the writing shed

my recent Criticker rankings

2011-10-02T10:53:00.002-07:00

'Sorcerer' (1977)

2011-09-03T19:13:00.020-07:00

*

"4 guys – on the run from crimes in other countries – who end up in this rainy jungly Latin American country – and they take a job where they have to transport 6 boxes of nitroglycerine through terrible terrain – seriously, if you hit a bump in the road (and there are barely any roads at all in the fictional country) – the whole thing will blow up." (plot recap from The Sheila Variations)

Several years ago I'd heard of 'Sorcerer' while researching Les Reed's soundtrack for 'Girl on a Motorcycle'. I'd stumbled upon a soundtrack paradise of a site (which has since disappeared) devoted to horror, sci-fi and cult film soundtracks, wherein through browsing I was introduced to several films for the first time. My relationship to 'Sorcerer' started with samples of its soundtrack, which I linked together with the electronic scores of 'Apocalypse Now' and 'The Conversation'; my preference for electronic soundtracks became fixed definitively within the mid-to-late 70s. These are the scores which are eerily in between the spectre and the recording studio; too real, strange, leaden, and humorless to fit comfortably within the digital/synth/electronic 80s. These 70s electronic sounds are somehow visceral, originating within the body; they inherently repel instant digestion and easy novelty, and refuse the airy, fickle attentions of the typical retro-hobbyist. Like Bottin, Zombi, and Boards of Canada, there are most likely too many musicians now who are capitalizing on pseudo-Goblin and pseudo-Tangerine Dream, but I'll always prefer the originals.

Director William Friedkin. I would agree with Robert Cumbow's take on a lack of characterization in many of Friedkin's films, often making them worse ('To Live and Die in L.A.' and 'Bug' for example), but I'm allergic to approaching every film with a somewhat formulaic set of expectations which remove chances for unexpected viewer affect. Cumbow states that Friedkin's refusal to show "clear and triumphant" camera angles in key scenes is "no accident", since it "would yield too much hope...they could only be regarded as optimistic; and Friedkin, concerned from start to finish of Sorcerer with bleakness, squalor, ugliness, and the absurdity of defeat, has no room for that." The tone of this claim sounds as though Cumbow feels this is an unecessary dourness in the film, which also suggests that it can't possibly have any constructive effect. I would say those are reasons to watch 'Sorcerer' and enjoy it for all of its relentless refusal to soothe, reassure, and entertain the general viewer.

Cumbow also complains that scenes that seem out of character (even within a lack of characterization) are just WRONG because we've been given little to no indication of motive, nor has Friedkin allowed us to get close to any of the characters. Throughout 'Sorcerer', I'd enjoyed knowing almost nothing about these people, wherein the film kept rattling the image I'd been building up of each character, genuinely surprising me just as any unexplained character would in a film which trusts me to build my own theories (even the non-narrated version of 'Blade Runner' mistrusts viewer intelligence). Of course it makes sense that in a film in which a character's motivations are spelled out, sudden unexplained scenes 'out of character' seem fickle and feel as if the film is falling apart. 'Sorcerer' is not that kind of film. From Genji Press: "the movie never falls into the trap of having each character shine on cue: they only do their thing when they’re backed up against the abyss, much as we all do in the real world. Their desperation’s not a pose...I enjoy films where characterization is given to us through the accruals of little moments, not big gestures." On Roy Scheider, the only 'name' in 'Sorcerer': "Scheider had an everyman look to him that worked so well in Jaws, and he uses the same how-the-hell-did-I-get-here? attitude to make us feel like he’s a person, not a star on location, even when that location looks half the time like the very crumbling rim of the world."

Genji Press and The Sheila Variations have researched the context for 'Sorcerer's appearance in 1977 and its Werner Herzog-like ambitions. Basically the film took 2 1/2 years to make and ended up bombing completely in the company of 'Star Wars'. Sheila Variations urges us to find 'Sorcerer' and see it despite its reputation: "The thing about Sorcerer is: you must see it outside of that context...1972? It might have been a massive hit. But 1977? Not a chance. The pendulum was shifting."

2011-08-26T09:04:00.001-07:00

This blog may be moving to wordpress, via new blogger rules about links and other content. Move TBA.

some notes on David Fincher's 'Zodiac' (2007)

2011-07-13T15:38:00.001-07:00

*
I have a lot of respect and admiration for writers who not only review a film, but attempt to flesh out the very instances in which the film made certain impressions on them personally, whether or not it fits into a clear and snappy few paragraphs designed to answer the reader's question of should I bother to watch it, yes or no; so below are some great found quotes expressing just that within David Fincher's 'Zodiac' from 2007:

"Adapted from Graysmith’s books on the Zodiac by James Venderbilt, this is an old-fashioned procedural at its most procedural, and David Fincher at his most visually restrained—we’re talking a two hour and forty minute movie of guys talking jurisdiction on phones, guys arguing over miniscule leads with ardent passion, guys rhetorically pondering the mysteries of the case, guys in city police offices, in newspaper offices, in rural sheriff offices, in police archives, in late-night diner booths, and crazy guys trying to convince resigned guys of the validity of their newest theory. For all intents and purposes, Zodiac is a documentary of actors discussing factual minutia; it is a picture of inevitable professional fallibility under a deluge of facts and figures that come together only to make clear that they will never add up."

"Like many of the best paranoia-infused films, space and the time are both entirely specific and totally arbitrary, if not abstract. This film could be 90 minutes long just as it could have gone on for another hour. When it is submerged in procedure it is at its best; when Ruffalo and Armstrong and secondary characters like the small-town sheriffs played by Elias Koteas and Ken Narlow submerge themselves in the film by likewise submerging themselves in the work, going through the motions of an investigation, and letting the routine and the frustration settle in naturally. (The analogy between the futility of the investigation and the futility of Fincher’s film itself is continually invited.) This is Zodiac playing towards its strength, of itself becoming part of the problem of the identifying the serial killer, of obsessing over chronology, endless factual details, name checking, and finally realizing exhaustion and a sense of only partial completeness."
(source)

"What makes "Zodiac" authentic is the way it avoids chases, shootouts, grandstanding and false climaxes, and just follows the methodical progress of police work. Just as Woodward and Bernstein knocked on many doors and made many phone calls and met many very odd people, so do the cops and Graysmith walk down strange pathways in their investigation. Because Graysmith is unarmed and civilian, we become genuinely worried about his naivete and risk-taking, especially during a trip to a basement that is, in its way, one of the best scenes I've ever seen along those lines."

"I am often fascinated by true crime books, partly because of the way they amass ominous details (the best I've read is Blood and Money, by Tommy Thompson), and Fincher understands that true crime is not the same genre as crime action. That he makes every character a distinct individual is proof of that; consider the attention given to Graysmith's choice of mixed drink." (source)

*I had many lovely pictures from the film to post, but blogger is being lame and is having a breakdown*

micro-reviews #2

2011-06-14T10:01:00.028-07:00

'Morning Glory' (2010)

(Harrison does some yelling, but not enough)

I saw a still from this film which involved Jeff Goldblum looking very embarrassed for someone. That was enough of a reason for me to give this film a try. Who is the target audience here? People who thought 'The Devil Wears Prada' was too complicated, too slow-moving, too hard to follow? Because this film resembles the aforementioned vacancy but with a morning news team. Goldblum had many scenes, embarrassed, saying "how embarrassing for you", but it didn't help. There's no reason to care about what happens or doesn't happen to anyone in this film. I kept waiting for Harrison Ford to punch everyone out. Why cast Harrison Ford if he doesn't get to lose his temper so that everyone becomes deeply ashamed? Who is a worse actor in 'Morning Glory' - Rachel McAdams or the craptascular soundtrack of screamingly perky songs?

(poor Jeff)

'Hamlet' (1990)

I love this film. From the Ennio Morricone soundtrack to Mel Gibson's freak-outs to Glenn Close's long wig to Paul Scofield's cracked voice saying "horrible! oh horrible!" I suppose I owe a lot to how it dissolved the otherwise depressing experience of high school Shakespeare classes; apathetic or sincere, most students forced to read Shakespeare aloud create an atmosphere of humiliation for everyone. Despite the present Mel, the Mel of the 80s and 90s still gives almost every role abrupt, visceral human weaknesses. As Hamlet he's believable, making emotionally desperate decisions, then shrinking away into spite and passive aggressiveness - he's weasely and manipulative, no matter how justifiably vengeful. The film's Scotland location and grave costume design still make the story feel like a FACT - this story seemed real to me at 14, and still does.

'Brighton Rock' (2010)

This film is loosely set within the same Mods versus Rockers Brighton Beach war as in 'Quadrophenia' (a particular favorite). But I do lose a bit of respect for a film if it relies too heavily on using the same group of actors we've seen in everything else lately, without giving anyone anything different to do; here we go, Helen Mirren, John Hurt, Andy Serkis, Sean Harris, Philip Davis...amongst a larger collection of British staples, they become a collective body, seemingly unable to sustain single remarkable performances without being propped up by each other's star statuses. This is mainly the fault of the director, who in this case is more interested in hurtling the plot along than in letting anyone act/breathe. That's why I appreciated how the film makes the poisonous relationship between Sam Riley and Andrea Riseborough a central story. And Sam Riley can be COLD. He is frightening. Andrea Riseborough is somehow more interesting and complex than Carey Mulligan in 'An Education', making a recent 60s-film link.

'Cassandra's Dream' (2007)

I prefer a small collection of Woody Allen films rather than the majority, but my favorites lately are those which belittle and undermine Allen's usual casting/dialogue/plot decisions. This depends mainly on the cast, and whether or not they can resist the hurried gratuitousness of Allen's usual dialogue, wherein every character is essentially the same lofty, bored socialite/businessman/accidentally-wealthy yet struggling actor-writer (who is usually suspicious of an even more wealthy character, while constantly teased about it by an oblivious wife/girlfriend). While I prefer 'Match Point', this film ended up feeling almost as strange, but not quite strange enough. Neither Ewan McGregor nor Colin Farrell are as unpredictable as Jonathan Rhys Meyers, but they still manage to avoid appearing flippant, bored, then guilty (one particular Allen-cut arc of emotion). Hayley Atwell's scenes as a stage actress - one of the heaviest and most obnoxious reminders that this is a recent Woody Allen film.

'Freeway' (1996)

I remember seeing this film advertised around the same year that everyone seemed be still trying to cash in on low-rent strains of 'Natural Born Killers'. Ok which film is worse? 'The Ringmaster' or 'Freeway'? There's only one scene I liked in this film - when Reese Witherspoon is sent to some bunkbed camp version of women's prison (which includes a believably creepy Brittany Murphy as group-cell-mate with spidery facial scars), and Alanna Ubach (I've only seen her once before as an OCD temp in 'Clockwatchers') slinks up for the newbie welcome beating, her dead eyes somehow creepier than Hannibal Lecter's silent stare. Otherwise I'm not a fan of cheap tabloid shocks and a drooling Kiefer Sutherland.

Well that's all I have time for. I know you desperately want to read more. Part three in the works!

end-of-term micro-reviews

2011-04-19T12:58:00.017-07:00

*
I love accidentally watching a film almost as much as finding one on my many lists, and so I end up watching a lot of trash. Since going back to school, there's been zero time to write about anything, but there should at least be time for micro-film-reviews:

Girlfriends (1978)

Remember Melanie Mayron? She's been in everything but she's always invisible. 'Girlfriends' successfully conveys the slow, boring, depressing, quiet, but very intimate world of being in your 20s in the late 70s and living with a roommate, then losing that roommate because she gets married, then feeling stranded while living alone. Oh and Eli Wallach is completely believable as the old-man romantic crush.

We Own The Night (2007)

The point of this film is to see Joaquin Phoenix in the role he does incredibly well: traumatized, vulnerable, and in pain. There is also an impressive car chase scene in the rain with freaky Lynch-like music.

Hysterical Blindness (2002)

Lose the cutesy indie-film toy piano soundtrack filler, and you've got a 100% believable role from Uma Thurman playing a clueless bar chick in the 1980s who continually fails to get herself a man "with Patrick Swayze eyes". The bar 'Ollies' should also win an award for supporting actor.

Arthur (1981)

I had to make sure I'd seen the original 'Arthur' in order to convincingly hate the remake. John Gielgud takes his role as Butler very seriously, Liza Minelli certainly has presence but in a 'Three's Company' way, and Dudley Moore is supposed to be playing a straight-forward 2-D comedic role but instead he's actually interesting, giving Minelli these looks as though he's acting in a completely different film.

Red (2010)

Oh I hate this film! I was tricked because Helen Mirren is in it! And WOW this film is BAD. 'Red' is a PG-13 Hollywood spy film for those who have never seen one before, and who need to know what a PG-13 Hollywood spy film formula is, for whatever reason. Everything is painfully spelled out for you. Poor Helen Mirren. Bruce Willis has been doing the same role for years though, it's his thing.

Hobo With a Shotgun (2011)

I'm a particular kind of perfect audience for contemporary grindhouse films, especially if they reference and pay tribute to films from the 80s; more specifically, popular rentals from the 80s. Just a few brief things about 'Hobo': Rutger Hauer is my hero AGAIN, and I'm impressed with how amazingly sleazy this film is while at the same time successfully avoiding the cool-olympics of other films such as Tarantino's, and the ending is pretty great and reminds me of Peter Jackson's early horror film slapstick. Not as good as 'Planet Terror' or 'Machete', but a really great attempt.

Shopgirl (2005)

I saw this in the hotel on a recent trip, so I can at least it wasn't a plan. I kept switching the channel with disgust, then going back out of curiousity. On second viewing (you can't truly make a case without proper study), I still hate this film but for slightly different reasons. Steve Martin and Jason Schwartzman have been playing annoying roles for years, so I wasn't surprised. Claire Danes disappoints me because she used to be, or at least appeared to be, unusual and gawky and androgynous. In this film she's a Stepford Girl. "Maybe we can have one of our nights," she says on an answering machine, her tone simultaneously rehearsed-flirty and unnatural.

Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (2011)

The purpose of this film is to judge Natalie Portman's acting ability and its rumored maturity. Sure, the film realistically deals with how people throw each other out, then reconcile, then repeat everything again because they're still learning how to deal and how to treat each other. But character development? So shallow and nonexistent. Check out Portman's 'friends'; they do walk-ons and emote in the most formulaic, accelerated way possible. Also, I think I've been ignoring it but I can't anymore: Portman's voice and inflection makes her sound more vacuous than I think her character is meant to be.

Australia revisited - 1986 and 1988

2011-04-17T10:01:00.010-07:00

Eli

2011-03-23T19:21:00.002-07:00

Pacino

2011-03-18T15:17:00.004-07:00

2011-03-02T06:05:00.004-08:00

found: the trailer for the HBO miniseries, 'Mildred Pierce', starring Kate Winslet, and directed by Todd Haynes!!!

Read an interview with Haynes at Artforum.

John Cazale in "I Knew It Was You"

2011-01-23T10:08:00.001-08:00

*

(found via simpleposie)

2011-01-04T15:15:00.002-08:00

found: the extremely honest, funny, and personal reviews of Kartina Richardson on her blog Mirror: Motion Picture Commentary. These reviews remind me what great film writing/reviewing/commentary can be.

excerpts:

"I did not watch a film at all. I had a conversation with myself. I crawled into my body and watched memories I forgot I had but needed to remember. They were projected on the inside of my body. Probably in my stomach somewhere." (on 'Baby Doll')

"Take it from someone who knows anxiety like the back of her shaking hand. Jack Lemmon nails it. It is his finest talent. He’s got a face for it. A wide muppet’s mouth resembling a trout with corners that slacken at command. Beady eyes that narrow into the sharpest of slits. A tiny chin that makes its point, and a forehead so smooth and pale, I have often mistaken it for a plane of virgin snow waiting for stress to leave its footprints." (on 'The Odd Couple')

"Nothing about the film was superfluous. There was no extra air. The editing is tight as hell, and the photography by DP Jeff Cronenweth (who also worked with Fincher on Fight Club) is great. Not spectacular or fancy, but noticeably thoughtful. Most of the conversation shots of the characters have a very shallow depth of field: perhaps another little way of communicating their isolation from the rest of the world. Additionally, I am personally pleased that most of the shots are truly static. No gently hovering camera here (a style that’s become way overused in the past ten years or so)." (on 'The Social Network')

"Solitude welcomes a self or selves that does not, cannot, appear when in the company of others. Private selves refuse to manifest in public because other personas are at the front lines. Like mother Elephants circling their calves, our public selves form ranks. Each is a layer of armor, tweaking our interactions in the unconscious name of self defense."

"The edges are blurry. This is familiar in avant garde film, but in mainstream cinema that usually assumes the audience is dumber than it is, it’s a rarity. In Black Swan, scenes aren’t spent establishing relationship back story any longer than necessary. Time isn’t wasted justifying actions. Any more facts would wrench the film out of the realm of the surreal in which it belongs. When direction is good, a glance from one character to another, or from one character’s persona to its rival self, is all it takes to know the deal."

(on 'Black Swan')

'True Grit' (2010)

2011-01-02T12:45:00.018-08:00

*

Collected thoughts:

References to 'Night of the Hunter' or not, the hymn as a musical genre is heavy with associations.

Every object, product, and personal talisman in this film has a name that goes beyond manufacturer and enters into a kind of thing theory. Uttering these names are to be listened to with the same respect as uttering a person's name and profession as beyond doubt. No one seems to care enough these days to use words with the cadence and deliberation of Shakespeare.

Dresses, coats, hats, suits, they're all extensions of the body and will definitely be plummeted into water, mud, blood and sweat repeatedly, and are expected to hold true.

The Coens test a stoic culture of morals in every way, having the young Mattie, for example, presumably sleep in a coffin on her first night in town because of a lack of boarding funds.

Hailee Steinfeld, who plays Mattie, gives the dry but extremely knowing dialogue the gravity and personal morality which avoids cute smart-alec territory. Resembling both Dorothy from 'Return To Oz' and a young Meredith Salenger from 'The Journey of Natty Gann', Mattie naively assumes her rightful place in the film, and is correct.

The Coens give this period film full respect and play everything straight. Everything is played "bone-dry", as one reviewer has pointed out. Just as traditional hymns are inherently played and sung bone-dry so as to avoid the tiniest speck of vanity and allow all people (most of whom should never try to sing, and certainly not in airless pews) to sing and experience some kind of unity beyond the corporeal, this film starts every scene and every speech with that same bone-dry, dogged, naive piety. The Coens avoid overdoing the knowingness of their dialogue with this bone-dry foundation, something that period films (or period TV series like 'Deadwood') usually fail to do with or without contemporary slang.

