Cowberry Festivalia in Ranchland of Remainders

Finally, after a mild hibernation and slow return to a more habitable routine (especially in regards to all things dietary), I am back up in my mental workboots and am ready to close this festival out w/ a reflection on my last two days of screenings. If we want to think of a film like a few pieces of packaged recorded music or I suppose a festival of music, as a kind of fetishstic series of back-to-back Lancanian objects a that is enjoyed on the brainscreen within a particular set temporal frame, then a good film festival is like a parlor for phantasmagoric juissance, somewhere between Marx and Freud w/ Walter Benjamin, done-up ex nihilo, lasting about ten days or as long as yr libidinal economy can stave off a nerve-market crash – yr personal share will only grow in accursed intensity. The last two years have been, by and large, truly well programmed here in the Cowberry. If last year’s great films were more often jaw-dropping surprises from out of left field (and if ’07 was a much better year here for cinema generally), this year may overall look better on paper (perhaps just enough of its films having been from ’07). All the same, this is truly becoming an event that handsomely pays off my annual pituitary-gland-inflected expectations of it. As it becomes smaller in overall scale, the festival has at once become a mercurial monster made of much mesmerizing must-see musculature, towering mightily over its pervious manifestations. Though it is still just another mid-tier festival-season dumping ground, it is my mid-tier festival-season dumping ground!

Full Battle Rattle

Toby Gerber and Jesse Moss’s documentary seriocomedy is the most darkly funny and ultimately disturbing such American export to reach us here since the similarly wincing Jesus Camp. Like that humdinger before it, Full Battle Rattle supplies its fresh unit of incompetents and engineers of sicohistoric folly as straight-faced as you could please, but as it goes along one can almost see evidence of the cameraman shaking his head in disbelief at the vain-at-best comedy-of-the-absurd on display. Full Battle Rattle takes us on a journey into two-weeks-as-usual on the grounds of one hell of a clusterfuck: welcome to Iraq, California, a town called Medina Wasl not found on any maps, population some three-thousand-some-odd, brought to you by the House Committee on Ways and Means … wait, strike that … brought to you by the National Training Center out in a thousand-square-mile patch of Mojave Desert, near Fort Irwin, where expatriated Iraqi refugees, most previously living in San Diego, and military muscle in training for imminent Persian deployment play one hell of a game of house/laser tag/Dungeons & Dragons wherein all the programmed obstacles and cataclysms go particularly wrong by virtue of a brash mixture of utter incompetence (at the bottom) and much-more-destructive well-meaning-hubris (at the top). Insurgents in our fantasy camp are not played by Iraqis but by American infantry goons, many if not all of whom have already been to the front and who take pernicious kid-w/-candy pleasure in blowing imaginary shit imaginarily up. They are so good at what they do that near the end of training they turn a major public relations opportunity for the Major into a scene of Bosch-like mayhem w/ no likely survivors amongst the townspeople or the cavalry. High noon covered in fake blood, crash-test-dummy corpses w/ photo-real gore, and very real fears and frustrations, the plywood Baudrillard sets suddenly eerily prefiguring the real sets to come. Maybe this camp does work, though. Perhaps its real unspoken raison d’être is to prepare these boys for the loss of a number of their own rank when they finally get over there to face the insurgency beyond this bubble of simulacra, of which the expository closing credit titlecards tell us that they did indeed subsequently lose about eight. These boys are starring in a prophetic western allegory about their own miserable future with very real bodies on the ground and explosions that will shake the shit out of them and cause them to pass out from the combustion at a few miles distance. None of the dead dummies ever look like women or children so they’ll have to build the intestinal fortitude to confront plenty of that as well. When we finally see our reality TV storm troopers boarding the planes that are taking them away to war and temporarily (they hope) from their weeping wives and children, it is impossible not to realize that any laughter this absurd lesson-in-what-not-to-do-as-empire has elicited from you over the course of the film’s running time is now sticking in yr throat like sharp glass. When you then again are laughing at “The Cowboy’s Lament” – which plays over the subsequent credits and which you may remember Roberto Benigni singing in Night on Earth – you will bleed in agony, spitting-up.

8/10

The Sweet Lady with the Nasty Voice

I’ve been to Nagasaki, Hiroshima too

the same I did to them, baby, I can do to you
‘cause I’m a Fujiama mama and I’m just about to blow my top
Fujiama-hama, Fujiama!
When I start erupting ain’t nobody gonna make me stop.
– Wanda Jackson, “Fujiama Mama”

Wanda Jackson is one of my most verily prized female icons of this or any era, somewhere just below Louise Brooks and Catherine the Great and just above Clara Bow and Helen of Troy, so to see a documentary about not only her life and history but also her inspiring fidelity to God, music, and brotherly/sisterly love – plus her having been married to the same good-hearted and well-heated fellow for nigh on half a century – this being the woman who sang in the 1950s, or rather none-to-subtlety growled: “rock me baby! all night long” over and over until you had to go and bust a nut – is frankly not likely to disappoint even if it is full of doubled lines for the minds of television viewers whose active-faculties-of-forgetting have been periodically tampered w/ by advertisers as this is the kind of context in which the doc was built to be staged (and upstaged by market demands). Or the eye-melting chapter-break titles, which look like Marc Bolan’s birthday cake if you were on microdot. Yes, this a mere talking-heads built-by-numbers operation, but w/ a subject like Wanda, then and now, you are still doing the world a great service by cutting this stuff together in even the most cursory way. Wanda’s early rockabilly songs are not amongst my favorite tracks of the Sun Studios white kids, they are the best tracks period, and I’m afraid Carl Perkins and deeply-twisted Charlie Feathers were her only competition of any real consistent caliber. Wanda was the only woman doing this music back then and the effect that she had on the societal moors of the day made Elvis, her ex-boyfriend, look like an impotent ponce. Any woman who has subsequently gotten up with a guitar and a growl owes Wanda for their bread and butter or perhaps just their leash on capital-S Spirit. I know that most of the female singers I loved as a young teenager took all of their fundamental anarchic energies and confrontational, brashly sexual energetic from Wanda and so I have her to thank for all of them too: Kat Bjelland from Babes in Toyland; Kim Shattuck from The Muffs; mostly the holy quadrilateral, though, of Patti Smith, Kim Gordon, Julia Cafritz, and Jennifer Herrema – this doc, for understandable reasons, veers to Chrissie Hynde and Joan Jett doing the Original Modern Lovers when searching out her contemporary avatars, assuring it a possible latenight run on VH1. At least some Wendy O. Williams footage would have been amusing though, sheesh. It should tell you something, also, that both Bruce Spingsteen and Lemmy from Motorhead go to see her on two separate occasions, each requesting “Mean, Mean Man,” a song that can still make you hard when she sings it now in her ridiculous black, old-lady Grand Ole Opry wig. No matter the quality of The Sweet Lady with a Nasty Voice (such a good title you hear it repeated at least five times) in terms of its situation of the nuts and bolts, the film is as good a gift as you could possibly bestow upon either yr ears or sense of moral courage. If its on the box you might just get yrs off, hey ladies!? My uncle and I left as giddy as schoolgirls w/ naughty thoughts.

