ralph fiennes | Bubul and Harms at the Movies

I lassoed out the kid’s hair in the photoshop title but then I smudge brushed it, oh well can’t be bothered fixing. Maybe I should photoshop a title image for Davey’s posts? Anyway March is my least favorite month of the year by far so I spent it watching mad movies:

Recommended

Babylon (1980)
Upbeat reggae buddies movie becomes “walls slowing closing in” tragedy for a young british jamaican as he and his friends prepare for the big sound clash. a grand tour of male power dynamics and painfully resonant race/immigration/class stuff, skillfully and empathetically observed, and with at least three incredible nowhere-else scenes. the ending soundclash scene is absolutely bonkers and got me shook. strong recommendation.

Worth watching

Beach bum (2019)
I think we’re gonna be writing more about this one soon.

Elle (2016)
a conflicted, slippery late-era Paul Verhoeven movie where a woman gets into a rape-fetish relationship with her actual rapist en route to getting revenge on him for raping her 😬. with Verhoeven’s characteristic pitch-black humor fully on deck, and an amazing Isabelle Huppert performance. great movie if you want to think abt how consent can transform the monstrous into the beautiful, but jeez, be warned, the kind of movie that’s infuriating because you just know there’re nincompoops watching it and getting a very wrong idea.

Killer Joe (2011)
Pretty fucked up movie adaptation of a play abt a family of bad, desperate people who sex-trade their on-spectrum teen daughter to the devil, here played by hot cop/killer for hire Matthew McConaughey, and the devil ends up taking everything. a “make yourself feel bad and gross” movie (cf. Todd Solondz) par excellence with tons of capital-t Theatre capital-A Acting. with Juno Temple (Kaboom (2010)) once again in the nude.

Mr rogers documentary (2018)
wow mr rogers neighborhood really was a pretty crazy project when you think about it

Yaji & kita the midnight pilgrims (2005)
episodic wacky/surrealist/cartoon-body-horror roadtrip romp nominally “about” two gay Edo men (one with a wife problem, the other with a drug problem) on a pilgrimage to a shrine, with all manner of cra-a-azy diversions and characters, including a testicles gag so gonzo they show it twice. lots of good stuff in here comedically, visually, and regarding love/hate relationships. shoutout Jacob for the rec, on the basis of my loving Funky Forest (2005)!

The rest

24 Hour Party People (2002)
a cute & tragic coogan movie abt having your time and that time passing, that’s also a rave-adjacent movie. didn’t appreciate the glib & jokey way it depicts ian curtis’s suicide but otherwise felt that it aged very well. pairs with fiorucci made me hardcore (1999).

But I’m a cheerleader (1999)
Teen sex comedy set in a dictatorial conversion therapy retreat house, with a color palate out of the Ranaldo and the Loaf “Songs for Swinging Larvae” video, that reads overall like a PG-13 Gregg Araki movie; definitely worth checking if you like those. at one point the teens sneak out to a nearby gay bar called straight-up “Cocksuckers” to slow dance together; insane to think this came out the same year as American Pie. With Dante Basco, Hook‘s (1991) Rufio.

Apocalypto (2006)
We wrote abt this.

Shallow Grave (1994)
The first Danny Boyle movie, a misfire of a corpse-disposal caper(?!) starring a long-haired young Ewan McGregor, managing somehow not to be a hottie at all. Pretty cool that these two got the recipe completely sorted out for Trainspotting just a couple years later.

The lavender hill mob (1951)
Jovial British caper abt smuggling gold to Paris as miniature Eiffel Towers, featuring an almost realtime dizzying descent from the actual Eiffel Tower on a windy spiral staircase (i.e. my actual worst nightmare), as well as a scene where a cop oinks along to “Old MacDonald had a farm.”

Monty python holy grail (1975)
Never been a big Python head and kinda generally dislike John Cleese’s macho creep vibe but I feel doomed to rewatch this one every so often anyway. I enjoyed it this time, the horse riding gag especially grew on me, and I love the mic drop ending. Pairs well with Yaji and Kita as a zany episodic roadtrip movie.

Candyman (1992)
We wrote abt this.

