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:

Bill Campbell as all-American hero rocking an art-deco jet-pack, Jennifer Connelly in 30s evening gowns, Timothy Dalton as scenery-chewing Errol-Flynn stand-in onboard burning Nazi zeppelins — The Rocketeer is good old-fashioned serial-style action-adventure full of pulpy twists tempered by a wholesome gee-whiz attitude. Based on the comic book by Dave Stevens, the character also inspired a Cinemaware video game I used to play on my Amiga (screenshots). Not to be confused with Raketenmensch Tyrone Slothrop.

The Rocketeer. Joe Johnston, 1991. ***

Here’s a climactic scene at the Griffith Observatory:

I’m not fanboy enough to give you an exhaustive rundown of all the scenes Ridley Scott recut, reshot, rescored, and reshuffled to create this “ultimate” version of his 1982 scifi milestone. Rest assured, that list will be online within hours of the December 18 release of the much-anticipated 5-DVD set. But I can tell you that Blade Runner, the movie that defined the cyberpunk look long before William Gibson wrote the opening lines to Neuromancer, has never looked or worked better. I had the pleasure of seeing it on a big screen for the first time in hi-def digital projection at the Walter Reade Theater, and I can’t remember the last time a scene sent chills through me like Roy’s “C-Beams” speech.

Yes, the unicorn is still there, the ending is that of the 1992 director’s cut, and apparently, there’s new music by Vangelis. The sequence where Deckard takes down Zhora has been redone substantially, and the shot in which Roy lets the dove fly is definitely new. There may have been a few new CGI vehicles, too. But everything is done tastefully and subtly; nobody here shoots first who didn’t shoot first before, and those Atari billboards are still were they used to be.

The new cut confirms Blade Runner’s status as a major achievement and the high water mark of Ridley Scott’s career. It’s also fun to see a younger Edward James Olmos as Gaff in a movie that his new show Battlestar Galactica owes so much to conceptually. The Final Cut will screen at the NYFF on September 29 and comes to the Ziegfield for one week starting October 5. Go if you can.

Blade Runner: The Final Cut. Ridley Scott, 1982/2007. *****

• On the Edge of Blade Runner - Documentary on Google Video
• Blade Runner on Wikipedia
• Metafilter on The Final Cut
• A trailer for this version:

How do we relax from the New York Film Festival’s two-movies-a-day schedule? With an old classic, of course, courtesy of the Criterion Collection. Jim Jarmusch’s episodic 1991 taxi cab confidential moves around the globe while Tom Waits growls and hasn’t lost a bit of its spirit and charm. Especially after seeing a film as cynical as Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, I was struck by how good-natured and kind Jarmusch’s vision was.

In the confined spaces of cabs in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome, and Helsinki, strangers are meeting strangers and, with the exception of the “bishop” who has the ill fate of running into Roberto Benigni, good things happen. I was especially pleased to note connections between the episodes and to other movies that I’d previously missed. Since this is a Criterion DVD, I shouldn’t have to mention that the quality of the transfer is first rate. Jarmusch won’t watch his own movies after they are completed, so there is no director’s commentary, but he does answer fan questions. Other extras include commentary by the DP and location sound mixer, a Belgian TV interview with Jarmusch, and essays by Paul Auster and others.

Night on Earth. Jim Jarmusch, 1991. *****

Billy Wilder’s timeless noir about the tragedy of fame attained and denied provides up-to-the-minute commentary on the Passion of Lindsay and her latest closeup, but that’s not the angle I’d like to pursue today. Instead, let me draw your attention to a connection that took me by complete surprise last night (yes, I screamed.) Compare and contrast:

Sunset Blvd.:

INLAND EMPIRE:

The film-within-a-film Gloria Swanson and William Holden are watching is a 1929 silent called Queen Kelly. The actress in the movie is in fact a younger Swanson, and Queen Kelly is directed by Erich von Stroheim, who also plays Norma Desmond’s storied butler Max in Sunset Blvd. It’s a delicious bit of recycled cinema that functions as inside joke and helps deepen Norma Desmond’s character.

Lynch’s reasons for quoting both movies halfway through INLAND EMPIRE are more obscure. Because the character, known as the Lost Girl (Karolina Gruszka), is speaking Polish, the caption from Queen Kelly is rendered in subtitles. Without knowing anything about its provenance, I found that it summed up the dark undercurrents of INLAND EMPIRE so well that I used it as a title for my original review.

On frieze.com, Kristin M. Jones writes that “[the Lost Girl] may represent the souls of ambitious actresses stolen by their dreams.” The intrepid interpreters on the INLAND EMPIRE forums believe that the scene is a good starting off point for theories about the film — after all, both Sunset Blvd. and INLAND EMPIRE concern Hollywood stars in spectacular houses with strange butlers, champagne and caviar, and movies that have the power to kill. Like Nikki Grace, Norma Desmond is “a woman in trouble.” Come to think of it, so is Linsday Lohan.

Sunset Blvd. Billy Wilder, 1950. *****

• INLAND EMPIRE on DVD
• Ten minutes of Queen Kelly on YouTube
• Sunset Boulevard on Wikipedia

“That’s a lot of entertainment for five grand!” Philip Marlowe’s talking about the questionable spectacle of a bunch of gangsters (including an uncredited Arnold Schwarzenegger) stripping to make a point, but it applies equally to Robert Altman’s time-traveling Chandler adaptation as a whole. Mumbling Elliott Gould is miles apart from Humphrey Bogart but drop dead cool in his own inimitable way, and all of 1970s Los Angeles emerges as his deceptively sunny antagonist.

The Long Goodbye. Robert Altman, 1973. ****

• Roger Ebert
• Terrence Rafferty revists The Long Goodbye
• Terrence Rafferty on the occasion of Altman’s 81st birthday
• Ill-Informed Gadfly
• Christopher Sieving at PopMatters
• The Long Goodbye at Wikipedia

The trailer:

I’m hitting the road for a quarter of Phish in a minute and seeing QT’s latest tonight (updates on Twitter), so I’ll make this quick. Charles Burnett’s classic of black independent cinema has finally arrived in theaters thirty years after it’s been made, but to be honest, I don’t think the years have treated it kindly. No doubt, in 1977, this must have been an extraordinary and unique film. The artistry and historical value is undeniable, but it didn’t connect with me in a real emotional way and we’ve seen most of its moves many times in the interim. We’ve seen David Gordon Green’s George Washington, we’ve seen urban ennui and indie verite understatement, and we’ve seen Sarah Vaughn been used better by Tom Tykwer–not to speak of the slaughterhouse floor, which we’ve just seen more than enough of (and in color!) in Fast Food Nation and Our Daily Bread. Still, something about this is stuck in my craw and I might give it another spin soon.

Killer of Sheep. Charles Burnett, 1977. ***

• Ed Gonzalez adores it
• Milestone Films
• Rotten Tomatoes