Party Girl 1995

Parker Posey was the queen of indie films in the 90's, her attitude and line delivery mad her a indie cool new directors a favorite. Party Girl was made in New York in 1995 by a first time filmmaker, starring an actress who, except for a notable supporting turn in a Richard Linklater comedy, had had only small character parts in independent films. Party Girl was accepted into Sundance that year and garnered only a limited theatrical run. But over the years through word of mouth, it has become a beloved cult hit, quoted ad nauseam by its devotees, whose ranks multiply yearly. The film was nominated for Grand Jury Prize for best drama.

The plot seems at first utterly conventional, straying between nominally feminist chick flick to slacker comedy. Downtown It girl Mary is unemployed, on the verge of eviction, and “fabulous,” which in movie parlance means she wears quirky outfits and uses her acerbic wit against her friends. When she gets arrested for turning her apartment into a makeshift nightclub, Mary is bailed out by her godmother, Judy, a librarian. In order to pay Judy back and to prove herself to as capable and trustworthy, Mary becomes a clerk at Judy’s library. Gaining her good opinion is complicated by Judy’s constant panting that she can’t trust Mary because she reminds her so much of her mother, an irrational grousing that is the movie’s only major flaw. Mary’s mother may have been quite the party-goer, but many young women are, and one can’t hold young people accountable for doing the same things that their parents did when they were the same age. I would be extremely frustrated if my grandparents always said, “Gillian, you’re such a bleeding heart liberal, just like your mother was when she was your age. I won’t be surprised if you end up getting divorced, too.”

In most movies of this genre, Mary would prove her responsibility and intelligence by harnessing her femininity to her advantage by translating her party-loving sociability into entrepreneurial skills. Movies where female protagonists use stereotypically female frivolous traits like shopping or beautification to gain respect and enter positions of authority reinforce false perceptions among women that clinging to traditional gender roles can still benefit them in modern society. Unlike Troop Beverly Hills or Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, in Party Girl Mary recognizes the detrimental effects of her superficiality on her friends and on herself. Rather than giving her enemies makeovers and introducing them to the insecurity and vacuity of the world of fashion, Mary realizes her vocation in the library sciences and resolves to gain the confidence of Judy and her peers. Party Girl is a fun film with a positive message powered by Parker Posey’s truly sassy and engaging performance. Certain scenes suffer from tired comedy clichés like gay sidekicks or male strippers, but Posey’s consummate delivery, timing, and body language pull the film’s weaker elements into her comically perfect orbit. And luckily she’s in almost every scene.

Direction: Daisy von Scherler Mayer

Screenplay: Daisy von Scherler Mayer, Harry Birckmayer

Music: Anton Sanko

Photography: Michael Slovis

Cast:

Parker Posey, Anthony DeSando, Guillermo Diaz, Donna Mitchell, Liev Schreiber, Omar Townsend, Sasha von Scherler

Surviving Desire 1991

Sophie won't tell anyone she's sleeping with her professor. He's young, handsome, and passionate - perfect for Sophie, who just wants to write about love. When they hook up, he drops everything and her notebook begins to fill with poetry. But while he's head-over-heels, she's about to write two important words: The End. Surviving Desire captures that dizzy feeling of love in one's twenties, an off-beat comic romance classic.

In regards to Surviving Desire, knowing Dostoevsky's biography, and having read his works, helps place the emotive trials and trails in this comedy. I've now seen all Hal Hartley’s films, and this is my favorite, I really think that Hart Hartley was one of the best indie directors, unfortunately he has remained unknown and underappreciated.  The gazes of the actors, their static quality, is more nuanced here than in meanwhile or trust. This film is compassionate to its characters in a way that is inspiring. The dance scene is captivating and goofy at the same time it is inspired on Godard’s Band of Outsiders famous dance scene. The period stage sets, and costumes were all very chummy. The dialogue's complexity made it a fun film. 

Surviving Desire is, on paper, an underwhelming prospect; a mere 53-minutes long, it began life as a made-for-TV special. However, don’t let its brevity and inauspicious origins put you off. Whether you view it as a televisual gem, a substantial short or masterful mini feature it is worth your time and money – being as it is a key work of the formidably talented Hal Hartley.

Surviving Desire opens brilliantly on an under siege professor, Jude (Hartley regular Martin Donovan), as he reads to his class from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “I believe you are sincere and good at heart. If you do not attain happiness, always remember that you are on the right road, and try not to leave it…” A rebellious, swaggering electric guitar score accompanies his lecture. A book flies at Jude, thrown by an unseen hand.

Quick as a flash, he turns on his heel and hurls his chalk back, the soundtrack has the unlikely missile whipping through the air with audibly improbable ferocity; nailing the perpetrator with an almighty thwack. It comically transpires that his braying, seditious class have been infuriatingly stuck on this same paragraph for over a month – they implore him to teach them something, anything. The classroom scene climaxes with Jude flinging a disruptive student aside before being assaulted from the wings -- violence which is explicitly played for laughs. So far, so bizarre. Welcome to the Hartleyville USA.

