The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2022: Made in U.S.A. (1966), directed by Jean-Luc Godard

 

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: 'As Tears Go By' by Marianne Faithfull

       This only seemed appropriate, didn’t it? Although Godard isn’t a huge name on this blog, we covered Alphaville a while back and that’s it, he was most certainly a huge name in the world of film at large, easily one of the most influential artists in the medium next to fellow legends like Alfred Hitchcock and Sergei Eisenstein. Generations of filmmakers were inspired by Godard, inspired by those who had been inspired, and so on and on. His death leaves a hole in the fabric of cinema, and we are all the worse for it. So for the very last film of the Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2022, let’s return to the work of Godard and see what the auteur has in store for us.

       Released in 1966, Made in U.S.A. was written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard and produced by Georges de Beauregard through Rome Paris Films, Anouchka Films and S.E.P.I.C., based on the film The Big Sleep directed by Howard Hawks, the novel ‘The Big Sleep’ by Raymond Chandler and ‘The Jugger’ by Donald E. Westlake. Godard muse Anna Karina stars as Paula Nelson, a journalist who has arrived in Paris to investigate the death of her former lover Richard. A heart attack, the official report says, but it becomes clear that Richard wasn’t felled by a coronary. There’s a mystery afoot, one that involves assassinations, political conspiracies, cover ups and Communist Parties, and Paula intends to get to the bottom of it.

       Made In U.S.A. is labeled as a thriller, a mystery, and a comedy, and I guess if you were feeling generous you could call it that. There are certainly absurd things that in other films would be considered comedic, like the reveal of Richard’s corpse, but which never cross the border into actual humor. There are elements which could leave the audience thrilled if the film ever had stakes, and the plot does involve a mystery, although the film is so free-wheeling with time and place that the audience struggles to care whether it’s solved or not, if it even was solved by the end. Really Made In U.S.A. is more a movie about people talking that occasionally has something happening on screen, and whether or not you find that interesting depends on if you find talk of French revisionism, the pointlessness of language and circular conversations about whether someone knows something interesting. I don’t, so this whole experience was akin to pulling teeth.

       Which isn’t to say that Godard is a bad filmmaker. He’s a very bold filmmaker, and there are things he does in film, the overt symbolism, breaking the 4th wall to have the characters tell the audience what they’re doing, which must have been very striking in ‘66. Hell it’s very bold even today, even after the legion of imitators. It’s just as a film, as a story that was meant to engage me on an emotional level as well as an intellectual one, it dropped the ball. It was white noise in the shape of dialogue, and as time wore on I became less and less interested in moving forward. I’ve complained a lot about movies being a bit too long, but I think Made In U.S.A. proves that even a 90 minute film can drag in the right conditions.

       Just so that this isn’t a completely negative post though, I will say that I enjoyed Marianne Faithfull’s cameo. Great singer, and Godard knew enough to just let her sing at one point. Anna Karina was also fairly interesting as a lead actress, and I don’t just say that because of her smoldering sensuality. I believe this was the last of Godard’s film to feature Karina in the lead role, whether she was aging out of the prime movie roles or Godard just wanted a change I don’t know, but it was enough to make me want to check out the rest of her work.

       Made In U.S.A. does not get the recommendation. A shitty send-off to a famous director, but I’m in a shitty mood so this is the best we’re going to get. Those interested in a better example of Godard should perhaps check out Alphaville, or one of his other films that probably won’t get reviewed on this blog since they aren’t genre films. Otherwise I’ll see you next year for another 31 films that you’ve probably already seen or don’t care about. In the meantime ebay some candy, dress like a ghost, have sex with someone dressed as a ghost, whatever. Go nuts, it’s a holiday.

Happy Halloween!!!

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2020: Beauty and the Beast (1946), directed by Jean Cocteau

 

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "The Beast", by Fugees

    Fairy tales are a weird thing. Originally they served as a sort of medieval after school special, teaching kids things like ‘listen to instructions or you will fucking die’, or ‘don’t talk to strangers or you will fucking die’, and in particular ‘step parents aren’t your real parents and they will never love you’. Important life lessons in the days when getting a cold was a life-or-death scenario and 12 years old was considered the prime marrying age, but in modern times those lessons have become largely obsolete, and it’s nature as an oral tradition have likewise ceased to exist. We still keep ‘em around of course, but it’s less about what those stories teach these days than it is how we can spin them. What if Red Riding Hood was an anime? How about Snow White and the Seven Dwarves as a raunchy sex comedy? They have become as clay, molded and remolded a million times over, which would surely be a living hell if they were sentient. But they aren’t so whatever.

    Released in 1946 through DisCina, Beauty and the Beast was written and directed by French director Jean Cocteau in his third time behind the camera. An adaptation of Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s adaptation of the 1740 story by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve. Josette Day plays Belle, a beautiful young girl who is forced into domestic work by her horrible sisters when her family falls into financial troubles. One day her father goes into town on the prospect of riches he asks his daughters what they would like as gifts. Her sisters, being your standard gold diggers ask for jewelry and other luxuries, but Belle asks for but a single rose. Because she’s the protagonist you see, and being humble is very marketable.

