There’s a new “edition” (new to my knowledge) of Oliver Laric’s Versions posted to his website. This time, Laric makes use of Disney’s penchant for reusing animation cells and the Romans’ tendency to copy Greek artwork to riff on the status of the image, which Laric argues is not watered down by but in fact requires reproduction (and always has). Laric’s versions are essential to any understanding of the multiplicities of the internet—-I’m extremely grateful for this one.
Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)
Leaving Inception yesterday, my cousin and I made for the Exit door immediately below the screen. Walking briskly down the subsequent staircase, we found ourselves finally at an Emergency Exit door that wouldn’t open. An architectural dead-end.
Inception–sort of a millennium generation answer to The Matrix– is about fantasy worlds within the mind, and the tenuous grip that people who indulge in fantasy maintain on reality. In the requisite exposition-heavy section of the movie, as Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) explain the rules of Inception’s world to newbie dream-architect Ariadne (Ellen Page), they demonstrate how the architects of their brand of manipulated dreams cut corners through spacial paradoxes and architectural dead-ends. Much like the hidden limitations of a video game world, the horizon isn’t infinite. (more…)
I’ve been trying, desperately, to come up with something intelligent to say about Toy Story 3 (something other than, “My mother and I cried watching this movie). With any luck, that review will be up here by the end of the week (any luck, really…). For now, I’ve been able to distract myself with the trailer for the film New Jerusalem, which stars Will Oldham. I love Oldham’s music and his acting, so I’ll be keeping and eye out for this one. As Vulture points out, his output is prolific. But it’s his presence in films–heartfelt, bizarre, genuinely talented and pleasurable to watch–that always fascinates me. This one looks no different.
I spent two rainy, somewhat cold, humid days in Paris last week. Exhausted and dirty, I felt like a young hero from a Balzac novel: none of the nobility, all of the fervor. At least I wasn’t wearing Tevas and crew socks. (more…)
I’ve been plagued by jet lag for the past few days, waking up around 4 wide-eyed and unable to roll over and talk in my sleep for hours (like I’d like to). It’s a nice, icy blue time of day–good to catch up on some reading, but even better to do some lonely home viewing. Here are a few of the things I’ve been enjoying at unlikely hours.
1. Breaking Bad — Okay, maybe you shouldn’t watch this at 4 AM: its tone is downright apocalyptic; and it’s more melodramatic than AMC’s other amazing offering, Mad Men. But Breaking Bad is not only engrossing and addicting, it’s pointed and truly modern in a way that fills a void left by The Wire and The Sopranos. The Season 3 premiere might be the best “the way we live now” ever.
2. By Brakhage — I’ve been revisiting these in preparation for the day when I buy Volume Two. Watching Brakhage without the flicker of the projector can be bizarre, but on DVD in the deserted morning it seems perfect: just let yourself zoom in, frame by frame, and watch everything pass and flow. But don’t look at it like a painting: it’s a film.
3. JFK — Why, yes, a healthy dose of epic conspiracy theory before the sun rises is more enjoyable than at night with friends. Paranoia is better in the dawn? Maybe. Don DeLillo in the evening, by the fire; Oliver Stone in the morning, with coffee. Back and to the left.
4. The Silent World — You’ve seen The Life Aquatic. Now spring for the real thing: Jacques Cousteau and Louis Malle collaborated on this Oscar winning documentary which seems timelier now more than ever. All the DVD collections of Cousteau’s explorations are also highly recommended.
5. Guy Maddin — All of Guy Maddin’s bizarre and beautiful films are made better by early morning confusion and lightheadedness, especially Archangel and the amazing Careful.
I’ve spent the last few hours searching downtown for this.
Bingo. (more…)
Today, my good friend Kevin and I launched a Tumblr called Lines of Flight. We’ll provide tidbits from popular culture, history, philosophy, science–anything–and illuminate them with passages from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, which we’ve spent a semester plowing through. Stop by, please, if you’re interested in another way to look at pop culture.
Iron Man 2, dir. Jon Favreau (2010)
Nothing in Iron Man 2 seems old: like the arc reactor in Tony Stark’s chest, everything glows for no reason. The screens with which Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) interacts throughout the film go past physical presence and become the very air of Stark’s workshop, which he can manipulate with his touch. He not only tells robots what to do, he is himself a robot. It becomes difficult to stop thinking you’re watching The Jetsons. (more…)
At around 6:00 p.m. yesterday, the shorts program ended here at the Geneva Film Festival and I walked over to the bar across the street. I sat down, got a drink, and on the back of the napkin began writing down the first things that came to mind after seeing my work screened (with other people’s hard, truthful work — but more on that in a later post). Here, unedited and unfiltered, is the list.
