(500) Days of Summer (2009)

In (500) Days of Summer (dir. Marc Webb) a messed-up chronology is a device to chronicle a failed romance. Unlike most similar movies, it does not start from the moments at which the parties laid eyes on each other, to go on to various expressions of romantic interest, etc. This film goes about it differently, perhaps wanting to give a more authentic picture of how we remenber things, that when we think back on something, we do not line things up in a neat series of events. Usually, memories appear chaotically, sometimes involuntarily. One thing is associated with another, it's all a jumble of emotion and thought. This is perhaps the most interesting feature of this otherwise conventional tale about the guy who falls for the girl who shies from attachment. - - - My own impression of the way this film takes on its subject is that there are an ugly undercurrent there somewhere. So the guy wants the girl but the girl wants to be independent. The story is told from the guy's perspective, which is also the film's point of view, it seems. I would say that the pespective expressed, but never really acknowledged, is that of self-sentimentality, of pity for oneself. The main character seems more in love with being in love, than nurturing a real interest for the lover. She seems to be reduced to an image, and when she breaks with that image, he is shattered. (500) Days of Summer in no way departs from the old&tired tradition of making movies about guys whose yearning is directed at "mysterious girl", and where this "mysteriousness" is both the core of attraction and the big problem. We end up with the following piece of eternal wisdom: women, you truly madden us men.

Starship troopers (1997)

Paul Verhoeven is in ... his own league as usual. In good and bad ways. Starship troopers is a sleazy sci-fi movie that one may or may not interpret as a parody of what a fascist utopia would be like. Or if one leaves that high-brow interpretation behind, one could just say that Starship troopers is a ridiculous movie swimming in repulsive ideals. Mankind is under threat and this time, the threat is embodied by giant bugs, horrific-looking and terribly hostile, of course. The film shows mankind at war with the bug-things, which are entirely reduced to their killing capacity. We are introduced to a bunch of kids who are about to do their military service in this war. Military service is a way to earn citizenship, it turns out. A fine political system, eh? These kids embrace the warrior culture. When we do not see them falling in love with each other, they are at it with the bugs. At it in battle, yes. What makes this film overwhelmingly entertaining is that it is so, so bad. Everything looks ridiculous, funny and every turn of the "plot" is giggle-inducing in their implausibility. The bugs are cute to watch, spit and mush and all. A charming piece of pulp.

Egg (2007)

Egg is the first film in Semih Kaplanoglu trilogy about a poet's life. Curiously, the trilogy moves "backwards" in time so that the first film explores the middle aged poet's, Yusuf's, life. He has returned to his village, where he hasn't been for a long time. His mother is dying and his cousin is now living in her house. They share the house in a slightly uncomfortable way. Yusuf gradually seems to settle in, and begins to remember what life used to be like. His cousin tells him that his mother had a wish; a lamb is to be sacrificed to her. Yusuf, an urban type, resists, but then succumbs. At the village in which they are to pick out a lamb to sacrifice the two bond in a new way.

Kaplanoglu's first film in the trilogy is rooted in a rather realistic tradition, even though there are many poetic excusions. The film dwells on spaces and sounds and lets us know about the relationships through hints. The mother's house is central. A shabby, crumbling place, but also a place of many memories, most of which we can only imagine and guess at. Egg is a slow film without the slowness appearing to be a trick or mere style.

The trilogy consists of Egg, Milk and Honey. These are titles loaded with symbolism, of course. The films can be said to be, too, but that would easily distort their very earth-bound quality. Take, for example, the lenthy account of the ritual. A lamb is to be picked out. But it turns out the herd has gone missing. The ritual is immersed in the main character's own exploration of the place, a place he encounters with a mix of alienation and curiosity. Also the relation with the dying mother is similarly earth-bound. There are distances to be crossed, and communation to try out. In their relationship, we see the son's doubts about himself, and where life has taken him. He is a failed poet that has been working in a bookshop in the city for many years. His mother lives in a rural place with other ways of life, other rhytms of life. Egg establishes the gentle and soul-searching tone that characterizes the trilogy as a whole. I would like to see the entire trilogy again: these are films that it takes time to let sink in. There are many layers of the cinematic approach and often I felt myself so amazed by a specific image or scene that I felt I was missing some other aspect.

