"If you fake the funk, your nose will grow." — Bootsy Collins
Well, I finally saw The Matrix Reloaded, weeks after everybody else.And unlike nearly everybody else, I actually liked Reloaded better than the first Matrix film–and certainly better than I expected to…
Well, I finally saw The Matrix Reloaded, weeks after everybody else.And unlike nearly everybody else, I actually liked Reloaded better than the first Matrix film–and certainly better than I expected to…
Continue reading “The Matrix Reloaded”
Chantal Akerman’s La Captive is a film so beautiful, so intense, and so claustrophobic that it is well-nigh unbearable. I mean this as unambiguous praise. La Captive is an adaptation of Proust–it is based on La Prisonniere, the section of A la recherche du temps perdu that narrates the narrator’s obsessive love for Albertine. And Akerman’s film is fully worthy of its source. Everything in La Captive is understated and underplayed: the lover’s jealousy, his efforts at surveillance, his relentless interrogation of the beloved, and her blankness and pliability. But this understatement is precisely right for the somber, nocturnal mood that is being depicted–love as a delirious possessiveness, doomed to impossibility, the attempt to possess a shadow, not merely another empirical person, but that person’s very otherness and mystery. It’s like trying to grasp the wind, or the darkness, in your two hands. Akerman conveys this, above all, through the rhythm, the temporality, of her film. This is a time that stops running, that turns back on itself, that keeps you waiting: not emptiness exactly, but the time of an anticipation that can never be fulfilled by presence.
Chantal Akerman’s La Captive is a film so beautiful, so intense, and so claustrophobic that it is well-nigh unbearable. I mean this as unambiguous praise. La Captive is an adaptation of Proust–it is based on La Prisonniere, the section of A la recherche du temps perdu that narrates the narrator’s obsessive love for Albertine. And Akerman’s film is fully worthy of its source. Everything in La Captive is understated and underplayed: the lover’s jealousy, his efforts at surveillance, his relentless interrogation of the beloved, and her blankness and pliability. But this understatement is precisely right for the somber, nocturnal mood that is being depicted–love as a delirious possessiveness, doomed to impossibility, the attempt to possess a shadow, not merely another empirical person, but that person’s very otherness and mystery. It’s like trying to grasp the wind, or the darkness, in your two hands. Akerman conveys this, above all, through the rhythm, the temporality, of her film. This is a time that stops running, that turns back on itself, that keeps you waiting: not emptiness exactly, but the time of an anticipation that can never be fulfilled by presence.
Demonlover, by Olivier Assayas, is a dazzling and brilliant film, even if not an entirely successful one. It’s a cyberthriller–with a great score by Sonic Youth–about corporate espionage and Internet porn, with (I am glad to say) mostly unpleasant characters. The plot is initially compelling, but it eventually spins out of control in a way that is, alas, silly rather than delirious. But Demonlover remains an exhilarating experience nonetheless, because of Assayas’ style–the way the film visually and sonically embodies what it is talking about. The camera moves about restlessly, usually in close-up, often blurry. Sometimes you get the impression of fractal replication across all scales, other times of the reduction of the image to its ultimate pixels. This is literally the case when a computer screen fills the film screen, but it’s a visual logic that predominates everywhere in the movie. The world has been transformed into multiple images, all different scales existing simultaneously, constantly throbbing and metamorphosing, never permitting anything like a synoptic (let alone panoptic) overall view. The world has been transformed into a pornographic videogame, and there is no external perspective, you are always in the midst of the action. The elisions and disconnections of the plot, and the way that the characters–mostly women–can never quite be pinned down in terms of motivations–even apart from all the secret alliances and double-crosses–have a long tradition in French art films; but Assayas carries them through in a new way, one that is somehow spacy and visceral at the same time. Demonlover is too much of an art film to have the kind of immediate excitement that recent thrillers borrow from computer gaming; but it works as a dreamlike meta-reflection on the logic that such pop films embody. Despite the fact that Assayas never manages to capture the sort of melancholia and over-the-top kitschy craziness of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, or the outrageous meta-leaps and imploded action of comix by Grant Morrison or Warren Ellis, or the truly bizarre and twisted visions of, say, Sogo Ishii’s Angel Dust, Demonlover is still a powerful exploration of the strange metamorphoses of the image in postmodern global capitalism.
