Archive for Tedious

Gomorra (2008)

September 14, 2009 at 11:43 am · Filed under Tedious

A messy slice of sleazy social realism. If you’re living in Napoli expect to be arbitarily shot at at any time – that seems to be the message.

The “characters” in this film have our eyes in the back of their heads watching out for them, just in case.

Not that we get that close to any of the (too) many characters; I didn’t really know who they were, what they’re doing, or why they’re doing it. They could have been “on the other side”. But who was the other side?. Was i on the side of “them” or was i siding with “us”? I didn’t know. Didn’t know who i was meant to be caring about. Any kind of soft empathy  in me – as a voyeuristic spectator – got diasbled. I couldn’t care less about any of them. Felt no compassion.

I suppose in this kind of world compassion is a redundant emotion to have, kind of irrelevant in the every day dog eat dog scheme of things.

The direction  deliberately lacked cohesion or coherence; we’re tracking about behind the camera, following behind characters we don’t know the relevance of, or what they might be “meaning” to the story of the film. The point probably is; there is no point, there’s no grandioise “meaning” to be extracted or film-like purposeful storyline to be entertained by in any of these disconnected lifes being lived.

It doesn’t glamourize gangster life at all; quite the opposite in fact; it’s stripping bare the romantic pretension from gangster life as depicting in Hollywood style mafia movies. Life is as it is: nasty, brutal, short and tragically disposable. There is no redemption for these people,

An uneasy flim to watch. Not comfortably entertaining. Just relentlessly, heartlessly, grim.

Glad i don’t live there.

Dir: Matteo Garrone, Italy

5.5/10

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Bad Timing (1980)

September 3, 2009 at 11:26 pm · Filed under Tedious ·Tagged , , ,

Art Garfunkel smoking yet another fag. He’s a Shrink. Falls into an obssessive possessive erotic relationship with Theresa Russell. As if we hadn’t got enough Americans in Vienna, along comes Harvey Keitel as a long haired Viennese cop (but just doing a Harvey Keitel impersonation) to investigate what the hells been going on.

Turns out not alot has been going on really. But Nicolas Roeg’s direction invests the going on with all sorts of conundrumy complexy subplots, side-plots, no-plots.

The story is jigsawed up into disparate bits; our job (and believe me it does feel like “work”) is to puzzle the pieces of narrative back into some kind of meaningful sense.

Garfunkel and Russell are hopeless in the lead roles; he’s meant to be a deeply thinking Doctor of Analysis; she’s meant to be alluringly attractively troubled. But their “fatal attraction” to and for one another is fatuous. Perhaps its because Art Garfunkel can’t act; he does baby-faced opaqueness and thats about it. Russell comes across as a brazen hussied blank.The intensely torrid relationship they’re supposed to be having is convolutedly annodyne, interior-lite.

Theres some skinny shagging between them. Russell has a couple of tantrums. Art carries on his baby-faced smoking. (what a high forehead he had; he must have gone bald soon after this)

The film technique is all too conspicuously present; lots of cutaways and zoom-ins (on random objects in the frame. why?) The non-linear narrative splits and splices the chronology in every direction; cutting and pasting and juxtaposing to make the story seem obliquely complex.

I just got irritated by it. The film is phony as fuck.

And its dull.

In fact i was already binning the film, having seen – and been unimpressed by – a bit of it i’d seen previously . Then i remembered Keith Jarretts Koln Concert had been used in it. I suppose to add in intensity.

But the film has no internal intensity, no real resonance.

There’s no way i’ll be associating the Koln Concert with this pile of pretentious poo.

Dir: Nicolas Roeg, England/USA

4/10

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Molloch (1999)

August 26, 2009 at 8:00 pm · Filed under Tedious ·Tagged

The reason to watch this was not the subject material (Hitler et al);  but the Russian director Surokov. I’ve seen one very good film of his already (“Mother & Son”, which I’ll review sometime soon) So this might have been worth a look.

