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Oscars nominations

I'll let Michael K of dlisted speak for me:

Tilda Swinton, ROBBED! Uggie the Dog, ROBBED! Michael Fassbender's big dick, ROBBED! Almodovar, ROBBED! Emma Stone's thirsty, busted, five cent curly fries wig from The Help, ROBBED! The diarrhea pie from The Help, ROBBED! The Help for Best Movie That Should've Been On The Hallmark Channel Instead, ROBBED! That satin scorpion jacket Ryan Gosling wore all through Drive, ROBBED! The guy behind me who snored all through Tree of Life for Most Appropriate Soundtrack, ROBBED! The ROBBED list goes on and on and on....

Petit Tailleur + Belle Epine Q&A

I went to a Q&A at the Institut Francais in South Ken, right before moving back to Paris.
Two films were shown: Belle Epine, and Le petit tailleur. They were discussed with their directors (Louis Garrel who was behind the camera for once, and Rebecca Zlotowski) and the star of both films, Lea Seydoux. Lea Seydoux was unsurprisingly stunning and luminous. We can see her in the new Mission Impossible. 

PETIT TAILLEUR

Louis Garrel is just as sexy in the flesh as he is on film. Especially when he's funny - well I thought he was hilarious but his dark humor didn't quite work on the predominently british audience. I've always loved him as an actor, but there he showed a lot of promise as a director in his black and white short (of 44 minutes) Petit tailleur. Heavily influenced by the Nouvelle Vague among others,he still has his own voice in this cute love story between beautiful Arthur and Marie-Julie (Arthur Igual and Lea Seydoux). 

BELLE EPINE

The director, Rebecca Zlotowski was very likeable. She was so sweet and probably a bit pissed as she said in her broken english that her actresses in the film are naked a lot because 'they just have the most beautiful pussies'. Interesting. Well we do see Lea naked a lot in it. 
It's a coming of age story that knows not to fall into nostalgia or sentimentality - even if it treats of a young girl (Seydoux)' concealed grief for her mother's death, and fascination for reckless,illegal motorcycle racing. Great vibe, great music, great acting but I'm not 100% convinced how I feel about it, therefore I feel a little uncomfortable writing a review...

best of the year

Best of 2011:

The Skin I live In

Melancholia

Weekend

Tyrannosaur
Shame (or is it 2012?)

DVD favourites:
Enter the void
Irreversible
I am love

I'm still a bit confused about....

Drive

The tree of Life

Submarine

We need to talk about Kevin

Midnight in Paris

True Grit

Most stupidly overhyped:

The Black Swan

Blue Valentine

The King's speech

Bridesmaids

And the ones I missed and will catch up on ASAP:

Meek's cutoff

Snowtown

Senna

L'appolonide

Polisse

Tomboy
Take Shelter
Certified copy

'Parlez moi de vous'

I love Karin Viard, and I love Nicolas Duvauchelle. So that's the film I went to see at the cinema with a friend as I landed in Paris.
click below for my opinion...

Weekend

I saw this a few months ago at the Brixton Ritzy on my own (as per usual...). I had no idea what it would be about, i just saw an excellent percentage on rottentomatoes (94%). When I found myself at the screening with about seventy Vauxhall gay bears and no feminine presence other than myself, I got the hint. Yay! A gay film!

The Weekend here starts on Friday night, at a gay bar. Reserved Nottingham lifeguard Russell, after a gathering with his straight friends, goes cruising in a gay bar on his own, and picks up outgoing Glen. 

The morning after the first night, Glen gets a tape recorder out, and asks Russell very intimate questions for an art project (a bit of Sex lies and videotapes...). Their own encounter is discussed as well as more general questions about what it means to be gay nowadays. This is no ordinary end to a one night stand... And as the two end up spending the weekend together, having sex, staying in, going out, discussing many things, we feel like we're there, and we're sad to know their romance has a deadline : Glen is moving to Portland on the Sunday night.

The dialogue throughout the film is so natural, we feel we get to know them in 'real time', just as they do over those 48 hours. Should they reveal as much as they can in the short time they're given, or not even bother at all?

One of the best films I've seen in 2011. It's just really sweet (just be ready for some anal sex).

'Shame'

I must have really, really liked Steve McQueen's 'Shame' for having seen it twice in cinemas in the space of 2 days. I anticipated it so highly, I went to the first screening I could go to on its day of release, on my own with only a few (traumatized) OAP's in the cinema. I found it earth-shattering- I wasn't sure whether it was for sheer artistic emotion or sexual excitement over Fassbender's full frontal shots. I was confused by the negative reviews and echoes from French pals (it came out much much earlier in france). I went back to the cinema 48 hours later with a friend to 'make sure why' I had been so moved the first time round. I was further convinced that this was one of the best I've seen in the last year. Thought provoking and devastating.

