Mr. Hulot’s Holiday

It is the last day of February, and the snow is flying. I think I will go home and watch one of my favorite movies, just to cheer me up. It always works.

M. Hulot’s Holiday is a charming movie. The charm lies, I think, in the tendency of the movie to portray our attempts to impose routine behavior on the holiday experience. In the end we carry our stories with us, as turtles carry their shells. Upstairs the beautiful young girl opens her windows. She has just arrived. She looks out from her rented room onto the beach. The regulars notice as they promenade. Everything is new and full of promise. The sky is blue and the air is fresh. But the holiday resort is populated by types. There is the bratty child, the upright colonel, the indignant waiter, and then there is M. Hulot, agent of anarchy. The dramatic interest in the story arises out of the encounter between the imposed routine of the boarding house and the liberating possibilities of the holiday experiences.

Who wouldn’t want to be at the seaside on a day like this? It’s just therapy, much needed on this, the last snowy day of February.

Chabon teams up with Coen Brothers

This should be good! The Coen brothers will teaming up with Michael Chabon for the movie version of “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union”, an alternative-reality, hard-boiled detective noir thriller set in Alaska. Chabon’s book is the best thing I read all year. Of course, the Coen brothers know how to do film noir, as they demonstrated with their very first movie, Blood Simple, another of my all time favorites. So, despite the fact that winter is doing a serious number on my overall mood, this is something to be cheerful about!

Atonement

I haven’t read Ian McEwan’s Atonement but I might now. What the movie does so well is to represent what I can only assume are the narrative concerns of the book - the multiple points of view and the choices an author makes to “tell the truth”. The first half of the movie is set in a massive English country estate on a sweltering hot summer’s day. There is visual emphasis on the polished dark wood surfaces, flowery wallpaper, clocks ticking, sunlight in shafts, and the palpable weight of time passing slowly. Children lie around trying to amuse themselves without the aid of DVD’s or video games. A little girl writes a play to occupy herself. Outside the trees bend with fruit, and weeds luxuriate. Multiple perspectives come into play, and parts of the movie are replayed from different characters’ points of view. I remember something similar from the old TV series Petrocelli , but this is entirely more rich and literary.

The second half of the movie involves war and those left behind. Everybody raves about the amazing tracking shot which opens Touch of Evil, rightly, but Atonement has the most spectacular continuous scene ever, set on the beach at Dunkirk as the soldiers are waiting to be picked up. There on the beach is all of humanity - ferris wheels, choirs, men shooting horses - heaven and hell, the good, the bad, and the ugly - all conveyed with an amazingly fluid walkthrough shot that leaves the viewer stunned.

Atonement is a richly rendered movie, worthy of all the praise it has been getting.

Charlie Wilson’s War

Went to see the above mentioned movie yesterday at the local cineplex, and was immediately put into a bad mood due to the fact that I hate the local cineplex experience with a passion… but missed the movie when it was on offer at the State Theater, so had little choice. You go in and you feel dirty. It may be dark, but I still have a pretty good idea where I am, and it’s not clean. It stinks of rancid popcorn, and all those people who turn out look like escapees from Idiocracy, with the Big Slurpys, etc. Then there’s the constant boom which comes seeping in through the thin walls of the next movie - Star Wars V perhaps? Lastly, you have to sit through about a half an hour of advertising (dog food and Bod spray) and bad propaganda from the National Guard, directed at the poor slobs who might be tempted to go and get their ass shot off in Iraq. Yes, well, at least the movie was good.

And here’s the amazing thing: I swear, Philip Seymour Hoffman played a character based almost entirely on a colleague of mine, circa 1985. It’s uncanny! The mannerisms, the hair, the slightly tinted glasses - I would say he ripped it off. See what you think:

Mad Love

Seen this morning on TV, a movie starring Peter Lorre, entitled “Mad Love”, 1935:
“A bald surgeon grafts a killer’s hands on to the pianist husband of an actress he loves.”

