housesitter

If Mrs. Quinlan builds his dream house, it's going to have this: wrap-around porch, lazy-boy in which to recline nude, enormous ribbon around front door, creepy ex who just happens to jog by, glass hallways, homeless parents, an ugly husband to counter my glowing tresses, and Goldie Goldie Goldie. Ms. Hawn is pure delight, her cleavage unburdens itself like a push-pop, her eyes twitter with tears. Next-door, Steve Martin is fumbling, crazy, lock-jawed, with a thing for Hungarians.

Like Arthur, this movie is one of those I love because nothing bad happens. The characters start at the bottom, things will only get better. It's refreshing! Happy! Pleasant! And I have terrible taste in movies.

fall guy

Directed by the same savant who calculated the atrocities of Battle Royale, Fall Guy is another gruesome scrabble which asks a central question in Japanese filmmaking: Who is that guy in the background of Samurai flicks?

Even if you've only seen Oldboy's elevator lobby scene, you'll recall those Kurosawa dudes who writhe and twist about in the background, limping from the blows they never received, reeling from backflips to escape any sort of wound. They flinch and fall like doves, unburdening themselves so that the central character can have a little circle of spotlight all for themselves.

Yasu is the dog-tired, doggedly-persistent underdog: square-jawed, weary-eyed, he is a background stuntman who would be unconvincing in a leading role. But through the magic of cinema, and the vain, prissy fumblings of the actual star of the show, poor, ugly Yasu is thrust the vain fop's leading lady: she's pregnant, he doesn't want to deal with it, and his stuntman has always dealt with the difficult blows in the past.

It's a cute story, and it's over-acted in the most delightfully cheesy way. Of course, this isn't just some romantic comedy wherein the ugly man gets the pretty girl. It's meta: movies unfold within movies, spills down staircases stand for metaphysical boils. It's not a happy love story: for each dollar he must make to support his beautiful suicidal wife, Yasu must take another spill for the glory of cinema. Love is pain, wounds are kisses, each bandage is a change of reel.

working girl

"I'm not a steak, you can't just order me," Griffiths blabs from behind a scrim of Jersey hair. Well, you're a stake: a stake in my heart, Mel, and I'm not just saying that as part of the project. I'm buying back Radio and it's saying This Movie Owns Me.

movies i saw today

an enchanting double feature, of sorts:

1. Ingmar Bergman's Persona
2. John Landis's Animal House

Both featured
1. Constrictive spaces, homes
2. Dream sequences
3. Sheets wrapped around bodies
4. Boozed-up ladyfriends

blow up

I rented this because it had the best poster I've ever seen, and because it claimed in all the history books to be the founder of "the mod look," a look I try to emulate in every aspect of my life, refraining, of course, from any sort of facepaint. Even the trailer claimed that "Michelangelon Antonioni's film captures the London of today!" Today being 1966, and 1966's london being like that High Numbers lyric: "I wear Ivy League jackets and white buckskin shoes..." Ditto.

It all reminded me a little of The Knack, probably because I'm stupid, and a movie about mods is a movie about mods, and also a movie where a group of mod teens terrorize a city by riding around through public spaces in an open air jeep feels a little bit like a movie where a group of mod teens terrorize a city by riding through public spacesin an open air bed.

The plot of Blow Up is a bit more sensical: a hip, dashing photographer is a bit bored of his hum-drum lifestyle where naked women lounge around his studio—naked, and sometimes throw themselves at him, and sometimes let him take their photograph (with all that mind-bogglingly stupid photographer dialogue: "hold it" "that's lovely" "give it to me" "perfect" "you're a star, baby, a star" UGH). When he takes some photographs in the park for his hip, dashing photobook, a woman caught by his camera will do anything to get the photos back. Why? He develops them, and uses a teensy magnifying glass to realize they capture her hired murder of the man she was with. Wowza! Well, don't be too impressed. Nothing else happens in the entire movie.

By far, my favorite plotline revolves around the frequenting of antique shops, the subsequent purchase of a vintage propeller, the subsequent drop-off of said propeller at studio loft, and subsequently the propeller not showing up ever again and having no importance at all to the plot. But why am I so picky about untied plot threads? This shouldn't be criticized as a movie, it's a giant photograph. It's pretty, it's wonderful, and it shows us lots of pretty, wonderful things. Maybe it's like the photographer said of his ex-wife, "She's not pretty, but she's easy to live with. No, the other way around. She's beautiful, but I can't live with her."

