Rubber

2010 killer tire movie

Rating: 14/20

Plot: An abandoned automobile tire rolls around the desert and uses its telepathic powers to destroy any trash, bunnies, or people who get in its way. A crowd of people is given binoculars to watch the proceedings.

Like Christine or Maximum Overdrive or Duel but with only a tire. Or like your typical 50's monster movie except instead of a guy in a rubber suit causing mayhem, you just get the rubber. From a technical standpoint, I enjoyed trying to figure out how the tire was brought to life. It may be a much easier special effect than I think it is, and it certainly wasn't a special effect you'd describe as flashy. Most of this movie is the tire rolling around, only stopping to quiver and make a loud noise and make something explode, or people sitting around watching the tire, a meta-cular cinematic joke that's the sort of thing Soderbergh might put together in his spare time between Oceans 19 and Oceans 20. We're told at the beginning that this film is an "homage to the most powerful element of style" in movies--a lack of reason. It frequently falls into annoying cutesy-clever territories, turning into the kind of indie production that you want to take out back and slap around a bit. But was I entertained? Heck, yeah! It's a tire rolling around making bunnies explode! How could I not be entertained? Funniest bit involves a cop taking a tire off a car and saying, "This is what our killer looks like." No, the funniest bit is probably where they set a trap with an explosive dummy. I also can appreciate any movie that has a scene implying that a tire has jerked off while watching an exercise video. I'll give director Quentin Dupieux credit for seeing this ridiculous idea to its end, but his message about movies comes across like a film school student trying to impress his professor who rambles on and on about arthouse cinema every class.

I'll probably lose any chance at a Father of the Year Award for admitting this, but I was watching this with a couple of my children until the moment when heads started exploding and I told them to go upstairs. They didn't enjoy the bunny explosions at all and were probably disappointed that their father laughed at it.

The Visitors

1993 time travel comedy

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A knight and his squire are transported by a senile wizard 800 years into the future. They have to simultaneously figure out life in the 20th Century while trying to return home.

This is a very amusing take on the stranger-in-a-strange land premise. leaning on slapstick and ironic situations to get more than a few laughs. It's very nearly whimsical! This film's shot well, and I really like an actor like Jean Reno in the lead role, a guy who is going to play it all so straight that it somehow makes it all even more hilarious. Narratively, this might get a little tiresome by the end, but it's a fun comic adventure and you know I'm a sucker for time travel movies that don't involve Kevin Costner. I wonder how much punnage and other word play I missed by having to read English subtitles for this one. You don't want to dig for depth with this one; it's more like a ninety minute joke peppered with punchlines, some intelligent and some dumb but most pretty funny.

The Story of a Cheat

1936 fictional biopic

Rating: 17/20

Plot: The titular cheat pens his memoirs from his tragedy-tinged childhood damned by mushrooms to the wild affairs and various criminal ventures.

Sacha Guitry wrote, directed, and starred in this classy little gem of a movie. I'm trying to think of a way to describe its style. Airy? Compared to most movies from the 1930s, this feels fresh and new, ironic since Guitry borrows heavily from the silent era. It's got virtually no dialogue and a voiceover narration (also Guitry) from top to bottom. But although it covers an entire guy's life, it's only eighty minutes long and paced in a way so that it seems like only half that. I'm not the biggest fan of narration in movies unless it's noir (almost necessary) or apparently a French film. Guitry's voiceover in this recalled Amelie for whatever reason. Maybe it's just the language though. At any rate, the tone is a playful one, and Guitry seems to have creative juices to spare, evident right off the bat with the cute title screen and introductions of the composer, the cinematographer, the actors, the set design folks, etc. I also liked his sense of humor. Writers didn't kill off entire families like Guitry did until the Coens came along. Breezy and (dare I say it?) whimsical and brisk, this is definitely worth a chunk of an afternoon.

The Illusionist

2010 French cartoon

Rating: 18/20

Plot: The titular magician's getting old, and with the emerging popularity of rock 'n' roll musicians, so is his act involving a squirrely rabbit and various objects stuffed up his sleeve. He travels to Scotland where he befriends a young maid named Alice. She travels with him to England where he struggles with his art and uses his meager funds to buy her shoes and dresses.

