Bathroom Break #21

from Rouben Mamoulian's Love Me Tonight

Bathroom Break #20

from Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Babel

Bathroom Break #19

from Brett Leonard's The Dead Pit

Bathroom Break #18

from Warren Beatty's Bulworth

Bathroom Break #17

from Bela Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies

A working class hero ain't nothin' but a sandwich

My wife and I can't usually agree on where to eat lunch or which one of us is going to be in a good mood for the week, but we almost always agree on books, movies, and music. We disagree a lot, and we're okay with that, but when we disagree about a book or a movie or a band, somehow my feelings are hurt and I get upset, then slink away like a wounded puppy. If we disagreed more often about the merits of artistic works, I would probably be less of an easily offended baby, but I still don't quite understand why I take it so personally. One part of it may be that I don't wash dishes to music, or go to movies for escape, or read books at the beach. I really care about this stuff, and I feel like it helps me live and understand life a little better and feel better about my own mortality and empathize with other people more and not feel so provincial even though I've never left the continent or even been to much of the Northeast and get through bad times better and be a little happier once in a while and blah blah blah and yank yank yank. (I also like Maniac Cop, so I don't know. Whatever the fuck, life is contradictory, cheeseburgers, etc.) We disagreed about Affliction tonight. Her problems with it make perfect sense, but I'm irrational about this stuff. This movie has a lot of personal significance for me. The voice-over is revoltingly bad, and should have been cut from the film, but Paul Schrader is a writer, first and foremost, and he was a little too in love with Russell Banks' prose. It's good writing, but it doesn't belong in a movie. The actors and images tell the story well enough, the words aren't necessary. Different mediums. Don't put mustard on the cupcakes. A couple of egregious mistakes elsewhere. Many things wrong with the movie. Why does Affliction have significance for me? It gets small-town life just right. Small towns aren't about backwoods hickery or naive optimism or good-hearted bootstrappery or quaintness or pies on windowsills. They're just places with people who know each other, and these people are either content or despairing. It's set in New Hampshire, but three of the five leads are from Nebraska (Nick Nolte, Mary Beth Hurt, James Coburn), one from Texas (Sissy Spacek), one from Wisconsin (Willem Dafoe). It gets alcoholism right. Both of my grandfathers were alcoholics, as well as many other members of my family, and my mother said when she watched this movie she had to stop it several times because James Coburn reminded her too much of her dad. When I saw it the first time, as much as I love Coburn, I thought he was a little over the top. It shocked me when my mother told me her reaction. When I watch it now, it scares me a lot. That good-natured fat guy falling asleep watching John Wayne movies on the couch used to be this monster? There's not enough snow in the movies. It's so photogenic. Class is a conscious but not overbearing issue in the movie. American movies and TV shows are afraid of class. Everyone is upper middle class. I have an irrational yet somewhat justified hatred of the upper middle class. It was fostered by my parents, who otherwise have nothing in common. There are a couple of moments in the film so good they make me flinch. Both with body language. One is when things are going badly, and Sissy Spacek's eyes give about 18 pages of information in three seconds. The other is when Nick Nolte's physically imposing character takes two steps back when his father, played by Coburn, enters the room. Those two steps tell the story of every bad drunk's kids better than anything. No voice-over necessary. I gotta pee.