8/10

Korridor No. 8 / Corridor # 8

Corridor # 8 is a quiet, unprepossessing sort of a ramblin’-blues community doc the template for which is undoubtedly Errol Morris’s extraordinary Vernon, Florida, following the lollygagging madcapped amblings of its various denizens living by or off of the titular EU-constructed highway traversing Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Albania. And then two Turks walk into a bar, right? Well not exactly, but you’ve got the gist of it. Things are laidback and playing for a vein of playful-touching here even if the Baltic realities of racial, ethnic, and microscopic regional differences create more sensitive faultlines than in the aforementioned Morris precursor, also addressed as part and parcel of the two first-rate Russian features that played this years, Aleksandra and 12. If Vernon, Florida is more about economic disparity and dispossession unable to trump faith in “God” and “America,” Corridor # 8 looks at economic disparity and dispossession in terms of the projected other, almost always from a standpoint of well-meaning folksy sort of prejudicial ontotheological construction that seeks to make ‘perceived difference in the other' the final Aristotelian causation of its own perceived blight. There’s a lot of humanity and resolution-despite-absolution dignity amongst the strange faces and stranger worldviews we come ever so fleetingly to engage in director Despodov’s not-so-sunny-afternoon documentary gallivant. It is unfortunate because somewhere in there is an even better documentary about how identities are formed in these interstitial zones, and not just how they are merely preformed. A more critical gaze was needed to open up this subject and better gut it. If, like Lacan, we want to really look at a community we must start w/ the psychic epiphenomena at the neural heart of these human positive-feedback-loops driving the post-Marxist engine. We want to see the Real emerge as a proper sewing between the Symbolic and the Imaginary. Though we realize the symbolic Other is structurally incomplete, that should not stop our desire from searching for these moments where the Imaginary and the Symbolic are sewn together on the visage of the Other. This evidence of the Real w/ which art and storytelling (even in the form of jokes and word games) have always best supplied us. Here, in Corridor # 8, is a stylized imaginary fog of real voices and actions barring any other delivery systems of direct exegeses. Unfortunately, in this fashion, it turns its subjects into cutouts and itself back into its subject but not to any explicitly reflexive effect or affection. It is too much a costume show for its participants and its cultural signs remain curiously hazy or maybe just too shallow to get much of a read on. I cannot help feel that this battered people, resentful in their refusal to succumb to the tragedy of poorly flung borders, are finally just supposed to come off as grumpy kooks. Of course they probably are just that … amongst other things we don’t get to see. And we don't need the lower-right-hand-corner nightly news-style titles telling us who's who. Especially if the film resists doing so.

7/10

La Crème / The Cream

Of all the films I knew little or nothing about this year, La Crème was definitely the major standout. It’s basic plot outline actually resembles almost note for note the previous American neo-noir Broke Sky during their mutual first acts in that it likewise focuses on two men sharing the same job, nowhere near the top of the rat pile, who are forced to decide which of them will step down from their position due to restructuring, or face having someone else make the decision for them. It does not help that our sad sac hero François has to watch his eminently contemptuous wife unapologetically flirt and make-out w/ his younger and less beaten-down competitor-in-training. When François receives a canister of face cream for Christmas he is surprised to quickly discover that the cream changes the way people perceive him, while in no way actually altering his face (except to slowly give him exzyma, changing him from unattractive to utterly unplesant). Folks begin thinking that he is a huge celebrity of some kind. The film is a truly funny check-yr-fantasy ethical parable, then, detailing just what you can expect from that thing you shouldn’t have hoped for because it just came true. Sure through-the-backdoor fame allows François to finagle his way out of dept in the cheapest and most callow way possible by exploiting a charity for sick kids, get his rocks off w/ all kinds of esteemed female partners, shut his wife up and make her idolize him, make his miserable kids love him, and allow him to pretty much go anywhere and do anything he wants. We shouldn’t be surprised that there are complications: 1) the cream tends to wear off at the most inconvenient times as when one woman’s orgasm-of-a-lifetime turns to screams of rape as she suddenly finds herself downstairs beside the washroom in a nightclub getting fucked by a man who at best looks like a much swarthier version of a middle-aged Serge Gainsbourg; 2) yr business is everybody’s business but nobody really knows who you are (though one bartender is pretty sure you are Gérard Depardieu); 3) being loved continuously is ultimately as unbearable and quesy as being stuck on a rollercoaster; and 4) yr younger competitor, the asshole, knows about the cream and wants in on the action (and then proceeds to engage in brazenly public sexual antics of both the oneist and group variety). It is a fairly predictable farce in its rudimentary scaffolding, I will grant you, but La Crème has a minimalist lived-in style and genuine sadness and warmth to it that is entirely its own. Laurent Legay is absolutely great as the lead, the only poster in his flat’s main room being of Chaplin and the kid from The Kid, the one in the kitchen from City Lights, as his performance continually hits those frowning and flabbergasted Buster Keaton grace notes, similar to similar-looking Palestinian actor-director and oft-considered Keatonesque Elia Suleiman in his great features Chronicles of a Disappearance and Divine Intervention. This is an oldschool comedy filled w/ childlike Chaplineque moments when the social seems to have been conquered, put in its place, situated to please you, and then it up and knocks you down on yr ass again while yr not sure what just happened, the audience full of knowing laughter. The whole thing comes off like a postmodern Tati or Chaplin additional episode for Bunuel's Phantom of Liberty, and not unlike the winning French comedy of festivalia '06, La Moustache, shot in the style of one of critic-professor-filmmaker Harun Farocki’s unflinching video eviscerations of management seminars, job interview training programs, and Playboy centerfold shoots. Best festival debut feature for sure.

8/10

My Name is Albert Ayler

My Name is Albert Ayler has just beaten out previous Cowberry Festivalia ’06 contribution, the Keven McAlester-directed, Lee Daniel-photographed Roky Erickson documentary Your Gonna Miss Me, as my favorite music-related documentary ever, though it may not be quite as good as documentary. Who cares? It’s the story of Albert Ayler served up w/ an audio-collage of his own interview fragments and epochal compositions from “Ghosts” to “Bells” to “The Truth is Marching In.” As with the Wanda Jackson doc this one cannot help but be a must-see event of unmissable proportions, though unlike that one it never wavers or staples into the margins of its powerful flows. Does this one ever keep its grip! Garnished w/ amazing interviews w/ a relatively balanced but heavily medicated Donnie Ayler and the supremely massive wall of percussion-bludgeon that is the inestimable Sunny Murray who, I suppose, would about have to be that big. As clearly God (or at least some dude with a beard and flowing white hair) brought this movie here just for me there is only one thing left left to say: thank’e, from one universal Indian to another. Any film that counterpoints Ayler's music w/ both church-going ecstacy and race-riot agony pretty much has its finger on the pulse!

9/10

Cowberry Festivalia Day 8

Eastern European Cinema Night for Jiminy Philip Murder here at the Cowberry. I put one cup of coffee too many on my bleeding guts and forgot to bring any antacids along for the trek. This probably sounds like a seriously stupid thing to do, but I was quickly reminded that the guts are always a better judge than the ever-waffling cerebral cortex. They call bullshit when they see it and I usually have to run out after the movie and puke. When they see the opposite of bullshit I feel perfectly fine, walking on clouds. Thinking back into the life-maelstrom I now realize how wise it would have been to have listened to my guts on subjects even more important than art-appreciation. I would have dumped the walking mind-fuck that was my last lasted-too-long lover like a hot potato in less than a week and would have known long before she started banging that war vet that my previous long-term live-in-partner and I were sadly through. You go stomach! And were you ever on last night! One cup of coffee too many can prove truly inspirational in terms of character assessment, be it a film or a fuck-buddy whose character is in need of same.

