Hey folks, Harry here with the man with too much on his hands... Anton Sirius! I love reading his review of LOST IN TRANSLATION... seeing him fall in love with the film does my heart well. HAUTE TENSION is a film I've heard that is something... slightly insane and special. I'd love to see it. I'm on record saying I must see THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD and I'm so disappointed by the word I hear on HOW TO GET THE MAN'S FOOT OUTTA YOUR ASS... one of the greatest titles ever... so sad. Well, here's Anton
No time for much color, starkinder, but there's a slight change in my interview sked. The on-again off-again interview with Toni Collette is off, and it's entirely my fault, dammit. I got caught trying to juggle too many commitments, and geography dictates that hers is the one that must be dropped.
To make up for it, I'll be interviewing Prachya Pinkaew, the director of Ong-Bak, instead. I hope that's OK...
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The Saddest Music in the World (2003, directed by Guy
Maddin)
Of all the filmmakers in the world out there doing their own thing, I think I admire Guy Maddin the most. The absolute purity of his esthetic, and the way he's honed it to such a degree over the years that his movies can leave fine, nearly painless cuts on your psyche, just has me gasping. And his ability to attract Eurobabes - getting the likes of Isabella Rossellini, Maria de Medieros and Alice Krige to star in his films, and counting Asia Argento among his fans - doesn't hurt either.
His latest film, the Saddest Music in the World, is so perfectly Maddinish that to describe the plot would be almost superfluous, but what the heck. Set during the Depression, it involves a paraplegic Winnipeg beer baroness, Lady Port-Huntly, 'celebrating' her city's status as the saddest in the world by holding a contest to find the saddest music in the world. The promise of $25,000 in prize money attracts weepy musicians from around the globe, as well as the shattered remains of the Kent family, whose tragedies intersect and intertwine with the Lady's own. Sublimely bizarre melodrama ensues.
This is a haunted film - the characters are haunted by their pasts and in at least one case their future; Maddin's style, of course, is haunted by all the countless silent films lost to Time and Man's arrogance; even the story is haunted by Kazuo Ishiguro's original script (yep, the film is an adaptation of a script by that Remains of the Day guy. Crazy old world, innit?). Maddin's ghosts are not all mournful ones, though, make no mistake. They can be as goofy as they can be glum, and sometimes both at the same time.
This is possibly the quintessential Maddin film. The direction is fevered, and the cast amazing, particularly Mark McKinney, the Kid in the Hall, in the lead. The sheer Maddinosity of the movie is almost overwhelming.
If you've never seen a Guy Maddin film before this is a great starting point; if you have, then what are you waiting for? Get a move on!
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Lost in Translation (2003, directed by Sofia Coppola)
Influenced by, without being a slave to, the French New Wave, Lost in Translation is an exquisite film about two souls adrift in emotional limbo who only need an anchor to save them - even if that anchor is each other.
Bob is an American movie star staying in Tokyo to shoot some whiskey ads, ostensibly for the money. Charlotte is the young wife of a photographer who's discovering that the man she married bears little resemblance to the man behind the camera. Both fighting insomnia and staying in the same hotel, the two emotional exiles strike up an unlikely friendship as their respective orbits come repeatedly in contact.
No description of the plot can really do justice to the movie, depending as it does on its two leads. For one thing, Bill Murray is so damn good as Bob it's criminal. He's hilarious of course, but Bob's humor is a shield, keeping all sharp prickly things away from his fragile heart. Think about the performances Murray has turned in over the last few years - Rushmore, the Royal Tenenbaums, even back to Ed Wood... and he's still not taken seriously as an actor. (OK, maybe that thing with the elephant has something to do with it, but forgive and forget already!) Kim Basinger has a freakin' Oscar, and Bill Murray is still working in the critical shadows. It's ridiculous.
The revelation here is Scarlett Johansson as Charlotte though. Great as she was in Ghost World and the Man Who Wasn't There, this is a quantum leap forward for her. She not only holds her own in verbal jousting sessions with Murray, but she gives Charlotte a maturity and resolve way beyond anything we've seen before. This is not a teacher and pupil relationship by any means; Bob and Charlotte are equals in just about every sense.
Unless, that is, the revelation is Coppola. The Virgin Suicides was a great debut, but this film is something else again. Coppola plays with some very interesting ideas here, not least of which is the audience's expectation that any relationship between an older man and a younger woman can resolve itself in any way other than sexually. I said it a couple of days ago but I'll say it again here - in a few years we could be saying "Sofia's dad, Francis Ford Coppola" instead of "Francis' daughter, Sofia Coppola". The film is that confident.
Lost in Translation is an extraordinarily wonderful movie, one that I loved when I walked out of the theater. It's filmmaking at its finest.
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How To Get the Man's Foot Outta Your Ass (2003,
directed by Mario van Peebles)
How To Get the Man's Foot Outta Your Ass is Mario van Peebles' tribute to his father Melvin's Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song, the landmark film that created the blacksploitation genre and helped shape the American independent film industry. Sort of an anti-Day for Night, the film sees Mario stepping into his own father's shoes both on screen and behind the camera to tell the story of how Sweet Sweetback came to be through, essentially, Melvin's sheer force of will.
It's a nice idea, but unfortunately there are a few problems with it. Some of the casting choices are questionable, and the script takes a wonky middle road between uncompromising realism and romanticized sentimentality. And of course, Mario is no Melvin (but then, who is really?) What's even worse than that though is the fact that the movie just doesn't have anything to say that Sweet Sweetback hadn't said before, and more clearly. We get almost no insight into the whys of Melvin's drive to make the film, beyond the surface "Stickin' it to da MAN!" ones. Instead what we get is facile pop psychology mixed with a little muddled Doors-ish desert mysticism that doesn't mean jack shit.
Maybe I'm just holding this movie to a higher standard, and comparing it to Sweet Sweetback is a mistake on my part, but given the subject matter such a comparison is inevitable, and it's one that can't possibly put How To Get the Man's Foot Outta Your Ass in a good light.
Mario made this movie for all the right reasons, but he simply bit off more than he could chew.
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Haute Tension (2003, directed by Alexandre Aja)
A grim little blood fest from France, Haute Tension (inexplicably retitled Switchblade Romance in English, despite the absence of a switchblade) does the job it sets out to do, but falls apart the moment you start thinking about the plot.
Owing equal debts to Tobe Hooper and Dario Argento, the story is deadly simple. Alex and Marie travel to Alex's family's home in the country for a vacation. A sadistic monster (played by I Stand Alone's Phillipe Nahon), searching for new victims, approaches the house. Nasty, bloody slaughter ensues, and the killer takes Alex away while Marie fights desperately to save her. There's more carnage during the chase, but Alex ends up saving herself, then pays Marie one last visit in the hospital. The end.
For most of the running length of the film my problem with it was simple - Marie was the stupidest heroine in the long, long history of stupid slasher movie heroines. And by the end of the movie, even after the film gives you some explanation for Marie's idiocy, I simply didn't care. The senselessness of the killer's rampage I could accept as part of the genre, a throwback to those early-mid '70s films that started it all, but the rest just pushed my disbelief off its suspension bridge and into the water.
Haute Tension isn't going to revolutionize horror, not even close, but if it gets a little nudge from Europe's newest power broker Luc Besson (who's friends with Aja) you'll probably see it somewhere in North America sooner or later.
Anton Sirius
