Tag Archives: Francois Truffaut

December 9, 2023 · 5:04 am

A superhero, a supervillain, a noir romance: movies viewed

BLUE BEETLE (2023) stars Xolo Maridueña as Jaime Reyes, living in a poor part of the Florida keys that’s now facing gentrification at the hands of Victoria Kord (Susan Sarandon), disgruntled sister of the late Ted. After Ted steered Kord Enterprises away from munitions and military contracting, Victoria’s now out to reverse course, using the Blue Beetle scarab as the template for her cyborg One Man Army corps. Only guess who winds up in possession of the scarab?

This was a lot of fun, particularly Jaime’s formidable grandmother (“Some day I will explain to you about her revolutionary past.”) and I respect their effort to work in not only Ted but Dan Garrett without making it unintelligible to newbies. It would double bill well with the Zachary Levi Shazam as they both involve the heroes’ families getting in on the action. “The universe knows it’s you. I know it’s you. You know it as well.”

THE INVISIBLE MAN (2020) hooked me from the opening sequence in which Elizabeth Moss sneaks away from her husband, obviously in terror he’ll wake up and catch her. Once away she builds a new life with her sister and sister’s family but so many weird things start happening: work vanishes from her portfolio, someone drugs her bottled water, there are emails sent from her computer she didn’t write. Slowly Moss starts to realize her abusive, gaslighting scientist husband has found a terrifying use for his expertise in optics …

This shows how much power there is in old tropes when they’re done well. Here, Moss’s husband is a monster even when he’s just human; invisibility simply ramps up his capacity to stalk and hurt her. Lives up to all its good reviews, though if any of this is likely to trigger you, perhaps it’s better to stay away. “The only thing more brilliant than inventing something that turns you invisible is not inventing something but making you believe he did.”

Francois Truffaut’s MISSISSIPPI MERMAID (1969) is an oddball film in which colonial planter Jean-Paul Belmondo is initially thrilled to discover his mail-order bride is Catherine Deneuve. Why, he’s so happy he eventually puts her name down on all his bank accounts and financial paperwork … oops. Eventually Belmondo hunts her down in France but it turns out the chemistry between them may be stronger than the things that set them at each other’s throats. The results are oddly romantic, as if Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck had gone off together at the end of Double Indemnity. Enjoyable even so. “I made you believe that I had fallen in the bathroom.”

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From the Renaissance to the Federation: movies across time

As TYG is an art history minor, our date night movie was an Art Center (Durham has several) showing of CARAVAGGIO (1986), Derek Janham’s unconventional biopic of the violent Renaissance artist. This was well executed but more arty than entertaining, though TYG, recognizing several scenes modeled on the artist’s paintings, got much more out of it. Plus she found a frequently semi-naked Sean Bean as the artists lover more of a plus than me (go figure). The cast also includes Robbie Coltrane and Michael Gough as church officials and some woman named Tilda Swinton as Bean’s lover. Below, the artist’s Inspiration of St. Matthew. “I did it for you.”

Moving to the 1960s, STOLEN KISSES (1968) has Truffaut’s self-insert Antoine Donel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), last seen in Antoine and Collette, struggling to adult and frequently failing. After getting discharged from the military he loses his job as a hotel desk clerk when he lets a private detective into the wrong room. He then goes to work for the detective agency but proves equally inept, finally falling hard for a married woman (Delphine Seyrig) involved in his investigation. I expected everything to come crashing down but Antoine ends up in reasonably good shape; the movie is much better than reasonably good. “You wrote to me yesterday and the answer is … me.”

Moving to the 21st century we have BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD (2012). Annoyingly this is billed as fantasy but only in the I Kill Giants sense that the young protagonist — a black girl living with her dad in a low-lying area near New Orleans — frequently uses fantasies of giant beasts to deal with her problems, variously including death, tropical storms and floods. Well done, regardless, so I’m not that annoyed. “They’s got to live in the woods and eat grass and steal underpants.”

