Weekend Film Watching

Time to check back in here. I'll start with bloggage: a new month starts on the Film of the Month Club - this month, looking at Disney's WWII Latin America propaganda cartoon, Three Cabelleros. Oddly enough, I look forward to this more than usual - I remember it, seeing a picture of Donald and the Parrot from the film in some book I had, maybe a Disney encyclopedia of some sort, maybe the articles about South America. Something about it must have made an impression on me, since I remember the picture but not the book. Anyway - here's hoping for a lively discussion... The next couple days I'll be at classes - tomorrow, my German film class: which reminds me that at the other monthly film discussion group, Jonathan Lapper will be leading a discussion of The Tin Drum from February 16 on.

Meanwhile - it was an interesting weekend. Started badly: my neighbors were making noise half the night Friday, putting me in a poor state of mind; it was a particularly lousy weekend for new movies - in the end, absolutely nothing lured me out of the house. But I did leave the house for the rep theaters, and was richly rewarded. A Paul Schrader double feature, with Schrader in attendance: he was quite inspiring. Funny, sometimes insightful and informative (he had a tendency to circle the questions, but it didn't matter, because he usually ended up telling interesting stories anyway), but always entertaining. He talked about religious symbolism (in Light Sleeper), saying he wanted images that weren't obvious - not like "fucking Darren Aronofsky" putting a "tattoo of Jesus on his fucking back." - "You have to cover your tracks!" He turned a confusing, awkward comment about Pickpocket from the crowd into a reiteration of his love for the film. He talked about making a "Marxist" film for Universal, in Blue Collar - and about fitting films' politics to the logic of the characters. It was a good night.

The films are pretty good as well. Light Sleeper is an odd concoction: a midlife crisis film - Schrader said he was looking for a way to write about middle age without falling into the usual cliches, when he had a dream about a drug dealer, growing old - that became the film. Willem Dafoe plays the dealer - Susan Sarandon his boss, who's going legit (cosmetics) - Dana Delany his old girlfriend, in their stoned days... bad things happen, redemption is sought... It's a nicely made film, though Schrader's style is relatively unexceptional - but he knows how to tell a story. He talked quite a bit about the music, by Michael Been of the Call - about his idea to have a suite of songs expressing the thoughts of the character, about wanting to use Dylan songs, but having Dylan not give him the ones he needed. Been's music almost works - it might have, except it's done in a very irritating late 80s/early 90s pop style that dates it worse than any of the costumes... Still - a good piece of work.

Blue Collar, on the other hand, is easily the best Schrader film I have seen - Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto are autoworkers, the first two family men with money troubles, the third an ex-con - they all have troubles, money, lack of respect at work, from the company or the union - they decide to rob the union shop. And that sets off a string of events that - change everything. It's first rate: the cast is extraordinary - Keitel and Kotto are always fine, and here, Pryor is astonishing - moving from his fast-talking persona to dead serious, thoughtful, fearful, defiant - just great. Schrader develops the characters, avoids demonizing or sanitizing - people do good and bad things for good and bad reasons, we never stop sympathizing with them, even when we know they are doing wrong. The film itself is, indeed, Marxist - a condemnation of the system, the corruption in the system itself, not in the particular people or institutions - a condemnation of the means of keeping people in place. Really, a genuinely great film.

Finally - staying home and firing up the DVD player - I watched Husbands and Wives. Which I was rather startled to discover (given my other recent Woody Allen experiences) is a pretty good film. It's the most satisfying Woody Allen film I've seen since Zelig, I'll say that. The story is - Woody and MIa Farrow play Gabe and Judy, married 10 years; their friends Jack and Sally (played by Sydney Pollack and Judy Davis) split up at thebeginning, precipitating a bit of a crisis for Gabe and Judy. He's soon flirting with a clever 20 year old writer; she passively pursues a co-worker; Jack screws his aerobics instructor and Sally goes after Michael, the same man Judy pines for. The film cycles among all these people and stories, and sometimes goes further, acting out bits of Gabe's novel, jumping into flashbacks for any of the characters - and framing the whole thing with a series of interviews with the characters. This gets at why I like this film - it is quite stylistically audacious. Allen uses handheld cameras, jump cuts, and all the twisty time structures, things like the mock interviews... It's interesting to look at, which is not often the case with Woody Allen films - and more than that, it serves the story. for all its fictiveness, it is, like a lot of his work, very essayistic - examining moral and personal issues almost abstractly: acting them out. Here - the links to Gabe's novel are underlined by the style - the film (with its look, with its narrative jumps, the flashbacks and forwards and fantasy sequences and so on) feels distinctly written. Ed Howard's comments on the film note that it's one of Allen's few nods to Godard - I think that's right, not just in the look, but in the way it is made like a novel, with a particularly willful first person narrator. Though it's an odd first person, with its multiple points of view, its shifting sympathies - it's quite dialogic. It is, in the end, very satisfying - it lives up to the claims Allen's fans make about his films.