I totally wanna be Michael James, Peter O’Toole’s character in Woody Allen’s scripting and acting debut film, “What’s New Pussycat?”. He plays a suave playboy who desperately wants to settle down but can’t because he keeps getting distracted by a harem of beautiful women. The “problem” started when he was 12 and romanced his teacher till now when he’s basically a fashion editor surrounded by scores of lovelies. I basically want the surrounded by scores of lovelies without the wanting to settle down bit. He’s also hella steezy.

That’s Peter Sellers on the right, by the way, playing a psychoanalyst who combines Austin Powers with Lord Farquaad.

The New York eyewear company Moscot has this pair of frames called the Zelig, named after the Woody Allen film. That was how I got to know about the film. It’s an interesting concept, a mockumentary that plays out as part romance as well as part social commentary. It’s a parody and it’s satire and whilst it might come across a little crass and even racist as some points, I don’t think it meant to be like that and honestly, the 20s, when the film was set, was a pretty goddamn racist time anyway. Also, in Allen’s favor, he pokes fun at the Jews just as much as anyone else through the use of stereotypes.

Ignoring that minor hiccup, I have to say I enjoyed the film. The excessive faux-intellectualism garnered from staged interviews with people like Susan Sontag or Irving Howe gives the film a certain authenticity if you will. It helped immensely in making the story about a human chameleon bigger than what it was. Of course the fact that I have no clue who Susan Sontag or Irving Howe are matters not a smidge. I actually wiki-ed them whilst watching hahaha!

Allen’s character is largely shown through flashbacks and mostly through film interviews or footage. Part of this footage is from actual vintage reels with Allen inserted inside. Bear in mind, the film was made in 1983 so it was pretty innovative. Anyway, Allen’s character, Leonard Zelig, is a human chameleon. He changes his physical appearance when in the company of more dominant characters, typically men, to become like them. So when he was with a group of fat guys, he’d swell up a belly. Or when he was with some Chinese, he took on “oriental” features. Likewise with black dudes, doctors, lawyers, American Indians, politicians, actors, Greeks, Jews, you name it. Every stereotype gets lampooned.

I like how the film detached the character till it was granted a near mythical status. Despite the fact that you see Zelig constantly, he is somehow removed from the audience because he’s always a subject, something you’re considering, rather than someone you get to empathize with. This actually plays into the plot itself very well.

I think it’s kinda insane how well Allen was able to transform his idiosyncrasies into a madcap film script that allows him the space to make political statements, deride Hitler, celebrate the music of the 20s and 30s, the definite homage to Kafka and his penchant for Freud Freud Freud. On many levels, I’m very encouraged to try to do what Allen has done with film in what I’m trying to accomplish in future endeavors.

Zelig with his posse, Capone et al.

Watched a trailer in the cinema about a new movie by Rob Marshall. Wondered why it looked like a musical 81/2, Fellini’s film. So checked wikipedia and learned that you’re gonna see this below, played by Fergie.

Just for the record, I find Fergie hugely unattractive. Man jaws and all dat. The film is actually based on a musical that’s been around since 1982 which came from a play inspired by 81/2. Also, Daniel Day Lewis is gonna be Marcello Mastrioanni. I’m trying to be really snide as well if you can’t quite read that through the soullessness of the internet.

Sting plays a cameo as Ace Face, the poster boy mod in Franc Roddam’s Quadrophenia. I first heard of the film like 13 years ago in some random issue of Q or something which probably mentioned The Who. Never caught it till now.

I’ll be honest, put me hands up and say I know scant little about mods. I know bits about the fashion and the image but not the whys and the hows. I do like me an anorak though. And I secretly still hanker for a Fred Perry polo.

How boss is that eh? Ace Face. Just so you know, he’s really a bellboy.

It’s been forever since I watched a Hitchcock film. I remember Rear Window when I was young and I loved it. I also watched Psycho for a film class once but that was never my thing. Strangers On A Train though, is a thrilling ride. Slow in pace but it’s got a seriously creepy villain character. The film is sorta based around a Patricia Highsmith novel of the same name. She of The Talented Mr. Ripley fame.

