Buys'n'GiftsGift to myself: Two books by Julian Barnes, Levels of Life and Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art. I can't go into what I got others for obvious reasons.
"Accomplishments"
In theaters: It took me about half of Spielberg's West Side Story to stop myself wondering if the original could suffer a remake. Sure, it's Spielberg, so it's slick and there's a lot of money on the screen, and of course it looks more modern than Bob Wise's 1961 version. But it's still a period piece and kind of old-fashioned, and while it's not as iconic as, say, The Sound of Music (which you can't imagine without Julie Andrews, whereas it's good to have an option where white people don't play Puerto Ricans), it's still pretty up there in the pantheon of musicals on film. But I love Sondheim, even when scored by someone else, so here we were. The second half won me over for various reasons. Mainly, Rita Moreno as the store owner has an expanded part and isn't just an Easter Egg. She even gets a song! Obviously, it's well put together (and my distrust of latter-day Spielberg is usually connected to his veneered proficiency which holds me at a distance), and he expands this 20-block world pretty cleverly. He moves some songs around to make the tragedy more ironic. Visually, I feel like Romeo and Juliet is better referenced. It's a little harder-edged than the 1961 film (thus closer to what you might see on Broadway), not only in terms of showing racism, but in having Anybodys an overtly trans character (and played by trans actor Ezra Menas). It makes the film more uncomfortable and you're less likely to take sides. The question "Are you a Jet or a Shark?" shouldn't come up after viewing. Having the Puerto Ricans speak a lot of Spanish is a bold move too, and while I know the story and am good at context clues, I wouldn't have minded subtitles here and there - it contributed to my at-times cold reception. Funny story about the theater audience: One lady shouted out "OH MY GOD!" during the tragic climax, which made me realize I often take certainly cultural touchstones for granted, but for some, it will be their first experience with the musical and, uhm, with Shakespeare, I guess!
At home: Guys, I'd never seen Home Alone so it was time to pop my cherry. Case in point, I thought the whole thing was the like the last 20 minutes, i.e. Die Hard for Kids. But it's much better paced than that, with the point of view moving from little Kevin to the family to the burglars, so as to give us a stake in everything. A real lesson in Chekhov's principles, everything you see will have a use later on, either as a plot point, a gag, or a death trap. As it is a Christmas movie, its sense of whimsy is appreciated, and it's probably the child's perspective on the angry furnace, for example, that allows to accept a Wile E. Coyote climax in which Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern aren't outright killed. That, or the semi-supernatural moment that makes the situation possible, though the script finds great ways to make us believe a family would accidentally leave one of their own alone while they jet off to France. Fun to see the puzzle pieces click into place, and Catherine O'Hara, as the mom, doesn't take the realization lightly. It's this and the subplot with the neighbor that gives the movie some heart, and so I was wrong to presume it was just slapstick and bad parenting!
/1985: Vagabond's original French title is way better - "Sans toit ni loi" (With Neither Roof Nor Law) - but either way, this is a humane film in which Agnès Varda presents us with a dead itinerant girl, then reconstructs her last days through other characters' recollections. So we know Mona is doomed, but how she got to her final fate is a less interesting mystery than who she is. Varda gives her something of the mythical by literally have her be born out of the sea, but there's no idea of Goddess in the every day grim beyond that point. We have this ideal for women that does not include thinking of them as unbathed and homeless, even (or perhaps especially) by choice. Is it a choice? We can't trust what Mona reveals about herself in dialog, but I would say the final shot looks like a choice, disturbingly. Bonus points for using Les Rita Mitsouko's "Marcia Baïla" in the soundtrack (it's in line with Mona's fate), but the image that stays with me is the beautiful picturesque opening shot that looks like a painting and where Mona's body is found, and then the later shot of a paining with a hole in it. How many holes are there in the tapestry of OUR lives and we don't even know it?