The midnight meat train (2008)
What’s with “agents of the world behind the world” being dapper besuited old-timey guys? I hate this. Here youngish Bradley Cooper is an art world-striving photographer trying to take pics of a besuited madman serial killer who bonks ppl with a hammer in a fake NYC subway, in order, it turns out, to feed the corpses to demonic CHUDs. Bradley Cooper becomes the besuited old timey guy who serves the CHUDs in the end – that’s art world success for ya! A Clive Barker adaptation I watched to prep for writing abt Candyman; it’s bad.

austin powers 1 (1997)
Wild that this dominated culture for what felt like an eternity and is now pretty much completely gone. It’s not good but it’s VERY dated; kind of the best part is how low-budget and underproduced it looks. With Will Farrell in a bit part before his own movie career took off. Austin powers 3 (2002) costars no less than Beyonce, which feels Mandela Effect to me.

Frances Ha (2012)
I completely cannot stand Noah Baumbach or any aspect of his cornball Woody Allen-worship career or his extraordinarily wienery “mediocrity struggle” characters, but I do kinda like Gretta Gerwig, so I watched this back to back with Meyerowitz Stories, the latter on Davey’s rec, to troll myself. NYC portraiture just does not get any more annoying than these goddamn motherfucking Baumbach movies, period. Even within this very specific category-within-a-category you can save time and cover both movies’ bases by just watching relatively-much-better movie Tiny Furniture (2010) instead.

Meyerowitz Stories (2017)
Supremely cloying just like every other Baumbach I’ve hate-watched, tho it has to be said that Adam Sandler is great in it.

Ideal Home (2018)
We put this on cold because we like Paul Rudd & Coogan but it turned out to be a feature length unfunny taco bell commercial.

The trip to spain (2017)
We’d just watched Gavin & Stacey s01-s03, with Rob Brydon as Uncle Bryn, which I found very cute and funny, so figured it’d be good to check back in with him and Coog in the The Trip movies. This one is funnier and less dark than The trip to Italy.

The thirteenth floor (1999)
If you google “movies like the matrix” this is like, the main one, from the same year, but it’s really more like Westworld or Inception. Here, computer nerds have an MRI machine that they use to login to the Matrix for like, two hours, so they can have sex with prohibition-era simulation call girls. Things get nuts when a prohibition-era simulation bartender realizes he’s in the simulation, then even more nuts when the computer nerds realize they’re also in a simulation. It’s not great but it’s funny and crazy to think about this movie being the “primary text” for these concepts in an alternative reality.

The beguiled (2017)
Watched in the bathtub. For “tragedy & shenanigans afoot at the repressed girls boarding school” movies this just doesn’t come even close to the incredible Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), tho it shares a lot of similar costuming, light, and big trees. For “poisoned by a deliciously-prepared mushroom dish” go with Phantom Thread (2017).

Wuthering Heights (1992)
Pure-plot rendition of the classic, with Ralph Fiennes as Heathcliffe, here remorselessly and relentlessly a dickhead to absolutely everyone. I’m not necessarily saying it’s good, but ppl who know it mainly as a Kate Bush song might be well-served; it’s got both the gothic “bad romance on the moors” vibe and the “histrionic billowing dress” energy both on deck.

Us (2019)
Peele is a national treasure and the complete Key & Peele should be required reading but tbh I just didn’t think this movie was that good. We wrote abt it.

Ridley Scott’s first film The Duellists is a deep dive into the dueling subculture prominent in the French military of the early 1800s. It’s almost entirely about two guys: Armand (Keith Carradine) is pretty ambivalent about the whole dueling thing but continues to participate because it’s more or less the thing you did back then. Carradine brings a really nice laid back vibe to proceedings, complete with California accent and something of a light Wiley Wiggins vibe. The other guy, Gabriel (Harvey Keitel) brings a heavy Harvey Keitel vibe and Brooklyn accent, which gives the film a real nice “East coast vs. West coast” feel. There’s lots of great early 1800s fashion, a fact underlined when the sparse narration refers to “the passing of 5 years and a change in military fashion,” after which cute braids are replaced by large hats. Which is to say, the film is both very concerned with period trappings and not taking itself too seriously.

After the initial duel is kicked off, we follow both men through the years as Gabriel continually looks for new opportunities to get into duels with Armand. According to military rules they can only duel when they aren’t actually actively at war, and are the same rank. This leads to a beautiful recurring gag: we see Armand at ease, learn his rank, see him have a conversation where someone mentions that Gabriel was recently promoted to the same rank, see Armand find out Gabriel’s in town, and then see him get roped into a duel. And the duels are great, escalating in weaponry and danger, and full of good duel jokes, a style of humor I was barely aware of before this film, but of which I now crave more.

