Wendy's Films of 2010 # 111 - #134: A Rush to Finish 2010's Reviews!

What with the store closing and all, I decided to take a slightly unconventional turn in an attempt to finish reviewing every new film (new to me, that is) I watched this year. I knew I wouldn't make it writing longer reviews since I have over 60 movies left on the list, but thought that this might at least be fun to read even if it wasn't very descriptive.

#111. True Blood: Season 2 (2009)

My guilty pleasure. Sexy, southern and full of bloodlust; it's like eating a dark, rich dangerously delicious chocolate cake that I just can't get enough of.

#112. Snake in the Eagle's Shadow (1978)

Jackie Chan a school janitor? You bet, but as expected he's soon to become a kick-ass martial artist! Good, but not the best Chan movie I've seen.

#113. Batman: The Movie (1966)

"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb." Cheesy, corny, wonderful 1960s fun: "It looks bad, batman. This brassy bird has us buffaloed."

#114. Lifeforce (1985)

A crazy sci-fi, vampire, zombie movie that's bound to blow your mind with it's absurdity, badness and greatness.

#115. Princess Mononoke (1997)

Probably my favourite Hayao Miyazaki film so far. The music, the animation, the colours, and especially the story: everything just blew me away.

#116. Subway (1985)

A neat film directed by Luc Besson and starring a french-speaking Christopher Lambert who roams the subways of Paris while blackmailing the woman he's infatuated with. It's very 80s and kind of strange, but awesome.

#117. Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus (2009)

Really? You need a review? Nah.

#118. Delicatessen (1991)

Colourful, classic Jean-Pierre Jeunet full of funny, sweet, dark and strange moments that are sure to please (if you're like me, that is.)

#119. Super Mario Bros. (1993)

I have no idea how they came up with the ideas they used in this film, but it's pretty fucking crazy and I kinda liked it.

#120. The Ladykillers (2004)

I really enjoyed this one, though that trend is pretty common with

me and the Coens. I'm still not totally sold on Tom Hanks, but hey, he's not so bad.

#121. Twilight: Eclipse (2010)

Unfortunately, it was better than the first.

#122. The Awful Truth (1937)

I love my Cary Grant romances and this is another classic. Perhaps not as wonderful as some of his others, but it seems he really can't go wrong.

#123. Project A-2 (1987)

"But I'm not cooking! So it stays open!" Apparently I thought this Jackie Chan line was so terribly funny that it deserved to be quoted, but I can't for the life of me remember why. I can't even remember what the movie's about. I think he plays a straight cop in a crooked area of town or something...

#124. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

Crazy disgusting slimy ear bugs. Also, it's quite awesome.

#125. The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (2009)

Colourful, nonsensical, neat to watch and Heath Ledger's last film.

#126. Objectified (2009)

Ooo, this documentary was way more boring than I thought it would be. I fell asleep.

#127. Porco Rosso (1992)

Wonderfully detailed, beautifully animated Miyazaki film about a mysterious swine-resembling pilot that takes a begrudging liking to a young girl and the antics that ensue.

#128. An American in Paris (1951)

Charming in a 1950s musical kind of way. Not my favourite old musical, but it'll do.

#129. The Beaches of Agnès (2008)

A lovely film by Agnes Varda about the life she lead, the man she loved and the beautiful films she made.

#130. Freaks and Geeks (1999-2000)

Probably my favourite series of the year (either that or Skins). It's a great, funny, interesting show about high school in the early 80s and I just can't get its lead, Linda Cardellini, out of my head. (Also starring James Franco, Seth Rogan, Jason Segal and directed by Judd Apatow. I know, right?)

#131. The Jerk (1979)

A charming idiot (Steve Martin) somehow ends up alright after leaving his family

#132. Against All Flags (1952)

Errol Flynn. Pirates.

#133. Super Fly (1972)

Pretty good blaxploitation film about a man who wants out of the cocaine dealing business: "Can you dig it?"

#134. Undeclared (2001-2002)

Sort of a continuation of Freaks and Geeks, directed by Apatow, but starring a completely different cast and taking place a few decades later. Also, not quite as good.

Chris 2010 Viewings #41: A Prophet

I watched this moving picture, A Prophet, something like two months ago. Before I wrote my last review, that of The White Ribbon. I then gave the DVD to Mike, who watched it but will never review it (because spoiler: he will never write a review here ever again), then to Maggie, who reviewed it much better than I will (because that is what she does). I think Wendy has the DVD now, but she is in Europe for a few months, so don't expect a review from her, either.

A Prophet is a film by Jacques Audiard, whose entire filmography is what the hip kids say is "made of win". A Prophet is also a French prison movie, and I have never seen a bad French prison movie. Two of my favourite films ever, Le Trou and A Man Escaped, fall into this genre. So watching A Prophet was, as the hip kids said 20 years ago, a "no-brainer".

