Finnished

Le Havre (Aki Kaurismäki, 2011)

The Man without a Past (Aki Kaurismäki, 2002)

The Proletariat Trilogy (Aki Kaurismäki, 1986, 1988, 1990)

Napoleon Dynamite (Jared Hess, 2004)

Night on Earth (Jim Jarmusch, 1991)

 

I am headed to Finland. I am headed to Finland to work for two months. I will be spending those two months largely inside of a windowless rehearsal space. I could probably have picked a better two months than December and January.

 

My only mental image of Finland comes from Aki Kaurismäki. I once assisted on a production of Bohème that borrowed heavily from his aesthetic. I thought it was brilliant, but everyone assured me that it was mostly stolen. I still haven’t seen the Bohème film.

 

But I did finally watch the Proletariat Trilogy. And I got my parents into him. They have seen more than I have at this point; odd thought. We watched Man without a Past together. I kind of like the little emotional affect that is characteristic of his style. It’s like Napoleon Dynamite except there’s a reason beyond hipster pretentions (please note: I enjoyed ND; I just have nothing to say about it).

 

And I watched Le Havre. For all that everything in these movies is stylized and generally drab, I have come to the conclusion that Mr. Kaurismäki is a humanist and an optimist. Stories have happy endings and senseless brutality is met with compassion and almost Christian levels of grace. This is good because mostly my image of Finland is that it is very cold. I think there is a section of Night on Earth in Finland. It’s cold there. Also dark.

 

Do I seem like I’m dwelling on fringe and unimportant parts of these films and not enough on the content? It’s a SAD world, my friends.

Pit of Stomach

Doctor Strange (Scott Derrickson, 2017)

Regular readers of this blog, of which there are none, will note that I haven’t posted in over a week. Arriving back to Europe knocked me out for a day and the US election knocked me out for a week. This film is very autobiographical.

Like other liberal, whiny members of a self-assured leftist elite, I assumed one thing and watched in terrible slow motion as my assumptions were shattered. The only useful part of the sickening helplessness was that I think I now understand how everyone on the other side felt these past years. I am not sure exactly how this information will be useful, but I’m sure it will.

At which point my girlfriend suggested we go to the movies. Thank God the cinema around the corner was showing Doctor Strange alongside headier stuff like films about homosexuality in East Germany. Briefly I was thankful for commercial movies.

Actually, this was the best Marvel movie I’d seen for a while. It’s a ridiculous thing, but the sort of Inception effects without the pretension was fun. Much was totally stupid, but with a pair of ridiculous acting talents slumming and hamming it up, a pretty decent time was had by all.

I’m still not back to where I was and I probably won’t be anything less than totally vigilant and nervous until the fall of 2018 at the earliest, but it got me out of the house. I probably will never be able to watch the movie again: it’s taken on the role of cinematic sin eater and will forever be contaminated with fear and disaster. Resist.

Punch Drunk

Creed (Ryan Coogler, 2016)

Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood, 2004)

Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980)

Cool Runnings (John Turtletaub)

The Mighty Ducks (Stephen Herek, 1992)

D2: The Mighty Ducks (Sam Weisman, 1994)

 

It is time to admit that I do not understand the boxing movie. First of all, I am amazed at its prevalence. Is there really this much boxing going on? I barely register that it exists. I have never been invited to a boxing match. I think I have heard about a few big pay-per-view events, but is it really such a big thing? This is probably a cultural thing. I just was not raised or exposed to the boxing set.

I do like sports movies. I understand that basic template of something like Cool Runnings: the ups and downs of competition, the training, the big setback, the final catharsis. I’m actually fine with this trajectory. It mimics the boxing film, but differs in one important aspect: boxers are lonely creatures. Certainly, there’s still a relationship between the coach and the fighter, but in team sports, we have more characters to look at, or at least more people under stress together. In the end, the man in the ring has only one partner: his opponent and sports movies are actually pretty terrible at characterizing the opposition. They are always implacable, unbeatable. Even war movies do a better job in humanizing the enemy. Sports films don’t have sympathetic antagonists: they have more money, better training, are the favorites. So in the boxing movie it comes down to one man or woman standing alone and suffering.

And I guess I don’t get this suffering. I find it boring. I have seen enough jump rope sequences. I have watched punches either lightning fast or in slow motion. I have seen too many people try and crawl from the mat.

Weirdly enough, I was a huge WWF fan as an adolescent. But the matches were flashy, I knew and understood both sides and although the action was simulated, I did not know the outcome. Pure circus.

De Niro is great in Raging Bull. But he’s not a character I understand. It’s an artificat, albeit a fascinating one. Sure, I’m interested in these people, but I just don’t care enough.

There is notably one movie missing up there: Rocky. Simple. I haven’t seen it. Maybe I should. Maybe it’s the key to the entire mystery and all boxing movies somehow reference Rocky or draw on it. This is, of course, bogus since there have been boxing movies long before Stallone, but I think it’s telling. I’m willing to give it a shot, but I think it might also be time to say that I will not be making a show of trying to watch any more ringside action. Or maybe I should just pay-per-view.

