Mailbox Film Festival #17: A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop (Zhang, 2009)

Over last Christmas break, I was talking to my dad about the Coen Brothers’ remake of True Grit. He made the comment that it didn’t feel like a typical Coen Brothers movie. I disagree, but I see where he was coming from. Mention the Coen Brothers and most people will think of Raising Arizona, Fargo, The Big Lebowski and Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, films populated by broad characters but tempered by a dry, often quite dark, sense of humor. But the brothers have also crafted a parallel filmography of relatively straight-faced, noir-tinged thrillers.  The precedent for True Grit can be found in past outings like Miller’s Crossing, No Country for Old Men, The Man Who Wasn’t There and Blood Simple.  Most of these pictures do have their little gags – True Grit has its Bear Man – but their relation to the brothers’ comedies is one of philosophy, not of tone.

Ah, but what if someone were to remake one of those serious crime dramas but, you know, Coens it up a bit? Thus A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop, Chinese director Zhang Yimou’s recasting of the Coens’ debut Blood Simple as a wacky farce. Zhang cranks the Laff-o-Meter so hard that the needle soars past the goofier likes of Burn After Reading and The Ladykillers and pings straight into Manic Jerry Lewis territory. Curiously, Zhang decided to reverse the Coens’ direction, making every performance larger than life except the one by M. Emmet Walsh’s analogue. One character’s eyes are permanently crossed; another’s overbite is so exaggerated that acrylic nails appear to have been glued to his front teeth. A husband cuts out the face of a picture of a baby and forces his wife to pretend to be the son they never had. What might sound deliciously weird on paper reads, in practice, as desperation.

I’m avoiding describing the plot, not because I want to avoid spoiling A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop but because I want to avoid spoiling Blood Simple.  It’s the premise that launched a thousand noirs – a man suspects his wife of cheating on him and hires a detective to prove it – but the Coens tossed a few wrenches that veer the story into unexpected directions.  Zhang may have broadened the tone and moved the setting to 19th Century China, but in terms of story, his take hews tediously close to the original. Noodle Shop romps perfunctorily from plot point to plot point, with none of the suspense or artistry that makes Blood Simple endlessly rewatchable. (Strangely, given his strict fidelity to the source material, the one scene Zhang doesn’t replicate is arguably the original’s most iconic.) If you’ve seen Blood Simple, you’ll be bored; if you haven’t, you owe it to yourself to see the story told with some style. As Blood Simple‘s Meurice might say, A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop is the same old song, but with a different (much less interesting) meaning.

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Mailbox Film Festival #16: Micmacs (Jeunet, 2009)

Micmacs isn’t a bad film at all. In fact, it’s got quite a lot of charm. The plot of Micmacs is as much a political wish-fulfillment fantasy as The Ghost Writer, but its outlandishness almost makes it more believable.  The actors ably toe the line between zany and overly twee, with the sorts of expressive faces and bodies usually found in the circus, not the cinema. Even the characters who threaten to be one-note (the contortionist, the calculator, the human cannonball) work precisely because there’s no emotional arc or complex characterizations to distract from the story or the visuals.  Micmacs also marks the return of director Jean-Pierre Jeunet and his distinctive visual style, a cross between a live-action cartoon and a shot-for-shot remake of an Old Hollywood picture. Jeunet stuffs the film with a dazzling number of ideas, regardless of whether they have anything to do with the story: a do-nothing machine, a pastiche of The Big Sleep, an animated sequence depicting famous weird deaths.

But why, then, does Micmacs fail to leave much of an impression? Perhaps because Jeunet, by making his films so singular, has constructed such a narrow universe that it becomes claustrophobically familiar. All the usual Jeunet trademarks are there, but they’re not as surprising if you’ve seen Delicatessen or Amélie before. That said, there’s something comforting about returning to Jeunet’s universe. Even if you know what you’re getting for Christmas, you can still enjoy the gift. Micmacs is a fun movie, if only to marvel at Jeunet’s ingenuity and skill. But will you remember it the next day? (I barely do.)

