January Recap

12 Features
The Seventh Seal (Bergman)
Through a Glass Darkly (Bergman)
Winter Light (Bergman)
The Silence (Bergman)
Invictus (Eastwood)
C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America (Willmott)
Blast of Silence (Baron)
The Adventures of Robin Hood (Curtiz)
Halloween 2 (Zombie)
The Big Lebowski (Coen)
Inglourious Basterds (Tarantino)
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (Juran)

8 Shorts
Early to Bet (McKimson)
Daring Daylight Burglary (Mottershaw)
Attack on a China Mission (Williamson)
The Big Swallow (Williamson)
Stop Thief! (Williamson)
Fire! (Williamson)
An Interesting Story (Williamson)
Nation's Pride (Roth)

7 Television Episodes
Dr. Who - The Daleks Series

Ending January

The Adventures of Robin Hood has become one of my daughters' favorite films.  From start to finish, the film promises adventure and delightfully delivers it in every sequence.  Absolutely essential viewing!

The Big Lebowski is such a rich film, offering inexhaustible treasures to all who will submit to its reordering of the world according to His High Dudeness.  I was prompted to rewatch it at home because I saw part of a TV edit version while at work.  I watched in fascination at the censorship that cleaned up some of the language.  "This is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps!" is one of the funniest dubs I've ever heard.

Halloween 2 is a disappointment, if only because I had my expectations raised a bit.  The way that family and dreams/visions are presented is slightly interesting, but the film is nothing more than another slasher genre picture, giving fans all of the obvious/expected kills they crave.  I confess that I'm not the target audience.  I don't like slasher films and see little worth in them.  I haven't seen any other Halloween film, either originals or remake.  This is also the first Zombie film I've ever submitted myself to.  If this is Zombie at his best, I feel fine continuing to ignore all of his previous output.

Inglourious Basterds is just as good at home on DVD.  I've spent the money now to rent it.  I'm waffling on whether or not to buy a copy.  Maybe when Hollywood Video starts selling copies for $5 a year from now.  

The entire short film Nation's Pride, included on the disc, is worth watching.  It's a lot funnier than I thought it would be.

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad is a movie that I loved when I was younger.  Now, my daughters have seen it and have become exposed to the genius of Harryhausen.  The look of awe and wonder on Annie's face at the beginning of the film when the cyclops first appears was enough to make a father proud. Millie is fast becoming a more sophisticated viewer.  I especially love when she'll point at a frame and let me know that she loves the composition of the shot (though she doesn't use those words).  She'll also often comment on when she thinks the music is especially appropriate.   Susie is way too impressed by all of the gushy romance, but I don't mind too much if she builds up expectations for impossibly chivalrous gentleman.  Little Pip still just squawks through movies.

Conversations 2010 #3

Conversations 2010 #3

Brandon, I'm trying to figure out what sort of fundraiser I need to plan to get you money for a new computer.  I hope you get one soon.  I'm glad that you seem to have found a way to post more often.  I hope you don't get "called into the office."

I'm only throwing this out there, but maybe Tara is not watching many films with you because you're watching Halloween 2 and The White Ribbon and others like those.  :)

I enjoyed the Lifeboat snd Saboteur reviews.  Two "minor" Hitchcock pictures that I've been meaning to check out for a while now.

I couldn't agree more with the Tarantino/Godard bit.  From the very beginning, Tarantino has been aping Godard (quite publicly- his production company is named A Band Apart for crying out loud) and reaping great benefits from it. The reason this works is because Tarantino is always very much his own man even when he shamelessly steals from his heroes.  Just like Godard kept trying to make a Hawks film and discovered that he couldn't make anything other than a Godard film.  

As far as Truffaut goes, I have to stay shamedly silent.

The Trouble With Harry is really great.  I watched it a few years ago with my friend Spike.  At the time, I hadn't even heard of it.  Now, I think it's essential Hitchcock.  Any Hitchcock film has a better sense of humor than 99% of what's typically billed as comedy.  When Hitchcock does a "pure" comedy (Harry, Mr. and Mrs. Smith), there's not much better in the world.

Jason, I saw Valley of Gwangi way back in Houghton days when I was back home staying with my parents.  I think it was shown on AMC, but maybe I even found a VHS copy somewhere or maybe we had gotten TCM at that point.  I can't remember.  I do remember marvelling at the special effects and being surprised by the story, just as you were.  Good stuff.  Also, I'm glad you made it to the Dryden.  

Your Fairbanks post reminded me that I had made a resolution this year to watch one silent feature every week this year.  So far, I'm failing miserably at this goal.  But, I have watched a handul of silent shorts.

From the 19 aughts...

5 directed by James Williamson:
Attack on a China Mission is a forgettable one-shotter.
The Big Swallow is a big gimmick/magic trick (a man swallowing the camera that is filming him) that absolutely works.
Stop Thief! is an early three-shot chase film that may have established the pattern for every chase to follow it.  It also holds up favorably against all of those subsequent chases.
Fire! may be interesting historically for its early complex editing and for inspiring countless other fireman movies, but it's otherwise uninteresting.
An Interesting Story follows a guy too absorbed in the book he's reading to care about safety.  The steamroller scene shocked me into fits of laughter because I really wasn't expecting it.

1 directed by Frank Mottershaw:
Daring Daylight Burglary builds on some of the ideas that Williamson had helped pioneer and populize and then pretty nearly perfects them.  There's a shot of the burglar and a cop wrestling on a rooftop in which the cop gets thrown off the side of the building.  I can't quite explain why, but I love this shot.  I think that it's because few directors today would hold that shot on the rooftop after the cop is thrown off.  Somehow, staying with the burglar for a few seconds longer makes the cop's fall all the more real than if we had been immediately given a cut to a shot of the body falling or hitting the ground.

Finally...
  You might be a Yankee if...

...you laughed often at the alternate history documentary C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America.

I'm not going to write a lot about C.S.A.  Except to say that I really liked it.  And that I would rank it as one of the best science fiction films of the last decade.  Seriously.

There is a long and boring debate in SF circles as to whether or not Alternate History (AH) properly belongs as a sub-genre of SF or if it belongs somewhere else completely.  I'm firmly in the former camp.  If SF is loosely defined as what may be based on what is, AH can be seen as what may have been based on what was.

C.S.A. is particularly illuminating in that it clearly sheds light on how far we have yet to progress in undoing the toxic effects of chattel slavery in this country.  

And tying C.S.A. back to silent film, the blackface Licoln in a Griffith parody/homage is absolutely hilarious.

Segmenting hate.

Lose yourself in the Christmas spirit with the rest of the suckers.

I just re-watched Blast of Silence.  Instead of gushing about how brilliant it is, I decided to practice my segmentation skills.  You'll find the results below.  Caution: spoilers. 

"Dividing a film into sequences in order to analyze its form is usually called segmentation.  It is usually not difficult to do, though most often we do it intuitively...  In segmenting any film, an outline format or a linear diagram may help you visualize formal relations (beginnings and endings, parallels, patterns of development, etc.)."
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, from Film Art: An Introduction  

Blast of Silence

Remembering out of the black silence you were born in pain
1. Train Tunnel/Birth Canal
2. Arrival in NYC
   a. Train Station
   b. Taxi
   c. Hotel
3. A Waiting Job
   a. Ferry Ride - The Contract
   b. Observing the Target's Routine
   c. Business With Ralphie
   d. The Target's Morning Rounds
   e. The Christmas Spirit
4. Alone at Dinner
   a. Face Out of the Past
   b. There Was a Girl
5. Christmas Eve Party
   a. Dancing With Lori
   b. Peanut Pushing Contest
   c. Dancing With Lori
6. Watching Target Leave Church
7. Lori's Apartment
   a. Meal/Conversation
   b. Rough Love
   c. Apologies 
8. Tailing the Target
   a. Shacked Up With a Dame
   b. Following Target and Dame
9. The Night Club
   a. Ralphie is There
   b. The Target's Birthday
   c. Bathroom Talk With Ralphie
   d. Torrid Town Montage
10. Eliminating Ralphie
   a. The Streets
   b. Murder at Ralphie's Apartment
   c. Hotel
   d. Reading the News
11. First Phone Call
   a. I Want Out
   b. Walking the Pier
12. Second Phone Call
   a. Lori is Busy
   b. Obtaining Gun on Pier
13. The Love Nest
   a. Outside
   b. Inside
   c. Above
14. Hotel
   a. Preparations
   b. An Orphanage
15. Lori's Apartment - Another Man
16. The Love Nest
   a. The Hit
   b. Escape
   c. Gun Disposal
17. Set-up
   a. Phone Call
   b. Drive
   c. On the Waterfront
18. Death/End Credits 
Back in the cold black silence

 

Exterminate!

The last time I spoke with my friend Joel, he told me how much he and his wife were enjoying the new run of Dr. Who.  Abby and I had watched the first couple of seasons, but we gave up on it mostly because I lost interest.  I liked it, but just let it go.

So... A couple of years after we started and stopped watching, I've decided to revisit Dr. Who, this time starting at the very beginning.  The 1st Doctor - William Hartnell.  Because of the way Netflix presented the discs, I accidentally received the second series (series= a single story arc; distinct from a season) instead of the very first one.  It was a seven episode story introducing to us for the first time one of the Doctor's greatest enemies, the Daleks.  

Relatively long takes, interesting pans and arrangements of figures in the frame, an incredible art design, lots of close-ups of anxious young Susan; I really enjoyed the simple visual delights offered here.

The Thales (sp?) are pretty boring.  The Daleks are as utterly and completely fascinating as they are ridiculous.  

There are a few painfully bad and/or cheesy moments, but most of it holds up really well, not only as good television, but as decent science fiction.

I'm really interested to see how the Doctor is developed as a character as different actors take over.  At first, I thought Hartnell's original take was really silly, but I quickly grew to love his performance.  Now I'm reluctant to see anyone take his place even as I know it must happen.

I don't know if I'll continue this interest in Dr. Who immediately, but I'll keep watching as I can.

I may cancel my Netflix subscription soon!

I really feel the need to watch all of the DVDs that I own.  I've spent way too much money on DVDs that are doing nothing more than sitting on a shelf and I just can't justify the expense of Netflix when I have so many unwatched DVDs at home.  I'm really trying to get through this much too large collection this year.  Not to mention the binder full of recorded TCM broadcasts from my mother that I've barely watched.

