There’s a difference between movies that are alienated/bleak/depressing because the auteur has fully digested a world view or philosophy which leads to alienation and movies that are casually or superficially “dark.” In the first category, much Bergman, much Fassbinder, much Bela Tarr, some Tarkovsky (but not Rublev which is life-affirming - Solaris which is pessimistic); in the second category, Gaspar Noe, much David Fincher, much Dumont, etc. Movies that truck in pessimism without a philosophical or historical underpinning are essentially bourgeois — and way more depressing, in actuality, than the movies that shoot from the hip about the evils of the world and see things in a clear-eyed light.
What intrigues me is how a filmmaker has his characters handle bleakness. In Bergman, people often collapse into paralyzed insanity. In Godard, they turn violent. I tend to believe more in the Godardian thesis, sensitivity leading to aggression (as Freud believed), and I think it ultimately makes for more gripping cinema. More cinematic cinema.
“As long as movies are depressing, life isn’t.” — Fassbinder
Schnabel has earned the right to be “pretentious” if anyone has. You can’t put a N.Y. downtown artist (or just a N.Y. downtowner for that matter) on television and expect him or her to blend in with the cartoons and the commercials. Sometimes pretension is actually just a different range of experience, or a greater comfort with difficult, “big” ideas. But I think the whole word is a bad starting off point for any discussion, because it’s like saying you hate the look of someone’s beard. It’s sort of like, “Yeah, so what? What’s good or bad about the art?”
Cronenberg’s biggest problem is that he is so great when he’s great — so original, so mind-blowing, so subversive — that when he’s anything less than great he is a huge disappointment. His greatness is also his greatest weakness, and he would probably want it that way, being a bit of an over achiever. But I’d rather have someone who has at least scaled Olympus several times, than someone who is only consistently mediocre. So I don’t like him much as a commercial filmmaker (we already had enough of those), but I will never give him up when it comes to Rabid, The Brood, Dead Ringers, Videodrome, and maybe Scanners and Naked Lunch.
Let me never hear lists and list making bashed on again! lol. Under the pedigreed and highbrow word “canon,” we have only discovered once again that the lists grow longer and longer with the mania of inclusion, the judgments become more and more scattershot and subjective, and the tone of “How could you forget so-and-so?” creeps in. Well, so and so was forgotten because he wasn’t on X’s list, er, canon, sorry; meanwhile so-and-so heads up Y’s pantheon as Zeus himself.
Our best lists/canons are our own collections, for those of us who collect. But, you have to actually watch what you buy, and you may have to admit that some don’t hold up to scrutiny. Out of the 100 or so movies I’ve bought in the last six months, I think I have re-sold only two. Not bad.
His best film about death is My Own Private Idaho. No one actually dies, except Bob and the father, but the terrible isolation of the River Phoenix character, as well as his tumbling into narcolepsy, are metaphors for death — as is the general broken heartedness. Those vast desert landscapes — that’s death. That painful laying awake as the guy you love bangs the shit out of a girl in the upstairs room — death.
The so-called death trilogy (who comes up with these names?) is, I think, just a way of linking three of Van Sant’s experimental, “story-less” films. Death is actually not death in Elephant — the living people are the ones who are dead, and the heroes love death so much that it becomes something else. It becomes a kind of lover. Last Days — well, yes, he dies, but it’s also a film about music, rock legends, betrayal, futile attempts at liberation, Top 40 devouring alternative, and choosing to live the kind of life you want/need to live. Gerry — no one dies in Gerry, both Gerries are the same Gerry all along, and while I don’t think Damon leaves the desert cured of schizophrenia, he has nonetheless reached some point of integrating selves and realities. But, as usual with Van Sant, reality is the craziest thing of all, because that strange father and son who pick him up — well, if anything’s symbolic of death in Gerry, it’s them.
It’s neither sexist nor misogynistic — the human form in general is how human beings express themselves, and how artists communicate humanity. Nudity is a very powerful thing. Female nudes have been the subject of ecstatic, almost religious contemplation throughout the ages. It is not rapists and serial killers who paint female nudes. Manson in prison makes spiders and scorpions out of hair.