The Hurt Locker, dir. Katheryn Bigelow (2009)
The Hurt Locker opens with a quotation from a book by the journalist Chris Hedges called War is a Force that Gives us Meaning. “The rush of battle,” Hedges writes, “is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” (more…)
Walter Murch on Editing
I’ve been editing Part II for the past 7 months, and it’s been a roller coaster of a ride. After a brief hiatus into production mode for re-shoots, I found myself back at the computer again with all of this new footage and the same old feeling of dread. I slapped together what I thought was right and compressed it and sent it out. Then, thank god, Spring Break (my last and surely best) swept me off my feet. For fun, I brought along a copy of In the Blink of an Eye by Walter Murch. They say that milk was a bad choice, but this was a good one.
This is your HD footage in SD.
I have to say, when Kelly Reichardt asked me to burn a DVD of “Part II” for review, my heart jumped to my throat and I almost fainted. Ok, a slight exaggeration, but anyone who has ever needed to burn HD footage onto a standard-definition DVD has felt this dread. (more…)
René Clair’s first film, Paris qui dort (1924), is a delightful silent science-fiction romp invoving the Eiffel Tower, a conniving and schlubby Professor X, and scenes of Paris so deserted they recall the earliest, emptiest photographs of the city. You can watch the whole thing online here, or you could seek out the Criterion release of Clair’s Under the Roofs of Paris (Sous les Toits de Paris), which contains Paris qui dort as an extra. At about 30 minutes, this version–retooled by Clair in 1950–is half as long as the original 1924 film.
Annette Michelson wrote about the film:
“Clair proposes, with a cascade of subtlegags, the topography of a great city; he explores its scale and pace, that which sustains its life. Temporality, apprehended as movement in space, is the vital current of metropolis, the medium of “the course of affairs,” of “the business of life.” Their powerful and intricate implication is the film’s generative core. Adopting the genre of science fiction–which is, as we know, one of cinema’s oldest forms–Clair offers a fresh series of critical variations upon the thematic cluster–the city, the crowd, capital–which the art and the cinema of his day had begun to explore. There is in fact no single theme of Paris qui dort which expressionism, in an antithetical register, did not also explore. The accuracy and lucidity of Clair’s enterprise were, however, products of a privileged position, a special preparation.”
It’s a great, important film. And it should be your weekend watch.
Like Kathryn Bigelow, recipient of the Oscar for Best Director, I’m utterly speechless. Last night the Academy decided, under pressure from the big moneymakers and unique genre films, to select the best-made film for best picture. Going into this, I was almost certain that it was going to be Kathryn Bigelow for Best Director and Avatar for Best Film. I am so glad that I was wrong.
The White Ribbon, dir. Michael Haneke (2009)
A friend once told me: “keep with highbrow, but distrust respectable.” I’ve always found it a useful dictum. When thinking about Michael Haneke’s latest film—the one that took the Palme D’Or at Cannes—nothing comes to mind more than respectable. The film manages to achieve a level of nauseating respectability on par with Schindler’s List, featuring pensive black and white photography, truthfully cinematic long takes, eastern European austerity, classical music, and a self-important relationship to historical events. These clichéd cues, somehow, seem to have been enough to satisfy hoards of hungry film critics around the world who appreciate mature, elegant, and adult filmmaking from Haneke. (more…)
This entry comes via an e-mail from Matt. Apparently I had to see this. Check it out for yourself before I go on because anything I say on the matter will be utterly useless if you don’t.
Friends don’t let friends trip alone. The inexplicable terror of the otherness of time, to borrow the cocktails-at-seven phrase from Freud, has overwhelmed this television ad in many ways. Forty-odd years later it seems like an odd relic of some civilization of indeterminable musical taste and choice in travel. Most haunting of all might be the realization that it was our civilization.
Video artist Amy Greenfield was recently informed that Youtube would be pulling her work from their website. She was told that “her works, which contain some artistic nudity, did not conform with YouTube’s ‘community standards.’ Under YouTube’s policies, ‘Films and television shows may contain [full nudity]; however, videos originating from the YouTube user community must abide by the YouTube Community Guidelines and are not permitted to include such content.’” Though Youtube has now reversed their decision thanks to efforts from the EFF and the National Coalition Against Censorship, I fear the issue is far from over. I found out about the story through BoingBoing, where one reader identified only as pjcamp commented: “I’m having a hard time telling the difference between artistic nudity and busty.pl[.]” I’m having a hard time deciphering “busty.pl,” but what intrigues me about pjcamp’s comment is how magnificently it manages to miss the point completely.
