by ·Comments Off on Two by Straub-Huillet (2006/08)

These Encounters of Theirs / Quei Loro Incontri (2006)

I’ve grappled with these guys before, trying to figure out their whole deal in previous posts. Think they stated in the Pedro Costa doc their moral grounds for cutting sound with picture with no attempt towards soundscape continuity, but I don’t remember the details. Today I’m here not to grapple, just to space out on the couch with a couple of their late works.

Familiar setup: some people (not actors, we’re told) are declaring/reciting dialogue, their performances engaging and alienating at once. This all brings to mind Denis Côté’s Social Hygiene in the staging. They pause strangely in the middle of sentences, and at the end of a scene they face each other in silence, having run out of lines, the wind blowing their clothes. Their words were written for Greek immortals by depressed communist Cesare Pavese in the 1940s. Played in competition in Venice alongside eleven others I’ve seen – what a year.

Neil Bahadur gets it:

Huillet once said about Straub, “Jean-Marie is always looking for paintings.” Perhaps they wanted to show us that the world itself is a painting, a moving one, always alive. Here is a film about the beauty that the world is capable of, not just by humans, but by the shapes and patterns that sunlight makes when it passes through the leaves and the branches of a tree. The world is so beautiful, so ephemeral that even the gods wish to become mortal. We humans don’t know what we’re missing.

–
Itinerary of Jean Bricard (2008)

First we motorboat around Coton Island a couple times, looking at wintry trees in 4:3 b/w. I assumed this was to demonstrate the size of the island (small enough to circle twice in 15 minutes) but Bahadur sees impressionism, abstraction, a tribute to Cezanne. Then onto land while the titular narrator tells stories of the area’s nazi occupation and beyond. Jake Cole: “He also talks of postwar projects that have dramatically affected the entire ecology and terrain of the area, which further complicates the tranquil images. Left hanging in the air unspoken is the notion that, to the land, the French are every bit the ruinous occupiers that the Germans were.”

by ·Comments Off on The Time We Killed (2004, Jennifer Reeves)

Trying to get out more instead of staying on the couch, so it’s funny to go out and see a movie about someone who never goes out. Movie was righteous – finally some representation for people who watch the news, feel very bad, then just stay home drinking and looking at starlings out the window. If I’d watched this on video I’d be pulling so many good quotes from the narration, but since I’m me, I can’t remember a single one of them now. Lovely to see Tzadik and related groups in the closing credits of an experimental film, since that’s the music I play during silent experimental films anyway.

Reeves in 2004:

When I started shooting, without a script, I thought the film would evolve into a longish short film based on montage. I was inspired by Warren Sonbert’s work, and Jack Chambers’ Hart of London. I think the film grew into a longer narrative with montage elements, because I was going through about as many personal changes as the world was undergoing at that time. I worked on it between 1998-2003. There was a murder suicide next door, I moved, my father died, 9/11 happened, I ended a relationship and was alone, the invasion of Iraq happened. Original intentions or inclinations were not enough, almost irrelevant to me … My process was about wanting to weave together these different personal and universal themes which I felt were related, the idea of wanting to escape your reality … I’m also seeing the film as a product of fragmentation, in the flight from reality one mode of escape can fail, so then you’re looking for another kind of escape. Robyn’s job writing romance novels is one way of producing a fantasy life, of trying to have intimacy and sexuality. Remembering the past with great nostalgia is another escape from what’s going on right now: being an isolated shut in, violence nearby and militarism. I was trying to bring out the tension between wanting to be in the present and continually struggling to get out of it, out of the room.

by ·Comments Off on An Injury to One (2002, Travis Wilkerson)

Opens with some nice blue skies, acoustic guitar, and text advocating for worker revolution. He starts into a history of Butte MT over some Dirty Three music, tying it into the novel Red Harvest. IWW/Wobblies vs. the Anaconda mining company in early century. The company wins, destroys the unions and lords over evil conditions. Mine runs full-tilt during WWI until a horribly fatal fire sparks renewed union interest… enter Wobbly Frank Little, arriving from Bisbee, making this the Che Part 2 to the Greene film. While he’s sleeping among the workers, the company breaks in and murders him. “All the we know of Frank Little’s time in Butte and all that we know regarding his murder comes from company papers and company spies. Thus official history is company history.”

A couple of Low songs “Mass arrests and deportations begin almost immediately” after the government declares war on organizers. Movie is ingeniously designed to make me angry, ending with the poisoning deaths of hundreds of birds. The company continues to assure residents that the water is safe.

from Cinema Scope 13:

Jason McBride: “Butte’s history – and Wilkerson’s film – is bound up with the entire history of the American left, the rise of McCarthyism, the destruction of the environment, and even the birth of the detective novel … Elegant, almost-still lifes shot by Wilkerson himself recall the work of his former teacher, James Benning.”

