Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join in the fun by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a bit about them!
This week on Thursday Movie Picks, we're looking at movies with non-linear timelines. Time always moves forwards of course, but with film, we have the capability to rewind, fast forward, double back, start over... we can view a series of events in pretty much any way we want. And these movies take advantage of that.
Cloud Atlas (Wachowskis & Tom Tykwer, 2012) This wildly ambitious film, adapted from David Mitchell's Russian nesting doll of a novel, probably never should have been made. The book has such a literary conceit that it's nearly impossible to adapt to cinematic form, but God bless the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer for trying. Whole long sections of this are just thrilling arias of pure cinematic expression, linking stories hundreds of years and thousands of miles apart by the elemental forces of human experiences. The overarching story (such as it is) is about the journey of a soul as it learns over the course of several lifetimes what it means to be good. The ensemble cast is full of some spotty performances (and some even spottier makeup), but Halle Berry, Doona Bae, and a near-unrecognizable Hugh Grant have never been better than they are in sections of this.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004) How this didn't win every single goddamn award walking away in 2004, I'll never know. It's a goddamn masterpiece, with career-best work from Kate Winslet, Jim Carrey, Charlie Kaufman, and Michel Gondry. Nothing I could write about it will ever top this that I wrote four years ago, so I won't even try.
The Rules of Attraction (Roger Avary, 2002) Oh those wild and crazy kids! What ever will they do to fuck themselves up next? This Bret Easton Ellis adaptation throws so much style at the wall to see what sticks, and a surprising amount of it does. Hopping back and forth between different attendees at a fateful college party and what led them to make the decisions they made there, we watch as teen heartthrobs Jessica Biel, James Van Der Beek, Ian Somerhalder, Kate Bosworth, and Kip Pardue do some VERY bad things, to themselves and to each other! The movie as a whole holds together only barely, but the best scenes (including a homoerotic bedroom dance/pillow fight to George Michael's "Faith", a rapid fast-forward through an entire vacation abroad, and one of the best, most effective suicide scenes ever put on film) really linger.
Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. It's very simple to join in the fun. All you have to do is pick three movies that fit the week's theme and tell us all about them. Try it - you'll like it!
This week was a tough assignment: Movies with third-person narration; i.e. movies narrated by someone outside of the story, in this case specifically by someone who doesn't appear on screen. I'll be honest. At first I could only think of one movie, and it was one I had already picked in a previous week last year. But after a glass of wine and a browse through my movie collection later, I thought of another, and another, and another! And all was well with the world. AND THEN it turns out one of those, my favorite, actually, had also already been one of my previous picks. GOD DAMN YOU SELF AND YOUR STUPID RULES! And then my second favorite of those is actually more appropriate for a later theme. So yeah, this week went from tough to easy and all the way back to tough again. After all that, let's see if anyone else picked any of these.
The thing about third-person narration is that by its very nature it adds a storybook quality to the film, which is something that can go very wrong very quickly. But in the hands of the screenwriters and narrators of these three films, it goes oh so wonderfully right.
Matilda (Danny DeVito, 1996) The books of Roald Dahl have been fertile ground for movies, but for some reason, this one seems to be one of the least heralded of those. Given that it gets Dahl's tricky tone down exactly right, I'm not really sure why. Matilda (the preternaturally talented Mara Wilson) is a smart, gifted young girl whose parents (real-life marrieds Danny DeVito - who also provides the third-person narration - and Rhea Pearlman, hamming it up to perfection) pay little to no attention to her. Oh, and when I say "gifted", I mean in the Carrie White sense. Yes, this is basically Carrie: The Elementary School Years, and appropriately the horror is of a very slapstick nature. But the film is just off-kilter enough to make it work. It's a perfect children's entertainment, and extols the virtues of learning and respect of library books. What could be better than that?
