Some ideas about a friend's post

My friend Professor Romance wrote a post about disparities in appreciation between art and science. Read it before you read this. I am greatly sympathetic to this post, but I am also coming at it from the perspective of a guy who has a tremendous amount of interest in art and some pretty serious deficiencies in math and science. I'll deal with that later, but first I want to tackle his frustration at social situations in which attempted conversation about science or math brands one as a nerd or a bore and conversation about music, movies, etc. gets everyone talking and offering opinions. Although I would have very little to contribute to a conversation about science or math, I feel more at home with his frustration than I do with a lot of people who share my interests. I think Prof. Romance is actually fortunate, in that people who don't know much about science and math will refrain from spouting off a lot of uninformed opinions, while art gets confused with entertainment and hipster lifestyle accessories. People who haven't seen a film predating their birthdate will consider themselves experts on cinema, while someone will spout off on music or literature simply because they have the right haircut and know a couple of people's names. Art (or the conflation of silly entertainment as art) is sexier than mathematics. Rock and roll leads to a lot more naked blondes and whiskey than entymology. That's just the way it is. However, real discussion about art and its aesthetics is just as absent from my life as discussion about science is from yours. When I go to a party, people will talk a lot about "Kill Bill" or the Coen Brothers, but finding someone with something to say about Robert Bresson, John Cassavetes, or Andrei Tarkovsky, to pick just three of the filmmakers whose work has (no shit) changed my life is like pulling teeth from my ass. When I do find someone who can talk about this stuff, he or she is usually a pretentious cocksucker who filters the work through some kind of fashionable sociological construct, rather than dealing with what the films are: their form, content, and structure. When I want to discuss this work, I have to pick up a book by one of the handful of critics who actually give a shit about it, and have an internal debate with myself. Most people don't give a shit about the artists I like. This does not make me feel "cool," hip or happy. Mostly, it makes me frustrated and angry. I imagine you feel the same way about science, math, and Spinoza. While "art" may be talked about more than science, it is usually because art is so easily confused with consumption, and it is fashionable as consumption. People are mostly just trying to get laid, and a lot of art talk is merely code for "I'm not a date rapist or a frat boy drunk on Coors." If science had more of an influence on haircuts, if math came in collectible 7" sleeves, people would spout off a lot more shit about it.
To move on to my lack of interest in science and math, it is not something I'm particularly proud of, though I don't feel like my lack of interest has anything to do with cowardice. Unfortunately, my science and math teachers in high school and college were unbelievably awful, and my English, history, and music teachers were mostly wonderful. This lopsided education, combined with my natural interest in the arts and my struggles with science and math (always difficult subjects for me), mostly dampened my interest in science and math while expanding my love of art. Whenever I learned a science fact or figured out some mathematical problem, I felt a real sense of wonder and accomplishment (this is still the case). However, this sense of wonder and/or accomplishment pales in comparison to what I get from a favorite piece of music, a film, a painting, a photograph, or a short story. Art does something to me I can't put into words. It gives me most of what I get out of bed for. Life is ridiculously short. My interest in the arts is a bit extreme, but it's something I need in my life, otherwise I'm incredibly unhappy. If I go two days without listening to music, it's very hard for me to function. I find life without music, literature, or movies almost unbearable. This all sounds melodramatic, and maybe it is (in practice, it's more matter-of-fact than melodramatic), but it's true. If I wanted to learn more about math and science, I would have to cut back on the other stuff, and I'm just not willing to do that. However, I'm still young. I've changed gradually and added interests, and science just might be one of them.
Finally, Prof. Romance, your frustration ("What is wrong with these dudes? Why don't they see what I see in math or science?") seems to me a frustration that every thoughtful person shares, namely "Why don't more people see things the way I do?" Some of my friends share my interests and some of them don't, but what unites them all, I think, is a strong sense of humor and a dissatisfaction with the complacent apathy of everyday life. All of us give a shit about something we don't "have" to give a shit about, and that is what makes us all worth knowing. Most of the people in my hometown don't have any passions or interests at all, including my father, and that scares the shit out of me more than anything.

P.S. Be glad you have a deep interest in something that frightens dilletantes. It's a blessing, not a curse.

No One Wants to Play with Me

A rare Werner Herzog short from the late sixties.

Yes!

Harold Ramis, I like what you have to say.

Paste-eating philistines

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.

Self-Indulgent Ramble Series, Essay 1: The Canon

It’s a constant source of irritation to me that most people, especially wonderful people who are a lot smarter than me, never see the films I love the most. Additionally, a lot of these smart people think movies are either irrelevant or dead. The mass audience seems to think of movies as a pleasant, forgettable diversion. They also seem to think there is no difference between seeing something on video and seeing it on the big screen, that art is a boring chore, and that subject matter or plot dictates a film’s interest to an audience. It is also a source of irritation that more people, even casual filmgoers, don’t know who is directing the film they are watching and how that film fits into the director’s body of work. This probably makes me sound like an elitist prick, but most people know who performed the music they listen to, who wrote the books they read, and who painted the painting they’re staring at on the gallery wall. Knowing who is responsible for the art you respond to helps you make better choices and avoid a lot of dogshit. Somehow, a lot of people who make informed choices about the other art and entertainment in their lives approach film from such childish perspectives: “I like boxing, so I’m going to see ‘Million Dollar Baby.’ I’m interested in the Holocaust, so I’m going to see ‘Schindler’s List.’ I like dinosaurs, so I’m going to see ‘Jurassic Park.’” That is how children pick their entertainment. Do you listen to James Brown because of an abiding interest in hot pants? Did you buy The Magnetic Fields’ “69 Love Songs” because you were a big fan of love? Do you see stand-up comics because of an intense curiosity in the way people speak into microphones? With the exception of the hot pants question, I hope the answer is no. We all love hot pants, but I wish we could all agree that art is good or bad because of how it does its thing, not what its thing is. Somehow, movies are treated like disposable whores. I believe film is an art form equal to any other (though music is probably the best), but not many people see the films that justify my claims. So, I’m starting this series by offering up a partial canon of my favorite directors and examples of their body of work. I’m generally more excited to see a bad film by a director I love than a good film by a jobber because I’m interested in their body of work as a whole, but I’m restricting my examples to a handful of great films per director. If this list inspires anyone to see any of these films, I’ll be happy. I’ll be even happier if you like them. Some of them are immediately accessible, while others take a lot of work, but I think all of them contain enough mystery to warrant multiple viewings. If possible, see them on a big screen. No fat chicks. Just seeing if you’re still paying attention. Fat chicks are also welcome.

Dr. Mystery’s Canon of Cinematic Gold

John Cassavetes: almost everything, but particularly Shadows, Faces, A Woman Under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and Love Streams

Charles Burnett: To Sleep With Anger

Howard Hawks: His Girl Friday, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo, Hatari!

Robert Bresson: Diary of a Country Priest, A Man Escaped, Au Hasard Balthazar, The Devil Probably, L’Argent

Charlie Chaplin: City Lights, Monsieur Verdoux, A King in New York, One A.M.

Barbara Loden: Wanda

Buster Keaton: most of the silent shorts

Mike Leigh: Bleak Moments, Meantime, High Hopes, Life is Sweet, Naked

Marx Brothers: Animal Crackers, Horse Feathers, Duck Soup

Preston Sturges: The Palm Beach Story, Sullivan’s Travels, The Lady Eve

Roberto Rossellini: Stromboli, Voyage in Italy, The Flowers of St. Francis

Vittorio De Sica: The Bicycle Thief, Umberto D

Rainer Werner Fassbinder: The American Soldier, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Lola, Berlin Alexanderplatz

Tom Noonan: What Happened Was, The Wife

Nicholas Ray: In a Lonely Place, Johnny Guitar, Rebel Without a Cause, Bitter Victory, They Live By Night

Werner Herzog: Fata Morgana, Aguirre: The Wrath of God, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Stroszek, Even Dwarfs Started Small

Jacques Tati: Playtime, Mon Oncle, M. Hulot’s Holiday

Yasujiro Ozu: Tokyo Story, Late Spring, Floating Weeds

Ingmar Bergman: Persona, Cries and Whispers, Scenes from a Marriage, Fanny and Alexander

David Cronenberg: Rabid, The Fly, Dead Ringers, Crash, A History of Violence

Elaine May: Mikey and Nicky, The Heartbreak Kid, A New Leaf

Jim Jarmusch: Stranger than Paradise, Mystery Train, Dead Man, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

Aki Kaurismaki: Ariel, The Man Without a Past

Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm

Andrei Tarkovsky: Stalker, The Sacrifice, Solaris

Gus Van Sant: Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, Gerry, Elephant, Last Days

Carl Dreyer: Ordet, Gertrud, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Parson’s Widow

George Romero: Night of the Living Dead, Martin, The Crazies, Dawn of the Dead

Harmony Korine: Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy

Frank Capra: It’s a Wonderful Life

Edward Yang: Yi Yi

Wong Kar-Wai: Chungking Express, Happy Together, In the Mood for Love, 2046

Monte Hellman: The Shooting, Ride in the Whirlwind, Two-Lane Blacktop, Cockfighter

Wim Wenders: Kings of the Road, Paris Texas, Wings of Desire

Robert Altman: McCabe and Mrs. Miller, California Split, The Long Goodbye, 3 Women, Short Cuts

