Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from: 

Amour (2012)

Georges: In the courtyard of the house where grandma lived, there was a young guy at the window who asked me where I'd been. He was a couple of years older than me, a braggart who really impressed me. "To the movies," I said, because I was proud that my grandma had given me the money to go all alone to the cinema. "What did you see?" I started to tell him the story of the movie, and as I did, all the emotion came back. I didn't want to cry in front of the boy, but it was impossible; there I was, crying out loud in the courtyard, and I told him the whole drama to the bitter end. 

Anne: So? How did he react? 

Georges: No idea. He probably found it amusing. I don't remember. I don't remember the film either. But I remember the feeling. That I was ashamed of crying, but that telling him the story made all my feelings and tears come back, almost more powerfully than when I was actually watching the film, and that I just couldn't stop.

A happy 84th birthday to the legendary director Michael Haneke today. In the spirit of Amour, a film about death, I'll admit here (and hopfully writing this out won't be some sort of horrible jinx) that I've come to terms with the assumption, over the course of the nine years since Haneke's previous film Happy End was released, that Michael Haneke probably isn't making any more movies. I might have kept holding out hope but then that great big boxed-set of his movies got released last year -- I pre-ordered the minute it was announced, only to get an email a few months later that the set was being delayed because Haneke, who was being very hands on with it, was insisting that the previously-missing Happy End make it onto the set.  That immediately read to me that he was seeing the set as a culmination -- a finality. I'd love to be proven wrong but it's been nine years and the man is 84. And also Isabelle Huppert said as much a couple of years ago. Truth be told the one-two punch of Amour and Happy End is a killer way to cap off his career. But if he wants to come back swinging, we're ready and we'll shoot through the moon with enthusiasm about it. For now I just hope he's enjoying life. Thanks for the movies, good sir. 

Good Morning, Waël

This Friday we're grabbing onto a newcomer for dear life -- his name is Waël Sersoub and he's actually been making movies for a decade. He was apparently in Michael Haneke's Happy End!  I really need to re-watch Happy End. Anyway on Insta I follow the photographer who took that picture and I one hundred percent thought it was a photo of former canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at first -- you can see the resemblance right? And yes it seemed like a big leap in Trudeau's career to suddenly be taking beefcake photos but hey he is dating Katy Perry right now. Who knows? The world works in mysterious, horny ways. Anyway it's not the former Prime Minister of our upper neighbor, it's a French model-turned-actor who I recommend looking up -- he pretty. Ooh he also was in a Matthias Schoenaerts movie. I like to think they made fast friends, him and Matty. Check Waël's Insta right here. Happy Friday!

 

Early Haneke Ho!

Incredibly exciting news for dour moody movie-lovers like me today -- Criterion and Janus Films have aquired 4K restorations of four very early Michael Haneke movies that have never seen release here in the U.S. before! Variety reports (thx Mac) that a French company has overseen the restoration of the films alongside Haneke himself -- the four films are Lemmings Tale 1: Arcadia and Lemmings Tale 2: Injuries, both from 1979, Three Paths to the Lake from 1976, and 1993's Rebellion (pictured up top); all of them were Austrian TV projects, which is what Haneke mainly did for the first half of his career. Jeez, Austrian TV sounds intense. You can read brief descriptions of each of the films at that Variety link. Anyway I imagine we can go ahead and clear space on our shelves for a Criterion box-set of these in the sometime-future, huzzah! I've long been annoyed at how much of Haneke's stuff pre-The-Seventh-Continent has been unavailable to watch over here. 

Franz Rogowski Eleven Times

I felt like the proudest of papas when Franz Rogowski's name was announced as the Best Actor winner for his performance in Ira Sachs' Passages (my review here) during the New York Film Critics Circle award announcements yesterday -- I can't say I saw Franz first but I can certainly say I've been one of his most relentlessly vocal supporters for the past five years since Michael Haneke's Happy End and Christian Petzold's Transit, just check our extensive archives! And I spent most of last year crowing about how his work in Great Freedom (my review here) was perhaps the year's best performance (give or take Bill Nighy's work in Living, of course). I think it's clear we're Team Franz round these parts! 

