Ten (2002)

Abbas Kiarostami, in Ten, as in his other films, directly engages material traditionally submerged by narrative. His themes lay 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

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."

Time of the Wolf

A captivating aspect of Michael Haneke's art 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.

Son of Babylon and The First Grader

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!!!!

Silent Souls and Kawasaki's Rose

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.

Scarecrow, Aloha Bobby and Rose, The Last American Hero, and Macon County Line.

Beginning with a rewatching of a personal favorite of mine, Straight Time, I began an impulsive streak of American film watching that both fascinated and exhausted me. It's low point was Wrong Turn 2: Dead End, of which I could not have a conversation without becoming violently offensive. If I must say something positive about it, I'd invoke a sentiment first expressed to me in a Ralph Ellison book, something about the closeness of hate and love in reference to specificity. Is it made-to-work or made-to-suck? It's made-to-suck. Compare to Adam Green's films, Hatchet and Frozen I watched, which are made-to-work.

The best theatrical moment in the rush was The Social Network. Fincher and Sorkin's movie leaves Pilgrim in the slow lane, as I like to say. For clarity, emotional accuracy, and dramatic speed, Social Network was fascinating. Another positive was Andrew Garfield, who then appeared in Romanek's Never Let Me Go (+ earlier in Gilliam's Parnassus). And that movie crushed me, as they like to say, with its tonal precision, emotional nearness, and vibrant vision. It's a beautiful movie, with sharp, natural colors, and subdued, steady expression. The meeting toward the end was my favorite scene from any film this year.

More distinctly, I also began a succession of American 70s films, ones with smaller legacies and followings, maybe you'd say second-tier American 70s films. I watched Jerry Schatzberg's Scarecrow, with Gene Hackman and Al Pacino, shot by Vilmos Zsignmond, co-winner of the 1973 Cannes Grand Prize (second-tier?). I mostly think of Pacino as intense (rewatched Carlito's Way recently - love the movie, but the problem is Carlito [Pacino] is the only compelling character in it), but here he's happy and easygoing, playful and kind. The movie is solely about the relationship between Pacino and Hackman's characters, and that relationship is exposed mainly through their contact with each other, the way they treat other, the way they behave, the way they speak and what they do. A pure-blooded character movie. Would've loved to have seen this in the theater.

Aloha, Bobby and Rose, with Paul Le Mat from Demme's Melvin and Howard! I was excited about this one. It's a dirty, sad, blue-collar 70s LA point of view on life and love, executed with the typical delusion and self-contempt of the period. Some filmmakers of the time veiled their films with illusory impartiality when depicting low-lives and deadbeats: authentic looking actors, naturalistic dialogue, regional atmosphere; yet so many of the films uniformly depict their lives as pathetic, irredeemable, and lost. Real people without real pain or joy. As a movie it has a few memorable moments, including an okay car crash, and I think someone orders ice cream, which I love in movies. And I think Elton John's Tiny Dancer is playing in the background! Would've loved to have seen this movie projected onto a white sheet in a friend's backyard.

The Last American Hero, with Jeff Bridges!, is a truly idiosyncratic movie, a totally American one that captures well some of the South's less exportable expressions of their famous virtues. Bridges has less room for personal expression and spontaneity in his performance than the actors in the previous movies because the script itself is more vocal about certain convictions. For example: Bridges plays the son of a moonshiner and becomes a Nascar champion, and it's titled The Last American Hero. I love it because Bridges never quite expresses his emotions yet somehow always does, he's always proving something. There's also a tremendously touching scene involving an office lady at a certain race track, who takes a personal interest in the drivers and follows them, supporting them, encouraging them, and sometimes sleeping with them. Sort of an office groupie. She's so sweet in this one bed scene it kills me. She tells a story of a horrible experience at an Atlanta frat party that involves ridicule and shame, and it's the most you learn about the character, so you don't really know who she wants to be, but once her party story is over, you know who she doesn't want to be. She doesn't want to be this person she once was. She isn't going back. It really worked for me. The moonshine and racing aspect and Bridges character were pretty interesting and easy to follow, though also formulaic, for example the same basic story is told in Robert Mitchum's earlier Thunder Road. Would've loved to have watched this one on a shitty tv in some third-rate hellhole hotel in the south, with a hooker, and pizza.