Before 1991, the year in which Surviving Desire appeared, Hal Hartley had directed several shorts and two excellent idiosyncratic features, The Unbelievable Truth (1989) and Trust (1990). Right from the off, Hartley presented a signature style and themes which would then reoccur throughout his work. Surviving Desire, as with the features that came before, is a star-crossed lovers’ drama with an overt absurdist streak. In it Jude attempts to woo his only committed student Sophie (Mary Ward), whilst, as is again characteristic for Hartley heroes, grappling with career dissatisfaction and a larger existential crisis. At one point he frustratingly comments, “shouldn’t knowledge provide solace?”

Those familiar with Hartley’s oeuvre will recognize the familiar traits: the impossibly smart-arse characters, both central and peripheral. Be they academics, those in the service industry or tramps they are, to a man or woman, prone to gnomic philosophizing and self- and peer analysis; almost as if speaking with one subversive voice. A coolly existential brand of wisdom pervades every scene and springs from the mouth of every character. In Surviving Desire, after hearing about Jude’s infatuation with Sophie, a barman proffers, “that’s the trouble with us Americans, we always want a tragedy with a happy ending.”

This shtick means his work exudes both a swaggering air of hipster cool whilst proudly displaying, like a peacock, his considerable smarts. Characters are self-aware enough to mock themselves as they pontificate and there is a deadpan melodrama to the romance. When told that he’ll never survive the liaison with his student Jude answers, “I don’t know I want to.”

Hartley has an almost theatrical rejection of naturalism both in terms of dialogue and narrative. As mentioned above, violence is played for humour and events often take a surreal turn -- as when Jude wanders past a band (The Great Outdoors) who have ‘set up shop’ in the street and are playing to a woman, stands giggling while looking at a window above the band. Also, inspired by the first flushes of romantic excitement, Jude performs a West Side Story-esque dance with two random men joining him in absurdly perfect synchronicity.

With regards to his actors and the laconic, too-cool-for-school performances he coaxes from them, Hartley traditionally reminds them less is more. Martin Donovan is perhaps the ultimate Hal Hartley hero -- and he is superb here -- but Mary Ward, as impish and charming as she is, lacks the edge of some of his other female collaborators. Although Sophia is a typical early Hartley heroine -- young, rebellious, beautiful and on a quest to prove herself intellectually – his first major heroine, the late Adrienne Shelly (the radiant star of The Unbelievable Truth and Trust) left a long shadow over all his subsequent collaborations with actresses.

Hal Hartley specializes in an inspired marriage of the ordinary and the extraordinary; the sublime falling from the mouths of slackers. His films may be an acquired taste but it’s one I’d urge you to indulge because ultimately you’ll find yourself, like his hopelessly romantic characters, tumbling head over heels.

is a deadpan melodrama to the romance. When told that he’ll never survive the liaison with his student Jude answers, “I don’t know I want to.”

Characters talk about tedious tasks with the same dreamy intensity that characterizes their discussions of love, literature and philosophy. The mundane and the highbrow are hilariously intertwined within strands of dialogue, as when Jude tells his friend Henry, “You can’t walk in, use my toaster, and start spouting universal truths without qualification.” When Jude (no coincidence of course that his name in itself carries considerable dramatic weight) lies down in the gutter in abject despair, he is interrupted by a man asking for directions. The result is both dryly comic and gives Hartley’s films an intensely soulful, totally unique character.

In Hartley’s films repetition is a mechanism, it’s fear, it’s pleasure — is the essence of his work. Aggressively, a father will challenge his son to "repeat what he just said", the characters quote each other, in and out of context, there are fragments of phrases taken from books that appear and disappear throughout the narration. Often, repetition has a spiral effect: it helps a protagonist to define his thoughts (that is, for Hartley, his relationship with the world), either in a context of friendly ties between men (as in Theory of Achievement, when two friends finally write the sentence that best describes them, having tried multiple variants by adding a new adjective every time: “young, middle class, white, university graduate, unqualified, no money, drunk… I think now we achieve ”) or through direct confrontation (Jude, the professor of literature in Surviving Desire, is violently attacked by a male student for having been a month and a half with the same paragraph of the Karamazov brothers by Dostoyevsky). Something even more disturbing is that the man feels bewildered by a phrase pronounced by a woman and begins to repeat it, with the vain hope of discovering her secret. On the part of the women, the repetition - although threatening at the beginning - finally dissipates to reveal, underneath it all, a more bitter truth.

