Catching up

I finally finished two Derek Jarman films that had been kicking around my TiVo “Now Playing” list for months and months, one from Sundance and one from IFC. I’d seen Caravaggio (1986) before (and no, he didn’t paint the Deposition I mentioned two entries ago -- maybe I was thinking of the Mantegna "Dead Christ"?), but this was my first viewing of Edward II (1991), adapted from the Christopher Marlowe play. Jarman certainly is a distinctive filmmaker, if not exactly on my wavelength. He tends to film minimalist theatrical tableaux with decidedly gay themes and sensibilities. But his films are seductive if you give in to their appeal -- Wittgenstein (1993) is my particular favorite, but both this Baroque artistic drama and Plantagenet history play are eye-opening, lush with language and color and histrionics. Tilda Swinton and Nigel Terry anchor strong casts in both. Well worth watching if you have the taste for it, and not if not.

I also watched two documentaries that I can commend, if not urge you to see, unless you have an antecedent interest: the first two hour-long episodes of the surprisingly visual, if ultimately repetitious, National Geographic series on Jared Diamond’s influential book of geographical determinism, Guns, Germs, and Steel, which attempts to answer a New Guinean’s query, why do you people of the West have so much “cargo”?; and a Sundance Channel “doc day” presentation of Deadline, a well done analysis of how the death penalty actually works and Governor Ryan’s last minute commutation of every death row sentence in Illinois.

Then from the ridiculous to the sublime -- 5 films in less than 24 hours. Relaxing on a Saturday evening I watched Serenity, to confirm that not everything my Buffy main man, Joss Whedon, does is magic -- sure it has the snappy dialogue you’d expect from a third generation screenwriter, and the familiar space cowboy tropes of Star Wars et al. are leavened with the historical perspective he learned at Wesleyan, but I never got past the feeling I’d seen it all before and didn’t need to see it again. I will not be tempted to watch the short-lived Firefly tv series on which Serenity is based.

You know the thing about junk food -- it just makes you hungry for more -- so then I popped Wedding Crashers into the machine. I can’t believe I watched the whole witless thing. There’s some naughty energy in the set up, and Vince Vaughan and Owen Wilson have some charm as the horndog duo, but the film just goes slack-jawed and drools. The gals who tame the guys have all the personality of inflatable dolls, and the story has by-the-numbers predictability. Nothing whatsoever is made of the highflown Washington setting, Daddy is supposedly Sec’y of the Treasury but might as well be a bloviating baron on an English estate, for all the changes that are rung on this tired old tale. I really do need to start cutting off this crap -- life is too short.

All Sunday afternoon I spent showing “Triple Feature: 3 Colors” to an ample and appreciative audience at the Clark. It was really worthwhile to watch Kieslowski’s Trois Couleurs in succession. And seeing each for the third time, they lose little of their enigma but reveal the precision with which they are made. Where before I might have given the edge to Red, for the sheer loveliness of Irene Jacob if nothing else, this time through I was most impressed by Blue, plunging into the sad loveliness of Juliet Binoche, and the political cast of the humor in White came through to me more forcefully. I now see the trilogy as a perfect unity. I suspect I will have more to say about Kieslowski in the future. Yes, vita brevis, but truly ars longa.