Then, I'm hoping to have a great purge and get my collection down to the handful of films that mean the most to me.  Someone please remind me in December that I wrote this back in January.  I hope I can get this done.  We'll see. 

Guest Post - Stephen Jones

Owen Zone
 
​This week was spring vacation from college.  I spent it in Owen Zone.  I am three quarters of the way through Last Call, and watched Stalker three times plus going from stone to stone for a fourth watch.
 
​The title is Stalker, not Zone.  To stalk means “to pursue quarry of prey stealthily”; a stalker is one who does that.  I began with worries for this assignment because I could think of only a total human beast stalking men but mostly women for sexual or murderous purposes.  This negative connotation doesn’t leave me, however, as I am told that the word stalker goes back to the Old English word, bestealcian, meaning to steal.  Note the few minor letter changes to get bestial.   Nevertheless, a true stalker was once noble and skillful and went after the necessary prey to feed himself and his family and tribe.  A stealthy, skillful quest on behalf of the nurturing of others into believing. I think that’s what Tarkovsky has in mind.  
 
Tarkovsky isn’t showing us a stalker but rather Stalker.  This guy is Stalker.  Stalker is so much his essence that, when Professor tries to take it from him he cries out, saying that taking others to the Zone—stealthily—“my happiness, my freedom, my self-respect are all here.”  “Here” doesn’t mean the Zone here; it means what he’s doing—stalking for others’ believing, as well as his own.  Who he is and what he is doing is what he means by “here”.  Stalker is Christ-like; he sacrifices for others; he dies over and over for others as he risks his life to lead parties into the Zone and then dies again, risking his soul, when he can see only his own failure as a result of the venture.  Stalker is a good guy.
 
​A problem he has is that he’s stalking hope and, since hope is in God’s hands, Stalker doesn’t know what he’s doing or have any measure of it.  All of his critics are right about his ignorance; how can we know ourselves as social animals when no one else does?  In fact, in his own eyes, he destroys people when he takes them into the Zone. He won’t take his wife because he’s afraid, and he says to her, that “it won’t work with you either”.  Once I met a man who found it easier to believe Jesus if he didn’t get baptized.  Getting baptized was too stark a test of his trust in Jesus.
 
Stalker’s life works, in Tarkovsky’s mind at least.  The one offspring—his daughter, Monkey—is in color, not sepia, by the end and especially after his latest journey.  She reads about the height of admiration as a friend’s eyes “when they are downcast” and when they reflect (“through the eyelash”) “a somber, dull cast of desire”.  Whoa!  I think, If that phrase doesn’t express the ambivalence of hope!  
 
At the beginning when it is said that Monkey is the victim of the Zone my sadness of knowing she’s crippled and mute, and therefore, probably, “victim,” doesn’t foreshadow the reality that Monkey’s plight is like our being victims of Christ.  Stalker’s daughter is truly the good fruit of his obesssion.  The last scene of the film shows Monkey moving drinking glasses across the table with her mind as distinct from a passing train merely jiggling them.  As the film fades to the end (or did Tarkovsky mean darkness comes or something like that?) Monkey’s totally clear and open face looks down the table watching the last glass actually fall over the edge without breaking on the floor.  Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” plays in the background.
 
​I am a Christian and see this movie with believing eyes.  So the movie is also about faith.  At the outset Professor and Writer have none.  They wrestle the world with their own understanding always getting in the way.  Writer despairs as the world he writes for is writing him.  Gently, Stalker weans him of the securities he thinks he must take with him into the Zone—cigarettes, booze, and a woman—and, in spite of his jabber to the contrary, there may be a ray of hope in knowing he has five dogs and Stalker’s wife thinking he must love them.  Professor must retain his knapsack because it contains the bomb with which he will blow up the Zone.  Lots happens at “the threshold”—during the “most important moment”—but the key activity, Stalker attempting to wrestle the bomb from Professor, fails.  With the assistance of Writer, Professor retains the bomb and then wanders around with unexpressed thoughts as Stalker, literally, saves Writer from falling into an abyss.  The color of the Zone shifts back to the sepia of the Stalker’s hometown but not before Professor disassembles the bomb and throws all its parts into water.  Twenty kilotons is twice the power of Enola Gay—not enough to take care of the world but more than enough for the mysterious territory of the Zone.  In these men something of Stalker has been contagious, though Stalker does know that and, if he did, he would stop stalking.  
 
​At first I thought the film was about redemption.  Easter is coming, and I’d just seen Gran Torino.  Then I thought that Stalker, unlike Jesus or Clint Eastwood, doesn’t know what he’s doing.  He lies in despair bitter over the knuckleheaded Professor and Writer and bemoaning the futility of his own, inexorable ventures.  He has no sense of the magnificence of what he is doing.  He sees only failure, and I guess that’s what you get when you’re stalking hope.  I was reminded of the anguished lament of Oscar Schindler at the end of Schindler’s List.  There’s a nice riddle going around about saving one starfish in thousands and realizing, and happy about, the well-being of that one particular starfish.  Schindler had a greater obsession and so did Stalker.  
 
An issue of futility applies to faith as well as hope.  Faith and hope have no meaning without a touch of futility.  Furthermore, you’ve got a chance of having faith only when you don’t think you do and you certainly see no evidence of the fruit of your faith—in this case, saved people through stalking hope.  Self-consciousness has disappeared and so has the self.  Stalker wouldn’t know that but he is that.  If he did know, his worldly consciousness would wake up and his faith would sleep.  That’s what it means, as he says, to be “like me, desperate and tormented”.  Stalker had the good sense to know that the people he guided would have to be “like me”.  That’s probably another reason why he couldn’t take is wife.  Because of whom Stalker is, his wife writhes on the floor in exquisite agony when he leaves home for another trip to the Zone.  Nevertheless, by the end of the film she is once again peacefully nervous as she tells us, trembling cigarette in hand, that in no way has she ever regretted marrying Stalker.  I believe her.
 
​So now I’m on Owen’s list.  Now I’m in the Owen Zone.  I don’t get it any more than Stalker’s wife did or Stalker or maybe even Owen and maybe even Tarkovsky—or it wouldn’t be art and life—but I don’t regret it either.
​

Conversations 2010 #2

Conversations 2010 #2

Jason, we're mostly agreeing with each other about Bergman. 

I think you're right that Bergman leaves a lot of room for the audience to maneuver around in (project their own ideas if you prefer).  This is one of his greatest strengths, that his films are simultaneously so intensely personal and so open to others to inhabit.   

I don't know why, but I did not use the word "hope" in regards to any of the Bergman films I've seen so far.  I think hopelessness may be Bergman's greatest failure.  In The Seventh Seal, you rightly point out that Bergman is wrestling with his faith.  I'd argue that he still has Hope at this point in his career.  Because he still has some faith.  In the entire trilogy, but specifically in The Silence, Bergman becomes faithless.  He gives up on Hope.  In doing so, he loses the wrestling match.  Because he's convinced that he has already lost.  

Hope continues to exist in Bergman's universe, but without faith (the substance of things hoped for) Bergman's hope is clearly shown (by him to him) again and again to be in vain.

Through a Glass Darkly ends in confusion and pathetic platitudes.  Winter Light ends with a man unable to follow his convictions, speaking hollow words with a hollow heart.  The hope in Through a Glass Darkly is that these characters will continue to genuinely care about one another even if they never find ways to express it.  The hope in Winter Light is present in the pastor's insistence on performing the liturgy to an empty house.  The show must go on.

The Silence is again the most complex of the films.  It is easy to see everything end in despair, but you're right to point out that Bergman identifies with the boy.  There is some slim shred of hope for the boy in the end.  He retains his innocence and gentleness in a world in which everything else is shattered.  He may not be able to read words in a foreign language, but he cherishes them anyway.  

I do think that any hint of hope present is a false hope, based on Bergman's embracing the twin towers of existentialism, that man is the measure of all things and man is meaningless.

Back to perspective, I saw something of worth in The Silence precisely because of its bleak assessment of the human condition.  This is exactly what I'd expect a world stripped of faith and hope to look like.  Bergman gives us a cinematic world in which he has finally rid himself of his monster god.  If faith is so bad, you'd think this freedom from god would be portrayed as exhilarating.  We'd get sunshine and rainbows.  Maybe we'd get Bruno.  Bergman is too honest with himself to do that.  We don't get sunshine and rainbows.  We get doom and gloom.  As a Christian, I can only assert that I think Bergman gets things absolutely right here about how he gets them totally wrong. 

In this committment to misery apart from faith, I have to argue that Bergman remains fundamentally Christian in his worldview, the leading spokesman of God's negative imprint.  He never does (at least not at this point in his career; I'm not as aware of his post-60s work) escape the worldview that he was shaped in.


I've got four more Bergman films in my collection yet to watch before my Bergman mini-marathon is complete.  Hour of the Wolf, Shame, The Serpent's Egg, and Saraband.  I've seen the first two before.  The second two will be new to me.

I'm going to take a break from Bergman for a couple of weeks, but then I'll get back to these four.

In a few days I'm going to post the first of what I hope will become a semi-regular feature here: non-cinephile friend guest posts.  The first post will be my pastor's Stalker essay that I mentioned a while ago.  After that, I'm hoping to get something written by a great artist.  I hope you don't mind too much, Brandon, that I'm loaning him your copy of F For Fake when he gets back from California in a couple of weeks.  I know he'll take good care of it and I really think that he'll appreciate it.  I'll get it back to you eventually!  

I'm also going to get a fiery Nascar-loving preacher's appreciation of Weir's Fearless and maybe Tarantino's Basterds if I buy a copy.  After that, I'm not so sure, but I'm already thinking of others and will hopefully get an all-star lineup together to offer up some different perspectives on different films.

Finally, the other day I let my girls watch some cartoons.  I was mostly getting ready for work while they watched, but I did sit down with them to see a short that I had never seen before.  It's called Early to Bet, directed by Bob McKimson and written by Warren Foster.  I loved it.  The premise is simple, the urge to gamble depicted as a literal gambling bug, a small insect that goes around biting poor suckers on the ear and causing them to make a wager just one more time.  The cat and dog gin rummy bit is great, but the opening of guys sitting around at a table betting on which mug of beer a fly would land on is inspired.  I'm really not sure if I'll see anything better all year.  

