Monthly Archives: February 2008

Politics

Posted by jdewitte on

With the genuinely experienced Democrats being chewed up and spit out very early on, I find that it’s a toss-up between the final two. I’m leaning Obama, and voted that way. The popular dilemma is mine as well – Hillary’s sharper on the specifics, but will be adversarial politics-as-usual. Obama’s more expansive outlook is inspiring, but he’ll definitely be The New Kid, and may end up in Carterville – every good intention meets the Beltway buzzsaw, and he’s wood-chipped into near-irrelevance. But if the mechanics of the campaigns are any indication of their White House managerial skills, Obama’s well-oiled machine can order up the champagne in less than a few weeks. I defer to a very good column by Frank Rich in today’s Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/opinion/24rich.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

Movies / A Rant – Superbad

Posted by jdewitte on

I think I’ve offended the powers that be. I think Ned Beatty thinks I have meddled with the primary forces of nature. Was it too many french films? Did I go overboard in my praise of ‘Jules and Jim?’ I seem to be serving penance for a sin I’m unaware of committing.

First, the egregiously overrated Lifetime-movie-with-sperm-everywhere ‘Squid and the Whale’. (Thank God for the too-infrequent sightings of the always classy Anna Paquin). Now here’s another movie I wouldn’t have lasted a half hour into if I had paid ten bucks. I’ve rearranged my Netflix queue – ‘The Kingdom’ and Jason Statham’s ‘Crank’ are now next. Bring me the blowing up of shit. Bring me the big budget. Bring me the hack directors. Please save me, Netflix.

But first, a rant. I’m perfectly willing to admit that I may have turned into an old, cranky, humorless killjoy. I may have completely forgotten what it was like to be an adolescent growing up in America. Years ago, I saw ‘Y Tu Mama Tambien’, and thought “Well, I see where he wanted to go here, and it could have been a good idea in the long run, but those two guys are insufferable tools. Who likes these guys? Who identifies with them? Only in the most exaggerated Cloud-Cuckooland testosterone circle of hell could these two characters exist. What the hell is Maribel Verdu doing with these guys? They’re supposed to be endearing? They’re behaving naturally? We should relate to these masturbating monkeys just because Gael Garcia Bernal has dreamy eyes? I don’t feel any empathy for her because she’s stupid enough to spend all this time and sexual energy on them. I don’t care if the end of the movie gives her a supposedly better excuse. I was at a loss. I didn’t get it. People loved this movie.

Because (Oh, boy, here we go…) when I was a kid, when I was that age, we thought about girls a lot. We thought about pussies a lot. We thought about our dicks a lot. We all had the hormones writing checks our brains couldn’t cash. But it wasn’t all our lives were about. In fact, the few kids I knew back then who Were all about the pussy and Were all about their dicks and Were all about getting into a girl’s, any girl’s, pants, and were all about being shitface drunk before any of it could happen, WERE FUCKING CREEPS! If those guys grew up to be like that today, THEY’D BE FUCKING CREEPS! I see that side of my own experiences in characters like this, but when the whole movie is about characters for whom that’s all it’s about, then it’s a fucking creepy movie about fucking creeps!

So it is with sadness that I must inform all of my friends with differing opinions ( and God Bless You All!) that the characters in the mega-hit, mega-hip Superbad, to me, were virulently unsympathetic, in fact, nauseatingly pa-thetic, and incapable of delivering one single funny moment. The only, one, single time I laughed was at the drawing of the erect penis standing in front of the tank in Tiananmin Square. ‘Porky’s’ is a better film than ‘Superbad’. ‘Bachelor Party’ is a better film than ‘Superbad’.

I felt only sadness for Michael Cera’s character, having to tolerate this pestilence of ‘friends’. I guess having Any Conscience Or Tact Whatsoever makes you not only an endearing everyman, but a good sport, too. McLovin is amusing for about a minute-and-a-half. The cops are a sloppy and unfunny live-action cartoon. All the drunk chicks egging on Becca the drunk chick – ‘Blow that cute drunk guy, Becca! You go girl!’… Been there? Done that? The sober girl is slobbered over and insulted by the surrealistically neurotic, brain-dead, mouth-breathing, practically insane excrescence that is Seth, and we sure hope they hook up anyway? So he’ll be saved from himself by the love of a good woman?

Shit is funny when you establish a reality, and then break it’s rules. It’s funny when you have How Life Is in common, then take liberties and say stuff and do stuff that We Sure Wish We Could Say And Do. We like to see the little guy put one over on The Man. Schaudenfreude can be funny – pratfalls, slapstick, Larry David.

For me, this film utterly failed at establishing any reality, alternative or familiar, that I might identify with in order to share, or even locate, humor in. It was all so exaggerated, so in-your-face, so ‘Hey, you get this, right?!’, so simultaneously eager-to-please and eager-to-offend, so FUCKING CREEPY, that I will now take a goddamn shower. Yeeeee-uckkkk!!

Movies – Squid and the Whale

Posted by jdewitte on

Maybe I saw this film too soon after ‘Jules and Jim’, but Noah Baumbach’s The Squid And The Whale was just excruciating. Well-acted, well-shot, with some interesting small revelations that accumulated slowly. But I’ll quote a Metacritic user who sums up my feelings exactly:

‘Far be it from me to suggest that a feature film should tell a story rather than submit its audience to self-indulgent scab-ripping. I sat through this film because the actors did a decent job with what is in essence directorial psychic masturbation captured on celluloid. I refuse to give credit to a film ONLY for being “real,” as if leaving the camcorder running in divorce court constitutes art. And while it is entirely possible for a “painful” film to be excellent, one cannot mistake pain for excellence. The film WAS painful to watch, and the acting WAS above average. However, there was nothing in the film to redeem the painful experience. Is the “message” that married adults divorcing in an orgy of narcissism harms the psychological development of children? So am I supposed to thank the director for poking me in the eye with a stick to convey the painfully obvious?’

