60. Losing My Religion &...

Lyrics

Life is bigger
It's bigger 
And you, you are not me
The lengths that I will go to
The distance in your eyes
Oh no, I've said too much
I set it up

That's me in the corner
That's me in the spotlight
Losing my religion
Trying to keep up with you
And I don't know if I can do it
Oh no I've said too much
I haven't said enough

I thought that I heard you laughing
I thought that I heard you sing
I think I thought I saw you try

Every whisper
Of every waking hour 
I'm choosing my confessions
Trying to keep an eye on you
Like a hurt lost and blinded fool
Oh no, I've said too much
I set it up

Consider this
The hint of the century
Consider this
The slip that brought me
To my knees failed
What if all these fantasies
Come flailing around
Now I've said too much

I thought that I heard you laughing
I thought that I heard you sing
I think I thought I saw you try

But that was just a dream
That was just a dream

That's me in the corner
That's me in the spotlight
Losing my religion
Trying to keep up with you
And I don't know if I can do it
Oh no I've said too much
I haven't said enough

I thought that I heard you laughing
I thought that I heard you sing
I think I thought I saw you try

But that was just a dream, try, cry, why, try
That was just a dream, just a dream, just a dream
Dream


I only started to appreciate R.E.M. when they broke up. But even when I didn't care much about them, I thought this to be a great song. I linked it to one of the most famous movies ever made, about a man who is well, losing his religion.

The Movie:  The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet) (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)

The 1950's and 1960's are considered to be the golden years of European art cinema. I have yet to see many of these movies made in this period, but I have mostly liked those I saw. It is also considered very highbrow, very intellectual cinema, that might be offputting for many people. Perhaps no one has that reputation more than Ingmar Bergman. The DVD cover of The Seventh Seal explicitly proclaims that Bergman, along with Andrei Tarkovsky and Michelangelo Antonioni rejected the simplicty of Hollywood movies, and strifed to make art that would stimulate the intellect. Now, I consider myself a pretty open-minded movie watcher, but I was a bit intimidated by the prospect of his movies, so this viewing of The Seventh Seal was the first time I saw a Bergman movie. I thought it was very good, for the expected reasons and for some unexpected ones.

I had many misconceptions about this movie, based on what I read about it. As I read someone tweet once, I basically expected this whole movie to be about Max von Sydow and Death playing chess on the beach, while discussing the mysteries of life. Well, they do that (but for a small part of the movie) and Bergman also does deal very extensively with questions of God. Does He exist? And if He does, why doesn't He show Himself to us? The two main characters of the movie are Jons and Antonius Block (he is played by Max von Sydow). They have just returned to Sweden from the crusades and they are pretty disilussioned. Jons has become a cynical man who has lost his faith in God completely. Antonius is in the process of losing his. When he is visited by Death he challenges it ( he, she?) to a chess match. If Antonius wins he'll be set free, if he loses, he'll die. They play with a lot of hiatuses, during which Antonius contemplates concepts like God and heaven, and whether he can ever know for sure whether these exist or not. To have true knowledge about these things is in fact for him even more important than whether they exist or not. Jons and Antonius have good reasons to doubt God. Everybody in Sweden has, as the country suffers from the plague. Did God send this plague? If He did, why would He be so cruel? And if He didn't, why doesn't He do anything about it? As you see, Bergman is not interested in subtlety here. His themes are very bluntly outlined. I think that's a good thing. Subtlety has become a pretty overrated concept in movies.

So yeah all these writers that praise the movie because it deals seriously and intelligently with such existential questions are absolutely right. And the image of Death and Antonius playing chess on the beach has become rightfully iconic. It is quite unfortunate though that writing on this movie focuses so much on this, thereby making the movie seem more 'highbrow' and inaccesible than it is. A couple of entries ago, I wrote about Chicken with Plums and how it is inspired by traditional folk tales. The Seventh Seal often reminds of one too. It feels like an original, filmed folk tale. This may be especially clear in the lauded final shot, when we see Death being followed by a group of people. They all are dancing. But this is also pretty clear in the story structure. The drama is conrasted by humor and touches of light romance. The heroic intellectuals are contrasted by cowards and fools, and ordinary farmers.

Yes, indeed this is often times a very humorous movie. Woody Allen always claims to have been heavily influenced by Bergman, and you can see it very well here. Especially the influence this movie has on Hannah and Her Sisters is very evident. There is this famous scene in Hannah and Her Sisters in which Woody Allen is depressed by life and tries to kill himself, only the gun doesn't work. In shock he wanders through the streets and ends up in a cinema that plays a movie by the Marx Brothers. The joy expressed in that movie gives him back his joy in life. There is a scene here reminiscent of that when we our characters happen upon a performance by a comedy troupe. Watching them perform, they forget all their troubles and enjoy life. The sequence becomes even more interesting when a performer starts singing a romantic, joyous song and Bergman cuts to backstage where an actor is wooing a girl. For about three minutes we are watching a tender romamtic comedy. That Bergman has no problem shifting tones expertly becomes even more clear when the comedy performance is disrupted when a group of harbingers of the apocalypse arrives at the scenes and starts singing dark songs about the end of times. All of these scenes flow seamlessly into one another, without the tone feeling off once. Bergman is clearly a serious director, but also a technically great one. Someone who even in a film of often such serious contemplation, commits to a very playful style, executing it greatly.

