the LAST FILM YOU'VE SEEN thread

[Chris Knipp]

Rodolphe Marconi: The Last Day (Le dernier jour, 2004). In French. Netflix DVD.

Another nice little recent film from France that lacked the wattage to get into American theaters. People will look at it now, because lead actor Gaspard Ulliel's strong presence and savage faun look have made him a star. He has shone in such films as Téchiné's Égarés (Strayed) and the upcoming Hannibal Rising that exploit his wild features, his animalistic air of danger. He is frequently seen as frightening and independent. He is sweet as the boyfriend in A Very Long Engagement, though. The Last Day shows him off better as an actor because here he is almost always on screen, but is allowed to be hesitant, mysterious -- the essence of a film that holds back its meanings and makes us guess what's going on. Simon is delicate, thoughtful and kind, a manchild and a slightly maladroit creature who detaches by filming and photographing the world. In playing Simon, Ulliel reveals admirable restraint. He shows how an actor must use he physical equipment. His looks are striking, but what counts is that he can do such different things with them.

Simon (Ulliel) is a young arts student. On the night train to his family's Christmas party he picks up a girl who comes along and then quickly takes up with someone who seems to be Simon's former flame. Simon sleeps with (along side) her, but can't have her. And he's been left out of the know because despite being all of 18 he still isn't aware of something important about himself. Rodolphe Marconi's film is nicely understated, never dwelling on a scene too long, stingy with dialogue and scornful of flashy effects. Ulliel's delicacy is essential to these qualities. So is something inaccessible about him that helps keep his somewhat pathetic situation from ever seeming sentimental.

The Last Day is full of a dry French tact, and escapes being dreary (if only just) by the characters' composure and fortitude. Simon is an athlete (swimming, tennis), but also a good sport in everything--and despite his breathtaking ease in the pool, he has a jerky little walk. What good manners he has! He is always there in deep close-ups, bashful and quiet. Yet we feel his hurt all the more deeply because it isn't acted out. Bruno Todeschini simmers. Nicole Garcia is like a more ravaged Rampling. There's nothing not to like except the ditsy pop songs with English lyrics. Fortunately at a crucial late scene an elegant John Lewis piano solo takes over.

[oscar jubis]

I'm surprised it was not selected by Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Rotterdam or Toronto. It wasn't even reviewed by Variety.

[Chris Knipp]

It does seem to have been under the radar. I should have mentioned Mélanie Laurent as the girl, and Christophe Malavoy as the head of the household, other notable actors in an impeccable cast. Europeans may be tired of paintful coming of age stories?

[Chris Knipp]

Henri-Georges Clouzot, Le Mystère Picasso 1956. Netflix DVD. Not a particularly good one: minimal visual quality and the commentary would not open.

Picasso (at 75, typically vigorous and wearing only shorts) drew or painted with colored ink on stretched canvas or paper which Clouzot's cameraman photographed from the back to show the artist doing maybe 20 paintings as they unfold from a few lines to a piece bristling with shapes and color. The assumption behind this is a little naive as Michael Atkinson said six years ago in the Voice. Atkinson called it the "bourgeois" assumption that we can see into the mind of an artistic genious by watching him at work. Well, as some of the sequences show and as the old Art News series "So-and-So Paints a Picture" showed, actually you can learn quite a lot about how an artist works out his ideas by following the sequence -- especially if he makes a lot of changes, and it is fascinating to get that kind of inside look. A slight weakness of Clouzot's film is that the process is staged, and allegedly (some say it isn't true) the paintings were even destroyed after the film was made.

Now, some of these pictures Picasso whipped off aren't particularly good. But Picasso worked fast normally. And as Motherwell once said, his unsuccessful paintings were necessary stepping-stones to the good ones. If you've looked at a lot of Picasso's work as I have, including the Skira suite of 180 drawings titled in the English edition "Picasso and the Human Comedy" of 1954,* which relates directly to some of the drawings done for the film, there won't be much "mystery" about the sequences--particularly as they relate to drawings. Toward the end though, Picasso starts doing some full-fledged paintings with overlays (I'm not at all sure how that was filmed, possibly by another method), where he really changes things all around multiple times (as he did with some of his etchings too--and looking at the sequence of them will give you very simimar information). That's more like the abstract expressionists (De Kooning, for instance) memorably chronicled in the "........Paints a Picture" Art News articles, and such metamorphoses do show the genius of the man, if not really how it works, since we're looking at, not into. I think Atkinson calls Georges Auric's music "bombastic." I found it unnecessary and turned it off and I also speeded up the sequences because I can think visually faster than this movie plods. The self-importance of the project is not untypical of other Fifties coverage of super-famous artists and it's mildly grating, but though I waited a long time, this film had to be seen.

*This book cost about $25 then. It is now worth a couple thousand dollars. Similarly the film has supposedly been declared a "national treasure" by the French. "Bourgeois" or "hagiographic" or self-important though it may be, this is an invaluable record.

[Johann]

Great Netflix reviews Chris

This site is a great archive...


My next door neighbor (apartment down the hall) has got tons of VHS tapes that he hasn't watched in years. He's been giving me 4 at a time. I watch 'em, get 4 more. Free 'o charge!
Nice to have friends like that...


