Roundup of Recent Films

I have to get better at this; I have to get better at writing about films, and other things, more quickly. I have been very bad this year. Things are dragging out longer and longer. I have to stop that. If nothing else, I will get back to this - sketching up a draft of notes about some recent films. This post stretches the idea of recent a bit beyond its usual online meaning: a couple months worth of new films, seen in theaters. That period has also included a good number of older films seen in theaters: Jose Luis Guerin and Manoel de Oliveira, particularly. There is always hope something may come of that. Anyway: a few notes on a couple months of films:

4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days: The Romanian abortion film, set in the days of Ceausescu's dictatorship. Made in a naturalistic style, handheld camera, something close to real time, following a girl trying to arrange an abortion for her friend. For all the political implications of it, it's really more like a Val Lewton film. A series of threats that don't, in fact, exactly materialize - lots of dead ends, hints and threats, but none come about - and most of the threat is suggested, but stated. The girl walking throught he dark city at night, looking to get rid of the fetus - complete with a Lewton bus - a dog jumping out from behind a dumpster she considers... which I suppose conveys the dread and paranoia, the routine horror, of the period as well as anything could.

Michael Clayton: Mistaken in some circles for a legal drama or a message picture, but in fact, a clean and well made neo-noir. George Clooney as Clayton, fixer at a law firm, broke, in debt to the wrong people, with a history of gambling and other bad behavior, and two brothers, one a drunk, one a cop: it's a classic set up. Clooney sets off to rescue a colleague who goes off his meds at a depo in the middle of a long horrible case - the man eludes him, and trying to get him back reveals all to our hero... I put off seeing it, fearing a Hollywood image picture, but in fact it is another fine genre piece, like so many of last year's films. Not among the very best - second tier - better than Before the Devil knows you're Dead, not as good as No Country for Old Men or The Assassination of Jess James (etc.). Clooney, of course, is wonderful - Tom Wilkinson is called on to ham and does. Tilda Swinton has a thankless role that she somehow pulls to near life (close enough for the Oscar, I se.) Sidney Pollack plays the same guy he played in Eyes Wide Shut, explaining it all to the hero...

Diary of the Dead: another zombie picture, this one presented as a shot on the fly documentary. A student film crew and their drunken teacher drive across Pennsylvania, fighting off zombies, sometimes with the help of people they meet along the way... It's okay - reasonably good zombie film, with silly pretentious blather about technology. Shawn of the Dead was better across the board, and it's hard to come up with more after that...

Witnesses: Latest Andre Techine film, set in 1984-85: a young man turns up in Paris, living with his sister in a hotel, which is really a brothel. He is gay, and soon he meets a nice older guy while cruising - before long the older man is squiring him around town, though without sex. The older man is friends with a couple, Emmanuelle Beart and her husband, an Algerian cop: it isn't long before the cop and the kid are having a wild affair. Then the kid gets AIDS, and things unravel. And go on. Techine does a nice job with this situation - especially after the boy gets AIDS, the other characters take turns accusing one another of things - selfishness, martyrdom. He handles it well - they attack one another, but Techine shows us enough to know that what they say isn't fair - but is a bit fair: none of them know the others as we do; but all of them miss things about themselves. Overall, a solid, well acted ensemble piece.

Be Kind Rewind: I certainly wanted to like this. I liked the last two Gondry films (even if one is a Kaufman film) - this one sounded fun. But in fact - it's lame. It's - what is it? It's strange - a big budget Hollywood extravaganza dedicated to the joys of low-tech filmmaking, low tech art. Though that's just where the ironies start: take the fact that contemporary technology, DV and computers and YouTube, make this kind of low tech filmmaking easy - making a film, any kind of film, on videotape? holy cow - that was work. That's harder than making a film on film!

The Band's Visit: one of the many foreign films jobbed out of a chance to win an Oscar, in this case because it was mostly in English (the common language of its Israeli and Egyptian characters). Not quite the tragedy that excluding 4 Months... or Persepolis or whatever was.  Not a bad film by any means, but basically sentimentalized Kaurismaki, in the desert... Complete with a band, funny clothes... Chet Baker?

Taxi to the Dark Side: Nothing special in the filmmaking, but then again, the subject does not allow it. Almost pure talking heads - but the story it tells is devastating. The story of torture in America, under the Bush administration, taking as its departure point the story of a taxi driver names Dilewar, arrested in Afghanistan and basically beaten to death in custody. From there it moves on to the rest of the sordid mess - Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, etc. And the Bush administration's continued campaign to get torture accepted. In Afghanistan and Iraq the administration behaved as perfect swine: they push for harsher interrogation methods, more intelligence (without much interest in whether the intelligence is any good), while insulating themselves from responsibility. They create the systems and the implication that harsher methods are allowed, without clarifying the rules - so when soldiers on the ground do something like at Abu Ghraib, or what happened to Dilewar, the soldiers take the fall. The administration creates pressures that lead to the soldiers abusing people, but in a way that they are never, officially, taking orders. At this point, noting the essential cowardice of the Bush administration is nothing new, but here it is again.

Still Life: Jia Zhang-ke's film set in the three gorges area of China. The film is split in two - a man and a woman come to town each looking for a lost spouse: he stays and works, she searches around, delivers her message and leaves. I can't really do justice to Jia Jiang ke in 3-4 sentences so I won't bother trying.

Paranoid Park: Latest fro Gus Van Sant - a skateboard kid goes to paranoid park, a skateboard park - bad things happen. What? Van Sant circles the story, around and around, as the kid writes about what happened, thinks about it - nicely done, almost a fugue state, really... Van Sant leaves us with the kid in suspension - what will he do what will happen? Probably not quite a match for Van Sant's other 00's films, but a fine work anyway.

CJ7 - latest Stephen Chow film - he plays a poor man who sends his kid to a good school, though the kid is bullied and not too well suited for it. Then he brings him a toy from the dump which turns out to be an alien from the planet Cute. The film is also very cute, and intermittently charming and funny,but not up to Chow's best. It has a couple moments, yes - Chow is at his best when he's most unhinged, and this one stays pretty securely fastened, but there is a fine dream sequence, as the kid and his alien space dog take vengeance on the brats at school... Otherwise the sentiment tends to overpower the wit, though it is still reasonably entertaining. 

Baseball Picks

We are getting close to the happiest day of the year - Tuesday, 6 in the morning - opening day! Nihon de! Time for some picks - I did this last year: got most of the AL right, botched the NL completely, but so did everyone, and you could have probably picked teams with a week to go and got none of them right. Given how completely the Mets and Padres choked... so here goes again...

American League:
East:
1) Boston - I have to pick them again. They brought back most of the team; they are reasonably young, so not likely to get hurt by injuries - they're going to be tough for a while. Though as usual, an injury or two to the wrong people and they're out of the playoffs. Losing Zumaya and the Gambler, probably, kept the Tigers on the sidelines last October, and that could happen here... But all things being equal, Boston's going to be near the top.
2) Yankees - pains me to say it, but I suspect they will hang around. See below for more reasons.
3) Toronto - I'd like to see them beat the Yanks - and they could, except they seem to have the worst luck, and unlike the Red Sox (and Yankees, somewhat) they don't have the depth to survive any injuries to key players. That's brought them down the last couple years. I think they have a better team than the Yankees though, and could even break better than the Red Sox, but they need everyone to be healthy and play well.
4) Tampa Bay - one of these years they are going to be halfway decent. Shields and Kazmir might get them started on the road, though they've almost had decent pitchers before. They have a solid array of nice young hitters, but have for awhile: until they start getting people out, they'll continue to stink.
5) Baltimore - can only dream of respectability.

Central:
1) Detroit - a murderer's row lineup, a couple prime pitchers - though behind the top of the rotation, things turn sour quickly, and there's not much waiting in the wings. So odds are they win the division, but it's hardly a sure thing...
2) Cleveland - there's no reason they can't maintain last year's success, even get better - they have decent hitters and all, and they are way deep in the pen, with 5-6 effective relievers - though oddly, the least of them get to pitch the 9th... this should be a good race in any case,between them and the Tigers, and I suspect this is where the wild card will come from this year.
3) KC - every year you have to pick someone to make a jump up or down - why not the royals? They were not bad last year - Greinke seems to be back on track; Brian Bannister emerged as a solid pitcher; Gil Meche brought stability... they have some good relievers - and some very interesting young players. If Butler and Gordon build on last year, they might get into hailing distance of being a decent team.
4) Chicago - still a complete wild card. Is Ozzie Guillen crazy? will they figure out who plays and who doesn't? will they have enough pitchers? I don't have a clue. I don't think they can win it this year, but otherwise, I have no idea what to expect. Somewhere between 65-85 wins, I guess.
5) Minnesota - everything must go! I hope Joe Nathan keeps his bags packed. It looks like another trip to the wilderness for the Twinkies, though like most of their disintegrations, this one probably won't last all that long. They still have nice core in Morneau, Mauer (if he can stay on the field), Young, Liriano (if he's healthy) - when a couple more of their young pitchers develop, they could be back in the hunt. Though probably not in time for Nathan or Morneau to benefit, not in Minnesota...

