Cowberry Filmflam

35 rhums

2010-03-04T20:26:00.000-08:00

Though it is not common to find anything much of value amidst the rambling and formless yayings and nayings that members of a seemingly endlessly broad film viewing web-public post beneath the “User Reviews” heading at the bottom of IMDB pages for pretty much any movie you can think of, it strikes me as unlikely that anybody is going to find a much better place to start assessing Claire Denis’s Pasrisian-banlieue-set Yasujiro Ozu homage 35 rhums than one Howard Schumann of Vancouver does by opening his evaluation of the film there quoting meditation guru Sharon Salzberg (the act of citation suggesting already that we are not exactly reading your typical autodidactic web commentary doggerel), saying that the world of the film is “transparent and illuminated, as though lit from within.” Indeed there are shots in the film – especially but in no way limited to those within the inviting and autumnal apartment that Alex Descas’s train engineer Lionel shares with his adult daughter Joséphine – almost suggesting that the actors themselves are the source of light within the frame, the hearths at the heart of the home. I can think of few films that exude such a keen, perspicacious sense of warmth. The only other films that come to mind are other films by Denis and the more fully realized later films of Hou Hsiao-hsien. Indeed the film that 35 rhums most reminded me of was Hou’s made-in-Japan Café Lumière (’03), not surprising considering it is the film that ultimately inspired Denis to make 35 rhums. In interviews Denis explains that she had always been deeply affected by Ozu’s Late Spring (’49), a film whose story of an extremely close widower father and his doting well-into-marrying-age daughter forced to come to terms with the fact that it is the daughter’s time to move on Denis always found mimetic of the relationship between her own mother and grandfather. She simply did not have the “courage” to embark upon constructing her own homage to Ozu’s masterpiece until seeing Hou’s likewise Ozu-dedicated Café Lumière. Both films begin with, and heavily showcase throughout, the gaze of the camera married to the movement of trains as they arrive and depart, negotiate intersecting latticework trajectories like those of their characters, demonstrating a sense of the manifold web of networks connecting spaces urban and beyond, and both are also heavily indebted to the work of their respective master cinematographers, Mark Lee Pin-Bing in the case of the Hou and Agnès Godard in the case of the Denis. It is no small accomplishment, considering the quality of Hou’s film, that the collaboration between Denis and Godard here is by a good measure the more triumphant. There are few films in existence with so palpable and intimate a sense of familial warmth as 35 rhums, all the more remarkable considering how much energy the film puts towards the service, in no way new to Denis, of deconstructing and recoding concepts of family. The trajectories of a handful of characters intertwine like train tracks bringing them into musical back-and-forth workaday dalliances as their private worlds intersect. These private worlds, never entirely private, are like boxes stacked in never-uniform rows, exemplified so beautifully by a shot of an array of warmly-lit apartment windows at night, not quite in perfect rectilinear alignment with one another, but a little off, like a slightly gnarly homemade quilt (an image that parallels a shot inside the Metro headquarters where various screens in ordered-chaos relation to one another detail the underground grid in all of its connected-disconnected complexity; a single shot that says so much more about this environment and its embodiment of disordered civic order than would any number of viewings of Tony Scott’s recent The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 remake). The way these close lives-at-odd-angles dance around one another is perfectly expressed in the film’s most bravo sequence: an automotive breakdown en route to a concert finds Lionel and Joséphine seeking out shelter with their two closest friends from the apartment complex – Gabrielle, played by Nicole Dogue, an old friend and possibly onetime lover of Lionel, and Noé, played by Grégoire Colin, a young man who has known Joséphine since they were both little and who yearns for her with the hardly-repressed blue-hot desire that Grégoire Colin is always yearning with in Claire Denis movies – in a bar run by the supremely gorgeous Adèle Ado. The characters by turns sit, stand, pace, watch each other, and dance, the trajectories intertwining, the participants both apprehensive and solicitous. Joséphine and Noé wordlessly negotiating unspoken and nebulous desire, disruptive intersticial micro-movements push-pulling them at close quarters, until he finally kisses her while her father watches uncomfortably, only to then himself start dancing with Adèle Ado’s hostess as Denis cuts to Gabrielle now watching this newly and querulously bonded duo, volumes of shared history and never-verbalized feelings writ upon her face. Each crossed trajectory creates ripples, the whole film swaying breathlessly with its characters, all to the accompaniment of The Commodores’ so aptly named “Night Shift.” It is one of the most exquisite scenes in all of Denis. Here as ever she is the contemporary filmmaker most willing to lead with her impressions, construct form as if from smoke, sculpt and elevate atmosphere to level of not just a poetry but a metaphysics, encapsulate physically felt, haptic spaces, and again and again say more about people with gestures than they could ever say about themselves in a thousand memoirs, while always leaving the viewer with just enough raw orientation so that part of the pleasure is putting what you are experiencing together for yourself. She continues to inspire and move me more than any other filmmaker. It is unfortunate that I had to experience the film projected digitally (thus robbing this gorgeous little masterpiece of much of its sharpness, shading, and contrast) with a bunch of sniveling rich WASPS who hated it. I have the fucking Palm Spring Desert Film Society to thank for that. As a final coup de grâce they told us that the filmmaker was in attendance for a Q&A after the screening when what they really meant – appallingly, unthinkably – was that some old dude from the Film Society was going to come out and, after some preliminary introductory piffle, put on a Film Society baseball cap that suddenly made him magically able to answer questions as though he were the filmmaker. It took me a couple of minutes, jaw agape, to process that what was actually happening was actually happening whilst my sponsor-cum-geocosmic-consultant, sitting to my right, who had been moved to tears by the film itself, now appearing completely drained of color, continually let’s-get-the-fuck-out-of-here elbow-nudged me until I finally got up and we loudly exited, making our displeasure at the fucking chutzpah of these swine demonstrably apparent. The nerve of these people. Anyway, we’re better now.

Some Seriously Reduced Thoughts Regarding an Onslaught of Recent Cinema

2010-03-03T12:09:00.000-08:00

Over the last month and change I have foregone blogging on the image culture partially due to a need to pursue other things, but primarily, I must admit, due to frustration at the films I was seeing and the fact that I have been so profoundly uninspired in terms of generating a need or desire to toil with language adequate to their too-often-too-paltry demands. Part of my frustration is that the films themselves so often use the same visual language the way a speaker might use clichés (nothing really new there), and that in the wake of a new renaissance in American cable television feature films these days very often seem so utterly slight in comparison. I have nonetheless been confronting a steady volley of film texts, sinking into them to the best of my ability, or combing across their denuded surfaces when it serves me, whether at the theater or on my laptop, mulling them over, and certainly finding plenty to digest, assimilate, or otherwise reincorporate into an underlining personal metatext. It’s just that I’m not sure what I want to say. Along with this comes the ever-present voice of blogger doubt: why and for whom am I even bothering to say anything? The answer is of course that it helps to make what I am experiencing and where I am at intelligible to myself, while at once at least attempting to reach out and start a kind of conversation, if finally perhaps only a theoretical one. What is most affecting me right now in cinema is the rendering of private moments, oftentimes serving purposes for me independent of the texts in which they are contained. Perhaps because so much of my life is occupied by time with myself, much of my rebuilding of myself stemming from a post-ironic need to affirm that I even am a self to begin with. One of the moments in recent cinema that touched me the very most occurs near the beginning of Clint Eastwood’s Invictus; a scene depicting Morgan Freeman’s Nelson Mandela making his barely ruffled bed after slipping obsequiously out of it in the morning, very much a man still habituated to the procedural protocol of day-to-day prison life, not unlike a kind of especially dehumanized barracks life (or my no-so-long-ago life in hospitals, psych wards, and rehabilitation centers, where the first things I would do each morning would be to pull the corners of two sheets back over the small lonely looking spot where I had just slept). That this seemingly inconsequential private moment speaks infinitely more to me, and in so much deeper a register, than the portentous scene that precedes it in which Madiba’s motorcade passes along a road between opposing fields with athletes lined up along a fence looking on – on one side white rugby players standing stolid and dismayed, the coach going so far as to foresee the end of civilization as they know it, as on the other black soccer players experience the event triumphantly, their expressivity and ecstatic collectivity of movement signifying that they are so much more alive – suggests why by the end of the film, when private moments of individuals alone with themselves or in dyads, triads, or relatively small groups give way entirely to national sporting spectacle, Invictus has lost me. The movies and I just haven't been comfortable in a crowd for a good long time. It is the same way I feel so close to Colin Firth when he is most utterly alone in A Single Man (though he is perhaps most alone wandering the campus where he teaches as opposed to in his home), a film that is so powerful to me because it shows how reaching a certain threshold of psychic trauma makes any kind of perception sting like hell. Firth’s George has organized and beautified his private world to such an overdetermined extent that he has made of his surroundings a narcotic, and like any junkie he winces when anybody or anything interposes, disrupts, or otherwise ruffles the sheets. He has lost his lover and has turned his whole world into a mausoleum of finery because he can hardly bear to see, hear, or smell anything anymore, repeated shots of a body’s slow motion immersement in water a repeating metaphor for the shutting off of his senses, the dying that has become his only reason for living in a world which he is already perceiving through a kind of protective integument. This perception-as-pain subtext also finds a home in Pedro Almodóvar’s brazen movie world melodrama Los abrazos rotos, a kind of ode to such Hollywood-on-Hollywood melodramatic kitsch as Robert Aldrich’s The Legend of Lylah Clare (’68), in which two movies-within-the-movie, one a frothy screwball comedy of the sort Mr. Almodóvar used to make in the 80s starring Penélope Cruz’s Lena, and the other a behind-the-scenes documentary-cum-act-of-investigative-jealousy, each bankrolled by her wealthy sugar daddy, demonstrate how cinema becomes a metaphor, like the orrery in the small beach community where the star and her director lover Mateo go to get away from her keeper, of how we try to mechanize the irrepressible chaos of desire at our own ultimate peril. The director Mateo is blinded in an accident that kills Lena, and as such serves his penance and is reborn with a new name (Harry Caine) and divested of the agony of having to see a world from which his glorious fetish object of a lover/star has been so unfeelingly subtracted. In the end Harry Lime finishes editing the principal film-within-a-film which Mateo has had taken away from him, consummating the relationship with Lena who is herself reborn as an image that he cannot see, becoming for him rather a new kind of tactile thing: a voice and a rhythm, fixed within the machinery of his film, perhaps also as a kind of narcotic. Other moments out of recent cinema that have reached me lately: how in Jennifer Lynch’s underrated Surveillance a surrealist logic of threes – not only is the story told in three-pronged parallax like Rashômon, but all kinds of things keep mirroring this structure (three cars lined up along the side of a highway, three video cameras in three rooms, etc.) – culminates in a subversively erotic, even pleasurable, ménage à trios sex murder that will remain in my head for a very long time; a series of wonderful scenes in Woody Allen’s otherwise pretty awful-if-awfully-harmless Whatever Works where characters come to accept things wincingly but with dignity, like we have to in real life, where other movies would have made a big deal of what a goddamn drama this all is, especially when Larry David’s chess teacher physicist Boris realizes that Evan Rachel Wood’s wizened hayseed Melody is dumping him and awkwardly-adorably tries to reframe the situation as him gruffly coaching her on the next chess move of her life after him, knowing that it is all perfectly reasonable but still fucking hurts; the moments in The Young Victoria where Emily Blunt, playing the child Queen with her eyes in the inverse way to how Anothony Hopkins played Hannibal Lecter with his, and Rupert Friend, playing Prince Albert, the man whose name became a euphemism for men's parts, express the give-and-take sparkle of emrgent coupledom between two intelligent and determined people, or the scenes in Orphan where Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard, conversely, explicate how a well-meaning marriage can become far nastier a monster than any murderous moppet of indeterminate origin ever could; or what about every scene in James Gray’s extraordinary Two Lovers where Joaquin Phoenix demonstrates in a way Ethan Hawke can only dream of how painful it can be to watch a lonely guy be charming especially when the precarious balance of the entire atomized dude lays so assailable in the balance? Though I may have seen and felt a lot by virtue of the cinema over the last month or so, this post nary scraping the scorched-earth surface, it is these films and moments within them that rise to the top right now. And I just wanted to share. The silence can get awfully deafening ...

Palm Springs International Film Festival: Final Four Days

2010-01-21T15:35:00.000-08:00

Appropriately enough on the final day of the Palm Springs International Film Festival, the Monday where they show all of the award winner and audience favorites, the torrential rain started coming down hard and it hasn’t stopped since. I spent the final days of the festival in too far-gone a stupor of cinematized neural overload to make appropriate time to commit my musings to communicable e-friendly blog form. I then spent another full day or two napping and reading a mendaciously addictive true-crime book, Most Evil: Avenger, Zodiac, and the Further Serial Murders of Dr. George Hill Hodel, ex L.A. homicide detective Steve Hodel’s follow-up to his Black Dahlia Avenger, in which he quite convincingly made the case that his father was responsible for the famous Black Dahlia murder as well as a series of related homicides in Los Angeles during the 40s and 50s. The new book finds Hodel expanding his investigation to include likewise convincing allegations against his father, accusing the old man of a spate of murders including the famous Zodiac murders in and around San Francisco in the late 60s and early 70s. I couldn’t put the fucking thing down. But with the book now finished it is high time I got my lazy ass around to having done with 2010 Palm Springs International Film Festival.

It was a wonderful festival, all in all, even if it did take place in what a friend of mine calls the Necropolis of Palm Springs, with an audience principally composed of bitter old WASPS and mainstream Republican homosexual males. Most of the films I saw did not cater to the narcotic, aesthetics-as-anesthetic needs of these dour, pain-in-the-ass Necropolitans. There was a particular trio of cackling old Christians that, every time they saw me at a screening, became visibly crestfallen, immediately aware that the following screening was going to fuck with their nervous systems in ways for which they were ill-prepared. I was like the angel of cinematic death for these poor creatures, unsuited as they were for anything that exercised even the most perfunctory interest in defying convention. This was a festival that will always exist in my mind as the festival of walkouts and vociferously voiced distaste. Nothing could stop these fucking corpses from lining up an hour in advance for films they had no business seeing, one after the other in an endless succession of misplaced cultural yearnings, a bare mimesis of participation in global culture that was not unlike witnessing the zombies, dressed mimetically in the costumes that defined their singular sociocultural positions and affiliations before the shit went down, returning in a mnemonic, automatist reiteration of consumerist habituation to the mall in George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Only this was the cinema instead, and by and large they no longer had any of their original teeth left with which to bite. Instead they bitched and moaned, tugging at the loose-fitting clothing of overwhelmed staff and volunteers, murmuring guttural disapproval like gay and/or gray Frankenstein monsters. As if to issue one final fuck you the festival gave the FIPRESCI prize for best foreign language film to … arguably the best foreign language film, the monumentally crowd-displeasing De ofrivilliga / Involantary, meaning that Ruben Östlund’s absolutely brilliant film was given one more opportunity to piss off fans between audience choice award winners on Best of the Festival Monday. My friend tells me he could hardly make his way to his car afterwards through the mob of incensed moviegoers wondering “what the fuck was that?”

A bevy of wonderful, fair to middling, and pretty wretched films kept me happily engaged between bouts of fastened-to-the-pavement zombie watching. The best performances by actresses were all by Korean women (one of them, Bae Doo-na, in a Japanese film), which is hardly a surprise anymore. I am thinking particularly of Kim Hye-Ja in Mother, Bae Doo-na as the wry and adorable Dostoevskian idiot of an Air Doll, and Kim Kot-bi as the shit-talking put-upon schoolgirl giving as good as she gets from Yang Ik-Joon in his own roughshod Ddongpari. The best actor award for me is an absolute no-brainer: Olivier Gourmet, know to even the most cursory of world cinema aficionados for his incredible performances for the Dardenne brothers, appeared in a total of three films that I saw at the festival and was brilliant in each. I especially liked him in Frédéric Dumont’s Un ange à la mer, which is also my vote for best debut feature (even though Dumont has been directing short films on a regular basis since 1986). Best cinematography I have to give to cinematographer Francisco Gózon for Altiplano, and this in a festival where two of the five greatest contemporary cinematographers, Agnès Godard and Mark Lee Ping-bin, were accounted for with new work. As for best film and best director, I have to give it a two-way tie for both: Marco Bellocchio for Vincere and Ruben Östlund for De ofrivilliga. Both of these films were sphere-splitting brain-dissectors.

I’ll put my top ten list at the bottom, following my roundup of the last seven films I saw this year in Palm Springs.

Looking for Eric

A new Ken Loach film is always a safe bet, and such is the case with the fine but decidedly underwhelming Looking for Eric. Nothing particularly special here but nothing to excite the gag reflexes of Palm Springs audiences either, Looking for Eric is a nice film that goes down easy. In a festival full of films that seemed too often like modern urban fairy tales, Loach and his regular writer Paul Laverty produced one of the most metaphysically kooky but uncharacteristically (for them) easy-going of the bunch. The film tells the story of at-least-twice-divorced Manchester postman Eric Bishop (played with sweetness and flustered enervation by the very winning Steve Evets), who at the start of the film is seen in full nervous breakdown driving his car repeatedly the wrong way around a roundabout until the inevitable accident finds him recovering in hospital. Back home we see the stressful working class circumstances that precipitated his collapse. Living with two stepsons, one black and one white, Eric’s home life is a chaotic madhouse run (and being run into the ground), in spite of his baffled and occasionally brusque attempts at fathering, by his two teenage children who have littered the place with numerous plasma screen televisions and all sorts of other dubiously procured bric-a-brac. It turns out that the final straw that precipitated his breakdown came in the form of an unwanted reminder of the past, established in flashbacks, when the grown daughter from his first marriage asked him to babysit his granddaughter, first picking the kid up from grandma, his first wife, with whom he bundled things terribly and the sight of whom drives him over the edge. Having been unable to approach her he sped off only to drive himself into the hospital in the scene in which we first met up with him. Eric still loves his first wife and knows that she probably hasn’t forgiven him, as he sure as shit hasn’t forgiven himself, for running out on her many years ago, unable to face up to the pressures of fatherhood. At an impasse, not knowing how to face up to his past or to cope with the hectic and dissatisfying present, Eric raids his son’s hidden-beneath-a-loose-floorboard marijuana stash, and smoking a joint of what is apparently really good shit, discovers that his French Manchester United football star hero Eric Cantona (playing himself), a near-life-sized poster of whom bedecks his bedroom wall, has suddenly materialized before him to offer sage wisdom in the form of bizarre-if-workable philosophical epigraphs and to goad the man into facing the demons of his past and moving forward like a champion. At first we might be liable to think that Cantona is the psychological projection of a troubled mind, a fact not made any less probable by the fact that he seems to appear at first only when the lesser Eric is smoking grass (the smoking of which Mr. Cantona obligingly assists in). As the film progresses, however, it becomes increasingly clear that the predominating explanatory methodology of these appearances is not psychological but rather metaphysical. What we are witnessing is not the hallucinations of a man whose psyche has been cracked by broken bonds and tough living, but rather a sort of mystical opening up of the laws of matter. We are first made aware of this by the fact that Cantona keeps doing and saying things (occasionally in perfect French) that it is not credible to believe Eric Bishop would be capable of projecting. Our suspicions are confirmed late in the movie when Eric Cantona, participating in a group dispensation of justice by videotaped humiliation and intimidation-though-vandalism of a psychotic thug who has turned the world of Eric Bishop and his sons upside down by forcing his son Ryan, through intimidation and extortion, to hide a gun under the same loose board where he keeps his weed, momentarily interacts with Meatballs, Bishop’s best friend from work and the pub, whilst wearing, along with everybody else in the mob, an Eric Cantona mask. This image of Eric Cantona, somehow metaphysically transported into the life of a fan who needs him, wearing an Eric Cantona mask says a lot about what the film is telling us. Perhaps our tendency to forget that those who inspire us are not just images on posters. Perhaps they are not merely masks of themselves. Perhaps they are real flesh and blood people who can teach us real things about strength, determination, teamwork, and faith. Perhaps the false distance we place between our heroes and ourselves, by putting them up on a pedestal, too often excuses us from carrying the flame ourselves, causing us to fail to see that we, by surviving, by retaining some semblance of sanity no matter what the world throws at us, by managing to raise children who have even a semblance of respect for us no matter what kind of front they put up, are equally heroic, or at the very least have it in us. Looking for Eric, then, is a sweet and compassionate film about degrees of heroism and the efficacy of faith in real-world magic. Kitchen-sink magic realism. It’s a perfectly nice film. I’m glad I saw it. Once.

Daniel & Ana

Michel Franco’s Daniel & Ana has the distinction of being the second worst film of the festival, and not by much at that. It starts out immediately on the wrong foot with a title card that makes an absurdly obnoxious truth-claim, stating that not only is the film based on a true story, but that it is in actual fact an exact detailing of the real events as they actually went down. Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that a film that begins by making such an overblown claim of verisimilitude immediately starts depicting shit that would never go down in real life the way it goes down in the film’s fucked-up counterintuitive universe. It’s hard not to understand why I wanted to see this film about a brother and sister forced to fuck on camera and the brother’s subsequent development of sexual feelings for his older sibling. It’s dirty, salacious stuff, and in the right hands could make for one hell of an uncomfortable exploitation film. And it is an exploitation film after all. The genre developed when crafty and unscrupulous, amoral producers realized that the best way to attract audiences to low budget movies that couldn’t provide stars or studio production values was to cram them full of shit that studios couldn’t get away with and market the films exclusively around this, promising more than they could actually deliver. This is exactly what Daniel & Ana is essentially doing for all its faux earnestness concerning its prospective status as important expose of Latin America’s gunpoint incest porn market. This whole things boggles the mind. With this material one would think a filmmaker would find something a little more shocking to dish-out than a wretched Mexican soap opera full of pouting rich people gazing at their various respective navels. When the central spoiled rich Mexican teenagers (not the world’s most sympathetic demographic to begin with) are kidnapped by three sort-of-mean lowlifes, escorted blindfolded to a not-very-secluded urban domicile, and made to stand next to one another in a stark white room with lights and a video camera, at no point up until this one have they even seemed mildly inconvenienced. When the head baddy starts giving them ineffectual orders and threatening to rape and kill them if they don’t do as they are told, the kids do start to look uncomfortable, admittedly. About as uncomfortable as the kids in those kiddie-porn-chic wood-paneled Calvin Kline adds years ago, only with significantly less art direction to buffer them. You almost feel like you are watching a documentary about the making of the actual film you are watching, focusing on how difficult a time the director (the head baddy) is having making these kids emote even a little. When they actually do fuck, with the assistance of a little blue pill plied upon the boy while his sister is in the other room essentially renegotiating her contract through forced sorbs, there is a very polite placement of hands and bodies so that genitals are politely blocked, she avoiding eye contact and he, looking like a skinny Mexican Dustin Diamond, allowing his bangs to hide his face. This could be any couple loosing their virginity awkwardly to each other. A scene that should easily disgust and arouse uncomfortably at the same time does neither. They are later dropped off at home and told to keep mum. Which they do. Considering that the baddies know who their victims are before they kidnap them, demonstrating this fact as part of their process of intimidation, you would think that they would also realize that these kids’ parents would rank among the world’s most likely to be willing and able to pay a hefty ransom for their safe return. Apparently this never crosses the criminals’ minds, despite the fact that ransom kidnappings are a fucking industry in Latin America. Upon being returned home, Ana starts putting the trauma behind her as best she can by postponing her engagement and seeing a psychologist (who upon being told of the girl’s unpleasant sexual ordeal sits next to her on a couch and places a consoling hand on her thigh which seems pretty fucking unprofessional), whereas Daniel skips school and goes to the movies, acting only slightly more sullen than usual. When his girlfriend calls his mom hands him the phone and he just hangs up on her. She doesn’t call back – apparently ever. Ana tries to talk him into seeing her therapist too. He goes there but doesn’t have the stomach to go through with the session. Instead he enters her bedroom the next night, having failed to find the footage of he and his sister in flagrante delicto online to jerk off to, and rather effortlessly rapes her. He’s pretty quick about it. After being raped by her brother in her own bed, and not wanting to tell anybody except her conspicuously incompetent therapist what has happened, she quite understandably decides she is suddenly very eager to get married to her fiancé after all and would just love it if he would take that job in Spain she was previously so skittish about. Problem solved. At the wedding Daniel get in one last lick by jerking off into his new brother-in-law’s drink before bringing it to him which, if this is indeed really a true story told as it really went down, was a pretty strange thing to cop to after having spent such a long time hiding even the basic facts of this story from everyone in his life. The final indignity is being told, again with those title cards, that this film was made so that the apparently huge underground market in gunpoint incest porn would be exposed. Really? It struck me that if Daniel & Ana is in reality a message movie that message is about really bad movies that want you to think they will be titillating but that just really, really suck. Look out for those. I should have known better. It’s my Achilles heel. If the basic plotline of a movie suggests taboo-smashery I will probably be there with bells on. Serves me right.

D-

Darbareye Elly / About Elly

About Elly is a pretty good pressure cooker from Iran that plays like an American or Western European play, notable for the presence of a number of supremely classically beautiful Persian women I would very much like to marry and have large broods of lovely mixed-race children with, that has a plot which very much plays like a long riff on Lea Massari’s disappearance about a third of the way through Antonioni’s L'avventura (’60), likewise suggesting that the dematerialization of one of its principal female characters involves some kind of unwitnessed death by acute ennui. Starting like a rather promising Iranian Eric Rohmer film (appropriate considering that the 89-year-old French master died during the festival) involving a group of Iranian friends retreating to a beach for the weekend to dance around love, desire, foreboding, humility, sex, communication or the energy of exclusion that often defines it, and the general age-old discreet battle of the sexes, the film takes a sharp left turn into theatrical where-did-she-go-and-why? chamber piece revolving around the disappearance of Elly, a shy, sullen-though-enigmatic (and bone-marrow chillingly comely) schoolteacher who has been brought along by one of her students’ mothers, Sepideh (Golshifteh Farahani, with eyes that pierce your soul and hang you to the wall), in the hope that she may get over the fiancé that she cannot stand and maybe make a good match with recently-returned-from-Germany and recently single Ahmad. When they first have a few moments alone Ahmad at one point shares a German saying with Elly: “better a bitter end than an endless bitterness.” Elly takes a moment to think it over, sighs, and comes to the premonitory realization that she entirely agrees. When one of the kids of one of the couples at the beach nearly drowns in the ocean while the bulk of the adults are playing volleyball, the exited retrieval and revival of the child leads to the sudden realization that Elly has disappeared. Has she drowned as the first prospective rescuer on the scene? Did she just fuck off as she previously has threatened to, uncomfortable with the whole situation and anxious to return home, despite the fact that Sepideh has hidden her handbag and cell phone to prevent just that? Nobody is sure and everybody is panicking. It makes for edgy cinema, everyone perusing every angle, the ever-suspicious authorities brought in, possible courses of action hatched, worked over, and argued into submission. Lies are told and exposed with escalating consequences as the confused and stressed-out group of adults uses the missing woman’s cell phone to contact her mother (who Elly has told to act like her daughter hasn’t even left town if anyone asks) and the last person she called, her fiancé who, for the sake of appearances, pretends to be her brother (though Elly has no brother). As the characters try to feel their way around the proper course of action, trying to keep the escalating web of lies, half-truths, and momentarily useful bluffs in orbit, wondering how much they can afford to disclose without exposing any breaches of decorum, outright transgressions of Islamic law, or without the late-on-the-scene fiancé killing Ahmad or Sepideh. This nearly comic juggling of truth and lies is clearly endemic to the repressive culture in which these characters navigate, and all the headaches and stockpiled deceits that come as its baggage, going a long way towards suggesting why Elly was fucking sick of it all to begin with and why, when her drowned body finally is recovered, it probably didn’t get that way trying to save no goddamned kid. A bitter end indeed.

Altiplano

Altiplano is a predictably gorgeous film from the same directing duo of Peter Brosens and Jessica Hope Woodworth whose first fiction feature after years of making documentaries together, the equally-visually-resplendent Khadak (’06), bowled me over at the Calgary International Film Festival a couple years ago. Altiplano – as I have said: the best photographed film of the festival – is just as tranced-out and Edenically calm-lake-surface-pristine pretty as Khadak, but is significantly more narratologically and humanly engaged, its directors putting pictorial splendor to even more satisfying use this time around. The film begins with two bravo sequences: in the first we witness a breathtakingly captured religious ceremony in the remote Peruvian Andes, wherein pagan native traditions are merged with Christian iconography in the form of a statue of the virgin Mary being hoisted and carried out into the sun, where it falls to the earth and shatters as the attention of some of the ceremony’s participants is distracted by shimmering pools of mercury foreshadowing the community’s imminent and catastrophic contamination by cavalier Western mining practices (the film was inspired by the real mercury spill in the Peruvian village of Choropampa in 2000); this is followed by the first of the film’s many mind-blowing 360-degree sequence shots showing a female photojournalist named Grace (the stoic Jasmin Tabatabai, exuding a rare screen intelligence), in the middle of war torn Iraq, as she is forced to photograph the brutal matter-of-fact point-blank murder of her Iraqi translator/guide. The rest of the film, a stark and powerful film about death, mourning, and the power of images (full of appropriately powerful images), details the way that these two worlds become spiritually and narrativistically intertwined. Grace is married to Max (the de rigeur Olivier Gourmet), a Belgian doctor who runs a remote clinic in the Andes. When we first meet them back in Europe, she has given up on images, forsaking photography because of its inability to change a reality which is harsh and unforgiving, he chiding her, insisting that events will never be real to people unless they can witness them vicariously through images like those Grace has made her reputation capturing. She remains unswayed, locked in despair and disconsolation after the tragedy she witnessed in Iraq. Back in the Andes we follow a beautiful young woman named Saturnina from the village of Turbamba whose young fiancé Orlando is the first villager to die of mercury poisoning. It is at the precise moment that Orlando’s body is returned to the village and the grief of Saturnina and the other members of the community is in full bloom that a group of doctors, of whom Max is the most unfortunate member, happen upon the scene, having just become aware that some sort of contamination is present in Turbamba, and because they are seen as members of the civilization responsible for this fresh trauma are met with a volley of rocks one of which strikes and kills Max, a fact which only becomes known to us when, in the next scene, the most remarkable in the film, another sequence shot, this one, in the style of Greek master Theo Angelopoulos, encompasses in its roving pan a mind-boggling temporal elasticity, passing over Max and Grace’s son hiding despondently behind a tall pillar, then over a group of people including Grace mourning his death, then back around the pillar emerging once again around the other side now showing empty space once occupied by the mourners, the shot finally terminating with Grace leaning solemnly up against the other side of the pillar from where her son was at the beginning of the shot. Now that both of the central women in Altiplano have lost the men that they love, Grace decides to visit the scene of her husband’s death in the Andes just as Saturnina decides to kill herself, filming her own death on the camera recovered from Max at the scene of his death by her brother, a camera Max once used to record video letters to his wife back home, by consuming a vial of mercury after stating directly to the camera that this is her last act of resistance against the West, the only one she has left at her disposal, and that it will not go unnoticed because of the camera, so that it will live forever. Grace, upon discovering Turbamba, joined en route by masked figures of local folklore who stalk the landscape and line her path, awakens in a hut to discover that her husband’s camera has been placed there for her to discover, turning it on she witnesses the suicide of Saturnina and her insistence that her death-as-act-of-resistance will live forever, captured as it is on video. At this moment, Grace, graphically and spiritually conjoined with Saturnina comes face to face with a powerful personal revelation concerning the epistemological, metaphysical, and social power of images. There is a powerful circularity to Altiplano, analogically paralleled as it is by the circular pans of DOP Francisco Gózon’s unusually versatile camera. Beautiful and extremely powerful.