So anyway yes I whooped and I hoorayed his big win -- I don't think his deeply challenging work in Passages will come anywhere near the Oscars, but I've been proven wrong before. (Hell I've been proven wrong about ten times as many as I have been proven right.) But who cares about awards -- go see Franz Rogowski in anything he does and you'll be enriched, the end. And yes I include these photos of him in GQ Germany from a few weeks back which I somehow missed -- quite enriching, also. Hit the jump for all that I could dig up from the shoot...

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

La Cérémonie (1995)

Jeanne: They're pathetic. What do they know? They've got it all. Their biggest worry is what color car to buy. Or which cousin stole half the inheritance. I'd be happy with a tenth of what they have. I'd have the life I wanted, instead of just the opposite.

It's a top shelf day for Criterion releases -- I already told you earlier that one of this year's finest films The Eight Mountains is hitting blu today. But that's not all! This 1995 Claude Chabrol masterpiece quoted above is also "entering the collection." (Sidenote: that phrase has begun to sound so provocotive to me. "Entering the collection." I'll enter your collection, et cetera.) Unbelievably I'd never seen it until about a week and a half ago when my review copy of Criterion's disc came in and HOLY SHIT. This movie is a banger. It's one of Isabelle Huppert's greatest performances up in here, and a horror show that totally sneaks up on you like nothing else I've ever seen. 

It is tempting to compare this to Michael Haneke's Funny Games, which came out two years later -- indeed I wonder what people who saw La Cérémonie first thought of the comparison. I'd hesitate to guess they found Haneke's take a bit histrionic in comparison (and I say that with love -- "histrionic" isn't a bad angle for the material.) But the poison of Chabrol's film, subtle and insidious, is deeply unsettling in its own special way. Anyway this movie is very much recommended to those of you who've never seen it! And if you have seen it tell me your thoughts in the comments, please.

Haneke Rides a Velvet High

I've had my head so far up my bum this week I didn't even realize it was time already for Criterion Announcement Day, which falls in the middle-ish of the month every month -- but here it is (the films coming out in December of this year) and hoo boy doozy! The prize from where I stand is what you see above -- a Michael Haneke trilogy of films boxed-set! The film included are 1989's The Seventh Continent, 1992's Benny’s Video, and and from 1994 there is 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, and yes I have seen all of these (indeed I already own them in a previous Haneke boxed-set) and yes they are all difficult and wonderful. Three of my faves of the filmmaker's, to be honest -- you'd be shocked how often The Seventh Continent can come up in real life. Especially since the pandemic started -- the film is about a family of three locking themselves inside their house and systematically destroying everything and... yeah, timely. Click over to Criterion to check out all of the extras; this set hits on December 6th, just in time to be the world's most incredible slash depressing stocking stuffer!

The middle sets are the ones I'm least familiar with, although I have at least heard of the 1975 comedy Cooley High about black teenagers' high school days -- I hadn't heard of Swedish filmmaker Mai Zetterling, who's also getting a three-film boxed set with her 1960s films Loving Couples, Night Games, and The Girls. Have you? Anyway finishing off the month of December is a 4K disc of Todd Haynes' really terrific documentary The Velvet Underground, which is about yes you guessed it the legendary musical act The Velvet Underground. That doc is very much worth checking out and this will no doubt be a gorgeous presentation. 

Mark Waschke, Human Actor

Can't believe I almost forgot about this -- a movie called Human Factors is out in theaters in New York and Los Angeles today that I recommend you seek out if you're in one of those two places; if you're not in one of those two places then you can see the movie much easier on May 24th when it hits digital and you don't have to drive or fly to one of those two cities, which would probably be excessive. I saw Human Factors at Sundance and I reviewed it over at The Film Experience -- I liked it! If I didn't like it we wouldn't be talking right now! No matter how hot the actor Mark Waschke, who plays the father in the movie, was. But as you can see he is very very hot, so that helps. And if he seems familiar to you he's on that Netflix show Dark among other things -- he's been around for awhile. Anyway Human Factors is basically what you'd get if Michael Haneke made his own Rashomon, that seems a good way to sell it. That cues you in to how you'll probably feel like killing yourself -- in the best of ways! -- after you watch it. Here's the trailer:

And here as a bonus, I mean since we're here and everything, is a gif of Mark Waschke and an actor named Howard Charles making out in an elevator in a 2013 movie called &Me -- enjoy:

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Funny Games (1997)

Anna: Well, no point in crying over spilt milk.

