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Assorted unfinished and refinished comments from the past [date of viewing or start of comments in brackets].The Two Jakes (1990)
It's got a good heart, and there are interesting things, particularly Harvey Keitel's performance, but Robert Towne and Jack Nicholson succumbed to the temptation to make a work out of Chinatown's reputation, already the cart before the horse, and if that didn't open the door to other vanities, they brought them in anyway. The good heart is both for the characters and in Towne's consideration of California history and politics. The vanity of the good heart is in trotting out some of the same characters in ways that aren't salient. [7/18/15]
2/16/23
It's got a good heart, and there are interesting things, particularly Harvey Keitel's performance, but Robert Towne and Jack Nicholson succumbed to the temptation to make a work out of Chinatown's reputation, already the cart before the horse, and if that didn't open the door to other vanities, they brought them in anyway. The good heart is both for the characters and in Towne's consideration of California history and politics. The vanity of the good heart is in trotting out some of the same characters in ways that aren't salient. [7/18/15]
Clouds of Sils Maria (2014)
This is in many ways more honest or plausible -- or perhaps less pushy, reaching or showy is a better way to say it -- than Birdman, for covering similar matters. As with director Olivier Asayas's Irma Vep, this is about the behind the scenes of movies, traveling, and experience we might think of as byproduct, or subordinate to event. [8/22/15]
This is in many ways more honest or plausible -- or perhaps less pushy, reaching or showy is a better way to say it -- than Birdman, for covering similar matters. As with director Olivier Asayas's Irma Vep, this is about the behind the scenes of movies, traveling, and experience we might think of as byproduct, or subordinate to event. [8/22/15]
Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem (2014)
There are moments that seem posey artsy in contrast to how this movie is really good: the pithy interactions between judges, lawyers, relatives, neighbors. It's well conceived and executed for this. It's easy to forget, with other kinds of production, cinematic or technical prowess, the basic material of drama, story, representation, so it's good to have something that sort of clears away the rest and reminds us. [8/22/15]
There are moments that seem posey artsy in contrast to how this movie is really good: the pithy interactions between judges, lawyers, relatives, neighbors. It's well conceived and executed for this. It's easy to forget, with other kinds of production, cinematic or technical prowess, the basic material of drama, story, representation, so it's good to have something that sort of clears away the rest and reminds us. [8/22/15]
Locke (2013)
A simple demonstration for how drama does not equal action, let alone what the latter is nowadays. [8/22/14]
A simple demonstration for how drama does not equal action, let alone what the latter is nowadays. [8/22/14]
Lost in La Mancha (2002)
As with Fitzcarraldo and Burden of Dreams, I'm afraid this serendipitous documentary may be something better than its subject movie could ever be. When they catch the flood on camera, it's reality itself contriving the most dramatic turn, and it's simultaneously the ruin of one movie, and the major event of another, and the figure for (as Woody Allen said of it) every director's nightmare, for everyone's nightmare of failure: having everything literally wash away. [7/26/14]
As with Fitzcarraldo and Burden of Dreams, I'm afraid this serendipitous documentary may be something better than its subject movie could ever be. When they catch the flood on camera, it's reality itself contriving the most dramatic turn, and it's simultaneously the ruin of one movie, and the major event of another, and the figure for (as Woody Allen said of it) every director's nightmare, for everyone's nightmare of failure: having everything literally wash away. [7/26/14]
Blue Ruin (2013)
What these filmmakers know how to do is the limited information approach, letting us discover more about the situation as it unfolds, and even what the characters are discovering, often quite different from what they thought they knew. It has the rate of violence of an action movie, but the drama there, too, is about how it goes down when people opt for that rather than thinking about things or thinking them through. [7/25/14]
What these filmmakers know how to do is the limited information approach, letting us discover more about the situation as it unfolds, and even what the characters are discovering, often quite different from what they thought they knew. It has the rate of violence of an action movie, but the drama there, too, is about how it goes down when people opt for that rather than thinking about things or thinking them through. [7/25/14]
Kin-dza-dza! (1986)
Russian, or more specifically in this case Georgian, absurdism, of the Soviet era, has the looseness of naive or children's caricature -- one of its creators did puppet shows -- and falls in with the more general style of 80s fringe pop, things like the Mad Max movies. [7/3/14]
Russian, or more specifically in this case Georgian, absurdism, of the Soviet era, has the looseness of naive or children's caricature -- one of its creators did puppet shows -- and falls in with the more general style of 80s fringe pop, things like the Mad Max movies. [7/3/14]
The Past (2013)
Better than A Separation. Cutting off action just as it peaks at times, in a subtle way, if that's possible. Curiously similar to the story of The Descendants, the comparison shows how much more pop that was, despite the merits of Alexander Payne. This is more pithy but in the way French films are that's not necessarily gritty, but more straight. Makes the Iranian directors like the inheritors of that French tone. [4/12/14]
Better than A Separation. Cutting off action just as it peaks at times, in a subtle way, if that's possible. Curiously similar to the story of The Descendants, the comparison shows how much more pop that was, despite the merits of Alexander Payne. This is more pithy but in the way French films are that's not necessarily gritty, but more straight. Makes the Iranian directors like the inheritors of that French tone. [4/12/14]
The Pervert's Guide to Ideology (2012)
Slavoj Zizek's manner is too candid for movie airs, for bombastic drama or for documentary speakers, narrators or subjects. But in a way that's curious and gratifying, his unmannerly manners, the shaggy dog look, the T-shirts, the nervous tics of swiping at his beard or nose or forehead, the hanging and pushing locution in his carefully bigger English, all of which make him seem more like a comic convention denizen than an academic or underground intellectual, have a formality all their own. This movie is a lecture. Zizek lectures, but because of his manner and the gimmick of posing him in mock-ups of scenes intercut with the movie clips he's talking about, it's disarmingly and thankfully not like a lecture or a documentary. [2/28/14]
Slavoj Zizek's manner is too candid for movie airs, for bombastic drama or for documentary speakers, narrators or subjects. But in a way that's curious and gratifying, his unmannerly manners, the shaggy dog look, the T-shirts, the nervous tics of swiping at his beard or nose or forehead, the hanging and pushing locution in his carefully bigger English, all of which make him seem more like a comic convention denizen than an academic or underground intellectual, have a formality all their own. This movie is a lecture. Zizek lectures, but because of his manner and the gimmick of posing him in mock-ups of scenes intercut with the movie clips he's talking about, it's disarmingly and thankfully not like a lecture or a documentary. [2/28/14]
To the Wonder (2012)
Picking up the extended montage form of Tree of Life, this is about a marital relationship, and though it doesn't have the cutaway cosmological musings of cells, stars and dinosaurs, it does have the role of Christianity, perhaps handled a bit better. Javier Bardem plays a Catholic priest, and actually that material adds a whole surprising perspective outside the relationship the movie is mainly about, between Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko. It's a more bracing perspective of the wretched in Oklahoma, along with the lush cinematography of there, Paris and Mont St. Michel, though in Malick's detached, elliptical treatment, this seems more generalized, too. But it's interesting the way Malick isn't really ignoring the social, or even in a more indirect way, whatever else -- political, economic -- as not just background but context. Affleck's character, for example, is some sort of journalist or inspector, in a few scenes inspecting sites for pollution by oil companies in particular. In Days of Heaven, the depression is the background, but obviously that's causally related to what goes on, the motives of the characters, even though nothing is stated explicitly in Malick's approach. But neither is anything shied away from, for example, all the hard stuff about relations, such as the father with his children in Tree of Life, and all the bad stuff in the relationship here. Even if Malick ultimately is referring all this to faith, passing the buck to God, what his method still does, allows, that is exceptional, significant, is showing us, dramatizing, rather than simply declaiming, stating, speaking it with the script. We see, in a movie way even more than what theatre can dramatize, and the "realism" involved, the observation, is one of musing and memory, of the waves and flashes of evocation that work in our minds, our feelings. [4/19/13]
Picking up the extended montage form of Tree of Life, this is about a marital relationship, and though it doesn't have the cutaway cosmological musings of cells, stars and dinosaurs, it does have the role of Christianity, perhaps handled a bit better. Javier Bardem plays a Catholic priest, and actually that material adds a whole surprising perspective outside the relationship the movie is mainly about, between Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko. It's a more bracing perspective of the wretched in Oklahoma, along with the lush cinematography of there, Paris and Mont St. Michel, though in Malick's detached, elliptical treatment, this seems more generalized, too. But it's interesting the way Malick isn't really ignoring the social, or even in a more indirect way, whatever else -- political, economic -- as not just background but context. Affleck's character, for example, is some sort of journalist or inspector, in a few scenes inspecting sites for pollution by oil companies in particular. In Days of Heaven, the depression is the background, but obviously that's causally related to what goes on, the motives of the characters, even though nothing is stated explicitly in Malick's approach. But neither is anything shied away from, for example, all the hard stuff about relations, such as the father with his children in Tree of Life, and all the bad stuff in the relationship here. Even if Malick ultimately is referring all this to faith, passing the buck to God, what his method still does, allows, that is exceptional, significant, is showing us, dramatizing, rather than simply declaiming, stating, speaking it with the script. We see, in a movie way even more than what theatre can dramatize, and the "realism" involved, the observation, is one of musing and memory, of the waves and flashes of evocation that work in our minds, our feelings. [4/19/13]
Stand Up Guys (2012)
Quaint little heartwarmer aimed at the nostalgic hit of Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin, compounded, in an over-the-hill gang act that seems strangely predicated mostly on 70s decor which often seems to imitate nothing other than bad TV sets of the 70s. Whether in signaling which era for these characters or actors was being hearkened, or because the 70s redo is itself dated, this plays weakly, not just meekly, the way the modest business intended does for the most part. When it gets into some of the bigger action stuff, it's as ham-handed as a 70s TV show, not in a campy or clever way. [4/6/13]
Quaint little heartwarmer aimed at the nostalgic hit of Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin, compounded, in an over-the-hill gang act that seems strangely predicated mostly on 70s decor which often seems to imitate nothing other than bad TV sets of the 70s. Whether in signaling which era for these characters or actors was being hearkened, or because the 70s redo is itself dated, this plays weakly, not just meekly, the way the modest business intended does for the most part. When it gets into some of the bigger action stuff, it's as ham-handed as a 70s TV show, not in a campy or clever way. [4/6/13]
Detropia (2012)
