tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33229436078220294782024-03-14T11:14:47.309-07:00Diary of a Country Pickpocketptatlerivhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07570950256657235397noreply@blogger.comBlogger68125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3322943607822029478.post-74058322048574115512017-10-04T08:06:00.000-07:002017-10-04T08:06:30.703-07:00Spooky Things #2: Victor Sjostrom's PHANTOM CARRIAGE<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br />Within a few years of its release in 1921, Victor Sjostrom’s <i>The Phantom Carriage</i> was considered a masterpiece of the cinema, alongside such canonical stalwarts as <i>The Gold Rush</i>, <i>Battleship Potemkin</i>, and <i>The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari</i>. Charlie Chaplin thought <i>The Phantom Carriage</i> was the greatest film ever made. However, as the silent era ended and <i>Carriage</i>’s eye-popping-for-the-time special effects became outmoded, Sjostrom’s film fell out of favor and was soon regarded as more of a relic than a milestone. Fortunately, back in 2011, <a href="https://www.criterion.com/films/27630-the-phantom-carriage">the Criterion Collection deigned to release</a> a Bluray of <i>The Phantom Carriage</i>.<a name='more'></a><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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On the surface, the film is a grim spiritual parable about the deleterious effects of alcohol. However, Sjostrom uses the supernatural trappings of the story to delve deep into human nature at its most depraved. The film ends up being a brutal morality tale about the limits of human love and good intentions in the face of abject cruelty.</div>
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<br /><span style="text-align: center;">On a bleak New Year’s Eve, Salvation Army nurse Sister Edit (Astrid Holm) lies dying of consumption. Her inscrutable last wish is to see David Holm (played by Sjostrom himself), who is spending the evening in a graveyard, cavorting with two like-minded ne’er-do-wells. Holm spooks his companions, recounting the legend that whoever dies this evening as the clock strikes midnight will drive death’s carriage.</span></div>
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<br />Holm soon gets to experience the full force of the legend first hand, when his companions accidentally kill him during a tussle just as the clock begins ringing in the new year. Death’s carriage comes to claim Holm’s twisted soul and, via a series of flashbacks, Holm is shown the highlights of his wayward life, especially where it intersected with Sister Edit.<br /><br />While it may sound like a dry run at <i>It’s A Wonderful Life</i>, <i>The Phantom Carriag</i>e is a pitch-black look at action and consequence; the title of the novel it’s based on, <i>Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness</i>, is far more evocative and to the point. God sends the insolent, cold-hearted bastard David Holm the pure hearted Edit, who nightly prays that Jesus will bless Holm, all the while developing consumption she contracted via contact with Holm’s filthy rags. Lars Von Trier would be hard-pressed to come up with a scenario as darkly ironic as this one.<br /><br />A large part of <i>Carriage</i>’s success is due to Sjostrom’s David Holm. Holm is a monster of the id, blundering through life, steered only by his drunken head and black heart. He divides his waning time between joyless hedonism and callous abuse of those closest to him. Sjostrom’s soul-bearing performance (allegedly based on his own irresponsible lout of a father) dares the audience to have any sympathy for Holm. One of Holm’s cruel pastimes involves aiming his tubercular coughs at innocent bystanders. “I cough in people’s faces in the hopes of finishing them off,” he boasts. “Why should they be better off than us?”</div>
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<br />In Holm, Sjostrom has created one of cinema’s most memorable belligerent assholes. Silent cinema is often derided for its over-the-top acting style but Sjostrom and the rest of the cast deliver performances that hold up nicely against contemporary standards. Sjostrom’s has always been best known for his performance in Bergman’s <i>Wild Strawberries</i>. But he was just as haunted and soulful here, thirty years earlier. Despite Holm’s evil ways, Sjostrom finds the heart of the character. This is, after all, the story of Holm’s (ostensible) redemption.<br /><br />As a director, Sjostrom is very controlling, setting the film in a hermetic universe of small rooms and claustrophobic, night-shrouded exteriors. Initially, the pacing feels a little too deliberate – it’s ten minutes before we even meet Holm or discover that it’s New Year’s Eve. But the plodding of the opening establishes an atmosphere of expectant dread that soon pays off.</div>
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The film’s aforementioned visual effects – all done in camera – hold up well, despite their obvious contrivance via double-exposure, forced perspective, etc. The images of the titular carriage rolling over the land (and, in one remarkable scene, sea) and the shrouded image of Death, the soul harvester himself, leave a lasting impression of moral terror. With <i>The Phantom Carriage</i>, Sjostrom has masterfully combined the mystical with the mundane.<br /><br />The Criterion transfer – created in conjunction with the Swedish Film Institute – is uncanny; the images have undergone a pristine restoration, giving cinematographer Julius Jaenzon’s chiaroscuro an almost three dimensional texture.<br /><br />The disc’s few extras are all extremely informative, particularly the visual essay by Peter Cowie detailing the film’s influence on Bergman and the historical/dramaturgical commentary by Caspar Tybjerg. There are two scores to choose from, a contemporary classical accompaniment by Swedish composer Matti Bye and a fascinating, brain-meltingly discordant piece by KTL – a side project of Sunn O))) avant-noise experimenter Stephen O’Malley.</div>
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(And, yes, this is the film that contains the sequence that Kubrick borrowed for the "Here's Johnny!" bit in <i>The Shining</i>.)</div>
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ptatlerivhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07570950256657235397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3322943607822029478.post-45766769911029347412017-10-01T18:36:00.001-07:002017-10-01T18:57:49.992-07:00Spooky Things #1: M.R. James "The Mezzotint"<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Well it's Halloween season. And - why not?! - let me go ahead and use that time to inch my way back into the blogosphere.<br />
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I'm officially done as the movie reviewer over at GreenCine. Everything I've written for them now routes to one of those "404 Not Found!" singularities. 'Twas a nice gig whilst I had it. As time allows, I will slowly port over everything I've written for them (published and otherwise) to this site.<br />
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But never mind that. For this month - October 2017 - I will go ahead and force myself to do daily check-ins. All of those check-ins will be somehow horror/spook/ghost/ghoul/ghast/goblin/hobgoblin/witch/etc.-related. What a devil of a time we will all have, my faithful readers!<br />
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The (very lazy and poorly defined) goal will be to highlight something that gives me the creeps/willies/chilblains/etc. Some will be supernatural, some will be disappointingly mundane.<br />
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For today's entry, I will briefly mention M.R. James's <i>"The Mezzotint"</i> which I reread a couple nights ago. The full text of the (very short so read it why don't ya?) story can be found <a href="http://www.thin-ghost.org/items/show/145">here</a>.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">M. R. James</td></tr>
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James is probably my favorite author of the weird/supernatural. His shtick is to take stuffy characters - antiquarians, philologists, historians, etc. - and hold them by the the throat over a dark abyss. Depending on the outcome, they either squirm and repent or are dropped to their doom.<br />
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I discovered James via two avenues: (1) Robertson Davies lauded him in the introduction to his otherwise bleh HIGH SPIRITS (a book I picked up after reading his excellent/harrowing DEPTFORD TRILOGY about ten years ago) and (2) Jacques Tourneur's essential horror film THE CURSE OF THE DEMON (or NIGHT OF THE DEMON, depending on which version you watch), which was based on James's <i>"Casting The Runes".</i><br />
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Anyway, once my mental radio was tuned to his station, I fell into an M.R. James vortex and have since read him several times a year. Where Lovecraft had previously been my horror go-to, James has solidified himself as the reigning master of chills and spooks and such.<br />
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The main edge someone like James has over someone like Lovecraft is that James still has a rigorously moral view of the universe while Lovecraft is - for all his tentacled beasts and mythos - essentially a nihilist. Honestly, a nihilistic view of the universe is (to me, at least) never anything but horrific, almost dully so. If everything is meaningless, just rolling out of bed to put on your slippers becomes a disgusting exercise in hideous, eldritch, squamous, nameless (etc.) horror beyond space and time. For true horror to exist, I feel like there has to be some sort of baseline of goodness (or, if not goodness, normalcy) that one acknowledges. Poor antisemitic, xenophobic, life-hating Lovecraft could never find a north star outside of himself to set his watch to which meant everything for him was scary.<br />
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Anyway: <i>"The Mezzotint"</i>... it's a good un'. Not necessarily my favorite James but I happened to reread it recently so here we are.<br />
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The best thing about it? It immediately stomps one of my least favorite horror cliches: the "it can't be!" syndrome. What I mean is: the main character, upon discovering that he has a weird painting that seems to be uncannily animate, doesn't spend a lot of time trying to find a rational explanation for the painting's anomalous behavior. And what's more, when he brings his professor friends in to take a look, none of them insist it's all poppycock or nonsense. They all immediately begin drinking in the horror that's before them and coping with its implications, rather than denying or explaining away its existence.<br />
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It's a great story and won't take you long to read. I'd love to see more horror filmmakers and writers inspired by James rather than Lovecraft or Eli Roth or whoever people are inspired by when they make things like IT FOLLOWS, etc.<br />
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Tomorrow I'll think of something else that creeps me out. Try and sleep tonight while you mull over what that might be!!!<br />
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BONUS - One of my favorite sections from <i>"The Mezzotint"</i>:<br />
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<b><i>"...tea was taken to the accompaniment of a discussion which golfing persons can imagine for themselves, but which the conscientious writer has no right to inflict upon any non-golfing persons.<br /><br />The conclusion arrived at was that certain strokes might have been better, and that in certain emergencies neither player had experienced that amount of luck which a human being has a right to expect."</i></b><br />
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ptatlerivhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07570950256657235397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3322943607822029478.post-520697309992938382015-06-01T06:03:00.004-07:002015-06-03T07:27:38.545-07:00It's the 2015 WHITE ELEPHANT BLOGATHON, people!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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By now, you all know the drill: film bloggers the world over have submitted their favorite (or, if they're particularly sinister, least favorite) film oddities to me. Those films have gone into a hat and been randomly assigned back to the members of the the <i>film blogletariat</i>.<br />
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There were a lot more "hey, you should check out this weird, overlooked idiosyncratic work" submissions this year (as opposed to the usual, "ha ha ha! watch this garbage, dumdum!" selections). So I'm looking forward to seeing how it all unfolds.<br />
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Links to all of the submissions will appear here throughout the day, in order of when they post, with some stragglers rolling in later this week. Enjoy (and thanks again to all who participated):<br />
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- Bill Ryan introduces the concept of "The Cinema of Cars Pulling Up in Front of Houses"<a href="http://wwwbillblog.blogspot.com/2015/06/shit-in-your-hammock.html"> in his review of Griffin Dunne's FIERCE PEOPLE</a><br />
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- Glenn Kenny tackles another work by White Elephant's favorite auteur, Ken Russell; <a href="http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2015/06/ken-russells-lisztomania-white-elephant-blogathon.html">this time the focus is on the "alcoholic bender"-inspired aesthetics of Russell's LISZTOMANIA</a><br />
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- Michael May <a href="http://www.michaelmayadventureblog.com/2015/06/white-elephant-blogathon-jump-tomorrow.html">discusses Joel Hopkins' JUMP TOMORROW</a>, a film featuring everyone's favorite TV On The Radio personality, Tunde Adebimpe<br />
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- David Blakeslee jumps on the Enterprise and <a href="http://criterioncast.com/reviews/david-reviews-robert-wises-star-trek-the-motion-picture">revisits Robert Wise's STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE</a><br />
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- Kirk Michael arises to <a href="http://www.thewhitetanktop.com/2015/06/stupid-fucking-dead-man-white-elephant.html">have a look at Jim Jarmusch's DEAD MAN</a><br />
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- Roderick Heath <a href="http://www.ferdyonfilms.com/2015/how-much-do-you-love-me-combien-tu-maimes-2005/24957/">has a go at Bertrand Blier's HOW MUCH DO YOU LOVE ME?</a><br />
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- Stacia Jones <a href="http://shebloggedbynight.com/2015/clifford-1994/">goes out of her tree with CLIFFORD</a><br />
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- Dennis Cozzalio <a href="http://sergioleoneifr.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-2015-white-elephant-blogathon.html">gets behind Charles Burnett's GLASS SHIELD</a><br />
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- Don Marks <a href="http://letterboxd.com/captfuzz/film/high-strung/1/">would rather hang than watch HIGH STRUNG again</a><br />
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- Patrick Miller <a href="http://patrickmiller.tumblr.com/post/120466795015/caged-2015-white-elephant-blog-a-thon">opens up John Cromwell's CAGED</a><br />
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- Andrew Bemis <a href="http://cinevistaramascope.blogspot.com/2015/06/i-am-into-tacos-like-you-are-into.html">ambles his way through Robert Downey Sr.'s TWO TONS OF TURQUOISE TO TAOS TONIGHT</a><br />
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- Craig Lindsey AKA Uncle Crizzle AKA Tavis Not-So-Smiley AKA Etc. <a href="http://unclecrizzle.tumblr.com/post/120476490323/white-elephant-blogathon-3rd-world-cops-2014">confronts the 3RD WORLD COPS</a><br />
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- Craig Phillips <a href="http://underdog.typepad.com/wandering_outloud_/2015/06/paris-is-burning-revisited.html">fiddles while PARIS IS BURNING</a><br />
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- Christianne Benedict <a href="http://krelllabs.blogspot.com/2015/06/white-elephant-blogathon-voyage-to.html">takes a VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA</a><br />
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- Even though his entry was late, <a href="http://arizonajim.blogspot.com/2015/06/hey-gang-yes-i-like-to-imagine-theres.html">Josh Ralske is NUMBER ONE WITH A BULLET</a> in all of our hearts<br />
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- Josh Bell writes <a href="http://signalbleed.blogspot.com/2015/06/white-elephant-blogathon-report-on.html">A REPORT ON THE PARTY AND THE GUESTS</a><br />
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- Paul Clark <a href="http://opalfilms.blogspot.com/2015/06/white-elephant-2015-did-you-know-your.html">lives JOHNNY DANGEROUSLY</a></div>
ptatlerivhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07570950256657235397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3322943607822029478.post-73929582448562560542015-01-11T08:24:00.000-08:002015-01-11T08:24:22.159-08:00A Moment of Rosi<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsHsgZkLhEJx64cv9UMRDr8zk1PibKPZB7lk7DqzZLMgFsnuMWoBlnghaaE_9iSKb04iwpPMVrEwy4tlj5GVPhQEP1VuoCdIAY4iLo-ElspQBIZL2Q0KqjnUlld99rQ-5AiA1Dt7w8R1Qx/s1600/moment+the+eponymous+ii.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsHsgZkLhEJx64cv9UMRDr8zk1PibKPZB7lk7DqzZLMgFsnuMWoBlnghaaE_9iSKb04iwpPMVrEwy4tlj5GVPhQEP1VuoCdIAY4iLo-ElspQBIZL2Q0KqjnUlld99rQ-5AiA1Dt7w8R1Qx/s1600/moment+the+eponymous+ii.jpg" height="284" width="640" /></a></div>
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Yesterday saw the passing of Francesco Rosi, who made (among many others) the excellent CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI, SALVATORE GIULIANO, and HANDS OVER THE CITY. Rosi leaves behind an impressive (and underseen) body of work that is an interesting marriage of neorealism and New Wave sensibilities. I hope his passing renews interest in his work.<br /><br />Below is an appreciation I wrote of his 1965 bullfighting saga, THE MOMENT OF TRUTH (which contains an unfortunate STAR WARS analogy but please look past that).<br />
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Francesco Rosi’s <a href="http://www.criterion.com/films/27674-the-moment-of-truth">THE MOMENT OF TRUTH</a> is a blood-soaked poem observing (if not totally celebrating)
the gory pageantry of the bullfighting circuit.</div>
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The film begins with an
extended, dialogue-less trek through a religious festival in a Spanish city. Onlookers
line the street while Catholic acolytes in Klan-like capirotes lumber through clouds of incense, holding grotesque statues of
Jesus and the Virgin. </div>
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The eerie, slow-paced ritual is suddenly interrupted by a
group of manic bulls pushing and bucking their way through the crowd. The
solemnity is shattered; people are trampled and tossed and one of the bulls is
vanquished for the camera. This is the first of many unsimulated animal deaths
in the film. The squeamish are hereby advised.</div>
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After this mesmerizing
open, Rosi's film temporarily adopts a bare-bones narrative (MOMENT is probably
a 70/30 blend of documentary footage and staged drama). We meet Miguel Romero
(played by real-life matador Miguel Mateo), who is sort of a neorealist Luke
Skywalker – stuck in the Andulusian backwater of Jaen, destined to inherit his
father’s dusty farm, Miguel yearns for the adventure and romance that await him
in the larger “galaxy” of Barcelona. </div>
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Despite his father’s
admonishment – “nothing’s better than a glass of wine or a slice of bread in
your own home” – Miguel soon departs to try his fortune in the city. Though he
doesn't specifically aim to be a matador, it becomes clear – after months of
literally breaking rocks for a living – that the only ticket out of poverty is
to attempt the bull ring.</div>
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The film superficially
follows the template of the loser-to-champion sports film that post-ROCKY audiences
have become inured to: we get the struggle at the beginning, and the fiercely <span class="st">ascetic</span> mentor (“No women from now on; no parties,” Miguel is
told. “Think only of the bull.”). After Miguel crashes an amateur bullfight to
prove his abilities against a real animal, he is quickly whisked into the big
leagues by enterprising talent scouts. More obvious plot points follow: the big
debut, the montage of successes, the hobnobbing with starlets and high society,
the wistful return home, and the inevitable Big Match. But, for all their
familiarity, these scenes are presented so nonchalantly, without manipulative
music or editing, that the drama is almost an abstraction. While the human
story is in no way lackluster, it takes an obvious second place to the
bullfighting.</div>
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Using special lenses,
Rosi and cinematographer Pasqualino De Santis were able to get very close to
the action in the ring and Criterion’s pristine Blu transfer bears this out.
