| House of Bamboo (Samuel Fuller, 1955) |
[Feb. 8th, 2010|11:19 pm] |
Look at those stretches of heath, these neglected homes, or the somber poetry of modern cities, those boats on a fairground lake, those immense avenues, and tell me your heart doesn't tighten, if such severity does not frighten you. You are watching a spectacle completely subjected to the contingencies of the world; you are face to face with death. Yes, invention holds sway only over language, and mise en scene forces us to imagine an object in its signification; but these clever and violent effects are so only to transmit the drama to the spectator at its highest level - I refer, of course, to the strangling in the wood and the struggle with the merry-go-round, scenes which contain so many astonishing realities, such depth in their fantastic frenzy, that I fancy that I breathe in them a gentle odour of profanation. The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea. Should one reproach this renouned film-maker for flirting with appearances? Certainly the camera defies reality, but does not evade it; if it enters the present, it is to give it the style it lacks.
-Godard on Godard |
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| Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (Agnes Varda, 2000) |
[Jan. 31st, 2010|10:57 pm] |
"I have the feeling that I'm an animal," Varda muses aloud, "Worse, an animal I do not know."
I can imagine this musing, like the dance of the lens cap that takes place, is made possible only by the fact that this was shot on video rather than film. But why is it exactly that digital video looks so hideous compared to film? What is it that makes it look so terrible? To paraphrase Gorin speaking at the cinematheque, the digital image on the screen is essentially just lines and lines of information that renders an image across a surface in which all the information is equal and ambivalent. The human mind, he says, understands all of this in a fraction of a second and as a result the image in question looks fucking terrible. And film? He says film is the result of a chemical process on a substrate where there is real image information surrounded by nothing. It is the chemical reaction, or the image created by a chemical reaction, that has some warmth to it and also, he said, a ghost behind the image.
Varda's documentary is charming enough to transend video. Like in Eloge de l'amour (2001) or Ten (2002) we have a seasoned director working in video so we can be at least assured that there will be substance and composition.
I really liked all the gleaner mythology. That she using art and legal records traced the practice of gleaning into a centuries old part of French heritage. Her sympathetic portrait of the crusty french dumpster divers was a total coup. |
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| Das weisse Band... / The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, 2009) |
[Jan. 28th, 2010|10:20 pm] |
Haneke uses a much more subdued approach in The White Ribbon than in other films of his I’ve seen. It’s not an all out assault like Cache and it’s not as bombastically violent and affecting as Funny Games. There are characters, a couple even, who are somewhat sympathetic. The approach is fairly classical. There are really arresting images like the children waiting outside the window, or the tenant farmer with the sickle on his way to sabotage the baron. The framing is used to delineate the relations of authority and the level of malice between characters. I’m thinking of scenes by staircases, scenes in which the figure of authority is seen overwhelmingly large in the foreground, or the scene in which the Divinity teacher is chastising the school children, his own daughter facing the wall. Compare that with Eva and the school teacher shown side by side on the carriage as equals. The placement of people within the frame – as in all films – speaks to the inner workings of their world. But somehow with the black and white and the starkness of the production in general, this is slightly more pronounced here. Even though stylistically Haneke is pretty low key.
For some reason after the film we couldn’t resist acknowledging the schoolteacher’s hair. It was nice to look at.
For the dude with the iPhone: I know your lady friend dragged you to this film against your will and you were feeling antsy but surfing your dumb phone in the cinema is totally wrong and you know it. The dim setting of the screen does NOT make it ok. This is not Transformers, you degenerate. |
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| Hei yan quan / I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (Ming-liang Tsai, 2006) |
[Jan. 17th, 2010|11:49 pm] |
I got the idea to rent this based on the Cinematheque's "Best of the Decade: an Alternative View" (or something). I remembered this title and found it in the foreign section at 2Q Video. I thought, 'I should see more Chinese cinema'. Of course the joke was on me when it turned out to be a film set in Malaysia and Tsai Ming-Liang turned out to be a Malaysian of Chinese descent who has also lived in Taiwan. Though according to the credits there is Chinese financing behind this film. It was also banned by the Malysian government.
