I swung by the Dupont Olsson’s yesterday after work to make sure I got a copy of “The Last Lecture” to send to Marina. The publisher apparently didn’t print enough copies for the publicity that caught on. It was something like two weeks before we got the orders we placed - I told her she should get one from McAllen or somewhere, but she said she’d wait. Waiting for me also means not having to pay for it herself. Nice racket.
I picked up a copy of the 1953 film “Pickup On South Street” for rent, then I went home and promptly fell asleep for twelve hours. I was looking forward to getting a few things done. Oh well, at least I got a good night’s sleep. I woke up early and picked up where I left off… Groceries, Laundry, some light cleanup. And the movie.
It looked like just another 50’s crime drama, but it was in the Criterion Collection. I usually trust them. The film is about a pickpocket who steals a woman’s wallet on the New York subway. The drama arises from the fact that she doesn’t know that she’s delivering film negatives describing an industrial chemical recipe for communists. That film has to be retrieved, so she tracks down the thief, but as each character discovers part of the truth, motivations are misjudged.
“Pickup…” is also one of those films that takes place in a short interval. I guess I’m just used to stories that take place gradually. Or, everything of any importance in my life seems to take so damned long. Certainly, when one character’s feelings for another change, it’s impressive how quickly it happens.
I was startled by the bait shack on the waterfront where the pickpocket lives. It appears to be at the base of the Williamsburg bridge. The waterfront plays a big role in a crime drama - here you’re in a city surrounded by water, with a constant flux of people over bridges, on ferries, or through tunnels, but water communicates anonymity; the down-and-out. Water gives life, but if you have to live near it, you’ve somehow failed to master the ways of the city - of civilization.
Posted in film-and-TV | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Fri, 02 May 2008 17:12:00 GMT
If you followed what I said about “Long Photos”, then you should also look at the short film “Very Nice, Very Nice” by Arthur Lipsett.
From Kottke.org we learn that: Kubrick directed the Strangelove trailer himself in Lipsett’s style after Lipsett refused to work with Kubrick on it. I found this fascinating, and I just had to see the Lipsett original.
Posted in film-and-TV | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 29 Apr 2008 19:48:00 GMT
I think I had a pass for an advance screening of this movie in 2004, but I didn’t get to go. It just goes to show how skeptical I have become of the flood of new movies. With so much to choose from, I tend to block them all out, then get so frustrated I will watch anything. Lucky for me, I also have some good intuition - many good films I have seen were going to be good for reasons I couldn’t know. I skipped reasons altogether. That’s part of ‘judging a book by its cover’.
I doubt Code 46 did very well at the box office - Yet another fact I needn’t bother looking up. I spotted the DVD last year and remembered that I missed a chance to see it when it first came out. For one reason or another, I didn’t rent it. There were a lot of other movies to see. I think maybe Tim Robbins bothers me. I didn’t realize that Samantha Morton was the same actress from “Minority Report” who helped me get over my distrust of Tom Cruise for a hundred minutes. And, like “Minority Report”, the science fiction angle was a powerful draw, making it seem inevitable that I would watch this movie.
So one day I’m at the Dupont Olsson’s and I get a flash - Hey wait: there was a movie I wanted, but I can’t remember the name. The memory blended with the place - I had been looking at the case for that DVD, but which movie was it? I didn’t solve the problem that day - it was another day that I realized I was looking for ‘the science fiction movie with Tim Robbins in it’. We found it on IMDB, the store database showed a copy, but then it wasn’t on the rental shelf. Damn. Foiled again.
Yesterday was the culmination of my search: Darius, one of the music managers, saw me looking at the rentals and brought over a copy of Code 46 from the discount bin: “Ever since we talked about this, I’ve been seeing it everywhere.” It was cheap, and I have store credit to burn, so I broke my rule of thumb on renting movies versus buying, and took that sucker home. I figured it would sit right next to other under-appreciated SF classics like “Gattaca”.
And there were actually a few superficial similarities to “Gattaca”. They also played language games akin to “Blade Runner” or the “Firefly” series. The documentary made a self-conscious remark about the futurism of the film: If you want to see the future, just look around you. Kind of harks back to the “The future is here - it’s just unevenly distributed” remark, eh?
