As someone who (heresy alert!) has always had reservations about Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad, I was blindsided by Alain Resnais’s extremely hard-to-see Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime (1968), which screens at the Siskel this weekend. The movie reworks the same themes of lost love and fragmented memory as the other two films, but in a more prosaic style that only increases its power. A failed suicide (Claude Rich) is recruited to test a time-travel device; he’s set to go back one year, but he becomes, as Kurt Vonnegut would dub it in 1969, unstuck. Unlike Resnais’s flashier earlier films, it simply cuts from one scene to the next, utilizing the film medium’s inherent capacity for time travel to make its point. The chronology is shuffled; the movie sometimes jumps back half a beat or repeats footage, but every moment gets equal weight. (Not to cite another film school text, but I was reminded of Stan Brakhage’s “Window Water Baby Moving.”)
It’s been suggested that Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime provided a blueprint for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a connection almost impossible not to draw while watching it. In its structural freefall, it also holds the DNA for Shane Carruth’s Primer (a.k.a. the should-have-been cult film of the last decade), and the biomorphic time machine resembles the game pods of David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ. Indeed, this may be one of the most influential films you’ve never seen. Simultaneously a love story and a mystery, Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime is nearly impossible to parse on one viewing. You’ll have two chances: Tomorrow at 3pm and Monday at 6pm.
Our local rep tells me that Fox won’t have a print of Avatar ready until after the Chicago Film Critics Association’s voting deadline. This is consistent with what Indiewire’s Anne Thompson reported nine days ago, which is that no one anywhere will see the film before December 10. By holiday-movie standards, that’s actually a pretty ominous sign: If it turns out to be true, it means the movie won’t be in contention for the National Board of Review’s awards, the Golden Globes (see calendar) and many critics’ best lists. Obviously, this is no ordinary film, and it’s easy to believe that James Cameron will be futzing with his putatively revolutionary technology until someone drags him away from his keyboard. But it’s harder to believe that Fox won’t shove a rough version at awards groups, as New Line did in 2005 with The New World. (New Line actually released the first cut for a New York/L.A. run in December before rolling out a shorter version in January, which meant that only the early one was eligible for the Oscars.) It’s true that the reaction to the Avatar footage shown in August was, as this video makes clear, not super-duper positive. But on two occasions Cameron has made hits out of what were, in their respective times, the most expensive movies ever made, Terminator 2 and Titanic. He’s also been underestimated before—remember, advance buzz suggested that Titanic would be a disaster. I’m still guardedly optimistic.
Just a heads-up that tonight is your last chance to catch Richard Kelly’s beguilingly strange The Box (see review) within Chicago city limits. Despite Kelly’s efforts to push it as a post–Southland Tales attempt at commercial filmmaking, the movie is basically closing after a lackluster two-week run. Next time move faster, cultists! I agree that it’s a flawed film—after two viewings, I still think it gives up its secrets much too easily—but there’s a lot of subtext to mine, and Kelly does retro-paranoia with a level of skill, craft and personality that surpasses anything comparable in theaters right now.
Frankly, I’d file it on my list of really interesting movies killed by their studios. Warner Bros. delayed most American screenings until Wednesday or Thursday the week of release (depending on the city), which created the impression of badness, which in turn created a certain amount of peer pressure among critics to pan it. Not that critics always follow a studio’s signals, but when confronted with a large WTF factor, a short deadline and a wink and a nod from the people putting the movie in theaters, fewer reviewers are willing risk looking ridiculous by praising it. There are, of course, perfectly legitimate reasons for disliking The Box, but I can’t help but wonder what kind of reception the film would have gotten if it had been marketed the way Paranormal Activity was.
Soledad Miranda as the Countess in Jess Franco's Vampyros Lesbos
With the release of Twilight on the horizon—see our Twilight package page—our Web editor asked me, why vampires? Why has the vampire endured as a symbol in film, TV and literature?
You might as well ask, why cowboys—another type of character whose genre reflects the changing needs of society? The vampire offers a potent, free-floating metaphor for our fears, for sex and for death. Like werewolves, vampires aren’t too far removed from us, and so provide a useful symbol of our temptations to transgress. They also, like any genre trope, reflect changing fashions: Move from Max Schreck’s long-nailed Count Orlok in Nosferatu to Bela Lugosi’s dapper Dracula to Christopher Lee in the Hammer films to Gary Oldman’s opera-ready 1992 incarnation, and you have a pretty good guide to what filmmakers thought would scare audiences over time.
If you had to cite a trend, it’s that vampires have become progressively more human and antiheroic, whether it’s in Anne Rice’s dabblings or Kathryn Bigelow’s moody, still-underseen Near Dark (1987), in which vampires aren’t all that bad—just outsiders with an unfortunate thirst for blood. (The flip side of that is the totally benign bloodsucker, who can be seen in ’80s cheese like My Best Friend Is a Vampire.) Michael Almereyda’s Nadja and Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction used vampires as stand-ins for AIDS. Lately, vampires have become synonymous with sleek: Some of the alleged vamps on screen today would be right at home in The Matrix (as in the Underworld movies and the forthcoming Daybreakers), which suggest the vampire is just as ordinary as any action hero. The original Buffy and then the series brought vampries into the realm of adolescence with wit and style. And now we have Twilight, which suggests that vampires can be just as boring as anyone else.
Having painted himself into a corner—with Betty about to run off with Henry Francis; Peggy weighing offers from Duck; and Pete on the verge of leaving for another company—Matthew Weiner resorted to a time-honored tradition: He gathered the best characters in a room and had them take the show in a new direction.
