Les mots: de trop

Easter weekend M5

Calcutta

IFC (1969)

A documentary by Louis Malle, currently unavailable on DVD, it seems. You think Calcutta, you think poverty, and indeed we see plenty of what Brecht called der Ärmsten der Armen--those, for example, through whose slum runs a streamlike sewer overburdened by the profane products of other people's sacred cows--but Malle reminds us that suffering does not eliminate quotidian living: the poor wash themselves, they work, they pray, they eat (fed sometimes by Mother Teresa's sisters), they entertain and are entertained. And he casts a much wider net, showing us also the upper-caste Brit wanna-bes watching the horse races in the shadow of the enormous Queen Victoria monument of chasing golf balls through a course sliced out of a slum. There is scarcely any narration (Malle himself provides it), and what there is seems calculated to maintain objectivity and avoid polemic--until the very last line, where, as if unable to shut off his soul anymore, he marvels that poor, dark-skinned immigrants from another region marvel not that they are shunned even by lepers but that anyone would point a camera at them and that their condition would inspire outrage. And then, as if Malle had made a deal with himself to stop filming as soon as he started preaching, FIN.

Le Mépris (Contempt)

FF (1963)

What a cast! There's Jack Palance, there's Fritz Lang, there's Brigitte Bardot, there's Brigitte Bardot's ass! This is Godard at his best, which is to say the intriguing:maddening ratio is at least 2:1. How can adoration turn to contempt in less than 24 hours? I hope you're not really looking for any answers, but contemplation of the question is mostly fascinating, and when it's not, well, the director is gracious enough to bring back Ms. B's derrière sublime every 15 minutes or so. Also views of the Golfo di Napoli from Capri, almost as breathtaking.
Aside from the visuals, the most fun--certainly the most surprising fun--comes from Lang, who is brilliantly cast as a multilingual German film director named Fritz Lang. He immerses himself in the role and nails it, with a lovely little shrug that almost constitutes a fifth language. Palance, encouraged to overact shamelessly, is delightfully awful, and did I mention . . . oh, wait, yes, never mind, I did.

Paranoid Park

Ang

Not sure what I was expecting from Gus Van Sant's latest, but I sure didn't think the word poetry would be coming to mind so often: visual poetry, especially in the many skateboard scenes (going through the head of the unathletic old fart: how the hell do they keep from constantly crashing into each other while hopping from concrete mesa to mesa?), aural poetry in a soundtrack and score as adept at depriving us of our balance as the boardboys are at keeping theirs, veering from Nino Rota to Cast King's "Outlaw" to Ludwig Van's Ninth (and no, neither of the ultrafamous bits).
Gabe Nevins, like almost everyone in the cast a nonprofessional actor 'til now, is perfect as the innocent betrayed by one seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time moment. Kid can act, and the kid's got a face.

Irrelevant postscript: what '70s master of campy piano pop does Van Sant put you in mind of these days?

Les Chansons d'amour (Love songs)

IFC (2007)

You know how you overhear people chatting in a language you don't know, or don't know well, and it always sound like they must be soaring at a level of wit of which you and your friends can only dream? And how, if you somehow find out what they're saying, you realize that they're just as dumb as you and all your dumb friends? Well, that's sort of how this musical of sexual fluidity works. But even with subtitles to tell you how pedestrian the lyrics are, and with your ear telling you how unexceptional the music is, the people are so damned good looking, and they are talking and singing in French, after all, and they're in Paris, fer chrissakes, and so, hell, I don't know, somehow it still works.

Blindsight

IFC (2006)

Remember those kids in Spellbound and how we cheered for them and admired their pluck and really worried about how they were going to do in the big bee? Well, let's say the kids are all blind, and they're all outcasts in the society, and instead of having to spell words in front of ESPN cameras, they've set out to climb Mount Everest. OK, OK, I'm exaggerating: not 29K-foot Everest but merely its 23K-foot neighbor Lhakpa Ri.

Just an astonishing film, with no villains, just some heroes who sometimes have a bit of the asshole about them, chiefly Erik Weihenmayer, the first blind man to scale Everest, and Sabriye Tenberken, co-founder of Braille Without Borders. Not gonna say anymore except absolutely, without fail, see it. Oh, wait, I lied, gotta say one more thing: may surpass Adaptation for best use ever of the Turtles' "Happy Together."

Trailers

• More Goddard coming to Film Forum, including Masculin Feminin, which I saw there only a couple of years ago, and Pierrot Le Fou; I'm up for the latter.
• Roman de gare--dunno, looks potentially awful, psychothriller.
• La sconosciuta (The unknown woman)--skeptical.
• Chapter 27--I fear this one very much: a fattened-up Jared Leto as Mark David Chapman, and how fucking sick is this: they cast a dude named Mark Lindsay Chapman to play Lennon.
• Mister Lonely--Hey, sooner or later Harmony Korine's gotta get it right again, no? This promises to be either brilliant or another Julien Donkey-Boy: an island of impersonators, including Samantha Morton as Marilyn Monroe and Diego Luna as Michael Jackson.
• Le Voyage du ballon rouge (Flight of the red balloon)--Hsiao-hsien Hou's eagerly awaited tribute to Albert Lamorisse's classic. Ouch: lead IMDb comment: "Dreadful. Awful. Dull." Well, I don't care: I'm a 4 (on a 5-point scale that I'll explain one of these days).
• Body of War--Another "Iraq sucks" flick--geez, haven't we made our point yet? I mean, it's not like we still have troops there!
• Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts--looks surprisingly engaging, especially the part where he says, "There's plenty of other music to listen to; if you don't like mine, don't listen to it." And clearly means it. Trailer ends with a great knock-knock joke by Chuck Close.
• Shotgun Stories--I'm gonna say probably not, from having seen trailer twice. Vengeance among poor white people.