Three day weekend = Pile of movies
So the MLK weekend kicked off with “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” on DVD. As you may have guessed, it is depressing, but it’s also the antidote to all those goddamned doctor-hospital TV shows. In it, a 62-year-old pensioner fades from life, and we watch him go through the emergency world. He throws up, calls an ambulance, and the ball gets rolling. It’s his bad luck that he’s gonna die the same night as a massive bus accident. The movie’s approach is hands-off; we observe but do not interfere or comment. Every ounce of contrivance and cheap confrontation has been drained out. Every story and every movie has a point-of-view or a case to make, but “Lazarescu” is so restrained that you almost think it doesn’t. Every emergency worker is beat and on edge and everyone gives Lazarescu a hard time for drinking. Half the doctors-nurses-neighbors give Lazarescu a rigmarole and would rather argue with each other than help him, the other half are sincere but exasperated. The handheld camera can get a little old, but it seems to reflect the turmoil of Lazarescu’s insides.
“The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” is a human drama from Hungary (or Romania or the Czech Republic or something, one of those garlic-eating hard-drinking OrthoCathSlim countries), so it’s never in danger of being too slick. Saturday began a trio of high-polish year-end productions - every frame shimmers with the potential of digital effects, no color scheme is without hefty doses of blue-gray, and every composer and sound guy busts his ass to give his money’s worth.
So Saturday was “Pan’s Labyrinth” and, I have to say, I was disappointed. Oh, God, I wanted to like this movie more. It’s essentially “The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe” remade with bugs and gore. That’s still an improvement though. The aftermath of the Spanish Civil War replaces WWII and the Fascists replace the Nazis. Your jaw will drop with how uninventive and one-dimensionally evil the villain (Sergi Lopez) is; he’s the kind of heavy who should only show up for a five minute cameo to contrast the main, layered villain. This seems especially lazy, considering all the humanism Hemingway crammed into the Spanish Civil War in “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”
As the mindlessly loathsome Fascist and the rebels alternately hassle lonely girl Ofelia she flees into a fantasy world where the fawn Pan has laid three tests for her to prove that she is really the princess of the underworld (she flees from fascism to a monarchy - say what?). Something bad happens, she imagines herself somewhere else that symbolically represents what's going on, okay, get it-got it-good, move on. Still, director Guillermo Del Toro displays considerable visual flair in several places. The highpoint is the eyeless, loose-skinned baby-eating monstrosity with stumpy legs. The fawn himself is part-man, part-deer, and a lot of tree. As per usual, Del Toro infuses the movie with Catholic imagery, from the Notre Dame windows in the underworld’s palace, to the baby-young mother-father God tombstone.
“Pan’s Labyrinth” is also an exceptionally noisy film, cluttered with insect sounds, creaking floors, crackling fires, and crunchy clothing, all underneath the score. Women swallowing and pursing lips is popular, too, although they don’t reach the pathological level of “Volver.”
Comparing “Pan’s Labyrinth” with Del Toro’s previous America features “Hellboy” and “Blade II” really is apples and oranges, although it’s fun to think about the show-stopping perfection of Hellboy’s self-application of a power-sander to his forehead.
Sunday, Sunday, Sunday only was “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer,” the best theater movie I saw in the weekend. It’s an extremely valiant effort to visualize the scent-oriented novel “Das Parfum” by Patrick Suskind, over which Stanley Kubrick and Tim Burton both threw in the towel. Both the novel and the film follow an Enlightenment-era killer in a detached, third-person style. The novel’s tone treats the people of the past with condescension, which is at first jarring, but then we realize that it’s Suskind’s way of having his cake and eat it too: he is simultaneously detached from his lead, yet he is able to convey the killer’s hatred of the world. The movie, directed by “Run Lola Run” Tom Tykwer, wisely dumps this tone, which is tolerable on the page but not so good on the screen.
The killer (Ben Whishaw) is a dirt-poor pre-Revolution Parisian, born in the muck with a superhuman sense of smell and no moral compass. Naturally he turns to perfumery, the way a man with exceptional hearing turns to music or a man with great sight becomes a painter. His quest is to capture the scent of everything; as his mentor (Dustin Hoffman) puts it, the scent of something is its soul. The movie is set in the Enlightenment because that was when Europe began to wonder if there is no God. Without another world after this one, the eventual disappearance of everything is terrifying and depressing. As Hoffman tells of how a Pharaoh’s millennia-old perfume smelled magnificent and was then lost, the killer’s face crumples in heartbreak. He MUST record everything.
