Movies

A Girl Cut in Two

PETER KEOUGH — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:56:38 GMT

High-quality perversity
The title of Claude Chabrol’s 2007 black comic morality tale — La fille coupée en deux — serves as a playful reminder of the role women usually play on the screen.

When men were men

STEVE VINEBERG — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:02:05 GMT

Sam Peckinpah at the Harvard Film Archive
Since Sam Peckinpah’s untimely death at the age of 59, he has acquired such legendary status that it’s startling to remember that he made only 14 films over a period of 22 years.

THE WILD BUNCH: In contrast with this film’s jackals and vultures, the Bunch act like men and die with honor.

“Sam Peckinpah, Blood Poet” | Harvard Film Archive | September 5-12

In the nearly two and a half decades since Sam Peckinpah’s untimely death at the age of 59, he has acquired such legendary status and his influence has been so pervasive that it’s startling to remember that he made only 14 films over a period of 22 years — and that even now many of them are still obscure. So the long-overdue retrospective that begins this Friday at the Harvard Film Archive, “Sam Peckinpah, Blood Poet,” is most welcome.

There were gaps in Peckinpah’s output owing to his uneasy relationship with the studios: fired off The Cincinnati Kid in 1965, he couldn’t get work again in Hollywood until after he’d returned to television, his original venue, and attracted critical notice with an hour-long adaptation of Katherine Anne Porter’s story “Noon Wine.” Only then did he direct THE WILD BUNCH, his masterpiece — and almost inarguably the greatest Western ever made. (The HFA will conclude the series with a screening of The Wild Bunch on September 12 at 7 pm, pairing it with Paul Seydor’s extraordinary 1996 documentary “THE WILD BUNCH: AN ALBUM IN MONTAGE,” which contains footage of the filming of the Bunch’s last stand that demonstrates how this classic sequence was assembled.) Five years turtled by between the release of Convoy in 1978 and his swan song, The Osterman Weekend. And he spent much of his too-brief career battling studio heads who insisted on dumping his pictures (like the exquisite Ride the High Country, which got relegated to the lower half of double bills) or recutting them. Major Dundee, The Wild Bunch, and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid were all released in versions he did not approve, though the last two can now be seen as he intended them to be.

I Served the King of England

GERALD PEARY — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:53:16 GMT

Ambitious but old-fashioned and sluggish
I Served the King of England , though an arresting story, is the least successful of Czech filmmaker Jiří Menzel's film adaptations.

The Grocer's Son

GERALD PEARY — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:55:41 GMT

Nothing much happens here
Le fils de l’épicier is a dull title, but appropriate for Eric Guirado’s competently made, unexciting movie.

Disaster Movie

BRETT MICHEL — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:58:09 GMT

Devoid of laughs or recognizable actors
Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer (the hacks behind Date Movie and Epic Movie ) unleashed their second witless rehash of pop culture references this year.

College

MARK BAZER — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:59:32 GMT

A vulgar, witless depiction of college
College , which was “directed” by Deb Hagen, is so full of nastiness and cruelty that it’s hard to believe anyone would find joy in it.

Babylon A.D.

BETSY SHERMAN — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 17:06:08 GMT

Incoherent and somewhat amusing
Vin Diesel’s bad-ass boomfest will do if you’re in the mood for post-environmental-apocalypse action that doesn’t make you think too hard.

Devil at the Gate

BRETT MICHEL — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 15:50:58 GMT

Giving voice to Red Heroine
The ensemble has spent the better part of a decade composing and performing soundtracks for silent films, creating their own brand of musical alchemy.

WHERE’S THAT ERHU? You can’t see it here, but you might hear it this weekend.

If the name Devil Music Ensemble conjures an apparition of musicians accompanying Rupert Julian’s adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s 1909-’10 serial Le fantôme de l’Opéra, then you might not be surprised to hear that such an outfit exists. And though Boston bandmates Brendon Wood, Jonah Rapino, and Tim Nylander have yet to achieve the fame of Cambridge’s Alloy Orchestra (or accompany Julian’s 1925 film, as Alloy have), they have spent the better part of a decade composing and performing soundtracks for silent films, creating their own brand of musical alchemy.

This weekend, they debut their latest work, an original score for the sixth (and only surviving) episode of the 13-part Chinese serial Red Knight Errant, Wen Yimin’s 1929 silent Red Heroine [Hongxia], the oldest extant martial-arts film. It will screen on Friday at the Chinatown Gate (on the vacant paved lot on Hudson Street) at 7:30 pm as part of the “Films at the Gate” free outdoor festival, and then on Saturday in Somerville’s Union Square at approximately 8 pm.

So, where did “Devil Music” come from? “Well, there are a couple of stories,” Rapino tells me. The main one has to do with George Crumb’s Black Angels (Images I): 13 images from the dark land. It’s really amazing music, composed during the Vietnam era. ‘Devil-music’ is the name of a piece of one of the movements.”

