Shards of Hopeless Cinematic Romanticism on Valentine's Day

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Another year, another Valentine's Day. And once again, though this year finds me without an official valentine to call my own, as ever, I turn to my great (abstract) love, the cinema—specifically, the sensuous romanticism of that great visual poet of longing and heartbreak, Wong Kar-Wai.

After all those images I posted at my blog last year of characters in Chungking Express and Fallen Angels just staring into space and dreaming/yearning, this year, my Wong-geared thoughts turn to a particularly intoxicating moment of actual action in his summary epic 2046 (2004). It comes late in the film, as Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) says good-bye to the mysterious "Black Spider" (Gong Li) who also has the name of Su Li-zhen, the woman he loved and lost in Wong's previous film In the Mood for Love (2001). This second Su Li-zhen, much like Chow, carries a haunted past that she never reveals to him, but which Chow intuits based as much on his own personal experiences as from her actual elusive behavior. And Chow, ever the lady-killer that he is throughout the shifting chronology and layering of fantasy and reality in 2046, decides that maybe it's best to leave the second Su Li-zhen, lest he keep thinking of the first Su whenever he sees her.

What a send-off Chow gives her! Upon Su's urging...

...he goes in...

...and instead of just holding her, as Su tells her to do, he boldly grabs her...

...and gives her the biggest, longest, most impassioned smooch ever shot on film:

The way Tony Leung just grabs Gong Li and goes for it, like that, kissing her like there really was no tomorrow? Man! The dude is my hero, just for that! (Not that Leung isn't hero-worthy for other reasons...)

And after Chow tells Su to get back in touch with him once she has finally escaped her past, we see Su's multifaceted reaction—first heartbroken, then more reflective:

The way Gong Li wipes that smeared lipstick off her lips, I rather wonder if Wong intended a subtle tribute to Jean-Paul Belmondo's famous lip-touching gesture in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960)...

...which, of course, Jean Seberg repeats at the very end, in a more ominous context:

Or am I merely overlaying one romantic cinematic vision on top of another? As a single cinephile with traces of hopeless romanticism in his soul, I have a tendency to do that...especially on Valentine's Day.

But seriously, folks: Has anyone seen anything so sexy since...hell, since Barbara Stanwyck tousled the heck out of a stunned-into-sexual-submission Henry Fonda's hair in Preston Sturges's The Lady Eve (1941)?

For all you lovebirds out there—attached, single or otherwise—enjoy your day of celebration!

Happy 80th Birthday, Jean-Luc Godard...

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

Jean-Luc Godard in the "Toutes le histoires" (1988) episode of his video-essay series Histoire(s) du cinéma

Technically, the first Godard feature I saw was, in fact, the director's first, Breathless (1960). Guided by Pauline Kael's review of the film, I found it interesting at my younger age less for its formal innovations than for its depiction of restless, amoral youth, which I found fascinating and even a bit attractive, for all its rawness and violence. But it was only with the second film of his I saw, Band of Outsiders (1964), that Godard truly became an important part of my movie-watching life. Finding myself thoroughly entranced by its movie-movie romanticism juxtaposed with its unsparing depiction of the sheer ordinariness of the lives of its three main characters, the film opened up a window of consciousness into a way of looking at both the world and the possibilities of movies, a consciousness that Godard would crystallize with those famous lines of dialogue in Masculine Feminine (1966):

We went to the movies often. The screen would light up, and we'd feel a thrill. But Madeleine and I were usually disappointed. The images were dated and jumpy. Marilyn Monroe had aged badly. We felt sad. It wasn't the movie of our dreams. It wasn't that total film we carried inside ourselves. That film we would have liked to make, or, more secretly, no doubt, the film we wanted to live.

As someone only beginning to dip his toes into hardcore cinephilia at the time, I felt a powerful sense of revelation at seeing and hearing these kinds of sentiments in a movie—in other words, seeing a film refer explicitly to other films, to the power of cinema, to the vast divide between what we hope for from the movies and what we settle for in our own daily lives. (Maybe it struck Todd Haynes the same way, too; he gave an explicit shout-out to some of those lines in his Bob Dylan bio-fantasia I'm Not There (2007).) Years ago, Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets had forever expanded my perception of cinema in regards to how closely it could approximate something like real life; miraculously, you can practically feel yourself amongst Charlie, Johnny Boy and the rest, living their up-and-down lives right alongside them. Many of Godard's films from the 1960s added the idea of self-reflexivity to my movie-going arsenal—the idea that a movie could be about movies in ways that were not just "fun" (like, say, Quentin Tarantino's films...though I don't necessarily mean that as denigration), but genuinely provocative and even beautiful.