The Coens play with the fact that the monotonous continuation of a natural talker soon becomes another extension of their body, taking on all kinds of textures and smells and weights through the duration and tediousness of listening. This is what Jeff Bridges does well. It's a relief to find a film that doesn't think the delivery of dialogue has to be constantly photogenic and sexy.

It's incredible how powerful a face can be with almost no movement, just a sudden searching of the eyes. Jeff Bridges can master this simplicity with only one eye.

Even arrogance is played bone-dry, check out Matt Damon's presumtuous, heavily-spurred performance.

"Why have you been ineffectually pursuing Chaney?"
"You give out very little sugar with your pronouncements."

The Coens have zeroed in on the one thing that makes actors like Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon and Josh Brolin truly vulnerable and therefore truly funny: for Bridges, it's a gaping, frozen face of befuddlement, for Damon it's an elderly, pained look, and for Josh Brolin it's a shuddering lower lip and sunken face of whiny pouts via Brand from 'The Goonies'.

"I have lapped filthy water from a hoof print. And was glad to have it."

Avoiding benevolent wit only, children are shoved, digits chopped off, faces are pressed to the ground with boots, limbs are lost from gangrene, tongues are almost bitten off, and other blunt violence make appearances.

I'm a fan of the bear-suit man who proclaims himself "Forrester, ah practice dentistry in the nation, also veterinary arts, and medicine for those humans that will sit still for it." Its not just the cute words here that make this scene work, it's Forrester's stout, baffled, monumental shape, his nose and eyes giving his immense silliness away. "I have taken his teeth."

"You do not varnish your opinions."

From other reviews:

"Here [Bridges is] so grounded and tough and the poetic dialogue falls off so natural, it's like you're seeing a real American myth, like the iron spirit of Leadbelly, roar up from the underbrush. Every character is so well-etched (Great to see Barry Pepper again, playing a guy named Art Pepper), even Josh Brolin's amiable playing-dumb outlaw, that it reminded me of all things, that TREASURE ISLAND starring Wallace Beery, where every character was an MGM-stable hoot and a holler and a story starring a child is allowed to be bloodcurdlingly violent without either hand-holding guilt or apathetic abstraction. Weak ending though, like the Coens couldn't quite do anything except trace a chalk line." (source)

"[Mattie] goes forward not because she has faith in a better worldly future — her last words to us are “Time just gets away from us” — but because she has faith in the righteousness of her path, a path that is sure (because it is not hers) despite the absence of external guideposts." (source)

"The important thing is, the Coens’ True Grit is very funny, and very serious, at the same time. This is a specialty of theirs, though it’s sailed clean over the heads of legions of filmgoing morons for ages. People have trouble with complexity: if the Coens are funny, they can’t also be serious, and if they can’t be serious, they’re mere postmodern pranksters making fun of everything, and ought to be squelched somehow. In author Charles Portis, the Coens have met their match and then some, because much of Portis’ humor is so hard and dry and unpandering, it’s like rock strata embedded in harsh cliffs and if you miss it, that’s tough. The Coens actually make it seem much showier; some lines play so raucously they send you flying back to the book to see if they could really be in there. And they are." (source)

"The Coens repeat similar incidents in different tones, first comical and light, then later, dark and heavy. LaBeef bids Mattie “Ay-dios!” twice, in opposing registers, and we’re meant to feel the accumulated weight that’s the difference between the two. Cogburn saves a mule from casual tormenters armed with sticks in a humorous scene early on, then later rides a horse to its awful death, jabbing it in the haunch with a knife." (source)

"That commitment to straight Western storytelling peppered with implication extends to the film's racial commentary...Bridges puts the racism of John Wayne's West on display as clearly as it can be seen back in town where every black character is a servant to whom even Mattie lightly condescends." (source)

Some stills:

2010-12-28T08:21:00.006-08:00

A few images from the excellent new BBC TV series 'Sherlock Holmes', which so far has only three episodes.

2010-12-12T08:02:00.001-08:00

2010-08-31T14:19:00.002-07:00

found essay on Chris Marker's 'La Jetée' (1962):

"Eli Friedlander makes a philosophical and psychoanalytic case for Chris Marker’s La Jetée working in part as a metaphor for cinema while questioning multiple boundaries and definitions, including that of cinema itself (boundary 2, Volume 28, Number 1, Spring 2001, Duke University Press, pp. 75-90). In what sense is La Jetée a “film,” anyway? It is composed of 28 minutes of montaged photographed, with one brief, blink-of-an-eye (literally) exception. Friedlander locates this exception to the film’s formal rules as part of its key. Consciousness and unconsciousness are integral to life and to cinema, to say nothing of the film’s narrative content. In a word, the film has us “look” at the “gaze.” This is not a Mulveyan gaze, but more like the gaze of cinema. Of most essential import is, can the gaze return itself? Can a film return the gaze of the spectator? As a production – a reproduction – and an artifact that creates the impression of movement intended for viewing, one might consider it non-real, unreal. Friedlander forces the issue, however, probing the ramifications of our prejudices concerning “the real.”" (read more)

2010-08-25T09:11:00.003-07:00

found: various stills from animated films, particularly of The Quay Brothers; source

2010-08-24T12:10:00.001-07:00

(image source)

"Doc Brown is so regularly and excitedly animate that it’s difficult to isolate the one scene that most succinctly summates his nature. But it is worth noting that he, in the most overstated manner I have ever seen, pronounces the title of the film in staring straight into the camera, raising his voice, and pointing a single index finger punctuationally in to the air. He does the same, only with a dramatic removal of his futuristic sunglasses – which reveal those characteristically excited eyes – in lieu of a finger, in epilogue, which doubles as the preface to Part II." (from Not Coming To A Theater Near You)

2010-08-23T11:38:00.001-07:00

I just saw the trailer for the new film 'Rubber' by director Quentin Dupieux, which is about a killer-tire, really. Read about it here. See the trailer, maybe you'll be as immediately fascinated as I am:

2010-08-20T14:33:00.001-07:00

(Bruno S. in Werner Herzog's "Enigma of Kaspar Hauser"; image source)

'Greenberg' (2010)

2010-08-20T10:11:00.023-07:00

*
The trailer for Noah Baumbach's 'Greenberg', and some of the first reviews of the film I'd read, were all about Ben Stiller more or less playing a later version of his character from 'Reality Bites'. Unfortunately, this continues to make sense after actually seeing 'Greenberg', since the trailer makes Stiller/Greenberg's complaints about the Y-Generation seem like easily digestible text-bites from popular articles on 'The Millennials". In the actual film, these same quotable complaints sound embarassingly clinical and corporate - coldly rehearsed formulas about point-form Y-Generation characteristics that we're supposed to take as fact, but when quoted, are excrutiatingly out of touch and clueless. Rather than just as a bitter and simple story about the differences between generations and classes, I prefer to read 'Greenberg' as a film about very specific and very familiar personalities and the fascinating and maddening ways in which they operate in the world.

Because the personality of Greenberg reminded me of both a former roommate and of a particularly unpleasant person I'd often had to endure, I felt empathy for Greenberg alongside all the frustration with his outwardly-projected self-loathing. There's a certain logic in Greenberg's abrasive and selfish belittlings of others, and with his hilariously tunnel-vision choices in how to show concern for others; there is a baffling but definite sensitivity to others' needs alongside an interest in affecting others' lives (or even 'helping' others), but it materializes in (and is inflected with) tones of begrudging and impatient bursts of anger. Look at these examples of Greenberg's concern and compulsion to 'help', as listed by Film Dr.: "at one point Florence has to go to the hospital, and while Roger's friend Ivan (Rhys Ifans) suggests that they get her flowers, Roger instead buys her a burger and humorously holds it up to her face when she regains consciousness. At another time, he prepares guacamole, chips, and Dreamsicles for an impromptu pool party that he sets up but then refuses to join...To strike back at the world, he writes letters of complaint to Starbucks, major airlines, and pet taxi companies.." Greenberg is a person who seems driven to correct, guide, advise, and be with people to some degree, but unbendingly on his own terms (and unable to think outside of what he would want), which happens to antagonize and insult (whether deserved or not) everyone he encounters. Tactless integrity? Myopic humanist?

It's interesting how Baumbach allows a character like Florence (played generously by Greta Gerwig) to exist in one of his films (which, based upon 'The Squid and The Whale', are determined to be littered exclusively with multiple versions of the same outwardly-cruel, inwardly-desperate personality). She is the very person to be struck by Greenberg's armoured feebleness amidst all the control-freak coldness, and her baffled reactions to his hurtful behavior - in contrast to maybe the long-suffering way his friends have learned to tolerate and ignore him - seem to restate and give fresh air to theories he's had about himself all along. His teenhood friend Ivan - the only one to still endure him voluntarily - finally vents years of frustration and hurt, yet still with a kind of heartbreaking sense of caring (at least in tones of outward respect), which Greenberg can only refer to later with the flat diction of someone who knows he 'should' acknowledge feelings verbally but has no idea how to pair genuine emotion with words. Which gives him a constant tone of snide self-entitlement and condescension out of lazy habit than thoughtful (rather than overthought) communication. This laziness still hovers over 'Greenberg' as the film ends, and to what extent anyone left in his life decides to continue to endure this is entirely up to them.

A few things left over: The way in which the music in 'Greenberg' is used is kind of clever and funny, even if the choices seem too easy and audience-pleasing (in one instance, a boring radio-sounding folky thing ends up having an atonal droning singing voice which matches the droning monotony of Greenberg shuffling around his house-sitting existence), but overall I was disappointed in the soundtrack. I sighed heavily at the heavy-handed symbolism of the "hollow, panicked" wind-sock man, to which Greenberg is "visually paired—twice, in case we missed it the first time"(source). Ben Stiller has a particular natural scowl, which is so perfectly used in this film (exhausted often but mainly he doesn't seem aware of it). Also, Baumbach has often used actresses with the most interesting-shaped mouths (Anna Paquin's wolfish "V"-shaped grin, Jennifer Jason Leigh's polite and lazy smile complete with air-vents at each corner like extra nostrils, and Greta Gerwig's "W"-shaped smile is startling when she does the big full-faced grin with teeth).

2010-08-18T11:25:00.003-07:00

As a fan of film reviews which are heavy on the personal and the hyperbolic and low on the heavy-handed wrap-it-up universal moralizing conclusions, I enjoyed these mini-reviews by A. S. Hamrah from n+1 magazine.

excerpts:

"The Hurt Locker - Far from being non-ideological or apolitical, The Hurt Locker is actually pro-war, and it’s not a contradiction that it’s the best American film made about the war in Iraq so far. Kathryn Bigelow’s film explicitly states that it is better to spend every day of your life risking getting blown to pieces defusing IEDs in Baghdad than it is to spend even one day in the US shopping for cereal at Costco with your family. While many films have tried to present the American family’s consumerist nightmare before, Bigelow’s film is one that really makes you feel it. She does not shy away from the lower-income status of her hero by ennobling it, nor does she make it shameful. It is stated as fact."

"The Last Mistress - Habits die hard, even when you’re out of town. After hurting my head thinking about Italian neorealism on an iPhone, the siren call of Asia Argento lured me back into a theater. The real title of The Last Mistress translates as An Old Mistress—another case of American distributors afraid of a French film’s actual title. “Even if your heart is loftier than your morals. . .” one character starts a sentence in this inscrutable tale with an important lesson: if you’ve got a hot mistress you really love, forget about your wife no matter what. Reminiscent of the period pieces of Eric Rohmer or Benoît Jacquot, Catherine Breillat’s lukewarm film, based on a mid-19th-century novel, lacks Rohmer’s love and charity or Jacquot’s enigmatic throb. It stays in the mind for the its clammy stare and its costuming, which at one point makes Asia Argento look like she’s auditioning for a silent-movie Carmen."

"The Limits of Control - Looking and listening—paying attention—replace the hysterical yelling and flailing of big-budget action in this anti-Bourne Identity. For something so minimal the performances are flashy—Tilda Swinton in a white wig and cowboy suit, Bill Murray as a rogue Dick Cheney in a toupee and bunker, a soulful John Hurt pointing out the difference between consumer bohemianism and the kind in Aki Kaurismäki’s poverty-soaked movie of La vie de boheme, which he describes without naming. At junctures in the film, the non-action fully stops to let Isaach De Bankolé‘s hit man contemplate three different paintings. Jarmusch mixes the subjects of these paintings into the film, relating them to objects, people, and landscapes. Paz de la Huerta is probably the most lingered-over nude in any American film; the Andalusian locations have a felt presence the deserts trashed in the Transformers movie don’t achieve before they’re destroyed."

"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen - This second Transformers film is garbage, a big pile of useless scrap and refuse in every way, but there are shots in it of plastic beauty which use Megan Fox’s stress-tested porno face like an element in a James Rosenquist painting of car parts and spaghetti. But so what? James Rosenquist paintings already exist."

"Sex and the City - Terrible, like watching dinosaurs fight—the fake dinosaurs at the beginning of Robot Monster that are really just lizards dressed up."

'Rumble Fish' (1983) falls flat, and not in a good way

2010-08-16T14:00:00.009-07:00

*

Something great about house-sitting is that there are unfamiliar films to watch. For me these are often films I probably wouldn't be looking for or spotting or wondering about all that much, mainly because I'd be sensing that probably these films are overblown, heavy-handed, preachy, or just plain yechh. But sometimes a film is yechh but I feel really bad about it, like I'm wishing the film could've tried harder, if only it had the right opportunities or screenwriter or director or actors or soundtrack. Because there's something great within the film, a few great scenes or moments, but not enough to save it if, say, I was watching it with a friend who is particularly cut-throat about the overall quality (to them) of a film. Though most of the films I care about the most would fail that test.

Poor 'Rumble Fish'. All those great actors, a great director, occasionally good music, it's black and white, it's vintage 80s, and it's very unsettling, usually in the best ways. But practically after every great moment is a pretty awful, distracting, hammy, forced, embarrassing scene (and not in the best ways).

The film starts off pretty badly, but this is because of dialogue. There is a terrible forced stagey way that all the tough young actors talk over each other in order to sound natural, therefore sounding unnatural. However, I have to say, Matt Dillon is one of the few actors in this film who consistently sounds and acts convincing. His stretched out toughness and yelling and swaggering comes from him, not from the cartooniness around him. Diane Lane, Dennis Hopper, and Mickey Rourke are also excellent. But oh man, Vincent Spano and Nicolas Cage can't quite carry their leadfoot-lines across the linoleum. Chris Penn kind of hangs around without much to do. And Tom Waits is the absolute worst, reminding me of one of the particularly failed sequences in Jarmusch's 'Coffee & Cigarettes' (even while Waits is pretty great when directed by Jarmusch).

It's not lost on me that this film is supposed to be heavily stylized, luckily not as embarrassingly as 'Streets of Fire'. I'm probably just not much of a fan of real-time dialogue forced into an echoey dreamscape suit, as if every line is being remembered in a cheesy reminiscent Disney 'Fox & The Hound' best friends way. I'm also not much of a fan of setting the tone and feeling of a time and culture by filming actors swaggering in a group like The Jets and spilling lines about how important this time and place and culture is to them (it doesn't fit their character, it sounds like a forced caption/insert wherein the scene is supposed to be super extra iconic like Woody Allen and Diane Keaton mooning about Manhattan and how lucky they are to be witness to its tightly-framed cultural influence); it's like making a film about any famous icon and forcing them to use every well-known quote in a conversational way, except this never works and it always sounds fake and false.

The music choices in 'Rumble Fish', particularly how they are inserted loudly and obviously into every scene, made me feel like I was being rudely tickled and jostled and shoved around by a horrible loud annoying relative. It ruined scenes for me in the same way that the dithering zither ruined much of 'The Third Man'; the tone was so off, and not in a good way.

What works: filming in black and white accentuates every glistening, staining, grime-smeared face and surface, and there is a constant, heavy, nauseous feeling of dread and uselessness that saves this film from being a jaunty illustration ('The Warriors' has a similar background of dread and desperation, but with a more consistent relationship to plot). Eventually the film focuses on Dillon's idolization of his brother (Rourke), and his brother's unwillingness to continue on in his 'legend', letting Dillon follow him around fruitlessly, eventually telling him to abandon his dying values (including him) and live his own life. 'Rumble Fish', like 'River's Edge', bothered me and stayed with me despite all its problems, due to a mainly amazing cast and their ability to take their characters seriously, even when the film doesn't.

Read more about 'Rumble Fish' at the excellent blog This Distracted Globe.

2010-08-13T07:05:00.000-07:00

(image source)

dance scene from '35 Shots of Rum' by Claire Denis

2010-08-01T19:16:00.000-07:00

'Splice' (2009)

2010-06-12T16:14:00.008-07:00

*

It's always a sad day when great actors end up in a film like 'Splice'.

The basic plot of the film can be read here.

Over at Scanners, I found this bit of telling info:

"You may notice the first sign of this gestational glitch in the otherwise wonderfully gooey in vitro credits sequence, where the title and the names of the lead actors are spelled out in mutant organic forms, like veins bulging beneath the surface of fetal skin. The credits read: "Screenplay by Vincenzo Natali & Antoinette Terry Bryant and Doug Taylor" -- which indicates that director Natali worked on it with Bryant, and Taylor probably did enough of a re-write to merit a screen credit. Someone -- or something -- almost certainly re-formed the last half-hour of the movie, when it suddenly dies and comes back as the predictable horror clone into which it had successfully avoided mutating up until that point."

Basically, the first half of 'Splice' is excellent. Sarah Polley's creepy smirk and Adrian Brody's nostrils never disappoint up until around the time when the plot decides to move into 'Jenifer' territory via Dario Argento, and both actors are shoved into apparently traumatized and abusive behavior which is never believable and so becomes Operatic and embarrassing. It's really, really too bad about the lack of subtlety is this film. Thanks to films like 'Species', of course there's an underlying sexual tension that will of course kill the film if anything is ever really acted on or shown in lengthy detail. Even 'Possession' understands this.

