I have to get back into this habit - and with another big snowstorm and the city (and my office) shut down, this looks like an excellent time to try it!
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night - 11/15
Extremely stylish, black and white vampire film, in Farsi. The vampire is a girl, who dances alone to 80s records in her room, then wanders the empty night city in a chador, seeking whom she may devour. The plot, as such, revolves around a cool looking young man with a junkie father and evil dealer - when the vampire kills the dealer, the boy takes him money and drugs, dresses up like dracula and goes to a party - on the way home he meets the vampire girl, and ends up at her place in love. In the end, they hit the road, with his cat, like an origin story for the vampires in Only Lovers Get Out Alive. It is all very handsome, and rather witty, though a bit thin.
Princess Kaguya - 10/15
Film by Isao Takahata, adapting an old legend - a bamboo cutter finds a baby in a bamboo stalk, takes her home and raises her - she grows supernaturally fast, and when money appears in the bamboo, he concludes they are meant to move to Kyoto and make her a princess. They do, and everyone is miserable about it. In the end, she remembers she comes from the moon, and must go back, though she doesn't want to. This leads to a fair amount of hopeless nostalgia and regret, until Buddha and his court come down from the moon to take her away. It is all a very beautiful film, funny in places, and moving, and sad, and probably a bit too long.
Inherent Vice - 12/15
Now we hit some of the highly anticipated releases of the new year - holdovers from last year - Oscar Bait! Though this one seems to have been left out. PT Anderson directs Joaquin Phoenix in a Pynchon adaptation - a shaggy dog detective story, drawn from the tradition of the long goodbye, the rockford files, philip k dick, the big lebowski, chinatown, and miscellaneous other things that might occur to you. We have Doc Sportello, a stoner PI whose former old lady somes by with a story about a kidnapping scheme against her current sugar daddy a real estate mogul who has become an acid head; the next day Doc gets a case from a black ex con looking for an ayryan brother ex con who works for Wolfmann (the sugar daddy); Doc visits and gets whacked on the head and accused of a murder, and Wolfmann's kidnapping. After this he gets a case from a woman looking for her husband who was supposed to be dead but someone deposited a lot of money in her bank account. He visits Wolfmann's wife; he visits his DA girlfriend; he is questioned by the FBI. That sets it up - from there on, the film is a series of absurdist situations that seem like classic detective story set ups but don't quite come off. There's something called the golden fang, that might be a boat, might be a drug smuggling cartel, might be a group of dentists doing coke and fucking their receptionists and dodging taxes. People come and go, die, disappear and reappear and in the end, he engages in some not-quite-unbelievable heroics, and then does something selfless, and Shasta Fay comes back. There might be a complicated scheme in there involving the FBI and Las Vegas, but Anderson whips past that in a hurry. The whole is confusing as heck but consistently amusing and clever - it ends up feeling like finding some channel showing a whole season of some detective show with a lose overall plot, that you keep clicking back to during commercials of the red sox game, so you ed up seeing it in unconnected 5 minute chunks. It's a really good show, though - sometime, you should sit down and watch it straight through! (Actually - it felt a lot like the episode of the Rockford Files that was playing at a laundromat I was at a couple days before Christmas. Playing commercial free, but I was coming and going, and doing laundry, and couldn't hear over the machines, and was reading a book while I waited anyway. Stray bikers and ex-cons and rich guys and land deals and cars screeching around corners and attempted murder and cops and lawyers, all blended together coming and going and cracking wise. Probably, on balance, more satisfying this way that actually watching the whole episode straight through.)
Mr Turner - 12/15
Mike Leigh's film about the artist JMW Turner from age about 50 to 75; works through his troubles and triumphs - hi relationship with his father, with his housekeeper, with his fellow artists and occasionally with collectors and royalty. (Ruskin loves his work - Queen Victoria is not amused.) Somewhere in there, about the time his father dies, he befriends a woman who runs a boarding house, and then beds her, and carries on a long affair with her, to his death - a time and place where he seems to be quite happy, most of the time. In the rest of his life, he is a bit of a pill. It is interesting, the art is fantastic (Turner was a bit of a 20th century abstractionist, before the time) - he is something of a son of a bitch at times, but not always, and indeed, part of the point is to undo all the easy conclusions - art requires suffering? artists are bastards? artists are exalted souls? artists - are anything other than people who work hard and create beautiful things that move other people. The film itself of course is extraordinarily beautiful, as Leigh and Dick Pope work to see the world like Turner saw it, at least out of doors.
