Dunno if anyone’s noticed, but I worked my last day at FiT many weeks ago…
I send this final message from the beyond to thank Karl for posting a link (to the right) to Lucid Screening , a film criticism site that I regularly write movie reviews for (Jeff writes there too, on average about once every six months). Thanks Karl!
Oh, and what the hell is the Mariner’s problem?!
We all get a kick out of Wes Anderson, don’t we? To one degree or another? Bottle Rocket is Karl’s favorite movie ever, and seems I’ve heard any one one of Anderson’s other titles - Rushmore, Royal Tannenbaums and The Life Aquatic - recommended by all the employees here at one point or another, so…
Click here for the new trailer for The Darjeeling Limited, Wes Anderson’s latest due out in September.
It looks fun, and funny too, but I can’t help having some serious misgivings about the film’s premise. I’ll spare y’all them here, but please feel free to ask me personally… or read a short take on my reservations over at Lucid Screening.
Hand it to a developing country on the global periphery like south Korea to give birth to a monster movie willing to shake things up in the world of genre. Fun, funny and fiercely political, Bong Joon-ho’s The Host is his third film, and the second that I’ve seen following 2003’s Memories of Murder. Both are firmly genre films, with a serial killer in Memories of Murder, and a giant monster in The Host. The Host’s unique mix of pathos and bathos is immediately recognizable from Memories of Murder, as is the strong anti-government satire. Where The Host is different, however, is in it’s a setting in the present, a shift of its critique of the State from the fear of emasculation to the fear of public crisis, and a slightly Spielbergian devotion to the family unit.
Unlike the standard established by Spielberg in Jaws, the monster in The Host – a giant skull-chewing CGI tadpole – is revealed very quickly: a river gets polluted and this big green jumping out of it. Bong’s intention seems to be to establish the premise and get it out of the way as soon as possible. The ensuing film, aside from a few choice chase scenes and a firy climax, is not even about a giant tadpole so much as it is a farce aimed at the State’s ability to declare a crisis without having a clue about what’s really going on. When the Korean government – and its overpowering overseer, the United States – declare the tadpole to be a SARS-like virus, it’s up to the intrepid, devoted family to navigate the real situation and resolve it on their terms.
As Karl mentions below, Little Miss Sunshine was last year’s other film about family dysfunction. Like Lil’ Miss, we get a host of idiosyncratic characters: there’s the central cute little girl, her unemployed college graduate father, an aging-old grandpa who runs a snack stand, a lazy uncle whose shifts at the stand double as naptime, and a professional archer aunt. While The Host is cute at times, unlike Lil’ Miss there’s nothing precious about it, largely thanks to the greater social and political weight on its shoulders. Unlike the traffic stop cop in Lil’ Miss, for instance, the State isn’t there simply as a set-up for a joke; in The Host, it’s there to perform its true function, to repress.
While Lil’ Miss was the more popular film of the two in the States, The Host became the top grossing film of all time in Korea. While one doesn’t have to know anything about Korea to enjoy the film, it might take some knowledge of the country to appreciate it. When the dad demonstrates his college degree was in molotov tossing, for example, it helps to know he’s part of a generation of students who helped throw out the country’s dictatorship. Apparently The Host is slated for a remake in the States, and it’ll be interesting to see if Hollywood does anything with these political details.
In my experience, this blog’s recommendations have yet to convince anyone to see any movie. And if anything is going to do it, its not going to be a huge picture of three Icelandic children. No matter…
I hearby declare for the next few months, my stock recommendation will unapologetically be Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, on DVD in the States for the first time ever this week (packaged together with another beautiful film, La Jetee). It’s got everything Bellingham’s movie viewers know and love - world travel, pretty pictures, leftist politics - and admittedly, a few things they don’t - no traditional narrative or storyline to speak of. I didn’t know what to think the first time I saw it, but now every time I think about it, it gives me big ol’ goosebumps. The movie is a big gaping black hole of wonder at the world. I daydream about it constantly.