So that’s how Joan comes back. Pity about Ken Cosgrove. I’m confident we haven’t seen the last of Sal, though the circumstances under which he’ll return are a mystery. And if there was any remaining doubt that it was okay to like Lane Pryce, let’s lay it to rest.
It's tea time at Sterling Cooper.
Mad Men carried off its third season finale in high style, opening plenty of new avenues while spinning a suspenseful story—the escape from Sterling Cooper—with tension, poignancy and plenty of good humor. (The lone comment on the last week’s Kennedy assassination episode was Roger making fun of Jane: “Most interest that girl’s ever had in a book depository.”) The final installment of the season also illuminated Don’s feelings by creating a parallel with his youth, when his father made the self-preserving decision to abandon a struggling farm collective. His dad’s accidental death turns out to have been from a horse’s kick, which gives extra resonance to the horse meat motif from a few weeks ago. But more to the point: Don/Dick saw as a young boy what it means to strike out on one’s own; if his secret past can ruin his marriage, maybe the values he took from it can save him professionally. He also bails from his sinking ship in a more collaborative way than his father did.
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Jumping the gun a bit, aren’t you, Matthew Weiner? Watching “The Grown-Ups,” the first Mad Men episode directed by Barbet Schroeder (Reversal of Fortune, Murder by Numbers), it’s actually pretty clear why the show didn’t save the Kennedy assassination for its season finale. Unlike the Cuban Missile Crisis, which ended season two and which provided a suitably paranoid backdrop for an episode of secret-spilling, with the Kennedy assassination, you’re essentially limited to having an entire episode of characters glued to their television sets (or in the case of Roger’s daughter’s wedding guests, reluctantly unglued). There are certain marks to hit—the announcement of Kennedy’s death, Ruby shooting Oswald—and since nothing else is going on in the world, it’s not exactly the best week for advancing the series’ drama. Yet it would be weird not to address it at all. Good on Weiner for getting it out of the way and—we hope—saving the season’s biggest fireworks for next week.
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Connoisseurs of the elusive so-bad-it’s-good genre: We have a new candidate. I don’t make that claim lightly, least of all when it means picking on a no-budget film that, as the more tactful Roger Ebert notes, is so obviously heartfelt in its intentions. Still, it’s not often one sees a Vietnam movie cast with actors who resemble extras from Baywatch. Or a Vietnam film that sometimes appears to have been shot in someone’s backyard (even though it was actually Vietnam). Or a military movie of any stripe that features a special appearance by Faye Dunaway (above) as an angry major. Less pathological but far, far more ambitious than the recent cult phenomenon The Room, 21 and a Wakeup (see review) offers all of the above and more.
Here’s a sampling. The film is set on a military base, but every character looks coiffed for the dance floor. Almost nothing about the set design suggests the early ’70s. Tom Sizemore—one of several other celebrities to appear inexplicably in bit parts—shows up to head-butt a girl. The main character—a star American surgeon played by Amy Acker—speaks perfect Vietnamese, though the subtitles briefly forget to turn off when she switches back to English. In the operating room, a nurse played by The Wonder Years‘ Danica McKellar summarily decides she’s got what it takes to be a doctor—though that epiphany doesn’t work out so well for her patient. A closing montage tells us what happened to all the major characters, noting that one of them “went on to become the top orthopedist for the NFL.” (I’m not sure how that reads, but it plays like something out of Animal House.)
Due to space constraints in my review, I didn’t mention the fact that the director is a Vietnam veteran. His clear sincerity only adds to the fascination (and makes me feel guilty about slagging his film in this way). 21 and a Wakeup appears to have to have been created through a perfect storm of passion, good intentions and tone-deafness. The film is getting a Chicago-area-only release beginning today. In the name of midnight movies everywhere, keep it in theaters.
This post contains mega-spoilers. Avoid—avoid!—if you haven’t seen this killer episode.
The next time someone puts together a special on Great Moments in Television, whoever it is had better reserve a choice spot for “Betty confronts Don.” The central scene of last night’s Mad Men cut to the heart of the show’s appeal on several levels: Don’s secret vulnerability, the shifting Betty-Don power dynamic, the notion that it’s impossible to escape your past. Normally, it would be the show’s m.o. to drop a bombshell and then ignore it for three or four episodes, which made the kitchen scene all the more shocking. For almost the first time in Betty’s presence, Don drops all artifice: He doesn’t make up any stories; he just crumbles. (Hamm’s performance is so textured, you almost wanted to hand him an Emmy on the spot.) Somehow Betty’s victory is tainted. Don’s explanation doesn’t invite forgiveness, exactly, but it paints him in a uniquely pathetic light. Even when she asks whether she should love him, his response is disarmingly frank: “I was surprised you ever loved me.”
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I should apologize to the Chicago film festival: After I predicted that last night’s surprise screening would be something completely uninteresting, it turned out to be Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, featuring Heath Ledger’s final, uncompleted performance. The movie is slated for limited release on December 25. I saw it at Cannes and really didn’t care for it—it’s less aggressively off-putting than Gilliam’s last miasma, Tideland, but just as undisciplined—but I have to admit that that’s a pretty decent surprise. Good job, festival. I’ll try not to mention RocknRolla again.
Tonight is the Chicago International Film Festival’s annual surprise screening, and I’m on the fence about whether to show up. I’m still annoyed about last year’s mystery film turning out to be RocknRolla when the rumor mill suggested it would be Quantum of Solace. (In fairness, festival organizers denied these rumors—but of course, they denied every title we threw at them.) Will this year’s movie be a genuine hot-ticket item, as the press release promises? Or will it be another boatload of crap that the festival is too ashamed to show in any other guise?
Assuming last year is an accurate indication—and it may not be—here are my three hunches about tonight’s film.
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