Over several nights as it is somehow engrossing and often toes the line of being too much. Written and directed by Tsai Ming-liang. This was his debut feature after a career in TV.
Taipei, Taiwan, feeling like the late 1980s. The traditional society that was breaking down in That Day on the Beach (1983) has broken down. The rain provides cover for the bad boys on motorcycles (dominant Chen Chao-jung, adjunct Jen Chang-bin) who are cracking everything coin operated (phones, vending machines) to pay for the night's entertainment at the video game parlour and endless cigarettes. Soon enough anithero Kang-sheng Lee has quit his crammer and burnt his bridges with his middle class parents, taxi driving Miao Tien and expositor-of-tradition Yi-ching Lu. There's a vibe that things are going to go all Taxi Driver but Lee is mostly mute. Along the way we learn that roller-rink attendant Wang Yu-wen is the only available girl in the whole city; in fact things are so bad for her that she keeps buying the boys dinner. I guess nobody gets what they want.
Pen-Jung Liao's realist cinematography is very effective. The morning-after early on is captured with some great tracking shots on the city streets as the boys go their separate ways. The flooded apartment is quite something. I don't think there's that much neon; the glare of the CRTs dominate in the arcade and the love hotels. Far less is made of the flouros at the restaurant than Christopher Doyle managed to in Chungking Express. The score by Shu-Jun Huang is often insistent.
#58 on the Golden Horse list of the 100 Greatest Chinese-Language Films, on par with The Way of the Dragon. A. O. Scott in 2015 upon its U.S. release. Richard Brody, also in 2015. The phone dating is so weird.
Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with director/co-writer Ariane Louis-Seize. Québécois, mostly in French with some English and Spanish.
It's almost entirely right there in the title; the only variable in the genre is what demographic these vampires are playing to. Unlike El Conde this is politically vacuous and in dank colour but shares its attitude that the world is as the creators say it is, carcass disposal and murder investigations be damned. Perhaps this couple eventually grows up and moves upriver to Detroit. The tepid humour cannot compete with What We Do in the Shadows; these guys aren't as fastidious about the provenance of the blood they consume as Jemaine Clement. Perhaps this is the next generation of Buffy.
More broadly there's a dash of quirky-/awkward-girl Amelie in a bland suburban aesthetic that isn't wild like a Tim Burton or fussy like a Wes Anderson. Lead teen Sara Montpetit is done up like 1990s P.J. Harvey. Her love interest Félix-Antoine Bénard is a bit walleyed like Marty Feldman's Igor. He wants to avoid a meaningless death (but apparently not a meaningless movie). The kids carry on like the young Americans they are. There is much object fetishism: vinyl records and egg chairs. Her first kill stands in for a loss of virginity. The fantasy fulfilment is uninventive. Things generally move along but do get bogged every so often. I guess you could say these guys are in favour of voluntary assisted dying.
More screwball from Frank Capra, again prompted by that book review. Also adapted by Robert Riskin from a short/magazine story by Samuel Hopkins Adams. Starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. Oscars all round, including Best Picture. #247 in the IMDB top-250.
Impulsive scion Colbert jumps off her father Walter Connolly's boat near Florida after he puts up a fight about her continuing to be (chastely) married to flying Jameson Thomas (not Oscared). Needing to get back to her man in NYC while avoiding the private dicks etc. of the era, she opts for a bus where she encounters Gable. The rest is inevitable, including the need to beggar these rich beautiful people to garner audience sympathy during the Depression. Larceny is OK if its in the service of love. It's not that screwy and again the last 30 minutes gets far too serious. I'm not sure which night it happened on.
Mourdaunt Hall at the time.
Kindle. George Mackay Brown's first novel. He certainly wrote about what he knew. Set in a fictional town (Greenvoe) on a fictional island (Hellya) in the Orkneys, he ably documents a dying way of life in an isolated community. The characters and their proclivities are closely and sympathetically observed. I got the feeling he split his own into a few people here. He does not shy away from the ugly things in life but greets them with gentleness. The nested and shifting story frames are smoothly and deftly handled. The writing is quite fine and the specialised vocabulary is a necessary part of the requiem. Far more engaging than you'd expect from what is structurally a soap opera.
