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Reviews
Le scaphandre et le papillon (2007)
Emotional and Visually Astonishing
This movie astonished me. I was taken aback by its ability to make the viewer feel like a stroke victim with "locked-in syndrome," who goes from a "fast" lifestyle as the editor of Elle magazine with a number of beautiful women and three kids to a vegetable who cannot speak or move. The colors are ravishing; they reminded me of the pale, dry colors of Renaissance artwork. The women in the movie are all beautiful, and its depiction of hospital life is sobering, but ultimately rejuvenated my desire to live.
Schnabel, a painter, exhibits his visual prowess in images rich with emotion and a sense of presence. Each shot is bold and striking. The movie fuses a poetic sensibility with a knowledge of current cinematic techniques and styles.
I highly recommend seeing this movie.
Secretary (2002)
Filled with awful messages
The plot of this film goes like this: "disturbed" and "fragile" girl leaves mental institution after cutting herself, gets a job as secretary for a lawyer, dominance and submission themes bubble up to (finally) the lawyer spanking the secretary quite hard and masturbating onto her back, to get out his sexual interest in her as a submissive female. She likes being submissive, though, and falls in love with him. He doesn't know how to love anyone; he can only fire the girls he has jerked off on. The secretary, through a sustained act of submission, wins over the man and they get happily married, despite the contradictory arguments made for and against the marriage by a litany of people and their lectures on feminist empowerment.
The movie is pretty simple, philosophically and artistically. It strives toward a point, and once it reaches this point, it ends. It's not as "racy" as some people might make it out to be (especially those who are accustomed to pornography or more challenging films like "Anatomy of Hell" and "In the Realm of the Senses"). Maybe it's racy to middle-aged, married adults who pop it into their DVD player and watch it together. I was disappointed; I thought it would be more titillating, more complex. Instead, it seemed to shy away from sex scenes (there is really only one clear sex scene, and it occurs at the end, with the actors' clothing on). And I was bored by how I was supposed to go "Oh my god!" when Maggie Gyllenhaal's breasts are exposed when she's in a bathtub, being caressed by her former boss and now fiancé. I also thought Gyllenhaal's voice to be contrived-sounding, with her wispy, prolonged accents and her supposedly "twisted" laugh, which occurs at "inappropriate times." To sum up my criticism, this film is very, very conventional-minded, so the director and actors, and audience, shouldn't pretend that it's racy and challenging. I thought that the basic message, that people should liberate themselves sexually and give in to their temptations without worrying about whether or not they are "healthy" or in line with feminist doctrine, is fine, but the movie carries some other troubling implications, for instance...
the treatment of the secretary's boyfriend- a timid, nervous JC Penney worker with low self-esteem-was particularly heartbreaking to watch. The film portrays this man as a pathetic, repressed, socially awkward "big boy" who lives with his lower-middle class parents and works an unambitious job. Gyllenhaal toys with him because her boss isn't responding to her, which is clearly wrong and sends off the message that it is okay for timid and insecure people to be taken advantage of, because they are, (after all!), pathetic. I disdain films that try to get us to sympathize with a behavioral or character nuance in someone who disrespects or mistreats someone else who is equally (any maybe even more) vulnerable. Not to mention that the social stigma of a lower-class person (JC Penney worker) is presented here in full ignorance, and the movie implies that the lawyer is not only better than the JC Penney worker because he is dominant, but because he is upper-middle class (has a nice house, treadmill, car, etc.). So, in the end, the film purports that dominance over women is good, people with money are better than people with little money, and less vulnerable people are better than vulnerable people. And that women should be "okay" with men being dominant creatures because, hey, some women JUST LIKE THAT!
With all this in mind, one can see how simple and conventional this movie is, and how this contributes to its triteness. I would advise you not to waste your time with this one.
Kansen (2004)
Structurally flawed, but has some frightening, tense moments that are worth seeing.
Infection is disconcerting and tense, but lacks real structure as a film. This is because it focalizes the point of view of the doctors in a hospital where an "infection" spreads through their subconscious and causes them to hallucinate. Hallucination is not very reliable, SO, the structure of the film is not very reliable, and doesn't seem to cohere at the end. This has a bad effect on the viewer. Still, the film has some really disturbing moments, and the atmosphere of the hospital (where renovations are left half-done, and doctors suffer from an inexplicable depression and inability to properly care for patients) is well rendered as dilapidated and abandoned-looking. There is something very disturbing about hospitals that look abandoned, as they imply indifference to human life and a sense of having "given up" (think of the abandoned hospital in Jacob's Ladder, which Infection steals a shot from, btw, with the low-angle shot of the menacing wheel of the stretcher being rapidly pushed through a dirty hospital corridor).