Michael Moore commented on the collapse of Flint, Michigan in the 1990s with comparison to concerted acts of terrorism like the Oklahoma City bombing. Showing photos side by side in his book Downsize This of the Murrah building, and a building in Flint being demolished, Moore begged the issue of aptness. No matter how much slower or less abruptly violent, the damage in Flint was far more diffuse, affecting the livelihood of more people. Now Detroit, Michigan's largest city and a major metropolitan area of the country, culturally as well as physically, has collapsed, and as I watched this movie I couldn't help thinking of comparison to New Orleans, especially after the series Treme on top of the other accounts we've had of that. While Katrina is certainly a matter of economics as well, there is no alibi of a natural disaster for Detroit. The demolition of thousands of houses from the outlying areas, returning much of this city to empty land -- even calling it prairie might be an optimism -- and the mayor's plan to forcibly compress the population are the more widespread effects touched on in this film. Views of buildings and areas, the kinds of heritage from many different eras, that are now ruins, are the more visible. Detroit was the fastest growing U.S. city in 1930, and the 2010 census showed its population at just over 700,000. Perhaps we don't even have to mention all its significance culturally, the auto industry and all its diverse ripples, from all the associated industries to its influence and effect on design, architecture, and through funding things like the arts -- Detroit's opera is one of the refrains in this film -- or Motown, its other contribution to music, and thus culture, as significant as that of New Orleans. The filmmakers here have in some ways mimimized that sort of mention as well, with a non-narrator and meandering approach. Some of the early photography suggests this could be more a tone poem, but it doesn't resolve into that any more than it does a proficient assembly of information. [4/4/13]
Michael Moore commented on the collapse of Flint, Michigan in the 1990s with comparison to concerted acts of terrorism like the Oklahoma City bombing. Showing photos side by side in his book Downsize This of the Murrah building, and a building in Flint being demolished, Moore begged the issue of aptness. No matter how much slower or less abruptly violent, the damage in Flint was far more diffuse, affecting the livelihood of more people. Now Detroit, Michigan's largest city and a major metropolitan area of the country, culturally as well as physically, has collapsed, and as I watched this movie I couldn't help thinking of comparison to New Orleans, especially after the series Treme on top of the other accounts we've had of that. While Katrina is certainly a matter of economics as well, there is no alibi of a natural disaster for Detroit. The demolition of thousands of houses from the outlying areas, returning much of this city to empty land -- even calling it prairie might be an optimism -- and the mayor's plan to forcibly compress the population are the more widespread effects touched on in this film. Views of buildings and areas, the kinds of heritage from many different eras, that are now ruins, are the more visible. Detroit was the fastest growing U.S. city in 1930, and the 2010 census showed its population at just over 700,000. Perhaps we don't even have to mention all its significance culturally, the auto industry and all its diverse ripples, from all the associated industries to its influence and effect on design, architecture, and through funding things like the arts -- Detroit's opera is one of the refrains in this film -- or Motown, its other contribution to music, and thus culture, as significant as that of New Orleans. The filmmakers here have in some ways mimimized that sort of mention as well, with a non-narrator and meandering approach. Some of the early photography suggests this could be more a tone poem, but it doesn't resolve into that any more than it does a proficient assembly of information. [4/4/13]
Killing Them Softly (2012)
Andrew Dominik is an assured scenarist, both with the screenplay and direction, certainly by comparison to so much else that even tries to be in this vein. So it works against him that he seems to be the more derivative one, with all the conceits of crime drama, earnest and quirky. It's definitely admirable and a relief that he wants to go against the grain of action, even defy that expectation by shifting to the banality of all the business, the conversations that go on and show all the pecking and posturing and bullshit, the motivation that makes for nothing but the worst laid plans, and how this is the economy. He's making the point, too, that it's not just this underbelly economy, but the larger one, which doesn't just force it, but only behaves the same way, the model. [3/30/13]
Andrew Dominik is an assured scenarist, both with the screenplay and direction, certainly by comparison to so much else that even tries to be in this vein. So it works against him that he seems to be the more derivative one, with all the conceits of crime drama, earnest and quirky. It's definitely admirable and a relief that he wants to go against the grain of action, even defy that expectation by shifting to the banality of all the business, the conversations that go on and show all the pecking and posturing and bullshit, the motivation that makes for nothing but the worst laid plans, and how this is the economy. He's making the point, too, that it's not just this underbelly economy, but the larger one, which doesn't just force it, but only behaves the same way, the model. [3/30/13]
La Grande illusion (1937)
Before Bridge on the River Kwai, before Stalag 17 or The Great Escape, before Paths of Glory, there was this. Fair composition. How to compose, the scenario, between script and edited movie: lingering silently on the men staring at one dressed as a woman; the elision in the last farmhouse segment to compress time but still convey duration. Director Jean Renoir carries on like comedy. More composed even than Altman, precisely in getting this offhand. It has its melodramatic excesses, where the self-sacrificing and honor are carried too far, but it's about WWI anyway, and it's caricaturish of this, also in that farce way of dealing Renoir has. Panache. Authoritative. Renoir is the grand orchestration version of 30s fare. A kind of distinguished affectionate humanism with rascal delivery. [3/15/13]
Before Bridge on the River Kwai, before Stalag 17 or The Great Escape, before Paths of Glory, there was this. Fair composition. How to compose, the scenario, between script and edited movie: lingering silently on the men staring at one dressed as a woman; the elision in the last farmhouse segment to compress time but still convey duration. Director Jean Renoir carries on like comedy. More composed even than Altman, precisely in getting this offhand. It has its melodramatic excesses, where the self-sacrificing and honor are carried too far, but it's about WWI anyway, and it's caricaturish of this, also in that farce way of dealing Renoir has. Panache. Authoritative. Renoir is the grand orchestration version of 30s fare. A kind of distinguished affectionate humanism with rascal delivery. [3/15/13]
Blade Runner (1982)
The "replicants" (Philip K. Dick didn't understand why they didn't want to use the term "android" in the movie) have a four-year life span, and they're trying to find out about their origins. When Harrison Ford's character meets Sean Young's, he tests her to show how effective the test is to the head of the corporation that made the replicants. She goes to see Ford to find out the result of the test. He cites to her memories from her childhood. They're not her memories, just implants, a program, borrowed from the corporate head's nieces. She's a replicant. And she cries. Human, all too human. The replicants, in mourning their passing, even the dubiousness of their memories, are thus all too capable of pathos. And the complicated daisy chain of this -- replicants, characters, actors, figures, who are thus also people standing for other people, personae -- demonstrates not only the simulation involved in "organic" memory, the simulation of being human, but the generalization of agency, the way we are involved with each other in all this figure, empathy, representation, making us this relay of self and other. The replicant gets upset because of the idea that her memories are not -- real. Representation, memory, the very fault of the record. No human has such abolute connection to what is past. But in behaving this way, in this sense of privation that makes a proprietary claim, the sense of this, as sadness or resentment -- the simulated that humans are in order for simulation to work -- this "replicant" elicits our empathy, as the basic operation of a character, a figure, a represenation, as well as any particular emotional response. Then this image we're watching of all this is doing the same, this simulation eliciting these responses. To remember exactly would be a program, a recording, a machine. To have even the memories and associations play back exactly the same way, as if we could only go through the exact program of them watching this movie, would mean having no opening or other track as it were for other reactions, associations, the space for the play of meaning itself. We have this double impetus, or tension, of the machine and the organic, but even within or as the organic, or desire, or memory: to have everything fixed, not perishable (Borges says eternity is the form of desire), but to also be spontaneous, unfixed, free and not absolutely determined. As humans, are we only a matter of the programming of this organic material, the model for machines?
Dick said the difference between his story and Ridley Scott's movie is that the androids to him are precisely bad because they have no empathy, are completely self-interested and don't care about doing harm to any living thing. He even said they are a figure for the worst kind of humans. The Rachel character, the one played by Sean Young, in not wanting to be an android, also shows empathy, and thus she's not like the others for those bad qualities. Rachel contrasts Batty (Rutger Hauer) whose despotic expression of his power also shows a childish side, the infantile narcissism of bullies and tyrants. It's an evolution in robots that makes them capable of resentment, malice, as well as the pure function or operation of killing imagined in sci-fi before as well as by police departments and the military. Would mere robots, such as from 50s sci-fi, give a shit? Scott's scene with Rachel, as well as the ending that has a twist for typical mano a mano resolution, despite his own kind of purple prose bursts (heavy Christ symbolism for one thing), refines this pathos of the machines, just as his design sense -- and the tenacity for it that was considered obsessive by some, too expensive by producers -- just as with Alien, gave us a view at once grittier and more intricately beautiful, a step in the development of cyberpunk as well as the movies. [3/10/13]
The "replicants" (Philip K. Dick didn't understand why they didn't want to use the term "android" in the movie) have a four-year life span, and they're trying to find out about their origins. When Harrison Ford's character meets Sean Young's, he tests her to show how effective the test is to the head of the corporation that made the replicants. She goes to see Ford to find out the result of the test. He cites to her memories from her childhood. They're not her memories, just implants, a program, borrowed from the corporate head's nieces. She's a replicant. And she cries. Human, all too human. The replicants, in mourning their passing, even the dubiousness of their memories, are thus all too capable of pathos. And the complicated daisy chain of this -- replicants, characters, actors, figures, who are thus also people standing for other people, personae -- demonstrates not only the simulation involved in "organic" memory, the simulation of being human, but the generalization of agency, the way we are involved with each other in all this figure, empathy, representation, making us this relay of self and other. The replicant gets upset because of the idea that her memories are not -- real. Representation, memory, the very fault of the record. No human has such abolute connection to what is past. But in behaving this way, in this sense of privation that makes a proprietary claim, the sense of this, as sadness or resentment -- the simulated that humans are in order for simulation to work -- this "replicant" elicits our empathy, as the basic operation of a character, a figure, a represenation, as well as any particular emotional response. Then this image we're watching of all this is doing the same, this simulation eliciting these responses. To remember exactly would be a program, a recording, a machine. To have even the memories and associations play back exactly the same way, as if we could only go through the exact program of them watching this movie, would mean having no opening or other track as it were for other reactions, associations, the space for the play of meaning itself. We have this double impetus, or tension, of the machine and the organic, but even within or as the organic, or desire, or memory: to have everything fixed, not perishable (Borges says eternity is the form of desire), but to also be spontaneous, unfixed, free and not absolutely determined. As humans, are we only a matter of the programming of this organic material, the model for machines?