Belleville baby (2013)

Lo-fi images, a voice that tells a bitter-sweet tale about love and abandonment, haunting piano music. Belleville Baby, directed by Mia Engberg, mixes documentary & fiction in a seamless, lyrical way. The "I" of the story recounts her memories of Paris and a love affair she had with a drug dealer. They lived in a cramped apartment. It did not last. Where is he now? Engberg's film is a successful encounter between spoken narrative and dreamy images. It's a moving collage that not only explores a personal story. The "I" talks about her artistic striving. She talks about class. Belleville baby is personal without shrinking into the merely individual. In a scene replete with hurt and longing, the "I" talks to her former boyfriend, a person with whom she has not for many years, on the phone. Their conversation - we never see them, just hear their voices - contains level of fiction, even mythological elements, but the film conjures up a fragile kind of intimacy. Everything does not work here. Some of the attempts to make the film "political" seem a bit strained, lacking in real focus. But Engberg has a good way of telling a story using sound & image in an association-based way.

Night moves (1975)

Sleazy types in shabby surroundings uttering woozy lines & trying to solve the mysteries of life: thrillers from the 70's at their best. Gene Hackman excels in the sleaze league in Arthur Penn's Night Moves, a story about a private eye called Moseby (MOSEBY!) working in a dreary office doing various gigs. His wife nags at him and life looks pretty miserable. Then he gets the classical film noir gig: he is hired by a femme fatale-ish woman to look for her 16-year old daughter who has gone missing. The mission finally takes him to Florida, where he finds the girl with her stepfather and his lover. Night Moves is all about the atmosphere. The story itself is .... r a t h e r elusive. Gene Hackman has little clue about what is going on and new surprises awaits for the viewer and the rather hapless private eye who instead of doing his job flirts with women. This private eye is left in the dark, rather than stepping up as a world-weary hero who ties all the threads together. Some say that the plot will reveal itself upon multiple viewings. Speaking for myself, I am not sure whether I am willing to put in that kind of effort.

The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)

No directors bend genres the way the Coen brothers do. Western, thriller, film noir - they can fuck it all up and make the genre mannerisms parts of their own goofy world. In The Hudsucker Proxy the brothers inhabit the universe of the screwball comedy through sleek-looking office landscapes of 50's New York. The film might not be a peak of the Coen-ouvre, but it is a charming dissection of careerism: the film shows you where "ambition" brings people. The world of business is not taken seriously at all, which is mostly a good think. Business, here, is all surface and style. Tim Robbins plays Norville, who goes from mouse-like mailroom clerk to sleek-looking exec sitting on the top floor of a glossy skyscraper. The road to the top: the invention of a hoola-hop. Of course, the Coen brothers do everything in their power to project the absurdity of capitalism. Norville is surrounded by plotting background puppetteers and wise-cracking journo ladies (Jennifer Jason Leigh with an ... accent). Hudsucker Proxy is about the little guy from the small town who becomes the boss because the top management tries to make the stock value fall; Norville seems to be the perfect proxy - a useful idiot. The American dream? Some more nightmarish version of it, yes.  Some parts of the film are rather contrived and does not quite take off. But it's well worth watching for its icy description of life at the successful business company. Among the classic office movies (The Apartment and so on) this stands its ground.

London River (2009)

I sat down on my sofa and grumpily expected to sit through a tedious and sentimental TV-drama about terrorism.
I was wrong!
London River, directed by Rachid Bouchareb, is a moving chronicle of a friendship between two people united by grief and worry. The storytelling is low-key, almost without melodrama, and plenty of space is given to exploring different parts of London. The film really excels in presenting a wobbly and extremely precarious relationship between two people.
The film follows the aftermath of the London suicide bombings. A man and a woman are worried about their children with whom they try to reach contact to check whether everything is OK. A widow from Guernsey comes to London to search for her daughter. She meets a man from Mali who is looking for his son and they end up investigating what has happened as a joint quest.
This film could have become a really schmaltzy affair about an encounter between 'cultures'.
But I am a bit ashamed for worrying so much about that. The film explores conceptions about cultures, it explores racism and stereotypes - in a subtle, humane and critical way. There is no preachy Message. London River examines how a tragic event disrupts people's life. That a tragedy may bring people together is here not a cliche, but rather a difficult realization that matures during the film as an insight for the characters.
The suicide bombings is treated as a human catastrophe with consequences for an entire city. But the tone of the film is not political - Bouchared sticks to the inter-personal. I find this less to be some sort of statement than a very fruitful dramatic point of view for exploring not only the evolving relationship between strangers from different backgrounds but also the relationship between parents and children. London River is a sad, but not gloomy, film that puts its hopes on the changes that new encounters present us with.
Superb acting from Brenda Blethyn (famous for her role in several Mike Leigh films) and Sotiguy Kouyaté.

