{"id":13277,"date":"2019-12-09T22:00:05","date_gmt":"2019-12-10T03:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=13277"},"modified":"2019-12-08T14:08:39","modified_gmt":"2019-12-08T19:08:39","slug":"notes-on-an-appearance-2018-ricky-dambrose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/13277","title":{"rendered":"Notes on an Appearance (2018, Ricky D’Ambrose)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jeez, this is the second time in a few months that I’ve watched two current 4:3 movies in a row. I suppose this one justifies it with the VHS tape tie-in (though what can justify the VHS tapes), and The Lighthouse<\/a><\/em> is set on a lighthouse so I’ll allow a taller ratio… Nightingale<\/a><\/em> maybe just for the period setting, overall the weakest 4:3 justification of the bunch, and I just dug the look of The Mountain<\/a><\/em> so it can take whatever ratio it wants. D’Ambrose said that he made each of his shorts to work out a different filmmaking problem, and it seems like he’s still working things out – he’s almost got a movie, but this felt more like an exercise. Of course then I watched the credits and changed my tune; this is obviously the latest high masterpiece from savvy executive producer Brandon Bentley.<\/p>\n

Keith (left) with the disappeared David (Bingham Bryant of Spiral Jetty<\/a>):
\n<\/p>\n

Somebody Up There Likes Me<\/a><\/em> star Keith Poulson meets David, who is writing about a late, controversial political theorist, and gives Keith a job itemizing the videotapes from the theorist’s travels and describing their contents. “I rarely saw anyone in any of these recordings. Their importance was unclear.”<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

There’s a riot and murder or two, but the movie describes these in documents, maintaining its quiet, measured tone in the main action. A wordless art gallery scene worked for me, the talky panel on translation did not. “Do you think this is uninteresting?” was the first line I heard upon resuming the movie, after pausing to see if anything was happening in the news (D’Ambrose told Filmmaker that scene died in Berlin and he hoped the NYC in-crowd would find it funnier). On the plus side: the great Tallie Medel (The Unspeakable Act<\/a><\/em>).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Style quirks: studio-audience applause over the first shots of actors… blackouts between scenes are video-green… small roles are filled out with a bunch of film critics I read… of course lotta close-ups on documents. Phil Coldiron does not appear, but wrote a major Cinema Scope article<\/a> on D’Ambrose, which I can only partly follow.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Vadim Rizov:<\/p>\n

Consistently clipped editing keeps the tone fluid: humor is in the cuts, and the film is never needlessly dour, deliberately refusing to dutifully find its way to a neatly summarizable Statement About The Zeitgeist.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

D’Ambrose:<\/p>\n

I don’t think of Todd and Karen and most of the characters as \u201cintellectuals\u201d – I can’t take them seriously as thinkers, I think of them as part of a milieu … I’m grateful I didn’t end up calling the movie The Millennials<\/em>, which was the original title.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jeez, this is the second time in a few months that I’ve watched two current 4:3 movies in a row. I suppose this one justifies it with the VHS tape tie-in (though what can justify the VHS tapes), and The Lighthouse is set on a lighthouse so I’ll allow a taller ratio… Nightingale maybe just […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1049,2513,361,2265],"class_list":["post-13277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-2010s","tag-disappearance","tag-new-york","tag-ricky-dambrose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13277"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13277\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13318,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13277\/revisions\/13318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}