A lot has been said on the subject of sex addiction in recent years...  We know it's now being treated in rehabs just like drug and alcohol dependency. 'Shame' doesn't show the journey of recovery of Irish New Yorker Brandon, the sex addict portrayed by  Fassbender. Just snapshots of a life devoted to anonymous sex, live sex chats, wanks in the office bathrooms and violent porn, facilitated by our modern world and the adult playground New York appears to be. We know nothing of the nature of his job, or his personal tastes and his flat is sterile, devoid of any personality. On the outside he's a fully functioning member of society - he's successful at work, handsome, confident.

His equally wounded sister Sissy (played wonderfully by Carey Mulligan) barges into his life (naked) and Brandon falls into confusion and resentment. It becomes clear their relationship to each other, and others is not ordinary.... The dark past of theirs is hinted at but we never know what happened to scar them so deeply.

'Shame' was pretty close to perfection visually.  No one can say the shots weren't composed beautifully and precisely (after all McQueen started out  in visual arts). There was a lot of symmetry in the scenes. I really could watch it over and over again. Maybe leave it on in the background.

Like all addicts he will need to hit rock bottom to consider recovery. Maybe his rock bottom is at the culmination of a sex 'bender', during a beautifully shot threesome. We see his face in a great close-up as he's having an orgasm. So full of distress... 

Sex there is filmed and acted exactly how it should have been, showing the darkness of the sex he's having, without any human connection. No joy is being had anymore, a source of pleasure has turned into an insatiable need and a source of loneliness and self-loathing. Addiction is addiction - the fact it's an addiction to sex doesn't make the film sexy in any way (unless like me, you find Fasbender irresistible).

5/5

Old: A streetcar named desire

Le jizz!

Arguably one of the best acting performances of all time from Brando, in the claustrophobic, controversial play from Tennesee Williams. Yet in 1951, he had lost the Best Actor Oscar to Bogart , although the film won four other statuettes.

To put it simply, sweaty, violent, sexual animal Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski blows all our actors out the water in terms of charisma, and sex appeal. Vivien Leigh looks like a terrified, hairless cat and has lost much of the beauty that made her Scarlett O'Hara but displays a great case of the crazies. Why can't more recent films show the sexual tension and manipulation meant to happen before the actual sex the way Williams and Kazan did?

I wish Houellebecq was my psychiatrist and/or my literary mentor.

I found this picture on The writerly Physique
topless writers/naked poets! Amazing!

And what do you think of this Anglo-Saxon world?

You can tell that this is the world that invented capitalism. There are private companies competing to deliver the mail, to collect the garbage. The financial section of the newspaper is much thicker than it is in French papers.
The other thing I’ve noticed is that men and women are more separate. When you go into a restaurant, for example, you often see women eating out together. The French from that point of view are very Latin. A single-sex dinner would be considered boring. In a hotel in Ireland, I saw a group of men talking golf at the breakfast table. They left and were replaced by a group of women who were discussing something else. It’s as if they’re separate species who meet occasionally for reproduction. There was a line I really liked in a novel by Coetzee. One of the characters suspects that the only thing that really interests his lesbian daughter in life is prickly-pear jam. Lesbianism is a pretext. She and her partner don’t have sex anymore, they dedicate themselves to decoration and cooking. Maybe there’s some potential truth there about women who, in the end, have always been more interested in jam and curtains.

So what made you write your first novel, Whatever, about a computer programmer and his sexually frustrated friend?

I hadn’t seen any novel make the statement that entering the workforce was like entering the grave. That from then on, nothing happens and you have to pretend to be interested in your work. And, furthermore, that some people have a sex life and others don’t just because some are more attractive than others. I wanted to acknowledge that if people don’t have a sex life, it’s not for some moral reason, it’s just because they’re ugly. Once you’ve said it, it sounds obvious, but I wanted to say it.

What about marriage?

I think that there is a sharp contrast for most people between life at university, where they meet lots of people, and the moment when they enter the workforce, when they basically no longer meet anyone. Life becomes dull. So as a result people get married to have a personal life. I could elaborate but I think everyone understands.

What do you think is the appeal of your work, in spite of its brutality? 

There are too many answers. The first is that it’s well written. Another is that you sense obscurely that it’s the truth. Then there’s a third one, which is my favorite: because it’s intense. There is a need for intensity. From time to time, you have to forsake harmony. You even have to forsake truth. You have to, when you need to, energetically embrace excessive things. Now I sound like Saint Paul.

You have said that you are “cyclothymic.” What does that mean?

It means you go back and forth from depression to exultation. But in the end, I doubt I’m really depressive.

What are you then?

Just not very active. The truth is, when I go to bed and do nothing, I’m not badly off. I’m quite content. So it isn’t really what you would call depression.

But what stops you from succumbing to what you have said is the greatest danger for you, which is sulking in a corner while repeating over and over that everything sucks?