Speaking of gambling, I'm going to up the ante this year here on the blog and commit to writing even about every short that I see (which will be mostly WB cartoons) and every television show that I watch (I'm currently in the middle of an early Dr. Who series).  I haven't given up on Breaking Bad.  I misplaced the disc that had all the Season 1 episodes on it.  I'll probably also start watching Lost Season 6 soon, but I'm tempted to just wait until the season is over and watch it all at once.

I watched about an hour and a half of the Golden Globes the other night.  That was stupid.  

I will not write about scraps of television that I'm forced to endure here and there at work unless I watch something in its entirety.  I'm also not going to write about the every once in a while when I'll turn on Conan or Charlie Rose for 15 to 30 minutes when I get home from work and bravely surf the digital broadcast wasteland.

Unrelated to anything that came above, I really want to see Crazy Heart.

Peace.             

Words in a foreign language

So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.
-G.K. Chesterton

I'm deliberately starting these Bergman posts with Chesterton quotes; specifically because I just finished reading Orthodoxy; generally because Chesterton's cosmic levity is precisely the antidote to the gravity of Bergman's terrestrial deafness.

Outside of The Seventh Seal, Winter Light is the most explicitly religious of any Bergman film I've seen, centering as it does on a pastor's crisis of faith.  There is a key moment when the pastor confesses that when his thoughts about god were stripped bare, he understood that his god was a comforting fatherly version of himself.  Confronted by his own spiritual nakedness, the pastor comes to the realization that God is a monster.  This is an important realization, understanding, as Lewis put it for children, that Aslan is not a tame lion.

It is obvious, but nonetheless extremely important that the pastor spends much of the film physically located in the shadow of Jesus.

Winter Light is as much about love and communication as Through a Glass Darkly.  How do we live with compassion in a junkyard of idiotic trivialities?  

The unbearable "Silence of God" is the heart of the matter and Winter Light is the heart of Bergman's trilogy.  There is one scene that is more important than all others.  A deacon or church caretaker of sorts (most definitely a sincere believer) speaks with the pastor about the Gospel Passion narratives.  Through this dialogue, it becomes clear that Bergman is aware that God Himself hanging on a cross experienced the Silence of God, suffering with humanity in all things, including Bergman's very specific affliction.
 
Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts.  The whole earth is full of His glory.

The Silence is the most complex film of the Trilogy.  Stripped of all faith, Bergman shows us Hell.  

Here, Bergman's exploration of the curse of Babel is complete, to the point at which one character seeks solace in the fact that the stranger she has just had sex with cannot understand a word she says.  Communication has broken down to the extent that the impossibility of communication is a relief when faced with the alternative of actually coming to terms with the Otherness of one another.

The flip side of that is that the most beautiful moment in the film is when two characters who speak different languages do bridge the gap through a shared awareness of the heavenly music of Bach.  Even the two fighting sisters make peace for the time that Bach is on the radio.

There's so much more that deserves to be written about.  The train, the dwarves, carnality and arid intellectualism, Johan and the hotel waiter, the tanks...

I'm feeling too lazy to do any of it justice.  

I will briefly mention that the sound design is excellent.  The Silence is anything but silent.  Ticks and drones, radio and talk, all serve to drown out that thunderous silence.

"These three films deal with reduction.  Through a Glass Darkly--conquered certainty.  Winter Light--penetrated certainty.  The Silence--God's silence--the negative imprint.  Therefore, they constitute a trilogy." -Ingmar Bergman

I do think that it's a shame that many think that Bergman successfully shed his religious "baggage" with The Silence so that he could move forward in his examination of human psychology without God.  Bergman does go on to explore human pyschology without God.  He never does shed his baggage.    

Bergman may have abandoned the Faith completely (though I don't think so; like the pastor he cannot escape the shadow of Jesus), but The Silence screams its "negative imprint."  Paradoxically, through the absence of God in this film and all that that entails, we're made all the more aware of our need for Pentecost's reversal of Babel and the reconciliation of all things in the work of Jesus.  We may not be able to believe this or live like this, but the need is clear.  

Maybe I'm misinterpreting all three films.  I'm pretty sure that Bergman was never really clear about his own motivations and what was in his heart.  I'd like to read his autobiography eventually.  Regardless, I know that I don't know.  My own heart is veiled and my vision is cloudy.  Forgive me for being bold in declaring anything about Bergman when I fail to understand anything about myself.  Like Bergman, I have to at least attempt to communicate something, even if all I'm communicating is how difficult communication can be.

Conversations 2010 #1

Conversations 2010 #1

Brandon, I agree with you about the importance of listening to non-cinephile perspectives.  I must have missed Hudson's resolution.  I need to go back and find that post.  I've been trying to get my friend Matt (are you "scanning" this Matt?) to join in on the film blogging fun.  He's definitely a non-cinephile, but I trust his values and opinions in other matters.  The fact that I trust his opinion in other matters is precisely why I want to hear what he thinks about films he's watching.  I feel confident that he'd join me in condemning Transformers 2.  I don't know how he would react to La Moustache or The Killing of a Chinese Bookie.  But I want to know.  

More importantly, he enjoys all sorts of silly musicals and I'd love to know specifically why.  I'm aware that my own aversion to musicals is primarily a peculiar personal bias, not a hard and fast rule that the genre has nothing to offer.

On that same note of listening to non-cinephile perspectives, I'd rather listen to my friend Scott talk all night about Lonesome Dove (which I still haven't seen) than read and listen to so much of what passes as critical discourse.

The White Ribbon, 35 Rhums, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, The Box, Up in the Air, and probably still more to come.  You've been busy!

I really regret not seeing The Box while it was out.  I remained optimistic about it despite the poor critical reception.  The one night that I could have definitely gone to see it, I took Abby to see A Serious Man instead (because I wanted her to see it and I wanted to see it a second time).  I never doubted Kelly but, then again, I still haven't seen Southland Tales.

I'm hoping to see Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans at the Cinemapolis soon.  I've never seen any Herzog film on the big screen.  I don't know why this one shouldn't be the first.

35 Rhums is playing at Cornell this Spring semester.  The new schedule is up at cinema.cornell.edu

I might get to see it.  I might just end up relying on you giving me a DVD data disc with all of these AVIs on it.

Finally, if you haven't already, then go now and check out my friend Jason's new film blog, read it regularly, and give him some encouragement!

http://youwinjohn.blogspot.com

Jason, I am happy.  Thank you.  

In response to your ESA post, I think that you read my Japon and Wrestler posts from early last year.  I've pretty much said what I have to say there.  I don't think that it is "uptight" to insist that ESAs have a proper place and that in front of a camera is never it.  In fact, I insist just that and I've rarely been described as uptight.  There's a reason that you have ESAs with your wife in your bedroom and not in my bedroom.  And yes, I'm getting a kick out of using the acronym ESA.

So why do I ever submit myself to viewing ESAs?  Maybe I'm inconsistent or hypocritical.  I think that it's more complicated than that.  In order to engage with the world, it has become necessary to a certain extent.  I can't walk into a grocery store without seeing magazines devoted to exploring new wild and wooly ways to engage in ESAs with strangers.  More importantly, I can't care about film, film history, and film culture without at least to a limited extent being exposed to filmed ESAs. 

I prefer not to be exposed to ESAs and that is one minor reason among many that I prefer so much of Code era cinema to what is being made today.  I would also argue that some of these Code films have a charged sexuality and eroticism that is just not possible with the all-out bare naked ESA.  The filmed ESA, by its nature, has no respect for Mystery.  It is the laziest and least beautiful way of conveying information about sexuality.

That said, I feel like bringing up The Limits of Control.  It is interesting to me to see Jarmusch play with the Idea of The Nude and introduce a chaste hero (at least while he's working!) as a sort of response to the popular action hero that everyone thinks is so damned cool.  Jarmusch is interacting with the entire history of nude representation in art in the midst of what is essentially a mystery/crime sub-genre, the lone gunman on assignment tale, a type of story (especially in the pulps that inspired many films) that is notorious for its use of ESAs.        

So, to begin to finish my rambling answer, what about a film like Shortbus?  I have no interest and would never watch it.  Unless... Yes, there are exceptions.  If I met someone and I came to value his opinion and he told me that Shortbus is his favorite film of all time, I'd consider watching it.  

Also, directors matter.  Twelve or so years ago, I watched Boogie Nights because I was so impressed with Hard Eight and Magnolia.  I wanted to know Anderson better.  I don't ever care to see it again, but after falling hard for There Will Be Blood, I may be first in line for tickets if Anderson felt that his next project needs to be Boogie Nights 2.  I don't know.

Similarly, I wanted to make it to Brandon's Antichrist party, but missed it.  I don't know that I care enough about Von Trier to ever seek this film out on my own in the future, but I had been willing, rightly or wrongly, to submit mysel to its tortures then.  

Somewhat related, there was an interesting post recently on The House Next Door exploring the intersection between pornography and Cronenberg's film Crash.  Check it out.

Eric Rohmer died yesterday.  His Astrea and Celadon is one of the greatest films I've ever seen, a truly great end to a master career.  The exquisite use of an (admittedly not too explicit) ESA at the end is perhaps the best argument I can think of in favor of a possible proper use.  I'm hoping to tackle his moral tales later this year.

I'll continue to think about it and maybe give a longer or at least fuller answer some time in the future.  Then again, maybe not.

I'm glad that you checked out a couple of Holmes films.  Since watching it, Dressed to Kill has only risen in my estimation.  I really like it.

As far as your list of movies watched in December, I only have one question.  I don't know exactly where you live now, but I'm guessing that it is relatively close to the Eastman House.  Why aren't you taking advantage of this amazing cinema in your backyard?

I haven't been in much of a movie chasing mood recently.  My  mid-December funk has carried over into the new year.  I should have a post coming soon about two Bergman features, Winter Light and The Silence.  I've watched the former already but I want to watch the latter (probably early next week) before I write anything.

My job did allow me to make it out to the cinema in 2010 and the first film I saw was Invictus.  I even got paid overtime to go.