Wilkerson: “I’ve always been excited by the Third Cinema … something that took from the high and low culture and was highly politicized, raw, a little less perfectly finished, often with social goals that outweighed pure aesthetics. They would always argue for this notion of imperfect film – a film that was perhaps not aesthetically perfect, but perfect along the lines of what they were striving for.”

by ·Comments Off on Find Me Guilty (2006, Sidney Lumet)

One of those studio flops that nobody talked about except for Jonathan Rosenbaum, who called it Lumet’s most entertaining feature and rated it one of the top films of the year:

What makes it for me so timely and relevant a satire is what it demonstrates about our unacknowledged complicity with criminals — how much we enjoy them and how much we forgive them for their crimes, at least if they put on a good show for us, regardless of what we claim. Lumet, who coscripted this subversive tale himself, forces the issue by making this thug so likable and the forces of law and order so corrupt that we constantly have to reflect upon what we’re actually buying into.

Vin is very likable indeed, and goes around shooting down criminal conspiracy charges by saying gee-whiz stuff like “I guess if you’re Italian you should be in prison,” while a big jazz soundtrack keeps the energy high. The lighting looked made-for-TV but maybe that’s the sacrifice for setting your entire story in government buildings.

Vin constantly defends Big Boss Nick (Alex Rocco of The Godfather and Eddie Coyle) even though the others have disowned Vin and think he’s tanking their case. Peter Dinklage is Nick’s lawyer semi-collaborating with Vin, Annabella Sciorra (Cop Land) is Vin’s wife, Linus Roache (Nolan-Batman’s dad) the prosecutor, and Ron Silver (Heat Vision & Jack) the judge.

by ·Comments Off on Dave Chappelle’s Block Party (2006, Michel Gondry)

One of the last movies I watched in theaters before starting this blog. Rewatching now because I read the great J Dilla book and am working my way through a list* of related artists. At the peak of his fame and success, Chappelle’s vanity project keeps alternating between music performances on the day, and his interactions with the public. Rewatching now I wish there was much more music and less Dave. Each group gets about one song, which keeps being interrupted by host episodes. This is a choice, not necessarily a defect – Gondry’s story is more about building this event and getting people excited about it, not a you-are-there concert film. Questlove must have remembered this movie once or twice when working on Summer of Soul. Filmed when Dave was at the top of fame, released a year later when he was in the news for walking away from his sketch show, and he’s had nothing but rocky press since then (along with then-rising young star K*nye W*st, bittersweet to see both of them here).

*A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, D’Angelo, The Pharcyde, Raekwon, Busta Rhymes, Fugees, Common, Erykah Badu, Slum Village, 5-Elementz, Talib Kweli & Mos Def, MF Doom, The Roots, Jill Scott, Ghostface Killah, Bilal, Madlib, Robert Glasper, Georgia Anne Muldrow, Hiatus Kaiyote, Thundercat, Flying Lotus, David Fiuczynski, Kendrick Lamar.

by ·Comments Off on House of Wax (2005, Jaume Collet-Serra)

On one hand, this is a semi-remake about stupid college kids camping out inadvisably close to an evil wax museum and going dead/missing one by one, starring nobody of note, spending too much time trying to make us care about the central sibling relationship. On the other hand, Jaume (in his debut) overachieves, shooting the hell out of it. The twin brother writers envision twin brother killers, who’ve taken the title literally and constructed the entire multi-story house out of wax. The town has been Phantasm’d, every resident killed by the brothers, waxed and posed. I respect how bonkers it all becomes by the end.

Despite Woman in the Yard, Jaume is more hit than miss – I’m considering a Liam Neeson Action Thriller Week to catch up. The DP specialises in stupid nonsense, editor did The Nice Guys, and first victim Wade is 22nd-billed in Terrifier 3.

by ·Comments Off on Dead End (2003, Andrea & Canepa)

A Marilyn Manson joke in the movie’s opening seconds, paterfamilias Ray Wise driving his daughter Laura, the camera hovering over the center line – somebody’s got a thing for David Lynch. It’s a Christmas road trip movie, petty griping from the back seat, until the ordinary gets interrupted by a Woman In White holding a dead baby. Figuring out what to do about the WIW the family members get separated, then they find what’s left of the daughter’s boyfriend Brad aside the road.

“This reeks of alien activity, you guys.” They appear to be on a loop road like the one in Freddy’s Dead, and whenever the Woman In White kills someone the survivors see them being taken away in a black car. After her son disappears mom goes nuts and shoots Ray in the leg, then she’s next. It all turns out to be a purgatorial fantasy when the daughter wakes up and is told she survived the car crash that killed the others.

Not a bad movie, though the music is a great crime. Most of the people who made this never worked again. The DP did an Elijah Wood thing, an exec producer worked on Voyage of Time. The mom is horror regular Lin Shaye, in Critters and The Hidden and New Nightmare, the WIW was a beer spokesmodel, and the daughter was in a Sid Haig / Bill Moseley movie that Rob Zombie had nothing to do with.