My MLK weekend of moviegoing

This past weekend I did not leave my apartment from Friday night to Monday afternoon, for a myriad of reasons. I thus watched lots of movies. I'll mention a few:



(on TV):



Bring It On: Still far more enjoyable than it has any right to be. Interesting to think about contextually, though. One of very few movies that are about females, and maybe the only successful female sports movie.

Bridget Jones’ Diary: What happened to Renee Zellweger’s career? Aside from a lot of coke? The trifecta of Bridget Jones’ Diary, Chicago (a continually surprising/enterprising perf), and Down with Love died for me after her atrocious perf in Cold Mountain. She was the worst part of an irritating and often unwatchable film. But Bridget Jones? Too much fun.

Now, to the big three. (I’m not yet done with Jules et Jim.) I started Netflixin’ to watch “important” movies, so we’ll see how this goes.


(Netflixin'):


Caché (2005, dir. Michael Haneke)


Caché (Hidden) begins with a long, still shot of a ordinary house on an ordinary street in Paris. The shot is so long it becomes unnerving, then suddenly it is re-wound -- it's actually a shot on a videotape, one of several being delivered to the people who live in that house, to let them know they are being surveilled by someone. These tapes are accompanied by very violent, childlike drawings of people and animals being killed. Daniel Auteil and Juliette Binoche play the terrorized/terrified couple, who maybe are being revenged upon by someone in Auteil's past.



The word to describe Caché is unnerving. It is sometimes scary, and in one scene horrifyingly, suddenly violent, but mostly it is just unnerving, disarming, creepy. Haneke shows how that tension, that unknowing and suspicion, really tears up and lays bare the neat family life that this couple and their son have set up for themselves. Auteil's character refuses, most of the time, to discuss his past with his wife, as he is ashamed that his actions perhaps were the catalyst to their present fears. During his childhood, his family almost adopted an Arab orphan from Algiers, but Auteil's character (as a child) lied about the boy and prevented the adoption. When directions on one of the videotapes leads Auteil to this boy, now a grown older man, he claims to know nothing about them. Maybe he's lying? Maybe it's his grown son terrorizing the family?



Eventually the situation seems to have resolved itself, but the last shot suddenly occurs to you as a surveillance shot of Auteil and Binoche's son's school. It's almost unfair, and definitely perverse (but that's Haneke for you).



Haneke is also trying to say something about France's relationship with Arab immigrants and the Algiers/North African population that, once liberated, have moved to France instead (and into other European countries, especially Britain). He takes xenophobia and class struggle between Auteil and his Arab potential terrorist from the personal to the political sphere, magnifying Auteil's past crimes to a present revenge that encompasses and destabilizes his entire life. There's nothing he, or we, can do about it, at any rate.




Dogville (2004, dir. Lars von Trier)


I had seen about half of Dogville when I started to watch it again on Saturday.


Urgh......can't keep thinking about this today.

New update to include:

My yes to Dogville. It's a modern day expressionist play, and I love it.


(At Film Forum):

I’m Not There: Yes. I think. I need to see it again before speaking more clearly about it. It is similar for me to Across the Universe, but not superficially as "musicals," whatever. The experience was similar. The experience was troubling and insightful, and took a lot of complication to arrive at something very simple. Was it worth it? For my money I think they're the two best films I've seen from 2007. (Although there's plenty I haven't seen it, most especially Le scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) and There Will Be Blood. Now that I've read Atonement I have very little desire to see it, as much as I like Keira Knightley).

More to come!