tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1857612897400779412024-03-05T09:34:49.515-08:00Movies....I've seen, and what I think of them, selected almost at random.tom newthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00883569375257663681noreply@blogger.comBlogger254125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-185761289740077941.post-39725476184621316922024-01-22T09:46:00.000-08:002024-01-22T10:30:47.143-08:00Season Of The Cat<div style="text-align: left;">Since Criterion have recently launched <a href="https://www.criterionchannel.com/cat-movies" target="_blank">their own</a>, here's the ORIGINAL <i>Season Of The Cat</i>, presented at <a href="https://sideshowbookstore.com/" target="_blank">SideShow Books</a> Los Angeles in the late summer of 2021 (credit for the initial idea to Tony SideShow, programmed by me)</div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIyREvIW6oKScqOXrOgKvV6zpwqjJsHkk5zL4EECD8X41k97pb9QlnUaf2TLXf3bX51XT0TWCruX6TP7MLslyW2_wYxsurW3arEJb04GHI8ira1BR35iJKpbVvI0xIqVNKdEUWTf-Vh7k_Y-JGqlmv56-NPDFX9nv92V3iWHQBmMuv18nF_lyP_QEN_b0/s3300/cover.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"> <img border="0" data-original-height="3300" data-original-width="2550" height="679" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIyREvIW6oKScqOXrOgKvV6zpwqjJsHkk5zL4EECD8X41k97pb9QlnUaf2TLXf3bX51XT0TWCruX6TP7MLslyW2_wYxsurW3arEJb04GHI8ira1BR35iJKpbVvI0xIqVNKdEUWTf-Vh7k_Y-JGqlmv56-NPDFX9nv92V3iWHQBmMuv18nF_lyP_QEN_b0/w616-h679/cover.jpg" width="616" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaCdxjrnw7eWMMX_INX3UdN5k9rMzL_3y3FDRBlHx3X9-AgpUjP0drMBuA_uC8oZoK7MitDXrZX3798KGSY6o_MN3GIUDCGCL1fvUsC85sA61axVUoywWWGZBonLOELQKxOcBuuwu7-IX919YZ76Hsm32gVovaXcaJ9q8IamVGafD64ltkrJNUaA8XSFA/s5100/inner.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="5100" data-original-width="3300" height="956" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaCdxjrnw7eWMMX_INX3UdN5k9rMzL_3y3FDRBlHx3X9-AgpUjP0drMBuA_uC8oZoK7MitDXrZX3798KGSY6o_MN3GIUDCGCL1fvUsC85sA61axVUoywWWGZBonLOELQKxOcBuuwu7-IX919YZ76Hsm32gVovaXcaJ9q8IamVGafD64ltkrJNUaA8XSFA/w617-h956/inner.jpg" width="617" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjESCVug7nAtwwsioVLpIL5QPFrsRuHVu0yGHyBAbQbnhOPCXoO_J0MPZRmqfeDGK9hFxzWYiFiF-yqVISAVJj4Wu5dyekmaV2xXBVp_J2L9RcRw2n4yVG9K_qw0_xd3HvPzRqqKahCYrtgT-nrquKF0Q3Z6xp4MTlslJPC1HAlEi5-MK6JxpHVAYq14KY/s3300/back.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3300" data-original-width="2550" height="799" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjESCVug7nAtwwsioVLpIL5QPFrsRuHVu0yGHyBAbQbnhOPCXoO_J0MPZRmqfeDGK9hFxzWYiFiF-yqVISAVJj4Wu5dyekmaV2xXBVp_J2L9RcRw2n4yVG9K_qw0_xd3HvPzRqqKahCYrtgT-nrquKF0Q3Z6xp4MTlslJPC1HAlEi5-MK6JxpHVAYq14KY/w618-h799/back.jpg" width="618" /></a></div><br /><br /><i>Seven Deaths In The Cat's Eye</i> (It, Margheriti, 73) / <i>Crimes Of The Black Cat </i>(It, Pastore, 72)<br /><i>The Cat From Outer Space </i>(US, Tokar, 78) / <i>Revenge Of The Black Cat </i>(Jp, Ishii, 70)<br /><i>I Am A Cat </i>(Jp, Ichikawa, 75) / <i>Darker Than Night </i>(Mex, Taboada, 75)<br /><i>Joseph Killian </i>(Cz, Juràcek, 63) / <i>Morgiana </i>(Cz, Herz, 72) / <i>Shadow Of The Cat </i>(UK, Gilling, 61)<br /><i>That Darned Cat </i>(US, Stevenson, 65) / <i>Le chat</i> (Fr, Granier-Deferre, 71)<br /><i>Shozo, A Cat, And Two Women </i>(Jp, Toyoda, 56) / <i>Eye Of The Cat </i>(US, Rich, 69)<br /><i>The Ghost-Cat Of Ouma Crossing</i> (Jp, Kado, 54) / <i>The Corpse Grinders </i>(US, Mikels, 71) <br /><i>When The Cat Comes</i> (Cz, Jasný, 63) / <i>Kuroneko </i>(Jp, Shindô, 68)<br />tom newthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00883569375257663681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-185761289740077941.post-43096272832497252922024-01-18T10:12:00.000-08:002024-01-18T10:33:48.343-08:00Tyrannosaur<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3vIBWgAX5b-eY7abWgSbSvYejQnYvci39kByGsNlsJWB8y0O6_OFVD5yT3j-K3pflQRFiJFdTJXYwbF3WBOkbHmljPNI1kaN1uGgBbzqTURZZr2RIoVs3UlsD41EMSmp2O2XQF5HgMHjMASHJ4kOsHnnCr2wV1GYymRYWn7vjvTnbmQfIEl6uaWxK5zE/s1280/tyranno.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="287" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3vIBWgAX5b-eY7abWgSbSvYejQnYvci39kByGsNlsJWB8y0O6_OFVD5yT3j-K3pflQRFiJFdTJXYwbF3WBOkbHmljPNI1kaN1uGgBbzqTURZZr2RIoVs3UlsD41EMSmp2O2XQF5HgMHjMASHJ4kOsHnnCr2wV1GYymRYWn7vjvTnbmQfIEl6uaWxK5zE/w640-h360/tyranno.jpg" width="510" /></a></div><div style="text-align: left;">Actor Paddy Considine has been at his most powerful and frightening in the midlands dramas of Shane Meadows (<i>A Room for Romeo Brass, Dead Man’s Shoes</i>). His first film as director adopts the same tone of inchoate anger and ups the grimness, taking us a bit further north to Leeds and a world of drab cul-de-sacs, old pubs and a perfectly-rendered charity shop full of banal objects that barely register in the consciousness.<br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">The greatest things about the film – and they are pretty great – are the performers. Peter Mullen is a really first-rate actor, his bullet head with an incredible spider’s web of lines around cold-water-blue eyes; he excels at giving life, self-knowledge, and just enough sensitivity to the hard-drinking, violent man he portrays, Joseph, and perfectly suggests a past of terrible mistakes and selfishness. Less widely-lauded (at the time of release) is Olivia Coleman whose turn in the excellent TV comedy <i>Green Wing</i> was the only one to suggest an actual person, and she gave her character in the likewise superb <i>Peep Show</i> a fine amount of modulation from daffy to hard-edged, with a superbly varied command of her chinless face and funny eyes. She plays Hannah here, a well-enough-to-do woman who works in the charity shop (hinted at, to fill her empty hours that have otherwise led to the bottle). </div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQIIdH0mrxZfmN4ADjqALbNl5_R_Hx-ImemsUoYhnp8zFZAiNnDgSAiC5ZI95HWZy1Lsq7apNr1Oi6xefpguNWBbjYgEoFdi54ULitwl4OW1-rkEqCsEEE4rIQuHvluZUaUjBu4ZL7KEopxNN9KjTeCWGS3EkcEkfPBpP_yDr6C0OC88E_rOw6EEmKtYA/s1280/tyranno2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="287" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQIIdH0mrxZfmN4ADjqALbNl5_R_Hx-ImemsUoYhnp8zFZAiNnDgSAiC5ZI95HWZy1Lsq7apNr1Oi6xefpguNWBbjYgEoFdi54ULitwl4OW1-rkEqCsEEE4rIQuHvluZUaUjBu4ZL7KEopxNN9KjTeCWGS3EkcEkfPBpP_yDr6C0OC88E_rOw6EEmKtYA/w640-h360/tyranno2.jpg" width="510" /></a></div><div style="text-align: left;">Once again, she first appears be a harmless mousy thing, but the character fills out – in a somewhat more satisfactory way than Mullen, even – as details of domestic abuse, religious conflict, regret, and imprisonment reveal themselves: her husband is a smiling, vicious type whose actions, it is suggested, are perhaps not too different from those in Joseph’s past. Eddie Marsan quite stands up to the leads, always reliable and here excellent, his cartoon face turned into something grotesque by his cold and frightening eyes, also an icy blue, such that it’s a bit of a shame not to see more of him.</div><div style="text-align: left;">The film opens in declarative style, with fucking cunts and wankers and a can of lager in an alley. Joseph’s angry about something, beats the wall, then kicks his dog. Then he’s very sad about it. It’s genuinely moving, but the effectiveness of this cycle diminishes; these are the only two modes offered him by the script, and when he’s not being angry and beating people and things, he’s feeling sad that he wants to, or that he has done so in the past. There’s very little to be cheerful about in this film, save the tentative relationship that grows between Joseph and Hannah. It adheres in almost generic fashion to a familiar type of grim British film-making, as most notably practiced by Ken Loach; but if Mullen and the film evoke echoes of Loach’s <i>My Name Is Joe</i>, it is to <i>Tyrannosaur</i>’s disadvantage. <br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">The framework is there, but Mullen is given disappointingly little to work with. Hints and suggestions are indeed all we get, of what he did to his dying best friend, or to his wife; Coleman is given the religious angle and the chance to pull off a tour-de-force eye-bawling confession of her husband’s insane cruelties, but Joseph bottles everything up. We never do quite understand, however, why it is she remains with her husband. And when a kid in Joseph’s choke-hold wails “I don’t know why you’re doing this” we cannot help but empathize. <br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">So despite the hints, the film is not really about the past, but still wants to play with its ominous implications, in much the same way that Marsan’s fate is both signaled and then played as revelation. Likewise the title, which we find refers to Joseph’s ex-wife, also does double duty as an obvious label for Joseph himself, without addressing the distinction between the two metaphorical meanings. Much of what unfolds feels inevitable in a generic rather than organic way, with elements – religion, for example – that remain underdeveloped; admirably aiming to avoid over-explanation, the film, a little like Mullen’s character, ends up lacking any meat beyond the performances, with the same frequent, needless gleam in its eye for (emotional) brutality. <br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">All that said, Considine directs with quiet efficiency, and allows some neat moments to DP Erik Wilson, the best of which is a striking portrait reveal of Coleman doing a terrific words-vs-meaning piece over her sobbing husband. One of those films that’s good enough for you to wish it were more substantial. <br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>d/sc</i> Paddy Considine <i>p</i> Diarmid Scrimshaw, Mark Herbert <i>ph</i> Erik Wilson <i>ed</i> Pia di Ciaula <i>pd</i> Simon Rogers <i>m</i> Dan Baker, Chris Baldwin <i>cast</i> Peter Mullen, Olicia Coleman, Eddie Marsan, Paul Popplewell, Sally Carman<br />(2011, UK, 92m)</div> tom newthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00883569375257663681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-185761289740077941.post-89505821063082131902021-03-16T19:48:00.009-07:002021-03-16T19:51:17.026-07:00Come Rain, Come Shine (Saranghanda, saranghaji anneunda)<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5693SO_o-p9F1CV8dW05fyHPlSRzxfmpAr5zs23t99BSoDutOFQOBsCV-xR-K2fNZUjJbWhtOSfDLn12jXcSOssCnjcNTXehOBGClPhxqJFZZKeF5TiXPPQ1J6nviGn4cHpU_g_yYqKU/s1600/comerain2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1048" data-original-width="1600" height="335" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5693SO_o-p9F1CV8dW05fyHPlSRzxfmpAr5zs23t99BSoDutOFQOBsCV-xR-K2fNZUjJbWhtOSfDLn12jXcSOssCnjcNTXehOBGClPhxqJFZZKeF5TiXPPQ1J6nviGn4cHpU_g_yYqKU/w510-h335/comerain2.jpg" width="510" /></a></div>South Korean extreme cinema was on a roll in the first couple of 21st-century decades, but it was not the sum of the nation’s output; in presumably deliberate contrast, Come Rain, Come Shine is an exaggeratedly quiet divorce drama.<p></p><p>A young unnamed couple are separating. We learn this in the long, long single hood-mounted shot that opens the film. She drops the news almost casually; his reaction is so non-existent that we wonder for a moment if we heard right. This sets us up for the film’s remarkably subdued tone. The rest plays out on rainy Sunday afternoon/evening, entirely in their handsome apartment, as they consider whether or not to go to dinner in the torrential rain, find a lost kitten, are visited by their neighbours looking for the same and, occasionally, discuss their impending break-up after five years of marriage.</p><p>He remains terminally okay about everything, carefully packing some china for her, suggesting she call her lover to arrange things. He admits to sharing blame for the end of their relationship; she calls that selfish. And that’s as pointed as it gets; they let it drop. For the rest, they wander slowly about their apartment, carefully make dinner, look out of windows, and suppress their emotions completely. One wonders why she is not mad that he is not mad, not trying to hold on to her. Apparently, he is used to her unwavering resolutions, so anger would change nothing; we learn little else about the past of their relationship, but it has clearly been a comfortable, possibly happy one, as they work together with the ease of habit in the kitchen, and converse with complete, intimate understanding.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-C_85S21LyhH8BC63313sbcFXA7JxI42m4yqyuzNbyT1CSy-bw0kSP5RSGlG3oG59-Y55S2Z9utDEpvP-a5JuDG3bbW9VOY2h3BC5vVs-Qfwu5NXSMqK-jrauaAQ3fKDJgF_OWxxyfmE/s1920/comerain.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1920" height="287" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-C_85S21LyhH8BC63313sbcFXA7JxI42m4yqyuzNbyT1CSy-bw0kSP5RSGlG3oG59-Y55S2Z9utDEpvP-a5JuDG3bbW9VOY2h3BC5vVs-Qfwu5NXSMqK-jrauaAQ3fKDJgF_OWxxyfmE/w510-h287/comerain.jpg" width="510" /></a></div>The leads persuasively convey character and feeling with the minimal detail made available to them (Hyun was already a superhot star, and just about to start his marines conscription, Elvis-style). Their intimacy and peaceful interaction is itself enough to evoke the melancholy and mourning of a relationship’s end. When he finally cracks, it takes the form of complete inaction; downstairs she tells the kitten that everything will be alright, as though not just for the cat. We have no idea what her conception of alright may be in terms of her relationship, and from their comfort together we wonder if perhaps a divorce will not go ahead after all, but he has, apparently, been okay with her having a lover for some time, so no less probably not. Everything will be alright because it already has been.<p></p><p>Drama is removed: the film is a mood piece, concentrating on the actors’ baleful miens, fetishising their smart apartment, juxtaposing the gloom of the indrawing, rain-drenched evening with occasional (and more-or-less superfluous) shots of the same in bright morning sunlight. It’s a dangerous game to play; indie productions the world over founder everyday on an unexamined awe before slow-cinema. The understatement is almost fatal here, but the leads are quietly captivating (plus, both are gorgeous). Rhythm and pacing are seductive rather than soporific; and the camera is occasionally sinuous, but most importantly, beautifully captures the dim, bathetic light of a long wet Sunday afternoon, to imbue everything with a real feeling of melancholy and sad acceptance. Not quite satisfying, but improbably gripping.</p><div style="text-align: left;"><i>d/sc</i> Lee Yoon-ki <i>p</i> Oh Jung-Wan <i>ph</i> Jang Hyeong-wook <i>ed</i> Kim Hyeong-ju <i>cast</i> Hyun Bin, Lim Soo-jung</div><div style="text-align: left;">(2011, SKo, 105m) </div>tom newthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00883569375257663681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-185761289740077941.post-53111376861382313702021-03-11T14:14:00.008-08:002021-03-11T14:20:14.840-08:00Hot Rods To Hell <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoocbXYtlXEFQlQYIj1wHb4HoHFkH01O41XAnqESZbCH1WkD6gLMotOBCk6xMBrMPAzn-vBC49L816f22htFgiEXjShjTCdj9bt7xVSBXLfNtEko_ksTzZfn12ncgUMqL1QWs9c8mSdsk/s1305/hot+rods.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1305" data-original-width="1280" height="531" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoocbXYtlXEFQlQYIj1wHb4HoHFkH01O41XAnqESZbCH1WkD6gLMotOBCk6xMBrMPAzn-vBC49L816f22htFgiEXjShjTCdj9bt7xVSBXLfNtEko_ksTzZfn12ncgUMqL1QWs9c8mSdsk/w521-h531/hot+rods.jpg" width="521" /></a> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">“These kids have nowhere to go and they want to get there at 150 miles an hour”: a familiar plaint, hardly reworked, but given some cult appeal by occasionally-interesting director Brahm and ditto veteran Andrews, as a father laid up by a Christmas-time car smash. Thus, he spends much of the film pathetically clutching his back, stiff-lipped in self-loathing at the loss of manhood, as he relocates his family from Boston to the desert to take over running a remote motel. <br /></div><p>Wouldn’t you know, on the way they’re buzzed by punk-kid hot-rodders out for kicks, and the motel coffee shop turns out to be a hopping roadhouse for underage booze and boobs. The kids ain’t gonna let no old square spoil their fun and besides, their leader sure likes the look of Andrews’ ripe and wide-eyed daughter, this much to the annoyance of his own trampy girlfriend (Farmer), all twitching mouth and crazy eyes, apparently on the perpetual verge of climax. <br /><br />A lot of the movie falls short: once poised and lovely, Jeanne Crain defaults to overwrought at every opportunity as the wife; there’s a dour traffic cop who spouts road safety homilies; and neither Andrews’ accent nor eyeliner can really be explained. There’s also from a sad lack hot rod fetish shots, but otherwise all the predictable notes are struck. The film-making is perfunctory, and it’s at least a half hour too long. This is a movie made by the squares, but they're old pros at least, and intentional or not, there’s enough kitsch, hysteria, and ridiculous lines to ensure a highly enjoyable time.</p><div style="text-align: left;"><i>d</i> John Brahm <i>p</i> Sam Katzman <i>sc</i> Robert E. Kent <i>ph</i> Lloyd Ahern Sr. <i>ed</i> Ben Lewis <i>ad</i> George W. Davis, Merrill Pye <i>m</i> Fred Karger <i>cast</i> Dana Andrews, Jeanne Crain, Mimsy Farmer, Laurie Mock, Paul Bertoya, Gene Kirkwood, Mickey Rooney Jr. <br />(USA 1967, 92m)</div>tom newthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00883569375257663681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-185761289740077941.post-30318224250144568562021-03-10T17:30:00.007-08:002021-03-10T17:45:05.085-08:00Geu-rim-ja sal-in (Private Eye)<div style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6Dzxps-ozJ4M-9sLVdIci307EfhpJ26viDh2ckJ_6b89gmC1ht54e376eF1flzxcbFt0wH2z-caVzpufree6r4F9DhyRItwzDr3kG9dJG3S2mr2b9LIYKZ_T0qkqse3sTxhvy8FVOSes/s1200/private+eye+l.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="1200" height="347" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6Dzxps-ozJ4M-9sLVdIci307EfhpJ26viDh2ckJ_6b89gmC1ht54e376eF1flzxcbFt0wH2z-caVzpufree6r4F9DhyRItwzDr3kG9dJG3S2mr2b9LIYKZ_T0qkqse3sTxhvy8FVOSes/w522-h347/private+eye+l.jpg" width="522" /></a></div><p style="text-align: left;">It was obvious halfway through that South Korea was walking away with the2010 Santa Barbara Film Festival: funny, sweet <a href="http://tomvonloguenewth.blogspot.com/2020/03/castaway-on-moon-kimssi-pyoryugi.html" target="_blank"><i>Castaway on the Moon</i></a> followed Bong Joon-Ho’s marvelous <a href="http://tomvonloguenewth.blogspot.com/2011/11/mother-madeo.html" target="_blank"><i>Mother</i></a>, and then there was a remarkably assured debut from Park Dae-min, the rollicking <i>Private Eye</i>. A detective story set in early twentieth-century Seoul, it opens in good atmospheric style with the removal of a body from a wooded clearing, and maintains fine form throughout.