West:
1) California Angels - it's not a sure thing, but they do look strong: deep rotation, solid pen, Vlad, plus Figgins, Hunter, Anderson, and some promising youngsters - they should hang on to first.
2) Seattle - though the Mariners could get there too. Bedard ad King Felix is a nice way to start a rotation; Putz a nice way to end games; Ichiro is Ichiban, and they have decent talent around him, though nothing overwhelming. I think their chances depend more on something going wrong for the Angels, but they could be in the middle of things.
3) Texas - they might have rebuilt quicker and better than I thought - they have a lot of young talent - Kinsler, Hamilton, Saltamacchia [I'm not looking up how thats spelled] - though as usual it's all offensive talent. Odds are probably pretty good that more than one of those guys will, after blossoming in Arlington, will seek their fortunes elsewhere in a year or two, like Soriano, Texeira, etc.
4) Oakland - out with the old in with the new! maybe. Until the new is ready, the A's can look up to the rest of the division. Unless Texas pulls its usual disappearance.

NL:
East:
1) NY Mets - Santana helps. They had the best team last year, but ran out of pitching - same as the year before (though they did it in the playoffs in 06). Santana ands Maine though should stay on the field, and that might be enough to win.
2) Atlanta - they have some pitching depth, they have some nice hitters, they have Bobby Cox - they should be all right. They are more likely to vulture someone else's collapse though..
3) Philly - they can hit, but they are in trouble on the hill. They have gone 7 years winning in the 80s - tied for the longest stretch of that brand of mediocrity ever. I think this year they take the record.
4) Washington - actually look like they might have the start of a decent team. "Decent" is a relative term, of course.
5) Florida - they have the best player in the national league.

Central:
1) Milwaukee - why not? they were close last year - this year, why not? they have a very god core of young hitters, who could improve this year - Hall was off, Hardy collapsed - why not? if their pitching holds up, they should win.
2) Chicago - about the same as last year, aren't they? there is plenty of room for either improvement or collapse - of more of the same.
3) Cincinnati - another possibly up and coming squad: they need some pitchers to develop,and better innings from Arroyo, they need Cordero to be effective and others to emerge behind him, they need the young hitters to play well. If those things happen, they could content - it's still a weak enough division that if a bunch of them happen, they could win it.
4) Houston - their rotation is hideous. Their lineup though might save them. At least keep them around .500, and from there, who knows.
5) St. Louis - they've been coming apart for the last couple years,though they had 2 good weeks in 2006 and won it all. I don't think they will be in any position to do that again.
6) Pittsburgh - the what - 10th? - team so far that, if their young pitching develops this year, could take a major leap forward. Well - something forward: they don't have much in the way of a team on the field.

West:
1) Arizona - they added pitching over the winter, though their biggest problem last year was hitting - but they have a team of young hitters, who were inconsistent last year - seems to me the odds are good that Drew and Reynolds and Young will all get better - and they should get something out of Upton: so they might be about to start a run of championships.
2) San Diego - still have a great, deep pitching staff - though old; old and mediocre offense, though some of those guys - Kouzmanoff, or however he spells it, say - could step up. They'll take the division if other teams stumble.
3) Colorado - pitching remains a question, but they can hit, catch the ball, and they do have some nice young pitching talent. Might be asking a bit too much to expect them to have full seasons. Odds are they won't be able to play .500 for 145 games and still get to the world series though.
4) LA - can Joe Torre integrate his kids into the rest of the lineup? I'm not sure. I don't know how things will go out there. Could be a contender, could disappear. I'll be boring and split the difference - 85 wins in a strong division.
5) Sa Francisco - they too have some nice pitching. But Benji Molina is their cleanup hitter.

And so: playoff teams?
Boston - Detroit - Anaheim + Cleveland: Boston wins through.
New York - Milwaukee - Arizona + Atlanta: Mets, what the hell. It's a rematch of 1986! Revenge!!!

Awards?
MVP: I suppose it's A Rod's to lose in the AL. If that happy event occurs - who knows - Manny? Ortiz? Victor Martinez? Ordonez? Granderson? Miguel Cabrera? There's a lot of talent to choose among.
NL: I'll say this year is David Wright's year - the odd thing is that the best NL players are way more interesting than the best AL players - Wright, Ramirez, Utley and Rollins, Reyes, Fielder and Howard, Holliday, Tulowitsky,Braun - the AL has been beating theNL up for a while, but those days may be coming to an end.

Cy Young: AL - Josh Beckett, dammit! NL - hey: the best two pitches in baseball are out there - Santana and Peavy. Santana wins this year.

Rookie of the Year: Jacoby Ellsbury! vs. Justin Upton? I don't know - we'll see.

Is this why they're the RED Sox?

It's sometimes very satisfying being a Red Sox fan. The team has just voted to boycott their trip to Japan if their coaches and staff are not paid. It's easy to snipe at players for the money they get, but it's a bit different when they do it for others - coaches, staffers in this case. MLB can't make the players do much of anything - players have the power to get their money and perks. The rest of the staff is not so lucky - unless the players take their side and push for it. $40,000 may be chicken feed for David Ortiz or Mike Lowell, or even Francona, but it's gotta be a significant chunk of change for the rest of the staff. It's nice to see the players using their leverage for the people around them.

UPDATE: And, nice to see a happy resolution... Still - an odd situation, and gratifying to see the players using their clout to get something for someone else.

Iraq Invasion Anniversary

5 years ago now the United States invaded Iraq. In a month or so we can celebrate the end of major combat operations in Iraq. After that, 5 years of disaster. Trillions of dollars wasted. God knows how many dead. Only 4000 Americans dead! Most of them after "major combat operations" ended of course. None of the excuses for the war proved true - no weapons of mass destruction, no connections to Al Qaeda; none of the promised benefits have come about - the middle east is as unstable as ever, we lost a lot of leverage in dealing with other countries, Iraq itself remains a disaster, repressive, dangerous, not likely to improve on our watch. The US is weaker than it was before the invasion, we've undermined our economy fighting this useless and evil war, we've undermined (to the point of breaking) the constitution, we've debased the discourse beyond the awfulness of the 90s. It's been a bad stretch.

It stands as a testament to George W. Bush - the worst president this country has had, surrounded by incompetent villains, who take pleasure in their villainy (look at clips of Dick Cheney talking about going to the "dark side" to fight terrorism: his smug supervillain act) - but can't do anything right. They brag about their villainy, but it never gets them anywhere, they try to keep it secret but it all comes out, they fail fail fail at everything they touch. Except staying out of jail, most of the time. And finding ways to make money. They posture and preen as if all this badness makes them tough - but attacking Iraq was a pointless and cowardly act of bullying - almost certainly undertaken because they knew that Iraq had no WMD or anything else that could harm us. I don't know if they even care what a disaster it has been since - after all that trillion plus dollars in government money is going somewhere... Ah, what socialists capitalists have become!

Anyway: it's a rotten decade to be an American. Just hope things like that don't last, and get as many republicans as far from power as possible...

Uncanny Games

I have to admit up front - I'm not sure if I am going to see the American version of Funny Games or not. I'm sure it will be controversial - Jim Emerson has a bunch of posts up over the last couple days, (starting here and scrolling up), generally focusing on the reactions. Most of the reviews, and the conversation at his blog, talk about the film's take on violence and entertainment - comparing it to torture porn (either for reveling in violence and degradation, or for withholding violence degradation, nudity), sticking with Haneke's claims that the film is about violence and our reaction to violence.

This is strange, to me. I admit, all that is in the film, and it's what Haneke himself harps on (and harped on back in 1997) - but it's not what I saw in the film, when I saw the original. What I saw then was one of the most effective classical horror films I have ever seen. It gave me nightmares: convincing and genuinely disturbing ones - I am not usually unnerved by films, I was by this one. It worked.

But that aside - the story, the structure of the film, was, I thought, an almost paradigmatic horror film, a classical monster picture like Frankenstein or Dracula. Those great monster pictures, and horror more generally, are driven - maybe even defined - by the idea that our fears, whether of isolation, sex, growing up, death, etc., can be given a form and let loose on the world to torment us in real time. Maybe even more precise than that: that what we fear inside ourselves can take form outside ourselves and come to get us. And this is almost always acted out in the home and the family: something inside the home is incorporated as an alien being that invades the home. It's usually acted out literally, like here - the monster invades the home, the house itself; as well as symbolically - the monster disrupts the family. And - again - almost always through monster that is both a Double and Other: both part of us, like us, our mirror image, an image of a child, parent, etc. - and something alien, other, completely stripped of its normal human form.

