thelasttwohundredyears

Sadly, IMDb does not allow updates to its FAQs for films from experienced and knowledgeable film fans.

Nevertheless, to the question of "any recommendations for films like it," I would add early Russ Meyer work. Surely the settings and cars and women and music and moral relativity caching a truer survivalist instinct found increasingly full (if not necessarily rawer) expression in films such as _Faster Pussycat, Kill Kill!" _Touch of Evil_ perhaps influenced B films more than A (and B, really, almost always determines A), but still it's hard not to think that Godard wouldn't have seen or had in mind _TOE_ when making _A bout de souffle_.

Part of the technical brilliance of _TOE_ is that is begins with a long take, but from that scene on, it is relentless short cuts. With film stock, no wonder studios hated Welles. He could do what he wanted back at the Mercury Theatre, but any Hollywood chief would have gacked completely at a 1hr50min film containing what must be a hundred separate scenes or more. This approach alone--of countless brief, intense scenes--makes the film daring and avant-garde and foreshadows the digital world to come. Other filmmakers would make quick use of many of the tropes and motifs and suggestive scenes Welles offered in _TOE_, but it would take a long time before some of his really individual methods became standard.

Henri is an orphan boy at a convent who, once the convent in Quebec (as countless did and have, in recent history) closes down, must leave the cloister and fend for himself--find work, find love, and find a way to pass on the gift he received there.

Thematically, the film is a long meditation on sight and perception that can branch off through many characters, from the ingenu titular character with a facility for illumination, to the turbanned business owner who can't get his educational credentials recognized, to the blind porn theatre ticket wicket girl who can "read" palms, and on and on. The sentient viewer will enjoy how the impressions and observations regarding viewing build up during the film.

This is a delightful/charmant film. Part of what makes it great is what usually makes great films great--tremendous supporting performances. It's a pity the role of blind Helene wasn't actually played by a blind person, but I guess we're so over that now, cavilling about such things. Oscarssowhite lasted what, 10 minutes? Accuse me of slacktivism, but the film would have been the more powerful, and if you tell me that a sightless person can't act sightful, but only a sightful person can act sightless, well. . . . Major, major opportunity missed, by having a sighted person play a blind one, instead of an actual blind person who gains some sight. (I've still never seen _Philadelphia_, and I'm sure it's a great movie, but if an actual gay person portrayed the protagonist, I'd probably see it; someday we'll get to the point at which you'd actually _lose_ money if you had straights play gays, but I guess that's generations down the road.) For a film that is supposed to challenge and overturn clichés, it does (charmingly), not just that. It tries to fight against its own clichés. But. . .it's 80% great, and the last 20% is so Dickensian/Hugoian and backloaded with clichés, that the film disappoints the eager and committed and devoted viewer; the director, having gone to so much hard work early in the film, completely lets us down and submits to total cliché in the end. It's understandable, since obviously the end was written first, and that's how you usually go about these things. But the huge sag between the early parts, when the director is thinking, and the end, when the director is on auto-pilot, is hugely and dismayingly palpable, especially for a film with such great pacing.

But there's great poetry and earnest effort in this film, still the same. I would like to highlight three excellent features of this film, that you will NOT regret having watched:

1) There's a loving and accurate dedication to accurate scenes here. So perfect and exact is the attention to this detail, that you forget completely that (there being no budget) there are no cars or anything, despite the film being set in Montreal--major triumph here. Anyone, in Quebec, or . . . Poland. . . or anywhere, will get it. Yeah, everything gets too set-piece, but the director employs colour and pacing excellently.

2) There are several comedic scenes, but a few are terrifically set up, and they also pass translation--I know, because, well, I speak both of those languages(and they're the only ones I know well)--so pretty good translations, on the whole, and how many movies have you watched when you just know the translations are off and you get distracted because they are so off?--here's a "foreign" film in which the translations might help and not hinder your enjoyment. If you're going to have comic moments in a sentimental film, you might as well make those comic moments good, and this film makes them great.

3) The soundtrack. Honestly since _Casino_ I cannot remember a film soundtrack having such an impact on me. In _Casino_, it's Scorcese playing the faves of his youth and basically mocking his own self-indulgent film, but here, it's a director actually marrying music to the score of his film and enriching nearly every scene with music, from popular to classical. Outstanding.

My DVD box tells us to buy it because of _Forrest Gump_ comparisons, and I guess those are there. But there is a difference, I think. Normally American studios scout the world over for old ideas they never thought of but can recreate, with money. In this case, a Quebecois director--and let it never not be said that no people, anywhere in North America--allo Police!--are more obsessed with America than the Quebecois--did take a Gumpian story and try to renew and refresh it and in some ways make a copy. Still, (lacking money) rather than simply compare what you just can't compare to, this film actually does extend the narrative and actually build upon other films. For that and for all this movie does, I'd say you wouldn't be disappointed if you saw it.

Mickey (Philip Seymour Hoffman), an outsider and man of uncertain means, finds that his stepson, Leon, has died in a construction accident. As an outsider, Mickey tries to work with reality in Devil's Pocket, Pa. His wife (Christina Hendricks), however, knows the hood, and feels that her son's death was not an accident.

Mickey loves Jeanie, so he's willing to get his underground buddies to help him calm Jeanie down; besides, he has money troubles of his own.

Along the way, town tribune and echo of sentiment/voice of morality Richard Shelburn (Richard Jenkins) haphazardly, but ultimately self-interestedly, connects the dots.

This is one brutal take on the true America—cash only, lacking health care or basic human dignity or unions or any sense of community beyond cheap whisky. Futureless Leon apes DeNiro like any al-Quaeda fighter. Florida and more guns are the only hope for 'Bird'; Jeanie glimpses only an unbuilt plot the rotting Shelburn is a skeleton upon. With a truly telling fact, the movie isn't even shot where it's about, Devil's Pocket, Pa. Actually, it was shot in New York—not even the desperate people it was about could get any jobs out of it.

A curious factor about this movie, and pretty well any other ones, is that all American reviewers seem to want to judge it on its "comedy" quotient. In other words, if it doesn't make you laugh (laugh at the killing and the poverty and racism and hopelessness and lack of education, and so on), then it just ain't doggone no good of a fillum. From the Marx Brothers' "why I oughta" to _I Love Lucy_ to now, some Americans should query just what they're supposed to find so funny about hurting or killing often defenseless others (women, children, non-whites). There's a moment or two of dark humour in _God's Pocket_, but those aren't the moments that are supposed to define the movie. For American reviewers, however, they are, because Americans can't see their own destitution in any ways but laughter or money—normal human emotion/sentiments simply don't apply, or constitute currency.

Here's a hint, or a tip, for those who really want to follow this film, but are too bored. The tortured drunk Shelburn isn't just put there for comic effect at the beginning, and the voice-overs later aren't there just for hapless loser commentary at the end. Americans know that they can't be un-American, even if it means losing to the rest of the world. In life and love, and in the town he owns, this is Shelburn's conundrum, and he attacks it with words, drink, a booty call, and probably being beaten to death.

I don't know; I don't see how anyone, outside of America, could call this anything but a pretty good and ambitious, if hopeless, film.