Some great films seen lately and other ephemera

I've been really busy during the last two weeks, hence no posts. I'll try to get some done in the near future.

But, em, you know, I get a feeling that everyone thinks I see only bad movies, like the recent Silent Trigger. I've seen quite a many great films lately, but for some reason or another I haven't written about them here. They include John Huston's James Joyce film The Dead, which is simply marvellous, Georges Franju's great, but slightly obscure Les yeux sans visage (AKA The Horror Chamber of Doctor Faustus), and, just late last night, Terrence Malick's war epic The Thin Red Line.

There was also the Festival of Finnish Cinema, during which I managed to see only some movies, but they included Seppo Huunonen's Karvat, about which I've written before (see here; I'll add the link later, there's some trouble with this computer), and Visa Mäkinen's exploitation flick Yön saalistajat/Hunters of the Night from 1984. Visa Mäkinen is an independent movie maker from Pori, where I used to live, and this is his only action film, from a script by Kari Levola, a writer who's now living in Raisio near Turku, where I now live. I know him, and he's a very nice guy, and I can see what he tried to do with the script for this film, but for some reason the delivery fails at all accounts: the direction, the actors, the editing. But the film is more fun for it. I'd like to see this remade. Maybe I'll have to start producing films on my own...

Have I been reading anything? Yeah, I've read two novels by Tracy Chevalier, The Girl with a Pearl Earring and Falling Angels, which I recommend heartily; I read them, because we are doing a sequel to the reference book on historical novelists with Jukka Halme and Sari Polvinen. I'll start one of Robert Harris's novels on Rome any day now.

I've also been reading Spade & Archer by Joe Gores (the Finnish translation just came out as Sam Spaden etsivätoimisto), but I'm not really getting into it. Spade seems a bit too stale. Was he this boring in Hammett's books? I don't think so. But I'll write more about the book once I finish it.

As for the family matters... Sigh. I just heard my daughter and her mother will be spending three more years in the Central Europe. These will be hard years. And I don't know what Kauto will think of this - he hasn't been told yet.

A quick update

Haven't blogged much lately. (I heard an expert say lately that blogs have lost some of their zest. It indeed seems that way, there are fewer comments on some blogs I've been following. I should say that with Facebook and other stuff the web moves away from being anonymous to being someone with a name and an identity. (Admittedly this notion comes from someone who's never understood the point of being anonymous.))

Okay, I digress. Some books and movies I've read and seen lately:

Allan Guthrie: Hard Man. Finally got around to reading this. Pretty much blew me away. I exchanged some e-mails with Allan (or should I say "Sunshine"?) about this and we discussed why a critic like Eddie Muller described the book as "torture porn". I can see that - I think it's mainly because Allan's book lacks (quite deliberately, I should think) social content. There's no whys and hows, there's only what (and how to get out). Allan wrote to me that the book is his most complex. Indeed, there are several discourses in the book, several points of view, and several narratives. It occurred me to compare Allan to - can you take this? - Vladimir Nabokov! His books are also complex and multi-layered, with the focus on the narration and the language, and I should say this applies also to Guthrie. (And I'm not kidding with this!)

Richard Matheson: I Am Legend. This one blew me away big time. Vow! From the start it's so suspenseful you want to die. This was quite recently translated for the first time in Finnish by a new publisher, Vaskikirjat. More power to them! Here's my friend pHinn talking about the book and digging up the old trailers from YouTube...

(I blogged about these on Crimespace. It's getting pretty difficult to keep all these Web 2.0 things together... Who remembers anymore that I have a MySpace account?)

Carl Th. Dreyer: Vampyr (1932). This one also blew me away. Almost like silent David Lynch of Lost Highway and Fire Walk With Me (even though the film is not silent, there's only very little of dialogue). Very inventive and very mysterious, based loosely on a story by Joseph le Fanu. The Redemption DVD I watched (thanks, Markku!) wasn't of a very good quality, but it may be the case that the negative of the film has been destroyed and all the copies are just as murky and dark. I don't mind: I've been waiting for 20 years to see this one. (Here is an essay about restoring the known prints of the films. Here's an essay comparing Vampyr to a film by Lucio Fulci. And here's the film...)