Wes Anderson: Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

Jafar Panahi: The Circle, Crimson Gold

Abbas Kiarostami: Close-Up, Life and Nothing More, Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us, Ten

Kenji Mizoguchi: Ugetsu, Sansho the Bailiff

Takeshi Kitano: Fireworks, Zatoichi, Sonatine

Sam Peckinpah: Ride the High Country, The Wild Bunch, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

Su Friedrich: Sink or Swim, The Rules of the Road

Chris Smith: American Job, American Movie

Shirley Clarke: Portrait of Jason

Dennis Hopper: Out of the Blue

Luis Bunuel: Viridiana, Belle de Jour, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Phantom of Liberty

Lionel Rogosin: On the Bowery

Jean Renoir: Grand Illusion, The Rules of the Game, Picnic on the Grass

Terry Zwigoff: Louie Bluie, Crumb, Ghost World, Bad Santa

Todd Haynes: Safe, Superstar: The Life of Karen Carpenter, Far from Heaven

Erich Von Stroheim: Greed, Foolish Wives

F.W. Murnau: Nosferatu, Sunrise, The Last Laugh

Lars Von Trier: The Kingdom, Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, The Idiots, Dogville

Paul Thomas Anderson: Punch-Drunk Love

Jean Vigo: L’Atalante, Zero for Conduct

Claude Chabrol: Le Boucher, Les Bonnes Femmes, La Ceremonie

Francois Truffaut: Stolen Kisses, Shoot the Piano Player, The 400 Blows

Jean-Luc Godard: Breathless, Band of Outsiders, Contempt, Weekend, Passion

David Lynch: Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive

Martin Scorsese: Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, The King of Comedy, After Hours

Hou Hsiao-Hsien: The Puppetmaster, Goodbye South Goodbye

Ermanno Olmi: Il Posto, I Fidanzati

Alan Clarke: Scum, Made in Britain, The Firm, Elephant, Rita Sue and Bob Too

Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne: La Promesse, Rosetta, The Son

Steve Buscemi: Trees Lounge, Animal Factory

I’m going to stop here. There are many, many others.

Movement, part 2

Seeing Richard Pryor: Live in Concert (Jeff Margolis) last week, it pained me to think about how often he was wasted in bad films and how his MS seemed to be some kind of vengeful retribution inflicted by insulted gods wanting to punish an artist whose comedy relied, almost exclusively, on facial expressions, body language, mimicry, anthropomorphization, and constant movement. Mostly, though, I laughed and watched a great artist at work. Pryor's stand-up comedy depended on Pryor's performance and delivery. If one were to transcribe his comedy and read it, it might produce a few smiles or nods of recognition, but most of it would lay dead on the page. Pryor's jokes are funny because of his delivery, not what is being delivered. He is a performer, in the best sense of the word, scrunching his body into the shape of a question mark and hopping from side to side as he talks about getting beaten by his father, lying on the floor in a ball and punching himself in the chest as he tells the story of his first heart attack, turning himself into an old woman, a lying little kid, Muhammad Ali, a white man, a pet monkey who likes to fuck people in the ear, a German sheperd, the engine of a car, and on and on. Pryor the artist is a living pinball, constantly in motion, banking off the multiplicity of human experience. Like all the artists I admire, he is simultaneously tough and compassionate, loving people while never letting them off the hook, and he never exempts himself from his work. He's not making judgments from on high and passing them down to an audience, he is discovering things about himself while performing and forcing the audience into self-discoveries as well. I would rank him, as a stand-up, right up there with lots of artists I admire in his wildly exciting understanding of patterns of speech and behavior and how body language and movement can reveal hidden mental states, including John Cassavetes, Mike Leigh, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, Tom Noonan, Charles Burnett, Bill Hicks, Lenny Bruce, Elaine May, Howard Hawks, Stanley Elkin, Barry Hannah, etc. If I'm making this sound too lofty, rest assured it is also funny as shit.

Movement and discomfort in performance

I've already written about the widespread behavioral tic of two men leaving an empty seat in between them in a movie theater. I would also like to bring up something that happened at the screening of Brokeback Mountain I attended. During the scene in which Michelle Willams' character sees the characters played by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal kissing, inadvertently discovering that her husband is having a homosexual affair, the audience, largely comprised of middle-aged straight couples, laughed heartily, though the scene is hardly played for laughs and I doubt much laughter would have ensued if the kiss was the product of a heterosexual affair. In the lobby, after the movie ended, most of these couples were talking about how much they enjoyed the film. So why did they laugh? They laughed because they were uncomfortable watching two men kiss, and they didn't know what else to do. Judging solely from appearances and overheard conversations (I could be way off), the audience members were largely middle and upper-middle class, middle-aged, white Americans with mainstream, conventional taste and manners. These are people who are not used to being uncomfortable. Though I share a lot of sociologic background with this audience, I am almost never comfortable. If I were forced to tally a percentage of my social discomfort, I would probably find that roughly 86% of my social encounters in life have been uncomfortable, painful, and/or awkward. Since so much of my life is socially uncomfortable, I am very receptive to art that thrives on making its audience uncomfortable, as long as this is achieved without condescension or contrivance. When comfort zones are nowhere to be found, the audience is forced to participate, to act, to work toward new ways of understanding life, to think. This can, at its best, lead to personal growth. As much as I enjoyed "Brokeback Mountain," and I enjoyed it a great deal, it is a fairly conventional romantic western, aside from the novelty of a homosexual love story in a mainstream film. I don't consider it an uncomfortable film. It was a skillful, old-fashioned crowd-pleaser. However, a lot of the audience members have probably never seen two men kiss onscreen before. As much as their laughter bothered me, it also made me feel like these people were working through their discomfort, trying to get past it. Maybe next time, it won't make them so uncomfortable. They won't need to laugh. The fact that they were even there, and that they loved the movie, is a hopeful sign. If two guys kissing is no big deal, what else is no big deal? My friends, a whole lot of shit is no big fucking deal. We seem so afraid of our own movements and behaviors, so constricted and locked into our patterns, so afraid to be human, afraid of our own existence, embarrassed by it. A couple of movies I've seen in the last couple of months have made me think about the laughter in the theater, and the value of discomfort and its effect on physical movement. The first is Mike Leigh's first film, from 1971, Bleak Moments. If you read most critics, they'll tell you that Leigh is in the long tradition of British "kitchen-sink realists" and that his films are predominantly overtly leftist political tracts about the economic effects of the British class system. This misreading of his work is epidemic. Someone should tell this legion of megabores to watch his film with their eyes, not their mouths. Though many of his films are grounded in the everyday and bear many resemblances to realism, kitchen-sink or otherwise, and a lot of his characters talk about their economic situation, Leigh's films are about behavior, performance, interaction, movement, discovery, pattern disruption, connection, and disconnection, not polemics or cinema verite. He wants to find things, not tell you what he already knows or merely observe life. His filmmaking methods tell you that much. Leigh picks a group of actors. He tells each actor to create a character. He works with them throughout this process. When the characters are created, he writes a script using the characters created by the acting troupe. This has been the case for all his films, with the partial exception of his two period pieces ("Vera Drake" and "Topsy-Turvy") when the story ideas came first. "Bleak Moments" is one of his funniest films, but also one of the toughest to watch. Every character in this film is profoundly uncomfortable, and their interactions make the audience just as uncomfortable. They are pathologically shy, inarticulate, embarrassed, withdrawn, afraid, closed-off. Anne Raitt (it's a shame she hasn't appeared in many films--her performance here is one of the most quietly memorable I've had the pleasure to see), as Sylvia, finally makes tentative movements away from social paralysis, and it's simultaneously funny and sad to see her character, a passionate, sharply funny, intelligent but painfully shy woman stuck in a life she's too wonderful for, rebel against the constraints of her own physical space. Every performance in this film is a tiny masterpiece of dis-ease, whole planets of emotion revealed in tiny movements of the lips, eyes, and fingers.
Movement plays a huge part in the other film I want to talk about, "Richard Pryor: Live in Concert," but I'm getting sleepy, so I'll write about that one tomorrow.

Self-promotion

I got a short thing about my favorite movies of the year published in the online Australian movie magazine, Senses of Cinema. Read it here, if you feel like it and have nothing else to do.

Dumb article written by dumbos about dumbshits

This is one of the dumbest things I've ever read. I don't have time to go over it, but pretty much every sentence is just about the dumbest thing ever. A few of the dumbest moments:

"From biopics to message films, audiences and creators alike seem to be drawn to 'reality'-based movies - both in content and technique, say those who teach, study, analyze, and criticize the film industry."

First of all, if biopics and message movies are your idea of "reality" (whatever the shit that is), you don't live on Earth. Secondly, if you were actually studying, analyzing, teaching, and/or criticizing films instead of the "film industry," well, you would be on the right track, but probably still making inane, irrelevant comments to the AP. We need a Vietnam War equivalent in academia, thin out some irrelevant, irrelevant motherfuckers quick.

"To some, Oscar night - and the movies it celebrates - has become a Rorschach test for a self-absorbed industry out of touch with mainstream tastes. Other culture watchers, though, insist that the cinematic tribute reflects, and even guides, America's collective direction and values."