“That’s the more sophisticated version,” laughs Wood. The “real story,” he confides, involves a lazy afternoon spent cranking Van Halen’s Fair Warning after school. “I was playing the record pretty loudly when my grandmother comes in yelling, ‘What’s that devil music?!’ I knew right then that that would make a great name for a band someday.”

That day came in 1999, when Wood formed the rock band Devil Music with Rapino and Nylander. But the film influence didn’t creep in till a couple of years later. Rapino: “We used to play at AS220 in Providence. Brendon was a fan of Jean Cocteau’s Le sang d’un poète, and he installed a monitor on stage showing the 1930 film “purely as a backdrop to our playing.” In 2002, Devil Music Ensemble (“We added the ‘Ensemble’ after we started playing live accompaniment for films,” says Wood, “since we sometimes bring in more musicians”) performed their soundtrack to René Clair’s 1926 film Le voyage imaginaire during the “Celluloud” series at the Coolidge Corner Theatre.

Unmitigated Gaul

A. S. HAMRAH — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:39:25 GMT

Eric Rohmer says adieu with Astrea and Celadon
Now 88 years old, Eric Rohmer, a leading light of the French New Wave and a former film critic at Cahiers du cinéma, says Romance of Astrea and Celadon is his last film.

PICTURE PERFECT? Rohmer, like Godard, finishes his career painting with light.

Now 88 years old, Eric Rohmer, a leading light of the French New Wave and a former film critic at Cahiers du cinéma, says Romance ofAstrea and Celadon [Les amours d’Astrée et de Céladon] is his last film. That people who have never seen a Rohmer film might not want to start with this one is a fair warning. Based on a 17th-century novel by Honoré d’Urfé and set in fifth-century-BC Gaul, Astrea and Celadon features a cast of French Renaissance Faire hippie-dippies playing shepherds and shepherdesses, nymphs and druids. It may be a Rohmerian moral tale, but it is far removed from the Parisian world of contemporary amour that Rohmer has been investigating over the past 40 years or so.

On the other hand, if you’re in the position to make Rohmer’s last movie the first one you see, do it. That way, when you get around to seeing classic Rohmer films like My Night at Maud’s, Claire’s Knee, A Summer’s Tale, or A Winter’s Tale, they will seem very strange, possibly even stranger than Astrea and Celadon. They won’t seem like talky relationship films at all. Under the influence of Astrea and Celadon, you will see them in the context Rohmer intended. They will appear to you as quasi-mystical love stories in which lovers, with a flat intensity, play for high stakes amid a deceptive, fragile calm. Or maybe that’s not your cup of tea either.

They say when a director dies, he becomes a photographer. But what if before he dies he becomes a painter? Astrea and Celadon presents viewers with a number of paintings on classical themes. At the same time, it demonstrates how the cinema transcends painting, furthers its work. The cinematography and the camerawork in this film equal any in Rohmer’s œuvre. We see characters outdoors, from a distance or in Rohmerian medium shots, not large in the frame but not dwarfed by nature. It’s a human perspective we’re not used to anymore.

Traitor

MARK BAZER — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:53:09 GMT

Never as exciting as an episode of 24
This Islamic-terrorist thriller takes us halfway around the world before landing on our shores to introduce us to the terrorists in our midst.

Stealing America

PETER KEOUGH — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:55:28 GMT

Something to infuriate everyone
Watching Stealing America , you wonder whether even the election of 2008 isn’t a foregone conclusion.

Kino pravda

MICHAEL ATKINSON — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:03:35 GMT

‘Envisioning Russia’ at the MFA
Because Mosfilm, the subject of the Museum of Fine Arts’ “Envisioning Russia” retrospective, was the Soviet state production studio, any cross-section of its history lays out the entirety of Soviet film history.

THE MIRROR: Tarkovsky’s film is a unique autobiographical testament.

Because Mosfilm, the subject of the Museum of Fine Arts’ “Envisioning Russia” retrospective, was the Soviet state production studio, any cross-section of its history lays out the entirety of Soviet film history — not only in its mainstream, but on its catapulting visionary fringes. Of course, Soviet filmmaking always resounded with the electric tension between state propaganda and individualistic artistry, often within a given film. Sure, the famous dialectic montage experiments from the 1920s salad days of Eisenstein and Pudovkin were motivated by pure Marxist guile, but it’s more difficult to see the extraordinary development of the long traveling shot as being anything but cinema rising to its own expressive level in spite of Politburo politics. Mosfilm was still the empire’s Hollywood, churning out populist fodder for the masses while sometimes conscientiously undercutting the government’s simplistic anti-Westernism to degrees that can make our own industry’s McCarthyite years seem outright pathetic.