Every fleck of foam and drop of blood is rendered in graphic detail, leading to
plenty of wince-worth moments. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_WXX2QqNJw8IzWlNFr20uQRD33_7HB85sIp8f7n6DiwsTC4t7oixMNAPgr90IglfchtqkmQgx9D4tLbdH2SIzU_nqslvE80HLnuw7MNn4lQOyhFSiGIxjTwZ2VaGenorGLyDmbeB4-A4f/s1600/moment+bleeding+bull.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_WXX2QqNJw8IzWlNFr20uQRD33_7HB85sIp8f7n6DiwsTC4t7oixMNAPgr90IglfchtqkmQgx9D4tLbdH2SIzU_nqslvE80HLnuw7MNn4lQOyhFSiGIxjTwZ2VaGenorGLyDmbeB4-A4f/s1600/moment+bleeding+bull.jpg" height="264" width="640" /></a></div>
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Despite the talk of Miguel’s trainer -- who
espouses the “grace and great elegance” of the sport – THE MOMENT OF TRUTH is a
bit of a harrowing gauntlet to run. The mortality rate for a bull entering the
ring is 100%. Even if the torero is gored or otherwise incapacitated, there’s
an eager phalanx of sword- and spear-wielding banderilleros and picadors
waiting on the sidelines to hack the beast to a bloody pulp. Not since that
poor giraffe in Marker’s SANS SOLEIL have I seen an animal so casually
brutalized.</div>
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That said, the film is
also a beautifully wrought document of a rarely seen world. Mateo comports
himself well as a man struggling with his newfound celebrity and his sense of
mortality. Forgotten for many years, Rosi's film is an adrenal mini-epic well
worth a look for viewers with a strong stomach.</div>
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<i>Please note: The frame grabs above are NOT from the Bluray and are not indicative of the transfer; to have a look at a fine gallery of MOMENT images, head over to <a href="http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film3/blu-ray_reviews55/moment_of_truth_blu-ray.htm">DVD Beaver</a>. Here's an example:</i></div>
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ptatlerivhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07570950256657235397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3322943607822029478.post-5262212904130601622014-11-01T17:23:00.000-07:002016-07-05T10:02:19.680-07:00Driven Through The Field<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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"As I was plodding along the River Fuji, I saw a small child, hardly three years of age, crying pitifully on the bank, obviously abandoned by his parents. They must have thought the child was unable to ride through the stormy waters of life which run as wild as the rapid river itself, and that he was destined to have a life even shorter than that of the morning dew. The child looked to me as fragile as the leaves of bush-clover that scatter at the slightest stir of the autumn wind, and it was so pitiful that I gave him what little food I had with me.<br />
<br />
<i>The ancient poet</i><br />
<i>Who pitied monkeys for their cries,</i><br />
<i>What would he say, </i><br />
<i>if he saw</i><br />
<i>This child crying in the autumn wind?</i><br />
<br />
How is it indeed that this child has been reduced to this state of utter misery? Is it because of his mother who ignored him, or because of his father who abandoned him? Alas, it seems to me that this child's undeserved suffering has been caused by something far greater and more massive -- by what one might call<b> the irresistible will of heaven</b>. If it is so, child, you must raise your voice to heaven, and I must pass on, leaving you behind."<br />
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- Matsuo Basho, <i>The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton</i></div>
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ptatlerivhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07570950256657235397noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3322943607822029478.post-37244434968749923002014-08-20T11:34:00.000-07:002014-08-20T11:34:09.486-07:00Hyponatremia<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
(<i>Note: this for a fiction writing competition I participated in and only serves obligations related to it. Posts should resume here in the fall. It's been a very busy summer. Cheers.</i>)<br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">“Of course they melted,” Sean Pratchett thought to himself. “What was I thinking?” </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The last of the runners made their way across the finish line, the heavy salt air absorbing the sound of the pok-pok-pok of their thin-soled shoes slapping against the asphalt. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Nearly six hours had passed while Sean sat in the canvas folding chair he’d borrowed from one of the race administrators. Six hours of scanning the thousands of runners as they broke through their miles of monotony, finally finding rest under the creaking redwoods of Carmel. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">While he sat, the Whitman’s Sampler box had balanced on his lap. The heat from his body had slowly turned the contents into a gritty, sticky ooze which now seeped onto his worn khaki Capri pants, leaving a faint brown square.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">“Another failure?” His mind hesitated. Surely he’d missed her. He wouldn’t have missed her, right? She would be twenty-two now. The last time she had seen him, she had been a mere ten years old. But he had a good idea of what she looked like now.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Through access to free library computers and myriad pseudonymous email and social media accounts, he’d been able to superficially piece together her progress through adolescence, young adulthood, and college. His amateur sleuthing had brought him here.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">“Lorelei Anne Pratchett will be celebrating her recent graduation with honors by running the Big Sur Marathon,” the alumni bulletin had read. “After that, Pratchett hopes to study for her Master’s at...” </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">He’d forgotten the rest because it involved high-minded aspirations in far-flung places. Pride in accomplishment – his own or his daughter’s – had never been a vice he’d grappled with.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">“Another failure,” Sean concluded, dropping the withering chocolates into one of the temporary trash barrels. “How could I have ever worked up the nerve to give them to her anyway?”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The late April morning had started with a vibrant, tickly energy on the fierce headwind. The drum circle had beat loud and the local arts coalition had assembled a group of shaggy folks to enact a twisting, arrhythmic dance at the outer fringe of the finish line, past the reporters’ trucks and near the patron-choked cafes and restaurants. The dancers sang blessings to the emergent victors, hanging medals around necks. When the medals ran out, daisy chains were employed. When these disappeared, hugs were freely given. When the dancers’ cosmic mission took them elsewhere – either beach or bed or brunch – the straggling runners were left to the devices of friends and family.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The crowd’s applause was softer and more obligatory now, coming in faint clusters delivered by spectators cradling their phones between their ears and shoulders. All but twenty-six of the runners were accounted for.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Sean stretched and shook out his limbs, his mind beginning to </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">wander to practical concerns: where he’d sleep tonight and who </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">with (a few of the lady dancers had been favorable); how to </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">score a little hash for the road and, speaking of that, how </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">he’d get back to Los Angeles in time for work Monday. He lit a </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">cigarette. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">In the distance, a tall female form limped with the help of one </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">of the race’s volunteer EMTs. Lorelei, if he wasn’t mistaken. </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">A few steps forward revealed he wasn’t. The sudden realization </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">made his palms go limp and wet.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">When he occasionally admitted to having had a family, whether </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">in a mess of drunken warm feeling or because of some official </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">document, the admission would shock and scare him. Thinking </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">about it too long was like staring into the flame of a welding </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">torch. He feared blindness from prolonged exposure.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Her gait was unbalanced, weakened. There was in it the same </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">cautious shuffle he remembered from two decades ago, when she’d </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">navigated the living room carpet for the first time. In her </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">wincing – audible now as she closed the distance between them </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">– he heard strains of the slow rising wail that signified a </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">nightmare, the one that meant he or Ruth would be sprinting down </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">the hall to murmur reassurances. It’s all just a dream, dear.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Sean’s mind flickered to the nightmare that hadn’t been a dream: </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Too many drinks, too few people looking out for him. A minivan </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">in his headlights arriving way too fast. The realization that </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">he’d crossed the double yellow lines occurring to him way too </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">late. A family of five dead. A sentence served. A family of </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">three lost.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">“They’re better off without me,” he would say when asked about </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">it, adopting a benevolent wistfulness. “They’re happy now. Naked </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Sean’s friends knew him as the wry one, the one who could </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">deliver the gallows punch lines. They didn't know about Lorelei </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">or the minivan. He didn't remain friends with the ones who found </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">out. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">“Demons took me for a test drive but they decided they’d keep </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">shopping around,” was his favorite woe-is-me, delivered in the </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">gentle mocking tone he’d affected for so long that he couldn't </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">remember his original melody anymore.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">She was limping mere yards away from him now. Their eyes met </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">without the flash of recognition he’d been terrified of. She was </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">beautiful, even in her pallid distress. She limped past, the EMT </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">murmuring reassurances. “You’ll be fine,” Sean heard him say. </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">“You’re lucky though.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Sean remembered reading about hyponatremia, the potentially </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">deadly state of overhydration that affects some runners. Too </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">little salt in their blood. He wondered if this had happened to </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">her. He thought of his own bland, watered-down life and then </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">felt – for an ecstatic moment that was instantly gone – a moment </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">of pride. She’d run. She’d tried. She was here. She’d be fine.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">“God is awful yet kind,” he said to himself, realizing that it </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">wasn't his own thought. It was from a book or a movie or song </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">or something he’d encountered long ago. He began walking south </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">with half a mind to stick out his thumb, allowing the headwind </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">to propel him homeward.</span></div>
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ptatlerivhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07570950256657235397noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3322943607822029478.post-89693416410049687682014-06-01T05:44:00.001-07:002014-06-07T14:27:05.381-07:00The Ninth Annual White Elephant Film Blogathon<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">And we're off! I'll be updating the roster below throughout the day and
then add some closing thoughts. [UPDATE 6/2/14: thoughts have been closed, pull quotes have been added. See below.]<br /><br />Since I'm hosting this year, I'm going
to delay posting my own entry until tomorrow so as not to steal the
thunder of the other contributors. Speaking of which:</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">- Anna Maurya keeps on moving with Francis Ford Coppola's <a href="https://bemusedandnonplussed.wordpress.com/2014/05/21/twixt-a-rock-and-a-hard-place-white-elephant-blogathon-2014/">TWIXT</a>!</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i>"... strange small town called Swann Valley, the kind of place that gets its own narrated introduction by Tom Waits (no really!)."</i> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">- Jason Alley pays a visit to <a href="http://letterboxd.com/jason_alley/film/female-prisoner-701-scorpion/">FEMALE PRISONER #701: SCORPION</a>!</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i>"The first scene in the movie to make me sit up and go 'Whoa, what the
hell IS THIS?' involves a door, a shard of glass, the color blue, and
some very dramatic makeup..."</i></span></span> <br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">- Dennis Cozzalio hangs with the <a href="http://sergioleoneifr.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-2014-white-elephant-blogathon.html">BROTHERHOOD OF DEATH</a>!<i><br />"But then there’s a murderous deputy
with a hairbrush mustache that would put Wilford Brimley to shame, the wild-eyed
local Grand Wizard, who just happens to be the town district attorney—his post-raid
speech to the faithful must have had Charles Laughton frantically trying to
reach his lawyers from beyond the grave— and various uniformed and sheeted minions
of terror who exist mainly to get blown up real good."</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">- Paul Clark makes <a href="http://opalfilms.blogspot.com/2014/06/white-elephant-2014-perfect-getaway.html">THE PERFECT GETAWAY</a>!<br /><i>"They're the kind of couple one sometimes meets while traveling- almost
oppressively friendly, somewhat clingy, full of tales and prone to
showing off."</i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">- Heather Seebach keeps an eye on <a href="http://www.viewerdiscretionadvised.net/2014/05/white-elephant-blogathon-2014-baby.html">THE BABY</a>! </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i>"What
follows is a battle between Ann and the Wadsworth family for custody of
Baby. By battle, I don't mean courtroom drama but a ridiculous sequence
of events involving a swinging 70s party (for a toddler) and an
attempted kidnapping/murder, followed by actual kidnapping and murder."</i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i> </i> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">- Stacia Kissick Jones endures <a href="http://shebloggedbynight.com/2014/white-elephant-blogathon-the-dunwich-horror-1970/">THE DUNWICH HORROR</a>!</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i>"'What
if we decided to really dig deep into the whole courtship part of
Rosemary’s Baby, and also include some almost nudity?' is what someone
surely said at some point during pre-production.</i>"</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">- Christianne Benedict heralds the <a href="http://krelllabs.blogspot.com/2014/05/white-elephant-blogathon-2014-return-of.html">RETURN OF THE KILLER TOMATOES</a>!</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i>"Oh, yeah. George Clooney. He's in this. I wonder if he still puts it on his CV, not that George Clooney needs a CV anymore."</i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">- David Blakeslee sheds a little <a href="http://criterioncast.com/reviews/theatrical/post-tenebras-lux/">POST TENEBRAS LUX</a>!</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i>"... an artist has every reason to expect that his heartfelt expressions
will be written off as trivial wankery if he persists in hewing so close
to his personal experience as the source of his material. That’s
especially true if he has yet to give the general public little reason
to be curious about his autobiography."</i></span></span> <br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">- Bill Ryan's entry is rated WebC-17 for <a href="http://wwwbillblog.blogspot.com/2014/06/like-in-movie.html">FULL FRONTAL</a> Soderbergh!</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i>"The fact that she has control over the situation after having been debased is made plausible by Duchovny </i>not
<i>being ostentatious with his character's guilt, and by McCormack not
screaming her throat raw. She's suddenly the disappointed adult." </i></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">- Jamie Grijalba plays the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVRwd3vDG0I">TRIANGLE</a> (a video review)!</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">- Michael May has a eur-<a href="http://www.michaelmayadventureblog.com/2014/06/white-elephant-blogathon-eegah-1962.html">EEGAH</a> moment!<i><br />"I've pretty much continued to foist terrible films on other people (this year it was 1981's TARZAN THE APE MAN starring Bo Derek), but I'll probably change that next year. EEEGAH has taught me a lesson."</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">- Kenji Fujishima whips up a batch of<a href="http://inreviewonline.com/inreview/old_hat_blog/Entries/2014/6/1__i_Satans_Brew__i__%281976%29__Rainer_Werner_Fassbinders_Screwball_Confessional.html"> SATAN'S BREW</a>!<br /><i>"It’s as if Fassbinder, for this one shining moment, decided to throw
everything that was occupying his mind against a wall, just to see what
resulted."</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">- Don Marks... uh... he... uh... <a href="http://letterboxd.com/captfuzz/film/tarzan-the-ape-man-1981/">TARZAN THE APE MAN</a>!</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i> "... insipid, excruciatingly drawn out does-he/she-like-me romance notable
primarily for the occasional appearance of Bo Derek's breasts</i>..."</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">- Kevin Cecil stalks the <a href="http://www.letterboxd.com/kevincecil/film/the-minstrel-killer/">BLACKFACE KILLER</a>!</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i>"The guy may not have money, but at least he’s got ideas.</i>"</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">- Andrew Bemis <span class="line">finally opens his eyes and voraciously demands
light with a howl of rage (<a href="http://cinevistaramascope.blogspot.com/2014/06/you-will-know-truth-and-truth-will-make.html">RED LIGHTS</a>)!</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i><span class="line">"</span><span class="line">... an ending that can't decide between Elmer Gantry-esque cynicism or wide-eyed Shyamalan-ian wonder."</span></i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span class="line"> </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">- Craig Phillips wonders about <a href="http://underdog.typepad.com/wandering_outloud_/2014/06/the-new-kids-1985.html">THE NEW KIDS</a>!</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i>"... one of the
most entertaining and memorably sleazy group of cretinous bullies you'll
find in any high school movie ever, with several lummoxes, a slow
chubby kid, at least one creep, and the picked-on little brother (it's
never entirely clear which if any of these kids are related, but they
seem inbred even if not with each other)."</i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i> </i> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">- All the way from Down Under, Roderick Heath witnesses an <a href="http://www.ferdyonfilms.com/2014/americathon-1979/21868/">AMERICATHON</a>!</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i>"There is perhaps no form of bad film more troubling than the bad comedy.
