Two week hiatus from blogging. In the final stretch of a semester and so I need to buckle down with the last of my school obligations. While these posts don’t take very long to physically write, thinking about what to say and what film to say it about, always seems to be at the center of my thinking when it should not be. When I’m done with classes and on formal break, I’ll probably take to blogging even more.
Monthly Archives: April 2010
Weekly Relief – Cinema Paradiso
The final scene from Cinema Paradiso, fully in Italian. If you haven’t seen the film, little will be revealed by watching it because it’s all about context. I remember this scene and post it now since it is still overwhelming for me emotionally. Not only do I call back all the scenes in the movie and remember a million things the way Toto must be at that moment in time, but I’m also getting an enthusiastically nostalgic look back at early movies from the European track.
When I first watched the movie, I was 17 years old and had really not seen any of the movies referenced during the film. I couldn’t put an emotional weight on films that were referenced briefly and laughed about or cried over by the characters. Sure, some American movies were mentioned but the only real famous one was Gone With the Wind and that was a brief cameo by its poster on the side of theater wall. All the other movies were foreign to me and so every time I do watch this film, I come back with a little better appreciation because another film on the reference slide within the film’s story has been loved and enjoyed by me. La Dolce Vita grows on each occasion I view it, but Cinema Paradiso has the good luck since I am an ignorant American viewer to do so in a basic way. There isn’t the emotional mileage of Fellini’s seminal film yet the growth Cinema Paradiso does present is satisfying in the most uncommon way. In the end, the movie is a romantic lapse into sentimentality, but those sentiments were firmly planted in my youth and my heart has been won over ever since. We all cheer lead movies which sit at the top of our heart and are easily recognizable to our personalities. Cinema Paradiso allows me to happily back track to find the most common emotions of the standard European movie goer.
TV Viewing: The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)
Just a quick comment. I spoke briefly about the Bourne Ultimatum before and I carried on about how it was a really great thriller. While I could go further into why it’s a great thriller and how it is better than other thrillers, those viewpoints are too subjective since not any thriller is really the same. They can be similar in their hallmark generalities and often times in their approach, but the Bourne Ultimatum makes you want to think it has the skinny on special OPs and how a super spy goes about his business. There are striking resemblances between Bourne and James Bond but since both films have two very different approaches, the commonalities end in the job description details.
No, my comment is about Black Briar in the film. It is a Treadstone upgrade involving black OPs and the damming details about the program is that it believes it can get away with killing United States citizens when under the guise of national security. When Bourne gets his hands on the secret documents, he sees a laundry list of murdered citizens that go beyond the few we know about in the film. Unless these Americans citizens were killed in country, what has been done to them would be legal in today’s age. The Obama administration has come out with a new law that says it is legal for the United States to kill a citizen when they are abroad and believed to be doing national security threatening activities. We live in a terrorist world today, but people and countries are punished by the United States when it’s believed what they do can be used by terrorists. Well, if you need a blanket excuse, it’s right there to go after almost anyone and so it’s legal.
The only thing illegal in the film would be the murder of the British national journalist. Unless the two countries found a way marry their efforts again terrorism even more, it would be a major crime today; the rest can all be rationalized as legal in today’s world. In the film, when all the information comes out, it brings down major heads of the CIA who had associations with the program, but would this really happen? It’s a more important question to ask than you may think because Bourne Ultimatum puts some major crimes on the table and seeks resolution the same way people do in real life, but it’s been only three years and already the film is a historical fiction and obsolete. Even worse movies than the Bourne Ultimatum put up hypothetical scenarios which could happen in real life if all the fictional elements were actually true. That’s usually the divider between fiction in movies and reality – the idea unlikely things ever really happening to bring out their truths, but in the final Bourne film, even the fiction in the story is mostly just fiction.
TV Viewing: Payback (1999)
I have to say, I really like Payback. Whenever it comes on TV, like it is on TNT now, I have to stop what I am doing and just enjoy the movie. It’s especially true if I am lucky enough to catch the flick right at the beginning like I did tonight. When the movie was released, it got no special attention. Mel Gibson had his offbeat action comedy series with The Lethal Weapon series so why was this movie anything special? Honestly, if the writing is any better, it’s only that way because it has a better focus. Lethal Weapon can be fun, but often times it got too domestic comedy for my taste. Payback is straight grit so there is a better payoff.
