Inner Genre

David Holzman's Diary

2012-01-31T08:00:00.000-08:00

"Okay, well, Penny is ridiculous. She's pride. She behaves melodramatically. She just - not credible. I know you didn't set it up, I know she really got annoyed. But I - I don't know somehow it just - it's not believable. Because - you listen, like very bad actress, in a very bad script -- horrible movie, just horrible movie. Um -- you know, I like her, it's alright. I - you know, if you want to live in her bad movie it's alright because - some people's lives are good movies, some people's lives are bad movies, and Penny's life's a very bad movie, but don't make me look at it on the screen, please. You know it -- (drags from a cigarette) -- the problem is that you wanna make a movie out of your life, alright, so you wanna be in it, you want Penny to be in it, and me to be in it, and your apartment my apartment, but, I'm an interesting character to watch, but you're not an interesting character, and Penny is certainly not an interesting character at all. And uh, I don't know, if you want to make a good movie just write a script, I'm sure you can write a better script than that. But this is not a good one. Your life is not a very good script, but, ugh. Somehow I - I don't think that you want to make a good movie. What you want do is find things about your life, find out the truth. There's something that happens that you don't understand, you wanna get to the core of it. Well David I don't think that you're gonna find it this way because if something happens and you don't understand it, [something], you're not gonna understand it any better by freezing it on celluloid and looking at it over and over again. You know - what you have to do is try to understand it the first time. And uh -- I don't know. (Drags from a cigarette.) But - you don't understand the basic principle: as soon as you start filming something, whatever happens in front of the camera is not reality anymore. It becomes part of something else. It becomes a movie. And, uh - you've stopped living, somehow. And you get very self-conscious about anything you do. 'Should I put my hand here, should I put my hand here?' 'Should I place myself this side of the frame, should I place myself this side of the frame?' And your decisions stop being moral decisions and they become aesthetical decisions. And your whole life stops being your life and becomes a work of art. And a very bad work of art this time. But, ahem (drags a cigarette, puts cigarette out). I don't know, it's just very foolish to think that there's any spontaneity in what's happening in this movie because you say to me, "Look, I'm onna show you the film I'm doing, and I want you to tell me what you think of it." And then what do you do? You place me in front of the mural, you make me move the table out of the way so you can see it all, and uh, you knew exactly what I was gonna say.

You didn't put words in my mouth, you didn't tell me what to say, but you knew what I was gonna say because you know me, and uh, and I'm not gonna say anything that will harm you. I won't say any truth, because I don't know you, I just know a little bit of you, and it's same way with the film, you wanna put - a little bit of David, safe part of David, the David that you wouldn't be afraid to show to anybody. But there's a David that you don't want to be in the film, and that David may be the truth. And uh -- that's what you should try to put in the film, if you don't dare face yourself other ways. Confess things to the camera. I don't know, say, say the things that -- that you're most ashamed of, things that you don't want to remember. Things that you don't want anybody to know. Maybe, maybe that way there'll be some truth. Or perhaps you should take off all your clothes and stand in front of the camera for hours. And and not do anything, just stand in front of the camera. Perhaps something magical will happen. Perhaps some truth will come out -- like, I'm not sure. But, you know, one thing I'm pretty sure of - you know, hmm -- the way you're handling this whole thing, you just getting half-truths. You're not getting truths, you're just getting half-truths, and, I think that's what's done a lot. It's very good. Okay, that - that's all I have to say. (Beat).

David, I don't want to play any games, please, turn it off."

Sugar Hill ('74)!

2012-01-30T03:15:00.000-08:00

Valentine: You know it's strange, after you and I split, it took a long time to get over the fact that you took up with Langston.

Diana: Yeah, but you got over it all right.

Valentine: In any case, I never thought I'd be questioning you about his death.

Diana: Murder. First time I met him was right here. He came up to me and he asked my name. It's Diana Hill I said. He said, well from now on you're gonna be called Sugar, Miss Sugar, 'cause you look as sweet as sugar tastes.

Sugar Hill is a blacksploitation Voodoo black magic crime action film from the mid-70s.

Diana 'Sugar' Hill (above) wants to sell her soul to the greatest of Voodoo gods, Baron Samedi (first photo), to avenge her boyfriend, Langston, who was murdered by a honky crime syndicate that wants control of his night club.

Baron: Tell me, why do you want my power?

Sugar: There are some men I want punished.

Baron: Punished?

Sugar: DEAD.

The screenplay was by prolific playwright Tim Kelly, who wrote over three hundred plays before he died at 61. It is the sole directorial credit for Paul Maslansky, producer of over thirty films, including the Police Academy films, Cop and a Half, Raw Meat, Circle of Iron, and Damnation Alley. Star Marki Bey had a short career that began with a role in Hal Ashby's first film The Landlord.

O'Brien: You're not going to do anything crazy, are you?

Sugar: You mean like I did to Tank?

O'Brien: Tha-that was you? I don't believe it.

Sugar: You're about to become a believer.

Slave shackles are used as Jujus (Voodoo charms) to resurrect a zombie murder gang of living dead slaves brought from Guinea to America in the 1840s. Sugar, Baron Samedi, and the living dead slave gang kill off the members of the honky crime syndicate one at a time.

There's a bar fight between Sugar and a blonde lady that begins with a bunch of slaps.

I have described the essential elements of the movie Sugar Hill.

Weekend (2011)

2012-01-26T12:36:00.000-08:00

I've always wanted to make this movie. This movie has played countless times in my head.

Seeing Weekend was like, wow, this is sweet, and this works.

Beautiful poetic realism,

naturalism (not one moment feels false IMO, which most naturalistic movies have at least a couple moments that feel false),

tenderness, honesty, earnestness,

reflective introspection,

contemplative and curious rumination,

and romance. It's cool with me that I don't have to make this movie now, it has been made, it is Weekend.

The Strange Case of Angelica (and some Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl)

2012-01-23T08:00:00.000-08:00

I like movies about old people (e.g. Elsa and Fred, Poetry), movies by old people (e.g. Around a Small Mountain), and movies made by old people about old people (e.g. Wild Grass). I believe the elderly are to be cherished, not least of all in the arts. Because you know it amazes me that John Huston was 77 when he directed Under the Volcano, you can imagine how extra amazed I was when I enjoyed Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl, a film directed by 100-year-old Manoel de Oliveira. I wonder how much he learned in the year between that film and The Strange Case of Angelica, and if you can tell the change in someone's perspective after one year's time when the person has already lived a century.

The Strange Case of Angelica, like Eccentricities, has gorgeous photographic compositions, engaging uses of sound and music, blooming long takes, and earnest passions. Oliveira's command of the movie medium is expansive and relevant to modern cinema, as any artist who engages in the exploration of an artform's potential will continue to be relevant. So, as to say, The Strange Case of Angelica is a film by a 101 year old man, but it is not just that.

As quoted here(what a great find Kino Caviar was!):

The cinema started with movement, ‘kino’, but the real difference between photography and the cinema is not movement, it is the content of each shot. Each shot resembles a photograph, but it is within context, while the photograph is out of context. The context is within the photograph, while in the cinema the context is outside the shot, in the relationship between shots. That is the great difference between cinema and photography. It is not movement, or rather it is movement between shots and above all as a possibility of introducing sound. If there is no movement, there can be no music; sounds do not exist without movement…. One does not need movement to show an image, but one does for sound. One might say, therefore, that sound is more cinematic than the image.

Manoel de Oliveira in an interview with Jean A. Gill, 1992

in Manoel de Oliveira, Randall Johnson, 2007

A man, Isaac (Ricardo Trêpa, also the star of Eccentricities), is summoned on a rainy night to take photographs of a dead woman for an aristocratic family. While he takes these photos the woman opens her eyes, and a fantastical love story begins. Oliveira, writer/director, tells his story as factual occurrence, blending unreal moments with the real, reminiscent of magical realism. His writerly voice also possesses the droll, dry tone that some magical realism writers used.

A poem by Texeira de Pascoaes, read aloud by Isaac near the film's beginning, frames the story: "Dance! O stars, that in constant dizzying heights you follow unchanging. Exalt, and escape for an instant the path that you are chained to. Time, stand still, and you, former beings, who roam fantastical, celestial ways ... Angels, open the gates of heaven, for in my night is day, and in me is God."

Again from Kino Caviar,

“It’s a film. It’s not reality,” Oliveira explained to Jean A. Gili in a 1992 interview. “But what’s a film? A film is a phantasm, it is not life. On the other hand, life doesn’t exist; it too is a phantasm. Without books, without historians, without memory, not a trace would be left. The moment is ephemeral. To struggle against oblivion, humans have a need to remake what touches them, a will to preserve that which is important to them.” To this end Oliveira rejects a style of filmmaking that insists that life on the screen is “real” and the spectator is right there with it, in complete but passive emotional and psychological identification with the characters. Instead Oliveira invites the spectator to actively participate in making the film — to remake life — which is, in cinematic terms, resurrecting its spirit from the tangibles of the world.

Returning from his phantasmagoric flight, Isaac muses, "That strange reality ... Perhaps it was just a hallucination? But it was just as real as this. Could I have been to that place of absolute love I've heard about? It disappears like smoke from a cigarette. Yes, why this sudden love, which banishes all the anguish I feel?"

An aspect of The Strange Case that I admire is its structure. Oliveira keeps the film's 'purpose' slightly out of center, sometimes poking at it, but never cracking it. He gives us the audience substance to consider, but then gives that substance a spiritual value that places it again out of reach.

In The Strange Case that spiritual value has a pronounced magical value, though in Eccentricities the spiritual was continually evasive, mysterious. The spiritual was hidden somewhere within life. A piece of writing, a poem by Alberto Caeiro, was important in Eccentricities, "Yesterday afternoon a man from the city was talking at the doorway of the inn. He was also talking to me. He spoke of justice and of the struggle for justice. And of workers who suffer, and of constant labor, and of those who go hungry, and of the wealthy who turn a blind eye to this. And, looking at me, he saw tears in my eyes. And he smiled, contentedly, thinking that I was feeling the hate that he was feeling, and the compassion he claimed to be feeling. But I was barely listening. What do I care for me, for what they suffer or think they suffer? Let them be like me ... and they won't suffer. All the woes of the world stem from our caring about each other. To do good as to do evil, all we need is our soul and heaven and earth. Wanting more is to lose all this, it is to be unhappy. And I thought to myself, while the man of the people was speaking (which moved me to tears). It was like a distant whisper of bells in that late afternoon ... Yet perhaps not the bells of a tiny chapel ... where to mass might go flowers and streams and simple souls like mine. Praise God that I am not good and that I have the natural egotism of the flowers and rivers which blithely continue on their way with no cares other than to bloom and to flow. That is the only mission in the World. To exist clearly. And to know how to do so without thinking about it. And the man had stopped talking and was looking at the sunset. But what does someone who hates and loves have to do with the sunset?"

Oliveira, in these two films, leaves me to consider his film, a little about myself, and a little about things outside the film and myself. So, then, Oliveira gives me the mystery and spiritualism that he gives his films.

Working Girls (1986)

2012-01-22T11:06:00.000-08:00

Pre-viewing thoughts:

1 - Why hasn't Lizzie Borden directed a feature since 1992, is she a bad filmmaker? Working Girls won the Special Jury Prize at Sundance in 1987, is that a big deal? What were the films at Sundance like that year, what was her competition? I've recently seen Poison, Todd Haynes 1991, (for its 20 year anniversary, damn), a movie that won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, and while that movie is great in so many ways, in other ways I think it would be a better film if it were made today.

Conversely, is Lizzie Borden a great filmmaker? Will I discover a golden voice that's been lost for reasons outside filmmaking ability? What was the standard quality for production values in early American independent films, and are those standards more than superficial weaknesses, or are there more important, deeper flaws? How will the structure and subsurface of Working Girls compare with the structure subsurface of movies made today?

2 - Will the film be sexy? It was the title and the sexy cover that made me check the movie out on Netflix streaming. Not this original dvd cover:

but this First Run Features dvd cover:

Not sure I would've checked out the movie if I'd only seen the former cover. Seems unlikely. This five star review on Netflix further motivated me to watch the movie:

I actually worked in a Nevada brothel in 2006, and this film is ACCURATE. Girls lay a sheet OVER the bedding, a "trick sheet". The ONLY thing I noticed they did not include is when a man walks out without choosing any lady, you simply say he "walked". As in, "oh, that man walked". I had a male house manager who was obsessed with cleanliness and made us girls clean a lot too! And now they are REALLY strict on no drugs, at least the house I was at. I enjoyed this movie, it brought me back. The life of a 'working girl' isn't ALL bad. Many men tell you they REALLY like you. I would say it covers about 2/3 of brothel life and facts. There isn't too much storyline/plot, its more of a documentary, with erotic entertainment thrown in.

What does it mean that the film is accurate, and how erotic will the erotic entertainment be?

3 - What will I learn about the female perspective from a movie about prostitution made by a female? Will I learn about 'the' female perspective, is that possible? Seems like I'll learn about a female perspective. What will be the nature of my lesson, will it be emotional, moral, or environmental?

Post-viewing thoughts:

1 - The acting is like television acting. It often feels like watching a script. The dialogue is stiff and the readings are stilted. I don't feel like the director pushed the actors to break through their characters. I don't feel they were directed beyond playing roles. But the sequences often have nice rhythms, and these sequences accumulate in a nice way to make a fine, satisfying movie.

There are stylistic camera pans. There could have been more choreography between the camera and actors, i.e. more interesting blocking. The camera pans are mostly 'look here, now looook here' pans, but I liked them, and enjoyed their occasional replacement of shot-reverse-shots. The camera setups are varied enough that I didn't tire of being in a single location.

It was smart to make the time frame short, this helped me become familiar with the location and the routine minutia of the characters; surely primary objectives. The single location also focuses the movie, and doesn't feel 'cheap' like some single location movies do, because the single location has a reason and a purpose.

Lizzie Borden wrote, directed, produced, and edited Working Girls when she was 28. That's a terrific achievement. Judging by this movie she has talent that if nurtured could grow into something really special.

Working Girls moves at a nice, entertaining clip, but also has sincere, substantive interest in its characters and their lives. It's a job movie that happens to be about prostitution: it deals with the pressures and headaches of a controlling (and effective) boss and a demanding job, juggling work with an outside life, and wondering what your purpose is and whether or not you have the right job.

2 - I'm attracted to women and this movie is populated by strong female protagonists who are aware of their sexuality and often undress. But the film's tone is clinical and neutral because it doesn't want to sensationalize its topic, it wants to express a point about the mechanization of the sex act by its repetitive nature in prostitution. The sex acts are not conveyed in a sexy way, and overall the film isn't very sexy, except women in lingerie are sexy, they can't help it.

3 - Sensed the female filmmaker's desire to address exclusively female activities, like inserting diaphragms, exclusively female experiences, like straight sex with men, and exclusively female perspectives, which were different for each woman. Each character in Working Girls, male or female, is distinct from the others and interesting due to diversity and contributions to a larger perspective. Maybe sometimes Borden went too far to give her film perspective; it feels like a bloated day, and there's even a birthday celebration!

There are many insights into the lives of working girls. Funny how so many guys want to meet Molly 'on the outside,' like they each feel that they have a special, meaningful relationship with her. One man asks Molly to come during sex, and she says she never comes in this place, and he says "there's always a fist time." Feel like if a man says that to a woman he has little chance of making her come. I was touched when Molly gave the teacher dating advice, like how to put his arm around a girl and how to give the first kiss.

Found this conversation interesting:

Molly: Hey Gina, how's your boyfriend?
Gina: I'm not seeing him anymore.
Molly: No? Oh, I'm sorry.
Gina: It's okay, it's nothing.
Molly: What happened?
Gina: Well, you know, when our relationship first started I decided I had to be really straight about this job, and I told him look, if you really love me you should be able to deal with my working. And then I thought, if he really loved me, how could he? You know?
Molly: Yeah.
Gina: Does Diane know you work?
Molly: No, no. I decided not to tell her. I just don't want her imagining what I'm doing here.

Frank Zappa's 200 Motels

2012-01-21T07:22:00.000-08:00

I clocked 200 Motels being creative at 400 mph.

My gun only registers speeds up to 400 mph!

200 Motels is maxed out, a densely creative and energetic piece of cinema. I've seen it twice now and still don't know all its moves, its curves, its innards.

Lonesome Cowboy Burt: Fine, you can brief me as long as you want, as long as you can tell me two things.

Rance Muhammitz: I know, when do we get paid --

Burt: No, I wanna know where is that waitress --

Muhammitz: Uh-huh, waitress --

Burt: And if she comes in this place, will she sit on my face, and loan me a couple bucks until the end of the week.

Muhammitz: Couple of bucks --

Burt: Heh heh --

Muhammitz: End of the week ... week ending, the week ending, what, what's that, what's the date?

Burt: Uhh, Tuesday was the 5th, uhhh, Monday was the 3rd. Make that out for Sunday --

Muhammitz: Ah ah ah -- don't say Sunday.

Burt: What's wrong with Sunday? The Lord's day.
Muhammitz: Ah ah ah --
Burt: A day of rest. Just make that sucker out for the 23rd of March, would ya?

(it should be noted that the quoted scene involves a toy machine gun and a man dressed as a general and a man dressed as a cowboy).

The movie, the first filmed on video, seems like it has no rules, no objectives. Maybe it was an excuse for the music, but as far as excuses go, this one is elaborate, fantastic, and magical.

It fulfills the promise of rock music via the medium of movies. It's a movie for people who want to explore their emotions through art, who want to travel to the anarchic limits of their imagination. If the movie sometimes goes too far, good, good for the movie for going too far, because who are the other filmmakers who are out that far, and doesn't someone got to be?

Mark Volman: The penis can be a very useful organ.
Howard Kaylan: Yeah, very exciting too, once you get to know me.
Crowd: Oh yeah, etc. (mumbles of approval).
Crowd in chorus: PENIS.
Groupie #2: It sounds so overwhelmingly medicinal.
Groupie #1: A penis sounds like something a doctor would have hanging off of him.
Groupie #2: None of the men I know and love in the rock and roll business got penises. They all got cocks or dicks at least.

Conventional and widespread criteria for evaluating a movie's success involves plot and character analysis. The goal is to decode the film's message, which audiences expect to be included, because cinema has become a didactic art form, evidenced by the plethora of children's television and movies, and too the arrangement of dramatic material within general mainstream adult films that treats an adult's mind like a child's. In a popular sense, movies have become an art form of hand holding, and by and large there's a shared DNA among the types of movie seen in the multiplex or rerun on television or imitated by television productions. If one is not careful, one could begin to believe there's a certain way a movie should be, a certain behavior that's suitable or characteristic for the art form.

200 Motel's riches are manifest, but not in what's become the traditional and ubiquitous sense of cinematic riches. 200 Motels is free from the shackles of plot and story, message and didacticism; the movie is a feeling - and a positive feeling! It's an experience of the joys of expansive personality and the thrills of adventurous hearts. It's silly, wacky, wild, and weird, yes, and also passionate, creative, and curious.

N.B.: 200 Motels was full frame in its original release.

The Sleeping Beauty (Breillat)

2012-01-20T08:00:00.000-08:00

Anastasia wants so badly to have the perfect life of a princess. Her princess wishes warp her sense of self and contort her view of reality, and the people around her encourage this view, treating her like a princess at a young age, filling her with the promise of that life.

Anastasia: Can't you mix a potion to enable me to break the spell?
Vieille mégère: I can't give you stronger powers than those you possess. Can't you see that animals and people succumb to you? You left barefoot, and without mishap wandered throughout the universe. I can't give you more strength than that.

Catherine Breillat treats seriously the fairy tale side of Sleeping Beauty, but is wise to the differences between dream and reality, or rather, the differences between our dreams as they exist purely in our dreams, and our dreams as they take shape in our lives.

Like with Bluebeard, Breillat uses the dramatics and structure of a classic tale to explore how clear and solid desires become unreliable and dangerous once human emotions are introduced. She often concentrates on sexual politics; in both Bluebeard and The Sleeping Beauty, Breillat contrasts the motives and goals of a male with the motives and goals of a female in order to depict the spoiling of a female's sexual innocence, and also to depict the female's discovery of inner strength.

The crumbling of her princess fantasies doesn't destroy Anastasia, she's made stronger by having suffered and learned and grown. Her journey to maturity, which is different from the male's, gives her wisdom which he lacks.

Johan: You love me as before?
Anastasia: As before. Except now it's after. You see, I went alone into your world.

Paris Is Burning (1990)

2012-01-19T03:05:00.000-08:00

Pepper LaBeija: Why is it that they can have it and I didn't? I always felt cheated. I always felt cheated out of things like that.

Pepper: You know a lot of those kids that are in the balls, they don't have two of nothing. Some of them don't even eat. They come to balls starvin. And they sleep [somewhere]. Or they sleep on the pier. Or wherever. They don't have a home to go to ... but they'll make, they'll go out and they'll steal something and get dressed up and come to a ball for that one night and live the fantasy.

"You can become anything and do anything, right here, right now. It won't be questioned. I came. I saw. I conquered. That's a ball."

Dorian Corey: If everybody went to balls, and did less drugs, it'd be a fun world, wouldn't it?

Dorian: To be able to blend. That's what realness is. If you can pass the untrained eye, or even the trained eye, and not give away the fact that you're gay, that's when it's real. The idea of realness is to look as much as possible like your straight counterpart.

Venus Xtravaganza: Some of them saying that we're sick, we're crazy. Some of them think that we are the most gorgeous, special things on Earth.

"They give the society they live in what they want to see. So they won't be questioned. Rather than have to go through prejudices about your life and your lifestyle, you can walk around confidently, blending in with everybody else. You've erased all the mistakes, all the flaws, all the giveaways, to make your illusion perfect."

"There's people who sit home all day, they have potential, okay. I mean they go to the balls and they prove that they have potentials on actually selling a garment. Okay, but they like, being that I have this potential the ballroom tells me, okay, the ballroom tells me that I'm somebody. When the ballroom is over, when you come home, you have to convince yourself that you are somebody. And that's where they get lost."

The Longshot (1986) and some Heartbeeps

2012-01-18T08:00:00.000-08:00

Dooley: Five big ones. Uh, not big ones like five dollars, but, uh … how do you say five thousand?

Lizard: (Beat) Five thousand.
Dooley: Right, that's, five thousand. I didn't know the term.

Paul Bartel delights me to no end. 1986's The Longshot tells straight-facedly a ridiculous story about four ordinary guys who want to bet big on a horse race.

Lou: Dooley I've been thinking. You can pull this off for us. All you gotta do is to waltz over to Ms. Big Bucks and see if she'd be interested in giving us a little back up loan.
Dooley: What are you talking about?
Lou: Nicki Dixon, the broad at the track. You said she got the hots for ya.
Dooley: W-wait a minute. I'm not selling this body.
Elton: You mean that piece of shit is for sale?
Lou: Listen, you don't have to romance her. [Something]. Those rich broads love to tell the girls at the club how they lend ten grand to some putz for no reason at all. And then maybe with a little wine, a little song, maybe you'll get lucky.
Elton: He may be able to do a little singing and a little sippin of the wine, but when it comes to women his winky is retired.
Lou: Winky? A grown man calls the ol' joystick a winky?
Stump: Why can't you call your wizzer a winky if you want?
Lou: 'Cause it's stupid, that's why. Who besides him do you know that would call a dork a winky? Right?
Dooley: Yeah, call it what it is.
Lou: There, you see. What do you call it?
Dooley: A monkey.
Lou: You're gonna get us this loan with a jug of wine, a loaf of bred, and a monkey?

Bartel downplays the ridiculous and emphasizes the ordinary, which I think makes the ordinary seem ridiculous and the ridiculous seem ordinary.

Clerk: Who shall I say is calling please?

Dooley: Hrm. Ah, um. Just tell her that the cigarette man is here. Oh no no … on second thought, tell her it's the guy from the track, with mud on his pants and a wet cigarette. She'll know.

Clerk: Good evening Ms. Dixon. There's a gentleman here from the track, with pants, and a cigarette.
Dooley: Mud. Mud on the pants.
Clerk: Mud. Mud, on the pants. And some cigarettes for you.

Dooley: From her. The cigarettes are from her, it was wet from her and they --

Clerk: From. You. I believe.

Tim Conway, who also wrote the amusing and likable screenplay, plays Dooley. Conway is an Ohio native who entered the entertainment industry through television alongside Ernie Anderson. I imagine Bartel enjoyed making the film, not because of the material necessarily, i.e. I don't think Bartel would have written this script, but I imagine he had affection for people who would want to make this type of movie, and in this instance that happened to include him.

Bartel was too cool, too sincere, too smart and too funny to turn his nose up to material he was handling. And to do so would have been to act like the snobby high culture elite, whom Bartel was so great at subverting with tasteful tastelessness. Bartel's fervent curiosity about all things high and low culture suggests that the world is full of living people loving things, and sometimes people with different loves and perspectives collide for humorous consequence, but all perspectives and passions are basically equal. Bartel revels in the peculiarities of society, its customs and interests, and The Longshot is full of tiny hilarities that come from careful observation of clashing worlds.

It's interesting to think that if Bartel hadn't made this movie I probably wouldn't have watched it, and that there are movies like this that Bartel didn't make that I don't feel a desire to watch. If The Longshot hadn't been made by Bartel I don't think it would have been as joyful and loving. I think some comedy directors make it very clear what is a joke and what is not, and I think Bartel knows that everything is a joke.

In 1981, Michael Phillips, Allan Arkush, Andy Kaufman, Randy Quaid, Christopher Guest, John Williams, Stan Winston, and Tina Hirsch all came together to make a robot love story called Heartbeeps, obviously.

The sum of the names involved doesn't equal Heartbeeps, not for me. I think it's a kid's movie that works only for kids, maybe, if the movie does indeed work for kids. I was unable to forge an emotional connection with the movie. And I didn't find it entertaining. I found it boring, except the first ~10 minutes, which I thought were lovely and charming. I recommend the film up to the point in which the robots leave the factory, which I think happens after ~10 minutes, maybe before, but then the movie becomes a long game of hide-and-seek, and material about bears being called camels.

I bring it up because Mary Woronov and Paul Bartel make cameos!

Bartel's line, as a house guest, after the house has been destroyed, is "I don't know about some people, I thought it was a stunning affair."

California Dreaming (1979)

2012-01-17T00:59:00.000-08:00

"My brother Phil, he was always talking about the ocean, and how he'd like to be able to see the ocean and play his trumpet at the same time. So I thought if I could go where I could see the ocean, and play one of his recordings ---"

I like it when TT (Dennis Christopher) enjoys himself, like in the above photo, wherein a pretty blonde comes near him, and he smells her hair, and her breasts rub against him.

Breasts rubbing against TT make TT smile, and I like it when he smiles. He's come from Chi-Town and wants to live the California lifestyle. According to TT and the movie the California life involves volleyball, surfing, movies, making out with girls, and pure hanging out.

Seems pretty badass to me.

TT: Do you prefer extended foreplay or a more spontaneous coming together?
Corky: TT why do you always manage to say something ridiculous?
TT: I read too many books I - I think.
Corky: Well why don't you just be quiet for a while?

The movie has some character developments and narrative arcs and stuff, but I don't know why, those things make the California dream feel like an interchangeable backdrop for a formulaic drama. I prefer the movie when it's pure hang out, when it's about the sun hanging in the sky, the waves rolling on the beach, people laughing, etc., I like it when it feels like a California dream.

