I Can't Sleep (Claire Denis, 1994)

Claire Denis' quite, contemplative film investigates what it means to be an outsider, and what it, in fact, takes to become a part of the dominant culture you are outside of. The three main characters are Daiga, a Lithuanian actress who came to Paris on the promise of a theater role that never materializes, Theo, a Martinique immigrant who takes care of his son and has has a tempestuous relationship with the child's mother, and Camille, Theo's brother, a gay/transvestite cabaret singer. Alongside the day-to-day struggles of these three outsiders, there is a mystery of who is behind a rash of old-lady murders around the city. Denis takes an outside approach to these characters, not giving them any real backstory or other facts for the audience to relate to. This is interesting in the character study sort of way, but I have a problem sometimes with movies that don't let the viewer in enough. While I really felt for each of the characters in a specific way, the ending leaves a little too much open-endedness. The murderer is caught, but we never get a feel for the motives, other than pure greed. It's a beautiful meditation on alienation and violence in the modern city, but a little too removed for me to love it. 7/10

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Three Times (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2005)

I had heard so much about the profundity and ambience of Hsiao-hsien's film before seeing it that I was a little intimidated by it. Maybe intimidated isn't the right word, but it seemed bigger than life. After watching it, however, Three Times, while profound, isn't about anything bigger than life, but about life itself and the love therein. Three Times is divided into three segments, one around the turn of the 20th century, one in the 1960s, and one in present day. Qi Shu and Chen Chang play the lovers in each section, giving the entire film a timeless quality. The first segment, set in the 1960s, is about a soldier and a pool hall attendant who seem ill-fated. This one was by far my favorite, as the atmosphere (settings, costumes, all that) and music were absolutely perfect, and really set the scene for these lovers' missed connection. The acting, as in all section, is perfect, yet with very little dialogue. The body language and facial expressions of the two leads speaks volumes more than anything they ever could have said. The second section, set in the early 1900s, is literally silent - the dialogue is presented written on screen as in silent films. At first, I was annoyed by this seemingly "cute" tactic, but as the tale of impossible love continued, it again put the focus on the characters themselves, and not what they choose to say to one another. The third story, set in present-day Taipei, deals with a disturbed, bisexual eplipetic and her affair with a man behind her girlfriend's back. If the first section's ending had the audience expecting marginally happy endings of these tales, the other two smash those perceptions. Three Times shows the tragic and inevitable nature of love; you cannot control your heart, the overriding theme seems to be. A great, beautiful movie (although I have to admit that it made me more than a little excited for Aronofsky's The Fountain, which has more or less the same premise). 8/10

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Some non-review updates

I've started a livejournal syndication for Wet Streets, which you can find here. If you're on lj, definitely add it to your friends list! In the next few weeks or so, I'm going to try to teach myself some basic CSS so I can make Wet Streets look a little better than just a blogger template. Anyone have any websites or other resources that make CSS easy(ish) to understand? That would totally be helpful. Lastly, if you want to trade links, I'd love to! I'm looking for ways to increase readership, and links seem to be a good way to do so (check out the blogs I read, especially the lovely Jenna's Cinema Knits). Again, if you have suggestions on other things to do to get people to read this thing, let me know! Thanks for reading. It's only going to get bigger and better from here, I promise.

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Dance of the Dead (Tobe Hooper, 2005)

I'm not a big Tobe Hooper fan. To be honest, I prefer the 2003 Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake to the original. Horror fan sin, I know, but the original is sort of boring. Anyway, I wasn't expecting that much from Hooper's Masters of Horror episode Dance of the Dead, and I was right. The hour-long show at the same time feels like ten minutes and three hours, as nothing really happens. Based on a short story by Richard Matheson (who wrote the teleplay), Dance tells of a post-apocalyptic United States, mostly represented by a club who's main attraction is, well, the dance of the dead. Robert Englund does a great job being appropriately creepy as the club's MC, but the dance of the dead itself is obscured by camera angles, and not particularly impressive. The camera tricks are my main problem with this episode in general; it's like someone just realized all these cool things their camera could do, but instead, it's incredibly distracting and pointless. The scene with the four kids in the car goes on way longer than it needs to, and is so visually overwrought that it's hard to watch. Alongside the overdone effects, the plot is paper-thin, so much so that I won't even go into it here, for fear of "spoiling" something. Nothing really happens, and when it does, you can see it coming a mile away. I'm a Masters of Horror completist, but I wouldn't recommend Dance of the Dead for anyone except the other completists in the world. 4/10