Honestly, people like watching stars in purty dresses, and media hoopla tends to draw crowds. That's all it is. It can't be out of touch with mainstream tastes when nothing is more middlebrow and mainstream, and it sure as hell doesn't reflect and guide our collective direction and values. Thanks for inventing a fake story and commenting on it, "film industry" experts. Well, goodnight, everybody. I'm going to go back to my critique of the "music industry" now. Is it out of touch with Joe Schmoe, or does it guide, shape, and reflect his direction and values? What about whacking off? I study that, too. Listen to this vexing proposition. Is masturbation only for the hoity-toity, or is it also enjoyed by the hoi polloi?

Slow declines

I was looking at some stills from "Raging Bull" on a DVD-reviewing website tonight, and was struck by the difference in intensity in Robert De Niro's eyes then, and now. The guy's obviously been phoning it in for years now, and who can blame him? I guess everybody gets tired of their day job eventually, no matter how fulfilling. The only difference is that people aren't cumming in their shorts because we're giving them lackluster results. If we phone it in at work, we get yelled at. If De Niro phones it in, some 29-year-old director has multiple orgasms because a legend is standing next to him. I wish he would just retire and get it over with. But what else would he do? Maybe he doesn't want to retire, and who am I to tell him he should? He doesn't owe us anything. We're lucky to have what he's given us. It's just that I'd rather see him give lousy performances than the zombified mediocrity he's attached himself to for most of the last ten years, give or take a couple of brief revivifications. Why are these old Hollywood guys so afraid of giving up their star salaries to actually do some fucking acting in good films? They're already rich. Why not take that pay cut and give some real acting a whirl again? If I liked sports, it would probably be like watching Michael Jordan's professional baseball attempts or George Foreman's last few fights. Except I don't like sports. I like movies, and most audience members seem content to watch our best athletes play their B-game.

The middle seat

I was at the Dobie Theater on Monday, watching Jia Zhangke's The World (which is one of the most cinematically satisfying films, in its use of visual space and the movement of the actors and the camera through this space, I've seen in a long time) when I saw another example of the Middle Seat Maneuver. I see this all the time, but I was surprised to see it at a screening of a 2 1/2-hour Chinese art film. The Middle Seat Maneuver, otherwise known as the I'm Not Gay, occurs when two men attend a film screening together but leave an empty seat between them to loudly signify their heterosexuality (or possibly their closeted, self-hating homosexuality). I don't understand this move. If two men go to a movie together and sit next to each other, I don't jump to any sexual conclusions, and I imagine most other people don't, either. If, however, two men perform the Middle Seat Maneuver, I immediately assume one of three things about at least one of the men: 1) Raging homophobe. 2) Horribly insecure man. 3) Closeted homosexual. Come on, guys. The Middle Seat Maneuver arouses exactly the kind of suspicion you're so desperately trying to avoid. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt, though. Maybe these guys are not trying to advertise their pussy-nailing abilities to a theater full of strangers. Maybe they're worried about ruining their friendship. Maybe they're such passionate cinephiles that, when touched deeply by a film, their hearts erupt with feeling and they start to make out. This would, of course, damage their friendship. They can't afford to take that chance. Their friendship is too meaningful, too important. In this day and age, when corporate greed, terrorism, warfare, and the 311/Creed altercation are part and parcel of daily life, this devotion to a lasting friendship between two straight men must be congratulated and saluted.

I have nine readers, not five readers! Oh, joy!

Don't worry. I'm working on the shit I promised. It's taking awhile. You may see it next month. If not, I got fuckin' sandwiches to eat, bitch.

Intro to the Self-Indulgent Ramble series

I’m going to take a break from writing about individual films and spend some time attempting to understand my own interest in film. The plan is to write several sprawling posts about how and why I became obsessed with movies, formative experiences that may have led to that interest, favorite movies and why I value them, disliked films and why I dislike them, the pros and cons of film criticism, why virtually all mainstream print and television film criticism is awful, why I value certain critics’ work, how other art forms and my interest in them relate to film and my interest in it, why (usually) bio-pics are pieces of excrement, why the gently patronizing and culturally pervasive influence of middlebrow approaches to criticism (such as NPR, The New York Times, etc.) destroys thought and ignores the body and the mind, how my personal biases may cause me to overrate and underrate certain films, why I love reading and writing criticism but hate debating the merits or lack thereof of artistic works verbally, why I write Film-Watching Robot and who I think it’s for, and why I’m such a big pussy who spends hours watching movies every week but has no interest or ambition in making one of my own. Let’s get this rodeo started. First, I’m either going to tackle why I hate bio-pics or moments from my childhood that may have affected my interest in film. I’m not sure which one would make a better start. Maybe all five of my readers have an opinion.

Daryl Hall kicked me and stole my taco while John Oates pointed and laughed

The last couple of weeks' viewing material that wasn't just an escapist retreat from the crushing disappointments of my current financial situation:
I'm Going Home (Manoel de Oliveira) 83 minutes of detail and experience, zero minutes of melodramatic bullshit.
No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (Martin Scorsese) Some of the talking-head interview footage is a useless fetishization of nostalgia, but Dylan's own words and the archival footage put the attention where it belongs: the songs, the creative process, the irrelevance of fame, and the humanization of Dylan the man.
The Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach) A comedy that's funny. Some flaws, but who wants to see a perfect movie? Not me.
Keane (Lodge Kerrigan) This is already gone from theaters after a ridiculously brief run, but don't worry. You still have three hundred more chances to see "The Legend of Zorro" and the eight million bio-pics that infest theaters every Oscar season. I think biographies of famous people are replacing the disabled and terminally ill as actor's choice of Oscar-bait. You want to learn something about Johnny Cash? Listen to his fucking records. That will tell you all you need to know. God, those movies are cinematic dogturds.

The erotic reawakening of Porkchop Mountain's younger brother Purvis, or how Stella got her lube back

This week, I liked Top Hat (Mark Sandrich) a hell of a lot, but I've got nothing of interest to say about it, so I'll move on.
I don't have much to say about Platform (Jia Zhang Ke), either, mostly because I don't think I fully understood it, either intellectually or emotionally, but I think it's worth seeing so I'll give it a shot. It's about a Maoist theater troupe in a small town in China, living in the anachronistic culture freeze of Maoist Communism c. 1980. Western influences and capitalistic compromises are slowly creeping in, but the town looks like postwar Italy, the kids are just starting to wear bell bottom jeans, and they regularly attend film screenings of what seem to be American and Indian escapist genre movies from the 1930s and 1940s. In what could be a subtitling error but is most likely another example of their cultural isolation, the kids refer to the movie theater as the "television." It's hard for a Western audience, or at least this Western audience member, to get a fix on what decade is being represented. I assumed the film was set in the early 1960s until a song sung one-third into the running time revealed the 1980 setting. The kids in the troupe and their Maoist rhetoric-spouting director/manager seem adrift, treading water in a stagnant culture. Things don't improve when Westernization and capitalism are tentatively added to the mix, the troupe now privatized and transformed into the hilariously titled Rock and Breakdance Electronic Band but still disconnected from their culture. I'm an ugly American bonehead when it comes to foreign politics, so I feel like I'm missing out on a great deal of context, content, and nuance. However, much of the film is also concerned with the evolving relationships between the group members as they move from their teens into their twenties and, obviously, a knowledge of Chinese politics isn't going to help you much there. Additionally, the film is shot in a way I admire, a way in which a lot of my favorite directors work. Point of view is shared between many characters, closeups are eschewed in favor of long and medium shots so we as an audience have more freedom to think instead of being forced to identify with one character in favor of another, and takes are long with a relatively still camera. If all movies were shot this way, it would be a bore, but I respond to this style more than I do any others.
I have some misgivings, but overall, I think The Son's Room (Nanni Moretti) is a really good movie. More conventional and a bit less visually interesting than the other two Moretti films I've seen, it's still the work of a singular artist and far from sentimental, excepting a couple of scenes. Even if it didn't work, I would have admired it for attempting to deal seriously with grief, particularly in the case of the death of a young person, without trying to wring out a bunch of easy tears and wallow in fake depth. I can't remember if it was Hitchcock or Welles who said (I'm paraphrasing here), "It's easy to make an audience cry. Just kill a puppy." A lot of people think a movie is great if their emotions have been exploited (just like a lot of people think a movie is important if it's based on a true story and a lot of people think drama is more artistic than comedy), but I don't agree. Emotions are easy to manipulate. Turn on any junky television drama or trashy soap opera right now, watch it for ten minutes, and feel yourself getting emotionally attached to the characters, even against your better judgment, even while part of you smirks at how stupid it is. It's no great artistic achievement to play an audience's emotions like a xylophone. It's easy. Unless we're autistic or deranged, we are empathetic animals. Our brains put us in other people's shoes constantly, whether we're watching "The OC," the World Series, Monday Night Raw, or a cat stuck in a tree. Needless to say, most movies about grief make us get to know a dying character, string us along for a few hours, then kill the character off while we cry ourselves out of the theater. I mean, while you cry yourself out of the theater. Crybaby. Naturally, there's a lot of meaning and symbolism in the saintly character's death, and a lot of hoohah about the great meaning inherent in each of our impending deaths. This movie is smarter than that. It recognizes that death is arbitrary. Random, unfair, symbolism-free, something that happens to us, not about us. The kid's there, then he's not. What happens to his family after that? This movie is about how a handful of people cope with grief. It's not concerned with showing us a bunch of people crying for two hours, though of course they cry some (however, even when, where, and how these characters cry is largely contrary to crying scenes in most films). (On an oddly related tangent, I've noticed something strange about myself. I almost never get bored watching a movie. I'm endlessly fascinated by moving images, and I could probably enthusiastically watch a three-hour film of a guy staring out the window, but I get ants in my pants during any scene of people crying. I squirm, I look at the clock, I'm bored as hell. I am bored by crying. It is boring to me. Your tears fill me with inertia.) Don't get the wrong idea. This movie is also full of humor and beauty and some nice little digs at religion and psychiatry. A scene in which the family sings along to the radio during a drive made me cringe from its lazy manipulation, but it's a minor quibble, especially when one of my favorite Brian Eno songs is effectively used later. Maybe I'm a softie, but I liked this one a lot.