Farley Granger is Guy Haines, a slim, tall, handsome amateur tennis player who bumps into Bruno Anthony, played by Robert Walker on a train ride. The excessively inquisitive and talkative Bruno has read about Guy’s affair with a senator’s daughter in the papers and catches on to the idea that he’s going home to get a divorce from his wife so he can marry her instead. Guy’s obviously uncomfortable with this and gets annoyed but stupidly keeps allowing Bruno to get an edge in. Eventually, Bruno proposes the perfect murder, just as a thought at first. By swopping murders, Bruno killing Guy’s wife Miriam and Guy killing Bruno’s father in exchange. Because neither has any motive and no one knows about the swop, it would be “perfect”. Guy thinks he’s loony and leaves him. Of course Bruno then actually commits the murder, before pestering Guy endlessly.

More then just a crime caper, the way Hitchcock frames stuff and puts stuff in, you get this sense of duality. Of the duality in man. In his noted cameo scene, Hitchcock pops up to go onto the train, the fat, lumbering director matched equally by the fat double bass he carries. Bruno, in a sense, is really Guy’s alter ego, a sort of strange culmination of his wanton desires. In truth, Miriam is a hindrance, a flirtatious, loose woman who is only clinging onto Guy for the money whilst she gallivants round town with random men. Guy, on the other hand, is really in love with Anne but can’t be with her because Miriam refuses to budge. If he could have committed the perfect murder and get away with it, he probably would have. He certainly looks like he would consider it.

Bruno is desire unchained by logic or ethics or any systems of understood social conscience. He just does what he wants. His character is a psychopath, devious and evil. He hates his father but adores his mother in a way that overtly displays an Oedipus Complex. She in turn, doesn’t exactly turn him away, which is pretty gross. In some ways, I’m kinda reminded of Dostoevsky’s The Double when I was watching the film.

So we get this chilling, thrilling story about Guy trying to get out of the sticky mess he unwittingly fell into but subconsciously wants to happen but doesn’t want because society says it ain’t ok.

Robert Walker’s Bruno is insane in the membrane. His smarmy, almost gay behaviour is what drives the annoyingness of the chase if you will. He’s relentless and perverse. You hope you never meet a guy like him. The weirdest thing about the film is that it’s got a happy ending! I haven’t seen one in ages! Albeit one that arrives with a violent process as resolution, a certain unintended but desired evil required to bring about an apparent peace.

Woody Allen doesn’t just make comedies. Interiors is a serious, sombre look at the disintegration of an upper middle class family in New York. It is slow, austere and really goddamn sad. There is never any excess showing of emotion. In fact, all the characters hide everything, behind facades, under their behaviour and beneath their words. Color is so significant in the film. 99% of it is beige and grey or black and bits of white. (So me right now!) There’s only one character that is a counterpoint to everything else in the film, a sore thumb that markedly provides the contrast element as well as some semblance of humanity and sanity. Then there’s the lighting, always in the shadows. Anytime light is allowed, it feels like it’s showing you something you don’t want to see. Otherwise the characters live amongst the cobwebs, afraid of facing real life like vampires brooding at the rising sun. It’s so gloomy and difficult and wordy I had so much trouble at the start. But once it all started falling into place, I was sucked in until the end, a quiet whisper like death coming in the night. I didn’t even know it had ended.

Geraldine Page plays Eve, the character for whom the title is referring. She’s an interior designer who’s gone off the edge after her husband announces a trial separation. She’s got severe OCD, wanting to direct everything in her life, orchestrating, like a puppet master handling her children. She’s also suicidal, thinking that life is no longer worth living because it seems like it’s outta control. It’s devastating her 3 daughters and her poor husband who just want to get on but cannot find the release. The tenuous relationships between these characters seem to be creaking severely and it’s clear that everything’s gonna fall apart. All around each person, things don’t seem to be going right. Every interaction and plot element seems to point at the failure of this family. Why I don’t really know but it just is. It’s pretty bleak but pretty, if you like the cold, barrenness of life as I do. God, I hope I don’t become Eve.