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Fresh Celluloid #5: Cracks (Scott, 2009)

I never went to an all-girls school, and certainly not a boarding school. I did, however, attend a girls’ summer camp for one month every summer from the ages of 10 to 17. From my experience there (an overwhelmingly positive one, I should clarify), I think I can extrapolate an understanding of the even more insular world of the year-round boarding school. Friendships in isolation accelerate at a faster clip and to a much deeper degree than out in the “real world.” Yet this setting can also intensify an adolescent girl’s worst impulses. The desire to fit in, the distaste for the unfamiliar and an underdeveloped sense of empathy is a noxious combination that, when multiplied across a group, can mutate into a mob mentality. There will always be girls who get hurt, and girls who look back later in disbelief, disturbed at their own indifference and cruelty.

The girls’ boarding school in Cracks is steeped in this atmosphere of intensely polarized emotion. The film starts as a British take on Mädchen in Uniform, the story of a relationship between a beloved teacher and her female students that, in a least one case, may be more than strictly pedagogical.  Di Radfield (Juno Temple) is the captain of the diving team and the favorite student of Miss G (Eva Green). At confession, Di admits to “lustful thoughts” about the gardener’s son, but he’s clearly not the only object of her desire. With her smoky-eyed Continental looks and her tales of exotic travels, Miss G is not just an engaging teacher and an attractive role model. She represents the world outside the boarding school and all the promise it holds for her students.

With the arrival of Spanish student Fiamma (Maria Valverde), though, the group’s idyllic existence begins to splinter. The girls are simultaneously fascinated by and jealous of this aristocratic foreigner with a mysterious (and, they imagine, romantic) past. After Fiamma’s elegant somersault pike at her first practice, Di no longer “sets the standard” in diving, and Miss G’s attentions begin to drift toward the new girl. Di, fearful of losing her place within the group, begins lashing out at Fiamma and enlists the other girls to do the same. Meanwhile, Fiamma, unsettled by Miss G’s fascination with her, rebuffs the teacher’s gifts and attention. She is the only student worldly enough to see through Miss G’s bohemian airs and adventure stories as fantasy, and to identify her impulsiveness and intense attachment to her students as something more sinister. The teacher, for her part, recognizes Fiamma as the sophisticate she only pretends to be. “You’re not like the other girls; they’re still waiting for their lives to begin,” Miss G tells her student, though she herself is just as inexperienced. The teacher can relate so well to her students because her emotions are also stalled in adolescence. Miss G desperately sacrifices everything just for her crush to notice her. When she doesn’t reciprocate … well, “cracks” is as much a verb as it is a noun.

Cracks is bound to draw comparisons with Lord of the Flies, although the underlying message is actually quite different. No matter how cruelly the girls treat Fiamma, their bullying comes from a place of petulance and insecurity. Only an adult, the film reminds us, has the capacity for true evil. The final act pushes this theme to almost absurd extremes, but director Jordan Scott never shatters the film’s dreamy yet troubled ambiance. Scott lavishes care on slow-motion shots of the girls diving through the air or dancing together at a secret midnight party, scenes that relax the escalating tension while simultaneously emphasizing the girls’ uneasy intermediacy between childhood and maturity. While (hopefully) few female viewers can relate directly to Cracks’s extreme plot, many more will recognize their own adolescence, refracted as through a shattered glass.

 

Cracks opens in theaters March 18.

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Mailbox Film Festival #4: Nowhere Boy (Taylor-Wood, 2009)

Would a viewer who doesn’t know anything about The Beatles like Nowhere Boy? I’m not entirely sure.  But putting aside the notion that anyone watching a film about John Lennon’s adolescence would not have at least a passing familiarity with the most popular rock band ever, Nowhere Boy does a better job than most of creating a compelling story that only partially hinges on the audience’s knowledge of what would become of the main character’s little skiffle band.