Here is a passage from the film’s narration that I feels sums it up the best.
In San Francisco I made the pilgrimage of a film I had seen nineteen times. In Iceland I laid the first stone of an imaginary film. That summer I had met three children on a road and a volcano had come out of the sea. The American astronauts came to train before flying off to the moon, in this corner of Earth that resembles it. I saw it immediately as a setting for science fiction: the landscape of another planet. Or rather no, let it be the landscape of our own planet for someone who comes from elsewhere, from very far away. I imagine him moving slowly, heavily, about the volcanic soil that sticks to the soles. All of a sudden he stumbles, and the next step it’s a year later. He’s walking on a small path near the Dutch border along a sea bird sanctuary.
That’s for a start. Now why this cut in time, this connection of memories? That’s just it, he can’t understand. He hasn’t come from another planet he comes from our future, four thousand and one: the time when the human brain has reached the era of full employment. Everything works to perfection, all that we allow to slumber, including memory. Logical consequence: total recall is memory anesthetized. After so many stories of men who had lost their memory, here is the story of one who has lost forgetting, and who—through some peculiarity of his nature—instead of drawing pride from the fact and scorning mankind of the past and its shadows, turned to it first with curiosity and then with compassion. In the world he comes from, to call forth a vision, to be moved by a portrait, to tremble at the sound of music, can only be signs of a long and painful pre-history. He wants to understand. He feels these infirmities of time like an injustice, and he reacts to that injustice like Ché Guevara, like the youth of the sixties, with indignation. He is a Third Worlder of time. The idea that unhappiness had existed in his planet’s past is as unbearable to him as to them the existence of poverty in their present.
If… you itch with indignation at any hint of hierarchy or imposed authority.
If… your sense of humor tends toward the sacrilegious.
If… you reimagined Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct as a modern day school shooting.
If… you like Malcolm Mcdowell - that stare, that sneer, that grin.
If… you like your militant macho politics with a strong hint of homoeroticism, including what David Ehrenstein calls “the most beautiful homoerotic scene ever filmed… better than sex.”.
Then you’ll really enjoy Lindsay Anderson’s If…, just released by the Criterion Collection on DVD this week.
If… you want to rent Zero for Conduct, we have it at FIT only on VHS, as its not on DVD in the States (criminal!), though for a VHS tape, its a pretty good print.
If… this review format is too trite for your taste, I’ve written a longer one at Lucid Screening.
A few months back, the store picked up Roz Payne’s What We Want, What We Believe, an 8-hour gift to historical researchers sifting through the history of the Black Panther Party. I wrote a long review which you can read here. Essentially, Payne’s collection is an amazing resource, but not the starting point if you’re interested in an entertaining, entry-level introduction to all things Panther.
This week here at FIT we’ve recieved another piece of BPP history, a 1972 film newly released by Facets Multimedia, The Murder of Fred Hampton. Whether you’re familiar with the Panthers or Fred Hampton, the film is essential viewing. The filmmakers were in the midst of filming a documentary about Hamtpon, Chicago Panther Party chairman, when the Chicago PD assassinated the twenty-year old expectant father in his bed while he sleep. The filmmakers arrived at the scene of Fred’s killing six hours after the event, and spent the next several months documenting the state of Illinois cruel attempts to cover up the facts of his death.
Hampton is someone you’ll read a lot about in history books, or briefly referenced in documentaries (e.g. footage from The Murder of… was used in The Weather Underground), but it is rare to actually see the young man in action, at his most electric. Many claim he would have been the next Macolm X - the radical “black messiah” the FBI feared so much - had he not been killed, a claim that might seem like complete rhetoric until the footage of this film. You get the chance to see Hampton both speaking publicly - a firy orator - and organizing privately. You also get an inside glimpse at the radical social services that the Panthers made the basis of their programs.