J'ai tué ma mere

Written, directed, co-produced, and starring twenty-year-old Xavier Dolan, J'ai tué ma mere is a ridiculously accomplished debut about a volatile love-hate relationship between mother and son, taking its title from a scene, echoing a not disimular scene is the ultimate French language debut film of all, Les quatre cents coups ('59), in which the son claims at school that his very-much-alive mother is dead. An occasionally very funny film, it actually runs on a kind of deeply entrenched sadness, getting most of its emotional gas from the pain of having to grow up, lose ones illusions, stuck in the place between total symbiotic dependence on ones mother and an adult place of accepting her as human and imperfect but still necessary. The film is about the landscape of late adolescence and how its fidgety, capricious, going-four-directions-at-once inconstancy creates tremors within the mother-son bond and threatens to destroy the bond that the son’s conception of self still depends upon to exist in the first place. The film fastidiously captures a feeling that is universal: a relationship with a parent defined by love and hate mixed into a confused cocktail of emotion wherein the two components cannot be cleanly uncoupled. Though Dolan’s Hubert is queer, it would be wrong to suggest that this type of relationship with a mother is somehow quintessential of the gay experience, rather his sexuality simply adds another layer of distance and dissonance between mother and son, creating another zone of uncomfortable exposure for a young man already in the late part of a supremely awkward stage of development. The film begins with a close-up of the mother Chantale (played by the note-perfect Anne Dorval) as she eats an orange and then a bagel smothered in cream cheese. Dolan cuts to a two shot of the woman and her son, she involved in eating, he staring at her with self-evident disgust. Immediately the film captures the deep-seated pent-up disgust we often feel at the most simple everyday actions of people with whom we are forced to spend a great deal of time in confined spaces. The simplest thing, like cream cheese carelessly smeared on someone’s face as they are eating, can begin to drive us around the bend. Hubert finds a lot of his mother’s mannerisms, absurdly girlish-feminine outfits, and habits nauseating to an extent that drives him to endless distraction. She in turn grows alternatively defensive and aggressive with him, irritated by his dependency and simultaneous rejection, often losing her temper just as easily as he does. Though his mother drives him nuts, it is the relationship most central to Hubert’s life, even more so than that with his boyfriend Antonin or the teacher, Julie, who understands and respects him. Certainly more than his father who is an absent figure and only comes into the picture later as a ruse to bring him back into contact with his mother after he runs away, and then to ultimately send him to boarding school. From the beginning of the film we see Hubert directly addressing the camera in b&w asides, in which he talks about the distance he feels from his mother, about how he doesn’t or cannot really love her, about how much he wants to escape her clutches. During these asides it becomes clear that the opposite of each proclamation holds equally true: that he needs his mother, that he cannot help but love her despite himself, that no matter how much he wants to despise her he admires her strength and independence from patriarchal expectations. We find out that these b&w direct addresses are not interior monologues stylized to betray their Freudian “other scene” quality, but rather videos that Hubert has shot of himself talking to his camera. We discover this at the same time Chantale does when she stumbles upon the tapes in Hubert’s room and watches them. These strident monologues suddenly attain the status of messages left for Chantale to discover, the product of a yearning to communicate with a loved one that one no longer knows how to communicate with. In addition to this, Dolan’s film takes strides to undercut his protagonist’s combustive contempt for his mother by giving her space in which to come into her own as a subject within the film. There are two key scenes that reveal Chantale’s strength and determination in standing up to the imposition of male authority or control. First when she confidently takes charge of the situation when she and Hubert are reconnected at his father’s, and later, after Hubert has run away from boarding school having been beaten up by virtue of his sexuality, in the most pleasurable scene in the whole film she goes over-the-phone ape-shit when the school principal suggests that maybe the boy needs more of a male presence in his life. Her tirade is both funny, empowering, and made to remind us of how cruel Hubert was in an earlier scene when he tells her it is no small wonder she cannot find another man. The conclusion of the film finds mother and son reunited at the rural home in which the boy was raised, which he calls his “Kingdom,” intercut with Super-8 footage of happier times we are seeing for the first time, suggesting that it is not our mothers that we are angry with but rather that things cannot be as simple and wonderful as they were when we were young, before life got messy and complicated, our families broken up, and the joy and connection so much more fleeting.

A-

Un ange à la mer

Un ange à la mer, advertised online and in the catalogue with a cute still of a young boy in angel wings, was another big festival surprise and the last of many films here in Palm Springs to instigate monumental walkouts, going to show once again that you can do whatever you want to people in your movies but if you start killings cats, even pretend killing them, you can expect serious reprisals. The film begins with a Belgian family setting up house in picturesque Morocco, immediately planting us in the subjective point-of-view of the younger of two sons, Louis, as he becomes a tragic victim of his father’s bipolar disorder and its monstrous manifestations. In the opening sequence they are driving through the North African desert, young Louis hanging out the window of the car playing a game wherein father and son emphatically pronounce whether the occupants of oncoming vehicles are happy or unhappy, the father manically declaiming that pretty much everybody is unhappy, the son being more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt. As the son continues to play the game his father suddenly becomes remote and morose, suggesting that this car too is occupied by at least one very unhappy camper indeed. We don’t know the half of it. Early in the film the father (Olivier Gourmet of course), working (or not really working) for a farmer’s rights activist group and almost permanently camped out depressed in his underwear in the upstairs bedroom of their home, calls his son upstairs to confide a secret that the boy cannot share with anybody, especially not his mother: that dad intends to kill himself that very night. Obviously the unthinkably cruel secret shatters the traumatized boy. Though dad doesn’t go through with the suicide, Louis is henceforth held captive by the secret. He spends most of his time playing guardian angel, high up in a tree adjacent to the house, keeping an eye on the bedroom window behind which his depressed father sits alone, perhaps biding his time. The mother (the always amazing if strangely cold Anne Consigny), meanwhile, is carrying on an affair with another man, one with whom she swims competitively, and is unable to connect with her unraveling son or her distanced, too-far-gone husband. In one heartbreaking scene she brings the son and father together upstairs to confront them on their strange behavior, demanding that Louis tell her why he is spending all of his time up in the tree peering in on his father. Looking uncomfortably between his father and his mother, knowing he cannot betray his father’s trust, the boy replies that he is building a tree house, plainly not the case and simply one of the saddest things I have ever heard in my life. The father’s depression is only occasionally usurped by outbursts of rage and extreme hypomanic cruelty, he and Louis only bonding over acts of animal cruelty, such as when the old man, crazed and lumbering about like Mr. Hyde, races downstairs and gleefully tries to drown a cat with a garden hose - whilst repeatedly chanting "el pueblo unido jamás será vencido," in parody of the Chilean cry of solidarity - after talking his son (from the upstairs window) through the process of catching it with a simple trap baited with food taken from the fridge, or when, after Louis sneaks into the trunk of the car and narrowly escapes suffocating in there because he is afraid to let his father out of his sight, the old man drives him home and has Louis keep score of the number of stray cats the old man manages to run down en route. The film is mostly shot in excruciatingly sad close-ups, particularly of young Louis as his too-young-to-cope-with-this-shit psyche bleeds out through his imperious eyes. When at the end of the film the mother finally gathers her two sons into the car and decamps without father, we may be forgiven for being momentarily relieved that they have escaped the clutches of this unfeeling madman, but this relief is cut short when Louis suddenly throws himself out of the moving vehicle and into the arms of the desert night as on the soundtrack the voices of father and son play a game of word association, one of the pathetically insufficient ways in which they have traditionally bonded. The title of the film comes from a poem that the boy is made to memorize for a school recital, also repeatedly spoken like a non-diegetic refrain on the soundtrack, in which an angel is asked if it can understand the full scope of human suffering. Un ange à la mer is an amazingly disconsolate and grim film about an all-together-unpleasant species. And it will fuck you up. It is the opposite of J'ai tué ma mere in that the deeper you dig the more it is finally just about the catastrophe of being born into the world of adults who deform and corrupt us to the point where everything is irredeemably stained. I loved it.

Sergio

A first rate exemplar of the HBO-produced talking head documentary, Frontline veteran Greg Barker’s Sergio, about the life and tragic death of United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Sergio Vieira de Mello, was the only film the screened on Best of the Festival Monday that I figured I ought to see, having heard good things from a friend. I am glad I did. It’s a ridiculously powerful story told with a graceful elliptical structure meant to involve the viewer in the escalating tension of the man’s final hours during the ridiculously under-equipped rescue effort to remove him from the rubble after a truck bomb exploded beneath his office at the UN headquarters in Baghdad in August of 2003 whilst at the same time allowing for periodic digressions that fill in more of the man’s amazing backstory as the film progresses. Sergio de Mello went from being a young philosophy student at the Sorbonne where he was a post-Marxist radical who joined in the student riots of May ’68, throwing stones at police and being hit in the head by a police baton, causing a permanent disfigurement above his right eye. From there he moved to Geneva, crashing on a friend’s couch, and decided that thought on its own was nothing without action, a realization that saw him seek employment with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. He participated in fieldwork in Bangladesh during its war of independence in 1971 and Cyprus after the Turkish invasion in 1974. He later became the first and only UN Representative to hold talks with the Khmer Rouge, ultimately allowing for the return of incredible numbers of Cambodian refugees to their homes. He was also the main figure in the process that led East Timor to independence from Indonesia between 1999 and 2002. Though he did not support the invasions of Iraq and at first claimed he would never accept the position of Special Representative of the UN Secretary General to Iraq, he ultimately did accept it at the direct behest of his friend Kofi Annan as well as George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice. Sergio was an incredibly charming man with movie star good looks and womanizing tendencies, but at the end of his life was anxious to marry the love of his life and move back to his native Brazil. In Sergio, the backstory is dealt with tactfully and is used to provide a basic sense of the man, his contradictions, his extraordinary interpersonal skills, extreme pride, and his habitual selflessness, all of which factor into the story of his death in the rubble of Baghdad’s Canal hotel (where the UN was stationed). It turns out that part of the reason there was no security around the perimeter of the building was that Sergio himself had not wanted any coalition forces there to suggest the UN’s complicity in the American-led occupation. While he was still alive in the wreckage, upside-down and being crushed by debris, his only spoken concerns remained for others, especially those in his employ. When one of the rescuers, a black New York fireman and paramedic, suggested that they pray together, Sergio responded by saying, essentially, “fuck that.” He remained a steadfast and determined secular humanist even in death. The ultimate tragedy is that the rescue effort to remove him and another man buried next to him from the rubble was so ill-prepared that they were literally using a woman’s handbag and string to haul rocks from out of the hole in what was left in the building, a perfect metaphor for how ill-prepared the occupying forces were in every facet of the Iraq theater of operations. The film is well put together, incredibly rousing at time – with subject matter like this it is hardly any surprise.

A-

Top Ten Films of the 2010 Palm Springs International Film Festival

1. Vincere
2. De ofrivilliga / Involuntary
3. Madeo / Mother
4. Politist, adj. / Police, Adjective
5. Les Regrets
6. Das weisse Band - Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte / The White Ribbon
7. Un ange à la mer
8. Altiplano
9. Kynodontas / Dogtooth
10. Ddongpari / Breathless

Cheers!

Palm Springs International Film Festival: Day 7

2010-01-15T17:44:00.000-08:00

A much more restrained day. Made my early meeting. Second such brush with celebrity in as many days as there was a famous rock and roll singer there today. This celebrity, however, seemed like more than a bit of an ass. Both of my screenings today were at The Camelot. One in each of its two theaters. The Camelot theaters are not nearly as good as the ones at the Regal 9 (where most of the films I have previously seen have been shown, excluding the back to back screenings of Fish Tank and Das weisse Band), but they are still pretty great. So no big deal.

A real disparity in quality today. The first film I saw was easily one of the worst that I have ever seen at any film festival anywhere. Which would go a long way towards making it the worst film I have ever seen on the big screen. It was supremely awful in ways that simply beggar belief. The second film was, for me, one of the highlights of the festival. As with most of this festival’s highlights, it was not a crowd pleaser in the least. Folks hated it. Such, my friends, its Palm Springs, that intractable little cunt that she is.

Pokrajina St.2 / Landscape No. 2

Landscape No. 2 is something else, man. This is some seriously awful filmmaking from the word go. Everything about it stinks to high heaven. I have never seen a Slovenian film before and was curious, being a huge fan of Slovenian philosopher-celebrity Slavoj Žižek and generally interested in the nation’s fascinating history. My curiosity was rejoined with Landscape No. 2, an utterly bizarre and in every way incompetent apologia for dormant fascist sympathies suffused within the national character presented in league with an aesthetic and worldview so skuzzy and deranged that the mind can merely boggle at its garrulous, insipid wretchedness. It is apparent that aside from the many other things that capitalism and democracy have brought to bear in Slovenian culture, the nation can also thank the West for exporting a particularly execrable form of the fanatical rightwing made-for-cable thrillers of the 1980s. The film is about two extortionist thieves, the older, wiser Polde, and his young, idiotic pussyhound lackey Sergej, who make money by stealing and holding for ransom illegally-obtained artworks from wealthy and powerful benefactors of the nation’s onetime communist elite. At the beginning of the film Polde and Sergej break into an ex-general’s opulent home, without much effort at all, to steal the titular landscape painting, which the general appropriated from Nazi-sympathizers who were summarily executed shortly after the end of the second world war. Instead of being happy with fulfilling this basic criminal task, Sergej also breaks into the general’s safe, without telling Polde, pocketing some cash and a set of documents the significance of which will only come to be known to the young man well after it is far too late to stop the wave of atypically sloppy murders precipitated by the efforts made to recover them. These documents, as it turns out, betray the general’s central involvement in those post-war executions that have heretofore gone unpunished. The general brings in a ridiculous heavy played by the glowering and seriously fucking humorless Slobodan Custic as one-quarter Terminator, one-quarter Boris Karloff, one-quarter Michael Ironside in Scanners, and one-quarter No Country for Old Men’s sociopath-for-hire Chigurh, to go retrieve the documents whatever the cost in human lives. Effortlessly tracking the painting through one of the two unreliable people in the whole world who knew of its existence (the general’s cleaning lady who is also friends with Polde’s family), the assassin doesn’t take long in disposing of Polde, who doesn’t know a damn thing about any documents and whose made-to-look-like-a-suicide death is witnessed by his Down syndrome-suffering son Igor (seriously), who somehow escapes unscathed despite the tendency of Custic’s ridiculous villain to really messily murder everybody in his path whether it is necessary or not, especially if they are women or fags. Finally tracking Sergej to a cabin in the woods owned by the family of one of the two women the young criminal has irresponsibly impregnated – which happens to be directly adjacent to a surrounded-by-candles-of-mourning hole in the ground from which the remains of the dead Nazi-sympathizers that the general is responsible for having executed just happen to be in the process of being excavated – the assassin chases Sergej to the precipice of the mass grave and then, because during all his killing and following of leads the general who has dispatched him to do the dirty work has died of old age, himself jumps out of nowhere to his death, leaving Sergej standing there looking dumbfounded, just as the cops show up ready to pin the trail of dead on the poor young thief, the documents that explain everything having just been incinerated by the candles aligning the really big, and apparently deep, hole in the ground. The acting is abysmal, with everyone genuflecting and mugging like they’re in a silent movie. To show how happy Sergej is about the money he just stole from the safe he takes the money out off his pockets in the middle of the street and starts exuberantly sniffing it. When his fiancé finds out that she is about to be murdered, impossibly slowly so that the choreography works just right, she goes about methodically running directly into every piece of furniture in the room. This is almost one of those movies that fits into the SOBIG (so-bad-its-good) sub-genre, pace Ed Wood or Menahem Golan’s The Apple (’78). There are indeed moments here of unintentional hilarity that are as funny as anything in your average decent comedy. It is almost a triumph viewed from the standpoint of parody. Besides that the film had two moments that really struck me as awesome in the same way early Paul Verhoeven is awesome: in the first such scene we see Sergej, as he waits for his hot redheaded pregnant-girlfriend-on-the-side Jasna to return to bed from another room, manually keeping himself hard whilst watching the remains of bodies being recovered from a mass grave on television (something I can see myself putting in a film); the second awesome scene, shortly after the first, finds Sergej giving nude-under-her-coat Jasna Larry Clarke-realistic head in the middle of a well stocked grocery store, up against a grocery cart, in what must be the most tantalizing and spirited celebration of the joys of consumer-capitalist consumption I have ever seen.

D-

De ofrivilliga / Involuntary

Involuntary, Swedish director Ruben Östlund’s second feature proper, is easily the most pleasant surprise of the festival so far. It was a film I knew nothing about until I did some cursory reading-up after the festival announced its lineup, and was made sufficiently curious about what I found to purchase a ticket and check it out. Am I ever happy I did. It is an exceptionally deft portrait of contemporary Sweden telling five interconnected-but-narratologically-unrelated stories in a style that superficially resembles Michael Haneke’s 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (’94), but is even more experimental and profound. Instead of an exploration of violence, causation, and contingency, which define the Haneke and have served as the core thematic concerns of a myriad of other films before and since, Östlund’s masterpiece is about something I have never seen encapsulated by the cinema so directly: the element of human nature, running parallel to our ethics and informed by drives bound up in our apperception of mortality, which manifests itself in the things we do that we know we shouldn’t do but that we do anyway as if we cannot help ourselves; as if we are doing these things involuntarily. Östlund’s film does not only approach this theme from five different angles, it does so in such a way as to legitimately lay claim to something like the status of a quintessential national portrait: particularly in its depiction of Sweden’s drinking culture and the domination of forces of repression that define it as a famously polite society built atop unsaid things. Four of the stories are about unsaid things or actions not taken: in one story a man attending a party at his home in his honor gets drunk and sets off a firecracker in his face and nobody will force the issue of his getting medical attention, with disastrous results, knowing that he is intractably stubborn; in another story a semi-famous stage actress accidentally breaks a curtain rod in the bathroom of a bus and will not cop to responsibility when the driver, assuming that roughhousing kids are responsible, refuses to continue driving until somebody fesses up; in a third story a pair of rambunctious young girls get incredibly drunk and when one passes out in a park whilst they party with a group of young people, the other fails to do anything about it, putting her friend at serious risk; in a fourth story a group of young men retreat to a cottage for a weekend’s drunken getaway and unspoken sexual patterns, behaviors that normally get repressed, cause one of the young men confusion when he cannot decide whether he wants to leave or to stay after an uncomfortable sexual humiliation takes place. The fifth story looks at the other side of things: a young schoolteacher, who does speak up when she believes that a student has been reprimanded by the woodshop teacher in a manner that “crossed the line,” faces ostracization from the rest of the staff. In each of these fragmented, interlocked vignettes we see how uncomfortable situations cause people to do things that they know they should not, to keep mum when they know they should speak up, and to participate in the acknowledged perpetuation of unhealthy illusions so that they do not incur reprisal or risk complete alienation in a society built on false illusions that refuses to allow for its members to be human and imperfect. Early on the teacher who is later ostracized leads her class in an exercise in conditioning by having one girl wait in the hall and telling the rest of the class to contradict her every time she chooses the longer of two lines in a series of graphics until the girl finally picks the line which she empirically knows is the wrong one. This scene is Involuntary in microcosm. It is a brilliant film about falling into line against our better judgment, told in fragmented long takes that place the viewer in a position of ontoepistemological estrangement. The camera consistently remains in discomfiting counterintuitive relation to the actions of its characters, retaining, along with its dense and extraordinary soundtrack, a profoundly immanent character as our heightened senses are excited by the oddness and destratified concretion of what we are experiencing and how we are experiencing it. There is a demanding, hyper-involved quality to Involuntary that is remarkably unique and experientially rich. It is extremely minimal yet of an ever-growing moment-to-moment intensity. A fascinating and penetrating work of art almost alien in its alacrity and formal audacity. Momentous!

A+

Palm Springs International Film Festival: Day 6

2010-01-14T15:22:00.000-08:00

One of the more fucked up days so far. Weird shit prevailing. I met Udo Kier at the screening of the Norwegian film Nord. When he walked into the theater I couldn’t believe my eyes. It’s fucking Dracula! Then he, a dude from the film festival, and Home director Ursula Meier sat right behind me in the near-empty theater. So I offered my hand and said hello Mr. Kier. We talked for a while before and after the film. He seems like a really nice guy. He kept asking me questions about myself. He didn’t really seem to think I belonged in Palm Springs until I finally told him that I had originally moved down to quit drinking and drugging. At this point I’m pretty sure he figured fucking me was probably not a very likely prospect and politely begged off. It was a nice chat.

The evening screening of Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere was an absolute clusterfuck of the highest order. I don’t know how the theater got as packed as it was but I know sure as the fucking nose on my face that the vast majority of the cunts and assholes seated in that theater were never at any point standing in either the ticket holder or pass holder lineups. Something is seriously fucking wrong with this picture. Fuckers. And you know none of these entitled bourgeois shits is in any way going to enjoy the new film by a Marxist filmmaker they have never heard of whose tactics they are going to find boring, tedious, and not a little discomfiting. I was barely able to get into the theater. I was literally the first person behind the admission cut-off point until I begged them to let me in. I told them I would happily sit in the front row. They let in ten of us. The theater was full except the front row. My A.A. buddy had tried to save me a seat but some false-haired old SoCal bitch with a face full of Botox nearly clawed him to death before he finally relinquished control of it. People were all pissed off that they didn’t have decent seats and were once again threatening to break into some kind of give-me-convenience-or-give-me-death riot. The poor fucking volunteers. I can only imagine the shit they’ve been taking all week from these country club swine. At least I got in. It was, after all, the film of the festival. A total, straight-up A #1 masterpiece to beat the band.

Nord

Norwegian director Rune Denstad Langlo’s bittersweet Nord is sadly not, as it turns out, a Louis-Ferdinand Céline adaptation. It is rather a not-exactly-a-road movie involving one man’s journey via skidoo and skis to visit the four-year-old son he’s just found out he has. It is one of those Northern European movies with dry-as-fuck humor, quirky-ass characters met en easy-does-it route, and so-unhip-that-it-is-in-fact-hip oompah music and big-band-variety bluegrass. It’s basically what would happen if you combined the aesthetic and temperament of filmmakers like either Kaurismäki brother or Fridrik Thor Fridriksson at his most whimsical and threw it half-assed at the basic storyline of David Lynch’s The Straight Story (’99) relocated to the snowbound hinterlands of mountainous northern Norway. The protagonist is Jomar, a booze-hound and nervous wreck, beset by anxiety attacks and not particularly inclined to get out of bed if he can help it. He is apparently the only employee of an out-of-the-way third rate ski lodge, though if it were up to him he’d still be back in the psych ward playing ping pong. Unfortunately for him the doctor in charge is steadfast in her conviction that it is about time that Jomar tried to get on with his life. An unexpected visit from an old friend – the dude who some years ago (I’m assuming four) took off with Jomar’s ex when she was finally fed up with his loafing – alerts our prospective hero to the existence of his son following some fisticuffs and consolatory hugs. Deciding that it is about time he shook things up a bit, Jomar burns down the ski lodge and heads off on a predictable if intermittently amusing picaresque adventure in search of booze, bonds, and redemption. Along the way he meets an assortment of loveable oddballs: a lonely girl in need of a friend who persuades her grandmother to let the husky interloper recuperate from snowblindness in a crawl space adjacent to her bedroom; a handsome and outspokenly homophobic young man (who perhaps doth protest too much if you catch my drift), left behind to tend to the homestead by parents who have left for Thailand in search of cures for their offsetting ailments (“cancer of the dick” in the father’s case), who has a nifty trick for an efficient drunk, learned from a Polish dude, involving shaving a patch off your head and taping an alcohol-saturated tampon to the bare spot (“it’s more like being stoned,” muses our hero re: the resultant buzz); and finally an old man ice-fishing on a frozen lake who has no intention of ever leaving the spot and probably should have thought twice before chaining himself to his snowmobile. Finally, the arduous final leg of the journey leads Jomar to the top of a mountain down which he skies in a beautiful shot in which the sky and the snow gauzily merge and the sense of release is palpable, this being a guy who has told us he used to love skiing but that it has long since quit doing it for him. Perhaps his journey has awoken in him a newfound appreciation for these small human pleasures. And perhaps that’s his son at the bottom of the mountain. Whatever. That’s it. That’s the whole movie. It’s 78 minutes long. I never would have guessed that it broke an hour. There’s not much to it and you’ve seen it all before. But it’s sweet. I laughed out loud a couple of times. It won the FIPRESCI Prize at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival, a prize traditionally given to fun-but-not-dumb crowd pleasers like, well, Nord. And Udo Kier seemed to like it. If you chuckle at the phrase “cancer of the dick,” then by all means! track this motherfucker down!

C+

Vincere

It turns out that crammed like a sardine into the middle of the front row directly at the base of the towering screen is a pretty kick-ass way to experience Bellocchio’s masterpiece. It were as though the film were straddling my chest and repeatedly pistol-whipping me with its exclamatory genius. Like a Straub-Huillet historical cine-tableau on crystal meth merged with an artillery shower of intertextual newsreel footage and fragments of other films (like Chaplin’s The Kid (’21) and Eisenstein’s Oktyabr (’28)), Vincere is a multivalent barrage serving to undermine the play of shadows and games of strategic omission that inform the way dominant history gets written and especially how it gets imaged, assimilating strategies from opera, fascist-futurist art, tabloids, costume drama, Soviet montage, and the aforementioned cinémathèque newsreels, in order to directly undercut the strategies of self-mythologizing, power-consolidating history-making of one prospective-media-baron-turned-intractable-imperial-despot (Mussolini), and to implicitly inform on another (why Mr. Berlusconi, bien sur). Vincere is a ruthlessly subversive-seditious film that not only frames a fascinating historical narrative but which simultaneously interrogates how the cinema and other cultural forms become accessories to crimes before, during, and after the fact. By putting the audience in a position of identification with Ida Dalser, the woman who loved and helped to make Benito Mussolini, who may have been his first wife and was certainly the mother of his firstborn son, and whose legacy is that of an individual not safely intelligible within the history-as-process-and-reproduction-of-its-own-limit, which she helps to set in motion, so is thus buried in a loony hatch, the film both forces us to identify with complicity in the manufacture of autocratic models and then with the helplessness of being crushed, muted, redacted by the draconian forces that we have helped to set in motion. This is a historical film that is unflappably told in the future-perfect tense. It is right now! And it is an absolute masterpiece. One which nobody saw coming from late-period Bellocchio or from contemporary cinema in general. We have so little to compare it to. There is the aforementioned connection to Straub and Huillet. Occasionally it looks somewhat like the most beautiful sections of Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley (’06). The acerbic appropriation of Soviet montage set to pounding, insistent silent cinema piano music on a few occasions brought to my mind Guy Maddin’s brilliant short The Heart of the World ('00). The guttersnipe pummeling also invokes the rat-a-tat-tat raised-fist journalismo of Sam Fuller. But nothing I have seen comes close to paralleling Vincere’s incendiary polyphony. It’s totally radical and out of this world. The title says it all: the fascist orthodoxy demands that the voice of power WIN. Bellocchio’s film doesn't just speak truth to power in its detailing of a buried treasure tale that the powers that be would rather we didn't know about. It undermines the whole semiotic apparatus and explodes the network from within. It's like a bomb. A bomb in the house of power!

A+

Palm Springs International Film Festival: Day 5

2010-01-13T17:15:00.000-08:00

Day five. On she goes. Pretty easy-going day today. Tuesday (I’m writing this Wednesday, things remaining fuzzy). Got all my final tickets lined up and have it set so that I will be doing two films a day for the duration, which as I said earlier suits me just fine. One tends to get what one deserves when one angles for quantity over quality. In terms both of overload and shitty film-going experiences. I’m basically getting older and it doesn’t take much for both my body and my brain to say uncle when pushed to over-commit themselves. It just ain’t worth it, compañero. Twenty-two films in nine days is still a pretty good rate of consumption if you ask me.

I had the pleasure of getting some positive feedback on the blog today from and A.A. buddy whose been hitting a lot of the same screenings that I have. We sat together for the Cédric Kahn. Aside from noting my brilliance (a sentiment with which, it should go without saying, I am entirely in agreement), he suggested that it might behoove me to stop writing “with” as “w/” and “your” or “you are” as “yr.” He also suggested I put up a photo in which, as per my new recovery-based lifestyle, I am shown not quite so stoned. I am taking all of these suggestions under advisement. I think I will most likely go with “with” from now on. I’m still happy with “yr.” And the photo fucking stays. For now. It’s the only remaining copy I have of that image and I have feelings of partiality towards it. Not long after it was taken I was wandering the streets in full psychotic collapse, invisible, Sanskrit catechisms materializing on every surface I touched, shooting down airplanes with my watch, and being chased by international media and the military, plants and bugs spilling from me. A cure for environmental degradation fused with my DNA by virtue of a potion I had taken at the hands of a guerilla dance troupe. I must not forget where I come from (a place I can return to very easily for the price of a drink).

As far as the films go, it seems that the dominant idiom this year is the post-millennial fable. They just keep coming. On one level I am enjoying it. On another it makes for films that are occasionally too cute by half. We’ll see if the theme persists. Part of me is hungry for something a little more blunt. Too much feyness makes me hungry for raw meat.

