142. In the Mouth of Madness

142. (27 Jul) /In the Mouth of Madness/ (1994, John Carpenter) 73



It's remarkable just how disorienting and engrossing In the Mouth of Madness is from the first frame. Its jumbled structure just serves to make a film that's genuinely upsetting more than terrifying. Carpenter regularly approaches Lynchian territory with his lengthy shots of dark highways, but much of the scarier imagery here is thoroughly original in its creepiness.

Sexuality & Wild Reeds (1994) **

André Téchiné is a highly regarded and respected French director, who has helmed some of the best films to come out of France in the last thirty years.  Many critics consider his 1994 Les Roseaux Sauvages (Wild Reeds) a masterpiece.  It won Césars (a French Oscar) for Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay (Olivier Massart, Gilles Taurand, and Téchiné) and Most Promising Actress (Élodie Bouchez). Yet, while Téchiné holds a special place in my heart for still giving Catherine Deneuve good roles when other directors overlook her, I can’t bring myself to agree that Les Roseaux Sauvages is as grand as some claim it to be.  To me, it’s an average film about young people discovering themselves (primarily sexually) in a pastoral setting.

The story takes place in Southwest France just as the Algerian War is coming to an end in 1962. Four students from different backgrounds are studying for their baccalaureate exams while dealing with their own personal problems. Bouchez plays Maïté Alvarez, the daughter of one of the school’s teachers (Michèle Moretti). Both mother and daughter are strident communists and oppose the French occupation of Algeria. Madame Alvarez actually has a nervous breakdown when one of her former students is killed in the war, which leaves Maïté alone to cope with both her exams and her odd relationship with François (Gaël Morel). 

Why is the relationship odd, you ask? Well, for starters François is gay and lusts after both Serge (Stéphane Rideau) and Henri (Frédéric Gorny), two young men at his boarding school. For some reason, Maïté is perfectly fine with the situation and seems to welcome the idea of being with someone who’s not interested in her sexually. She actually says to him, “I don't care what you do with others. What's between us counts much more.” I watch a lot of French movies, so this doesn’t seem as bizarre to me as it might to someone unfamiliar with what film scholars refer to as ‘French queer cinema’.  Still, even I was a bit perplexed when Maïté first made an emotional connection and then later a sexual connection with Henri—an Algerian-born French exile who stands for everything she is against and whom she only met because he thought about burning down a building she was in. And then, taking Gallic romanticism to its brink, she pushes away the man she obviously desires (and could possibly love) to remain the companion of her gay boyfriend. Perhaps you’ve seen the end of this and asked yourself the same question as me: did she really end up in a sexless marriage with François?  Oh, how depressing a thought!

The other sexually complicated relationship is between Serge and François. There is absolutely no question that François is gay—even if he does go on dates with Maïté to see films like Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly and Demy’s Lola—but it’s not so clear whether Serge is gay or bi-curious.  It is Serge who first initiates François into the sexual world, but it’s a one-time thing.  For the rest of the film Serge talks about sleeping with girls and his brother’s widow, while François pines after him.  At one point, François considers becoming involved with Henri and says to Maïté, “I admit it. I want to sleep with Serge. I want to sleep with Henri. What if another one comes along next week? It's awful. What will become of me?” I don’t think Téchiné ever makes it clear who or what Serge is—he’s a sexually ambivalent being.  Does Serge tell François to forget about their encounter because he’s not interested or is it because he isn’t willing to share with 1960s French society who he is? 

For (then) relative screen newcomers, all four actors give steady performances.  Not surprisingly, Bouchez’s career has turned out to be the more highly regarded of the group. Her portrayal of Maïté is melancholic and simple.  The underlying self-resignation that her character is forced to carry clearly shows on her face.  Of the three men, I most enjoyed Gorny’s Henri. In someone else’s hands Henri’s brooding and recalcitrance personality could have descended into a caricature of the angry young man myth. Gorny provides an even and steady depiction of a character who you find yourself both disliking and rooting for.  In reality, Henri is the only character who shows his true self, and I suppose that’s why I liked him so much. 

Overall, Wild Reeds is an interesting coming-of-age story that focuses on its characters’ sexual awakenings.  It makes you reflect on how difficult the transition from adolescence to adulthood truly is.  Yet, to me, it is far from a masterpiece.

Forrest Gump

Forrest Gump, 1994
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
Nominated for 13 Oscars, Won 6
Up Against: Four Weddings and A Funeral, The Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, Quiz Show

Embarassingly, I haven't seen this movie before. Actually, I don't know if it's embarassing to admit. The only things I really knew about this movie was "life's like a box of chocolate..." and "run forrest! run!" Other than that, I didn't know a whole lot about it. Though I knew people quoted it a lot. But overall, no idea really going into this.