I remember when Changeling came out, there seemed to be a lot of conversations around White Elephant art.  After seeing Changeling and reading Farber, I can only say that critics can be stupid.  I don't think that Eastwood has ever made a thing that qualifies as White Elephant art (keeping in mind that I've only seen a tiny portion of his films).  After Invictus, I'm even more impressed at how Eastwood selects stories that matter to him, leaves the scripts alone, and then tells the story instinctively as best he can.  There's a sense in which Eastwood's films are carefully constructed according to classic Hollywood principles, but there is also a more immediate sense of Things being thrown out there, stuffed full of Eastwood's interests, and held together by Eastwood's passion alone.  In Invictus, there are weird editing choices, songs that shouldn't be there, non-professional actors who scream non-professional actor, and all manner of triteness.  Eastwood makes it work.  

I liked Invictus.  I probably liked it even more because I was almost forced to go see Old Dogs instead.  That was a close one.  

Happy 2010.

Out of Love

The mere questioner has knocked his head against the limits of human thought; and cracked it.
-G.K. Chesterton

I love The Seventh Seal. I don't watch it as often as I should.

It has somewhat unfairly developed a reputation as a dour, serious film that tackles the big questions that we don't like to think about. Even the Criterion box cover with Death on the front invites the general public to just walk away.

Which is too bad. Because The Seventh Seal has everything that I'm looking for in a spectacular summer blockbuster.

We've got: bawdy songs and spiritual songs, dancing and flagellation, action and contemplation, romantic comedy and existential trembling.

The Seventh Seal is a generous film. Even at its most serious moments, there is a gentle humour just below the surface. We are not passive spectators. Bergman invites us to share in the narrative and invest ourselves in these characters and their struggles, occasionally winkingly reminding us that it's all fiction.

No one should be afraid of Bergman or The Seventh Seal. Fire up the corn popper and settle in for a good time.

Minor Spoiler: This viewing, I noticed for the first time how important Jof's visions are. If we join in believing that he sees Death later in the film (and we have all along accepted Death's presence as real so we must grant the same liberty to him) then I think we're forced to also accept that he earlier had a genuine vision/encounter with Virgin and Child.

Only the holy fool has simple eyes to see. The practical result of this is that Virgin and Child are at least as real as Death. Bergman tips his hat, barely but clearly, in favor of faith.

The knight simultaneously does not believe and believes with his whole heart. But he cannot see. Or rather sees only partially; Through a glass darkly.

Lord, I believe; Help thou mine unbelief.

Early last year or late the year before, I was driving to work and listening to a magazine compilation CD for probably the 20th time. This time, I really heard one specific song for the first time. Devendra Banhart's cover of Antony's Fistful of Love. It made me cry. I played the song again. It made me cry again.

Something snapped in my mind and I heard the song as if it were being performed by a "praise and worship" band at the chapel at Houghton. I don't know if anyone else on earth would have had that thought, but it came naturally to me. I hate "praise and worship" music. I hated most Houghton chapel services. But, that's because they were never as earthy or painful as Fistful of Love.

There may be something sacriligeous or blasphemous about how I'm interpreting a song which on the surface seems to be about an abusive relationship. Maybe. I can't change how I heard the song.

God shows His love to His covenant people by beating the hell out of them. That's the message of the Prophets, more or less, no?

I thought of Fistful of Love while watching Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly.

"I was lying in my bed last night staring
At a ceiling full of stars
When it suddenly hit me
I just have to let you know how I feel
We live together in a photograph of time
I look into your eyes
And the seas open up to me
I tell you I love you
And I always will
And I know you can't tell me
I know you can't tell me
So I'm left to pick up
The hints, the little symbols of your devotion
So I'm left to pick up
The hints, the little symbols of your devotion
And I feel your fists
And I know it's out of love
And I feel the whip
And I know it's out of love
And I feel your burning eyes burning holes
Straight through my heart
It's out of love"

There's no 1:1 correspondence between song and film, but there is the connection of the strained communication of love.

My favorite moment is early in the film when, after dinner, Karin's father goes into the house with the pretence of grabbing his tobacco. Once inside, he sobs under the weight of his failures. Later, he speaks of love as something light, but here he is overwhelmed by its heaviness.

There's another more (in)famous scene in which Karin encounters god or a demon or a spark of miswired brain chemistry. This scene is more terrifying than anything I saw in my horror explorations last year. But here also the subject is love.

Each of the characters speak of love and/or enact love. Yet that love more often than not fails to hit its mark. There's a love breakdown. The film is "about" many things- mental illness, the presence/absence of God, identity and family dynamics; through it all, its cinematic seams are stuffed with love. The really painful kind that is so hard to give and harder to receive.

I could spend the rest of the year thinking and writing about Through a Glass Darkly. Maybe I should, but I won't.

Instead, I'll move on to the next film and the one after that. For better or for worse, I'll keep on moving on,

But I won't forget. I hope I won't forget.

Weakly.

Flixster

Jason, Flixster sucks. I used it for a while, then quit when I tried logging movies and Flixster didn't have the movies I was watching in its database. This happened several times with older and foreign films and especially short films.

Also, I just checked Flixster and your profile page shows that you have 0 ratings and 0 reviews. Somehow, what you're doing through Facebook isn't showing up on Flixster itself. So I can't even subscribe to any feed through Flixster. I rarely ever check Facebook (usually only after someone has sent me a message that way) so I honestly didn't even know that you were still commenting on movies at all over there. There's no way for me to keep up with what you're watching/writing unless I have a feed to subscribe to or unless you're emailing me content. My main Internet source is through my iPod Touch. I either pick up a wireless signal where I'm working or I stop somewhere quickly before work and download email and/or feed subscriptions and then read them offline. I don't have time to leisurely check Facebook every 20 minutes because I don't have an Internet connection at home anymore. All of this not to berate you for not doing what is most convenient to me, but to explain why I haven't commented on any of your Flixster posts. I just haven't seen them. If you were posting to a blog instead of to Facebook, I can guarantee that I'd read everything you write. Instead, I'm missing out. And I really mean that. I'm missing out because I really would like to be reading what you're writing (and I didn't know that you already were consistently logging and writing).

Peace.

Brandon, in the new year I'm hoping to watch all of my personal DVD collection. I'm currently making my way through the 7 or so Bergman films that I have. I'll make it to Dante before the year is over (Piranha, The Howling, Gremlins, Gremlins 2 are what I own). I'm really looking forward to it. I saw Gremlins 2 in the theatre when I was a kid. It really needs to be seen in the theatre. It is one of the best and most favorite moviegoing experiences of my life.

It's here.

Top Ten 2009

1) A Serious Man (Coen)
2) The Limits of Control (Jarmusch)
3) Munyurangabo (Chung)
4) Inglourious Basterds (Tarantino) 
5) Moon (Jones)
6/7) Still Walking/Summer Hours (Koreeda/Assayas)
8/9) Ponyo/Up (Miyazaki/Docter)
10) Drag Me to Hell (Raimi)

Honorable: Adventureland, Beeswax, The Big Community, Food Inc., The Hurt Locker, Julie & Julia, Public Enemies, Sugar, Timecrimes, Two Lovers, Visioneers, The Yes Men Fix the World

And my favorite non-2009, non-2008 releases that I caught on DVD for the first time this year:
 
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (Cassavetes)
In a Lonely Place (Ray)
La moustache (Carrere)
F For Fake (Welles)
Dawn of the Dead (Romero)
The Plumber (Weir)
Blast of Silence (Baron)
Lancelot du Lac (Bresson)
The Seventh Continent (Haneke)
Dear Wendy (Vinterberg)
It Happened One Night (Capra)

Tidying up for the new year.

Brandon, I think Emerson already gave you your whipping.  I may eventually see Avatar, but I have low expectations despite your enthusiasms.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2009/12/avatar_plummets_into_the_uncan.html

Unrelated, I just re-watched Pulp Fiction for the first time in at least ten years.  

I also watched The Happening.  I couldn't help myself.  I knew I had to see it eventually.  Why not treat myself on Christmas Eve?

And you know what's funny?

Pulp Fiction is generally good.

The Happening is generally bad.

But, they both have something in common.  As "pure" auteur pics, they both share the same weakness.  

All of the dialogue sounds like it may as well be coming out of the same mouth.  There are lots of characters but each one of them speaks strictly on behalf of their creator, not on behalf of themselves.

Tarantino seems to have grown out of this bad habit (though he hasn't shaken it completely).  Shyamalan seems to be stuck in a rut.  He knows how to frame an effective shot and structure a story appropriately, but his personality gets in the way.  If anyone gives him money to make another film (which is doubtful at the moment), I really hope that they require him to shoot someone else's script.  He's an extremely competent and talented director with a headful of muddled narratives.

Dialogue and stupid story aside, The Happening is a bold and brilliant failure.  It's not a stupid movie in the same class as average stupid movies for the masses.  Any film that attempts to make wind and trees and bees disappearing scary and has a lame science teacher hero has already beaten almost all of the fart jokes of the year combined.  The Happening is a noble failure.

Christmas day was fun.  I had the sniffles through the day, but generally felt fine.  The sweetness of the world had arrived.  I had only to enjoy it.  And I did.

Maybe a bit too much.  

The night ended in a haze of Imported Polish potato vodka courtesy of brother Peter.

The next morning, I found that Santa had left me a nasty little day-after-Christmas-cold.  I felt crappy, but went to work anyhow.  After getting some work done, I spent the last few hours of my shift recuperating on a couch with medicinial TCM before my eyes.  While on that blessed couch, I saw my first ever Rathbone/Bruce Sherlock Holmes film.  Interestingly enough, my first Holmes film was the last one that this marvelous duo would ever make.  Evidently, Rathbone wanted to spend the rest of his career being in awful horror pictures instead.

The film was Dressed to Kill and it was an absolute delight, just the sort of thing that my sick and grumpy soul needed to make me feel better.  The mystery involved three music boxes worth killing for and a femme fatale to die for.  I especially loved the whole tobacco sub-plot and also Watson quacking like a duck to console a traumatized little girl.

Jason, your boy may be too old or too cool for these Holmes movies, but I say give them a try.  I plan on eventually watching them all with my girls.  While I'm writing to you, specifically, Jason, how many times do I have to beg you to start your own movie blog?  2010 is a good year to start.  One sentence per movie watched.  That's all I'm asking.  It's cheaper and more satisfying than collecting Star Wars merchandise.  