Pora umierac / Time to Die

While I really wanted to like this resplendent Polish chiaroscuro black&white old-biddy-and-her-dog picture w/ its glorious decompressing lenses and filters, invoking dream, memory, and the epistemological alienation of its seriously wrinkled protagonist, the guts knew better and balked. In short, Time to Die made me puke in an alley behind the theater afterward and I hold it entirely accountable. The guts were sadly right, as they always seem to be, this gloriously stylized death-fable having a script that forces its exultant and dynamic 91-year-old lead, Danuta Szaflarska, to pull off some risibly cute festival-audience-pleasing horseshit in the service of demonstrating that the cantankerous centennial-pushing matron has a heart-of-something-much-closer-to-gold than she is willing to let on in her obstinate solitary zealousness. When nobody is looking the old bat twirls in the rain and giddily rides the child’s swing still anachronistically hung from the trees in the garden. She tells somebody off then fondly gazes at them from her window like the codeine is suddenly taking effect. Then there is her dog. That fucking dog! The thing is better trained than a kid and taps more reaction shots for all their sap than that fucking Jerry Maguire pipsqueak blond-o or even Dakota Fanblade (sic), answering the fucking phone not once but twice when the old lady has trouble getting down the stairs. Here is a dog you want to frankly kick and kick hard. If O’Horten was an embarrassing feel-good film about a 67-yeat-old’s solitude & forced retirement made by a middle-aged wanker who doesn’t know a kidney stone from a colostomy bag, Time to Die, though still decidedly the superior film, one-ups it by giving the same feel-good treatment to an even older person who is not only shirked off by her asshole Oliver Platt-looking son and his fat little bitch of an eight-year-old daughter, but whose time it will clearly soon be to die, as is not so subtly hinted at by the title of the film. While enough cannot be said about Szaflarska’s job of haughtily carrying what little of this movie there really is on her shoulders, digging into tremulous pools of lightness and darkness both, in league w/ the cinematography, it still all adds up to a movie that made me hurl bile on the rainwashed pavement and moan my tremendous discontents, the burning in my intestines and throat warning me off any such further indulgence in such sickly-sweet confectionary cine-atrocities. Blech! Still, it will warm audiences's hearts worldwide. Oh no … I … I think I’m gonna be sick …

6/10

12

Entering the theater nearly twenty minutes after the posted start time and having been looked over quite rudely in the WC by patrons irritatingly amused by my second noisy round of acid-reflux-launching, my guts still feeling like they had caught a surface-to-air missile on its way to take out a Blackhawk, it was very clear that 12 had some serious work to do. Thankfully this was work for which the mindbogglingly fun-but-dead-serious Russian export was exceedingly prepared, rife w/ no end of highwire cinematic pleasures and stomach-softening narcotic capabilities. Pure mainline adrenal fix. I was a big fan of the two previous films I had seen by actor-director Nikita Mikhalkov in my mid-teens, Dark Eyes (’87) w/ Marcello Mastroianni and the Oscar-winning Burnt by the Sun (’94) which I likewise saw on the big screen, but was in no way prepared for this always-captivating though nearly impossible-to-pull-off 50th Anniversary homage to Sidney Lumet’s men’s weepie 12 Angry Men. Just like in the original many of the manly aging character actors in 12 make us fear that at any minute they may keel over from an overacting-induced coronary, but that is exactly how these pumped-up testosterone melodramas are built to ride, baby, and we couldn’t, wouldn’t, and most definitely shouldn’t have it any other way! Don’t believe me, just ask the guts. I felt like I had taken twenty-five milligrams of intravenous morphine afterward and could have emptied a canteen of strong espresso and Pennzoil to no noticeable effect (though I settled for four Tums and half a bottle of Lurisia mineral water). The original 12 Angry Men is such a universal template that it feels built to translate, expand, amorphously absorb cultures, continents, and civilizations. Placing it in Russia and having the accused be a railroaded Chechen teenager - adopted son of the deceased, a retired Russian military officer responsible both for the grizzly shock-and-awe death of his biological family and also his subsequent, complicated salvation - immediately throws down the cultural-landmine gauntlet in a way that Sidney Lumet could only have dreamed of in his original liberal-humanist pressure cooker (not to mention William Friedkin’s soggy 1997 made-for-TV rehash). The faultlines go off the Richter scale in this new Mikhalkov razzmatazz version: Anti-Semitism; post-Soviet-collapse class relations; past communist affiliations; Caucasus-hate and immigration anxiety, return of the militarist repressed; plus a whole wide world of anxieties created, uprooted, and forced into radical schism whenever you put twelve pent-up dudes in a highschool-gym-as-proxy-deliberation-hole and let them throw medicine balls at one another or wield evidence-for-the-prosecution knives whilst confronting various levels of symbolic castration (or, to put it in fancy-pants psychoanalytic terms, castration in the realm of the symbological). The stylistic ingenuity of this overstuffed Kammerspiel gives it way more room the breath than the Lumet, and also to explicate the mental state of an innocent boy whom we are never allowed to forget is stuck in a very real holding sell not half as brutal as the prison of memory which he will never escape, forced to relive a past that was brutally torn from him in various artillery showers, a dog ever approaching through the fog of war, something horrendous in its mouth. Mikhalkov even manages to make the obvious metaphor of a bird trapped in the gym with the testosterone touching. How? The man is a fucking genius and always precise in his reigning in of all these excesses right before they sink him, then departing on a new line of baffling, head-rush flight. This is a film that teaches us why we all fell in love w/ Hollywood by demonstrating, pace Nietzsche, that overcoming the teacher is the best compliment you can pay him. Fuckin’ A! One from and for the guts.

9/10

Cowberry Festivalia Days 5, 6, & 7

Three days of festivialia have gone to vapor w/ nary a peep from me on the Cowberry. I can only say that a mixture of stomach trouble and the resultant fatigue/sleeplessness has kept me less spry than I otherwise might have been. I have been collecting my spirits and wiles for a heavy dose of blogorrhea. So get out yr shit umbrellas – a hard stinky rain is gonna fall. And it won’t be relenting for the next couple of days either. The festival responded to my complaints re: the brutal ass-waxing that was their botched screening of Wonderful Town and implicit suggestion that I will be writing an article on the fest for Senses of Cinema that could still go either way in terms of favorability (not untrue, though there is far from any guarantee that they will have use for such an article) by proffering six comp tickets o' my wax'd ass. Good karma, I say. Though they canceled Moscow, Belgium I was also able to get a pass to Gomorrah which entitled me to some fine hors d’ourves and rather decent conversation with a Colombian photographer named Alex doing PR photography for the festival and a batty old bird who proceeded to bash both Gomorrah and, get this, Goodfellas afterward. I ended up missing the 9:45 screening of The Lark so I caught up w/ it the next day though I might not have bothered if I knew better what was good for me. A bit of a washout that one. So, some highs (Gomorrah) and some relative lows (The Lark) these last couple days. No biggie. This is a fucking Canadian film festival after all.

Gomorrah

An adaptation of Roberto Seviani’s best selling and no-doubt-scintillating Neapolitan expose of the Camorra crime syndicate (by virtue of which the author now lives in hiding), Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah is interwoven, multi-tier storytelling at its very best, filled w/ stylistic swaths of blue-green alloy and a handheld camera that seems to move as effortlessly through tight crawlspaces and the backseats and trunks of cars as it does through the never-cutely-connected web of narratives, up and down the criminal food chain from micro to macro and back again, nothing here resembling the groaning pinwheel horseshit of convenience that makes such claptrap hokum as Haggis’s Crash or, say, Babel so utterly laughable. Convenient narrative connections remain totally unnecessary here because each storyline finds its different characters, struggling towards their own various lesser-faire ends, each differently (but similarly) trapped in what critic Cristoph Huber of Cinema Scope so eloquently (and alliteratively) calls “the stranglehold of a predetermined pattern on the proceedings.” The story that most holds the attention is of a couple of young, duderheaded freelance badasses who remain unaware that they are even caught up in this machinery until it fills them w/ lead, these clueless olvidados too busy playing kindergarten Scarface to take account of the stakes. The higher up the chain we go the more of the same we see. Even the big players are walking a tightrope, nobody willing to pay for the bill of goods sold to them in order to certify their compliance. But comply they must, as the odds of walking away from the system are nil. That’s how capitalism works, sucka: once you buy in ain’t nobody gonna pay you out – not beyond the price of a bullet. Kent Jones, as usual, puts it better than I could: “Gomorrah is just the movie for a country that has installed a true despot in office not once, not twice, but three times.” Indeed, this is the ultimate crime movie for Berlusconi’s fascist-fuck-you Italy and, as such, the best and most prescient Italian crime-as-big-business film since Francesco Rosi’s 1973 masterpiece Lucky Luciano. A near-masterpiece, this one, from a national cinema presumed dead in the water. If the elliptical structure leaves some audience members confused, just imagine how the cops must feel (or the ones who aren’t being paid off anyway).

