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Céline et Julie vont en bateau: Phantom Ladies Over Paris (1974)
Maybe Only Disappointing Because it Isn't How it Starts
I'm going to get drummed out of the corps this time for certain, but tonight I finally got around to Jacques Rivette's universally acclaimed *Celine and Julie Go Boating*, and I'm afraid I didn't care for most of it -- indeed by the end I kinda hated it. (Spoilers ahead.)
The problem, it seems to me, is that the film's tone, pace, and subject matter were all *so* much interesting before that weird house became the central McGuffin of the last 3/4 of the movie. And that's a very special kind of disappointment that I've felt several times regarding some otherwise completely unrelated movies: If the first act, or even part of the first act, promise me one palate of tones and expectations, and then the movie shifts those out from under me ... I'd better like the new movie even more.
Wall-E fails this test. Cloverfield fails this test. Lument's The Offence fails this test. And, alas, Celine and Julie Go Boating fails this test. Badly.
Why, I ask in earnest good faith, *why* couldn't we have just enjoyed the relatable inscrutability of two young French women behaving with erratic impulses toward each other, which somehow always seem to make perfect sense a half a beat after they've happened? Karbanova's Daisies but by Claude Chabrol? I'd have *happily* watched three hours of that, narrative be damned. And who wouldn't? We all love the vertiginous sensation of projecting our own over-tethered ethos onto the choices of someone radiantly unencumbered by concern.
And what did we get instead? After forty adorable, near-flawless minutes being set up to expect that movie? What we got instead was a labored and uneven mashup of heavy-handed mutual self-sabotage and paranormal whodunnit, with an all-but-literally infuriating little splash of Marx Brothers thrown in at the end. Promised Daisies by Chabrol, we got DIscreet Charm by David Lynch, with ending written by the hacks who gave you 4 Rooms, Murder by Death, and Clue.
I mean, Jeebus Christmas on a pink-pained bicycle: The sitting-on-the-trunk scene was so plodding and self-indulgent that at one point one of the women literally yawns and says "I'm bored" and then tries to take a nap!
Ain't it the truth, sister. Ain't it the truth.
Threads (1984)
A lyric and funereal masterpiece of uninvited fortitude and dread
The Fifty-Two Fridays Project, week 1:
Mick Jackson's astonishingly impactful, deeply disturbing guerilla-auteur masterpiece about a theorized nuclear apocalypse, *Threads* (1984).
Made for almost literal beans (400,000 pound, total, if Google is to be believed), this scrappy-in-every-way made-for-television gem manages to strum a poignancy and near-timelessness in the viewer that utterly, *utterly* belie the limitations beneath which it was made.
Karen Meagher is pitch-perfect as "Ruth," the lovesick every-woman protagonist forced to roam the postwar landscape for scraps of bread and hope-drained opportunism; Harry Beety is uncannily understated and British to the boot-straps as "Mr Sutton," the reluctant God-by-proxy over the ruins of Sheffield.
Just exactly how the same man who gave you Volcano *and* The Bodyguard could have tossed off something this flawless, with this nobody-cast and on this kind of shoestring, is a question that will stay with me almost as long as the after-images of the film's most impactful scenes, particularly and indelibly its very, very, very final moment, which just might be the most effective of such devices that I have ever experienced.
An absolutely gob-smacking achievement. I almost never give 10/10's on IMDB -- fewer than 50 in my entire history of registration with the site -- but this was an easy call. See it once, and then thank every star in an unblemished nighttime sky that you never have to see it again. But *do* see it once, because it's just that good.
War Dogs (2016)
Is everyone else going crazy or am I having a stroke?
I like a *lot* of pulpy, mainstream-entertaining movies, and that makes it all the more puzzling why so many people seem to have graced this picture with anything approaching a good review. Seven is not an easy score to get on IMDB, much less seven-point-one, and I'm sorry to say that I genuinely don't get the appeal. A muddled, uneven, atonal mishmash of drama that's not very dramatic and comedy that's not very funny. The screenplay budgets huge swathes of itself to needless framing of the point, Jonah Hill's character is palpably unlikable from wire to wire, and as you sit there trying not to let either thing wreck the experience the rest of the way, you can't help but notice how the film positively vibrates with the panic of having no idea whether it's trying to be funny. It gets five stars on account of a few stand-out scenes, but also because IMDB won't let me give it four-and-a-half, which is what I would have. Do yourself a favor.
Force of Execution (2013)
A silly movie, yes, but also a surprisingly good time
For the past few weeks I've been enjoying a YT channel that makes fun of Steven Seagal movies so I was hoping -- or maybe I should say "hoping" -- that Force of Execution would be as terrible as some of that other guy's send-ups. But in fact, this is an improbably fun and cohesive picture. It's never going to win any awards, but the plot is much more cohesive than I was expecting, the characters are well drawn, the action scenes are much better-done than I was expecting, and it even has some pretty good desaturated-gangster-dialogue. Where are the bizarre jurisdictional contradictions? Where are the dropped storylines that never come up again? Where is the over-the-top Seagal worship?