Working girl (1988)

Working girl is, in some ways, Liberal feminism 101. Women should have the same right as men. They should have the same right to climb the career ladder. This means that the state of working life is pretty much taken for granted: if the presupposition is that women should obtain the same rights as men, the idea is still that competition is a natural environment; justice means that women should somehow get 'a fair chance' to survive in the rat race.
However, Working girl take an ambiguous position. It seems to advocate a blandly American version of feminism, basically glorifying business and corporations. But one can also read it as criticizing a world in which women are to compete with each other. From this point of view, Working girl may be said to tell a story about a girl from the working class whose problem is not only gender, but also class. Rule number one: in business, you have to un-learn everything about solidarity and friendship among women.
The point, in this movie, is that a woman in business must be respectable and that this creates a particular connection between gender and class, united in a sexist world.
The heroine is called Tess (Melanie Griffith) and she's the lowest of the low. She is a secretary at a fancy corporation on Wall street and her boss is a steely woman (played by Sigourney Weaver, hooray). Tess has ideas, she is good at selling stuff to customers. She knows the game and how to rule it. She is clever and brave, but her street-smart edge is not enough. Her boss is an asshole who likes to humiliate her female subordinate. The boss goes on holiday and Tess sees that she has stolen her secretary's idea. Tess response: she sneaks into the boardrooms by presenting herself as an exec.
Sadly, the film reels off into a stupid romantic side-plot that involves Tess and her boss' lover. This makes the film much more boring than it has to be. And much more predictable. It's more fun to watch Tess in her working-class hoods, talking to her friends and visiting tacky bars.
Mike Nichols makes the film engaging because it presents Tess as somebody who has a life and a background (Staten island!) - and Wall street is presented as a full-fleshed vampiristic environment where new money learns to talk to old money. Mergers & acquisitions.
But, as I said, the very core of Working girl remains unclear to me. Are we to think that Tess will, end the end, become just like her boss? Or are we rather lead to think that there are more ethical and fair people who will change the game?
 My fear is that the film remains very shallow, both in its critique of sexism and in its critique of class structures. Perhaps the film is just conjuring up the capitalist fairy-tale of romance and business as a harmony of passion and ambition.

River of no return (1954)

Cheesy but entertaining - River of no return offers some stunning locations, a mediocre story and some quite clunky acting. The reason why Otto Preminger's film is shown on Finnish television 50 years later is, no doubt, Marilyn Monroe. Marketed as an 'outdoor drama', this film seems more about showing of Monroe on a log raft or playing guitar in a saloon than the mountainous scenery and the glossy CinemaScope. Robert Mitchum is almost always clunky but charming and this is true also about this movie, in which he plays good-hearted loner. This is a movie in which Indians are portrayed as unnamed bad-ass people who pose a threat to decent Whites. Hm.

The Fall (2006)

Tarsem Singh made the colorful and imaginative but rather hollow The Cell. The style is instantaneously recognizable in The Fall. If you like films by Terry Gillian or perhaps Tim Burton, or films like Pan's Labyrinth, this is for you. If not - well.
Speaking for myself, I was strangely entertained by this film - I found myself sucked into its nonsensical world. The story is, on the face of it, very simple, like a fairy tale. A girl is hospitalized after having broken her arm. The setting: Los Angeles in the 1920's. She starts to talk to a stunt man. He tells her a story. The film shifts between the gritty reality of the hospital and the lush images of the stuntman's story.
It must be said that the audacious aesthetic of The Fall is rooted in music videos and commercials. It is a film of wild imagination of the sort that does not touch you deeply. Pan's labyrinth, with its story about children and war, is on another level in this sense, I think. However, I don't think The Fall is cheaply calculated - it is far too wild and crazy for that, its exercises in shared imagination (the girl and the stuntman's) too bold and winding.
So perhaps: the romantic, sweeping panoramas that Tarsem Sing conjures up don't really, for all their stunning effects and visual play, speak to me.
The Fall is also a very romantic elevation of the force of cinema. Not only does the silent movie stunt man become a romantic hero - the visual fantasy testaments to the limitlessness of movie-making (or at least I think that is Tarsem's own idea).