St. Nick

St. Nick strikes me as a kind of folk movie, in that it draws from its own self, and seems faithful to itself  above all. Like, it sings a song of its own soul, with the voice of cinema.

The narrative evokes thoughts and feelings about self-searching and urgent discovery, and the speed of the movie is true to its characters, children (who are gifted with a mostly clockless existence), and its settings of fields and rundown homes and other outskirts of civilization.

It's sort of off the grid, minding its own, and unhurried by unseen troubles.

Is it a children's movie? In every wonderful way: its content is child friendly, its main characters are children, and most important to me, I felt like a child when I watched the movie. It has the sensitivity of a child and somehow -- a product of its art -- the movie vibrated with mystery and wonder, like the world does for a child.

The movie is fluent in the language of cinema. David Lowery (writer/director/editor) and dp Clay Liford demonstrate such good taste that was I reminded of the classic Hawks quotes about "three great scenes, no bad ones" and that a good director is "someone who doesn't annoy you."

St. Nick is a warm and lyrical movie that's essentially faultless.

A thing that's difficult to demonstrate in this format is Lowery's skill for cinematic grammar. The narrative is essentially a wallless series of drifting vignettes. Events occur late in the movie to help provide an overall context, but the bulk of the structure exists inter-sequence, emotion to emotion.

Cinema, from the inside out.

The Brown Bunny

"i've never been a popular person, but it doesn't matter. i have everything in my life that i want. i'm not a walking publicity stunt. i'm not an anarchist, or bitter. i'm not trying to be subversive. i just try to remain unguarded, unprotected by fear, and agents and publicists, and i feel comfortable that way." vincent gallo

there's the story in the bell jar about the poet esther eats with at a fancy restaurant, where everyone but the poet is dressed a certain way, and the poet uses his hands to eat his salad, "one piece of lettuce at a time." and no one whispers or stares at him rudely. esther uses this story to communicate her belief that it's not one's knowledge of a table fork's intended use that's essential, but that the fork handler has confidence.

basically, i'm comparing vincent gallo with that poet in the restaurant. that's how i see him -- eating lettuce with his hands in a fancy restaurant.

a single restaurant couldn't be analogous to all of cinema, there'd have to be multiple restaurants, because it seems clear that not everyone wants the same cinematic food.

it's difficult to imagine a theater full of random people all liking and feeling positive about the brown bunny, based on people i know and movies that are popular. but because it doesn't appeal to everyone doesn't mean it wasn't made for everyone. this is important. gallo made his movie in a very specific way, but by all accounts (and i feel when watching the movie that) his intention was to make the movie for everyone. brown bunny doesn't operate on and isn't enriched by exclusionary cultural references or extraneous background knowledge.

the brown bunny exists as an unmappable curiosity, fine-tuned liked a person. its weight comes not from cinema, but from cinematic realness.

it wasn't a popular movie, with the audience or with critics. in the recent sight and sound poll, brown bunny received one vote: american moviemaker josh safdie (pleasure of being robbed), who also voted milestones, korine's julien donkey-boy, and a maurice pialat movie.

i feel deep and meaningful connections to the brown bunny, more than i do with the majority of movies i see (and i see so many movies) and i guess that means things that don't appeal to everyone have the same capacity for personal meaning as movies that appeal to a greater number of people.

two weeks ago or thereabouts, over a shared bottle of sake, i told my roommate a problem i had was i wanted to see a movie in the theater but there wasn't a movie in the theater i wanted to see. and again he became mad at me for not wanting to see the dark knight rises. it's his favorite routine. it's either the dark night rises or fincher's girl with the dragon tattoo or slumdog millionare or some other movie. i sense that he wants me to see these movies not because i might like them, but because he likes them so much.

amid my explanations for not wanting to see the dark knight rises, he accused me of not wanting to see the movie because it's popular. he was so off it startled me. we weren't having the same conversation. it took me a day and a half to figure out where the assumption came from. i realized there's this perception that the popularity of a movie has meaning -- that the numbers themselves have a meaning. this doesn't occur to me, not because i'm anti-numbers, but simply because numbers don't have the same meaning for me.

i like community, and i want it from cinema, but there are other things i want.

there are other things i want more.

based on my familiarity with the type of movie the dark knight rises is, and its maker, and based on its trailers, the movie isn't my bag. my specific bag. it's not the thing i die for. and i might like the movie, when and if i see it, i might be totally wrong. but nothing about it immediately sings to me, and don't we all follow the things that sing to us?

