Movies Watched -- Elle (2016)

In French. 131 minute running time so at least 30 to 40 minutes too long … this movie was comically bad … Isabelle Huppert is in her SIXTIES, nobody wants to rape her, especially every half hour … and it was perverse in the way that only French movies can be, just dumb and sickening and it makes you wonder how the hell these things get made. Total garbage. Do I have John Farr to blame for this one? Yes, another terrible recommendation, Farr! Nominated for eleven French Césars, sweet Jesus!

Dick Brody gets it right: “‘Elle’ sets up a house of cards that trivializes and—in the guise of earnest dramatic attention—pathologizes Michèle’s pleasures by embedding them in her own peculiar, almost impossibly exceptional life experience, in circumstances that, despite the sobriety of the drama, turn the character into a muffled mockery, an unwitting freak show … Verhoeven is uninterested in Michèle except as a tool for his problem set, for his message mechanism, for his facile issue-mongering, issue-muddying provocation.”

Tight for a 63-year-old woman

The Tragedy of the Commons

From Eleanor Randolph’s interview on Booknotes:

“… the old saying in the Soviet days was, ‘What's mine is mine, what's yours is yours and what's ours is nobody's.’”

Read:

The Tragedy of the Commons — Garrett Hardin

Today Is The Greatest Day I've Ever Known

A cover of “Today” by Fruit Bats that is vastly better than the original:

Movies Watched -- The Child (2005)

In French. 96 minute running time. This was completely absurd. Bruno is a 20-year-old Belgian kid with blue eyes and blonde hair who looks like a surfer dude and spends his time stealing and lying … he has an improbably beautiful girlfriend with amazing bones who has just had his boy child (L’enfant), but Bruno, who is also an enfant, has the bright idea to sell the baby for quick cash, this is the kind of a guy he is … it’s just so silly. This got the Palme D’Or, but only because they give it solely to French language movies, and there was nothing else made in 2005 in French.

John Farr is to blame for this bum reco: “we realize these kids have no positive examples to draw on in making decisions, and that by circumstance, adulthood has been thrust on them well before they're ready for it” … oh spare me, John.

Je m'appelle Jimmy

Movies Watched -- The Hustler (1961)

135 minute running time so at least 35 minutes too long … not a feel-good picture … gambling (pool sharks), alcoholism, love and desperate women (what would now be called a “co-dependent” relationship) … stars Paul Newman when he was peak handsome (age 35, looked younger) and George C. Scott (pre-Buck Turgidson) … way too long and a major downer, I can’t recommend this one, just read the script instead (which is good).

Yeah, percentage players die broke too, don't they, Bert?

Ruby Ridge Roadblock

Jon Ronson on Booknotes:

“… it [was] at that roadblock that the militia movement really began in the United States. This became the touchstone. Timothy McVeigh visited Randy Weaver's cabin a couple of years later. And -- because the government had become just what the conspiracy theorists have always said the government was, out of control, determined to destroy the lives of simple people who wanted to live free. The government had fitted into that stereotype. They became the monsters that the extremists always said that they were.”

Ain't No Consolation Prize

Lucie Silvas with “Black Jeans” … I dig it:

No One To Call Mine

Dominique Fils-Aimé with “You Left Me” … again using the pop sound to mask the dark lyrics, I dig it:

Movies Watched -- Tetro (2008)

127 minute running time so at least 30 to 40 minutes too long … this was terrible, I hated it… a Francis Ford Coppola self-funded vanity piece … I like Vinnie Gallo’s movies so someone recommended I watch this one where he’s an actor instead of the writer director producer, etc., but that was an awful idea.

Peter Rainer correctly wrote that it is “an inchoate mass of half-baked (and sometimes blackened) Oedipal dramaturgy … whenever Coppola goes into his indie-outsider dance, he stumbles badly.”

Kyle Smith correctly calls the movie a “frazzled, fractured monster” and writes, “Having passed through the phases of Interesting Apprentice, Mad Genius, Chastened Bankrupt and Shameless Wage Slave, Coppola at 70 may be the world’s oldest student filmmaker.”

Marjorie Baumgarten correctly writes, “… judging by the narrative flabbiness of [the] film, it might be possible to conclude that the Sturm and Drang of answering to one’s backers is not necessarily a bad thing for the overall artistic process.”

Peter Bradshaw wrote the best review of all: “a self-indulgent mess … it is laboured, massively implausible, excruciatingly self-important and really quite staggeringly boring in the way only a deeply personal film from a deeply important film-maker can be.”

She is 18 years old, like you

Perhaps That Was A Mistake

I love the typically British understatement:

MacDONALD: I was very surprised to hear General Westmoreland tell me that he had not studied the Indochina War, because he ...

LAMB: He never did?

MacDONALD: Apparently not. And I liked him; I admired him. You know, I don't want to say anything just hurtful to him, but it did surprise me that he had not studied this, because after all, he was fighting the same people and the same general, and they had fought the French for nine years. So I asked him, actually, if they had studied it at Ft. Leavenworth or at the war college and they hadn't. And so I think perhaps that was a mistake.