... When someone makes a bad horror
film or scifi film, the viewer has the privilege of enjoying the
disparity between intent and result—they can laugh at it. Whereas bad
comedy is bad precisely because you cannot laugh at it. This failure
inspires instead a sense of personal desperation."</i> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">- Josh Bell goes <a href="http://signalbleed.blogspot.com/2014/06/white-elephant-blogathon-underground.html">UNDERGROUND</a> with some <a href="http://signalbleed.blogspot.com/2014/06/white-elephant-blogathon-underground.html">ACES</a>!</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i>"... manages
to be both sexist and racist, in addition to completely nonsensical
... This is the kind of movie that features two different fast-motion
montages set to 'wacky' fiddle music."</i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">- Craig Lindsey takes a spin with a <a href="http://unclecrizzle.tumblr.com/post/87555750703/white-elephant-blogathon-girl-on-a-motorcycle-1968">GIRL ON A MOTORCYCLE</a>! </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i>"... </i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i>a must for anyone who ever wanted to see Faithfull in her willowy, lip-pursing heyday ..."</i> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">- Patrick Miller feels an <a href="http://patrickmiller.tumblr.com/post/87600717015/aftershock-2014-white-elephant-blogathon">AFTERSHOCK</a>! </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i>"... just tedious enough to keep it from being compellingly inept ..." </i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">- Steven Carlson smells <a href="http://steveosteve.tumblr.com/post/87611343488/punch-like-an-elephant-gun">THE GLOVE: LETHAL TERMINATOR</a>!</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i>"... during the fight with the butcher, there’s about a thirty-second period
where we’re left to stare at Saxon’s ass as he lays on the ground
because I presume nobody thought to get the scene from another angle."</i></span></span> <br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">- <a href="http://www.amazon.com/It-Doesnt-Suck-Showgirls-Classics/dp/1770411747">Recently published author</a> Adam Nayman is one heck of a <a href="http://steveosteve.tumblr.com/post/87629890473/bonus-elephant-goodness">HELLROLLER</a>! <i><br />"I don’t know what movies it could be usefully compared to, but I wouldn’t want to see them in any case... this isn't just a 'low' movie; it's positively subterranean ..."</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">- Josh Ralske <a href="http://arizonajim.blogspot.com/2014/06/cant-stop-wont-stop.html">CAN'T STOP THE MUSIC</a>! He really can't, you guys!</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i>"If the point of the White Elephant Blogathon is to stymie your fellow critics, I lose and you win, chooser of CAN'T STOP THE MUSIC."</i></span></span><br />
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<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Well that's that everyone. As of this writing - 8:57pm on Monday, June 2nd - there are only five stragglers (one of which is me; I am a no-good hypocrite). That's close enough. I've been through all the writing (and watched the video) and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20TIlrGHkf0">I declare this pizza to be awesome</a>. This year seemed to be marked by an inordinate amount of films that people thought were good-to-great (or, at least, worthy of careful inspection and not merely colorful derision). I'm actually kind of bemoaning the fact that the film I got wasn't awful enough to just write a funny, glib dismissal of. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Anyway, thanks again to all the contributors this year (and especially to past keepers of the flame Paul Clark and Ben Lim). I hope to do this again next year, either as a host or a participant or both. In closing, <a href="http://www.rogerebert.com/thumbnails/thumbnails-622014">here's a link</a> to a RogerEbert.com article that mentions this link. I'm hoping that clicking it will result in some sort of ouroboros singularity that will turn the fabric of timespace inside out. At the very least, it might create the internet version of that thing that happens when you point your camcorder at the TV while using the TV as the monitor for your camcorder. Or take a picture of yourself while standing between mirrors.</span></span><br />
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ptatlerivhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07570950256657235397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3322943607822029478.post-65095822867016041872014-05-31T17:23:00.002-07:002014-06-01T12:37:19.961-07:00Foolish and Beastly<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Once again, it's time for the White Elephant Film Blogathon. Last year, when <a href="http://opalfilms.blogspot.com/">Paul Clark</a> asked for volunteers to take over hosting duties for the big event, I drew the short straw. So here is where we find ourselves.<br />
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Paul ran the last four White Elephants. Before him, Benjamin Lim (the originator of this whole affair) oversaw four more. This makes it our ninth time out (and, perhaps, means that White Elephant organizational responsibilities run for the same term length as US presidential administrations).<br />
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I can thank White Elephant and the Muriels (Paul, in other words) for helping me begin my scattershot career as an amateur film writer. No amount of bad film assignments will make me less grateful for the community of people the White Elephant has introduced me too.<br />
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Tomorrow, I'll post a roster of all the links for this year
(three people have already posted their write-ups but, if you're that
impatient, I'll leave it to you to suss out whom). Now, if you'll excuse
me, I have to watch and write up my assignment. Until tomorrow then...<br />
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While you wait, here are a few links to choice pieces from the first year I joined the blogathon (2010):<br />
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<i>"Then Donald gets sacked by a parrot, which was when I poured myself a
large glass of whiskey. It would be the first of many."</i> <br />
- Ali Arikan (on <a href="http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2010/06/the-white-elephant-blogathon-the-survivors/">THE SURVIVORS</a>)<br />
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<i><span style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">"Have people actually </span></span><span style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">seen</span></span></i><span style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>
this film? Granted, it's not a hidden masterpiece, but the idea that
this is some kind of comedy nadir is absolute rubbish, especially since
Ashton Kutcher is still making movies."</i> </span></span>- Kent Beeson (on <a href="http://kentmbeeson.blogspot.com/2010/06/she-gave-me-golamine-beads-ishtar-1987_14.html">ISHTAR</a>)<br />
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<i>"Supposedly Joe Estevez is running an amusement park, but I’m pretty sure the filmmakers just
paid admission (or hopped the fence – I wouldn’t put it past them) and
shot Joe shouting dialogue to himself on what looks like a late-80′s
camcorder."</i> <br />
- Brandon (on <a href="http://deeperintomovies.net/journal/archives/4675">ROLLER GATOR</a>)<br />
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<i>"I don’t think any movie has ever taken four hours of my life and given me less during that time."</i> <br />
- Victor J. Morton (on <a href="http://vjmorton.wordpress.com/2010/06/15/paul-clark-is-a-sadist/">L'INTRUS</a>)<br />
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<i>"... he of the designer dashiki, eyeglasses shaped like hairdressers’
scissors and a battery of saucy jokes meant to assure Middle America
that homos are harmless but </i>funny<i>."</i> <br />
- Dennis Cozzalio (on <a href="http://sergioleoneifr.blogspot.com/2010/06/dreamscape-mannequin2-on-move.html">MANNEQUIN 2: ON THE MOVE</a>)<br />
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<i>"... but then, maybe lines like 'Don't listen to me; just wait until he kills
you' and 'Kissing you made me want to vomit' wouldn't do even the most
experienced of actors any favors."</i><br />
- Kenji Fujishima (on <a href="http://mylife24fps.blogspot.com/2010/06/4th-annual-white-elephant-blogathon.html">SCREAM FOR HELP</a>)<br />
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<i>"Cut to “FORTY YEARS LATER” (or “ORTY
YEARS” as the title card on the old poorly cropped VHS copy used to
read). ... Of course, it’s folly to expect a film like this to not be
in the
business of making a quick and dirty buck, but did it have to be so
dispassionate? Even the silliest Italian horror films tend have a
deluded auteur at the helm to claim some sort of thematic coherence or
hidden agenda."</i><br />
- Matt Lynch (on <a href="http://nonunionmexicanequivalent.tumblr.com/post/698910311/pieces-of-you">PIECES</a>)<br />
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<i>"... there seems to be no reason for it to exist – nobody involved in it
really seems to know what they’re doing. I'm guessing there was a lot of
awkward silence around the craft services table, a lot of furtive
glances and avoidance of eye contact."</i><br />
- Jeff MacMahon (on <a href="http://whenthedeadwalktheearth.blogspot.com/2010/06/swept-away-2002.html">SWEPT AWAY</a>)<br />
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For further reading, here are the links to Paul's master lists for the last four years (it would appear that Ben's White Elephant internet presence has -- whether through his intention or not -- disappeared):<br />
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<a href="http://opalfilms.blogspot.com/2010/06/white-elephants-on-parade.html">2010</a> -- <a href="http://opalfilms.blogspot.com/2011/04/white-elephant-2011-super-post.html">2011</a> -- <a href="http://opalfilms.blogspot.com/2012/04/white-elephant-2012-victims.html">2012</a> -- <a href="http://opalfilms.blogspot.com/2013/04/white-elephant-2013-this-years-victims.html">2013</a><br />
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ptatlerivhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07570950256657235397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3322943607822029478.post-30791131028348323772014-01-02T06:41:00.001-08:002014-01-02T06:54:28.867-08:00State of the Internet<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Happy 2014 everyone! The above sums up the type of writing I hope to bring to this blog in the coming months. Terser, less informed, and more off-the-cuff. It's exactly on the way I would write. It's going to be a great year, "once dust settles!"</div>
ptatlerivhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07570950256657235397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3322943607822029478.post-65591103109574404812013-12-07T07:50:00.003-08:002013-12-07T08:31:48.496-08:00A Visable God<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b>"Money is an abominable idol. It is everywhere. The only things that matter are invisible. Why are we here? What are life and death?"</b></div>
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- Robert Bresson, in conversation with Michel Ciment </div>
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<b>"(I saw) L’ARGENT, which was beyond awful. A cynical old man’s movie with every
stylistic trope that would provide perfect evidence to back the case of
all those who might claim to detest 'Art Movies.' Especially French ones."</b></div>
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- [NAME REDACTED], in an email to me<br />
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As <a href="http://profoundlyrewarding.blogspot.com/2013/03/i-have-way.html">previously documented</a>, Robert Bresson is -- if I must choose only one -- my favorite director. Mainly, I think he's the one who has the most to teach anyone who wants to use moving images to tell stories. Over the course of his career, he whittled filmmaking down to its most basic (and deceptively simple) elements. While I think A MAN ESCAPED is both the most representative and accessible of Bresson's films and techniques, Bresson's swansong -- 1983's <a href="http://www.hulu.com/watch/225622">L'ARGENT</a> -- may just be the apotheosis of his style. In fact, as my friend argued above, a case can be made for L'ARGENT being close to a Bressonian self-parody. While a plausible case for this can be mounted, I heartily disagree.<br />
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L'ARGENT is based on Tolstoy's novella "The Forged Coupon." A rich young man with Rick Astley hair (see above) named Norbert owes a classmate some money. His aloof parents decline to help him get out of his debt, so a scheming friend gives him a counterfeit 200 franc note, which they use to purchase an empty picture frame.<br />
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The proprietor of the frame shop discovers that the bill is a fraud and, rather than find the culprits, passes it off on a working class gasman named Yvon Targe (played with simmering roboticism by Christian Patey). Yvon is collared by the authorities when he tries to use the bill, the frame shop employees lie under oath to frame Yvon, and the die is cast.<br />
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The simple act of greed from the boys at the beginning sets in motion a torrent of sin that transforms Yvon from innocent victim to cold-blooded perpetrator in a terse series of mishaps. L'ARGENT is filmmaking concentrate and, depending on what concoction you mix it with, you could end up with a Coen Brothers film (FARGO, BURN AFTER READING) or a Dardennes Brother film (any of them). <br />
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"Feels like a final film" was the first note I made. But this sounds disrespectful. One read of L'ARGENT is that Bresson has so cornered his style that it has nowhere to go. It's like a series of simplistic, stick figure storyboards come to life. Another read would be that he's rubbing his Bressonishness in our face. It's a work of genius so effortless, it looks like he's showing off. "I can get away with this because I'm Robert F*cking Bresson!" Reading through the later interviews with the director in James Quandt's Bresson anthology, there's no merit to this. He put every ounce of passion into L'ARGENT as he had his previous work (it can be argued that this film is actually a return to form after THE DEVIL, PROBABLY). L'ARGENT was to proceed the director's never-realized dream project, an adaptation of the first few chapters of the Book of Genesis. (As so-called lost films go, Bresson's GENESIS beats out David
Lynch's RETURN OF THE JEDI for the top of my alternative universe movie wish list.)<br />
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<b>"Begins with the premise that human nature is, by default, rotten
and inclined to wrongdoing. 80-some minutes of starkly beautiful
compositions and dead-pan performances later, it ends with the premise
that human nature is, by default, rotten and inclined to chopping up
whole families with hatchets.</b><br />
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<b>(By the way, I had to dock it a star because the
silly "money monster" on the DVD cover art does not make an animated
appearance.) **** out of *****"</b><br />
- my 2008 capsule review of the film<b> </b></div>
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<b>"When I am working poorly, I am imprecise. Precision is another form of poetry."</b><br />
- Robert Bresson, in conversation with Michel Ciment<br />
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My glib capsule review aside, L'ARGENT was the film that unlocked Bresson for me. I finally got what he was up to and devoured the rest of his available films. Marathoning my way through Bresson's filmography changed my DNA a bit. I cut reality TV for a living, so nearly every edit I make is arbitrary and disingenuous. Watching over a dozen hours of Bresson's precision reset my brain, cracked through my cynicism, and made me excited about films again. Jean-Luc Godard famously said that "Robert Bresson is French cinema, as Dostoevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music." Godard is close; I would remove the "French" qualifier. Robert Bresson is cinema.<br />
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(<a href="http://dcairns.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/the-late-show-4/">For David Cairns' Late Show blogathon.</a> I had to abandon this post early due to time constraints but hope to revisit L'ARGENT when I finally fulfill my promise to work through Bresson's entire filmography.) </div>
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ptatlerivhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07570950256657235397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3322943607822029478.post-15240939264733001802013-11-17T06:55:00.000-08:002014-01-02T07:32:33.098-08:00Making Out With Pan<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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There's this moment in Michelangelo Antonioni's LA NOTTE (<a href="http://www.criterion.com/films/28111-la-notte">recently out on Bluray</a>) where a woman attending a lavish,<i> la dolce vita</i> fete gets carried away in the middle of a downpour and starts making out with a statue of Pan. [You're going to have to take my word for it (or, better yet, see the film; it's a good one) because I lack the technical sophistication to pull a frame from a Bluray.] I bring it up because it's a nice little moment. An obvious one, perhaps -- the wealthy debaucheress paying tribute to the god of wild abandon -- but still a hint at what Antonioni's up to in the film.<br />
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Actually, suggesting he's "up to" anything might be too fine a point to put on LA NOTTE. I don't mean to suggest it's a message film of any sort. It is, of course, the middle piece in what is regarded a trilogy - with L'AVVENTURA and L'ECLISSE playing the first and third part. The New York Times' Stephen Holden refers to it as a "trilogy on modernity and its discontents." Of course, there's not much beyond exegetical convenience (and Monica Vitti) binding the three films. Certainly, Antonioni's style and themes remain consistent throughout them but it's not like he finished L'ECLISSE and said "okay, now for the fun stuff!" and made a bunch of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carry_On_%28film_series%29">CARRY ON...</a> films after his ADVENTURE/NIGHT/ECLIPSE cycle. The alienating force of modernity (and those discontented with it) are all there in RED DESERT, BLOW-UP, ZABRISKIE POINT, and THE PASSENGER, too.<br />
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LA NOTTE follows a Milanese married couple (played by Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau) through a 24-hour period. He's an author in what one character describes as "the anteroom to fame", having just published a new novel that has all the Right People buzzing. She is his steadfast wife. Neither seems particularly happy with the marriage, but the film lacks any sort of VIRGINIA WOOLF knock-down, drag-out. Indeed, when Mastroianni confesses his brief indiscretion with a nymphomaniac in a sanitarium, Moreau is dismissive and too forgiving. She doesn't want to punish him, preferring to simmer in... well, not quite resentment so much as disappointment.<br />
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The nympho scene happens near the beginning of the film, just after the couple has visited a friend dying of cancer who, in his terminal lucidity, begins cataloging his life's regrets. These are not even necessarily germane to what follows but then
every moment is kind of its own point in a movie like this; nothing is
telegraphed or diverted through convenient ideological, message-bearing
sluices into the cozy confines of the viewer's self-congratulation.<br />
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The couple is soon on their way to a book signing, snaggled up in urban gridlock (modernity!) like something out of a somber version of a Tati film. Upon arriving at the book signing, Moreau checks out and begins a slow wander through the streets of Milan. This is the film's best section, playing both to Moreau's strengths as an actress and Antonioni's most effortlessly stunning formal maneuvering. During her nearly silent trek, Moreau's face registers a broad spectrum of deep-set emotions -- recalling John Ford's legendary dictum that "the most interesting and exciting thing in the world (to film is) the human face." Moreau is the film's solid center and her walk brings us into her head -- a place we'll stay for the remainder of LA NOTTE. We later discover that she's taking a nostalgic trip to the couple's old neighborhood, perhaps in an effort to figure out what it was that brought her to marry Mastroianni in the first place (again, this is never overtly suggested; Antonioni allows plenty of room for your imagination to roam).<br />
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After Moreau's interlude, the rest of the film takes place at the aforementioned party. A captain of industry has specifically invited Mastroianni in the hopes of wooing him into some quasi-creative position within the firm ("every millionaire wants his own intellectual," Moreau remarks). Temptation abounds at the party; Mastroianni is taken by the tycoon's sultry daughter (Vitti) while Moreau is whisked away during the downpour by a tall dark handsome stranger.<br />
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Which brings me back to the woman and the statue; the symbol of cold-as-marble, joyless merry-making. Despite Holden's assertion, the quiet desperation or discontent or whatever that infuses the couple's world is as old as Pan himself. Again, I don't see Antonioni aiming for a particular capital-P Point here, but the most obviously universal one is the classic Faustian bargain: "what profit it a man to gain the world and lose his soul?" It's not explicit, but that's the point; you chip away at your integrity -- your marriage, your happiness -- one little shaving at a time.<br />
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"Ennui" is a word this type of film gets rubber-stamped with. But this isn't an exploration of boredom so much as some sincere pain. Moreau and Mastroianni play this pain through every scene; she tries to put a brave face on it, he mixes it with a sort of puppy's anxiety to please; the artist on the cusp of becoming an Artist. Again, Antonioni never rubs it in our face. As a character says to Mastroianni at one point, "observing things is enough, no need to write them down."<br />
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ptatlerivhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07570950256657235397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3322943607822029478.post-43841026655401353672013-11-15T20:08:00.001-08:002014-12-01T12:31:05.801-08:00The Barnes and Noble Criterion Sale Ultimate Decision Maker!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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As with yesterday's little exercise, I'm giving you a list of films to buy in the BN.com sale during the Criterion 50% off promotion they're running. Sure, you could stream them on Hulu or get them from the library. But - as I continue to discover - the best thing about <i>owning</i> a DVD or a book is that you don't actually have to watch or read the thing you own. Ownership implies consumption! Buy these, put them on your shelves, impress your guests, horde them until you shirk this mortal coil, and enjoy the sleep of the just!<br />
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Anyway, in order of preference:<br />
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1) <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dvd-marketa-lazarova-magda-vasaryova/3907648">MARKETA LAZAROVA</a> (1967; Frantisek Vlacil) - <br />
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Maybe I’m just getting cocky, but I feel like I’ve seen most of the
Major Works and, if I’ve not seen them, I at least have passing,
conversational knowledge of them. So when Criterion released MARKETA
LAZAROVA this spring, I was rather unprepared for the mind-thwacking it administered.
