Soldiers Pay; Black Christmas

Soldiers Pay is a hodgepodge documentary short, directed by David O. Russell among others, consisting mostly of interviews with dozens of soldiers about the 2004 Iraq war. There's enough enraging and fascinating material here to choke a Halliburton horse, but not really enough to make it a full-blown documentary. It's more like DVD extras material for Russell's excellent film Three Kings, which it was actually supposed to be. Russell was hoping to use this as ammunition against Bush during the elections, but the studios found out and nixed it; however, Russell managed to release it to the public at a later date, well after the elections. Damn! I still can't believe that $#%&*#@ was re-elected, or that we're in the mess we're in. What to do? Throw up our hands in despair and disgust, and watch another movie.

And the next movie? Black Christmas (1974) by Bob Clark, who is perhaps most famous for directing Porky's. Laugh if you want! Black Christmas practically invented the slasher genre, inspiring such films as When a Stranger Calls. With no outright blood or gore, it's pretty low-key in comparison to modern slasher flicks, but even today, some of the shocks are truly horrific, the obscene phone calls truly obscene.

Cléo de 5 à 7 by Agnès Varda

Agnès Varda's The Gleaners and I is one of my favourite documentaries, passionate and thoughtful and personal, about people who glean, who comb through trash and recycling, who live off of what is leftover. I was eager to see her earlier work, as part of the French New Wave. Varda started out as a still photographer, and her films are evidence of her careful attention to framing, to detail and photographic stunts like images reflecting off mirrors and windowpanes. Cléo from 5 to 7 is full of such details and other New Wave signatures like jumpcuts, long tracking shots, and stylish, showy editing. The story follows a young singer, Cléo, who is waiting results from a medical test. At 5 P.M. her fortune teller turns up the Death card for her and refuses to read her palm. In the following two hours, she wanders the streets of Paris, seeing omens of Death everywhere, until finally she meets a young soldier who gives her some hope and comfort as he offers to accompany her to the hospital to get the results. What a great concept! The movie doesn't quite live up to its potential, but it's absorbing and entertaining to watch anyways. Varda's later films show much more depth, and we've put 3 more of her films on our to-rent list.

Spanking the Monkey; Curse of the Golden Flower

Curiously, our two most recent films both feature incest between a mother and her son. Coincidence? I don't know. Sometimes the universe thinks it's pretty funny. Nonetheless, I really got into both these films, though they both had their weaknesses.

I first heard of Spanking the Monkey years ago only because there was a poster at the old Cinema de Paris on St-Catherine St. in Montreal. I didn't see it back then, and knew next to nothing about it. Only years later, after seeing David O. Russell's excellent Three Kings, did I realize that Spanking the Monkey was by the same director, and so I put it on our to-see list. Finally, it arrived. And wow, is it ever uncomfortable to sit through! The film handles the build-up to the incest with subtlety and tension. Very believable, solid and well-rounded characters. And truly, truly, squeamishly, painful to watch. In a good way!

We've had Curse of the Golden Flower kicking around for a while now, but Joe was reluctant to see it, for no reason he could really name. I knew what he meant. Zhang Yimou films are grand, epic, relentless, and very long. Sometimes too long and relentless. His early works like Raise the Red Lantern were smaller in scope but epic in human drama, but some of his later works, like Hero, while gorgeous to look at, were cold in characterization. But finally, we watched his latest film, and we were surprised at how quickly we were sucked in to the escalating drama. Curse of the Golden Flower is Shakespearean in scope, the story of an empress who is sleeping with her stepson, the emporer who is trying to poison her into insanity, an attempted coup, revenge, tragedy, betrayal. It was fantastic, and incredibley art-directed as usual, though really, we had to laugh sometimes at how over-the-top it got. And then near the end, the climactic battle scene started to resemble The Lord of the Rings! Thousands of CGI soldiers storming the walls, the bows and arrows, the armour, it was all there, only with Chinese soldiers instead of Orcs and Elves. Normally, Zhang Yimou makes realistic, effortless use of computer graphics, but here, the sheer size of the armies, while fairly well done, still foregrounded their unreality. Joe said it reminded him of insects, crowds of insects. This may be intentional, as part of movie's theme was about the absolute power of the Emporer over his minions. But at the same time, the humanity within the tragedy, so evident in his earlier works, was lost.

Shampoo by Hal Ashby; An Inconvenient Truth

Hal Ashby's Harold and Maude was such an odd and beautiful gem, that when Shampoo came in the mail, Joe and I were looking forward to seeing it. Joe says he remembers the furor the film made in 1975, as it was considered rather racy back then. But unfortunately, Shampoo turned out to be more oddly confusing than oddly entertaining. Warren Beatty produces, co-writes with Robert Towne, and stars in this odd film as a hairdresser who sleeps with many of his clients, but who seems more interested in doing their hair. It's a comedy but not very funny. Joe and I had an ungoing debate about whether Warren Beatty's character was supposed to be ridiculous or genuinely sexy. It's set in 1968 and his hair is an incredible pouf. Julie Christie plays the woman that Beatty falls in love with, though there is no palpable chemistry between them here, unlike in Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Towards the end of the film, Beatty does her hair so that she ends up looking like a drag queen. Again, Joe thought she was supposed to be sexy after the style of the times, though failing, but I thought she was supposed to be ridiculous. I mean, it's a comedy! Clearly, Goldie Hawn and a very very young Carrie Fisher are both way sexier but Beatty goes for the drag queen! Is that where the comedy is? I dunno. Very hard to figure out. "Shampoop" says Joe.

The next film we saw was An Inconvenient Truth, which we'd been meaning to see for a long time, but never really felt like it since, after all, global warming is a bit of a downer. But it turned out to be solidly entertaining as well as a highly convincing, frightening, effective, really well-made film. Al Gore is a charming and even funny lecturer. It's heartbreaking to think where we might be now if things had turned out differently and he'd been made President. And it ends with hope. There's still hope! We must all take action now! Joe said the only thing about the ending was that it should have been thoughtful and meditative, instead of trying to rock out with Melissa Etheridge.

Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, by Alan Rudolph

The last film in our Alan Rudolph festival had been sitting on my desk for almost a month. After the last four films we watched of his, three of which were fast-forwarded (see "Alan Rudolph festival" entry), we weren't looking forward to Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, a film that I remember watching in the theatres when it came out (1994). Back then, I thought it wasn't bad. Watching it this time, well, we didn't fast-forward, but we were glad when it was over. It started out well enough with interesting Altmanesque dialogue (as he is Altman's protegé) mishmashed over Jennifer Jason Leigh's acerbic portrayal of the bitter and wisecracking writer Dorothy Parker. She recites Parker's poems in little black and white asides throughout, sometimes sounding like Joe when he is doing his rendition of a Shakespearean actor (Oh brave new world, that hath such creatures in't!). But as she became more and more dreary, bitter, and depressed, we couldn't help wishing that the film would end. It was the same way with Sylvia (the Sylvia Plath biopic with Gwyneth Paltrow): I kept thinking, when is she gonna stick her head in the oven? Joe says, what a monster you are! Maybe I am, but really, we all know what's coming. We shouldn't want the end to come faster!