tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31448334905736856742024-03-13T15:58:10.475-04:00Perpetual NostalghiaUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger43125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3144833490573685674.post-16925627364315250202015-02-06T19:54:00.000-05:002015-02-06T19:55:49.651-05:00Links & Viewings - 2/6/15<span style="font-size: small;"><i>by</i> <a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Allen%20Irwin" target="_blank">Allen Irwin</a></span><br />
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In a heartening announcement, <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/behind-screen/kodak-inks-deals-studios-extend-770300" target="_blank">Kodak has struck a deal</a> with the major studios to continue the production and use of 35mm film.<br />
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Kino Lorber is Kickstarting a DVD Set called “<a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kinolorber/pioneers-of-african-american-cinema" target="_blank">Pioneers of African American Cinema</a>"<br />
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Jillian Mayer (<a href="https://vimeo.com/88035957" target="_blank"><i>#PostModem</i></a>, <a href="https://vimeo.com/64605295" target="_blank"><i>The Adventures of Christopher Bosh in the Multiverse</i></a>) has a new (very) short film.<br />
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The film <i>Public Hearing</i> (2012) is <a href="http://public.automaticmoving.com/" target="_blank">screening for free online</a> until March 21. You can read more about it <a href="http://filmmakermagazine.com/84869-lost-in-translation-public-hearing/#.VM-P-caIhk8" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
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The latest entry in Scout Tafoya & Matt Zoller Seitz’s <a href="http://www.rogerebert.com/mzs/the-unloved-part-fourteen-joe-vs-the-volano" target="_blank">RogerEbert.com series “The Unloved”</a> focuses on Joe vs. the Volcano.<br />
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Reverse Shot has posted another entry in their <a href="http://reverseshot.org/features/1998/escape_from_new_york_moscow" target="_blank">“Escape from New York” series</a> about cinephilia in other countries, this time focusing on Moscow / Russia.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3144833490573685674.post-2006019230866037882015-01-30T19:30:00.000-05:002015-01-30T19:37:34.596-05:00Links & Viewings - 1/30/15<span style="font-size: small;"><i>by</i> <a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Allen%20Irwin" target="_blank">Allen Irwin</a></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Video Essayist <a href="http://everyframeapainting.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">Tony Zhou</a> has a new short video about staging & visual geometry in Kurosawa’s <i>The Bad Sleep Well</i>.<br /><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jGc-K7giqKM?rel=0&controls=0&showinfo=0" width="640"></iframe></span><br />
<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Grantland had two great pieces this week: a <a href="http://grantland.com/features/david-simon-show-me-a-hero-hbo-the-wire-treme/" target="_blank">profile of The Wire creator David Simon</a> and his new HBO miniseries, and <a href="http://grantland.com/features/selma-oscars-academy-awards-historical-accuracy-controversy/" target="_blank">Mark Harris on the think-piece firestorm</a> caused by <i>Selma</i>.<br /><br />I tend to avoid paying too much attention to coverage of the Sundance Film Festival since I won’t be able to see any of the films for anywhere from a few months to over a year. However, the <a href="http://thedissolve.com/features/postcards-from-sundance/" target="_blank">series of dispatches over at The Dissolve</a> give a good sense of some titles to keep an eye on without making it too apparent that most of the films don’t even have trailers you can watch yet.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Adam Curtis’ new film Bitter Lake has been uploaded to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM8W87UcO2U" target="_blank">YouTube</a> though it may not be available for long.<br /><br />Matías Piñeiro (<i>Viola, The Princess of France</i>) is the guest on the latest episode of <a href="http://www.thecinephiliacs.net/" target="_blank">The Cinephiliacs </a>podcast, and his first film, <i>The Stolen Man (El hombre robado)</i>, is available to watch on YouTube.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/UZyFDff4eyk?rel=0&controls=0&showinfo=0" width="640"></iframe> </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3144833490573685674.post-91739670068218804902015-01-23T18:57:00.000-05:002015-01-30T19:32:15.555-05:00Links & Viewings - 1/23/15<span style="font-size: small;"><i>by</i> <a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Allen%20Irwin" target="_blank">Allen Irwin</a></span><br />
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Jia Zhangke has made a lyrical short film for Greenpeace called “Smog Journeys” focusing on the effects of air pollution in northeast China.<br />
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<a href="https://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/the-hollywood-blacklist-revisited/" target="_blank">Guernica has an interview</a> with filmmaker and scholar Thom Andersen (<i>Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer</i> & <i>Los Angeles Plays Itself</i>) covering his documentary <i>Red Hollywood</i> which was just recently added to Netflix streaming.<br />
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Fandor’s Keyframe has begun their annual dissection of the primary Oscar races with the <a href="https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/oscars-2015-who-should-win-video-evidence" target="_blank">Video Evidence</a> series. They’ve covered Supporting Actor & Supporting Actress so far, but keep checking back in the coming weeks for the rest of the big categories.<br />
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Doc Alliance Films is currently running a <a href="http://dafilms.com/event/197-Kossakovsky/" target="_blank">free online retrospective</a> of Russian documentary director Victor Kossakovsky until February 1.<br />
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Vdrome is currently screening Jonas Mekas’ 2011 film <a href="http://www.vdrome.org/index.html#videos" target="_blank"><i>Sleepless Nights Stories</i></a> until January 28. His film <i>Out-takes from the Life of a Happy Man</i> was a favorite of mine last year.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iXFVt7PtO_U/VMLfqZIvmbI/AAAAAAAAA-I/YpXKK4H5Q7c/s1600/BlindBeast_Masumura.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iXFVt7PtO_U/VMLfqZIvmbI/AAAAAAAAA-I/YpXKK4H5Q7c/s1600/BlindBeast_Masumura.jpg" height="171" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Blind Beast</i> (1969) - Yes, those are noses.</td></tr>
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Lastly, the ever eclectic Jonathan Rosenbaum has a <a href="http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2015/01/masumuras-madness/" target="_blank">primer on Japanese filmmaker Yasuzo Masumura</a>. <i>Blind Beast</i> is the only Masumura film that I've seen: a disturbing <i>katabasis</i> into the strange bond formed between a blind sculptor and a model he kidnaps. It left a strong enough impression to mark Masumura as a prime candidate for further research. As it turns out, <i>Blind Beast</i> is available on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7l39rM5gGo" target="_blank">YouTube</a> along with a number of his films.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3144833490573685674.post-53208811511906578652015-01-16T12:33:00.000-05:002015-01-30T19:32:41.372-05:00Links & Viewings - 1/16/15<span style="font-size: small;"><i>by</i> <a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Allen%20Irwin" target="_blank">Allen Irwin</a></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> </span><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Allen%20Irwin" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></a></span></i><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Here’s a quick roundup of some of my favorite links from the first couple weeks of 2015. The idea for the new year is to post things like this more regularly but with much more self selection and curation so I don't go insane trying to keep track of everything.</i></span><br />
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<b>Tired of Awards Season Bloat? Here are some alternatives.</b><br />
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When even something like the Independent Spirit Awards seem to be colonized by movies that are not, by current standards, independent (<a href="http://www.spiritawards.com/spiritawardcategory/best-feature/">4 of the ISA nominees for Best Picture also have an Oscar Nomination for same</a>, and the line for eligibility is that a film have a budget under $20 million) it’s time to look elsewhere. It should go without saying that I don’t have anything against larger budgeted films, but the field of view on what’s happening in contemporary cinema shouldn’t be so narrow. Thankfully we have a few able guides.<br />
