Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky opens at the Landmark Embarcadero today. It's about an ebullient schoolteacher named Poppy who ambles through life as an eternal optimist. Yeah. I was puzzled for a minute too. Is this the same Mike Leigh who wrote and directed Naked with a misanthropic protagonist at its center? Apparently yes! I'm going to see it today and being the incorrigible pessimist that I am, I'll wager there's gonna be a murder and lots of dialogue about death in it. Today's New York Times review of the film is here. indieWire has an interview with the director on their site. Read it here.
An excerpt:
"indieWIRE: How do you make a film about happiness?
Mike Leigh: Well, it's not a film just about happiness, that's simplistic, and I'm sure you agree. You know as well as I do you have to give a film a title. "Happy-Go-Lucky" evokes the spirit of the film, rather than a precise description of what's in the bottle. It's a film about positivism and coping with life in a mature, intelligent, focused way - not sort of mindlessly looking on the bright side and just being happy, as though she'd eaten magic mushrooms or smoked a lot of dope."
Another film that I've been eagerly anticipating is Wong Kar-Wai's Ashes of Time Redux. It's the only other film of his besides his debut feature, As Tears Go By, that I haven't seen. Originally released in 1994 Ashes of Time was lovingly restored after the director discovered that prints of it were rapidly deteriorating in a lab. It is a martial arts wuxia film about two young swordsmen (one a mercenary) who try to outrun their checkered pasts (subtext: the persistence of memory). It opens at the Lumiere on October 17. Wong Kar-Wai talks briefly about the '94 shoot in this recent NY Times piece here. Here's an excerpt:
“It was the first production of my company,” Jet Tone, said Mr. Wong, whose international success had yet to come. “We were still figuring out how to do things.”
Those chaotic beginnings were witnessed during a visit to the set in 1992. The movie was being filmed around the clock in Yulin, a remote town on the edge of the Gobi Desert. One day the shooting in a grotto stretched into evening, and a scene with Ms. Lin, delivering lines of an intense dialogue while staring into a spinning bird cage, headed into 40-plus takes. More than a dozen crew members were crammed into the small space, made stuffier when smoke was fanned in for atmosphere. Mr. Wong was in a corner watching on a monitor. Every so often, in his measured way, he made a suggestion to Ms. Lin or called out to his cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, “Is that all you can do?”
Wong appeared in an Apple In-store last week in New York with cinematographer Christopher Doyle and New York Press film critic Armond White to talk about the release of Ashes of Time Redux. indieWire's coverage of it is here.
I'm also looking forward to seeing Momma's Man, which is coming to the Lumiere Theatre on October 24. Azazel Jacobs' film has received gushing reviews from the critics, but that's never been a reason to see a film for me. What intrigues me about this movie is that it looks seriously (and unavoidably, with a wry smile) at a thirty-something guy who would much rather live with his parents than face the challenges and pressures of being a man with responsibilities. Isn't that one of the main conceits in Stepbrothers, Knocked-Up, that crappy movie starring Matthew McConaughey (sp?), and a dozen other flicks about grown men acting like boys that have been in theatres these past few seasons? With the unemployment rate in America at 6.1%, the difficulty of finding a satisfying job, divorce rates declining only because less people are getting married, and the catastrophes being broadcast on every news channel every hour of every day, why wouldn't you want to move back in with Mom and Dad, into your incubator/cubby hole of a room, to watch Land of the Lost reruns in your jammies, while eating bowl after bowl of Count Chocula underneath sunbleached posters of Kiss, if you could?
And finally, there is Lola Montes. The resplendent technicolor masterpiece by the great Max Ophuls. It has been restored to as near to its full glory as when it was initially shown in France in 1955. I first saw it on VHS video several years ago and though the film itself was captivating (as all of Ophuls films are), the VHS quality left much to be desired. I saw it again this January at the PFA in Berkeley and it was absolutely breathtaking. Lola Montes is, like in many of Ophuls' films, the lovelorn heroine. She recounts her illustrious romantic liaisons with the composer Franz Lizst, a german student played by Jules and Jim's Oskar Werner, and Ludwig of Bavaria played by screen icon (at least to me) Anton Walbrook, as part of a circus revue. The colors, virtuosic camera work, the choreography of a cast of thousands, the music and not least of all, the vignettes of Lola Montes' life will make you swoon. A "definitive" 35 mm restored print of Lola Montes will be shown at the Castro Theatre November 19-25.
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