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January 29, 2005
Port Mungo, Patrick McGrath
Not a bad book, but he has better ones. It's about a painter and his family as told by the sister who sticks with him no matter what. It's told well, I guess, but it has another one of his unreliable narrators and a plot twist toward the end that seems so obvious. I'd just rather not have plot twists anymore. He keeps the pace up by revealing things slightly sooner than you would expect, but after Asylum, I'd like a new story out of similar characterizations.
Posted by deaconmf at 12:51 PM | Comments (0)
January 25, 2005
The Grind, 1/26/05
I think we've finally hit the exhaustion point in the war news. The byline in today's Chronicle on the war reads "Video shows American pleading for his life. Meanwhile, six U.S. soldiers are killed." Ho hum. Another six deaths. Sigh. My heart still goes out to the poor man pleading for his life though. Hope something changes soon.
Posted by deaconmf at 01:20 PM | Comments (2)
January 24, 2005
Notorious on DVD, 1/22/05
The first thing that always amazes me about this movie is Ingrid Bergman. Her Alicia Huberman is radiant looking, drunk, poisoned or sober. There's always this element of distance in her acting as though she's a exotic angel come to earth to dwell among us. Her very slight accent helps the illusion. Strangely, in this one, she plays a drunk who sleeps around a lot. Then she meets Cary Grant who plays a government agent who actively falls in love with her, then ends up pimping her out to man they want to spy on. They argue about whether or not she can change. The plot mechanics in this movie are smooth, but motives are all messed up. Worst of all, the man they all have to dupe seems to be the most decent of this lot. Well, except for the fact that he's a Nazi. It's a beautiful screenplay constructed out of the motives of some very conflicted, confused people. The only element I have a real problem with is that Alicia has to become such a victim to show she's changed. This movie is so amazing I'd do Alicia, drunk, poisoned or sober. Too bad, she's long gone.
Posted by deaconmf at 12:27 PM | Comments (0)
January 18, 2005
The Aviator, Metreon, 1/17/2005
Here's another long biography of someone famous. It's not a bad movie; it's like watching someone lie entertaininly about their life. LOL.
Flippant remarks aside, I felt like I didn't know much about this character that Citizen Kane hadn't already revealed about rich, famous and powerful men. It didn't help that the opening sequence has a sequence about another mother determining a man's initial path. It also didn't help that Scorsese's style seems to overshadow the man's life story. As the color processes get more realistic, our hero descends into madness. It's like the Wizard of Oz, if Dorothy went mental. (You know, maybe she did.) It's telling that the movie's heroic motion seems to be about his final moments of sanity before his madness carries him off again. I know movies don't need to be about the truth. Most movie biographies select a narrow portion of a person's life to illustrate, but there's something about this one that seems dishonest. Howard Hughes spent the last portion of his life living in penthouses with his uncut hair and nails, horribly obsessed with his bodily wastes, watching movies endlessly. There's no happy ending in this and, while this screenplay powerfully suggests that horror, it does so without confronting the all the confusion of this poor man's madness, his ignominous death and the ugly legacy of his contested wills. The movie seems to be about the greatness of one man dealing with barriers that would kill most people. I can use a history book or encyclopedia entry to figure out why Howard Hughes is important, but a movie requires a truth to tell. His life does not kill him; it makes him mad instead. And while I admit to cynicism, that seems to be the truth of Mr. Hughes's life.
That being said, it's a beautiful movie to look at. The cinematographer never seems to make a misstep and Scorsese's incredible attention to detail makes the movie a wonder to watch. He remembered that peas looked blue in the original Technicolor process. It makes the peas look sickly, which reinforces Mr. Hughes's revulsion at that point.
I've spent a good month watching Cate Blanchett in very different roles. While she makes an amazing elf-queen, Kathryn Hepburn gives her a real workout for her skills. She certainly has Hepburn's accent down and even that ungainly walk, but she somehow radiates a real warmth when the role demands it. Her attempt to get Hughes out of his projection room feels real, even with the difficulty of not being able to actually talk to him face to face. Kate Beckinsale, in comparison, looks radiant, but sure doesn't seem like Ava Gardner.
Part of my problem with the movie may be Leonardo DiCaprio himself. He doesn't much look like the man at the beginning and he uses his considerable boyish charm to give us that sense of wonder and ego that Hughes probably felt about flying and running his companies. I don't think we quite get Hughes' very adult command of people or his considerable smarts. A lot of those scenes come off with an air of "gee whiz" and not enough deliberate thought. I will give Leonardo this though: he does the slow descent into madness well. He looks like a man whose stresses finally grab enough of him to force him to surrender. That scene where he repeats himself is really terrifying because he seems to grasp something very real about paranoia, which is the inability to shrug something off because you just get stuck in a loop. He looks great as the paranoid Howard Hughes, scarred, frightened and obsessed with his urine.
Well enough about this movie. And if you haven't guessed, no, I wouldn't sleep with Leonardo DiCaprio. However, Jude Law as Errol Flynn? Mmmm, Tasmanians.