It wasn’t. Although the opening 10 minutes promised something visually poetic and unusual: obliquely angled shots of Eva Braun in the noddy doing calisthenics inside a stony grey mountain castle. Ten minutes with no talk but lots of moody eerie atmosphere.

The first line of dialogue is: “A drops form. Conformity of drops-form” Not a good portent. Is this going to be wankily abstractly obtuse?

Eventually Hitler arrives with his SS sturm-troopers, Martin Boorman, Joeseph Goebbels and Co; he’s acting and looking like a fat Charlie Chaplin. He gets into typical spasmodic rants and rages. But mostly he comes across as somebody dimly deranged – an unappealing.

As all the rest of the cast of characters are. Smelly oik (Boorman), pathetically sycophantic (Goebbels) fawningly sybaritic (the female spouses) Eva (Braun) has a bit of spunk in her – even has the audacity to kick Hitler up the arse (this the prelude to chasing around the bedroom before sex)

At 23 minutes in i’m hitting fast forward. Not engaging me. The Russian actors are dubbed into German but their mouths look out of sync. It’s all airily estranging.

Dir: Aleksandr Sokurov, Russia

4/10

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Betty Blue (1986)

August 20, 2009 at 8:43 am · Filed under Tedious ·Tagged , ,

“I had known Betty for a week. We screwed every night. The forecast was for storms” is the first line, narrated over Betty and Zorg screwing in their beach bungalow with Mona Lisa above the bed. The scene has got a lush soft-core glow about it (apparently they were at it for real in this scene)

So more screwing, getting pissed, being crazily in love, painting bungalows together. Then she’s getting into a tantrum; starts throwing things out of the window; 10 minutes later another tantrum – and everything gets chucked out; then she’s burning the bungalow down and they’re fleeing the torched scene.

Bit of a wildcat she is. Or a bit cracked. But he loves her. Is crazy about her (craziness) So he’ll put up with anything.

Turns out he has to put up with the whole kit and caboodle. Those storms are gonna be coming. More tempers and tantrums; a tendency to lash out, or slash out violently she has. You know it’s gonna end tragically eventually. She’s gonna end up doing one. Which she does. Poking her own eye out with a knife. She’s got so nuts (apparently) the nurses have had to strap her tight into the bed. Zorg does the only kind thing his fatally flawed love will allow; he puts the poor tortured soul out of her misery by smothering her frozen mush with a pillow.

Then he’s back to the kitchen, to eat his pot of chilli, and scribble away on a pad with a strange white cat (Betty?) sat on the table. He’s gonna write that masterpiece. Maybe the whole tragically tempestuous love affair has been a figment of his imagination?….

This Directors Cut version is 3 hours long; it gets tedious after about an hour – but there’s still another 2 hours of their selfish love to be got through. I was soon becoming immune to Betty’s charms; her self-absorbed impetuous narcissism. Her descent into madness isn’t deeply interiorized, but a shallow show externalised by these superficial  hysterical hissy fits.

Betty Blue was a fav of an ex-girlfriend of mine, so i associate it with her – mostly – negative character traits; it’s wowed up adolescent bombast; it’s exaggerated, conceited, romanticism; it’s vivid, sumptuous – but vacuously ostentatious style; all hype but no substance. Fatuous. Empty.

Glossy trash souped up as a self-important, tragically doomed, – but passionately fab -”love affair”.

Dir: Jean-Jacques Beineix, France

5/10

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Remember me (2003)

August 16, 2009 at 5:01 pm · Filed under Tedious

I’ve watched about half of this film so far.

I don’t feel particularly sympathic towards the characters or their self-centered melodramas.

Possibly because they are all too fabulously glamorous. Too beautifully Italian. The mom, dad, daughter, various boyfriends and girlfriends, all look like they’ve been air-brushed from out of a glossy lifestyle magazine. Affluence, excessive self-importance, a wannabe want-it-all look-at-me egotism infects their gloriously Me-absorbed aspirations.