    Well the deal falls through, and as the father makes the journey he is set upon by a great storm and ends up lost in a forest. Things seem grim, until he manages to stumble upon a mysterious castle. He is given a meal and a nice rest (although he never sees anyone do it), but when he picks a rose from the garden he is immediately set upon by the owner of the castle, known only as the Beast (played by Jean Marais). Beast condemns the man to death for the heinous crime of doing something innocuous that he couldn’t possibly know was wrong, but being a reasonable sort of guy he offers him a deal: Give me one of your daughters and you get to live. Which the father refuses to do, but Belle decides to sacrifice herself and sneaks off to the castle, because selflessness is also very marketable. So begins the cohabitation between the beautiful Belle and the fearsome Beast, but will this really be the nightmare she has been led to believe? Or is there a spark of something more there? 

    As someone who grew up during the so-called Disney Renaissance of the 1990’s, it’s hard not to make comparisons between this Beauty and the Beast and the animated adaptation put out by DIsney during that time. Especially as there are certain elements that feature in both works, such as Beast’s leonine traits and a rival for Belle’s affections who are kind of ‘sexual assaulty’ (Gaston for Disney and Avenant in the Cocteau). While there may be an attitude among some to side with the older film just because it’s older, or because it’s closer to the source material, but in watching this film I found that Disney’s changes actually made sense. Taking out the whole wicked sisters angle was good, keeps things from feeling too derivative, and making Belle into a bookworm gave her some characteristics beyond ‘meek maiden’. More importantly though, where the Disney adaptation rings true is its focus on building the relationship between Belle and Beast. I mean let’s face it, Beauty and the Beast is ultimately a really creepy story, and the only way to make it palatable is to tone down the death threats, extortion and Stockholm Syndrome aspects. Which Cocteau’s version doesn't really do at all; If anything he makes Beast feel like even more of a creepy stalker than before, and he spends more time making the two walk slowly down hallways in silence than he does building a solid foundation for a relationship. She pities him sure, in one of the few conversations they have where he’s not pressuring her to marry him, but I don’t think pity is the same thing as love. Plus there’s this whole thing with Avenant and Beast near the end of the film which just comes across as weird and maybe a little gross. I don’t know if it was in the original Beaumont story, but it feels awkward and jams up the flow of the scene in my opinion, so I think Cocteau would have been better off changing it. The movie’s nearly a century old by this point though, so he might want to hurry up.

    Where Cocteau excels at in this film is in capturing the essence of the fairy tale, and really playing into the duality of the thing. The living furniture is the pinnacle of that, both elegant and grotesque, but really the entire castle is locked within contradictions. Belle’s bedroom which has been overtaken by greenery, elegant architecture marred with images of dragons and monsters, and so on. This is also apparent in his use of shadowplay; the darkness is so intense that I wouldn’t be surprised if he had physically painted things black in order to draw any potential light out of the scene, like the inky void in space that is the dining area, save for a fireplace and tiny Edwardian table. All of it serves to heighten the surreality of the story, of the fantastical coming against the visceral. When Belle first explores the castle she doesn’t walk down the halls she glides, and this isn’t out of place because she has stepped into the dream.

    I also appreciate the fact that Cocteau injected some humor here and there. He pays a lot of lip service to the innocence of children at the beginning of the film, and I believe he recognized that, as a children’s story, the film needed a bit of levity to break up the sturm und drang. A lesson that constantly needs to be relearned in this day and age. It also gives the sister characters something to do, quite frankly, as they’re largely superfluous compared to Avenant or even the brother character Ludovico.

    Nothing much to say about the acting. I found Josette Day’s performance as Belle to be fine, she was arguably a bit too old to be playing a maiden at that point but she got the point of Belle across. I really wasn’t all that impressed with Jean Marais as the Beast however. To his credit the Beast makeup requires him to do a lot of acting with his eyes and when he’s not talking he’s not too far removed from Lon Chaney Jr.’s Wolf-Man, but then he opens his mouth and his high-pitched, raspy voice marrs the whole thing. Combined with his whole ‘marry me or I’ll die of loneliness’ schtick he comes across as one of those guys who complains that the gamer girl bath water he ordered isn’t 100% authentic. Neither looking or sounding like someone you’d actually want to be in a relationship, outside of certain circles of the internet.

    Ultimately though I will give Beauty and the Beast the recommendation. Finding an adaptation of a fairy tale isn’t exactly difficult, but I think Cocteau’s unsettling, avant garde direction gives his film a unique quality that sets it apart from others. For those who want their children’s stories with a bit of an edge to it, or are interested in seeing the early years of one of France’s great filmmakers, this is a film worth checking out this Halloween. Or on a date, but I don’t think there are that many dates going on right now.

