October 29
Festival over, back to the grind. More to come...
AMERICAN MADNESS (Frank Capra, 1932) (66)
[This would've been my second viewing of THE PASSENGER but it completely sold out one of the flagship Leicester Square theatres, with dozens of people (incl. me) having to be turned away. Go, cryptic glacially-paced Euro-art!]
BUBBLE (Steven Soderbergh) (72)
Soderbergh's a genius, but his films all feel like exercises; his genius lies in the problems he keeps setting himself, and the ease with which he solves them. Here it's the line between reality and unreality - specifically the Lynchian unreality of mundane small-town lives - visualised in a kind of stylistic schizophrenia: the style is affectless, matching the content (vending machines, mustard-yellow walls, a sign reading "Customer Orientation"), yet the style also erupts at intervals - first in a gratuitous wide-angle pan (the most 'unreal' of moves, literally twisting the fabric of the image), then a series of extreme close-ups when the heroine goes to church, a red flag alerting us to her inner life. If she's super-religious she doesn't show it - but of course that's the point, people living in a bubble so they never see the bigger picture (their life, we're explicitly told, is like the life of a doll); something awful happens and we - who can see the bigger picture - are encouraged to sift for clues, like a cinematic game of 'Where's Waldo?' (was it jealousy? religious mania? remember the way she stopped chewing when the girl revealed she was a single mother?), but of course it remains unexplained. There's a constant tension in the way Soderbergh views these people - they're allowed dignity and feeling, but the film is very aloof and doesn't exactly sympathise; they're not mocked, Solondz-style, but some scenes are played for laughs (it's quite reminiscent of FARGO); it's a character piece about Ordinary People, but shot almost entirely in impersonal wide-shot. The result manages to be utterly banal and utterly strange, which is pretty much the idea; one shot seems to reference Edward Hopper - his famous painting of someone sitting in a bar behind an awning, seen from out in the street - and I think that's what he's trying for, that sense of quotidian anomie as autistic poetry. Cold but brilliant, and only a genius could've got those performances out of non-pros.
'DESOLATION ROW': Avant-Garde Program
For Them Ending (Jonathan Schwartz)
Neptune's Release: A Shot in the Dark (Joell Hallowell, Jacalyn White)
The Bleeding Heart of It All [L'Eclat du Mal] (Louise Bourque)
Terrace 49 (Janie Geiser)
The Two Minutes to Zero Trilogy (Lewis Klahr) (*)
Trilogy About Clouds (Naoyuki Tsuji)
nostalgia (april 2001 to present) (Christina Battle)
(*): I know some people - actually it's more like one person - consider this one of the greatest films of the 00s, so I feel I ought to say something. I basically had two problems here, which were (a) the first segment ("Two Days to Zero"?) felt repetitive, and I couldn't see why the awesome juxtaposition of judder-cam and dreamy 60s pop needed to be stretched out to 20 minutes (beyond the fact that it was, in fact, awesome); and (b) it felt like the 'narrative' should be getting clearer as we moved towards the Moment of Truth, but in fact I was just as hazy on the details after "Two Minutes" as I was after "Days"; if Klahr is playing on the impulse to construct a narrative out of related fragments (itself an act of textual violence), as we do in comic-books and of course in movies, shouldn't a narrative in fact be constructed? That said, there were several bits when the juddering was perfectly in sync with the music that were blissful and (surprisingly) a real adrenalin rush - the music harnesses the judder or something, the violence of the camera-move gets gloved by the phrase of music so it feels more potent (yet the music is gentle so the feeling isn't corrupted; it's luxurious, like a ride in a powerful car). I'm rambling; still, I dug this movie.
SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM: TAKE ONE (William Greaves, 1968) (82)
Wow. Who knew, etc.
AMERICAN MADNESS (Frank Capra, 1932) (66)
[This would've been my second viewing of THE PASSENGER but it completely sold out one of the flagship Leicester Square theatres, with dozens of people (incl. me) having to be turned away. Go, cryptic glacially-paced Euro-art!]
