steviekeys Reviews

Biutiful (2010)

so worth seeing

[10/10 · 5 May 2012]

I am so glad I overcame my trepidation, caused by all the talk of how depressing this is. It is, indeed, grim, grim, grim. But it ends with two scenes of such calm, serene resolution (real resolution - not the treacly Hollywood kind) that the end effect is down-right exhilarating.

Innaritu is a great film maker. And this film increases my respect for him. It is impressive that after making such a 'big' movie as Babel, he could let himself scale down - do something smaller, quieter, more personal.

If you read the credits closely, it becomes clear that Innaritu was trying to make his own 'Ikiru', possibly reflecting on the death of his own father (?) The result is tender, touching...and yes, hopeful.

And let it be said, this is one of the very few films I've seen that looks hard at globalization...and reminds us of how thoroughly it is shaping our world.

Carlos (2010)

Praise for Assasyas

[9/10 · 17 February 2011]

This is an engrossing, sometimes scary retelling of history, history so recent it's almost shocking how dimly it is remembered in our time. Rich in detail of a time of world-wide revolutionary fervor before its collapse with the victory of capitalism in 1990 and its replacement by the specter of Jihad. A film that raises many important questions about politics and society that remain with us today - and yet still manages to be an exciting action/espionage yarn.

Olivier Assasyas has, over the years, continued to produce so, so many interesting, impeccably intelligent, and constantly varied pieces of work - from moving generational dramas ('Late August, Early September') to pieces of compellingly sordid sleaze ('Demon Lover' and 'Boarding Gate') to quiet soulful meditations ('Summer Hours' and the sublime 'Clean'). I can't think of anyone else with such a range (except maybe Soderberg). And I think, for my money, he has become the new preeminent French film director of our poor, poor time.

Head-On (2004)

punk is not dead!

[5/10 · 8 October 2008]

just wanted to add my voice to the chorus of hallelujahs...i love this movie for all the above reasons.

I was drawn to this because of my long-standing love affair with the city of Hamburg. And the city is so proudly represented here - the wonderful seedy world of the bars and clubs and all-night Turkish food joints of Altona and St. Pauli, the poetry of crushed beer cans.

Watching this film is like listening to a great Tom Waits album...it has all the gleeful lewd humor and bitter tears and truth.

And yes, Birol Unel's performance is as moving as acting gets.

There is no way to overstate how good this film is.

Pierrot the Fool (1965)

Still a joy...

[10/10 · 6 April 2008]

and now more valuable than ever as a reminder of a time when art like this - and thought and politics like this - was possible. We, sadly, may never have another like JLG, but we are at least given in the luscious new Criterion release another chance to celebrate. The film is probably my favorite Godard, as well....adventurous, invigorating, annoyingly cerebral one moment, joyfully breezy and buoyant the next, alternately intellectually rigorous and totally casual. It is a 'great film', but not in stuffy 'Masterpiece' self-important way; rather it has the air of something off-handedly thrown together, which becomes 'great' out of the sheer brilliance of the minds that fashioned it. This is what sixties art was at its best.

I love this film. And congratulations to Criterion for getting this reissue right. The whole package perfectly reflects the flavor of the movie.

Once (I) (2007)

how can you say no to this?

[10/10 · 15 October 2007]

OK...i'll join the chorus - gladly.

It's like this - this has happened over and over... i'm talking with a friend i haven't seen in a while and then we get to the part of the conversation - and we haven't even been talking about movies - where they ask me "Have you seen 'Once'?" And we both happily enter into that shared experience of talking about how 'great' it was. As if all anyone ever wants to do anymore is to agree for once that something in this world is 'great', which in the case of this movie i'm really thinking means 'pure', not infected by the cheapness or cynicism of so much out there.

To accept this very sentimental movie requires a great suspension of cynicism. The only people I know who haven't liked this were unable to make this leap. But I always have the feeling they very badly wanted to.

And the music is great. And the music scenes - the rehearsals, the recording session - are among the few i've seen that come close to the capturing those experiences in any true way.