In between the many duels are portraits of the life of a French soldier in the early 1800s, snapshots which run the gamut from having a pipe with your buds, talking about how cool it is that you’re going to war (so you don’t have to fight a duel with Gabriel), to freezing to death in Russia. There’s a kind of underlying madness to all of them, which helps make Armand’s obligation to keep dueling even though he’s just not that into it plausible. This is a world where there are rules to be followed that are designed to stave off the world’s brutality and chaos, even if those same aspects are the byproducts of the rules themselves. This is perfectly illustrated in a moment where Gabriel is told to walk west at the beginning of a duel and he quickly scans the sky just to make sure he knows exactly where due west is before heading out, neatly saying everything the film is telling you about its “rules over life” mentality in a wordless moment.

In terms of films about two dudes, one who can’t get enough of dueling the other, and another who is just not that into it anymore, The Duellists delivers big time. It’s got a pretty strong “one or no duels is probably enough” message which we could all use, but more importantly it’s a super funny weird-ass period piece that features Harvey Keitel wearing cute braids. Great film for those of you consumed with vengeance or deeply exasperated by the people seeking it.

Sometimes someone makes something that too closely and uncritically borrows or even openly steals from someone else’s idea. This is “bad” in two ways – it’s bad for the original, which the derivative cheapens thru lesser repetition, and it’s bad for the derivative, because strongly-foregrounded influence obscures whatever unique material might actually be hiding in there. Ridley Scott has made 25 movies, but his first one here is stone-cold Barry Lyndon (1975) worship straight off the rip. Made just two years before, that movie’s influence is absolutely present and unsynthesized here, in a manner that in painting, comics, or fiction, would read as hackish and embarrassing in the worst and most obvious way.

I happily found the results much more complicated here. Barry Lyndon is an optically mind-blowing but dramatically unconcerned piece of source material, and Ridley Scott is a decent stylist who tries to make popular movies with oomf and pizazz. So on one hand, The Duellists is super interesting and strange when viewed with its relationship to its inspiration directly in mind: The zoom-outs, the narrator, the Nora Brady appearance, the occurrence of the word “chevalier,” the lighting, cinematography, and even character voicing are all at least a full grade below, but the sum it manages is “bizarro remix,” not “wack bite;” it’s definitely “in conversation,” an uncanny illumination of what sets Barry Lyndon apart from pretty much everything. And on the other hand, The Duellists is a period story with oomf and pizazz that’s fun and funny and not like Barry Lyndon at all.

In that movie, we have an absolutely opaque Harvey Keitel (inexplicably in full Brooklyn mode, though in Napoleon’s army in the late 18th/early 19th century) picking a fight with Keith Carradine over some bullshit, and insisting on resolving it with a duel. The duel keeps getting interrupted and punted to a later date because one or the other guy keeps getting too injured to continue dueling, but without dying completely enough for the fight to be resolved. Carradine understandably gets super bummed every time Keitel pops back up to finish the engagement, and man does he keep popping back up over the course of changing circumstance and rank. The duel goes on for 16 years. No lessons are learned and nothing changes.

My favorite part was how nice the the sword-fighting felt. The sabres have a danger and weight that feels unusually rare, to the point of making me feel alert to how choreographed and risk-free sword-fighting usually looks on screen. There’s a part where a chunk of Carradine’s shoulder is hanging off, and another part where he nervously sneezes; both great. There’s also a gruesome “winter hellzone Russia death march” scene that’s got a Dreams (1990) / Marketa Lazarova (1967) vibe, with everyone staggering around wrapped in burlap and clutching themselves, which I always love to see.

I tried to get a better, non-Lyndon-oriented feel for this one on a by watching Black Rain (1989), Scott’s “Michael Douglas as a complete asshole NYC bad-boy cop in Osaka” movie (extremely bad), and The Duchess (2008), an unrelated 18th century peerage movie with an emphasis on gorgeous wigs where Kiera Knightley gets into a bad marriage with Ralph Fiennes (who I love and am probably about to watch in Wuthering Heights (1992)) (not bad but not great). But I’m already over word count here so I’ll abruptly conclude with the basic verdict that The Duellists is a relatively very good period movie (though it’s not the best one as much as it tries), as well as a relatively very good Ridley Scott movie, and that I would like to see a supercut of all period drama scenes where “a carriage rolls up to a manor house, and someone gets out of it while the servants watch expectantly.”

Tag Archives: ralph fiennes

Recent bubul movies part 2

The Duellists (1977)