Delicatessen (1991), directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet & Marc Caro

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Meat Grinder" by Madvillain

       It’s always something of a treat when you see a couple of creative people just click together on a project. Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor for example: Great on their own, and absolute dynamite when put together. Or Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, although I’d give anybody credit for hanging out with Jerry Lewis for any length of time. People who may not be friends per se, may not even like each other, yet they are not only understand each other but elevate each other to heights they may not have achieved on their own. It’s a fascinating thing to see, and as someone who is often trapped in his own head and unable to get any creative writing done, thoughts racing ahead of my ability to act upon them, it’s something I’d like to experience myself at some point. Of course some of those famous pairs ended up hating each other, but I figure if you go in hating yourself you won’t have anything to worry about.

Those of you who understand where I’m going with this might not agree with the idea that French-born filmmakers Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro fit this description. They only really worked on three films together after all, one of which was Alien: Resurrection of all things, and Jeunet’s most successful period both critically and commercially didn’t come until afterwards, while Caro’s film career is basically non-existent as far as I can tell. Not much ‘elevating’ going on. Yet City of Lost Children was a big, Ron Pearlman sized treat, and I feel like I’ve name dropped these two enough times over the years that it’s finally time to cover the film that introduced me to these two in the first place. Years before the blog got rolling in those halcyon days when hulu actually had stuff you could watch for free, I stumbled upon a strange little film by the name of Delicatessen, and decided then and there to never shut the hell up about it. And now we’re here.

Released in 1991, co-written by Gilles Adrien, Delicatessen was the feature-length directorial debut of Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. France, and possibly the entire world, has been reduced to a blighted, miserable wreck, much like your average town in the Rust Belt. Meat has become scarce, and rather than switching to a vegetable-based diet, the landlord of an apartment building (who happens to be a butcher and the owner of a delicatessen) and his tenants have arrived at the most sensible solution: Lure folks in with the promise of room and board as the maintenance man, murder them in the night and cannibalize their bodies. Such is the fate intended for Stan Louison, ex-circus man, eternal optimist, played by Jeunet regular Dominique Pinon, and at his best when pan-fried and served with soup or a fresh garden salad. However poor Louison is not without allies in this den of wolves; Julie, the butcher’s daughter (played by Marie-Laure Dougnac) is determined that this handyman will not suffer the fate of the others before him. He’s gonna get out, and this apartment building is never going to be the same. Partially because of the severe water damage.

Delicatessen was one of those films that, in hindsight, seated as it was in that collection of weird surrealistic fantasy and science fiction films that have since become my wheelhouse. Our tenants are as motley a crew of misfits as you’d ever see, even if they weren’t cannibals . There’s the woman plagued with voices in her head who plots out elaborate suicides, the brothers who make those little cylinders that moo when you flip them, the pistol packing postman, all folk that would seem right at home in your average mental institution. It’s also nice to see the ‘debut’ appearances of several actors that we would later see in City of Lost Children and Amèlie, like Dominique Pinon, Rufus (who played one of the cow box brothers here and Amèlie’s father) and the late Ticky Holgado. Pinon especially, who so projects this aura of the everyman schlub that it allows him to slip from the likable clown Louison here, to the moronic minions in City, to the misogynist loser in Amèlie without ever skipping a beat. 

Despite that, things never quite come together as it feels they should with this movie. There’s the core of good satire there, that in a time of crisis these folk would literally kill friends and family rather than give up the morning sausage, but it never really comes together in a way that’s completely satisfying. The setting feels a bit too self-contained for the world they’ve established, which makes plot points that happen later feel too convenient. Louison never feels like enough of the doe-eyed optimist to counteract the negativity around him, and while things move towards that direction it feels less like his worldview being challenged and more things happening to him. Which is fine if he’s more of a plot device, a catalyst, and Julie was the main character, but it never definitively moves in that direction either? Delicatessen is a movie full of people moving in a straight line it seems like, they're the exact same person when they come out as they were when they went in. Which I guess doesn’t matter if they all died an agonizingly slow death from starvation after all this, but then that’s true of everything.

Thinking about how to wrap things up, and my mind instantly flashed with comparisons to Jabberwocky, Terry Gilliam’s first proper movie outside of the Monty Python umbrella. Ok films, films that have that spark of something unique that make you perk up your ears and take notice, but trip before the finish line. A prelude to something better, in hindsight. So it was with Gilliam, who proved himself a few years later with Time Bandits and so it was Caro and Jeunet, though to this day it unfortunately has been their last. Delicatessen gets the recommendation, and maybe this short, barely coherent ‘review’ will be what you need to get interested in the works of Jeunet, just as this film was all those years ago. Or at least it might slightly tip the search algorithm in his favor, because apparently he’s hard up for movie-making funds at the moment and needs all the help he can get. I dunno, the internet doesn’t make sense.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2019: Alphaville (1965), directed by Jean-Luc Godard

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "Computer Age", by Neil Young

