Finally, a fantastic Friday

I wasn’t planning to let the cat—er, fox—out of the bag this early, but I can’t help myself: WUD Film will be showing Wes Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox” this Friday and Saturday night at the Play Circle. As always, there’ll be two showings on each night, at 7 and 9:30 respectively.

I’ve written about “Fantastic Mr. Fox” ad nauseum (Exhibit A: my review of it in the Cardinal), so you have to figure that I’m sick of seeing and/or talking about the film, right? You guessed it: I’ll almost certainly attend one of the four showings, provided that they don’t get too crowded (which I hope they do).

(Visual) Quotes…, 2/9

Another one from “Elle a passé tant d’heures sous les sunlights…” (1985).

I lost it at the (action) movies

This review of “From Paris with Love” (about which I hardly know a thing, thankfully) by the Badger Herald’s Amelia Wedemeyer is haunted by the perverse and pervasive fetish for gun violence that makes films like the new Mel Gibson revenge fantasy “Edge of Darkness” (about which I hardly know a thing, thankfully) plausible and even lucrative as commercial entities. Take it away, Amelia:

The highlight of the film is seeing Travolta as the crazy yet magnetic Charlie Wax, who wields everything from handheld revolvers to bazookas. Yes, Travolta’s appearance as the white version of Sinbad might throw off viewers at first glance, but it becomes evident that the appearance is most definitely part of who Charlie Wax is. Though Travolta probably won’t be up for next year’s Academy Awards, his quips and grasp of the character make the hour-and-a-half film enjoyable enough.

Yikes. What else?

With the release of “From Paris with Love,” Pierre Morel (“Taken”) establishes himself as a leading director of action movies. His quick and precise shots enhance the vivid feats that many audiences like to see from their favorite action movies. Though this film doesn’t have the emotional appeal of “Taken,” it still leaves audiences satisfied with every bullet aimed for the bad guys.

I did say it was a fetish, didn’t I?

And fortunately for audiences, Morel knows how long most people can stomach the same sequence of murderous rampages by keeping the film less than two hours.

I can see how that would get old, yes. Finally:

From the explosive scenes to the quick paced shots, this film is for those who want action and to see things (as well as people) get blown up.

Pretty scary stuff—the review, that is. The movie looks and seems utterly mindless and shamelessly calculated to score big with an especially gun-crazy demographic. But it’s not like this is an uncommon phenomenon, seeing as how there are consumers like Wedelmeyer who apparently derive satisfaction from watching staged “murderous rampages” and who find the sheer variety of guns used in a film to be the film’s very best part.

The world within a window

Though he doesn’t say much that hasn’t already been said on the subject, at least the Badger Herald’s Tony Lewis bothered to point out a very real and surprisingly relevant phenomenon: the advent of 3D cinema. Lewis has no argument per se, and he frames the rise of 3D in purely economic terms (3D movies = more expensive tickets = balm for the achin’ film industry). Most of what he says in the article is quite true, though I wish he’d have elaborated on the only explicitly aesthetic point he makes:

Take “Avatar” for example. Never do you have robotic arms reaching out at you or arrows whizzing by your head. Instead, Cameron uses 3-D to make Pandora seem like more than just a mystical CGI wonderland.

Well, yes, I suppose that’s true. Cameron’s major achievement in “Avatar” is the way he and his technicians used 3D to create an intensely cinematic space (as distinct from a pictorial or a textual space) whose dimensions, while still unmistakably illusory, bear a much stronger resemblance to space as we encounter it outside the movie theater. This is where the whole “it feels like you’re inside the movie” thing stems from.

Lewis is right to say that 3D has likely moved beyond the gimmickry that made the sensation of having objects pop out of the screen at the audience more laughable than thrilling. Hopefully the technological legacy of “Avatar” will have more to do with creative manipulations of space and time than with the comparatively unpleasant economics that enable such monster-scale films to be made in the first place.

Heads-up re: TCM, “prepping for the Oscars” edition

The Academy Awards might be a total joke (nothing illustrates this better than 1997 Best Picture winner “Titanic,” which my roommate and I had the privilege of catching about 15 minutes of late last night—holy moly, what an awful flick), but don’t tell TCM that. Basic cable’s Cinematheque seems determined to make the most of it on our behalf. All month long TCM is hosting a “31 Days of Oscar” daily marathon-type deal, and the lineups are absolutely stacked.

Skimming through the schedule for the next week, there’s a handful o’ films I’d like to direct you toward:

-Ernst Lubitsch’s all-around silly “Ninotchka” (1939) tomorrow night at 7PM.

-Sam Fuller’s blood-spittin’ “Pickup on South Street” (1953) at 9PM on Wednesday night.

-Vincente Minnelli’s “The Band Wagon” (1953) at 1AM on Thursday morning (here’s my review of the film from when the Cinematheque screened it last semester).

-Warren Beatty’s pinko-epic “Reds” (1981) at 9PM on Friday night.

-Two William Wylers—”Jezebel” (1938) and “Roman Holiday” (1953)—at 11:15AM and 4:45PM, respectively.

-Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blowup” (1966) at 1AM on Sunday morning (praise the dawnin’, etc.).

