Author name: Blake Williams

I want to like this more than I do. What started out as a mesmerizing, beautiful arrangement of memories that flowed onto the screen in the same manner that memories cycle through one’s brain dissolved into a tedious sequence of sing-alongs that frustrated me and pulled me out of the film’s spell. It is the best Davies film that I have seen, though (I like it more than his Trilogy and his recent Of Time and the City), but I’m starting to think that he isn’t for me. His work is undeniably well crafted, and his use of pop music is first class. But it wears thin, and it hasn’t kept my attention for an entire feature yet. The filmmaking, though, is poetic, nostalgic, and occasionally very moving. One of the most powerful moments of this film for me was in the transition from Distant Voices into the Still Lives half. A scene at a fireplace fades to black, and then, a phenomenon that can only be experienced when watching this projected on film, the dust on the negative mixes, and is absorbed by, the reflections in a pitch black body of water, all while the sound of a woman giving birth fades in to interrupt the beauty of the image. It’s a brilliant transition, but it also mirrors the formal construction of the film, in which the crooning women never stop singing, interrupting the stunning everything that was Distant Voices. But I look at the poster now, and I see the tagline “In memory, everything happens to music.” Its a tacky way to try to sell this film; I think it preps audiences for something more in line with Meryl Streep’s Music of the Heart. It does make me reconsider Davies’ intentions, though. While I felt the influence of musicals on this film, I wonder if he was trying to make a musical. The film certainly evolves that way. Its interesting to know that the film is a parade of his own memories, and it is telling about him as a person and the circumstances in which he grew up in that these sing-alongs are what he remembers most, rather than all of the misery. There is a lot of misery in this film, but I wouldn’t call it miserable. I felt a lot of joy in watching it, and I got the impression that everyone in this family, despite how rocky things were, could keep loving each other no matter what, and could always see optimism in the future. The film has tons of good ideas and huge emotion, I just wish it all gelled a bit better for me.

This Toronto based documentary filmmaker picked a fascinating subject for this first part of his narcissism trilogy. Zweig goes around to a few dozen vinyl collectors around Ontario and interviews them about their collections, their motivations for collecting, what their collecting is allowing them to do in their life/keeping them away from, and everything in between. I was more interested in the material when Zweig was strictly interviewing other people and asking them blunt questions like ‘do you ever feel like you’re a sad guy who hates himself and that’s why you have to have all of these records?’ than when Zweig has putting his own personal life into the film (not that I didn’t like that he was doing it at all, but he did it too often, especially toward the end). A dense man who claims that his goal in record collecting is to obtain every song ever made is hilariously inane, smug, and, of course, narcissistic. When asked if he is only collecting all of the songs written in English or if he wants every song in any language, he replies ‘all of them, I’ve got the French and the Italians right over there.’ He insists on projecting his knowledge and it is repeatedly shown to be incorrect (surprise! there are more than four bands in the world whose band names start with the letter ‘Q’), and he is one of the clearer examples of the narcissism that goes into collecting something. There is a sense of ownership that comes from buying something when you are aware that you are collecting it, like you have conquered that part of that world and you can now move on to the bigger fish. But a huge point in this film is that the obsession removes the original point of it. Most of these men don’t listen to what they are buying, they haven’t even heard of much of it, and are instead just collecting the vinyl as a material instead of the music. I’ve collected a few things in my life; I was a player in the beanie babie boom, and I currently collect DVDs and shoes. In the former, I can look back at it and acknowledge that I bought many of the babies that I bought because I knew that other people wanted them instead of me wanting it. I had this fantasy that another huge collector would come into my house one day, see my collection, and fall on his knees and bow to my superior stash of bears. But luckily I moved on (helped by the decline in quality and the selling out of that company). I caught myself a couple of years ago falling into a similar trap with my DVD and shoe collections, and so I’ve developed stricter rules for myself for when I decide to purchase a film or a pair of shoes. The characters in this film have no such standards, and based on a few of their behaviors, the obsession of having everything is pushing them closer into reclusion from society. One frail looking man won’t even invite anyone to his home anymore, partly because there is little of the floor that is not covered in records, but also because he is ashamed of himself.

