The Latham Loop

2009-08-17T01:04:00.002-04:00

"I did not care for what you had to say about my movie, Andrei."

Sorry, brah.

I'm in Hawaii!

Here are two reviews that I forgot to post here:

Nollywood Babylon

Lake Tahoe

Two new ones.

2009-07-06T14:43:00.003-04:00

Heyo, I've got two new reviews up at Spectrum.

Here's one for The Windmill Movie: http://spectrumculture.com/2009/07/the-windmill-movie.html

Here's one for The Hurt Locker, which I mentioned in the previous post: http://spectrumculture.com/2009/07/the-hurt-locker.html

I'm happy to say that both are real positive, The Hurt Locker especially is worthy of just about all the hype it's got. Bonus content for the blog - I mention in the review that the film's a bit pointed at times, but there's one moment that I haven't noticed any comment on that seemed pretty aggressive to me: A bomb goes off in the middle of the night and the EOD squad goes to investigate it. They start trying to figure out if it was a suicide bomber or a timed explosion and so on, and eventually they decide the bomb must have been triggered from nearby, so they walk off to the edge of the blast zone to investigate the surrounding area. While they're standing there they discuss the merits of this new theory, and at one point, all three soldiers flash their lights directly into the camera and keep them there: "It'd be smart for them to do that. They can just sit there at the edge of the blast zone laughing to themselves while they watch us clean up their mess." To say that the movie is entirely free of on-the-nose moments is I think being a little charitable, it's just that the whole thing is so good that it's easily forgivable. There are a couple conversations the soldiers have about how screwed up war is that ring pretty true, I imagine that conversation is one soldiers have occasionally, but the accusatory tone of the blast zone comment struck me especially. Is it just a guilt trip or is it a positioning of moral superiority? Is making a movie about the war a big enough gesture that you can consider yourself a non-spectator? Is it a meta-commentary on the fact that everyone in the audience is watching an entertaining dramatization of the horrors that some people are experiencing at that exact moment? I dunno. Something about it came off a little hollow for me. Even so, the movie has very few missteps, it's really great.

I've got a few more articles in the pipeline right now, starting to build up a little head of steam here. I might try to write a brief thing about Public Enemies on here just to keep makin it happen, but in the meantime check that stuff out.

Starting today I'm a different number, 24, so if you've got any goats go ahead and sacrifice them, thanks.

Watch this video, it's unbelievable:

24 City

2009-06-24T11:32:00.003-04:00

"Let's hang out, weld things, and read Andrei's review of 24 City over at Spectrum Culture!"

http://spectrumculture.com/2009/06/24-city.html

What a great idea, you guys!

Seeing The Hurt Locker tonight for the site, looking forward to that.

Toying with the possibility of turning this into a massive feature, also, I guess I'm posting that here to psyche myself up a little bit.

I saw John Boulting's Brighton Rock the other day at Film Forum, it's a British noir from '47, starring Richard Attenborough. I don't quite have it in me to write a full piece on it, but let me just say that it's well worth seeking out. Really cut-throat and vicious, the way noirs ought to be, and a good bit more unhinged than American ones were allowed to be at the time - not thematically, but:

u kno. And look at Attenborough's face, man! It's wild-looking, kind of mystifying. His performance in this is really out of sight, between seeing this and Jules Dassin's unbelievable Night and the City earlier this year, I'm really into the idea of seeking out more noirs by UK filmmakers or (cause I know Dassin's not a Brit you guys!) at least set out there.

Alright, we'll speak soon.

Love,
Andrei

Tetro

2009-06-17T11:37:00.004-04:00

"Read Andrei's Tetro review or I'll punch your fuckin' face off."
- Vincent Gallo

http://spectrumculture.com/2009/06/tetro.html

Away We Go

2009-06-10T15:11:00.001-04:00

New review up at Spectrum: http://spectrumculture.com/2009/06/away-we-go.html

Spectrum Culture

2009-06-09T15:32:00.005-04:00

I've been writing more lately, but it hasn't been going up here. I'm writing about movies for a site called Spectrum Culture, so if you're reading this you oughta check it out. My latest review for them is up on the front page now, but here's a full list of the articles posted thus far. Maybe I'll throw up a notice on here when more stuff comes up. I still plan to put things up on The Latham Loop as well, but it's gonna be at the same appalling level of frequency that you've come to expect from me. Or maybe I'll change this site's format into bl

The Window - http://spectrumculture.com/2009/05/the-window.html
Viridiana - http://spectrumculture.com/2009/06/revisit-viridiana-1961.html
The Hangover - http://spectrumculture.com/2009/06/the-hangover.html
Munyurangabo - http://spectrumculture.com/2009/06/munyurangabo.html

Click on those Digg links, if you will.

Crank: High Voltage

2009-05-11T13:31:00.005-04:00

Crank High Voltage, Neveldine/Taylor. [F] april 20th, (lol) 2009.

I was actually looking forward to seeing this. See, Crank was an aggressively stupid movie, but there was something clever about the way it pursued that platform; it was visually inventive, occasionally bold in its provocations, and most importantly it seemed to possess a sense of tongue in cheek self-awareness that diluted its more irredeemably repulsive moments and enhanced its often funny attempts at genuine humor.

The entire movie played out as self-parody, a replica of spastic action movie tropes taken to their grotesque extreme, resulting in a sort of blackly comic reflection of the genre it was trying to embody - and the mindset that sustains it - taking many cues from television commercials and video games as well. A man who can only stay alive by constantly upping his adrenaline – it’s not subtle, but it’s clever, it turned the film into a sort of ironic deconstruction of American machismo. Crank wasn't always consistently smart enough to carry this concept all the way to the end, but I admired its ambition and it had a few surprisingly interesting moments of pure cinema that enhanced its effect as well. Plus it wore its griminess on its sleeve, with Google Maps location transitions and crappy looking DV video that gave the whole film an endearing handmade feel. Having seen the second installment, I'm inclined to believe that it might’ve just been a fluke.

Even the concept of the second one is meaningless in comparison to the first: a plastic, electrically powered heart is placed in protagonist Chev Chelios’ (Jason Statham) chest and he is forced to constantly recharge it by exposing himself to extreme amounts of electricity. Crank High Voltage makes the mistake of assuming that the success of the first film was due to how whoaaaa craaaazy the whole thing was. Interesting, unique camera work and editing becomes incoherently fast and choppy, lazy and uninteresting. Jokes are entirely abandoned for the sake of accommodating unending strings of curse words shouted from the mouths of racial stereotypes in the same way that a ten year old would spit them out: meaninglessly, counting on the words’ inherent offensiveness to do all the legwork. I’m not moralizing here, there are multiple scenes where this literally happens, and it's more or less an embodiment of this film's entire approach. If you thought that the first film’s treatment of its female characters was questionable, prepare yourself for a movie that never passes up an opportunity to show a naked woman riddled with bullets.

This is what it would look like if the Scary Movie people decided to do a feature length parody of Crank. As a blatant cash grab, the film does a really bad job at delivering even more of the same. It’s a complete misreading of all the things that gave the first one merit and a celebration of all the things that weighed it down. As an action movie, it’s boring. As a comedy, it’s not funny. As a reflection of a worldview, it’s cancerous.

Treeless Mountain

2009-05-05T11:57:00.003-04:00

Treeless Mountain, So Yong Kim. [B+] april 21st, 2009.

Standing on the rocky hill where, days earlier, they watched their mother disappear onto a bus and out of their lives, two young sisters stare down at the stop they’re hoping to see her at once more. One girl disappears and comes back with a large branch, which the two set about burying into the rocks, propping it up and leaving it standing like a small tree. “That was hard!” shouts the older one before turning back to the station. Nothing comes easily to them, not in a world this big.

So Yong Kim’s follow-up to In Between Days is in many ways an extension of the earlier film’s concerns. In Kim’s debut feature, a teenage girl, recently emigrated from Korea, wanders around an unnamed North American city, mostly during the night, constantly under the watchful eye of homogenous apartment buildings and the dim glow of streetlights, dealing with an unrequited love, a new environment, and an uninspiring new life. What the film excelled at was in depicting the terror of an unfamiliar place, the oppressive qualities a city can take upon when one is alone, unsure and sad. This awareness of and focus on environment continues in Treeless Mountain. The story concerns two sisters whose mother abandons them in order to find their missing father. She passes them off to their ambivalent aunt, who eventually passes them off to their grandparents, to live on their farm.

The film is simply an account of how these moments come to pass and, more importantly, how the girls deal with them. It’s thoroughly realistic in its depiction of these events and narrative trajectory, but its focus is less on narrative than on the effect of these experiences, and so it’s also an extraordinarily subjective film. In some wide shots you practically lose sight of the girls altogether, dwarfed as they are by the massive environment around them and the sudden, not entirely understandable changes in their lives. Most of the film is shot in close-up, and in these instances things happening in the foreground of the shot often eclipse the girls, activity that sometimes threatens to obscure them altogether.

In Between Days was almost aggressively monotonous, which was effective given its subject and narrative, but which also made it something of a chore to watch at times. It was arranged so that many scenes transitioned from one to another linked solely by lingering landscape shots, which wound up giving the film some visible seams that also reduced its sense of urgency and immediacy. Treeless Mountain is similarly bogged down at times, but it rises above these things due to the strength of its performances and cinematography. There is a palpable sense of growth and discovery as the girls turn their plight into a game, learning from a new friend how to barbecue grasshoppers and then turning that knowledge into a little entrepreneurial pursuit in order to buy their aunt a pair of shoes. Narratively it attempts to imbue some fairy tale elements onto the story, the younger sister always wears a princess dress, the grandparents turn out to be something like kindly witches, but it’s ultimately just another textural touch, a game that Kim seemed to enjoy playing with the film and the girls. Treeless Mountain lives off of the texture of the unique experiences it depicts. The thing that glues it all together is the marriage between this exacting subjectivity and the strength of the girls’ performances, which are really the centerpiece of the film. Getting a great performance out of a child actor is one thing, but getting an utterly natural one is really something special. Consequently, almost every moment in this film rings true.

Quintet

2009-03-25T17:37:00.016-04:00

Quintet, Robert Altman. [B-] march 25th 2009.

Robert Altman's films are generally rooted in the reality of unique environments, which consequently gives them a sort of strange sense of hyperreality. McCabe and Mrs. Miller is one such example - a familiar world, the Western, made alien by way of historical accuracy and then inhabited by real-feeling people going through their lives under these curious circumstances. Altman's got an open, seeking eye, and so he's constantly exploring these worlds after they're put together and operational, even though they're already built to his specifications. This sense of reality and openness is what unites his work to me.

The problems with Quintet lie largely in Altman's realization of this post-apocalyptic world. Word is the titular game was fully fleshed out with rules and everything before the film went into production. That level of verisimilitude is appreciated, and needed, for a piece of good sci-fi, but I think Altman may have taken it for granted that he could just create and begin inhabiting a world without explaining himself at all, and I think that's a mistake. Certain things don't require explanation and certain things do. One of the marks of great sci-fi is in the way that it reveals its world to you, not via exposition but through contextual clues, which need to be realistically cued by the demands of the story. The result, when done well, is a feeling of immersion within a different reality.

I get nervous when making assertions like these, because it makes me feel like I'm coming off a certain way - I don't need my hand held the whole way through, I don't need to know everything that's happening as it's happening. Part of the fun of sci-fi and fantasy is when you feel like you're just starting to catch up to the story's world, just beginning to understand a couple things that were throwing you earlier and now here they are, you finally get them, and the extra bits you've received from this information are allowing you to fill in a couple blanks from earlier and so on. By the end, there's always a little blank space left over. That's how it tends to work, and I think that in Quintet this effect is just kind of lost. If that was part of the intent, then maybe I'm just not putting it together, I don't know.

The stuff the film does have going for it: the environment itself, this iced over world so near death that everyone's already more or less called it a day. The act of dying is removed of all ceremony, bodies are simply dumped outside for the dogs. These bands of dogs wander through town looking for food - conversations are sometimes held just a few feet from where they're feasting on a corpse. Everything's fallen apart, the buildings are ruined, people have gone back to primitive living, there seems to be no hope. In this world, everyone's got it so rough there's nothing to look forward to except for Quintet, a board game people play to the death for no reward other than the thrill of playing. The scenario here is win-win.

As far as visions of the catastrophes ahead of us go, that makes Quintet one of the bleaker entries in the annals of post-apocalypse, because unlike most films of its ilk, the focus of its attention isn't on the destruction of the world, and the ongoing survival of the people who continue to exist in its wake, but rather on the destruction of the human spirit. Everyone in this film has completely given up, not just on the prospect of a future for mankind, but on themselves, individually. Even the villains in Mad Max were striving for something, in Quintet almost no-one is. Our hero's greatest victory is in his hopeless denial of this hopelessness - after surviving the senseless game he unwittingly wandered into, he refuses to stay on and keep playing, to accept unilateral defeat: he heads off into the endless tundra. Maybe there's something else to the North.

Defiance

2009-01-08T15:22:00.005-05:00

Defiance, Edward Zwick. [D] january 2nd, 2008.

So at first I wrote Defiance off because I've got the same kneejerk exasperation with Holocaust films as most everyone else, but then I got wind of the premise - Jewish guerillas fighting Nazis in the forest - and I thought maybe it might be interesting. Then the New York Times gave Edward Zwick a whole page to outline his motivations for making the film (which they, haha, ran opposite a full page ad for it) and I thought, "well maybe I'll give it a shot," even though statements such as "when my childhood friend Clay Frohman suggested we make a Holocaust-theme film based on Nechama Tec’s book 'Defiance,' I groaned, 'Not another movie about victims.'" already suggested to me that maybe this guy wasn't the guy to talk about this stuff. The weird underlying tone of resentment and shame that pops up here and there throughout that essay manifests itself in the film as well, culminating in perhaps its most embarrassing form when Daniel Craig, atop a white horse, delivers a rousing speech™ to the community he's helped build in the forest and a small child turns to his father and asks incredulously "That's a Jew?" Ai yi yi.

The problem with a lot of Holocaust films isn't that they're about the Holocaust, but that they're about the Holocaust, as in solely. There are many stories left to tell, many perspectives to be offered, but most of these films seem to be more interested in simply saying "these things happened" in the same tone of voice that a stranger at a funeral tells you they're sorry for your loss: with a certain amount of weighted pride, cause they know they're doing a Good Thing. Every filmmaker that approaches this subject says that this movie was very important to them to make, but very rarely is that reflected in the films themselves. Perhaps it's fearfulness that keeps that from happening, no one wants to be accused of insensitivity and so "now is not the time for indulgence," but in creating a sort of template for how these films are to work, which is almost never strayed from, the Holocaust has been turned into a genre and distanced respectfulness gives way to callousness.

On top of that, there's the silly fake Russian accents, the empty archetypal characters, the abbreviated plot development. Why does Liev Schreiber's character fall in love with a particular woman? Because upon her introduction the camera cuts to a close-up of his face and some music plays and it cuts to her face and some music plays. She only has three scenes, what do you expect? The other two brothers get to hook up, too. Why is there a running gag about how incompetent the man who stands guard for the camp is? Daniel Craig's character beats the shit out of his brother for insolence, kills another man for not obeying his orders, but the guy in charge of the safety of the camp is an idiot because the movie needed comic relief? This guy's not even trying, is he? It's definitely a cool story, and so there's merit in this film to that extent, but it just makes me wish I'd read the book instead. I also got excited during their first attack when they just ambush and kill the shit out of a bunch of Nazis on a road. It was kinda brutal and heavy and I was jazzed about the prospect of this just being almost a B-movie, Jews massacring Nazis cathartic fuck you kind of thing, but I guess we're gonna have to wait for Inglourious Basterds to get that.

Here's a link to a related article, written about the current crop of Holocaust films: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/movies/11heilbrunn.html?_r=2&ref=movies

The Visitor

2008-12-31T04:10:00.006-05:00

The Visitor, Tom McCarthy. [B] december 30 2008.

Usually after I watch a movie I like to read about it a bit. While doing that after seeing The Visitor, I happened upon a review of it written by Scott Foundas that I found to be off-base and I started writing a comment on the article before realizing that a) I was writing a blog post and b) there's not much point in commenting on months old articles. I'm just writing this because otherwise my original first sentence wouldn't make much sense in the context of a standard blog post:

I think you're projecting a bit here. This isn't a movie about how liberal white America's a bunch of dunces because of their obliviousness to other world cultures, it's about an uptight guy dealing with the death of his concert pianist wife and his obliviousness to other world cultures, which, granted as a college professor dealing in globalization is maybe a little bit much, but the premise of the film wouldn't really be served by him knowing about this stuff, and I think seeing that he doesn't further drives home the point of how aimlessly he's made his way through life thus far, presumably even when his wife was around. The scope widens when dealing with the issue of immigration law, but that doesn't mean that it casts its net so wide as to implicate every single person in this country for having a hand in it. You know how Tarek, Mouna and Zainab don't blame Walter for this happening to them? The movie doesn't blame you, either, it's just saying it's kind of a drag that this kind of thing is happening, is all. The Visitor's pretty understated overall, even with its occasional lapses into distastefulness (Richard Kind's completely unnecessary and kind of hateful character, that tacky fade to white on the American flag in the airport) and I think some critics have been mistaking its understatedness for lazy all-inclusiveness. I'm a guy that suffers from liberal white guilt from time to time, but it's pretty bonkers that folks are allowing themselves to get so neurotic they start feeling liberal white guilt over their liberal white guilt.

At the heart of this movie is a simple, humanistically told story anchored down by four really strong performances. The fact is that, given the premise of this movie - uptight white guy comes home to an apartment he never uses only to find an Arab man and an African woman misled into renting the place and who unlock a once-repressed joie de vivre in him through the magic of the djembe before one of them is unjustly placed in an immigration detention center - I was expecting it to be more or less unbearable. Things proceed the way you'd expect them to given the premise but what's surprising about the film is that it retains a sense of believability because of the deftness with which this material is handled. Tarek, while definitely a loveable kind of guy, isn't just a magical pixie that comes out of nowhere to unlock the rhythm in this white guy's heart with his pure-hearted otherness, he's a dude who's probably being self-consciously nice to a man who let him stay in his apartment despite the aforementioned misunderstanding, an act which in turn probably wouldn't have ever happened were it not already established that Walter is at the lowest point in his life he's had in years. Sure there are manipulations, it's a film and thus a heightened reality, but the story flows in a believable way and there are no fake dramatic moments where a character unconvincingly decides not to listen to another or does something stupid solely, and obviously, for the sake of advancing the plot in a certain direction. It's smarter than most, even if it's still kinda naive at times, and really an impressive juggling act that manages to only drop the ball a couple times.

2008-12-27T16:48:00.006-05:00

A Scanner Darkly, Richard Linklater. [A] december 25, 2008.

It is with great trepidation that I approached this; I fuckin hated Waking Life and here I am about to watch a movie that looks just like it from the same director. It's a testament to this movie that now I'm kind of tempted to give Waking Life a third chance. (My recent rediscovery of the magical Dazed and Confused is also a factor - that one's quickly shot up the ranks for me and, if I'm being honest with myself, it might be my favorite movie at this point, or at least the one I'd most readily watch at any given time.)

ANYWAY, a drug movie in the vein of Naked Lunch, a sci-fi movie in the vein of Alphaville, A Scanner Darkly is set in a hallucinatory, barely-disguised modern future virtually crippled by a highly addictive ("You're either on it or you've never tried it") and destructive drug called Substance D. So now there's surveillance cameras everywhere and "Scanners" sitting at monitors - like a real-time version of the ESPERS in Blade Runner - keeping track of everything at all times; license plates are bar codes, houses are surveilled in addition to public places, and standing in a McDonald's parking lot screaming about The Man doesn't just get you put in the clink, it gets you shoved into an unmarked van by an entire gang of goons in riot gear armed with assault rifles.

Keanu Reeves is working undercover for the sherrif's department as "Fred," although his badge is nowhere to be seen. His assignment is monitoring Bob Arctor's house, a bit of a drug den in Anaheim, CA. He also is Bob Arctor, a Substance D addict living with two drugged out misanthropes, a fact the sherrif's dept. isn't aware of because all drug agents, and their superiors, wear identity concealing "scramble suits" as a security precaution. These scramble suits are one of the first things you see in the film and they more or less set the tone - they divide their user into multiple fragments so that the wearer looks like a constantly shifting patchwork of various people, "the ultimate Everyman," and it's just one of several reasons why this movie couldn't have been done any other way. The rotoscoping effectively places us within the headspace of Arctor, transforming the world around him into something recognizably real, but unreal. The colors are too vivid, the surfaces constantly in motion, people's faces swirl as they speak, environments are transformed in an instant, sometimes echoing the past, sometimes becoming something else altogether, the lines between reality and dream or perception and reality or even perception and dream are completely and utterly gone.

The rotoscoping is at the heart of this; when we watch Robert Downey Jr. transform into a bug in a chair, we know that he was filmed sitting in that chair, that he was drawn over and eventually transformed into a bug, but we see his face and his performance is retained, if we could wash away the drawing somehow, the reality of what was captured on camera can still be seen, but the perception of the animation has transformed it into something else, which is itself a transformation of the reality within the film itself. Do you mistrust your eyes or Arctor's? The line blurs, and the beauty of the film is that it constantly forces you to deal with this - the animation isn't a gimmick, the crux of a high-concept thrill ride, it's an element of the reality of the film's world. There are no action set pieces, just people pissing around, having aimless conversations, shooting off guns into the air, discussing the number of gears on a bicycle, calling a tow truck when their car breaks down on the side of the road. What kind of world is this?

Private Fears in Public Places, Alain Resnais. [D] december 25, 2008.
Blah blah it's not fair to hold him against the standards of his earlier achievements etc. etc. Nahhh, it's completely fair. It's not fair to hold the ambition of his earlier achievements against the ambition of this film, maybe, but it's fair to assume that, since he's turned out some masterpieces, he can turn out some good movies. The fact is that this isn't a poor movie by Resnais' standards, but by anyone's. Facile in its characterizations, embarrassingly scripted, this movie is uninteresting in almost every capacity in which it can be uninteresting, the very definition of MOR. I hate saying that, but it's true, I haven't had a more torturous experience sitting through a movie in a while and the respect I give to Resnais is that I forced myself to not turn it off. I guess I could say more about it, but I've wasted enough time on it. It looked nice.

The Exiles

2008-07-21T11:38:00.008-04:00

The Exiles, Kent Mackenzie. [A-] july 14th 2008.

You're almost obligated to mention a few certain points about this movie when you talk about it, so I'll get them out of the way:

• The Exiles is a lost film - largely forgotten since its completion in 1961, it never played theatrically until this year and only went to a few festivals otherwise.
• Thom Andersen and his great documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself spawned a resurgence of interest in the film through his incorporation of clips from it into his own.
• It was filmed in Bunker Hill, a neighborhood which no longer exists.
• It stars a Native American cast, a group of people not generally depicted on the screen.

To be fair, the stuff that's generally mentioned about this film is the stuff that got me initially intrigued by it as well. I'm being cute by bullet-pointing it, I guess, but these little tidbits are so ubiquitous at this point that they threaten to overshadow the experience of the film itself if you let them get driven so far into your head that they become the focus of your viewing. I'll try to address other stuff instead.

I want to lead with the photography, although I guess people talk a lot about the film's striking imagery as well - this is in no small part due to the amazing restoration that those geniuses over at UCLA have put together, but it's also got a lot to do with the fact that the photography itself is almost uniformly gorgeous. It's shot in a verité style, but it's a very heavily man-handled reality that's in the film, and Mackenzie's got a really strong eye for powerful, sort of graphic framing. There's no synch sound, so all the dialogue is dubbed and the soundtrack is constructed. In more dialogue heavy segments this can be a bit distracting, but it also makes me think that all the imagery was cut together before Mackenzie even started thinking about dialogue and sound.

I wonder if some of the better moments in the film would even exist in the form that they do had this not been the case. There's a really beautiful, delirious segment in a tunnel that perfectly captures the sensation of drunkenness, of the sort of camaraderie and adventure that can only come from communal recklessness, and the way it's put together feels uniquely tied to the rhythms of silent, moving imagery, assembled with complete disregard to sound. This sequence alone makes the movie worth seeing.

The soundtrack, meanwhile, is also quite lovely. A sound collage of period songs and various field-recordings, it never entirely feels real, which is something that stands in stark contrast with the documentary style imagery. The soundtrack is occasionally punctuated with that kind of awkwardly naturalistic voiceover that's become a staple of many an arthouse darling over the years, although this film precedes a great many of them.

The believability of The Exiles is what makes it so powerful, but it's also what makes it so sad. The plot itself is almost not there, it's just some people going about their night, but the environment and circumstances shown are disheartening at times, although the vast majority of the characters are seemingly absent of despair in the face of their lives, having already decided to instead move on to self-destructive ambivalence. Ruts are tough to get out of, though, and thankfully the movie is governed by empathy enough to acknowledge that and not pass judgment upon or to condemn any of these characters. A true slice of life, the film begins somewhere in time and ends somewhere else, a group of people you've just met disappearing into a doorway down the street, their lives still moving forward even as you sit there, looking at the empty street, wondering if it's the end or not. Then the lights come up and you go out your own door.

An update: I've been living in Brooklyn since January. I work as an assistant for a director whose work I enjoy quite a bit and it's been pretty solid thus far. I'm not gonna name him, just cause it's the internet and I'd rather not, but it's a good thing. Stuff's been fine, although I've been being a real lazy guy when it comes to things like writing in this here blog, or anywhere else, really, and I've actually even gotten sloppy enough to stop maintaining the film log that so many of my earlier entries were based upon. I've since rectified that situation and I'm looking to do a little more updating, too, so keep your eyes peeled.

Superbad, Hamlet and Walkabout

2007-09-17T23:53:00.001-04:00

Superbad, Greg Mottola. [A-] september 9th 2007.

I'd be tempted to call Judd Apatow a one-trick pony if it wasn't for the fact that I find the trick so entertaining and also that the trick is basically just making good movies. As expected, this is another raunchy comedy that, through its raunchiness, honestly depicts and discusses what it's like to be a (male) person. Like the other high-profile Apatowian films of the last few years, it's ceaselessly hysterical and painfully identifiable. If a comparison is necessary, I'll say that I don't think this movie is as good as Knocked Up, but that I probably enjoyed it about as much. Superbad is a little more episodic and set-piece oriented, but I don't really think that's a fault and I think it helps the movie to more eloquently explore the awkwardness of the period it's attempting to document. There's a whole lot of experience and growth to pack into one two hour period and it's pretty unbelievable that this film manages to compress it all as elegantly as it does.

More than anything else, I was surprised by the stuff the writers, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, were able to channel and bring up in this movie. There are a lot of absurd situations that the two main characters, named after the writers, get into in this movie, but there are also frank discussions about friendship, girls and how to hide your boner when you're walking out of class that are totally conversations I have had before as well. I think if you were a sex-obsessed loser in high school this movie will hit you harder. I feel like there's a great deal of courage in the level of self-exposure that the writing of this movie contains, which is ostensibly about fear - of sex, of responsibility, of loneliness. Being able to revisit these awkward years in this confrontationally comedic way was hilarious and therapeutic for me - I can only imagine what seeing this movie will be like for current high school students who are like these characters now.

It's interesting to note that there's a sort of chronological portrait of stunted growth developing from this cycle of films that Apatow has been putting out these last few years. (For the record, I know he didn't direct this, but it's so similar to his other films - and aesthetically it's not unique at all - that I figure I'll credit the man whose sensibility most seems to dictate what this movie is about.) The characters of Superbad, Knocked Up and The 40 Year-Old Virgin are all emotionally and developmentally kind of at the same place at the start of each of these movies - and at the end - but each is devoted to a different age group; Superbad chronicling adolescence, Knocked Up young adulthood and The 40 Year-Old Virgin the middle years. As a result, the setting of the movie could really be described as the period of life that it occupies rather than the physical place it exists. To a degree it's as if these guys, realizing what they themselves have been through and having emerged miraculously unscathed, are now creating a series of documents of past experiences as a series of how-to guides to help fellow insecure dudes of all ages put things into perspective - to develop a sense of personal accountability and self-worth and enable them to go forth into the world as functioning human beings. That's probably pushing it, but at the very least, there's a great deal of commiseration to be had with these films for all current and recovering losers everywhere.