It's a structure present in most of the great horror films: Frankenstein (a surrogate and monstrous child, who complicates a marriage, invading a home on the wedding night, etc. [that detail may be in the book, not the film - though the monster certainly invades the home in both the whale Frankensteins] ); Dracula (who replaces Harker, who certainly represents sexuality, desire and so on, who has to be invited in, but when he gets in makes the most of it - violating the integrity of our bodies and minds, another dominant theme in these films); it's there in many of the Val Lewton films - Cat People (the fear of sex releasing a monster); I Walked With a Zombie (the whole plot - the afflicted household, the relationship with the voodoo outside,the way the voodoo is brought in to the house, etc.); even in later films like Isle of the Dead - which does not have a literal family, but it does have a literal house - it posits the threat as something inside: the disease or the vorvolaka - who is, significantly, linked to Karloff's dead wife; plenty of angst about bodily integrity, losing control of our selves as well, in that one); Bava's horror films tend to work this way - Karloff's Wurdalak is paradigmatic - something from the home that becomes it's own double, and returns, becoming, simultaneously, part of the home and an invader of the home.) Eraserhead is another paradigmatic film (the child, the formation of the home, which immediately proves monstrous and destructive.) Rosemary's Baby. There aren't many that don't fit. It persists down to the present, though other kinds of horror have appeared as well: zombie films are not so easy to assimilate to this scheme: but Audition, Doppelganger, The Tale of Two Sisters all fit well enough. So, for that matter do Benny's Video, Cache, as well as Funny Games.

Because Funny Games fits the pattern almost perfectly. Its monsters, Peter and Paul, are unheimlich, as the Austrians might say. They come from inside the home, they are incarnated outside the home, as Others - as embodiments of fears, and then they invade the home, to violate its security, and the bodies and minds of the family. They are, socially, part of the same milieu as the family - same social class, same way of acting: this might have been even more obvious in the original version, with Arno Frisch and Ulrich Muhe playing criminal and father, as they did in Benny's Video. (Though I hadn't seen the earlier film at the time, and Funny Games was plenty effective.) But aside from that - they are also, quite clearly, products of that central fact of the modern home - the television.

That's worth a comment - the role technology plays in contemporary versions of these films. Children, sex, aging, death, the classic sources of the horror, have been augmented by technology, ubiquitous, domestic technology - televisions, telephones (Bava again, in Black Sunday!), computers, as well as things like toys, etc. Familiar technology, that turns against us. Which we get here. Its not the first time horror film monsters stepped out of the television - Cronenberg is fond of the idea; Poltergeist played with the idea; The Ring (and it's 8 million variations), of course. But it's quite rigorous here, and it's not like Haneke is subtle about it - the remote control scene is the most famous scene in the film.

I will, I think, let it got for now. Like I said - I don't know if I am going to see it or not. The first one was quite enough, thank you. But I do think the conversation about it, at least what I have seen has been ignoring the ways this film is an almost perfectly classical horror film. Comparisons to Saw and Hostel are evasions. And questions about whether people will see it as exploitation or critique of exploitation are evasions. I admit that Haneke has pumped up these aspects of the film - I'm not sure why: maybe to emphasize its disruptiveness, rather than its classicism. Maybe just to distinguish it from the rest of his career, because these themes - the disruption of the family, often from within; the specific role of technology as a kind of disease that destroys the home - are pervasive in his work. This one too - what's different is its treatment of violence... Maybe. Either way - it seems to me that Funny Games is less about violence as such than about the monsters that emerge from within our homes to destroy our homes...

Robin Hood

Somehow, I got this far in life without ever seeing The Adventures of Robin Hood, the Errol Flynn movie. How did I do that? It's one of those films that is so often cited, shown on TV, at least clips, talked about, it feels like I'd seen it. And I'd seen enough clips and shots from it for it to be very familiar - but I hadn't seen it. Boy - what a treat. I have been on an old adventure film kick - this, Captain Blood, a bunch of Douglas Fairbanks films, got quite a few more Flynn/Fairbanks etc. films in the queue... They are all quite fine - but this really is a cut above. It looks great, that eye-popping color; it swoops along - it starts quick and nothing gets in the way of the action; it's funny, clever, it mostly makes sense; it's acted with panache all the way up and down the cast - Flynn is superb, as is De Havilland; Claude Rains is oily and dangerous as Prince John, and Basil Rathbone - oh: would make Alan Rickman proud!



Its the template for every action movie to follow - wisecracks and action, secondary plots (love! family! what have you) alongside the action... It's much more effective than some of the earlier takes on the genre. Captain Blood and Fairbank's Robin Hood, especially, take forever to get going: both of them are half set up - it's well over an hour in before Fairbanks even starts being Robin Hood, and even then, most of the Robin Hood stuff is offscreen. Captain Blood is almost as bad, taking forever to get Flynn out to sea. None of that here - this one dives in, wastes no time giving us Robin Hood - and giving him to us in all his glory, swinging down on a vine, crashing Prince John's party with a dead deer... And building to a series of magnificent set pieces: the big party scene; the ambush in the trees; the archery contest, with its famous arrow splitting business; Robin's escape; the big brawl at the end - and that magnificent duel between Flynn and Rathbone. That alone is worth the price of admission - that one shot in the middle: long crane shot starting with the men fighting, they go out of frame and we see their shadows on a huge pillar in the middle of the screen, they come fighting back into the shot on the other side - sweet Jesus, that's a beautiful shot.



I can't get enough of it. I had to buy it.

Don't I Get a Saving Throw?

It's been a week for obituaries here - today, Gary Gygax, co-inventor of D&D. The blogosphere pays tribute, revealing some of their inner nerd - me too, I guess, me too. Is that saving throw gag too obvious? So what if it is? it's long since entered the vernacular, at least among certain classes of people - including a good many of my friends.

The truth is, I've never played all that much D&D. I started in college, and my brothers simultaneously discovered the game in middle school. I played at school, but I wasn't an enthusiast about it - even as a gamer, I was more into Diplomacy and Squad Leader. I was a history nerd, not a scifi nerd. I played a lot more with my brothers - though our games were a different kind of thing. The Making Light link mentions the mashup style of D&D - that was us. It was always a mix of war game and Hardy Boys, Bonanza & Gunsmoke, Get Smart, LOTR - in later days, this got out of hand, and we played characters based on William S. Burroughs, Zippy the Pinhead, ran dungeons derived from Borges or Eco, always working in jokes about contemporary politics, our friends, etc. Of course most of these things never quite got past the conception, and maybe writing up character sheets, and heading out to fight monsters but instead getting into a long conversation with a strange old man on the trail... once the dice started rolling, everyone got bored and went to the other room to watch the Braves.

Anyway: I don't talk about that kind of stuff here, but maybe I should. I've never really set down what this blog is supposed to be for - but the template adornments ought to be a hint - it really is a three headed monster composed of Captain Beefheart, Shohei Imamura and the Hardy Boys. The boys tend to get short shrift, I'm afraid. I manage to get around to talking about music often enough; and movies most often (when I get any posting done) - but the Hardy Boys, not so much. The Hardy Boys represent, well - not quite pop culture not quite trash culture - but maybe, nerd culture - or the odd corners of pop culture - or, maybe most of all - a kind of mashup culture, cartoons and paraliterature and YouTube and primitive cinema and Ed Wood and D&D and so on - not just disreputable things, but things that invite you to make of them what you want to. A Madvillain aesthetic. And that was something that D&D did very neatly: provided a means of chewing up and spitting out whatever caught your eye. It was, at its best, improvisational mashups - injokes and incongruous references the point of the exercise.

I don't think we were unique in that approach: I think it was built into the game, especially in the days when Gygax was writing it. "Lamentable Belaborment" spells - or the spell that made you tap and shuffle, heel to toe and shuffle off to Buffalo... made me happy.

Friday Top Ten

I've already made a couple music posts this week (and that reminds me - Tucker's got a couple posts about Larry Norman and christian rock - including a very cool Glass Harp clip), but let's try another one: the iPod was generous, walking home in the cold today.... here are some of the songs I heard.