There’s more though. Beyond the purposeful style references, this film is an homage to an old kind of movie. The category is the quintessential modern guy movie. During the 60s and 70s, only James Bond was an elite figure of intrigue both mentally and physically. The normal character was more like Steve McQueen’s Bullitt or Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry. They excelled in a few areas, but were lackluster in many others as well. Dirty Harry didn’t know a dangerous situation he couldn’t pursue on his own and Bullitt actually seemed to be a bad detective. An original review of the 1960s chase film actually just listed all the ways Bullitt wasn’t very good at basic detective skills, but the point of Bullitt and Harry Callahan is that their exuberance elsewhere is what made it up for these things. This all goes back to Humphrey Bogart debuting his “Bogie” character in The Maltese Falcon and defining how being a man is what can make all the difference in the world.
Payback plays up that machismo to a more apparent effect. Not only is Mel Gibson’s Porter a distinguishable man of action and charm, but he pursues his means to an end at all illogical costs. The only difference now is that the stupidity of his action is obvious. He risks life and limb against the mob to recapture just $70,000 he lost from a busted deal. When a cop is being dumb in a crime case, he’s doing it to the audience’s non-knowledge of how most crime investigations go down. In fact, since movies have long deluded how criminals are really captured and prosecuted, audiences have even less idea about what is real. The mission of Porter is just dumb and the movie plays up his delusional machismo with every other character in the movie confusing what amount of money he actually wants back and why he even would be interested a sum so little. Porter acts like there could be a principle to the payment, but is a principle of $70,000 worth your life? Not at all, but as James Brown’s It’s a Man’s World is blaring over the soundtrack, all we need to know the point is in the character himself.
The movie makes the viewer aware Porter is ultimately not in control of his life. He’s cunning and deceptive and can handle himself physically, but numerous scenes show him escaping death at the whim of luck. Porter also spends a lot of time on his back and getting pummeled so his physicality has a lot of limits. Whenever an old film would show a character in any defeat, it would ignore the macho contradiction of the defeat element and continue on. Payback operates between a level of comedy because Gibson embraces the scenes and over acts them like he was in a different movie, but ultimately the story believes in the physicality of Porter as a tough guy who can almost do anything. When Maria Bello’s character speaks of Porter with reverence, there is sincerity in her voice. Their story continues on until the end and is believed in while they also have to do some questionable things to get ahead.
The movie Payback ultimately reminds me of is Out of Sight. Made only a year before, the film also makes a believable caper story out of an absurd situation played up to mock the convention of the genre it’s referencing. A lot of that movie is excellent and still memorable. Payback is just a little more conspicuous about the mockery. Only sometimes do other characters act dumb in ways which undermine their status. My father loves the film and references it alongside other older movies of his generation yet he does not pick up on (or care about) the comedy element of someone as thickheaded as Porter being anything to really admire in a man. There are generalities to Porter which are attractive, but there is not one scent of rationality to him either. I still admire the low level charm of the comedy since the film ultimately works as both an action story and a comedy.
“Dancer in the Dark” Shakedown
My Limited Beef With Lars Von Trier
Lars Von Trier has been a pest in my film going. To compare to him other filmmakers I generally dislike, I would argue I also don’t hate the Coens or Tarantino, I would admit I have a general distaste for them, but I’ve just really disliked every Von Trier film I’ve ever seen. That doesn’t mean I have a dislike or hatred for him in general because I’ve only seen five of his films. I’ve ignored a lot of his work so I don’t believe I’m qualified to give an opinion on the man overall. Life’s too short to try see a majority of films by someone when even a small sample hasn’t inspired you in the least. Looking ahead to newer Von Trier fans I can see, Anti- Christ does fascinate me, but because it seems like Von Trier isn’t going to try to hedge the content in that film the way he does in Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark. Anti-Christ at least looks like a different beast.
Dancer in the Dark is highly problematic because of its attempt to make thematic meaning between dogme 95 and the musical. It’s not that Von Trier isn’t right to attempt to combine structural approaches, but he finds the dumbest and most obvious contrast to Dogme 95 in exploring a musical tone. The musical tone is even more ridiculous because the story is dreary and bleak from the get go. Bjork’s situation looks seemingly helpess, but gets even sadder when her accidental misfortunes allows her to be arrested and executed. Von Trier tries to find positive things about her life to counterbalance the dismal reality she occupies, but a musical imagination is just a stagnant opposite of her world. It would be fine for one sequence in the film, but it doesn’t develop the story or elaborate on her situation much at all. It just occupies time and space and repeats in the same manner through out the film. It’s use becomes so heavy handed that it’s blatant repetition just thuds any true context that can be given to Bjork’s personality in the film.