The repetition to convince oneself of the truth (incredible or not) or to get the "trust" of others: Hartley's films show the effects of language on life, the psyche, the body of its protagonists. His characters constantly carry books and read them aloud, like Anna Karina in Alphaville, from Godard. However the compulsion to read as well as the failed mechanism of repetition has another origin: an unpaid debt. The murder of a father, the death of a mother in giving birth to her son, the frustrated hopes that parents place in their children, the failures of the lives of adults who pass from one generation to the next — the films of Hartley are full of rebellious teenagers, brutal parents, psychopaths or cowards, incompetent adults, young people angered by the stupidity of the ruling class, frustrated ambitions, intelligent people who suffer in the narrowness of degrading jobs.

Beyond the horrors that are hidden in the ideal world of a family and the suffocating boredom of the suburbs, one must give an account of something else: for being young, prosperous, American; in other words, someone whose lifestyle is, in some way, responsible, for example, of an impending nuclear holocaust.

The vagueness of the debt makes everything even more unbearable. Did Mary really kill her father? Is Matthew's father a tyrant who exploits his son, or is Matthew a taciturn young man, difficult and ungrateful? Is it true that "we should never be afraid of our pusillanimity to find love," as Jude asserts when quoting Dostoyevsky? And why does the adjective "drunk" appear immediately after the two friends, in Theory of Achievement, agree with the word "white"? It is not possible to be accountable for being young, being bored in the suburbs, furious in New York, angry with your parents and more than anything, for not being able to love.

Hartley's cinema is relentlessly dynamic. It never succumbs to the fascination of the beauty of its images, impeccable symmetry, perfect resolutions — which, as film theory states, "stop the narration" to replace it with aesthetic contemplation. His stories constantly ride on a difficult balance, so they continue to capture our attention.

Hartley's love stories cannot be interpreted in a vacuum: Jude makes Sophie uncomfortable by insisting that her relationship must be "accepted" by the outside world: the gaze of the Other is what sanctions the validity of what happens. In other words, the lives of the characters are determined, sutured, "framed" by what lurks off the screen: the hidden mechanism of fate, the crazy machinery of the bachelor who blames irregularly, the sins attributed not only to the father, but to a society on the verge of bankruptcy.

Hartley's protagonists are a type of modern Oedipus who fight to face love, social responsibility, the crisis of faith, while a giant shadow of catastrophe looms over them. Women, also caught in the conflict, are partly victims, sexual objects, and sphinxes; their very presence questions, disrupts the complacent development of male discourse. While they are no less "lost" than their male partners, they appear to have access to a different level of knowledge. Swinging gracefully between irony, urban despair and romanticism, Hartley's films are rigorous, elegant, and fascinating stories about pure impossibility and the absolute necessity of love.

immediately after the two friends, in Theory of Achievement, agree with the word "white"? It is not possible to be accountable for being young, being bored in the suburbs, furious in New York, angry with your parents and more than anything, for not being able to love.

Directed by Hal Hartley

Produced by Jerome Brownstein, Ted Hope

Written by Hal Hartley

Starring: Martin Donovan, Julie Kessler, Matt Malloy, Merritt Nelson, Mary B. Ward

Music by The Great Outdoors, Hal Hartley (as Ned Rifle)

Cinematography Michael Spiller

Edited by Hal Hartley

Brick 2005

Brendan Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is an extremely intelligent young man who is not afraid to support his claims with actions. Brendan is a high-school student at the Southern California high school. However, he prefers to stay out of everything.  He prefers to go unnoticed, but the only thing that makes him change is his ex-girlfriend Emily, that changes when Emily unexpectedly reappears to disappear without a trace. His feelings for her are still deep, so he will try to find her with the help of his only friend, this makes Brendan embark on a quest full of dangerous challenges.

The Brain played by Matt O’Leary provides him with the dark secrets of the students in his school and Brendan will come into conflict with strange characters like Laura (Nora Zehetner), a sophisticated rich girl, the thug Tugger (Noah Fleiss), the junkie Dode (Noah Segan), and the seductive Kara (Meagan Good).

For several years now, mixing genres has been fashionable, mixing them using all kinds of tricks, telling the same story that navigates between these genres, giving it a different touch of style, changing a typical argument of one of those genres and placing it in another context, etc. Everything has already been told, we just need to find a new original way to retell that story that we have already seen again and again. Sometimes they get it, sometimes they don't and sometimes they stay halfway. “Brick” belongs to this last group of movies. We could say that it tells the classic story of film noir, but set in an institute, so the characters are much younger than those who used to play these thrillers. This is the particular case of Brick, by adding a few drops to the mix, it produced a new kind of independent cinema that became so popular almost 2 decades ago, that is the reason why Brick won awards at festivals as prestigious as Sundance.