Such wisdom! In all seriousness I love that Michael Haneke has one of his characters say this most banal bit of wisdom in Funny Games, because it situates itself against the absurdity finely. For one, Anna (Haneke regular Susanne Lothar, giving a tremendous performance) is actually talking about dropped eggs, not milk. Sure that's a technicality -- we use the "split milk" thing for all kinds of situations not involving milk. But "eggs" are breakfast adjacent enough to "milk" to add a wee vibe of wrongness, a thing that Funny Games thrives on. It's off. So off.

But also it's that there will be plenty of reason to cry over this "spilt milk" shortly, and the sheer inability of Anna's trite phrasing to truly reckon with what she's actually facing at this moment as this strange man smashes eggs in her foyer -- your folksiness isn't gonna get you anywhere, Anna, and she learns this right quick. 

But you should deep dive into all this by picking up Criterion's brand new blu-ray of Funny Games, out today and stuffed with their typical healthy dosage of extra helpings -- you can read critic Bilge Ebiri's fabulous essay on the film on their website already, but on top of that the film's been digitally restored with Haneke's personal supervision, and most excitingly to me though there is a new interview with Haneke regular Arno Frisch, who gives a chillingly charming performance as the head bad guy in this film. We adore him.

Oh Franz, You Devil

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German actor Franz Rogowski is trying to kill me! I'd just mentioned the Transit star earlier this morning, as he's part of the stellar cast for Terrence Malick's new film that's about to take Cannes by storm, and as if summoning up sex from the very earth itself this picture presented itself to me mere minutes later, via Franz's Instagram. His caption to this photo reads, "Heute Abend wieder No Sex in München #20uhr30Kammer1" so ya know, if you're in Munich, get your ass over to Franz's place, folks. (And insert a joke about his movie Happy End with Michael Haneke here.)
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Franz Rogowski Was Here

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I have officially reached saturation point where I am losing track of what I have just seen and what I am about to see, here in the middle of the New York Film Festival press screening season, but I just looked it up and I am now headed off to see the new film from German director Christian Petzold, who made the smashingly good back-to-back pair of Nina Hoss starrers Barbara and Phoenix - this new one's called Transit and it doesn't have Nina (boo) but it does have Franz Rogowski here, who caught my eye in Michael Haneke's Happy End last year. He's the eye-catching type...

He was also in the very good single-take Victoria back in 2015. Anyway tomorrow's kind of a long day in screenings again - I'm seeing Yorgos Lanthimos' The Favourite, huzzah! - but I'll try to pop in by the end of the day. Make due with the two reviews I posted earlier (scroll down for them) and then I'll probably have another one to share with you over at The Film Experience at some point tomorrow too. Until then hit the jump if you want more Franz...

10 Off My Head: Siri Says 1989

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Well it's Tuesday so you know what that means - there's about a 20-25% chance that I won't be lazy and I will actually do one of our "Siri Says" series posts, wherein I ask the robot lady inside my telephone to give me a random number between one and one hundred and then, once she has, I take that number and I turn it into a year and then I pick my five (well usually five) favorite movies from that year. For example today my phone gave me the number 89, and so we're going to list out favorite movies from The Movies of 1989.

On first glance through 1989's movies I thought this was going to be a small sad strange bunch, since the year was mostly populated with junk like Weekend at Bernie's or Born on the Fourth of July or (horror of horrors) Driving Miss Daisy. Blecch no thank you - I am with Spike Lee; Morgan Freeman should have driven Miss Daisy right off the cliff. But then I started digging deeper and there are a bunch of buried gems that came out this year, and what follows is probably one of the strangest most erratic batch of movies I've ever listed for one of these.