</p></div><div style="text-align: left;"><p style="text-align: left;">Gutter PI Hong, who chases errant wives and is so recklessly fond of disguises that he usually gets found out, finds himself via an entirely organic chain of events teamed up with a clever young medical student, in order to track down the killer of a minister’s son. The kid proves pretty useful, as does Hong’s friend, a high-class lady inventor with a secret mechanical lair-cum-Q-lab, providing Hong with intricate optical devices beautifully fashioned from wood and brass.</p></div><div style="text-align: left;"><p style="text-align: left;">There’s bumbling police, a brief but terrific old-school newspaper editor, and a marvelous circus, as well as plenty of action, from a rollicking punch-up in an opium den to the tense final showdown in the dark. It can get a bit silly, but in an endearing, old-fashioned way – after dispatching a load of goons Hong sighs “not another one” and takes more beatings than Marlowe. Less forgivable is a nauseating camera effect applied to mar an extended and otherwise finely choreographed chase through splendid street sets. </p></div><div style="text-align: left;"><p style="text-align: left;">Overall, performance, pacing, structure, music, and production design are exemplary. No detail is wasted, the release of information is judged perfectly to keep the audience half a step ahead of the twisty plot but rarely more, and just enough backstory is revealed about Hong and his lady friend at just the right time. Skillful, supremely good-humored, and with an unusually fine balance of character with/through action, it is so purely enjoyable, and winds up with such a shameless but stylish sequel set-up, that one is happy at the prospect of more. (it didn't happen) </p></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>d</i> Park Dae-min <i>p</i> Lee Sang-yong, Han Seon-kyu <i>sc</i> Park Dae-min, Lee Yeong-jong, Yoon Seon-hui <i>ph</i> Choi Chan-min <i>ed</i> Nam Na-yeoung <i>pd</i> Choi Hyeon-syok, Jo Hwa-seong <i>cast</i> Hwang Jun-min, Ryu Deok-han, Uhm Ji-won, Oh Dal-su, Yun Je-mun, Ju Da-yeong, Jeong Gyu-su<br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">(2009, SK, 111m) <br /></div>tom newthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00883569375257663681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-185761289740077941.post-7792768409881597342021-03-10T12:59:00.012-08:002021-03-10T13:08:10.051-08:00Chloe<div style="text-align: center;"><p> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaoeGEjEwc1BwG_U8az5mJRARzCOhkL01PMfFRogJvGBbYzPr9VPdWLL-8GrpRj6jGV0JChH-IXORlaQPvpB70X64aOHaOFadjECzYBH2MD1eROEZ6XbizFJ112cgkUpFJRZamtrXxisE/s1024/chloe2.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="680" data-original-width="1024" height="362" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaoeGEjEwc1BwG_U8az5mJRARzCOhkL01PMfFRogJvGBbYzPr9VPdWLL-8GrpRj6jGV0JChH-IXORlaQPvpB70X64aOHaOFadjECzYBH2MD1eROEZ6XbizFJ112cgkUpFJRZamtrXxisE/w546-h362/chloe2.JPG" width="546" /></a> </p></div><div style="text-align: left;"><p>Cribbed from Anne Fontaine’s <i>Nathalie</i> (2003) and star-studded with Depardieu, Ardent, Béart, <i>Chloe</i> is Atom Egoyan’s brush with the mainstream, in cast and ancient narrative, a glossy, engaging-enough sexual drama with aspirations to irony and wisdom, but shot through with cliché and bad faith.</p><p>We know it can’t be tawdry sexploitation (can it?), because the protagonists are so sophisticated: gynecologist Moore is married to classical music professor Neeson, who is seen first lecturing on Don Giovanni and his conquests. They live in a chic, boxy, modernist house, all exotic hardwood trimmings and giant windows looking like a Mondrian from the outside. She thinks he’s cheating, and through a chance encounter (sparing a square, no less) hires Seyfried’s eponymous hooker (high-class) to see what husband does when approached by an attractive young woman. Obviously this is not a good idea. </p></div><div style="text-align: left;"><p>The classy, net-diffused montage of said hooker that opens the film is out of time, as she languorously, ideally, dons lingerie whilst musing in voiceover on the power of words and her ability (professional duty, indeed) to use them to become whatever her client desires. Likewise, her body must be used, we hear, to create an illusion of intimacy. An interesting exploration of the mind/body dichotomy is sadly unforthcoming. Words do indeed prove important, but even for one such as I, normally slow to spot a twist, the lying does not convince for long. </p></div><div style="text-align: left;"><p></p></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhM4weKZXPy-1qPzEOhgPHuGh5IACWWTw17y-f3W1IPp2M2wUIULQ2YdwdgLE7Ru8-kAvXw4raeD8LJ8x9nNMWKHSXt_cZVTrOLn6pJuWC6lmJmaVZt9rDaSwxjBXTNWry_Yg7nN8SJ0Gs/s550/chloe.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="366" data-original-width="550" height="376" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhM4weKZXPy-1qPzEOhgPHuGh5IACWWTw17y-f3W1IPp2M2wUIULQ2YdwdgLE7Ru8-kAvXw4raeD8LJ8x9nNMWKHSXt_cZVTrOLn6pJuWC6lmJmaVZt9rDaSwxjBXTNWry_Yg7nN8SJ0Gs/w563-h376/chloe.jpg" width="563" /></a> </div><div style="text-align: left;">Red herring or window dressing, a lovingly- lit shot of Chloe’s
unbelievably obvious track marks performs the same vague function; poor
Seyfried’s cuckoo in the nest is treated as a cipher throughout. Her
unknowableness produces ignorance and inconsistency rather than
ambiguity, never mind complexity. A similar decoration, more effectively
jarring, is lighting that frequently shadows Seyfried’s upper lip to
give her a John Waters mustache; her large eyes are as disconcerting as
ever (she also has great hair throughout). Julianne Moore, on the other
hand, is one of the rare performers who can act even solely with her
upper lip, so she is great as usual, even if her central part is
somewhat underwritten. Neeson is staggeringly uninteresting as usual,
but is mercifully mostly sidelined.</div><p style="text-align: left;">Films that come immediately to mind: <i>Fatal Attraction</i>, <i>Theorema</i>, even <i>The Hand That Rocks The Cradle</i>. Chloe is not even that good. Bonding over some ghastly indie rock band and how she “hates the internet,” Chloe seduces son Michael, for whom the climax should be a royal head-fuck. Could her final shot reveal her to be an angel sent to teach this family something about itself? If so, it is too late for all concerned, us included. </p></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><p>The closing scene is such a Hallmark happy ending of smiling family with party guests and their precious house, that the sense of satire tips from mostly imperceptible to blunt instrument. Egoyan signs off with hatred, for his characters’ callous self-absorption and social veneer. This is likewise too little too late, and rather akin to a jab at the audience for having (assumably) enjoyed what has gone before. That it all played like an extended excuse to bathe a classy hotel room in warm golden light, and have Seyfried and Moore make out naked on the bed, rather undercuts the point. <i> </i></p></div><div style="text-align: left;"><p style="text-align: left;"><i>d</i> Atom Egoyan <i>p</i> Jeffrey Clifford, Joe Medjuck <i>sc</i> Erin Cressida Wilson <i>ph</i> Paul Sarossy <i>ed</i> Susan Shipton <i>pd</i> Phillip Barker <i>m</i> Mychael Danna <i>cast</i> Amanda Seyfried, Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson, Max Thieriot, R.H. Thomson, Nina Dobrev<br />(2009, US/Can/Fr, 96m)</p></div>tom newthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00883569375257663681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-185761289740077941.post-33938104372424206492020-03-05T10:06:00.004-08:002021-03-10T11:55:57.639-08:00The Outlaw Josey Wales<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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It was with some alarm that I heard Ben Mankiewicz declare at a TCM Festival screening, “there’s no better Western than this.” He proceeded to read some amusingly negative contemporaneous reviews, which were closer to my own distant memory of the film, and related the bizarre story of the right-wing nutjob, Asa Earl Carter, who had written the source novel under a pseudonym. Eastwood was entirely unaware of the author’s racist past and a certain tension between his own curious politics, Carter’s background as a staunch segregationist, and the latter’s new emphasis on his fractional Native American roots, may perhaps have contributed to the unfocused nature of the film’s fundamental themes.<br />
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His homestead razed by Union raiders, Josey Wales joins the rebel guerrillas in vengeance, gaining a fearsome reputation, and continues solo even after peace is declared. Stalked by the army and by bounty hunters, he heads for safety in the Indian Nations. With the ragtag bunch of companions with whom he finds himself saddled, a return to idyllic rural existence seems possible, once he has pacified the local Comanche chief. But Death stalks him still.<br />
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The fundamental problem with this movie is one of tone. It asks to be taken seriously, which sits awkward with its familiar tropes. Aside from the fact that Eastwood is improbably too handsome to be a field-tilling farmer at the start, his awesome reputation trades 100% on persona rather than character, established as fact entirely offscreen before we first see him in action on anything but a fence post. He spends much of the movie fleeing and having guns drawn on him – which he can then dispatch with supernatural ease – but the revenge drama is less turned on its head than casually dropped. An increasingly comedic tone sits ill with the body count (high), and the disparity between the cold-blooded killer Wales is taken to be, and the apparently sensitive man who is given a chance to return to a quiet life, is handled with as little sophistication as the liberal strand of “governments don’t live together; people live together”.<br />
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It is true that a warm sense of what should be right and good emanates from the film, as it looks as though Wales will be able to find bucolic peace once again, but this is as much due to the spirited playing of the supporting cast. Chief Dan George is an old, solitary Cherokee, something of a classical fool, and retains the ironic dignity of that role, providing a foil for cloudy conversations about the dispossessed. Trueman, Dano, and others sparkle with good humour. Locke is as drippy as ever. But Eastwood’s character is a mess. It is an undeniably invigorating sight to see him narrow his eyes and gallop across the plains, a gun in every hand, but despite his best efforts the more human, sensitive characteristics are as awkwardly grafted onto the persona as the changeable prosthetic scar on his cheek. The laconic underplaying is decidedly unhelpful; the relationship with kid outlaw Bottoms is unremarkably reluctant-paternal, and there’s not the least spark to his eventual splendour in the grass with Locke.<br />
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So he’s respectful of women, fine, but why is it okay for him to spit on the dog all the time? His laconic one-liners are almost 007 flip, and other comic intrusions (a bothersome carpetbagger is particularly unwelcome, but does give Clint his best quip) undermine rather than counterpoint the serious moods elsewhere. The revenge element remains mostly implied; Wales is in no particular hurry to confront his nemesis, who in any case is little more than a ginger beard and a grubby face. Likewise, behind the piercing blue eyes of John Vernon, the motivations of the erstwhile friend coerced into helping track him down flip-flop with vagueness rather than ambiguity, then back again for a dismissably self-conscious finale.<br />
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Bruce Surtees photographs the dappled woods and wide plains in a nice array of styles, with a decent rein on over-prettification, and Jerry Fielding provides a robust score. Eastwood’s direction is never less than efficient, sometimes more than that, and even if the film seems overlong, it at least maintains a brisk enough pace from set piece to set piece. The various conflicting elements of tone and motivation feel like banal conceits rather than movements born of character, pseudo-familial ties are worn like so much subtextual window dressing, and the socio-political philosophy is no more sophisticated than “why can’t we all just get along?”.<br />
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<i>d </i>Clint Eastwood <i>p</i> Robert Daley <i>sc</i> Philip Kaufman, Sonia Chernus <i>ph</i> Robert Surtees <i>ed</i> Ferris Webster <i>pd</i> Tambi Larsen <i>m</i> Jerry Fielding <i>cast</i> Clint Eastwood, Chief Dan George, Sonia Locke, Bill McKinney, John Vernon, Paula Trueman, Sam Bottoms, Royal Dano, Will Sampson<br />
(1976, US, 235m)tom newthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00883569375257663681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-185761289740077941.post-15037138369191221972020-03-05T09:43:00.001-08:002020-03-05T09:43:29.121-08:00United Red Army (Jitsuroku Rengo Sekigun: Asama sanso e no michi)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The film divides roughly into three sections across its 3-hour running time and culminates in the infamous 1972 mountain lodge siege, the last stand refuge of five members of the radical leftist student group the United Red Army. A title announces at the start that the film is factual, with fictional elements interposed, and it begins with a dizzying documentary recap of radical student action from 1960 to 1971, comprised of newsreel footage, statistics of actions and arrests, and a frankly bewildering number of name and age captions for the actors and actresses who gradually pop up. From the humble beginnings of objections to raised tuition fees the various student groups combine, divide, get bitten by the bug of communism, fight amongst themselves, hijack aeroplanes, train in Palestine, and eventually two of the paramilitary factions join forces to become the United Red Army.<br />
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The group retreated to a base in the mountains at the start of 1971 ostensibly for military training. But here in the second part of the film, in an isolated, claustrophobic cabin, we are witness to the terrible face of ideological fanaticism as the standard practice of self-critique is taken to extremes. Rather than fighting the war on the outside, the Army’s attention turns itself inward as the intimidating and unflinching leader Mori Tsuneo and his homunculus 2IC Nagata Hiroko pick on one member after another, and the quest for ideological purity becomes a purge: the first individuals are tied, beaten, and left outside to die of exposure, and the later ones simply executed. So powerful is the sway of the leadership and the intensity of the revolutionary ideal that one young woman is induced to beat her own face to a bloody pulp. There’s no doubt that Mori’s demented zeal is in part due to shame over his desertion of a group operation in the late ’60s, before begging to be readmitted; and evil-eyed Nagata seems to relish her power no more than when jealously needling one of the attractive young women and effectively sentencing her to death. We see all of the twelve victims meet their end, each commemorated with a caption of name and age (all in their early twenties) and the whole extended sequence is frightful; and if the fundamental roots of how the striving for ideological purity can become so twisted are not investigated, the path it takes to this sort of insanity is at least laid clearly and horribly before us.<br />
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With the police closing in, the remainder of the group splits and disperses. The leaders are picked up and most of the others arrested, but five pursued men make their way through the snowy mountains to a ski-ing lodge, where they hole up with the inn-keeper’s wife while the police surround them. It has the tragic air of a last stand, as they prepare to fight and die for the memory their murdered comrades. As in the secret retreat, we are kept entirely inside the lodge, hearing only voices from outside, and experiencing the impressively disorienting water and smoke attacks with the subjectivity of the radicals. As it turned out, after ten days the five were taken alive and the film closes with a textual wrap-up of Japanese radical activity since then, beginning with Mori’s suicide in jail and culminating in the self-immolation of a former member in 2001 in protestation over the treatment of Palestine. It is an incisive reminder that if what we have just seen is history, the commitment of the protagonists has a directly traceable relevance and importance to present-day international politics.<br />
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Wakamatsu’s film was a project close to his own heart. He had affiliations with the radical left in the sixties, even joining the Red Army for training in Palestine, which resulted in his making a film about them and the PFLP in 1971 (his 100-strong filmography consists mostly, however, of strange, perverse, yet always engaged “pink” movies ie underground soft-core porn, including some of the best films, of any kind made anywhere, in the 1960s). After several years' doldrums, he mortgaged his home to make this one, and used and destroyed his own mountian lodge for the finale. But the viewpoint here for the most part is detached and objective: the first third is almost pure documentary, with brief re-stagings of meetings, and the second third is unflinchingly detached, a cold eye the only way to try and comprehend the insane spiral of zealotry, with no excuses made. Allowing us no view of the outside, the third section encourages closer identification with the radicals, but on a more humanistic than political level as, isolated in the lodge, their political ideals become more abstract than ever: Nixon is shaking hands in China; fear and futility reign; the eating of a cookie can become anti-revolutionary; and the only remaining action in which meaning can be found is resistance on principle. It’s on this more subjective ground that Wakamatsu makes his only false move, as a pleadingly plaintive song lyric plays under a moment of emotional desperation; otherwise the score by Jim O’Rourke is impressively low-key, chugging urgently along to the first section’s barrage of information and elsewhere underscoring with a distant guitar reminiscent of Neil Young’s <i>Dead Man</i>. For the rest, the film is note perfect: long and involved to be sure, harrowing in places and too dense for a casual viewer, but an important and heartfelt bearing of witness.<br />