1 Undertones - She can Only Say No
2 REM - Wake Up Bomb - from New Adventures in Hi Fi, which I have almost never listened to in all the years I've had it
3 James Brown - I Don't Mind - live at the Apollo
4 Neil Young & Crazy Horse - Hey, Hey, My My (From Weld)
5 Nick Cave - Oh My Lord - one of those wild epics of his, and a fine song
6 The Brian Jonestown Massacre - Fucker - I wonder what Anton's worked up about? some fucking bitch tried to drag him down, if I got the lyrics right - gee...
7 New Pornographers - Use It
8 Come - Brand New Vein - how did Hole become a big hit, and Come just a minor underground act? couldn't be Courtney Love starfucking, could it?
9 Eric Dolphy - Bird's Mother - Eric Dolphy is so good
10 Boogie DOwn Productions - You Must Learn - hey! BDP! nice stuff....

Let's see - what can we find for video? Can't find the song above, but here's the Undertones, doing Teenaged Kicks - can't beat that!

Another Guitarist Down

Goodness - two musical obituaries in two days - this one perhaps even more obscure than the last, but a good deal more central to my particular musical life. I see on Alicublog that Pere Ubu's Jim Jones has died. I doubt that the true depths of my devotion to Pere Ubu has come through on this blog: but they are, and have been, one of my favorites, since I first discovered them in the mid-80s. Jones was part of the Cleveland scene in the 70s, turning up on a great many records, and he joined Pere Ubu proper when David Thomas put them back together in the late 80s, and stayed throughout the 90s, until his health forced him to retire. Of all the Pere Ubu guitarists through the years, he's probably the least distinctive - of course Laughner and Herman and Thompson were about as distinctive as punk (and post and pre punk) guitarists got.... But Jones' stay was a pretty impressive run for the band. Not up to their first pass through (but what is? who was better in the late 70s?), but they still produced - what, three? great records (Tenement Year, Worlds in Collision, Raygun Suitcase), and 2 other excellent records, plus a great live record (Apocalypse Now) - they're on the shortlist of the best bands of the 90s, as well as the 70s... Jones' virtues are probably summed up in the solo on Memphis I mentioned a couple weeks ago - a basic, uncluttered, snarling riff that makes the song. He did that consistently, playing just what made the songs... I don't know how much of their less experimental and abrasive sound from that period was his doing, but it's good music, sometimes great, and he served it well.

Larry Norman

I see on Slacktivist that Larry Norman has died. That may not be an obituary anyone would expect to see here - I don't make much of my upbringing, but I have spent my time among the evangelicals. Saner evangelicals than what we usually hear about, but still... Oh, I remember the periodic paroxysms of the evils of rock and roll that went through my circles - the terrible, shocking revelations that the Rolling Stones used drugs! that "Queen" was slang for "transvestite"! and other wonders... This often translated into pressures to only listen to christian rock in some circles - it never had much affect on me (I was in the throes of Bruce Springsteen worship at the time), but around some people... Then, as now (from what I know of it), christian rock was a wretched and lifeless genre. There were three bright spots I remember: Phil Keaggy, who had the decency to shut up and play guitar (and was the first "real" concert I ever attended, featuring lots of soaring guitar solos - bless him); Keith Green - a strange, jagged, piano driven singer songwriter, whose songs hold up on their own to this day - I have quite a few of them on the iPod, highly ranked... And Norman - whose music did sometimes fall into a bland 70s soft rock vibe, but was still quite listenable - and topped with genuinely sharp, funny, smart lyrics. No wonder Black Francis name dropped him. Anyway - an hour on youtube later...

Acoustic version of Why Should the Devil Have All the Good music - a reminder of how funny he was:



And Electric:



And proof that it's not just me - here's Frank Black covering Six Sixty-six:

Jose Luis Guerin Films

It's taking me forever to write about the Harvard Film Archive's retrospective of films by Jose Luis Guerin - but I'm going to do it, no matter how long it takes. I suppose one of the advantages of writing about films like this, undistributed (mostly), usually only seen in festivals and special showings like this one, is that there is not the sense of timeliness you get with current releases. They'll show here and there, they'll turn up on video formats, and people will be talking about them, here and there, once in a while, for years. They are wonderful films: beautiful, clever, full of ideas and images that stay with you, and tend to get inside your head. You start thinking about other films through them - I do anyway. They create new contexts - for instance - seeing Tren de Sombras, with its reproduced (invented) films puts a twist on not just fake Nietzsche footage, but big budget Hollywood fare. They give me too many things to think about, and I might as well think about it in public.

This post, then, is just an introduction: capsule reviews of the films themselves. Subsequent posts will dive in a bit deeper. Hopefully sooner rather than later, though who knows.

Inisfree - shot in Ireland, on locations John Ford used for the Quiet Man, with extras from the Quiet Man, as well as discussions of the film, reenactments of scenes from the film, and so on. Guerin talked about the myth of the lost paradise, and its application to the Irish in America. But that myth comes up over and over in Guerin’s films, as we shall see. This is a handsome film, consistently interesting in what was on screen, but a bit fragmented and disorganized - it's a very young film, it seems.

Tren de Sombras - recreations of amateur footage from the 20s, at times presented as if real, at others shown explicitly as reproductions. Both are manipulated - the film is distressed, manipulated - slowed down, sped up, reversed, repeated, and so on, sometimes as if it were just the found footage, at other times, explicitly being manipulated for this film. This alternates with footage from the present - shots of the village and castle in Normandy where it was shot, some of them straight documentary, others more ambiguous. Guerin spends a lot of time in the house, shooting the rooms and props - shooting especially at night, the shadows on the wall, which make a visual rhyme to the distressed film: but that’s what a film is, after all - shadows on the wall.

En Construccion - this is the closest to a straight documentary of these films. Film about the destruction of a block of slums in Barcelona, and the erection of a new apartment building in its place. Gentrification, Catalan style! Shot over a year or so (though it took a couple more years of work - Guerin had the luxury of time because he had a student crew to work with - this was their education, three years making this film) - roughly following a group of characters. Juani and Ivan - a pair of lowlifes - he's lazy, does nothing - she's a prostitue, tough and charismatic (and very reminiscent of Vanda Duarte); some of the workers - the man in charge of the bricklaying and his son; another bricklayer and his two Morroccan assistants - one skinny and strong, the other a smart, talkative, communist; an old sailor turned tramp, and a couple of his friends; a couple kids - especially a girl, related to the foreman. Guerin films them as they build the place, start to finish basically, showing them working together, talking together, etc. - and then the place is done, and they are replaced by the finish carpenters putting in fixtures, and real estate agents giving tours, and prospective tenants complaining about the rest of the neighborhood. Though it ends better than that - with a family getting their kid to wave at the old people living across the street. And then we see Juani carrying Ivan down the street as the camera retreats and a crowd follows them - then she puts him down and he picks her up and we cut to credits...

(This film is very similar to Pedro Costa’s Vanda’s Room - story of a slum being razed, shot over a long period of time, etc. - and both of them centered on a dark haired husky voiced drug addicted woman - Juani and Vanda: who not only anchor the film, but were apparently instrumental in getting it made. Vanda’s room was the center of the production as well as the content of the Costa film - and Juani’s room was the center of Guerin’s production, their headquarters, and she was the liaison to the community. Both being made almost simultaneously, as well...)

In the City of Sylvia: 3 days in Strasbourg: a young man, day by day - first he walks around the city with a map, then settles into a café. The next day he comes back, and looks at the people at the café - we look at the people at the café - for a very long time. We watch them, we watch him watching (taking notes, sketching) - then, he sees one particular woman, and sets out to follow her when she leaves. Follows he through the city, at first without her noticing, then with the owman trying to evade him - he finally catches up to her on a tram, and tells her what he is doing. Is she Sylvia? He says he knew her, six years ago. She says no. He keeps trying - she says no. He apologizes and apologizes, and she gets off the tram, no longer angry at him. Later he goes to a bar, tries to talk to one woman, watches people dancing, while a bartender reenacts Manet. The next day, he’s back at the café, then follows another woman to a train station - where he sits all day, looking at people, as we do. And that is all.

Some Photos from the City of Sylvia: Black and white still photos related to the City of Sylvia film. Starts in Strasbourg, telling the same basic story of the fiction film: Guerin (or a narrator) looking for a woman he knew 22 years ago... Going to their old places, looking for her in the streets, riding a bicycle, etc. Starting there, it moves to the broader themes - the woman glimpsed - from Dante and Petrarch to Goethe to Alfred Hitchcock. (Doesn't mention Citizen Kane though that is the basic situation: a woman seen once, the man projecting a whole alternate life on her). Moves to Madrid, Florence, Avignon (where Petrach saw his Laura) - showing the streets again, women, etc. We see hints of the coming film: Manet’s Folies Bergere painting quoted in the fiction film; the graffiti - "Laure, Je T'aime" that occurs throughout the streets of Strasbourg comes from a wall in Florence - "Tiamo Laura" - etc. This is all very much in the vein of Chris Marker: still photos like La Jetee (and shots that are very similar to La Jetee - people on the streets, shots in museums, etc.) - the style of Marker’s essay documentaries, with written titles playing the same role as the voice overs in Marker's films. A travelogue, like Sans Soleil, which itself contains a meditation on Vertigo, among others - as are these two Guerin films. That, I fear, will have to be something I develop later.

