"Accomplishments"
At home: Somewhere at the crossroads between Diary of a Chambermaid and Belle du Jour, Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie presents us with an upper class that hides its callous and venal monstrosity in polite mores and fine dining. Of course the director won't let them eat without increasingly insane interruptions. Denying the fascists (also his target of Chambermaid) their fill and their peace of mind. He covers the incomprehensibility of privilege in noisome sound design that you can see confounds lower-class characters, and of course interrupts (or retcons) the action with dream sequences, like a good surrealist. Buñuel also gives us a Catholic bishop who yearns to be a gardener, and the clergy too is a kind of bourgeoisie/aristocracy and this subplot carries its own hypocrisies. Often amusing satire, but it might have worked better for me without the dream sequences, which is to say, if Buñuel didn't mark them so clearly as such. Bourgeoisie works best when it's simply theater of the absurd, with its repetitions and non sequiturs.
Everything's a little wrong or a lot in Quentin Dupieux's Wrong, as he lends his style of surrealism (though I'd rather call it absurdism, as it has more in common with Ionesco than it does with Dali) to that "funny feeling" (to quote Bo Burnham) when you feel the entirely world feels wrong. The accumulation of weird moments and elements might make some disconnect from the film, but it's not weirdness for weirdness' sake, though I will admit the various subplots, while part of the same general theme, don't connect all that well to the A-plot. The main story is nevertheless extremely watchable and inventive, as a man desperately seeks to find his missing dog while unknown forces work to keep them apart (without revealing too much, this is like a pet lover's version of Fincher's The Game). It's Dupieux's tribute to pets and their ability to bring you out of a depression, or at least provide emotional sanctuary, when all you really want to do is focus on the negative. That cat or dog doesn't know what you're moaning about and there's a purity there you can and should latch onto. And there's nothing wrong with THAT.
Very interesting animation style in Chicken for Linda!, a well-observed family drama/comedy of errors about a single mother trying to find chicken for her dead husband's recipe at the behest of her unreasonable daughter. Finding chicken would normally be easy, but in this case, there's a general strike on (did I forget to mention this was all taking place in France?) and all the shops are closed. The characters feel very real - though some are played mostly for comedy, like the rookie cop, but he still manages to be one of my favorites - but the unintended consequences of this quest grow into a fiasco of absurd proportions. I'm less convinced by the three musical numbers, seemingly included to stretch the animation to its full potential, as they're jarring and the actors just don't have good singing voices. I don't think "Linda veut du poulet!" needed them, as it shines brightly enough in the way it portrays human and animal expression with a minimalist line.
Though an important transitional movie for Disney, The Fox and the Hound is wayyyy too much like Bambi (mother killed by hunter, half the movie as kids and the other as adults, woodland friends, the courtship, the climax involving at least some fire, the ending with animals sitting on a hill) for it to see particularly original. It can't hide its derivative nature behind the book it's based on, because the novel is more of a Watership Down than classic Disney. That, and the Looney Tunes gags afforded the bird characters (out of place) make it a middling animated film despite it being the first (or at least early) work of many name animators, including Tim Burton, John Lasseter and Brad Bird, as the Nine Old Men responsible for Disney's golden age retired, and Don Bluth took his team out of there to work on personal projects. The animation is still of a piece, and frequently detailed and gorgeous, so it doesn't FEEL like a troubled production. But when you know what was happening behind the scenes, you can sort of imagine what the points of contention were, because they're likely your own.
My Companion Film of the week features Nicola "Peri" Bryant... In Parting Shots, a man is diagnosed with cancer and given six weeks to live, and after spending his life being the nice guy who let people walk all over him, he does the only sensible thing - murder all the people who wronged him. That concept hasn't aged particularly well, but the edge is blunted by the fact that it IS a black (or at least dark gray) comedy. A huge disappointment if you went into it because it's Death Wish director Michael Winner's last film, but fine if you know you're watching a quirky British comedy. Winner makes two big mistakes, directorially, though. One is the annoyingly bouncy music. The other is casting musician Chris Rae in the lead. Rae just doesn't have the acting skill nor the screen presence for this role. He is, however, surrounded by recognizable British actors who bring a lot to the proceedings despite often limited roles (and a lot of them have Doctor Who cred going backwards and forwards, so that's an uptick in interest for me and mine, but not for everyone, I realize). I'm not going to act like Parting Shots was unfairly panned, but I wasn't bored.
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