Not only is this often a humorous movie, it's humor and style often feel much more contemporary than they are. Jons has some lines which are so typical of Woody Allen, they nearly pull you out of the movie. The most obvious such line is perhaps 'Our crusade is such madness that only a real idealist could have thought it up.' Jons in general is being given several oneliners to say, which nowadays we would call zingers. Some of them go beyond Woody Allen's humor and would be right at home in the Lethal Weapon movies. The movie's mix of humor and romance with existential questions and serious drama is perhaps best exemplified by the characters of Jof and Mia. They are a husband and wife who are part of the comic troupe I wrote about earlier. They are presented as pretty loving and ordinary people, only Jof often has religious visions (this sets up the final shot with the dancing people following death). He sees for example Maria and baby Jesus. These visions pose interesting religious questions, but they are handled with a lot of humor. And then there is the scene where Antonius joins them for a dinner, which is one of the most simple, but beautiful expressions of the pleasure of company ever filmed.

Still the best scene of the movie may be the scene where Bergman gets self-referential. In a church Jons has a conversation with a mural painter, asking him why he is painting such depressing images. The painter to that responds that depressing images scare us, and thus makes us think and ask important questions. When Jons asks him what happens when they think, the wonderful answer of the painter is that they only become more scared. Jons than asks him what he'll do if the people stop caring about his art, because of all those horrific images. The painter responds to this that he'll start making some funny mural paintings and the people will come back. This seems basically like the method Bergman uses in this movie. This is by the way not just a throwaway scene. There are other scenes here in which Bergman deals with how an artist can be capable of making the art he wants. That is just as much a subject here as the silence of God.

59. God Only Knows &...

Lyrics

I may not always love you
But long as there are stars above you
You never need to doubt it
Ill make you so sure about it

God only knows what I'd be without you

If you should ever leave me
Though life would still go on believe me
The world could show nothing to me
So what good would living do me

God only knows what I'd be without you

God only knows what I'd be without you

If you should ever leave me
Well life would still go on believe me
The world could show nothing to me
So what good would living do me

God only knows what I'd be without you
God only knows what I'd be without you
God only knows
God only knows what I'd be without you
God only knows what I'd be without you
God only knows
God only knows what I'd be without you
God only knows what I'd be without you
God only knows
God only knows what I'd be without you
God only knows what I'd be without you
God only knows
God only knows what I'd be without you
God only knows what I'd be without you
God only knows
God only knows what I'd be without you
God only knows what I'd be without you
God only knows
God only knows what I'd be without you


This is the best song by The Beach Boys, a band I've never been much interested in, even though all their songs are quite good. I don't have much else to say about it, except that it was used to great effect in Boogie Nights.

The Movie: Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997)

Boogie Nights is one of my favourite movies. Sometimes its seems to exist mostly so Paul Thomas Anderson can show off his film making skills. As we know, they are considerable. But the movie has more than only style. Without ever moralizing Anderson paints a very harsh portrait of the world of porn movies. Despite that he makes us care for all his characters, Not only that he manages to make them quite sympathetic, even though they (or at least some of them) are pretty awful people. The movie has often been compared to Pulp Fiction, especially in that regard. Sometimes it even goes further than that movie in making us root for awful characters. John Travolta at least helps a woman who OD's because of him. In Boogie Nights our heroes secretly dump her in front of a hospital. I did not like The Master very much, but that doesn't change the fact that at this moment Anderson may be one of the three best American filmmakers. The other two are Tarantino and the Coen Brothers. I probably don't anticipate any movie more right now, than Inherent Vice, Anderson's next film.

Boogie Nights was only his second movie. It feels as if he knows exactly what he is doing in every shot and every scene. It all starts of course from the great one-take opening scene. The scene is more than simply showing off. It is a very clever way to introduce most of the characters and to make us understand the relationships between them. By shooting it in a single take he also makes expertly clear that all these characters are connected to each other and dependent on each other. All these characters sure enjoy making porn movies and they sure as hell like each other. But Anderson doesn't let us forget that their presence in the porn world, around director Jack Horner is a neccessity for them. It is a world that's enclosed from the real word, in which most of these characters cannot survive. The porn world, whether they like it or not, is their only lifeline. And when near the end of the movie we hear The Beach Boys singing 'God only knows what I'd be without you', that's the perfect summation of what the porn world means to these characters. Anderson by then has shown us their adventures in the real world and it's clear they can't function there at all. They are pretty much hopeless there.

Anderson basically divides his movie in two parts. The first part takes place in the 70's, porn's golden years. Our heroes have work, fun, success and porn's newest star Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg in his best peformance). They have dreams that one day they'll make a porn movie, that wil also be considered a great film. It's quite moving how serious they take their job. The cinematographer is concerned with the look of the film, the screenplay writer really wants to write a story that makes sense and the actors, well they'll do anything to make it look as convincing as possible. But beneath all the joy, there is still some misery here. Some of these characters can't even fully function in this world. Especially tragic are Amber Waves (Julianne Moore), a mother who constantly uses coke to forget her sadness for not being able to see her son. Then there is Little Bill (a classic and typical William H. Macy role) who must cope with the fact that his wife fucking with everybody (even out of work) without caring one bit whether Bill knows or not. Lastly there is Scotty J. (Philip Seymour Hoffmann) a deeply closeted homosexual with a crush on Dirk. And could it be that the same can be said about Reed Rothchild (John C. Reilly), Dirk's best friend.

There are some truly extraordinary scenes in this first part. There is for example the scene in which Dirk 'acts' for the first time. We see how unglamorous porn filmmaking really is. It happens on a cheap stage that's basically a made-up cellar. It is filmed with cheap material and Anderson certainly doesn't want to leave us with the impression that the sex is in any way sexy or romantic. Then there are the Brock Landers movies, a wonderful parody of the fourth-rate (if that) action movies they made in the 70's. If that parody wasn't great enough it ends with a wonderful punchline when Jack Horner proclaims it the masterpiece by which people will remember him. The best scene is the most tragic one though. At new year's day Bill, for the umpteenth time finds his wife in bed with another man. While the joyful music plays in the background Anderson then follows him to his car where he takes a gun from and shoots his wife, her lover and himself. It's a genuinely shocking and sad scene, because of the joy by which it is surrounded. 