How had I not heard of this? Beyond its <i>sui generis</i> greatness, LAZAROVA's DNA can be found in many films
that have followed -- from WALKABOUT and WICKERMAN to the works of
Gaspar Noe and Nicholas Winding Refn. It also fits nicely in a continuum of cinematic classicism that includes the work of Bergman, Tarkovsky, Mizoguchi and, ultimately, Kubrick (2001 is the only obvious corollary I can draw to LAZAROVA).</div>
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The voice-of-God narrator tells us at the beginning
of LAZAROVA that there are times when it's "better to roost by the fire and
listen to tales of old", perfectly setting the stage for LAZAROVA's
12-part folk tale structure. The forever-swooping camera winds it's way
over a barren, snow-swept plain, broken only by the black
dots of hungry wolves. Vlacil's unfolds like an arcane Medieval illuminated manuscript, telling a deceptively simple story of grace and mercy versus the savage justice meted out by the warring clans it takes as its subjects.</div>
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LAZAROVA is psychedelic, funny, shocking, and oddly religious, containing the piety of something like THE FLOWERS OF ST. FRANCIS and the profanity of SIMON OF THE DESERT, often within the same scene. It's extremely exciting, too, brimming with the casual brutality and haywire sexuality that draws people to stuff like GAME OF THRONES. LAZAROVA's nearly three-hour running time is mitigated by its episodic nature. It's the best film you've never seen (a statement that's fundamentally impossible to prove, I realize).</div>
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Vlacil was trained in art history but always held a fascination with American westerns and the fusion of both sensibilities in LAZAROVA is obvious. In a fascinating documentary that accompanies the film, the (self-taught) director describes the painstaking process it took to arrive at LAZAROVA's authenticity, in the hopes of making into a "13th century documentary." Here's
hoping this release renews more interest in Vlacil ( “Vuh-lah-chill” –
learn how to pronounce it; as his films become rediscovered, I'm sure
Vlacil will become more and more a part of the “greatest _____ ever”
discussions).</div>
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2) <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dvd-the-letter-never-sent-mikhail-kalatozov/12261273?ean=715515093811">LETTER NEVER SENT</a> (1959; Mikhail Kalatozov) - Previously covered <a href="http://www.greencine.com/central/Letter-Never-Sent-Review">here</a>. Not much to add to the review, except the additional half star to make it an even five out of five. Of all the films I've watched over the last few years, this is the only one that directly inspired an idea for a screenplay project of my own (one that's still hobbling its way toward completion). It's a piece of Soviet statist propaganda (though there are hints that Kalatozov wasn't particularly sold on the whole "martyrs for Mother Russia" angle) expertly disguised as a terse man vs. nature thriller. There's enough to unpack in its 96 minute to reward repeat viewings.<br />
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3) <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dvd-babettes-feast-st-phane-audran/3624235?ean=715515107518">BABETTE'S FEAST</a> (1987; Gabriel Axel) - Speaking of folk tales, Axel's film is a lovely adaptation of an Issac Dinesen/Karen Blixen story (which is included in the DVD booklet). It's essentially a parable of using ones talents wisely and for their own sake, in this case a wildly talented Parisian chef (Stephane Audran) is relegated to playing housemaid to two kindly spinsters in a Danish backwater. The film takes the scenic route to the titular feast, gently building a fable structure that's comforting in its simplicity. Dinesen's story carefully illustrates her frustrations with the roles women are often forced to play in society while still holding a respect for tradition.<br />
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4) <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/ballad-of-narayama-criterion?store=allproducts&keyword=ballad+of+narayama++criterion">THE BALLAD OF NARAYAMA</a> (1958; Keisuke Kinoshita) - Kinoshita's makes an audacious formal move by choosing to film this story -- a millenia-old Japanese legend -- as an almost seamless piece of theater. He uses lavishly illustrated tapestries as backdrops that rise, fall, and fly in when the scene changes, creating the ultimate practical wipes.<br />
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The story is a bleak one, focusing on the legendary practice of <i>obasute</i>, which was essentially euthanasia. Once someone reached seventy years of age, they were to be deposited on the frozen, unforgiving mountain of Narayama. A tough old matriarch stubbornly refuses to succumb to the ravages of age, bringing shame on her family and consternation to her village. Kinoshita's employment of stark music and beautifully expressionistic sets (the films deserves the recognition given to CALIGARI and its ilk) is perfectly suited to the somber, poetic meditation on mortality.<br />
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5) <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dvd-chronique-dun-t-edgar-morin/3861580?ean=715515102919">CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER</a> (1961; Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin) - Lastly, there's this: the forebear of so-called <i>cinema verite</i> - a phrase coined by Edgar Morin at the outset of this project. Rouch and Morin loosely follows a cross section of urban French young adults, picking up other participants along the way. Their stated purpose is to simply find out how their subjects live. While the word "summer" in the title conjures expectations of APROPOS DE NICE-style leisure/recreation, this film is a startling document of France at a crossroads. Working-class unrest, race relations, Algeria, and even the Holocaust find their way into the film's narrative. The fourth wall is knocked down from the outset; the
filmmakers are as interested in filming themselves and their process as
they are their subject. Normally I hate this kind of self-reference <i>ad absurdum</i> but CHRONICLE works extremely well because of how earnest Rouch and Morin are in their quest for truth. The film was orginially shot in 16mm but has been painstakingly restored and looks fantastic. </div>
ptatlerivhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07570950256657235397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3322943607822029478.post-88985044198851601512013-11-14T19:21:00.000-08:002013-11-14T19:21:16.655-08:00The Barnes & Noble 50% Off Criterion/Eclipse-mas Holiday Gift Guide-a-thon Part One!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<![endif]--><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Since we've already established that
I'm essentially a shill for the Criterion Collection, I figured I'd throw
together a couple quick lists of recommendations for the ongoing 50% off Barnes
& Noble sale. I tend to use these things to pick up pricey boxed sets, so
I'm going to lead off with my top five top picks from Criterion's recent Eclipse
line releases (tomorrow I'll highlight five of my favorite recent Blus from the mainline
label).</span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<a name='more'></a><div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">For a while there, the Eclipse
imprimatur was becoming Criterion's most exciting division. They used it as a
place to bundle works that were a bit off-the-beaten-path into comparatively
affordable, extras-free sets. With the advent of Criterion's Hulu deal, there
has been less of a push to release tricky-to-market physical media when the
streaming stuff is almost risk-free from a business standpoint. After a banner
year for Eclipse in 2012 (seven sets!), 2013 saw a decline in the label's
output (two sets)*. However, there's already a Satyajit Ray box coming in
January so maybe 2014 will pick back up. </span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Anyway, here are my recommendations
in order of preference (links are to the B&N store; further info is always
available at <a href="http://criterion.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">criterion.com</span></a>):</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinmUyYGtkpL6F2CXR-WT-LsMwCjkjczpsn8Z0phGK117jsQf9IBUv7zUgE5NnxzpLoduWrOD8XLIPohtda7P7EF2QURgqWNQRjX-hVrLa06G8BMAu_8pzA1NkVWtn1Q5vmnLn2lClFikoI/s1600/crasy-16.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinmUyYGtkpL6F2CXR-WT-LsMwCjkjczpsn8Z0phGK117jsQf9IBUv7zUgE5NnxzpLoduWrOD8XLIPohtda7P7EF2QURgqWNQRjX-hVrLa06G8BMAu_8pzA1NkVWtn1Q5vmnLn2lClFikoI/s640/crasy-16.jpg" width="640" /></a></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">1) <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dvd-three-popular-films-by-jean-pierre-gorin/22946127?ean=715515092210" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">ECLIPSE SERIES 31: THREE POPULAR FILMS
BY JEAN-PIERRE GORIN</span></a></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Previously covered <span style="color: orange;"><a href="http://profoundlyrewarding.blogspot.com/2012/01/you-know-how-to-sucker-guy-in-dont-you.html" target="_blank">here</a> </span>and<span style="color: orange;"> <a href="http://www.greencine.com/central/Eclipse-Series-31-Three-Popular-Films-by-Jean-Pierre-Gorin-Review" target="_blank">here</a></span>.The most well-known
film in the box is POTO & CABENGO and I've already sung the praises of ROUTINE
PLEASURES. Let me use this space to stump for MY CRASY LIFE (pictured), Gorin's
explorarion of L.A. gangs -- circa late '80s -- that's equal parts grim and
whimsical ("grimsical<span class="st">®</span>"). <span style="background-color: #cccccc;"></span>Gorin gets deep -- even following one of the gang members
back to his former home in Samoa where life is sweet, simple, and devoid of any
of the violent posturing that's come before. It's an excellent look at a
confounding subculture. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglqatA54FDK2_MohchhP1ATEDJLgehTF91RYThB0Lj8CHUzxe2S1HsPaWbWXI5iwSuUGq2bK4XTxT0gf-PJ0iXVzH2sgxbKTt-gi8-VJ2cr8e3hFdGfn1Rmm-5lc3CINldaE7RyYd3VlBd/s1600/_jean_gremillion_dvd_lumiere_dete_05.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglqatA54FDK2_MohchhP1ATEDJLgehTF91RYThB0Lj8CHUzxe2S1HsPaWbWXI5iwSuUGq2bK4XTxT0gf-PJ0iXVzH2sgxbKTt-gi8-VJ2cr8e3hFdGfn1Rmm-5lc3CINldaE7RyYd3VlBd/s640/_jean_gremillion_dvd_lumiere_dete_05.jpg" width="640" /></a></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">2) <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dvd-jean-gremillon-during-occupation/24270498?ean=715515097215" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">ECLIPSE SERIES 34: JEAN GREMILLON
DURING THE OCCUPATION</span></a></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The only thing wrong with this one
is that it contains only three films by the often-overlooked Gremillon. For
whatever reason, Gremillon’s body of work has been difficult to see in America
beyond BitTorrents, the occasional retrospective, and import DVDs. Hopefully,
this set will rectify this scarcity and renew interest in a director who
deserves to be mentioned whenever the pantheon of auteurs is discussed. In
spite of his more truncated filmography, Gremillon deserves comparison with
Renoir, Ophuls, and Carne. The films included in the set:</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">REMORQUES
(Stormy Waters) – A routine rescue at sea goes awry when the venal captain
of an endangered boat connives to de-rescue his craft. A captain par excellence
(the always-charming Jean Gabin) comes to aid the ship, only to be tested when
he gets involved with one of the rescued, a mysterious woman (Michele Morgan). An
otherwise stand-up guy, Gabin is waylaid by a moment of desire. His ten-year marriage
(to Madelieine Renaud) is brought to the brink of destruction and the bulk of
the film is the couple’s Bergmanesque desolation as they cope with infidelity
and a stale relationship. “Unhappy people easily recognize each other,” remarks
Gabin’s temptress. “It’d be sad if we didn't.” It’s a simple film, marked with remarkably
astute relational insights, an especially haunting ending, and – throughout –
some amazing, Ophuls-level, tracking shots.</span></span><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">LUMIERE
D’ETE (Summer Light) – This is the breakout film in the set. One review I read
derided it as “RULES OF THE GAME fan fiction”, something I can’t really
consider a pejorative. <span> </span>Gremillon’s film
is a containment drama documenting the relational pratfalls of the idle rich in
a small village in the middle of Provence. <span> </span>RULES<i> is</i> the most obvious corollary(though
LUMIERE D’ETE isn’t quite as epic in scope). Central to the drama is the dying relationship
between Cri-Cri (Madelieine Renaud) and her increasingly sadistic lover (Paul
Bernard) [Her: Do you still love me? Him: Do you really want to know?” Her:
No.] The characters slip further into bizarre behavior; she becomes more of a
controlling harpy, he more of a gun-toting, woman-stalking sociopath – their
particular pathologies wouldn’t be out of place in a Polanski film. It’s a richly
written film that rails against the whole soul mate business, underscoring the
truth that you can’t look to other people to complete you.</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">LE CIEL EST A VOUS (The Sky Is Yours) – This charming film lies at the
intersection of Capra and Renoir, a light-hearted drama “based on people who,”
per the opening title card, “even today, lead modest, hardworking lives in
Southeast France.” A woman (Madelieine Renaud, again; she’s one of
the set’s biggest revelations) decides to share in her husband’s aviation hobby
and ends up trying to break a world record. The underdog scenario feels oddly
fresh here, as does the very romantic (yet non-cloying) husband-wife relationship.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE7anossmT7NeFQHGB0JADOCeYtBQCbtkN305_x35C46aVTbVPUSn4ozHuv2AVWr9kdnuPQ9dgs0i4fxWPPADv7Pe-GSjcg7YKUh_nIYOxWyxsxt3UZvRyq7LzEZXkunGOWyAIHUcDwDUV/s1600/LockwoodTheWickedLady.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="520" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE7anossmT7NeFQHGB0JADOCeYtBQCbtkN305_x35C46aVTbVPUSn4ozHuv2AVWr9kdnuPQ9dgs0i4fxWPPADv7Pe-GSjcg7YKUh_nIYOxWyxsxt3UZvRyq7LzEZXkunGOWyAIHUcDwDUV/s640/LockwoodTheWickedLady.jpg" width="640" /></a></span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">3) <span style="color: orange;"><a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dvd-criterion-coll-eclipse-36-three-wicked-melodramas-from-gainsborough-pictures/24932146?ean=715515100014" target="_blank">ECLIPSE SERIES 36: THREE WICKED
MELODRAMAS FROM GAINSBOROUGH PICTURES</a></span> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">This
is probably the least-heralded set on this list (the BN.com link doesn't even
bother with a thumbnail of the packaging) but it may be the most fun of the
bunch, too. Per the title, it collects three quick-and-dirty productions by the
famed Gainsborough studio, films that are comparable to the motley, scrappy
sibling of the Powell/Pressburger/Archers stuff (which itself often dipped into
melodrama). These were the type of productions that, back then, were cranked
out on recycled sets with semi-regularity (now it feels like films of this
nature involve far more fanfare and Oscar buzz). The films in the set are ideal
for people who like the pudding-thick plots of DOWNTON ABBEY or DRAGONWYK (or
the Rafaelo Matarazzo Eclipse set for that matter). </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">
</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
THE
MAN IN GREY – Black-hearted Margaret Lockwood plots to destroy her best friend
(Phyllis Calvert). Lockwood can’t help it, she seems almost genetically
indisposed toward destructive self-centeredness. James Mason swaggers in at the
twenty minute mark, bleeding from a duel (at which he has killed a young boy
who’d dared write a crummy limerick). Mason is a perfectly oily cad (as if dueling
weren’t enough, he’s also involved in dog fights), all glowers and sneers. Lockwood
smolders behind her scowl; her smiles are so rare, it’s obvious why men work so hard to provoke them. The penultimate
scene is a woman being beaten to death with a fire poker yet THE MAN IN GREY still manages
to end on a happy note. Is that melodramatic or what?</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
MADONNA
OF THE SEVEN MOONS – A DuMaurier-ian tale wherein a woman (Calvert again) has
to choose between her desire to be a nun and her father’s wish for an arranged
marriage to a rich vintner. The film is full of Theremin-tinged moments of
psychological dread and goes rather bizarre places with its meek Madonna vs.
insouciant whore split personality plot, building to a climax involving
tastelessly costumed Gypsy bandits.</div>
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<br /></div>
</span><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">
THE WICKED LADY – By the third film in the set, you already know that virtue
and innocence will be rewarded with tragedy and heartbreak and cynical harlotry
will prevail. Lockwood once again wears the black hat as the titular character,
ruining another Pollyanna (Patricia Roc). After stealing her friend’s fiancé,
Lockwood takes up literal highway robbery as a hobby, joining forces with – who
else? – the nefarious James Mason. This is the most risqué – and best – of the
bunch, full of innuendo and licentiousness one might usually expect from films
imported from more exotic countries.“We’ll come to the gibbet soon enough,” he
tells her. “Don’t lets race for it.” Oh, but she does, poisoning every
relationship she has – in one case, literally.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgg_O9lnvDRYN_YHtOtCut50kt6pF_iVTs1KXSeLPUFWggeheIQ2AH7CSp9Bupw781MuO6qsDaXBf0R4WmOq_Lw199bocdvuwuNXl207sWGuW2FDOeKF_Iyzi5_qlb3STgA_utVvLhxNCxY/s1600/_two_tons_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="482" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgg_O9lnvDRYN_YHtOtCut50kt6pF_iVTs1KXSeLPUFWggeheIQ2AH7CSp9Bupw781MuO6qsDaXBf0R4WmOq_Lw199bocdvuwuNXl207sWGuW2FDOeKF_Iyzi5_qlb3STgA_utVvLhxNCxY/s640/_two_tons_2.jpg" width="640" /></a></span></span></div>
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4) <span style="color: orange;"><a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dvd-up-all-night-with-robert-downey-sr/23921322?ean=715515096119" target="_blank">ECLIPSE SERIES 33: UP ALL NIGHT WITH
ROBERT DOWNEY SR.</a></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
Here
you’ll find the protozoa of modern comedy. Downey’s the Captain Beefheart of
filmmakers – fevered, discordant, and exhaustingly inventive. I prefer his kind
of undisciplined experimenting to the academic rigors of more hallowed,
canonized avant-garde artists. PUTNEY SWOPE is the notorious entry into the set, and probably deserving of its own extra-packed release, but Criterion does a
service to the other films here by putting them on equal footing with SWOPE.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
BABO
73 – Warhol regular Taylor Mead plays the President of the United States in the
dystopian future year of 1973. The film opens with a religious leader driving
around in a huge convertible, defiling a female hitchhiker, and then going to
the government for absolution. Heavy-laden with wordplay-based humor
– “Fascist gun in the west,” “United Status”, Digressional Committee – BABO is
an interesting exercise, most notable for Mead’s insane/inspired turn as a
president that seems distantly related to Steve Brule.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
CHAFED
ELBOWS – LA JETTE if it were made by Harmony Korine or PINK FLAMINGOS-era John
Waters. Still pictures tell the story of a down-on-his-luck man who becomes pregnant,
then becomes a painting, and … well, ELBOWS is a series of increasingly bizarre
vignettes that zigzag across the line between appalling and humorous. Downey throws
so many jokes out; some stick, some don’t. The spirit bleeds through, if not
always the intent. The proto-MR. SHOW.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
</div>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
NO
MORE EXCUSES – A collage of war stock footage, a Civil War soldier wandering
through Central Park, a histrionic speech by the president of the Society for
Indeceny to Naked Animals, Charley Giteau, a man and woman enacting a rape
fantasy, <span>and </span>an ad for Preperation H.<span> </span>“I need this like I need underground movies”</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
PUTNEY
SWOPE – <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">Truth and
soul. </span></span>Opens with a hilarious death scene and its uphill from there. A
lot of stuff gets called absurd; this really deserves the label. This is Downey’s magnum opus, a pandemonic laugh
while civilization collapses. “I dream about you every night.” “That’s fine.
Just don’t send me the laundry bill.”
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
TWO
TONS OF TURQUOISE TO TAOS TONIGHT – This is Downey’s mutable thesis, his Trout
Mask Replica, something he’s edited and reedited and renamed over the years. It’s
radical editing has a hyperlink quality and I imagine is an approximation of what
it’s like to rattle around inside Downey’s head for 50-odd minutes. TAOS is a
series of out-of-context moments/punchlines (many involving Downey’s ex-wife,
the very talented Elsie); these are home movies from another dimension, the most
representative (and most confounding) film in the set. What I imagine Warhol’s
films might have been if they were actually fun/entertaining. </div>
</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span>
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyn2clPAbb5HqXt-X9lVs4rX6xHIkP7BAtx7W9zgmZyixS2ayBgDqpFb4mUy7nCdORF1p0WG68CtMjL832pDTJeDNzAnbdIGlOmei1_lgLlzIleasHcLwquJaT8Us99xasAFun9egUfly3/s1600/800_black_sun_3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="286" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyn2clPAbb5HqXt-X9lVs4rX6xHIkP7BAtx7W9zgmZyixS2ayBgDqpFb4mUy7nCdORF1p0WG68CtMjL832pDTJeDNzAnbdIGlOmei1_lgLlzIleasHcLwquJaT8Us99xasAFun9egUfly3/s640/800_black_sun_3.jpg" width="640" /></a></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">5) <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dvd-warped-world-of-koreyoshi-kurahara/22373489?ean=715515085816" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">ECLIPSE SERIES 28: THE WARPED WORLD OF
KOREYOSHI KURAHARA</span></a></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Hard to further elaborate on what
I've already covered <span style="color: orange;"><a href="http://profoundlyrewarding.blogspot.com/2011/08/sun-sweat-and-smoke-visuals-of.html" target="_blank">here</a> </span>and<span style="color: orange;"> <a href="http://guru.greencine.com/archives/2011/08/eclipse_series_warped_world_of_koreyoshi_kurahara.html" target="_blank">here</a></span>. BLACK SUN remains the
standout but I'm also a huge fan of the very concise noir thriller INTIMIDATION
and the completely bonkers depraved-youth-run-amockery of THE WARPED ONES.