Two Days, One Night - 12/15
Another fine film from the Dardennes brothers, this time about a woman (played by Marion Cotillard) who, when she is about to go back to work after being out with Depression, learns that she has been laid off. Or will be laid off - the workers were given a choice of letting her go, or losing their bonuses - they voted for the bonuses, but under pressure from the bosses, so there will be another vote. She gets a weekend to try to convince people to save her job at the expense of their 1000 Euros. That's the plot. It's a handsome film, with their usual sense of propulsive drive - though starts to feel a bit like treading water. And the plot is particularly melodramatic this time, with the poor woman on the verge of another breakdown te whole time, and - well, there's a fistfight, aa suicide and a marital breakdown before the weekend ends. Of course, most of the Dardennes brothers' films are melodramas, disguised in their over the shoulder through the streets of Liege filmmaking style - but this one feels a little more contrived than usual. But still handsome and smart, and Cotillard is more than worth it.
Selma - 11/15
Good old fashioned political fiction about the Selma marches - centered on Martin Luther King mostly, though surrounded by people, doing their own thing. It is all very well done - solidly filmed and constructed, put together like an old fascioned war film, The Longest Day or something like that. Might (like those films) be a bit too slick, a bit too much of the Big History story for its own good - but it is still very good. It has engendered some controversy - mostly about LBJ - which might have some merit, though I'm not convinced. It might underplay his role a bit - but it isn't really his story. It's King's story, and the voting rights movement's story - LBJ provides the political obstacle they have to overcome, you might say to get the VRA moved to the top of the legislative pile. I dont know enough about the actual history to know if this is more unfair than it seems - in general the film seems more than reasonable. If it has a flaw, it's that it poses economic justice against political justice - from what I know of King and Johnson, both seem to have understood the importance of both, economic and political rights. You can't have one without the other. I suppose, though, drama requires arguments about strategy, not about tactics (and the choice of how to get to two necessities, is one more of tactics, maybe), so this has to seem like a starker choice.
Duke of Burgundy - 9/15
This is a very hard film to evaluate - gorgeous looking, clever, but rather empty. It's a deliberate throwback to a kind of 70s art-porn horror film - somewhere between Jess Franco and Robert Altman's Images (both of which live somewhere on that continuum) - though mostly short of the porn and horror. Plenty of art, though. There is a story, more or less - two women, Cynthia and Evelyn - Evelyn seems to be a maid, Cynthia a professor who bosses her around - though this is quickly revealed to be a Game - Evelyn is writing the scripts, Cynthia playing her part... They are lovers, more or less happy enough, living this rather excessive S&M role playing life - though cracks appear. Does Cynthia get tired of the dress up and fake cruelty? Is Evelyn doing chores for other people? is she doing more than chores for them? Can Cynthia get revenge by wearing comfortable PJs and dirty socks and ignoring the safe word? We shall see. There are also butterflies and other bugs pinned in their cases, and lectures on entomology, and recordings of insects at play. If this were the Brothers Quay or Jan Svankmajer, these might come to life - they do turn into a Brakhage film at one point.... Anyway - a bit underwhelming, but a handsome film, that gets its 70s style down - especially the credit sequence, which might be the best part of the film, really nailing the feel.
Showing posts with label PT Anderson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PT Anderson. Show all posts
Monday, February 02, 2015
Thursday, September 27, 2012
The Master and Such
The Master arrives, like all the PT Anderson films before it, on waves of hype and praise and some complaint - I suppose I could review it, but the world abounds in reviews, and I have other things on the mind, so I think I will just make a list of things that caught my attention...
1) My first impression of the film is of how perfect Joaquin Phoenix looks for 1950 USA. That lean, hard body, skinny, strong, but with no definition - I look at old pictures of my father and uncles in the 40s and 50s and they look exactly like that. It goes a long way toward selling the character. Freddy looks right. Now, his behavior, his movements, ways of standing, and so on, are mannered, sometimes to the extreme - though I doubt they are as extreme as they look to 2012's eyes - but his body, face (and hair, clothes, and so on) are uncanny. He looks like 1950 come to life.
2) I saw two films last weekend, The Master and For Ellen. I liked For Ellen - a carefully observed character study, a quiet acting tour de force for Paul Dano - a nice little film, though that's all. (It's enough, of course, though perhaps underwhelming against the competition. Like all those perfectly acceptable little indie films in the spring that disappeared on contact with Moonrise Kingdom.) But reading through the reviews, I find For Ellen described as "poetic" - probably more than once. And this is something that bothers me.