Ventriloquist, by the way, is a "belly talker" as ventri means belly and loqu means talk. Latin roots. Engastrimyth is from the Greek and means "stomach talker." I figured you'd find that interesting.

I love Tati, I love French whimsy, I loved Chomet's The Triplets of Belleville, and I was pretty sure I would love this movie. I might not be right about a lot of things, but I was about that. There's a wonderful texture to Chomet's 2D animation. A scene near the end with a shadow makes me tear up just thinking about it, but there are all kinds of tiny details that I just loved in this--the radiance of a jukebox, shadows over golden grasslands, a twist of a coat in front of a mirror, window reflections, the clown nose of the downtrodden. The style and the settings make me nostalgic, and I'm not even sure why. I've never been to Scotland, France, or England. But there's just something about the way the places and backgrounds are drawn. I loved the way this film looked. And like Triplets, I love the way Chomet has his characters move. Again, he exaggerates the grotesqueness of human beings, putting the needle on the old quirk-meter well into red. The hup-hup-hupping acrobats. The melancholy clown (a scene where he listens to calliope music alone in his room is just beautiful). The little fellows who run the hotel. The ventriloquist and his dummy (loved that first appearance of the dummy!). The way the rock band sashays off the stage. They all interact in a nearly dialogue-free little world because words just aren't that necessary. All you need to do is watch a handful of silent films to find that out. This has that silent film funk but with a slightly more complex range of human emotions. Inferences need to be made, and there's definitely some wiggle room here, allowing for a variety of hunches about what's going on with these characters. I'm definitely the type of movie watcher who's moved more by imagery than words, and it's great how Chomet tells so much story without having to explain things with any superfluous language. And then you've got the Tati influence. It's Tati's story, personal and heartbreaking, and this medium is perfect for capturing the Hulot mannerisms, the Tati-type sight gags, and the overall flavor. Chomet does capture Tati's movements very well, from the way he chases after his rabbit to his careful maneuvering over an extension cord. It felt good seeing Tati again even if it was just an animated version of him. Maybe that's where the feelings of nostalgia come from. This might have a little more sentimentality than Tati's live action films, but it's that sentimentality of the aforementioned silents and therefore feels very comfortable to me. Comfortable is a good word for this maybe. The French have this way of making movies that you inhale instead of just watch. They're movies that are like old shoes, and this is a real old shoe of a movie, one that feels like it's just always been there, more beautiful because of its dust and scratches and the fact that it smells just like my old foot.

A Nous la Liberte

1931 French satire

Rating: 17/20

Plot: Emile and Louis are tired of wasting away in a prison cell. They long for freedom, so much that they feel the need to sing about it even. They attempt an escape, and while Emile makes it to the other side of a pair of walls, Louis is captured again. Or maybe it's the other way around. Anyway, the guy who breaks out winds up becoming a rich and successful owner of a factory that makes phonographs, a device that apparently played MP3's back in the 1930s. Eventually, Louis also, regardless of his actual intention, succeeds in breaking out of jail and meets up with his buddy when he gets a job at the factory.

It's just a guess, but I'm thinking Rene Clair wasn't totally ready to embrace the new technology that would allow the characters of his films to speak, just like his buddy Charlie Chaplin. So much of A Nous la Liberte reminds me of silent comedy, and Clair tells the story of these two guys visually a lot of the time. And visually, this movie's really impressive. I'm not sure there's anything I'd describe as fancy with the camera work or its movements, but the cinematography definitely has more of a modern feel than almost all the other comedies I've seen from the 1930s. So although we do get to hear the characters communicate, I'm not sure we really need to because the visuals do a good enough job telling the story. We definitely don't need to hear them sing. The songs aren't very good anyway, and if you call this a musical, you have to call it a half-assed one. Satirically, it seems pretty subversive, actually exploring similar ideas as Chaplin's Modern Times. Maybe that's why the studio sued Chaplin for cinematic plagiarism, but really, I don't see that much that these movies have in common. I'm a sucker for great visuals, it's one of those whimsical French dealies, and this is just the kind of comedy that hits my sweet spot. Yes, that's a reference to my taint.