The films which brought me to the point of satiation were last night's Lee's Do The Right Thing (watched She's Gotta Have It earlier, a charming, wonderful movie) and this other 70s American movie set in the south, Macon County Line. It's at mid-point between Aloha, Bobby and Rose and The Last American Hero. Two Chicago brothers spend a few weeks joy riding through the south before Army duty, but by circumstance are involved in a gun battle with a local police officer. It's a homicidal misunderstanding. The film feels like a trip from Los Angeles to the south, and never manages to feel truly Southern, and it's never convincing, straight down to the father (police officer) and son relationship (although crucial for a late-movie moment), but it's always nearing something. For example: the brothers are supposed to be switchblade, hellbent Beach Boys, and that's fine in my book, but that's the most I learn about them, and so they remain only that. The craftsmanship in the final showdown moment is laudable, as is the payoff. Would've loved to have seen in it at a drive-in.

Detour.

"That's life. Whichever way you turn, fate sticks out a foot to trip you."

Sometimes I worry about the perils of critical distillation. Hardly ever is the critical element of film appreciation a multi-headed beast, only in special circumstances do you hear about the technique of the filmmaker, and his/her method of expression as a collaboration between talented and creative pre-, post-, production crew members. The art of filmmaking is a processes involving the transformation of human emotions and ideas into celluloid, and as the art continues to grow so does the intensity of these facets and the attention to detail in the components of film design.

Douglas Trumbull recently stated that the future of special effects is the creation of an immersive environment and a straying from traditional narrative. The semantics of the statement seem to de-emphasize the writerly aspects of filmmaking, but Trumbull is really talking about a journey away from narratives of traditional form toward narratives of senses, and the identifier and creator of sensual experiences has been and continues to be the writer of the film. It's like Trumbull is talking about a tastier cake, and it's not that we shouldn't record the recipe, but we need to examine the ovens, the ingredients, the chefs; we need to explore the chemistry and science of our recipes, ask ourselves the hard questions about flavor, color, texture, and presentation.

I use cake as a simile because great filmmaking involves an irreversible reaction in which the components of the film combine in spiritual, emotional, chemical ways. A great film should change you while exposing itself as a piece of work beyond pure formal theory. It should be like a tornado sweeping through the small-town of your imagination. This is what I think. Sometimes I mind wrestle ardent intellectual types who pontificate an idea of 'perfect' art, which I suppose means flawless design and technique, and I guess inarguable results. I've heard that axiom about how your response to the Mona Lisa reveals more about yourself than anything about the Mona Lisa. I agree with that to the extent that please reveal your opinion of the Mona Lisa so that I can learn more about you! Because for fuck's sake if we just stick it on a wall and call it great great great forever it's going to become some boring, immaterial and inhuman artifact. Art should never be like the Grand Canyon, I don't think so, I subscribe more to the eccentric view of 'magical electricity' than the view of 'perfect art,' because I don't want to say "That wonder of the world gorge there, yeah, just fuckin' erosion and other natural processes. Magnificent, sure, otherworldly, no." The Mona Lisa as a piece of great art should defy natural order! I believe Leonardo's mind was in direct contact with something incorporeal, something emotional and non-scientific, when he created the Mona Lisa.

Leonardo was a great fucking painter. Painted two of the most well known and lasting pieces from the Renaissance. You don't have to tell most people about Leonardo, they already know. Can a film like Detour affect a person on the level of the Mona Lisa? Fuck yeah. And that's art, and how art extends beyond perfection.

The first thing most people will say about Detour is that it's not very good, and the second thing is probably that they liked the movie. I love the movie. Even without a sophisticated or mature sense of cinematic technique it achieves existential levels of contemplation and deep currents of guilt, sadness, futility, struggle, endurance, suspense, drama, intrigue, etc. It's a film of naked emotion, the more naked due to the less production gloss. That's art.

