May 2004

• I'm Not Scared (5/8, YSC)--Probably the most Spielbergian European film I've ever seen, and I don't mean that in a negative way: Spielberg's standard themes of childhood fragility in the face of the sordid adult world, here set in southern Italy. Very effective. [30]
• Young Adam (5/9, Orange)--Was going to skip this but went on Jennie's admittedly mild recommendation. What I learned: (1) despite the climate, people in Scotland fuck outdoors a lot; (2) there's only one good-looking guy in the whole country, and it's his responsibility to service all the attractive women, even the marginally attractive ones.
• Troy (5/15, NoHa)--As expected, mostly excellent action scenes, mostly dreadful dialogue. Worst problem is that Pitt and (especially) Bloom are so quintessentially 21st century that it's impossible to take them seriously when they speak. No, I take that back: worst problem was that the theater had no large popcorn bags, meaning that my salt intake was inadequate to absorb my large Diet Pepsi, meaning that bladder anxiety kicked in less than an hour into a 16--minute movie.
• Super Size Me (5/21, YSC)--We have found the new Michael Moore. A very Mooresque documentary shows in hilariously hideous detail what happens if you eat nothing but McDonald's for a month.
• Strayed (5/28, YSC)--The exodus from Paris in front of the German, young widow and her two children are helped by a young man who is not what it seems. Wanted to like it more, but everything just seems so scripted: fated to happen by unseen forces (the filmmakers). Much more French than good.
• The Agronomist (5/30, Vil. E.)--The start of a record-setting M5! Documentary by Jonatahn Demme about Jean Dominique, who ran Haiti's lone genuinely independent station for 40 years, minus two exiles. A good portrait, but what elevates the film to something special is all the film footage of the man himself, who is extraordinarily animated, energetic, alive. Which makes the one trick Demme plays remarkably effective: not until late in the film do we learn that Dominique was finally gunned down outside his station by gunmen sent by political enemies. So you leave the theater in an odd combination of sad and uplifted.
• Godzilla (5/30, Cin. Vil. [1954])--Yep, restored to its pre-U.S. release state (goodbye, Raymond Burr). It was perhaps overpraised in the Times, hence my attendance. Yes, it's true that scenes of a city in flames are as resonant in post-9/11 America as in postwar Japan, and yes, it's true that the sound--the drum-pounding score and the unearthly screech of the monster--is wonderful, but otherwise it's still just a cheesy fright flick. The most surprising thing for me, having recently watched King Kong again, was how vastly more sophisticated were the special effects in that 1930 film. Which is to say sophisticated at all.
• Springtime in a Small Town (5/30, Cin. Vil.)--A first: this was shown on the same screen I'd just seen Godzilla on. A Chinese film, very quiet, and with a certain charm, but nothing special. A standard love triangle, including a sympathetic husband who is ill (though it's never really clean exactly how ill). Adding a fourth angle is the husband's 16-year-old sister (played by a positively radiant actress: the most memorable element of the least memorable film I saw that day), whom he would like to marry off to his old friend who is smitten with his wife. Passion, repression, guilt, yadda, yadda, yadda.
• The Five Obstructions (5/30, FF)--Without a doubt, the best of the year's films I have seen so far. Lars Von Trier challenges his mentor, Jorgen Leth, to remake his 1967 short "The Perfect Human"--essentially a study of banality--five times, each under certain restrictions imposed by Von Trier. Because of their mentor-student relationship, which the nature of the exercise reverses, and because "The Perfect Human" was one of the films that inspired Von Trier to be a filmmaker, there is a huge dose of oedipal energy here: Von Trier is avowedly determined to force Leth to make a "crap" version of his great short. But for every road block Von Trier throws in his way--making no cut longer than a half-second, making a film in "the worst place in the world," incorporating animation (which both directors loathe), making a film with the rule of no rules--Leth manages either to finesse it out of the way or, more often, to make a virtue of the necessity. It's fun watching the bits of his shorts, but it's more fun watching the interplay between the two filmmakers, Leth invariably in despair over what Von Trier is asking of him, Von Trier invariably frustrated by his failure to trip up his filmic father figure. I expected the film to explore the artistic process in an interesting way, but I was a little afraid that it would be pedantic and humorless; instead, I laughed more than I have at some purported comedies this year (Starsky and Hutch, e.g.). Wonderful film--this and The Agronomist are exactly why I do these all-day movie trips.
• Smiles of a Summer Night (5/30, FF [1955])--A Bergman comedy! The master's take on A Midsummer Night's Dream, and in turn the source for Woody Allen's Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy. And for me also reminiscent of 18th-century comedies of wit & double entendre. A lot of fun, in any case. This was not planned--going in, I had forgotten almost everything about The Agronomist and Springtime except that they were on my list of things to see--but I wound up seeing no two films in the same language, and The Agronomist features 3 prominently: English, French, and Kriyòl; the others: Japanese, Chinese, Danish, and Swedish. and also, of course, two films nearly as old as I.