Going boldly where no-one has gone before — STAR TREK: Of Gods and Men (2008) was a fan film that boasts Nichelle Nichols as Uhura, Walter Koenig as Chekhov, Tim Russ as Tuvok, Alan Ruck as Captain Harriman, Grace Lee Jones as Rand and Cirroc Lofton, Arlene Martel (T’Pring) and Garrett Wang in supporting roles. The plot has Charlie X, finally free of his alien keepers, using the Guardian of Forever to erase Kirk from reality.

Next thing you know, the universe looks a lot like the evil Mirror, Mirror universe with Uhura and Chekhov in different ways fighting back. Charlie shows up, now repenting what he’s done, but is it too late to undo it? This was a real treat, though it reportedly disturbed Paramount enough that they started cracking down on fan films from that point on. Worth seeing on YouTube. “Who decides the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few — and who gave them the right to decide that in the first place?”

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November 4, 2023 · 5:13 am

The bride wore black. Robin Williams played football

I’ve seen THE BRIDE WORE BLACK (1967) described as Truffaut’s tribute to Hitchcock though I’ve never felt there’s anything really Hitchcockian about it, despite using Hitchcock’s favorite musical collaborator, Bernard Herrman.

Based on a Cornell Woolrich novel, this has a woman (Jeanne Moreau) hunting down five men, insinuating herself into their lives as a teacher, maid, flirt or artist’s model, and bringing death to each of them in revenge for the death of her husband (I won’t spoil it beyond that). It’s a good film, with a nice little sketch of each man (petty thug, shy dude, pompous politician and so on), but as my friend Ross has said, it’s hard to believe the police couldn’t figure out the connection before the end. And the novel has an ending twist that’s more effective — I wouldn’t mind seeing a faithful adaptation some day. Still, this is an entertaining film, even if Truffaut thought it a misfire (he wished he’d made it in black and white). “Listen to the sounds of her stockings rubbing against each other.”

SCARFACE (1932) is the first really great movie since I started working through Howard Hawks’ films. Paul Muni plays Tony Camonte, a thinly veiled Capone rising to the top of the rackets despite competition from coin-flipping George Raft and Boris Karloff in one of his last Supporting Gangster roles before stardom struck him; Ann Dvorak is Muni’s sister, whom he’s a little too protective of. A raw, striking gangster film that hit enough of a nerve with the New York state censors Hawks had to offer a new ending (Tony goes to trial, convicted, and hangs by the neck until he is dead); when that didn’t work either, he released it in every other state with the original ending and it was a hit.

The Films of Howard Hawks argues that Tony Camonte is very much a prototype for later, selfish antiheroes such as the protagonists of Twentieth Century and His Girl Friday. Like them, Tony is a selfish prick who goes after what he wants with little regard for fair play or the rules, but there’s even less of a velvet glove over his iron first. A very good gangster film. “Colorful? What color is a crawling louse.”

Frank Sinatra’s Ocean’s Eleven was a tedious Rat Pack film in which Sinatra reunites his commando team from WW II to pull off a casino robbery. Steven Soderbergh’s OCEAN’S ELEVEN (2001) is much better. Con man George Clooney gets out of prison to discover wife Julia Roberts has now attached herself to casino magnate Andy Garcia; he sets out to settle the score by stealing millions from Garcia’s supposedly impregnable money vault (5 Against the House would be a good double-bill) with the help of Brad Pitt, Bernie Mac, Don Cheadle, Carl Reiner and Elliott Gould. It’s an entertaining caper film but way too much a sausage fest: Julia Roberts is the only woman with more than a walk-on and she’s nothing but the McGuffin Clooney and Garcia are fighting over. “There’s a 95-pound man with $160 million behind that door.”While in Florida I rewatched THE BEST OF TIMES (1985) with my BFF Cindy and she thoroughly enjoyed it. Robin Williams’ entire life has been defined by dropping the ball in the Big Game; now he launches a crazy scheme to lay his ghost to rest by re-enacting the game, much to the discomfort of his lifelong buddy and former star quarterback Kurt Russell, who’s worried this could destroy his own legend (“I was good for around here but everyone remembers I was great.”). Donald Moffatt plays Williams’ malevolent father-in-law; a fun film about obsession, old injuries, high school and making peace with your past..“Victories for the underdog are an aberration in the natural order of the universe.”