When the hell is this coming out on DVD? My friend Monica has gone nuts - crazy over a heartbreak and the only helpful thought I can come up with is I want her to see this movie and get out of herself for 85 minutes.

Kings & Queen (2004)

the most extravagantly praised french film of the year...

[8/10 · 19 December 2005]

I was so hoping it would live up to the hype...and it almost does - but you know how it goes with extravagantly praised films.

Desplechin's 1996 "My Sex Life" was brilliant - a rambling, shambling, thoroughly engaging 3 hour trip through the lives of a group of rambling, shambling, lost characters, made by a director looking to pour as much raw life into a film as possible and let the rest sort itself out. He has no interest in a well-knit story....

This somehow doesn't work as well here...what is missing is the "engaging" part. This isn't a matter of his being unable edit himself; it's just characters and their situations just seem less able to cross the divide and touch you.

But i'm all in favor of Desplechin's intentions. This is a director definitely worthy of trust and respect. And can all those critics be wrong? I'm going to see this again.

"My Sex Life" had the benefit of three wonderful actors: Mathieu Almaric, Jeanne Ballibar and Emmanuelle Devos...we need more films from all three. Almaric and Devos return here. He is, as always, terrifically fun to watch. But this is her movie...Emmanuelle Devos seems to be coming into her own now, after years of playing lesser roles (The Beat my Heart Skipped). She is a marvel. Always playing the victim, stoic and long-suffering, and always bringing to this role a huge richness of feeling. She is heart-wrenching here, as she was in "My Sex Life", which she practically stole. And what a remarkable look she has...one moment the ugly duckling, another moment a ravishing beauty. I can't take my eyes off her. A great actress.

Weekend (1967)

nothing quite like it....

[9/10 · 8 November 2005]

Finally my local video rental place got in the DVD - a chance to see this again after years; I saw it in the theater when it came out. While some of my memories were accurate (the magical herd of sheep, the famous traffic jam), i was surprised what a different tone it had. I remembered it as a lot funnier and a lot less brutal than it seems now - maybe when you're younger casual violence just seems funny...

What a remarkable piece of work...a trenchant political tract, a cartoon, a film of ideas, a grotesque farce, a slap in the face...shocking one minute, annoyingly boring the next...in the end as exhilarating as anything you can see in cinema.

A girl on a train to Berlin: "i remember seeing Weekend and thinking this isn't a movie, but also realizing i'd never seen anything like it."

I once recommended it to a young guy, in love with movies, saying "without Godard, there would be no Gregg Araki or David Lynch."

Highlights:

Mereille Darc's long monologue about the orgy - riveting, spooky and silly, all at the same time. Another example of Godard's weird, perverse, yet wonderful use of music to both highlight and distract you from the scene.

The fight with the kid with the bow and arrow...very funny.

That traffic jam!!! A ten minute parade of honking horns, burlesque humor, cheap sight gags...suddenly giving way to a climax which is just heart-wrenching.

About the DVD: the interview with Raoul Coutard is wonderfully endearing, the audio commentary is annoyingly silly (get rid of that guy!), but the gem is the interview with Mike Figgis, an uncommonly thoughtful reflection on Weekend and Godard...anyone trying to make sense of this infuriatingly dense director should watch this as an introduction to his work.

Anyone who is willing to entertain the notion that film can function as art, which is to say provide a experience that has nothing to do with "entertainment" and that this experience is desirable should see this. Anyone else can just continue to call it "pretentious".

Our Music (2004)

Alien vs. Terminator

[10/10 · 2 June 2005]

A huge portion of the world's population consider Americans lazy, uninformed (because they are lazy), short-sighted (because they are uninformed), narcissistic (because they are short-sighted).

"Can 30 million Frenchmen be wrong?"

"Probably," we would say (that the French are worthy of scorn being an article of faith among a huge portion of our population).

"Well, what about 3 billion non-Frenchmen?"