A very cool Cory recommendation. I think the movie poster probably first attracted him.

Band of Outsiders

1964 Godard funk

Rating: 17/20

Plot: Two buddies named Franz and Arthur meet the fetching Odile in an English language class. They fall for her, likely because she's fetching, and try to persuade her to help them steal a wad of cash from a bureau in her aunt's house. Love triangles, Hollywood B-movie imitation, half-assed crime sprees, and dancing ensue.

This is Godard at his most playful, most winking, and most ornery. Snippets of jazz in the score, a scene featuring a minute of silence (I think it's short about twenty seconds though), a lengthy dance sequence, wanton melodrama, cheeky omniscient narration. Following (not directly) the more sophisticated Contempt and Breathless, this is like a crazy uncle of a movie, standing up right in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner to show you that he's got his napkin sticking out the opened fly of his trousers, a cloth phallus that he, of course, points to with both thumbs. I like the three leads. Well, I guess Sami Frey as Franz (reminds me of John Lurie a bit) and Claude Brasseur (no relation) are fine. I enjoyed some of Franz's mannerisms anyway, cool-guy pointing and show-off Fedora tricks. But honestly, I'm not sure how either of those guys did because whenever Anna Karina was on the screen, I couldn't take my eyes off her and nothing else mattered. I'm not just talking about nothing elses in the movie either. Nothing else in life mattered, nothing in the past, nothing in the future, and certainly nothing in the present. She's a goddess! The narrative's simple, but the dialogue's clever, self-referential and almost-funny. The style's simple, too, but deceptively so, especially during a scene in Odile's house where violence begins to escalate, a scene that almost works like a ballet with Godard using the architecture similarly to how he used space in Breathless. Tarantino named his production company after this movie, and it reminds me a bit of Jeunet's work although that could just be the playfulness and narrator use. This is one crazy uncle you won't complain about after you catch him fisting the stuffing when Grandma turns her back.

Irreversible

2002 movie

Rating: 17/20

Plot: Alex goes out for a night of partying with current boyfriend Marcus and ex-boyfriend Pierre. She's raped and beaten nearly to death, and the two boys go hunting for the criminal in order to get revenge.

It's not a movie that I can give away the ending to because, like Memento, it's told in reverse chronological order. Instead, I don't want to give away the beginning which, with the help of Beethoven's 7th (2nd movement, the one I've told people I'd like to some day die to), gave me a genuine emotional jolt. The entire movie's an experience unlike any other. I don't necessarily mean that in a positive way, and I'm not likely to recommend this movie to anybody. Argentine director Gaspar Noe (this is my first Noe movie) displays a gift for making a movie into a very raw, visceral experience, and Irreversible is a movie you watch more with your guts than anything else. Discombobulating camera angles in which the handheld camera spirals and bends and undulates, barely discernible off-kilter incidental music, sickening lighting effects, and long takes where either nothing at all happens or too much to handle is happening make this a queasy viewing experience. Noe's techniques, which I'll tell you again are the types of things that a lot of viewers will despise, put the experiences of these characters, especially a scene of brutal violence and the infamous and seemingly endless rape scene, right in your face. It's strange because the effects and storytelling techniques make you aware that you're watching a movie and that these actors will be just fine, but it just doesn't sit right and you're disturbed. I had difficulty sleeping after watching Irreversible and didn't feel like watching a movie for several days afterward. And the reverse chronological order thing? Unlike Memento, a movie that felt cold and gimmicky to me the sole time I saw it, the trick adds an emotional intensity and fits right in thematically. I imagine that Noe reached his cinematic goals with Irreversible. I can't imagine that I'll ever feel like putting myself through it ever again. I do, however, really want to check out more of his oeuvre.

I also want to see Memento again.

A Town Called Panic

2009 animated chaos

Rating: 16/20 (Jen: 15/20; Dylan: 12/20; Emma: 16/20; Abbey: 10/20)

Plot: Cowboy and Indian have forgotten to get Horse a birthday present and decide to build him a barbecue. A computer (user) error causes them to order fifty million bricks instead of fifty. This sets off a chain of cause-and-effects that involve what I think are sea monkeys, a stolen tractor, a falsely arrested farmer, missed music classes, a giant robot penguin, and a trip to the center of the earth.

