The Castle of Cagliostro (1979)

During the getaway from their latest heist, master thief Lupin III and his sidekick Jigen realize that the cash they've stolen is fake. They set off to the tiny principality of Cagliostro to search for the source of the superb counterfeits. On the way, they see a beautiful young woman in a convertible trying to elude a car full of thugs. She is Princess Clarisse of Cagliostro. Lupin tries to rescue her, but the thugs win, and Lupin and Jigen travel to the eponymous castle, determined to recover both Clarisse and the counterfeiting plates. Oh, and Clarisse is engaged to marry Count Cagliostro--an evil dude who tries really hard to kill Lupin.

I'd been told (by the Internet) that this movie works without any background in the Lupin III series, and it does, but not that well. There are two characters--the samurai Goemon and con artist Fujiko--who seemed totally superfluous to me. I can only imagine they're in the movie because they're established characters in the series, and fans would expect them. Even Jigen (Lupin's sidekick) and Zenigata (a Japanese cop who pursues Lupin) seemed to be treated as more significant characters than they were in this particular story. The Castle of Cagliostro works as a stand-alone movie, but I think I'd probably have liked it better if I had read the manga or seen the TV series, and I think I've enjoyed other Miyazaki films more in part because they felt more self-contained.

The Castle of Cagliostro's main characters--Lupin, Clarisse, and the Count--bear a strange resemblance to the main characters of The Princess Bride. Count Cagliostro is a carbon copy of Prince Humperdinck. Lupin must cleverly work around an injury in his assault on the castle. He and his two sidekicks even set up a "terrifying apparition" routine to interrupt the wedding--a routine very much in the spirit of the Dread Pirate Roberts. In the same scene, I was honestly surprised when the officiating clergyman didn't say, "Mawwidge is what bwings us togevah today." (Instead he tells Clarisse, "You must speak now. Otherwise, silence will be accepted as consent to this union." GOOD. That is a good policy.)

Clarisse cannot object to the union because the villainous Count has sedated her. Even without the drugs, though, Clarisse is pretty passive. She has the opening car chase going for her, but after that, she turns into a garden-variety damsel-in-distress. At one point, there's a wide shot of her standing still as the lights are switched off in her well-appointed tower prison.


I thought it would be funny if she just stayed that way, perfectly still--if she switched to a state of suspended animation whenever there were no men around to talk to her. Alas, she does not; instead, she occupies herself with staring rapturously at a fuckin' flower Lupin gave her or whatever. The movie's other female character, Fujiko, seems to have much more potential. I presume she's a regular in the Lupin series; it's too bad she's such a minor character here.

Overall, I felt like The Castle of Cagliostro was not a particularly compelling movie, but it had some very compelling sequences. The car chase with Clarisse, Lupin, and the baddies is a lot of fun, and I loved Lupin's heist antics on the castle rooftops and in the aqueduct. But I didn't love the movie, partly because I didn't know enough about the characters, and partly because my expectations were too high. I was hoping Cagliostro would be as magical as later Miyazaki movies like Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, or even Porco Rosso. It's not.

- Liked It

Doctor Who: Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks (2007)

"That motherfucker had, like, 30 goddamn dicks."

Doctor Who is this great show about a dude named the Doctor who is an alien and is awesome and zips around space and time in his space-and-time machine, which looks like a blue box and is called the TARDIS and is also awesome. One caveat to the show's awesomeness, though: sometimes it sucks.

In this two-part episode, the Doctor (David Tennant, at this point) and his companion Martha (Freema Agyeman) visit New York during the Great Depression, because, you know, they figured that would be fun. Alas! Their quaint excursion to the breadlines is foiled by--who else?--the genocidal Daleks. The Doctor's mortal enemies are kidnapping people and dragging them to the Empire State Building in service of some evil plan.

Okay. Pretty straightforward. Also pretty boring. Neither the Doctor nor Martha does or says anything particularly interesting, and most of the guest characters are similarly flat. I do like the relationship between stagehand Laszlo and Adelaide-clone Tallulah. It's sweet and sad. Everything else about this two-parter, though--the tedious plot, the awful American accents, the idea of Human Daleks--is best forgotten.