8/10

The Lark

The debut feature of the U.K. theater group calling itself the War-rag Collective, The Lark is an occasionally riveting psychodrama early on because it throws us right into an expressionistic nightmare world of psychosis and confusion and doesn’t apologize for refusing to explain anything, but the more everything coheres and we begin to think outside of the protagonist’s boxhead the more this warehouse fever starts to feel old-hat cloying. Balls-out expressionism has never worked well on a miniscule budget or w/ excruciatingly stagy set pieces (what can you expect from a theater troupe?) and, ultimately, that is the problem. Having dabbled in psychosis I can tell you right now that the hallucinations that The Lark presents to us are seriously fucking lightweight, but how could they be otherwise? What it does get right, however, is the resultant confusion, which is why the film loses all of its appeal when it starts waking us up from the nightmare and providing the obvious answers we see coming a mile away and are not, I would hope, too stupid to figure out for ourselves. Groan. Why do we always have to have this shit rammed down our throat? Why can’t a movie fuck me up and leave me that way? I prefer a meltdown that keeps on giving. No need to see this one. If you want British expressionist crazy, you would be well advised to dig into Simon Rumley’s flawed too-eager-beaver but vastly superior 2006 med-skipping The Living and the Dead. I’m still scared of that one.

5/10

Confessions of a Porn Addict

A truly hilarious and charming-despite-itself peon to Canadian repression, anxiety, and class-A narcissism (the audience here was at capacity and truly in on the joke, Kevin Smith's new porn movie also having sold out across town) starring the always ridiculously self-righteous-no-matter-how-self-abasing Spencer Rice (of Kenny vs. Spenny, TV’s current number one no-you-didn’t-just-_____ fad), Confessions of a Porn Addict is as wonderful a waste of yr time as yr likely to come across in the malnourished landscape of current Canuck cinema. An increasingly self-and-sex-obsessed – though still fundamentally neutered – culture gets the jackboot treatment from Rice (playing “My name is Mark Tobias and I am a porn addict”), director/editor buddy Duncan Christie, and their coterie of comic collaborators, some unwittingly so (famous porn guru Rob Black who appears to believe in the old adage that no publicity is bad publicity) and some so in on the joke they fucking steel it (Yuk-Yuk’s founder Mark Breslin in the comic performance of the year as Tobias’s in-over-his-cock’s-head sponsor). Tobias has a court case pending, having been caught manhandling himself in his favorite video store after an adult video’s cover pushed his buttons, and has hired a film crew and entered rehab in the hopes of showing the judge that he is at least making an effort (ps: never show anything like this to a fucking judge). All well and good until another self-abuser sees a picture of Tobias's estranged wife and recognizes her as Felice-Shayo, star of a recent Rob Black production in which she gets her first anal from a man in a bunny mask. Needless to say, this doesn’t sit well with our hero, though he was too busy watching porn to pay attention to the missus when she was actually, you know, like, around. So they all decamp for the San Fernando valley to find Mark’s wife and infiltrate the porn world (both in this production and as this production), whereby a male Marilyn impersonator in the throws of a crack binge, and a resolve-testing massage later, our couple is reunited during the filming of an extreme bukaki party. Needless to say the romantic kiss of reconciliation had half the audience howling w/ laughter and the other half retching, most people doing one or the other (or both) whilst rolling in the aisle, my national pride having been briefly reawakened.

7/10

XXY

A tremendous film which, unfortunately, is too cloistered and not nearly emotionally expansive enough to be the masterpiece that it could have been, XXY is nonetheless another indicator that Argentinean cinema remains, alone w/ the cinema of the Philippines, the most neglected national cinema on earth. Sharing with Gomorrah a jet-chrome palette of extreme, mournful blues, one cannot help but conclude that this is precisely how the coast of Uruguay actually looks and feels, and Inés Efron as intersexed Alex (she of the titular glandular confusion, sporting both sets of genitals) gives the performance of the festival so far, or maybe just her unbelievable eyes do, and she looks quite a bit like both Carla Bozulitch (of the Geraldine Fibbers and Scarnella) and Tracy Wright (women the contents of whose pants I’ve been repeatedly suspicious about over the years). The tragedy of Alex’s story is all the more powerful because her confused parents are never for a moment unsympathetic, their genuine love for him/her making the collective confusion all the more moving. Dad, however, seems more content to see Alex as a boy (particularly after he catches her ass-fucking a confused teenage interloper, son of the surgeon they have brought in to take a lay of the land) whereas mom, who once dreamt of having three daughters, a dream now inexorably on hold, veers the other way, hoping to keep her a girl. Alex clearly isn’t sure that anything needs to change at all but, as such, is, at fifteen, coming to terms w/ the fact that she will always be a freak and that any sexual chemistry she experiences will always strike her as emanating from her own sideshow sexual indeterminacy. Do you love me? or are you merely curious about the carwreck between my legs? We all feel that way at fifteen anyway, so we can all relate, though most of us didn’t have to live there forever, thank fucking Christ. I may have wanted more from this film, but that is probably my fault. It killed me softly, all the same, and everyone should try to see it. Roger Ebert, who is always more sympathetic than I (perhaps because, as one of the South Park guys once said, every movie has candy and popcorn), puts it quite nicely: “this is not a simple film but a subtle and observant one.” Perhaps all I wanted, then, was another twenty minutes or so of subtle observation. Hardly a damning critique really.

7/10

Wuyong / Useless
It challenges the obliteration of memory, the over-exploitation
of natural resources, and the speed at which all this is happening.
- Jia Zhangke on Ma Ke's "Wuyong" fashion line

If anybody out there doesn’t think that Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke is one of the most vital cinematographic artists in contemporary cinema than they either are not doing their homework or they are blind and fucking def. Useless, his most recent proper doc (the same designation cannot quite be applied to his subsequent 24 City, which I, like most landlocked North Americans, have yet to see, as that film features actors like Joan Chen pretending to be documentary case-studies) steadfastly out-minimalizes the minimalism of his tremendously awesome fiction films by combining an opening tone-poem full of garment factory (read: sweat shop) tracking shots, and two sections of laid-back interactive documentary (only a few questions are ever heard being asked, but characters by and large address the camera directly in the latter two-thirds), to paint an abstract-expressionist portrait of China’s relationship to both high/low fashion and the day-to-day role of clothing and labor, suggesting how each become about different forms of bondage, but also about capital-L Life. From the sweat shop laborers to the Parisian models forced to stand as still as ghostly consumer-capitalist corpses atop glowing light boxes in Ma Ke’s designed-by-earth-and-decay line of titular clothing, made-up like they themselves were just drug out of the mud, whilst fashonistas gather around drinking wine and no doubt talking a load of shit, there is little sympathy here, as in all Jia, for those who do the outfitting, all of it reserved for those who sew and/or get sewn. The interview towards the end with a man who can no longer afford to make a go as a tailor, as a suit on the racks now costs less than a properly hardscrabbl’d one, and his touchingly shy wife unsure of what clothes her husband looks his best in, is one of the most sweet and moving scenes in all of Jia’s works precisely because no actors can reveal this much through their humble concealments, actors not tending towards humility. Though it moves like a snail and refuses to tell you what to focus on, this sublime piece of videography is amongst Jia’s most irrepressible works. Useless is never compelled to either dress up or explicitly dress down. It is refreshingly naked. Similar in some ways to Wim Wenders’ 1989 Yohji Yamamoto doc Notebook on Cities and Clothes but without the self-aggrandizing voice-over. A ridiculously underrated masterwork.

