Century 2001: Hawaiian Gardens

Hawaiian Gardens. Percy Adlon. 2001.

Well, this is a different aesthetic from Percy Adlon. Instead of super-saturated colours a sound stage and nice film stock, this looks like it’s been filmed on an early-generation digital camera, and it’s all on location with natural lighting.

It’s got a rating of 4.1 on imdb, which is the lowest possible for a real movie, I think, and Adlon wouldn’t do another cinematic release until 2010 (Mahler on the Couch, which is OK, but not as good as his earlier, funnier movies).

Adlon had an interesting career arc if you peek at imdb. I haven’t seen his earliest films, but he won the world over with the iconic Zuckerbaby, and followed it up by leaving Germany and doing three more films in basically the same mode (Bagdad Cafe, Rosalie Goes Shopping and Salmonberries), and they’re all great.

Then you get Younger and Younger, which I remember being… er… not that good? (I should rewatch.) That’s in 1993, and then he apparently couldn’t get financing for any US films any more. Or any financing whatsoever, based on this film.

But I think it’s fair to say that everybody was pretty disappointed by Hawaiian Gardens? (According to imdb the working title was “DogShit”.)

This DVD has an English audio track… which means, I found I just now, that when anybody who’s talking English are talking, they’re not dubbed into German. But when a German person is talking, we get German on the audio track, and the German subtitles disappear. I mean, I understand German vaguely if they talk slow or I’m reading the German subtitles s-l-o-w-l-y. But I basically didn’t really understand a lot of what’s going on here.

So perhaps it’s really brilliant and I just didn’t understand! It’s possible! But it looks like shit and the acting is shocking. Adlon has never exactly gone for naturalistic actors, but there’s a wide gulf between stylised poses and uninteresting acting.

I like the Adlon flourishes in the soundtrack, though.

This blog post is part of the Century series.

Everything Dies

Gah! I had the almost perfect machine for schlepping around the apt while cleaning, and then it goes and does this:

Rebooting seems to help… sometimes. One out of five reboots it seems to come up alright again, but if I flip the orientation it goes back to that state again.

It’s an HP Spectre x360, according to dmidecode… Anybody know what’s up with this? Loose wires? Firmware updates? GPU settings?

I imagine there is a setting in the nvidia configuration utility: “[ ] Don’t shake the screen like you just don’t care” and I just have to tick that.

Right? Right?

Right.

Perhaps I should start looking for a new laptop…

Century 2000: In The Mood For Love

In The Mood For Love. Kar Wai Wong. 2000.

The last time I saw this film, it looked completely different!

2046 was more like this film, only much more mannered. This film has nerve and emotional depth. I watched the Anthony Bourdain Hong Kong show the other week, and he mentioned that this was his favourite Wong Kar-Wai film, and I can totally see why.

It’s such a romantic vision of Hong Kong. Almost mythological in the picturesque details.

And the story is a pretty loopy, interesting conceit. He goes all in on the emotional content, but avoids being obvious.

This blog post is part of the Century series.

Innovations in Music Distribution

I was at a jazz concert the other week, and I was looking at the CDs and stuff the musicians had brought to sell.

Adam Pulz Melbye had brought a shrinkwrapped bass string:

With a Bandcamp download code. (Censored above.)

I just had to buy one! Genius!

It’s weird that I haven’t seen anybody doing something along these lines before… It’s like a souvenir from the concert, but it’s also a way of selling music.

Century 1999: An Ideal Husband

An Ideal Husband. Oliver Parker. 1999.

How weird. I can’t find the DVD for this film, or any of the other four I ripped on the same day… I must have… put them… somewhere..

But. Hm. what’s the expression to describe this… “Aggressively pedestrian”? “Excessively standard”?

Ever single shot here is a shot you’ve seen, down to every detail, in half of every British period comedy/drama for the past quarter century.

When the cinematographer and director are no help whatsoever, it falls upon the actors to try to charm their way through the schmaltzy soundtrack into your heart. And I think they give it their best effort. Minnie Driver is great, and so is Julienne Moore, and Rupert Everett plays Rupert Everett.

But it’s Oscar Wilde, so there are tons and tons of witticism and a fun plot. It’s really entertaining watching Wilde’s clockwork intrigues tick tock into place with such precision.

This blog post is part of the Century series.