For some reason, in new Who*, the presence of Daleks (or Cybermen, another classic enemy of the Doctor) tends to indicate crappy episodes. The big exception is the Ninth Doctor episode "Dalek," which is heart-wrenching and pretty dope. But while "Dalek" pulsed with an emotional core, most Dalek-centric episodes have been heavy on the "EXTERMINATE!" catch phrase (which--don't get me wrong--I love) and light on real feeling. The most recent season of Doctor Who was superb; to my mind, its only truly lackluster episode was the third one: "Victory of the Daleks." I'm going to idly speculate that Dalek episodes disappoint because 1) they're probably commissioned in an unimaginative way ("Give us Daleks in the thirties!" "Give us Daleks in WWII!") and 2) Daleks bring down the whimsy level, which means that the episode must compensate by being really dark or really scary. Otherwise, it's just really dull.

Looking back on season 3 of new Who, I'm sad for Martha Jones. She was a one-season-only companion, and she got shortchanged. First, her pining after the Doctor was not a particularly meaty arc. Second, she was in a lot of mediocre-to-bad episodes. In spite of those substantial handicaps, I find Freema Agyeman's performance completely winning. I love Martha and want only the best for her. But she did not usually get the best. She usually got "Daleks in Manhattan."

*There is "old Who," which ran from 1963-1989, and "new Who," which began in 2005. New Who is not a true reboot; it continued from where the old series left off. (More or less.)

- Didn't Like It (but if I were rating new Who as a whole, I'd give it 4 stars, and if I was rating the newest season of new Who, I'd give it 6 or 7)

Moon (2009)

This is a great week for everyone but me being right. For years, my friends, colleagues, and frenemies have been telling me I should watch The Wire, and I have said, "I will watch The Wire when I watch The Wire." Now I am watching The Wire, and you all were right, and I was stupid. Similarly, last year, while everyone I knew flipped out about Moon, I said, "Yeah, I'll get around to it." WELL, I HAVE GOTTEN AROUND TO IT, AND IT IS GREAT.

Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) works for a company called Lunar Industries, mining helium-3, which humanity has adopted as its primary energy source. Sam is the only human part of the operation, there to inspect and maintain the automated harvesters. He's been alone on the moon for almost three years. When the movie opens, he's two weeks away from returning home, which is good, because the isolation is driving him crazy. He's started hallucinating, and one vision distracts him as he's driving out to a harvester, leading to a nasty collision. In the aftermath of the accident, he starts uncovering his employer's sinister secrets. (Ooh! Sinister! [Very sinister.])

Here are some things that Moon has:
-Sam Rockwell
-A robot
-Outer space
-Feelings
-Great production design/art direction


Moon looks better and is better (smarter, more interesting, more emotionally compelling, etc.) than almost everything that was nominated for an Oscar last year, blah blah, arts awards are bunk. And it is more original than everything else I saw last year, with the possible exception of Logorama. People who know how fond I am of In the Loop and A Serious Man will understand how much it pains me to say that any movie exceeded them at anything, but it's true.

Watching movies like Moon is wonderful, of course, but it's also a little bit awful: it makes average movies look really bad. For a few weeks after I saw Hunger, other movies and TV shows felt mechanical and unchallenging. I'm sure that Moon will also make me bridle at the next movie I try to watch.

Moon is energetic. That's what it is. It has the scrappy intensity of a very ambitious movie made on a small budget, a fuck-you-itiveness. It says, We will show you humanity and corruption and sadness and hope. We will do it on the moon. For $5 million. And it will look goddamned fantastic.

- Loved It

Banlieue 13 (District B13) (2004)

"This is actually the best part of my day so far."

In the near future, violence has skyrocketed in the impoverished outskirts of Paris, which are now ruled by sadistic drug lords and their private armies. The French government has either responded to this phenomenon or caused it by walling off the most dangerous "districts," like the eponymous B13. Leïto (David Belle) lives inside B13. He is a vigilante (?) and landlord (??) who has stolen a lot of heroin, in a public service kind of way. When enforcers come to recover the drugs, Leïto destroys the stash and leads them on a merry chase across the rooftops. B13's kingpin, Taha (Bibi Naceri), retaliates by kidnapping Leïto's little sister, Lola (Dany Verissimo). Leïto almost rescues her, but the cops double-cross him, he goes to jail, and Lola is enslaved by Taha. (We'll come back to that.)

Meanwhile, in a more respectable part of Paris, we meet Capt. Damien Tomasso (Cyril Raffaelli), a cop who's infiltrated a criminal Spanish roulette operation? I don't know; something like that. Something gambling-related. Damien arrests the head Spaniard and, um, kills like twenty guys? Because that is a correct end to an undercover operation. Once Damien's bad-ass cred is established, the movie partners him with Leïto; the two of them are sent to B13 to disarm a bomb that Taha has stolen from the French government.

