howard's end

I'm restless just watching you cheat. I'd swish that skirt, swish that tea, unbutton that boot, that hat. Umbrellas are sacred--follow them through rain, across puddles dimpling with newer drops. Into the alleyways seek gamblers, prostitutes, the low life that flowers your own. The wilderness should be kept still in wallpaper, paperweights, weighted tassles. There is a house in the country, up a road haloed by trees, purpled by the bluebells you will walk through. Follow the curved twists, the dustmounts high behind the automobile, look out for the maid on her bicycle. Clip-clop, I could not find it, I saw only the fence and stopped there. A bookcase inside learning to creak, you can hide beneath the sword in a stranger's fireplace, undo your hair in an upstairs room, push open a window and put out your hand, palm-up, to a mellowed sky, to check there for weather.

There is something about Howard's End that changes all syntax, undoes all poetry, that puts you splash into the mudsoak of Victorian England grappling with its reins. The unavoidable wall for me--the brick wall of all my interior nightmares--is my inability to understand that other people exist. But it is possible to watch this movie and to believe that all people, all their pasts, existed. Here, something recalls the Dickenson poem about the sponge and the ocean, about the brain's inability to comprehend a world outside itself. Watching Howard's End, though, I find a humid sort of evidence that the past exists, that the people then were the same, that their foibles and their pipe dreams were as twisted as my own. Staircases twist like nautilus. High collars hum against the folds of neck. As Barbara Kruger once stenciled: I cannot look at you and breathe at the same time.

juvies

Scenario: A 14 year old girl is pressured by everything, by whatever, by the boy's she's seeing, by her family, by some burden bigger than 'atlas shrugged' on a cafe table,*** to pick up a gun because it's the only option. To shoot her best friend because it is the only option. Because if she does nothing, if she just watches films during the day, or sits on staircases and stoops, the opposing gang (that the other's sleeping with) will kill her family, the gun-toter's family, that is, because she won't reprimand the ex-best friend. It's complicated/simple. She does it. What else? Now the shot-up girl's paraplegic, obese, wheeling around and showing cameras her scars, trying to make me understand that "she understands": that it was the "only thing" this other girl could do. Imagine me, sitting next to you, on steps, just watching a screening, trying hard not to do anything at all, and all I'm thinking about is how hard this is. How hard it is just to sit next to you. Take it back, I can take it back. It's not hard. It's not hard compared to this girl who's still a-smilin', jack-o-lantern faced, with walmart bullet scars like strikethroughs. I carry no weapon, coming empty handed, empty-headed.

*that force a girl in a newsy's cap to tumble down a san francisco hill before the screening starts. dave eggers chuckles. everyone makes their own joke about what a perfect san francisco moment. think of lewis carroll here: the hunting of the snark. yet, still seeing others suffer and the laughter after. we didn't know the girl. don't know any of these, really.

blood simple

Blood simple....ISN'T. I wonder what the headlines were then, huh?

Okay, I've got a game. Put five names on flashcards. Put five deaths on flashcards. Mix them up and scramble, order and unorder. Get a colored marker and draw a line over all of them, like a snail would crawl. Turn them backs up and create a way to prevent each death. Number all those complications, then throw down a die. Write the nubmers against each name, put in rainbow order. There.

It's not a soap opera, because we never see love, any sort of redemption. There's a dog in one scene, who seems, wide-eyed to see nothing. That's what we'd wish for, huh. To just be out of this world, a world, where things could happen. You've got a screw loose. You're about to go.

fargo

there's a shot in the snow, the empty parking lot, where everything is just geometric. where everything is perfect.

if i read poems for perfect lines, why can't i read movies for perfect shots?

barton fink

is about a man who writes a hit play (read, m.o.n.o.l.i.t.h.), becomes the toast of new york (read, observer), is flown out to LA (read, driven) to work for hollywood (read, berkley), and stumbles upon writers block, faulkner's doppleganger, john goodman as murderer, steve buscemi as bellboy. In that it's about a writer with a problem, it recalls Henry Fool a bit, but that it's basically just another beautifully written Coen brothers screwpiece, it recalls their other films a lot more closely. You can see in Goodman's smile the spin of a bowling ball in Lebowski, and in the dusty lobbies of the grand Hollywood hotel where Fink throws down his valise, the scooty parlors of Minneapolis embodied in Fargo. Blood Simple's in the murder scene--disposal of the body, sir? And there's Pandora's box there right at the end, against a yellow wash horizon, like O Brother. Still, I'm all about movies about writers about movies, and Barton Fink, who's failing at writing a script, is just a plot I can latch onto, cuz I'm failing, and I liked The Player. Lots.

in the company of men, reviewed in stream of consciousness

I'm reading this short story collection by this woman named Lorrie Moore, and it's good and everything, but Obviously, Lucy's criticisms are right, the girl scrubs life clean and remember when you played that "Game of Life," with those little cars and you chose two pink people as a joke and someone said, "are you a lesbian?" and you were like, "are you gay? you have two blues?" and you realized you could just fucking pair these people together and send them to the old age home and what i'm trying to say here is what Moore does and what Neil LaBute does in In the Company of Men his low-budged breakout picture, where he basically takes these two characters (pushover and Mr. Right) and gives them this situation (date the same woman, and break her heart to make themselves feel better) and gets them to actually do it.