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<i>d/ed</i> Kôji Wakamatsu <i>p</i> Noriko Ozaki <i>sc</i> Kôji Wakamatsu, Masayuki Kakegawa <i>ph</i> Yoshihisa Toda, Tomohiko Tsuji <i>m</i> Jim O'Rourke <i>cast</i> Maki Sakai, Arata Iura, Akie Namiki, Gô Jibik, Shima Ohnis<br />
(2007, Jp, 190m) tom newthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00883569375257663681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-185761289740077941.post-30503384722220294232020-03-05T09:21:00.002-08:002020-03-05T09:21:24.700-08:00Castaway On The Moon (Kimssi pyoryugi)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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When I saw this at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, it was introduced to as “crowd-pleasing”, and it was. Kim (Jae-Yeong Jeong) is an indebted salary man who starts the film by jumping off a bridge over the Han River in Seoul. He finds himself washed up on an island beneath the bridge, but unable to swim or attract attention, he is stuck there. From that point on, he must learn to feed and shelter himself in strange isolation beneath the tower blocks and myriad night-time lights of the city. Good play is made of the assorted city flotsam that he puts to use, and when he finds an empty noodle packet, his mission becomes to grow corn to make noodles, achieved in quite an ingenious fashion.<br />
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Unbeknownst to Kim, however, his presence on the island has not gone entirely unnoticed. Once he has settled in a bit, he changes his ‘HELP’ scratched on the beach to ‘HELLO’ and catches the attention of a strange young woman (also called Kim) who has lived in her cluttered bedroom for three years, presumably on account of a half-hidden mass of scar tissue on one side of her forehead. She lives a false life through the internet (briefly explored) and takes photos of the moon with the same long-lensed camera that allows her to see all that Kim is up to on his island.<br />
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The pair begins a tentative and amusingly polite communication via words in the sand and the conventional message in a bottle delivered in nicely unconventional fashion, and suffice to say that the ending is rather sweet and lovely. This is not a film that aims for any great significance, but (male) Kim is consistently engaging and endearing in his attempts to adapt to the island and his growing content with life there.<br />
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The whole process provided a good number of humorous moments and witty offhand details. Emotion is not shirked, as when he finally eats his noodles (they look so good!), when he feels abandoned by his unseen pen pal, or when he must inevitably leave his new home. But with very little pandering, snappy pacing, and charming oddness, the film fully earns, and avoids the derogatory connotations of, the label ‘crowd-pleasing’.<br />
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<i>d/sc </i>Hae-jun Lee <i>p</i> Moo-Ryoung Kim <i>ph</i> Byung-seo Kim <i>ed</i> Na-young Nam <i>pd</i> Gonjakso Hwasung <i>m</i> Hong-jip Kim <i>cast</i> Jae-yeong Jeong, Ryeowon Jung, Yeong-seo Park, Mi-kyeong Yang<br />
(2009, SKo, 116m) tom newthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00883569375257663681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-185761289740077941.post-23818390850928500432020-03-04T22:22:00.000-08:002020-03-04T22:22:56.546-08:00Encarnação do Demônio<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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For those unacquainted with the legend of Zé de Caixão - Coffin Joe, loosely - <i>Encarnação do Demônio</i> may prove something of a bafflement. Longterm fans will be well used to that. Briefly, José Mojica Marins was once the most famous man in Brazil thanks to his creation and alter ego Zé de Caixão, star of film, comic books and even a limited edition Volkswagen. Clad in top hat, black cloak, and wicked 4-inch fingernails (Mojica’s own), Joe is beyond good, evil, God, and the Devil (though he tends to the last), the embodiment of amoral existentialism, with a strong streak of sadism, railing against the oppressions of society (chiefly drugs and the police), whilst merrily beating, raping, and murdering in pursuit of a suitable mate to perpetuate his singular bloodline.<br />
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Brazilian cinema had known no horror films before the Mojica/Joe explosion in the mid-sixties, and 50 years later, even in the age of torture porn, he could still conjure the transgressive. Released from prison after 40 years, Joe sets up a torture dungeon where police and women are subjected to ever more horrific ordeals (the worst being reserved for policewomen). Not even the most extreme is the sight of a woman being blindfolded with the back of her own scalp pulled over her skull (though that did prompt spontaneous applause in some quarters).<br />
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Meanwhile, Joe’s haunted by flashbacks and visions of his past victims, a device previously used to pad out micro-budget features, but now given extra weight by Mojica’s palpable agedness (72 at the time of shooting), and a more-than-ever believable sense of mental disturbance. Add to this a pair of blind, gurning witches, plenty of blood-covered naked women, a deranged one-eyed cop (from the end of <i>At Midnight I Will Posess Your Corpse</i>, 1967), an even more deranged priest (son a victim from <i>At Midnight I Will Possess Your Soul</i>, 1964), and a blood-soaked copulation that leaves <i>Angel Heart</i> standing and results in a hallucinatory trip to some Pasolini-esque purgatory, and you’ve got a barrel of lunacy.<br />
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With sharp photography, fluid camera movement, and exemplary special effects (smartly aided by various body-modifying performers), much of the charm of the low-budget '60s offerings has worn off; the social commentary is as broadly drawn as ever (Joe objects to the police and poverty, though is no avenging angel beyond the service of his own desires and whims); and a certain amount of business about images and watching remains superficial. The ontology is still muddy, but its great to hear Mojica’s stentorian voiceover intoning the tenets of his idiosyncratic worldview: a welcome return, as committedly amoral and startlingly individual as ever, and if it is now rather more nasty than fun, one is tempted to assume that Mojica would have had it so in the first place, particularly if given back in the 60s today’s technological resources and jaded viewers.<br />
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<i>d</i> José Mojica Marins <i>p</i> Caio Gullane, Fabiano Gullane, Débora Ivanov, Patrick Siaretta <i>sc</i> José Mojica Marins, Dennison Ramalho <i>ph</i> José Roberto Eliezer <i>ed</i> Paulo Sacramento <i>ad</i> Cassio Amarante <i>m</i> André Abujamra, Marcio Nigro <i>cast</i> José Mojica Marins, Jece Valadão, Adriano Stuart, Milhem Cortaz, Rui Resende, José Celso Martinez, Cristina Aché, Helena Ignez<br />
(2008, Bra, 94m) tom newthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00883569375257663681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-185761289740077941.post-41104846320906245852020-02-18T14:20:00.000-08:002020-02-18T14:20:06.306-08:00Silence, sounds, and Tabu<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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For all its glib meretriciousness, <i>The Artist</i> prompted thoughts about how silent cinema works, and how and why its techniques might be related to modern technology and film-making custom. Nostalgia and wonder increase along with distance in time, as silent cinema ascends to the status of a lost art. It’s in the air: for all its gross faults, <i>Hugo</i>’s ecstatic cinematic evangelism reached many; the 2013 Goya nominations are mostly dedicated to a (less than successful but handsomely-mounted) silent retelling of Snow White, <i>Blancanieves</i>; and a slick and expensive Valentino biopic starring Isabella Rossellini (not as Valentino, sadly) is due to wind up its years-long production within months [eventually <i>Silent Life</i>, 2020].<br />
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The spectacle of Méliès’ silent magic has never really left the cinema: the dumbest, dialogue-free, digitally-created action sequence of today (anytime, really) could easily, probably preferably, have its stock movie score and library explosions replaced by a vigorous organ player. The point is to excite through adventure and fantasy. As such, cinema remains cinema, with or without synch sound. Vast swathes of experimental film-makers have felt no need for a soundtrack. It is a formal consideration like any other. Plenty of so-to-speak arthouse film-makers pare their dialogue to a minimum or, like Marguerite Duras (<i>India Song</i>) divorce sound and image entirely. The earliest semi-mainstream experiment along these lines had Ray Milland suffer torments as a secret-selling nuclear physicist, whilst footfall, phone bells, and whatnot are heard, but not a line of dialogue, in the intermittently effective but largely off-putting 1952 independent <i>The Thief</i>.<br />
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Mostly, though, it’s comedians who embrace the absence of dialogue. Tati’s bubbling soundtracks are the appropriately banal white noise of the quotidien, but he’d be no less funny with an out-of-tune upright accompaniment. The association of silent cinema with comedy, however, has mostly been because of a widespread discrepancy in frame rates. In anything as low as 16fps, uniformly projected at 24, people just scurry. No wonder then that <i>Silent Movie </i>(1976) was the first high-profile sound-era silent feature, nor that the sped-up parts actually made Mel Brooks funny.<br />
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No dialogue is one thing, but no synch sound at all is another. It’s interesting as Silent Movie opens with a complete lack of sound how disconcerting it is – it plays like a spoof of the avant-garde. That’s in part because it’s in color. For the ghostly visual aura of silent cinema, one need look no further than Guy Maddin, but there have been others who’ve gone the whole homage hog. Most intriguingly, there’s Jérôme Savary’s 1975 semi-pornographic circus movie, <i>La fille du garde-barrière</i>, in look and sound if not quite in content, a recreation of silent cinema; Aki Kaurismaki made his typically downplayed <i>Juha </i>(1999) as a traditional silent, more to evoke an era than to throw shadows over everything; and the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society’s <i>Call of Cthulhu</i> (2005) is a largely successful exercise in both. These films, as with <i>The Artist</i> and <i>Blancanieves</i>, do capture some of the beauty of silent cinema, the seeming magic of wordless communication, and the transport to another time. But the straight recreations, even the more satisfying examples, seem designed to amaze that they have even stood on their hindlegs at all – silent cinema as a fetish.<br />
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There’s room for more interrogation of silent cinema’s sound and image disjunction, and the different significances of direct and synch sound, or lack thereof. Some synching of music and sound effects in <i>Blancanieves</i>, for example, feels like flashy cheating rather than as a considered device. On the other hand, Hsiao-hsien Hou uses intertitles and soundless, moving lips in the 1911-set section of his <i>Three Times </i>(2005), but shoots in rich, deep color and natural light to avoid the straitjacket of stylistic recreation. The conceit is persuasive in conjuring a bygone time, but Hou also bends the rules in a highly effective fashion, by privileging his main character with synch sound, as she sings to her own melancholy lute accompaniment, inevitably drawing us closer.<br />
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The most intriguing recent experiment with the form and effectiveness of silent cinema occupies the whole second half of Miguel Gomes’ strange and beautiful <i>Tabu </i>(2012). A voiceover relates the events of 50 years previous, in the shadow of (the fictitious) Mount Tabu, in an unnamed Portuguese colony in Africa. Black and white 16mm photography provides a silvery sheen of agedness; the story of forbidden love evokes the <i>Tabu </i>of Murnau (1931); and grasses rustle, cicadas cheep, but the characters’ lips move soundlessly. The project is not one of recreation, nor a nostalgic evocation of silent cinema, but an attempt to use characteristics of silent cinema to evoke nostalgia itself, the bittersweet mourning for a lost time (in this instance, labeled “Paradise”). This is pretty much a case of saudade, as Portuguese as can be, an emotion to feel but not describe, just as one cannot quite describe how the distance of years, and the absence of sound, makes silent cinema feel like a dream.<br />
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Direct and synch sound make us feel present; their noticeable absence is an immediate distancing device; and more complex relationships to the film before us can be conjured by a mixture of the two. Withholding of dialogue aside, <i>Tabu </i>is free from an over-strict schema, either literal or symbolic. It is as though Gomes is feeling his way in each scene, deciding which sounds, dialogue aside, will best bolster the images. It’s disarming enough when, half way through the film, words cease to emerge from the characters’ mouths; more so even, when the splashes of a swimming pool suddenly go unheard. In fact, Gomes might have benefitted from further erasures of direct sound; the more we hear of the world around them, the less comfortable the characters’ silence becomes.<br />
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But this is an experiment – there is no correct formal approach. In straight recreations of silent cinema one can point out cheats, but here the cheats are the point. No self-regarding replication, the wonder of <i>Tabu </i>is how it investigates the formal properties of pre-sound film in an attempt to channel its particular emotional power. The sense of distance in time comes easily, of course, but less so the emotional relationship between audience and characters whom they cannot hear. In <i>Blancanieves</i>, for example, that step of removal is a barrier; in <i>Tabu</i>, as in the best silent films, it is wonderland looking glass – we can both see though it, and see ourselves reflected in it.<br />
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Gomes’ smartest move, in fact, is relating his formal decisions as much to silent cinema as to home movies. His characters’ 16mm footage is made to look distinct from the story around it, but there’s no incontrovertible reason why it should. There is a built-in nostalgia to this too, for most people’s experience of home movies is direct-sound video; but the form of the home movie, from mid-century to mid-eighties, is recognizable and familiar – a less pristine image than that which we expect on a cinema screen, and an absence of sound. There’s a sense of intimacy, and a sense of loss – the faces can straddle the distance of years, but where have the voices gone? They were so sweet once, but they remain beyond our reach, locked away in the past. It sounds a lot like silent cinema.<br />
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<i>d</i> Miguel Gomes <i>p</i> Sandro Aguilar, Luís Urbano<i> sc </i>Miguel Gomes, Mariana Ricardo<i> ph </i>Rui Poças <i>ed </i>Telmo Churro, Miguel Gomes <i>pd</i> Bruno Duarte <i>cast </i>Laura Soveral, Ana Moreira, Teresa Madruga, Henrique Espírito Santo, Carloto Cotta, Ivo Müller<br />
(2012, port/ger/bra/fr/sp, 118m, b/w)tom newthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00883569375257663681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-185761289740077941.post-2712983454905861542020-02-10T12:23:00.004-08:002020-02-10T12:27:40.183-08:00Road To Nowhere: conversation with Monte Hellman (2011)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">When the Venice Film Festival awarded Monte Hellman a richly-deserved career achievement Lion last year</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> [2010]</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">, it was on the occasion of his triumphant return to the screen with the rich and personal </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Road to Nowhere</span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;">. In the twenty one years since his last feature, Hellman’s name has passed before more filmgoers’ vision as executive producer of </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Reservoir Dogs</span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">than as the director of </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Two-Lane Blacktop </span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;">(1971), the epitome of that lonely American cinema of the </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">‘</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">70s; never mind his pair of eerie metaphysical westerns, </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Ride in the Whirlwind </span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;">and </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">The Shooting</span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> (shot back-to-back in 1965); or the oft-suppressed </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Cockfighter</span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> (1974). He is the secret auteur of American cinema, too infrequently spoken of, his films even less frequently seen. