d+kaz

Ever more, sorry for the lack of detail:

Around the Bay (Adams, 2008) - better than Canary, and reminds me a great deal of Resnais.  The structure of the sound design is very ostentatious but wonderful.  Title seems to not quite work as a title but fits so very well as something allusive and suggestive in meaning.

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (Scott, 2009) - liked it, wrote on it for The Auteurs.

The Fountainhead (Vidor, 1949) - what a strange post-war creature this is.  All the more so pairing the barely-the-lead-actor Gary Cooper with the Strangest Looking Lead Actress, Patricia Neal.  A masterpiece but I have no organized thoughts about it.

The Hangover (Philips, 2009) - “A Todd Philips movie”?  That’s the most pretentious thing I’ve seen in film in 2009, and I just came back from Cannes!  Opening credit sequence is nice, as is Ed Helm, but this thing never takes its concept anywhere interesting, over or under the top.

My Left Eye Sees Ghosts (To/Wai, 2002) - saw this as prep for an interview with Wai, who I thought directed it solo.  Credits tell me no, but film tells me yes.  Would love to rib hard-core auteurist To acolytes to know where they see him in this.

Breathless (Yang, 2009) - wrote a bit about this at The Auteurs.

Scenes from Under Childhood (Brakhage)

Written By (Wai, 2009) - wrote about this at The Auteurs.

Year One (Ramis, 2009) - will be writing about this for The Auteurs, but I say skip it (the film that is).

Bunny Lake is Missing (Preminger, 1965) - I haven’t watched a Preminger in a while, and seeing this reminds me how much Resnais is indebted to him, and how much the ending of Muriel relies on Preminger as an inspiration.  Oh, and how weird is the ending of this movie?  Seems to devolve, right?, away from the concept of the psycho-drama, but only gets more unsettling unresolved and opens more bizarre psycho-doors in the story.  It explains away the plot mystery but does nothing but introduce things that undercut all that safety and satisfaction.

Whatever Works (Allen, 2009) - will be writing about this for The Auteurs, but I say see it (the film that is).

Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen (Bay, 2009) - I swear I quite liked this movie, thought it was rad, and not to be one of those jerkish contrarian high brows.  It moved better, faster, and less smugly than the previous film, and the greater amount of fights combats all the more with ILM’s insane attention to CGI detail.

The Exploding Girl (Gray, 2009) - really lovely, and, finally, an American indie that uses tripods and precise editing.  My hat’s off.  Still lacks details of the real world outside of emotional/romantic sensation, which is a real detriment to the film and to films like this in general, but gets so much right in comparison to the wrongs currently being made by similar filmmakers that it is hard to stay mad.

Maine-Océan (Rozier, 1986) - uncategorizable, difficult to talk about, absolutely brilliant.  Wandering, free form, surrealist (pace David Phelps), fresh, so fresh.  Rozier never made a full feature again?

10 Rillington Place (Fleischer, 1971) - as a good friend would say, this is some real ham and cheese.  Only John Hurt escapes with some tenderness, and the rest never really settles on any of the angles  that would make the story interesting.  And it relies on ham and cheese.

I don’t want to give any sort of impression that I’m keeping this site regularly updated or even that my updates accurately reflect any sort of movie-going or -thinking on my part, but sheesh let me at least mention what I’ve seen recently:

Man Hunt (Lang, 1941) — long awaited and a strange creature once met.  First third is from another world, a lean and mean version of Lang’s bloated, caddish millionaire espionage silent hero-tales.  I wrote a little something on this at The Auteurs.

Star Trek (Abrams, 2009) — pure television, in the pejorative sense.  Only the frequent use of rainbow lens flares by the camera hint at Abrams realizing he’s making something for the big screen.  Really stellar casting, a good stylish look, but utterly forgettable in the long run, no color or specifics, no rough edges.

Adoration (Egoyan, 2008) — another movie that’s not a movie.  Watching this was like reading an academic thesis on grief, trauma, and media.  A bad thesis.

The Champ (Vidor, 1931) — I’m just starting to dip my toes into Vidor’s work, which is clearly something earthy, real, and splendid.  This is all that and more.  Someone needs to revive early 1930s cinema for Our Current Depression and give it the profound media attention it deserves.  Where is The Champ of 2009 (or the Me and My Gal or 7th Heaven or…)?

Canary (Adams, 2009)—a curious film that courts excitment in the same way a Tourneur film courts poetry—sidelong and unexpected.  Well deserves the praise it’s getting in a conspiratorial-type way around the internet.

