38th Five Films, 2007
NOTE: I'm working up a separate blog for this stuff so I/you/we can use tags (by director, country, decade, rating, etc.) for individual entries. Hopefully I'll get all new movies from this year entered as a kind of backlog before posting there regularly in 2008.
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No Country for Old Men (Joel & Ethan Coen) at Clearview Chelsea. Given the overwhelming positive critical consensus here (consider me at least as enthusiastic about it as anyone), I'm waiting for the backlash, though I doubt Jonathan Rosenbaum's rant is one that many people will latch onto. I'm probably closer to sharing his views on violence/killers onscreen than 95% of the audience, and even I think he's quite a bit off.
Sometimes when I'm watching a movie like this, I fantasize about my ideal contemporary Western. It's written and directed by Richard Linklater, starring Matthew McConaughey, Ethan Hawke, Ben & Casey Affleck, Billy Bob Thornton, Woody Harrelson, Tommy Lee Jones & Kris Kristofferson. Perhaps Philip Seymour Hoffman? Maybe Robert Rodriguez stops by to direct the more physical sequences. It could be like a Thin Red Line type of thing, except all dialogue would be voiced by a character placed within the setting of the film rather than voiceover. It'd be nice to do a kind of heavily symbolic thing about the state of the US or civilization, but it's also terribly important that it not move too fast or fiercely, so that might be tough. Jim James and/or M. Ward could do the score. It would be in color. I'm torn between the traditional post-Civil War period and something more like The Last Picture Show, particularly as it would impact the presence of something like a jukebox, or country/western songs on the soundtrack.
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The TV Set (Jake Kasdan) at home on DVD. These felt like scenes from a pretty good movie, but where they left a lot of the good parts out of the final cut. It's just not quite cutting enough or brilliant enough or caring enough. Also, it's been a truism since the dawn of time that network television caters to the lowest common denominator, so how are we supposed to feel anything but annoyed at a guy who rants and raves about not being able to make important, personal art through that medium? It's like an artisanal cheesemaker who becomes disillusioned when his new job at the Kraft factory turns out to be manager of the American singles line.
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Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli) at Museum of the Moving Image. I was constantly reminded of On Moonlight Bay, the film that Jonathan Rosenbaum writes about in various literary modes in Moving Places (his film-related memoir), which I think is set up as a secondhand remake of this picture. This felt kind of secondhand as well, particularly since the high point was the morbid four-year-old sister who didn't really sing.
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Southland Tales (Richard Kelly) at Angelika Film Center. I was hoping this would open more widely so I wouldn't have to see it at the dank little hole that is the Angelika. Their cafe upstairs is nice enough but I've yet to find a decent theater in the three movies I've seen there. But since I didn't have anything to do on Sunday and I'd been waiting a year and a half to see this, I went ahead and crammed in to peer up at the tiny screen.
I feel like this most closely resembles a particularly deranged MAD TV sketch, two hours long, played totally straight with really high production values. Perhaps this feels most effective as an attempt to rediscover media-centric irony & satire with actual social commentary from a culture that's been mired in self-reference and knowing winks for so long that it doesn't even remember what the point was in the first place.
There are actually some similarities here to the execrable Domino, written by Richard Kelly and directed by Tony Scott. The climactic, terrorism-flavored explosion high above the glittering greed-based metropolis is probably the most noticeable. Also the abduction of celebrities (Ian Ziering and Brian Austin Green from 90210 go along for the ride in Domino) and frat boys as dei ex machina. [Max can feel free to comment on that pluralized latinization if he needs to.]
The artifice of the whole thing is foregrounded, particularly with the use of a lot of traditionally lowbrow stars in key roles. Even the titles are so garishly comix-futuristic that it's at once hard to take them seriously but also hard to dismiss them as a total joke, because they're kind of cool in a nerdy way. Too professional to be kitschy (is that even an option anymore with the democratization of professionalized tools of media production?), not flowery or "real" enough to be camp, it occupies a very strange (counter-)cultural space.
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The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Julian Schnabel) at the IFC Center. This was the second member screening I've been to here, and they announced two more coming up next month, including There Will Be Blood, which apparently has an ambitious soundtrack by Jonny Greenwood*. I was confused when this won the director prize at Cannes. What could be interesting about a movie based on a guy who can only move his left eyelid?
I suppose there's really no middleground here. Shooting from an outside perspective would have been really dull and shooting from inside Bauby's head, as is the case most of the time, feels adventurous (and claustrophobic). The movie is essentially plotless, though that's not to say that nothing happens. There are memories, dreams, hospital visits, etc. Despite all the certifiably crushingly sad (though rarely sentimental) moments, it was actually that old hipster chestnut "Pale Blue Eyes," playing over a scene where Bauby's attendant reads to him from The Count of Monte Cristo while out sailing, that did me in. Weird.
