Oslo sprach Zarathustra

Memorial Day weekend M4

Reprise

Sun (2006)

Art and its relationship to madness, love, friendship (including arrested-developmental male bonding), and Being Norwegian.

I don't know anything about the conditional mood in Norwegian (or about anything in Norwegian), but if the subtitles are accurate, the conditional is used to brilliant narrative effect: at the start and at the end, and once or twice in between, we are told what "would" happen to the dual protagonists, aspiring young novelists and best friend who drop their manuscripts into a mailbox together.

The opening "would" narrative is clearly an initially optimistic shared fiction of the two that turns nightmarish--though reality (whatever that is), when we return to it, is almost as nightmarish. But the exercise creates the hint of alternate realities, alternate narratives, and brings the whole notion of narrative and creation (and manipulation?) to the fore. Moreover, it calls into question the conclusion, also told in the conditional.

It's the film Charlie Kaufman would do if he were Scandinavian--high praise from me. One sad note: the signature song by the boys' favorite punk band, Kommune, doesn't show up in a Web search, either in video or audio, so you're just going to have to see the film to hear "Fingerfucked by the Prime Minister." (Speaking of sad news or at least disturbing prospects, see the Times Cannes story last week that mentioned the difficulties Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York, is having finding a U.S. distributor--Soderbergh's Che films, too, The Argentine and Guerrilla.)

Up the Yangtze

Quad

A nonfiction companion piece to Still Life, beautiful and sad and elegiac, about two young people working in hell, aka a river cruise ship full of rich white tourists. The two are from different classes in China's classless society, one essentially sold into cooliehood by her poor family, the other, one guesses, handed over by his middle-class parents for some toughening up for his capitalist future.

But it's really about ways of life, pretended ones (equality, the happy sacrifice by the few for the many, the promise of progress) and real ones (the rapacious relentlessness of that progress, as represented by the Three Gorges Dam's displacement into economic and existential limbo of millions of Yangtze lives).

Constantine's Sword

Quad

James Carroll was raised an Illinois Catholic, like me--but really more like my brother, who, like Carroll, was born during World War II and heard a calling to the priesthood. My brother decided after a year in the seminary that he'd heard wrong, but Carroll stayed the course through ordination and five years of service, 1969-74; it was Vietnam, for the most part, that drove Carroll away from the cloth, but he remains a devout believer in a god he has come to know much better than the church ever made possible.

This remarkable film, based on Carroll's book by the same title, primarily traces the Catholic Church's complicity (well, leadership in some cases) throughout the centuries in anti-Semitism and specifically in the Holocaust, but it goes beyond that to examine Christianity's role in warmaking and ethnic hatred from before the Crusades through the recent scandal over proselytizing at the Air Force Academy. One angrymaking film.

Mister Lonely

IFC

Ah, if Harmony Korine didn't exist, we'd have to invent him. I desperately wanted to love this film--set mostly in an island commune populated by impersonators of famous people from Abraham Lincoln to the Three Stooges--and for a long time its sweetness and naïveté and innocence carried me along even as my pesky mind kept raising annoying questions (like "How come Michael Jackson dances like Michael Jackson and Charlie Chaplin does some Chaplinesque slapstick, but the impersonation by arguably the best actor in the film, Samantha Morton, of Marilyn Monroe is limited to a blond wig, big boobs, and the Seven Year Itch dress getting blown up occasionally to show her '50s undies, without any mannerisms or vocal characterization?").

But the movie ultimately is like one of those fascinating people you meet at a party who just keeps talking and talking and talking until fascinating evolves into annoying and annoying evolves into get-me-the-fuck-out-of-here. OK, that's excessive; I do recommend it, but you have my permission to leave after the lovely ensemble dance to "Cheek to Cheek."

Trailers

• Already have Recount in my Netflix futures queue, but this is the first taste I've had of it onscreen. Thanks, HBO; some of us just can't get enough agony.
• Quid Pro Quo--looks creepy; I remain a 3.
• Trumbo--Solid 4, tending toward 5ishness.
• La terza madre (Mother of tears)--Looks very DaVinci Code; 2.
• Finding Amanda--I'll stand by my 3.
• The Go-Getter--Looks potentially fun--and did I know Steve Coogan's in it? Solid 4.
• Take Out--Looks devastating, hard to watch; 3 toward 4.
• Une vieille maîtresse (The last mistress)--If I didn't know that it's Catherine Breillat, I might be a soft 4 from the trailer; as it is, I'll upgrade my 2 to 3.
• My Winnipeg--5, duh. Why weren't more people laughing uproariously at the trailer? Which I saw, incidentally, at IFC, which suggests a shift in the local platform for Maddin. Opening date is a bit awkward, 13 June; it needs to still be around for a 4th week when I M next.
• Savage Grace--I'm wrong about ever having seen the trailer, and even w/ Julianne, I can't go higher than 3.
• Operation Filmmaker--Potential, but I'm sticking at 3 for now.