Same goes for the film. It would be just dandy to play above a bar with all the people below talking about how much they pretend to love it, or loved it when they were stoned. There was even an option on my DVD to allow the dialogue to go away and the music only to remain. Perhaps I should have clicked it. Nothing said out loud said any more than the pictures, which, I suppose was the point of the whole thing.

ALSO ALSO ALSO FORGOT HOW COULD I FORGOT TO SAY YES SAY ENTIRE THING BASED ON JULIO CORTAZAR STORY! STORY! STORY! STORY! GOSH I LOVE THE GUY! BUT LA MAGA JUST DONT TRANSLATE!

addams family values

Dear Tim Burton,

Yeah, Tim, I really really love you. I love Ed Scissorhands and that scene with the different jellos. I love Beetlejuice and the mom's weird sculptures. I, too, think Winona Rider is the shit, and I, too, admire the squeedles of Jonny Depp, so I'm going to come right out and apologize: I'm sorry, I'm really really sorry that I prefer the product of the hijacking of your vision to your vision itself. Yes, I prefer Barry Levinson's dark lenses to your cracked-out ones. It's Addams Family, and it has Values. (Worship that, Bush-y).

If I'm going to be overly simplistic about it, I'll start with Joan Cusack as a "black widow" in vintage 40s ensembles with kitten heels and drawn nylons who smooches Fester with festering reluctance. "I'm a virgin!" she squeals. Holy cow! Cusack's got a mouth like a trampoline, eyes like dishplates, a figure like a highway cloverleaf—built for speed with all the right curves.

But, unquestionably, the greatest thread in this psycho dark comedy unfurls to rip the Addams' seams when evil Nanny Cusack sends the kids to camp—Summer camp. Girls in floral dresses. Polo shirts. Tans. Canoes. Where The Addams Family stuck mostly to preaching to the choir, here the kids are brought out into the real world where they must defend for themselves. Perhaps this film did more for those outcasts who equate "perky" with evil, who don't even try to fit in, who can't complete their boondoggle arts & crafts lanyards, than for any other film in my generation: For whenever I'm rejected, I instinctively daydream back to the scene wherin the outcasts, cast as Indians, in the camp re-enactment of The First Thanksgiving, pillage the on-set village, scalp their peers, tie the blonde chick to the stake and swamp her in gasoline to the cries from the bleachers of doting parents sporting Ralph Lauren. It's a beautiful scene, in a movie with an even more indulgent artistic director than Beetlejuice. I love you, Tim, but I've chosen darkness.

city of god

If you can squirm past the start wherein a chicken's head is neatly trimmed from its body, you can probably stomach the following scene wherein our boy hero, Rocket, is caught between a line of Rio de Janeiro cops gripping firearms and the brooding Rio de Janeiro gang sweating in their crosshairs. Warning: I could not make it past this scene when my brother tried showing me this film a year ago. Since, I suppose, I've matured. Or, I suppose, I had recently seen Oldboy—a violent-for-the-shock-value-of-the-thing thriller about Revenge.

Revenge also builds the walls of the City of God, a housing project outside the city whose unpaved, yellow streets remind one of Babar's illustrations for Celesteville more than a "slum" (as the inhabitants refer to their hometown). Crime here is the only way to get ahead, blah blah blah, and the film startles an audience into rapt attention with a series of gorgeously gruesome crimes culminating in the serial murder of all of the guests in a local Motel. Basically, as my couch-sharer said, "This is not an advertisement for Rio De Janeiro." Uh, no. It seems as though everyone in the film gets shot, especially Little Dice, a seven year old child who does most of the shooting.

However, what makes the City of God great is that the violence doesn't speak for itself, doesn't linger as a statement, doesn't claim to be out of the ordinary cycle of human events: It is commanded within the quaking tone of the film as simply an extension of the quick cuts, of the sun's match flare against the lens. Simply put, there is no other way to tell the story of a boy, Rocket, who escapes from this mess by photographing it. Rocket is just like us: he fears the violence, sees it for what it is, and will only survive by escape. The photographs he snaps then, for the local paper, are that form of escape: The violence exists whether we see it or not, but we can only control its movements through film.

party monster

"It's my birthday, and I wanna have a And I want a troll costume and mock Jerry Springer played by that guy from Full House and I want "I don't do drugs" to be a laugh line and I want to see Chloe Sevigny in a bikini made of O.R. masks and I want that other dude to wear an eye patch—stoically—and I want Seth Green to dance to 80s tracks barefoot in his "luxury condominium" and I want men in rat costumes, chicken costumes, bear costumes? And I want Rodney, the employee of a fried-chicken joint in Times Square, to be overwhelmed by the sights of these gaudy "club kids" and yet to la la love them. And I want to teach my mom to do ecstasy ("It's not even a listed substance") and I want boys in tents doing K. And I want the grizzly death of Ricky from "My So Called Life" as well as some jokes about hacking-up flesh and flesh flesh flesh and I want nothing more than Behind-the-Scenes featurettes of directors telling "Mac" where to stand. And a bloodfeast. That too.

nurse betty

Nurse Betty or Nurse Booby?