Feminism is right on, but unless it embraces sexuality it’s a little wet. And once that sexuality is embraced, even more power can flow from it. Now, of course, if someone is standing in front of a Manet, or a Degas, or a Rubens in the museum, beating his pecker and shooting off all over the wall, then that’s sick, that’s a problem. But I don’t think we’re talking about the antisiocial here, just the opposite.
Think of the amazing tracking shot in Rublev which follows the stark naked pagan priestess as she runs across the beach and into the ocean to escape the religious zealots who are trying to arrest her and her boyfriend after the long orgy night (in which Rublev, as a monk, is tied up and threatened by death with drowning, though she herself kisses him and helps him escape). This beaitiful, heart stopping, mesmerizing shot, where you fear for the safety of her exposed flesh, and you root for her to fly or swim away like a goddess, this would be nothing if she were clothed. Nothing.
I finally got to see this movie and I was pleasantly surprised. It’s really not bad at all, with some of the best visual conceits I’ve seen in a De Palma film (especially the leaves on top of a canopy bed which seem to twitch alive and writhe like big black insects as the camera pans over them caressingly). De Palma has even sublimated his voyeurist obsession to such a degree that it’s no longer the center of the film, but have you noticed how every sex scene is shot through a window or glass doorway from the point of view of someone in the bushes? An older De Palma hero would have gotten off on Elizabeth Short’s screen tests, too, instead of cringing at them painfully as Bucky does here. The problems for me were mainly that too much was resolved through rapid fire flashbacks in the last five minutes. That, and the typically inept use of voiceover — De Palma tracks over a noisy, clamoring crowd and we hear Josh Hartnett say, “The boxing arena was packed,” or redundant words to that effect. I just rewatched Preminger’s Exodus recently. It’s an amazing lesson in how to tell a long, complicated, human story without having the main character reiterate everything in voiceover. It’s called acting, camera placement, mood, mise en scene. There’s a shot where Paul Newman as the Jewish militant is sneaking into the prison disguised as an Arab, in order to liberate the Jewish prisoners, and he turns around just once and looks back into the night, and you just feel this sense of destiny and danger. A film today would have him saying on the voice track, “I looked over my shoulder and wondered if I could accomplish this dangerous mission…” Blah blah blah. Film and literature will never replace each other, and the less they have to do with each other’s failed ambitions, the better. I will decide what character I choose to empathize with, thank you very much.
Woodstock is one of the most boring films ever, and castrated by Albert Grossman’s refusal to let his acts (such as Joplin and Hendrix) appear in it. Really an incomplete document. The better the music, the better the concert film, and if it’s a great musician I like the film to be very unfussy and just show me the performance.
Re Plato- his argument for ideal forms (admittedly kind of spurious) is an attempt to logically deduce a universal creator. The chair exists as a form in the mind of the carpenter, who in turn existed as a form in the mind of God. It’s an attempt to rationally presuppose how we got here, and it loses weight by virtue of the lack of hard scientific knowledge in Plato’s time and also the reduction of people to object status.
Dr. Lemonglow brings up an interesting point with Niagara. Does anyone remember the first time we see Marilyn talking to her lover on the phone? We don’t see his face or his body, just a close-up of his feet up on the bed, in shoes. This metonymy is meant to characterize him in a nutshell as a brute of a man — he wears shoes in bed! So in many cases, males are reduced to something much less clean than the naked body — something associated with filth, with the impenetrable.
The doc is a funny portrait of people who are trying to be touching. The film adaptation is probably going to try to be a “touching” portrait of people we’ve been led to expect are funny. Needless to say, the 70s get this kind of grotesquerie right, whereas today we bring too much of a Social Services perspective to it.
And did you see that someone is finally releasing Une Femme Mariee – not one of his best films but really worth watching and fascinating nonetheless.
Also, I recommend to all Godard fans the documentary on disc 2 of Pierrot le Fou, “Godard L’Amour La Poesie.” I learned so much about Godard and Anna Karina from watching this, things I had never known. For one thing, the final close-up of Belmondo at the end of Pierrot comes full circle to the opening close-up of him at the beginning of Breathless. In both, he is swearing. I never noticed that. I didn’t know either that they lost their baby to a miscarriage and this made his films after A Woman is a Woman become both more personal and more deeply pessimistic.
