For those of you who helped Failure to Launch and The Shaggy Dog become, respectively, the number one and number two grossing films of the week, thanks for your dedicated efforts in the fight to make the United States of America the dumbest fucking country on earth. When you decided to go to either of these movies, did you look through the paper and weigh your options? Did you decide that, yes, "Failure to Launch" and/or "The Shaggy Dog" truly rises to the top amid the sea of cinematic possibilities available in the area this week? If you went to one of these two movies, did you enjoy it? Why did you enjoy it? I'd like to know. Honestly. I don't understand you very well. Help me understand. We need to reach some common ground, average American moviegoer, because right now I feel like I hate you. I wish you ill. I don't like feeling that way. I don't want to feel ill will and hatred. I'm really a positive guy, believe it or not. There is much in life I hate, but I am glad to be alive. Are you glad to be alive? If you are, you're sure sending mixed messages. Was your ticket purchase at the multiplex a cry for help? Have you hit rock bottom? Do you no longer care how you spend your time? Do you just wander around, dazed, spending money where you're told? Do you have a hard time distinguishing between information and advertising? Have you ever sought out anything on your own? Do you hate yourself? Is art something that is other people's business? Is the coddling, patronizing familiar your preferred way of life? Are you devoid of a brain, a heart, a penis, and/or a vagina? If I smashed your head open with a baseball bat, what would come out? Straw?
All is not lost. I've seen some great, great things in the last three weeks, and some good things, too. I've seen two of the best films I've ever seen, I Fidanzati and Under the Roofs of Paris.
"I Fidanzati" (Ermanno Olmi) is fresher than every rotting corpse stinking up the multiplex now and forever. It takes advantage of the possibilities of film editing in ways that are continually ignored by the plodding televisionisms or graceless displays of thoughtless technique of most mainstream movies. This film is structure, content, form, and the thoughtful connection of achronological images causing each viewer to construct his/her own narrative. It's so instinctively right. It isn't a waste of labor and energy.
"Under the Roofs of Paris" (Rene Clair) is one of the first of that group of films, mostly clumsy, that marked the transition from silence to sound. It isn't clumsy. It's graceful, beautiful, funny, sad, and other adjectives that have been drained of their meaning by being thrown around on undeserving work. Its studio-built replicas of Paris streets create a dreamy, melancholy atmosphere in which the city is a continuous, living organism. It is a musical, in that the music, like the city, is also a continuous, living organism, passing from background score to a hummed tune on the female lead's lips to songs sung by the actors to a phonograph playing in a bar, and on and on. The camera glides gracefully over the fake city, and then becomes completely still. Dialogue is accentuated, then dropped out completely, overtaken by the music, then brought back again. We observe characters through windows and glass doors, then up close, then the camera retreats again. And the guy doesn't get the girl in the end, unless he does.
Two recent films seen on the big screen excited me, obviously because I thought they were good, but also because they seemed to me a clearer picture of the America we actually live in than the billboard/infomercial/catalogue-photo America of shit like almost every mainstream American film, "independent" or Hollywood. If you see them, and still prefer "Failure to Launch" or "Star Wars" or "Crash" or "Traffic" or any other diverting lie, we may not live in the same country. In all honesty, I haven't seen "Failure to Launch" or "Crash," so I'm mostly talking about their trailers and how they've been marketed and/or reviewed, but, when it comes to Hollywood filmmaking, what's the difference? Also, I'm talking about Academy Award "Crash," not the great David Cronenberg "Crash." Anyway, the two American films about the America we actually live in are Tommy Lee Jones' The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and Michel Gondry's Dave Chappelle's Block Party.
Coming soon to Can-Smashing Robot: A tale of small-town life that turned into a tale of American life in general, featuring Dave Chappelle, $50 million, Americans' reactions to both, Devolution, freedom from choice, how city Americans are just as lazy, complacent, and curiousity-free as their small town counterparts, and is it just me or does our country keep getting batshit-fucking crazier and crazier and stupider and stupider? Also, money is bullshit! Thank god you can trade it in for art.
1 comment:
I saw both of those films in the last couple of weeks, and when I think of them together it makes me realize how incredibly huge the "American experience" is. It also makes me realize how unrealistic the usual representation of that experience is.
The great thing about Dave Chapelle is that he conveys two ideas at once: there is no real reason we shouldn't all get along, and there are thousands of reasons why we don't all get along. He manages to be optimistic and realistic at once, and this shines through even in a mediocre concert documentary. I left the theater smiling.
Tommy Lee Jones' movie is good. I haven't thought about it enough to express any reasons why, but I left the theater feeling not-bullshitted.
p.s. I do know that there may have been some bullshitting.
p.p.s. my verification word was "jewmhk." Sounds like Jewish Martin Huther King.
Post a Comment