And running through all these films is the theme of the lost paradise: the mythical place in Innisfree; the lost time and places in the lost films of Tren de Sombras; the destruction of the old neighborhood in En Construccion (which wasn’t much a paradise - though neither was Ireland, with its wars and unemployment, when you take it as it really was); and the lost women of the two Sylvia films. And that myth, the woman glimpsed who represents another life, suggests another dimension of these myths: the idea of the shadow self - the person you could have been, a life you could have lived. But I will have to come back to that, too.

There's an Award Show today, isn't there?

If I were going to watch it, this would be the year, I suppose. 2 honest to god outstanding films up for best picture - another very solid achievement in Michael Clayton, and even Juno, whatever its flaws, isn't embarrassing. Which of course means that Atonement will win. Anyway - everyone else will be watching it and writing about it: taking a not quite random sampling - here's The House Next Door's Oscar link page; Edward Copeland and company predict; and if I decide to pay any attention to it, I'm as likely to read Moviezzz' live-blog as to watch it. I have to wrap up - I'm going to see one of the many controversial films not in this year's Oscar race - The Band's Visit starts in 45 minutes: I'd best get going.

And of course the thing itself: the TV page, and the Academy's page.

Anyway, none of this is any fun without predictions and snark, so without further ado, the ones that interest me, at least a little:

Best Picture:

* Atonement - will win, because the worst film with a chance will win, and this has to be the worst of these films, not that I have any intention of testing that theory empirically.
* Juno
* Michael Clayton
* No Country for Old Men - this one could win, and if it does, may portend a laudable shift toward good films being rewarded. But I've thought that before.
* There Will Be Blood - this is what should win; this is a great film - and time may reveal it6 to be even more than that.

Achievement in Directing

* Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood
* Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men - I think they'll win this one, even if they don't win best picture. Maybe they should, though Anderson and Schnabel more than hold their own.
* Tony Gilroy, Michael Clayton
* Jason Reitman, Juno
* Julian Schnabel, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role

* George Clooney, Michael Clayton
* Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood - I assume he will win, as he probably should
* Johnny Depp, Sweeney Todd
* Tommy Lee Jones, In the Valley of Elah
* Viggo Mortensen, Eastern Promises

Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role

* Casey Affleck, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
* Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men - This is a good guess to win, and certainly deserving.
* Philip Seymour Hoffman, Charlie Wilson's War
* Hal Holbrook, Into the Wild
* Tom Wilkinson, Michael Clayton

Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role

* Cate Blanchett, Elizabeth: The Golden Age
* Julie Christie, Away from Her -another good guess, and the best... though this was not a year for the ladies, I'm afraid. The big downside of those 70s channeling genre films...
* Marion Cotillard, La Vie en Rose
* Laura Linney, The Savages
* Ellen Page, Juno

Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role

* Cate Blanchett, I'm Not There - this is my vote; it's a reasonable guess too, though the talk about it seems to have faded once the film came out.
* Ruby Dee, American Gangster
* Saoirse Ronan, Atonement
* Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone
* Tilda Swinton, Michael Clayton

Best Animated Feature Film of the Year

* Persepolis
* Ratatouille - this will win, which is more than fair; this and Persepolis should replace Juno and Atonement in the best picture race.
* Surf's Up

Original Screenplay

* Diablo Cody, Juno - this is going to win, I imagine
* Nancy Oliver, Lars and the Real Girl
* Tony Gilroy, Michael Clayton
* Brad Bird, Ratatouille - this is the one that probably should win
* Tamara Jenkins, The Savages

Adapted Screenplay

* Christopher Hampton, Atonement
* Sarah Polley, Away from Her
* Ronald Harwood, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
* Joel Coen & Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men - I don't know if it will win, but it's a fine choice. As are most of the rest - which means Atonement will probably win....
* Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood

Best Foreign Language Film of the Year - Ha ha ha ha ha!

* Beaufort (Israel)
* The Counterfeiters (Austria)
* Katyn (Poland)
* Mongol (Kazakhstan)
* 12 (Russia)

Achievement in cinematography

* “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” (Warner Bros.) Roger Deakins
* “Atonement” (Focus Features) Seamus McGarvey
* “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” (Miramax/Pathé Renn) Janusz Kaminski
* “No Country for Old Men” (Miramax and Paramount Vantage) Roger Deakins
* “There Will Be Blood” (Paramount Vantage and Miramax) Robert Elswit - another strong slate, but this is probably where I'd vote. It was a good year for the cameramen, and no mistake.

Philosophers on Film?

While I continue to procrastinate in writing about last week's Jose Luis Guerin retrospective (I will, I promise) - I see some interesting footage making the rounds (though it seems to have been around a while), purporting to be of Frederich Nietzsche, on his sickbed. It's not, of course - as Brian Leiter notes - it's digitally altered photos. It's pretty easy to spot - the pictures are famous; the animation isn't all that good (the morphing is obvious in most of the shots) - and the cinematography itself is quite impossible in 1899 - camera movement, zooms - no, no, no. On the other hand, there is this footage - which is a good deal more believable. For one thing, Nietzsche (or the actor playing him, if this is staged - which is always a possibility) moves - really and actually. The film itself looks about right: the camera is stable, the shots relatively brief; and it looks beat up in a convincing way. Splotchy, scraped up, with flashes of white - even on YouTube's crappy video, you can get an idea of what the actual damage looks like - even if it's not authentic, it's been accurately damaged.

That may prove relevant to some Guerin films...

Friday Guitar Gods

As it happens, two different blogs I read posted mp3's of guitar playing magnificence this week - Girish offers Robben Ford on a Joni Mitchell song, and Bill Frisell backing up the Ambitious Lovers (Arto Lindsey's post DNA group); and Neddie Jingo posts songs and videos featuring Django Reinhardt. Much inspiration and happiness to be found there....

Now I'm not going to try to match that... instead, inspired mostly by Girish's title (Short Sharp Solos), and the fact that the record his post called to mind - the upcoming collaboration between Bill Frisell and Earth, is very unlikely to feature much in the way of short anything - here is a list, not scientific by any means, of songs with short sharp solos - guitar solos (or parts) that don't last long, but that feel (to me anyway) Epic. These songs have short, or just normal solos, but they feel like friggin' Dazed and Confused. (In fact, I'm tempted to include Dazed and Confused, the original version - which though the solo isn't particularly short is quite sharp - it's dense and compact and thrilling, an effect lost when Jimmy and co. started stretching out toward the half hour mark... [though to be honest, other than the violin bow crap, D&C never bothered me much - even the long versions are structured more like medleys, with the segments fairly well constructed, each part a separate solo, which mostly work... it's the "boogies" - their live versions of Whole Lotta Love, crap like that, that makes me want to burn my zep records....]) That digression lasted longer than it should have: much like Dazed and Confused! Anyway - here is a list - 10 short (rock) solos that feel like epics:

1. The Byrd's Clarence White on the version of So You Want to Be A Rock and Roll Star from Live at the Fillmore - actually, while everything White plays is great, it's that one note he plays at the 1:35 point that does it... you could put that 2-3 seconds on permanent loop, and I would be happy...
2. Eddie Phillips' on Makin' Time (Creation) - speaking of dazed and confused... bringing out the violin bow, and putting it to far better use than Jimmy Page did. It's a cool song, but the solo jumps out of it...
3. Johnny Ramone's bit of Black Sabbath riffing on Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue...
4. Almost everything Bob Mould or D Boon ever played would count: both of them could fit more into their 12-15 second solos than most guitar players get in a minute. If I were choosing one example each - I'd point to the version of Hanging On on the live Husker Du record (The Living End)...
5. ...and Sell of Be Sold on the Minutemen's What Makes a Man Start Fires? - it's a simple bit, but perfectly cool, and, like everything they played, built out of the band dynamic, the interplay of bass and guitar, the rhythm.... who was better in the 80s?
6. Jim Jones of Pere Ubu on Memphis, from Raygun Suitcase: it's nothing fancy, just a snarly little riff, but it slices into the song....
7. Tom Morello on Shadow on the Sun (the first Audioslave record) - I almost feel guilty putting an acknowledged guitar god on here (not that Boon or Mould or White [as under-appreciated as they come] aren't guitar gods) - but this solo, some helicopter noises, then 8-10 seconds of soaring sounds - is too good not to mention. Those two audioslave records are mostly disposable, except for Morello's parts - probably RATM for that matter too...
8. Paul McCartney's solos on Tax Man - and Tomorrow Never Knows...
9. Wire's Sand in My Joints - some of my old AOL cronies used to cite this as the greatest anti-guitar solo ever - I can't deny it... and it fits perfectly here....
10. and finally - there are a few notes at the end of the Replacement's Within Your Reach, a little pattern Paul Westerberg (I assume - I think that's all him) plays as it fades... that are perfect. All you need right there. Just enough.