I cheat a little, I put them on pause and come back to them. I think I watched Satantango over three days recently, Berlin Alexanderplatz over four or five. JP is right about BA, the episodes are natural breaks, and each episode has its own story arc. I’m getting ready to watch both of them again. I wouldn’t read War and Peace, or even Madame Bovary, in one sitting. Amarcord, Andrei Rublev, and Inland Empire I’ve watched more or less straight through recently. I appreciate being able to stop and digest and return — sometimes a scene will be so intense that it’s better to let it stand on its own a little bit.
I think there’s significance, as Bob suggests, that the misleading Prince is Russian, and the drunken violent corrupt police chief is German, in terms of Hungarian history. But apart from some generalities I can’t say exactly what the significance is. Watching Tarr’s films makes me want to read a book about Hungary. It’s so easy to figure out German cinema, for instance, or even American — the historical context is so obvious. Tarr has moved from documentary-like social realism to a more surreal, allegorical cinema, but I think that’s progress rather than anything else.
We often ask why great art is melancholy or depressive. I think it’s more to the point that a lot of great artists take a stance of being highly critical of their own people, for instance, or of the times they live in. Has anyone seen Bela Tarr’s first film, Family Nest? About twenty minutes in, something so random and disturbing happens that it seems almost incomprehensible. In fact, the movie seems to really have two general points — socialism is bunk, and Hungarian men are walking testes. Similarly, in Breillat’s Fat Girl, there’s a moment near the end where the mother watches some people making a mess in a highway rest stop and concludes, “We’re a really awful people,” meaning the French. Other times, artists take the extreme stance of being ambivalent about their own humanity — love, sexuality, etc. They question everything. Naturally — it’s like the sensitive child who comes out of a big squabbling family and most people would find that family normal but the artist-child finds it oppressive, so he says, “Oh, where I come from, it’s awful, it’s awful.” And maybe it is awful in a lot of ways. But maybe it’s also not so bad.
Sometimes this feels like the de rigeur position of what a good enlightened leftist is supposed to promote in 2009. I say this as a leftist. I don’t think that life is so easy that it can be reduced to good/bad. People are comfortable having their own values and assumptions reinforced. It’s difficult to be both critical and tender at the same time — to see the goodness in life while also deploring the bad. Oliver Stone’s portrait of Nixon was interesting in this regard — in spite of the necessary grotesqueness there were moments when you almost feel sorry for him. That’s a risk, but it’s calculated, and it’s not even what I’m talking about. I guess Grand Illusion, La Dolce Vita, My Life to Live, Fear Eats the Soul, those would be closer to what I’m trying to describe.
Yes, I do hope you get to meet him, Drew. You could do this – ask your uncle to throw a small party and have him invite the couple and you. You meet him on an equal basis and find out what he does by asking him, as if you didn’t already know. Play it off. Then everyone is spared embarrassment. Don’t let on that you know the wife’s crazy. ;-)
But really, your uncle should have just done this in the first place without opening up the whole confidentiality can of worms.
It is like a male Persona, and I sometimes think that Van Sant’s whole point in these moody, elliptical character studies is to dwell on male actors in such a way as to prove that men are as enigmatic, mysterious and profound as women are. So it’s more about life, ultimately.
Wow, it’s about time for Two or Three Things I Know About Her, probably one of his five best. And Made in USA will be great to see, finally.
But Benjamin Button? Who could have foreseen this? Did anyone list BB on the thread about which recent films will make the CC?
I would have thought Fincher-Pitt’s Fight Club (I almost typed Pincher Fitt — say that 3 times fast, lol) would have beaten out Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
The Japanese trilogy looks good too but basically this is a wallet-saver batch for me.
T., you know the world of Irreversible? You’ve seen someone bludgeoned to death with a fire hydrant? You’ve sat around grimy little rooms with dirty old men talking about how people are shit? It’s just too much, it’s undigested negativity without being attached to a social context. You think it’s honest, I think it’s dishonest for that reason. Buckets of blood do not equal a compelling vision of the world. La Haine is probablu a better French film. And Masculin Feminin does have some random violence in it, so it really isn’t sugar coated. But the thing is, even if it were like Jacques Demy’s Lola or Irma La Douce, there’s a certain bravery and beauty in building a vision of the world that’s tender and beautiful — that’s just as valid and realistic as something that says we’re all depraved killers and victims waiting to get our brains bashed out. It’s too easy.
