Reviews

MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS (although not intentionally or explicitly): A clumsy horror film, treading the lines between spoof, self-aware and "oh my god it's not a film!" realms not very successfully. The main problem is tone - the writing is overly obvious and overdone: Lane is in no way a realistic character or human, easily committing 3 faux pas/insulting acts in the first 10 minutes that would have gotten him fired, no matter his "friend" is his supervisor.

Casting your plot in a film equipment rental house is a potentially good idea to set up your "killer with a camera" idea but since this has been done a dozen times already (Shatter Studios, The Last Showing, Hollywood Kills, etc) one must do it smarter or better, not worse and more amateur-ish. I'm not talking about the low-budget look, I'm talking about the sloppy plotting and "motivation" of the characters. Rountree and Banks' script gets to "snuff" territory and stops thinking completely.

Also, clearly, the 10-star reviews are ringers. Claiming "nuance" and "intelligence" and wondering why the hate, clearly they've been tasked with balancing the rating here on IMDb (and all from Feb 2015, it looks like). Very suspicious as this is no Scream, this is no Babadook, this is no Chronicle. Maybe the filmmakers and producers should have spent more time on their script and fleshing out their ideas, not gaming IMDb.

This is junk.

As has already been said, "The Moon in the Gutter" compared unfavorably with Beineix's previous light and playful "Diva." It also cost too much, which at the time ('80s) was being widely reported as some kind of aesthetic crime. But "Moon" seems to be nothing more powerful as a waking dream/nightmare. With its constant references to being in a dream, the beautiful and artificial sets and lighting, and the way people, cars, and the camera move through and around each other, the film, with a relatively low level of dialogue, manifests an urgent physicality.

The camera love the leads, particularly Depardieu and Kinski. Depardieu is shot in repose often, a block of smoldering anger while Kinski seems almost like a light flare of red chiffon he can't grasp. Some reviewers seem to bemoan the lack of a clear mystery or resolution, but the very text of the film seems to stem from the inside of Gerard's (Depardieu) inner thought processes - the sweat, the lights, the suspicion. He flares in anger almost without provocation and can't get the vision of his dead sister out of his head or his dreams - or that razor out of his hand.

The billboard, "Try Another World," is a cruel tease, a promise he can ultimately not follow. At the end, he is not with the girl who may save him but we wouldn't believe it if she did. Some viewers may want a clearer denouncement of what comes of Loretta, but the stance, the razor in his hand, the billboard impotent on the other side of the glass and the conflicted schizophrenic cadence of the music says everything you need to know.

Beineix's use of symbol to express mood and plot subtext was better submerged in "Betty Blue," a big hit.

The moon is not in the sky, it is in the gutter, and there it is strangely beautiful, reflecting another world that is unobtainable, all surface, threatening and like a model on a hill.

Rowan Atkinson is one of our most refreshing clowns and has had a long career, in UK films and the Bean shows and films. This film not only nails his innocence and good-natured cluelessness (without much of the show's occasional mean-spiritedness) but it's a very well-directed, surprisingly assured and subtly-themed road movie about someone who just wants to go to the beach, and how such an innocent goal can be worthwhile.

People seem to want to really badmouth this film - come on, folks, it really doesn't deserve it. The corporate Adam Sandler and Dane Cook sh==fests are much more soul-sucking.

This one actually nods to Jacques Tati, with a nice post-modern twist - Bean's home movie ends up on the screen in Cannes, as the show-stealing hit of the festival.

If you're predisposed to Rowan and Bean, check it out.

Antonioni's last important film, and while it has the surface of a mystery - mistaken identity, gun-running, faked death, it's really about the existential journey of its characters.

By this point in his career, Antonioni is no longer interested in paying serious attention to the thriller aspects of his plot. Instead this film is a stream-of-consciousness, practically fever dream about a man who thinks he can escape what he doesn't like about his life, but finds all those elements following him anyway.

Even when he changes identity, his wife and boss are still looking for him - under the new identity. And while we get a suspicion of how much he works to merely "report" the news, to remain objective, he finds himself in the middle of the war he has aggressively only reported up to now. (In fact, it seems to be easier to be involved - to sell guns to the rebels.) At what point does he give up? The girl - a strong and potent symbol of fate - actually calls him on it when he asks what she's doing there with "him" and he can't explain who "him" is. She knows he's lost grip of who (and what) he is.

