Film is Truth 24 Times a Second

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.

The Criterion Co. has just released this little-known but highly-regarded film on DVD. If you’re a fan of relatively experimental war films like The Thin Red Line or Come and See, then I’d suggest you have a look at this one. I’ve written a review of the film which you can read here.

10 Items or Less is a great example of a movie made possible by the casting. It’s pretty easy to imagine how the movie could have been another inert lump of precious indie hipster shaggy-doggism (and, to be honest, many people will still find it such), but Morgan Freeman hoists the entire film up on his shoulders and lopes away with it. Freeman’s charisma — his specific brand of easygoing charm — makes the meandering film work, and it’s hard to think of another actor who could pull it off convincingly.

Steven Wright: When the Leaves Blow Away is Wright’s first concert film in many many years. It’s exactly what you’d expect, if you’re at all familiar with him — funny stuff, but I found his nasal drone a little difficult to listen to, uninterrupted, for so long. The concert film is around 45 minutes. There’s also a short film he did called “One Soldier,” which is sort of like if Wright was in The Seventh Seal and it was set during the Civil War.

Tears of the Black Tiger — well, if Sergio Leone and Douglas Sirk got married and honeymooned in Thailand, this is the film the would make while they were there. It’s an action-western-romance-melodrama in which garish violence plays out in front of Easter Egg-colored sets, like Sam Peckinpah on a Pixy Stix bender. There aren’t characters so much as there are symbols — the good guys gaze at their beloved ones piercingly and soulfully, while the bad guys sneer and cackle wickedly. Worth watching.

The blog was down for a while.  Now it’s back up.  Welcome back!

Not to be confused with “Daniel-San” of Karate Kid fame, Danielson: A Family Movie is a doc about the band that occasionally goes by the Danielson Famile. I for one didn’t know much about them upon viewing, only recognizing the name Sufjan Stevens which was attached ambiguously on the back of the case.

The Danielson Famile story is an interesting one, mainly focusing on the strong Christian influences on the family and their musical leader Daniel Smith, who thinks, breathes, and thanks God every day for their music and lives. In a world where Christianity has arguably becoming synonymous with conservativism and perhaps even ignorance, Danielson defies this association, pushing musical boundaries and creating a completely unqiue sound. If you need a brutally rash likeness, think the Osmonds meets the Flaming Lips, and there you go.

The documentary itself is composed of montages, interviews, and performances, and although crudely done in some parts, doesn’t detract from the overall effect of the film. Though you may not subscribe to the message of Danielson, you can at least admire their artistry and attempts to be a real band. Also, fans of Sufjan Stevens can rejoice as he dominates a good chunk of the screen time as well.

Creed, Sixpence None the Richer, your days are up. Say hello, Danielson.

Wow, I cannot believe this hasn’t been rented yet. The Lost Room was a short series from the Sci-Fi Channel, tapping into the same mystery and intrigue as Twin Peaks (whose 2nd season coming out this week may be overshadowing the Lost Room).

Peter Krause of Six Feet Under glory, plays a cop on the LAM while trying to find his daughter who went missing in the lost room. There are six episodes, each one focusing on what the show refers to as “Objects,” common items capable of extraordinary things, such as time travel or teleportation, all leading up to trying to understand just what happened in the Room to create these anomalies. The supernatural aspects of the show are actually quite interesting and refreshing, like an extended episode of the Twilight Zone.

Unfortunately, the show ends a bit short, leaving a lot to be further explored, and with no sequel in sight, it is frustratingly apparent that any questions or ideas you are left with by the end will go unanswered.

In a world where shows tend to go on for a season or two more than they actually should, The Lost Room had so much more to give us that really would have made it a greater show and possibly a cult phenomenon. Who knows, it might get picked up again down the road (spin-off?), but certainly not when it hasn’t even rented once yet. C’mon folks, help it out.

I suppose I asked for it. On a very vague and admittedly stupid quest to watch (at least attempt to watch) every film in the Criterion Collection starting today and working backwards. This is up there with starting at the beginning of the FIT catalog at “A” and working up to “Z” (Jeff, you know what I am talking about).

As part of this journey, I stumbled across Fat Girl. I came into it not quite amazed, but still hanging onto it. As the film progressed, I came to find it a very interesting examination of teenage behavior regarding sex and youth. After a good hour, I could safely say it was worth watching, a bit slow and a little frustrating at times, but worth something.

Then, in the last 5 minutes, it all came to a screeching halt. I won’t spoil it, and in fact, I encourage you to watch it to understand my frustration and anger. How could it end like this??? It was a slap in my face, and left me asking, “Really…That’s all you could do? This is what you had to resort to?” Even the alternate ending added to my despair. Why not end it with ‘…and it was all a dream…’ which I even wanted it to be, but wasn’t. I now approach Director Catherine Breillat with great skepticism, and can only hope that her other films (Brief Crossing, Anatomy of Hell, etc.) carry the same senses of Fat Girl, but don’t fall short of their potential.