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<a href="http://www.hammertonail.com/editorial/the-2014-hammer-to-nail-awards/" target="_blank">Hammer to Nail</a> has been making their own lists for a few years now, and their model for selection is much more in tune with the realities of independent film in the age of non-theatrical release and micro-budgets (their focus is on American films made for under $1 million). They also have good taste.<br />
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Indie Documentarian and Editor Robert Greene has posted a personalized list of <a href="http://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-sound-magazine/best-documentaries-2014" target="_blank">“Cinematic Non-Fiction” at the BFI</a>. His picks are wonderfully personal and make you want to search out things you missed, as well as keep an eye out for ones still one the festival circuit.<br />
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On the internet video front, critic and video essayist Kevin B. Lee has curated a list of the <a href="https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/the-best-video-essays-of-2014" target="_blank">best video essays of the year over at Keyframe</a>, including his own breakdown of contemporary video essay vernacular “What Makes a Video Essay Great?” (embedded below). Please do go check out the other videos on his list.<br />
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<b>Assorted Nuggets</b><br />
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DP/30 goes long with an interview with Selma and A Most Violent Year cinematographer Bradford Young. It is worth your time.<br />
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<a href="http://filmmakermagazine.com/88971-39-movies-released-in-2014-shot-on-35mm/" target="_blank">Vadim Rizov</a> has gathered a small feast of tidbits from cinematographers talking about why they chose to shoot on film in 2014.<br />
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I’ve only begun to dig into <a href="https://twitter.com/tayarisha" target="_blank">Tayarisha Poe</a>’s <a href="http://www.selahandthespades.com/" target="_blank">Selah and the Spades</a> project which I was alerted to by raves from <a href="https://twitter.com/terencenance" target="_blank">Terence Nance</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/filmmakermag" target="_blank">Scott Macaulay</a> on Twitter, but what I’ve seen thus far is very promising and worth checking out for a sample of non-traditional formatting for cinematic storytelling.<b> </b><br />
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<b>An Only Slightly Film-Related Tangent</b><br />
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A short history of the paperback book phenomenon over at the <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/05/pulps-big-moment">New Yorker</a>.<b> </b><br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UkueVWWIGao/VLlKv1FbuOI/AAAAAAAAA90/wE7D2lSWjLY/s1600/1984BookCover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UkueVWWIGao/VLlKv1FbuOI/AAAAAAAAA90/wE7D2lSWjLY/s1600/1984BookCover.jpg" height="320" width="187" /></a></div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3144833490573685674.post-73859587640978241382014-03-22T12:48:00.000-04:002014-03-22T12:55:41.221-04:00Links & Viewings - Feb/March<i>by</i> <a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Allen%20Irwin">Allen Irwin</a>
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In addition to picking up the publishing pace of content here in the site, I’m also adding a new feature: an occasional round-up of articles, online videos, films, and recommendations. The content here will reflect what I’m reading/viewing/discovering each month both new and old, though it will be neither exhaustive nor too selective, as either would require too much effort.
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Let’s kick things off with some...
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<b>SHORTS</b>
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Michel Gondry has a new music video out for Metronomy’s “Love Letters”.
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Celia Rowlson-Hall has been making waves lately for her short films and choreography. <i>The Audition</i> is super short, but packs a punch. Her first feature, a silent dance film, was just successfully <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/celiarh/ma-a-modern-day-silent-film">kickstarted</a> and will star Amy Seimetz. There are even more shorts on her <a href="http://www.celiarowlsonhall.com/short-films">website</a>.
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Another place to look for new shorts is <a href="http://borschtcorp.com/">Borscht Corp.</a> - a collective of filmmakers based in Miami, FL. Perhaps not coincidentally, both Rowlson-Hall and Seimetz have produced shorts in collaboration with them. Check out <i>#Postmodem</i> from Jillian Mayer and Lucas Leyva.
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If you missed this YouTube viral sensation, I won’t spoil it for you. Just know that in all seriousness it makes a case for best “documentary” of the year so far...
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Anahita Ghazvinizadeh has received a number of glowing mentions at film festivals with her new short film <i>Needle</i>, but you can take watch her earlier short <i>When the Kid was a Kid</i> above.
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Experimental filmmaker <a href="http://www.jodiemack.com/">Jodie Mack</a> has been in a lot of festival coverage lately for her films <a href="http://vimeo.com/60982297"><i>Dusty Stacks of Mom</i></a> and <i>Let Your Light Shine</i>. You can see a number of her earlier short films and videos over on her <a href="http://vimeo.com/jodiemack">Vimeo Channel</a>, though.
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Thanks to the AWESOME Recommended Viewing blog over at <a href="http://www.theseventhart.org/main/">The Seventh Art</a> (who also have TONS of interviews with directors as their main content) I was introduced to the short films of Japanese experimental filmmaker Takashi Ito, including the haunting <i>Thunder</i>. You can find more of his films online <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjI7izmyc84">fairly</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5Jt986GYoI">easily</a>.
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For the Venice International Film Festival’s 70th anniversary they had 70 filmmakers create short films. Above is Athina Rachel Tsangari’s “24 Frames Per Century”. Evocative of anything familiar? Check out the rest of the shorts <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2J3c5AtY5K_dINEXUacWHDW4C-NnloIs">here</a>.
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<b>FEATURES</b>
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Tsai Ming Liang’s new film <a href="http://www.theseventhart.org/main/tsai-ming-liangs-latest-film-journey-to-the-west-now-available-to-watch-online/"><i>Journey To the West</i></a> is available free online for a few more days. It features the always wonderful Denis Lavant, whose past collaboration with director Jonathan Glazer for <a href="http://vimeo.com/21190241">Flake chocolate bars</a> recently made its way around the interwebs.
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Avant-Garde titan Michael Snow recently came to Washington, D.C. for some screenings. While you can view some of his major 16mm films on YouTube, they really should be viewed on film in a theater, and I won't directly link them here. One thing I did find, though, was one of his more recent forays into digital filmmaking, <i>*Corpus Collosum</i> broken up into sections <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mxz86aUbfyE">here</a>. For a wealth of Michael Snow articles, essays, and even a lengthy video lecture by the man himself, check out <a href="http://filmstudiesforfree.blogspot.de/2009/10/michael-snow-video-and-links.html#uds-search-results">this post</a> over at the indispensable cinematic resource <a href="http://filmstudiesforfree.blogspot.de/">Film Studies for Free</a>.
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Another recent D.C. screening I attended was the 1946 <i>film noir</i> <a href="https://archive.org/details/TheChase_"><i>The Chase</i></a>. Besides a delectably devilish supporting turn from Peter Lorre, this brutal little film offers a sly twist on your typical <i>noir</i> scenario by pulling the rug out from under the narrative half way through, and ultimately leaves you with a “was it real?” style quandary that would later be utilized in films like <i>Total Recall</i>. After watching the film be sure to read Nick Pinkerton’s <a href="http://blog.sundancenow.com/weekly-columns/bombast-111-2">sharp essay</a> on it.