The second part of the movie takes place in the 80's. The dream that you could one day make an arty porn movie is now dead. The movies will now be shot on video, instead of on film. As Jack's cinematographer sadly exclaims, it all looks the same now. Jack resists the cheapening of his movies for a long time, but when his financier is caught with child pornography and has to go to jail, he has to give in. And cheapening his movies means working with amateur actors. For many of our heroes there is no room anymore in the porn world. They have to go out in the scary, 'real' world. It doesn't end well. It is in these section that Anderson really shows his great skills. At one point he is cutting between three subplots, while the same song plays on the soundtrack (no idea which) There is Amber fighting for custody over her son. There is Buck (Don Cheadle) trying to get financing for his own hi-fi stereo store. And there are Dirk and Reed who try to do everything to get some money. These are quite moving scenes. We know, for various reasons, that there is no chance these people will get what they want. But they want it so much and with such frenetic desperation that we can't help but feel a little sad for them. In this section we also find the best scene of the movie. It is not the rightfully celebrated scene with a completely deranged Alfred Molina. That too is a great scene, which really has to be seen to be believed. But the best scene is the scene just before, when Buck finds the money he needs for his store. It is a scene which could interest the opening narrator of Anderson's next movie Magnolia. After all, he loved coincidences so very much. In any case after much hopelessness eventually all the characters find their way back to the safe confines of Jack Horner. They'd better as God only knows what would have happened if they didn't.

58. Nine Million Bicycles &...

Lyrics

There are nine million bicycles in Beijing
That's a fact
It's a thing we can't deny
Like the fact that I will love you till I die
We are twelve billion light years from the edge
That's a guess
No-one can ever say it's true
But I know that I will always be with you
I'm warmed by the fire of your love everyday
So don't call me a liar
Just believe everything that I say
There are 6 billion people in the world
More or less
And it makes me feel quite small
But you're the one I love the most of all
We're high on a wire
With the world in our sight
And I'll never tire
Of the love that you give me every night
There are nine million bicycles in Beijing
That's a fact
It's a thing we can't deny
Like the fact that I will love you till I die
And there are nine million bicycles in Beijing
And you know that I will love you till I die

 

As I explained in my first post on this blog, Radio 2 has published a list of its 2000 best songs for every year since 1999. I use the list published in 2008, the ten-year anniversary of Radio 2's contest. In 2008 the Dutch couldn't submit a list of their 10 favorite songs, but all the votes of all the previous years were accumulated to create a sort of ultimate top 2000. As you can see Nine Million Bicycles is placed 58th on the 2008 list. I like the song, but that's a joke. It has no business being placed in such vicinity to all these classics. But it's high placement does show Katie Melua's enormous popularity in The Netherlands. Nine Million Bicylces came out in 2005, which means that it in three years it gained more votes than, for example, any Michael Jackson song did in 10 years. That is quite incredible. In any case I didn't think much about what movie to link to this song. I am really very unfamiliar with the Asian cinema, and because Bejing is mentioned quite prominently I chose to watch a Chinese movie from the early 90's, a period considered revolutionary for Chinese movies.

    

The Movie: Raise the Red Lantern (Da hong deng long gao gao gua) (Yimou Zhang, 1991)

"Good or bad, it's all playacting. If you act well, you can fool other people; if you do it badly, you can ony fool yourself" This quote from the movie sums up pretty well, what this movie is mainly about. One can discuss all day long whether this film is a critique of the authoritarian Chinese state, but in the end this is a movie about power and sex. Or more specifically, it is about the nasty games being played to obtain power and sex. And its view of the world is even bleaker than that sounds. The only reason to have power here, is to obtain sex and vice versa. And if real power cannot be obtained its characters are even satisfied with the illusion of it, even when they are fully aware that they are only deluding themselves. This is indeed a bleak, suffocating movie, but it is very good. Yimou Zhang (this is the first movie of his I've seen) is not only audaciously relentless in creating a bleak, suffocating atmosphere, he also knows exactly how to do it.  If for nothing else, the movie would be watchable because of Zhang's sheer confidence in himself that's at display in every shot.

Gong Li plays Songlian, a 19-year old woman who had drop out of college after her father's death. Out of poverty her step mother sells her as a concubine to a rich Chinese man, in the film only known as 'The Master'. Songlian will become The Master's fourth mistress (or wife), and no The Master did not divorce his previous three. While each wife has her own room, The Master, his four wives, and his many servants all live together in the same enormous house.According to tradition, each night the four wives (together with their personal servants) have to go to the central corridor, where it will be announced with which wife The Master will sleep that night. The corridor and the bedroom of that particular wife will then be lit by red lanterns. Also that wife will get a foot massage. Not surprisingly The Master at first favors Songlian, his newest, and youngest, wife. But sex means more than just sex here. Whomever sleeps with The Master has (some) control and power over the whole household. So the competition between the women is enormous. It aren't just the three other wives that plot against Songlian; her personal servant is jealous, because she expected to become The Master's fourth wife. And Songlian herself, who doesn't need really need any time to adjust to the games being played, is no saint either.   