Hamlet, Michael Almereyda. [B+] september 10th 2007.

This movie feels real gutsy to me. I know Baz Luhrmann did the whole modernized/hip Shakespeare thing just a couple years prior and undoubtedly many other stage productions tried the same thing before that, but there's a big difference between this film and that one. Where Luhrmann chose to embrace the theatricality of the source material, Almereyda has chosen to eschew it altogether, making an honest attempt to truly place the play within the context of our times, partially as a challenge to himself and also perhaps to the text as well. The actors don't always manage to suppress the urge to deliver their lines in a Shakespearian manner, but a great effort is made to diminish that effect - one of the first things that struck me about this movie, aside from the strikingly beautiful cinematography, was the naturalistic tone that all the performers deliver their lines with, as if they really are just some people having a conversation in the parlance of their time. It's an interesting effect that occasionally serves to diminish the effectiveness of the text's clarity, while at the same time serving to humanize it more by reducing its feeling of artificiality.

In this modern world, Denmark is transformed into Denmark Corp. and Hamlet is the film student son of a CEO who's been secretly murdered by his brother in order to facilitate a hostile takeover of the company. His soliloquies are largely delivered in the form of a personal video diary that he keeps, which Almereyda shoots on this really cool format called Pixelvision, smartly implementing them into the film in a believable way that sticks to its modernized approach. Instead of staging a play to let his mother and uncle know that he knows the truth about his father, he screens an experimental film he's made that none too subtly makes the same point. Hamlet's father's ghost appears to him in front of a soda machine. Like I said, it's a gutsy interpretation. Ultimately and unfortunately, it falls apart a little bit during the last twenty minutes or so - I think it's really hard to integrate guns into Shakespeare's plays - but it manages to keep itself together so well otherwise that it's tough to fault the film for some of the stumbling blocks it hits.

Walkabout, Nicholas Roeg. [B-] september 11th 2007.

Something surprising happens at some point in this film that I think kind of sets the tone for the rest of the movie to come - in many ways I think you're meant to spend the rest of your viewing experience recovering from it. Sometimes spoiler warnings are a good thing, but I guess The New Yorker's too cool for spoilers, what with their umlauted o's in the word coöperate (really!) and their coy, bordering on chuckleworthy cartoons, and they spoiled it. They just went ahead and did it. Granted, the movie's from the 70's and it was a personal essay about the film, but what the hell, Jeffrey Eugenides? See all the links? This is a blog and I'm linking. Also, don't click on that last one if you don't want what happened to me to happen to you. Unless you already know, in which case go ahead and click on it 'cause it's kind of a nice essay otherwise.

Anyway, having had that moment spoiled for me I feel like the movie itself was partially spoiled, because I spent the next three months or so before I finally saw it running through this spoiled moment in my head and visualizing it and filming it in my brain over and over again - it's a captivating idea. And then I just anticipated it. And it happened and it wasn't how I shot it and I spent the rest of the movie recovering from my disappointment instead of my surprise. And if you haven't seen this movie and you're reading this I've probably ruined it for you too, and I'm sorry for that.

Anyway, the movie underwhelmed me to some degree even beyond that - perhaps it was the shockingly terrible quality of the print that Criterion sourced from for their DVD, but it really wasn't an attractive movie for the most part, disappointing because you'd expect a walkabout in the Australian outback to be gorgeous. The dynamics of the group of kids that find themselves out there is well handled but the politics of the movie, this idea of technology ruining nature and the world, while valid, is handled and delivered in such an obvious and heavy-handed way that it's tough not to roll your eyes a little bit. Structurally, this movie is pretty interesting, the editing is more far out and jumpy than most traditional narrative films and it results in some pretty captivating moments, but for the most part I found myself disappointingly disappointed. I think this movie probably deserves a revisit from me sometime in a couple years.

August in Retrospect

2007-09-03T14:14:00.000-04:00

I took this picture in Gibraltar:

On the one hand, I haven't put up any more of those movie blurbs since the first one, but on the other hand I really haven't seen many more movies since then. I was going to do a Phillip Marlowe threefer, which you'll see below in the list, but I didn't do that because I'd done the Naked Lunch/Ivan one a while after those movies and I wanted to give it a few days in between blurbs, but then I had to deal with moving out of my apartment and leaving Boston and preparing for a two week trip with my family out of the country, which I just got back from last night, and I just didn't find the time. I've been without internet and movies for half of August. The good news is I swam in the ocean a bunch, rode a camel, saw a ton of neat stuff, smoked some Cuban cigars and read a whole lot. But no movies. And last night I was too tired. I watched like 20 minutes of a Laurel and Hardy short earlier this morning, but that's been it if you don't count the two hour version of Spider-Man 3 I watched on the plane back home in between moments where I dozed off, read from my book or looked out the window. I watched a few episodes of Deadwood here and there, too. Show's incredible, by the way.

Now I've got to get my act together. I'm working on this screenplay, trying to organize myself to move out to Los Angeles in the next couple months (cliché, I know) and I've got a lot of movie watching to get done, too. As soon as I see some movies, I'll try and write about them. Here's the rest of the stuff I saw in August:

The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman. [A] august 3rd 2007.
Murder, My Sweet, Edward Dmytryk. [B] august 4th 2007.
Lady in the Lake, Robert Montgomery. [F] august 4th 2007.
Buffalo Bill and the Indians or Sitting Bull's History Lesson, Robert Altman. [B+] august 7th 2007.
The Bourne Identity, Doug Liman. [A-] august 11th 2007.

Naked Lunch and Ivans the Terribles

2007-08-07T15:15:00.001-04:00

Naked Lunch, David Cronenberg. [A] august 1st 2007.
It seems that today's entry has a sort of hallucinatory undercurrent running through it, which is nice. I like themes. I've been engaging in some debate recently about David Lynch's Inland Empire, the topic being the film's obtuseness. It came up when the movie was first released into theaters, mostly brought up by a surprisingly high number of dismissive critics, and now that the DVD release is imminent and rips have leaked and spread across the internet like wildfire, it's starting to become a topic of discussion again.

For my part, narrative obscurity is never a sin. The tactile visual and aural experience of the film can be as important as the story or even come to replace it. I know that my position should be that film is above all a visual experience and blah blah blah, but there are "theatrical" films that I enjoy a whole lot, relatively uninterestingly shot films whose stories are compelling enough that I overlook their less interesting aesthetics, etc. Inland Empire is a film for which the inverse is true: the film looks and sounds and flows so wonderfully that the actual narrative, which I can't address at all, not having seen it in eight months or so, takes a back seat for the ride. This isn't to say that the film doesn't have "things to say," simply that they're presented, perhaps, in a more associative, metaphoric way, left open for personal interpretation and processing. Inland Empire is a poem, not a novel.

This is what I value about Naked Lunch as well. Obviously, it's based on a novel, but the film, like the novel (or so I hear), operates on a more open narrative level, one that can be more closely linked to poetics than traditional narrative. The film feels episodic, as if each scene exists on its own, even as it follows a tangible narrative thread. Things happen seemingly without reason: people change and become other things, some are monsters and some are witches, typewriters become bugs or alien-like creatures that discharge a sort of come-y goo that provides inspiration, drug abuse becomes writing becomes sexual denial becomes paranoid conspiracy theories and somehow a story results from all of these elements.

The story is coherent but it proceeds in a free-associative way. I can't imagine how this film got written or shot, it feels like a constant juggling act between coherent narrative, seemingly random flights of fancy, an obscured biopic by way of adaptation by way of drug-induced nightmare. And within it all, considerations of the nature of creativity, sexuality, madness, friendship, masculinity, life are all addressed, riffed on and distorted. This movie's dense, insane and beautiful. At its core it captures that feeling that making art can give you - it's ultimately about the act of creation and how difficult it can sometimes be to reconcile a tangible life with it.

Ivan the Terrible Part One, Sergei Eisenstein. [x] august 2nd 2007.
Ivan the Terrible Part Two, Sergei Eisenstein. [A] august 2nd 2007.
And speaking of creation, the two Ivan the Terrible films by Sergei Eisenstein are all about the creation of a legendary persona, the events leading up to a man's metamorphosis into the "Terrible" man he is remembered as. I can't entirely comment on the first because I was unbelievably tired, inattentive and miserable during it, but I got an enormous coffee between screenings and caught all of Part Two. It blew me away. Just look at the shot at the left, which is actually from the first, but still. Visually, it's such a perfect, wildly imaginative movie that it's worth seeing for the images alone. The performances are wild-eyed and mad, really over the top, but there's a sense that every actor is playing their characters in a sort of self-awarely over-the-top way, as if it is not the actor playing Ivan as a wide-eyed ham, but rather playing Ivan as a man playing a wide-eyed ham, in an attempt to retain a degree of artificiality and intimidation in his interactions with others, something which, by the way, I really enjoyed about Christian Bale's Batman in Batman Begins but that a ton of people railed against. There are a couple naturalistic performances in this film that I feel back this theory up.

Part Two is really a tragic film, to me, capturing Ivan's slow realization that his sovereignty is entirely hinged on his being a person distrusting of others, a coldly practical man who has to do bad things to keep his power, who must deal with others hating and fearing him despite the fact that all he really seems to want is a friend. A friend isn't something he'll ever have again, because his friends inevitably turn into assistants and servants, there is a hierarchy in his court and he will never be anything but the head of it. You get enough power and friendsip is impossible, since friendship is hinged on a sense of equality. When Ivan realizes that not even his family is behind him, he finally descends into a dark place that he will clearly never emerge from, erecting an icy barrier around him that no one will ever penetrate again. It's a heartbreaking story, not just because Ivan's lost but because his people are lost, reduced to serfs in his eyes by the end of it. This is a brilliantly filmed portrait of the destructive results of greed and power.

July in Review

2007-08-02T15:13:00.000-04:00

This is gonna be a drag, but there's no blurbs at all this month. I didn't write them when I saw the films and don't feel particularly compelled to try to revisit an an entire month's worth of viewing to do it now. Though this month goes by uncommented upon, my plan for the future is to do a post every few movies with a blurb on each. I think I've said this before, so it could be an empty promise, but it's something I'd like to try out for a while. In the meantime, here's a list of things I watched in July, if that's of interest to anybody at all. I've gotta say, it was a pretty good, fruitful month. A little shy of one movie a day, but I'm getting there, finally, again.

Dr. Bronner's Magic Soapbox, Sara Lamm. [B-] july 3rd 2007.

La Haine, Mathieu Kassovitz. [A-] july 3rd 2007.

Paris, je t'aime, Various. [D] july 4th 2007.

Live Free or Die Hard, Len Wiseman. [B] july 5th 2007.

Rescue Dawn, Werner Herzog. [B] july 8th 2007.

Le Petit Soldat, Jean Luc Godard. [B] july 11th 2007.

Purple Rain, Albert Magnoli. [A] july 11th 2007.
[I can't seperate personal enjoyment and cinematic achievement with regards to this one. Objectively, that's probably not the rating it deserves.]

Ratatouille, Brad Bird. [A] july 12th 2007.

Batman and Robin, Joel Schumacher. [oh god] july 12th 2007.

Sicko, Michael Moore. [A-] july 14th 2007.

Every Man for Himself and God Against All, Werner Herzog. [B] july 16th 2007.

Aguirre, The Wrath of God, Werner Herzog. [A] july 16th 2007.

The French Connection, William Friedkin. [A] july 17th 2007.

All About Eve, Joseph L. Mankiewicz. [A] july 17th 2007.

Unfaithful Wife, Claude Chabrol. [C+] july 18th 2007.

The Pleasure Party, Claude Chabrol. [B+] july 18th 2007.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Shane Black. [B+] july 19th 2007.

Marnie, Alfred Hitchcock. [C-] july 20th 2007.

Pursued, Raoul Walsh. [B] july 20th 2007.

The Marriage Circle, Ernst Lubitsch. [A-] july 23rd 2007.

The Merry Widow, Ernst Lubitsch. [B+] july 23rd 2007.

The Pied Piper, Jacques Demy. [C] july 26th 2007.

Don't Look Back, D.A. Pennebaker. [A] july 26th 2007.

Notre Musique, Jean-Luc Godard. [A] july 27th 2007.

Once, John Carney. [C] july 29th 2007.

Japón, Carlos Reygadas. [C+] july 30th 2007.

The Simpsons Movie, David Silverman. [C+] july 31st 2007.

June in Review

2007-07-18T15:35:00.000-04:00

Heyo!

A note on ratings: I always feel like I'm being real generous with them. Part of this may be due to the fact that I actively seek out films I think I'm actually going to enjoy - I'm not a film critic, so it's not my obligation to see License to Wed - and part of this is just that I tend to always find some interesting or redemptive aspect in most things I see, something that gets me thinking or is visually exciting/unique. As a result, I very rarely out and out hate something I've seen. Anyway, I started adding ratings mainly to assist me in ranking the films I've seen in a given year for my year-end list, even though I don't like lists and never felt compelled to make one until I started maintaining this thing. Either way, I'm constantly torn by my approach to letter grades, whether it's from a critical or personal vantage point and they're basically entirely done on whim and the only reason they're here is because they're in the file I copy/paste them from into this blog. Ok.

Knocked Up, Judd Apatow. [A-] june 2nd 2007.

Darkman, Sam Raimi. [B] june 3rd 2007.

Serenity, Joss Whedon. [B+] june 5th 2007.

3-Iron, Kim Ki-Duk. [A-] june 12th 2007.
[Kim Ki-Duk's a tough egg to crack. I've seen three of his films now, The Isle and Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring being the other two, and I'm not sure what to make of him. His films are unbelievably beautiful, each of them reveling in a sort of poetic ambiguity that often makes them feel more like a prose poem in film format than a traditional film, if that makes sense. I choose prose poems primarily because all of the ones I've encountered have possessed a sort of magical realist, strange attitude towards the world that his films seem to also carry within them. An epigraph at the end unfortunately states what has already been said, but it's one of the few out and out disappointing things about this movie.

This film is haunted and haunting, it's about a man who wills himself to become a ghost and a woman who, having dipped her toe in the land of the dead, chooses to continue living on the borderlands while loving her specter.

One particular scene jumps out: A sad-eyed dog hovering alongside his master's corpse, looking up at two interlopers in his home, but not moving or uttering a single sound. Something about this dog chilled me to the bone.]

Spider-Man 3, Sam Raimi. [C+] june 13th 2007.
[I'm about as torn by this movie as I've been by any in a while. There are moments that are so utterly hysterical that it is unfathomable to me that they could not be intentional. Of course, it's bizarre that Raimi would choose to, after toeing the lines but never quite taking the plunge in the previous two installments, convert this huge movie franchise into an outright camp comedy, but I'm pretty sure he's done it. There's a long history of Spider-Man empathizing with his antagonists, it's one of the things that makes him such an endearingly human superhero, but he out and out verbally reconciles with two of the three (!) baddies he encounters in this movie by the time it's finished, the most anticipated of which, it needs to be said, is so half-assed and so much of an afterthought that it almost feels like a blatant slap in the face to Spider-Man geeks everywhere. The movie seems to bask in a sort of Art Deco style for a long while before eventually, and unfortunately, becoming a slick action movie again but it doesn't really stumble until the climactic battle. James Franco turns in one of the best comedic performances I've seen in a while and I had a blast watching it, but determining whether this was good or not or whether I even liked it, despite my previous statement, is infuriatingly difficult for me to determine. Still, I found myself constantly shocked and in disbelief over what I was seeing and I'd be hard-pressed not to recommend a viewing of it just for its sheer what-the-fuckness.]

Knocked Up, Judd Apatow. [A] june 17th 2007.
[Upon first viewing, I decided that, while I liked it, I liked it less than The 40-Year Old Virgin. Upon second viewing, I decided that is definitely not true. What can I say that hasn't been said already about this movie? Over the course of Apatow's career, Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared included, he's demonstrated a remarkably observant and compassionate attitude towards his characters that has really resonated with me. He's a humanist filmmaker and I dig that. I've always been kind of a comedy geek, but his movies make me want to pursue a career in it.]

Pierrot le Fou, Jean Luc Godard. [A] june 17th 2007.
[Godard's probably the most exciting filmmaker that I've ever seen and I'm thrilled that I got the chance to see this on the big screen for the first time. I wish I could remember more about it, but it really takes a lot of turns and I'm writing this far too long after the screening to really say anyting of worth. I can remember that it was endlessly thrilling, inventive and fun, and I can't wait for the inevitable DVD release following this restoration's national tour.]

3-Iron, Kim Ki-Duk. [B] june 22nd 2007.
[I showed this to a friend and, upon conclusion, he told me "I can find little to complain about in this movie." I feel like I liked it a little less the second time around, but the blurb I wrote about it (above) was written like 6 days after this second screening and I think I've already somehow transported myself back into the mind-space I had upon the first viewing. Really, I like this movie a lot.]

Army of Shadows, Jean Pierre Melville. [B+] june 23rd 2007.
[This is a really beautiful film, but it stumbles a bit in its desire to preserve as much of its plot as it possibly can. Like many biopics and historical films, it feels the need to include everything and consequently glosses over certain things while devoting more time to apparently smaller details that feel more significant, so there's a constant struggle between prioritizing poetry and facts and as a result both are occasionally compromised. The last 30 or so minutes of the movie feel especially compressed, but the overall picture has enough wonderful moments to make up for it, and the blue-tinted cinematography is really something else as well.]

Wild at Heart, David Lynch. [B+] june 24th 2007.
[I liked this a whole lot more the second time. It's maybe the airiest Lynch I've seen, in the sense that I don't feel like there's a lot going on beyond the spectacle of it. It's strange that a movie this light is home to some of the most grotesque things I've seen in his oeuvre, but the whole thing is really more of a cartoon than anything else.]

The World, Zhang Ke Jia. [A-] june 25th 2007.
["We hope this panoramic view will heighten your knowledge of the world." This line, uttered by an electronic voice in an elevator going to the top of a replica Eiffel Tower at the center of an uber-Epcot like "re-creation of the world" park in the middle of Beijing, feels like the Rosetta Stone for this film: it is an earnest attempt to recreate the world via allegory, set within a park that is an earnest, if ridiculous, attempt to recreate the world. Of course, that level of self-reflection and self-effacement simultaneously acknowledges the audacity of this endeavor and the possibility for its failure, but it doesn't indicate any shame or reservation, which I think is good.

The story itself, the personal story, is a series of episodic allegories for various situations that the world itself is in. Initially the whole piece comes off as more of a political allegory, with the romantic relationships being examples of how politicians and countries betray and oppress each other, motivated by self-interest and greed above all else. After a while the political aspects of the film start to feel minimized in relation to the personal story, which made me start to wonder if the film had lost its way. This concern quickly disappeared. Rather, I started to think that the initial, politically oriented bits are meant to serve as set-up for the later part, which is definitely dominated more by issues of identity and personal, rather than power-based, relations to others - cultural concerns. It is through culture, Zhang is saying, that we will begin to establish a sort of global unity. Not to mention of course that we must keep in mind that politics are meant to be in service of the people, not the dominant force running this World.

Of course, the fact that the entire movie is set within a park that is completely reductionist of world culture doesn't hint at a great deal of hope, but it's important to note that there's a sort of naive beauty and admiration that seems to fuel it - more than consumerism - which necessarily gives the place a bizarre beauty and hopefulness. The park is an idyllic vision of the world, one in which the twin towers still stand in New York and a troupe of dancers performs in front of the Taj Mahal on every hour. Still, there's an acknowledgment that if we continue going at the pace we are, the world, just like the central couple in the film, will inevitably self-destruct.]

Fucking Åmål, Lukas Moodysson. [A] june 27th 2007.
[I don't think a movie's made me this happy in a while. It's a simple story of two high school girls that start to fall in love in a small town, done in a verité style and expertly acted. The whole film is filled with charming moments and the characters are wholly believable and real. Even though Moodysson is clearly sympathetic with the two central characters who can't stand their town ("fucking Åmål!"), there is never any contempt or judgment on his part towards the others, which I like. There might be an air of disappointment, but it never treads into mean-spirited territory. The film maintains a tone of sympathetic objectivity, a humanistic attitude that makes the sad moments even sadder and the happier moments unbelievably soaring. This is a really beautiful movie.]

Where the Buffalo Roam, Art Linson. [B-] june 29th 2007.

The Searchers, John Ford. [A] june 30th 2007.

In Between Days, So Yong Kim. [B-] june 30th 2007.

May in Review

2007-06-01T18:25:00.000-04:00

May was an interesting month. The first few days of it were spent finishing up a post-collegiate cross-country road trip I started on the 25th of April. It was nice, we took the northern route, up to San Francisco, cutting through Nevada, Utah and the northern midwest, before tracing down to Chicago, cutting through Philly and getting back in Boston on the 3rd or 4th. Reno, Nevada is easily the worst place on Earth. San Francisco is up there on a list of bests. I had my graduation a couple weeks ago, so now I possess a BA in film from Emerson College. I don't feel any different, but I'm feeling a lot more anxiety now that I don't have any netting underneath me anymore. I'm living in Boston for the summer, writing a screenplay and trying to find something that will enable me to make money. In the fall I'm either back in LA or I'm in New York. Leaning towards New York, but I really dug LA, so who knows? I've noticed that I'm watching movies at a steady rate again, which I like. I went to the Harvard Film Archive three times in one week. It's June 1st and I'm consumed with my eagerness to see Knocked Up. I'll probably go tomorrow night. Here's what I saw in May, no overview or even commentary on the Ceylans, unfortunately. Another boat missed.:

Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters, Matt Maiellaro and Dave Willis. [C-] may 5th 2007.
[I guess this was kinda funny. I laughed a lot at the intro, but then I was bored for the next hour and ten minutes. The theater served beer, which made my experience better, but whatever. I'm a little ambivalent about talking about it, but that's just a response to the filmmakers' ambivalence towards making a good movie. "We've got your fucking money now so feel free to leave." Fuck you. To be fair, I dig the show and the brand of humor, but it really doesn't lend itself to a feature film length, and there was a definite feeling that the dudes that made this were trying to make an ultimate declaration of their contempt for their audience with this picture. Still, I guess I'd watch it again to see if I thought differently the second time. I don't like not liking stuff.]

The Host, Joon-ho Bong. [B-] may 6th 2007.

Distant, Nuri Bilge Ceylan. [A-] may 18th 2007.

Climates, Nuri Bilge Ceylan. [A] may 18th 2007.

An evening with Leighton Pierce, may 20th 2007:
He Likes to Chop Down Trees [B-]
Red Shovel [A]
Blue Hat [C]
50 Feet of String [B]
Glass [B+]

Clouds of May, Nuri Bilge Celan. [B+] may 21st 2007.

Cocoon, Nuri Bilge Ceylan. [B] may 21st 2007.

The Small Town, Nuri Bilge Ceylan. [A] may 21st 2007.

Hot Fuzz, Edgar Wright. [A-] may 22nd 2007.

The Thing, John Carpenter. [A-] may 24th 2007.

The Devil's Backbone, Guillermo del Toro. [C-] may 24th 2007.

Children of Men, Alfonso Cuaron. [A-] may 27th 2007.

The Lover, Valeri Todorovsky. [D-] may 29th 2007.

Paris, Texas, Wim Wenders. [A-] may 30th 2007.

Grindhouse, March and April

2007-05-07T23:30:00.001-04:00

A take on Grindhouse I put up here, then took down and now am putting up again:

I loved it, but I divide it up pretty snobbily between stuff that I felt had worth outside of the gimmick of the double feature B-movie thing and stuff that simply made me giggle while I sat there in the theater. All of it was enjoyable, except for maybe Rob Zombie's surprisingly dull "Werewolf Women of the SS" thing, but the two highlights were easily Edgar Wright's "Don't" and Quentin Tarantino's "Death Proof." Out of all the segments in the film, these were the two that felt like something beyond both parody and homage; they weren't even updates of the style, they were things that acknowledged their respective predecessors and then, in a true display of film geekery, decided to demonstrate what they learned from them by making something completely new and unique.

Obviously there's a huge degree of self-awareness coursing through this film, the very notion of bringing the grindhouse experience to an audience, largely unfamiliar with the phenomenon in question, sitting in a THX-certified auditorium requires some self-acknowledgement in order to even remotely work. Still, "Don't" and "Death Proof" felt like they weren't just self-aware jokes, like the rest of the stuff in Grindhouse did; instead, they were able to simultaneously make self-aware jokes about the influences they draw from and synthesize all those sources in provocative ways to make something that was both new and interesting.

At their core, both of these pieces seem to capture their creator's love of movies through their delirious, infectious enthusiasm. "Don't" literally explodes. "Death Proof," on the other hand, feels like a an aggressive piece of advocacy, a statement of affection for the cinema and a protest film against its current state at the same time. My gut reaction upon leaving the theater was that this is the best thing Tarantino's done yet. The dialogue scenes never bored me, but they did make me restless, knowing full well that something nasty was going to have to happen soon, given the nature of the whole grindhouse spectacle. My suspicions were confirmed - the first half of the movie ends with what is the only legitimately disturbing sequence of death in the entire 3 hour-plus runtime of Grindhouse, a savagely unexplained slaughtering of a group of girls by the villain, Stuntman Mike; his complete lack of motive and the relish that he takes in the killing pushing the whole scene over from "excessive and funny" territory to "pretty fucked up" land.

Of course it has to be fucked up; if the movie was pushing for cheap laughs, it'd be achieving nothing, and this movie feels like it's striving for a lot: a plea for less cgi in films and a return to practical effects and the kineticism of real objects shot on real film. You can feel it in every frame of that final chase; the movie seethes with anger, a sort of indiscriminate anger that the final, unbelievable beatdown caps off as a final rebel yell, about nothing in particular and everything all at once: the overuse of CGI in movies today, the state we've let our country get in, the state we've let our interpersonal interactions get in - "Death Proof" is the most girl-power thing I've seen in a long long time - this movie's a cathartic yell of frustration at it all and I found myself grabbing my hair, my jaw on the floor, a shit eating grin on my face when that ending came.

Here's March and April in review. Coming later (maybe): an evaluation of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's films. (hint: they're great!!)

The Palm Beach Story, George Cukor. [A-] march 6th 2007.

The Lady Eve, Preston Sturges. [B] march 13th 2007.

F for Fake, Orson Welles. [A] march 13th 2007.

Loose Change, ?. [whatever] march 14th 2007.

Gerry, Gus Van Sant. [A-] march 17th 2007.

What's Up, Doc?, Peter Bogdonavich. [B-] march 20th 2007.

Wild at Heart, David Lynch. [B+] march 20th 2007.

The Turning Gate, Hong Sang-soo. [B+] march 25th 2007.
A Tale of Cinema, Hong Sang-soo. [C+] march 25th 2007.
[I saw these two at USC, part of a triple feature put on by the Korean Film Club. I missed the last show. A Tale of Cinema didn't really do it for me that much, but The Turning Gate really kind of blew me away. It felt alien and intimate at the same time, the willfully long takes achieving the sort of objectivity that really allows you to sympathize with the characters on screen. This is a really beautiful film. A Tale of Cinema for some reason felt awkward for me. The decision to not include a single shot without a zoom felt contrived; at first I thought it was an interesting device that was meant to differentiate between the movie within the movie and the real life incidents, but when it persisted further, I started thinking it was interesting because it didn't distinguish between the two. Then after a while I just found it distracting and ugly to look at. Still, I'd like to see more of this guy's films.]

Something Wild, Jonathan Demme. [C-] march 27th 2007.