And David, The Squid and the Whale is such a human and gut-churning piece of work, it depicts the everyday brutality and madness of family life better than any other film I can think of. I don’t understand why people dislike it. One of the most profound and honest movies I’ve seen.
I think that’s an excellent analysis, Doctor Lemonglow. It sort of gets into the way women are generally depicted as Nature incarnate. They don’t even have to do anything, they just stand there and exist and they are part of Nature. Whereas a man must do something, must act in some way, to take his place. If I’m not mistaken Niagara is just about the only Monroe film that does show her in totally natural outdoor locations — I think of her usually as being in the city, in apartments, in offices, in a court of law in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. She quickly became more of an “unnatural,” constructed figure, or maybe she represents Nature in these un-natural places. Re Jean Peters, there’s often a “good girl” in noirs to counterpoint the vixen — a sort of madonna/whore dynamic. Lauren Bacall was usually a good girl posing superficially as a bad one, in The Big Sleep for instance — she just needed the right man, Bogart, to bring out her softer side, because he was so much harder.
Cinesnag, it’s not like anyone’s going to be offering the opportunity to sit through Warhol’s four stars anytime soon. The second disc of Satantango is probably the most difficult to absorb all at once, but if you get through the disturbing part there’s this wonderful treat, the Tango scene, which could have gone on twice as long as far as I was concerned. That’s really a film where the more Tarr makes you look at these characters, the more you see them — even if we’re probably supposed to feel like God does at the end when he just boards up the window (although they’ve abandoned him before he abandons them).
The police chief is actually speaking in German, when he’s talking about calling in the Panzer. He’s speaking German. Aunt Tunde is, I guess, Hungarian but she’s also an interloper. Griyori is susceptible because of his preoccupation with German culture, specifically Werckmeister. Schygulla was deliberately cast, I think, because she is so closely associated with Fassbinder and his films about Nazi Germany.
But that scene where the guy goes to check on the police chief’s sons and they’re jumping around and banging on drums and screaming, “I’ll be hard on you!” — Bunuel would have given his left nut to direct that scene.
Okay, I know London is a very violent, high crimes place. But why does Irreversible have to be told in reverse? Usually you are made to sympathize with characters (through their happiness) before seeing them torn apart and it makes it more involving. I just question how you never exactly get inside the characters, not even through small gestures that distinguish them. It’s a bit like watching rats in a cage — now the rats are fighting over a scrap of food, now they’re fucking. I just saw it as clinical.
The only thing I can think of is that the film is a triumph of make-up and blue screen animation, and they’re saluting it for technical reasons. Which can be kind of valid. That’s the main reason to watch Thief of Baghdad, imo.
It’s great, and one of the best things about it — apart from von Stroheim in that ungodly neck brace (he looks like a strange marionette) — is the fact that everyone speaks his own language. This isn’t Spielberg where the Germans talk in broken English among themselves. You have Englishmen speaking English, Russians speaking Russian, etc. It’s very real. The Marseillaise here beats Casablanca’s Marseillaise walking away backwards in high heels, too. But I don’t love it as much as some other Renoir movies, like La Bete Humaine and probably Rules of the Game. But to watch it is to see how many other films have borrowed from it — Down By Law, The Stationmaster’s Wife, etc.
Do great films have to be depressing and bleak to be great? about 3 years ago
Formerly Biberkopf here. Back under my real name.
There’s a difference between movies that are alienated/bleak/depressing because the auteur has fully digested a world view or philosophy which leads to alienation and movies that are casually or superficially “dark.” In the first category, much Bergman, much Fassbinder, much Bela Tarr, some Tarkovsky (but not Rublev which is life-affirming
-Solaris which is pessimistic); in the second category, Gaspar Noe, much David Fincher, much Dumont, etc. Movies that truck in pessimism without a philosophical or historical underpinning are essentially bourgeois — and way more depressing, in actuality, than the movies that shoot from the hip about the evils of the world and see things in a clear-eyed light.What intrigues me is how a filmmaker has his characters handle bleakness. In Bergman, people often collapse into paralyzed insanity. In Godard, they turn violent. I tend to believe more in the Godardian thesis, sensitivity leading to aggression (as Freud believed), and I think it ultimately makes for more gripping cinema. More cinematic cinema.
