My Night at Maud's (1969)

It's not often that you find a film director who can effortlessly articulate the woes and triumphs of day-in, day-out love. Eric Rohmer is one member of this rare breed. Having only seen Love in the Afternoon prior to My Night at Maud's you could hardly call me a nerd for Rohmer films, but I can already tell why he's garnered such a prestigious reputation. The man is just so damn good at plucking buried emotions and profound realizations from the mundane existence of domestic life. His primary focus is the relationships between men and women, but he also shows how those relationships effect personally held philosophies and religious beliefs. He pulls these observations down and presents them with a thoughtful, breezy confidence that leaves you both curious and affected.

My Night at Maud's is foremost a love/hate letter to Blaise Pascal, the famous mathematician and philosopher. I'll tell you right out of the gate that I don't know very much about Pascal. I thought it would make for an interesting (and much more honest) review relating what I learned about his ideas in the movie to the narrative itself.

The film focuses on a Catholic engineer, Jean-Louis, as he tries to reconcile the whims of his romantic life with the strictures of his faith. Splitting his time between work and church,  Jean-Louis comes across a young woman, Francoise, during a night at mass. Despite knowing nothing about her, Jean-Louis is instantly enamored with Francoise and secretly vows to marry her. Before he can ask her out, an old friend, Vidal, invites Jean-Louis over to the apartment of Maud, a recently divorced woman looking for a bit of excitement.

The film has a distinct mode of pacing, going from successions of short scenes to drawn out sequences and back again. Jean-Louis' intrepid desire to marry Francoise is summed up quickly, while his night with Maud stretches its feet and lingers. Naturally, this is done to emphasize the importance of the discussions being had, rather than action driving the plot steadily forward. It's almost as if Rohmer wants to get plot out of the way so he can sit you down, pour you a nice glass of milk, and let loose an avalanche of deeply pondered ideas.

Pascal seems to always be on the tip of Jean-Louis' tongue, however, his love or hatred of the man is never made completely clear. As Jean-Louis stays up with Maud on the titular night in question, the two discuss at length the rigors of love, morality and compromise through the lens of the philosopher. Though both characters tend to be racked by dualities, Maud holds to the notion that love based on religion is a sham and she questions the validity of Jean-Louis' passion for Francoise. Jean-Louis maintains that, while he isn't a perfect Catholic due to his various affairs in the past, he knows without a doubt that love, sex and faith are inextricably bound.

Jean-Louis asserts that Pascal shunned intellectual diversions (mathematics) in favor of his faith to God, finding passion in tangibility rather than abstract ideas. In this sense, Jean-Louis' tangibility is a woman that he loves for her faith and conviction before the indulgence of her sexuality. His diversions are the women he ran with in the past, the idea that he found out too late that he was wasting his time with them when he could have been pursuing something meaningful. Maud finds Jean-Louis' ideas intriguing but reminds him that marriage is far from perfection, having gone through a divorce with an unfaithful man. The morning after provides the crux of the entire film, Jean-Louis laying next to Maud in the most defiantly platonic fashion. There is a brief moment where Jean-Louis nearly gives in to Maud's charms, going into kiss her, but at that point Maud has had enough of the indecision wrought by his conflicting morality.

This particular scene is the centerpiece and the soul of My Night at Maud's. It acutely captures the combination of stuffy intellectual posturing and poignant emotional observations that make up the bulk of the film's dialogue. Whenever the dialogue feels like it's about to go jerk itself long and hard, a heavy, tactile set of lines are delivered to anchor the whole thing back into reality. This way, Rohmer gets to express his views on religion, love, morality and Pascal while maintaining a palpable intimacy. My Night at Maud's is essentially one of the best proponents for late night conversation, where all those woozy but profoundly expressive thoughts are formed.

