February 6, 2004
Bay of Angels
The opening shot of Bay of Angels, a gorgeous, high-speed reverse tracking shot away from Jeanne Moreau and down the boardwalk of Nice, set expectations the rest couldn't match. The script -- the story of a young bank clerk, played by Claude Mann, and his wild gambling jag with a broke and desperate Jeanne Moreau while on a vacation in Nice -- asks the viewer to swallow an awful lot. The look on the faces of the two actors is wonderful, as it encompasses the sheer boredom of gambling, and particularly of roulette, a game that has all the appeal for me of wagering my paycheck on a lumberjack contest on ESPN2. There are long moments of bored stillness once the chips are down, punctuated only by Moreau's fingers twitching slightly as she kills another cigarette. But real life doesn't have the timing of a script, and the down-to-the-last-dollar wins the pair keep racking up are just predictable and tiresome, even granting that it's just a movie. The end seems to be missing about five minutes of footage, and whether it's meant to be a happy ending or a cheerfully ironic "happy ending", it has all the subtlety of cinder block dropped from height. The film is aware of its own artifice -- Mann compares Moreau to a novel, her lifestyle to an American movie. The actors are excellent and have real chemistry (although, as V. notes, nobody beats up a woman quite as ineffectually as a Frenchman in a New Wave film); Moreau's performance is particularly good. She has a sort of breathtaking squirreliness, sexy and doomed and dangerous to herself and others; the part reminded me of a number of other self-destructive archetypes (I kept thinking of Sid and Nancy, actually, for very little reason that I could see on the screen). But I was expecting more than this from the director of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg; everything felt too much like Demy was purposefully making a Hollywood-style movie, too pat. The opening shot, a high-speed reverse tracking shot down Nice's boardwalk, is wonderful, and for the first half of the movie I thought I was going to get an honest paean to the real pleasures of being young, reckless, and stupid. If Mann had had his wild fling, lost his money, and never seen Moreau again, he could have treasured the memory and the film might have lived up to that amazing opening.
May 10, 2003
Bob le Flambeur
Bob le Flambeur (that's "High-Roller Bob", the Jean-Pierre Melville film that was recently remade as The Good Thief) defied my expectations, and I'm not entirely sure that that was a good thing. With its set-up (semi-retired hood decides to go for one last score, which I hope was less tired in 1955), Melville's clear feel for noir as demonstrated in Le Samourai (one of the most purely iconic crime films I've ever seen), and a screenwriter fresh from writing the great French caper film Rififi, this could have been a great crime movie, if that was what it wanted to be.
(more...)February 22, 2003
Burma/Oxes
Tone/Oxes/Mission of Burma, the 9:30 Club, 21 February
Tone are playing when we arrive at the 9:30 Club. Tone consists of many, many guitar players, two bassists, and a drummer, or at least it did when I saw them last, a few years ago. We stand around in the lobby and chat. Our friend Nihar drifts by. We chat further. Everyone is amused by my $3 bag of earplugs, which contains ten pairs. Tone finishes their set and we troop into the main part of the club. Andrew has brought his Holga in the hopes of getting some good action shots of Oxes, but it is not to be; we're too far from the stage. Oxes play a very loud set. Their Shellac meets Van Halen schtick isn't quite as pronounced -- the mathy stuff is less obviously weird, and the this-one-goes-to-11 guitar solos don't seem quite as blisteringly fast -- but they've got some weird anti-charisma mojo working (the drummer announces that the tie he is wearing was a gift from his mother) and, as I've heard, take full advantage of their wireless guitars and wander around the crowd. V. declares the guitarist, zipping through the crowd on his knees, "unheimlich". I strongly suspect that the Fucking Champs don't kneehop. Despite the presence of decently-sized audience) (including Jenny Toomey, J. Robbins, and a bunch of people who will dance like loons when Mission of Burma comes on), the crowd seems kind of dead for the Oxes set.
We have a minor brush with fame when one of the Oxes apparently gives Jane a shout-out; he has recognized her as associated with her high school boyfriend. Jane bursts out laughing. Later, our friend Bob wanders by, and reports that someone over where he was standing also seemed to think they were being referred to. Jane's high school boyfriend must get around. Bob mentions both that Martin Swope is not with the band for the reunion and that Big Bob Weston is manning their tape loops instead. He also tells me that Suicide is playing tomorrow night. If I hadn't already committed to going to a coworker's party, I could have a theme weekend. We chat some more, then Mission of Burma come on. I'm not sure why it is that I find punk rock reunions less creepy than, say, the eternal touring of the Rolling Stones, the Las Vegas-ready acts of people like Peter Frampton, or Depeche Mode's camp-injected revivals. Maybe it's because they're still playing clubs of approximately the same size as when they were in their heydey; maybe it's because they peaked before I was listening to punk rock and never became overly familiar through MTV. A singalong "Academy Fight Song" seems neither creepy nor pathetic. Mission of Burma is about what you'd expect for a bunch of guys who've been playing off and on since the early '80s -- slightly flat vocally, quite tight instrumentally. They rock hard for old guys. Between songs, Bob notes how mindblowing it must have been to wander into the Rat and hear these guys in 1982. Everyone sings along to "That's When I Reach for My Revolver", and V. and I stagger out into the snow to catch the last train home.
(indie) (live) (music) (retro)