Imagine the scene from The Shining in which Shelly Duvall accuses Jack Nicholson of having bruised the neck of their son, Danny. Jack is sitting at his desk in the big open room, and Shelley Duvall is crying and yelling at him. Jack has a confused look on his face, a baffled and oneiric look that goes well with the tense string music to develop a sense of confusion and horror. Take the tone and feeling in this scene, my personal favorite from The Shining, and extend it for an entire movie, and you have the feeling sustained throughout the entirety of Infection.
The sound is constantly designed to make the viewer ill at ease, so our muscles never relax. It seemed as if every ten seconds, there was a devastating collapse of tense sound that synchronized with a frightening, spook-out image. The movie succeeds at discomforting the viewer.
Infection was a rare find. I thought INLAND EMPIRE and various horror films had desensitized me to horror as a genre, but Infection renewed my interest a bit. I most liked how it takes place in the dark and under-maintained hospital, and the sense of guilt and depression looming behind the plot's events (the guilt the doctors have of having mistakenly killed a patient by administering him calcium chlorate instead of calcium chloRIDE).
Der siebente Kontinent (1989)
?
This movie is not so bad. I rented it because I was intrigued by the conceptual gloom it promised. But the actions of the family are not committed wholeheartedly, the mother is reluctant to follow through, indicating a hidden normalcy to the characters. The suicide is referenced in voice-over letters and in explanations as to how it "should" be done before it actually is done, (e.g. the father breaking down a shelf and telling his wife, who is drawn into the room and bewildered by the scene, "it is best if we do it systematically"). I felt that it would have been stronger if the family had not referenced it, but had just done it in an organic, fluid and uncompromising manner. When the characters have lines foreshadowing their suicide, it gives it a predictability as banal as the bureaucratic world the family is abandoning. I haven't seen any of Michael Haneke's other movies, but he seems like a very deliberate, intellect-wielding director. Sort of like a contemporary Godard, although he had to break from Godard in order to replace him. I was watching this with a friend, who said, "I feel like he is making a clear-cut argument." I felt the same way. Although I am not opposed to this way of approaching film-making, it detracts from the characters, because they become tools of the director's thesis rather than living, emotion-showing individuals. This movie is not disturbing, it isn't depressing, it's just a point of view, cut and dry. I did like one thing about this movie- the way that it was shot. It has a photographic crispness to it.
Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
This movie was TERRIBLE! No stars!
"When the sea was calm, all ships alike showed mastership in floating." -William Shakespeare
The summary was what I said, verbatim, after leaving a theatre in Portland with some dorm friends. Choosing to do so at such an early point in my college friendship career, (everybody else loved it and I therefore was outcasting myself) was an unfortunate decision I still can't come to terms with. The movie was embarrassing because it was aiming for some Todd Solondz lugubriousness while maintaining a pop cadence. I didn't feel any of the visceral depression and longing for suicide while being intellectually provided enough to realize that it would all be for the attention that Solondz gives me. I just thought it was cute. Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness, and really whatever film Solondz makes is worth the severity, this film seems to me to be complacently on the fence between authentic experiential loss and the let's go dancing and then get the car washed type facade that I respond to in such vivid disgust. Valerie Dayton and Jonathan Faris are good filmmakers, I think the video for the Smashing Pumpkins' 1979 is the best of its genre. But what we have here is some imitatively dysfunctional, yellow-colored Sufjan Stevens sounding celluloid bilge. Could be for you, though. Heck, you probably saw it and loved it, and are brainstorming a nasty rebuttal.
Lost Highway (1997)
A Response to Years of Enthusiasm for Lost Highway
This movie is a favorite of mine, and I have a very personal connection with it that is unperturbed by the comments involving its excessiveness or vacuousness. I can imagine such a person, energetic and excited by his own misunderstanding, looking for a channel with which to justify his apparent ineptitude with some explanation of an antithetical sanity. I am not challenged or disturbed by anybody like that.
Lost Highway is an authentic movie. Its director is genuine, and has always made films like this. He has always been somebody troubled by an uncommon lack of distraction, and therefore, when he is not seeing everything in its nakedness without an amiable song in his head or a happy facade he is superimposing on the world, he is seeing it all with a troll shard in his eye, recognizing the immanent ugliness which a nice connotation cannot conceal. Although it is a theoretical idea, one that you may have no use for, it is evident through Lynch's collection and application of sound, along with his visions of everything in the world as unassisted and scarily uninviting. Undoubtedly, David Lynch would never admit to anything like this, because he is too pure to be an intellectual. He is experiential and intuitive, a real and indisputable artist rather than a critic, theorist or didactic informant.
