Christopher Nolan, USA, 2010, 148 min.

This film is a spectacle. Momentous in its visuals, intriguing in its structure, surprisingly poignant in its characters. Its a big-budget film, slick solid and well-paced with a great original screenplay and high-caliber acting.

After flirting with greatness in his Batman films, Nolan has finally done it. He has made a Great film. I am not a Nolan-fanboy, blindly obsessed with anything he makes, but for 2 1/2 hours I knew what it was like to be one.

This film wins the award “Best Fight Scene” for Joseph Gordon-Levitt flying around a hotel in twisting aerial combat.

As you probably have seen, this website has become a little stagnant. Not because I haven’t been watching and thinking about films, but because I have a lack of confidence with what I have been putting online.

I have decided to rethink how I am approaching this website. People don’t really care about every movie I watch (to be honest, I don’t either), so I am going to discontinue the “Recently Watched” entry at the top of the page.

I am also going to change how I write my reviews and how I decide which film to review. I plan to find a way to distinguish this website from the sea of similar ones.

With LCD’s help, a design face-lift will be coming soon. But more importantly, we are hoping the content will make you want to revisit more and more.

UPDATE: I have decided I will mostly do two types of posts for this site. Film reviews will be the main posts. These reviews will be much shorter than I used to write. No one wants to read 500 words on most films.

To compensate I will rate films with a letter grade and for fun each film will get an award of my choosing. I hope to make these insightful and interesting and post them much more often.

At the end of the year I will collect all of the awards from that years films, adding a few more, and post the results in our yearly award show.

The second type of posts will be essays. These will be more detailed in-depth discussions of various film-related topics. They may cover one film, or many, or something else entirely. Those will be posted less frequently, but I hope to keep the content very memorable.

I don’t want to wait for LCD’s redesign, which I am sure is forthcoming, so I am going to start this change today with the above post for the last film I watched.

Enjoy!

Claire Denis, France, 1999, 93 min.

A group of young soldiers train in the desert of Africa. They are French Legionnaires, and in director Claire Denis’s hands, their training becomes a poem. The men go through their days exercising, doing chores and going into the African city at night. It feels so real that it is hard to imagine that the director was never a French Legionnaire herself.

The soldier’s lives, although physically demanding, are shown in such a peacful and gentle way that you can understand why their sargeant, the narrater, looks back upon this time as his happiest. Galoup, played to perfection by Denis Levant, is quiet and brooding. He is good at what he does, but is starting to age and the lack of recognition from his commander, although not exactly a problem for him, is something that weighs on his mind.

Through his narration we learn that his time in the Legionnaires will come to an end, and when a new recruit arrives, we see his hatred grow and know that this soldier will be his undoing. Why does he hate Sentain? He’s young and lanky, and looks weak compared to the other muscular solders. But everyone takes a liking to him, and after an act of heroism (shown off-screen so as not to break the gentle mood of the film), Galoup’s commander takes a shine to him as well.

Galoup sees Sentain easily interacting with the other soldiers, and how Sentain has an equally easy time outside the camp in the city, in the dance clubs and with women. Galoup doesn’t have an easy time socializing, and this jelousy grows over time. When an altercation between the two finally happen, Galoup reacts in his usual calm and thoughtful way. But what he does is so wrong that it causes him to lose his place in the Legionnaires.

After leaving, we know he will be a fish out of water. The military lifestyle was a perfect fit for his personality. In a hotel, he still makes his bed in the efficient and tidy military manner of a French Legionnaire.

In the film’s final scene at a dance club Galoup finally allows himself a moment of real expression. Free from the prisons that he has made for himself. It is a moment that is jarring against the lyricism of the rest of the film, but perfectly suited as a catharsis for both Galoup and the audience.

Chantal Akerman, Belgium, 1975, 201 min.

Due to the release of this film on Criterion DVD, I am publishing a review I wrote many years ago. It’s poorly written, but my viewpoints still stand.

This film focuses on three days in the life of its title character, Jeanne Dielman. She’s a Belgium housewife/single mother who takes gentleman callers into her flat to get her income. The film at over three hours, is told in a flat repetitive style that lends itself to the daily life of this particular housewife. The camera holds on the actress, Delphine Seyrig, as she performs menial tasks like cooking, cleaning, folding, sewing, etc. Most things are shown in their entirety, and after only a few minutes, one gets a real sense of how this woman lives.

