November 2022: Werner Herzog, Godard, Truffaut, Pasolini, Van Sant, plus Hud, The Crown 5, Blue Dahlia, and The Earth Is Blue...

 Elliot’s Watching - November 2022

Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampire (1979) is a loose adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel (and apparently of Murnau’s silent) and it fully lives up to the standard its forbears set: Dark, creepy, ugly, disturbing, even for those who’ve read the original (I found it terribly dated) or seen any of the many adaptations. Set in a German village, Herzog’s version of the legend begins with a young man with a lovely young wife (Isabelle Adjani) is sent by his boss (they seem to be in the real estate business), a weird guy in his own right, giggling and full of ticks, on a business assignment: Go see this man who wants to buy a major property in town - Count Dracula. Wait as second, who would go on such a mission?! We want to say: Stop! Hold it right there! Go home! But, no, he’s young and ambitious and heads off on his own - a journey of 4 days, mostly on foot, as nobody he meets wants to take him to Dracula’s castle (this part of the plot veers from Stoker’s). When he arrives, he meets his nemesis - played by Klaus Kinski, Herzog’s fave villain/weirdo - who has weird long fingernails like claws, a ghastly bald dome, dark clothes, dark everything - and as he feeds the young many (Harker) a substantial dinner Drac. hovers over everything: He notes that he cannot conduct business during the daylight hours, listens to howling “creatures of the night,” and so on. In short, months, in seems, later Harker returns to his home a completely damaged and ruined man (again, quite differing from the sources), carried by a carriage that contains dirt-filled soil from Dracula’s estate - and the shipment also caries many rats, who disembark and multiply into vast swarms - the plague! Watch it for the extraordinary sense of dread and gloom, esp when Drac clamps onto peoples’ necks to draw his life-sustaining blood. Though it’s not entirely the conventional Dracula narrative, it’s a great intro to this material for those who can stomach it. 

Pier Paolo Passolni’s (short) film (30+minutes) film La Ricotta (as in the choose - 1962) which ran as part of those ominous features popular in intalian art films in the ‘60s is a sometimes hilarious bit of sisal criticism and hypocrisy and a glimpse of the prices of the art and skill or lack thereof of filming, esp crowd scenes shot en pleine aire. This shows PPP’s nihilistic and blasphemous treatment of organize (Catholic) religion, and as elements for offend just about everyone, or at least every disbeliever and skeptic. A ragtag grojp of about 5 actors, dancers, musicians are set to shoot a scene of the death of Jesus o the cross; they’re in one of those outlands, cold and muddy, with lots of new cheap high rises sprouting in the distance, an image of the rising yet still inchoate landscape of postwar industrial Rome - a setting familiar to those who’ve sene Fellini’s early works. The kicker is that as the production crew - led Orson Welles playin a type of himself, an enigmatic and querulous director who has no truck with the Italian journalist on hand to interview the great director - struggle and stumbles to get the actors to tat heron these appropriately costumed and ready at the least with their lines - as he prepares for the grand finale the Crucifixion - essentially arranging his actors into tables of great Renaissance paintings, Everything goes wrong, and in the foothills of this carefully constructed scene the troupe of actors indifferent to the artistic vision engage unjust about all of the 7 deadly sins and more, notably infidelity, gluttony, jealousy, avarice, lust, greed, sloth, wrath, coveting, et al. - all I’m high-energy scenes of hilarity played out at the foot of the Crucifixion re-enactment - with some tragic consequences. No wonder that PPP was banned by the Church of Rome - not something he feared, evidently - and the film holds up today (though what does the title mean?) and makes its point through riotous hilarity (think Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale) rather than dismal pronunciation from on high (think Chaucer’s Priest’s Tale).