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;"> “I don’t think a lot about the movies that I’m making and I kind of take the script at face value and deal with it”. </span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;"></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Hellman rolled into Hollywood at the tail end of the studio period, a climate that had discouraged a view of director-as-artist. Most seemed happy that way, professionals at work. He got a thorough apprenticeship in Corman’s back room, re-editing and re-shooting, and remained a film-maker for hire ever since, with a hand in everything from </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Head </span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;">to </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid</span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> (he even directed second unit on </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Robocop</span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;">). For his most significant outings as director, he enjoyed remarkable latitude: Corman trusted him with the westerns and </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Cockfighter</span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;">; and whilst </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Two-Lane Blacktop </span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;">may be</span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;"> </span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;">the </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">refined</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Easy Rider</span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;">, the freedom afforded Hellman would not have been permissible without the latter’s success. He prefers to take an anti-intellectual approach to his own film-making, but his Laurel Canyon home is lined with books and movies</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">,</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> and the craftsmanship is mingled with the instinct and emotion of a poet. He may not be the director to run around declaring that his vision </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">must</span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> be seen, yet a personal vision is exactly what has emerged in his films, through one of the clearest and most consistent authorial voices in anything like mainstream American cinema.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">The title of Hellman’s new film is as neat a summation of his philosophical outlook as any, and returns once again to man’s powerlessness in a world of dubious purpose. Even in his debut, the likeable, low-rent </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Beast From Haunted Cave</span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> (1959)</span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">, </span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Hellman allowed the two young leads to discuss whether we humans make our own luck, or if our luck makes us. In his next two pictures, shot back-to-back in the Philippines, he has one of the soldiers offers his observation of human beings that “they get</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> born</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">, they stumble around in life for a bit</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">,</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> and then they</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> die</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">”</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">;</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> Hellman then illustrates this perfectly in the second film, the shaggy</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">-</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">dog chase </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Flight to Fury </span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;">(1964). Ever-wary of over-intellectualizing, he rejects the significance of the lines however: “They might sound like (authorial statements) but I didn’t write those lines. I didn’t cut them out, but I think a lot of that stuff is really sophomoric: it’s what we talk about late at night when we’ve finished cramming our books in college, you know. And I don’t think you can take any of it too seriously apart from the fact that everybody thinks that stuff, it’s out there. I could take any writer at random and he’s going to write me a line like that.” </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">The lines become less explicit than in those early films, but the philosophy persists, in part because Hellman has always sought out like-minded writers. Rudolph Wurlitzer was hired for </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Two-Lane Blacktop </span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;">on the basis of a passage in his strange novel </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Nog</span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> that has human interaction break down, with the individual left to plough on alone. That is more or less how the film concludes, but the killer touch was Hellman’s. He’s something of an ending specialist, in fact, repeatedly crystallizing an existential worldview, from the dead man’s shoes of </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Flight to Fury</span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> right up to the voyage into the unknown of </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Road to Nowhere</span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;">’s final slow zoom. The last shot of </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Ride in the Whirlwind</span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> has cowhand Jack Nicholson in silhouette on the skyline, frozen in an eternal flight from blind injustice; all his friends have been killed</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">,</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> and he has lost control of his destiny: “The intent was really to tell the story of the making of an outlaw, the making of a gunfighter, and how circumstances take somebody who was an ordinary man and force him into this position.” So Nicholson’s Wes turns perhaps into someone like his cold-blooded gunman Billy in </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">The Shooting</span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;">. His fate is to end as a small speck in a vast expanse of nothingness in Hellman’s most abstracted absurdist nightmare. “I think that </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">The Shooting</span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> is kind of a surreal movie, but I don’t treat it as surreal, I treat it as realistic. I was hoping to do </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">The Trial</span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> at one time. My idea was to do it super-realistically and shoot it in Chicago. Once Welles did it I gave up on that.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">The affinity with Kafka is clear, but the stronger one is with </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Godot</span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;">, which Hellman has kept close to his heart since staging the first LA performances in 1957. “I think it’s the idea that God is laughing and that our only defense is to laugh back. I don’t know if I believe that the universe has it in for man but I think that I agree with the lines from the Santayana poem [quoted in </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Road to Nowhere</span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;">]: ‘in this great disaster of our birth we can be happy and forget our doom’ ”. The doom is never quite forgotten in his films, but happiness can be found in snatches, and the ideal of love, though rarely attained, is held to be worth the disappointments. </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Cockfighter </span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> even boasts a (possibly) happy ending, one of Hellman’s best for its joyful affirmation of optimism in Warren Oates’ cracking grin. It’s a corrective to the tragedy of his previous film, </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Two-Lane Blacktop</span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;">: Hellman fell for Laurie Bird on that movie and the catatonic attempts by James Taylor (The Driver) to connect with her character, The Girl, must echo something of the director’s own. The stunning conclusion holds many meanings, from “end-of-the-road” filmstrip ribbon as asphalt highway, to a logical conclusion of how far film can capture and examine human experience, stripping away the unnecessary until it destroys even itself. But it is also a frozen, cosmic howl of pain, a conviction – momentary in life perhaps, but not here – that even love cannot succeed. </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Road to Nowhere </span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;">is dedicated to Laurie Bird and reaches the same conclusion as that earlier film, with the prison of lovelorn Taylor’s Chevy literalized. Neither wallows in pessimism, however. These are merely the natural conclusions of an artist who, despite doubt as to its point, has sought to render life with honesty and integrity. His commitment to realism is less of the Stroheim school of correct underwear, than simply to tell it how it is. But only a little less. Production design is meticulous and discreet. “It’s just the idea that whatever you’re doing, that it be honest. I think the details are important. Not just for the audience but to stimulate the actors to give their best as well. The more real it is for them the more real it will become for the audience“. Although Hellman was a photographer in early years (a coffee table book has been long gestating), the cinematography is likewise invisible, landscapes fade into the background, and the images flow by as records rather than pictures. “I’m very concerned with the composition of the shots, which is not exactly naturalistic or realistic, and so to that extent my movies have a pictorial quality to them. But hopefully not to the point of taking the audience out of the movie. I don’t want people to notice any particular thing. I don’t want people to say “oh, what a pretty shot”. The backgrounds are very important but they’re all presented in a way so as to be unobtrusive. I don’t want anything to interfere. I don’t want them to think about what I’m doing. I don’t want them to think about what the actors are doing. If somebody says, God it was really well directed, I think maybe I’ve failed, because I don’t want them to notice the direction.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">If the ending of </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Two</span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;">-</span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Lane Blacktop</span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> was the most startling instance of a Hellman film recognizing its own self, he manages an equally jaw-dropping moment of real-life revelation near the close of </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Road to Nowhere</span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;">. This is in itself an achievement in a film that is riddled with ambiguity as to the “reality” of what we are watching. From the off, Hellman dares to waive his own rule of unobtrusive film-making: a disc marked “Road to Nowhere” is slipped into a laptop, we zoom right into the screen, and the credits play out for a Mitchell Haven picture. The time had come for Hellman to declare his love for cinema, for the life-affirming pleasure of both watching and making it. So his own film follows the shooting of the Haven film, which is itself a reconstruction of events that conclude with an apparently bogus double suicide and missing state funds. An insurance investigator and the blogger who logged the story provide additional viewpoints. Variations on the same scene may be reality or fiction played out more than one way. Facts are elusive. And the suspicion that Haven’s lead actress may not be who she seems (twice over!) makes matters yet more complicated. Haven’s film, Hellman’s film of his filming, and events that predate the present action are intermingled to the point where confusion hovers close at hand if Haven himself is not onscreen. “It’s like these things happened almost against my will because certainly that amount of taking the audience out of the story is absolutely against everything that I believe, but here I was stuck with this thing. I had to deal with it in some way and I did the best I could. What amazes me was that we keep taking the audience and saying, OK you’re just watching a movie, stop your trance and come back to actual reality, sitting in a theatre watching a movie, and in spite of that fact they go right back into it. And how quickly they go back into it is amazing. It just demonstrates to me the power of this medium, no matter what we do. All this instant media and all this mass of information to which that the audience is exposed to, if anything it desensitizes them. And what is amazing today as opposed to thirty years ago is that the audience can still be caught up in this medium. You’d think that they’d be immune by now but they’re not – everything we do is to immunize them. But even the worst of our breed – the directors’ breed – who really don’t know how to engage an audience, they really can’t help it because the medium engages the audience.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">The porous line between filmed fiction and reality has been a constant in Hellman’s career, even if this is a new, dream-like test of its limits. Verité elements of the cockfighting circuit or Laurie Bird panhandling are the most visible, but elsewhere dialogue has been derived from cowboy diaries and idle conversations; unexplained details have been allowed to linger that refer to unused or even unfilmed parts of script; the late 70s western </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">China 9 Liberty 37</span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> was virtually made up as it went along; and </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Two-Lane Blacktop </span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;">was filmed in sequence, as the non-acting leads and company travelled the protagonists’ route cross-country, and script pages were dispensed the night before their filming. James Taylor and Dennis Wilson don’t play themselves in </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Two-Lane Blacktop</span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;">, but then again they don’t play anyone else in particular (“Driver”, “Mechanic”): Hellman’s direction for actors is not that they should become their character, but that the character should become them. Wilson’s natural insouciance is if anything a little underused, but Taylor’s self-assurance perfectly carries his dealings with other drag racers, and his discomfort at the filming process, along with those hurt, wary eyes, dovetails perfectly with the character’s inability to make a connection. The incomparable Warren Oates gives a remarkably touching performance of insecurity, but for Taylor it’s real.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Haven was called Hellman for a while (as Hellman had been called Haven one summer way back) and he shares not only initials but also Hellman’s definition of the director’s job: 90% casting, and he can’t remember the other 10%. Haven is struck by almost-non-actress Laurel Graham and casts her as his lead. His eye is good: it seems she was already cast in the real-life story, replacement for a mysterious Velma Duran. The part is played by Shannyn Sossamon with a luminosity that carries the film – it has to, because much of the time we really cannot be sure whether we are watching Graham pretend to be herself, Duran, or herself pretending to be Duran, who we are watching beyond </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">this </span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;">woman doing and saying </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">these </span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;">things. A couple of times it’s Sossamon herself, talking to her director. The various identities have merged to the extent that it is no longer possible to distinguish between them. Haven is so bewitched that he seems not to care for the truth beyond the immediate here-and-now of being with her, directing her, watching late night movies with her. Hellman weaves a similar spell on the audience through the confusion of plot, chronology and character, forcing us to go with the flow. To introduce his actress, there is an uncharacteristically long empty sequence of Sossaman and a hair dryer at the start. “The intent was twofold. First of all I was just fascinated by the action itself; I just thought it was beautiful. And secondly I used that much of it because I felt it was just a way to get the audience to understand that this was not going to be a music video and they better get used to it now, and then we gradually build up the pace.” We are never much more sure of who she really is than in this opening scene, but neither, does it turn out, do we really need to be.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">If the structure of </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Road to Nowhere </span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;">makes it sound like a tortuous </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Marienbad </span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;">puzzle, it is much more akin to the story games of Rivette (</span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">L‘amour par terre</span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> in particular). The mystery plot and the permeability of the film’s “reality” are structures to entice the audience, not to frustrate them. “The script was much more complicated than the movie, in the sense that the scenes were more randomly placed. We tried to give at least an identifiable chronology to the framework, which is the making of the movie. So we put that literally in chronological order. And everything else that’s out of sequence is either because it’s a memory or it’s a variation; it’s the director playing with different possibilities of a scene; or it’s just to represent the way things are shot as opposed to the way they are in the final movie, because they don’t shoot the scenes in order. But it’s such a simple story – it’s not that complicated! There was a whole backstory that we did not shoot just because we didn’t feel it was necessary and that’s the one that people have the hardest time with, where the real Velma Duran ostensibly dies in Cuba. In the script we had scenes where we see her being captured by the police and so forth, and trying to escape and getting killed. We just felt that was way too much information – rather than clarifying things it would have just made it more confusing.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> “I was consciously aware of the fact that some things may be difficult to follow in the theatrical experience of it. But just like when we’re reading a detective story we can go back and check some fact that happened thirty pages earlier, in viewing it on video or DVD or Blu-Ray or whatever we do, people will be doing that, and I realized that then everything that was difficult would be made much easier. Again I tried to make sure that we didn’t use tricks, like in a movie like </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">The Usual Suspects</span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> where you’re actually given false information. I made sure that all the information was accurate and true and that nothing would fall apart upon that kind of examination. It’s not a trick movie at all.”</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">It’s not a trick movie, but if you want to play, it can be a fiendish puzzle. Or it’s a dream of reality, past and present, of stories less important than the people who enact them. But best of all, it is a love poem to cinema, a deeply personal project of Hellman themes exploded, his own exhilarated antidote to the woes of the human condition. “I think I stole that line </span></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">‘</span></span>love poem to cinema</span></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">’</span></span> from somebody’s review of the movie, but it struck me as something I wish I’d thought of myself. I don’t think there’s any better advice given about the work that we do than the advice that Hamlet gives to the players in </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Hamlet</span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;">, ‘to hold, as</span></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> ’</span></span>twere, the mirror up to nature’. That’s something I kind of paste on my mirror every morning and try to live up to it. But it ain’t easy.</span></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">”</span></span> </span></span><br />
