Blue Planet

I’d never heard of Franco Piavoli’s 1982 Blue Planet (not to be confused with the David Attenborough-narrated Discovery Channel series) until I saw an ad last week for a 25th Anniversary re-release with a pull quote from Andrei Tarkovsky: “[A] poem, concert, journey into the universe, nature, life . . . truly a different vision.” That, and a rave from Michael Tully, was all I needed to get me to the Pioneer Theater for the last day of its sparsely attended run (so sparsely attended thanks to a pan in The New York Times that a rep for the film—bless him—stood up afterwards and quizzed the eight people in the audience—one by one—as to how they’d heard of the film.)

At its most banal Blue Planet is a pretty bog-standard nature documentary with close-ups of murderous spiders and copulating snails and a fairly obvious season-to-season and day-to-night progression. Though Godfrey Reggio is a big fan, it is neither as original nor as bombastic as Koyaanisqatsi. But at its best it has some stunning passages: a sequence of light dancing on water reminiscent of Ralph Steiner’s H20; an Olmi-esque tableaux of an Italian farmhouse at dusk; an abstract sequence of motorbike lights flashing through a dark forest; a field pulsing in the wind à la Tarkovsky (and, yes, there is wind in the trees, of course); and a shot of caterpillars inching up invisible skeins (so that it looked as if they’re climbing the scratches on the celluloid).

Turns out Il Pianeta Azzurro was never released in the States, but played for a year in a theater in Rome in ’82. I found out about it too late to catch a Piavoli retrospective (he’s made five films) at Anthology the week before. Too bad.

Movie poster of the week

Although I think the Saul Bass hommage in general is a little played out, this is still very fine, and a cut above just about everything else I’ve seen recently. And this Jarmaniac from way back loves seeing Tilda Swinton’s name up in lights with Clooney and Pitt. Derek is spinning merrily in his grave.

It’s the trees, stupid

Two things I love: apocalyptic movies and Zooey Deschanel, so hells yes I went to see The Happening on opening day. Little did I know, or could even dare to hope, that M. Night Sham’s new one is a wind-in-the-trees movie par excellence. Nearly every other shot of the film is a shot of rustling trees, a ratio that Jean-Marie Straub would be hard-pressed to keep up with. And, even better, mid-way through the film there’s a complete steal from the greatest wind-in-the-trees shot of all time: from Tarkovsky’s Mirror (talking of which, the trailer right before the film was a Kiefer Sutherland movie called Mirrors, which I’m hoping is to Mirror what Aliens was to Alien).

Beyond trees and wind, The Happening is an entertaining enough little B movie that, were it signed by John Carpenter or George Romero, we’d be cutting a lot more slack, which is not to say that it’s any good. Marky Mark’s salary aside, it looks like it cost a few hundred thousand dollars to make, and on top of that it feels like it was made up as it went along. The premise is ludicrous and gets ludicrouser minute-by-minute (of which there are only 91), the acting stupendously bad (Wahlberg and John Leguizamo are two of the most unlikely high school teachers you’ll ever see, and the back-story of Wahlberg and Zooey’s relationship is awfully labored) and M. Sham makes some really odd choices in the simplest of set-ups. But, that said, and until it peters out at the end, I had a blast watching it. It’s no Philip Kaufman Invasion of the Body Snatchers, though it does its damnedest to rip that off, but it makes for an OK episode of The Twilight Zone, and an amusing companion piece to this happening.

The Films of Others

After a bit of an argy-bargy with a friend the other day about how much he hated The Visitor, I thought I’d better go see the damn thing. Tom McCarthy’s The Visitor is that film that your neighbors who see a couple of films a year went to see and loved. And with fairly good reason: as a crowd-pleaser for thinking people it’s not bad. It’s well-made and well-meaning, it tickles the emotions, and it’s smart without being too challenging. And that started me thinking why my friend was so angry about it. There are plenty of far worse films out there deserving of his scorn. The Visitor may be safe, it may be predictable, it may be pandering to white, middle-class liberal guilt… but there are so few films out there for The Visitor’s target audience that to complain about it seems selfish. And then that reminded me that said friend had also hated last year’s arthouse crowd-pleaser: The Lives of Others, a film equally beloved by pretty much the same audience. And suddenly it struck me that The Visitor and The Lives of Others are practically the same film! Think about it: a lonely, middle-aged man who has shut himself off emotionally from the world suddenly finds himself in the presence of a young, vivacious, artistic couple who are everything that he is not. Through cohabiting (in one way or another) with these strangers and becoming exposed to their passions (where The Lives of Others had Beethoven, The Visitor has Fela Kuti) and creativity he loosens up and starts to enjoy life. But when the dark forces of a tyrannical regime (the Stasi/the INS) intrude and threaten his new friends he discovers hidden wells of passion and goodness in himself. See?!

I’m not accusing Tom McCarthy of plagiarism (though given the character he played on the last season of The Wire that’s tempting), but he sure seems to have tapped into a perfect formula for middle-class, middle-aged, middle-of-the-road feel-good cinema.

Happy Birthday Prince

Prince turns 50 today! I feel like re-watching the greatest concert movie of all time this morning.