It’s tough to get through the dialogue. I reckon much of it sounds somewhat pretentious but it’s necessary in depicting the characters and their self-absorbed “problems”, most of which are their own doing. Their dysfunction seems to rip everything apart and they almost seem to revel in being tortured and depressed. It’s almost nauseating to watch. Their on screen emotional turmoil is so disturbingly quiet and calm on the surface, but inside, it’s all asunder. Yet, I kept wondering why, why, why. Why put me through this near pointless exercise in a study of human emotions or lack thereof? A vacancy flailing at something but I’m not sure what.

I think the steez is uber though. Check out Eve in an awesome “ice gray” suit thing and then later in repose, prepped for death. If you look closely, there’s black tape sealing the gaps in the windows, all part of her plan to die by gas inhalation. Everything about her suggests she’s some sort of mournful soul that’s waiting for the grim reaper to take her. The excessive neatness of her hair, kept long in a bun and with a side parting made me think of the early Shakers, who happen to relate directly to her occupation. The last pic is the final scene, a closeup with each sister entering from the sides, all facing the right, wondering what to make of themselves now that they’re finally free.

My first Jean Pierre Melville film was Le Samourai, which I love intensely. It was this fascination with his crime capers that made me initially shun watching L’armee des ombres, or Army Of Shadows. No, Army is about the French resistance in WWII and whilst the subject matter differs, the style and execution is probably better. It’s Melville crafting an excellent, if severely depressing view on things. Normally you get heroes who die gloriously but here it feels a lot more like average joes slowing going out with the barest whimper. Their fates appear embraced right from the beginning. I enjoyed it as a film but also hated it because it feels too awful.

Scene after scene, you get dreary and bleak juxtaposed against the calm insouciance of the characters, or perhaps it’s some innate understanding that there’s no escaping the clutches of death painted on the faces. Yes, everyone dies. Yet, it’s careful pacing, haunting soundtrack and constant subterfuge overpowers the violence and brutality required for the story. So you’re always focused on how these guys keep going on despite what happens and what they must do.

The film reunites Melville with two of his stars from Le Deuxieme Souffle, Lino Ventura and Paul Meurisse. The former is one of the leaders of the underground French resistance and the film starts with him going into an internment camp, only to make a daring break, narrowly avoiding capture. Which feels like most of the film, complicated, detailed operations with lots of set up and always near misses until we reach the inevitable conclusion, where everything is the darkest, subjectively and literally. Along the way, there’s a little questioning morality in war but also honor and courage as well.

In 2006, the film was re released in the US to critical acclaim, having been ignored for its near complete existence before that. Check the trailer.

Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing was made way back in ‘56 and it’s a film noir heist caper about a buncha guys tryin’ ta rob a racetrack. Note the duality in the title in it referring to a windfall as well as to death. Noirs never get a happy ending and this one tells you as much.

I thought the start of the film was a touch confusing as you don’t get introductions to characters, not that it’s necessary. It jumps right into the idea that this was a heist and it starts right about when the robbery takes place, slowly revealing more scene by scene, placing things in a timeframe and not having a linear time scale. One interesting thing was the multiple different views and perspectives the film shows you to build the story and give each character their own story.

Sterling Hayden, whom I previously saw in another noir, The Asphalt Jungle, plays the lead role as Johnny Clay, the guy who just got outta jail and saw his wife after 5 years only to decide it’s time for another ill-advised criminal caper. He strings along a few acquaintances and friends to do a big job, $2million dollars by robbing the racetrack. He hatches an elaborate plan involving a marksman, a wrestler, a bartender, a ticketer and a cop. Each one of ‘em has their own issues and reasons to need the dough.

So we get this interesting play of personalities and needs and the idea that crime doesn’t pay. No one gets away scot free but it’s an intriguing take on how desperation never gets the best out of man. You just know it’s all going to end ugly, but you don’t know how. That’s what the film is really about.