One character, Duke Slusarski (Seymour Cassel), brags about his exciting life all the time. Cool guy IMO, but some of the kids think he's full of bologna and are irritated by him. The movie does a mean thing to Duke. Its point is that the California dream can't sustain itself forever, but the film makes this point in several other ways too. I'm not sure the loudest expression of a point is necessarily the best or truest. I'm definitely sure that the thing the movie does to Duke doesn't make TT smile, and I like it when TT smiles.

If I made a movie titled California Dreaming it wouldn't end in the rain. It's like, why even want to dream then. I want to dream of escaping the rain, so that during the day I can think of my dream, and think that maybe the rain can be escaped. I think it's okay to make a movie about smiles. Seems okay to dream about a place of smiles.

A Separation

2012-01-03T14:40:00.000-08:00

In A Separation's opening scene, Simin (Leila Hatami), talking to a judge, comments that her husband, Nader (Peyman Maadi), whom she is asking to divorce, "is a good, decent person." In the beginning minutes of the film I too thought Nader was a good, decent person, then I thought maybe he wasn't, maybe he was selfish, protective, maybe slyly corrupted, then I thought he was a good, decent person who sometimes did bad things, then I wondered what 'bad' means, and then I wondered what 'good, decent' means. The film's closing scene purposely frames the importance of these ideas in a moment of tangible consequence.

Truth and morality lose their abstractness, but not their complexity, when taking shape in the lives of Simin, Nader, Razieh (Sareh Bayat), and Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini), and their collisions with each other. Writer/directer Asghar Farhadi (whose About Elly I also admired), with exhaustive and veracious detail, like in About Elly, explores and observes particular, pivotal choices in his characters' responses to tragedy. Seems like a double-feature of this with Margaret would make for an insanely dense and interesting round of after-movie chatter.

In one scene Nader explains to his daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi) that he was aware of Razieh's pregnancy but was not aware of her pregnancy in the moment he committed an action, and that he can't explain this truth to a judge of laws that are formed without considerations for the complexity of actual existence. In the eyes of the law, Nader either knew or did not know, but in reality Nader knew without acting on the knowledge, viz., his knowledge did not have a personal value during an instant. This scene seems to encompass the spectrum of perspectives that become entangled in A Separation - the perspectives of morality, truth, law, and human emotion.

There are multiple instances of events being reshaped by the person telling the story of the event. Sometimes it seems like a matter of semantics, or a matter of moral emphasis, for example whether or not Nader 'pushed' Razieh out the door, 'threw' her out, 'shoved' her, etc. The verb selected becomes tethered to guilt and possible legal accusations. It feels like if Nader can find the right word, or explain his side in a certain way, he can escape guilt and legal penalty. Nader seems sometimes confused about whether he wants to escape personal guilt or escape legal penalty, for example when he tells Termeh that he wants to explain how Razieh couldn't have fallen down the stairs the way she claimed she did, and says he wants to explain this so that she (Termeh) knows, as if to say the discussion is solely about a moral conscience that exists independent of the legal system, but the next scene is Nader making the same explanation for the police, exposing that the discussion is linked to the legal system. Other times Nader proposes the possibility of conscience objectivity, like in the scene discussed in the previous paragraph, but notice how the way he shapes the proposal seems unfair and cowardly. When Nader tells Termeh the truth about his knowledge of the pregnancy he also tells her that he'll tell the judge if she wants - if she wants to see her father go to jail for one to three years - if she thinks that's the right thing to do.

The events of A Separation feel believable and real because the script is well-written, the film is well-made, and the actors offer consistent, successful performances. Sareh Bayat has remarkable, expressive, revealing eyes; during the movie I had thoughts like "her eyes are literally the world, we live on the surface of Bayat's eyes." They fit so much emotion that when they tear up it feels understandable, how eyes with such heaviness could sometimes burst. The actors, all of them, seem to grasp the emotional depth of their characters, as offered under Farhadi's leadership, and the actors give performances that feel engaged with a reality beyond the screen. It seems like they are being people, not like they are being characters.

It excites me that someone like Farhadi is a filmmaker. Farhadi, Jafar Panahi, and Abbas Kiarostami make challenging films that should challenge American filmmakers to make better, more honest films. When I think about their films I feel astonished by the power and potential of films. When I think too about Romanian filmmakers Corneliu Porumboiu, Cristian Mungiu, and Cristi Puiu, UK filmmakers Steve McQueen, Lynne Ramsay, and Andrea Arnold, Chinese filmmakers Tsai Ming-liang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Jia Zhangke, French filmmakers Olivier Assayas, Arnaud Desplechin, and Catherine Breillat, when I think about filmmakers like this and the films they make I almost feel like I could explode, like my heart is like Bayat's eyes, overfull with limitless feeling.

The Adventures of Tintin and War Horse

2011-12-27T00:48:00.000-08:00

During an early The Adventures of Tintin sequence Snowy, the dog, chases a cat through Tintin's apartment and knocks over various things, including a model ship. The model ship hits the ground, one of its masts breaks, and a scroll in a grey tube falls out from inside the mast. Tintin, returning the model ship to its place, knocks the tube further beneath a cabinet with his foot, oblivious to the scroll's existence.

I knock scrolls beneath cabinets, sometimes, when I see films. My attention is in a different place, the vital components are mysterious or unknown to me, and my life continues. Sometimes I am like Tintin and encounter clues that alert me to my ignorance. Because I live in real life, sometimes not (perhaps mostly not). Steven Spielberg doesn't make films without explanatory keys. They are 'easy' films. They give you things - emotions, experiences, stories, meanings, messages, visual cues, etc.

The Adventures of Tintin, overall, gives you little else but action and excitement. The Unicorn ship is the mystery. Tintin isn't meant to have mystery. The furthest developed character is Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis); we learn about his family history and encounter his problems of drinking and self-doubt. The scroll, in metaphor, says something like "be cool, have fun." The second time I saw Tintin I followed the story closer and more things connected, but, if you can believe it, understanding the plot elements didn't make the film better, but empowered me to further appreciate the nonplot elements. Think about when you attend a party with nervous anticipation because you don't know some people and wonder what they're going to think about you and you worry that maybe some of them are superior to you or whatever but suddenly at one point during the party the other guests reveal themselves enough or you get smashed enough or whatever that you realize or remember the fact of universal human imperfection and fallibility and cut loose and stop giving a shit about what everyone else thinks and just have a good time. I continue to be disinterested in the story elements, but I feel okay about having fun with everything else.

Amazing to me is the fluidity of the camera, the film's delectable candy-colors, and the extraordinary ways Spielberg choreographs camera actions and character movements. Tintin is animated, but Spielberg directs it like live action. I submit that if you can feel the camera or the camera makes you feel, its actual existence is irrelevant. The long, dazzling chase sequence after the shattered glass case scene, involving motorcycles, cars, sliding buildings, and multiple characters, is a glorious and paramount example. A recent video essay introduced the term The Spielberg Face into the lexicon of cinephilia. The Spielberg Face is an example of how Spielberg works with the camera, doing some type of emotional or narrative lifting with each shot. Each shot gives something to the audience, manipulates us in some way.

War Horse section - I reveal some of the film's outcomes, see movie first:

War Horse's scroll, in metaphor, says something like "love strong, love long." The majority of the relationships in War Horse are loving ones, including love between Albert (Jeremy Irvine) and horse Joey, Albert and his father Ted (Peter Mullan), Ted and his wife Rose (Emily Watson), Captain Nicholls (Tom Hiddleston) and Joey, Joey and Topthorn (horse), Emilie (Celine Buckens) and Joey, Emilie and her grandfather (Niels Arestrup), rivals turned friends Albert and David (Robert Emms), and various members of the German and British armies and Joey. Joey is love's center.

Spielberg wants to overwhelm us with love, and by depiction of overwhelming love, encourage us to love more. The emotions of the film are purposefully bloated, carefully developed to bloated excess. Sometimes, I think, the film's emotions are like nails on a chalkboard. In several instances Spielberg 'protects' us from the blunt force of radical misery: rats in the British trenches appear in one shot and vanish in the next, Topthorn's body mysteriously vanishes when the German tank appears, which would run over Topthorn in reality, and Emilie dies in words spoken by her grandfather. The vision is narrow, it's Spielberg's magnifying glass pointed at love, and horrible pain and tragedy are only allowed to lurk on the outer edges, or become beautified and transmuted into tenderness, such as the death scene of Captain Nicholls.

But after we accept that this is what the film is, we can see that the film does these things well. Audience members openly sobbed during War Horse. The untruth of the screen sometimes agitated, bored, or offended me, but also sometimes I felt moved, compassionate, or joyous. My favorite sequence follows Joey's escape from the German tank: he hurdles the British trenches, bombs bursting in air, runs parallel to them for a while, tries to jump to the other side, doesn't make it, falls into the trench, runs through the trench for a while, and then runs into no man's land, trapping himself in barbed wire. WWI is happening and I am amazed by a running horse! Oh, Spielberg, you sorcerer.

2011 Recap and The Sitter

2011-12-22T20:20:00.000-08:00

These are films I saw multiple times in 2011, theatrically, ordered in a way that reflects the intensity of my feelings about the films as of right now:

Enter the Void Director's Cut, Gaspar Noé (3x)
Poetry, Lee Chang-dong (2x)
The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick (2x)
Melancholia, Lars Von Trier (2x)
Shame, Steve McQueen (2x)
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Apichatpong Weerasthakukal (2x)
Margaret, Kenneth Lonergan (2x)
My Joy, Sergie Loznitsa (2x)
Hugo, Martin Scorsese (2x in 3D)
The Adventures of Tintin, Steven Spielberg (1x in 3D, 1x in 2D)
Dogtooth, Giorgos Lanthimos (2x)
Rubber, Quentin Dupieux (2x)
The Last Circus, Álex de la Iglesia (2x)
Cold Weather, Aaron Katz (2x)

It seems both easy and honest to say these were my favorite films of 2011. The list of films I saw once and loved would be longer and hard to trim down, harder to order.

My favorite film from 2011 that I did not see theatrically but saw on a television is Jodie Foster's The Beaver.

I kind of almost missed The Sitter during its theatrical run. It left the Arclight, the closest theater to where I stay, after a week and a half, in order, I think, to make room for The Adventures of Tintin, or maybe In the Land of Blood of Honey, or maybe both, but anyway it was booted. I made a special trip to a theater I'd never been to in order to see the movie.

The Sitter is about people trying to be themselves and then, being themselves, trying to be friends and have relationships with others. In every way this is what the movie is about. Karl (Sam Rockwell) is the leader of a gang of probably-gay weight lifters, and the doorman of his lair/gym is a probably-gay rollerskater named Garv (Sean Patrick Doyle). Garv is Karl's #3 best friend. I believe Karl's #2 best friend is Julio (J.B. Smoove), though it may not be explicitly stated. He seems to literally be Karl's #2 man: he encourages hugs and 'sword fights,' and is always with Karl.

Noah (Jonah Hill) is in a position to be in Karl's top ten of best friends, but the friendship is complicated when one of the children Noah is babysitting, adopted Rodrigo (Kevin Hernandez), a Salvadoran, steals from Karl a painted dinosaur egg filled with cocaine. Noah, Rodrigo, party girl Blithe (Landry Bender), my favorite of the kids, and anxious, closeted Slater (Max Records, of WtWTA) spend most of the movie searching for a way to obtain $10K to pay Karl for the painted dinosaur egg filled with cocaine, although the adventure began because Noah was promised sex by his gf if he bought coke (from Karl) and brought it to a party. Along the way Noah makes friends, after misunderstandings, with some people in a bar, a couple of these people having appeared in previous scenes. One of these people, the gorgeous Roxanne (Kylie Bunbury), is Noah's future romance; the others, including Soul Baby (Reggie Green), are his future saviors.

The Sitter is directed by David Gordon Green. It's a warm and humorous film that treats its characters affectionately, despite, or because of, how eccentric, flawed, and weird they are. Because the film is about friendship and self-worth and because DGG loves all his characters and because all the characters are different from each other, I always felt good during the film, was never bored, and was often delighted.

Highlights from AFI Fest 2011

2011-11-11T11:18:00.000-08:00

My friend Joe Peeler and I spent most of yesterday waiting in line outside the Grauman's Chinese for a chance to end 2011's AFI Fest with the North American premiere of Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin. We were excited about attending a high-profile premiere and anticipated the thrill of seeing and being among Spielberg and Peter Jackson. Neither Spielberg nor Jackson attended the premiere, but Jamie Bell did, and he introduced the film. I kept forgetting who Jamie Bell is, no offense Mr. Bell, when Joe would remind me I would feel bad I had forgotten. Joe and I sat in seats off to the far right and Joe thought he had child-sized 3d glasses. The movie was sometimes dazzling and my memory of it is warm; Joe and I agreed it was a nice end to the festival, although neither of us were sure what the plot had been, and discussed our slight mutual annoyance at having to follow plots. It's fair to say that I approached the film with a calculated emphasis on my youthful side and sense of wonder and curiosity and that this side of me was often rewarded with sequences of action and fun.

The movies I saw during this year's fest were Haywire, The Color Wheel, The Day He Arrives, Law of Desire, With Every Heartbeat, The Kid With a Bike, The Forgiveness of Blood, The Turin Horse, Carré Blanc, Shame, Beyond the Black Rainbow, Attenberg, and The Adventures of Tintin. Thirteen movies. I fell asleep for short periods during three; twice due to tiredness and disinterest, and once due solely to tiredness. During Attenberg I periodically wished I was sleeping, or outside, or somewhere anywhere else.

Wednesday November 9 was a spectacular day: The Turin Horse, Carré Blanc, Shame, and Beyond the Black Rainbow. Each of these films was distinct from one another and had a pronounced personality that distinguished it from most other films in general. Seeing them all together reminded me - a wonderful reminder - of the diversity and potential of cinematic art.

Beyond the Black Rainbow is an interesting film that traffics in unique sectors of our feelings and thoughts. The writer/director, Panos Cosmatos (son of Cobra director George Cosmatos), answered an audience question regarding symbolic intention in BtBB by explaining that the film doesn't have symbolic motivations and that he (Cosmatos) wrote the script in a stream-of-consciousness manner and that any symbols in the film were a product of his own unconscious. This great and honest answer helps explain the ineffable experience of watching BtBB, and also helps articulate the difference between, say, BtBB and Shame. BtBB aids us in making discoveries about parts of ourselves that do not fit tidily into narrative or character frameworks: it's all neon and synths and disorientation ('black rainbow,' wtf, right?). I perceive Shame's artistic flourishes as complimentary and integrated and tools that bring you closer to Brandon (Michael Fassbender), and I prefer this because I prefer character based cinema.

Shame would typically not be compared with Beyond the Black Rainbow, but seeing these thirteen movies together initiated a process of differentiation. On Wednesday, owing mainly to temporal juxtaposition, I observed that although BtBB is a visual (and thus visceral) film, the major difference is the range of emotions conveyed. BtBB's range is a fascinatingly abstract sector of ourselves; Shame probes the core of our being. It is my opinion that Shame could likely be appreciated, understood, and enjoyed by a person unfamiliar with film and human emotions, and that by viewing the film this hypothetical person would know something about the human experience. Before one begins to dissect the film, inspect its themes, evaluate its performances, etc, I believe Shame has already worked, on purely visual and visceral levels. Certain aesthetic qualities - composition of frame, color palette, shot selection and variety, locations, music, etc - create an experience that bores into the heart and mind of the viewer a truth that transgresses the screen. Shame is a film of emotional alchemy, and its magical quality is the art of cinema.

Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse was another Tarr film that seems difficult to compress my feelings about into words. It's like the film isn't about an emotion, the film is an emotion. I would like one film that I am involved with to have a shot as immediately and immensely engaging and affecting as The Turin Horse's first shot. This first shot is a long tracking shot of the horse pulling the cart.

Carré Blanc intermittently kicked my ass and rocked my world. Jean-Baptiste Leonetti's dystopian tale reminded me of a novella I read recently, Benoît Duteurtre's Customer Service, in that I don't fully understand every narrative decision, but understand that perhaps the intention is not understanding but questioning. Like, by altering our pov of a subject (bureaucracy, technology, modernity), and by heightening our analysis of narrative particulars with distorting dramatic technique, the artists attempt to instigate personal reflection. Carré Blanc was a dense, intelligent, abstract investigation into the way society hurts us and the way we hurt ourselves by belonging to and engaging with society. It is also a Love Conquers All movie, in a fascinating, bleak way. I enjoy formal, axis-shifting narrative exercises, and felt this was a successful one. By comparison, Athina Rachel Tsangari's Attenberg was also a formalistic experiment, but it did not grip me. Attenberg was a coming of age story, but I felt unable to sense what was coming or aging, and had a hard time registering the film's intentions. Or rather, I felt unable to register how those intentions were growing or further revealing themselves over the course of the film. Also by comparison, I feel that by examining Tintin's golden unicorn story I'm not rewarded with knowledge of myself, but feel that I am rewarded by examining Carré Blanc and even Attenberg.

Alex Ross Perry's The Color Wheel and Hong Sangsoo's The Day He Arrives were a great back-to-back experience. These two films deal with the loose-ends and unsortable complexities of our emotional makeup. I like how The Color Wheel was disinterested in untangling the confused emotions of its characters; it was enough for the film to admit their existence. Sangsoo continues to depict human interactions in a way that feels unique and honest and smart and funny, i.e. feels like 'being.' The Day He Arrives has flashes of great beauty and terrible sadness, sometimes in shared moments.

For the sake of tradition:

Four Star Movies
Shame
The Turin Horse

Three and a Half Star Movies
Beyond the Black Rainbow
The Day He Arrives

Three Star Movies
Law of Desire
Carré Blanc
The Adventures of Tintin
The Kid With a Bike
The Color Wheel

Two and a Half Star Movie
The Forgiveness of Blood

Two Star Movie
With Every Heartbeat

One and a Half Star Movies
Haywire
Attenberg

Disclaimer: There are many movies I'm sad I missed. I started to make a list of those movies but it was too long and made me too sad.

Tower Heist

2011-11-06T15:26:00.000-08:00

I couldn't compile a substantial list of good reasons for seeing Tower Heist before I went to see Tower Heist. Most reviews and word of mouth were negative. The people who did say a couple positive things about the movie sounded like they were on party drugs, like they could only say it had been a 'good time' without clear evidence of why it was a good time. I went to see the movie anyway because I wanted to see the movie.

I laughed out loud approximately seven times during the movie. This is a high number for me, especially since I saw the movie stone sober at 12pm on a Saturday. There were two other people in the theater; for whatever reasons our laughter was never synchronized. Sometimes one other person repeated back lines at the screen, moments after the line had been spoken, a phenomenon I've encountered before which completely boggles me. I have done it (repeated a line), but I can't think of what the reason was, and whether or not I had a good one.

The first time I really laughed was when Special Agent Claire Denham (Téa Leoni) and Josh Kovacs (Ben Stiller) share some drinks and Claire drunkenly says she will take a 'crab' home. I laughed so hard. Leoni did a great job playing drunk. Why is she not used more? Has no one seen Flirting with Disaster? Téa Leoni is funny. The second time I laughed really hard had something to do with Mr. Fitzhugh (Matthew Broderick) I'm pretty sure. Can't remember what exactly*, but I enjoyed Broderick's nebbish, anxious Mr. Fitzhugh. Broderick is great at comedic subtlety, and this would be his best performance of the year, if his best performance of the year wasn't in Margaret. There was also a scene in which robbery intel was interrupted by a conversation about lesbians. I thought the scene was executed seamlessly and for hilarious effect. "A gauntlet of lesbians." Eddie Murphy is in the movie too. He is very funny.

The narrative is ridiculous and should not be taken seriously. Not all narratives need to be taken seriously, it's not a big deal. The only problem, as other reviewers have mentioned, is that the third act heist is too long. I speculate that the third act heist feels too long because the dramatic beats interfere with the character moments that are the best part of the movie.

Tower Heist has an ADD narrative and that's great. Some scenes were so short and ended so abruptly I almost felt like the joke had been omitted. *I just remembered the Mr. Fitzhugh joke - it's when they're putting the team together and Kovacs asks Mr. Fitzhugh if he's in and Mr. Fitzhugh says "come back to me." Kind of reminds me of an Of Gods and Men scene.

It's my belief that films should subvert narrative conventions whenever possible and move at whatever speed they deem necessary. I believe the idea of slow films being superior to fast films is idiotic. I think it's like saying long films are superior to short films or whatever. There are no rules in art. People who try to make rules for art are bad critics, not artists, and also not good critics. The speed of a film should be dictated by the needs of the narrative and by the director's perceived effects of speed upon the audience in relation to the intended experience. I'm not saying Tower Heist is great because it moves quickly, and to tell you the truth I haven't heard anyone criticize the movie for moving quickly, I'm just soapboxing because my opinion is that the movie moves quickly and that not only is this fine but it's great. I almost cried during Tower Heist, twice.

No one is hated by cinephiles like Tower Heist's director Brett Ratner is hated by cinephiles. No one. Because he's so hated it makes me view him as an outsider in mainstream filmmaking. Here is a filmmaker who many people think shouldn't be making films. Supposedly he's an arrogant womanizing asshole who is talentless, dilettantish, and stupid. Ratner will always have the last laugh, however, because he doesn't take himself too seriously. This is the thing people don't get that gives him his bizarre power. So in my eyes he's a wickedly flawed, potentially misguided, contentiously effective filmmaker. To me that sounds like the Hollywood filmmaker archetype, and in my mind it's a suitable personality for a creator of comedies. I'm not saying he's the best Hollywood filmmaker, but I am saying that I don't regret seeing Tower Heist.

Stewart Raffill and Standing Ovation

2011-10-16T12:24:00.000-07:00

Last night I showed my nieces Standing Ovation, a musical comedy by Stewart Raffil. I had seen the movie 1 1/4 times previously. It was their first time. At first they weren't excited. Multiple times they asked me how I had heard about the movie. They seemed to find it interesting, perhaps even alarming, that a) this movie existed b) I knew this movie existed because I had seen it before.

Stewart Raffill's career strikes me as enviable. He specializes in films made for children. I speculate that making children's films for a lifetime could result in a lifetime of endless fun. Exhibit A: In 1974 Raffill made his feature debut The Tender Warrior. This is the synopsis for that film, taken from IMDb:

The sheriff of a small Georgia town on the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp does nothing to stop a family of white-trash moonshiners from trapping and killing defenseless animals. But Sammy, a young swamp-boy, takes matters into his own hands. Assisted by his pet chimp, Chuck, Sammy launches a campaign to free the trapped animals. "Pa" Lucas and his idiot sons don't take kindly to Sammy's scheme of beating them out of butter-and-egg money, and are soon chasing Sammy and Chuck over swamp and quagmire. As if young Sammy didn't have enough troubles eluding the Lucas family, he soon finds himself being hotly pursed by a leopard, an escapee from a circus.

As of today The Tender Warrior has an average IMDb rating of 4.5, which is a fairly typical average for Raffill, whose films have low averages on IMDb. His average rating on IMDb shouldn't be important to him, because he's making movies for fun, and having fun making movies, and making movies for kids. His highest average is 6.3, for 1974's When the North Wind Blows, his second film, the follow up to The Tender Warrior (NB: I'd like to encourage my friends to nickname me The Tender Warrior). His lowest average is 2.9, for 2010's Standing Ovation, his eighteenth feature film, and the film that started me talking about Raffill today.

Raffill isn't only the director of these wonderful (?) children's movies, he's also wrote many of them. I wouldn't have guessed, judging by Standing Ovation alone, that Raffill was the writer of at least sixteen prior features. But I'm happy to learn. Tammy and the T-Rex is my favorite title within his filmmography. Mac and Me is his film that I've heard of the most, though I often encounter, and considering purchasing, the The Ice Pirates dvd. I'm 75% sure that I saw his movie Mannequin: On the Move on cable when I was a child; my memories of this movie are fond. By far my favorite poster for one of his movies is:

I would hang the High Risk poster over a desk I planned to work from, and every day it would bring me inspiration and motivate me to travel further into my imagination.

My nieces were reluctant to watch Standing Ovation because the Netflix average user rating was 3 stars. I told them my star rating would be higher and not to worry. Briefly they considered watching Tangled for an eighth time, but either I convinced them to try something new, or Olivia did not want to watch Tangled for an eight time even if Claire did so there was going to be no watching Tangled and why not watch what Uncle Shawn wants us to watch.

Immediately they commented, to my genuine surprise, that some of the acting in Standing Ovation is bad. They made this observation within the first couple minutes of the movie, and repeated it throughout the movie at irregular intervals. Sometimes they recoiled in their seats and commented on how a thing happening in the movie was bad or awful or ridiculous or was I serious. My surprise was due to the fact that I had watched some Disney Channel shows with them, and had considered the acting in those shows bad, but had never heard them say so, although during Standing Ovation they said so many times. This is probably because the "bad acting" in Standing Ovation is actually a complex mixture of bad acting, bad writing, bad staging, and bad directing. My nieces knew when something was wrong, but, owing to the recentness of their sense of critical awareness, were not always able to pinpoint exactly what was wrong.

Early into the movie I had to pick up a third niece from her high school homecoming dance. The trip took about ten minutes. When I returned it was the scene in the movie when The Five Ovations are eating at the same place as The Wiggies. I could tell my nieces were now hooked because when I entered the room Claire told me "I love Joei!" The song in this scene, Soup to Nuts, went over really well, and the nieces kept repeating "Sit up straight, or you get no food," even after the scene was over. We were perhaps howling with laughter and slapping our knees or something, can't remember, but it was definitely good times at this point.

We all four of us let go and began to really (?) enjoy the movie. Letting go is something you have to do when watching a movie like this, and when you do a kind of magical thing happens. Not sure I can describe it - something to do with how "good" or "serious" movies require you to be "good" or "serious" during them, while during a movie like Standing Ovation you can be yourself. I think something about the film's flaws ultimately makes the movie easier to watch, which perhaps sounds ironic, but isn't. Think about how perfect seeming people are sometimes harder to talk to than people you can easily relate to and feel you share a handful of traits with.

Joei was a huge hit, as was her purse of bottomless surprises, of course. She was probably their favorite character, followed by Alanna Wannabe. Strong characters and personalities can be really important, whether it's a good movie or bad movie. Joei and Alanna are terrific characters because they're so expressive and funny and interesting. They're two smart roles to write for kids because kids want to be larger than life and centers of attention. If there's a character you can connect with and enjoy seeing, however ridiculous the movie, you are more likely to want to keep watching the movie.

I hyped up the final musical number, Shooting Star; like I told them "this is my favorite dance scene in the movie" before it began. It has a great opening that they appreciated, "I am D2, intergalactic space traveler with a female interface. Make. Me. Dance." And then Alanna is like "woo-ooo-ooo" in a high-pitched dreamy voice. Strong opening. When the energy began to dip Claire asked me something like "so what's the big deal" and I said "here he comes" because I had seen the movie and it was true that right then the little boy came out and said "I am D3, intergalactic space traveler with a male interface. Make. Me. Dance." and then he does all those dance-jumps and they my nieces were like quiet and totally into what was happening.

That night when they, my nieces, were going to bed, I told them that I hoped they danced in their dreams. I'm pretty sure they knew what I meant, because we had just watched Standing Ovation.

Margaret (Finished 2006, © 2008, Released 2011)

2011-10-11T13:37:00.000-07:00

Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret is a massively impressive but imperfect depiction of a massively imperfect but impressive character, Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin). I saw the movie twice in two days and was more affected by the blemishes of both the movie and its lead character on the second viewing. My dissatisfaction was either heightened by or a product of the fact that two friends of mine shared my second screening as their first. I had told them it was a very good movie, and I had told them it made me laugh and cry within single narrative moments. With their eyes I tried to look, and I kept wondering "what are they thinking?" and either because I kept wondering and worrying about their thoughts, or because of the movie itself, or because of a little of both, I was less captivated by the movie, overall, the second time, and in fact fell asleep for a short period. Still, the next morning I found myself unable to stop my thoughts from returning to Margaret and how it further complicates my thoughts on the already complicated relationship between imperfect narrative and imperfect character.