Demonlover, by Olivier Assayas, is a dazzling and brilliant film, even if not an entirely successful one. It’s a cyberthriller–with a great score by Sonic Youth–about corporate espionage and Internet porn, with (I am glad to say) mostly unpleasant characters. The plot is initially compelling, but it eventually spins out of control in a way that is, alas, silly rather than delirious. But Demonlover remains an exhilarating experience nonetheless, because of Assayas’ style–the way the film visually and sonically embodies what it is talking about. The camera moves about restlessly, usually in close-up, often blurry. Sometimes you get the impression of fractal replication across all scales, other times of the reduction of the image to its ultimate pixels. This is literally the case when a computer screen fills the film screen, but it’s a visual logic that predominates everywhere in the movie. The world has been transformed into multiple images, all different scales existing simultaneously, constantly throbbing and metamorphosing, never permitting anything like a synoptic (let alone panoptic) overall view. The world has been transformed into a pornographic videogame, and there is no external perspective, you are always in the midst of the action. The elisions and disconnections of the plot, and the way that the characters–mostly women–can never quite be pinned down in terms of motivations–even apart from all the secret alliances and double-crosses–have a long tradition in French art films; but Assayas carries them through in a new way, one that is somehow spacy and visceral at the same time. Demonlover is too much of an art film to have the kind of immediate excitement that recent thrillers borrow from computer gaming; but it works as a dreamlike meta-reflection on the logic that such pop films embody. Despite the fact that Assayas never manages to capture the sort of melancholia and over-the-top kitschy craziness of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, or the outrageous meta-leaps and imploded action of comix by Grant Morrison or Warren Ellis, or the truly bizarre and twisted visions of, say, Sogo Ishii’s Angel Dust, Demonlover is still a powerful exploration of the strange metamorphoses of the image in postmodern global capitalism.
I’ve been reading Harvey Pekar‘s comics for over twenty years, so I was very happy to see American Splendor, the new film about Pekar and his autobiographical comics of that title. Pekar’s comics are naturalistic to the extreme; they are slices of life from Pekar’s own life, and the lives of people he knows, works with, or meets. At the same time, these comics are quite self-conscious, aware of themselves as a medium, and as the progress they increasingly reflect the fact that Pekar’s semi-fame as a comics author is a big part of his life. The film remains pretty much true to the double nature of the comics, combining dramatizations of Pekar’s life, as recounted in his books, with the excellent Paul Giamatti as Pekar, together with on-screen commentary by Pekar himself, and photographed scenes that replicate drawings in the comics, not to mention the real places they are based on. What I’ve loved most about Pekar’s comics has always been their down-to-earth humor and grimness–Pekar is funny, but also even a more negative, doom-and-gloom pessimist and depressive than I am. The film does justice to this sensibility, while at the same time pointing up the comic’s reflexivity. It even manages to be quite charming, without being offensively sappy in a way that Pekar would hate.
I’ve been reading Harvey Pekar‘s comics for over twenty years, so I was very happy to see American Splendor, the new film about Pekar and his autobiographical comics of that title. Pekar’s comics are naturalistic to the extreme; they are slices of life from Pekar’s own life, and the lives of people he knows, works with, or meets. At the same time, these comics are quite self-conscious, aware of themselves as a medium, and as the progress they increasingly reflect the fact that Pekar’s semi-fame as a comics author is a big part of his life. The film remains pretty much true to the double nature of the comics, combining dramatizations of Pekar’s life, as recounted in his books, with the excellent Paul Giamatti as Pekar, together with on-screen commentary by Pekar himself, and photographed scenes that replicate drawings in the comics, not to mention the real places they are based on. What I’ve loved most about Pekar’s comics has always been their down-to-earth humor and grimness–Pekar is funny, but also even a more negative, doom-and-gloom pessimist and depressive than I am. The film does justice to this sensibility, while at the same time pointing up the comic’s reflexivity. It even manages to be quite charming, without being offensively sappy in a way that Pekar would hate.