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May 13, 2023 · 5:15 am

Traffic, Trafic, Truffaut and Chicago: movies and a play

Some years back I caught a British TV serial, Traffic, about the UK government’s futile efforts to beat the drug trade. It bored me silly but Stephen Soderbergh’s film version, TRAFFIC, was anything but dull.Michael Douglas plays the judge recently promoted to federal drug czar, confident he can succeed where his predecessors failed. But as he soon discovers, the demand is huge, the cartels’ resources and ruthlessness huge and his efforts amount to bailing out the Atlantic with a tea cup. None of this is a novel insight, of course, but the film turns it into riveting drama and earned Soderbergh a Best Director Oscar. It doesn’t hurt that we have a fantastic cast: Benicio del Toro and Don Cheadle as cops, Erika Christensen and Topher Grace as drug-using teens, Steven Bauer and Catherine Zeta-Jones as drug kingpins and Amy Irving as Douglas’ wife. “If you’re going to start on the fucking war metaphors, I’m going to wrap this car around a telephone pole.”

TRAFIC (1972) was French comic Jacques Tati’s next-to-last feature, in which his eternally hapless Mr. Hulot is just one part of the ensemble struggling to get a new-model camper to a Belgium auto shop in the face of French holiday traffic. I’ve only seen a little of Tati’s work but this seemed much less slapstick than his earlier work, though it still kept me watching. “You left the motor running and I have to do the cranking.”

ANTOINE AND COLLETE (1962) was the first of Francois Truffaut’s sequels to The 400 Blows, wherein Antoine, now 17 and living on his own, falls for a college student who persists in seeing him as Just A Friend (while this bums him out, Truffaut treats this as just hard luck, not some cosmic injustice). While I saw this on its own, it’s actually part of the French anthology film Love at Twenty. “You think there’s a difference between a reason and an excuse — I don’t.”

My birthday presents was tickets to a touring production of CHICAGO which finally hit town at the end of April. As y’all may know, the show centers on a conniving adulteress (“First I fooled around, then I screwed around, which is like fooling around without them buying me dinner.”) on trial for murdering her lover before he could dump her. She hopes the celebrity will jump-start her failed showbiz career but that’s only going to happen if her attorney can successfully rebrand her as a wronged innocent.Strippers, Showgirls and Sharks says this flopped when it opened in 1975 but its 1990s revival found audiences connected better with its cynical take on corruption and show business. This was a dynamic show, full of energy and great dances (clearly channeling some of the style Bob Fosse gave the original production); if you’ve seen the movie version, Catherine Zeta-Jones has a much bigger role than the same character here (I’m guessing it’s because CZJ had more stage-musical experience than costars Renee Zellwegger or Richard Gere). The photo above is the spare but effective set after the show ended. “So I fired two warning shots … right into his head.”

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April 8, 2023 · 5:10 am

A beast, book-burning and Billy Joe: movies caught

Thanks to some birthday gift certificates I picked up Criterion’s BluRay of Jean Cocteau’s 1946 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, a retelling of the fairytale in which a merchant learns the drawbacks to plucking roses without consent, the Beast’s hands smoke from killing a deer and moving arms serve as the wall sconces in the Beast’s castle (this is way eerier than you might think).This is a visually striking, magically uncanny version, with Beauty’s home based on paintings by Vermeer and the Beast’s castle on Gustav Doré. Cocteau doesn’t hesitate to shift from noon to twilight according to the needs of the visuals, and while that would make me mock a lesser film (trust me on this, I have) here it works. It helps that the Beast is both striking to look at and also well performed by Cocteau’s younger lover, Jean Marais. According to the commentary track, when Marais was sick Cocteau tried using an understudy but despite the all-encompassing mask, it didn’t work.If you’re really into the movie the Criterion special features are, as always, first rate. If not, you still get a first rate version, cleaned up from the worn-out analog film reels.“There are men far more monstrous than you, though they conceal it well.”

