Breaking In.

I wish John Sayles had written the character of Ernie Mullins (Burt Reynolds) as a homicidal geriatric, and the character of Mike Lafeve (Casey Siemaszko, whom I'm not very familiar with, but is actually the best part of the movie) as a crime-scene photographer. And they should have crossed paths, elected to go on a road trip, and then visited Coney Island.

I went searching for the Pauline Kael review of Breaking In my late 80's Kael review book, Hooked. It's not in there and I didn't search any further. What happened is I started reading Kael's review of Joe Dante's Innerspace, which luckily describes the exact same kind of film. Kael mentions that Dante goes out of his way to make Innerspace inoffensive. Do they still make films like that? I don't know, because essentially those films become films for kids, and I don't see as many kids films as I maybe (?) should.

I did watch Breaking In. I love Forsyth's Gregory's Girl and Local Hero, love them, and what's so charming and appealing about them is their ability to strip away the mechanics of their stories and expose the human innards. Essentially this is the execution of Breaking In, but the subjects of the film are a seasoned thief and a tire installer turned criminal protege. And that's film bullshit.

Film bullshit should be loud and obnoxious, overpowering, or not present at all. That's how honesty can be achieved. Film bullshit should be a pit bull. And in Breaking In, Forsyth and Sayles take the pit bull to the veterinarian, have its teeth and balls removed, and enter it into a dog show. The crime scenes are tedious, the friendship scenes are heavy-handed, and the characters' personalities are skin deep. It's not a film about criminals or people. Just some shit happens, you laugh three-to-six times, and then the credits roll. It's charming, but charming like sledding down a hill of melting snow, sighing at every patch of grass.

Police, Adjective.

Then I realized: it was odd to call the film Police, Adjective. I was at the library, and I opened up their big dictionary on the table. A transitive verb, yes, a noun, certainly, but no listing as an adjective. My MacBook's dictionary doesn't have police listed as an adjective. It does have 'police procedural', an instance I think of police being used as an adjective, although in my MacBook 'police procedural' is listed as one word and as a noun, defined as 'a crime novel in which the emphasis is on the procedures used by the police in solving the crime.' Police, Adjective is a police procedural film that deals with the ambiguity of basic concepts, concepts misshaped into amorphousness by semantics, culture, education, beliefs, etc.

And the joke is consulting a dictionary over the title of Police, Adjective. I can't begin to describe the suspended state of hysterical absurdity (punctuated by the still life bowl of fruit on the table, and chalk-drawing on the board, and a secretary's search for a dictionary) which the film ends on. Some of the film's biggest detractors claim its final moments almost single-handedly save an otherwise obnoxiously boring movie.

The movie's very boring, is what most people were saying today at PIFF, following its screening yesterday. I heard a couple local Portland critics saying it was the worst film of PIFF thus far. Get the fuck out of here, as they say.

Police, Adjective is a film in which long takes search out natural rhythms, and the temporal fabric echoes the vast moral field which is the film's playground. The film is about a policeman who contemplates essential questions with enormous consequence in the mundane circumstances of modernity. Police work is an ideal conduit for expressing everyday dullness (and habit and ritualization as obstruction from comprehension of the meaningful) because of cinema's legacy of glamorizing police work. Here is cinema's most illustrious genre, a genre which for many defines the medium, and here it is stripped bare. Which is why everyone can at least understand the semantic, bureaucratic farce at the end (another great one occurs between the husband and wife over a song, and their dispute illustrates how words can function as obstacles between raw feeling and rationality - and who understands words better, the husband, who understands words only as tangible objects, or the wife, who participates in the struggle to grasp the intangible depths of words).

The final semantic journey charts itself between conscience - law - moral - police: a policeman in a boss's office is asked to turn the dictionary pages to each word as they discuss whether or not a raid should be executed on a teenage boy (where is the teenager in your mind as this conversation takes place?). I also overheard the Portland critic tell his friend that he felt like he was being lectured to the entire film, and that the final question was simply a matter of strict adherence to the letter of the law* versus the spirit of the law. But it's more than that. It's about a buried feeling, hard to name, hard to express. Where does it originate, and how true is it? A feeling embedded in the soul. And also, importantly, how much of our lives are shaped by how well we can express ourselves?

This is the spirit of the film that goes deeper than the words debated in those final moments, and though I can try to be persuasive on this point, part of my argument will remain trapped within me, inexpressible for various reasons, owing to the words I use and the way I search to express them, and that's something Police, Adjective understands about people and their lives. I've never seen it expressed so well, so clearly, in a film.

