jürgen fauth’s muckworld

So this is why they invented the phrase “va-va-voom!” The second most pleasant surprise about this film is the ending, which eschews the usual moralizing. Take note, Smiley Face: just because you have a female main character who behaves comme un animal sauvage (sexually or herbally) doesn’t mean you have to make her pay for it. Guess that’s what makes And God Created Woman such a libertine landmark. But why don’t we leave the analysis to Chuck Stephens and ogle Bardot in the trailer instead? This movie would make a fine double-feature with Le Gendarme de St. Tropez.

Et Dieu…créa la femme. Roger Vadim, 1956. ****

• And God Created Woman at Wikipedia
• Brigitte Bardot at Wikipedia

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. ***

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. ***

The prevailing image of Joe Swanberg’s second feature is a pasty-faced young man transfixed by a tiny screen — a cellphone, a laptop, a camcorder, what have you. Often, there’s an adorable young woman with the man, but he’s oblivious to her charms. Talky and mundane but equally fresh and fascinating, LOL won me over because it’s topical — our metathesizing gadgetry is usually taken for granted– but also because it proves that male pigheadedness is timeless. (It’s just getting better bandwidth.)

LOL. Joe Swanberg, 2006. ***

• Official Site
• Benten Films
• LOL on Rotten Tomatoes: 100%
• Hannah Takes the Stairs

A booby-trapped tale of wartime love and guilt, adapted from the great Ian McEwan, who has been mining the darker recesses of desire since First Love, Last Rites (1975). Joe Wright directs an excellent cast — Keira Knightley, James McAvoy, Romola Garai, Vanessa Redgrave, and newcomer Saoirse Ronan — in what begins like a standard period piece but ends up transcending the format with a sharp-eyed inquiry into the power of fiction to destroy and redeem; I haven’t been able to get this movie out of my head. Atonement opens on December 7; if you haven’t read the novel, I highly recommend staying spoiler-free.

Atonement. Joe Wright, 2007. ****

Instead of the spoilerish trailer for Atonement, here’s a clip from Andrew Birkin’s 1993 movie based on McEwan’s The Cement Garden, starring Charlotte Gainsbourg:

It’s one of the profound mysteries of the movie year 2007: why, exactly, did critics embrace Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof the way they did while dismissing the far superior Robert Rodriguez half of Grindhouse out of hand? I could go on about this, but instead of expounding on the comparative joys of Planet Terror yet again, I’ve decided to join the Close-Up Blog-a-thon underway at The House Next Door and post a number of dramatic close-ups that perfectly illustrate just how much fun Rodriguez is having with the Grindhouse concept. The DVD of Planet Terror, severed from its insufferably pretentious twin, is available tomorrow.

Planet Terror. Robert Rodriguez, 2007. ****

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

Marcy already reviewed Ang Lee’s latest, so I’ll limit myself to one point: Lust, Caution is continuing evidence that unsimluated sex is making inroads into mainstream films and more traditional styles and genres. Hardcore fucking in serious movies started out, of course, with the French (Romance) and pretentious art movies both domestic (Brown Bunny) and international (Battle in Heaven, 9 Songs). Then came Shortbus, which I consider a watershed movie because it was the first to successfully integrate real sex into a relationship comedy. Likewise, Lust, Caution, an otherwise old-fashioned spy drama with surprising turns, absolutely relies on graphic sex as a decisive element for both plot and character. The story simply wouldn’t add up if we hadn’t seen what happens between Tony Leung and Wei Tang during the NC-17 scenes. Lust, Caution opens today.

Se, jie. Ang Lee, 2007. ***