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Tom Tykwer, 2006) When you're trying to make a film of a novel as interior and literary as Patrick Süskind's Perfume, it's maybe best you just don't do it, but if you must, hiring John Hurt to do some narration isn't a bad way to go. The other, more difficult, thing to do is to change the plot JUST enough so that your film becomes kind of its own thing, but keep the spirit of the novel intact. That Tykwer mostly manages that feat is quite something, especially since the story of Perfume is a queasy one: Grenouille, due to the rather disgusting conditions of his birth, has the world's most acute sense of smell, and no smell of his own. Naturally, he winds up as an apprentice to a master perfumer, to learn the trade of scent. But it's so easy that he sets his sights on something bigger: To distill the essence of beauty itself into a perfume. Naturally, the only way he can think of to do this is to kill beautiful women and take their scent. I can't imagine how Tykwer managed to make a film of this novel, let alone one this beautiful. And beautiful it is, capturing exactly what it is about beautiful scents that so drives Grenouille, and often drives us deeper into our own vanity.
(500) Days of Summer (Marc Webb, 2009) "This is a story of boy meets girl... You should know upfront, this is not a love story." And with that bit of Richard McGonagle narration, Marc Webb's debut feature shot straight into immortality. Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel make for an adorable, unfortunately mismatched pair who are destined not to be "the one" for each other. The film charts their relationship by bouncing back and forth among the 500 days they spent together, mostly focusing on the little seemingly-incidental moments in a relationship that you later realize were actually hugely meaningful. I remember really liking this but having reservations about it when I first saw it, but haven't seen it since. I'm curious to see if it holds up better or worse than my memory.
Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join in the fun by picking three films that fit the week's theme and telling us a bit about them!
Ah, the love triangle. The time-honored tradition of two men going after the same woman... or one woman falling for two different guys at the same time (yeah, it usually doesn't go the other way around). It is a situation fraught with tension. Or, at least, it can be. I can only imagine how frustrating this must be in real life, but in movies it can sometimes be fun.
The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940) I suppose you COULD call this a "love square" since Katharine Hepburn's Tracy Lord has three suitors.... except that the third man (John Howard's poor George) is really never part of the "love" part of the equation. Tracy divorced C.K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant) for his alcoholism, and now she's set to marry the respectable and utterly boring George, who worships her. But then undercover newspaper reporter Mike Connor (Jimmy Stewart) shows up and sparks fly as friendly competition picks up between all three of them (this is Kate Hepburn we're talking about, after all). Everyone knows she isn't going to end up marrying George (poor, poor George), but will she fall back in love with (read: realize she never fell out of love with) Dexter, or will she fall hard enough for the stalwart Mike? The three leads could not have been more perfectly cast (except perhaps for the two men Hepburn originally wanted, Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy - of course), and despite the manic plot the whole thing is fleet-footed in that way that only comedies of the 1930s and 40s are.
Victor/Victoria (Blake Edwards, 1982) Alright, now pay attention, this one's kinda complicated. Out of work opera singer Victoria Grant (Julie Andrews) is broke and starving in Paris when she runs into Carroll Todd (Robert Preston). Together, they hatch a plan to become the toast of the town: Victoria will play the role of Victor, a female impersonator. She sings as herself, then at the end of the act, rips off her "wig" to "reveal" herself as a man! Because Julie Andrews is SO BUTCH! But then Chicago club owner King Marchand (James Garner) and his girlfriend Norma (Lesley Ann Warren, the REAL star of this movie) show up, and King falls in lust/love with Victor. I mean, Victoria. Because he's absolutely positive that there's no way she's really a man (probably because he's an American. I mean, what do the French know, right?). But Norma is convinced her beau is falling for a man, because she may be a ditz, but she's not completely.... well, no, really, she is completely dumb. But now King is caught in the middle, between a crazy dumb chick and a woman playing a man playing a woman. A lot of the very smart things Victor/Victoria has to say about gender, sexuality, love, and attraction are undercut somewhat by the fact that "Victor" really doesn't exist, but to be honest, that doesn't really matter, because Blake Edwards is in top form here, perfectly staging every single scene in this gag-filled movie musical. And the music by Henry Mancini is pretty damn great, too. Come for Julie's iconic "Le Jazz Hot", stay for the beautiful, hugely effective ballad "Crazy World". And then there's Lesley Ann Warren, doing the greatest dumb blonde routine this side of Jean Hagen in Singin' in the Rain.