The cowardice, emptiness, and bad luck of main character Al Roberts seem a reflection in the pool of human imperfection. He works on his own as a dimwitted protagonist whose miserable circumstances lead to a downward spiraling narrative, but he takes on greater meaning when seen as a symbol for the human condition: the human condition of being yourself, being conscious of yourself, and lacking control of your future. I can see the death of Charles Haskell Jr as a genuine mistake, but I detect or project animus in the eyes of Roberts as he tugs on the telephone chord late in the movie. There seems to be a moment in which the violence of his efforts penetrates his mind, and he wonders in fear what the results of his emphatic frustration could be. The moment works on its own as an instance of strangulation, but works better as a symbol of the destructive power of fear and ensnarement.

That's a popular noir trope which continues to be used today, as in 2008's The Square, the idea that all is forgivable on the path of redemption. A lot of revenge fantasy films isolate and amplify this concept. A difference here is that Roberts is no badass, he's pathetic. Sartre would have either hated the guy or been fascinated by him, because he gives up all control of his life, avoids his freedom and independence, and constantly searches for a way to be irresponsible and unaccountable. He's ecstatic that Vera might alleviate the burden of his circumstance, and although as an audience member you know it can't end well, you also cheer Roberts's minor salvation, this new buffer between him and the painful misery of his crime. Because you can't imagine Robert managing any aspect of his life, you accept his reception of this new person, who, even with her hostility, constitutes companionship.

He works on his own, but he's better as a symbol of our desperation, and his ability to function as a symbol makes Detour good art. I just simply believe that human imperfection is our own greatest mystery. Beyond the mystery of the stars, the big bang, etc. I like the astronomical theory that we are formed by the dust of the universe, that we are the remnants of energy from stars, and I believe there are ever expanding ever growing and impossible to fathom territories of the interior, as with the exterior universe, and that unlike the exterior universe, parts of ourselves cannot be explained or observed with instruments, processes, or intellectual constructs. I believe this because I believe in art as a portal into the unknowable.

Of course, Detour isn't without design. The characters work because of the story, and the production isn't so horrible as to be devastatingly obstructive. The actors are okay. Edgar G. Ulmer had legitimate directing chops. Fellow blogger Roger Ebert demystifies the experience of the film I'm describing. Hell, he isn't even overwhelmed by the intrusion of chance, "`Detour' is an example of material finding the appropriate form. Two bottom-feeders from the swamps of pulp swim through the murk of low-budget noir and are caught gasping in Ulmer's net. They deserve one another. At the end, Al is still complaining: 'Fate, [or] some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me, for no good reason at all.' Oh, it has a reason."

His response is justifiable. His pronouncement human. The feeling that the weak deserve their fate is an expression of nature and evolution. As I've said, I believe art is a battle with the natural. And so I say that the end of Detour is reasonable is of secondary importance to the central force of the film, which is the unreasonableness of the whole goddamn cosmos, always creating in order to destroy. Or maybe that's what Ebert meant. I think it'd be better though if I framed it so that it appears I'm building on Ebert's ideas rather than reiterating his point. Anyway it's headed toward this: Detour is imperfect, its characters are imperfect, but it suggests perfectly a simple human question. And that's art.

Detour couldn't withstand a comprehensive analysis of its construction. Or at least, the results wouldn't be flattering. Certain mistakes have to be overlooked, or rather, certain mistakes shrink in stature when next to certain towering strengths. A film like this gains from critical distillation, is allowed to shine as brightly as better made films. What, then, of the better made films? Aren't they worth examining twice, thrice more thoroughly? What is the relationship between critical dissection and emotional appreciation? People sometimes ask me if the more I know about films the less I enjoy them. They mean they don't even want to look under the hood. They mean they fear the parts under the hood. I think sometimes criticism ignores what's under the hood, and that's bad. I think sometimes criticism ignores what's under the hood, and that's good.

Great World of Sound.

Fire up your own Great World of Sound dvd. Put it on in the background, chapter thirteen, 1:25.32 in. If you begin to watch it instead of reading this you're making the right decision, I won't take it personal.

Because Great World of Sound doesn't require qualification. It doesn't require familiarity with contemporary American independent cinema, conditions of society in the southern states, the bland disillusionment of stagnation, the frustratingly misleading dimensions of success, love between friends, between spouses, or between strangers. The film is a tour through a place and time, an introduction to its people, and shrine to the feeling of being there.