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A Hole in My Heart (Lukas Moodysson, 2004)

Lukas Moodysson did not want A Hole in My Heart released on DVD; he did not want it to get into the hands of children and has said that if it was up to him, he would never have made a movie like this. Moodysson's got a point. A Hole in My Heart is one, if not the, most disturbing, genuinely emotionally distressing films I have ever seen. It is pretty violence-free, and the actual sex scenes are short and not very graphic, but there were moments I just could not watch the onscreen action. The movie plays like a home video. It is the story of Rickard, who makes amateur porn, his son Eric, who is withdrawn and cold to his father, and Gecko and Tess, the two leads in the porn. It might take place over a single day, it might be months. There is no definite feeling of time or place in the movie, as it takes place solely in Rickard and Eric's apartment. There are no other characters than these four people, making it intensely focused on the relationships between them. (There are a few scenes, however, where you wonder who is controlling the camera - is Moodysson himself a character?) The film is highly experimental in style; there are loud, gnashing noises, shots of very disturbing imagery (such as vaginal surgery, which Tess has had), and virtually no distinction between reality and fantasy. I was left wondering what had happened and what was in someone's mind. In one scene, Rickard's face is covered in blood, he looks to be dead, and yet he has a very meaningful conversation with Eric, the only time in the film we see them really connect. This obviously didn't happen, or did it? There are asides from all the characters about their childhoods, and how life did not turn out how they expected. These deeply depressing, emotional moments undercut the porn filming in the other room. Oh, the sex. While the actual sex is not incredibly graphic, there are lots of closeups of (real and fake) vaginas, and one scene, involving a food fight and eventual filming, made me want to throw up and/or cry. Sanna Brading, who plays Tess, gives an incredible performance, although all the actors are quite remarkable. Tess is incredibly manic, desperate to be famous, no matter what the cost. She goes from laughing to crying in a matter of moments. Because of the rawness of the film, Tess becomes a girl that we might have known in school, one who started out with good intentions and ends up in a man's apartment making porn no one might ever see. Brading is fearless in her performance, and the film is fearless in its treatment of many subjects: family, love, sex, reality television, fame, gender relations, sexual orientation, and suicide, among many others. I can't give this film a number rating, it's not that kind of movie. It's not the kind of movie that you like, per se. I would definitely recommend it for those who are looking to be pushed and questioned by a movie, people who want to think about the dark side of life and aren't afraid of disturbing images and what they might mean. I was very impressed by this film, because it stuck with me emotionally more than the superficial crying moments you can have at almost any film. This is what filmmaking is about.

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Traveling Companion (Peter Del Monte, 1996)

Traveling Companion is another movie I rented just because of Asia Argento. It didn't hurt, either, that I heard Asia won the Italian equivalent of the Best Actress Oscar for her performance. I was impressed with Asia's performance, as she's never really shown her chops in many other roles. As Cora, a 19-year old cocktail waitress whose life is really going nowhere, Asia plays the role as blankly as you would expect someone like Cora to be in the first two-thirds, but really develops ad blossoms in the third act. Cora is hired by a friend to follow the friend's father, Cosimo, a 70ish former professor who is in what seems like the advanced stages of Alzheimers. After a few days of following Cosimo around the city, making sure that he gets home alright, Cora has to follow him on a train to other towns around Rome, as he is apparently trying to take a bird as a birthday gift to an old friend. Nothing much actually happens in the film; Cora and Cosimo eventually begin traveling together, and Cora gives up trying to get him back to Rome and instead lets him finish his mission. This all unravels in the third act, when Cora realizes that Cosimo is not just forgetful and is actually sick, and the results are devastating. Cora, in her relationship with Cosimo, becomes a deeper, different person than she was at the beginning of the film. In the last scenes, the audience knows just as well as Cora what she is going to do next, which is not very well at all. Argento is great at bringing out the vulnerability and toughness, often at the same time, in Cora, and makes her more than a floozy waitress. My main problem with the film is that the first two thirds are slow; nothing actually happens, and alongside that, there are several very unresolved and sort of annoying subplots that make no real sense. Argento's performance is very strong, and for someone like me, who has a close relative with advanced Alzheimers, it is touching and frustrating to see Cosimo's confusion and Cora's reaction, but the slowness prevents me from recommending it to everyone. 6/10