There are movies in here that I loved as a 11-year-old kid and there are movies that I have come to appreciate with a more adult sensibility, but side by side these all seem a little bit bonkers. Anyway once I did get to digging I found plenty to adore - indeed too many, and this week's list is twice the standard. And I could've made it even longer and brought several of those runners-up up too - Indiana Jones and Batman should've made my top list probably, but I decided to just stay weirder.

And before you write an angry defense of Do the Right Thing (obviously the true masterpiece of the year) please remember these aren't the "best" movies of the year, they are the ones I personally get the most joy from. My "favorites." My "best" list would be pretty different. (There are also some real glaring oversights in the list of movies I haven't seen, for that matter.) I give you...

My 10 Favorite Movies of 1989

The Little Mermaid

(dir. Ron Clements & John Musker)

-- released on November 17th 1989 --

Road House

(dir. Rowdy Herrington)

-- released on May 19th 1989 --

Heathers

(dir. Michael Lehmann)

-- released on March 31st 1989 --

Dead Calm

(dir. Phillip Noyce)

-- released on April 7th 1989 --

Steel Magnolias

(dir. Herbert Ross)

-- released on November 22nd 1989 --

Meet the Feebles

(dir. Peter Jackson)

-- released on December 8th 1989 --

Apartment Zero

(dir. Martin Donovan)

-- released on October 18th 1989 --

The Seventh Continent

(dir. Michael Haneke)

-- released on May 19th 1989 --

The War of the Roses

(dir. Danny Devito)

-- released on 1989 --

Society

(dir. Brian Yuzna)

-- released on May 13th 1989 --

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Runners-up: Batman (dir. Tim Burton), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (dir. Spielberg), Do the Right Thing (dir. Spike Lee), Sante Sangre (dir. Jodorowsky), Back to the Future: Part II (dir. Zemeckis), Parenthood (dir. Ron Howard), Drugstore Cowboy (dir. Gus Van Sant), The Abyss (dir. James Cameron), Troop Beverly Hills (dir. Jeff Kanew)....

.... Ghostbusters II (dir. Ivan Reitman), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (dir. Gilliam), The Fabulous Baker Boys (dir. Steve Kloves), Akira (dir. Otomo), Crimes + Misdemeanors (dir. Woody Allen), Parents (dir. Bob Balaban), Major League (dir. Irby Smith), When Harry Met Sally (dir. Rob Reiner), Sex Lies and Videotape (dir. Steven Soderbergh), The Burbs (dir. Joe Dante)

Never seen: Casualties of War (dir. Brian De Palma), My Left Foot (dir. Jim Sheridan), Roger & Me (dir. Michael Moore), The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (dir. Peter Greenaway), Dekalog (dir. Kieslowski)...

... Kiki's Delivery Service (dir. Miyazaki), The Killer (dir. John Woo), Last Exit to Brooklyn (dir. Uli Edel), New York Stories (dir. Various), The Rainbow (dir. Ken Russell), Sweetie (dir. Jane Campion), Valmont (dir. Milos Forman)

What are your favorite movies of 1989?

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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

The Piano Teacher (2001)

Walter: Just then I was under your window and I was jerking off. That's what you want, huh? You want to... is that it? You're a witch, a pervert! You want to give everyone your illness, don't you? Not me!

I don't really know what the "lesson" is that we're "learning" about "life" from this patch of dialogue since one thing I already knew about myself before writing this down was that I liked to think about Benoît Magimel jerking off underneath my window - perhaps this is a lesson for you, though? Perhaps you didn't know that you wanted this, and I have brought the fruit of this resplendent new wisdom to your life? You're welcome, then! And a happy 44th birthday to Benoît today. See lots more of him in the archives.

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The Book of Haneke

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Most of the headlines attaching themselves to the news that Austrian provocateur (listen if I could be legitimately described as a "provocateur" I'd want people to use that word whenever I was mentioned) Michael Haneke has decided to make a ten-part television series his next project have been along the lines of, "All the auteurs are doing TV now -- it's a revolution!" Which is a hip thing to say! Be hip, by all means. But that ignores the fact that Michael Haneke spent the first 20 years of his career making television, so this isn't exactly as groundbreaking as it was for, say, Woody Allen to work with Amazon. 