Bacon double cheeseburger

This week, I'm excited about the Sirk/Fassbinder double feature the Austin Film Society is putting on tomorrow night as part of its 20th anniversary series, especially for the chance to see one of my favorite films, "Ali: Fear Eats the Soul," on the big screen. I saw some great stuff last week, too, on the lesser but adequate home video format.
Esther Kahn (Arnaud Desplechin) is an underrated and unjustly forgotten film, though it's only four or five years old. Apparently, most critics didn't like it (except for the French), and it was poorly distributed. It's an odd movie, a little disjointed and awkward, and a few scenes don't work. However, as much as I hate siding with the French (they hate America and stink of cheese while forcing champagne down the barely developed throats of their infant children, don't they?), I have to wonder what kind of film-literate person dismisses this work. "Esther Kahn" is a flawed, fascinating, physical film (sorry for the alliteration--I hate alliteration) that is infinitely more interesting than any darling of the press I can call to mind. I don't know how to rave about an actor's performance without sounding like Peter Travers or a twat, so I'll just say that I could have watched Summer Phoenix's performance for several more days without eating or sleeping. I also think this film smartly handles the problem of convincingly portraying an artistic process by keeping it elusive and mysterious, shunted off to the side and obscured, so that it becomes the film's subject almost by accident. It's dangerous territory, full of deadening and stupid traps, but Desplechin knows how to move in it.
The Kid (Charlie Chaplin) Chaplin's first full-length film paired him with the then-unknown seven-year-old son of vaudeville parents, Jackie Coogan, who most of us know from his later years as TV's Uncle Fester on "The Addams Family." It blew my mind when I found that out. I love Chaplin. Of course, he wants to be loved, and sometimes he's pretty ingratiatingly vulgar about it, but I can handle the sentimentality and the mugging. There's some damn thing I can't put my finger on about his movies, some strange mix of order and chaos, elegance and poverty, comedy and tragedy that is still ahead of its time.
I also want to make a brief Halloween plug for The Return of the Living Dead (Dan O'Bannon). I've seen it three times, and it still makes me laugh. I think this movie should be taught to film production majors to show them what can be done with a tiny budget. The film is limited to three locations, practically a stage setting, and the camera barely moves, but there are few horror/comedies I like better. The script is witty and fun, the actors have great comic timing, and the zombie gore is completely satisfying. I have a soft spot in my heart for zombie gore. At ninety minutes, there is very little padding. This is a lean, economical, smart B-movie, and the fun the cast and crew are having is present on the screen. I'll take this goofy little zombie movie over whatever overhoopla-ed drivel makes it into the Oscar race this year, which probably will be 14 more goddamn bio-pics. Film biographies are like watching a Vegas impersonator fuck a stack of Cliff's Notes.

Whoop whoop

This week I recommend Carl Dreyer's The Parson's Widow and They Caught the Ferry, conveniently on the same DVD. That guy knew where to put a camera.

The weekly plop

Before I get into the two movies I'm recommending to anyone who is exactly like me, I want to talk about a movie I watched last week that I think is a good movie but also a perfect illustration of the kind of art that means little to me personally and a lot to most other people who have some kind of artistic bent, and why I feel more disillusioned when I'm around people who strongly share my interests (they're the fucking worst). In short, I'm constantly uncomfortable, but at least I'm used to it. I grew up in a town of 1,500 people, for christ's sake, and I sure as hell didn't find salvation in the city. (I can't believe how many people have tried to empathize with me by saying, "Hey, I grew up in a small town, too." "Oh, yeah," I say. "How many people in your town?" "40,000," they usually say, or some similar figure. If only I could have been so lucky.) Anyway, the movie is The Virgin Suicides. It's an accomplished film. I think it achieved what it set out to do. Sofia Coppola is a natural filmmaker with an eye for detail and an understanding that film is a visual medium. It's surprising how many filmmakers don't understand that. I'm unable to call this a bad film. It's good. I enjoyed it. It just doesn't mean much to me, aside from an entertaining Friday night. Most art doesn't. It doesn't because most art is symbolic, metaphoric, and/or transcendent. Symbols, metaphors, and transcendence don't make me feel alive. They distract me from life. If I can figure out what the symbols and metaphors mean, there's not much left. The artwork has been used up. It has nothing left to reveal. It's a husk, a pelt. I don't see much difference between that artwork and a crossword puzzle. Once the puzzle is solved, what are you going to do with what's left? Use and dispose. Metaphors and symbols are games. Coppola's film is based on a metaphor, and though it's a subtle and clever metaphor, what can you do with it after you've deciphered it? If I return to films that depend on metaphor and symbol for their existence, it's because of details that aren't part of those metaphors and symbols. The way an actor delivered a line or moved his/her eyebrows. The way a tree looked in the corner of the frame for a few seconds. The way a joke made me laugh or the way a smile made me think about a terrible summer. Art, to me, is about the mysteriousness and frustration and finite brutality and joy of existence and the difficulty of communication and honesty and breathing in and out. It's about dirt, blood, bone, vomit, semen, saliva, skin, teeth, the growl of a stomach, the shift of an eyebrow, the difference between what the face shows and what the mouth says. It's about tonal shifts and fluctuations, about the infinity of experience, about how each person is a minority of one, about how nothing we do can ever be understood. I don't represent red-haired people. I'm not a symbol of western Nebraska, or German, Irish, or Czech-Americans, or white males, or Generation X, or lost youth, or one crazy summer, or the Ghost of Christmas Past. I'm one human being. When art is doing something to me, I don't feel larger than life, or entertained, or intellectually inquisitive, or transcendent. I don't even feel this way when I'm on drugs. I feel alive. My nerve endings are raw. I feel present, I feel mortal, and I feel finite and real. Good art doesn't make me feel like I'm hovering outside of my body, or living solely inside my head. It makes me feel like all I have is the present and I better do something with it besides jerk off to metaphoric crossword puzzles or work dead-end office jobs until I'm dead enough to retire. Here are the two movies this week that weren't dead ends for me:
Junebug (Phil Morrison) We don't live in red or blue states, just gray ones. It's hard to tell anyone, especially family and friends, exactly what the hell you mean, especially if you don't even know.
In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai) Kar-Wai's movies are like songs. It's hard to tell where one scene ends and another begins. Take out one piece, or add another, and the whole thing falls apart. He's a master of instinct. His movies are felt, not thought out.

I need to update this site

I'm currently bogged down with an increasingly frustrating and hopeless job search (though I haven't regretted quitting the old one) and writing essays for a grad school application, but I do want to pick up a little slack on this site and do some more things with it. I don't think I'll go back to writing about every movie I watch, mostly because I watch too many goddamn movies and some are a lot better than others, but, for the time-starved present and near-future, I'll keep it simple. Every week, I'll mention the movies I watched during the week that meant something to me, that I would watch again, that do more than just pleasantly pass the time. Maybe some weeks I'll have nothing. This week was a particularly good one. I have five. Three on the big screen, two on video.
I got to see Au Hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson) again, this time on the big screen. What a great experience. It's nice to forget about what a fucking mess I've made of the part of my life that makes a living and spend a couple hours seeing a great piece of art the way it was intended. It was a beautiful, sparklingly clear 35mm print, and no one in the audience showed up late, talked during the screening, or forgot to turn their cell phones off. Thanks, thoughtful citizens. (I blame our current, and, unfortunately, probably permanent, cell phone culture for the frightening increase in loudmouthery during live concerts and movies. Shut the fuck up, everybody. You're boring. It can wait. Why did you buy a ticket to this event? Etc. Too much talking and not enough listening. The world's an amazing place when you close your mouth and look at it. I'm not a Luddite. I thank the gods every day for the Internet, file-sharing, computers, cruise control, etc. I just hate cell phones, and I wish they had never been invented. A phone doesn't belong outdoors. I will always believe this. Even if I'm caught in a bear trap with nowhere else to turn. {I'm caught in a bear trap, and I can't walk out, because I love you too much, baby.} Hopefully, everyone gets brain cancer in twenty years. That'll make them shut up.)
A History of Violence (David Cronenberg). This is such a deceptively simple film. I don't even want to talk about this movie, because the reactions it caused in me are such personal ones that I want to keep them to myself. You should have plenty of your own if you watch it with the openness it demands. How does this film do so many contradictory things at once? I need to see this again, in a year or two. Then again, a few years after that.
Yi Yi (Edward Yang). Three hours and not a second is wasted, stretched, padded, labored. A lot of morons have convinced a lot of casual moviegoers that foreign films are pretentious, boring, and high-falutin' just because they're subtitled. A lot of morons on the other side of the spectrum pretend to love foreign films (and world music CDs) as a kind of high-culture affectation, a fetishization of novelty objects and a robotic display of politically correct, multi-culturalist attitudes currently fashionable among people who manage to convince a lot of other people (including their own real selves) that they're smart without having to go through all the bother of independent thought. The casual moviegoers are victims of our country's culturally isolationist entertainment distribution systems and their own ignorance. This can be overcome. The high-culture nitwits are dangerous, however, because they have good intentions. They truly believe they're enlightened, open-minded, artistically savvy, and non-racist. However, all their multicultural horseshit reduces individuals to boring group types. Instead of being a book by James Baldwin-individual, artist, and damn good writer, it's a book by James Baldwin-African American homosexual. Instead of being a book by Henry James-individual, artist, and damn good writer, it's a book by Henry James-dead, white male of European ancestry. Art is bypassed, and worse, ignored, by this affected group-lump of multiculturalism. If any of these people approached the art on its own terms--its style, form, and content-- instead of the important but not all-encompassing sociologic makeup of its creator, maybe something new would happen in their brains each day instead of wasteful atrophy. Whoah, I'm getting way off-topic here. I don't think I've even read anything about "Yi Yi" that takes that approach. I just get tired of all the good films getting wasted on pretentious douchebags, all the ceremony and reverence and self-congratulation and silly symbolic interpretation involved with the "art film" crowd, when real art films should belong to open, intelligent, living, humorous, non-affected people. Art is not a dirty word. It doesn't need to be delivered on a silver tray. It doesn't need to be respected. You can treat it rough, slap the shit out of it, laugh at and with it, live with it, put it in a headlock, give it a handjob. It likes that. Art is alive, comes from life. It's not good if it doesn't. It's not going to church. It's not an intellectual dinner party conversation starter. It's about human beings trying to connect with each other. Drop the self-important bullshit and let it connect. I just wanted to say "Yi Yi" is a great movie. To me, anyway. Maybe not to you, whoever the hell it is I'm writing to. Maybe it won't connect with you. Maybe you have valid reasons for that. I just hope you get a chance to see it. I hate how the guys with the money decided that most Americans are only worthy of shit like "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo" without taking the time to ask any of us. Jesus, this paragraph was incoherent.