Quick whining: Why couldn't this have been dubbed? I'm not stupid. I don't need all foreign movies that I watch to be dubbed. I don't mind reading. But there was so much happening on the screen, and I wanted to pay attention to it all.

If you love Gumby even half as much as I do, you need to check this out immediately. The humor's quirky, the stop-motion is clever but rudimentary, and the plot makes virtually no sense. This is a kiddie flick for the kiddies with ADHD, and these characters go all over the place during these misadventures. Gotta love the imaginative spirit of the writer/directors (Stephanie Aubier and Vincent Patar), a couple filmmakers who either have a good grasp on how the average child's mind works or are wacky on the junk. Don't watch this if you're looking for something with depth or heart. This ain't Pixar. This is simply a breezy bit of insanity with some fun characters and lots of very humorous episodes. I imagine it's the sort of thing that could irritate or even infuriate about the same amount of people that it could amuse. There are a few episodes of the television show on Youtube if you're interested. In fact, at about 80 minutes, this would probably be a test for the average adult's endurance like a lot of shorts blown up into features. But seriously--Gumby fans would love this.

Micmacs

2009 shenanigans

Rating: 15/20 (Mark: 13/20)

Plot: Bazil, not to be confused with any of the numerous cartoon mice named something that sounds like Bazil, has every reason to hate the companies that manufacture weapons. A land mine killed his father and a stray bullet still lodged in his forehead could kill him at any moment. He ends up homeless until adopted into a family of junkyard-dwelling misfits including an ex-human-cannonball and a contortionist. They're more than willing to help Bazil with his convoluted plan to bring down the weapons manufacturers.

This has a lot in common with Jeunet's City of Lost Children and Amelie but it's not nearly as daring or touching as those. You get some visual thrills, some quirky characters, and the wild imaginative quality of his other movies, but this is a little uneven and at times seems like something that's inspired by those films rather than something made by the same person. Still, there's a great story, and a stylistic impersonation of Jeunet's work is a lot better than an impersonation of something else. I wish there could have been more time spent with the assortment of characters. Bazil even seemed a little on the flat side. Instead, most of the time is spent with the intricate ploys Bazil and his posse invent to enact his revenge. They're goofy as ploys can get, like a cross between Wile E. Coyote and fleshy Rube Goldbergs. They're imaginatively complex. I always like Jeunet's refusal to just stick to a story; the quirky asides, like the rhythmic almost-voyeuristic what's-going-down-in-everybody's-apartment scene in Delicatessen, are maybe the best parts! This has its share, from junkyard gadgetry to a tour of one of the weapons guy's odd collection of historic body parts. And speaking of Delicatessen, there's a neat little nod to that film as well. Despite this film's flaws, I couldn't help digging it.

Special note: Julie Ferrier plays the contortionist. I figured she was a contortionist who could act well, but it turns out she's just an actress who isn't a contortionist at all. An erotic contortionist was used for some of the movements that Ferrier couldn't do.

Another note: The full title of Micmacs which appears on some posters throughout the movie means "Non-Stop Shenanigans" apparently. I'm guessing Micmacs means shenanigans.

Les Diaboliques

1955 thriller

Rating: 17/20

Plot: Michel runs the boarding school owned by his wife Christina, a teacher at the school. Michel's also sleeping with Nicole, another teacher in the school. Since he's kind of a jerk, Christina and Nicole conspire to get rid of him by drugging him and drowning him in a bathtub. Huzzah! They get back to school and dispose of the body in a rather filthy swimming pool, but soon realize their troubles are not over when the pool is emptied and Michel is nowhere to be found. Oh, snap!