It is almost impossible not to sympathize from the beginning with Brick, the director’s debut of Rian Jonson, a genuine freak in the best of senses, who had previously worked as an editor in other teenage weird movies. How not to be hypnotized by a movie of teenagers in which they speak as the hard types of Hammett's novels and Bogart films? ---Brick is almost always fortunate in its attempt to recreate the lyrics and spirit of the classic film noir and the criminal pulp fiction of the 1920s, in the unusual and unexpected high school setting. But Johnson, who has been soaked by Lynch and the Coen brothers, inspired by Tarantino and American Film Noir, recreates a surreal and eerily timeless high school, a fantastic and referential world, where there are hardly any adults. And as always happens in the most sophisticated artificial universe as well as a kind of artificial cinematography, the characters work and carry the story, sometimes in an incredible and perhaps impossible manner. It is precisely because of this difficult balance between humor, postmodern self-referentiality, surrealism and adolescent intrigue drama that it seems to work well for Johnson as naturally as a rabbit appears from a wizard's hat. The film is intended for really cool viewers.  We can say that the best thing about is its visual atmosphere. The worst is the fact that sometimes it gets a little out of hand.

The somewhat messy argument as in any good film noir begins when our protagonist discovers that his ex-girlfriend, which has tried to contact him, has disappeared. In a web of events where nothing is what it seems, Brendan (the protagonist) will face increasingly tough guys without giving a single inch to discover what is hidden behind the disappearance of what was the woman of his life.

Making reference to the Film Noir canons, here we have the typical character; lost in love with a woman who no longer kisses or hugs him, and that lost, impossible love, marked by that type of “fire” is what makes him continue forward, despite of the word "loser" written on his forehead. In the same fashion, the protagonists of this type of stories are usually losers as well. Certainly with a certain charm, and almost always with nothing to lose, because what they wanted most they have already lost it.

Rian Johnson is assertive in the creation of an atmosphere very suitable for the story, an atmosphere of pure film noir. And also in the development of the argument, which is gradually becoming complicated, although in the final third part it gets confusing. Johnson had very few elements at his disposal to shoot this film, the budget must have been very poor, and yet he saved the film as few directors would have been able to do. Despite its obvious lack of means, the film distills a certain class, and that shortage is not a problem at all.

An aspect of the film that has been criticized is that it is very cold, and distant. Film noir is not like that, no matter how much they wanted to give it a twist here. This idea rested on nothing at all, thus this coldness plays against the film alarmingly. Many viewers will take time to enter the story or simply will not. Absolutely all the characters are so depressed that it seems from one moment to another they will make a collective suicide. This touch so characteristic of independent films does nothing but spoil much of the story. They could have saved it and the film would have worked better.

Regarding the acting; Joseph Gordon-Levitt who takes over the main character by filling it with carefully studied nuances. The rest of the cast is not honestly up to par. Nora Zehetner plays the typical femme fatale a classic in this type of story and the truth is that she baffles as much as she likes loosing the character’s control. On the one hand her strange beauty makes it suitable for the role, causing a certain fascination especially when she moves,  but on the other at certain times, she seems  too young to carry a role of these characteristics.

Today this film is destined to become a cult film if it isn’t one already, it collected several good reviews at the time of its release, although it is important to have these; the film also suffered from some failures that could have been easy to avoid.

Directed by Rian Johnson

Produced by Ram Bergman and Mark G. Mathis

Written by Rian Johnson

 Starring:

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Nora Zehetner

Noah Fleiss

Matt O'Leary

Noah Segan

Meagan Good

Emilie de Ravin

Richard Roundtree

Lukas Haas

Music by Nathan Johnson

Cinematography Steve Yedlin

Edited by Rian Johnson

Production company: Bergman Lustig Productions

Distributed by Focus Features

Release date:

January 2005 (Sundance Film Festival)

April 7, 2006 (United States)

Tadpole 2002

I have to admit I have seen this movie more than a dozen times. It was a favorite of mine and a dear friend. Oscar Grubman, a fifteen-year-old student who speaks French and quotes Voltaire, believes that girls of his age have neither lived nor know enough to be interesting. So, when he returns to his home in Manhattan to spend Thanksgiving vacation with his father, who has remarried, he will try to seduce his mature stepmother. The film is set in that Manhattan, a type of New York that Woody Allen has shown us so well. This story is about as close to a contemporary descendant of J. D. Salinger's beloved preppie misfit, Holden Caulfield, as has ever been brought to the screen.

At its most endearing, the film conveys the same intense identification with Oscar's thoughts and mood swings that Mr. Salinger brought to his legendary character, and its adolescent-eyed view of Manhattan's Upper East Side as a glowing, mysterious wonderland is deeply Salinger-esque. This was Aaron Stanford, first his feature-film debut in the movie, Oscar might have emerged as an insufferably pretentious hothouse flower. But the actor (23 when the movie was made) flawlessly captures his character's aching, doe-eyed sincerity and yearning goodness.