Also, the musical numbers are horribly done. All the musical numbers are song and dances with a number of people involved, but Von Trier continually films each one with millions of edits and quick cuts between a lot of different camera angles. There is little progression with how the musical numbers develop in Bjork’s brain over the course of the film. They do not start out seemingly pleasant and get more chaotic and disturbed as her situation plummets even more, but just remain relatively the same through out. Also, the quick cuts and edits do not elicit a cognitive style. Von Trier never tries to change camera angles, mix in different type of shots or even change the tone at all. All he does is set up a million cameras from various coverage points of view and just films the numbers. The only distinction Von Trier has is with the quick cuts, but they become bland and boring immediately.
If musical criticisms need clarification, my argument has nothing to do with the choreography. It has something to do with the editing, but that is a lower level criticism. The main level to my criticism has to do with how the musical aspects has little to add to the film. That’s important because they are so overly handled through out the film so it affects the rest of the film. Yes, what Von Trier does is different, but he does it at such an obvious and simplistic level. I’m more inclined to wish Von Trier took notes from Fellini who made a drama into a musical (of sorts) when he did 8 1/2. He had success because he didn’t make the musical montages overly obvious. He found ways to interweave them into the text of the main story. During 8 1/2, before long, the viewer has little notion of what reality is and isn’t. That’s a psychological rendering of the musical mixing into reality, but Von Trier has little interest to blur the lines in his approach. The musical numbers are black and the realism is white. Does Von Trier need to exactly duplicate Fellini? Not at all, but he does need to come up with a concept of some equivalence in thought.
I think Von Trier does this because he thinks the content of the film will overwhelm viewers. In some people’s case , it seems like it did. Fine. I’m always skeptical of stories that are about extremely sad situations because abuse of those stories are so common. Artists feel like they can get away with anything in the abstraction process because the general story is so sad, but that just shows film is the easiest art to fall prey to in the emotional category. It’s good that Von Trier dabbled with other structures, but different alone isn’t good.
Rolling With Stone, dir. Sarah Bertrand
This isn’t an informative blog post about a new documentary I have the skinny on and want to share with you. While I do know the basic details in that it is a doc about Oliver Stone making his own documentary, South of the Border, which is his expose of the current Latin America and its relationship with America, I don’t know who the director Sarah Bertrand is and I don’t know when and how we can expect this film. Supposedly she has made her own documentary about Stone’s process of filmmaking and the personal juncture which got him to want to make the film at the point of time in which he does.
All I am asking is for someone who has information on this documentary to come forward and give me an idea of where it’s at in the production stage and what we can expect. South of the Border will not be released in America until this summer so if Rolling With Stone gets any kind of release, whether viral or on DVD, it wouldn’t be until after Stone’s film premieres. I know this is more of a personal blog, but sometimes people associated with a film do searches of their own work online and see what kind of feedback it is getting. That person could come forward and be a little helpful to this lowly blog. Haha, thanks!
Guy Maddin’s Night Mayor
A new short film by Guy Maddin has come online. Those who have the unfortunate situation of not seeing anything in his filmography can get a full blast of his technical wizardry and style in a short film that is anything but muted or unlike the temperature of his feature films. Entitled Night Mayor (a play on “nightmare”), the film is about an immigrant to Canada, the inventor Nihad Ademi, who has dedicated himself to sounds and switches over from playing the Tuba to recording the Northern lights and getting noises from the ether by relaying them back into a whole host of machines and instruments he has created which do numerous things, including take the noises and transfer them into images.
A continuing theme in his films, it is about the history of recording and making images. The flow of the images are wonderful and eclectic, but Maddin contains the virtuosity of images to a limited number of sets, actors and scenes. The story relays actual time and history through narration and the film relays the story by doubling back on the same images, changing the lens, camera speeds, distortions and angles to change to the juxtaposition. Included in these general visual alterations are a whole host experimental touches which includes different light tones, low grade effects and other things which were norms for underground filmmakers since the early 1920s. Maddin even instills earlier technical norms of the earliest cinema.