So about that superb first half! As I've said before, when a script is pretty lame and flat, good actors can often work around it by going through the motions while also making fun of their lines. Brody and Polley do this very well. The dialogue is indeed lame. I think I remember one good line during a scene involving a glassed-in leathery artificial womb. The creature effects are pretty seamless and go beyond the kind of slick realism used so often in films - the kind that is simultaneously clinical and prosthetic rather than neauseatingly fleshy and quivering (the kind that works - 'Splice' is full of this kind of realism but takes it further with a pair of gorgeously organic tongues and the amazing silhouette of Dren).

Some things I just have to get out: no film in this day and age should ever resort to using the cheesy demonic-computery voice for someone 'evil' (remember 'Legend'?); why allow Brody the romance and Polley the trauma?; generally, 'creature' plots are more successful when creature-running-amok is peripheral to a larger story (the most classic example: 'The Birds'; the most instant and much more superior link to 'Splice': Cronenberg's 'The Fly'); when a film fails so horribly, I can't take anything seriously anymore, and the film becomes absolute comedy (as maybe a companion film to 'Black Sheep').

I recommend the first half of this film, but not the second. If you see this in the theater, watch out and be ready to laugh and make Brody offspring jokes along with the rest of the audience.

And you'll need some cheering up. Here:

Oh and you have to listen to the June 9th episode of The Scare-ening, a podcast on horror stuff by bloggers Heidi Martinuzzi and Stacie Ponder - it's full of spoilers but if you've seen 'Splice', listen to this hilarious complaint of the film!

2010-05-21T10:02:00.002-07:00

found: 'The Innapropriate Golden Book' by Josh Cooley; source

'Misfits' (2009)

2010-05-16T11:10:00.013-07:00

*

"This is so not Skins meets Heroes. It’s Trainspotting meets X-Men. Something very British, very grounded, and the empowering of a disenfranchised underclass. Five young people on anti-social community service orders are hit by lightning in a freak weather storm and develop remarkable and very personal powers. Then end up wearing orange jumpsuits. And it’s bloody great". (source)

'Misfits', a British TV series about working-class accidental heroes, is funny, disturbing, violent, and for the most part anti-TV. The editing is still really slick, music choices are usually pretty great (but epic-ly fail here and there - Lady Gaga and James Blunt ruin scenes briefly), and there are lots of cartoony personalities. BUT it's what the show does with the conventions of the 'accidental hero' genre as well as the medium of TV that makes this worth watching. I've never been one who wants to accept the bargain of putting up with what most TV series continue to do (horrible acting, awful boring personalities, insulting and bludgeoning editing, smug and pretentious dialogue) in order to see a bit of "oh well at least it's better than...", as if I have no actual standards. I expect a TV series to not only show its awareness of what it is, but ruin and deflate all passive viewer expectations.

Briefly, 'Misfits' doesn't treat its viewers like vacuous morons (see every TV series and sitcom with the exception of a tiny few). Accents aren't watered down or subtitled, finally allowing this other level of character to exist rather than forcing the voice into an easily digested soundbite. The level of sexuality and violence is never tactful or TV-tasteful, and even crosses lines that most popular films don't. There is characterization, and personalities aren't classified and compartmentalized in rapid succession, but fleshed out and believably complex. Each scene is lit in greying, harsh tones, avoiding the falseness of CSI: Miami surface.

For those who don't want to put up with disappointment after disappointment, 'Misfits' is a great show.

'The S From Hell' trailer

2010-04-25T10:12:00.001-07:00

2010-04-25T09:23:00.002-07:00

found: 'The Black Dahlia'

(image source)
(image source)
(image source)

'Days of Heaven' (1978)

2010-04-23T13:39:00.016-07:00

*

Brooke Adams has the face of a more feminine Diego Luna (most recently in Harmony Korine's 'Mister Lonely'). Whenever I run into her in a film, her acting style inevitably links to other actors and actresses who can say everything while simply sitting stooped and slouching, head hung forward, face slack. In fact director Terrence Malick allows everyone in this film to say everything by saying almost nothing; by doing everything and yet most of the time, nothing much. This is a film which heightens actors in such a way that their later work appears so much more trivial and ridiculous. Yes this film is beautiful, and it's too neat what they were able to do with some puffed wheat to resemble hoards of locusts, and everything does suggest what it might have really been like during the Depression. But you can't talk about 'Days of Heaven' without talking about Malick's choice of actors and actresses.

Richard Gere is great at looking so wounded, he really is, and despite how vacant he is otherwise as an actor, his character is allowed to simply relax and get used to the feeling of really truly being wounded. By giving him very little dialogue, the film focuses on how he attends to his (secret) girlfriend played by Adams, and her kid sister played by a young Linda Manz. The usual irritation that happens when Gere appears on screen is replaced by a character who takes care of these two people while all the while naturally looking for something better than what his situation allows. Even while Gere is doing a Ryan O'Neil with the wounded routine, he's a few notches more clueless and believably short-tempered and brutish (O'Neil would have been too flustered and devastated, whereas you can see Gere shoving everything down in order to put a new plan into action).

Brooke Adams has a face with built-in crevices, slopes, sink-holes, and solar flares, and she seems indicative of the kind of actresses who only seem to appear in those older films which seem to celebrate the oddest of beauty rather than smoothing out everything unique in order to create surfaces that deflect rather than grasp. To me, her many expressions, body language, and natural manner of going slack are so interesting because they threaten any kind of lazy presumptions that she is merely something pretty and distracting dropped into an epic landscape. She has that way of looking away, dropping her face, and pulling away from that incredible laughing smile seconds before, which threatens easy relation with her character, and Malick's decision to limit dialogue allows this tension a lot of room to live.

Linda Manz is also an odd beauty with the toughest and driest of too-smart kid roles (speaking of Ryan O'Neil, he and Tatum in 'Paper Moon'....!!). She seems to be playing a character based on how she is in everyday life. I've seen her in 'Out of The Blue' and she has an incredibly weathered, toughened way about her that simultaneously reveals what she's going to be like when she's 40 or 50. She's very old in her youth, and her narration throughout the film could have been too sentimental with forced lightness of mood, but not Linda Manz. Her voice is thick with intuitive understanding of the fate of things. She sounds so lazily impartial at first, then says biting things about what is going on around her. People glimpsed from a boat could be "maybe calling for help, or getting rid of a body or something". Instead of just the idea of being tough and impartial, she has the complexity of someone who is at the same time very genuine and interested in everything around her. Her oldness lives alongside her absolute fascination with a slapstick fiddler shouting "whoooo-EEE!" She pretends to be a ventriloquist's dummy, her face broken into the biggest smile and the awkwardness of her youth shows through the scariness of her imitation.

Sam Shephard is way too reliable in a way which puts so many actors to shame. His face pulls and puckers in places that accentuate his expressions while in actuality he isn't making any actual 'face' at all. He upstages Gere as he seems grounded in something outside of the film. He gives every decision more time and weight. And he wouldn't be as interesting without those broken teeth.

Everyone in this film pulls away in odd places from viewer empathy. The landscape, much harsher and crueler than descriptions of this film usually claim, is what tears down what appears too easy or too predictable, wearing down integrity, morality, and the ability to bear others' weight.

2010-04-22T08:47:00.004-07:00

found lectures from Tate Online:

31-20-2009 Mapping the Lost Highway: New Perspectives on David Lynch

"In this landmark event, Tate Modern brings together leading artists, academics and writers from around the world to offer a series of new perspectives on Lynch's films."

http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/podcast/mp3/2009_10_31_Mapping_The_Lost_Highway_David_Lynch_1.mp3

http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/podcast/mp3/2009_10_31_Mapping_The_Lost_Highway_David_Lynch_2.mp3

04-04-2009 Polish New Wave: Andrzej Żuławski - On the Silver Globe - Intro and Q&A

"One of the earliest cosmic odysseys and science fiction superproductions, the film begins and ends with off-screen commentary by Żuławski on the failure of the film's twelve-year-long production, left unfinished due to bureaucratic intervention. The film's self-referential commentary, amazing costumes, hysterical and ecstatic cinematography and montage, and unforgettable performances, are all typical of Żuławski's unique and shamanic film language."
Introduced by Andrzej Żuławski and followed by Q&A.

http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/podcast/mp3/2009_04_04_Andrzej_Zulawski.mp3

'The Runaways' (2010)

2010-04-13T10:35:00.015-07:00

*

(mere sorta lookalikes)

It was really naive of me to think that anyone in this film might be able to pull off resembling Joan Jett or Cherie Currie. And I don't mean looking like them, because that's easy. In all the clips and promo images available on 'The Runaways', it seems as though Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning may be able to impress with mimickry, including voice inflection, body language, stage presence, and singing voice(s). But as much as I don't want to be one of those people who are always complaining about having their personal expectations messed with, I feel like Floria Sigismondi's 'The Runaways' is one of those films that provokes, rather than satisfies, the need for decent fictional music biopics. Fictional biopics that not only tune into personal nostalgia but extend it within a world beyond the film (see Todd Haynes' 'Velvet Goldmine' AND 'I'm Not There', and the amazing 'Performance' by Nicolas Roeg for starters).

There were about half a dozen short scenes, with full credit to Floria Sigismondi, which were quite gorgeous and sexy, effectively making most of the people around me in the theater squirm and complain (but that says more about the still prevalent amount of homophobia within the general populace than any particular inventiveness from Sigismondi). And how flat and boring to find scenes of gutsy sexual honesty edited into airless poses in the service of montage cuteness and iconic stills.

The well-known Fowley-meets-Cherie clip circulated around previews for 'The Runaways' is actually the only good scene involving Michael Shannon's take on Kim Fowley. Otherwise he is, as one reviewer put it, cartoony and shrill. I think my memory has blocked him out due to general embarrassment.

Kristen Stewart is a drip, it's true. But maybe she can be mean and cold and complex! Ehh no. See the part where she's in the bathtub, her cute Jett shag slicked back so that she just looks like Kristen-drip, and she's droning some lyrics with a final mock-Jett whine. Mock-Jett. That's what Kristen Stewart is mainly able to do in between songs. She's great in clips like this:

But she's pretty laughable otherwise.

(true Jett)

Dakota Fanning probably decided to make the Cherie Currie character her own, because mainly there is nothing resembling Cherie Currie in the film apart from the scene where Dakota performs 'Cherry Bomb'. This is ok as long as you're alright with Dakota's decision to play Cherie as really passive and introverted, the flat wide-eyed cuteness never really leaving her face (that look of trying to look tough by looking 'dead inside', except this mainly just makes her look startled and pouty). Clips of Cherie Currie from the 70's reveal someone who appears and sounds teenage, but who you know is so much older, and whose eyes burn into you. Dakota is like a shrugging, posturing fan rather than a believable Cherie.

(true Cherie)

(Cherie from 'Foxes' (1980))

'Search and Destroy' (1995)

2010-03-05T10:09:00.007-08:00

*

David Salle's 'Search and Destroy' must have appeared on pay-per-view shortly after its release, so late 1995/early 1996, the summer after I'd graduated from high school and discovered my first and last few horrible cashier jobs. These were also the years of my life that feel, in memory, the most heightened in pre-art-school obsessions, writing projects, drawings, and research. The anxiety-fed creativity of knowing that soon I'd have to give up my post-highschool empty days and become part of someone's shift schedule in airless buildings with lite-rock and lunch rooms.

Basically, after 'Pulp Fiction' came out in 1994, every American character-actor film seemed as though it were riffing off Tarantino. Dennis Hopper, John Turturro, and Christopher Walken were just three of many actors who were in EVERYTHING, and watching films meant watching key, iconic scenes which extended the running jokes and fascination with actors' schticks. These were the films made for viewers who hadn't yet discovered films beyond empty vessels for actor vehicles accompanied by "indie" soundtracks. 'Search and Destroy' is unique compared to many of these actor-vehicle rip-offs and music videos, although it still relies heavily on showoffy conversational cues learned from Scorsese mobster films, Griffin Dunne's pretentiousness and panicky freak-outs, Dennis Hopper's chuckling and short temper, and Christopher Walken's amused indifference and matter-of-fact violence. Illeana Douglas, who'd appeared earlier in 'To Die For', seems like she's playing herself. I love the way she kids with Dunne and tells him the plot of a horror film she's written - we learn more about her character through these scenes than any of the scenes involving Hopper or Walken, who remain insta-characters through built-in expectations. 'Search and Destroy's characters are very cartoony, but their schticks are used intelligently rather than lazily: my favorite scenes involve Turturro's version of campy while telling a story in a tailor's shop while Raymond Scott's 'Moment Musical' responds to his monologue (this is before it was heavily used in things like This American Life and Ren & Stimpy, to name a few instances), a Japanese night club with disco pop music as the energy which heightens the faces of Walken and Douglas in supernatural tonal cues, Hopper's furious and convincing version of the self-help steps of success (which come out as condensed lines from pop-psychology books like 'The Road Less Traveled'), and a clip from Douglas's horror film involving a pre-CGI puppety monster battled in wet noises by a super-poised actress covered in carefully splattered dots of blood. Griffin Dunne is extremely irritating, but purposefully so, and he's perfectly cast as someone who fixates on self-help philosophies to replace taking actual responsibility for his actions.

David Salle manages to point to many of the cliches and formulas in the character-actor vehicle films of the mid-to-late-90s, and this was very refreshing at the time. Seeing the film again, I particularly still appreciate how the hollow iconic lines that appear in so many of those post-'Pulp Fiction' films are ridiculed in 'Search and Destroy' through their basis in Hopper's self-help philosophy. And I'm still fascinated with Turturro's frightening story-telling energy, Hopper's generic yet blunt rules for success, Walken's glowing head, and Illeana's dreamy description of monster guts.

Fellini's Casanova (1976)

2010-03-01T17:53:00.024-08:00

*

"Fellini researched the project by examining Casanova’s Memoirs with his co-writer...The director quickly became bored. As in Fellini’s Satyricon and Roma, he decided to film his own version of the subject matter.”

"In his film the prolific lover is a dissipated, melancholic, mechanical man. (Fellini likened him to a puppet, a Pinocchio who never grew up.)"

Why do we watch certain films? How do we watch them?

Teenage years and some kind of Great Cinema of the Ages book, a tome with that book-weight, that book-body of thumbed and dog-eared pages and reissued, reprinted archival posters and lobby cards and stills. And there's campy black-and-white Donald Sutherland with a head-piece for conjuring rites with drippy candles and eclipsed compact mirrors and sweeping foreheads and saggy dark-lined eyes. My interest in Fellini's films were centered first upon 'Satyricon', which kept me company one summer in first year of Undergrad, along with lime-flavored yogurt and chicken sandwiches and Skinny Puppy's 'Bites'. I saw a 'Casanova' VHS in an aging video rental and didn't care, and it disappeared from stock.

While researching Fellini I realized my horrible mistake. Several years later I find 'Casanova' by accident, pulling the long string of needling icons collected over the years, having constructed their own 'Casanova' film out of the inner wiring of the sound-image-text associations (added to Todd Haynes' 'I'm Not There' and his use of Nino Rota's soundtrack).

I remember reading something Fellini was saying about how he would approach a biopic or adapt an existing story, thinking of any historical text as a work of science fiction. 'Casanova' is science fiction, and that's why it works despite its marathon sideshow orgies, which seem like minor smudges in a larger story more fascinating and terrifyingly beautiful than the majority of films I've seen.

Already amazing Donald Sutherland in 'Klute', 'M.A.S.H.', 'Don't Look Now', is, in 'Casanova', astoundingly androgynous, lithe, poisoned, and the kind of frightening that is barely there in his other roles of the 70s. I love the stories Sutherland tells in interviews about his horrible experience being directed by Fellini, as this makes the film and his strangeness even better. 1970s Sutherland is tall and wolfish and scrawny, with weird teeth and a long hook-nose and drooping, teary eyes. Fellini gives him a silky wig in trebled battalions and Spaniel curls, delicate make-up, and period-film nightshirts and coats and boots stretched and gathered and pinched into Glam-rock-inquisitor-reaper-vampire kimonos.

(from 'Fellini's Unlovable Casanova', by Paul Schwartzman)

(Paul Schwartzman)

There may be endless, sweaty orgies in 'Casanova', but they're hilarious, and 95% of the time, play out like terrible puppet shows with circus-toned Nino Rota music throughout. You can't believe what you're seeing, or HOW you're seeing it. This kind of cancels out the feeling that everything is horrifically dubbed or worse, heading in 'Lips of Blood' directions. You might fall in love with everyone in this film. And then you might find it impossible to explain this feeling to people, or you'll avoid it because of the thought of failing to transmit the feeling into the listener. 'Casanova' is that kind of film.

Koki Tanaka's Furiously Fascinating Film

2010-02-11T11:55:00.002-08:00

*

"6 minutes of random things happening for some reason. It's oddly satisfying. A film called "everything is everything" by koki tanaka (made in 2006)"

new footage from Yuri Norstein's 'The Overcoat'

2010-02-06T12:20:00.011-08:00

*

(See my earlier post on Norstein)
This week I discovered new footage via filmjourney.org from Yuri Norstein's animated film-in-progress 'The Overcoat' (based on the story by Gogol). From filmjourney:

"The Overcoat at present is a supremely subtle representation of an impoverished St. Petersburg clerk as he comes home, undresses for the evening, and begins the process of transcription; Norstein uses hundreds of cutout elements to simulate the facial shifts, contortions, and evolving expressions that continually play out while the clerk is lost in a world of meticulous perfection. It’s an almost bewildering study of the human face–not slavishly realistic but obsessively attuned to each and every physical fluctuation–that is wholly remarkable. It’s easy to see why this has been a thirty-year project and counting: such evolving minutia of movement has turned the face into an animated study that borders on scientific illustration. Norstein told us that in addition to a huge amount of photographic references, his animation for the film is influenced by eastern (Chinese) as well as western (Duret) anatomical studies, medicinal books, patients at a psychiatric clinic, and Charlie Chaplin and the art of pantomime in general. He decided early on to resist the temptation to film actors and mechanically reproduce their images, because “this way is submissive,” noting that it would include a lot of unnecessary visual information as well."

"“Adapting a known text must involve discovery,” he said, claiming that the most important thing to him is to show the things not written by Gogol that are nevertheless true to the text–a reading between the lines. And one can sense that Norstein’s film is an ongoing project of discovery for him, evolving a life of its own and taking the filmmaker places he has yet to explore or conceive."

(read more about Norstein and 'The Overcoat' at filmjourney)

Some stills:

The stills are taken from this Japanese documentary which features the new footage (let the entire clip load before watching; otherwise it will keep stopping):

'A Midsummer Night's Dream' (1935)

2010-02-05T09:09:00.010-08:00

*
Here is my bed: sleep give thee all his rest!
With half that wish the wisher's eyes be press'd!