Youtube isn’t protecting anyone from “busty.pl,” though it might appear so. What’s happening, instead, is that Youtube is continually serving the interests of “films and television shows.” These, to be sure, aren’t your films or the tv talk show you and your friends record every Sunday night: “films and television” shows are films and television shows from networks, studios, and distributors that have a serious financial worries about how their media is viewed. Since Amy Greenfield wasn’t one of those, her work got axed–though, presumably, if it had been from the film Young Adam starring Ewan McGregor, Youtube wouldn’t have thought twice. That’s what is dangerous about Youtube: its interests couldn’t have less to do with you. The question is not one of moral censorship but rather of financial censorship: Youtube isn’t barring nudity, they’re just not allowing it if you aren’t distributed by Fox Searchlight. It’s a question, all the same, about what we’re allowed to see.
There are always films that fall through the proverbial cracks in every filmmaker’s viewing library, well-known and applauded films that we have claimed to have seen but actually have on our I’ll-eventually-sit-down-and-watch-it list. We all have these lists, myself as much as anyone.
Which is why last night, thanks in part to the wonderful advent of Netflix, I decided to start crossing a few films off the list with weekly double features of missed works. It certainly didn’t hurt that my girlfriend was out of town and I could unapologetically choose which films to watch.
I’m approaching these posts as impressions more than appraisals. I’m not going to write up synopses or review the filmmaking. The films that I’m going to watch are classics that have just passed me by — I’m choosing the ones I’ve heard are magnificent, and it follows that they are going to deliver on the promise. For this first week’s double feature, I chose to kick things off with a triple feature: Terrence Malick’s Badlands, Jerry Schatzberg’s Scarecrow and Robert Altman’s Gosford Park.
I just found this wonderful little video directed by Dewey Nicks of superstudio for Jade Castrinos (of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros):
There’s something unexpectedly vital about the video that blooms out of Nicks’ decision to use layered live audio where most music videos just stick the studio recordings on top. It’s not the take-away show idea, either, which from the very start was a familiar idea–a stripped-down concert video. This is something new entirely: edited like a music video (which is to say, edited heavily), recorded like a take-away show, you get pulled in to the reverie of the song–eternal, omnipresent, out of time and space, whether you’re on the beach or in a park or getting in your car or following a toddler in a devil-jumpsuit down the stairs, the way a good piece of music lingers under your breath for a day, or a week.
Shutter Island, dir. Martin Scorsese (2010)
As Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo approach Shutter Island by ferry, what strikes us is the sky: it goes on forever in a way that anyone from Boston knows is impossible, and the artificiality of the colors and the actors makes it clear that this isn’t Changeling or Schindler’s List. This is the past of film, not a film of the past, and it’s clear that Scorsese is taking his cues from Samuel Fuller’s camp experiments as much as Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological obsessions, tossed with a dose of Hiroshima Mon Amour. (more…)
Fish Tank, dir. Andrea Arnold (2010)
There are movies I see every once and a while that remind me why I watch in the first place. If that seems clichéd, let me assure you that Andrea Arnold’s second feature, Fish Tank, is not. Here is what we hope for and rarely get: urgency without manipulation, intimacy without bland sentiment, shock without exploitation. (more…)
Every year they make the same mistake. They rinse off the pot, give it a quick dry, pop it on the burner and twist the heat to high. The prep work takes precedent, chopping the onions and slicing thin the meat, letting the pot heat all the while. Then the time comes for them to brown the meat and they pour in a few tablespoons of oil, which smokes for a moment, and then, with a sudden and heavy breath, pfoof! – fire. (more…)
Yesterday, NPR.org’s picture show blog featured the work of Kate Stone. I knew Kate at Bard, but had missed her thesis show; boy, am I grateful to NPR for cluing me in to what I’d missed.
In her most recent work, Kate explores a space with her camera, prints the photos, reconstructs the space in three dimensions, and then re-photographs the scene. In At The Seams, Kate disassembles and reassembles strangers’ houses, leaving doors poking out of the floor and fans reproducing across empty rooms. In Wunderkammer (which translates to ‘cabinet of curiosities’), the stuffed animals at a museum seem to step right out of their displays. (more…)
Fresh off the heels of the romantic and alluring The Pleasure of Being Robbed, Joshua Safdie has teamed up with his brother (and fellow Red Bucket Films mate) Ben Safdie on Daddy Longlegs, also known by the title Go Get Some Rosemary. The film’s two titles are indicative of the film’s own dual identities. If you watch the trailer available now via Apple and then watch what’s on the Red Bucket website, you’ll see two different films. (more…)