Anybody fond of any of the '60s-era cinematic New Waves would do well to check
these films out. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">[*<i> To
be fair, 2013 also marked a ridiculously banner year for multi-film releases on
the mainline: Pierre Etaix, SHOAH, the Roberto Rossellini/Ingrid Bergman box,
the 27-disc Zatoichi set, and the forthcoming Martin Scorsese World Cinema
Project collection more than make up for the lack of Eclipse sets.</i>]</span></span></span></div>
</div>
ptatlerivhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07570950256657235397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3322943607822029478.post-44206470912912327632013-11-13T19:51:00.002-08:002013-11-13T19:51:59.843-08:00Undateable?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTs8NLxiCOp5k36RRikF3q459O3nRmw0IjLIzDCxoNQipVrXcRydGULLbgvvZEDqqwbmEBwYBpHKeqZ_sZ_vvSOd0GF54jDKCSbtgejJLnWe7ho9nwQ53FPHKDgx193KN96CrPbJzZ9-Oi/s1600/800_frances_ha_blu-ray_04_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTs8NLxiCOp5k36RRikF3q459O3nRmw0IjLIzDCxoNQipVrXcRydGULLbgvvZEDqqwbmEBwYBpHKeqZ_sZ_vvSOd0GF54jDKCSbtgejJLnWe7ho9nwQ53FPHKDgx193KN96CrPbJzZ9-Oi/s1600/800_frances_ha_blu-ray_04_.jpg" /></span></a></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I tend to hate reviews that arbitrarily pit films against each
other, setting one up as a cudgel to thrash the other with. It's the
obnoxious conceit that drives Armond White's annual "better-than" lists,
the idea that something can only be considered good while in relief
against something dismal.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That said, I've been trying to figure out why I liked Noah Baumbach's FRANCES HA so much more than Lena Dunham's<a href="https://www.greencine.com/central/Tiny-Furniture-Review"> TINY FURNITURE</a>, both Criterion releases (the former having been released yesterday in a <a href="http://www.criterion.com/films/28560-frances-ha">Blu/DVD</a> dual format package). </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Both
films have a superficially identical recipe: a twenty-something white
woman experiencing post-college paralysis, adrift in Manhattan (and, of
course, Brooklyn; the nerve center for this sort of thing), sponging off
of others while vaguely aiming for an unambitious career in the arts,
surrounded by a coterie of privileged, like-minded, polyamorous friends
and -- ultimately -- just (heavy sigh) soooo unsure of what to do with
themselves.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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</div>
<a name='more'></a><div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As the hyperlink above will tell you, I'm on the
record as liking FURNITURE well enough (though I'm thinking that extra
half-star was awful generous). But I liked FRANCES HA. A lot. And where I
find Dunham to be a particularly noxious personality (on- and
off-screen), I've always been charmed by Greta Gerwig, the star and
co-writer of FRANCES HA. But I still began by gritting my teeth through
the opening moments of the film, expecting another 80-minute trip
through the insufferable quirks of a free-spirited freeloader. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuDC7t5VjV3Xy-lSZm4Vq8siuEZfNCDjC4fulrUy6Lm7W0s002YhCv1kjxTNx19pYMUvRGvnUwujcVquZkIrDijqQ9Lofj80hJiVSdYyyk_4khrycoWEpbTj7kYuMq1odSpJo0j6LJy9lP/s1600/800_frances_ha_blu-ray_03_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuDC7t5VjV3Xy-lSZm4Vq8siuEZfNCDjC4fulrUy6Lm7W0s002YhCv1kjxTNx19pYMUvRGvnUwujcVquZkIrDijqQ9Lofj80hJiVSdYyyk_4khrycoWEpbTj7kYuMq1odSpJo0j6LJy9lP/s1600/800_frances_ha_blu-ray_03_.jpg" /></span></a></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Those opening moments establish Gerwig's Frances as a barely functioning woman-child. She lives with her best friend, Sophie (Mickey Sumner) in a small apartment in New York. Despite the close quarters, Frances still can't get enough of Sophie, opting most nights to share her bed (in a totally non-sexual, slumber party way). Her attachment to Sophie leads to her refusal to move in with her boyfriend, resulting in their breakup. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The film zips rather quickly from vignette to vignette. Sophie soon liberates herself from Frances and Frances spends the majority of the film treading water, pining for her best friend and refusing to make a leap into... well, anything resembling an adult life. The film is not necessarily about unhealthy relational attachments, although that's certainly a part of it.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The wonderful thing about FRANCES HA -- and I believe this is where it parts ways with TINY FURNITURE and the rest of Dunham's work -- is its vulnerability. Despite its setting, its characters, its soundtrack, there's no affectation at its center. When Frances tells a friend, proudly, that she and her current roommates live their lives "like a sitcom", I don't think we're supposed to smirk and think how cool that must be. There's an undercurrent of sad desperation to it. This isn't quirk for quirk's sake. Most of the credit goes to Gerwig's performance (and you have to really love Gerwig to even begin to appreciate this film; if she doesn't do it for you, steer clear). Frances is definitely a stock character for her but I don't see her improving on the whole wayward twenty-something beyond this point. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Baumbach, too, is at his peak here. Like his colleague and sometime collaborator Wes Anderson, Baumbach is often accused of making the same quirky, affected film over and over. Also like Anderson, I think most detractors do not recognize (or just do not care) that there's a real tenderness at the center of Baumbach's work. With FRANCES HA, he's taken a step backwards from the snarky cynicism of MARGOT AT THE WEDDING and GREENBERG. FRANCES HA is almost a maturation of Baumbach's other post-college drama, 1995's </span><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.criterion.com/films/795-kicking-and-screaming">KICKING AND SCREAMING</a>. </span><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That film was stuffed with self-aware pop culture references and rather absurd (and, yes, sitcom-ish) characters and plot structure (it hasn't aged well). With Frances, Baumbach and Gerwig have built someone who -- whether she wants to or not -- inhabits some version of the real world and must come to terms with it.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHxV1pHdFS5ZiIKtpf-zkGszEfXR7aTnFY-D7syAZkXScQRrItaZzj9DE9gx4AuhTKu2zPZ-_7FjsA77L8oDSoDN2Bu3aKPxS4N6zIEqAX64UkJ5xXpZLfCFsYeMG97ZikvAIpuEAQeuZ9/s1600/title_francis_ha_blu-ray_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHxV1pHdFS5ZiIKtpf-zkGszEfXR7aTnFY-D7syAZkXScQRrItaZzj9DE9gx4AuhTKu2zPZ-_7FjsA77L8oDSoDN2Bu3aKPxS4N6zIEqAX64UkJ5xXpZLfCFsYeMG97ZikvAIpuEAQeuZ9/s1600/title_francis_ha_blu-ray_.jpg" /></span></a></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">***</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Speaking of comedy that doesn't date well, early in the summer, I rewatched Mike Leigh's 1990 <a href="http://www.criterion.com/films/27982-life-is-sweet?q=autocomplete">LIFE IS SWEET</a> (again, a Criterion release; and, no, I don't work for them; however, if anybody from that outfit is reading this and wants to hire me as a colorist/online editor...). The film had been my gateway into Leigh, someone I regarded as a favorite for a long time (and someone whose films I still eagerly anticipate). If you'd asked me to name my favorite Leigh film, it would have been a toss-up between LIFE IS SWEET and SECRETS & LIES. In both cases, I would have cited Timothy Spall's performance as a major factor in my decision.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Rewatching the film ten years after I'd first seen it (and over twenty since it arrived just in time for the early '90s independent film explosion), however, I found the film -- and Spall's nervously cool man-child in particular -- quite grating. What might have seemed refreshingly odd in 1990 felt like it had been already wrung out via quirky comedies with packaged modern rock soundtracks and their sitcom cousins.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">LIFE IS SWEET wasn't a disaster, per se. It had all of Leigh's usual ingredients -- his obsession with what makes regular folks happy, working class angst, intentionally off-putting characters (I'd watched CAREER GIRLS a few weeks before which pulled off the "endearingly annoying" thing with a lot more aplomb). It just bears the stains of a
certain type of late ‘80s/early ’90s indie film that I'm a bit too tired to define further right now. I loathe faulting something for being dated but there is a point where stylistic choices made, at the time, for their brazen flaunting of convention look a little silly in retrospect. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">However, Jane Horrocks plays a rebellious daughter with the need to
punctuate every thought with a sneering, clichéd insult ("fascist pig", etc.). This aspect of the character wears thin fast but Horrocks manages to pull a strange, sad poignance out of the character, building to a big scene between her and her mother (played by Alison Steadman). Despite my memory of LIFE IS SWEET as a funny film, this</span> scene (about 40 minutes in) was the one lodged in my brain. It'd be a shame to spoil it but I will say that, whatever its faults, its worth sitting through LIFE IS SWEET's overripe comedy to get to its rather timeless moment of pathos. I can't help but wonder if I won't be saying the same thing about FRANCES HA twenty years from now.</div>
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ptatlerivhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07570950256657235397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3322943607822029478.post-72948090678638131922013-11-01T06:22:00.000-07:002013-11-01T06:22:04.048-07:00Happy November Everyone!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Pretty uninspired you guys.</div>
ptatlerivhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07570950256657235397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3322943607822029478.post-77123997898833832392013-10-29T15:45:00.001-07:002013-10-29T15:45:05.219-07:00Glittering Eyes<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I was feeling free. I thought all my debts were settled. And then I received another summons from the redoubtable Bill Ryan (right). I had no choice but to carry out his diabolical orders and write up Isak Dinesen's "The Monkey", selected from her SEVEN GOTHIC TALES (out in a handsome <a href="http://www.foliosociety.com/book/GTT/seven-gothic-tales">new Folio Society edition</a> which is number one with a bullet on my Christmas list... - hint - hint -). <a href="http://wwwbillblog.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-kind-of-face-you-slash-day-29.html">My ruminations</a> are over at The Kind of Face You Hate and (again) a part of the horror fiction series Bill runs every year.<br /><br />While you're over there, also check out <a href="http://wwwbillblog.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-kind-of-face-you-slash-day-25-what.html">Roderick Heath on M.R. James</a> and <a href="http://wwwbillblog.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-kind-of-face-you-slash-day-23-way.html">Bill hisself on Maurice Level</a>. Great stuff, as per usual, and (again) I'm happy to be a contributor.</div>
ptatlerivhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07570950256657235397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3322943607822029478.post-68280544498808253912013-10-16T07:09:00.000-07:002013-10-16T07:09:45.962-07:00Hugger-Mugger Propinquity<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Well... it's been quiet around here. A little TOO quiet. Eerily quiet, even. I...</div>
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AAH! WHAT'S THAT?!</div>
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Oh. WHEW. It's just <a href="http://wwwbillblog.blogspot.com/">Bill Ryan</a>, ladies and gentlemen! My! Did his bulged eyes and <span class="st">exaggeratedly aquiline nose give me a fright!</span></div>
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During October every year, Bill runs <a href="http://wwwbillblog.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Kind%20of%20Face%20You%20Slash">31 days of horror fiction-related posts</a>. Over the years, this has become one of the few holiday traditions I look forward to. Bill's posts have led to me discovering a new writer (like <a href="http://wwwbillblog.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-kind-of-face-you-slash-day-21-is.html">William Scott Home</a>) or finally getting around to an old one (like <a href="http://wwwbillblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/kind-of-face-you-slash-day-27-dust-in.html">Algernon Blackwood</a>, whose WILLOWS just might be my favorite piece of horror fiction). Bill's posts are funny and refreshingly free of blinkered fan boy reverence (check out his take on <a href="http://wwwbillblog.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-kind-of-face-you-slash-day-1-this.html">HOUSE OF LEAVES</a>) but -- more importantly -- Bill has a deep love of the genre that's evident throughout his writing. If Bill chastens and chides today's horrorsmiths, it's only because he wants them to do better, dammit. </div>
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Anyway, I'm not just writing this to praise Bill's annual efforts (incidentally: he's pretty good the other eleven months out of the year, too). For this year's project, Bill called on a veritable ghoul's gallery of ghasts to contribute pieces. I happened to sneak my way in to a roster that (thusfar) includes <a href="http://wwwbillblog.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-kind-of-face-you-slash-day-2-read.html">Andrew Leon Hudson</a>, <a href="http://wwwbillblog.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-kind-of-face-you-slash-day-4.html">Jose Cruz</a>, <a href="http://wwwbillblog.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-kid-of-face-you-slash-day-6-secret.html">Dennis Cozzalio</a>, <a href="http://wwwbillblog.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-kind-of-face-you-slash-day-8-in.html">Danny Bowes</a>, <a href="http://wwwbillblog.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-kind-of-face-you-slash-day-10.html">Andrew Bemis</a>, <a href="http://wwwbillblog.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-kind-of-face-you-slash-day-11-some.html">Arion Berger</a>, and <a href="http://wwwbillblog.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-kind-of-face-you-slash-day-14.html">Bryce Wilson</a>. </div>
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My piece -- on Charles Williams' DESCENT INTO HELL -- <a href="http://wwwbillblog.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-kind-of-face-you-slash-day-16.html">runs today</a>. Enjoy (if you dare!)...</div>
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[ps This is where I would normally promise more content in the days to come. I won't since that always seems to turn out empty. "<span class="st">Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring" and all that.</span>]</div>
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ptatlerivhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07570950256657235397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3322943607822029478.post-65340401807023974902013-07-21T11:54:00.000-07:002013-11-24T11:19:12.080-08:00Everything can be done, in principle.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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</xml><![endif]-->As long as <a href="http://www.greencine.com/central/node/1676">I'm talking about Westerns</a>, here's a piece that was supposed to go up last fall but never did.<br />
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In 1978, MGM/UA gambled about $44 million (around $150
million in today’s dollars) on Michael Cimino’s Western HEAVEN'S GATE. The
director was running hot off of the critical and commercial success of his
Oscar-winning THE DEER HUNTER and seemed like yet another auteur in the Scorsese/Coppola
mold of Hollywood young turks poised to continue the paradigm shift of '70s American
filmmaking.<br />
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Unless you’re a cinematic dilettante, you know how this
story ends. Far more famous than the film itself is HEAVEN'S GATE’s troubled
saga of floppery. The film’s name became shorthand for a sort of filmic
Waterloo, a bloated folly that was too big <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i>
to fail. HEAVEN'S GATE: The Film has played second fiddle to Heaven's Gate: The Symbol of (Fill In Your Thesis Title).</div>
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Last fall, <a href="http://www.criterion.com/films/28036-heaven-s-gate?q=autocomplete">Criterion released a deluxe Blu</a> of Cimino's definitive
final cut, a grand occasion for those of us who'd never seen any version
of the film. Their Cimino-supervised restoration has beautifully rendered his original vision and (hopefully) will steer attention back to the film itself, rather than the hash made of it by trade magazine pundits and industry wonks. I, for one, went into the film fully expecting to love all 216 minutes of it - I have a soft spot for long films, westerns, and crazy pet projects.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Well I’m here today to tell you that
HEAVEN'S GATE is not all that bad, which is hardly a radical statement. Even
during its pained stillbirth, the film had its staunch defenders (Robin Wood
and Z-Channel savant/noted murderer Jerry Harvey among them). The film is one
of those that has been assessed and reassessed enough over the years to where I
think it’s not generally regarded anymore as a bad film. I boldly stand in the
camp between the people who think it’s a disaster and the people who fall over
themselves in fits of contrarianism to laud it as some overlooked American
masterpiece. It is a solid film, brilliant in places, with more than a few
missteps. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The film certainly begins with a
misstep: a tedious scene devoted to depicting the tribal rites of blue bloods as
they graduate Harvard. Here we're introduced to central character James Averill
(Kris Kristofferson) as he runs across the campus, gets caught up in a
graduation procession, and - after
several infernal zoom lens flourishes - ends up in the graduation hall where
Billy Irvine (John Hurt) delivers a long, rambling oratory to send the grads on
their way. Beyond Kristofferson's magnetic presence, there's nothing to draw us
to Averill during this sequence. If you watched this scene alone, you'd imagine
that the dandy fop Irvine was GATE's protagonist.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The whole thing feels like a deleted
scene, like if Coppola had opened APOCALYPSE NOW with the French plantation
dinner. I think Cimino intended this sequence to serve the same function as the
opening wedding in the DEER HUNTER by introducing our heroes within the context
of his happiness so as to provide a stark contrast to the embattled life that
follows. It doesn't work that way. First of all, Hurt is front-and-center here
but his screen time in the first scene probably matches his combined screentime
for the remainder of the film. Secondly, after a protracted post-graduation
celebration - complete with hundreds of extras, swooping crane shots, a
perfectly choreographed waltz on the Harvard green that's as pattern-obsessed
as Michel Gondry's "Let Forever Be" video (but nowhere near as fun) -
we flash-forward twenty years and the real business of HEAVEN'S GATE can begin.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Cimino's focus shifts to
hardscrabble frontier life - an generic immigrant family tends to some large
chunk of greasy meat while their sheets flap in a merciless wind. An enforcer
for the local cattle barons (Christopher Walken) creeps up and shoots the
immigrant paterfamilias dead, leaving wailing women and children in his wake.
This is a microcosm for the rest of the film: the civilized cattlemen versus
the immigrants. Averill belongs to the former class but comes to stick his neck
further and further out for the latter. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The plot pits Averill against the
Cattlemen's Association and their genocidal plan to seize all of the land for
themselves. The Association is led by a painfully one-dimensional Sam Waterson
(who's only lacking a mustache to twirl). Waterson holds a backroom cigar-and-brandy session that results in a kill list naming most of the immigrant men.
Averill, whose laconic front and hickory-smoked voice mask a volcano of pioneer
justice just waiting to erupt, aims to frustrate the Association's plot.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The film's first hour nicely raises the
stakes but then GATE comes to a crashing halt when Averill drops in on Ella (Isabelle
Huppert), an immigrant who runs a bordello. At this point, the film desperately needs Huppert's femininity
as much as it needs to "go micro" in its focus, but Cimino isn't up to the
task. Despite an amazing cast - Jeff Bridges, Geoffrey Lewis, Tom Noonan, Terry
O'Quinn and a pre-monsterism Mickey Rourke among them - we don’t know these
people. Each stereotypical immigrant is indistinguishable from the next; the
documentarian’s distance Cimino employs works<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>on a spectacle level but fails on a very basic human one (which reminds
me: soon and very soon on these pages I’ll be studying the cinema of Godfrey
Reggio! Stay tuned!).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">GATE finally picks back up once the
wrath of the Association is unleashed. “There’s an armed mob of paid men about
to invade your country,” Averill tells the immigrants, “with the open threat to
destroy the lives and property of your friends.” This pronouncement comes
nearly three hours in. Most westerns would practically open with this line and
this, in essence, is the type of scenario John Ford or Budd Boetticher could
make for about $5 (with an 80-minute running time), granted with much less
obvious production value.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In one of the supplemental
interviews, Cimino humbly boasts that he “didn’t study writing or movie-making”
and that he’s “not an intellectual” and “can only write about people.”
