California Summer 5

Staying up late watching movies.

Quelques cinemas

I was in Paris last week and spent some of my evenings at the movies.

Top: Le Desperado. I saw Né pour Tuer (Born to Kill, a nice film noir set mostly in SF).
Bottom: La Filmotheque. I saw Blow Up and Heat (which the line is for).

CA Roadtrip: Lone Pine Film History Museum

Dr. King Schultz's wagon from Django in the Lone Pine Film History Museum. 

At the movies

Melody convinced me when we first moved here to buy an UGC Illimité card, which allows you to watch an unlimited number of movies at most movie theaters in Paris for a yearly fee of about 240 euros. At 8 euros a movie, we would need to watch 30 movies to make the card worthwhile, and I think we accomplished that in our first couple of months here. Most awesomely, there was a complete Rohmer series at La Filmotheque in August, so we saw all the subtitled versions they showed:

-Le Genou de Claire
-Pauline à la plage
-L'Amour l'après-midi
-La Femme de l'aviateur
-Les Nuits de la pleine lune
-Le Rayon vert
-L'Ami de mon amie
-Conte de printemps
-Conte d'été

We just watched Barry Lyndon at La Filmo as part of their Kubrick series. I had seen BL on video, but watching a projection of it made it clear that it is the most beautiful looking movie I've ever seen.



We also recently saw Sailor et Lula (Wild at Heart) at Le Champo, down the street from La Filmotheque.



It seems there is always some Lynch playing somewhere in town, always some Hitchcock, always some film noir, and always some westerns. So, for example, we saw To Catch a Thief, Lifeboat, and Strangers on a Train at La Filmo, Melody saw Kiss Me Deadly there too, and I was giddy watching The Wild Bunch at Action Christine and Pat Garret and Billy the Kid at La Filmo.

Some others I can remember:

-Rio Bravo (La Filmo)
-Les Felins (La Filmo)
-An Affair to Remember (La Filmo)
-Now Voyager (Action Christine)
-The American Friend (La Filmo)
-Badlands (La Filmo)
-Thin Red Line (La Filmo)
-The New World (La Filmo)
-Bad Lieutenant (La Filmo) (this was part of a Harvey Keitel series!)
-Klute (La Filmo)
-Manhunt (La Filmo)
-Ninotchka (La Filmo)
-Hombre (La Filmo)
-Minuit à Paris (UGC Danton, which appears in the opening montage)
-You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (Mk2 Quai de la Seine)
-Source Code (don't remember where)
-Paths of Glory (Le Champo)
-Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (La Filmo)
-Black Swan (Mk2 Quai de la Loire)
-King's Speech (Mk2 Quai de la Seine)
-The Fighter (somewhere on the Champs-Élysées)
-The Social Network (Mk2 Quai de la Seine)
-Reservoir Dogs (La Filmo) (also part of the Keitel series)
-Crimes and Misdemeanors (La Filmo)
-Femme Fatale (La Filmo)
-Charade (La Filmo)
-Breakfast at Tiffany's (La Filmo)
-An American in Paris (La Filmo)

Cinémania

La Filmothèque du Quartier Latin is our favorite movie theater. Since we've been here, they've played complete series of Eric Rohmer and Terence Malick, a series of movies featuring Harvey Keitel (including The Border), movies featuring members of the Fonda family, a series of movies set in Paris, and now they're in the middle of showing a ton of Peckinpahs. Last night we saw Pat Garett and Billy the Kid, which is the best Peckinpah after La Horde Sauvage.

The Filmotheque is great, but if you want to see anything you need to get there early. These pictures show the queue-jumping mob outside the theater on a Monday night at 6pm. The crowd is fighting to get a place to see either Manhunt or Straw Dogs.

Indiana Jones: The Adaptation

The Hirschhorn museum in Washington D.C. occasionally screens free movies in its auditorium. When Melody and I were undergrads, it was a reliable source of contemporary avant garde film. We saw Michael Haneke's original Funny Games there and one of the Cremaster series, for example. A couple of weeks ago, while browsing its film series, I saw that they would be screening Indiana Jones: The Adaptation, a more or less shot by shot recreation of the first Indiana Jones movie, made on a BetaMax over seven years (1981-1988). Both Melody and Zed predicted that the screening would be popular, and Melody recommended that we show up several hours in advance. I thought that was absurd, considering that I had never seen the auditorium more than half full. But when we showed up two hours in advance, there were already about 50 people in line ahead of us. Eventually the line grew so long that it coiled twice around the inside of the circular Hirschhorn courtyard. So many people showed up that they had to show the movie twice that night.



