Holiday season M5
A unconscionably long time between Ms, and since the calendar doesn't provide an actual 3-day weekend this yule, I had to steal one. But what a one, the definition of what I do this for: foreign, indy, revivals of classics I'd never seen, and every one a gem. (Let's see: one film with more than a handful of lines in English, that one from Australia; one film by an American director, that one almost entirely in Japanese.) And I discovered the perfect place in the IFC/Film Forum neighborhood to grab a quick sandwich and maybe a nice beverage and, if so inclined, an ass-kicking dessert (try the Dirty): Sweet Revenge, 62 Carmine Street, east of Seventh Avenue.Höstsonaten (Autumn sonata) (1978)
IFC
Why can't we all just get along? Bergman directs Ingrid Bergman as a faded concert pianist and Liv Ullmann as her daughter, who is convinced that nothing she has done has ever been good enough for Mom. After a little preliminary sparring, they essentially go at each other with emotional steel wool for the last hour. Halvar Björk is quietly perfect as Eva/Liv's husband, who tries to disprove daily/lives with the consequences of her conviction that she can never truly be loved. A four-star sad-bastard film. Ingmar was Oscar-nominated for the screenplay, Ingrid as Best Actress.The Black Balloon
CV
It's hard enough to be an Australian teenager anyway without having an autistic brother prone to making fecal art or masturbating at the dinner table when your girlfriend is visiting. A film that has moments as excruciating as any but manages to end with some hope but without any foolishness. Twenty-seven-year-old Luke Ford is convincing as the 18-or-so Charlie, Rhys Wakefield is heartbreaking as the younger brother who simply can't always love Charlie for better or for worse, and Gemma Ward not only is spot-on as the girlfriend but is also a dead ringer for Big Love's and Mamma Mia!'s Amanda Seyfried, which ain't a bad thing. And as the boys' mother, Toni Collette is Toni Collette, which is all you need to know.Aanrijding in Moscou (Moscow, Belgium)
CV
Boy (29-year-old trucker) and girl (41-year-old mother of 3, whose art-professor husband is off having his midlife crisis with a 22yo student) meet collision-cute in a parking lot, and in the midst of shouting mutual abuse, something clicks for him when she tells him an unwelcome but undeniable truth about himself. Through all the complications, as many horrifying as comic, that ensue, this never abandons its unlikely screwball-comedy heart, and just like so many of those, which work seemingly in spite of the stage machinery, it simply does. Stephen Holden in his Times review likened Barbara Sarafian's look here to "Frances McDormand with Joni Mitchell hair," and I can't improve on that. The best movie I've seen with a largely Flemish script in I don't know how long.Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)
FF
Director Paul Schrader, there for a postscreening Q&A: "I wondered who would come out in a blizzard on the Friday night before Christmas to see a movie in Japanese about a gay, fascist writer. Here"--extending an arm to the absolutely packed house--"is the answer." (The "blizzard" was an exaggeration: he should have seen the New Haven I came home to.)Went in knowing the basics of Mishima's life and death, and having read two or three of his short stories and seen the very sexy Sarah Miles-Kris Kristofferson film of The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea long, long ago. Not having paid much attention, I expected a documentary, but instead, what a got was something that I suspect Schrader would be amused rather than outraged to hear likened to All That Jazz. Both films are about art and sex and death and fame and the web of interconnection among them, and both combine episodic pieces of biographical narrative (some of it more fictionalized than others--obviously ATJ is all ostensibly fiction, but we know it's really Bob Fosse's premature suicide note) with thematically articulate scenes from the protagonist's art, all building toward the wow finish. And both play the bio/fiction parlay about as effectively as it can be played. The quintessential M film: something I'd barely heard of that I now can't imagine having done without for so long.
Amarcord (1974)
FF
Speaking of which. Well, no, different deal here: obviously, I've known about Amarcord forever, but not all of my experiences with classic Fellini films that everyone worships have been fulfilling, so I'd just never gotten around to making myself sit through this one. What a moron I was.A semiautobiographical portrait of the director's hometown, it is long on eccentrics but blessedly short on outright freaks. Just gorgeous in every way, hilarious, heartbreaking, visually stunning from moment to moment, and: as much as I hated the Nino Rota score I heard the day before, this one is just wonderful, stealing nicely here and there from "Stormy Weather" and "La Cucaracha" but mostly comprising the familiar phrases Danny Elfman stole for Pee-Wee's Big Adventure.
Trailers
- Shadows (1959)--More teaser than trailer, Cassavetes.
- Made in U.S.A. (1966)--Also a trailer, a very clever silent one, Godard.
- Wendy and Lucy--You had me at "Wendy."
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