Anyway Haneke hasn't made anything for TV since he adapted Franz Kafka's The Castle in 1997 so this does mark a change for the director, and ten full hours is much longer than anything he did for TV before. The miniseries is called Kelvin's Book and here's how Deadline describes it:

"The English language, ten-part, high concept series is set in a dystopian world and will tell the adventurous story of a group of young people in a not too distant future. During a flight, they are forced to make an emergency landing outside of their home and are confronted with the actual face of their home country for the first time."

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Happy Holidays From Armie & Friends

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Well that's it for MNPP until 2018, folks. Per annual usual we're off the week between Christmas + New Years, taking the time to recuperate what little remains of out addled brains (which in this year's instance translates to "going to see Call Me By Your Name every day at least once"). I hope everyone gets all their Jollies off, and I'll see you back here on January 2nd. If we're not dead, anyway! And if you need something to read while I'm offline here's a few reviews of movies coming out or expanding over the holidays:

My review of Michael Haneke's Happy End HERE

My review of PTA's Phantom Thread HERE

My review of Molly's Game HERE

My review of I, Tonya HERE

My first piece on Call Me By Your Name HERE

My second piece on Call Me By Your Name HERE

All of my many posts on Call Me By Your Name HERE

See you in 2018!!!

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Funny Games & Happy Endings For Everybody

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How funny is a dead hamster? (Okay technically it's drugged, not dead, but the effect's the same.) The hamster comes in the first five minutes and you'll know by then. Where you land on that question might just tell you how you'll fall on Michael Haneke's Happy End, the terrifying Austrian auteur's new wacky LOL-laced comedy of upper-crusted-over ill manners. 

Is anybody else calling it that? A comedy, I mean? I watched Happy End in a room full of critics and nobody around me laughed -- meantime I was dying inside. "Inside" being the choice term - I held my laughs in, lest I be judged terribly. It was, after all, a dead hamster I was laughing at. Not to mention a suicidal old man. And it's all played... well even calling it "straight-faced" does a disservice to "straight" - if you zoom in on a straight line, magnify it to oblivion, it ceases being a line and it starts being a series of dots, dots within dots. Infinitesimal. This is like that, for comedy.

To call this the Comedy Mask Cousin to Haneke's former film Amour, all tragedy, an unbroken close-up of a rigid death mask, seems right to me. Feels to me like the director of our sternest cinematic lectures is letting off some steam. It would be wading into spoilers probably to get into how explicitly Haneke ties this movie to the former, but I consider them siblings. One's the refined lady of the house, and one's the embarrassing black sheep, honking noses and getting blasted at the funeral. 

Even the title is a funny game of its own - you approach a Michael Haneke Movie called Happy End with a hefty dose of side-eye, expecting him to be more miserable than ever. And then he wheels the expected misery out in front of you, only to then goose it like a deranged pervert. He hasn't done anything this funny since the dead dog fell out of the trunk in Funny Games. 

On its own Happy End might probably be Minor Haneke - I get the complaint that it reads like a Greatest Hits Compilation of themes that he's wrung through many times before. It feels somewhat incomplete on its own. But as a Squirt Down The Pants of his own self-seriousness, as a comic parasite attached to the backs of those earlier movies, Happy End is essential viewing. But will anybody else be laughing? I guess it depends on that dead hamster, ha ha.

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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

The Conformist (1970)

Giulia : If you want... want to... 

Marcello : If I want to...? 

Giulia : Yes, right here... on the floor... 

on the carpet... Want to? 

Marcello : Better think about the priest. 

He may not grant absolution. 

Giulia : They grant everyone absolution.

This is just one of the most gorgeously shot scenes in one of the most gorgeously shot films ever made, is all. The light moving through those blinds against the colors of her dress, everything about it, it makes my eyeballs sing. Watch:

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God I adore this movie. Top Ten of Ever, for sure. A happy 87th birthday to the legend Jean-Louis Trintignant today - I'm supposed to see the new Michael Haneke film Happy End tomorrow night if all goes according to plan, which reunites Haneke with his Amour leading man, so stay tuned for my thoughts on that soon enough!