11’09″01 is an omnibus film about the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Eleven filmmakers from around the world each made a short film about the events of 9/11; each film is exactly 11 minutes, 9 seconds, plus one frame long. Nearly every section is powerful, or at least interesting; but the film does not have a distributor in the USA, because it is considered to be too anti-American. Though no more so, I would argue, than the events warrant. Among the most powerful sections of the film were: Samira Makhmalbaf’s portrait of Afghani schoolchildren exiled in Iran, who are unable to comprehend an event that will nonetheless have extreme consequences for them; Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s extraordinary sound collage (with only a few images appearing on an otherwise blank screen) of the fall of the Towers; Mira Nair’s story about a Pakistani woman in New York whose son has been killed trying to rescue people from the Towers, but who is wrongly suspected by the FBI of being a terrorist; Amos Gitai’s single-take depiction of a terrorist bombing in Israel; and Shohei Imamura’s oblique fable of a war veteran who comes back home transformed into a snake. Denis Tanovic reminds us that September 11 is also the anniversary of the Srebrenica massacure in the Bosnian war; Ken Loach memorializes September 11, 1973, the day that Salvador Allende’s government in Chile was overthrown by a CIA-sponsored coup. The one American entry, directed by Sean Penn, is kind of sappy and dumb in terms of its concept, but it is redeemed by the wondrousness of 11 minutes of closeups of an elderly Ernest Borgnine.
11’09″01 is an omnibus film about the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Eleven filmmakers from around the world each made a short film about the events of 9/11; each film is exactly 11 minutes, 9 seconds, plus one frame long. Nearly every section is powerful, or at least interesting; but the film does not have a distributor in the USA, because it is considered to be too anti-American. Though no more so, I would argue, than the events warrant. Among the most powerful sections of the film were: Samira Makhmalbaf’s portrait of Afghani schoolchildren exiled in Iran, who are unable to comprehend an event that will nonetheless have extreme consequences for them; Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s extraordinary sound collage (with only a few images appearing on an otherwise blank screen) of the fall of the Towers; Mira Nair’s story about a Pakistani woman in New York whose son has been killed trying to rescue people from the Towers, but who is wrongly suspected by the FBI of being a terrorist; Amos Gitai’s single-take depiction of a terrorist bombing in Israel; and Shohei Imamura’s oblique fable of a war veteran who comes back home transformed into a snake. Denis Tanovic reminds us that September 11 is also the anniversary of the Srebrenica massacure in the Bosnian war; Ken Loach memorializes September 11, 1973, the day that Salvador Allende’s government in Chile was overthrown by a CIA-sponsored coup. The one American entry, directed by Sean Penn, is kind of sappy and dumb in terms of its concept, but it is redeemed by the wondrousness of 11 minutes of closeups of an elderly Ernest Borgnine.
I saw two Chinese films yesterday at the Seattle International Film Festival. The Best of Times, by Chang Tso-chi, from Taiwan, is a drama about two 19-year-old boys who get into big criminal-related trouble. But what distinguishes the film is its formal style, with carefully distanced and framed camera positions, black-outs between scenes, and emphasis much more on everyday family life, than on high-octane plot. It’s really a film about the intractibility of character, and the nearness of death, more than it is a juvenile/gangster movie. The accretion of detail, and de-emphasis of heavy dramatic gestures, makes for an intelligent and affecting film (even if Chang is not the equal of his mentor Hou Hsiao-hsien).