The filmmakers were there to introduce the movie and answer questions. They apologized beforehand for the terrible sound, and opened the movie with the invitation to "Let the Beta wash over you". You can get some idea of what the Adaptation is like in these clips.

The opening jungle sequence is recreated remarkably well, including the scene of the porter reaching nervously for his gun and Indiana Jones knocking it out of his hand with the bullwhip. The sound was indeed awful, and it was only because we had watched the original a couple of nights beforehand that we had any idea what anyone was saying. We also debated about whether the grainy, blurry picture helped or hindered the experience of the movie; it was often hard to tell what was going on, but otherwise mundane settings were concealed and made mysterious because you couldn't see much of what was going on. Most importantly, though, the low fidelity made what otherwise would have been glaring continuity problems easier to accept: characters' hair got longer and shorter, depending on the changing styles between 1981 and 1988, voices changed, actors got acne, grew noticeably in height and weight, and so on.

The only scene that was completely left out of the Adaptation was the fight with the strongman around the airplane. During Q&A Melody asked why they left that scene out. The director said that he still has nightmares about not doing that scene. He said that they had prepared to shoot it, with a big fan painted silver for the propellor, the most muscular kid in school ready to play the strongman (complete with a bald wig), and a mock-up of the plane that was to be blown up with a pipe bomb. But some undisclosed problem with the pipe bomb ruled out shooting the scene as planned, and the director said that the idea of blowing up a model with an M-80 was thought to be "too cheesy".

National Building Museum

National Building Museum, originally uploaded by Nat Hansen.

For the last three weeks, the National Building Museum has been showing movies that conspicuously feature elements of mid-centurury design and architecture: The Moon is Blue, The Best of Everything, and In Like Flint. The sound was pretty awful, since the interior of the museum is cavernous. But they did allow you to bring food in.

Kicking and Screaming

Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming was one of the first movies that my friends and I watched as freshman in college. We liked the way Grover and Max dressed: sportcoats, corduroys, brown shoes. Some of us still dress like that.

The college scenes in the movie are supposed to take place somewhere on the east coast. Grover at one point refers to the town the college is in as "Munton", but I haven't been able to find Munton on the map. But there are any number of reasons to think that it's set on the east coast: In the opening party scene, Max says that his parents have flown out from Chicago "to rent out these swank digs". When Friedrich says that "racism spans the globe", he says that "from Howard Beach to Crown Heights we witness acts of hatred". Howard Beach is in Queens and and Crown Heights is in Brooklyn. It's unlikely that that would be a familiar geographical reference to someone not close to New York. Grover's dad is obsessed with the Knicks and has an apartment in "the village", and his girlfriend works for the New Yorker and has "a lovely place in Oyster Bay" (Long Island, presumably). The high-school girl, Kate, who Grover tutors and who eventually takes Max to prom has a New Jersey-like accent. And the clothes everyone wears (corduroys, sweaters, sportcoats) are not really west coast. But most conclusive is a remark that Otis makes he is leaving to go to grad school in Milwaukee. Grover and Max say that Milwaukee is only an hour's difference, and Otis worries that he'll be hungry for dinner at five and ready for the local news at four. That means he has to be in the Eastern Time Zone.

But any attentive viewer of the movie will realize that the outdoor shots of the college don't look like anything on the east coast. The buildings have red, Spanish style tile roofs and there are even some palm trees in the background of some shots. It turns out that Baumbach couldn't shoot the movie at Vassar. He shot it at Occidental College, up in the hills above LA. I've known about the location for awhile, but I haven't gotten a chance to go check it out until this last trip to LA. Ben Chan was nice enough to take a break from working on his dissertation and spend an afternoon driving me up there.

Stupidly, I didn't bring shots from the movie with me, so I was working from memory. That meant we spent a lot of time walking around trying to spot locations, with only moderate success. At one point, out of desperation, I approached a bunch of college kids lounging around on the lawn and asked them if they were familiar with the movie. "What movie?" They asked. "Kicking and Screaming", I said. "I haven't seen that", one of them said, and another said, to my surprise, "That's not a very good movie". Somewhat surprised, I asked them if they knew that some scenes from the movie were filmed at their college. None of them knew that, and they seemed nonplussed. I would have thought that watching the movie would have played some role in college orientation the way that The Exorcist or St. Elmo's Fire played at Georgetown.

