jürgen fauth’s muckworld

Since I’m behind the curve on most items in this Konsum roundup, the soundtrack for today’s post is provided by Talking Heads, performing “The Great Curve” in Rome in 1980. You can download a DVD of the entire show from Dimeadozen.

4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days
As apparently the last critic in New York City to see the freshly Academy-snubbed 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, I don’t have much to add to the universal acclaim the film has garnered — only this: if you take a look at the Rotten Tomatoes page, you’ll see adjectives like “excruciating,” “harrowing,” “wearing,” “wrenching,” “bleak,” and “unblinking.” All of those fit, but it seems to me the terminology applied to blockbusters like The Bourne Ultimatum isn’t inappropriate, either: 4 Months is also an edge-of-your seat thriller.
4 luni, 3 saptamani si 2 zile. Cristian Mungiu, 2007. ****

Woman on the Beach
My favorite at NYFF06 — at least until INLAND EMPIRE showed up — is currently playing at Film Forum. Reason enough to take another look. Lo and behold, it’s still a wonderful film. J. Hoberman.
Haebyonui yoin. Hong Sang-soo, 2006. ****

The Duchess of Langeais
An About.com review of Rivette’s Balzac adaptation starring Jeanne Balibar and Guillaume Depardieu is forthcoming.
Ne touchez pas la hache. Jacques Rivette, 2007. ****

The Wire, Season 1
Yes, we’re ridiculously far behind, so I can barely participate in the conversation at this point. Anybody who’s been following this blog knows that I’m a sucker for structure, and The Wire’s intricate plot lines left my head spinning. Looking forward to catching up with the remaining four seasons, like, this weekend. ****

30 Rock
I love every single character on Tina Fey’s show, from Alec Baldwin’s head of TV and microwave programming to nutso Tracy Morgan and Kenneth the Page, and I haven’t seen a TV show that delivers as many smart laughs per minute since the first season of Arrested Development. 30 Rock makes me happy. ****

Californication
Thoroughly enjoyable HBO series about a sex-and-booze addicted writer (David Duchovny) who is still in love with his ex-wife (Natascha McElhone), and whose novel God Hates Us All was adapted into the “Tom and Katie” vehicle Crazy Little Thing Called Love. ***

Gregg Araki’s stoned follow-up to Mysterious Skin, playing now at the IFC Center and out on DVD in January, deserves a proper review on About.com. For now, a few screenshots to prove that Anna Faris’s fearless performance owns this movie the way Luisa Williams owned Day Night Day Night — only funnier. One girl’s buzzed screwball odyssey through L.A., Smiley Face had me laughing hard for the entire duration… until the most unforgivable ending since Yella ruins it all.

Smiley Face. Gregg Araki, 2007. ***

The trailer:

A computer-animation from Norway featuring a junkie elephant, a gang of rabid animal rights activists, hapless stoners, and the Lappish mafia on choppers, with the voices of Simon Pegg, Woody Harrelson, Samantha Morton, and Kyle MacLachlan? Sure, I’ll go see that. Too bad that everything that’s even remotely funny or interesting about Free Jimmy was contained in the previous sentence.

For an irreverent, free-wheeling comedy that wants to shock and amuse by breaking taboos and letting ‘er rip, the only shocking thing about Free Jimmy is that it’s almost entirely devoid of jokes. The mirthless CGI characters are uniformly ugly, and the voice talent is woefully underused. Samantha Morton, as an exaggerated cliché of the annoying vegan, only gets to mope and whine.

In the best sequence of the film, the tragically addicted elephant faces heroin withdrawal with the help of a friendly moose, but a few minutes later, he’s shot dead for one last misguided, cynical attempt at humor. A truly miserable time at the movies.

Free Jimmy. Christopher Nielsen, 2006. *

• The trailer

At a screening for Sunshine last month, Danny Boyle confessed that he felt directing romance was not his strength. After seeing his late-nineties bestseller adaptation The Beach, it’s easy to conclude that he’s on to something with that self-assessment. How else do you explain that when Leonardo DiCaprio and Virginie Ledoyen are having edenic sex on a remote Thai island, the most memorable thing about it is the Moby soundtrack?

In all fairness, Alex Garland’s tale of a utopian beach community run by an overprotective Tilda Swinton was hokum to begin with. At the time The Beach came out, I was living in my own tropical paradise of sorts, and like most things, it’s neither that good nor that bad. The Beach oversells its utopia at first, just to turn around and sell it out for the thriller finish, when sharks and evil pot farmers create trouble in paradise. But what kind of utopia doesn’t have a library or a movie theater, anyway?

The Beach. Danny Boyle, 2000. **

Incredibly engaging documentary about the writer’s writer, composer, traveler, expatriate, existentialist, kif connoisseur, husband to Jane Bowles, translator of Jean-Paul Satre, and friend of William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, W.H. Auden, and Gertrude Stein. First Run Features is releasing the DVD on July 24.

