The forks below the forks

Independence Day weekend M4

An M# first: my grad school friend Lisa joins me as a special guest blogger.

My Winnipeg

IFC

On the one hand, you have unambiguously false "facts" about Guy Maddin's childhood and his hometown and his documentary process; on the other, you have perfectly plausible information. But does "plausible" necessarily equal accurate, or is it just a clever misdirection play, a sort of documentary game of three-card monte? And for that matter, does implausible necessarily equal false? Is this a new genre, documentary of the psyche? Clearly, every frame contains Maddin's truth. Still, I'm curious to know whether there really were three vertically stacked and sexually segregated public swimming pools (the topmost--ground level--pool reserved for families), and exactly how much of what the rest of us might recognize as objective truth there is to his account of the 11 thoroughbreds fleeing a racetrack fire only to perish in the river, their frozen heads forming a sculpture garden-cum-trysting ground for curious and horny Winnipeggers.
Perhaps the most ambitious of Maddin's films I've seen (though "ambition" is certainly not something Maddin stacks vertically or arranges in any other easy geometric pattern), and after a slow (intentionally soporific, it seems) start, one of his best.
First of all, let me thank the illustrious Cheeseblab for allowing me to accompany him on his July 4th weekend M4, and for his invitation to add my thoughts about the experience to his blog. I expected to be totally mindblown by the end of the fourth film, but in fact, though I was tired, I was quite exhilarated by the films we'd seen. The breaks between films, including brisk walks from theater to theater and around the Lower East Side and the Village, and the quest for interesting and quick food and refreshment, really helped.

When was the last time someone told you a story? Did you trust the narrator, or did your narrator so skillfully weave together the plausible and the implausible that you didn't know whether to trust him or not? The latter is the case in Guy Maddin's pseudo-memoir/documentary of his hometown, My Winnipeg. This is his Winnipeg, indeed. Maddin's dreamy, black-and-white train ride through this city in the landlocked Canadian province of Manitoba serves as much to reveal as to obscure, and makes Winnipeg as much a place to escape from as to gravitate to, with its magnetic fields, confluence of rivers, and "forks beneath the forks." The "re-enactments" (actors playing his siblings, but his mother, also in fact played by an actor, ostensibly playing herself), which are meant to help the filmmaker make sense of his life, only obfuscate matters more and add to the tall tale/shaggy dog (or, here, the long-dead chihuahua--played in the re-enactments by a pug) nature of the tale. It was a fun and funny film, in a head-scratching, mind-bending sort of way, and it made me want to see more Guy Maddin films.
17 August addition, as Lisa found this: http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2008/07/13/her_winnipeg_is_pretty_strange_and_surreal_too/. Damn! I was sure the swimming pool thing was true!

Kabluey

CV

This was a late inclusion in the program (sorry, Une vieille maîtresse) on the basis of an enthusiastic Times review when it opened Friday, but while I wouldn't go so far as to call it a disappointment, it does seem to me a thoroughly conventional film aside from the fact that one character works as a corporate logo, wearing a puffy blue costume and a macrocephalus.
Aside from that, we've seen it all many, many times before: misfit who must overcome his own awkwardness to prove his worth to skeptics who come to love him. Fine performances by Scott Prendergast (who also wrote and directed) and the criminally underutilized Lisa Kudrow make it worthwhile. Well, and admittedly the big goofy blue suit helps, too.
Every Man is trapped in his role, whether it's the bored cashier at a grocery store, the unhappy spoiled wife of a rich man, or the hopeless soldier's wife single-handedly raising two hellions. Or so says this movie, which illuminates this message by having an Everyman, Salman, literally trapped in a silly blue corporate mascot costume, giving out flyers advertising rental space at a nearby office building. It's hard to imagine a better person to play this Everyman than Scott Prendergast, the writer and director of the film, with his bewildered, blank, "I don't know where I am or how I got here" stare. Salman and all the other characters seem powerless to change the lives they've been dealt, and overall there's something very sad about this bowing to the inevitable. But sometimes there are breakthroughs, like when Salman figures out how to maneuver in the blue suit, or when he suddenly understands the loneliness of his two nephews, or when his soldier brother comes home from Iraq. The blue suit is some sort of catalyst for these breakthroughs, and wearing it somehow brings order and growth to Salman. It's an odd and endearing little film, with a well-cast Lisa Kudrow as Salman's long-suffering sister-in-law and Teri Garr as an unhinged former employee.