Revenge of the Cheerleaders, Richard Lerner. [B-] march 27th 2007.
[I saw this at Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse festival in LA, at the New Beverly Theater. We picked this one randomly from the schedule but a month or so after I saw it I learned that Tarantino touts it as one of his favorite grindhouse pictures. I can see why; it's one of the most enthusiastic movies I've ever seen. It's not very good, but its will to entertain is so blatant and sincere that I wound up appreciating the sheer amount of effort they put into it so much. These are people who aren't terribly talented but sincerely believe they can do something good, so they throw everything they've got at the audience. Some of them can dance, so there's a dance number; some of them are well endowed so when the picture slow's down we'll throw some breasts on the screen; there's a fight scene, a car chase, a cartoonish corridor chase, there's quicksand, a conspiracy, a food fight, a drug trip, there's EVERYTHING. Something about that is real beautiful to me.]

Zodiac, David Fincher. [B+] april 1st 2007.

Ivan's Childhood, Andrei Tarkovsky. [A] april 2nd 2007.

The Hudsucker Proxy, Coen Brothers. [C+] april 3rd 2007.

Chungking Express, Wong Kar-Wai. [B+] april 5th 2007.

Grindhouse, Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino. [B] april 6th 2007.

Flirting with Disaster, David O. Russell. [B] april 10th 2007.

Killer of Sheep, Charles Burnett. [B] april 10th 2007.

Playtime, Jacques Tati. [A-] april 11th 2007.
[I realize I'm only addressing films I saw at actual screenings, although I'm not even touching on all of them, but those experiences wind up being the most memorable and valuable to me, more so than a film I watch at home on my laptop. That's just how it is, experiences matter and they're one of the most valid reasons for going out to the movies - to allow the profundity of the world to interact with the film you've seen and really allow the film to reflect something new and interesting to you, something outside of the film itself. I saw this at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, projected on 70mm film, the movie was 25 feet tall. Pretty important for a movie that wants to overwhelm you with its environments and contain information in its reflective surfaces. There was no more appropriate place for a movie this excessive to be screened - I emerged from the theater onto the ridiculousness of Holywood Blvd and couldn't tell the difference.]

Intolerable Cruelty, Coen Brothers. [C] april 17th 2007

The Muthers, Cirio H. Santiago. [C] april 17th 2007.

Mean Girls, Mark Waters. [B] april 21st 2007.

Hot Fuzz, Edgar Wright. [B+] april 23rd 2007.

"Shirt basket?" "Shirt basket." Gerry, 2003.

2007-04-04T16:00:00.001-04:00

It's tough for me to think about this movie without referring back to my first viewing of it. Freshman year of college, when I was still at Pratt, I went to Paris with three friends for spring break. It was a spontaneous decision to go, made just barely over a week before I left. We took a freewheeling approach to exploring the city, outlining a few things we knew we wanted to see, getting a general feel for where that was located relative to where we were and then trying our best to find our way there, allowing ourselves to get distracted by whatever caught our eye along the way. I made a conscious decision to not take too many photographs, opting instead to document the trip with a detailed daily journal that I wrote each night from the various two word notes I wrote to myself throughout the day. Of all the trips I've taken in my life, I remember it the most vividly.

One night, while walking the Champs-Elysées, we decided to take in a movie. We stepped up to a theater and saw it was playing Gerry in ten minutes. I'd read about it in the Boston Globe when it came out in the States while I was still a few months from graduating high school, back in New Hampshire. I'd wanted to see it, but it never came to the local art-house and I never made the trip out to Boston. We all wanted to get a little taste of home, so we went in. There were maybe ten other people in the theater. This was my first big exposure to the long take aesthetic that I've since grown to love; I took to it almost immediately. How ballsy that ten-minute long shot of the sun rising in real time felt to me! I was surprised by how funny the movie was, too.

My group was laughing constantly at the strange conversations peppered with "gerry," a word of seemingly endless applicability in this movie's world, and the playful, verbally inventive banter between the two leads. No one else in the theater so much as chuckled, which made us laugh all the more. They weren't jokes, but situations and attitudes, methods of communication, that made us laugh; untranslatable things. The movie starts off so innocently that I was immediately struck by how interesting it was, in spite of its apparent mundanity. A long shot of the two Gerrys racing each other through the trees was interesting solely due to the beauty of the photography and the charisma of the actors, there was no plot investment at this point. I was looking at something because it was pleasant to look at and nothing more and I really liked seeing a narrative film do that. I was also impressed how, by being forced to stare at a single image for a long time, rather than being bored I found myself more invested in it, interested in analyzing the image more closely. Everything started taking on a higher level of significance, the way the character's shirt rinkled, the cadence of his breathing, the subtle fluctuations in the furrowing and unfurrowing of his brow; it all felt important.

The gradual degradation of the situation the two men face was handled with such grace that it almost entirely snuck up on me, which resulted in an all the more gut wrenching experience by the end of it. The movie left me in a daze, completely out of sorts and unable to communicate with anyone around me. I didn't want to talk about it, I just wanted to think about it and feel it for a while, so I deliberately walked up ahead, away from my group so I could be by myself. We emerged from the theater, back onto the Champs-Elysées. I felt as if I was lifting off, my brain trying to soar up out of my head but my skull keeping it in place, the resistance between the two resulting in the sensation that I was slowly being pulled up off the ground by a helium balloon, like in a cartoon; only the balloon was my head itself and the lift was coming from within. I could differentiate between every individual voice around me, taking every piece of sound coming at me and dissecting the overall field into separate tracks. A woman speaking a mile down the street was as distinct to me as a couple ten feet in front of me, and when I zeroed in on whatever sound source I selected, all the others faded. I realize it sounds like I'm describing a drug experience right now, but the film was so powerful to me that it actually had a physiological effect.

Having viewed some of the works that influenced this film, although I still haven't seen any Béla Tarr films, Gerry is less impressive to me than it was in the past, it ultimately feels a little superficial, like a stylistic exercise more than anything else, but as a point of introduction to this unique school of cinema, it's proven to be invaluable to me.

I just checked, hoping that I'd serendipitously be posting this on the anniversary of this screening, but the three year mark happened a little less than a month ago. Ironically, I started writing this entry about eight days after that mark, but that "start" only constitutes the first two sentences of this post. The rest were written today, April 4th 2007. A review of March will come in the next couple days.

February in Review

2007-03-16T17:57:00.000-04:00

It's been too long. I was going to just tack this onto the end of a post I'm planning on doing soon, without blurbs, but I'm gonna try to attack this a little bit. I'm writing them now, today on the 16th of March, making this a little bit unnecessary and silly. LA's been taking up my time, what with the internship and the classes and whatnot. I went to the desert to shoot part of a short I'm making last weekend and we got stuck there for 6 hours. As soon as I have it done, I'll find a way to post it to the internet so my imaginary readers can see it.

In the meantime, here's what I watched in February. You'll note that it's still a pitiably small amount of movies.

The Awful Truth, Leo McCarey. [B+] february 6th 2007.
[I honestly don't remember much about this, other than the fact that the titular awful truth at the end of this film is that they're stuck together, because they're the only people they can truly love. This was fun, but it's not my favorite of the ones we've watched in my screwball comedy class, partially because I don't recall being terribly impressed by either of them. The two protagonists are always much smarter than everyone else they're surrounded by in these movies, but in spite of the fact that the characters in this movie fulfilled that screwball requirement, neither of them actually struck me as terribly exceptional.]

Dead Alive, Peter Jackson. [B] february 7th 2007.
[This is a silly movie. It's fun, but I don't really know why I bought it. If I wanna laugh or be grossed out there's plenty of other movies I'd sooner turn to. Still, I really do like the camera work in this movie. It's pretty obviously indebted to Sam Raimi, but there is a distinctive style to it that makes it Jackson's own. The opening sequence of this is especially funny in light of his King Kong remake, because his approach to shooting the boarding of Skull Island isn't much different. I like that even in his huge budget stuff like King Kong and Lord of the Rings, his geeky adoration of the Evil Dead series shines through. I don't really like this guy overall, though.]

Children of Men, Alfonso Cuarón. [A] february 9th 2007.
[This was one of the more incredible theatrical experiences I've had in recent memory. The fact that it was slighted of a cinematography Oscar is an even bigger offense than its not being nominated for Best Picture. This is an epic movie, but it still feels very human, which most epic movies don't manage to do. Gorgeous and not too optimistic while also not being too cynical. It ends with a glimmer of hope but no guarantees, and I like that. As a technical achievement, this movie is mind-shattering.]

Eros:
The Hand, Wong Kar-Wai. [B] february 10th 2007.
Equilibrium, Steven Soderbergh. [B+] february 25th 2007.
The Dangerous Thread of Things, Michelangelo Antonioni. [F] february 25th 2007.
[I liked Equilibrium the most. I guess that's clear from my ratings. Wong Kar-Wai's one of my favorite dudes on the planet, but I'm one of the few people that dig him that don't regard In the Mood for Love as his best work. I much prefer Fallen Angels and Days of Being Wild. This is a little more In the Mood for Love. Still, I haven't seen a film by him that I haven't enjoyed. I can't say that of Soderbergh, but I'm a sucker for Robert Downey Jr. and noirs and this has both! So does Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which is why, I guess, I dug that movie as much as I did. Anyway, I can't entirely tell you what's going on in Equilibrium, but I like it. Antonioni's is an abortion and it's really pretty staggering that someone who once achieved as much greatness as him managed to make a movie this unbelievably bad. To say it's like a bad student film is an insult to bad student films. If anything, this is a bad bad student film. The opening alone solidifies how embarrassing it's going to get: A woman lying topless on a chair, she sits for a while and then a guy comes out and just starts yelling at her like they've been in the middle of an argument for the last 5 minutes. Antonioni's done zany stuff like that before, though, so I don't know. Maybe the acting was just really bad. I mean it was really bad, but maybe they ruined his brilliant vision. Either way, this sucks. And I doubt it, anyway.]

Bringing Up Baby, Howard Hawks. [A-] february 13th 2007.
[There's a leopard! I liked this movie. It doesn't work for me out and out - the ending is rather silly and I feel like it kinda loses its steam a little bit at one point - but I like it. That's all I've got to say right now.]

Double Indemnity, Billy Wilder. [A] february 16th 2007.
[Man, more than anything else I just really love Wilder's dialogue. It crackles with life and really makes this movie unbelievably fun to watch. Raymond Chandler was no slouch either, so the two of them doing a collaborative thing here is basically awesome city. I was reading the script on imsdb recently and it's pretty neat to do that, not only because it's nice to read the scene descriptions and to see what the dialogue looks and feels like on the page, but also just to see what an old screenplay looks like. The link's here: http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Double-Indemnity.html Fun fun fun.]

The Philadelphia Story, George Cukor. [A] february 20th 2007.
[I was kind of surprised that this was classified as a screwball comedy, because it's not terribly screwy, but it sure feels sad a lot of the time. Jimmy Stewart's unbelievable in this, and I really like that it's fairly ambiguous who she's going to go with for a lot of the movie. Good stuff, you guys. Plus Katherine Hepburn was hot. I like seeing all these hot Golden Age of Hollywood ladies. The more screwball comedies I see, the more I think I was made for the thirties. I probably woulda been an awesome dude back then. As it stands now, I'm kind of middling to great, depending on the day.]

Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese. [A] february 23rd 2007.
[I saw this at UCLA's Billy Wilder Theater and Michael Ballhaus was there to talk about it. Seeing this on the big screen was a fairly revelatory experience for me. I never really held this movie in terribly high regard before seeing it here. It was good and everything, I totally acknowledged that, but it never really did anything for me before this. I got into it this time, more than I had before. There's a certain amount of so-whatness that this movie elicits from me, but biopics tend to do that to me, even though I enjoy them. Oddly enough, I responded really well almost immediately to The Aviator. Anyway, this movie is technically virtuosic and a blast to watch and not as shallow as I once considered it to be, although I don't think it's terribly deep or anything, either.

Some neat things: In that montage at the end where they're discovering all the corpses, there's a shot where we see a mobster's frozen body on a meat truck. The way they did that scene was by having a steadicam operator stand on a platform attached to a crane. The crane lowered, down to the level of the truck bed and then the guy just stepped off of it and walked down the length of it for the rest of the shot. Isn't that totally neat? Also, the Copacabana shot was done like so: they had a fake hallway set up that the camera follows Henry and Karen through and into the kitchen. While they were looping around the kitchen, the crew was moving those walls around and redressing them so that when they were done in the kitchen, they could walk through those very same walls and into the actual club itself. Wild. Scorsese was real specific about the floating table in that shot, so they had to do multiple takes to accomodate that and they also had to do multiple takes cause the waiter at the end flubbed his lines or something. And actually the wildest thing about that shot is that they couldn't ride the exposure or anything, so they actually lit that whole sequence to one f-stop. That's nuts! Ok.]

Little Miss Sunshine, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris. [B-] february 24th 2007.
[Hey, you know. It was funnish. Best Picture is some ridiculous shit, but the Oscars are dumb anyway, so what can you do? The ending was pretty bad and that whole "let your freak flag fly" thing got really simple and silly, but the movie's not a grating experience and there were probably worse ways I could have avoided sleeping than watching this. I'm fairly ambivalent towards it.]

After Image, Robert Manganelli. [F] february 26th 2007.
[The director, cinematographer and lead actress came to my class to speak about this. They were nice and their insights into the filmmaking process were really useful, but this movie's bad to the bone. John Cougar fuckin Mellencamp, man. I really don't even wanna talk about this.]

Blue Velvet, David Lynch. [A] february 26th 2007.
[I made a pretty sweet post about this movie in August. I just re-read it, maybe you'd like to re-read it, too. Arguably for the first time: http://lathamloop.blogspot.com/2006/08/people-like-frank.html

Someday I'd like The Latham Loop to go back to its past glories and be more like this entry. That's really more of what I set out to do with this thing. I mean, what I set out to do was to further expand my film education by forcing myself to confront and explore my comprehension of a film by attempting to articulate myself about it in ways that went beyond the superficial "I liked it/didn't like it" type conversations I usually had with people. I don't feel that my monthly log blurbs are shallow - although they certainly can be - but I do think it's important to note that they were once viewed as the supplementary material to the meat of this thing, rather than the main, once per month content.]

His Girl Friday, Howard Hawks. [/] february 27th 2007.
[I hate that I was so tired that I fell asleep during this in class. So it goes. ADDED TO TEH QUEEUE

(I honestly didn't mean to type it like that, but I saw the typos and decided to leave them. I guess this note defuses it of any comedy value, but then again TEH INTERNETS type jokes aren't really that funny. I should delete this whole thing.)]

The 40 Year Old Virgin, Judd Apatow. [A-] february 28th 2007.
[I've talked about this a couple times on here. I like it a lot.]

January in Review

2007-02-01T13:48:00.000-05:00

So this was a pretty slow month. I've been getting settled in - I'm out in Los Angeles now - and that's been taking a lot of time, but I really can't account for what kept me from watching more movies in the first week or so. But yeah, I'm in LA, trying to make it in the pitchas or whatever. I'm still in school, interning at a pretty neat company that mostly makes music videos and commercials. So far I've worked on three music videos, the most high profile of which was for Christina Aguilera. I read scripts and do coverage and I do whatever else. It's nice and that's about it.

Here's January:

The Lost Weekend, Billy Wilder. [B] january 3rd 2007.
[This isn't superfun Billy Wilder like Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard - although thinking back on it I can't think of a single Wilder film I've seen thus far that hasn't made me sad - but it's still Billy Wilder and it's still good. His dialogue doesn't crackle as much in this, but I wonder if that's just due to performances. For whatever reason, none of the characters in this film really endeared themselves to me and I found its moralism a little off-putting. It's clearly a product of its time, though, and it needs to be forgiven for that. The movie is still fairly riveting when it isn't clearly trying to show us how wretched the main character is, but actually does show it.]

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, William Greaves. [B-] january 9th 2007.
[I didn't really know what to make of this movie. I watched it on the plane to Los Angeles and I was pretty tired due to only getting in a few hours of sleep the night before. I've actually held on to the DVD rather than returning it to Netflix because I wanted to give it another viewing. From what I was able to gather, it seems like a fairly clever prank and nothing more. After a while it became difficult to figure out what the point of the film was, the premise seemed to communicate as much as the film itself, but I suspect that maybe the lack of an apparent point is part of the point itself. Hence the re-watch. I'll talk about it when I do.]

Pan's Labyrinth, Guillermo Del Toro. [A-] january 11th 2007.
[I did not expect this to be anywhere as grisly as it was. I'm glad that I was caught off guard by those elements of the film, though, because I think it helped them hit with their intended impact. As an indictment of fascism, it's as effective as any other indictment of fascism. We all agree it suck, etc. As a movie about resistance and finding your inner strength, it's a lot more effective, largely due to its events being told from the perspective of a child. The fact that we are given opportunities to question her story, despite the film's subjective narration, gives it an added layer of depth. You can choose to believe in the magic or you can not, but her strength, which is derived largely from the fantasy elements of the film, is undeniable.]

It Happened One Night, Frank Capra. [A-] january 17th 2007.
[I've seen this once before. It's a fun, sweet comedy. I don't have much to say about it.]

Idiocracy, Mike Judge. [C-] january 21st 2007.
[This was simultaneously funnier than I expected and much worse than I expected. It starts off kind of strong, if a little bit hateful and mean-spirited, but it quickly loses steam and by the end of it, turns into a completely formulaic studio comedy, with the sentimental lesson learned at the end, which is awful for a movie meant to be a send-up of how dumb our culture is to do. Overall, it's not really worth anyone's time, but if you're bored, there's worse things to watch on google video, though there's certainly better as well. Why not check out Louis and the Nazis?]

My Man Godfrey, Gregory la Cava. [A-] january 23rd 2007.
[So I guess this is the part of my screwball comedy class where the "screwball" part starts being a lot more apparent. I absolutely love manic comedies like this, relentlessly paced. It gets me psyched for the rest of the semester.]

Ax 'Em, Michael Mfune. [F] january 23rd 2007.
[This movie is truly unbelievable. I put an F down because really it fails on every level as a movie, but that's exactly what makes it so worth your time. Netflix this thing and prepare to be astounded. This feels like a movie made by a dude who's never seen a movie before. Everyone who tries to make a narrative movie has been able to have some semblance of a story come across in their work. That's because everyone's seen enough movies to, at least on some rudimentary level, be able to make one, even if it's a crude one. This movie is a horror movie. A genre movie suggests that dude has seen some movies before, but the fundamental lack of any comprehension for how a movie works makes me wonder if he got all of those Friday the 13th movies at all. So fun.]

Decasia: The State of Decay, Bill Morrison. [B] january 24th 2007.
[Like the cinematic equivalent of William Basinski's Disintegration Loops, a recording based around a tape loop slowly deteriorating as it plays over and over, Decasia uses decaying film. I've read some evaluations of the film saying that it's an exploration of life and death and all that, but I just think it's very nice to look at, if a bit on the long side.]

Birth, Jonathan Glazer. [A-] january 29th 2007.
[I feel like I've talked about this movie before. I like it a lot and I think he really is her husbad.]

Easy Living, Mitchell Leisen. [B] january 30th 2007.
[Fun enough, but not quite as madcap as My Man Godfrey. There are some slapstick bits that really fall flat in this movie, too. I'm having a hard time differentiating between this and My Man Godfrey at the moment. They kind of blended together for me and I don't really know what to say about it, so I won't say anything at all.

Madman, Joe Giannone. [D-] january 30th 2007.
[This is just a bad horror movie. Not so bad it's good, just so bad.]

Ravenous, Antonia Bird. [B] january 31st 2007.
[We talked through most of this. The letter grade is largely arbitrary. I'd like to see it again.]

See you next month, hopefully sooner.

December/Year in Review

2007-01-04T16:44:00.000-05:00

I've never done one of these top 10 lists, not for anything. I don't really care much to read them and I never cared much to do one, but for some reason I figured, since I'm keeping a log of movies I'm watching and stuff, I can compile one at the end of the year and see what happens. I started off this year kind of strong, but wound up falling behind in the new releases quite a bit, so this list is really like one third of the new releases I saw this year. Still, it's a LIST, you guys! You guys!

01) Brick (Rian Johnson)
02) When the Levees Broke (Spike Lee)
03) The Fountain (Darren Aronofsky)
04) Inland Empire (David Lynch)
05) Dave Chappelle's Block Party (Michel Gondry)
06) Mutual Appreciation (Andrew Bujalski)
07) Volver (Pedro Almodovar)
08) The Departed (Martin Scorsese)
09) Unknown White Male (Rupert Murray)
10) Miami Vice (Michael Mann)

Pretty unextraordinary list, really. Note the lack of foreign films. Gonna have to remedy that next year. Anyway, here's the stuff I saw in December. Also pretty lax, but it's been kind of hectic lately. I head out for Los Angeles in 5 days and I'm trying to get an internship going and figure out last-minute medical stuff and yadda yadda. Here's barebones December:

Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky. [.] december 1st 2006.
[I hate myself for being so tired during this. The most pristine print I've ever seen, it was like being inside the movie and I couldn't stay awake. I tried pounding coffee, but it didn't really work out for me. Probably my biggest New Years resolution is to stop letting insomnia ruin my life. Anyway, that's the period.]
Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Alain Resnais. [B] december 4th 2006.
Ménilmontant, Dimitri Kirsinov. [A] december 5th 2006.
The Fall of the House of Usher, Jean Epstein. [A-] december 5th 2006.
The Fountain, Darren Aronofsky. [A-] december 7th 2006.
The Big Carnival, Billy Wilder. [B] december 9th 2006.
Three Times, Hou Hsiao-hsien. [/] december 11th 2006.
[We watched an awful VCD copy in class that was literally unwatchable for a third of the movie, didn't come close to finishing the other two thirds, either. It was really disappointing, because I loved what I saw. I look forward to seeing it properly sometime.]
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, F.W. Murnau. [A-] december 12th 2006.
Inland Empire, David Lynch. [B+] december 17th 2006.
Being There, Hal Ashby. [A-] december 25th 2006.
Volver, Pedro Almodovar. [B] december 30th 2006.

Weak post, weak month, although certainly not in content, just quantity.

The rundown for the year?

173 features, 29 shorts (Not counting repeats, but counting individual viewings of films I've seen before.)

Not bad, but I think I can do better. Here's looking forward to a great 2007.

November in Review

2006-12-04T18:33:00.000-05:00

I've been real lazy about keeping the blurbs going. I don't wanna do them after the fact, because I really can't summon myself to do it right now. I can barely do the work I've got for school right now, much less this. I'd say the greatest loss is the Solaris blurb. I had so much stuff to say about that movie after I got done watching it, but I didn't put it down and I don't want to try getting back into the headspace necessary to accomplish that. That's movie of the month, though. Blew me away completely. We'll see how December goes.

Hana-Bi, Takeshi Kitano. [/] november 6th 2006.
[I slept through this. I wasn't entirely blown away by what I saw while I was awake, the cinematography seemed fairly uninteresting, but everything I've heard about this film is overwhelmingly positive, and considering its fragmented narrative, I can't really claim to have gotten anything out of it at all. You can't wake up every 5 minutes and figure out what happened.]

Easy Street, Charlie Chaplin. [B+] november 7th 2006.
[This was fun, but I don't have much else to say about it. There's something real bleak about some of these Chaplin movies I've been seeing in my silent class. Really, about all of the films of his that I've seen. I was half expecting him to a be a junkie at the end of this.]

The Last Laugh, F.W. Murnau. [B+] november 7th 2006.
[This easily rivals Murnau's other indisputable classic, Sunrise, at various moments, but is ultimately brought down a couple notches by the completely inexplicable and extraneous epilogue. I can't be sure whether the intertitle preceding it is entirely true or not - that the producers felt bad about the unhappy ending and decided to tack on a hypothetical good outcome - but the way it's written steeps it in melancholy because you know, they say as much, that it could never happen. The sets are incredible. The forced perspective on the street scenes is unbelievable: little figurines run through the windows of the buildings in the backgrounds, little cars run on tracks down streets in the distance; not to mention the courtyard the main character lives in. The Last Laugh also boasts one of the finest dream sequences I've ever seen. Even with all this technical virtuosity, the story doesn't get entirely overshadowed and there are some genuinely affecting moments in this film. Still, it's a little too unfocused and spotty at times to be a complete masterpiece.]

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, John Cassavetese. [A] november 8th 2006.
[Shadows didn't really do it for me, although I'd like to revisit it, but this really blew me away. I think a lot of bad films have been made in the verite style because the filmmakers assumed that they had to assume a very cold, objective stance on the characters and situations they were depicting, but I think the best films I've seen done in this style, of which this is one, are borne from empathy more than anything else. I like that a lot obviously went into the art design of this film, too. It's real interesting to consider that so much went into choreographing these crappy shows. The drive to make art and make a life for yourself through it seems to be the crux of this film, and it's definitely a pretty bleak look at the frustrations an artist is sometimes forced to face in their efforts to get a project made. I really like that the main character isn't treated like a maroon.]

Calendar, Atom Egoyan. [B+] november 9th 2006.
[Calendar's a structural experiment more than anything else, but it's one that winds up being really fun to watch. It moves in a cycle, through which it takes a couple rounds to fully pick up on, that allows for very subtle variations in procedure to take upon great significance. In an earlier post I wrote about Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman. That movie uses the first of its four hours just to fully establish its world in the most precise terms imaginable. Only because we know Jeanne makes potatoes for dinner every day does it deeply affect us when she messes up while making them. Same thing with this movie. Certain unexpected glances get to mean a lot. Watching the main character's marriage fall apart in such a small scale gets to be very moving. I like the additional idea of this film being an exploration of ones cultural roots. Egoyan's an Armenian-Canadian filmmaker, but he clearly identifies with his Western home more. The first shot feels like an evocation of Kiarostami, so there's a way in which Egoyan appears to be exploring his "roots" in a cinematic sense as well as a literal one. One of my only complaints with this film is the visual inconsistency between the Armenian and Canadian sections. Because the Armenian section's entirely shot outdoors during the day and the Canadian one is entirely indoors at night, the lighting conditions are drastically different, but the way the light falls is also quite different. After seeing these beautiful, stark images of ancient churches in the countryside, the Canadian parts draw even more attention to themselves as artificially constructed sets, which I don't think serves the film. Even if a visual contrast was something Egoyan was going for, the dinner scenes are lit for a sitcom.]

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, Larry Charles. [C+] november 10th 2006.
[Yeah, it's funny, but it was still a bit disappointing. The fun of Borat is his interactions with other people that aren't hip to his schtick, so why so much in character stuff with no one around but other characters? I really would have been okay with this movie not having any narrative arc at all.]

Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht, Werner Herzog. [B-] november 10th 2006.
[Worth seeing, if only for Klaus Kinski's performance. I realized while watching this movie that I've now seen 5 Herzog films and not a one of them doesn't have forests, mists, rivers and waterfalls in it. Good to know. I like that Dracula's kind of the hero in this movie. Harker and his bride are so boringly perfect that you don't care much about them. Dracula, meanwhile is sympathetic and really kind of pathetic. This isn't really the best Herzog I've seen, but not everything can live up to Aguirre, I guess.]

Double Indemnity, Billy Wilder. [B+] november 11th 2006.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Shane Black. [B] november 12th 2006.

Dead Man, Jim Jarmusch. [A] november 12th 2006.

Solaris, Andrei Tarkovsky. [A] november 12th 2006.

Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham..., Karan Johar. [F] november 13th 2006.

Stardust Memories, Woody Allen. [A] november 13th 2006.

The Limey, Steven Soderbergh. [B-] november 18th 2006.

Punch-Drunk Love, Paul Thomas Anderson. [A] november 18th 2006.

Three Days of the Condor, Sydney Pollack. [C+] november 19th 2006.

Bringing Out the Dead, Martin Scorsese. [A-] november 20th 2006.

Lady Windermere's Fan, Ernst Lubitsch. [B] november 21st 2006.

