Steven Rubio's Online Life

birdy (alan parker, 1984)

I'm not a big fan of Alan Parker. There are a couple of his movies where the over-the-top presentation connects with me (Shoot the Moon, Angel Heart), but when I don't connect, I really don't like what I see (Mississippi Burning, The Life of David Gale). Birdy might be the first time where I'm more in the middle ... I didn't love it, didn't hate it.

Birdy is a buddy film about two young boys-turning-men who are damaged. It's more obvious in the case of the title character, played by Matthew Modine, whose love of birds goes beyond wanting to have them around ... he wants to become a bird. Nicolas Cage plays Al, a typical high-school jock, and his damage comes during the Vietnam War. Much of the film centers on Al, returned from Vietnam, trying to bring a comatose Birdy back to some semblance of the real world. It's not a bad movie, and both of the stars are good in their roles. But it's never clear why Al hooked up with Birdy in the first place. They are a true odd couple. I could believe that Modine and Cage were friends, but Al and Birdy were a mismatch that remains unexplained. So I didn't find myself as involved in their relationship than I imagine was intended.

I admit, the impetus for my finally watching Birdy was that my cousin Jon Guterres was a grip on the film. He always has good stories about the films he worked on. I forwarded the following clip, and asked him where exactly he was as they filmed, and what exactly did you do. He said he was a very hard scene to film, and passed along this photo of him and Alan Parker lining up a camera shot for the scene:

Here is the scene:

music friday: miranda lambert

Today is Miranda Lambert's 40th birthday, which is as good a reason as any to give her a Music Friday.

First, there's her breakout song from 2005 (and I love this video ... OK, I love the song):

"The House That Built Me" was her first song to make #1 on the country charts, in 2010:

Lambert has also shone in collaboration with others, especially with the "side project" The Pistol Annies, with Ashley Monroe and Angaleena Presley:

And if that isn't enough star power for you, here she is with Caylee Hammack, Tenille Townes, Elle King, Maren Morris, and Ashley McBryde with a great cover from 2019:

geezer cinema/film fatales #185: anatomy of a fall (justine triet, 2023)

It's not really accurate to call Anatomy of a Fall a procedural. A good portion of the film takes place in a courtroom, and over the course of the film, we learn more and more about what might have happened. The gradual unveiling is something like an episode of the old Perry Mason show, except the courtroom and the rules of the courtroom are French, and we aren't sure of the defendant's innocence, because while writer/director Justine Triet and co-writer Arthur Harari have made a film reminiscent of past courtroom dramas, the innocence of the nominal heroine isn't guaranteed. Apparently Triet didn't tell Sandra Hüller (Toni Erdmann), who played the defendant Sandra, if the character was innocent or guilty, only telling her to act innocent.

While there is a mystery to be solved, at its core, Anatomy of a Fall is a family drama. It's not what you'd call a good date movie ... the couple at the center of the story have their problems, and the emotions get quite raw at times. The acting is stellar throughout ... Hüller will get most of the attention, deservedly so, but young Milo Machado-Graner as her son is realistically secretive, and Swann Arlaud is very appealing as her lawyer friend. The intricacies of French courtrooms were puzzling to me, but there is no reason to doubt the veracity of the representation.

There is a fascinating subtext involving language. While almost all of the characters are French (and, obviously, the courtroom proceedings are in French), Sandra is German. She speaks French, but there is a hesitancy when she does. With her husband, and with her attorney, she speaks English ... it seems that when one speaks German and the other speaks French, they meet in the middle and talk English. Giving testimony during the trial, she is required to speak French, but eventually she doesn't feel she can get the meaning of her words across, and she receives permission to speak English. (When she talks to her son, she speaks English to him and he replies in French.)