when a movie plays in the theater that sings to me, like solondz's dark horse, or hansen-løve's goodbye first love, the value isn't related to b.o. receipts or attendance. that stuff doesn't matter in an ultimate sense. and a lot of people talk about how it's the business end and a lot of people talk about how it does matter, but the truth comes to people when they sit alone in the theater and experience the movie.

only the movie matters.

while having domestic squabbles with the local multiplex i can sometimes forget there are these really wonderful american movies, and i think that's because some of the most wonderful don't play in multiplexes. many american movies i think are really wonderful aren't popular, for one reason or another, and by popular i mean they don't get mentioned in glossy magazines or chatted about too much on television and people don't go to see them and things like that.

i don't at all think the pure fact of them being underseen or unappreciated makes them important or unimportant, culturally or otherwise. that's like thinking the person who's talking the loudest or whispering the quietest has the most valid opinion by virtue of their speaking volume.

this doesn't apply strictly to independents either. when five-year engagement and the avengers were in the theater at the same time i asked my friend, who's a big alison brie fan, if the friend had seen five-year engagement, in which the supporting actors alison brie and chris pratt outperform the movie's leads, in my opinion. my friend told me he hadn't seen five-year engagement, that he doesn't go to the theater often, and that he chose to see the avengers because it was the more "culturally important" movie. well, i remember alison brier's wedding speech in five-year engagement better than i remember anything from the avengers. i took more from five-year engagement than the avengers. facts. but i don't blame my friend, i think the summer's first blockbuster, by a talented moviemaker with an exciting and huge cast of people, has many reasons for being seen, and i think a lot of blockbusters offer tremendous riches. prometheus was a pot of gold. abe lincoln vamp hunter had a lengthy action sequence that took place within, and used as weapons, stampeding horses, in 3d. snow white and the huntsman doesn't just have a magical godlike white unicorn that reigns over a lushly fantastical forest specialworld, the movie also uses this unicorn creature for a major dramatic beat. you can't not make this stuff up. skipping the dark knight rises i take the risk of missing riches. but you can't see everything, right, so we each make these little judgments about how we're going to spend our time based on the information we have about the thing and about ourselves.

we follow what sings to us. the voice that sings to me is weird and not the same voice everyone else hears, and sometimes i hate it for that, tell you the truth. and then in stronger moments i know and believe that if others aren't hearing it, i have more personal responsibility about remembering its song.

i'm arguing with imaginary people.

gallo, right, the brown bunny, right. right right right.

gallo does despair, as he does all things, without the traditional accompaniment of self-pity and self-consciousness. he doesn't apologize for having emotions.

the twisted confidence of his misery makes it a mini-miracle. if you've ever been around a person or people and had a bad feeling, and apologized to the person or people for having that bad feeling, there's a strength to be acquired through gallo and his art.

the brown bunny is about bud clay (vincent gallo) feeling miserable while driving across america to los angeles. and i think the movie, by its patience and focus, captures many shades of misery that are important.

both this movie and buffalo 66 have a lead collapsing inward on a very specific feeling.

until the movie's end one might not identify the brown bunny's central feeling as a specific emotion, (a large number of people would describe the movie through their own emotion, boredom,) but the attentive viewer senses an emotion hovering outside frame.

and car trips in general and the specific shots of this trip engender complex feelings about traveling -- the literal experience of traveling, reasons for traveling, feelings stirred by traveling, memories of travel, etc.

over backstreets, passing white-shingled two-stories in the middle of bug-splatters and gas stations and highways and days turned to nights, one senses a feeling chases bud, and one senses a feeling bud chases.

the first spoken word, "hi," comes at 6:27. bud to the country girl.

whom he ditches, promoting a feeling other than misery, or at least a compound misery. something like anger, disapproval, objection.

bud's misery takes the shape of its environment.

sometimes the movie doesn't feel miserable.

things other than misery take place.

i think the movie is actually a quiet war against misery.

or at least an investigation into misery.

its despair has a confessional tone that lends it a sense of earnestness. bud, a victim of tragedy, victimizes others, creating new tragedies. he's stuck in the cycle of humanness that pains him. he buzzes with pure and innocent fear. one notices his downcast eyes. his short replies. (his conversational goal seems to be to speak as little as possible without appearing rude.)

the divergent emotional textures have roughly each the same value in an eventless and drifting narrative. gallo doesn't emphasize emotions, doesn't suggest one is more important or greater than the other. this indifference is the indifference of a reality beyond the camera.

the movie makes me feel tender. i want to take care of buddy. didn't i begin this piece by defending buddy, by rooting for him? the movie draws it out of me, triggers my instincts to protect the weak. and that's because buddy's imperfections are as clear as his humanness and his frailty.

and i feel for him. for 93 beautiful minutes.