       Of all the filmmakers that made up what film historians now call the French New Wave, it seems to me that none can quite top Jean-Luc Godard. Francois Truffaut had his successes, as well as a fantastic book on Alfred Hitchcock, but he also stank up the joint with his adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Louis Malle had a fruitful career as well, but I can’t say the work of his that I’ve covered (My Dinner with Andre and his segments in Spirits of the Dead) really blew me away. Godard, however, seems like the romantic of the group. Full of big ideas, big emotions, who unabashedly attacked film like a painter would attack a canvas. His films can be very polarizing, in fact I think the trope of weird arthouse cinema was in part inspired by him, but if one defines the purpose of cinema as a means of self-expression, of eliciting an emotional response from the audience, then Godard’s place in the annals of history is assured. If nothing else you’ve got to give him a smidge of respect for inspiring other famous directors like Martin Scorsese, and that smidge is just enough to buy him the penultimate place in this year’s Marathon. What a shock, eh? Did I leave you breathless?

       At 24.17 Oceanic Time, in perhaps another galaxy entirely Ivan Johnson, a reporter for the Figaro-Pravda newspaper in what is known as the Outer Countries, arrives in the city of Alphaville. Alphaville is a technological marvel, a society whose every aspect is managed by an enormous super-computer known as Alpha 60, the invention of the city’s chief figure, Professor Leonard Von Braun. Sounds pretty cool at first, until you learn a while back Alpha 60 obtained consciousness, and his views on humanity has transformed Alphaville into a mindless dystopian state, where the toughs at Civil Control routinely arrest and execute people for illogical thinking, every other lady seems to have been branded and brainwashed into soulless comfort women, and words like ‘love’ and ‘why’ are practically nonexistent. Poetry, music, art, theater, all relics of those inferior civilizations that aren’t ruled by a couple hundred pounds of psychopathic silicon. All things that Ivan Johnson enjoys, being from the Ouer Countries (New York to be specific). Except his name isn’t Ivan Johnson, newspaper reporter, it’s Lemmy Caution, secret agent. And his job isn’t to write an article on Alpha 60’s creator Leonard Von Braun, it’s to kill him.

       A science fiction film noir set in the future  whose principal theme deals with modern society’s over-reliance on machines to the detriment of its humanity. Throw in a megacorporation and Jean-Luc Godard would have preempted the cyberpunk genre by 2 decades. Not exactly of course, I don’t think the internet was even science fiction in 1965, but it’s fascinating to watch this and see the roots of films like Blade Runner. Particularly the first half of the film, dealing with Lemmy’s investigation and culture shock dealing with this weird ass society, and you’re subconsciously waiting for him to pull his gun out and gun down some Replicants. I love sci-fi and I love film noir, hardboiled detectives, femme fatales the works, so the more I can get that combo in me the happier I am.

       The second half isn’t as tight. Keeping in mind that certain nuances in the script are going to be lost in translation, although I’m sure the people at Kino Lorber do great work, there’s a certain point where things just stop making sense. Not in a ‘suspension of disbelief’ kind of way, I legit couldn’t understand what the fuck the characters were going on about. Conveniently enough this also where Godard starts getting ‘artsy’, like suddenly cutting into a dark room where Lemmy and Natacha (our love interest) pose around each other, or ‘hey these 5 seconds are going to be photo negative, enjoy!’ The exact kind of thing that you would expect get mocked if the name on the poster wasn’t Godard, and maybe still then. Things which I wouldn’t necessarily mind given the kinds of film that pass through here, but on a first impression comes across as pretentious. Why is a computer talking about becoming a tiger?

It’s also worth noting that there isn’t much of anything in the vein of special effects in this sci-fi movie. In fact if you had somehow stumbled upon it while channel surfing you wouldn’t be able to tell this is a science fiction movie at all until Alpha 60’s toad of a voice came up or someone mentioned the word galaxies. I think it works out fine, but if European science fiction tends to be about the ideas rather than the American position of the spectacle, then Alphaville might be the most European science fiction film ever made.

       I’m also not entirely sold on our main character, personally speaking. The stoic detective/investigator is a common trope in film noir, and I think that actor pulls that off well, but in the context of the film it seems a bit strange. After all, the entire point is that Alphaville is full of these robotic people and yet Lemmy doesn’t come across as any more emotional than any of the other characters. He’ll say things but he won’t express things. You could chalk that up to his nature as a secret agent, but it ends up having to force the issue somewhat at the end to give the larger cultural conflict between Alphaville and the Outer Countries some weight. 

       This is also another one of those movies that loves to use and reuse music stings, specifically a 2 second burst of swelling brass that will turn out to be a greater monster than Alpha 60. I don’t know if this would be a universal issue, but when I was watching it with headphones the horns were mixed so loud that I actually had to turn down the volume of the movie because it was physically painful. A tolerable experience if the context of the scene called for it, but of course if I’m writing about it. Godard apparently had an addiction because he constantly drops this cacophony in the film, even when it makes no sense to do so. Oh, you’ve got a 10 second scene of Lemmy showing pictures to passersby on the street. Better pretend this is a dramatic scene then! Just outright souring the viewing experience.