Even if you think the narrative is flawless, which you probably don't, it's still another matter to consider the ways possible for liking and disliking Lisa Cohen. She is frustrating to various degrees. Andrew O'Hehir wrote that "she belongs to a constitutionally irritating class of person — the overprivileged New York private-school teenager — about whom no more movies need to be made, by anyone, ever. (I live in New York and don’t want to know anything about those people. Perhaps, though, they are more tolerable viewed from afar.)" O'Hehir's compulsion to issue a blanket judgment on Cohen's personality type is in fact a terrific testimonial to the necessity of this film's perspective, which O'Hehir would see if he wasn't being such an asshole. That I think O'Hehir is being an asshole in his review doesn't mean I think he is wrong about Lisa, just like I don't disagree with everyone in the movie every time they are mean to Lisa. I do think he is wrong about the movie; specifically, as he admits, his perspective on the movie is narrow and limited, and his ridiculous qualifier is so obviously the real truth that it's absurd to mention it glibly. Yes, Mr. O'Hehir, art wishes to endure, and the view is from afar - either from outside NYC at any point in time, or from outside the moment of now from any place. Lisa's view is limited, but the audience member's view needn't be.

Similar to Lee Chang-dong's Poetry, a movie superior to this one, my inability to wholy appreciate, understand, or enter the life of the protagonist doesn't interfere with my admiration for the filmmaker's dedication to a narrative of comprehensive and specific nakedness. Narrative sacrifices for the goal of full disclosure are beneficial for the film if the narrative sacrifices are meaningful distortions of dramatic traditions and favor the realities of the protagonist. In the instances of Poetry and Margaret, the filmmakers chose for the narrative's angle of vision a porthole from their protagonists' souls or emotional selves, and just as it'd perhaps be preferable to stand outside a ship and have a panoramic view of the surrounding area, rather than use the porthole, the reality of the porthole isn't wrong, it's its own distinct, unique reality. Do you see what I'm saying about portholes? A.O. Scott wrote that towards Margaret's end "[t]he dialogue becomes louder and rougher; the scenes screech to a halt (or else just keep on screeching); and the sense that anything is really at stake, or that anything even makes sense, dwindles before your eyes." The criticism is equally relevant to the protagonist's journey as to the film, viz., the criticism attacks a part of the film that is an essential component for understanding Lisa Cohen. The film's last hour tracks the transference of the dramatic stakes from objective and outward principles to emotional and interior ones. Earlier in his review Scott noted this when he wrote that "Lisa’s subsequent attempt to make sense of this trauma — to figure out how it counts as something that happened to her and to assimilate it into her developing sense of the world — is at the center of 'Margaret.'" Scott saw both these points at once, but for obscure reasons didn't connect them. That's odd. Let's say you (real-life you) dedicated yourself to a cause, with total vehemence and conviction, and at the tail end of your efforts experienced drastic disillusionment. I'd expect the emotional and personal value of your original dedication to equal your subsequent disillusionment, in your eyes, for separate but vitally important reasons, as they're both transformative episodes.

What Margaret doesn't do is fix Lisa, or attempt to sublimate her quest into dramatic edibles. Owen Gleiberman wrote that Lisa "makes the accident about her, which is why she must learn that it wasn't. The trouble is, it's a lesson we grasp all too early on. Margaret may be the longest film ever made about the moral education of a selfish, annoying princess." Gleiberman's criticism connotes a personal superiority that should remain independent from Lisa's experience. His criticism wants to deny Longergan the right to grant Lisa the right to a) be who she is, and b) learn her lesson as herself. Gleiberman's desire for back-seat driving is an inhibitive response - filmmakers needn't avoid excruciating or agonizing particulars of individual existence. I believe it's perfectly acceptable for a filmmaker to point the narrative mirror at the protagonist, to contemplate from the protagonist's viewpoint, even when that viewpoint is less refined or mature than his own, even when it's tedious. Sometimes life is tedious. If some films want to forget or ignore this reality, that is fine, if some films wants to mention or depict this, that is fine too.

Some of the potential faults of the movie are addressed as topics within Margaret. For example, an early conversation between Lisa and Mr. Aaron (Matt Damon), about attempting to be interested in things one would not regularly be interested in, seems to prepare the audience for its confrontation with Lisa's quest. There seemed to me to be many conversations within the film that foreshadowed and echoed the film's events, instances I'd like to explore more thoroughly after repeated viewings. One unmissable instance is the movie's final scene, which seems to demonstrate the potential value of the film and art in general. As Margaret and her mother (J. Smith-Cameron) have a moment of catharsis during an opera, we the audience are inspired to have our own moment of catharsis, and also to come nearer an artform, as they do. We share feelings with the characters. This is possible only because Lonergan has made a promise to the audience to always tell the truth about his characters' feelings. If Margaret is sometimes heavy, as life is sometimes heavy, than that heaviness contributes to the powerful lightness of the final scene. Though Lonergan sometimes depicts Lisa at a level of truthfulness that damages the film's accessibility and enjoyability, his unwavering faithfulness to his characters means that we the audience can't help but sometimes have a distaste for these characters, but also can't help ourselves from loving them, despite themselves and ourselves. I'd argue that the hate and love we experience during Margaret as an audience is more like how hate and love operate in real life, compared to other dramatic performances that perhaps favor embedding love and hate in dramatic traditions.

What about, however, me falling asleep and being bored and kind of restless during certain scenes on my second viewing? Valid problems, like bad acting moments, lines, and scenes, are present. They are disruptive to the viewing experience. I wonder about Lonergan's editing problems and the film's delayed release. I wonder if sometimes a scene is bad because in real life the scene would be bad, if that's what Lonergan wanted. How can I know? Sometimes in real life I'm a bad actor, and it's painful to experience, painful for me and the persons present. Sometimes my life is poorly written. Sometimes I'm given good advice in broken, unpolished ways. Sometimes I give and receive good advice for bad reasons, or bad advice for good reasons. If I seem to have avoided confronting these weaknesses in Margaret, it's because my thoughts are overrun by the depth of deliberation, feeling, and honesty that Lonergan invested in his film, and because the film itself is ponderous about the complexities of perspectives and opinions and personalities. Margaret says these things exist in life, and has a kind of self-consciousness that makes me feel like the movie implicitly confesses to these problems within the film. One of Lonergan's requests for us as an audience is to puncture the surface flaws. Why can't an artist ask this of us? If I want to tell you something, but admit I don't know the perfect way to say it, should you not listen to me? I believe the character of Lisa is a symbol of this request. Margaret is a film of deep convictions and desperate questions, it is that above all else. It has material worth talking about beyond dramatic form, and for that reason alone I lament how it has been overlooked upon release. I've seen films play every note right and come close to perfection and be meaningless, while I consider Margaret's imperfections immensely meaningful.

Bellflower (2011)

2011-08-27T16:40:00.000-07:00

From, "As important as the operatic assault at the movie’s end are the scenes of Woodrow scouring the fields in slo-mo with his flamethrower—it cannot be an accident that he is compensating for emasculation with a fiery phallus. That said, Glodell’s awareness about the thoughts of Woodrow doesn’t change the fact that the actions of Milly make no sense. Great art has to contain the perspectives of multiple people, even when one person’s emotions are a raw wound. Bellflower is the work of a director bravely admitting that he doesn’t understand how to relate to women. It would be a better movie if he understood women."

Disagree.

I think Mesh confuses his perception of the imperfections of the characters with his perception of the imperfections of the narrative, and I don't think he took the time to separate the intentional from the unintentional, nor did he grant the film the potential complexity of these qualities being intertwined. The movie's characters are flawed, all of them, and none are explained. The film's goal isn't explanation.

I think the moment you make a rule for art is when you begin to misrepresent it and shape it in your image. In this case, if the movie understood women, it would literally be a different movie. By withholding permission for the characters (and creator) to not understand women, Mesh is wanting to correct the characters, to shape them into other, perhaps better, perhaps stronger, but other, different characters.

The reason this bothers me is it perpetuates the creation of art that untruly reflects reality. It's like if you had a city with dirty streets and you made a film in which all the streets were clean - when you went outside, the city streets would, of course, still be dirty. Only the window was clean. I simply don't think you should demand that artists say the streets are clean in all places when they are not. Plus, maybe no one else will ever make a film about the city, the only record of it will be a false one, and no one will ever be able to know what the streets were really like.

I concede that Bellflower's ending disappointed me (and that I almost walked out during it), but, then, it may have been appropriate for its characters, and, by the way, I wouldn't want to be the people in the movie. I could relate to them because I knew guys like that growing up, and I would hang out with them sometimes, but usually feeling remote, and they'd probably hurt my feelings and I'd go home and write Young Adult Poetry (while they made flamethrowers and had sex with women who were probably impressed by the manliness exhibited by making fun of me - it's a culture I escaped from). I have different limitations and fixations, that's all, not better or worse, and I will always defend an imperfect movie when its imperfections further develop its imperfect characters, because for me the pairing continues to make a lot of fucking sense.

Teen Wolf ('85) and some Standing Ovation

2011-08-26T14:09:00.000-07:00

Teen Wolf begins with a great sequence: Scott Howard (Michael J. Fox) approaches the free throw line. His team, the Beavers, are being crushed by rival team the Dragons. I can't remember if he makes his shot, probably not, but what I remember is the sweat on his face and the intensity of the moment. Heart beats may have been emphasized on the soundtrack as well, but if not then, definitely later in the film. Coach Bobby Finstock (Jay Tarses) wants to forfeit the game, but the Dragons' coach doesn't allow it, since this game will increase his players' league stats. The Beavers get womped! Seriously, they lose so bad, and Scott even misses his buzzer-beating final shot.

This is a movie that gets going right away: during the first sequence you know Scott will become a werewolf. Because the titles begin the movie, but also because he growls at archenemy Mick McAllister (Mark Arnold). You're like, whoa. It surprised me to learn that director Rod Daniel came from television! Teen Wolf's cinematic touches made this film way more enjoyable than, say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Rod Daniel knew how to have fun. Stephanie and I were cracking up during his movie, and I think maybe high-fived a couple times, and once, I swear, she said, while watching Teen Wolf, "This is why I love movies," or something like that, maybe "The only movie I'll ever love from here on is Teen Wolf. Oh Teen Wolf, you have won my heart and it is yours forever." I can't remember the exact phrasing.

When Scott's eyes turn red and he speaks in his wolf voice to demand a keg of beer, the movie entered my heart. It's such a silly, perfect scene. I believe the keg scene is directly followed by Rupert 'Stiles' Stilinski (Jerry Levine) surfing on top of the moving van. At that point I was really getting excited and was having thoughts like "Don't make 'em like this anymore," which is a thought that made me think I need more movies like Teen Wolf in my life - maybe they still make them like this, where are they, please let me know.

I watched Standing Ovation recently, and that was a lot of fun. I don't think it's the same thing, however, because when I recommended it to a friend he texted me, "And why am I watching standing ovation? Im 7 minutes into it and am more confused than ever why you thought of me. Im gonna try to sit with it." I'll have to recommend Teen Wolf; I really don't think this person could say the same thing about Teen Wolf. But maybe, there's just no accounting for taste.

One thing I was confused about was Teen Wolf's message. In the movie Scott decides to be his human self and not showboat his werewolf side, so I guess the movie is saying he should like himself for who he is and not for who people want him to be, but he is actually a werewolf. In the movie he's actually a werewolf. So why shouldn't he be a werewolf all the time? Doesn't that mean the message is really that we should accept mediocrity and never reach for higher aspirations because doing so may affect the status quo and possibly shatter our complacency? There's also something about how becoming a werewolf gives Scott confidence but he learns by the end of the movie that he doesn't need to transmogrify in order to have confidence. And he ends up with his friend Lisa 'Boof' Marconi (Susan Ursitti), the girl who liked him all along and liked him for him, not for werewolf-him. That still seems like the message is things are fine the way they are and we don't need to ask for more or want alterations in a life that's livable as it is.

That's stupid. Personally, this movie made me want to be a werewolf. I think that's a perfectly fine message to send to kids, and I don't understand why the movie wanted to complicate things in the end. Other evidence of normalcy brainwashing: when Stiles (pretty much the coolest guy in the movie because people seem to really like having him around and he brings genuine joy with him, and he wears sunglasses in a lot of scenes) gets back a D- test grade and he shows it to someone with a bit of pride, presumably because it's not an F. I guess the movie had to cut into him like that and imply that he's a person of limited intellectual depth, because it supports the subplot about his opportunism, but also because it reinforces the central motif about normalcy being the best option. It's like, he can't wear the brightest and best shirts and be a smart guy, no way, this movie wouldn't allow it. This sensibility flatters the Normal Kid who sees Teen Wolf in the mall or wherever, and Normal Kid leaves the theater thinking he's perfectly cool the way he is. Teen Wolf is like, yep, just be Normal Kid, you're fine, get out of here (buy some soda on the way out). I just think the better message is about not being afraid of change and exploration of your internal and external possibilities.

Sure they win their final basketball game due to inner powers, but that's not realistic, that doesn't usually happen, and if it does it's an unusual circumstance and becomes some Yahoo News headline. They didn't even have to work to become better at basketball. There were no practice montages, and I don't think Chubby (Mark Holton) ever went on his diet, not really. That tells kids miracles occur, it goes full-throttle on a stupid movie miracle, so why not on a great movie miracle like lycanthropy. Have werewolf Scott eat a kid's head, who gives a fuck?

Of course, you can forgive the film for this conservatism because of its great scenes, like the wolf dance during prom.

You can also forgive the film for having actors in their mid-20s play high schoolers, no suspension of disbelief required: they're all in their 20s; they've stuck to high school because they don't believe there's reason to move on or go forward, life has nothing special to offer them. Their lives are frozen. Then, Scott turns into a werewolf, and they all begin to believe, and you know they're on the cusp of graduation into adulthood and an acceptance of unlimited possibilities. See, that makes the movie even more magical. And if you want to see Michael J. Fox nearer the correct age and in high school, there's always Class of 1984.

Kes vs. Terri

2011-08-25T14:30:00.000-07:00

I woke up in today's early morning hours with a thought on my mind: it seems fair to compare and contrast Ken Loach's Kes with Azazel Jacobs's Terri. I terribly wanted to return to my sleep and consider the matter again at a later time, but I could not fall asleep again and remained restless. Similarities and dissimilarities kept popping into my mind, and the cinematic kinship seemed so urgent and important that I felt a little rush of excitement in even considering it, which was counterproductive to falling back asleep. I also could not pinpoint, to my satisfaction, the fundamental distinction.

Sorry, but I still don't have the answer.

Part of me thinks that Kes is a more authentic film because of its relaxed dramatic structure and use of more non- and semi-professional actors, but another part of me thinks I can't make this claim without having lived and breathed in its time and place, and also because the film has a lyrical and sometimes literary quality that prohibits it from being completely naturalistic. It's based on a book; adapted by the author, Barry Hines, with credited contributions by director Ken Loach and key collaborator and producer Tony Garnett.

In these two films filmic technique and thematic intention are intertwined - each necessary for the other's full shape. It doesn't seem fair, despite the use of more professional actors, to accuse Terri of being more artificial. Both films are composed of dramatic sequences, and though the sequences are breathing, and wish to capture the feeling of reality and being, the fact is that deliberate dramatic tools are used to achieve this, and I don't think in one film more than the other. Both films temper their dramatic forces with sprinkles of characters who and moments that represent oppositional or clarifying elaborations - part of a structural design that takes additional steps to avoid on-the-nose-ness. I won't give away specifics, but, to address crucial final moments, it's true that both films depict tribulations of powerful emotional importance that are achieved by film-long buildups to catastrophic moments.

Some characteristics that I considered are difficult to give relative values. I like that Kes is bereft of a sentimental love subplot, but I like that Terri includes a troubled, complicated love subplot. In my opinion, Billy Casper (David Bradley) from Kes is simply a more lively and interesting kid, his environment has more beauty, and training hawks is more captivating than killing rodents. But then, that's to say that Kes is really a film about sometimes escaping and always wanting to escape harsh conditions, and Terri is a film that meshes misery and hope. The components of Terri that are awful or boring or ugly are part of the film's chemistry, and to remove them would be to falsify, ruin. In Kes there is terribleness too, but the strength of Billy's spirit is so radiant, so like pure and gorgeous, that it's him we remember most of all. Does that mean Terri is the more honest film then, or does it mean that Kes is the better film, or does it mean something else or nothing at all?

Heartbeats

2011-08-13T17:17:00.000-07:00

Lately, more and more, I've been wanting to talk about movies that I like. I think it's because, although you can come up to me and we can chat about Cowboys & Aliens, the truth is that a little part of me dies when this happens, that's just the truth. Not because of what Cowboys & Aliens is, because I think all types of films should be made and co-exist, but because of who I am, and because in order to appreciate the things that other people like I sometimes have to silence the voice that is mine. Heartbeats is a film I saw during PIFF, and about it I wrote, "No one could decide if The Woods was more self-indulgent than Heartbeats, but Heartbeats won me sometimes with its sincerity, because sincere self-indulgence is still sincerity," and I gave it one and a half stars.

Most cinephiles can probably relate when I say that you can tell when you were right or wrong about a movie, months after you made your judgment, based on whether you'd watch the film again or not. And the fact is that right now I would watch Heartbeats again. Preferably with someone who might like the movie (during PIFF I saw it with a person who hated it so much that he felt completely justified in checking his wristwatch - which required a light button to view - multiple times during the screening, and btw let me tell you that this says nothing to me about the movie and only exposes a thing or two about the person I'm seeing the movie with).

Let me tell you also that the person I saw this movie with might have hated the movie based on the speculative view that we hate the things we see in other people that we unconsciously hate in ourselves. I have seen those around me make fools of themselves in holy, blind tribute to the art they love, and if twenty-two year old Xavier Dolan wants to make a film that makes a fool of him in order to pay holy, blind tribute to the art and beauty that he cherishes, then I see NO FUCKING PROBLEM, and I encourage all 22 year olds to be exactly this way, and not to care about what mean spirited or envious people say, or even what loving and nurturing people say, like Cannes, or Sundance, or whomever, and to love to the fullest the things you love, right or wrong.

Which is what Heartbeats does:

It's on streaming. I wish it was on blu-ray. Also, I would not want to rewatch The Woods. So that settles that.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Redux)

2011-08-10T23:53:00.000-07:00

It's an accident that my second attempt at writing about Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is so near the one year anniversary of its theatrical release (my first, dated 8/14/10). Last night I watched Scott Pilgrim, which I don't like very much, for the fourth time (w/trivia track), which must mean that I like this movie very much. It's a compliment when I say that in my opinion Edgar Wright's films are the easiest popcorn films to watch - I've seen all of them multiple times and have written about Shaun of the Dead multiple times as well.

"You broke the heart that broke mine. Now get ready to Chau down." - Knives Chau (Ellen Wong)

But still I struggle over what it is exactly that I get out of them. They're infectious, they're fun, perhaps the acme of modern escapist fantasies, but they haven't stimulated me on deeper levels. His films haven't rattled my insides, and I can't find a reason why they should. For me it's telling that reshoots were required for Scott Pilgrim's ending and that focus groups and O'Malley's final volume were necessary for Wright to find the film's emotional denouement. Here is a filmmaker who, largely through self exhibition, is well-known to be meticulous, but it may be that he holds his microscope to dramatic and filmic design, and struggles to give his characters more than a filmic depth.

(Michael Cera) Scott's fight sequences are best considered from a symbolic pov, as allegorical treatments of what would be emotional confrontations in real life. He's not The Bride, and he's not really killing; he conquers the idea of evil exes. The duels to death, as called by Matthew Patel (Satya Bhabha) through e-mail, involve no real deaths, but page-turning moments of maturity. Edgar Wright says he "tried to make it so that [Scott's] emotional story is consistent throughout [the film] and even the way he fights the exes is, in some ways, a reflection of his emotions." Most viewers probably make this switch without putting it into words. If the battles are taken as literal, Scott is a murderer, kind of, or whatever people who turn other people into coins are called.

Either way I don't understand why Scott Pilgrim reserves judgment for boy on girl violence, and I continue to see the implication as being that some forms of violence are acceptable. Wright has said that when Scott "gets to ex number four [Roxy Richter] he doesn’t really even want to play anymore and tries to opt out of fighting because he’s just had it," and it's true that Scott and Ramona are in conflict when this fight occurs. What we hear from Scott is "I don't think I can hit a girl. They're soft," and Ramona's response, "You don't have a choice." Other instances of boy on girl violence are given specifically negative contexts (all except the [accidental] boob punch), and are singled out from other violent acts committed in the film. The first time is when Todd Ingram (Brandon Routh) punches the highlights out of Chau's hair, and it's meant to be an example of how Todd is a rockstar asshole. The last time comes after Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) utters "let's both be girls" before kneeing Gideon Graves (Jason Schwartzman) in the balls. Gideon backhands (double checked in slow-mo) Ramona, and as he does a BAD!! graphic flashes on screen, and as he kicks her down the pyramid's stairs more BAD!! graphics flash on screen.

If the film wanted to express an ethical point it might have considered violence charged personalities from a more objective pov, but instead it makes the easy, obvious comment that girls should not be hit by boys, and chooses not to explore the complexity of the problem of boys hitting boys, or violence in general. The film behaves like Scott Pilgrim. All instances of this moral judgment, against boy on girl violence, which contradict the phantasmagorical circumstances, are clouded by narrative material - Scott is tired, Todd is an asshole, Gideon shows his teeth - but the fact is that not a single instance of boy on boy violence is given this type of treatment.

Scott Pilgrim's double standard on violence has also always bothered me, it's present there in my first response to the film. It's lame that the film would draw one line and not other, harder to draw lines; it's lame that Scott would. To me it indicates that the film's focus is not on philosophical or fundamental inquiries, and only considers essential questions from its narrative and temporal pov. Scott's pov, during the early 2000s or whenever the film is set. And Scott is a purposefully imperfect character, he's: immature, selfish, insouciant, and nearsighted. At least. A damaged protagonist can be more interesting than Edgar's Scott Pilgrim (I've never read the comic books, I should mention). Scott is a dull, limited lead for a movie. Worse, Edgar hopes both to give Scott flaws and to forgive them, which ideology I don't traffic in, because it seems contradictory to the point of having flawed characters.

The fear of female sexuality by males is very real. Though I think the film fails to offer rich expressions of intimacy between Scott and Ramona. Why she loves him is a complete fucking mystery to me. It's not that I doubt that a person could fall in love for no good reason, it's simply that I think the good reasons, and bad reasons, are way more interesting to explore than no reason. In the interview I keep quoting, Edgar laughs about this, laughs, saying "man, I’ve told girls I’ve loved them without knowing anything about them (laughs)." Okay, he's told a girl he's in love too early, but does he know the difference between telling a girl you love her and really loving a girl? I can't tell by the film.

This may be why Edgar didn't know how to end the film - he didn't know why anyone cared about anyone else, and he wasn't sure how seriously to treat their feelings. Emotional satisfaction is like sexual satisfaction in the Roxy Richter (Mae Whitman) battle, a matter of opportunity. Edgar may have been unsure of their final moment because he hadn't asked himself vital questions about his characters.

Scott's confrontation with the lesbian character Roxy is handled by Ramona herself fighting (battle hammer vs. razor belt), then puppet fighting for Scott. How she is defeated, though, is by Scott touching her erogenous hotspot, a place below one of her knees. She explodes in an orgasm, or something. What bothers me is the fact that this transgresses the simplest principle of lesbian intimacy, namely that a woman is stimulated by other women and not men. It makes sexual pleasure a matter of purely physical logic, activated by anyone given the knowledge and opportunity, and not a matter of more meaningful emotional intimacies and loyalties. I call bullshit. I too have an erogenous hotspot, located between my legs, but I don't explode in orgasms when anyone touches it. I explode when the right person touches it. That's because my penis is romantic (as love should be, please?).

The final fight, between Scott and others vs Gideon, is a process that is exactly the same as all the others + w/more people. If Scott had really gained the sword of self respect he might have immediately put the sword on the ground and realized his fights against other people were misguided and the real fight existed in an interior realm. I think one fight is with ourselves, one fight is authentically personal; and either Scott was wrong about the final fight with Gideon, or he was wrong about all the previous ones. Scott shouldn't have to destroy the hipsters or Gideon in these battles. When the real battle arrives, the one with Nega Scott, a joke about french toast is made (foreshadowed when Knives and Scott play Ninja Ninja Revolution and Nega Ninja appears: "I can never get past that guy," Scott says, to which Knives replies "Don't beat yourself up about it." I see this as more implicational evidence that Scott views everyone else as the problem).

It's knights and damsels programming, ("about him trying to win the heart of this fair maiden"), the same cultural wiring as always. The film's reluctance to probe violence from a fundamental level is for me symptomatic of a larger problem of emphasis on the superficial. All the worse that the violence is PG-13 neutered by a lack of bloodshed and profuse videogame flourishes. It's violence for kids, and it's glorified. All the worse that it echoes the most dramatically pleasing aspects of violence, without considering the reasons behind violence's dramatic dominance.

Edgar's Shampoo joke holds no water for me. It may be that Universal wouldn't have allowed the downbeat ending, in which Scott ends up with neither girl, but this undermines the gravity of Scott's flaws and his need to face them. It makes the dirtiest Hollywood lie there is: that the process of personal growth fits neatly into some manufactured narrative. I hate the way Edgar emphasizes how the film's end is a question mark, "a symbol to the audience that you gotta figure the rest of it all out," because he really means it's a question of who Scott will be with. That's the major riddle. Will Scott become an evil ex? To me that's an ambivalence that sidesteps harder questions about Scott's hubris.

The "hidden" elements in Scott Pilgrim, many of which I know better thanks to the trivia track, are unimpressive and reveal little more about the characters. Most things are simply complimentary on an aesthetic level; for example the inclusion of numerical clues to the exes (practical ones around ex number one, twos around ex number two, etc.), and heart shaped lights for Scott in relation to Ramona, and ex shaped lights and objects in relation to Scott in relation to Ramona's exes. That's information already available in the narrative. The film's surface and subsurface are so simple and smooth that the film can be watched and rewatched ad infinitum. It's designed that way, and "the essential love triangle should be easy."

Tabloid (Errol Morris)

2011-08-07T18:24:00.000-07:00

Last year's documentary Catfish was about a woman who wore a robe of lies with many loose strings which were slowly pulled until the robe came unraveled and the woman stood naked before the gawking filmmakers. There was discord between the wishes of her heart and the realities of her world, and the film's tragedy was in the revelation of that great divide.

But Tabloid is about a woman, Joyce McKinney, whose lies are inseparable from her construction of reality, and whose secrets are buried in the deepest chambers of her heart, which she guards with all her strength. If you've seen the movie you know she even places a guard dog, a literal guard dog, between the outside world and herself, and when the dog dies she clones it, and there come to be five guard dogs that protect her secrets. Each secret that could potentially destroy her love's integrity she protects with conviction relative to the extent the love's integrity is necessary for her existence. But is it really a love for Kirk Anderson, or is it a love for self?

Because I thought also about how Joyce McKinney referred to her years of dramatic training - she said she summoned her dramatic abilities for her court appearance on the matter of her notorious sex in chains scandal (rope, perhaps, but chains sound better, as one teller says). What I thought about was how the degree to which we expose ourselves to the tradition of drama and dramatic structure and dramatic interpretation warps our visions of ourselves: we cast ourselves as major players in the drama of our lives.