Unfortunately, all of this shows through. GATE is basically composed of few
awe-inspiring moments strung together with rather standard dramatic connective
tissue (“you can’t fire me, I quit!” is used as an actual, pivotal line). The
scenery writes a check that the screenplay can’t cash and the story unravels
exponentially, culminating in a protracted battle scene (where, among other
monotonies, Jeff Bridges’ character has nothing to do for about twenty minutes
but gallop in circles yelling “get down!”).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The most consistently amazing thing
about HEAVEN’S GATE is the production design, which is especially brought to
life by the Blu (which is one of the most gorgeous I’ve seen - even the more
fogged/degraded elements are polished to near-perfection). Cimino’s background
in architecture shows through here; the attention to detail and texture is
insane and I mean that literally. Cimino is clearly OCD in his approach to
production design and I wonder if maybe he missed his calling to be the next
Dante Ferretti. The noise, dirt, and stench of the Old West is palpable in each
frame (and I haven’t seen frames this full in a while; just to reset the
background for a retake would take hours). There are plenty of “how did they do
that?” moments (unfortunately, the answer is most likely “with gobs of
money!”).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Earlier, I criticized using GATE as
a symbolic catch-all for whatever thesis you want to posit regarding Hollywood
filmmaking. Well, indulge my hypocrisy while I say that, in a way, GATE
straddles the two types of films that the '70s became known for: the
blockbuster spectacle and the gritty, street-level dissection of human
behavior. The world GATE presents exists somewhere between the stark depravity
of Scorsese’s New York and the permanent adolescence of George Lucas’s
starry-eyed action figure-verse. On the one hand, you have the full-blooded,
unblinking look at the horrors and corruption that drove Westward Expansion. On
the other, you have a golden-hearted hooker and (at times) too cutesy,
generically Eastern European immigrants straight out of central casting (though
I guess they're not quite as offensive as that quasi-Jamaican fish-rabbit
everyone hated in Lucas's STAR WARS, TOO or whatever it was called).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In the end, HEAVEN'S GATE is an
all-in proposition. You're either on board for three and a half hours of
brilliant failure or you're not. Barring the false start, the first hour is
amazing and as exciting a bit of filmmaking as was produced during Hollywood’s
period of 1970s fecundity. It’s traditionally epic (think late period Lean) but
shot through with the energy and iconoclasm that marked the Easy Rider/Raging
Bull generation. The film never again quite achieves the cohesive greatness of
the first hour, but there are enough fitfully brilliant moments to reward the
viewer's patience. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Oh yeah and this: </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span>
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ptatlerivhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07570950256657235397noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3322943607822029478.post-66057840421793550912013-07-18T19:27:00.000-07:002014-09-05T10:18:52.241-07:00Bully For You, Chilly For Me<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Hey everybody. Over at GreenCine, I have a write-up of Delmar Daves' <a href="http://www.greencine.com/central/node/1676">JUBAL and 3:10 TO YUMA</a><span style="font-size: small;">, which came out in May from the Criterion Collection. However, I'm taking a break from my Criterion reviews to focus on another unhealthy obsession: making lists of movies. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Over at the <a href="http://murielcommunity.blogspot.com/">Muriels site</a>, our noble leader Paul Clark is in the process of inaugurating the Muriels Hall of Fame, a compendium of films that we the Muriels voters think deserve some hallowed position in filmdom's Valhalla. He breaks it all down much better in <a href="http://murielcommunity.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-muriels-hall-of-fame-introduction.html">his initial description</a>.</span><br />
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So far, the Hall has some very prestigious (if familiar) inductees: THE SEVENTH SEAL, VERTIGO, NORTH BY NORTHWEST, PSYCHO, YOJIMBO, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, CASABLANCA, THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC, REAR WINDOW, and M. There are six more to be unveiled over the next few days.</span><br />
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I figured that at this point I'd go ahead and unveil my own ballot to you, the imaginary reader of this blog.</span><br />
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The first round called for us to just hammer out a list of ten films we thought were great. Easy enough. Except <a href="http://skuriels.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-skuriels-individual-ballots-s-v.html">I already did this last year</a> in The Skuriels, the Sight and Sound-ish poll we held jointly with the Skandies voters. I wanted to avoid repeating myself, so this time I tried to dig up stuff that I thought was great, if not Best Ever-worthy. These were my off-the-beaten-path choices (admittedly, my picks aren't too far from Sight and Sound orthodoxy. None of the films listed here are likely to be unknown to anyone who considers themselves an Avid film watcher. My tastes are obsessive but not that obscure.)</span><br />
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<u><b>Initial Ballot</b></u></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING! (1945; Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger) - I chose this one mainly because it was my introduction to the Archers. It's not as bursting with ideas as something like THE RED SHOES or COLONEL BLIMP but it drips with the atmosphere of its Hebridean setting. It's an extremely haunted film and one of the few films to effectively capture the old, weird feeling of folklore. (See also Powell's THE EDGE OF THE WORLD.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">LAND WITHOUT BREAD aka LAS HURDES (1933; Luis Bunuel) - The film that finally sold me on Bunuel. This weird bit of "ethnofiction" - social documentary pushed beyond hyperbole - is a fine synthesis of his irreverence, his religious obsessions, his surrealist DNA (minus the insufferable Dali-isms of UN CHIEN ANDALOU), and his very serious insights into human nature. This 26-minute satire masquerading as a documentary contains more truth than the entire filmographies of many of today's ripped-from-CNN, stock footage compilers masquarading as documentary filmmakers. (Other contenders for this spot were Forough Farrokhzad's similarly-themed THE HOUSE IS BLACK and Bunuel's surprisingly reverent Christ allegory NAZARIN<span style="font-size: small;">.</span>)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">NIGHT OF THE DEMON (1957; Jacques Tourneur) - This made my Skuriels ballot, too. Heavy on atmosphere, light on gotcha! scares... this'll always be the kind of horror film I prefer. I wish more filmmakers could achieve the high strangeness of this M. R. James adaptation. (Mark Robson's THE SEVENTH VICTIM unsettles in a similar way.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">SHADOW OF A DOUBT (1943; Alfred Hitchcock) - Had to include Hitchcock since he's a big part of the reason I got dragged into this pit of cinephilia. This is probably my favorite film of his, maybe because it's one of the last of his masterpieces I watched when doing my initial Hitch marathon. I think Joseph Cotton's Uncle Charlie is one of the most blandly chilling personifications of evil committed to film. Teresa Wright also deserves a lot of credit for imbuing her confused small town girl with a strength that another actress may have missed. (If I had to pick another Hitch for Hall of Fame recommendation, I might go with FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">PAISAN (<span style="font-size: small;">1946, Roberto Rossellini) - Lean, mean, and dirty, like the war-wrecked people it depicts. This is </span><a href="http://vimeo.com/68514760">neorealism</a>'s finest hour (well, 134 minutes) and is a revelation every time I watch it again. How he managed to pull off any one of these vignettes - and then build them into a loving, coherent mosaic - is a miracle. (This is a hard one to posit an alternative for. I'm going to throw out two others - Gremillon's LUMIERE D'ETE and Henri-Georges Clozout's LE CORBEAU - that manage the same oppressive, claustrophobic alienation that PAISAN achieves.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">RIFIFI (1955; Jules Dassin) - The infamous silent bank heist scene here is enough to commend it. It's been heisted itself many times and still no one can quite get the tension right (it has a lot in common with the climax of A MAN ESCAPED). Dassin made about six other great films (and a few more good ones) but this is him at the height of his powers. It's the pinnacle of one of my favorite subgenres -- the French crime film. (For an American film, Robert Wise's ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW comes very close.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">THE NAKED SPUR (1953, Anthony Mann) - Had to include a Western so I went with the one where Jimmy Stewart's the crazy bad guy. The way his eyes flash while he's trying to wrestle that corpse out of the river at the end portend his work in 1958's VERTIGO. (See also THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALENCE, THE MAN FROM LARAMIE, WINCHESTER '73... I could make a list of just ten Jimmy Stewart-starring Westerns to be honest.) </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A MAN ESCAPED (1956; Robert Bresson) - See my thoughts <a href="http://profoundlyrewarding.blogspot.com/2013/03/i-have-way.html">here</a>. (This is Bresson's best film. No substitution is possible.)</span><br />
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THE RED BALLOON (1956; Albert Lamorisse) - This is a perfect film - no fat on it. (I almost entered Murnau's NOSFERATU for the same economy in its storytelling.)</span><br />
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THE MUSIC ROOM (1958; Satyajit Ray) - <a href="https://www.greencine.com/central/the-music-room-review?page=14">I wrote this up</a> for GreenCine. It's a recent discovery but one of the few films I've seen for the first time recently that have really stuck in my mind. (The other, more obvious, end-of-an-era offering that belongs in any film hall of fame is Welles MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So those were my ten hall of fame picks. After these were submitted, Paul shot back a list of 76 films, 18 of which I hadn't seen (one of these I hadn't even heard of)*. From these, I was to pick ten. Here, then, is the fascinating result:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><u><b>Unranked Final Ballot</b></u> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">1. A Man Escaped (1956, Bresson)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">2. I Know Where I'm Going! (1945, Powell/Pressburger)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">3. Rififi (1955, Dassin)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">4. The Killing (1956, Kubrick)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">5. The Night of the Hunter (1955, Laughton)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">6. Nosferatu (1922, Murnau)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">7. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943, Powell/Pressburger)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">8. The Red Shoes (1948, Powell/Pressburger)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">9. Sansho the Bailiff (1954, Mizoguchi)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">10. The Searchers (1956, Ford)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Happy to put in three votes for Powell/Pressburger. And happy that three of mine made the final cut.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Okay... this was just an exercise to get words sputtering back out. As always, it's an honor and a lot of fun to participate in the Muriel voting. I look forward to seeing the final results. I have LORD OF THE FLIES, BABETTE'S FEAST, LIFE OF OHARU, MARKETA LAZAROVA, and LIFE IS SWEET pieces that should post (either here or over at GreenCine) over the next week or two. Cheers.</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* The ones I haven't seen: L'AVVENTURA, CHILDREN OF PARADISE, CITY LIGHTS, DUCK AMUCK, FREAKS, THE GENERAL, HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR, I WAS BORN BUT..., IKIRU, LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD, THE MAN WITH THE MOVIE CAMERA, MONSIEUR VERDOUX, SHERLOCK JR., SINGIN' IN THE RAIN, THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE, LES VAMPIRES, WINDOW WATER BABY MOVING, and (the one I'd not heard of) MENILMONTANT.</span></i></div>
ptatlerivhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07570950256657235397noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3322943607822029478.post-67871884108203525242013-06-28T19:00:00.003-07:002013-07-11T04:27:05.299-07:00SHOAH Part 3 - "Bureaucrats became inventors."<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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By the end of 1940, if you were a Jew living in Warsaw, you were forced to relocate to the well-guarded ghetto in the center of the city. You were among 400,000 fellow Jews -- some 30% of the population of Warsaw, occupying less than 3% of its space.<br />
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The next few years saw exponential degeneration of your quality of life. Even if you entered the ghetto rich, your funds were soon depleted as the Nazis extorted your rent and living expenses out of you at inflated prices. Within months of entering the ghetto, sickness and death became an ever-present, daily reality. Children born in the ghetto would know no other world. Corpses were stacked in the streets (you weren't allowed to bury your dead unless you could pay the Nazi rates) and typhus and other filth-born illnesses ripped their way through the community. If these didn't kill you, starvation would. Your money could be spent on rent or food but not both. Many Jews opted for the first, preferring to die indoors from starvation rather than roaming the icy streets.<br />
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By 1942, about half the people you knew had died agonizing deaths. If you'd survived this long, you'd lived to see your fellow Jews degenerate into desperate beggars -- willing to sell anything for a cup of water or a crust of bread. Uprisings had failed, supplies had been cut off... the Nazis were waiting for you to follow your friends and family into the grave.<br />
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However, in the mid-summer of 1942, it was announced that you were to be "deported" or "resettled": stuffed -- with a few thousand others -- into cattle cars on a train bound for "the East." The heat was wretched and the ride interminable. The trains were too packed to sit. No water or food was provided. About one in ten of your travel companions died on the way. The money that the Nazis had extorted from you over the past few years had paid for your (one-way) ticket.<br />
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In the middle of the night, your train stopped in the tiny, heretofore unknown backwater village of Treblinka. You were yanked from the train car, beaten and urged forward by machine gun-wielding guards. Dazed by the trip and lack of sleep and sustenance, you blinked at the glaring spot lights, seeing only silhouettes of SS officers, barbed wire twisted at the top of stockade fence, machine gun nests in towers, and -- barely visible, a bit in the background -- a giant smoking monolith, barely casting a red glow.<br />
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The beatings and curses moved you forward. One of the SS commanders calmly shouted above the screams and groans that everything would be fine, you were there to work (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbeit_macht_frei">"labor makes you free"</a>). While this happened, your wife and children were yanked away from you, through the mass of bruised and bleeding people. You had no chance to tell them goodbye or kiss the tops of their heads or offer reassurances. You never saw them again.<br />
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You were ushered down stairs, through a tunnel, and ordered -- with hundreds of others like you -- to strip off your clothes. Above you were signs reading: "Clean is good." "Lice can kill." "Wash yourself." Your strangled brain maybe held on to these and the words of the commander -- piecing them together in a flimsy, rational patchwork that said <i>this will be okay. I'll be cleaned and then I'll work and this will be okay; I will go on.</i><br />
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You were pushed out of the undressing area and up a tunnel made of sharp, wiry tree branches and barbed wire. So many of you in a small space (about thirteen feet wide), all of you being pressed into the sides of the tunnel, your naked flesh being torn further.<br />
<br />
You wait in the tunnel -- for what? For the showers, you're told. After standing and sweating (or shivering -- if you were here in winter, you waited for your "shower" in temperatures ranging from fifteen degrees Fahrenheit to negative four), crammed up against your bleeding companions for another eternity, you were shoved into a small room. The dimly lit room smelled of human waste -- shit and vomit -- and another, hard to place sweet smell that hung over everything else. The guards told you to wait.<br />
<br />
The doors were locked. The lights went off. Terror struck. "The alarming nature of darkness," as one Nazi memo put it, "drives the load toward the doors." You are part of this "load". You start pushing in the pitch dark, your companions push you down, climb on top of you, trample you. The sweet smell is intense now, tickling then burning your nostrils and then your lungs. You scream but less and less oxygen means the sound fades.<br />
<br />
It takes about ten minutes. You cease. You don't go on. You're unloaded by other Jews in an adjoining room. They work unceasingly for days, removing bodies like yours from the gas chamber and shoving them into the oven. If they don't, they will be shot and thrown in the oven themselves (or just thrown in the oven alive). Within about three or four hours of your arrival at Treblinka, you are reduced to ashes.<br />
<br />
Why did this happen to you? Because you were Jewish. Where the Pharaohs,
the Babylonians, the caliphs, the Czars, etc. had failed, the Nazis had
(nearly) succeeded. <br />
<br />
This was the Shoah (inasmuch as I'm able to approximate it). <br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAReKv1_4WYwnWVmTaP1dIfzJTkad93oQTTFjf2U4R4MH2cOr5cT9w7bsrfZ441kW309aGV1E9Dt-Wrr3r5pNCuKlQLEa_Br2P6yJmkD2MP0Vt_wZoFhihXPAAIutTRu7PRz43_dIfy4R6/s1470/813tP7Yh2TL._SL1470_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="466" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAReKv1_4WYwnWVmTaP1dIfzJTkad93oQTTFjf2U4R4MH2cOr5cT9w7bsrfZ441kW309aGV1E9Dt-Wrr3r5pNCuKlQLEa_Br2P6yJmkD2MP0Vt_wZoFhihXPAAIutTRu7PRz43_dIfy4R6/s640/813tP7Yh2TL._SL1470_.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
In the end, SHOAH's death fugue sears some version of the above experience on your soul. Lanzmann keeps going over the same details -- getting them from the survivors AND the SS who worked in the camps -- to create what he calls a <i>gestalt</i> of the Shoah.<br />
<br />
I was struck by the mathematics of it all. Nazi memos urging greater efficiency: reduction of size in the gas chamber so there's less room for "the merchandise" to move around, figuring out which speed to drive the gas vans so that "the load" was "no longer moving" when it reached its destination. As historian Raul Hilberg says in one of fascinating interviews in the film (I could have just listened to Hilberg for nine hours; he's a highlight), it was important to the Nazis to "do the things" but "do not describe them." All of the bland, clinical interoffice memos describing numbers and train routes, then, barely hint at their sinister purpose. "This one paper," Hilberg says, holding up a innocent-looking train schedule, "equals ten thousand dead Jews."<br />
<br />
