First destination was Paris via Youtube. Upon learning that the long-anticipated portmanteau film Paris je t'aime was bootlegged on youtube, my hot little criminal hands sought then out immediately. So yes, watching a 5 in screen surrounded by white space and ads is not the optimal viewing experience, but shame on US distributors for not putting it out in theaters or DVD. (Especially when this French movie has so many American directors and stars.) I haven't gotten around to watching them all -- it seems 6 years of French study has been for naught -- though I have been so far duly amused and touched.
Maybe it's just my short attention span, but I adore short films and short stories. It is a difficult art to capture something momentous in only a few minutes or a few pages. Brevity is the soul of wit, no? When done well, a short film is the perfect capsule of a sentiment. When done badly, it just seems very pedestrian. From the segments I've seen so far, Paris je t'aime is a mix of both. My favorite are by Tom Twyker and Alexander Payne (not, interestingly, my favorites directors at all): Fauborg Saint-Denis and 14e arrondissement. Least favorites are by Christopher Doyle and Wes Craven, the former tries unsuccessfully for Chinese-French punnage and the latter is just unsuccessful despite invoking the spirit of Oscar Wilde.
Sunday night, I turned my gaze eastward and backwards in time to 1980s Berlin. Wings of Desire was recommended to me by my UChicago interviewer, and since I recently received a nice email from her, I decided I needed to watch it now. But Wings of Desire is not an urgent movie. It languishes, it longs, it lingers. From its soaring aerial views to the cool black and white , it's a poetic meditation. I actually liked it quite a lot, but I need to rewatch it in a less detached frame of mind. I love the title Wings of Desire because it's haunting, and the same can be said about the film, but I need to let it "haunt" me more. The ending however, just totally lost me; I thought it was terrible and stopped listening.
By the way, on top of sharpening my French, I need to learn German too. The angels in Wings of Desire hear snippets of thoughts that are never translated in the subtitles--how infuriating! The opening lines of the film are echoing in my mind right now. Whoever said German was an angry language never heard enough German.
After a hemisphere change, I found myself in a rambunctious Mexico City. Sรณlo con tu parejga is a exuberant sex farce that manages to take on a rather serious topic: AIDs. Tomas (Daniel Gimenez Cacho -- creepy priest of Bad Education!) is a serial womanizer who gets a bitter pill when one of his conquests decides to take revenge. I adore the cover art - inventive, loopy, and rife with phallic symbols - sums up the film perfectly.Now I am off to the utterly unlovely and unromantic Mathland.
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