Stanley Kwan’s Hong Kong set film Rouge (1987) is not the kind of film I would ordinarily care for - a rom-com/melodrama ghost story - but Kwan tells this love story with such panache and humor that it’s hard not to smile and enjoy this fantasy romp. In essence, it’s about a young woman, Fleur,  indentured from childhood to serve as a “courtesan” - i.e., prostitute - in a high-end Hong Kong brothel that caters to the wealthy young (and older) men. She and one of her clients (Chan)  fall in love; they arrange a meeting with his mother - and Fleur (Anita Mui) is obviously charming, intelligent, poised, lovely 0 but Mom will have nothing to do w/ her because of her sullied past. So - the two drink poison on OD on opium in a joint suicide pact (see R&J, Aida, et al.). Tragic - but - we pick up the story some 50 or so years later in Honk Kong with an unchanged Fleur wanders into a newspaper office planning to place a personal ad to find the whereabouts of her lost love, if he is still alive. Two reporters take up the challenge w/ her, leading to a # of complications but most important - the pursuit leads to two reporters, 2 misfits, to fall for each other (he, Alex Man, is particularly gawky and ill at ease with women) - and their sweet love story evolves out of the star-crossed lovers of the frame story. Kwan manages to find much humor and joy in what could have been a mawkish romp, and the lighting, costumery, and interior and exterior sets throughout - particularly night-time scenes in the rain on the streets of HK - are in themselves enough to hold anyone’s attention in this under-the-radar success. The score will not be to all tastes, but the passages of Chinese opera are integrated very well into the story line (Chan is a wealthy young man who somehow aspires a career as an opera singer - isn’t there a similar film concept in an early Japanese movie that I can’t quite remember?)

Does (Jean-Luc) Godard’s film Weekend (1967) stand up after so many years? Pretty well, I think, in that it’s just as odd, at times hilarious, at times boring and off-putting, but for whatever reason, good or bad, my reaction today is much like my reaction 50 years ago. It’s worth watching if only for the great “traffic jam” sequences, an incredibly long set of 4 (I’m told) shots of cars and truck stuck on a freeway, in which everyone’s blasting away as if that will do any good. Then we get to some really gory sequences, many bodies strewn along the roadside - and what does it mean? You have to be totally “square” or out-of-it even to ask: It just is. We (loosely) follow our protagonist couple on their weekend adventure, during which they make several encounters during which the conversation explores: Are we real people? Or actors in a movie? A very 60s kind of question and dilemma - seems quite antiquated as well. And then two migrant laborers talk at great length direct into the camera about their revolutionary aspirations - again, very ‘60s in the days of idolatry of Marx and Mao. And they film wraps with a Western-movie shootout at a pastoral retreat of some the characters we’ve met en route. And it all amounts to? A critique of society? Not really, but maybe a glimpse of what it would be like 50 years hence, i.e., today, with our over-dependence on gasoline-powered cars and with the remnants of colonialism still hovering over the African nations. Godard was no seer, but he broke the rules of narrative and made viewers think and react, if not with any of the Marxist fervor that he would have liked or anticipated.  

Traces Series 2 (we missed the 1st season but each season stands alone successfully. In this series, set in beautiful Dundee, Scotland (the Scots are really showing their stuff via crime series of late), the main strand of the plot involves the search for a serial bomber who threatens to create more havoc. What’s good is that the pursuit is intense and along the way we learn a lot about forensics and crime investigations, thanks largely to the clear accounts of the ongoing pursuit Laura Fraser (Professor Sarah). What disappoints a little is that - as in far too many crime thrillers - there are about a thousand things that could have gone wrong in the investigation, arrest, and interrogation but - miracle of miracles! - ever guess pans out and everything works. Put aside any skepticism and enjoy, I guess. A more troubling aspect is the absolute and complete mystery of the attraction between Sarah and the lead investigator - possibly the most off-putting and incomprehensible office romance ever filmed, not that I’ve seen them all. 

