deeplyshallow // that new new wave

that new new wave

By and large, I enjoy seeing almost any type of movie. There are a few genres that come with caveats — I have to work myself into a certain mental state to enjoy a war film, for example; it’s usually worth it, but it’s tedious enough that I’m rarely in the mood for it. Westerns, curiously, are much the same for me, much as I love them. I will watch horror movies, though I prefer horror that fucks with your mind, not your gag reflex. Foreign films are usually the real test for me. When they’re finished, I’ve usually enjoyed them, but they require enough of an investment — of participation, I mean, specifically the effort required to watch and read simultaneously — that I tend to save them for a very laid-back day. I love comedy, but I’m not big on slapstick. Satire definitely intrigues me, but spoofs are an immediate turnoff. I’ve seen enough mysteries and thrillers by this point in my life that I demand a little more originality from the genre, and you know as well as I that this rarely is delivered. And all I want from love stories is real love, not the push-pull attraction that’s become the gold standard of romantic comedies.

So yesterday when Felicia calls me up and says that one of her regular customers just raved about this movie that’s playing at the Palm, and she tells me it’s a French-language film called Diva, and that her regular described it as ‘beautiful and moving’, I’ll admit I wasn’t all that optimistic. I did a bit of quick research and learned that it was the first film by a French director whose name I now forget — Biscuit or something — and that it was about a man who bootlegged operas and that it was twenty-five years old, and my optimism was not bolstered. I read a few reviews and was surprised to find that Ebert had given the movie four stars in 1982, and that the film seemed well-regarded.

So we went. Standing in line outside the theatre, I notice the poster for Diva right next to the poster of a movie that I actually did want to see, Starting Out in the Evening. The Evening poster is understated, subtle; it is a writer’s movie. The poster for Diva was splashed with the sort of shapes — triangles, squiggles, circles — that graced the cover of my very first Trapper Keeper. The poster was blue and Day-Glo yellow. The tagline at the top said something pretentious like Prepare Yourself For the NEW French New Wave or whatever. Felicia notices my sorry stare and says, “We can see Starting Out in the Evening if you want instead. We can see this other one tomorrow.” But I’d already prepared myself for the worst; I might as well use the steeled nerves rather than try to work myself up to seeing it the next day.

So in we went, and the movie was, ironically enough, prefaced with the Starting Out in the Evening trailer, which pretty much fit the mood I reserve for my favorite kinds of movies. And then: whammo, Diva began.

And it was the funniest movie I’ve seen all year.

Competely awful, this movie. There’s a stalkery postman who secretly records a famous opera singer as she performs, and then makes off with her satin gown after the show. There’s a mysterious foreigner who has a kept woman who can’t be more than fifteen and who wears strange plastic raincoats and steals records. There’s a cop who claims he has thighs of steel and that he was born to run. There is a car chase that turns into a subway chase that turns into a footchase. There are two bad guys who stalk around throwing awls into the backs of anybody who gets in their way. There are two other bad guys who are either cops or Chinese bootleggers. There is a dead hooker who records an incriminating tape, but who must have been brought back to life in order to record a non-incriminating version. A girl drinks Coke through a radiator hose. People fall into elevator shafts. Oh, and there is of course the opera singer, who never lets anyone hear her practice, who won’t record for the public, and who bangs the postman even after she identifies him as a total psychopath.

Beautiful. Moving. Four stars!

Someone needs to take back Ebert’s Pulitzer.

Meanwhile, I finished watching the fourth season of The Wire this morning, and it knocked me flat. Again. Every time I begrudgingly come to respect a character, and look forward to their scenes, which are few enough as it is, then something awful happens. Like bullets going into their head. That sort of thing. I cannot think of a single episode of this show that has bored me. Every season they mix up the theme song, “Way Down in the Hole” — they’ve used Tom Waits’ original version, they’ve used the Blind Boys of Alabama, they’ve used the Neville Brothers, and this season, they used a group of Baltimore teenagers that call themselves DoMaJe, and it’s strangely intoxicating.

The Wire is finally getting its due from the media and critics, who are calling it what it is — probably the best show that’s ever been, and certainly the most ambitious. Way it feels to me, it’s like an in-depth pull-no-punches news story that was so interesting that the writer and editors decided to serialize it, to continue the story, to follow it as far as it could go — and it just never ends. This is the history of an American city, laid bare and unpolished, and it’s compelling and tragic and hopeful and I can’t stop watching.

The third season kicked my ass. I spent all of it fascinated by the way Stringer Bell balanced the real world and the street, spending his nights studying for his business degree and his days running the Barksdale operation. And then it all came apart, and he got himself killed — but he got himself killed by the single most and complicated character on the show, Omar, and much as I hated that Bell was gone, I couldn’t help being fascinated by Omar’s story, and this becoming part of it. Now, in season four, I have finally come to very much like Bodie, the loyal hardass who’s been working the corners since the first show, and just as he gets extremely interesting, he gets gunned down. But not just by anybody: by an eighth-grader who is coming up fast and hard on the streets, and who has gone from a soft-spoken innocent to a brutal hood over the course of the season. Watching him become what he’s becoming is exciting; that a favorite standby is gone in his wake is, I guess, the price of great storytelling.

I am always grabbed by great stories, but this show — it’s something else. It’s epic in the way that epics never are. I can’t imagine television ever getting better than this right here. Ain’t nowhere to go but down.