This movie is not that great. The plot is generally thin and yet still sometimes confusing. The characters and stakes are established in ways that ensured I would not care about them. The acting ranges from workmanlike to atrocious (I'm looking at you, Marc Andréoni). But--and this is a big "but"--there is PARKOUR. If, somehow, in this day and age, you do not know what parkour is, look it up on YouTube. You're welcome. Also, cancel all your plans; you will be watching parkour videos for the next week or so.

Raffaelli's stuntwork as Damien is good, and I enjoyed the set piece that introduces his character, but the real star of the action (and thus of the movie) is Belle. His chase scene at the beginning of the movie is so great. Sorry to wimp out on describing it, but if I say, "He leaps out a high-rise window onto a rope," it is not nearly as cool as when you see him leaping out a high-rise window onto a rope. I wish B13 were all parkour chase scenes, strung together with the bare minimum of dialogue. Parkour porn, in short.

But it is not that. Instead, it tries to be a real movie with, among other things, a real lady storyline. Bad decision. Listen: you cannot have your one and only female character spend the majority of the film being drugged and raped. I don't mean the only female character of note. I mean, truly, the only female non-extra onscreen. This movie is very much like Tennessee Williams, in that it hates women and is totally gay. Leïto and Damien spend their acquaintance 1) fighting in order to form an emotional bond, 2) handcuffing each other to things, and 3) basically doing it. I approve of all of that, but I wish action movies could be super gay without driving women into the cave of rape and irrelevance. If you will it, Luc Besson, it is no dream.

While we're on the subject of "me complaining about this movie's problems," B13 also has a slight case of Iron Man-itis. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I do not want action movies preaching to me about nonviolence or the democratic process. It draws me out of the world of flying people and whizzing bullets and back into the world where high body counts are horrifying, not entertaining. The scene in which Damien speechifies at the defense minister is B13's equivalent of the press conference where Tony Stark declares he has "more to offer this world than just making things that blow up." First of all, no, you don't. Second, shut up. Don't burden me with an excursus on your highly selective morality; it ruins the amoral fun of the movie.

My "liked it" rating may be confusing in light of the preceding paragraphs, but, in the wise words of my roommate Mary, "Parkour always deserves seven stars."

- 3 stars

Hunger (2008)

Well, here we go, everybody. Hunger opens with three intertitles, which say:

Not a lot of context, especially since the movie is so stingy on dialogue. I don't know much about the Troubles, generally, or about the Maze prison, specifically, so I was a little lost at first. That turned out to be completely okay. If anything, my ignorance heightened the feelings of desperation and immediacy that Hunger works to build. The movie's not apolitical, but it's also not primarily political. It's more about specific conditions and individual reactions to them. It's a microscopic examination of pain as a way of life--for prisoners and officers alike.

I just said there wasn't much dialogue in Hunger, but that's not quite true. For about 25 minutes in the middle, Hunger is all talking. But the movie before that long scene and the movie after it is light on speech and heavy on physical degradation: excretions, beatings, death. It's slow but riveting, unfolding at an oozing pace.

Basically it's a date movie.

In the first section of Hunger, we see the routines of two Republican prisoners and a guard. Their daily lives are tedious, violent, and dominated by bodily fluids. The guard often looks, rapt, at his bloody knuckles. He examines them when he smokes; he soaks them in hot water before and after his shifts. For the prisoners, their excretions are their last resort. They are years into the no wash protest, and their cell walls are thick with shit and blood. At a yelled signal, they all pour their collected urine under their doors into the H-Block hallways.

The genius of this painfully long, lovingly filmed portrayal of seeping misery is the contrast it creates with the second part of the movie: the 25-minute conversation between Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) and Father Dominic Moran (Liam Cunningham). Without realizing it, I had adjusted to watching violence and putrefaction, and I felt the thrill you're supposed to have during the actiony bits of movies in the one scene where no one is hitting anyone else, where there are just two people talking in a room without sticky sights or sounds.