Instead of getting better, by Monday the cold had moved down to my chest and I was starting to cough up foul colored gunk.  I spent the day reading Cordwainer Smith's Norstrilia (which would make a great film!)

Tuesday, I called in sick.  I caught up on a couple of borrowed films and a third that I regret buying for a few dollars at Hollywood video.

Knife In the Water is good at what it is, but I mostly don't care.  I'm a geek and relate to geeks.  Whether I like it or not, Synechdoche, New York was made for me.  Knife In the Water was not.  I can't relate to "manly" men trying to out-man each other.  I can't even enjoy watching how stupid this contest is.  I have firsthand geek knowledge that this is stupid painful behavior on the part of non-geeks that only ever hurts geeks.  I'm rambling and not really discussing the feature.  Oh well.  There is a knife in the water.  At least we get what we're promised.

F For Fake delivers the geek goods.  I loved it.  Maybe more on it later.

Spielberg's The War of the Worlds is a huge disappointment.  It works as a monster/chase movie with little to no science fiction premise to back it up.  If that's all I'm getting, I'd rather watch Carpenter's The Thing a few more times.  There is some family dynamics here, but it's only the same Spielberg broken family learning to love and live through the cracks.  And you know what?  It doesn't even work as a monster/chase movie.  I think that the only SF element here is that Cruise and Fanning are immortal and invincible, preventing any audience relatability.  There are no scares or thrills when you can't suffer even the possibility of a bad end.

That's it.  Those are the last six films seen in the calendar year 2009, bringing my watched total to around 200.  And I've written about every one of them.  It's been fun.    

Top ten tomorrow.

See you in 2010.  

Pre-list list

Perspective

Counting repeat viewings, but not counting short films, I count 195 as the number of feature films I watched in 2009.  58 of those were seen in a theatre.  About 40 films qualify as 2009 releases, more or less depending on how one determines these things.

Despite my Cornell time, I didn't watch significantly more films this year than last year.  The number was 185 films in 2008.  The big difference was that I saw a lot more films at the cinema this year instead of home on DVD.  And the other huge difference is that I spent time writing about each one this year.
 
My upcoming "best of" 2009 list isn't set in stone.  I'm looking forward to catching up on films I missed, either because they never played here (35 Shots of Rum, The Headless Woman, The Sun) or because I was too busy to see them (The Box, Where the Wild Things Are, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Coraline).  I probably would have made it to those last three or four if Mildred was 14 instead of 7, but I'm definitely not rushing anything.  She's growing up too fast already.  I'm glad that she loved Ponyo so much, both her and the film brimming with wonder. 

There are also current "awards-style" films like Invictus, Up In the Air, and The Road that I'd like to eventually see.

2009 seems like a decent year in film.  I need to see two Herzog films before I can know for sure.  It might end up being the best year of the decade.  I like Herzog documentaries.  I adore Herzog narratives.  And we got two this year.  

I had the special experience of working at Cornell.  What made the year great, though, wasn't the quality or the quantity of the films released or seen.  The best part of this film year was maintaining this stupid blog and being able to read yours.  It's been a lot of fun.  

Before my top ten list, here is my top ten UNSEEN films of 2009, ranked according to my burning desire to see each one.

1) My Son, My Son What Have Ye Done
2) Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
3) Birdsong
4) Police, Adjective
5) 24 City
6) Bright Star
7/8) Fantastic Mr. Fox/Where the Wild Things Are
9) The White Ribbon
10) The Sun 

Ten Years

Decade, alphabetically

Appaloosa (2008)
Ashes of Time Redux (2008)
La moustache (2005)
Munyurangabo (2007)
The New World (2005)
No Country For Old Men (2007)
The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (2007)
A Scanner Darkly (2006)
A Serious Man (2009)
There Will Be Blood (2007)

If some lunatic cinephile demigod appeared to me in a vision and threatened celluloid annihilation if I did not choose ten and only ten films from the last ten years that were the only films that I'd ever be able to watch again from this decade, the above list is what I'd choose.

It might change tomorrow, but it is what I'd choose today.

I'm not arguing that these are the "best" films or the most important ones.  These are the films that I've thought about the most and currently mean the most to me.  It's a totally subjective list meant to please me and only me.

The list is a strange one, I know, not least because I don't include a single film from the first five years of this decade.  What kind of decade consists of only five years?  Well, that's how I experienced the decade.  I missed out on most of the critical darlings, foreign and arthouse, from those first five years and I just haven't caught up yet.  I probably won't ever catch up, but I do have the TSPDT 250 list as a starting guide to what I'm missing.  Then again, something like Dear Wendy was almost universally reviled by critics yet just barely missed placing a spot on my list of ten above.  Of course, ten is a stupid number, but it's the traditional number and I'm sticking with it.

The films I picked:

Appaloosa is a small masterpiece.  I'm convinced.  I could name any scene, but the one that pops into my head right now is the shootout in the street.  There's no rolling or running, dodging or ducking.  Only men standing.  Repeatedly firing lead at one another until someone falls down.  The editing is fast and tight.  We get a shot of someone firing a pistol.  We get a shot of a man falling down with a bullet inside of him.  Oh, the simple pleasures.

The Coens win by earning two spots on the list.  While others play it safe with their moralizing, the Coens run roughshod through Ecclesiastes, leaving us to feel the questions.  No Country For Old Men and A Serious Man are two towers of ancient morality not disguised as but perfectly achieved and expressed as a thriller and a domestic drama respectively.  The Coens are among those happy few who can have their cake and eat it, too.

Including Burn After Reading, the Coens are on a winning streak at the moment.  We still have the Chabon project and True Grit yet to come!

Ashes of Time Redux, The New World, and The Romance of Astrea and Celadon all probably qualify as romantic pictures.  I didn't know I was such a softie until I made this list, but I do have a mushy core.  Strike that.  These are not soft easy films.  These are hard films with sharp edges.  They will cut you.  If they don't hurt and you don't bleed, you probably have no life or love left in you.  These three films are each brilliant, each building up love as difficult but precious rather than tearing it down and cheapening it like most films do.  

In the Mood For Love and 2046 are both hovering around the boundaries of this list, but I prefer Ashes of Time.

Ashes of Time is a bit of a cheat since the film was first released in 1994.  Without having seen the original cut, I have to argue that the Redux is a different film from the original in that any new cut of a film produces an entirely new and different film.  The Redux belongs to 2008, not 1994.

A Scanner Darkly really captures the spirit of Phil Dick's work.  And Dick's spirit is one of the most important of the last century, with us still today more than ever.  I'd love to see Linklater direct a Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said adaptation.  It would be unlike anything he's done before, but I think that he's the most qualified to do it.  As an aside, now that I'm thinking about it, maybe Kaufman could stop navel-gazing and try an Ubik adaptation as his second directorial project.

La moustache haunts me.  I don't know why.  Maybe it plays perfectly to my own thoughts and fears about identity and relationships.  Maybe I'm just amazed by how it works as a thriller.  

Munyurangabo hits every right note.  The domestic scenes are the heart of the film, but it's the last twenty minutes or so that will take your breath away.  What is amazing is that the film achieves this broad shift in emphasis so organically.

There Will Be Blood.  I still haven't watched it on DVD, but I saw it three times at the cinema.  There's no question that I would immediately go three more times if it re-opened for a one week run in Binghamton.  It and The New World struggle in my mind for the top spot on this list with all of the others swimming around each other below these two titans.  I decided not to even try and rank them.  So alphabetical.

I'm glad that I don't really have to limit myself to rewatching only ten films.  I get to keep my copy of King of Kong: Fistful of Quarters and my shelf of Pixar magic.  

These exercises may be mostly meaningless, but they are fun.  And there is no denying that we each have our own sub-canons alongside and maybe against the wider critical consensus.  I know that there are still dozens, if not hundreds, of films that I would need to see for this to be a "fair" list, but if I wait until I've seen all of these films that I "should" see, then I'll have missed all of the list-making fun. Everyone seems to believe that the decade is over.  I need to review and evaluate the decade as I've experienced it because now, not later, is the time to give an account.

So, the ten above.  I'm happy with them.  I could have opened up the list to 25 or 75, but it was more fun narrowing down to what I feel are absolutely "my essentials."

Happy decade.

P.S. Brandon, you'll be happy to know that 2007 leads the pack with four titles!

No posts

Brandon, I just checked. Your blog has no new posts since Fantastic Mr. Fox. Maybe IT is blocking you somehow. Give me a call if you think you're going to the 10:15 showing, either tonight or tomorrow night.

Peace and goodwill. Later.

A useful hypocrisy

There are some great little moments in In the Loop, but not enough to save it from itself.  As far as I can tell, my problem with the film is that I couldn't find an access point.  Not a single character is likable and the entire situation is admittedly stupid.  It's supposed to be satire, but it doesn't feel funny.  Just sad and oppressive.  

Full disclosure: I was tired and a bit cranky when I watchd it. Maybe I didn't give it a fair chance, but I don't care.

I was still tired and cranky when this week's student films were screened.  That didn't stop me from loving one of them and liking the others.

There were four "intermediate" student films.

You Never Know is a fun time-travel superhero film made in the same loving spirit that my friend Nick directed the Parthe films of our youth.  It's not great, but I smiled through most of it.

The Big Community is the film I loved.  It is a sweet homage to the Big Sleep and general hard-boiled tropes while simultaneously being a nice family film about intergenerational relationships.  I talked with the director afterward.  He promised to send me a DVD copy, so hopefully you'll be able to see it, Brandon.

Rethinking Tragedy: Creative Solutions to Conflict in the Caucuses was the only dud.  It's too bad because I think that the professor's ideas were interesting and worthy of a better presentation.

Jacob's Birthday features a boy being raped on his 16th birthday.  The story seems a bit too deterministic in its plotting, but the direction is confident and the acting is solid enough.  And the homosexual angst is obviously heartfelt, adding to the sincerity of the pain envisioned and enacted.

There were also seven animated films, but nothing really special.  The music video for Poison is only so-so, but I'll single it out as the best of the bunch because the song is catchy and the tune has popped into my head more than a few times already since Sunday.

The program was a nice way of ending my ushering career.  It was a fun experience.  I'm going to miss doing the job, but it will be fantastic to not have to leave my family anymore.  I really began to regret committing to the entire semester.  I had fun, but it really wasn't worth spending so much time away from my family.  If only I could quit my regular job and get paid the same to work as full-time usher.  Oh well.