I had never seen Hud and had consigned it in my mind to a typical American Western, centered on a larger-than-life tough guy (cf Liberty Valence, High Noon, for some better examples). But, prompted by reading a review of  PN’ auto bio, I thought I’d take a look at Hud on Criterion before it was too late (it will drop from Criterion library next month). Wow, was I surprised: Martin Ritt’s Hud (1963) is a really great American film, right from the first frame, when we know this will not be another dull, drab Western exterior. The film, shot by JamesWong Howe extreme Panavision (ie the vantage is always wider and narrower than convention letter-box framing), a great way to feel from the first immersed in aTexas landscape. Plus, filming in b/w - an homage those who shot thousands of oaters - but here the b/w gives the film the look of classic - just beautiful. We see life in a hardscrabble farm house where Newman lives and runs the farm with his grandfather and with his late brother’s teenage son - 3 generations of guys in the one meeting - + plus the girl, Patricia Neale. What a set-up: we could be heading toward Tennessee Williams, or other films of ne’er do well bros and struggling farm fams, see e.g. East of Eden. And in the desolation of the nearby town, where there doesn’t seem much to aside from drinking and fighting; the landscape will remind many of Last Picture Show and maybe the novel Lonesome Dove, both by Larry McMurtry, a genius, and the author the excellent screenplay for Hud. Hud as played by Newman is a vile, sexist, angry, and dangerous man; his smoldering temper - which leads to a brutal assault on Neale and much peril for Hud’s nephew, who worships Hud - and follows him down a path could lead to much self-destruction. One thing curious about the plot, however, is that Hud’s nephew seems to have no friends - a sad side-note that the film never quite recognizes or resolves. As with so many great dramatists - compare Pinter, Strindberg, O’Neill - everyone suffers. 

Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991), aside from its great title, did little for me and I quit on it about 40 minutes in. I found the whole production to be in some ways self-conscious and cute and imaginative but to no good cause; in other ways, the characters are repulsive and dangerous and I just felt the whole movie, or the half of it, was an unpleasant place to be. If you’re interested in the community of dropouts, drifters, drug addict of there Pacific NW, a far better film is Streetwise, which is much more realistic (it’s a documentary) and much more sympathetic to the lives of its participants. It’s note exactly a feel-good movie, but it’s straight=forward and honest and not filled with visual pyrotechnics and other distractions. 

George Marshall’s noir LA film The Blue Dahlia (1946) is best known and appreciated today, to the extend that it is known and appreciated, for the Raymond Chandler screenplay - which I think is one of his few writing credits for original work rather than adapted from one of his novels or stories. The film isn’t great - a far too complex, head-scratching who-dunnit  - but any Chandler project will have some great dialog and this one also  has some fine moments such as the Alan Ladd Veronica Lake drive up the dark coast to and past Malibu, or the opening scuffle in a downtown LA diner, where we get the first sense that one of the characters, William Bendix as Buzz - shows himself to be mentally disturbed - specifically, by a wartime head injury that leaves him with serious PTSD, though the term came into use only later; credit here to Chandler and Marshall for a film that recognizes the price of war on civilian life, even after the armistice, and without a mawkish or melodramatic tone. 

Filmmaker Iryna Tsilyk was traveling/working in Ukraine ca 2020 when she met a family (a single mom and her 4 kids) that was making a film about their life during the war - mostly directed by the teenage daughter who, with some friends, aspires to become a filmmaker herself; IT decided to make a documentary film, The Earth Is Blue as an Orange, about the film - which seems as if it would be a precious, ironic venture - but, no: by filming the fledgling efforts of these teens and their mom and younger sibs and neighbors, we get an intimate portrait of what the family is living through, coping with, and in a real sense triumphing over during the war - which had been ongoing for five years at the time depicted. We see both the spirit and energy of the young filmmakers - for ex., gaining cooperation from some Ukraine tank soldiers for a short staged sequence - and some harrowing accounts of how the family copes with the constant night-time bombings: they hide in a cell in the basement, for the most part. In one interview with children talk about how they’ve learned to distinguish incoming from outgoing missiles. Many winter exterior shots show us the grim, post-Soviet, ugly cityscape - and then there will be a patch of beauty - bridge, a neighborhood along a greenway; and then, worst of all, bombed out apartment buildings, charred beyond repair. The movie is uplifting in the end - but of course that’s not the end, and we have to wonder: What has become of this family, and so many others, since 2020? A scary thought. 