Iron-y

Pumping Iron (George Butler and Robert Fiore, 1977)

Am I alone in finding bodybuilders oddly fascinating? I hope not, because that would be sort of awkward. After over an hour of staring at muscles, I think we lose a bit of our initial uncomfortable reaction: we no longer see the uncanny valley or perceive the extreme body proportions as odd. We could talk about things that are “homoerotic,” but mostly it’s just different.

But this movie isn’t really so much about muscles. This movie is about watching a goddamn shark take apart everyone else. I had no idea how smart Arnold Schwarzenegger was until I watched this. Sure, he’s huge. But he’s smart about it. He hires ballet dancers to help him present himself. He’s building his brand before that awful phrase entered the lexicon.

And the mind games. He takes apart Lou Ferrigno. I know the movie is partially scripted, but Arnold doesn’t come across as anything other than shrewd and possibly a little bit evil. Evil in a sort of rakish charming way. Or maybe a little bit more evil than that. It seems like he’s towing the line to turning heel, to borrow a phrase from a different group of muscle-bound showmen.

In light of all the nasty stuff that Arnold was apparently doing to women in those days, I feel bad enjoying his performance. But it does explain a lot me about how this guy managed to parlay his passion for working out into a film career and then into his stint as governor of California. I’m glad he’s gone from that scene, but when I saw this film I was no longer so surprised that he got there. It’s clear that he has no trouble kicking the psychological chair out from under his fellow pumpers. He’s a big fish surrounded by minnows. The irony should not be lost.

PS. George Butler went to my high school. Which is kind of cool.

Hustler(s)

Heist (David Mamet, 2001)

The Spanish Prisoner (David Mamet, 1998)

House of Games (David Mamet, 1987)

Clue (Jonathan Lynn, 1985)

Sleuth (Joseph L. Mankiewicz)

The Score (Frank Oz, 2001)

The Game (David Fincher, 1997)

Dirty, Rotten Scoundrels (Frank Oz, 1988)

A glut of twisty ending movies but pre M. Night. And mostly directly by David Mamet. Heist did not grab me. I had sort of inured myself to this kind of “it turns out the other guy really has the upper hand” plotline by 2001. No idea. The Score was good, but that was possibly a function of its cast. Although Gene Hackman is hardly a slouch. Maybe I was just sick of Mamet, which is hard to believe.

The Spanish Prisoner was definitely the beginning of my interest in all of this. A classmate had mentioned The Game, which I saw much later (and which introduced me to “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane), but I know that Steve Martin being eveil was my first exposure to all of this. I later tried out Dirty, Rotten Scoundrels, which was good, but the twists with comedy I remember finding more fun in Clue. Clue also gets massive points for having to adapt itself from a board game and oddly doing justice to the changing endings of the actual game. I was briefly obsessed with a series of figure-it-out mysteries based on the game, but I forget if this was before or after I watched the film. I digress.

My mother remembered House of Games, so we watched it. Actually, I think it’s stayed with me a lot, but I couldn’t really say why. I guess I just like Ricky Jay? And I sort of feel like Sleuth was pulled out shortly afterwards. It introduced me to a fear of automatons and a number of new racial slurs for Italians. Also some great scene chewing on all sides. Never saw the remake.

It’s strange to me that this is a genre: the active tricking of the audience. The overturning of the established plot without any warning or real ability for the audience to solve it. I guess people just like conmen and hucksters? I can’t really say. I don’t think I’ve seen one of these pictures in a while, but there’s certainly a lot of tricky twists out there and an almost expected-unexpected-unlikely betrayal.

Windmills

Sideways (Alexander Payne, 2004)

An old friend got married last week in Solvang, CA. The wedding was in Los Olivos, actually, but most of us were staying in Solvang on her recommendation. I had not quite realized how much the town featured in Sideways.

I saw the movie a number of times, once with director commentary. I think I enjoyed the scenes of a California that I could relate to and not some high powered, botoxed movie fantasy. Also, I really liked Sandra Oh and this was before Grey’s Anatomy had made her into quite such a commodity, if you know what I mean and even if you don’t.

Solvang was a bit like returning to somewhere I had been as a child and suddenly seeing things that looked immensely familiar. Luckily, a number of the other guests had also seen the movie and so when we walked around, we could say things like “that’s where Sandra Oh beat Thomas Haden Church with a motorcycle helmet!” Solvang is a very Chamber of Commerce run town, so there were often helpful little signs to remind us about which scenes happened where. Seriously, there was a booth in a diner with a little plaque mentioning some scene that had been shot there. I didn’t really care. I cared about the enormous stack of pancakes that had been given to me.

