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