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8 1/2 (Federico Fellini, 1963)

It seems nearly pointless to talk about 8 1/2; it's widely regarded as one of the finest films ever made. Fellini is another of those directors whose entire ouvre I'm trying to see, but it seems so intimidating at times to even try to get into the head of this master. 8 1/2 tells the story of a director, trying to make a film, even though he has written a (seemingly) terrible script, has financial troubles, and, most of all, has troubles with all the women in his life. It is the best movie I've seen about filmmaking ever, but it wasn't quite the revelation I expected it to be. This movie has some of the finest moments of any film ever - the temper tantrum Guido throws on his way to the cocktail party with the media, and one of my favorite scenes I've seen in a film ever, Guido's imaginary harem. He controls "his" women with chores and a whip, and threatens them with banishment when they get too old, because he has no control over the women in his life. Of course, Fellini's direction of women make them more gorgeous than one would ever have thought possible - it sounds corny and stupid, but whenever Fellini trains his camera on one of Guido's girlfriends, you can see everything in her eyes, and she is the stereotypical (only not) Italian heroine. He's kinder and harsher to women than any other director I can think of. All in all, a wonderful, magical, surreal movie that anyone who loves film should see. 8/10

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District B13 (Pierre Morel, 2004)

District B13 features parkour, which is much like Thai martial artist Tony Jaa's discipline - it's basically trying to get over anything in your path as fast as possible, whether you have to jump or vault yourself over it. Sounds cool, right? Well, in the first chase scene in B13, it really is. David Belle, who actually is the founder of parkour, stars as Leito, and in the first, unbelievable 20 minutes of the film, he runs and escapes from a huge gang with guns who are determined to capture him. Cyril Raffaelli is just as impressive in his first big fight scene, as Damien, an undercover cop who also has to fight a huge gang that wants to kill him. These two scenes, along with some appropriately hammy performances, make the first 40 minutes of B13 unbelievable. The second half, however, is not as great as the first. Damien and Leito have to pair up and go into District B13, Paris' most dangerous walled neighborhood, to defuse a bomb and save Leito's sister. The action with the two men is not as explosive or amazing as it could have been, and the two men's tactics to get to the bomb are, well, a little boring. There is still at least one awesome parkour scene, and a good fist-fighting scene, but the action, along with the heavy-handed political message, really brings the second half down. The ending is touching, but a little sappy. The supporting cast is pretty good; Dany Verissimo, who plays Leito's badass sister Lola, reminds me of a younger Asia Argento, and I think she's going to be a next big thing, perhaps a cooler version of Audrey Tatou. All in all, great for fans of action and/or Tony Jaa-esque stunts (and who isn't!?). 7/10

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Jenifer (Dario Argento, 2005)

For his episode of Showtime's brilliant (in concept, not always in execution) series Masters of Horror, Dario Argento takes a teleplay written by Steven Weber, who also stars, about a deformed girl named Jenifer who has strange powers over men. Jenifer's face is rather horrifying, especially the first time you see it, and she is unable to talk and often acts like an angry cat. Weber plays a police officer who saves her from being murdered, then falls victim to her powers (even after she does things like eat his cat). And that's pretty much it. The gore, of which there is a pretty good amount, is realistic looking, but there aren't really any actual scares. Nor does the audience ever find out any more about Jenifer than what she does in the present. I was dying to know how she got deformed, where these powers come from, and even if she was human or not, but the audience never gets that much. It's all surface here, which is entertaining enough, but not enough to make it one of the better MOH episodes I've seen. Speaking of which, Takashi Miike's banned Imprint comes out on DVD September 26th, and I haven't been this excited to see a movie since...I don't know. I'm just psyched. So, unless you're a die-hard horror/Argento fan (which I am), you might want to pass on Jenifer. 6/10