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<i>Retiree terrible</i> Steven Soderbergh is up to his now usual bag of tricks, releasing a <a href="http://extension765.com/sdr/15-psychos">mash up of the Alfred Hitchcock and Gus Van Sant versions of <i>Psycho</i></a> on his website. He also has been doing some writing (on <a href="http://extension765.com/sdr/13-the-forty-year-rule"><i>Chinatown</i></a>, among other things) and <a href="http://nofilmschool.com/2014/03/steven-soderbergh-king-of-the-hill-criterion-collection-interview/?utm_campaign=twitter&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitter">speaking about past filming experiences</a>.
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If you’ve got an hour to spare, I’ve got an oldie-but-a-goodie for you: Thom Andersen’s must see documentary / essay film on the life and achievements of one Eadweard Muybridge (pronounced Edward My-bridge), whose work you are guaranteed to be familiar with, even if his name seems like something out of a Dr. Seuss book. Not only is it fascinating biography, it probes into the very essence of cinema. <b>Absolutely essential</b>, and it’s only an hour.
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For a recent cinema recommendation, there’s Nandan Rao’s <i>Hawaiian Punch</i> - newly debuting online over at <a href="http://nobudge.com/main/2014/3/4/feature-film-hawaiian-punch">NoBudge.com</a> - Rao’s The Men of Dodge City was a favorite of mine last year.
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Some stray film recommendations NOT readily available on the web:
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- Raoul Walsh’s Pre-Code Romantic Comedy <i>Me and My Gal</i> starring a young Spencer Tracy
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- <i>Battles Without Honor and Humanity</i> - Kinji Fukasaku’s (Battle Royale) opening chapter of a the epic <i>The Yakuza Papers</i> - bloody, brutal, stylish, and nearly impossible to follow, and yet I was enthralled the entire time.
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- <i>Brute Force</i> - Jules Dassin’s prison film is as bleak as they come. This would make for a GREAT double feature with Howard Hawks’ The Criminal Code (which can be found <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsLA9cfamdo">here</a>)
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<b>VIDEO ESSAYS / MISC. VIDEOS</b>
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Another FSFF entry, this time a gathering together of links related to the theme of the <a href="http://filmstudiesforfree.blogspot.de/2014/02/the-flaneur-on-film-on-films-by-richard.html">flâneur and the cinema of Richard Linklater</a>, as well as this video essay by Rob Stone about walking the streets of Berlin, trying to retrace the steps Jesse & Celine took in <i>Before Sunrise</i>.
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Catherine Grant (who runs FSFF) posted this short tone poem to commemorate the recent passing of Shirley Temple Black - “Mechanized Flights: Memories of HEIDI”
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Video Essayist and all around digital chameleon <a href="http://freecinemanow.blogspot.com/">Nelson Carvajal</a> has been hard at work lately putting out a number of video essays on subject ranging from <a href="http://blogs.indiewire.com/pressplay/video-essay-women-in-the-works-of-martin-scorsese">Women in the films of Martin Scorsese</a>, the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUWi5zR1w5Q">films of Darren Aronofsky</a>, and a short documentary about the <a href="http://blogs.indiewire.com/pressplay/video-essay-rough-and-ready-the-return-of-the-microcinema#.UynxccTfbpw.twitter">return of the micro-cinema</a>. Below is his video essay <a href="https://vimeo.com/86251763">“Mise en Scène & the Visual Themes of Wes Anderson”</a>.
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Over at Fandor, Kevin B. Lee presented his <a href="http://www.fandor.com/keyframe/oscar-video-2014-who-really-deserves-to-win">annual series of videos essays</a> arguing which films he believed should win Oscars. Below is one of the best ones.
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Lastly, this short video about the Criterion Collection’s restoration process should act as a delightful little dessert after all these intense narrative & essay selections. I recommend pairing it with <a href="http://thedissolve.com/features/exposition/429-film-preservation-20/">this article</a> from The Dissolve on the state of film preservation.
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<b>ARTICLES & ESSAYS</b>
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The SundanceNOW blog recently (and supposedly only temporarily) closed its doors, bringing to an end two really great weekly columns: Michael Koresky’s archeological/sociological/personal reminiscence examination of cinema <a href="http://blog.sundancenow.com/weekly-columns/here-now-then-gone">Here & Now & Then</a> and Nick Pinkerton’s <a href="http://blog.sundancenow.com/weekly-columns/bombast-130-2">Bombast</a>. Both of them use their last posts to provide indexes of their entire runs, and therefore you should beware of falling down a rabbit hole of great writing if you click either of the above links.
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Pinkerton already has another gig writing at Film Comment’s blog in a new column titled “Futures & Pasts”, with a focus on dusting off older titles for reassessment. He kicks things off with a kind of mission statement of sorts:
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<i><small>“I will try also to save Forgotten Masterpiece hyperbole for deserving occasions, if at all. The fact is that most old movies aren’t Forgotten Masterpieces, but this doesn’t mean that they don’t have pleasures to give, that we can’t learn from their flaws and accomplishments, or that they don’t deserve to be talked about and written about.”</small></i>
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Sounds good to me. So far he’s covered <a href="http://www.filmcomment.com/entry/trans-europ-express-alain-robbe-grillet">Alain Robbe-Grillet</a>, <a href="http://filmcomment.com/entry/darkman-and-the-shadow"><i>Darkman</i> and <i>The Shadow</i></a>, <a href="http://www.filmcomment.com/entry/the-carey-treatment-blake-edwards"><i>The Carey Treatment</i></a>, <a href="http://www.filmcomment.com/entry/futures-pasts-barabbas-richard-fleischer">Richard Fleischer and <i>Barrabas</i></a>, and <a href="http://www.filmcomment.com/entry/the-bowery-and-gangs-of-new-york"><i>The Bowery</i> and <i>Gangs of New York</i></a>.
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At Reverse Shot, they have kicked off a new symposium examining the cross pollination between <a href="http://www.reverseshot.com/34/home_theater">Television and Film</a>, which shouldn’t need any more words from me to get you over there.
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Michael Koresky on the “Painterly” films of Vincente Minelli over at <a href="http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/brushstrokes-20140221">Museum of the Moving Image</a>.
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Kevin B. Lee applies cinemetrics to Oscar nominated films for the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/movies/awardsseason/cinemetrics-extracts-statistical-data-from-movies.html?smid=tw-nytmovies&seid=auto&_r=2">New York Times</a>.
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J. Hoberman on <a href="http://harpers.org/archive/2014/03/here-there-is-no-why/?single=1"><i>12 Years a Slave</i></a> and a recent <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/mar/11/news-from-space-exhibition/">Sci-Fi influenced art exhibit</a> at the New Museum.
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<a href="http://www.fandor.com/keyframe/film-drunk-critics-pick-favorites-at-true-false-2014">Fandor</a> has a dispatch from “Film Drunk” critics at True/False on their favorite films of the festival.
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We may be getting a <a href="http://www.esquire.com/blogs/culture/star-wars-lost-movie-black-angel">new Star Wars related film sooner than we think</a>, and not from somewhere expected. The short <i>Black Angel</i> played in front of The Empire Strikes Back in the UK and Australia and was thought lost to time until it was recently found in a Universal Studios archive.
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It’s been rough for cinephiles losing both Alain Resnais and Chris Marker in the span of less than two years. Here’s a <a href="http://chrismarker.org/2014/03/prix-jean-vigo-1954-alain-resnais-chris-marker/">look back with some footage</a> of both of them receiving an award back in the 1950s for their collaboration <i>Les Statues meurent aussi</i>.