Sands has called the priest to the prison to talk about the impending hunger strike. They banter for a while, but then they get down to the business of arguing. Father Dom thinks Bobby is being crazy and destructive; Bobby thinks Dom doesn't get it on account of living a cushy life without shit on his walls. Although the scene's between a priest and a man about to embark on an act of pseudo-Christian martyrdom, the conversation's aggressively secular. They talk about the propaganda value of the hunger strike. They talk about attempting negotiations with the British government. When Sands asks, detached and skeptical, "God's gonna punish me?" Father Dom responds, "Well, if not just for the suicide, then he'd have to punish you for stupidity." It is a really good scene, you guys.

The talk ends, and the last section of the movie begins with a doctor describing how a hungry body shuts down. Then we see Sands starve. It's really, really brutal, and it feels really, really long (it's actually just under 20 minutes--shorter than the Father Dom scene). As Sands flickers out, we see his memory/vision of himself as a child in the countryside. I could have done without that. It's a callback to the end of his conversation with the priest, and it's not that sentimental, but it's still too sentimental for me. This movie's so tough to watch; I didn't want anything that felt like a relief from that. Little Bobby in the field felt to me like a lone distraction in an otherwise single-minded movie. Steve McQueen, the director, said in an interview that he "wanted to get out of that prison cell" and give "people a chance to breathe," but I didn't want a chance to breathe at minute 123 of this 125-minute beast.

Sands' exchange with the priest is definitely my favorite part of the movie. Not just because it is mercifully free of fecal sculpture and running sores, but because DAMN is that some acting and DAMN is that some writing. Fassbender and Cunningham perform this smart, emotional scene with passion and nuance. The intensity is amplified by the famous seventeen-minute take; for most of the scene, the two actors share the frame, the camera fixed, their profiles in shadow (see below). They're so expressive, but you don't see their faces very clearly. You feel the urgency and conviction in the words, their voices, and the tilt of their bodies.

(Look, I feel really weird about the tags for this: I don't want to rate it. Five stars, I guess? It is superbly put-together and made me have a lot of feelings, so I'm not sure what more I could ask. And while it fails the Bechdel test, so what, you know? Almost no one talks in this movie. There's one long conversation. Apart from that, you could count the intelligible lines on two hands--one hand if you don't count the audio clips of Margaret Thatcher.)

The Lady Eve (1941)

I have always dreaded old movies. When I was little, I didn't like black-and-white. No idea why. Then I grew up (relatively speaking), and suddenly I loved black-and-white movies but whoops also feminism. Movies made now are bad enough in the way they treat ladies, but most of the pre-1960 stuff I've seen is nightmarish. (This may be because I haven't seen that many old movies. Because I avoid them.) Anyway, I went into The Lady Eve assuming that the gender politics would make me miserable, but they didn't! They were decent enough that I could just pay attention to whether I liked the movie or not, and I did because it's awesome.

Charlie Pike (Henry Fonda) is the heir to an ale (not beer) fortune. Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck) and her dad are card-sharps: she reels rich men in, and her father takes them at poker for large sums of money. Charlie is their mark on a cruise from South America to… North America. But OH NO Jean falls in love with this sucker, and she insists that they not steal his money, and she's going to marry him but OH NO he finds out the truth (minus the she-loves-him part) and wants nothing to do with her. Then she goes after him--for revenge? Or to win him back? THE LADY EVE coming soon to computers near you.

The timeline of their romance is insane, but I assume they don't call the genre "screwball" because of its realism. Speaking of screwball, Henry Fonda delivers some pretty decent physical comedy in this movie, you guys! I didn't know Juror #8 had it in him. He's always tripping over stuff (get it? The Lady Eve. The fall. Get it? Get it?), and there's one scene where he keeps getting food all over his nice jackets. Haha! Fonda also manages the impressive trick of making his character seem likable and reasonably intelligent. Pause for a moment and consider: that is an amazing feat. The most casual examination reveals that Charlie Pike is a bland, credulous boob. Have you seen the Branagh Much Ado About Nothing? It's like that: Claudio's a piece of shit, but Robert Sean Leonard's performance makes the character seem more decent than really makes sense. Charlie (Fonda) is a less-horrible Claudio figure--gullible, boring, jealous (but not so jealous and angry that he publicly humiliates his fiancée and doesn't mind causing her apparent death SPOILER ALERT). I've digressed. What I was trying to say is that, in defiance of reason, Henry Fonda sells this character as a cool guy who maybe even deserves Barbara Stanwyck, which he doesn't because no one deserves Barbara Stanwyck.