A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin, Eric Simonson. [A-] november 22nd 2006.
[Viewed as a companion piece to Good Night and Good Luck, it's rather impressive how much more this film manages to accomplish within its brief, 40 minute span than Clooney's biopic. It's unfortunate that it won't enjoy the same level of exposure. The content far outweighs the form of this movie, there are clumsy sound mixing decisions and moments where sounds and images are uneffectively reused, but sometimes that's ok. The stories, sounds and images being presented are so strong and affecting that it's impossible to diffuse their worth. Which isn't to say, even, that I think the film as a documentary is without its merits. As a filmmaker, Simonson isn't terribly interesting or great, but as an editor he chooses some excellent moments to highlight in this film. That ending, man. Makes me want to listen to On a Note of Triumph again.]

Solaris, Steven Soderbergh. [B] november 23rd 2006.

North Country, Niki Caro. [C+] november 24th 2006.

Mihai si Cristina, Cristian Nemescu. november 24th 2006.

Povestea de pe Scara 7, Cristian Nemescu. november 24th 2006.

Fun with Dick and Jane, Dean Parisont. [C] november 24th 2006.

Short Cuts, Robert Altman. [A-] november 24th 2006.

The Isle, Kim-Ki Duk. [B-] november 27th 2006.

October, Sergei Eisenstein. [B] november 28th 2006.

Zelig, Woody Allen. [B+] november 29th 2006.

October in review

2006-11-17T04:00:00.000-05:00

Good month. A good part of these were written after the fact. Within the last couple of weeks things really started coming to a head on a film I was directing and I started devoting all my resources to it. We got our footage back today and it looks good, so that's a relief.

I'd mentioned in an earlier post that I'd been hoping to update on a weekly basis, or even every three movies or something like that. Hopefully that starts being feasible soon. I've been wanting to do a big post on Tarkovsky's Solaris, too, but I feel like I've already missed the boat on that one.

Here's October, for now.

Pep of the Lazy J, Victor Noerdlinger. [C] october 1st 2006.
[Another Janet Gaynor silent. So's the next one. The Harvard Film Archive's running a series. Anyway, I enjoyed this one immensely, but I suspect a good deal of that had to do with the live piano accompaniment. That really pushed things to another level, especially since dude was relentless during this one. His performance during Lucky Star was much more subdued, probably because that was a near two hour film and this was just a 20 minute short, but he was going wild on the piano and totally made the film a million times more compelling than it would have been on its own. Still, there was a nice little saucy Gaynor moment in it and some other fun little things, so it was by no means a loss or anything like that.]

Lucky Star, Frank Borzage. [B] october 1st 2006.
[I wasn't as wild about this as Seventh Heaven, although I'm in the minority for that, at least in terms of the folks I went to these screenings with. Still, this was another sweet movie with some beautiful things in it. The set design and lighting in this was miles apart from Seventh Heaven. The opening sequence especially has some beautiful shots depicting daybreak on a little farm. Gaynor's relationship with Farrell was a little beyond creepy at times, but I guess that's just some stuff I'm gonna have to attribute to the times. In all of these films there's some pretty consistent reenforcement of patriarchal norms that is at times disappointing, but they do occasionally get subverted. Beyond which, despite my feminist objections, I'm still a dude that's a sucker for a cute, demure girl in a dress.]

Shoot the Piano Player, Francois Truffaut. [A-] october 2nd 2006.
[The second half isn't as strong as the first, but I definitely enjoyed this movie. The first scene, I think, sums up the movie pretty effectively. A man runs away from a pursuer. Dark, noir-ish lighting and frenetic editing drive the scene and then, out of nowhere, the guy trips, is helped up by a man on the street and winds up going on a 5 minute walk with him during which they talk about his wife. As soon as they part ways, he goes back to running. This makes me really want to see more nouvelle vague genre pictures. The scene where Aznavour is debating whether or not to put his arm around a woman is so unbelievably on point and wonderfully rendered, that I can't believe it. Other than The 400 Blows, I haven't really enjoyed any other Truffaut films I've seen (the rest of the Doinel films and Jules and Jim) but this movie makes me want to watch all the rest and revisit the ones I didn't dig as well.]

Blood Simple, Coen Brothers. [B+] october 2nd 2006.
[This isn't a perfect movie, but that just makes it all the more inspiring to me. I liken it to Brick in that it feels like a really great student film. I saw this on the big screen this time, which was nice.]

Caché, Michael Haneke. [B+] october 3rd 2006.
[I didn't even catch the turn at the end until I read about it and reviewed it. Watched this on a pretty small screen and don't feel like I got nearly as much out of it as I should have, although I certainly enjoyed it. It was tense and well-acted. I like the cold, stark look of the film quite a bit. HD is really starting to seem like a wonderful format. Anyway, I want to watch this again on my computer or something and just keep my face a foot away from the screen.]

The 1002nd Ruse, Yevgeni Bauer. [D] october 3rd 2006.
Daydreams, Yevgeni Bauer. [B] october 3rd 2006.
After Death, Yevgeni Bauer. [B+] october 3rd 2006.
[The 1002nd Ruse is a real shoddy comedy, and I won't bother dealing with it. Daydreams is good, but feels like a precursor to After Death, which really stood out to me. I was surprised at how effectively creepy this movie was. Some of the close-ups are really startling and the dream sequences are really something else, although I feel like the film should have ended after the second one.]

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. [A-] october 3rd 2006.
[Really beautiful to look at and ingeniously put together, but the story bothered me a little bit. I felt like dude was too readily redeemed and it didn't really come off entirely. I liked the dance sequence, and specifically that the couple initially refused to do the folk dance, not wanting to put themselves on display or open themselves up to condescension before deciding they didn't care. I think it would be impossible for a film to maintain the level of delirious giddiness that Sunrise has at some moments, and it's really an accomplishment that it manages to keep it going for as long as it does, but that doesn't make it any less disappointing when it eventually calms, and the near drowning thing at the end really felt wholly unnecessary.]

Double Vision, Kuo-fu Chen. [D] october 4th 2006.
[Pretty mediocre thriller. I kinda just started waiting for it to end after a certain point, but I was watching it in a class, so I couldn't just leave.]

Vagabond, Sans toit ni loi, Agnès Varda. [A-] october 4th 2006.
[I wrote this for a class, so here it is:

Vagabond is a portrait more than anything else. A portrait of not one person's life, but of many people's lives and the difficulties they face. It is not a happy movie, but I guess there isn't much to be happy about for the majority of them, although it's not filled with despair, either.

What I really like about it is the way that Varda hybridizes documentary and fiction filmmaking techniques to capitalize on the strengths of her non-actor cast and to emphasize the realistic grittiness of the film's presentation of its world. The standard talking head-style documentary bits are heavily influential to the rest of the film because, in a sense, once we've looked into these peoples' eyes, we've established that the next image we're going to see is point of view, in a way. This isn't literal, but I feel that the camera in this film is subjective and that it is largely subjective in the view of the person immediately interacting with Mona.

The first image in the film is a point of view shot of her corpse. When she swims in the ocean, we see her from far away, from where the motorcyclists are positioned. There are reasons beyond Mona's own obtuse nature. She is objectified in the eyes of the viewer, but always through the eyes of the diegetic spectator. For the professor, who regards her as an amusement, Mona can take on quite funny characteristics. Likewise, when she is viewed as a mysterious drifter by the gas station attendant, she withdraws into her tent and disappears. When she begins to freeload off the hippie farmer, she becomes a pathetic display of ambivalence. We see her from above, smoking cigarettes on her bed and staring out of the doorway.

By seeing Mona in these subjective ways from this multiplicity of sources, we start painting as accurate a picture of her as we can, subscribing to James Agee's school of journalism: by showing you a little bit of every recallable detail, an accurate picture of the truth will soon begin to form.

The landscape of the countryside in and of itself is a sort of character in the film. At the very least, it becomes a commentary and a reflection of, not just Mona, but all the characters in the film, in some way. This place is barren and frozen over. It is empty and the outer shell is far too hardened for there to be any new things planted inside of it. The fact that farming goes on in this dreary place is truly astonishing. It's not as simple as to say that the landscape is simply Mona's to be reflected in, she certainly is, as an often cruel and always uncompromising person, but it reflects, and this is but one example, the mad dedication of the tree professor in being willing to travel through this barren land to preserve what she in all likelihood views as its beauty.

The landscape is endless, the horizon goes off towards infinity. These field will never abandon Mona, even as she abandons the rest of the world, and she takes comfort in that. It is the safety blanket she can afford herself in order to be able to maintain her tough as nails exterior all the way up to the end; it serves as a constant reminder of how she can, without anything else at her disposal, still be able to rely on herself whenever she needs to.]

The Conformist, Bernardo Bertolucci. [A] october 4th 2006.
[It was nice to not fall asleep during this movie.]

Heart of Glass, Werner Herzog. [A-] october 5th 2006.
[This movie looks like what a black metal album sounds like/is about. Mountains and forests and shit. That briefly popped into my head while I was watching it. Having only seen Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo and Grizzly Man, this movie opened up a whole new Werner Herzog to me, and I'm really interested in pursuing him further. A dude got pretty snarky on me when I compared a film, State of Dogs, to Gummo because it blended documentary and fiction film. He went all "What, like Werner Herzog?" on me. Now I see it.]

The Departed, Martin Scorsese. [B] october 6th 2006.
[So was this a black comedy or was it a straight thriller? Seems like folks are pretty divided about that. I can't decide which side I fall in. Lots of stuff made me laugh, and some of it definitely felt like it was meant to be a send-up of these kinds of thrillers. At times, especially that Rolling Stones shit at the beginning, it felt like Scorsese was even maybe parodying himself a little bit. It seems like he had fun putting this film together, and I really did enjoy myself almost all the way through, but the fact that I can't even pin down what kind of movie I think it was or was trying to be puts me on edge a little bit. I like that Scorsese got downright Godardian with his sound in this film a few times. That iris close and open was a total nouvelle vague nod, too, and I really like that a big-time mainstream filmmaker with THE NUMBER ONE MOVIE IN AMERICA can manage to squeeze that kinda stuff into his work. Despite its problems, and that unbelievably cheesy final shot, I had a good time with this movie.]

Crank, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor. [infinity forever] october 7th 2006.
[This movie is everything that is wrong with everything SO MUCH that it becomes hysterical. But it's like you're laughing through the tears or something. People are nuts, man. J.R. Jones said "This is one of those movies whose empty-headed premise is so pure it's witty," and that may be true to an extent. My trust in people is strong enough that I have to take it in good faith that a good portion of this was made with tongue firmly planted in cheek, because if this is a result of earnestness, then I dunno. Thing is, and this is bad, it's probably neither. It's probably cynicism at the root of this one.]

Chinatown, Roman Polanski. [A] october 10th 2006.
[I finally got to see this on the big screen. Unfortunately, it was the shittiest print I think I've ever seen of any movie ever. Beyond awful. But the movie's great and it was nice to see like that. I know people make a deal of the use of subjective camera in this film. I never really noticed it because I always wound up getting so absorbed in the film that I stopped thinking about it much at all. This time I really saw it, and its effectiveness is really amazing. I found myself laughing at points when Gittes tricks people, but laughing in a real self-satisfied way. That kind of snort of laughter that you get when you're messing with someone. I was absorbing Gittes' accomplishments as my own. When I realized this was happening, I kinda went nuts.]

In a Lonely Place, Nicholas Ray. [A] october 11th 2006.
[Humphrey Bogart, man. I'll watch anything with him in it. Only other Ray I've seen is Rebel Without a Cause. I remember reading that Godard quote that Ray is the cinema and not really getting the love based on that film. Which isn't to say I don't love that film, I do, just that I don't necessarily see why Godard did. This film definitely has more of the wryness that I see in Godard's films. Also more of the heaviness. And more of the sketchiness. I dunno. I really liked this movie.]

South of Ten, Liza Johnson. [B+] october 11th 2006.
[This is a really great short film. I guess Liza Johnson's just done a few shorts before this one; I wasn't able to find out much about it. It's a movie about Katrina in a sense, but it's more about the people affected by it. A girl crawls out of a tent in a tent city and starts riding her bike down the street amid all these houses variously affected by the hurricane and now the focus is on a guy standing in his gutted house walking over to his unaffected kitchen to take a pot of boiling water off the stove. He pours the water out and retrieves an object from it, walks out his house into this half destroyed neighborhood and picks a trombone up off the ground. It turns out he was cleaning the mouthpiece to it in the water. He picks the instrument up and starts playing it, walking out of the frame, and now we're on to another person. So that's the kinda style it goes for. Fly on the wall, silent observation of small moments in people's lives in the wake of the devastation. I like that it covers people from various social strata, so we get a good, broad picture of everybody's situation. A beautiful, empathetic film that I really wish I had the means of seeing again.]

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Robert Wiene. [C-] october 12th 2006.
[I don't really like this movie. It looks nice, but it's kinda boring. The scene where dude's getting ready to stab the girl in the bed and grabs her and does that freaky tongue thing creeps me out every time, though. The set design is alluring and there are some really startling moments in this movie, but overall it just doesn't move me. ]

Hold Me While I'm Naked, George Kuchar. [B+] october 12th 2006.
[Pretty funny short film from the 60s that kind of explores the role of the filmmaker in the exploitation of his actors, to an extent. But really it's also just kinda funny and charming.]

Kitschitoarele, 2FM, Cristian Nemescu. [B] october 14th 2006.
[A buddy's student film. Romanian documentary about gypsy fortune teller types.]

Eux et Moi, Stéphane Breton. [B+] october 15th 2006.
Le Ciel Dans un Jardin. [B+] october 15th 2006.
[French anthropologist's films about people in Papua New Guinea. These were at the Harvard Film Archive. Breton was there and it was neat.]

Not One Less, Zhang Yimou. [C-] october 16th 2006.
[Starts off promising and gets more and more schmaltzy as it progresses until it dissolves into this ridiculous thing that kinda stinks.]

Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Shinya Tsukamoto. [B] october 16th 2006.
[I saw this on the shittiest, most deteriorated VHS tape that ever was in my school's media library. People that have seen this: is this entire movie shot in that Wong Kar-Wai style speed-up effect thing where he shoots shit at like 16fps and then doubles frames occasionally? I straight up wasn't getting any, literally any, fluidly moving scenes in the entire film, and it was so distracting that I couldn't even really focus on it all that much. That said, what I did see was pretty great and I really dug it in spite of its presentation at the time.]

Haunted Spooks, Hal Roach. [D+] october 17th 2006.
[Harold Lloyd's a charming, funny dude, but hindsight's 20/20 and racism's just not that funny. There's some okay stuff at the beginning.]

The Sword of Doom, Kihachi Okamoto. [B+] october 18th 2006.
[Nothing happens in this movie. Like a lot of shit happens happens, but the dude starts evil and ends evil. That said, it was enjoyable to watch and the ending is pretty chilling. I guess it was meant to stay open for a sequel, but I thought the final freeze frame worked much in the same way as the final shot of The 400 Blows does, as a summation of the character's current "place" in life, and the chaos inside of him. I didn't think he'd survive it. I really like the ending of the essay in the criterion disc: "What, really, could surpass that freeze-frame of the swordsman caught in mid-rampage, bent on continuing to kill as if it were a way for him finally to extinguish himself?" I love that.]

War, Jake Mahaffy. [A-] october 19th 2006.
[Filmmaker was at this screening and was real cool. It's refreshing when someone can make something so comfortably inaccessible and still act like a human being. The crowd, par for the course with "art" screenings, was unbearable and the questions terrible. Dude shot this thing on a Bolex whose motor he disengaged, so he could hand-crank each shot, allowing him to have 10 minute takes rather than the 23 second takes the Bolex usually allows you with a fully wound motor. He shot it over 5 years in these farmlands in Pennsylvania and the whole thing is real eery. Basically these 4 characters wandering through the landscape and living their lives. expanded upon via voice-over, since the Bolex doesn't allow for synch sound. It feels post-apocalyptic, but may or may not literally be. It's chilling and beautiful and pretty fuckin great overall. It wiles me out to hear that this was originally envisioned as some sort of traditional epic Godfather style epic about this farm passing through generations of a family and over the years of conceptualization kept changing until it arrived at this. It took 5 years to make and I really look forward to seeing more of Mahaffy's stuff.

You can find out stuff about it here: http://www.handcrankedfilm.com/jake/jake_pages/warpage2.html]

Imelda, Ramona S. Diaz. [B] october 20th 2006.
[A real solid documentary that very effectively portrays an insane person in fairly humane ways. Obviously you can't get too down with her because she's Imelda Marcos and she's no good, but simultaneously you see that she's so far gone from any semblance of reality that it's like "what the fuck, how am I gonna blame an infant for knocking over an expensive piece of electronics?" Obviously in the case of the infant you blame yourself for placing it near those electronics. In the case of Imelda you can do no such thing because she was hot and charismatic and could formulate words, and was really only married to the guy that was doing a lot of the awful stuff, but still, what a loon. This was a screening, too. Editor was there. I gotta keep note of that information, too.]

Happy Together, Wong Kar-wai. [B+] october 23rd 2006.

Amadeus, Milos Forman. [B] october 28th 2006.
[I slept through more of this than I'd like, but what I saw was nice. It's a fun movie, but it's long and wasn't terribly interesting to me. Pleasant to watch.]

Princess Mononoke, Hayao Miyazaki. [B] october 30th 2006.
[I don't really like Miyazaki's style all that much. At least based on this and Spirited Away. Yeah, there's this sense of childlike wonder to them, but alongside that there's also that same level of incoherence that children's games have, where they just kind of make up rules as they go along. Watching his films, especially Spirited Away, feels like what I imagine watching a game of Calvinball would be like. Still, this came together for me way more than it did on initial viewing, enough that I think I can add this to the list of films I enjoyed.]

Rififi, Jules Dassin. [A] october 30th 2006.
[This is just a great film. I'm starting to get real tired. I missed a lot of these blurbs this month.]

Foolish Wives, Erich von Stroheim. [A-] october 31st 2006.
[Not an interesting story, really, but it goes so many places, aesthetically. I see so many already existing and yet to be made classic films in it that watching it is almost like finding the missing link in a lot of ways. In this sense more than any other, this film blew me away.]

Happy Together, but really the post is mostly about me and this thing.

2006-10-23T13:58:00.001-04:00

As the format suggests, this is one of those things that started as a tiny blurb in the film log and expanded in size to the point that I felt like posting it on its own. I haven't set out to do a post post in a while now, but maybe soon. If I ever get around to watching the next film in my 8 year long Kubrick fest. Anyway, this one goes a little out there and I'm almost reluctant to post it at all, but it wouldn't really be in the spirit of things if I didn't and really who am I protecting myself from?

I'm gonna stick with this monthly film log thing for the remainder of October, but I've been thinking and realizing that not every post I make needs to be a big huge meaty substantial 500 word essay or whatever (You know I actually went to a post, copy/pasted it into Word and did a word count just to make sure that my estimate was accurate? I just stopped mid-sentence!), just that I ought to say some interesting things in them and keep this thing going. I like the idea of running a blog like this and I think having regular updates of substance means that I don't need to turn this into a writing assignment kind of thing. This should never be homework.

So anyway, starting in November I'm gonna be doing a regular posting of fragments of the log, something like every three films or days or whatever other arbitrary criteria I come up with to justify my posting. This is also meant to serve as a motivator, because since the semester started I've seen a lot more films (30 so far this month! [6 shorts.]) and it's getting hard to keep track. With the monthly thing I let myself get complacent and say something like "I'll write about it later."

So anyway, that's what's up. Here's my thing on Happy Together.

Happy Together, Wong Kar-wai. [B+] october 23rd 2006.
[God damn it dude, I love Wong Kar-wai. I don't own a single film of his on DVD, but he might be my favorite living filmmaker. It's weird. You know what else is weird? I don't necessarily love his films. I love his aesthetic, his sensibility, and I love the feeling I get watching his films, but I don't know if I'd classify any of them as favorites. It's this sort of bizarre hybridization of ambivalence and absolute infatuation. That's also not entirely accurate, because some of his films I absolutely love. It's tough to articulate. I love them and don't love them. They're always under my skin. Fallen Angels is my favorite, but there isn't a single one I haven't enjoyed.

Maybe the fact that my reaction to his films is ineffable is part of why I love them so much. I can't imagine how he goes about making his films, but I guess he doesn't really know either, considering how long his shoots go, sometimes. I'd love to be on set, helping out and watching this man work. Maybe that's an idea for an internship. I somehow doubt that would ever happen, though. Anyway, this is a real lovely movie, though I can't really tell you much about it. I want to watch it again, I can tell you that. And I guess I can probably tell you a decent amount about it, but I don't really want to.

Sometimes I'm lazy, I guess. I just don't really feel like talking about Wong Kar-wai's films in general, except to gush over them. I'm all about the intellectualization of cinema and all that, but I have a hard time reconciling that with the fact that I feel that films are largely experiential and should primarily be dealt with in this way. But I guess that's reflected in the way I often write about them: "Dudes, this fuckin thing was really great!" You know those guys that document their acid trips and post 'em on the web in this sort of stream of consciousness way? I feel like that's a really good way to talk about movies. Your emotions guide you through the experience. Alejandro Jodorowsky once said that he demands of cinema what others demand of psychedelics, and while that's especially true of his cinematic vision, I think the sentiment is applicable to films as a whole. At least when you want it to be. Otherwise, it's not. When I spoke about Chantal Akerman's film, "Jeanne Dielman," earlier this year, I had a more coldly intellectual tone, at least I think I did, but I was still just more or less stream-of-thoughting it and trying to work out my thoughts on the film immediately as they came to me. I mean, I went back and edited for readability, as I tend to do through these, but I don't really self-censor. *

This has been my tendency for a while. I write papers for school like this, minus the "dudes" and the curses, but with the same tone and overall flightiness. (Well, that's not entirely true, but whatever. I haven't even always been writing this blog like this. Not entirely, anyway.) I guess I'm evaluating my own writing style now and (maybe) coming up with the foundations of some sort of a personal critical style, although this isn't really foundational stuff so much as refinements of existing archetypes. Beyond which, I'd like to think that my general overall style is still at least a little bit respectable. Sorry if this post comes off as masturbatory or whatever, writing about my writing, but it's interesting to me and it's all coming out pretty quickly, no pun intended. I feel like this is important stuff I'm sorting out right now, although I'm not certain what it is I'm realizing. Regardless, I feel something going on in my head, like a lock turning in a key. You do psychedelics just once in your life and you wind up talking like this for the rest of your life. Jesus. Also, the coffee. Eh, but now I'm back in my usual defensive apology/clarification of context thing that I do, and now I'm in my self-aware commentary on said apology and now I'm in my awareness of that and it becomes this bizarre self-reflexive defense mechanism that kind of nullifies itself. I'm turning this blog into completely unreadable drivel.

That's alright, though. I feel as if this one is different and as if I've gotten somewhere with this little blurb and as if I've laid myself out a little more bare than I have a tendency to and I think this has been useful. I hope it's been interesting, too. Cheers.]

* That said, and I think this post is guilty of it (I'm writing this sentence after I finished the post and maybe it's symptomatic of that self-reflexive nervousness I speak about further down) I might be getting a little too cute or blasé. I was writing instantaneously, but I had a bunch of thoughts formulated and a general outline in my head before I sat down to write. Anyway, back to it.

September in Review

2006-10-01T15:58:00.000-04:00

Good month. And the cinemas around here have some pretty stellar schedules, not to mention the schools. This is going to be a really amazing semester. Either way, this is indicative of a return to form.

Downfall, Oliver Hirschbiegel. [C+] september 1st 2006.
[This movie is not the objective portrayal of Hitler's last moments it seems to want its audience to believe it is, nor is it in any way a strong enough indictment of his actions for it to be of any service. Obviously, just about everyone's on-board with the fact that Hitler was bad and the Holocaust was bad and Nazis are bad, to the extent that a movie functioning simply as an indictment of Nazism is about as useful or interesting as a movie about how sad it is that someone you love died. If it doesn't have anything to say about that sadness and what it reveals to the person experiencing it, then it's not very necessary.

I'm not saying that I wanted this movie to be an anti-Nazi film or anything like that, although I certainly expect some elements of disgust in anything dealing with the topic, but it's tough to figure whether or not the movie tries too hard to humanize Hitler, to the point that it shifts the balance of depiction a little too far over. Dude still comes out bad in the end, but not bad enough. In other words, the moments when he's nice - being sweet to his secretary, feeding his dog, etc. - portray him in a more positive light than the moments when he's being bad portray him in a negative light. The fact that the film doesn't deal with the topic of the Holocaust at all basically is also a bit alarming. Bruno Ganz is real good as Hitler, but I'm not sure Hirschbiegel had everything entirely figured out when he set out to make this movie.

I wanted to praise the movie for its lack of score starting off, but at the half-hour mark I first noticed some schmaltzy strings come in and they stayed for too long of a time. At the end of the movie, when going through all the profiles of what happened to everybody after the events depicted, those schmaltzy strings were still going. My dad got kind of pissed and wondered aloud why this sad music was playing over their stories. Me being a dude that likes to answer the same question six different ways started hypothesizing that maybe it was sadness about the war, about violence and hatred in people, or just sadness about sadness, that the feeling is so firmly integrated into these events on an ineffable level that its pervasiveness should not come as a surprise to anybody. Any of these are possible explanations, but none of them are satisfying. If there was silence over the credits I would qualify that as overly somber and self-satisfied; bouncy music would be wholly inapproriate. In other words, this topic is so heavily loaded and this film's approach so ambiguous at times, that the only justification I have for saying I didn't entirely like it is based within the realm of punctum; I can not readily identify what it is that puts me off about this film, but I can feel it.

This review articulates a good number of my feelings on this film in a much better way than I seem to be capable of:
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/cinema/?050214crci_cinema]

The Hustler, Robert Rossen. [A] september 3rd 2006.
[I've never seen a movie more infused with seediness than this one. Almost every shot smells like smoke. The Hustler's one of the most strikingly beautiful black and white films I've ever seen. The atmosphere is so strong that it could probably drive the film all on its own, and in a sense it does. The first hour or so of the film proceeds almost conflict-free; it is as much of a "character study" as I imagine a film can be, but there's a sense of purpose and drive lingering underneath the surface.

It's clear that Newman's character wants something, but that desire only manifests itself a couple of times, allowing for a conflict and a plot to develop, while not allowing it to envelop the movie within itself. By only letting the story come out in slight bursts, it allows the movie to consume it in the same way that Eddie is consumed by his desire to win, to be somebody. It also allows the movie to consume the audience within its environment and ambience, so that we become a part of its world and really start to feel the darkness digging away at Eddie, which of course makes us all the more invested in his character when things really start happening.

It's a masterfully executed maneuver that really takes this film to a much higher level. Of course, the fact that the rest of the story progresses in a satisfying and appropriately painful way, and that the performances that drive it are all so picture-perfect and convincing, only serves to elevate The Hustler even more.]

Brick, Rian Johnson. [oh u know] september 3rd 2006.
[Showed this to my folks because they wanted to see it. I didn't expect them to dig it the way I do, and I wasn't surprised when they didn't. A lot of the appeal has to do with having some familiarity with what high school is like in the US, or at least in a country that isn't ruled by a communist dictatorship, something that they don't have the benefit of. My mother thought the events in the film were inconceivable, I thought they were completely plausible. There are many fantastical elements to the film, but none of them are really the plot. Anyway, still dig it, but I think I'm gonna chill on it for a while now. I wanted to show it to the folks, but I don't want to let this well dry up, so it'll probably be a while until I revisit this film again.]

The Passion of Joan of Arc, Carl Theodore Dreyer. [C+] september 4th 2006.
[see the post]

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Chan-wook Park. [B] september 10th 2006.
[I didn't dig on Oldboy much, but I liked Park's short in Three Extremes, so I went into this with a relatively open mind and wound up being pleasantly surprised. For all of the ultraviolence that fills his films, Park has an excellent eye for beauty, occasionally managing to make even the gruesomeness pretty.]