Throughout the first three quarters of the movie all these games are being played beneath the surface. Although everybody in the whole household knows what is going on, all of them keep a facade of politeness and friendliness. But behind every gesture and every word there is a single unifying motive: the quest to gain or to show power. This is clear from Songlian's first day. She is put in the spotlight and given a special treatment, as, she is told, is the custom. But this custom doesn't serve merely to make Songlian feel at comfort. We see that there is a specific servant for every part of the treatment she gets. It is clear that every servant has a specific role, which he/she is expected to fulfill. So the special treatment serves to show Songlian, that she has a specific role with a specific purpose (most importantly, to give birth to a son) in the household. And that she shouldn't really think of stepping beyond that role or challenging The Master's power, which is at full exhibit during this treatment. Everybody works for him without him even having to say anything. He is so powerful, he doesn't have to explicitly exert his power. This is quite a chilling sequence, and many more are to follow in the same vein. One includes a sequence in which Songlian fakes her own pregnancy, just to get a foot massage. But perhaps the most shocking scene is the one when we find out that Songlian's personal servant has fully decked out her room with red lanterns. That is a meaningless act, since The Master obviously isn't sleeping with her. Besides, she is the only one who knows that the red lanterns are in her room. She has no power at all, but the red lanterns give her the illusion of it and that makes her happy. Even though she is knowingly deluding herself.

In the last quarter of the movie all these tensions that were until then sub textual, suddenly come on the forefront of the movie. Songlian is the catalyst for this shattering of the facades. The games played start being explicit and can hardly be called games anymore. The conversations become more honest and some of the women start becoming friends. That's when the Third Mistress the quote from the beginning to Songlian. And she opens up even more about some of her secrets. It will only lead to her death, for which Songlian is partly responsible. And that's not the only death Songlian is responsible for. 

Of course I watched this movie with English subtitles. But if you were to watch it without subtitles, you'd also get a pretty good sense of what it's about (especially if you happen to be Chinese!). Yimou Zhang achieves quite a lot by his editing and framing of the shots. It is quite interestingly for example that we never really get to see The Master's face. We either see him in long shot, sideways, or with his back towards the camera. At point we see The Master and Songlian in bed in long shot. In the next shot we cut to a close-up. Not only doe we now only see Songlian, it actually seems as if Zhang is making a point of not showing The Master's face. He wants us to notice we don't see his face. And we also don't ever, not even in long shot, do we actually see The Master having sex with any of his wives That could be because he wants us to show the power of The Master. To show that even while he is hardly present in the film, the mere fact of (the knowledge of) his existence is enough to hold power over the whole household. But it also could be that Zhang wants to grant some power to the women, by making this clearly a story about them. Zhang after all does seem to have some sympathy for their awful behavior. There is nothing else they can do really in this suffocating place. He represents this suffocation, by the choice of his shots. Most of his shots are symmetrical and when there is a person within the frame that person in the middle of the frame. He also doesn't really show us many things. We stay at all times in the confined space of The Master's house and even there, there are only about 6/7 places wherein he situates the story. He especially cuts so often to the main corridor, that it almost becomes a joke. I believe that serves to show us that whatever these women do, there is no escaping from this rather dull world. They always end up in the same position as if they are just walking in circles. This is made rather explicit with the final shot of the picture. Lastly it is quite interesting in this regard that there is one shot in which we actually finally see some trees, that are out of the confined spaces of the house. It may be telling that this shot comes at the beginning of the sequence in which the Second Mistress will be killed.

57. The Day Before You Came &...

Lyrics

I must have left my house at eight, because I always do
My train, I'm certain, left the station just when it was due
I must have read the morning paper going into town
And having gotten through the editorial, no doubt I must have frowned
I must have made my desk around a quarter after nine
With letters to be read, and heaps of papers waiting to be signed
I must have gone to lunch at half past twelve or so
The usual place, the usual bunch
And still on top of this I'm pretty sure it must have rained
The day before you came

I must have lit my seventh cigarette at half past two
And at the time I never even noticed I was blue
I must have kept on dragging through the business of the day
Without really knowing anything, I hid a part of me away
At five I must have left, there's no exception to the rule
A matter of routine, I've done it ever since I finished school
The train back home again
Undoubtedly I must have read the evening paper then
Oh yes, I'm sure my life was well within its usual frame
The day before you came

I must have opened my front door at eight o'clock or so
And stopped along the way to buy some Chinese food to go
I'm sure I had my dinner watching something on TV
There's not, I think, a single episode of Dallas that I didn't see
I must have gone to bed around a quarter after ten
I need a lot of sleep, and so I like to be in bed by then
I must have read a while
The latest one by Marilyn French or something in that style
It's funny, but I had no sense of living without aim
The day before you came

And turning out the light I must have yawned and cuddled up for yet another night
And rattling on the roof I must have heard the sound of rain
The day before you came


This is the last song ABBA ever recorded. They sure went out on a high note. I think this is a really good and very interesting song.  And it's by far the best thing they've ever done. The lyrics are slightly cheesy, but in an intelligent way. Their cheesiness seems to be the whole point. The woman is aware that her life before 'he' came was cliche and stereotypically cheesy. That is precisely the reason she is telling us about her day(s) before he came, thereby implying, of course, that after he came, her life became better. I think it is quite wonderful how she stresses the importance of her lover by actually telling us nothing about her life with him, instead focusing on her life without him. I can't think of another (popular) song really with this kind of structure.

In any case, while writing this piece I became more and more in awe with the lyrics and the structure of this song. So I decided to read around a bit, and this song just became even more fascinating. I interpreted this song as it being about her lover, but that's not ever explicitly stated in the song. The 'you' who came may not be her lover. It may not even be a man. But let's say that the 'you' who came is her lover. Then we still have to deal with the fact that we don't actually know whether she is still with him. The video clip, after all, ends in heartbreak. Imagine she's breaking up with her lover. That would add another layer to the song, and some more poignancy too. Than these lyrics would be a remembrance of a sad time, that could now come back. This is not that far-fetched an interpretation. After all, it would mirror real life. As I wrote earlier this is ABBA's final song. They were about to break up. After all this, I find it quite unfortunate to say that I linked such a 'simple' movie to this song. But the character as described in the song, did (and still does) remind of the typical role Sandra Bullock played in her romantic comedies, especially in the 90's. And I am quite happy to report that the movie I chose opens with a similar shot like the video clip.