Another film we have at FIT - a one-hour long film available for a reduced rental price - is Passin’ It On, which follows the police repression of another Panther, Dhoruba Bin Wahad, in New York City. Passin’ It On was made in the 1980s, and thus is better at tying the legacies of the Panthers struggle into the present than The Murder of Fred Hampton, a product of the early 1970s. It covers much of what was later revealed in court cases and other struggles: that the FBI and the US government were out to get Black militants from the very beginning. Watched together, these two films povide a general introduction to the Black Panthers in less than three hours.
Absolutely essential, and I’m not one to throw words like that around. Both of these films document struggles as they were occurring, and thus avoid the fatal mistake of nearly all documentaries about the ’60s and 70s: nostalgia and distancing.
For a longer review of The Murder of Fred Hampton, please visit Lucid Screening
I just wrapped up a full-length review for the newly released Regular Lovers that I’ve posted at Lucid Screening because - probably against my own better judgement - I cuss a lot in it.
I will say here that Regular Lovers proved to be the best damn movie and the most painfully boring movie I have seen in a long time - simultaneously.
I’ll also say I couldn’t imagine a better movie being made about Paris in 1968. The first third is like a Robert Bresson film if he was a revolutionary anarchist instead of a dyed-in-the-wool Catholic. But the last two thirds is burdened with the question of why revolution never happened in France in 1968, and so there’s lots of apathetic sitting around and doing nothing. Its true to life - which is why its brilliant - but sometimes life sucks, and life in Regular Lovers is no exception.
As the credits began to roll for Old Joy, a person in front of me in the theater whispered to the friend beside her, “That was the most boring film I have ever seen.” I quite liked the film, but I can understand the sentiment. Old Joy is not “deceptively simple,” as the copy often reads on press releases for a film like this - its simple, period. There’s no deception involved. It really is just two dudes going hiking. But I found simplicity to be Old Joy’s virtue: it amplifies the details of its characters’ lives and the environs of the Pacific Northwest, leaving a great deal to mull over - if you are up for it.
Dude #1, Mark (Daniel London), has a wife who’s pregnant and a Portland neighborhood he calls home. One day, Dude #2 Kurt (Will Oldham) calls up Mark for a day of hiking in the nearby Cascades, and off they go. Kurt is, like Mark, pushing thirty, but unlike Mark, he’s never considered settling down; he still shares party glory stories about smoking dope and getting laid expecting Mark to be into it, but Mark can’t muster the enthusiasm. It becomes clear Mark and Kurt were once much better friends, the “joy” of the film’s title that has now grown old.
Changing times and aging lives have created a distance between Mark and Kurt, a crisis that neither can articulate because their liberal white bubble lacks the political and social terms to explain it. Anyone who is currently or has ever considered themselves – or been considered by others – as the constituency of the Green Party will know the types immediately: Pacific Northwest dwelling, avid Air America listening white liberals who fail to do anything concrete with their Bush-hating moral conscience. As Vincente Rodriguez-Ortega observes, “Old Joy aims to reflect the emotional and social conundrums that constrict the mid-to-late thirties American white male.”
As far as crises go, these are rather petty: Old Joy might be what you call middle-class neo-realism. Unlike most films, whose intent is to help you forget real life for length of their running time, there’s nothing vicarious about Old Joy; the characters are too mundane, too recognizable. But as American narrative film-making, outside of documentaries, generally avoids realism of any variety – by which I mean an attempt to grapple with the social, economic and political lives of individuals in plain, uncontrived ways - any realism is a breath of fresh air.
What for one person might be downright dull about Old Joy, I found to be “tranquil,” “meditative,” and ultimately downright “heuristic” (thanks Roget’s): serving to indicate or point out; stimulating interest as a means of furthering investigation.Watching it, I couldn’t help thinking “For better or worse, life is really like this.” While I’m not where Mark and Kurt are in their lives, I have friends who are - and if I’m not careful, I might find myself there too, political obscurity and all. I urge you to give Old Joy a try to see how it affects you. At worst, you’ll get a good snooze out of it; at best, you’ll be scrutinizing the languid details of white liberals and Pacific Northwest living. In a liberal bubble like Bellingham, that can only be a good thing.