Long answer short, I was lucky enough to be able to attend the Cannes Film Festival this year and covered it for The Auteurs here.  Enjoy!

As this site falls in continual under use due to editorial activity at The Auteurs, I thought I’d at least give a semblance, in broadside, of what I’ve been watching since last I posted here. In terms of film writing, you’ll have to go to The Auteurs for that.

The Man Who Left His Will on Film (Oshima, 1970)
Bed and Board (Truffaut, 1970)
Lousiana Story (Flaherty, 1948)
Alexander the Last (Swanberg, 2009)
Adventureland (Mottola, 2009)
Purchase Price (Wellman, 1933)
About Elly (Farhadi, 2009)
Pleasures of the Flesh (Oshima, 1966)
Other Men’s Wives (Wellman, 1931)
Love One Another (Dreyer, 1922)
Heroes for Sale (Wellman, 1933)
Cloak and Dagger (Lang, 1946)
Séance (Kurosawa, 2000)
Master of the House (Dreyer, 1925)
The Bride of Glomdal (Dreyer, 1926)
Il Generale della Rovere (Rossellini, 1959)
Two Lovers (Gray, 2009)
The Stendhal Syndrome (Argento, 1999)
Japanese Girls at the Harbor (Shimizu, 1933)
Ornamental Hairpin (Shimizu, 1941)
The Masseurs and the Woman (Shimizu, 1939)
Leave Her to Heaven (Stahl, 1949)
A l’aventure (Brisseau, 2009)
The Shopaholics (Wai, 2006)
This Day and Age (DeMille, 1933)
No Greater Glory (Borzage, 1934)
15 Year Old Girl (Doillon, 1988)
Villa Amalia (Jacquot, 2009)
Bellamy (Chabrol, 2009)

Director: Yoshishige Yoshida. Country: Japan. Year: 1969. Format: Film.
This had been hanging around my must-see list for so long as to curdle into vague assumptions and baffled expectations. The result was so out of left field that even the film’s rather extreme sense of time and tedium was not enough to click into its mindset. I can say that this should be sandwiched between L’Amour fou and Zabriskie Point as one of the more epic studies of late-60s revolutionary youth. Yoshida’s exceedingly cryptic use of Japanese history was borderline impenetrable to me, or maybe it didn’t matter; half of the film’s focus is on a revolutionary/anarchist/feminist couple in the 1910s but instead of focusing on their nationalist or humanist politics Yoshida is interested in their social politics. But perhaps that’s even a misnomer, for, like the other half of the film that sets its sight on two wanton, wandering revolutionary youths in 1969 Japan, struggling against and for the same things as those in the past with seemingly no progress made except in how each can express their turmoil, Eros Plus Massacre’s actual angle of attack is very obscure. It certainly isn’t psychological drama, and I don’t think it is even representational in its depiction of humans, which makes the near-kammerspiel-like approach to the 1910s section truly baffling and abstract. Combine this with Yoshida’s ultra-rare quality of truly baring Antonioni’s torch of extreme, two-dimensional graphic compositions—the framing throughout is nearly catastrophically off-center—as to really ask fundamentally questions like “why?” Utterly perplexing, but clearly utterly requisite. I haven’t quite figured out why it is either of those things, at least not yet.

Director: Kazuo Kuroki. Country: Japan. Year: 1966. Format: Film.
I feel like in describing a certain kind of movie, that where the narrative supposedly travels with an object rather than a character, the descriptions over-emphasize how literal this conceit is. Yes, Winchester ‘73 and Madame de… are sort of structured around a rifle and a pair of earrings respectively, but it isn’t until I saw this film, which is narratively structured around the movements of a caterpillar around Japan, that the purity of the idea, as well as its failings, come to light. The episodic content is mostly lame, and despite Kuroki’s exuberance in filmmaking (this is his debut feature), the film really needed someone smartly, slyly subversive like Oshima or Masumura to both reign in a degree of stable intelligence to the story and the style, as well as clarify it for greater political oomph. That being said, the final reel, where the caterpillar seems to precipitate the re-militarization of Japan, inspire gang wars, and perhaps trigger an atomic bomb detonation point towards these object-narratives as being most exciting when the non-empathetic inspires the non-empathetic, objects precipitating a pleasurably distanced unfolding of uninvolved events.

Director: Jacques Doillon. Country: France. Year: 1996. Format: Film.

