Up All Night

"We believe happy people should not worry about hidden things," says an elder in Knud Rasmussen. That's the near-polar opposite of Slavoj Zizek's worldview. Zizek, a Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst, is the star of Sophie Fiennes's The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, a three-part lecture devoted in particular to the films of Hitchcock, Lynch, Chaplin, and Tarkovsky, though it touches on lots of other films and directors along its long but engaging path. Using painstaking reproduction work and some original locations, Fiennes inserts Zizek into the visual world of the films he's discussing, not that the star needs much help to be entertaining. Zizek stutters, spits, searches for words, gestures wildly, and altogether behaves like the dream professor of one's dreams. Occasionally, as when he posits that Groucho, Chico, and Harpo represent the Superego, Ego, and Id, Zizek seems too reductive, not to mention Zeppo-repressive. More routinely his thinking is outsized, stimulating even when it seems to flirt with sophistry.

I wish Zizek were here to engage Satoshi Kon's Paprika, an anime film about a high-tech gizmo that allows psychotherapists to visualize and enter their patients' dreams. That sounds like a super idea, but the device gets into the wrong hands, from which it can only be wrested by headshrinker Chiba Atsuko and her alter ego Paprika. In my dreams, I'm usually telling someone that I don't have a Speedy Rewards card or something like that, which might be why I liked this movie so much.

 

Thursday
I got another batch of DVD screeners yesterday, possibly my last. My editor has been trying to get me the new Lars von Trier and some other biggies, but this stuff can be hard to track down. I might not be able to reach 30 movies after all. I'm relieved. I figure I'll file my article on Friday—or maybe Saturday, still ahead of schedule.

As I say, I haven't been programming my viewing choices with any agenda in mind, but yesterday was mostly jokes and marshmallows. Francis Veber is a master of the bagatelle, and The Valet proves it. I won't even gloss the plot. It's a romantic comedy involving supermodels and deception, with an especially funny performance from Daniel Auteuil. David Wain's The Ten proffers a comic sketch for each of the Ten Commandments, and features alums from MTV's The State. It's blasphemous and "politically incorrect"—as if political correctness held any sway these days—but not really edgy (or "edgy"), since its satire has nothing it really wants to cut.

An old tweed jacket of a movie, John Carney's Once tells of the musical and romantic relationship between a vacuum repairman/busker (Glen Hansard) and a Czech flower girl/pianist (Markéta Irglová), both eking out livings in Dublin. A slice of life and a slice of (very good) cheese, Once gets emotional resonance out of a search for AA batteries, and never lets go of its rainy, bittersweet mood. The characters don't exactly break into song, but Carney's skeletal plot is conveyed largely by way of original folk-rock tunes, written and performed with soul by the leads.

Jesper Ganslandt's semi-autobiographical Falkenberg Farewell, shot on the super cheap and largely improvised by Ganslandt and his boyhood friends, proves to be one of the best cinematic portrayals of hetero male intimacy I've seen. At first the film seems to be about ennui and nostalgia among Swedish small-town slackers. But then the ennui turns to serious despair.

During today's longueurs, I stayed perky by doing some of my ablutions. I brushed, I flossed, I clipped. I was encouraged to forego shaving this week, but my face gets oily when hairy, so I laid out a towel and a pot of nearly boiling water in front of the TV and enjoyed a long, sensual shave. The secret to a close, comfortable shave is not five-bladed razors but the hottest water you can possibly stand. For years I didn't know this. So you see, I, too, have suffered.

 

Good Friday, Noonish
I'm not a religious man. But I'm pretty sure Jesus didn't die on the cross in order for me to have the freedom to watch a movie about killer sheep. Not to damn Black Sheep, a genetic-engineering-gone-haywire picture from New Zealander Jonathan King that does double duty as satire and giddy gore fest. (Ever see a man get his penis bitten off by a rabid sheep? Now's your chance!)

Black Sheep arrived this morning along with the aforementioned von Trier flick and three others, so it looks like I will be able to see 30 movies, though I guess not in a time that's likely to impress anybody. Last night I played tennis and ate a two-course meal with the TV off.

 

Good Friday, Three-ish
I still have nine movies to go, but I'm excited about my new innovation: a cheap portable DVD player. I figured out that I could prop it up on the side of the tub and have a nice long soak while, you know, working.