jürgen fauth’s muckworld

Words fail me. There’s a certain kind of twisted logic to it: a novel about the persistence of love has turned, in the hands of a mediocre director, into a a campy, puffed-up piece of rotten Oscar bait, a movie of such boundless badness that it would take somebody with a Nobel Prize in literature to truly fathom the extent of its wretchedness. Gabriel García Márquez’s 1985 novel is an impossibly sustained lyrical romance of unfulfilled love that stretches over decades, set among the lush vegetation and brimming cities of the Colombian coast. With his adaptation, Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) demonstrates that there’s more to Garcia Marquez than extravagant plotting: without the master’s ineffable touch, even his most fertile fictions turn to dust.

The story’s all there: in the late 19th century, the young clerk Florentino Ariza (Javier Bardem) falls in desperate love with the beautiful Fermina (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), but her father (John Leguziamo) interferes, and she marries Dr. Urbino (Benjamin Bratt) instead. Undaunted, Florentino decides to wait for her, no matter how long it will take. In the novel, Garcia Marquez fills the intervening years with outrageous and obsessively detailed anecdotes and labyrinthine detours rendered in extraordinary language, but Newell gives us nothing but a few dusty costumes, uninspired direction, and — instead of subtitles — Spanish accents that are supposed to communicate some sort of foreignness.

For the teenage Florentino, Newell uses a different actor (Unax Ugalde), but when the star-crossed lovers turn old, he just covers them with layers of ridiculous make-up. Were there no aging actors available that could have given the septuagenarian Fermina and Florentino a bit of desperately needed verisimilitude? Even worse, the film is completely tone-deaf when it comes to Garcia Marquez’s mingling of ruefulness and bawdiness. Newell plays all the wrong dramatic moments for laughs and mistrusts the romance to such a degree that he slathers every emotional cue with a syrupy score that makes identification with the characters impossible. As Fermina’s confidante, the wonderful Catalina Sandino Moreno (Maria Full of Grace) is not only wasted but, for the later part of the story, has to suffer the indignity of a fat suit.

But enough. It’s fruitless to count the ways in which Love in the Time of Cholera fails. Critics’ screenings here in New York are usually quiet affairs where you can get shushed for looking at the screen funny, but at the one I attended, people were talking back at the movie, Rocky Horror-style. Love in the Time of Cholera is scheduled to open on November 16.

Love in the Time of Cholera. Mike Newell, 2007. *

• Reading Love in the Time of Cholera
• The Painted Veil also features broken hearts and a deadly disease
• If you must, here’s the trailer

Bonnie and Clyde are the names of the cats we’re currently staying with, so there was no way around rewatching Arthur Penn’s 1967 classic. The film is still horrifying and hilarious in its casual depiction of murder, love, and grand theft Ford Model T, and it’s this last part I found most curious: Bonnie and Clyde provides the blueprint for a gazillion crime-spree romances to follow, and the car already occupies a central role, as if American lawbreaking in the 20th century wasn’t even possible without the automobile — even when there weren’t roads to drive on. You know Ms. Parker and Mr. Barrow are doomed when their escape vehicle is hit by a hand grenade, and the final machine-gunning riddles not just their bodies but also their “death car” with bullets. This movie has led to many ruthless but gentle mock machine gun executions of our feline friends.

Bonnie and Clyde. Arthur Penn, 1967. *****

• Bonnie and Clyde on Wikipedia
• Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow on Wikipedia
• Bright Lights on Pauline Kael and Bonnie and Clyde
  
• A review of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, Lester D. Friedman (ed.)
• Bonnie and Clyde on All Things Considered
• Greenbriar Picture Shows on the film’s 40th anniversary (via)
• Brigitte Bardot and Serge Gainsbourg: Bonnie & Clyde

Not bad for a black comedy based on a website. We always like looking at Winona Ryder, and her insurance-adjuster romance with uptight Joseph Fiennes is plenty cute. But the meat-and-potatoes of the movie are the outrageous scenes of people killing themselves in idiotic ways. With David Arquette, Lukas Haas, Juliette Lewis, Tim Blake Nelson, and Chris Penn is various bit parts. Any movie in which both Metallica and Lawrence Ferlinghetti have speaking parts is ok by me.