Bathroom Break #16

from Paul Schrader's Affliction

Bathroom Break #15

from William Lustig's Maniac Cop

Bathroom Break #14

from Simon Hunter's Dead of Night

Good Director/Bad Movie

Welcome to Film-Watching Robot's new regular feature, Good Director/Bad Movie. This semi-weekly (depending on my free time) new feature will focus on a shitty movie made by a director I like. I can't think of a more appropriate film to kick off this series than Gus Van Sant's Finding Forrester. Van Sant has always been a polarizing director, for critics and audiences alike, but, for the most part, I greatly admire almost every movie he's made. Mala Noche, Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, To Die For, even the goofy, awkward, yet unfairly maligned and severely underrated Tom Robbins adaptation Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. I liked them all, and mostly loved them. Still do. Something happened in the late nineties and early two-thousands, though. Van Sant, thankfully temporarily (though it was a long temporary), lost his way. It started when he was offered, and accepted, Good Will Hunting. His most financially successful and crowd-pleasing film, Good Will Hunting is basically a remake of Rocky, but with math. Written by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon and produced by (yuck) Kevin Smith, it still has Van Sant's visually distinctive eye, a weird Harmony Korine cameo, and is reasonably entertaining, much more entertaining than a film with Affleck and Robin Williams has any right to be, but Van Sant, for the first time, was not personally connected to his material. It was a job of work, and its success has more to do with how much mainstream U.S. audiences never tire of the Rocky story, even after the 1500th fucking time, than with Van Sant's artistry. Ostensibly an "independent" film, if you consider Miramax independent-I sure as fuck don't, Good Will Hunting was a whole lot of empty audience wish fulfillment and Oscar-bait. But what do I know? People love that movie. When my college film professor expressed his disappointment with it, half the class actually booed him. (He deserved some boos, just not for that particular opinion.) I was disappointed, too. But it got worse. Next came the unfortunately timed (considering its bookends) shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock's Psycho. Like Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, it was hated by audiences and critics alike, and this time for understandable reasons. I actually admire it, for its dumbass audacity and unembarrassed "desecration" of a classic, but I don't understand the few changes Van Sant made (the masturbation scene, the added nudity, the pseudo-avant garde images of clouds and goats edited into the murder scenes), Vince Vaughn is a piss-poor Anthony Perkins, and why bother shooting in color if you're going so far as to recreate the original shot-for-shot. Filming it in color seemed an obvious concession to Hollywood producers and the lazy, lazy multiplex audience. I still have no idea what to make of the film, which wouldn't be such a problem if it had been preceded and followed by good films, but, at the time, it seemed like more proof of Van Sant's decline. After Psycho, Van Sant made the worst thing he's ever done. Basically another remake of Rocky via Good Will Hunting via Scent of a Woman, Finding Forrester is about a promising young high school student who, through a series of generic Hollywood contrivances, befriends a reclusive Salingeresque author who inspires him to live his dreams. Not content with Matt Damon's twentysomething working-class math genius, Finding Forrester ups the ante with Rob Brown's inner-city whiz kid. Not only is he a sixteen-year-old basketball star, but he's also a gifted writer who has somehow memorized every major novel, short story, and poem ever written. He is Michael Jordan, Richard Wright, Will Hunting, and Rocky Balboa in one uncharismatic package. Shazam! The Salinger figure, Forrester, is played by Sean Connery, who is of course hostile to young Rob Brown until his cynical, cold heart is slowly melted. Both men reveal truths to each other, and Connery learns to live again, exemplified by his thick Scottish brogue clamping down on the phrase, "You're the man now, dogg!" Unfortunately, "Hoo-ah!" was already used by Al Pacino several years previously and was unavailable to screenwriter Mike Rich (who also wrote the Cuba Gooding Jr.-plays-retarded-man inspirational tale Radio). Did I mention F. Murray Abraham plays an evil private school English teacher? Is Connery's Forrester going to leave his apartment for the first time in years to vouch for Rob Brown after Abraham accuses him of plagiarism? Will Apollo Creed rise from the dead? Will Robin Williams eat a bologna sandwich? Will I save money on my car insurance? Will Busta Rhymes' film career ever stop skyrocketing?
Van Sant has reticently admitted having zero interest in the film, and merely wanted to see what it was like directing a blockbuster, and it looks like it. Before the plot kicks in, the film has a definite visual flair and sense of place, but once Brown and Connery meet, Van Sant's style disappears and we could be watching Failure to Launch. Flat, uninteresting, boring, stupid, and conventional, Finding Forrester seemed like the nail in Van Sant's coffin. Surprisingly, he was one of the few directors lost in the mediocre Hollywood jungle who was able to find his way back out. His last three films, Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days, are every bit as good as his early work. Finding Forrester, though. Holy shit.

You're the man now, dogg!

Bathroom Break #13

from Olivier Assayas' Irma Vep

Bathroom Break #12

from Yasujiro Ozu's I Was Born, But...

Bathroom Break #11

from Billy Wilder's Witness for the Prosecution

Bathroom Break #10

from Jan Svankmajer's Conspirators of Pleasure

Bathroom Break #9

from George A. Romero's Day of the Dead

Bathroom Break #8

from William Witney's Darktown Strutters

Bathroom Break #7

from Emir Kusturica's Underground

Bathroom Break #6

from Claire Denis' Nenette and Boni

Bathroom Break Series #5

from Norman Z. McLeod's Horse Feathers

Hatari! - Trailer
Uploaded by enricogay

I watched "Hatari!" the day after oral surgery, and I was veerrry mellow from the codeine I'd been prescribed. It was the perfect movie to watch in that state. It's a very long, loosely plotted comedy about a bunch of guys dicking around on safari, punctuated by long, hypnotic action scenes of a jeep chasing a rhino. I think it was the most relaxed I've ever been. Usually I'm angry or nervous about something, like paying a bill or having to put my shoes on or imagining some kind of future fiery death.

Bathroom Break Series #4

from Ace in the Hole (Billy Wilder, 1951)

Bathroom Break Series #3

from The Day of the Beast (Alex de la Iglesia, 1995)

Bathroom Break Series #2

from Satantango (Bela Tarr, 1994)

It was a 7 1/2 hour movie. That's why we paused it so much.