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In other Marker related posts, Kevin B. Lee has a <a href="http://www.fandor.com/keyframe/chris-markers-image-index">short video</a> condensing Marker’s <i>Remembrance of Things to Come</i> into a few short minutes, highlighting how deftly he could organize stills to create both a compelling biography as well as a sharp social critique.
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WHEW. Ok, I take back what I said about that Criterion video being your dessert for wading through this feast of linkage. This is your dessert:
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"The Moon Song" from the film <i>Her</i><br />
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“The Moon Song” appears to be a spiritual stand-out from the other “Best Original Song” Oscar nominees: it’s a little more obscure, and it’s unpolished compared to the radio-ready sheen of the other nominees. But its lack of polish shouldn’t be mistaken for “authenticity,” at least the kind that many enthusiasts of similar, unpolished folk enjoy. Both the vocal and guitar here have a highly affected tentativeness that probably fit the director’s demands here, and the tentativeness in Karen O’s voice sacrifices a solid “hook”-esque melody for the sake of character and syncopation. “The Moon Song” might be toying directly with that issue of manufactured emotional authenticity, given that the film is addressing the boundaries of meaningful passion between a man and an operating system; in which case, the approach of this song to “be raw,” or “be real,” is well-executed, even if it is affected.<sup>1</sup> It’s unfair to judge the merits of the song itself on the reviewer’s own ideas for its intent; these theories are unsubstantiated, projected, and, even worse, this writer hasn’t seen the film for which it was written. But let us assume that the eccentricities of the vocal performance and guitar performance are there for a reason. What do we make of the song then?<br />
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It does seem likely that both the singing and the guitar are being performed under the performer’s skill level; from what I’ve heard, Karen O is generally more assertive in her attack (even in lending monumental flourishes to Flaming Lips’ “Watching the Planets”) and charismatic in the lower end of her range (which goes mostly unused here). This is a stylistic choice on Karen O’s part, but the musicianship on the guitar doesn’t register with the listener as nuanced. It doesn’t seem clear how deliberate the guitar’s underperformed instrumentation is, but it sabotages the nuance in any principle behind Karen O’s singing choices.<br />
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The guitar here is played consistently, with a beginner’s strum and often a beginner’s attack. The recording has some charming squeaks and unexpectedly muted strings on barred chords here and there, which indicates a little bit of poor technique. From a songwriting position, the song plays it safe on beginner chords (a nice ii-V-I in the open-position C major). As a template, the rhythm and the chords here are quite underwhelming, and by the time the F to F minor comes along for the “million miles away,” it is too little, too late. The F minor chord adds a small bit of flavor but in a way that makes its own cleverness as a song seem slight, like the whole piece is a draft or, worse, that this sophomoric attempt at chord cleverness was purposefully executed as if it were an afterthought. The underwhelming nature of the guitar bogs down Karen O’s efforts; it makes her look like she’s weirdly overcompensating by intentionally under-singing. Because of this, the song feels underdeveloped; the chords, strum, and general sparseness are all elementary enough to purposefully give off that vibe. The strumming pattern and chord sequences are choices very familiar to many songwriters that are simply poking around on a guitar until a better idea comes along.<br />
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In the interest of giving the song some credit for how “off” it sounds, perhaps the “calculated authenticity” is intended to parallel the “off-ness” in the film’s core relationship, or be a commentary on how what is authentic or calculated about the film’s central relationship. Regardless, it feels like “The Moon Song” might have benefited, oddly enough, from a little bit more development. Oftentimes the recording feels like a premeditated improvisation, and in this regard it is a success. But does successfully mimicking a rough draft make for a good final draft? In most cases, the answer is no. “The Moon Song” fell short of capturing what could have been a heartfelt and resonant tentativeness; instead it is a blandly maudlin moan. And the worst thing is, it sounds like it fell short on purpose, as if it were part of the plan all along.<br />
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><sup>1</sup> Side note: For those seeking that truth and rawness in music of a similar character, check out Privacy’s record “Without Mercy.” “The Moon Song” reminded me strongly of Privacy, and it is a strong record.</span></i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3144833490573685674.post-78556194202737714482014-03-14T14:31:00.002-04:002014-03-16T10:16:53.492-04:00Number Wan Fan<i>by</i> <a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Adam%20Sweeney" target="_blank">Adam Sweeney</a><br />
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<i>The Conjuring (2013) </i>- dir. James Wan <br />
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It was a Friday. My parents were gone for the night, off to dinner and drinks with friends. My sister was at work and I had the house to myself. I decided to get a jump-start on my homework because there didn’t seem to be a lot to do. I looked around the house, trying to find something to watch.<br />
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My living room was filled with VHS. Several movies of varying genres were on the table next to me. I considered each carefully, but settled on <i>The Haunting</i> with Liam Neeson. I had seen the movie the year before in the theater. I knew what I was getting into. I slipped the tape out of the case and placed it in the VCR.<br />
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I grabbed myself a glass of milk and a sandwich to tide me over until my sister got home with actual food. I laid down on the ground, facing the TV. The movie started and I began doing my math homework.<br />
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Then it happened.<br />
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It was dead silent in the living room. There was a slight breeze outside, but it was barely audible from where I was. Through the silence, I heard an extended creak. I paused the tape, hoping it was the movie. I even held my breath. The sound continued.<br />
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The door towards the back of the living room was ajar, swaying slightly. When I started the movie it had been shut.<br />
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There was no one home besides me.<br />
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It wasn’t the movie.<br />
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Pure, unmitigated panic came over me. My heart began to race, my ears pounding. I slowly reached for the remote, aimed it at the TV and turned it off. I placed the remote on the table in front of me and sat on the couch. Without turning my head, I glanced towards the nearest clock.<br />
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6:47 P.M. My sister wouldn’t be getting home until 10 and my parents much after that. I took a deep breath, hoping the fear would subside and I would be able to finish the movie.<br />
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Just then, the door shut, the latch clicking into place.<br />
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Calmly, I stood and ran out the door before I could even realize what I was doing. I stood on the sidewalk looking at the house, then the sky. It was overcast - no chance of rain, but ominous. My chest heaved with every breath.<br />
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In actuality, these events took no longer than fifteen minutes. It felt like an eternity. The fear extended the anxiety and, seemingly, time itself. This experience is the closest thing I can compare to watching <i>The Conjuring</i>.<br />
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<i>The Conjuring</i>, directed by James Wan of <i>Saw</i> and <i>Insidious</i> fame, is two hours of relentless tension. Most horror movies will build tension for the first half, only to release it towards the conclusion. <i>The Conjuring</i> builds about every ten minutes and never really releases. By the time the end credits roll, we’re still expecting something to pop out, a demon’s voice to be heard or, for the love of God, the face of a doll to appear out of the darkness.<br />
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The plot is fairly standard. A family moves into a house, things get wonky and they enlist the help of paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, portrayed by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga. The Warrens go to the house, things get wonkier and a battle between good and evil ensues. As ridiculous as all this sounds, it’s treated with the utmost of seriousness by everyone involved, especially the actors.<br />