“As long as movies are depressing, life isn’t.” — Fassbinder
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PRETENTIOUS FILMMAKERS/FILMS about 3 years ago
Schnabel has earned the right to be “pretentious” if anyone has. You can’t put a N.Y. downtown artist (or just a N.Y. downtowner for that matter) on television and expect him or her to blend in with the cartoons and the commercials. Sometimes pretension is actually just a different range of experience, or a greater comfort with difficult, “big” ideas. But I think the whole word is a bad starting off point for any discussion, because it’s like saying you hate the look of someone’s beard. It’s sort of like, “Yeah, so what? What’s good or bad about the art?”
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Hit or Miss? about 3 years ago
Cronenberg’s biggest problem is that he is so great when he’s great — so original, so mind-blowing, so subversive — that when he’s anything less than great he is a huge disappointment. His greatness is also his greatest weakness, and he would probably want it that way, being a bit of an over achiever. But I’d rather have someone who has at least scaled Olympus several times, than someone who is only consistently mediocre. So I don’t like him much as a commercial filmmaker (we already had enough of those), but I will never give him up when it comes to Rabid, The Brood, Dead Ringers, Videodrome, and maybe Scanners and Naked Lunch.
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IS THERE SUCH A THING AS A 'DEFINITIVE' CANON OF FILMS/DIRECTORS? about 3 years ago
Let me never hear lists and list making bashed on again! lol. Under the pedigreed and highbrow word “canon,” we have only discovered once again that the lists grow longer and longer with the mania of inclusion, the judgments become more and more scattershot and subjective, and the tone of “How could you forget so-and-so?” creeps in. Well, so and so was forgotten because he wasn’t on X’s list, er, canon, sorry; meanwhile so-and-so heads up Y’s pantheon as Zeus himself.
Our best lists/canons are our own collections, for those of us who collect. But, you have to actually watch what you buy, and you may have to admit that some don’t hold up to scrutiny. Out of the 100 or so movies I’ve bought in the last six months, I think I have re-sold only two. Not bad.
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HOT NEW DIRECTORS about 3 years ago
McGuigan
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Gus Van Sant and his relation with death about 3 years ago
His best film about death is My Own Private Idaho. No one actually dies, except Bob and the father, but the terrible isolation of the River Phoenix character, as well as his tumbling into narcolepsy, are metaphors for death — as is the general broken heartedness. Those vast desert landscapes — that’s death. That painful laying awake as the guy you love bangs the shit out of a girl in the upstairs room — death.
The so-called death trilogy (who comes up with these names?) is, I think, just a way of linking three of Van Sant’s experimental, “story-less” films. Death is actually not death in Elephant — the living people are the ones who are dead, and the heroes love death so much that it becomes something else. It becomes a kind of lover. Last Days — well, yes, he dies, but it’s also a film about music, rock legends, betrayal, futile attempts at liberation, Top 40 devouring alternative, and choosing to live the kind of life you want/need to live. Gerry — no one dies in Gerry, both Gerries are the same Gerry all along, and while I don’t think Damon leaves the desert cured of schizophrenia, he has nonetheless reached some point of integrating selves and realities. But, as usual with Van Sant, reality is the craziest thing of all, because that strange father and son who pick him up — well, if anything’s symbolic of death in Gerry, it’s them.
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The female form... about 3 years ago
It’s neither sexist nor misogynistic — the human form in general is how human beings express themselves, and how artists communicate humanity. Nudity is a very powerful thing. Female nudes have been the subject of ecstatic, almost religious contemplation throughout the ages. It is not rapists and serial killers who paint female nudes. Manson in prison makes spiders and scorpions out of hair.
Feminism is right on, but unless it embraces sexuality it’s a little wet. And once that sexuality is embraced, even more power can flow from it. Now, of course, if someone is standing in front of a Manet, or a Degas, or a Rubens in the museum, beating his pecker and shooting off all over the wall, then that’s sick, that’s a problem. But I don’t think we’re talking about the antisiocial here, just the opposite.
Think of the amazing tracking shot in Rublev which follows the stark naked pagan priestess as she runs across the beach and into the ocean to escape the religious zealots who are trying to arrest her and her boyfriend after the long orgy night (in which Rublev, as a monk, is tied up and threatened by death with drowning, though she herself kisses him and helps him escape). This beaitiful, heart stopping, mesmerizing shot, where you fear for the safety of her exposed flesh, and you root for her to fly or swim away like a goddess, this would be nothing if she were clothed. Nothing.