Movie poster of the week

If I were in Cannes this week (if only!) the film I would be most excited to see would be Three Monkeys, the fifth film by the great Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. The reviews so far have been decidedly mixed, ranging from “the first major film of the festival” to “largely commonplace, drear, and claustrophobic” (thanks Mr. Kenny) but that’s par for the course for Ceylan who has often been a great divider. Still, his aesthetic is right up my alley, (Climates was my favorite film of 06) and I’m glad to see that he hasn’t lost his penchant for roiling skies and despondent souls looking out to sea. I can’t wait.

Movie poster of the week

The early films of Wim Wenders have been notoriously hard to see in recent years, either on screen or DVD, most especially his superb road movie trilogy of Alice in the Cities (1973), Wrong Move (1975) and Kings of the Road (1976), all starring that hangdog icon Rüdiger Vogler. So I was happy to discover that Alice in the Cities was re-released in the UK earlier this year (with this campaign [enlarge] from AllCity, the design team behind Reprise). Here’s hoping it will find it’s way to the US soon. Meanwhile, thirty-five years after Alice, Wenders is in competition in Cannes next week with The Palermo Shooting, a film starring Milla Jovovich and Dennis Hopper, with Patti Smith and Lou Reed as “themselves.” A return to form? Doesn’t sound promising, but one can only dream.

(Bad) movie poster of the week

I post this UK version of the Sarah Marshall campaign not because it’s a good poster—it isn’t—but for two reasons. One for the way that Russell Brand—unknown here but a huge celebrity in the UK—has been positioned as the star of the film, and the other because it reminds me of the Local Hero poster to which I have a fond attachment.

Back in 1983 I saw a TV programme about the making of Bill Forsythe’s second best film which showed the marketing department going through various drafts of the poster until they came up with the final design of Peter Riegert wading by the red telephone box. (The phone booth was dropped for the more vertical and wordy US campaign and, in a reversal of the Sarah Marshall scenario, Burt Lancaster was added). Back then I made a mental note that designing movie posters seemed like the best job in the world, but I was about to head to London to study English literature. Somehow I found my way back.

As for Forgetting Sarah Marshall, I saw it yesterday and even for this Apatow apologist it was disappointing. Great cast, not least Brand and the most beautiful Ukrainian actress outside of a Paradjanov film, but droopy exposition. Not memorable.

Music Poster of the Week

It’s business time.

Blue Berries and Red Balloons

A remarkable red letter day for cinephiles, April 4th saw theatrical openings of new films by both Hou Hsiao Hsien and Wong Kar Wai, the two greatest Chinese-born filmmakers working today. There was a time (briefer for Wong than for Hou) when neither director’s films could find distribution in the States so this is cause enough for celebration. Coincidentally both films—both of which premiered at last year’s Cannes—are set abroad (one in France, the other in the States), star A-list actresses and center their stories on an introverted outsider who quietly observes the maelstrom of life around her. In My Blueberry Nights it’s heart-broken Nora Jones who leaves New York and travels cross country in search of solace. In Flight of the Red Balloon it’s Fang Song who goes to work as a nanny for harried single mom Juliette Binoche. Both films are more mood pieces than narratives. Both flirt with whimsy: a wandering red balloon—a hommage to Albert Lamorisse’s children’s classic of course—that bobs and weaves through the action; and a labored metaphor about blueberry pies. Both films are, in their own way, as light as air…or pastry crust.

As airy as it is, Flight of the Red Balloon is by far the stronger film, one of Hou’s best in years while My Blueberry Nights, dubbed a failure at Cannes, comes to us with its tail between its legs. Seen with low expectations, Blueberry is not unwatchable. Its screenplay (co-written with—WTF?—crime writer Lawrence Block) is terribly corny and adolescent and full of Hallmark sentiment, but the film looks gorgeous. WKW and his cinematographer, the great Darius Khondji (who has three films in theaters right now along with Funny Games and The Ruins!) fill every inch of the frame with a blur of color and light which is almost enough to distract us from the banality of its shopworn scenarios. Flight of the Red Balloon on the other hand is less spectacularly but more subtly beautiful. HHH and longtime DP Mark Lee Ping-bin work miracles in small spaces. Much of the action takes place in the cramped, cluttered apartment of Binoche’s puppeteer and her six year old son and one of the wonders of the film is the way Hou gradually redefines space. At first he films only one wall, with its central table at which everything seems to happen (reminiscent of so many other bustling family tables in earlier Hou films). But as the film progresses Hou reveals staircases, lofts and tiny chambers, like a dream in which you discover a room in your house you never knew was there.

But what really separates Hou’s film from Wong’s is that in Red Balloon, which overflows with incident and life, we feel as if we’re listening in on conversations, catching glimpses of people’s very real lives. (The scenes with the furniture movers and the blind piano tuner in particular are wonderful). In the far more hermetic Blueberry Nights we feel we’re being lectured about people’s lives that don’t ring true at all. And while Nora Jones is passable in her film debut, in Red Balloon Juliette Binoche (not the center of the film but definitely the star) gives the most surprisingly vibrant, mercurial performance of her career. That said, My Blueberry Nights still gets points for Cat Power, whose “The Greatest”—one of my favorite songs—plays at least three times in the film and who appears herself in a lovely, unexpected cameo.