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I need to go off on a tangent for a moment: Patrick Wilson is one of the most solid actors working today. His films are always pretty good, and when they’re not, he’s usually the best part. I think often times directors will throw him in a movie because they know that he’s a team player and will bolster the performances of the rest of the cast.<br />
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It really is strange to consider Wilson’s role in the movie. He is one of the main characters, but still seems to fade into the background. This isn’t a criticism of his skills as an actor, but more of a compliment. Coming from a theater background, Wilson allows the other people to shine. He plays off all the other characters extremely well and his performance seems lived in; he plays Ed as one of the most reasonable, caring people you’d ever meet.<br />
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Anytime there is a skillfully made horror movie, comparisons to <i>The Exorcist</i> are inevitable. I believe even James Wan understands this, and he understands that this is a high standard to live by. Instead of trying to outdo <i>The Exorcist</i>, he takes a different route. <i>The Conjuring</i> isn’t incredibly deep. It’s not going to help negotiate peace in some war-torn country, but it’s a great entertainment.<br />
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<i>The Conjuring</i> is skillful in how it handles it’s scares: it piles situations up on other situations until it’s unbearable, like a snowball effect. It sneaks up on you. The camera lingers on things for so long that your brain overworks itself. At one moment in the film, the camera focuses on dark corner. Because the camera stays on it, you can’t help but think there’s gotta be something there that you’re not seeing. Slowly, you start to fill in the blanks, your own version of a demon in the corner. Mine had horns.<br />
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To me, that’s infinitely scarier than them actually showing something. Had they shown something in the corner with horns, a pitchfork and Cerberus on a leash, we wouldn’t care. I wouldn’t be writing about the movie. As obvious as it may seem that you wouldn’t want to show something like this, you have to remember what age we live in. An age where people are too busy trying to watch other people’s lives to take the focus off their own. The general movie going public would much rather have everything told to them. The fact that Wan has evolved from <i>Saw</i> to this gives me much hope for his career.<br />
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One last thing: the movie is rated “R”. This may not seem like a big surprise to some, but maybe the reasoning behind the “R” is the shocking part. The movie doesn’t have any real overt violence, there’s no sex, and the language sticks to a PG-13 level. The only reason that this movie was given an “R” rating was due to the unbearable tension: the MPAA agreed that this movie was far too intense for a 13 year old.<br />
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I get the feeling that some day in the future, I’ll sit down to watch this. No one else will be in the house and everything will be quiet. The wind will blow slightly against the windows, maybe even a raindrop or two will pelt the glass. I’ll remember that night where I felt completely helpless in high school. I’ll feel scared, alive. And then I’ll likely not sleep for weeks. But, it will be worth it. Every second of it.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3144833490573685674.post-87661135717043201542014-03-04T17:46:00.001-05:002014-03-04T17:47:20.212-05:00Nothing is A-Changin'<i>by</i> <a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Luke%20Burns" target="_blank">Luke Burns</a><br />
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At the end of <i>Inside Llewyn Davis</i>, the film takes a surreal turn, looping in on itself. Events from the beginning of the film are repeated, making it seem as though the titular character is doomed to relive the same series of days over and over again—a <i>Groundhog’s Day</i> scenario, only worse, because Llewyn is unaware of this endless, hopeless, repetition. The fear of failing—artistically, financially, and socially--is what pushes Llewyn through the film. But the end shows us that failure isn’t the worst fate that can befall an artist. The worst thing that can happen to an artist is stagnation.<br />
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We’re tipped off to this truth by a lyric in the song “Hang Me”, which Llewyn plays at the beginning (and end) of the film: “I wouldn’t mind the hangin’/but the layin’ in the grave so long.” Dying isn’t so bad because, hey, at least <i>something</i> happened.<sup>1</sup> What’s really bad is being in a deathlike state—a state in which you’ve done everything you’re ever gonna do, and can’t do anything new. This is the state that Llewyn finds himself in at the end of the film. The film’s allusions to <i>The Odyssey</i> and reference to <i>The Incredible Journey</i> should be seen as counterpoints to, rather than analogues of, Llewyn’s story. In those stories, the characters are trying to get back to where they started, but their journey causes them to change. Llewyn, on the other hand, goes on a journey and returns home, but he doesn’t change, and he doesn’t learn anything.<sup>2</sup><br />
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Worst of all, the music that Llewyn plays, his supposed raison d’etre, becomes part of this cycle of stagnation. One of Llewyn’s go-to jokes in his on-stage patter is, “If it was never new, and it never gets old, then it’s a folk song.” But one could equally say, “If it was never new, and it never gets old, then it’s Llewyn Davis’s life.” Llewyn doesn’t seem to particularly enjoy playing folk music, though he certainly seems content to play the same songs over and over and over again.<sup>3</sup><br />
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A question that nagged at me throughout the film is: what is Llewyn’s emotional connection to folk music? Llewyn’s rendition of “Queen Jane”, for example, is incredibly moving, and the song touches on some of the things that he’s grappling with in his life. But the song is not about him, it’s not about his historical moment, and it’s not his voice. Llewyn doesn’t own the songs he plays, a fact that is driven home when a middle aged midwestern woman takes the stage after him and performs one of the same songs that he just sang. One of the central ideas of folk music is that it’s a common heritage, something we all share—but Llewyn can’t stand seeing someone else playing “his” tunes (see also, Llewyn’s reaction to Mrs. Gorfein joining in when he plays for them at dinner), and his possessiveness drives him to new heights of assholery. <br />
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Llewyn is failing his art, but his art is also failing him. Llewyn’s inability to move forward in his own life seems to be connected to his inability to create a coherent narrative about his life through music. He is unable to transform his personal experiences into song, to use his talent to give meaning to those experiences, to merge his life with his art, and as a result, he’s just spinning his wheels.<br />
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The main way that the end of the film differs from the beginning is the appearance of Young Bob (as he is called in the credits), who serves as a counterpoint to Llewyn, and points to how Llewyn could move forward. Bob Dylan is an artist who has violently broken with his past many times (not unlike the Coen brothers). During the period in which the film takes place, Bob is still primarily a folk singer, but he’s making the move to playing his own material—indeed, the song he plays when he takes the stage is an original composition. But Llewyn ignores Bob, stalking into an alley behind the club to get a repeat beating at the hands of a mysterious stranger. Young Bob sings “Farwell”, and Llewyn delivers the last line of the film: “Au revoir!” That is, literally, Till I see you again.<br />
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Any number of people will be happy to detail all the times that Bob has, in their opinion, failed over the course of his career. And they’d be right, too (sometimes). But failure’s not the worst thing that can happen to a person. There’s a line in “Fare Thee Well” that echoes the one from “Hang Me”: “It aint the leavin’/that’s a-grievin’ me/but my darlin’ who’s bound to stay behind.” Better to move on than to stay behind and find yourself in the condition Bob describes in a very different song he wrote some 30 years later: <br />
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<i>I was born here and I’ll die here, against my will</i><br />