Francois Truffaut’s 1966 version of Ray Bradbury’s FAHRENHEIT 451 feels timelier than ever given conservatives efforts to ban everything they can possibly take issue with, even to the point of defunding public libraries. Oskar Werner plays Montag, a “fireman” in a dystopian future whose job isn’t to fight fires but burn books (the title comes from the temperature at which paper supposedly burns), then go home to his TV-junkie wife (Julie Christie). Then Montag encounters a pretty woman (Christie again) who provokes him into saving a book during his next job, then reading it. Wouldn’t you know, he begins reconsidering his career choice. Visually there’s something decidedly “off” about a lot of the future settings which works, though I can’t pin down what it is; there’s also the nice touch of no on-screen credits at the opening — instead they’re spoken aloud. “Books are bad for people — they make them anti-social.”

ODE TO BILLY JOE (1976) takes Bobbie Gentry’s song about a Mississippi Delta suicide and shows what lay behind it. Set in the 1950s, it stars a young Robbie Benson is Billie Joe, determined to win young Glynnis O’Connor who’s ready to be courted … sort of … but anyway her father would never put up with the likes of Billie Joe so there’s nothing more to be said, right!

Produced and directed by Max Baer (Jethro on The Beverly Hillbillies), this does a great job capturing the time and place, though very much through a white lens — if there were any black characters passing across the screen, I’ve forgotten them. Unfortunately the explanations it offers are much less interesting than the speculations that swirl through my mind every time I hear the song. “No man can be ordained as a Baptist minister unless he’s ready to think the worst of his congregants.”

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March 11, 2023 · 5:10 am

Destroyed by their lust for women: three movies

A GIRL IN EVERY PORT (1928) is another silent Howard Hawks films, wherein swabbies Victor McLaglen and Richard Armstrong go from brawling adversaries to best buddies only to risk falling apart when McLaglen falls for Louise Brooks, whom Armstrong knows from experience is No Damn Good. The male bonding makes this feel more Hawksian than the other silents I’ve caught recently, but it’s still not very good. The homoerotic overtones had TYG snickering when she caught part of it while I watched. “It’s ten after nine.”

THE SOFT SKIN (1964) is the first film in my Truffaut-a-thon that I haven’t seen before, though it turns out I wasn’t missing much. While well-made, this is a surprisingly conventional married-boy-gets-girl, married-boy-loses-girl, wife-gets-a-gun,drama that could easily have been made by a half-dozen other creators (something I wouldn’t say about Jules and Jim). I do, however, like Roger Ebert’s observation that most of the protagonist’s problems come not from adultery but from being a half-hearted, inept adulterer. “I’d rather save that for my talk so as not to reveal myself.”

THE VAMPIRE LOVERS (1970) isn’t as arty an adaptation of Carmilla as Vampyr but it’s much more faithful. Then newcomer Ingrid Pitt plays a beautiful, stranded noblewoman taken in by Peter Cushing’s family, after which Cushing’s daughter suffers a strange, wasting disease — and then it appears the same fate will befall Pippa Steele (above right, with Pitt). While sex and blood were always part of Hammer’s appeal, like Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, this film shows them getting much more explicit, with nude breasts, vampire bites on breasts and lesbian scenes that must have been eye-popping at the time; that said, it’s tame compared to the lurid AIP poster below (AIP released this and Sister Hyde in the US). The box office was good enough to generate two sequels, Lust for a Vampire and Twins of Evil; Kate O’Mara (later the Rani on Doctor Who) plays a discarded lover. “The trouble with this part of the world is they have too many fairy tales.”#SFWApro. All rights to images remain with current holders.

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January 21, 2023 · 5:15 am

Dioscuri movies and more!

My friend Ross has often used the term “dioscuri” — the Greek name for the heavenly twins, Castor and Polyneices — to refer to twinned fiction characters such as Kirk and Spock, Holmes and Watson, Starsky and Hutch, and Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. They fit together. They’re each other’s missing puzzle piece. And that applies to some of my recent viewing.

Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s Road films had them cast as vagabond Dioscuri entertainers, always united until it came to figuring out who gets the girl. ROAD TO RIO (1947) was in a two-movie set with Road to Bali but it’s much better. After enraging a few too many fathers by hitting on their daughters, the guys head south of the border where they end up helping Dorothy Lamour, whose aunt Gale Sondegaard is hypnotizing her into a marriage for mysterious reasons. A lot of fun, though having a happy ending arranged via hypnosis doesn’t age well at all; parodies both McGuffins (“The world must never know.”) and last minute cavalry charges (“It didn’t amount to much but it was exciting.”). “Blood is thicker than water — and this is not the time to prove it.”

JULES AND JIM (1961) is Francois Truffaut’s story of two Dioscuri, one German (Oskar Werner) and one French (Henri Serre), who meet and bond deeply in the years before WW I and remain friends despite fighting on opposite sides (their biggest fear being injuring or killing each other). But when Jules falls in love with the mercurial, restless Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), who also fascinates Jim, it sends their friendship and their lives in an unexpected direction. I clearly remember being underwhelmed with this when I first saw it but for the life of me I can’t figure out why, as it’s excellent. Along with being well-made, the casual attitude to sex and love must have stood out from Hollywood’s films back when it debuted. “I’m slowly renouncing my claim to her — and all that I love in the world.”

In ERIN BROCKOVICH (2000) attorney Albert Finney doesn’t think of working-class mom Julia Roberts as much beyond an annoyance. Then she takes an interest in some old case files involving a small town, a whole lot of health problems and a utility covering up its polluting track record and they become the team they were destined to be. Steven Soderbegh directs an excellent based-on-truth film with supporting performances by Marg Helgenberger as a victim, Conchata Ferrell as a secretary, Aaron Eckhart as Brockovich’s biker boyfriend and Peter Coyote as a lawyer. “Before you go off on some sort of crusade, you might want to consider who you’re dealing with.”

And now the more — I picked GLASS ONION (2022) as my and TYG’s December date night film and it was an excellent choice, even though TYG, contrary to my memory, swears she hasn’t seen Knives Out. Daniel Crag once again plays Benoit Blanc (TYG gives his accent thumbs up) who somehow winds up invited to tech billionaire Edward Norton’s isolated Greek island along with politician Kathryn Hahn, airhead model Kate Hudson (“How was I to know ‘Jew-y’ was offensive to Jews?”), YouTuber Dave Bautista and others — and wouldn’t you know, death is in the air? A traditional set-up — an isolated mansion, a murderer among us — but enlivened by director/writer Rian Johnson’s skewering of the rich (pretty much the perfect moment for it too). While I think Knives Out worked slightly better as a mystery, this may be a better film overall. “I think it’s dangerous to think speaking without thinking is the same as speaking the truth.”

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October 29, 2022 · 5:15 am

A feminist and a pianist: This week’s movies

During that thrift-store visit I blogged about yesterday I picked up a DVD of DOWN WITH LOVE (2003), the delightful take0ff on the Rock Hudson/Doris Day sex comedies (not that there was a lot of sex happening but it was clearly on their minds) of 60 years back. Renée Zellweger plays Barbara Novak, author of Down with Love, a book about how women should approach love and sex like men: don’t get attached, have your fun but never let it interfere with your career. After globetrotting womanizing reporter Catcher Block (Ewan McGregor) — “man’s man, ladies’ man, man about town” — stands her up for an interview in favor of getting laid (stewardess Jeri Ryan being among the distractions), she singles him out as precisely the kind of man women should stay away from. As her book climbs the bestseller lists, Block sets out to prove Novak is no different from any other woman — he’ll make her fall in love with him (after assuming a disguise, of course) and catch her confessing her deepest desire is to be a housewife!