I'm all caught up again now with writing.  I think I'm going to take a break for a week or so.  I'll be back after Christmas with some sort of year-end post.

You need to get that new computer  Brandon.  It's not quite as fun doing this alone.    

Time for love

Love is all a matter of timing.

Those are Mr. Chow's words to himaelf in 2046.  I'm not sure that he even believes them.  It's a comfortable lie.

2046 is an excellent sequel/companion to In the Mood for Love.  The ideas in it are also clearly in dialogue with both Ashes of Time and My Blueberry Nights, the other two Wong films that I have seen.  I am ignorant of any other filmmaker who is currently exploring romantic love at this level of depth and committment in such an adult way.  Rohmer comes to mind, but he's at the end of his career now.

Out of Sight is a cute little heist romance that has fun with the notion of love being a matter of timing.  Easy to watch and easy to like, the film is pretty perfect at being the trifle that it is.

Junebug is comparable in its ambitions to Still Walking.  Junebug fails by comparison as it teetertotters along the borders of melodrama.  This would be okay if the characters were fully established, but I feel like they are rather players in a grand directorial joke instead of real human beings.

Both brother characters seem underdeveloped, working as fleshed out stereotypes instead of being their own men.  Overall, I feel lukewarm toward the film, but I'm glad for more Southern stories on screen.  Also, the one scene where Johnny is trying and failing to tape the meerkats transcends the rest of this film and most other films like this.  It's just a beautiful moment of truth.  Love is all a matter of timing.

Those are three of the films you let me borrow.  I have to wonder if you recognized the common themes when you gave them to me or if it was just a happy accident.

I also watched Two Lovers.  It wasn't nearly as awful as I was prepared for it to be.  It is actually quite good, among the best American films of this year that I've seen.  Which may not be saying much with competition like Transformers 2 and Paul Blart: Mall Cop.

Like the films you loaned me, Two Lovers is about love and timing.  And it mostly succeeds in its modest attempt to tackle such important ideas without trying to provide answers.  Just feel the questions.     

Some of the writing is poor (only in the sense that shortcuts are taken), but the story is solid and the three main performances are all top-notch.  I hope that Pheonix changes his mind about his retirement.  

Gray is definitely a director to watch.  I'm excited to see what he does in the future and hope to get around to checking out his past films. 

I also mostly rewatched Julie and Julia at home with Abby.  I say mostly because i walked out a few times to do things and i fell asleep before the end.  Like Out of Sight, it is a trifle and it likewise holds its own by being more fun than it has any right to be. 

Finally, Munyurangabo is a great film. I highly recommend it.  I'm grateful to Film Movement for giving it DVD distribution in the States.  I don't know much about Rwanda or the genocide there, but I am familiar with the wickedness of hatred and the futility of unrighteous anger.  Munyurangabo made me want to get down on my knees and beg for mercy.  

Love is not all a matter of timing.  

It is all a matter of continuing sacrifice.  It is a matter of dying to self and living for others.  I still have a lot to learn.   

You can't touch this.

I had the pleasure of watching The Wolf Man with my children, exposing them to its horror before Abby knew what I was doing.

The Wolf Man is no Frankenstein.  It is not a great film.  It is still a lot of fun and has a stubborn serious streak.  Through little fault of his own, our hero becomes a wild killer.  He has to deal with mystical events beyond his capacity to understand.  As he so clearly puts it, "things you can't touch."

I've also finally delved into the third episode of Breaking Bad.  It is definitely a turning point.  The first two episodes were joined together in style and substance.  This third episode departs in a few ways.  The "flashback" that frames the episode does a lot to establish the episode's theme, achieving a didacticism absent from the previous two episodes.  If anything, this aspect of the episode is too clear and too meaningful.  The episode is still great, but just barely.  The season could go up or down from here.  Even if it is a bit too clearly stated, this episode shares The Wolf Man's trepidation and guarded respect for things you can't touch.  Both explore the "Jekyll" and "Hyde" sides of man.  Yes; they explore the soul.

False hope

I liked the first Yes Men film, but thought that it lacked some unidentifiable unifying principle.  The Yes Men Fix the World remedies the uneven episodic nature of that first film by zeroing in on a theme: false hope vs. enacted anticipation of imagined realities.  This theme ties Fix the World's episodes together and paves the way to one of the finest endings I've seen all year.

The Yes Men effectively actualize the change they wish to see happen.  Only for a moment.  But really for a moment.  

As harbingers of the change that must occur if we do not first destroy ourselves, the Yes Men defy the present world order to the shame of us all, to the extent that we rationalize our own particpation in its evils.

Back to the ending.  It reminded me of nothing more than the grand finale of that very special film, The Muppet Movie.  All possibilites, however remote, spread open before us and all of the artifice involved in the making of the movie is washed away in a wave of audacious joy.  I don't remember ever crying at the end of The Muppet Movie.  I was sniffling back tears at the end of Fix the World.

Speaking of false hope, the Cornell student films were largely a disappointment.  To be fair, these were the Intro class films.  Next week are a few Intermediate films and some animation.

I won't go over them all since there's little chance that anyone else will ever see them.

The two best films were The Elephant in the Room, a humorous "coming out" tale, and Reel Culture, a documentary about Cornell Cinema.  Love at First Site showed promise and Young Blood was too cool for its own good.  Both were about fleeting relationships.  The rest were mostly disposable, though none were entirely bad.  I'll save the program and check IMDB in ten years for the names of all involved.

V

I now believe that television itself, the medium of sitting in front of a magic box that pulses images at us endlessly, the act of watching TV, per se, is mindcrushing.  It is soul-deadening, dehumanizing, soporific in a poisonous way, ultimately brutalizing.  It is, simply put so you cannot mistake my meaning, a bad thing.     --Harlan Ellison, Strange Wine

I've just caught up with the first four episodes of the current V remake.  Thank you, Mom, for recording it for me.  

Unfortunately, V is, in a bad way, mindcrushing.  The best compliment that I can give V is to describe it as completely watchable.  I had no problem sitting around for 168 minutes or so even though I started actively disliking it early on in the first episode. 

The story and the dialogue are both stupid.  Not innocently stupid.  Actively and dangerously stupid.  The action is not at all compelling and usually resolves in silly ways.  Elizabeth Mitchell's character is as generic as can be.  I mostly liked Mitchell in Lost.  She's wasted here.  She's not given anything to work with and doesn't rise above the blah material at all.   We get as boring a hero as can be.  It's not any better for any of the secondary characters.

V both succeeds and fails, not by being good or bad, but by achieving perfect mediocrity.  

Video or Videodrome? I'm staying home and watching TV.

One movie and two TV episodes is all I have to report for the last week.  I haven't really felt like watching much lately.  Maybe a short break.  Maybe the beginnings of an early winter slump.

Sugar is a sweet little film.  Alongside Rudo y Cursi, Sugar stands in a tradition of sports movie cliches and gently rises above them.  Besides being a great baseball film, Sugar smartly comments on immigration issues in a much more effective way than the heavy-handedness of something like last year's The Visitor.  

Ignore all the hype about Blind Side (which, to be fair, I haven't seen so shouldn't be bashing).  We already have the best sports movie of the year.  Its name is Sugar.

I just finished the first two episodes of Breaking Bad and really love it.  The show barely skirts the line of the ridiculous while providing thrills and eliciting heart-churning emotional responses.  There's an ultrsound scene in episode 2 that is so perfect, it's among my favorite motion picture moments of the year.  

The wall between "cinema" and "television" was already being torn down when talented B directors like Joseph Lewis and "A" talents like Hitchcock were working in early television and international masters like Rossellinni, Rohmer, and Fassbinder started working in the medium (and probably from the first flickering moments in Philo's workshop).  

That wall is in ruins now.  Most of us so-called "cinephiles" barely make it into a cinema.  I've been lucky to see a lot of films projected this year, but the dominant way that I watch "films" is through DVDs, either on my relatively small television or computer.  Sometimes I break out the digital projector.  I've got it set up nice in my bedroom right now and hope to use it more often now.  Every once in a while, I've done the truly horrific and watched something on my Zune (I've yet to watch a full movie on my iPod Touch, but it will happen).  All to say that motion pictures are much more than any single format.      

I can't speak for the general condition of today's television programming.  I assume that the large majority of it still sucks.  Breaking Bad does not suck.

Breaking Bad is basically a lively cross between Bill Nye and Hard Case Crime.  There's a pulp sensibility permeating the series (at least the first two episodes). The action is compelling and vitually non-stop, from the very first shot of pants flying through the air to the bathtub scene in episode 2.  Every moment, even the quiet ones, from intimate breakfast chatter to chemistry class are moments of action that advance the tight plot.

Besides the action, the show is closely related to pulps in its morality.  Our "straight-laced" chemist Everyman breaks bad without hesitation and ultimately without regret (so far).  There's a hardness to him that is pure noir, alongside the struggling humanity of his situation that makes him not only relatable, but totally sympathetic.  

There's a 3-second or so reaction shot during the above-mentioned ultrasound scene that reveals, in a silent face, the quiet desperation at the heart of all the action.  Then, quickly, hardness; a cover-up which is as painful for both of the characters involved as it is incrdibly funny dialogue for the audience to enjoy.    

As an aside... Brandon, you wrote that Jarmusch reminds you physically of Marvin.  During Limits, I kept thinking that Bankole reminded me physically of Jarmusch.  Which may be weird, but I thought it was there.  

I'm looking forward to the rest of Breaking Bad and also getting around to checking out all of the other critically acclaimed shows of the past decade that I've mostly missed out on.

On a related note, I don't pretend that Lost is great art, but I'm more excited about the upcoming season of Lost than I am about any upcoming art film (except for the new Malick which will be the movie event of 2010).  When Lost is doing everything right, it becomes more than goofy entertainment.  It's magic.     

Handful of dirt.

The Limits of Control IS hard to write about.  

It plays out at its own defiant pace, interacting with the paintings depicted in it at least as much as the films it references and the "lone gunman" tradition that it stands in.  All while tearing apart and remodeling time, space, and imagination.  

There is no center and there are no edges.

As far as I understand what plot there is, I think that the film plays out like the cinematic equivalent of Woody Guthrie scribbling "this machine kills fascists" across his guitar, then using that death machine to belt out "take you riding in the car," every note screaming playful liberty.

