Of the four films I watched this weekend I enjoyed most by far Tom Ford’s A Single Man.

The dialogues and interactions between the characters are literary rather than social, measured yet evocative.

George Falconer is the kind of man I have aspired to be but have all too often fallen well short. I am aspiring still.

I mean something beyond the stylishness, charm, and fastidiousness Falconer presents. I mean the way he is a gentleman, the way he listens and responds, the way he looks and smiles at the world around him. The way he expresses anger but does not inhabit it, is not controlled by it. This is what I most admired and related to.

Perhaps dying relatively young is the best way to go. The deus ex machina of the film is that Falconer is prepared to choose to die (his only moments of awkwardness), but in the end doesn’t have to. In this he is like those characters in nineteenth-century novels who sicken and quickly die solely because of their sorrow. Falconer is a Romantic, after all.

Julianne Moore’s character is a kind of gargoyle. He enjoys her company and can relax around her in a way he doesn’t with the others. But her sorrowful desire renders her with a mean excess. It is she, after all, who has over-invested in substitution. Sad, understandable, but the viewer cannot empathize due to her gargolyed meanness.

What I mean when I call Falconer a gentleman is that he refuses meanness and petulance in exchange for a sadness that is refined, earthy, and strong. This is the essence of what it means to be civilized. By doing so he achieves his humanity rather than rejecting it for the sake of self-pity. Moving and exemplary.

Reflecting on the world I live in, the often uncouth, aggressive, and thoughtless ways the people around me interact with the world made me nostalgic for a different scene. And so I have sadness, memories, and still some hope. And I will continue on, with a better manner.

Anton Corbijn

Retro in the best style: neither a straight-up homage nor a contemporary re-invention, but something in between.

I don’t much care for the silhouette in the title type, but that’s relatively small quibble, given how much I love the colour and background choices.

As Adrian Curry says, the poster attempts to put George Clooney in the same gallery of cinema history as Lee Marvin, Steve McQueen, and Burt Lancaster. Hopefully the film strives to fulfill that same effort (I’m seeing it tomorrow).

[UPDATE, 5 September 2010]:

The film isn’t terrible but is disappointing nonetheless. The American’s boss tells him he’s lost his edge, his priest acquaintance tells him he’s a sinner, and his women ask him what’s on his mind. But nothing really comes of any of these questions, the American just sleepwalks his way through. There’s very little action and without the music (by Herbert Grönemeyer, strangely enough), there would be very little suspense. Even worse–the music careens from the peaceful to the suspenseful, and consistently over-promises suspense, meaning that you’re often sitting on edge with little payoff.

And the only chase scene involves a Vespa. Really.

Bottom line, it’s skippable or a rental, and the poster is better than the film.

Dan Brown’s Your Lucky Day, at Vimeo

/via This isn’t happiness.

/via You Might Find Yourself

Pauline Kael reviewed the film in 1974, in The New Yorker:

[I]n Lacombe, Lucien, he is trying to seek out and create a sensibility utterly different from his own.

…

Some artists have a natural feeling for the riches of chaos; when they don’t pin things down for us to know exactly what’s going on, we understand that they’re not giving us that kind of meaning—they’re giving us more than that. And Malle achieves that with Lucien, but he isn’t skilled yet at merging scripted scenes with found material, and at times we feel that something has been left out.

…

The picture is a knockout, and the flaws don’t diminish its stature, so it may appear silly to discuss imperfections—which could be passed over as ambiguities. But it’s because the picture is a major work that it seems necessary to distinguish between the great ambiguities of its theme and the piddling, diversionary gaffes and gaps in its execution. There’s another reason for bringing up the crudenesses: they are the price that Malle the aesthete is willing to pay for discovery. Here is a director who achieved sleek technical perfection in his early, limited films and who is now saying that perfection is cheap and easy (which seems to be true for him). He’s looking for something that he doesn’t have the tools or the temperament to grab hold of, and he’s catching it anyway. Malle’s renunciation of conventional drama—or his new indifference to it—cripples him in places where he still needs it. He hasn’t fully cast off the hard shell of the brilliant young pro who made The Lovers [1958] and Viva Maria! [1965] and Zazie [1960], but he’s lost his slick. He’s in the process of turning himself inside out and reaching into the common experience. Malle isn’t used to playing by ear; he keeps looking at the notes and seeing they’re wrong, revising them and hoping they’re better. Yet somehow, with all the wrong notes he hits, and parts of the bass left out, he gets sounds that nobody’s ever heard before.