Hanna Schygulla in Passion (1982)

Godard's postmodernist bent is far from the only entry point in getting a handle on his body of work, of course—especially as, in his later films, he's more or less shed that early Hollywood romanticism and has uncompromisingly explored some of the political and philosophical undercurrents of even his most approachable earlier work, sometimes to the point of obscurantism. I admit that I've seen less of his post-Weekend than I should, and that sometimes his later work just plain puzzles me (I remember especially coming up short upon first, and so far only, viewings of First Name: Carmen (1983) and Detective (1985), both available for contemplation via this Lionsgate three-DVD set). And yet, even at his most inscrutable, Godard, I still believe, has things to reveal to us about the world and about this great popular art form, the cinema. Even at his most challenging and problematic, he is one of those directors who I value enough to take whatever he does seriously (his latest, Film Socialism (2009), is no exception, "Navaho English" subtitles and all; it played at this year's New York Film Festival, and I took a stab at it here).

Besides, Godard was such a powerful influence during my college years that I even wrote my senior thesis about him! That eventually got published in four parts at The House Next Door! (Not to mention, his Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967) was the first film I ever saw at Film Forum...so I probably owe him that, too.)

No Honorary Oscar validation necessary, M. Godard; you have an honorary place in my movie-going heart, especially on this, your 80th birthday. Joyeux anniversaire!

Godard pretending to mentally ill in First Name: Carmen (1983)

P.S. I was originally going to post something about Godard's 1980 film Every Man for Himself—which I saw in a new 35mm print at Film Forum, and which I think is one of his finest, and most deeply moving, works—this week...but I guess I somehow spent all my blogging energy for the week on those four short posts Monday and Tuesday. Sorry about that, all you readers of mine who are only now coming to this blog from my recent inclusion in the Large Association of Movie Blogs; here's hoping next week will be a more substantive one, post-wise!

Besides, I spent the rest of the week basically thinking about another birthday: my own! More on this to come...

Howard Finster's Fire-and-Brimstone Marriage of Text and Image

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Speaking of religion: Who among you knows of the artist named Howard Finster (1916-2001)?

A few weekends ago, I ventured forth into Harlem for the first time ever to check out a private new art gallery that recently opened up. How private? So private that it's basically one family's two-story studio apartment! One of my co-workers—who, it turns out, is himself an artist specializing in scanner photography (check out his site here, if you're curious what "scanner photography" looks like in practice)—decided to turn his apartment into an informal art gallery displaying some of his own works, some of the work of other artists, and cultural artifacts he has collected over the years.

Among the works of art displayed in this gallery was this:

The Devil's Vice, Howard Finster

Two things jumped out at me about this print: first, the sheer, overwhelming amount of detail packed into this canvas; and second, the fact that much of that detail was given over to words rather than images.

When it comes to movies, a lot of critics have a sometimes seemingly knee-jerk disdain for such characteristics as "preachiness," "heavy-handedness" and "didacticism." I guess many critics just don't like to preached to—but who does, right? And we all consider film a visual art more than anything else, so of course we'll vastly prefer something expressed visually rather than verbally; if a filmmaker is so clumsy as to feel the need to spell out his/her intentions for us in the audience...well, then, where's the fun in that?

Personally, I've always taken films that go the didactic route on a case-by-case basis. So yeah, sometimes such spell-it-out-too-explicitly heavy-handedness can bother the hell out of me too. Take one of the most popular, and widely praised, films of recent years, Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight (2008). This highly touted sequel to Batman Begins (2005) abounds in fairly graceless speechifying about, among other things, what morality there can really be in a world governed by chance and fate; but the speechifying matters less to me than this gnawing sense that Nolan is so insistent on putting his order-versus-chaos allegory across that he sacrifices character development and subtlety to do so. When he actually tries to turn his thinly veiled allegory into some kind of human drama, the lack of three-dimensional characterizations is thrown into sharp relief; there's nothing to care about on a human level beyond each character's preordained place in Nolan's grand allegorical scheme. The film ends up playing more lke a big-budget philosophical thesis paper than a drama with flesh-and-blood characters; thus, its many moments of overt didacticism—especially its "will one boat blow up the other" climax—stick out like so many sore thumbs.