I stopped attending the Toronto International Film Festival 8 years ago. I stopped for a lot of reasons, but one of them was that if I watch too many movies in close succession they become one big blur and I don't remember too much about them. I watched A Prophet in the middle of a close succession of movies two months ago and my memory of it suffers accordingly. So bear with me.

It is about a young Arabic man in France. He goes to jail, and winds up straddling two factions: the other Arabic inmates, and a middle-aged crime boss who decides to make him a protege of sorts due to his "in" with the other Arabs. I don't want to spoil anything, but the crime boss gets egg on his face eventually.

This movie won an armload of Cesars (the French Oscars) and probably deserved them, though I will withhold judgment until I see every French film of 2009. It was nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar, and like most great Best Foreign Film Oscar nominees, it did not win. Audiard is a filmmaker with a great eye for telling details and powerful imagery, like a man who is casually on fire (see above). The two leads (Tahar Rahim and Niels Arestrup) are fantastic, and make the power shifts that take place believable and affecting. That doesn't sound like a big deal, but usually when movies depict that, they just have a guy who was previously the weak one slick back his hair and put on bigger clothes and expect that to do all the work. Rahim and Arestrup reflect their stations in every ounce of their physical beings. Good work, guys.

That's all I have to say about A Prophet, which I will watch again because it deserves it.

Maggie 2010: The Beat That My Heart Skipped & Fingers

#53, 54 -- The Beat That My Heart Skipped & Fingers





In 1978 director James Toback came out with Fingers, an American film about a young man torn between his love of music and loyalties to his father, a loan shark in deep with the mob. In 2005 Jacques Audiard came out with The Beat That My Heart Skipped, a French film about the very same. And these two works are just as distinct as their nations of origin would have you believe.

The divergence is immediate. As Fingers opens, Jimmy Fingers (Harvey Keitel) is jubilantly playing music at his piano. When he finishes he sees a woman across the street, evidently listening to him play. He follows her with his radio, playing "Summertime, Summertime," a 1950s number by The Jamies, until she turns around. Pleased at her range of musical interest, a car ride and apartment courting ensue. Then he goes to lunch with his dad, with whom a whole crapload of exposition is unloaded in a conversation replete with hackneyed Italianisms. His dad laments his son's taste in 1950s music but shows respect for Jimmy's pursuit of a musical career. He asks for Jimmy's help with some loan shark business. He asks Jimmy for an opinion of the new woman he wants to marry. Jimmy gives his opinion frankly but without much invested interest. He's happy-go-lucky. He's got his music. What could go wrong?

The Beat That My Heart Skipped is no such bed of context-oblivious roses. Our first introduced theme is the weight placed on sons by their fathers, emerging in a quiet conversation absent any music at all. We then find Tom Seyr (Romain Duris) in the midst of shady work as a real estate broker, devaluing property, ousting squatters, and otherwise doing everything to turn a profit on the buildings he and his partners own. He's not happy about his life, and it shows. He goes to lunch with his father, with whom music is a taboo topic: His father doesn't respect it; his father wants him to focus on collecting bad debts; his father generally doesn't seem to appreciate how much his son cares about him. When his father's new lover is introduced this time, the lighting, the cinematography, the acting convey every bit of Tom's disdain. Far from open about his deeper passions, Tom comes back to music tentatively in this film, going through recordings of his late mother's skilled piano performances and struggling to overcome his own absence from the form for years.

At the crux of both films are a few core plot elements: the main character's flawed audition for a career-track pianist position, the father's problems getting money back from one particularly well-connected debtor, the senseless loss incurred soon after, and the main character's responses to it. But where Audiard's conflicts are developed gradually enough that we know why Tom chokes at his audition, it isn't until after the audition in Toback's film that Jimmy explains (yes! more exposition!) what made him screw up. So it goes with much of Fingers.

In fact, if I had to describe the difference between the two films in one word, the word would be "penis." While Audiard's piece focuses intimately on Tom's hands -- the crisis of personal identity they invoke, the ways they embody his failings and drives -- Toback takes an all-too-typical American gambit and places the seat of Jimmy's physical failings, well, in the seat of his pants. He can't get it up when he wants to. Lacking his mentally-ill mother's love, he sometimes needs women to want him before he can get it up or have an orgasm (I know -- a shocking state of affairs, isn't it?) Indeed, a sizable portion of Fingers has nothing to do with the conflict between being a thug and being a pianist, but instead follows alternating emasculation and violence around his relationship with Carol (Tisa Farrow), the woman from the movie's start. Carol's later relationship with Token Black (Bad) Guy, Dreers (Jim Brown) also serves, in truly American style, to further invoke stereotypical White Man Sexual Anxiety, and alpha male posturing ensues.