Oh yeah, I also got a lot out of Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay) and Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty).

This has nothing to do with movies, but I feel it is time to update this site, or The Experiment

I'm bored. I don't feel like studying for the GRE or reading my book, so I'm going to conduct a two-hour experiment. I have five homemade compilation CDs in the stereo, on shuffle. Between the hours of 1 and 3 a.m., I will update this blog every time a new song starts. I will write the name of the song and what I am doing at that particular moment. This is an experiment in mind-numbing, anal-gazing banality. Won't you join me? Let the pointlessness begin.
12:54 Yo La Tengo - "Pablo and Andrea" I made a gin and tonic. I wonder if the fettucine noodle I dropped in the space between the stove and counter will attract cockroaches.
12:59 Curtis Mayfield - "No Thing on Me (Cocaine Song)" I've sipped the gin and tonic twice. Burt Reynolds has aged surprisingly well.
1:04 Lou Reed - "Lady Day" Still sipping the gin and tonic. Some sort of half-man half-bat creature crawled through my window and rubbed my head reassuringly.
1:08 The Dirtbombs - "The Sharpest Claws" I wonder if I've ever been touched inappropriately.
1:10 T. Rex - "Raw Ramp" For christ sakes, it's only been two minutes. Nothing has changed.
1:14 T. Rex - "Cosmic Dancer" Freaky. Two T. Rex songs in a row. What are the odds? What are the fucking odds? I'm not wearing a shirt.
1:19 Salt - "Hung Up" My mind has gone blank.
1:21 Brian Eno - "Needles in the Camel's Eye" I haven't had a shirt on for hours. Hours, baby. I'm gazing upon myself in all my shirtless wonder. It's a beautiful, holy vision.
1:25 Ted Leo and the Pharmacists - "Hearts of Oak" I got nothing.
1:31 David Bowie - "Sound and Vision" On my immediate right, two half-naked men are bearhugging each other. No, it's not what you think, friends. It's the WWF VCR Wrestlemania game. The VCR portion is missing.
1:34 Stephen Malkmus - "Pencil Rot" I'm halfway through the gin and tonic now.
1:39 Iggy Pop - "Some Weird Sin" I just read a post about Iggy Pop and Guns N' Roses five minutes ago on Stars and Garters. Brought back many fond Axl-related memories. That guy liked his short-shorts. My stereo seems to have a preference for disc 2. It's picking disc 2 almost half the time. Come on, give the other discs some.
1:43 Alex Chilton - "My Rival" Thinking about sandwiches.
1:47 Them - "Hey Girl" Thinking about naked ladies. And sandwiches.
1:50 Sly and the Family Stone - "Somebody's Watching You" I just inadvertently discovered that I'm a teenage werewolf.
1:53 The Faces - "Just Another Honky" I will never get over the fact that Rod Stewart once made good music. It's been thirty years, so he's due for a comeback. Right? He'll knock one out of the park again. Won't he? No. He won't.
1:57 The Fiery Furnaces - "Mason City" The condensation on the bottom of my drinking glass just dripped on my crotch.
2:05 The Stooges - "T.V. Eye" My shirtless antics are wearing thin. I feel a slight chill. Must put shirt back on. Unfortunately, my shirt is in the bedroom where my wife is sleeping. Can't put shirt back on. This is what I deserve. My shirtless hubris could not go unpunished forever. The gods have made known their displeasure. I am a failure.
2:10 The Beach Boys - "Darlin'" Discs 4 and 5 are still being criminally ignored. Sometimes I think my stereo is fucking with me.
2:12 Arthur Russell - "Treehouse" Damn this condensation!
2:15 Black Flag - "Nervous Breakdown" Should I make another drink? The answer is always yes.
2:17 Roxy Music - "2 HB" I just urinated.
2:22 Sly and the Family Stone - "Africa Talks To You 'The Asphalt Jungle'" Have you ever had a Hardee's Monster Burger? Fuck, those things were abominations.
2:31 Minutemen - "Spillage" Cheese won the battle of the vices over a second gin and tonic.
2:33 Psalms - "Rolling Stone" Snarf loves Liono.
2:37 Oneida - "Spirits" Snarf loves Liono.
2:42 Mott the Hoople - "Crash Street Kidds" Snarf loves Liono.
2:46 Huey Piano Smith - "Little Liza Jane" Snarf loves Liono.
2:49 The Specials - "Concrete Jungle" Snarf loves Liono.
2:53 David Bowie - "Rebel Rebel" Snarf loves Liono.
2:57 Six Finger Satellite - "Cock Fight" Snarf loves Liono.
3:00 This experiment, as expected, was a resounding failure.

Taking a break

I'm going to take a break from this site for awhile. It's getting to be a chore making myself write about every movie I watch, and I think the writing's getting repetitive. I'm still going to keep the site up, and I'll probably write about a movie if I feel like I have something to say, but I've got a lot of other things I need to do and this site's sucking up too much time.

The Terrorist (Santosh Sivan)

This movie was filmed two years before our localized disaster of September 11, 2001, and its global ramifications. Apparently, this is supposed to add poignance. We expect the world's sympathy, and its art, to reflect our own current conditions. The rest of the world was dealing with terrorism-as-fact-of-life long before we had to, and it doesn't make this Indian film any better now that we can relate. It's a decent piece of action entertainment, but it thinks it's a piece of art, and it isn't. It was directed by a famed cinematographer. That's it's first strike, in my book, which is a strong personal preference, I'll readily admit. I care about directors, actors, writers, and editors. I could give a shit about cinematogaphers unless they give a shit about these other four. Beauty is a hindrance to my holy quartet. Beauty is a lie. If you spend your movie figuring out beautiful ways to shoot everything, you're creating some massively expensive wallpaper. The wallpaper is attractive, but it's not a movie. I like a lot of things about this wallpaper. The lead actress is iconic and beautiful, every shot could be framed, some scenes have an urgent sense of suspense. But once the wall has been covered, what else is left? I'm not going to be thinking about anything in this movie tomorrow, and I didn't think about anything in it while it was happening. Because it's about a terrorist cel, people think it's important, but it's just another cliched melodrama, and an Americanized one at that. It's fun, but the director/cinematographer thinks he's making a profound political statement. Maybe he is. Maybe he's illustrating how American business values have corrupted non-American storytelling. Maybe he's just an over-talented hack. Either way, he's made a good movie that's not very good.

I wrote this review in a drink-damaged state. Please forgive run-on sentences and poor sentence construction. This site is a fucking burden. Why did I decide to write about every movie I watch? All art takes a lot of time. This immediate response thing is probably worthless. Goodnight.

