jürgen fauth’s muckworld

Marcy’s got this one covered: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon
is a charming homage to the 1956 French classic by Albert Lamorisse and
an intimate portrait of a unique Paris family. A blond Juliette Binoche
stars as Suzanne, an accomplished puppeteer who a hires a Taiwanese
nanny (Song Fang) for her gentle seven-year-old son Simon (Simon
Iteanu). Read Marcy’s review of Flight of the Red Balloon.

Le Voyage du ballon rouge. Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2007. ***

• All posts related to the New York Film Festvial

Been meaning to make a top ten list of the best films about filmmaking for a while, and Truffaut’s love letter to the movies remains firmly perched in the top spot. It’s so overstuffed with large and small disasters, throwaway gags, and winking allusions to great films that makes rewatching it an endless pleasure. With Jacqueline Bisset, Jean-Pierre Leaud, Truffaut himself, and Nathalie Baye as the production’s R2-D2.

La Nuit américaine. François Truffaut, 1973. *****

[tags]film, 5 stars, francois truffaut, jacqueline bisset, jean-pierre leaud, nathalie baye, filmmaking, france[/tags]

Still getting my head around this making-of documentary on Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, which turned out to be both more and less disturbing than expected. Less, because the catastrophes that bedevilled Herzog’s production in the Peruvian jungle aren’t quite on the scale of Apocalypse Now (as chronicled in Hearts of Darkness), and because Kinski is making more and more sense to me. In Burden of Dreams, he appears as the sanest person around–and that in itself is mighty disturbing. The real maniac here is Herzog, even though the film barely includes anyone else’s point of view. In the end, Herzog gives a rousing speech about his responsibility to make movies (”If we don’t articulate our dreams, we might as well be cows in a field”)–but it’s not his own life he risked trying to pull a boat over a mountain, and others had to die. The Criterion DVD comes with Les Blank’s short film “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.”

Burden of Dreams. Les Blank, 1982. ****

[tags]film, 4 stars, german, peru, werner herzog, klaus kinski, fitzcarraldo, dreams, documentary, filmmaking[/tags]

A textbook, essentially, by the director of Sweet Smell of Success Alexander Mackendrick. This caught my interest because of the matter-of-fact talk about film grammar in the second half, but the first half was almost more interesting: I didn’t expect much new from the chapters on constructing narrative, but there’s lots of good practical advice with a different emphasis from what you find in most fiction textbooks. Recommended.

Every hormone-addled boy wants to join a rock band because “the chicks are great.” But those kids don’t know that becoming a director is an even better way to get laid. This biography, by a bunch of Cahiers du cinema writers, drives home that point beautifully, and it names names: Jeanne Moreau, Claude Jade, Fanny Ardant, Catherine Deneuve, and pretty much every other beautiful woman who ever acted for Truffaut.

If that’s not inspiring, the book traces FT’s growth from street punk and syphilitic deserter to Oscar-winning independent auteur with admirable style. The part about his flame-out with Godard is fascinating, but I have to admit that I had to skim the clinical and terribly depressing description of his last brain-tumor infested months.