I was seduced into watching 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' because of several found stills which appear much creepier than probably intended.

There are a lot of things I wish hadn't happened in this film, but in a way, everything shrill, terrifying (Mickey Rooney), hammy, and clunky has been tempered by Shakespeare's language and the intensely gorgeous mythic costumes and sets (Anita Louise is amazing, with very interesting woolen hair with hidden recesses and appendages); it's funny to see 1935 actors overacting and hamming it up while speaking through Shakespeare (Dick Powell and Ross Alexander jutting out their chins and mugging like extras in a Marx Brothers film), giving the American acting formulas of the age an unexpected nonlinearity and humor. Unfortunately some of the hamming completely killed my desire to care about the film at times. I kept picturing either the Director wanting ONLY Mickey Rooney for the part of Puck, for whatever obscene reason, or maybe there were auditions and he was the only one who could manage the horse whinneying, leaping, and elderly Auntie speaking voice.

I don't think I'm going to touch the more recent version with Michelle Pfeiffer and Kevin Kline, but maybe I'll be forced to (check out that cast list!)....

'The Five Obstructions' (2003)

2010-01-25T10:38:00.009-08:00

*

Description (from The Guardian): "In 1967, filmmaker Jørgen Leth made a film called The Perfect Human, a short, quirky examination of what it means to be human, from eating to existing in a body. This is one of controversial film director Lars Von Trier's favourite films, and so in 2001 he decided to offer Leth, his mentor, a challenge: remake the film five times, using five obstructions devised by Von Trier. Leth accepted."

Purposeful, human, cruelly funny, brave, and surprisingly playful and gentle. What superficially-beautiful, complacent, pretentious film would you love to challenge, castigate, traumatize in order to provoke the human behind it? Whether for those reasons or others (the film lets you theorize), Von Trier chose Jørgen Leth's 'The Perfect Human' (1967). It is impossible to ignore Lars von Trier, particularly recently because of 'Antichrist', a film whose devices might be loathesome but still purposeful, and placed in the woodsy cinematic cues of the horror genre. Enjoying a film, watching a film, being a viewer, etc. Von Trier has always wanted viewers to question what these actually mean to them, and whether or not they even care. His films place you in the position of caring, or at least being more aware of your expectations and habits. Von Trier doesn't suggest, he implicates and makes it impossible to be a lazy viewer.

I can empathize with von Trier's motivations to challenge Leth, and at the film's end, which is most cruel to von Trier himself, I found 'The Five Obstructions' to be the most important film I've seen in years. Emotionally cerebral, maybe that's close. Very funny, very cruel, very self-judgmental, and again, very gentle and honest about it (at least in this film): Lars von Trier.

Here are numerous other viewers' responses (agree? disagree?):

"Lars von Trier's tendency to be a deliberately provocative pain in the ass prevents some from appreciating his playful wit. In print, the Danish filmmaker's political/aesthetic ultimatums come off as arrogant and presumptuous, but in person or on-camera, von Trier often wears a puckish grin, as if daring listeners to take him seriously."

"Would he say that von Trier is a natural sadist? Leth chuckles. "In a way, yes. He likes to torment and humiliate people. But it is double-edged. There is a purpose to it.""

"the documentary draws to a satisfying conclusion as Von Trier recognises that the obstructions simply made Leth all the more creative, and if anyone has been shown up by the exercise, it is its instigator rather than its "victim". It's entertaining to see the impish Von Trier's imagination exposed and failing to make a dent in Leth's composure, and what could have been a spectacularly pointless film offers a valuable insight into how restrictions can test the limits of creativity for the better."

"Those who find Danish auteur Lars Von Trier (Dancer in the Dark, Dogville) to be an insufferable, egomaniacal pain-in-the-ass will undoubtedly find much to loath about The Five Obstructions, a fascinating (and oft-times infuriating) documentary in which Von Trier instructs filmmaker Jorgen Leth to remake his abstract short film The Perfect Human (which Von Trier puzzlingly finds to be "perfect") five different times under varying sets of difficult circumstances. The point of this cruel experiment is twofold – to torture the mild-mannered Leth (not unlike how Von Trier reportedly likes to torment his own actors and actresses), and to help Leth transcend his safe, comfortable artistic space."

"That Leth’s new films seem to improve upon his original confirms The Five Obstructions’ position that artistic inspiration frequently flourishes not in an environment of complete freedom but, rather, one of sometimes-severe restrictions, but it also subtly stands as Von Trier’s "told you so" rebuke to critics who decry his harsh work methods."

"Von Trier wants to leave Leth "marked," have him come back from an obstruction changed in some way, push him and challenge him to re-explore himself. Yet the documentary footage of the creation of each obstruction and the conversations between Leth and Von Trier reveal little about each person and other than the odd remark or amusing comment (Leth compares this experiment with Faust’s story, inadvertently implying von Trier is the devil) the "doc" footage serves more as an film essay-like introduction for thematic ideas explored between (re)creation and envisioning the (re)creation."

"The whole enterpriseis so playful, so frivolous and offhand that The Five Obstructions can be taken as a great joke, but dismissing it as such would ignore the thoughtful, provoking discourse on cinematic creation. An added bonus is a hilarious, self-mocking portrayal of von Trier."

"Or perhaps this failure at true epiphany is yet another intelligently sarcastic move on the part of von Trier, who would love to mock as much as honor the seriousness of artistic creation. Either way the resulting film is a fascinating look into filmmaking, and one that is more wry, more subversive, and more odd than any other portrait of the creative process."

"Von Trier's assumption clearly is that Leth himself is the "perfect human," and that his arbitrary rules for the "remakes" (the first of which is that no take will be longer than 12 frames -- half a second) will put dents in Leth's control so deep, will cut so far into the crystal glass of his perfection, that he will fall apart and will be forced to make a "mess." This is what Von Trier repeatedly states: that nothing would make him happier than for Leth to make a "mess." He hopes that through destroying Leth's artifice he will make Leth produce something truer and more human."

Wong Kar-wai Part II: 'Fallen Angels' (1995)

2010-01-21T19:48:00.011-08:00

*

In 'Fallen Angels', a too-cool (you can tell by the music in the background) hitman (Leon Lai) announces his fickleness and lack of interest in people by explaining that he's "basically a lazy person", choosing to be a hitman so that other people will make all the decisions for him. His assistant (Michelle Reis), who cleans up his hideout and stakes out locations while never having met him, also announces her ideals of being unattached and above the mundane lives of everyone else. The hideout is a nightmarishly exposed yet hidden and cozy, (like a tiny and cheap camping trailer) tin shack with a single-size bed in fuzzy plaid sheets. Reis reveals her romantic and erotic idea of Lai by seducing the idea of him in his hideout, looking through his trash, and mingling her detached professionalism with her hopes of meeting him in his habitual hangouts. Here is where 'Fallen Angels' uses music in a more interesting way than in 'Chungking Express'. Leaning into a glowing jukebox, Reis chooses Laurie Anderson's 'Speak My Language', which I felt I'd never really heard before until this scene. Its dying, reptilian tones change the entire texture of the film up to that point, and Kar-wai edits the scene so that each shot (not necessarily the actress) moves with the music. This isn't Brigitte Lin draped over a bar table, her face a dull frozen pose. This is much more physical; the film becomes a subtle, emotional extension of Reis's body.

Meanwhile, another character (Takeshi Kaneshiro), who announces himself cartoonishly as a having just got out of jail, as well as unconvincingly having become mute from eating expired pineapple (link! says Kar-wai), transcends his two-dimensionality by coming up with such a strange, hilarious way of not only making money (sort of), but connecting with people - he breaks into shops after they've closed, and forces people to become his customers by grabbing them and hauling them inside. Because he's mute, he's even more relentless as frightened people try to get away, yet they eventually see that he just wants them to buy things (and let him wash their hair, or maybe they have to keep eating ice-cream). I love these scenes where the grinning, slapstick Kaneshiro scares and annoys people, and refuses to let them leave without buying something or sticking around as forced company.

Even better, Kaneshiro finds himself under the power of an indifferent (to him) obsessive whose unrequited love for another guy finds action as she tries to find the girl named Blondie who stole her man. Whether crazy or just indifferent to reality, she hauls along Kaneshiro to help her look for Blondie in random apartment buildings and restaurants, and she doesn't seem to know where this girl lives or who she is. Kaneshiro, understandably through so much contact, falls in love with her. In a scene where he realizes this, and tries to snuggle up to her, her complete obliviousness to him in general is perfectly shown as she stares into space, effectively warding him off.

My spoiler style of film notes will give the whole film away so I'll end there. With some Laurie Anderson:

Although there is an entire story yet centered around an intensely insecure Karen Mok in a short red-blond wig, who temporarily seduces Leon Lai. You must see.

Wong Kar-wai Part I: 'Chungking Express' (1994)

2010-01-21T18:41:00.021-08:00

*

My impressions of a place like Hong Kong are immediately attached to Wong Kar-wai's films 'Chungking Express' and 'Fallen Angels' (to name just a few impressions: flimsy and cheap living spaces and food stands, bodies which fold themselves in postures of relaxation within tiny corners and closets or perched like gymnasts in dollhouse rooms, grime and slime and stains and dollar-store architecture like shower curtains as doors in restaurants and tiny corrugated-iron apartments). Bodies and voices are inventive and territorial within the smallest of spaces, exchanges are beyond blunt and flippant, and people are always dreaming and never connecting.

'Chungking Express' starts to do everything that 'Fallen Angels' does, but usually not as well. There is way too much repetition of the overplayed song 'California Dreaming', and characters' fickleness is more often abrasive or vacuous rather than human and relatable. Chef's Salad, which everyone eats in 'Chungking', is so repetitive that it becomes an inner architecture (whether in Hong Kong it resembles Western Chef's Salad, I couldn't tell), so I kept feeling the after-effects of eating it as much as everyone did in the film (not to mention the 30 cans of pineapple), and I felt an interesting queasiness with phantom after-tastes of cheap dressing and furry post-pineapple teeth throughout the entire film.

Most of the first half of 'Chungking' is made up of the rapid-fire suiting-up of East Indian drug-runners by an acutely flippant woman (Brigitte Lin) in ridiculous cartoon Noir blond wig and raincoat and sunglasses. The drug-runners double-cross her at a fascinatingly disco airport, and then she sort of drifts around uselessly within other character's routines, doing the most boring thing possible with her getup - using it as the extent of her character. I read that Kar-Wai loosely based the outfit on Cassavetes' 'Gloria', but obviously only by surface appearance. I wasn't interested in this first half of the film - about a guy who devises a deadline for himself which will tell him when to stop caring about a breakup, and then he claims to have fallen in love at first sight with the cartoon Noir woman and hangs out with her in a bar. There are a lot of corny theories in voice-over about love, breaking up, attraction, etc. projected upon cans of pineapple and suchlike, which fails in this first story but starts to work in the second.

In the second half of the film, there is the super-cute fast-food girl (Faye Wong) who plays 'California Dreaming' nonstop on a stereo while she serves people, especially a late-night cop (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) who repeatedly visits for black coffee. Chiu Wai had an affair with a stewardess in his apartment (which is alarmingly close to a public escalator- this fact says more about the use of space in Hong Kong than almost anything I've seen - like right next to it so that you can peek and talk to people using the escalator). The lack of space in the city exists alongside the constant noise around the characters, and they shout and yell to try to be heard with an impressive patience for each other. Wong has a crush on Chiu Wai, and the way the film is edited it seems as though, when he returns to the food stand to buy food for his girlfriend, that he's talking specifically about Wong, asking her indirectly what she would like him to order for her.

It is revealed that Chiu Wai has a cute, but pretty funny habit of finding a sympathetic ear in objects around his apartment. He projects his feelings upon them, telling them not to worry (he tells a bar of soap that it's losing too much weight through stress). His girlfriend seems to have become bored with him and disappears, but he keeps waiting for her. Wong decides to get closer to him by hanging out in his apartment (see the film to see how she does this). She doesn't just hang out in it, but the way she tries to spend time with him says something about her character - she cleans the apartment, restocks the fridge and pantry, changes sheets, yells out the window to the escalator people, and does this routinely when Chiu Wai isn't home - she insinuates herself into his space, and becomes a part of his personal routine. This is hilarious and much more realistic about a desire for intimacy than shallow theories about canned pineapple. The flippancy and inability for anyone to express their feelings in ways other than the wildly impersonal in 'Chungking' is dealt with eventually through the strange inventiveness of its characters.

Kar-wai's shooting and editing styles (many styles glimpsed and treated like digressions not far from Terry Gilliam's endless nights) place the film within the emotional and physical spaces of single characters, which pushes the claustrophobic feeling of their living and working spaces and fascinates beyond being a neat and cute film about breakups and crushes. Roger Ebert wrote on Kar-wai's films: "I was watching a film that was not afraid of its audience. Almost all films, even the best ones, are made with a certain anxiety about what the audience will think: Will it like it? Get it? Be bored by it? Wong Kar-wai, like Godard, is oblivious to such questions and plunges into his weird, hyper style without a moment's hesitation. Does it matter what these people do? Not much. It is the texture of their lives that Wong is interested in, not the outcome. He records the frenetic, manic pace of the city, exaggerating everything with wide-angle lenses, hand-held cameras, quick cutting, slow motion, fast motion, freeze frames, black and white, tilt shots, color filters, neon-sign lighting, and occasionally a camera that pauses, exhausted, and just stares." Though unlike Godard, Kar-wai's films want you to live in them physically and emotionally.

for the love of movie posters

2010-01-19T11:55:00.007-08:00

*
(images source)

'Avatar' (2009)

2010-01-18T09:43:00.017-08:00

*

I started the day with a link to Billy Ocean's video for 'Loverboy', which is a sleazy uber-macho pile of Henson Workshop leftovers with some 'Superman II' special effects, and some horse-riding on a beach. As a friend described aptly: "I like TV man and lady, strange alien riding knight horse, martini-making robot, chubby devil man, very determined walking style of protagonist, and overly cooperative gelfling girl as she's being kidnapped. Oh, and I forgot the wibbly-wobbly, timey-whimey synthesizer stuff at the beginging. That's the best!" This sparse but deserved description highlights the memorable points of the video and its sad attempt to appeal to the youth of the 80s through sci-fi-muppet trends. This description can also serve as nonlinear headings for my next report/review: James Cameron's 'Avatar'.

TV man and lady

The "TV man" here is James Cameron, whose "epics" often end up playing repeatedly on TV, therefore he is quite the TV Man. The "lady" is Sigourney Weaver, who seems to have been doing Cameron a favor by being in this movie.

strange alien riding knight horse

I wonder if one day animated creatures will be depicted as animals often are in real life - doing a whole lot of nothing cinematically interesting; hiding, sleeping, yawning, and sniffing. This would just amaze me with its realism.

martini-making robot

I liked how the spaceship-jets looked like kitchen utensils and vacuum cleaners.

chubby devil man

Every time Stephen Lang appeared on screen, I wanted to leave. Somehow he automatically links to Paul Verhoeven's style of actors, who have bulging watery eyes, beefy plastic-figurine stiffness, and voices/accents meant for age-10-and-under cartoons.

very determined walking style of protagonist

I would think in these early stages of Cameron-style animation 'realism', as in most animation of the Disney-to-Pixar-to-CGI years, all characters will continue to walk around with movements and expressions of self-awe, like "wow look at how I'm moving, check out the gravity of my swimsuit-spread body adornments, and take in the sensual curves of my cinematically-composed acrobatics". Uggh.

overly cooperative gelfling girl as she's being kidnapped

I'm quite sure that the quality of acting displayed by the Na’vi matched the overacting and hamming it up acting level of the latest 'Star Wars' films.

wibbly-wobbly, timey-whimey synthesizer stuff

What exactly does this do for the viewer - the visually-phenomenal physical movements, colors, textures, and space within Cameron's animated scenes? How much emotional investment is there? This depends upon what kind of viewer you are, whether you've seen more than three films, whether you're taken in by black-light effects, recycled sci-fi-tribal ritual generalizations and mass dancing, and formulaic plot arcs/shifts/twists. I can't speak for anyone else, but I can speak for myself. I was actually more emotionally invested in the way night-forest and underwater scenes made it seem like bubbles and alien fluff were close enough to be breathed in, thanks to neat retro 3-D technology and free plastic glasses. But I can't relate to any kind of cathartic rebirthing and post-viewing depression happening in the ever-prevalent mass-viewing universe. Which brings me back to Billy Ocean. Well to the fact that I just love that song. It's so 80s.

'Up In The Air' with a bit of 'A Serious Man' opener

2010-01-10T11:24:00.013-08:00

*

I did see 'A Serious Man' and found it depressing. I'm always happy to be thrown in the world of a film, no matter how bleak, but I'd like to feel that it was useful to be trapped in that world for 2 hours, and that no matter how abrasive, relenteless, or condescending a film is, it still reveals something beautiful and painful in that endurance test of viewing. 'A Serious Man' had three great things going for it - the evil-vortex-ear-canal opener with Jefferson Airplane, the terrifying "let's just count to ten" hand-touching scene which made me hide my face in fear, and the driest of humor from the elderly faces of teachers and Rabbis. All other ebbs and flows of desperation, naivete, denial and raw panic seemed somehow easy and almost formulaic, but without the film making interesting use of that hyper-mundane experience of human isolation.

'Up In The Air' somehow begins perfectly, as one of several newly-fired office employees describes his reaction as not just equal in feeling to a death in the family, but that his job was his family, and he's the one who died. This introduces a kind of theme of small, inner deaths, perfectly set in the culture of offices, airports, conferences, and a wedding. The inner deaths that are not just accepted through time, but make room for something more, or something real.

"Faux and homey. Foamy."

The scene where Ryan meets Alex by teasing her about her frequent-flier/hotel-stayer/car-renter card status seemed one of the most direct and honest scenes of seduction I've seen in a film in a long time. These are people who are so comfortable in their travelling roles that they've long ago passed that point where they can talk about anything but the logistics of work. But they understand this enough to identify each other and become an instant duo. This kind of mutual understanding, even while it can only exist up in the air, is the kind of ideal that other relationships in the film never find.