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DE PALMA'S BLACK DAHLIA about 3 years ago
I finally got to see this movie and I was pleasantly surprised. It’s really not bad at all, with some of the best visual conceits I’ve seen in a De Palma film (especially the leaves on top of a canopy bed which seem to twitch alive and writhe like big black insects as the camera pans over them caressingly). De Palma has even sublimated his voyeurist obsession to such a degree that it’s no longer the center of the film, but have you noticed how every sex scene is shot through a window or glass doorway from the point of view of someone in the bushes? An older De Palma hero would have gotten off on Elizabeth Short’s screen tests, too, instead of cringing at them painfully as Bucky does here. The problems for me were mainly that too much was resolved through rapid fire flashbacks in the last five minutes. That, and the typically inept use of voiceover — De Palma tracks over a noisy, clamoring crowd and we hear Josh Hartnett say, “The boxing arena was packed,” or redundant words to that effect. I just rewatched Preminger’s Exodus recently. It’s an amazing lesson in how to tell a long, complicated, human story without having the main character reiterate everything in voiceover. It’s called acting, camera placement, mood, mise en scene. There’s a shot where Paul Newman as the Jewish militant is sneaking into the prison disguised as an Arab, in order to liberate the Jewish prisoners, and he turns around just once and looks back into the night, and you just feel this sense of destiny and danger. A film today would have him saying on the voice track, “I looked over my shoulder and wondered if I could accomplish this dangerous mission…” Blah blah blah. Film and literature will never replace each other, and the less they have to do with each other’s failed ambitions, the better. I will decide what character I choose to empathize with, thank you very much.
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The female form... about 3 years ago
But cinema shows us lots of things that normally take place in private.
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Superior concert DVDs about 3 years ago
Woodstock is one of the most boring films ever, and castrated by Albert Grossman’s refusal to let his acts (such as Joplin and Hendrix) appear in it. Really an incomplete document. The better the music, the better the concert film, and if it’s a great musician I like the film to be very unfussy and just show me the performance.
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The female form... about 3 years ago
Good Magritte find.
Re Plato- his argument for ideal forms (admittedly kind of spurious) is an attempt to logically deduce a universal creator. The chair exists as a form in the mind of the carpenter, who in turn existed as a form in the mind of God. It’s an attempt to rationally presuppose how we got here, and it loses weight by virtue of the lack of hard scientific knowledge in Plato’s time and also the reduction of people to object status.
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The female form... about 3 years ago
Dr. Lemonglow brings up an interesting point with Niagara. Does anyone remember the first time we see Marilyn talking to her lover on the phone? We don’t see his face or his body, just a close-up of his feet up on the bed, in shoes. This metonymy is meant to characterize him in a nutshell as a brute of a man — he wears shoes in bed! So in many cases, males are reduced to something much less clean than the naked body — something associated with filth, with the impenetrable.
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HBO's Grey Gardens about 3 years ago
The doc is a funny portrait of people who are trying to be touching. The film adaptation is probably going to try to be a “touching” portrait of people we’ve been led to expect are funny. Needless to say, the 70s get this kind of grotesquerie right, whereas today we bring too much of a Social Services perspective to it.
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Really did not want to wait... about 3 years ago
Which new Godards are they doing?
And did you see that someone is finally releasing Une Femme Mariee – not one of his best films but really worth watching and fascinating nonetheless.
Also, I recommend to all Godard fans the documentary on disc 2 of Pierrot le Fou, “Godard L’Amour La Poesie.” I learned so much about Godard and Anna Karina from watching this, things I had never known. For one thing, the final close-up of Belmondo at the end of Pierrot comes full circle to the opening close-up of him at the beginning of Breathless. In both, he is swearing. I never noticed that. I didn’t know either that they lost their baby to a miscarriage and this made his films after A Woman is a Woman become both more personal and more deeply pessimistic.
