"As long as movies are depressing, life isn't." -Rainer Werner Fassbinder
The Fassbinder Retrospective at the Centre Pompidou is best and cheapest thing to do in Paris right now. My freshman year of college, I wrote a 20-page paper on The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant in one night. I rented the tape and watched it in my dorm room at least four times in twelve or thirteen hours, writing and chain smoking, while my poor roommate slept. Since then, I've only been able to watch Fassbinder films on the big screen, which is how they deserve to be seen. Ironically enough, the first thing I saw at the retrospective was Eight Hours Don't Make a Day a mini-series that Fassbinder wrote and directed for German television in the early seventies. The whole thing lasts about, well, eight hours, but we only watched three and will go back next month to catch the rest. The great thing about it is that it's this generic soap about a working class family, but it has all these fantastic Fassbinder touches, like two people are talking in a cafe, and there's an enormous parrot behind each of them and a monkey cage in the foreground. And then there's a group shower scene at the factory, with all the dudes casually scrubbing each other down full frontal. If you're in Paris on May 14th, you must go see it. Best of all, if you have a Pompidou membership (25-40 euros for the year), the screenings are all FREE!
“We are all empty houses, waiting for someone to open the lock and set us free” -Kim Ki-Duk
Also this weekend, saw the movie Locataires, which seems to be called 3-iron in English. It was made by Kim Ki-Duk, a Korean director whose films always get amazing reviews but look either too violent or too slow for my taste. This one featured a few fist fights, and the pace was...leisurely (one guy fell asleep and snored loudly for a good five minutes), but it was also a totally engrossing and poetic love story and I think I actually held my breath through a good half of the film.
"Vive La France" - Bruce Willis
Did you know that the French people honored "die hard" Bush supporter Bruce Willis last week by naming him an officer in the Order of Arts and Letters this week? C'est vrai! I thought they only handed out these medals to Oscar nominees (Leo DiCaprio) and Mensa members (Sharon Stone). Bruce delivered his acceptance speech in French, sort of. You can actually watch this trainwreck, if you so desire. Warning: It's neither as funny as Look Who's Talking Too nor as touching as Armageddon.
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