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“Sex I discovered between ignorance and horror”

May 24, 2010 by Christopher

Léolo is the story of a childhood that is filled with longing, confusion, and darkness. A sense of bleak, ill-fated lives seems to pervade the entire world, not just Leolo’s, and I finished the movie feeling like life had no anchors for hope — or especially sanity. A dry summary of the plot would fail to capture the impressionistic nature of the story and the movie offers few traditional Hollywood setups or explanations. It’s just life: brutal and meaningless. That is not to say the movie is confusing. In fact, it is quite straightforward. But it is to say that looking for deeper motivations and asking why Leolo’s situation is what it is misses the point that children are helpless in a world that is scripted by adults.

Much of the story is told by Léolo himself through his writing (narrated for the viewer) which reveals his inner thoughts and reactions to life with his disturbed family. I couldn’t help wonder how much of Léolo’s story was the writer-director’s own. Besides the fact that the main character and the director share the same names (Lauzon) and the same hometown (Montreal), the movie is saturated with a sense of an adult’s recollections of childhood. The Word Tamer (a mysterious character who is perhaps the only benevolent figure in the movie) is an adult trying to help Léolo, but his abilities to intervene in Léolo’s life are limited. Even though the Word Tamer and Léolo appear in a scene together, I couldn’t shake the feeling they were the same person: the boy falling into oblivion and the man helplessly watching in recollection of his own childhood.

I found the whole movie very believable (yes, even that scene) except for the opening with the tomato which seemed out of place. It barely got a quick laugh, but didn’t match the tone of the rest of the movie or Léolo’s tenuous grasp of sex. My first reaction to the end of the movie and the setup for it was that it was too abrupt. But after considering it more, I think it fit the rest of the movie well.

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“Those who trust only their own truth, call me Leo Lozeau.”

May 18, 2010 by Kevin

Whenever a film combines mismatched elements – seriousness and humor, graphic scenes and vague ideas, unsettling images and comforting ones – I feel obligated to enjoy it. Léolo was bound to succeed on this level, until halfway through when it sank to one side and left me feeling only one thing – depressed. What started off looking like The Return Of Amelie, turned into Breaking The Waves II. Even so, I recommend seeing it, just not with my usual level of enthusiasm.

It was easy relating to Léolo’s back story, in which a pre-teen boy fantasizes about growing up in an environment much different from his own. What makes this story unique, however, is that the boy doesn’t just start with the present and go forward, he goes back to the very beginning – how he was conceived – in order to reinvent himself in a more thorough manner. This represents the movie’s funniest and most memorable scenes. Then, he addresses the issue of his name. Instead of settling on the French-Canadian Leo Lozeau, he insists on being called Léolo Luzone because it reflects the country with which he’d rather be associated, Italy. As Leo examines each member of his family, the reasoning behind his obsessive fantasies becomes clear; his situation is bleak and he desperately needs an escape.

Some of the fictional scenes were hard to watch, but only because I knew they weren’t real. Whenever Leo is pictured in a simple, normal setting, that ideal image was bound to disappear and give way to reality. The picnic scene is the best example and it left me hoping that at least one vision came from a pleasant memory.  I kept looking for proof that it actually happened, but it didn’t. As the movie progressed, Leo’s condition became increasingly serious and Léolo concludes with a tragic and powerful ending.

I enjoy having my emotions twisted into knots and pulled in several directions and by that definition, Léolo worked very well. But even with its odd mix of traits, its only lasting impression on me was that of feeling sad about its outcome.

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“If I gave you my life would you know what to do with it?”

May 5, 2010 by Kevin

Writing something about which you hate seems too easy. Any half-wit can toss off a few lines when they’re of the mind that something sucks. They may even succeed with having written a clever line, but that kind of response still feels like a cop-out. Writing something about which you really enjoy, however, can present a great challenge. Most people want to share the excitement of what they loved, but conveying that impact can be tricky. All movies, I thought, could fit easily into a “really liked it,” or “really didn’t” category, but Angel-A fit neither. It’s true, I didn’t like Angel-A, but certainly not on the same level as disliking the highest-grossing movie of all time, and it served to remind me of the varying degrees of what we label “sucky” and what we declare as “great.”

Some things I really liked:  the film looked beautiful shot in black & white and at times looked more like black & silver, I loved the shots of Paris in the background, I enjoyed the story, especially the part of how the protagonist’s angel misrepresents the future in order to change its direction. I even liked the instrumental music used throughout the film. But, speaking of music, early in the movie there was an entire feature song that was so misplaced I almost stopped watching right then. Its inclusion felt like an obvious attempt to push some unknown artist into the charts. The frozen frame effects, visual morphing, and sped-up scenes all worked against it, too, but I stuck with it hoping for a big turnaround. Since one never came, Angel-A’s good points balanced with its bad and it landed as a zero on the movie number line; neither positive nor negative.  Now if only that other movie comes up for review on 3mulligans.com…

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“Oh mother, how unfortunate we are! But the sun will kill the white man…”

