Kramer vs. Kramer; Coal Miner's Daughter

Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) belongs to the spate of Oscar-winning emotional family dramas of the late 70s/early 80s, such as Ordinary People (1980), On Golden Pond (1981), and Terms of Endearment (1983). I'd never seen any of these in their entirety, so I was interested when this film about a divorce and child custody battle showed up in the mail. And sure, it was really well-acted and well-written, a little overdone in the way of Oscar-winning Hollywood films, all orchestral music soundtrack and traumatic events. I always feel a little manipulated, even as I'm enjoying it. And I did enjoy it, though I sympathized for Meryl Streep's character, who is portrayed as a real selfish witch. I guess that's a testament to her acting, since the film's POV seems to side with the father. I wonder if the feminist overtones to the mother's story (which only comes out in the end courtroom scene) are actually there, or something I'm reading into it? And the ending, I found pretty unbelievable, like something tacked on because they wanted (SPOILER! MOVE TO NEXT PARAGRAPH IF YOU DON"T WANT TO KNOW) a "Happy Ending." What? A Happy Ending? Quelle surprise.

Joe has always said that Kramer vs. Kramer had one of his favourite scenes, where Dustin Hoffman is sprinting down the street to music on the soundtrack, when suddenly he runs past a band playing that music, effectively turning it from non-diagetic to diagetic. When Joe saw the actual scene again after so many years, he said the details of the scene were completely different than how he had remembered and described it. "Maybe the scene I remember comes later on," he said. But it didn't.

And then, from the same time period (1980) and also graced with an Oscar for Sissy Spacek's performance, was Coal Miner's Daughter. Surprisingly, I enjoyed this film pretty much without reservation! Most of the credit goes to lovely Miss Sissy as Loretta Lynn, whose performance truly is amazing (she sings her own songs live for the camera, no lipsyncing here), though Tommy Lee Jones as her husband is also pretty darned good. Loretta Lynn's life makes quite a story, and I was in the mood for a good old-fashioned story. What fun, when done right! Right on!

Highball

Highball is another Noah Baumbach film, except that it is credited to Ernie Fusco. I found this out only after we watched it and were searching the credits for Baumbach's name. Who the heck is Ernie Fusco? I said. Joe looked it up on the internet, which is substituting for his and everyone else's memory these days, and it confirmed that Ernie Fusco was Baumbach. He had shot Highball on a shoestring with his famous friends improvising, in only six days. And in spite of the fact that the film looks and feels like it was shot in six days, it was a lot funnier than Mr. Jealousy. Baumbach's usual stylistic tics are here, like the use of quick jumpcuts that look like stutters, which seem like a mistake everytime it happens, except that it happens so often. It's dialogue heavy and seems like a stageplay, especially since the camera often frames two-shots from the knees up, for whole scenes, without any close-ups, shot/reverse shots, or any other edits. But there are some genuinely laugh-out-loud scenes which occur when the cast lets loose into serious wackiness, like a great gag with two giant lizard suits, or a falsetto karaoke rendition of Beautiful Dreamer.

Jennifer Eight; 25th Hour

We rented Jennifer Eight (1992) because it was written and directed by Bruce Robinson, writer and director of the very very excellent "How to Get Ahead in Advertising" and "Withnail and I." It's said that this movie was his attempt to do a mainstream, formula film so he could get leverage to make other projects, but it was box office failure. And frankly, it feels like his heart wasn't really into it. Beautifully gloomy photography can't cover up the gigantic plot holes that destroy this film. I mean, a blind woman (or anybody, really) wouldn't notice that someone is in your bathroom with you, taking pictures of you in the tub? Come on! In fact, the sound design really sucked throughout. People are always walking noisily around Uma Thurman, the blind woman who can't hear the most obvious sounds. Halfway through the movie, Joe, who had put it on the to-rent list in the first place, suddenly said "I thought this was another movie! I remembered John Goodman being in it!" And he's not. The last comment on this really not good film is that it was brought to you by Diet Coke, which is drunk very conspicuously at least twice.

Next, we watched Spike Lee's 25th Hour, which we were both looking forward to. Frankly, I'm not a Spike Lee fan, since I've only ever liked Do the Right Thing and She's Gotta Have It. The rest of his oeuvre I've found either "meh..." or just not very good, though I admit I haven't seen Malcolm X, which Joe likes a lot. But 25th Hour had gotten excellent reviews, and we were psyched! But expectation has a lot of influence in how one receives a film, and if we hadn't been so psyched, maybe we would have liked it better. I thought it had a few good scenes, but I didn't like the spoken word pieces that popped up. Maybe as short films in themselves or in another film, but not as part of this one. It felt too completely disparate with the rest of the movie. The soundtrack was the most obtrusive thing I'd ever heard, trying to give drama to everything, even banal things like walking the dog (which, I know, is perhaps the point, but I found it simply distracting). It's one thing to build drama with music, but when it's on all the time, it becomes flat, like it's not even there because you learn to ignore it. Joe was less forgiving of the film. He said: "It's a muddled pile of poop!" This film seemed sponsored by Guinness, as it was drunk conspicuously a few times.

Le Neg'

The DVD interface amazed Joe and I immediately, consisting of a stop-motion animation clip from the movie that was one of the most original ideas I'd seen in quite some time. It looked like plastic toy figurines moving around a toy farm set. But then, their eyes moved, making us realize with a shock that they were humans in costume and make-up. Wow!

If you're not familiar with the work of Robert Morin, all I can say is, you should be! His classic film Yes Sir! Madame... is a classic of faux-mockumentary fiction, exploring the bi-personality of growing up Franglais in Montreal. He often uses video to heighten the soap-operatic dramas that build to violence, and fractured storylines and POVs. Le Neg' is an intense, Rashomon-like story of one night of violence, reconstructed through the POVs of each of the participants, whose stories, of course, contradict each other while giving more and more details as to the climactic scene of horror. The story follows a police investigation into the assault on and torture of a young black kid after he defaces a lawnboy, which ultimately leads to the shooting of the elderly woman who owned it. One of these POVs is from that of an autistic boy who has his walkman on all the time, listening to a beautiful song "Donnez-moi des roses" by Fernand Gignac. The racism is intense, at times verging on too much, and hard to take, but at the same time, not too explicit. The characters are, to their credit, full of surprises, becoming less and less stereotypical and flat as the film progresses, though more and more cruel. A harrowing, but powerful Quebecois film.