Zweig turns the camera on himself throughout the film to relate his own vinyl collecting to his interviewees. He believes that his love life is the primary victim to his obsession, and he shows an existential yearning for reproducing that is sad and pathetic, though he oftens reaffrims to himself that he is not. This doc is funny, moving, and incredibly interesting, but it does overstay its welcome by about twenty minutes, mostly because Zweig puts a little too much time into himself toward the end (perhaps this is where he sees the narcissism theme come in). I’m trying to get my hands on the other two parts in the trilogy, I’m having some trouble, though.

While this is the best of any of the Academy’s ‘Best Picture’ nominees that I have seen so far (until now, I’ve also seen Slumdog Millionaire and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), it still leaves a lot to be desired. The first third of the film is drastically different than the concluding hour and fifteen minutes. I thought a lot about Breillat’s Brief Crossing during this first act, a film that addresses an older woman’s interest and sexual encounter with a minor with more depth, grace, and maturity than anything that culminates in Daldry’s film. While Breillat builds her film and her characters’ relationship slowly and believably, Kate Winslet’s Hanna is fucking Michael for days before they even know each other’s names. Their relationship is not only rushed, but it seems to be unmotivated, too. Obviously Michael’s participation makes sense because he is a teenage virgin, and of course he’s horny, but Winslet is bitchy and cold toward Michael, and their isn’t any sense of attraction between the two before they are going at it all day every day. If this had evolved throughout the film, it could have led to something sexually revelatory for a Hollywood film. Instead, their relationship is dropped and never returned to. In fact, given the treatment of their relationship during the rest of the film, you could replace that first act with one in which Hanna is Michael’s nanny, with Michael reading to her while she does her chores, and the final two acts of the film, left alone, would have made just as much sense and gotten the same emotional response from me.

Winslet is mediocre in her role, as is Fiennes as older Michael; the only exception is David Kross as young Michael, who is good. Winslet somehow felt like she was doing a Streep impersonation in this, even though I cannot think of any particular film that Streep acts like this. I’m probably just projecting my assumptions of how Kate perceives her own acting skills onto her, but, either way, she is just as undeserving of awards recognition in her role here as she is in Revolutionary Road. She ages so unbelievably that its embarrassing, and her German accent was just as bad as Jeff Goldblum’s in the putrid Adam Resurrected. Fiennes is lost and bored (and boring) as the older Michael, and his conversation with a victim from Hanna’s Nazi camp toward the end of the film is one of the worst acted scenes in movies last year. The entire Holocaust twist on this film felt contrived given that it’s not mentioned or developed at all in the first act of the film, and I’m sure it’s the only reason the film got funded, since everyone in Hollywood loves honoring Holocaust victims, at least every other year. This film was too long, mildly interesting, and melodramatic; its message, ‘Learn how to read when you’re young so that your life doesn’t suck,’ was lame. The potential it had in its first 45 minutes, though, makes it better than Slumdog, and it’s lack of plagiarism makes it better than Benjamin Button.

This portrait of a young healthy-looking gay man who learns that he only has a few months to live because of cancer tries hard to be taken seriously but failed to make me care about the lead or his condition. This film is a ‘weepy’ and has all of the stereotypes of a death film. Death versus birth, sunsets, reconnection with family and past lovers, etc. The biggest compliment I could give the film is that the lead is attractive and that his illness isn’t AIDS. Romain’s homosexuality really has nothing to with anything in the film, which is the way it should be. He is gay and treated as straight. That said, I know that the lead, Melvil Poupaud, is a straight man, and he plays his character like a straight man in the film. I never bought that he was ill, either, until towards the end when he rapidly lost a bunch of weight and is limping around the city. The film is pretty shallow and portrays impending death as a time to remember when you were a boy and nothing more. He has flashbacks to when he was about 8 or 9 years old, and only that age, and it’s handled in an excessively sentimental way that I thought was begging for my tears. Yes, there was a time when he was young, healthy, and had his whole life ahead of him, I know that, it’s in every other ungood film about a dying character. The best character in the film is Sasha, Romain’s ex. He is victimized by Romain’s moods and never knows of his affliction, which I thought made his relationship and break-up with Romain more interesting, especially their reunion toward the end of the film. But their relationship, like Romain’s relationship with his father, sister, and grandmother are all underplayed. The climax of the film involves Romain deciding to impregnate a girl he has just met whose boyfriend is sterile. This all makes sense until the boyfriend is involved in the conception, shown as a threesome that is confusing, silly, and empty. After this and Swimming Pool, I’m hesitant to give Ozon another chance.