A large part of the credit for pulling this off belongs, I think, to screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh.  His first film, the Ian Curtis biography Control, earned well-deserved praise even from critics who’d never listened to Joy Division.*  Like Control, Nowhere Boy manages the trick of outlining the life of a cultishly revered musician while avoiding the hazards plaguing most rock biopics.  There are few pandering shout-outs to Lennon’s future output (i.e., no shoehorned-in dialogue à la “Ya’ll cain’t walk no line!”), and what references that are present are low-key enough to be charming.  The beginning of the film, which puns on the opening sequence of A Hard Day’s Night, works as a glimpse into John’s (Aaron Johnson) early ambition, not just an easy reference pandering to Beatles fans.

Another element Greenhalgh gets right is Lennon’s attitude, how he could be creative and charismatic but also narcissistic, controlling and quick with a cutting remark.  When his bandmates in The Quarrymen recommend 15-year-old Paul McCartney (Thomas Brodie Sangster) join the group, John dismisses him because he recognizes that Paul’s a better guitarist and singer than he is.  (“You don’t seem like a rock’n’roll kinda guy,” John sneers. “What,” Paul replies, “’cause you mean I don’t go smashing things up and acting like a dick?”)  Ultimately, though, John’s possessiveness gets Paul into his band, if only to prevent him from joining someone else’s.

But the formation of The Beatles is really only a sub-plot.  The majority of Nowhere Boy hinges on John’s uncertainty as to where he belongs.  Is it with his Aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas), the disciplinarian and classic stiff-upper-lip Briton, who’s raised him for as long as he can remember? Or is it with his mother Julia (Anne-Marie Duff), a free spirit who’s secretly been living just a few blocks away with a new family? On the surface, John seems to share more in common with Julia: she plays rock and roll records and teaches him banjo.  But her relationship with her son is uncomfortably unmaternal.  Julia treats John more like a boyfriend she can run away with to Blackpool for the day, or ignore when he starts getting clingy. Her kisses are too frequent, her manner too indulgent, her feelings too easily hurt.  Julia is eternally stuck in adolescence.  It’s only a matter of time before John outgrows her.

By the film’s end, John recognizes Mimi as his true mother, and not just because she’s done all the duties that his real mother should have done.  Greenhalgh’s dialogue brilliantly captures John and Mimi’s shared language, thick with wordplay and witty sarcasm.  John’s controlling nature is mirrored throughout by Mimi’s attempts to establish a respectable middle class household, despite John’s and her husband George’s rebellions.  Even though she doesn’t get rock and roll, Mimi’s the one who buys John his two guitars, first the acoustic he begs for, then the electric she intuits he’d want.  It’s this story of discovering one’s true family that gives Nowhere Boy a more universal appeal beyond the before-he-was-famous look into John Lennon’s adolescence.  It’s fitting that when the film ends, the closing titles don’t tell us about John’s future artistic or commercial success.  Instead, the film closes simply with these words: “John called Mimi as soon as he arrived in Hamburg … and every week thereafter for the rest of his life.”

 

(*Fun coincidence: Control was also the first feature directed by Anton Corbijn, who helmed MFF #3 pick The American.)

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Listomania: 2009 in Review

Another year’s over, this one perhaps overlooked as decade-end lists took precedence over year-end lists.  Speaking of, can we agree to call this new year “twenty ten” instead of “two thousand ten”? Syllables are a precious resource worth conserving.  At the very least, please avoid saying “oh ten.”

Oh yes, back to the year-end lists. For 2009.

Top Books of 2009

Fiction: Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon
Non-Fiction: Inventory: 16 Films Featuring Manic Pixie Dream Girls, 10 Great Songs Nearly Ruined by Saxophone, and 100 More Obsessively Specific Pop-Culture Lists by the A.V. Club

Conveniently enough, these were also the only two 2009 books I read this year.  Also conveniently, they were both excellent.