And good drama, in the traditional sense, is fueled by conflict. For some, I believe, conflict is the engine of a lifedrama which is indivisible from a personal conception of a meaningful life. I worry about this all the time because I watch so many movies and read some books - I talked about it a little in my entry on the melodrama - what if I harbor a desire to ink spectacular stories for my life? What if I attempt to fill my life with great drama because I incorrectly equate great drama with great importance?

Joyce McKinney is a US southerner as well, which links her narrative with that region's tradition of willed self-identity and bubbles of private fantasy. Her story's foundation of perpetual and romantic self-construction and idiosyncratic and homespun belief systems is the foundation of so many other memorable US south tales. Although I've always admired California as the birthplace of lifestyles, the truth seems to be that lifestyle ideology has always existed. I point to the US south as evidence.

And of course if you believe yourself to be a free-spirited self-styled wide-eyed individual like Joyce McKinney, it may very well be that it is not secrets you are guarding at all. Many theater goers were saying mean things about Joyce as the end credits were rolling, about how she was full of shit and all that, but most of us compose our lives from tiny lies which we do not even know to be lies. Isn't that the similarity between us and Joyce and the world of Mormons? She refers to herself several times as something like a good ol' American girl. Well, that's her Mormonism.

In a way everything about the film including the film itself is a lie. As sometimes happens to people thrust into the limelight, I do not believe Joyce ever stopped hungering for attention, and I believe her thoughts continue to dwell in the limelight. The film was another stage for her. Did she not seem to be working herself into tears at certain points? But if her life is a drama she creates, than the drama becomes her reality, and if her tears are symbols of a lie that constitutes her core being, then the tears are both real and not real. Joyce McKinney's personality is large, and forceful, and magnetic. Couldn't I categorize this documentary, a documentary of her life, as a melodrama?

The Melodrama

2011-08-05T18:35:00.000-07:00

This is my first official, my first labeled, entry on the melodrama genre. I have been going through something of a melodrama phase lately. And by phase I mean the figure of melodrama has taken shape amidst the immensity of film history, and whispered in my ear sweet things about Max Ophüls's Caught, André De Toth's The Other Love, Edmund Goulding's Dark Victory, and Michael Curtiz's Flamingo Road. Flamingo Road came recommended to me by the dead, by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who listed the film as one of his favorites.

The functional melodrama works because of an agreement between the heart and screen. It is a visual, visceral secret shared with a person by a film, and the greater and braver the truth of this secret, the more the film works. Honesty is achieved by commitments from the filmmakers and actors - they must fully believe in the material and invest in it a seriousness and purpose to match the extreme heights of the human emotions conveyed.

Human emotions are conveyed with the utmost sincerity in a melodrama, even when the utterly absurd occurs. This is why melodramas from Hollywood are dazzling, and specifically, dazzling from Hollywood in the 1930s through 50s. During this period the craft of populist and sensationalistic filmmaking reaches for the highest peaks of the human heart, and the two, craft and heart, ignite and explode before the teary eyes of the audience. These movies are hot messes. The hotter and messier the better and bigger the film.

It takes a large, powerful personality to lead a melodrama, someone like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, or Elizabeth Taylor. It takes a sensitive and keen filmmaker to create a melodrama. The latter seems more interchangeable than the former: certain actors cast long shadows over the melodrama genre, while the filmmakers they worked with are more numerous, and truly great melodrama filmmakers, like Max Ophüls and Douglas Sirk, are as rare as truly great melodrama actors.

I have always been attracted to the melodrama genre, but tend to have consumed it in small doses. This is because the films destroy me, viz., they wreck my heart. I wonder what it is about the melodrama that attracts me to it; is it desire for purgation, contrition, catharsis, escape, masochism, or other, or all? Do I want to suffer and does the film help glorify my suffering? Do I want to fantasize my life as some thing of great importance and terrific emotional scope? Do I want to pretend to be rich, or pretend to be a servant? I cannot know for sure. If the answer is simple, the film isn't good.

Exciting Moments in Modern Cinema

2011-07-29T18:23:00.001-07:00

Alamar Pedro González-Rubio, 2009
The Holy Girl Lucrecia Martel, 2004
Blissfully Yours Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2002
A Snake of June Shinya Tsukamoto, 2002
Distant Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2002
Unknown Pleasures Jia Zhangke, 2002
Police, Adjective Corneliu Porumboiu, 2009
Take Care of My Cat Jeong Jae-eun, 2001
Kings and Queen Arnaud Desplechin, 2004
Friday Night Claire Denis, 2002
Sparrow Johnnie To, 2008

Each of these is a thoroughly modern film; the list expresses my preference for a broad range of styles, thematic interests, and modes of representation. I confess that I favor a cinema of minor revelations and quiet epiphanies. The purpose of this entry is to nakedly recommend all of the films listed as examples of some of my favorite movies. This list is intended to provoke curiosity about under-exposed films and not to echo a thousand wonderful things that have been said about other modern greats*. My first draft was longer - this one is 100% business, so much so that it's even arranged in my suggested order, and the final two are candidates for a rapturous double-feature. I also confess that these filmmakers have other great films that should have made the list, perhaps even over the ones that did, depending on my mood and yours; other countries and regions should be represented, for example there are zero declarations of love for certain Scandinavian, Middle Eastern, and English speaking films, that I in fact do love (#12 is probably A Somewhat Gentle Man, 2010, dir: Hans Petter Moland), but there's only so much a list can express, and I don't even think this list demonstrates my expansive appreciation for the national cinema of countries that are represented, because for example I flip out over many more Romanian New Wave films.

I'll make it a goal to write about all of these, as at this point only Police, Adjective has an entry.

* But, okay, even though it's not my goal to write about or expound on my love for the following movies, which at this point I think have already been well-received and analyzed, I also want to make another list, so here are movies that already have critical and/or popular validation that I also love (perhaps the way that I demarcate this distinction is arbitrary and/or biased). This list is not recommendation ordered but preference ordered:

In the Mood for Love Wong Kar-wai, 2000
Enter the Void Gaspar Noé, 2009
Talk to Her Pedro Almodóvar, 2002
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days Cristian Mungiu, 2007
Caché Michael Haneke, 2005
Poetry Lee Chang-dong, 2010
The Son Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2002
Revanche Götz Spielmann, 2008
Carlos Olivier Assayas, 2010
The Protector Prachya Pinkaew, 2005
Gomorrah Matteo Garrone, 2008

I confess that this list leaves out so many great films and filmmakers, and that I didn't reuse a director previously mentioned, although that means well-established directors from the previous list with other great movies were omitted. There's so much to see, what can I say? I also confess that I couldn't decide on which list or due to which film Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Andrea Arnold, Roy Andersson, Ulrich Seidl, Hong Sangsoo, Tsui Hark, or Lars von Trier should be merited inclusion, among others. Also also I confess that, actually, for example, I prefer Lynne Ramsay to Andrea Arnold (and I'm waiting to see what Steve McQueen does next: and holy fuck because they each have new films coming), but my favorite Ramsay is Ratcatcher, which is beyond my self-enforced 21st century boundary, as are my favorites from other important 21st century filmmakers, for example Jafar Panahi's The Mirror. And, really, these lists are hard for me.

Destiny (1921)

2011-07-23T12:52:00.000-07:00

In a way I travel time and trot the globe when I watch movies, but, in reality, of course, I remain fixed in my time and place. Although the way in which I do travel when I watch movies is sometimes stranger, sometimes more interesting.

When I watch Destiny I place parts of my mind in Berlin in 1921, where and when the film was seen for the first time. We, the audience, are uprooted from the ordinary; in a way, to travel back to Berlin in 1921 to watch Destiny would be to immediately leave again, but through the screen. Destiny, written and directed by Fritz Lang (and based on a dream he had), motivates willing hearts and minds to contemplate the wonders of physical and spiritual existence, and always present is a sense of expansive realities and surrealities. Its story provokes one to consider oneself as a unit within a tremendously vast and exciting network of people and places, lives and moments.

Death visits a town. He buys, with gold coins, some land intended to be used as the cemetery's annex. Around the land he builds a massive, towering wall, with no entrances that anyone can see.

Death takes, from the world of the living, a woman's husband. The woman confronts Death. She tells Death that love is stronger than death, and she asks for her husband's resurrection.

Death has his woes, too - the German title's literal translation is Weary Death - and he tells the woman that it's hard for him to carry the burden of hate for obeying the commands of god. He explains that he can't bring someone back, it's simply impossible, irreversible. But the woman is persistent, will not believe what she is being told, and forces Death to demonstrate the truth of his words. He offers to resurrect her husband if she can prevent the flames of three others from going out.

Three trials begin, staged in separate places, outside the barriers of time, and as fantastic experiences. In the above, a hookah is smoked from on a rooftop rug during a starry night.

Then, just as quickly and as easily, and for no apparent reason, we, the audience, are in Renaissance Venetia, experiencing a cock fight. The fantastic, the imaginative, and the romantic are framed within this quest by a woman that's a battle with death over the corporeality of her husband. Each of the three Stories of the Light is about wanting to defeat death, explicitly about this; and for me it's also about the death of time, and the impossibility of re-experiencing a moment.

Because time moves forward in movies as in reality. Running its natural course, as in a theater, and not at home with a remote control, movie time is fleeting, the gasp of a white light, sent through a lens, to give life to a celluloid image, that spans the room's length, where it dies, instantly, in a gorgeous collision with the screen, twenty-four temporal deaths a second.

If you're not still with me, I'm in China. Supposedly. I do not believe that this China ever existed, in reality or even in the imaginations of anyone else. The above image is the descent of a flying carpet into a royal court. The event's purpose is explained in a letter that's so perfect I have to quote it in its entirety:

Oh, Highly Venerable One,
Oh, thousand-year-old One,
Oh, leading light of wisdom,
Oh, precious jewel!

Tomorrow is my birthday and I have
ordered that there should be great
rejoicings throughout the Empire of
China. And for my birthday I ask
that you, oh pearl of all magicians,
should drive away my imperial boredom
with magical tricks such as were never
seen before, from the treasure-chamber
of your illustrious spirit!

With amiable greeting
Djin Schuean Wang,
Emperoror

P.S. If you should also bore me,
contrary to expectation, Oh Highly
Venerable One, I shall be forced, with
my deepest regret, to have you
beheaded!

The Above

For me there's the magic in the screen and the magic of the screen, and watching Destiny bridges them together.

Queen Kelly

2011-07-20T17:06:00.000-07:00

Queen Kelly is an unfinished film from 1929, story and direction by Erich von Stroheim, produced by and starring Gloria Swanson (also produced by Joseph P. Kennedy, father of JFK). It's unfinished because Swanson fired von Stroheim while shooting scenes for the film's final act. She objected to both her role in the material, as the madam of a brothel, and to von Stroheim's treatment of the material, e.g., requesting that an actor drool tobacco juice on her during a wedding scene.

If I understand correctly, and if my information is true, the film was not released in America in its time, owing to clauses in von Stroheim's contract. In 1931 Swanson directed scenes that ended the movie before the final East Africa sequences, and Queen Kelly, with its truncated 'Swanson ending,' photographed by Gregg Toland, was released overseas in 1932. Queen Kelly was, with perhaps some exceptions, not shown in America until after Sunset Boulevard had reached an esteemed place in movie culture, and then it, Queen Kelly, was shown on television, in the 60s.

The Kino version of Queen Kelly I saw used stills to piece together von Stroheim's intended ending, similar to their technique for Swanson and Raoul Walsh's Sadie Thompson. The difference is that Sadie Thompson was once complete. Large portions of Queen Kelly, intended by von Stroheim to be over four hours long, were never shot or performed, simply never had physical existences. Eighty years later I see the movie and wish they could have reconciled their differences and finished the film, somehow; and I wonder about the magnitude of the inner tolls that prohibited either Swanson or von Stroheim from compromising.

Queen Kelly is a silent psychosexual romantic tragedy period piece, among other things (e.g. wacky). It's a class act pre-code film: everything is powerful, memorable, and sensational, and no one looks back.

Queen Kelly's narrative flexibility and von Stroheim's attention to detail (the characteristics seem to compliment each other) are still relevant. The movie also has psychological material, i.e. character developments and insights, and, perhaps most impressively of all, von Stroheim fuses the interior with the exterior. This gives the film a tremendous scope, a richness of texture that's also very modern.

Von Stroheim paints his characters. He uses the sets, the art design, lights, and costumes: all things feel carefully considered. It feels, in every way, large. This bigness is like Josef von Sternberg; and there's a fluidity that's like Max Ophüls.

Von Stroheim creates sequences that unravel and captures feelings as they bloom. The meeting scene between Kitty Kelly (Swanson) and Prince Wolfram (Walter Byron) is graceful and charming. She throws underthings at him. He follows her on a horse. He's engaged to the queen. She's in a nunnery (she's out with the nuns during the scene). They flirt. They get to know each other. Von Stroheim captures the experience of two people from different worlds colliding, then conjoining. Our investment in their relationship is earned because we experience the sensations of its formation.

The Killer Is Loose

2011-07-14T13:30:00.000-07:00

Love the wallpaper, the backdrop for a deadly serious conversation.

The Killer is Loose, starring Joseph Cotton and Wendell Corey, shot by Lucien Ballard, directed by Budd Boetticher, was released on the 2nd of March, 1956; the same year, on the 4th of August, Boetticher's Seven Men from Now came out.

(Cotton) Detective Sam Wagner's crisis is engaging: he shoots the unarmed wife of Leon 'Foggy' Poole (Corey), while arresting Foggy, who is sent to jail, but breaks out for revenge. Corey convincingly portrays a snapped personality. I don't mind the dense dramatics, but, for me, the end was unsatisfying. Lots of false tension because what you expect to happen in a Hollywood movie happens.

Paperboys and Deformer, two shorts by Mike Mills

2011-07-12T11:43:00.000-07:00

Mills: So, Brandon, what do you think it's going to be like in ... twenty or fifty years for paperboys?
Brandon: I think that there probably ... might be a paperboy, I don't know. 'Cause th-you might, you might find out all the, like, defying gravity, and then there'd be like, cars that would be in air. So, I don't know (with shrug). That's kinda hard to tell. Um ... I think it'd be cool to have a car that could float in the air, 'cause then you could, (shrugs), I think it'd be cool. Um ... 'cause I've always wanted to know what it'd be like to fly ... and ... float in the air. Um ... I think ... that ... in fifty years ... the paperboys would probably have their, (shrugs), their own system, where you could just deliver to the houses by mail or something like that.

I found a lot to relate to in Paperboys, the 40 minute Mike Mills documentary about paperboys in Stillwater Minnesota. It connected with some of the things I'd been thinking when writing about Fear City, and it reminded me that I view the problem of conformity and the death of personalities from my perspective, and Brandon and his paperboy friends view it from a totally different perspective.

The paperboys, in the 11-14 age range, want to talk about their bikes, favorite sports, movies, television shows, videogames, cars they want, and the money they can earn. They're into rap music, gangster rap, like Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. Corporations they probably wouldn't list as enemies. They're trying to be good kids. They're wrestling with growing responsibilities and self-awareness, and Mills tries to allow them to speak for themselves (though he asks some of them the same leading questions).

Paperboys is curious about how we become ourselves and how our society becomes our society. Or, as put by Gary Davis, writing about Ed Templeton for the short Deformer, "Ed is a bundle, a bundle of nerves, feeling life. [???] all the slivers are bound together into a complete person: happy, sad, friendly, mean ... straight, strange, and of course supremely messed up. Like all of us. The way it's supposed to be. The way it is. Reality."

Mills was recently interviewed by Gus Van Sant for Filmmaker Magazine (Beginners press). In the interview Van Sant broached the matter of Mills being both independently minded, and a creator of corporate advertisements. Mills replied that he's sometimes torn over the issue, but it's complicated for him, and doing some advertisements allows him to continue to live the life of an artist.

"You go to Huntington High School and there's just - half the kids are fuck ups. They're all - tweaked in some way," Templeton says in a voice over. "It's more like: my life's supposed to be normal, I'm supposed to be a good kid, but I'm ditching. There's like, a full ... blanket, of like, secrecy."

Mills strikes me as a genuine person, someone concerned about the people around him. I like that he has more questions than answers. I think he tries to discover people, instead of making judgments about them; he tries to see them for who they are instead of who they're supposed to be. I worry that his reluctance to draw bigger conclusions inhibits the scope of his narrative films, as in Beginners, which I thought was flat, but that's not a problem in these two documentaries.

Fear City

2011-07-11T17:33:00.000-07:00

I'd have to update my blog to adult content just to talk about Fear City, which "was originally made by 20th Century-Fox, but they decided that it had too much nudity, sex, violence and drug references for them, so they sold it to the independent Aquarius Releasing" (although you have to be careful about believing what you read on IMDb).

Be great to see Fear City in high-def. The image quality is of course superior on my television, but it's still not blu-ray, and I think if there's a place that deserves the high-def blu-ray treatment, it's the interior of a strip club in NYC during the '80s.

This was the Abel Ferrara film that followed Ms. 45. Important early Ferrara collaborators were involved, including cinematographer James Lemmo, editor Anthony Redman, and screenwriter Nicholas St. John. Billy Dee Williams is a cop, Melanie Griffith is a stripper, and Tom Berenger is a bouncer. Berenger's Matt Rossi was a boxer who retired after killing a man in the ring; Fear City is about him conquering that guilt and reigniting the flame inside. His challenge, for the prize of self-redemption, is a serial killer who's targeting strippers from Rossi's own club.

It's a gritty, mean, icy cop film with a kung-fu narrative: there are training sessions, and the film culminates with a physical battle between Rossi and the serial killer (who is unnamed and the actor uncredited). But there's no glory here, no heroes, and no celebration of murder. The killings are nasty, repulsive, and unglamorous, and the killer's killer is confused and haunted.

Cinematically speaking, for me, NYC in the 80s has begun to challenge LA in the 70s, and London in the 60s, as centers of weirdness and awesome cinema. The 80s have great, weird NYC movies like Fear City and Ms. 45, Basket Case, William Lustig's Maniac, Scorsese's After Hours, Michael Schultz's The Last Dragon, Lucio Fulci's The New York Ripper, and vibrant, independent, and personal films like Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It and Do the Right Thing, Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise, Variety, Malle's My Dinner With Andre, John Sayles's The Brother from Another Planet, and 1980's Gloria, directed and written by John Cassavetes.

NYC has a well-known and rich cinematic history, and edgy, progressive, and talented filmmakers continue to come from the city. I'd like to see more weird ones. Aren't they running together, these days? My impression is that there's a great worldwide panic about the lack of weirdness in our modern lives. I think weirdness is being purchased and then processed by capitalistic logic. It's horrible to witness mass conformity take place. Culturally speaking, in America, corporations and businesses have a stronger impact on trends and lifestyles than politics, humanities, sciences, traditions, or histories (at least this is my impression, based on my extensive field studies, conducted without supervision, and under periodic intoxication). It's not the government, it's the corporations, and examples of corporations are movie studios. They have to behave like corporations, you are what your nature is, but, by the same logic, people should behave like people, not like corporations. Corporations want to be like people, they want you to think they are like you, and that they, too, if no one else, feels the same way. But that's just a lie. So we should continue to allow ourselves to be different, and continue to express our inner selves, and we have to keep changing and moving and exploring ourselves and our world, at least to stay ahead of the corporations.

This "information" is a millionfold inflation based on my projections rooted in specific paranoias and mistrusts. Probably not entirely though, because don't US multiplexes confirm what I'm saying? Fuck me if our theaters aren't boring now, and fuck me if US cinema hasn't lost its imagination. Like more and more things, the rest of the world is, right now, more interesting, more exploratory. We're importing, from Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Sweden, etc. We're remaking the films we're importing. We're remaking our own films. We're rebooting our franchises. We're sequeling ourselves into cinematic hell, America, we're sequeling ourselves out of relevance.

I'm getting myself really worked up. Take it to the page, you should tell me; you should ask me to take it the page, and write movies, write screenplays, you should tell me to write movies and not whiny diatribes. Seriously will you please call me and say that to me.

Variety (1983)

2011-07-10T20:09:00.000-07:00

Friend: You gotta hit the streets honey. Go out there and work; I mean you're skinny, you're pretty, you could sell clothes. Go to 5th Avenue.
Christine: Oh, 5th Avenue?
Friend: Yeah.
Christine: You know people wait in line for those jobs.
Friend: Truly? Amazing.
Christine: People will do anything ... for work. Including me. I don't know, man. If I don't get a job soon, I ... I don't know what I'm gonna do.
Friend: Really?
Christine: I really don't. It's ... it's uh ... getting bad.
Friend: Well, I do know of a job Christy, but I don't think you would want it. I really don't think you're the type.
Christine: Sure.
Friend: I don't think it's for you honey.
Christine: Look, I'm interested! What is it?

Variety is a film from 1983, set and filmed in New York City. It's also the name of the erotic theater where Christine (Sandy McLeod) works. Christine's trying to carve a path for herself through life.

Will Patton, Luis Guzmán, Tom DiCillo, and John Lurie receive early film credits. Christine Vachon was a production assistant. If you IMDb Luis Guzmán, you can see director Bette Gordon had the vision to cast him in a speaking role at a time in his career when he was playing roles like Gypsy Cabbie, Goon #1, Gang Member #2, and Bystander (uncredited). He, Luis Guzmán, as Jose, has one of the best dialogue scenes in the movie:

Jose: Oh - okay. The guy that be sitting in the front row. Yeah, right up on the screen.
Christine: Yeah ... well I don't know where he sits, Jose ...
Jose: Honey I don't know about that guy I'm gonna tell you right now ...
Christine: Do you know who I'm talking about?
Jose: Yeah yeah yeah. He be having the price tag be sticking out of his suit, man, 275 for a suit, man, that guy must be sick coming in here, (tsk), damn.
Christine: Jose, I don't know what you're talking about ...
Jose: You don't know ... that guy took his mother to Coney Island and left her on the Cyclone for thirty years, man ...
Christine: Jose ...
Jose: He went back and she still was on the ride.
Christine: I don't want character analysis. I wanna know if you've seen him.
Jose: Well, I haven't seen him honey. I tell, I'm gonna tell ... and he is funny. But, eh, why you wanna go see funny guys when you can see a guy like Jose, you know, like ... Friday night - me and you go have some cuchifrito, gonna do some, some ...
Christine: Jose ...
Jose: Some meringa dancing ...
Christine: It's been great seeing you ...
Jose: You know what I mean ...
Christine: I'll talk to you later.
Jose (as Christine walks away): Just, just, you don't like to tango. Okay. Hey. Can't take a joke, don't be showing up here early, alright. (to himself as he sweeps the theater floor) Gotta warm up this woman, really now. Jesus Christ. Try to be a nice guy and look at how they treat you.

Some great cinema. Certain scenes are anecdotal and expose aspects of the person speaking; they reminded me of Richard Linklater's Slacker. A crucial late scene used "The Diary," performed by Little Anthony and the Imperials, like Azazel Jacobs used "Damaged Goods" in The GoodTimes Kid. The camera's love of beauty and lights reminded me of Wong Kar-wai, and Variety is kind of like if Christopher Doyle had shot Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver or Paul Schrader's Hardcore. It's the older sister of Lee Kang-sheng's Help Me, Eros.

Bette Gordon's film and I share the same tastes. It's into urban cultures and lifestyles, perversity, seedy underworlds, truer visions of the downtrodden, pop art, John Lurie's jazz, lights, and the dark heart of the city. In this movie the camera loves neon like I love neon in real life. Gordon also searches out aesthetic layers that occur naturally in a modern society.

Love that the JumboTron is playing a video of a space shuttle launch. Other shots have home televisions, and several scenes take place within Variety while a porn movie plays. Often shots are set up around mirrors or glass. These visual textures suggest a society with a densely complex personality, and as Christine learns more about this society, she learns about herself.

Vigilante Force (!)

2011-07-09T12:32:00.000-07:00

Vigilante Force begins with some manic fucking hellraising. Within the one minute mark, while the credits are still rolling: guns are fired from the bed of a moving truck, a man is dragged down the length of a bar by another man in a cowboy hat, a high-heeled woman in a bikini dances on a pool table for cash money, a roulette wheel is spun, there is a bar fight which escalates to gun violence - and then all out pandemonium (guys being thrown onto tables and stuff), and for what appears to be completely unrelated reasons (unrelated to the bar fight) a man is thrown out a window in a coffee shop, followed by a police car being set on a fire (with a fucking torch) and shot at until it explodes.

This is followed by an early morning robbery getaway sequence. Three men with guns, and either a woman accomplice, or a female hostage, flee to their car while exchanging bullets with the police. Two officers, and an elderly bystander, are shot.

The town is overrun by criminal behavior.

Residents don't feel safe walking down front street anymore. Harry, the sheriff, can't be everywhere at once. He's losing men. Ben Arnold (Jan-Michael Vincent), a young tractor salesman and local, has a Vietnam vet brother, a "genuine war hero," whom he offers to contact for auxiliary police protection.

Aaron Arnold (Kris Kristofferson) agrees to the arrangement on the condition that he can bring with him four friends, friends he promises are war vets and/or ex-police. They're sworn in and issued guns, badges, and handcuffs.

Vigilante Force was written and directed by George Armitage (Miami Blues), with production design by Jack Fisk. It was produced by Gene Corman and released by United Artists in 1976. Kris Kristofferson plays a softer, but not much softer, Kurt Russell type. He controls the criminal population in order to cheat the town himself, and the movie is about his betrayal of the trust offered to him.

This means a cycle of corruption, violent action, and town drama. It's my opinion that no one in the movie is interesting except Kristofferson as Aaron. But he's pretty interesting. The film first made me lose my shit when Aaron breaks up a cockfight by pistol shooting the roosters dead in front of the crowd of betters. "You're all under arrest" is his line.

The problem is Armitage doesn't make me care about anyone, so who gives a fuck about his outrageous, ridiculous southern anarchy narrative. It's tedious and drags itself through a slow middle half that's only punctured by Aaron shooting two roosters. Except, at the end, the movie take off. TAKES OFF. It's the end of the movie I want to describe, and part of the ending's charm when watching the film is its surprising pay offs, emphasis on surprise, and I don't recommend you read the next section or look at its pictures unless you've seen the movie. BUT I also recommend you do check out the next section, even if you haven't seen the movie, if your position is still that you don't think you should watch this movie, because you totally should.

THE END OF THE MOVIE

Evil Aaron and his evil friends disguise themselves as a marching band and intend to use their small arsenal to rob something I forget what.

Ben has assembled a vigilante group (earlier, around a pick-up truck, he'd been like, "I'm the one that brought you here, and I'm the one that's gonna run you out," to a topless Aaron, who'd been saying stuff like "Now you listen to me I didn't volunteer for this").

Ben tries yelling down some threats. There's a stand off. It's intense. Aaron tests Ben's seriousness.

Ben is very serious.

Hell breaks loose. It's insane. They just don't make pandemonium like they make pandemonium in the US south. Guns are fired, things explode, people are given hell, people take cover.

In one instance ...

a woman with a Molotov cocktail ...

throws the Molotov cocktail ...

at a man ...

whom she hits ...

who presumably dies a horrible, painful, fiery death.

The action heads to the nearby ghost town, where things are settled the only way these things can be settled.

The Scarlet Empress

2011-06-30T11:37:00.000-07:00

Begin shot:

/End shot.
Cut to:

It's amazing not only how Josef von Sternberg moves the camera, but how he moves people and uses objects within the frame to compose new shots while moving the camera. Begin shot:

/End shot

In The Scarlet Empress, Sternberg's photographic composition is as lavishly ornamental as the decor,

and someone like Count Alexei (John Lodge) is overpowered by the frame,

secondary to Sternberg's cinematic art. Sternberg, who calls actors marionettes.