Genetics plays a key role. I’ll try not to spoil it too much for you, but once again - the future is already here. In “Gattaca” also, the world of technology presumes to tell you what you can and can’t do, but here the danger is related to widespread in-vitro fertilization. I thought it was blown out of proportion, but the basic message still applies. Your girlfriend could be a clone of your mother, and you wouldn’t know it. Any Oedipal issues in that? Well why don’t you watch the film and find out?
In “Firefly”, characters pepper their English with Chinese - mainly it’s cussing. The presumption being that this occasional outburst of emphasis will not render it unintelligible to English-speaking audiences, while still indicating that the characters use a somewhat different language, evolved by contact with others. “Blade Runner” chose to mix in Spanish and Japanese in a patois - it also constructs the class lines on a linguistic basis: The poor and stupid are the ones less likely to speak English. Odious but effective. “Code 46” presented an even harder to follow mix of Arabic, French, Spanish… Although it’s interesting how English dominates: As if everyone grew up speaking English, and English has simply borrowed a lot of vocabulary, like a few replacement bulbs on a Christmas tree.
Lastly, the environmental decay: Everywhere is a desert. This prompted a tongue-in-cheek remark about “studying the Road Runner cartoons in school”. There is a barely explored ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, the way “Firefly” sorts its planets and moons into ‘core’ and ‘edge’. If anything, it all reminds me of a television commercial for sunglasses that tint themselves in strong sunlight. I hated that commercial and its futurism - In the future, everybody’s glasses will transition from dark to light: You mean we’ll still be wearing glasses in the future?!?! I was hoping for something better than that. But the point seems to be that people don’t just live in sophisticated climate control, they need special insurance permission to venture out. The power and control of this arrangement are on view, but never traced. The plot grows out of the fact that somebody has been getting counterfeit passes. You might wonder “Who the hell cares?”, but that’s the germ of the problem right there: Somebody in control does care, and the society conforms.
Posted in film-and-TV | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sat, 26 Apr 2008 22:21:00 GMT
One more in my series of future British dystopias. Joining “Children of Men”, “28 Days Later”, (and let’s not forget “Brazil”) is (“V Is For Vendetta”)[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0434409/]. I’ve now watched it twice, and for all the superficial criticism of Britain, it’s also a film critical of America. The depiction of aprehension and interrogation by secret police was already familiar to me from “Brazil”, but it still strikes fear to see it again. There’s all the predictable means and ends chatter, and the Fascist look and feel to the regime.
The ending was a bit sappy - for a brief moment there, I thought I was watching an Amnesty International commercial - but don’t let that stop you. The most important message comes in the middle of the film anyway: A government can wage a campaign of terror more effectively than any rogue group (or in this case individual - I love how the mock news reports refer to him as an organization). Regimes that rely on torture, such as Argentina or Egypt once did, engender a culture where life has less meaning. Where disappearances are the cost of doing business, and anybody could be next. Except that I’m sure I won’t be next, because I haven’t done anything wrong - and those criminals get what they deserve.
Posted in film-and-TV | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sat, 29 Mar 2008 19:02:00 GMT
Michael Clayton
In The Shadow Of The Moon
Antonio Gaudi
The interesting thing I notice here is that these three films are very different: You’ve got a mainstream big-budget Hollywood flick, a talking-head documentary with NASA footage, and a wordless appreciation of a unique Spanish architect by a Japanese director. You might say my tastes are ‘eclectic’.
Where is my Gaudi biography? I must have forwarded that on to Marina. The film doesn’t identify the buildings in any way, so I recognize a few and can name fewer. Perhaps the book would offer more guidance, but then again maybe not… I don’t remember much of a catalog. I would be relying on captions alone. The Takemitsu compostions are haunting and ethereal: burblings of bass from a synthesizer give a foundation to what sounds like glass harmonica, orchestra and percussion. I’m reminded of Vangelis. Some of the churches are bathed in organ but at other moments I get a distinct medieval feeling.
“In the Shadow of the Moon” had a lot of the surviving Apolo astronauts talking, but this was well balanced by archival NASA footage and excellent music. The DVD contains additional interviews that were off topic, and a special about the composer and his orchestra. A launch sequence in the film has music in a distinct 19th century American pioneer mode. I didn’t need to be told the significance of this sound - it reminded me of the best music in Firefly, where the outer planets have been colonized by pioneers strangely western for the future of space exploration.