Top Albums of 2009

Franz Ferdinand – Tonight: Franz Ferdinand
The Decemberists – The Hazards of Love

2009 was a tricky year for me for albums, as I didn’t actually spend a lot of time listening to them.  Most of my listening happened earlier in the year, which is probably why those two stood out the most.  I do think Tonight was unjustly overlooked.  It’s actually quite a strong record – song for song, it’s comparable to Franz Ferdinand.

Art Brut vs. Satan seemed to be a letdown at the time, but I might have been too harsh.  I still haven’t formed opinions on Further Complications, Horehound, It’s Frightening, Humbug, Josephine etc.  I only just got Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix and Wilco (The Album) for Christmas, so I’m not ready to weigh in on those yet.  I never did buy It’s Not Me, It’s You.  I totally forgot I bought Everything Touches Everything by These United States until I just now saw it listed on my iTunes. I’ve never even listened to it. That’s the trouble with going on used album binges at Academy Records.

Top 10 Movies of 2009

01) A Serious Man
02) Inglourious Basterds
03) Where the Wild Things Are
04) Awaydays
05) Little Dorrit
06) Drag Me to Hell
07) Away We Go
08) Up
09) Funny People
10) Extract

I gave the game away a bit by putting A Serious Man at #4 for my decade list, but it’s just that good.  Speaking of the decade list, you may notice that I swapped the order of Inglourious Basterds and Where the Wild Things Are.  I didn’t change my mind. I’m just being willfully inconsistent.

#4 and #5 are cheating in a way. I saw Awaydays at South by Southwest, and it blew me away. I doubt that it’ll get a U.S. distribution, though, as it’s focused on a very specific element of British culture unfamiliar to most Americans.  Little Dorrit is actually a TV miniseries, not a movie.  Still, it’s probably the best Masterpiece Theatre-type adaptation since the 1995 Pride and Prejudice (which was A&E, not PBS).  It also beats the 1987 Little Dorrit by miles.  (It helps that Arthur’s not a creepy old dude and that Amy has a personality.)

I think Drag Me to Hell is the first movie I’ve seen in theaters twice since the first Pirates of the Caribbean.

Warren Zevon’s “Keep Me in Your Heart” just starting playing on my iTunes. It approves of me ranking Funny People at #9.

Top 25 Tracks of 2009

The first 10 songs are my top 10 of the year in order (that is, “Percussion Gun” is my favorite song of the year).  The following 15 tracks are not ranked.

01) White Rabbits – “Percussion Gun”
02) Franz Ferdinand – “Ulysses”
03) Lily Allen – “The Fear”
04) Handsome Furs – “I’m Confused”
05) Jay-Z ft Alicia Keys – “Empire State of Mind”
06) Flight of the Conchords – “Hurt Feelings”
07) Lady Gaga – “Poker Face”
08) Phoenix – “1901”
09) The Avett Brothers – “I and Love and You”
10) Kelly Clarkson – “My Life Would Suck Without You”
11) Jarvis Cocker – “‘Further Complications.'”
12) Yeah Yeah Yeahs – “Heads Will Roll”
13) Death Cab for Cutie – “Meet Me on the Equinox”
14) Art Brut – “Alcoholics Unanimous”
15) Brakes – “Crush on You”
16) The Features – “Lions”
17) The Dead Weather – “I Cut Like a Buffalo”
18) Arctic Monkeys – “Cornerstone”
19) Magnolia Electric Co. – “O! Grace”
20) Wilco – “Wilco (The Song)”
21) Miike Snow – “Animal”
22) The Juan MacLean – “One Day”
23) The Bottle Rockets – “The Way It Used to Be”
24) Au Revoir Simone – “All or Nothing”
25) The Decemberists – “The Wanting Comes in Waves / Repaid”

Download

But didn’t I list “Poker Face” as a 2008 track on Monday? Yes I did. But that’s OK – the Grammys tried to change the rules for Lady Gaga, too.  At any rate, though it may have technically been released in 2008, it didn’t get near the pop charts till this year.

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