The absence of dialogue make the even the banal actions awkward and touching. Tsai does a lot with light. He gets amazingly painterly effects from the bombed out walls of makeshift homes or the urban decay of a flooded construction site. Mosquito netting and spraypainted walls never looked so sweet and haunting. The comparison to a Caravaggio painting is apt. You really get a sense of hazy humid nights.
A lot of the action in the film revolves around a mattress that is found in the trash, washed, and re-used. There is a tiny incident of bed bugs at one point. That must have been what upset the Malysian censors.
The final image of this film is like a gift to the audience. I could just hear Tsai as if he were saying to the viewer, 'Here you go. Thanks for sticking around. You're excellent!'
Now it's time for sleep. |
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| Last Night (Don McKellar, 1998) |
[Jan. 11th, 2010|11:31 pm] |
I remember seeing this when it came out. I was still only just becoming interested in movies. So I didn’t notice that the man from the gas company was David Cronenberg or that the woman in the streetcar was Arsinée Khanjian even though I surely would have seen The Sweet Hereafter by then. I didn’t give too much thought at the time as to exactly why there is no night in this apocalyptic vision. I always thought it was neat that as the film progressed toward midnight, never getting dark, and there was only a short mention of it at the end when Don McKeller’s character says, “it’s times like this that I miss the night.” Thinking about it now, I can only assume that this was done to save money on lighting the scenarios. This is a Canadian production after all.
Also, I didn't realize that it used to be called 'Mel Lastman Square'. |
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| Los abrazos rotos / Broken Embraces (Pedro Almodóvar, 2009) |
[Jan. 3rd, 2010|01:38 am] |
| [ | music |
| | Krzysztof Komeda Quintet | ] |
I love Almodovar. His films are so rich and melodramatic. It's like eating a really ripe piece of fruit that's about to go off. It's bursting with flavour and colour and could also burst with rot at any moment. This is thinner than the usual Almodovar fare, but I think critics were pretty hard on it.
This was my third attempt to see this film, although I didn't even get the idea to see it until an hour before it was to start. When I realized that I had movie gift certificates in my wallet (thanks for the Christmas gift, sis), and absolutely *nothing* to do. Bordom is a great motivator when it's not actually stopping one from doing things.
Well holidays will be over soon. Here I am celebrating with red wine, clemontines, and Polish jazz. I'm pretty stoked for 2010. I had a pretty aweosme new year's eve. I've got a new apartment, working for the moment, and my band is gonna play a couple shows this month and next. I want to go skating, take my ex-landlord to court, write a short screenplay, record an EP with Tori, and finish a new zine with a new title. And to top it off, i'm not going to change the blog provider (or whatever) for Cahiers. I'm sticking with Live Jive. Why? Laziness.
Dog bless. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 1st, 2010|02:04 pm] |
Dear, few, scattered people who still use Livejournal. The time has arrived. The moment that really only I've been waiting for: the end of year lists! The 94 films I saw this year all widdled down to two top ten lists.
Same rules as last year: films are listed in order of order of awesomeness (most enjoyable first and so on). Re-watched films are given low priority. For example I saw Rome: Open City at the Cinematheque which is one of the greatest films ever made, but I've already written about that film and digested it. But I also saw Jules et Jim again but found it so darn engaging and found new things in it I never noticed before so I include it. Also, new films get an easier time of it. Woody Allen's Whatever Works, in reality, is a pretty poor film all things considered. Yet Allen gets cred just for coming out. Going to his films are still a pleasure even when they're no great shakes just because he's an icon and the few laughs or whatever to be had are somehow better just because.
Okay, on with the lists!