The killer doesn’t start a God-complex, but the movie puts him on mountaintops, in front of crosses, and in a communion…of sorts. If life cannot be eternal, then the ability to record it is the next best thing. But the killer’s quest to record turns to a quest to make a perfume that will convince others that he is the most amazing person they have ever met. If you’re bothered by how preposterous this is, then you don’t really have any business in a movie theater anyway.
Some of “Perfume’s” best scenes hearken back to “Blow-Up” and “The Conversation,” in which we see a man content in his lonely work. We follow the killer not so much through stalking his victims but through every step of capturing their scent off their corpses, and every step of his training leading up to it. So often movies gloss over how things actually work, but here we see the killer learning the ins and outs of perfumery.
Hoffman has fun as his arrogant mentor and Alan Rickman plays the closet thing to the killer’s nemesis. (I spent the entire novel waiting for the killer to lock horns with a man with no nose.) As the killer, Whishaw is rough, myopic, asexual, an aggressive physical performance with no speechifying or Oscar clips.
The wife and I wrapped up the weekend with “Children of Men,” and I’m still not sure what I think of it. I guess I’ll call it a too-perfect middlebrow genre pic, in which the chase is slowed down to make room for political-topical talk whose main purpose is to sound political and topical. The movie wears its liberalism on its sleeve but never chokes on it, but the point is to see it more than do anything with it. It’s the new Alfonse Cuaron movie (“Harry Potter 3,” “Your Mother the Tambourine”) set in a future where mankind has been sterile for 18 years, until Clive Owen comes across a young pregnant woman he must transport from Fascist Britain to the benign Human Project. Given the preview, there are surprisingly few blows from the poignant stick.
But those long takes, breathtaking and elaborate! An entire car ride, ambush, and murder is delivered in a single continuous take. Clive Owen sneaks down from his bedroom, outside, and we watch what he sees through a window, all in one take. Last but not least is a virtuoso footchase through a combat zone, as Owen ducks bullets and tanks down a bullet-riddled street. Clive Owen and Chiwetel Ejiofor are as good as ever and Michael Caine does his mentor schtick. I can see exactly why it’s being mistaken for a great movie - there are smatterings of pseudo-profound talk but all the explosions still happen at the right times. There’s literally an anti-Bush bumper sticker, which seemed to fit at the time, but strikes me as such a cheap stab at prescience in retrospect. If there’s a connecting factor between “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “Children of Men,” other then the coincidence that both directors come from Mexico, it’s that it’s easy to see why they’re so highly-praised: they do most of the audience’s work for it.
So that was my weekend.
“The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” is a human drama from Hungary (or Romania or the Czech Republic or something, one of those garlic-eating hard-drinking OrthoCathSlim countries), so it’s never in danger of being too slick. Saturday began a trio of high-polish year-end productions - every frame shimmers with the potential of digital effects, no color scheme is without hefty doses of blue-gray, and every composer and sound guy busts his ass to give his money’s worth.
So Saturday was “Pan’s Labyrinth” and, I have to say, I was disappointed. Oh, God, I wanted to like this movie more. It’s essentially “The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe” remade with bugs and gore. That’s still an improvement though. The aftermath of the Spanish Civil War replaces WWII and the Fascists replace the Nazis. Your jaw will drop with how uninventive and one-dimensionally evil the villain (Sergi Lopez) is; he’s the kind of heavy who should only show up for a five minute cameo to contrast the main, layered villain. This seems especially lazy, considering all the humanism Hemingway crammed into the Spanish Civil War in “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”
As the mindlessly loathsome Fascist and the rebels alternately hassle lonely girl Ofelia she flees into a fantasy world where the fawn Pan has laid three tests for her to prove that she is really the princess of the underworld (she flees from fascism to a monarchy - say what?). Something bad happens, she imagines herself somewhere else that symbolically represents what's going on, okay, get it-got it-good, move on. Still, director Guillermo Del Toro displays considerable visual flair in several places. The highpoint is the eyeless, loose-skinned baby-eating monstrosity with stumpy legs. The fawn himself is part-man, part-deer, and a lot of tree. As per usual, Del Toro infuses the movie with Catholic imagery, from the Notre Dame windows in the underworld’s palace, to the baby-young mother-father God tombstone.