I was really digging this artfully tense little thriller until the final fifteen minutes or so when I was blown away. To be completely honest, the ending is a little predictable, even the ending that takes place after the ending, but the way director Clouzot builds the tension and constructs the story is nothing short of masterful. The direction is deceptively simple. I loved the camera work in this one, all those slight movements that led to big revelations. It's all deliberately paced, but it's perfectly deliberately paced. The story gets some room to breathe which, despite some implausibility, somehow keeps everything plausible. I liked Paul Meurisse (Army of Shadows) as the jerky Michel. Actually, Simone Signoret who plays the mistress was in Army of Shadows, too. I would have given this movie an extra point if she looked less manish and wore her sunglasses less. Still, this is excellent stuff.

Manon of the Spring

1986 sequel

Rating: 18/20

Plot: Picks up ten years after the sad denouement of Jean de Florette with the hunchback's daughter, now a shepherdess who hunts and sells birds, getting her revenge on everybody who had a hand in her father's breakdown and ultimate demise.

Whereas Florette was all about breathtaking beauty, character, and tone, this one's more about the story and character. I wasn't as impressed with the cinematography here, but I was enamored with Emmanuelle Beart. She's lovely and replaces the beautiful images of the lush countryside. Or maybe the imagery was the same, and I was just distracted by Emmanuelle Beart. She gives her character this innocent rage that is just perfect. And I know I dug that harmonica solo. Yves Montand and Daniel Auteuil, are terrific in both of these movies, the latter despite having too many vowels in his name. I loved them as despicable villains in the first movie, and I loved them as villains you almost feel sorry for while they get what they deserve in this one. I really liked what happened with the characters here, and there are some twists that I just didn't see coming. In fact, I thought the movie was over and started to go into my winding down process (putting my pants back on, bracing myself to help stop the internal vibration, a few deep-knee bends) before realizing that there were a few more surprises left. This isn't quite as good as Jean de Florette, but it's a great completion of that film's story. And together, they make a wonderful and moving experience.

Cory, a delightful guy, tried recommending this during my "man" streak, the most impressive achievement in human history, but that would have been cheating.

Jean de Florette

1986 moving painting

Rating: 18/20

Plot: The Soubeyran family once prospered, but times are tough in the French hills where Cesar and his nephew Ugolin struggle to keep their heads above water. Speaking of water, that's exactly what they really need. Ugolin's got an idea to grow roses and make a fortune, and the pair come up with an idea to buy the land adjacent to theirs and take advantage of a spring. A lot of things happen that will be more interesting to you if I don't tell you about them before a hunchback moves onto the adjacent land with his wife and daughter and ambitious dreams about raising bunnies and crops on soil that everybody else assumes is cursed. Cesar and Ugolin stop up the spring and work with nature against the titular hunchback.

I love that this movie gave me the chance to type the words titular hunchback. And I really loved every minute of this movie, the type of movie that has the ability to make a person breath better. Not to sound too pretentious, but most movies you get to see and hear. I'd almost swear my other senses were involved with Jean de Florette somehow. It's a film that absorbs the viewer from the opening shot and doesn't spit him back out until the closing credits. I doubt I'll ever see a movie where every single shot is perfect, but Jean de Florette comes awfully close. The lush French hills provide a setting where it might have been impossible to position a camera and not capture something gorgeous, a shot where it almost looks like my television oozes colorful foliage. But the cinematography is stunning from an opening shot with a moving car that has a weird orange glow to a whole bunch of "How the hell did they get this on film?" shots. Pause this movie at any point, and you've got a shot that was obviously meticulously constructed, artistic enough to almost get in the way of the storytelling. And there's a focus on the minute that really helps you connect to every fine detail of the story. Narratively and visually, It reminded me a lot of Days of Heaven, except in Jean de Florette, there's a lot more dialogue. The dialogue's good, too ("I don't shave anyone who is horizontal."), and the characters could almost be mistaken for comic ones if what was going on with them wasn't so dark or tragic. Take an early murder scene, for example. There's a goofy argument and an ensuing fight scene that is almost cartoonish. Jean de Florette definitely explores the lighter side of evil greed and tragic circumstance. Breathtakingly beautiful (one of my favorite scenes: a duet with harmonica and vocals) and overwhelmingly sad, this one is movie poetry and one of the best movies I've seen all year. That's despite an embarrassing hunchback.