TOP TEN FILMS OF 2009 (or thereabouts)
Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008)
A Serious Man (Ethan & Joel Coen)
Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, 2008)
Une Catastrophe (Jean-Luc Godard, 2008)
Trash Humpers (Harmony Korine, 2009)
Whatever Works (Woody Allen. 2009)
My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, 2007)
The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky, 2008)
Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009)
Examined Life (Astra Taylor, 2008)
TOP TEN FILMS SEEN IN 2009
Jules et Jim (François Truffaut, 1962)
Teorema (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1968)
Cléo de 5 à 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962)
Éloge de l'amour (Jean-Luc Godard, 2001)
Gas Station (Robert Morris, 1969)
Underground (Emir Kusturica, 1995)
Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot (Jacques Tati, 1953)
The Man with the Golden Arm (Otto Preminger, 1955)
Ziemia obiecana / Land of Promise (Andrzej Wajda, 1975)
Le père Noël a les yeux bleus (Jean Eustache, 1966) |
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| W. (Oliver Stone, 2008) |
[Dec. 29th, 2009|12:59 pm] |
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I don't quite understand what it was about George W. Bush's ego, trials, and tribulations that was attractive to screenwriter Stanley Weiser. I don't see why anyone should be interested or curious about whether Bush was jealous of his brother, or if he had tensions with his father, or whether he struggled with drinking. It seems that a way larger focus should have been on is precisely how cynical and greedy was this individual? Did he actually even believe that we was acting in anyone's interests or was the whole thing just a well executed scam? And exactly how cheap can human life be to a man? |
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| Balseros (Carlos Bosch & Josep Maria Domènech, 2002) |
[Dec. 27th, 2009|11:59 pm] |
Follows the lives of Cuban boat people who try to start better lives in the US. The cinematography and framing in particular, is very poor in Balseros. I worried it would have some ideological axe to grind against Cuba and show the US as this great savior. But there's no mistaking that every single successful Cuban transplant that made it to the US had their lives ruined chasing the American Dream. |
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| La haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995) |
[Dec. 26th, 2009|11:43 pm] |
Mathieu - my friend Mathieu, not the director - put this on this hazy morning. It looked great. Black and white, wide angle lenses, quick pace, and larger than life characters who speak loudly and naturalistically. For some reason the main characters - Vinz, Hubert, and Saïd - are all going by their real, actor names. And I might add that Vinz is none other than Vincent Cassel.
"Matt, this doesn't have subtitles."
"You mean you can't understand it?"
"No, I don't speak french really well."
But is was pretty exciting to follow nonetheless and Matt translated all the really important parts for me. He was like a real life benshi.
The camera soared over the ghettos of suburban paris. It looked awesome. Mathieu remarked, "this shot reminds me of I Am Cuba." |
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| Four Christmases (Seth Gordon, 2008) |
[Dec. 25th, 2009|11:26 pm] |
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If it's 3:00am, and your head is already whirling from a night of celebration (of the baby Jesus of course) and someone offers you a glass of scotch for a chance to display their snazzy new crystal whiskey glasses, DO take it, DO drink it, and DO cancel all your plans for the next day. You will be unconscious. |
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| Elf (Jon Favreau, 2003) |
[Dec. 24th, 2009|12:19 am] |
| [ | music |
| | The Best Show on WFMU | ] |
It's getting close to the end of the year. I'm hoping to get Broken Embraces in before the end of the year list begins. I'm in Ottawa and I brought it up to my little sister, because I know she's a big Almodovar fan, and she said, "ok we'll try and see it but if there's a lineup outside the Bytowne I don't want to wait out in the cold too long. Sorry but I like big theatres like the AMC because they're warm and I can park. I know they're not as...cute."
"Cute?"
Anyway, it will go down.