Oscar has little tolerance for his fellow teenagers' tastes in pop culture, and on the train into Manhattan, he appears oblivious to the flirtatious signals flashing from an attractive schoolmate (Kate Mara) whom he dismisses as too immature to be girlfriend material because she has “babylike” hands. He also imagines himself a connoisseur of women: older women, to be precise. But that taste proves the source of Oscar's heartache. Of all the older women in the world to covet, the one for whom he has developed a consuming passion is his attractive stepmother, Eve (Sigourney Weaver). A medical researcher whose marriage to Oscar's father, Stanley played by the great comedian, the late John Ritter, an academic, has drifted into stagnation, Eve is beautiful, cultivated, self-possessed and 40-something. And as the camera studies her through Oscar's adoring eyes, you understand exactly why he would prefer her to someone his own age. For one thing, she doesn't have hands like a baby's.

The film's chief pleasures derive from the delicate interactions of Oscar, Eve and Diane (Bebe Neuwirth), a chiropractor who is Eve's mischievously sexy best friend. The core of a story, which suggests a refined French farce about intergenerational sex and lies (but no videotape), this dinner scene full of intrigue and comedy represents the core entire movie, finally we find Oscar sleeping with Diane but feeling terrible about it afterward because he has betrayed his true love.  Bebe Neuwirth, whose leggy, smirking bravado recalls the younger Anjelica Huston, more or less steals the movie. Her portrayal of Diane, a sexy, self-assured single woman with a rebellious streak, gives ''Tadpole'' its erotic snap. Diane's juicy reminiscences of the wild rock 'n' roll adventures she shared with Eve 25 years earlier now make her friend uncomfortable. A critical scene is when Sigourney Weaver, displaying the greatness of her craft, deals with the teenage masturbation; all kinds of emotions go through her head and you can feel them. Within this genre which I consider topped by The Graduate, however I will rank Tadpole in the top five of that list along with Midnight Cowboy, Sunset Boulevard and The 80’s cheesy fun movie “Class”.

''Tadpole” comes from a screenplay by Niels Mueller and Heather McGowan, was an audience favorite when it was shown earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival. The performances are precise with a sweet and kind Sigourney Weaver in this simple story that is told where the only interruptions are to show some phrases of Voltaire, part of Oscar’s obsessions; true axis of this film. The film's soundtrack includes a version of the Simon and Garfunkel song"The Only Living Boy in New York" interpreted by one of my favorite duo of all times "Everything But The Girl."  

Tadpole won the prize for the best director of a drama at Sundance in 2002, which went to Gary Winick. This movie was shot in just two weeks with a hand-held digital camera and was one of the many that during the eleven days of the festival found a distributor and buyer.

Directed by Gary Winick; written by Niels Mueller and Heather McGowan; director of photography, Hubert Taczanowski; edited by Susan Littenberg; production designer, Anthony Gasparro; produced by Mr. Winick, Dolly Hall and Alexis Alexanian; released by Miramax Films.

Cast: Sigourney Weaver (Eve), Aaron Stanford (Oscar), John Ritter (Stanley), Bebe Neuwirth (Diane) and Robert Iler (Charlie).

I Heart Huckabees 2004

There are films and proposals that in our present times allow us to give the impression that not everything has been invented in the field of comedy cinema, despite its lukewarm public response and not too hot American criticism - which contributed to poor international distribution. I HEART HUCKABEES directed by David O. Russell in 2004 can be an example of signs of renewal in American Indie films during the early 21^st century. However, as soon as we take a closer look at the images, there are clear echoes of the screwball comedy developed in the thirties and forties, the use of those pastel colors of the late fifties become a ruthless criticism of the current consumer society.  I'm sure someone like Frank Tashlin would have loved this movie - and his visual formulation that has the longing for the great supporters of this comedy genre in the sixties - Jerry Lewis, Stanley Donen, Blake Edwards, etc.-. However, I think that the most palpable reference is the brilliant comedy, the masterpiece of Paul Thomas Anderson; PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE (2002), sharing visual similarities and the strong presence of Jon Brion in the soundtrack.

This is a film perhaps not suitable for all tastes, but which was a very pleasant surprise for me when I saw it with my friends in 2004, and progressively becomes a more ingenious than funny film, aptly developed more as a sort of musical comedy, very well translated into a careful panoramic format defined by a “Tutti-Fruti chromatism” that caters to the internal needs of its images and it does not remain just as simple and brilliant ornament, as was perhaps in the case Down with Love, 2003 by Peyton Reed which I loved by the way but for different reasons -. Russell’s images give off enough skill to propose the interaction of a series of characters that initially may seem absurd - and they are - but that in the development of their stories they have much to tell us about the search for their own identity or the meaning of an existence that is called into question, even as part of a comfortable environment.