This very simple film is perfect given what it was trying to do. A story about a boy trying to return his friend’s homework notebook somehow translates into a surprisingly poignant and beautiful love story. Ahmed’s journey is an intense labor of love for Nematzadeh, whose potential fate of being expelled is a far greater disturbance to Ahmed than any punishment his parent could offer for his disobedience. The primary reason why this film works so well is the unbelievable job by the actors (the boys playing Ahmed and Nematzadeh are real life brothers). In the first scene when Nematzadeh is crying and Ahmed is looking at him, it is devastating because Ahmed’s heart is breaking in that moment. On the way home, Nematzadeh trips on the dirt road, and Ahmed leads him to a fountain, rolls up his pants and washes the dirt from his friend’s skin. His care for him is instinctual, and I got the impression that it had become his mission to never let anything bad happen to him from that point on. When Ahmed finds out that he has accidentally taken home Nematzadeh’s notebook, it’s impossible to not feel the anxiety of the situation. Every hold up in Ahmed’s quest to return the notebook is nerve-racking, and as the night crawls in, and Ahmed is still scrambling through Poshteh, still hasn’t bought bread for his mother, and still hasn’t done his own homework, the hopelessness of the scenario became exhausting to watch.

I was thinking of Pedro Costa a little bit while watching the film. The towns in this film look similarly beat up to those in Costa’s films, though the people here don’t feel as impoverished, pessimistic, and generally dirty as in Costa’s work. More, though, is the door motif. This film opens with a shot of the door to Ahmed and Nematzadeh’s classroom, partially open, swaying slightly as the children make conversation before the teacher arrives. The door continues to be a nuisance for the teacher, and it takes several attempts at shutting it before it finally won’t open again. Later, two important characters are introduced who are doormakers. One man wants to replace everyone’s wooden doors with iron doors, while another, older man limps through Poshteh, pointing at several doors and windows and proudly claims them as ones that he installed. While these latter men and their doors seem to show the changing style and sense of security of Iran, the door of the classroom mirrors the behavior of the children in the film. Ahmed, especially, is remarkably persistent; he will not take no for an answer. He is scolded at one point for always making elders repeat things instead of obeying them when they say something the first time, but it shows his maturity that he doesn’t take any of the adults’ bullshit. One review I read of this film wrote that Ahmed was naive, but I think he is clearly the opposite. His eyes and behaviors show an understanding of his situation more than any adult in the film comes close to. As predictable as the ending may be, it is extremely powerful because I endured Ahmed’s journey and could feel the selflessness that he must have in order to spend the night doing what he’d done. When I saw the flower in the film’s final shot, my heart sank because of its purity and complete lack of cynicism.

This film will live in my brain, forever, with the name Armond White attached to it, much in the same way that I always think of Roger Ebert when I think of Haggis’ Crash. What these two have in common is that both critics picked the respective film as the best of the year in which it was released. The difference in the two, though, is that I actually think that Ebert thought that Crash was the best film of its year. Broken Sky, on the other hand, has no business being praised by a major film critic, and I think that White had his thumbs at his temples, waving his other eight fingers back and forth when he published is review of Hernández’s film, and then erected his middle finger when he placed it at the top of his Top 10 of 2006 list. Adding to the insult, is that he had the audacity to bring up this film in his review of Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century, writing that “[Syndromes’] exploration of sexual passion resists Hernández’s wonderment and depth.” Taken from White, one should probably take this as a compliment for Weerasethakul’s film, but if it’s not, I don’t know that White and I watched the same film. Broken Sky blatantly avoids depth so much so that I assumed that ‘lack of depth’ was Hernández’s thesis. Characters in this film just will not speak to each other, especially the two leads. If one of Hernández’s rules for the film was to create a film in which the characters do not speak to each other, I might have bought into it. But they can speak, and they do a couple of times, which makes all of the moments when they aren’t speaking, and they obviously should be, awkward and self-conscious. If my boyfriend is going to make out with someone else at a club, there are going to be words between us. If the two leads were to actually have a discussion about this, it probably would have been more interesting, and provided more ‘depth’ to the characters, than watching both of them look at each other with sad faces for the rest of the night (and film). The lack of speech and excessive length are clearly gimmicks employed to create a sense of artfulness. In the end this felt like any other gay film that gives gay films a bad name: promiscuous characters who can go from being madly in love with one guy to falling in love with another guy the next moment, all based on a glance and a kiss. Armond White calling this an important film is not only inaccurate, but detrimental to the reputation of GLBT filmmaking.

