I am finding it strangely difficult to get back into the flow of blogging, so permit me to be a trifle garrulous, as a way of easing back in. My keyboard time for the past week has been spent pounding out a 12,000-word “what I did on my vacation” essay called “Italy for One Dummy.” I will not inflict it on Cinema Salon readers, and don’t look for it on your newstands anytime soon, but for me it was one more step in a late-blooming conviction that I can be a professional writer -- give me a topic and I can churn out the words. This despite the Doonesbury comic panel that I keep by my computer, that asks the telling question, “Isn’t blogging basically for angry, semi-employed losers who are too untalented or too lazy to get real jobs in journalism?”
So, anyway, you wanted to hear about Me & You & Yada-Yada. Well, I liked it. It was different, and easy to see how it became a Sundance fave. But it also irritated and discomforted me, which was no doubt part of the maker’s intent. Miranda July opens up her solo performance pieces to the construction of a tight little world that centers on her sensibility, indeed on her personality, somewhat plaintive and quizzical, seemingly flighty but with a whim of iron, attractive but assertively plain, friendly but scary. (I'd have to fine myself if I called her "quirky," but the word keeps buzzing around.) She’s a would-be performance artist daylighting as an ElderCab driver, who falls for a sadsack shoe salesman, with two adorable caramel-skinned boys by the stunning black woman who has booted him out. Though funny even when it takes horrifying peeks at ordinary life, the film is resolute in its exploration of the theme of loneliness and the longing for connection. Its air of unshockable naivete will either charm or annoy you, probably both. (2005, Images, n.) *6+* (MC-76, RT-82.)
It was nice to be back at Images, a cinema that wasn’t chiuso for August, and I have to thank Janet Curran for how well her “Spotlight” interview with me came out in the new issue of their Focus Arts Monthly.
It was also nice to be back showing films in the Clark auditorium. Last Friday’s screening of Lukas Moodysson’s Together in my “10 Under 50” film series confirmed it as one of my favorite films ever, certainly among the Top 25. And I’m looking forward to re-seeing Sofia Coppola’s debut, The Virgin Suicides, today.
The only dvd I watched all week, what with the Tribe surging to the front of the wildcard race, was Leave Her to Heaven. I was under the misapprehension that this 1946 Gene Tierney vehicle was a film noir, but while she played a memorable femme fatale, it was really a sprawling technicolor melodrama. Director John M. Stahl is no Douglas Sirk, however. This film comes across as utterly artificial, and predictably unpredictable. The swelling music, the eye-popping color scheme both indoors and out, the posing of the unnaturally smooth-faced stars, could be taken as a hoot, but has no Sirkian dimension of believable psychodrama. Cornel Wilde is wooden as the author hero entrapped by the obsessively possessive Tierney, but Jeanne Crain is pleasant if one-dimensional as the virtuous other woman. Vincent Price surprises with a bravura performance as a relentless D.A. in a ludicrous courtroom scene. If you’re keep score at home, I would give this a *4* and Together a *9+*. Watching them on the same day highlighted the different approaches to directing. Moodysson keeps his teeming canvas together, and his story relentlessly moving in place, by focussing on only the key moments of each scene, eliding the transitional moments, always going straight for the jugular, up close and very personal, while Stahl is stagebound in the manner that characters always walk on to the scene and then laboriously cross the widescreen before they begin their interaction, scripted with phony literariness.
While waiting for the Indians game to begin one evening this week, I tuned in for a stretch of The Ghost & Mrs. Muir, to catch a contrasting glimpse of Gene Tierney. With Rex Harrison as the ship captain ghost, this will be worth watching through at some point.
No comments:
Post a Comment