jürgen fauth’s muckworld

A guy walks into un bar a pute and tells a beautiful prostitute that he just won the lottery. Would she live with him for a hundred thousand a month? Of course she would. Problem is, the guy (Bernard Campan) has a weak heart, and Daniela, the hooker, is played by Monica Belluci. His doctor warns him: “How many times a day will your heart rate climb to 140? I cannot condone it!” Another problem comes in the hulking shape of Gerard Depardieu — he’s Daniela’s James Lipton. How Much Do You Love Me?, now available on DVD from Strand Releasing, is a sexy, silly romp that, like much of Blier’s work, straddles the line between affecting and absurd, often to hilarious effect.

Combien tu m’aimes? Bertrand Blier, 2005. ***

I’m behind the curve on David Cronenberg’s Russian mobster tale of sin and redemption, so I’ll make this short. At any rate, I can’t discuss the narrative slights-of-hand I admired most without spoiling the film — so let’s just say that the acting by Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts, Vincent Cassel, and Armin Mueller-Stahl is top notch, the violence and spilled bodily fluids are uniquely Cronenbergian, and the script is a wonder of tightly wound efficiency. You can tattoo that on your kneecaps.

Eastern Promises. David Cronenberg, 2007. ****

• Eastern Promises on Rotten Tomatoes
• Jordan and Kerry on David Cronenberg
• The trailer

Jude Law looks a lot better when he’s lit by the Mediterranean sun, wearing a striped t-shirt, and steering a sail boat than in a suit and tie under phosphorescent lights in a London architect’s office. This is only one of the many lessons to be drawn from Anthony Mighella’s first feature as sole writer/director since Truly Madly Deeply (1991). He was better off adapting Ondaatje and Highsmith: the convoluted, contrived plot of this class struggle/domestic relationship psychobabble adultery crapfest is almost as lame as the dialogue. Juliette Binoche (hampered by a Sophie grade Eastern European accent) and Robin Wright Penn manage occasional moments of grace, but it’s Vera Farmiga, in her all-too brief scenes as a thieving King’s Cross hooker, who gives the hackneyed proceedings the only glimpses of real vitality.

Breaking and Entering. Anthony Minghella, 2006. *

• Rotten Tomatoes: 33%

Apparently, Japan is home to an underground industry of “pink films,” a genre of softcore porn that is still exhibited in theaters. Genitals are strictly taboo, but from the evidence of this film, generous helpings of cum and warped political allegories reenacted with GI Joe dolls are just dandy.

The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai is a repurposed version of a pink movie called Horny Home Tutor: Teacher’s Love Juice, in which a role-playing prostitute (Kuroda Emi) is shot smack-dab in the forehead by a North Korean assassin/rapist. Instead of killing her, the bullet gets lodged in her brain and turns her into a genius who gets off at the mere mention of Noam Chomsky. In her handbag, Sachiko finds the cloned trigger finger of George W. Bush, who appears to her at the bottom of a water bucket, and later, on a rooftop, where her bush is fingered while a deranged version of the infamous Mission Accomplished speech plays on a TV that materialized out of nowhere. (It’s the best masked impersonation of a U.S. president since Ultrachrist!)

After that, things get really strange. I might have fallen asleep and dreamt the part about the wind-up toy that saves the world from nuclear holocaust, but it’s clear that The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai is some sort of obscene, elaborate joke at the expense of the Bush Administration. With its flashes of violence and gross-out humor, endless sex scenes, and bizarro political commentary, it’s the trashy midnight weird-out that Grindhouse could have been. The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai is currently playing at Cinema Village.

Hatsujô kateikyôshi: sensei no aijiru. Mitsuru Meike, 2003. ***

• The Glamorous Life Of Sachiko Hanai at Rotten Tomatoes
• Manohla Dargis’ Review
• Official Palm Pictures site, with trailer

When the director of Showgirls, Basic Instinct, and Robocop takes on a story that begins like The Diary of Anne Frank, you can bet your sweet ass that the heroine is going to shoot and screw her way out of trouble until she finally makes it to a kibbutz. Black Book, which did big business in Holland and arrives here with the cachet of an acclaimed foreign film about the Holocaust, would be plain-old kitsch if it didn’t cash in on the suffering of millions to get its low-brow action-adventure kicks. The word for this is Shoahxploitation.

How titillating is Black Book? At cliffhanger pace, Rachel (Carice van Houten) flees from her bombed-out hiding place, and Verhoeven runs down a comprehensive checklist of World War II tropes: endless narrow escapes through attics, trunks, and caskets, barges that get the Apocalypse Now treatment, resistance airdrops, backroom operations, midnight raids, botched kidnappings, prison breakouts, firing squads, and tense passport controls: “Papiere, bitte!” Oh no, we’re carrying secret microphones and suitcases stuffed with Jewish gold!

Plenty of machine-gun violence leads to gleeful close-ups of mass graves, and Verhoeven doesn’t skimp on the sex, either. When good men are imprisoned, it’s clear that somebody must sleep with the occupiers to free them. Graphic Jew-on-German action follows, and in one extended scene, our dedicated heroine colors her pubic hair to fool the Obersturmbannführer (Sebastian Koch). In turn, drunken fascist swine piss in front of their whores, and our heroine has to vomit a little. And you know if there’s a shitbucket, Verhoeven won’t be satisfied with a simple close-up: somebody has to dump it out over someone else, preferably a naked woman.

I can’t even begin to tell you how tired I am of movies where the murderous villains carry my father’s name, and the Nazis in Black Book are about as three-dimensional as the ones in Indiana Jones. With Starship Troopers, Verhoeven himself created a compelling satire of fascism. There is a entire tradition of very good and very necessary movies about the Holocaust and the Resistance, but is it asking too much that they grow more insightful rather than more graphic and exploitative? Black Book pretends to bring news about duplicity and treachery and the odd bedfellows that wartime makes, but it’s obvious that nothing gets Verhoeven as excited as the cold steel of a Nazi gun against hard Jewish nipples.

Zwartboek. Paul Verhoeven, 2006. *

• Here’s the trailer

Atrocious. If we’d seen it in time, this movie would have been assured one of the top spots on the list of worst movies of 2006. It’s not just that Scarlett Johannson and Josh Hartnett are fatally miscast–nobody here is pulling off the 40s tough guy/dame thing. Hillary Swank does a mediocre Kate Hepburn impersonation, Aaron Eckhard flounders, and Scarlett certainly ain’t Lauren Bacall. It’s like watching Brick–or Bugsy Malone–except that nobody bothered to clue in the actors. The only scenes that aren’t flat-out laughable are the black-and-white bits with Mia Kirshner.

The Black Dahlia. Brian De Palma, 2006. *

• Rotten Tomatoes: 36%
• Matt Zoller Seitz finds plenty to admire

[tags]noir, thriller, murder, brian de palma, prostitution, cops, los angeles, film, 1 star, hillary swank, katherine hepburn, aaron eckhard, scarlett johannson, lauren bacall, josh hartnett, james ellroy, mia kirshner[/tags]