Ryan is made for his job, and there's a real pleasure is watching him work, which is the interesting position the film puts you in - it's a film about the experience of being fired, yet I feel equal if not more empathy for Ryan. Jason Bateman's character is so nicely smug and void. The Natalie Keener character is every svelte, robotic conference speaker, every encounter with that quick glowing smile and dead sharp stare, and she's perfectly cast. Is Ryan the last romantic back-stabber? I love the simple, but fun tables-are-turned situation of the youth being put in place by the leathery-voiced "old guy". Simple, not particularly artful, but it works.

"Are you mad at your computer?"
"I type with purpose."

"We are here to make limbo tolerable."

The funniest thing about Ryan's short, soothing speeches to fired employees is that they condense the message of the typical self-help/motivational speech - do what you're good at despite what your'e supposed to accomplish and who you're supposed to be doing it for. Rather than motivate managers to be better managers, the message is to quit the lifer job and get a life. It's the funniest because it's true.

Read this excellent review of the film at The Guardian.

aphasia and the first rap

2010-01-08T09:26:00.007-08:00

*
Late yesterday afternoon I ran into excerpts from Paul West's story of his experience with aphasia. Below are samples from his wonderfully Victorian way of describing the aphasic senses and body, giving each encounter its own grave humour and personality (there are also tones resembling Kafka's diary entries):

"Or you disentangle the least bit of wiry fluff that has been haunting your tongue for half an hour, and assign it to the unwilling project of the human mess. These rank as contributions in some way or other, but the assorted confectioneries are too massive to eat, and the strand of henpecked fluff is too narrow, which makes them both second-rate substitutes and sees them out. What I’m trying to say, in language ever more oblique, is that the human psyche can sometimes see evidence of what is not present to the senses."

""Bosh," one hears you exclaim, "this man is writing about nothing!" But is he? It could be that he is writing about something somebody said to him after he had regained his senses, or that he regained these senses for himself, and detected shreds of rabbit fluff here and there. Imagine a man coming round after five days in the human tank that denatures us all and finds no memory worth talking about. I suspected as much from my 10-day immersion in whatever I was immersed in."

"I rapidly formed an adverse view of my jaw, temple, and hand, wishing them all far away and put to the good uses of someone else who was not too proud of what he brought to the human encounter."

"I never thought the merest smidgin about music in all the time I’d been in rehab. Now it burst forth, from my micro-mini set, like a noise I’d never heard before, recognizable but impossibly weird, like something Delius might have written in one of his most romantic moments crisscrossed with something by Schoenberg. I listened, rapt, for some time until I was awakened to go and play skittles, which, when I got there, turned into a game of soccer without warning with two of us instead of eight, the only two patients with competent legs. Such a clash with Delius-Schoenberg was unthinkable, and I heard the strains of both above the usual football noises."

"Such, you see, was the extent of my knotty porings over my cosmic fate, reducible always to a quick swat, but also convertible to a bright, almost blistering bugle of human matter."

(read the entire article)

Also, I can't help but love this odd "first rap" video/dance number by Italian singer Adriano Celentano, which sounds like its supposed to be English but it isn't. This does endlessly fun and annoying things to the wondering brain, which tries so hard to pick out coherent words. From another version of the clip, a commenter says: "This isn't about rap, it supposed to be what the English Language sounds like to non speakers, it was written to include the correct syntax etc, so now you know what you sound like to a non English speaker."

'Whip It' (2009)

2010-01-07T08:43:00.008-08:00

*

Luscious Jackson has a generally cute video about roller derbying alongside their disco-esque song "Here". Also, a couple days ago I discovered the song 'Young Men Dead' by The Black Angels and its Richard Ashcroft-shaped refrains of "let's go" and "you're too slow" that seem of the right after-mood tones. That's my added layer to generally good memory of Drew Barrymore's 'Whip It', which I was finally able to track down for a Birthday Monday viewing.

'Movies Kick Ass' takes adequate stock of how and why the movie works - particularly why it's so fun without being merely innane or lazy about it. Juliette Lewis brings back memories of every girl-demon rival ever known, the creepy saturation of religion in the film's small-town settings proves empathetic to this writer's Canadian prairie version, and Ellen Page is a perfect surrogate Drew Barrymore.

Patti Smith 'Dream of Life'

2010-01-01T19:55:00.004-08:00

2009-12-23T07:22:00.000-08:00

2009-12-22T19:38:00.000-08:00

2009-12-15T14:17:00.014-08:00

Much of what makes my weekday mornings bearable is reading the lengthy, generous, and amazingly personal writing out there on film. I'm constantly finding more and more bloggers whose tributes I only wish I'd found months earlier. I haven't had access to this much information about need-to-see films since college, when Senses of Cinema and KinoEye were the extent of my sources. I haven't had time to mention all the great posts I've been finding, but I hope the fancy-schmancy little Google-Reader widget on the right at least makes it easy to visit my daily finds. And I can't even say how much I love those exhaustive and/or hyperbolic posts on favorite films, no matter how much the easily bored and the non-serious film lover deems them unworthy.

Here are some of the films I've been led to view thanks to all these bloggers, and just in the past couple of weeks:

The Long Goodbye

Author! Author!

The September Issue

The Box

Flirting

Breezy

Pirate Radio

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Get Carter

Alucarda

The Seventh Victim

(and not including my recent David Cronenberg-a-thon)

2009-11-24T19:39:00.037-08:00

I'm happy not to have spent any money on being bored while watching 'Twilight: New Moon'. Film Dr. breaks down the film well enough. Embarrassed by all surface and no persuasive depth of acting skill, I lost all respect for the story before it really even started. This kind of claustrophobia might have worked if it were purposeful...

The films that mattered to me at the 'Twilight' target-ages of pre- to mid-teens were films that kept on bothering and worrying me into my twenties. Infatuations aren't flowery and pleasant and full of mere fleeting vapours, but seem disturbingly tailor-made to fit all those personal obsessions and hang-ups that are hard to explain and almost impossible to share in the same way en masse.

I was going to call this next section "Scattershot! An inventory of my pre- to mid-teen filmic-infatuations in the late 80s to mid 90s":

('I Wanna Hold Your Hand' 1978; always on late at night, I watched this often, as the idea of Beatlemania freaked me out and filled me with constant fascination)

('A Hard Day's Night' 1964; access to Beatlemania through the actual Beatles; also it was fun to go against the grain of the Deee-Lite/B-52's music flavor of the late 80s and find something better)

('True Romance'; 'the cartooniness of 'cool' antiheroes)

('Wild At Heart'; horror-film-romance)

('Untamed Heart'; mainly because of Marisa Tomei and the bleak setting of her waitressing job)

('Twin Peaks'; dark, droll, with believably raw emotion never before seen on TV)

('Edward Scissorhands'; Depp loses all dignity, but retains an otherworldliness; humiliation of the main characters can't be overstressed)

('Cry-Baby'; hilariously and deliberately un-sexy; superior to 'Grease 2', another obsession)

('Bram Stoker's Dracula'; not afraid to become operatic in violence, erotica and Transylvania-lore)

('The Crow'; super-thin story of violence and revenge; more acting through the eyes)

('Natural Born Killers'; Oliver Stone making us love Mickey and Mallory in the same way the tabloid-loving people in the film do; one of the few Juliette Lewis film roles that work)

('Performance' 1970; Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, non-linear and phenomenal)

('The Man Who Fell To Earth' 1976; a very naturally-alien David Bowie in a film by my favorite director at the time, Nicolas Roeg)

'The Tall Guy' (1989)

2009-11-13T19:57:00.025-08:00

*

So the mid-to-late 80's seem to be the secret height of Jeff's film role career. I think the 1980s just seem to fit certain actors particularly well, at least specific versions of them which later become less ethereal-cartoony and more action-flick-streamlined in the 1990s. I wonder if you could say the same for the British romantic comedy.

Writer Richard Curtis is the link from 'The Tall Guy' to some of the things I loathe most of all ('Bridget Jones...', 'Love Actually', 'Notting Hill'), as well as some of the things I love ('Blackadder', 'French & Saunders'). I can't quite remember the reasons why I terminated 'Love Actually' after the first few minutes, but I think it had something to do with the song 'Love Is All Around' and Hugh Grant in a montage-opener. On the other hand, an entire series devoted to non-Bean Rowan Atkinson and his black bile throughout the ages alongside Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, and others: fantastic. And so with 80s-synth, 'wacky' bass, saxophone-soulful, and oboe-pensive background music throughout, 'The Tall Guy' exists as maybe a rare balance of sweet, sarcastic, and acid-satire which all those later films abandon.

With hair that makes him resemble the 'Sowing The Seeds of Love'-era singer from Tears For Fears, Jeff Goldblum opens 'The Tall Guy' with a narration of his life thus far. With a job as pratfall/scapegoat to a weasely Rowan Atkinson in a popular stage show, he lives in a London apartment with a sitcom-like roomie whose multiple lovers shuffle around naked in the hallways and kitchen. The roomie, over-coiffed and over-dressed, has a cartoony-British stiffness of the face wherein the tiniest movement of the mouth appears exaggerated. Her dry delivery actually tempers the constant bawdiness of the apartment atmosphere, which is supposed to make Jeff feel even more depressed and humiliated. Jeff underplays his role as bumbling, pathetic, hilariously-American oddball, etc., and so all the raunchy lines he has to blurt are given his reluctant, subtly sarcastic tone and droll additions of purpose. His character is given hayfever, and his wind-up before the forced-slapstick sneeze-bit is a good example of how naturally funny he is without all the stoogeness. Rowan is nicely hateful, and stands with a slight tilt, as if he is partly prosthetic.

Emma Thompson is like an update on Jenny Agutter's role in 'An American Werewolf in London', with that nurse-as-Mary-Poppins stern charm and iron-clad crispness, but also given 80s-cheap orange clothing and an androgynous haircut. Her first love scene with Jeff at first appears to be moronic, but them turns into the best critique of sex-is-slapstick I've ever seen in a film with the exception of Rip Torn in 'The Man Who Fell To Earth' (of many occurrences, everything falls off of every surface and smashes, and a lot of abandoned food items are squashed and/or explode from being fallen/sat on; they land on a bowl of cereal and toast at the same time, and also at one point they fall out of a crammed wardrobe; all this and it ends very sweetly). Later there's an in-love musical montage that could have been a lot worse, wherein Jeff smiles dreamily while Emma insults him. Jeff appears more and more relaxed in this film, and so after seeing great short scenes like the one where he's in an audition and replies to a spitting-vitriolic thug with a mildy stern version and pointedly pointed finger, there is a realization that someone finally understands and wants Jeff to play himself.

Oh and there's also an acid-searing satire of the schmaltzy Broadway musical - they take one of the most harrowing, un-aesthetically-sexy stories - 'The Elephant Man' - and make it into a musical. Jeff plays John Merrick, with fully-facial deformity, but with a hilariously lame small elephant's trunk added on. During Opening Night, Emma Thompson is shown in the audience as shocked and trying to stifle laughter at the uber-earnest lyrics and cheesey choreography. Kim Thomson plays a sharp-featured, orb-eyed Victorian doll-woman who Jeff has an affair with, leading to the formulaic racing-to-apologize-theatrically end scene, which is very weak indeed.

Conclusion: there are more great scenes than horrible scenes in this film, which makes it a rare Jeff Goldblum comedy that I would have to say...that I liked!

2009-11-11T11:00:00.001-08:00

'The Dead Zone' (1983)

2009-11-10T09:11:00.003-08:00

*

"This film, which is unrelentingly bleak from start to finish, is well named. It is populated by a whole series of 'dead zones' both physical and mental, with the frozen white and lifeless expanses of snow which form the film's constant backdrop and the various forms of grief and regret which underpin the lives of all the characters. This sense of tragedy and loss is underlined to great effect by the late Michael Kamen's superb and haunting score. As Kamen remarks in an interview...'melancholy is the gateway to the sublime'." (source)

See a basic plotline for the film here.

I've had a lot of unexpected experiences with David Cronenberg's films, which provided much adolescent fear and curiosity, often completely fed by stills and essays (Danny Peary's writing on 'The Brood' in 'Cult Movies' is a good example) before finally accessing the films in my twenties. During the ongoing search for films with the right temperature and tone of frightening, beautiful, and believably human; that search for films which would confirm that I didn't have to put up with vacuous schlock, pretentious essay-films, or popular rent-a-formula. Often this was also a search for the right temperature and tone of film for a particular actor, and Cronenberg has repeatedly chosen actors for the right reasons. What we've gotten used to in an actor's screen appearances, Cronenberg tends to reveal, traumatize, and reinvent.

'The Dead Zone' is my favorite Christopher Walken film. The film is about information we're not meant to have about people, ourselves - lives built, lives left behind, as well as who is or isn't meant to see abilities which become suddenly visible and involuntary. Stubborn actor personas, even when in their early stages, need to be emptied out for the actors to become convincing characters. While they suffer (in all senses of the word), they can truly become someone in the film's world. Walken's usual avuncular, elderly speech habits become a prematurely elderly appearance - drained and shocked physically, emotionally, psychologically. The constant setting of Winter and stifling, sentimental interiors describe the film world's version of "life"; as Winter is relentlessly cruel, it's also a visible, tangible cruelty of snow and ice, and finds an equal feeling of visible suffocation in the intrusive wallpaper appearing in scenes of particular trauma. Positioned mid-film, one of the most violent scenes is filled with stained orange, green deer wallpaper, lime-green light, curtain cowboys in brown, a theatrical black raincoat, scissors on pink glass, and a death scene so unusual that its almost impossible to feel detached from it. Cronenberg lets us see what is going to happen, to the extent that its calm ceremony is more frightening than the suddenly revealed result.

Walken's physical presence within each psychic visitation adds to the constant story of his powerlessness and attempts to manage a relentless grief. From writer William Beard: "In a way...Walken's performance is the only and best special effect of the film: his ability to convey the essential madness of love in a temporary world (seen not only in Johnny's story, but also the story of a serial killer's mother, of a child's faith in his father's love, and of a general love of faith as filtered through a campaign process) is an achievement almost unparalleled in the actor's career."

Julie & Julia (2009)

2009-11-06T20:50:00.008-08:00

*

Just a few notes and reactions.

oh.......Amy Adams is channeling Meg Ryan in 'Sleepless In Seattle', ETC. I'm not exaggerating.

Meryl Streep is The Reason to watch this film at all. She makes this film a phenomenon. When she's on screen. Otherwise you get the Adams-Ryan schtick.

Meryl's scenes with her sister, played by Jane Lynch, are really amazing. Meryl/Julia's blustering, guffawing voice mixed with Jane's, and how they get into each other's space in such a believably affecionate way. A scene with subtle, dryly-funny timing and physical humour. It feels and looks like the way close sisters know each other's body movements so well that they don't even have to look at each other to know every move and work with it.

I really wasn't expecting to be so surprised by a film otherwise sickly-sweet perfect with Meg Ryan, er, Amy Adams in the annoying role of "fan" and blogger (eckhh notice the cute vapidity of what is actually blogged on screen; I can't speak for the writing it's based on...).

Jeff Goldblum phenomena (continued)

2009-11-02T13:26:00.035-08:00

*
Jeff Goldblum, like many weird and eccentric actors who are typecast and underused (ex: Christopher Walken), became fascinating through David Cronenberg, interview clips, short appearances, and TV roles.

'Raines', a cancelled 2007 TV series about a hallucinating homicide detective, is a nice example of what usually happens with Jeff post-1990s. If you get past the heavily-generic first episode, you learn mainly one thing: Jeff cannot be banked on in a TV series in the way that other actors can often be, because he isn't vacant enough. Take the entire cast of all the CSI series, which 'Raines' gazes at longingly; these actors have always been adequate, convincing, and boring, and so when they start to carry over the personality quirks assigned to them from episode to episode, it works, we get to know them, we accept the limited information because they're empty vessels for basic illusions and projections. Jeff's hedging, waffling verbal doubts and physical complaints, edited as quirky scene-bites, fill the stomach with jagged glass. Films are always easier to take when this happens, as Jeff is given a lot more space to move. TV is very claustrophobic (the shallow space of sitcoms is the most stifling) unless allowed to function like scenes from a prolonged film. 'Raines' wraps up each homicide case with cheesy dramatic music and rushed acting full of cliches and cardboard characterization. Until they start to use Jeff's physical and verbal strengths to punch tiny holes in the 'reality' of the show; in one scene, Jeff wiggles his prominent ears to distract and get a suspect to admit his identity, which works as a scene because it invites us to abandon and ignore the formulaic story and stare at his ears. These deliberate distractions are starting to appear in Jeff's role on 'Law & Order', but they only work when they're unexpected (you can't have Jeff riffing on the piano and doing rope tricks in every show he's in and expect us to not remember all the other times and all the other shows with riffing and ropes).

Enter Jeff's cameos and appearances on talk shows and comedy shows. All the lounging, flirting, private chuckling, and clenched, shifty-eyed sarcasm merely introduced in his film appearances are suddenly stretched out and challenged; they become living, breathing, and human, and subject to all the usual threats to identity from live conversations (despite TV editing). His many appearances on The Tonight Show With Conan O'Brien are particularly amazing. Jeff is genuinely creepy, fussy, dry, polymorphously flirty, and to all appearances, very sweet. The slick, cartoony ego of Conan becomes the perfect victim, as Jeff spends most of his time saying refreshingly honest and visceral things about his and others' bodily woes and unexpected pleasures.

Notes on some of Jeff's films (in order of viewing):

The Fly (1986)

See my review here.

Adam Resurrected (2008)

I'm sure overall, Jeff can give a convincing German accent, but not for an entire length of a film, wherein his natural voice keeps slipping in, which is interesting because at first it gives the film a layer of cringe, then changes from a general malfunction to a strange anchor when everyone else in the film seems quite lifeless.
There is a general complaint from reviews of this film about the tone and flashback editing style, which sits in between something more garish and drunk (Terry Gilliam), to emotional without the facetious distance. This is exactly the emotional space of Jeff's character, but it gives the entire film a claustrophobic framing that doesn't convince me of the particular time and feeling of Jeff's memories (scenes with Jeff and Willem are rarely alongside what is happening in the rest of the concentration camp, and so while this would serve to heighten the feeling of imprisonment, it instead feels like a contemporary series of scenes in costume and not a fully-dimensional historical setting; tight framing and constant focus on Jeff also doesn't help). In the beginning stages of the film, Jeff stretches out his tendency to hug everyone, then give them critical stares, revealing his character's ability to seduce convincingly while feeling very little from it. He is also amazing as a knife-thrower and public tickler of his wife and female assistants. (HERE is a much simpler, more articulate review of the film from another reviewer)

Jurassic Park (1993)

This goes under the category of having seen it too many times to have really paid much attention to actual acting. Luckily this film doesn't lay on the embarrassingly forced crowd-pleasing "comedic chemistry" between everyone too thickly (see 'Independence Day' below), but remains an exciting catastrophe film where everyone's schtick becomes deflated through convincing fear. I always found it unsettling and fascinating to watch Jeff's shameless flirting scenes with Laura Dern, who appears like she can't help herself. This film is about the special effects, and so Jeff is used accordingly, never really deviating from his assigned purpose and facetious lounge-nerdness.

