Vaguely Cool

I've mentioned how much of a French New Wave fanboy I am - our college film society had a couple of great series on New Wave. So of course I wanted to see Nouvelle Vague (2025), Richard Linklater's fim about the making of Breathless. 

It stars Guillaume Marbeck as Jean-Luc Godard, a writer for the French movie journal Cahiers du Cinema. He is watching a recent movie with a group of other critics, like Truffaut and Chabrol. Back at the office, he wonders why no one from Cahiers was going to Cannes to see Truffaut's first movie, 400 Blows. After some office banter, he steals some office petty cash and head off to Cannes. 

He becomes desparate to make his own movie. He can't get a producer interested in Une Femme est une Femme, but gets the go-ahead for a gangster film from a treatment by Truffaut. He casts Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) as the lead, and gets Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch) to play the American girl he falls for. 

But his directorial style is more than peculiar. He likes to play pinball more than shoot, and days go by with only one take for one shot filmed. He just wants to wait for the perfect take, even if it isn't very perfect. He ignores continuity, eye lines, and the 180 rule. He films too many closeups and not enough coverage. It will be impossible to edit together. Belmondo will never work again and Seberg wants off the picture. Her last film was directed by noted sadist and perfectionist Otto Preminger, and this is a worse experience. Godard won't direct, except telling the actors to do less, or just do what they want.

The film is a rousing success. His fellow critics tell him, "Eh. It's no Citizen Kane." Then they heartily congratulate him.

This is a fun film for fanboys in a number of ways. First, it's in black and white and has a very New Wave feel. The actors chosen for the main roles, mostly unknown, are credible representations of the real life people they are portraying. I would have recognized Marbeck as Godard even if he wasn't labelled, and he isn't the most recognizable person. Dullin doesn't quite have Belmondo's swagger, even if he does have the nose (prosthetic?). Deutch makes a good Seberg, although I don't see the intensity I expected. I guess that's acting.

The range of characters from the milieu is enormous, and they are all labelled onscreen when they appear. So we get to see Truffaut, Chabrol, Agnes Varda, Jean Cocteau, Roberto Rosselini, and on and on. When Rosselini is giving a talk, the names in the audience just go on and on, ten or twenty of them. I can just here the applause each one gets in a movie theater (with the right audience). 

I'm not sure how non-fanboys would find this. Godard is shown as a major jerk, although maybe talented. The parade of historic New Wave personages would just be vaguely familiar namesWOuld the look of the film be beautifully nostalgic or just old and weird? Was the Dullin/Deutch connection strong enough to pull the viewer in, like Belmondo and Seberg? Was the tale of underappreciated genius compelling? 

I don't know - I'm a fanboy, and probably anyone who reviews this is too. So, enough for me. 

Battle Fatigue

As a Thomas Pynchon fan, of course I was psyched for One Battle After Another (2025), P.T. Anderson's adaptation of Vineland. Of course, like most Pynchon, Vineland is unfilmable - but he did a good job on Inherent Vice, so let's see how it goes.

We're thrown right into the movie, with an attack on an ICE holding camp by a group of revolutionaries who call themselves the French 75. Ghetto Pat, AKA Rocketman (Leonardo DiCaprio) is the demolition man, and lover of Perfidia Hollywood Hills (Teyana Taylor). Taylor is mad for this kind of action, taking every chance to fight, sling a slogan, and love up DiCaprio. It definitely turned him on. So when she finds Col. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), she orders him to stand - that is, get himself hard. 

In fact, they later hook up. 

Taylor and DiCaprio get married, and have a baby. DiCaprio wants to settle down, take care fo the kid, but Taylor is too much into the thrill of revolution. She kills a hostage in a bank robbery and is finally captured. Penn offers her amnesty for information, and when he threatens her daughter, she cracks. Most of French 75 are killed in a long montage. By the way, this is a comedy? Taylor goes into witness protection, but slips away to Mexico.

Sixteen years later, DiCaprio is living in a little northern California town (not Vineland, though). He lives in a shack, smoking dope and seeing feds everywhere. His daughter, Charlene AKA Willa (Chase Infiniti - how Pynchonesque!) is a fine young girl, active in high school and Benicio del Toro's dojo. 

Meanwhile, Penn has been moving up in the ranks. He gets an offer to join a secret, silly, Santa-worshipping white supremacist group. But if they find out that he had a black lover (Taylor), and maybe even a mixed race daughter (Infiniti), he would be cast out. So he starts looking for her.

Word of this gets back to DiCaprio through the remnants of the French 75 underground. While he tries to find out some info - and getting nowhere because he is too stoned to remember the underground codes and passwords. Maybe he wasn't paying much attention, anyway. OK, this is comedy. 

It ends up with a three-way chase and fight between Penn's forces, DiCaprio and the underground, and Infiniti, a very capable young woman. At least she remembers the recognition code, "Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillis, Hooterville Junction" - from The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. 