Trumbo

Sun
OK, let's cut to the chase: this fucker was a fucking hero, and everybody who doesn't know his story, or only kinds knows his story, as was the case with me, needs to see this depressingly timely film about speaking the truth to power while refusing to name names.

That said, geez, I wish director Peter Askin had had more faith in the language of Dalton Trumbo's letters that a cast of Hollywood heavyweights (plus, inexplicably, Josh Lucas) read. Askin has his actors act instead of reading, and acting simply isn't called for. The emotion is in the words: we don't need the reader to get up from his chair, fiddle with his water glass, tear up. It reminded me of some of my authors, who insist on using italics to signal emphasis in their sentences. As I tell them, if your language is right, it'll carry the emphasis on its own; if it ain't, typography won't help.
Just when we thought we had enough to be ashamed of, here's a reminder of something else to add to the pile--the blacklist of the late 1940s and 1950s. The creative individuals on this list, many of whom had ties to Hollywood, were humiliated, denied an opportunity to earn a living, ostracized by society, and in many cases driven to suicide for their supposed ties to the Communist Party. This film focuses on one individual on the list, the author and screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, and his experiences leading up to and following his sentencing by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. What stands out most clearly is the terrible waste of talent brought on by this travesty, and the power of one man's words to document and make human the effect this travesty had. Trumbo himself and others appear in segments to describe what was happening, and Trumbo's letters and writings are read (and in some cases dramatized, perhaps unnecessarily) by such actors as Michael Douglas, Liam Neeson, Donald Sutherland, and Nathan Lane. Man's inhumanity to man is perhaps most poignantly illustrated in a letter read by Trumbo describing the effect of the blacklist on his young daughter, who endured
scorn and ridicule every day at school. Have we learned anything from this episode in our history? Ask the detainees at Guantánamo Bay.

Ne le dis à personne (Tell no one)

Sun
A fine, Hitchcockian thriller that ought to be about 15 minutes shorter than its 125. What it does perfectly, though, is invest us in the protagonist's plight, so that not only do we desperately want him to overcome what we know to be unjust suspicions, we want the wife he has been mourning for eight years to prove worthy of his having put his emotional life on the shelf for her memory.
We had to sit in the second row of a crammed theater, and oddly, that position enhanced the early moments of disorientation, after which it just came to seem normal. We sure didn't have any trouble reading the subtitles!
The crowds got progressively larger as the day advanced, and by this fourth of the four films in the M4, the largest theater at the Landmark Sunshine was packed. I thought that sitting in the second row, craning my neck to see the entire screen would impede my enjoyment of the film, but in fact it made the experience rather IMAX-like, and I certainly didn't miss any of the subtitles!

This man-wrongly-accused mystery focuses on the murder of the protagonist's beloved wife. After eight years, Alex, a pediatrician, is a productive, functioning member of society, but he hasn't healed. The discovery of two bodies near the site of the original crime reopens the case, and mysterious emails, a blurry video clip, car chases, mad pursuits down streets, across parks, and through cafés, missing evidence, and a growing body count ensue. We're won over by Alex, played by François Cluzet, a handsome Dustin Hoffman lookalike, and we want things to go well for him; that empathy, and the beautiful scenery and the ear-pleasing French, allow us to forgive the tumble of puzzle-solving and often contrived information delivered in the last ten minutes. This was a great summer Saturday night movie.

Trailers

• Naissance des pieuvres (Water lilies)--Fille crush; who does it better than the French?
• A Very British Gangster--Title says it all.
• Das Wilde Leben (Eight miles high)--Remember Uschi Obermaier? Yeah, me neither. Think German Edie Sedgwick, I guess. Somebody named Victor Norén plays Mick, which doesn't strike me as the best career move imaginable.
• CSNY Déjà Vu--Directed by Neil Young, so maybe promising.
• The Stone Angel--Didn't we already see this, as The Notebook, maybe?
• Man on Wire--Looks terrific--trailer had me teary: doc about the French dude who walked between the WTC towers.
• What We Do Is Secret--About the Germs!
• Choke--It's Chuck Palahniuk, but how do you resist Sam Rockwell and Kelly Macdonald?
• Take--Another one that all looks familiar, but two words: Minnie Driver.