Yesterday morning in Los Angeles Bob Clark was killed by a drunk driver (who, naturally, was hardly scratched). Clark made two excellent films about the same holiday:

Christmas Story (1983) is an outrageously funny, nostalgic but not necessarily sentimental observation of the inane chaos and feverish anticipation that gathers as the big day approaches. The film contains no false homilies or tired platitudes, and remains beloved for its portrait of family disfunction but not dissolution. It’s also one of the great movies about kids, as Roger Ebert (sorry, Andrew) mentions in this excellent review. The last scene of this film, a makeshift X-mas dinner in a Chinese restaurant, is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.

Clark’s horror film Black Christmas was made ten years earlier (1974) and anticipates Halloween, Scream, etc. but is much better — it manages to be as suspenseful and disturbing as the former, as knowing as the latter, and even has quite a few laughs thanks to the trenchant script. It’s beautifully photographed and features great performances by Olivia Hussey, Margot Kidder (pre-Superman, pre-breakdown) Keir Dullea (2001, Bunny Lake Is Missing) and genre stalwart (ha ha) John Saxon.

Clark also directed Porky’s in 1982, a full 20 years before the success of American Pie ushered in a new era of crude sex-comedies, proving once again that the horny teenager is a perennial subject and audience member.

“Tarkovsky is for me the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.”
-Ingmar Bergman

One of my two or three favorite filmmakers, Andrei Tarkovsky was born on this date in 1932. He only made seven feature films in a career that was hindered at every step by the Russian authorities while praised by his peers around the world. Among his ardent admirers were Ingmar Bergman, Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa — all of whom’s work betrays, eventually, the influence of Tarkovsky’s radical style: stunning photography, infrequent but extraordinarily calculated camera moves, stagey yet beautiful choreography, poetic dream logic and, perhaps most identifiable of all, incredibly long takes.

Tarkovsky wasn’t the first to utilize lengthy, unbroken shots (see Murnau, Welles, etc.) but he was the first to make it a signature aspect of his intentions as a director. So if you’re impressed by Cuaron’s “long” shots (even though they are CGI-aided) in Children of Men, or Van Sant’s “long” shots in Elephant, or Bela Tarr’s “long” shots in… well, all of his films, remember that Tarkovsky did it earlier, and better, and never as a gimmick — always with the form of the whole film in mind.

Still, he was just as likely to cut a flurry of brief shots together, almost subliminally disorienting and hypnotizing the viewer. He even authored a book called Sculpting in Time, the precis being that editing is the inherent quality exclusive to motion pictures. Again, he wasn’t the first to say that (see Eisenstein, etc.) but as with long takes, he made the process seem essential to what he was doing.

And what was he doing? I think he would have said, unapologetically, that he was making “art” with a capital “A”. I wouldn’t watch his films for a laugh (though there is plenty of humor there, if you look for it) — his concerns are life and death, our place in the universe, the nature of creation, etc. Fortunately he was as removed from didacticism as an artist could be; whatever his personal beliefs, and despite an obvious intellectual streak (some - and I pity them - would call it pretension), the entirety of his work is open-ended and highly intuitive, even mystical. This ambiguity encourages the continued interest in and study of his few films.

A brief overview of Tarkovsky films available at FIT:

The Killers - Based on the Hemingway short story, this 19-minute student work is an extra on the Criterion Collection’s The Killers two-discer. It’s an unusual choice for Tarkovsky, at least in retrospect. He even appears in one scene.

The Steamroller and the Violin - His diploma project for film school. A 45-minute film that is relatively minor, but features his mature style in gestative form. Some lovely images, and a nice performance by the child lead.

Andrei Rublev - Seriously, one of the greatest films ever made. Ever. Three hours of 15th century artists, philosophers, peasants and pagans… There is a thirty minute sequence at the end of the film wherein a giant bell is cast under the direction of a young boy, which is a great film itself, though it serves as an incredibly cathartic climax to the whole piece. The Criterion disc we have is not the finest picture quality (you’ll have to go outside Region 1 for that) but it is the longest cut — I guess the editor of the movie hid this print under her bed for years, and Martin Scorsese helped smuggle it out of the USSR. Not sure if that’s true, but it’s a great story.

Solaris - Often called the Soviet “answer” to Kubrick’s 2001, though that gives short thrift to both films. Based on the brilliant and dense novel by Stanislaw Lem, this is one of the great science-fiction films of the 70s. The - you guessed it - Criterion edition of this is truly gorgeous, with a second disc of worthwhile extras, including some very nice unused scenes — particularly one that occurs in room full of mirrors. Avoid the Stevie Soderbergh remake at all costs.