I had to watch it, just because - so into it after 4 seasons, so how can you not watch Season 5 of The Crown, especially as we know what lies just over the horizon: the specter of Diana, pursued by the media and the public, dead on a speedway in Paris. But not yet - that’s for season 6. And Season 5? Just not quite as good, engaging, varied, and lavish as the first 4. What went wrong? top of the list would be the casting of Domenic West as the most un-Charles-like Charles as possible; could not in any way fathom Charles as a handsome, cocky, ladies man, no way. And the conflicts in most of the season were muted and peripheral, unlike the first 4 seasons that really developed a character over time (Eliz. seems the same as in season 4, and not too different from the Queen we all know in her final years, decades. What’s good about Season 5?: the 8th episode that traced the manipulations by the BBC in getting Diana to tell her story via one of its news programs - great look at the Diana phenomenon and at the workings and working-overs of the media; and episode 9, in which Charles and Diana seem to reconcile into a friendship post divorce - but not for long. The last episode seemed a stasis, with the Queen lamenting the retirement of the royal yacht about which who cares? Are 5 castles or whatever enough? Boo hoo.  

Francois Truffaut’s best-known film, Jules and Jim (1962), based closely on the 1953 novel by Henri-Pierre Roche, is the classic love triangle - J&J being the two best buddies who fall for the same girl, Catherine (Jeanne Moreau). Over the course of some years or so - beginning with the protagonists as easy-going young men living the vie Boheme in Paris before the Great War - their friendship interrupted by the war (Jules is German, and served on the Russian front; Jim is a journalist who is assigned to write about post-War France) - until, after a gap of some time, Jim visits the now-married Jules & Catherine in rural France. Thus begins Catherine’s on-again, off-again relations with each of the two men, plus at least one outside fling - none of which, at least at first, provokes the jealousy and vitriol that one would expect. But this triangulated marriage/friendship cannot endure forever, as we see in the last third of the film, in which it becomes every more obvious thatCatherine is more than just a flirt but also a seriously deranged and dangerous woman. The great success of this film is that it hovers between romantic idle - esp with Truffaut’s beautiful wide-angle b/w film and topography - and tragic cruelty; try as we might, we can’t truly identify with or aspire to this kind of relationship, so cruel to those so close. If J&J were to be re-made today, of course, the erotic attraction between the two men would be explicit rather than implied or suggested (a recent streaming series from Mexico, Everything Will Br Fine, touched on similar themes).

What I've been watching, January 2021: Murder on Middle Beach, Zodiac, I May Destroy You, I Hate Suze, Kurosawa, The Flight Attendant, Elizabeth Is Missing, Lupin, Bresson, Truffault,

 Here's what I've been watching in January 2021:

Elliot’s Watching 2021

Murder on Middle Beach. HBO. Documentary. Debut for young director, examining the murder of his mother - who dunnit? But this quest becomes his examination into his family history, and first real knowledge that his father was/is a con man, that his mother and all of her siblings was/are severe alcoholics, that his mother was deeply involved in a ponzi scheme (Gifting parties) - and that the police of his small Conn. town, Madison (strangely, his first name) were/are reluctant to pursue various leads and are letting the case die after 10 years - until his intervention, which prompted a renewed investigation. Totally engaging series of 4 episodes, and we await a 5th as the filmmaker presents new evidence to the Madison police Many possibly guilty, including father (via a hit man?), even his only sister, who has relocated to Argentina.   1/2

