Review: Cinema

Was stressed out for of couple of reasons and I’ve been waiting for La Moustache to come to South Jersey, so tonight was movie night.

La Moustache: If you’ve read a review, then you know the basic premise: a guy shaves off his mustache, his wife doesn’t notice, hijinx ensues. I thought, what a great idea for a movie, and let’s face it, I would watch Emmanuelle Devos and Mathieu Amalric read the phone book together. When Arnaud Desplechin shoots those two, one of them is neurotic but functional and the other is a total mess, and they seem to switch off; here they both played off someone else who was a mess. The other Amalric-is-a-literary-type vehicle worth checking out is Assayas’ ‘Late August, Early September.’

When the opening credits rolled I thought, do I really need to see the actual movie? Well, it does utilize ambiguity to milk all the psychodrama out of that comic premise. I’ve been watching Antonioni’s ‘Eros Is Sick’ trilogy and it is a sort of cartoon version of La Notte, and it’s in color, and the third act is in Hong Kong, as I didn’t know if Devos was allowed to leave Paris.

The other funny thing is they used Philip Glass music, which is unusual in a comedy. Usually you hear his music in a movie and you wait for the world to go out of balance, or Mishima to kill himself, the Maoists to repress the Dalai Lama, or John Heard to tell off a pol in Mont St Michel, but here a Glass score is played for laughs.

So this is Ian’s Summer Pick, tho I can’t remember if I saw something else that was good this summer.

Wicker Man: Saw about twenty minutes in the middle, as I only had one choice for my filler until Changing Times, piece of crap, but it does draw you in. I don’t have cable, but it’s the kind of movie people seem to watch when they have cable. I find horror movies to be the most ideological, and LaBute seems to be grandstanding about something here, but I don’t know or care what.

Changing Times: Catherine Deneuve’s first line is her complimenting her son for shaving off his goatee, so already they forfeited what has proved to be a winning dramatic concept.. Once I went to this theater and paid to see Charles Durning play the governor (O Brother Where Art Thou?) and snuck in to see Charles Durning play the mayor (State and Main).

SPOILER ALERT The times they are a-changing. END OF SPOILER ALERT Never thought much of Téchiné, here he creates a lot of characters and gives them two acts of development but with this amount of characters it gets up to 108 minutes. Worth seeing for the acting, though.

SPOILER ALERT France and Morocco are one happy dysfunctional family but the Yanks are gunning down the Iraqis END OF SPOILER ALERT

Factotum: The good news is that now that Mickey Roarke and Matt Dillon have both played Charles Bukowski in essentially the same movie, the chances of Tim Allen playing Bukowski are lessened.