Anatomy of a Fall is engrossing despite its long length (152 minutes), getting its intensity not from wild action scenes but from interpersonal relationships.

film fatales #184: the innocents (anne fontaine, 2016)

This is the tenth film I have watched in "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2023-24", "A 33 week long challenge where the goal each week is to watch a previously unseen feature length film from a specified category." This is the 9th annual challenge, and my fifth time participating (previous years can be found at "2019-20", "2020-21", "2021-22", and "2022-23"). Week 10 is called "Nun for You Week":

Nuns have enjoyed a rich history in film, from being featured in classics like Black Narcissus and The Sound of Music, through the Nunsploitation era in the 70s, to today as filmmakers are still fascinated by nuns as characters. Nuns are so compelling and can be featured in a wide-range of genres because they represent a fascinating dichotomy between female-empowerment and male authority. Entering a convent could signify a woman wielding her own power over herself and choosing her own path for a life absent of and free from men with other women, but a convent is still run by a man and the Catholic Church is still a deeply patriarchal system. The suppression of sexual desires is also ripe for the power of romance to overcome, for both dramatic and comedic effect, with or without men. Nunsploitation films offer taboo thrills, but also often critique and question the authority of the Catholic Church. However nuns are depicted in cinema they almost always come from the imagination of someone who is not a nun and could never know what it is really like to be one, which has allowed them to take on a mysterious and almost fantastical role that is also a part of the allure.

This week’s challenge is to watch a movie featuring a nun as a main character. Here’s a list from NunMovieFreak to help you out.

I came to The Innocents spoiler-free. I knew there would be nuns, and that's about it. I'm happy to report that it's a very good film, emotionally wrenching, based on fact, perhaps loosely. It takes place in Poland at the end of 1945. A Red Cross doctor is asked to come to a local convent, where she discovers a very pregnant nun during delivery. To say more is to spoil, but the movie is extremely intense at times, and it doesn't paint a pretty picture. I knew none of the participants ... I'm new to director Anne Fontaine, and to the cast, with Lou de Laâge as the doctor and an excellent cast as the nuns (unfair to single anyone out, but Agata Buzek is a standout). The look of the film is expansive at times, claustrophobic at others (the cinematographer is Caroline Champetier).

Fontaine places women at the center of the story, which is obvious but you never know. Most of the men, with one exception, are brutes ... you're glad there aren't more of them. Fontaine is fair to the faith of the nuns ... the doctor is a non-believer, but everyone gets their perspective presented honestly. The Innocents is a film about faith, but it's also about the importance of sisterhood (no pun intended) and community. It's not an easy film to watch, but it's worth the effort.

murder à la mod (brian de palma, 1968)

Brian De Palma's first feature is a curio, recognizably his. He wears his influences on his sleeve (Hitchcock, of course, Michael Powell). It's got voyeurism and violence. It's got overly flashy technique. It's not much of a movie, and I can't recommend it to anybody but hardcore De Palma completionists. At least it's short.

music friday

This will be brief and random ... Comcast will be working on our internet, so I can't be sure I'll be online, so I'll toss something together in advance. No real connection to these tunes:

Two with Mavis Staples:

From the 1976 tour, the only time we saw a Beatle in concert:

And a band I saw a lot more than one time:

body snatchers (abel ferrara, 1993)

This is the ninth film I have watched in "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2023-24", "A 33 week long challenge where the goal each week is to watch a previously unseen feature length film from a specified category." This is the 9th annual challenge, and my fifth time participating (previous years can be found at "2019-20", "2020-21", "2021-22", and "2022-23"). Week 9 is called "Horror Revival Week":

Some of the best horror movies of all time are remakes, like The Thing or The Fly, but in general remakes get a bad rap due to failures like Psycho or Poltergeist. In recent years we've seen different methods of revival with long-awaited reboots/sequels like Halloween, Candyman, and Scream. This week we'll find out if these stories deserve a second life, or if they belong back in the grave.

This week's challenge is to watch a horror remake, reboot, reheat, etc. Use this list for inspiration.

Apparently we need a new Body Snatchers movie every two decades. The first, and still classic, was Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don Siegel in 1956, a few years after Jack Finney's novel was published. It was something of a Red Scare movie, with the pod people standing in for Commies. Philip Kaufman's 1978 remake fits in with other paranoia films of the 70s, with New Age undertones. I'm not sure where Abel Ferrara's 1993 movie fits into all of this, although the foregrounding of a female character marks a difference, as does the setting (not a small town like the '56 version, or San Francisco in '78, but instead an Army base).

What matters more than anything else is that Ferrara delivers on the horror. The acting is solid, the gore level is expectedly higher than before, and the dystopian attitudes of the earlier films remains. To say that this is the third-best Body Snatchers movie is not to say it's bad. (I haven't seen the 2007 version, with an impressive cast led by Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, which was mostly trashed by critics.)