Saw David Fincher’s 2:30+ Zodiac, from I think about 2010 and looking back on the pursuit of the eponymous, pseudonymous madman who terrorized the Bay Area in 1969 and beyond. I defy anyone on first viewing to keep straight the myriad leads, clues, and red herrings that waylay us along the way toward identifying and arresting the allusive killer, who tantalize police, press, and public with taunting, threatening messages. But following the nuances isn’t the point; mainly the film is about 2 obsessions - the killer’s and that of a young newspaper cartoonist at the SF chron, played well by Jake Gillenhall (sp?), who lets his personal pursuit of the killer turn into his own obsession and overturn his life. The tension at times is almost unbearable, but it’s leavened with some moments of laugh-out-loud humor, particularly the children of the protagonist (who wrote the book on which this screenplay, mostly factual apparently, is based). I do have two quibbles: hating the role of the nagging wife played well enough by Close Sevigny but such an ignoble stereotype, and of course the dynamics and politics of the news room are completely off base on a # of matters - for ex., the crime reporter and the cartoonist would never be part of the daily meeting of the editors (unless there were a specific reason for them to be present). 1/3

The HBO series I May Destroy You, a tour-de-force by writer/lead actor Michaela Coel, who plays the lead character, a young Ghanian-descent woman in present-day London and trying to break out as a published novelist (Arabella). She’s totally on the cutting edge of art, culture, and social issues (and way beyond where I stand in life - out of dozens of background songs that pulse throughout, I recognized the name of only 2 artists). This series has been described as a lesson and warning for young people, especially young women, who get deeply involved in recreational Rx, risky sex with strangers, heavy bouts of drinking, and obsessive on-line presence. And the series should stand as a warning for most viewers, one would hope - though first 4 of so of the (12) episodes seemed to be to be overly glamorizing the fast and loose life. But the series gets in gear by episode 4 of so, when Arabella gets knocked out when a guy “spikes” her drink and rapes her, an event she can only a moments recollect; froths point, the series becomes, at least in part, a search for the perp - and in the process a dissection of the life of Arabella and her closest friend, most of them Black; particularly notable are sections about her inability to get on w/ he writing and her mistreatment by her agents and publisher, as well as the sad and frightening depiction of rape among male homosexual pickups and long-term effect on one of the victims. I won’t divulge the conclusion, but will note only that many viewers will be puzzled or upset by the final episode - but that’s your call. 1/9

Netflix series I Hate Suze, about a child-star actor/singer now in mid-career and looking for a break gets a major gig in a Disney movie but, just as that happens, finds herself in an unDisney-like predicament as he files have been hacked and nude photos of her are appearing online. Based on first half of first episode - unfunny, unpleasant, not for us. 1/11

Kurosawa’s 1949 film, Stray Dog, starring a young T Mufone, is a great social document and an exciting movie as well. In essence, the story, quite simple in outline, has TM, a rookie Tokyo police detective has his gun stolen by a pickpocket while he’s riding a bus home after a double-shift day. Honor would lead him to resign from the force, but sympathetic older officers cut him a real and send him on an odyssey as he pursues his stolen phone through a series of underground and otherwise shady Tokyo settings. The how-and-why details of the pursuit, complex at times, aren’t the reason to watch the film. The strength comes from the many excellent scenes and even moments: The chorus girls at a shady club collapsing in exhaustion back stage after completing their routine, the scenes on the ubiquitous buses and esp trains (de rigueur for any Japanese film of the era), and even a scene filmed at a Japanese major league baseball game (Giants v Hawks). We see and sense throughout many of the traumas and forces shaping life on postwar Japan, notably the poverty and ruin of many cities, the PSTD suffered by many Japanese soldiers, the burgeoning new economy, emulating Western styles and values (baseball league for one example) - a picture of a society under stress and duress. 1/17