The Movie: While You Were Sleeping (Jon Turteltaub, 1995)

I suppose this will be one of the only times that I'll have more intelligent things to write about the song, than about the movie. This is a very lightweight movie that does nothing much that's interesting to write about. But there is also nothing to really hate about it. I kind of wished it was directed by the Coens, or some other like-minded directors. They could have turned the movie into a wonderful pitch black comedy or a great satire if they fully acknowledged, and engaged with, the insanity of the characters. After all, we are dealing with a plot here in which Sandra Bullock plays a woman named Lucy who after saving a man who fell on the train rails is mistakenly believed to be his fiancee. The guy, named Peter can't do anything about it, because he is in a coma. So Peter's family takes Lucy in as one of their own. She goes along with it (mostly because there wouldn't be a movie if she didn't). But also because she is single and lives alone in the big city. And because if it now turns out that she is not Peter's fiancee, his grandmother will die of a heart attack. That's at least what Saul,who finds out Lucy's secret, tells her. Saul is not blood related to anyone in the family, nor is he married to someone who is (though he is Peter's godfather). Yet he still does everything together with the family, which obviously doesn't have much trouble taking people in. I keep referring to the family as if it is a character, because it basically is here. We hardly ever see any of Peter's family members alone. All of them are always at the same place! Except Peter's brother Jack, who while his brother is in a coma, falls in love with Lucy and starts hitting on her. Despite the fact that he he thinks she's his brother's fiancee. Meanwhile Lucy is stalked by a an Italian doofus in her flat, who keeps deluding himself that he has a chance with Lucy.

Well, you can see how this could have been a black comedy. But it's not, nor does it want to be. It wants to be a silly, lighthearted Sandra Bullock romantic comedy. And it does a good job of being that. I am not exactly its target audience, but I enjoyed it. It is of course contrived, but not too much. There isn't much drama for its own sake. In fact I liked that it sometimes actively avoided unnecessary dramatics, like when Jack tells his father that he doesn't want to work for their furniture company any more, because he has started his own successful one. His dad is (surprisingly) perfectly fine with it, and they continue their pleasant conversation. Pleasant is basically the tone of every conversation in the movie. I also liked the fact that while the movie is set between Christmas and New Year, there isn't a really big deal made out of it. This is (thank God) not a Christmas movie with all the cliches that come with it. It is just pretty convenient for it to be set around that time, because it means that there is snow. And without snow the best throwaway gag of the film would be impossible. Nor would Jack and Lucy be able to fall in live if they didn't flirtingly help each other to not fall on the ice The family members are played by actors like Jack Warden and Peter Boyle, whose roles mostly consist of saying funny one-liners, giving good advice and seeming like generally nice people. They are good at that.

Everything though revolves around Sandra Bullock and she is (genuinely) very good. She always manages to come of smarter and cuter than she should be based on her dialogue. She somehow makes Lucy a quite charming character and makes us care for her. She is clearly smarter than the material, but she never even gives the slightest of hints that she is above it. She even comes of as joyous. I am not and have never been a really big fan of her (though I also don't mind her at all), but she certainly deserves some respect. She is one of the few actresses who was a star in the 1990's and has remained so. Women like Julia Roberts, Cameron Diaz and Catherine Zeta-Jones are now a bit forgotten and mostly have small roles in films that are neither very good or very popular. The fates of the likes of Meg Ryan, Andie MacDowell and Minnie Driver are even worse. That's not necessarily their fault. Older actresses aren't always treated very well in Hollywood (that is a bit of an understatement). The only other actresses actually who were stars in the 90's and still are, are probably Meryl Streep (who is a star since the 70's and is probably untouchable) and Natalie Portman (who is much younger). That can't be just because of Bullock's acting ability. It takes intelligence too. There are better actresses than Sandra Bullock, but she has starred this year in the very successful blockbuster comedy The Heat, and later this year she'll star next to George Clooney in the artsy science-fiction drama Gravity. Few other actresses can/get the chance to do that.

56. Music &...

Lyrics

Music was my first love
And it will be my last
Music of the future
And music of the past

To live without my music
Would be impossible to do
In this world of troubles
My music pulls me trough

Music was my first love
And it will be my last
Music of the future
And music of the past


Music, John Miles sure does love himself some music. And he expresses it with a song I dislike a lot. Lyrically, all he is doing is making sentimental, meaningless statements about his love for music. That wouldn't be bad at all if he didn't deliver them as if he is making some sort of profound statement about music or himself as a musician. I find the composition itself also pretty uninteresting. His love for music never really shines through in this song. For all his repetitive claims about his love of music, he may as well sing about his love for, say, mathematics. The effect would be nearly the same. In any case, the movie I've linked this song to, about a man who is (nearly, and with good reason) literally in love with music, couldn't be more different. 

The Movie: Chicken with Plums (Poulet aux Prunes) (Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Parronaud, 2011)

According to IMDB one of the next projects Marjane Satrapi will direct will be The Voices. A horror movie which IMDB synopses as follows: 'a disturbed factory worker who hears advice from his pet dog and cat is implicated in the accidental death of his co-worker." Now normally I wouldn't be very interested in a movie with such a (what I would consider) pretty stupid premise. But after only two movies Marjane Satrapi has completely convinced me to see everything she does. Persepolis was already a great film, Chicken with Plums is an even better one. I had seen it once already and loved it. After a second viewing it is even better. It's achievements are incredible. It has a marvelous, logically (and even tightly) constructed screenplay, yet the space it leaves itself for freewheeling and invention is enormous. And it damn well uses that space. 