Paired Short: When artists talk about their passion and craft, I don't think it matters what art they're talking about for me to enjoy it. No doubt because of the sound and moving feet and hands, my cat also enjoyed the hell out of About Tap.
1986: Jim Jarmusch is the king of offbeat decisions, and Down by Law is a good example - the characters, the pacing, the choice of what to look at, everything takes a left when another movie would take a right. Indeed, bifurcation is one of the themes. Three men make a wrong decision and find themselves in a Louisiana parish jail (mostly on bum raps), Robert Frost is evoked, and the film ends on a fork in the road (and the third choice of not moving at all). And no closure. In a final twist, the audience is left to its own devices and asked to decide which path is the better one. A jazzy atmosphere pervades, a music of many paths. I'm not entirely convinced by the free-form plot, but the cinematography often makes up for the film's listlessness - clever lighting cues, wonderful bayou shots in nitrate silver... I think my main problem is probably with Roberto Benigni, who I don't find that funny, or for the most part, intelligible (though I love his dance at the end), but his energy is a good contrast to Tom Waits' and John Lurie's, who are, first and foremost, musicians (who, in fact, collaborated on the score). Their stillness makes them the better actors here.
Paired Short: You’ve Got Beautiful Stairs, You Know… is Agnès Varda's tribute to the Cinemathèque using famous shots of stairs in cinema. It dig it, but it is what it is.
1987: More Run Lola Run than Sliding Doors despite the train element, Krzysztof Kieślowski's Blind Chance introduces us to Witek through flashes of memory that will become important, then, at a crossroads in his life, has him catch a train at the last minute, or not. From this quantum moment unfurls three possible lives. In each, he meets someone from his past who becomes important to his future. And in each, the Party is sure to screw him over. The film is a very human story (or three), but also a complete and very bitter take-down of the Polish regime, at least in the late 70s (therefore banned when it came out in '81, and only released with censors in place in '87 - the Criterion Edition restores Kieślowski's original vision). I won't pretend to know anything about the then-current events depicted in the film, but we're living through a patch now that impacts everyone, no matter the path they end up taking, so we can at least relate.
Paired Short: A student film signed Guillermo del Toro, Geometria is a tribute to Italian Giallo films, ridiculous but with a fun final twist.
1988: Claire Denis' semi-autobiographical first feature, Chocolat, in part describes what it might have felt like to grow up in colonial French Africa, as the director's stand-in, taken for a tourist, revisits Cameroon in adulthood and remembers... Sort of. There are entirely too many moments in the flashback the little girl was not privy to that it can't really be called that even if it's how Denis sets it up. It's really my only real complaint, as otherwise, it has a ravishing psychological complexity (and an intriguing political layer seeing as the girl is called France). At the center of the film (no matter what the posters would make you believe) is the family's head servant Protée, both an insider and an outsider, unable to act on any feeling given the power dynamic. The little girl knows nothing else and can't be said to be prejudiced, but the act of colonization in itself makes her princess boss, however innocent. The mother puts Protée in difficult situations, ignoring his (perhaps mutual) attraction to her like he was furniture. The father loves Africa and respects its people, but also lets racist house guests say what they like essentially unchallenged. So while imbued with Denis' childhood impressions, the film is also a portrait of colonization where even the nicest people are still criminally in power.
Paired Short: Set in Mike Leigh's low income estate world (seen in Meantime and High Hopes), The Short & Curlies is a kind of anti-romcom, in that it's a lot more realistic about how people end up together (and even given how mundane it all is, there are still going to be people who are jealous of the happy settlers).
1989: A vibrantly colorful black comedy (if I may use the expression), I don't think Almodóvar's Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! should be taken very seriously in terms of its Stockholmed romance. It certainly isn't any kind of example to follow, kids! A young Antonio Banderas plays the mentally unstable Ricky who kidnaps a former adult star (Marina) beautifully played by Victoria Abril so she can get to know him and reciprocate his love. Well. Let's just say the abrupt ending doesn't do the idea any favors even if Abril manages to sell it. My favorite things have little to do with the romance - the crazy horror film Marina just completed (I would want to see that!), the commercial parody, the wonderfully absurd eroticism (which does seep into the romance, that's quite the sex scene, but the bit in the tub takes home the prize), the Masters of the Universe figures - there's a lot to enjoy if you can agree Almodóvar knows this is not a healthy relationship.