I am taking a class on poetry just now, Modern Poetry at that, so it is in my head. I've written about it here before - I have theories, which I confess are a bit idiosyncratic. I think, for example, that film resembles poetry more than any other written form - I think its basic structure, the compilation of shots, as discreet units, arranged in a sequence, and building meaning out of their sequence, their arrangement, and out of a host of connections from shot to shot, sequence to sequence - is a process that is much closer to poetry than to prose. Film is poetic by its nature. But I think its poetry lies in its construction - poetry itself is defined, I think, by the heightened language - and by the structures patterns of language. By line breaks I am tempted to say.... And if a poem itself can be more poetic by being more explicit about its ambition, and its derangement of language, then so can a film, by highlighting its construction, its derangement of images. And so - how is The Master not poetic?
Why do people call For Ellen "poetic" but not The Master? I suppose it's obvious - it's the slow pace; it's those long the long held closeups of faces, of people alone, mostly Dano alone, thinking, waiting, holding the screen. It's the inserted symbolic shots - the sky, trees, the roads, motels, and so on. Those are the things that signify poetry in films. The Terence Malick stuff, I suppose. The lyricism, the contemplation.
But there's a lot more to poetry than lyricism. We are reading Ezra Pound just now in that class, and soon will be reading T. S. Eliot, and when you read The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock or the Wasteland, or you read Hugh Selwyn Mauberley - what do they have to do with films like For Ellen? And how are they not almost perfect prefigurations of a film like The Master? Look at what it is - a film that follows a man, his passage through life, through a period of time - but impressionistically, discontinuously. It is large and sprawling, but so is Whitman - so are Pound and Eliot - Milton, Dante. And look at how it works - dense, allusive, built around patterns, rhymes and rhythms, condensed to hard, specific images, arranged to play off the images around them. How is it not poetic?
As it clips along, Freddy on a beach, Freddy at sea, Freddy insane, Freddy trying to work in a store, Freddy fucking a store model, after half poisoning her with his concoction of photography chemicals and whatnot), Freddy fighting with a complacent bourgeois, Freddy among the migrant workers, Freddy running across a field, Freddy on the waterfront - the scenes come, without connective tissue to the last, a device you will find, I say, in Pound and company, in Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, to name a name. Not just as ellipse - but with even sequential moments (as Freddy's fight with the workers, and flight from them across the field), the scenes can be constructed as if they were completely unconnected. And it continues, and like poetry, it builds patterns across scenes - runs multiple patterns: as simple as the way Jonny Greenwood's music seems to run separately from the scenes - layered over them rather than sculpted to match them. It's in the ways individual images can overpower the flow of images - Freddy running across a field; Freddy trashing a jail cell - or just Freddy's way of standing, walking, the way he seems placed against the grain of every scene he's in. It shifts tone, between scenes, within scenes. It repeats images - moments, images, memories? or just the way an alcoholics' life falls into dreadful repetition - though the film never announces anything like that, anything like a clear meaning to the images it gives you.
3) I love it without loving it. I am in awe of it, without feeling the overpowering sense of its rightness I feel, for example, with Moonrise Kingdom. Is P.T. Anderson the equal of Wes Anderson as a filmmaker? He might be, to tell the truth - but Wes is more to my tastes. But - it's hard to ignore the coincidence of the names (I can ignore the coincidence of the two Paul Andersons, however) - but it really comes down to the fact that they have separated themselves from the other (American) filmmakers of their generation. No others match them - some may get there (Kelly Riechardt? Ira Sachs? etc.) - but none have yet. But the two Andersons have, I say, lifted themselves into the ranks of their forebears - Scorsese, Lynch, The Coens. They are in the ranks of the best world wide, the filmmakers whose works I wait for years between - Costa, Denis, Kurosawa, Apitchipong, older filmmakers like Hou and Kiarostami. I don't think it's an unjustified comparison. It took me a while to get there with PT (while I was with Wes from the go) - but this and There Will Be Blood seem to me to deliver what they promise, and what he has been promising - utter mastery of the medium, put in service of stories that show you things in the world you might miss. So yes: I can't say I have taken the measure of this film, not by a half, but I think I can say it is a great one.
1) My first impression of the film is of how perfect Joaquin Phoenix looks for 1950 USA. That lean, hard body, skinny, strong, but with no definition - I look at old pictures of my father and uncles in the 40s and 50s and they look exactly like that. It goes a long way toward selling the character. Freddy looks right. Now, his behavior, his movements, ways of standing, and so on, are mannered, sometimes to the extreme - though I doubt they are as extreme as they look to 2012's eyes - but his body, face (and hair, clothes, and so on) are uncanny. He looks like 1950 come to life.