       Alphaville is a film that’s long been on the Marathon to-do list, and perhaps the expectations of what it could be ended up overshadowing what it actually is. It’s a fascinating film for the time though, a spiritual ancestor for properties like Blade Runner and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, and I think overall Godard managed to push some interesting ideas while still making an accessible movie. Which wasn’t always the case with his films, from what I’ve heard. It gets the recommendation, as well as the award for Easiest Halloween Costume. Forgo logic and pig out on candy and popcorn this Halloween instead.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2018: Amélie (2001), directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "Les Jours Tristes", by Yann Tiersen

       Destiny. Fate. Kismet. None of these ideas are ones that I ascribe to, personally, but it does seem like returning to the work of Jean-Pierre Jeunet was an inevitability. After all, with the way I talked up The City of Lost Children last year, and the way I’ve name dropped Jeunet in countless conversations that may or may not be recorded on this blog, and the fact that we’re digging into return guests this year, the stars seemed to align for this exact moment. Because this wasn’t just a chance to fill my quota, you see; it was the perfect opportunity to relieve myself of a movie-sized weight off my back. A film that has lingered in my to-watch queue for years now like a restless ghost, never quite getting its shoe in the door even as other passovers like Trollhunter and Nightcrawler eventually got their golden tickets and their chances to shine. Always a bridesmaid and never a bride as they say, and the fact that this was due to my own inability to commit was an endless source of annoyance. Well no more. Fuck that, we’re covering Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and we’re doing Amelie, and there’s not a damn thing anyone can do about it! So there!

       Smoothest. Paragraph. Ever.

       Released in 2001, four years after his work on the infamous trainwreck known as Alien Resurrection, Amelie is arguably Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s most famous work, which I base off of the fact that it’s the only one of his films that I’ve actually seen people besides me talk about. At the very least it is his most successful film since his debut, Delicatessen, receiving not only the Cèsar (France’s national film award) for Best Film and Best Director but also his only Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay and Best Foreign Language Film, and pulling in 174 million dollars on a 10 million dollar budget. It is also the first Jeunet film to not feature the talents of fellow Frenchman Marc Caro, the collaboration which produced Delicatessen and City of Lost Children and which was eventually brought to an end by Alien Resurrection (according to wikipedia). Instead we have Monsieur Guillaume Laurant, who co-wrote this film and would later co-write Jeunet’s latest film, 2013’s The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet. It’s not an unnoticeable difference as I’ll touch upon later, and while it is a shame a partnership that created such interesting films fell apart it also happened over two decades ago so it seems silly to be upset about it now. It’s also possible that Amelie wouldn’t even exist had it not been for the Jeunet/Caro dissolution, and as this is a review (more or less) of Amelie I feel a sense of obligation to support its existence so that I can justify writing about it. As I would for any movie that isn’t Dr. Fugazzi. So let’s get to it.

       On September 3rd 1973 in near Montmartre in Paris, Amelie Poulain is born. A neglected child, split between an aloof father and a neurotic mother, is forced to retreat into dreams and fantasies as a series of unfortunate events pushes her through a painfully isolated adolescence. Five years after the death of her mother in a darkly comedic accident, Amelie’s life is not quite as her dreams might have lead her to believe. She has an apartment, a job as a waitress in a bar/cafe known as The Two Windmills, and she has a handful of odd folks that she might call friends, but none of of it can compare to her daydreams. Then again, what life could?

       Then one day, the same day that Princess Diana had her fatal accident in fact, Amelie discovers a box of trinkets in her apartment, hidden by a boy named Dominique Bretodeau over 40 years ago. Amelie, still chomping at the bit for a change of pace, decides to track down the now senior Bretodeau and return the box to him, and when she sees the look of happiness on his face she is filled with an enormous sense of accomplishment and well-being. So much so in fact that she decides she wants to help more people, and so turns her attention to her friends and neighbors, each with their own set of neuroses and problems that she needs to travail. However, when she happens to meet a young, handsome man named Nino, who just so happens to have the same kind of weird hobbies as her, it soon becomes clear that Amelie is going to need some help of her own.

       Amelie sees the return of many familiar faces for Jeunet fans; Dominique Pinon, Rufus, Ticky Holgado, but the obvious stand out performer is newcomer Audrey Tautou in the titular role of Amelie Poulain. Looking at her in 2018, it honestly feels like the she was the blueprint for what would eventually become known as the ‘hipster girl’. Short hair, unflashy fashion sense, interest in weird things, not traditionally ‘sexy’ but attractive in a slightly androgynous David Bowie kind of way, that exudes a kind of mischievous energy and social awkwardness that brings all the introverts to the yard. Give her a latte and a vinyl record and you’ve probably seen about a dozen Amelies around your local college campus. It works though, because Audrey works. The way she looks and moves, the way she smiles, it meshes perfectly with the character, without any need for dialogue (although that area is okay as well). Seeing her on screen you can tell how she managed to pull several Best Actress awards off of her debut film, Tonie Marshall’s Venus Beauty Institute, and why Jeunet would bring her back for his next film, A Very Long Engagement. When she’s on screen you want to see more of her, and when she’s not you’re waiting for her to come back. That’s what you call stage presence.