Cory recommended this one, probably because parts of it could be described as delightful.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

2007 drama

Rating: 17/20

Plot: Based on the true story of Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby who, after suffering a stroke at the age of 42, is unable to speak or move anything but his left eyeball. But he gets to spend lots of time with attractive women and writes a book, so it's all good.

I thought this movie was profoundly moving although I suspect I've been tricked by filmmaker Julian Schnabel by his use of tricky trickery. The music, the experimental camera stuff, a draining script. The whole thing screams, "I'm trying to win awards here!" While watching this, I kept thinking that there was an overwhelming amount of out-of-focus, swirling and discombobulating imagery at the beginning and far too many scenes of the therapist reciting her rearranged alphabet in the second half. However, the quantity of both of those were important, the former because it so effectively helps you to empathize with the protagonist's experience and the latter because it so effectively shows how tedious and painful the communication process had to have been. The effects are nearly overwhelming as Schnabel almost bombards you with this guy's condition. And when you finally get to see actor Mathieu Almaric's portrayal of post-stroke Jean-Do (deep into the movie), it's shocking, especially as it contrasts to the Jean-Do's lifestyle pre-stroke that we see in flashbacks and half-memories. Really, it's only Almaric's eye that is doing any acting here, but it's startling simple performance. This movie really doesn't have much acting in it at all, the story told more with the camera and style than through anything the performers are doing. It reminded me of Clean Shaven, a movie somewhere on this blog, and like that one, parts were tough to watch.

Another happy Cory recommendation.

La Femme Nikita

1990 French movie

Rating: 17/20

Plot: The titular femme is arrested as the only survivor of her gang's burglary attempt. She's convicted as a cop killer and burglarizer, but instead of sending her to prison, they send her to a training facility where she learns to be pretty. And how to kill people. Mostly how to kill people actually. Once she graduates, she's ready to be a pretty assassin although she still longs to be an interior decorator.

What I really love about this movie is the developing paradox. As Nikita makes the transition from killer to, well, another kind of killer, she somehow becomes more and more human, learning more and more how to appreciate life and how to love. It's complex characterization, and I really liked how I never actually felt that I had a handle on Nikita. Those are usually the kind of characters who stick with you. Luc Besson directs the story with a controlled style, and although I don't think this is as good as Leon, there's still this density that places this head and shoulders above other films in the genre. You do get a little Jean Reno, and he'll always move a film up a notch or two up the ladder of cool. Or three. I don't know how these rungs work! Pushing this further up that ladder though are some terrific scenes. It's not just the action stuff either (although a scene in a restaurant kitchen is great). There's a quiet character-developing scene where Nikita looks lost as she's shopping at a grocery store that I also really like. With a crafty sense of humor, some bitchin' violence, that aforementioned coolness, and confident direction, Nikita is just really rad. It suffers a bit from a terribly dated soundtrack, a last gasp of those 80s synthesizer-filthy scores, but that's a small quibble. Je suis un essui glace!

Recommended by Cory, a cat who knows how rungs work.

Boudo Saved from Drowning

1932 Renoir comedy

Rating: 16/20

Plot: The titular ragamuffin decides to jump into the river and end it all, presumably because rude Frenchmen won't stop laughing at his beard. Middle-class bookseller Listingois spots the suicide attempt from his window and runs to the river, dives in, and saves Boudo from drowning. That's where they get the title for the movie! Boudo turns out to be a pest, a filthy and crude house guest who ends up making life miserable in the Listingois household. Oh, snap! Lesson learned, Monsier Listingois: Don't invite a dirty hippie into your home.

Cool little comedy which stands up surprisingly well for a movie nearly eighty years old. Maybe it's because it's in French. There's very little flare though Renoir's direction is still unspectacularily great, assured and confident. I really liked the character and Michel Simon's performance as Priape Boudo. Priape? Yes, the randy bum did play on the name, alluding to the Greek fertility god Priapus who is known for his gigantic permanent erection. Something about Michel Simon reminded me of Will Ferrell, never a good thing really, and I imagine Ferrell could easily pull off this type of character in a reimagining of the story. Or maybe he could just jump off a bridge? I didn't really understand the satiric elements of Boudo, likely because I don't live in France in the 1930s, but I still really enjoyed this amusing little tale.