2) I saw two films last weekend, The Master and For Ellen. I liked For Ellen - a carefully observed character study, a quiet acting tour de force for Paul Dano - a nice little film, though that's all. (It's enough, of course, though perhaps underwhelming against the competition. Like all those perfectly acceptable little indie films in the spring that disappeared on contact with Moonrise Kingdom.) But reading through the reviews, I find For Ellen described as "poetic" - probably more than once. And this is something that bothers me.
I am taking a class on poetry just now, Modern Poetry at that, so it is in my head. I've written about it here before - I have theories, which I confess are a bit idiosyncratic. I think, for example, that film resembles poetry more than any other written form - I think its basic structure, the compilation of shots, as discreet units, arranged in a sequence, and building meaning out of their sequence, their arrangement, and out of a host of connections from shot to shot, sequence to sequence - is a process that is much closer to poetry than to prose. Film is poetic by its nature. But I think its poetry lies in its construction - poetry itself is defined, I think, by the heightened language - and by the structures patterns of language. By line breaks I am tempted to say.... And if a poem itself can be more poetic by being more explicit about its ambition, and its derangement of language, then so can a film, by highlighting its construction, its derangement of images. And so - how is The Master not poetic?
Why do people call For Ellen "poetic" but not The Master? I suppose it's obvious - it's the slow pace; it's those long the long held closeups of faces, of people alone, mostly Dano alone, thinking, waiting, holding the screen. It's the inserted symbolic shots - the sky, trees, the roads, motels, and so on. Those are the things that signify poetry in films. The Terence Malick stuff, I suppose. The lyricism, the contemplation.
But there's a lot more to poetry than lyricism. We are reading Ezra Pound just now in that class, and soon will be reading T. S. Eliot, and when you read The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock or the Wasteland, or you read Hugh Selwyn Mauberley - what do they have to do with films like For Ellen? And how are they not almost perfect prefigurations of a film like The Master? Look at what it is - a film that follows a man, his passage through life, through a period of time - but impressionistically, discontinuously. It is large and sprawling, but so is Whitman - so are Pound and Eliot - Milton, Dante. And look at how it works - dense, allusive, built around patterns, rhymes and rhythms, condensed to hard, specific images, arranged to play off the images around them. How is it not poetic?
As it clips along, Freddy on a beach, Freddy at sea, Freddy insane, Freddy trying to work in a store, Freddy fucking a store model, after half poisoning her with his concoction of photography chemicals and whatnot), Freddy fighting with a complacent bourgeois, Freddy among the migrant workers, Freddy running across a field, Freddy on the waterfront - the scenes come, without connective tissue to the last, a device you will find, I say, in Pound and company, in Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, to name a name. Not just as ellipse - but with even sequential moments (as Freddy's fight with the workers, and flight from them across the field), the scenes can be constructed as if they were completely unconnected. And it continues, and like poetry, it builds patterns across scenes - runs multiple patterns: as simple as the way Jonny Greenwood's music seems to run separately from the scenes - layered over them rather than sculpted to match them. It's in the ways individual images can overpower the flow of images - Freddy running across a field; Freddy trashing a jail cell - or just Freddy's way of standing, walking, the way he seems placed against the grain of every scene he's in. It shifts tone, between scenes, within scenes. It repeats images - moments, images, memories? or just the way an alcoholics' life falls into dreadful repetition - though the film never announces anything like that, anything like a clear meaning to the images it gives you.
3) I love it without loving it. I am in awe of it, without feeling the overpowering sense of its rightness I feel, for example, with Moonrise Kingdom. Is P.T. Anderson the equal of Wes Anderson as a filmmaker? He might be, to tell the truth - but Wes is more to my tastes. But - it's hard to ignore the coincidence of the names (I can ignore the coincidence of the two Paul Andersons, however) - but it really comes down to the fact that they have separated themselves from the other (American) filmmakers of their generation. No others match them - some may get there (Kelly Riechardt? Ira Sachs? etc.) - but none have yet. But the two Andersons have, I say, lifted themselves into the ranks of their forebears - Scorsese, Lynch, The Coens. They are in the ranks of the best world wide, the filmmakers whose works I wait for years between - Costa, Denis, Kurosawa, Apitchipong, older filmmakers like Hou and Kiarostami. I don't think it's an unjustified comparison. It took me a while to get there with PT (while I was with Wes from the go) - but this and There Will Be Blood seem to me to deliver what they promise, and what he has been promising - utter mastery of the medium, put in service of stories that show you things in the world you might miss. So yes: I can't say I have taken the measure of this film, not by a half, but I think I can say it is a great one.
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