Sometimes, though, didacticism can be done in a way that's genuinely thought-provoking and maybe even emotionally stirring. When it comes to some of the more hardcore-intellectual work of Jean-Luc Godard, for instance, sure, the same criticisms I just lobbed at The Dark Knight would probably apply. Does anyone really remember much about the characters in films like 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967), Tout va bien (1972), or in more recent work like In Praise of Love (2001), Notre musique (2004) and his latest, Film Socialism (2010)? In these films, to varying degrees, his "characters" mostly spout off ideas and aphorisms, and he leaves it up to us to either take his thoughts seriously or dismiss it as "pretentious." And yet, Godard's didacticism usually evinces a curiosity and engagement with the wider world that Nolan's never does; plus, for all the chatter he includes in his films, he's far more visually inventive in the ways he expresses his intellectual obsessions on the screen (witness, for instance, the back-and-forth tracking shot in the supermarket towards the end of Tout va bien, from which the above still is taken). There's an exciting sense of exploration in Godard's later work that, even at its most inscrutable, offsets any sense of preachiness; he's trying to pin down his ideas the same time we in the audience are.

Admittedly, Finster's art isn't fueled by that same sense of exploration. A Baptist pastor from Georgia, Finster often claimed that God, through visions, implored him to spread His word through his art; in that way, much of his more than 46,000 works are essentially fire-and-brimstone expressions of his faith. And yet, one look at the portrait above and one gets the sense that he is so passionately committed to that faith that he'll even go so far as to include large amounts of text, scriptural or otherwise, in his canvases in order to get the Word out. One could consider this the visual-art equivalent of the kind of talky didacticism in Godard's films or The Dark Knight, and one might even dismiss it wholesale as crude and un-artistic. For me, however, there's a certain purity of intent to Finster's art—his posters, his sculptures, his self-built Paradise Gardens—that rises above its simple means and becomes almost transcendent. It's his zeal that moves you, whatever the method.

 Here's another example of his art, this one in the shape of an American flag:

Oh, and for those who think they've never seen Howard Finster's work before...remember this album cover...

...and this one?

Yep, Finster designed the album covers for both R.E.M.'s 1984 album Reckoning (the band's second) and Talking Heads' 1985 Little Creatures. In the former, he collaborated with lead singer Michael Stipe, and it looks sparer than many of the Finster paintings/sculptures I've seen; the latter seems more echt-Finsterian in its denseness. Rolling Stone magazine named the Little Creatures cover the best of its year. The more you know...

You can get more information about Finster, by the way, at this ancient-looking website. He seems quite a character; I look forward to delving even more into his work in the future.

The man himself

New York Film Festival 2010: Playing Catch-up

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—My apologies, readers; I've gotten so bogged down with New York Film Festival stuff (in addition to a few socializing detours) that I haven't been able to find time to update My Life, at 24 Frames Per Second...until now.

So, as my way of catching up, here are a few links to recent New York Film Festival dispatches published at The House Next Door:

Film Socialism: review here
Aurora: review here
Black Venus and Post Mortem: reviews here

Not included among these links are reviews of my two favorite films of the festival so far, Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy and Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. I caught up with both after I was forced to miss their respective press screenings Tuesday of last week; Kiarostami's film I caught at a smaller press screening on Monday night, Apichatpong's at its public screening on Saturday.

That was a fun experience, by the way, watching Uncle Boonmee at that public screening. First of all, I was able to score $10 rush tickets, half the price of a regular-admission ticket; even better, I got a seat all the way in the first row of the Alice Tully Hall auditorium! (Some people don't like sitting all the way in the front, but generally I don't mind; in this case, it allowed me to be better able to completely immerse myself in Apichatpong's wondrously surreal imagery and bask in its amazingly evocative sound design. I felt like I was staring up at an IMAX movie in complete awe.) And secondly: Apichatpong was there to discuss the film with film critic Melissa Anderson. I was so enthralled by the experience that, after the Q&A was over, I went up to him on the stage and asked for an autograph.

He obliged! Thus...