There isn't a single sentence which can describe the film. That's why I missed it in the theater. There's no angle. By the time of its release its distributor, Magnolia, was already a well-known independent; the director, Craig Zobel, had been the producer of DGG's George Washington (and here DGG is his producer), which implied certain recycled tendencies it seemed; partly because the trailer was, I think, misleading, because of the classic problem: Magnolia (or maybe even the director, what do I know), didn't know what it had. It wanted to fit Great World of Sound into this popular conception of independent cinema, and it made it seem like either a boring drama or an only slightly funny comedy. It made it seem like a 500 Days of Summer type movie, without the youth appeal. If you think I'm overstating this condition of indie branding which is brainwashing and neutering the market, please take a moment to glance over this year's Independent Spirit Award nominations. Please, take a moment.

Though you don't have to give a fuck about any of this. It's my theory on what happened to this film, from a personal perspective, but it doesn't matter. What I mean is, Great World of Sound doesn't give a fuck. It's liberated. It doesn't make an effort to belong to any movement or be a certain type of film, but, and this is very important, it also doesn't make any effort to be different. It allows its jokes to be fully expressed, its drama to be fully explored, its characters to learn and react, its story to evolve, and it does all this without an imposed cinematic frame. I heard the name Robert Altman thrown around at the time of its release, but I disagree with the comparison. Altman has a unique style, a strong voice, and pronounced features, all of which distinguish him from other filmmakers and imprint a worldview on his films. And I don't feel that Zobel is borrowing from or mimicking Altman. If they have common virtues, it's that they both allow their characters space, and subordinate the plot. Certain attributes are shared between two places off the map.

What delights me about Great World of Sound is the precision of the film. Zobel is a craftsman with a traceless touch, and he reserves cinematic punctuation for impacting moments. Songs work like dialogue, appearing briefly, stating their intentions, and then vanishing (including the auditioning characters). This is different from the bloated use of music in many contemporary films, which drift songs over multiple scenes and entire sequences, making their meaning ambivalent and their presence unmissable. So too does the story creep in the background. When done poorly, a story instructs and leads an audience. In Great World of Sound, the audience's knowledge of the film's circumstances expands as the characters move forward, and it's ultimately the characters who make the decisions that power the narrative. We learn about the reality of the Great World of Sound company through the experiences of the lead characters, and as their perspective changes, so too do their characters' hearts, which alters their decisions. The narrative tension, and the struggle, is generated as they begin to respond to shifting conditions while remaining consistent to their personalities.

Pat Healy and Kene Holliday are the perfect leads because they're comfortable playing the characters. They never feel like they're acting. They're so skillful, so unassuming and natural, that I assumed they were non-professionals or first-timers. Pat Healy and Kene Holliday, it turns out, are professional actors who have been at it for a long time, with many credits to their names. I apologize for my surprise at learning this, but it is of course a compliment, and their performances are commensurate to the accomplishments of Philip Seymour Hoffman, John C. Reilly, or Philip Baker Hall, etc, actors who fill their roles with such capability, commitment, and detail that you can't even believe they exist somewhere off screen. Zobel's characters have a completeness, like in a Mike Leigh film.

It's not required of a film to contain the key to its own lock, but I never mind when they do. Great World of Sound does. There's a business meeting, the boss is up front discussing the objectives of the company, and he tells the new-hires: "Most people that make it in this country today just do it on volume. They come up with a simple idea, but yet something everyone can use. Like a bolt, or a slightly different bolt. Or a bowl that holds just a little more cereal. A slight change, small innovation." The message of this speech and its hilariously dead-end delivery enforces the absurdity of the company within the film, and also the treasures of the film itself, which is far more than just a slightly different bolt.

Love Liza.