Mister Frost (1990)

This is one of those films which reveals its low-budget hair and make-up decisions loudly. This is a soap opera, where everyone appears generically capable of each emotion while characterization is stretched as thin as possible in order to focus on standing and sitting seductively in empty rooms. All Jeff has to do is stare at people, and since he plays the Devil, he talks about how bored he is yet tied to the need for people to believe in him (this seems more convincing than other cinematic Satans who are operating entirely independently and without human need for validation).

Earth Girls Are Easy (1988)

I remember trying to watch this when it came out on video. I was about 12 at the time, and attached to everything Tim Burton, so I wasn't in the mood for what this film was selling - CAMP with a B-52's soundtrack and dance scenes from 'In Living Color'. Now it seems like a weak John Waters film. All Jeff has to do is wear Miami Vice fashion and look beefy.

Into The Night (1985)

This is a hilariously terrible excuse for an 80's Noir comedy, and made me want to rewatch the highly superior 'After Hours'. 'Beverly Hills Cop' even tops this film. I think they wanted Jeff to be accidentally seduced by Michelle Pfeiffer. His character is meant to act reluctant, square, confused, and since his life is so boring otherwise, easily transformable into a mysterious anti-hero. Then we have stereotypical villains with slapstick function, useless cameos, topless hijinks, and a plot advanced by aimless visits to mansions, clubs, and hotel rooms (this makes me think of 'Who's That Girl', another great music-video-film). There's a good car chase at some point, and David Bowie's brief role as a sleazy someone-or-other works because he looks like he's having too much fun. Its actually more uncomfortable to see Michelle have to play her part merely by looking desperate and/or smiling while shrugging.

Independence Day (1996)

There are certain popular films which should be under the heading "Oh I Wasn't Really Watching That". This is a film where audiences yak and eat and whatever until the battle scenes start, because they're really cool. And so the actors just need to give iconic lines and become easy sitcom-like foils for eachother, with some politically correct and/or socially responsible tones for target audiences. Jeff has a nice relationship with his crusty father. Jeff rides a bike to work and tells everyone to recycle. Jeff is a techno-nerd who notices computery things that Area 51 apparently didn't for years, because he's computer-literate and with-it? Its funny to see Jeff become cartoonishly drunk in order to show he's Really Upset, and also his action-film pacing fails to keep up with Will Smith, and the editing room cut off his hesitating response at one point to make it appear faster and wittier. Bill Pullman is so ridiculous, that it took Lynch's 'Lost Highway' to make him strange enough to be watcheable again.

The Big Chill (1983)

I was happy to finally see this film so that I could find proof for not liking it. To me this film is about how sad and boring the characters are, punctuated by a soundtrack mainly filled with songs that fill me with suffering (there are many amazing songs from the 60s and 70s that could have been used, so why these overplayed moldy corpses which headline classic rock stations everywhere; a long symbolic around-the-kitchen-table-in-the-morning scene was filled with the depressing lite-apathy of The Band's 'The Weight'; also, I didn't know this was a slightly better version of 'Peter's Friends'). This is a film about lean bottoms in casual pants (actually it is about clothing and hairstyles which today are preferred by the elderly). Also it is about gender and generational cliches! I did read that Jeff's character is widely remembered as being incredibly annoying. Not so! He's pretty underused actually. His glasses do most of the acting. There are some parts where he fails to flirt successfully with all the women, but its really only interesting when Glenn Close almost shoves him off the couch.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

I was totally distracted by Donald Sutherland. But Jeff briefly plays a frustrated writer who loathes a pop-psychologist played by Leonard Nimoy (later Jeff resembles that part in 'The Life Aquatic'), and he hits tables and throws things in anger (there doesn't seem to be time for this emotion to become more fleshed out). He does get cloned by the pods and appears creepily sedate later. Donald Sutherland inevitably steals the show, giving that great fish-mouthed alien shriek at the end.

Film's I've yet to track down:
Vibes (1988) - Jeff and Cyndi Lauper play psychics; its a comedy!
The Tall Guy (1989) - Jeff in London; cultural misunderstandings and a musical of 'The Elephant Man'; its a comedy!

'The House of the Devil' (2009)

2009-10-31T14:04:00.008-07:00

*

See a basic plotline for the film here.

Today I wanted to see a scary film more on the side of 'When A Stranger Calls' (1979) and the first 'Halloween' (1978), than some of the other recommendations I've been avoiding. The stringently economical 'The House of the Devil' is exactly what I wanted. It seems to be a tribute to classic economical late 70s/early 80s horror films with terrorized teenagers: tight jeans with high waists, tucked-in shirts, feathered long hair, lack of hand-held technology and computers, pizza parlours, and a simple story of creepy strangers in a creepy house, but with a great Satanic cult cheesiness. Right, and a cameo by Dee Wallace. Well, this turns out to be a film that cares. The music, nicely peripheral (aka not obvious 80s top hits but those moldy B-side ones which become ressurected years later in films like this) feels lived in. Complex killers' motivations are shown through their body, not through constant editing hints. This film is a great reminder that feeling the boredom, sadness, and daily emptiness of the characters becomes 80 percent of any kind of persuasive dread. Sources of fear are overwhelmingly mundane for most of the film, and then take unexpected, extreme form. A cave-like dorm room, the squelching noises of a roommate wiping her nose. The weird frowns of an inane friend latching onto several scenes where food is rejected because of unexplained rancid tastes. The telephone is a key character in these economical 70s/80s horror films, and 'The House of the Devil' uses it as subtle source of texture which inhabits each slow scene of uneasiness; pre-internet, dead spaces seem suddenly filled with whoever is speaking or has just spoken (again, see the original 'When a Stranger Calls') - Megan's lazy-slapstick phone message turns into a throaty string of taunts, and Mr. Ulman's apologetic voice evokes something perverse and slimy to come. Its always been hilarious for a film to assume its characters would willingly choose the music they're supposed to be rocking out to; music by The Fixx during a dance scene becomes a pathetic character; an overplayed, radio-ready 80s tune with a hollowness that describes a growing lack of hope, or the way that people who might be able to help turn out to be all style and no substance.

2009-10-28T07:50:00.001-07:00

found thesis:

'Starting from scratch : turntables, auditory representation, and the structure of the known universe in the films of David Lynch', by Randolph Jordan. Masters thesis, Concordia University, 2003.

'An Education' (2009)

2009-10-09T12:47:00.002-07:00

*

In 'An Education', Carey Mulligan, who I remember from playing the Sally Sparrow character in a 2007 Doctor Who episode, seemed to be on a similar level of under-utlized acting as Michelle Williams in the cheesy sweeping generalizations of 'Me Without You'. Both actresses appeared to be dumbing themselves down in scenes of super-sweet sprees of coming-of-age-ness, and both were obviously in their twenties while playing teenagers; Mulligan in particular seems much too smug and self-possessed to be playing that age. Most of the cute awkwardness in this film doesn't fly as anything more complex than an easily-digestible laugh. I keep thinking of Naomi Watts in the TV series 'Brides of Christ', also playing a teenager while in her twenties, but managing to appear convincingly without a fully-formed identity or set of beliefs and principles. Mulligan acts like someone who is playing a teenager as a favor or more like a chore, while too-easily slipping into the surrogate family of congealed adults in Sarsgaard's world.

This film certainly pleased the CIFF audience with its overly-simplified, water-tight cuteness and pleasant, almost entirely superficial tone. Alfred Molina played a cartoon, giving useless speeches about money not growing on trees (a very long, shouting speech in particular). Cara Seymour appears to be a much more silent version of Brenda Blethyn, which could have been interesting if her character were fleshed out in any way. Peter Sarsgaard appeared like a young Jack Lemmon, the truth of his age difference from Mulligan creating an interesting creepiness.

From this great review of the film at reverseshot.com:

"This highly stylized tale of a naïf taken in by the lies of an older man in prefeminist, pre-Beatles England is decked out like an overlong episode of Mad Men and places stunning costumes and impeccable art direction above sympathetic characters and relatable situations."

"a story spread as thin as marmalade over melba toast"

2009-10-09T09:01:00.004-07:00

I love this reading of David Lynch's 'Eraserhead' through its sound-narratives.

Excerpts:

"In the upper-left corner of the wall, a light is shone onto the surface. There is, of course, the omnipresent hum but it’s accompanied by distant screams as the light is put into place on the wall. When the light pauses, the screams stop. But when the light recedes, the screaming picks back up with the light’s movement. I don’t attribute any particular symbolic weight to this screaming light, but it certainly does add to the film’s already creepy tone."

"In a theatrical setting, it’s the equivalent of the bass at a concert being felt in your organs."

"When The Lady in the Radiator embraces Henry (in the bright white light), it’s accompanied by what sounds like a large choir holding a beehive while their tea is slowly coming to boil."

Trick 'r Treat (2008)

2009-10-08T09:29:00.018-07:00

*

After sitting through the first appearances of the 'Saw' and 'Hostel' films in 2005, I'd decided I'm a horror fan who prefers dark comedy over gore endurance. I've yet to write about my favorite horror films within the context of that wonderful horror genre thesis 'Beast With A Million Eyes', and 'Trick 'r Treat' deserves to be written about at length. One of the few films worth seeing at this year's Calgary International Film Festival, and a return to amazing classics like 'Lady In White' (1988)!

See the trailer for 'Lady In White' here, or the entire film here!

From Acidemic:

"TRICK-R-TREAT is a life (and death) affirming gas with almost no torture porn, just lots of fun, crazy, Halloween-empowering spookshow ghoulshit!"

"Clearly a labor of love for writer-director Michael Dougherty (he wrote X-Men 2), it's the kind of thing that can turn you completely around on Halloween and horror films, the way THE WARRIORS can turn you around on urban grime!"

2009-09-29T11:21:00.005-07:00

Read Kevin Olson's great review and revisitation of Spike Jonze's 'Being John Malkovich'. Also reviewed is 'Rosetta' by the Dardennes. Both are in my top favorite films of all time list.

'The Fly' (1986)

2009-09-28T10:48:00.006-07:00

*

When I was a kid, I had a talent for walking in on scary movies during the most horror-climactic and/or grody moments; a psychic talent I only enjoyed years later. Since then my therapeutic method has been to slowly make friends with these memories by forming new relationships with the objects of accidental fear. The results are usually hilariously anticlimactic.

In 1988-1989, the height of all my puberty-related abject memories, I accidentally walked in on mostly-mutated Jeff Goldblum pleading with Geena Davis on a roof in 'The Fly' while it played on TV. At least I think this is the point I walked in on. As I had subconsciously psychic powers to anticipate anything that might frighten me, yet never conscious of this until I was accidentally frightened, I instinctively knew I should steer clear of the late-summer evening TV atmosphere that night, and hilariously misjudged the point at which it was safe to venture forth. Clumsy and rubbery to more recent standards of gore, Jeff's bulbously-mutated face filled the screen, seemingly smeared against the screen's edges like a face pressed against a window. Unable to filter my body's instant-empathy with everything gross, I experienced something similar to the author of the intro to 'Cronenberg on Cronenberg', describing the director's particular styles of on-screen body horror as provoking instant contagion within everything thought impermeable and detached in the viewing body. I remember standing and staring at what used to be my bedroom, as it was suddenly a space post-mutation, as the film had left the screen and covered everything with an invisible, aging skin. Such was the powerful physical/spatial impact that any film could have on my sense of personal boundaries. Days and weeks later, the experience invented countless ways to become mobile enough to follow me into any space. Songs and images revealed ominous motivations underneath seemingly innocent surfaces. While probably a lower percentage of kids of my generation, it would seem this post-horror-scene experience is quite common. David J. Skal, author of 'The Monster Show', likens these childhood experiences to VCR-generation primal scenes.

Yesterday, accidentally breaking (or spraining) one of my toes, I suddenly felt compelled to watch 'The Fly' from start to finish. As a kid, I remember having a compulsion to hear verbal accounts of all the movies I was too scared to watch, and so I was almost certain I knew this film scene by scene (one memory I have is at a friend's house, wherein her younger brother broadcasted each stage of Jeff's/Seth's mutation by yelling it loud enough for me to hear in the next room). Directed by David Cronenberg, I was certain the film would stand apart from other horror films of that year, or even decade.

Love at first stare.
The Opening credits of 'The Fly' announce themselves with electric-icy monolith-typeface similar to 'The Thing', while electronically liquid blue and red shapes swim together in the background, foreshadowing the machine-like purpose of mutation. A gathering in a large corporate room reveals carefully-coiffed Seth telling 80s-urban-leather-clad Veronica that he's discovered something that will "change the world". Jeff Goldblum has looks that are simultaneously frightening and attractive, with a manner and diction simultaneously nervous and arrogant, and a face gentle and relentlessly piercing. Geena Davis acts self-assured but is constantly of a goofy suspiciousness. From Seth's slick, then rattled attempt to demonstrate his telepods, and from his scary-hands "cheeseburger" gesture to his baffled response to Veronica's attraction, 'The Fly' starts out as an absolutely hypnotizing and unsettlingly real love story.

Humor!
As this introductory tone changes, I was amused and distracted by the dated yet ingenious special effects of Seth's decomposition. I was also surprised by how sparingly Cronenberg actually used these scenes, often visiting Seth after apparently days or weeks had gone by wherein he would have become progressively more mutated offscreen. As a kid I couldn't understand the purpose of such a plot, and thought it the height of cruelty to viewers (particularly me) by merely existing; a film dedicated to graphically showing pain and suffering. Rather, Seth began to make jokes about what was happening to him, closer to Cronenberg's comments on an interest in the guileless nature of disease, which simply does as its nature dictates. And so Seth behaves as his nature begins to dictate, while the film never bludgeons with explanations but places the viewer as witness as surprised as Veronica. Seth's mutation is treated with empathy and humor, but remains grounded in the inevitable.

Gross!
Horror films often have the ability to shift its climactic scenes to peripheral or accidental victims, wherein there is a fascinating projection of the film's after-effects of trauma upon the most blameless and defenceless; rather than the 'monster', the victims become the main players in the viewer's mind and body's directing of disgust and fear. Dated and clumsy, the final metamorphosis effects gave me distance from the "claustrophobic terror" often described of the final scene. But the film is definitely that - claustrophobic. As with films that make you fall in love with them, then remove all those elements you loved, this film is surprisingly powerful beyond its silly and needlessly relentless gross-outs.

I love this take on Cronenberg's use and amounts of horror, over at Acidemic:

"Cronenberg keeps the exploding heads and gunfire and bursting blood vessels and injections and so forth occurring regularly enough that the parts where people are cordial to one another become oases, cozy little nooks. In keeping us focused on the vulnerabilities of the body, so when the bodies are snug in sweaters and drinks, we feel our own bodies sigh in gratitude. Cronenberg’s films are humbling that way; the dread creates a sense of bodily awareness and if you're not in pain, you feel pleasure to be there."

A great review can be read here; excerpt:

"David Cronenberg has never thought he needed to make a long movie in order to make a muscular or a profound one, and it's immensely to his credit and to Goldblum's that Seth's testy, eccentric bravado and his mordant facetiousness, established so early in this first scene, lends the movie enough raw, thick, vivid personality from which to spin an entire, complicated parable. He's a great, layered character, tragic and comic in conception and in performance"

2009-09-25T22:05:00.000-07:00

Thinking about the post below, and how someone's list of favorite music from films is an irresistable challenge to create my own list, I've chosen the first four that come to mind this morning:

(music from Hayao Miyazaki's 'Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind')

(the Opening credits to 'Girl on a Motorcycle', composed by Les Reed)

(the library scene in 'Wings of Desire')

(John Lurie's music for Jim Jarmusch's 'Mystery Train')

2009-09-25T08:03:00.000-07:00

(source)

'Cremaster 2' (1999)

2009-09-17T09:42:00.001-07:00

*
(image source)
(image source)

'Cremaster 2's "echoes of the horror film. We’re on edge from the start of Cremaster 2, with Jonathan Bepler’s rumbling score rising dissonantly as the bleeding logo hurtles out at us, looking like a thorny torture device. The dripping nose and bolted mouth of Baby Fay la Foe, the bees swarming over the thrash-rock musician as he makes a call, and the bloody body of the gas station attendant offer us some fairly pure horror-movie iconography. It could just as easily be called Creepmaster." (source)

See an elegant description of the film's themes here.

What really interested me was the effect/tone of angry bees+gastrointestinal pipe organ+Patty Griffin in the soundtrack. It made me want to see:

'The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension' (1984)

2009-09-09T11:44:00.007-07:00

*

I don't have any interest in reviewing this film. Its strong points are maybe what would trick someone into buying it in a sale bin: "The characters each look like they are from a first generation music video, speak like they are in a work of serious science-fiction, and sound like a stepchild to Huey Lewis and the News — the latter comment is entirely in regard to the Hong Kong Cavaliers, “the world’s most elite musical fighting group.” (source) What I found myself caring about were Peter Weller's red-rimmed glasses, particularly worn by him. To me, this is an example of fully-dimensional high standards in the present world of cute glasses fashion. Rather than aiming to look like a prepubescent, I think the true way to use 80s glasses are to look like you're in your late-30s, early 40s. If you can't swing that, then I'd suggest the Judd Nelson/Bender cold weather look. See a nice example below:

(image source)
(image source)

2009-08-26T14:08:00.000-07:00

Tonight's dinner-with-movie will be.......

YES!

Barbara Harris!