I know I shouldn't expect strong female portrayals from any movie before Alien (for superficial fare produced after 1979, I get progressively crankier), but it bears noting how staggeringly different each director's treatment of women is in these stories. Instead of this whole sexual emasculation subplot, Audiard's 2005 film introduces a female piano tutor who doesn't speak English, but takes Tom on anyway, as a client, after his failed audition. Their narrative arc completely eschews a common film archetype that says men and women can't occupy the same space without a sexual relationship being hinted at or rising to the fore. (The ending can be taken one of two ways in that regard -- a subtle note that again places the conflict between thug and musician at the fore of the film, where it belongs.) Nor is Audiard's treatment of women token in this regard: in both films a mobster's girl is stalked by the main character, in his effort to get the mobster to repay a debt to his father. However, in The Beat That My Heart Skipped, the mobster's girl is every bit as strong, smart, and self-assured as she needs to be to survive in that kind of violent world. In Fingers, however, said girl gets herself sexually assaulted (and I use that language mindfully, because the actor is given to perform in such a way as lets the viewer know she was "pretty much asking for it"). Toback also pulls this shitty trick wherein, right after said assault, Jimmy is a) provided a convenient opportunity to redeem himself by helping a stricken, weeping woman on the street cheer up, and b) made to atone for his assault by getting a prostate exam. Yeah, definitely resetting the scales there -- thanks Toback! Also, when Jimmy bullies Carol into taking out her diaphragm before sex -- so jealous of the other men she's seeing he wants to knock her up so she'll have to stick with him -- we also conveniently get a portrayal of Carol's alternative, the skull-smashing Token Black Menace Dreers, in order to reassure ourselves that Jimmy is really "the good guy" in all of this. You can imagine my "delight."

Having watched and exulted in The Beat That My Heart Skipped, I honestly don't see what's so great about Fingers: from the ham-handed exposition, to the clumsily constructed character conflicts, to the diffusing of audience attention between Jimmy the Pianist and Jimmy the Dick (get it? I made a funny), to the weak portrayals of all women in this film, it's hard -- really hard -- to care about the choice Jimmy makes in the end.

Meanwhile, Audiard has a gift -- a real gift -- for conveying his characters as fully-formed upon first viewing -- bearing their pasts, their trajectories, in all that they say and do thereafter, right down to the smallest detail. Thus, The Beat That My Heart Skipped is about a man who has the capacity to make music or effect violence with his hands, and who struggles -- plainly, privately, fiercely -- towards being a better human being, even if he can't ever really be considered good. Despite coming first of the two, Fingers doesn't even come close to carrying that tune.

Chris 2010 Viewings #14: The Girl on the Train (La Fille du RER)

France, 2008. Directed by André Téchiné. Starring Émilie Dequenne, Michel Blanc, Catherine Deneuve, Ronit Elkabetz, Mathieu Demy.

This film is based on a true story that caused a major media frenzy in France back in 2006. If I heard about the case back then it has since fled my mind and doesn't ring a bell, and I wasn't aware of the film's source when I sat down to watch it. I'm not going to divulge any details so that a viewer who reads this can go into it cold like I did if they choose to; a brief google search using the film's title should give you the information you need if you don't care.

The absence/presence of background information has given me a lot to chew on in the days since I watched this. Even if you look the story up on google, you will never be able to experience the sensation the case caused in France, any more than someone who had never heard of or seen Michael Jackson could experience the peculiar disconnect a lot of people who grew up in the 80s felt upon hearing of his death. This is important because a French audience would know about the pivotal plot point in this film, and be waiting for it throughout the entire 60 minutes that elapse before it happens, their entire experience of what they're watching coloured by their knowledge of what was coming and how they felt about those events when they were all over the TV and newspapers and internet a few years earlier.

Many viewers already feel a bit alienated when they watch any foreign film, conscious that something is not only being lost in the translation of the subtitles but also in the cultural differences. An acquaintance of mine once told me he didn't watch any Japanese period films because the principles of conduct and honour that would be implicitly understood by the Japanese audience made it seem to him like he may as well be watching martians for how alien the behaviours and logic were to him.

All of this would not be as pertinent to me if not for the fact that there is a puzzle at the heart of this film: why a key character does something particular. It's a relatively straightforward film, but the big catharsis/breakdown/explanation that a Hollywood version of the story would deliver never comes. This didn't especially bother me; it's not uncommon for European films to keep some key elements ambiguous, to keep the film turning in your mind, chewing over the motives and ideas raised. And knowledge of the case doesn't make the difference, either: the question troubles the major characters as the film closes, leading one of them to ponder an extensive personal investigation, maybe as a book? Or a film?

André Téchiné is a terrific director, and this is one of his most interesting films of recent years. His work with actors is always notable, and all of the leads shine, especially Dequenne as the title character.

Ultimately, my recommendation is to go into the film cold, if at all possible, though obviously it isn't crucial, since it could not be reasonably expected of its homegrown audience. I thought the plot was heading clearly in one direction, only to be thrown for a loop several times, ending up far from where I thought I would. And in a film that tackles the mysteries of the human mind, maybe the curve balls often thrown by real life aren't such a bad thing.