Posted by deaconmf at 09:02 PM | Comments (1)
January 12, 2005
Ack!
This is what I get for being so far behind. I kept putting in entries for things I'd done, but hadn't gotten around to writing about. So because I started those entries in December, that's where the newest entries are. Ack! Ack! Sorry kids. Please look in the December archive for last few things I wrote about. Thanks.
Posted by deaconmf at 01:45 PM | Comments (0)
January 05, 2005
Hero on DVD, 12/31/04
One of my housemates got the DVD for Christmas, so I sat down and watched it again. I hate to say this, but the color schemes are the reason to watch the movie. Yellow leaves flying in cyclones. Sword points bouncing in and out of blue green water. Green tapestries falling from ceilings. The art direction is incredible. I hate to say that because the movie itself is still entertaining. It's not the art-house works that Ju Dou or Raise the Red Lantern are, but at least both sexes get to be heroic figures in this action flick. This movie has a lot of exposition because so much needs to be explained in the course of two hours. It's partly a function of trying to keep a story told three times interesting and partly because we Americans know nothing about Chinese classical history, but mostly because it's a movie about where character motives keep shifting and narrators turn out to be unreliable. Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung do make one attractive couple although we never do actually hear their side of this story. So, yes, I would sleep with Tony Leung. Damn, he's hot.
Posted by deaconmf at 10:16 PM | Comments (0)
Hotel Rwanda, 1/4/05
I'm not quite sure how to feel about this one. The movie's heart is certainly in the right place, but I get the feeling a PG rated genocide is just not as horrible as it needs to be. This have very little to do with Don Cheadle's performance though. He's amazing as Paul Rusesabagina (I love that name) who seems to be the one truly civilized man in Rwanda when the massacres begin. He epitomizes smooth when the world seems to be failing him. In fact, he seems far more civilized than the Westerners in this movie who abandon him. Mostly, it's amazing how he gets by on his charm and negotiating skills for so long. There's also a great scene where he tells his wife what she needs to do if the Tutsi attack the hotel.
There's one moment where the horrors becomes visual. He leaves the compound and he ends up driving on the bodies in the middle of a street. It's a horrible scene but done with so much fog and so little light, it's hard to see what's happening. There are bodies everywhere, but they don't seem particularly bloody. They seem like extras lying down in the street. The characters in this film are often threatened or scared, but the movie itself seems to be less stressful than it ought to be at this point. While there is a need to show children the horror of genocide, this did not seem like a movie for adults.
Posted by deaconmf at 02:16 PM | Comments (0)
January 03, 2005
A Very Long Engagement, Embarcadero, 1/2/04
Or as Ms. C's boyfriend put it, "Amelie Goes to War". Or maybe they should have titled it "Amelie Deals With War Atrocities". With minutes of starting, the breathless pace and the relentless self-mutilation mean we're not watching a heartwarming, quirky romance. This time, the director means to have us see the horror of this war. But something strange happens. It's a movie that's split into two parts. One plot thread has us rooting for the very plucky Mathilde while she and her quicky family search for her missing fiance. Here, the style looks very familiar. Jean-Pierre Jeunet gives us the visual asides and strange stories he fills his movie with. The other half of the movie shows us what happened the horrible day that Manech, her fiance, was supposed to be executed. It's all so well filmed, but the parts of this movie don't seem to synthesize well. Mostly, Manech seems so very sketched in. We don't hear him say much as an adult. Mostly, he just seems so shell-shocked. Worst, we never see him with Mathilde much. So, the very summery yellows and browns of Mathilde's part of the movie don't synthesize with the blues and greys of the war story. I hope Jeunet's next movie goes back to something much lighter or much darker without this compromise. And oh yeah, I would totally do Manech if he had something to talk about. LOL.
Posted by deaconmf at 09:55 PM | Comments (0)
In the Realm of the Unreal, Castro Theater, 12/29/04
Henry Darger was a 81 year old janitor who seemed to know very few people at his death. There seem to be exactly three photographs of the man found among his effects. The people that did know him were uncertain how to pronounce his last name. They seem to know a few biographical details, like his mother's early death while giving birth to a sister, who was then adopted and whose name he had forgotten.
It wouldn't have mattered much if his landlords hadn't gone into his place when Mr. Darger moved to a pauper's home and discovered that he spent years cramming hundreds of water color paintings and thousands of pages of handwritten and typed text into his very tiny living space. While it also included a 5000 page autobiography, the largest part of the work was a 15,000 page novel called In the Realms of the Unreal where seven Christian sisters lead a nation to war against heathen hordes. Most of those paintings depict incidents in his novel. Some are two sided, done on butcher paper and show the Vivian sisters nude. The sisters have tiny penises. He illustrates explosions, torture and disembowelments of children in his war and he allows two very different endings, one where the girls win and another where they lose.
The movie refrains from figuring out what it might all mean. It dwells on the strangeness of his creation without commenting on the mind of its creator. So, I'll refrain as well except to say I wish I was driven to write this much.
Posted by deaconmf at 09:54 PM | Comments (0)