Kûki ningyô / Air Doll

Kore-eda has tended to work pretty slow. All of a sudden he has brought in one feature each for two Cannes Film Festivals in a row. I’m afraid the rushed pace sort of shows. My feelings for Air Doll while it was playing out before me were of a considerably more amenable-to-its-charms character than they are now after a little cursory distance from its expertly cast spell. A somnambulist fable about a blow-up sex doll that has “found a heart,” as the doll herself has it, and come to life, Air Doll shouldn’t work at all. And it wouldn’t in the hands of any director other than Hirokazu Kore-eda, possibly the only living filmmaker capable of executing with heart-limning panache such a ridiculous concept. (Which is not to say that I was not entirely won over by Cherry 2000 (‘87) as a pre-adolescent boy). The doll (named Nozomi after her owner’s lost love) is played as an animate sentient creature by impassive and wry one-hell-of-an-animate-sentient-creature-herself Korean starlet Bae Du-na, who smiles with one side of her face with girlish bemusement at the new wondrous-if-sad world she robotically traverses during the day whilst her sad-sack owner is busy waiting tables (though he is so ashamed of his lowly position that he even lies to a blow-up doll about his professional status). She even gets a job herself working in a video store. (Ah, the video store: that substitute for the cinema, that place of worship for we lonesome urban souls yearning for connection. As such, a video store is to the cinema what a blow-up doll is to a sex partner. No?). Though it is a heart that Nozomi claims to have found, it is her lungs which first betray that something is stirring within, as following a few deep breathes she gets up, crosses the room (her seams still showing on her newly humanized skin) and sticks her hand out the window to allow a few drops of water to sensually drip upon it. It turns out that air is not just what fills the doll up but is also the principal subject of this Aristotelian film (which might just as easily have been called De Anima in homage to the Greek philosopher). Air, aether, the breath of life, whatever you want to call it. Negative space, the gentle breeze, the space in-between. It is not negative space, the film insists, but the connective tissue that conjoins us in our lonesome corporeal solitude. Air is the subject of Air Doll (and this is why Blow-Up Doll would be the wrong title in case you were wondering). The cure for urban loneliness, then, is the admission that we are all one. It is to emerge from out of our illusion of solitude for just long enough to bask in the gratitude and wonder demonstrated, for we the viewers as for the characters she impacts, by wise-because-innocent Nozomi. That the same forces that bring, as one of her poetic mediations reminds us, pistil and stamen together on the whim of a tremulous gust breeze through our lives as well, elevating us above the sad solitary plight of the living (as when Nozomi, filled with helium, in perhaps the film’s most beautiful scene, floats in a room surrounded by blow-up planets and constellations), filling our lives with buoyant-making substance invisible to the eye. Air Doll itself is a roving zephyr, sweeping together its various structural elements au hazard, and it works extremely well while you are watching it, blowing softly over you and its own pretty surfaces (shot by Mark Lee Ping-bing, Asia’s finest photographer). Unfortunately the film is handicapped by too many elements for it to do anything other than give most of them short shrift. Kore-eda seems to be inspired by Dostoevsky’s The Idiot in his structuring of the film’s story around an innocent who unknowingly and without intending to inextricably alters the lives of the people with whom she comes into contact. Unlike Dostoevsky, however, Kore-eda is not able to provide enough space for these tangential lives to breathe, so that we are left with blithe shorthand characterizations of figures on the margins who are all brought together in what is supposed to be a touching operatic apotheosis at the end of the film but instead becomes the movie’s flattest section because we are all of a sudden realizing how little we know or care about any of these people. It would have been a good way to end a miniseries but not a feature film. At least not this one. What Air Doll does well it does remarkably. Some passages here are as great as any you will ever see. Sadly its fundamental airiness means it can only go so far towards attaining the lofty broadly-encompassing goals it sets unreachably before itself.

B+

Les regrets

Cédric Kahn’s new dry-ice comedy is another of his dark battle-of-the-sexes two-handers w/ a clever sense of humor, palpable sexual energy, a title which pretty much tells you, like his L'ennui (’98) before it, exactly what the film is a philosophical rumination on, and two actors so perfectly cast (Yvan Attal and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi are the movie) that the motherfucker pretty much directs itself. Throw on a score by Philip Glass and it’s a no-brainer that yr gonna have a pretty good night at the movies. The screenplay is actually pretty ingenious too. It uses structuring narrative elisions and fill-in-the-blank backstory to cunning effect, keeping the audience in a position of having to do more leg work than is often the case with such films. Attal and Tedeschi play onetime lovers who bump into one another when he returns to his childhood home to see to the last days of his dying mother, and to set about making the resultant funeral preparations with no help from a deadbeat brother, years after a not-so-amicable separation in which too much remained unsaid and explanations were not proffered. He has gone on to a fairly successful career as an architect working in concert with an attractive wife unable to bear children, she has returned from a life in Africa with a mulatto child and is currently living with a backwoodsy drunk named Franck. There reintroduction to one another spawns a whirlwind affair, he promising to drop everything for her and she in turn being fearful that their relationship is doomed to fail as it did the first time. Regrets that eat away at them from within beset them each. But it are his regrets that threaten to fuck up life for both of them. His pride will no allow him to let her off the hook this time. Overwhelmed at the speed at which things are progressing, the two of them communicating (or strategically failing to fully communicate) their reactivated feelings through increasingly terse text-messages, she developing cold feet and, instead of picking up with her onetime beau where they left off, deciding to flee with Franck to Chile, thus driving Attal’s Mathieu into paroxysms of possessive mania and explosive, hilarious jealousy. Things come to a head in a mad scene of l'amour fou turned loose in the streets. Kahn plays fast-and-loose with audience expectations, leading us to believe that we are watching a prospective Chabrol-style crime film in which nobody seems sufficiently amped to actually commit any acts finally explicitly criminal in nature, though the edge is briefly and amusedly flirted with. Kahn seems to be always at his strongest when teasing his audience. Romantic regrets remain the subject of the film, and seem to serve as an anarchic energy force within bourgeoisie society that works expeditiously and unchecked in order to keep bland and suffocatingly banal lives interesting. An epilogue finds our two characters reunited once again three years after the shit goes down. This time it is her regrets as opposed to his that may be set to throw the whole frenetic roundelay into play once again, he with a new wife and now a child to add to the mix. As with many of Kahn’s previous films, Les regrets works as a what-not-to-do portrait of contemporary masculinity, and Attal brilliantly personifies the kind of world class cad that they only make in France. Fucking hilarious. And unlike Air Doll, this is a film that works better and better the more that you think about it. A real pleasure.

Palm Springs International Film Festival: Day 4

2010-01-12T13:43:00.000-08:00

Starting to really feel the over-investment of my energies here. I’m well behind on the blog. I will be lucky if I manage to finish this meditation on the fourth day of the festival before the completion of the fifth day’s screenings. I am rushing here and there, wolfing down meals between screenings to the detriment of my digestive tract. I am running through Tums pretty rapidly. I am also still trying to make my traditional 5:30 AM A.A. meeting. Everything considered, I am lucky to still be walking.

Day four was relatively laid back. Two screenings that were separated by a couple hours. I was able to more properly enjoy my spicy buffalo chicken melt. I got to walk around and talk to strangers more. Flirting w/ old ladies and the like. It suits me just fine keeping the day down to two films. In this case the weakest film of the festival so far followed by the most accomplished. Worlds apart these two were!

The Balibo Conspiracy

Robert Connolly’s The Balibo Conspiracy is a barely serviceable piece of crap about a seriously underexposed historical moment that still needs proper exposure. It is the story of an Australian journalist named Roger East (the ever-reliable Anthony LaPaglia) who is recruited by the foreign minister (and eventual prime minister) of East Timor, Jose Ramos-Horta (Oscar Isaac acting a little too colorful), to come to East Timor in 1975 and help run their national media immediately before Indonesia’s brutal invasion of the small, impoverished island rich in untapped oil reserves. What attracts East to investigate is not the plight of the Timorese or the brazen actions of an Indonesian government directly assisted by the governments of America and Australia, but rather the disappearance of five other Australian journalists who went deep into the jungle to Balibo in order to cover the story of the invasion, never to be seen or heard from again. The film details Roger East’s cliché-driven consciousness-raising as he makes his way into deepest Timor, at first cowardly and in over his head, less interested in the plight of the natives or even his journalistic counterparts than he is in saving his own hide and buffering his own image. This is counterpoised w/ the previous journalists led by the courageous and sensitive Greg Shackleton, shot in 16mm, whose journey is interjected in the form of flashbacks to a few weeks earlier and leading up to their brutal murder by plainclothes Indonesian military forces attempting to pass as a local civil war faction. Balibo is a paint-by-numbers political thriller/melodrama in the Costa-Gavras / Roland Joffé mode equipped w/ a shopworn story not unlike those of amazing-awful Italian horror movies such as Lucio Fulci’s Zombie (’79) or such Ruggero Deodato films as Cannibal Holocaust (’80) and Cut and Run (’85) focusing on white people who find themselves in peril when adventuring into savage outposts where whatever intensions bring them there, good or bad, lead to no good end. An incredible documentary could be made out of this material, engaging both the international machinations involving Western corporogovernmental collusion and the remarkable footage left behind by these brave journalists that was discovered after their deaths and which is here recreated unnecessarily considering the stuff is really out there. The only real things Connolly’s film has going for it is that it makes this story more widely known, exposes the difficulty of covering and then dissemenating these kinds of stories in the analogue age, and makes visible to international cinematic audience the real landscape of East Timor and the places where this history actually went down. These are all things that a documentary could do as well if not better. I got the impression listening to Connolly talk about the footage and documentation available that even the special features on the Australian DVD of the film are most likely significantly more valuable and compelling than the actual film itself which, though it doesn’t shy away from the violence and conspiratorial politics of this story (which it depicts in the first case and plays lip service to in the latter), doesn’t do itself any favors by whitewashing a nation’s tragedy w/ blasé and ethnically-typed portraits of its citizenry and a story which foregrounds the actions of brave white males in their attempt to do right by these noble savages. It is not at all a technically deficient film, it is simply one that is not even remotely capable of optimally handling this material. The clichés come thick and fast and the story is old hat. You’d be better off reading up on this stuff, looking up Greg Shackleton on YouTube, and foregoing the movie all together.

Madeo / Mother

To my mind the festival’s first out-and-out masterpiece, Bong Joon-ho’s Mother is another densely political revisionist genre triumph from the formidable South Korean master. It may well be his best yet, and this is the guy who made the amazing bumbling police procedural / serial killer masterpiece Memories of Murder. At first Mother seems to settle into similar terrain as that 2003 film, focusing on an apparent miscarriage of justice and the various comic police incompetencies and endemic corruption that make it possible. Yoon Do-joon is a handsome, mildly-retarded young man who lives alone w/ his mother (the title character is played by Kim Hye-ja in an amazingly sturdy performance which plumbs emotional depths and deftly rolls w/ the character’s many sudden turns). The young man is arrested for the murder of a young schoolgirl because when she was last seen he was following her after a night of heavy drinking at a bar called The Manhattan. Next to her laid-out-for-all-to-see corpse a golf ball, a keepsake upon which Yoon Do-joon has earlier scratched his own name, is discovered, leading investigators to the not unreasonable conclusion that the young man is responsible for the girl’s death. Faced w/ a corrupt and incompetent police department that will not budge and a high-priced lawyer, talented at disappearing acts, who thinks they should exploit the boy’s mental condition for a reduced sentence, mom decides to investigate the case herself Miss Marple-style. Looking into the dead girl’s past she discovers a blackmail conspiracy relating to men the girl photographed w/ a cell phone her friend had turned into a “pervert phone” (meaning the sound the phone makes when you take a photo w/ it has been disabled) after having had sex w/ them in exchange for money, food, or other gifts. Because young Yoon Do-joon is in jail and in possession of a woefully inadequate memory, mother is pretty much on her own, though she does pay her son’s only friend, a young ne’er do well w/ a fondness for high school girls himself, to violently shake down a few potential young witnesses. From here the well-meaning mother becomes more and more corrupted by her need to prove her son’s innocence, slackening her moral worldview and increasingly giving in to desperation and ethically dubious stratagems leading up to a major twist that I will not give away except to say that it comes like, well, a pipe wrench to the head. An explicitly Korean film about selective memory, blanket corruptibility, living w/ lies, and bonds that run deeper than justice, Mother is a masterpiece of satirical suspense, bookeneded by a lonely and desperate old woman engaged in sad-ecstatic interpretative dance, that looks absolutely fucking amazing w/ its CinemaScope framing and cannot help but leave one thinking about Hitchcock at the top of his game. A mordant but tonally measured critique of a family-centric society w/ a tendency to extricate itself from incompetent autocratic rulers only to sink back into the same self-defeating patterns, Mother is a film about the private-public politics of amnesia that world cinema aficionados who see it won’t soon forget.

A+

Palm Springs International Film Festival: Day 3

2010-01-11T23:21:00.000-08:00

Day three was entirely given over to the debut features of first time directors, a proposition which can be wary-making to say the least. None of the films was bad, each had a number of things going for it, but each was at least a little bit green. That’s the way these things tend to go. These were noticeably virginal works. Again, the audiences were full of people whose reasons for attending the films that they attend – only to grumpily carry on, bitching and moaning about the content and approaches to content of each film – perplexes me to no end. It were almost as though these people had done no reading up on the films, had never seen any films not necessarily intended for mass-market appeal (or if they have seen such films they have completely forgotten not having enjoyed having done so), or are simply an especially cantankerous bunch of retirees and entitled occupants of gated communities. It is amazing and not a little bizarre to sit in a theater next to a couple in their seventies who are themselves sitting down to their fourth film of the festival having despised in their very marrow the first three. I was talking about this w/ film scholar and horror specialist Charles D. before the screening of Home (as well as various other subjects including, memorably, how eXistenZ is in part an allegory about the pleasures and anxieties associated w/ anal sex), and he told me about a particularly crusty group of fogies who had come very near to tearing him a new asshole in one of the festival’s incredibly long lineups earlier in the day for having hade the temerity to defend the Haneke. While I am getting annoyed w/ my regularly having to shush people during screenings who are light years beyond the age where the should know better, I continue to find this all rather amusing. Americans are famous for knowing what they want. In Palm Springs, lately, I have seen them very clearly able to express what they don’t want. It remains to be seen if they know what they actually do want. What, I keep wondering, are all these seemingly hopeless cases finally doing here? It were as though they’d wandered in baffled, fresh off the golf course. Anywho, without further ado:

Samson and Delilah

An in-demand cinematographer in Australia since the late nineties – both operating the camera and directing his own screenplay w/ Samson and Delilah, an ambling, dreary, and clearly deeply personal Aboriginal love story punctuated w/ quick combustive pops of shivery violence – Aboriginal filmmaker Warwick Thornton, who is here in town w/ his film, has attracted plenty of worldwide festival attention w/ it (he won the Camera d’or at Cannes). It is an accomplished and uniquely naturalistic film, if often excessively precious, that follows two non-actor Aboriginal leads playing characters presumably not unlike themselves, but w/ quizzically biblical names, as they escape lives of hopeless repetition and violent reprisal in their Central Australian desert community for lives on the lam that are no less bleak but which do yield to light at the end of their proverbial tunnel. He is fifteen-year-old Sampson, speaking only once in the film w/ so disabling a stutter that he can barely manage his name, escaping violence at the hands of his brothers who comprise a reservation house band and are eternally practicing the same reggae number outside the gutted room where Sampson, mostly dressed in a tattered black Birthday Party T-shirt, passes most of his time huffing petrol on his filthy mattress and listening to a beat-up old radio. She is sixteen-year-old Delilah, not much of a talker herself, taking care of her aging Nana whose Aboriginal art she assists w/ the production of and which we subsequently find out is being exploited for profit, sans remuneration, by whites. When Nana dies, Delilah is beaten up by the female elders in the tiny, dusty community as part of a traditional ritual that Thornton is suggesting betrays a cruel part of his community’s archaic traditional system of cosmic justice that perhaps needs to be rethought. The two youngsters, emotionally, spiritually, and physically bruised by their concurrent beatings, flee to civilization in the community’s one and only truck, only to find themselves surviving by the skin of their teeth, squatting under an elevated highway in the occasional company of a mentally ill freestyling drunkard who offers them occasional morsels of food and not-so-sage advice (he is the only Aboriginal character who speaks English, or says much of anything at all, in the film), all the while singing to himself about spaghetti, Jesus and various other matters of the heart. The film is beautifully shot, especially adept at its use of early morning and late afternoon light which it uses like expertly manipulated dollops of oil paint, and the non-actors extremely compelling and proud, especially Marissa Gibson as the endlessly suffering but enigmatic and determined Delilah. The whole thing does, however, feel a little on-the-nose and twee. Themes of addiction, exploitation, disenfranchisement are par for the course and by and large are not handled w/ much subtlety, though the film itself at the same time does anything but beat you over the head w/ itself. Its tone remains relaxed and fluid. The passage of time is registered in multiple unique ways and is part of what Samson and Delilah is best at capturing, along w/ a kind of quiet love which is more about survival than romance, and which does not correlate w/ the gauzy and inflated kind that Delilah fantasizes about whilst locked in the truck each night, before they leave town, whilst listening to Spanish love ballads. The film works far better as a parable than as a work of social realism, though despite this the ending, which finds the teenage duo ensconced in unlikely domestic bliss, fails to convince for all its happily-ever-after earnestness.

B-

Home

Ursula Meier’s promising debut takes off from an admittedly brilliant originary conceit which is captured ingeniously in the film’s triumphant final shot: the road movie’s conceptual inverse, in which our focus remains on something fleetingly glimpsed out of the window of a passing car instead of remaining in the vehichle. Home is the story of a family of five who have lived next to an unfinished, unopened superhighway for ten years and whose lives are thrown into a state of crisis when it finally one day out of the blue is opened to traffic. The parents happen to be played by Isabelle Huppert and Olivier Gourmet, two of cinema’s finest actorly students of the infinitesimal. It takes what would have been a wonderful sight gag in Tati’s Trafic (’71) and fashions from it a sweet feminine fable that is grounded in the body, the sensorium, domesticity, and the intimate-if-messy biological imperatives of family life. Shot by one of my very favorite DOPs in the world, Agnès Godard, best known for her extraordinary work w/ female directors, especially Claire Denis (probably my favorite contemporary filmmaker), the final shot was far from being the only one to steal away my breath. The camera is a roving presence, deftly framing and darting about within compressed zones of ecstatic back-and-forth, close range trajectories energetically alive w/ minute, expressive games of human pinball breaking out within tightly-knit microtopographies. The family is like a busy organism attending to its appetites and protecting its vital organs, as its members bathe together, roughhouse, inspect one another’s skin for the tell-tale spots, engage one another w/ unrestrained physicality. Home borrows from the western, the horror film, and even SF, focusing on the encroachment of civilization and the bio-sensorial threat it imposes. There home is like the town in so many westerns into which the introduction of the railways presents a new threat of assimilation and homogenization. When the highway crew arrives to tar the pavement and set up crash barriers they come decked out in orange suits and masks as though from out of The Andromeda Strain. When the cars come they descend on the newly exposed homestead like Hitchcock’s apocalyptic birds (The Birds (’63) being the only film that Meier mentioned as an influence during the Q&A following the screening, though it is clearly also an anti-Wim Wenders movie). Neuroses within the family are awakened w/ the new influx of civilization’s automotive detritus, auditory overload, and bad (perhaps deadly) air. A massive traffic jam provides plenty of gawkers, causing mother and the two youngest children to decamp for a brief picnic. When they return the eldest, who has stubbornly refused to forego her habit of sunbathing in the yard in a bikini whilst listening to death metal, has disappeared with a party or parties unknown. Everybody is losing their shit. So far so good. The first two-thirds of the film work quite marvelously. Home, being Swiss, could even be said at this point to be a witty little national allegory about an isolated conscientiously-objecting island-unto-itself through which much of the world’s capital (think Swiss banks) is just passing through. When father finally explodes, however, and mother stubbornly refuses to leave, clearly being as afraid of the outside world as was the mother in Dogtooth, no doubt having been previously burned by civilization and its discontents in some never-specified manner, a violent scene leads the claustrophobic man, realizing that they are at an impasse and that the situation as it stands has come dangerously close to turning him into a monster, to take the uncharacteristic action of bricking-up the windows and doors, effectively encasing his wife and two remaining children in a deathtrap. A family that was once happy, open, garrulous and free is now reduced to a totally debased, closed-off group of individuals, who leave rotting food everywhere, mope like they’re pacing a psych ward, and who no longer occupy the same frame (or do so only when lying lifelessly in bed). When the eldest daughter returns, not even able to enter the home, she is forced to leave again perhaps for good. Finally, starving for air, again making a decision that is less psychologically pre-determined than based on physical need, mother takes a sledgehammer to the bricked-up door and our family emerges into the light. The final shot is point-of-view from inside an unseen vehichle that briefly sees our family walking together next to the highway then, leaving them behind as quickly as it captures them, briefly passes over the house itself and then up into the light, as though leaving the earth itself behind for good. The last act of the film is rushed (as though the director has become a truck driver making time), somewhat dull, perfunctory, and not entirely convincing. But the poetic resolution is, embodied by this single gravity-defying tracking shot movement-image, genuinely sublime.

B+

Ddongpari / Breathless

Though the wetness behind the ears, heaviness of hand, not-particularly-original dissection of violence’s cyclical nature, and slight problems of plotting betray Ddongpari as a directorial debut (please note that I refuse to call it Breathless, a title which should be retired like a star player’s jersey, as the Korean title apparently translates as “Shit-Fly”), its emotional power is so utterly astounding – even honest-to-goodness goosebump-inducing – that I cannot help but consider it an almost complete success on its own terms. The opening scene embodies the film entire in microcosm. Sang-Hoon (an amazing performance from writer-producer-director Yang Ik-Joon), as the central pugilistic deputy-enforcer to an easy-going loan shark and freelance breaker-up of demonstrations, comes across some fellas beatin’ up on a helpless dame. After beating up the ruffians, he starts repeatedly slapping the girl himself, demanding of her an explanation as to why she doesn’t fight back. This goes on until, out of frame and unseen by the viewer, somebody smashes Sang-Hoon over the head w/ something. Cut to the film’s title. That is Ddongpari in a nutshell: self-perpetuating cycles of physical, emotional, and lexicographical violence, directed inwards and outwards, forming intertwining ellipses like the Olympic rings around the lives of its characters. The film is structured around scenes of violence like a porn is structured around fucking. It is an exhausting experience, and the moments of lyricism it occasionally pans from the sediment (especially two dialogue free montage sequences of its characters peacefully hanging out in the city set to a score of peaced-out shoegazery) certainly doesn’t get mined from prettiness. This is an ugly world. The film doesn’t look like any other Korean films about lowlifes (a genre which is a fucking industry unto itself over there). Its gritty shot-on-the fly (the shit-fly?) documentary look makes it resemble more so-called sixth generation Chinese films like Fruit Chan’s Public Toilet (’02), which are shot quickly, totally independently, and on the cheap, documentary-style, to escape the unwanted attention of the authorities. Though its tone is uneven, especially whenever we see Sang-Hoon shooting the shit-talk w/ his way-too-friendly employer (this is a film where a dude who pays guys to seriously fuck people up is the nicest male we meet by a long shot), the film seldom feels phony or forced, even when taking a turn for the potentially-too-precious when our hero meets-cute a potential love interest in the form of an equally profanity-spewing high school girl. He spits where she happens to be walking. She curses him out and slaps him. He curses her out and then punches her out cold. Then he waits for her to come to and buys her a beer. What looks like the stuff of coy movie fluff actually turns into an unbelievably powerful story about fear of intimacy and platonic connection. When her brother becomes involved, unbeknownst to her, kicking ass under the supervision of Sang-Hoon (who is likewise not aware of any connection) we can immediately she the circular machinery spinning into a lock, and we know that this is not going to end well. And end well it does not. Let’s just say that a genre movie cliché involving bad shit happening on a main character’s last day working a dirty job and the missing of a nephew’s school play gets pulled out to bring around the story to its logical point of termination – a stark decisive-moment freeze-frame of profoundly disheartening realization on the part of our young schoolgirl as she stares the reality of violence’s perpetual motion machinery in the face – but that nothing this debut feature trips up on or clumsily falters w/ in any way managed to stop it from wringing my guts like a wet dishtowel.

A-

Palm Springs International Film Festival: Day 2

2010-01-10T01:48:00.000-08:00

Day two. Saturday. Holy upside-down Christ! What a fucking day! I haven’t seen anything like this before. This is really a fucked-up festival. Man alive. Two films provoking walks outs and, in the case of the first one, near Rite of Spring-style rioting. These people do not like their good dollars being spent on confrontational art. Holy shit. You would not believe what crazy fucking fun I had today. Dogtooth, the aggressively weird and hellaciously salacious Greek import w/ distribution from Kino International, just plain fucked people up. It was awesome. Two waves of walk-outs the likes of which I’ve never witnessed. It was like Paris in the twenties in there. I was afraid someone might storm the projection room. Someone could have gotten killed. If those old ladies don’t get a refund someone might just die for it yet. So awesome. You can’t get this shit on DVD. Palm Springs, man. They maintain the lowest ticket prices of any festival in the United States, they only play two short adds before each screening (unlike Canadian festivals which roll over like skid row slags for their sponsors and unspool upwards of fifteen minutes of pre-film promos), and they are not afraid to piss off the non-converts. Again, I get the impression that people come here w/ some form of amnesia that prevents them from remembering how much they hate European cinema, how enraged they were last year, and leave temporarily vowing never to return. It’s absolutely hilarious. I cannot remember the last time I had this much fun any goddamn place!

Needless to say, a hell of a second day. Two great films about language, power, and obfuscation in very, very divergent styles:

Kynodontas / Dogtooth

Hard to know where to begin w/ Dogtooth. I guess it’s kind of about how we can be suffocated to death by protection. It is just so giddily, aggressively odd and unsettling. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s absolutely singular. Like if Lars von Trier, Michael Haneke and Samuel Beckett tried to make a film based vaguely on the recent story of Austrian psycho Josef Fritzl and his family. It is a very funny film on a lot of levels, none of them indicative of sound mental health. A family where nobody is named. Father is some kind of industrialist, working in a factory that produces God know what. He keeps Mother, Older Daughter, Younger Daughter, and Son (those are their names in the credits) locked up in the house and its adjoining yard (w/ a pool!). He has created a world for his children w/ an absolutely berserk psychic topography, filling them w/ completely insane ideas about how things work. The children are told that they will die if they leave the compound. The only way to survive is in his car. They will not be allowed to learn to drive until they have grown something called a “dogtooth.” They are told that their mother is pregnant w/ twins and a dog. Words have all kinds of twisted meanings and gnarled logic rules the day. Vaginas are “keyboards.” A “pussy” is a dining room light. “Zombies” are a kind of yellow flower. The film is episodic and shot w/ lengthy takes, mostly close-ups. When there are establishing shots they don’t work like establishing shots. The close-ups and medium shots have a quality of interchangeability. The montage is very odd yet totally precise. Scenes and sequences develop their own geographies slowly but surely, like a world the viewer is building in their own brain as the sensorium tries to situate itself, sounds from one scene overlap onto another, often the sound cuts out all together, and the whole film has the quality of a patchwork w/ holes in it, much like the language within the film, which is in a constant state of being modified and expanded upon, bumping into walls, hiccupping, stop-start lurching, knitted together by the experimentations and odd game-generating activities of the adult toddlers, developmentally stalled as they are, intractably bound up in polymorphous perversity and unable to direct their sexual drives toward any kind of utilitarian end, so constantly searching, fumbling, spazzing, playing around. This family has developed its own semiotic realm at once confused, elaborate, and wickedly amusing. This sense of language functioning from a degree-zero is very reminiscent of Beckett’s plays. Apparently if you speak Greek, a really upset Greek guy told me after the screening, Dogtooth is even stranger. We never have any idea why Father keeps up this ridiculously complex charade, how exactly Mother figures in, or how a man capable of thinking the way Father does is able to pass in the outside world. Invariably the film is partially about that. How little we know of guys in suits who keep their cards close to their chests. The only time we see him communicating at the office it is to explain to a co-worker why his wife doesn’t like having visitors. But the outside world is not entirely held at bay. Father brings home a blindfolded female security guard named Christina from the factory whom he pays to regularly fuck the Son (who looks like a young Russell Crowe if you kept him in yr attic for a few months), until she starts bribing Older Daughter to lick her keyboard in exchange for gifts like a hair band that sparkles in the dark and hair gel. Older Daughter persuades Christina to trade her two video cassettes for a week in exchange for a final keyboard licking, because what the fuck does she need w/ hair gel? Father finds the tapes, duct tapes one of them to his hand and then repeatedly bashes Older Daughter over the head w/ it. Later he beats her so nastily w/ the VCR I think the fat girl I was sitting next to actually started crying. At this point Christina is no longer allowed in the house, blindfold or no blindfold. So Father gets the idea that Older Daughter should have to fuck Son. The ensuing sex scene, awkward and uncomfortable (you think?) produced the first wave of very loud and vociferous walkouts from the audience. There is levity, however: cutting away from the sex to the two of them lying next to one another in bed, Older Daughter tells Son: “you do that again, bitch, I’ll tear yr guts out!” Later Older Daughter, apparently pretty fucking sick of the status quo at home, smashes her own face to smithereens w/ a small dumbbell in front of the bathroom mirror, spitting her teeth in the sink. Again, a thunderous wave of walkouts. Older Daughter, bloodied-up in her nighty, missing a bunch of teeth, hides in the trunk of the car. The family searches for her to no avail, barking like dogs to ward of the murderous cats that they figure must have gotten her, Father having warned them that a cat can eat a person whole after Son disemboweled one w/ hedge clippers subsequent to its having happened to hazard onto the lawn, Younger Daughter calling out “Bruce!” as per one of the many games the girls have concocted in which Older Sister moves around the room and sits in various places and positions, moving her head in recognition of the name Bruce. The next day, nothing resolved, Father drives to work and parks out front. He goes into the factory. The camera holds on the car’s trunk for an inordinate period of time. Nothing happens. I’m guessing Older Daughter probably suffocated in there. The end. Holy shit! Nice!