LOVE STREAMS (#11)
Uploaded by birdy66

Michelangelo Antonioni 1912-2007

Yesterday, after hearing about Bergman's death, I said to my wife, "Antonioni's about the only old master left." How odd that he died the same day. I forgot about a few people when I said that. The French New Wave filmmakers are mostly still kicking and (mostly) still making good films, e.g. Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Alain Resnais. However, they are nearly a generation younger than Bergman and Antonioni. Portugal's Manoel de Oliveira is 99 years old and still making an average of two films a year. He's the only director living and, more impressively, working today who started in the silent-film era. However, though critically regarded as a master, his films haven't been distributed well, and only a handful are available on DVD in this country. So Antonioni may have been the last of a dying breed, namely, classic directors beginning their careers in the 1940s.




"Scientific man is already on the moon, and yet we are still living with the moral concepts of Homer."

"Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing."
--Michelangelo Antonioni

Ingmar Bergman, 1918-2007

"I hope I never get so old I get religious."
--Ingmar Bergman

persona
Uploaded by seryeuse

Bathroom Break Series #1

From now on, whenever we pause a DVD for a bathroom or get-another-beer break at the Dr. Mystery/Spacebeer household, we will take a picture of the paused screen and post the photo on Film-Watching Robot. Here is the first photo, from Guillermo Del Toro's Cronos.

From "Ordet"

The boss jumped in

Edward Yang, 1947-2007

On my 30th birthday, I suddenly said to myself, 'Damn, I'm getting old!' I realized that I had to change my life. I needed to start doing something that I could enjoy and through which I could feel fulfilled.
-- Edward Yang, on quitting his computer engineering job to make films

I could do without anymore of that language

Everyone's looking

Shoes

But we won't tell her about this

I leave that mishigoss to the Catholics

The father of the hot dog cinema mustard new wave relish movement

I'm so fucking tired of trying to read something new about John Cassavetes, and instead continuing to be bombarded with people calling him "the father of American independent film," godfather of independent cinema, master of independent low-budget American cinema, ground zero independent film, independent film starts here, blah blah blah, shut the motherfucking fuck. He's not the founder, originator, or godfather of anything except John Cassavetes films. Maybe he's "independent" of the need to lick money publicly, but he's not "independent" of the influence of previous filmmakers, writers, musicians, chefs, cab drivers, fellow human beings, friends, love, hate, getting out of bed, going to sleep. What does "independent" mean? I know what it means in terms of "independent" film or "indie" rock. A mediocre product squeezed from the hard work and blood of unappreciated, hard-working artists and peddled to dogmatic youth cultures and consumerist apathetic couch potatoes alike by young men and women with no guts, balls, clits, or souls on behalf of old white men with enormous sums of money. This is obvious, pamphleteering stuff, and I'm in danger of sounding as stupid as what I'm complaining about. It's an unfortunate but shrewd result of the successful selling and consumption of mediocre, profitable capitalist American "culture" products that any complaint about this way of life sounds even stupider, shriller, more obvious, and more immature than the way of life itself. It's a testament to the incredible power, profitability, fashionability, and potential ridiculousness of film and music that these are the only two arts saddled with the meaningless buzzword "independent," or "indie" if you're lazy, or "Ms. Indie" if you're nasty. Have you ever heard anyone say, "I'm going to the museum to check out some indie art," or "I'm going to the library to pick up some indie books." This word means nothing. And if you think John Cassavetes is responsible for films like "Thumbsucker," "Boondock Saints," any movie about how the suburbs are secretly bad places, etc., you grossly misread not only his work, but life itself. Eat a fucking hot dog and shut up.

Leaning

Who lives?

1955's 2007

"What is the meaning of this revolution [in filmmaking]? To pass beyond the long period of submission to the manufactured product and openly renew links with the tradition of 1915, (D.W.) Griffith and Triangle, whose vitality moreover still nourished the work of the old Hollywood directors -- (Raoul) Walsh, (King) Vidor, (Allan) Dwan, and of course (Howard) Hawks; a return to lyricism, powerful feelings, melodrama (the audience at the smart halls sneer at (Nicholas) Ray's films as they did at Allan Dwan's); the rediscovery of a certain breadth of gesture, an externalizing of the roughest and most spontaneous emotions; in short, the rediscovery of naivete."
Jacques Rivette, "Notes on a Revolution" (1955)

We can't stop the dancing chicken

Helloooo....

The dirtiest sport in the world

Bug Off

Clip of the day

Since I'm going back to school soon and also keen to work on some non-blog writing projects, my blogs are going to be sporadically updated for the foreseeable future. To keep you from going away forever, I will put up some YouTube clips every day until I find something I want to write about and some time to do it. Here is the first daily film clip. (Ignore the sorta-smug actor voiceover about a minute in and look at the excellently chosen beautiful images instead. Or ignore what I just said and do what you want. Who am I to tell you what to do?)

