Engineer's Daughter

one person can change your life forever

Sometimes I think I might be the only person of my generation who isn't completely enchanted by Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain.  I saw it in the theater (a couple times) when it first came out, and then just watched it again recently on DVD, appropriately enough not long after re-viewing Say Anything...  I had to learn the hard way that Lloyd Dobler doesn't actually exist in real life, but I fear many smart boys I know have not yet figured out Amélie Poulain is merely a figment of the moviemaker's imagination.  And like Amélie herself, her film's calculated quirkiness threatens to overwhelm its considerable charms.  I do appreciate Jeunet's imaginative film-making style, and there are many marvelous sequences that occur throughout his cleaned-up version of contemporary Paris that give me a vicarious thrill.  I am certainly a firm believer in living life passionately and true love.  It's just hard for me to stomach a fairy tale romance with an aggressive candy coating so intent on selling its fantasy that it sometimes feels like being fed a pill.  Give me a Kieślowski film instead, with his clear-eyed observation of human behavior and the small moments that lead to real connection between two people.  His Trois couleurs: Rouge also has its main character a young woman who lives by herself in an attractive apartment, but Valentine is quietly introspective rather than self-pitying and makes a huge difference in the life of one lonely man in particular because she is compelled to do the right thing.  Amélie seems downright contrived in comparison.

to know lloyd dobler is to love him

I must have first seen Cameron Crowe's Say Anything... when I was about 13 or 14, a very impressionable age indeed, which goes a long way toward explaining why I still tear up a little every time I hear "In Your Eyes" on the radio.  Lloyd Dobler's boombox maneuver has become shorthand to my generation for the ultimate grand romantic gesture, the modern-day Romeo serenading his recalcitrant Juliet.  I have to watch the movie again every few years and am always pleased with how well it stands up, Ione Skye's outfits aside (which frankly looked pretty frumptastic even back in the day).  Crowe has always had a deft touch when it comes to portraying relationships, and here the emotional punch not only comes from what happens between Lloyd and Diane but also between Diane and her father.  Crowe also perfectly captures the heightened feelings, half dread and half eager anticipation, of that one summer between high school and the rest of your life, and along with the genuine laugh-out-loud moments in the film (hey that's Jeremy Piven as the "You must chill!" dude!) he never allows any of his characters, teenagers and adults alike, to become mere caricatures.  I do explicitly blame him for the fact that I spent all of high school looking for my Lloyd though.

the world is changed

In amongst my numerous activities this last weekend I also managed to squeeze in a viewing of The Fellowship of the Ring, and it was probably about the fifth or sixth time I've seen it (I lose track).  It seems hard to believe now that almost ten years ago when it first came out no one really knew who Viggo Mortensen was or that there was doubt Peter Jackson was going to deliver anything less than a fully epic interpretation of Tolkien's trilogy.  My brother was the Tolkien fanatic back in the day, not me, so I'd never read the books and experienced everything in the films the first time I saw them as a complete surprise.  Now that the stories are more familiar to me I just sit back and enjoy my favorite scenes, which coincidentally enough all have Viggo in them.  I'm still impressed at what Jackson managed to accomplish, not only satisfying the pickiest of die-hard nerds but creating a thoroughly entertaining movie experience for the rest of us with a little bit of CGI and a whole lot of old-fashioned skill and costumes and make-up.  Imagining what it must have been like to organize the entire production, my mind just boggles.

a new regime

I spent the last month making my way through Season 3 of The Sopranos, originally broadcast so long ago that the Twin Towers are still in the opening credits.  Admittedly I'm more than a little behind and yes I've already seen the series' famous final episode, but I find something intensely satisfying about watching the characters slowly work their way toward that finish.  There are so many unforgettable moments in this season (Livia's funeral, Dr. Melfi's attack, the unfortunate results of Ralphie's coke bender, Tony's relationship with Gloria), and the entire Steve Buscemi-directed "Pine Barrens" episode where Christopher and Paulie get lost in the woods is a small masterwork of self-contained TV storytelling from start to finish.  Just don't ask me how long it's going to be before I get to Season 4.

we scare because we care

Before there were blue cat people on Pandora there was a big blue monster named Sully.  I recently watched Monsters, Inc. for the first time since I saw it in the theater back in the day (almost ten years ago, yikes), and it just reinforced for me all over again what expert world-builders those geniuses at Pixar are.  From the nixie tubes of Monstropolis's digital displays to the six-armed octopus sushi chef at restaurant Harryhausen, the film is absolutely chock full of details and nerdy inside jokes that make me smile.  I know Pixar films often follow a very familiar plot trajectory, but I've said it before and I'll say it again that sometimes it's just nice to know everything is going to turn out OK in the end.  And I think Boo might be one of my all-time favorite animated characters.  "Kitty!"  Now bring on the sequel please.