3 (Tom Tykwer, 2011) What if a couple in a long-term relationship fell, independently of each other, for the same man? That is the question posed by Tom Tykwer's film, and it's a totally contemporary, worthy question. And the best part is, most "love triangles" are really Vs, with one person attracted to two others at the same time. But here, that third line gets filled in, creating a TRUE love triangle. It's a fascinating film, kind of like Tykwer's breakthrough Run Lola Run without the action sequences, but with all that energy turned into sex/sexiness.
Written as part of the blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. You should join us - just pick three films that fit the week's theme and tell us about them!
For this week's Thursday Movie Picks, we delve into the wonderful world of Foreign Language films (well, at least, they're foreign to us English-speakers...). Awesome. I love a good foreign language film just as much as I love films in English, and there are many that I hold very dear to my heart. Unfortunately, German films are not an area of expertise for me. I just haven't seen any films from their canon of great filmmakers (Herzog, Fassbinder, etc.), and while I've seen plenty from the silent era (Metropolis, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, etc.), I decided that choosing something without any spoken dialogue would be cheating a bit. BUT! I shall persevere. Here are three wonderful films in German.
Run Lola Run (Lola Rennt, Tom Tykwer, 1998) Tykwer burst onto the scene in 1998 with this blast of fresh air starring the tremendous Franka Potente in a star-is-born performance. Franka is the titular Lola, a young German lass whose boyfriend Manny has gotten stuck on the raw end of a drug deal and must come up with a large sum of money in a short amount of time. He calls Lola and tells her he's going to rob a market to get it. She implores him not to do something so stupid, but the clock is ticking. So she runs. But there are many options open to her around every corner, starting with where to get the money. And each choice she makes has an effect on the people around her, which Tykwer shows us in a series of snapshots after Lola runs into certain people. The film tracks her through three different runs, each with a different outcome but each with the same propulsive energy. In between each run, we see a scene with Lola and Manny in bed, presumably post-coital, talking about what love means to them. If all that sounds like too much, or too pretentious, let me reassure you: It is neither of those things. Everything here is in perfect balance. Run Lola Run is a thinking person's action film for sure, but everyone can enjoy it.
Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin, Wim Wenders, 1987) The angel Damiel is one of many of God's emissaries on Earth, able to hear the thoughts of everyone around him and offer comfort to those who are at the end of their rope. But it's a very lonely existence, because he cannot be seen by anyone except the other angels (who, it must be said, don't seem particularly friendly). And then one day, he sees and falls in love with a trapeze artist. But it cannot be, unless he chooses to become human, one of those beings he watches over that are always in despair. Sound familiar? PLEASE don't judge this gorgeous film by its Americanized version, City of Angels (which starred Meg Ryan and Nicolas Cage). This is the real deal, a film about what it means to be human, what it means to be alone even in the most densely populated of cities, and just what it is that makes life worth living.
Summer Storm (Sommersturm, Marco Kreuzpaintner, 2004) One of the better gay films in recent memory, Summer Storm follows Tobi, member of a German rowing team installed at a training camp during the summer in the lead-up to a big regatta. The team is supposed to be camping with a girls' team, but instead gets placed with a gay youth team after the girls cancel. Naturally, this leads to all kinds of youthful exploring and pushing of buttons and boundaries, because Tobi has been hiding his attraction for his best friend and teammate, Achim. It's not a great film, but Summer Storm excellently captures the confusion and searching surrounding youthful sexuality - both gay and straight - in a way very few films seem to grasp. Plus: CUTE boys!