“We’re the simulacrum of the petite bourgeoisie,” says one character. Yes, it seems like individual angst is being mocked up for the camera, faked for film purposes. Stylishly synthetic suffering.

Let’s indulge ourselves in abit of actiing it all up. Or rather; indulge ourselves in simply being Italians.

It’s reminiscent of “American Beauty”, that cynical film about family dystopia with Kevin Spacey; it’s got an omnisicent voice-over narrator attempting to “place” or contextualize the characters as part of  a typically conventional sort of Italian family. I think thats what it’s doing.

I’ll watch the 2nd half tonight.

@

It got marginally better. But in a way my mind had been made up not to like it too much or get too sympathetico.

The daughter/sister gets to get on telly. The mother/wife gets to go on stage (and get clapped) The son/brother gets laid. The husband/father doesn’t get his book finished. Cus he – accidently – runs into a car while rushing off to be with his ex-lover. But he gets to be cared for. And walk again (with a slight limp) so nothing too horribly tragic happens. He’s secretly ringing ex-lover again at the end – so the great novelist will no doubt be eventually discovered.

I don’t seem to click much with Spanish or Italian  films. Too tantrumy and tempremental.

Dir: Gabrielle Muccino, Italy

5/10

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Life is sweet (1991)

July 28, 2009 at 9:09 am · Filed under Tedious ·Tagged , , , ,

Jane Horrocks virtually ruins this film with her nasal impersonation of a whiny cockney teenage bulimic. She’s like a nastier and unfunnier version of Harry Enfields spotty adolescent “Kevin”.

Other Mike Leigh films have suffered from actors getting too “stuck”. Instead of creating credible “characters” they slide into grotesque caricature. Timothy Spall in this film also overcooks the goofball eccentricities of Aubrey; his acting becomes parodic, becomes a “performance” of quirky mannerisms; he’s fallen flat into a 2 dimensional comedy sketch character from off The Fast Show.

Mike Leigh has to take the rap really; he’s allowing actors to become ridiculous. A serious failure of judgement is going on. When i first saw this film back in the early 90’s i had the same dismayed reaction to it as i have now. It was the first film of his where i’d thought, “No, this isn’t working – it’s crossed over from being comedy of cringe into simply being embarrassing. Not embarrassingly funny; embarrasingly bad”.

Even Alison Steadman resorts to the verbal mannerisms of roles she’s played before (ala Beverley in Abigails Party), doing her little this and little that… “Aww bless him”… “You’re jokin me“”….and “little” chuckly laughs, trying to make light, make trite of everything.

Jane Horrocks says “bollocks” alot, and needs boyfriend David Thewlis to do wierd sex on her. “Not again, it’s borin” he groans. “I’m not doing it then” she says. “Lie down then” he says. “You pervert”. Turns out she likes to be tied up to the bed and have chocolate spread smeared and sucked off her flat chest.

David Thewlis is about the only character that works, has authenticity. “I don’t want “it”, i want “you”. I want to treat you like a real person rather than a fucking shagbag” he says. “You’re a fake” he says.

He’s right. Not only not a real person. But not even a real character. A genuine fake.

“Piss off then!” she snarls.

So he does. He leaves her.

I cheered him out the door

Dir: Mike Leigh, England

4/10

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Henry Fool

July 24, 2009 at 9:30 pm · Filed under Tedious ·Tagged

First thing to say: this is one load of primary bollocks. Which is nothing unsual for a Hal Hartley film.

Simon Grim is a stick-thin bespectacled garbage collector. Who also happens to be a Nobel Prize winning poet in the making. Which is where Henry Fool comes in. To make him.

Henry Fool is not a Nobel Prize winning writer. Although he want to be. Or thinks he already is.

Simon Grim has a slutty sister called Faye. She wants to be fucked. Often. She’s got her slutty eye on Henry. But the Fool fucks catatonic mom on the sofa instead.