The Trick, here, and I say "TRICK" because it's everything that makes me respect a storyteller and everything that makes me love David Lynch, as well as everything I think is the stupidest easiest game to play, which is also in The Shape of Things etc., and i only really bring it up because it played at the theater I worked at for about three months and everyone, really everyone except for the strictest of Paul Rudd fans, hated it. Basically, what was I saying? oh yeah, so LaBute just gets character combinations and doesn't tell you anything, puts you in the meat of things, and halfway through you lose your footing and begin to not trust any of this, and you don't know who's bluffing and who's loving, and does that make it a psychological thriller (as the cassette enthuses) or does that make the girl on the bed, who's crying her eyes out, seem lame and terrible, or that much more beautiful, or just like you, like us, because we're like the people in these movies, and we can't trust anyone, and the world is ugly, and not harmonic, and the animals eat eachother, and when you put the combinations in the cars, they will have to have to have to go somewhere.

brewster's millions

The essence of criticism is jealousy. If those who can't do, teach, those who also cannot teach, preach. And that's what I'm doing here, and here, and here. And the other half of criticism is hope. We can make something beautiful. You dissappoint me. Your 260 million dollar picture could have saved Africa.

When Brewster, a failing minor-league pitcher whose fifteen minutes are long used up, gets tapped on the shoulder by a scruff who looks like a con, everyone's thinking they know where this film is going. Examinations of greed, sports team melodrama, women who don't love him. Nope. Brewster has inherited 300 million dollars. But, like all of God's children, the man must overcome hurdles, and pass the difficult tests set out by the omniscient. Here's the hurdle: In order to inherit the full 300 mil., Brewster must spend 30 million dollars in 30 days.

If you haven't seen this film, you've seen its imitations:
1. Xanadu's depiction in C.K.
2. The spending scenes in Disney's Blank Check
3. The Addams Family Vault
4. Cruella DeVille's garage
5. Arthur

Classically, Arthur is the picture I point to, as a critic, that contains a rare quality in cinema that I actively seek out. It is a picture about a rich man looking for true love, that openly contains no plot point on which the protagonist would actually LOSE something. I seek the holy grail, the kind of movie where absolutely nothing bad will happen, a movie scrubbed of all antagonists, a movie which begins as a cinderella story and has no roadblocks to a pure happiness. There is no "it's academic"esque face-off scene, no teams that showdown for a final duel, there is no love interest that starts with a rejection, no sallow-faced fop hiding behind his office chair. There are no gangs, no fists, no pain in this world that isn't erased in minute ten. Instead, Brewster buys people lunch. He plays baseball with John Candy in his Plaza suite. He rents tuxes and runs for mayor.

It makes me jealous, and it makes me hope. It drives me up the wall and buys me out.

broken flowers
wedding crashers
the magnificent ambersons
les liasons dangereuses

can you keep it up for a week?

When I saw that my boyfriend had netflixed Can You Keep it up
for a Week? (1974) I asked when we were going to watch this “pervy”
movie. (My apologies for quoting myself.) He scoffed and insisted that
the title was a play on words and was just a twee British pun about
whether or not this gent was able to hold down a job. Well, in a sense
that is the plot of the movie, but it is acted out with all the
traditional porn clichés and double entendres and yes, it’s pervy
alright.
Can You Keep it up? is the only film directed by Jim Atkinson.
Other films he edited included 1976’s I’m not Feeling Myself Tonight
aka Sex Ray and the 1975 special The Ups and Downs of a Handyman aka
Happy Housewives. Sense a theme? To burst your kinky bubble, he was
also the sound editor for Deliverance.
That said, the movie is silly-raunchy not offensive or
revolting in any sense. Jeremy Bulloch somehow pulls off this dopey
guy who is only good at one thing. He even made it through Can You
Keep it Up with some semblance of a career, which is more than you can
say for most of the other actors in the blue flick. He was in two 007
movies, The Spy Who Loved Me and Octopussy and Star Wars movies #5 and
#6 as – wait for it – Boba Fett.
Enough about Jeremy! Can You Keep it Up has kitsch value on
it’s own. Familiar scenarios like the bombshell customers’ top
accidentally coming off car wash, stripping down and seducing the lady
doctor and a patient at her office and getting the old zipper stuck so
that the Johnson is fully frontal for a job interview come one after
the other like old friends. Oh yes! There’s that old set-up. Oh
yes! There’s the orgy with the boss scene! Oh yes! The lesbian
dominatrix scene – oh yes, oh yes, oh yes!!!
—Raquel