9/10

Alone

Horror movies, as everybody and their uncle knows, are about the return of the repressed. As an ontological materialist, the only way I tend to be able to digest ghost stories (as I find the supernatural about as scary as the devil w/ horns and his fucking pitchfork, The Exorcist having only made me laugh at how scary puberty and female arousal are to religious people) is if they skew towards the psychological (Lee Soo-Youn’s amazing and unsung The Uninvited) or are just utterly fucking unnerving (Ju-on, duh, the original – I never want to sleep in a strange bedroom again). Bi-directed Thai siamese twin contribution Alone (already set for American remake purgatory) tries a little of both, to its credit, but falters on both fronts. It sells out its psychological context w/ some truly daffy red herrings involving a sane character experencing ghostly epiphenomenon (which can perhaps be chalked up to a contact high, though that's seriously stretching credibility), and yes its ghost gets awfully scary at times, in one instance in particular I could imagine milk shooting out of an off-guard viewer’s nostrils, the tension remaining higher than in most of these genre exercises, but that tension is founded entirely on things we have seen before, which is the real problem w/ these damned ghost movies. Ghosts are just too easy, and we’ve come to expect them to be jumping out of closets and mirrors, grasping suddenly out from under linen, when we “least expect it.” Tired. Seriously tired. It’s a given that stories about ghosts, family, and righteous comeuppance go back into Asian culture long before Christopher Columbus let alone Poe, but that certainly doesn’t make these kneejerk mechanics any more novel, quite the contrary. As Alone starts off in Seoul, it is not surprising that it ceaselessly plays full-frontal homage to recent K-horror exports, most of the time coming off as the Coles Notes version of Tale of Two Sisters, replacing that film's near-comic whirligig of third-act-twist-and-turn brain freezes w/ one mighty clunker that a ten-year-old can see coming a mile away (though why you would bother to see it coming is beyond me, unless maybe you were ten; I know I couldn’t be). I’m probably being to hard on it, because Alone is actually brisk and fun if a bit lame. It’s short running time assures that nobody is likely to find it all that irritating, it does a wonderful job of burning down its creepy-cool house (an apparent must in these films) during the denouement, and the lead actress is well on the hot side of the hot/cold piece of nasty ratio. Go ahead and see it, maybe snort some milk out yr nose once or twice. See if anybody cares. Least of all you.

6/10

Cowberry Festivalia Day 4

Because my father was in town, I had a wonderful steak sandwich at The Vintage Chophouse for lunch. (I later took him to see the new Assayas which he liked, though I'm sure it made him wonder what the fuck him and his siblings will do w/ the farm when grandma bites it). This was the first steak I have had in forever that I ordered medium rare and received … medium rare. They cook their steaks from top and bottom so that the whole thing retains the same consistency. I heartily recommend.

Summer Hours
Perhaps this could be seen in terms of the modern evolution
of Western societies: history took place, but at a subterranean
level, unbeknownst to us. Its upheavals and what is at stake are
henceforth situated in a new terrain, one in which the cinema doesn’t
know – or barely knows – how to grasp the theoretical tools that
would permit it to analyze them.
- Olivier Assayas, “Modern Times: Edward Yang”

Assayas has said that Summer Hours is his “most Taiwanese” film as it is indeed aesthetically filled w/ shout-outs to both Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-Hsien, two of the greatest filmmakers of the last twenty years. I can see where Olivier is coming from, here (with his Yang-like focus on family dynamics and history and his Hou-like get-togethers with slowly roving camera), but he coyly avoids acknowledging that the anxieties beneath the surface of his wonderful new film are fundamentally Western and were also inherent to his early Ozu-inspired masterpiece, Late August, Early September. Both films are fixated on the pas de deux between art and capitalism in the West, bound up in le temps perdu. In the earlier film art was related to status and death, which it also is here, although age has sharpened Assayas’ critical razor and provided him more distance. Summer Hours is about art and estate tax. It tells the story of the death of a matriarch, whose uncle (and lover?) was an artist of grand social status and perhaps talent, and whose children find themselves uncomfortably in charge of the estate. A war is at play between capital and nostalgia. As two of them are bound to New York and China (new world order) respectively, and only Charles Berling’s pouty intellectual Frédéric feels a personal responsibility to preserve a past he cannot even face adequately without having a bit of a spaz, it is only a matter of time before everything is sold off to the highest bidder, perhaps Christie's in New York, nationhood having been outmoded. After a series of more blatant eviscerations of late market capitalism and the death of narrative (Demonlover, Boarding Gate), Assayas superficially seems to be doing something else altogether here, but is emphatically not. The West is getting better and better at outliving history (nationhood too!) and in the future we won’t perhaps know what “history” even is – we will not have access to our own narratives. It will be some vague, opaque database to which we have forgotten the password. Summer Hours is as leisurely and occasionally idle as its title suggests, but in no way does it deviate from the Assayas criticoaesthetic template – it is simply more leisurely, less confrontational than the recent and admittedly more powerful works, equally indebted to the Taiwanese masters as it is to Jean Renoir’s ‘choral’ films. If there remains any doubt concerning the prescient and most cutting critical edge to Summer Hours, one should remind oneself that the Musée d'Orsay, which originally helped put the film in motion as part of a series that would ‘exploit’ their collection, eventually withdrew their support, a problem Hou Hsiao-Hsien absolutely did not have w/ his more crowd-and-museum-pleasing Flight of the Red Balloon (of which even I am slightly more fond).

8/10

Broke Sky

Broke Sky wants so badly to embody the perfect, darkly humorous neo-noir (Blood Simple and Red Rock West particularly come to mind when contemplating its aspirations) that it starts sinking in the quicksand of its own self-consciousness right from the get-go and only recovers sporadically, making it all the more frustrating. The idea of a film about county roadkill collectors forced to decide who gets shitcanned because of a new truck that incinerates coon corpses as it rolls on down the interstate is fucking brilliant, as is the queasy use of actual roadkill (I would definitely not want to have been a production assistant on this motherfucker), but unfortunately the film knows how brilliant this and other conceits are and won’t stop telling you. Hey look at me! Aren’t I clever? It is precisely because of this that the few times the film actually surprises you w/ a twist, twenty seconds or so later you don’t feel surprised at all. It is funny, it is fucked up, Bruce Glover is fucking awesome, and I really had to piss for about half the movie but didn’t want to miss anything, but you know what? afterwards I didn’t care one bit because all it cared about was being clever and anybody can be clever. All it takes, really, is the unobvious arrangement of obvious things. And you know what? it's not even really all that clever. Ho-hum. The best part of this movie was the piss I had after. Helluva poster, though!

5/10

Cowberry Festivalia Day 3

The third day of festivalia was a day of things most wondrous and ulcer-poundingly aggravating (in no way helped by the chicken dinner I was forced by circumstance and time constraints to force down with the utmost haste, though I would later come to seriously regret this). Unlike the second day, which ended on a majestic high, the third ended on such a flubbed note I felt obliged to put a night's sleep and half hour of meditation between it and this written reflection. I imagine, though, that there are a very few of you out there who have been waiting in eager anticipation or even, for that matter, waiting at all. Welcome to my Charlie Brown nobody-loves-me blog. Fuck you too! Heh. Again, the ankle weights are proving most fortuitous right now.

