Coffee and Cigarettes

Jarmusch’s latest is a collection of short films featuring people sitting around, for the most part enjoying the titular drug-delivery mechanisms.   As Jarmusch puts it, the film is shot in black (“coffee”) and white (“cigarettes”).   He’s shot these comic vignettes over the years, with the oldest dating back to 1986.   Most of the famous and near-famous actors and musicians play versions of themselves.   Bill Murray meets the rappers RZA and GZA; Cate Blanchett visits with her punk rock cousin, also played by Blanchett, etc., etc.   Not every sketch works but at their best they make interesting cultural observations as they allow us to observe various types of humans interacting.

- Jun 4, 2004

The Saddest Music in the World

This completely mad film is the first and only that I’ve seen by Guy Maddin, the noted Canadian independent.   Often we go to a film hoping to see something that we’ve never seen before, and just as often we’re frustrated.   Not this time.   This very funny comedy/musical/melodrama is an original, although it’s designed to look like an old film: the feel of German expressionism is evoked by the stylized sets (which Maddin designs and helps build).   It’s largely in B&W with brief segments of Technicolor.   Everything is a bit grainy and targeted areas of the frame are overexposed.   It stars Isabella Rosellini as a Depression-era beer company owner in Winnipeg (“the world capital of sorrow”) who sponsors a competition to determine which of the world’s countries boasts the saddest music.

- May 27, 2004 

Young Adam

In the words of actress Tilda Swinton, David Mackenzie’s latest film is about “the crisis of the alienated intellectual” and “the whole question of spiritual loneliness”.   It features Ewan McGregor in a fine performance as a barge-worker on the canals of Scotland circa 1960.   We learn that it was not always thus: once he was an experimental writer who in frustration drowned his typewriter and ran off to work on the barge.   As the film begins he discovers a woman’s body in the harbor, and the film comes to be about the ways in which his alienation affects the decisions he makes in response to the events that follow her death.   Swinton gives an excellent performance as the barge-owner.   Highly recommended.   Based on the novel by Alexander Trocchi.   Music by David Byrne.

--May 20, 2004

The Agronomist

Demme’s latest is a documentary on Jean Dominique, the founder of Haiti’s first free radio station, Radio Haiti-Inter.   As a radio journalist Dominique was the voice of the democracy movement in Haiti until he was assassinated in 2000.   However, he always thought of himself as merely an agronomist, a man of the people, the farmers.   He loved film and was inspired in particular by the French New Wave.   Demme, who’s long been interested in Haiti, has made a stirring and instructive film.   In particular we learn of longstanding U.S. efforts to undermine and subvert democracy in Haiti (although the Democratic administrations are depicted as being better on human rights than the Republican).   Although it ends before current events, the film is relevant in that the Haitian democracy movement has recently been dealt a perhaps crushing blow, now that Aristide has been deposed by the wealthy, Duvalier-linked “opposition” (with its enthusiastic backing from the Bush Administration).

- May 13, 2004

AKA

Duncan Roy’s latest film tells its story in “simultaneous triptych”, i.e. three panels.   Set in late-70s England, it’s the autobiographical story of a young man, gay and working-class, who impersonates an aristocrat’s son and is able to infiltrate British high society, which is depicted as utterly hateful.   The three-panel approach allows for us to observe telling details of the setting and to watch characters who are not the center of attention.   For the most part, all three panels take place in the same time and space (although sometimes they’re subtly staggered).   However, sometimes one panel shows the ongoing story while the others work as counterpoint, showing something that happened in the past or in another place.   Roy doesn’t use the technique as a gimmick but rather to amplify the themes.

- May 5, 2004