52 Pick-Up

I forgot how great this little Frankenheimer film is.
Strictly adult all the way. Hookers, torture, extreme violence
The script is by Elmore Leonard and I'm sure Tarantino loves it.

Roy Scheider is being blackmailed into giving up 110 thousand dollars. Things don't go so well.
Ann-Margret is really good in it- I didn't realize how good an actress she can be.
AWESOME movie.
My fanboy rave: I watched it late at night all alone and it was wicked.


Citizen Kane

Hadn't seen it in about three years.
What can I say?
Fellini said it had "immense depth of field"
Polanski said "it was like a blueprint"
von Stroheim said "Welles' theme is small"

I say HE'S MISTER KANE!

Love it to death.
I always gagged on that silver spoon...





Alex Haley's QUEEN

Excellent T.V. miniseries, with a great cast including Martin Sheen, Ossie Davis, Ann-Margret (again) and Danny Glover.

I guess it could be a companion to ROOTS, but it stands on it's own too. It was made according to Alex Haley's wishes and it is dedicated to him.
It's about the South, black slaves and black history.
Very important film, and not just for blacks.
EVERYBODY should see it.
I was very moved by it.

[Chris Knipp]

Thanks, Johann. Sounds like you're getting some good opportunities, VHS is a hidden resource. Unfortunately public libraries are phasing them out -- a mistake. 52 Pickup was one of the first I saw after I "discovered" Elmore Leonard. A good one. For sure Tarantino likes this one.

Did not know about The Queen. Might be hard to find? As I said, tapes are just disappearing, and we're going to regret it because I don't think the films are all making it to DVD. I know they're not.

[Chris Knipp]

Jacques Audiard: Read My Lips/Sur mes lèvres. (2001).

The heart of the movie's original concept is the "troubling meeting of two outcasts," as one French critic puts it, the deaf, isolated, but highly competent office worker (Emmanuelle Devos) and the rough just-paroled ex-con (Vincent Cassel) who is sent to help her out in the fax room. Both find out they can get something important from the other that the other may not want to give and this leads them to be collaborators in excitement and danger -- yet the lovemaking doesn't happen till near the end. The two actors turn in terrific performances, Devos' more central and marginally more rich (and she got the César; so did the sound and the screenplay, but this was Amélie's year).

This was how I originally discovered Audiard. It was greeted as his best to date (see Frondon, Le Monde, on Allociné) and the performances of Cassel and Devos celebrated in France as a collaboration to be long remembered. Then came Audiard's next one, The Beat My Heart Skipped/De battre mon coeur s'est arrèté (2005), and that was even better and was even more of a sweep at the Césas than Amélie (8 vs. 4) So I wanted to go back and review. The Beat is more exciting and complex but both do much the same thing: combine psychological and social study with "polar noir," action crime story -- and each time with great originality, due I suspect in large part to the lively imagination of co-author Tonino Benacquista: this is a great collaboration. Audiard impresses me as one of the most focused and original of French directors today and I await his next film with great anticipation.

Devos is my favorite "new" French film actress. See her splendidly used in Arnaud Desplechin's films, My Sex Life and Kings and Queen, the recently DVD-released Gilles' Wife/La femme de Gilles (Frédéric Fonteyne, of the completely different An Affair of Love). She has been in a ton of other films I haven't seen and a couple others I have. She is beautiful but not pretty-pretty, and her more complex looks and vulnerable yet strong manner contribute to her ability to take on roles of more depth than the French cutesy or ice queen beauties. She has a small role in The Beat. There's something a little repulsive about Cassel, but also scary, wiry, energetic--he has been particularly good in Crimson Rivers/Les Rivières pourpres (2000), Brotherhood of the Wolf/Le pacte des loups (2001), and, of course, the edgy and nauseating Irréversible (2002).

Read My Lips has been criticized for ending with a "mere" crime story and dragging that part out more than the "more interesting" earlier section. True the film changes direction but it does not drag at the end nor is the relationship lost sight of.

[bix171]

Oscar Jubis wrote:
you'd have to elaborate about Hitch appearing to be afraid of women.

I think Hitchcock's treatment of women, especially from the '50s onward, which has a degre of cruelty I'd say bordered on sadism (culminating in Tippi Hedren's attack in "The Birds"), stemmed from what appears to be a mistrust of women, especially blondes. He continually puts them in harm's way and forces them to defend themselves, whether it be Grace Kelly in "Rear Window" or "Dial M For Murder" up to the aforementioned Hedren in "Marnie" and "The Birds". Whether or not this comes from his personal interactions with these women on and off the set (my understanding is Hedren, in particular, rebuffed him although I've also read he was celibate after the birth of his daughter) I can't be sure but I do think it heightens the experience of watching his films.

[Chris Knipp]

François Ozon: Time to Leave/Le temps qui reste (2005, US release 2006). Netflix DVD.

Moved to mouton's Le temps qui reste thread:

http://www.filmwurld.com/forums/show...6911#post16911

[Johann]

The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl

Outstanding documentary on the greatest female filmmaker of all time.