Funny Ha Ha (Andrew Bujalski) and Me and You and Everyone We Know (Miranda July)

Funny Ha Ha

Me and You and Everyone We Know

It was exciting for me this week to see two new films by two young American filmmakers and to be excited, engaged, upset, and energized by their films. It doesn't seem fair to compare the two, but I'm going to do it because both filmmakers are close to my age, both films are honest about loneliness, and I like these movies. Of the two, I think Funny Ha Ha is the better work, but it's not like they're both throwing the shot put at a track meet. Both films are playing in Austin right now, both will be on video soon, no either/or choice has to be made unless you have one day to live, and in that case, you shouldn't be wasting your time watching a couple of movies anyway. Bujalski's film is a minor masterpiece of unease, inarticulateness, awkward pauses, ellipses, and shifting meanings. Bujalski has mentioned being hugely influenced by John Cassavetes and Mike Leigh (coincidentally, two of my favorites), but he's invented a cinematic language of his own. This film is painfully awkward and true, and my life is better for having seen it. I also loved July's film, though it's a lot more conventional, albeit an indie hipster conventionality. There are more flaws in July's film. A few scenes are generically indie, a few others tip dangerously over into sentimentality, but the majority of this debut feature is human, funny, and curiously uplifting. While Bujalski's dialogue is full of silences, pauses, losses for words, and aversions of meaning, July's characters can't help but blurt out exactly what they mean. In both films, these speech patterns leave the characters frustrated and lonely. July seems more interested in searching for happy endings, but she's equally adept at getting honest performances from her actors. July's film also offers the bonus of one of the funniest scenes I've ever seen. It involves two kids, a computer, and the word "poop." I won't spoil it by revealing anything else.

The Decameron (Pier Paolo Pasolini)

I like this movie. It was made by a serious artist, but it's full of lowest common denominator comedy, involving shit, sexual hijinks, pratfalls, swagger, lots of people with no teeth, and severed heads. It's clear that Pasolini was pretty much tapped out as an artist by this point, but who was expecting this? It's a fucking trainwreck. I couldn't look away. And the ending is surprisingly poignant.

Au Hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson)

I'm not a fan of hyperbole. It's something you need to get out of your system while writing music reviews for the college newspaper (if you're me). If I were an artist being reviewed, I think I would dread a hyperbolic rave more than anything. By saying something is one of the greatest works ever/of the year/of the decade/of the century/of the week, you are as much as shitting on that work you profess to admire so much. Every flaw in that work will be magnified a hundredfold by anyone reading your review. That's why it makes me uncomfortable to write the next sentence. This is one of the greatest films ever made. I mention this because I don't think I can write about this film under the pretense of it being just another film, even just another great film. Additionally, only five people read this website, so I can make with the hyperbole like there's no tomorrow. Why is it so great? I won't be able to scratch the surface of that question. Jean-Luc Godard said Balthazar was "the world in ninety minutes," and he was right. The film begins with the birth of a donkey, Balthazar, and ends with the donkey's death. In between, Balthazar is passed around from owner to owner in a small French village. These owners are connected to each other, as most people are in a small town. Some of these people are cruel to the donkey, others are kind, but all are weak, and their weaknesses determine the course of the donkey's life. This is merely a plot synopsis, and a plot synopsis is getting me nowhere. I can see this while I write. Why is this film so good? How can a film about a donkey be one of the great artworks of our time? Maybe a discussion of Bresson's methods can get me closer to an impossible answer. Bresson had a severe formal aesthetic. Beginning with his third film, he only used non-actors, which he called models. He filmed scenes repeatedly until all emotion and "performance" was drained from the performance. He did not want his non-actors to "act." His "actors" perform actions mechanically, not reactions emotionally. Once Bresson worked with an "actor" once, he refused to work with him/her a second time. A handful of his non-actors became professional actors later, but most faces you see in a Bresson film you won't see again. You will never see a scene from a character's point of view in Bresson's films (including the donkey in Balthazar). His characters exist. They act and actions are performed on them. It is up to us to project our point of view on the action. This technique sounds cold and unemotional, and it is if you experience the films as a passive viewer. Paradoxically, the reactions a Bresson film provokes from an engaged audience are exactly the opposite of his techniques. It took me three of his films before I knew how to respond, but watching a Bresson film now is an almost overwhelmingly emotional experience. His films are holy moments. They have strange powers, and they shut down, cut off, and slow down the distractions and irrelevancies of the unnecessary parts of our existence. For two hours, Paris Hilton doesn't exist, never existed. Balthazar exists. He's a dumb animal. We see people beat him, stroke him, work him, feed him, and we see them do these things to themselves and others. We are not experiencing his reactions, his existence, nor theirs. We are experiencing our own. How many other filmmakers let us do that?

Let me also mention briefly what Bresson does with sound. Pay attention to his uses of natural noise and silence and wonder why so few others have followed his lead. You don't just watch a Bresson film, you hear it, too.

I've been thinking about three things Bresson said about this film:
1) It was inspired by a passage from Dostoevsky's The Idiot in which Myshkin talks about how happy he was when he heard a donkey bray in a foreign marketplace. Bresson filmed two Dostoevsky adaptations, so the influence is no secret, but this quote got me thinking about how Bresson is probably the closest cousin to Dostoevsky of any artist I've encountered in any medium. Maybe I'll say more on this later. I don't have much to go on for proof other than the similar effect their work has on me.
2) Bresson said the donkey was his version of Chaplin's Little Tramp character. This seems odd, initially, considering how far from comedy Balthazar is, but it makes a weird kind of sense. Again, I have no proof other than my gut feeling.
3) Balthazar is full of extremely unsympathetic characters, but the audience is never pushed into hatred, contempt, or scorn for anyone. Bresson said, in response to a question about the ugliness of the characters, that it should be as possible to love humanity at its worst as much as we love it at its best. That's a powerful thing for Bresson to say, considering that he spent a year in a Nazi prison camp for being a part of the French Resistance. Maybe this attitude is merely an extension of his devout Catholicism, but I find this statement, and the film, a maddening and beautiful way of looking at what we do and how and possibly why we do it.

I'll finish up with more Godard. I've been thinking about this movie almost constantly since watching it on Saturday, and I drew a conclusion that the character of Marie was also a donkey. Of course, I don't mean this literally. I'm talking about how the actions performed on and by Marie, and the use of her by others, parallel Balthazar's existence. I was going to develop this further, until I found out that Godard had said the exact same thing. I was a little pissed that he'd stolen my thunder, albeit several years before my birth, though the fact that we drew the same conclusion made me happy. Godard usually makes me feel stupid, so it was a nice little surprise when he made me feel smart. Godard later married Anne Wiazemsky, the woman who played Marie, but they divorced in the late seventies. Maybe Godard fell in love with a donkey, and got a woman instead.

Safety Last (Fred C. Newmeyer, Sam Taylor)

This was my first look at silent comedian and fellow Nebraskan Harold Lloyd. He's the (distant) third big name in silent comedy after Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, which is probably good for Lloyd. Being less admired, he gets to avoid the stupid "Keaton or Chaplin" debate. That debate is infected with businessman's syndrome and has nothing to do with personal preference or aesthetic value. Instead, it squashes two distinctive artists into one generic product: Silent Comedian. They're not microwaves or socket wrenches. Why should we have to choose one over the other? Keaton is as different from Chaplin as Chaplin is from Keaton and Keaton is from Lloyd and Lloyd is from Chaplin and a radish is from a doorknob. I'm glad there is room in this world for all of the above. I like Lloyd, if I can judge him from this film and An Eastern Westerner, a short that was also on the copy of the video I watched. He's not the artist Keaton or Chaplin is. Instead, his greatness comes from the sense that performing is not natural for him and he's working his ass off. I don't mean to suggest his comedy is labored or overcooked. Instead, it seems fresh, spontaneous, ingenious, with Lloyd as a hardworking guy having to adapt quickly to ridiculous situations.

P.S. When did pratfalls stop being funny? Watching someone fall down in a classic comedy is hilarious. Watching someone fall down in a modern comedy is nauseating. Maybe the problem is not that pratfalls are no longer funny, but that funny comedians no longer do pratfalls. Yes. This makes more sense to me. Bad comedians have monopolized modern pratfalls. I'm going to call this phenomenon the Martin Lawrence Effect.

Face/Off (John Woo)

This movie, unlike the other American John Woo films I've seen, looks a lot like his Hong Kong stuff. It's ridiculous, sentimental, overblown, exciting, fun. Fired bullets are filmed in loving slow motion like weird fetish objects. The villain and the hero are inextricably linked through some odd bond (in this case, swapping faces). The action set-pieces are a frenzied, vulgar, maximalist orgy, especially the finale. In Face/Off's final battle, a boat crashes through another boat. The boats don't crash into each other. One boat crashes through the other boat. Splits that mother in two. Oh yeah. I've read some criticisms of this film (mostly of the fanboy variety on imdb messageboards), and the consensus seems to be that this is a good action movie, but the viewer must set aside the utter ridiculousness of John Travolta's cop undergoing a covert surgical facial swap with Nicolas Cage's comatose super-villain in order to trick his brother into revealing the whereabouts of a bomb. Critics of the film apparently feel this ridiculousness damages the otherwise plausible universe of the modern action film. These people are idiots. The modern action film is always implausible and ridiculous. Taking this ridiculousness to ridiculariffic extremes can only improve the modern action film. The plot is insanely stupid, and I wholeheartedly endorse the sublimity of this stupidity. It allows Cage and Travolta to ham it up, to have fun, to play themselves, their characters, each other's characters, and each other. A lot more fun than watching Schwarzenegger smash a few things up, kill some Arabs, hang from a helicopter, and spout a few monosyllabic catchphrases. (In addition, Cage and Travolta will probably not become terrible governors.) That said, I have two major reservations. 1. Joan Allen plays Travolta's long-suffering wife (she's played more long-suffering wives than any woman in acting history).. He's always got his mind on his work, never on romance, blah blah blah. This subplot is in roughly 74 percent of mainstream action movies and police thrillers released in the last fifty years. The movie grinds to a halt whenever these scenes occur. They could have shitcanned this entire subplot and, though it would have required a few re-shufflings of plot and character motivation, it would have made the movie better and shorter. 2. Occasionally, Woo douses the film in a coat of pretentious, high-art sheen that is humorless and embarrassing. The most egregious violations include a child listening to his headphones during a climactic gunfight while he's lit with a spotlight from above, soundtrack dropping out except for the ironic counterpoint of the innocuous little children's song as he gazes with puppy dog eyes at the carnage escalating around him, and a scene in a church that could have been titled "A Shitload of White Doves + A Crucifix = Symbolic Truth." Also, Margaret Cho is in this movie for no discernible reason. I can overlook these flaws, however, because I get to see a boat crashing through a boat. I love that.