Punching the Clown

Faced with several attractive possibilities for Netflix streaming, but overloaded on conflicting reasons for watching each one, I instead decided to watch a completely random movie I'd never heard of and knew nothing about. Typical to this situation, the Netflix image for the movie was a deciding factor:

The randomness of my choice, as opposed to the deliberateness of selecting one 'for my mood' or based on expectations, combined with the interesting poster (complete with laurels), and the positivity expressed by the swath of reviews I sampled, compelled me to watch Punching the Clown. Sometimes this method burns me and wastes my time, but I was lucky enough this time that it paid off.

Henry Phillips plays a fictional version of himself in a movie he co-wrote with director Gregori Viens. Henry is a comedian/musician large enough to have his name listed in Wikipedia, and small enough that the link doesn't lead to a page (red font = no link):

and that seems like a pretty good introduction to Henry. In the movie he's decided to give his industry career a chance to blossom by moving to LA and sleeping on his brother's couch. His brother, Matt (Matthew Walker), is an actor who, when not auditioning for Hot Pocket commercials, dresses as Batman for children's parties.

Not actually a photo of Matt, this is Henry in Matt's costume. Matt is a balding redhead with a goatee and jangly teeth (I assume that's how he likes to be described)

Matt: Carrie left me.

Henry: Aw shit man. Just like that huh?

Matt: Well we had a pretty big fight, and I'll spare you all the gory details, but I thought it would be a good idea to make up, so I sent her a singing telegram. Then she fucked the singing telegram guy.

The movie does a good job of rerouting typical situations into humorous variants. The narrative works by surprise, coincidence, misunderstanding, etc punchline betrayals of audience expectations. His lyrical humor functions this way as well, by employing creative wordplay; because of this, his songs work best the first time you hear them (I wonder if the movie would be like that too, cinematically it's unimpressive).

The movie's LA feels unprocessed and realistic (it's shot 'documentary style'). There's often a satirical view of LA milieu and its tendency for small-talk charged with business overtones. Other LA topics explored are personal voice vs marketing image, power vs perception of power, public appearances vs reality, etc social dimensions common to the entertainment industry.

A thing I liked about Punching the Clown is Henry doesn't possess an LA personality. Henry seems genuinely unfazed by the gloss and glamor of the city, uninterested in adapting to its business models. He hopes to remain himself and obtain the modest goal of financial success. In this way the movie is about the enduring artistic struggle to retain one's integrity and intentions in the business of art. This makes the movie the least-LA LA movie I've seen in a long, long time.

I don't think Henry places himself above LA, I think he's likable for his skill at deflating the ego of LA while cracking into his own persona. It's not at all a story about a rise to success, or even overlooked genius. Just some crummy and relatable semi-miserableness. He pokes fun at his plight by performing a blues song that's about being out of blues, because his life isn't so bad. The movie's dry humor compliments its vague dreariness, and it's consistently funny and interesting.

Aching Souls: Love Songs, Declaration of War, Tomboy

Christophe Honore's Love Songs is a dreamy light-kissed romantic musical tragic romance. Because it's French, you know the double-up on romance isn't an accident: when the movie begins Ismaël Bénoliel (Louis Garrel) is in a threesome relationship with two girls, Julie Pommeraye (Ludivine Sagnier) and Alice (Clotilde Hesme). Julie is his girlfriend, the threeway is their mutual desire.

I can't tell you what other French movie's middle-moment is similar to Love Song's without spoiling both movies, but I'll say this movie shares a desire with other movies to explore the emotional trajectory of a single character as the character's life passes through multiple events that could just as well be two or more separate movies.

Love Songs investigates, for example, the role of one's partner's family in one's life when one's no longer partnered with the family, i.e. one's ex's family. When in a relationship, one's partner's family may come close to feeling like one's own, but if one wants to put distance between oneself and an ex, it may be necessary to distance oneself from the family, which might hurt the feelings of the family. In Love Songs, Julie 's family thinks of Ismaël as family, but as his life extends beyond his relationship with Julie, he comes to think of them less. "I already have a mother and father," he tells Julie's sister.

Love Songs showcases emotional details with a graceful elegance that enriches feelings of romance.The narrative isn't flattened in order to untangle emotional complexities. Honoré is faithful to his characters, honors their complexities, and doesn't "fix" them, but simply follows and observes, with a dazzling and intelligent camera that helps sharpen their emotional experiences.