Anyone who makes a filmlike this....uncompromisingly serious (this is a huge slap in the face to the notion that movies are about entertainment) political (read "leftist"), fiercely anti-American will be dismissed as difficult, obtuse, elitist. This is an anti-War movie and not one of those treacly "King of Hearts" anti-war movie that lets the audience off the hook by allowing them to congratulate themselves for their sympathy for the director's view. That is much too easy for someone like Godard who likes to think that mankind's endless history of "cutting off each other's heads" is unspeakably horrible, somehow something to be taken seriously.

Maybe it's OK for someone to ask the audience to do a little work when engaging a work of art.

This is a sublime experience. The look of the film is endlessly breathtaking....how does he get that look???? (i've never seen anyone else who could do this. And the musique, the cutting in and out of these short searing bursts of symphonic music....

This pass weekend i saw 2 movies on DVD - Notre Musique and Predator. Yes, i relished the chance to see an Arnold classic and yes, i felt reluctant to have to put up with Godard's cranky obtuseness. After watching Schwartzeneger (??) I felt like i'd just wasted 2 hours of my life that i would never get back. After watching JLG, I felt like my view of the world had been permanently changed.

The message of this film is that it might soon be too late. For anyone not interested in buying into such things, there is always Predator 2.

The Russia House (1990)

John LeCarre heaven

[9/10 · 24 January 2005]

My first comment for this site....exciting stuff.

Prompted to write this by seeing this again on video - the third time for me, and it's rare that I want to see anything three times. And I realized that it's fascination still holds....this is one of my top 10, definitely.

The reasons I would rate this a "9", while somebody else would give it a "5.9" are largely personal....i think it always comes down to the personal. Talk all we want, when we watch a movie - as when we eat a meal, or kiss someone - the pleasure center in the brain either lights up or doesn't. For me it's all about the love of a place...for Scott Barley Blair it's early Glastnost Russia, for me it's 90's Germany - Hamburg, Berlin...the strangeness, the trueness of people who surround you in such a place and your love for them because of this. The fact that a film can light up specific sense memories like these means that it is true - at least in that respect. This is a remarkably honest film - terrifically unsensational for a spy film and one of the rare "love stories" that delivers the satisfactions expected of a "love story" without getting mawkish. Everything rings true here except for the ending (a fabricated "happy ending" which is the only thing that kept me from rating this a 10).

To ask for Manchurian Candidate type excitement from this low key film is wrong. The suspense, which is remarkably sustained (those rich long tracking shots of people walking through public places to uncertain destinations to meet with, or maybe not meet with shadow characters who may be allies or enemies) is the truer suspense of the uncertainty of living in a gray, gray world...where nothing much happens, but peril is part of the fabric of mundane life.

(Those sequences are gorgeous....the colors of autumn in a Leningrad park, the closeups of the stone gargoyles....the moody circular stepping pace of the soundtrack....Branford Marsalis' saxophone.) Someone has said here that it is talky. Yes, it is talky...but the talk is brilliant...it is the perfect reflection of a world where everyone - book publishers and bureaucrats and spies alike speaks in mannered, ritualized streams of code. This is not disinformation - it is perfectly understood by all, a language that has supplanted the language of an earlier age in which sincerity was an option.

Besides that ending, the piece is perfectly faithful to LeCarre's novel. LeCarre's books have had good luck when being translated into movies. Of the eight or so that have been adapted, four have made great films: The Spy Who Came into the Cold, The Russia House, and the two George Smiley BBC miniseries. LeCarre is a great writer and more specifically great at plotting and dialogue, and these films all succeed pretty much by filming what is written unadorned and pouring on the atmosphere. And they are blessed with lead performances by three great actors at the top of the form - Richard Burton, Sean Connery and Alec Guiness (Guiness especially...to watch him for six hours in Smiley's People is one of the great pleasures).

A beautifully efficient and elegant translation by Tom Stoppard of a great novel, wonderfully dignified and touching performances by Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer (never seen her better), a beautiful soundtrack by a second tier composer graced by the presence of a real jazz master, a terrific evocation of a place and time....a very moving film.