Ottawa is snowy but calm. I'm in Nepean and Jessica lives near the old Nepean City hall and it's making me want to go skating. But my skates aren't here. I definitely want to get a Nathan Phillips Sq. skating expedition going some time soon after I get back. |
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| Watchmen (Zack Snyder, 2009) |
[Dec. 23rd, 2009|12:07 am] |
Not to sound all first wave but I thought that the images of violence against women in this film were gratuitous and useless backed by nothing but a dumb story and typically exaggerated ideas of masculinity. True fact: this is the first Blu ray disc I've ever watched. I couldn't really tell the difference, though. Nixon looked like a monster. Literally a monster. |
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| Dreams (Akira Kurosawa, 1990) |
[Dec. 21st, 2009|06:30 pm] |
I’ve been wondering about Kurosawa’s Dreams for some time now. I'd heard from some that it’s magical and great and from others that it’s sentimental and lame. So I never rushed out to see it but I knew I would one day. I think you need to be in the mood for this one. It unfolds a little like a child’s storybook. There’s a lot of fantasy and a lot of unexplained phenomena. A bit of whimsy.
I liked the first story (the film is separated into a dozen short films or “Dreams”) because it opened with rain. I knew I was watching a Kurosawa film when there was the rain. It’s a familiar comforting feeling like that at the beginning of Rashomon. There’s a sense of adventure but also of impending tragedy.
The preachy environmental and nuclear bits come off a bit weak. It’s not just lack of sustainability and greed that is causing the ecological crisis. It is also caused by fiercely held ideology. It’s capitalism and dangerous radicals like Stephen Harper. The anti-war parts, however, are mesmerizing and spot on. Some of the music is really great.
There’s a lot of spectacle here and a lot of colour. Kurosawa has always been into pushing things visually in terms of spectacle. From spray painting an entire field gold, or training three cameras on one horse to get multiple images of the same shot. It seems crazy to me to build a castle – a castle - with the sole intent of just burning it to the ground before the cameras.
Martin Scorsese plays Van Gogh in one scene. Another scene has screaming demons and giant dandelions. The last shot in the film is of underwater weeds and the stream rushing over it. It seems if this is Kurosawa’s farewell to cinema then the stream should be running with blood.
Although there is a fair amount of cruel and meaningless death in the film, Kurosawa has a much more conciliatory attitude toward mortality in Dreams compared much of his work. The last part, the Village of the Watermills, especially stands out in this respect. Here a man at the end of his life describes the virtue of an existence based on hard but meaningful work, sustainability, and old fashioned life? Is it a total fantasy? A joke? Here is a man who made his life in modernism and the cinema. Surely he can’t be extolling the evils of technology can he? |
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| Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009) |
[Dec. 15th, 2009|08:17 pm] |
I like the fact that there's all this conversation about 30s and 40s filmmakers. I like that he keeps quoting the famous interior/exterior shot from The Searchers. I like that they talk about nitrate film and its flammability. I actually found that pretty darn exciting.
Tarantino seems to be doing everything in his power to avoid being considered a serious director. Whatever was encouraging in Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction is replaced with goofy typography, fake film grain, and reworkings of cultish aesthetics. His films are kind of like the prizes that come in cereal boxes. They're not very nourishing yet there's usually something kinda special to enjoy in them. |
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| In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (Guy Debord, 1978) |
[Dec. 4th, 2009|11:58 pm] |
What can you say about Guy Debord’s films? He doesn’t believe in the cinema and he doesn’t believe in the image. In fact everything he says about the image and about the cinema in this film is dead wrong. Amazingly wrong in every conceivable context.
I purchased a copy of Guy Debord’s Complete Cinematic Works 5 years ago and have only ever browsed it. Like anyone who enjoyed Crass records and read Adbusters in the mid-to-late 90s, Debord was to me a classic, provocative, trouble maker who’s ideas seemed so daring and crucial in the face of what then was called “globalization” or the “new economy”. His ideas seemed to get at the heart at what was so wrong with the terrifying changes of that time. He was someone who’s words seemed to be resonating only then, three decades after his Situationist International clique made its name. More likely it only seemed so because the ideas were all so new to me at the time. Regardless, time, in terms of memory but also in terms of the times we’re living in, are a great concern of his in this film.