A-

Politist, adj. / Police, Adjective

Another in the ongoing vanguard of dryly comic and methodical Romanian films focusing on institutionality and individual estrangement, Police, Adjective, by 12:08 East of Bucharest director Corneliu Porumboiu, brings a whole new meaning, along w/ its title, of course, to the expression “arguing semantics.” A slow, methodical film about onerous policing (verb) in the director’s hometown of Vaslui, suggesting the drudgery of the work and the alienating character of the urban landscape, and shot in the style film theorist Laura Mulvey called “liminal” in relation to Chantal Akerman’s hyper-minimalist masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, meaning that it resists temporal elision and perspectival fragmentation in favor of fixed perspective and a focus on the drawn-out duration of actions and gestures in real time (which in turns means that much of the Palm Springs audience was bored as fuck and not shy about verbalizing it to those sitting close by, requiring them to be repeatedly shushed and, failing that, threatened and asked to just please go home already by yr humble reviewer). We follow bored and increasingly annoyed plainclothes cop Cristi as he follows a trio of teenagers involved in covert hash smoking, trailing them to and from nondescript buildings and urban hangouts, often spending hours waiting for something to happen, smoking cigarettes and passing time. He occasionally prepares and goes over at length various detailed (and very funny) reports on the very little that he is accomplishing. This dryly humorous, caustic, and ultimately sad and trenchant film spends a lot of time focusing on down time in between minor interactions, most of which have to do in one form or another w/ the vicissitudes of language, law, and authority as each relates to the other. Though the powers that be are anxious for Cristi to close the case and bust the kid who is passing around the joints, Cristi believes that it is wrong to punish the kid for an essentially harmless crime, is suspicious of the other kid, who he terms “the squealer” and who is nominally ratting on his own pal, and thinks the cops should just sit tight until the suspect’s older brother, whom Cristi suspects of being the source of the drugs, returns from one of his regular trips to Italy. He kills time avoiding having to agree to set up a sting and arrest the kid. He argues w/ a co-worker about why the portly co-worker would suck a foot tennis, claiming that there is a law correlating an individual’s sucking at football and the consequent certainty of his sucking a foot tennis. The two argue the semantics of this “law.” Later a half-drunk Cristi argues w/ his pretty grammarian of a wife over the lexicographical implications of a cheesy song she insists on repeatedly watching on YouTube. When he finally confronts his captain w/ his refusal to set up the sting, the captain uses a dictionary to dialectically manipulate language to undermine Cristi, forcing him to define word after word – “conscience,” “law,” “moral,” “police” – until Cristi has been turned completely inside-out. The film details how Cristi is alienated by pointless, deadening labor only to be subject to the manipulation of language to authoritarian ends in a process which disempowers and confuses him, divesting him of agency and forcing his complicity. Language is a heavily polarized chess game, grounded in this case in a political culture not long removed from its totalitarian origins. Police, Adjective is as dry as a coal miner’s cough, but it is very funny and incredibly astute. It is very much another commendable achievement in the ongoing renaissance of one of the most flourishing and singular national cinemas currently in existence.

Palm Springs International Film Festival: Day 1

2010-01-09T22:18:00.000-08:00

Ah, the film festival: the last outlet for the clean and sober spree-happy addict that I am; a time of overindulgence, unswayable all-systems-go immersive indulgence; weeklong retinal-aural bliss-out. Nothing beats a good film festival. This is my first in Palm Springs and may well be my one and only opportunity to sample its various nefarious delights. Palm Springs, after all, is no place for a thirty-year-old heterosexual writer-musician-whatever. This is not the place for me and it never will be, but that doesn’t mean I cannot take full advantage of its damn fine art gallery, sundamaged, rutting celebrities (was that Cloris Leachman enjoying the avocado club sandwich at Rick’s?), and even the occasional cultural event that is not taking place in a casino and featuring some washed-up crooner of yore or avuncular stand-up comic.

The line-up in for the World Cinema section is good here. The Palm Springs International Film Festival prides itself on this. They annually screen every country’s submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. They are, in fact, the only festival in the world that scrupulously goes about doing this. Which is pretty cool, but would not work if they didn’t also bring in stuff that doesn’t have that disempowering stamp of approval from governmental funding agencies and the diplomatic corps. Luckily they appear to be keeping things sufficiently interesting in this regard. There is also a spotlight on new Australian cinema this year, which I will be sampling some of and which is undoubtedly a good idea. It is an underrepresented national cinema that at its best effortlessly competes w/ any in the English speaking world, and it has been a little while since I’ve caught a reasonable dose. Cool. What else? This year has already, before the proper commencement of festivities, seen one newsworthy story break. Arms of the Chinese government, in all its anarchic cartoon Stalinism, have reached out to withdraw both of the Chinese films that were supposed to show up here (City of Life and Death and Quick, Quick, Slow) after the festival refused to itself withdraw The Sun Behind the Clouds: Tibet's Struggle for Freedom the existence of which (and the festival's unwavering intention to screen it) pissed off the Chinese for obvious reasons. This is too bad, as clearly City of Life and Death was the big discovery at last year’s Toronto fest, and was one of the films that I was most excited about. Alas. Them’s the breaks.

All in all the first day was a real promising blast-off. The crowds are huge here, and full of ridiculous bourgeois scum and people holding appallingly stupid conversations in the extremely lengthy lines (except for Polytechnique, amusingly, which attracted approximately ten of us, despite the presence of the lead actor at the screening, going to show that English Canada is not the only place where nobody goes to Canadian films). Today in line for the new Michael Haneke a woman behind me actually extemporized that Barack Obama's politics were, to her mind, well to the left of Attila the Hun's. Attila the Hun? Attila you dastardly proponent of collectivized farms you! Attila w/ yr five year plan! Goddamn Hun apparatchik! Fucking moron. I wonder how long this woman lasted in the two-thousand-strong baffled audience for the Haneke, filling every last seat of the Camelot’s main theater, many noisily making their exits as the film progressed, finally leaving us w/ a substantially less packed-to-the-rafters group of people who had not just apparently stumbled unknowingly upon their first European film. What a pissed off group of old white people in shorts and white socks that remained though! I, of course, was pleased as punch by the whole gleeful clusterfuck. This is going to be a strange-ass weak!

Anywho: without further ado, my first day’s screenings:

Fish Tank

Andrea Arnold’s second feature, after the well-received CCTV downer Red Road, is so determined to pay homage to the bleak tradition of unflinchingly dower kitchen-sink downers that have long met programming requirements for British TV, that she and DOP Robbie Ryan have shot this BBC and Film Council-funded bleak house in blocky and boxy 1.33/1 ratio w/ a surprisingly good eye for television-scale compositions. The camera spends a lot of time tracking after determined fifteen-year-old aspiring hip hop dancer protagonist Mia (the very credible newcomer Katie Jarvis overplaying her hardened insouciance because that’s what her character would do as a means of survival and emotional defense) in a way that suggests the influence of Alan Clarke’s steadicam urban roadmappings (see the original Elephant (’89) and the appropriately named Road (’87) especially), also shot in the 1.33/1 ratio (though they, unlike Fish Tank, debuted on television and were not intended to be shown on theatrical screens). More than the television work of Clarke, though, which tends to be smooth and ascending, the documentary kineticism of these tracks – often from behind, yo-yoing over-the-shoulder, or in profiles that slap the vigilantly restless protagonist against the skuzzy urban gridwork like something trying to escape a spider’s web – makes them resemble those that show up repeatedly in the contemporary films of the Belgian Dardenne brothers, whose Rosetta (’99) clearly informs Fish Tank in ways that are not always flattering to Arnold’s film, the inherent poetry of which is more forced and less delicate/immanent than that of Rosetta. Compared to the slew of films over the years that have focused on down-but-not-out lives in the miserable confines of English council estates, however, Fish Tank stands up as a powerful and first rate offering, rhythmically and visually alert, as well as showcasing a natural ability to glean crystalline moments from its ugly Essex w/ its emptied out wastelands concealing a beauty that the film repeatedly ferrets out when least expected to. These films always walk a tightrope between proffering condescending portraits of their vulgar, stupid, and reflexively violent working class characters on the one hand, or demonstrating how social imbalances and organizational institutionalization of class structures creates the conditions in which individuals are stripped of the privilege of being able to make moral decisions or the option to treat others w/ anything like the respect w/ which they themselves would like to be treated on the other. I very much like how in Fish Tank a lexicon of grievance, anger, and contempt persists even when the characters are trying to express love and understanding for one another. Mia will repeatedly lash out w/ vitriol at her mother and sister, and especially at her mother’s boyfriend Conor (Michael Fassbender, who is way too much of a hunk to ever quite fit in here, and whose character is so anachronistically sensible he even backs into parking spots), for whom she progressively develops confusing sexual feelings, at exactly the moment that feelings of love-or-something-like-it are excited. When Mia leaves the family nest at the end of the film, having fucked Conor, who then retreats from their lives and the pursuit of whom reveals more secrets, lies and painful self-realizations, her little sister sobbingly tells her that she fucking hates her only to embrace her in a hug. Her beautiful drunk mom tells her to fuck off already whilst dancing to Mia’s Nas CD, only to then join her two daughters in a sad and touching cavort to the same music, in which they mirror one another’s swaying movements and try to conceal smiles. Ultimately the film becomes about how facades of toughness and coolness, conditioned by measly living environments and legacies of hurt and abandonment, become entwined w/ how love and devotion become simultaneously expressed and repressed. It is about how sad it is that some people only know how to express love through cruelty because cruelty and fear define their world from the ground up through no fault of their own. Fish Tank is ultimately as compassionate and cruel, or rather compassionate-cruel, as its characters. Fish Tank is a shitty name for this film, however, and not one that helps it look like it has found a way around the problem of positioning its characters condescendingly. Do they really need to be compared to helpless fish?

B+

Das weisse Band - Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte / The White Ribbon

“A German Children’s Story” as the German subtitle has it, which does not survive the title’s translation into English. Haneke has said that he excised that part of the title for the rest of the world because he did not want people outside of Germany to think the film somehow was a nationally specific allegory, but was more than happy to have German audiences believe that it was. Meaning? Meaning that Haneke, as usual, wants his Palme d'Or-winning film to implicate everyone, nobody excluded. And it’s personal, buddy. So yes, Das weisse Band explores w/ lateral moves, calculating elisions, and novelistic digressions that great and perennial 20th century theme: fascism starts at home. The main temptation for misreading the film, however, would lie in wanting to extrapolate from this story of young minds being shaped, disciplined, prodded, and humiliated into supplication before the social-behavioral tenants prognosticated by the principal adult figures in one particular German Protestant village at the dawn of World War 1, an allegory expressly about the emergence of one particular fascism: the subsequent rise of National Socialism and Hitler’s Germany during the adulthood of the film’s teenagers and children. While the film certainly wants us to understand that this connection is there, it is finally much more universal than that. Haneke’s anti-Bilungroman about how raising children is doomed always to pervert them, shot in digital color to allow for natural light to be used at night, and then de-chromaticized to take on the stark b&w of August Snader’s photography from the era, is about how children raised to universalize the value systems promulgated by their parents and community leaders (here represented by The Pastor, The Baron, The Steward, The Doctor, and the narrating Teacher), become aware of the fallibility of these parental figures, the implicit hypocrisy at the heart of cycles of discipline and punishment, and instead of seeing these failing as simply human, develop a spirit of revenge or give in to even harsher reciprocations of the regime of discipline-punishment, judging their progenitors w/ their progenitors’ own values and finding them wanting, turning a newly intensified regime upon their own offspring and thereby perpetuating the cycle. The film is really about how socialization invariably damages the young, rendering us all defective in its attempt to impose its correctives. Haneke focuses on the hungry eyes of the young people, eating up every minute adult failing, registering the pain of unjust rapprochement, concealing the knowledge they possess as well as a deep, troubling animosity. Essentially about a series of cruel events that take place in the village (The Doctor and his horse felled by a strategically placed trip-wire, a farmer’s wife falling to her death through a shoddy wooden floor, the pretty son of The Baron found tied-up and beaten in the barn, the subsequent burning down of The Baron’s barn, the midwife’s Down syndrome child found brutalized and blinded) that are paralleled w/ acts of cruelty witnessed by, enacted upon, or informing the world of these children, and three acts of violence explicitly executed by young people (the eldest son of the dead woman gets revenge on The Baron, whom he deems responsible, by fervently laying waste to The Baroness’s cabbage patch w/ a sythe, the daughter of the pastor murders his pet bird and leaves it impaled by scissors on his desk in the shape of a cross, two young children of laborers beat up The Baron’s son and nearly drown him in order to steel his wooden flute). The film very much follows from Caché (’05), Haneke’s last film (not including the Funny Games remake), a thriller that focused on a bourgeois intellectual whose past was fraught w/ post-colonial guilt, being besieged w/ a frightening array of incendiary reminders of his past. In that film we are given a series of clues that lead nowhere, pieces of a puzzle that cannot be resolved, thus the mystery becomes informed by the central character’s own paranoid guilt. In Das weisse Band, we once again are met w/ a slew of incidents and portents, connections and ambiguities that suggest a puzzle that will never quite fit together. The final ominous sense in that of a secret bond between the children (the film has been compared by many to Village of the Damned (’60) which is actually fairly accurate), a repressed bubble of collusion that remains outside the realm of adult oversight and which one is lead to suspect, along w/ the teacher, has replaced the adult world’s system of justice w/ its own more streamlined and unforgiving version, and that the reason that two of the town’s more innocent children (especially the retarded boy, who is wholly innocent) are punished is based on some sort of perversion of this system of discipline-punishment that is forced to enact itself on persons who are entirely without the ability to resist. Not only does this unseen alliance of the children portend the fomentation of Nazism, it suggests how the exercise of power over children may engender all kinds of extremisms on either end of the political spectrum or entirely independent of it. This is the byproduct of all forms of social-production at the site of its real point of energetic implementation: the consciousness of the child, and by the extension upon the social body of the community of young people (dominated by, as The Baroness says of the village itself, “malice, envy, apathy and brutality”). It’s Haneke most dense, dynamic, and literary film (not made for television). At times it’s kind of like a homage to Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le corbeau ('43), which was another stark portrait of a town whose raw nerves are exposed and irritated (in that film a small French village during Nazi occupation suffers a mysterious outbreak of poison pen letters). And the fact that Buñuel’s old writing partner Jean-Claude Carrière helped w/ the script here means that there is way more humor (some of it dark, granted, such as when The Doctor viciously dresses-down the midwife. his erstwhile lover), playfulness and even warmth than one usually finds in Haneke. It is his best film since Code inconnu (’00).

Polytechnique

Polytechnique is Quebec filmmaker Denis Villeneuve’s attempt to cinematize the 1989 massacre at l'École Polytechnique, an event which still looms large in the consciousness of Canadians and which means that the very idea of such a film was extremely controversial from the moment it was first announced. The film goes to great lengths to demonstrate that it doesn’t exist for the wrong reasons and intends no ill-will to survivors, victims, or the families thereof. It refuses to attempt to get inside the killer (Marc Lépine in real life, “the killer” in the closing credits here), it uses composite characters instead of trying to gaudily fictionalize the people whose lives were directly impacted by the event (sort of: Sébastien Huberdeau plays Jean-François, one of the men who stood by helpless while the women were killed and who did his best to help in the bloody aftermath, but who was so guilt-stricken and traumatized that he ultimately took his own life, which means that there is one particular individual in real life whose story his parallels as actor Maxim Gaudette explained after the screening). Years ago Jacques Rivette wrote eloquently in Cahiers de cinema about what he saw as the morally appalling tendency of filmmakers to aesthetecize historical tragedy, particularly anything to do w/ the Shoah. In the seventies, when the Cahiers entered its sternly-theoretical-but-still-hip period under the leadership of the amazing Serge Daney, such a position became even more engrained. Any film that attempted to use beauty and artifice to frame historical tragedies was immediately attacked on moral grounds. While such positions seem a little outdated these days, Polytechnique spends so much time not existing for the wrong reasons that it never really finds a reason to exist. I was also, I must admit, strangely put off by its b&w gorgeousity. It is intermittently very effective in terms of its look and the incredible amount of tension and sensory shock it exploits. Its sound design is especially stunning. There is clearly one reason, however, that the film was shot in black and white (no matter what the very talented but occasionally vapid Villeneuve says about wanting to minimize the blood and gore (really?)), and that is that nobody wants to have to try and make a typical Canadian university look like anything other than an ugly, shittily lit cinder-blocked hell on earth. The movie wants to look pretty. I cannot blame it for that. But somehow I cannot credit it for that either. Especially when its composite characters and gender politics are so unpleasantly telegraphed in ways that absolutely kill the movie when nobody is getting killed. The main female Valérie (actress and co-producer Karine Vanasse, often framed beautifully to showcase her strident absence of an Adam’s apple) is shown before the carnage begins sauntering through hallways while loutish men bump her about, entrapped in the bondage of high heel shoes, then being frankly told by a prospective employer that chicks make bad engineers because of their tendency to grow up and lay eggs. It’s silly, especially as the male killer is explicitly made out to be a deranged malcontent and not a redolent microembodiment of patriarchal society (he is rather someone who has been especially unsuccessful at fitting into that society). Thankfully Polytechnique waits until Valérie’s unspeakably poorly-written monologue at the end – in which she goes on about how she hates it when people tell her she is strong but demonstrating through her stating this how strong she in fact is, talking about being able to lay eggs and still be an engineer, all of this edited over footage of her working in a hangar and at a desk that looks like a fucking b&w DeVry add – to get around to just outright sucking. Villeneuve’s pretty, fun, and somewhat vacant previous women’s films may not have been masterpieces, but at least they weren’t fucking stupid. Polytechnique leaves you w/ a final impression that finally undoes anything that it might have had going for it. Where Gus Van Sant’s impossible-not-to-compare-it-to Elephant ended pretty awkwardly, this one just takes a crap on the linoleum. There’s a pretty cool upside-down track along a hallway roof’s fluorescent lights that closes the awful final passage. Earlier I also like how swirling snow seems to equate the killer’s spree w/ ethereal natural forces. But still …

C+

Top Twenty Films of the 00s

2010-01-06T10:48:00.001-08:00

Some decade! It has frankly been bananas. Ten years of war, apocalyptic terrorism(s), madness, global conspiratorial aggregations, the collapse of deregulated markets, black people in the white house, the viral spread of digitality in all of its forms, and the continued outboarding of our brains in our ongoing evolutionary transformation into a particularly complicated type of ant or something. Virtuality increasingly predominates. The cinema, as per, has been right there to clinically catalogue the symptomatologies, serve as test-case host for the microbial agents, and to begin to construct a complex multi-dimensional cartography of our brave new morphological world, setting out to discover its limits and contours, its gradations and plateaus, its depths and its peaks. We have certainly lived through interesting times in these ten years, a propos the supposedly Chinese curse the origins of which have never been established, but which came into popular usage in the 1930s, a decade no less hellishly interesting than the in-some-ways-similar one we have just endured w/ its economic disaster and endgame competition of global extremisms (a fact which may portend a very dark road ahead indeed). For someone like myself who prides himself on his dark sense of humor and fondness for disaster, it has become irreducibly apparent that I am right where I ought to be in the space-time continuum. Part of what has been most appealing to me in these past ten years in how the digital world has precipitated a growing formal grammatical complexity and sophistication in the image culture. I can think of no better example of this complexity and sophistication than that gradually built up by the amazing and globally very popular Bourne franchise, three films spanning the years 2002-2007. No films better exemplify how popular cinematographic practices have so stridently surpassed previous understanding of the medium’s capabilities than this increasingly sophisticated post-global triptych. A further indication of how extraordinary a decade of cinema this has been is that The Bourne Ultimatum fails, despite its not insignificant virtues, to quite make my list of the best twenty films of the decade. Nor, somehow, does Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (’03), the film that to my mind still best demonstrates how these newly sophisticated cinematographic tools are used to make even the most brazen of consumerist entertainments – owing so much to the kinetic virtuosity of music videos and the nimble, spatiotemporal sculpting first perfected in the sly Marxist parable The Matrix (’99) – absolutely fucking mind-melting. It is clear that cinema itself is at a serious impasse, and that the world of new media is still in the early stages of asserting its dominance over how we make sense of ourselves and our world – how we are entertained, informed, and inspired. Films like Avatar continue to mollify the masses whilst maintaining the primacy of cinematographic spectacle, tied as it is to a public experience in a theatrical setting, in a world that will continue to change, along w/ its image culture, very fast indeed.

A little preliminary explanation as to the nature of the following list of twenty films is in order before it is laid out. First and foremost, there is no objective set of aesthetic, formal, sociopolitical, or historical criteria that informs the choice or these individual films or the order in which they are presented. (I do notice that the vast majority of the films come from the first half of the decade which may have something to do w/ the amount of time I have had the opportunity to live w/ them). The list only exists in order to help me orient myself, because it gives me pleasure – it is, in fact, a taxonomy of pleasures tied to a particular period of time, as such it is a consideration of pleasures that could not have been had at any other time. It is important to me that the films I choose do in one way or another seem particularly important by virtue of both when they were introduced into the world and when they became known experientially by me. It is also important for my enjoyment that the list not be bogged down by too many films by a small handful of filmmakers. If I were to consider more than one film by any filmmaker, I fear that the top five films would all be by Claire Denis which, though absolutely just, would be no goddamn fun at all. It is for this reason – that of my own personal pleasure – that this list of films contains only one film by any given director. Finally, as usual, there are a great many films that could just as easily replace some on the list. It is hard not to include a brief list of runners up. It is almost impossible to come to terms w/ the fact that we have just lived through a decade that includes twenty films that I deemed superior to: Comédie de l'innocence (Raoul Ruiz, 2000), Saenghwalui balgyeon / Turning Gate (Sang-soo Hong, 2002), Um Filme Falado / A Talking Picture (Manoel de Oliveira, 2003), Salinui chueok / Memories of Murder (Bong Joon-ho, 2003), Birth (Jonathan Glazer 2004), The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005), Les amants réguliers (Philippe Garrel, 2005), Solntse / The Sun (Aleksandr Sokurov, 2005), Period Piece (Giuseppe Andrews, 2006), ...a bude hur / It’s Gonna Get Worse (Petr Nikolaev, 2007). And those are just the first ten that came immediately to mind. These lists change over time, anyway. Maybe eventually I can make a top twenty list of my top twenty lists of the 00s. Until then …

20. Forty Shades of Blue (2005)

Halfway through the decade the film to beat as state of the nation address on American masculinity was Forty Shades of Blue, a film paradoxically dominated almost entirely by the performance of an actress, and I’m pretty sure no other film ever quite did. It also overtakes Jarmusch’s Mystery Train (’89) as the best film ever about Memphis. Telling the story of Alan James (Rip Torn at his doddering, explosive, drunken bestial best), a legendary music producer entering into old age and grieving his youth, taking it all out on his young Muscovite trophy wife and mother-to-his-three-year-old-son Laura, played in possibly the greatest performance by an actress this decade (who wasn’t Isabelle Huppert or Jeanne Balibar) by Dina Korzun. When Alan’s troubled adult son returns into the fold and develops feelings for Laura, we watch as these insecure, secretly needy men fall over themselves to entrap her in their confusion, desire, and need to be accredited as men, while Laura retains a total strength and self-composed insouciance, struggling w/ her own feelings but also well aware that she needs desperately to hold on to this life in which she now finds herself, subsumed within a cocoon of wealth and status that can be taken away from her at any moment. This is not the sort of maudlin “adult” relationship material trucked in by American workhorses like Sydney Pollock and Robert Benton, but more the touching and radically decentered poetics of family relations that one finds in the greatest films of John Cassavetes and Maurice Pialat. And the steely Memphis blues of the lighting are gorgeous. This was only the second film DOP Julian Whatley shot (and he has, criminally, only shot one since). He sets up shots for director Ira Sachs here that remind you of the kinds of shots Mark Li Ping-bin would set up for a Wong Kar-wai or a Hou Hsiao-hsien, providing sleek finish to a film heavy in naturalism.

19. Miami Vice (2006)

Michael Mann’s total reinvention of the 80s television cop opera that, w/ its combination of white suits, puffy hair, and ejaculatory gunfights, established him as a major player after his terrifically accomplished but underperforming debut feature Thief (’81), is simply put the best looking digitally shot film that I have yet seen. It is a gorgeous, textural film, that fetishizes everything within its visual field, featuring by far the sexiest shower love scene ever committed to celluloid (which the digital had to be blown up on to for theatrical screening). The narrative and the characters are so streamlined to meet the basic needs of this no-beating-around-the-bush built-to-ride policier, that the flaws of Mann’s other films are nowhere to be found here. There is nothing extraneous forced upon the sleek and compact chassis of this baby. It plays more like a stoned tone poem than an action film, and would probably be the best film made this decade to watch on opium (which would be an ironic thing to do whilst watching a film about vice squad heroics in the first place), if not for the fact that the film is already opium enough. Sorry Karl Marx. I like it.

18. Process (2004)

Speaking of tone poems, Process is a motherfucker of one! Of all the films that I have seen only once, Process is the one that I most wish to see again. Somebody must put this excruciating suicide masterpiece on DVD. It is a must see for anybody who has suffered through recurrent periods of obsessive suicidal ideation. Shot is twenty-nine single long takes of Béatrice Dalle (perhaps my deep-down-in-the-dank-darkness-of-myself favorite living actress), as she is led through the titular process which culminates in her taking her own life onscreen. Before this we witness her onstage theatrical meltdown, a lengthy bout of threeway sex w/ two actors from whom two very realistic performances have been, ahem, excited, the revelation of scars from an offscreen mastectomy, a snack of shattered glass, and the lengthy packing up in boxes of a very substantial collection of books. It is a hypnotic, glassy, and powerful ordeal scored by John Cale and featuring songs by Smog and others, as well as lots of intertitle text and quotations from Don DeLillo etc. Everything about this film is sinister and unapologetically cruel. Guillaume Depardieu, playing the ex-lover of the glamorous suicide-to-be, limps around in his final performance before the amputation of his leg. I have been unable to track down either of the subsequent films that American art critic turned cinematic provocateur C.S. Leigh has made. I can think of nothing more singularly maddening. My ex and I loved this film so much we spent years trying to track down a copy on eBay to no avail. Talking to her recently, I discovered that she still hasn’t given up, though none of her leads have turned out as of yet. It’s that kind of film. You can’t put the fucking thing to bed.

17. Death Proof (2007)

Tarantino once called Jackie Brown something along the lines of his hanging out w/ people movie. Death Proof fits that same bill only more so, surpassing Jackie, his previous high water mark. It is his masterpiece. The list of things he is borrowing from, as usual, is longer than a Fritz Lang anaconda, but rest assured you’ll catch up w/ his childhood love of Dukes of Hazard. Just the lap dance scene alone (playfully excised as it was from the shortened Grindhouse version) references Blue Velvet, Almodovar and his protégé de la Iglesia, Tarantino’s buddy Rodriguez … and he’s paying so many props to seemingly unrelated contemporary Richard Linklatter in the Austin section … or what about all the references to the films of Jack Hill merged w/ Smokey and the Bandit? Opening w/ Jack Nietsche and the foot/ass fetish is the least of it (though it sure demonstrates that yr in good perverted hands like a motherfucker). This movie is a total feminist masterpiece and if you don’t notice that the first time than I recommend that you rescreen Death Proof and pay special attention as the amazing Zoe Bell returns the too-cool-for-Burt-Reynolds-school gaze right as power polarities are putting our portrait-of-a-serial-killer not-so-cartoony-as-we-might-at-first-think antagonist right in the goddamn crux of his own swarthy castratedness, poring Red Rose bourbon on his wounds and weeping … then she grabs a heavy pipe and leaps on a Dodge Challenger like it were a John Ford stallion. The editing is the most brilliant freaked out digikink madness since Miike’s Dead or Alive. I would marry any one of up these bitches AND FAST. And good to see Film Comment on the rack at a Tennessee gulp ‘n’ go! And his best soundtrack yet! More fun than any of us deserve!

16. Ne touchez pas la hache / The Duchess of Langeais (2007)

Though Jacques Rivette, the king of really long French new wave films w/ impeccable mise-en-scène, is indeed adapting Balzac’s The Duchess of Langeais w/ his measured 2007 masterpiece, his French title, Ne touchez pas la hache (which was the title Balzac originally chose) is way better, and the film definitely should have been released in North America as Don’t Touch the Axe. It really is the perfect title for this quietly nasty story of two lovers trying to keep the upper hand over one another, salubriously maneuvering to force the other to make the fatal gesture, keeping everything at the level of a sinister seductive game of intelligence, subversive wit, and intertwining stratagems of ridiculous unspoken complexity, for fear of exposing themselves to courtly humiliation or romantic hurt. Rivette has long proven to be cinema’s greatest adapter of 19th century literary masterpieces, and Ne touchez pas la hache is one of his greatest such adaptations. Jeanne Balibar brings smirky brio to her turn as the manipulative, coy and by-turns-obnoxious duchess, while Guillaume Depardieu is bullish and brash as the in-over-his-head but no-less-malicious Napoleonic military hero freshly returned from darkest Africa to something equally menacing in the chambers of a lady. Something which by turns perplexes, excites, and enrages him. The way their bodies inhabit these extraordinary spaces in their dance of love/hate was no doubt aided by the fact that the actors reportedly despised one another. That it is ultimately the duchess upon whom the axe falls is indeed surprising. As is her resultant reinvention as a barefoot Carmelite nun. Sexy and vicious stuff.

15. Hayabusa / Dog Days Dream (2006)

Perhaps the great underscreened debut feature of the last twenty years, Hayabusa remains so below the radar that it doesn’t even have an entry on the Internet Movie Database. It is the greatest slacker love comedy of all time. A young Japanese couple lose their dignity and pathetic sources of income (he basically collects garbage until he suddenly doesn’t) during a brutal heat wave, and decide to barricade themselves inside the wreckage. This is simply one of the best Japanese comedies of all time. We open w/ a shot of her brushing his teeth whilst he lies in bed. Long takes have been a major characteristic of the finest art films of this decade, but it is rare to see them so well deployed in a straight-out comedy (let alone a debut feature), but Hayabusa may well be the film that rocked those motherfuckers better than any other. Good Lord! As a statement about post-Marx hopelessness and the lives of young people w/ no room to move, this movie is an instrument of comic cosmic war (channeling W.C. Fields, Jacques Tati, Jerry Lewis, and the Godard of Soigne ta droite), begging for an understanding of how hard late market consumer capitalism is on the young, sexy, and terminally lazy. There is no way that most of the films winning festival awards these last couple years even deserve to sit at the same table as this masterpiece nobody saw. Number two of the decade on the list of films that I would give large quantities of plasma to see a second time.

