Film is Truth 24 Times a Second

Tideland opens with what has to be the most ominous, least promising beginning of all time: the face of the director, Terry Gilliam, telling you that there’s a strong chance you’re going to hate it. And I must admit that there’s a strong chance he’s right. A quick look at the reviews for the film shows that an awful lot of film critics really did hate it quite a lot. I didn’t hate it, but I couldn’t exactly say that I enjoyed it either, although it is often quite funny. The most I can hope to do is to attempt to understand it.

In his cautionary introduction, Gilliam advises the audience to forget everything they have learned as adults and to try to return to the innocent state of childhood. This theme of childhood innocence and fantasy has always been central to Gilliam’s films in the past, almost all of which seem to revolve around the idea of creating fantasy to escape brute reality (hence the tragic perfection of abortive attempt at a film based on Don Quixote). For the first twenty minutes or so, Tideland plays like Time Bandits’ White Trash cousin: the protagonist, a girl of about twelve named Jeliza-Rose, lives with the most comically ghastly, unpleasant, uncaring junkie parents, cooking up heroin for her father (played by Jeff Bridges) while her mother (Jennifer Tilly in the role she was born to play) alternates between hurling abuse and craving affection. Before long, like Time Bandits’ Kevin before her, she is liberated from these most undeserving authorities and freed to pursue her adventures.

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I got 13 out of 24, or 54% — the worst I’ve done in years. For the most part, I’m not surprised, having not seen a bunch of this year’s nominees. Of those, the one I’m most looking forward to is The Lives of Others, which looks like a German version of The Conversation, and how could that be bad?

Oh, here’s a link to the full list of winners: Click Here

P.S. Children of Men was robbed.

I feel really ill-prepared; this is the first time in years that I haven’t seen all of the Best Pic nominees (I missed Iwo Jima & The Queen).

Pic: Babel

I’m torn. Sunshine winning would be like if, say, My Big Fat Greek Wedding won in 2003, and I can’t wrap my head around that.  (I mean, I liked it — but Best Pic?) I would vote for The Departed, myself, and I kind of feel like Babel already won, last year, when it was called Crash. Nevertheless. (Of course, if Pan’s Labyrinth and Children of Men were in the running — then I’d really be torn.)

Director: Martin Scorsese

Actor: Forest Whitaker

Actress: Helen Mirren

Sup. Actor: Eddie Murphy

Sup. Actress: Jennifer Hudson

Orig. Screenplay: Babel

Adap. Screenplay: The Departed

Animated: Cars

Foreign: Pan’s Labyrinth

Cinematography: Children of Men

Editing: Babel

Art Direction: Dreamgirls

Costume Design: Marie Antoinette

Original Score: The Queen

Original Song: “Listen,” Dreamgirls

Makeup: Pan’s Labyrinth

Sound Mixing: Dreamgirls

Sound Editing: Iwo Jima

Visual Effects: Pirates

Documentary Feature: Inconvenient Truth

Documentary Short: Blood of the Yingzhou District

Animated Short: Little Match Girl

Live Action Short: West Bank Story

Maya Deren: Experimental Films

Every time I play this disc in the store, it prompts questions from customers, and I really appreciate that because it’s an amazing collection that deserves to rent more than it has. Deren was a pioneering avant-garde filmmaker whose work is still remarkably potent and influential today — Meshes of the Afternoon’s brief 18 minutes alone can count among its descendents Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal, David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr and Lost Highway, and - unfortunately - too many awful music videos to name.

But, unlike even the best MTV fare, Deren’s work is not trite or arch or pretentious or hip; instead it’s a startlingly palpable realization of psychological/dream states (Meshes) or a formally elegant deconstruction of tradition and performance (At Land & Ritual in Transfigured Time) or a simple but lovely admiration of human movement in her camera-choreographed “dance” films (The Very Eye of Night & Meditation on Violence).

Meshes of the Afternoon is probably the best experimental film since Un Chein Andalou, but unlike that wonderful film, Deren’s masterpiece seems personally felt rather than surrealistically absurd. It’s not a collection of random images pulled from a hat (I’m not saying that’s all that Dali & Bunuel’s film was, by any means) but the work of one extraordinarily intelligent and talented woman who was able, with a relatively simple series of images, to externalize the internal, in a way that remains surprising and moving and - most of all - convincing.