Dick said the difference between his story and Ridley Scott's movie is that the androids to him are precisely bad because they have no empathy, are completely self-interested and don't care about doing harm to any living thing. He even said they are a figure for the worst kind of humans. The Rachel character, the one played by Sean Young, in not wanting to be an android, also shows empathy, and thus she's not like the others for those bad qualities. Rachel contrasts Batty (Rutger Hauer) whose despotic expression of his power also shows a childish side, the infantile narcissism of bullies and tyrants. It's an evolution in robots that makes them capable of resentment, malice, as well as the pure function or operation of killing imagined in sci-fi before as well as by police departments and the military. Would mere robots, such as from 50s sci-fi, give a shit? Scott's scene with Rachel, as well as the ending that has a twist for typical mano a mano resolution, despite his own kind of purple prose bursts (heavy Christ symbolism for one thing), refines this pathos of the machines, just as his design sense -- and the tenacity for it that was considered obsessive by some, too expensive by producers -- just as with Alien, gave us a view at once grittier and more intricately beautiful, a step in the development of cyberpunk as well as the movies. [3/10/13]
How to Survive a Plague (2012)
Cool and efficent, or at least down to business, the account honors its subject in that manner, tone, method, because the major tactic, feat, accomplishment and significance of ACT UP was transferring information. Learn fast, that's the how of the title, and ACT UP helped not just one community, their own, but everyone because they recognized the importance of spreading information faster than the disease. The tragedy of course was that everyone else took too long to convince. [3/9/13]
Cool and efficent, or at least down to business, the account honors its subject in that manner, tone, method, because the major tactic, feat, accomplishment and significance of ACT UP was transferring information. Learn fast, that's the how of the title, and ACT UP helped not just one community, their own, but everyone because they recognized the importance of spreading information faster than the disease. The tragedy of course was that everyone else took too long to convince. [3/9/13]
Flight (2012)
The trajectory is impressive in comparison to standard fare, for example the sort of thrillers Denzel Washington has done, regardless of plausibility, which in this case may be a matter of straining less. Though it may amount to a pamphlet for Alcoholics Anonymous -- the epilogue is the only thing that really presses this, though the plot is also structured for the object lesson of bottoming out, despite achieving a more interesting and complex version of that, one where the main character is forced to convict someone else by his own lies -- it's clever, if not shrewd, about balancing the appeal, the sense of accomplishment of and through drugs, as opposed to a strict moral renouncement that lacks understanding. [3/8/13]
The trajectory is impressive in comparison to standard fare, for example the sort of thrillers Denzel Washington has done, regardless of plausibility, which in this case may be a matter of straining less. Though it may amount to a pamphlet for Alcoholics Anonymous -- the epilogue is the only thing that really presses this, though the plot is also structured for the object lesson of bottoming out, despite achieving a more interesting and complex version of that, one where the main character is forced to convict someone else by his own lies -- it's clever, if not shrewd, about balancing the appeal, the sense of accomplishment of and through drugs, as opposed to a strict moral renouncement that lacks understanding. [3/8/13]
Avatar (2009)
If you commit rank self-derivation should you sue yourself for infringement? This is James Cameron plus Disney plus Star Trek and the worst part of it is actually the Cameron part, right up front the cloddiest rehash of mostly the Aliens schtick, though how even that went through others like The Abyss -- the drop ships and loaders and robosuits and honorary macho female who's here a compression of Vasquez with the helicoptor pilot with sunglasses, the infatuation with the showy military -- a precursor to the sort of purple fantasy sci-fi here. [2/16/13]
If you commit rank self-derivation should you sue yourself for infringement? This is James Cameron plus Disney plus Star Trek and the worst part of it is actually the Cameron part, right up front the cloddiest rehash of mostly the Aliens schtick, though how even that went through others like The Abyss -- the drop ships and loaders and robosuits and honorary macho female who's here a compression of Vasquez with the helicoptor pilot with sunglasses, the infatuation with the showy military -- a precursor to the sort of purple fantasy sci-fi here. [2/16/13]
Searching for Sugar Man (2012)
This man's story is an amazing example of not just how fickle and tricky fame is on a chronological line, it's also a demonstration of how it shimmers with oblivion, like a sharkskin suit, at any time. The filmmakers slot out the story chronologically to tell the same progression that occurred to a couple of devoted South African fans who went looking for what happened to Rodriguez. [2/2/13]
This man's story is an amazing example of not just how fickle and tricky fame is on a chronological line, it's also a demonstration of how it shimmers with oblivion, like a sharkskin suit, at any time. The filmmakers slot out the story chronologically to tell the same progression that occurred to a couple of devoted South African fans who went looking for what happened to Rodriguez. [2/2/13]
Looper (2012)
Another circle of self-absorption. As with The Matrix, as the major key, but for everything else that is the constant fantasy everywhere, there are things in this movie that are suggestive, clever, but precisely of something more, else or other than the trappings here. Maybe these people have to shoot themselves to get out of all this. If I could see me now then. Hyper-real fascination with the past is here the function the future serves -- twice over. See Tomorrow I'll Wake up and Scald Myself with Tea. [1/19/13]
Another circle of self-absorption. As with The Matrix, as the major key, but for everything else that is the constant fantasy everywhere, there are things in this movie that are suggestive, clever, but precisely of something more, else or other than the trappings here. Maybe these people have to shoot themselves to get out of all this. If I could see me now then. Hyper-real fascination with the past is here the function the future serves -- twice over. See Tomorrow I'll Wake up and Scald Myself with Tea. [1/19/13]
Raging Bull (1980)
Mean Streets with the production design of The Godfather, a sort of culmination of two lines of the 70s. The elegant phrasing of banality creates more parallax because of Michael Chapman's black and white photography. The owning up of Jake LaMotta (it's based on the book of his account), the truth we're seeing -- Scorsese seconds this with an epigraph at the end, "once I was blind and now I can see" -- as what occurs is more stark, unglamorous, but it's in the guise of boxing pictures and noir. [1/5/13]
Mean Streets with the production design of The Godfather, a sort of culmination of two lines of the 70s. The elegant phrasing of banality creates more parallax because of Michael Chapman's black and white photography. The owning up of Jake LaMotta (it's based on the book of his account), the truth we're seeing -- Scorsese seconds this with an epigraph at the end, "once I was blind and now I can see" -- as what occurs is more stark, unglamorous, but it's in the guise of boxing pictures and noir. [1/5/13]
Boxing Gym (2010)
An exercise in exercise. It's all about rhythm. The tactic of hanging back, giving them enough rope, in this case to jump with. [12/22/12]
An exercise in exercise. It's all about rhythm. The tactic of hanging back, giving them enough rope, in this case to jump with. [12/22/12]
Amelie (2001)
The disgusting magic of the movies. The patron saint of preening. [11/23/12]
The disgusting magic of the movies. The patron saint of preening. [11/23/12]
Apocalypse Now Redux (1979/2001)
While movie trailers most typically make good movies look worse, there are cases where I've thought montage compression, an elliptical style (of which Terence Malick is one of the best examples), could make certain movies better, precisely by getting rid of so much bad stuff. See the case of Dune, for example, where it's suggested by the movie itself, Lynch's composition and handling much more interesting than the script, certainly a lot of the dialogue. Apocalypse Now is a positive example, though it's hard to think of it as reductive or even reducing. It's perhaps the grandest dissolve movie of them all, flows like the river, making it the sort of movie version not just of Heart of Darkness but Huckleberry Finn, and if it seems like the flipped out version, it's actually not so different an exposé. [11/17/12]
While movie trailers most typically make good movies look worse, there are cases where I've thought montage compression, an elliptical style (of which Terence Malick is one of the best examples), could make certain movies better, precisely by getting rid of so much bad stuff. See the case of Dune, for example, where it's suggested by the movie itself, Lynch's composition and handling much more interesting than the script, certainly a lot of the dialogue. Apocalypse Now is a positive example, though it's hard to think of it as reductive or even reducing. It's perhaps the grandest dissolve movie of them all, flows like the river, making it the sort of movie version not just of Heart of Darkness but Huckleberry Finn, and if it seems like the flipped out version, it's actually not so different an exposé. [11/17/12]
Leningrad Cowboys Go America (1989)
Aki Kaurismaki is artistically related to Jim Jarmusch, as directly stated by the latter's appearance in this movie. Slouching to the promised land. Like Stranger than Paradise or Down by Law, there's a factor of the most humble or banal sort of experience of America, a foreigner's perspective, that of the poor immigrant even if incidentally. [11/10/12]
Aki Kaurismaki is artistically related to Jim Jarmusch, as directly stated by the latter's appearance in this movie. Slouching to the promised land. Like Stranger than Paradise or Down by Law, there's a factor of the most humble or banal sort of experience of America, a foreigner's perspective, that of the poor immigrant even if incidentally. [11/10/12]
To Live and Die in L.A. (1985)
Accidental tourism. William Friedkin is a better director than Brian DiPalma, the comparison because of a similar combination of artsiness and pulp, in the case of the latter, more often schlock. This can be seen by the way the two poles often make greater contrast, one stretching the other. While Friedkin's toney or swank quality can make some things ring all the more laughable, in the case of this movie the abrupt cut to the dance club with the glowering face paint (the sort of thing that tried to make being a poseur into it's own art form in the 80s), on the other hand, something like a car chase can have deft flourishes of, well, grace and beauty (there's an amazing shot here that somehow tracks up a ramp on one side of a freeway to parallel one car going up a ramp on the other side and another chasing car on top on the freeway arriving alongside). Curiously like Leningrad Cowboys Go America, which I saw a couple of days after, To Live and Die in L.A. is a travelogue of the 80s and L.A. It may be as much by the lurchy quality, that lurching between matter of fact and overwrought where demonstrativity had not taken over everything. But perhaps in spite of that, or apart from it, Friedkin has made every scene in this movie a show-off of some L.A. location. An indirect travelogue, the shots of places, locations, landscapes are incidentally evocative or manage to have a good roving sensibility, that goes with the loose dramatic construction, to put it nicely. Interesting, too, how Kaurismaki's manner is dry, flat, and Friedkin's lush, but both are simply including these cutaway roving views of the scenery. "I am a passenger," as we could hear it in Iggy Pop's expression. Compare also Two-Lane Blacktop. [11/5/12]
Accidental tourism. William Friedkin is a better director than Brian DiPalma, the comparison because of a similar combination of artsiness and pulp, in the case of the latter, more often schlock. This can be seen by the way the two poles often make greater contrast, one stretching the other. While Friedkin's toney or swank quality can make some things ring all the more laughable, in the case of this movie the abrupt cut to the dance club with the glowering face paint (the sort of thing that tried to make being a poseur into it's own art form in the 80s), on the other hand, something like a car chase can have deft flourishes of, well, grace and beauty (there's an amazing shot here that somehow tracks up a ramp on one side of a freeway to parallel one car going up a ramp on the other side and another chasing car on top on the freeway arriving alongside). Curiously like Leningrad Cowboys Go America, which I saw a couple of days after, To Live and Die in L.A. is a travelogue of the 80s and L.A. It may be as much by the lurchy quality, that lurching between matter of fact and overwrought where demonstrativity had not taken over everything. But perhaps in spite of that, or apart from it, Friedkin has made every scene in this movie a show-off of some L.A. location. An indirect travelogue, the shots of places, locations, landscapes are incidentally evocative or manage to have a good roving sensibility, that goes with the loose dramatic construction, to put it nicely. Interesting, too, how Kaurismaki's manner is dry, flat, and Friedkin's lush, but both are simply including these cutaway roving views of the scenery. "I am a passenger," as we could hear it in Iggy Pop's expression. Compare also Two-Lane Blacktop. [11/5/12]
Certified Copy (2010)
This is Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami's homage copy of Rosellini's Journey to Italy [Viaggio in Italia]. Whether he's having us on, or what tone it's supposed to be, I'm not sure. Korean director Sang-soo Hong did this better in The Day He Arrives, offhand changes of state that are more broadly recursive, mount up symbolically in an unassuming way. In that movie, the characters talk about it in their conversation with each other, then there is repetition, and a kind of switch involving supposedly different characters that resemble each other. It's ambiguous what's being represented: imagination, faulty memory, etc. In Certified Copy, the couple behaves as if they don't know each other, though there are cheats, clues, that they already do. Then at one point, a scene where they even first refer to each other as not a couple, they suddenly are. Kiarostami himself has done much better with this kind of thing: Close-Up. It may have something to do with the actors. The man is British opera singer William Shimell and the woman is Juliette Binoche. I think he's the right idea, something prim and unapproachable, but it's just too much. The actor's manner mingled with the character, and I can't get rid of the sort of film festival darling aspect for Binoche. Her performance here is showy, and that's one of the problems, that all the material about the marriage is not sufficient in some way to really bring out the significance of the change-up. It didn't do the figure-8 of fantastic the way Lynch does. But this is hard to articulate. Because it's not a matter of signaling it, making it express, of course. That's what makes it fantastic. The scene where they switch over is significant because an Italian woman mistakes them for a couple and then he says, "We'd make a good couple." And it's from there they start revealing that they are, or being the couple. So there is that suggestion. As if he assumes the role. But I actually think Journey to Italy is better at evoking all the late marriage strain, and even Roman Holiday has a better off-the-cuff sense for Italy.
It doesn't help matters that the whole discussion about original and copy in the first part, when they're talking about the theme of his book, is on such a broad level. The script could have done better to suggest the ordinary with that theme and vice versa, mixing the two together better in each half. Still there is so much that Kiarostami does well, the more subtle movement. The last shot is really nice, of an Italian villa and bell tower out a little bathroom window, and then the sun sets during the credits. That's the sort of Tarkovsky-like "still" shot where things move and change slowly. [10/18/12]
This is Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami's homage copy of Rosellini's Journey to Italy [Viaggio in Italia]. Whether he's having us on, or what tone it's supposed to be, I'm not sure. Korean director Sang-soo Hong did this better in The Day He Arrives, offhand changes of state that are more broadly recursive, mount up symbolically in an unassuming way. In that movie, the characters talk about it in their conversation with each other, then there is repetition, and a kind of switch involving supposedly different characters that resemble each other. It's ambiguous what's being represented: imagination, faulty memory, etc. In Certified Copy, the couple behaves as if they don't know each other, though there are cheats, clues, that they already do. Then at one point, a scene where they even first refer to each other as not a couple, they suddenly are. Kiarostami himself has done much better with this kind of thing: Close-Up. It may have something to do with the actors. The man is British opera singer William Shimell and the woman is Juliette Binoche. I think he's the right idea, something prim and unapproachable, but it's just too much. The actor's manner mingled with the character, and I can't get rid of the sort of film festival darling aspect for Binoche. Her performance here is showy, and that's one of the problems, that all the material about the marriage is not sufficient in some way to really bring out the significance of the change-up. It didn't do the figure-8 of fantastic the way Lynch does. But this is hard to articulate. Because it's not a matter of signaling it, making it express, of course. That's what makes it fantastic. The scene where they switch over is significant because an Italian woman mistakes them for a couple and then he says, "We'd make a good couple." And it's from there they start revealing that they are, or being the couple. So there is that suggestion. As if he assumes the role. But I actually think Journey to Italy is better at evoking all the late marriage strain, and even Roman Holiday has a better off-the-cuff sense for Italy.