Mirror - His most personal, abstract work. A collection of dreams, memories, news footage, etc. Maybe his most visionary film, but not necessarily the easiest one to start with.

Stalker - Another science-fiction film, though almost purely philosophical. Three men search for a room bearing the contents of a… spacecraft? divine visitation? …that will grant the entrant’s wishes — whether they want it to or not. The corroded landscape and buildings eerily predict the tradgedy at Chernobyl. His most focused and mesmerizing story.

Voyage in Time - Sort of a documentary, sort of an essay, only co-directed by Tarkovsky himself. Records his time in Italy while making his next film (Nostalghia). Not essential unless you’re already a fan of his stuff.

Nostalghia - Made while exiled in Italy. Slightly warmer tone than the rest of his work, and features some of his finest photography. His most “beautiful” film in the classical, traditional art-history sense.

The Sacrifice - His last film, and possibly my favorite. WW3 has begun and a man pleads with God, offering to kill his own son for the sake of the world. A strangely incomplete film (though it was entirely finished and released under Tarkovsky’s watch before he died in 1986) with a secondary plot about a “witch” that is difficult to justify but impossible to dismiss. His most urgent yet hopeful film. Made in Sweden and starring Erland Josephson and shot by Sven Nykvist, both regular collaborators of Bergman’s.

Tarkovsky’s first feature film - Ivan’s Childhood - is a great debut, prefiguring in some ways Malick’s The Thin Red Line, Klimov’s Come and See, and other subsequent war films. Unfortunately, the film is out-of-print in the USA, though it reportedly will be released this year by the Criterion Co.

(above: Mirror)

For the best online resource about Andrei Tarkovsky, go here.

Mario Bava is generally considered one of the fathers of the giallo, a notoriously popular, stylish and influential genre of Italian crime and horror films whose practitioners include Lucio Fulci, Sergio Martino and – most famously – Dario Argento. This week sees a newly released box set of five of Bava’s films, several of which have been out-of-print and unavailable for several years… while uninspired Hollywood imitations have flooded the multiplexes with the tepid blood of countless teenaged victims (and I count the audience of such lifeless entertainments among the injured).

Bava’s father was a cinematographer; Bava himself studied painting and eventually followed his father into the film business, first as a photographer and special-effects artist, finally directing his own work — which was clearly the product of someone with a keen eye. His style varied somewhat over the course of his career (and depending on the project) but his trademarks include vivid, unreal use of color, cavernous and idiosyncratic Welles-ian compositions, and a general tone that was at once flamboyant, hypnotic, creepy and dreary.

The five films in the box are from the 1960s, a decade that saw the emergence of several new strains of horror film: the regional, underground work of George Romero and Herschell Gordon Lewis, newly subversive Hollywood fare like Psycho or Rosemary’s Baby and the continued presence and influence of the British Hammer Studios films, many of which were riffs on classic monsters (Frankenstein, Dracula, et al.) or historically based, gothic mysteries. It is the latter genre to which most of this set’s content is indebted, four of the stories being set in the past. The one film that occurs in the (then) present – 1963’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much – is often called the first true giallo film, in spirit if not flesh (it’s virtually bloodless).

Black Sunday, Bava’s first credited film as director (he made several others earlier without attribution) is essentially a gothic horror film about a reincarnated witch seeking revenge (?) and features most of the trappings of the genre: claustrophobic sets of crumbling stone, long shadows through diffuse, foggy ambience, horse-drawn coach rides in nightmarish woods, and a lovely, dark-haired woman the victim of eternal peril and/or the perpetrator of endless menace — in this case, that role is played by the great Barbara Steele, one of the icons of Italian horror cinema. She’s not necessarily a great actress here (this isn’t, admittedly, a great script) but her face is unforgettably framed and lit by Bava, emphasizing the cursed terror (insert maniacal laugh *now*) of her plight. The film’s charms are primarily visual and tonal, then — despite the somewhat predictable plot and common characterizations, the look and feel of the film is truly unforgettable and a clear influence on countless subsequent and lesser movies, among them Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow and Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula.

1966’s Kill, Baby… Kill! is, despite the apparent modishness of the title, another historical fiction, this time about a village jinxed by the ghost of a young girl. Again, not the most “high-concept” of ideas, but what matters here is the presentation — and boy is this well made. The sets (which are obviously sets – no attempt is made to hide that fact – if anything, a theatrical space is emphasized) are beautifully appointed and almost psychedelically lit with colored gels. The camera navigates the rooms, alleys and grounds with remarkably complex, fluid and unbroken shots — and when still, the images are unsettlingly memorable.

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