Maybe someday this will become very valuable? (I would have taken a photograph of him, but I didn't have my camera on me, and the camera on my cellphone doesn't seem to have the ability to turn off the flash.)

Anyway, I hope to write about both Uncle Boonmee and especially Certified Copy—an intellectually dense yet deeply moving achievement—in the near future. (Those two, Manoel de Oliveira's The Strange Case of Angelica and Olivier Assayas's Carlos would probably constitute the highlights of my festival experience so far.) In the meantime: Tonight I will finally be introducing myself to the work of avant-garde filmmaker James Benning through his latest work, Ruhr, playing in a program of its own at the festival's Views from the Avant-Garde series going on throughout this weekend. It's about time I delved more deeply into experimental cinema, methinks!

Music You Realize You've Heard Only After You've Heard It

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—Every once in a while, in my music-listening explorations, I'll come across a piece of music that I recall hearing in a film I saw somewhere but remained unknown to me until hearing it at that moment—and that recognition would trigger a feeling of exhilaration along the lines of, I didn't know that was the piece of music used in such-and-such film! Awesome!

I experienced a moment like that a week ago while listening to a 1963 recording of Robert Schumann's 1842 Piano Quintet, with pianist Rudolf Serkin playing with the Budapest Quartet. I was hearing the work for the first time...or so I thought.

The second movement of the work begins with a solemn C minor funeral march that stands in marked contrast to the whirlwind close of its first movement. But then...wait a minute...what's that I hear in the movement's ethereal second subject? Could it be? Yes, yes it is...




It's the chamber music that so delicately opens Ingmar Bergman's 1983 masterpiece Fanny and Alexander, as Bergman literally draws a curtain open into the life of the Ekdahl clan, especially through the eyes of the titular two children. For some reason, I had always believed this was simply "the music from Fanny and Alexander"...and then, upon hearing Serkin and the Budapest Quartet perform this Schumann work, bam! Shivers of recognition running up my spine.

It was a beautiful feeling—hearing music that I realized I had heard only after I had heard it.

(Oh, and even before I saw Fanny and Alexander, I heard this piece of music in the context of Michael Winterbottom's Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005)...though the less said about its sophomoric appropriation in that film, the better.)

Of course, this wasn't the first time I had such a musical encounter.

For example, the late Richard Stone—a composer who scored many of the 1990s Warner Bros. television cartoon series I loved growing up, including Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs—would every so often use a selection of Johannes Brahms's famous heroic big tune of the finale of his First Symphony in his various cartoon scores...and I didn't realize it until I finally heard Brahms's First Symphony in high school and had my eureka moment. (Not that that was a fresh stylistic trope; Carl Stalling, who famously scored a lot of Warner Bros. cartoons in the '40s and '50s, often incorporated music by Rossini, Chopin, Rimsky-Korsakov and others into his musical accompaniments for the adventures of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and the rest. The difference is, I was fully aware of Stalling's homages at the time.)

Jean-Luc Godard famously peppers his films with all sorts of allusions to popular and classical music. In Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967), for instance, Godard randomly uses snatches of Beethoven's string quartets...but only after listening to this complete box set of Beethoven string quartets was I able to put names to the seductive musical bits on the soundtrack. (I don't think it's absolutely necessary to know that it's Beethoven you're listening to on the soundtrack; the music's intimate grandeur speaks for itself. But it enriches your experience of the film quite a bit if you are aware.)

But it's not just classical music, of course.

Before my trip to Los Angeles, I gorged on the music of The Beach Boys, having not heard their complete albums, only their hits. Turns out, though, I hadn't even heard all of their hits...or, at least, I had heard all of their hits, but in some cases I didn't realize I had heard them until this recent diet of Beach Boys listening.



So when I heard their song "When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)," from the group's 1965 album The Beach Boys Today!, I immediately recognized it from Look Who's Talking (1989), not having realized that director Amy Heckerling had used more than one Beach Boys song on the soundtrack (I had already known that "I Get Around" accompanied the film's opening-credit insemination).

And the song that plays over the million reconciliations at the end of Love Actually (2003)? "God Only Knows," from Pet Sounds, of course...though I didn't realize it 'til I finally sat down and listened to the complete album recently.

