Three movies this week, although the legitimacy of the first one is somewhat debatable (an argument could be made that it is a 2007 release). Quite an impressive spread in the scores, as well.
Allegro
Christoffer Boe, 2005
Quite the frustrating movie, this. The central conceit (A man’s repression of his own painful memories and imperfections expresses itself physically as a natural disaster, creating an area of the city which no one seems able to enter until the man solves his issues) is interesting, and right up my alley (see my discussion of the Phillip-K-Dickian literalization concept in the last Movie Saturday post). The execution is lacking, however. The first problem is the intrusive voiceover, which accomplishes nothing but to allow the filmmakers to skip over parts of the story that they don’t want to deal with. Fortunately, this is really only an issue for the first half hour and the last few minutes. Second, the story is put into motion due to the trauma of a relationship the protagonist has with a woman who is barely seen in the movie. Her absence makes it hard to understand the impact that she had. Third (and probably a result of the first two), the whole thing had a very cold, clinical feel to it. I never really felt anything for the characters, try as I might. This is especially bizarre since the filmmakers spend a lot of time repeating the fact that, without his painful memories, the protagonist (a concert pianist) plays perfectly but soullessly. The whole movie revolves around the idea of regaining a spark of warmth and humanity, but the movie itself lacks that very spark.
That said, the middle hour, in which our hero wanders around the surreal zone that he created, is very interesting, and there are some wonderfully evocative sequences – particularly one in which he must play, badly, on a tiny piano in the middle of a public square. The final image is an arresting one as well. I wanted very badly to like this movie and, in the end, I did – but only just.
6.5/10
Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg)
Jacques Demy, 1964
This movie is insane. Whoever came up with the idea (whether Demy or someone else) of making a musical in which every single line of dialogue is sung, but there are no actual songs, has no business living in a rational world.
And yet.
And yet it worked, magnificently. The dialogue is, for the most part, fairly pedestrian, but gains a certain magic in this context. There’s just something wonderful about hearing someone sing the question, “regular or premium gasoline?” The plot (Two young lovers are separated by war) is straightforward and conventional, but perhaps it had to be, in order to allow the rest of the experimentation to hang together. And even then, it winds up someplace that I didn’t expect - that is to say, it ends in precisely the way that a French musical romance should not.
The film is not without its flaws, as it drags somewhat in the middle, and the lovers’ proclamations that they want to stay together and will wait forever to be reunited grew wearisome after the thirty-eighth iteration. When I’m presented with images as gorgeous as these, however, and a production infused with as much madness as this, it tends to put me in a forgiving mood.
9/10
Hudson Hawk
Michael Lehmann, 1991
From the writing/directing team that brought you the terrific Heathers comes one of the most infamously terrible bombs in my lifetime, a flop that nearly ended Bruce Willis’s career and was widely lambasted for its obscene $50 million budget, back in the days when $50 million wasn’t the cut-off for the “low-budget indie” category.
This reputation is somewhat undeserved. Hudson Hawk is not one of the worst movies ever made. This is not to say that it’s a good movie. It isn’t. At all. Well, maybe a little bit. A very little bit. Somewhere, buried deep within the bowels of the script, there was some funny, clever dialogue – dialogue so funny that I could actually see the humor, even when obscured by the way it was delivered. This is a film completely out of control, where the only law is the law of slapstick and restraint has been outlawed (so only outlaws have restraint). It’s the sort of movie where Bruce Willis does a double-take and the soundtrack makes a helpful “BOING” sound to emphasize. Where dogs are launched out of windows by tennis ball machines (okay, I actually liked that bit). Where viewers are forced to watch and listen to Sandra Bernhard. Need I go on?
The rating below is probably a tad generous, but I still seem to be in the mood to reward insanity, and Hudson Hawk has it in spades.
2/10
Progress: Par +1
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