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tom newthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00883569375257663681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-185761289740077941.post-26355389827753732652020-01-31T12:18:00.001-08:002020-01-31T12:18:16.762-08:00A Three-Level Monster: Denis Côté on Que ta joie demeure and documentary practice (frieze, 2014)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Heads were scratched, a couple of years ago, over what to make of Denis Côté's semi/non-documentary <i>Bestiaire</i> (2012). The bulk of the film was concerned with looking at animals in an off-season Quebec safari park, clattering around their stalls, or simply standing and staring. No context was offered, no invitation to identify with the animals or, heaven forbid, anthropomorphise; instead, Côté's project was to find a fresh way of looking at what conventionally might be treated as either a ‘cute’ subject, or one on which to hang tired bugbears about zoos, and man's relationship to animals in general. The result was strange and hypnotic, and the fact that it is so hard to pin down, both in its effect, and in what kind of a film it actually is, suggested that there was interesting further work to be done along these lines.<br />
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With the disarming narrative of <i>Vic + Flo ont vu un ours</i> (2013) coming in between, Côté has returned to the practice of <i>Bestiaire</i> for his latest film, <i>Que ta joie demeure</i> (<i>Joy Of Man's Desiring</i>, 2014). The subject this time is a sliver of the workforce, operating large Dr. Seuss-like machines in a series of factories (the different locations are never specifically delineated, beyond implication by the various products turned out – several critics assume it is one massive plant, producing mattresses, cutting metal, and packaging coffee). The approach is, initially, rigorously hands-off; was this intended therefore as an extension of <i>Bestiaire</i>?<br />
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‘The various audiences for <i>Bestiaire</i> wanted to talk mainly about the animals, whereas my starting point had been an obsession with looking and observing. I felt therefore that some abstract questions had been left unanswered, so I decided to look at something that is less obviously appealing than animals: the act of working. This is why in the end the films look like some sort of diptych.<br />
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‘I think that with every new film, I try to find ways to approach and twist the realities I’m filming. I am also looking for new ways to approach people who don’t share much with my reality. I like those human adventures. A lot of documentary filmmakers are content with finding a reality and filming it for what it is. This is not enough for me. I find a reality, and I twist it to make it my own. You can’t put a label on a hybrid object like <i>Que ta joie demeure</i>. It’s not really an account of what factory work is; it’s not a reflection on life; it’s staged and real at the same time. It doesn’t fit any reality. It’s mine. It’s very artificial, and it’s far away from any social doc we usually see. At least, I hope so.<br />
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‘So, just as <i>Bestiaire </i>is not really a film about animals, neither is <i>Que ta joie demeure</i> really a film about workers – such a film would have demanded things like interviews, or a more obviously humanist approach. As in <i>Bestiaire</i>, the intention was more cerebral, abstract. I’m interested in the act of working, the idea of work; thus one must make austere choices, leading to an abstract result. Both films are dehumanized, or de-animalized – some people will obviously say that I missed an occasion of making warmer films but I disagree.’<br />
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Certainly there is little joy present in <i>Joy Of Man's Desiring</i>, but neither is there an exaggerated sense of gloom, or even monotony – we observe the strict regularity of the machines and their operation, and listen to the clanging symphony of rhythms they produce, but measured editing denies the easy effects of hypnotism. However, whilst the similarly studied avoidance of easy anthropomorphism in <i>Bestiaire </i>creates for the animals a certain self-contained dignity, the humans here are (initially) treated in a similar manner, at the risk of casting them simply as automated extensions of the machines they operate. Côté's strategy to combat this diverges from that of <i>Bestiaire</i>, using actors instead of filming real workers, and gradually introducing scripted scenes and careful staging:<br />
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‘I felt that <i>Bestiaire </i>did what it had to do, and that there was no point in making the same film in another environment. My observational style had to go somewhere else. There is observation in <i>Que ta joie demeure</i>, but also some humour, and I question some clichés about life. The last “act” of the film is filled with these things: the sorts of banal ways in which we discuss our work (being depressed, being tired, the need to change job). I thought the film needed to morph from being simply observational, to a somehow twisted narrative, so the dialogues were written. Some things in the film are accidental, some are staged. Hopefully the audience is trying to guess.’<br />
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Here is where the exaggeration comes in – art, if you will – prompting us to consider the implications of complaining about the work one continues to do, for a living wage, to support a child; to state blithely that one does indeed feel concern for the business as a whole, for the management, which in this environment at least, seems a thousand miles away; to be depressed about this low-level monotony when the option is... what? Côté's title is just as exaggerated in the opposite direction:<br />
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‘The Bach sonata is called ‘Jesu, Que ma joie demeure’. I twisted this sort of very poetic title (we would never normally use such an elegant expression in French) into something a little misleading, but no less poetic in the end. I see the title as some sort of word of encouragement to the worker. The film is not supposed to be depressive or bleak; it’s not supposed to be a condemnation or an anti-capitalist manifesto. It is not a social film with a message. Yet work is undeniably at the center of our lives. Sometimes it’s rewarding, sometimes it’s debilitating, sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it hurts. The film is one long prayer to the worker, saying ‘keep up, my friend’. I think that those people who think the film is depressing or dark are those who are inclined to make an unthinking, instinctive judgment about the type of work we see in the film.’<br />
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It should be noted that the type of work we do see is particularly restricted in scope. Apart from the various factory workers at their machines, we see occasionally a woodshop, the only hint of anything like artisanal work (although the woodworker is engaged mostly in the banalities of melamine-trimming). Certainly the scope of the film is so confined to factory interiors that we wonder about the differences in outlook and environment that might have been illustrated by the manual work of, say, fruit pickers, either mechanised or even by hand, and whether or not the mostly dour outlook of the characters here presented is not linked directly to their enclosed, airless environment.<br />
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‘At first I wanted to film all kinds of works and activities, but at some point, you need to find an aesthetic focus. Filming a lawyer or a receptionist would potentially not have given me very much, cinematically speaking. I went for industrial environments where the body is explicitly solicited; where repetition becomes poetic; where machines are noisy and expressive. Then I imagined interiors only. Going out becomes a goal or a dream. There’s certainly something out there – liberty? fun? danger? – but the film denies that ‘outside’ world.’<br />
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In fact, this is like any other Côté film, disguised as a film about work and workers: its real focus is, once again, a small community of people and their restricted, out-of-the-way environment. That we are being privileged – Côté, too – with a glimpse into that world, is indicated by the opening monologue. A female worker speaks over her shoulder to an unseen listener who, judging by the words addressed, may be a new colleague; yet the tone is intimate, almost as one would address a lover. That she stresses the need for trust, and that one may find good things here in this place, remind us too that her words are also directed of course to the film-maker behind the camera and, by extension, to the viewer-visitor.<br />
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‘I like the opening. It sets the tone, and at the same time the viewer is completely at a loss. It has that “what am I going to watch” edge, I think. [Actress Emilie Sigouin] is addressing a co-worker as if she were some sort of boss. She also embodies the idea of talking smoothly to workers, keeping them happy, promising things. But she is “the film” itself as well, talking to the audience, saying something like “if you’re open-minded, I’ll bring you somewhere special.” Even if we don’t completely get it, the film introduces itself as a three-level monster.’<br />
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One of the pleasures of Côté's oeuvre is the way his films wriggle out from easy categorisation, existing simultaneously on these different planes. The documentary element has always been present, particularly in the form of exploring sequestered communities – the curious, careful gaze from a distance seems to catch something singular and mysterious beneath the surface of these tucked-away realities. Yet it was with <i>Carcasses </i>(2009) that Côté really started to push his way towards a new form, rupturing the observational (the solitary life of a junkyard guardian) with unexpected narrative intrusions. It was also around this time that he started to concentrate more on framing, locking down the previously jittery camera to create the increasingly precise tableaux (most beautifully in the Josée Deshaies-shot <i>Curling</i>, 2010) that in much of <i>Que ta joie demeure</i> achieve a science-fictional strangeness in their choice of detail.<br />
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‘Mini DV was the trend around 2004-2005, and the Dogme films were still influencing a significant number of new filmmakers. There was this obvious handheld camerawork choice going on. At some point I thought, there’s no way the films are more dynamic or true just because the camera has a nervous style. So I slowly changed. I like the tableau-style approach. The viewer has to enter a very still shot that is not telling him on what he should focus. He must do the job. I like an active audience. A moving camera usually guides your eye, your emotion, your conscience.<br />
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‘I think that with <i>Carcasses</i>, <i>Bestiaire</i> and <i>Que ta joie demeure</i> I found what I was looking for, meaning observing a reality and making it my own, using a fixed frontal camera in the vein of directors like Ulrich Seidl or Nikolaus Geyrhalter. You look at something in a very dry and static way. You don’t want to editorialize, or make a social comment about what you film, and in the end, the audience is going to give you their own reading; the film takes its own revenge on you by “saying things” that were not consciously in your head (the bleak colors and the cages of <i>Bestiaire </i>are “talking” in this way, as is the repetitive nature of manual work in <i>Que ta joie demeure</i> and so on). That said, for all their similarities, these films certainly do not form a coherent trilogy, and I don’t feel the urge to make another one.<br />
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‘But as far as documentaries, loosely-speaking, are concerned, I also like to watch those impossible, hybrid films. I find them fragile and beautiful in their weaknesses. I was totally hypnotized by <i>Two Years at Sea</i> by Ben Rivers. It was unconscious for sure, but coming directly out from the womb of <i>Carcasses</i>! I also like to follow the Sensory Ethnography Lab filmmakers; of course my style or name have been connected to a film like <i>Leviathan</i>, which I love.’<br />
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Another pleasure of this work is that, despite superficial similarities to the new observational furrows being ploughed by the HESL filmmakers, Côté is resolutely going his own way, mixing larger narrative productions with smaller, three-man-crew operations like his latest, fearlessly trusting that his audience will look at these objects with the same attention and inquisitiveness as that with which he films. This is due, in part, to his having come of age as exactly that sort of audience-member, whilst simultaneously parlaying his love of cinema into a long stint as a critic with <i>ici </i>magazine. Despite this, however, it is remarkable how little in debt to other filmmakers his work seems to be, how few influences are readily discernible – the cinema of Denis Côté is his own.<br />
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‘I briefly studied film and always wanted to be a director. But I was also a grade-A cinephile. Meeting other cinephiles under various circumstances and at various events got me in touch with the worlds and people of radio and newspaper film criticism. I became a film critic by accident, for nearly a decade, until 2005.<br />
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‘So of course I carry a long cinephile heritage. I was obsessed with it for a long time, until my third or fourth feature maybe. Then, instead of watching everything just to have an opinion, I started watching only films that could really bring me something. I don’t remember copying a scene from a favorite film or imitating a director’s style. But people know I’ve been a film critic, so they love to say silly things like “oh <i>Elle veut le chaos</i> is in black and white, so it’s an homage to Bela Tarr”. All I’m sure of is that my cinephilia was really sparked by the turn-of-the-century kind of postmodernist masters like Abbas Kiarostami, Jia Zhang-Ke, Claire Denis, Bruno Dumont, Tsai Ming-liang, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the Romanian wave, Dogme films, and so on. If you add to that an admiration for very different filmmakers and signatures, like John Cassavetes, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Dario Argento, Maurice Pialat, and Robert Bresson… it makes quite a cocktail in the end. There are tons of them, yet no clear influences at the same time.<br />
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‘Nowadays, I’m just busy with my own shit. I go to festivals and it’s all about me, me, me – interviews, Q&As, and stuff. The cinephile in me is slowly losing the battle, but maybe it’s a good thing for future projects. I don’t overthink everything anymore. My films are made fast and instinctively. I’m not an intellectual. I’m very down to earth and pragmatic in real life. I talk a lot, I contradict myself, and I collect paradoxes. I’m not living the arty poet life. But when I sit down to write a story, it feels like I need introspection, silence, slowness. I need to ‘get serious’. Every film is a therapy, I’d say, but I don’t think about it too much – it’s dangerous.’tom newthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00883569375257663681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-185761289740077941.post-75889397408191065012020-01-31T09:04:00.002-08:002020-01-31T09:48:08.595-08:00Leos Carax interview re Holy Motors<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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There are not many poets left in the cinema. Perhaps the poet is always something of a throwback, a reminder of former glories. “Now, I feel I make films for the dead, and you show them to people who are alive”. Leos Carax’s new film <i>Holy Motors</i> in part laments the passing of the mechanical age. It also evokes the Island of Cinema of which Carax speaks, a place where life is seen through the prism of cinema, but a prism that allows for all possible viewpoints, less to do with filmic reference and harking back than to do with finding new ways to look at the world and the human condition.<br />
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Carax has always stood deliberately apart, with his cigarette and sunglasses, as a lone voice seeking the ineffably romantic in cinema. A wave of teenage cinephilia flowed into his first two features – <i>Boy Meets Girl</i> (1984) and <i>Mauvaise sang</i> (1986), but their evocations of the New Wave were joyful rather than derivative, the cool look worlds apart from the cool <i>look </i>of contemporaries Luc Besson and Jean-Jacques Beineix. <i>Les Amants du Pont Neuf</i> (1991) was as grand a romantic gesture as could be, to Juliette Binoche, to Paris, to love. The personal and artistic torment of <i>Pola X</i> (1999) had it dismissed in some quarters as wonky at best; it now looks like one of the best films of the 1990s.<br />