One thing I found noticeably lacking was any discussion of faith in light of this. God is barely mentioned, as an agent of solace or object of contempt (also conspicuously absent is much mention of Hitler; his name barely comes up in all nine hours). There is a scene at synagogue in Corfu with an impressive and imposing group of Jewish men (among the 5% still alive) enacting some sort of sung rite. But that's about it. The Jewish religious response to the Shoah is one of the many subjects I'll be looking into following this (I've already heard the "Christian" one; a quasi-Zionist, almost bizzarro anti-Semitic philosophy based on extremely flawed theology that wrongly suggests the book of Revelation is discussing the Holocaust and not <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Jerusalem_%2870%29">this</a>).<br />
<br />
I'll be digesting SHOAH for years to come. Right now, it's still a bit suffocating. Watching it is a supernatural experience and one that I can't recommend enough (with all the obvious caveats; it's a severe commitment). There are about 2000 words of notes left that I haven't even touched but I'm a bit tapped out on this one. See it and remember.<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
ptatlerivhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07570950256657235397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3322943607822029478.post-68088388611926968802013-06-26T14:18:00.000-07:002013-06-26T14:19:40.851-07:00SHOAH Part 2 - "A production line of death"<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b>"One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic."</b><br />
- Joseph Stalin<br />
<br />
Six hours in and SHOAH is starting to congeal into several main thoughts/ideas.<br />
<br />
The biggest revelation for me during this round occurred at the film's four-hour mark. Lanzmann casually chats with residents of Grabow, Poland -- the village closest to the Chelmno extermination camp (400,000 dead, two survivors). Thirty-odd years after the Shoah, there's no real love lost between this particular group of Poles and the Jews. Lanzmann lightly cajoles the still-active strain of antisemitism out of the villagers. Of course none of them wanted to see them die or be gassed or anything, BUT...<br />
<br />
The Jewish women were much more beautiful than the Polish women. Why? Because they didn't have to work. They were rich. "Because the capital was in their hand."<br />
<br />
The Jews were dishonest. "They should have gone to Israel on their own."<br />
<br />
One townsperson recounts a "rabbi's story" about how the death of the Jews in the Shoah "expiated the blood of Christ" and that the whole thing was "God's will."<br />
<br />
After hours of hearing about men, women, and children reduced to crumbling, flattened, ragdoll-like corpses -- whether in the cattle cars, the gas chambers, the death pits, etc. -- we start hinting at the "why" just a little bit. And the "why" is still there. We've seen the effect, now for the cause.<br />
<br />
Lanzmann does what he said he would not and flat out asks the villagers, "Why the Jews?" After a pause, one of them blurts out: "Because they were the richest."<br />
<br />
Fascinating. I'd never heard it quite broken down in terms of class envy before. Not sure why that never occurred to me. Any study of Hitler quickly reveals that he was chock-full of craven covetousness, brimming with a juvenile, one-dimensional envy of anyone he thought had something that he deserved. This particular psychoses trickled into his fiery rhetoric and, well, tens of millions of dead later, etc.<br />
<br />
And its when this particular revelation hit that my thesis materialized, my main takeaway (so far) from SHOAH:<br />
<br />
There is NO REASON that this won't happen again. Not necessarily to the Jews, though that's always a possibility. Every anger-fueled conspiracy theory message board/political argument is just a click or two away from blaming the Rothschilds for the world's woes and it's not even a full click from there to the jewry.<br />
<br />
But it doesn't even have to be the Jews next time. There is nothing in history to tell us mankind is trending toward a less destructive, less avaricious way of living.<br />
<br />
Lanzmann recognizes, therefore, the moral imperative of making SHOAH. During an interview, a barber (who was forced to cut women and children's hair minutes before they were reduced to ashes) breaks down and refuses to finish recounting an anecdote. He won't go on. He can't.<br />
<br />
But Lanzmann gently urges him on: "We have to do it. You know it."<br />
<br />
"You want History," one of the former SS guards asks Lanzmann. "I'm giving you History." The Nazis knew their history. The Final Solution piggybacked on planned exterminations like the Armenian genocide and the Russian pogroms. They knew that the deep vein of thousands of years of antisemitism -- institutionalized by governing bodies both secular and religious -- could continue to be tapped and exploited.<br />
<br />
Now it's time for the rest of us to get caught up on our history.<br />
<br />
Tomorrow, I'll wrap this up... <br />
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ptatlerivhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07570950256657235397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3322943607822029478.post-72195841676686654322013-06-25T14:35:00.000-07:002013-06-26T13:25:00.186-07:00SHOAH Part 1 - An Everlasting Memorial<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2G8EWLHVhv5-ECwx9T8IYyM6O52LHyz-A-w1CnRdD9tnvvBmJrxRZuXHfAYNYJo-I3S7DO8MQguJROr4_j3czBjoLd0ZW_IL8Ol9ewQaqjQ29V2mvvVfjYoYuu7ThsbNdB0Yr-U7DDNoF/s1600/71FHHTtwQBL._SL1470_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="466" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2G8EWLHVhv5-ECwx9T8IYyM6O52LHyz-A-w1CnRdD9tnvvBmJrxRZuXHfAYNYJo-I3S7DO8MQguJROr4_j3czBjoLd0ZW_IL8Ol9ewQaqjQ29V2mvvVfjYoYuu7ThsbNdB0Yr-U7DDNoF/s640/71FHHTtwQBL._SL1470_.jpg" width="640" /></a></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The image above is probably the most famous from Claude
Lanzmann’s 1985 SHOAH. Having never seen the film (until recently), the image has been my
brain’s shorthand for it; mention SHOAH and the impish little Eastern European
man leaning out of the train with the simple sign for “Treblinka” behind him
pops up in my head.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">He’s one of the many survivors interviewed for SHOAH, but
not a survivor of the arm-tattooed variety, as I'd assumed. His name is Henrik Gawkowski. He was responsible for driving the trains packed with thousands of "deported" Jews back and forth between the tiny Polish village of Małkinia Górna and the Treblinka extermination camp. It was a short trip -- about six miles -- and Gawkowski made it countless times during his tenure as a train operator. Nearly one million Jews met their death at Treblinka, so the trains -- for that matter, all of the machinery of the Final Solution -- had to work overtime. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Today marks <a href="http://www.criterion.com/films/27968-shoah">the Criterion Collection's release of the Blu-ray</a> of Lanzmann's nine-hour documentary. I've been looking forward to finally catching up to it but I'm not sure why exactly. If I'm honest, part of it amounts to cinephile bragging rights -- "I sat through SHOAH" is not a claim many can make. That's a pretty lousy reason to do anything, let alone subject yourself to 550 minutes of human suffering. But, again, if I search my heart, I admit that's one of my reasons.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Whatever the reasons, I've been extremely excited about receiving my copy and, now that it's here... well...</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">SHOAH is a physiological experience. As of this writing, I'm halfway through it and the <i>weight</i> of the thing is hard to get out from under. I've been watching it in stages (it's divided into four roughly two-and-a-half-hour parts), and even during the daylight hours when I'm not watching SHOAH, it's not too far from me. The film changes your DNA, your perception of the world. I don't even mean in the obvious sense -- how miniscule your travails suddenly seem compared to those of the Nazi's victims -- I mean in how you sense the world. The fact is <i>that</i> happened somewhere on the planet. It was perpetrated by people. And it wasn't that long ago.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I remember the day after September 11th feeling claustrophobic in a wide open field, like the sky was pressing down on me because, at any moment, it could in fact fall. There's a bit of that feeling that comes with watching SHOAH. The event is a warp on history and to get this close to it is to feel it resonate across the decades.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I don't guess that this is exactly selling the SHOAH experience but I can't recommend it highly enough. There's something almost sacramental about it. If you want to gaze into the abyss of human nature, really understand what people are capable of, it's vital. But not to be entered lightly.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Since the film is so singular and the experience of watching it is too massive to nicely encapsulate, I'm going to spend the next few days serializing my thoughts. These will be a bit random and perhaps not add up to a coherent essay. But it's the only way I know how to approach the film. (Note: The Criterion set comes augmented with about 3.5 hours of further works by Lanzmann but I don't think I'll end up getting to them for this piece.)</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Anyway...</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>* * *</b></span></span> </div>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">First, there's that name. "Shoah" is Hebrew for "calamity' or "destruction." Lanzmann (and many other historians of the event) prefer it over "holocaust," a word that has its roots in a term meaning "sacrifice for a greater good." Anti-semites
often twist this bit of history to blame the victims, citing the word
“holocaust” and – through
their own syphilitic logic – saying that the Jews fed themselves to the ovens
as part of some sort of hideous, satanic/pagan rite.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The Shoah is such an obscenity, it’s hard to write a word or post a
picture on the subject without feeling like you’re spreading obscenity. I can't imagine being asked to give a "star rating" or sit here and talk about technique or lighting or mise-en-scene. As J. Hoberman said in his write-up for Film Comment, "SHOAH <i>is.</i>"</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">That said, one of the things that people might find infuriating about Lanzmann's approach is his desire to reveal the film exactly in the way that he experienced its making. If someone speaks a language foreign to Lanzmann -- Polish or Czech, for example -- we hear the person speak first (without subtitles), then the translator (with subtitles), then Lanzmann's follow-up question (with subtitles), the translator's communication with the subject (without subtitles), the subject's answer (without subtitles), and then the translation (with subtitles). It makes for a long haul -- doubling or tripling the time of these particular interviews. HOWEVER: it also creates a reflective rhythm. The emotional punch of each interview is allowed to hang on just a little bit longer.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Lanzmann's interview subjects cut through the entire swath of people effected by the Shoah: not just the death camp survivors but the people who worked as cogs in the machine and, most interesting of all, the villagers who knew what was going on in their backyard but were too afraid (or, more to Lanzmann's point, too caught up in their own lives) to say or do anything about it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglR2aKMV14hrwhzRbBqIJndWYUn44XlE0lu_6JrmJXzB6xntr6Qo0EatxF-s5GF8uJbQnFcaZfvJbMbMHRL4Z3qjnzNFr9e8AUziA8G3jgld6nlSxjfdI479ClTZw7BvX2SKWLysUshLd2/s1600/icarus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="422" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglR2aKMV14hrwhzRbBqIJndWYUn44XlE0lu_6JrmJXzB6xntr6Qo0EatxF-s5GF8uJbQnFcaZfvJbMbMHRL4Z3qjnzNFr9e8AUziA8G3jgld6nlSxjfdI479ClTZw7BvX2SKWLysUshLd2/s640/icarus.jpg" width="640" /></a></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Throughout these interviews, I keep thinking of the poem by <a href="http://english.emory.edu/classes/paintings&poems/auden.html">Auden about Icarus’s fall</a> (about human suffering occurring "While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully
along") and the Brueghel painting that inspired it (which, oddly, shares the golden/green look of the film).“It was just as peaceful when they burned Jews here,” an interviewee remarks during a scene filmed on a particularly crystalline spring day. “Everyone went on with his work.”</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Come to find out, the
Auden poem <a href="http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/refugee-blues/">"Refugee Blues"</a> is a staple of Holocaust Studies syllabi – not because it’s
about the Shoah, per se, but because it captures the atmosphere of bigotry
and prejudice that existed just before the onset of Hitler’s juggernaut.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">And then this made me think of Elie Weisel's quote:<i> </i>"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of beauty is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference."</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The key to inhumanity is
to make yourself indifferent to the Other and then you can be taught to do
almost anything.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">That word: "inhumanity." SHOAH makes me wonder if inhumanity isn't perhaps humanity’s natural state.
Conquistadors, human sacrifice in Mezo-America, Nanking, gulags, the Khans, the
Roman conquests… human history is oddly enough a pageant of so-called “inhumanity”. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Yet many of the interviewees scratch their head and marvel at the fact that the Shoah happened. Some thirty years after the fact (Lanzmann made the film over the course of a decade, starting in the mid-'70s), the Shoah seems like a bad dream for the villagers. “No one can recreate what happened here,” says one of the men.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">SHOAH is a story without apparent heroism. There's no Oskar Schindler here. Everyone -- victims and perpetrators alike -- rides the tide of the times. I'm also not seeing any anger in the interview subjects here, only sadness.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">About twenty minutes in, one of the first time someone says “Jew," I
started to wonder “why” – why the Jews? According to an essay by Lanzmann that accompanies the film, one of his only rules going into the making of SHOAH was to avoid asking "why." There could be no possible reason.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Inappropriate as it might be to say this, SHOAH is a beautiful film. Lanzmann's camera drifts like a ghost through silent, primal places that were formally “full of screams,
gun shots, and dogs barking.” By concentrating mainly on the faces of men telling stories, he’s
giving them their humanity back.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">We're used to narratives that come from inside the <i>concentration </i>camps: Anne Frank, SCHINDLER'S LIST, Weisel's <i>Night</i>, etc. What I had never considered were the <i>extermination</i> camps: the camps no one lived to see. When you were offloaded from the trains and into one of these, it was a matter of minutes before your body was being processed - burned, gassed, ground into bone powder. This was the very brief narrative of most of the six million. We hear about the long suffering and hardship of the concentration camps all the time without realizing the sheer magnitude of the killing floors of the extermination camps. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Until tomorrow...</span></span></div>
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ptatlerivhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07570950256657235397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3322943607822029478.post-15437079611173465982013-06-14T19:06:00.000-07:002013-10-18T11:40:23.716-07:00“I hate movies.”<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Being part the fourth of my wrasslin’ with the work of Jean-Luc
Godard. The first two parts – 2 OR 3 THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER and BREATHLESS –
went undocumented. The last bout between Godard and I – when I watched 1967’s <a href="http://profoundlyrewarding.blogspot.com/2012/11/what-rotten-film-all-we-meet-are-crazy.html">WEEKEND</a>
– occurred last fall. (I’ve also seen both ALPHAVILLE and CONTEMPT but both
were so long ago that my opinion on these has been misplaced.) I know everyone
finds my struggles with a highly regarded auteur fascinating, so I’m here to
bravely confront BAND OF OUTSIDERS.</div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
I was told that BAND OF OUTSIDERS would be The One, the
Godard film that would instantly connect with me as it travelled the same
neural pathways as my beloved film noir. Popping in <a href="http://www.criterion.com/films/291-band-of-outsiders">Criterion’s recent Bluray</a> upgrade of the film, I went full Pollyanna, expecting this to be my JLG Rosetta
Stone.<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjf6f6EkBpVsomH29C0dTeaDO6OirjqHZNg5kgsbdyBiFyRZmvYor7JDDTN1jvOBoiVNtwKCJXvSJYwYcWn7WCVYQ6DzrnG0rFzv9Pr8SLqLTqadsi4JFPzKA9cCy-2eM9LIQPQxm1-Olnq/s1600/BandeAPart(still02).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="488" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjf6f6EkBpVsomH29C0dTeaDO6OirjqHZNg5kgsbdyBiFyRZmvYor7JDDTN1jvOBoiVNtwKCJXvSJYwYcWn7WCVYQ6DzrnG0rFzv9Pr8SLqLTqadsi4JFPzKA9cCy-2eM9LIQPQxm1-Olnq/s640/BandeAPart(still02).jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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My first pang of trepidation came near the end of the
(otherwise brilliant) <a href="http://youtu.be/AOuTIHGgWJQ">opening credits</a>, when Godard billed himself as “Jean-Luc
‘Cinema’ Godard”. That “cinema-is-my-middle-name” bit made me audibly groan.
It’s this kind of affected wankery that I find so bloody grating in Godard’s
films.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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If I switched on the film just after the credits, it would
initially be hard to distinguish from a gritty French crime film in the vein of
Jules Dassin. The film opens with two young toughs (Sami Frey and Claude
Brasseur) driving toward some undeclared nefarious purpose while engaging in
idle young tough chatter. This is a classic set-up, one that ripples down from
BAND OF OUTSIDERS all the way to PULP FICTION (Quentin Tarantino named his
production company “A BAND APART” after the Godard film’s French title; indeed,
it would seem QT mined Godard - and BAND OF OUTSIDERS in particular - pretty
heavily). </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuqtk6oFURZRYDZW1e3ujc3vuvXd0hx3k4PFj3asWpH5wrrbCrsqWb-tkoJz_MtFOLtNcR0KV0MpDZnEGZLjLVveztL0zWHJa7o8wW-zbGsD9WXQVjp-xLov47uPQJyDumXu2oJjZXIbLr/s1600/940__band_of_outsiders_blu-ray_subs_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="476" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuqtk6oFURZRYDZW1e3ujc3vuvXd0hx3k4PFj3asWpH5wrrbCrsqWb-tkoJz_MtFOLtNcR0KV0MpDZnEGZLjLVveztL0zWHJa7o8wW-zbGsD9WXQVjp-xLov47uPQJyDumXu2oJjZXIbLr/s640/940__band_of_outsiders_blu-ray_subs_.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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The two men arrive at their destination: a spot just across
the river from a small mansion, the home of Odile (Anna Karina), a classmate of
theirs and the object of their psychosexual desires. They’re casing the house
in the hopes of robbing it with Odile’s help. </div>
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All of this – the first few minutes of BAND OF OUTSIDERS –
is shockingly conventional for a Godard film. There’s still the sense of oily,
amoral youth endemic to his films but it’s not until the poetic, confessional
narration kicks in – voiced by Godard himself – that the film’s pedigree begins
to show. At the fifteen-minute mark, I scrawled “most accessible JLG, not as
visually audacious” in my notes and that assessment held for me to the end.</div>
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The rest of the film follows a rather typical (for film noir
and Godard) trajectory: the doomed trio bungle their way through their
relationships and toward a bitter anticlimax. Godard takes his own odd, ugly thing and tenuously hangs it in a familiar frame.