*The film has deadpan letters of the law jokes. Visual puns that make me shit my pants from laughter just thinking about.

True Stories/Stop Making Sense/Demons.

We have cocktails and appetizers at Bar Mingo until 6:40, and I don't want to run the twenty blocks so we take a cab to the theater. Someone with us knows the cab driver. We make it just in time: the girl walks toward the camera down the two-lane road hugged on all sides by fields, great open Texas fields. Byrne begins his narration, introducing the town. His voice is mostly relaxed, with undulations of terrific joy and puzzlement.

John Goodman works in a microchip plant. He wants to find a wife. Sad music causes him to lie down on the floor. He can remember kids' names if they sit in alphabetical order. He dances (there're musical pieces, frequent but spontaneous, for example a great moment has Byrne in a field, reflecting with a real estate agent on the curious nature of housing developments, and as the camera tracks with Byrne a group of kids appear screen right; they carry instruments and burst into song). Goodman is Byrne's traveling companion through this mostly relaxed narrative tapestry (it also has undulations of terrific joy and puzzlement). Byrne's car is not leased, it's privately owned. He's a crazy driver.

It's an easy to like movie. It's critical but affectionate, and it's more curious than critical. It's more perceptive than curious. It's more funny than perceptive.

Ten minute intermission. We avoid security cameras. The movie has started when we re-enter, so we crouch as we cross the front of the theater to our seats. We're front row. I want to dance but I'm too self-conscious about it. There's seriously a dance floor in front of the screen. I notice the guy next to me keeps shaking his leg, and then I notice that I keep shaking my leg. I think that in our heads me and this guy are the purest dancers here, the real dancers. I stop shaking my leg, my theory being that the energy will grow and I will explode into a dance frenzy on the stage. Sometimes in bursts I hear the audience singing along. Sometimes they clap after the songs. I stare at the screen, mesmerized.

On the way back I call a lamp pole a lamp post, but no one says anything to me about my mistake.

We arrive twenty minutes early. The previous movie hasn't let out. We wait on the sidewalk.

It's more gory than I remembered. I try to keep a list of the types of brutality: eye gouging, face tearing, throat slashing, bulging sores erupting with green puss. I think next time I'll bring paper if I want to keep a list of types of brutality featured. Terribly creepy and visceral fang sequences. My favorite moment used to be the helicopter breaking through the roof, but now it's the girl pushing the theater screen with her hands, an effect reminiscent of Videodrome.

I keep yawning during the movie. Am I tired (later, I'll come home and watch thirty-forty minutes of Man of Aran, waiting to fall asleep), or am I bored? Maybe you can't follow Stop Making Sense with Demons. I blank out for about twenty minutes, after the pimp dies.

PIFF Week One, Press Screenings (+/-).

The first film is Russia's Hipsters, Monday morning 11:00am. I eat a cinnamon bagel before I go. I don't know anything about the film, the experience is about encountering cinema with infinite trust. What I see is a 50s Moscow Soviet Union drama with scattered musical sequences. A group of psychocandy-colored dressed early-adults are cinematic post-Jarmusch/DiCillo rockabillies. The female lead is Oksana Akinshina of Lilya 4-Ever.

In the first sequence the audience laughs merrily, but the laughter doesn't continue in a united sense. Hipsters strides through its jokes too speedily and derivatively for them to grow in meaning, and its jubilance is exaggerated. It still manages to create infrequent shivers of joy within me. But a film that should be about the joy of discovery takes place in the machinery of convention. Being post-modern it's also hyper-aware and ironic about this (as one characters ultimately states, "The freer the person, the simpler the clothes"). The film unwinds itself in the final twenty minutes, beginning approx. with the birth of the African-American-Soviet-Union baby, and its final message is that you can't be hip for long. But fucking everybody can dance in the street.

I eat at Chipotle. At 2pm A Prophet starts. Jacques Audiard's perfectly crafted, badass, and crushing gangster film. "A better life, for me and my friends."

Blueberry waffles in the morning. Tuesday 11am, the Iranian About Elly. A film with a grueling twenty minute centerpiece. The cast is terrific, each playing their role with bravery and openness. "As lies and deception compound into catastrophe, About Elly focuses on the behavior and values of the Iranian middle class, illustrating how convention, conformity, and tradition can be restrictive, even among those who fool themselves into thinking they are not guided by them."