Debord knew better than anyone that time forgives no one and the first portion of this film, in which he essentially insults his spectators for 15 minutes, has aged terribly. Images of the mindless bliss of consumerism are juxtaposed with a voice declaring how the spectators are weak, cowardly dupes living in a delusion brought down by their grinning and invisible overlords. Yawn. There was nothing novel or exciting in his pronouncements that hadn’t been done to death in the same types of lefty journalism Debord reviled. Yet strangely, after this attack, he moves to adopt a more nostalgic, sentimental, even melancholic tone. He speaks of youth, Paris of the 50s, and reflects without regret about the SI, its aims, its struggles and defeats.
After suffering through the opening then I found myself touched. I was impressed that someone who dismisses the cinema could manage some impressive use of found footage combined with voice-over dialogue. Sometimes he wass humorous. Other time he provoked unintended chuckles from the audience unmoved by his egoistic pronouncements. But at times In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni came off honest, touching, and profound.
I’m pretty sure that if Debord had not taken his own life a decade ago, he would have delighted in every negative thing I have written about him and maybe even taken issue with the positive. I’m stumped as to what this uncompromising and iconoclastic anti-capitalist would feel about his film being presented, for free, by Ontario provincial government grant agencies and the Bell, a giant telecommunications corporation. Though I can assuredly say he’s lucky to have never lived to witness what those Crimethinc. ninnies have done in his name. |
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| Ohayô / Good Morning (Yasujiro Ozu, 1959) |
[Nov. 30th, 2009|09:27 pm] |
Seeing Ozu in colour is an experience. This is a small, tight-knit story in which not much happens. Oze manages to centre in modernization in suburban Tokyo where the retired are broke, boozy and depressed, the adults are scrambling for work, while others live relatively comfortably. Everyone takes so much in stride. There's some tepid debate in the pub about what TV means to Japan ("it will make us idiots!"), some rumblings about class and norms. It wasn't a knockout but it was great to just watch his film style. It's reassuring that he never changed his medium-low framed, right angle to doorways kind of shooting. His disregard of the 180 degree rule, and his way of making the outskirts of Tokyo look like the edge of the universe and and beginning of childhood. And the children are so realistic, badly behaved, yet valuable as foils for inconsistencies in the adult world. |
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| Funny People (Judd Apatow, 2009) |
[Nov. 29th, 2009|07:29 pm] |
I was looking at this and about 5 or 6 minutes was like, "..! Is that the RZA???"
So what I've been thinking about lately is that I still want to do the film entries, but I was thinking of moving to another blogging thing. It seems so few people are on Livejournal that maybe another service might be easier to read / follow / might function better? Does anyone have any experience with this? Has anyone tried Blogger or Wordpress?
Help me possibly find a new home for cahiers (not Twitter). Thanks! |
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| La rabbia di Pasolini (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1963/2008) |
[Nov. 19th, 2009|11:26 pm] |
I was really only attending these films to see Gorin speak. These films were presented as part of the Cinematheque’s series on the so-called “Essay Film” (works which hardly resemble the essay form at all apart from having no protagonist and often dealing with non-fiction). I think movies like Sans Soliel and Letter to Jane would be better termed as meditation films, since they tend to meditate on a theme but put forth no thesis to defend. Though why call them anything at all?
Gorin had some interesting thoughts on narration, especially where found or reappropriated footage is concerned. He said, “narration must always hit an image from an angle, but never straight on and never parallel.” He made frequent references to “the ghost behind the image” and how the filmmaker goes about bringing it out. He said that today you could not construct a meaningful film out of news images as Pasolini did in 1963. It was possible in the 60s because back then even news photographers had a keen sense of framing, distance, and proportion. That news images today suffer from the tyranny of centrality of the subject and digital rather than chemical properties which make them look crappy.
He also sais some mean things about Herzog, who, according to the Eye Weekly has a film out now starring Nicholas Cage?? Am I on crack or is this true? |
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| Away We Go (Sam Medes, 2009) |
[Nov. 15th, 2009|11:19 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | blueburd -band on the run | ] |
Oh garbage!