At its core Chicken with Plums feels like a film version of a traditional folk tale. More specifically, one of those tales that seems to have been orally passed through the generations by grandmothers telling it to their grandchildren. While in each telling of a specific such tale the core remains, the teller usually grants him/herself the freedom to mix up the details and add the right combination of romance, magic, and adventure to connect best with the child the tale is being told to. Of course each of these tales also has some sort of (moral) lesson. Chicken with Plums is such a tale about a violinist who decides to lay in bed and die after his wife has broken his favorite violin. But it's more than just that. It is also a postmodern mash up of many of these tales Satrapi must have heard as a child. It is also a homage to them. If that's not enough the film is also a love letter to pre-1979 Iran, before the Iranian Revolution made it an authoritarian Islamic state. Lastly the movie is also a critique of the representations of Iran and its people in both Iran and the western world. Just like in Persepolis Satrapi wants to show that Iran is more than just a bunch of evil, Islamic man in beards being busy making nuclear bombs and oppressing women. She wants to show that there is beauty there in both the geographic and the personal sense. That it is a civilization with people caring about science, philosophy and culture. That the movie achieves all of these things is a testament to how great Satrapi and Parronaud manage to mix genres and tones. The movie shifts between being a (melo)drama, a romance, a (slapstick) comedy, a satire, a parody and an adventure movie. Often it is two (or more) of these things at the same time and never does the tone feel off in any way. 

The movie begins when Nasser-Ali (the violinist) who on his way to repair his favorite, now broken, violin, recognizes and addresses a woman. She doesn't recognize him though, which makes him very sad. Still, he continues on his way trying to fix his violin. When that proves to be impossible he hears from his brother that in Rasht, a city far away from Teheran, there is a man selling a Stradivarius. He goes on a long trip to buy it and back in Teheran the next morning he starts to play it. Depressed with the sound it makes he decides to not only never play violin, but even to die. He decides to this in a 'dignified' way, by laying in bed and not eating anything. 8 days later he'll be dead. In the rest of the movie we'll learn of Nasser-Ali's life, why his violin and his music meant so much to him, and why he decided to die right now. To tell his story Satrapi and Parronaud cut between the past and the present (and even the future) and between different story lines. All of these story lines come together in the masterful final 5-10 minutes when the full extent of Nasser-Ali's tragedy becomes clear. 

55. Verdronken Vlinder &...

Lyrics

Zo te sterven op het water met je vleugels van papier

(To die like this, in the water, with your paper wings)
Zomaar drijven, na het vliegen in de wolken drijf je hier

(Just floating, after flying in the clouds, you float here)
Met je kleuren die vervagen

(With your fading colors)
Zonder zoeken zonder vragen

(Without seeking, without asking)
Eindelijk voor altijd rusten

(Finally resting forever)
En de bloemen die je kuste

(And the flowers that you kissed)
Geuren die je hebt geweten

(Odors that you have known)
Alles kan je nu vergeten

(You can forget all of it now)
Op het water wieg je heen en weer

(On the water, you lull back and forth)
Zo te sterven op het water met je vleugels van papier

(To die like this, in the water, with yout paper wings)

als een vlinder die toch vliegen kan tot in de blauwe lucht 

(Like a butterfly that kan stil fly into the blue sky)
als een vlinder altijd vrij en voor het leven op de vlucht 

(Always free, like a buterfly, and run away from life)
wil ik sterven op het water 

(I want to die in the water)
maar dat is een zorg van later

(But that's a concern for later)
ik wil nu als vlinder vliegen

(Now, I want to fly like a butterfly)
op de bloemen , blaren vliegen

(Fly myself to blisters on the flowers) 
maar zo hoog kan ik niet komen 

(But I can't come that high)
dus ik vlieg maar in mijn dromen 

(So I just fly in my dreams)
altijd ben ik voor het leven op de vlucht

(I always run away from life)
als een vlinder die toch vliegen kan tot in de blauwe lucht
(Like a butterfly that can fly into the blue sky)

Om te leven dacht ik je zou een vlinder moeten zijn

(To live, I thought, you need to be a butterfly)
Om te vliegen heel ver weg van alle leven alle pijn

(To fly far away from all the life and all the pain)
Maar ik heb niet langer hinder van jaloersheid op een vlinder

(But I am no more bothered by jealousy for a butterfly)
Als zelfs vlinders moeten sterven laat ik niet mijn vreugd bederven

(If even butterflies must die, I will not let my joy be spoiled)
Ik kan zonder vliegen leven

(I can live without flying)
Wat zou ik nog langer geven

(Why should I care any longer)
Om een vlinder die verdronken is in mij

(For a butterfly drowned in me)
Om te leven hoef ik echt geen vlinder meer te zijn

(I don't need to be a butterfly anymore, in order to live)

Had this video been made in 2013, it could have been seen as a perfect parody of Dutch hippie culture. Alas, it's made in 1966 and is a completely earnest object of the hippie culture in the Netherlands of the 1960's. That context is the reason for both the positive and the negative aspects of the song. On the whole, I like it though. The first couplet of the song could be interpreted as it being about Amelia Earhart. That would obviously be a wrong interpretation, but for the purpose of this blog much is allowed.