The retro serves as a crash lesson in Russian film, starting obligatorily with Eisenstein’s BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925; September 11 at 5:15 pm). For too long now, this one has been reflexive university viewing to such a suffocating extent, American students may be surprised to find that early Soviet filmmaking was not all hammer-to-the-head editing and Marxist cant. In fact, Eisenstein’s position as one of the medium’s looming giants has silently deteriorated; the more time passes, the more mechanical and manipulative his work seems. The limitations were built-in: his entire æsthetic was predicated on his being the omniscient god and the audience his easily controlled minions. (Spielberg and Lucas, it could be said, have demonstrated similar sensibilities.) Free of historical intents or contexts, propaganda art is usually beguiling in its naïveté, but Battleship Potemkin feels bitter, as if revolutionary discontent unconsciously expressed Eisenstein’s outrage that of all the nations in all the eras for this artist to be born into, it had to be this one.

Interview: Ludivine Sagnier

PETER HYMAN — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:24:12 GMT

Nude? Naked?
As sultry French starlets go, 29-year-old Ludivine Sagnier is as advertised.

As sultry French starlets go, 29-year-old Ludivine Sagnier is as advertised. Seductive, clever, sensual, and often at the center of a torrid love triangle, the Prix Romy Schneider winner first bared her soul to American audiences as the skinny-dipping ingénue in François Ozon’s Swimming Pool (2003). Her wide-eyed enthusiasm and fragile sexuality will be on display again next week in Claude Chabrol’s erotically chilling A Girl Cut in Two [La fille coupée en deux], in which she plays a provincial TV weather girl torn between an older author and a rich young dissolute. Now five months pregnant with her second child, Mlle. Sagnier sat down with me in New York to discuss nudity, submissiveness, older men, and American politics.

One of the film’s themes is the question of whether French culture is moving toward decadence or Puritanism. Which do you prefer?
Decadence. But . . . not the hypocritical decadence that we have now, which encourages people to get more and more stupid.

How close are you to the character of Gabrielle Deneige?
She’s more frustrating because she’s desperately looking for a father figure, and she is also very provincial, whereas I come from a very balanced family in Paris. I’ve been much less naive in my life. I don’t fall into those traps. I fall into other traps, but that’s a story for another time.

You’ve been nude in at least five of the films you done, most notably to American audiences in Swimming Pool. Does being naked come naturally to you?
No. That’s a legend, an image you have here in America. I’m not necessarily open to being nude. It’s just a question of performance. And all the times where I play naked, it’s always done with dignity. It’s not like these are lousy movies.

A Girl Cut in Two has little overt nudity, yet it was more sexually charged than anything you’ve done.
Yes, it’s all about sex. Even Chabrol joked that he was doing his porn movie. I was like, “Come on Claude, you don’t even show anything.” And he said, “I don’t need that, I’ve put obscenity in the eyes of the audience, they can put it wherever they like.”

Was that more difficult to do than simply taking off a robe and lounging in the sun with no clothes on?
It was very destabilizing because everything is possible. The only boundary is the imagination, and when you’re playing that, it’s very disturbing. I wasn’t comfortable at all. I felt dirty, much more than I did just being physically naked.

The House Bunny

TOM MEEK — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:57:13 GMT

Cheap gags and the requisite amount of T+A
Once again Anna Faris, the only reason to see the Scary Movie franchise, adds undeserved riches to an awful premise.

Death Race

JASON O'BRYAN — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:58:49 GMT

A B-movie full of crowd-pleasing bullshit
Glistening torso Jensen Ames (the ubiquitous Jason Statham), is framed for the murder of his sweet wife in this loose remake of the 1975 cult favorite Death Race 2000 .

What We Do Is Secret

BETSY SHERMAN — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:17:19 GMT

Exposition trumps atmosphere
That staple of the musical bio-pic — a close-up of dope bubbling on a spoon — punctuates Rodger Grossman’s account of the short life of Darby Crash.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars

BRETT MICHEL — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:06:47 GMT

A stiffly-animated, money-grabbing afterthought
It is Star Wars , but it's also an ad for an upcoming video game and an animated TV series debuting in October.

Sixty Six

PEG ALOI — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:03:56 GMT

A pleasing, if unbalanced, period piece
Paul Weiland ( Made of Honor ) directs this autobiographical coming-of-age comedy set in London in 1966, the year England took on Germany in the World Cup final.

The Rocker

BROOKE HOLGERSON — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:08:25 GMT

The set-up is adequate, but the jokes fall flat
Rainn Wilson of The Office gets promoted to the big screen with this anemic comedy directed by The Full Monty helmer Peter Cattaneo.

Mirrors

CHRIS WANGLER — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:09:19 GMT

A less gory and more clichéd remake
It would all be funny if it didn’t mirror the same burnt-out ideas every one else is using.