Parts of this movie were great, maybe all, but only in parts. It just didn't really hold together for us. Our main problem was that the comedy of very real repression and somewhat silly violent revolution was lost on us. Pynchon's message that revolution and repression are human, and therefore fucked up and fundamentally goofy is fine when the struggle is against, say, Reaganism. But we're living with immigrants and citizen being rounded up and even shot in the streets, and we just can't laugh at it. We don't see any armed struggle against it, not even one made up of sexed up thrill junkies. Anyway, the movie shows that most of them are only playing revolutionary. It left a sour taste.

Which is too bad, because many things do come across. DiCaprio's stoned dingbat trying to cope with an immediate emergency was actually comical. Most of the action was quite effective - the final car chase on long, rolling, empty California highways is pretty and thrilling, although maybe a bit long. DiCaprio did pretty well as a goofy stoner, and Penn was ... interesting as a swaggering bully. But he did a lot of mouth work - puckering, sucking his teeth, grimacing. It was a little overdone. 

One part I did like was that, like in Vineland, Taylor just sort of fades away. She isn't killed, she doesn't show up to save the day or otherwise. She's out of the picture, in the wind, a concept, a shadow, a myth, either idol or traitor. And Taylor sells the part so well that even her absence has a presence. 

Not So Good

We're big Michael Jai White fans, and it looks like he's making a bunch of direct to video films these days. So, I decide to watch a bunch, including As Good as Dead (2022).

Set in Mexico, it starts with student Luca Oriel being shaken down for lunch money by a local gang. This is the gang his brother runs with, but he's in prison now, so he has no one to turn to. But he has noticed Michael Jai White, a mysterious gringo recluse, doing martial arts training. So he he starts following his exercises from afar. White chases him off a few times, them starts training him.

When Oriel's brother gets out of jail, he and his fellow gang-bangers go to White's trailer to tell him to stay away from the kid. So he whoops them all. Doesn't make them love him, although Oriel is pretty proud. 

At an all-comers cage match, Oriel volunteers to fight a local big man, and beats him, due to his training. Specifically, he uses a distinctive defensive stance with fists up, elbows out and fore-arms protecting the face. Someone videos the fight and the video gets back to the US and Tom Berenger.

It seems Jai White is hiding in Mexico from some bad trouble in the US. And now Tom Berenger knows where he's hiding. So the last act will be White, Oriel, and the chastened gang against a militarized American force.

I'm afraid I can't say much good about this. White wasn't a big presence in this, and there are only a few real fights. The Mexican setting seemed a bit cliched, although I liked the way the gang was humanized (a little). Still, White is a real presence, and the whole thing was fun enough. Not great, but no complaints. 

Intolerable Hilarity

Speaking of movies that I saw before this blog that I'm watching again: Intolerable Cruelty (2003). The Blank Check podcast reminded me of how much I liked it, and I chanced upon a copy, so...

It starts with TV producer Geoffrey Rush coming home to his Hollywood home to find his wife messing around with the poolboy - and they don't have a pool. As divorce is imminent, she goes to divorce lawyer Miles Massey (George Clooney), who gets her a big settlement, even in the face of infidelity. He's just that good. 

Cedric the Entertainer is a scumbag private eye whose specialty is videoing indiscretions for divorce cases. He catches a politician in bed with a blonde, and nails his ass. That's his motto, "Nail his ass!"

The politician is married to Catherine Zeta-Jones, who wants a big divorce settlement. In fact, she makes a practice of marrying and divorcing rich men for money. But this time, the husband hires Clooney, and Zeta-Jones gets nothing. 

She sets out for revenge. She marries Billy Bob Thornton, an oil heir. But she insists that they get a pre-nup - the famous "Massey pre-nup", which has never been broken. So she will not be able to profit from the marriage. After the wedding, Thornton tears up the pre-nup, leaving himself exposed. There's a lot of gasping about being exposed. 

Then, when Billy Bob dies, and she's left a widow (and a rich one), they begin a romance, and get married. But will they have a Massy pre-nup?

This is a very screwball movie. The patter is snappy, and the romance and deception go hand in hand. In fact, the offended woman romancing for revenge was the driver for, for instance, The Lady Eve. And of course, the chemistry between our two beautiful leads is off the charts. Of course, Clooney knows how good he looks - we meet him at the dentist getting his teeth whitened. We see him peeling back his lips to inspect them in mirrors all throughout. And the plot is as twisty and nonsensical as any screwball. 

The Coens fill the movie with other great characters, like Billy Bob and Cedric the Entertainer. Cedric and Rush even get happy endings, as Rush is now hosting Cedric's TV show, America's Funniest Divorce Videos, where he shows you how he will "nail his ass!"

Let There Be Music

I'm sorry I haven't been keeping up very well. I've been taking a long vacation, at home, watching lots of movies. But there won't be a lot of blogging. A lot of my viewing has been rewatches. But I've also been watching some musical performances. For example, I watched Glass: The Perfect American (2013), the Philip Glass opera about Walt and Roy Disney.