2009-08-14T14:14:00.008-07:00

*
(image source)
(image source)

I just saw 'Nashville' (1975) last night, and became much more aware of what irritates me the most about various Robert Altman films, yet those same things work in films like 'Gosford Park' (more on this later). Also I still hate Country music, and so when Keith Carradine and Barbara Harris start to sing, I feel an instant catharsis. More specifically, I've always adored Barbara Harris ever since 'Freaky Friday' with Jodie Foster. Harris' teetering, drunk comprehension, speaking voice, and way of flirting-clowning with everyone and everything yet seeming as though she could fall asleep on you through sudden narcolepsy - well its bizarre and I can't stop staring. It's beyond great that Harris gets to end and triumph over 'Nashville', as her character throughout is peripheral and apart from the ego-stroking and over-the-top flops that populate the film. More on Barbara as I collect my thoughts.

2009-08-14T10:11:00.007-07:00

Another video which is superior to the song: Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Heads Will Roll

I love hateful, suddenly-dancing demons/werewolves. Especially if they have a frozen glare of resentment, as if they're like "there's your damned dance move. Up yours! Now stare at my bulging forehead and electrical prowess. Augghh the pain of transformation! MY DAMNED HEAD!"

Who wants sensitive vampires? Not me!

'Pontypool' (2008) Part I

2009-08-09T18:13:00.007-07:00

*

In contrast to the lack of subtlety needed, but absent, to carry off such a direct black comedy in ‘Teeth’, Bruce McDonald’s recent film ‘Pontypool’ stunned me with its quiet, austere, intelligent use of the zombie / body-horror genres.

I’ll be working on a longer post about this film, but I’m impatient to publish some of my immediate notes and thoughts:

No need to coddle the audience with any backstory, particularly when trying to build a sense of building terror of the unknown; ‘Pontypool’ allows the viewer the role of amnesiac, following the story as it constructs itself scene by scene without any predigested explanation for location or character motivation beyond what we see happening in front of our eyes.

It's rare to be allowed to watch a radio station crew working together, speaking to each other, editing as they go, and trying to ‘curb’ personality outbreaks within a responsibility to the public; posture and facial expressions and how they perform quite apart from the tone and character of a radio voice.

Nice sexual tension amongst the radion station crew and its ‘host’.

The longest scene of living-dead ‘attack’ involves an extension of something rarely explored in the physicality of the filmic zombie – the pre-decomposed trauma quickly appearing upon the body; the most direct link I can think of is the poster for Cronenberg’s ‘Rabid’.

Needed within a story of outbreak/zombies, the first explanations of how contamination is caused is an interesting situation of conceptual/philosophical language turned blithering idiot; ‘Pontypool’ doesn’t try too hard, nor is it too self-satisfied with a coolness of style which would insult its ideas.

Similar to how Jim Jarmusch uses stream-of-conscious narrative, the ‘cure’ for contamination becomes a kind of poetry as alternative to theory.

Unexpected contamination hasn’t been this scary since ‘The Thing’.

More soon!

'Moon' (2009)

2009-08-07T13:13:00.010-07:00

*

There is a story by Bruno Schulz wherein a young man visits his father in a sanatorium. His travels begin in a passenger train fitted with heavy leather seating where passengers are sleeping soundly, indifferent to ideas of departures or arrivals. In the sanatorium, the patients seem abandoned, left sleeping all day, getting in and out of bed fully clothed, shoes still on. Later, the young man encounters a familiar stranger, who quickly becomes aggressive and progressively changes into a wolf with each insinuating proposition. The story has a claustrophobia and contagious panic about it, as do dreams about being late for an appointment but getting sidetracked and becoming increasingly less and less the person you were when you started the dream. Guilt and loss sloshes around in the lungs and stomach all the while. This is the feeling that seems to anchor those science fiction films that are hard to watch, and which change me somehow through the watching, wherein I might never want to see the film again until enough time has gone by, until I've changed and become the next version of myself. My feeling is that Duncan Jones' 'Moon' empathizes strongly with this revisitation of past selves and the loss of younger ideals.

'Moon' is a story about a man named Sam with a few weeks left on his 3-year contract to mine much-needed material from the Moon. He knows his duties so well that he leans and slouches into them without needing to see where he's going or even to think, which is also how he goes through his remaining days. Aside from minimal tele-video contact from his wife and 3-year-old child, his sole companion is the sweetly attentive robot Gerty, who is nevertheless quite unhelpful in the day-to-day loneliness and boredom. Sam starts to hallucinate, crashing his space vehicle into mining equipment, and wakes up in recovery (did Gerty find him?). Confined to recovery, Sam invents an excuse for Gerty to let him outside, and he finds something which reveals mechanisms that have been operating in the background from the beginning, and become more and more compromised through his growing awareness of them.

Sam's experience is frightening, sad, but still hopeful, and this is a film which, unlike the bludgeoning intimacy of 'Synecdoche', becomes an inescapable, convincing reality through the duration of viewing. You begin to live in the film, and your body becomes Sam's. You see Sam's personality at different maturities and in different roles, and at one point, a gentle and fragile Sam, wearing magnifying specatacles and hovering over the carving of miniscule figurines, speaks to a suspicious, distant, younger and fitter version of himself; the older eyes amused as the younger eyes narrow with irritation and maybe (self)disgust.

Something else about those harrowing sci-fi films of the past - the texture, color, sound, and mere mention of them become instant triggers to the feeling of watching them - a stubbly chin, craggy profile, greasy strand of hair, or chalky, staining colors transferred through VHS copies are enough. 'Moon' does this continuously, living quite apart from its apparently obvious formal references to other sci-fi films and styles.

From other reviews:

"The scenario, [Jones] continues, is in some ways less important than what the film is actually about, 'which is can you face yourself? Do you like yourself enough to be able to look in the mirror and say I’m actually a decent guy.’ Or as Trudie Styler, who co-produced the film, says, 'It’s about inner loneliness as much as outer space.’"

"'those very human-centric films with the blue-collar characters you don’t really see any more,’"

"Science fiction tropes like “body snatcher” films have often utilized the interpersonal anxiety psychopathologically manifested as Capgras syndrome (the delusion that someone has been replaced by an identical impostor)—an acute and inexhaustible project, it seems to me—but in these two films, we get something more, well, spiritual: dramatic images and constructs that ask about the meaning of love (fraternal and romantic), if the object of our ardor is somehow different but somehow exactly the same, if there are two or three or more versions, indistinguishable and yet as separate as versions of ourselves in our memories. Which is, of course, what the symbologies boil down to: memory and its tenuous rescue of the past, just as Tarkovsky’s film ends in a dream of childhood home and parental immortality."

"Alternately bearded, goateed, and clean-shaven, his eyes morose and yet always alight with a flicker of self-determination, Rockwell is as snark-free human and compassionate as he's ever been."

"Like much science fiction “Moon” is a meditation on the conflict between the streamlining tendencies of technological progress and the stubborn persistence of feelings and desires that can’t be tamed by utilitarian imperatives."

'Hannah Takes The Stairs' (2007)

2009-07-26T11:00:00.008-07:00

*

Plot: "[Director Joe] Swanberg is accurately charting the social rituals of the young and inarticulate." (more)

Throughout: the flirty forced bubble of giggling at everything, talking like a whiny child, and saying everything is awesome in this annoying voice that sounds like a half-sob and a drunken slur. The kind of talking to eachother using sounds of partial words and ums and yeahs and uhs.

"can I just be honest? I'm always laughing with you, I'm never..."
"yeah"

"nobody ever hears what anyone else is actually saying. Ever."

Really great: I loved the part about the six-pack and the crevices. Body humor is a way to give some substance to the airy pushing around of half-words.

I also love the intelligent scene where Matt talks about antidepressants "building a floor to stand on", but how the problem is that people who feel depressed think that's it, pills are the cure, and never start talking to anyone about their problems and never become self-aware. To me this is more of an instance of current attitudes about depression within film, and I'm impressed with how much time 'Hannah' gave to this scene.

I agree with Lauren Palmor's review:

"This is not high art. Dialogue is entirely improvised, the film shot cheaply on digital. The cast is composed of people you probably would meet at any dive bar in the friendly, hip part of any American city. But it's the way our generation is so honestly captured that makes this film valuable-- more as a document than an artwork. If we may collectively choose one movie to tell us who we were in our early twenties, this would be it."

Although I think this is multi-generational and not to be seen as isolated within X-gen and Y-gen only. I can empathize with this lack of being able to communicate because I see this fragility every day.

'Secretary' (2002)

2009-07-21T08:34:00.012-07:00

*

My first viewing of 'Secretary' happened while house/cat-sitting for a friend/former teacher, and so the setting was a well-kept living room with red leather furniture, sci-fi-slick ash-trays, and two obese house cats who vomited at least once a day in neat piles to show their annoyance at my efforts. I had no previous knowlege of Mary Gaitskill's short story so I reacted to the film on its own terms, which were lopsided, silly, and accumulated strangely towards the most believably romantic film I'd ever seen. Watching it again recently, I remembered the feeling of being so hypnotized by the film's polymorphous sexual tension that I have even more respect for it now despite everything that doesn't work (not even halfway through, its a mistake to actually manifest the cartoony S&M games in carrot-biting-with-saddle and updated medieval restraints while Leonard Cohen and lame-ass synth are playing in the background; much too much too soon that the amazing tone of the film up to that point is squashed like a joke). When the film isn't afraid to go all the way through to the end of its thoughts, it transcends its more superficial modes of wanting the viewer to think about what "normal" and "erotic" is, and never judges.

"Have you ever read what Nabokov said, that Chekhov wrote sad stories for humorous people, and in order to understand their humor you have to understand their sadness because they're connected? People don't get that now. To me, Secretary was a sad story for humorous people. It's actually very funny. But you have to feel the pain of it before you can laugh at it. I think you can certainly like the movie and like the story too, but I think a lot of people whom the movie would appeal to would not understand that." (Mary Gaitskill)

From other reviews:

""Secretary" hinges on the interplay between Gyllenhaal and Spader: The two of them do the classic romantic-comedy advance-and-retreat so beautifully that it feels like something they've built together -- a strong, invisible core for the movie -- rather than simply a case of good actors responding well to one another. Spader plays Mr. Grey like a one-man mystery unfolding before us -- we start out being wary of him, for good reason (his need for control isn't always pretty), and we warm to him only gradually, not quite knowing how to read his sudden and puzzling blurts of kindness. When he expresses concern for Lee, or curiosity about her, it's like an electrical current jerking through him. At one point he scrutinizes her and says, "There's something about you. You're closed up, you're tight ... Do you ever open up?" (To which she responds, simply and with no pretense of evasion, "I don't know.") Spader gives a sensational performance, building it out of fragile, shaky layers. It's the only way for an actor to earn sympathy for a closed-off man: If you reveal too much too soon, his guardedness amounts to nothing."

"The problem with paying homage to a vision as unique as [David] Lynch’s is that it’s tough to top a master at his game. David Lynch films, for all their grotesque flourishes, manage to create a tactile enough atmosphere that it’s undeniable that someone’s obsessed over the sordid details. That obsessiveness makes the film attractive, even if the thing being photographed is ugly. Director Steven Shainberg doesn’t seem so fixated on his S&M fantasy that the energy becomes attractive."

"As I watched Lee dig through a dumpster at Mr. Grey's behest, my wife said, "You look like a kid in a candy store." It was true: my attention was rapt by the events unfolding before me, events I've seen at least three times prior. It's true that Maggie Gyllenhaal ranges from adorable to sexy in Secretary, but that wasn't the reason for my focus. Watching the dominance-submission occurring didn't particularly excite me sexually, either. No, I was watching two people fall in love and I was thrilled by it!"

For FUN

2009-06-17T12:33:00.003-07:00

*
(image source)

Okay first, a portrait series by artist Jon Huck, wherein individual portraits are placed alongside portraits of breakfast ("Some of these people bear a striking resemblance to their food!").

(image source)

Second, there is actually a site out there which focuses exclusively on confessional/cathartic tributes to childhood trauma via TV/Films. The site owners are sleuths, who will find clips for partially remembered freak-outs. Although unfortunately I could always remember mine down to the last awful detail. Thanks to the two Davids - Cronenberg and Lynch.

Although, if you're like me, you have a few things to say on any claim, no matter how trivial (particularly in what form it becomes manifest), upon strong memories. There are ways to do things and then there are ways to do things. Check out the vastly superior site 'Hysteria Lives!', with their great catch-phrase "Slash with Panache!"

'Repo! The Genetic Opera' (2008)

2009-06-14T21:53:00.010-07:00

*

A local theater recently screened 'Repo! The Genetic Opera', which I remember seeing advertised at moviebox last year and thinking it could be cheesy-prosthetic-gore via 'Escape To L.A.', or it could be wonderfully perverse and slapstick, like the best kind of horror-comedy. See the trailer here.

Anthony Head, who I only know as the Prime Minister from 'Little Britain', is more than a measely updated Phantom here (of the Opera or the Paradise); he is an impressively slippery leading anti-hero-and-villain (with an Anthony Hopkins clenched grin and dilated stare) who steals the film because be looks simultaneously uncomfortable in his role while constantly losing himself in it.

'Repo' uses a lot of 2-D characters, utilizing the screen/magazine-lives of 2-D celebrities, and the entire film is shamelessly superficial. The quality of music and lyrics are adequate and seem rushed in composition, but are like metaphorical intestines and organs inside an elegant body of Victorian-Sci-Fi mini-climaxes: post-apocalyptic desperation and exploitation, a dark and complicated father-and-daughter relationship, and lots of Shakespearean revenge-feeds-revenge. There is also an infectious pleasure provoked by the cast's delivery, even plasticine-doll Paris Hilton. The disease-ridden daughter (named Shiloh, which is a bit canine) is played by Alexa Vega, who has a dull pop-voice which is propped up by electronic baroque and at one point, Joan Jett. Sarah Brightman plays an opera singer with prosthetic retinas that resemble tin-foil decorations, but which have the power to gaze in lazer-vision (in a scene which has the most impressive music). During a long Opera-house scene, the film cleverly comments on contemporary mash-up online tastes as depth-less, boundary-less, genre-mixed, and completely camp, yet still emaculately ornate and choreographed (I had the continuous feeling this was 'White Christmas' by John Carpenter).

The audience was packed, shouting out dialogue, lyrics, and one-liners which either bombed or stole scenes with rapier wit and timing, making the experience top anything I've seen in the theater this year. Plus its nice to be surrounded by an audience dressed in fishnet stockings, Victorian-high necks, and New Wave coiffures.

2009-06-11T13:08:00.004-07:00

This short review of 'The Dark Crystal' (1982) is sprightly and full of beans!

excerpts:
"THE DARK CRYSTAL is the apex of Jim Henson and designer Brian Froud's interminable artistry (they also collaborated on LABYRINTH), and here, they've built a timeless universe of breathtaking spectacle, exotic unfamiliarity, fanciful magic, ancient mysticism, exacting detail, and uncompromising depth. They are so confident (and deservedly so!) in their vision, that they've chosen to dispense with humans altogether, relegating them to puppeteering and vocal duties. There's no CGI here, no poorly rendered computer animations rendered by some lazy skeeze at his PC. Everything's been rigorously fashioned and laboriously crafted from the ground up."

"philosophical complexity, palpable trauma, and visceral evil."

And, I might add, so is this review of 'Escape From New York' (1981) over at 'Not Coming To A Theater Near You'!

2009-06-02T11:33:00.002-07:00

(image source)

PJ Harvey & John Parish's new 'Black Hearted Love' is my song for 2009. Since I'm not great at keeping up with new music, I latch onto the few that seem to latch onto me, aside from the kind of latching that happens out of songs of the loathesome and annoying. 'Black Hearted Love' links to the pain and beauty of what has worked for other Harvey & Parish songs, as well as hauling up the remaining worth of The Cure's 'Wish' album from 1992 ('From The Edge of the Deep Green Sea' and 'Apart' come to mind).

2009-05-30T09:26:00.001-07:00

found: a highly enjoyable tribute to Kate Bush at this amazing blog! Also, more Literalized Music Videos - here's 'Total Eclipse Of The Heart'.

2009-05-28T12:07:00.002-07:00

In this recent essay in Frieze magazine, the films of Michel Gondry and "Synecdoche, New York" are compared to the "magic-realist-lite" trends of TV commercials:

"[These commercials] function as a kind of signal jamming device that helps detach our emotions from the product in question, and reattach our feelings about the brand to some woolly, warm, vague notions of innocent creativity, big ‘life moments’ (birth, marriage, having kids – no death though), community spiritedness and global harmony. Sat in front of the big screen, I slurped on my lemonade and wondered just what it was that these commercials were trying to convey. ‘Don’t worry!’ they seem to be saying. ‘Cars, mobile phones, banks and mass-produced spirits are just like animals, trees and fun, creative, homespun games with your neighbours – they are your friends!’"

"As with Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004, co-written with Kaufman and artist Pierre Bismuth), The Science of Sleep (2006) and Be Kind Rewind (2008), Synecdoche, New York is a big-budget film that takes everyday characters, in supposedly ordinary environments, and subjects them to some form of pop-surrealist device."

"The magic-realism-lite advertising subgenre tends to use three modes, often at the same time. The first is grand spectacle (Ford Mondeo cars floating from balloons, for instance), the second a form of low-fi, homespun whimsy (for example, the rainbow streamers in the Orange ad), and the third – usually by way of music – a kind of epic, epiphanic atmosphere. Both Kaufman and Gondry’s films use similar strategies."

"What Synecdoche, New York certainly reminded me of was Alain Resnais’ astonishing 1977 film Providence, (pictured above) in which a dying writer, played by John Gielgud, struggles with both his haemorroids and the plot of his final novel."

"As a study of creative narcissism, it works all too well – each character is entirely wrapped up in themselves, unable to communicate with those around them, trapped in prisons of over-privileged self-regard. You sense that if you were to have a conversation with Cotard, he’d be the kind of artist who would never ask you any questions about yourself."

(more)

'True Blood' (2008)

2009-05-22T13:09:00.020-07:00

*

I remember the feeling of reading Stephen King's 'Misery' in my teens, and its claustrophobia-generating machine of plot, including the sadness and cheapness of the only escape for the writer/victim into a forced extension of an already hokey romance novel world meant to sell to the lonely, house-bound, and extremely vapid reader. Romance novels and bedridden misery also come to mind when I think of how disappointed I am in the new TV series 'True Blood', a new stab at the contemporary vampire story, apparently based upon a romance-novel-like series of Southern vampire tales, which explains the hiked up focus on the easiest way to sell the show - make it into a "a steamy Southern mystery that happens to involve some kinky sex and vampires". Thus the sadness and boredom when this is divulged and resigned to just that. The fact that the show's title sequence is set to a country song seems to hint that we're in for everything loud, cheap, obvious, and cliche. I would almost end up missing all those Hammer Horror cardboard characters in pseudo-Victorian costumes tailored for more cleavage if it weren't for things like 'Lesbian Vampire Killers' recently ruining it for me. If you watch 'True Blood' with the sound turned off, the experience would be much improved, but it would make you face another sad and obvious truth - the show is only about uber-beautiful TV bodies, vampires or no vampires. Also with the sound off you wouldn't hear the bubbly cartoon role Anna Paquin is squeezed into, nor would you hear her vampire love interest pronounce her name in an overly exaggerated accent that reminds me of the scene in 'Death Proof' where Quentin Tarantino asks a woman named Hunky or Honky to switch on the porch lights, vividly portraying the grossly lazy slang of the sweltering brain.