“Pan’s Labyrinth” is also an exceptionally noisy film, cluttered with insect sounds, creaking floors, crackling fires, and crunchy clothing, all underneath the score. Women swallowing and pursing lips is popular, too, although they don’t reach the pathological level of “Volver.”
Comparing “Pan’s Labyrinth” with Del Toro’s previous America features “Hellboy” and “Blade II” really is apples and oranges, although it’s fun to think about the show-stopping perfection of Hellboy’s self-application of a power-sander to his forehead.
Sunday, Sunday, Sunday only was “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer,” the best theater movie I saw in the weekend. It’s an extremely valiant effort to visualize the scent-oriented novel “Das Parfum” by Patrick Suskind, over which Stanley Kubrick and Tim Burton both threw in the towel. Both the novel and the film follow an Enlightenment-era killer in a detached, third-person style. The novel’s tone treats the people of the past with condescension, which is at first jarring, but then we realize that it’s Suskind’s way of having his cake and eat it too: he is simultaneously detached from his lead, yet he is able to convey the killer’s hatred of the world. The movie, directed by “Run Lola Run” Tom Tykwer, wisely dumps this tone, which is tolerable on the page but not so good on the screen.
The killer (Ben Whishaw) is a dirt-poor pre-Revolution Parisian, born in the muck with a superhuman sense of smell and no moral compass. Naturally he turns to perfumery, the way a man with exceptional hearing turns to music or a man with great sight becomes a painter. His quest is to capture the scent of everything; as his mentor (Dustin Hoffman) puts it, the scent of something is its soul. The movie is set in the Enlightenment because that was when Europe began to wonder if there is no God. Without another world after this one, the eventual disappearance of everything is terrifying and depressing. As Hoffman tells of how a Pharaoh’s millennia-old perfume smelled magnificent and was then lost, the killer’s face crumples in heartbreak. He MUST record everything.
The killer doesn’t start a God-complex, but the movie puts him on mountaintops, in front of crosses, and in a communion…of sorts. If life cannot be eternal, then the ability to record it is the next best thing. But the killer’s quest to record turns to a quest to make a perfume that will convince others that he is the most amazing person they have ever met. If you’re bothered by how preposterous this is, then you don’t really have any business in a movie theater anyway.
Some of “Perfume’s” best scenes hearken back to “Blow-Up” and “The Conversation,” in which we see a man content in his lonely work. We follow the killer not so much through stalking his victims but through every step of capturing their scent off their corpses, and every step of his training leading up to it. So often movies gloss over how things actually work, but here we see the killer learning the ins and outs of perfumery.
Hoffman has fun as his arrogant mentor and Alan Rickman plays the closet thing to the killer’s nemesis. (I spent the entire novel waiting for the killer to lock horns with a man with no nose.) As the killer, Whishaw is rough, myopic, asexual, an aggressive physical performance with no speechifying or Oscar clips.
The wife and I wrapped up the weekend with “Children of Men,” and I’m still not sure what I think of it. I guess I’ll call it a too-perfect middlebrow genre pic, in which the chase is slowed down to make room for political-topical talk whose main purpose is to sound political and topical. The movie wears its liberalism on its sleeve but never chokes on it, but the point is to see it more than do anything with it. It’s the new Alfonse Cuaron movie (“Harry Potter 3,” “Your Mother the Tambourine”) set in a future where mankind has been sterile for 18 years, until Clive Owen comes across a young pregnant woman he must transport from Fascist Britain to the benign Human Project. Given the preview, there are surprisingly few blows from the poignant stick.
But those long takes, breathtaking and elaborate! An entire car ride, ambush, and murder is delivered in a single continuous take. Clive Owen sneaks down from his bedroom, outside, and we watch what he sees through a window, all in one take. Last but not least is a virtuoso footchase through a combat zone, as Owen ducks bullets and tanks down a bullet-riddled street. Clive Owen and Chiwetel Ejiofor are as good as ever and Michael Caine does his mentor schtick. I can see exactly why it’s being mistaken for a great movie - there are smatterings of pseudo-profound talk but all the explosions still happen at the right times. There’s literally an anti-Bush bumper sticker, which seemed to fit at the time, but strikes me as such a cheap stab at prescience in retrospect. If there’s a connecting factor between “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “Children of Men,” other then the coincidence that both directors come from Mexico, it’s that it’s easy to see why they’re so highly-praised: they do most of the audience’s work for it.
So that was my weekend.