May 4, 2010 by Christopher

Way back when I worked at Get Lost Travel Books in San Francisco, Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost came out. I don’t know what it was that kept the book in my mind all these years, but Ghost seemed to be something really special. More than 10 years later, I took the time to read it and immediately regretted I hadn’t gotten to it sooner. It was a shocking reminder of how ignorant people are — how ignorant I am — of major world events. In sheer numbers, Leopold’s slave state killed between 5 and 8 million people at the beginning of the 20th century, a fact mostly unknown or ignored today. The institutionalized system of forced labor, kidnappings, beatings and maimings was all in the name of bleeding the Congo of as much money and resources as possible before the rest of the world caught on. Hochschild deftly tells the story of the Congo, its explorers, famous visitors like Joseph Conrad, and Leopold’s eventual downfall, but I don’t intend to focus on that here. What I found to be most chilling about the book was the massive system of collusion and trickery that went into sustaining the entire operation. All I could think of is how modern it all sounded. Journalists were bribed, whistle-blowers hounded, lobbyists were paid to bend governments to Leopold’s will, excesses were justified as casualties in the war on marauding Arabs, dummy organizations with innocuous names were set up to channel funds, state archives were burned, some surviving documents were treated as national secrets and kept out of public scrutiny until the 1980s (!), and my favorite trick – “leaking” English-language press releases that were misleading summaries of French-language reports full of damning evidence. After all this, when world outrage reached its peak, Leopold forced the Belgian government to buy the Congo from him for an outrageous sum, ensuring that the system of abuses would continue while Belgium recouped its losses. Hochschild’s final chapter “The Great Forgetting” is a sobering reminder of how the dominant powers get to spin the histories, or in this case, wipe them out altogether.

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May 4, 2010 by Craig

Okay….

Mikey and Nicki

Good Lord…I was tired after I watched this.

I will go with my good and bad format…sicnce that works best for my martini addled brain.

The good

Acting…just top notch.!

Therse are 2 pros working the skills that they have honed to a tee. Which also was what I will address in the bad as well.

Peter Fauk is always amazing to me.

He plays the same role and yet is diferent all the time. I have a special place in my heart for him…” Serpentine, Shell, Serpentime!!!”

I thought his charachter was true  and honest except for the scene with the kinda hooker that John took him to.

John played his part so well I couldn’t stand him! I guess thats a compliment but I wanted to shoot him after their first 15 minutes!

I loved the locations they used here…seemed like they just followed there 2 around New York…into the cafes and restaurants…what a fun shoot this must have been.

The bad

I HATED the John Cassevettes charchter so much it ruined the movie for me.

Now…that being said…he was so convincing in his mouse-like/shrew derelict loser guy I addressed the main issue of the movie for me…..

Why were these 2 friends?

John treated Peter SO shabbily that I couldn’t buy into he fact that Peter was his friend.

Totally killed it.

If my “friend” treated me that way, I would Not be his friend…ever.

Don’t know why this is duoble spacing, but it is .

Not the martinis….I can double space on my own.

I had an issue with not enough back story.

Why were therese 2 friends, why were they loyal, why why were willing to to do what they did….just not enough back story.

Not that I need a lot…just enough to to let me flesh the the movie.

Again…I love movies.

These 2 hit it it out of the park as far as acting…….story was lacking but took a back seat to watching 2 gifted pros doing their chemistry.

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Absent mulligan checks in!

May 4, 2010 by Craig

Okay…I have a fresh cocktail in hand(like thats a rare occurrence) and am ready to be part of this cool project the 3 of us came up with.
I feel that before I post anything of a general relevance, I must first get caught up on our movie reviews.

Brand upon the Brain

Good Lord!
This is quite the twisted MoFo of a movie!

First the good.
Black and white.
Love the way they shot this. Black and white seems to be shot in black and white just to make a cheap statement but here it was the only way I saw the story told. If you are into photography at all you will remember infrared B/W film. This was so close to that it was scary. The D/P was really on his game with this. And I did see the VERY few frames where they had color in a single aspect of the shot…very cool.
I thought the actors they got to play this did the material justice and I have to believe this was not an easy shoot.
I have to say, in a world full of Hollywood remakes and reboots, it was an original story.
Have to give a thumbs up to anything original anymore.
And there was something for everyone here… burgeoning lesbian love, incest, immortality experiments, chemistry, remodeling…(see painting…and lots of it) pineal gland expriments…all the things that make a movie great!

Oh…and the credits…when they finally came.

The bad

Okay…this is a unique (read strange) movie.
The quick cuts were my biggest issue here.
It was like the entire film stuttered.

Apologies to those that stutter.

It was kind of like being on the verge of being seasick for 90 minutes.
Not a big fan of the quick cut.
Don’t like the Tony Scott/ Michael Bay versions and it was even worse here.
However, it did add to the strangeness of the movie.
I found the movie exploring all kinds of areas.
Not a bad thing in itself but Holy Cow!
Orphanage on an island with a light house that has owners that experiment on the kids for harvest of special fluid that mimics immortality that the wife is addicted to and a husband who invents GPS before its even known we needed to keep tabs on her son and daughter whose awakening sexual desires are just showing themselves as well as horrible cooking (which you learn in future posts I will NOT tolerate( and a possible imaginary friend shown in flash backs. Oh…and I forgot…the resurrection of the dehydrated father.
What movie isn’t complete without one of those.!

I love movies.
just wanted to say that.
Bad, good, and everything in between.

I did enjoy watching this and would recommend this if you want to see something totally weird and unique.
Just a lot to talk about after.
And it ain’t for everyone.

One last thing.

And this was a biggy!

If the main guy was promted to paint the entire lighthouse, inside and and out, with 2 coats of paint…where did all the paint come from?

Just askin’.

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Mikey and Nicky

April 20, 2010 by Christopher

One of my favorite parts of movies that are set in a single night (like After Hours or even Harold and Kumar go to White Castle) comes near the end when characters are at their most exhausted from a long string of misadventures; they are craving sleep and rest, but the sun is coming up on a new day for better or worse. Mikey and Nicky has this same nighttime setting and sense of exhaustion by the movie’s end (“Would you go to bed?” is even the movie’s last line), but unlike Griffin Dunne’s character in After Hours who has to face another identical, awful day, Nicky’s eyes are opened, just too late to change his fate.

Mikey and Nicky chronicles two friends, one under the threat of a mob hit, and the other who tries to help him escape and keep him out of harm’s way. I was predisposed to think of Mikey (played by Peter Falk, with his doughy, kindly Columbo face), as being the good friend and savior of Nicky, played by John Cassavetes. But as the movie unfolds, Mikey’s selfishness and violence is more startling than the paranoid and crazy (and in an odd sense predictable) Nicky. By the end of the movie, I almost felt more allegiance to Nicky, but both of them are so villainous, cowardly and cold that life in their world seems like a hostile, empty existence and I wanted little to do with either. The end for Nicky comes predictably, but for all that, is still shocking.

I loved the movie in all its violent, misogynist, 1970s grit. There are no heroes here, or even sympathetic roles. But we do get a human perspective when the characters express themselves over loss of family and being snubbed by the boss (Mikey) and the desire to see a newborn daughter one more time (Nicky). Even the hitman has a bad night and, if we’re not exactly supposed to feel bad for him, at least he shares the same kind of frustrations over traffic the rest of us face.

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“Aren’t you gonna die someday?”

April 20, 2010 by Kevin

With characters so well-defined and scenes that developed so naturally, it’s hard to believe they started as ideas on paper. Peter Falk and John Cassavetes played the roles of Mikey and Nicky so perfectly that I felt like a bystander to their intense badgering. And man do they go at it. The cemetery scene – an absolute classic – was representative of the whole film; I felt sad for their torn relationship, but laughed at how they handled each situation. As washed-up as they were they still tried staying two steps ahead of each other and I found myself trying to figure out what each of them were thinking. After seeing such a great film and watching actors of this caliber it’s easy to dismiss another dozen Hollywood movies as nothing more than unconvincing high-gloss fluff, but the greatness of Mikey & Nicky more than makes up for them.

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“What’s a suicide attempt without a wedding?”

April 5, 2010 by Kevin

I had very little information about this film before adding it to my Netflix queue, but I did know it was part of The Criterion Collection, shot in black & white, silent, and recently filmed in 2006.  Those descriptions didn’t add up to much, but after reading about its storyline I couldn’t pass it up.  That alone made the decision easy.

When a man visits the island lighthouse where he grew up, which also doubled as an orphanage, he is confronted by secrets kept from him by his parents.  While his mother keeps a close watch on the orphans, his father occupies himself with basement experiments.  When it is discovered that all the orphans have similar marks on their heads, a pair of famous kid detectives show up to investigate.

Brand Upon The Brain! was everything I was looking for in a movie, mainly because I’ve never seen anything like it.  My attention was glued to the screen until it ended and I watched it without a single interruption, no small feat since my two young teens watched it, too.  There’s additional fun with getting to choose from six narrator voices, but after hearing Crispin Glover’s (Simeon insisted) I wished I had chosen Isabella Rossellini’s.

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“Rumania! Rumania! Rumania!”

April 3, 2010 by Christopher

The opening shots of Brand Upon the Brain! made me think that I was in for another surreal, B/W collage of images that would likely prove to be dull — probably the kind of movie that years ago I would have liked only as a diversion and not on its own merits. However, just a few minutes into the movie — right when Isabella Rossellini starts her narration — I was hooked. The movie is goofy, funny, sad, and scary and even made me a little jealous of the director’s creative vision and how he evokes childhood memories. I don’t want to say too much about all the elements of the plot and the odd environment of the film, but it immediately brought to mind two artists I love: Timothy Winkler, who does gorgeous retro-futuristic drawings, and Glen Baxter, who draws very odd and funny — and often homoerotic — versions of familiar genres. There were so many other things this movie referenced, either directly or indirectly. Most obvious was the silent movie genre. But it also incorporated child detectives à la Nancy Drew, a great scene that reminded me of Lord of the Flies and a vampiric mother that seemed taken right out of the legend of Countess Bathory. All this while the director claims that 97% of the story was taken from his own childhood. I’m sure it was, emotionally, even if not absolutely factually.

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