Video - not much way to beat the Reinhardt video and links Neddie Jingo has, but I'll put up something - maybe a fine performance by one of the masters of understatement - Luther Perkins!

Kon Ichikawa

I was sad to read today about the death of Kon Ichikawa, director of films like Harp of Burma and Fires on the Plain, Tokyo Olympiad, The Key, An Actor's Revenge, etc. - while he wasn't exactly neglected in this country, he has never been counted in the upper echelon of Japanese directors (not that being in the upper echelon ensures having their films available: Naruse is usually rated among the best, but very few of his films are circulating in the US in any form). And while he may not be quite the equal of the best - Ozu and Mizoguchi, Naruse and Imamura, Kurosawa - he's not far off. And that is very heady company.

It's depressing to see this is my first post in a week. I wish I had more to offer just now... I should have more to offer in the next few days. One thing keeping me off line was a Jose Luis Guerin retrospective at the Harvard Film Archive - that was very inspiring. I hope to get back to thinking about it, and write something up. And Ichikawa deserves some attention. So I can hope to have some content in the next couple days...

Super Tuesday

Politics? don't have much to say. Did my bit for democracy - always a neat experience. The ordinariness of it makes me very happy... I suppose it's not always so simple and low tech (the paper voter rolls, the paper ballots and felt tip pens, the nice retirees running the affair), though it seems hard to beat the low tech version.... I haven't said much about politics - Massachusetts is not the most interesting place to have a vote most of the time - we're pretty predictable.... this year - it's an interesting primary race: I won't mourn either of the big dems winning, though I suppose, given a choice, I'd rather not see Hillary Clinton nominated. Since I did have a choice, I chose. If Edwards had still been around, it might have been a tougher choice - as it is, I took Obama.

I don't think I will do much more political writing this year. It's hard to talk politics: there's not much that can actually get done until Bush is out of office; every other issue pales next to the simple necessity of getting a Democratic president and as many democrats in congress as is humanly possible. The republican party does not deserve to hold any power at all: they have blown it, doing this country terrible damage... Someday, hopefully, we can get around to pushing for important useful things - some kind of decent health care system, more sensible tax and spend policies (instead of sending out rebates as a stimulus, why not try to create some jobs? fix a bridge, whatever...). Get the hell out of Iraq, and try to undo the damage that's caused... But first things first.

And - since god knows how much I'll post in the next day or so - non-politics: Burt Reynolds gets his due at Welcome to LA. And Edward Copeland's Best Best Actor poll is up - all sliced and diced...

Oops!

Well, I guess I'll post about the Super Bowl - probably my first, and hopefully my last, football post at this blog. I suppose it's a sad day, the local 11 going down to defeat - worse, failing to complete a perfect season. That's more disappointing than the locals losing - perfection is worth chasing. For someone to make it - would be impressive. A lot more impressive and admirable than another boring upset. On the other hand - that was a pretty lame outing from the Pats, so they hardly deserved to win - though they did have the game pretty much won. Make that one sack, and it's 19-0 and Don Shula can shut up already. But that play - the catch Tyree made on that play - that was a thing of beauty. You make plays like that, you deserve to win. If the Pats weren't going for perfection, I'd have been pulling for the Giants after that catch. Especially if your opponent can't make a sack when they have the guy in hand, twice....

Anyway - the bigger point is that thank god the football crap is done! now we can get back to the important sports news - Celtics! Red Sox! Pitchers and catchers, pitchers and catchers, soon, soon...

On another note - Bobby Knight resigned. Good riddance - about 20 years too late, probably. He's a strange figure - in a lot of ways - his commitment to graduating players, notably - he was a very admirable figure. And he was obviously a hell of a coach. But he was also a dick,a nd got worse and worse as the years passed, to the point where his presence spoiled the game. Years I paid no attention whatsoever to college basketball, I would make a point of cheering against Bobby Knight's teams. I certainly won't miss him...

Finally - one good thing about the Patriot's losing is that congress is not likely to try to investigate "spygate". Leaving them more time to deal with the important problems facing the country - like Roger Clemens' steroid regimen! whoo hoo! good lord, we are run by imbeciles.

Friday Music Notes

Been a while since I've pulled out this trick... the Friday Random Ten! But that alone is excuse enough.

1. Of Montreal - Gronlandic Edit
2. Kings of Leon - Genius
3. Beatles - Polythene Pam
4. Mars Volta - A. Part I
5. Johnny Cash - Long Black Veil
6. Ramones - Cretin Hop
7. Dinosaur Jr. - Cats in a Bowl
8. Replacements - Mr. Whirly
9. Merle Haggard - Mama Tried
10. fIREHOSE - Too Long

Meanwhile, on the broader music front - I did indeed attend the second concert in three months, seeing 6 Organs of Admittance, along with Thalia Zadek and Mick Turner. An enjoyable evening. Zadek was good - I've seen her a few times through the years, with Live Skull back in the day, with Come - this time, she had a piano player and violinist along, which gave her act a decided Nick Cave flavor - not a bad thing... Mick Turner played an improvised set, playing along with a slide show of paintings and landscape movies shot from the windows of buses and off the decks of boats: playing little guitar figures over loops and such... he's good at it, though it seemed to me to fall between the audio-visual poles... the projections were blank and repetitive, there, it seemed, to give the musicians something to play against - except the music felt like it was there to support the visuals... both sound and vision seemed to be pointing to the other, with neither quite clicking.... Though it was well done....

And Six organs of Admittance: Ben Chasny played a handful of songs alone, acoustic, then brought Elisa Ambrogio out to abuse an electric guitar. She can make a dreadful noise, no doubt - I don't know if she can actually play a lick on the guitar, but she knows how to get a racket out of it. Chasny stuck to singing and playing fairly straight, leaving the noise to her... in some ways, they're a bit less interesting than they are on record - Ambrogio's brand of guitar wanking is a bit flatter and less interesting than what gets put on his records, and the songs definitely miss the arrangements - the acoustic raga sounds, the percussion, with the occasional electric wigout... But I must also say - I like bands that reinvent themselves, and Chasny's performances seem to reinvent his material constantly... playing 1000 Birds, say, as an almost straight garage rocker.... it's good: they were quite enjoyable.

Anyway - here's Chasny droning out - we didn't get much of this: he left the noise to Ambrogio...



And the two of them, doing 1000 Birds (in a completely different style to how they did it in Boston) - you can't see much, but it sounds good:

January Films

Wow - it's been 2 weeks since I posted anything, other than a space filler... I shall try to make up for that. I have seen some nice films in that time (and all through this month) - not as many as I thought I was going to, but still... so to get back in the swing, here's a kind of round up-new-movies-seen-post, covering most of the month.

I don't know where to start, so start at the top: There Will Be Blood arrives trailing hype and accolades and delivers. It took a couple viewings to completely sell me, but it did sell me. More than just an allegory of the modern republican party - oil men and religious freaks in a poisonous alliance, taking turn abusing each other: god-botherers subjecting the oil men to bizarre ritual humiliations - in exchange for which the oil men rob them and their followers and everybody else blind.... For all the epic scope of the thing, it's almost a chamber drama, fathers and sons and brothers, real, imagined, symbolic - watching it the second time, though, the themes, the parallels, the underlying methods and patternings come forth - details, in the filmmaking, in the story, come out - it delivers on all that PT Anderson has been promising. The Andersons - Paul Thomas and Wes - have, for the last decade or so - been clearly to the champions of this generation of American filmmakers, and this film solidifies that once again.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: why did I skip this when it came out? Was I just so disappointed with 3:10 to Yuma that I figured another artsy western would be a waste of time? was it just the length? were there bad reviews? It was a mistake, whatever it was. Thank goodness it came around again, a recap of some touted films from last year, and I got to see it - it's really good. It's long, not much seems to happen, sure, but it does happen - it makes you wait, as the characters wait - it's structured around the delay of the inevitable: the title lays it out, and you wait for it - the characters wait for it - everyone, it seems, quite aware of what is going to happen, just a matter of how. (Though the how - basically a series of people getting shot in the back of the head.)... A fine, elegant looking film, with some slick performances - Pitt playing off his star power, Affleck weird and squirrelly, and Paul Schneider giving a fascinating supporting bit as someone who's dumb as a board, but a tick smarter than the rest of them... Maybe not quite on par with Zodiac and There Will be Blood and No Country for Old Men - but another excellent genre film given an art film twist....