I was curious what TYG would make of this as she hasn’t seen any of those old comedies (including Lover Come Back and Pillow Talk) but she enjoyed it as much as I did. Part of the fun is the glamorous ultra-fashionable 1960s set design and fashions; we also have Sarah Paulson as Novak’s frustrated editor and David Hyde Pierce as Block’s editor and buddy, the kind of long-suffering sidekick role Tony Randall played in the Hudson/Day comedies (Randall himself appears as a publisher). Probably not to everyone’s taste, but definitely to ours. “I had the idea that I was in some zany sex romp and you’d switched keys with the lead so that you could use his apartment to entrap me.”

SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER (1960) was Francois Truffaut’s second feature and unlike The 400 Blows it lived up to my memories. The protagonist is a piano man (Charles Aznavour) tickling the ivories on a second rate piano in a small Paris bistro; when his brother shows up, on the run from some hoods, the pianist helps him get away and thereby draws the thugs attention to himself. As his story (including striking up a relationship with a cute waitress [Marie Dubois]) progresses, we also flashback to when he was a star concert pianist only for tragedy to erupt. Ever since then he’s been hollowed out — will he come back to life now? Will the thugs give him a chance?

As a film writer with Cahiers du Cinema, Truffaut and his colleagues expressed an admiration for American filmmaking that was quite radical for the time (Hollywood films were generally considered Not Art). The Hollywood influence is much stronger here than in 400 Blows: this is a noirish crime drama where no matter what the protagonist does, it’s probably going to end badly. However it’s also distinctly Truffaut, though I’m not sure I could define what I mean by that. “All I ask of a man is to tell me when it’s over — no-one has.”

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Classic, crappy, creepy: assorted movies

After reading Hitchcock/Truffaut, I figured I’d rewatch Francois Truffaut’s films as I did Hitchcock’s. First up is Truffaut’s first feature, THE 400 BLOWS (1959, in which a restless boy starts out coping — barely — with domineering teachers and somewhat neglectful parents — and winds up sliding into the school-to-reform school pipeline through increasing misbehavior.

I remember liking the film a lot when I first saw it on TV but it didn’t impress me as much this time. The adult figures in his life don’t have much to commend them but I don’t find myself feeling much sympathy for the boy either. So maybe it’s just age that makes the difference.

It’s still a well-made, supposedly somewhat autobiographical film, and very different from how an America movie of that era would have done it — the American (I assume) poster makes The 400 Blows sound like a Hollwyood juvenile delinquency story and I don’t think it is. “I deface the classroom walls and defile the French language.”

THE LOST GIRLS (2022) stars writer/director Livia de Paolis as Wendy Darling’s (of Peter Pan) granddaughter, haunted by vague memories/hallucinations of her own trip to Neverland, her mother’s mysteri0us disappearance (did Peter take her and keep her) and her daughter’s angry dismissal of her mother’s presumed delusions about some flying boy. This is a muddled mess in every way possible, from de Paolis’ distracting Italian accent to the bland look of Neverland and the murky narrative; de Paolis apparently wanted to give us a mix of Neverland fantasy and female trauma and flops both ways. Vanessa Redgrave as Wendy leaves the rest of the cast in the dust.“You disappoint me — I expected better of a Darling.”

That article on Catholic horror I read recently recommended THE DEVIL’S DOORWAY (2018) as an example of Catholic horror that deals with the Church perpetuating evil rather than just standing against it. It’s 1960s and two priests — one idealistic and young, the other old enough to be skeptical about miracles — arrive at a Magdalene Laundry to determine whether one of the statues there is genuinely weeping blood.In the 75 minutes that follow, the two priests grapple not only with supernatural manifestations but with the brutality of the institution, and the way the nuns treated unwed mothers and illegitimate children (“Would you like to know how many of the fathers were … fathers?”). Shackling and restraining a teenage mother possessed by Satan isn’t that different from what the church did to non-possessed unwed mothers. It’s the Catholic equivalent of ethnogothic horror. It’s also very good. I normally dislike found footage films — it often feels like an easy way to keep the audience in the dark — this one works, though it does feel a little too Blair Witch Project at the finish. “You sweep it all under the rug, then leave us to hide the dirty laundry.”