State of Dogs, Peter Brosens and Dorjkhandyn Turmunkh. [A] september 13th 2006.
[This is a Mongolian/Belgian co-production that, kind of like Gummo, blends documentary, narrative and pseudo-documentary elements together to create this sort of weird, amorphous narrative that is as much based in atmosphere as it is in story. Gorgeous and fascinating. I haven't been this blown away by a movie in a while. It basically starts as a riff on all the stray dogs the Russians left behind in Mongolia, starts following a dog hunter hired by the government to keep the dog population in check, and then starts following the spirit of a dead dog, first retroactively through his life with a family in the steppes and eventual abandonment, to his wanderings through Ulan Bator - the city he's eventually killed in - both as a living dog and eventually as a dead dog, offering a strange and beautiful portrait of Mongolian life. Then he gets reincarnated as a human, or is about to anyway.

Wowow, great movie. Unfortunately it's not available on DVD or VHS or anything. My professor showed it to us on a shitty VHS copy that a friend of hers dubbed when she screened it at a festival like 8 years ago. It's not on Karagarga, either. It's really unfortunate, as I'd love a copy and I think it really deserves to be seen more.]

The Celebration, Thomas Vinterberg. [B+] september 13th 2006.
[A low-budget inspiration, and not at all what you'd expect the first Dogme film to be after reading the Dogme95 manifesto. Which I guess is partly the point. This is a real entertaining story that I think benefits from the impositions that Dogme places upon it. The film wouldn't be as affecting if it wasn't shot verite style. I don't really have much more to say about it. It's just a solid, fun movie.]

Kicking and Screaming, Noah Baumbach. [B-] september 14th 2006.
[See, this is a movie that I heard was infinitely quotable and real fun and charming, but I just found annoying. None of the characters endeared themselves to me and I wound up just getting frustrated by the fact that they thought they were so clever. I really loved The Squid and the Whale, oddly enough, but I couldn't take this. It had its moments, but eh.]

Various short silents. september 19th 2006.
[Dolly's Adventure, Musketeers of Pig Alley, The Lonedale Operator and A Corner in Wheat by D.W. Griffith. Various undifferentiated or titled Méliès. The Big Swallow by James Williamson.]

Forever Fever, Glen Goei. [B] september 20th 2006.
[Forever Fever is a film that, on its surface, appears to be, and really is for all intents and purposes, a light comedy about a guy in Singapore that discovers disco. It's also a pretty profound film about a country in transition and how its denizens are dealing with this period of transition. The film is set in a time when Singapore was starting to become more westernized and was just on the cusp of achieving "little dragon" status, of becoming one of the most powerful economic presences in Asia. Knowing this and thinking about it lends a story of a Bruce Lee fanatic who starts to discover disco music and John Travolta a greater level of profundity, especially when you see how the film explores, often comically, the way that each of the characters deals with personal and cultural identity.

The main character, Hock, doesn't westernize his name, and even retains some Bruce Lee style kung fu moves in his dance routines, he becomes a sort of hybridized person. His sister, meanwhile, goes by Francesca, reads trashy romance novels and fashions herself after a 19th century duchess. What's interesting is that, despite the fact that she adopts dated customs and ideas about womanhood, she could not have done this without the recent influx of western influence. Her antiquated behavior and mentality is entirely new. Hock's brother, Leslie, changes genders, despite being the most traditional of the three siblings. He encompasses the old influences and the new influences into his life and the confusion in between. He must completely restructure himself in order to be able to remain comfortable in this new world and culture.]

Hapax Legomena I: Nostalgia, Hollis Frampton. [B+] september 20th 2006.
Hapax Legomena III: Critical Mass, Hollis Frampton. [C] september 20th 2006.
A and B in Ontario, Hollis Frampton and Joyce Wieland. [B] september 20th 2006.
Wedlock House: An Intercourse, Stan Brakhage. [C] september 20th 2006.
[This was a series of four short experimental films that I saw at MassArt, so I'll just talk about them all in this blurb. Nostalgia was the most interesting of the bunch. It fucked with the concept of memory in really cool ways and was probably the most thought-provoking of the bunch. Critical Mass had its funny moments, but it was basically just two people arguing and the stroboscopic editing style got grating after a while. A and B in Ontario was probably the most fun of the four, just a couple people running around town with their bolexes shooting each other like they were in a spy movie or something. The Brakhage, disappointingly, didn't do much for me and I usually like his stuff a lot. I'm writing this blurb well after the fact, mostly out of a sense of guilt that the only experimental cinema being represented in this log was completely neglected, but I don't really have much to say about these at this point.]

Weekend, Jean Luc Godard. [A-] september 25th 2006.
[First time seeing this. I don't really know what to make of it, but I know it kicked my ass. I've never seen a film more teeming with rage, bile and fury. Maybe The Texas Chainsaw Massacre at its peaks. That's the last movie that I remember seeing and thinking to myself, "That was fucking FURIOUS." So much happens in this movie and I'm not really prepared to talk about or intellectualize any of it. As an experience, it was a thing unto itself. That long uniterrupted shot of the traffic jam's been hyped up so much that I didn't really know what to expect. Dude takes spectacle filmmaking, parodies it, creates a piece of spectacle cinema himself, and uses this spectacle to undermine it and itself. The film constantly feels like it's bursting at its seams, even when it doesn't hit, Godard's throwing so much stuff at the target at once that, at least some things are bound to. Jeez man, jeez. I really want to see more of his films. Everything I've seen I've loved.]

In the Park, Charlie Chaplin. [C+] september 26th 2006.
[Funny enough, I suppose. Has its occasional moments, but damn is it out there. The amoral world this film seems to take place in is terrifying. Three people get concussions via bricks being thrown at them, babies get cigarettes thrown on them, Chaplin kicks a guy into a river to drown him. What the fuck, dude.]

The Golden Chance, Cecil B. DeMille. [B-] september 26th 2006.
[Didn't blow me away as a film, but it's really beautiful looking at times. I don't have much to say about this one. I'm just glad to be watching a lot of silent film these days, on account of a class of mine. I'd always kind of put off watching silent films, and it's nice to know that every week I'm going to see at least a little.]

Cyclo, Tran Anh Hung. [A-] september 27th 2006.
[This is a pretty hard movie to watch. Very few good things happen, but I've rarely seen a film portray chaos so compellingly. And I don't mean explosions and violence chaos, though there's a bit of that, I just mean complete abandon. It's a pretty terrifying way to view humanity, and I'm
always chilled when seeing people being reduced to relying on just their pure animal instincts to survive.]

Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Tobe Hooper. [A] september 27th 2006.
[Speaking of furious movies, god damn. Second time seeing it, and this is like rage being captured on celluloid. Unrelenting, terrifying, brutal. Best horror movie I've ever seen.]

The Thin Red Line, Terrence Malick. [B] september 28th 2006.
[Didn't do as much for me the second time around. The voiceovers that I once found so affecting seem almost cartoonish to me now in their relentlessness. As soon as one character stops talking, another begins. Also, the film feels less fragmented and starts revealing a narrative to me that isn't terribly interesting or well-executed and what I once thought was abstraction for the sake of poeticism becomes, at times, abstraction for the sake of salvaging a film that isn't doing so hot otherwise. I don't know, I'm writing this a few days after the fact, and I feel as if I'm being terribly harsh. I still enjoyed it a great deal, and I wonder how much I enjoyed it less because I was watching it with (presenting it to) other people, rather than just allowing myself to enjoy it by myself. This movie's still pretty dear to me and I imagine the third viewing will be more enjoyable for me. It seems sometimes like the first time I watch a movie and pan for all the good things, then the second time I go for the bad things. If the movie still holds up after that level of scrutinization, it stays with me.]

7th Heaven, Frank Borzage. [B] september 30th 2006.
[I'll bet if this movie was made today I'd dismiss a lot of it as schmaltzy. But because it wasn't, I really enjoyed it. I've always been a sucker for this kind of sentimental romance anyway, they've just gotta be well-executed, and this one was. It's kinda fun seeing older movies, like 1927 old, and seeing elements of them in other, more modern movies that you enjoy. My friend likened it to listening to an older record and recognizing a thing that got sampled in another song you've liked for years. It's a satisfying feeling. Some impressive set design and camera movements. At least I thought so, but a professor of mine that was at the screening and is a bit of a silent film aficionado told me that is not the case. I have a very limited set of references for silent films, so on the oen hand I'm just enjoying them and letting myself be impressed by what seems impressive, but on the other hand I have no way of contextualizing what I'm seeing in the general standards of the time, so I'm having a hard time figuring out what is and isn't impressive. That said, I know what I enjoy and that is a pretty static value. This is a really sweet little movie.]

The Passion of the Joan

2006-09-04T05:13:00.001-04:00

note: This post started as a blurb in my monthly film log, but quickly outgrew its spot in there. I'm not gonna edit it or anything like that, but I'd like to put it up here instead, because I'm curious if anyone has any stuff to say in response to this. If someone could convince me otherwise or whatever. Part of my intent when I started this blog was to put out my impressions in a fairly unedited way and then sit back and read comments and see discussions happen and learn stuff from them.

It was never my intent to make this a showcase of my film writing or critical work or whatever it is that I do on here, rather it was meant to be an extension of my studies, another tool for me as a film student to learn. And it's true that attempting to regularly articulate myself about the things I see is helping me engage more with film and learn more about it as a result, but I'm hoping that other people out there have some stuff they can teach me, too. If anyone's reading this and has seen this movie, it'd be pretty cool to hear from you. I suspect I'm largely typing to myself, but it'd be nice to be proven wrong.

______________________________________

You know, the big problem with me and this movie is that I wasn't moved by Maria Falconetti's performance. For some reason, I got really annoyed by her expressions, mostly that really wide-eyed one she uses throughout the film. This was a very gut level reaction that I had no control over and it more or less rendered me completely incapable of emotionally investing myself in the film's proceedings. That's a problem.

For a silent film, this movie's very talky. It's almost entirely constructed of conversations. This is one of the aspects of the film that seems useful to me. There is absolutely no way to keep track of what everyone is saying, so you can't really be expected to follow the conversation. This underlines a couple things, the inanity of the questions being presented to Joan, and her utter helplessness in the face of this tribunal. Her inability to say anything that can help her in a very literal sense is underlined in a figurative sense by the limitations of the technology at hand. It also means that a good part of the film must be told through people's expressions, which necessitates the technique of shooting the film mostly in close-up.

My problem with this is that it makes the proceedings difficult to follow. People pop in and out at random, and it seems as if the same territory is being covered in the interrogation over and over again. Perhaps this is meant to reflect the incessancy of the questions being thrown about in a structural way, the inability to keep track of what's happening reflects Joan's own confusion, but I don't think it's effective. Confusing the audience to reflect the protagonist's confusion works to an extent, but when the film itself becomes more or less unfollowable, as this did for me at times, I find myself becoming less and less empathetic and more and more aware of the artificiality of the proceedings at hand. Once more, maybe an intentional thing, but certainly not something that worked for me.

This isn't a question of visual literacy, either. I don't mean to say that I can't follow the conversations or the proceedings; simply that I can't follow the people, the cuts feel awkward to me to the point that the film feels very slapdash in a way. (I keep second-guessing myself and overexplaining because I'm aware that I'm reacting this way to a very heavily canonized and highly beloved film and I'm wondering if there's something wrong with me for not seeing what apparently so many others do, but I'm gonna stop doing that.)

Another qualm of mine is with the villification of the interrogators. I realize that Dreyer was working from actual transcripts and if that's the case then the questions can obviously be read as intended to ensnare Joan into condemning herself, but they can also be read as profoundly stupid questions being posed by profoundly stupid people. I always felt like the most effective aspect of martyrdom was that the martyr was condemned not by villainous assholes, but by people too dumb to know the wrongs they were committing. People condemned by assholes are simply victims. Martyrs are martyrs because people don't realize how stupid they're being and, because of the martyr, can later realize the ugly mistake they made and learn from it. By villainizing the judges to the point of near cartoonishness, Dreyer makes a statement not of redemption, but of condemnation and teaches us nothing. This film feels about as misguided as Mel Gibson's Passion was, just much less objectionably so.

August in Review

2006-09-02T02:23:00.000-04:00

This was a good month. Definitely a step in the right direction. I saw a couple more movies than this, but I didn't feel they were right to put up, since I slept for like a half hour during each. I'm going to rewatch them soon and give them my proper attention. Also, it picked up and started slowing again. This can be attributed to having a lot of work to do, being on a completely bizarre sleep pattern that turned me more or less into a walking zombie for all of my waking hours, Buffy/Angel progress and Turner Classic Movies, IFC and Sundance kind of having uncompelling schedules for a few days. It looks they're starting to pick up again, so that's a plus. Anyway, here's my usual array of blurbs peppered with swears, self-aware laziness and occasional moments of insight.

Grandma's Boy, who gives a fuck. [Z] august 3rd 2006.
[A friend really wanted me to watch this movie because he thinks it's funny. I work real hard to be polite sometimes, and I still don't always succeed.]

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. [B-] august 5th 2006.
[I dug this, although I didn't like it as much as Anchorman. Something about the whole NASCAR angle had me too self-consciously looking at it for political commentary. Was the product placement in the movie over the top because it was a satire of NASCAR's use of it in that way, or was it just meant to look like satire while actually functioning as mindless profiteering? Did I want the red staters to be treated humanely because I thought they were cheap targets, itself a patronizing idea, or because I thought they deserved fair treatment? I found myself watching the film so self-consciously that I had a hard time really relaxing and enjoying myself. That said, my big problem with it is that it's too much of a movie. I'm a comedy nerd and I kinda dug the fact that Anchorman had a flimsy plot that existed solely to string jokes together. That's what I wanted from it. Talladega Nights might be a better film, because of this, but I didn't go in expecting to engage it like one. I think I want to see it again.]

The Descent, Neil Marshall. [?] august 6th 2006.
[Went with drunk as fuck friends who shouted every 5 minutes and I spent the entire time nervously paying attention to them/occasionally trying to quiet them down because everyone within our general vicinity seemed to want to fight us. It seemed cool, the monsters were neat, good build-up. Too many cheap "BOO" scares, which put a bad taste in my mouth. I honestly couldn't tell you what I thought of it, on account of the circumstances, though. It seems like maybe it's got more going on than meets the eye, but I'd have to give it a proper look-see before I can comment.]

Brick, Rian Johnson. [A-] august 7th 2006.
[Showed some friends Brick today because they wanted to see it. They dug it. I still love it, although certain parts grate on me more than they did before. Thing is, each time I watch it something new annoys me and something that annoyed me before I don't mind. I dig it overall far too much. Also: I keep "figuring out" the story or whatever more, which is nice.]

American Psycho, Mary Harron. [B+] august 9th 2006.
[I haven't seen this movie since it first came out. When I was 15, watching it felt like a clandestine action, me and my friend in his basement breaking the rules or whatever; I was a relatively sheltered kid. Anyway, I never really saw it, because I guess I was too taken with the act of watching it. I'm surprised by how much I remembered of it, but more so with how little. Something about this movie reminds me of David Cronenberg. I guess its coldness, but its coldness also feels less studied than his, so that the film really feels more like a very warm, tongue-in-cheek Cronenberg. The actual criticisms that the film levels against consumerism and materialism are pretty standard-fare. The film itself is so fun to watch and charming, though, that you really don't care. And I'm aware that calling a movie like this charming is kinda messed up. It's really creepy and messed up, but in an endearing way. I'm not wild about the ending.]

Talladega Nights: etc, Adam McKay. [B] august 11th 2006.
[A couple friends of mine wanted to go see this and I had nothing else to do. I let myself be a little less self-conscious this time around and I dug it a good amount more. Laughed more, anyway. I still don't like it as much as Anchorman. This log is too much social moviegoing. In a few days I'm going home and the real film watching starts. Also, I've been chugging along in Angel/Buffy. I'm kind of addicted. That's been occupying me. I'm very far along in both right now. Probably be finished by mid-September. It's been quite an undertaking. It really is some pretty satisfying television. The Buffyverse stuff accounts for a lot of the slowness of my movie watching this summer, too. I've been watching a couple episodes a night, basically. The equivalent of a film. I just did the calculations. I've watched about 120 hours of these shows. It's absurd. Anyway, I guess this is the blurb where I talk about that.]

You, Me and Dupree, Anthony and Joe Russo. [B] august 13th 2006.
[I really did not want to see this movie. Not at all. Friends insisted. Man, I'm too lazy to write right now. I'm having some wine, I'm hanging out, I wanna relax. Here's the deal. The movie's a lot funnier than I ever expected. Occasionally I wonder what its agenda is with relation to marriage, there's some of that old, cliched "you lose your manhood when you marry" shit and there's a couple moments in the film that deal with masculinity in somewhat silly ways, but I wasn't bothered by that stuff so much. Rather, I was bothered by a couple moments in the movie where the characters did things that were completely inconsistent with their natures, especially near the end. I guess you could say the flip that Dupree takes around the midpoint of the movie is a bit of a stretch, but I wound up not minding that so much. There's other stuff, more near the end, that's a bit more objectionable. The disappointing thing about that is that there's all this funny stuff sandwiched in between and all that funny stuff could have remained there even if the inconsistent stuff was changed. It probably would have been funnier, actually. Bad ending, due to probably the most disappointing character inconsistency in the film. Still, I think I liked this more than Talladega Nights. I'm real shocked by that, by the way. The Russo brothers were responsible for some of the better episodes of Arrested Development, though, so I guess I shouldn't be that shocked. The writing isn't as sharp, but whatever. Oh, there's a pretty poopy Asian stereotype in the movie that totally didn't need to be there. That was disappointing, too.]

Mullholland Drive, David Lynch. [A] august 13th 2006.
[It's been some time since I've seen this movie. It took me a while to get into it this time around, I wasn't really in the mood for it, but I quickly found myself sucked into it as much as I've ever been by it. David Lynch has made some of the most captivating films I've ever seen. Films that, aside from narrative or anything else, are so hypnotic that they qualify as an experience as much as they do a work of narrative art. Their stories can be viewed as secondary to the feelings they evoke in the viewer. I'm trying to think of a good way to explain the way I feel I view his films, but I keep coming up with inadequate analogies. At first I thought about comparing the way I watch a Lynch film to the way I taste food or wine or whatever else, but my explanation wound up making me come off as indiscriminate, as if I don't think about what I'm tasting or what I'm watching, or that I don't try to piece together the narrative of the movie because I'm not concerned with it as much as I am with the "experience" of the movie, absorbing it like a sponge or something. Lynch's stories are very straight-forward and identifiable, they're comprehensible on a very base level, to the point that even if you don't get every single little bit of the story, like for me what the significance of the blue box in this film is, you still get what happened. You are made to feel the story more than it's told or shown to you. There's "show don't tell," the age old mantra for writers; Lynch appears to be on, not a different level, but a parallel plane that I can only think to refer to as "imbue through show." A lot of people cite The Big Sleep as a movie that contains an almost nonsensical plot that ultimately proves to be completely inconsequential to the viewer's ability to enjoy the film. I wouldn't place Lynch's films in the same place, because his plots aren't nonsensical so much as abstracted to the point of occasional incomprehensibility, to the point that they become textures. I got a friend hooked on Lynch with this movie, which I'm pleased about.]

Brick, Rian Johnson. [A-] august 14th 2006.
[And then I got same friend into this one too. I've talked about it enough. I like it a lot. It gets me excited to make movies.]

Funny Face, Stanley Donen. [C-] august 19th 2006.
[Audrey Hepburn, Fred Astaire, an exciting combination, if a little creepy given the age difference. Funny Face starts off promisingly. The opening credits sequence is pretty great, and I like the opening number as well. "Think Pink" led me on a train of thought where I was going to observe how every old classic musical I've seen appears to have some semblance of subversive messages in them - Singin in the Rain functioning as a critique of cinema's transition to talkies, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying as a critique of corporate practices and the domestication of men and women in the corporate world to essentially make them slaves, etc. I thought this movie would maybe have some stuff to say about the superficiality of the fashion industry, but the first song, with that line "if a woman's gotta think, think pink!" being a good example of the kind of stuff that was setting me off, but it quickly devolved into a celebration of anti-intellectualism and superficiality. Some of the songs were good, but for a Gershwin-penned musical they were surprisingly flat. The dance numbers were pretty neat at times, but I think there were only a couple musical scenes in the film that I didn't feel went on too long. The look of the movie was cool for a while, but the attempt to stylize each scene, drowning the free-jazz freakout in the cafe in red light, stylishly lighting the streets of Paris in green and yellow, gauzing up the image of the "wedding" scene to a ridiculous degree; some of these things looked cool, some of them rendered the frame at times borderline unreadable, but all of them put together resulted in the film feeling very unfocused and fragmented, due to the overwhelming disparity in styles on display. Audrey Hepburn's unbearable cuteness practically carried this film.]

Blue Velvet, David Lynch. [A] august 20th 2006.

The Dirty Dozen, Robert Aldrich. [C] august 20th 2006.
[Not really a fan of this movie. Totally didn't need to be as long as it was. It really dragged at parts. The raid at the end is awesome, though. So's the war game. Jefferson's Zidane attack in the bathroom is probably the most badass thing in the movie, other than Lee Marvin. And actually Charles Bronson too. Pretty poor ending. There was a certain point of no return where they probably should have all just died. The fact that they were so flippant at the end given all the people they lost disappointed me too. I'm not sure if I'm just doing the "looking for stuff to be offended by" thing right now, since I like being offended by shit or something, but Maggott's turn at the end, while somewhat projected and all that, really seemed pretty unnecessary to me. Where's the offensive part, you say? Well, I wasn't sure if it was symptomatic of a kind of mean-spirited villification of religious people or not. We as a culture seem to be doing that a lot lately, and it's interesting to see how far back that attitude stretches. And by we as a culture, I mean "we the educated liberal non-religious types" haw haw. But seriously folks. Oh. And no German is subtitled at all in the entire movie except for some small talk between two guards talking about how one is going on leave tomorrow. Why is it subtitled? BECAUSE HE'S GONNA GET STABBED IN TWO SECONDS! I'm all for being mean to Nazis, if I had one here maybe I'd kick him or something, but really? Is that how you're gonna play it? Beyond that stuff, movie was just kinda boring a lot of the time and something felt off about the whole thing. Shame Turner Classic Movies scheduled Point Blank so late at night. They show a lot of really badass stuff way too late at night.]

Point Blank, John Boorman. [B+] august 21st 2006.
[I stayed up. Second time seeing this. It's a fun movie. At times I found myself thinking that this is what it would feel like if Antonioni had ever made a revenge movie. Obviously this isn't quite as thematically loaded and ponderous as a lot of his movies, but the look and feel of it doesn't seem that off from Blow-Up or Zabriskie Point. It flips me out that this was a studio release, but I guess it was right on the heels of Bonnie and Clyde so that whole crazy thing was happening in Hollywood at the time. Anyway, great stuff and totally Lee Marvin just being a badass. I really wanna see The Limey again, now, so I guess that's going to the top of my Netflix queue.]

When the Levees Broke - Acts 1 and 2, Spike Lee. [A-] august 21st 2006.
[Looking forward to the second half. Some stuff was dragged out a bit too much, moments where he was cutting quickly between 30 people all more or less saying the same thing, although I think a lot of the reason for that is to demonstrate just how unanimous everyone was on a certain issue or how absurd some things, like the relocation of people out of the city without telling them their destinations, were. I don't really have much to say about this. I think it's probably going to function very well as a document of what happened to New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina for future generations. It's as effective as any text book I could imagine. I wish there was a little more diversity in the interview subjects. There's a lot of people in this film, but there are a lot of recurring faces and I keep wanting to hear other people's stories, rather than just this core group of twenty or thirty people that Lee interviewed. I like the way he's structuring this, though. The first act was just an objective look at the physical things that happened. People recounting their experiences with the storm. The second half was more politically charged, trying to explore what happened that resulted in the failure to send help to New Orleans sooner. I'm really looking forward to the second half. I hope Lee takes a more pronounced presence in at least one of the acts, because I'd really like to hear his take on this, too.]

The Baxter, Michael Showalter. [C+] august 22nd 2006.
[This movie's a lot worse than the people associated with it. It's good natured and occasionally funny, but it really should have been a lot less innocuous considering that some of the funniest comic actors working today comprised a good portion of the cast and creative team behind the film. I dug the concept, but I felt like it coulda said more other than just being a movie for losers to commiserate over. Also, the completely arbitrary and by now outdated jumping through time structure didn't help it not seem like an amateurish movie.]

When the Levees Broke - Acts 3 and 4, Spike Lee. [A] august 22nd 2006.
[Flawless. Third act was absolutely gut-wrenching. I think the explanation of the concept behind jazz funerals really brought the whole film together in a very interesting way. I spent three months in New Orleans and I still had a rather terrible idea of how brutal the effects of Katrina actually were. I saw the devastation in the ninth ward, but hearing people's actual testimonies really takes it to another level. I really think this is an important film that everyone should go out of their way to see. My admiration for Spike Lee grows and grows.]

Hard Eight, PT Anderson. [B-] august 25th 2006.
[This movie hasn't held up to repeat viewings for me. It's got great things in it, but I was struck by how self-conscious and unconfident it felt, especially given the strenght of the rest of PT Anderson's work. He's one of those guys that has managed to get better with each subsequent film. A real feat. An interesting depiction of a bizarre subculture of transient gamblers that for all I know actually exists and gives the film a real interesting push. The opening is kind of odd, it comes, it happens abruptly and then is thrown away in favor of a completely different story altogether, but the movie benefits from this. Even some of the acting seemed really stale to me at times on this viewing, which is really wild given the cast. Anyway, a good debut, but kind of stiff, like a film student getting a big break and wanting to do well but letting himself get real nervous about it, which is essentially what it is. It's a film I can identify with.]

The Aluminum Fowl, James Clauer. [B] august 28th 2006.
[A short film with a lot of great moments, but lacking a sense of completion or fullness. It's kind of like a hybrid between George Washington and Gummo, and was co-produced by Harmony Korine. This film also feels somehow less honest than Gummo, which consequently makes it feel a little colder and meaner than Clauer probably intended it to be. It's good, very promising and interesting. I dig the fact that there are people out there making movies like this. I certainly wouldn't even know where to begin creating something with this sort of tone, or something like Korine's, who I love. It's worth thirteen minutes of your time. You can find it on youtube here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=vwhlSw_ofzQ]

Idlewild, Bryan Barber. [C-] august 29th 2006.
[I said this in the theater, then I joked that I was gonna throw it on my blog, and now I am throwing it on my blog: This is one of the most tedious interesting movies I've ever seen. It has a lot going for it, some really cool, creative moments, but there's too much caca in between that stuff to really say it's a good movie. Barber's got a good eye, he lifts a lot of material from other films/videos, but he does it well. Thing is, the story, the performances, they get in the way. Just as you think that the eccentricity and outrageousness that Outkast brings to the equation is going to keep this film out of the realms of cliche, the most hackneyed, boring thing imaginable happens. Just as often, though, when you think something is going to follow another event in a logical way, the movie throws a curveball at you. Ultimately not good and a disappointment, but too consistently inventive for me to not give it some recognition for it. It's overlong, though, and didn't have enough interesting moments to keep from getting bored and even dozing off for 10 or so minutes during it.]

People Like Frank

2006-08-20T16:39:00.001-04:00

After reading David Foster Wallace's essay on Lynch, "David Lynch Keeps His Head," a week or so ago, I'd been jonesing to watch Blue Velvet (1986) again. When I first saw it a few years ago I thought it was a really good movie, but I didn't like it as much as Mulholland Drive or Eraserhead or anything else of his that I'd seen. It wasn't out there enough for me, not "Lynchian" enough, too narrative. This viewing has me me jumping on the "Blue Velvet is his masterpiece" bandwagon.

