7/26/09]

by Ryland Walker Knight

• A Matter of Life and Death [Powell & Pressburger, 1946] Gorgeous fantasy in delicious technicolor, weird-to-great propaganda. Nivens' charm is unending and the Cardiff-lensed images pool light in otherworldly ways, as you'd expect. The loveliest P&P theme is the beauty of the imagination—though it can spell peril, too, with actual consequence.
• The International [Tom Tykwer, 2009] Like everybody else, I dug the Guggenheim roundelay, and the cynicism. The pathos can't cut it, but it's conceptually perfect, as most Tykwer movies are, and, although it's not exactly tautologically fun, the redundancy is almost a non-issue when thinking "story" or "screenplay." Ignatiy wrote some smart notes and I'll push it further: it's about half a movie. Wish I'd seen it theatrically. —Tosser comparison: I prefer Bourne 3.

• Duelle [Jacques Rivette, 1976] Those aren't women, they're goddesses. Amazingly sexy, and fun, everything coils and weaves; it's a circulatory system coursing—and you can see the veins. Also, of course, we sing: Lubtchansky. For serious. More soon, I hope, after Noroit.
• Charade [Stanley Donen, 1963] Tons of fun. I wrote that bit for Mike, yes, but also for Arne.

• Love Affair [Leo McCarey, 1939] Irene Dunne is amazing, the movie's a little daft, but the chemistry between my favorite wife and Mr Boyer is just fabulous—even if the DVD looked lousy.

10 Personal Touchstones in American Cinema

by Ryland Walker Knight

[Originally posted at the curator corner, where you can read the full post.]