<i> I know it looks like I’m moving, but I’m standing still</i><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><sup>1</sup> In the same way that, as Roland Turner backhandedly points out, at least it was original for Llewyn’s musical partner to jump off the George Washington Bridge instead of the Brooklyn Bridge.<br /><br /><sup>2</sup> Joyce’s </span></i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Ulysses</span><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">, which also prominently features characters wandering around a city and another artistic young asshole, Steven Daedalus, is actually probably a more apt point of comparison than Homer.<br /><br /><sup>3</sup> “Please Mr. Kennedy” may be total schlock, but at least Llewyn actually seems to actually be having fun when he’s playing it.</span></i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3144833490573685674.post-58068714969020296322014-03-03T17:25:00.000-05:002014-03-03T17:25:30.732-05:00Forte's Forte<i>by</i> <a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/James%20Folta" target="_blank">James Folta</a><br />
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Acting is partially the art of disappearing – the better the actor, the less of her we should be able to detect beneath the character. Many actors find a comfortable range of roles and tones and settle there. Nothing is more satisfying than to see an actor play well against their type when they are able to challenge our expectations.<br />
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This year we saw two great comedians play against their genre. Louis CK and Will Forte took more serious roles in the Best Picture nominated <i>American Hustle</i> and <i>Nebraska</i>. Both actors faced the challenge of playing against their previous work, and while Forte was very successful, Louis struggled to settle into his role.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Forte's background helped him tremendously; he's a longtime sketch guy with a reputation as a character chameleon. On SNL, Forte stood out as an impressionist and a comedian who can make anything funny through strong choices. In <i>Nebraska</i>, he would seem to be miscast, too goofy for such a quiet role. He plays David Grant with nuanced choices -- he’s a lonely, struggling man who is watching his father, Woody (Bruce Dern), slowly succumb to his old age while trying to maintain his dignity.<br />
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It's a far cry from a Forte SNL character like Greg Stink or MacGruber. MacGruber is a MacGyver parody who responds loudly and brashly to the absurdly heightened stakes of his situation, locked in a control room with a ticking bomb, and then fumbles to the point of death by explosion every time. MacGruber is an American stereotype. David Grant, though, is an American archetype, that of a mediocre lost sheep. He is a bland Midwesterner seemingly without larger aspirations who comes across as numb to his problems, responding quietly and politely to injustices and losses. Seeing him step outside of his comfort zone to help his father is a joy to watch. Where MacGruber would yell for rubber bands to fix the problem, Grant hides in bathrooms and ashamedly returns stolen generators.<br />
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Unsurprisingly, Forte rises to the occasion of both roles. An incorrect assumption is that comedic acting is easier than dramatic acting, that the broader strokes it takes to create a character like The Falconer require less commitment or dedication than a dramatic one. Both types of role behoove an actor to make smart and bold (large or small) choices that emphasize the emotional truth of the role. Every successful character, whether she makes us laugh or cry, needs to come from a place of honesty. This requires dedication from the actor to reveal the character. Any winking or flagging commitment ruins the effect of any role. The skills are the same, but to different ends. Forte is a formidable actor and is able to easily find the sadness and the humor in David Grant. He’s someone we're used to seeing abandon himself to roles. It's easy to forget Will Forte and follow David Grant. It's sad and sweet to see David struggle to relate to his cousins, stand up for his father, and act the part of straight-man to his acerbic mother.<br />
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Louis C.K., though, can't seem to dodge his popular persona in <i>American Hustle</i>. He's way too recognizable. C.K. is one of the most famous stand up comedians working at the moment, and his material and stage persona is unrelentingly personal. He's made his name by his specific perspective that stems directly from himself. We believe that C.K. offstage and onstage are one and the same. Even most of the acting work we've seen him in before is versions of himself. I mean, the titles of his two TV shows were “Lucky Louie” and “Louie.” Louis plays Louis.<br />
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So it becomes hard to see C.K.'s <i>Hustle</i> character, Stoddard Thorsen, as anyone other than Louis. Perhaps this is miscasting; a stand-up isn’t necessarily the best choice for the comic relief FBI boss. Perhaps this would’ve been better suited for a character actor -- shed a tear at the thought of Philip Seymour Hoffman in this role.<br />
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It's a shame, since C.K. is far from a bad actor, but the glasses and middle management attire of the straight-laced G-man can't disguise him enough. We see his mannerisms as just more Louis. While this doesn't ruin the film, the prominence of the performer ends up drawing the viewer out of the scenes. David O. Russell, the director of <i>American Hustle</i>, encouraged his actors to adlib, something that I imagine would be difficult for a stand-up who is used to total control in his performance. Taking direction and adjusting acting choices to find the best performance is a difficult process, one that C.K. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD3yrKQGAWQ" target="_blank">self-deprecatingly addresses in his show</a>. And again, C.K. isn’t bad. It's fun in <i>Hustle</i> to see him struggle to get his one didactic story out, or get battered with an old phone, but it's to the film’s detriment that he can never distance the character from himself. <br />
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I love seeing comedians in dramas. It's often incredibly rewarding for the audience and it lends legitimacy to the hard work that comedians do. Every new role shows us a new side of an actor, adding depth and breadth to what we already know them to be capable of. This is where C.K. falls down in <i>American Hustle</i> -- we don’t learn anything new about who he is, his character is a rehash of Louis. It works because we love him, but it’s less than it could be because we land in the same place we started. Forte’s acting in <i>Nebraska</i> adds a poignancy and pathos to his broad comedic talents. The thrill of seeing an actor subvert expectations becomes the rule for a performer like him, who has such breadth that we never know where he is coming from.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3144833490573685674.post-81524200177437113712014-03-02T12:35:00.002-05:002014-03-02T12:35:52.993-05:00Best Adapted Sequel<i>by</i> <a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Mark%20Paglia" target="_blank">Mark Paglia</a><br />
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It may not be the most exciting Oscar category, but this year “Best Adapted Screenplay” may be the most unusual. As has been noted <a href="http://www.themillions.com/2014/01/based-on-a-true-story-the-fiction-free-finalists-for-the-best-adapted-screenplay-oscar.html" target="_blank">elsewhere</a>, this year’s nominees are notable for their source material: <i>Before Midnight</i> is included because it is a sequel, and the other four are all based on nonfiction books. In every other year, nominated screenplays have been adapted from novels, plays, and short stories as well<sup>1</sup>.<br /><br />This being only a single year, it would be rash to declare that Hollywood has turned its back on novels and henceforth will only be adapting biographies, memoirs, and nonfiction for the screen. So rather than focus on this year’s heavy dose of nonfiction, I’d like to consider the exception in the slate of nominees: <i>Before Midnight</i>.<br />
<a name='more'></a><i>Before Midnight</i> falls under the adapted rather than original screenplay category because it is a sequel. This logic strikes many as arbitrary, but thinking about this particular nominee has brought me around to the Academy’s point of view. The most obvious reason for denoting certain films as adaptations is to ensure credit is given to the sources of inspiration; original screenplays can be hackneyed or derivative, but not outrightly plagiaristic<sup>2</sup>. However, this motivation doesn’t apply to <i>Before Midnight</i>, since the same writers created the source material. So what else separates an adapted screenplay from an original one?<br /><br />Adapted screenplays, on a practical level, function differently from original ones. An adaptation starts with preconditions and restrictions. Sure, characters can be changed or dropped (e.g. <i>Jurassic Park</i>) or different storylines brought to prominence (<i>There Will Be Blood</i> versus Upton Sinclair’s <i>Oil!</i>). Nevertheless, some of the source material inevitably remains. If it didn’t, what would be the point of working with a source material in the first place? Presumably screenwriters adapt works because they like some of the elements of those works, even if said elements hem in the resulting screenplay. It’s rather akin to a creative writing exercise that requires one to work a particular phrase or object into a story. The goal is to create a story that flows in a manner indistinguishable from a wholly original one, but the writer takes a very different path to get there. So too are adapted screenplays subject to the same Hollywood demands for marketability and accessibility to audiences as original screenplays; the adapted ones also get additional restrictions from the source material.