If you asked me to name my favorite of the week, and told me you'd abstain from kissing me if I didn't reply, I'd tell you my favorite was About Elly. This is a perfect poster for the film. This is how innocently it all begins. On vacation with friends and family, in a seaside villa, your children with you, someone goes missing. Someone is probably dead. And how do you explain to the police, to the person's family, and to yourself, how this has happened? The film examines the shades of guilt cast over the vacationers, and as small white lies build toward a state of total fabrication and confusion, each person goes through a series of confrontations with their own blame and guilt. As a viewer, I do as well.

I eat at Chipotle. It's raining and I don't have a jacket. Ajami is at 2pm. It's a non-linear slums story from Israel/Palestine. Its dimensions are revealed from different angles in dileniated chapters and culminate in a shocker ending.

Two green sauce burritos, from Trader Joe's, for breakfast. Wednesday 11am is Terribly Happy. A Danish Twin Peaks (lumber truck giveaway) by way of Hot Fuzz. It's best when it's funny, and sometimes it's hilarious. It also exhibits blends of tragedy and humor, terror and bliss, paranoia and provincialism. It bursts with a low-key creativity and I hope Henrik Ruben Genz builds in this direction.

I eat at the Persian House. 2pm is Fish Tank. Fish Tank is the first one I'd heard about prior. It won the Cannes Jury Prize. Andrea Arnold had done this previously with her debut Red Road. The protagonist is a teenage hiphop dancer who lives in Essex, England, in a monolithic apartment complex with her mother and younger sister. In a great early moment she head-butts another girl, then tries to free an old white horse tied up next to a trailer home. Arnold treasures her character (played by the real-deal Katie Jarvis), but never lies to us about her, and this means she never forces us to see her in a single way. The elasticity of her emotions enrich the film's shifting textures of bravery and fragility. Arnold's talent as a filmmaker engenders cohesion and broad-ranged poetic realism.

No breakfast. 11am, Art of the Steal. It stunned us all. A comprehensive documentary about an absolute instance of commodification of art. It's a brave wide-eyed film.

Lamb meatballs at the Persian House. 2pm Girl on the Train. The female lead character is great, but her journey is overstated, especially one day following the subtle tragedy of Fish Tank. In a key scene she leans on the shoulder of a young boy and explains away the whole film. Later, the boyfriend explains it again. The second half should have been titled "Explanations" and not "Consequences," essentially. Give Catherine Deneuve something to do!

11am this morning Mid-August Lunch, a delightful, short Italian comedy from screenwriter Gianni Di Gregorio, who crafts richly detailed moments and cleanly developed characters. The film left me with the sensations of a genuine visit. It also was the most consistently funny film of the week. Or as I told a friend, it's a smile of a film. That's what I told my friend, "It's a smile of a film," which means that I actually talk like this in person too. I should also mention that these audiences are basically me and a pack of the elderly. They loved it too.

A downtown restaurant, chicken parmigiana sandwich. 2pm today is Home. Another terrific surprise. The film journeys into madness by following a family of five whose house becomes highway adjacent property. It's not a straight trip though, and the film is always vacillating, and always exposing its characters in full dimensions. The level to bizarre detail is astonishing.

The Man Who Skied Down Everest.

Like the world is a faulty piece of electronic equipment, and somewhere a person is turning dials, consulting a manual, calling a helpline, etc, smacking the machine etc, trying to smooth out the irregularities. Because just the other day my friend Richard and I were talking about nature, and anthropocentrism, and I told Richard that, largely due to watching Planet Earth on Blu-ray, I've recently begun to think of myself as sort of this upward growing mountain, or that my life is analogous to the growth of a mountain, and my hardships are the natural result of erosive elements, the wind, the melting snow, the rain, etc*.

And then last night I watched The Man Who Skied Down Everest. The film was recommended to me by a friend. She told me, "It's funny, like Night of the Lepus." It's not, or I don't get the joke. It's a serious film in which a man, Yuichiro Miura, confronts nature manifest, Mount Everest.

The film is narrated by Douglas Rain, ostensibly from material recorded by Miura in a journal during the expedition, and the intention is for the viewer to consider all the thoughts to be Miura's. The film begins with preparations for the journey. Joining Miura on his trip is a massive, eight-hundred person beast of a crew, including the filmmakers, press, scientists, and local and Japanese mountaineers. The crew dwindles during the ascent, and when Miura skis down the face of Everest only six other people are at the altitude with him (not counting the filmmakers, and I can't tell where the filmmakers are most of the time, though they seem rather gifted mountaineers).