It doesn't help matters that the whole discussion about original and copy in the first part, when they're talking about the theme of his book, is on such a broad level. The script could have done better to suggest the ordinary with that theme and vice versa, mixing the two together better in each half. Still there is so much that Kiarostami does well, the more subtle movement. The last shot is really nice, of an Italian villa and bell tower out a little bathroom window, and then the sun sets during the credits. That's the sort of Tarkovsky-like "still" shot where things move and change slowly. [10/18/12]
The Deep Blue Sea (2011)
Like a Brief Encounter redo, but more brutal than just a tearjerker. Though not as good as director Terence Davies's House of Mirth, it's a clever revelation drama, so all sorts of things that are foregrounded in typical movies serve as expectations that are thwarted. It begins with what's supposed to be the worst, but proves not to be: a suicide attempt. One of the great strokes of House of Mirth is how it works against the grain of period movies. This is more like the lush stuff, and the piece he picks for the soundtrack at the beginning is almost too much. But it also makes the suicide more melodramatic and what happens after more in contrast. It's close set, among few characters, and we see, progressively, more to them that changes what we think we know. Similar to Dennis Potter, when you think someone is bad, they prove to have good qualities, and vice versa. It's a deceptive sort of muckraking. [7/8/12]
Like a Brief Encounter redo, but more brutal than just a tearjerker. Though not as good as director Terence Davies's House of Mirth, it's a clever revelation drama, so all sorts of things that are foregrounded in typical movies serve as expectations that are thwarted. It begins with what's supposed to be the worst, but proves not to be: a suicide attempt. One of the great strokes of House of Mirth is how it works against the grain of period movies. This is more like the lush stuff, and the piece he picks for the soundtrack at the beginning is almost too much. But it also makes the suicide more melodramatic and what happens after more in contrast. It's close set, among few characters, and we see, progressively, more to them that changes what we think we know. Similar to Dennis Potter, when you think someone is bad, they prove to have good qualities, and vice versa. It's a deceptive sort of muckraking. [7/8/12]
Almost Famous (2000)
A smarter movie wants to break out of an afternoon movie. Or is it really that it wants to break into one? It's all so cute and palatable, you just can't imagine this has anything to do with the real stuff, whether bus rides or puke or overdose. [7/6/12]
A smarter movie wants to break out of an afternoon movie. Or is it really that it wants to break into one? It's all so cute and palatable, you just can't imagine this has anything to do with the real stuff, whether bus rides or puke or overdose. [7/6/12]
Prometheus (2012)
There are a few impressive design choices, and the inspiration from the Prometheus myth was an interesting idea, but not as executed by the co-writer of Lost. It's watercooler conceptualism, with some pure trash pandering: the sex bit between Idris Elba and Charise Theron; the attempt to trump the chest bursting with the auto-surgery, just another Alien sequel and ripoff; one more addition to the now perpetual cliche of the loveable rogue crew which Aliens was the first to solidify, already derivative; and it's an orgy of computer graphics. After all the cracks I've been making for years about the juvenile infatuation with futuristic interfaces popping up on transparent boards or in the air, from James Bond to every TV police series, and after Scott actually quoted Douglas Trumbull in an interview, that you should always choose in-camera effects when you have the option, to the effect that Scott didn't want this movie to be another CG overload, he went and did this. I think there is some kind of CG in almost every scene of this movie, and they even did life-sized holograms taking place where they happened to stretch it. It's like an SNL skit exaggeration. [6/9/12]
There are a few impressive design choices, and the inspiration from the Prometheus myth was an interesting idea, but not as executed by the co-writer of Lost. It's watercooler conceptualism, with some pure trash pandering: the sex bit between Idris Elba and Charise Theron; the attempt to trump the chest bursting with the auto-surgery, just another Alien sequel and ripoff; one more addition to the now perpetual cliche of the loveable rogue crew which Aliens was the first to solidify, already derivative; and it's an orgy of computer graphics. After all the cracks I've been making for years about the juvenile infatuation with futuristic interfaces popping up on transparent boards or in the air, from James Bond to every TV police series, and after Scott actually quoted Douglas Trumbull in an interview, that you should always choose in-camera effects when you have the option, to the effect that Scott didn't want this movie to be another CG overload, he went and did this. I think there is some kind of CG in almost every scene of this movie, and they even did life-sized holograms taking place where they happened to stretch it. It's like an SNL skit exaggeration. [6/9/12]
The Turin Horse (2011)
This is an excruciating -- intentionally -- portrait of peasant life, almost unbearably repetitive. Whether this exercise in tedium is worthwhile or not, Werckmeister Harmonies is still a much better, more interesting movie, mesmerizing in its own use of long shots on people walking, but past tedium to an elegant fascination, before it turns into a political nightmare of a paranoid thug state. [5/13/12]
This is an excruciating -- intentionally -- portrait of peasant life, almost unbearably repetitive. Whether this exercise in tedium is worthwhile or not, Werckmeister Harmonies is still a much better, more interesting movie, mesmerizing in its own use of long shots on people walking, but past tedium to an elegant fascination, before it turns into a political nightmare of a paranoid thug state. [5/13/12]
Like You Know It All (2009)
Muckrakish. If "muckraking" could actually refer to the other sense of "rake" (which itself is related to "rakehell": debauchee, libertine, idle or dissolute person). [5/13/12]
Muckrakish. If "muckraking" could actually refer to the other sense of "rake" (which itself is related to "rakehell": debauchee, libertine, idle or dissolute person). [5/13/12]
Film socialisme (2010)
The Godardian (k)not. Again the first time. Godard starts in a scatter, then it accumulates to eloquence. "You see, with the verb 'to be,' the lack of reality becomes flagrant." Like what Roger Ebert says about Battleship Potemkin, that Eisenstein is technically brilliant but has no emotion, that old bourgeois cloddishness, with the abstractions of "emotion" and "character," is really ruling things out. It's hard to see how Potemkin -- and Godard has a homage to the Odessa steps sequence in this -- lacks passion or even sentiment, or that it doesn't inform or isn't expressed by the "technical," the scene and shot and sequence construction. It's the equivalent of the "too many notes" criticism of Mozart. Godard tries patience on purpose. He doesn't want to be lost in fantasy identification, the medium and its mechanisms transparent. But almost always, if you wait -- well, maybe not Ebert -- then you get through the agitation to see something else going on. There's a risk of reducing to slogan. But then Godard plays with that enough that you see he's also not going to assume that a movie can just elaborate everything. And there are scenes in this movie where he shows a small boy listening to music. It's utterly banal, and playful with this banality. The "art" -- of the music, for example -- is disconnected from the film. It's not seamlessly incorporated into a plot. So are these scenes of the people. Scenes of banality as disjecta, at least from any smug continuity of a story. It's disfiguration, in two senses. [5/5/12]
The Godardian (k)not. Again the first time. Godard starts in a scatter, then it accumulates to eloquence. "You see, with the verb 'to be,' the lack of reality becomes flagrant." Like what Roger Ebert says about Battleship Potemkin, that Eisenstein is technically brilliant but has no emotion, that old bourgeois cloddishness, with the abstractions of "emotion" and "character," is really ruling things out. It's hard to see how Potemkin -- and Godard has a homage to the Odessa steps sequence in this -- lacks passion or even sentiment, or that it doesn't inform or isn't expressed by the "technical," the scene and shot and sequence construction. It's the equivalent of the "too many notes" criticism of Mozart. Godard tries patience on purpose. He doesn't want to be lost in fantasy identification, the medium and its mechanisms transparent. But almost always, if you wait -- well, maybe not Ebert -- then you get through the agitation to see something else going on. There's a risk of reducing to slogan. But then Godard plays with that enough that you see he's also not going to assume that a movie can just elaborate everything. And there are scenes in this movie where he shows a small boy listening to music. It's utterly banal, and playful with this banality. The "art" -- of the music, for example -- is disconnected from the film. It's not seamlessly incorporated into a plot. So are these scenes of the people. Scenes of banality as disjecta, at least from any smug continuity of a story. It's disfiguration, in two senses. [5/5/12]
Tuesday, After Christmas (2010)
One of the best dramatizations of a relationship breakup I've ever seen, because of how patient and unassuming it is, observing all sorts of details and contradictions that way. It's painful to watch, because in the crux scene of an unlikely moment of confession and confrontation, it runs the gamut of just about every awful reaction and the awful predicament for everyone. You can see it building up, and knowing is also seeing and feeling what the characters are going through. It's dramatic even in anticipation. Telling, bearing all the reactions, there is nothing to say that is right or even sounds decent, and you know too well all the reactions of the offended party, no matter how unreasonable or irrational they become. [3/31/12]
One of the best dramatizations of a relationship breakup I've ever seen, because of how patient and unassuming it is, observing all sorts of details and contradictions that way. It's painful to watch, because in the crux scene of an unlikely moment of confession and confrontation, it runs the gamut of just about every awful reaction and the awful predicament for everyone. You can see it building up, and knowing is also seeing and feeling what the characters are going through. It's dramatic even in anticipation. Telling, bearing all the reactions, there is nothing to say that is right or even sounds decent, and you know too well all the reactions of the offended party, no matter how unreasonable or irrational they become. [3/31/12]
A Separation (2011)
While it follows suit of recent Iranian movies in unspectacular, undemonstrative, matter-of-fact style, a sort of realism that doesn't really have to make that statement either, Asghar Farhadi's everyday drama gets wound up so tight that it has a well-made feel of its own, especially about the time the woman who'd been hired to clean, Razieh, makes her admission. Everyone is so thoroughly balanced with compromising factors, qualities or intentions or circumstances, like in Dennis Potter's schemes, but without quite that tragic debauchery. [3/25/12]
While it follows suit of recent Iranian movies in unspectacular, undemonstrative, matter-of-fact style, a sort of realism that doesn't really have to make that statement either, Asghar Farhadi's everyday drama gets wound up so tight that it has a well-made feel of its own, especially about the time the woman who'd been hired to clean, Razieh, makes her admission. Everyone is so thoroughly balanced with compromising factors, qualities or intentions or circumstances, like in Dennis Potter's schemes, but without quite that tragic debauchery. [3/25/12]
The Cranes Are Flying (1957)
Crisp, clean plot, boiled down to archetype or moral tale material, rather like Bicycle Thieves or even more, The Shop on Main Street, but more didactic than either of those. That may be to say more the sort of state-favored socialist realism, or at least the conventions that became favorable -- the ending with looking to the sky as hope and future, the title symbol, echos Dovzhenko's Earth, which was not -- but there is a competence and expressionism beyond that. [6/12/11]
Crisp, clean plot, boiled down to archetype or moral tale material, rather like Bicycle Thieves or even more, The Shop on Main Street, but more didactic than either of those. That may be to say more the sort of state-favored socialist realism, or at least the conventions that became favorable -- the ending with looking to the sky as hope and future, the title symbol, echos Dovzhenko's Earth, which was not -- but there is a competence and expressionism beyond that. [6/12/11]
Unfaithfully Yours (1948)
Screwing around. High fidelity. What does screwball do? Such great shots as the pull in to the eye, such marvelous turns as imagination versus banality, the composer with his recording machine that is so easy it operates itself -- and how about this for a turn on the line of "modern" technology, giving the slip to our arrogance of the presence, if not merely forgetting. Rex Harrison suggests John Carradine at times. Compare to The Miracle of Morgan's Creek. Quick business. [5/29/11]