Later I realized that these college kids thought that I was asking about the 2005 Kicking and Screaming, which clearly was not filmed at their college and isn't a very good movie.

I spotted the location of the scene where Max and Grover talk about improving Grover's resume. Grover has listed on his resume that he "Drove a truck". Max thinks that's not impressive enough and says that Grover should put instead "Responsibilities included: delivering gourmet cheese products throughout the metropolitan area".

From the movie:



From my visit:



Here's what the arbor Max and Grover are walking under looks like from the other direction:



Grover and Max notice that a student is hanging up flyers that read "Cookie Man: Pro Life?" on the pillars of the arbor:



Here's a close-up of one of the pillars:



There are several other locations that I missed:






That means I'll have to go back for another visit.

One thing that came to mind while hiking around the hilly Occidental campus is that the actors must have been unbelievably hot in the jackets and sweaters. It was around 95 degrees when Ben and I were walking around. There is a good reason why people don't dress like that out in Southern California, even in the fall.

The Ultimate Picture Palace

The Ultimate Picture Palace is Oxford's shabby but loveable independent movie theater. When I visited this time to see The Lives of Others, the movie started 20 minutes late, the back rows of seats were covered in black plastic sheeting, and there was a big pile of beers on the floor by the trash can. This picture from the front row shows the paint peeling off the walls. But the picture quality and sound is good, and the decrepitude of the theater doesn't matter much when you're watching the movie.

One time, Melody and I showed up to a late (11pm?) showing of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. The guy taking the tickets laughed and told us "This is what separates the men from the boys". I think there was only one other person there.

Inland Empire at the Music Box

Saw Inland Empire this afternoon at the Music Box with Melody, PJ, Jay, Colin, Dan and Erica. The movie benefitted greatly from seeing it with a group of friends, and from our attempt to make sense of it all.

The slightly creepy interior of the Music Box and the freezing temperature in the theater produced an ideal viewing experience. Altogether the afternoon was a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk.

Siskel

Jay, PJ, Melody and I went to see Interkosmos last night at the Gene Siskel Film Center. There was an entertaining Q&A afterwards with the director.

Time Travel

A couple of years ago, there was a discussion, prompted by PJ, about what exactly is going on in the first Superman movie after Lois Lane is killed in the earthquake. Superman flies around the Earth a bunch of times and reverses its rotation. This is supposed to reverse time. But that makes no sense. We argued about what was actually being depicted in the movie, but I don't think anyone came up with a very plausible explanation.

I asked this question over at the (very interesting) Ask Philosophers website. David Papinaeu replied.

Vertigo

3rd floor Cobb.

The Logic of The Palm Beach Story

Last night, after watching Preston Sturges' Palm Beach Story, we argued about how to understand the opening screwball sequence. Let "M1" and "M2" stand for the male twins (McCrea), and "W1" and "W2" for the female twins (Colbert).

Our conclusion: M1 and W1 are scheduled to get married. M1 freaks out and runs away. W2 wants to marry M1, so she ties up W1 and leaves her in the closet. M2 wants to marry W1, so he steps in for his brother who has left town. So M2 and W2 end up at the altar and get married, though neither to the person they think they are marrying. The fact that M1 didn't want to marry W1 explains why those two don't just get married after the mix up. Presumably M2 and W2 are initially content with their marriage though it isn't what they had expected. This also helps explain why Colbert's character is so willing to leave McCrea.

Here is an alternate account I found on the website Greatest Films (I substituted our notation for the notation used on the website):

"Dressed in his wedding tuxedo, a groom [M1] runs away from something and rushes out to a waiting taxi-cab. The frame freezes. Bound and gagged and only wearing a slip, a would-be bride [W1] struggles to get out of a closet. The maid faints again after finding another bride [W2] dressed in a wedding gown. When the bride [W2] leaves - the frame freezes - she trails her dress's long train over the maid's prostrate body. The would-be bride [W1] kicks her feet through the closet door, while the other bride [W2] with a bouquet in her hands hails a taxi out on the street. The frame freezes. The maid staggers into the hallway and faints a third time when she sees the would-be bride's [W1] legs breaking through the door. The groom [M1] is still dressing during his taxi ride and on his way down the aisle. He and the bride [W2] meet at the altar and smile lovingly at each other. There's another shot of the unconscious maid on the floor."

On this account, M1 thinks he is marrying W1, and W1 wants to marry M1. So why don't M1 and W1 just get the marriage between M1 and W2 annulled? And this also doesn't explain why M1 is "running away". And M2 is completely superfluous.