Yes, she made films for the Third Reich.
No, she was not a part of the Nazi party or the Nationalists.

She was an artist.

Hitler saw her do a dance by the sea in one of her movies and fell in love with her style.
She was a "daredevil" actress, who with her mentor/partner Fanck made "mountain" films that had powerful expressive beauty and real-life danger. She was a rock climber who was subjected to really dangerous stunts (like being placed in the line of an avalanche) and learned a great deal about editing and lighting and the demands of shooting in harsh conditions.

Her time as the Fuhrer's filmmaker was actually an amazing time.

90% of the people supported Hitler before the war.
He was all about social justice and lifting Germany into a world power.
Work and Peace was the message.
Not "kill all Jews"- all of the anti-Semitic stuff came later.
It started small- people thought it was just political campaigning.
They didn't think people were serious about the Jewish hatred.
Then there was Goebbels. Then the shit hit the fan.

Triumph of the Will won Gold seals, film awards as artistic achievement par excellence. THIS WAS BEFORE THE WAR FOLKS.
1934!
Germans loved Hitler because here was a guy who was standing up and showing & telling them what to do.
People were fascinated by him.

Leni says he had a hypnotic quality about him that she feared, because she loved her freedom. She felt herself being taken away from her own beliefs whenever she was in his presence.
Dude had the charisma.

He wanted a filmmaker to make propaganda films that were not newsreels.
He wanted an artist. He got one.

Because she was considered a Nazi, someone who slept with the devil, someone whose artistic talents were null and void because of her prominent position within the Reich, she had a hard hard time making films since Triumph of the Will.
She has had every hateful thing in the universe spewed at her.
And it's tremendously unfair. This doc will show you why.
She wanted to be considered a cinematic angel actress like Dietrich.
She wanted only to be an artist.

She worked damn hard, breaking her back editing miles and miles of celluloid for a vision that she didn't really share.
It was the times. She says it was pretty much impossible to get away from Hitler and Goebbels. She says she damaged her health making those films.

She was their slave. Goebbels told her once when she was arguing with him that if she wasn't a woman he would throw her down a staircase.

She agreed to make Triumph on the grounds that it be the last film she make for the Reich.

Olympia is the film all of her critics should take a look at.

400 kilometers of film was shot. She and her crews made a groundbreaking document of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.

She dug holes in the ground to contrast the athletes with the sky, she had underwater cameras for the high divers, she had Hot Air Balloons to get aerial shots!

The woman was a genius.

See this amazing doc by Ray Muller to see what I mean.

I've only scratched the surface of what's in this profile of this incredible (deep-sea diving at 91!) German Goddess.

[bix171]

Chris, I'm sorry. I didn't read as carefully as I should've.

Johann wrote:

Not "kill all Jews"- all of the anti-semitic stuff came later.

Um, have you read "Mein Kampf"?

[Chris Knipp]

Chris Knipp wrote:

Not "kill all Jews"- all of the anti-semitic stuff came later.

Um, have you read "Mein Kampf"?

Whoa, there!

That was NOT my post! It was from Johann. Under the circumstances I would appreciate it if you would delete that post and repost it with the right name on it, not mine. These are not my views on Leni Riefenstahl or on the Nazis, at all.

[Johann]

Ooh, we've hit a nerve!

The "anti-Semitic stuff came later" is in the context of "later" as in the sheer horror of the Jew persecution.

I'm talking about BEFORE the concentration camps.

BEFORE the horrors that Hitler ordered.

The anti-Semitic sentiment didn't explode until later.
The German people thought it was POLITICAL CAMPAIGNING.

How little did they know...


What are your views on Riefenstahl, Chris?
I'm insanely curious.

[cinemabon]

You can hardly call Leni Riefenstahl a documentarian. Her work for the Nazi Party only furthered the view Hitler should be considered some man of the people. Nothing could be further from the truth. As with all propoganda, it only serves to further the political views of those behind the work, and divides people along party (ethnic, cultural, religious) lines with the premise that anyone opposing those views must be against the government, anti-patriotic.

Take Fox News. This isn't news. They don't have sources. They spout opinion all day long without facts (such as the recent 'scandal' about Obama - completely untrue and unsubstantiated). The Nazi's would be proud of Fox News. I changed my sign off (below) for a reason. I've grown tired of those people who keep stating we are embolding the enemy when we criticize the President's plan.

In a democracy, "the supreme power is vested in the people." It seems to me that the people voted overwhelmingly last fall to change that policy. Bush may be untouchable now as President, but any man in that office can be impeached. Take those embolding words to the bank. And put Riefenstahl back in the ground with her anti-semitic ways. Her only genius was in dying, and none too soon as far as I'm concerned.

[Johann]

Have you ever heard a single anti-Semitic thing come out of Riefenstahl's mouth?

Give me a quote from her.

Post a quote of her saying something against the Jews.

Give me a direct quote. There is absolutely NO record of her saying ANYWHERE anything anti-Semitic.

Come on- back up what you say.

Point to the quote of Riefenstahl's that is pure hatred for Jews.

That's right- there is none. No history book, no film has her saying or doing anything against Jewish people.