The Orphanage (Bayona) at the IFC Center. There are a lot of similarities here to
Cache. A well-to-do couple is haunted by mysterious figures related to a dark secret from childhood. The perpetrators here are at least mostly spectral, though. Again, the adult is ultimately held accountable for what really seemed to be an innocent misunderstanding, and again I'm baffled. Everyone, including the new widower seems weirdly pleased with the outcome.
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Val Lewton: Man in the Shadows (Jones) at Walter Reade Theater. During his post-screening Q&A, Jones made the point that most stuff like this you see on television (his project was financed by Turner Classic Movies) is pretty hackneyed, unrevealing stuff, but he (like narrator Martin Scorsese) was interested in making a film rather than just an hour-plus of biographical TV. He seemed to capture the mood of Lewton's films, get into why they were made the way they were made, and focus on his life as it informed what made it onto the screen rather than just lurid detail for detail's sake.
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Streetwise (Bell) at Anthology Film Archives. The shots of the railyards reminded me of Richard Linklater's
You Can't Learn How to Plow by Reading Books when he arrives in what feels obviously like a pre-tech boom version of the city, one which I of course never witnessed. While I'm not generally a development-hating antiquarian, it comforts me to see a working-class, industrial side to the city, maybe because I grew up next to Rust Belt capitals like Cleveland, Akron, and Canton. An obvious counterpart to
On the Bowery, at least for me, I think a focus on stuff like this is why I feel much more at home at Anthology than, say, the immaculate Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center.
It's perhaps most interesting to see the various family situations of the kids on the street, one shifting his weight uncomfortably during a visit by his seemingly functional mother and grandmother, another lamenting her alcoholic mother's choice of a second husband, a third visiting his dad in jail.
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Southland Tales(Kelly) at the Village East Cinema. On a second viewing,
Southland Tales flows much better. I was able to pay more attention to the score, the various hidden jokes (eg the name of the arcade is "Fire," one of the hundreds of news headlines that comes up, dateline Kabul, is "Wannabe Terrorists Get Schooled in Destruction," there are posters featuring extremely Donnie Darko-esque rabbits in the neo-Marxist headquarters, etc. ad nauseam) though I failed to catch the Latin phrase on the side of the police car. It was also easier to fit relationships together. And although I appreciated it the first time through, this time I reacted more like I did when I read
Slaughterhouse Five, like Kelly has possibly profound things to say or suggest about a deeply troubled world, but can only do so via seemingly ridiculous methods and genre.
I also wondered about the intended connection of the audience to the aura of the pop stars in the film. It seems to me that most of them got their starts or big moments in the late 90s. The Rock as a wrestler, Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy, Seann William Scott in
American Pie, Cheri Oteri on Saturday Night Life (Amy Poehler a bit later, though), Will Sasso on Boy Meets World, and Moby (who did the score) released
Play in that era. This group seems targeted pretty directly to the college kids (now graduated) who went crazy over
Donnie Darko. It makes me wonder how I, a member of the target demographic, might experience the film differently from the critics currently championing it, all at least somewhat over the age of forty, such as Manohla Dargis, Amy Taubin, and J. Hoberman.
Steven Shaviro has posted a long and involved, extremely positive
response at his blog. All have mentioned
Inland Empire as one of the only movies working the same territory (Shaviro also mentions David Fincher, but I'm not sure I'd fully admit him to the club), so I'm pretty definitely going to have to get that from Netflix and commit to watching it two or three times. Everyone also makes a big point about Lynch's sound design, which is what I really loved about
Eraserhead.
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Bus 174 (Padilha) at Anthology Film Archives. This felt impossibly slow. There's so little actual activity on the bus, yet the footage is shown over and over and over, analyzed again and again. I just don't understand the logic for this being any longer than the minimum to be considered a feature. Even with all the B-roll footage of prisons, favelas, and prior incidents, I felt like the impact could have been stronger with a more compact run-through of the hostage situation. Maybe it's just because I didn't need convinced of the main point, that the favela kids have been screwed by society and we probably shouldn't be surprised if they attempt to return the favor.
Labels: Film, Lists