The current HBO series The Flight Attendant is by no means a deep and introspective movie, but it’s fun to watch throughout and that’s largely thanks to the 2 leads, the eponymous attending (Kaley Cuoco) and her bestie, young lawyer played by Zosia Mamet, with hilarious staccato brevity, and even the secondary characters are well-cast, sometimes against type (though I had trouble accepting the excellent Rosie Perez as a “Meagan” who speaks fluent Korean). The show in short entails the attendant, Cassy, meeting a guy on one of her flights and spending the night w/ him in Bangkok, waking in the morning to find herself in bed next to his corpse. From there the film become a genre pic - invoking many genres: police procedural, spy adventure, buddy movie, all lifted above the genre cliches, though, by 2 elements: Cassy’s struggle w/ alcoholism (not done in a maudlin nor judgmental manner) and her many interactions w/ the ghost of her murdered friend - handled very well, especially as we quickly understand that he’s not exactly a ghost from the supernatural realm but are her way of coping with her current predicament and other trauma in her life. In short, a much deeper and more inventive series that it seemed off the bat, and about as high in entertainment value as a B-movie can get. 1/17

Glenda Jackson deserves all the praise she’s been receiving for taking on the lead role (Maud) in the (PBS) film Elizabeth Is Missing (2021). Maud is a highly largely unsympathetic and even for a +70 hardly attractive woman, not at all a glam role, not at all a glorification women (or men) in late life. Maud is suffering from what appears to be an advanced case of Alzheimer’s; as we first see her, alone in her flat (in a small city/village, unnamed, somewhere in the northern UK it seems) with typed notes placed everywhere reminding her to lock the door, turn off the kettle, etc. Someone’s watching out for her, although maybe not thoroughly enough. The story line has it the Maud believes that her best friend (Eliz.) has gone missing, and she fears the worst - but her intuition about Eliz may well be a delusion - certainly, everyone in her fam and of her acquaintance thinks so, in particular because Maud can be a nudge and a pest -multiple visits to the PD, posting a notice in the paper seeking info from possible witnesses, e.g. If left to that - a woman troubled about her best friend’s fate who cannot get her concerns through to anyone because of her mental deterioration - the show would have been fine. Unfortunately, the story line - adapted from a novel - includes several confusing subplots that at the least will raise eyebrows and that ultimately lead to a ridiculous resolution. Too bad; a less ambitious project would have been far better. 1/19

The Netflix series Lupin, Season 1 (2021), starring the excellent Omar Sy, is thoroughly entertaining as long as you accept that this is one of those crime dramas that is so far out of the edge of improbability as to be comical in itself. Sy plays Arsene Diop, a middle-aged man on a mission to avenge his father’s death, caused by the evil industrial magnate Pellegrini who frame Arsene’s father and had him accused of stealing a valuable necklace. The beauty of the series is Arsene’s audacity - posing as a potential buyer of the necklace, now being auctioned at the Louvre of all places, as just one example, in which every facet of the complex robbery goes perfectly as planned. The general conceit is that people like Arsene - a black man of African descent - are overlooked and ignored, so they can get away with all kinds of criminality - which I think is an inversion of the truth, that someone like A would have been looked on as immediately suspicious as the only black man at the auction, for example - but never mind. The series is fun and exciting and a good diversion. Beware that it ends abruptly at an episode 5 cliffhanger - though they say season 2 is not for behind. 1/27

Noting here that I also watched, for the 2nd or 3rd time, Bresson’s great film Pickpocket (1959) and, if you can put aside the unlikely love story that motivates the main character, Michel, and see this as almost a documentary about street crime - great to see all the little tricks and tics through which the thieves pile their trade - and most of all as a close-up portrait of an alienated young man living in deep poverty and persona despair who turns to crime, even though it’s against his better nature. Martin La Salle, an amateur actor, brings so much to the story line, esp through his long face, deepest eyes, searching expression - and of course Bresson had his unique method of cinema narration - spare sets, long takes, focus closely on characters, each scene taking a beat more than needed, not afraid to focus on a door after it’s closed, for ex. 1/27/21