14. Izo (2004)

If cinema is the seventh art then Takashi Miike is presumably on to about the ninth or tenth by now. Just when you think he can’t go any further (than Gozu? Come on!), he takes his game into even more decentered territories with the space-time continuum disrupting Izo, his furthest-out-there alien intervention yet. Telling the story of a time-traveling Christ-figure without the forgiveness part, Miike’s elaborate reworking of epistemology in TV miniseries MPD Psycho gets transferred into purely metaphysical territory, the whole while inventing a new Brechtean street theater approach. Izo is a wonder of digital montage and countercultural archive/database fever. This is the first Miike manga-mash for Chomsky readers and black-kerchief-wearing anarchists. It is his first film for readers of pre or post-kitsch SF. It is many things if not most. At its center is a hero for right now; a warrior at war with all life on earth, with all history as it folds before power’s pen; with all institutions and systems (including laws of astrophysics and molecular biology). Izo is “grudge” as demonic possession, as post-individuated, as post-temporal. The grudge is of us, we are of it. The manifold is open like the universal wound, our struggle akin to the struggle of sperm in search of fertilization (did he get that shit from some educational film?), a fiery yawning of the firmament, and we are always swallowed back up by our ecstatic activity, our accursed share. History is a fire science of revenge. Izo is our wrath and rapier, the eternal return of a fall, skipping down across phonograph grooves of the real. Every name in history is I, said Nietzsche. And the time is always right now, answers the cybercipher. Izo is above us and below, his deathblow conjoins two gravities within a single field of movement. This is the new smoke and mirrors folks.

13. Dying at Grace (2003)

Allan King is a Canadian national treasure. As a Canadian, I cherish the documentary tradition on which my national cinema is founded. It is the only national cinema in the world whose two greatest filmmakers, Michel Brault and Allan King, are primarily known for documentaries. King invented a form of fly-on-the-wall documentary that he calls “actuality drama,” and each of his films has been about other people who represent or act out concerns that are dominating his own life (such as marriage in his unbelievably awesome A Married Couple (1969), which I recently saw again as part of a Canadian cinema retrospective in Calgary – it just gets better). With Dying at Grace, King has made an incomparably powerful film out of his own concerns about mortality. Filmed over the course of one winter in the palliative care ward at Toronto's Grace Hospital, Dying at Grace unflinchingly shows us the last days of five terminal patients, up to and including their final breaths. More than anything else the film confirms how exhausting death is both for those who go through it and those (sometimes, sadly, only the hospital staff) who wait by their side. And finally how peaceful, even transcendent, the letting go.

12. Ten (2002)

Ten conversations involving an Iranian woman driving a car and her various sundry passengers. Fewer camera setups than that. Is Kiarostami not now officially the bus driver of our cinema? the man at the helm, astride the wielding of our gazebox? Well it’s certainly starting to look that way, Bub, and you had better get on board if you want to catch the current of our digital world and its new networks and veins of video truth! What Louis and Auguste Lumière started, the Iranian resistance continues, standing in refusal instead of mere awe. An oppositional poetics confronting the hegemony of silence, the absence of light met with unburied luminosity, vision wrested from the shroud. The truth does not need complications, polyrhythmic abundances, false provisions, when it itself is victory. Not when the liberated senses are the world’s common field. Not when the locally-global stand no longer needs mediation. Kiarostami has won our World War III. Not that that will slow down the bloody losers! This is our infatada against the forces of silence, the presencing absences of any empire whatever! This is our cinema unbridled, under the radar, and it matters very much!

11. Qian xi man po / Millennium Mambo (2001)

Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien, arguably the greatest filmmaker of the nineties, continues to go strong, having even branched out to make gorgeous and lived-in films in Japan and France. His druggy and opulent Qian xi man po, shot in his homeland and expertly capturing, encased in amber, the Taipei of an ecstasy high, was perhaps better than any other film this decade at capturing the look and feel of the lives young people lived in it. A film absolutely alive w/ electric nightlife color, sensuous decadence and sumptuous decor, focusing most of its energy on the camera-worship of Hong Kong starlet Shu Qi , playing a woman ever in-between looking back on the contemporary action (a solemn love triangle involving a DJ boyfriend and a Hou-type criminal ne’er-do-well) from the not-to-distant future (2011 to be precise). Hou structures the achronological narrative, framed by our heroine’s unreliable narration, as is his wont, around gatherings over food and drink which Mark Li Ping-bin’s roving camera eats up like its in on the feasting, w/ most of the nominal action played out offscreen. Qian xi man po captures our post-global era flawlessly, traversing its nightclubs and tiny apartments w/ effortless grace, as though it were exploring a strangely familiar planet full of both bluesy ennui and exultant beauty. As good looking a film w/ as pretty a cast of characters as you will ever see. It’s a minor work, but gloriously so. One which crystallizes a place and time like no other.

10. DemonLover (2002)

When William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman were adapting Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep to the big screen, one of them famously asked Chandler to clarify a few plot points. It turned out that he had no idea who had committed one of the murders in his own labyrinthine novel. One imagines that if confronted to provide the same type of narratological overview of DemonLover writer-director Olivier Assayas would be forced to offer up a similar shrugging of shoulders. His international cyber-espionage thriller (on steroids) about slimy corporate malfeasance in and around the hardcore manga market, is so intricate and opaquely plotted that the viewer is left as confused to its goings on as the average citizen is to the behind-the-scenes machinations of real post-global affairs. Part of the film’s radicality is that the most nefarious agents of subterfuge and domination are its hyper-intelligent and self-sufficient women. Vanguard technologies remain at the forefront of this forward-looking masterpiece in a way that makes it read like the abject unconscious to the Bourne franchise’s ego. DemonLover will be written about at great length in one hundred years, like Conrad’s The Secret Agent was in the last years of the 20th century. This is pure epochal cinema, summing up how we do business and summing up how everything we do is “just business,” while at the same time entering uncharted structural and formal waters that feel eerily familiar because this is a director in full control of his craft even if chaos is, after all, his canvas. People have trouble understanding what is happening in this film…this is not there fault! I have trouble understanding what is happening in this film. The characters have trouble understanding what is happening in this film! Something is being encapsulated here, on both sides of the fourth wall, and you feel it queasily in yr diaphragm; not unlike watching yr TV and seeing two simulacra skyscrapers crumbling into the concrete. DemonLover makes for a one hell of a conspiracy-confusion double-bill w/ Assayas’s subsequent companion film, Boarding Gate (’07).

9. Cowards Bend the Knee (2003)

Although we could not possibly have seen it coming at the time, Winnipeg countermythologist Guy Maddin’s Cowards Bend the Knee (originally made as a gallery instillation to be viewed through peepholes, suggesting the sordid nature of the material) would turn out to be the first and greatest film in a masterful sui generis trilogy (at least a trilogy, maybe more are forthcoming … one can only hope), continued through Brand Upon the Brain! (’06) and My Winnipeg (’07), in which he has constructed a temporally unstuck autobiography, no longer simply imaging-into-existence an alternative history to Canadian national cinema but one for himself as well. Nobody, amazingly enough, has ever done anything quite like this. The conceit is pure genius: make a completely honest film about what a prick you are, how you made your first girlfriend have an abortion and immediately grew cold and withholding towards her, blaming her for everything, and then killed your hockey coach father by being such a huge disappointment to him, but make this film strange and dreamlike and situate it in an era before you were even born … but use your real name. Fill it w/ horrific abject fetal abattoirs hidden within beauty parlors, acts of Oedipal anguish, hands w/ their own berserk autonomy, and an aesthetic that brings to mind flashbulb-lit photos of the hockey stars of yore. This movie reads my soul like brail. I can still hear my own father screaming “skate, skate, BEND YOUR KNEES” at me during hockey practice as a kid. This film almost feels like my own private fever dream (replace Winnipeg with Calgary and off you go). Points also for bringing the film in at approximately one hour. Maddin’s shorts are like premature ejaculations and his features are likely to drag. This cine-novella is the greatest thing since legalized abortion.

8. Rokugatsu no hebi / A Snake of June (2002)

Finally, the greatest film about mediated sexuality in the digital age! Somebody had to do it! Shinya Tsukamoto (who had a hell of a comeback decade in general) is our man, much as he was at the end of the 80s when he made Tetsuo, the Iron Man (’89). Set your cell phone on vibrate and submit to Rokugatsu no hebi, wise elder Tuskamoto’s schizosexual manifesto on the liberation and consequent bracing-back-up that proper desire needs if it’s going to breathe. Control, in the sense required of it for psychosexual enjoyment, must feed from chaos and such chaos must find its chaosmos (on-and-off control-like phenomenon). The biomechanical nightmare cartoon carnality of Testuo has given way to a biomechanical nightmare social realism, of a kind, though it is still hyper-cyber-stylized in that way – that smog and blue concrete manner, in an industrial jazz inferno (it was shot in black and white then tinted blue) – that only Master Tuskamoto Shinya can swing it. Asuka Kurosawa’s Rinko, a help-line outreach worker, becomes lost in a sadomasochistic web of virtual contact, mediated biosocial control, and cell phone self-endangerment tactics, with the viewer admiring the hardwiring and the director/sadist attending to the release of current. This film is like a machine: a sex chair – the kind used to unkink all blocked flows so that full orgasmic root potential can be breached – which can also be used to torture or kill; the best kind of machine, in short: one with mobile parts and counterparts. Tsukamoto is the gleeful sadist at the controls as the maniacal interloper in the film and analogically as its director. One of the best, most radical films of the last twenty years, A Snake of June, with its devo science of desire, works like a computer virus. Infect yourself. Get off.

7. Sud pralad / Tropical Malady (2004)

The greatest new discovery of the decade was probably the New York-educated, queer Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul (‘Joe’ to his friends), whose films continually push forward notions of what cinema is and what it is capable of doing. Sud pralad is one of the most beautiful love stories ever put on screen. Broken into two halves, employing a brokeback structure (a structuralist term which has nothing to do w/ gay cowboys eating pudding) that are often utilized by his films (Sang sattawat / Syndromes and a Century (’06) would use the same approach to strikingly different effect). In the first half, we witness the blossoming of love between confident soldier Keng and shy farm boy Tong. Their growing attraction and intimacy brings w/ it a heightened awareness of the fullness of life, as small gestures increasingly contain worlds. In the second half, a feverish fairy tale suddenly breaks out as the soldier now pursues the object of his affections, now a shape-shifting something-or-other, in a moving primitivist parable (full of tigers in trees, mysterious cattle, and a philosophical baboon) that may bespeak the impossibility, the obscure slipperiness, of queer desire in a culture as stultifyingly conservative as Thailand’s (where Joe’s movies are routinely banned). Sud pralad is an incredible, adventurous formal triumph that ceaselessly discovers new and engaging ways of seeing. It is also tremendously haptic. You can almost touch it. The humidity is palpable.

6. Inland Empire (2006)

“A woman in trouble,” quoth the poster for David Lynch’s greatest movie, shot as it was by the consummate stylist on customer-grade video. And the poster ain’t fuckin’ kidding! Lynch, in his voluble and volatile, sui generis style, has come dangerously close to finding a new form with this video extrapolation of his late-period fugue technique trapped in a twisted web of female psychic collapse. Though just another Möbius strip, it is certainly his greatest achievement, formal or aesthetic, since Eraserhead first emerged from the AFI horse stables. Inland Empire (apparently occasioning experiences of real life synaesthesia in some viewers) was well served by being distributed in the Roger Corman / Barnum & Bailey style, causing it to resemble a (post-global) nightmare slowly sneaking down into our towns from upstairs. An absolute triumph of form in the William H. Gass sense of the word: a thing synthesized by proxy through the most systematic yet precarious set of disciplines, like a monstrous, Rabelaisian house of cards being built along with its own corresponding physics.

5. La commune (Paris, 1871) (2000)

Peter Watkins is one of the great artists of the last half century and one of the last remaining Marxists of high cultural standing w/ anything like a commercial audience in mind. The sprawling La commune, running at approximately six hours in its complete form, was his greatest film since 1974’s Edvard Munch. Using a coterie of nonprofessional actors w/ whom he collaborated carefully, forcing them to share in the research and development as he always does, Watkins restages the famous events of the Paris Commune and its violent suppression by the French republican and Prussian forces of Bismarck in the late 19th century, all in a minimally decorated derelict factory, covering it w/ an anachronistic documentary crew and fabricating hilarious news footage, complete w/ coolly "objective" talking heads. By the end he is even talking to his actors as themselves, reflecting upon the events that they have been reenacting. The mordantly clever device of modern news casters and documentarians participating in historical events to which such access was obviously never available, a device he began using w/ Culloden in 1964, allows for a critique of how history has been and is currently being constructed differently-but-the-same, and how acts of resistance and microcultures which practice such resistance become surreptitiously reintegrated and assimilated by dominant mechanisms of power and historical sense-making. The whole exercise serves to celebrate the universality of movements for emancipation and the fleeting pleasures of order usurped at the ecstatic and violent behest of workers, artists, and intellectuals. Powerful and inspiring stuff, Watkins continues to invent new methods for critically framing history, at once beautiful to look at and endlessly conceptually rich.

4. Bu san / Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003)

Perhaps the cinema’s most quietly profound love letter to itself as an artform, Tsai Ming-liang's Bu san nonetheless suggests that cinema may well be entering the century of its own death, something Godard has been proclaiming for a long time and which is also implicit to his own decades-in-the-making Histoire(s) du cinema project. There is something tremendously punk rock about the minimalist and quiet Bu san, in that its depiction of an empty, or rather emptying, movie house, which is screening Honk Kong action kingpin King Hu’s kung fu classic Dragon Inn, is presumably meant to be partially soundtracked by the walkouts that it itself is guaranteed to provoke from any but the most stalwart of audiences. The movie house in the heart of Taipei, about to shut down for good, is a haunted, gutted realm of the dead. The few who remain are there to worship. Such is the film’s own intended audience. The sounds of ghosts reverberate through its dark, mysterious recesses. There is no film in the world that presents a comparably implacable realm of screen shadows, as the kinetic action plays out in and around and at odd angles to expertly constructed long takes this formally intractable masterpiece of understated grace delivers, dedicated as it is to commemorating the magic-lantern artform that brought us the exultant sculpting of light. Bu san is one for the believers. A postmodern conceit that plays as the highest of high modernism.

3. En la ciudad de Sylvia (2007)

En la ciudad de 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. It reminds me very much of the three films to have most palpably done this to me so completely 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.

2. La captive (2000)

Another film, like En la ciudad de Sylvia, whose formal elegance, impressionistic visual power, and piercing, deliberate cutting invoke both Bresson and Hitchcock, the two most deliberate filmmakers I can think of, Chantal Akerman’s La captive is the film whose DVD I have most persistently returned to over the last couple years like a favorite record one routinely puts on to hang out w/. While not her most important film, or even her best, it is most certainly my favorite. A truly hilarious and touching feminist-surrealist riff on Proust’s La prisonnière, the fifth volume of A la recherche du temps perdu, the film just as readily evokes the patriarchal anxieties of Maupassant’s short story “La femme de Paul,” (transmuted to an era in which the man proper is no longer needed for procreation) w/ its feminine object of desire being taken in by the Sapphic delights of lesbianism driving the hero to drown himself. Simon (played by the hilariously befuddled Stanislas Merhar as a big handsome soft-eyed baby) is so terrified that his lover Ariane (softly querulous, slyly deflective Sylvie Testud, here approaching goddess stature) will end up making out with one of her girlfriends when he isn’t looking that he effectively turns them both prisoners of his desire, the whole while being unable to contain her unrestrained lifeforce, which threatens his masculine pride and his sanity both. The story is like late Buñuel, only better, and it fully demonstrates what Julia Kristeva calls “feminine genius,” a genius in part characterized by the following consideration: “to live means to live for the other, including, and above all, when this is impossible and traumatizing.” Such is the plight of Ariane. And the gift of Akerman. What a supreme gift.

1. Trouble Every Day (2001)

I already said that if I did not put specific limitations around this list Claire Denis would have seriously dominated the top five. Aside from having the greatest film noir title ever, her Trouble Every Day is both my favorite horror film ever and the only film of the past decade that is guaranteed to be on my list of the twenty greatest films of all time. It deserves to take on an absolutely iconic position in our culture. It is the horrifying and intoxicating story of two individuals, played by Vincent Gallo and Béatrice Dalle (!), infected by some contagion released in the wilds of Africa by some sort of never-clarified meddling, causing their mutual sex drives to take a swing for the sublimely monstrous. Denis, more than any other living filmmaker, thinks in cinematographic terms. Nothing has to be translated from the language of literature, theater, or anything else. It is pure cinema-thinking-itself. If you have ever loved somebody so much you wanted to eat them, Trouble Every Day may be for you. Don’t say I didn’t warn you, though. It has taken me over like the contagion that takes over its perfectly cast actors. Everything is perfect, from the obligatory music by the Tindersticks, the photography by the always magnificent Agnès Godard, the bizarre and glorious performances, to the post-colonial critique and wildly out-there violence that nobody saw coming from Denis in a million years. It is simply everything I could want from a movie. Then again, I am not a well person.

Top Ten Films of 2009

2010-01-02T09:03:00.000-08:00

On my front it was a year of much trauma, come-down, humility-by-necessity, recovery, an ongoing project involving getting right (and right-sized) w/ the God of Spinoza, and ultimately a significant geographical move from the Canadian prairie from which I was spawned to the California desert where I am currently biding my time before the next significant move of the chess pieces whose tactical manipulation on the board of the given in regards to which I have never possessed much cunning. Because much of my time has been spent in hospitals, psychiatric wards, and in and around a particularly well-know recovery center (named after a first lady), I saw significantly fewer films than would naturally suit my yen, not having been able to attend nary a single film festival (quelle horreur!). Much of the cinema of 2009 that I have missed, however, I will be catching up w/ in January during the 2010 Palm Spring International Film Festival, hopefully signifying a better year forthcoming all around in this regard (as well, bien sûr, as in others). The films I did see constituted a meager assemblage of odds and ends indeed, bespeaking a year most memorable for the disappointing offerings of a number of top-line cineastes. New works by Tarantino, the Coen Brothers, and Jim Jarmusch managed to curry favor from a good portion of the critics who assessed them, but certainly not from this humble cinephile. Jarmusch's The Limits of Control was particularly execrable (making that two in a row pieces of nice looking shit from him!), compensating for an absurdly thrown-together narrative jigsaw jazz improv (adding up to little more than a glib apology for art over commerce) w/ gorgeous cinematography from Cristopher Doyle and a hipster-cred avant-metal soundtrack from Boris, Sunn O))), and Earth. The Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds, was just as much a goof as its fuck-you-to-spell-check of a title, and joins the overstuffed and undercooked Kill Bill diptych as a film that feels like an indulgent collection of scenes in search of a topology, so movie mad and in love w/ its own possibilities that it forgets to make good on them – and this after his hanging-out-w/-girlfriends Death Proof, a masterpiece of form, fun, and concision. The Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man was amongst their best directed films but felt too often like an awkward attempt to adapt a non-existent collection of vaguely interrelated short stories into a coherent film, adding as it does in its balefully scattershot manner to the already overstuffed canon of the self-hating Jewish kvetching genre, one of the least winning in American popular culture. And its use of dream sequences was so tremendously irritating one couldn’t help but feel like their oft commented upon contempt for their characters (which only ever struck me as applying to the titular character of Barton Fink, a dude who is never really forgiven for his self-righteous shallowness in a film that I love anyway) was finally being turned upon their audience. The other film that disappointed me based on my high expectations for it, but which works significantly better in any regard than the three previously mentioned disappointments, was Michael Mann’s Public Enemies. Mann continues to frustrate me by making the best looking HD films on earth (here practically reinventing how night looks on the screen), w/ the very best action set-pieces, but continually getting so tripped up in narrative and characterization where he resorts to endless cliché, overemphasis, and has a tendency to truck in hamfisted improbabilities. It is becoming progressively clear that he will most likely be unable to make another film equal to the extraordinary Miami Vice. Finally there were the two films based on children's books by exciting and idiosyncratic American independent heroes par excellence. While I liked both Where the Wild Things Are and The Fantastic Mr. Fox, I found that both of them ultimately seemed like exactly what I was expecting. Again, I feel a tad disappointed, though the fault here may primarily lie w/ myself.

These various considerations aside, there were a number of truly wonderful films that I managed to catch this year. The following constitutes the crème de la crème. I am not entirely sure that the films that comprise my top ten have all that much thematically in common. If they do, it probably has something to do, first and foremost, w/ the construction of discourses on masculinity and their problematicization in relation to various sociocultural indicators (though this clearly doesn’t apply to my choice for #1). What they all have in common w/ absolute certainty though, is that they each seemed to come into my life in the exact right place at the exact right time in order that they made that particular space and time implicitly belong to them. They are each a cinematic postcard from 2009. Their insights and particular intensities will always belong to that year and to my experience of it. I am, of course, grateful to each, and would recommend them to pretty much anyone who might ask. To be eligible for the list the only requirement is that the film had to be released theatrically somewhere in North America during 2009, which explains the four films technically from 2008.

10. Tyson

James Toback’s interactive documentary portrait of the famed and half-deranged, half-philosophic prize fighter is a quintessential American story of rags-to-riches tenacity, Sophocles-style hubris, recovery from addiction, and a truly unique ongoing oratorical manipulation of the English language. Listening to Tyson talk is almost as staggering as the life being expounded upon. An extremely sensitive product of poverty and abuse, he is tremendously volatile and at the same time uniquely vulnerable. Tyson’s ruminations shape Toback’s visually fragmented, jittering speed-of-thought film. At once tragedy and high comedy, Tyson must be seen to be believed. Though the man’s version of his transgressions and morally questionable actions is never held up to any critical distanciation, the film doesn’t pretend to be historiography. It is rather an intimate, queasily bumptious portrait that isn’t interested in humanizing so much as facilitating, even when the man shoots himself in the foot or betrays inconsistencies or troubling internal dynamics. There is something heroic about Tyson, and something too sad for words. None of it is easy or necessarily classifiable. That the daughter we see him w/, whom he clearly cherishes, was subsequently to die in an unfortunate accident does nothing to quell this powerful sensation of a man who cannot escape his tragic tendency for retraumatization. And I can think of no better film to see whilst in rehab (!).

9. The Hurt Locker

A film about war, homosociality, and the intoxication of high-tension living, The Hurt Locker is the least judgmental and most involving fiction film to yet focus on the war in Iraq. Following three members of a bomb disposal unit through their highly fraught tour of duty, the film is truly radial in its distillation of its men-only world w/ its fault lines of race, class, and temperament as a locus of sexual tension and destructive pleasure. War is both a drug and an equalizer. It makes an entire population a potential enemy. Suddenly nothing is innocent, everybody is a threat. Some people get off on the adrenaline, others get dragged under. That peacetime domestic family life is the real fear for group leader William James (amusingly named, no?) betrays where the real horror lies. Some are so hungry for war that it’s no small wonder that the species has such a hard time extricating itself from its insidious delights. Our pleasure as viewers is part of an alarming appetite that Kathryn Bigelow’s flawlessly calibrated film makes absolutely no bones about.

8. Encarnação do Demônio / Embodiment of Evil

The return of Coffin Joe is a cinematic happening way too long in the making, given glorious life in director/star José Mojica Marins’s unexpected and giddily exuberant addendum to the series that made him famous in the world of Latin American genre cinema. Zé do Caixão (a.k.a. Coffin Joe) is released after forty years in jail (it’s been about that long since the character last properly graced our screens). Returning to the transformed-for-the-worse favelas of contemporary Sao Paulo, filled w/ drugs, prostitution, and newly institutionalized police brutality, Joe is a force of evil anachronistically outdated, but still eager to find ideal female candidates to bear his demonic Nietzschean offspring. With the help of Bruno (Rui Resende), a retarded hunchbacked grave digger, he quickly picks up where he left off, hindered by a one-eyed cop, whom he deformed in an earlier outing, and a psychotic flagellant priest, Joe sets about collecting and torturing lots of extremely attractive women whilst pontificating on the nature of evil, eternal life, and transcendent pleasures of the flesh and its ritual mortification (think Nietzsche by way of Bataille by way of Count Dracula). He also acts like a pussy and engages in girlish histrionics. The hilarity of Joe, Bruno, and their campily over-the-top adversaries going about gory business in the contemporary world makes for extreme anarchic fun at the joyous expense of good taste. A playfully transgressive cinematic happening for the happily sick, the filmmakers and their cast occupying the real world of contemporary Brazil like sneaky old squatters exiled from some baroque traveling carnival.

7. The Box

The Box, a film that takes off from memories of Richard Kelly’s own childhood (the father has the same job w/ NASA that his dad had), embodies surrealist father André Breton’s notion of “pure psychic automatism” in its free-associative death-dream trip, it’s characters seeming to scuba dive through its berserker set-pieces as in an aquarium that is the frame. There is no freewill in dream as in life – only the nauseating, floating inevitable. The Box, a film about apocalypse like Kelly’s two preceding films, working out Lacan’s hypothesis that a letter always arrives at its destination in a way quite unlike any other film I have ever seen, ends w/ an extreme tenderness for all its incendiary bleakness: a death-embrace of mutual affirmation and stunted acquiescence, husband and wife intimately cooperating in the not-at-all-intimate succumbing of the whole world to the pathogen from which it can only be delivered by surrendering to total inevitable collapse. Though its narrative engine is asleep at the wheel (the film, dream-like and filtered through the child’s complicated frame of reference, fundamentally abiding by oldschool surrealist tenants), the machinery of apocalypse is no less systematically consummated for its basis in a kind of monstrous catatonia. The Box will remain, in its twilit zone of mid-seventies digital-era-dawning art-direction (Donnie Darko style), one of the most messed-up and memorable films of 2009.

6. Bakjwi / Thirst

While many films about vampires have focused on themes of contamination and addiction, none in memory has pursued the latter theme so extensively into the darkly comic realms of codependency run amok as Chan-wook Park's sexy, conceptually exhaustive pop-art opus Thirst. An immaculately designed contraption blocked out cleanly in three specifically delineated acts, the film details the secularization and sexualization of infected priest Sang-hyeon (Kang-ho Song), as he falls in love and then progressively into a state of elastic bondage w/ headstrong domestically enslaved young sexpot Tae-ju (the ethereal and potent Ok-bin Kim), the two of them transforming from careful managers of their addiction to people catastrophically out of control and violently at odds. It is a film, then, about two junkies in love who stay that way well after the love has turned as sick and as compromised as they themselves are. Its sexual politics are not so much self-generatively misogynistic (the female the equivalent of Eve, leading our male protagonist intuitively and amorally down the garden path to oblivion) as it is part of a critique of power polarities and gender roles in a Korean society that babies its men and represses female expressivity. Although we start the film relating to Sang-hyeon, the end leaves us sharing in Tae-ju’s apocalyptic anguish as the two lovers commit ritual suicide by sunlight. Withdrawing junkies really hate the sun. Even more than we worshipers at the altar of cinema!

5. Tulpan

Sergei Dvortsevoy’s slight comic fable about an awkward big-eared ex-soldier named Asa who, returning from active duty to the barren Hunger Steppe of southern Kazakhstan to hopefully start his own farm, hopes to marry the only eligible woman in the barely populated region (the unseen Tulpan of the title), is the surprise feel-good comic triumph of the year. Shot w/ roving pans and intimate handheld tracking shots by erstwhile documentary filmmaker Dvortsevoy, Tulpan takes on the impression of a cheerfully dissolute fable shot on the fly atop a strange, barren planet not entirely unlike our own, where camel, sheep, and human compete for resources and attention, and occasionally a water truck will drive past blaring “Rivers of Babylon.” W/ so little at their disposal, the filmmakers wisely make structuring absences the meat of the matter, and focus lovingly on the day-to-day drama of small lives played out on a canvas of sublime distances and gaping horizons. Dvortsevoy makes his films by living w/ his subjects for a lengthy period before shooting begins (on film instead of the more obvious choice of video, considering the removed-from-civilization conditions in which he shoots), which means that Tulpan feels very much like a film at home w/ these subjects and their struggles. This is ethnography taken to the level of epic poem. It is beautiful, funny, and moving.

4. Chi bi / Red Cliff

Dialectical-materialist history-as-parcels-of-action-and-reaction action fest Red Cliff was easily, until Avatar, the meat and potatoes cinematic spectacle-qua-spectacle entertainment of the year; a dialectical materialist network topology of object and human relations lurching forward w/ pinwheel precision, balancing epic macro and sensual micro, in its adaptation of 14th century Chinese urtext Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Shorn of half the length of the original two-part-and-nearly-five-hour Chinese release – the biggest budget film in Chinese history, as well as surpassing Titanic as that nation’s all time highest domestic grosser – John Woo’s stridently cut new version, prepared for the world beyond Asia, doesn’t seem to bowdlerize the original text so much as simply blast through it DJ style, quickening the piledriving web of intersections, scratching out new headrush breakbeats against the grain of the film’s own internal rhythms, intensifying flows instead of breaking them off. It is rare to see such a massive vision coalesce in the form of such an exited and exhaustive drawing inward – such a total, utter inhalation – of forces, resources, image-images, sound-images, action-images, from the smallest element up to the most awesome. It is so much of the world and of the flesh, in all of its flounce and bounce, that yr heart cannot help but beat along to its. Red Cliff is a blood machine. It pours it fucking everywhere. It pumps it w/ evenhanded control of the nerve meter. It works just so. And it’s a massive little adrenal treasure and a hell of a movie-movie fix.

3. Avatar

Clearly and without reservation the cinematic event of the year, Avatar did not simply live up to expectations as a cultural event and block busting megaspectacle, it managed to cultivate a new cinematographic ontology by equating its central conceit, avatars on an alien planet as the byproduct of genetic hybridization w/ their human agents who control their actions from sensory deprivation tanks on a nearby space station, w/ the immersion of its viewers, sitting back in our theater seats as our sensory-motor equipment is permitted access to the world within the spectacle both before us in one sense and all around us in another. It is clear to even the most cynical viewers, unmoved or even moved to crack wise by the film’s determinedly earnest investment in spirituality and ecology (such people will get out of life the exact nothing that they put in to it anyway), that Avatar is a sign of things to come in the image culture and marks some sort of quintessential moment in the expression of the possibilities of spectacle and its applications in an evolving landscape. I need to see it a couple more times before I write about it at any length. A sure sign that it is here to stay.