Once Upon a Time in the West
(Thechniscope restoration from original negative)

My recently deceased hero Manny Farber, America’s greatest writer on the subject of cinema (who isn't Jame Agee) and one of its greatest painters, critically juxtaposed, in his most famous essay, “termite art,” which he loved, and “white elephant art,” which he caustically denigrated. This was before his wife Patricia Patterson started collaborating with him and all-inclusive judgments were excised altogether thanks to her judiciousness (or perhaps the earlier writings only provide the impression that his more blunt statements were such judgments, as they often seem lovingly intended if brash in character – such was Manny). Though Once Upon a Time in the West is one of cinema’s greatest totems of the White & Elephantine, I’m sure Manny must have loved it, as it also falls into another category he loved, “Underground Films,” not to be confused w/ experimental or countercultural ones – these were films whose “dry, economic, life-worn movie style … made their observations of the American he-man so rewarding,” more often than not principally about “barnstorming, driving, bulldogging.” Action films, then. Unwound films about the underworld. Once Upon a Time is, of course, as tightly wound as the fastest draw in town (each scene is slow and drawn out because we are perceiving things the way a quickdrawing motherfucker perceives them: in perfect, contracted detail), but otherwise fits the bill better than anything by Hawks, Walsh, Wellman, Kieghley, pre-Stagecoach John Ford, maybe even Anthony Mann. What separates Once Upon a Time is that it is film as Opera as opposed to shoot-from-the-hip existential mayhem – it is so calibrated that it can blow yr suspenders off in two shots at eleven paces. It is cinema-cinema, then, unlike those works by Farber’s heroes, and, for its time, it was the greatest popular exemplar thereof. There are still few, if any, what touch it. It’s life lessons alone guarantee its canonization as 20th Century must: never trust a man in suspenders and a belt because the s.o.b. don’t even trust his own pants; Jason Robards’ dying words, a bullet in the kidney: “Harmonica. When they do you in make sure it’s somebody who knows where to shoot.” Seeing the restored Techniscope negative in a proper theater was like a pillowcase of Halloween candy dropped from the sky. Paramount studios (who actually sent a liaison in Stampede garb to introduce) and The Film Foundation, under the guidance of one Marty Scorsese, have done an unbelievable (and no doubt unbelievably expensive) job sucking the earth tones out of Leone’s transcendent pop vision and blowing it back up into ‘scope, and I can now say that I have seen one of the great movies exactly how it was supposed to be seen. Now what else can you ask of a film festival? I beseech thee. More please! The Man from Laramie comes to mind (hint, hint)! Yee-haw!

10/10

O’Horten

O’Horten is pure festival film happy-go-so-what? dross. Equally dull and saccharine in its eager-to-please middlebrow quirkiness, it is the cinematographic equivalent of sugar water, all the more irritating because that’s about the only drink they seem to serve in these “arthouses” w/ any consistency these days. Of course, the bourgeois audience, patting itself on the back for going to see a Norwegian film, was elated every time they “got” a fucking sight gag as though they’d just finished translating Goethe from the original German. Directed by Bent Hamer (ironically also what I call my penis), the film tells the story of Odd Horton (what an adorably quirky name, no?), a 67-year old train engineer on the cusp of forced retirement, as he decamps on a cutesy-poo picaresque through the streets of Oslo after showing up late for his last day of work. Even the sad mournful stuff is supposed to make everybody feel good and edified. Fuck that! Thank God for the amazing DP John Christian Rosenlund, who captures winter palates as well as anyone and helps sell the many excellent aforementioned sight gags by using the entire frame. Star Baard Owe, who you may recognize from his work w/ Lars Von Trier and who looks like the Norwegian love child of Vincent Prince and Peter O’Toole (who would clearly be the bottom in that relationship), is also great. Worst of all: somehow towards the end this sugar water started giving me a bit of a rush, I actually found it winning me over and began to blush in shame. Then the film shat its senile pants and ended. What? Are you pulling my fucking leg? O’Horten may be a better film than About Schmidt but it certainly doesn’t have that old fart pic’s awesome ending. Quite the opposite. It falls on it’s sword (or ski, I guess) and impales its own limpid self. I left the theater wanting to beat the shit of an adorable old person, though, so at least I felt something. Still, next time I hope they actually bring in a new film by Roy Andersson or especially the significantly more justifiably bitter Aki Kaurismäki, the two cineastes Hamer keeps ripping his style from.

5/10

Wonderful Town

This is not a wonderful town, in fact Sunday night I had the worst experience I’ve ever had at this or any festival, which is really saying something. It has nothing whatsoever to do w/ Aditya Assarat’s very-good-but-not-great Tsai Ming-liang-esque tragic love story, as usual, but with the context of my reception of it here at the Calgary International Ha Ha Go Fuck Yrself Film Fans Festival. I managed to suck it in when some asshole in the lobby was talking loudly during Once Upon a Time in the West and they managed to totally flub every second reel change, but this Wonderful Town experience was a different kettle of rancid fish all together. There weren’t many people in the theater and when the absolutely gorgeous 35mm print of the film was proven to have French instead of English subtitles nobody got up or audibly guffawed. I was even sort of exited to maybe deduce some more French vocab from the experience. But no, fat fucking chance. The programmer, Brenda Lieberman, may she suck an exhaust pipe, stops the film, apologizes, and tells us that they are going to project the, get this, PREVIEW ONLY DVD OF THE FILM WHICH HAS WORDS IN THE TOP RIGHT CORNER INFORMING YOU THAT THIS IS INDEED WHAT YOU ARE WATCHING … FOR THE ENTIRE DURATION OF THE FILM. So instead of a gorgeous print – in which the opening shot of water and foam cascading against the shore invoked both the paintings of the master, Paul Cézanne, and the tidal forces which will consume anything (our male lead as standing-reserve here) that tries to separate this tsunami-ravaged coastal community from the symbolic-symbiotic innocence of one of its favorite daughters, a last desperate icon of what this community was before its spirit was covered in destroyed cars and crumbled buildings, then pulled violently back out to sea, only the buildings having subsequently been rebuilt, the spirit still squashed – what we got instead was a muddy, undetailed, out of focus, light-and-shadow-destroying, live public abortion. A WALKING ABORTION. And I don’t need to tell you that a walking abortion is the worst kind. Sure I sat through the whole thing. I had to have a hot shower afterward, too, for my trouble. It were as though I were the one who has just been fucked ungently by a straightened-out coat hanger for the better part of 90 minutes. In the words of Charlie Brown: AAAGH!

?/10

Cowberry Festivalia Day 2

Since I saw one of the greatest works of art ever committed to celluloid tonight it will be hard to not start grading on a curve, but if I do that then everything will get 0/10 and we cannot have that. It was a pretty awesome day all in all but ended w/ such an utter cataclysm that I am tremendously glad that I have these ankle weights in my apartment to keep me from floating off into the aether. Experiences this transforming only come every so often in a lifetime and this is my second this year (the other, equally amazing event being Charlie Haden and the Quartet West playing Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman” for a half hour in a church). Wow!