From the first shot, this Nurse flick seems to be about a hospital, about life-and-death scenarios, about the grizzly tragedies of the heart that take place when it's splayed open in an operating theatre, the wiry sinews of its aorta attuned to the glinting scalpel of Doctor David Ravell. Instead, Doctor David is attuned to very different matters of the heart, it seems, as Chloe—his busty assistant—reapplies her lipgloss and recounts his escapades.

Pull out and we see squeege-eyed Renee "I'm a simple, ol' housewife" Zellwegger is getting teary eyed, scanning her favorite hospital soap for secret messages to escape her slavish marriage to a tacky car salesman who, it turns out, is messed up in a different kind of Coke than the bottled sort she pours as a small-town waitress.

Soap operas? Coke? This seems like a kooky, crazy comedy that busts out of hollywood conventions like Zellwegger's tits in a nurse outfit! Things get "out of control" when two black men scalp her white husband. Excuse me. One moment.

TWO BLACK MEN SCALP HER WHITE HUSBAND.

Is this...okay?

To get to the shot where bored, wheezing Chris Rock (the highlight of this shitshow) is standing in Betty's kitchen, holding a tuft of hairy scalp, one must traverse grand canyons of Bunuel-esque violence. Oh yeah, and then they go to the Grand Canyon. I really don't know what to say here. This becomes a road trip movie that lands all three of them—Betty & The Black Guys (my new band name)—in the apartment of a stereotypical latino chick who's hard-knock for dates in seedy L.A., where Betty's favorite soap just happens to be filmed. But Betty didn't come here to see it "filmed": She thinks it's real. A dissociative fugue that's more Thelma and Louise than Lost Highway has meshed her real life with that of "A Reason to Love." For example, she thinks she's a nurse, and she's in love with Dr. David Ravell—not the actor, the dude. The dude on the show.

But it's a Cinderella story of the sort not even Oprah could have cooked up! Betty saves a man's life, and becomes a real nurse! She meets Dr. David, they fall in love, and she gets a guest spot on his show! I won't unburden myself of the "plot twist," but, since you shouldn't watch this movie anyway, she squinches up, doesn't say a word, and ends up back at the latina's—where the black guys find out she's been hiding the coke, etc. etc.

HOWEVER, Crispin Glover does play a dorky small-town reporter with the hots for Betty. I hope he rubbed elbows with Rock at craft services. Though I don't know if that's enough to discount the image swimming in my head of a teary-eyed Morgan Freeman kissing a photo of Nursey-wursy as he walks down the stereotypical desert highway from his smoldering Buick. I mean, she's ugly, okay?

bartleby

I would review this spectacular film, but, ah, I prefer not to.

the knack...and how to get it

Nancy, Colin, and Tom are rolling Colin's new four-poster, deer-emblazoned, iron, six-foot bed through the curvy streets of London (naturally) and somewhere—everywhere—prissy little british cap wearing oldies are chanting, "Mods and Rockers, Mods and Rockers." Earlier there's a stair-way full of identically-dressed women lined up for Tolen's bedroom, "It's an exagerration," Colin says to the camera, "He just gets a lot of women." Or something like that. The film is dizzying, splendid, souped-up, and features a room entirely painted white. Tolen wears sunglasses. Tom is an artist. Colin is a stone fox. I'm in love with this 1965 Cannes winner; although surely to have said so at the time, I might have been labelled a "mod" or a "rocker." For shame.

the saddest music in the world

"I don't believe that all this sadness really exists," says Chester—the American Ambassador of Sadness—scanning the faces of a funeral's mourners. "Well, bad things happen—I'm not gonna deny you that. But somehow when people try to show how they've been affected by these bad things, they start faking it: They know, deep down, no one cares, but they want people to know they're faking it so that when something awful happens to them, they can get some of this fake sympathy themselves."