<br /><br />In <i>Before Midnight</i>, the screenwriters are not free to have Jesse and Celine do absolutely anything. The characters are already trapped by the previous two films. Not only have their personalities been delineated in the previous works, but <i>Before Midnight</i> comes loaded with specific questions that must be addressed. What happened when Jesse (presumably) missed his flight? How did he divorce his wife? How did they choose whether to live in France or the States? One of the more strained (in my opinion) scenes in <i>Before Sunset</i> involved answering the question from <i>Before Sunrise</i> of whether or not Jesse and Celine had sex during their nighttime stroll. Richard Linklater and his co-writers knew the audience was curious for an answer, and in that instance shoehorned it into Jesse and Celine’s banter. Rather than, say, mentioning “what we did that night” with a knowing look, Jesse and Celine have a disagreement whose only purpose is to force them to declare unambiguously to the audience, “Yes, we had sex, definitely.” <i>Before Midnight</i> executes better, opening with a scene that tacitly brings us up to date (Jesse’s son lives in New York, they live in France, etc.) and then teasing out the details until the film’s climax. To go back to my earlier creative-writing analogy, <i>Before Sunset</i> left the required line of dialogue sticking out awkwardly, whereas its sequel managed to camouflage it by starting out with oblique references that gradually build to a fully fleshed-out history of Jesse and Celine’s relationship.<br />
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<br />In both cases, important aspects of the screenplay are predetermined by the previous installment(s) of the series. If the films did not fill in these blanks, they would not really be sequels, nor would the characters feel like Jesse and Celine. Which is all to say that <i>Before Midnight</i> is different from the (hypothetical) film that would result if Linklater et al. decided to write an original script about a Franco-American couple’s day in Greece. There would be similarities, yes, and shared influences and allusions, but our hypothetical original screenplay would not be the story of Jesse and Celine. And while a film about a random couple walking and talking can be enjoyable--this is exactly what <i>Before Sunrise</i> was--a major part of the pleasure of the series comes from watching two people grow and change and not change over time. This demands continuity in the characters, which requires that the sequels obey the strictures set down by previous installments. Properly done, it turns adaptation into art. Which is the whole reason for having the award in the first place.<br />
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><sup>1</sup> In fact, in many years the nominees have been exclusively adapted from novels and plays. By my count, there have only been two previous years in which no novel adaptations were nominated: the first Oscar ceremony in 1928 when all three nominees were based on plays, and 1936, which featured plays, short stories, and biography as source materials. What is more, movies based on novels and other literary inspirations are almost wholly absent from the rest of the Oscar categories this year. Of all the feature films nominated in all the categories this year, </span></i><span style="font-size: x-small;">August: Osage County</span><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"> and the Belgian film </span></i><span style="font-size: x-small;">The Broken Circle Breakdown</span><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"> are based on plays; nominations in the technical categories went to </span></i><span style="font-size: x-small;">The Book Thief, The Great Gatsby</span><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">, and the second installment of </span></i><span style="font-size: x-small;">The Hobbit</span><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">, plus </span></i><span style="font-size: x-small;">The Lone Ranger</span><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"> and </span></i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Iron Man 3</span><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">, whose literary merits are slightly more suspect.</span></i><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;"> <sup>2</sup> I know, original ideas don’t spring into writers’ minds from nothingness. Still, we recognize a distinction between having influences and copying another’s work.</span></i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3144833490573685674.post-79536344821860560752014-02-09T14:44:00.000-05:002014-02-09T14:52:44.618-05:00Issue 2 - 2012 Year in Review<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>FILMS</b></span><br />
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<a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/2013/01/you-can-never-go-there-and-back-again_5.html" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WGF2I7PJnMA/UOiSKamqXYI/AAAAAAAAAaQ/ySgXtsfuTjA/s200/The-Hobbit-An-Unexpected-Journey-Thumb.jpg" height="111" width="200" /></a><a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/2013/01/you-can-never-go-there-and-back-again_5.html" target="_blank"><b><span style="font-size: large;">You Can Never Go There and Back Again</span></b></a><br />
<b><i>The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey</i> (2012)</b><br />
<i>by </i><a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/James%20Folta" target="_blank">James Folta</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/2013/01/wes-andersons-new-wave.html" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-p-seqEPPNXo/UOikRPsqGYI/AAAAAAAAAbk/oIu99ZNoLgc/s200/Moonrise-Kingdom-Thumb.jpg" height="111" width="200" /></a></div>
<a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/2013/01/wes-andersons-new-wave.html" target="_blank"><b><span style="font-size: large;">Wes Anderson's New Wave</span></b></a><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><b><i><span style="font-size: small;">Moonrise Kingdom </span></i><span style="font-size: small;">(2012)</span></b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>by</i> <a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Mark%20Paglia" target="_blank">Mark Paglia</a></span></span></span><br />
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<a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/2013/01/a-map-of-empathy.html" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7huiG-a4g-M/UOfYH9yUzHI/AAAAAAAAAY8/ssOQ55nRKP4/s200/Cloud-Atlas-Thumb.jpg" height="111" width="200" /></a></div>
<a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/2013/01/a-map-of-empathy.html" target="_blank"><b><span style="font-size: large;">A Map of Empathy</span></b></a><br />
<b><i>Cloud Atlas</i> (2012)</b><i> </i><br />
<i>by</i> <a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Mike%20Yarsky" target="_blank">Mike Yarsky</a><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">L<span style="font-size: large;">ISTS</span></span></span></b><br />
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<a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/2013/01/six-funny-things-from-films-of-2012.html" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-cJaKzWiLCfM/UPBC5WMZFLI/AAAAAAAAAfU/AfW-SHhcCTw/s200/Six-Funny-Things-thumb.jpg" height="111" width="200" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/2013/01/six-funny-things-from-films-of-2012.html" target="_blank"><b>Six Funny Things from the Films of 2012</b></a><b> </b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>by</i> <a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Luke%20Burns" target="_blank">Luke Burns</a></span><b> </b></span><br />
<b><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span> </span></b><br />
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<a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/2013/02/new-films-attempt-to-capitalize-on.html" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DyjrSecmmZo/USp7klSe9LI/AAAAAAAAAgU/nF8DQq7Qfq8/s200/ThaddeusStevens-Thumb.jpg" height="111" width="200" /></a></div>
<b><a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/2013/02/new-films-attempt-to-capitalize-on.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: large;">Lincoln Inspires New Wave of Political History Films</span></a></b><br />
<i>by </i><a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Luke%20Burns" target="_blank">Luke Burns</a><br />
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Take a break from Oscar predictions and consider the endless possibilities of political history!<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">DISCUSSIONS</span></b><br />
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<a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/2013/01/stand-up-comedy-2012-in-review.html" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Hwv8DJJVoKU/UO5N7Gw62yI/AAAAAAAAAds/WeFJZ345wMU/s200/Comedy-Review-2012-thumb.jpg" height="111" width="200" /></a></div>
<a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/2013/01/stand-up-comedy-2012-in-review.html" target="_blank"><b><span style="font-size: large;">Stand-up Comedy - The Year in Review</span></b></a><br />