Seventh Heaven (Benoit Jacquot)

What happened? This is a rough draft dreamed onto celluloid. It's an intriguing premise (woman is a sexually unresponsive kleptomaniac, gets mysterious therapy and is cured, husband starts losing it because his wife's no longer messed up), the leads are excellent, but the movie does nothing after setting it all up. Eighty minutes after it begins, it ends. What happens in between is curiously flat and uninvolving.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks)

Two Howard Hawks movies in less than seven days. The good lord must be smiling down upon me. This is, as far as I know, Hawks' only musical, and it's his most female-centric film. Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe are the focus, the men are mostly wimps, ogling oldsters, and ineffectual bumblers. Most traditional films would pit the women against each other in competition for men, but in Hawks' world, Monroe and Russell are allies whose strengths and weaknesses complement each other. Monroe plays a gold-digging airhead; Russell is smarter and more contemptuous of money. That's only a launching pad for a series of gags and musical numbers that satirize our business-obsessed culture and the ways men objectify women, while revealing subtler, deeper shades in Russell and Monroe's characters that modify our opinions of them. Neither Monroe nor Russell are great dancers, and their singing voices are merely pleasant, but these weaknesses only add to the greatness of the musical numbers, giving them an awkward charm and an unpolished naturalness.

Scream (Wes Craven)

I put off seeing this movie for a long time. I could have kept putting it off. It's trash. Offensive trash. This is a film with utter contempt for its characters, its makers, its genre, and its audience. It's probably the most cynical film I've ever seen. It pretends to wink at you, to let you into its exclusive club of smarty-pants deconstructivism and self-reflexivity, while instead explicitly laying out the theme that life is just a movie, a movie is just a movie, a movie is not important, and neither is your life. You are a cash machine and a moron. Allow us, the makers of Scream, to make a withdrawal. We don't care about you, we don't care about our movie, and we don't care about anything. We will pretend to provide a self-aware postmodern take on the horror genre and be praised by mainstream critics for our wit and cleverness when what we actually provide is a guided tour into the emptiness of our hearts and minds. This film is disgustingly cavalier about the value of human life. That might sound funny coming from someone who loves horror movies as much as I do, especially someone who loves exploding heads and gushing geysers of blood (yep, me again). Pretty cavalier, right? The difference is that when the average horror director rips someone's guts out or decapitates someone else, the desired effect is to bring pleasure to an audience of real, live human beings. In director Wes Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson's world, however, the audience is told life is just a movie (this line of dialogue is repeated several times throughout the film), the characters' behavior comes entirely from other movies, and we're instructed how to respond to these scenes as audience members by the exruciatingly overbearing dialogue (more life-as-movie, behavior-learned-from-movie ironic detachments). We're not allowed responses of our own, just told repeatedly how clever we are and how superior we are to what we're watching while at the same time what inconsequential, pop-culture obsessed, lives we lead. Williamson and Craven's message seems clear to me: Your life is defined by what you consume, not by what you experience, and we are going to take advantage of that to get a piece of your money. To them, I say: Go fuck yourself. Your movie is inhuman, and I'm not interested.

Other observations:
1. The much-ballyhooed self-referential script is a plodding, pointless gimmick. Horror movies are already self-referential, and they have been since at least Bela Lugosi's 1931 performance in Dracula, probably earlier. To use a more recent example, John Carpenter's 1978 Halloween, which is referenced in Scream a gazillion times, is full of movie in-jokes and references that are far more clever than anything in Wes Craven's mega-turd, and they're used without belaboring the point.
2. The killer's outfit is astonishingly non-frightening. The mask is based on Munch's "The Scream," another pointless reference and example of the film's turning art into product, while the rest of the costume looks like Skeletor at a drag ball.
3. Matthew Lillard sucks. His obnoxiousness and his noxiousness are substantial. He makes Chris Kattan look like Harry Dean Motherfucking Stanton.
4. This movie made a shitload of money and spawned two sequels, which also made a shitload of money. Maybe the Craven/Williamson two-headed jerk's cynicism was justified. Sometimes it's hard to be a humanist.

His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks)

Few directors' movies give me as much pleasure as Howard Hawks'. I've seen a lot of his work, and I've loved everything I've seen. Now recognized as a great director, in his prime he was pegged as merely a reliable entertainer, probably because most of his movies were either comedies, action/adventures, or westerns. A bogus stereotype prevailed at the time, and still infects a lot of critics' and audiences' perceptions today. Namely, a film isn't an important work of art unless it's about something Important (i.e., racism is bad, terminal disease is sad, biographies of famous people's lives give us something to strive for, war is hell, symbolism is where it's at, etc.). Hawks was so much deeper than that. His films are concerned with varieties of human experience and behavior, eschewing closeups and identification with a single character. In a Hawks film, we watch a group of people interact, the camera taking in all the principals at once so the audience can see the characters react to each other without giving us a push in one direction or another. We choose our own reactions, our own points of view, based on our own experiences. Hawks is interested in tonal shifts in speech patterns and facial expressions, in the temporalities and fluctuations of life, in the dynamics between groups of men and between men and women. He's interested in how people act when they have to interact with other people, something most Hollywood films ignore. Sure, Hollywood movies are full of actors and extras, but most of them focus on one character's point of view at the expense of all others, with every camera movement guiding the audience toward a fixed understanding decided in advance by the filmmaker. In His Girl Friday, our sympathies toward and feelings about Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell are never fixed. We like them (Hawks has affection for all his characters), but our responses to their behavior bounce around like pinballs. Meanings shift and shift again mid-sentence, dialogue overlaps dialogue, rhythms of speech speed up and slow down. Hawks is pulling the rug out from under our preconceived notions of how we watch movies every step of the way, and doing it in the guise of a romantic, screwball comedy. It's just another great movie from a guy who made dozens of them.

Faust (F.W. Murnau)

Emil Jannings plays Mephisto in Murnau's version of Faust, but he probably should have played the title character. He made his own pact with the devil a few years later. When Hitler came to power, Jannings chose to stay in Germany and act in Nazi propaganda films. Murnau was dead in a car accident by the time of Jannings' disgrace, but their last German collaboration is interesting, considering their respective fates (Murnau moved to the United States after this film's release) and the fate of Germany shortly thereafter. It's like a whole country made a deal with the devil, and Murnau's pre-Hitler silents, Faust and Nosferatu, seem like early, cautionary warnings of a fascistic, creeping menace infecting our better judgment and our hearts. I love the early German silent films, and the German New Wave of the late sixties and seventies, but I often wonder how many people I'm seeing onscreen either embraced the Third Reich or were raised by parents who did. German director Werner Herzog (whose mother fled the Nazis and settled in rural Bavaria and whose remake of Nosferatu is partially about what happened to Germany) put it another way when describing the explosion of creative talent in sixties and seventies German film: "We're a group of people with no fathers, only grandfathers." Murnau was one of the grandfathers he cited, a poetic visionary who was as comfortable pushing the boundaries of visual effects as he was exploring the shifting emotional routes of the human face. His movies are full of both human fantasy and experience, and he's still among only a handful of directors comfortable with both.

My Sex Life, or How I Got into an Argument (Arnaud Desplechin)

This film, which only engaged me in fits and starts in terms of its writing and editing but had my complete attention in terms of its actors' phenomenal performances, got me thinking about something. I have a need to devour my interests. I want to see every movie, read every book, listen to every piece of music, and eat every meal that even vaguely intrigues me. I also want to spend lots of time with friends and family, and look at/watch a lot of paintings, photos, concerts, sculptures, prints, dancers, street musicians, people who can do a lot of high kicks, anybody doing anything weird in public, and maybe the occasional basketball game, boxing match, or professional wrestling exhibition. This need to devour as much art and life as is humanly possible clashes with the relative brevity of one human lifespan, the interruptions of living by a 9 to 5 job, going to the bank, buying toilet paper, etc., my own lack of ambition, and the demands that really ambitious art makes upon its viewer, in this case, me. This is an ambitious film and, though the acting touched me deeply, the film as a whole left me disengaged. This is an odd dichotomy, and for that reason alone, the film probably deserves another look. If I watched it again, I'm sure I would find more answers and more questions, and my relationship to the work would deepen. The problem is, it's three hours long and there's so much more left to see and do. If a film that left me lukewarm deserves further investigation, and I think it does, what of the work I think is brilliant? Maybe my life would be better spent if I picked 100 works of art spread across different media that had blown my mind the most and really get to know them in the depth they deserve. Wouldn't this be a more valuable way to spend my time? Maybe so. But can't I do both? I think I'll try. I'm rambling now. I guess my point is that life is too short, there's too much art (which is a wonderful problem and something to be thankful for), and this movie is worth seeing if you're interested in film. If you miss it, your life won't be damaged in any way, but, please, don't miss it because you're eating Pringles and watching "The Princes of Malibu." Have a good reason for missing it. Fill your life with meaningful things. I don't care what they are. I don't care if you like movies. Just like something enough to tear the ass out of it with your teeth. That's living. Don't let the bastards get you down. Life isn't so bad. Sorry this turned into a pep talk. Don't blame me, I voted for you. My other car is also a car.