I watched this on YouTube, but I was actually trying to watch another Glass opera, Satyagraha. When I couldn't get it, I gave this a try. It was inventively staged, with projected animations and sometimes ranks of animators in the background. There was an animator who complained about never being recognized by the brothers. The timeline was flexible, and in many scenes, Walt is delirious, dreaming or dead. This was all great. The music, however, did not really strike me. It was not deeply minimalist, more classical modern with a touch of minimalism and a few blues/jazz passages. Fun to watch, less to listen to.

A friend recommended Becoming Led Zeppelin (2025), a documentary made with input from the surviving members and some past interviews with Bonham. It was interesting to hear about the old days before they formed up, since they all had musical careers already. I was interested in Page's desire for Zep to never have a hit single - he made too many of those as a studio guy. He wanted Zep to be an album band! But because the doc was based on their interviews, I felt like it presented a cleaned up version, without as much personality as I could have hoped for. Maybe I'm spoiled by listening to THe History of Rock and Roll in 500 Songs, which tends to go pretty deep. Still fun.

I also watched a lot of YouTube world music type concerts. I loved  Ben Aylon, who plays the Senegalese xalam, a lute with a skin soundboard. I also like Constantinople, a trio of kora, setar and percussion. YouTube's algorithm is very good about feeding these to me.  

And I hope to continue this, even as my vacation draws to a close. 

Naked with a Bullet

Ms. Spenser was pretty skeptical about The Naked Gun (2025), but I'd heard good things, so I threw it on while she was working. She ended up liking it more than me. 

It starts with a bank robbery. A little schoolgirl trapped among the hostages turns out to be... Frank Drebbin Jr., Liam Neeson. So he defeats the robbers wearing a plaid skirt. But he doesn't notice the head robber, Danny Huston, getting away with the contents of one safe deposit box, which turns out to be the P.L.O.T Device.

Because Neeson was a little bit over-zealous in the bank case, he is busted down to traffic. He arrives at the scene of a seeming suicide - someone drove their electric car right into the water. But back at the office, Neeson meets the man's sister, Pamela Anderson, who doesn't believe it was suicide. But she's a crime novelist, so she would. 

But you didn't come for the plot. You came for the jokes. And there are a lot of them. A cute runner is Neeson and the other cops getting handed a coffee every few minutes. Less cute is the long scene with Neeson suffering diarrhea from his disordered eating, then berating himself, then pigging out again. This wasn't so cute. I think percentage of tasteless jokes has risen a bit from the original trilogy. But this one has very little O.J. Simpson, so I guess it's a wash.

Also, a lot of the gags are straight up stolen from other movies - sometimes as homage, sometimes just a lift. That doesn't bother me, especially if the jokes are any good. But I did feel like there were fewer than there should be. The jokes in the background were still there, but I felt that the density wasn't. Maybe I'm idealizing the originals. though. I should rewatch, maybe (hard to sit through the O.J., though).

Neeson did a very respectable Drebbin - he has no trouble playing it straight and stone-faced. Pam Anderson was great as the dame, looking and acting the part. Of course, she's competing with Priscilla Presley and Anna Nicole Smith, so she doesn't have to stretch much. But it is nice to see her getting a middle-age return, looking lovely and a little more natural. 

So I laughed but felt a little let down. Ms. Spenser laughed (when she looked up from her work), and was pleasantly surprised. Maybe it's a question of expectations. 

The Count and the Vampire

Ms. Spenser was ready for some horror, and we thought The Vourdalak (2023) might fit the bill. Did it, or was it more horror-comedy?

In the 18th-century, the Count d'Urfe. a French delegate to a conference on the Russo-Turkish conflict, is robbed and separated from his party. The delegate, played by Kacey Mottet Klein, is left stumbling through an Eastern European forest in his court clothes and white makeup. The first habitation he finds turns him away, telling him to leave this forest - it isn't safe in the day and worse at night. But he does get directed to the Gorcha family that may help him out.

 He meets the family a few at a time. The middle son is a pretty young man who wears flowers and make up. The daughter is a rough beauty. The older son, who is out fighting the Turks, is married and has a young son. When he returns, having failed to kill the Turkish leader, he promises to the count that he can have a horse the next day. The patriarch, old Gorcha, has left to fight the Turks as well. He has left a note saying he will be back in six days. If he returns after six days, it won't be him, but a vourdalak, a kind of local vampire.

That night is the sixth. They find old Gorcha collapsed at the edge of the property. Even though the six days has elapsed, the eldest son doesn't believe in vourdalaks, and doesn't care that the old Gorcha looks like a gruesome puppet. And so they take him in.

As you can imagine, things don't go well for anyone, and in ways that are pretty horrific. However, the horror is a bit nonchalant. The tension isn't as tense as it could be. This may be a dramatic choice, showing how insidious horror can be - how easy it can be to accept violence and death. 

More seriously, the count and old Gorcha are both rather ridiculous. The count looks like a clown, in his white makeup with rouged cheeks. Old Gorcha resembles the puppet in Saw more than a Nosferatu. 

But we did like it a lot. The characters were interesting and fully formed, the setting unusual, and the horror horrible. But I think we enjoyed Mario Bava's take with Boris Karloff better.