Movies – Jules and Jim

Posted by jdewitte on

When I was just a young’un growing up in suburbia, one of my favorite Saturday night diversions was the series of Janus films they used to show on channel 11. ‘L’Avventura’, and the profound inscrutability of Monica Vitti; Cocteau’s ‘Orpheus’ – death as the elegant blonde in a black limousine, Lattuada’s ‘The Overcoat’, and a generous sampling of Bergman – ‘Seventh Seal’, ‘Virgin Spring’, ‘Sawdust and Tinsel’. I saw these films as an ongoing course in How Grown-Ups Behave, what adults think about, how joyfully they can laugh, how bitterly they can despair.

Henri Serre, Jeanne Moreau and Oskar Werner in “Jules And Jim.” credit: criterion.com

But the landmark, the tabula rasa, the textbook of How Grown-Ups Behave was Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim. I watched it, enthralled, when I was eleven or twelve years old, and just thought “Jules! Jim! Catherine! They’re so cool! They’re so much smarter than anyone else I’ve ever known!”, with all the wisdom and reverence a pre-teen can muster. I saw it once again shortly after college, mid-twenties, and thought ‘OK, this explains why people don’t like French movies. Characters sitting in living rooms, characters sitting in cafes, characters sitting next to each other in bedrooms, talking, talking, talking, about life, and death, and l’amour fou. Trying to have everything both ways, hell, every way. How goddamn French.” But that didn’t necessarily mean I had dismissed Truffaut – I recognized him as a great filmmaker, and loved a number of his later movies; ‘Wild Child’, ‘Day For Night’, ‘Adele H’.

So ‘Jules And Jim’ was always planted in my brain as a film I should revisit, and this week I did. And was completely blown away. It was interesting to discover how much of it I had actually remembered, how much of it had stayed with me. Jules and Jim (Oskar Werner and Henri Serre) meet in Paris in the days before World War I, and form a deep and lasting friendship. Georges Delarue’s brilliant music score describes, overtly, the carnival atmosphere of being young in vernacular Paris society. In the midst of having the usual entanglements with girlfriends serious and transitory, they meet Catherine (Jeanne Moreau). They compare her to a face they’ve seen on a primitive sculpture they both admire – the first time the three of them go out together, Catherine’s in male drag as a goof, and instantly closes the gender gap that might separate the nature of their friendship-to-be. Catherine is established as a force of nature, a walking, talking, living, breathing argument against conventionality. Now there are three inseparable friends. Catherine gravitates to Jules in this particular present, and they become a couple before the three of them are separated by Jules and Jim’s conscriptions for the war. Jules and Catherine reunite as a married couple after the war, and have a child together, Sabine. Jim is happily reunited with his coupled friends post-war at their cottage in Austria, only to find that they are deeply troubled by their domesticity, Catherine most profoundly.

At this point, we’re about halfway through the film, and what follows is, to my mind, one of the deepest, richest, most passionately thoughtful explorations of human behaviour that has ever been commited to celluloid. Jim and Catherine commence an affair of their own, with Jules’ resigned blessing, and they agree to live together with Sabine as a threesome.

Catherine-as-force-of-nature, from all her irresistable graciousness to her seemingly unforgivable betrayals, adored by the devoted friends, and the constantly changing emotional landscape between the three of them, isn’t presented by Truffaut in happy-happy montages or knock-down-drag-out arguments or taciturn earnestness. He simply follows the characters honestly through events over time. When Catherine meets Jim’s train in Austria for their reunion, Jim describes her demeanor as ‘fantasy and daring barely held in check.’ Throughout the film, there’s a running motif of them chasing her – across a footbridge, through a field, on bicycles. Jules and Jim frequently, off-handedly, refer to ‘the others’ – “How are the others?” “Oh, the others. You know.” When Jules inadvertantly witnesses a demonstration of Jim’s love for Catherine, he says “Give my regards to the others.” Catherine becomes the defining reference for the mens’ own regard for themselves. When the one is in her favor, the other has been self-consigned to the fate of,…well…, The Others. The pedestrians, the regular joes, the conventional. Each feels exiled, and in exile refers to the present couple as the ‘Other’ – it’s your turn for the shot at domesticity with her, as long as it lasts. What it is the three have together, and what is the ‘other’ life, is constantly examined and rethought.

There are also a number of references to Goethe’s novel ‘Elective Affinities’, which takes the scientific theories of how chemicals behave when incongruously combined, and uses that as a metaphor for human relationships. I’ve never read it, but did a little homework and came across this from an Amazon.com commenter: “With this novel, Goethe tries to demonstrate that love is not a matter of conscious decision-making; that we can not control at all who we fall in love with, and that it is absurd to try to fight against it.” One could very well reach this same conclusion with Truffaut’s film – is this a truth that Catherine already takes for granted? Is this what Jules and Jim must constantly struggle with, unresolvedly? Can they choose not to struggle and just accept a sublime truth?

Obviously, I worship this film. The only other film that I can recall even coming close to the profound intimacy and understated passion of this film is Marco Giordana’s ‘Best Of Youth,’ and God Bless Marco, but he needed six hours to pull off what Truffaut did in 1:45. I may someday review ‘Best Of Youth’, a superb film, but for now I think this review does it as much justice as I’ll ever be able to:

http://nypress.com/print.cfm?content_id=12611