The Movie: Amelia (Mira Nair, 2009)

When I was young I was fascinated by the explores of the world, those people that you could call the pioneers of travel. I read much and even wrote some school project about them. And I liked them all From the early ones like Marco Polo and Christoffel Columbus, to others like Roald Amundsen and Robert Scott, who traveled even further to the edges of the world. And then in the 20th century, came those who experimented with flying. The Wright Brothers of course, and later on Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart. And once they conquered the skies, it was time to go even further. That's of course what Yuri Gagarin and Neill Armstrong did. Chronologically, that's where my interest in them stopped. There have obviously been many people after Armstrong who achieved astonishing travelling feats, but I didn''t care much about them. I suppose I felt that after 'we' reached the moon, all other feats would be less interesting and heroic. Someone should go to Mars or something. It seems I wasn't the only one to feel this way. A major reason I was fascinated by all this explorers that came before Armstrong is the fact that the world was fascinated by them. They are presented as heroes in the books made about them, their feats are taught in schools and presented as great milestones in the history of the world. And this is exactly the spirit Amelia is made in. There isn't much drama or ambiguity in the movie. The movie posits that Earhart was a greatly heroic woman and that this is a fact about which no debate is much necessary. And I couldn't help but agree with that. The movie was much criticized when it came out. It has some (huge) problems, but I liked it quite a bit. It tries to be a slightly different biopic than most, and succeeds for better or worse.

The movie focuses mostly on Earhearts deeds and is not much interested in dramatic developments on the personal level. I liked this approach. Too many (even good to great) biopics focus a lot on the personal hardships their subject had to overcome in order to achieve their great deeds. Or they simply use the life of their subject to tell a sentimental drama/romance full of cliches, without focusing much on the things their subject did to warrant a biopic about him/her in the first place. This movie doesn't present such a view of Amelia Earhart. The movie shows us that Amelia loved to fly and did so. There wasn't much she had to overcome to do it. We are not presented with parents protesting her wish, nor with grapples with poverty. Amelia is also talented at flying, so there also aren't any scenes in which he has to overcome her failures in learning to fly. Except for some early scenes the movie doesn't even dwell much on the fact that she is a woman in a man's world. Her relationship with her husband/manager George Putnam also focuses mostly on the work they do together. He is a man of marketing and makes Amelia go to a lot of publicity events. Amelia is not always very happy about that, but that's no reason for great dramatic events in which she, for example, would leave him and than he would promise her to listen more to her wishes and than she would would come back to him. No, these are perfectly reasonable people who lare like most normal couples, except she is America's greatest pilot and he is one America's best marketing men. A nice bonus of the movie is that it shows good understanding of how the media is used to make somebody a national icon and how the icon is then used by the media and vice versa.

 It is also a pleasure to see Hilary Swank and Richard Gere as Amelia and George. They both enjoy their role and it was nice to see that Richard Gere could have done this role in his sleep but didn't. Since Boys Don't Cry Swank is often cast in roles in which she has to play some tortured soul or a as women who want to reject their feminine side. It was nice to see that here she wasn't forced to do any such things. Amelia obviously does enjoy doing (what was then seen as) manly stuff and she is a not very beautiful women with short hair. But she is presented as a woman who enjoys her life and enjoys sex with men.

Still the movie has two problems. The one small, the other pretty big. Despite the fact that the movie prefers presenting us with Amelia's working life over her personal life, it still does want to show something of her personal life. It wants to do this in a fast, efficient way. And in order to this, it ramps up the cliches and sentimentalism even more than the ordinary biopic I talked about earlier. It's good that this scenes take up such a short amount of time, because their are utterly generic and unexceptional. The second problem is bigger though. As I said the movie wants to focus much on Amelia's working life. Much of it obviously involves flying airplanes. So the movie shows us lots of scenes of Amelia flying an airplane or simply an airplane flying in the sky. This scenes are incredibly dull. We hear Amelia on the soundtrack talking about the joy and awe of flying, but Nair completely fails to convey this joy and awe. Every time we see an airplane on screen it is accompanied by the same dull and monotone piece of music. In the last scenes prior to her crash in the Pacific Ocean at least the movie does manage to bring some tension to the flight. At least for me. For some reason I was convinced that Amelia had died somewhere in the Bermuda triangle. So I expected that she would happily finish her solo flight around the world and didn't expect her to die.

54. I Put A Spell on You &...

Lyrics

I put a spell on you, because you're mine 
You better stop the things that you're doin' 
I said, "Watch out, I ain't lyin'", yeah 
I ain't gonna take none of your, foolin' around 
I ain't gonna take none of your, puttin' me down 
I put a spell on you because you're mine, all right 

I put a spell on you, because you're mine 
You better stop, the things that you're doin' 
I said, "Watch out, I ain't lyin'", yeah 
I ain't gonna take none of your, foolin' around 
I ain't gonna take none of your, puttin' me down 
I put a spell on you because you're mine, all right and I took it down


Creedence Clearwater Revival (wonderful name) is a band I should, theoretically, love. Yet none of their songs really connect with me. I can't say that there is anything wrong with this one either (and it's not even originally their own) but I don't really care about it. It did gave me a chance to watch a great movie about a man who is put under a (sort of) spell and be controlled through it to do some really awful things,

The Movie: The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962)

Sometimes you need to think about a movie to realize that it is great, or maybe watch it again. This is not such a movie. Right after watching it you realize that this is absolutely a masterpiece. I had before this seen the second half of the 2004 remake. I remember finding it quite enjoyable, but not much else. So, while I expected this to be a good movie (and a better one than the remake) I didn't expect it to be this good. It tells a rather complicated, entangled story in a very patient way. Frankenheimer has the confidence to show scenes and shots that don't make much sense right away, but will a bit later on. It diverges a lot from its plot, only to show us later that every diversion was a sensible one and fitted in the larger picture. And most of the individual scenes are so well conceived, written and acted that even if they wouldn't have all fit together, they would still be fascinating and wonderful. It may be the best cold war satire/drama I've yet seen.