Oh yeah, and the particular style of fangs that appear in 'True Blood', as described in a great found review, "click into place", signaling their impotent cheapness and resembling the buck-toothed style of fangs from Herzog's version of 'Nosferatu'.

Joyland.ca states: "If we could teach a course on bad writing, this show would be a key text. No, it’s not banal-bad or a “fascinating failure.” It’s just bad. But hating it, should we happen upon an episode, brings us together. What makes True Blood rise below is that it’s so assured of its fake wit and fake edginess, at the same time deploying dead dialogue and wooden delivery. (Brian’s favourite line so far is, “I know the vampire of whom you speak.”)"

When I first heard about 'True Blood', I was hoping for something that would combine 'The Hunger' (1983) with 'The Addiction'(1995) and 'Near Dark' (1987), alongside scenes like the bullet-dislodging ecstacy of Michael Sheen in the first 'Underworld' film. Come on!

(image source)
(image source)
(image source)
(image source)

Other bloggers on vampires in TV and film.

2009-05-19T11:54:00.010-07:00

Last night at the Quickdraw B-day Bash, this animated film by Amy Lockhart had me in stitches, with large amounts of sawdust and fluff tumbling out onto the floor. And just in time too, as hovering around huge crowds of strangers at events which start LATE always makes me feel like I'm back in high school.

2009-05-12T10:43:00.005-07:00

(image source)

Marveling at David Lynch's speaking voice, which is full of statements that freeze and level whoever is interviewing him. There is this DVD extra called 'A Slice of Lynch', a corny setup at a bar with cherry pie and coffee, and Lynch is talking about the show with Mädchen Amick, Kyle MacLachlan, and John Wentworth. Lynch gives small speeches and asks direct questions rather than swims and slips around a conversation. Insta-identification with this awkwardness caused cartoon hearts to float around my head. Kyle and Madchen both tried to lighten the mood several times and made many micro-faces of exasperation.

Snake Plissken's Hair vs Wolverine's Sideburns

2009-05-05T10:35:00.007-07:00

*
(what happened to the Logan who knew he was lame?; image source)

What we want or need a film to do will inevitably prickle the skin of those who are all "don't expect the film to be what its not". What about those films which are what they are because they stand apart from their genre/novel/comicbook origins, and are self-deprecating and slippery like the best kind of zombie film, rife with metaphoric understories and queasy humanity? The first three X-men films from 2000-2006 contain character self-awareness of the plot's need for overacting and bulging absurdity, mixed with questioned sexual orientation and deliberate drag, fleshing out comfortably with guilt, shame, and body-horror in scenes that would otherwise only rely on iconic optics and violence via the stiff prosthetics and poses of films like 'Sin City'. The newest X-men film was a horrible disappointment in contrast to everything that worked in these previous films. If you'd like to be lightly entertained with characters you don't need to bother investing in, within a plot that can be digested and forgotten easily, added to some fat-suit comedy given generous screen time, you'll be satisfied with this film.

James Nadeau at 'Big Red & Shiny' says with finality in his review:

"Ultimately X-Men Origins: Wolverine was disappointing because I wanted it to be good. And it wasn’t. I love the characters and the world that is around them. It is disheartening to see it presented so poorly. I am not one of those people who insist that the film and the source material be one and the same. I honestly liked Watchmen and felt that it worked as a film in a very different way than the graphic novel did. I enjoy a film that succeeds on its own, regardless of how if diverges from its origins. What makes me mad is when filmmakers and screenwriters are given such a rich, deep world to work with and they do a shoddy job of it. Alas, X-Men Origins: Wolverine is going to join that group of films that are financially successful but won’t be classics. It has already grossed $165 million since its release. It will go on to earn more money. But what it won’t have is staying power. In my mind it will be remembered for taking a great character and wrapping a really mediocre film around it."

Maybe its just me, but didn't this theme from the first 'X-Men' make you cry?

There are many well written complaints/reviews of the film, examples here, here, and here.

with the features of a rodent

2009-04-27T07:56:00.001-07:00

*
found: "Kambal sa Uma" (TV version 2009)

(image source)

More images here.

"Tokyo!" (2008)

2009-04-19T10:57:00.005-07:00

*

An hour previous to seeing ‘Tokyo!’, I was so late to meet a friend for dinner, because of a bus that decided not to bother showing up, so we had five minutes to eat. My frantic, furious walking for blocks appeared in ‘Tokyo!’ in various ways, something soothing but then in one instant a dirty trick, reminding me of films like ‘Dogville’.

Michel Gondry’s opening short film can soothe anxieties of tiny apartments and lack of private space, by featuring an apartment so small and cramped that the only way one of the characters can assert individuality and the space/pace to exist is to find those pockets of time in apartments temporarily vacated by tenants for the daily rituals of day jobs and commutes. How this is done should be seen in the film rather than leaked here.

Leos Carax directed the second short film, appearing, as Salon puts it, "like a Buster Keaton short gone mad...a grand physical turn that would do Keaton proud", and then very quickly becoming, states The House Next Door, "one of the most unbearably shrill, unfunny things I’ve ever seen." Dark, violent, bizarre, but lacking reasons for me to be personally invested in its punishing, plodding metaphors for suppressed paranoia.

Bong Joon-ho directed the final short film, involving the phenomenon of shut-ins in Tokyo, called hikikomori. Unlike recent news stories about airless, light-less cubicles rented out to citizens unable to afford apartments, the home of the main character is like a fantasy-version of the perfect air-raid shelter, forever stocked with supplies and lined with books. An uncomfortable reminder of the common lifestyle, inches away from the shut-in, of the full-timer living in the suburbs, or the multi-job artist wanting to renounce all roommates and commutes and cubicle zoos for some semblance of individuality, Joon-ho’s main character, as many people in apartment buildings around him, finds it very natural to simply stay inside. When a pizza delivery girl faints in his doorway after an earthquake, he’s forced to "contact" someone physically after years of avoidance, and is compelled to find her after she leaves. We experience the overwhelming feeling of noise, heat, and light that he feels when he steps outside, as Joon-ho avoids stylish angles and poses and allows the physical extremes of this space to exist almost in real-time.

'Big Man Japan' (2007)

2009-04-18T13:01:00.009-07:00

*

The 'hero' in 'Big Man Japan', similar to 'Zebraman''s hero whom no one wants to acknowledge in every-day life, is spared none of the boredom and alienation of life which everyone else around him experiences, even while he battles monsters and saves lives. Ever since trying to get through the glacially paced 'Tomei' films, I've since expected a slowness punctuated by perverse, yet 'lovable' action sequences to stretch out new monster-battle films from Japan. 'Big Man Japan' uses this slowness in a way more deliberate than I've seen so far, wherein the 'hero', in between his 'powered-up' persona of massive size, is an everyday man rejected by people around him and interviewed by a reporter who represents a culture more interested in how he fails daily than by his incredible encounters with monsters.

But! 'Zebraman' allows the hero to transcend the limitations of going back to his everyday non-existence, while 'Big Man Japan' decides to toss this idea, interrupting what would have been a great finale by shoving the hero into a cheesy substitution of his 'real life' powers, wherein a set of replacement 'heroes' sit criticizing him on his lameness as the credits roll. You'll realize, if you see this film, that his lameness is his strength, as is the complete sweetness of another 'hero' of a previous generation, who revisits the role of hero and at first decides to use his massive size to run around using nearby buildings like old toys, using a chimney as a makeshift flute, delighted by escaping the drabness of the nursing home (local newspapers, having covered his appearance in the streets, crank out incredulous one-liners meant to belittle).

Despite the cop-out ending, 'Big Man Japan' works because of its intensely dry humor where all legs are hairy, all stomachs paunched and sagging, all the monsters' 'purposes' are queasily body-functional, and all victories are accidental and misunderstood on a mass-populace scale. All the monsters in this film seem to physically resemble daily experiences of the dreaded or sweet-sad people that populate daily life: lonely middle aged men with comb-overs (the equivalent monster "hugs" buildings to death), and sleazy loudmouths crowding our space (this monster indifferently emits a hormonal stench while holding up traffic), for instance. The 'hero' can't help but panic when losing a shoe mid-flight, deflating the vacuous ceremony of streamlined heroics, escaping the lie of slick editing and special effects.

Sergei Parajanov

2009-04-13T18:19:00.013-07:00

found: footage from "Ashik Kerib",

(image source)
(image source)

and a documentary on Armenian painter Hakop Hovnatanian,

(image source)
(image source)

2009-04-09T08:08:00.002-07:00

I've always had a problem with this - saying that Wes Anderson's films are 'Salingeresque'. This is based on how much of a bad idea it is to say anything is 'Salingeresque'; like any highly personal experience of reading, its insulting for anyone to presume ownership over what accesses elements of a writer's world, when we know perfectly well, even though privately, how to access the phenomenology of a story. Beyond making the most superficial of comparisons, Anderson's films are FAR from Salinger. Much more about this in the near future...

"'taint no sin to take off your skin and dance around in your bones"

2009-03-25T11:55:00.006-07:00

*

The old Russian animated series "Cheburashka" has been hard to find because it hasn't been linked to Roman Kachanov, the animator. But now this is very exciting - youtube has several clips from the series, which you can watch here!

edgar allen poe on vintage radio

2009-03-22T19:30:00.004-07:00

*
(image source)

An amazing find, particularly as I long for more radio stories on snowy nights - from the website Escape and Suspense!, countless audio files for vintage radio stories, including several versions of 'The Pit and the Pendulum'. I prefer the Henry Hull version over the Vincent Price 'update'. There's a completely different ending floating around, and the one I'm thinking of is within Jan Svankmajer's short film version (which is the best film version of the story I've ever seen), which you can view here.

three stills from Hammer

2009-03-06T17:28:00.004-08:00

'Coraline' (2009)

2009-03-02T10:59:00.012-08:00

*
(image source)
(image source)

One of the most annoying things on earth is to still hope that people, when asked "how did you like the film?", will go beyond, "oh it was good!" To get some dialogue going about the film itself rarely happens in day to day life. Luckily, and once in a while, writers out there speak against the platitudes and the vacuous one-liners. This morning I'm thinking of reviews of 'Coraline' particularly.

The look and design of the film (I'm going to pretend it isn't meant to be 3-D, as I missed that secret viewing deadline), as well as evidence of its stop-motion techniques, is actually more interesting than the film itself, which tends to slip out of the brain and leave behind maybe an image of a character with a grey gut overhang, or the pasties upon an elderly woman's billowing breasts, or an aerial view of a glowing garden in lite-brite color (very Arcimboldo), or the superior second half, wherein its all decomposing spiders and bat-winged terriers. Mainly, images of what worked in the film remain, and the rest, consistently without teeth, melts.

There aren't any problems with the film when looked at it as it is - a PG-rated stop-motion film meant to appear as though its completely CGI (sorry, its true). Its more interesting to think of John Hodgman doing the voice for the droopy father(s), or of the horror-film techniques that pushed 'PG' into reasons for nearby parents to groan uncomfortably (nice metamorphosis shots, the graphic feline chomping of a mouse, and the breastage). The voices of Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French were horribly unrecognizable, thus useless. A mouth forced into a grin with clenching metal clips, and a pair of hands made of sewing needles carried a general sense that all smiles were strategies instead of emotive, and surfaces were poked, prodded, plucked and stitched instead of peeled, too late, to reveal Shakespeare sonnets beneath.

(image source)
(image source)

Over at 'the house next door', 'Coraline' is summarized in this way:

"Coraline, nonetheless, doesn't slouch in any department: the dialogue is consistently witty, the voicing is distinctive (special props to Ian McShane as a calisthenically-enthusiastic Russian whose body seems molded at least a little bit on Yellow Submarine's Blue Meanies), the allusions entirely avoid Shrek's circle of pop-culture hell and assume at least a rudimentary familiarity with Shakespeare (good enough for a kid's film), and the dissolves from scene-to-scene can be startlingly well thought-out. It's not perfect—I could do with far less appearances from the usual fantasy oohing-and-aahing choir auditioning for an Edward Scissorhands remake, and could do entirely without the generically spunky Coraline, who adds nothing to her own story—but it's far, far better than we have any right to expect this early in the year. It's eerie without being totally unnerving; if Selick and co. ever had the inclination to really scare the shit out of people with a full-on Lynchian 3D spectacle, though, we might all be traumatized for years."

Jeremy Heilman nails it, writing:

"Animated features with pre-teen girls as protagonists seem to be rare these days, which makes it all the more disappointing when Coraline begins to resolve its plot in a messy, masculine manner. Although Coraline herself is not presented as an exceptionally bright character (she’s really quite unlikable), it still seems ridiculous that any heroics in the final act of the movie should hinge on whether or not she can grab her hedge clippers fast enough, or whether she can outrun a detached claw."

"This narrative inelegance and indifference to character is typical of Coraline’s script, though. Despite a small cast, there’s barely any explanation of the villain given. Coraline herself doesn’t overcome obstacles so much as have solutions to her problems explicitly relayed to her. The series of magical doodads and supporting cast members become the real heroes, making the petulant titular character less of a role model than a blank slate. More exasperating is the realization that for a film so thematically insubstantial, Coraline is exceptionally long-winded. The resolution of the plot grows padded out beyond belief, as one arbitrary quest is replaced with another. Eventually, the tiresome action sputters out, but the conclusion brings no great catharsis… only the realization that for all of its attempted transgressive wonderment and morbid curiosity, Coraline remains firmly grounded in convention."

HERE are some videos, courtesy of imdb.com, of the making of 'Coraline'.

'The Man Who Laughs' (1928)

2009-03-01T08:32:00.007-08:00

*
(image source)

There were many collections of short stories that hung around in grade school, usually called 'readers', and my favorite included Edgar Allen Poe's 'Hop-Frog', and a short story wherein this poor guy with an inability to stop grinning shows up at this doctor's office, his affliction laced with an undercurrent of perverse self-punishment. The main character in 'The Man Who Laughs' had his smile forced upon him by "unlawful surgical acts". This film is one of the sweetest love stories ever, mainly because the scenes of affection are so believable. And Conrad Veidt appears like an ultimately heartbroken Count Dracula via Gary Oldman in parched white and heights of crowned hair. This film has so many attractive problems and lavisciousness, and provokes embarrassment with and for the characters, that it removes a more distant experience of viewing it as a 'silent film' only. Here is a full description of the story, and here is a great review at 'not coming to a theatre near you'.

And here are my favorite stills:

2009-02-24T18:07:00.011-08:00

Another great introduction to another favorite of mine - 'Five Easy Pieces', over at 'The Stop Button'!

But I disagree with this:

"The film’s momentum and gradual pace do present one significant problem. The sequence with Helena Kallaniotes’s lengthy monologue, played for humorous effect–Nicholson’s famous chicken salad sandwich scene is in the middle–is a disaster. It’s long and goofy, ending with Kallianiotes looking the viewer straight in the eye. It doesn’t belong in this film or any other. It’s a transition between the two halves of the film. For a long time, it seems like the film can’t really recover from the spill. But then it does."

The Helena Kallianiotes scenes are part of what make this film so weird and impossible to forget. And Kallianiotes scares me, and scared Karen Black!

2009-02-19T07:26:00.003-08:00

(image source)

Here is a great introduction and series of background bits on a favorite film of mine, 'Withnail & I'!

excerpts:

"To play the role of “I”, Paul McGann was hired and twice fired by Robinson. “He would not lose that Scouse accent. I kept saying to him, ‘You’ve got to dump it, Paul. You’re meant to be a lower-middle-class boy who’s gone to drama school, and you can’t speak like that.’ I got rid of him then reinstated him because he promised me he’d get rid of it, which he did.” Actors who circled the role of Withnail included Daniel Day-Lewis (”He didn’t so much turn it down as time passed and by then he wasn’t available.”), Bill Nighy (”He gave a very good account of himself in the auditions, but that was in Bill’s drinking days and I thought that one drunk on the set was going to be enough.”) and Kenneth Branagh (”He’s an excellent actor, Branagh, and he could have played Withnail, but it would have been a podgy Withnail.”) Though he’d never done a feature film, Richard E. Grant was ultimately cast in the part."

"As early as 1998, actor Paul Rudd had watched Withnail and I sixty times, stating “The true fanatics insist it’s nice to have a gem that is somewhat secret. But for the people involved, you want as many people to see it as possible. I’ve probably turned thirty people on to the movie, so I’m obviously not too private in my enjoyment of the film.” Comedian Margaret Cho – commenting around the same time – had seen the movie more than forty times. “I liked the look of the video box. I watched it and I just screamed and howled. It’s one of the funniest films ever made. But it’s not that simple. It reflects the changing of the times and of the seasons in someone’s life. My ritual is that when I have to leave early to go on a trip, I’ll watch a little bit of Withnail while waiting for the car so I will be soothed for my long journey.” Actor Donal Logue added, “For a movie like this to come together, where all the elements caught everybody at their stride, to me it’s a marvel, like a great musical experience when all the elements are chiming correctly.”"

"The center of Withnail and I resides in the craft of its dialogue and the relationship between its central characters. Bruce Robinson – whose silliness was not high in demand for The Killing Fields - penned some of the most off-beat film dialogue ever (my favorite from Withnail: “I feel like a pig shat in my head.”) The picture avoids sentimentality or pandering to college kids or Baby Boomers, while documenting a moment in time with such brutal honestly that it can resonate with both. I can’t think of many movies about the fleeting nature of a seemingly inseparable friendship that are as fun as this one. Its cocktail of destitution, despair and camaraderie might not register as much with women, but Ralph Brown steals the film as the sage dirt merchant. Richard E. Grant launched his film career with his bitter, boozing, wickedly funny performance as Withnail."