If the Hatchet-Wielding Manohla Dargis Says a Movie Sucks

maybe it does -- or not. If she says it's good -- as she does aboutBatman Begins -- it may be worth a look.

Hey, wanta see a funny name for a director?

Check out this.

Did you know Antonioni's Blow Up was spawned by Julio Cortazar?

I didn't, and that wasn't all I learned from Thomas Beltzer's Senses of Cinema article on story and film. There is one inaccuracy, however: in Brian De Palma's homage, Blow Out, Nancy Allen is killed by John Lithgow, not Dennis Franz.

Andrei Rublev

is a long, long dream and I am having the hardest time staying intereested. Tarkovsky may be a genius, but he's so imagistic and elliptic I have a hard time following him. I'm now taking a break after Part One; I won't bail on it completely, but I think I would enjoy it more if I understood what was going on.

Comme une image

a.k.a. Look at Me is a sweet French film that I'm not going to do justice to, mainly because yours truly - Mr. I Yearn for the Drug of Cinema -- watched it while drowsy, and because I got up to pee during what may have been a key moment of exposition. (I headed for the bathroom when one character was crying, and after a long piss which I just didn't feel like rushing, they were all were driving somewhere in the country for reasons I didn't understand.) Still, it's the kind of movie that I can see myself absolutely loving if I saw it again; in fact, I'm already rather attracted to it. It's a kind of Mike Leigh-type film, not because it's improvised or made up as it went along, but because not a whole lot happens, and you're not sure where it's going or why, and which finds its story in the emotional life of its characters. It's a deeply human and humane movie whose every character wants to be loved but is a little too self-absorbed to love anyone else. The exception is the lead character, a plus-sized young singer curiously named Lolita -- played by a remarkable life-force named Marilou Berry -- who strives for the love of her famous writer father, who is too wrapped up in his own career and his hot new wife to pay any attention to his daughter or her burgeoning talent. The same goes for boys, who only pretend to be attracted to her so they can meet her father. Lolita more or less feels rejected all around by everyone but her vocal coach -- who spends most of her time babying her husband, a mopey writer who has endured years of failure and is about to become a celebrity. Then there's this boy she meets who seems like the real thing. It wends its melancholy way toward an unforced happy ending between Lolita and her beau, walking with her bicycle against a starry sky.

This is easily the slackest review I have ever written. My others will be better. I'll get more sleep ahead of time, and I will drink less cola. But do see the movie. You'll like it.

More DVDs

picked up at lunch: Tokyo Story, The Seventh Seal, Hidden Fortress, Suddenly, Last Summer.

I yearn for what Truffaut called the "drug" of cinema.

But I also have to, have to, have to do the yard this weekend, which is something I doubt Truffaut ever had to do. I am willing to bet you anything Francois never mowed.

What I'm Listening To: Leos Janacek's Jenufa, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras.

Tonight's movie (or this weekend's)

Look at Me -- much adored by Ms. Penn.

13 DVDs I Have Every Intention of Watching Over the Next Week. Or Two. OK, the Next Month.

Andrei Rublev, Autumn Sonata, Early Summer, La Strada, Hour of the Wolf, The Leopard, Man on the Train, The Magic Flute, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Smell of Camphor, The Fragrance of Jasmine, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, Tokyo Drifter, Variety Lights.

Scorsese's Italian Trip

I'm terrible with long movies, escpecially if they're on DVD and I have the option to watch whenever I please. I can watch a long movie in a theatre, no problem; well, maybe "no problem" is pushing it, as I spent the last half-hour of Yi-Yi trying to mentally communicate the message to please, please, please stop. But in a theater I can at least prepare myself for the long haul. If I have a DVD of say Tarkovsky's 204-minute Andrei Rublev, i'll do anything not to watch it.

Documentaries by Martin Scorsese are a different matter, especially if they focus on his love for Italian cinema. About ten years ago, he made this four-hour-plus documentary called My Voyage to Italy, and damn if I didn't sit there transfixed through the whole thing.

To his credit, Scorsese doesn't try to give an entire history of the industry. Rather, he makes it personal in the very best sense of the word, recalling how he first saw these films on a black and white television as a boy growing up in New York, where Italian cinema revealed his heritage to him and his family. (The family footage he uses here, reminiscent of the opening credits of Mean Streets, is extraordinary, as are the director's own boyhood drawings of posters of the movies he dreamed of making.)

He focuses mainly on five key directors -- Rossellini, Visconti, De Sica, Fellini and Antonioni -- and what their work has meant to him. It's overlong at points, as Scorsese uses film clips to tell the entire plot and then some of every Italian movie he has ever loved, but he also blends in a lot of sharp analysis about style, camera movement and meaning. Like any good critic, he has an infectious enthusiasm: he makes you want to see these movies, again or for the first time.

Of particular interest: Visconti's Senso and Rosselini's Voyage to Italy, both of which look perfectly stunning.

Scorsese also hit some very important points, I thought, such as the way film enthusiasts are divided between Fellini's La Dolce Vita and Antonioni's L'Avventura, two films about the same thing -- the soullessness of the early 1960s Eurotrash class -- that couldn't be more different in style or execution. (Both, I might add, are two long films I've managed to get through many times.)

Fellini's great film hits this world from every angle, telling something like (if I remember correctly, because I once counted) seven main stories, with six connective ones between them. It's a film about fakery, about masks -- they appear all the way through it -- and how, with the main character, Marcello, the mask ultimately absorbs the personality.

Where Fellini's film was loud, noisy, intensely visual, Antonioni's was comparatively cool and restrained, and tackled the very idea of narrative form itself. Like Psycho, which came out around the same time, it has one of the most distinct story arcs in history, taking a ninety degree turn early on.

It begins with a group of wealthy young pals on a voyage; when they stop at an island, one girl goes missing. They can't find her. She could be dead, she could have disappeared, she could have fled the scene altogether, no one knows. Over the rest of the film, her boyfriend and best friend look for her, and then fall in love themselves. The story of the search fades completely -- the adventure of the title is their advernture together, and our adventure in watching it, in trying to figure out where this unpredictable journey will lead. It's a movie with a beginning, a middle, and an ending that wanders completely off course. We never find out about the missing girl; she vanished. What matters isn't that she vanished, but what her vanishing causes, what it creates, the chain of events it sets into motion, reflecting along the way on a society where people live somewhat by comfort and impulse.

I think you could almost make the point that both movies are latter-day extensions of Renoir's Rules of the Game, the original Eurotrash masterpiece.

I remember both Pauline Kael and Stanley Kauffmann extolled Antonioni's over Fellini's, and ever since then it's been seen as the hipper, more with-it, more intellectual of the two choices; Fellini's great film is seen as flashy by contrast.

Anyway, this was just one aspect of Scorsese's documentary, which I watched more or less is one ass-fatiguing sitting, with only occasional breaks to smoke or piss.

It was like being at an Italian meal with the director where I never wanted to leave, and I very often found myself talking back to the screen, saying "Oh yes, the Bicycle Thief is great," and and "Wow, how come I've never seen that? Tell me more..."