Wilson Joel: Do you have the yellow pages?
Cashier at Pancake House: Customer copy out of the phone book.
Wilson Joel: It's all torn to shreds.
Cashier at Pancake House: I apologize, but that's our customer copy.
Wilson Joel: Can I use your copy?
Cashier at Pancake House: Sorry, convenient store next door might have one.
Wilson Joel: But, you have one.
Cashier at Pancake House: Sir, I'm sorry. Try next door.
Wilson Joel: I just got finished eating your bad pancakes and got my plane stolen out of my car in your parking lot.
Cashier at Pancake House: Want me to call the police? I can call the police.
Wilson Joel: No, I just want to see the yellow pages.
Cashier at Pancake House: What are you looking for?
Wilson Joel: Planes.
Cashier at Pancake House: Planes?
Wilson Joel: Yea, model planes. You know remote control planes?
Cashier at Pancake House: Toy Planes?
Wilson Joel: Yea, toy planes.
Cashier at Pancake House: You're not gonna find anything like that.
Wilson Joel: Let me look... let me look.
Cashier at Pancake House: You're not going to find it.
Wilson Joel: Haha, yea you see that? You see that? One of your fucking friends stole my plane. Somebody who eats the bad food in this place all the time. That plane is going to ruin this whole place.

Milestones (Portland Screening).

My previous reactions after seeing Milestones at the LA Film Festival.

A haunting portrait and exploration of lost dreams, I ascribe Milestones a false lyricism - one that exists in my memory of the film but was missing from the screen Saturday night. Milestones is a revolutionary's counseling session, a musing on a journey out of a certain place. This place is referred to as a 'melted context' and 'changed roots,' and it means that people from a generation of self-discovery are a decade later emerging to find themselves trapped in a lifestyle, and to a greater extent a society, that doesn't fit the image they conjured in their early dreams. It's real stripped-bones filmmaking: the film implements no cohesive device to structure its story, and the narrative is personal, non-traditional, and amateur. This amateurism is what my memory had smoothed over.

The film on a technical level isn't very well made. Boom mics are present regularly, voice-overs are used over scenes of two characters together, some of the more obviously staged scenes lack motivation, and the choices in editing often mirror the hippie mindset. For example, the narrative is stopped for a moment in order to watch clouds pass over the moon. I find it hard to determine which scenes are diary-like or documentary, and which scenes are fiction. A character dies a fake death, and it makes me wonder how authentic his introduction was. Some of the dialogue is wooden, but is it because that's the voice of the person, or is it the staging of the dialogue? You realize at a point that the film isn't always entirely what it needs to be, only what it wants to be.

The title references the transformations taking place in the characters' lives. The film ends with a real-life birth (I admit that, knowing it was coming this time, I watched this scene with my peripheral vision, and am really terrified by ten-foot tall six-centimeter-dilated vaginas), and in some ways everyone in the film is being born or re-born or growing up. Their openness is the film's lasting charm. Ultimately I think the film truly makes transparent, fictional or non-fictional, the lives of its characters, and it shares their honesty on a basic level. Maybe you can't really categorize the film, but you can't really categorize the people in it either.

Ramin Bahrani.

When Stephanie calls Ramin Bahrani's films depressing, I know what she means. He knows what you mean. On the commentary track of Man Push Cart, Bahrani speaks of MPC as a filmic justification for suicide in the face of horrible, unchanging circumstance. He refers to the following inspirations: Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus, Hou Hsiao-Hsien's The Boys from Fengkuei; in a magazine article he also mentions Robert Flaherty's Man of Aran, Steinbeck, and Dostoyevsky. On his commentaries (both Man Push Cart and Chop Shop have great ones) he dissects his characters, their origins, the films' themes, provides true-life parallels, and mentions more and more movies. He's kind of like an art house QT, I think, and what it would mean to be an art house QT has been on my mind lately.

How genuine are his films, specifically, is my question. Bahrani isn't just dramatizing intense and stark landscapes, he's also attempting social realism and some kind of didacticism. He's attempting to portray real pain, real people, and real situations. These qualities generally throw up red flags for me. I find that often times artists and filmmakers will use the pain of others as a way of soothing or assuaging their own guilt, or as a way of self-criticism, or as a way of self-dramatizing, or for vanity, or...etc examples of selfish reasons for exploring the true grit of humanity.