It's a familiar enough experience to watch a film or TV episode and get excited when you hear a piece of music you know and possibly love being used in a fresh context. But what about the tingles of excitement you might feel when you recognize a piece of music that you then realize you had already heard before without knowing back then what it was you were listening to? To me, such moments carry a kind of excavation-like thrill—as if you've happened upon a long-lost artifact in your own mental artistic landscape.

Does this feeling sound familiar to you, dear readers? (Or does this whole blog post merely expose how catching up I need to do in my knowledge of classical and popular art—a fact that was only emphasized yesterday with the passing of cartoonist Harvey Pekar (RIP), who I know only from the excellent 2003 film American Splendor?)

An Image for the Day, To Get You in a Weekend Mood

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—I think I pretty much exhausted my blogging energy with my four-posts-in-24-hours barrage Wednesday-going-into-Thursday. Am I crazy or what? (On second thought, don't answer that.) So, to close out the week, I leave you all with this:

This is my way of pointing the way toward the weekend—which looks to be a pleasant one, weather-wise—the way Sami Frey points the way toward English class in Jean-Luc Godard's great 1964 film Band of Outsiders (which, by the way, I wrote about earlier this year here). Up and at 'em!

I may be back early on Sunday for a Father's Day post (because I've spoken too much about my mother on this blog in the past, and not nearly enough about my dad). Nevertheless: Have a lovely weekend, my friends!

Weekend Movie Round-up: Character Studies Wrapped in Genre...and Indie Grunge

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—

Another Godard film on the big screen, another revelation!

Can you believe that it's been 50 years since Godard's Breathless—with the help of François Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Alain Resnais's Hiroshima, Mon Amour, both from a year earlier—ushered in the trailblazing French New Wave movement and, with the full force of gusty winds of restless innovation, more or less changed the way we look at movies? For the occasion, Rialto Pictures has released a new 35mm restoration of the film, playing through Thursday at New York's Film Forum. I went to see it there on Saturday...and not only is it as exhilarating an experience as it ever was, but in some ways I think I can honestly say that I felt like I was seeing it afresh.

Sure, having seen the film twice before on DVD, I was already well acquainted with its jump cuts, its Tradition of Quality-subverting documentary style of Raoul Coutard's cinematography, its obsession with American genres, its daringly distended second-act hotel-room seduction, and its cool and playful tone. All of that was as familiar to me as, say, a mural I couldn't help but stare at for hours on end.

What really struck me about Breathless this time around, however, is just how appropriate its title really is, in more ways than one.

In French, the title is À bout de souffle, which is perhaps more accurately translated as "out of breath." On a literal level, this translation makes sense considering the ennui that eventually befalls its protagonist, Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo); by the end, as he realizes his American lover Patricia (Jean Seberg) has betrayed him, he verbally expresses fatigue, as if he has finally come to the end of his rope in keeping up his lifestyle of bedding girls and stealing cars.

Only in this first-ever theatrical encounter with Breathless, though, did I truly feel the sheer freedom of Godard's seemingly improvisatory style—as jazz-like as Martial Solal's score—and understand how intricately that freedom corresponds with that of its characters. The film may be celebrated these days for its game-changing cinematic innovations, but those jump cuts and frequent digressions don't exist in the film simply for their own sake. In Breathless, the technique is put to genuinely expressive ends, encoding Michel's high-flying amoral lifestyle into the film's DNA while maintaining a palpable distance from the character. And when, thanks to Patricia, Michel finally sees the end in store for him, the film likewise finally slows down, with Godard's use of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto infusing his moment of realization with a powerfully mournful feeling I don't think I've ever experienced with its ending before.

For me, what excites me most about Breathless beyond its still-startling technical innovations and its exultant celebration/deconstruction of American crime-genre conventions is how all of it advances a particular worldview, one of genuine intellectual and emotional curiosity about what makes his pair of young characters tick. This film is one cool cat...but, like the best American genre films, it frequently goes beyond its surface coolness to penetrate the essences of its two main characters: one seemingly without a care in the world except, perhaps, what he grasps in the movies (thus his lip-touching mannerisms and his self-conscious emulations of Humphrey Bogart); the other more worldly and concerned with her own future. In its own jazzed-up way, it's a character study—and while that certainly isn't the only way to approach this eternally fresh and endlessly fascinating classic, I submit that it's on that level that Breathless will endure the most. Certainly for another 50 years.