Henry Fool wears a 3-piece charcoal suit, has foppish locks, talks in sonorous tones like a academic of Literary Theory: “The relativity of cadence in relationship to the readability of form” he opines. But he looks like a thuggish street-dealer. And goes around impregnating various fawning females. “Beast! Fiend! Rapist!” He fucks Faye eventually. Gives her is progeny.

Henry has jumped parole. “What did you do?” asks Simon. “I got caught” says Henry. Got caught screwing a 13 year old girl. Got 7 years. So, not a literary genius – a paedophile.

Mom is playing piano. “That was nice”. “Yes, it was nice – but it was unmemorable” “Does that matter?” “Yes it does”. Mom puts down piano lid. She reads Simons pornographic poem. Slits her wrists. That was memorable enough.

Simon gets his poem published. Becomes a literary sensation. Becomes feted, awarded, rewarded. Becomes the famously respected genius Henry Fool will never be. Henry Fool is just a schmuck. Just a notoriety. Just a kiddie-fucker. A good for nothing drunk. A deluded pretentious twat.

On the scale of pretentious twatism this film wins hands down.

All the characters seem like they’re seriously disassociated from the normal range of human feeling. Like they might be suffering from mild to severe variations of Aspergers syndrome.

I used to be more tolerant, even indulgent, of this po-mo kind of stuff 20 years ago.

But not anymore.

Dir: Hal Hartley, USA

5/10

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The Double Life of Veronique (1992)

June 8, 2009 at 8:32 am · Filed under Tedious ·Tagged ,

When i first saw this back in the 90’s I wanted to like it; it was Kieslowski, director of Decalog, it was gonna be great.

But it wasn’t. And isn’t. Not even now. I’m just as disappointed by it as i was then. I even feel mildly irritated.

I think its something to do with how precious it is. And while we’re at it – being precious – lets throw in specious too. All wafty visual tonery. And flopping about in expensive Parisian flats looking ethereally lost.

I don’t know if this is Irene Jacobs fault or how Kiewslowski’s directing her. It’s probably him. He sticks the camera onto her face and follows her lovingly around like a devoted doggie. The critics seemed besotted by her “ravishing” beauty too.

I’m not. She’s too pretty, too bloody angelic! Too much vague vacuity going on in lieu of expressive feeling, or even explicable feeling. She doesn’t say alot. Does lots of wan-looking, as though she’s lost her virginity somewhere but can’t remember when or with who.

“I have a strange feeling. I feel that i’m not alone in the world” says Polish Weronika to her dad. No, cus there’s a French doppelganger that looks just like her living in Paris called Veronique. Who also happens to be musically gifted, have a heart condition, have lovely teeth.

Weronika is getting giddinesses. Collapses dead on stage while singing her beautiful song. 27 mins in. The rest of the film is taken over by Veronique, and how she’s sensing the possible presence of Weronika around somewhere in tantalisingly vague ambiguous presentiments. Or maybe not. We can’t be sure what she’s experiencing cus she never really says anything. Just this lifted up longing in her face, beaming into beatific.

Its all far too slow, cooked on a slow simmering heat of semblence and seeming significance; spiritual speciousness.

And that “haunting” faux meaningful music of Zbigniew Preisner (used to irritating effect by Kieslowki in other films) makes my skin itch; its like listening to Polish pan-pipe music for the cerebrally inebriated.

Dir: Krzysztof  Kieslowski, Poland/France

5/10

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Stroszek (1977)

May 30, 2009 at 10:04 am · Filed under Tedious ·Tagged

One of those Werner Herzog films i saw back in my early 20’s. Oddly compelling at the time.

Not now though. Odd yes, but not especially compelling.