Paul Bowles: The Complete Outsider. Catherine Warnow and Regina Weinrich, 1994. ****

• Paul Bowles - Wikipedia
• Jane Bowles - Wikipedia
• The Authorized Paul Bowles Website
• The International Paul Bowles Society
• On YouTube, John Malkovich and Debra Winger have sex in the desert in a key scene from Bertolucci’s adaptation of The Sheltering Sky. In Italian.

The Internet Movie Database lists 48 adaptations of Macbeth–give or take a few TV versions–but Geoffrey Wright’s contemporary gangster take on the Scottish play doesn’t resemble any of them as much as a low-budget remake of Scarface. There’s lots of gunplay between drug dealers, the witches are a bunch of doped-up goth chicks, and some of the Bard’s best soliloquies are abbreviated in favor of extended orgies (some literal, some merely orgies of bloodletting.)

Fresh off of Slings & Arrows‘ pitch-perfect second season, in which the New Burbage Festival takes on the cursed play, Marcy and I were more than eager to see a fresh take on Mackers, but there’s precious little to praise here. In the title role, Sam Worthington gives most of his speeches in voice-over without changing his expression at all, and Victoria Hill looks like she would be more comfortable in a prime time soap than as literature’s most cruelly ambitious woman. She gets to do “Out, out damn spot” topless.

The contemporary updating–Duncan and his men are Melbourne drug lords–is supposed to make the drama more accessible but only distracts instead. (Macbeth’s gated estate bears a sign identifying it as Dunsinane, Banquo likes to ride motorbikes just so he can ride something when he gets whacked, and Burnham Wood is a logging company.)

Worst of all, the direction lacks the go-for-broke pomo gusto that made Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo & Juliet such a success: everything about this adaptation, including the slow-motion finale, feels unconvincing and lackluster, and the beauty of the language never takes wing. How could it if you cut “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” before the punchline? Stick with Orson, Roman, and Akira. Opens July 6.

Macbeth. Geoffrey Wright, 2006. *

Videos: Geoffrey Tenant takes on Macbeth at the beginning of Slings & Arrows S2E2, newsreel footage from Orson Welles’ 1936 all-black stage version, and trailers for Polanski’s 1971 and Kurosawa’s 1957 adaptations.

Marcy is taking over reviewing duties for this one, so I’ll make it short: Frank Oz’s morbid farce is the funniest movie I’ve seen this year so far. We’ll have the review up on World/Independent Film before the June 29 opening.

Death At a Funeral. Frank Oz, 2007. ****

The trailer ruins a few surprises but not all the best laughs:

From the secure, undisclosed New Jersey location where we’re weathering the storm, here’s a muckworld roundup, covering the triumphs, marriages, deaths, drug convictions, and ambivalent critical reception of five artists so famous their first names are enough.

Jami
I have neither video nor photos to prove it, but an exquisite literary time was had at KGB Bar on Friday, where Jami Attenberg celebrated tax day and the release of her Instant Love paperback together with Pauls Toutonghi (Red Weather), Darin Strauss (Chang and Eng and The Real McCoy) and Min Jin Lee (Free Food for Millionaires.) Jami read a story about anonymous sex with accountants. Darin Strauss played the Dobro, and Anya Ulinich sang the Internationale. I have it on good authority that less than half of those in attendance actually recognized the song, which indicates that it’s been a good long while since everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers. The dustbin of history, indeed.

Kermit
Finally, good news from New Orleans: Kermit Ruffins got hitched! I realize St. James Infirmary isn’t quite appropriate, but it’s the best Kermit on YouTube. Congratulations, and thanks for all the BBQ. (And thank you for the tip, Robbi Jeanne.)

Kurt
“If you read Kurt Vonnegut when you were young — read all there was of him, book after book as fast as you could the way so many of us did — you probably set him aside long ago,” begins Verylin Klinkenborg’s piece in the Times. I followed her advice and just picked up Cat’s Cradle for the first time in 15 years, and it’s even better than I remembered. Around 1999, I saw Vonnegut speak, but at that point, he wasn’t my wavelength at all and just seemed like another bitter old Luddite griping about how superior the post office was to sending email. My friends Dusty and Kathleen enjoyed hanging out with him afterwards, so perhaps it was me who was bitter. Either way, Kurt could write. John Leonard in The Nation: “God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut.” Mourning at Metafilter and on Maud Newton.

Quentin
That Cleopatra rant was my last word on Grindhouse, but there are a few more pieces worth pointing out: Filmbrain, whom I had the pleasure of meeting last week, thinks Quentin needs a girlfriend, and the Looker agrees with my assessment that Death Proof is just way dull. At The House Next Door, Keith Uhlich and Matt Zoller Seitz have a debate that’s twice as exciting as the actual movie–and almost as long.

Trey
Trey pleads guilty. IANAL, but five years probation with mandatory prison in case he slips sounds like a tough deal. Hang in there, Trey. We love you. Push on ’till the day and don’t you listen to that evil Amy Winehouse. A video of better times: