Movie memories

While we were in Paris, we had hoped to see some movies. It is already a few years ago that my mother brought me and my wife to see Trees Lounge (1996), written and directed by Steve Buscemi. She said my father wouldn't like it because he didn't like stories about losers. My wife and I later saw Bobby G. Can't Swim (1999) written and directed by John-Luke Montias, another film about losers which we also liked. I think my mother had started to have memory troubles by that time, because I seem to remember seeing Memento (2000) and not knowing what to say about it in front of them, because my father was trying to pretend there was no problem. Still, I also remember she and my father went to see Woody Allen's Small Time Crooks (2000), which so incensed my father that since then he no longer wants to see any Woody Allen movie. Meanwhile I myself hadn't really like Woody Allen since Love and Death (1975), so I was gratified that my father disliked him, but then on the plane back from seeing my parents in Paris, my wife and I saw it and it cracked us up. We suspect my father, who is fond of deluding himself, saw too much of himself in the movie.

Anyway, I thought about those loser movies this year when we saw Greg Marcks' 11:14 (2003), which apparently still hasn't been released in the US, about a bunch of different storylines that converge at the time of the title, and it's not till the end that you realize how they fit together. In retrospect, it's a hokey device, but I found it well done, and the actors were pretty believable. It reminded me a little of John Herzfeld's 2 Days in the Valley (1996) or John McNaughton's Wild Things (1998), both of which I enjoyed.

Speaking of devices hokey in retrospect, we also saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), which my wife couldn't watch because of the jumpy camera work. I liked it quite a bit, even though I caught on to exactly where it was going pretty soon. So many love stories put in scenes of the lovers together meant to show how much they love each other but that just look dumb to me, but here the desire to hold on to every memory made those scenes poignant for once. Funny, none of that really seems to be affected by the parental state.

Finally we saw Lost in Translation, which I didn't like, but hadn't expected to. As Donald Levit wrote,

Incongruously billed as "a valentine . . . to the city of Tokyo," the film images that megalopolis as repellent, mindless, neon and noisy, its few English speakers laughably unintelligible out of old racist stereotypes. Worse, the nation and its culture are handled with jarring provincial condescension and contempt.

Absolutely. So much for political correctness. I couldn't help but feel that it was Sofia Coppola’s very adolescent fantasy of a meeting with an understanding older man, possibly written when she was tagging along with her own famous daddy. But finally, I just couldn't understand why they didn't leave the hotel more. For long periods of my life, in Paris, NYC and Taipei I felt out of place and disconnected, and I got out and saw the city. Coppola's or the the characters' lack of interest in Tokyo struck me as terribly provincial.