August 2010
2 posts
“THE VERY SUBSTANCE OF THE AMBITIOUS IS MERELY THE SHADOW OF A DREAM.”
– Some Dead Englishman
Inception (2010)
Big Important Movie. Whoop whoop. Was it good? Ok yeah it was pretty entertaining. The rotating hallway – they built that? what? – was pretty great. And the linkage between the different levels of dream – the car is in freefall so the elevator is weightless – are bizarrely satisfying. (Why are simple cause and effect so pleasurable to see on screen? The marble hits the dish and the angry...
December 2009
2 posts
“CAPITALISM IS WHAT PEOPLE DO IF YOU LEAVE THEM ALONE.”
– Kenneth Minogue
September 2009
4 posts
“THE HUMAN SOUL NEEDS ACTUAL BEAUTY MORE THAN BREAD.”
– D.H. Lawrence
Hot Blood (1956)
A slight premise - arranged marriage produces spontaneous love – that, in the hands of skilled professionals, bears more passion, heart and pump-thumping red-meat vitality than many other more complicated, less predictable romances of the star-crossed sort. It’s all set in a downtown gypsy camp where semi-modern Romani shuck the suits and skirts that walk into their fortuneteller storefront....
“SOMETIMES YOU JUST HAVE TO PEE IN THE SINK.”
– Charles Bukowski
The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
Screenhogging giants (Sterling Hayden leads) reach for greatness and fail, miserably and totally, for want of common sense. It’s a gas to watch, so long as you get off on suffering. The film – a robbery picture, where the theft comes off but the crooks are burned – is a downward sloping work from the very start. “Every man works for his vice” a bookie drunk observes early on. True indeed –...
July 2009
2 posts
Keanu Reeves at This Recording →
Radio Days Review at This Recording →
June 2009
6 posts
“ANYONE WHO HAS DECLARED SOMEONE ELSE TO BE AN IDIOT, A BAD APPLE, IS ANNOYED...”
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Transformers: ROTF (2009)
And so we come to Michael Bay. The artist. If anyone wants to deny him that title, well, they can go screw. His movies are unique, they are his. All media fields - television, film, games - have tried to steal his style, his flash, his self. Rarely to any effect. Michael Bay is inimitable. The only other director of the past decade to have exerted as much influence on the collective...
“NOTHING IS MORE STERILE OR LAMENTABLE THAN THE MAN CONTENT TO LIVE WITHIN...”
– Harold Pinter
The Hit (1984)
The Hit, shot the year I was born (’84), plays fresh, smart and lean. An Eric Clapton opening riff sets the date, as do the Warriors-style graffiti credits, but the rest of the film is free from period vestiges. It’s one of those films where the parts are a little bit more than the whole, but the parts are entertaining enough to excuse the lack of gestalt. The film is a philosophical...
“I FANTASIZE ABOUT GOING BACK TO HIGH SCHOOL. I WOULD SHINE.”
– Spalding Gray
Gray's Anatomy (1996)
Spalding Gray talks to the camera (to himself) for an hour and half while being wheeled through a series of themed sets. The background noise is directed by Stephen Soderbergh, but the performance (and the film) is all Gray. He delivers a continuous monologue. He wrote it. It’s good. Any actor will tell you: that’s a rare thing. Good Monologues are stories that would fall flat...
May 2009
7 posts
Terminator Salvation Review at This Recording →
“NO ONE IS OUT TO GET YOU. IT’S JUST THAT … PEOPLE ARE MONKEYS.”
– by Brakhage
The Photography of Stan Brakhage
Narrative filmmakers could learn something from Stan Brakhage; they could learn to be brave. The man filmed his interests, not his comforts. He and Herzog would have been great friends. They both have stones in their guts. Here are a few Brakhage films.
Mothlight.
Moth wings glued onto a film strip, one wing to each frame. Brakhage killed and winged about 2,100 moths for this (the film...
“ALMOST ALL OF THIS COMES OUT OF MY FEELING THAT THE HUMAN FUTURE IS BRIGHT.”
– Gene the Dancing King
Star Trek (2009)
A little boy’s technobabble wet dream recorded at $1 million/minute. This new Trek is everything earlier Trek denied it was but secretly desired to be: fast, sexy, and popular. This film will make money, lots of money, and some basement dwelling fans of the television series may balk, very loudly and very publicly, at the ballooning box office. ”This isn’t Star Trek,” they may say, “this is...
“I GOT NASTY HABITS; I TAKE TEA AT THREE.”
– Mick Jagger
Performance (1970)
A scabby little film from the dead end of the sixties - all you needed to make a picture then were a half-dead rocker and an interest in psychedelics (these days you need a past-its-prime comic book and an uncle at Warner Bros.). The film was shot and finished in 1968 but not released till ’70. The studio thought they were getting their own little A Hard Day’s Night starring the Stones;...
April 2009
18 posts
“FAITH, LIKE A JACKAL, FEEDS AMONG THE TOMBS.”
– The Other Melville
Léon Morin, prêtre (1961)
Big-time machismo directors always shoot one “girl’s movie” - a picture with a lady in the lead, ostensibly about women’s experience of the world. It’s some kind of right of passage. I understand the urge to make these, but god I wish they wouldn’t. Sometimes the pictures touch down fine, like Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, but more often they land strange and sick from...
“HE WHO DESPAIRS OF THE HUMAN CONDITION IS A COWARD. HE WHO HAS HOPE FOR IT IS A...”