I'm begging you

Favorite Actor Monday can take a hike this week and possibly every week hereafter. I still have plenty of favorites, but I've run out of things to say. Instead, I want to implore, beg, cajole, coerce, persuade, convince, and plead with anyone who reads this blog and lives in Austin to see Charles Burnett's "Killer of Sheep" at the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown Wednesday night at 7 p.m. (if you didn't see it tonight, although feel free to see it again if you did). Burnett shot this film on weekends in 1973 with a cast of mostly nonprofessionals as his master's thesis for UCLA film school. He finally completed it in 1977. (It is worth noting that film schools once encouraged filmmakers to make art about, with, and for their communities as a means in itself and now churn out a supply of inconsequential douchebags whose goals are to get on "Entertainment Tonight" and become famous and wealthy alumni making bullshit for morons.) It was one of the first 50 films chosen for the Library of Congress Film Registry, and has never been officially released until this year due to a failure to clear music rights. It will be released on DVD later this year for the first time, along with his second feature, "My Brother's Wedding," and two shorts, "The Horse" and "When It Rains." When even our best new filmmakers seem to be obsessed with monosyllabic infantile indie rock breakups with their girlfriends, it's absolutely energizing and life-affirming to see a film with such modesty and ambition, an expansive and empathetic vision encompassing many lives and a community, an intelligent and organic feel for film language, and an artistic perspective not stuck up its own asshole. This film is poetry. It's beautiful and deserves to be seen by as many people as possible. Please go see it.

Favorite Actor Monday

Apples and oranges, yes, even though I'm talking about brothers working the same profession, but cut me a little slack and let me say that Chris Penn was a better actor than Sean Penn. He wasn't as famous, didn't get as many leading roles, had to do some truly shitty movies, and was playing mostly bit parts at the time of his death, but at his best, Chris Penn made his older brother look like a schoolboy getting depantsed (or pantsed, depending on where you're from). Chris may have been felled by an appetite for booze, drugs, and mass quantities of food, but Sean has been killed by his own ponderous humorlessness. Sean Penn tries too hard and is way too serious about it. He's as far away from his own performance as Spicoli in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" as former president Dwight Eisenhower is from the nearest Burger King. Chris Penn was a fucking force of nature, scary and funny and natural and sad. Don't get me wrong. Sean Penn has turned in some incredible performances and directed some flawed but interesting films (particularly "The Indian Runner" and "The Pledge"). But he's no Chris Penn. Imagine Chris in "Mystic River" instead of Sean, and imagine a much better film. Raise your glasses and toast the forgotten Penn, our Favorite Actor of this Monday.















Recommended (a few of these movies are atrocious, but there's something happening when Chris Penn is on screen):
Rumble Fish (Francis Ford Coppola, 1983)
Footloose (Herbert Ross, 1984) (atrocioulicious)
At Close Range (James Foley, 1986)
Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1992)
Best of the Best 2 (Robert Radler, 1993) (I dare you to rent this movie)
Short Cuts (Robert Altman, 1993)
True Romance (Tony Scott, 1993)
Mulholland Falls (Lee Tamahori, 1996) (atrocious)
The Funeral (Abel Ferrara, 1996)
Masked and Anonymous (Larry Charles, 2003)
+
a couple of TV performances I caught on late-night reruns of particularly awful material actually being transformed to something more than watchable by Chris Penn's performance:
"Grave Young Men" episode of CSI:Miami (2003)
"Fanilow" episode of Will & Grace (2003)













I'd like to see Sean Penn be taught how to dance by Kevin Bacon in a musical montage and totally commit to it without worrying about looking ridiculous:

Favorite Actor Monday

What else is left to say about Marlene Dietrich? I don't have any new insights. However, I should probably write something. Here's three observations and a quote:
1) She exudes an intense sexuality that fills the screen and the room where the film is being projected or watched on television while she herself seems less interested in sex than any other person on earth. There is an odd yet thrilling disconnect between her effortlessly magnetic presence and her uninterested detachment from it. She's like a spider who doesn't give a damn about its web.
2) She doesn't get enough credit for being one of the greatest comedic actors. She's funny.
3) It's difficult to find a picture of her without a cigarette in her hand or mouth, and she loved to get drunk. Somehow, she lived to be 90.
4) "There is a lack of dignity to film stardom" - Marlene Dietrich.

Recommended:
The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930)
Dishonored (Josef von Sternberg, 1931)
Shanghai Express (Josef von Sternberg, 1932)
The Scarlet Empress (Josef von Sternberg, 1934)
A Foreign Affair (Billy Wilder, 1948)
Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)