In a mostly empty Alamo Drafthouse, I saw Candy Von Dewd last night, a movie made by my high-school friend Jacques.

The movie can be aptly described using one of the better lines in the movie:

Wow, he’s really fucking that plant!

The movie is trippy and pretty non-linear, with obvious references to Barbarella and perhaps-unintended references to Babylon 5: Crusade, among other things. Jacques himself mentioned to me “I’d
like to encourage people to see it the way 2001 was marketed, that is to say, see it high.”

Jacques was making amateur movies back in high school. He finished one project that was very gritty and down to earth–more like the 400 Blows than anything else. But he started on another (which I helped on, in a very minimal way) that had a lot in common with this. I got the impression that with Candy Von Dewd, he was sort of wrapping up something that had been in the back of his mind for half his life. Gwen got some ideas for her Halloween costume.

Bonus! Candy Von Dewd trading cards

Tomorrow night at 9:45, Alamo Drafthouse will be showing Candy Von Dewd, an underground science-fiction movie made by a good friend of mine from high school, Jacques Boyreau.

Be there.

Two days ago, Gwen and I saw a movie that reminded both of us of Ghost World. Today, we saw a movie starring one of the actresses from that movie, Scarlett Johansson: Lost in Translation. Very good and very melancholy. The story is less sad than Sofia Coppola’s previous movie, The Virgin Suicides, but it feels sadder, somehow–Virgin Suicides had a very detached quality to it; this had a very intimate quality. It also made me very nostalgic for Japan, and a little melancholy about my own experiences there.

Gwen astutely commented that it was sad seeing Bill Murray, an actor we’ve grown up with, not only playing (well, being) an old guy, but in a role where his age is a key part of the role. She also pointed out that a scene where the two main characters were chasing through a pachinko parlor seemed like it was lifted from another movie we had recently seen, but neither of us could quite put our finger on which one.

Ideal double-feature companion movie: CQ: both movies address the isolation of smart young Americans abroad. Both use the movies as a schtick in the movie. And both are made by second-generation Coppolas.

Finally got around to seeing American Splendor last night. Very good. If I’m ever feeling down about my own life, I can console myself with the thought “at least I’m not Harvey Pekar.” That sounds mean, but come on–a file clerk who says “every day’s a struggle” is automatically pathetic and self-involved.

Despite the aggressively mundane quality of Pekar’s world, and his almost complete inability to find any joy in it at all, the movie’s funny. The little observations within the movie are funny, and the wacky metafiction mashups are funny: the real Harvey Pekar provides voiceover, and occasionally the scene shifts to a white space, cluttered with some of the set dressing from the previous scene, with the Real Harvey giving some insight on what’s going on. This might sound annoying, but it is necessary, if for no other reason than Toby. Toby is one of Harvey’s coworkers depicted in the story, and he is such an oddball character that one would be forced to conclude that his depiction, if not the person himself, was fictionalized. But eventually we cut to the Real Toby, and that’s exactly what he’s like, and we realize fiction is hard-pressed to keep up with truth for strangeness. In that shot, we see Real Harvey talking with Real Toby, as Paul Giamatti (portraying Harvey) and Judah Friedlander (portraying Toby) sit on folding chairs in the background. That’s meta.

Paul Giamatti wears a scowl through the whole movie that’s constantly on the verge of a grimace. He probably had to do face-yoga at the end of every day of shooting. The shots of Pekar himself today show that he’s mellowed a little bit with age, and he occasionally breaks into a smile.

Ideal double-feature companion to this movie: Ghost World. Both are comics-inspired, and Harvey Pekar seems to have been the inspiration for Seymour in Ghost World.

“No special effects…no stuntmen.” That text flashes across the opening shot of a surfer dwarfed by a 20′ wave. It is a documentary, after all, but it’s interesting that the director felt the need to point that out, and refreshing to see a movie so visually exciting that doesn’t depend on tricks. Step into Liquid is a documentary about surfing, and it’s beautiful. It has its faults–the voiceover is annoying half the time, the interviews are self-indulgent most of the time, and the soundtrack is bad some of the time, but so what? The main course–surfing footage–is great. Shot from helicopters, jet-skis, and from underwater–the underwater footage was jaw-dropping–we get an amazing view of the action and the waves.

Some of the less-likely aspects of surfing showed up. Surfers in Sheboygan, Ireland, and Easter Island. Surfing the wake of a supertanker. Hydrofoil surfing. And it was interesting to see that all the surfers, even the guy in Wisconsin wearing his Blatz work shirt, had that surfer squint.

Just go see it. It’s shame that we only had a chance to see it on a relatively small screen–this movie deserves to be seen on the biggest screen possible.

Saw And Now…Ladies and Gentlemen on Saturday with Gwen. We missed the first few minutes, which may have been important. The rest of the movie is a time-shifting montage from which, eventually, we were able to extract what seems to be a coherent storyline. It was, all in all, very entertaining. Jeremy Irons was excellent but creepy, as usual (I’ve never seen him do comedy, but something tells me he would kill). Two thumbs up. The story is hard to describe and not so much of interest as the characters.

Saw The Magdalene Sisters with Gwen and Lissy while in Chicago. The movie tells the story of Ireland’s magdalene asylums, a system of homes for wayward girls run by the Catholic church. A girl could be committed to one of these by a guardian for getting pregnant, being too pretty, or just being inconvenient. Once in, they could be locked in there indefinitely. They worked as indentured washerwomen, symbolically washing away their sins (real or invented by the nuns), and the nuns apparently had a tidy little laundry business going. For their part, the nuns treated the girls with anything from contempt to sadism. The closing credits inform us that the last asylum closed in 1996.

Watching this movie made me want to go out and throttle a nun. There’s so much about the story that is shocking: that this went on under everyone’s noses with (apparently) no great outcry. That organized religion could practice such institutional cruelty upon its own members. That the Catholic church had so much power in Ireland that the civil authorities didn’t stop what amounted to systematic kidnapping and enslavement. The storytelling in the movie is simple and understated–it doesn’t need to hit the viewer over the head with ham-fisted dialog to get the point across.

The day before we saw this movie, I took Gwen down the street where I had grown up. Half of the block was occupied by a Catholic-run hospital, and the nuns who worked their were widely despised in the neighborhood. An example of why: The street is very narrow, and parking is very tight on the block. One night, when I was little, there was a fire on the block. The hospital had an empty lot on the block, and the firemen wanted to tow some cars into the lot to gain better access to the fire scene. The nuns formed a human chain in front of the lot to prevent the firemen from doing so. The hospital is closed now.

Saw The Legend of Suriyothai last night. The first Thai movie I’ve ever seen, this tells a story, apparently out of Thai history, of Princess Suriyothai, who was somehow involved in the goings on during a turbulent period in the country’s history in the 1530s.

The movie is epic in scope and length, and may be guilty of biting off more than it can chew–at several points, I wished I had a scorecard. In a period of roughly 20 years, Siam burns through four kings, what with civil conflicts, civil strife, usurpers, and the permanent threat of invasion by a drag queen in Burma.

There is as much treachery and intrigue as you’ll find in any two Shakespeare tragedies put together, along with a character, Srisudachan, who makes Lady Macbeth look like a harmless biddy. For that matter, Srisudachan’s maid makes Lady Macbeth look like a harmless biddy.

The eponymous heroine, however, is a model of wisdom and selflessness, and the whole story strikes me as a Buddhist allegory–world of strife, self-sacrifice for the good of others, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.