From a premise of a classic argument of a musical comedy, spread around some characters related to a global company, Huckabees thus the title, from which emerges the one character that serves as a link between the rest of the cast.  This is Albert (Jason Schwartzman), an environmentally conscious young man who reflects on the search for the meaning of existence from a series of coincidences related to a young black immigrant. In the middle of the process, he goes to an “existential” detective agency - the best idea in the film - that will try to resolve the young guy’s identity crisis. With this plot the presence of a narcissistic executive obsessed with success, his girlfriend, a firefighter who is bitter by his intuition of existential nothingness and obsessed with the doctrines of nihilist philosophers all these characters will be interspersed. An authentic mosaic wrapped in a brilliant plot overflow and an attractive visual treatment, which sometimes even uses digital effects and almost surreal fantasies. It is true that I HEART HUCKABEES is not a particularly funny title, but at all times it is characterized by its enormous capacity for ingenuity and, what is truly great is how this is expressed cinematographically with as much inventiveness as it is with assertion.

To achieve a good result like this, there are two elements that David O. Russell manages to reverse in the film. In the first place, a magnificent direction of actors that even achieves a splendid result in Mark Walbergh’s character, and he knows how to exploit Jude Law's haughty antipathy for comedy, but that reaches a huge result in a Dustin Hoffman that reaches in my opinion one of the best roles of his entire career in a character that lent itself to the worst excesses. The other feature that gives the film its own personality is the sound counterpoint of Jon Brion who, at times, "takes over" the film, helping with his creativity and symphonic singularity to reach that " extra gram of madness" that define the best moments of the film for example; the sequence in which Jason Schwartzman and Isabelle Huppert show their sexual attraction in such an unusual way.

Finally, between the anguish before nothingness, philosophical hopes, attempts to seek happiness with love or the fragility of being aware only of the image and consumerism, the truth is that in I HEART HUCKABEES one rejoices before a personal view that without losing its ingenuity, at times seems to take us to the world of Lewis Carroll and makes this indie film as one of the most original and valuable comedies of recent years.

It has an amazing cast with: Jason Schwartzman, Dustin Hoffman, Isabelle Huppert, Jude Law, Lily Tomlin, Mark Wahlberg, Naomi Watts, Ger Duany, Kevin Dunn, Jonah Hill, Fisher Island, Tippi Hedren, Bob Gunton, Talia Shire, Richard Jenkins, Saïd Taghmaoui, Shania Twain

The Squid and The Whale 2005

After directing three initial films, Noah Baumbach got a hit with a story set in Brooklyn in the 1980's that attracted critical attention. When the independent American cinema seemed bound to the relentless repetition of the 90’s model via Sundance (with better or worse results) Baumbach created a film that reworked all that immediate legacy to create a narrative with autobiographical colors, in turn, he produced a film with another type legacy much more important and profound;  than the one  left by those intellectuals who, after the counterculture, settled in their bourgeois armchairs without having closed the wounds that were left open. And so, “The Squid and the Whale” is so much a comedy about keeping the wound open of a broken family in which children assume adult roles, parents misbehave it also a look into different kinds of love, first love, adult love, lovers, etc.

“The Squid and the Whale” is based on the real experiences of the film's director, Noah Baumbach and his brother.  Jesse Eisenberg ('The social network') and Owen Kline ('The Anniversary Party') embody the Berkman brothers and actors Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney bring the Berkman marriage to life. The drama won an Oscar nomination, in 2006, in the Best Screenplay category, as well as my other awards.

Set in Brooklyn in 1986, “The Squid and the Whale” reflects the daily life of the Berkman family. Bernard and Joan will separate. His two sons, Walt, 16, and Frank, 12, each put on behalf of one of their parents. It might seem that the older son’s age makes him understand his father a little better, while admiring and envying him at the same time; at the same time the younger boy prefers to remain protected by his mother. But story keeps evolving and the personalities of the two kids change as they realize that everything has nuances.

Perhaps that is the greatest merit of the film: to present the situation and the characters with their nuances and flaws, without saying that things are white or black, without presenting good or bad. Like the children, it is difficult for the film to put itself on the side of one of the two members of the marriage.

These flaws make the characters multidimensional and well created, therefore, character identification occurs and we are interested in following the plot to see what happens to them. The dialogues are well written, witty, funny sometimes sarcastic and move away from the topic in which they could easily fall. Also in those flaws and nuances set the tone of the film, another success. It is neither melodrama nor comedy; it operates within the difficult balance of dramatic comedy or bittersweet drama. The best example of one of the protagonist’s flaws is the husband’s reaction, Bernard, to the achievements of his wife as a writer. He has been her mentor and now she can't stand to be the one who succeeds, precisely at the time when her success is in about to occur. Although this way of behaving could put us against him, the rejection towards the character is not total, but rather human understanding occurs. Running the risk of being branded as a feminist if I would say that it is a very expected male attitude, because of the masculine ego, but that is what the film shows in a very human way. This rivalry seems to be the straw that fills the glass, but the marriage had long been on the rocks, since fidelity was not the strength of either.