The Eye, a horror film from Hong Kong by the Pang Brothers, is the best new horror film I have seen in a number of years. Like all great horror, it combines visceral thrills with intellectual depth. A young woman, blind for many years, has her eyesight restored due to a cornea transplant. She sees the beauty of the world for the first time since the age of two. But she also sees dead people—and must learn to come to terms with such a burden. The Eye is in every way (except budget) vastly superior to The Sixth Sense, with which it shares this premise. The Pang Brothers make something truly unsettling and haunting out of corny camera and editing tricks: out-of-focus photography, sudden pans, odd framings, abrupt cuts, and the like. The undeparted dead are not evil in this film, but the mere fact of seeing them cannot help being deeply disturbing for the protagonist–and for the audience as well. This is a film about the dangers and fragility of seeing; it is about mortality, and passivity, and the need to come to terms with trauma, and the impossibility of ever really settling one’s accounts, since the world is infinitely unpredictable.
I saw two Chinese films yesterday at the Seattle International Film Festival. The Best of Times, by Chang Tso-chi, from Taiwan, is a drama about two 19-year-old boys who get into big criminal-related trouble. But what distinguishes the film is its formal style, with carefully distanced and framed camera positions, black-outs between scenes, and emphasis much more on everyday family life, than on high-octane plot. It’s really a film about the intractibility of character, and the nearness of death, more than it is a juvenile/gangster movie. The accretion of detail, and de-emphasis of heavy dramatic gestures, makes for an intelligent and affecting film (even if Chang is not the equal of his mentor Hou Hsiao-hsien).
The Eye, a horror film from Hong Kong by the Pang Brothers, is the best new horror film I have seen in a number of years. Like all great horror, it combines visceral thrills with intellectual depth. A young woman, blind for many years, has her eyesight restored due to a cornea transplant. She sees the beauty of the world for the first time since the age of two. But she also sees dead people—and must learn to come to terms with such a burden. The Eye is in every way (except budget) vastly superior to The Sixth Sense, with which it shares this premise. The Pang Brothers make something truly unsettling and haunting out of corny camera and editing tricks: out-of-focus photography, sudden pans, odd framings, abrupt cuts, and the like. The undeparted dead are not evil in this film, but the mere fact of seeing them cannot help being deeply disturbing for the protagonist–and for the audience as well. This is a film about the dangers and fragility of seeing; it is about mortality, and passivity, and the need to come to terms with trauma, and the impossibility of ever really settling one’s accounts, since the world is infinitely unpredictable.
Tian Zhuangzhuang is one of my favorite Chinese directors. His new film, Springtime in a Small Town , is his first since The Blue Kite (1993) got him in trouble with the Chinese authorities for its acerbic portrayal of the Cultural Revolution. Springtime in a Small Town is a far quieter and less ambitious film, but a beautiful one nonetheless…
Tian Zhuangzhuang is one of my favorite Chinese directors. His new film, Springtime in a Small Town , is his first since The Blue Kite (1993) got him in trouble with the Chinese authorities for its acerbic portrayal of the Cultural Revolution. Springtime in a Small Town is a far quieter and less ambitious film, but a beautiful one nonetheless…
Continue reading “Springtime in a Small Town”
Liu Bingjian’s Cry Woman is a powerful, laconic and understated film about a woman who ekes out a living in the Chinese countryside as a professional mourner at funerals. This after she leaves Beijing, where she is hassled by the police, irritated by her good-for-nothing husband, foisted with the care of a child who is not her own, and finally forced to flee from creditors as well as from the consequences of her husband’s incarceration. The tone with which the film recounts all this is neither comic absurdism nor built-up pathos, but a kind of blank, elliptical observation. This seems to parallel the situation of the heroine herself, who must block out her own feelings of pain in order to be able to function at all, in order to just survive. It’s almost too perfect an irony that she earns her living by weeping and singing, for cash, at funerals–she can express other peoples’ pain, at the price of repressing her own. As the film progresses, it all gets to be too much; but the camera never falters. A beautiful and unusual film.