This narrative technique has always been a favorite of mine for the reason that I've never truly felt like I'm the leader of all my own life's circumstances, sometimes I feel the inflluence of forces like fate, chance, chaos, catastrophe, etc. The fact is, things occur in my life outside my ideal script.

Tell you the truth, before watching it, I thought Valérie Donzelli's Declaration of War was a romance movie. It isn't. But it kind of is. It's a romance with realworld intrusions, and it's fair to say their story isn't the romance Romeo (Jérémie Elkaïm) and Juliet (Valérie Donzelli) anticipated upon meeting each other. Even those names, of course, refer to a terrific romance, but after the movie swiftly establishes their love affair, a child is born, and the child and his brain tumor are almost the center of the rest of the movie.

I say "almost the center" because the movie is still so much about the love affair between Romeo and Juliet, and one can often sense their love, behind a curtain of pain, even when many later scenes are set in the hospital (this makes the outdoors romance more romantic and lovely).


Donzelli depicts realities of existence and being human, and how one's quest for love and happiness is sometimes sabotaged by outside forces. She suggests dedicated love has an immense power (Romeo and Juliet's love for their son is something brave and big), and says part of our happiness comes from a choice made about one's interpretation of circumstances. 

Funny to think a lot of family movies are about kids struggling to like their parents or parents struggling to like their kids or otherwise many variations on unhealthy, damaged, dysfunctional, or broken families. But fatal sickness and hovering death can make these problems vanish, in life as in the movie. Or rather, the problems don't vanish, but there's no greater human problem than death.

Donzelli sneaks her trysts with cinema. As a smile can break a spell of sadness, so too the movie occasionally sparkles; because if the characters are not, cannot always be, sad and dull, it follows that sometimes the voice of cinema has to sing.

I'd seen and liked Céline Sciamma's previous movie Water Lilies, but I'd never seen or read about Sciamma herself. I was delighted to discover a person whom I felt I could relate to, by her age, a curious detail in her IMDb profile, and her no-bullshit and badass IMDb photo.

The underlined portion reads: "She is  totally afraid of dogs no matter their size," and she was born November 12, 1980.

It's interesting that, before I started this entry, I wouldn't have guessed Tomboy was the movie I'd have the hardest time selecting four choice screencaps to use (out of fairness to the other two movies that were given four). I don't think the camera does a great job of moving or breathing, and I don't think the aesthetics are eye-licking, but there's an intelligence to all of Sciamma's cinematic choices, sometimes subtle or subtextual.

The first photo seems important because it portrays Laure's ability to blend with boys (as Mickäel) at her age. The second photo express physical limitations, and the third captures her physical self-questioning.

It makes sense that visuals would be important to a movie about gender identity. Sciamma tends to compose a shot to frame the human elements, and this emphasis over the purely aesthetic grants her movie a lens of empathy.

I felt like Laure and her experience and private feelings were of paramount importance. She's in most shots, and when she's not in the shot she's being talked about.

During the movie I thought a lot about what looking at people means; it was interesting to see Laure observe boys to learn their mannerisms in order to imitate them. She had a special eye, different from everyone else. I thought about how one watches other people in order to learn how to be a person.

Common to each of these three French movies is the idea that characters as the center of movies creates opportunity for anything to happen, and then anything that happens is meaningful and important and relevant. If the story is the focus, character details can be off-topic and irrelevant, but if the movie is stories happening to a person, with an emphasis on the person, it seems like really and truly anything can count. It feels like the freedom of existence, rather than the rules of storytelling.

The Good Heart (Dagur Kári)

I made my way to The Good Heart via Dagur Kári, being a fan of his 2003 movie Nói. He wrote and directed that one and wrote and directed this one. My reasons for watching the movie are similar to my reasons for watching Roadie, which I watched because I was a fan of Michael Cuesta's 2001 movie L.I.E. And, isn't the world tiny, The Good Heart reteams the duo of Paul Dano and Brian Cox, the dramatic center of L.I.E.

The man in the middle is the great-great(-great?) grandson of Jules Verne, he's trying to be a writer as well but it's a a hard shadow to stand in

The Good Heart creates a microcosm of special feelings from a NYC bar at the universe's center. Most dramatic action begins or ends here. I felt during this movie how I felt when I visited my grandparents when I was younger, that all answers and everything else were somewhere within the walls, and the antique feeling of the bar coupled with the desaturated colors enhanced this feeling.