The way the point of view is presented is yet another great merit of the film. Get us to consider the vision of the two adults and get us to understand the attitudes of both, despite having shown us the aforementioned character flaws. He even gets us to understand the attitude of both children. The risk of putting ourselves in the shoes of these young kids would be to fall victim of the anti-divorce pamphlet, but the film moves away from it with mastery, showing us that separation is something that had to happen, that a forced continuation of a marriage would do anyone good.

Noah Baumbach was the director of 'Kicking and Screaming' (1995), 'Highball' (1997) and 'Mr. Jealousy '(1997). The producer and promoter of the idea is the now legendary Wes Anderson, director of series of amazing and successful films. The protagonists are Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney, William Baldwin and Anna Paquin. The children are played by Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline.

In conclusion: “The Squid and the Whale” has many merits and is a good film; it has been nominated and won several awards: It was nominated for the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay,  the Golden Globe for Best Film, the Golden Globe for Best Actress (Laura Linney),  the Golden Globe for Best Actor (Jeff Daniels). At the Las Palmas International Film Festival, Laura Linney was chosen as the best actor. Other awards it has accumulated are: Best Film 2005: New York Online Film Critics. Best Screenplay 2005: Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Best Screenplay 2005: National Board of Review. Best Screenplay 2005: National Society of Film Critics. Best Screenplay 2005: Toronto Film Critics Association. Best Screenplay 2005: New York Film Critics Association. 6 nominations for the Independent Spirit Award: Including the Best Film. Best Director: Sundance Film Festival 2005. Waldo Salt Award for Best Screenplay: Sundance Film Festival 2005. Official Selection: New York Film Festival 2005. Official Selection: Toronto International Film Festival 2005.

The Dreamers 2003

Unlike the rest of his filmography, for the initial credits of Stolen Kisses (Baisers volés, 1968) François Truffaut introduced a dedication and a visual reference that are directly related to the events that took place in Paris during the filming of his movie (Stolen Kisses). The dedication, written with his own hand, is offered to Henri Langlois, founder and director of the French Cinematheque, while the visual reference is to the gate of the same entity in the palace of Chaillot, where a note that is found that reads closed until future news.

Now back to the Dreamers, it is to that same gate Isabelle seems to be chained, one of the protagonists of The Dreamers . This film is directed by the Italian maestro Bernardo Bertolucci. Isabelle, her twin brother Theo and a young American man, Matthew, t hey met there, they are part of the huge group of moviegoers who in February 1968 crowded around the film library to protest the dismissal of Langlois, sparked by a power struggle in the city. Several people were involved like Pierre Moinot, president of the film library, André Holleaux, head of the National Center for Cinematography and the culture minister, André Malraux.

In 1968, Truffaut interrupted the filming of Stolen Kisses to actively participate in the protests, which reached a climax on February 14, when the police confronted the nearly three thousand demonstrators grouped around the palace of Chaillot. ----May 68 had been anticipated a few months for the film community, through pressures, letters of solidarity from directors and actors around the world, and the virulent denunciations of the publication Cahiers du Cinéma group in other media, managed to reinstate Langlois in his position at the end of April. The start of the union protests and strikes in May coincided with the opening of the Cannes Festival, which was forced to cancel in solidarity with the movement that took place in Paris.

In the Dreamers, Bertolucci wanted to capture that era in his film with a combination of elements: being young, being a movie buff, being in Paris and living in 1968. However the Dreamers  is not a historical film. The Langlois affair underlies only as a backdrop, as a reason for the relationship between Isabelle  (Eva Green, in her film debut), Theo (Louis Garrel, the son of the great French director Philippe Garrel) and Matthew (Michael Pitt ), which is the true theme of the film. The director does, without a doubt, a tribute to the era and the intoxication of cinema in which many young people lived. As if it were a hallucinogen, the images on the big screen excite them, make them fly, transport them. Isa states that she was really born in 1959 and that her first words were "New York Herald Tribune", the same as Jean Seberg vociferates on the Champs Elysees in Breathless (A bout de souffle, 1960) by Godard. We believe her, many women were born to life with that free and mysterious image of  Seberg, who proposed to them a new model of life.

Matthew (Michael Pitt) is a young American who lives in Paris as an exchange student, there he meets the university students Isabelle (Eva Green) and Theo (Louis Garrel), two brothers obsessed with film and very involved in the French May. Isabelle and Theo, whose parents are traveling, invite him to leave his hotel and live with them. There he discovers that they are Siamese twins and that they have a strange and unclassifiable relationship.