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The boy-meets-girl theme bubbles under even in <i>Pola X</i>, but with <i>Holy Motors</i> Carax takes his eye from the petri dish of a relationship, to cast it as broadly as possible. Gone is the exhilaration of love but, with something of the spirit of Jean Cocteau and Georges Franju, there is a deep, nostalgic emotion running through the film, which has its own sweetness, encapsulated in the protagonist’s answer to why he continues: “pour la beauté du geste.”<br />
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The film follows M. Oscar (Denis Lavant) through a series of appointments in which he assumes a different role, from silver-haired businessman to old beggar-woman, and on. Part of the film’s project is a hymn to the actor, who lives so many experiences on our behalf. Another part is to recognize that this capability exists in us all, and that the sense of identity is fixed far less than we should assume. It’s the classic Man Without Qualities existential dilemma, and no wonder Oscar takes to the late-night bottle in the back of his stretch limo, desperate for some human contact.<br />
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As Carax put it when we met (AFI Festival 2013), <i>Holy Motors</i> “was born from the rage of not being able to make films for so long, so it was imagined very fast and shot very fast, without watching the dailies. It happens in one day, from dawn to moonlight. It gave me the possibility to show in one day a whole range of human experience. Of course there is a game with virtuality in the film, which we know about more and more, because when you talk about reality, one of the questions is, can we avoid it? Some people try through fame, or money, or entertainment, or these virtual worlds. What happens if more and more of us try to avoid it more and more? We’ll see.<br />
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“I’m not a cinephile, but people, critics, tend to see my films in terms of cinephilia. The language is cinema, I hope, but I don’t see <i>Holy Motors</i> as a film about cinema. People ask what is it about, and I say I don’t know, because I don’t really understand the word “about”. Is Hitchcock’s <i>The Birds</i> about birds? Films are metaphors, and in this case I tried to invent a science-fiction world, because science-fiction is great for that – it’s a metaphor for reality. So hopefully the film is about that, about the structure of reality: can we still face it, do we still want lived experiences, do we still want action? Action means responsibility, and this kind of science-fiction world that was invented for the film, with this strange job where you travel from life to life, I felt it was a good way to show the experience of being alive. He doesn’t have any present. He doesn’t have what people call a life, or at least you wonder if he does, or what is his life. In my mind it’s different movements inside any life, inside many lives, dealing with what we all deal with, which is ageing, dying, loving, losing etc. It’s a strange pitch for a film – what is your film about? It’s about the experience of being alive today.<br />
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“I started making films quite young, and I stopped making films quite young. I made three films from 20 to 30 years old, and then I couldn’t make films again until I was 38. And then again ten years. So I had a life within cinema, but I can hardly call myself a filmmaker. Probably in this film there is something like a jump, where suddenly I wake up and I’m not 20, I’m not 30 anymore, and this question of who am I becomes important.<br />
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“I changed my name when I was 13 years old. I wasn’t yet interested in cinema at that time. I don’t remember exactly who that boy was at 13 years old, who I was, but I guess I felt the need to reinvent myself. I think every child should be allowed to change his name. You should be allowed to say at 12 or 13, you had your father’s name for a while, or your mother’s name or whatever, now it’s your turn to invent your name and write your life. I have six nephews from aged 10 to 25, and sometimes I worry that they don’t see that, that it’s possible to write your life. Of course, you can’t write all of it, but you can try. It relates to what I was saying about experience – do we still want experience? I’m not against virtual worlds or connecting through computers or whatever. Connecting is the opposite of fighting, of resisting. All these possibilities that this virtuality offers are wonderful, and I hope I used them in <i>Holy Motors</i>, but as a lifestyle I don’t like it. I’m worried about the fact that young people are maybe not searching for experience so much anymore. Which always existed before: young men wanted to go to war, or take boats. They wanted to reinvent themselves. Whether young people still want that I don’t know.”<br />
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The fact that <i>Holy Motors</i> starts with Carax himself, waking in bed and passing through a magical portal into a cinema auditorium, has naturally enough prompted assumptions that this is a film about cinema. This is true only to the extent that it is about what cinema can show us of ourselves. There are few specific references, save Carax letting his hair down at the end, along with Edith Scob (as Oscar’s driver ), as though he had been restraining himself. The film cameras, he laments, are one part of a change, a shrinking from reality, that the talking limousine makes clear at the end with a call for silence: “men don’t want visible machines anymore.” It is a film not about cinema, but born of cinema. Carax’s Island of Cinema is a place we recognize. It is not a place of reference, or stealing, but a place for looking at ourselves in different ways. Thus the shadows of genre in <i>Holy Motors</i>, and the feel that when the camera swoops up to Kylie on a balcony, wailing a lament (by Neil Hannon) in the abandoned deco shopping mall that itself figured prominently in <i>Les amants du Pont Neuf</i>, this is some gushing musical in the Demy tradition. But it is not: the song is rather lovely and apt, the moment is perfectly judged, and this is a particularly potent way of conveying the emotion of nostalgia, as she sings “who were we?” The evocation here, as elsewhere, is less referential of cinema of the past than a rather convincing impression that they don’t make ’em like that anymore.<br />
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“It’s usual when people talk about my films that they don’t give the desire to people to go and see them because people think, oh it’s a film for specialists, it’s a film for cinephiles. This I mind. I’ve shown the film to 13-year old kids and they get it. They don’t know anything about my cinema, about cinema in general. When I started making films I used references a bit like the New Wave did, to be playful, to be fun, to say I love cinema, I love films, I love film history, but I stopped that after my second film. I felt I had paid my debt to my love for cinema. That’s why I don’t call them references any more. It was nothing very conscious. There were two conscious things. One was that Denis Lavant was going to run on the treadmill and re-enact in a way the scene from my second film, in the virtual world, but it doesn’t change anything if you haven’t seen <i>Mauvaise sang</i>. You still get it. And then at the end of the shoot, I decided to give Edith Scob the mask close to what she had in her earlier film when she was 20 [<i>Les yeux sans visage</i>, 1960]. I hesitated, but it felt absolutely right, and like a gift to her, because I loved her so much on the shoot and I think she loved the experience of the film. It was like a present, and I felt it went with the film, that she should put a mask on at the end. But it was not to say hello to the Franju. I don’t think in those terms, but of course I’ve read books and I’ve seen things and they appear in my films, for sure.<br />
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“It may be strange, but I see cinema as more than films. Obviously I loved films, and I’ve seen many films, when I was younger. When I call it an island, it’s because it’s a place, a place where you can see these things – life and death – from a different angle. So I’m grateful that I can go back to this island, but I don’t need to see films to love cinema. I’ve never seen my own films again. You have to fight so much. Making a film is one way of trying to stop the fight and trying to look, to see. That’s what I like about cinema.<br />
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“Sometimes I think I should see more films, especially when I travel, but then I see one or two that discourage me. When I was younger I didn’t mind seeing bad films at all. To see a bad film could be very inspiring to me. Now it’s not the case; it’s depressing. I don’t have the courage of discovering that I used to. Now I watch films because I want to see an actress in a film, or the work of a DP. Last year I saw a film I thought was good – it’s not a great film, but it does try to show something of the superhero discovering his powers – <i>Chronicle </i>(2012). It’s a small film, about three kids who discover they have super powers; a cheap film, for sure, compared to usual superhero films, but when they have the scene in the sky where they fly, it’s not like two shots that costs millions of dollars, it’s a long scene and they fly. It’s nice to see people in the sky flying, simply. I am always surprised when you see that kind of superhero that they don’t use that. He lands and it’s over. Flying is great – if a man can fly, keep him going for 20 minutes flying, go around the clouds. This film has a bit of that simple strength. If someone made a film where someone would fly for an hour and a half, people would go see it.<br />
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“Movies started with motion, motion pictures. That’s why I showed these images from [Étienne-Jules] Marey, these 19th-century images. It’s the human body – we still love to watch the human body. We love to watch other things, landscapes or things we invented, the cigarettes, the guns, the cars, but basically what we all love is to watch a face, or a human body in motion, running, fucking, exploding. This is what motion capture is. You still need the holy motor of a human body to create it, and in that sense it’s exciting.<br />
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“My films are not always light, but with each film I’ve felt the need to try to reach joy, through speed, through dance, through music. In this film I tried through the intermission scene with the accordions, because I think joy is important. I don’t know much about happiness but I know I need joy.<br />
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“Each film has really felt like the first one and the last one. I feel like an imposter in a way because I didn’t study film. I was never on a shoot before I made my first film. The fact is that to make a film you need people, and I’ve had lots of trouble to find people. It’s not so much the money. I don’t think I’ve ever not made a film because of money. It’s always people; whether it’s not finding an actress, a producer, someone I trust, it’s people. The hard thing with cinema is people. The other reason I haven’t made many films, apart from all the problems, is probably that once you make a new film, all the past projects are dead. When I make a new film I have to feel that I’m not the same person as the one who made the film before.<br />
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“Albert Prévost is the one who made Holy Motors possible. We met on <i>Lovers on the Bridge</i>. Money is very abstract in cinema. You can have, let’s say, $1,000,000, which is nothing to certain producers, and worth a lot to other producers. This man had a kind of genius that I think is pretty rare. It worked for me, but it doesn’t mean it would work with any film-maker. To know how to make a dollar into $10, or when I wanted something, really he understood that that was important for the film, that some money had to go there. And he was able to transmit that to the crew. People trusted him. They knew that he wasn’t spending money behind their backs. When I started making films, I always worked with people who were like crooks, but good crooks. Well, not always good, but the ones I liked were good. To be a producer of a film you have to have a kind of craziness. I think it’s always been true with cinema, and that makes it kind of exciting. The first big producers, in the silent days, were crazy. They were capitalists, they loved money, but they were crazy. If you don’t have that craziness you make bad films, or you make boring films, or you just don’t make films, and I think it’s really that craziness that we miss. It’s rare to find. Cinema from the beginning was something crazy. It’s the only art that’s been invented. Other arts didn’t need to be invented. It’s a miracle it exists.”<br />
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As one might expect, Carax is a lover of celluloid, but embraces digital technology in <i>Holy Motors</i> both to rejoice in the movement of the human body in the motion-capture studio, and to create degenerating, subjective visions of Paris as Oscar gazes from his womb-like limo.<br />
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“Everything has changed with digital. When I was 20, I met the DP I was to work with for ten years, [Jean-Yves Escoffier], and he became my best friend, like a brother. Then after <i>Lovers on the Bridge</i>, we didn’t talk for ten years. He moved to Hollywood, and he died out here. After that, working with light, working on celluloid, was not the same for me with other people. That was one thing that helped me go to digital because I felt that if I don’t have that kind of relationship with a DP, I might as well shoot digitally.<br />
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“I have a bad reaction to digital, mainly because it’s been imposed on us, and I hate that. It’s been an issue since the beginning. Cinema was a very powerful invention, but obviously this power of cinema – it’s like a holy power – you have to reinvent it all the time. Nobody’s scared of seeing a train coming into a station any more. So every generation has to reinvent cinema, the power of cinema. If you see a man walking in an F.W. Murnau film, and the camera is following him, you feel like he is being watched by a god. If a kid does the same shot today and shows it on YouTube, you don’t have this feeling at all. So cinema has to reinvent its power all the time, and that’s what I feel has to be done nowadays more than ever, to reinvent the power of cinema, because if not, it’s lost, it’s not there. People think it’s still there, because they’re entertained by cinema still, but truly if it’s not reinvented, it’s stale. The power has also been devalued by images – images are not only in cinema today, they’re all over the place. You go in the streets and there are screens all over the place, images all over the place. To reinvent the experience of watching something is getting harder and harder. It always seems strange to me that most films are only references, like a photocopy of each other. Hopefully I’m trying to invent something.”<br />
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<i>Holy Motors</i> was greeted at Cannes with surprise, as a new sort of thing, and a bolt from the blue. It is a new sort of thing, but it’s also an old sort of thing. The opening specifically evokes Cocteau and a brand of poeticism that is not seen so much any more, perhaps because the idea of a grand aesthetic gesture, the aiming for something greater than literal truth, is not so much in fashion these days. It is a unique, personal gesture. One of the finest things about <i>Holy Motors</i> is that it does not feel definitive. Tomorrow will be completely different, as it should be. <br />
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<br />tom newthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00883569375257663681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-185761289740077941.post-89213690416488206392020-01-17T14:03:00.005-08:002020-01-17T14:05:27.597-08:00Felicitas<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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A commercial and critical success in its native Argentina, this is the true mid-19th-century story of (ironically-named) Felicitas Guerrerro de Álzaga (Sabrina Garciarena), whose happiness is constantly defined by the men around her, and even by her apparently loving sister, as what they consider to be best for her and her family’s estate. A valuable asset, at age 15 she is plucked from the arms of her lover Enrique (Gonzalo Heredia) and married off to the richest man in Argentina, forty years her senior (Luis Brandoni). The grotesquery of the white-haired husband caressing his porcelain-skinned child bride aside, Álzaga is hardly an ogre, but a life in which she could conceivably find happiness and mutual respect is threatened by plague, a secret from his past (undeveloped beyond a cog in the plot mechanics to get him briefly out of the way), and the reappearance of Enrique.<br />
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This latter gets short shrift, required simply to look pretty or brooding, but he does transform unexpectedly from the idealised partner of the opening rural idyll into a war-brutalized ogre and, finally, bogeyman; his attitude towards women-as-property is eventually no more enlightened than that of Felicitas’s father. When their rupture comes, it is so sketchily explained as to be almost bewildering, but his contribution to the tragic ending – presented with admirable restraint in a short sharp shock – tearing her from the bosom of real, grown-up happiness, finally strips the film of all romanticism, exemplifying the impossibility of Felicitas’s finding happiness on her own terms in the society of the times.<br />
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The film starts out like a “they’ll never let us be together” story (yes, those words are spoken), but is as much concerned with depicting the oppression of women in this time and place. One of the film’s problems is that it cannot quite decide to be one or the other and ends up superficially straddling both camps: it’s only a matter of time before the frogs Felicitas collects and keeps in jars are explicitly granted metaphor status, and the brief mention of her (male) cousin’s proto-feminist thesis is given no context regarding the wider struggle for women’s rights outside the narrow compass of the story, or even in terms of his character.<br />