If we can describe Maurice Pialat’s movies as raw-raw, I venture to say that Jacques Doillon’s are, after seeing 1996’s Ponette, are sleek-raw: the emotion is there as frighteningly strong and frontal as Pialat’s, but Doillon’s characters put a face on top of that emotion.  It is not a mask per se, but it is a face of someone constantly thinking, constantly considering.  We see them feel, but before that we see them thinking about what they are feeling.  It puts a layer between their truest emotions and the world around them, as if they have to first process the drama, process the situation that is happening to them right now before they can absorb it and feel something.  In fact, Ponette, which is about the eponymous girl (eerily, affectingly and effectively played by Victoire Thivisol), is entirely about watching this young girl process, absorb, fight, and come to terms with the fact that her mother just died.  The plot has her grasp at and discard a variety of quasi-religious, quasi-mystical attempts to recapture her mother: unable to conjure her up at night, she turns to God to try to speak to her mother, but unable to speak to God she then tries to conjure up God.  While on paper the story seems like it could be a tritely allegorial tale of the rationale behind searching for and being disappointed by different kinds of faith, Doillon’s attention is entirely turned to how Thivisol (as the character but perhaps more disturbingly as an actress) thinks, considers, and is consternated and frustrated by her feelings and her thoughts and her inability to rectify them with the world.  This is why practically the entire movie is shot in long lens with the characters constantly moving back and forth sideways along the x-axis of the frame: pursuing and fleeing one another, always thinking, always on the move, processing, trying to figure the thing out, whatever the thing may be.  I’m actually surprised the film can hold up it’s 90-some-odd-minute run time, for, all due consideration given to Doillon’s story, Ponette is simply about the way Ponette thinks (and the look and feel of this thinking) as she walks back and forth.

Director: Clint Eastwood. Country: USA. Year: 2008.

Ever since Million Dollar Baby, Clint Eastwood’s films have all had the same look, the same feel: studies in gray palette of a world filled with people being drained, pulled ever so slowly away from life on an opaque transition—not a path, far from a journey—from one world to the next.  The plots, even the characters, hardly seem to matter: boxer, soldier (American, Japanese), child, murder, mother, old man, all live in a world whose pale white light, bleaching the image into the monochrome of old photographs, exerts a mortal gravitational force upon them.

Gran Torino, the filmmaker’s second movie of 2008, is little different in focus from that of Changling, although, as always, the genre and the story shift, a new, quintessentially American archetype tested by a man who has lived his stardom as an example of that archetype.  Much has been said about Eastwood not just acting in Gran Torino, but the role screenwriters Nick Schenk and Dave Johannson have written for him: a guilt-ridden, irascible old man whose calloused prejudices are a defensive barrier against the unchanging guilt inside him and the flux of the world outside, Dirty Harry in old age or some such triteness.  Yes, alright, but as always this engagement with archetypes is Eastwood merely roping us in through things we recognize—the man brandishing a humongous pistol, the gravel voice growling bestial dissatisfaction along with nasty threats.  Yet once we’re in, we find this particular death trip one of simple comedy; a comedy almost broad yet too earnest not to be funny.  In its utterly straightforward delve into a man and a community’s preference for tradition to fend off death, Gran Torino presents the absurdities of defensiveness against the inevitable.  That it takes the form of finding much to laugh about in racist slurs, a dying old man’s gumption, and the erratically impoverished and gang-threatened neighborhoods of a decaying American suburb marks the film as a surprise—and a somber, moving one at that—rather than the easy read of finding it stupidly simplified, or silly.

What more can one say about a film that shares a final shot with the best film of 2008, Jacques Rivette’s Ne Touchez pas la hache (The Duchess of Langeois), with the notably cringeworthy exception of Gran Torino featuring closing credits music garbled out by Eastwood singing in character?  That clanker of a song is another instance, perhaps, of the film’s challenging side-by-side salvo of comedy and melodrama to craft an utterly laconic picture of a man admitting not only that he has to die, but, as in all these recent Eastwood films, that he has to die right.  Almost without pacing, containing only a handful of trite plot points delivered through stilted dialog from mostly unconvincing actors, the film typifies a style of late, old-age auteur filmmaking, giving the sense of a camera simply following the actor/director around as he improvises the bare bones of a movie on location around a stalk, resonate theme and stock assets.  The result—again—is surprising.  Far from the bloated, everywhichway Changling of this year, Gran Torino contains within its strangely tight wanderings the utter, dexterous precision of drama—comedy and tragedy–given not to intellect and consideration, but to profound conviction and feeling.

Director: Clint Eastwood. Screenplay: Nick Schenk, Dave Johannson. Cast: Clint Eastwood, Bee Vang, Anhey Her. Country: USA. Year: 2008.

Director: Clint Eastwood. Country: USA. Year: 2008. Format: Film.

Review coming soon…