So my Objectified DVD just got in the mail like 3 days ago and last night was a time when I could muster the strength to watch it. Its just been one late night with an early start after another so whatever. So right, the film. It’s nice, I suppose. Gary Hustwit is really good at noticing these little details that attach the viewer to humanity at large in relation to the context of the film. He also focuses on very quaint, yet poignant, statements and ideas that address the behemoth that is design, or more precisely industrial design.

There’s plenty of stars from the design world featured here, from the Bondi bum attitude of Marc Newson to the sagely Dieter Rams or the childlike Naoto Fukasawa, it’s definitely interesting if you’re a designer fanboy like I am. I dunno why but I reckon I just admire the philosophies that each individual has. You can say all you want about each one but they’re all where they are today because they think different than you or me.

I appreciate that the film is one that provides a good amount of insight into the design process and all its trials and tribulations. The film takes the viewer from idea conception and generation through to the solutions, then the refinement processes and the eventual outcome and also the ramifications of what they have done. You get to see Jonathan Ive compare an aluminum blank to the finished keyboard cover piece on the Macbook Pro (unibody version) and how designing it wasn’t so much designing the keyboard cover but the processes involved to make it possible. Or the team at IDEO generating completely random and silly ideas for a toothbrush/oral care concept. Or Smart design take out a box full of foam models that eventually led to the OXO good grips peeler. Or Naoto Fukasawa talk about why he put facets on a handphone because of a memory of peeling potatoes as a child. It’s like memories of uni revisited. Hello long nights in the studio! I so do not miss you.

For most people, I think design still remains far removed but I think it should stay that way. Like most of the designers in the film, I too believe design shouldn’t even be seen. Like Apple’s monitors where they try to remove everything and leave you with the screen or the indicator lights that only appear when they need to. You could argue that in the former, nobody really cares or maybe it’s an evil Apple plot to mind control humanity into slavery in Steve Jobs future robotic utopia but it’s really about attention to detail. Great designers make stuff nobody even notices and take for granted. They just do what they’re intended for. You can’t please everyone though. Between the money men and raving teenagers or cranky people. It’s a tough life being a tastemaker.

I’ve always obsessed over the material world, from having the biggest brand whatever to the most hyped this or the legendary XXX designed that. And when I hear Dieter Rams right at the end talking about how design will be more about survival in the future, I almost feel a pinch of hypocrisy in myself. But sorry, I remain indignant that I am a materialistic bigot that thinks he has better taste than everyone else. Rams excluded. Have you seen his pad? It is the shiznit. And his accent and mannerisms. MY GOD! So German! So Kunst! So cold. Just like his coffee maker. Yes I miss his coffee maker. Even if I much prefer expresso coffee, that Braun makes me wish I were drinking drip. I guess I always feel more for the object than for the activity. The tangible, material world rather than the experienctial, emotional one. I must be part German maybe. No. I’m way too humorous.

I think it’s nice to have a film like this. That appreciates the under-appreciated and the maniacal few that decided that they wanna be designers. I think the next film Mr. Hustwit tackles should be a food one. Where he puts his keen eye for detail real up close and personal (you can actually see the lines the lathe makes when it carves out the objectified logo on a piece of white polycarb!) and people can get really hungry. He could do a few of the Michelin starred peeps and then some of the old school guys and some weirdos or whatever. Or maybe a fashion one with the Antwerp 6 at a roundtable sharing jokes or Dolce & Gabbana & Bruno hello?

I always remember that scene where Harrison Ford is about to order noodles from like this floating Asian noodle spaceship but his colleague stops him in his tracks. Or the one when he’s running after the female replicant wearing the transparent raincoat and the multiple awesome flyby city scenes like the one above. Bladerunner is just one of those movies where visuals > content and it’s something I find admirable, although the storyline itself was good as well. Sometimes it just doesn’t matter what you’re looking at because it’s just beautiful.