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street: a nice adaptation - some interesting choices. Depp can hold the screen with anyone, and here he has Rickman for balance (who makes a better villain?) Bonham Carter and Spall make fine second bananas, and the juvenile and ingenue are cute and bland as one expects. The music is fantastic, of course.... When it came out, I saw a few comments calling it "inert," complaining about the lack of movement... That's not far off - though it shouldn't exactly be criticism. First - because of the way Burton shoots it - he uses static shots - it looks like he's shooting storyboards. He does that a lot - his style, in most of his films, is more like a comic book than a film - the shots seem to have a kind of self-contained quality: they do what they do because of what they look like, rather than what happens in them, or how they link together, exactly... Second - and this is criticism - the "third act" ("development" as Bordwell and Thompson might have it, corresponding, I think, to the first half of the second act of the musical itself) - is inert. The rest (parts 1, 2 and 4 - the "setup", "complication" and "climax") is dramatic - the story is enacted; but this part is not - it is all summary. "Todd became a murderer and Mrs. Lovett baked the bodies into pies." There are three or four songs - but this part of the film does nothing but make an excuse for those songs. It's plot role is summed up in the summary. The film sags, until the boy finds the girl and things start moving again...

Persepolis - handsomely animated adaptation of Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical comic. Great looking - beautiful black and white, silhouettes and cutouts that are handled with great subtlety and flexibility - nice to see a full length animated feature that uses the art to expressive effects. The story is about what you would expect - a feisty girl growing up in Iran before during and after the revolution - the themes, of liberal hopes for change dashed by the mullahs, and the continued efforts to civilize the place, to maintain one's dignity and self-respect in the face of various forms of oppression - are fairly common in Iranian films... This being made in France, they are perhaps more explicit than in films by people like Jafar Panahi or Darius Merhjui...

Charlie Wilson's War - amusing, hilip Seymour Hoffman is spectacular - not sure what more to say about it.

Walk Hard: the Dewey Cox Story - thoroughly silly music movie spoof, probably only a couple jokes, though they stay funny throughout... there are a few outstanding moments - the Beatles bit, say - and all of it is diverting... probably nothing special, but I still find myself quoting it, though no one else seems to have seen it. "It's called Karate!"

I Return, Sort of

Let me try this. It has been a long week. A good friend of mine lost his father (who I also vbery much liked) last week, and that has had all my attention. It certainly changes how one might react to something like Heath Ledger's death - sad and disturbing as it might be, it's too remote to register when you're mourning someone yourself. Still a shame. He was young, he was good, he seemed to be on the way to something like greatness.

Otherwise, there's not a lot going on. I owe Piper a dinner with someone - I'll get back to it, someday, I swear. I had an idea - my dinner with Joe Breen? I could blame him for Eli Roth and American Pie and feed him a ration of crow and lament the taming of Warren William. That might still work, though I missed most of the series, in the end...

Larry Aydlette is gearing up for a whole month of Burt Reynolds - 29 posts in 29 days! woo hoo! [which reminds me of my neighbors, who are raising hell - there's a party going on! way too much thumping and stomping and whooping and hollaring. That's neither here nor there, but it explains the hour of this post, for it would be the acme of folly to try to sleep. Instead I'll type away while I wait for the fun to end, listening to Six Organs of Admittance in anticipation of tomorrow night: looks like the second concert I'll attend in less them three months! it's like it's 1988 all over again!]

So back to the post - don't forget - Edward Copeland is running another poll - best acting Oscar winners. I have to do that, too... I have a lot to do, actually. Hopefully, I'll get some posts up in the next few days...

Val Lewton Notice

Stopping in mid-week to note the ongoing Val Lewton blogathon, being hosted by Michael Guillen at The Evening Class. There is a wealth of material there and throughout the blogosphere, devoted to one of the undersung masters of film.

I have to admit, I came late to Lewton's iflms. People talked about them, they sounded good, but I hadn't seen any of them until the middle of last year, when I found a cheap copy of Cat People - very impressive. And later, I got the I Walked With A Zombie/Body Snatcher DVD, and that really did it. They're the type of films you can live with - stripped down and simple, in some ways, but with ever shot, every detail infused with intellegence and mystery, revealing something new every time you watch them. And thematically sophisticated - with complex patterns of guilt and innocence, interesting, ambiguous, motivations and results. Look at the way culpability is passed along from character to character in the Leopard Man, or the way good comes out of evil (Karloff the Body Snatcher directly leading to the cure of the little girl, etc.) in other films....

Coming at the end of the second contemplative cinema blogathon, it's intriguing how well the Lewton films fit. The stripped down style, the atmospheric style, working through suggestion and indirection, their treatment of plot (shifting protagonists, delaying revelations of characters' or events' significance, and so on), even some of the specific devices - mutism and silence; use of shadows, etc.... The links are pretty straightforward, too - Pedro Costa speaks of remaking I Walked With a Zombie in Casa de Lava; Tropical Malady draws heavily on Cat People. You can see the influence, and certainly, filmmakers are clear about the influence of Lewton and Tourneur (in particular.) They are wonderful films, and it's great fun reading about them.

Notes on Variations, Mostly

As the second contemplative cinema blogathon comes to a close, I want to write up some thoughts on "parametric" explorations in contemplative cinema. I am not sure what this means, if it means anything. I suppose I start from the notion (outlined in my previous post on this) that "contemplative" cinema is a refinement of the "art film" - that it derives its style mostly from that tradition, and shares most of its concerns, and its orientation toward reality, human subjectivity, expressiveness, and so on, with the art film. That is - style and content are, usually, aligned - silence and stillness and ambiguity in contemplative films, like in art films, are meaningful - they express either the subjective experience of their characters, or of the filmmaker. This is one of the points where they differ from the "parametric" film - the "modernist", or maybe "formalist" film. These are films where elements of the style function on their own - the style still conveys the experience of the characters and ideas of the filmmaker, but they take on other functions as well.

So how do these kinds of formal play work in contemplative films? I can't pretend to answer that - but I will offer some observations on a couple films that do play with those kinds of ideas. Particularly Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century...

Syndromes does some parametric things. It is split in half, and the two halves are related in a number of ways: same actors, playing the same (or similar) characters; both set in hospitals; the second one starts in a new, modern hospital but later moves into the basement, which uses the sets from the first half. It's structured as two sides of a love affair (or anticipated love affair) - in the first half we follow a woman doctor, her affairs, or non-affairs; in the second, a man, and the end of an affair, rendered with great subtlety. The plot turns on this continuity - both stories are about one of these characters not falling in love, or falling out of love, with someone else. And the two halves echo images and ideas - repeating or reversing them. The most powerful, probably, the pairing of a solar eclipse in the first half with a long strange shot of a piece of machinery, a hose or lamp or something, which, like the eclipsed sun, fills the screen with a huge black circle....

Repetition and parallelism are common in art films - and contemplative films. Hong Sang-soo, for instance, usually builds his films around repeated scenes and stories. But Weerasethakul seems to be handling this a bit differently, here and in Tropical Malady (the two of his I've seen so far - though with luck, I'll see Blissfully Yours next week). Hong naturalizes the repetitions - he tends to repeat scenes as they are experienced by different characters: so in Virgin Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, for example, we see the same story from the two main characters' points of view. Syndromes and a Century may be doing something like that, but not exactly - because it is creating a different story world, where different things happen. It is not the same story seen two different ways, with differences that can be attributed to varying memories and attitudes: it is a different story.

This moves it closer to what Bordwell calls "parametric" films. It highlights the act of telling a story even more than usual for art films. It is not presented as multiple versions of the same story, but of multiple stories with a related purpose. It plays, then, like two passes through the same material, running the changes on the basic stuff of the story. In this, it recalls Ozu's films - the way he kept reusing his actors, his story situations (a daughter marrying, usually), character names, family relationships - but arranged differently, as if trying out all the possible permutations. This begins to suggest a way of considering these films different from Bordwell's. Bordwell focuses on narration, on how the story is told, on the relationship, in a film, between the telling and the story world being created. But while there are stylistic variations in Syndromes and a Century, the main changes are to the story world - the "fabula". This creates a different dynamic - one that calls to mind Brian McHale's characterization of post-modern fiction as being driven by ontological concerns. McHale argues that modernism was driven by epistemological questions - what can be known about the world? how does ones subjective experience of the world shape it? Post-modernism, though, is driven by ontological questions - what is real? The distinction is neatly illustrated by comparing Hong's double narratives to Weerasethakul's. Hong's films show a stable ontology from multiple points of view - his films are about point of view, memory, individual interpretation of events. Syndromes, though, shows two different possible worlds, linked by various elements - characters, actors, situations - but they don't create the same story from two angles. They create different stories.