Screwing around. High fidelity. What does screwball do? Such great shots as the pull in to the eye, such marvelous turns as imagination versus banality, the composer with his recording machine that is so easy it operates itself -- and how about this for a turn on the line of "modern" technology, giving the slip to our arrogance of the presence, if not merely forgetting. Rex Harrison suggests John Carradine at times. Compare to The Miracle of Morgan's Creek. Quick business. [5/29/11]
Blow-Up (1966)
What might be Antonioni's most consistent film may have as much to do with the inadvertent effects of the combination: English-speaking and more particularly the species of 60s London milieu, and Antonioni's wandering. The transplant to another scene, and the whole scene, man, controls his ponderousness so that it rolls along. It's a moral tale that doesn't feel or act like one. The approach to the murder mystery makes this chilling, suspenseful, fascinating and dramatic in a whole other way than the conventions of explicit crime movies or murder mysteries, similar to Bergman's Winter Light in the countereffect of the body, but buiding much more on suggestion and remoteness with the photographs. [4/22/11]
What might be Antonioni's most consistent film may have as much to do with the inadvertent effects of the combination: English-speaking and more particularly the species of 60s London milieu, and Antonioni's wandering. The transplant to another scene, and the whole scene, man, controls his ponderousness so that it rolls along. It's a moral tale that doesn't feel or act like one. The approach to the murder mystery makes this chilling, suspenseful, fascinating and dramatic in a whole other way than the conventions of explicit crime movies or murder mysteries, similar to Bergman's Winter Light in the countereffect of the body, but buiding much more on suggestion and remoteness with the photographs. [4/22/11]
Bigger than Life (1956)
There's a tension between the kind of subtext of something like Notorious or Suspicion and the fact it's not supposed to be a subtext. It's supposed to be a -- what? realistic? -- depiction, based on an actual case history reported a year before the film came out. James Mason, who produced this movie and helped write it, by the North by Northwest route also suggests Claude Rains, and this movie builds a similar austere, lurid tone. [2/19/11]
There's a tension between the kind of subtext of something like Notorious or Suspicion and the fact it's not supposed to be a subtext. It's supposed to be a -- what? realistic? -- depiction, based on an actual case history reported a year before the film came out. James Mason, who produced this movie and helped write it, by the North by Northwest route also suggests Claude Rains, and this movie builds a similar austere, lurid tone. [2/19/11]
The Ipcress File (1965)
What begins as an antidote to Bond excesses, albeit with Bond pedigree (producer Harry Saltzman, score by John Barry), expands into similar fluff. [12/31/10]
What begins as an antidote to Bond excesses, albeit with Bond pedigree (producer Harry Saltzman, score by John Barry), expands into similar fluff. [12/31/10]
The Order of Myths (2008)
Nice, deft manner. Moves from one thing to the next in an unassuming way, but everything is pertinent. With a laissez-faire kind of fascination, we find out about the whole Clothilde significance, as well as the way the racial contradictions exist in the more benign, "polite" way. The ending comes as just a little tack-on, but it ripples out, implications for all documentaries, even representation. Folly chases off death. Mystic societies -- as the personages themselves define them, it's all about being anonymous. The figure of hiding even this racial distinction. Tokenism. [4/18/09]
Nice, deft manner. Moves from one thing to the next in an unassuming way, but everything is pertinent. With a laissez-faire kind of fascination, we find out about the whole Clothilde significance, as well as the way the racial contradictions exist in the more benign, "polite" way. The ending comes as just a little tack-on, but it ripples out, implications for all documentaries, even representation. Folly chases off death. Mystic societies -- as the personages themselves define them, it's all about being anonymous. The figure of hiding even this racial distinction. Tokenism. [4/18/09]
Army of Darkness (1992)
The movie aesthetic. The technocratic costume party. Domestication of metaphor = effects. The quainty sublimation. Tendency to Disney, Spielberg. Character is a bald wire with features hung willy nilly, whimsically. No continuity, save for a kind of reassuring blandness, guardrails. [10/18/08]
The movie aesthetic. The technocratic costume party. Domestication of metaphor = effects. The quainty sublimation. Tendency to Disney, Spielberg. Character is a bald wire with features hung willy nilly, whimsically. No continuity, save for a kind of reassuring blandness, guardrails. [10/18/08]
Up the Yangtze (2007)
There's a bit of subterfuge. The narrator of the movie is taking a trip, but the movie starts telling us the story of two others. This is not bad, but there is also the documentary staging of a story that suggests some planning. How did he know the girl on the riverbank family was going to go to work on the boat? The shots in her bunk when she's writing her diary: grace and elegance of strokes of anecdote, readymade drama, tone poem (although at least once, with the dissolve of the river's rise, it presses too much with artsiness). [10/4/08]
There's a bit of subterfuge. The narrator of the movie is taking a trip, but the movie starts telling us the story of two others. This is not bad, but there is also the documentary staging of a story that suggests some planning. How did he know the girl on the riverbank family was going to go to work on the boat? The shots in her bunk when she's writing her diary: grace and elegance of strokes of anecdote, readymade drama, tone poem (although at least once, with the dissolve of the river's rise, it presses too much with artsiness). [10/4/08]
L'Avventura (1960)
Like Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky, Michelangelo Antonioni is what people satirize as "foreign cinema": ponderous, brooding, groping, straining intellectualism. Also like the other two, Antonioni's bent for all this is away from other conventions, and by happy accident, the right premise or script, something really compelling can get made. L'Avventura is Antonioni's Persona or Stalker (certainly not on the level of the former, but as singular in Antonioni's own body of work). When Gabriele Ferzetti and Monica Vitti suddenly have a conversation about the former's work, his own groping and dissatisfaction, it's a peek in passing at their thoughts. Aesthetically there is a world of difference from having contrived stand-in characters speak the points of the movie and dramatizing it: cf. La Notte. Here there's actually a nice little farce of mores and amours. It's like The Tempest with Antonioni's cinema opening it to the world of photographic vistas and real tempests. L'Avventura is like a sketch for something to come. It works like a moral play that finds out it doesn't know the moral, and in a way what's precisely good -- active, operative, generative; creative but in a way that's like the opposite of visionary -- is how this groping of the artist works as the art. It's the movie that's telling us it doesn't know the meaning and has to drop the pretense. [9/27/08]
Like Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky, Michelangelo Antonioni is what people satirize as "foreign cinema": ponderous, brooding, groping, straining intellectualism. Also like the other two, Antonioni's bent for all this is away from other conventions, and by happy accident, the right premise or script, something really compelling can get made. L'Avventura is Antonioni's Persona or Stalker (certainly not on the level of the former, but as singular in Antonioni's own body of work). When Gabriele Ferzetti and Monica Vitti suddenly have a conversation about the former's work, his own groping and dissatisfaction, it's a peek in passing at their thoughts. Aesthetically there is a world of difference from having contrived stand-in characters speak the points of the movie and dramatizing it: cf. La Notte. Here there's actually a nice little farce of mores and amours. It's like The Tempest with Antonioni's cinema opening it to the world of photographic vistas and real tempests. L'Avventura is like a sketch for something to come. It works like a moral play that finds out it doesn't know the moral, and in a way what's precisely good -- active, operative, generative; creative but in a way that's like the opposite of visionary -- is how this groping of the artist works as the art. It's the movie that's telling us it doesn't know the meaning and has to drop the pretense. [9/27/08]
The Valley of Gwangi (1969)
Cowboys meet dinosaurs, from an idea that Willis O'Brien of King Kong fame had for a project but never got made. James Franciscus and Richard Carlson (of The Creature from the Black Lagoon and It Came from Outer Space fame) are on the cowboy side, but of course, the real star of the show is Ray Harryhausen: the dinosaurs. Yes, all the rest is dumb, but the clothesline on which to hang Harryhausen's stop-motion scenes. This one has a more particular point of including a prehistoric horse. When I saw this as a kid, after I learned more than just the elementary dinosaurs, I was quite impressed that it had Eohippus. [6/14/08]
Cowboys meet dinosaurs, from an idea that Willis O'Brien of King Kong fame had for a project but never got made. James Franciscus and Richard Carlson (of The Creature from the Black Lagoon and It Came from Outer Space fame) are on the cowboy side, but of course, the real star of the show is Ray Harryhausen: the dinosaurs. Yes, all the rest is dumb, but the clothesline on which to hang Harryhausen's stop-motion scenes. This one has a more particular point of including a prehistoric horse. When I saw this as a kid, after I learned more than just the elementary dinosaurs, I was quite impressed that it had Eohippus. [6/14/08]
Michael Clayton (2007)
Melodrama done right. Hollywood serious message movies are melodrama nonetheless, all the same elements. It makes no difference whether it's George Clooney or Clint Eastwood, or whether the side of the good guys amounts to liberalism or vigilantism. Compare to Robocop, by the chance of having watched them close together. While Robocop was on the way to the prosthetic visage, the super-costume that Clooney would eventually don as Batman, it was also a comic pop rebelliousness, would be subversive, versus the melodrama of manners. Clooney has doffed the Batman suit for the guise of seriousness, crusading nonetheless. The hyperbole of pulp action may be more co-opted, but trading that for a business suit doesn't mean you've put down the tools of commercial storycraft. [3/15/08]
Melodrama done right. Hollywood serious message movies are melodrama nonetheless, all the same elements. It makes no difference whether it's George Clooney or Clint Eastwood, or whether the side of the good guys amounts to liberalism or vigilantism. Compare to Robocop, by the chance of having watched them close together. While Robocop was on the way to the prosthetic visage, the super-costume that Clooney would eventually don as Batman, it was also a comic pop rebelliousness, would be subversive, versus the melodrama of manners. Clooney has doffed the Batman suit for the guise of seriousness, crusading nonetheless. The hyperbole of pulp action may be more co-opted, but trading that for a business suit doesn't mean you've put down the tools of commercial storycraft. [3/15/08]
Nobody Knows (2004)
The best kind of evocation, especially for being based on a true story, a deadpan naturalism, if not exactly fly-on-the-wall documentary, and of course as a study of effects, it's also letting this ripple out as the indication of the larger social problem. It's very sad, but doesn't wring it. As usual, when a movie isn't "uplifting," it's so much more uplifiting. [2/2/08]
The best kind of evocation, especially for being based on a true story, a deadpan naturalism, if not exactly fly-on-the-wall documentary, and of course as a study of effects, it's also letting this ripple out as the indication of the larger social problem. It's very sad, but doesn't wring it. As usual, when a movie isn't "uplifting," it's so much more uplifiting. [2/2/08]
House of Flying Daggers (2004)
Zhang Yimou tamed the art production and digital effects since Hero, but also the aspects that re-situated the martial arts, which I can barely stand as they are. I think he is one of the best directors in the world, but I don't follow his interest in that. [2/9/08]
Zhang Yimou tamed the art production and digital effects since Hero, but also the aspects that re-situated the martial arts, which I can barely stand as they are. I think he is one of the best directors in the world, but I don't follow his interest in that. [2/9/08]
The Simpsons Movie (2007)
The benefit of stretching a Simpsons episode to an hour and a half is there's more room for the flourishes and tangents and digressions, to pack more and follow more. The disadvantage in stretching The Simpsons over 18 years is that a movie at this point is a drop in the bucket. It washes into the ocean of Simpsons episodes, even if it's as long as three. [1/12/08]
The benefit of stretching a Simpsons episode to an hour and a half is there's more room for the flourishes and tangents and digressions, to pack more and follow more. The disadvantage in stretching The Simpsons over 18 years is that a movie at this point is a drop in the bucket. It washes into the ocean of Simpsons episodes, even if it's as long as three. [1/12/08]
Turtles Can Fly (2004)