I liked it a lot. 

Brandon, sorry I missed Mr. Fox. Thanks for calling. We didn't have anyone to babysit and I didn't feel like coming out alone since I'd already spent a few nights going off on my own and hanging with friends on the Island. I just felt like staying home with family and getting to sleep early.

Update.

There's no chance that I'm making it to the Cinema Saver tonight. It's about 3:30pm and we still haven't left the Island. Bleh.

After writing my A Serious Man post, I read all that I could find that has been written about the film. So far, my favorite article is this Salon interview... http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/btm/feature/2009/10/01/coens/index.html

Well, I'm definitely out of my depth with respect to Jewish culture, but the whole story -- the whole movie -- feels to me like a Talmudic parable, a moral fable about what happens to somebody who makes certain choices in his life. Then you've got these other stories nested into it, including a prologue that's in Yiddish and has the feeling of the old Yiddish theater. It uses the old tradition of the dybbuk, a kind of demonic spirit from Jewish folk tradition. I'm sure you don't want to give too much away, but what can you say about the relationship between that story and the main story?

E.C.: Well, it's interesting that you ask about it in connection with your other comment, that the main body of the movie feels like a folk tale or fable. That, I guess, is the ambition -- well, not even the ambition of putting on that beginning story, because there was no clear-cut agenda. It just felt right to us. But I think it felt right for that reason. It felt like a folk tale, so it served implicitly as an introduction, to say, "Here's another folk tale, here's another Jewish story." I guess this is imposing an explanation after the fact, because we don't really think about it in these terms while we're doing it, but, yeah, it's part of the whole Yiddishkeit, part of the whole Jew storytelling thing. Jews are big on stories, you know?

J.C.: Yeah, exactly. At a certain point we were thinking, maybe not explicitly, "What is Jewish storytelling?" This is Jewish storytelling, and this is Jewish storytelling. Are they an echo or a reflection of each other? Can they be? Would that be interesting? "What is a Jewish community?" This is a Jewish community in the shtetl, this is a community in another place. Are they reflections or echoes of each other in some way that's vaguely interesting and feels right, or at least not wrong? Will it be an interesting ambassador for the rest of the movie?

As Ethan was saying, sometimes you impose these things after the fact. But I think there was a little bit of thinking that by doing this we were saying immediately, "This is a story very specifically about Jews." Not a story about the Midwest, which you might have felt for a while if we hadn't done this. We were plunging into the deep end, and saying, "Here you are in a world of Jews, and that's what this movie is going to be about." It's a cliché, but when you see them in the long black coats and the sidelocks, that's putting your face in it. And we thought that was a good thing.

My heart's not in this post. It's late and I'm tired.

Goliath is an okay little mumblecore film. Similar to A Serious Man in its portrait of a man suffering through serious loss, the film differs in the fact that its lead character is awkward if not downright psychotic. The first half almost had me giving up, but I was wowed by a pretty great divorce papers shot, then silenced by the awesomeness of a crazy chainsaw/pepper-spray finale.

I don't really feel like writing about The Hurt Locker, but a post is past due and I'm otherwise caught up with writing about everything I've been watching. It is an expertly crafted film, but it falls short for me in the way that most war movies do. War is thrilling. Bah humbug. I liked The Hurt Locker. It makes sense to me as a drug movie and it works well at what it is. I just don't care too much about it now.

I took Abby to see A Serious Man tonight. It's still the best film of the year and I stand by my initial reading of the film. I could write a stupid funny story about the terrible circumstances leading up to seeing this film, but I'm too tired.

Brandon, if I can leave the island early enough tomorrow and make it back to Binghamton in time, I'm hoping to catch another double feature at the Cinema Saver, Where the Wild Things Are at 5, then The Box at 6:45, but it depends on how tired I am. I doubt you'd want to come out for it, but the offer is there if I even go through with the plans myself. Also, I'm not sure if I can come out yet to see Fantastic Mr. Fox on Thursday. I've been overindulging on personal nights. I don't really want to come out unless we can find a babysitter and Abby can come, too. Right now, I'm thinking probably not, but who knows, it may change.

I'm generally cranky at the moment, but here's a moment to thank you, Fred, for the "glorious dawn" link. I hadn't seen it. It's simple and genuinely moving. I love it.

Goy's Teeth

Spoilers. If anyone is reading this who hasn't seen A Serious Man, then stop right here. Go see it while you can.

I really loved A Serious Man. At the moment, it's my favorite film of 2009. Like the writing on those teeth, it's going to keep me up at night until I realize that I have no proper answers to its challenge.

I saw it earlier tonight in the best of circumstances, at a great little theater with an old friend immediately after enjoying a liter mug of delicious Oktoberfest.

Brandon, I just read your post after getting back home to my parents' house after seeing the movie. Great timing. Now I'm staying up too late responding.

I'm also still struggling with the pre-credits sequence, but I love it. The best that I can make out is that it introduces themes of faith and rationality that are explored throughout and ends leaving the question up to debate. I also think that it immediately sets the film within a folklore and storytelling context. I've argued in the past that I see most Coen Brothers films as fairy tales (cf. Chesterton) or parables (cf. Meyers). I think that it is clearly the case here.

The Book of Job parallels are there, but not as overtly as many early reviewers made it sound. I went in to the film with bare minimum knowledge of it. What I had heard over and over again, though, was the Job comparison. Despite the constant refrain of "I haven't done anything," I don't think that Larry is as passive or as whiny as you make him out to be, but I think that you're on to something. Larry isn't quite a righteous man like Job even though he "hasn't done anything." He is a contented man and happy with his life. He's not sure why others can't see things the way he does.

The trouble, of course, is that he's not seeing clearly at all. Seeing, he doesn't see, and hearing, he doesn't hear. You seemed to think that the rabbis gave bad answers and that the Coens take some pot shots at the religion of their youth. I have to disagree. Larry can't see it, but each rabbi does give him a piece of wise counsel.

The scene with the first rabbi is one of my favorites in the whole film. Just look at the parking lot! Really, really hilarious. I also think that his advice is true and useful. I've already written that Larry has vision problems. He can't see what is going on around him. He does need a new perspective. He does need to look at a parking lot with wonder in his eyes. Parking lots and automobiles are freaking amazing. More so, we should be in awe that creatures just like us surround us day by day. Gobs of organs and tissues are held upright in a case of fragile flesh and we're able to vibrate the air to send thoughts to one another by flapping two pieces of meat in the middle of a meat head. We walk around on green pointy blades that bend beneath our feet. We can feel granules of sand on our toes. We have toes! The world is magical, but we can't see it.

The second rabbi gives Larry more advice that Larry doesn't want to hear and thinks is useless. Basically, the rabbi tells Larry that we live in a barely comprehensible story, that we can only understand as it is, through a glass darkly. We live with the questions and life goes on. "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD." This isn't comforting to Larry, but, then again, Larry's still suffering from blindness and deafness.

The third rabbi is busy. He's thinking. This also displeases Larry, but it's obvious at this point that Larry doesn't have ears to hear anyhow.

The rabbi does speak to Larry's son and gives him what amounts to the moral of this whole tale. "When the truth is found to be lies and all the hope within you dies; what do you do then?" The rabbi's next statement, after his praise of "The Airplane," is an answer to his own rhetorical question... "Be a good boy."

I'm not sure what it means that Jefferson Airplane's lyrics were changed from JOY to HOPE, but it's there. Or did I mishear this? Anyhow, Larry has discovered that the "truth" of his life has been a lie. Not all is stable. At a certain point, he does realize that maybe, just maybe, this testing of everything in his life has made him reevaluate his perspective, but then clearly rejects the idea. What is interesting is that he remains basically good throughout. Finally, though, dealing with the lies and having his hope die, Larry makes the fatal mistake of no longer suffering through the questions. He provides his own answer. He chooses not to "be a good boy" and crosses a line. The moment he does so, the magnificent finale begins. The ending caught me by surprise, but it only took me a couple of minutes into the credits to decide that I love it.

As far as what movie it reminded you of, I'm going to guess Drag Me to Hell.

Lastly, I really liked the nightmare sequences, especially Canada.

I'm hoping to see A Serious Man again tomorrow night. I'll let you know if I do.

I finished writing this at 3am. Hopefully at least some of it is coherent.

A theatre full of middle-aged women and me.

When I saw Departures, I spent about the first half an hour thinking about how delightful the film was.  Unfortunately, this rapture of mine was blown to bits by a terribly trite montage and I had to suffer through all of the contrivances that followed.

Like Departures, I was actually enjoying Julie and Julia through its opening 30 minutes.  It was irresistable.  I let myself get swept away in its delight.  I kept waiting to be disappointed.  The difference this time was that I wasn't.  Julie and Julia, despite (because of) its conventional Ephron script kept me delightfully engaged from start to finish.  I say that it's conventional because it is; all the typical RomCom stuff is there.  It just seems more mature than any of its countless siblings and every note of this familiar formula is played just right.  

There are moments toward the 3/4 mark where the film drags because the obstacles set up for these women are sure to be overcome, but even these are tolerable because by the 3/4 mark, I was already invested in everything coming out alright.  I knew it would and I was eager to see it happen.

Don't dismiss Julie and Julia.  It's one of Hollywood's best offerings this year; easily worth a rental when it gets its DVD release.  I'm looking forward to seeing it again with Abigail. 

From a whisper to a scream to a whisper

I deny that Epidemic is a horror film.  It is instead a comedy about writing a horror film that fails to horrify anyone.  The hypnosis scene is the payoff to a long joke that seldom works.  Maybe I'm missing something.  I don't know.  I didn't particularly like or appreciate Epidemic.  I am going to watch the film again with the Von Trier commentary track on.  Pedro, what am I missing?

Scream, which I also watched recently,  holds up as a really smart love letter to the specific form of horror movie that flourished in the late 70s through the 80s.  It lovingly deconstructs the slasher film while upholding all of its basic tropes.  I've never been a fan of these sorts of horror movies and ultimately don't care about Scream, either, but I do respect Scream for its critical devotion to the tradition it stands in.

Since I've been engaged in educating myself about horror films and know that I like at least some goofy horror... I finally broke down and saw Zombieland at the Cinema Saver.  