-Preston Sturges’ “The Lady Eve” (1941) will be on at 3PM on Sunday afternoon, followed by Howard Hawks’ own Barbara Stanwyck comedy, “Ball of Fire” (1941) at 5PM.

-George Stevens’ “A Place in the Sun” (1951) at 11PM on Monday night (if you didn’t already know, the film is an adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, the same novel that Eisenstein hoped to adapt during his brief stay in Hollywood).

So there you have it. A week’s worth of viewing. Good luck.

Quotes of quotes of quotes of quotes, 2/8

From Jean-Luc Godard’s “Montage My Fine Care” (in Godard on Godard):

Anyone who yields to the temptation of montage yields also to the temptation of the brief shot. How? By making the look a key piece in his game. Cutting on a look is almost the definition of montage, its supreme ambition as well as its submission to mise en scène. It is, in effect, to bring out the soul under the spirit, the passion behind the intrigue, to make the heart prevail over the intelligence by destroying the notion of space in favour of that of time.

Wonder what JLG thought of those ads last night. All of that “go to our website to see the rest of this commercial” business was pretty strange.

The fine line between “excellent” and “oy gevalt”

It’s one thing to watch a film and, hours later, be completely uncertain whether you thought it was good or bad (“good” here meaning “worth recommending”); it’s quite another to watch a film and, while watching it and for a while afterward, be completely uncertain whether it’s the type of work that makes you say “wow” or the type of work that makes you say “oy vey” (which isn’t to suggest that one can’t say both).  Patrice Chéreau’s “Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train” (1998) is definitely closer to the latter of these two indeterminate experiences.

“Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train” is very self-involved. Superficially its subjects include many of the usual suspects: mortality, various correspondences between the spheres of art and life, love’s status as a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t bear-trap, etc. But, like I said, these are only its ostensible targets: just as quickly as it poses a question it moves on, posing another, then another, then another, so on and so on, roll credits.

So long as I’m addressing the surface of “Those Who Love Me…” I might as well point out how similar it is to Arnaud Desplechin’s “A Christmas Tale,” at least in terms of organization. Yet “Those Who Love Me…” isn’t nearly as skanky as “A Christmas Tale”; it is, on the other hand, much more authentically wounded, its characters much more damaged and much more pleasurably unpleasant to spend time with.

It’s also tough to know what to make of Chéreau’s occasional excursions into a poppier style, one in which songs with intelligible lyrics and swooping crane shots are deployed to attract much of the spectator’s attention. These techniques effectively make the film stylistically overdetermined, that is to say, a difficult machine sputtering and flailing wildly in 7 or 8 directions at once.

But, again, “Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train” is nothing if not drunk off its own vibes, a 200-lb. love letter addressed to itself. Normally, this quality would be insufferable; but the film is dysfunctional enough and self-consciously glitchy enough to sustain even an easily irritated viewer’s engagement with it. There’s a certain air of self-satisfaction emanating from all of the film’s constituent elements, yet at no point does this amount to a kind of arrogance. It’s quite the tightrope act.

If only the film’s narrative conceits were as intriguing as its difficult aesthetics, then Chéreau would’ve achieved something like 2005’s “Gabrielle”: an intensely chewy work in which the drag race between story and style ends in a dead heat.

(Visual) Quotes…, 2/4

From Philippe Garrel’s “Night Wind” (1999).

Oh, so that’s where they are

I likely should’ve mentioned this yesterday or even the day before but WUD Film Committee is screening “Where the Wild Things Are” tonight and tomorrow night at—where else?—the Play Circle, a venue as iconic as it is mediocre. There’ll be two showings on both nights, at 7 and 9:30 respectively.

I’ve yet to see “Where the Wild Things Are,” but plenty of folks seem to dig it, so I just might have to march my lazy bones on down to the Union for a beer and an inquiry into whether childhood was really all it’s cracked up to be. Here’s what J. Hoberman and Manohla Dargis made of the film when it was released last October.

If you haven’t done so already, go see “Fantastic Mr. Fox” at the Orpheum. The only showing tonight is at 7. Be sure to stop by the Orpheum’s notorious Happy Hour (free mussels!) on your way into the theater.

What we oughta be discussin’

In today’s edition of the Daily Cardinal you’ll find my latest column, a somewhat meandering meditation on the distinction between art and trash, what DVD technology may or may not have meant to cinema, and why I’ve never been one to knowingly review a crappy movie. If you ask me, the piece is kind of bland and inoffensive and even a bit preachy. Not my best work, not my worst work.

Between you and me, the version of the column that’s on the website and in the paper was neutered of a few well-meaning but unmistakably critical comments about my fellow Cardinal film critics (the “other film critics” mentioned in the second sentence of the third paragraph… those obviously aren’t my words). Basically, I said that some of my colleagues deliberately seek out bad movies (like, say, “Legion” or “The Tooth Fairy”) because doing so allows them to practice a certain type of snarky writing. Not very controversial, right? I honestly can’t imagine that any of the writers I was alluding to would’ve disagreed with my point, so it’s unfortunate that the parts in question were omitted. Oh well.

P.S. Please do not e-mail me about “Anchorman” or “Final Destination 3.” However, “The Final Destination” (that’s the one in 3D, yes?) is, of course, fair game.