The film opens midway through the first day, and we see Jeanne’s rituals slowly play out, very deliberately. She has a specific way and method she does things. It seems like she has been doing everything this way for years. She starts off cooking, and cleaning, turning the lights on and off as she leaves each room. Its all very systematic. Soon the doorbell rings and she lets in an older man. They proceed to the bedroom. The camera holds outside for a moment. At this point we know what’s happening inside, so we don’t need to see it. When they come out, he pays her and leaves. Other than the prostitution thing, she seems to be a normal, boring housewife (no offense intended).

The day goes on and we meet her teenaged son. He comes home, and dinner is served. They eat in silence, exchanging few words. In fact, the dinner scene is very effective. Jeanne eats her soup like a machine. Slowly sipping spoon after spoon until her bowl is empty. The only thing she says to her son is to stop reading at the table. He does and the meal continues.

The rest of her day consists of dishes, sewing, and saying goodnight to her son. She gets into bed, the lights go out, and a moment later the lights go on. She has slept the night and has risen early to prepare breakfast and do the other mundane things that need doing.

The next day is almost exactly the same. Its basically another hour of us watching her in her daily rituals. This repetition serves to solidify her systematic life in the viewers mind. Almost exactly the same things happen as did the previous day. This time, we get to see her morning errands when she goes out to the stores to buy food and sewing materials, stops for coffee, and arrives home in time for another gentleman caller. The dinner scene is repeated again, and Jeanne tells her son to stop reading at the table once more.

This time, however, she has trouble with the dinner. Something happened with the potatoes and it took her longer to cook them. Since we are so used to her systemic life, this little change comes as some sort of strange blow. It makes one feel uneasy. There is no real reaction from the two characters, but the awkwardness seems all that more apparent because of it.

There is some back story revealed about her husband during a creepy conversation she has with her son when she says goodnight to him, and this is something to note about because it may tie into the ending depending on how you look at it. He talks about how when he first learned about sex from a friend, he thought of how his father did it to his mother, and how he would have nightmares and scream for his father to stop. His friend had described the penis as a sword, and the son equated this with pain. He didn’t want to see his mother hurt by his father. After this strange conversation, she goes to bed and so ends day two.

Day three is where things start to change. Again, the acts she does are repetitive ad nauseam, but little things start to go wrong. She gets shoe polish on her sleeve, she forgets to button a button on her robe, the coffee she makes doesn’t come out right. Nothing major, but again all these little things seem very major in the life of Jeanne Dielman, so major that the audience probably feels it as well.

While she is out doing her errands, things deteriorate even more. She can’t find the button she needs to fix her sons jacket, her usual at seat the coffee shop is taken, and the waitress she always gets has gone home for the day. She feels so out of sorts that she even tries to reach out to a shopkeeper by telling her a bit about her life, which we know she would never normally do. When she gets home and has to baby sit her neighbors baby for a while, it won’t stop crying every time she tries to pick it up.

This is a good time to start talking about the sound design of this film. It has no music, but even on the horrible bootleg I was watching, the sound was loud, and accurate. The clicking of the silverware, the hissing of the stove… all these everyday noises are very very prominent. The above-mentioned baby sounds almost demonic. Its very unsettling and it shows how increasingly unsettled Jeanne herself is getting.

The climax of the film is given as much weight as some of the little things that go wrong in her day. It is such a huge moment, yet it is told in the way all those small moments are told. If you blink, you may miss it. But that is life. Most times the big events in ones life happen very quickly, and are surrounded by the dull boredom of our dally existence.

SPOILER

Suddenly we are in the midst of her having sex with one of her clients. Until this time, we could picture her quietly and unemotionally doing her job until its finished, just like most of her housework. This time, however, she appears to be getting pleasure out of the act, but not wanting to at the same time. She tries to push the man off of her, but he continues and it appears that they both orgasm. After this, she gets dressed while he dozes on the bed. Then, without warning, she takes a pair of her sewing scissors and stabs him in the neck, killing him. The final shot of the film consists of her sitting at the table. Not showing any emotion or doing anything. For once, at peace.

END SPOILER

Over all, this film is probably more fun to read and write about than it is to watch. But its not supposed to be fun. Its supposed to make an impact. There are things you can only get from the film by watching it in its entirety. Is it feminist? A lot of people call it that. It is a commentary on the life of the quintessential housewife. The ending definitely has feminist overtones. One can look at it as the only way for a housewife to get out of this vicious cycle of repetitiveness. It is harsh… but its also true.

http://www.youtube.com/user/dvinitystudios

I enjoy criticizing other people’s films, but here is my chance to give back. This link contains all of my short films which are of varying quality. Some even have LCD in them!

Please watch and enjoy.