And I also watched, probably for the 4th time spread out over probably 40 years … Truffaut’s great movie The 400 Blows (1959) and it has not only aged well but if that’s possible improved with age. The simplicity and power of the narrative remain as ever, filling us with empathy for the troubled young protagonist - Jean-Pierre Leaud as Antoine Doinel, a young boy in a very strict school - probably an early h.s. grade, age about 14(?), where he is rambunctious and energetic and consequently the subject of harsh discipline, even as his family - jovial father and cold, distant mother - is in the midst of upheaval, as one day Antoine sees his mother passionately kissing a mag not his father (her boss, probably); he bears this family secret with some grace, but he is tortured inside, and it’s almost painful to watch the struggles and isolation he endures. Alongside the sorrowful coming-of-age story we have some scenes of laugh-out-loud humor and gasps of style, most notably the phys-ed teacher leading the 30 or so boys in the class on a job through Paris streets (the kids desert the group one after another) and the famous closing sequence of the escape to freedom from the school for delinquents. The scenes of Paris in the ‘50s are reason enough alone to watch this great film; Truffaut teasingly includes panoramic view of the Eiffel Tower in the long opening sequences, only to turn away at least from the monument and the classic Gallic architecture of the “hotels” - and we are in a crowded urban district (and in the Doinels’ tiny run-down apartment) where the tourists do not ever venture - a place not at all romanic and scenic, which in fact reminds me of Newark from the same era. 1/30/21

Some fine moments in Truffaut's late [not Last, see correction below] film

Francois Truffaut’s The Last Metro (1980) is far from his best film but it was his last film (he died, too young, in 1984) [Correction, 5/22: it was not his last film, it was his third-from last] and it holds up well over the years and is still worth watching. In brief it’s about a small theater company (the Montmartre) in Paris in the early 1940s under Nazi occupation; the Nazis, using obsequious French so-called journalists and drama critics, have purged all theater companies of  Jewish actors/producers/owners and evaluate each script and performance to exhume Jewish elements and traits, whatever that’s supposed to mean. A horrible and frightful time – and this theater company pulls together to launch its new show, a plaintive melodrama, it seems. The head of the company is played by Catherine Deneuve, beautiful as always; her Jewish husband has supposedly left the country but actually lives in the cellar of the theater, from where he listens to all the rehearsals and provides his notes and comments – a nice conceit, but pretty much impossible. Gerard Depardieux plays the male lead in the show-within-the-show, an ambiguous character at first but who ultimately rises up against the Nazi censorship and leaves the company to serve in the Resistance. The film reminds me of 2 I’ve seen recently. The obvious comparison is w/ Truffaut’s Day for Night; that one gave us an inside look at the process of making a film – this one gives an inside look at producing a play, though it’s in no way as complete and surprising and bold as D4N. The film also calls to mind the screwball comedy To Be or not To Be, about a theater company under the Nazi occupation of Poland – a much more uproarious film and produced during the uncertainty and terror of the war. Last Metro has its heart in the right place, of course, though the Nazis [and collaborators, I should add - 5/22] are a pretty easy target by 1980; this film was not in and of itself about the resistance – it’s nothing compared w/, say, Army of Shadows – but Truffaut does a great job managing a large cast of eccentric characters, and the film has some fine sequences, including a bit of a surprise at the ending (no spoilers here), even though Truffaut had to cheat a little bit to bring the ending to life – we’ll excise that; I was his last film [see correction above], and it was Truffaut.