Likewise, Enrique’s role is muddled, and by the end one can no longer quite understand his power over Felicitas, for whom the torch had apparently burned out some time ago. But at the centre of it all, Garciarena gives a full-hearted performance, delightful as the laughing child-woman, and luminous as the strong and beautiful young widow ready to take on the responsibilities of her <i>estancia</i>, Barbara Stanwyck style. The passions are not quite as swoon-inducing as they might be, and the film, though full of incident, rarely (before the end) touches on excitement, but its deficiencies of emotion and incisiveness are amply compensated for by consistently lovely photography, a lush but restrained Nico Muhly score, and the marvelous frocks, furniture, and sets of the gorgeous production design.<br />
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<i>d</i> María Teresa Costantini <i>p</i> Daniel Pueyrredón<i> sc </i>María Teresa Correa Ávila, María Teresa Costantini, Sabrina Farji, Quadros Felix, Graciela Maglie <i>ph</i> Lula Cavalho <i>ed</i> Laura Bua <i>ad</i> Cristina Nigro <i>m</i> Nico Muhly <i>cast</i> Sabrina Garciarena, Gonzalo Heredia, Alejandro Awada, Ana Celentano, Luis Brandoni, Nicolás Mateo, Antonella Costa, José Luis Alfonzo<br />
(2009, Arg, 128m)tom newthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00883569375257663681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-185761289740077941.post-83506542917007067342020-01-16T20:09:00.002-08:002020-01-16T20:12:57.994-08:00The Merry Widow<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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For almost a century, there’s been debate over the best way to watch silent films. Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque française insisted on no accompaniment at all in the '50s, but modern times have seen a trend of making musical events out of these screenings, from the London Philharmonic playing along to <i>Napoléon</i> (1927), to some local, knob-twiddling synth-lord bleeping along to something ill-suited to his "art". I caught Eric von Stroheim’s 1925 comedy <i>The Merry Widow</i> at the TCM Festival in Hollywood a few years ago, introduced by the incomparable Kevin Brownlow and a wealth of anecdotes, and accompanied by a splendid new score, a North American premiere no less, by Maud Nelissen, conducting the Von Stroheim Virtuosi, a small and largely competent ensemble of strings, woodwind, percussion, and a very useful accordion.<br />
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In the almost non-fictional kingdom of Monteblanco there are two cousin princes, malicious stiffneck Mirko and goodnatured Danilo. The latter falls hard for visiting American chorus girl Sally, but Mirko’s mischief and his own princely duty dissuade him from marriage. When Sally marries a wealthy capitalist who dies, she becomes an eligible match, and Danilo has to contend with Mirko as a now-serious rival, as well as the unresolved misunderstanding of his previous rupture with Sally.<br />
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Stroheim claimed the film was butchered by the studio, of course (“The man who cut my movie had nothing on his mind but a hat” – turns out Brownlow does a pretty neat Stroheim impression). He also claimed the ending was a spurious addition, despite his having written and shot it himself. The film’s very inception – a commercial project accepted on the grounds that he had to include two specific scenes (including the waltz), but could otherwise do what he liked – betrays the lack of personal investment. The legendary obsession with realism is present, naturally, as is the discretely specific <i>mise-en-scène</i>, but in service of what? A flippant tale of two princes, comically dissimilar, and the dancehall girl who inflames the passion of one and the malignancy of the other. Roy D’Arcy is hilarious as the cartoonishly villainous Mirko, all toothy rictus and monocle, but he’s pure caricature. All the better for him, as the leads are not even granted that dignity – the real prince Danilo of Montenegro sued MGM for defamation, with some justification, as Gilbert’s prince is little more than a carousing, good-natured simpleton (imagine the reaction to his screen counterpart’s first appearance, chuckling in all too worldly a fashion at pornographic photographs his chum got from his barber). Mae Murray fares little better, her character confined to the standard-issue '20s thatch of a hairstyle, bowtie lipstick, and petulance, and most of the scenes between the two descend into (hard-fought!) eye-goggling contests.<br />
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There’s plenty of amusing incident and splendidly bizarre touches: the final wedding takes place beneath a monstrously large crucifix; the capitalist is a drooling foot fetishist; and snippets of Stroheim’s outlandish orgies remain in tantalisingly brief glimpses. Certainly some amusement comes from character, but the comedy is generally broad enough to overwhelm the human content (this is a film made by someone who finds a prince in military uniform kicking his servant in the rear deeply hilarious). The separation of Danilov and Sally is a sequence of some desolate power, and the misunderstanding that prompts the climax would be genuinely moving if the rest of the film weren’t so trivial. Plenty of amusement, moments of startling oddness, but little of substance: a charming if rather disappointing frippery.<br />
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<i>d</i> Erich von Stroheim <i>p</i> Irving Thalberg <i>sc</i> Erich von Stroheim, Benjamin Glazer <i>ph</i> Oliver T. Marsh <i>ed</i> Frank E. Hull, Margaret Booth <i>pd</i> Cedric Gibbons, Richard Day <i>cast</i> Mae Murray, John Gilbert, Roy D'Arcy, Josephine Crowell, George Fawcett, Tully Marshall, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Xavier Cugat<br />
(1925, US, 137m, b/w) tom newthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00883569375257663681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-185761289740077941.post-91217280772731685302020-01-16T19:39:00.000-08:002020-01-16T19:39:40.380-08:00Potiche<div style="text-align: center;">
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One of the most enjoyable branches of François Ozon’s film-making is his fondness for theatrical farce and borderline hysterical camp. It may come off a bit wonky in <i>8 Women</i> (2002), but that film did at least introduce him to Catherine Deneuve; together they have whipped up the delightful fondant that is <i>Potiche</i>, loosely adapted from the stage and set in the provinces in a semi-fantastical 1977.<br />
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“Potiche” means trophy wife in French. That’s wealthy bourgeoise Suzanne Pujol, coiffed, poised and, we are lead to believe, terminally airheaded. In fact, she’s just terribly sweet and polite, and writes not-quite-awful little poems about squirrels and roses, and when her abrasively self-satisfied husband (Fabrice Luchini – hyper-controlled but effectively developed) is kidnapped by the striking workers of his umbrella factory, surprisingly, it is she who she knows just what to do. A late-night visit to the mayor secures his intervention. This is Gérard Depardieu, an old flame with a smoldering torch; but he’s also the only one in the film who is not really funny, striking instead a note of melancholy, with the subdued desperation of an aging communist (20% of the French vote in 1977) looking to hang up the hammer and scythe, and settle down to family life. Ozon take us out of the narrative for a moment to pay homage, when Deneuve and Depardieu lock eyes on the dance floor of the splendidly divey <i>boîte</i> Badaboum!, together once again. In her newly-found independence, however, Suzanne has no time for that sort of thing, and before long the men are reduced to hanging around her like puppy dogs.<br />
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Further musical interludes, perfectly deployed sunny '70s pop froth, are as inconsequential, apparently, as Suzanne’s opinion. Yet it is part of the farce that such a bright and determined spirit would break out only now, after so many years of subservient marriage. She’s a perfectly-mannered Billie from Born Yesterday, with the same sweet surprise of self-realisation, but the education here is her unexpectedly successful transformation of the factory while Pujol recovers from a heart-attack. Under Suzanne’s gentle yoke, the hairy unionists are subdued, the workers are harmonious, and her children are by her side. Jérémie Renier is charmingly open-natured as her son the artist, his character revealed with delightful understatement, albeit the vessel of an incestuously homosexual subplot; daughter Joëlle (Judith Godrèche) and secretary Nadège (pert Karin Viard) complete with Deneuve a triumvirate of self-liberating women whose path – in an extension of the original play and evocative of more recent political events – takes her all the way to the National Assembly.<br />
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Despite boardroom shenanigans, heart attacks, liberal promiscuity, and family betrayal several times over, nothing ever seems too serious. There are issues inherent to the plot – the position of women in society, business, and family; the rights of the workers; maternalistic management vs rampant profit motive – that provide a solid emotional bedrock which needs little exploitation to prop up the jolly goings-on. Ozon directs briskly, with touches of sitcom style and great fondness for his characters and setting (the umbrellas are as much Tati as Demy). Best of all, it’s a worthy vehicle for the wonderful Deneuve. She is radiant, of course, regally elegant (she honors the workers by wearing the jewels their labour bought her), and deliciously funny. The instinctive intelligence and thoughtfulness of her character balance the farce, and that link to a real emotional world is all Ozon needs to affirm that, whilst things may have changed a great deal in 33 years, in some ugly respects they look remarkably similar. It is to his credit therefore, that the high-pitched candy coating makes such consistently amusing fun of it.<br />
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<i>d/sc</i> François Ozon <i>p </i>Eric Altmayer, Nicolas Altmayer <i>ph</i> Yorick Le Saux <i>ed</i> Laure Gardette <i>pd</i> Katia Wyszkop <i>m</i> Philippe Rombi <i>cast </i>Catherine Deneuve, Gérard Depardieu, Fabrice Luchini, Karin Viard, Judith Godrèche, Jérémie Renier <br />
(2010, Fr, 103m)tom newthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00883569375257663681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-185761289740077941.post-31850490083598090062020-01-16T19:17:00.003-08:002020-01-16T19:18:08.673-08:00Cargo<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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As with Johnson’s walking dog, the surprise of <i>Cargo</i>, Switzerland’s first science-fiction film, is that it was done at all. An immensely ambitious undertaking, set almost entirely in deep space, on a long-haul cargo ship, the film took nine years to make; but the time and care lavished on it show right there up on the screen, in the incredibly impressive digital environment and highly-detailed production design. Occasionally an effect doesn’t come off (usually the deep space green screen when human figures are involved) but for the most part, the intricacy of the giant space stations and vessels, their movement, and the hard light of deep space are rendered in an astonishingly accomplished and well-imagined manner that bears valid comparison with similar features in <i>2001</i>. Would that the substance of the film were so sophisticated.</div>
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Young medic Laura is on a four-year cargo flight; the crew are in cryo-sleep; but maybe she’s not alone.. The labyrinthine space ship offers several dramatic settings, from the giant cargo-container hold, to the pretty cool cryo-baths, and even a basement-type area dripping with water (why?). <i>Alien </i>and <i>Bladerunner </i>loom large in the look of lived-in-future interiors and synthy score; <i>Aliens </i>contributes a (barely used) girl-child ; and a <i>Matrix </i>set-up underpins the whole plot, such as it is, with a dash of intergalactic eco-terrorism.<br />
Even if not so original, it’s still an interesting concept, the choice between grubby reality and a perfect, if artificial world, but this is so little explored that Laura’s final decision is borderline incomprehensible. And, for all the excellence of the space-ship’s design, the geography between different areas is almost completely ignored, and even in a single location frequently muddled. Occasionally this creates a useful sense of disorientation, but more frequently it is distractingly vague.<br />
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Likewise, bursts of action are continually undermined by mistimed edits and spatial confusion, and tension is consistently cut short in the same way: there turns out not to be some monster hiding in the ship, and when the stowaway is discovered, a hugely fertile possible direction for the film to explore is immediately cut off, as though a sub-plot had been brutally excised at the last moment. Smothering it all is the overbearing, heard-it-before synth score, part of a careful but over-emphatic sound design of standard-issue metallic clanks and rumbles. Mediocrity of script, direction, editing, and sound are pretty fatal to any movie, but the remarkable backdrop in Cargo maintains enough good faith to see the viewer through to the (ridiculous) ending, and the immense hard work that went into the incredibly impressive digital design of the film incline one to a certain leniency of judgment. But basically, as the sort of entertaining yet thoughtful sci-fi film it would like to be, it’s just not very good.</div>
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<i>d </i>Ivan Engler, Ralph Etter <i>p</i> Marcel Wolfisberg <i>sc</i> Arnold Bucher, Ivan Engler, Patrik Steinmann, Thilo Röscheisen <i>ph</i> Ralph Baetschmann <i>ed</i> Bastien Ahrens, Ivan Engler, Timo Fritsche <i>pd</i> Matthias Noger <i>m</i> Fredrik Strömberg <i>cast </i>Anna Katherina Schwabroh, Martin Rapold, Regula Grauwiller, Yangzom Brauen<br />
(2009, Swi, 112m)tom newthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00883569375257663681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-185761289740077941.post-54739311333249544322020-01-04T15:17:00.006-08:002022-10-23T15:03:57.474-07:00S&S flick lit aug18<div style="text-align: center;">
not written by me, but worth reading (since Sight & Sound have not made it available online unless one is a subscriber) - an interesting list</div>
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<a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kFPfHWht5hzaHIfb0b95aHZS81bMuyGK/view?usp=sharing" target="_blank">**see it all here**</a></div>
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also, somewhere online - DM for credit - i found the above-cited Tanizaki's "<a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DvIWq-NMDJukuwdJJwTZbGGLfyAADcCd/view?usp=sharing" target="_blank"><i>Tumour With a Human Face</i></a>" - a terrific read - as well as <span class="st">"<i><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Bwa2gFf3MHZMZp4B1XzLzeTeFdRjLrmm/view?usp=sharing" target="_blank">The Present and Future of the Moving Pictures</a></i>"</span></div>
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tom newthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00883569375257663681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-185761289740077941.post-20171682636708249602019-06-26T10:50:00.002-07:002019-06-26T10:52:11.567-07:00Thirteen Most Beautiful<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The programme is made up of 13 of Warhol’s 500+ screen tests (shot between 1964 and 1966, with subjects ranging from random passers-by to Dali and Dylan), accompanied by live music from Dean & Britta. When I saw it presented at the LA Film Festival (in 2010, perhaps), it was introduced by the totally charming Mary Woronov. The story of her own test was apparently typical: she was sat on a stool at one end of the factory, while Warhol and coterie retreated to the other, talking amongst themselves, leaving her unsure of what to do faced with the staring camera for an interminable five minutes.<br />
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So we’re presented with head and shoulders portraits of, amongst others, the defiant Woronov; blank-faced Edie Sedgwick; Dennis Hopper, his eyes closed for much of the test over an occasional wry smile; slyly mugging Ingrid Superstar; and shade-wearing Billy Name who lived in the Factory closet and did most of the attractively stark but varied lighting for the tests. Warhol made these films like living portraits; he was fascinated with simply looking (as in his long, incident-less movies) and wanted to look at people without the uncomfortable distraction of their seeing him look. Woronov related that it was only Warhol who watched all the films; the rest of the gang would look at them from time to time for the amusement of spotting when the subject cracked, unable to keep up their pose or poise in front of the implacable camera for the hyper-extended duration. And that’s why the screen tests work so well: after a length of time almost anyone is going to break down and show something truthful of themselves, whatever that may be (unless, like the haughty but tolerant Nico, you just don’t care from the off).<br />
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Accompanying this, the music has moments of greatness. After an electro-soundscape opening (for Richard Rheem) the band creep on below proud Anne Buchanan and build up a wordless number that wonderfully recaptures the yearning melancholy of Dean (Wareham)’s Galaxie 500, so simple yet imbued with that ineffable something, while tears start to roll down Buchanan’s immobile face. It’s a mighty impressive start, but then, for grinning, gum-chewing Paul America, the songs begin. Wareham has never matched his first band, and with Luna he started to overstretch his song-writing skills further than an excuse for a three-chord jam, and his weak lyrical skills further than they could bear; none of the original songs here is worth its place, particularly beside a cover of the lovely “I’ll Keep It With Mine” for Nico’s test (it was written for her by Dylan). A little obviousness in the marrying of sound and image is no bad thing, and approaching the halfway point we get what we’ve been waiting for as the band break into a chugging Velvety workout for Dennis Hopper. A little later they’re just getting into a nice Galaxie-esque wig-out below chiseled Freddie Hirko when the flashing dots of the reel-end pull them up short; all the tests chosen are of roughly the same five-minute duration (though some others approach up to an hour) which never allows the band to stretch out and develop a groove to match the mounting tension of watching the pinned-down subjects. And that tension in itself is dissipated by the overlit stage, which unfailingly draws the eye even when clumsy lyrics are not jarring the aesthetic mood.<br />