       Now because I promised it earlier, the big difference between Amelie and the early Jeunet-Caro films is one of whimsy vs. caprice. All three films carry this feeling of heightened reality, where magic feels like it could exist even if it doesn’t, but if you’ll recall from The City of Lost Children write up I mentioned that it and Delicatessen were intentionally made as tributes to Terry Gilliam, and Gilliam is a capricious director. Yes his films take place in strange magical worlds, but they’re not exactly very nice worlds either. In the first ever Gilliam film we ever covered on this blog for example, Jabberwocky, Michael Palin plays an utter dunce who is constantly abused by the people around him, Time Bandits has a child traveling through time with a band of surly dwarvish thieves (and that ending…), Baron Munchausen is a pompous ass throughout the entire film (although you warm up to him), and the Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus has a murderous child organ thief in a major role. These are not fairy tales that Gilliam is telling us folks, these are bawdy pub stories, full of grimy, bizarre places and the sad and mean people who live in them. That’s the essence of Gilliam’s films, that sudden, blatant intrusion of reality into fantasy, that Jeunet & Caro attempted to replicate in their own films. Quite well, in my opinion, although it’s been a while since I saw Delicatessen.

       Amelie, on the other hand, is whimsical. There’s no grime in this world, just lovely architecture that houses precisely designed rooms, where our quirky protagonist and their eccentric friends have quirky, eccentric fun together. Sure, sometimes bad things happen, but everything is so explosively colorful and hey man life is like that sometimes so whatever. Rather than Terry Gilliam, it would probably be more appropriate to compare it to the works of Tim Burton, Wes Anderson, or Bryan Fuller’s cult comedy series Pushing Up Daisies, which in retrospect apes so much of the Amelie style you’d think it was some kind of weird fanfiction. Pretty people and upbeat gallows humor, you get the idea.

       That’s where the enjoyment of the film is going to hinge for you, I suppose. If the idea of quirky characters being quirky around each other and falling in love sounds like something you’d be into, then this is definitely the movie for you. If not, then it’s two hours of that thing I just said, so be warned. Personally I ended up liking it, despite not generally being a romance movie kind of guy. I found Amelie and the cast likable enough, the writing generally witty, and the romance being at the very least more believable than The Shape of Water. The 2 hour runtime is a bit of an issue, I feel like they drag the build up a bit too long and that the payoff is smaller than it should have been, but overall I think it manages to entertain fairly consistently the whole way through. In spite of its obvious lack of Ron Perlman, that is.

       Well cross Amelie off of the bucket list, finally, and while you’re at it mark it down for a recommendation. It might not be what you might expect from a movie on Halloween, and how many times have I said that on these lists, but it is a fun movie, and potentially capable of filling the cockles of your heart with a warm, fuzzy feeling (as a person without a heart I can only speculate). Grab a bowl of popcorn and a significant other and enjoy. You might not get spooked, but at least you’ll be happy.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2017 - The City of Lost Children (1995), directed by Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet

The Trailer
and
The Appropriate Tune: "Who Will Take My Dreams Away", by Angelo Badalamenti and Marianne Faithfull

     Last year around this same time, the Marathon dipped into the Franc bank to give you two films from the magical land of France: animated bird boob movie Gandahar and one third of the Poe tribute Spirits of the Dead. Pretty okay films all things considered, but the most important thing they did was to get me interested in covering more French films, as long as they were in the appropriates genres. I’d already seen the horror classic Eyes Without A Face, so that was out. La Jetee was also a possibility, having been the inspiration for the amazing 12 Monkeys, but that was another one I’d seen before (plus it’s only 28 minutes long). The work of Luc Besson was probably the strongest contender for the majority of the time, with Nikita, Leon the Professional and The Fifth Element all being on my watch queue at some point or another, however the poor reception to Valerian ended up souring my mood on Besson. Maybe next year.

     Which leads us to The City of Lost Children, directed by Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunut. OG Hellboy Ron Perlman stars as One, a simple-minded yet strong-hearted carnival strongman living in an incredibly 19th century French port city. Live is shit, as you’d expect in a time before labor laws, but it is tolerable as long as he has his ‘little brother’ Denree by his side. Of course Denree is almost immediately kidnapped by bizarre thugs with steampunk technology strapped to their faces, an issue faced by French port cities to this very day. Completely lost as to how to begin his search, One is suddenly joined by Miette, a young street smart orphan girl forced into a life of crime. Together, the odd due go off on a fantastical adventure to rescue Denree, a journey of steampunk cults, evil circus performers, a gaggle of clones and a mad scientist and his devilish dream machine. Not to mention lots and lots of Santa Claus cosplay.