Old Joy is available for rental on DVD starting Tuesday, May 1st.
I suppose most folks go to movies for the fantasy of it all, so it only makes sense that V for Vendetta ranks with the top video rentals for a liberal oasis like Bellingham, WA. V gets the left-leaning among us all pumped for that moment when the masses recognize the government for what it is - fascism, according to the film’s aesthetic - and surge to overthrow the State. Too bad this revolution is led by a computer-generated cartoon.
This week we here at Film is Truth acquire a DVD of Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames, my favorite film of all time… for political purposes, anyway. Released in 1983, Flames precedes V for Vendetta by twenty years, and features a revolution made, not by cartoons or Hollywood actors, but real people. Or to be more exact, real women: black women, white women, butch, femme, working class, middle class, young and old, sex workers and social workers, artists and theorists, activists, slack-tivists and butt-crack-tivists (by which I mean to suggest this films got some nudity). Like V, Born in Flames imagines a revolution targeted against an authoritarian government, but this time it’s not a fascist state, but the State itself that’s the target.
Here’s how it goes down. Flames is ingeniously set ten years after a socialist revolution in America, and while the labor movement is apparently in power, women and people of color are – surprise, surprise – still treated like crap. The film follows the efforts of various factions of women to fight back against the discrimination and violence they face in their everyday lives. From the armed self-defense of the Women’s Army, to the broadcasts of Phoenix Radio and Radio Regazza, direct action becomes the only effective course of action in face of the hollow promises of social democracy (some – like me - would call this sort of thing anarchism).
Through it all, Born in Flames becomes a veritable catalog of issues that real-world American radicals are always faced with. Never mind that it was released the year I was born (1983); its relevance to today is one of the most striking things about it. No other film that I know of mixes issues of anti-racism, anti-hierarchical organizing, armed struggle, anti-sexism, working class and queer politics, theory vs. action, State repression, internationalism, media (both corporate and alternative) in the same way. And it doesn’t hurt that the soundtrack kicks ass – a sweet as hell mix of early punk and dub. The theme song alone will be stuck in your head for days, and you’ll love it (“Borrrrrrrrrn in Flaaaa-ames…. Bornnnn in Flaaa-ames…”).
Maybe the reason it feels so authentic is that Flames itself emerged out of radical feminist circles in NYC in the early 1980s. Director Borden interweaves her fictional characters into real political demonstrations, and puts real newscasts to use in her fictional narrative. Activists themselves constitute the cast, giving it a documentary feel while reminding us all the same that the “act” in activist unfortunately has nothing to do with acting (they still manage to act Natalie Portman under the table. IMHO.).
Some might find the film’s pace and inability to resolve a lot of issues irritating. This ain’t no Hollywood film, and for a lot of viewers that might make for a painful viewing experience. Unlike the comic book choreography of V for Vendetta, much of the “action” in Flames simply consists of debates over proper tactics, stuff like violence versus non-violence. Where V is pure fantasy, resolving its plot in an over-the-top revolution, where all the cards fall into place, Flames puts its sci-fi conventions to use in asking barbed questions, at daggers drawn.
Born in Flames is most humble too, more than aware of its inability to resolve everything it is putting to you. How else to explain its explosive, open-ended - and inflammatory – finale? “We are born in flaaaaaaaaaaames” wails the sound track. Now that we’re born, the film leaves it up to us to start living again. And that’s right where the power belongs – in the of the hands of those who lack it (not fools like me, I should note, who are up to their neck in privilege). So rent this film if you have a fist that needs raising.
“ Anna Nicole Smith’s bizarre sudden death became even more twisted than her life yesterday as a series of revelations uncovered an ever-growing web of sexual intrigue, including the claim that her late billionaire husband may be the father of her infant daughter… ‘That’s my sister for you. That b—h probably doesn’t even know who the father is. Soon she’ll probably say it’s J. Howard’s,’ Hogan [Anna Nicole’s sister] wrote.“