BUBBLE (Steven Soderbergh) (72)
Soderbergh's a genius, but his films all feel like exercises; his genius lies in the problems he keeps setting himself, and the ease with which he solves them. Here it's the line between reality and unreality - specifically the Lynchian unreality of mundane small-town lives - visualised in a kind of stylistic schizophrenia: the style is affectless, matching the content (vending machines, mustard-yellow walls, a sign reading "Customer Orientation"), yet the style also erupts at intervals - first in a gratuitous wide-angle pan (the most 'unreal' of moves, literally twisting the fabric of the image), then a series of extreme close-ups when the heroine goes to church, a red flag alerting us to her inner life. If she's super-religious she doesn't show it - but of course that's the point, people living in a bubble so they never see the bigger picture (their life, we're explicitly told, is like the life of a doll); something awful happens and we - who can see the bigger picture - are encouraged to sift for clues, like a cinematic game of 'Where's Waldo?' (was it jealousy? religious mania? remember the way she stopped chewing when the girl revealed she was a single mother?), but of course it remains unexplained. There's a constant tension in the way Soderbergh views these people - they're allowed dignity and feeling, but the film is very aloof and doesn't exactly sympathise; they're not mocked, Solondz-style, but some scenes are played for laughs (it's quite reminiscent of FARGO); it's a character piece about Ordinary People, but shot almost entirely in impersonal wide-shot. The result manages to be utterly banal and utterly strange, which is pretty much the idea; one shot seems to reference Edward Hopper - his famous painting of someone sitting in a bar behind an awning, seen from out in the street - and I think that's what he's trying for, that sense of quotidian anomie as autistic poetry. Cold but brilliant, and only a genius could've got those performances out of non-pros.
'DESOLATION ROW': Avant-Garde Program
For Them Ending (Jonathan Schwartz)
Neptune's Release: A Shot in the Dark (Joell Hallowell, Jacalyn White)
The Bleeding Heart of It All [L'Eclat du Mal] (Louise Bourque)
Terrace 49 (Janie Geiser)
The Two Minutes to Zero Trilogy (Lewis Klahr) (*)
Trilogy About Clouds (Naoyuki Tsuji)
nostalgia (april 2001 to present) (Christina Battle)
(*): I know some people - actually it's more like one person - consider this one of the greatest films of the 00s, so I feel I ought to say something. I basically had two problems here, which were (a) the first segment ("Two Days to Zero"?) felt repetitive, and I couldn't see why the awesome juxtaposition of judder-cam and dreamy 60s pop needed to be stretched out to 20 minutes (beyond the fact that it was, in fact, awesome); and (b) it felt like the 'narrative' should be getting clearer as we moved towards the Moment of Truth, but in fact I was just as hazy on the details after "Two Minutes" as I was after "Days"; if Klahr is playing on the impulse to construct a narrative out of related fragments (itself an act of textual violence), as we do in comic-books and of course in movies, shouldn't a narrative in fact be constructed? That said, there were several bits when the juddering was perfectly in sync with the music that were blissful and (surprisingly) a real adrenalin rush - the music harnesses the judder or something, the violence of the camera-move gets gloved by the phrase of music so it feels more potent (yet the music is gentle so the feeling isn't corrupted; it's luxurious, like a ride in a powerful car). I'm rambling; still, I dug this movie.
SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM: TAKE ONE (William Greaves, 1968) (82)
Wow. Who knew, etc.
posted by Theo at 11:57 PM
1 Comments:
Um yeah, I'm always pretty low-key in my post-film reactions. This is on account of being too damn cool for the whole enthusiasm thing.
I *would* have been raving about Symbiopsycho, though. It's a real shame you couldn't stay for that one - with Greaves himself in attendance! Try and catch it if it ever turns up. Wildly enjoyable.
Also, yes. Egoyan = misunderstood. It's a mess but a potent mess in my (and the Hack's) opinion(s).
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