Its basic conceit is quite fascinating and surprisingly simple. During the Korean War nine American soldiers have been kidnapped by communists who have hypnotized them to believe they emerged victorious out of a seemingly unwinnable battle. All of this, because of the great leadership of sergeant Raymond Shaw. It is Shaw himself who is actually the main target of the communists hypnosis. He is hypnotizeed in such a way that any time he sees or hears about the diamond queen in a deck of cards he can be controlled to do anything such as kill two of his fellow soldiers. The biggest strength of the movie may be the fact that it is totally uninterested in keeping this a secret. In fact, we see exactly what the communists plans with Shaw are, and how they intend to use him in what is basically the first scene of the film. The rest of the movie is about the political and personal consequences of this evil communist plot. This scene in which the communists' hypnosis is revealed is right away the best scene in the film. It also shows immediately how confident the film is in its storytelling abilities. When the scene opens we see an old lady talking about flowers in front of a bunch of other old ladies and the soldiers who we previously saw fighting in Korea. It appears we are at some sort of florist convention. And we are a bit surprised as to what these soldiers are doing here and how this can be of any possible importance to the plot. But eventually the film shows us that what we are seeing is the point of view of the hypnotized soldiers. All these old ladies are in actuality most of the evil communist leaders of the world. And the main old lady talking is a Chinese scientist who is showing off how greatly he can hypnotize Shaw and how this can be used. He shows that he can control Shaw and the soldiers so well that he can order Shaw to kill two of his soldiers and no one will be bothered by it. And when this wonderfully odd and absurd scene ends it is used seamlessly to kick off the plot, when it is revealed what we were seeing was a recurring nightmare of lieutenant Ben Marco, one of the soldiers present at the 'florist convention.' Soon realizing that this is not an ordinarily nightmare, he goes on to investigate.

Though it sounds like it from this plot description the movie is not some sort of satire on communism or an anti-communist parable. The movie surely doesn't present a very rosy view of communism, but it doesn't present a rosy view of American politics either. The movie is basically a satire power-hungry politicians. It presents the idea that the all the fights about ideology in the Cold War, were simply fights about who has the power and the money. Ideology was just a nice cover for the participants. A Russian communist spy working on cover operations in America boasts to a fellow communist that his operation is one of the few to actually bring in a profit. It is quite interesting that he doesn't mention anything about whether his operation is successfully spreading communism to America or anything. The American politicians may be portrayed even worse though. The main villains in this movie are Shaw's mother Eleanor and her husband John Iselin, who is not Raymond's real father. The portrayal of John is basically a scathing satire of Joseph McCarthy, only Iselin may be even worse. He accuses the Secretary of Defense that there are communists working in his department. But his accusations are totally random, constantly making up a different amount of communists, only to finally settle for the accusation that there are 'exactly 57 communists working in the Defense department.' But John Iselin is just his wife's puppet. She is really the one who works out his strategies and tells him exactly what to do. And (I guess this is a spoiler) she is also the American 'controller' of her son. She can hypnotize him to do exactly what she wants. And she does, using him to kill many of her political enemies. She certainly cooperates with the Russian and Chinese, but it is left relatively ambiguous whether she is communist, using anti-communist sentiments as a cover (She basically accuses every politician to disagree with her of being an anti-American communist). Or whether she is simply a power hungry politician willing to cooperate with anyone to come to power. In one of her final scenes she exclaims that ones she has the power she will bring the communists down, because when she asked them for a hypnotizable killer, she didn't expect they'd actually choose her son.

John Frankenheimer really shows he can direct anything in this movie. He can film any scene in any style that's necessary for that particular style There are naturally scenes here which play very surrealistically, and then they are (impeccably) followed by scenes which are a realistic depiction of the political games and the press' reporting these games. There is a very short scene in which we follow a car driving through the city and it seems to come straight out of a European new wave movie. Character examinations are easily followed by political satire. Thriller elements by comedy. Frankenheimer directs a martial arts/kung fu scene, which is even more impressive considering the fact that kung fu movies weren't very known or popular yet in 1962 America. There is a great scene between Shaw and Marco that starts with comic, nearly Seinfeldian, dialogue about why it is a good thing Shaw didn't get a Christmas card. This dialogue flawlessly flows into a flashback in which Shaw tells, how he lost the love of his life due to his mother. The whole flashback plays like a short romantic drama. And it adds poignancy to scenes later in the movie.

Lastly the actors shouldn't be forgotten. I don't Frank Sinatra as a singer at all. And he probably wasn't a very good person in real life either. But in his acting and his looks he reminds here very much of a young Jack Nicholson. He gives an amazingly great performance as Bennett Marco. So does Laurence Harvey as Raymond Shaw. Raymond is really a uniquely conceived character. He is basically a good man. He is just not very lovable as he puts it himself. He annoys people because he seems to take everything way too seriously, hardly ever joking. The evolution of the relationship between Marco and Shaw is one of the many great things about the film. Marco dislikes Shaw at the beginning of the movie. Not for a specific reason, but because the movie understands that sometimes you dislike someone, because of certain characteristics, without necessarily thinking that it is a bad person. As the movie progresses Marco does start to like him more, but they never become great friends, which would happen in most other movies. Their relationship is a completely normal one, basically one like you'll have with the most people you'll meet in life.   
But it is Angela Lansbury who gives the best performance in the movie. She creates one of the most memorable villains I've seen in movies, playing her Elaonor with a very cold demeanor. She is constantly trembling, always seeming to explode with anger. And when she sometimes does, it is vigorous. Her performance is even more impressive, considering the fact that I've only known her as the kindly grandmother detective from Murder, She Wrote. It is a role as far removed from her role here as can possibly be. In the remake Eleanor is played by Meryl Streep, and she isn't nearly on the same level as Lansbury. Which is not something you can often say about Streep.