Some believe these shorts can be extended into longer efforts, but Maddin shows exactly why they are better in short film form. Because he plays with a limited number of sets and actors, he is telling the story by revolving the way he shows images, building up steam in the film to a strong finish where everything (including a new brisk pace of editing) comes to its intended calamity, but the whole point of him operating with limited number of sets is so he can lift up mundane images and make them look beautiful through synchronization of effects and technicalities so it blows over to a creation of visuals so twisted and mangled that they merge together and becomes a myriad of musical visualizations. The reason I use musicals because they are based on specific structures which jump thoughtful assumptions and enter into the brain waives where the listener (of the viewer, in this case) gives themselves over to the motions of the piece. Nihad Ademi wants to make noise miraculously become images and Maddin, in provoking this creative process, makes filmmaking feel a little more musical.
Cannes Line Up and Omissions
Well, the news has come and brings with it a few surprises. First, the omissions seen more glaring with Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life not being ready for Cannes and Julian Schnabel’s Miral being offered only an out-of-competition slot which has apparently made Schnabel to pull his film from even showing at Cannes. The new roll out will apparently happen at the Venice Film Festival.
In competition, you have a race that is ready for a dark horse candidate to take the top award. I’m surprised Doug Liman’s Fair Game will be in competition, but every year Cannes seems to like to have one American film in that place where it’s contending but doesn’t have any real chance to do much of anything. I’m happy by the return of Bertrand Tavernier with The Princess of Montpensier. He’s a personal favorite of mine, a filmmaker who started out in the area of quality realism but has stated storytelling is best to exist in a realm where story isn’t so structured and should flow to currents which cannot be broken down by critics for purposes of mass consumption in their world. People applaud filmmakers who appease critics, but they don’t understand the trappings of being too “critic conscious” where a filmmaker angles their films to be understood more so than enthralling or riveting. Tavernier has adequately dedicated himself to a mantra of exceeding easy credibility conventions.
Other than that, festival favorites like Mike Leigh and Abbas Kiarostami are back in competition. Kiarostami is debuting his first international work with a story set outside of Iran. Out of competition-wise, Jean Luc Godard is in Un Certain Regard along with Lodge Kerrigan who is finally coming out with his first film after the wonderful, Keane. Woody Allen and Oliver Stone get official out of competition screenings. The Guardian is reporting that Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps will close the festival.
Official line up:
IN COMPETITION
“Another Year” (Mike Leigh)
“Biutiful” (Alejandro González Iñárritu)
“Burnt by the Sun 2″ (Nikita Mikhalkov)
“Certified Copy” (Abbas Kiarostami)
“Fair Game” (Doug Liman)
“Housemaid” (Im Sang-soo)
“La Nostra Vita” (Daniele Luchetti)
“Of Gods and Men” (Xavier Beauvois)
“Outrage” (Takeshi Kitano)
“Outside the Law” (Rachid Bouchareb)
“Poetry” (Lee Chang-dong)
“The Princess of Montpensier” (Bertrand Tavernier)
“A Screaming Man” (Mohamed-Saleh Haroun)
“Tournée” (Mathieu Amalric)
“Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” (Achitpong Weerasethakul)
“You, My Joy” (Sergei Loznitsa)
OUT OF COMPETITION
“Robin Hood” (Ridley Scott) (opening film)
“Tamara Drewe” (Stephen Frears)
“Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” (Oliver Stone)
“You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” (Woody Allen)
UN CERTAIN REGARD
“Adrienn Pál” (Ágnes Kocsis)
“Aurora” (Cristi Puiu)
“Blue Valentine” (Derek Cianfrance)
“Chatroom” (Hideo Nakata)
“Chongqing Blues” (Xiaoshuai Wang)
“The City Below” (Christoph Hochhäusler)
“Film Socialisme” (Jean-Luc Godard)
“Ha Ha Ha” (Hong Sang-soo)
“Heartbeats” (Xavier Dolan)
“Life Above All” (Oliver Schmitz)
“The Lips” (Ivan Fund and Santiago Loza)
“Octubre” (Daniel Vega)
“Rebecca H. (Return to the Dogs)” (Lodge Kerrigan)
“R U There” (David Verbeek)
“Simon Werner Has Disappeared” (Fabrice Gobert)
“The Strange Case of Angelica” (Manoel de Oliveira)
“Tuesday, After Christmas” (Radu Muntean)
“Udaan” (Vikramaditya Motwane)
MIDNIGHT SCREENINGS
“Blackhole” (Gilles Marchand)
“Kaboom” (Gregg Araki)
SPECIAL SCREENINGS
“Abel” (Diego Luna)
“Chantrapas” (Otar Iosseliani)
“Draquila: L’Italia Che Trema” (Sabina Guzzante)
“Inside Job” (Charles Ferguson)
Nostalgia for the Light” (Patricio Guzman)
“Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow” (Sophie Fiennes)
I used to like you but now I hate you
Daniel Chase Peach, an up-and-coming filmmaker, made this short documentary, I used to like you but now I hate you, about a local wrestling event in Kentucky. Instead of tell the story for the sake of just covering the event, he angles it from select perspectives: the highlighting of an older woman, young children ringside and the happenstance of wrestlers during downtime. In between these assorted images, there is a heavy metal soundtrack to show the highlights of what looks like a royal rumble match.