The skiing is a hugely suspenseful final moment, but it's not the film's only great moment. The trip up the mountain is sometimes spiritual, meditative, adventurous, and humorous. Miura's journal entries lift the film above the neutrality of a nature documentary. There are terrific moments in mountainous villages and campsites, including the final village, a village of Sherpas of course. Miura's group also passes by an Everest alumni, an elderly man who tells Miura that if he was younger he'd join him on his trip, and he tells Miura that "Challenge is what makes men." Etc accumulations of introspection and existential contemplation. There's a severe tragedy. There's practicing skiing down a mountain with a parachute.

* The Long Day Closes has a classroom scene in which the teacher lists the six causes of erosion. It's either the longest scene with the least relevance, or Davies knew I'd watch his film in the future and planted it there for me to receive, so I wouldn't feel so alone in the universe. The latter is more likely I think.

The Long Day Closes.

There's this story about inviting Kendrick to a movie, Van Helsing, and you show up to the movie theater approximately on time, and then right when the movie's about to start Kendrick's family shows up but Kendrick isn't with them. Where is he? Who knows. You don't see him until three days later and by then you've forgotten the episode, because it wasn't really a big deal, but then the memory pops up when other similar Kendrick stories are being shared. A lot of people have Kendrick stories like this. You tell your Van Helsing one, someone else tells a similar story, laughs are shared, and then later the two stories get told together again. And time passes and other more important things happen in your life, and you tell the Van Helsing story one day at a dinner party and someone stands up across the table and says, "Didn't that happen to me, not you?" and neither of you are really sure. You sort it out, and yes, it is your story, but did it happen in 2003 or 2004 (it was a summer, Van Helsing is a summer movie, it was definitely a warm evening...let's IMDb Van Helsing, okay 2004...), but did it happen in Beavercreek or Centerville (I remember the parking lot was expansive, but I can't remember what it expanded towards, and there were lights out front...)...

And what I've done here is approximated the experience of seeing The Long Day Closes, which will surely blend into my dreams and memories, and uses the magic of cinema to express the magic of life. The protagonist is a small boy, a stand-in for a young Davis, and it's always clear that the story is being told in the present, by Davis looking back. The story feels like it's being told while Davis lies on a couch with his eyes closed, with various records and movie samples being played to accompany the storytelling. It's not a story really, he's just opening up to you. His thoughts drift (the camera drifts). The moments are scattered, the people (characters) disappear and reappear, and the impressions are strong. He tells you that he remembers believing, because of a teacher probably, that when you shine a flashlight into the sky the light travels on forever. He remembers staring out the window at a bricklayer who smiled at him. The smile vaguely confused him, and below his mother yelled at him to bring down a sheet, which he dropped onto her head. Etc.

The Long Day Closes is part of a trilogy. I haven't seen the other two. I don't know how/when I'll get the chance to. I'd like to see how they connect together and learn if the characters develop, what themes are shared/explored, and what the narrative scope is meant to be. Isolated from its siblings, it's a beautiful film full of mystery and strong emotions.

Daisies.

Is it true that the moon is a detached piece of the Earth? If it isn't, believe anyway that it is, just for a moment. The relationship between most normal mainstream cinema and Daisies is the same as the relationship between the moon and the Earth. Chytilova's film was formed by the materials of cinema, but it exists solitarily, orbiting a greater mass.

This is a liberation of a different sort, not for example exclusively liberated from one thing. Because it's so impractical and impertinent in nature, it feels critical, maybe it's slightly critical, owing to its political context, but I don't think it's a critical film. I think that its total liberation lends itself to the idea that the film is a sponsorship for anarchy. How cute! Two girls, inviting older men out to dinner, and then ditching them at train stations, and in between discussing men, invisibility, etc, and going on crazy adventures, can be interpreted on deeper, more sinister levels.

Say that about a contemporary American comedy. Just try it.

These two amiable, adorable Czech girls, who go on a series of hilarious, entertaining escapades, are the conduits for the film's extraordinary, expansive depth. The reason Daisies feels framed within greater dimensions is because the quest of the two Maries is the essential point of anarchy: lawlessness, independence. Their terrain is limitless. How do you know you exist Marie, you aren't registered, you don't have a job. I exist Marie, because I am here with you. Essentially.

The narrative is anecdotal, and the filmmaking is playful. A shade of green in apples becomes a green-tinted image of the girls. Green apples in water become green apples on a plate. A trip becomes a sit. A train journey becomes a magical, colorful segue. Scissors cut into the film, rearranging the characters on screen. The girls seem to be able, in part, to manipulate the reality of their existence. The control they exercise in their narrative journey to become bad is sensational, surreal, and alluring. It is ultimately enough to provide them a final escape from themselves. However, the nature of this escape still follows the logic of reality, which requires that we pay for everything.