The best movie about the making of a movie: Day for Night

Francois Truffaut's Day for Night (1973) is probably the best of all movies about the making of a movie; no other film gives as great a sense of what it's like to direct a film and of the complex internal dramas that take place throughout the process of a shoot. Of course there are exaggerations and extremely eccentric behavior, but it's like a compendium of all that can go wrong on a shoot - and of how every aspect of the process connects to the director. We see not only the interplay of often narcissistic and insecure people but also the culture of the staff and crew and even the extras - so much controlled chaos that we wonder how any film is ever completed. Yet we also see how hard they all work, how difficult it is or can be to stage a simple scene, the constant rewriting and revising to make the script better and the demand this puts on the actors and crew, the incredibly scary work of the a stuntman and of the camera crew on a crane, the monumental task of dealing with extras on a complex street scene. And then - to recognize, of course, that all the complexity we're seeing takes place not only in the movie being filmed (Meet Pamela) but also on the film we're watching (Day for Night); there's a movie outside the frame as well as within the frame, so to speak. Of course this is not a documentary; there are many story lines and some terrific long takes, notably the famous opening shot and the long series of takes in which one of the stars, drinking heavily, screws up each time - at first this is comic, soon it's nearly tragic. This might recall for some the recent film about that showed what it's like to be a working actor, Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood. The movie it most reminds me of, however, is the great Rules of the Game - many interwoven plot strands, much interplay between the luminaries and the workers, collision of social classes and social forces, face mixed with tragedy - so I was not surprised when one of the characters name-checks the Renoir film. Like Rules, Day for Night is totally engrossing - look, if you're even thinking about watching a Truffaut film you're probably interested in how a movie is made - funny and sad, especially in that it was probably his last great film - a fitting capstone.

Why it's so much fun to watch Mississippi Mermaid and why you can't stop watching Tiger King

Sure it's not much more than a French take on a noir crime remake featuring an alluring femme fatale, but thanks to Francois Truffaut's Mississippi Mermaid (1969) is incredibly fun to watch - just ignore the improbability of many of the plot twists - thanks to his great, imaginative direction and the presence of two great French film stars in the leads, Catherine Deneuve and Jean-Paul Belmondo. The story, in short (based on a novel by the crime writer Cornell Woolrich) has a well-off factory owner in the French territory of Reunion resorting to the classifieds for a mail-order bride - which first of all is hysterical: Imgine Belmondo in need or a mail-order bride or Deneuve responding to want ad! Of course there are twists, which we see way before Belmondo does, but even he, playing a dolt (funny in itself as well), realizes that this is not the bride he'd expected - though he falls in love w/ her nevertheless (no surprise there) - until she bilks him of all his money. In short, he heads off to France to track her down, but when he finds her he falls in love w/ her all over again and the two embark on a completely improbable crime spree, no details necessary because who really cares about the plot? But Truffaut's touches make the movie lots of fun; to cite a few: the opening credits played out over a page of want ads and read by various men and women; the terrific way he fills us in on the back story while Belmondo drives at reckless speed on the narrow roads of Reunion (or wherever the film was actually shot), Belmondo (his stunt man of course) scaling balconies and ironwork to sneak into Deneave's top-floor apartment; the really funny dialog as they buy a getaway car, the absurdity of burying a body beneath the concrete floor of a house they're renting (Did you ever try to dig a grave beneath a concrete basement floor? It's really hard to do!), and the final moments which make a nice bookend w/ the great freeze-frame Truffaut used at the end of 400 Blows. In short, not a movie to take seriously but one to just plain enjoy.

A few words on the 7-part Netflix Erik Goode-Rebecca Chaiklin documentary series The Tiger King, about the zoo owner "Joe Exotic" and his years-long battle with animal-rights activist Carole Baskin. At least through the first three episodes as we examine the warped psyche of Joe and his increasingly bizarre behavior alongside the weird obsessive behavior of Baskin we just keep wondering: Could these people be real? Could this show can become any more weird? And it does become more and more weird as there are various unexpected twists in the story line through the first 3 episodes. But I have to say that eventually the filmmakers have made their point - everyone involved w/ the illegal market in tiger cats is at best weird and at worst malevolent and criminal, with many victims including not only the wildlife - and by the end we feel or at least I felt I'd had enough already; these are not people I'd want anything to do with ever, I'd never go to one of these "private zoos" nor would I have deal with these people, and I'd had enough - though I have to admit, I couldn't help but see it through to the end. Obviously the filmmakers worked long and hard on this project and it's really hard to "kill your darlings," but some judicious editing would have helped, I think.