The only person whose humanity punctures the synthetics is Catherine II, Marlene Dietrich, whose powerful personality Sternberg amplifies, making her the most magnetic, interesting, and extravagant part of the movie, and wonderfully so.

Tokyo Sonata

2011-06-27T11:29:00.000-07:00

Foreground, middleground, background.

Diagonal foreground, middleground, and moving diagonal background (highway) (+city in far background) (+diagonal overpass).

Includes portion of lower floor in shot, escalator diagonals, janitors in uniforms.

Sometimes his visual layers make dialogue unnecessary, and the physical distance between two characters is always dramatically significant.

Fence, kids hiding in foreground, adults searching in background.

People in crescent moon shape on right, lots of empty space on left. Real simple and sweet visual representation of moment; the pool of light - you want to put it over him. Perfect.

Dear Wendy

2011-06-26T16:21:00.000-07:00

"It's either a one or a five," have you heard people say that? I've heard people say that. It means the person both loves and hates the movie. What kind of movie do you both love and hate? Thomas Vinterberg's Dear Wendy is the first movie I've seen that I would rate either a one or a five.

Dear Wendy is about five or so pacifist teenagers who form a group, which they name The Dandies, in order to cultivate their romantic interest in firearms.

It's a Danish Southern movie: the movie takes place on a Copenhagen set that, in broad strokes, is a stand-in for West Virginia. I'm not sure how this image of the American south gestated in the minds of screenwriter Lars von Trier and director Vinterberg, but the films of David Gordon Green were likely influences. Star Jamie Bell had appeared in Green's Undertow the previous year. It's kind of a drunk Dane's American fever dream, and really the film takes place in, and feels like the product of, the imagination of its creators. This is the film's problem, and also why it's sometimes fun and sometimes works as a comedic satire. You just have to detach yourself from reality, in order to have a better look back on it.

Aside from Bell, whose Tintin performance I eagerly await, Alison Pill (Kim Pine in Scott Pilgrim, Anne Kronenberg in Milk) and Mark Webber (Stephen Stills in Scott Pilgrim) offer luminous performances, and Bill Pullman plays some kind of oblivious sheriff. But it sort of feels like none of them are acting in the same movie. I couldn't build real connections with them, or consider them as real people. Danso Gordon has a great role because his job is to express bewilderment at the ridiculous gun worshipping and strange ritualization.

Vinterberg and Von Trier want to probe delicate issues in outrageous ways. I'm not sure why. The film is darkly absurd, hyperbolically humorous. Bell narrates in v.o., reading from a love letter written to his gun, which is named Wendy. Dear Wendy = Dear My Gun. A moment of jealousy over the handling of Wendy initiates a conflict that ends with death.

Vinterberg (from dvd interview): "...it is possible to study weapons, and know all about weapons, and shoot in the dark against some targets, and become experts, to obtain knowledge of something, without getting violent. You can say, 'They do shoot policeman and so on.' Yeah, but they only do that because fear enters the picture. Clarabelle is dumb enough to shoot a policeman because she is scared. It's not until ... I mean you can see them as gunpowder, there must be a spark for it to explode. In its clean form, which is how The Dandies worship it, it is merely obtaining knowledge, just like when Lars studies how the Nazis lived and so on. I cannot see anything wrong with that. There is nothing dangerous in that. It is not until you mix it with impurities like lust for power, lust for enrichment, fear and emotions like that. Which are universally human ... feelings."

The Dandies, pacifists, carry their guns ("partners") for "moral support," and one of their rules is that their partners shouldn't be brandished. But the end of the movie is a shootout. Vinterberg gets to make his point and have his fun, and he's not ignorant about the contradiction (officially there is no agenda or moral). He knows the fun he has sabotages the seriousness of his movie, but he's fine with that. As a filmmaker he isn't tormented by human messiness or paradoxes. He makes big bets on the wrong hands - think of it like poker - he makes big bets on the wrong hands, and this causes all the serious players to be like "Hahaha" and "He's not very good," but Vinterberg sees poker as just a game and thinks playing by the rules is boring and means predictable results. He's lighting the Queen of Spades on fire and sticking chips up his dirty asshole. Some people are leaving the table. Vinterberg doesn't care about the table, or he doesn't take it very seriously.

Which is why I love and hate the movie. It's like, think of movies as like a party, you know how some parties are utterly boring and there's some too-drunk person who's making a big mess of things and you're personally thinking "Why did I even come to this party?" and the next day someone asks you about the party and you say "It was awful, so-and-so was doing..." and you describe intolerable, egregious behaviors. And a couple months later all you remember about the party is that one too-drunk person. The movie is like that I guess.

Ten (2002)

2011-06-24T16:57:00.000-07:00

Abbas Kiarostami, in Ten, as in his other films, directly engages material traditionally submerged by narrative. His themes lie about on the surface, sunbathing, while most filmmakers abandon their themes to darkness and eternal paleness.

The material substance of Ten is Mania Akbari in a car, mostly driving, often talking and often listening to a rotating ensemble of passengers, recorded by two dashboard mounted cameras (all the film's photography a product of this setup). The takes are long and the cuts few, Kiarostami prefers to hold on his characters for extended stretches, even when they are not the ones talking; this allows the audience to 'discover' the characters, rather than force the characters and moments into shapes through manipulative editing.

Often the things Amin Maher (Mania's real life son, who plays her son and frequent passenger in the movie) does with his face and body expose details about his relationship with his mother (though he'll tell his mother when she's begun to irritate him, you'll see it on his face first, or perhaps by the way he plays with his schoolbag) and his development as a person. He behaves like a child (squirmy, impatient), but not only like a child: Mania has divorced the boy's father as part of a greater effort for female social lib, so, natural for a boy in this situation, he also exhibits shades of adulthood. In his situation he must express his ideas (or echo cultural ideas he's been taught and not yet challenged for himself). It's a very specific role, the kind that comes from a confluence of real life particulars, and the mother/son dynamics are excitingly complex. In many aspects the boy is a foil to the mother, in some ways an antagonist, a multifaceted symbol of opposition, but always a son.

All other passengers are women, no two are duplicates, and each has her own idea about how to be a woman, how a woman is supposed to behave. Because Kiorastami so expertly grounds his characters in reality, and because in reality women are intricately specific and idiosyncratic, the dramatic action is as simple as developing conversations. When a new person enters the car the talk is at first light and circumstantial, then differences accumulate, unshared opinions collide, and eventually important, basic views become illuminated through dialogue.

Ten is kind of a highbrow essay film version of Taxicab Confessions.

Kiarostami's art is captivating both because of how simple it begins and because of how big and meaningful it becomes. Everything blossoms in his movies. Character revelations have a corollary relationship with an audience member's intelligence and curiosity, and for every one thing at first hidden that Kiarostami slowly reveals, two or three or more things should occur to the audience to consider, such that by the end of the film the audience member may carry tenfold the weight of narrative contemplation compared to films rich and dense in dramatics, but which chain, bound, maybe gag their themes in subtextual dungeons.

And all this produces this amazing and very rare extra layer, a Kiarostami specialty: the cinematic form is a kind of parallel to the film's interior themes. Think of a poem, it's like that, think of it on paper, the way it looks, think of its rhythms, the way it sounds, each part contributing to a total meaning. The way Kiarostami stirs the deeper parts of ourselves through selective and highly important filmic qualities, few (minimal) but important ones, mirrors the nature of Mania Akbari's desire for liberation from tradition. What Akbari wants is both complex and simple, her liberation a matter of choosing her life's path for herself, avoiding, when possible, boundaries imposed by exterior forces.

If it sounds confusing or heavy it's because words get in the way. Everything is crystallized in the movie. Two people talk to each other, shot by one of two cameras, while sitting in a car. That's it (and there's so much more).

Deadhead Miles

2011-06-06T11:37:00.000-07:00

Alan Arkin's Cooper is a playful and likable character who carries Deadhead Miles on his shoulders. A heavy burden for someone whose philosophical remarks are, for example:

"Yeah, I used to believe in Jesus. But then one night I wanted to make sure. I was getting this funny play in second gear, you know? So I took some clutch parts and I laid them under the rig and I went to sleep thinking, 'Okay, if you're Jesus you come on down, work on the clutch, maybe we talk a deal.' Next morning, all them clutch parts was gone and I was still getting that play in second gear."

This he says to Paul Benedict's Hitchhiker while Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah plays on the drive-in screen. He has what you might call Southern charm, very much like Kit it Badlands. The movie, infused with road scenery, snapshots of lifestyles and attitudes encountered en route, and always with folk music on the soundtrack, fits in its time. You could double-feature it with Schatzberg's Scarecrow.

The comedy is well-constructed and often works. Screenwriter Terrence Malick allows moments of curiosity (a woman tied to a stove by a long rope affixed to a belt around her waist), the supernatural (the legend of Johnny Mesquitero), the ridiculous, and zany. Cooper, again like Kit, stumbles through his unplanned and wayward journey with a large degree of indifference.

"You know, you're not going to believe this, but I saw Ethel Merman once at a state fair. In Kansas. 'Bout four years ago. She came out there, sang a song: four bars through it a hog, a hundred yards away, fell down dead on its side. I swear that's the God's truth."

At its best the film evokes the strangeness and absurdity of living and being human. The lack of a central theme sometimes causes the energy to dip. As the hitchhiker comments, "It's as interesting as you are interested."

Monster Camp and some Zoo

2011-06-04T14:35:00.000-07:00

8 Sampsonia Way on Google Maps is where I first learned about LARP. Its existence made complete sense to me. Then I encountered it in The Wild Hunt, the insane Canadian movie wherein the game and real life become confused. That movie introduced me to the structure of LARP performances, and I first heard LARP talk.

The documentary Monster Camp examines a chapter of the game in Seattle. It's actually one of two LARP documentaries streaming on Netflix (the other is Darkon). I like that they're both classified as Genres: Documentary | Fantasy on IMDb, and I really like the message board discussions about them, especially this post. To quote:

"Anyway, my opinion on LARPing:
I personally think it's a lot of fun, because I think of it as interactive improvisational theatre. You've got a costume, you've got a character and a setting, and everyone is contributing to a story and trying to make it as interesting as possible. =) However, I think it crosses the line when it becomes escapsim, or a sort of self-medication. If you seriously wish and desperately pretend to be your character, then there are almost certainly some real-world issues that are in need of remedy. But, as long as you're doing is as a fun aspect of life as opposed to a replacement, it's awesome. =) Just keep it healthy."

There are captivating dimensions to the game, and many of them are well-explored in Monster Camp. I think the concept of two people in LARP costumes fucking is rather interesting, just like I think furry sex is interesting.

I first learned about furries from the MTV documentary Plushies & Furries, and then later met director Rick Castro. He owns a fetish gallery in Los Angeles, the Antebellum. He also hosted a monthly fetish screening at the Egyptian in Hollywood. I attended Zoo with a group of friends and remember one question during the post-Zoo discussion about whether or not the zoos, animal lovers, were regularly penetrated by horses. Poor Rick Castro made a face, and I realized he'd been cornered into visualizing horsedick penetration. Then I realized I was also considering the logistics of horsedick penetration, and my friends had funny facial expressions too. Castro replied, quite seriously and not without disgust, that a horse's penis is too large for a human's anus (the documentary Zoo specifically concerns itself with an instance of deadly horse-in-human anal sex). What a relief. Afterward my friends and I discussed similar aspects from the movie, off and on, during a mostly quiet and weird ride home. You could say we both wanted to talk about it and not think about it; couldn't help think about it and couldn't figure out how to talk about it.

Monster Camp does not directly state that there is costumed sex, but sexual dynamics, in-game and real world, are discussed. None involving animals for your information. It's more like: one gameplaying couple's relationship is strained because within the game the girl is the mate of another male. On the flip side, she accuses her boyfriend's character (but not him) of being too flirtatious. Sometimes the roleplaying goes too far and feelings are stirred that linger beyond the weekend of LARPing. Two of the LARPers, at least two, have not successfully graduated from high school, although they're into their 20s, and if I understood correctly one of them still attends high school. It's his fifth year being a senior. It must be night school by now right? I probably don't have to tell you that some of them, including these two, play too many videogames. Some of them are parents, and some parents bring their kids.

One father, also writer of the game's plot (jealous), has an eight-year old daughter. He tells a story about his daughter complaining to him that he plays too much World of Warcraft, while he's playing WoW (he's both telling the story while playing WoW and the story itself is set during an instance of him playing WoW), and there's a look in his eyes and tone to his voice that makes me think the daughter lost that round, had lost rounds before, and will always be second in his life to videogames. His intensity reminded me of the man in Cinemania who assaulted the lady in front of him during a movie, and then finished the movie, knowing the cops were in the lobby waiting for him.

There are the game's sunnier sides as well. One lady in a wheelchair doesn't leave the house much and enjoys her interactions with the group of LARPers. She sews and designs costumes for them. At the events she sits behind a table and forgets for a little while how she is lonely and in a wheelchair. She does not forget to hand out the lizard zombie costumes.

Le Million

2011-05-18T17:44:00.000-07:00

Time of the Wolf

2011-05-14T10:55:00.000-07:00

My previous thoughts on Time of the Wolf come from a different time, different place, and almost a different person, though when I read them now I still see so much of myself, and glimmers of central questions that continue to hound me. In fact, that entry is rather like my recent entry on The Pleasure of Being Robbed, in that it reads like a written account of a confrontation with (for me at the time) exciting and form-pushing new cinema, and in it I express aspects of myself alongside snatches of reflections and observations on the film. This is an important idea at the center of Inner Genre: when we talk about cinema, we talk about ourselves.

But I want to talk about Michael Haneke for a moment, and the captivating aspect of his art that comes from his reluctance to offer audiences answers and solutions, and the way this works within his films to embolden instances of mistrust, uncertainty, fear, and violence. He keeps hidden the interior world of antagonists (Funny Games, Code Unknown), who can also be self-harming protagonists (The Piano Teacher, Benny's Video, The Seventh Continent), and/or the identity of antagonists (Caché, White Ribbon), to motivate us, with a high degree of success, toward self-analysis, and to omit shortcuts for reducing the film to a dramatic presentation.

Time of the Wolf is a curious film because the fact that a catastrophe occurred before the film began is undeniable, as is its secondary importance to the aftermath. The catastrophe's nature is neither investigated nor explained in order to fix the film in a world of total uncertainty. This is how it differs from other Haneke films, which are usually about disruptive or injurious acts puncturing otherwise normal existences. In this one, massive uncertainty is the only narrative certainty.

Although this one giant mystery seems to engulf tinier, more specific mysteries present in many of Haneke's other films, it also emphasizes Haneke's perennial theme: the grand mystery of the human spirit. When people group together in Time of the Wolf, so too do their flaws accumulate, and Haneke illustrates through his blossoming narrative the exponential complexities of justice and fairness. Here the reasons behind characters' actions are often painfully clear, motivated by ideas about self-preservation, and used to investigate protean tolls of human imperfection, the way each person carries baggage of selfishness, pride, greed, and other obstructions of communal bliss. Questions are raised about mankind's ability to function in harmony.

It's significant that would-be hero figures embody conflicting characteristics as well. The mother's (Isabelle Huppert) timorous frailty impedes her maternal goals, Koslowski's (Olivier Gourmet) leadership is based on rules he alone makes and enforces, and the leaders of the group who join later deflect interpersonal retributions for the sake of protecting the group as a whole. And ultimately, don't each of them rest their priorities on foundations of opportunity for personal, more than communal, self-preservation? This suggests that people cannot live alone, and they cannot live together.

The sentiment echoes from the movie's first scene. Recall it now: one family encounters another in a village house and a gun is fired.

Recall, from the same first scene, the screaming baby in the mother's hands. Remember their later (but not so much later) arrival at the train station. What happened to the provisions and car they stole? And where has the baby gone?

In the final scene the young boy is held in the arms of the nightwatchman who stopped him from throwing himself naked on the fire by telling him hopeful wishes about a man in a sports car arriving to announce that everything bad is over, everything is fine now. He feeds the boy wishes to encourage him, but we know they're lies, the boy must know they're lies, and the final, horrible mystery seems to be: why keep going? Why not throw ourselves in the fire? It must be to follow a great lie.

That then is the reason to respect and admire Haneke, because although he knows we each carry within ourselves catastrophes and raging fire resolutions, he refuses to lie to keep us from them, and asks that we encounter the ugly places in ourselves, so what we may return to the world with newfound awareness. And hopefully some kind of strength to endure.

The Pleasure of Being Robbed

2011-05-10T18:24:00.000-07:00

Most great reviews attempt to navigate sub-surface meanings by charting surface maneuvers, such as what a filmmaker did and how it was done. For some viewers the 16mm aspect of The Pleasure of Being Robbed is almost as important as the filmed in NYC aspect, equal also to the non-professional, naturalistic (and charismatic) actors aspect, and the natural rhythms and sounds of the city aspect. Seen a certain way these choices compose a beautiful and elegant song by the filmmaker to the subject for the audience, and with the right performer, right shots, right tempo, and right feeling, we see a real person in a city that breathes.

It's easy to find and discover main character Eléonore (Eleonore Hendricks), a lively woman alive in a living city, because Joshua Safdie, filmmaker, closely and intensely searches for her. Many features of traditional drama are stripped away, thinning the clutter between audience and film. Safdie asks Eléonore to lead and control her narrative's direction, and so the movie exists for her and because she does (exist). It becomes her. The way she extends her arm to defend herself from a car as she runs across the street to meet her friend illuminates parts of her character, vital things that expose deep-level personality traits.

16mm's reputation is weaved with low-budget woes, but its frequent, distinct use has generated a history of important reference points. Shooting in NYC on 16mm is a style associated with gritty urban reality, used for films like Shadows by John Cassavetes, Abel Ferrara's Driller Killer and Ms. 45, Basket Case, and recently Ronald Bronstein's Frownland, among others. Its use here nears romantic. The Pleasure of Being Robbed's camera is handheld and unsteady, reminding the viewer of the camera and cameraman; colors pop in a conspicuously filmic way and can remind the viewer of texture and physicality, light passing through celluloid; all about it is this sense of honesty and naturalism and a rare and intimate interaction with the filmmakers and subject. In Hollywood films seem made by machines. This is the exact opposite.

These creative decisions have certain qualities and meanings that help us understand Eléonore and her world. The film doesn't tell you everything about her, it shows you only what she does and some things that happen (the things she does are not necessarily a result of what happened), and it keeps secrets and guards solutions, and neither glorifies nor denigrates her. Eléonore's choices often seem desperate, miscalculated, or irrational, and she doesn't always do the right thing or the thing she's 'supposed' to do. The film offers a subjective realm in which you make either make decisions about what type of person Eléonore is, observe her without question and judgment, or experience life with her as she does (I prefer the latter of course).

Wide Sargasso Sea

2011-05-09T11:02:00.000-07:00

Therese and Isabelle

2011-05-04T20:20:00.000-07:00

To be honest (and why wouldn't I be honest?), I wasn't sure which part of my body (penis, heart, or mind, in order of suspicion) would be most frequently stimulated while watching Therese and Isabelle, a lesbian love film from 1968 by Radley Metzger, a director of softcore sex films of an artistic nature. When it began in black and white I was even more curious, because for some reason I'd expected a color film. The other films I'd seen by Metzger, Score and The Image, were in color, but anyway Therese and Isabelle is black and white, and the answer is heart.

So much heart. Therese and Isabelle fits squarely in the tradition of boarding school romance narratives, and explores the meaning and makes subjective the experience of self-discovery that comes from investigation of the interior and/or physical world of another (and instigates all sorts of themes that I cherish).

It was Metzger's use of space and pacing that indicated to me what kind of movie this was going to be. The lead character Therese (Essy Persson) is sent to a new school in part because her mother has remarried some wealthy man whom she (the mother) enjoys making love to and traveling with. Therese isn't invited into their new lives, as she's made painfully aware, and so begins her time at the school questioning her perceptions on love, loyalty, intimacy, and self-identity.

I concede the point that my ~205kb cell phone photos, taken of my television from my couch, don't do justice to the beauty of the camerawork, landscapes, and architecture exhibited in the movie. While sometimes I question the meaning of background beauty in movies, in this one it's clear: why, when everything is so gorgeous, do I (Therese) feel so low?

The blocking sometimes evokes Michelangelo Antonioni, which, if you don't know, is actually not off base. Metzger began his civilian film career by cutting trailers for Janus, including Antonioni and Bergman films. Metzger once said that a compliment from Bergman about one of his trailers was the highlight of his (Metzger's) career (source needed, where did I hear this, did I dream it, am I making it up?). The dvd liner notes make studious mention of Georges Auric's contribution as composer for the film.

None of which matters or is important when the movie is on, because you can enter without cultural or filmic reference points, because the story is told with emotional precision and tonal accuracy. The POV is an adult Therese as she revisits the boarding school and memories of her and Isabelle's love affair are stirred by locations and objects around the grounds and school.

Isabelle (Anna Gaël) isn't the perfect romantic partner, which quality alone elevates the film into a realistic, painful, and imperfect realm. She also isn't Therese's only lover in the film, and the other encounter is poignant and necessary for emotional development, in case you still think this is some standard sex film.

Also, the movie really isn't very sexy. Most of what's explicit is narrated in voice over, and most of the voice over I had trouble finding sexy. This may have been purposeful in some instances, as their relationship is so clearly about more than sex, and their physical encounters are also about more than sex.

It's really about painful encounters with others, and it's really about the inherent instability and insecurity in our relationships with others (for me that's what it was about, maybe it'll say something else to you). Also the excitement, the nervousness, the adventure - all these things mixed up together. For example the above photo, wherein the girls stare at each other naked.

Or this photo, wherein Therese presses her ear against the wall and hears the sounds of others making love in the room next to the one she and Isabelle have rented to make love. You experience with Therese the process of learning about sexual identity, yours and others, and its ultimate value. To Metzger's credit you don't just experience it, you feel it too.

In Which I Spoil Incendies and Address an Enter the Void Issue

2011-04-26T14:39:00.000-07:00

Google Analytics informs me that Mystics in Bali(!), Cría Cuervos, Enter the Void and Incendies are the most frequently searched titles by which singles of people throughout the world find their way here. Though I don't think I answer, in their original entries, the questions implied by the search terms, and because I too am often disappointed by a lack of answers from the sites I visit for answers I'd like to offer the following two points:

Incendies Ending The rapist/torturer in the prison in which the mother was held as a political prisoner was her first son (which her other two children were searching for). So the son was raping the mother. The son/rapist is also the little boy at the beginning of the movie when the first Radiohead song (which, alas, I don't know the title of - another frequent search) plays. The mother identifies the son/rapist by his tattoo. That's why the two letters are delivered to him, one as a mother, and one as a victim. This also makes the father of the second and third children the first son, or in other words the man is their father and brother. I bet you actually knew this but didn't want to believe it.

Twin towers in Enter the Void During the Love Hotel sequence, as Oscar's spirit/the camera travels through the rooms of love makers, there is a moment that's either a flashback or a flashforward. The moment intercuts Linda and Alex's lovemaking (Linda also morphs into Oscar's mother [as Victor's mother did in the previous scene]). Like the final moment this intercut is out of focus (Noé has confirmed the woman in the birth scene is Oscar's mother): a man and woman couple, on a bed, hold a baby while a young girl in a yellow dress plays with a stuffed bear. The camera floats out the window and there's a skyline, and in the skyline is apparently the twin towers. I'm not a NYC skyline expert, but I think, like singles of Internet searchers across the world, that two buildings in the skyline are the twin towers. It's a confusing scene because the young girl is in a yellow dress, as Linda (young and old) often is in Enter the Void, and she has the bear Linda often has, but if it's Linda in the dress it can't be Linda on the bed with the baby, and also if it's Linda in the dress it can't be Oscar as a baby since Oscar is the older brother. The man appears to have long hair like Alex, and due to the content of the scene it intercuts (including the ejaculation, naturally) you would think it's Alex and Linda holding their second baby with their firstborn daughter playing with the bear and wearing the dress, perhaps a dream of the future Oscar has. But if those are the twin towers how can that be, since the towers were destroyed on September 11 2001?

Notes on Rubber

2011-04-19T12:36:00.000-07:00

NO REASON, SOME REASON, LOTS OF REASON
There is a kind of narrative that must be played out as long as the wheelchair bound spectator (Wings Hauser) lives, and a narrative is a kind of waterfall of reasons, fundamentally (this movie has many of those rocks which jut out from the otherwise smooth surface behind the waterfall). Things can make sense without being sensible, or as a friend told me after watching Rubber a second time, "There are parts of this movie I like without knowing why."

The movie begins with a series of chairs set up for no apparent reason that are destroyed for no apparent reason by an oncoming car along the desert road, but one of the spectators later questions why the chairs were destroyed when they could have been sat in - this joke begins a series of internarrative logic based paradoxes which expand in humorous and interesting ways through the movie's duration (by the way, the movie begins not with this car, but I believe with the man holding the binoculars, which is a weird image, later given reason when the spectators use the binoculars in an impossible way made possible by internarrative logic: it's how they watch the movie they create by watching it).

IS ROBERT INNOCENT OR MALEVOLENT?
The #1 reason I went to see Rubber a second time was to have a good time. The #2 reason was to investigate an alternate interpretation of Robert's character which was proposed to me over roasted bone marrow at the Little Bird Bistro on my birthday. Attempting to describe the movie for a friend, I began by stating that it's "about a malevolent tire that emerges from the desert without a past and embarks on a senseless mission of violence." Whether it was the special day, the bone marrow, or naive arrogance, I remember feeling that I was at the beginning of a pretty good description, which is sometimes difficult to do on the spot and unrehearsed. Only, then a friend across the table interrupted me, "Ahhhh. I don't know," he said, perhaps wagging his finger, "I thought Robert was an innocent." "Me too," someone else said. "Something about a tire's destructive nature and the fulfillment of natural urges" my first friend said. "Something about lions in the wild hunting for food," another friend said. I defended my position okay enough, but I don't believe I changed minds just then. Later of course there were things I wished I'd said, but didn't say then, but said, with appropriate conviction, in muddled whispers to myself while showering or aimlessly walking. Many people don't appreciate other people stirring misunderstandings or conflicting viewpoints, however, and so it's been my own battle since then.

Robert’s a pretty malicious character, but he’s also likeable. What was your inspiration for that?
Quentin Dupieux: Honestly, when I wrote it, it was only supposed to be an evil character. In my mind it was like, ‘Okay, it’s just the bad guy,’ but then, when I started to shoot it, I had to deal with a tire and there’s nothing evil about a tire. So I had to change my mind a little bit (laughs), and when we did the first tests with the remote controlled tire – I had the camera attached to a stick – and it was just following the remote controlled tire in the field and, at this point, the tire was like a dog. The way it was rolling and behaving in the field, it was like a dog. So I decided, ‘Okay, it’s like a dog. It has to be like a dog.’ That’s why there’s shots where it drinks water, things like that. Suddenly, it was not just an evil character. It was more like a stupid dog. That was the inspiration.

Dupieux's answer seems to validate both interpretations to some extent. I wonder how different it would be if Robert had a face, or at least eyes, and what that face or those eyes would make us believe, or rather, how those eyes or that face would strengthen the force of our beliefs. Ultimately the answer is that Robert is fictional and neither malevolent nor innocent, but rather a character obeying laws appointed by a writer constructing a narrative, and given the facelessness of Robert and the multiple original concepts for the inanimate object, it's the best answer. I also submit that this answer is no fun.