***

I saw a couple of other films in the theater this weekend, both of them worthy and interesting efforts.

For its first two acts, Vincenzo Natali's Splice (2009) works intriguingly as a domestic drama with chilling sci-fi elements, focusing as it does on Elsa and Clive, a scientist couple (Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody) who secretly decide to go forward with an experiment to blend human and animal DNA to create a new organism. Or is it merely scientific curiosity that drives Elsa? The script, by Natali, Antoinette Terry Bryant and Doug Taylor, drops tantalizing hints that Elsa has come from a troubled childhood, and that her memories of that childhood may be driving an unspoken desire to give birth to a child of her own, however bastardized. Potent questions of bioethics also haunt a good deal of Splice: how far this couple should go in its experimentation, or whether they already went too far in even conceiving of such an experiment. So far, so ambitious and intelligent.

And then comes its third act—and your reaction to what transpires in its last half hour or so will depend almost entirely on one's willingness to accept its increasingly outlandish twists at face value, or whether to laugh in disbelief and dismiss it all as "near-campy bullshit," as a friend of mine did. Or can it be possible to do both, like I did? I wouldn't dream of spoiling any of those surprises for you; all I'll say, though, is that, to my mind, none of what happens in its third act comes out of nowhere. It all arises organically from themes and plot points in the film; it's just skewed in a more outrageous tenor than what has come before. The fact that I admittedly laughed at some of its outrageousness doesn't necessarily mean I found it difficult to take seriously.

Splice may not totally cohere in the end, but it's still worth seeing for the questions it raises, some brilliantly freaky imagery and a pair of fine lead performances that lend emotional gravity to the film even at its most over-the-top.

***

The other film I saw theatrically this weekend was Daddy Longlegs (2009), a low-budget independent film from New York filmmaking brothers Josh & Benny Safdie. Based on their experiences growing up with their own father, the film focuses on Lenny (Ronald Bronstein), a free-spirited 34-year-old divorcée as he tries to bond with his two sons (Sage and Frey Ranaldo) during the two weeks he has them away from his wife. 

Lenny is one hell of an interesting case. From taking a random trip with his kids to upstate New York with a woman, and her boyfriend, he barely knows; to drugging his kids when he is forced to work a late shift as a movie-theater projectionist, with near-disastrous results; to getting himself thrown into the slammer when he's caught tagging during a late night out on the town with a couple of male buddies: Here is a man who acts like he is a slave to his child-like, self-centered and stubborn whims. That child-like quality, though, paradoxically makes the character, for all the problematic behavior he displays in the film, strangely magnetic. As Bronstein plays him, he exudes a strangely charming openness to life, a sense of genuine wonder amidst the grungy environment in which he lives (skillfully captured in 16mm by Brett Jutkiewicz and Josh Safdie); at its best, the film itself exudes a similarly warm feeling, sometimes whimsically zeroing in on side characters—a homeless beggar here, a Chinese-restaurant owner there—unimportant to the story but simply there to provide lively textures to Lenny's world that even Lenny himself is too self-absorbed to perceive.

It's this tension between delving into Lenny's head and stepping outside of it to offer us a sense of perspective that gives Daddy Longlegs its most fascinating quality; unlike Greenberg, Noah Baumbach's similarly discomfiting study of an adult fuck-up, the Safdies feel no need to stick so steadfastly outside their main character's point-of-view; they even going so far as to throw in a dream sequence featuring Lenny getting sucked dry by a giant mosquito. But when Daddy Longlegs finally does spend a sustained period of time outside of Lenny's vantage point in the film's concluding 15 minutes, the effect is quietly devastating: We begin to see him from the two sons' perspective after those two weeks with their father have passed into history, and suddenly he doesn't seem quite so likably loopy anymore, just abrasively so. 

This oddly warm and wise movie looks to possibly be nearing its run at the IFC Center, but it may still be available on demand even after it leaves the theater. If you like to be as adventurous in your movie-watching as Lenny is in his life-living—without the adverse consequences—check this one out, by all means.

***

Thus, another weekend of movie-watching comes to an end—and a pretty fruitful one, all in all. I haven't even gotten around to my big DVD discovery of the weekend! What is it, you may be wondering? You'll just have to check in here later in the week and find out, won'tcha?

See, I have my eyes of keeping all of you coming back for more...