Bruno S – who plays Stroszek -  is odd bordering on idiot; he declaims his lines in a faux oratory style as if he’s acting being an actor .There’s no appropriate feeling going on to match whats being said. A simpleton sort of soul, vaguely sympathetic, but also strangely alienating. His personal peculiarities belonging somewhere along the Autistic spectrum, left of Aspergers. After a while i found his blank idiocy disingenuously disengaging.

Disingenuously disengaging is how i found the rest of the film too.

Apparently Ian Curtis -  of Joy Division – watched this the night he hung himself. I suppose if you were feeling especially alienated this film would speak to you, alienate you even better.

The scenes at the end; of the truck automatically circuiting round and round, the automated dancing chicken spinning itself madlessly about on its dish, Bruno S swung up high and helpless on the ski lift….these scenes disturbingly stick with you, like images from a bad dream you had, and don’t care too much to remember.

Herzog peoples this film with misfit eccentrics and their eccentricities (like he does in most of his films) losers living as outsiders, not fitting into the “norm”, not fit for the norm – even though they appear to have naive hope in US style normality, materialistic aspirations. You know they’re never gonna fit in, are doomed to be defeated by their automated failure-lifes. Just as alienated and automated as those dancing chickens really.

I don’t know about Werner Herzog. I suppose back in the 70’s he seemed like a mad mystic visionary. And then you get to hear how dull he is interviewed, like a softly spoken, mild-mannered NHS line-manager. And the films he’s made in the last 20 years or so seem stripped of that cult like allure.

Maybe its because we have access to so much film these days, via Dvds, the Internet, etc; we’ve got so much to see – so the tolerance level for stuff that looks willfully obscure, cerebral, or “difficult” is much lower. Well, it is with me. I’m just not prepared to put up with the Herzogs, Wenders, and Godards of this world boring me to death with their pet abstractions and obsessions.

And maybe i don’t need or want to watch films that don’t inspire me, don’t charm me, don’t move me; films – like this one is – that make life feel negatively displaced, estranged, futile.

Maybe i’ve just grown-up, got older, matured. I know better now the kind of films i “really” like to see, rather than the films i ought to be admiring.

Dir: Werner Herzog, Germany

5/10

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Let the right one in (2008)

May 20, 2009 at 11:09 am · Filed under Tedious

Went up to Exeter Picture House to see this. Had high expectations, even tho I usually wouldn’t watch a vampire movie; but there’d been favourable reviews by the critics.

Turns out my expectations were too high.

This film seemed confused as to what kind of film it wanted to be.  Too many jarring tonal shifts between childhood romance, social satire, and that stupefying OTT vampirism.

Think i would have preferred it to stay gently on the achingly melancholic little relationship between the 2 12 year old misfit kids, bullied blonde boy Oskar and undead Eli with her big dark drops of eyes.

Instead you keep getting sudden erruptions of grisly gorishness; not sown seamlessly into the introspective mood of the film, but kind of manically stitched on – then ripped apart, with much gnashing and slashing of teeth.

It seems like normal narrative logic doesn’t apply to this Vampire genre; the more it doesn’t make rational sense the more frightened you’ll be with what you don’t understand; the more inexplicably incoherent internal motivations are the more fascinatingly “other” the wierdness is supposed to be – sparking off scary subconscious fears inside us who sit and gape.

Durr, no. All i start to become aware of is how clunkingly manipulative all the “horror” effects are being. I’m not scared! You’re not scaring me! So stop it – and start developing characters i can actually believe in, have sympathy for.

I mean, i don’t get: why the serial killer father is stringing up his victims in public places. Or, after he’s smashed to his death out of the hospital window, why Swedish social services aren’t knocking on the door of the flat to take his little daughter into care; or why the police aren’t cottoning on to all these grisly goings on in the locality (you don’t see them at all in fact)

I had confirmed to me why i don’t watch films about vampires. They’re preposterous!

All that ravenous neck sucking, and rabid blood guzzling. Not for me i’m afraid. Not that i was afraid. Merely faintly bemused by it all.

Dir: Tomas Alfredson, Sweden

5/10

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