We hear an earlier conversation on the tape recorder in which he mentions "what's on the other side of that window?" He's talking to Robertson, who will soon be dead, and throughout the film we get visual rhymes with windows, him looking out, through bars. "What do you see now?" Finally, at the end, he is trapped inside that prison, unable to escape his place, his body, his identity, no matter which one it is. Even though the camera (and the narrative) has more freedom to move out.

_ _ _ _ The film seems very slow, especially on the first viewing. But its pleasures are subtle and carefully measured. Jack Nicholson is in his prime, and manages to capture much with a surprisingly little amount of actual talking, exposition or business. Once you realize what it isn't going to do, you can enjoy what it does.

This is a severe-looking film, not nearly as "composed" and beautiful as L'Avventura or L'eclisse. Antonioni is older, shooting in a grimier part of the world, with a loose (distracted) camera movement. (Renoir's later films also seemed very "sloppy.") The camera doesn't seem to be able to stay on Locke/Nicholson. That can't be on accident. It drifts aimlessly away from him often throughout the film. He has no "gravity." Also, Maria Schneider (Last Tango in Paris) was a flavor of the month who's effectiveness has not translated over the years. The dialogue is self-aware, pretentious, and sometimes awkward, but this is a product of its times.

As a discourse on shifting identity, who we are and how we act, and the political (personal and otherwise) ramifications of our actions, The Passenger (originally called "Fatal Exit" - what a great title) is important, thoughtful and challenging.

One of the greatest (almost) lost films I've seen is Jean Renoir's "The Crime of Monsieur Lange." Renoir made it in 1936, prior to the invasion of France by German forces, and just before his two wartime masterpieces "Rules of the Game" and "Grand Illusion," which both have overshadowed it critically and in terms of popularity. But I consider "Lange" to be richer in irony, political bite, and even humanity than its more famous followers.

It relates the story of one Amedee Lange, a pulp writer for a weekly paper, published by the womanizing and ever scheming Batala, played with delicious gregariousness by Jules Berry. Lange writes the continuing western serial "Arizona Jim" for the paper, but his prose suffers the indignity of having advertising blurbs inserted into it to by Berry. When Berry, in an effort to avoid creditors, fakes his own death in a train wreck, Lange and the other workers for the paper rally and take over the publishing themselves, creating a popular and commercial success, continuing "Arizona Jim," sharing in the tasks and rewards, and even staging a (rather stagy and unconvincing) film version of the western for the local cinemas.

Renoir creates a potent political subtext by defining this community - the workers, neighbors, and friends - around a single courtyard. His camera glides through doorways and peers through the windows of apartments and shops to eavesdrop on all the personal and professional intrigues (in a way that at the time was considered outrageously overdone). Lange himself has never been outside Paris, and when people comment on the apparent "authenticity" of his western serial, he constantly corrects them - but to no avail. He is soon taken for the lover of the laundress whom his bed-ridden friend has a crush on, another misunderstanding. Lange's a fake – but he barely suspects as much, as he's too concerned with trying to explain, facilitate his friends, or going along for the ride to ever express much more than a sense that he finds the situation ironic. His misunderstood, almost aggressively passive existence becomes the catalyst and center of this self-forming community, a new populist collective that's practically communist.

When Berry unexpectedly returns (dressed in a priest's outfit he's appropriated), he intends to reap the benefits of the commune's success publishing and filming the serial. Lange realizes Berry's capitalist worldview and intent to dictate over them again threatens the well-being of the community, indeed will destroy it. After a drunken party that night (in which Marcel Lévesque gives a speech, in a way reprising his role as the good-hearted sidekick in Feuillade's 1917's "Les Vampires"!) Lange leaves Berry's office and the camera follows him outside through the windows of the office. With a bravura camera pan of a full 360 degrees to take in all the elements around the central courtyard (considered quite self-indulgent then, but now practically invisible to our jaded eyes) Renoir returns to Berry, who's now lying on the cobblestones bleeding - Lange has stabbed him – off-screen - yet the camera move signifies a profound emotional event has transpired and transformed the community...

Lange was made during the period that the Popular Front was gaining political ground in France, when there was optimism that people could band together and conquer the threat that Hitler was manifesting. Renoir's political themes have always been background texture rather than text – "The Rules of the Game" is considered one of the best anti-war films ever made and yet the topic is never brought up in the film. Even "Grand Illusion," taking place in prisoner-of-war camps, concerns itself primarily with the class-based relations between the Germans and their captured prisoners.