The Darwin Awards made history in Muck’s World because it’s the first Netflix Movie-on-Demand we tried. I hadn’t realized that you get an hour of free streaming time for every dollar you paid on your regular subscription — to ease the transition, no doubt. Once I stopped grumbling about the fact that it doesn’t work with Firefox, the software installed without a hitch, and quality over a cable connection was great. It’s the way of the future! As a man who knows a thing or two about online movie distribution once told me, there’s a reason it’s called Netflix, not NetDVD.

The Darwin Awards. Finn Taylor, 2006. ***

Christophe Honoré’s follow-up to Ma Mere is a loving homage to the French New Wave that stays true to its own emotional core. Heartthrobs Louis Garrell (The Dreamers) and Romain Duris (Moliere, The Beat My Heart Skipped) play brothers who find themselves once again in their father’s small Paris apartment, Jonathan (Garrell) as a student, Paul (Duris) in the throes of depression after his breakup with longtime girlfriend Anna (Joanna Preiss.)

Read the rest of my review on About.com. Dans Paris is scheduled for limited U.S. release on August 8.

Dans Paris. Christophe Honoré, 2006. ****

Instead of the trailer, here’s a scene where heartbroken Paul listens to Kim Wilde:

This vehicle for aging Peter O’Toole dances around places Lolita and Harold & Maude boldly went decades ago. Jodie Whittaker plays the sassy, underage object of an aging actor’s affections, and after a few dirty jokes and a drinking binge, there isn’t anywhere to go for Hanif Kureishi’s strangely timid screenplay. And so we wait for the inevitable as the movie succumbs to a fatal case of sentimentality.

Venus. Roger Michell, 2006. **

Forget Six Feet Under: Molly Parker plays a necrophiliac embalmer in Lynne Stopkewich’s 1996 debut. She begins her career as a peculiar little girl who likes to bury birds and roadkill, and grows into a woman who likes her men cold. When Matt (Peter Outerbridge) falls hopelessly in love with her, the story is taken to its logical conclusion. It’s all handled very tastefully, lyrically even, but the denouement feels rushed.

Kissed. Lynne Stopkewich, 1996. ***

The first two acts of this W. Somerset Maugham adaptation are fantastic: Naomi Watts plays a woman who marries stodgy bacteriologist Ed Norton out of desperation and cheats on him with Liev Schreiber as soon as they arrive at his home in Shanghai. To punish her and himself, Norton takes her into the interior, to a village ravaged by cholera. The way the two steer their wrecked relationship through the lush landscape stalked by death is terrific–it’s sort of a grown-up version of Battle Royale, in which the stakes of love are ratcheted up to 11: if you leave me, you’ll die a grisly death. Toby Jones (Truman in Infamous) provides the cynical but helpful foreigner, and there are nuns.

I was less fond of the third act, in which Chekhov’s Law is adhered to much too slavishly: if there’s cholera around, somebody’s gonna get it! Still, The Painted Veil is big classic Hollywood cinema, splendidly engaging, marvelously acted and shot, sumptuous and emotional. The real mystery is why this film, far better than The Departed and most of the other nominees, didn’t get any kind of attention at Oscar time. In decades past, this would have been exactly the kind of thing the Academy would’ve gone gaga over. As a sign of how much times as changed, the The Painted Veil wasn’t even technically released by a major studio but by their “indie” distributor Warner Independent. It was drowned out in December’s mad movie rush, and now the official site is hocking the DVD as “just in time for mother’s day!”

The Painted Veil. John Curran, 2006. ***

• Rotten Tomatoes: 75%

This skilled BBC adaptation of Sarah Waters’ novel is a lesson in structure: the intricate plotting of the Victorian crime story has been simplified by screenwriter Peter Ransley, but the carefully layered revelations still affect and surprise. Casting is excellent, with Elaine Cassidy and Sally Hawkins as the tender lovers embroiled in Dickensian intrigue and Imelda Staunton as baby-trading Mrs. Sucksby. The academic in me is itching to write a treatise called “‘You Pearl:’ Voice, Identity, and Female Desire in Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith and Marcy Dermansky’s Twins.”

Fingersmith. Aisling Walsh, 2005. ****

• YouTube is full of fan-made Fingersmith music videos, but they’re bound to spoil it.