Blue Velvet (1986)

I feel like, after watching Blue Velvet, and a number of David Lynch's other works (such as Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive) that I can safely say he is a frustrating director. Now, I don't mean frustrating in that stupid modern art rally-cry kind of way - the "ah, it's just too fucking subversive and crazy fantastic for you to handle". I mean frustrating in a way that says "the quality of the film is dictated by a sloppy seesaw of styles".

It seems like in much of his work, Lynch is attempting to bridge the gap between consciousness and subconsciousness, where dreams meet reality and reality don't much like what ensues in the resulting collision. He attempts this balance, but always ends up cheating on reality for his true mistress, dreams (and the repressed desires contained within them). I wouldn't have nearly as big of a problem with Lynch if he fleshed out ideas exclusively in his 11th hour, ghoulish worlds, but he stumbles over himself by simultaneously filling in the shoes of a hackneyed drama coach.

Blue Velvet provides a lot of clarity on this point. The film's narrative about Jeffrey, a young man who finds a severed ear in a field, leading him to get involved with a distressed older woman and a circle of criminals, already has fundamental problems at work. Jeffrey's motivation to look into such strange circumstances is never really justified. There are no scenes that establish Jeffrey as a compassionate social servant or an overly curious junior sleuth, he's just kind of winging it the whole time. You would think that as the film progressed perhaps some insight would be shined down upon Jeffrey's intentions, but they remain vague and pedestrian throughout. Why? Because Lynch was far too interested in watching Dennis Hopper writhe on top of Isabella Rossellini, shouting "Blue velvet!" and "Don't you look at me!" to care that much about the protagonist.

And rightfully so. I didn't really give a shit what happened to Jeffrey or why he was there in the first place because I was distracted by the excellent scenes involving a pitch-perfect Dennis Hopper as the deviant sexual maniac, Frank Booth. Whether it's his unnatural fondness for the song, "Candy Colored Clown" by Roy Orbison, or his faintly homoerotic intimidation of Jeffrey, Frank is what saves Blue Velvet from becoming a giant waste of time. You could replace Kyle MacLachlan's Jeffrey with a paper lunch bag that has a frowny face drawn on it and not notice much of a difference. However, taking Hopper's Frank out of the equation would unhinge the film entirely.

The night-time hijinks of Frank and his crew provide a welcome tear away from the flaccid, melodramatic relationship forming between Jeffrey and an equally unnecessary love interest, Sandy, who is portrayed by Laura Dern's nose. I mean, Laura Dern. It was hard to even care about the affair forming between Rossellini's Dorothy and Jeffrey, even though there is a fantastic sequence where he hides in her closet only to be found out and forced into taking off his clothes. But ultimately, she's sucking the dick of a paper bag with a frowny face, so the emotions you should carry away from it don't last, only the image of it stays with you.

All in all, Blue Velvet goes quite well with my David Lynch hang-ups. In a sense, you could liken his strengths and weaknesses to a director obsessed with special effects in his or her movies. The effects may slap you in the face with their awesomeness but when someone asks you about the story, you respond with, "what story?" The main difference is that Lynch's "special effects" have enough intelligence and permeating presence that they create stories in and of themselves. So, why, Mr. Lynch, even bother with white-bread, by the numbers drama? It only gives off an uneasy, after-school special vibe in your case. Just stick to making pretentious short films about rabbit humans, selling naked pictures of your girlfriends for $500 and making blues albums with ridiculous titles like Crazy Clown Time.

The Dungeonmaster (1984)

The Dunegeonmaster, also known, hilariously enough, as Ragewar. I have to admit I had really high hopes for this clearly awful movie, what with it's esoteric poster of a heinous man looming large over a red grid with a miniature brawny man wearing cricket pads and shooting lasers from his wrist-guards. The poster had that awesome, excessive art style that has graced a plethora of '70s, '80s, early '90s movies and even early Nintendo games. I thought to myself, "well played, Netflix, I'm intrigued." And, though it sat on my queue for a few weeks, I always glanced over it in my browsing, the heinous man's cackling face watching me as I swept it aside for something else.