An Iranian/Iraqi co-production about Kurdish refugee children near the Turkish border. It's similar to The Time of the Gypsies in its sympathetic perspective, in this case even younger children, some of them the actual victims of mines. While it's disturbing, the overall effect is opposite that of the lurid use of images of starving children to grab attention, and it's affecting in a way similar to Miracle in Milan -- not a dour portrait of the downtrodden, but showing the thriving regardless of the situation. Not that it's not dour or dire circumstances, just the way it's done. There's, for example, a particularly unflinching part about a girl who wants to abandon a baby, and even life itself. [12/15/07]
An Iranian/Iraqi co-production about Kurdish refugee children near the Turkish border. It's similar to The Time of the Gypsies in its sympathetic perspective, in this case even younger children, some of them the actual victims of mines. While it's disturbing, the overall effect is opposite that of the lurid use of images of starving children to grab attention, and it's affecting in a way similar to Miracle in Milan -- not a dour portrait of the downtrodden, but showing the thriving regardless of the situation. Not that it's not dour or dire circumstances, just the way it's done. There's, for example, a particularly unflinching part about a girl who wants to abandon a baby, and even life itself. [12/15/07]
Deliver Us from Evil (2006)
A very good compilation job presents the arc of discovery of the scope of pedophilia in the Catholic church, as it was sparked by the particular case of Oliver O'Grady in various parishes in California and rippled out to the Los Angeles Diocese, the whole U.S., the institution of the Catholic church right up to the current pope, and even back to the 4th century. The placement of the material is what is done so well by Amy Berg and company, alternating between interviews of O'Grady, his victims, advocates and other experts done for this film, and videotaped depositions of O'Grady and the Los Angeles Diocese hierarchy, including Roger Mahoney. The assemblage manages a point-counterpoint of the mixed feelings and perspectives at the same time it charts the events. [12/23/07]
A very good compilation job presents the arc of discovery of the scope of pedophilia in the Catholic church, as it was sparked by the particular case of Oliver O'Grady in various parishes in California and rippled out to the Los Angeles Diocese, the whole U.S., the institution of the Catholic church right up to the current pope, and even back to the 4th century. The placement of the material is what is done so well by Amy Berg and company, alternating between interviews of O'Grady, his victims, advocates and other experts done for this film, and videotaped depositions of O'Grady and the Los Angeles Diocese hierarchy, including Roger Mahoney. The assemblage manages a point-counterpoint of the mixed feelings and perspectives at the same time it charts the events. [12/23/07]
Army of Shadows (1969)
The detachment achieved, whether stylistic or incidental (but how they are same) has the cumulative effect of a sacralizing abstraction of "la resistance." Note also how this more general term came to be a matter of specific designation, of the contest of it, of authenticity after the war, but here the depiction. Be careful of fighting monsters lest you become a monster. A hierarchical code like that of the Nazis or of the gangsters in Melville's other films becomes necessary. The film can actually be reduced -- reduces itself -- to this issue: why they had to kill their own. The early murder is not completely understood until the last. [11/24/07]
The detachment achieved, whether stylistic or incidental (but how they are same) has the cumulative effect of a sacralizing abstraction of "la resistance." Note also how this more general term came to be a matter of specific designation, of the contest of it, of authenticity after the war, but here the depiction. Be careful of fighting monsters lest you become a monster. A hierarchical code like that of the Nazis or of the gangsters in Melville's other films becomes necessary. The film can actually be reduced -- reduces itself -- to this issue: why they had to kill their own. The early murder is not completely understood until the last. [11/24/07]
Outskirts [Okraina] (1998)
Fantasy of power. Matter of the "of." Is it a fantasy about these people or to be them, through them? In this sense, it's a fascist fantasy, even if the genitive is still operative. Comments to this effect, by the characters about their own brutality. Strong depiction of the sort of Russian defiant, elusive figurative thought. Irrationalist? [11/17/07]
Fantasy of power. Matter of the "of." Is it a fantasy about these people or to be them, through them? In this sense, it's a fascist fantasy, even if the genitive is still operative. Comments to this effect, by the characters about their own brutality. Strong depiction of the sort of Russian defiant, elusive figurative thought. Irrationalist? [11/17/07]
The Last King of Scotland (2006)
Though it's not a particularly good movie, in fact kind of dumb, it's the breakout role for James McAvoy, Forest Whitaker's best performance, and it has great music. [11/10/07]
Though it's not a particularly good movie, in fact kind of dumb, it's the breakout role for James McAvoy, Forest Whitaker's best performance, and it has great music. [11/10/07]
This Is England (2006)
A good plan of the seduction of a tyke by skinheads in 80s U.K. -- the title is their take on it -- falls short of the kind of soupy, tender, faux verite earnestness that passes for seriousness in so many movies now. But this film tips into it enough, and at the right moments, that it's hard not to see a cycle of sappy credulity commenting the vitriolic response to the previous sappy credulity. Apart from the neo-folksy, pseudo-soulful parts of the soundtrack, the black character has the sort of convenience for this rhetorical purpose regardless of any facts or facticity about the '69 original skinheads or soul music and cross-racial Anglo supremacists. [10/27/07]
A good plan of the seduction of a tyke by skinheads in 80s U.K. -- the title is their take on it -- falls short of the kind of soupy, tender, faux verite earnestness that passes for seriousness in so many movies now. But this film tips into it enough, and at the right moments, that it's hard not to see a cycle of sappy credulity commenting the vitriolic response to the previous sappy credulity. Apart from the neo-folksy, pseudo-soulful parts of the soundtrack, the black character has the sort of convenience for this rhetorical purpose regardless of any facts or facticity about the '69 original skinheads or soul music and cross-racial Anglo supremacists. [10/27/07]
Godzilla: Final Wars (2004)
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2005)
Robokitsch v. panderschlock. The Channel 4 News Team. Just how much a fad, phase, idea, franchise is irrelevant is by now irrelevant. The pandering of pop has reached such a high-spun state that even the disproportion of budget to toss-off creativity (read rush to market) is of little conern. Stan Lee doing his cameo appearance in the Fantastic Four sequel (and he once fought to get more than Marvel wanted to pay him for selling all his ideas for big-budget productions) serves to confer: whatever the market will bear. [10/6/23]
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2005)
Robokitsch v. panderschlock. The Channel 4 News Team. Just how much a fad, phase, idea, franchise is irrelevant is by now irrelevant. The pandering of pop has reached such a high-spun state that even the disproportion of budget to toss-off creativity (read rush to market) is of little conern. Stan Lee doing his cameo appearance in the Fantastic Four sequel (and he once fought to get more than Marvel wanted to pay him for selling all his ideas for big-budget productions) serves to confer: whatever the market will bear. [10/6/23]
Conspirators of Pleasure (1996)
Love and process, act of love, love of one's art, desire of process. Process of desire. If you didn't get the idea from Alice or any of Svankmajer's short works that the material worked with included fascination, infatuation, compulsion, fetishization, lust/disgust, attraction/repulsion, erotic charge and a more specifically Freudian meditation on such, this film makes it explicit. It does so in a credit source statement, if the movie itself didn't serve as slapping you in the face with it. Fascination with the material is also part of the material of the fascination. The poetic or dramatic displacement of all this erotic fascination is more a better stroke in the fairy-tale or folklore allegorical guise bundling more like a puzzle box, or simply clothing, in Alice and the later Little Otik. The latter most particularly packs a counter-punch about the creepy possibility of that fetish or perversion of a proper sexual function, the conjugal neurosis and all the sublimation of desire, repulsion, gratification and resentment in baby lust. But the merit of Conspirators of Pleasure is to put right out there all this play of displacement, all this business of play, to play outright with this sublimated play. Chains of signifiers, ulteriorization. Fish, etc. Rhebus. [6/29/07]
Love and process, act of love, love of one's art, desire of process. Process of desire. If you didn't get the idea from Alice or any of Svankmajer's short works that the material worked with included fascination, infatuation, compulsion, fetishization, lust/disgust, attraction/repulsion, erotic charge and a more specifically Freudian meditation on such, this film makes it explicit. It does so in a credit source statement, if the movie itself didn't serve as slapping you in the face with it. Fascination with the material is also part of the material of the fascination. The poetic or dramatic displacement of all this erotic fascination is more a better stroke in the fairy-tale or folklore allegorical guise bundling more like a puzzle box, or simply clothing, in Alice and the later Little Otik. The latter most particularly packs a counter-punch about the creepy possibility of that fetish or perversion of a proper sexual function, the conjugal neurosis and all the sublimation of desire, repulsion, gratification and resentment in baby lust. But the merit of Conspirators of Pleasure is to put right out there all this play of displacement, all this business of play, to play outright with this sublimated play. Chains of signifiers, ulteriorization. Fish, etc. Rhebus. [6/29/07]
Double Indemnity (1944)
There's always someone else. The expression itself: someone else. Some one. Else. It's always a matter of an/other. This or the "metaphysical" thriller. The first violation of one's part with another is the other which one is. Thought of this in sense of response to Double Indemnity as the other girl being unnecessary complication. But is this an aesthetic response? A reflex having to do with preference or ideal? Curiously, too, is this loyalty, to art, this aesthetic loyalty, analogous, if not the same, as this ideal of love, the ideal of the one? Is, then, the ideal of the one, the ideal of conjugal union, of communal fusion, of monogamous reduction, an aesthetic (and a further or branching question, esentially or effectively), and conversely, is this aesthetic of unity, contiguity, reduction, not this ideal of fidelity, of the logic of love? As Columbo put it, the first murder was a beauty, but that second one, that was sloppy. All the intricacies of a murder perfect enough to get by the insurance company are given the slip by/in the climax, where even the dramatic workable and more interesting ambiguity of the Barbara Stanwyck character is given a hasty tidying up -- one that's have your cake and eat it, too, at that. [1/12/07]
There's always someone else. The expression itself: someone else. Some one. Else. It's always a matter of an/other. This or the "metaphysical" thriller. The first violation of one's part with another is the other which one is. Thought of this in sense of response to Double Indemnity as the other girl being unnecessary complication. But is this an aesthetic response? A reflex having to do with preference or ideal? Curiously, too, is this loyalty, to art, this aesthetic loyalty, analogous, if not the same, as this ideal of love, the ideal of the one? Is, then, the ideal of the one, the ideal of conjugal union, of communal fusion, of monogamous reduction, an aesthetic (and a further or branching question, esentially or effectively), and conversely, is this aesthetic of unity, contiguity, reduction, not this ideal of fidelity, of the logic of love? As Columbo put it, the first murder was a beauty, but that second one, that was sloppy. All the intricacies of a murder perfect enough to get by the insurance company are given the slip by/in the climax, where even the dramatic workable and more interesting ambiguity of the Barbara Stanwyck character is given a hasty tidying up -- one that's have your cake and eat it, too, at that. [1/12/07]
Camille Claudel (1988)
Art less art: remarks on the inadvertently apt. A clarification (precision): that this "less" is most often a gesture of more. It's inflation. So much shimmery expedience. The breadth of 19th century narrative novels crammed into feature-length screenplays. [1/20/07]
Art less art: remarks on the inadvertently apt. A clarification (precision): that this "less" is most often a gesture of more. It's inflation. So much shimmery expedience. The breadth of 19th century narrative novels crammed into feature-length screenplays. [1/20/07]
Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)
Revenge of the Creature (1955)
The Creature Walks Among Us (1956)
[Original 3D process at Castro Theater, San Francisco, 10/14/06.]