As with Fankle-the-cat the outro here rails against the destruction of nature and deep history, the displacement of the locals, for expedient and withheld reasons. (Just what was Black Star?) It comes with a rush and a change of style and voice, a simplification of language, like he's explaining himself to a bureaucrat from London.
Goodreads. Calm, entertaining, thoughtful. Mystical. Robert Crawford on Mackay Brown.
Prompted by Andrew Katzenstein's review of Grégoire Halbout's book Hollywood Screwball Comedy, 1934–1945: Sex, Love, and Democratic Ideals in the New York Review of Books. A very young James Stewart, scion of a NYC banking dynasty, romances his secretary Jean Arthur while his father Edward Arnold looks to close the biggest deal ever, hinging, of course, on buying her grandfather Lionel Barrymore's sprawling abode. Directed by Frank Capra who won the best director Oscar. The film got best picture. Spring Byington was nominated for her very amusing diverted mother/wife. Adapted by Robert Riskin from a play by George Kaufman and Moss Hart.
It's clear the actors are having a ball. There are some great scenes — Jimmy Stewart dancing with a young girl half his height, the crow and the cones, the crazy inventiveness in the basement (evoking 1960s Doctor Who), ecumenical grace at the dinner table, some farcical court proceedings. There's a bit too much speechifying and out-of-character listening, and things start to drag in the last 20 minutes or so as the gears shift from screwball fantasy to moral fable. It's at its best when it's just having a laugh.
Thematically it foreshadows The Godfather — grandpa is beloved by the community — and the epic destruction of neighbourhoods by Robert Moses. I doubt many businessmen quit when they realise they're not having enough fun.
Frank S. Nugent at the time.
Excess Alain Delon completism. Prompted by Glenn Kenny's review in 2021 — a Critic's Pick! It took me several goes to make it past the first half hour.
The scenario has Delon holidaying with hot stuff Romy Schneider at a friends' villa in the south of France. She's a writer of some kind, as was he before he failed into advertising. They're still heavily into each other despite it being about two years since they met and both being powerfully inert apart from the scenes of staged friskiness. A friend/erstwhile lover in the tunes business arrives with his previously undiscovered nubile daughter causing the usual complications. Things then grind on as they must.
It's sexy in a camera-objectifying-female-bodies way; the male gaze is all we get as the women are too busy looking at the men. I found it boring as not much effort is put into developing the characters; for instance it's clear that Delon isn't drinking but we are never given a reason why. Another scene has Schneider getting annoyed at her chopsticks. The attempt to turn it into a detective flick in the last movement is lighter than air.
It's tagged at IMDB as a psychological drama and I guess you could bracket it with minor Hitchcock like Spellbound. At times I wondered if it was taking on more of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? than it could swallow.
Bill Forsyth's first Hollywood feature. Inevitable after Breaking In. Adapted by him from a widely feted book by Marilynne Robinson. Over many nights due to a failure to grip.
Two young ladies (soon enough and mostly Sara Walker and Andrea Burchill) are dumped by their mother Margot Pinvidic (looking a bit too much like Susan Sarandon) on their grandmother in fictional Fingerbone, Idaho. Her passing brings their free-spirited aunt Christine Lahti (...And Justice For All, Running of Empty) back to town and she is entrusted with their care. Her opinions on child rearing are not so much relaxed as entirely absent. Adventures ensure, some growing up occurs but none of the typical coming-of-age stuff.
It's billed as a comedy-drama but I found little of either. There are some of Forsyth's signature moves (repeated motifs, significant gestures). The initial scenes and themes of female freedom/wild abandonment/Pinvidic/road trip evoke Thelma and Louise and not Little Women. The described-but-not-shown epic train derailment points toward Magnolia and there's just a dash (maybe) of Welcome to the Dollhouse in Ruth's exclusion from Lucille's social life. Of course Forsyth is too gentle a filmmaker to take any of it to the limit.
Roger Ebert: four stars and much effusion. Lahti's Sylvia "seemed closer to a mystic, or a saint" than a mad woman. A Critic's Pick by Vincent Canby. Lahti plays "a siren of the open road". IMDB trivia: Diane Keaton was originally cast in the lead. Takes place in 1955. Further details at Wikipedia. Unlike Forsyth's other efforts there's not much of a soundtrack.