David Lynch: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1994). Now, this one didn't blow me away. You may remember my fascination with the Twin Peaks series. I didn't like this film when I saw it originally, but I was ready to take a challenge. It's still flawed, but more interesting than the first time around. It's pretty difficult to fathom what one would think of this if he/she wouldn't have seen any episode of Twin Peaks. In this respect, the film is a precursor to Lynch's more mysterious latter-day films, such as Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr.

Okay, is there still something more? Oh, I've been reading Boccaccio's Decamerone and The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer, maybe later... And I started Sean Chercover's Big City, Bad Blood. Seems pretty strong so far.

Some late additions (I wrote the above yesterday): Antonioni's La Notte: nice photography and very nice ladies in the lead (Jeanne Moreau and Monica Vitti, in very nice early sixties party costumes and high heels!), but something in Antonioni leaves me cold. The films are detached, yes, and it seems quite deliberate, but still there's something... Pirates of the Caribbean: okay fun, but too long.

EDIT: I had some e-mail exchange with Sunshine Guthrie and decided to change my "blow me out" phrases into "blow me away". Sorry all. My English isn't flawless. And thanks, Al!

Birth and The Deep End

Peter Rozovsky over at Detectives Beyond Borders said in a comment on my comment on his comment that he really doesn't know my taste in movies. Well, some of my favourite movies are pretty obvious (do I need to point out I'm a film noir buff?). I watch movies pretty regularly, even though Kauto usually goes to sleep so late there's really no time. (And he's not old enough to watch nothing but Bob the Builder and similar stuff. Ottilia's frustrated at this - she's already digging deep into Hayao Miyazaki and they are way too heavy for Kauto.) I'd really like to write more about movies here, but I don't seem find the time to say anything substantial. (And here's a guy who's written an introduction to the history of cinema...)

Recently I watched two films that bear resemblance to each other and have also somewhat noirish tone: The Deep End, based on The Blank Wall, Elizabeth Sanxay Holding's excellent and underrated novel, and Jonathan Glazer's Birth from 2004 that has Nicole Kidman experiencing a rebirth of his dead lover in the form of a ten-year old boy. I didn't see all of it, but the rest seemed intriguing enough to hold my interest (and for me to tape the last 45 minutes). The pace is deliberately slow and nothing is really explained, but I was left wondering what the makers of the movie wanted to say. The film really didn't seem to have much beneath its surface, but I seem to have grown a liking to Nicole Kidman and her frail, yet determinate figure. However, I thought this was a much better film than The Sixth Sense by M. Night Shyamalan it resembles.

The Deep End however struck a chord. Holding's novel - which you all really should read - is a clever female noir text, in which Holding handles the theme of a lonely housewife at mercy of a weird and scary world very well. Her prose is so simple that it may fool you to think there's nothing in the book, but there's also hypnotic feel to it. Raymond Chandler held Holding in high regard, and so does Ed Gorman who took care of getting some titles into print recently - the book was first published in 1947.

It was filmed pretty soon, but I haven't seen that film. The one I saw was the new version from 2001, written and directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel who also made Suture (1993) which I haven't seen. Unfortunately, since The Deep End captures Holding's theme and mood very well and the modernization had been made with style. Everything seems implausible at first, just like in the original book, but then you realize there's nothing these people really can do. The housewife is falling in love with a petty crook, but that's not because of his good looks - it's a matter of intricate play of identities and identification. There's no one else she can cling herself to, her husband is always away (we never hear him even speak). The housewife, played marvellously by Tilda Swinton, seems very powerful and very weak at the same time - which is pretty much true of almost everyone I know. There's only point in the movie I didn't like: Tilda Swinton is great in the lead, but her looks - her feel - are definitely British.