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But the show builds to a great climax: Lou Reed’s test (the penultimate) takes the musical honours – there he is, in Raybans of course, fuck-you swigging on a coke bottle while the band launches into a raucous (if rickety) cover of the great “lost” Velvets blues “I’m Not A Young Man Any More”. And then finally we get Baby Jane Holzer, all hair and eye make-up, brushing her teeth. The slightly lame accompaniment becomes irrelevant; she’s the only one to rivet the camera rather than the other way round, vivacious without being salacious (quite a feat, as the toothpaste oozes from her mouth) and glorious proof that a screen test can indeed find you a star.<br />
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<i>d/p</i> Andy Warhol <i>m</i> Dean & Britta <i>cast </i>Paul America, Susan Bottomly, Ann Buchanan, Freddy Herko, Jane Holzer, Dennis Hopper, Billy Name, Nico, Richard Rheem, Lou Reed, Edie Sedgewick, Ingrid Superstar, Mary Woronov<br />
(US, 1964-69/2009, 59m, b/w)tom newthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00883569375257663681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-185761289740077941.post-20890895569524402362019-06-23T10:16:00.002-07:002019-06-23T10:23:35.517-07:00Carancho<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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About ten years ago, there were <a href="http://cinema-scope.com/features/features-mariano-llinas-and-other-argentinean-species-beyond-official-cinema/" target="_blank">exciting things going on in the cinema of Argentina</a>. The international resurgence around the turn of the millennium (with <i>Nine Queens</i> et al) resulted in a healthy state-funded production system, which in turn spawned a reactive and fertile counter-cinema (centred round <a href="http://tomvonloguenewth.blogspot.com/2010/08/historias-extraordinarias-extraordinary.html" target="_blank">Mario Llinás</a>). Both thrived, and whilst the independent arm explored various interesting questions of narrrative and representation, the mainstream concentrated on making good, solid, as-it-were Hollywood far, of the type one bemoans Hollywood for making no longer.<br />
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Carancho means “vulture” and like the previous year’s Darín-starrer <i>The Secret In Their Eyes</i> is a slick, well-made, and exciting drama/thriller with an emotional thrust, handled in a thoughtful and adult fashion: that is to say, exactly what a popular movie should be. Ricardo Darín is a mainstay of this cinema, effortlessly rumpled, effortlessly ambiguous, and effortlessly charismatic. Here he’s an ambulance-chaser with a shady outfit that won’t let him go; he wants to straighten out as much for himself as for his handsome, somewhat surly, young doctor girlfriend, co-producer Martina Gusman, fine and understated, who turns out to be less held-together than she seems.<br />
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Director Pablo Trapero conjures a spot-on grubby night-time world as Darin hustles his way around crash sites, morgues, and hospitals, and he has a fine way with a chaotic action sequence. The film opens with an effectively sustained bang and closes with a double bang, preceded by some nice old-fashioned tension. He’s rather heavy on the close-up and jiggly handheld, but that’s just part of the lexicon, I suppose; elsewhere he gives the actors plenty of scope to play well with one another, in long, often locked-down takes and consistently well-composed two-shots. There’s nothing frightfully profound here – the state of healthcare is briefly bemoaned and there’s some tension between whether Darin is a vulture or can actually help the poor and uninsured who are his clients – but these are efficiently dispensed-with serious-theme-as-backdrop elements. Primarily the film tells of two people near the bottom of the barrel, trying to claw their way up and doing it together, and fitted out in a punchy and efficient urban action style, it works perfectly well.<br />
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<i>d/p</i> Pablo Trapero <i>sc</i> Trapero, Alejandro Fadel, Martín Maregui, Santiago Mitre <i>ph</i> Julián Apezteguia <i>ed</i> Ezequiel Borovinsky, Trapero <i>ad </i>Mercedes Alfonsín <i>cast </i>Ricardo Darín, Martina Gusman, Carlos Weber, José Luis Arias, Fabio Ronzano, Gabriel Almirón, José Manuel Espeche<br />
(2010, Arg/Chil/Fr/SKor, 107m)tom newthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00883569375257663681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-185761289740077941.post-19236721109011281202019-05-14T22:23:00.000-07:002019-05-14T22:33:09.580-07:00Sawdust City<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
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A few years ago, when I was attending festivals a more often, I would go through phases of really making an effort with contemporary American independent cinema. So, I saw a lot of lousy movies, partly the reason this went in phases. This one remains the most impressive, albeit it sounded from the LA Film Festival programme like another tired midwestern masculinity/small-town-probing indie. It’s debatable whether it’d have seemed more or less attractive if the programme had mentioned the film was inspired specifically by Cassavetes’ terrific <i>Husbands</i>, and by him and Peter Falk in <i>Mikey and Nicky</i>. First-time director David Nordstrom was on hand and dedicated the screening to the mere days late Falk, who would have liked it a lot, I believe.<br />
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Nordstrom was not slavish in his inspiration, and nor did he confine himself, channeling a load of wintery '70s vibe with a sailor and a knapsack. A first-rate opening montage introduces us in very natural fashion to two brothers, who’ll see each again after some years, with closeness and caginess. On the soundtrack, Pete the sailor calls brother Bob from a bar, chews the fat, lets on he’s in town and says he’s got to find Dad. They spend the night, and the rest of the film, on a bar crawl. Some stuff comes out, of course, but mostly the film lets them just be together, spar, drink, annoy, and generally fit.<br />
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The whole premise allows Nordstrom to hit obvious notes, but he nails almost all of them, dispensing the secrets of family and absence with care, and creating a couple of central characters whom one would be happy to watch doing almost anything together. He takes Bob himself, opposite Carl McLaughlin, a quiet, stolid presence who perfectly registers restrained annoyance, and makes his shell almost visible. Bob is a remarkable creation and a selfless performance – he can be such a dick at times that strangers want to beat him up; but he’s always ready to forget and raise another beer, and his obligatory toilet confessional is properly great.<br />
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Just that film would be pretty fine, but this one has a killer touch: the brothers are joined by Gene (Lee Lynch), a free-flowing barfly and practiced freeloader, who injects a great deal of amusement into the proceedings, supposedly guiding them to their dad. The kicker is that it’s like late 60s Dennis Hopper is in the movie: his first shot is an instant classic, sitting at the bar, telling a hilarious story, with cowboy hat, shaggy beard. But it’s not an imitation: in speech he has echoes of Hopper, but his own voice. Lynch is brilliant, in a really unusual move pulled off to a tee.<br />
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The film plays out to a spot-on soundtrack of 70s bar rock, and the feeling for that kind of small-town bar existence is note perfect (filmed in Nordstrom’s home town in Wisconsin); photography is handsomely appropriate; there’s a great deal of humour; the emotional stuff is almost all handled well; and one of its most endearing features, it entirely avoids modishness and irony. If the final dialogue is cliché-ridden, the characters have earned it – and would they not be likely to talk that way? Thing is, Cassavetes and Falk wouldn’t have, and one misses the first-rate naturalism of the rest of the script. But overall, terrific.<br />
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<i>d/sc/ed</i> David Nordstrom <i>p</i> Mike Ott, Frederick Thornton <i>ph</i> James Laxton <i>cast</i><i> </i>David Nordstrom, Carl Bird McLaughlin, Lee Lynch, John Brotherton, Julie Carlson<br />
(2011, USA, 97m)tom newthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00883569375257663681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-185761289740077941.post-2176603145343593942019-05-14T21:39:00.001-07:002019-06-18T17:10:48.047-07:00Los Bastardos<div style="text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4A60kHbZCMMUzwNJXhDFJXrEVz0eRgCRb0An1-tO7oCxMtUiQV86CWcCt2jEHWbfDhK-EptYI-DPut0FwFR1INvFuT3Phd-sQYZEVDF_2g2IAgSRa729zdH7voL_95OMaVxKnU33WL4U/s1600/2008bastardos01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="235" data-original-width="550" height="317" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4A60kHbZCMMUzwNJXhDFJXrEVz0eRgCRb0An1-tO7oCxMtUiQV86CWcCt2jEHWbfDhK-EptYI-DPut0FwFR1INvFuT3Phd-sQYZEVDF_2g2IAgSRa729zdH7voL_95OMaVxKnU33WL4U/s640/2008bastardos01.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
Jesús and his younger friend Fausto (estimable first-timers Jesus Moises Rodriguez and Rubén Sosa) are Mexican day labourers in LA. They wait with others outside the downtown Home Depot, go on a job, drink beer in the park. So far so usual. Except they’ve a sawn-off shotgun in their backpack, and they were picked up already that morning for a “quick and easy” job about which they’ve agree not to blab. Something is afoot.<br />
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We know from the off that something cinematic is afoot as well: an interminable, static shot shows two tiny figures advancing down the early morning concrete of the LA river. We wait a long time for them to pass the panning camera and clamber up the embankment. Frames are carefully composed; shots are held; gradually, as the pair prove themselves to be the most unhurried house-breakers in the world, tension builds. The Chekovian law of guns is obeyed, and the finale is shocking, although so meticulously (and startlingly) well-executed that the ultra-restrained build-up can’t help but smack of simply servicing a single-shot tour de force – some of those long takes might more effectively have been used on the day’s ditch-digging, for example. The impact is thus slightly tainted with gimmickry (director Escalante has continued to show a penchant for shock).<br />
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Race plays its part, of course: the white folks at Home Depot are gently mocked, but their condescension is primarily class-based; the pair encounter a far more unpleasant form of cowardly aggression in the park, but their resentment is implied to stop short of anything more than vindictive intimidation, if only in the name of staying out of (unpaid) trouble. The sense of otherness is reinforced, and the absurd futility of having undergone hellish hardships to attain the very bottom of a socio-economic ladder, when they could be getting drunk to celebrate El Grito the following day.<br />
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So, the formalism is slightly forced, the “unexpected” developments are pat, the characters are under-drawn to the point of being generic, and the affluent white mom (Nina Zavarin), despite a game display of middle-age spread, is not a good enough actress to transcend the poor English-language scripting. But moments of humour hit home; the labourers’ camaraderie is as believable as the wretchedness of their situation is palpable; and following the remarkable finale, a strawberry-field coda unexpectedly merges the human and the political in an outbreak of emotion at a secret all the more terrible for the certainty that it will never be exorcised by judicial punishment. Ambitious, and in the end, quite admirable and affecting.<br />
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<i>d</i> Amat Escalante <i>p </i>Amat Escalante, Jaime Romandia, Carlos Reygadas <i>sc </i>Amat Escalante, Martín Escalante <i>ph</i> Matthew Uhry <i>ed</i> Ayhan Ergürsel, Amat Escalante <i>pd </i>Gabriel Abraham <i>cast</i> Jesus Moises Rodriguez, Rubén Sosa, Nina Zavarin, Kenny Johnston<br />
(2008, Mex/Fr/USA, 90m)tom newthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00883569375257663681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-185761289740077941.post-6247016279062026042019-05-14T18:07:00.001-07:002019-05-14T22:32:14.060-07:00Jalsaghar (The Music Room)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbwnivx7uFX4Mw0Sng2Q54t_LnI5ONX4P-zo8gcJ-mj-1FFk6prndu5_0LFyz_9g7Q80dfxbsdjWvvso-Ppdpjf4Ec6FlAgn6Ib5fL4eu7CYzJ5fJuwjGdx5zKbsM_6WwgLqdiFu6ROgo/s1600/jalsaghar.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="310" data-original-width="550" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbwnivx7uFX4Mw0Sng2Q54t_LnI5ONX4P-zo8gcJ-mj-1FFk6prndu5_0LFyz_9g7Q80dfxbsdjWvvso-Ppdpjf4Ec6FlAgn6Ib5fL4eu7CYzJ5fJuwjGdx5zKbsM_6WwgLqdiFu6ROgo/s1600/jalsaghar.jpg" /></a></div>
Satyajit Ray feared that this would be his last film, following the box office squib of <i>Aparijito</i> (<i>The Unvanquished, </i>1956). Perhaps as a result, it is infused through and through with a sense of melancholy, the passing of an order, and the supreme importance of art above all else. And it is a quiet masterpiece. Ageing zamindar Huzur Biswambhar Roy (Chhabi Biswas, soon to be seen in to equally good effect in Ray's <i>Devi</i>) sits languidly around his decaying palace, watching his barren lands be eroded by the river, and irritated to the core of his being by his nouveau riche neighbour, Mahim Ganguly (Gangapada Basu), the son of a usurer.<br />
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The sound of Mahim’s sacred thread ceremony for his son prompts Huzur to hold the ceremony for his own son, in the crumbling grandeur of his jalsaghar, albeit is a celebration he can scarcely afford. Men sit on the carpet, recline on pillows, smoke and drink, while musicians play, and Huzur’s “dangerous passion” for music is reignited. One can see the foolish fondness in the eyes of his puffy face, but also the hard pettiness that has him hold another jalsa, further whittling down his meagre remaining resources, simply so as to refuse an invitation from Mahim; his grand gestures are motivated as much by social jealousy and inchoate disgust at the changing of the social order as they are by the transportative power of the music. Still, as he lolls around his ancient mansion, the music is all that can restore him to life.<br />
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It’s a simple story, told in plain enough terms to incorporate a family tragedy that seems a mite excessive in the context of an already perfect melancholy and helplessness at the passing of time, palpable and moving. This is represented in large part by the heart-breaking, faded glory of the palace, and in particular the jalsaghar, dominated by ancestral portraits, chandeliers, and a giant mirror, gorgeous in its prime, desperately magnificent even in decay in a spell-binding sequence in which Huzar wanders in semi-delirium from fading candle to fading candle . But at the heart of it all, of course, is the wonderful music, presented in three separate jalsas, eternal, transportative, and fully justifying its position as the most important thing in the world.<br />
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<i>d/p/sc</i> Satyajit Ray <i>ph</i> Subrata Mitra <i>ed</i> Dulal Dutta <i>pd</i> Bansi Chandragupta <i>m</i> Ustad Vilayat Kahn, Robin Majumdar <i>cast</i> Chhabi Biswas, Gangapada Basu, Padmadevi, Pinaki Sengupta, Sardar Akhtar, Bismillah Kahn, Salamat Ali Khan, Waheed Kahn<br />
(1958, Ind, 95m, b/w)<br />
tom newthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00883569375257663681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-185761289740077941.post-18871862349448587482018-11-09T09:50:00.001-08:002018-11-09T09:52:46.938-08:00Death Wears A Yellow Jacket<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-peN03gp2bZfbMjHbBBjkIhRtzU0k2J6FAXHY_m-V_he2aF-kwWLNNxu3BYOsXtkvFQKU-9tcUaSLqmBL9_Xm0AR6SHkv7KtvZYir0HaH4qor9KrcgKOC1-MM40sNo9CPr2K6NR8TcGI/s1600/MV5BNGYxYmE5NjktNjFjMC00YjY2LWI5MjgtNmRmZjg5NGVhNzQ0XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjUyNDk2ODc%2540._V1_SY1000_CR0%252C0%252C529%252C1000_AL_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="529" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-peN03gp2bZfbMjHbBBjkIhRtzU0k2J6FAXHY_m-V_he2aF-kwWLNNxu3BYOsXtkvFQKU-9tcUaSLqmBL9_Xm0AR6SHkv7KtvZYir0HaH4qor9KrcgKOC1-MM40sNo9CPr2K6NR8TcGI/s640/MV5BNGYxYmE5NjktNjFjMC00YjY2LWI5MjgtNmRmZjg5NGVhNzQ0XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjUyNDk2ODc%2540._V1_SY1000_CR0%252C0%252C529%252C1000_AL_.jpg" width="337" /></a></div>
What with Luca Guadagnino's new <i>Suspiria</i>, homage, and last month’s Argento retrospective at Metrograph, ‘giallo’ would seem to be the genre <i>della giornata</i>. Yet with its supernatural core and hyperbolic stylization, Argento's original <i>Suspiria</i> (1977) barely qualifies as giallo at all, and as for Guadagnino's version – pointedly not a remake – it seems to bear as much relation to the genre as the faux perfume-ad gialli tributes of Forzani and Cattet.<br />
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That said, to pin down the precise nature of the filmic giallo is notoriously difficult. The definition provided by prolific genre screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi – ‘a difficult-to-explain event and its rigorously logical explanation based on the evidence and details provided in the story’ – is as opaque as many of his plots. Yet just as the spaghetti western can be identified by time and place, the giallo can be pegged to early 1970s Europe, and while motivation and behaviour may often beggar belief, apparently supernatural elements will always be a killer’s ruse, or a dream...<br />
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<a href="https://frieze.com/article/what-exactly-giallo-film" target="_blank"><b><i>Read more at frieze.com</i></b></a><br />
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tom newthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00883569375257663681noreply@blogger.com0