Forrest Gump is the story of, well, Forrest Gump. Forrest is peculiar. He is sitting at a bus stop and starts telling his story to a woman (the 'audience' changes various times). He was a peculiar kid. He has leg braces, giving him a funny walk, and has an extremely low IQ. He meets a girl named Jenny on the first day of school. She's nice to him while all the other kids are mean. We are told they become lifelong friends. The story continues; Forrest telling us about shedding his leg braces, falling in love with running, playing football in college, serving in the Vietnam War, having his own shrimp boat, and finding Jenny again.

I'm just going to put it out there that I thought this movie was pretty weird. It was quirky, and odd and just really weird. Some things were so unrealistic, and hard to believe. That being said, I didn't enjoy this movie as much as I thought I would. Sure, it was a nice movie, but it was pretty odd, and I kept wondering how this won Best Picture. Again, not terrible, just okay. However, Tom Hanks was utterly amazing. He really owned the part of Forrest, and truly brought him to life. He completely shines and is overtaken by the role. He really knows his character, and is able to embody him in all ways. The accent was great, the manner of speech, the body language.. The best thing about this movie was Tom Hanks.

This is a movie about life, and following Forrest through it. Through this movie, I was continually thinking of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I really loved that film, and thought it was so heartbreaking, and so interesting. And I could see so much of CCBB in this (or vise-versa I suppose). Interestingly enough, both movies had the same screenplay writer, Eric Roth. Roth really understood his source material for this film though. It was funny, and really followed through on Forrest, really embodying him the same way, the entire film even though the film was a little too long. Much could've been shaved off.

For some of this film, I was sure whether it was supposed to be taken seriously, or to be joked off. It went back and forth between these two things, being very extreme on the 2 side to boot, that it was a little hard to take in, since it seemed so choppy. One moment Forrest is rescuing his fellow soldiers from an attack and bombing in Vietnam, the next he is eating ice cream in the hospital while recovering from being shots "in the buttocks" and wearing an enormous bandage/cast. The next we're learning about his friend, who lost his legs, and is mad Forrest didn't let him die out in the attack, and then Forrest is becoming a ping-pong champ and hitting at "amazing" speeds. It was very back and forth, and made it hard to take the serious stuff seriously, and the funny stuff in a jokey way. Not that other movies aren't like that, but there is a fine line, and having the serious stuff and funny stuff on two very different ends of the spectrum, it was hard to swallow.

Overall, the film was a little all over the place. There were recurring jokes of showing Forrest with celebrity icons before they were famous and inspiring them (John Lennon, Elvis), and him being put into old footage of football teams meeting the president, when the first black students arrived at Forrest's university (University of Alabama). We see contrast between Jenny's wild life of sex, strip clubs, drugs, and hippie lifestyle, with Forrest living a simple life, being in the Vietnam war, living on a shrimp boat, and their on again, off again relationship. It's a story about life, and love, and how you never really know what you're going to get in life, but that it's your life, and it's worth living to the fullest. While it was a cheesy at some points, purely lame at others, and just full-out unrealistic at others, Forrest Gump is an alright movie, but is extremely mediocre when you think about it winning Best Picture- particularly over films like Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction and Quiz Show.

6/10

053. World and Time Enough

053. (17 Feb) World and Time Enough (1994, Eric Mueller) 36



Well-intentioned in its politics, World and Time Enough tries hard to announce Mueller as an important voice in New Queer Cinema. His overwritten script and faux-arty aesthetic certainly make an impact, but there's nothing effortless here that makes him seem at all accomplished. There's some cleverness, perhaps, in a few key scenes. A particularly good couple have a distant son leaving answering machine messages for his father who's lying there dead. It's also worth noting Mueller has chosen uneducated, working class men in a rural setting, which sets this apart.

Ultimately, Mueller just can't create plausible relationships or intriguing characters. He bites off way more than he can chew in terms of plot, ultimately leaving us with a mishmash of scenes that suggest a movie that might've originally been an hour longer. Gregory Giles and Matt Guidry have romantic chemsitry, but that's nowhere near enough to carry this gimmicky goop.

Double Feature: Quiz Show (1994) and Shine (1996)

Quiz Show:

This 1994 film is based on the Twenty One quiz show scandals of the 1950s involving contestants Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes) and Herb Stempel (John Turturro). On a hunch, lawyer Richard Goodwin (Rob Morrow) investigates and unearths details of behind-the-scenes tampering by NBC producers, who were subsequently made to testify at congressional hearings.

The film received nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Paul Scofield), and Best Adapted Screenplay. Though mostly forgotten, the film is a charming Best Picture nominee.

Shine:

In this modest biopic, Geoffrey Rush stars as David Helfgott, a talented but troubled pianist. Taught to play by his father, David rises and falls in popularity in his native Australia, suffering a mental breakdown and living in institutions before a small resurgence at a local diner.

The film received nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor (Armin Mueller-Stahl), Best Original Screenplay, Best Film Editing, and Best Original Dramatic Score. While the film did not deserve that much recognition, it is hard to argue against Rush's Best Actor Oscar win.