Happy Thursday, everyone! Still winter here in the US and now it's snowing, but there's only 6 days until spring in the Northern Hemisphere and it will warm up. So let's get to what I found this week!
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I'm always a little fascinated by how Jean Renoir, fantastic French director through the '70s, was also the son of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, fantastic impressionist painter. One a master of portraying groups of people forming shifting and contradictory group activities and one a master of using combinations of color and poses to portray people in all sorts of situations. Back in 2018, I saw a wonderful exhibition focusing on their linked works at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.
For instance, this is Pierre-Auguste's painting of Jean around 1900. (One of the joys of the Art Institute here in Chicago is how the robber barons of Chicago bought Impressionist works for a song when it was still out of style, resulting in it having the greatest collection of it outside of Paris, so I grew up on paintings like this.)
La règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game) came out in 1939 and is the story of a weekend hunting party at a country home in France. A comedy of manners on the surface, as the movie deepens it turns more and more sour as you see how much these upper class twits are ignoring the gathering storm in Europe. They're also ignoring what's going on with their servants, who have a much better idea of just how much the shit is about to hit the fan. If any of this sounds familiar, congratulations, you might have seen Gosford Park, the later Robert Altman movie that takes place at a British country house in the same general time period and tosses in a murder.
(Not quite the same, but Remains of the Day has a bit of a similar feel and also has Christopher Reeve as a US Congressman who explains very clearly to his hosts that they're a bunch of appeasers who are keeping their heads in the sand over the NAZI threat).
La règle du jeu is streaming on Criterion Channel and Kanopy as well as being for rent and sale at the usual outlets and is an absolute must watch.
Gosford Park is available for rent and sale.
The Remains of the Day is on Tubi with ads and available for rent and sale.
And hey, here's a bonus, Jean Renoir as an adult in Hollywood. Still, that painting is adorable, right?
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I've never quite started a section for them on my bookshelves, but I do have a good weakness for novels (especially mysteries) that take place around bookstores and authors and the like. For instance, the fun anf nasty Murder at the AMA, where Isaac Asimov killed off a fictional version of Harlan Ellison as a good on his friend (who could be very abrasive to people); Sharyn McCrumb pulled off the same joke with her sci-fi con set Bimbos of the Death Sun. This appears to be the 5th in a series of bookseller mysteries so yippee, new mystery series to read!
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Now here's a director I'm completely unfamiliar with. Marcel Pagnol was a director of the same time as Jean Renoir and this loose trilogy of films, two of them based on plays written by Pagnol. Pagnol is apparently not especially popular these days but I'm always for rediscovering someone who was apparently well-regarded in his day. (And in looking him up, I like that he also had a fun side gig of translating Shakespeare and Virgil into French; his Hamlet is apparently still being performed.)
Marius, Fanny and César are all streaming on the Criterion Channel and available for rent and sale at the usual places.
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I'm a sucker for Little Women and variations on it. So learning about this variation, involving an African-American family of sisters and set in the Freedman's colony on Roanoke Island off the coast of North Carolin in 1863, is absolute catnip for me. I'm very curious to see how Bethany Morrow reworks this for a modern YA audience.
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Schlock of the week time! I so love finding weirdness at the Dollar Tree and hoo boy can it be a source of tossed-off horror terribleness. Doll Face has exactly one review on Rotten Tomatoes and hoo boy, is it succinct:
"We don't know who wrote or directed Doll Face, but we do know that whoever did, can neither write nor direct a film."
Frankly, the whole review is a joy. It's been a while since I've run across a serious piece of trash to enjoy and this looks like exactly my speed.
Doll Face is cheap as hell on Amazon and Vudu.
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This week's recommendation is from yet another French director, Julia Ducournau. Grave (Raw, 2016) was such a fantastic debut, a movie about coming of agee and college and hazing and oh, also cannibalism. It was one of the craziest going-in-blind experiences I've ever had in a movie theater. But now I'm recommending her followup, Titane, which is now on Hulu. It's not quite as great as Grave but boy howdy does Ducournau still leave nothing off the table. And fair warning, it's insane, it's foul and has body horror on a Cronenbergian level but it never feels salacious or gazey; it's just weird. And my god, the performance by Vincent Lindon in this is amazing. He apparently won the Cesar in 2015 for La Loi du marché (The Measure Of A Man) and I'm 100% going to see that soon.
Warning again: this trailer is NSFW.
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