I should have more to say about Michael Clayton. I respect this film for what it is, and how it accomplishes a little bit more than I expected: There is a hauntingly beautiful moment where this ruthless janitor of a lawyer (“You’ve got all the Cops thinking you’re a Lawyer and all the Lawyers thinking you’re a Cop.”) has a humbling encounter with nature. The horses in the field reminded me of the horses running in “28 Days Later” oblivious to the affairs of humanity… And then it’s Rewind! and we get the whole story from the ‘beginning’, if there is such a thing. The climax is not to be missed. He avenges his dead friend and settles the matter, but he is still profoundly unaware of what happens next. The final scene conjures up the fading euphoria at the end of “The Graduate” and a little bit of the face held in the frame I associate with Kurosawa films.
Posted in film-and-TV | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 27 Mar 2008 14:42:00 GMT
Today’s movie was Walker. It’s newly released on Criterion. Can you believe that Americans went to make a film in Nicaragua in 1987?
The Iran-Contra affair was a major event during my formative political years. But it turns out that it wasn’t anything particularly new. William Walker invaded Nicaragua in the 1850’s and even became president for a couple of years.
Right now I’m taking a second pass through the movie with the commentary on. There are some deliberate anachronisms scattered through the film to force the parallel between Nicaragua then and Nicaragua now (whoops - I mean the 1980’s).
Watching the documentary was more informative. There were Nicaraguan elementary school students who knew more about William Walker than I did. How much of that is propaganda? A truth that supports doctrine is liable to be the first lesson. Teachers are probably relieved that in this lesson at least, there is no need to bend the truth. It’s a high-priority truth in service of opinion. In 1987, there were a lot of Leftist Americans in Nicaragua as tourists. They were collectively known as the “Sandalistas”. Quite a few of the Sandalistas became extras in the film. The filmmakers were not all that different: They saw the American government meddling in the affairs of a sovereign nation and wanted to teach the relevant history lesson. Heck - Joe Strummer of The Clash wrote the music for the film and appears as an extra. Isn’t one of the Clash albums called “Sandanista”? You see how it all fits together? I was getting my history lessons from The Clash at an early age. Rock the Casbah!
And the commentary was recorded for the release of the video on Criterion. The Director Alex Cox and the Writer Rudy Wurlitzer talked over the film, and it was very entertaining. They had all sorts of things to say about the newly emergent parallels to our subsequent war in Iraq. William Walker is an American Archetype. Eliminate one and there are more behind him, ready to take his place. Heck, we’re still using today some of the same arguments and techniques you find in Walker’s journals. Monroe doctrine and all.
Posted in film-and-TV | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 23 Mar 2008 20:51:00 GMT
Let’s talk about Yugoslavian director Dusan Makavejev.
Yugoslavia is located in… Wait. What?
Well, I can’t find it in my atlas anymore. I guess it doesn’t exist. I seem to remember hearing about it in the news.
Nevertheless, Makavejev still exists. And I just watched “WR: Misterjie Organisma”. It is a movie about Communism, Wilhelm Reich, and Sexual Liberation.
[More Later…]
Posted in film-and-TV | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 23 Mar 2008 15:52:00 GMT
I borrowed the X-Files movie from my boss. She’s a big fan of the series - I once borrowed every season from her and watched them in order. When it came up in discussion that I couldn’t remember if I had seen the movie, she brought it in for me. No doubt I watched her copy a few years ago. It was strangely familiar… Like I had seen it before. Of course, that’s partly the effect of having watched the entire ouvre over a short interval several years ago. A lot of episodes blur into one another in my memory. I didn’t have the experience of watching it gradually week after week, year after year. I also saw a lot of reruns on TV for a while there.
I was amused by the scene where the “Doctor” tells Agent Muldur all about how FEMA is a shadow government that springs into action to contain and cover up alien virus outbreaks. I wanted to dub that monologue over footage of flood-damaged New Orleans.
I’ve got some advice for conspiracy theorists - Maybe this will only make things worse: The spectacle is probably not the story. Conspiracies are complicated business - most of the work goes into keeping the secret when there are so many opportunities to let it slip. Criminal plans are foiled all the time by loose talk or a nervous twitch. The more things that go wrong, the more preparation and insurance, and the more tightly coupled elements. People are going to notice you went to a lot of trouble to do something - even if they’re not sure what that something was.
