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