2. Bright Star

Jane Campion’s most restrained and carefully modulated film is also to my mind her greatest by far. She is a filmmaker who has long sought to shock and arouse, and what both shocks and arouses here, in her gorgeous and moving love story about John Keats and Fanny Brawne, is that she has found new and understated ways, free of cliché or affectation, to show love, devotion, and inspiration – tricky things all to visualize. This is a sublime work of steady-handed impressionism, at times even invoking the romantic Bresson of Quatre nuits d'un rêveur and the decorous lilting pageantry of a subdued Max Ophüls. Campion’s two actors, Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish, give luminous, quietly enervated performances that stir you up without seizing you w/ abrupt indiscretion. They lack gumption or knowing. They are singularly incandescent and guileless, and they grow in the viewer as they do on each other. I fell in love watching this film, reliving the precise litany of sensations, from trepidation to transcendence, that this falling occasions. Bright Star in no mere biopic. It is a love story, pure and simple. A portrait of ascension. A celestial poem of cosmic grace.

1. La danse - Le ballet de l'Opéra de Paris

In Frederick Wiseman magisterial La danse, a work of pure cinematic pleasure, the art of dance is not just thrown into contrast w/ the bureaucracy and consumer capitalist machinations that it requires in order to exist at all, but the smoothed, infinitely opened out spaces where the dancing is done – both the mirror-walled rehearsal spaces that reflect infinitely redoubled illusory reflections outward, and the actual stages w/ their purplish-blue spotlights terminating at a black horizon – suggest plateaus that all this under-rigging supports in the same way money, human labor, and the Lehman Brothers support it. The bodies of these incredible young people, boys and girls (like w/ most great films, I was steadfastly bisexual for the duration), are framed in such a way that we almost never see them reflected in the mirrors when they are rehearsing. They are singular and they command the attention of our entire sensory-motor apparatus. The brain and nervous system dance w/ them. In a way that is somewhat similar to kung fu movies, dancers remind us of Spinoza’s supposition that we are not yet aware of what a body is capable. Dancers are masochist, practicing a kind of bondage. What they do to their bodies to transcend what is thought of as the body, its utilitarian implementation, is staggering, and to see what they do, these beautiful, tormented bodies, atop these opened-out planes, is to witness something as primordial and elemental as the flickering of a flame. Dance is a Heracletean drug. The process of hypnotizing ourselves watching these dancers is similar to the effect produced by the pulsing, silently musical, morphological handpainted films of structuralists like McLaren (whose non-handpainted Pas de deux probably remains the most beautiful dance film ever) and Stan Brakhage w/ the added component of these sexually charged bodies, commingling bodies, bodies that will grow old and die. Wiseman’s formally exquisite documentary is one of the most gorgeous and ineluctably transcendent films I have seen in a very long time. Its beauty and precision were unmatched by anything I witnessed in 2009 by a not insubstantial margin.

Dušan Makavejev - Free Radicals

2009-12-28T16:27:00.000-08:00

Dušan Makavejev was one of the great countercultural sui generis voices to emerge from the convulsive antiestablishment bedrock of the 1960s, w/ its various new waves and locally global movements for the emancipation of desiring-machines and their assemblages from the clutches of social-machines in the East and the West. (Social-machines as manifested by the military-industrial complex, malevolent forces of Capital and State, sociocultural estrangement, and what New Left post-Marxist critical theorist Herbert Marcuse called Technological Rationalism (the destructive drive inherent to the state apparatus of the Soviet Union just as much as those of Western Imperialism)). His films bring to mind May ’68 French student slogans such as: “take your desires for reality,” “it is forbidden to forbid,” and “under the paving stones, the beach.” While many of the radical cultural and social movements in the West maintained ideological allegiances to Stalin, Mao, Trotsky, and Marxist-Leninist discourse in general, radical artists and dissidents in the East who lived under the tyrannical sets of controls erected around European communism throughout the nations aligned beneath the aegis of the Warsaw Pact, saw the failings of Marxist-Leninist ideology, as the supposed dictatorship of the proletariat became nothing more than a base plutocracy supported by military power, a fact that became visible to the whole world in 1968 when the Soviet Union intervened militarily in Czechoslovakia to put an end to the popular Spring Movement for socialism w/ a human face under Alexander Dubček. Radical writers, artists, and filmmakers (as well as politically active dissidents) throughout the Eastern Bloc had long before come to know how difficult it was to freely communicate, or especially to enact, ideas in this repressive climate. Yugoslavia’s Novi Film movement, made-up of outspokenly critical artists – besides Makavejev, the movement included Aleksandar Petrović and the seriously fucking bitter Živojin Pavlović – was one of many, many movements that skirted censorship by embossing their critiques in films that were superficially made to resemble the standard socialist-realist fare promulgated by the Serbian Communist Party’s Ideological Commission in their case. Makavejev, who started out working in the fifties after having gorged himself on disparate cinemas, high and low, at the Yugoslav Cinémathèque, quickly developed a unique style, combining bricolage, intertextuality, frank sexuality, documentary style, and sly commentary. Makavejev’s cheeky films push ideology to the foreground to lambaste and undermine it, showing how people get tangled up in it, overwhelmed by it, and ultimately trip up, all in tizzy. He mocks the image of a functioning, idyllic collectivity foisted on the masses by the existing institutions, making a mockery of popular forms and idioms, along w/ their underpinning ideological scaffolding. What his films celebrate is unbridled personal liberation of a sexual or performative nature that breaks through any constricting bonds the outside world may seek to impose upon libinal drive. The form of his films likewise takes on a freewheeling, open-ended, asymptotic wildness, turning on a dime, heading off on new lines-of-flight, employing multiple narrative forms and voices, crashing through barriers, and enacting new schema, landscaping new root-systems, wherever they may burrow. He was able to practice his termite art under the radar for well over a decade before being exiled in 1973 after the release of his greatest masterpiece, WR: Mysteries of the Organism (’71), a free-form cinematic essay celebrating Wilhelm Reich and his theories of the primordial cosmic energy he called “orgone,” which essentially amounts to the orgasmic energy that connects all things to the Universal force of Life and which pulses out of the earth, down from the heavens, and through organisms. Reich is the ultimate subject for Makavejev, whose entire body of work, leading from his early experiments in Yugoslavia, to his twin masterpieces of performative libidinal desublimation, the already Criterionized WR and Sweet Movie (’74), and culminating in a series of sneakily subversive international co-productions, has continually broken down the decrepit structures of any-given-position-whatever, to allow energy to flow and explode new possibilities out of the formulaic gridwork of narratological and ideological precedent, replacing meaning or discursive reiteration w/ sped-up ecstatic and anarchic joie de vivre, an endless making passionately active of reactive forces, fixed to blast through any institutional moorings in its path. Criterion’s bare-bones new Eclipse series box, Free Radicals, presents his first three Yugoslavian features, showcasing the early, putative emergence of Makavejev’s absolutely singular vision.

Covek nije tica / Man is Not a Bird

Man is Not a Bird (’65) opens w/ a crazed-looking oddly-coiffed mesmerist, the “youngest hypnotist in the Balkans,” delivering a soliloquy on his chosen trade, talking about “the negative aspects of love,” explaining how he has used hypnosis to free a young girl of the “delusion” that she was in love w/ a particular boy, because of some occult spell she had been put under, who it was deemed was no good for her. He talks directly to the camera, as in a documentary, riffing on the various kinds of magical thinking, old wives tales, silly superstitions, and absurd beliefs that play a major role in everyday life. “The moral,” he says, is that “magic is absolute nonsense.” How then, the ensuing film seems to ask, should we understand love? What of its magic? What of its madness? What do we do w/ desire? What follows is a fractured narrative, interrupted by various documentary asides, about two copper factory employees in the remote region of Bor. One, Jan, is relatively high up the factory ladder, an assembly expert who is in the throws of a messy affair w/ his landlord’s daughter, a tempestuous hairdresser named Rajka (the sexy and diffident and oh-so-flexible Milena Dravić). The other is Barbulović, a hulking, fiendish member of the lumpenproletariat, who loafs around, gets wasted, and fucks whomsoever he can lay his dirty hands upon (a depiction of the communist laborer that is almost ridiculously subversive in a culture used to seeing such figures hoisted up as selfless, heroic, defenders of the little people – and funny, because there is never really any reason for him to be constantly interrupting the love story that we are nominally watching). The story (or the stories-that-are-the-story), which in its way details the endless frustrations of its characters bound up as they are in demoralizing work and the vagaries of relationships that are frustrating, untenable, and impossible to cleanly extricate oneself from, is constantly being interrupted by scenes of hypnosis (the title coming from one such scene wherein a stage full of hypnotized audience members are made to flap about the stage fully believing that they are, in fact, birds), odd carnivalesque performances, digressions on Beethoven, and a mordant tour of the factory where a guide pontificates on the wonders of this worker’s paradise before a group of rapt school children while we witness Barbulović trapped in filthy, exhausting labor, an emasculated object of the collective gaze. The film depicts a taxonomy of humiliations and desperations within a set of conditions not conducive to life. Even love becomes a baleful purgatory fraught w/ dangers and conditions as poor as the barracks that house the workers. The film suggests that love and ideology are two kinds of hypnosis that can entrap entire populations of people in a mnemonic thrall from which they are unable to awaken themselves, and in which their individual strivings, desire having been hijacked by external forces, amount to little more than a mad zonked-out Serbian dude flapping his arms in an impotent, vainglorious attempt at taking flight.

Ljubavni slucaj ili tragedija sluzbenice P.T.T. / Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator

Almost a streamlined variation on the not-a-love-story between Jan and Rajka that made up a good part of Man is Not a Bird, Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (’67) tells the temporally disjointed story of Hungarian telephone operator Izabela (Eva Ras, often naked and lazed-out in odd positions like Milena Dravić before her) and her older Serbian Muslim rat exterminator boyfriend Ahmed (the adorable and diminutive Slobodan Aligrudić, almost overwhelmed by his clothes), a story that the temporal disjointedness lets us know early on is not going to end well when one of Makavejev’s trademark documentary digressions flashforwards to the recovery of Izabela’s body accompanied by a dry dissertation by a doctor concerning the handling of the corpse. As the arc of the relationship between our two lovers goes from the heights of blissful cohabitation to bedeviled tragedy after a dalliance w/ the horny local mailman causes a guilty and sullen Izabela to collapse the love affair from within, sending mild-mannered Ahmed back to the bottle and culminating in her unfortunately unwitnessed accidental death at his blotto hands. Again, the film is routinely bisected, interrupted, and rerouted back and forth by Makavejev’s patchwork exploration of the subject from every possible angle and vantage, as a sexologist and criminologist take turns lecturing to us, elucidations on the history of phallus worship are presented along w/ erotic sketches from antiquity, fragments from Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm (’31) appear on the TV, a shot of Izabel’s bare ass is graphically matched w/ a pair of eggs, then with two mounds of flower into which the egg yolks are dropped and kneaded as part of a subsequent lesson in strudel making. The film throws all of its disparate elements together in freewheeling collage, turning what is essentially a neorealist-style staged documentary into and artfully arranged hardscrabble poetic tapestry of fragments that reflexively align w/ one another, mimicking the autopsy performed by the coroner of the film as by all of its experts and talking heads who, in one way or another, for all their pompous elocution, scientific deduction, and myriad of truth-claims (like those propogated and upheld by the socialist state in its reification of the fixed tenants upon which it is all-knowingly erected), are unable to grasp the generally messy, inextricably complicated, and never semantically reducible complexities of lives as they are actually lived, carried out, and brought to thorny and difficult ends, often not morally coherent or easily assimilated by easy encapsulations as these are. Love Affair is mussed and diffuse, never equivocating one way or the other, hard to fix judgment upon, just as is life. Here we are seeing Makavajev begin to structure very directly his evolving tendency to show how ideologies, systems for endogenously producing hard-and-fast truths-in-themselves, employing bureaucracies of voices that refuse, or deploy energy to repress, the anarchic life-forces that dispel the illusion of their claims, how powers that have the tendency to narrate histories, no matter how marginalized or entrenched, in their own voice, using their own systems of signs, actively destabilizing any opportunity for critical thought, doubt, or disharmony within the apparatus of a limited and limiting expressivity, ultimately fail to uphold the frames that they impose upon the world when exposed to even the slightest countervailing exposure.

Nevinost bez zastite / Innocence Unprotected

With Innocence Unprotected, the most conceptually rich and formally busy film from his early Yugoslav period, Makavejev further encroaches upon the mashup terrain of his subsequent masterpieces of intertextual collage, WR and Sweet Movie, that directly follow it, w/ a “new production of a good old film,” as the opening title card half-truthfully informs us. The title is taken from a 1942 film of the same name as Makavejev’s, the first talkie made in Yugoslavia, though the communist powers that be tried to suppress the fact since it was made under Nazi occupation, thus making it incompatible w/ the self-mythologization of the state (this being a film whose production had to be kept secret from the Nazis for similar reasons!). The bulk of Makavejev’s film is actually given over to an arch and extremely funny repositioning of the actual 1942 film, often tinted or hand-stenciled so that Makavejev can impose his own jokester antics on the crapace of the original film itself as though he were tagging it like a Brooklyn subway car. Made by the absurd and extremely popular dangerous-to-himself-and-others muscle man, acrobat, daredevil, escape artist, and workaday locksmith Dragoljub Aleksić, the original film is a boisterously over-the-top vamp-fest featuring incomprehensibly bad acting and a shopworn plot – intercut, in a way that perhaps foresaw Makavejev, w/ documentary footage of Aleksić’s various fucked-up what-the-hell-is-he-doing? feats of highwire derring-do – about an everyman hero who saves his true love from being raped by an evil industrialist scumbag in the upstairs bedroom of the home where she is kept by a heartless old slag who has sold her out to the letch for favors already performed (or soon to be returned) in gratis. The film had one public showing during the war, but was subsequently squashed from the records, its director-star accused of collaboration and nearly sold down the river. Makavejev comes onto the scenes twenty-six years later and rounds up Aleksić and his collaborators on the classic-that-wasn’t-to-be, interviewing them, letting them do oddball shit in front of his camera, and filming nearly-septuagenarian Aleksić flexing on a rotating pedestal w/ some seriously gorgeous bitches dangling off of him. These are some self-effacingly goofy people whom age has in no way softened. Not only does Makavejev intercut the modern versions of the players in this forgotten blip on the radar of cinematographic history, he also mines moments of surprising poignancy by offsetting moments in Aleksić’s ridiculous melodrama, such as when the love interest in a moment of longing and lamentation poses crestfallen at a window to peer out on the outside world, w/ newsreel footage of the war-ravaged streets of Sarajevo, reminding the viewer of the real world context of the film’s impossible-seeming production and the extraordinary tragedy that befell Yugoslavia not only as one of many countries to be raped like an innocent young romantic in an upstairs loft by the Nazis, but as the only country to be bombed by both sides during the war. Suddenly the original movie’s corny plot and cardboard heroics take on a moving subtext, as a celebration of individuality and shared values in a world in which values were thrown out the window to make way for imperialistic plunder and catastrophic violence. Innocence Unprotected becomes a wild and wooly gaff w/ serious underlying resonances that milks a historical text for easy laughs only to turn the gambit around on us revealing a genuine and complicated pathos. It is both a celebration, a mockery, and a solemn and powerful reconfiguration of its own berserk and heavily mediated contents, a batshit collage that Makavejev would soon outdo once again, with WR and Sweet Movie, his two subsequent jaunts into outer-fucking-space.

World's Greatest Dad

2009-12-28T10:39:00.000-08:00

Well known as the barking, spasmodic Tourette’s propulsion-unit of a standup comic who found himself deep-sixed in the sorry, unforgiving hinterland of popular 80s D-list comedies like the Police Academy movies and boy-meets-horse debacle Hot to Trot (’88), Bobcat Goldthwait subsequently went on to infamy as the dude who seriously fucked up Jay Leno’s set, made the appalling and awesome Shakes the Clown, and disappeared into the Los Angeles smog, presumably a little pissed off that the corner his career had started off in left him w/ precious little space to back into. Instead of showing up on Celebrity Big Brother or The Surreal Life, like many of his ilk, Goldthwait quietly reemerged in the new millennium as a director of late night comedy shows, and is now releasing his second feature film of the decade, World’s Greatest Dad, a follow up to the criminally underappreciated Stay ('06)(a.k.a. Sleeping Dogs Lie). The two films are of a piece (not just in terms of the fun they both have w/ aberrant sexual practices, either), enacting a dialectical counterpositioning of each other in terms of their divergent approaches to one particular ethical grey zone: the uses and abuses of honesty, its complicated pragmatics, and where and when it may or may not work itself out as a concept applied to practice(s). If the apparent philosophies of the two films contradict one another, this only serves to enhance the business of their ardent comedy of ethology in all its murky indeterminacy, w/ its built-in contradictory schematics and its demands for irreducible situational considerations which need to be endlessly considered, reconsidered, and finally tested, by the narrative business of the films themselves, to see where and when which ethical precepts may or may not apply. In Stay, the protagonist, Amy, is a woman asked repeatedly by her fiancé to reveal her deepest, darkest secret. That her deepest, darkest secret – which happens to be that she gave her dog head as a lark when she was eighteen – is probably something best kept secret from the party in question is proven by virtue of the woebegone revelation’s consequent seismic impact on her life as it ripples destructively out from the epicenter of this now compromised intimacy (the revelation is overheard by her creep of a brother), seriously negatively impacting all of Amy’s relationships. Amy doesn’t want to share the secret w/ her writer boyfriend, he has to keep prodding her to do so, until she does … at the exact wrong moment. Something in Amy makes her feel guilty for withholding, so she relents, but all along she knows that sharing the fact that she once sucked-off a dog – sharing it w/ her boyfriend, of all people – is in no way going to serve anybody’s greater interest. She should have stuck to her guns, and she knew it all along. Likewise, but alternatively, the sad sack protagonist of World’s Greatest Dad, high school poetry teacher and failed writer Lance Clayton (Robin Williams), foments a series of escalating lies he knows deep down he shouldn’t when his son Kyle, a pervert and asshole for whom nobody, including his father, cares much at all, dies of autoerotic asphyxiation whilst jerking off to pics of dad’s girlfriend’s crotch taken surreptitiously under the dinner table w/ his cell phone. (It should be added here that Kyle is, in a brilliant bit of casting, played by puberty-ravaged Daryl Sabara, the adorable wide-eyed moppet from the Spy Kids movies). Overwhelmed by this tragicomic accident, Lance does all he can to make the death look like a suicide, hanging his son up from the chin-up bar in the boy’s own closet, cleaning away the telltale evidence, and finally concocting a tortured and eloquent cri de coeur suicide letter. When the letter gets out, the whole school becomes moved by it, rallying around the now iconic image of the asshole son. Lance’s sort-of girlfriend, the phony and unequivocal art teacher, grows closer. His erstwhile unpopular poetry class begins to fill. Lance, who has always equated the writing success he strives for w/ women, cash, and adulation as opposed to self-realization or artistic transcendence, becomes addicted to his newfound, vicarious popularity, finally taking the bull by the horns and fabricating an entire journal to stand in as his suddenly incandescent son’s life’s work, landing him on a talk show, causing him to be pursued by the publishers who have eluded him all these years (who are even willing to publish one of his novels if they can have the journal), allowing him to meet “Kyle’s favorite,” Bruce Hornsby, and seemingly consolidating once and for all the wandering attentions of the art teacher. (Only Kyle’s one real friend, the even less popular Andrew, is suspicious, observing that the heartbreaking journal features no digressions on “vaginas, anal sex, fisting, felching, or rim jobs”). Just as the library is about to undergo a dedication to Kyle – poised like Ernesto “Che” Guevara in the only portrait we ever see of him, now as ubiquitous as that of the asthmatic Argentine doctor so often is on the clothes of the student body and the walls of the school – Lance, who out of his genuine desire to protect his son and himself, to feel loved and respected by the people in his life, has carried this lie as far as he wants to or is ethically capable of, makes an abrupt about-face and reveals all to the not-so-teeming masses, unburdening himself, at the dedication, of a life’s worth of pent-up stuff never revealed for fear of not being accepted, the disarticulated intensities of a life built on a constant attempt to be judged not wanting in the eyes of others, a life gone nowhere for fear of missteps. The film ends w/ a comically operatic enacting of this metaphorical rebirth as Lance, a one-time member of the college diving team, runs through the school, stripping down to his socks, leaping naked from the highdive into the pool. From the water he rises mirthful and ecstatic, born anew. Where in his previous film, Stay, Goldthwait outlined a particular set of circumstances in which honesty was undermined as a universalizable moral maxim, as it serves no one in the case presented by the film, and was never going to, as Amy knows deep down from the start. In World’s Greatest Dead, Lance also knows the whole time that his web of lies stems from the bad faith and concealment-of-self-for-the-benefit-of-others upon which his whole miserable life is founded and always has been. Paradoxically, he learns a lesson implicitly understood by his son Kyle while he is alive: that a man who depends upon no one else to define himself is inherently free. Indeed, Kyle is the only character in World’s Greatest Dad who isn’t playing a losing game of self-identification managed haphazardly through the relay of the self through the heavily overcoded gaze of the other. When Lance finally comes clean at the library dedication and the principal calls him an “asshole,” Lance thanks him. An asshole is what everybody always thought his son was, and to finally pull down the scrim of deceit (from which Lance comes to be constituted well before his son’s death throws the whole gambit into endgame), and to reveal that it’s okay to be seen as an asshole so long as the truth can prevail and the self be thrown into relief, Lance not only comes full circle, he is also at this very moment able to affirm his son and to embrace him, by embracing the asshole within, in a way that he was never able to do while the boy was alive. World’s Greatest Dad appears to prove the opposite theory to the one proven by Stay, but the two films taken together ultimately prove one theory: that the either/or binary apparatus is not sufficient in matters of ethology; that different conclusions can and will be arrived at by approaching ethical or moral issues from opposing points of origin; that the truth may set you free just as it may doubly imprison. The final lessons are these: that a principle doesn’t hold up until you play it out in a particular theater of operations, and that we always already knew what the right thing to do was in the first place.

Up in the Air

2009-12-14T21:36:00.001-08:00

Is everybody high? Perhaps it’s just that the film itself works like a blithe pharmaceutical. It turns out that, despite the gushings and mushings of a great many apparently sane people prostrate before its supposed majesty, Up in the Air is a barely serviceable, shallow piece of artless shit, saved from utter abasement by two excellent actresses, one or whom is probably, to my mind, the best one working in American cinema today. George Clooney probably cannot really be faulted for playing George Clooney. He’s a fucking movie star, isn’t he? But the filmmakers do us a disservice by bringing to bear just such a movie star in a film that desperately needs, you know, a guy. Vera Farmiga is, however, and despite a series of questionable career moves of late, seemingly capable of doing no wrong. Here, she effortlessly manifests a high-test femininity that one doesn’t encounter often enough in this world (though one encounter is, oddly, often one too many for those who cannot take the heat – which is essentially most of us): pure sexual magenta, a tectonic libidinal depth charge, distributing life-destroying circulatory coolant. Hers is the kind of sexual poise and inexhaustible je ne sais quoi that fucks up lives – destabilizing the deeply entrenched philosophies that go w/ them – and fucks ‘em up right proper (!). Perhaps worse than Up in the Air itself is the realization that I will be sitting through this shitty movie again, and again, and again so that I may submit before Vera Farmiga’s deafening skull-caving goddessery. Her character, Alex, is the only digestible apple in the bunch simply because she is the only one not possessed of illusions concerning the nature of the cutthroat world she sharks about in; the kind of person we should all be grateful to get the chance to be used by; a woman who will never need anything back from us. She’s doing the best she can to ride it out in style in a shitty world full of pithy Hallmark epigraphs that barely disguise the fact that nobody here ultimately gives a shit about anybody other than themselves, least of all the filmmakers (who do the most of anyone to demonstrate caring w/ a faux earnestness as bankrupt as the commodities market). The film’s apparent trump card – non-actors tricked into the film by classified adds asking recently fired out-of-work nobodies to appear in a documentary about termination in our current economic climate (which is not what this is!) – seriously backfires on it. These quickly clipped together talking heads, directly addressing the camera, who open the film proper and appear again later for some easy blues, make obvious director Jason Reitman’s total lack of perspective. His consequent attempts to make us care about George Clooney’s sexy ennui or dizzy princess Anna Kendrick’s growing realization (admittedly well wrought) that the world can be unfair and cruel are – built to ride as these trajectories are on the spare parts of real lives really sunk – a losing battle from the word go. As freelance corporate assassins who cavort about Anywhere Red State U.S.A., traveling first class, complaining about how their lives lack real form or meaning (or occasionally basking in it, as Clooney’s Ryan Bingham is wont to do, because the film wants to be edgy), they find themselves in need of a much darker, more savage film than the one they are in, which is basically as fluffy as the clouds at 30,000 feet. Spinning their curt workaday destruction of sad, desperate lives of indentured servitude as offerings of fresh, hopeful new beginnings for the recently downsized, they demand a considerable taxation on our investment as an audience. When Bingham decides that his “travel light” philosophy of life – which he pedals, in a manner which stretches expositional credulity, as a part-time prospective Tony Robins-style inspirational speaker doing an unfunny variation on George Carlin’s “stuff” rant – is no longer doing it for him, and goes off in search of love and approval from Alex, only to discover that she is not in fact real-life-available, this is hardly sufficient comeuppance. He deserves so much worse, and a nastier, more pissed-off movie to deserve it in. I mean: the guy got to fuck Vera Farmiga! Boo hoo! Bingham’s third act restoration is such horseshit that even Clooney can’t sell it w/ that shit-eating grin and go-get-‘em mien of his. That this visually blah film, which demands of its actors that they carry the whole thing, only to make that impossible for them when considered next to the catalogue of shit-out-of-luck faces from the crowd, expects us to enjoy it as a breezy, cunning entertainment, shows some serious fucking chutzpah. A chutzpah entirely missing from the lifeless execution of this risible little treat itself, which no amount of snappy cutting or dude-packing-his-shit montages is gonna save.

Me and Orson Welles

2009-12-13T22:05:00.000-08:00

Orson Welles seems like an odd subject for Richard Linklater, a director whose films often feel very much like celebrations of people other than himself. Me and Orson Welles, Richard Linklater’s warmly evocative period suite, adapted from highschool English teacher Robert Kaplow’s novel of the same name by Vincent Palmo Jr. and Holly Gent Palmo, possess a sly agrammatical title that sneakily tells you a great deal about what the film is actually about: the serious folly of allowing ones ego to put itself trippingly in the way of one the size of an Orson Welles’s. Such egos, at the top and bottom of the theater food chain, are not merely a byproduct of collaborative artistic endeavors, but actually a fundamental component of what makes such collective expression excel on the rare occasion that it manages to truly do so, and a fairly substantial part of what presumably drives anyone into a field where they would presume to demand the undifferentiated attention of a rapt audience. As much as we postmodern neuters may wish to dispel great man theories, it is hard not to concede that the theater has long been a place where self-stylized great men have traditionally excelled, and presumably will continue to do so for as long as such an institution exists. The film tells the story of glib seventeen-year-old (and entirely fictional) New Jersey pretty boy Richard Samuels (the almost obscenely self-possessed Disney hunk Zac Efron as walking embodiment of cocky youthful hubris), and his magical consciousness-raising / illusion-shattering momentary immersion in Welles’s 1937 Mercury Theater Italo-fascist “black shirt” adaptation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, in which he lands the role of Brutus’s lute-playing page, Lucius, during the last week of chaotic by-the-seat-of-the-pants rehearsals. Welles, played w/ heroic verisimilitude (particularly in the eyes and brow) by Christian McKay, is a careening, petty genius, juggling a bevy of mistresses and a pregnant wife, whose incredulous belittling of everyone w/ whom he comes into contact is matched only by his profound ability to massage effortlessly to brilliant life egos he has freshly gotten through bending to the point of tensile threshold. McKay’s Welles is a garrulous showboating fiend and cocksure, cornball charmer who has an ability to tune his fellow artisans to the precise pitch he requires of them through effortless manipulation of the sinewy strings of unpretty pride. He remains, in so doing, entirely unsullied by authenticity – something the film implicitly argues has no place in the communal realization of theatrical greatness. Artifice and calculation become twin strengths within the film (and childishness almost a sign of moral life), and can thus be read a posteriori as part of Me and Orson Welles’s own charming, infectious autocelebratory self-image w/ its heavily manufactured sound stage Depression New York front and center in its continuous demonstration of its supreme joy in being itself, manufactured as it was in Britain using a bare minimum of well exploited pseudo-exteriors. (In this way the film brings to mind Samuel Fuller’s entirely independently made 1952 Park Row, the bulk of the budget of which went toward the fabrication of the titular strip of 1880s Manhattan real-estate that Fuller understandably wanted to shoot every last fucking fabricated inch of – after all, he paid for it). Poor Richard makes the mistake of falling for the theater company’s young, shrewdly career-minded-deployer-of-pussy secretary Sonja (fussily busy-faced Claire Danes), who seduces him as a gaff and mindfucks poor full-of-himself-beyond-his-means Richard by casually demonstrating that her eye remains unapologetically on the prize. Of course, she promptly fucks Comandante Orson and has designs on none other than David O. Selznick. Young Richard, crestfallen and full of a righteous indignation (to which he has no right), misunderstanding the advise of cooze-hound Joseph Cotten (James Tupper, unsettling look-alike), overplays his hand and fights for the girl – by fighting w/ Orson. Oops. Though Welles strings our young hero expertly along in the wake of this colossal error of judgment, the great man’s ego cannot stand to be so stressed. Opening night will be Richard’s last. Welles even has Joe Cotten fire the poor fucker. The kid learns his lesson. There is a hierarchy of ego in place. By all means, throw yrs in the fight; just keep the fuckin’ thing right-sized (the size that it has earned); keep yr angling on the down low. A man like Orson Welles will never demand that you respect him as long as you can perform respect like a “God-born actor.” Where Kierkegaard saw the despair in the self of having a self, Welles knows, cherishes, and would have his minions truck in the business of carving, out of silence and gaping time, this marvelous collective emancipation: no self left at all. To remind Orson Welles that he has a self beyond imposture is to invite yr ass to be handed to you. The cold trauma of being one person, one accountable individual, scared and ultimately alone, may be a fact of life. But it ain’t the fuckin’ theater. A man like Orson Welles can spend an entire life running from the specter of himself as a self. Running in the direction of greatness and/or disaster. It’s ultimately irrelevant which.