Luis Bunuel created one of film’s most notorious images: that of the woman you see to the left, about to have her eyball sliced by a straight-razor. Bunuel does not flinch; he shows the bulging globe of the eye in grotesque close-up as the razor cleaves smoothly along its equator and into the gelatinous flesh. The film was Un Chien Andalou, and it contains no shortage of shocking imagery. Co-created by Salvador Dali, it’s generally considered the apogee of surrealist filmmaking. Bunuel’s remaining career, though, provides evidence that he was far from a mere provocateur — his subversive condemnation of Church & State was deeply felt and daringly expressed throughout the rest of his work, most of which was far more understated - but no less sedate - than the overt sensationalism of his early masterpiece. His lineage of influence includes David Lynch, Crispin Glover, Harmony Korine and Joel Schumacher.

Films by Bunuel available for rent at FIT include:

• Un Chien Andalou
• L’Age D’Or
• Land Without Bread
• The Great Madcap
• Los Olivados
• The Brute
• Robinson Crusoe
• The Young One
• Viridiana
• The Exterminating Angel
• Diary of a Chambermaid
• Belle de Jour
• The Milky Way
• Tristana
• The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
• The Phantom of Liberty
• That Obscure Object of Desire

Sam Peckinpah revolutionized the portrayal of violence in films: he utilized slow motion, repeated shots, rapid cuts, etc. to simultaneously emphasize and neutralize the physicality of gunshots, fistfights, stabbings and explosions. His inventions might be common cliches now, but in his hands they were the tools of a serious artist who appeased and subverted the audience’s insatiable desire for bruised flesh and gushing wounds. His concerns were the responsibility and indulgence of masculinity, the ambiguity of right and wrong, the questionable myths of history and the inescapable fate of our bodies’ limitations. He’s probably one of film’s greatest director/editors, alongside Nicholas Roeg, Russ Meyer, Terrence Malick and Stanley Kubrick.

Peckinpah films available for rental at FIT include:

• Ride the High Country
• Major Dundee
• The Wild Bunch
• The Ballad of Cable Hogue
• Straw Dogs
• Junior Bonner
• The Getaway
• Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid
• Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
• Cross of Iron

I just read, via this link, that Ryan Larkin died last week. His career at first seemed precocious (creating several highly idiosyncratic and influential shorts while still in his twenties) but his fate was ultimately tragic — both aspects of his life explored in the very strange, Oscar-winning documentary DVD Ryan, which also includes examples of his startlingly intuitive work. His short films were lovingly (and time-consumingly) drawn by his own hand and provide a poetic alternative for personal expression in a medium generally used to sell toys and indoctrinate children (and unwary adults).

Larkin worked with Norman McLaren (who was actually Scottish-born) at the National Film Board of Canada, and whose work we have available on a two-disc set called Norman McLaren: The Collector’s Edition. This is some truly brilliant stuff, no lie — the range of styles (and the uncanny command of each) that flowed from this one man’s hands is awe-inspiring: traditional character animation, Oscar Fischinger-esque musical abstractions, Brakhage-like film painting and chemical experiments, gorgeously choreographed dance photography that brings to mind the pioneering styles of Muybridge or Edgerton, ahead-of-its-time use of raw electronic signals and computer animation, and on and on. I can’t extol the excellence of this collection highly enough. If I had to live with just one animation DVD for the rest of my life, this would be it.

A third animator of note from the Great White North is Grant Munro, who also collaborated with McLaren. Cut-Up: The Films of Grant Munro features his own work, which is just as varied (if not as virtuoso and accomplished) as McLaren’s.

All three discs are highly recommended — and if you’d like additional suggestions of experimental animation, please ask, as I’m working on a more thorough list to be published here… eventually.

If there’s a better film than Brian De Palma’s Femme Fatale, I’d like someone to name it, because I can’t think of any.

Best. Film. Ever.

Due to the hefty amount of spam comments we’ve been getting, all comments which include a hyperlink are now held in a moderation queue until I get a chance to look at them (which I do a couple of times a day).

Further hatch battening as events warrant.