I allowed the movie reality to replace my assumed reality. The movie rewarded me for this by behaving like a fantasy; it's the most romantic portrait of a bar I can think of, almost certainly the dreamiest depiction of small-business drudgery yet committed to cinema.

Um, that's a duck -- he's chasing after the duck, they're friends :)

The emotions come in swelling undulations. As Boudu Saved from Drowning demonstrated so long ago, the homeless make for terrific stories. In this movie Lucas (Paul Dano) is homeless when bar owner Jacques (Brian Cox) meets him in the hospital. Jacques has been hospitalized owing to his fourth or so heart-attack, and Lucas attempted suicide by wrist slashing. Funky couple? You bet.

The story from there is what you'd expect.

lol

Warm and gooey tragedy, almost candlelit. In addition to the great-great(-great?) grandson of Jules Verne, other lively bar regulars (Jacques business wisdom: no walk-ins allowed, and having more than 13 people in the bar is discouraged) include a chimney sweep, a garbage man, a male flower shop clerk, and others, all of them charming.

The movie's title refers to a 'good' heart and a good heart, the figurative and the literal. Like having heart by being a good person, and having a heart in your chest that literally goes thump-thump-thump. When you get it you got it.

Morvern Callar

The first shot is Morvern Callar's face (Samantha Morton),

lit by a pulsing light.

The lights are on a tree. It's Christmastime. Her boyfriend has committed suicide.

Morvern doesn't bother to turn the Christmas lights off. Their behavior sets a visual tone for the movie, which will cast Morvern in and out of darkness.

We learn about Morvern through light and by Morven's face. The visuals like thematic glue.

Light touching Morvern Callar's face, an echoing visual:

And intuitively one feels as Morvern does, that the Christmas lights are inescapable. The repetitive sensation links one's memories to the Christmas lights, and the dead boyfriend beside it, to the present; tethered to Morvern's sensations I can relate to her, lost in the search for a light bright and warm.

We're both bugs seeking light.

And too, a bit goose.

There's a lot of drinking and smoking in the movie. She's a Scottish supermarket cashier, counting down to pension, and the movie follows her through Christmas celebrations and a Spanish vacation.

The dialogue feels loose and naturalistic but is laser-precise, if infrequent. The writing is good movie writing because it doesn't make her story a writer's mission; it's Morvern's movie, and I never felt like a writerly voice was imposed on her (it takes no narrative 'shape'). One of the longest stretches of dialogue is between Morvern and two people from a publishing house who want to purchase the book:

Male Publisher: Is there anyone on the business side, re the book, that we should be talking to specifically? Someone back in the UK?

Female Publisher: Yeah, do you have an agent, or -- someone, you know, to deal with.

Morvern: Me -- t,talk to me.

MP: Directly, great.

FP: Great.

MP: Fine.

FP: That's great.

MP: Well, um so

FP: Fantastic.

MP: So we like it, no agent. Since we're talking to you, directly, what did you have in mind, dealwise?

Morvern: (silent)

MP: Well, should I just put something out there. We were thinking of...something in the region of...one-hundred.

FP: I know it's always a bit awkward talking about money --

MP: Well, more than that, I'll be direct, I mean -- we love the novel, that's why we're here, we don't just jump the plane to Spain at a day's notice on, um, every unsolicited manuscript that comes through the door. But. You are a first time writer, and as such we're taking a risk taking you on, and you have to  appreciate that --

FP: I can assure you that for a first time writer a hundred thousand pounds is-is a really good deal.

Morvern: (beat) (picks up glass, sets glass down, half-smiles) Can I go to the toilet?

FP: Of course.

Morvern agrees to sell them the book, and the three celebrate by chatting and drinking until sunrise.

The solution to her financial problem. She asks her friend Lanna (Kathleen McDermott), whom she traveled with to Spain (the trip: a minor disaster), to vacation with her again.

Lanna: I'm happy here.
Morvern: Are yuh?
Lanna: Yeah. Everyone I know is here, there's nothing wrong with here Morvern, it's just the same crap as everywhere so stop dreaming.

This is the tragedy of the inescapable lights, of the burdens and ravages of time and memory, and one's hopeless flight from oneself.

The movie ends in a club scene. The Mama and The Papas song Dedicated to the One I Love plays; the title refers to her boyfriend's book being written for her, and the mixtape he left her, and brings us back to the beginning.

The movie ends as it begins, pulsing lights against the face of Morvern Callar. You can't escape the lights.