arthurpewty

I have only seen 3 Bertrand Blier movies, but this one is easily my favorite of the 3. BUFFET FROID, starring Gerard Depardieu, was the first I saw -- and the fact that it was basically plot less and full of absurdist humor made it instantly a favored flick. I more recently saw Blier's Oscar-winning GET OUT YOUR HANDKERCHIEFS but thought it was a little too conventional and strained next to the more flat-out freewheeling BUFFET. About 15 years after that pair of movies comes this one, which marries the sensibilities of the other two perfectly. Like HANDKERCHIEFS, it actually has a story, but like BUFFET, it doesn't bother with real-world logic, good taste, or linear chronology in telling that story. SOLEIL is sort of a movie about coming-of-age in the projects, sort of a movie about sexual psychology, and sort of a cut-and-pasted collage of unusual moments. The magical thing is that the damn thing winds up more moving than it probably would have if it was a straightforward tearjerker about hard living. Of course, Blier can't be credited completely for this, as his actors are wonderful, especially Anouk Grinberg as Victorine, our perpetually childish heroine, and Marcello Mastroianni as her charming perpetually drunk papa. An under-seen gem.

I have been recently watching a lot of Tim McCann movies in anticipation of his new movie with Robin Tunney and Aaron Stanford.

This second-newest release, NOWHERE MAN, is a great slice of low-budget DV independent/ B-movie film-making. And when I say B-movie, I mean it in the best sense of the term. I read a FILM THREAT interview with McCann where he talks about preferring Anthony Mann movies to anything made today, and NOWHERE MAN has that same sort of hard-hitting pulpiness that a film academic could respect... if they weren't TOO uptight. After all, this is a movie whose main character has had his willy removed.

The acting all around, from leads Rodrick and Rochon and Olivier to one-scene appearances by Michael Risley (who starred in McCann's excellent REVOLUTION #9) and Bob Gosse and Lloyd Kaufman, is really solid and plays more to the realistic side of the situation, but with a few moments of comedy -- both broad and subtly dark -- in there for good measure.

The theme of NOWHERE MAN is quite similar to McCann's first feature DESOLATION ANGELS, which also featured Rodrick as a man who learns a secret about his girlfriend that drives him to unnecessary macho violence, but this is a much leaner, more effective film. Unfortunately, I fear too many people won't be able to get over this flick's cockiness, so to speak, and see it for the well-told drama that it is.

Of course, the filmmakers aren't helping matters with the selection of crude outtakes put into the end credits, which sort of undercut the tone of the film -- but which presumably are there to pad this lean, mean film out to feature length.

I checked this out from the public library, because the cover looked vaguely interesting and there was basically no risk, but for some lost time. And, like someone discovering a song-poem collection in a used-LP bin, I was amazed and amused by this great (and fortunately brief) little film. It's about these people who send in poems or lyrics to a company, which promises to make a song from those words, then asks them to pay the recording cost -- which is how they make money. But the scheme is beside the point. Instead the movie focuses on some of the "poets" who write tunes, almost always with a straight face, with titles like "Non-Violent Tae-Kwon-Do Troopers" and "I Am a Ginseng Digger." The movie also features some of the performers, composers, and producers of these songs (sometimes separate, often not), and even has time for a brief rise-and-fall story regarding one artist that the song-poem cultists and performers all seem to consider a squandered semi-genius. It's a crazy-quilt portrait of low-impact American ambition and creative expression from Joe Public (no, not the early 90s group). A real freakin gem.

A really entertaining and thankfully in-depth look at the road to CLERKS, taking the journey with Kevin Smith from birth to high school sketch comedy to working odd jobs with no direction post-high school to seeing SLACKER to making the movie to getting it seen to getting it in Sundance to finally finally getting it sold. This is a refreshing departure from a lot of DVD making-of docs which are loaded with clips and halfhearted praise from the participants about everyone else on the film. The CLERKS story is one of the great underdog tales of indie film, and this doc really lays it all out carefully, clearly, and amusingly for fans and wannabes alike.

I think the French title sums up this film best, but not in the way it intends. I love romantic crap like this normally, especially offbeat stuff -- but the characters never seem to grow up, they remain children playing children's games. This prevented me from really caring about their eventual joined fate.

Especially when the stakes are raised, and the lovers takes on spouses and have children, they never really grow up and these people have no bearing on their infantile love-battle with each other. The fact that these outsiders disappear conveniently when they are not needed in the story shows how shallow the storytelling truly is.

Admittedly, a movie I like very much, SHE'S SO LOVELY, features a similar storyline where childish people are separated by time and when they come back together, they throw away everything that has happened in the intervening years just to be together again. The difference is that that film was written with an emphasis on character, not on style, and while it is not wholly successful, it remains a better portrait of l'amour fou than this film.

This documentary by Jim McBride about his British girlfriend Clarissa and her decision to marry another man for a green card is undeniably from the maker of the great pseudo-cinema-verite mockumentary DAVID HOLZMAN'S DIARY... but this time it's real. Interesting as a time capsule, it is still way too long at 60 minutes for a movie in which the big event takes only about five and is bookended by endless talking.

It remains a necessary preface, however, for McBride's far more energetic and far superior self-reflexive doc PICTURES FROM LIFE'S OTHER SIDE, which picks up the couple and their son (Clarissa's, from a previous relationship) a few years later on a cross-country road trip looking for a new home. Even though imdb doesn't list it, I saw the films as a double feature a few months ago, and I highly recommend the experience.

This two-parter short film feels like going crazy from playing too many video games while watching MILO AND OTIS. A favorite at the 2004 Tromadance Film Festival, hopefully this flick will get more exposure because it is tons of fun.