Chi bi / Red Cliff

2009-12-06T15:41:00.001-08:00

Full of staggering striated patterns of boats and bodies, Triumph of the Will-like phalanxes that might sometimes, from a squinty-eyed distance, look like expertly sculpted pubic hair, John Woo’s first Mandarin megapicture is more than just a work of fantastic fascistic symmetries. A lofty typological marriage of Western and Eastern epic elements, Red Cliff is easily the meat and potatoes cinematic spectacle-qua-spectacle entertainment of the year; a dialectical materialist network topology of object and human relations, rendered as quicksilver synthetic apotheosis, lurching forward w/ pinwheel precision, balancing epic macro and sensual micro, in its adaptation of 14th century Chinese urtext Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a towering novel rooted in fact, that has been transformed over time into totemic mythic abstraction, given elegant though sweaty (and red-dirt-encrusted) digital flesh by Honk Kong slow-mo gangland melodrama master turned sleek Hollywood go-to action director John Woo. Shorn of half the length of the original two-part-and-nearly-five-hour Chinese release – the biggest budget film in Chinese history, as well as surpassing Titanic as that nation’s all time highest domestic grosser – Woo’s new stridently cut version, prepared for the world beyond Asia, doesn’t seem to bowdlerize the original text so much as simply blast through it DJ style, quickening the piledriving web of intersections, scratching out new headrush breakbeats against the grain of the film’s own internal rhythms, intensifying flows instead of breaking them off. Though I cannot wait to see the full version, I have a feeling that by delving further into backstory and courtly politics the film will invariably lose some of the druggy, glandular magic of the motored-away montage on display in the two-and-a-half hour version. The story, that of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, tells of the Han Dynasty, after years of war and corruption, fallen into the hands of power-mad prime minister Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi), who convinces the neutered Emperor to declare war on two autonomous southern principalities run by a pair of warlords – the older more wearied/experienced Liu Bei (You Yong) and the young dandy Sun Quan (Chang Chen). Though the warlords are far from being allies, they decide to team up in an attempt to fend off attack from the massive Imperial army which has stationed it troops and naval forces on the banks of the Yangtze at the base of the titular cliff. Two extremely valuable men assist the rebels: Zhuge Liang (Takeshi Kaneshiro), Liu Bei’s military advisor, able to predict meteorological events well in advance, thus providing the rebels repeatedly (and ultimately decisively) w/ the tactical upper hand, and Sun Quan’s viceroy Zhou Yu (superstar and Wong Kar-wai regular Tony Leung Chiu Wai), a peaceful and philosophical man of compassion and implacable focus, whose anti-war tea-artist wife is nonetheless not afraid to go behind enemy lines and play Mata Hari for the cause. The film proceeds through a series of bafflingly complex and meticulously executed battles, on land and at sea, in which natural rhythms and environmental factors merge w/ human industry and improvisatory acumen to create a profound transmutation of energies on behalf of the intelligent will of the steadfast rebels, who use fog, dust storms, the reflection of the sun, and shifts in the direction of the wind all to harness nature’s wrath on their collective behalf. Soldiers are tricked into pursuing women on horseback through a wall of luminous dust only to have their horses blinded by the sudden deployment of golden shields reflecting the sun, fog is used to trick the prime minister’s army into unleashing a torrent of arrows unto unmanned boats rigged-up to collect the arrows for rebel recycling, a change in the direction of the wind is exploited to turn the power of fire against those presumed in its possession, and the prime minister uses the corpses of those in his rank fallen by typhoid for some pretty unsportsmanlike biological warfare. Both sides pull every move out of the Sun Tzu playbook. Red Cliff combines Eisensteinean montage and the mythmaking grandiosity and rabble-rousing of a D.W. Griffith or King Vidor to deliver what is ultimately a visceral, supercharged combat experience directly to the brainstem. The CG digital paintbrush is utilized to dead-serious cartoon effect to open up magnificent plateaus and mind-melting horizons that nearly refuse to enter the eye at all. These images actually use their unreality to make them feel more real, like an overwhelming surplus of stimulus might leave one w/ a sense of scope beyond scope, like a mountain that breaks the mind w/ its size, or an event that refuses to be assimilated by the apparatus of perception. Woo’s unapologetic pop-mythological vision is nowhere near as ornate or precious as that displayed in Yimou Zhang’s House of Flying Daggers (’04) or Curse of the Golden Flower (‘06). Chi bi represents a kind of film that simply isn’t made anymore. The makers of such grand exhibitions almost never have this kind of control over the encapsulation of the infinitesimal. It is rare to see such a massive vision coalesce in the form of such an exited and exhaustive drawing inward – such a total, utter inhalation – of forces, resources, image-images, sound-images, action-images, from the smallest element up to the most awesome. It is so much of the world and of the flesh, in all of its flounce and bounce, that yr heart cannot help but beat along to its. Red Cliff is a blood machine. It pumps it w/ evenhanded control of the nerve meter. It works just so. And it’s a massive little adrenal treasure and a hell of a movie-movie fix. Goddamn, it's almost too much fun!

Capitalism: A Love Story

2009-12-06T12:05:00.000-08:00

A Michael Moore film is a strange beast. Neither documentaries nor essay films per se, his movies are more like frustratedly impassioned multimedia letters to some proverbial editor, raked together out of bits and pieces, torrential in their intertextual incorporation and manic dispersal of various stuff, almost never waylaid by arguments of a particularly cogent vintage, scattershot in their multidirectional takeoffs and landings, and ultimately ingeniously populist in their attempt to address a particular kind of man on the street who may or may not exist in any particular time or place. People who think he makes impotent protest pics that merely preach to the converted are, however, probably selling him short. He is the only popular fixture of the American left who manages to harness the outrage and vehemence demonstrated as a matter of routine by Fox News, Moore and his ilk’s unceasingly popular bête noire, and such an argument leaves aside the huge amount of Americans who are either too young or too clueless to have concretely made their minds up about much of anything, yet who may be compelled by circumstance or word of mouth to happen upon one of his cine-screeds. It is toward these people that Moore directs his various books, television be-ins, and movies. While he is tremendously good at righteous indignation and compassion-at-gunpoint (the people whose sad stories he routinely exploits for their pathos often feel like they’ve been lined up and shoved half-willingly in front of his lens), strong when he is leading w/ his emotions and outraged sense of irony, he is not, despite his veritable army of researchers and lawyers, particularly good at drawing conclusions or following his information where it would ultimately be likely to take him. His arguments tend to be circular, blotchy, mired in emotion, and clueless to various enormities that surround and dwarf them. Capitalism: A Love Story leads off from his last couple films, limiting the baseball-capp’d fatso’s physical presence to only a few acts of decaffeinated street theater, but foregrounding the controlling agency of his voice and editorial decisions to the extent that the viewer never escapes his presence, even when the found footage is doing the legwork. Moore’s film never feels like it wants to abolish capitalism at all, which is probably smart. It sees capitalism, instead, the same way Antoine de Saint-Exupery saw war in his famous Heinrich Böll-appropriated epigraph: as a disease not unlike typhoid or malaria. It isn’t going anywhere but it needs to be treated lest it totally undermine our collective physical integrity. And let’s indeed face it: the free market isn’t going anywhere. It’s like anal sex. Once somebody stumbled upon it humanity was never going to get rid of it. So then how do we treat it? I have no idea and Michael Moore doesn’t really either. He makes it clear that bank regulation failed, that congressional oversight was undermined by the boys from Goldman Sachs running the show under the rule of Henry Paulson, who turned the Democrats in congress into the delivery boys for his fiscal bailout coup d'état. So what we need, then, is more of the same government? More of the same ineptness and corruption, then? Moore thinks democracy should trump the plutonomy (self-admitted in a leaked Citibank memo) of the top one percent – it’s still one man one vote, after all – but this is ultimately undermined by his argument that both of the major American political parties are in the pockets of the corporate demagogues. Get up off yr ass and do something, the film demands at the end. Join me in my struggle to bitch and moan, irritate security guards, and milk reaction shots. He does show some minor victories in the form of collectivized labor and moderately successful refusenik interventions in the realm of both factory shutdowns and mortgage default evictions. These are less empowering, though, then they ought to be. Collectivized labor will simply never be the dominant Western paradigm simply because it doesn’t happen democratically, it happens from the top. And the people who refuse to leave the factories that have been abandoned or the homes that have been foreclosed upon only make us feel shitty. In fact, there is so much in this movie that will make any thinking person seriously mad (from “dead peasant” insurance policies to sentence-happy judges getting kickbacks from private corrections facilities), that any fuel thrown into the fire finally begets only more of the same grievous anger. Moore pines for the halcyon days of the 1950s when unions were strong, the rich paid 90% taxes, a middle class couple only needed one of ‘em a-workin’, and the competition overseas was still recovering from being bombed into the Stone Age. If there’s one thing I know, having watched Capitalism: A Love Story, it’s that we can never go back and stop Eisenhower from picking up where the British Empire left off. This shit is in play, baby, and when it slaps you you’ll take it like Peter Lorre and you’ll like it! Alas. Amo, amas, amant all you want. I don't feel any less fucked.

Ninja Assassin

2009-12-04T13:43:00.000-08:00

What do young people in our age want from their cinema? I should think that they want, following the strictures of contemporary cultural theory, a rage of profane or destructive excitements without any clarifying discourse, any programmatic investment, or any demands placed on them or by them other than that the odd semi-coherent orgy of vandalism be played out on the inert flesh of the world. I should think, then, that the people who made it are way more right than the critics who deplore it: the people have spoken and what they want is Ninja Assassin. And you know what? I’m perfectly OK with that. Have we not learned the lesson taught by the Marquis de Sade? That when the social contract is on its last legs all that is left to do is unmask the true, comically sick sublimated desires beneath – debauchery, perversion, crime. We are living in a culture of gore born out of the end of a dead-ended era of Empire, just as the maniacal Marquis was is his pre-revolutionary aristocratic cell, returning the social contract’s repressed self to itself in the form of its sickest, most immanent phantasies. What do the dreams of our children look like? They look like full-immersion Grand Theft Auto. And Ninja Assassin, w/ its Korean pop star practicing a Japanese martial art in an explicitly Americanized global context (Berlin and Japan are interchangeable, everybody speaks English), not only indulges our appetites, shares our dreams, and enacts an ideal psychotic fantasy, it also suggests a radical superman for tomorrow, leaping forward from the Jason Bourne franchise, and demanding that we imagine this future man as possessed of total sensorial discipline and control. A man who has not only honed the eighteen disciplines of ninjitsu, but who has fully tapped into the emergent plane of the immanent, who hears the thoughts of others, who reads the networks of causation in which he is flung like sentient dice, always ready for the playing out of the inevitable against the vectors of the given, always totally rooted in exact sense-knowledge. This man is all sense sensing itself and total fascist discipline of the flesh. Such is Ninja Assassin’s hero rebel Raizo, as he turns his harnessed powers against the symbolic father, Ozunu, the Mars-like cultivator of the forces of war, assembler and converter of orphans into incontrovertible agents of global death-reach, turns the Americoeuropean war machine against Ozunu’s micowar machine, and releases a torrent of CGI blood that looks something like an endless series of obscure glass-blowing accidents. Of course Raizo will finally defeat Ozuzu by pulling out one of those Mortal Kombat secret moves that require the dexterous pushing of a number of buttons in precise succession. Yes, the people have spoken. I await Ninja Assassin II w/ bated breath.

Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire

2009-12-03T10:11:00.000-08:00

And push it does. Approximately as subtle as that dangling deformity of a subtitle, Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (if that is yr real name) strains, in fact, like a pair of movers hoisting a grand piano. This shit practically herniates itself. Claireece ‘Precious’ Jones is our heroine, an obese sixteen-year-old girl in pre-Giuliani, oldschool-bleak 80s Harlem, her head shaped like the Hindenburg. What else? Um … she is the illiterate mother to a four-year-old girl w/ the Down syndrome (whom she endearingly calls “Mongo”); she is casually bearing her second child, both her kids fathered by her own father (who has been raping her since she was three); she is physically and psychologically abused by her motormouth mother w/ whom she lives in piss-lit jaundiced haze of television, hatred and pig’s feet; she has just been suspended from junior high and is about to discover that she is H.I.V. positive. That’s right motherfucker! Every couple of minutes you are going to find out that things can indeed get worse for Precious. Goddamn! No wonder she suffers from an insultingly puerile post-traumatic fantasy life full of Entertainment Tonight approved safe places which she enters and then repels from like a Negroid Rapunzel through chasms opened up like birth canals (or crucifix-shaped peepholes) in the flaking scenery whenever the going gets particularly tough. The vulgarized commercial, showbizzz latticework of the adolescent unconscious, w/ its paradisial unfurling of red carpets, the demonstration of designer gowns before the flashing cameras, and, of course, the idealized secular-religious placement of the couple – the fulfillment of the promise of total status ek-stacy in the love bond – placing her eternally internally on the arm of a handsome light-skinned blatino. At one point she even primps in the mirror, a blond, skinny white girl gazing back out. Even her fucking dreams make her pathetic. (The film itself does seem to dream similar dreams out loud: all the “together” black folk in the movie – Lenny Kravitz, Mariah Carey, and Paula Patton – are about as white as black gets (Precious cannot even figure out what Mariah Carey’s social worker in fact is)). This is humiliation melodrama on hyperdrive and, as is generally the case in such self-defeating operations, its ultimate incredulity is to ask us as viewers to find the catharsis and uplift on the other end of this near-comic carnivalesque panoply of wear-down travails (at least its funnier than the Coen Brothers’ recent scattershot Job riff, which is to say not really very fucking funny at all, is it?). The film finally becomes most insulting to itself and us when it grants us license to use it to feel better about ourselves, kind of like we just gave a bum a twenty. The performers truly redeem themselves by putting in their all, though. You’ve never seen so many people in a movie squinting so hard to feel, and never so many inexperienced actors able to dispense that melodrama money shot: the single tear trail down the cheek. But really, when you think about how many people in America actually live lives like that of Claireece ‘Precious’ Jones, how they have to slog miserably courageously through it, never getting noticed, is the feeling that this leaves you w/ a profound feeling of need to see performers redeem themselves? Fuck no, it better not be. Precious did indeed move me at times, I have to admit that. I even caught some of the uplift. The film is far from incompetently made. What can I say? I’m a sucker too. But I don’t feel good about it and I don’t commend the film for pulling off what the source material clearly made inevitable anyway. The only lasting effect that Precious really had on me that I can be happy to keep as an ongoing token of its efforts is that seeing her as a frumped-up social worker without a coterie of beauticians to attend to her, I can now say that I have fallen deeply in love w/ Mariah Carey. Like seriously deep in love. Seriously. Deep. I never thought she was all that pretty. Turns out she’s not all that pretty. She’s, like, fucking beautiful. What can I say? I always find the girls in the before-and-after shampoo adds more attractive before they have the shower, when their hair still won’t do what they want it to. So yah. I guess I grew a little.

The Road

2009-11-30T14:03:00.000-08:00

Confession time: I haven’t read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I love McCarthy, I thought the book sounded great, and it was hardily recommended by friends for whose taste in literature I harbor nothing but the highest admiration. Still, I never read the fucking thing. I guess the best argument I can make on my lazy behalf is that no other novel in recent memory better fits the category of book described in the first chapter of Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler as: “Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them, Too.” That being said, I have nothing to compare John Hillcoat’s adaptation (written by nobody screenwriter John Penhall) of The Road to other than other post-apocalyptic movies, a job Hillcoat’s somber-as-fuck existential film goes a long way toward making irrelevant. It’s clearly its own thing. In some ways it succeeds and in others it does not. In the end, the only other film it leaves me wanting to compare it to is the better film that it itself could have been w/ a number of small to mid-size adjustments. Or, perhaps, to the better film that it in fact was when in first came in at some four-and-a-half hours. Or maybe even the subsequent film that it became before once again being ushered back into editing for being too bleak for test audiences. First the triumphant end of things: The Road is a masterpiece of visual design. Flawless, even. Its incorporation of every single conceivable stop along the grey scale tour, its incredible landscape compositions, and its flattened out vistas of half-eradicated space are absolutely superb. The way its ashen, hollowed-out humans are absorbed into the gutted leftover detritus of human species activity, which itself dissolves back in to a natural world that is itself dead or dying, creates a sense of profound monoform unity. Everything is reduced to the same dismal grain, the skin of the film as sickly and washed out as that of its characters. But it is precisely this reduction of the human characters in The Road to elements of its landscape that makes its repeated attempts to rise to the level of transcendent elegy nearly impossible to achieve. The tone is too post-human and maudlin for that. It is forced to lean far too heavily on the by turns elegiac and sinister – admittedly gorgeous but always excessively foregrounded – score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, and an unfortunate voiceover which pretends that this film is about Viggo Mortensen’s Man when by all rights it should really be about The Boy, played w/ some serious credibility by newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee. One suspects that the voiceover and the flashbacks to pre-apocalyptic domesticity featuring lithe Charlize Theron as increasingly moribund mommy, were heavily padded-on after the film’s poor performance at test screenings. Were the Weinsteins and the folks at Dimension honestly hoping to proffer an adaptation of The Road onto the general public which people somehow wouldn’t find bleak? By using the voiceover and tying it into flashbacks that are supposed to be dreams, the film puts itself in the wrong head, and does so sloppily at that. It’s just not credible. The flashbacks work when they are at their most fragmentary: two sets of hands playing on a piano briefly breaking away for a caress, the wife before an iced-over window behind which a fire appears to be frostily burning, the synthetic appropriation of an inner thigh, the play of sun on a sundress. But when large blocks of the past play out it feels like a cheat. I mean who dreams convenient bits of backstory when they go to sleep at night? All that these flashbacks are ultimately good for, soundtracked as they are by insistent music and poetic voiceover mewlings, is 1) reminding the viewer how much better Terrence Malick is at this stuff, and 2) undermining a potentially powerful film about how a father’s love for his son becomes a distorted, prismatic splintering of itself into something morally blurry and increasingly monstrous. Taking away Mortensen’s voiceover would go a long way toward making him more frightening, the implication of his dogged way-the-fuck-beyond-the-pale love for his son more suffocating, and the final release of his son from this protracted bondage at the film’s end, on the shores of the horizonless Gulf Coast, more liberating (if not exactly hopeful). This is the story of a man who holds his son hostage, two suicide bullets left in his revolver, by using the boy as his only reason to go on, as an excuse to see all other human beings as a threat, and as a source of hope where there determinedly is none. The Man is, after all, the figure in this dyad who stands in for the civilization whose hubris got it snuffed out in the first place. It is The Boy who is slowly made aware of this, as he grudgingly comes to realize that they are not unconditionally the “good guys” after all, that “good” is in fact a dead luxury, and that there may not be any kind of evil his father would not be willing to engender in his son’s name. There is a key point somewhere in this film where The Boy becomes terrified of The Man, and it is this exact moment, difficult if not impossible to pinpoint, upon which everything rests. Anytime The Boy turns to another he is chastened by the paranoiac father. The family that takes The Boy in at the end of the film is given away by the presence of their dog as the cause of the noises which precipitated the departure of our duo, at father’s brash insistence, from the underground bunker where they had enough food and supplies to last them a very long time indeed. It is the paranoia brought about by his deformed, mutant love that gets The Man killed and effectively leaves his son to his own meager devices. In reality, though, it is not until this monstrous father is vanquished that the son can begin to live out his final days w/ any degree of efficacy whatever. That yr father – the fundamental support without whom there would be no norm, no ability to accept frustration, to obey any prohibition, without whom there is no law or moral code – is in fact a monster made such by his love for you: this is the root of a child's nightmare, where there is nothing left to protect you from the only one left to protect you. To discover – in a world of hillbilly cannibal marauders, walls of fire, and regular tree-felling earthquakes – that the one you love the most is the one you most have to fear: this is the very heart of The Road’s true horror story.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox

2009-11-28T14:23:00.001-08:00

Busy, funny, and (ahem) fantastic, w/ its endlessly inventive promulgation of densely industrious sight gags and word games, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson’s new Roald Dahl-adapted stop-motion extravaganza, invokes many of the sorts of things you might find in a typical child’s bedroom: shoebox dioramas, model train sets (an actual one of which is on display in Mr. Fox’s son Ash’s bedroom), ant farms (the geological strata of this autumnal toy world are presented to the viewer in cross-section through which the various animals dig and burrow, constructing rhizomes), doll houses, and lots of furry stuffed creatures anthropomorphically dressed. This is a child’s-eye-view of the world, then. This will not surprise viewers of Mr. Anderson’s previous films. All of them erect heavily art-directed childlike vantages (often pejoratively mistaken for “infantile” ones) w/ all the wonder and play that the term suggests, as well as the impalpable idea of a world-sense founded in an endless questioning, prodding, discovering – the very processes by which a child comes to an understanding of what all of this stuff consists in which his questions unquestioningly believe. The world that this child’s gaze looks upon in a Wes Anderson movie, though, the world that is having sense and understanding made out of it, cut out from cardboard, is a world of adolescence in perpetual relapse (one of the many obvious and not so obvious things it has in common w/ Spike Jonze's recent Where the Wild Things Are). Inescapable, unrelenting, painful adolescence is the preservative fluid in which Anderson’s fetal creatures are ultimately suspended. This is less a flaw inherent to his films than it is a reality at the heart of which is the genuine clinical sociocultural symptomatologies his films delineate: it’s a condition, in short, w/ which contemporary society is duly afflicted. And such is the case w/ The Fantastic Mr. Fox. All the men are animals who won’t – cannot – grow up. Mr. Fox himself is a chicken thief turned newspaper columnist, an unsatisfying career change made by virtue of a promise he makes to his soon-to-be wife at the start of the film. They find themselves in quite a pickle, trapped in a cage, about to be butchered, she announcing that she is pregnant. Mr. Fox (sort of) promises that if they survive he will reign in his wild ways. Cut to twelve fox years later, Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney as only a slightly toned down variation on the go-for-broke convivial Clark Gable chutzpah he brought to O Brother, Where Art Thou?), full of resentments toward the boring, hardscrabble domestic scene in which he’s stuck, living in a hole in the ground w/ wifey and bitter, ungainly, ‘different’ son Ash. Something’s gotta give. Against the advice of his Badger lawyer (Bill Murray doing his thing), uppity Mr. Fox, in the throes of his midlife fox crisis, decides to move his family into a beech tree on a hill, in plain view of the residences of nefarious farmers Bunce, Boggis, and the unremittingly nefarious cider-drunken sharpshooter Bean (Michael Gambon, likewise – and hilariously – doing his thing), and to secretly return to his thieving ways, w/ the assistance of bashful opossum pushover, Kylie (snout poking out of bandit mask). By virtue of Mr. Fox’s inability to keep his animalness and hubris in check, he enters a war of attrition w/ his tripartite farmer adversaries, putting his family, community, and self in serious jeopardy. And getting his tail blown off for his trouble. When Mrs. Fox confronts him and asks him why he has lied to her, been so selfish, and thrown the whole animal community into a state of crisis, he responds quite simply: I’m a wild animal. Who amongst us cannot relate? I am what I am, the confluence of the various drives that make me up; I fight, I fuck, or I flee. I’m a fox goddamnit! It is precisely the adolescent who holds up his unmediated, untrammeled drives for valorization. It is the adolescent who, as Julia Kristeva reminds us, “idealizes the drives and their satisfaction.” It is the adolescent who says “I am a wild fucking animal. What did you expect?” The adult knows to keep the drives in check, to make use of an ingrained, healthy shame to prevent indulgence in shameless behavior. The adult operates without the constant need to pursue his animal appetites, damn the torpedoes. Mr. Fox’s son Ash is the other side of adolescent striving. Unable to live up to the reputation of his one time whack bat star father, who dismisses him and instead focuses his attention and praise on hotshot maternal cousin Kristofferson – athletic, wise, disciplined and effortlessly able to seduce Ash’s foxy (ahem) lab partner – Ash desperately fails to attain the realization of infinite pleasure and perfect harmony in the object relation, so he blames himself for the failure of this relation, turns against himself, and ultimately enacts an inward-directed nihilism that causes him to act out in ways that differ from his cocksure father’s acting out (he acts shameless because he is actually ashamed), but which likewise put others in jeopardy and which can only be resolved by joining his father in a selfless acting-on-behalf-of-community. In the end, Mr. Fox indeed does bring all the animals together, in celebration of their animalness, listing off each of their Latin nomenclatures, putting the animal to use on behalf of, curbing the drives for the shared purpose of a collective overcoming. Still, these American-voiced animals in their war of independence against the British farmers whose law stands in for the paternal limit, the law-of-the-father, are still made intelligible, ultimately, in terms of an Oedipal transference which once again finds them, in their collective ideality, simply pulling one over on daddy. So for all its valuable children’s movie life lessons about community, selflessness, and the celebration of difference, the cute little beasties in Anderson’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox, having escaped certain death beneath the earth, but consigned to remain there all the same, under the law of the father, are unable to escape the prison of chimeras that is their adolescent ideation. For all the jubilation at hand, there is a certain sadness at work underground. These animals remain, like the human Andersoneans who precede them, as trapped as the rest of us when we find ourselves backstepping - when we refuse, or are unable, to grow up.

La nana / The Maid

2009-11-28T11:05:00.001-08:00

To be a live-in maid / nanny to one family for over twenty years, as Catalina Saavedra’s Raquel has been in Sebastián Silva’s subtle and sneaky second film, is to work and have worked a shitty, demanding, confoundingly repetitive, and often quietly humiliating job upon which you not only come to depend for your livelihood and physical security, but for yr sense of belonging, home, personal self-value, and emotional wellbeing. It is an indentured servitude that doubly imprisons by imposing the most desperate form of psychic need upon its entrapped practitioner. La nana, an autobiographical film based on Silva’s childhood (his younger brother plays his teenage self), shot in his family’s Chilean home, dedicated to his two childhood maids, approaches this perilous lifestyle w/ a deeper, more restrained understanding than any film about the baffling socioeconomic and psychological polarities of living w/ and/or as household help than any I have ever seen, and is so unique in its doing so that it cannot help but sieve much of the business of its meaning-making from the audience expectations that it implicitly subverts. From the beginning of the film, Catalina Saavedra’s jerky, nervous, tick-laden performance and halfway malevolent forty-one-year-old-virgin gaze set us up to expect the worst; some sort of cathartic aberration; some good ol’ ultraviolent bourgeois comeuppance; a calamitous return of repressed libidinal energy in the form of a raucous reprisal. The literary and cinematic depiction of maids has often focused on repression, alienation, and dispossession leading to rebellion, abjection, madness, and murder. The master narrative for these maid tales is the case of the Papin sisters, Lea and Christine, who brutally murdered their employer and her daughter in Le Mans, France, in 1933. Jean Genet used the story as the launching-pad for his theatrical masterpiece, The Maids, first performed in 1947. It has gone on to directly influence films such as Les Abysses (’63) by Nikos Papatakis, Claude Chabrol’s 1995 masterpiece La cérémonie, Jean-Pierre Denis’ Les blessures assassins / Murderous Maids (’00), among other works of cinema, theater, literature, and reportage. (Unrelated masterpieces like Joseph Losey’s The Servant ('63), Buñuel’s Le journal d'une femme de chamber (’64), and Pasolini’s Teorema, have likewise used personal servants as standing-reserves for violent, subversive destabilization of erstwhile calm zones of domestic upper-middle-class placidity w/ their immanent and corrosive play of sublimated power relations). Saaverda’s performance and the way the filmmakers isolate and underscore her odd, increasingly pathological behavior – complete w/ migraine headaches, blackouts, attacks, and spells of glassy aphasia – present us w/ a woman quite clearly on the brink of physical and emotional collapse. While this is indeed the crux of the situation, La nana doesn’t use her as a cog in a diaphanous discursive machinery of class schism. Instead it renders her as a woman in a complex situation of servitude and neediness, who struggles to meet these unconscious needs and has to confront the fear that her piece of security, a security that has been carved out for her conditionally, can be taken away from her at any moment if she is no longer seen as of use. Any form of change is, in fact, a possible threat to this partial, compromised zone of dependence and abnegation as both-part-of-and-not-a-part-of another family w/ its own unsteady dynamics. Even the two growing teenagers – he regularly spunking up his bedsheets and pajamas and she flowering into a self-possessed, confrontational adult whose face Raquel has thusly carved spookily out of her collection of family photos – threaten her already loosening grip on a status quo that she perceives as desperately necessary to her physical and spiritual survival and to which she clings like a territorial surrogate-mother bear at war w/ chronos. Her kindly mistress proves understanding, but when her solution to the ongoing dilemma is to hire another maid to help Raquel out, the already problematic maid goes even further off the rails, desperate not to lose any ground: she makes short work of the first assistant, an innocent, guileless Peruvian name Mercedes, whom she browbeats and locks out of the house, disinfecting the entire bathroom each time the poor young thing takes a shower; a second maid, Sonia, is brought in – mean, coarse, and built like a brick shithouse – but she quits too after the two maids come to blows, Sonia also having been locked out of the house (and having consequently injured herself climbing over it); finally, after she collapses in front of her benefactors, a third auxiliary maid named Lucy enters the picture during Raquel’s consequent convalescence, and everything changes in a way that we do not see coming and which, in its heartwarming unraveling, makes of our cynical, condescending expectations an object of ridicule. Lucy is a sweet, engaging and sympathetic woman who refuses to be chastened by Raquel’s passive-aggressive hardheadedness, insisting her way through the older woman’s force field, taking being locked out of the house as an opportunity to sunbathe naked, befriending Raquel, loving her, listening to her, coaxing her. Mariana Loyola’s performance in the role of Lucy stands in stark disjunction w/ Saavedra’s – hers is reminiscent of a Chilean riff on Sally Hawkins’s infectious performance-as-workable-lifestyle-ethic turn in Happy-Go-Lucky – but even more perfectly modulated and surprising in terms of where it takes the film. Given an opportunity to be heard, a space in which compassion can open her up to a new acceptance of life on life’s terms, and a locus for transference aided by tenderness, Raquel emerges slowly and cautiously from her fog, like a wounded animal into a clearing. Lucy, who is only passing through and likes it that way, allows Raquel to giver herself away so that she may receive herself back, become alive to herself, no longer defined simply as an precarious adjunct to a family that just won’t stay still, a position she disdains and depends upon in a maddening and untenable day-to-day paradox that has up until this point been closing in on her, shutting her down. The final shot of the film is of Raquel, enacting the transference in real bodily terms, taking up the now-moved-on Lucy’s habit of jogging w/ earphones, locked into her own flesh, her own psychic and biological autonomy, smiling as she roves gingerly out into the world, content in herself of having a self. The film, then, is about how the right person entering her desperate, sad life at the exact right moment, makes it okay for Raquel to feel okay. Of course this is how this story goes. And we should be fucking ashamed of ourselves.