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How do you watch long films? about 3 years ago
I cheat a little, I put them on pause and come back to them. I think I watched Satantango over three days recently, Berlin Alexanderplatz over four or five. JP is right about BA, the episodes are natural breaks, and each episode has its own story arc. I’m getting ready to watch both of them again. I wouldn’t read War and Peace, or even Madame Bovary, in one sitting. Amarcord, Andrei Rublev, and Inland Empire I’ve watched more or less straight through recently. I appreciate being able to stop and digest and return — sometimes a scene will be so intense that it’s better to let it stand on its own a little bit.
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Werckmeister Harmonies about 3 years ago
I think there’s significance, as Bob suggests, that the misleading Prince is Russian, and the drunken violent corrupt police chief is German, in terms of Hungarian history. But apart from some generalities I can’t say exactly what the significance is. Watching Tarr’s films makes me want to read a book about Hungary. It’s so easy to figure out German cinema, for instance, or even American — the historical context is so obvious. Tarr has moved from documentary-like social realism to a more surreal, allegorical cinema, but I think that’s progress rather than anything else.
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Help me figure something out about 3 years ago
A director who lives in SoCal and whose wife is in therapy. Good luck, that could be virtually anyone. Your uncle is a big tease.
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CRITICAL OF ONE'S OWN PEOPLE. CRITICAL OF ONE'S OWN TIME about 3 years ago
We often ask why great art is melancholy or depressive. I think it’s more to the point that a lot of great artists take a stance of being highly critical of their own people, for instance, or of the times they live in. Has anyone seen Bela Tarr’s first film, Family Nest? About twenty minutes in, something so random and disturbing happens that it seems almost incomprehensible. In fact, the movie seems to really have two general points — socialism is bunk, and Hungarian men are walking testes. Similarly, in Breillat’s Fat Girl, there’s a moment near the end where the mother watches some people making a mess in a highway rest stop and concludes, “We’re a really awful people,” meaning the French. Other times, artists take the extreme stance of being ambivalent about their own humanity — love, sexuality, etc. They question everything. Naturally — it’s like the sensitive child who comes out of a big squabbling family and most people would find that family normal but the artist-child finds it oppressive, so he says, “Oh, where I come from, it’s awful, it’s awful.” And maybe it is awful in a lot of ways. But maybe it’s also not so bad.
Sometimes this feels like the de rigeur position of what a good enlightened leftist is supposed to promote in 2009. I say this as a leftist. I don’t think that life is so easy that it can be reduced to good/bad. People are comfortable having their own values and assumptions reinforced. It’s difficult to be both critical and tender at the same time — to see the goodness in life while also deploring the bad. Oliver Stone’s portrait of Nixon was interesting in this regard — in spite of the necessary grotesqueness there were moments when you almost feel sorry for him. That’s a risk, but it’s calculated, and it’s not even what I’m talking about. I guess Grand Illusion, La Dolce Vita, My Life to Live, Fear Eats the Soul, those would be closer to what I’m trying to describe.
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Help me figure something out about 3 years ago
Yes, I do hope you get to meet him, Drew. You could do this – ask your uncle to throw a small party and have him invite the couple and you. You meet him on an equal basis and find out what he does by asking him, as if you didn’t already know. Play it off. Then everyone is spared embarrassment. Don’t let on that you know the wife’s crazy. ;-)
But really, your uncle should have just done this in the first place without opening up the whole confidentiality can of worms.
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Gus Van Sant and his relation with death about 3 years ago
It is like a male Persona, and I sometimes think that Van Sant’s whole point in these moody, elliptical character studies is to dwell on male actors in such a way as to prove that men are as enigmatic, mysterious and profound as women are. So it’s more about life, ultimately.
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CRITICAL OF ONE'S OWN PEOPLE. CRITICAL OF ONE'S OWN TIME about 3 years ago
Well said. That’s a good point.
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Really did not want to wait... about 3 years ago
Wow, it’s about time for Two or Three Things I Know About Her, probably one of his five best. And Made in USA will be great to see, finally.
But Benjamin Button? Who could have foreseen this? Did anyone list BB on the thread about which recent films will make the CC?
I would have thought Fincher-Pitt’s Fight Club (I almost typed Pincher Fitt — say that 3 times fast, lol) would have beaten out Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
The Japanese trilogy looks good too but basically this is a wallet-saver batch for me.