     It makes more sense in context.

     According to the general info, City of Lost Children, along with Delicatessen (which I actually saw years ago) and Amelie (which I constantly see around but never watch) was intended by Caro & Jeunet as a tribute to the works of Thunderbird favorite Terry Gilliam. If you’ve ever seen one of Gilliam’s film, in particular Time Bandits or Brazil, then the comparisons start to flow. Grungy yet colorful and almost expressionistic settings contrasted with fairy tale stylings and magic realism with copious amounts of black and visual humor, occasionally with a Monty Python actor thrown in somewhere. That’s Gilliam, and that’s what Caro & Jeunet manage to accomplish damn well here. The comedy kinda falls flat on occasion, which I’ll chalk up to cultural differences, but it nails that sense of dark fantasy that few directors are able to perfect. Gilliam, Tim Burton, Guillermo del Toro, and now Caro and Jeunet.

     More than anything else though, what really sells the movie is the friendship between One and Miette (played by Judith Villett). The gentle giant and child isn’t a new concept in storytelling (bringing it back to fairy tales), but the two have such a great chemistry that you don’t really mind. Villett as the stoic, wiseass but ultimately vulnerable girl, Perlman saying everything with just an expression, it’s endearing to see them bond over the course of the movie. Way more than any scene with Denree, if we’re being honest. Kid’s a MacGuffin with an eating disorder.

     By the way, the music here is done by Angelo Badalamenti, who you might know from all your favorite David Lynch movies. I actually didn’t know this going into the movie and it ended up being a real treat.

     The hour and 52 minute runtime does drag a bit unfortunately, but overall The City of Lost Children was a lot sillier and lot more enjoyable than I was expecting. More than little bit disturbed, plenty depressing, but at its heart it’s simple moral: If you give love, then you’ll receive love, and no matter how hopeless things seem, love always wins. You don’t often find movies on Halloween that have a happy ending, but this is one that I can heartily recommend. You might even want to throw this on and watch with the kids if the repeats of Nightmare Before Christmas and Monster House has gotten a bit stale. Just remember: Cultural. Differences.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2016: Spirits of the Dead (1968), directed by Roger Vadim, Louis Malle and Federico Fellini

The Trailer
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The Appropriate Tune: "A Dream Within A Dream", by The Alan Parsons Project

     If there are two things that you just don’t see all that often in movies nowadays, it’s Edgar Allan Poe and anthology movies.

     Now as far as film legacies go, there aren’t many American writers, especially horror writers, that have achieved the same level of success on the silver screen Poe. There have not only been scores of films based directly or indirectly on his work (The Raven from earlier in this list, the Roger Corman series in the late 60s), but even films based on Poe himself (anybody remember that one movie with John Cusack?). That being said, there hasn’t really been anything Poe-related out recently, and it doesn’t seem like there’s as much of a outcry for Poe than there was in the past. Is America just not in a mid 19th century mood anymore, or are we just not interested in things related to books anymore? Who can say?

     In the case of anthology films, or films comprised of separate story segments (occasionally directed by separate people) compiled into one artistic piece, well those have never been all that prevalent in general. I can name drop a few, The Twilight Zone Movie, Creepshow, Black Sabbath, but it’s a pretty underused framing device that emphasizes brevity . Hell, even anthology TV shows are rare, despite the incredible pedigree that it has garnered for the horror and sci-fi genres (the Twilight Zone of course, the Outer Limits, Tales From the Crypt, Night Gallery if you’re being generous). Has modern America become so obsessed with the idea of continuity and arcs that we’ve killed off episodic storytelling? Should shows stick to 6 episodes if they’re going to stretch one story arc over an entire season? Who can say?

     For those who love the works of Poe and anthology films, look no farther than Spirits of the Dead, otherwise known as Tales of Mystery and Histoires Extraordinaires, starring Brigitte Bardot, Jane Fonda and Terence Stamp, among others. From the U.K. we have Roger Vadim with “Metzengerstein”, a story about a beautiful and sadistic Countess, her cousin, and a mysterious black horse. From France we have “William Wilson”, directed by Louis Malle, about a sociopathic young man who is stalked by another man who just so happens to also be named William Wilson. Finally, there’s “Toby Dammit” by Italian director Federico Fellini, detailing the tragic downward spiral of an neurotic, alcoholic actor who’s arrived in Rome for an awards ceremony. Fun fact: Only the first two parts of this movie are actually based on stories found in the Poe collection Tales of Mystery & Imagination, which is the name it first released under in the U.K.