It's a very weird place to be, emotionally: First and foremost I feel self-conscious about having enjoyed this as much as I did. But then there's ... disappointment isn't quite the right word, but I honestly expected to spend the whole movie cackling at how ridiculous it is, and that just didn't come to pass. It's a fun evening spent on a fun ride that you don't have to take seriously, and you could do a *lot* worse. And it's got some A-list talent in it, too, which doesn't hurt.
So who should read this review and watch this movie? I think I figured it out: Let's say that you think Steven Seagal movies are always terrible, but you've got a movie-watching compatriot who wants to watch a Steven Seagal movie. That's a weird segment of the market, I'll admit, but if you answer the description, then the thing to do is say, "Okay, but I want it to be this one."
Long story short, you might regret watching this movie if you thought you were going to see The Salton Sea or Ronin, but you won't regret watching this movie if you thought you were going to see a Steven Seagal movie.
Midway (1976)
Anachronistic cornpone and loose ends
I loved this movie as a child but now that I'm in my fifties it's not just me who hasn't aged well. Feeling less like a movie from the zenith of the great Hollywood heyday and more like a late-1940s schmaltz-fest, *Midway* is hackneyed, jingoistic, wooden, and inexcusably slipshod. The plot-lines are telegraphed, the actual drama of the battle is belaboured well past the point of sustaining interest, the conflicts are wooden, the B-story about the Japanese family is left utterly unresolved, and the effects -- less than a year before Star Wars -- look like they were done in someone's bathtub. Remember it fondly because you've probably seen it at least once before, but leave it there. For a film with such packed-to-overflowing promise, it's ultimately suspenseless, soulless, and, dare I say it, rudderless. A shame, but there it is.
City of Ghosts (2002)
A near-miss with great bones and frustratingly high potential
The core of Dillon's tale of Cambodian intrigue is rock-solid and easily told: A young man finds himself in desperate need of a rendezvous with his erstwhile benefactor, himself holed up and possibly deal-making with the shadiest of the 2000-era Cambodian warlord-turned-businessman glitterati. What a shame, then, that the film takes a full reel and then-some to even put all the chess pieces on the board, then wastes even more time on pointless b-stories involving the youth-backpacker scene and sordid long-term expat intrigues and the preservation of Khmer antiquities. It's a fine little tale with a great basic structure and it moves along nicely when it deigns to get out of its own way. Which, alas, isn't consistently enough. As a permanent resident of Cambodia, I can also tell you that things have moved on quite a bit from the warp and rhythm of the place as depicted in Dillon's film, but in fairness things hadn't really come all that far from them when the movie first hit the screen. Worth it for the big twist at the end, if only just.
Hei yan quan (2006)
Proud to differ
I am always a little surprised to see negative reviews of Tsai Ming-Liang films in web communities populated by film enthusiasts. And that's not because I'm about to argue that all film enthusiasts should like Tsai Ming-Liang movies, far from it. Rather, what surprises me is that film enthusiasts -- people motivated enough to have IMDb logins and, further, motivated enough to write reviews -- would be unfamiliar enough with Tsai Ming-Liang and his work, prior to viewing any particular film, that they could end up being surprised by what they get. Like all of Liang's films, this is a very, very, VERY quiet movie. That's the whole point: long takes, minimal dialog, you get out of it what you're prepared to concentrate hard enough on to see the subtlety of. I own all of his films and I watch them again and again -- and that doesn't make me a better person than the other reviewer, either. He's an acquired taste and if you don't like quiet, light-brush-stroke movies you won't like this guy's stuff. But I can't imagine anyone not knowing all of that before they start, and then complaining about it afterward.
The Departed (2006)
Overrated, silly ending
I've seen a lot of overrated movies in my life (can anyone say The Crying Game? Gladiator? Million Dollar Baby?) but never has an entire audience been so completely lost by the Director of an eventual Best Picture Winner. In my screening in Gainesville, Florida, the last forty minutes of the film -- you remember, the forty minutes in which nine of the eleven main characters get skull-shot by someone else? -- the audience was so pulled out of the thing that people were actually LAUGHING AT THE SCREEN. This is a truly mediocre movie. It's dreary, it's ham-acted, the dialogue is forced, it's half an hour too long, and its ending is one of the silliest I've ever seen in a film that expects itself to be taken seriously.
Before Sunset (2004)
Wanna know what happened next? I'll tell you :-)
So, here's my take on what happens next after this movie ends: Jesse and Celine make love, passionately, in every corner of her apartment, until the following morning at about five-thirty. Jesse writes Celine a tortured, "we both knew we couldn't be together" note on her telephone message pad, pins it to the 'fridge with a magnet, and disappears out into the damp Paris pre-dawn to call the valet and get a lift to the airport for a later flight. Why do I feel all of this so strongly? Well, it works on the same logic as Helen Hunt's character not getting back together with Chuck at the end of Cast Away: Clearly Jessee loved, has loved, loves, and will always love Celine -- but the movie makes it equally clear that, as much as they are mourning the missed opportunity in Vienna, they are also mourning the loss of their own youth; and one of the hallmarks of losing one's youth is that you start to choose responsibilities over passions. If the next sequel doesn't open with them having another chance meeting after having not seen each other for another nine years, I'm going to cry foul. I mean, come on: they're in their thirties now -- they know better than to start permanently mucking-up each others' lives.