Since I'm on that David Foster Wallace tip, let me start by saying that the whole "seedy underbelly" take on Blue Velvet may well be a mistake on the part of a lot of the critics that spout it. Evil, and I think we can refer to Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) as a pure distillation of evil, is not something that lies underneath the surface of society, or more appropriately humanity, but rather runs parallel with it, is embedded within it. I mention DFW because this is one of the main points about the film that he makes in his essay and I don't wanna be a rip-off. I'd like to think I would have reached that conclusion on my own even if I hadn't read his take on it before watching the film for what is arguably the first time, but I'm citing my sources because I'm a good school-going kid with the fear of expulsion in my heart. I say "first time watching it" because at the time I first saw it, I think I was tired, I wasn't paying much attention. Me and my friend were talking a lot, too. Anyway, the only things I really remembered from it were fragments of scenes. Mainly stuff I thought was funny like "FUCK THAT SHIT! PABST BLUE RIBBON!"

That's the thing about Blue Velvet that isn't mentioned too often, in favor of discussing how disturbing it is: it is funny at times. Moreso, Frank is funny. It's an alarming thing. Maybe it speaks volumes about me more than anything else, but the line where he calls Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini) "tits" is something that elicited a chuckle from me. As did, and maybe this is really messed up on my part, "Baby wants to fuck!" I find it funny that in the context of this movie something as offensive as that is not offensive to me on the level that I fault the film for it. That is to say, it's an offensive thing, but it's an offensive thing that an offensive character is doing, something that results in making it sort of inoffensive and even funny. Meanwhile, I watched Stanley Donen's musical, Funny Face, last night and found myself getting greatly offended by its blissful anti-intellectualism and misogyny. I guess an offense that's meant to offend in order to further the plot or character is occasionally not personally offensive, although Roger Ebert doesn't seem to think so, at least when it comes to this film. I'm straying. The big thing here is Frank is an entertaining character, although he often veers from being entertaining to being terrifying, something that I think partially reflects what Lynch is trying to say about the capability for evil in people.

A couple times in the movie we see people watching suspense films, and they're always about to witness a murder in the film, which we never see. I think part of Lynch's agenda here is to demonstrate how perfectly nice people can take pleasure in acts of violence, even if they're just pretend. That's simple, but it's later reflected in the way that Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) allows himself to become violent when he eventually has sex with Dorothy and she begs him to hit her. He has the urge for violence in him and so does she. He discovers his limit later in the film when he is forced to kill Frank and finds himself genuinely horrified by it. He isn't Frank, but there are elements of him inside. That's why the question "Why are there people like Frank" more or less gets answered later by Frank himself: "You are like me." And of course, as DFW notes, he's looking directly in the camera when he says this. We are like him.

I outlined the logical identification with Frank/evil running parallel with humanity stuff earlier on in this post. The way that these things are communicated in the film is pretty interesting. Jeffrey is an identifiable nice guy, who we the audience associate with. Lots of subjective POV stuff to really demonstrate how in his head we are. So as Jeffrey starts his transformation, his dive into evil, we are with him, a part of him. We are now starting to feel it. This is when Frank goes from the monster we see in the closet to the funny psychopath we see at Ben's place. We are entertained by him, we think he's kinda funny, and then he turns into a monster again. That's when the fear comes back and the balance is established. Jeffrey is somewhat restored back to lightness, but after his initial release of violence, he appears to have taken some of that darker side of him to heart. He keeps it with him. When his grandmother keeps asking him about the bruises on his face, despite his repeated protests, he jokingly threatens to hit her.

At first I thought that when Frank inevitably dies at the end, Jeffrey, by the law of entropy or something, would turn even worse to balance it all out. I'm glad that didn't happen. The evil was confronted, but it's not gone, though it's not all consuming either. Sandy's (Laura Dern) metaphor for love, the robin, appears at the happy ending of the film and it is holding a writhing insect in its mouth. I think that sums things up pretty perfectly.

I guess that's why I like this movie. In its simplicity, it becomes very complex. Initially, as I said earlier, I didn't like this movie as much as Lynch's other stuff because it wasn't weird enough or abstract enough. It defied my expectations in that sense. I don't know if I believe what I'm about to type, but it occurred to me and I had it noted as a thing to touch upon, so I'll at least throw it out there. Blue Velvet's effectiveness, as opposed to that of Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive, is that in its more straight-forward, traditionally narrative approach it manages to still retain many of the characteristics that make Lynch's films so enjoyable, while also resulting, oddly enough, in the communication of more abstract ideas. The story is so taut that the themes swimming through it become much more loose and fluid, so in a sense the ratio of ideas to story in this film is reversed in relation to his others. Eraserhead is so out there and filled with abstract images and scenes that by the end of it, all I can really glean from the film is that it's about the dread of becoming a parent. The narrative is obscured, resulting in the ideas becoming rather concrete. Blue Velvet's story is very straight-forward, resulting in the themes and ideas being explored becoming more abstract and difficult to place. Like I said, I'm not sure if I entirely buy this. I do believe that this movie has more going on under the hood than some of his others, but that could just as easily be attributed not to this arbitrary "story to idea ratio" that I cooked up, but to the fact that those appear to be more visual and textural explorations while this film is more of a thematic one. Regardless, I think there's a lot to be said about this film, and I feel as if I've greatly simplified the stuff I set out to talk about when I initially started typing this post up. In conclusion,

July in Review

2006-08-08T06:07:00.000-04:00

This has really turned into a month in review blog as of late. I go home in seven days and I won't have much to do then but watch movies, so we'll see how things go when that happens. I've really been enjoying myself a lot this summer, which I've dubbed my last as a kid. My last summer break. I graduate at the end of this year and then I'll probably be trying to make a living forthwith, so I've been a little preoccupied with going out with friends and seeing a city I probably won't come back to after I leave it soon. I've enjoyed my time in New Orleans. Here's July.

Chinatown, Roman Polanski. [A] july 2nd 2006.
[This was the second time I've seen this film, and I'm not entirely certain I've got every little bit of the water divergence plot down. I watched this with a few people and certain bits were talked over, but everyone seemed to really like it and one of them said they were gonna buy it post-haste, so I felt pretty good about the whole thing. I may well watch it again later this week. I just watched this and I'm currently reading The Long Goodbye and I just broke down and bought the Altman version of it, which I love. I feel pretty steeped in this whole old-school detective genre, although it's notable that the two movies cited are new-school throwbacks to it, especially considering how infatuated I've been with Brick since I saw it in the theater, but I've always dug the aesthetic. I remember even when I was in elementary school writing little short stories, very inspired by that hardboiled Chandler-esque feel. I hadn't watched or read any of the source material yet, but when I read them to my class, they all had fun with them. It's become such a part of our cultural vernacular that you don't actually need to be actively familiar with any of it to "get" it. It flips me out that kids' shows will reference all sorts of stuff that goes totally over their audience's heads, but do it so effectively that they actually become familiarized with these genre archetypes without any actual exposure to them whatsoever. That has nothing to do with this awesome movie, though. It's awesome.]

The Amityville Horror, Stuart Rosenberg. [F] july 4th 2006.
[This movie sucks. I can't comprehend the level of ineptitude that would result in a movie coming together so shoddily. The climax, the height of tension in the film goes something like this: The house is going nuts and maybe the dad is crazy too. He's got an axe and the mother has locked the kids and herself in the bathroom upstairs. He chops the door down because they won't let him in, and he tells them he would never hurt them. They run down the stairs to the main hall, but the walls are bleeding so the stairs are slippery. They slip on the stairs a little bit, but they reach the front door, which promptly shuts. The mother can't open the door, so the dad says let me try and he jiggles the handle a bit and then they get out. They start driving away, but they forgot the dog and the dad says forget the dog and they continue driving away. Then he goes back, gets the dog and nearly drowns in a pool of something that looks like tar but is allegedly the mouth of hell. The dog helps him out. He tries the jiggle the handle escape again, but this time the door really won't open so he smashes a window and climbs out through there. This movie is ridiculous. It should not be called The Amityville Horror, it should be called The Amityville Mildly Unpleasant.]

The Wind Will Carry Us, Abbas Kiarostami. [A-] july 11th 2006.
[I saw Taste of Cherry a while back and dug it a whole lot. I'm a sucker for the sort of austere, restrained filmmaking that Kiarostami has apparently made his calling card, and I look forward to seeing his other films. This film is much more enigmatic than Taste of Cherry, though. Some of the less obvious elements of the film threw me off so much that I wasn't certain whether I had missed something or not. I appreciate that about it, though, and recognize it as an integral part of the film's sensibility. I dig this guy's work a lot, so far.]

Children of Heaven, Majid Majidi. [B] july 13th 2006.
[A really sweet-natured film that I think borders on schmaltziness a little too often for its own good. Still worth checking out, though.]

Sharks 3D, Jean-Jacques Mantello. [F] july 15th 2006.
[I went to the aquarium. This was awful. I enjoyed this far more than any awful movie I've ever seen. I'd never really done the 3D movie thing before, but I found myself, after my eyes stopped hurting/adjusting, being really taken by the whole thing. There were some incredible moments, where a close-up of a shark, combined with the 3D effect made the shark a very tactile thing, the texture of its hide became something very real and fascinating to stare at. The narration of this movie was obnoxious and not at all informative, the music was terrible and the constant "sound effects underlining visually stunning moments," like wind chimes when schools of fish parted, really pissed me off. The attempts at humor were embarassing and the movie failed completely at its stated goal. If you want to get people to feel empathy for these creatures that you call misunderstood and unfairly maligned, then you don't play terrifying music and talk solely about how much it could eviscerate you when you finally get around to showing it. It's just common sense. Honestly, I don't want much. Something that's like Discovery Channel quality that teaches me some stuff and shows me a bunch of neat stuff in 3D would basically have been perfect for me. Instead, a turd.]

The Apartment, Billy Wilder. [A] july 19th 2006.
[My problem has been this: I used to have this insatiable appetite for films. Anytime I'd watch movies, if I thought I had an opportunity. Of late, I've been fetishizing the experience, demanding that I set aside the proper slot of time, that the room is pitch black, that I am completely alone and guaranteed no distractions, and it is very rare, especially in a roommate situation, to find these circumstances. Today, out of frustration, I just said "fuck it" and put this movie on. I've had it out from Netflix for like a month. It's one of the saddest movies I may have ever seen. Jack Lemmon was wonderful, the movie was great. I think I might put on another movie. I really love the ornateness of this film. It's not The Leopard or anything like that, but even in the most mundane places, like an office building or a Chinese restaurant, Wilder manages to find a way to make the place look not busy, but somehow more interesting and perhaps more complicated than it truly is. The film is occasionally peppered with moments of cinephilic recognition that I really like, too. A clip of Stagecoach plays on the television while Lemmon's character eats dinner.

During a particularly tense scene all the sound drops out except for the old-timey music that, with the editing, evokes almost immediately a tense scene in a silent film. It moves into the next scene so smoothly afterwards that this brief foray into an entirely different sort of sensibility doesn't feel at all jarring. This film is so masterfully put together that it's tough to not be taken in by it. It feels effortless. While watching it I felt frustrated by the fact that more "entertainment" films can't manage this level of sophistication and trust in their audience's intelligence on a more regular basis.]

The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman. [A-] july 20th 2006.
[One of my favorite moments in this film comes about a third of the way in. By this point the theme song of the film has been featured often enough that it can truly be considered omnipresent enough for this joke to work, but Marlowe goes into a bar that apparently doubles as a sort of office for him and a guy starts playing and singing the theme while he's on the phone with a potential client. Lacking a pencil to write the address down, he interrupts the singer and says "Hey, buddy, got something to write with?" It's such a wry little moment, the character interrupting the artifice of the film to keep it going, like maybe the world we're watching at the present is going on in spite of us and, while most of the other characters in the film are intent on entertaining us, Marlowe couldn't give less of a shit, he just wants to get another job.

I guess one of the main tenets of the film is that this decidedly 40's-based, hard-boiled gumshoe has been transplanted into a new era, the 70's, and that part of the fun is watching him interact with the world around him while maintaining the values he has from a previous time. "Rip Van Marlowe" is the cute name Altman gives it. I feel kind of dumb, because I never picked up on it until I had it explained to me by the filmmaker, but I guess my thing is that I don't find it that unbelievable that a man like Marlowe could exist in this world. One of the defining traits of an interesting hero has always seemingly been that he has an otherliness that separates him from the rest of the characters in a film. He could probably function just as well today as he could have in the 1800's. I just don't see how deeply rooted his character is in the 40's.

Anyway. This movie's really just a joy to watch and I think a lot of that has to do with the endless charm that Elliot Gould plays Marlowe with. It's an interesting take on the character that I think is a pretty big departure from the Marlowe in Chandler's novel, but a great characterization. He imbues the entire movie with an irresistible charm that makes it impossible to dislike.]

Brick, Rian Johnson. [A-] july 22nd 2006.
[I saw this just before it came out in the theater and it totally blew me away. Since then, I've been jonesing to see it again, but could never bring myself to go twice when there were plenty of other movies out I hadn't seen. Well a DVD rip is making its rounds and I couldn't wait the extra couple weeks for the proper release, so I've got this to placate me till that Tuesday rolls around. Unfortunately, the revisit didn't hit as hard as the firs time. I attribute that largely to interruptions. This is a movie that benefits largely from being allowed to do its work on you from beginning to end without stop. The mood it establishes within the first 20 minutes needs to be retained. I guess this can be said for all movies, but I think it had a direct impact on my enjoyment of it today.

The central schtick of the movie, the hard-boiled noir dialogue in the mouths of high school students, never particularly bothered me. I kinda feel bad referring to it as a "schtick," also. The fact is, if I hadn't known going into the viewing that this was a conceit of the film, I probably wouldn't have caught on for the first 30-40 minutes; that's how taken I feel I am with this movie. A couple things didn't work as well for me this time around, the jump cuts bothered me occasionally and some of the jokes weren't as effective as they could have been, but the film as a whole is such a fun, inventive thing that I can't really complain about much. The sound in this movie is unbelievable, too. Really, one of the most creative movies I'v seen in a while and easily my favorite from this year.]

The Player, Robert Altman. [A] july 25th 2006.
[I'm a sucker for these Hollywood insider type things. They almost invariably scare the shit out of me, but I dig 'em. This one I think has more going on with it than most, though. I've been reading around and it seems like a lot of folks I respect have written about how this is a shallow criticism of the industry, as much an exercise in narcissism as it is an indictment, and I can see where that's coming from, but I'm impressed by Altman's approach. This isn't a conventional Hollywood film, it's got too many of Altman's stylistic quirks, but it's conventional enough to function equally as a straight entertainment picture as it can an art film. One of the things that blows me away about Orson Welle's Touch of Evil is that, as good as the 1997 re-edit is, it's not the film he wanted to make. When Welles was shown the studio's version of the film, he went home and sent them a 60 page memo within a day, detailing all the things he'd change to make the movie better. He didn't ask them to use his original cut or to make modifications to the film that would turn it back to his vision, he sent them suggestions on how to make THEIR version of his film better. They ignored them and the movie wasn't all too good and then, using that memo, Walter Murch re-edited the film in 1997 and now it's awesome.

Well anyway, it doesn't seem like Altman's trying to convince Hollywood to make McCabe and Mrs. Miller here, he's just trying to show them how to make a good thriller without insulting their audience's intelligence. I don't think it's a coincidence that the box office figures of Fatal Attraction are discussed at one point in this film.]

Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson. [B+] july 27th 2006.
[I put this on for kicks because I'd been jonesing to see it again for a while. It might be my least favorite of PT Anderson's movies, but it's fun for a while. By the same token, I'm not wild about Goodfellas, either. The film's got great moments, I especially love John C. Reilly's character, but as an overall film it doesn't have a whole lot going for it. It's virtuoso filmmaking paired with halfhearted storytelling, and that can only carry you so far, especially within the span of two and a half hours. Still, it's obvious everyone involved had a great time making it and sometimes that level of enthusiasm alone can be very infectious.]

Manhattan, Woody Allen. [B+] july 28th 2006.
[Yeah, the whole dude dating a 17 year old thing is pretty creepy, but I really like this movie. For some reason I always want to put it next to Annie Hall and I always say that I like it more. It seems like a lot of people pair the two together, which I don't actually get when I think about it. It's like pairing Shadows and Fog and Crimes and Misdemeanors. No need. Anyway, I like this movie but I'm not prepared to say much more than that. Partially because this is the one blurb I'm writing today, August 8th, instead of today, the day I saw the film. Actually I wrote Boogie Nights today, too.]

Miami Vice, Michael Mann. [B-] july 30th 2006.
[This is from an e-mail I sent a friend. Robocop 1.3 on our rating scale equates to the B- you see here: Saw Miami Vice tonight. Robocop 1.3, which is disappointing. Someone needs to tell Michael Mann to listen to a band other than Audioslave. Also, it could have been retitled Dicks: The Movie and been totally accurate. Still, I liked it. It's fucking aggressive with its machismo, but I think it successfully modernises the notion of masculinity in such a way that the concept remains pure, while still managing to remain functional in this Modern World. In other words, men are still men and women are still women, but no one is really subjugated, if that even makes sense. It's somewhat responsible, even if it slips from time to time.

Also, Mann is the only guy that has really successfully gotten me excited about the possibility for video to look really nice. I really think that as the technology is refined it will grow to make film irrelevant, which bums me out to a degree, just because I appreciate the tactile nature of working with film. Video's a lot more ephemeral and easy to get by trial and error. To an extent, who cares how you get to the end product if it's great, but there's something kinda nice about a dude that knows what he's doing working. You still need an eye with video, but you can go in flying blind and as long as you watch enough movies you can make a competent one as long as you're honest about what it is you're working with, I think. Just ctrl/apple+z until it looks like Scorsese. Take these opinions with a grain of salt. Sometimes I like to ramble just to think things through. There might be some validity to it, but it reeks of elitism, and I'm for the people, promise.]

See you next month. Hopefully sooner.

June in Review

2006-07-01T17:21:00.000-04:00

I don't have much to say about this month. It does a really cutesy little full circle thing that I kinda want to punch it in the face for. Totally unintentional, I swear.

Also: I feel like kind of a jerk for saying this, but I'm getting kind of embarassed by my logs lately. I've just been living with friends of mine lately, and basically every minute of every day I'm either spending time with them or I'm at work or I'm sleeping and I haven't been able to really watch movies in the sort of solitary, serious way that I'd like to more often. I'm trying to figure out a way to structure my days so that this fact doesn't really impact me as much anymore, because I've got a screenplay I want to work on and I've got a bunch of movies I want to see.

Alright, without further ado: June.

Billy Madison, Tamra Davis. [x] june 2nd 2006.
[Man, this is just a fun, stupid movie. I hate it when folks say they go to the movies to not think, but I still find myself capable of going into this state sometimes. (Third to last question in that interview, by the way.) That said, when things go bad, I zip out of that state pretty quick and start getting pissed off. Which I guess means that I'm always an active viewer, just sometimes I'm an inactive active viewer, if that makes sense. Anyway, I get pretty inactive and chuckle during this sometimes. Still the best Adam Sandler Movie, although not the best movie he's ever been in. Either way, I don't really wanna rate it or consider it. I ate some chips while watching it and then I went out.]

Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee. [A] june 3rd 2006.
[Maybe someday I'll write a real involved thing about this movie, but today is not that day. First time I saw it I cried uncontrollably all through the riot scene. Spike Lee has made me cry more than any other modern filmmaker, I think. This, 25th Hour, He Got Game and Bamboozled all got me, to one degree or another.]

Imitation of Life, Douglas Sirk. [B] june 4th 2006.
[For some reason this didn't blow me away anywhere as much as All That Heaven Allows did. That movie killed me. I feel like I owe this another view. Something about the way the story kept jumping in time kept taking me out of it and made it very hard for me to invest myself emotionally in any of the characters.

The Aristocrats, Paul Provenza. [C-] june 4th 2006.
[Not a good movie, but it's got a couple laughs. "The tragic events of January 4th" especially. Anyway, they keep cutting in the middle of jokes to other comics talking about how good the guy they cut away from's telling of the joke is. Why not just let me see the joke? Also, about 5 actual points get made in this movie, then they get repeated a billion times. Really kind of tedious, overall.]

The Break-Up, Peyton Reed. [C+] june 5th 2006.
[I wish this movie had more conviction. It positions itself as a movie that offers an honest look at relationships, but still vilifies the shit out of Jennifer Aniston's character while allowing Vince Vaughan the opportunity to be the same loveable yet crude, slovenly fast-talker he is in every movie. The movie works for a while, but it just keeps resorting to easy ways out of complex situations. The movie offers up a couple of okay laughs, most of them cheap, and at the very least it has the decency to not throw together a saccharine kiss and make up ending at the last second. Still, completely inconsequential.]

Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic, Liam Lynch. [D] june 8th 2006.
[Funny comedian makes unfunny movie. Happens pretty often, but I don't get how a funny stand-up comedian can make an unfunny stand-up movie. It's really sort of an achievement, if you think about it.]

Cars, John Lasseter. [D-] june 11th 2006.
[Good lord. I had a lot to say about this when I saw it, but figured I'd hold off on my log. Later in the month I started getting into the habit of writing these little blurbs in the .txt file on my desktop immediately after I saw the movie. This isn't one of those instances. I'm going to edit down a thing I wrote on a message board about it:

First off, the premise in and of itself is easily the weakest, most uninteresting one Pixar's ever had. The title itself gives away how creatively bankrupt the movie was from the get-go. Even Finding Nemo wasn't fucking called "Fish."

Pixar's loudest, crassest movie is so thrown together it can't even stick to one form of internal logic. If the cars have feelings and experience pain, can think and speak, why is the car crash at the beginning of the movie played for laughs, rather than being a disturbing massacre? And why is the car crash at the end of the movie then played as a devastating injury? Why are there tire tracks in the sky as a visual pun in one scene, but then later in the film we see regular planes flying? Why does the main car make a face every time the tow truck sticks his hook under his bumper, implying anal penetration, but other injuries like popping a tire and shit aren't treated as a broken foot? You anthropomorphize mechanical objects and then pick and choose when these rules apply. I realize this is something that most people will call me finicky about, but some of this stuff, especially the car crash at the beginning of the movie seems especially disturbing. When the tow truck rides in the helicopter near the end I found myself feeling legitimately bothered by the fact that one creature was riding inside of another living creature.

The little songs interspersed throughout the movie were awful and the whole idea of bullshit nostalgia for this whitebread idea of an idyllic America that I'm not entirely certain ever actually existed is corny as fuck, but in a movie that relies on every single classist and racist stereotype in the book for a whole bunch of its jokes, it's especially offensive. Beyond which, what is it that we're lamenting? Walter Chaw wrote this in his review of the film and it made me laugh out loud: "McQueen [...] is stranded in a Podunk nowheresville that, we see in flashback, used to be a garish tourist trap before the department of transportation rendered it moot." In one sentence dude completely undermines all the film's sentimentality. He's right: it was just a shitty little neon town with a diner and a gas station designed to get some motorists to stop in on their way through. Who gives a fuck? "Main street isn't main street anymore." Please.

The thing that was so charming about previous films this studio put out is that they hit actual emotional marks, and even if the points they were making were often simple, they were handled gracefully and never felt corny or insincere, as this movie often does.]

Imitation of Life, John Stahl. [C] june 14th 2006.
[Nothing to say.]

The Squid and the Whale, Noah Baumbach. [A-] june 17th 2006.
[I really wish I had written these things after seeing the movie. This was one of my favorite movies of last year. Short and bittersweet, it's a really nice, honest movie about a bunch of messed up people messing up over and over again until they finally realize they're messing up. Then it ends.]

Hustle and Flow, Craig Brewer. [C-] june 18th 2006.
[I had a hard time caring about this guy. I understand the whole rags to riches thing, but I'm not gonna stand up and cheer as the orchestra swells when a dude forces a woman to have sex with a guy for a microphone as much as I am when a guy is having a really tough time climbing a mountain, but manages to push himself all the way to the top. I guess I just dig mountain climbing movies or something.]

Amelie, Jean-Pierre Jeunet. [C-] june 20th 2006.
[I didn't even actively watch this. I was in and out of the room, but I've seen this a couple times before and I guess I just wanted to go on record as saying that I don't like this movie. It's hyperactive and self-consciously cute and overall sort of unbearable. I feel as if my teeth are going to rot when I watch it and I find it thoroughly unpleasant.]

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, Justin Lin. [B+] june 20th 2006.
[A technically flawless, emotionally hollow piece of shit that I just couldn't help but love. I can't account for it, I wish I could, but this is good times.]

Good Night, and Good Luck., George Clooney. [C+] june 23rd 2006.

Pitch Black, David Twohy. [B+] june 25th 2006.
[I was pretty happy to find myself really impressed by this movie. A mainstream Hollywood thriller that isn't afraid of complicated characters and moral gray areas. Not to mention a surprisingly experimental visual style, although the structure of the film is wholly traditional. Marred by a cheesily cliched side character that feels as if he got lost on the way to whatever film he was supposed to be in and decided to stay and an inexplicable audience-insulting flashback that feels completely inconsistent from the rest of the film and an unnecessarily underlined conclusion that wasn't all that subtle to begin with. Still, a fine film that's really well worth seeing.]

The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury, Peter Chung. [F] june 25th 2006.
[I don't want to talk about it.]

The Chronicles of Riddick, David Twohy. [C] june 25th 2006.
[A friend of mine bought the Chronicles of Riddick trilogy on a whim and I decided to marathon it with him. Perhaps this is the reason I didn't enjoy The Chronicles of Riddick as much as I may have otherwise. I was so impressed by Pitch Black's unconventionality in a conventional genre that, when I saw this film I was inevitably disappointed. I've since read a couple reviews of the film that point out a lot of scenes and set-pieces from this film that I completely forgot. Maybe my rating is undue, but it's the truth. Regardless, the movie is entertaining enough, but reeks of a cash-grab in the same way that the half-hour long piece of shit Dark Fury reeks of making a "trilogy" for the sake of marketability. Judi Dench's character feels completely superfluous, I still can't explain her purpose, and all the dutch angles in this movie started pissing me off after a while.

Still, some great action sequences and fun Vin Diesel moments. If he and The Rock would team up on a movie, I would be in the theater opening day yelling at the screen and headbanging after every stupid one-liner. Anyway, apparently the ending in this Director's Cut is slightly different from the Theatrical. My friend explained the difference and this one really is much better. Seeing the way the end of the movie builds towards that moment is really sort of worth the price of admission alone.]

The Corpse Bride, Tim Burton and Mike Johnson. [B-] june 26th 2006.
[I like this movie when it's a pretty, austere tribute to German Expressionism and stop liking it when it turns into a shrill musical. The songs are awful and the whole thing is a little too over-the-top in its morbidity. I don't like how the main character's two suitors are treated, either: thrown away and picked up again at will with almost no motivation.]

Defending Your Life, Albert Brooks. [B] june 29th 2006.
[Occasionally cheesy, occasionally interesting and mostly fun.]

Click, Frank Coraci. [F] june 30th 2006.
[The most painfully idiotic piece of shit I've seen in a long long time. Two things made the experience bearable: 1) Kate Beckinsale is so painfully attractive that I could look at just her face while getting stabbed with needles and I might not chalk up the experience as a total loss. 2) They sell booze in theaters down South. (I'm in New Orleans for the summer.)]

Good Night, and Good Luck.