Werner Herzog shows one of the closest visions of actual insanity that I have seen in a film with Heart of Glass, even if half of that insanity is in the production of the film. Herzog claims that all of the actors, save the lead, performed their roles while being hypnotized. Regardless of whether or not hypnosis is even possible, the idea and effort are both audacious and looney. That said, this film took my breath away several times throughout its short hour and a half running time. The opening of the film could give any of the time lapsed shots from Baraka a run for its money, and made me feel like I was watching heaven and hell simultaneously approach the earth. The film also reminded me of The New World, nothing new for a Herzog picture, notably the opening and middle interludes and the finale for their abstractly assembled and glorified depictions of nature set to ethereal music (this time with some prog rock thrown into the mix). Hias, the protagonist (if there even is one), evoked a Tolkien hobbit (especially Sam from the Peter Jackson films) and spent much of the film preaching apocalyptic premonitions and visions of the future.

The film centers on a small town that is turned upside down when the town’s glassblower, who made a ‘Ruby glass’ (supposedly the town’s main or only export and source of income, and also probably magical and/or the product of Satan) dies. The town’s people become sedated, mad, and borderline goth as they try to find the secret that allowed this glassblower to create Ruby glass. The film condemns this civilization for their reliance on an individual for flourishing. The death of the glassblower seems to not only spell hard economic times for this community, but it has also presumably opened the gates of hell, not so dissimilar to those opened before Dieter’s eyes in Little Dieter Needs to Fly. Hias has even completely lost it by the film’s end as he wrestles a bear that is either not there or completely invisible. The conclusion, which fortunately picks up the pace of the film (it was beginning to drag toward the end), tells a short story of a nearby island and it’s few inhabitants. The finale is absurd and funny and puts emphasis on many of the film’s themes of civilization and inevitable destruction of humans by nature. Herzog has a pretty pessimistic outlook on humanity.

This is one of the worst films that was released in 2008. A mistake in nearly every department, I feel like Sam Mendes is trying to become the M. Night Shyamalan of American dramatic filmmaking. The most upsetting thing about it is that I actually find some of the ideas in the film interesting, but I feel obligated to dismiss these ideas because they are housed by such a condescending, melodramatic, and narcissistic film. From the moment Kate Winslet starts acting like a brat and fighting with Leo, my eyes didn’t stop rolling. Constant eye-rolling for two hours. Much like Breillat’s Romance, I felt like I was being forced to sympathize in some way with individuals who subject themselves to a deteriorating relationship, despite the fact that there is obviously no reason why these two people should be together in the first place. The first scene shows Leo and Kate meeting, and then, literally two minutes later they are having a massive argument on their way home that almost results in Leo smacking Kate a good one. Yet, I am suppose to pull for these two to move to Paris so that they can save their marriage?

In their family, Leo pays the bills, and Kate is the house mom. The idea is that they will escape suburbia and move to the lively Paris, where Kate will pay the bills, and Leo will sit at home with ‘time’ and they will live happily ever after. I am also supposed to pull for this scenario, even though I know that it will not solve their unhappiness with each other. Another aggravating thing is that the film blames their broken marriage on suburbia, when the film should be considering that these two individuals have a broken marriage because they are incompatible as partners. I know that everyone loves to blame suburbia for some of the worst problems in America, but it would be more interesting to try and convince me in the film why suburbia is ruining this relationship instead of asking me to assume that since they moved to the suburbs that that is of course the problem. I only began to relate to anyone in the film when Leo fessed up to Kate that he had been seeing another girl, and Kate replied that she didn’t care at all. I didn’t care either!