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PRETENTIOUS FILMMAKERS/FILMS about 3 years ago
T., you know the world of Irreversible? You’ve seen someone bludgeoned to death with a fire hydrant? You’ve sat around grimy little rooms with dirty old men talking about how people are shit? It’s just too much, it’s undigested negativity without being attached to a social context. You think it’s honest, I think it’s dishonest for that reason. Buckets of blood do not equal a compelling vision of the world. La Haine is probablu a better French film. And Masculin Feminin does have some random violence in it, so it really isn’t sugar coated. But the thing is, even if it were like Jacques Demy’s Lola or Irma La Douce, there’s a certain bravery and beauty in building a vision of the world that’s tender and beautiful — that’s just as valid and realistic as something that says we’re all depraved killers and victims waiting to get our brains bashed out. It’s too easy.
And David, The Squid and the Whale is such a human and gut-churning piece of work, it depicts the everyday brutality and madness of family life better than any other film I can think of. I don’t understand why people dislike it. One of the most profound and honest movies I’ve seen.
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The female form... about 3 years ago
I think that’s an excellent analysis, Doctor Lemonglow. It sort of gets into the way women are generally depicted as Nature incarnate. They don’t even have to do anything, they just stand there and exist and they are part of Nature. Whereas a man must do something, must act in some way, to take his place. If I’m not mistaken Niagara is just about the only Monroe film that does show her in totally natural outdoor locations — I think of her usually as being in the city, in apartments, in offices, in a court of law in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. She quickly became more of an “unnatural,” constructed figure, or maybe she represents Nature in these un-natural places. Re Jean Peters, there’s often a “good girl” in noirs to counterpoint the vixen — a sort of madonna/whore dynamic. Lauren Bacall was usually a good girl posing superficially as a bad one, in The Big Sleep for instance — she just needed the right man, Bogart, to bring out her softer side, because he was so much harder.
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How do you watch long films? about 3 years ago
Cinesnag, it’s not like anyone’s going to be offering the opportunity to sit through Warhol’s four stars anytime soon. The second disc of Satantango is probably the most difficult to absorb all at once, but if you get through the disturbing part there’s this wonderful treat, the Tango scene, which could have gone on twice as long as far as I was concerned. That’s really a film where the more Tarr makes you look at these characters, the more you see them — even if we’re probably supposed to feel like God does at the end when he just boards up the window (although they’ve abandoned him before he abandons them).
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Werckmeister Harmonies about 3 years ago
The police chief is actually speaking in German, when he’s talking about calling in the Panzer. He’s speaking German. Aunt Tunde is, I guess, Hungarian but she’s also an interloper. Griyori is susceptible because of his preoccupation with German culture, specifically Werckmeister. Schygulla was deliberately cast, I think, because she is so closely associated with Fassbinder and his films about Nazi Germany.
But that scene where the guy goes to check on the police chief’s sons and they’re jumping around and banging on drums and screaming, “I’ll be hard on you!” — Bunuel would have given his left nut to direct that scene.
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PRETENTIOUS FILMMAKERS/FILMS about 3 years ago
Okay, I know London is a very violent, high crimes place. But why does Irreversible have to be told in reverse? Usually you are made to sympathize with characters (through their happiness) before seeing them torn apart and it makes it more involving. I just question how you never exactly get inside the characters, not even through small gestures that distinguish them. It’s a bit like watching rats in a cage — now the rats are fighting over a scrap of food, now they’re fucking. I just saw it as clinical.
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PRETENTIOUS FILMMAKERS/FILMS about 3 years ago
That’s interesting.
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Benjamin Button!?!? What the Hell? about 3 years ago
The only thing I can think of is that the film is a triumph of make-up and blue screen animation, and they’re saluting it for technical reasons. Which can be kind of valid. That’s the main reason to watch Thief of Baghdad, imo.
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Any Thoughts on Grand Illusion? about 3 years ago
It’s great, and one of the best things about it — apart from von Stroheim in that ungodly neck brace (he looks like a strange marionette) — is the fact that everyone speaks his own language. This isn’t Spielberg where the Germans talk in broken English among themselves. You have Englishmen speaking English, Russians speaking Russian, etc. It’s very real. The Marseillaise here beats Casablanca’s Marseillaise walking away backwards in high heels, too. But I don’t love it as much as some other Renoir movies, like La Bete Humaine and probably Rules of the Game. But to watch it is to see how many other films have borrowed from it — Down By Law, The Stationmaster’s Wife, etc.
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