Paired Short: Lots of interesting experiments in Cycles, presenting the ticking clock of a late period as a flood of contradictory emotions.
1990: Whit Stillman certainly has a thing for the old-fashioned comedy of manners as evidenced by his adaptation of Jane Austen's Love & Friendship in 2016 (which I thought hilarious). His first film, Metropolitan, discusses Austen, but one could also point to Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and the French writers who immortalized the salons of the Belle Époque. Light satire about New York's high society, throwing a relative outsider/reluctant social climber in with a group of rich kids during the Christmas/debutante season. Bit of soap, bit of commentary on class divides, bit of young intellectuals speaking in cultured tones and revealing themselves to be phonies. At least to the audience. I mean, it's well written and I was never bored, but I'm also quite incapable of caring for disconnected assholes born into wealth, and even the nominal "impostor" isn't really that far from them. Metropolitan's heart perhaps exists in Audrey, the Austenian virtuous heroine, but her disconnection is just as unbearable. Unlike the others, she's no hypocrite, but that's because she doesn't morally engage with her status. When someone says of another "they're a good person, basically", take a sip of eggnog and know that that's the ambivalence of the rick talking.
Paired Short: Look alive, Tim Curry completists! He narrates The Marzipan Pig, the story of a lost object and the chain of impacts it has on the world, much like our own once we, too, fall behind the couch and are forgotten.
Books: My first experience with Stendhal (and should not be the last) is the unfortunately unfinished Féder (ou Le mari d'argent, that is, The Moneyed Husband), and the book maddeningly bills itself as a finished novel. Well, maybe it's a good thing, or else I might not have had my introduction not only to an excellent prosaist, but also a deft psychologist, bringing his characters to life through their inner world more so than their outer ones. That outer world is the French Belle Époque, in which the title painter navigates the complex mannerly labyrinth of loving another man's wife. The husband, in this case, is a marvelous comic caricature of the rich bourgeois who really knows nothing of the finer things, but would like others to think he does. So would I recommend Féder even if it grinds to a sudden halt? I would, with the appropriate caveats. A clever reader might even tease a cynical/ironic ending from the last legible paragraphs. Cynical? Well, there's something to Stendhal's notion that the painter only brings out ugliness in his subjects which could be translated to the book's portrait of high society as well...
Role-playing: So we finished up our GURPS (Mythic) Greece adventure this week and I tried to make it as big as I could, with sphinx riddles, gods needing to be saved, lesser gods allying with the PCs to tsunami an evil island, not to mention a time travel element that allowed them to undo the villain's evil enslavement of, well, everyone (which led to the heroes becoming part of a myth themselves, as evidenced by the strap-on comedy played at the ensuring festival in the "present". Low on combat, as they decided to befriend all the possible antagonists (probably wise considering this included a pair of immortal cyclops three times their size). Oh, and Willie Jay, whose ability to properly shift, was restored as a gift from the gods... Just in time, in fact, for the next shift. As the characters pulled into their port city in Western Greece, BAM! They find themselves on a spaceship approaching a massive space station. Yep, they've got to retool their character sheets already as we open up GURPS Space, a world of space opera I'm modelling on Star Wars in terms of tone (I'll probably make use of Cinematic Points) - blasters and hyperspace jumps and espers and aliens, but not even a memory of Earth - even if their town of Paradise is more or less based on Deep Space Nine. But no Empire and Rebels, no utopian Federation. Instead, I'm pushing for a wild frontier that's closer to westerns, and a corporate element that evokes Alien, while the inevitable soundtrack is going to edge towards space rock rather than symphonic (but we'll see).
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