2006-06-23T19:32:00.001-04:00

Beautifully photgraphed, this movie. The imagery, the lighting, very obviously an homage to the studio films of the 40s and 50s. It's visually rooted in the era it takes place in, which I dig. The visuals pack a punch, but the story doesn't hit hard enough. I don't want to sound crude, but for a film made with the intention of riling people up about the current state of the media, it's not visceral enough to really deliver the gut punch it ought to. The actual original source footage of McCarthy and his ridiculous crusade are the most agitating things in the film, but removed of Edward R. Murrow's actual broadcasts, the stuff that should hit hard doesn't manage to as much as it should. Which isn't to say David Straitharn doesn't deliver a great performance as Murrow, just that I don't see why he had to. I saw the original Murrow broadcasts within the context of a documentary a few months ago and remember that hitting much harder than this film. The film is so centered around the news room, and single-minded in its location and focus that it fails to evoke the feeling that Murrow is at war, too peaceful and incidental to give the central conflict any real tension.

While the visuals of the film are firmly rooted in a more classical style, the camera itself switches between more static image to movements very reminiscent of the American cinema of the 60s and 70s, which I think is a good launching point, at least in terms of intent, for the film, but it immediately brings to mind All the President's Men for me, which renders the film fairly unnecessary. That movie says a lot of the same things this film does about the ideal purpose of our media, and does so more effectively.

So far, I prefer the subject matter of Good Night, and Good Luck. in the form of a documentary and in the form of a movie from the 70s. Both, while not entirely esoteric, certainly not a part of the mainstream at this point. So the next conclusion I come to, then, is that Clooney, while aware of the fact that this is well-worn territory, felt strongly enough about saying what he's saying in this film that he made it as a sort of populist exercise, knowing full well that a lot of people don't want to watch old movies or documentaries. But then why shoot this in alienating black and white? Am I just talking nonsense at this point? I feel as if I might be coming off as shallow or dismissive right now, possibly even ignorant, but these were some of the things that occurred to me as I was watching this film and I figure I ought to put them down here.

I also didn't really see the point of the subplot of the married couple.

It's unfortunate that, despite its lofty ambitions, Good Night, and Good Luck. is just a moderately enjoyable, yet disappointingly insubstantial and unnecessary, film.

May in Review

2006-06-05T18:24:00.000-04:00

Happy National Day of Slayer, everybody.

May was an improvement over April, at least in terms of quantity, but I don't know that I accomplished much more. I might have seen more films I'd never seen before in April. May consisted of a few old favorites, but very little "scholarly" viewing. I'm in New Orleans for the summer. I work at a bar from time to time, I go bicycling, I spend a lot of time going out with friends and we've been watching lots of stupid comedies socially, which has made up the bulk of my viewing.

I don't know what's happened to me lately, but I've grown so complacent in my studies. Last summer I literally locked myself in my room, drew all the curtains and spent the days marathoning films from Netflix and Turner Classic Movies. I guess I'm preoccupied these days, but I think I can still make time to watch some films more seriously. Last night I watched Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life. I'm going to try to watch the John Stahl version tomorrow. I liked it, but nowhere near as much as I absolutely loved All That Heaven Allows. I don't really feel like writing about it, because I'm not certain I really have all that much to say about it, probably a sign that I didn't watch it closely enough, but I'm just stretching right now. I haven't used this muscle in a while, and it's time to start working out again. I feel like I apologize or explain myself in every post I make on this thing, which is ridiculous. I'm trying to motivate myself, I suppose.

Anyway, here's the film log with comments. The "x" rating designates that I just didn't want to rate it. Sometimes this is because I didn't finish it, didn't watch it in good circumstances, whatever, and didn't feel I'd given it enough of my attention for it to be fair for me to rate it. Most likely, though, it's because I've seen the film countless times and don't really want to rate it any longer.

Touch of Evil, Orson Welles. [A] may 12th 2006.
[I love this movie. I think about it constantly and I think it informs me in my evaluation of other films a lot. I'd say it's probably had a big impact on me. The first time I saw it was on the big screen at the Film Forum in New York. I wasn't really a huge Orson Welles fan, I'd only seen Citizen Kane before this, a film that I think is great, but that doesn't personally speak to me on a major level. I realize this is bordering on blasphemy, but hear me out. It's a wonderful film, I admire it a great deal, it just doesn't have that certain je ne sais quoi that makes me love it. Almost as if it's too perfect. I love this movie in spite of its flaws, the casting of Charlton Heston, the hokey greasers and all that. The movie opened and I was lost in it immediately. I saw the camera pulling back from the car, going across the alley and I thought it was impressive. Then I saw it rise on a crane and I started getting giddy. "There's no way it doesn't cut here," I thought to myself but then it didn't. And then it didn't, and then it didn't, and then it didn't and I knew as I was watching it for the first time that I was seeing arguably the most virtuosic shot ever filmed. That opening alone endears this movie to me ineffably. There are so many incredible moments in it that I almost can't stand it.]

Walk the Line, James Mangold. [B] may 13th 2006.
[This rating is sort of a compromise. As a film, Walk the Line is decidedly M.O.R. Not really a slight, there's nothing terribly wrong with being inoffensive, there's just nothing terribly interesting about it either. The performances raise it for me, though. As boring of a cinematic achievement as it is, it's ridiculously watchable. I guess being a fan of Johnny Cash's, a fan that's almost completely uninformed as to the details of his life, probably helps. It's a shameless hagiography that I shamelessly lap up. Plus Reese Witherspoon in this movie. Man. I saw this the day after it opened in the theater and walked the twenty minutes home completely sullen. Over the span of this movie I managed to fall in love with her and then have my heart broken by the illusion shattering credits at the end. I guess a lot of the positivity I gives this movie comes from that. I think it's safe to say that movies, and to a lesser degree television, have over the course of my life systematically destroyed girls for me.]

Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, Les Blank. [C+] may 14th 2006.
[I watched this on youtube. Not the best venue for anything, but that's it. I just didn't find it terribly interesting. Herzog has some interesting stuff to say near the end, but for the most part the film's need to exist is entirely predicated on the idea of hero worship. There is no reason to document or watch a good deal of it except for the sake of documenting and watching Werner Herzog, the cinematic idol. Yes, the situation must be explained, the preparation must be viewed, the justification for the action must be spoken, but there's just a lot of fat on this film I felt could have been trimmed, and perhaps I feel that way because I've only seen three Herzog films, one of which I loved, one which I thought was good and one which I disliked.]

Killa Season, Cameron Giles. [F] may 18th 2006.
[I like Cam'ron a whole lot, but his one-two punch of album and movie was hugely disappointing. I eagerly anticipated them both only to be confronted with a mediocre record and an absolutely terrible film. I really don't want to get into it, but let me just say that I wasn't expecting a masterpiece. I was, at best I guess, expecting a "so bad it's good" kind of thing that I could laugh at while watching my favorite rapper act ridiculous. This movie transcends "so bad it's good" to enter "so bad it's unbearably terrible" territory. This article will basically tell you all you need to know.]

Anchorman, Adam McKay. [x] may 21st 2006.
[It's funny I laugh a lot and have fun ha ha ha.]

Wedding Crashers, David Dobkin. [x] may 21st 2006.
[Not a really good movie or anything, but for some reason I really like it. It's like candy or soda or something, I don't really like them to begin with but sometimes I just compulsively consume them. Except I do like this to begin with so I guess that's a terrible metaphor. But the compulsively consume part works.]

Wet Hot American Summer, David Wain and Michael Showalter. [x] may 21st 2006.
[Yeah man. This movie flipped me out the first time I saw it. All the intentional continuity errors and absurd leaps in logic made me scream with laughter in high school. I even went to the first midnight screening of this in New York, complete with costume contest a few years back. The Molly Shannon bits were always a little irritating to me and that still hasn't gone away, but I dig the movie a lot and that's really all there is to it.]

Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater. [A-] may 22nd 2006.
[I think I spoke about it a while back. Actually, I think I avoided speaking about it. It's an appropriate companion to Wet Hot American Summer in a way, although it's a lot more earnest than the painfully ironic WHAS could ever be. I think it's really a pretty wonderful movie about being a teenager and coming of age and all that. I'm especially impressed with the way the movie handles Wiley Wiggins' character's entrance into that teenage bacchanal world of partying and doing stupid things. My entrance into that world is not too many years behind me and it really rings true to me. Really, it's just such a sweet-hearted movie I can't help but love it.]

The 40 Year Old Virgin, Judd Apatow. [x] may 22nd 2006.
[Speaking of sweet-hearted movies, I really loved this one. I guess the same thing with Wiley Wiggins' character's entry to that world applies to this. The montage of Andy getting introduced drinking in a bar, going into drinking even more, going into smoking weed out of an apple on a rooftop, going into pissing in public on a restaurant is just so funny to me. I'm fixated on the fact that Andy is never the butt of any jokes. I know this sounds ridiculous, but it's not. There is never any real mean-spiritedness in the movie, gentle ribbing at worst, and everyone gets everyone. Lots of the movie really feels like friends jokingly insulting each other and having fun, and I really like that about it.]

The Conversation, Francis Ford Coppola. [A] may 24th 2006.
[This movie, along with Punch-Drunk Love, Miller's Crossing and Touch of Evil, is in the running for my favorite movie of all time. Depending on my mood, I say a different one, but it's always one of these four. The Conversation's such an elegant movie. Really well-crafted and not in the least bit show-offy.]

Punch-Drunk Love, Paul Thomas Anderson. [A] may 24th 2006.
[Really well-crafted and pretty show-offy, but I like that about it. I've had friends tell me this movie made them nervous. I never saw that before, but I saw it this last time I watched it. I don't know why the aggressively present score, the frantically constant motion of characters and the camera, the nervous tics exhibited by every single one of the characters in the film never registered with me as symbols of anxiety. For some reason I always just viewed this is a terribly sweet, romantic movie. L'Atalante might be the most romantic film I've ever seen, but for some reason it doesn't hit me the same way this one does.]

Old School, Todd Phillips. [x] may 25th 2006.

The Big Lebowski, Coen Brothers. [A] may 25th 2006.

X-Men 3: The Last Stand, Brett Ratner. [D-] may 27th 2006.
[Good lord what an atrocity, an abomination against humanity, this movie was. It feels like Brett Ratner started filming this with the intent of ruining the X-Men franchise. I can't think of any other reason why you would make this film. You dumb everything down to a ridiculous degree, you kill off an absurd amount of principal characters, you take the villain that every comic book geek has been anticipating since the very first movie in the series was announced I don't know how long ago and make her boring, everything about this movie is wrong. Beyond that, there are some startlingly bigoted moments interspersed all throughout X3, something that goes entirely against the whole point of the series to begin with. What an insult.]

The Girl Next Door, Luke Greenfield. [B+] may 28th 2006.
[This movie caught me by surprise. I'm not gonna lie, the motivation for watching this movie was to see Elisha Cuthbert be really hot, which by the way she totally is, but I also wound up seeing a pretty fun dumb teen comedy. I don't know what to say about this, really. It's a fun, slightly subersive though ultimately oppressive comedy with a premise that affords it some more interesting characters than you typically see in this sort of fare.]

Freddy Got Fingered, Tom Green. [x] may 29th 2006.
[I don't think I've gone on record about this movie yet. Here it is, on the record: I think this movie is brilliant, a true work of art that will, in a few decades maybe, be looked back upon with reverence by a lot of the people that write it off and dismiss it as stupid Tom Green childishness. It brilliantly subverts traditional film narratives and there is not a single moment in the film that isn't played for laughs. Literally not a single moment. That's fairly incredible, really. I remember the first time I saw this movie, in my last year of high school, I was at first amused and bewildered, but as the story progressed I started realizing that I was watching an art film.]

Kubrick Fest '06 - Day Two: The Killing

2006-05-05T01:54:00.001-04:00

I guess it's kind of comical that I title this post "Day Two," since it feels like it's been months since the first post in this supposed "festival." (Oh yeah, haha. It has been months!)

Well, whatever. It's getting to be a tired device on this blog that I self-awarely refer to my lack of output, I'm gonna have to find a new crutch to fall back on. Nah, let's just get started.

I was disappointed to find myself not all that taken with Kubrick's second movie. The Killing (1956) just wasn't as interesting to me as Killer's Kiss. Something about the film just didn't grab me as much as his first did.

A shame, because it's got a hell of an opening. Horses lining up for a race, moody music playing, the imagery basically all shot documentary style. It felt like this was a good insight into what Kubrick's approach as a photo-journalist early in his career may have been like. I pictured him running around at the tracks with a Bolex, getting as many interesting shots as he could himself. And then, the "directed by Stanley Kubrick" credit comes on, the gates open and the race begins. There's a certain bravado to this moment that I greatly admire. I'm here, on the edge of my seat. And then the narration begins: "At exactly 3:45 on that Saturday afternoon in the last week of September, Marvin Unger was, perhaps, the only one among the hundred thousand people at the track who felt no thrill at the running of the fifth race." Suitably hardboiled and mysterious, but I was taken aback by the use of the device. It's a tired cliché to say that films fall back on voiceover when their narrative isn't clear enough without it, but it sprang to mind immediately for me. It felt that way. The story of the caper in the film is plenty intricate and fun, but was never particularly compelling for me, either.

The visuals were largely uninteresting, too. A lot of the scenes are shot indoors, using primarily medium and close-up shots and the portraits that comprise these dialogue-heavy scenes, which comprise the lot of the film, never jumped out at me or interested me much. There are certainly some compelling moments, the lighting effects with the blinds and curtains in some scenes are fairly stunning, the clown mask heist is eery, the ending is pretty, but nothing about this movie really struck me the way some of the images in Killer's Kiss did. I guess if I had to make a direct comparison between this film and that one, The Killing is in my mind a lesser film. It's more adventurous with its narrative, although less successful in fully realizing its more complex story, but it's much less adventurous visually. I was sold on Killer's Kiss almost from the get-go with that shot of the main character eating in his apartment and his next door neighbor going about her business through a window in the background. Nothing in The Killing jumped out at me as much.

When I originally wrote about Killer's Kiss I wanted to talk about how the use of latin music, more specifically this kind of intense, escalating tango, reminded me of the use of music in Orson Welle's Touch of Evil. I never wound up covering that point, but I think it's good I saved it for this post, because it's even more appropriate here. One of the few truly electrifying moments I can recall comes in a scene which I view as the titular killing of the film. Although there are a few others that could just as easily vie for the spot, it's the scene in which George (Elisha Cook Jr.) finally snaps and lets himself turn mean that I think is the moment I'd most readily identify as "the killing." The way the editing speeds up during this scene, the way the camera itself almost seems surprised by the events taking place, and the way that loud, spiralling music in the background all come together reminds me so much of the killing of Joe Grandi in Touch of Evil that I can't help but trace some sort of lineage from this film to that one, which I couldn't entirely with Killer's Kiss, even if there was some foundation for it. I'm pretty sure Orson Welles voiced admiration for this film when it came out, too, so it's definitely not coincidental.

Ultimately, though, this film didn't do a whole lot for me, which I'm kind of disappointed about. I already know that I love the next film on the list, Paths of Glory, and I'm looking forward to rewatching it and writing about it. Until next time, I guess.

In the mean time, here's the pathetic film log for April. I've been so taken with TV shows lately that I just haven't been devoting the time I should to viewing films. I watched like all of The Shield in this past month, lots of Newsradio and The Kids in the Hall and just recently I've embarked on a viewing of the entire run of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, a show I wrote off when it was on the air but have now managed to amass a pretty embarassing obsession with. I guess the bite-sized chunks of TV viewing were more palatable to me while I was so involved in my college coursework, but the damn shows are usually so addictive that I wind up watching five in a row or something anyway, completely invalidating any argument I can make for them taking up less of my time. I expect May to be more fruitful, but not until I finish Buffy and probably Angel, too. I'm a little embarassed, but I'm having too much fun to care all that much. Anyway, here's April.

Shadows and Fog, Woody Allen. [A-] april 12th 2006.
[I really liked this movie an awful lot. It makes me want to watch some of the other movies that I've ignored, yet intrigue me, like Stardust Memories and Zelig. The ending to this film is so beautiful.]

The Big Lebowski, Coen Brothers. [A] april 12th 2006.
[I've heard mention of the "Lebowski Effect" before. This idea that a movie actually gets better over multiple viewings for you, not just that you have more fun with it or find it more comforting with each subsequen viewing, but that it actually becomes a better film. I disliked The Big Lebowski the first time I saw it in 1998 and now I can think of few Coen films I like more. I don't ever see it usurping Miller's Crossing as my absolute favorite of theirs, but I like it quite a bit.]

The Killing, Stanley Kubrick. [B-] april 23rd 2006

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Chantal Akerman. [B+] april 24th 2006

The Old Man and Jesus: Prophets of Rebellion, Marcelo Andrade. [B+] april 25th 2006
[This is a documentary that an alumnus of my school made. He came back on campus to show it and I was pretty taken with it. It's not going to screen in any cinemas anytime soon, but that's not really the point. He's a member of a revolutionary group in Venezuela that's attempting to get a real people's movement going against the upper class in that country. Just typing that sentence made me feel like a goof. I'm not going to pretend having even a rudimentary knowledge of the situation down there, but there were a few kids, fellow students, from Venezuela, more specifically, from the affluent parts of Venezuela that seemed pretty shaken by the film. The Q&A afterwards got pretty intense. It was definitely an interesting event to attend. I had a few thoughts then that I wanted to share in the discussion, but wound up deciding to hold to myself and I can't really remember much about the film with sufficient lucidity now to really say much. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.]

3 days in the life.

2006-04-25T01:25:00.001-04:00

So I was originally going to post the next installment of my 5 year long Stanley Kubrick Fest '06, but I saw a movie yesterday that I kinda wanna talk about.

I saw Chantal Akerman's La Captive about 6 or so months ago and was pretty blown away by it. It was slow, but never boring, captivatingly mysterious and thought-provoking. It subtly steered my thinking in various directions without feeling at all like it was holding my hand or being patronizing. Simultaneously, it left itself open in many ways for interpretation. I don't know what it was about the style and narrative of the film, but it was one of the most engaging experiences I'd had with a film, or any other type of work of art for that matter, in a long while. I wanted to see more by Akerman, who I'd previously never heard of, but didn't know where to begin. Someone recommended Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which left me keeping my eyes peeled for screenings. Thanks to the Harvard Film Archive I finally got a chance to see it.

The very first thing I noticed about this film, in relation to La Captive, was how beautiful and colorful it was. Which isn't to say that La Captive wasn't a very nice film to look at, but it worked with a much darker, more limited palette than Jeanne Dielman. The sets in this film are surprisingly colorful, the images so perfectly, formally composed that you can't help but be struck by the photography. The camera remains motionless throughout the course of this nearly three and a half hour long film and yet it is almost always visually captivating.

Jeanne Dielman painstakingly documents three days in the life of a Belgian widow, choosing to document the minutiae of her life in unrelenting detail. Throughout the course of the film, you will see the titular character take a bath, prepare a meal, prepare the table, wash the dishes, all in real time. All with a non-moving camera and with about 3 different angles assigned to the different rooms of the apartment she shares with her son. It's oppressive, but remarkably captivating. The framing, the ornate set and the wonderful performance given by Delphine Seyrig all serve to make this a surprisingly inviting and watchable film, relatively speaking anyway.

The first day proceeds fairly uneventfully. Jeanne's clacking footsteps seem to be amplified, and her movements are mechanical, something that zeroes you in on her routine very quickly, and also really effectively communicates the oppressive tone and feel of the film. This is a routine she does every day and she is proficient at it. Everything seems to be going normally until she gets a visit from a client and we learn that, in addition to maintaining a household, she is a once-a-day prostitute. Her relationship with her teenage son is cold and distant, they exchange a minimum of pleasantries and go about their own business, except at the end when Jeanne's son asks her about his father and she more or less tells him that she never loved him. Her son says that if he was a woman, he could never make love to a man he didn't love. She tells him he has no idea what he's talking about, he's not a woman.

It's a fascinating exchange, and one that I think lies at the heart of this film. As the film progresses and Jeanne's descent into a sort of domestic madness really starts happening, we realize that she's been subject to the needs of a man she didn't love for the greater part of her adult life, and even more than that, to all men, always. She's pressured to marry by her parents, she does. She has a kid, she takes care of him. It's nothing more. When, and I guess I should warn you that this sentence contains a pretty big spoiler, she eventually murders one of her clients, it's as if she is burning an effigy of her dead husband and of all men, I guess. When she kills this man, it is as if she finally kills the thing within herself that holds her to this life, and the ambiguous final shot doesn't really communicate whether she killed herself, if she dies of strange natural causes related to this symbolic inner destruction, or if she just dozes off at the table. It doesn't matter how she dies or even if she dies, she's dead. I've written a simplistic summation of a fairly complex presentation of this idea, but I think it's accurate. When Jeanne babysits the neighbor's infant child on the last day, it shrieks and bawls uncontrollably whenever she tries to hold it and calms down when it's in its crib. This may sound heavy-handed, but it's not. It'd be funny if it wasn't so devastating.

The actual breakdown that Jeanne Dielman has throughout the course of the film is perfectly rendered. There were moments in the theater where I actually felt myself going crazy along with her. The perfectly executed routine of the first day is perfectly photographed, choreographed, edited. By the second day, she starts making small mistakes here and there, the editing starts stuttering a little bit when it comes to her entering and exiting the frame, creating a sort of uncomfortable sense of displacement and mounting urgency to her routine and when she finally makes a mistake preparing the potatoes for dinner, it is seriously a big deal. By the third day when we start seeing new camera angles we'd never seen before, it's difficult to even zero in on the beauty of these wonderfully framed shots, because the sense of discomfort received from getting all this new visual information so late in the film overpowers the pleasure.

On the third day, during a 10 minute, or who knows how long I guess, uninterrupted shot of Jeanne washing the dishes, I saw that one of the dishes she put in the drying rack had suds going down it and I actually kind of freaked out a bit in my seat. I stared at the suds sliding down and couldn't handle it. When she finally grabbed the plate and rinsed it off, then replaced it on the rack, it was a huge relief. It's fucking nuts that a movie can do that to you. Jeanne Dielman is so densely packed with stuff to talk about that I'm almost embarassed to put this pretty cursory look at it out as on offering, but I can't begin to think about what the experience of writing a really long, focused piece on it would be like. Writing about it in this way helped me to think about it more and, I think, got me to understand some things about it that I had previously been confused about, so I guess this blog is starting to serve the initial purpose I had for it. Not to end this post completely like an elementary school book report, but I really recommend you check it out.

update: I was googling this movie trying to read more about it, because I really can't seem to get it out of my head, and I came across slant magazine's write-up of it. I think it's really pretty great and worth reading if more information on this movie is something you're seeking. That last sentence was written by Yoda.

April showers bring...

2006-04-01T03:03:00.000-05:00

... another monthly film log. This one's pitiful, too. But you see how I stepped it up at the end? Big time? Stepped it up big time? Yeah. That's how I want all of April to look. Little write-ups underneath ones I feel like doing little write-ups for.

______________

Dumb Comedy Tallies (all social situations)
Old School: 1
40 Year Old Virgin: 2
Anchorman: 1

The Man Who Planted Trees, Jean Roberts. [C+] march 1st 2006
Capote, Bennett Miller. [B+] march 1st 2006
Team America: World Police, Trey Parker. [D] march 7th 2006
Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater. [A-] march 7th 2006

The Hills Have Eyes, Alexandre Aja. [C] march 11th 2006
[I was excited going into this. I really liked High Tension, minus THE TWIST, and I kind of like that there's a guy out there like Aja, prepared to make horror grisly and gruesome and horrifying, without feeling gratuitous or disingenuous, like I imagine Hostel to be or know Saw to be. When I got hints of political allegory at the beginning, I was prepared to let myself love this movie, even if it was a fairly superficial and uncontroversial one. But then the story winds up getting real muddled and uninteresting and a guy gets his throat speared on an American flag and I start not liking it so much. Oh well. Maybe I should see the original.]

Inside Man, Spike Lee. [B-] march 21st 2006
[There's elements in this film that feel distinctly Spike Lee-esque and moments where I felt that it was clearly the studio getting involved. It bothers me that this wasn't advertised as the latest Spike Lee movie and it bums me out that the studios feel that his isn't a marketable name. I've heard that he cites Dog Day Afternoon as an influence on this and I really don't see it. Fairly fun thriller with some wonderful moments suffused with some equally terrible moments. Not sure I liked the story overall, either. Something about it feels off. This is the first Spike Lee movie I've seen that I didn't really like all that much. Okay, but not great. And what's with all the conspicuous product placement?]

The Warriors, Walter Hill. [C+] march 22nd 2006
[Maybe I was harsh on this. I do gut reaction grades in my log, but looking back on it, I definitely like this more than The Pillow Book and yet the grades don't reflect that. Fun/stupid adventure movie.]

The Pillow Book, Peter Greenaway. [B] march 22nd 2006
[Wonderful for the first half hour/forty minutes. Mediocre to bad once Ewan McGregor shows up. The whole movie became too narratively focused at that point and all but abandoned the beautiful and startling abstraction that it was before. And then it got good again for a little while and turned bad again at the end. A real let down after such a strong beginning.]

Sans Soleil, Chris Marker. [/] march 23rd 2006
["/" means I had 2 hours of sleep when I saw this on campus and can't remember any of it, which I feel awful about. I've gotten my hands on a copy since then and will totally give it a legit viewing sometime in the near future.]

Freddy Got Fingered, Tom Green. [+] march 25th 2006
["+" means I don't want to rate it, but I love this movie. I don't want to justify it or discuss it much, or anything else, but I will say this: It's one of my favorites and I definitely think it's brilliant, and not in a novel sense but in like a "this is a great work of art" sense. No one else has my back on this and I don't expect them to.]

Dave Chappelle's Block Party, Michel Gondry. [A-] march 26th 2006

Brick, Rian Johnson. [A-] march 29th 2006
[Boy was I excited to see this and boy was I happy that it fulfilled all my expectations. I was considering giving it its own post, and I may still do that in the next couple days, so I guess I'll leave it at "it really blew me away." It seems to be a real divisive movie; most people can't seem to agree on the issue of its main stylistic element: the hard-boiled dialogue in the mouths of teenagers still in high school. Those guys are jerks.]

Invisible Children, three dudes. [A] march 31st 2006
[I can't remember their names, it's not on IMDB and I don't really wanna search around on their site right. It doesn't matter, really. The film is good, but it's not great. That said, it's a great film. An utterly devastating documentary about three pretty well-off kids that go to Africa to make some sort of documentary in an attempt to "find themselves" but instead wind up stumbling upon one of the saddest, most intense stories I've ever seen. Rebel armies in Uganda kidnapping young children, aged 7-12 and forcing them to become soldiers in their armies, brainwashing them, torturing them, subjecting them to horrible conditions. Right now it's about 45 minutes long and the guys that made it are touring it around the US. They're hoping to make it into a feature that will get released next year. If it comes near you, please make an effort to see it, it's really wonderful, inspiring and heartbreaking and I think more people should become familiar with this issue and want to do something about it. I left the theater blubbering uncontrollably.
http://www.invisiblechildren.com Check it out, see if and when it's coming near you, as if anyone reads this, and see it. Seriously. I'm sleeping out on the street on April 29th because of this movie.]

Junebug, Phil Morrison. [B+] march 31st 2006
[I'm glad this was great. I didn't know what to expect of it and I was anxious that it would be another sort of generic "indie" mvoie, but it wound up being a really inventive, truthful and beautiful film. The audience I saw it with was largely unbearable, laughing at a lot of spots that simply weren't funny and betraying their contempt for the people portrayed in it. Their laughter reminded me of why I hate shit like Napoleon Dynamite: the entire joke hinges on you wanting to laugh at the people in the movie and letting yourself feel superior to them. Napoleon Dynamite is reprehensible, but this film doesn't have any element of that mawkish grotesquerie in it. Instead, the audience seemed to attempt to inscribe it into it. I hate how ironic my generation is getting; we're post-post-post-post-modern and it's really getting kind of unbearable. People can't be earnest without suspecting themselves or each other of sarcasm and it depresses me. This screening was just another example of that. That said, I thought the film was great and Phil Morrison, who was there to do a Q&A, seems like a stellar guy. One of the most insightful Q&A's I've ever attended and one that I feel took a lot away from.]

A little bit of something.