I remember seeing ads for this in Dufferin Station back when I would get up super early to go to work at the TTC. I started at 7:00am, so I woke up at 6:30. I had a pretty good system worked out for dealing with such harsh hours. The coffee would be made beforehand and all my clothes would be chosen and laid out the night before. So, when my alarm screamed the sounds of JazzFM I might have even smugly hit the snooze button on occasion because I knew, no matter what, that system I worked out would get me to work on time. Here’s how it worked:
I turn off the alarm. It’s 6:30am so I have to confront not only extreme fatigue, but also the emotional strain of no-human-being-should-be-up-at-this-hour-ever. It’s hard to tell which is worse but the physical pain of forcing your body into an unnatural situation has an unpleasantness factor of about 10. But a few stumbles away I flick the coffee machine on and then schlep over to the sink to brush my teeth. It helped that at the time I lived in an apartment the size of a shoebox. Once I get dressed, I flip on the CBC. I love the CBC, but at this hour it’s kind of useless. I always seemed tojust be catching a strangly detailed, fringe sports update. And as irrelevant as sports updates are to 99.9% of the population, this broadcast happens to include high school sports. It seems absolutely insane. What’s next? Are they going to have DIY punk show listings on the national public broadcaster? Maybe updates on some other vain hobby? Who cares? Stick to public affairs and real civic issues, traffic, culture, and – I don’t know – things that apply to normal people? Sorry not everyone knows someone in some house league sport thing, and if we do, we can get the freaking scores from them!
Anyhow, if I could withstand the pain of the normally excellent CBC feeding sports blather, I put my helmet on, clip on my pass (which also gets me on transit for free), and gulp down as much coffee as I can without scalding my insides. Once I walk down Bloor at this hour it looks weird. Really weird. There’s nothing but blowing newspapers, the weird banner ad for some out-of-touch looking Portuguese play, and the construction workers hoarding the Tim Hortons. In order to insulate myself from this scene I synch my iPod with the greatest podcasts in the world. If I’m blessed then I will have a new Best Show Gems podcast cued up, or – even better – a Best Show podcast proper. If not I could always rely on – before he forsaked us through his retirement - Politics with Don Newman. Probably the last public affairs radio program made for grownups still on the air, except maybe The House, which, thankfully, is still with us.
So when I get to the subway station there it is. The last thing before I’m in motion: The movie posters. There was some Seth Rogan poster up for awhile but then, or possibly at the same time, there was this poster for the film Away We Go. It had not only a stylish design, and a SNL cast member, but also Dave Eggers on it. I was intrigued. In truth, of Dave Eggers, I’ve only ever read his interview with Bob Dylan, which was okay I guess. But I thought he must be pretty good. I figured, he’s this smart, rich, New York intellectual that all my smart friends like, so what I mean to say is that his name, and these other beforementioned factors, made me pretty sure that this was a film I should probably see.
Well it’s not surprising that a guy that reports to work everyday (temporarily, of course) does not get out to any movies very much. So I didn’t see it. But down the road I eventually acquired a copy of it on video. One night before bed I turned it on. I think I was about 10 minutes in total and listened to a patchwork of about 30 additional minutes in total. The reason for this is that I was more tired than I thought. But It’s also because Away We Go is the type of cliché, bullshit, gen-x inanity that I thought had gone the way of shows like Friends or something. This film was the stuff of bad television.
Oh, and I took exception to the sad, rich, Montreal couple who have trouble having kids. “Our generation is selfish,” the would-be father says, “we wait until we’re 30 and then wonder why when we try to have a baby it doesn’t work.” And for the first time I felt like engaging with the film. How dare you?, I thought, with the cost of student loans combined with stagnated wages and off-the-wall housing costs, compared with that of our parent’s time, many in our generation can’t even afford to start a family until our 30s. How insulting!
Utter rot, I say! |
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