The disclaimer at the start of the film that none of the footage was sped up or altered at first seems ludicrously unnecessary, but soon it seems more like a lie... how can anybody move that fast? The filmmaker is moving fast too, as he quickly whips through the history of street dancing which has led to the new underground dance movement - Krumping. Reportedly a feature doc is in the works, and it'll be interesting to see if the energy can sustain a full-length flick. Either way, this short is a blast.

Technically brilliant, beautifully shot, amazingly cast, and really darn funny... remind me again why this is supposedly no good? Oh yeah, it's not as good as the book. Get over it. This movie is due for a bit of revisionist criticism, now that more and more folks are starting to realize how much they overreacted about the greatness of MASH... now maybe they can look this one over again and realize, hey, it's pretty good. Heck, it's even great. (The DVD transfer is beautiful and the commentary with Mike Nichols talking to Steven Soderbergh is fun, if a little too gushing. At one point, it sounds like Soderbergh has wet himself with glee.)

A movie adaptation that succeeds by remaining true to the novel's theme while telling the story with an exciting new structure and style. As opposed to the novel's use of more conventional flashback passages, in the film the past seems to attack Ludvik Jahn -- played brilliantly by Josef Somr of CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS -- from all sides, as the past echoes inescapably through the world of the present. It also doesn't hurt, I suppose, that Kundera himself co-wrote the screenplay.

It's hard to believe that such a small film about such a simple subject could bring so much enjoyment to so many. My entire household has gone nuts for this little video. The dogs are cute and the voices they are given are memorably hilarious, but the movie is heartwarmingly charming as well. I'm surprised more people haven't seen it, and I think that they certainly should.

Most of the people who will tell you this film is a piece of garbage either haven't seen it or are unwilling to submit to someone's imagination. This is not to say that the film is an overlooked masterpiece -- it is too hampered in places by conventional storytelling to soar into the stratosphere of truly great demented comedies like the Monty Python movies or a John Waters film. But, like those films, it has a boldness to be truly sick, un-PC, and go for a good, hard, low-brow laugh when it's called for. Its main assets are its actors: the gifted Jake Gyllenhaal, whose exemplary performance in DONNIE DARKO convinced me I should give this movie a chance, the appealing Marley Shelton, and many many great character actors including Swoosie Kurtz, Danny Trejo (a Robert Rodriguez regular), and John Carroll Lynch (he was Norm, Marge's husband, in FARGO).

I saw Jungle Fever for the first time years ago, when it first came out on video. By the movie's end, I was lost. Part of it may have been maturity - I was in junior high - and part of it was that the movie I was sold was not the movie I got. Part of this selling is Stevie Wonder's title song, which frequently finds its way into my tapedeck. And the kind of color-blind love Wonder sings about is not the relationship in this movie. Something I feel now as I felt then was that the film does not let us get close to these people, let us see them in love. Only now do I realize that this is because the film is not about two people in love. When I first saw it, I thought the film was advocating segregation from the "other side." Now I realize that it just showing the complexity of issues which come to play when a black person and white person from separatist neighborhoods come together, and mostly how those environments are changed. There are things to overcome, but this relationship will not overcome them. I am still puzzled by the rather large subplot involving Samuel L. Jackson as Wesley Snipes's crackhead brother and by the final shot where Wesley Snipes clutches a crack-whore to himself and screams "NO!" while the camera rushes from halfway across Harlem to end in a close-up on him. It's indelible - most of what has stuck with me about this movie over time involves this subplot and that shot - but I am still puzzled by its intention in the overall scheme of what the film is trying to say. Something about the endless problems facing black people?

John Cusack, as our lead character the record shop owner Rob, talks to the camera, narrating his own story, in between the bits where it unfolds on its own. The genius of this is that it allows the prose from Nick Hornby's extremely enjoyable book to remain, without voice-over, which would seem inappropriate for this story. And therefore the only real fault of the movie is there is not as much book in the movie as there is in the book.

Some of the REALLY GOOD bits from the book that stick in memory are unfortunately missing, but there is plenty good left. Cusack is quintessential Cusack, Jack Black takes the abusive record clerk Barry to bigger heights than any reader could have dreamed, and Iben Hjejle - the only wonderful thing in the formulaic MIFUNE - is again wonderful as Rob's on- and-off girlfriend Laura. One of the additions not in the book, a scene where Laura's new guy Ian (Tim Robbins) comes into Rob's record shop and he envisions revenge is a hilarious showstopper.

One of the best moments in the great short comes when Truffaut pays homage to/rips off the Lumiere short L'arroseur Arrose, involving one of the "mistons" stepping on a gardener's hose, causing him to get squirted in the face. Truffaut is acknowledging the French film heritage he will have to respect and continue, and he seems to have done pretty nicely. The short was recently put on video with another wonderful short, Antoine & Colette, which continues the adventures of Antoine Doinel a few years after The 400 Blows, as he falls and fails in love. The tape/DVD is worth seeking out

Kubrick's brilliant early film is my all-time favorite crime picture, well-acted and cleverly plotted. I also have a strong suspicion that the manipulation of chronology at the time of the track robbery was an influence on Tarantino for his also-brilliant (and underrated) Jackie Brown, when we are shown the stealing of the money from every point of view consecutively and not simultaneously. If you have never seen it, what are you waiting for? Go

Vincent Gallo stars, co-writes, and directs this truly hilarious and beautifully touching movie about an ex-con who kidnaps a dancer (the simply wonderful Christina Ricci) to convince his parents that he is married, before going off to shoot the man who put him in prison. And, of course, the pair fall in love, and the film's ending is almost a surprise for an indie flick Very stylized and maybe even a little distancing on first viewing, this film shines. Many thought Ricci was robbed of an Oscar nom for Opposite of Sex. I disagree. This was truly her best performance t