[I should have more to say later…]
Posted in film-and-TV | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 20 Mar 2008 17:24:00 GMT
4:32 PM 3/8/2008
This morning I watched the movie This Is England. It is a story of a young boy who falls in with some skinheads in 1983.
11:49 AM 3/10/2008
I can’t say enough good things about this movie. When I took it off the shelf, the manager asked me if it was a documentary. I nearly fell for that, too: From the cover you could be forgiven for thinking it. But the story is semi-autobiographical: It follows a true story from the director’s childhood.
The structure of the movie is excellent: As soon as our protagonist is accepted by a clique of older kids, their old leader returns after doing time in prison. The unexplored past suddenly becomes palpable. The group is split by the leader’s newfound nationalist rhetoric, and the young boy is drawn to that rhetoric and away from his new friends. Violence eventually results from that logic of nationalism set against the unrevealed tragedies of the past. And, the young boy’s transformation is very moving. The acceptance and brotherhood (and fashion sense!) he signed on for turn sour and he’s left questioning the ‘meaning of it all’.
Posted in film-and-TV | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 10 Mar 2008 16:32:00 GMT
I am vaguely aware of the forces that drive the creation of feature-length movies. And, I actually prefer my art flawed. So it should make sense that the films of Wes Anderson have a tendency to amuse and upset me at the same time.
Ever see his AT&T commercials? He’s got an amazing set design team. They like to build solid looking sets that can be pulled apart and rolled away at a moment’s notice. These must have been theater people: film doesn’t really require such quick changes - but it can help economize production. The boat in “Life Aquatic” was mostly a stage set, and it supplies an obvious cartoon quality to their real surroundings. In “Darjeeling”, they have struck again: Only this time, they converted a real train into a stage, with a lot of removable panels to peer into one compartment with a fly-on-the-wall perspective.
“Darjeeling” also used a lot of slow-motion. There is a repeating gag where one or all of the brothers is running to catch a train as it is rolling away. This is compounded by the slowly dawning reality that they are burdened by their dead father’s luggage. We don’t get much about the father: The three brothers have not spoken since the funeral one year prior, and you can devise your own theories about the nature of their eccentric family. What’s Bill Murray doing in the film? I think he represents their father - this seems obvious to me the more I think about it: Murray is listed only as “The Businessman”. His character is hurtling through through an Indian city as a passenger in a taxi, clearly late for a train (gee, I don’t know what that feels like - In India your train isn’t usually on time anyway, so you’re never sure if you should be panicking yet…). He isn’t fast enough to catch that train as it leaves, and Peter - the Adrian Brody character - overtakes him and jumps on. He is out of place, and a little ridiculous (which happens in India sometimes. Um… stop laughing, Amanda). But the key to the Bill Murray character is provided near the end when they have an amazing dream-time sequence where the cars of a train contain memories/reminders of their lives. Not flashbacks, exactly, but a mixture of their concerns. If you’ve read this far, I’ll give you a minor spoiler: The movie is about carrying too much baggage, which they have literally been doing the whole time. This is why I think he represents their father - he’s a ghost.
Another signature device of “Darjeeling” is the shots of the three brothers lined up: Mainly sitting on a bench together: the back seat of scooter rickshaws, a bus, a limousine, a temple, and the train berth. There is a good shot of all three of them riding together on a moped (with the luggage following them in a scooter rickshaw). The scenes of them running to catch the train and one of them walking out on the tarmac to catch a plane establish the theme. And, best of all, a slow motion shot of them walking through a village to join a funeral procession they’ve been invited to. On one level all these shots of the three brothers together are too blunt, but there is enough variation in context to make it interesting each time.
I don’t want my art to be hyper-realistic. There is at least one conversation that has an extremely obvious double-meaning - a little too formally significant for daily life. Or, maybe I just don’t remember making a lot of mundane remarks that could be construed as personal growth while I was in India. The scene of the dream-train that I mentioned earlier echoes the ‘Let Me Tell You About My Boat’ scene in “Life Aquatic”. I’m very impressed by the feeling of both scenes - that we are viewing the next best thing to a mental model of reality, not just eavesdropping on incidents from somebody else’s life.
Posted in film-and-TV | 1 comment | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 03 Mar 2008 15:38:00 GMT