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Puddle Cruiser (Jay Chandrasekhar, 1996)

I couldn't stay away for long, I guess. I've found a little time while in Minnesota to update about a movie I watched the night before I left, Broken Lizard's Puddle Cruiser. Now that I've seen it, I've seen all the major Broken Lizard movies, hooray! This one, their first movie, made for $250,000 in 1996, is sweeter and gentler in nature than their subsequent films, but still shows flashes of their trademark humor that would find its way into center stage. The plot resembles something that might have been on Undeclared; Felix falls for an overachieving fellow student with a boyfriend (his name is Traci Shannon, which leads to some great jokes in the movie). That's the basic plot, with several subplots that fill out the movie and make the characters more than one-dimensional college boys. Except the ones that are one-dimensional college boys. The five Broken Lizard guys are in the beginning stages of their comedy, and you can see where they're going in their gags, some of which are repeated in their following films. Again, not much I can say about this, analysis-wise, but I whole-heartedly recommend it for people who have seen and enjoyed other Broken Lizard films. I wouldn't make it your first of their films, because it's not very representative of their comedy style, but it's a good, if a bit slight, romantic comedy with a decidely goofy edge. 6/10

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Boys of Baraka (Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady, 2005)

One last update before I head to Minnesota until Sunday - no updates until Monday at the earliest. But I did manage to catch Boys of Baraka, a movie I had been very excited to see, on PBS tonight. This is really a remarkable documetary, one that moves you into many different emotions and speaks to the power people have to help others. The Baraka school in Kenya takes 12 middle-school aged boys from Baltimore and enrolls them for two school years. They do both academic work and work that teaches them discipline, respect, and other qualities that these boys need to stay out of jail and have a successful life. The progress of these boys, four of which are profiled in-depth in the movie, is at first rocky at best. But through the progress of the film, these boys learn some important things about life and their places in it. The boys who are profiled in the movie are your stereotypical cires for help; none have fathers present, they get in trouble at school, and have trouble academically. My heart went out to Richard, who, as a 13 year-old boy, has a reading level of a second grader. No teacher has ever taken the time enough to even realize Richard's apparent learning disability, much less help him. Although I'm a stauch believer (and attender) of public schools, there's a difference between teachers who care, and those who don't. Without getting any further into urban politics, the school system, along with basically everyone in their lives, has failed these boys, and the Baraka School tries to repair some of that damage. Without giving away what happens to these students, the movie moves into both inspiration and devastation in its final minutes. This is what a documentary is supposed to me; moving and truthful, and reveals something about life. 9/10

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Spanking the Monkey (David O Russell, 1994)

I had Spanking the Monkey at home from netflix about two weeks before I watched it this weekend, which is never a good sign. Although I apparently wasn't pumped to watch it, it was an alright, interesting, experience. When it was over, my brother said to me, "That wasn't really a comedy," and I said, "Yeah, but it wasn't really a drama, either." To me, that is the central dilemma, and selling point, of this movie; it is very unclassifiable. While I found myself laughing a few times, I was uncomfortable and nervous even more times, but it wasn't very dramatic. Spanking the Monkey deals with Ray, a college student who's obtained a prestigious summer internship, but, as luck would have it, his mother has broken her leg and needs him to stay home to take care of her. The mother and son's proximity and necessary intimacy (Ray has to help his mother stand up in the shower, etc) leads to some, ahem, uncomfortable situations for the audience. I don't want to give up much more than that plotwise. Jeremy Davies as Ray is a very solid performance. Ray isn't the kind of character you like, no one in this movie is, but he's very realistic and relatable in his angst. He's at the age where he's both an independent adult and still his parents' son, and there is necessary conflict being in that position. Jeremy and his mother deal with it in ways that most families never even consider, but it doesn't seem unlikely in the way that Russell has written it. On the other hand, the characters are all so unlikeable that at points, I didn't care what happened to them. The realism goes both ways, I guess. The story, while shocking, wasn't particularly compelling at times, and the subplot with Carla Gallo as Ray's teenage "girlfriend" was good, until Gallo's character was turned into a whiny child. A good debut for a now-accomplished director, but I wouldn't recommend it without reservations. 6/10