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Funny Games (1997)

Paul: ...whether by knife or whether by gun, 

losing your life can sometimes be fun. 

We just called Funny Games one of our favorite movies of 1997 yesterday, and the universe responded with a sturdy thumbs-up by way of Film Forum announcing today that they're doing a great big Michael Haneke retrospective later this month, huzzah! They're showing basically everything except a couple of the TV movies that are also worth seeking out (like his version of The Castle) and they don't seem to be showing his 2007 remake of Funny Games with Naomi Watts, weirdly enough. Just the original one. 

But they're showing The Piano Teacher and Cache and The White Ribbon and Amour and The Seventh Continent (I just re-watched this one a few weeks ago and it really holds up - I find its depiction of a family's epic disintegration told in miniature absolutely riveting) and on and on. This is all a precursor to the release of Happy End, Haneke's new film (which has gotten a bit of a cold shoulder critically so far), which is out on December 22nd. The series runs from November 17th through the 23rd!

10 Off My Head: Siri Says 1997

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It's time for our weekly (when I feel like it) extravaganza "Siri Says When" wherein I ask my phone to pick a number between 1 and 100 and then name my favorite movies of the year that corresponds to whatever that robot voice from the future tells me. Today she gave me "97" and so it's The Movies of 1997 (which are all turning 20 this year, of course) that we're talking. And per my usual schtick with the 90s I have way too many favorites and I couldn't narrow it down easily, so instead of just 5 favorites I'm expanding it to 10. I don't have to make it hard for myself if I don't want to, dammit.

But I was seeing absolutely everything that came out at this time (I was in film school and I worked at both a video-store and an art house movie theater) and a lot of it left a mark. That said some of these I also haven't seen in many years, so it could be nostalgia I'm still feeling more than a recognition of actual quality? Whatever. That's why I say "favorite" and not necessarily "best."

My 10 Favorite Movies of 1997

Boogie Nights

(dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)

-- released on October 31st 1997 --

Starship Troopers

(dir. Paul Verhoeven)

-- released on November 7th 1997 --

My Best Friend's Wedding

(dir. PJ Hogan)

-- released on June 20th 1997 --

 Waiting For Guffman

(dir. Christopher Guest)

-- released on January 31st 1997 --

The Ice Storm

(dir. Ang Lee)

-- released on November 26th 1997 --

The Sweet Hereafter

(dir. Atom Egoyan)

-- released on November 21st 1997 --

Nowhere

(dir. Gregg Araki)

-- released on May 9th 1997 --

Lost Highway

(dir. David Lynch)

-- released on February 21st 1997 --

Jackie Brown

(dir. Quentin Tarantino)

-- released on December 25th 1997 --

Funny Games

(dir. Michael Haneke)

-- released on May 14th 1997 --

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Runners-up: L.A. Confidential (dir. Curtis Hanson), As Good As It Gets (dir. James L. Brooks), The Lost World: Jurassic Park (dir. Spielberg), Cube (dir. Vincenzo Natali), Live Flesh (dir. Pedro Almodovar), The Spanish Prisoner (dir. Mamet), Scream 2 (dir. Craven), Mimic (dir. Del Toro), Gattaca (dir. Andrew Niccol)...

... Romy & Michelle's High School Reunion (dir. David Mirkin), I Know What You Did Last Summer (dir. Jim Gillespie), Anaconda (dir. Luis Llosa), In & Out (dir. Frank Oz), Dante's Peak (dir. Roger Donaldson), Eve's Bayou (dir. Kasi Lemmons), Bent (dir. Sean Mathias), Event Horizon (dir. Paul WS Anderson), The Game (dir. Fincher), The Butcher Boy (dir. Jordan) Titanic (dir. Cameron)

Never seen: Donnie Brasco (dir. Newell), 

The Apostle (dir. Robert Duvall), SubUrbia (dir. Linklater)

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What are your favorite movies of 1997?

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