OK, not only is he bald, but he’s insane. Favorite line from movie, spoken by an eager reporter who is close to the case:
“It’s the old story. The old family doctor stuck on a girl and tries to plant a murder on the husband to get rid of him. He’s been doing something mighty queer with Rollo’s body!”

Well, who wouldn’t want to see that movie?

Revenge of the Zombies

You start watching it because of the title: “Revenge of the Zombies.”  Press the info button on the remote and you get this: “Revenge of the Zombies. 1943.  A mad doctor makes zombies for Hitler after practicing on his wife.”  Hmmm.  Sounds interesting.

Part of the seasonal offerings leading up to Halloween, when all of the truly awful movies come out again, this one (you think to yourself) sounds so bad, it might actually be good.  So you watch it, keeping in mind the zeitgeist, the cultural underpinnings, the milieu of 1943 wartime America.  Good luck with that.  Hitler you understand, but why did the mad scientist (John Carradine, father of David, later of Kung Fu fame) start practicing on his wife in the first place?  What does that tell you about the state of play between men and women in 1943?   And why zombies?

So, for a laugh, you watch, enjoying the stagey placement of characters, the lazy camera work, the zombie-like acting of everybody, actually, not just the zombies, come to think of it, and the overall Badness of the whole production.  And as you begin to tune into the dialogue you start to realize that this is perhaps truly the worst movie ever, all things considered, for in the space of only five minutes you hear lines such as these:

“I don’t know what your plan is, but if it has anything to do with vengeance, we might act together,” (spoken with a Rumsfeldian flourish by mad scientist John Carradine, just prior to diverting suspicion away from himself).

and

“You know, I find this mixture, which I invented myself, to be an excellent stimulant for the digestion,” (spoken by Carradine again, as he pours out laced libations for the unsuspecting dummies who are about to find themselves strapped to a zinc table in the basement).

Wow.  When I say this movie is bad, I mean Baaaad!

V for Vendetta

I’ve watched this movie twice now. I gave it a chance. But in the final analysis V for Vendetta is a deeply flawed movie. The plot is complicated by the motivation of the hero, V. He is physically strong, a survivor of biological experimentation, who gets badly burned, and then vows revenge. The problem is that V’s revenge (and the reason for it) is physical, but his appeal is meant to be intellectual. Phantom of the Opera meets 1984. I wanted to like it, but it’s just OK.

Jesus Camp

Just finished a week at the Traverse City flim festival, and also finished with my current class. Grades are entered and life is good. I can’t help making connections between one of my students and one of the movies I saw, “Jesus Camp”.

“Jesus Camp” chronicles a group of kids who attend an evangelical camp which trains them up for the world of fringe religious activism. What I took away from the film is the overwhelming sense of fear which permeates the evangelicals. They are afraid of the world, essentially, and look for Satan in every mishap, including botched PowerPoint presentations. Most of them are home schooled, and the film showed parents going out of their way to teach that evolution is wrong and global warming is a hoax. So… the message is, fear and denial.

I had a student in my recent class who is a preacher in a backwoods church. Bright guy, a walking concordance of biblical quotes. Trouble is, he approaches learning that way too, piecemeal. His only reason for learning anything about other religious and philosophical traditions was so that he could pick out key quotes to show their inconsistencies. He also used every opportunity in the discussion board to “testify” and generally bring everything back to his own belief system. So… far from being open to the world and open to new ideas, his whole purpose in learning was to pick up information which would butress his own views. Shocking, and sad.

Fear will do that.

circus laundromat

Seen on Direct TV show description last night:

When Night is Falling

“A bisexual mythology prdofessor has an affair with a circus performer she met at a laundromat.”

Well, that’s certainly worth a look.

Fridge Magnetism

A plot summary for what must be the most boring movie ever made, taken from the DirectTV directory:

White Banners
Movie, Drama (193
“A motherly woman helps a professor and his student invent a refrigerator in 1919 Indiana.”

Wow. I wonder if they succeeded?