I went in with low expectations, but I was still disappointed.  There's a lot to like and I smiled and chuckled often, but the film lost me during the cameo sequence and never won me back.  Up until that point, I bought all of the emotional stuff going on even if it was dumb and shallow.  There was still some core realism to the expressed emotions amid the goofiness.  Once Brandon Musa (or some other comedian with the initials BM, I forget) shows up, though, and gets casually killed, every last remnant of reality vanishes and the stakes don't matter anymore.  If the characters can't care about BM's death, I can't care about anything else that happens for the remainder of the movie.  I couldn't even care about attaching a spoilers tag to all of this.  Sorry.  The ending was a big let-down and about as conventional as possible, but, even so, it was fun to see Woody Harrelson play things so cool as a one man zombie annihilation machine.

What I took away from all three of these films is the knowledge that I still don't quite know how to define "horror."  Is it an "I know it when I see it" sort of thing?  Am I trying to be too rigid in my genre boundaries because of my quest to understand this thing?

Epidemic didn't feel like horror.  It felt like an examination of a creative process in a pre-Kaufman Kaufmanesque style.  Heck, Synechdoche, New York is more of a horror film than Epidemic is.  Scream works in the slasher sub-genre and is probably the clearest to define of the group.  Zombieland has a backdrop of zombie apocalypse, but it's more of a comedic road movie than anything else, sharing more in common with National Lampoon's Family Vacation than Romero's Night of the Living Dead.   

Brandon, I got your note too late. I ended up going to the Cinema Saver for
the double feature of Zombieland/The Hurt Locker. I'll be writing about The Hurt Locker soon after thinking about it for
a few more days. Also, we're in training together on Thursday. Want to work
out a movie loaning swap?

Benjamin Button Still Sucks

Quote: It's true that the two of us share a lot of the same tastes in film and it seems that whenever we do disagree it rattles you more than me.

Response: Nah, I wouldn't say that it rattles me. It doesn't even really bother me.  I actually think that it is really fun when we have disagreements.  I enjoy making little friendly jabs as I know you do.  I do think that you misunderstood part of my post, but I'm more than willing to take the blame for being unclear.  

My post was more me wondering out loud about the things that make us all unique even when we share commonalities.  Despite the uneven tone of my post, I think that these differences are a good thing and allow us to see things more clearly, not less.

Quote: I'm not surprised that you hated this film but I am surprised by statements like “I have to grapple with my respect for you as a person and specifically for your opinion regarding movies.” I don’t even know how to respond to something like this except to hope that this was written with heavy sarcasm.

Response: Yikes.  Here is one of the limitations of quickly blogging.   I do apologize if there was any insult there.  I actually meant quite the opposite.  I wasn't saying that I have to grapple with whether or not I'm going to continue to respect you and I definitely was not tossing out any moral condemnation.  Au contraire!!  

To be clear (which I obviously wasn't before), what I meant was:  I do respect your opinion.  Therefore, based on this respect, I can't dismiss your tastes in regards to something I don't like.  I need to "grapple" or wrestle with your way of seeing.  I need to be honest and reevaluate whether or not there is/was something wrong or incomplete with my own opinion of a specific film because I know with certainty that I can learn something from you.  I'm missing something in the film if I don't learn to see it in the way that you are seeing it.  I may still disagree and that's cool, but through disagreement I learn something.  

Quote: When we write about film here we are not making an argument for right or wrong but for our personal tastes and I had thought that we were not going to make attacks on each others' character. When you make a statement like the one I quoted above you make it sound like I robbed an old woman rather than simply expressing my love for a film.

Response: Again, yikes!  I do hope my clarification makes sense and has made things better.  I have nothing but praise and respect for you, my friend. Even if you are wrong about Benjamin Button (insert smiley face here to indicate good will). :)

Really?!??

The Curious Case of Disagreements Between Like-Minded Friends

I finally got around to seeing Benjamin Button this past Saturday night.  I went in biased against it (I couldn't help it but at least I was aware of it) and left it feeling underwhelmed.  I was hoping to find something there that would make me appreciate the film in some small way, but I couldn't find a thing.  The romance at the heart of the film didn't work for me so nothing here really mattered.  I hated the Katrina framing device.  The aging backwards and all the themes that accompanied it was stupid and worked out implausibly.  I liked some of the music and the special aging effects were alright.  The film's most obvious reference point is Forest Gump, but I think that it also shares affinities with countless biopics in its failed attempt to tell a sweeping life story in under three hours and make it all MEAN something.

So, why do we disagree?  Isn't it as obvious as the elpephant in the room that this picture just isn't so good after all?

It's tempting to think that I'm always right and those that disagree with me are wrong.  But, I was given a wife to be witness to how often I'm wrong.  I just can't get away with it.  Even though she agrees with me about Benjamin Button.

Besides admitting that I can be wrong, I have to grapple with my respect for you as a person and specifically for your opinion regarding movies.  We're so often in agreement that the disagreements are striking.

How could you possibly fall for the schmaltz of Button?  Why do we look at 25th Hour so differently?  

I insist on loving Julien Donkey-Boy and recently became quite enamored of Dear Wendy, another film that it seems every critic loves to hate.  Terror In a Texas Town, easily dismissed, is my ideal Western, above any Ford or Hawks.  I'm sure there are plenty of other examples.

It's a funny thing.

I am really glad that you liked Still Walking.  The more I think about it, the more I think it might be the best movie (that I've seen) of 2009 so far.  It's only been four days since I've seen it, but I haven't been able to watch a film since.  I almost went to see Where the Wild Things Are on Monday afternoon, but I got to the AMC parking lot, then couldn't do it.  I haven't even been interested in the DVDs I got from the library.  I want Still Walking to rattle around in my head a little longer.

Also, I was a bit dismissive of Beeswax.  I shouldn't have been.  It's among the best 2009 releases that I've caught so far, easily in a top ten if I was forced to list a 2009 top ten right this moment.  Movies like this one should be championed and held above the megaplex offerings and most of the arthouse fare.  It still doesn't particularly resonate with me deeply and personally in the same way that something like Moon did, but it has a quiet power.  To get in one last dig, Beeswax, in its small way, has all of the fierce veracity that Benjamin Button, in all of its bombastics, lacks. 

Ever Seen

I just re-read my last post and decided that it's one of the stupidest things I've ever seen.

"one of the best Westerns I've ever seen"

"best 'costume drama' I've ever seen"

"effective uses of pop music in any film I've ever seen"

I now promise to eliminate the words "I've ever seen" from my vocabulary.  If I write these words again, shoot me.

Writing letters to dead rabbits

Presentation, or Charlotte and Her Steak is a nice little early Rohmer/Godard short.  Communication between the sexes is the ever-present exploration of both of these men.  This little film doesn't go far in answering any big questions, but Charlotte does get to eat her steak.  I'm hoping to watch more Rohmer shorts and all of his "Moral Tales" before the year is over.

As long as I'm writing about what I hope to watch, I have to confess that I haven't gotten back to the Boetticher box set like I had hoped.  The Tall T is all I've seen so far, but that film is easily one of the best Westerns I've ever seen.  I love Scott's character.  I hope that I grow up to be half the Man he is.

I started writing a post about Rossellini, Neo-Realism, and The Taking of Power By Louis XIV, but scrapped it because I was unhappy with it.  Simply, Taking of Power is the best "costume drama" I've ever seen, steeped in Rosselini's neo-realistic aesthetic.  I've been to Versailles (somewhere there is a picture of me relaxing and reading a pulp Western on the palace lawn.). What's fascinating to me Is how fair Rossellini is in his treatment of the king.  I have to wonder how the film was received politically when it was released.  I wish that I had bought all of these historical films during the last Criterion sale.

The Bugs Bunny/Road-Runner Movie is another formative film from my childhood, like The Muppet Movie, that I recently got a chance to revisit with my own children.  My girls have already been (over)exposed to Loony Tunes/Merrie Melodies through the first two Golden Collection DVD sets that we own.  The Golden Collections are awesome, but when I was a kid, it wasn't so easy to find these 'toons.  The Anthology films like Bugs/Road-Runner were my primary means of exposure.  This particular film is really a "best of" collection of Chuck Jones shorts.  I've grown to prefer most of Freling's shorts, but there's no arguing about these Jones selections.  Great stuff.  

I especially love the 19-minute Wile E. Coyote/Road-Runner chase.  I still havent seen Hostel, but I'm sure that it has nothing on these 19 minutes.  This is the original torture porn.  

Broken Flowers is a lovely little movie.  I wasn't sure about it given the cast and the story, but I shouldn't have doubted.  Jarmusch plays every note just right.  We leave aching a bit.

Sometimes I just fall for a movie, completely, even when I know better.  Dear Wendy caught me with my guard down and it absolutely charmed me.  Thomas Vinterberg delivers the heart which may sometimes be lacking in his friend Lars's own films.  Von Trier wrote the script here, but it is Vinterberg who grounds the entire enterprise in real human emotions and gives a real sense of place to staged surroundings.  "Pacifists with guns" is as good an externalization as anything to represent the obvious tensions that a dude like myself feels, torn between wanting to be cool like Randolph Scott out in the world, but feeling more comfortable sitting around writing about what goes on in a dark theatre.  Anyhow, the Zombies soundtrack ranks among the most effective uses of pop music in any film I've ever seen.

Tonight was a good night at Cornell Cinema.

I really enjoyed For All Mankind, a documentary about the Apollo VIII mission.  Fred, I think that you'll love this if you haven't seen it already.  It's got a good original score by Eno, but my favorite moments involve the astronauts playing music that they've brought along on cassette.  From Buck Owens to Berlioz, I had no idea how important a role music played in getting us to the moon.  There are also a few fun nods to 2001 by the astronauts.  

I don't know if humans should be messing around in space until we figure out how to get along with ourselves and with our planet down here, but I also get giddy about space travel and conquering the stars.  As a Christian and as a Science Fiction fan, I'm certain that this whole crazy universe is a lot more wonderful than we've yet imagined.

Still Walking, the second picture of the night, is all about life on the ground.  Unlike its Japanese sibling, Departures, this film earns every strained and painful moment, and also every joyous one.  The score is beautiful and supports the images instead of overpowering them.  

I'm just not the right guy to write about these family dramas.  Brandon, you did a great job with Summer Hours.  You need to see Still Walking and give it the proper considered response that it deserves.