Trying on evolution. The Universal monsters on the path from medieval superstition to scientific fascination (that path that eventually carries to Alien at another studio), and the pathos of monstrosity. What's often thought as a subtext of sympathy for the monster, expressed via Marilyn Monroe in The Seven-Year Itch long before monster movie cult fandom and "postmodern" appraisals, is not submerged, but express in the Creature. The evolutionary connection, projecting this reflexive monstration back to the amphibious threshold, a sensitivity towards the environment already established even if as a sort of popular platitude of the scientific sensibility, and even that in the throes of an arrogance of manipulation (cf. all the stuff with the chemicals to stun the fish, which can't help but suggest much worse nowadays). The pathos of the Frankenstein monster already laid the foundation.
Trying to evolve. After the floppy sequel Revenge of the Creature, it's hard to think that a third installment could be anything but a cash-in job, even more so because of the history of the Universal monster movie chains (or even something like the The Thin Man series, where each movie seems exponentially worse). But The Creature Walks Among Us is in many respects the most interesting. No prints of the movie survive, so for this special showing of the whole set of films, The Creature Walks was added as a footnote, projected in video, the opportunity to see it's worth thus more precarious (few stayed to watch it). The script, by Arthur Ross who also co-wrote the first movie, attempts to turn all this allegorical stuff of monster movies out front, make it the plot itself, to lift the veil, or the monster mask. If it doesn't really go that far, there is the fact that it changes the gill man's costume, plays a transformation of the creature (for some reason the sleeker, rather lanky underwater version adapts not only to lungs, but to a linebacker physique -- Don Megowan plays this creature on land, rather than Ben Chapman). The creature is almost entirely reduced to victim, here -- bandages in a hospital bed -- and upstaged by the whole drama of what the humans are trying to project with it. The B-movie tone of it -- in the beginning there's that absurd 50s officiousness, groping even for decorum, all the characters introducing each other with their "Mr." and "Dr." and stilted exposition, grown-ups playing grown-ups -- makes it seem like strained bedroom drama, the creature walking among Peyton Place. If too earnest, it's also interesting as an attempt to make express the pyschological investment, an empathetic trade-off with all this monstration, and perhaps most notable there is a real stride (the first?) towards defusing the rescue of the woman.
Revenge of the Creature (1955)
The Creature Walks Among Us (1956)
[Original 3D process at Castro Theater, San Francisco, 10/14/06.]
Trying on evolution. The Universal monsters on the path from medieval superstition to scientific fascination (that path that eventually carries to Alien at another studio), and the pathos of monstrosity. What's often thought as a subtext of sympathy for the monster, expressed via Marilyn Monroe in The Seven-Year Itch long before monster movie cult fandom and "postmodern" appraisals, is not submerged, but express in the Creature. The evolutionary connection, projecting this reflexive monstration back to the amphibious threshold, a sensitivity towards the environment already established even if as a sort of popular platitude of the scientific sensibility, and even that in the throes of an arrogance of manipulation (cf. all the stuff with the chemicals to stun the fish, which can't help but suggest much worse nowadays). The pathos of the Frankenstein monster already laid the foundation.
Trying to evolve. After the floppy sequel Revenge of the Creature, it's hard to think that a third installment could be anything but a cash-in job, even more so because of the history of the Universal monster movie chains (or even something like the The Thin Man series, where each movie seems exponentially worse). But The Creature Walks Among Us is in many respects the most interesting. No prints of the movie survive, so for this special showing of the whole set of films, The Creature Walks was added as a footnote, projected in video, the opportunity to see it's worth thus more precarious (few stayed to watch it). The script, by Arthur Ross who also co-wrote the first movie, attempts to turn all this allegorical stuff of monster movies out front, make it the plot itself, to lift the veil, or the monster mask. If it doesn't really go that far, there is the fact that it changes the gill man's costume, plays a transformation of the creature (for some reason the sleeker, rather lanky underwater version adapts not only to lungs, but to a linebacker physique -- Don Megowan plays this creature on land, rather than Ben Chapman). The creature is almost entirely reduced to victim, here -- bandages in a hospital bed -- and upstaged by the whole drama of what the humans are trying to project with it. The B-movie tone of it -- in the beginning there's that absurd 50s officiousness, groping even for decorum, all the characters introducing each other with their "Mr." and "Dr." and stilted exposition, grown-ups playing grown-ups -- makes it seem like strained bedroom drama, the creature walking among Peyton Place. If too earnest, it's also interesting as an attempt to make express the pyschological investment, an empathetic trade-off with all this monstration, and perhaps most notable there is a real stride (the first?) towards defusing the rescue of the woman.
The Saddest Music in the World (2003)
If Careful was where it all ripened, where this act of silent camp blossomed into its own sort of expression and beauty, The Saddest Music in the World is another sort of apotheosis for Guy Maddin. [7/17/06]
If Careful was where it all ripened, where this act of silent camp blossomed into its own sort of expression and beauty, The Saddest Music in the World is another sort of apotheosis for Guy Maddin. [7/17/06]
Pandora's Box (2003)
There's a moment, a scene, after the trial when Louise Brooks is back in the house of the slain husband, where the film verges. It verges on an ambivalent portrait, a portrait of ambivalence, perhaps even as tragically so as Camus's The Stranger (although tragic might not be the better extent of it, considering both the comparison and the pretense of the result). Brooks in the set of this house is one of those floater moments from movies before the 40s, before the set portrait sheen had set in, when the black and white still flickered and there was a grainy remoteness to everything that still made it seem to have a candor, and even more so before sound, when the parallax of that remote sense and a breathy, shimmery, delicate sense was even more pronounced. In 30s sound films there are gaps of silence, relative to dialogue and music, where an ambient sound of the medium itself is like that of a fire, of gaslight or the crackle of phonograph records of the era. In this moment, Brooks's Lulu floats in the gaping hours of the day belonging to no order of guilty or innocent. [7/15/06]
There's a moment, a scene, after the trial when Louise Brooks is back in the house of the slain husband, where the film verges. It verges on an ambivalent portrait, a portrait of ambivalence, perhaps even as tragically so as Camus's The Stranger (although tragic might not be the better extent of it, considering both the comparison and the pretense of the result). Brooks in the set of this house is one of those floater moments from movies before the 40s, before the set portrait sheen had set in, when the black and white still flickered and there was a grainy remoteness to everything that still made it seem to have a candor, and even more so before sound, when the parallax of that remote sense and a breathy, shimmery, delicate sense was even more pronounced. In 30s sound films there are gaps of silence, relative to dialogue and music, where an ambient sound of the medium itself is like that of a fire, of gaslight or the crackle of phonograph records of the era. In this moment, Brooks's Lulu floats in the gaping hours of the day belonging to no order of guilty or innocent. [7/15/06]
Some more notes on Alien (1979)
Species lust. Symbolosis. Organasm. The way the disparate interests/tastes come together to make the representation. Mind-fuck. The bio-technical phantasm: vampires, post-industrial. Rocky of the species. The matter of "species" a la Constance Penley, Spock, sci-fi, etc. St. George and the dragon analogy -- made by someone as if countering the Rocky one as disparagement, "what's wrong with that?" Defensiveness, when it comes to the need for monsters! The defensiveness about the -- need? -- compulsion to triumph, prevail, overcome. A whole other line about the path of this, from psychological to political. The context of a self -- other: invasion, incorporation. "Alien" -- the literal sense of even "art" with this bio-fantasy, and the symbolic complication: the representation itself can be involved, pregnant with an other, forcibly, infected -- catachresis. Controlling the metaphors. Looking "right." Monstration. Building a better boogie, sawhorse, straw man (Quixote, Machiavelli). The hiding/teasing tactic, showing and not showing. [c. 2005]
Species lust. Symbolosis. Organasm. The way the disparate interests/tastes come together to make the representation. Mind-fuck. The bio-technical phantasm: vampires, post-industrial. Rocky of the species. The matter of "species" a la Constance Penley, Spock, sci-fi, etc. St. George and the dragon analogy -- made by someone as if countering the Rocky one as disparagement, "what's wrong with that?" Defensiveness, when it comes to the need for monsters! The defensiveness about the -- need? -- compulsion to triumph, prevail, overcome. A whole other line about the path of this, from psychological to political. The context of a self -- other: invasion, incorporation. "Alien" -- the literal sense of even "art" with this bio-fantasy, and the symbolic complication: the representation itself can be involved, pregnant with an other, forcibly, infected -- catachresis. Controlling the metaphors. Looking "right." Monstration. Building a better boogie, sawhorse, straw man (Quixote, Machiavelli). The hiding/teasing tactic, showing and not showing. [c. 2005]
The New World (2005)
The world that would have been. The lost world? Terrence Malick's return to the world of movie-making (in 1998 with The Thin Red Line, his first since 1978's Days of Heaven) is itself an elipsis, a jump of beginning-end, promise and result, consequence (a la Intolerance, The Godfather, Part II). Lyrical muckraking. Ode (what is form, pastoral?), but with -- what is form of this beatification of the pithy? -- like Joyce in Ulysses, what sort of pictoral art? Dreamlike and banal at once, the banality of dream and memory, the elipsis of this memorial, evocation, and the dream of all this banality. Welles's Brazil movie and Eisenstein's Que Viva Mexico project. Dovzhenko's Earth, as I thought of with Days of Heaven. Sophistication and naivete: Malick possibly the paradigm of this. Malick was on the cusp of the golden age of cinematography, more particularly as he anticipated it, his imitation of incidental lighting in Days of Heaven just before the fast film stocks came in that allowed shooting in location light and all the picturesque indulgence that begat. His Jamestown of this movie bypasses the graphic and prestige dramatic grandeur of the era since. But he's left with, for example, the stars of this day. Colin Farrell approaches Joseph Fiennes as the type of teen idol incongruity, only sparing us that extent because he's not given Shakespearesque dialogue. This is the first time Malick's voice-over material seemed unnecessary, even at odds with the effect of the rest. [1/29/06]
The world that would have been. The lost world? Terrence Malick's return to the world of movie-making (in 1998 with The Thin Red Line, his first since 1978's Days of Heaven) is itself an elipsis, a jump of beginning-end, promise and result, consequence (a la Intolerance, The Godfather, Part II). Lyrical muckraking. Ode (what is form, pastoral?), but with -- what is form of this beatification of the pithy? -- like Joyce in Ulysses, what sort of pictoral art? Dreamlike and banal at once, the banality of dream and memory, the elipsis of this memorial, evocation, and the dream of all this banality. Welles's Brazil movie and Eisenstein's Que Viva Mexico project. Dovzhenko's Earth, as I thought of with Days of Heaven. Sophistication and naivete: Malick possibly the paradigm of this. Malick was on the cusp of the golden age of cinematography, more particularly as he anticipated it, his imitation of incidental lighting in Days of Heaven just before the fast film stocks came in that allowed shooting in location light and all the picturesque indulgence that begat. His Jamestown of this movie bypasses the graphic and prestige dramatic grandeur of the era since. But he's left with, for example, the stars of this day. Colin Farrell approaches Joseph Fiennes as the type of teen idol incongruity, only sparing us that extent because he's not given Shakespearesque dialogue. This is the first time Malick's voice-over material seemed unnecessary, even at odds with the effect of the rest. [1/29/06]
Grizzly Man (2005)
One naturalist to another. Unnatural naturalists. Herzog's movie is like the Monty Python skit about watching bird watchers. The twist is not just that here the subject watches bears. Subject/object -- of representation. The eyes of the bear: Herzog using Treadwell's shot, the imposition of "nature." What he imagines about the bear's look, looking back at us via the camera, as well. Natural, occurring, readymade, found -- and context. The citation and changing of context, the ripples of that here. With also Treadwell's sense of fame, representation, co-existence with nature, and the other kind of respect that is cited as well. Respect for bears as well as any wildlife is also recognizing our projection and imposing of any ideal, even fondness. The lengths we go to touch nature, even for whatever reason we think good, may also be deleterious. Not to mention respect as self-interest and preservation as well: what fear is good for. Herzog's decision about what not to provide directly, the grizzly not to exploit. [8/15/05]
One naturalist to another. Unnatural naturalists. Herzog's movie is like the Monty Python skit about watching bird watchers. The twist is not just that here the subject watches bears. Subject/object -- of representation. The eyes of the bear: Herzog using Treadwell's shot, the imposition of "nature." What he imagines about the bear's look, looking back at us via the camera, as well. Natural, occurring, readymade, found -- and context. The citation and changing of context, the ripples of that here. With also Treadwell's sense of fame, representation, co-existence with nature, and the other kind of respect that is cited as well. Respect for bears as well as any wildlife is also recognizing our projection and imposing of any ideal, even fondness. The lengths we go to touch nature, even for whatever reason we think good, may also be deleterious. Not to mention respect as self-interest and preservation as well: what fear is good for. Herzog's decision about what not to provide directly, the grizzly not to exploit. [8/15/05]
Glory (1989)
Why Matthew Broderick was chosen, perhaps only to convey youth, but there's an effect, not quite intended, of a dramatization of spectatorship itself. The viewer doesn't just empathize with Broderick, he's the agent of the audience in the drama. This quality is not specific to this film. It's one of the things that makes Election so good, only there it's made to order, Broderick the humble school teacher more wide-eyed and innocent than his students, watching them race on, guided or misguided. But it's this film that this shows for Broderick more generally. [12/25/03]
Why Matthew Broderick was chosen, perhaps only to convey youth, but there's an effect, not quite intended, of a dramatization of spectatorship itself. The viewer doesn't just empathize with Broderick, he's the agent of the audience in the drama. This quality is not specific to this film. It's one of the things that makes Election so good, only there it's made to order, Broderick the humble school teacher more wide-eyed and innocent than his students, watching them race on, guided or misguided. But it's this film that this shows for Broderick more generally. [12/25/03]
Finding Nemo (2003)
The fine line between narrative momentum, rhythm, and annoyance. [11/03]
The fine line between narrative momentum, rhythm, and annoyance. [11/03]
Fellini's Roma (1972)
Meandering between fiction and non-fiction, with that strange muted declamatory style of 60s and 70s travelogues and industry films, this shows Fellini as more playful for having wondered outside the pretense of a story or dramatic premise. At the same time, it shows what is Fellini's reflex, his tic and his major impulse: movement, or meandering itself. That floating tracking style here is lifted to the whole conception. [10/18/03]
Meandering between fiction and non-fiction, with that strange muted declamatory style of 60s and 70s travelogues and industry films, this shows Fellini as more playful for having wondered outside the pretense of a story or dramatic premise. At the same time, it shows what is Fellini's reflex, his tic and his major impulse: movement, or meandering itself. That floating tracking style here is lifted to the whole conception. [10/18/03]
The Truman Show (1998)
On the deceit of the deceit of The Truman Show. Ever since there has been representation, there has been representation telling us to watch out for representation. We've all seen sitcoms that tell us the lesson that watching TV is bad for us (Willy Wonka, too). In The Truman Show, why do we identify with Truman? Don't we realize that precisely every trick and maneuver Truman experiences has been done to make us do this? Which is the greater vanity? To think we would idenitfy with someone trapped in a sitcom? Or that we do?