2006-03-02T01:53:00.000-05:00

I don't know why I've been sitting on this post for so long. I wrote this thing partially during the construction of my Killer's Kiss post. I cut it because it no longer worked there, but I liked it and kept it and, a few days later, expanded upon and outright changed it. I was going to post it with a bunch of other little snippets in a similar vein to my post before the Killer's Kiss one, but then I let it chill and now it's well over a month later and I just wanna put it out there and move on with my life and this blog. I guess I got self-conscious about posting something like this because I'm not entirely certain that I agree with it/it seems somewhat obvious and almost patronizing to try to share with people, but whatever. A month away from writing it, I've decided I like it and am no longer self-conscious about it, so here it is.

-- I get frustrated when I hear people talk about films very simply in terms of "shots," as in "the shots in that movie were good." It happens a lot in classes and I often long for a more detailed explanation. I guess that's not really an issue in most criticism, and I'm probably just venting frustration I've been having with a class of mine lately, but I'm alright with that. A lot of films, even great ones, use standard framing devices (medium shot, close up, etc.) in very utilitarian ways: to communicate the information they want to convey in precise terms. This, to me, is literary. And occasionally, just like novels will occasionally dabble in poetry, a film will contain some really eye-popping, interesting or beautiful images and this is when films start to become truly and purely cinematic, as far as I can tell.

Experimental and non-narrative films are purely cinematic. Narrative films are always, by their very nature, partially literary. What I like is when a narrative film finds the time to offer up some cinematic poetry. Even more of a treat is when a narrative film finds ways to, either in its visual or narrative sense, and on rare occasions both, marry these two facets into a kind of hybridized form. I'd argue that Terrence Malick's films, especially his most recent three and double-especially his most recent two, have successfully married poetry and literature in both a visual and narrative sense, which I guess is, to clarify, a more pretentious way of saying that all of the imagery is deliberately and consistently interesting and beautiful while still conveying narrative information and that the actual narrative structure of the films are simultaneously meandering/poetic and effectively communicative and informative.

02.14.06

-- Film log for February.

Pretty disappointing. Even more sparse than January. And March is shaping up to be abysmal. I'm hitting rock bottom. I remember when I used to sometimes hit 3 movies a day. Or at least one per. I can't account for this drop.

Five Easy Pieces, Bob Rafelson. [B+] february 2nd 2006
Grand Illusion, Jean Renoir. [B] february 8th 2006
Killer's Kiss, Stanley Kubrick. [C] february 9th 2006
Quiz Show, Robert Redford. [A-] february 14th 2006
Tsotsi, Gavin Hood. [C-] february 14th 2006
The Alphabet, David Lynch. [A-] february 18th 2006
The Grandmother, David Lynch. [C] february 18th 2006
Lumiere, David Lynch. [B+] february 18th 2006
Contempt, Jean-Luc Godard. [B] february 18th 2006 (I was tired and kinda fell asleep during this.)
Open City, Roberto Rossellini. [B+] february 20nd 2006
My Life to Live, Jean-Luc Godard. [B-] february 22nd 2006 (Same deal as Contempt. I feel bad doing this to Godard.)
Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks. [D] february 22nd 2006
Rear Window, Alfred Hitchcock. [A-] february 27th 2006
Unknown White Male, Rupert Murray. [A-] february 28th 2006

Kubrick Fest '06 - Day One: Killer's Kiss

2006-02-10T03:44:00.001-05:00

Kubrick's second feature, Killer's Kiss (1955), comes as both a disappointment and a relief to me. On the one hand, I was totally ready to believe that this dude was a genius from the get-go. That he made brilliant films from day one and never managed to really screw up too bad. But he withdrew his first film from circulation and this one, which he let stay around, isn't that amazing either. Something about that, to an aspiring filmmaker, is comforting. Killer's Kiss isn't a bad movie. It's fine, but it's not amazing. It's not KUBRICK, and I kinda like that about it.

This is a really nice looking film. Kubrick's history as a photojournalist is immediately apparent here. His future meticulousness is also hinted at. I don't know how to put it, but almost every shot in this film feels very thoroughly planned out. There appears to be a lot deliberation behind the compositions that I don't see in a lot of films, unfortunately. Almost each frame would work well as a still photograph, which I think is a good criterion for judging a good shot. There are very few uninteresting images in this film.

As an overall package, Killer's Kiss isn't terribly stunning. The story is fine, but not particularly captivating and the acting isn't too hot, so it's really just kind of neat to see as a precursor to Kubrick's "proper" career as a filmmaker. The on-the-fly feel of the film is cool, too. It's clear this was made very cheaply and I like seeing aspects of that in the film, and how they were overcome. There are some stunning handheld street scenes that look like something straight out of Cassavetes' Shadows or Godard's Breathless, which is all the more surprising and impressive because this film precedes them by half a decade. They were shot this way primarily out of necessity, and yet in them I can see a precursor to a new style of cinema. That's exciting to me.

Also: there's some wonderful stuff in this film with regard to images within images, reflected images, etc. The initial moment where you see Davy (Jamie Smith), the pugilistic main character, in his apartment and his next door neighbor and love interest, Gloria (Irene Kane), can be seen out his window and through hers in her kitchen totally took me by surprise and got a big stupid grin out of me. There's some wonderful use of mirrors in the apartment and office scenes, as well.

And then of course there's the famous marionette factory sequence at the end, where Davy and the main villain, Vincent (Frank Silvera), play a game of cat and mouse among the various statues scattered about the huge room. The sheer number of human shapes scattered about the room helps mask both Davy and Vincent among them, so that their own skin becomes a form of camouflage. This, of course, wouldn't translate on color film because the actor's skin tones would have stood out against the solid white marionettes, but it works beautifully in black and white and is, more than any other scene in the film, probably why it's so often cited by historians and critics, an early indicator of Kubrick's skill at using imagery and abstraction to confuse and otherwise disorient his audience. His awareness of the black and white film stock's effect on the appearance of this scene also betrays his future involvement with film technology and innovation, although maybe that's a bit of a stretch. The fact that the marionettes that have been serving to disguise Davy throughout this scene later "betray" him by pointing him out to his pursuer is another brilliant touch.

A thousand pardons.

2006-02-02T00:37:00.000-05:00

Preamble
It's a cryin' shame, the way I treat this poor blog. If it were a kid, it'd be pretty messed up. Not like I'm a particularly violent parent, but I think I'm psychologically abusive. I make a nice lengthy post that I'm proud of, then I kinda sit back on it, thinking that I need to come up with something equally substantial for my next one. I get bogged down in school and other activities and it's months until I see something that makes me want to talk about it as extensively as the last film I wrote about did, then I second guess myself, I wind up not writing about films I actually do want to write about, until I finally work up the nerve to write another post and then I start the cycle again. I'm sorry, Latham Loop.

This blog started off as a very idealistic thing: an outlet for me to write about films in any way I saw fit, even free-associatively, because the idea was that forcing myself to articulate ideas about films I've seen would help me learn from them. And then I wound up turning it into this outlet for formalistic mini-essays that ultimately wound up causing more stress to myself than catharsis. Now, I like that I'm writing stuff at all, and I have a tendency to organize my thoughts in a way that makes me lean towards essay writing, but I'm gonna try to be a little less high strung in regards to this thing. I may not be able to unclench my jaw while I'm walking down a city street, but god damn it, I think I can do it on the internet.

Content: 4 little bits

-- Unfortunately, I don't have much to say at the moment. I watched Rebel Without a Cause the other day and absolutely loved it. I remember the first time I saw it, I just thought it was pretty good, but it didn't really strike me. I don't think I was paying much attention to it. Sometimes, I let my mind drift during a film and wind up missing a whole lot. Sometimes I'm watching it on my computer while eating a sandwich and wind up focusing on the sandwich more for the first half hour or so. I dunno. Stuff happens. But this time, this time I really paid attention, and I'm glad I did. It's really a very beautiful film. Sure, it's got some missteps, some stuff that seems comical, unbelievable, slightly silly. But it's also really spot-on about how much it sucks to be a kid in ways that few movies have managed. Rewatching it, and especially zeroing in on the screen test on the bonus disc of the special edition, I also got a distinct vibe from it that Ferris Bueller's Day Off, a movie I love, is really indebted to it. Plato's monologue about his parents fighting is, in delivery if not content, more or less the same thing as Cameron's monologue about his father at the end. Perhaps an obvious observation, but it was revelatory to me.

-- Lots of the extras on the DVD, at least the deleted scenes and part of the wardrobe tests, are silent. Kind of a bummer in one sense, but also kind of nice, because they function as miniature silent films on their own. I realized while watching Peter Hutton's New York Near Sleep in a class the other day that I really like silent film, especially less narratively focused silent film. Due to my aforementioned tendency to occasionally let my mind drift during a film, I find it refreshing when that doesn't really have an effect on my filmgoing experience. I'm not missing any dialogue, so I can interact very purely with the visuals and let my inner monologue go off on any old tangent I want it to. I really like that luxury from time to time, and so I'm glad when the opportunity arises for me to watch a few experimental films here and there.

-- I got that Stanley Kubrick Archives book by Taschen on a really good deal a couple weeks ago and it occurred to me that I now own two books on his career, I also have Michel Ciment's, and I've yet to see all of his films. This, to me, seemed like a silly thing, so I'm going to hold a sort of personal Kubrick film festival for myself. I'll be going through all of his films, or at least the ones really properly recognized in his oeuvre, from Killer's Kiss on, in chronological order. Netflix is a beautiful thing. Be my Netflix buddy if you want. As if "you," in the form of an actual reader, actually exist. My e-mail, regardless is andrei.samaATgmailDOTcom. I'll post impressions of each of the films on here. Hopefully. Maybe.

-- Last thing: I keep these little text files on my computer logging all the films I've seen, or at least I started to in late 2005. I've got 'em organized by year and month. Since it's the start of February now, I'm gonna dump January's here and just continue to do that each month. Hopefully February's a little more fruitful. "You're" gonna learn some things about me from this log. Like the fact that I have a huge weakness for dumb comedies. Fun stuff.

Wedding Crashers: Uncorked Edition, David Dobkin. [C+] january 4th 2006
Wedding Crashers: Theatrical Version, David Dobkin. [B] january 4th 2006
The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Jacques Audiard. [B-] january 5th 2006
Morvern Callar, Lynne Ramsay. [B+] january 5th 2006
I am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco, Sam Jones. [C] january 6th 2006
McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Robert Altman. [B-] january 6th 2006
La Captive, Chantal Akerman. [A-] january 8th 2006
The 40 Year Old Virgin, Judd Apatow. [A] january 9th 2006
Broken Flowers, Jim Jarmusch. [A] january 11th 2006
Nobody Knows, Hirokazu Koreeda. [A] january 13th 2006
Match Point, Woody Allen. [B-] january 14th 2006
Cremaster 1, Matthew Barney. [C+] january 17th 2006
The Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpah. [B] january 18th 2006
Stagecoach, John Ford. [B-] january 22nd 2006
The New World, Terrence Malick. [B+] january 25th 2006
Mutual Appreciation, Andrew Bujalski. [A-] january 27th 2006
Anchorman, Adam McKay. [B+] january 28th 2006
Save the Green Planet!, Jun-hwan Jeong [D+] january 29th 2006
Julien Donkey-Boy, Harmony Korine. [B+] january 30th 2006
Dead Ringers, David Cronenberg. [A-] january 30th 2006
Annie Hall, Woody Allen. [B] january 30th 2006
Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog. [C+] january 30th 2006
New York Near Sleep, Peter Hutton. [B] january 31st 2006
Rebel Without a Cause, Nicholas Ray. [A] january 31st 2006

"Well, the past is gone, I know that. The future isn't here yet, whatever it's going to be. So, all there is, is this. The present. That's it."

2006-01-13T03:54:00.001-05:00

As bad as it may be of me, I don't tend to sit through the credits of most movies. I get up after 10 seconds or so, just as the cast credits start rolling and I walk out of the theater, or I hit the stop button and get up and go do something else. Only on very rare occasions have I been so transfixed, so utterly drawn into and moved by a film that I must sit, must give myself some time to ruminate, digest and get a hold of myself before I can move on. That's when I know I've seen a really great film. It's not necessarily a sad emotion that motivates this need for repose, I've experienced this after great comedies as often as great tragedies, rather the feeling that I need this time. I felt that way the first time I saw Broken Flowers, I sat in a silent daze in the empty theater as the credits scrolled, and I felt that way again when I watched it at home on DVD the other night.

I found Broken Flowers deeply moving, as I often find Jim Jarmusch's films to be. For the record, I place this film at the top of his body of work, right alongside Dead Man. I love his somewhat fragmentary, vignette style of story-telling and I think it really serves this story of ennui and displacement extraordinarily well. A book I was reading last week really struck me in the way that each chapter stood off by itself really well as a self-contained work, while still helping to serve the overall narrative. Because I was still reading this book at the time, one of the first things that popped into my head as I was watching this film was how each chapter in it, bookended by slow fades in and out, could easily stand alone as a great short. It's a beautiful way to work, focusing on each individual moment so closely in lieu of taking the forest for the trees route, and I think that due to this method Jarmusch has managed to forge a very unique and beautiful cinematic language all his own.

Bill Murray's Don is a listless aging ladies' man. His every action communicates apathy, or at the very least a sense of futility. When his girlfriend leaves him at the beginning of the film, he doesn't emote. All he can offer is "What do you want me to do?" When he discovers he has a son he's never met, his excited friend Winston, played by Jeffrey Wright, tells him he should go on a journey to meet him. Don remains uninterested and lethargic, opting instead to sit on his couch in the dark. Eventually he agrees to go and, the night before, he has a solitary going away party of sorts in the form of a two minute long scene in which Don does nothing but sit on a couch, staring off into space while listening to Marvin Gaye's "I Want You." It would be easy to mistake the moment as self-indulgent, and I think it could be in someone else's hands, but Jarmusch is such an honest and genuinely compassionate and interested filmmaker that he manages to build this character in very beautiful, simple and subliminal ways with scenes such as this. Don sits across from a freshly opened bottle of champagne, presumably a celebratory drink marking the start of his journey to track down his exes and hopefully his son, but he doesn't touch it. It's the most melancholy celebration you've ever seen. The way Jarmusch drags the scene out for so long, building anticipation in the viewer that something is going to happen, that he will get up, take a sip of champagne, anything, is uncanny. It builds and builds and then the scene slowly fades out with the song. It's devastatingly simple and beautiful.

Equally interesting are the driving scenes that function as segues between Don's encounters with his exes. They consist of various shots of the road and Don driving while listening to Winston's travel mix, a disc filled with Ethiopian jazz. The fact that he's apparently chosen to only listen to this on his journey, that these songs have become a sort of funky mantra for him is fascinating. The songs groove in much the way you'd expect a ladies' man to, but they're mainly composed in somber minor keys. What you've got at the end of the film is one unwittingly groovy, yet ultimately depressed man who has just awakened to the fact that he has no idea where it is he wants his life to go and less and less time on his hands to figure it out.

"If you want the things you love, you must have showers."

2005-09-18T20:48:00.001-04:00

NOTE: I wrote/posted this in September. It was up for like a day. Then I deleted it because I was embarassed of it. It's not particularly good. Because I have no audience and no content and I'm thinking of resurrecting this thing, I've decided to repost it, unembellished. So here it is. I just shrugged.

Pennies from Heaven was not what people expected when it came out in 1981. It was overlooked then and has continued to be overlooked, which is a shame because this is a gorgeous, wonderfully choreographed little film. Audiences expected a sequel to The Jerk from Steve Martin and instead they got a pretty great bummer of a musical and his dramatic debut. At least, I think it's a musical. Everyone calls it one and it does indeed have song and dance numbers interspersed throughout its narrative, but none of the songs were written for the film and all of the numbers are dream sequences of some sort or another.

All of the songs are from the period in which the film is set, i.e. the 30's, and are lipsynced to by the actors, which is startling at first. Equally startling is the way that the songs are introduced, there are no strings swelling, smiles forming and lights dimming in this film. No traditional song setups. One minute people are speaking and the next a song is being performed. The first song comes out of nowhere within the first five minutes of the film and disappears after just a verse or two. This startling jump sets the tone for the way the rest of the numbers will be introduced. What's interesting about the way that the songs are used throughout the film is that they're not, unlike with most musicals, actually part of the plot. Sometimes they serve as a sidelong inner monologue and on other occasions they fill in the blanks in a conversation. In at least a couple scenes, a conversation is interrupted for a song and then resumes at the exact same spot. Time has not moved forward in the story, but it feels as if the song has embellished upon the scene in some significant way. The songs communicate something that a simple look or line of dialogue can not.

Pennies from Heaven is a pretty bleak film, something that is both startling and wonderful. The cheery songs from the 30's are ironically juxtaposed against a somber depiction of the reality of the era. Many shots in the film are recreations of paintings and photographs from the 30's and the numbers are quite clearly tributes to the Busby Berkely musicals of the time. The film recreates within itself the zeitgeist of the 30's and places it on top of a dark story which stands in stark contrast to it. Steve Martin plays a sheet music salesman who loves his job and the songs he peddles, but naively ignores the fact that business is not going well for him. The songs he sings are the ones he sells and they project a happy attitude that he stubbornly maintains despite the direness of his situation.

Over the course of the film things get worse and worse for its characters, but the music keeps coming. It doesn't overstay its welcome because the irony of the film is not simple enough to rely on the gimmickry of the concept alone. Instead, it feels as if the film becomes a response to the artists that created during that time, a slight reproach. Steve Martin's character is so taken with these songs and films that he begins to believe that they are true and that the logic they operate on is applicable to the world at large. This is of course proven untrue and the film becomes a sort of a reflection of the power of escapist art to take a hold of the naive and destroy them.

I'm going a bit overboard here, because it's pretty clear that the filmmakers loved the songs and musicals of the time and this films is lovingly researched in the way that it references the art of the time. I guess rather than a condemnation of escapism it can be viewed as a look at how powerful of an effect art can have on a person and a reminder of how it can just as easily hurt as it can please. The film isn't an all around success, it has plenty of problems, but I think it's well worth checking out.

"Some people need more than they got, other people got more than they need. Just a matter of gettin' us all together."

2005-04-23T19:47:00.001-04:00

I've been in love with David Gordon Green's George Washington since I saw it probably over a year ago. I saw it twice the day I rented it and I haven't seen it since, but I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. I probably think about it at least once a day. It ruined other movies for me for a little while. I've cooled down now, but I still consider it one of the better films I've seen in my lifetime. Imagine my surprise when, after doing a little bit of reading and talking with various people, I find out that apparently another guy had been doing similar stuff nearly three decades earlier. Every article I ever read on George Washington mentioned Terrence Malick's name, a name I'd heard before but didn't bother looking into for some reason, and the influence that it took from his work. Right then I knew I had a guy whose filmography I needed to start looking into real quick-like.

Unfortunately, I didn't do it real quick-like. I did it real slow. Regardless, I've delved into Malick's work now and I can say this: Days of Heaven is a hell of a thing. I unfortunately had to watch my school's fullscreen VHS copy in the media center so I didn't get the whole picture, a better viewing is probably due soon, but regardless of the inferior version I had, it's still got to be one of the most gorgeous films I've ever seen. I guess Malick likes to do this thing where he "discovers" his movies as he goes along, I'm assuming something along the lines of what Wong Kar Wai does with his films, and so when you read the screenplay of Days and compare it to the finished product, you find that they're significantly different. I like it when filmmakers can pull this approach off, because I think it results in some truly wonderful moments. I saw Los Angeles Plays Itself today and I recall the narrator saying that if documentaries can be admired for their dramatic qualities, there is no reason for a narrative film to not be admired for the documentary-like qualities it contains. I think that these are the moments that truly make Days of Heaven a great film. The film will cut away from the primary action of the story to capture wheat swaying in the wind or some people dancing around a fire, the idea being that all of these things are significant. All of them are a part of the story, and by taking a look at these things, the film becomes less narrative and more experiential. This film captures a time, a place, people. It's more than just a story. Watching it often feels like watching a poem or a memory.

"In this life and in this world, I want to do well."

2005-03-14T00:42:00.001-05:00

As I was watching Magnolia today I was wondering how it is that it managed to be as good as it is. There are so many elements in it that should wreck it: Julianne Moore's over the top performance, the heavy-handedness that permeates the entire film, the occasional self-aware bits that make you wanna roll your eyes, like Phillip Seymour Hoffman's speech about "that scene in the movie" during that scene. And yet the movie ends and I have gotten goosebumps a bunch of times, nearly cried like twice and held my breath a half dozen times, despite having seen it three times before already. During the segment near the end when everyone's in a car and crying, I thought to myself "Man, if I heard just the audio to this scene from the other room or something I'd be rolling my eyes so hard right now." And despite realizing this, I love it.

I think it's largely due to the film's ridiculous ballsiness. It's willfully inconsistent in its delivery, and I think that variety is what makes it a joy to watch. Like Blur's "13" or Pavement's "Wowee Zowee," albums that are so scattershot and all over the map that you can't help but love them, Magnolia experiments with many different visual styles. Frank TJ Mackey's (Tom Cruise) seminar is shot like a concert film, quiz kid Donnie Smith's (William H. Macy) scenes in the bar are written and feel like a stage to screen adaptation and all the scenes surrounding the game show feel like a crazy episode of the West Wing with all those long ridiculously coordinated and choreographed steadicam shots.

The pacing is relentless and I think that is probably very useful to it, too. I don't remember where I heard it, I think it's just kind of a cliché at this point, but someone told me that if the story and characters that you've created are compelling enough to the audience, they won't care if a boom mic or whatever enters the frame at some point, chances are they won't even notice. Magnolia moves so quickly that it doesn't give you the chance to notice its flaws even if you do catch them in your peripheral for a quick second, because by the time they've really registered with you, you're already in a completely different situation with a different character. Granted, I'm exagerrating a little bit, but the film is kinda loony, regardless.

I mentioned the heavy-handedness of the film earlier, but didn't really get too specific about it. Everything about this movie is big, the cast, the pacing, the runtime. So the simple themes of sadness and forgiveness are blown up as well within this story, to the point that it almost feels like Anderson's just trying to throw as much sad, pathetic stuff at his audience as he possibly can. There's an empathy that he exhibits towards his characters that makes it difficult to stay too pissed at him for painting them into these awful corners in life. Some stories end happily and some stories end badly, just like in life.

I initially perceived that final montage of all the characters singing the Aimee Mann song as nihilistic. All of the characters are singing and looking pretty bummed out and the last line of the song is "It's not going to stop so just give up." At first I was kind of alarmed by how pessimistic this was, but then I thought about it in relation to all of the ridiculous coincidences that occur throughout the film and I started thinking that maybe it's talking more about the strange coincidences in life and not about life itself. If that's the case, then the idea is more that we can't resist whatever curveballs life throws at us, so we need to learn to accomodate them and work with them, rather than give up altogether. Throughout the film I was under the impression that maybe these characters were all a little sad and pathetic and maybe to an extent they are, but when faced with adversity they display a surprising level of strength and resolve, and I think that this optimism carries over into the audience. The movie ends with a smile, a sign of hope for all of them.

"Have you ever seen a human heart? It looks like a fist wrapped in blood!"

2005-03-11T02:38:00.001-05:00

I've been meaning to see Closer for some time now, but despite that desire something always came up that prevented me from checking it out in the theater. I finally got around to it and, maybe it's because the last two movies I saw before it were The Pacifier and 50 First Dates, I was quite impressed. I'm not familiar with the play at all, so I can't comment on its transition to the screen, though I disagree with the criticism often leveled against the film that it feels too stage-y. The dialogue is fairly roundabout, but not by any means obtuse or difficult, in fact its terseness helped it feel natural to me, like a more realistic David Mamet.

The film was pretty visually subdued. Most of the shots in it are static, choosing to focus more on capturing the moments between the characters. This is an actor driven film and lots of the imagery in it is portrait-based, perhaps going in line with Anna's own beautifully photographed sad strangers. There were a few striking moments, however, such as when Clive Owen's character, Larry, walks out of the kitchen after an argument with his wife, Anna (Julia Roberts), and the camera hangs back in the door frame watching him from behind as he walks away. The camera shakes just a little bit when he stops, underscoring his own shakiness at that particular moment. That or the cameraman sneezed or something. Either way, his shakiness and vulnerability quickly give way to aggression, and after that he begins to attack Anna with all sorts of discomfiting questions that only serve to expand the rift between them, eventually making it uncrossable. He is not out for understanding at that moment, he is out for blood.

Closer is filled with moments like that one, characters constantly going on the defensive, waiting for their opportunity to lash out at one another and then going straight for the throat. That's sort of why I'm puzzled by all the praise I've heard this film receive for its supposed honesty and accuracy regarding romantic relationships. To me the film is not about those kinds of relationships at all, but rather about combat. At one point Larry tells Alice (Natalie Portman) that women are the territory for men and she responds by saying "It's not a war." She's wrong, it is a war for all these characters, which isn't to say that there is no love in them, simply that it isn't always their primary motivator.

When Dan (Jude Law) picks Alice up at the start of the film, it feels methodical, like he is planning out all of his moves ahead of time. When it is revealed later on in the film that he tells the cabbie she is his girlfriend before they have even introduced themselves to one another, that fact is emphasized. Later on when he and Alice have their argument in the hotel room and he walks out, sees himself in the mirror and realizes he has fucked up, he goes back to talk to her thinking that it will gain him ground with her. She sees this and cuts him off before he can lay his cards out. Every move these characters make is like a carefully planned move in a game of chess. None of it is motivated by their affection but rather by their desire to have or get rid of something, a constant juggling and re-valuing of their possessions.

In order to assess the worth of a possession, you've got to understand its relationship to you. As a result, there is a constant push towards "truth" from the characters that only results in them hurting themselves. By finding out "the truth," they can find out if the love they have is worth something to them, rather than settling for being happy with the fact that they have it. The most noteworthy scene in regards to this is the aforementioned kitchen argument in which Larry wants to know about Anna's relationship with Dan. He asks her many questions, pushing her in the meanest ways he can and reveling in her obvious apprehension and discomfort until she finally lashes out and says what he wants to hear, not a response but an affront. She answers his question in the most hurtful way possible. And that's when he tells her to fuck off and die. There is a strange sense of love in these peoples' relationships that they keep messing up with constant prodding. Even though he knows Anna has violated their trust for the past year, Larry can not muster up the strength to tell her off until she has said something hurtful to him first. The closer these characters come to the so-called truth, the further they drive themselves away from each other.

Let's see how long this lasts.

2005-03-03T16:59:00.000-05:00

So a couple nights ago I was surfing the web and thinking that I ought to do something more productive with my time. Thing is, I didn't just want to do something productive, I wanted to do something worthwhile, something interesting. "What is it that the world needs right now?" I asked myself. "What is it that we've got a serious shortage of that I could maybe take care of?" And then it hit me: Of course! A film blog!

I don't expect that anyone will ever wind up reading this, yet I'm writing it as if I intend it for an audience already. Kinda silly, kinda self-conscious, whatever. I'm a film student at Emerson College in Boston right now, I'm a sophomore, 19 years old, name's Andrei. Since I've been here, I just transferred in this semester, I've noticed that I watch a whole hell of a lot of movies. Like at least two a day usually. I usually look up some essays on the films after I watch them, read up a little bit and that's the end of the story.

So a couple nights ago I'm surfing the web and I see all these people keeping screening logs, writing about the movies they've seen, internalizing them, trying to talk about them and I start to remember how much better I process something when I try to talk about it and so here I am. If other people can write about movies, so can I. Maybe not well, but I think it'll help me out, so this is going to be a learning process for me. These are going to be my study notes, I guess. Hopefully I don't slack off on this thing. I suppose this was a foolish time to launch the thing since I'm going on Spring Break in a couple days visiting a friend and won't likely get the opportunity to update this until the week ends, but at least it's started. Now I just need to make sure it keeps going.