The characters – even the lovely Karina – are narcissistic sociopaths, which is
kind of the point I guess (in an odd move, late in the film, Godard introduces
Arthur’s family, themselves a horde of crooks; this is the closest I’ve seen to
a psychological backstory in any of the Godard films I’ve taken in). </div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEim4mzeEvI4j9eD24dww9F62V8A6gU7otpc-OCBrFEblYm0SKMpKlPokyWBuNjedrAVzSvxyAXI8NUS0kKyS7fwsUepEVhu0usvfkusDvwdetNfcliSdkXgEwSM64aSWsOeJ2hYhKYGy0CN/s1600/940__band_of_outsiders_blu-ray_x05_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="476" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEim4mzeEvI4j9eD24dww9F62V8A6gU7otpc-OCBrFEblYm0SKMpKlPokyWBuNjedrAVzSvxyAXI8NUS0kKyS7fwsUepEVhu0usvfkusDvwdetNfcliSdkXgEwSM64aSWsOeJ2hYhKYGy0CN/s640/940__band_of_outsiders_blu-ray_x05_.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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As a lust triangle, an amoral character study, and a crime film, BAND OF OUTSIDERS accomplishes its aims but never rises to the heights of the similar JULES ET JIM or even Godard's own BREATHLESS. In fact, for all of my kvetching about Godard's flights of intellectual fancy and self-gratification, I think I prefer his more unstructured work to his attempts at linear storytelling. BAND might not have the highly aggravating self-satisfaction of WEEKEND, but it also doesn't have anything close to the sublime aside about the life of a rock or the performance of Mozart's piano sonata #18 (not to mention <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oviB7td-CaU">the coffee bit</a> in 2 OR 3 THINGS, which remains my favorite Godard thusfar). I'll take the rambling essays for their moments of transcendence over the dull cynicism of BREATHLESS and BAND.</div>
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That said, BAND has two such playful asides, both of them quite famous. There's the storming of the Louvre (referenced in Bernardo Bertolucci's execrable THE DREAMERS) and the part where the trio make an impressive go at <a href="http://youtu.be/KGlyB842ajY">dancing the Madison</a>. Both of them are fine, I guess. Fun-ish. Good additions to Oscar clip reels thrown together to remind people that there are foreign films.</div>
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My biggest problem with Godard has always been his approach
to storytelling, which I find very dull. He’s not really concerned with much
beyond rubbing his own cleverness in our face. With each film, whatever his pet
obsessions happen to be at the time become the footnotes that he uses to create
his “story” (itself just one big hyperlinked meta-footnote). As with the
Criterion edition of WEEKEND, BAND OF OUTSIDERS is accompanied by a very
instructive extra that parses all the academic and cultural winks and nods that
Godard saw fit to use as a leavening agent (Rimbaud and French surrealists were
primary inspirations).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For this reason,
I feel like Godard films are perfectly complimented by the DVD format when it’s
used to its fullest. His work opens up quite a bit more when decanted from an
illuminated, expository container. </div>
</div>
ptatlerivhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07570950256657235397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3322943607822029478.post-60067316508109582522013-04-05T18:09:00.001-07:002013-04-08T16:42:01.786-07:00The Q Word<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>"Travis seems confused. He is so much part of his own world, he fails to comprehend another's world."</b></span></span></div>
- Paul Schrader, TAXI DRIVER<br />
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Do you remember that scene in TAXI DRIVER where Travis Bickle finally lands a date with the woman of his sick fantasies and decides that taking her to a Swedish porno film in Times Square is just the ticket to win her over? When Betsy balks, all Travis can do is scratch his head in befuddlement. "These are the kind that couples go to," he protests. "Honest. I've seen them."<br />
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That was an unsettling little scene, right? Well what if Travis Bickle were painted by Schrader/Scorsese/DeNiro as just a loveable, misunderstood galoot? And what if Betsy just rolled her eyes, shrugged her shoulders, and said "here we go again!" or something and accompanied Bickle into the theater?<br />
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I suspect I'm being a little hyperbolic, but that's the first analogy that sprung to mind when trying to characterize Jeff Daniels' decidedly unhealthy relationship with a high schooler played by Emma Stone in the very odd 2009 film PAPER MAN (directed by the husband and wife team of Kieran and Michele Mulroney). I'll come back to the Bickle thing in a minute.</div>
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PAPER MAN is, of course, my assignment for this year's <a href="http://opalfilms.blogspot.com/2013/04/white-elephant-2013-this-years-victims.html">White Elephant Blogathon</a> and I can't imagine any other way it would have come over my proverbial transom. In fact, I can't imagine how anyone (other than, perhaps, an Emma Stone completist) would end up watching this thing. It's a nonplussing film with a nonplussing premise: Jeff Daniels plays a writer holing up on Long Island during the winter to get over writers block while his wife (Lisa Kudrow) works in the city during the week, visiting him on weekends. While alone, Daniels strikes up a bizarre relationship with Stone's troubled youth.</div>
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Also: both Daniels and Stone have imaginary friends. Daniels clings to Captain Excellent (a bleach-blonde Ryan Reynolds) and Stone is clung to by a moody, lovesick Kieran Culkin. Both imaginary friends represent unfinished business in their host's lives. As the poster for PAPER MAN makes abundantly clear/painfully obvious, "it's grow-up time:"</div>
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I have to admit, PAPER MAN is not necessarily a bad movie. For that reason, it's a tough film to write up for this exercise. It's not <a href="http://profoundlyrewarding.blogspot.com/2010/06/dispassion.html">Anthony Perkins wielding a sharpened dildo</a> in a sex-ological thriller. It's not <a href="http://profoundlyrewarding.blogspot.com/2011/04/road-to-hell.html">Hitler</a>. It's not a <a href="http://profoundlyrewarding.blogspot.com/2012/04/how-do-you-explain-midgets-or-sock.html">pretentious straight-to-video sequel</a>. I daresay that PAPER MAN even successfully accomplishes telling its story on its own terms.</div>
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But its the film's terms I don't quite understand. PAPER MAN is best described as "post-JUNO." It traffics in a deadly quirkiness that continually scuttles it for me. Quirk is a very difficult ingredient to use. I almost think that one has to not be conscious of using it. Do people like the Coens, Wes Anderson, Jarmusch, Lynch... do these people who are often labelled "quirky" (and I pretty much disagree with that classification in all cases)... do they sit down and say, "okay... let's make something really quirky, really random. Something where the audience will be, all, 'that's so <i>random</i>, man.'" Do they? No. </div>
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In PAPER MAN, Jeff Daniels is a man-child whose quirks are megaphoned from the outset:</div>
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His first impulse upon arriving to the cabin is to put a conch shell to his ear (code for his childlike wonder, I suppose)!</div>
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He's afraid of an ugly couch in the house, so he moves the entire living room outside!</div>
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He prefers writing on an old fashioned typewriter and gets all weirded out by the newfangled laptop his wife graciously offers him!</div>
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He can't make headway in his novel because he can't settle on the main character's name! </div>
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He gets around town on the only form of transportation he can find, a child's bike!</div>
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(The script even makes a point to have his wife offer him a rental car and have him decline it so as to explain the need for this. The filmmakers then try to milk as much humor as they can from the above image. The returns are diminishing.)</div>
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The filmmakers slather Daniels with character quirks that add up to what real life people would call near-crippling mental illness. </div>
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Then there is the relationship with Stone. When he first sees her, she's playing with matches and avoiding her scary brute of a boyfriend. Daniels stalks her down an alley way and she gets the better of him in a confrontation that somehow ends in her providing him with hand soap.</div>
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Not knowing what else to say, Daniels hires her to "babysit" for him. He doesn't have any children (again with the quirky! who hires a babysitter when they don't have kids?!) so she essentially sits in his empty home while he passes time on the beach talking to Reynolds' superhero character. When he comes home, he discovers she's made him soup. Because, she tells us, soup is easy to make. You take all the crap you have lying around that you're just going to throw out <b>and turn it into something useful. </b>And there's your very clearly telegraphed moral of the story.</div>
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But the film doesn't end with them simply having soup. The next time Stone visits, Daniels makes a drunken pass at her. To her credit, she rebuffs him. But eventually, they patch things up and he agrees to throw a keg party for her <b>and all her underage high school friends.</b></div>
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This is painted as quirky fun, but it gets a little, uh, morally complex. Long story short: it culminates in Daniels and Stone passed out drunk together on a couch. No sexual relationship is suggested but it's still odd. A platonic romance a la Bickle. Daniels obsession coupled with Stone's neediness (eventually a dark secret about her past comes up, taking the film into a discordantly somber direction) results in a very unhealthy relationship that the film's generic indie pop soundtrack can't conceal. He never quite Humbert Humberts it up with Stone but it's still a bit icky.</div>
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Of course, Kudrow walks in on the two of them and PAPER MAN comes to a head. The filmmakers make an effort to paint Kudrow as a square, shrewish killjoy. She's disgusted by Daniels lack of productivity, his clinging to his imaginiary friend, his tossing the furniture in the yard, his throwing a drunken party for fifteen-year-olds, his inappropriate relationship with an underage girl... boy, what a bitch!</div>
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Ultimately, I just couldn't connect with this thing. It works on its own terms but PAPER MAN is so much a part of its own world it can't comprehend another's.</div>
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(Thanks again to <a href="http://opalfilms.blogspot.com/">Paul Clark</a> for organizing this and for being patient. I wish the end result was a little more worth the wait. And apologies to Kent Beeson for the <a href="http://letterboxd.com/kza/film/eyes-of-the-mothman/">145-minute Mothman documentary</a>.)</div>
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ptatlerivhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07570950256657235397noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3322943607822029478.post-58159428650270578462013-03-30T11:09:00.000-07:002013-04-01T07:19:25.580-07:00I Have A Way<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNleyaHtDgbjzsBGsF6A0jbHFCO24RjWgMLd15xD6OuqrWRarnmvsIw2tGB7WeFRXALnRaIsz_p4o8-XW2_k9ufowxyXprTUNZU5c_09iOYFljrgfjOkP-r1Um0WCycnzoOjX47U1DDBX1/s1600/900__a_man_escaped_blu-ray_07_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="475" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNleyaHtDgbjzsBGsF6A0jbHFCO24RjWgMLd15xD6OuqrWRarnmvsIw2tGB7WeFRXALnRaIsz_p4o8-XW2_k9ufowxyXprTUNZU5c_09iOYFljrgfjOkP-r1Um0WCycnzoOjX47U1DDBX1/s640/900__a_man_escaped_blu-ray_07_.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>"Bresson is a rarity among filmmakers: he
apparently knows exactly what he does and why he does it... any study of
Bresson must take into account his astute self-criticism."</b></div>
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- Paul Schrader, <i>Transcendental Style In Film</i></div>
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<b>"A
MAN ESCAPED would seem of all Bresson's films the most plot-oriented;
it is about a prison break. But the title dispenses with any possibility
of suspense - UN CONDAMNE A MORT S'EST ECHAPPE (a man condemned to
death has escaped)."</b></div>
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- Paul Schrader, <i>ibid.</i><b> </b></div>
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<b>“‘Fear Eats the Soul’... there’s more truth in that title than
most whole films.” </b></div>
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- Jennie (Naomie Harris) in TRISTRAM SHANDY: A COCK AND BULL STORY</div>
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<b>* * * </b></div>
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Last year, I participated in <a href="http://skuriels.blogspot.com/">The Skuriels</a>, a joint effort between the <a href="http://skandies.org/">Skandies</a> and <a href="http://www.murielawards.org/">Muriels</a> to come up with the twenty greatest films ever made (released in conjunction with <a href="http://explore.bfi.org.uk/sightandsoundpolls/2012">Sight and Sound</a>'s decennial list). When considering <a href="http://skuriels.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-skuriels-individual-ballots-s-v.html">my own ballot</a>, my "short list" of around 150 films was weighed heavily toward certain directors: Scorsese, Lynch, Hitchcock, Welles, Tourneur, Dreyer, etc. etc. Of all the repeat filmmakers, Robert Bresson probably had the most impressive track record; six of the eight films of his I'd seen were contenders for my top ten.</div>
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This dull little accounting exercise has a point: I don't think there's a more consistent (and consistently great) filmmaker than Robert Bresson. MOUCHETTE, AU HASARD BALTHAZAR, DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST and especially later (even more idiosyncratic) efforts like L'ARGENT and LANCELOT DU LAC represent a boldly stubborn way of making films that few filmmakers can approach. Only Kubrick springs to mind as someone with an equally individualistic oeuvre. However, where Kubrick's vision was decidedly humanistic, Bresson -- as indicated in title of Schrader's book -- aimed for a spiritual transcendence in his work.</div>
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Long story short: I picked A MAN ESCAPED (which makes its <a href="http://www.criterion.com/films/27848-a-man-escaped">Bluray debut</a> this week, courtesy of the Criterion Collection) as my representative Bresson film because I think it is both Bresson's most accessible film and the most unadulteratedly "Bressonian" of his works.<sup>1</sup></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDJr0DtkcWXNHu0jsc_biVyrVz8b1kUpW3cqqhN3ZQOBKCo56W6PRMky3uLOaxVUJPqho5Yny5LScQ6ORb2L8fFUODiSfyQa8l7cZ6EKh0jgBpFMDAF9RwqVrw1bm7n1VTakP8mdiUNHCM/s1600/900__a_man_escaped_blu-ray_subs_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="476" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDJr0DtkcWXNHu0jsc_biVyrVz8b1kUpW3cqqhN3ZQOBKCo56W6PRMky3uLOaxVUJPqho5Yny5LScQ6ORb2L8fFUODiSfyQa8l7cZ6EKh0jgBpFMDAF9RwqVrw1bm7n1VTakP8mdiUNHCM/s640/900__a_man_escaped_blu-ray_subs_.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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A MAN ESCAPED tells the story of Lieutenant Fontaine's 1943 escape from a Nazi prison in Lyon, France. The film is based on the memoirs of Andre Devigny and in an opening title card Bresson claims to present his story "without adornment." Further research reveals that -- while he might not have adorned it, per se -- Bresson <i>did</i> strip Devigny's story of any potentially complicated details. Devigny was arrested for murdering a police officer and was tortured by the infamous Klaus Barbie while in prison. He was also recaptured <strike>immediately</strike><sup>2</sup> after escape.</div>
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Bresson eschews these sort of details in order to make A MAN ESCAPED take place in an almost ahistorical, ageographical context. What Bresson is concerned with is not so much the Screenwriting 101 business of plot points and rising action and conflict resolution. Bresson views Fontaine's struggle as a spiritual one. </div>
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It can't be a coincidence that Criterion has decided to release A MAN ESCAPED during Easter week. As alluded to above, the film's full title is UN CONDAMNE A MORT S'EST ECHAPPE OU LE VENT SOUFFLE OU IL VEUT ("a man condemned to
death has escaped or the wind blows where it listeth"). </div>
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<span lang="fr">That casually tacked on "or" title is a big key to unlocking the film: "the wind blows where it listeth" comes from Jesus's conversation with Nicodemus in the Gospel of John (the same conversation that includes the ubiquitous John 3:16). The particular phrase Bresson chooses is one of Jesus's more confounding phrases, describing the activity of the spirit (both the soul of man and the capital-S Holy Spirit). The full context: <i>"</i></span><span lang="fr"><i>The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof,
but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every
one that is born of the Spirit."</i>What does all this have to do with escaping from a Nazi prison? Bresson chooses the very simple premise of his title to represent the Christian's struggle for redemption. Is it faith or works that save man's soul? In this case, is it Fontaine's hope of salvation or his actions toward escape that save him? The film stands at the crux (pun intended) of this (I would argue false) dichotomy: there can be no salvation of the soul/escape from prison without a healthy mixture of faith and works.</span></div>
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<span lang="fr"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="fr">The film is so heavily underpinned with Christian theology that I'm afraid analyzing it too much will make it sound like a painfully didactic Sunday School lesson. We're not just talking some vague religious sentiment or spirituality, A MAN ESCAPED is a theological treatise disguised as an exciting man-vs.-Nazi adventure. Bresson's subtext is also his text, Christ is everywhere. He's in the figure of Fontaine -- not too long into the film, we see him with a bleeding head, being spat on by guards, and revealing a back striped with blood from the abuses he's suffered:</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlJNC7vj7xnVBIoEnjfrHMLHQ4mv4CkgGjVQdJ1UW-0pgjsJd3AL9qTrs7J-8QAx8-I2QD-6M65rTF77aDh-pOenrOu25BJn2WBXH7MXJ5MJGiqWFxRbWVXhh0XSdv0Nn1xlVadTx7vksI/s1600/cap061.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlJNC7vj7xnVBIoEnjfrHMLHQ4mv4CkgGjVQdJ1UW-0pgjsJd3AL9qTrs7J-8QAx8-I2QD-6M65rTF77aDh-pOenrOu25BJn2WBXH7MXJ5MJGiqWFxRbWVXhh0XSdv0Nn1xlVadTx7vksI/s640/cap061.bmp" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span lang="fr"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="fr">And then there's another prisoner who's executed after he tries to escape. Before his death, he reveals a fundamental flaw in Fontaine's plan which Fontaine then corrects. "He had to blow it so you could make it," observes one of Fontaine's fellow prisoners in an obvious paraphrase of Christ's ministry.</span></div>
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<span lang="fr"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="fr">How Bresson buries all of this within his riveting narrative is the secret to his genius. It would take much more research and time on my part to really delve any further into it. More importantly, </span>A MAN ESCAPED succeeds in terms
of a suspenseful prison escape film. Even if the title spoils the outcome, the
tension holds from the first frame.</div>
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The opening sequence is essentially a microcosm of the film -- Fontaine attempts escape while being transported to prison. It's a masterful few minutes -- a suspense set piece worthy of Hitchcock.</div>
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Without establishing who Fontaine is -- only that he's in hot water and hungry for escape -- the film instantly orients us into his head (where we'll be for the next hundred minutes or so). And it's all through a very simple, very rhythmic montage.</div>
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We see Fontaine:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMe21BK3BPzlh3bqP6XvrDybqFOjyrEXKcGojGgwYP7gdP83FuLRcPPRJtTGMjfWXIFKas06xH_8HvuE6nOY1b0VJi4e6rRU3e_gWOaWlEqCJZJHIrymIhoa28gBCsjaCTsey-B9P3r2v8/s1600/cap051.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMe21BK3BPzlh3bqP6XvrDybqFOjyrEXKcGojGgwYP7gdP83FuLRcPPRJtTGMjfWXIFKas06xH_8HvuE6nOY1b0VJi4e6rRU3e_gWOaWlEqCJZJHIrymIhoa28gBCsjaCTsey-B9P3r2v8/s640/cap051.bmp" width="640" /></a></div>
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His POV:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNHOg_mxSuKPMP7AootSPZu5VRktuzD9eZhui5k9eiGuCPc06PJjLVcwRid32JQ73uq0RYdEYJZFeb5_Dc84d3g-nMwFHGTzTlSWNPFboHiCLY2oKvf6LNM4aVg9fuqetB1vGDeH05_16T/s1600/cap041.bmp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNHOg_mxSuKPMP7AootSPZu5VRktuzD9eZhui5k9eiGuCPc06PJjLVcwRid32JQ73uq0RYdEYJZFeb5_Dc84d3g-nMwFHGTzTlSWNPFboHiCLY2oKvf6LNM4aVg9fuqetB1vGDeH05_16T/s640/cap041.bmp" width="640" /></a></div>
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His hand inching toward the door handle:</div>
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And the gear shifting of the oblivious Nazi driver: <br />
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There are maybe two dozen cuts, building toward Fontaine dashing out of the car, only to be picked up by two Gestapo. The whole sequence is wordless, scoreless... all we hear are the VERY selective natural sounds Bresson wants us to: the car engine, the gear shift, the clang of a trolley. All of it adds up to an extremely exciting open, worthy of any hook contrived by spec script scribes. And the stomach-coiling tone of the scene doesn't relent for the rest of the film; A MAN ESCAPED is -- above all -- a masterful thriller.<br />
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The Criterion Blu looks amazing (for the record, I had to take the opening images above and the image of Fontaine's back from the old New Yorker DVD, which is vastly inferior) but it's the sound mix that is truly astounding. They've eliminated all of the scratches and mud, rendering Bresson's fastidious mix crisper than it's probably been in 50+ years.</div>
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A MAN ESCAPED is that rare film that works as an intense entertainment AND a thought piece that goes as deep as you want to delve. I'd even go so far as to say it should place higher than its current #5 position on my Skuriels list. I hope to revisit it again soon and explore the three hours of extra material included on the disc.</div>
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<sup>1</sup>MAJOR CAVEAT TO THIS STATEMENT: I've seen eight of Bresson's <strike>twelve</strike> thirteen features. So I'm admittedly a fraud when I say this. HOWEVER, I'd like to take this time to announce my intention to watch -- and subsequently post about -- Bresson's entire filmography this year. Ideally, I'll start rolling out a post a week about his films, beginning sometime in May. Other than his lost first film -- 1934's<i> </i>PUBLIC AFFAIRS<i> -- </i>the only snag in the plan right now is finding a watchable copy of FOUR NIGHTS OF A DREAMER. If anyone reading this wants to weigh in on where this can be found, please let me know. I've managed to score copies of all the others.<br />
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<sup>2</sup> See comment section below -- I inferred an "immediate" where there might not have been one.</div>
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ptatlerivhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07570950256657235397noreply@blogger.com3