On the deceit of the deceit of The Truman Show. Ever since there has been representation, there has been representation telling us to watch out for representation. We've all seen sitcoms that tell us the lesson that watching TV is bad for us (Willy Wonka, too). In The Truman Show, why do we identify with Truman? Don't we realize that precisely every trick and maneuver Truman experiences has been done to make us do this? Which is the greater vanity? To think we would idenitfy with someone trapped in a sitcom? Or that we do?
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
Method to madness, or rather madness to method. Not just a burlesque of the middle ages, or an absurdist poke at English history. Irreverance, incongruity. Evocation by exaggeration, and juxtapositions to produce this. Reflexive, too, as the coconut joke spoofs epic movies or movie-making, the means. Flight of reference, topical incongruity. Stretching the incongruity over one topic. The Frenchmen are a foreshadowing of the Norman conquest and thumb of the nose to the patriotic sense of English history. The feel. Despite the jokes of shoddiness of means, there is such attention to detail for comic intent that it's more evocative than other serious or dramatic depiction: the muck, but then the Black Knight scene has shots that suggest medeival paintings or Caravaggio. Medieval learning is also an easy target, and regression in the sense of syllogism.
Method to madness, or rather madness to method. Not just a burlesque of the middle ages, or an absurdist poke at English history. Irreverance, incongruity. Evocation by exaggeration, and juxtapositions to produce this. Reflexive, too, as the coconut joke spoofs epic movies or movie-making, the means. Flight of reference, topical incongruity. Stretching the incongruity over one topic. The Frenchmen are a foreshadowing of the Norman conquest and thumb of the nose to the patriotic sense of English history. The feel. Despite the jokes of shoddiness of means, there is such attention to detail for comic intent that it's more evocative than other serious or dramatic depiction: the muck, but then the Black Knight scene has shots that suggest medeival paintings or Caravaggio. Medieval learning is also an easy target, and regression in the sense of syllogism.
Deliverance (1972)
Between nature and law, but in this story, there is no easy out, no triumphal solution, no trump. As soon as the civilized (but also sedated, weakened, sophisticated in the original sense of degraded) man brings himself back to some sort of brutality -- is that "nature"? -- is it possible for any other creature to be brutal, to be a brute? -- he is not out of the woods. James Dickey, who adapted his own book, carries the story right on through to the way the civilized man must account for his breaking the structure (unlike in Straw Dogs). The hand at the end, despite horror film theatrics, is the dread of guilt, the civilized man can't escape his "nature."
Between nature and law, but in this story, there is no easy out, no triumphal solution, no trump. As soon as the civilized (but also sedated, weakened, sophisticated in the original sense of degraded) man brings himself back to some sort of brutality -- is that "nature"? -- is it possible for any other creature to be brutal, to be a brute? -- he is not out of the woods. James Dickey, who adapted his own book, carries the story right on through to the way the civilized man must account for his breaking the structure (unlike in Straw Dogs). The hand at the end, despite horror film theatrics, is the dread of guilt, the civilized man can't escape his "nature."
My Darling Clementine (1946)
Most notable thing about it is the atmosphere. Already Monument Valley is the distinctive character, before even the monumental Ford 50s and the color cinematography. There's not much of a plot here, but there's more character in the scenes of Henry Fonda out on the big porch, hanging out, leaning back in a chair. You get the sense of the expanse, the town opening right onto the big southwestern landscape. There's a couple of shots in an upstairs hallway of the hotel, with a big half-circle window. They have a sharpness and an immediacy, with the light coming in the window and the bareness of the hallway. This expansiveness is very un-set-like, and is what is most distinctive of John Ford's westerns. The plot, which is the story of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral between the Earps and the Stantons, is pretty thin and even foolish, reworked to get in two romances, including one with a Clementine so the movie could graft on another bit of western lore. But it's in spite of the commotion of the plot that you get the Ford feel of the west: lanky and loping, not fussy or too made up. Fonda is the onscreen version of this. Then there's the action, particularly the gunfight at the end, all very matter of fact. There's no extra spectacle or ceremony, the gunshots don't take any longer or have any extra angles. Ford doesn't compromise on this, in fact he seems firm on portraying this very aspect of the west. Victor Mature is fine as Doc Holliday, better than you'd think from gladiator movies. [12/7/96]
Most notable thing about it is the atmosphere. Already Monument Valley is the distinctive character, before even the monumental Ford 50s and the color cinematography. There's not much of a plot here, but there's more character in the scenes of Henry Fonda out on the big porch, hanging out, leaning back in a chair. You get the sense of the expanse, the town opening right onto the big southwestern landscape. There's a couple of shots in an upstairs hallway of the hotel, with a big half-circle window. They have a sharpness and an immediacy, with the light coming in the window and the bareness of the hallway. This expansiveness is very un-set-like, and is what is most distinctive of John Ford's westerns. The plot, which is the story of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral between the Earps and the Stantons, is pretty thin and even foolish, reworked to get in two romances, including one with a Clementine so the movie could graft on another bit of western lore. But it's in spite of the commotion of the plot that you get the Ford feel of the west: lanky and loping, not fussy or too made up. Fonda is the onscreen version of this. Then there's the action, particularly the gunfight at the end, all very matter of fact. There's no extra spectacle or ceremony, the gunshots don't take any longer or have any extra angles. Ford doesn't compromise on this, in fact he seems firm on portraying this very aspect of the west. Victor Mature is fine as Doc Holliday, better than you'd think from gladiator movies. [12/7/96]
Waking Ned Devine (1998)
Charming and pithy, with some light black humor, if that's not a contradiction. But still limited to quaint dramatics, and doesn't go after too much more, despite the material for some really good stuff. It's fluffed up, but the direction is fairly good. There are some great strokes, for example, the way the dream of Ned Devine is handled despite the heavy production. The tone of it, thanks also to some of the performers, mostly David Kelly, and some of the frankness of the presentation, keep it from being too earnestly feel-good, or too giddy with the hijinks, but that's still what the movie is. It does not achieve the more resonant drollery of Bill Forsythe's work, for example, certainly not Comfort and Joy, but not even Local Hero which it resembles in some ways. [12/23/98]
Charming and pithy, with some light black humor, if that's not a contradiction. But still limited to quaint dramatics, and doesn't go after too much more, despite the material for some really good stuff. It's fluffed up, but the direction is fairly good. There are some great strokes, for example, the way the dream of Ned Devine is handled despite the heavy production. The tone of it, thanks also to some of the performers, mostly David Kelly, and some of the frankness of the presentation, keep it from being too earnestly feel-good, or too giddy with the hijinks, but that's still what the movie is. It does not achieve the more resonant drollery of Bill Forsythe's work, for example, certainly not Comfort and Joy, but not even Local Hero which it resembles in some ways. [12/23/98]
Fireworks (1997)
Hailed by some critics as a major work from Japan, this is a kind of refined cop revenge movie. It's methodical, poised, and uses lots of quiet to set up contrast to quick bursts of action, but this refinement also makes its violent sentiment more jarring. [3/21/98]
Hailed by some critics as a major work from Japan, this is a kind of refined cop revenge movie. It's methodical, poised, and uses lots of quiet to set up contrast to quick bursts of action, but this refinement also makes its violent sentiment more jarring. [3/21/98]
The Informer (1935)
The tragedy of a common man, and an ill-equipped one, at that. Victor McLaglen plays a poor childish brute who can barely stand still as he makes things up to cover himself. The story follows his suffering from guilt and dread and, as if that weren't enough, how he gets shilled by a jackal of a hanger on. It's a great portrait by McLaglan and and by writer Dudley Nichols. Director John Ford is low-key, here, a steady sedate treatment of this acting in the grainy fog. This doesn't have Gregg Toland's cinematography, as for The Long Voyage Home, but that one doesn't have this one's script. If you could combine the two, it might be Ford's best film. [3/21/98]
The tragedy of a common man, and an ill-equipped one, at that. Victor McLaglen plays a poor childish brute who can barely stand still as he makes things up to cover himself. The story follows his suffering from guilt and dread and, as if that weren't enough, how he gets shilled by a jackal of a hanger on. It's a great portrait by McLaglan and and by writer Dudley Nichols. Director John Ford is low-key, here, a steady sedate treatment of this acting in the grainy fog. This doesn't have Gregg Toland's cinematography, as for The Long Voyage Home, but that one doesn't have this one's script. If you could combine the two, it might be Ford's best film. [3/21/98]
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Entries by Greg Macon for the Facebook group Movie Brains, related to film comments on this website, Fixion. Text for movie comments this page © 2023 Greg Macon. Banner image from By the Law by Lev Kuleshov.