76 minutes of my life were thus ended upon the playing of this movie. 76 minutes I'd pay to have back. To be doing anything else, like showing up at my sophomore year Homecoming only to find that the girl I was head over heels for, Katie O'Donnell, had brought some cocksucker to the event instead of me...or, you know, sticking needles in my eyes.

To get the particulars out of the way, the movie tells the story (if you want to call it that) of a brawny computer geek, obsessed with his computer girlfriend instead of his real-life girlfriend. Despite this, brawny geek asks his real-life girlfriend to marry him. Real-life girlfriend doesn't give him an answer but still inexplicably considers his offer while aiming some crazy jealousy at computer girlfriend. Brawny geek and real-life girlfriend go to bed one night and soon find themselves transported to a sort of fantastical plane, where a pseudo-European pornstar conducts a lengthy gauntlet of challenges in order for brawny man to save real-life girlfriend.

For one thing, the movie looks like it's shot on a low-grade camcorder that the director borrowed from his mom. Wait, I take that back. There were multiple directors that steered this shit-ship, so maybe they all borrowed their mom's camcorders respectively. For the life of me, I cannot figure out why multiple directors were even -necessary- as the style remained completely the same for each sequence, that style being "absolute shit."

The plot is so laughable and convoluted that you can actually see the actors themselves become confused and tired as the film progresses. Oh, and that pseudo-European pornstar wizard that I mentioned before? That's Richard Moll. Yeah, the bald guy from Night Court. Total icing on the cake. I feel the film was conceived in a very hazy and vague manner, something like all the directors sitting around a table at a bar and saying in unison, "wouldn't it be funny if..." or "wouldn't it be crazy if..." They even have the audacity (or stupidity) to try and throw in a moral to the story. Since the dialogue is so hackneyed and robotic, it's far too difficult to even paraphrase it, but it was something along the lines of abusing power out of boredom. You know, because having pointless, shoddy fantasy fight sequences is a cure for boredom.

And yet I think the most unforgivable aspect of The Dungeonmaster is the wrist-guard that brawny man uses throughout the film. All the props, costumes and set pieces look like garbage, the barren landscapes, the caves, the dungeons, the zombies, that SHITTY HEAVY METAL BAND "WASP" - but nothing stands quite as tall as this wrist-guard, which is a mix of a Texas Instruments calculator and that electronic sequencing game, Simon.

 This wrist-guard is the blatantly convenient plot device to be measured against all other movie plot devices. It has to be the most esoteric swiss-army knife man has ever conceived. If brawny man finds himself needing to shoot lasers at enemies, no problem. If he needs to shoot lasers in multiple directions at once, no problem. If he needs a laser-generated bar to pull himself up from certain death, no problem. If he needs very small, specific lasers that unlock handcuffs, no problem. If he needs to run a background check on a criminal, no problem. If he needs to plan the trajectory of ricocheting rocks off cave walls to hit a single target, no problem. If he needs to deflect samurai swords, no problem.

Jesus, this movie isn't even worth existing. It should negative exist. This isn't even just a "bad" bad movie, it's like taking the art form of movies on a cheap date, to IHOP or something because The Dungeonmaster is too cheap to splurge on Denny's, and still expect to get the goods. Also, I cannot condone any film that supports stealing from frozen Albert Einsteins.

Welcome to The Movie Gestapo!

Welcome to The Movie Gestapo, a blog of criticism, editorials, ideas, silly thoughts, serious thoughts - all about movies!

This blog attempts to make sense of my schizophrenic taste in movies. Like most critics, I have an undeserved, presumptuous and skewed sense of authority on the topic. Nonetheless, I hope that you will enjoy what I have to say about movies from all walks of life - new and old, popular and unpopular, ribbed for pleasure and magnum, Harry Potter book club and Twilight book club, the shitty cookies you make yourself and the good ones at the grocery store, medium rare and well done, god-fearing and godless, double pen and cumshot.