En la ciudad de Sylvia (2009)

Spanish director José Luis Geurin inflicts his audience with this laboured, tedious and pretentious exploration of voyeurism and the allure of images - both cinematic and actual. The heavily deconstructed narrative follows an arrestingly angular young man as he attempts to track down a former lover on the streets of Strasbourg. Despite the chiseled features and eurotrash pose, both the searcher and the film prove surprisingly irritating considering their brief screen time - an excruciating 84 minutes. The approving reviews from the artier side of the popular press are mystifying.

Antonioni does this so so so much better.

Vineland (1990) - Thomas Pynchon

I love this book. I'm a big pynchon fan I've discovered.

UPDATE: Okay, I've finished Vineland, and I'm still a great fan, even if it isn't necessarily a great book. There are just so many wonderful moments, imaginative and hilarious turns of phrase and incredibly culturally potent conceits that I couldn't not love it.

Gore Vidal thinks Pynchon gives his characters the most awful names, but I think they're incredibly poetic in the sense that they seem to have been chosen for certain expressive or purely aural effects. Here's a rundown of some of the more interesting names and characters featured...

Zoyd Wheeler: The ostensible hero of the book
Frenesi Gates: ...
Brock Vond: ...
Prairie Wheeler: ...
Darryl Loiuse Chastain (otherwise known as DL): ...

Some interesting ideas include the Thanatoids Blah blah need to finish sometime

A few amusing images or turns of phrase (selected almost at random):
"I used to worry about you, Zoyd, but I see I can rest easy now the Vaseline of youth has been cleared from your life's lense by the mild detergent solution of time, in its passing..." Hector sat slumped in zomoskepsis, or the contemplation of his soup."

Later, describing the suerlative way DL breaks open the door of a government facility, Pynchon says something along the lines of, "she didn't Jimmy so much as James it open"

XXY

The Class (Entre les murs) - 2008

The Class is based on an autobiographical novel by author and former teacher François Bégaudeau, about working at a tough multi-ethnic school in the Parisian banlieux. Remarkably, Bégaudeau plays himself, or a version of himself; and he does it very well, although as Peter Bradshaw reminds us 'teaching is all about putting on a performance commanding enough to subdue the toughest audiences' so maybe that shouldn't surprise us.

The class of 14- to 15-year-old kids in the film is made up of non-professionals, and their unobtrusively superb and authentic classroom scenes have apparently been devised through improvisation.

Definitely one of the better movies I've seen this year. There are a couple of contrived, overtly didactic moments, but the rest of the movie is so enthralling (who woulda thunk a language lesson could be so exciting) that they hardly tarnish the experience.

I thought it raised lots of interesting questions about authority and the legitimacy of authority in schools (related to descriptive and prescriptive modes of language and teaching). Naice.

The Dead Girl (2006)

The Dead Girl is a quintet of stories about seemingly unrelated people whose lives converge around the murder of a young woman - not in the sense that they overlap in strange, unconvincing and implausible ways (ala Crash), but rather that the death of one girl (Brittany Murphy actually) becomes a device or, more accurately, an entry-point into the lives of 4 other women, all of whom are suffering in some tragic way. [Click on pics above for larger versions.]

The Daughter: Toni Collette plays an emotionally stunted woman terrorized by her emotionally abusive and domineering mother (who's also an invalid requiring constant attention, natch). After finding the dead girl's body, and nicking a little momento, Collette leaves her mother and embarks on an awkward love/sex-affair with serial-killer-obsessed store-clerk Giovanni Ribisi. Hilarity ensues as Collette subtly but implacably makes BDSM-related demands to be tied up and beaten etc etc - my personal fave

The Sister: Woman with missing/abducted sister mistakes body of dead girl for her sibling, coz she's also a coroner, obvs.

The Wife: Wife of man discovers man to be vicious serial killer of young girls. Decides not to turn him in.

The Mother: ha ha ha. Check out Marcia Gay Harden's costume! She's a small-town, uptight, but essentially good woman (duh! look at that collar) who discovers that her missing daughter is not only dead, but was also the dreaded hooker-lesbian-junkie combo. Marcia rescues newly-discovered grandchild from evil poor people and manages to make some sort of peace with daughter's hooker lover. Total TV movie.

The Dead Girl: Brittany Murphy ends up dead.
The Take-out: A serious, sombre and relatively bleak film which is remarkable for managing to be a film about women without becoming a 'women's film', if that makes any sense.

Watchmen (The comic, okay) (1986-1987)

Can anything good come out of hate? Maybe. The imminent release of Watchmen the movie finally pushed me into reading Alan Moore's classic and I have to confess that my desire to hate the movie with impunity had a lot to do with me reading the graphic novel.

Only a willful contrariness (or laziness perhaps) can account for my failure to acquaint myself with Moore's tale of the superhero gone to seed*. Goodness knows it's been influential enough. Images from the comic were inescapable as I read comics in the 90s, eventually coming to be quite influential in my own daydreams featuring myself, or some other version of me, as a masked adventurer. There were in fact several owl-boys who popluated my superhero-dominated imagination.

Anyway, I've done it. I've read it. And it's good. Very. The universe Moore creates for the reader is very well realized, even without the slightly exhausting and unecessary fictional extracts and documents which end each installment. The dialogue is a bit portentious at times, and the 'mature' nature of the content is needlessly foregrounded (obsiously in an attempt to explicitly seperate Watchmen from the more pulpy adventures published by DC) - the result being that there are passages that feel a little contrived. And I tend to agree with a recent review commenting that the comic's denouement reads as slight naive and fanciful. The idea that mankind would suddenly abandon all intra-species conflic in the face of an alien invasion stratches the limits of credibility, but doesn't seem entirely out of place within the narrative to be absolutely fair.

What works:
Dr Manhattan is terrifying.
The scenes with Rorschach and the neon lighting outside the hoodlum's apartment are great.
Silk Spectre is a wonderful character. Selfish and self-absorbed in a wonderfully realistic way.

Anyway, have to dash, more coming soon...

*On this topic, it's interesting to think of The Incredibles as a sunnier version of the same story.

NEW: here are two scans from the book. One of them is interesting for its cinematic quality, the neon switching on and off in time with Rorschach's step is awkward but also ambitious. Not sure it really works. The other scan is from a bit near the end where Ozymandias sets off his alien-bomb-teleportation thingy. Through most of the book the newsagent and the kid reading the pirate comic next to the newstand have a pretty indifferent/antogonistic relationship and the way they move towards each other in the face of their imminent death is pretty poignant. The plain white panel to end the issue is also quite effective, no? Oh, wait, I already have images of those panels...oh well.