Liu Bingjian’s Cry Woman is a powerful, laconic and understated film about a woman who ekes out a living in the Chinese countryside as a professional mourner at funerals. This after she leaves Beijing, where she is hassled by the police, irritated by her good-for-nothing husband, foisted with the care of a child who is not her own, and finally forced to flee from creditors as well as from the consequences of her husband’s incarceration. The tone with which the film recounts all this is neither comic absurdism nor built-up pathos, but a kind of blank, elliptical observation. This seems to parallel the situation of the heroine herself, who must block out her own feelings of pain in order to be able to function at all, in order to just survive. It’s almost too perfect an irony that she earns her living by weeping and singing, for cash, at funerals–she can express other peoples’ pain, at the price of repressing her own. As the film progresses, it all gets to be too much; but the camera never falters. A beautiful and unusual film.
Another great Iranian film. It’s amazing how many fine films have come from Iran in the last ten or fifteen years. (Better enjoy them while we can, before Bush, Rumsfeld, and company destroy the country). Anyway, Marooned in Iraq, by Bahman Ghobadi, takes place in Kurdistan, in isolated, mountainous territory on the Iran/Iraq border. An old musician goes with his adult sons to look for his ex-wife, rumored to be in a refugee camp after Saddam’s chemical and bombing attacks against the Kurds. What he finds, or what the film finds as it follows him, is terrifying, surreal, sometimes almost absurd and carnivalesque. Like many other Iranian films, Marooned in Iraq relies on non-professional actors, real locations, and picaresque, relatively unscripted plots. Ghobadi, however, is more expressionistic in his style than many other Iranian directors; also, his insistence on the Kurdish language and Kurdish ethnicity is something of a political statement. All in all, this is a powerful, deeply affecting film, moving from grotesque comedy to sublime tragedy to a very tentative humanist affirmation.
Another great Iranian film. It’s amazing how many fine films have come from Iran in the last ten or fifteen years. (Better enjoy them while we can, before Bush, Rumsfeld, and company destroy the country). Anyway, Marooned in Iraq, by Bahman Ghobadi, takes place in Kurdistan, in isolated, mountainous territory on the Iran/Iraq border. An old musician goes with his adult sons to look for his ex-wife, rumored to be in a refugee camp after Saddam’s chemical and bombing attacks against the Kurds. What he finds, or what the film finds as it follows him, is terrifying, surreal, sometimes almost absurd and carnivalesque. Like many other Iranian films, Marooned in Iraq relies on non-professional actors, real locations, and picaresque, relatively unscripted plots. Ghobadi, however, is more expressionistic in his style than many other Iranian directors; also, his insistence on the Kurdish language and Kurdish ethnicity is something of a political statement. All in all, this is a powerful, deeply affecting film, moving from grotesque comedy to sublime tragedy to a very tentative humanist affirmation.
Under Another Sky, by Gael Morel, is a French/Algerian film about clashing cultures that leaves no easy answers. Samy is French, but of Algerian ethnicity. When he gets in trouble with the cops, his parents ship him back to relatives in Algeria. He finds himself in a strange landscape–he doesn’t know the language, the customs, or the politics (the threat of fundamentalist terrorism), even though Algeria is ostensibly “his” country. This is a grim, tormented film, shot in a carefully controlled, but understated style: there are mostly tight closeups in some sequences, handheld cameras in others; the style varies according to what is happening, but it is always claustrophobic and relentless. The film is both political and psychological; it seems impossible for Samy to find release, let alone freedom, in either France or Algeria.
Under Another Sky, by Gael Morel, is a French/Algerian film about clashing cultures that leaves no easy answers. Samy is French, but of Algerian ethnicity. When he gets in trouble with the cops, his parents ship him back to relatives in Algeria. He finds himself in a strange landscape–he doesn’t know the language, the customs, or the politics (the threat of fundamentalist terrorism), even though Algeria is ostensibly “his” country. This is a grim, tormented film, shot in a carefully controlled, but understated style: there are mostly tight closeups in some sequences, handheld cameras in others; the style varies according to what is happening, but it is always claustrophobic and relentless. The film is both political and psychological; it seems impossible for Samy to find release, let alone freedom, in either France or Algeria.