jürgen fauth’s muckworld

From highly enjoyable exercises in pop style (8 Women) to over-conceptualized constructs that left me completely cold (5×2), Francois Ozon’s films are hit-or-miss. Misgivings about his adaptation of the novel by Elizabeth Taylor arose the moment the snooty Berlin box office dude made fun of our choice of movie — was this really going to be “Rosamunde Pilcher hoch zehn,” a terrible melodrama that we hadn’t packed enough tissues for?

Yes and no. The story of Angel Deverell (Romola Garai), the precocious grocer’s daughter who transforms herself into a successful writer only to lose it all to love, war, and the unpredictable currents of taste is indeed what we used to call a Schmonzette, an overblown melodrama that should be the object of our ridicule, and that of ticket takers everywhere. Anybody with a hankering for rustling fabric, lavish sets, trembling bosoms and tragic turns of events is certainly welcome to enjoy Angel at face value.

But Ozon manages to keep a generally winking attitude even while he’s presenting a fully functional romantic epic. Through the use of rear-projection, a lush score, and especially Romola Garai’s finely tuned performance, Angel has its melodramatic cake and keeps its post-ironic distance, too. The movie itself very much resembles the preposterous stories with which Angel Deverell makes her fortune — and is thus also a target for the snide comments of smarter people within the movie. With the help of an editor’s wife played by Charlotte Rampling and grim painter Esmé (Michael Fassbender), Ozon provides sophisticated commentary on the film from within the film. As recreation of a (mostly) defunct genre, Angel feels less self-conscious than Todd Haynes’ faux-Sirk Far From Heaven; thanks to Romola Garai, it is also more engaging.

Angel does not have a U.S. release date yet.

Angel. Francois Ozon, 2007. ****

The trailer:

Twice a year, Berlin celebrates the “long night of museums,” during which over 100 of the city’s galleries, churches, memorials and other cultural institutions open their doors for eight hours, from six to two a.m., all for the price of a single ticket. Shuttle buses connect several areas around town, and most venues offer special tours, musical acts, installations, and people in period costumes. I was reminded of Bonnaroo by the festival atmosphere and overwhelming amount of stuff on display — there’s enough there for several long weeks of museums.

We began at the Martin-Gropius-Bau with Scythian mummies and an exhilarating Cindy Sherman retrospective, and stopped by the Abgeordnetenhaus where Prussians played the flute and marched into the state parliament. At Potsdamer Platz, we discovered that the Filmmuseum’s “lounge” was awfully misnamed, hopped a bus that took a tortured route to Schloss Charlottenburg, and had Weinschorle in the Ehrenhof. The inside of the Schloss contains awesome splendors, including an incredibly garish collection of Chinese porcelain and a glorious chapel. Unfortunately, an ornery Prussian demanded special tickets for access to the gardens, and we passed.

Back at Museumsinsel, the Altes Museum in front of the Dom was dramatically lit while crowds on the lawn blissed out to amplified classical music. Somehow we found ourselves in the catacombs and made our way to the newly reopened Bode- Museum, which impressed us with a spectacular display of medieval sculptures, many of them in wild color. After a quick run through the Pergamon and the Egyptian collection of the Altes Musem, we were ready to wind down with the festival’s 10th anniversary cake at the Podewil’sche Palais afterparty, where Afri-Cola screened short films and the champagne was free. More photos on flickr.

An Indie comedy from New Zealand that reeks of the Sundance workshop where it was conceived by writer/director Taika Cohen — which is to say it features a road trip, a quirky dysfunctional family, and a couple of awkward lovers who dress up in silly costumes. Eagle vs. Shark tastes an awful lot like Napoleon Dynamite meets Little Miss Sunshine — with Kiwis!

Lily (Loren Horsley) is a gangly young woman who lives with her brother and has an inexplicable crush on Jarrod (Jemaine Clement), a nerdy loser who makes his own candles. They’re both awkward, they both work at the mall, they have the same upper-lip mole, and they both say “cool” a lot. Their favorite animals, respectively, provide the film’s title.

After Lily and Jarrod agree to have cool sex, the action shifts to Jarrod’s home town, where he plans to take revenge on a former high school bully–by challenging him to a fight. While Jarrod trains with cool nunchaks, Lily meets his family, among them an uncle and aunt who sell training suits out of Jerrod’s old room, which is why our lovers have to pitch a tent in the garden.

And so forth. Eagle vs. Shark may sound entirely predictable, and it’s true that it doesn’t add much to the quirky romance sub-genre, but the film does have one major asset: Loren Horsley. The face of Lily, with its big moist eyes and lopsided smile, is winning enough to make the derivative details surrounding her come alive. Opens June 22.

Eagle vs Shark. Taika Cohen, 2007. **

• The trailer:

For some reason I was under the impression that Cecil B. DeMille’s Cleopatra was silent, but of course it’s not. How else could Claudette Colbert trade cheesy come-ons with noble Romans? Production design is sumptuous, and since this film is much shorter than Mankiewicz’s 1963 version with Liz Taylor (or Rome, for that matter), the plot zips by: the Queen of Egypt has just barely finished rolling out of the rug when a bearded Brutus decides to rid the republic of J.C., here comes the Queen’s barge, Actium, the asps! Colbert is more flapper than ancient monarch, and that’s fine by me–she may well be my favorite Cleopatra yet. Whenever she’s off-screen, the movie drags, but her seductions of Julius Caesar and Marc Antony are great camp.

Cleopatra. Cecil B. DeMille, 1934. ****

• Filmsite.org transcribes some of the dialogue

Prompted by the grand finale of Rome, we took another look at Cleopatra, which is one of those movies I can rewatch every few years. Compare-and-contrast is a fun enough game, and Marcy, who was never entirely sure which of the HBO characters were fictional, was entertained by noting differences in motivation and plot. Every frame of Cleopatra must have cost more than an entire episode of Rome, but the storytelling is much more contemporary on HBO. The movie nearly bankrupted Fox because it was designed to trump TV by outspending it. Forty years later, it has been shown up by… a TV show. But the images are still twice as wide, and the characters twice as grand.

Here’s what fascinated me, though: the palatial sets, outlandish backdrops, and outsized drama of Cleopatra resemble another, much more recent epic about larger-than-life figures. Along with forties serials, The Hidden Fortress, Ray Harryhausen and all the other usual suspects, there is no doubt that the Cinemascope epics of the fifties and sixties, and specifically Cleopatra, served as a blueprint for the Star Wars films. Archetypes in ever-morphing hairdos and caped costumes acting out eternal tragedies and reciting awkward, overwritten lines of dialogue — especially Revenge of the Sith, the episode in which the galactic shit hits the fan, is the spiritual and cinematic heir of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s four-and-a-half-hour epic.

Read on for more about Star Wars, Grindhouse, and why Jar-Jar Binks is cooler than Stuntman Mike. Also, lots more screenshots.

Read the rest of this entry »

New York Film Festival press screenings started today, so for the next four weeks, I’ll be at the Walter Reade. So far, not so good: Lincoln Center is under construction, the suave and soothing presence of Graham Leggat is painfully absent, the breakfast spread has been scaled back catastrophically, brand-new security guys kept asking me if I had checked in yet, and the first movie was a terrible disappointment. Off the top of my head, I can think of 50 reasons why Sofia Coppola’s poppy Versailles biopic doesn’t work, but for now, let’s just say that it’s every bit as decadent and clueless as its main character.

Update: my About.com review is now online.

Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola, 2006. *

[tags]1 star, film, nyff, sofia coppola, kirsten dunst, jason schwartzman, versailles, decadence, costumes, revolution, cake[/tags]