For the moment my desire to be loved is enough to spur me to action. I want to be loved despite my faults. It isn’t exactly true that I’m a provocateur. A real provocateur is someone who says things he doesn’t think, just to shock. I try to say what I think. And when I sense that what I think is going to cause displeasure, I rush to say it with real enthusiasm. And deep down, I want to be loved despite that.
Of course, there’s no guarantee this will last.

Hable con ella

I remember being a child and a teenager, and reading film magazines and the Canal + film catalogue, and seeing all sorts of films I wasn't allowed to see yet. Before films were put online, I couldn't get access to all the films I wanted beyond my parents' Kubrick and Hitchcock dvds... and I remember watching a feature on Canal + about Hable con ella, and seeing the scene of a tiny man entering a p***y and I thought wow I cant wait to see weird shizz like that. (I have yet to find the film on necrophilia I had read so much about ).

So last night I saw Hable con ella and it was worth the wait of a decade. I loved it so much. We already knew that Almodovar is a master at mixing comedy and tragedy like no other... But I find this one more mature maybe than his other works, well, let's say more in the vein of his 'Piel que habito' (again, a lot about skin...) . As usual he gives a story that's compassionate and brave, but the thing is slowed down, less scattered, less... 'spanish'?

I wasn't a big fan of his work just after that though...I wasn't taken with La mala educacion, and I didn't find that open love letter to Penelope Cruz that was 'Los abrazos rotos'.

But like his latest, 'The skin i live in', 'Hable con ella' is unmissable!

I enjoy Almodovar like I enjoy Tennessee Williams plays and it's a very big statement.

I think this one will stick with me for quite a while.

Blogger is so unsteezed. Need to find to make it a little bit more pleasant...

Love letter to Houellebecq

Houellebecq is somewhat of a literary phenomenon in France, and pretty much everywhere else. Curious to see what kind of skills got him to win the prestigious Prix Goncourt, I started 'La carte et le territoire' (the map and the territory), his latest book, earlier this year. I didn't finish it. It didn't have the scandal, and obscenity he was famous for... but mainly I was just a little bored.

But since I am in the Japanese mountains this holiday and I have nothing else to do but ski, stick to the 10 books and 40 dvds I've brought with me (there's a lot more space in my suitcase when heels are not involved)... I've given him another chance, with his first commercial success, Les particules élémentaires (the elementary particules/ or 'Atomised'). This is nothing short of a revelation to me... A sentiment of relief, I feel. Compulsive, essential reading - especially after what I've read recently (see previous posts ).

Houellebecq is a true novelist. He covers society as it is now, with all its realities and complexities - the way Balzac did so long ago, and I hadn't really found since. He uses scientific, philosophical, metaphysical, sociological and autobiographical tools to render a pessimistic portrait of the society left by our parents and grand parents, in which 30-something men are sick, depressed and impotent... ravaged by the sexual hedonism and feminism of previous generations. It's fiction as social commentary as there's almost no real 'plot' in 'Atomised'.

Ok it's also provocative and shocking. The New York Times called it a 'deeply repugnant read'. Many see it as hate-filled, sex crazed, nihilistic, disgusting book, so it's not for everyone.

But I really feel that Houellebecq is breathing new life into french literature, and this is obvz so inspiring.

I really enjoy his interviews as well (not the ones in which is racist comments land him in court). This one is great: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6040/the-art-of-fiction-no-206-michel-houellebecq. This bit reminded me that as a French teenager, obsessed with Verlaine, Baudelaire and Corneille (Le cid remains one of my favourite plays), I left prose on the side and spent most of 2003 writing in alexandrines! How ridiculous. Who did I think I was?!

And what about poetry?

I think poetry is the only domain where a writer you like can truly be said to influence you, because you read and reread a poem so many times that it simply drills itself into your head. A lot of people have read Baudelaire. I had the more unusual experience of reading virtually all of Corneille. No one reads Corneille, but I came across a little pile of classics, and for some reason, I loved it. I loved the alexandrine, the traditional twelve-syllable verse. When I was at university, I wrote quite a bit of classical verse in tetrameters, which appealed to the other poets. They said, Hey, that’s not bad. Why not write in classical verse? It can be done.

A constant refrain in your novels is that sex and money are the dominant values of this world.

It’s strange, I’m fifty years old and I still haven’t made up my mind whether sex is good or not. I have my doubts about money too. So it’s odd that I’m considered an ideological writer. It seems to me that I am mostly exposing my doubts. I do have certain convictions. For example, the fact that you can pay a girl, that I think is a good thing. Undeniably. An immense sign of progress.

You mean prostitutes?

Yes. I’m all for prostitution.

Why?

Because everybody wins. It doesn’t interest me personally, but I think it’s a good thing. A lot of British and Americans pay for it. They’re happy. The girls are happy. They make a lot of money.

How do you know that the girls are happy?

I talk to them. It’s very difficult because they don’t really speak English, but I talk to them.