EVIDENCE OF MALEVOLENCE (can I say I'm so, so pleased with this note's heading?)
1. Robert explodes heads.
2. There is a montage of people with destroyed heads. These people are strewn about streets and sidewalks and seem unconnected to the narrative trajectory, i.e. the love story between Robert and Sheila, which motivates many of Robert's actions.
3. Robert doesn't attempt to destroy trees, buildings, cars, etc., and if he was truly innocent wouldn't he not be making these types of distinctions while expressing his inborn state of destructiveness?
4. It's true that tires are kind of destructive, but a) it's not like their principal purpose is destruction, like a bullet or missile or something, and b) if you view a tire as destructive it's only because of the way humans use them (they put them on their cars and drive over surfaces and sometimes minor obstacles), and hence it's a nurtured or acquired state, because if you see a tire just fucking lying on a store shelf not on a car or anything and like shiver from fear of personal injury caused by the lifeless tire you're a fucking weirdo.

THIS IS TOO CONFUSED TO COUNT BUT
My initial confrontation with the question of Robert as like a lion was to quip, "A lion doesn't seem innocent when it's attacking you," which was good enough to cause the group to consider, but upon review it really seems more like fate or circumstance is the malevolent force and not the lion, because the lion continues to behave as a lion, lacking aspects of self-awareness and premeditation that enable its action to be labeled malevolent, or at least its kill to be called murder. But for me this opened a rabbit hole into other considerations, primarily I began to wonder what animal first ate another animal, what was the first one with teeth that bit into another living creature, and whether the witness sensed on a primal level (which was just the normal level at that stage I guess) something wrong about carnivorousness, and like signaled with unspoken emotional communications that an abrupt change in the perceptions and realities of relationships and communities was taking place, if the animal witness thought, even without advanced levels of self-awareness and certain reasoning faculties, "this is going to lead us to horrible long-term consequences, this single act here" and if the animal trembled, really trembled. It seems to me the origins of senseless killings are tethered to the origins of purposeful killings, because when no one is eating anyone else, and then someone eats someone else, isn't that the beginning of malevolence? It would benefit the conversation to offer definitions of the words on trial:

malevolent |məˈlevələnt|
adjective
having or showing a wish to do evil to others

and

evil |ˈēvəl|
adjective
profoundly immoral and malevolent
• (of a force or spirit) embodying or associated with the forces of the devil
• harmful or tending to harm
• (of something seen or smelled) extremely unpleasant
noun
profound immorality, wickedness, and depravity, esp. when regarded as a supernatural force
• a manifestation of this, esp. in people's actions
• something that is harmful or undesirable

and

innocent |ˈinəsənt|
adjective
1 not guilty of a crime or offense
• [ predic. ] ( innocent of) without; lacking
• [ predic. ] ( innocent of) without experience or knowledge of
2 [ attrib. ] not responsible for or directly involved in an event yet suffering its consequences
3 free from moral wrong; not corrupted
• simple; naive
4 not intended to cause harm or offense; harmless
noun
an innocent person, in particular
• a pure, guileless, or naive person
• a person involved by chance in a situation, esp. a victim of crime or war
• ( the Innocents) the young children killed by Herod after the birth of Jesus (Matt. 2:16).

An animal is harming the other animal it eats, even if it's within its nature to eat it, though it's free from moral wrong, and as it doesn't know the potential depths of its own consciousness it can't be expected to grasp the potential depth of another consciousness. The thing about mankind is we've brought efficiency and numbers to the act of killing, and introduced the term murder - which I definitely don't think animals do, murder, given the premeditation aspect (though it's kind of cute to imagine lions hunched over a table covered in blueprints, cigars in their lion mouths) - but I reject the claim that this makes us extra evil, or only extra evil, because we're also capable of extreme tenderness, compassion, empathy, mercy, rectitude, etc. We're simply extra capable creatures who possess sufficient reasoning faculties that we hope will eventually win the battle over our extra harmful potentialities. The thing about the cycle of life and nature and shit is that advancement and evolution entail injustices that must be balanced by nature, and I think it's interesting that human self-awareness and reasoning allow us to kill plentifully, but also love exceptionally and to amazing degrees. Robert demonstrates an advanced degree of self-awareness, a component of humanistic reasoning, by loving Sheila for purposes beyond evolutionary or survival advantages. She doesn't pet him, take care of him, etc., though she doesn't attack him either. Robert's consciousness lacks a sense of morality, perhaps, but I believe his knowledge of love is superior to, for example, King Kong's. Robert's story is like the story of King Kong - Robert is taken from the jungle of unconsciousness into the civilization of consciousness - and they're both captivated by a single woman - but King Kong behaves like a real animal, and is only violent in animalistic senses, while Robert demonstrates several human and superhuman qualities that could potentially result in culpability for his actions, which extend beyond self-preservation. I'd have dinner with King Kong, but not Robert.

EVIDENCE OF INNOCENCE (AND EXPRESSIONS OF PERSONAL BIAS)
1. Well, it's not like lions confusedly attack trees and buildings (please link to appropriate article w/pictures if they do). They attack things which pose a threat to them, and Robert makes peoples' heads explode because they are his potential threat (but was the water bottle a threat, was the glass bottle, and was the goddamn bunny?).
2. As Dupieux discovered when he began to consider the tire as an evil entity, a tire is not inherently evil. Think of the lion again, and think of training a lion to attack, which is weird so downgrade and think of an attack dog: the dog takes on a violent purpose due to conditioning and training. Robert is trained to destroy through a past life as a car's tire (as seen, in fact, during a flashback after the pool drowning incident). The lesson of destruction is forced upon it through prolonged experiences that shape its view of reality, made to absorb violence at the center of its being, its nature corrupted by man. I think Robert demonstrates signs of advanced consciousness and self-awareness, for example emulating Sheila by showering (to shower, Robert must have used his mind powers to turn the water knob), swimming, and watching television, and I think these evidences of advanced consciousness rule out this consideration, but maybe not.

EVIDENCE OF THE NARRATIVE BEING THE CORE OF ROBERT'S ESSENCE AND THE SUBSTANCE OF HIS DESTRUCTIVE NATURE
1. Robert becomes inert (at the bottom of the pool, though, a kind of multiply motivated inertia I admit) when the narrative is believed to be concluded due to the deaths of the spectators. Once this is disproved and reported, he re-animates and kills the hotel owner.
2. Seems like, in the same scene, he should have exploded the head of Lieutenant Chad (Stephen Spinella) to eliminate the brunt of his woes.

EVIDENCE THAT ROBERT COMES TO EXIST ON THIS NARRATIVE PLANE AS A CREATION OF THE NARRATIVE AND THEREFORE HAS INTRINSIC CHARACTERISTICS WORTHY OF DISCUSSION
1. Robert, in his new form, explodes the head of the wheelchair man and continues his journey (towards Los Angeles!).

I Am Curious (Yellow) and Zusje

2011-04-05T14:16:00.000-07:00

Mr. De Grazia: Would you state for the jury, please, some of the ways in which this film explores important issues of today?
Stanley Kauffmann: I would begin by stating its basic tone, temper, or theme is the idea of transition, that the picture has grappled basically with the idea that we are living in a time of profound change in all aspects and perspectives of modern industrial civilization; and this basic theme of change, of transition, which is affecting all our lives, willy or nilly, is explored in four or five different veins.
That is, we see change in social attitudes, change in political attitudes, change in that version of political attitudes that deals with military views, changes in sexual relations, changes in the status of women in the society ...

They fought the battle in the courts and on the screen, but does the screen remember the fight? I Am Curious (Yellow) reminds me of the possibility of absolute freedom in film narratives, of the creative potential of dramatic form in cinema. For example, for years I've carried the dream of mid-film credits, for whatever reason, and now I know what that would be like. It'd be charming.

In special features Vilgot Sjöman explains how he asked his producer for film and total creative control with no script, and because it was the 60s or Sweden or for other reasons, this happened. Sjöman shot, edited, shot, edited, and felt he didn't have a complete film, so he asked his producer for more film and ended with enough footage for two movies, Yellow and Blue, the colors on Sweden's flag.

In the book edition of Gus Van Sant's screenplays for Even Cowgirls Get the Blues/My Own Private Idaho, Van Sant talks about his screenwriting form, which he admits isn't traditional. He notes that Hollywood standards are based on a model of conformity, and he fucks conformity. He says the distinctness of his films is a direct result of the individuality present in the way he writes his screenplays.

I believe in the principles of both these anecdotes. The creative artist must allow itself limitless, unreserved potential. Cronenberg talks about this another way when he says the writer shouldn't write with a budget in mind. He insists it'd be a form of self-censorship.

Stanley Kauffmann: Psychologically, the film does its exploration in carrying forward at the same time several different strands of unassailable reality and of variations on that reality that play back and forth, that present a nicely variegated, thick texture of fact and sort of fantasies on fact, which is representative of what our society is beginning to be more and more aware of in terms of our daily perceptions of what we see, that there is a great difference between the black and white that has been formerly assumed of what is fact and what is fantasy ...

Although after all this is said, the film must be watched. What is it like to watch I Am Curious (Yellow)? It's sometimes confusing, boring, alarming, etc. It's a different type of movie, and brings with it different types of feelings.

Stanley Kauffmann: ...what this director is aiming at is exactly that slight fuzziness, slight blurring of the line between what is fact and what is fiction.
It is a part of a modern view of not just art but a lot of matters. What used to be thought of as a clear dividing line, an iron barrier between art and life, should go or can go or has gone, and we are not really aware of it yet.

I quote Kauffmann not simply as an authority, but because of the eloquence and insight in his answers, and his participation in the context of Yellow. Such compassion was shown for a quest of meaning, such tenderness for the individual. It's important to me to see that the movie, in its time, was treated seriously despite its potential lack of solutions, and despite its sometimes playful surface. Kauffmann excavated the inner questions of Yellow, so that the court could grasp the sense of a shared journey between audience and film.

I believe that while exploring the dimensions of a film, as an audience member, you should also be exploring dimensions of yourself, and as the film is more and more revealed to you, you are more revealed to yourself. This can happen in so many interesting ways, but a direct course to indirectness shouldn't be dismissed, although I think in contemporary films it perhaps has been, as a preference for elusive focal points has been relegated to the art house. Mainstream characters, potentially perfect (sometimes designed to be perfectly flawed for dramatic purposes), have replaced people, who have a history of imperfection and ambiguous virtue.

In particular it's interesting that a complex, multi-sided and ongoing battle for societal harmony is explored on a macro scale through the politics of Sweden, and on a micro scale through Lena's experiences, especially her stormy love affair and home life. Yellow's narrative is of Lena, a free thinking 20 year old who tallies the changes brought by radical external development as she participates in her life's narrative and expansion of personality identity, sometimes cordial and sometimes in conflict with the outside world.

The movie knows our greatest problems lie within as much as anywhere else, that the seeds of discord are in the hearts of people and their relationships with each other. The movie wants to truthfully depict this, but is concerned about its manipulations and short cuts, and so Sjöman includes himself and his own conflicts as a filmmaker. The documentary aspects aren't granted automatic ascendency over the fictional elements, and sometimes the two are blended so that vital questions remain more important than easy answers. I too suffer from immense confusions, not easily solved by applying dramatic devices to my life (though I sometimes try, to great disaster, because strong emotions rarely, and then hardly, follow story beats), and find the ideas of Yellow sometimes liberating, sometimes cathartic, and sometimes simply, wondrously relatable.

The question of the camera and its effect on reality is a fundamental concern in filmmaking. Zusje's technique of a protagonist in a camcorder pov raises implicit ideas about the camera's ability to record facets of a person's soul, and of a camera's ability to illuminate the emotions of a person in front of or behind the camera.

Martijn visits his estranged sister Daantje, who has started her own life in Amsterdam. What Martijn's life is like I'm less sure of, and what I know about Daantje I know from Martijn's camera. The film is the record of their relationship as witnessed by Martijn's camera, and we cannot know about the man behind the camera without knowing about the people in front of the camera, and vice versa, and the audience works to realize what they are not showing or telling.

The subjective camera brings us closer to the characters' living experiences and creates an ambiguous emotional surface. For example, why does Martijn hide behind the camera, what is he hiding, and is he hiding? Another example, do the others tolerate Martijn despite his camera, or because of his camera - are they starving for recognition, in whatever form, for attention, however it comes? Is it even about any of these things? The nexus of the film is in the relationship between brother and sister, and the film's narrative is the surface, the mask to, an inward investigation of intricate connections between the siblings.

I had long wanted to do a film that felt like a found home video, and Zusje is that film. Martijn fabricates and conjures a narrative of partial and absolute reality, aiming his camera as a way of personal emphasis, and the people around him respond in spontaneous and unprogrammed behavior sometimes, calculated and purposeful behavior other times. That is, the camera becomes a symbol of the human eye, the obtrusiveness of our lives upon each other, and the way our presence shapes the lives of others.

These two films represent courageous encounters with the substance that envelops certain mysteries of being human. If the mysteries were clearly solved, the essence of mysteries would be neutralized, and the struggle for self-identity trivialized. Answers needn't be strained from dramatic forms. In forcing clarity on complex matters there is the danger of reductionism, and also an ironic non-admission of complexity, a kind of dramatic accusation about the nature of uncertainty. Simply, irrationality itself must thrive in the heart of a film that truly wants to deal with matters of irrational humanity and eternal riddles.

In the spirit of Yellow, I'd like not to end on what appears to be a summation. I'd like to say that I like the scene in Yellow when Lena has a conversation with MLK Jr. from her bike. I like her pedaling feet, and I like Jr.'s face, which must have done so much of his work for him, as it's an incredibly sincere and naked human face, with eyes like deep portals, etc.

Cop (1988)

2011-03-31T11:28:00.000-07:00

Joanie Pratt (Randi Brooks): Have you had breakfast yet?
Lloyd Hopkins (James Woods): I haven't been to bed yet.
Joanie: If you come over you can have a little of both.
Lloyd: I thought you didn't like to talk to cops.
Joanie: Who said anything about talking?
Lloyd: What's your address?

Policeworkprivatelife, where's the line? When not having sex with his wife, which he often doesn't, Lloyd has sex with women on the periphery of his detective work, as a time saving measure. He's a work obsessed cop, the type who develops an unprofessional monomania and bends the law when necessary. He has a very high arrest record, so people respect him, including higher-up Dutch Peltz (Charles Durning). Lloyd is just so damn good (or is he, if you know what I mean).

I'd like to know the roots of this type of film and character, but I'm not sure how to investigate its history. Touch of Evil, Orson Welles 1958, is a very important and early example in the film world, and Jim Thompson's 1952 novel The Killer Inside Me is a remarkable development in shaded cop figures (though not the same; I'd have dinner with Lloyd, but not Lou). I'm not sure if those are the earliest or ground-laying examples because I'm not an aficionado of crime films or novels. There are people who are experts in this field, and I'd like to meet one and ask them. I will look for the loner in the bar, wearing a fedora, and ask that person. If that person happens to be James Ellroy, he'll ask me if I know that Cop is an adaptation of his 1984 novel Blood on the Moon, and I'll say yes. The film is adapted and written by James B. Harris, who was a producer for Stanley Kubrick on The Killing (and Paths of Glory and Lolita). The Killing has a corrupt cop but not a questionably corrupt cop.

Although I believe cops like this exist in real life, and Michael Mann told me they take purer forms, I don't believe they exist like depicted in Cop, which is very sensationalistic and even kind of goofy. For example, the killer is a poet who leaves notes like "Next class - phys ed/Then you'll be dead." Movies like this can be a lot of fun, but also some of the goofiness is poorly done and perhaps unintentional. More than anything else, more than the clichés, the cardboard characters, the cheap dramatics, the easy laughs, more than anything it bothers me that a major dramatic moment takes place in a phone booth.

The above depicts the revelation of the true identity of the killer. It's in a fucking phone booth, over the phone. The scene may have been taken directly from the book, but it shouldn't have been, because even if it works in the book there's no way this is a good movie scene. If anticlimax is its intention it comes off as disingenuous given the loud dramatic notes that ring throughout the movie. How a movie with lines like "I don't give a shit if you two were fucking each other in a bathtub of cocaine" can come to make such a bad decision is beyond me.

Mogambo

2011-03-29T12:33:00.000-07:00

Linda Nordley (Grace Kelly): Feeling down darling? It must be those shots we took. The doctor said they sometimes cause a reaction.
Victor Marswell (Clark Gable): What shots?
Donald Nordley (Donald Sinden): Yesterday, at the settlement, the tsetse fly injections.
Victor: Tsetse fly? Your letter didn't say anything about going up into tsetse fly country.
Linda: We understood we had to go through that territory to get to the gorillas.
Victor: Not necessarily. And why gorillas?
Donald: It's a pet theory of mine. I want to study gorillas, their family life and so on. Even get some of their vocal sounds on a tape recorder I brought with me. It's a theory on the derivative evolution -

Victor (interrupting): I'm sorry, I wouldn't understand, and again, to be quite frank, it's a long and difficult safari. It doesn't fit in with my schedule.

Victor Marswell isn't interested in much more than his manliness, and Mogambo presumes that women, for example Ava Gardener and Grace Kelly, when confronted with this man, are unable to resist him. Contemporary social and cultural norms of manliness and man beauty are substituted for believable development of sexual tension, and a then-popular, widespread conception of Gable as attractive is necessary in order to understand the romantic triangle.

John Ford's Mogambo, 1953, is a remake of Victor Fleming's Red Dust, 1932; John Lee Mahin worked as a writer on both, from an earlier play by Wilson Collison. Clark Gable, somewhat ridiculously, stars in both films. Red Dust is a lean 83 minute film that still holds up, last time I checked, last year on my birthday for a rubber plantation double-feature with White Woman. Red Dust is pre-code and pre-manners, the kind of early Hollywood movie run by lunatics and preposterous behavior (the kind that's a lot of fun in my opinion).

Much of Mogambo has lost its flavor over time. For a number of reasons it was tough for me to think of Victor as heroically manly. First, he flirts with women using corny, transparent sexual innuendos. Coded sexual language is a familiar Hollywood device, but here the dialogue is strained and uninspired. It's just not sexy. Red Dust's famous Jean Harlow bath scene is fun, sexy, and surprising; in Mogambo, Ava Gardner's shower scene is pretend turn-on. Second, his Africa is both real and fake, on-set and on-location, a mixture of rear projections and cut-aways.

It's only real when it's safe, like when it's baby elephants. It feels like Victor lives in safety, which he does. Perhaps Mogambo's 116 min running time is a result of so much Africa documentary footage. Exciting on its own, it doesn't manage to add truthfulness to the movie's love story, and the worlds never converge, even when they're supposed to, for example when the gorilla charges. Third, the fiftyish Clark Gable did not win my heart, personally.

Ford's intention must have been to use the exotic as an intensifying backdrop. This would have worked if the love story itself had reached exotic heights. It remains standard love story fair, if not worse. I felt bad at the end, for everyone. Linda's husband's smartness and manners aren't enough to keep her, he isn't exciting enough, and when she wants to enjoy dirty hut sex with Victor she does. When Victor feels bad for Donald and gives Linda back, he decides to marry Eloise (Gardner), and Eloise is more than happy to be asked back.

There's a reality to the outcome that I respect Ford for observing, and the story and its consequences are basically the same as Red Dust. The difference is the bloated running time, and the visions and sounds of Africa (Ford used tribal music in place of a studio score). These are efforts to make the story something it's not, to transform it to a larger scale.

Overall it's a melodramatic vision of a standard drama, but maybe because it's Ford, there are also inspired moments. Like when Eloise first leaves on the boat, seen above, filled with nice little details, including the leopard in the box. In the next scene Eloise paces back and forth in front of the leopard, and the leopard paces along with her. That's charming. The moment Donald approaches Linda and wraps a scarf around her neck, clutching it, and the only noise is the wind, is a sexy thirty second scene. The shining moments are nice, and I wish there had been more.

Waterloo Bridge (1931) and Red-Headed Woman

2011-03-27T15:23:00.000-07:00

Roy (on the right): It's about a girl.
Roy's stepfather, Major Wetherby: About a what?
Roy: Well, about a girl.
Major Wetherby (to mother): I don't know what he's talking about.
Roy's mother (o.s.): A girl, darling, you know, a girl. A girl.
Major Wetherby: Yeah, yeah, yes, I know, a girl is. Well, what about it, boy?

Roy (Douglass Montgomery) meets Myra (Mae Clark) on Waterloo Bridge during an air raid, each helping an elderly lady recover potatoes, fallen from her basket. Fourteen days before he returns to the trenches, Roy, nineteen years old, falls for Myra, a sometimes chorus girl and hooker. He intends to marry.

"Identification...not only connects us to the protagonist onscreen but, at a deeper level, through our implicit understanding of cinematic language, to a basic sense of ourselves as cohesive subjects." - Todd Haynes introducing his book of screenplays for Far From Heaven, Safe, and Superstar.

Waterloo Bridge, a 1931 pre-code hyperdrama, is an early film by the forty-one year old James Whale. He directs with an eye for behavioral nuance, and unusually prominent sincerity. There's more than mischief to the film.

There's mischief too. The narrative sometimes makes sharp-turns, or perhaps even performs a figure-8. It moves with surprising speed, passing through bouts of comedy, stretches of sympathetic character observation, and bursts of cinematic jubilance. When I watch pre-code films I wonder about the logic of the audience members' lives, so near the center of the depression. This is a narrative of hope struggle and strength, still questioning and being hurt by malevolent interior forces, not yet arrived at the cynicism of film noir, but heading for it, heading for worse without awareness.

Roy, if you can believe it, doesn't suspect Myra's "private income." He's unspoiled by reckless living, somewhat innocent. He's brave, but knows little of his enemy's nature. Myra knows the enemy well, and Whale shows deep concern for the nature of her dignity. She knows Roy's money comes from sweetness, which makes it different, but she wonders how to have a pure relationship with Roy.

Whale's characters, even when reciting pat, over-written lines, or under-performing as actors, maybe especially then, are connected with a pulsing sense of life. Curiosity in the true emotions of his characters brings him to explore the fringe details of their lives.

Backgrounds are often animated by gardeners pruning trees, or passing milk carts, everywhere the sense of the film opening into the lives of the living.

Were the lives of Waterloo Bridge's contemporaries as capricious and turbulent as the film, torn by internal and external forces, and are our lives now? The movie ends as it must, as truthfully as it could for its time. It might surprise you to know its final moment. I'd like to watch the 1940 post-code remake, and 1956's Gaby, to see how they handle some of the same questions Whales does here.

Myra's reluctance to legitimize the fiscal-sexual power of her femininity adds another layer to her determination. She wants to believe it's possible to preserve her personal integrity, and to establish customized boundaries based on life experiences and realistic expectations. The second time Roy offered her free money, and she attempted to refuse him, reminded me of a scene in the recent My Joy, a film separated by 70 years from this one.

Myra prostitutes herself for a degree of independence, and draws lines between her profession and romantic love, while Jean Harlow, in Red-Headed Woman, and Barbara Stanwyck, in Baby Face, each play a secretary who enters the pants of the man in the top floor office, in order to climb rungs on a social ladder from which they're otherwise excluded. They seek not nights with the men, not only a month's rent, but full lives of luxury and class.

There's mischief too, and open enjoyment of fulfilled desires. Harlow's journey in particular seems entirely joy-focused, as Red-Headed Woman deviates from the other two movies by never forcing the protagonist to change or learn from conflict. She jumps from one bed to the next without a glance back, either because she chooses not to confront the inner toll, or because for her there isn't an inner toll; it's an easy choice between gutter and glamor, and Harlow's Lil has freed herself from the social responsibilities of love and sex.

In this way Lil reminds me of Boudu from Jean Renoir's Boudu Saved from Drowning, 1932. Homeless Boudu was taken in by the wealthy but rejected the prospect of change, and the film rejected the idea that Boudu must undergo a transformation or epiphany because of his contact with high society and comfort. Boudu, in the end, is Boudu, and Lil, in the end, is Lil.

District B13, District 13: Ultimatum, and Taken

2011-03-09T14:44:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, while watching Pierre Morel's Taken, I felt a sense of magic. Not about the movie, but about me. I felt like a soothsayer, because I knew what was going to happen next and what was going to be said next (most people will), especially in those beginning thirty minutes, before the daughter is kidnapped, when the characters and their relationships are being set up. I'm not just being an asshole, I'm also being sincere: there was truly an instance in which I mouthed the dialogue along with the actress (Famke Janssen), despite never having seen the film or read the script.

I imagine Luc Besson thinking of the idea while eating eggs for breakfast. He calls screenwriter Robert Mark Kamen, who amazingly has a career as a screenwriter dating back to The Karate Kid, and Kamen pounds out the script by the time he meets Besson for lunch. Over sandwiches they create a second draft. "It's almost perfect," Besson says, "except you did forget the Arabic..." "Sheikh," Kamen interrupts, "I did forget the Arabic sheikh or sultan or something. But that's what this meeting is for monsieur Besson, my apologies." "Yes ... oh my god wait, let's put him on a big fancy yacht. Fuck yeah. Also, I'd like a rimjob. What do you think?" "I think that's why you're monsieur Besson, monsieur Besson, that's what I think!" (Rimjob). Etc. By dinner Besson has called Pierre Morel (the director of a film he previously produced and originated the story for, District B13) and the movie is officially in pre-production.

And isn't it likely that my imagined version is simply an exaggerated version of the truth? It's clear that Besson now concocts whole films around a handful of attractive and sensational elements, and then hires a screenwriter to attach bullshit and perfunctory story formulas. That's too bad, on the one hand, because I'm speaking about the same Besson who once gave us better films like Le Dernier Combat (which had the courage to be what these films should be - without dialogue; some action movies in the future, I hope, will be more like silent films), The Big Blue, La Femme Nikita ... well you know who Besson is. In District 13: Ultimatum's blu-ray special features there's an interview with Cyril Raffaelli, who had a starring role in both District B13 movies and also served as fight choreographer. In this interview he's describing a moment in which he discussed his idea for a fight scene with Besson, who seemed pleased with what he was hearing. "Just so you know," Besson told him, "in this scene you're going to be holding a Van Gogh."

It's pretty great, on the other hand, because Besson still wants to create cinematic special-worlds, engineered for the delight of an appreciative audience. The action moments of Taken are when Morel shines the most, naturally, and I don't mind the way he emphasizes cinematic propulsion over continuity and logic. He edits purely for the sensational delight of the audience, and a late car chase and fight scene were expressionistic and thrilling rather than realistic and detailed. I don't mind that at all.

He succeeds in engaging the audience because he thinks as an audience member seeking escapism, exaggerated emotions ("I don't like realistic movies," a friend once told me, "no, real life is boring enough.") and heightened experiences. Do you remember earlier when I imagined the brainstorming for Taken? I used some of the same narrative techniques used to jump-start Taken. It is tempting to take shortcuts for dramatic effect, to write in emotional shorthand for these types of movies. That too I understand.

But in my opinion if you're going to exaggerate, and I've said this before, exaggerate all the fucking way. District B13, for example, is indeed a better movie than Taken. Not because it's smarter, no no no, but because it succeeds in capturing the bliss of decadent fantasy. It's as if the French found an abandoned Escape from New York narrative vehicle, hot-wired the thing, and drove it into 21st century Paris. Glorious! The extent of the liberation you allow your imagination is the difference between a low or high-brow film and a middle-brow film, and middle-brow films are worthless in every way except generating ticket sales and quickly becoming forgotten.