This is such a fantastic film. I haven’t seen Rescue Dawn, but I cannot imagine that it would add up to anything as funny and emotional as what Herzog and Dieter put together here. I kept thinking about all of the camping trips that I went on when I was in the Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts. Every summer, there was summer camp, where my father would force me to spend a week in the summer heat, with no private bathrooms, terrible cafeteria food, and sweaty boys who hadn’t discovered deodorant yet. I hated it, every year, and I thought it was hell. Hearing Dieter explain his circumstances when he was captured, though, makes all of what I endured seem like heaven. Dieter tells his story as if he’s been waiting 30 years for someone to listen to him. He spouts out detail after detail of what he went through with a very focused and energetic demeanor; he sounds like he could be calling an auction.

The film is also occasionally hilarious. During the ‘training’ video about what men in the military ought to do if they are stranded in a jungle, with commentary by Herzog, I couldn’t stop laughing. It was also amusingly bizarre that Dieter was recounting his experiences in front of present day Vietnamese villagers (like those in the poster above). He would tell an insane story of brutality and torture, and then turn and have an awkward laugh with a man standing next to him. It was also very bizarre that Dieter was re-experiencing the moments, like being tied up and blindfolded and being led through the jungle. There is this odd fascination that he has with this experience in his life, as if he bases his entire life on it. I got the impression that he’d come to fetishize his treatment during his imprisonment, and perhaps looked back on it fondly.

Herzog does an amazing job visualizing Dieter’s story. He found some stunning archival footage of decaying cities, soldier’s in wartime, and, most impressive, films from cameras that were attached to planes that were dropping bomb after bomb on villages. His commentary is less aimless here than I’ve ever heard it, but he still shows how he is such a great storyteller.

Wow, I actually liked a Breillat film! This film was able to be completely focused on relationships without feeling forced like in the other films of hers that I have seen. The film is essentially made up of three scenes, two long conversations and then a seen of ‘romance.’ This latter scene was superior to every other such scene that I have seen from Breillat because it never goes over the top. I’ve previously had the feeling that Breillat draws out her sex scenes and makes them gratuitously graphic. Here, though, She shows only what needs to be shown, and the entire scene not only feels natural to the story, but essential. This film’s purpose is to detail the different perspectives that different sexes and generations have on being in a relationship. All of the film’s energy is spent on this topic, and the end result is pretty compelling, and in the end actually poignant. The only, fortunately brief, Breillat-indulgence that I detected in the film was the old man who wanted to court Thomas (the boy in the film) when he asked if he could take the unused chair from his table. I actually thought it was a funny moment, but it reminded me that everyone in Breillat’s universe seems to think about sex 24/7 and is constantly trying to mate with anyone who is breathing.

Sarah Pratt is perfect in the film as Alice. She reminded me quite a bit of Isabelle Huppert and Julianne Moore, both in her appearance and with her ability to be simultaneously soft and stern. Her role in the film as Alice seemed to be very difficult to pull off, as she has to believably come off as a woman who has just left her husband, is drawn to ‘rough’ men, and is falling for a ‘charming’ underaged boy (The Julianne Moore comparison is especially apt because of the character similarities with Moore’s recent Savage Grace). Gilles Guillain as Thomas wasn’t bad, but I thought he played him as a bit too suave and confident given his age and supposed inexperience.

One problem that I have been having with Breillat is that she casts attractive people as her leads (except for Fat Girl, in which she appropriately went to the completely opposite end of the spectrum and cast an obese girl (in addition to the attractive rest of the cast)). This film does nothing to alleviate that trend. Breillat is trying to make portraits of human sexuality and relationships with her films, and it is my understanding that she aims for the sex scenes to support her ideas for each film without being erotic or stimulating. But it is difficult for me to take this seriously when she casts actors who seem to be hired from modeling agencies. I have not seen her entire oeuvre, so I cannot speak for any discrepancies to this trait.