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*From Todd McCarthy's review in Variety:
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No Country for Old Men (Joel & Ethan Coen) at Clearview Chelsea. Given the overwhelming positive critical consensus here (consider me at least as enthusiastic about it as anyone), I'm waiting for the backlash, though I doubt Jonathan Rosenbaum's rant is one that many people will latch onto. I'm probably closer to sharing his views on violence/killers onscreen than 95% of the audience, and even I think he's quite a bit off.
Sometimes when I'm watching a movie like this, I fantasize about my ideal contemporary Western. It's written and directed by Richard Linklater, starring Matthew McConaughey, Ethan Hawke, Ben & Casey Affleck, Billy Bob Thornton, Woody Harrelson, Tommy Lee Jones & Kris Kristofferson. Perhaps Philip Seymour Hoffman? Maybe Robert Rodriguez stops by to direct the more physical sequences. It could be like a Thin Red Line type of thing, except all dialogue would be voiced by a character placed within the setting of the film rather than voiceover. It'd be nice to do a kind of heavily symbolic thing about the state of the US or civilization, but it's also terribly important that it not move too fast or fiercely, so that might be tough. Jim James and/or M. Ward could do the score. It would be in color. I'm torn between the traditional post-Civil War period and something more like The Last Picture Show, particularly as it would impact the presence of something like a jukebox, or country/western songs on the soundtrack.
+ + +
+
The TV Set (Jake Kasdan) at home on DVD. These felt like scenes from a pretty good movie, but where they left a lot of the good parts out of the final cut. It's just not quite cutting enough or brilliant enough or caring enough. Also, it's been a truism since the dawn of time that network television caters to the lowest common denominator, so how are we supposed to feel anything but annoyed at a guy who rants and raves about not being able to make important, personal art through that medium? It's like an artisanal cheesemaker who becomes disillusioned when his new job at the Kraft factory turns out to be manager of the American singles line.
+
+
Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli) at Museum of the Moving Image. I was constantly reminded of On Moonlight Bay, the film that Jonathan Rosenbaum writes about in various literary modes in Moving Places (his film-related memoir), which I think is set up as a secondhand remake of this picture. This felt kind of secondhand as well, particularly since the high point was the morbid four-year-old sister who didn't really sing.
+
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Southland Tales (Richard Kelly) at Angelika Film Center. I was hoping this would open more widely so I wouldn't have to see it at the dank little hole that is the Angelika. Their cafe upstairs is nice enough but I've yet to find a decent theater in the three movies I've seen there. But since I didn't have anything to do on Sunday and I'd been waiting a year and a half to see this, I went ahead and crammed in to peer up at the tiny screen.
I feel like this most closely resembles a particularly deranged MAD TV sketch, two hours long, played totally straight with really high production values. Perhaps this feels most effective as an attempt to rediscover media-centric irony & satire with actual social commentary from a culture that's been mired in self-reference and knowing winks for so long that it doesn't even remember what the point was in the first place.
There are actually some similarities here to the execrable Domino, written by Richard Kelly and directed by Tony Scott. The climactic, terrorism-flavored explosion high above the glittering greed-based metropolis is probably the most noticeable. Also the abduction of celebrities (Ian Ziering and Brian Austin Green from 90210 go along for the ride in Domino) and frat boys as dei ex machina. [Max can feel free to comment on that pluralized latinization if he needs to.]
The artifice of the whole thing is foregrounded, particularly with the use of a lot of traditionally lowbrow stars in key roles. Even the titles are so garishly comix-futuristic that it's at once hard to take them seriously but also hard to dismiss them as a total joke, because they're kind of cool in a nerdy way. Too professional to be kitschy (is that even an option anymore with the democratization of professionalized tools of media production?), not flowery or "real" enough to be camp, it occupies a very strange (counter-)cultural space.
+ + +
+ + +
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Julian Schnabel) at the IFC Center. This was the second member screening I've been to here, and they announced two more coming up next month, including There Will Be Blood, which apparently has an ambitious soundtrack by Jonny Greenwood*. I was confused when this won the director prize at Cannes. What could be interesting about a movie based on a guy who can only move his left eyelid?
I suppose there's really no middleground here. Shooting from an outside perspective would have been really dull and shooting from inside Bauby's head, as is the case most of the time, feels adventurous (and claustrophobic). The movie is essentially plotless, though that's not to say that nothing happens. There are memories, dreams, hospital visits, etc. Despite all the certifiably crushingly sad (though rarely sentimental) moments, it was actually that old hipster chestnut "Pale Blue Eyes," playing over a scene where Bauby's attendant reads to him from The Count of Monte Cristo while out sailing, that did me in. Weird.
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*From Todd McCarthy's review in Variety:
On top of these elements is the sweeping, surging, constantly surprising score by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood, which could be described as avant-garde symphonic. It develops over long, sustained periods, not always in precise emotional alignment with what's taking place onscreen, but generally deepening and making more mysterious the film's moods and meanings. It's a daring, adventurous, exploratory piece of work, one that on its own signals the picture's seriousness.
Posted on Tuesday, November 27, 2007
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