I had a pretty good weekend, give or take a couple of bad movies and some unsolicited criticism of my personal appearance (see comments under "Unemployment Journal: Day Five" post). My life is so much fuller and busier now that I'm unemployed, oddly enough, and my sugar mama wife treated me to not one, but two, concerts: The Magnetic Fields on Friday and Neko Case backed by Kelly Hogan and The Sadies (the latter's opening set was pretty stunning as well) on Saturday. I even ran into friends from the old job and their equally friendly significant others at both shows. Ah, the glories of being a kept man. Also got to see the James Agee/Walker Evans exhibit at the Harry Ransom Center on the UT campus on Friday and had some drinks with the old co-worker friends on Thursday night. I don't miss the job, but I miss seeing the fine people that work there. On the movie front, I'm going to start with the two disappointing films:
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (Peter Weir) Not particularly terrible, and opening with some intriguing scenes of the everyday routines on a British warship during the Napoleonic Wars, the film ultimately gets bogged down in the cartoonish simplicity of the characters, confusingly edited battle sequences, and sluggish pacing. The open-ended conclusion is too obviously a plea for a sequel rather than an interestingly ambiguous touch.
Yankee Doodle Dandy (Michael Curtiz) This is a wildly overpraised musical biography of super-patriot George M. Cohan, Broadway actor and writer of the flag-waving anthems "Yankee Doodle Dandy," "Over There," "Grand Old Flag," ad nauseum, that changes most of the facts to suit the story. James Cagney plays Cohan and is pretty great in the role. There are some nice moments at the beginning of the film showing Cohan's rise to fame on the vaudeville circuit as part of a traveling act including his sister and his parents. Even with Cagney's performance and a handful of good scenes, the movie is mostly vulgar, stupid, boring propaganda. Filmed and released shortly after our involvement in World War II, the film was obviously meant as a morale booster, but is so cloying in its rah-rah jingoism I'm surprised we won the war. If you really want to vomit, watch the scenes of Cohan receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor from a patronizingly smug FDR lookalike. And those songs. Ugh. Imagine Lee Greenwood's "Proud to be an American" or "God Bless the U.S.A." or whatever the hell it's called given a John Phillips Sousa arrangement. Then imagine about thirty more songs that sound exactly the same. This movie is interminable and even a force of nature like James Cagney can't save it.
Leave it to those freedom-hating Saddam-lovers, the French, to keep my movie-watching weekend from being a total bust:
Story of Women (Claude Chabrol) Isabelle Huppert is so good in this movie, and her character is beyond complex. Trying to figure out the motivations for her behavior in this film could be a full-time job. The other actors are wonderful, too, and the period recreation (the movie is set in Occupied France during World War II) is flawless. It's not like I was in France in the early 1940s, but the film seems like a document of a living, breathing corner of the world, not a hollow, stagey movie recreation.
Under the Sun of Satan (Maurice Pialat) This might be a great movie, but I think I need to see it a few more times to decide. And seeing it a few more times might not be much fun. This is a somber, austere, cerebral, dense, joyless film. Gerard Depardieu plays a humorless, zealous priest who feels the world is manipulated by Satan, not God, and is constantly tormented by this belief. This is such an artfully composed, deeply felt film, but its lack of humor and narrative confusion throw some obstacles in the viewer's way. Like its most obvious influence, Bresson's "Diary of a Country Priest," the movie is based on a George Bernanos novel.
Currently reading: Werner Herzog's original script for his movie "Fitzcarraldo"
Just finished: The Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell
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