Lange's positioning as the reluctant center and catalyst for the commune, as well as its inadvertent savior (by eventually committing murder, the "crime" of the title), is played in ironic set-ups. Berry is dressed as a priest for his ignoble return. Earlier Berry mentions to a priest on the train he "must be able to get away with anything" and this returning sheep in wolf's clothing is another resonance with how people put up fronts that are misunderstood. The film also manages to address, redolent in its subtext, the vagaries of pop culture, verisimilitude of representation, and personal responsibility. (None of the handful of pregnancies in the picture seem to enjoy the benefit of being in wedlock – it's likely that Berry is responsible for all of them).

My favorite moment occurs at the train station, when Berry is about to flee the office for the first time. He's saying goodbye to one of his smitten secretaries (who doesn't realize what a cad he truly is). Renoir allows Berry a moment of wisdom as he tells her how to capture the sympathies of some passing young man (speaking perhaps from personal knowledge) so she won't be lost, abandoned, once he leaves her - by suggesting she pretend to cry over a departing lover on the station platform. Indeed, as Berry's train leaves, her sobs capture the attention of a passing man, whom she begins to walk with. The shot fades out with the hint of a slight smile on her face as she begins to warm to her new conquest. Amazing.

Truffaut called "Monsieur Lange" Renoir's greatest work. The film was issued by Interama on laserdisc in 1988 (now way out of print of course). It was recently issued on VHS from Kino, now OOP as well, and could use a Criterion-grade upgrade and reissue.

Who would have thought that Wes Anderson's latest would be an unofficial ode to the melancholy joys of making films? Wes Anderson's commentary basically states as such, and the joys of "Life Aquatic," especially on repeated viewings, bears it out.

Anderson's works seem to find their audiences once they've gone to DVD. I remember hearing how disappointed people were in "Royal Tenenbaums" after it came out in theatres ("It ain't no "Rushmore"), but it getting a new lease on life (and popular acclaim) on DVD. Likewise, "Life Aquatic," which people REALLY hated during its theatrical run. Like "Tenenbaums," "Aquatic" is a loosely structured ensemble piece, centered around a not-very-likable character and his extended family. Here the lead is Bill Murray, who's misanthropic and iconic charm overpowers the mood of the film, affecting everything in it. Finally, we have Bill Murray in the center, as the lead of an Anderson film, not just a small character. He fits into Anderson's world perfectly.

With a larger budget, Anderson has managed to create a much richer mise-en-scene here, with incredible production design (that boat!), uniquely beautiful Italian locations, and (as usual) carefully composed and edited set-pieces. Yet all this work in the sidelines - his "texture" - almost overpowers the "text." Anderson and his co-writer (Noah Baumbach, of "Squid and Whale" fame) spend much more time on Zissou/Murray, and his personal and professional crisis as the film unfolds. (These crises may have been going on for years.) But Zissou is never one to complain, or to state outright what his crises may be, so the more we're allowed to observe him, the better. He comes across as a smart-ass misanthrope, but actually he loves the extended family around him. Even Owen Wilson the interloper. Zissou's barely articulated sarcastic asides may be directed at himself.

The production design, the ship, and all the visual clues in the b.g. (from action figures, beat-up editing equipment, 2-d animated aquatic life in the background, etc.) all contribute to our understanding of Zissou. Perhaps at the expense of his other characters. But since Zissou's back story is more rich, contradictory, and seeped in popular and oblique cultural echoes (Jacques Clouseau, Yellow Submarine, film festivals, Cinecitta, etc.) the time is necessary, and rewarded.

Shifts in tone within the film (especially the pirate attack half-way in, the obviously "fake" fish) have bothered many viewers, but are ultimately part of the texture of the film's world view. Interestingly, I consider this film to be very sentimental, in spite of its surface "coolness" and overt "hipness." It's a film of great subtleties and buried treasures, and aesthetic grace notes that harken back to, and suggest a real fondness for a previous innocent age, when adventurers went and made nature films and had them shown on t.v. for us kids in the 60s and 70s.

SPOILERS - I talk about the thematic end of the film (if not the actual facts): Ultimately the film is an affectionate study of an aging filmmaker, not sure what his legacy is (a son? a series of "swimming" films?) who's a father figure to a ragtag collection of strays who go along with him to be a part of something, and maybe be valued, at least for a while. And Steve Zissou wouldn't have it any other way. Passing on that Zissou ring to the little kid, to make sure the legend stays alive, is the final revealing moment.

(Nice "Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai" walk thing at the end also. They're a team forever.)