The film does not shy away from the violence of the environment or the match itself. In fact, it shows how violence is married to an absurd but sincerely emotional life where the fans get involved and take everything to heart. The wrestlers react in turn and play up the drama to the highest points possible. On TV, the show looks silly but when people are putting themselves on the line for nothing in small quarters in dingy buildings, there is a happy sadness to the situation. Darren Arnofsky’s The Wrestler was fine on many levels, but one thing missing was the thrilling and fun element of wrestling where people live for the adrenaline of the show. This short documentary better objectifies all the facets of the wrestling world.
I Served the King of England
Jiri Menzel , 40 + years after Closely Watched Trains
That never happens for me, but both realms do explain the great Jirí Menzel. He hasn’t been a prolific filmmaker since making his classic, Closely Watched Trains, but I Served the King of England is a crowning work for him. It blends his trademark humor and perceptive filmmaking with a magical and semi epic story. Menzel proves once again that he may be one of the most pleasant filmmakers ever. Every part of this film is appealing and inspires a lot of smiles. And like Closely Watched Trains, it deals with the Nazi take over of Czechslovakia, but old age hasn’t tempered Menzel. If his new film is any evidence it means he has become even more daring and comic.
I Served the King of England is a hedonistic musical of filmmaking and comedy. It is about a series of episodes involving the adventures of Jan Díte, a career waiter and purveyor of women and delights. The joke is that he was born small, but it gave him the blood to achieve big things. His main ambition in life is to become a millionaire, but he achieves the goal through many intervals and fantastic little adventures.
The beginning of the film suggests that the comic episodes will be simple and slight, but the episodes continue to grow in comic outreach and daring. Slowly the story gets more involved in the idiosyncrasies of the protagonist and starts to run with his imagination. He is the narrator of the film and is self involved with his stories so each episode never has a dramatic point like a third source was telling the story, but each story does exist good nuance.
That is the whole point of Menzel. In his great film, Closely Watched Trains, he filmed the story to an even still so no event or scene would stand above the others (except the last scene, of course). The memory of the scenes as a collective unit is what mattered. It’s just in this film Menzel is so much adventurous and daring with his filmmaking. He continues on with an old theme of flattery with women, but Menzel adapts the spirit of Fellini a little bit with making fanciful filmmaking and hyper realistic imagery everywhere in the film.
The beauty of this film is that Menzel isn’t just copying Fellini. He’s much more quaint with the stylistic touches and keeps his excellent eye for compositional shots. Fellini allowed the camera to dominate an entire set and leave the audience with big impressions, but Menzel is a structured storyteller in keeping the shot on one scene and working with tight specifics in it. This style allows him to pull off some magical shots late into the film when the story takes on the historical ramification of the Nazi invasion. Simple shots of trains filled with Jews in the background are excellent foreground to the tragedy that is coming in the story, but the film never gets too dramatic. It keeps everything within the context of it’s tragic comedy twist.
The film wasn’t the funniest thing to watch. Only a few scenes really got me to laugh, but most of the times I think the film just wanted me to smile. That I did a lot and really loved every second of the viewing. It’s beautiful and I hoped it’s seen by more people. In comparison to Closely Watched Trains, the film is more elaborated on in the fantastic and whimsical. Some could say it’s overblown, but I consider this film to be a congratulation film for Menzel. Jean Cocteau made a similar film when he made Testament of Orpheus and just let loose with his talents, but Cocteau didn’t expand upon his great filmmaking there. In I Served the King of England, Menzel shows new levels of comic flair in his filmmaking that make a lot of sense for his personality.
Film Splatter 