one day history will have its say

Anyone who has read King Leopold's Ghost needs to see Raoul Peck's 2000 film Lumumba, which dramatizes the life and horrifying death of the first prime minister of Congo after that country gained independence from Belgium in 1960.  Peck does not glamorize Patrice Lumumba, and the brilliant French actor Eriq Ebouaney instead plays him as a complex leader who was a powerful orator but also a perfectionist whose stubbornness proved a liability to his country in the volatile period following independence.  Lumumba lasted mere months in office before he was assassinated, and Peck leaps backwards and forwards in time to illustrate Lumumba's meteoric rise and fall at a dizzying pace that takes the viewer along for the ride, mirroring too the extreme instability in Congo's government that is the country's legacy to this day.  Lumumba is the rare biopic that trusts the intelligence of its audience, and I appreciated that Peck's intention was to capture something of the personality of his main character and not to simply spoon out dry historical facts.  However, the movie sure did inspire me to run to Wikipedia afterward to do some further reading.

if you're hoping for the perfect family don't hold your breath

Hollywood pumps out chick flicks faster than you can name the four protagonists of Sex and the City, but it's the rare film that actually captures women in all of their complexity.  Nicole Holofcener's 2001 film Lovely & Amazing is exactly that elusive beast.  Diving deep into the female psyche, Holofcener focuses on three sisters played by Catherine Keener, Emily Mortimer, and Raven Goodwin and their varying relationships with each other and with their mother (the always-sublime Brenda Blethyn).  They are a close-knit family but each character struggles with a set of neuroses that include anger and crippling insecurity, issues that are not unfamiliar to myself and many other women I know.  Holofcener is a keen observer with a great ear for dialogue, and as an added bonus the film features a young Jake Gyllenhaal as Keener's photomat boss.  We're talking Donnie Darko-era Jake Gyllenhaal here, people.

la pianiste

I knew I was going to be in for it watching Michael Haneke's 2001 film The Piano Teacher, based on the book by Elfriede Jelinek.  After all, neither director nor writer are known for their delicate sensibilites: Haneke's Funny Games (both versions of it) is notoriously one of the most disturbing movies ever made, and Jelinek's novel Greed about a serial killer in Austria gave me nightmares for a week.  In The Piano Teacher, from the moment the young piano student played by Benoît Magimel locks eyes on music professor Erika Kohut (the astonishing Isabelle Huppert) he is determined to possess her.  But as Haneke shows us scenes of how the dangerously repressed Erika gets her sexual thrills, we start to get the feeling that this is not going to end well at all.  The pitch-black story contrasts strikingly with the gorgeous classical music (oh, the Schubert) that is performed by the characters throughout the film, and Haneke's direction, though stark, lingers to show the beauty of a player's fingers on a piano keyboard or the barest flicker of pleasure across Huppert's tightly-composed face.  I was reminded of Bergman's Cries and Whispers in the way Haneke portrays the brutality and the dark undercurrents of human emotion, and like The Piano Teacher that's another film I'm very glad to have seen but am also OK if I never see it again.

greetings from...

One of the many things John Sayles excels at is creating a world so complete in his films that the viewer feels like a resident, from the Louisiana bayou of Passion Fish to the Irish fishing village of The Secret of Roan Inish to the Texas border town of Lone Star.  He does it again in 2002's excellent Sunshine State, a portrait of a fictional oceanside town in Florida with a history of segregation and which in the film is under attack by land-hungry developers.  The Altman-esque ensemble cast is stellar throughout, but standouts include Angela Bassett as a prodigal daughter returning home and Edie Falco as a woman who runs her father's motor hotel (which just happens to stand in the middle of a piece of prime real estate).  I also loved the Greek chorus of golfers who appear at key moments to offer some oblique commentary on the action.  Sayles masterfully weaves together easily half a dozen plot lines and gives his characters plenty of time to reveal their secrets, and the result is a wonderfully multilayered film that never feels contrived.

mares!

This is what happens when I'm feeling a little down and there are like five things I want to be out doing but instead I'm home nursing a brand-new sore throat.  In my feverish delirium I watch Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, a movie where the plot wouldn't challenge a six-year-old and the soundtrack is dangerously studded with Bryan Adams.  I have always had intense affection for horses; as a pre-teen I read every single Black Stallion book Walter Farley ever wrote and spent several Christmases actually believing I would find a pony under the tree.  And the animation is pretty and Matt Damon and James Cromwell do some of the voice acting.  Still, best to leave this one to the youngsters (and the occasional bedridden adult female) methinks.