And Lost Highway is, amongst all of his movies, the most audacious, (Eraserhead coming close but being too complete and ambitious to want to inspire much interpretive difficulty or frustration). While I will always love Lost Highway despite claims against its incoherence and frivolity, I must at least waste my time to say that the observations of the detractors are right. Those two qualities are present and actual attractions, and are demonstrative of the artistic fullness and unimpeded representational ability of the director. I go to Lynch's movies because of their incoherence, for the same reason why I go to a writer who lacks sociopolitical interest. He is someone too generous to ideas to cloud them with periodic assertions and interruptions involving social or political information. And coherence is a social product: it has been developed traditionally by filmmakers, and has been proved to work because audiences generally like it. People generally like understanding what is going on. Not to say that they should be ashamed of their often anxious and natural inquisitiveness, but they should at least realize that the most timeless art is not devoted entirely to lucidity and linearity. A thought, reflection or image gestates independent of such obligatory qualifications, which is why the impositions of structure and common interpretations of quality force it through a filter. David Lynch is the real thing, and his films defy the filter. Why can't certain viewers understand this? Why is authenticity so difficult to receive, and why is it that any kind of experiment seems to them a failure to match convention, and why are you so proud of your claims regarding its incomprehensibility, as if its fans had never realized this? Why have you all made me look ridiculous, sitting here writing this tirade in support of an artist you need to come to terms with, to submit to?
Punch-Drunk Love (2002)
See it and be relieved
This movie is very, very good. And well thought out. If you'd like, recognize similarities between Adam Sandler and Jacques Tati, since there are lots of them- especially in the clumsinesses, the oblivious initiations into seemingly unintended color schemes, etc. I do not want to reprimand those who thought this movie boring but will do so anyway. Did you watch it all? And, if you did, how long did it take you to make your needy discrimination? Watch it again with some Bose speakers and maybe you'll understand. Period!
Okay just to fill up the rest of these ten lines, (please move down to the other comments if you are having a crisis which in some way involves the juxtaposition of the brevity of life next to the eternity of death and the consequent avoidance of time-wasters), but this film is my favorite. I love it. It makes me happy, which few things can do for us nowadays. Even movies cannot make us happy, since we think of them only as catalysts for highfalutin and inflated intellectual writing a la Peter Travers. I did not need to write about this film because I did not feel the need to exploit it. But whatever.
Dead Man (1995)
Hmm.
Thought I might contribute again to this website to console that small enthusiastic voice in my head telling me my opinion on Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man actually matters, and can affect your lives in some trivial cinematic way.
Dead Man is bigger than a cult film. More people like it, and most will assure you that it is in some way assertive and profound. I disagree, on the basis of the film itself and on the director's entire career. It is not every day when you find a director like Jarmusch who is arrogant enough to advocate and support his own mediocre works as if they were untouchable segments from the I Ching, and he seems to do it with a great strain of confidence that strangely does not seem to confuse him. It would confuse me if I were confident about the value of movies like Dead Man and Coffee and Cigarettes if I had made them. I would most likely wonder why I would not be putting my head down in black awkwardness and shame at having created an object the thinness of which would be inevitably discovered by somebody more authentic than me. But Jarmusch takes his own mutterings for revelations, even when, as in Dead Man, they are the most complacent. They are satisfied with their achievements, assuming that they are apotheoses rather than blocks, and do not have any meaning behind them as a result of it. Take, for instance, an exceptional and endlessly ambitious movie like Amelie. The director, fortunately, cannot stop himself from producing and creating. He is never satisfied, and always sees potential even in the most accomplished reels. We are impressed by something in the film, an intricate human moment, and would be grateful for its own impressive value alone, but are then taken over the edge by another quality that has been placed on top of it, a consequence of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's endless generosity and prolific creativity. Dead Man does not advocate such productivity. It is content with its own vacuous minimalisms and empty signs, a quality that is, I think, derivative of the director's ego. We seem to stagnate only when we have time to brood over ourselves and our reputations, and Jarmusch seems to me to have had much of this kind of time between shots.
The auteur makes a profession out of listening to himself. Jarmusch just happens to be stuck in his own personal monotone.