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Camille 2000 (Radley Metzger, 1969)

Before taking a turn into hardcore as Henry Paris, Radley Metzger made hyper-stylish, Euro softcore porn (made by an American!). Camille 2000 is my first Metzger film, and while I can't call it a great film, I thorougly enjoyed the voyeuristic trip into the swinging 1960s. Marguerite (also known as Camille, though I didn't really catch why) meets Armand, suave American bachelor in Rome, and they fall in love and have a lot of sex. There's the basic plot right there, although there is more to it than that, as the movie is based on a novel by Alexandre Dumas. The veneer is all happening sex and drugs, but there is a darker thread of self-destruction and death underneath all the sparkle. The sex is filmed in that perfect, soft-lensed focus of 1970s exploitation films, and although it isn't patricularly arousing or revealing (I've never seen sex by two people laying perfectly still on a bed, but whatever), it is very timely piece. The acting isn't bad, in fact, I rather liked Marguerite and how she was handled as a woman who takes care of herself by any means necessary, yet is soft and incredibly vulnerable on the inside. But if you only need one reason to see Camille 2000, there is a prison-themed party, complete with a sex jail. Seriously. This movie is nothing if not a suggestion of the end of the swinging 60s (just check out the ending for proof of that); still, it made me want to be a loose, rich, drug-addicted celebutante in Europe. Well, maybe not. 7/10

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Red Siren (2002, Olivier Megaton)

I will rent just about any movie if Asia Argento is in it. While I've made some mistakes in the past (Trauma, Love Bites), I keep coming back for more. I didn't expect Red Siren to be any more than an exploitative erotic thriller, but, much to my surprise, I got a highly stylized crime thriller, a sort of 2000s update of Leon. Asia plays Anita, a French/Italian detective who comes upon the case of Alice, a 13 year old girl who says her mother Eva killed her nanny. Through a sequence of completely unbelievable, but enjoyable, events, like a wicked car chase and shootout in a gas station, Alice escapes from her mother and hooks up with Hugo (Jean-Marc Barr, who does a great job), a former mercenary who makes it his mission to deliver Alice to her father (who may or may not be dead). Whew. The plot involves a huge shootout in an enpty hotel, an evil mother who enjoys snuff films, and explosions. The plot is, as I said earlier, pretty unbelievable, but that's the thrill in crime thrillers most of the time. Jean-Marc Barr is great as Hugo, who accidentally killed a child in war years before, and has been trying to atone for his behavior ever since. Argento is not quite as good, but still pulls out an interesting performance as a detective who may have more invested in this case than is on the surface. The real revelation of this movie, though, is young Alexandra Negrao, who plays Alice with conflicting and paradoxical feelings that make her much more relatable and complex than any young girl should be. Again, I recommend this film if you're looking for a stylized, modern crime thriller that doesn't plague the brain too much. 7/10

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Club Dread (Jay Chandrasekhar, 2004)

I had stayed away from Club Dread for a while because I had heard nothing but terrible things about it. After seeing Beerfest, however, and realizing that hey, I think Broken Lizard is a group of really funny guys, I decided to give it a chance. Naysayers be damned, I am certainly glad I did. The movie is more or less a mock-up of 80s horror movies, although they don't really make fun of horror movies themselves. Maybe, then, it's more of an 80s horror movie with jokes. I'm not sure. But there's a Jimmy Buffet-type character (Coconut Pete, whose song "Pina Coladaburg" is enough to make the rental worthwhile) who runs a pleasure resort, and during this trip, staff members start being murdered. Simple enough plot, and not guaranteed hilarity, but the Broken Lizard guys really make it their own. They all have hilarious characters that seem like the annoying people you find at these resorts (my favorite being Putman, Jay Chandrasekhar in a great dreaded wig with a terrible British accent), and they put their all into these ridiculous characters. Plus, there's boobs. A lot of boobs, in case you care. There's really not much more that I can say, especially intelligently, about Club Dread, but if you enjoyed Super Troopers (which I think is great, if not a little overrated), give this underrated film a try. If you're not a fan of the stupid-smartish comedies of recent years, though, stay far, far away. 7/10