This is also why I think District 13: Ultimatum is better than District B13, even though I fell asleep three times while watching it(?!). For District B13 Besson used actor Bibi Naceri (who plays the crime lord in the movie) as co-screenwriter, and they designed some story about, um, revenge and valor, things like that. No co-screenwriter is listed for Ultimatum, and themes are borrowed from the original. Based on the Raffaelli story I already retold, and the experience of having watched the movie, I'd speculate they made the shit up while they went along, i.e. action took precedence over story. That's how they sometimes work in Hong Kong too, and I've come to appreciate the method. It allows for the superficial elements of superficial films to shine, as they should.

General opinion seems to be that District B13 is the better movie. That's probably because its narrative makes more sense, relatively, and so its action has more meaning or impact. Get out of town. The meaning of the District B13 movies is action, and its true themes are punches, kicks, and parkour. Ultimatum clearly better develops these themes. The story, as it is, is ten times more confounding, outrageous, and unbelievable; as it should be. If I'm going to have a conversation with a crazy person, I want to have a conversation with the craziest goddamn person in the city, personally.

PIFF 2011: A Few Specific Things

2011-02-28T21:25:00.000-08:00

For various reasons it's unlikely I'd listen to a full 58 albums or read a full 58 books within a month's span. One reason is it might get in the way of watching movies. From the end of January to the end of February I attended 58 theatrical programs 62 times, while continuing to view titles at home*.

Which is to say films took over my life, in not an entirely positive manner. A lady told me she didn't know what was going on in Egypt and it occurred to me I didn't know what was going on in my life. Plus, Egypt didn't have any films in PIFF this year. Egypt's Garbage Dreams was one of three amazing documentaries at the festival last year.

I'm bound to compare this year and last year, as I'm bound to compare the films to each other; hence, the last post, with films ranked by a count of stars. Which is silly and vague, overall.

So I wanted to say a little more about some films I wanted to say a little more about. For example, I nearly walked out of Poland's All That I Love during its first half, but several good writing choices and two sexy scenes (even middle-brow dramas have sex scenes in European films) made me glad I stayed. The relationship between the band singer and housewife was depicted in tender but brutal tones, and fully developed might have turned into something resembling Fassbinder. Conversely, Sweden's Behind Blue Skies began with several strong dramatic decisions and a sexy scene, but its narrative suffered from diminishing inspiration. A scene with Martin's (Bill Skarsgård) cock in a girlfriend's mouth, as she attempts to persuade him to spend the night with her, was very well done.

At the beginning of The Housemaid, a South Korean remake, a girl stands on a ledge overlooking a neon city block and the camera is over-the-shoulder. My friend says "Enter the Void" enthusiastically. The rest of the movie disappoints, and by the end just goes up in flames. Thankfully, real flames. The Revenant was the worst of the midnight screenings, but somehow charming, like its writer/director D. Kerry Prior, who proudly brags about beginning his career in the special effects department of Don Coscarelli's movies. His film quivers with life but never bursts.

Good Morning to the World was an encounter with a micro-budget Japanese art house film, probably made by a young filmmaker. The way Hirohara Satoru wanted to use his camera to express the interior loneliness of his character made me less lonely, and I hope the filmmaker finds a path that leads to fully realized films. The Woods was this type of movie: everything I didn't like about the movie could perhaps be used as a reason to like the movie. But I don't buy it. Films like Milestones and Symbiopsychotaxiplasm show you can have hippie idealism and also create an interesting film. The Woods dresses a formless, hollow narrative in clothes of innocent rebellion, and if you can buy that you can buy the whole thing. I'll buy Gas-s-s-s. No one could decide if The Woods was more self-indulgent than Heartbeats, but Heartbeats won me sometimes with its sincerity, because sincere self-indulgence is still sincerity.

In Italy's The Double Hour the dream was real (and in The Last Circus the dream is very, very real), but I could hardly care because its double-cross story is entirely lifeless. Just like the art design and attention to period detail don't elevate the predictable, cheap dramatics of Spain's Black Bread or Lope. France's The Princess of Montpensier, directed by Bertrand Tavernier, is better because it treats period detail with a light, minimalist touch, and the characters feel greater in importance than the settings.

Human Resources Manager was the second best movie at PIFF about the transportation of a dead person, as La Pivellina was the third best movie involving a circus performance (the latter suffered from a low-quality source material, which was too bad). Cameraman was illuminating and sometimes inspiring, but clearly preaches to the choir (the same choir was better preached to in Clouzot's Inferno).

As it began I was afraid I was going to like New Zealand's Boy too much. It begins with a great montage over the audio of Boy's class presentation. The montage and presentation provide the audience with knowledge of Boy and his environment, and though the technique was familiar, I loved everything, all the small touches, like the notebook paper animation, dead-pan Michael Jackson admiration, and other curious details. Unfortunately, the experience was for me more curious than emotional, which is how some felt about the opening night film, François Ozon's Potiche. They could be right - but as with other things, if you want to be that thing, be it all the way. And I thought Potiche was curious, playful, and charming for its duration. It's sort of like if Scott Pilgrim was shown on a television in a Douglas Sirk movie, if that makes sense to you.

Japan's Mutant Girls Squad was Scott Pilgrim shown on a television in a Shinya Tsukamoto movie, if that makes sense to you. It sometimes murdered me with novelty and exuberance, and its commitment to cinematic insanity impressed me. It's better than Potiche which I gave a half-star more. I hope that demonstrates the faultiness of the star system, and also the absurdity and energy of Mutant Girls Squad, which I recommend to anyone wanting a cinematic freak out.

Real life conversation: from a friend's point of view, I should care more about the humanitarianism side of Spain's Even the Rain. I tried to make it clear my disappointment was with the dramatic shortcuts and easy answers (which Aftershock and The Whistleblower suffered from to even greater degrees). I appreciate that Even the Rain internally addresses several innate hypocrisies and contradictions in its film type, but I wanted more from the character design, not the ideas. It's possible to do both, as Costa-Gavras and Pontecorvo demonstrate.

The same could be said about Denmark's A Family and In a Better World, both of which I think begin with a promise of emotional honesty they ultimately betray in the interest of dramatic form. On the one hand these movies create a full-size portrait of an issue, on the other hand they neither trust their characters nor the film viewing audience with a component of imagination or mystery. They illuminate all the shadows - thus missing the point of shadows. Isn't that the error of so many films? They want to be films - the popular, widely accepted concept of films - so dearly they willingly seek comfort over challenge. The end of Germany's When We Leave, good or bad, designates it as a movie. A good movie ending brings a question or answer to both the character and audience, and in this case it's hard not to think mainly about the end in terms of dramatic structure, thus stripping the preceding moments of some of their grace. The difference between my appreciation for France's Illegal (how many mother/son relationship films were there this year?) and When We Leave, which both both use dramatic form to expresses emotional intensity, may be a result of Illegal's slightly less definitive ending.

Austria's The Robber is like character contrivance as religious, spiritual, and cinematic worship. The film is all speed and grace. This is sort of fucking brilliant: he's a bank robber who is also a marathon runner, and after each robbery there's a kind-of marathon in which he flees the scene(s) of crime. He's Mann's professional criminal developed to a logical absurdity. The narrative is a polished version of the blank-faced criminal odyssey.

The more I watch and like yakuza films, the more I like Takeshi Kitano. Outrage's deadpan brutality is occasionally softened by environmental flourishes or incredible consequence, and sometimes a scene has both intensity and density. But I never feel like it accumulates dramatic urgency, and I don't feel any closer to the movie by the end. This may also have been my problem with Great Britain's The Arbor, a much different movie, a documentary about British working-class playwright Andrea Dunbar and her family. Dunbar was a mother, and the movie develops beyond the story of Dunbar by entering the story of her children, who recount their stories in taped sessions that are played while actors lip-synch the recordings. I admire its formal inventiveness and narrative nakedness, but sometimes the technique interfered with my emotional investment, and I struggled with the distance between the actual person's voice, and the actor's body and moving mouth.

If you're going to be contrived, you can be contrived all the way, as Spain's The Last Circus demonstrates. The movie makes a thrill ride out of contrivance, and pushes the viewer further into the insanity of its concept as the film progresses. It's a crazy movie, in a completely safe way, and I admire it for its sometimes lavish detours into narrative incredibility. The mania is directed, by Alex de la Iglesia, sometimes with cinematic and visual grace, and sometimes for gaudy fun; if you begin to lose sight of the difference the film works. I did hear one lady say "What kind of person would like this film?".

USA's Cold Weather wants to create the contrived out of natural materials (it's from the city of Portland). Writer/director Aaron Katz attempts to translate a personal, naturalistic style into compact, genre form, and the result sometimes exposes the limits of each. I would say it makes the sides bulge, in a good way, as Katz continues to ask important questions about film nature, and its relationship with the natural, and succeeds in pulling off a meta-genre film without violating filmmaking principles previously demonstrated. It's a growth film for Katz, and might be a film that grows on me.

How to Die in Oregon made tears swell in my eyes three times, and I took a break from the movie after its first twenty minutes. I went into the lobby for a moment, because everything was so heavy for me, and then returned to the movie. It's truly hard for me to separate my feelings about the film from the intense feelings the stories produced in me. I can't imagine making this film, I can't imagine spending hundreds of hours pursuing this and editing it and living with it all the time. I liked the film and I can't imagine watching it again. The film's own clear headedness is a testament to the documentary skills of its maker.

Chile's Nostalgia for the Light brought the universal and personal together through two narrative strands of equal interest and philosophic weight: astronomers, and women who seek remains of the disappeared; both in the Atacama Desert. The complimentary aspects of the narratives are skillfully developed and explored. Mexico's Circo wasn't a documentary version of Geek Love, but a sadder, realer story of circus life and family, less sideshow and more acrobatic. It follows the Ponces as they struggle to find an audience and grow as performers, and investigates the shared traits of real life and circus life. Like the family members, I wasn't sure which I preferred.

Italy's The Four Times was a big surprise, and the second biggest discovery after My Joy. In The Four Times, it feels like Michelangelo Frammartino directs nature. Four narrative strands are given equal emphasis and attention (one of the strands is a baby goat, and another strand is a single tree). The Four Times is an amazing movie of amazing natural and narrative simplicity, fully realized by a sophisticated film design.

Ukraine's My Joy vividly draws the viewer into a miserable world through a perspective of utter bleakness - a message about the transference and perpetuation of hate and fear. It's an icy, cruel film, haunted by violence, that manages both to depict malevolence and conjure it as well. Its overall lack of redemption emboldens several of its core tenets, denying the audience the same escape from harsh reality impossible for its characters. Sergei Loznitsa demonstrates an extraordinary talent for cinematic craft, and his skill in creating fully realized sequences allows the film to work.

In Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, every element of the film's design works in harmony, creating a lush sensory experience. The movie is a steamy love session with cinema. Weerasethakul creates rich, dense sequences, which work because of their intensity, sincerity, and mystery. The film builds and expands several themes and environments introduced in Weerasethakul's earlier films, and continues to enlarge the meanings of his films, which work well together when seeking sometimes subterranean themes. His actors are given or seem to be given total freedom, and sometimes encounter fantasy elements in a realistic but cinematically surprising state of nonplus (and then a kind of tonal, philosophical fusion; a spiritual condition of perpetual awe).

Lee Chang-dong's Poetry must have been my favorite movie, because I think of it as having everything all the good films had. I admire it for its penetration of both character and cinematic form. Chang-dong makes the interior of Mija (Yun Jeong-hie, who radiates, seriously count her mysterious smiles) the stuff of cinematic dimensions. He creates a fantastic fabric out of personal emotions; he deconstructs filmic types in a way that's intensely specific and dramatically engaging.

The tapestry of emotions is clearer in the second viewing, and more rewarding. Chang-dong quietly insists everything has an importance and dramatic depth, but feels free to leave dangling narrative strands and obscure structural departures. The point seems to be it's important because it happens in Mija's life, and like all narratives of self, Mija is her own main character and seeker of meaning; this is beautifully magnified by Mija's search for poetic voice. Like Saul Bellow, Chang-dong believes each person carries a batch of poems.

I've heard it said the scenes run too long, which is what they always say about the films I like. I think these people aren't asking themselves the questions Chang-dong is giving you the freedom to ask, or experiencing the moments Chang-dong is asking you to experience. If you don't shrink from the emotional freedom and mystery that's being offered, it's a film of pervasive and endless beauty. I also believe the film sticks its landing, and succeeds in other important narrative moves.

*Including Endless Love, The Taking of Power by Louis XIV, Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl, French Cancan, Spring in a Small Town, Diary of a Lost Girl, The Devil's Sword, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Who Are You Polly Maggoo?, Perfect Blue, and Ghost in the Shell!

PIFF 2011: An Overview

2011-02-27T13:20:00.000-08:00

Four Star Movies
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2x)
My Joy (2x)
Poetry (2x)

Three and a Half Star Movies
The Four Times
A Somewhat Gentle Man
The Last Circus (2x)
Of Gods and Men

Three Star Movies
If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle
Silent Souls
The Robber
Nostalgia for the Light
Certified Copy
Rubber
Circo
Potiche
Revolución
How to Die in Oregon

Two and a Half Star Movies
Cold Weather
Outrage
Honey
The Arbor
Illegal
Mutant Girls Squad
Armadillo
Son of Babylon
Steam of Life
The Princess of Montpensier
How I Ended This Summer
The Woodmans
Boy

Two Star Movies
Even the Rain
A Family
Of Love and Other Demons
Behind Blue Skies
Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff
In a Better World
When We Leave
La Pivellina
Sawako Decides
Human Resources Manager
The First Beautiful Thing
Black Bread

One and a Half Star Movies
All That I Love
Kawasaki's Rose
The Housemaid
Lope
The Revenant
The First Grader
His & Hers
Passione: A Musical Adventure
Good Morning to the World
The Woods
Heartbeats
The Double Hour

One Star Movies
Barbershop Punk
Incendies

Half Star Movies
Aftershock
The Whistleblower

Total: 58 movies + 3 shorts programs, and 4 repeat viewings.

Rubber

2011-02-19T11:17:00.000-08:00

Last night I saw a movie about a killer tire, and the audience was wild (many people were enjoying themselves).

It would be great if Robert, the killer tire, was the face of modern cinema. When wanting to verify his name as Robert, I checked the cast section at IMDb. When I didn't see Robert mentioned, I clicked "Full cast and crew." His name was not listed there either, and not until I began to scroll around the page did I remember tires are not listed in the cast section at IMDb. And then I appreciated Rubber.

The story of the film is familiar, a killer without a past emerges from the desert, but the hero is a first: the first Dadaistic protagonist of the 21st century (and the Dada movement of the 20th century led to the Surrealism movement of the 20th century[!]). The film celebrates the glory of pure nothingness, nothing for the sake of nothing. The sheriff, in the beginning and end, calls the movie a an homage to no reason.

I'd be very delighted if the casting tapes for Rubber were released to the general public, and also the letters written to potential investors and between producers. They all those involved should be given medals, and the largest medal should go to Quentin Dupieux. He is the type of independent filmmaker who furthers the concept of auteurism, not only because he is the writer, director, cinematographer, camera operator, and composer of his film, but because the film is a personal vision pursued to audacious ends.

If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle and Certified Copy

2011-02-05T14:04:00.000-08:00

I believe Silviu, the lead in If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle, has a tempest in his soul. He's eighteen and has been incarcerated for four years, and in a conversation with his mother says he spent eight years raising his brother, so he started raising his younger brother around the age of six or ten (did he raise his brother from his cell? If the mother has only just arrived, possibly). I think it's fair to say Silvie has a tempest in his soul.

"Most of all I like eating pizza."

The movie is a great portrait of trapped feelings, with a heightening condition of incarceration, helping focus the film on themes of control and manliness (brotherhood, fatherhood, selfhood). It begins slowly as crescendos do. In the beginning moments I enjoyed the film's grainy texture and its invitation into the world of Silviu; it really opens up with Ana's appearance. She's an exterior force, and he dreams of being with her after his imminent (fourteen days away) release. "And I'll pick her up from work, and we'll fuck right there in the car. And we'll fuck on and on and on," he speculates.

She becomes a goal, along with a reunion with his brother. When his mother threatens to take his brother away to Italy, Silviu, in jail, wonders not only what to do, but how to even do it. His mother's interference signifies the presence of obstructive factors in the pursuit of his goals, an indication of uncontrollable reality, so different from prison. The actor, George Pistereanu, who plays Silviu, has the gift of believability. He doesn't betray, through his performance, or through his eyes, his character's future. For the audience member this means a feeling of a shared experience, it allows us to come near him emotionally, and understand the extremity of his desperation by the actions of the film's later moments.

At a certain moment in the film another interceding moment of harsh reality reconfigures the film's stakes. It becomes a much different film than its proceeding moments have indicated, yet remains logical, and mostly consistent. It's as if the gates have opened, and life has poured in. Locked inside Silviu, we are trapped as he is trapped, scared as he is scared. This is the gift of a good film.

Certified Copy begins with a scene waiting for action: an empty table set up for a book discussion. A man enters the frame and makes an apologetic announcement into the microphone: the author is late, and he can't blame traffic because he's staying upstairs. Scattered laughter. Moments later the author arrives and unwittingly makes a similar statement: the banality of the joke is apparent, and no one laughs this time.

Kiarostami has made his point in the first couple minutes of the film, but the idea of an original and a copy will take manifold permutations throughout the film. So too will there be multifarious jokes about Elle (Juliette Binoche) and James (William Shimell) being married, although they met just this day. The joke, as it's elaborated, nearly replaces the actuality of their relationship, and becomes its own copy of a life. Certified Copy is an essay film and a romantic comedy, not one more than the other, which is impressive. I was emotionally invested in every moment of the actors' encounters with each other, and also found my mind working out the ideas being discussed. It's an "invitation to self-inquiry," as the author speaks in the beginning moments.

"I wrote the book to convince myself of my own idea."

Elle initiated the day by passing on her number to the author's friend. Her son, present only in the opening scenes, challenges her reasons for wanting to meet an author whose book she's claimed to dislike. Elle will also tell James, in moments over the course of their time together, how she does not like or disagrees with his book. Sometimes she suggests she does not like him, and in one instance he flatly states that something she's said has made him not like her. Romantic comedies often generate laughter by noticing the differences between the male and female characters, and Certified Copy does this too, but it's also serious about the meaning of their differences and the friction it creates.

"All that stuff's good for books."

Some people may not find it romantic at all. I found it romantic, but not very funny (much of the comedy is monochrome). I think this is what happens when a film is full of life. I think this is what films should be like. I believe there's a proper, acceptable way for a film to be flawed, and that's by virtue of flawed characters or admissions of flawed existence.

In Certified Copy, Kiarostami lets life in. The film buzzes and hums with life. Ambient noises and conversations float in the air, and cell phones ring at inappropriate times. His camera is endless curious and attracted to what it finds most interesting, most telling (and it's never insincere). Life happens between moments in the film, like when James answers his phone and leaves the coffee shop, and Elle begins a conversation with the lady who works at the shop; or when Elle pretties herself in the restaurant, and returns to find James in a different mood (this is the end too - you wonder what condition James returns to find Elle in). The frame has limitless potential with Kiarostami, and as when we watch a movie our thoughts are somewhat encapsulated by the frame, Kiarostami then frees our minds too. In this one, he wants to free our hearts as well, but he knows how hard that can be, and he knows that "simplicity is not simple."

Son of Babylon and The First Grader

2011-02-03T18:43:00.000-08:00

In a future time movies such as these two, with scripts that are dramatic machines, will feature automatons in staring roles. And no one will notice the difference. To be fair, Son of Babylon offers more potential for an actor to breathe; the young boy plays his plucky character with gusto and preciousness. To be judgmental, isn't that the performance of all children in road movies? Movies like these two I normally don't see, and seeing them during PIFF reminds me why I don't, and how they can sometimes offer surprises and delights despite themselves.

Son of Babylon is about people who know "Saddam is a bastard and the Americans are pigs." It offers tiny thrills and tiny tragedies with big emotions, like when the young boy boards the bus that drives away without the grandmother who frantically chases after it. Around these moments swirl a major tragedy, the one of Hussein and the collapse of Iraqi society.

The movie reminds you that so much went missing from the lives of these people. And as everything vanished around them, the people remained, roamers of the desolation, the truly post-apocalyptic, forced to become scavengers of terrible ruins; heartbroken people who visit mass graves in search of family members (I wrote this during the movie, which is sometimes boring). At times there's an almost overwhelming sadness to the movie (and really didn't require a road movie shtick in my opinion) including some late images of a mass grave and fragmented skeletal remains.

The First Grader is a movie about an 84 year old man who wants to attend school for the first time, and it's made for an 84 year old man seeing a movie for the first time (that line © me). This is apparent from the very beginning, and so I thought, okay, the surface rings false, but what about the subsurface? I kept trying to see it, but the dramatic jet engines were on full thrust, and you know what that's like, with the wind of drama blowing so fiercely in my face that I sometimes had to close my eyes. There's a lot of emphasis on the man's age and determination without an expansion of character, except there are these horribly cheesy flashbacks of his past tribulations.

My friends, there is a flashback, at the moment the old man approaches a pencil sharpener, of a horrendous moment from his past, involving a sharpened pencil being stuck inside his ear! This movie is based on a true story, but even if that part is entirely true I would've buried the damn thing, or saved it for my horror comedy, also titled The First Grader (aka The First Grader from Hell). It also reminded me that my good friend Joe Peeler is right and not every dramatic strand requires dialogue, because for example this movie shares a theme of the past haunting the present, like some of the other films this week, but in this movie I'm absolutely 100% sure because there are these lines: "Can't we just put the past behind us?" and, "The past is always present, never forget that." For a movie populated by people who don't like to be told what to do, it's odd this movie tells me how to feel.

"An old man, no better than a goat."

I'm not the audience for this movie anyway. There is an audience for this movie! I swear it, because at the end people applauded. My friends, I was there. I wasn't astounded either, conscious as I was of the fact that the man next to me kept wiping the tears from his face. Two-handed wipes across the face, maybe a thousand tears!!!!

His & Hers and Of Gods and Men

2011-02-02T18:20:00.000-08:00

His & Hers is a documentary from the Irish Midlands about domestic women. It begins, adorably, on a young baby girl lying on a blanket, placing her feet in her mouth; by the middle mark the film reaches middle age. I wasn't constantly glancing at my watch but it may have been a decade jump every ten minutes - tell you the truth I looked at my watch at the middle age point because I thought 'already?' and then I remembered people can live well past middle age because that age is just the middle. These are the type of things you may reflect upon while watching His & Hers.

"Men love their girlfriends the most, their wives the best, and their moms the longest."

You know how there are those oxygen bars? Well, there are these oxygen bars. I've never understood them. One day I may reach an age or health condition in which I do, who knows, but anyway all you do is sit and suck in life giving forces. His & Hers is also like that, you sit at the screen and suck in life giving forces. No men appear in the movie, but the women talk about their: dads, boyfriends, husbands, sons, and dead husbands. Spoiler joke. Most of it's charmingly candid, and some of it's like domestic poetry. One time this black cat was spread out atop the couch fuckin' napping during an interview! That was really cool. They didn't mention the gender of the animals. The women talk about: chores, school, living spaces, pregnancy, health, and pets. The art of life is given primacy over the art of film, and most of the photography is simple portrait-like. Also, it's funny that elders complain about their kids the way young kids complain about their parents. If you think this stuff is like floor-rolling hilarious, or are incapable of remembering it's touching without an 80 minute film, please see His & Hers. I liked it at first but by the end was exhausted.

Of Gods and Men! The moment I knew I really liked Of Gods and Men, I mean really, really liked Of Gods and Men, came during one of the monks' daily meetings. It was an especially important meeting. There was a discussion as to whether Christian (the designated leader) had betrayed the principles of community by making a decision without consulting the others, and as the camera cut between the monks, Amédée raised his finger but didn't say anything. He wasn't sure what to say. His thoughts were stuck, and the film captured that moment.

It could have been earlier, however, when Luc was giving the young girl advice on love, and I suddenly realized he was talking about his love for God. It applied so well to the girl and her boy troubles. The film regularly depicts scenes of worship and religious contemplation, meanwhile developing natural rhythms and showcasing gorgeous landscapes, but wisely avoids the purely religious. Of Gods and Men is about powerful people, and their power is in their hearts. If anything I was forced to remind myself that monks may be less interesting than this in real life, because for a moment I considered signing up: these are men who have strong feelings of tenderness, their convictions have a real power, and every moment of their lives seem to escape happenstance - not because of divinity, but because they invest in each moment the totality of their constitution (except sometimes they are sleepy or tense).

"Wildflowers don't move to find the sun's rays."

The film's beauty is unforced, and mingles with the ugly; there's bloodshed, and sometimes simple daily routine, quotidian failure. For example, an extremely important question within the movie, both dramatically and philosophically, is whether or not the monks are stubborn. They are at first "like birds on a branch" who can't decide if they should flee their monastery under threat from local radicals ('fundamentalism meets fundamentalism' as the press synopsis states), not wanting to force martyrdom, or stay and help the locals as they have pledged. It's a genuine crisis.

I admire the film because it knows there isn't armor for all pain. However strong the monks are, whatever their convictions, the romance of their intentions doesn't pad the blow. They make choices and live with consequences. The decision to become a monk could be one, and in a touching scene a monk laments the loss of his secular life. He tells the story of confronting this reality during his mother's birthday party. What should he do, return home to become a plumber, join the town council? He can hardly imagine.

The physicality of the monks is also a movie, each one embodying another feature-length. Their eyes hold love and war, their faces humor and sadness, their hands strength and weakness. When Amédée raises his finger, he doesn't have to say anything.

Incendies and The First Beautiful Thing

2011-02-01T17:54:00.000-08:00

Incendies is a plane, boat, and car trip away from being the type of film I like. It's an awful combination of spiritually contrived, thematically earnest, and dramatically dense; a veritable stew of gaudy coincidences and histrionics dressed as profundity. I knew I was in a trouble from the beginning: an opening static shot from a window, reminiscent of a beer (Corona) commercial, that morphs into an orphan populated music video (just wait to see why … oh father), literally edited to a Radiohead song. The movie's litany of dramatic clichés is almost astounding: an underdeveloped religious backdrop, bolstered by pretense of concern for war-torn nation, illusions of humanitarianism, tonal somberness, visual and thematic heaviness, a fractured narrative timeline, a central character with unshakeable convictions who symbolizes the perseverance of the human spirit, along with parallel blood-related character on quest for true identity and secret brother, crazily inappropriate dramatic devices, and twists that were meant to enlarge our emotions or do who knows what else but I simply kept wishing would please stop, please.

"To teach the enemy what life has taught me." A quote from the movie, but perhaps the director's intentions for the audience while designing this movie.

In my opinion its dramatic technique is far more hysterical and barbaric than any villain within the movie, on its own plane. And there are several grueling scenes and several horrible moments in Incendies. By the end I thought: why were there grueling scenes? Why did I suffer through this? For me there's a brutal amplification of disappointment that comes from feeling the director masqueraded dramatic masturbation for caring, sympathetic discussion. I won't name other movies that I think do this, so as not to digress, but surely you can think of one that affected you this way, and remember the feeling of thinking more harm than good comes when dramatic flamboyance disguises spiritual reductionism: I do not think this film examines the roots of war, hatred, and enduring love, as its synopsis claims.

I didn't like it overall. If you're smarter than me you won't see it, and if you do see it make sure you stay until the end for the dedication: "To our grandmothers." Its main theme is breaking the "chain of anger," which is a pretty good theme that I think is spoiled by severe dramatic excessiveness. It has a sharp, crisp visual style, and a patchwork of culture, religion, family, and identity, but I think it's all for nothing.