The Saddest Music in the World is all about this fake sadness. bogged down by depression era Winnipeg and its unending snow, Lady Port Huntley—beer barroness, pretty lady, and big time milionaire—thinks up the spectacle of a "Saddest Music in the World Competition." ("If you're sad, and like beer, I'm your lady!") Teams from the likes of Serbia, Sweden, and Scotland and compete in karate-kid-esque face-offs; moving up the ladder only when they've been granted a slide into the winner's "pit of beer" (it looks like golden-age Nickelodeon). Outrageous announcers muck-up any kind of true sadness with cheeky, cliched commentary, and nobody looks particularly foul-mouthed. Except of course for Serbia, who's really Rodderick—Chester's brother—and who carries around his dead son's human heart in a glass jar, "preserved by [his] own tears." His wife's left him, but she turns out to be Narcissa, Chester's lover, who's really an amnesiac nymphomaniac. All of Chester's relations seem a bit fuddled, but he retains his plastic grin, despite even a kooky father, who has drunkenly amputated the wrong leg of the love of his life—leaving Lady Port Huntley legless on a "dolly."

If you're going to love this movie—and you will—it is not for the plot, which looks inane when spelled-out. It is for the sheer absurdity of any of the action, the Lynch-ian predicaments, the man walking by in his pajamas through the snow ("Oh, a sleepwalker!" exclaims Chester, before Narcissa kisses the man on the cheek). (Kazuo Ishiguro wrote the script, which is kind of an explanation?) Not to go unmentioned, the film is as beautiful as it is difficult to watch. Filmed on old cameras (I'm guessing here), it's like the early days of talkies, or like a movie you would try to make on an old 8mm, if you were actually a genius. Comforting Lady Port Huntley when her glass legs break, Chester sighs, "Anything that can be built can be rebuilt." This film feels re-built, as if it all existed in the backs of our minds or the upper echelons of our attics: it feels old, classic, canonical—and yet it is entirely new. I liked this movie, and I'm not faking it.

pump up the volume

This Promised Everything.

Promised:
1. A Pump
2. Volume
3. Christian Slater

Everything:
1. Doppleganger of Winona Rider
2. Repeated message to "take down the system"
3. Fist-pumping parents in angry PTA meetings

Like Heathers without an ironic bite, like Empire Records without any revelry. This, as my brother noted, was like Rock 'n Roll High School if it had a denoument. Plus, there was no Joey Ramone.

birth

Like the waterbirth in the fourth scene I arrive at Birth gawking, gasping, heart-stopped and hopeful. Great trailers can mean terrible movies; and I hate hate hate Nicole Kidman in the same way every child does—because she's prettier than me, smarter than me, and her teariest longshot packs a tougher punch than I can stomach. (Also, my lunch money is low and she seems to be rolling in it.)

Birth seems an easy movie to make: there's a heart-faced protagonist with a dark backstory—her aryan husband died ten years prior, and she's been duped to fall for some highbrow with a widow's peak as sinister as Count Chocula's. But when a doe-eyed Cameron Bright wanders into their perfect engagement party claiming to be the dead Sean, the film doesn't fall into a pit of gooey gravitas. Anticipating an audience who would laugh at the screen for something so phony, director Jonathan Glazer ( Sexy Beast ) has thrown in a jostling cynical sister and her snobby, psychiatrist hubby who quiz the whiz-kid and still don't fall for it. On the other hand, Anna (Kidman) tongues his ice-cream and watches him climb into bath—her bath. But this film is not about the plot—which is good enough that we never quite figure things out—it's fucking BE-A-UT-IFUL.

Three-minute long shots of Kidman's pretty face recall, as much of the body of the film does as wel, a Mia Farrow of Rosemary's Baby days. Then, the camera swings low to show us little Sean's little, low world, and reveals in the meat of the film a dark, wealthy New York that dresses in black and blows out tapered candles like it's their job. This is not sugar-coated or candy-colored, it's a world tinged in a jealousy as green as their silk wall-paper, a golden hope as honey-colored as every cream molding. Black maids who huff and doormen who puff are the voyeurs of this mad spectacle, along with us and all our dopey cynicism.

Then there's the music, which rumbles under the film like a strip of road; which guts us like a low, perfect punch. My heart beats with every wiped tear, every closeup of poor, little, dead Sean's enormous blue eyes. Re-born into something terrible, I am on the playground again, and slurring my words: 'How could you do this to me, Nicole? How could you be so...perfect.'