Antichrist

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

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)

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

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

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.

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

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