Also I saw Italy's The First Beautiful Thing, before Incendies, and enjoyed it much more, even if the experience was soured by what came after. Initially it was difficult for me to become involved with The First Beautiful Thing, though I loved the liveliness of its first scene, because a lot of time is spent on the resentment the husband and son feel for the mother (wife). They fear and sometimes despise the power of her beauty, and seem embarrassed by her self-expression. Slowly, however, the film begins to burst with all signs of life. The primary characters are the mother and her son and daughter, and by the end of the movie I felt close enough to them to be near-tears during a wedding scene.

The Italians can do this very well (in their time Italian neo-realist films were called 'male weepies,' not, I assume, because only men cried during them, but because they were the films men both cried during and wanted to see). The film embraces the triumphs and tragedies of its main characters, and follows a narrative lifeline from 1971 to 1981 to the present; eventually encompassing the sympathetic downstairs neighbor, a sexually adventurous lawyer husband and wife, and a secret son who spoke my favorite line, "This is my sister … I mean my fiancé!" The mother isn't depicted as a full saint, though she sometimes performs saintly deeds, and too the son and daughter are multi-dimensional. A question asked by the non-secret son to his girlfriend (whom he calls his roommate), "Do we want to misunderstand each other?", echoes through the movie. It's a kind of sprawling slice of movie that neither makes a single dramatic point nor attempts one; it wonders if we live emotionally honest and cheerful lives, and acknowledges the almost never ending inundation of obstacles in our life's path.

Silent Souls and Kawasaki's Rose

2011-01-31T19:29:00.000-08:00

Right away, it was so nice PIFF had begun again. Silent Souls opens with an in-motion tracking shot: we're behind a bicycle with a bird cage resting on its rear, two birds inside. Switch to a reverse POV: a moment for the viewer to simply soak in the passing forest, the small puddles of water on the asphalt, the emotion of motion. I felt it then, and it was what we all said to each other when the movie was over: this is why we love movies. Poetry is alive in cinema. We (I) sometimes forget after so many visits to American multiplexes, but today we (I) remembered.

Silent Souls is a Russian movie with the personality of Russian and Finnish movies, and the film is about the Merja people, an ethnic minority from a historically Finnish enclave of Russia, a people experiencing the steady extinction of their culture, customs, and memories. The film explores internal and external reasons for this, and Aist admits that "no one remember anymore" the history of certain Merja traditions.

A terrible feeling of sadness of loss haunts the film. Aist (the narrator and one of two protagonists) has been asked by his friend Miron to travel with him to an emotionally significant river in order to perform the Merja death ritual, which involves rivers. A river is a sort of highway to heaven, and Aist tells us that if a Merja dies by drowning, they will simply weigh the body down without performing the death ritual. For them drowning is a privilege, and purposeful drowning is considered impolite, like cutting in line to arrive at heaven.

"A woman's body is also a river that carries grief away."

It captures well the feeling of hopeless loneliness in the midst of people - the type of loneliness sometimes called the worst. Aist and Miron, often in a car together, for most of the film together, seem incapable of truly bridging the distance between themselves, of truly connecting to each other. Another Merja custom is "smoking." Smoking is sharing private things about the dead that wouldn't have been shared while the person was alive; a process Aist refers to as turning "grief into tenderness" (a lovely sentiment worth expressing and demonstrating). Miron is sometimes smoking, but Aist wonders what Miron isn't saying, if he's really sharing anything unknown, and the audience is allowed to know, through flashbacks, things we can wonder whether the two know about each other.

The second film was Kawasaki's Rose, from Czech Republic, directed by Jan Hrebejk, whose film Shameless I saw at least year's PIFF. Like in Shameless, Hrebejk weaves disparate emotions into an unusually shaped narrative that flashes with moments of pain, beauty, and love. For example, there is a musical sequence of petty theft (chocolate bars) and arrest. This quality I most admire about Hrebejk.

It's a quality well-suited to some of Kawasaki's Rose, a film that explores entangled familial and national relationships. A son-in-law, who is a "jealous outcast from the family church," uncovers damaging secrets about a father-in-law he's always despised, and then much of the film deals with sins of the past haunting the sinner and sinned-against in the present. Unfortunately some of this material doesn't allow Hrebejk to shine. Branching paths are sometimes ideological rather than emotional, despite Hrebejk attempting to make them otherwise, and most points are followed through to their near-conclusions, which created a feeling of disconnect for me.

Kawasaki's Rose, like Silent Souls, has a theme of "a common fight against the loss of collective memory," but Silent Souls makes this theme universal and transcendent, and I think Kawasaki's Rose fails to do this. It fails because it has a specific, political agenda at its core, and though it searches for several ways to unbound its themes, including a documentary project within the movie, and the introduction of characters of different perspectives, its vacillation between the spiritual and tangible contaminates the sincerity of each. I would think my unfamiliarity with Czech politics of the 70s was one of the problems, but the film spends plenty of time explicating the historical political climate: doesn't this make it the film's problem and not mine? I guess maybe, maybe not.

Alucarda

2011-01-27T11:46:00.000-08:00

It's a rather straight path to the heart of Alucarda; it begins with a little bit of madness, a dying mother trusting a wild looking gypsy to deliver her newborn baby girl to a convent, and ends in total madness. The insanity of its closing moments would be terribly fun to describe, but if you've seen the movie you already know, and if you haven't seen it I wouldn't want to give it away.

"They used the most evil language I ever heard to recognize Satan as their lord and master."

Although clearly made by a serious devotee of horror mythology, its exact roots seem difficult to delineate. The grandmommy of them all, the novella Carmilla, is likely an influence, but the title is of course the feminine version of the backwards spelled Dracula, first used as the name of Dracula's son in 1943's Son of Dracula.

The director Juan López Moctezuma began in the theater. Early in his career he encountered, befriended, and collaborated with Alejandro Jodorowsky, working in producing roles on Fando y Lis and El Topo. The mania of Jodorowsky's films is present in Alucarda; the two filmmakers share a creative point of view of visual and thematic adventurousness. But then, the 70s were like that, weren't they?

"This is not an act of faith! This is the most primitive expression of ignorance I've ever seen!"

"Now, how can you explain this from your scientific point of view?"

There isn't much in the way of political subversiveness, at least compared to the extreme heights of other films' political subversiveness at the time. Moctezuma seems both critical and curious about religion; the film both attacks and sympathizes with the nuns and priests. It's interesting that the nuns are not dressed in traditional nun habits, but rather wrapped in white cloth almost like mummies. The whiteness of their strange clothes is, of course, perfect for soaking the red of blood.

There are a few moments of pure diabolical playfulness and bucolic bliss, but not to the extent of Séria's Don't Deliver Us From Evil. Moctezuma's agenda is to create a seriously sinister demonic possession movie, but his is more jubilant, sensational, and playful than Friedkin's brow-sweating and anti-everything The Exorcist. It's insane like Russell's The Devils, but doesn't make you feel insane yourself like that movie does.

Point is, Alucarda, despite its similarities and dissimilarities with other movies, is its own thing. The movie works as it is, and would work if those other movies didn't exist. Moctezuma's seriousness and passion win. When watching the movie the emotion which overrides all others is appreciation, an appreciation for cinematic form and the ability of filmmakers with talent and heart to enmesh the unrealities of fantastic cinema with the unrealities of the human spirit.

Mystics in Bali!

2011-01-09T13:05:00.000-08:00

Old Leák Queen: What is her name, and where does she come from?
Catherine: Catherine Kean from the USA.
Old Leák Queen: Hmm. And where is that?
Mahendra: Very far away.

"Here there is even a western actress playing a key role. In fact, the elusive Ilona Agathe Bastian was not an actress at all, but a German tourist holidaying in Bali. She was spotted by the wife of one of the film's producers and it didn't take much to persuade her to stay on for a few months free holiday." -production notes.

H. Tjut Djalil is a new hero of mine. This, Mystics in Bali, is the second film of his I've seen, following Lady Terminator. He is a director of keen imagination and sharp cinematic wit. Roughly a year ago I didn't even know Eastern black magic horror films existed. Which is appropriate: here I was in the house of film, and black magic was being practiced in the back yard. Of course! The ones that I've seen, including a recent theatrical screening of Boxer's Omen, are among the craziest, most enjoyable movies I've ever seen. They lack the tiresome earnestness and rectitude of Christian horror films, and their potential for engaging supernatural phenomenon is greater.

"I'm surprised that a pretty girl like you would be interested in learning black magic."
- the first line of Mystics in Bali

H. Tjut Djalil is a genre surrealist. Neutral, monotonic voice dubs and plastic-faced actors engender a strange impassiveness as the protagonists journey to learn the intricacies of Leak Bali, a black magic which could be the church of Lynch. The roots of its power seem to be joyless high-pitched laughter. The laughter is one aspect of black magic taught by the face-shifting Old Leák Queen, who takes on Catherine as an apprentice. Of the things the Old Leák Queen teaches Catherine, the most important is drinking newborn blood by way of disembodied, floating head.

Blood has a restorative power for the Leaks, and infant blood is best. Like other exploitation movies, kicks are to be had, intentional and not. Some of the dialogue exits in this movie are extraordinary. When Catherine vomits green goo and live mice, Mahendra blames the prior evening's meal! Absurd on the one hand, but true on the other: does Mahendra know of the prior evening's metamorphosis, the transformation of Catherine from human to pig (Leaks can do this[!])?

Mahendra starts Catherine down the dark path of black magic. She asks him to; she's learned about African Voodooism already, and now wants introduction to Leak Bali, the strongest black magic in the world. It ends badly, unfortunately for Catherine and Mahendra, but fortunately for the audience, but really Mahendra is a great guy who cared about Catherine and meant best.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992)

2011-01-08T13:06:00.000-08:00

If I'm going to dig through the trash, I'm bound to inspect other people's garbage. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the 1992 movie, puts to the test my idea of a lasting place for all films in curious hearts, and a permanent value for them as historical records. A recent theatrical opportunity was, like Basket Case, a testament to the fervor of its followers, who might say the film isn't material for a tolerance test but good material. Simply, I disagree with the assertion in Buffy's case, and remain interminably ignorant of the television show and the show's spin-off. I consider it passable material.

I'll attempt to avoid dismissive language that might reduce the conversation to the purely taste based. As a film, Buffy is a specific breed of popular 90s filmmaking: a vampire element (genre emblem) is subordinate to related vampire hunting mythology (subgenre), subordinate to teenage allegory (demographic), subordinate to broad ranged teen comedy (Hollywood). It's execution is as a generic and broad ranged teen comedy. It functions as a teenage allegory as the vampire myth is secondary to the myth of Buffy, and the film is structured on her acceptance of new adult roles. Its efficacy boils down to your emotional investment in Buffy, who is written to attract sympathy and become liked.

Mostly the direction is functional, sometimes perfunctory. Working directors, without personal agenda (or vision), from Sam Wood and Lloyd Bacon to the present, are always the first to be accused of artlessness. When you feel the hand of Fran Rubel Kuzui in the movie it's in short, disconnected moments; stylistic choices, like the perfect push in on Buffy when the vampires arrive at the dance, are rare. It's occasionally decently written, sometimes entertaining. It can be both ("I'm the chosen one, and I choose to be shopping"). Too much time is spent satirizing 90's breed airheads, and either airheads are now more sophisticated or, more likely, filmmakers have become more sophisticated at portraying them. Several actors in the film were popular at the time, and several made names for themselves later on. I don't think it's worth discussing in this case. The performances are neither good nor bad. They are conspicuously performances, people pretending, without passion. Several times humor is used to puncture the artificiality, most notably in the instance of Paul Reubens's prolonged death.

The movie's deficiency, compared to other movies of the type that I enjoy, is the limited scope of personal, internal material. Little is undiscoverable, mysterious, or captivating in either the written characters, the actors' performances, or anyone else involved, behind the camera or in front, and it fails to capture the reality of the time and place. It's clearly made in the 90s, but says nothing interesting about the 90s. The weak direction limits its potential as spectacular dross, and too the film's conventional middle-class values make it less thrilling, less compelling. Taken as a teen comedy, the vampire stuff gets in the way; a discordance that generates copious exposition potential for the writer, but ultimately reveals little about teenagers or vampires. As a character based drama it's most successful, but I have difficulties imagining an enduring legacy for Buffy without the television show.

Basket Case (1982)

2011-01-05T17:07:00.000-08:00

"But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES."

- from Frank O'Hara's Why I Am Not a Painter, because this could be Why I Am Not a Critic, as it's only tangentially a discussion of Basket Case:

It's difficult for me to imagine a mainstream one-thousand theater rerelease of Basket Case, mainly because it's never enjoyed such mammoth distribution. The film, even in its time of production, was self-consciously executed from the margins. Made by a certain type of movie fan, it's dedicated to Herschell Gordon Lewis, for a reciprocating audience familiar with its rote of camp and humor infused gore and horror, it has fared better than some of its contemporaries that didn't make it to dvd and don't enjoy reputations. The lifespans of this film type are entirely dependent upon fans of the movies, as the film is released by an independent distributor, Something Weird, and has only a sliver of cultural relevance. If not for its esoteric demand it could easily become lost, and, more terrifying to me, people could easily question the relevance of its disappearance. While films by Orson Welles are still underseen and underreleased, who cares about Basket Case? I care about both, and think everyone else should too.

The question of its perpetuation is for me a matter of social self-censorship, a matter of the merits of Basket Case versus the reality of Basket Case. Films like this are now rarely ever made, supplanted mostly by films of ironic self-consciousness, and far better produced films, and distribution for independent films is ever diminishing. Within Basket Case, for example, shot in New York City, 1982, the protagonist strolls by a kung-fu theater playing a triple feature next to a grindhouse with its own set of features. In John Cassavetes' The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Ben Gazzara takes his dancer girlfriends to a kung-fu theater and has to ask the girls to leave because they're still sitting after three movies! Three kung-fu movies! This culture, even in its time marginal, has mostly disappeared. Its lingering presence can be relished in revival screenings, in youth populated revival screenings, wherein the majority excitedly see the movie for a first time or attend for an "experience," and especially in random encounters with aging film fans. Nothing reminds me of the shared, universal condition of human suffering and longing so much as encountering a genuine fan of a movie after a revival screening, someone seeing it for the second time since its initial theatrical release, even better if it's a non-cinephile, and only loves the particular movie and had to see it again. For me, the more esoteric the film, the deeper the connection, because I often have meaningful conversations about popular films, but rarely have the chance for passionate conversation about the obscure, and treasure when I do. The conversation can be of a delicate, personal nature, the kind prone to evaporate with time.

Films from the margins often show or appeal to the marginalized. For example, their actors are often less talented, less perfectly beautiful, or never became well-known enough for their looks and talent to receive popular validation. Sometimes they are unappealing, sometimes despicable, sometimes outrageous. In this way outsider independent films can depict overlooked characters in a society, people not usually on screens, screens more and more reserved for manufactured, big-budgeted entertainment. So in time an outsider film can come to be defined by what it does show, the particular forms of personality and character it exhibits.

Cities well-known for filmmaking often tend to depict shifting populations. Think of the shades of urban character that flourish and vanish through decades of Los Angeles film, and the continuing near-eradication of particular forms of eccentricity that used to be a striking characteristic of New York City's personality. Bright, imaginative, fresh-thinking NYC films still exist for a different type of minority, one that has always blossomed in the film community: the sophisticated, cultured film fan. Recent NYC movies like Momma's Man, Frownland, and Tiny Furniture prosper because their subjects are members of the viewing cadre, and they're great films, but it's hard to imagine Gazzara's dancers sitting through them in succession*!

Diminished and homogeneous genre films, and other forms of esotericism, are partially to blame for the receding scope of independent films. The baby has been thrown out with the bath water. As smaller independent theaters, production companies, and distributors leave the stage, theatrical options narrow, and with them the potential for diverse encounters. Quality levels have risen, in theaters and films, but the curious and unconventional continue to die out^. All film fans have recently heard the repopularized "I'd rather stay home and watch television (!)" The reason for this get-the-fuck-out-of-town comment's revitalization is that television has begun to surprise its audiences, while cinema only flatters.

Cinematic taste has turned the corner while fleeing from Basket Case and films like it, and that's too bad. The progress of narrative variety and the evolution of filmic curiosity shouldn't be slowed to accommodate the safe or familiar. It's not that I want Basket Case to be remade again, the solution Hollywood suggests with their surge of remakes, it's that I see a necessity for an environment of creativity that allows for films like it to be made. In order to sustain the legacy of Basket Case, the outer boundaries of the imagination must continually be sought by filmmakers of all types. While continuing to ask for honesty, I also ask for invention, and gratefully welcome the intrusion of dreams.

* Momma's Man, Frownland, and Tiny Furniture, while not portraying an audience generating minority, due of course portray the statistically marginal, and are made deliberately non-mainstream in order to appeal to a certain group. They don't have well-known actors and they receive limited distribution. Like Basket Case, they sometimes challenge your reasons for watching them with either poor or atypical decisions and processes. The films' specific tones and points of view alienate audiences seeking comfortable inclusion, but reward the curious. I love them, and love that they get shown, but they're not the subject here. They should stay the same and in addition there can be other types of films.

^ If I must mention Internet alternatives well here I have, but it's not really the subject.

Heat (1995)

2011-01-03T17:45:00.000-08:00

Films are historical documents, even when they lie to us. They are a recorded reality first, entirely or partially fabricated stories and characters second. By the nature of film and natural processes the real life context of films evaporate with time, so for example future people may not be aware of Al Pacino's other work or his social life, and that part of him may cease to exist, but as they view the film Heat they will be reminded of the existence and past reality of Al Pacino. For me this is the vital feature of film theory, and it is the vantage point from which I attempt to view film. It's important here because Michael Mann has a prized, well-earned reputation for accuracy in his depictions of violence, crime, and action, but a dual reputation for escalating tension, achieved by focused structuralism, low-key but ubiquitous glitz, and robust dramaturgy. Mann's film style itself is bedizen with harmonious philosophies, and this is a central theme in his film Heat.

The way Neil McCauley, Robert De Niro, holds his rifle is a detail of realistic drama Mann portrays superiorly well because the primary aspects that concern him are McCauley's professionalism and skill, and he expresses the character primarily by exhibiting these characteristics. If someone's a good flute player, it's worth mentioning, and Mann thinks it's worth mentioning multiple times in different ways from alternative perspectives, with long flute playing scenes, and friends who also play instruments. Thus, each scene develops said motifs and contributes thematic continuity to the film's dramatic structure.

Mann replaces typical action movie dramatic nonsense, bridges between action scenes, with idiosyncratic, pop art, advertisement chic inspired nonsense. In Mann's films the action scenes are reality and the characters' lives are fantasy; this sentiment is explored interiorly in the film's major dramatic scene, the conversation between De Niro and Pacino over coffee. Their characters can neither do nor even consider doing anything else; they are to their essence, respectively, a criminal and a cop. Life, everything else, is second.

On a simple level, Mann's auteurism organizes the drama. After the film's centerpiece bank robbery an hour of the film remains, and in order to keep you interested Mann unleashes knock-outs from three major dramatic strands. The love life dramas reach apotheoses, in dramatic synchronization, and the stakes swell to vertiginous heights. Like his action scenes, Mann doesn't leave drama to the imagination. He's precise and articulate.

Criminal behavior is a lingering fascination with filmmakers; perhaps some who are technically minded see clearly that filmmaking and crime share more than dramatic properties. Certain filmmakers excel at identifying with obsessive, autodidactic or well-educated experts in specialized fields because this is what they are themselves. Precision and articulation are cherished features in crime film sequences, as they require a high level of intimate knowledge on the specifics of the subject. Ex-convicts and ex-cops can produce authentic seeming material, as in Edward Bunker's No Beast So Fierce, turned into the film Straight Time, as well as others close to the lives of criminals, such as ex-lawyer George Higgins's The Friends of Eddie Coyle, turned into a film of the same name. Mann is well known to have consulted and made relationships with real life convicts and cops while designing Heat, which is rooted in a real life crime story.

If I accept Heat's dramatic conditions it presents me the opportunity to learn about the personality of the filmmaker, his characters, and their obsessions. He chooses an expressionistic atmosphere to evoke the emotions of his characters, and succeeds in achieving sometimes spectacular reality, sometimes dynamic fabrication. It's difficult for me to categorize my responses to films that conspicuously weld fantasy and reality, entangled as my feelings are by the performance of the film, especially those of total fusion of romance and reality, which is what I think Mann wants to achieve in Heat. In this way the film has a life in my memories and imagination.

Lady Terminator!

2011-01-02T20:37:00.000-08:00

"The role of Nyai Loro Kidul as a Javanese Spirit-Queen became a popular motif in traditional Javanese folklore and palace mythologies, as well as being tied in with the beauty of Sundanese and Javanese princesses. Another aspect of her mythology was her ability to change shape several times a day."

Lady Terminator is an Indonesian action myth-fi, based loosely on stories of the South Sea Queen, reinterpreted with central images borrowed from James Cameron's Terminator. It shares the action spectacle excess of outrageous Hollywood action films and the sloppy short-hand dramatics of a poorly written b-film. It was my first Indonesian genre film. My understanding is that there was a wave of these types of productions in Indonesia, and seeing this movie and later learning this feels like discovering treasure chests on the seabed of cinema.

The riches of this film are found in the execution of the material, its performance as a film narrative. It's written for an audience, by a filmmaker who thinks as an audience member, particularly an audience member seeing the movie in a mall or multiplex, the populist, consumerist audience member. It's written and directed to be this kind of mainstream formulaic movie, but the filmmaker fucks it up in a thousand exciting and different ways that make the film a thousand times more interesting than those movies usually are. For me the idea of a Hollywood style film from a non-Hollywood location is richly compelling, as with genre films from the southern United States, Australia, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, France, etc., because parts of the filmmaker's outsider personality will inherently corrode the mechanization of material that's such an annoying and artless feature of many Hollywood films themselves. The filmmakers who attempt to curb this natural tendency are the bad ones, the ones as bad as the Hollywood filmmakers. The filmmakers who make movies like Lady Terminator are gems, treasures of the film world, unconscious documentarians of the human soul in flight from reality.

The movie wisely steals several attractive features from the Terminator series: the tech noir vibe, the unstoppable murdering machine (with compelling backstory), and key scenes, including the downtown car chase (!), are directly imitated.

Most of the heavy-duty action material is performed by an actress named Barbara Anne Constable, who apparently acted in several other regional films and never expected Lady Terminator to be seen overseas. Lady Terminator is her sole credit listed on IMDb.

Constable is badass in Lady Terminator, in presence and performance. She does things no other human being will likely ever do, with a gusto and brazenness that only a skilled and daring actress could bring to a role. It's impossible to imagine her character existing in the real world, and yet simultaneously easy to sense the presence of a personality and distinct acting choices beneath her performance - qualities that bring the unreal to life! Her character is a spirit-possessed human, and this allows acting space for a role previously played, in the Terminator series, as emotionally barren by consequence of robotics.

Like many other action b-films the dialogue is dramatically perfunctory and bridges together action scenes. Unlike many other action b-films the action is frequent and engaging. Its successes are easy to calculate: play the film before an audience and listen to them. I saw it at the end of a triple-feature that began with Master of the Flying Guillotine and Gates of Hell aka City of the Living Dead and this one was my favorite - and I really like the first two - because most of the components that contribute to the perception of this film as a failure are for me very entertaining, interesting, and human, and all the little blemishes are simply stimulators for my imagination and curiosity, as with the best of films.

Tomorrow - The World.

2010-12-29T16:44:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow - The World, a movie that "portrays the personal effect of HItler's chilling declaration: 'Today Germany, TOMORROW THE WORLD,'" was recommended to me by a friend to whom I showed the first several minutes of Friedlander's The Raven. What the supposed connection was I'm not sure, though this isn't the first time I've been led to a curious film by an unusual route.

It would have made more sense if I'd been showing Mayo's Black Legion, '36, the Warner Bros film in which Humphrey Bogart discovers several compelling reasons to not be a violent racist. Like that film, Tomorrow investigates how 'normal' people were transformed into ambassadors of hate through the influence of community and the power of social pressure. Tomorrow is the more interesting movie because several fingers are pointed.

The premise is that an indoctrinated twelve year old Nazi, Emil, is sent to live with a suburban American family. Emil is a really horrible kid, even outside out of his Nazi spy aspirations*: he's a deceitful, mean kid who lies and mistreats people. His new aunt says he's a good example of why all Germans should be killed, and the German housekeeper, whom he corners and speaks to of 'corroboration,' considers him a megalomanic asshole. He's such a crappy person that his new family wavers between strangling him and sending him to prison. Point is, on the one hand he embodies hate, on the other hand so much hate is reflected back at him. And he's so young, he's just a kid. The movie's closing argument is basically that he's too young to be held culpable, and its final evidence is that he cries over his murder attempt.

The surrogate father is Frederic March, from Mamoulian's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde! Like Peck in The Omen, his journey leads to the attempted killing of an evil child. It's interesting to consider the film as a precursor to demonic children films. There are perhaps many Nazi in America films (The Stranger, Dr. Strangelove, Marathon Man, and Blues Brothers spring to mind). The amalgamation of demon child and Nazi spy is an inspired film idea, undoubtedly the cause of the film's longevity, more than its philosophical handling of the material. Like the grapefruit smashing in The Public Enemy, the sight of a young boy in a Nazi uniform continues to be unsettling; and even by contemporary standards the kid is a prick. It's easy to imagine wanting to strangle him.

This is copyright 1944, Lester Cowan Productions. Germany had not yet surrendered. I see it as a discussion about the twin problems of the perpetuance of Naziism after the war, and the veil of circumstance that both protected some genuine Nazis and condemned those morally and spiritually enfeebled by the Nazis. Tomorrow suggests a solution of tolerance and second-chances, but the situation is one of poisoned youth and corrupted innocence, of a twelve year old boy, and I see less complexity in this scenario than in others. It began as a play of ideals, and it retains this form in the film: its final point is obvious, its path contrived. It's sometimes outrageous, sometimes tedious.

* Simpsons reference: You remember when Bart was a foreign exchange student? He went to a miserable French country farm, and an I think Russian boy/spy came to live with the Simpsons family. This movie several times reminded me of that episode.

Silent Night, Deadly Night.

2010-12-24T11:20:00.000-08:00

The same way you can call a delightful day with lots of relaxation and intimate pleasures a perfect day, despite perhaps the absence of extraordinary moments like lottery wins or moon landings, it's acceptable to call Silent Night, Deadly Night a perfect genre movie. The film fully executes the splendors of its concept, and, as is often the case, the filmmakers' total conviction and commitment to the idea contributes to the film's charm; think also of Corbucci's Django and Ferrara's Ms. 45.

This film's success is its delight in the wicked, its joyful subversiveness. The children are sweet, Coca-Cola type doe-eyed children: completely innocent, perfect for corruption. The script revels in the absurdities and obscenities of its central character's descent into madness, and is tailored to the shape of their filthy ambition, his destiny as a murderous Santa. It's reminiscent of a John Waters movie, the way it casually introduces the most insane plot elements and then uses those elements as the impetus for even stranger insanities. The minor characters are made to pop out, be memorable. Beyond killer Santas: grandpa's ominous warning, mischievous sled thieves, pool-table love-makers, and a tyrannical head nun are each given humorous, indelible scenes.

"To protest the film, critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel read the credits out loud on their television show saying, 'shame, shame, shame' after each name."

What the fuck is that about, did Ebert and Siskel work for a greeting card company? Ostensibly Christmas is a religious holiday - as I often, sometimes to my social embarrassment, forget - and certainly this Santa fellow shouldn't be sacrosanct; he just breaks into children's homes. In fact children should be urged to see this movie, so that as they grow into adulthood they spend less money on Special Edition Christmas Oreo tins with a Limited Edition Hand Painted Santa.