Let’s take a quick look to see what’s arrived in the mail here at the Geek Compound.
Science Is Fiction: 23 Films by Jean Painlevé
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The mesmerizing, utterly unclassifiable science films of Jean Painlevé (1902-89) have to be seen to be believed: delightful, surrealist-influenced dream works that are also serious science. The French filmmaker-scientist-inventor had a decades-spanning career in which he created hundreds of short films on subjects ranging from astronomy to pigeons to, most famously, such marine-life marvels as the sea horse and the sea urchin. This definitive three-disc collection brings together the best of these, and also includes the French television series Jean Painlevé Through His Films, rock band Yo La Tengo’s eight-film score The Sounds of Science, and an essay by film scholar Scott MacDonald.
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Set in London, this romantic comedy stars Dustin Hoffman as Harvey Shine, a divorced and haggard jingle-writer quickly aging out of his career and workaholic ways. With a warning from his boss (Richard Schiff) to not bother rushing back, Harvey goes to London, begrudgingly, for his daughter’s wedding, fielding that work calls the whole time he’s there. When Harvey greets his estranged daughter, Susie (Liane Balaban), it becomes clear just how far away he’s grown from his family. The film never spells out in exactly what ways Harvey was a bad father, but it is clear he missed the boat when Susie asks her stepfather (James Brolin) to give her away. As Harvey leaves his heartbreak at the ceremony for an emergency work call, he misses his flight and gets fired. While nursing a whiskey at the airport bar, Harvey bumps into Kate (Emma Thompson), an airport employee escaping her own bad day with a glass of wine and a book. Suddenly taken by Kate’s British charm, a tipsy Harvey bombards her with tales of his trouble. This unlikely trading of sob stories leads to lunch, a walk around London, and a day of unexpected romance.
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With LOOK, accomplished screenwriter and director Adam Rifkin (THE DARK BACKWARD, DETROIT ROCK CITY) takes the modern world’s infatuation with surveillance technology to a disarming new level. After opening the film with a jarring title card that explains just how many surveillance cameras exist in our society, Rifkin then goes on to prove it by using surveillance camera footage exclusively to tell his multifaceted story (artificially constructed, of course, but convincing nonetheless). What follows is an acerbic commentary on America in which a wide spectrum of citizens are captured in a series of unsettling, uncomfortable, sometimes hilarious, and ultimately dramatic situations. They include two cop killers on the lam, two bored convenience store clerks, a philandering husband, a sex-addicted clothing store manager, a high school teacher and the student who is out to seduce him, a nerdy office worker who is constantly harassed by his coworkers, a devastated mother whose daughter is abducted, and the mysterious abductor himself. Rifkin ingeniously uses his conceit as a way to comment on how depraved our society has become, yet he also uses humor to keep things from becoming too bleak and dour. As hidden camera after hidden camera captures the glaring foibles of these intersecting lives, we become further embroiled in the dramas at hand. The result is an unsettling portrait of a world at its nastiest, where good intentions become bad ones, and in which happy endings occur, albeit with crushingly ironic twists.