I don't believe that politics, governmental or social, in film work like they do in real life. In the physical world the initiator of the change will fade away but the products of his/her efforts will remain regardless of initial intention. All the King's Men stuff. In film, what you produce has to be a result of what you believe, to be totally effective and important. It has to be. You can believe whatever you want, and your beliefs can be outrageous and totally different from mine - I actually love that - just make a film out of what you really believe.

That's why I listen to Bahrani's commentary tracks. I don't have to, because the films are great themselves, but when I do I can begin to understand why and how they are important. Because that's really what the question of sincerity is meant to probe. If Bahrani's films are socially aware, as they are, and I am watching them, what is Bahrani attempting to make me aware of, and why?

I didn't know right away. Not after seeing all three, not after two commentary tracks and a handful of magazine articles. I was eating pizza when the answer came to me. I have seen these people (his film characters) now, and I know them. And that is all. Bahrani has introduced me to struggles outside of my own, made me feel them, experience them, guided me through them, and that is all he has done. What happened afterward was up to me, and that's what makes his films really great.

This is what makes his films really great: Bahrani doesn't offer you the significance of his character's existence. He shows you their lives; you learn about them only by how you respond. As if you were really just meeting them (to meet some of these people, how great that would be, how great is Bahrani's eye for character). It's the imposition of structure and moral codes that delimits the worldview of most films, and Bahrani intelligently offers as little of himself as he can. There are dramatic points in his films. Certainly there's rising tension and character development. I just love that these are movies where we don't really have to discuss all that. Each minor particular doesn't matter as much as the total sum of the experience of seeing these movies.

He speaks of erasing himself from Chop Shop, erasing the presence of the camera and the filmmakers behind the camera. And he does it masterfully. An expert at stylized absence (master of non-style style?), Bahrani is Ozu in the gutters and streets. During a tracking shot in Chop Shop, the d.p. Michael Simmonds refers to the Dardennes' Rosetta, about how he had rewatched Rosetta recently and the tracking shots were wider than he remembered, and Bahrani replies that his intention was to keep the camera as unobtrusive as possible. Where the Dardennes add emphasis, Bahrani does not. That's why you can approach a Bahrani film from any direction, and why you can approach the films as anybody.

I leave myself with a reminder of a stick being tossed off a cliff with a rising wind, and does it rise back? I don't know. That's great.

A Sherman's March Pitch.

So then. . .I figure this will be the beginning of my screenplay. So that's the first - scene in my screenplay. Just me and Granny Smith - I have braids on, plaid shirt, the whole thing. ('You have to give me a compressed version because I'll never...') (She laughs). So that's how it starts out.

Then I turn into the best actress in the world. Probably with some huge love scene, comparable to Romeo and Juliet. Something that captivates the whole world - the heart of the world. Now by the fact that I'm such a famous actress I'm a multi-millionaire, and move to an island in the South Seas, with my lover who's going to be Tarzan to me. And we just play Jane and Tarzan.

And then about three years later we build a center - which will have seven or eight centers coming out from - we'll have another island with a center. And this will be the most intellectual island in the world, full of the top scientists, we'll cure cancer, et cetera.

And I come back, and I've found all these scientific things - possibly cured cancer myelf. Come back - -

Now wait a minute, while I'm on the island though, my Tarzan lover, whose name is Will, he has a fit because he no longer has me to himself, so he goes into a fit and burns down the island that's totally built on, you know, all the scientific research.

And at this point in the movie I want it to be total fantasy. Just, like, tropical, huge, huge plants. Huge animals. The music will be, just, unbelievable. Probably Stevie Wonder's type of music. 'The Secret Life of Plants.'

('How old are you at this point?')

(She sighs). At this point, pretty much ageless. Because I've been an astronaut. So I haven't really aged. And this is another thing that overwhelms people, is that I'm this person who's really never really aged.

And so we go to Venus. And - we start coming back and forth to Earth and we start teaching people flying lessons, 'cause the gravity's different, so, therefore we can build our muscles up like breaststroke (she demonstrates). And we come back and forth.

Well I get in a huge fight with Will in Venus and he takes a sword and cuts my head off and my head floats back to Malibu Mountain, in California. And I give this speech - and at this point I'm a female prophet - and I give this speech to the whole world who's lined up on fences, beaches, all along the mountaintops.