Hope for the Broken Contender

What can one expect from a video-shot melodrama made by eager neophytes in Calgary and Regina, for less than $7,000, about a young man trying to quit slinging crack by the railroad tracks in order to become a champion prizefighter, thus fulfilling his dead father’s dream? I will say this for Hope for the Broken Contender: it has a tremendous amount of heart and it is pulled off w/ a surprising amount of technical acumen, particularly in the video and sound editing departments. Charlie Robson’s central performance also has moments of genuine pathos – he appears to have a good sense of when to hold back to dramatic effect. That being said, the script is a mess and the central love interest (is that what she is supposed to be? it’s actually sort of unclear) looks twelve at most. Creepy (that much is clear). The blocking is contrived (characters speaking to one another w/ their backs theatrically turned to one another – what is this the 40s?), and the economy John Woo crime / action subplot is absolutely inane, further complicated in that its third act resolution renders the hero a total punkass bitch (though the slow-mo gunplay, belonging in some other movie altogether, does actually come off weirdly well, especially considering the absence of a budget). Twenty Four Seven this is not. Scheuerman and crew could have stood to learn something from Shane Meadows’ aforementioned testosterone soap. When you have a low or non-existent budget and are dealing w/ young gang members taking up the gloves you are well served by angling towards social docu-realism and understatement instead of full-on heartstring yanking – also best to avoid turning the women into risible clichés (in one case an explicitly and unapologetically racist exemplar thereof – the Asian slut arm candy was WAY too much). What you risk doing, and what Contender repeatedly does, unfortunately, is end up eliciting unintentional laughter when things are most supposed to count. If Hollywood actors would have trouble pulling the shit off then that doesn’t bode well for the local drama club. When trainer Joe gets emotional and tells his young, wet-behind-the-ears charge that he is the greatest boxer he has ever seen, well, one can only imagine what George Foreman could do to the poor fucker w/ one arm tied behind his back. This is a film that will only appeal to the most naïve of audiences, unfortunately, though the young upstarts involved do have talent and vigor to burn. I wish them the best of luck on whatever’s next. Please consult a few actual gang members on the script if yr gonna go this route again, though. Sorry guys.

4/10

Mýrin / Jar City

Clearly Iceland is a country invented for the swooping helicopter car-traversing-vast-landscape shot. Take that opening of The Shining! I have been meaning to check out Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur’s films since first reading about 101 Reykjavík (which I am now even more eager to get around to) and Jar City is an extremely promising introduction. Though it ain’t got nothing on Joon-ho Bong’s 2003 masterpiece Memories of Murder, this is a formally vivid and darkly moving policier w/ a real honest-to-goodness head on its mournful shoulders, if it remains unquestionably (and clearly quite intentionally) a minor work in scale. Jar City’s trump card is that it bespeaks a materialist ontology so that its dabbling in forensics and genetic science / ethics serves a bleak philosophy of life rather than too-easy CSI:Reykjavík titillation. It is a film about tragic genealogy and repression (buried bodies and origins, hidden mysteries and the pain and suffering that comes w/ digging the shit up). It also puts the seat of the soul in its proper place, the city of the title, a place where special brains are kept in jars after the obligatory autopsy. It has its central characters (all exceptionally rendered) ask the same existential question that Jude Law’s character in I Heart Huckabees found himself asking repeatedly in the form of an unwanted mantra like a gnawing upon the brainstem: “how am I not myself?” The answer, of course, is in the blood. Deeper than that, though, is the real answer by which you would be wise to abide: “trust me, you don’t wanna know kid!” Cans of worms get opened and it never ends until yr buried too. Powerful stuff, though it could have gone further.

7/10


Man on Wire

It is impossible not to be blown away by Man on Wire, though I defy you to imagine how anybody could fashion a documentary out of this material that didn’t blow you away, especially if they have sections of Michael Nyman’s score for Peter Greenaway’s A Zed and Two Naughts and Satie’s “Gymnopédie No.1” to cut the stuff to (!). Man on Wire tells the story of Philippe Petit, rock star of the poetic-terrorist guerilla action (Christ, the fucker even looked like Brian Jones when he was younger and actually pulling this shit off), and how he and a motley assortment of transcontinental cronies rigged a wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center and sent the crazy Pepe Le Pew bastard out, a quarter mile above the streets of Manhattan, to smilingly dance there, in a state of infectious rapture. The real power of Man on Wire (the title taken hilariously from the subsequent police report) is not, as many critics would have us believe, the presencing absence surrounding the present absence of these particular twin architectural behemoths, which goes unmentioned, but rather the effect that this transcendental roundelay in the sky had on the very real human relationships of those who came together to make it happen. The most beautiful moments in the film are of the preparation for this breathtaking coup of August 7th, 1974 – the frolicsome unity of the young, irresponsible, and collectively in love. The moment Petit stepped down off the wire into the clutches of the NYPD, nothing these beautiful young lovers had could ever be recovered – it was incontrovertibly sucked into the vortex of a too-great transcendence that caught the imprisoning eyes of a whole vampiric planet what wouldn’t let go. The most integral accomplice, Jean-Louis Blondeau, cannot speak of this heartache through the tears. The whole things is framed like one of the heist movies Petit gorged himself on in preparation for le coup, but it is really a tragedy about lost love and the families we build only to be shed like dead skin. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, these volk can never go home again. Kansas is but a memory, home being where the heart no longer is. Effortlessly intoxicating, but tremendously sad.

8 / 10


En la ciudad de Sylvia / In the City of Sylvia

In the City of Sylvia is, quite simply, one of the most sad, funny, moving, and exquisitely constructed works of art that I have ever seen committed to celluloid. On the surface it is merely a film about a beautiful and strange young man, habitually sketching the amorphous charcoal shrouds of women (or a woman that is manifested in each – in his notebook he writes “elle” under one sketch only to promptly add an s) who stalks a strange and beautiful woman he believes to be Sylvia, a chick he met at the conservatory café six years previous, through the meandering streets of Strasbourg (a city in which my first love lived for some time when I most missed her). One is reminded, of course, of Jimmy Stewart’s Scottie trailing Kim Novak’s human question mark through Vertigo’s psychosexually spiraling San Francisco only that in Sylvia the desperation so awkwardly worn on this young man’s face and suffused through his every move demonstrates in a way that I have never seen before what Pasolini once called in a poem “proof of love” – and not just love for Sylvia but for all Sylvias as for the pumping of blood through your own body like a tympani drum as you lie in bed dead sober, more powerful than any drug. This is a film about ridiculous desire and its tremendous gravity, and it encapsulates this like no other work of art I know. Only three films have ever done this to me before: Au hazard Balthazar; The Devil, Probably; L’Argent. The Bresson film that Sylvia most invokes, though, is Four Nights of a Dreamer, Bresson’s only romance (no matter what Paul Schrader thinks the end of Pickpocket means). This is clearly done intentionally, as director José Luis Guerín has gone out of his way to tell this dreamer’s story in three chapters: “First Night”; “Second Night”; “Third Night.” Amazingly enough, I would take these three nights over Bresson’s four any day. The greatest film ever about we desiring-machine monads, trapped magisterially in our eyes and ears, pumping pure life into the veins of our collective civic self. A miracle of a thing.

10/10

Cowberry Festivalia Day 1

First day come and gone, she went down like a good single malt even if I did awake in an apocalyptic, apoplectic doldrums to rival Othello’s death scene. Some days waking up just feels like shit and when one is not drinking or drugging one is obliged to take it and like it, pace Peter Lore in The Maltese Falcon. The Festival has cut down on the amount of films this year supposedly to increase efficiency and allows the volunteers time to breathe. All well and good, though it still took them extra time to get us into Alexandra thus causing me to walk my ass off to make it across the Bow River to Kensington in time for Triangle which itself had first reel technical issues, actually a good thing since it confirmed that the film was actually being projected on celluloid. Well I never! What will they think of next?