The three initiate a sexual relationship marked by the veiled attraction between the two boys and between the brothers among themselves. Matthew, who ends up getting involved in a protest demonstration with violent confrontations with the police, is the weak part of that trio and ends up realizing that the political ideals and psychological behavior of the brothers are incompatible with his relationship with Isabelle. Incest, probably the greatest taboo that exists in the West and polyamorous relations are present throughout the film. 15 years ago there was no talk of this type of love and Bertolucci, director of feelings and sexualities, dared to name it with a film as uncomfortable as it is beautiful.

A model for life. That was the cinema for them, that in their cinephilia they did not see another valid representation. They sought to transgress what was established by a reality dominated by their elders, they wanted to be like the actors and stars they admired, to recreate the scenes of their favorite movies, to discuss movies, to think about movies, to eat movies, to get drunk on celluloid. They were not people, they were characters in a film playing a role. Victims of the contagion of a disease transmitted by eye contact, all three have no remedy. Bertolucci takes pleasure in showing us that frenzy in which they wander, interspersing the protagonist trio with clips from the films they evoke, in a beautiful montage where we get a glimpse how deeply tattooed was film on their skin. They are weird people, freaks like Tod Browning's homonymous film that is cited in the film.

The three run through the Louvre trying to break the record set by the trio of Band of Outsiders (Bande à part 1964), fight over the pre-eminence between Chaplin and Keaton in the reign of the silent comedy or braid in impossible riddles involving Top Hat (1935), Queen Christina (1933), Blonde Venus (1932) and Scarface (1932). More than living, they imitate, they represent, they dream. Eric Rohmer said it, recalling his time as a film writer: "We did not live. Life was the screen, it was the movies, it was to discuss and write about them."

But every philia has its evil side and Bertolucci knows it. From its name, The dreamers is an escapist work and for that reason the characters decide to flee from the reality in which they live and give themselves to some private and perverse games to which the cinema has perhaps taken them, or at least- has convened. With the closed cinemateque, they seem to have lost the thread that has united them to the world and they are enclosed in themselves, inside the huge apartment that Isa and Theo's parents leave in their care. Bertolucci releases the ties and the ballast, and the balloon in which the trip begins to rise to infinity. As I have mentioned previously, the episode of the protests around the cinemateque was only an apology (but no less successful, even Bertolucci got the actors Jean Pierre Léaud and Jean Pierre Kalfon recreate their active roles they had in those days). The director wants to look closely at his characters, study them, learn how far they are able to reach in that perverse sexual game in which they descend in a dangerous spiral.

Many have criticized Bertolucci for having missed the opportunity to show us his version of what happened in that spring of 68, but the same happened with Truffaut: Stolen Kisses is not a politically compromised work. Antoine, his protagonist, is enamored and undecided and works as a hotel porter and then as a detective. No political statements, no awareness, no philosophical manifestos. The cinema reflects the world of its director, not necessarily the real world. Bertolucci does not want to chronicle Langlois, he wants to show a film about three people who lived there and who shared a special and complex connection.

As in The Last Tango in Paris (1972), the isolation of the characters is the trigger that leads them to explore themselves, in a perverse game that leads Isa and Theo to the limits of incest, initiating Matthew into a forced sexual awakening that at first it makes him drunk, but then rejects it, when things are taking a less clear course. However, unlike the film with Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider, the attitude of the director towards the behavior of the characters of the Dreamers is very compassionate, completely idealized, without judging or criticizing them. And that same attitude is that of his gaze: the camera of Fabio Cianchetti, with his sensual palette, embellishes the actions to a degree in which it is more about an aesthetic complacency than a faithful approach to the real, stripping the images of everything that indicate how low they are falling in their personal degradation. What actually happens only we see when the twins’ parents come back home and they find the three asleep, intertwined in the middle of the chaos they have converted  the apartment and that only now we seem to perceive, now that we have awakened from the hypnotic dream in which we were.

That is what Bertolucci led us to: imagine that everything was possible, that utopias were viable and that the revolution was crossing the street. That sex, politics and cinema were a precise combination. When in reality we were naked and didn’t know it: "Then both of their neyes were opened, and they knew they were naked so they put together fig leaves and made aprons," this is what the biblical text reminds us. The director awakens us from the youthful dream we had. Now we are adults, now the streets are full of demonstrators. We join them knowing that nothing will ever be the same again, that what we dreamed has ended. The movie came to an end. The projector went out, someone turned on the lights of the theater. It's time to leave: life awaits us.

Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

Produced by Jeremy Thomas

Screenplay by Gilbert Adair

Based on  The Holy Innocents by Gilbert Adair

Cast:

Michael Pitt  Matthew

Eva Green as Isabelle

Louis Garrel as Théo

Anna Chancellor as Mother

Robin Renucci as Father

Jean-Pierre Kalfon as Himself

Jean-Pierre Leaud as Himself

Florian Cadiou as Patrick

Pierre Hancisse as First buff

Valentin Merlet as Second buff

Lola Peploe as The Usherette

Ingy Fillion as Théo's girlfriend