And all they see is my head floating. And it's just totally....gets to the whole world.

And my message is one of love.

Slasher.

Just leave him alone in the hotel room, Michael Bennett, the slasher, in the grip of all his nerves and fears, and let him work out before the camera his marital hardships, a self-evaluation of professional competence, and an implicit litany of peripheral anxieties (How much is the bottle affecting him? How much do his friends understand and appreciate him?), and you have a movie I'd watch 85 minutes of.

What exactly goes on at the car dealership - the price gorging, the business politics, the orchestration of the slasher event - is interesting as a backdrop, but the substance of Slasher is in the tiny moments. I get really involved in a movie when I think I'm seeing something absolutely genuine and unmotivated and sort of unexplainable. I feel like a vital, intimate aspect of humanity is being communicated through the screen directly to me and I open up to the screen, allow it access to me as it gives of itself. Documentaries are almost always successful at delivering this feeling. Simply the lack of stages sets scripts and actors will accomplish the feeling. What I want though is for the film's role to take shape as the subject develops. You can tell when a documentary is trying to shape its footage and material based on the filmmaker's agenda, and you can tell when the subject doesn't fit into that conceptualized idea. It's horribly boring and painful to watch.

Landis's documentary is about the slasher, Michael Bennett, more than it is about the slashing event. You actually see very little of the pitching and dealing, and what you do see only fortifies the development of Bennett's personality the auxiliary scenes are building. There is also a strong sense of Memphis, and the people of Memphis. As strong as what you would get from a DGG film, and even achieved by similar means: the small activities and decisions of the people are framed just right as to suggest the larger meaning and social structure. It's kind of gloomy, it's kind of destitute, but it's really soulful, organic, and endearing. It's funny too, and a documentary that is funny and sincere can make the humor warm and cheerful.

This was a movie I had heard of back in Ohio. The manager of the theater I was working at had heard of the movie, was a fan of Landis, and had recommended the movie to me. Five years later I finally rented the movie. The next day Stephanie and I went to the theater to see Drag Me to Hell, and before that movie began a trailer played for Neal Brennan's The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard. I would almost think Hollywood wasn't small enough for these two movies to coexist without direct influence (The Goods is apparently not based on Slasher, or at least no credit is given, even though a few similarities even in the trailer are startling, including the dj character, although maybe this is common in slashing events I don't really know), if not for time apparently being small enough so that this irony of sequence could occur.

Milestones.

July 16 2008. From IMDb. I remember reviewing this movie because 0 or only 1 or 2 other people had previously reviewed the film on IMDb and I was in complete rapture after seeing the movie. You don't get the sense from what I wrote, but I remember and know I was! Original text left unaltered.

Titled: A shared journey.

While Milestones is ostensibly about the years following a historical movement, and the film does very much take place in the ashes of the 60s, it is a film of tragic specificity and genuine intimacy that reveals more to the viewer than political or social agenda. The film is remarkably successful because it tunnels through the superficial, and it achieves feelings of both documentary and fiction (it has to be both documentary and fiction, because there is a major moment towards the end of the film that could only have been partially staged), spreading out across human experience, examining stories of betrayal, redemption, bonding, sacrifice, disappointment, and hope. It has stories of beginnings and ends, family stories, stories between friends, lovers - I don't think there is any other film with such an amazing diversity of characters and situations with such meaningful focus on each character.

This large ensemble narrative, then, which possesses a narrative that is both indifferent and engaging, is special for having a structure emblematic of its major social intention. While a film may be about caring, it seems that this film is about caring and does care.

Describing the actual film would be a matter of detailing the myriad of characters' paths, and I won't do that for you because the mystery of the journey is part of the fun of the film, but I will say that some of the characters are: a three person hippie family unit searching for a place of true meaning out across the roads of America, a commune that feels similar to Moodysson's much later film Together, a father trying to find a relationship with his son he left behind years ago, an elderly woman who has worked her entire life, a pregnant woman, a man wanted for murder in a way similar to Days of Heaven, a blind potter, a gentle, sincere radical recently released from prison, and a musician trying to make living money. They come to mean so much more though, than that I can describe.