The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett)

This is one of the classic films noir, but it's not filmed like one. The plot is quintessential noir: a drifter cruises into town, gets a job cooking in a diner, falls in love with the boss' much younger wife, they plot to bump the old man off, things go wrong. Stylistically, however, the movie is minimal, spare, economical. Unlike most noir, there is no German Expressionist influence, no interplay of shadows and light, no stylized camera angles. Tay Garnett directs like an anonymous hack and gets a better movie than if he'd stamped a director's personality all over it. He seems to simply point his camera at the action and let it happen, as objectively as possible, avoiding genre cliches. He does move the camera a lot, however, but the movements are natural, unobtrusive, subtle. Only the occasional awkward closeup interferes with the tone. It's a nice little movie. Not that important, ultimately, but fun is fun, and fun is a lot.

Also, Lana Turner was smokin' hot.

The Milky Way (Luis Bunuel)

Bunuel's little seen Milky Way is the red-headed stepchild of his late-period filmography, an interesting failure blemishing his otherwise astounding series of masterpieces from the 1960s and 1970s. I have red hair and, as of last March, am now someone's stepson, so I feel some affinity with the film. I was also raised Catholic and lost my faith, like Bunuel, and, again, like Bunuel, I feel contradictory impulses to both admire and shoot poisoned darts at the religion. This film never really comes together in any satisfying way, but it's worth seeing if you're a Bunuel fan, a Catholic (lapsed or otherwise), or both. It's a satire about Catholic dogma and heresy with an episodic, anecdotal narrative structure in which two characters make a pilgrimage on foot from France to Spain to bilk some money out of the tourists flocking to see a saint's body on display in a cathedral. Along the way, they move in and out of different time periods and spatial realities and meet many well-known Christian heretics. The action frequently leaves the two main characters for minutes at a time before rejoining them. This structure is interesting, but never seems to gel into a cohesive whole. (Bunuel would use a similar structure much more successfully in The Phantom of Liberty.) The problem is that Bunuel's script is as dogmatic as his target, and he'd already covered this ground more successfully in earlier films like Viridiana and Nazarin. Bearing some similiarity to later Godard (though completely different in terms of editing and structure), the film is dense and theoretical, more of a philosophical argument than a cinematic exploration, but funny in places and always watchable.

Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki)

Twenty minutes into Gregg Araki's new movie, and I'm thinking he might have made himself a masterpiece. Then the extended flashback sequence ends, and the film dies a slow, conventional death. The problems are many: Michelle Trachtenberg suffers from either A) terrible acting or B) a poorly written character (answer: C), indie-film cliches crowd out the good stuff (ex: the male prostitute character's one last trick goes bad, also known as the Miramax version of the cop getting shot one day before retirement), and the story loses momentum halfway through and all we're left with is inevitability and a "revelatory" ending that reveals nothing we hadn't already figured out. It's easy to be tricked into thinking the movie's any good while watching it, mostly from the early scenes' powerful confidence and the strength of the non-Trachtenberg performances (especially Elisabeth Shue and Brady Corbet), but it eventually leads to so what. Araki is being praised by almost every mainstream American critic for maturing, but I'll take the ridiculous-to-sublime momentum of his Nowhere over the sublime-to-mundane Mysterious Skin any day of the week, even Monday. A mature Araki actually includes scenes like this in his new movie (dialogue half-remembered and paraphrased, I'll do my best):

(Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Michelle Trachtenberg, having a heart-to-heart about his male prostitution next to the speakers at an empty drive-in movie theater.)
MT: I wish we were watching a movie about our lives on this screen. It would show everything that happened to us and end with us right here, staring at the screen.
JG-L (disinterested): Unh.
MT (cradling the speaker next to her, then holding it up to her ear): Listen, you can hear the voice of God.
JG-L (holding the speaker next to him up to his ear): Yeah, I can hear it.
(Cue stylized planetarium-style stars descending and spinning around them.)

If you haven't choked on your own vomit after reading this, you may like this film.

The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges)

I love Sturges, for the simple fact that he made comedies which are funny. That's what comedies are supposed to be, but the vast majority are groaning anthologies of deadness. This comedy, about what happens when business values infect human relationships, will kill despair for a couple of hours. The dialogue is a ping-pong match between the practical and the visionary (though the players often switch sides), the Ale and Quail Club is a prescient depiction of unchecked wealth, and the quotable lines are plentiful.

Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli)

I think I like this movie more in retrospect than I did while watching it. After seeing Minnelli's great The Band Wagon a few weeks ago, Meet Me in St. Louis was a disappointment. It seemed syrupy, inconsequential, even dull in places. There was a cutesy little kid who ballhogged too many scenes. It also seemed to lack any male energy, i.e. it was too girly for me. I don't say that often. I'm not a believer in phrases like "chick flick" or "guy movie." If a movie's good, it's worth seeing. I don't see movies because of their plot or story, so I don't care if they're focused on male or female characters or are examples of predominantly male or female genres. If a movie can be conveniently tagged a "chick flick" or a "guy movie," that movie is probably garbage with no respect for its audience. I don't see a whole lot of difference between "How Stella Got Her Groove Back" and "XXX: State of the Union," and I don't want to find out if there is. At any rate, Meet Me in St. Louis seemed like it was consciously excluding anything that could pique a male interest. I don't know how to explain it any better than that. Still, a lot of male critics and filmmakers I admire love this movie, so maybe I'm just missing something. Thinking about it in my head, though, I find a lot of things to like. I like the way Minnelli has his actors move in, out, and through the frame, I like the colors he uses, I like the lived-in atmosphere of the family home, I like the candle-dimming scene, I like the Halloween scene, and I even like a couple of the songs.

Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa)

I don't have much to say about this one. Kurosawa successfully incorporates elements of the western and the comedy into the samurai genre. I like the film's singularity of purpose and how the camera's movements are always at right angles. The cinematographer, Kazuo Miyagawa, also worked with Ozu and Mizoguchi, and the images seem more visceral than other Kurosawa films of the period, even Rashomon, which Miyagawa also shot. This is an escapist, entertainment picture, but in the best way. I was able to escape a hangover and was consistently entertained for the entire running time. Eleven thumbs up.

The Driller Killer (Abel Ferrara)

Abel Ferrara's first full-length film (not counting the porno movie he made before it, Nine Lives of a Wet Pussy) was marketed as a slasher flick, but it's really about urban paranoia, punk rock, and 1970s New York City sleaze. Ferrara plays the lead. He's not much of an actor, but you don't need to be much of an actor to kill bums with an electric drill. Thank god he used Christopher Walken, Vincent Gallo, and Harvey Keitel in later films. He's a painter who slowly goes nuts because he can't pay his bills, a punk band moved into the apartment below and they practice all night, and his relationship with his girlfriend is deteriorating. He has no choice but to run out into the street and eliminate a chunk of NYC's homeless wino population with an electric drill powered by a Porto-Pak (cordless drills being unavailable at the time). It's pretty silly, and Ferrara made a lot of much better (and worse) films afterwards, but he was already a confident director technically and some of the scenes have a weird power. The DVD also includes the trailer for his porn film (complete with loads, pun intended, of hardcore action) and three early short films. The shorts vary wildly in quality. Nicky's Film is art-wank, film-school bullshit. The Hold Up is technically shoddy, but more personal and representative of Ferrara's later work. The real gem, though, is Could This Be Love, which I would include as one of his best films. Ferrara is able to reveal a lot about his cast in just thirty minutes, and he shows real and unexpected tenderness for two of the unlikeliest characters, while unveiling bitter and surprising cruelties in two others.

God's Comedy (Joao Cesar Monteiro)

I value this film highly. It's got a lot of what I respond to most: an objective camera, extreme long takes that let actions unfold in real time, a skewed sense of humor, seriousness without pretension, painterly shot compositions, vulgarity, curiosity, compassion, pessimism, hope, reactions to failure, an interest in what people do at work. It's about a master ice cream maker and aging pervert and his attempts to seduce the teenage girls who work in and visit his ice cream shop. It's also about everything else.

Thieves (Andre Techine)

I've seen four Techine films and been slowly won over, my enthusiasms gradually increasing. Did the films get better, or did I just learn how to watch them? I'm hoping it's the former, because I have no desire to revisit the first Techine film I saw (Rendez-vous). I thought it was a piece of junk. Then came Scene of the Crime, flawed as hell but worth seeing, and Wild Reeds, consistently good. Now I've seen Thieves, and it's almost great. What's going on here? Thieves excites me the most because it has the structure of a novel while remaining a film. The story begins in the middle, then moves backward and forward, showing the same event several times from multiple perspectives, which has the effect of shattering our assumptions about the characters' relationships to each other when more is revealed and deepening our responses to these characters in the scenes leading up to and beyond the events in the film's opening instead of just waiting for the plot to unfold. Point of view and narration are passed like a baton from scene to scene, much like those novels in which each chapter is narrated by a different character. I find this approach more challenging and rewarding than the mainstream Hollywood model of empathizing with one character while he/she takes on the world.