     Out of the three, I found that it was Fellini’s contribution that stood out as the most interesting, both narratively and creatively speaking. Vadim and Malle’s stories are entertaining enough, and they stuck to the Poe identity much closer than Fellini, but there’s something so… ‘of the times’ about them that keeps them from standing out. The extensive use of colors, the cheesecake eroticism, the way the camera lingers on certain things to make sure you know they’re important, it all feels like something you’d see in, say, Corman’s Masque of the Red Death or a late era Hammer horror movie. That’s not to say they’re bad of course, but you know what you’re going to get with those stories, and they run on just long enough that you’re relieved when they finally decide to wrap up.

     “Toby Dammit” however, despite having the least in common with it’s source material, seems far more unique and prescient even today. It’s a surreal, kaleidoscopic mix of paranoia and self-destruction from beginning to end, and only rarely does it seem like we as the audience are going to be let in on what’s running through the titular Toby’s mind as stumbles madly to his inevitable conclusion. In that way, I think that Fellini manages to capture the sense of ‘fear & loathing’, that infamous state of mind coined by the great Hunter Thompson, better than any other filmmaker I’ve seen yet. Even Terry Gilliam, the man who directed the excellent Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, never quite reached the frenetic rush of anxiety, self-hatred and dissociation as “Toby” manages to achieve at its climax. It’s a question of pacing and it’s a question of brevity, and Fellini appears to feel more at ease with them than Vadim and Malle, who struggle at times in their sections to pad out their runtimes. Especially Vadim, who feels the need to stick a multi-minute long montage between a woman and her horse in the second half. And trust me, that’s not as interesting as the internet would have you believe.

     Vadim’s section is easily the weakest of the three, but I wouldn’t say it’s outright bad. Malle’s is rather predictable, which might be the fault of the author rather than the director really, although there is some worthwhile cinematography. Fellini’s is, as I mentioned, quite good. So overall I suppose it averages out to a pretty good movie, and I’d say it has earned a recommendation. If you’re working a very Poe-centric Halloween this, make sure you get this one in the queue.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2016 -- Gandahar (1987), directed by Rene Laloux

The Trailer
and
The Appropriate Tune: "The Robots", by Kraftwerk

     Yes, even the Europeans have animation. Some of you out there might be surprised, considering the Academy doesn’t care about animation beyond whatever Disney has crapped out that year and even less about animation outside of the U.S., but it’s true. That Tintin movie Spielberg came out with a couple years ago? Based on a Belgian comic book, which had a very popular cartoon series in the 90s. The movie Heavy Metal? Based on the sci-fi magazine Heavy Metal, which is based on the French sci-fi magazine Metal Hurlant, and featured several French artists. Wallace & Gromit? Incredibly British, as it turns out.

     As far as French animation goes, some movie fans might know the name Fantastic Planet, which was the name the English crowd gave to a French animated film released in 1973. While the actual plot of Fantastic Planet is probably lost on most audiences, the thing that sticks most in their minds is the visual design. Part Terry Gilliam picture manipulation, part Salvador Dali LSD nightmare, the film is unlike anything that you would see out of an American studio before or since. Not just because America has a bias against all things animation, but because the entire mindset around filmmaking is different. The French (to use a blatant generalization) love art, they love things to be fantastical and whimsical and surrealistic, even when it comes to their horror and their science fiction. Americans (to use another blatant generalization) love their sci-fi hard, the explosions large and a 3 to 1 ratio on violence versus sex. It’s not an issue of which one’s better than the other, it’s just how our respective cultures have progressed over the years.

     That being said, I have to say that Gandahar still isn’t all that great a movie. It looks interesting enough, beautiful even, bringing to life a world that seems to be directly inspired by such talents as Alejandro Jodorowsky and French comic artist Moebius. The story is packed to the brim with symbolism, for those that are interested in that sort of thing. Nature vs. technology, male vs. female, there’s more obvious allusions here than a 1st year film student’s term paper. The main villain looks like a giant penis for god’s sake, how much more on the nose can you get?

     All the animated boobs in the world however doesn’t change the fact that for a movie about a guy trying to save the world from an army of killer robots, not of exciting things actually happen in the movie, and even if it did, the limited animation quality would have made it seem like it was happening at a snail’s pace. It was an issue I had with Rock & Rule as well, where everything felt like it was moving in slow-motion, but it is far, far more noticeable in Gandahar. I don’t know if it’s an issue with budget or, again, it’s just a cultural preference that I’m not privy, but it almost doesn’t even seem worth doing an animated film if there’s so little you can do with it. Sure, there are scenes and effects that can only properly be done through an animated medium, but when your characters are relegated to having coy conversations with each other and behaving like animatronics, then it seems like you’ve managed to sidestep the point.

     Those of you who are super into animation, or if you like your sci-fi mostly fantasy and your fantasy mostly sci-fi, you just might find something to enjoy about Gandahar, or Light Years as its dubbed version was known. Otherwise, pretty pictures don’t make up for an ultimately boring film, and that’s why I can’t really recommend it. You’ll find more interesting films, and more cartoon breasts, in your nearest Bakshi filmography, so I suggest looking there instead.