La danse - Le ballet de l'Opéra de Paris

2009-11-26T11:46:00.000-08:00

Watching La danse, I kept thinking of death. My death. It seemed weird. Perhaps, I thought at first, perhaps it is Wiseman. Eighty-years-young this coming January, Frederick Wiseman is simply the greatest, most important filmmaker working in the United States, and he is not long for this world. He was one of the first filmmakers to perfectly hone the observational mode of direct cinema made famous in the U.S. by the Maysles Brothers and D. A. Pennebaker, but more than anything else a form perfected in Quebec by Michel Brault. As a Canadian, I cherish the documentary tradition on which my national cinema is founded. It is the only national cinema in the world whose two greatest filmmakers, Michel Brault and Allan King, are primarily known for documentaries. Wiseman is alone in the U.S. as their equal. He has been making films that immerse the viewer in the workings of institutions without talking heads, direct address, intertitles, chronology – any cinematographic tools that would serve to foreground any functional agency of the artist’s – since making 1967’s Titicult Follies, one of the greatest and most heartbreaking documentaries ever produced. His films are exhaustive fly-on-the-wall dioramas of institutional life: mental institutions like in Titicut, high schools, police departments, welfare offices, zoos, hospitals, women’s shelters, meat packing plants, Wiseman has done them all. La danse is his second film focusing on a ballet company, after 1995s Ballet, about the American Ballet Theater, and it is as beautiful and purely cinematic a film as I have ever seen. I think that a dance company is the absolute perfect subject for Wiseman, allowing him to focus on the institution, how it runs, what kind of market forces converge upon and underpin it, as well as upon dance itself: perhaps the one artform that the cinema elevates more completely, by virtue of the proximity it can attain, than any other. Filmmakers from Powell and Pressburger to Norman McLaren to Robert Altman have done some of their best work w/ ballet as their subject. The film begins w/ quickly intercut establishing shots of Paris followed by similar shots of the world beneath the studio: corridors, pipes, tunnels, the striated networks and subterranean structures that underlay the studio. Photographer John Davey uses the square box of the old Academy ratio (1.33:1) to emphasize the hard and soft lines of these busy connective tissues, these arteries and tessellations. The art of dance is not just thrown into contrast w/ the bureaucracy and consumer capitalist machinations that it requires in order to exist at all, but the smoothed, infinitely opened out spaces where the dancing is done – both the mirror-walled rehearsal spaces that reflect infinitely redoubled illusory reflections outward, and the actual stages w/ their purplish-blue spotlights terminating at a black horizon – suggest plateaus that all this underrigging supports in the same way money, human labor, and the Lehman Brothers support it. The bodies of these incredible young people, boys and girls (like w/ most great films, I was steadfastly bisexual for the duration), are framed in such a way that we almost never see them reflected in the mirrors when they are rehearsing. They are singular and they command the attention of our entire sensory-motor apparatus. The brain and nervous system dance w/ them the same way someone richly involved in a sporting event will jerk about an enacting of the direction he wants a player to go. In a way that is somewhat similar to kung fu movies, dancers remind us of Spinoza’s supposition that we are not yet aware of what a body is capable. Dancers are masochist, practicing a kind of bondage. What they do to their bodies to transcend what is thought of as the body, its utilitarian implementation, is staggering, and to see what they do, these beautiful, tormented bodies, atop these opened-out planes, is to witness something as primordial and elemental as the flickering of a flame. Dance is a Heracletean drug. The process of hypnotizing ourselves watching these dancers is similar to the effect produced by the pulsing, silently musical, morphological handpainted films of structuralists like McLaren and Stan Brakhage w/ the added component of these sexually charged bodies, commingling bodies, bodies that will grow old and die. Dance, like everything else (only more so), is about fucking and dying. Wiseman’s film is a fetishization of death-drive opened up onto a plateau built up from a microcosmic superstructure of institutional scaffolding. Much of the dance work shown in the latter sections of the film invokes Alfred Jarry, the occult, Magick. One woman dancer smears two children w/ stage blood, slams buckets violently over their heads, then lays them at the stage. These beautiful, young bodies writhing in death-lust. There is no power anywhere like this power. And then suddenly we are watching janitors cleaning out an empty, cavernous theater, and again the specter of death and depopulation. It's ineluctable. La danse is easily the film of the year and, after Allan King’s Dying at Grace, the second best documentary I have seen this decade.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

2009-11-26T09:28:00.000-08:00

In a story in his latest book, narrated by the Hep C virus, Will Self riffs on the “slapstick of addiction.” “Slapstick is, in essence, the ritualized worship of causation, something humans place more faith in than they do their gods,” he writes. “Anyone watching a comedian attempting to do two things at once – or even one – will be familiar with this instinctive belief.” Watching hypomanic Nicholas Cage, in the early throws of cocaine psychosis, do even one thing at once in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans proves a recipe for high highwire comedy indeed. Like Wile E. Coyote pursuing a fix bigger than God, he rushes into and out of concentric, inward-eddying happenings, vamping like Red Skelton on rotgut, hobbled like Olivier in Richard, Duke of Gloucester mode, hovering at the edge of the wolf pack to sniff out weird mushrooms, whilst employing some seriously advanced intuitive drunken monkey kung fu. Turns out he is doing two things at once, whether he is in-the-moment aware of it or not. He is an addict, bien sûr, but he never stops being the decorated hero cop. Dude gets his man, he just takes the scenic route is all, roughing up grannies if he has to. Maybe not so scenic. The post-Katrina New Orleans of Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant non-remake is somewhere between Western ghost town and movie-movie backlot. There are plenty of cars but no people, most of the action taking place in any-place-whatevers – the police stations, crime scenes, sports bars, luxury mob apartments, casinos, and rustic hideouts of any given Steven Seagal movie. Directing Nicholas Cage to (cue Bavarian accent) “let the hog loose,” Herzog gives the actor plenty of room to spree. And let the hog loose he does. All over what is essentially a hopped-up Don Siegel picture w/ those cool oldschool crane-shot urban reveals. The police procedural, like slapstick, is all about causation. One clue leads to another leads to a shakedown leads up the ladder leads to the kingpin. This is precisely what happens in Port of Call, except that Cage’s vulpine piggy is running on schizzed-out midbrain instinct, forced to improvise at the speed of sound. Out hero is not a user of intravenous drugs: he is a snorter, a smoker, a popper. It is always go-time. A race to get up on the stress hormone. The accidental inhalation of heroin requires a hard-slog over to his girlfriend’s (a prostitute who looks-like-a-starlet-because-she-is, of course) to get the alkaloid antidote lest he need, you know, sit down for a spell. Like all addicts, Lieutenant Terence McDonagh’s cure for existential loneliness is isolation. He is locked into his own mad monadology. People are projections on a screen, action movie ciphers as much for him as they are for us. They can’t touch him. The limbic compromise of his reptile brain causes him to see iguanas, like the lobsters and crabs that followed Sartre around for a couple years after he took mescaline. Alleygators get under his skin. Herzog’s one Herzogean touch in the visual field is the employment of reptile-cam – insert shots in extreme wide-angle of scaly neo-cortex topographies connected to Cage's dopey backgrounded gaze. The other thing the good Lieutenant has in common w/ all addicts in active addiction (and I should know), is the backward slapstick skip of ethics as they retreat up the beach to allow for the incoming tide of dependency. Counterintuitively, Port of Call actually suggests the efficacy of these tremendously pliable ethological gradations and degradations, first because their playing out is very funny, and second because they somehow work … for a while. The film isn’t so much a celebration of addiction, then, as a kind of marveling at it. Where Abel Ferrera’s 1992 Bad Lieutenant saw abjection and aberration put a man of faith back on his knees, Port of Call’s hero practices the wrong kind of surrender all together, but an immanent plane of causation yields to him all the same, the way Buster Keaton might accidentally fall into the exact place he needs to be. The reptile comes out on top by chance, and the hog, somehow, is vindicated. It’s luck ‘til luck runs out. And we need luck. We do. But we need a human connection, and I don't buy the variety served up here in the dénouement. You can't have it both ways.

The Messenger

2009-11-24T08:51:00.000-08:00

It would seem natural that Israeli combat veteran Oren Moverman’s directorial debut would delve into the heavy moral morass of military life and its discontents. Already having made a name for himself in the industry adapting Denis Johnson (whose heavily visual prose in Jesus’ Son already seem blocked out and halfway art directed), and, in concert w/ director Todd Haynes, the various parallel texts mythological that cohabitate under the aegis of "Bob Dylan," Moverman appears to have a handle on the complex interplay of inner and outer worlds running alongside one another (or outer worlds on top of other outer worlds), an understanding of the dexterity required to make slippery texts, subtexts, and metatexts conceptually cohere, and an ear for oddball countercultural American vernacular not actually uncommon to foreigners perhaps because one is forced to hone ones depth perception when operating outside of ones native tongue (think Kafka). That being said, none of these apparent assets is evident from The Messenger: all that is left is talk, talk, talk. There is clearly a good film to be made on the subject of men whose job it is to notify next of kin that their loved one has died in combat, perhaps w/ the bulk of this cast, and perhaps w/ Mr. Moverman calling the shots. This is certainly not that movie. Despite the high-test quality of the two central leads (Ben Foster as wounded-in-action Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery and Woody Harrelson as Captain Tony Stone, recovering alcoholic military lifer secretly ashamed to have never seen combat), they are consistently made to masticate heavily telegraphed dialogue that sounds an awful lot like writing. Though a wonderful actress, Samantha Morton has to deal w/ the worst of it, forced to trade in dross that would be impossible to sell even in the mouth of an actress more suited to the part of a sexually compelling working class American woman w/ a half-black kid. Samantha Morton has become more asexual as her giant forehead increasingly leads her around and her eyes look out of the screen like huge, glossy cries for help – every time I see her these days I can only think of that ethereal, wide-eyed and amniotic human battery she played in Minority Report. What ever happened to the hot-mess firecracker who first made herself known to me fucking-the-pain-away her way through Under the Skin? She is not the problem though. All of the characters say things that no one would ever say, moving episodically through sets that feel like empty casks in which no one has ever lived, emotional payoff falls out of the sky and goes kersplat, and the dead-in-its-tracks romance between achy-broken Foster and nervous android Morton is sickeningly creepy in a way Moverman is apparently unaware of, leaving one to wonder if he actually sees this stalking and cagey cornering as fucking redemptive (?). The Messenger remains refreshingly free of message in the big picture but remains chalk-full of tiny little moment-to-moment messages that are persistently spelled out and scattered condescendingly about our feet like birdseed. So far the critics have been gobbling it up. Personally, I hunger for something more substantial. I remain convinced, however, that when people start using him right Ben Foster will be one of this generation's finest actors. Maybe he needs to be playing shy-but-hyper like he did when he was a kid. Here he just barely doesn't quite totally suck. Professional pothead Woody Harrelson actually takes him to town. Goddamn!

Antichrist

2009-11-22T12:56:00.000-08:00

Shot by Anthony Dod Mantel – Dogme 95’s onetime photographer in residence – w/ awe-inspiring etherealized gorgeousity one minute and raw guttering nerves the next, Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist is, if nothing else, easily the best thing he has done since his masterpiece The Idiots (’98) (the only film he ever made under the strictures of his Dogme manifesto’s various vows of chastity). Unveiling the new film at Cannes this year, the walking Danish personality cult attempted to explain its origins by way of describing a creative impasse brought about by a period of clinical depression and extreme anhedonia to which an extreme act of purging was the only viable artistic response. Certainly Antichrist is a film that feels overwhelmed by crises at once personal, artistic, and spiritual. It details a Satanic metempsychosis wherein all of nature, within and without the realm of the human and the personal, has become transfigured by daemonia. No vision of hell realized on earth has ever been rendered so impersonally while at once feeling so extremely grounded in specters of personal suffering – it seems to suggest firsthand experience of how easily life can be lived into a corner from which one suddenly cannot escape, where the earth itself burns the soles of yr feet and the spasms and shudderings of a cataleptic horror become the lingua franca of all human exchange. Antichrist tells of a married Seattle couple whose lives are shaken to the core when their infant son escapes his crib and crawls out the window to his death whilst they, taking a break from doing the laundry, are hastily (and graphically) fucking. This is merely the prologue, done in slowed-to-a-pulsing-seethe b&w tableaux vivant accompanied by Handel. From here we enter the tidal process of their gradual, terrific undoing, accompanied by a pernicious, droning score and delineated with baleful inevitability in four chapters and an epilogue, each separated by smeared chalkboard title cards: “Grief,” “Pain,” “Despair,” and “The Three Beggars” – the beggars in question being manifestations of the three previous chapter titles embodied by a deer perpetually giving birth to a half-externalized stillborn, a talking fox eviscerating itself (“chaos reigns,” it extemporizes), and a crazy fucking resilient crow, one of each of which is introduced at the end of each of the first three chapters as brief, calamitous visions of universal enmity, all congregating in the final one. The film proper starts w/ “She” (Charlotte Gainsbourg as withered gynec apparition) in a state of almost complete grief-stricken collapse, being subjected to a strong-arm regime of recovery by her stupid, rigid, and invasive therapist husband, “He” (chiseled, phallic, and purplish Willen Defoe w/ lips not unlike that of a penis). Our couple soon retreats to their cabin in the woods, portentously named “Eden,” He trying to take her to the core of her fear so that She may be expunged of it. From here their Ingmar Bergman-school Kammerspiel sparring culminates w/ the two of them driven to the brink in an explosion of cathexis and violent desublimation whereby a whole history of gynocide precipitates a confused degeneration of human and extra-human nature (not to mention a bloody cock-bludgeoning and an unspeakably graphic clitoredectomy-w/-scissors). “The Epilogue” follows He, emerging half-crippled from the woods, leading a giant procession of women w/ blurred, amorphous faces; the repressed female dead of a phallocracy built atop their myriad corpses; the depersonalized currency w/ which evil has spent itself. She, a creature of Intuition and Nature who has been working on a dissertation concerning the history of 16th Century violence toward women, is no longer certain that such violence was not in some way justified by virtue of an inherent evil embodied in the feminine, a nature which has evidently been awakening within her for some time, evidenced by the fact that She appears to have been secretly abusing their son during the period leading up to his death. He, in his way, represents the Rational and the realm of Control, though some sort of invagination of his cortex allows him visions of animal excrescence and a connection to the realm of sublimated destructive evil w/ which the natural world surrounding Eden is invisibly pregnant. The violence that erupts when She becomes terrified that He will leave her confuses this dynamic all the more as She proceeds to enact a mutual mortification of the flesh that parallels the kinds of violence men have traditionally visited upon women, almost religious in its ritualized singularity. It is almost impossible not to, by the end of the film, see the two characters as two sides of one nature inscribed upon the hand, and in the head, of Mr. Von Trier. As a filmmaker who has often said he identifies w/ the women his films keep martyring as if he were doing them a favor (much to the dismayed chagrin of many a feminist), he is also famous for being rigid, arrogant, and especially cruel to his actresses. It seems obvious that Von Trier deeply relates to both characters: both part of nature and both, ultimately, overwhelmed by it. If nature is, as She would have it, “Satan’s church,” then it seems fit that each of us, and not just Mr. Von Trier and his human puppets, should be possessed by and in possession of an unspeakable evil that courses through all that which is and which manifests itself in forces which overpower all rational blockades we may seek to impose upon them, whether internally or externally. Evil, then, is in the aether and Antichrist is less about gender than it may at first appear – instead it is finally about the absorption and depolarizing of gender’s pitiful surfaces and the assertion of its ultimate irrelevance. The film ends w/ a bizarre dedication to Andrei Tarkovsky, a filmmaker whose deeply religious vision was not nearly as troubled as Antichrist’s is. What Von Trier’s film does share w/ Tarkovsky’s masterpieces, though, is an absolute disgust w/ all secular-humanist institutions and modes of address as well as a gauzy visual power. The distinction is – and it is a great one – that Antichrist has no room for the divine. Its sodden wounds are cauterized w/ bile and sap.

An Education

2009-11-19T18:50:00.000-08:00

Though the culmination of the titular éducation sentimental in An Education invariably leaves residuum of a deeply ingrained conservatism as aftertaste, Danish director Lone Scherfig and de rigueur English scenarist Nick Hornby, in full ribbed-for-her-pleasure mode (adapting the Granta-published memoir of barb’d-tongu’d journo Lynn Barber), give themselves enough ethological slack that the film never becomes explicitly reactionary (or sentimental, in point of fact), in no way hanging any of its finally-all-quite-likeable characters out to dry, or in any real way resembling a cautionary tale, despite some hard lessons hard won. The journey is, as the film details it, well bloody worth the tears in the tea. As anyone knocked about by the school of life can tell you, a little mutual exploitation can serve its purpose so long as ones illusions don’t get in ones way. It is precisely w/ the not-so-innocent cultivation and sudden decommissioning of her illusions that bright, impetuous, sixteen-year-old Francophile, and prospective Oxfordite Jenny gets burned. In pre-swing 1961 Victorian Twickenham, in a land before mods and rockers and Peter Pan syndrome, Jenny hooks up with Peter Sarsgaard’s David Goldman, a charming, worldly, thirtysomething Jew, w/ a knack for the short con and a tendency to botch its more involved, longer-investment brother, who effortlessly ensconces her in his world of art auctions, concerts, supper clubs, jazz, and bon vivant friends Danny and Helen. By flattering her intelligence and wantonly entitled aspirations for cultural ascension, he wisps her away to Oxford and then Paris, where she is summarily, and apparently quite briskly, deflowered on her seventeenth birthday, having had her square-peg parents smarmily won over by David’s improvisatory wiles, his having played on their fears of looking like the people they in fact are, and having implicitly promised to make all her Juliette Gréco-soundtracked dreams come Technicolor true. Sarsgaard makes the film credible by playing the truth of the arrested-adolescent conman: all flash and filigree masking the scared child within, full of thinly concealed neuroses, a terror of honesty and exposure, and some pretty considerable sexual hang-ups that manifest themselves in the bedroom in the form of uncomfortable baby-talk and an awkward attempt to bring a banana into the mix. This warts-and-all education is just as much his as Jenny’s, only sadder, he seemingly just as excitedly enraptured by this world of things made sparkling new as his jailbait Audrey Hepburn w/ her eyes alight and proneness to full-faced blushery. It is the kind of adult sanity, which David Foster Wallace elsewhere on this Blog calls “the only unalloyed form of heroism available today,” that is the structuring absence of this too-good-to-be-true pleasure cruise drunken boat from which Jenny has the opportunity to awaken but which David is far too deep in to ever escape, his pathology and track record having serialized his protective skins of untruth and armored-in-riches childishness. Everybody is talking about young ingénue Carey Mulligan and her resplendent turn as Jenny. Enough has already been said as far as all that is concerned. She is indeed something. The film’s sense of genuine midrange BBC tragedy, however, lives and dies by the wounded man-boys in An Education. Both Sarsgaard and Alfred Molina, as Jenny’s stuffy, befuddled chump of a well-meaning father, expose layers of defensiveness and self-deceit through which brief rays of vulnerability and genuine care cautiously pierce. The real heartbreaker, though, is Mathew Beard in a small part as Jenny’s erstwhile teen suitor, who w/ wince-inducing pubescent lack-of-any-dexterity-whatever navigates out-of-my-league desire, clumsy-waltzing around a steadfast limit he is shatteringly aware of, making him the most pathetic male figure in the film, but also the only one in possession of sufficient self-awareness to know when to make an exit. It is finally Jenny who holds most of the real power in An Education, as is often the case in these situations (not a politically correct sentiment, granted), and having had her heart edifyingly broken before it is too late, she emerges from the film, and a con in which she was much more than a willing participant, as a potentially unstoppable force, poised to enter adulthood a second time w/ procedural savoir-faire, shed of all the mauvaise foi. The film, finally, is a breezily directed and prettily framed piece of triumphant ball-busting bluster, almost worthy of half the effusive praise it has been getting.

(Untitled)

2009-11-18T13:44:00.000-08:00

Another deadpan comedy in an unhurried lackadaisical register from director Jonathan Parker and his writing partner Catherine DiNapoli – they of the slightly droll Crispin Glover-starring adaptation of Herman Melville’s hysterically funny but admittedly one-joke short story “Bartleby the Scrivener” – (Uncut) is a loving sort of a satire that refuses to-talk-down-to-or-about, concerning conceptual art and avant-garde music and their perilous work of shattering bourgeois complacency in a world (Manhattan) that is only fitfully interested in having its core aesthetic beliefs wrenched about, and only then as long as the prices are sufficiently high to bespeak serious marketplace significance. Our protagonist, Adrian Jacobs, is a composer of willfully difficult music that plays to audiences only slightly larger than his three-piece band. He not only pounds the piano with his elbows, arms akimbo, like Cecil Taylor and his eighty-eight tuned drums (plus the inside of the piano, duh), he also hands out pages of composition to his musicians that look not unlike Mr. Taylor’s hyper-complex diagrams of burbled chaos that might well be the diagnostics of UFO engines, and is perfectly rendered by Adam Goldberg with dead serious slacker intensity and simultaneous lassitude in both gait and demeanor. After a particularly poorly attended and remarked-upon concert of new material culminating in his waving the American flag aggressively at the near-empty theater, Adrian is introduced by commercial artist brother Josh to Madeleine Gray (played by sexy human bunny rabbit Marley Shelton), the attractive owner of a high-end Soho gallery who supports her outré showings of seriously far-out but-is-it-art? by pedaling Josh’s banal amorphous-pastel-fields-featuring-dots to hospitals, hotels and the like. Madeleine’s gallery features artists like English eccentric Ray Barko (Vinnie Jones in anachronistically quotidian dress), who does the Damien Hirst thing w/ dead animals crashlanded on household objects, and the borderline retarded single-named Monroe, who just puts his name on the household objects, in one case a blank white gallery wall itself, like an autistic Marcel Duchamp. After his disastrous performance, Madeleine takes to Adrian, whom she sees as a fellow traveler and prospective fuck-buddy (much to the chagrin of Josh, to whom she will not offer an opening in her gallery or bedroom), and he, for his part, is interested in sampling the sound-collage that is her wardrobe and in particular her squeaky leather skirt, which she happily offers up before jumping his bones. When Adrian starts to see his music made to analogically parallel worthless (to him) art that is worth a lot, he becomes seriously divested of his illusions and stages a John Cage 4’33-style pièce de literal résistance instead of the commissioned work involving kicking of bucket, rattling of chains, and a particularly nonplussed Russian opera singer. It takes this immersion within a world where art is both commodity and piss-take for Adrian to become unsettled about the value of his own work. At least until a beautiful epilogue (in fucking Nantucket, no less), which may or may not find him w/ cause to rethink things in the very real human terms that he perhaps started thinking about them in the first place. The real trumpcard in (Untitled)’s hand is that it has brought in real artists to provide the music and art so that what we are seeing and hearing is pretty damn close to the stuff that is actually out there. There is no too-easy mockery being dispensed here, but rather genuinely bemused relish in all the absurd majesty of this millennial art world rumpus room where dead-earnest craftspersons pound away at immortality while everybody else kind of wonders if the whole thing is a joke. We cannot tell if Madeleine is crazy, a flake, or a genuinely thoughtful and worldly woman precisely because she is all of these things. One minute she seems like a daffy duck and the next she is expertly explaining the difference between art and entertainment: “entertainment never posed a problem it couldn’t solve.” The best part of the whole film is the almost afterthought ministrations of cast member Lucy Punch, who as Adrian’s bandmate and friend (and lover?), is known only as “Clarinet,” and who walks through the film w/ that eager small town energy to engage people writ all over her face always on the verge of toppling into punked disbelief and quiet exasperation at all the bizarre goings on. You always see this person at parties, mouth open, head nodding, trying to be interested in what someone who is either drunk or crazy or both is saying and not wanting to be impolite and just get the fuck out of there. (Untitled) knows, and is in fact finally about, how she feels. She features in the final shot, eating quiche, eyes wandering impassively around a crowded Nantucket art opening, ever the game observer. You want to hug her. (Untitled) is not a hysterically funny movie, but you may end up wanting to hug it too.

Halloween II

2009-11-16T10:52:00.001-08:00

Despite the fact that Rob Zombie the screenwriter keeps preemptively shooting Rob Zombie the director in the foot a priori via sub-Tarantino character-development-as-pop-culture-reference and on-the-nose stabs at satire that land as cheap, bloodless farce, this does not diminish his not inconsiderable mastery of the murder tableau. It is in the treatment of violence at the site of its realization and psychic excitation – the zone of person-to-person overlap where it engenders ruptures, fissures, traumas, and transferences – that Zombie emerges as a genuine artist of insight, empathy, and radicalized spiritual connectivity. His original Halloween film was less a remake than the humanizing biopic of a famous fictional archetype, focusing on how violence is communicable, tragically passed on generation-to-generation and person-to-person (it starts at home), which built up to an exquisitely executed ending where Michael Myers’ unknowing sister Laurie/Angel comes to a point of neural equivocation, circuit overload, and ecstatic merger w/ her deeply repressed brother. That film becomes, at its explosive decisive-moment point of exhaustion, a film about tragic connection and poisoned affinities at the site of violence’s implantation of its legacy. Zombie’s new sequel begins minutes after this point of ego-collapse and circuitously brings us to one year later, where the once virginal and innocent unknowing sister has sublimated the abject brother, decorating her room w/ dour Goth furnishings and death’s heads, unconsciously absorbed within the family Id whereby she continues to psychically merge w/ brother and undead matriarch. Ego-collapse has led to a zone of umbilical virtuality where dreams are shared and individuation collapses. This is a film about how the traumatized retraumatize themselves out of confused love and monstrous devotion; how profound traumatic disruptions explode the striated construction of self and open up smooth fields of psychic interpolation; about the bonds that preserve and double developmental perversions. Zombie and DOP Brandon Trost have added to the film’s intimacy by shooting it in 16mm not to feed off grindhouse nostalgia so much as to bring to attention the film’s grain, its haptic physicality, its tactile skin. The dark, ashen texture of the film allows wounds within the frame to bleed stabs of pale light. It has a very specific feel. The film is often focused on touch. While men and older women are dispatched suddenly and w/ cursory matter-of-factness, only to be lingered on, felt, and absorbed, young women receive heightened attention in a manner that bespeaks something more complicated than misogyny. First they are made subjects. We are put in their nervous systems at the precise moment their sensory-motor apparatus is overloaded by the onset of horrific violence: they perceive in slow motion, sound is cut out so that the soundtrack quietly throbs; they become locked in a double-movement w/ Michael Myers, the subjectivity becoming doubled, interchangeable; the attention to touch, contact, returned gazes is exhaustively detailed. Death is reciprocated through the gleam of serene, druggy relief of the eyes and sanguine skin. There is a rigorous detailing of gestural interchange, each death enacting a mimesis of the very real transference of identity, drive, and affection from Michael to Laurie/Angel. What Zombie creates w/ this film is a horrifying remonstration of exchange value within a violently transgressive libidinal economy. It is a subversive notion for a slasher film: we are all ready to return the gaze of violence, to turn the trauma around, to secretly enjoy its return, to share in the vile acts that define us, to die or to kill (or both) w/ real selfless ecstasy.

The Box

2009-11-15T12:15:00.000-08:00

The Box, the film that nobody is talking about, is Richard Kelly’s third film as director and also his third film to commit apocalypse. This is quite a track record. Each film – the preceding two being the wet-behind-the-ears / water-on-the-brain debut Donnie Darko and the reviled closed-circuit new-media celebrity-TV-centric mindfuck Southland Tales – plots out the terminal cartography of a network brought down by a computer that takes itself out; each apocalypse revolves around a symbolic suicide. In each film one (or more) character(s) exist(s) through whom the whole grid’s frayed, spark-spitting wires are exposed, broken rebar juts out, a rupture is opened, and the metaphysical Open itself gapes. Suicide is traditionally the most efficient way for the individual to annihilate the whole world of others and objects. In Kelly’s films it is also always a kind of secular-humanist sacrifice with spiritual resonance played out on an ethical vector traversed by metaphysical currents (like in late Tarkovsky, whose final film, The Sacrifice, must be an influence and could easily be made to share its title w/ any of Kelly’s). The Box finds boyish Corvette-driving aerospace engineer Arthur (James Marsden) and pretty, deformed Sartre-misrepresenting English teacher wife Norma (a woefully accented Cameron Diaz) playing a game of freewill unto death in a preset terminal loop. Norma teaches No Exit to private school kids and comes to disprove Sartre’s hypothesis (and that is what it is) that hell is other people. The Box undercuts Sartre’s basic arrogance and psychotropically rebuts: hell is us – the self is contaminated in its very helixes. We are the embodiment of hell in our basic species activity, in possession of the opposite of grace: preordained extinction one computer, one vector, at a time. The Box embodies surrealist father André Breton’s notion of “pure psychic automatism” in its free-associative death-dream trip, it’s characters seeming to scuba dive through its berserker setpieces as in an aquarium that is the frame. There is no freewill in dream as in life – only the nauseating, floating inevitable. The Box ends w/ an extreme tenderness for all its incendiary bleakness: a death-embrace of mutual affirmation and stunted acquiescence, husband and wife intimately cooperating in the not-at-all-intimate succumbing of the whole world to the pathogen from which it can only be delivered by surrendering to total collapse. Though its narrative engine is asleep at the wheel (the film fundamentally abiding by oldschool surrealist tenants), the machinery of apocalypse is no less systematically consummated for its basis in a kind of monstrous catatonia. The Box will remain, in its twilit zone of mid-seventies digital-era-dawning art-direction (Donnie Darko style), one of the most messed-up and memorable films of 2009. You have my word on that.

2009-03-17T11:55:00.000-07:00

I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.

- David Foster Wallace

It will be a year soon. This is something I am still processing. I have hardly been able to write anything, let alone on this negligible blog. This New Yorker article told me so many things about both Mr. Wallace and myself and I am forever grateful for the heads up.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/09/090309fa_fact_max?currentPage=all

Cowberry Festivalia in Ranchland of Remainders

2008-09-30T13:30:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-27T10:21:00.000-07:00

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

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

2008-09-26T13:06:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-23T10:41:00.000-07:00

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