Brandon's movie memory

Not a very popular movie, not easy to find or widely discussed, so I wondered about the title. Is it “Lion’s Love” or “Lions’ Love” or just “Lions Love”. Title card on the movie says:

“Lions Love Lions Love Lions Love by Mama Lion”

So that clears that up.

Jim and Jerry, writer/performers of the musical Hair (and therefore the cringe-inducing song Age of Aquarius), along with Andy Warhol model/actress Viva, lounge around an L.A. mansion speaking hippyese, apparently playing themselves. Shirley Clarke, also playing herself, comes to stay for a while since she’s meeting Hollywood bigwigs about getting an independent film produced. Bad things come in threes within a couple days in June, when RFK and Andy Warhol are both shot and Shirley overdoses on pills. All but Kennedy turn out okay.

I’m not sure what the movie was getting at. The other Varda film I didn’t love, One Sings, The Other Doesn’t, at least had a point, exploring feminism from a number of angles, but what is this one getting at? That violence is a drag? That Los Angeles is full of phony hippies?

There are scenes in a film studio where a producer is meeting with Shirley’s representative trying to agree on a project. The budget works out, but ultimately the studio won’t give her final cut, using careful phrasing like “of course she has creative control, but we might have to change things after test screenings.” And we get a scene (the only one I loved) where Shirley refuses to “overdose,” so Agnes jumps in front of the camera and does it for her, showing Shirley that it’s no big deal. But I wouldn’t say the movie is about the difficulty of making a movie. No movies ever get made here except Varda’s, and Viva’s acting career is barely mentioned.

AV: “I’m trying to make a movie”
SC: “Right, it’s your story, you do it.”

L-R: Jim Morrison, Agnes Varda, Frank Zappa

Auteurs quotes PFA in calling it “a deliberately decadent riff on fantasy, immaturity, and violence: American culture, 1968,” so I guess it’s that.

Eddie Constantine shows up at the door for a little scene, but I didn’t catch Jim Morrison (besides the photo above) or Peter Bogdanovich – IMDB claims they both appear.

Mostly it’s bubbly hippies talking over each other, singing, improvising and pretending to be deep. This is pretty much exactly how I imagined 1969 to be. It must have been unbearable. I like the brief street sign montage of roads named after movie stars – didn’t know about that, but should have guessed.

Viva: “I’m tired of all this emancipation crap”
“Please turn the camera off.”

Shirley Clarke with cardboard camera, an image Varda would re-use in Simon Cinema

“Should art imitate, exaggerate, and/or deform reality?”

Even Varda runs out of patience with these guys sometimes – I like that she speeds up the action, replacing the sound with string music, whenever the scene gets long or the dialogue is less good.

They watch Lost Horizon on TV, as old to them as Lions Love is to me. The hippies find out they don’t get along with children. Frank Zappa appears again in a montage of drawings after title card “the witnesses.” It’s ironic since Frank hated hippies. The apartment whispers things to Shirley. One of the guys suspiciously uses the line “let the sun shine in.”

“Why Kennedy? Why do they always shoot Kennedy?”

I did love the ending, an interview with the three lead actors (Jim takes off his fake wig), ending with Viva who wants to just breathe for a while, a long closeup as she does exactly that. Warholian? Possibly.

Eddie Constantine visits Viva:

Also found a lovely TV interview with Varda and Susan Sontag, whose first film Duet for Cannibals was just out. Varda starts by protesting the introductory speech’s use of the word “grotesque,” says her stars “are not grotesque people at all. They have long hair and they live like free people.”

“It’s not a story; it’s a chronicle, I would say.”
“It’s mainly a film about stars, stars-to-be, political stars…”

Sontag joins Varda in attacking the interviewer – A.V. calls him racist for continuing to use the word grotesque, and S.S. contradicts him when he tries to speak about all of underground cinema as if it’s the same kind of thing. He tries to get out of it, uses phrases like “labyrinthine convolutions” and mentions Dostoyevsky, but it’s too late for him. It’s funny to me that Varda’s film is in English and Sontag’s is not.

More craziness from Lions Love:

On one hand, I thought this was a bad movie.

The script seems to have been written for fourth graders, and every camera shot is from a helicopter so you start to get the feeling that all the slow gliding movements are on purpose and you’re watching a giant slow-motion Bollywood video. Narrator Glenn Close throws huge numbers and statistics at us until they become meaningless.
“faster and faster…”
“billions and billions…”
“There’s no time to be a pessimist.”
The slow pace, lingering on each beautiful helicopter shot, and precious repetition-heavy voiceover stinks of pretentiousness, as does the stereotypical music (the kinds of howling African female singers that Martha Wainwright listens to). Sometimes the music turns new-agey, and the voiceover says stuff like “The earth is a miracle. Life remains a mystery,” I’m thinking as a concession to hippie-minded creationists. I wasn’t sure if the doc advocates vegetarianism as part of its packaged hippie agenda or because meat is actually worse for the earth than veggies. And in the length between cuts, I had time to reflect on the irony of a conservationist riding over the whole globe in a helicopter. Maybe their copter ran on biofuel, but more likely they paid a farmer in bolivia a dollar fifty to plant some trees then declared their film “carbon-neutral” in the credits.

But speaking of the credits, jeez, this was shot in twice as many countries as The Fall, and there’s no doubt that the visuals are amazing, especially in the high-def version that I watched. And the point of the movie is to keep the viewer hooked with these visuals while impressing upon us how severely we have destroyed the earth (for people like me who missed that Al Gore doc), and what consequences we will soon face. Glenn Close tells me that “humanity has no more than ten years to reverse the process,” then I turn off the movie and, no shit, read the headline “global warming skeptics growing in numbers,” along with the usual business about war, politics and health care. A few windmills in Florida are not gonna be enough to forestall the wrath of Glenn Close’s global-warming pandemic.

We are severely screwed. Movie ends up being scarier than Collapse, Wolf Creek and Martyrs combined. I bought ice cream.

Available here from Amazon on DVD:
Home DVD
But really, don’t bother with the movie unless you can watch the bluray:
Home [Blu-ray]

A useful doc if you haven’t heard of raw foods, bovine growth hormone, solar energy, biodiesel, compact fluorescent lightbulbs, or Woody Harrelson. I’ve heard of these things, so it was just a pleasant entertainment.

Best part is Project Ruckus or Camp Ruckus, a protester boot camp.

Had animated bits between sections, but not as many as in Tales of the Rat Fink.

Recommended listening: Blade of Grass by the Asylum Street Spankers