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Perfect Love (Catherine Breillat, 1996)

Catherine Breillat is another director whose entire body of work I'm attempting to see. At times, most times, actually, she is a difficult director to like; her films are incredibly philosophical and talky, as well as pornographic. She's a strong, radical feminist director, but sometimes her films have the edge of exploitation. Breillat does this to question the viewer's relationship between voyeurism and misogyny, but that doesn't make it any easier to watch. Perfect Love comes between A Real Young Girl, a film that I thought was immature in its sexuality and discussion thereof, and Romance and Anatomy of Hell, my two favorite Breillat films, that discuss female sexuality and female sexual power in intensely philosophical terms. In its maturity and subject matter, it is a perfect bridge between those two groups of films (I'm excluding Fat Girl for the moment, it's a different case entirely). Frederique and Christophe meet and fall in love, despite the fact that's she's almost twice his age, twice divorced and with two children. Their relationship takes a familiar path: infidelity, lack of desire, and insults, but the conclusion is different. Christophe murders Frederique (in a scene that I, the biggest gore-hound this side of the Mississippi, found it incredibly hard to watch), a fact the viewer finds out at the beginning of the movie. Movies with foregone conclusions are always intruiging to me, so I was interested in finding out how the relationship sours so badly. Breillat makes it clear that the relationship isn't extraordinary, but the people in it are. Frederique, Christophe points out at the beginnning of the movie, seems to destroy the men she falls in love with, and Christophe is a possibly-gay womanizer with quite a temper. These two clash almost immediately, but their periods of love are just as intense. Breillat's trademark inquiry into the power of female sexuality are there, although in a less mature form than, say, Anatomy of Hell. Frederique, in the film's most powerful dialogue, says, "I love sex, but I hate myself." This is kind of a thesis statement for Breillat's female heroines, and Ferderique dies for it. Perfect Love is the kind of movie that gets better the more you think about it, which is true of all Breillat's work in my opinion. While not her best work, it shows the work of a filmmaker getting more mature and confident with every film she does. I can't wait for her new one with Asia Argento! All in all, a good, thought-provoking rental. 8/10

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Common Wealth (Alex de la Iglesia, 2000)

Alex de la Iglesia is one of the directors whose entire body of work I'm attempting to see via Netflix. Being sick and having no Netflix at home, I decided to go out and rent Common Wealth, which is my fourth de la Iglesia film (after Accion Mutante, El Crimen Ferpecto, and Dance With the Devil). While it's no Crimen Ferpecto, it is a classic de la Iglesia, full of gore and suspense and comedy, often at the same time. The plot is pretty common; Julia (Carmen Maura, one of my favorite Spanish actresses) is a real estate agent who finds 300 million pesetas in a dead man's apartment. The other tenants figure out she has the money, and terror and hilarity both ensue. The line between ridiculousness and real, horror film-style terror is often very blurred, as Julia is literally trapped in the building by the other tenants. The film's climax is the perfect example of this melding of genres, as (without giving anything away!) there is a chase scene that is both scary and slapstick-funny at the same time. de la Iglesia is one of the masters of black comedy, and of making the grotesque hilarious (something that is even more pronounced in Dance With the Devil). Carmen Maura is near-perfect as a real estate agent who takes and won't let go of what she should never have gotten. She's smart, sexy, and I really wanted her to prevail, no matter what bad things she does along the way. An Almodovar staple, it was refreshing to see Maura do something more extreme in every way. I definitely recommend Common Wealth (aka La Comunidad) to anyone who enjoys laughing at what they shouldn't. It would also be perfect for an introduction into the twisted, hilarious world of Alex de la Iglesia. 8/10

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