But still, I had this pervasive feeling that I had been here before that I don’t believe I have ever encountered with a place. Maybe Oxford because of innumerable episodes of Inspector Morse, but even then it was put together all wrong in my head. I’m sure Solvang doesn’t fit together quite right in the film, but it’s so small that maybe your head self corrects better. Oxford isn’t exactly enormous, but it’s definitely bigger and more elaborately built than Solvang. Also maybe because Solvang already looks like a back lot with its fake windmills and fifty “authentic Danish bakeries.” I don’t drink wine, but I wish I had because I can’t say it was a place I enjoyed immensely. I didn’t totally dislike it either. Las Vegas is the only place ever to make me feel like I never wished to return. I don’t want to dump on Vegas too much: it’s just not for me. No, Solvang is a bit strange, worth perhaps a stop or an overnight, but I wouldn’t want to dig too deep. I hear the hills are nice to hike and the wedding was certainly very beautiful. Los Olivos was more upscale, but on the other hand Solvang definitely made a better backdrop. Go figure.

Ha.Ha.

Hot Shots (Jim Abrahams, 1991)

Hot Shots Part Deux (Jim Abrahams, 1993)

Naked Gun (David Zucker, 1988)

Naked Gun 2 1/2 (David Zucker, 1991)

Naked Gun 33 1/3 (Peter Segal, 1994)

Airplane (David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker, 1980)

Above this sentence is the level of humor I grew up with. I think it’s a miracle that I survived.

 

I remember preferring the Hot Shots series to anything else. This was probably because someone I know recommended it and I respected this person in my own childish way. The Naked Gun movies were mostly notable for extended shots of Anna Nicole Smith, which was a thing that was interesting to pubescent boys at the time.

 

Airplane I saw much later. I had heard of it and many people viewed it as a touchstone, but by the time I watched it, I had somehow moved on from the obvious jokes and visual puns. I still like Don’t Call me Shirley, though.

 

Oh, I don’t know. It is difficult to dismiss things that you’ve laughed at years later. I tend to think or perhaps to hope that I am somehow more sophisticated, more refined than I was when I laughed at such broad lampooning. But is Judd Apatow really all that more sophisticated? Likely no.

 

Leslie Nielsen looked to me like someone’s doctor. It was all dad jokes, but yet it wasn’t. Charlie Sheen had not yet gone crazy. Or perhaps the world just hadn’t sobered up and kicked the cocaine habit. Thinking about these things now, I suddenly start remembering moments that I liked, little things like the Martin Sheen cameo in Hot Shots or the arguing PA systems voices from Airplane. I don’t know that I would rewatch these to confirm or dispel my bias, but I think I have decided to leave them alone and just enjoy that I once found them funny and maybe still do.

I did not realize the irony

Sleeping Beauty (Walt Disney Studios, 1959)

This is a remarkable film in that I am positive I have seen it, but I cannot remember a thing about it.

This post says less about my autobiographical relationship to this movie than my current relationship to weariness, which is quite close at the moment.

Small and Large

The Big Lebowski (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1998)

 

Cults are generally a negative thing. Not this cult. It doesn’t really mean anything. I don’t think this movie is inherently funny. It’s sort of on the edge of funny. It’s like balancing on the edge of the funny pool. And never quite falling in.

I don’t smoke pot, so I may be missing major components of this damn thing, but somehow it is hilarious. We quote it like scripture. But why? It’s not because any of it is usually relevant to the situation. It’s like as soon as we say something close to a line, we just free associate the dialogue into it. It’s a bit like The Dude recycling George H.W. Bush’s speech into his interview with Lebowski.

Maybe it’s just a California thing: this is how random and weird life is and we will show it. Possibly it’s the musical montages.

It’s also possible that this is entirely generational and nobody else is even aware of this movie. My father certainly doesn’t know the film. Although he’s probably seen. Probably. Do the “kids” know about this one? Does it have relevance to them at all or will this be like “Bullitt”? Maybe there’s a different Old Movie that I’m missing, but I’m just too young and don’t have enough respect.

Still, I believe that the cognitive relaxation of The Big Lebowski keeps it where it is. There is no pressure in this movie. There is no need to rewind if you have missed something. Or to skip a scene. It just flows, like scripture from the screen and into our heads. You can pick it up and put it down at will. I think I have rarely watched it all the way through. But I don’t need to. My mind will fill in the gaps.

Luke Warm

Blue is the Warmest Color (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013)

Midnight before flying back for my first Christmas at home in five years. Went on way too long. Somehow this film turned into a bit of a mess. Possibly we were too tired to really watch multiple hours of movie that late at night. Maybe we just wanted to escape the cinema and spend a last few hours together before I left for two weeks.

But this was stupidly long. And with a lot of slightly ridiculous softcore scenes à la Mulholland Drive. I don’t know much about lesbian intimacy, but I think I can identify the male gaze when I see it.

Somehow, however, this was a nice night: a cold winter, a late movie, some dinner before hand and a stroll through winter streets. I don’t particularly want to watch it again, but it ties me to the moment and to the place and so maybe it did get to me. Maybe just a little.