– A Thin French Man
The Human Condition (1959 - 1961)
We should clear something up: no one with a sense of humor talks about “the human condition.” It’s too much of a drag. “A man is capable of the greatest ills and the greatest affections; he is torn between his limitless mind and his enfeebled body; he strives for life but sustains himself on death.” Well, sure. Of course. But: men also laugh when people get kicked in the nuts. They...
“I CAN’T REALLY DEFINE WHAT I BRING TO FILMS AS A WOMAN.”
– Lynne Ramsay
Gasman (1997)
A sensitive little Mallick movie that ditches the dialect voiceover in favor of a more rigid dramatic structure. I do love Mallick, Texas-sized target though he is, but it’s refreshing to see a filmmaker who mimics the man’s internal, expressive camera style while leaving behind the philosophy student v.o. ramblings. This short is located on the same Cinema16 dvd that Wasp was contained on, and...
“MOVIES NEVER SHUT UP.”
– Jean Baudrillard
Rififi (1955)
Riffi is a heist movie with one great, prolonged scene of pilfering that will send most cinema nuts into a spring chicken heat. It’s a safe cracking scene, the sort of trite, well-worn Hollywood cliche that continues, well past its expiration date, to tool around the movie palaces. No one has the heart to tell it to go home. But the theft in Rififi, perhaps because the film is old and strikes...
“ONLY CONNECT! THAT WAS THE WHOLE OF HER SERMON.”
– E. M. Forster
Howards End (1992)
Howards End is a Merchant Ivory movie. I liked it. Complain if you want. I like Merchant Ivory movies. Not all films of Quality are horrible, and this is one that rises above. Based on E. M. Forster’s novel, the film is one unending lark. The filmmakers just couldn’t spend enough time on set. Every scene is dressed half to death with period appropriate bangles and baubles laid out...
“WOMEN OFTEN POSTPONE THEIR LIVES.”
– Jane Campion
Sweetie (1989)
Sweetie is Jane Campion’s first feature. It reminded me a lot of the Coen Bros’ Raising Arizona. Both films share a fascination with non-traditional, self-consuming families and both films adhere to the shifting, sliding ideology of ground-level budgets: never let ‘em know you’re broke. There aren’t many crazy camera moves, but each static shot is loved like a ginger baby. Lighting is...
“THE ARTWORK IS ABOUT THE ARTWORK.”
– Steve McQueen
Hunger (2008)
Hunger is mostly technique and provocation, but I would not discourage you from seeing it. I walked out after the film telling my friends that “I might hate it.” The more time I place between myself and the film, the more certain I am that that sentiment was correct. “Hate” is what I feel for this film. But at least that’s a reaction; a much more potent, valuable one than ambivalence. Steve...
“ANY FOOL CAN CRITICIZE, CONDEMN AND COMPLAIN AND MOST FOOLS DO.”
– Ben Franklin
Wasp (2003)
A harsh one today. Wasp is a British short film found on the Cinema16: Eurpoean Film sampler dvd. Many people, apparently, find this film radiant and overwhelming in its compassionate observation of a welfare mom and her Raggedy Anne litter. The filmmakers, hearing that, would probably laugh along with Carroll’s Walrus: audiences, like oysters, were made to be shucked. The film is no more...
“MOVIES SAVED AMERICA.”
– Nikita Mikhalkov
12 (2007)
12 is, of course, an adaptation of the play Twelve Angry Men, first brought to screen by Sydney Lumet in 1957 (Henry Fonda as the lead). This one was adapted by the Russian writer/director Nikita Mikhalkov (also shamelessly playing the film’s key role), and he lenses the picture in Russian, with Russians, in Russia. Leaving the theater after the show, I overheard one bespectacled young...
March 2009
14 posts
“I’M BY NATURE AN ANARCHIST.”
– Lina Wertmüller
Swept Away … by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea...
Swept Away… does not strike me as so misogynistic and lady hating as some seem to believe it. After all, it’s the woman of the film who finds herself able to adapt, change, and grow in response to a shifting environment, while the man remains prideful, unhappy, and alone, even while embraced in the arms of his hard won female prize. If anything, the film seems down on the hairier sex, accusing...
“YOUR END OF NOTHING IS NOTHING.”
– Nick Garcos
Two by Jules Dassin
Thieves’ Highway (1949) spends 85 minutes screwing up its courage to commit an act of old testament violence - hands hacked off for feet - but chickens out at the critical moment. Whether out of deference to the production code or to the filmmakers’ weak stomachs, the axe that Richard Conte holds above Lee J. Cobb’s shattered hands never finds its way to the poor man’s...
“I DON’T HAVE A MORAL PLAN. I’M A CANADIAN.”
– David Cronenberg
The Dead Zone (1983)
Hollywood’s myths are democratic. That’s why they sell. Every paid-for-a-ticket butt in every cheap-o seat must (must!) be able to imagine itself up on the silvered screen, tending to the needs of the masses. There’s something wonderful in this accessibility, that all our heroes are average, meek Joes who, through circumstance and will, have managed to ascend to the clouds...
“DEAR LORD, PLEASE DON’T LET ME FUCK UP.”
– Alan Shepard
The Right Stuff (1983)
Space travel was interesting once. In the 60s. Other things were interesting back then too: presidential reverence; war protests; brand names. Sometime after Armstrong took his jaunt, it all vanished. NASA became a bureaucracy (it always had been, but a snazzy bureaucracy), and “spaceman” the profession of crew cut geekbots. The heroes were in the past; the heroes had grown...
“ACTUAL VIOLENCE HAS NO ATTRACTION FOR ME AT ALL.”
– Jane Campion