Bordwell, as it happens, covers something similar to this in his new book. One of the chapters discusses forking path films: Run Lola Run - Too Many Ways to be Number One - Sliding Doors - Blind Chance.... films that explicitly pose varying possible futures. Syndromes and a Century doesn't present itself explicitly as an alternative future film, but it is similar. In some ways, it might be more radical - it doesn't rationalize its style as fantasy or science fiction or explicit options or allegories. It just tells 2 similar, but not identical stories about similar, but not necessarily identical characters, in similar, but not identical worlds, populated by similar, but not identical people. Using similar, but not identical locations, images, conversations and so on. Which if you're a bit of as formalist like me is just endlessly fascinating....

Getting back to the question of contemplative cinema - this sort of formal game play may seem to be at odds with the expectation for muted narrative, blankness, silence and so on, but it's not unknown. Divided stories turn up quite often in films of this sort. Some, possibly most, follow the fairly conventional art film patterns of Hong Sang-soo's films: exploring different points of view, following different characters in turn, etc. is common enough. But this can be linked to some degree and type of parametric storytelling as well. Sometimes safely within the "fabula" - Kiarostami's A Taste of Cherry, say, is structured around three variations of one conversation... Sometimes by imposing formal strangeness on a relatively stable story world - as in Tsai Ming-liang's I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, with its parallel stories, each centered on a different Lee Kang-sheng character.... And sometimes, films push the variations quite far into the realm of style. In Vanda's Room, Pedro Costa alternates between scenes shot with Vanda and her family and friends, and scenes shot with a group of men, living (mostly) in a condemned, abandoned, room. All of them share the basic look - digital camera, natural light, long takes, etc. - but there are significant stylistic differences as well. He has said that he looks at the scenes with Vanda as theater - the men as cinema: he films her in her room, usually on her bed, holding forth, quite often, with her family or friends, fairly vocal, very performative. The bed is a stage - he frames and shoots to emphasize the stage, the frontality of the room. The men, though, are cinema - which emerges in the way he shoots them. While the camera is fixed in any given shot, he shoots from a much greater variety of placements; the room has much more of a sense of 360 degree space. There is a stronger sense of offscreen space as well, with sounds coming from the street, with visible doors, people coming and going, and so on. Vanda's room tends to be closed in: it is what you see (though not always what you can hear.) I'd even say that the variation extends to the type of drugs they use: the women smoke heroin - the men shoot it. I don't know what that means - but in the film, it serves to create a kind of structural, formal pattern. Its meaninglessness, in fact, emphasizes its formal functionality - it slides toward being a purely formal device. Which, again, pushes the film toward "parametric" filmmaking....

Vampira

I see the news is going around that Vampira, the great horror movie hostess and sometimes star, has died, ae 86. Nice tributes are starting to appear, not all from the film blogging world - this one from PZ Myers at Pharyngula is where I first saw the news. One notices such things - an iconic figure who played a part in an iconic film... I can't say I paid much attention to her otherwise, until I started seeing the tributes to Plan 9 and Ed Wood - where she was invariably the most charismatic and interesting figure to be seen. May she rest in peace...

Contemplative Films as Art Films

The second annual contemplative cinema blogathon is up and running, with some good reading already up. I have to say - I like this idea: I like the chance to go back to something every now and then. Especially big, open ended topics, like this one, or things like the recent film endings or opening credits blogathons - things that are likely to hit you at intervals.... It's nice to swing back a couple times.

But now... there's no lack of things to write about contemplative cinema - the poetics, the history, the individual films - the criticism, which is getting some attention this year. What catches my interest, though, is pretty much the same as last year - the question of what "contemplative cinema" is - where it came from, how it relates to other kinds of films: the questions of style and history that I usually end up with, when I start trying to be serious... I keep coming back to them, because I really don't know the answers. That may be my point - that defining CC may be impossible - it has too many sources and lines of descent, the formal and stylistic devices that mark it are neither exclusive to it nor adequate to define it. Which isn't to say that there aren't identifiable films we can describe this way - it's just that we can't find one line of descent for them, or a completely stable set of features...

The fact that I'm reading David Bordwell's latest, The Poetics of Cinema, certainly encourages those questions. One chapter reprints an essay from the late 70s on the "art film", with new comments, bringing some of the arguments up to date. (He also extends this, with examples, in Narration in the Fiction Film.) I think it's reasonable to consider "contemplative cinema" as a refinement of Bordwell's "art film." These films (per Bordwell) emphasize realism (both external and subjective) and authorial expression: they operate through ambiguity (both in what happens, and how it is presented), psychological exploration; they are usually loosely plotted, deemphasizing causal connections, character motivations - they often have drifting, observing, passive protagonists (lots of journalists and prostitutes) who encounter events and whose story is more their perceptions and experiences than their goals, met and missed. Art films downplay the tight explanations and strings of causality that classical cinema emphasizes, both in what they tell (what a good Russian would call the syuzhet), and what happens (the fabula - the story world).

Contemplative films follow that pattern pretty closely. They are, perhaps, an "intensified" version - the art film's tendencies and structures extended: ambiguity, passive characters, emphasis on mood and tone, etc., lack of obvious story, elision of the plot at the level of the telling, all taken that much further. The new material in Poetics of Cinema discusses developments of the art film since 1980 or so, describing many of the stylistic features of contemplative films: long takes, longer shots, quietness, planimetric compositions (arrangements of people or objects in a row, along a plane parallel to the picture plane, often against a neutral flat background), etc. Bordwell also considers the history of art films: the development of art films out of neo-realism, first in Europe in the 40s and 50s, then, following similar patterns, in several other areas - notably Iran, China and Taiwan, Africa, Turkey, etc. It's still a valid question how to characterize CC's development of the art film: is it an extension? a refinement? a branch of the art film? a departure? I'm inclined to look at it as an extension and refinement - a tendency within art films that has evolved and thrived...

The wild card in this, though, is another type of film Bordwell discusses - the "modernist" film, or the "parametric" film. I'm tempted to call it the "formalist" film - though that might require another post or two to define. (It's got it's own chapter in Narration in the Fiction Film.) This type of film is marked by a split between the style and the storytelling - the style and the meaning. It is a film that gives style, structure, formal elements non-signifying functions - functions that do not mean anything. The classic examples are who you would expect, I suppose - Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, Tati - Godard and Eisenstein in some modes - the tradition today is continued most obviously in Wes Anderson (all those frontal compositions and odd cuts and angles, none of which has any obvious meaning - it doesn't convey anyone's perception of the world, it doesn't really comment on the world or the stories - it's an arbitrary, graphic patterning meant to be enjoyed for its own sake). Bordwell contrasts art cinema with both classical, narrative cinema, and "modernist" or parametric cinema - not exactly splitting them into three types of films - more positing them as three modes of films, that might combine in different ways, in given films. (My Life to Live, say, might be read as an art film, if you concentrate on the story, on Nana's passage through life - or as parametric, if you concentrate instead on Godard's methods of staging and shooting and editing scenes, as he passes through a series of possibilities, that are not directly related to the story and its psychological meaning.)

Now: it seems to me, that given this scheme, contemplative cinema is mostly firmly within the tradition of the art film. Firmly enough that most examples of CC are more than adequately described as "art cinema" - as adequately as L'Avventura or Breathless or Shame might be. They might represent a particular type of art film, but they don't depart from the model in any fundamental ways.

Except when they do - or - when elements from CC start to migrate into more classical narrative films, or to parametric films. Or - when what are mostly "art films" incorporate elements of parametric film-making. This is when things get really interesting. But I think this is where I have to start a second post, maybe a third. Because there seem to me to be quite a few interesting examples of both types of film - "classical" films that have incorporated devices from contemplative cinema; contemplative films working with "parametric" devices. The former - take any of several excellent 2007 films: the way No Country for Old Men or There Will be Blood, say, both strip down the dialog, eliminating it, or reducing it to formula (Plainview's repeated sales pitches).... or the way those films, or Zodiac as well, dissipate their plots - moving significant events off screen, leaving things unresolved, and so on. They are, then, art films, in the older sense - but often through devices seen in contemplative films.

On the other side - this definitely will require a further post - but consider the parametric structures of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's films - specifically their bifurcations - their repetition of stories, events, etc. in different registers... this seems to me to change the way the films work, somewhat - complicating the idea of what a contemplative film might be...