Oh, Barbara Stanwyck, you electric being. I am in love now. Stanwyck's character is so quick, so sexy, and so confident, and watching her, I could only imagine that Stanwyck was more Jean than Jean. Which she might not have been because acting is not the same as living, but the performance was good enough to make me think stupid thoughts.

Circling back to the gender shit at the beginning of this post, I really want to express my gratitude to this movie/Preston Sturges/everyone involved for not being awful. Charlie Pike does not spend the movie talking down to Jean--you know, the "listen, little lady" bullshit. Also, he gets really mad at her at several points in the movie, but he never threatens to hit her. Holy fucking Moses. How incredible is that? Thanks, It Happened One Night, for making me astonished by basic humane behavior in olde tyme pictures.

Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player) (1960)

This was the first French New Wave movie I've ever seen (sorry, mom!), and it left me intrigued but unsatisfied. I'm gonna watch more Nouvelle Vague, but if this was what Truffaut was up to, I'm not sure what all the fuss is about (sorry again, mom!).

Tirez sur le pianiste is about a piano player named Charlie (Charles Aznavour). He works in a dive bar/club and wants to stay out of trouble--but just when he thought he was out, they pull him back in! Or whatever. His older brothers are fuck-ups and criminals, and when Charlie helps one of them evade two thuggish pursuers, he attracts the thugs' attention. Charlie accidentally gets his co-worker Léna (Marie Dubois) involved in his troubles, too. (Ironically, the bad guys decide she's associated with him because she asks him to walk her home at night. Because she doesn't feel safe. I thought that was a nice touch.) Turns out things aren't what they seem, of course: Charlie has a secret past, which Léna knows about. In fact, she stalks him because of it? But in a cute way! Anyway, she has some ideas about his life, as do the thugs, his brothers, and his boss at the bar. Charlie, like many noir protagonists, is a mostly passive figure at the center of swirling chaos. Okay? Okay.

I really enjoyed the two leads' performances. Dubois does some kind of magic (acting?) that makes her character seem more likable and less undeveloped than the script deserves. Aznavour balances Charlie's timidity and charisma beautifully. (Also, he reminds me of Kevin Spacey, all detachment and dimples.) Their chemistry with each other was fine, but their makeout scene was Very Awkward. They don't so much kiss as press their faces together. Plus the camera doesn't just hang out on them; it does this weird thing where you see them and also a panning shot of Léna's apartment over them? Or maybe under them?

Dissolve back and forth, forever. ))<>((

As for other characters, there's a prostitute Charlie likes to sleep with (Michèle Mercier); she also takes care of Charlie's little brother when he's out (i.e. most of the movie). Charlie's boss (Serge Davri) is one of those okay-until-he's-not types, and the violent confrontation between Charlie and Plyne was one of the least believable, least enjoyable parts of the movie for me. I guess I'm not supposed to find it "believable" because the New Wave wants to teach me about artifice and bust down all my square ideas about narrative film. Bore snore. A work of art that makes me reexamine my ideas about plot/story/politics/zucchini is exciting. A chain-smoking Frenchman telling me to reexamine my ideas is irritating.

Though I found some parts of the movie boring/annoying, Truffaut's style is undeniably cool. The sequence where Charlie and Léna drive out of town has a lovely, familiar feeling. It's shot through the windshield, and over the course of a song ("Dialogue d'amoureux" by Félix Leclerc and Lucienne Vernay, apparently), the city's streetlamps are replaced with the sun rising over the snowy countryside. I enjoyed select images much more than I enjoyed the film as a whole: opening credits inside a piano with its hammers hitting, a gangster with a musical lighter, a betrayal framed with--not sure how to describe these:

What is this technique called? Besides "cool."

Finally, I want to mention the first scene of the movie, which did not let me down. Truffaut does this hilarious thing that shows up in lots of French movies: he has two complete strangers talk about very personal things for no reason. I love seeing movies where this happens, and I love the reliable pattern for these conversations: "intimate detail, proverb/platitude, agreement/disagreement, proverb/platitude, intimate detail." Example:

Man A: In the old days, there were never enough syringes. My wife and I met when we looked up from our shared needle. Haha! You know what they say: a stitch in time saves nine.
Man B: No, I don't think so. After all, what's true is true.
Man A: I have celiac disease.

Sound like bad dialogue? Maybe here, but translated and spoken by two knobbly-nosed men strolling down a narrow Parisian street, it's stylish. Welcome to French cinema!