So, without further ado:

Aleksandra / Alexandra

The festival had great timing with this one considering the current crisis in the Caucacis. Sokurov’s masterful Alexandra follows the titular babushka as she travels into deepest Chechnya to visit her grandson, an officer stationed there. The concept is entirely surreal and is matched as such by the typically stylized performances and the deep, textural sepia of the images which makes the whole thing feel like somebody seriously muddied their oil paints, denaturing all of the primary colors, and which injects a vague air of death and dust into the rather bleak proceedings (it does not look dissimilar in that regard to his The Second Circle). That being said, Alexandra is the closest any Sokurov film has come to neo-realism, even invoking Rossellini as when our Mother Russia wanders from the barracks into the war-ravaged landscape outside, befriending another grandmotherly figure, an ex-teacher who speaks fluent Russian and escorts her through half-bombed-out buildings to her apartment so that our heroine may rest her weary legs. It is hard not to read the film as veiled allegory, which is in no way a criticism here. The figure of the mother has always been fundamental to both Russian socialist realism (dating back to Gorky’s Mother) and Soviet Propaganda (Mother Russia being like the Russian equivalent of Uncle Sam, only more guilt-inducing). She is a symbol to rival the bear its very self. And Alexandra Nikolaevna is, in her combination of irascibility and regal nobility, tremendously ursine, in no small way because she is portrayed by the physically broad and utterly regal opera legend Galina Vishneskaya, who though decrepit is not about to be knocked over by much of anything. Sokurov is one of those hermetic filmmakers who seems to work best when his films are at their most accessible and universal and in that regard Alexandra sits next to Mother and Son and his recent Hirohito pic The Sun as one of his very greatest fiction achievements. Though it has a sad familial intimacy and representation of military dehumanization upon men and those close to them in common w/ his Father and Son, this is by far the superior film. It ends, profoundly, w/ a sigh. Sokurov’s idol Tarkovsky would be proud indeed.

9/10

Tie saam gok / Triangle

An utterly berserk three-handed game of exquisite corpse in which Hong Kong genre stalwarts Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam, and Johnnie To (in that order) combine forces to build a heist film in triptych, Triangle is one drunken faltering beast of a thing. The order, if anything, seems ingenious. Tsui Hark starts us off in full Time and Tide mode w/ his typical scattershot combination of pharmacological stylistic kineticism (extreme close-ups fused w/ dizzying action) and narrative noise (endless plot points / apparently incidental characters dispensed like manic throwing stars), Ringo Lam reigns things in, cooling down the craziness w/ his typical second act morality play (this time without the black suits and skinny ties of which Tarantino is so fond), and then Johnnie To, the youngster here, loses his crazy shit all over the finale as things degenerate into a batshit metaphysical slapstick farce of radical contingency and explosively intersecting trajectories. So basically this is a game where everybody brings there own set of tools to bare, fucking w/ each other and seeing if they can nullify each other’s contribution. Not surprisingly the whole thing comes off as a bit of a navel gaze and unfortunately Johnnie To (the most fundamentally talented of the bunch) tries way too hard and consequently succeeds in undermining the whole project, though his section is the most amusingly diverting for all that. Because of him the film comes off like a lesser Sabu effort (Sabu being the Japanese genre metaphysician of radical contingency - Johnnie's Nipponese equivilent). All in all the film is a whole lot of fun and an utter ridiculous mess by the end. Will definately please fans of this sort of thing though it may be soon forgotten. I'd see it again.

6/10

Cowberry Festivalia Pregame Show

Cowberry Festival Itinerary

Well, the chips are down and Jiminy Philip Murder has secured himself a twenty pass (though I will have to go without my standard half-ounce of cannabis this year). So at very least, his proficiency with the short con notwithstanding, he will be seeing twenty films. Below is the schedule as currently outlined at the outset. I have put a star next to the films that are clearly unmissable. I have already secured actual tickets for about half of them though, as usual, this was probably not necessary.

Two notes: for some fucking reason they are charging $25.00 dollars to get into Cannes sensation Gomorrah on Tuesday (they better have some good Italian wine on hand or something) so I will be trying to finagle a comp ticket from someone (apparently more than half the seats are reserved for sponsors), and I am only going to see the locally-produced Hope for the Broken Contender because I promised the star / co-writer Charlie that I would (in case those of you with a good critical eye are wondering what the fuck that’s all about).

FRI 19
Aleksandra / Alexandra*
Tie saam gok / Triangle

SAT 20
Hope for the Broken Contender
Mýrin / Jar City
Man on Wire
En la ciudad de Sylvia / In the City of Sylvia*

SUN 21
Once Upon a Time in the West (restoration)*
O’Horten
Wonderful Town

MON 22
L’Heure d'été / Summer Hours*
Broke Sky

TUES 23
The Lark

WED 24
Aanrijding in Moscou / Moscow, Belgium

THURS 25
XXY
Wuyong / Useless*

FRI 26
Pora umierac / Time to Die
12

SAT 27
(day off)

SUN 28
Tôkyô zankoku keisatsu / Tokyo Gore Police
Corridor #8 / Korridor No. 8
My Name is Albert Ayler*

Burn After Reading

Les Fréres Coen deliver another one of their HitchockoHawksian wet dreams of a comedy – inspired, they claim, by the Bourne franchise, lensed in no way coincidentally by Children of Men cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (who also shot The New World, one of the best photographed films EVER!), and w/ a musical score familiar to viewers of any number of generic contemporary, Washington-set espionage thrillers – this time to the dead-on tune of contemporary politics both public and private, unlike, say, the a-couple-years-ago-in-Las-Angeles-county anti-heritage historical masterpiece The Big Lebowski. We are in Bush country the sequel, and it is as lonely a place for the punters as it is celebratorily, self-satisfactorily idiotic. Burn After Reading is an indictment of its characters, certainly, but the dour humanist critics who are always lining up to point out the misanthropy of the Coens are the real misanthropes, because they refuse to acknowledge that the stupid things that these complex caricatures stupidly effectuate through their affection and affectation are done in order to avoid the loneliness of this world, which paints their present a prison and is no kind of future – no country for old men (as it were). This is the loneliness of the Hardbodies manager (pathos master Richard Jenkins as Ted Treffon) ordering his seven-and-seven, in love w/ a dolt who breaks his heart w/ an unfeeling that is not unfeeling so much as selfish-feeling; it is the loneliness of that very dolt, McDormand’s Linda Litzke, who will step on anything and anybody to get plastic surgery procedures performed – including selling an ex-C.I.A. operative’s burned-to-disk memoir-fragments to a Russian envoy comically named Krapotkin – procedures she knows will save her from dying as alone as her hapless, eternally crooked-glasses bedecked introductory internet date, a sad sac sex fiend, who sits unlaughingly next to her through a particularly execrable Dermont Mulroney comedy to get to the pussy, a pure portrait of pastel loneliness, one dog playing poker; it is the loneliness of the career spook, bounced from his job for his drinking and mile-wide mean streak, attentively watching the host of Family Feud, Richard Karn (who is also probably a lonely asshole), unloosen those withheld “survey says” Intel specs in the middle of the afternoon, as he mixes his drinks to volitile effect. Only Charles Schultz and Jules Feiffer do work w/ caricatures who we love and need like these Coens do. Once again, in our era of freedom’s ferocious marketing, freedom means, as the beautiful and brilliant Arundhati Roy says, the freedom “to stay home with your washing machine.” So, watched with the right eyes, Burn After Reading, for all its cartoon ambivalence and gale-force goofery, is a film about puff-headed peons who evoke pathos all the same, similar in spirit and letter to Blood Simple, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and No Country, the Coen films it now, for my dollar-vote, joins at the head table in their gallery of giddy grotesques. Its murder set-pieces-de-résistance (the Coen special sauce as usual) alone guarantee it a spot not only with those films, but w/ Psycho and To Live and Die in L.A. as well. Tilda Swinton’s underdrawn “cold, stuck up bitch” and the curt pacing (part of the parody) are the only things holding the film back, and critics who are this week trashing it will once again have to listen to the rest of us quoting its bon mots ten years hither, Lewboski style. Yes, there is a god, then. A god of these small things.