Accomplishment #002: New York Stories

Directors: Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Woddy Allen
Edition: Touchstone DVD

Imagine you're making a sandwich. You start with two great pieces of bread, maybe pantofolina (my favorite). Then, between these two slices of sumptuous, crusty bread you place... a big steaming pile of shit. That's what New York Stories is like.

I'd actually seen the first third of this film (Life Lessons, by Scorsese) twice before. It seems to be pretty standard film school viewing; and for good reason: it's great. The characters are fascinating and very complex. In just over thirty minutes Scorsese is able to craft characters with more depth than most you see in a movie running over two hours. It's one of the great things about this shorter format, that you're able to really focus on the meat and bones of the story; cut the fat.
Nick Nolte plays Lionel, a very successful, but creatively frustrated New York artist with a sprawling live/work loft. Sharing his quarters is Paulette (Rosanna Arquette), his live-in assistant and ex-lover. Tensions between the two rise to boiling point as they try and redefine their mentor/student relationship. I love Scorsese's use of the iris wipe (seen as recently recently as The Departed) to reveal Lionel's obessions, ie. his work, Paulette, Paulette's feet. As the two's relationship degrades Lionel becomes more and more unhinged, but at the same time it seems to benefit his work. I really love the ending to this portion of the film. In a very short scene it completely sums up the Lionel character and explains his cyclical nature.

Life Without Zoe by Francis Ford Coppola is terrible and I'm certain there is one reason for this: Sofia Coppola. The daughter of Francis is given a writing credit for this sack of putrid shit and it shows. The short of this story: a spoiled condecending brat who is over the top in love with her father and insulting to her mother runs about with her other spoiled brat girlfriends in the elite society of New York. She ignores her mother's instructions and becomes incredibly excited about the "new boy" at school who happens to be the richest child in the world. Blah blah blah, something about a stolen jewel, who gives a crap? The writing is aweful, the acting is deplorable. It was obviously a sign of the impending doom of Copolla's directing career. After this he made Godfather III and Jack (I'm not mentioning Dracula cause I love it even though Keanu was pretty retched in it).

After the turd burger in the middle comes Woody Allen's Oedipus Wrecks. I've been known to talk some smack about Woody Allen in the past, but I loved this piece. It's the story of a New York lawyer named Sheldon and his overbearing Jewish mother. The mother, played by Mae Questel (voice of Betty Boop and played Aunt Bethany in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation) is pure comedy gold. This film has a really great turn that I don't want to give away. It's a gimmick, for sure, but one of the best I've ever seen.

So who else has seen this flick from '89? What do you think Nick Nolte's character says about artists and where they look for inspiration?

Accomplishment #001: The Element of Crime

Director: Lars Von Trier
Edition: Criterion DVD

The first film for the experiment was certainly a bizarre one. Lars Von Trier's first feature film is a heavily art directed neo-noir that takes place is some odd dystopian future where it is always night and everything is lit by sodium lamps (with the occasional bright green fluorecent thrown in for contrast). Von Trier's use of sodium light gives the entire film a monochromatic sepia tone where white is yellow, blacks are a dark brown and rainy streets seems to run thick with heavy arterial blood.

Here's a brief synopsis (I don't like spoilers so I'll always try my hardest to avoid them):
A cop named Fisher sees a therapist in order to unlock supressed memories from his last case. After the opening scene the entire story plays out as a flashback; occasionally the therapists voice coming through to remind us of this.
Fisher returns to "Europe" to work a murder case earily similiar to a series of murders from years back. On his return he finds his mentor, Osborne has been disgraced and is on the verge of sinility. Fisher decides to embrace the teachings of his aging mentor as layed out in Osborne's book "The Element of Crime", the basics of which call for Fisher to think and act like the killer. As the investigation goes on the lines defining the difference between Fisher and the killer begin to blur.
I have to admit I was pretty exhausted when I viewed the film last night so I feel like I'm going to give this one another go sometime soon. I'm sure I missed a few things. Hell, with how odd this film was if I was 100% alert I would have missed a few things. I'd love to get someone's perspective on some of the abstract imagery and ideas in this film. Why the dead horse and the little horse heads as the killer's signature? What the hell was with the frustrating cup handles that always came off when Fisher was trying to drink something? Why the post dubbing on the dialogue? Was this an intentional effect, or just a neccesity because of the low budget?

A new experiment...

I am an unaccomplished film buff. Oh sure, I went to film school, I have a collection of nearly 400 films (last I counted), and I've seen thousands and thousands of films in my lifetime. I'm nearly certain I've seen more films than anyone I know. Even so, friends and family are constantly able to come up with titles that I haven't seen. And I'm not talking about bizarre and obscure titles from early 70's Yugoslavian cinema either, I'm talking about must see movies. People are continuously pointing out my failure as a film fanatic because I haven't seen The 400 Blows or Eraserhead. My film negligence is expansive.
I am now hellbent on fixing this issue. I've set myself up with a Netflix account and have added a smorgasborg of titles to my queue. My mission is to watch as many of the titles as I can over the next year (there are currently 500 titles, apparently the limit). I will then do a short review of the film here. I hope a few people will engage me in conversation about the titles. I do enjoy talking about a film after I see it as opposed to letting it immediately disappear into the obscurity that is my terrible memory. I'll think of it as my own personal film school 2.0.
Please feel free to recommend films you think I should see. Give it a try. Other people seem to like it when they think of a flick I haven't seen. You can roll your eyes and think to yourself, "He hasn't seen that movie? He's not a real film buff!"