<i>by</i> <a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/James%20Folta" target="_blank">James Folta</a> <i>and</i> <a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Mike%20Yarsky" target="_blank">Mike Yarsky</a><br />
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Whether you like a rare steak or a refined piece of sushi, "Raw" was on the menu this year.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3144833490573685674.post-54919108270944990032013-08-08T00:19:00.000-04:002015-01-16T12:19:51.727-05:00Experimental Lunch: Mothlight<span style="font-size: small;"><i>by</i> <a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Allen%20Irwin" target="_blank">Allen Irwin</a></span><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Allen%20Irwin" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></a></span></i><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">This essay kicks off another new column here at Perpetual Nostalghia: Experimental Lunch. The primary goal will be to write about shorter experimental films that can be viewed online, perhaps on a lunch break, and to provide context and commentary.</span></i><br />
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<i>Mothlight</i> (1963) - dir. Stan Brakhage<br />
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Stan Brakhage’s <i>Mothlight</i><sup>1</sup> is a perfect example of what the average person probably imagines an “experimental” film to be: images flash past in a flurry of abstract shapes and colors, it has no plot, and there is ostensibly some grand, philosophical meaning latent in its flickering images of bugs, plants, and other organic bits. It also serves perfectly as an introduction to some of the central ideas and pleasures of experimental film viewing, such as pushing the boundaries of film language, exploring new perspectives, and examining the medium of film itself.<br />
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The initial idea that would become <i>Mothlight</i> had its genesis when Brakhage witnessed a moth fluttering around his workspace one night, prompting him to consider the motion of a moth in flight and what it might see. Shortly thereafter, he noticed moths dying by self-immolation in his home’s various light sources, so he decided to create a work inspired, “...by moth flight, thoughts about, feelings thereto.”<sup>2</sup> He says of the film:<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">"Here is a film that I made out of a deep grief. The grief is my business in a way, but the grief was helpful in squeezing the little film out of me, that I said “these crazy moths are flying into the candelight, and burning themselves to death, and that’s what’s happening to me. I don’t have enough money to make these films, and ... I’m not feeding my children properly, because of these damn films, you know. And I’m burning up here... What can I do?” I’m feeling the full horror of some kind of immolation, in a way."<sup>3</sup></span><br />
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His response to this grief was simultaneously philosophic and pragmatic: he began gathering up the bodies of dead moths (and other insects) along with bits of grass, flowers, and other natural detritus and pasting them between two strips of mylar editing tape, creating an organic, linear collage the width of a strip of 16mm film. Working quickly and intuitively, adopting a desperate moth-like method of his own, Brakhage soon had three rough “movements” and a coda. After completing his work of arranging and gluing, he anxiously ran the strips of mylar through a contact printer to create a projectable 16mm print: a film created without the use of a camera.<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-nkVoWJnbej8/UgMaC2BkXZI/AAAAAAAAAtU/cukpbZZ0RVU/s1600/Stan-Brakhage-Mothlight-Filmstrip.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-nkVoWJnbej8/UgMaC2BkXZI/AAAAAAAAAtU/cukpbZZ0RVU/s1600/Stan-Brakhage-Mothlight-Filmstrip.jpg" /></a></div>
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Here’s where some of <i>Mothlight</i>’s deeper themes come to light, as it were. The moths that Brakhage saw dying, Icarus-like, in the bulbs and candles of his house are reanimated, however briefly, by the light of the projector. This momentary reincarnation achieves an astounding degree of beauty when you consider that the image on the screen (if you are watching the film projected from a 16mm print) is like seeing a ghost: the film-image has a tangible relation to the original organic matter that ran through the contact printer 50 years ago, with a beam of light as the thread tying them together.<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wUQH9ukiMs0/UgMYOMyBR8I/AAAAAAAAAtA/Tv2x2bwrKlU/s1600/Mothlight-Single-Wing.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="151" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wUQH9ukiMs0/UgMYOMyBR8I/AAAAAAAAAtA/Tv2x2bwrKlU/s200/Mothlight-Single-Wing.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
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In his gallery talk at the Hirshhorn Museum, Glen Dixon drew a link between <i>Mothlight</i> and <a href="http://wonderingminstrels.blogspot.com/1999/03/lesson-of-moth-don-marquis.html" target="_blank">this poem</a> by Don Marquis. Brakhage’s attempt to convey, as he described it, “What a moth might see from birth to death if black were white and white were black,” has strong resonance with the dichotomy Marquis’ poem sets up: the opposing desires to seek momentary beauty and to live safely and comfortably, if unexceptionally. At just over three minutes and containing no images that last more than a single frame, <i>Mothlight</i> is clearly representative of the former desire; it is itself a kind of self immolation, as the images will eventually give way (again, only if seeing it on film) to the pure, white light of the screen after the reel runs out and the last frame of film has left the projector gate.<sup>4</sup><br />
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These additional depths afforded by 16mm film viewing shouldn’t stop you from seeking out the film in whatever form you can find it, however. On a purely structural, visual level, it still calls attention to the circumstances under which it was created and the nature of film itself no matter the viewing medium: the images still flutter in their own moth-like way 24 times a second,<sup>5</sup> perhaps foolishly, in an attempt to create meaning - a universal statement about the moving image if there ever was one. Finally, even in a degraded quality transfer on YouTube, you can see and appreciate the textural multitudes present in Brakhage’s materials, whether insect wing, flower petal, or raw earth. Perhaps the most basic takeaway that <i>Mothlight</i> affords is one of its most important (and one of Brakhage’s central goals), which is to urge the viewer to look more closely, and with renewed curiosity, at the everyday.<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VMJTB3SAuOw/UgMaOkLblwI/AAAAAAAAAtc/dGexPSVFO30/s1600/Stan-Brakhage-Mothlight-Wings.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VMJTB3SAuOw/UgMaOkLblwI/AAAAAAAAAtc/dGexPSVFO30/s320/Stan-Brakhage-Mothlight-Wings.jpg" width="51" /></a></div>
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For some other writing and info on Brakhage and <i>Mothlight</i>, check out these links:<br />
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<u>Mothlight</u><br />
<a href="http://www.lafuriaumana.it/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=410:mothlight-and-beyond&catid=59:la-furia-umana-nd-10-autumn-2011&Itemid=61" target="_blank">Fred Camper</a> at <i>La Furia Umana</i><br />
<a href="http://sensesofcinema.com/2004/cteq/mothlight/" target="_blank">Senses of Cinema </a><br />
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothlight" target="_blank">Wikipedia</a><br />
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<u>Brakhage</u><br />
<a href="http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/272-by-brakhage-the-act-of-seeing" target="_blank">Fred Camper</a> for The Criterion Collection<br />
<a href="http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/273-before-the-beginning-was-the-word-stan-brakhage-s" target="_blank">Paul Arthur</a> for The Criterion Collection<br />
<a href="http://www.rouge.com.au/1/brakhage.html%20Wikipedia%20http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_Brakhage" target="_blank">Nicole Brenez and Adrian Martin</a> at <i>Rouge</i><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">A Downloadable PDF of Brakhage's book <a href="http://archive.org/details/metaphorsonvisio00brak" target="_blank"><i>Metaphors On Vision</i></a><i> </i></span><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">1 - I recently saw </span></i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Mothlight</span><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"> projected in 16mm, running on a loop as part of the Hirshhorn Museum’s </span></i><a href="http://www.hirshhorn.si.edu/collection/over-under-next/" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Over, Under, Next</span></a><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"> - a great exhibit on the art of collage which also includes Bruce Conner’s </span></i><a href="http://sensesofcinema.com/2009/cteq/report/" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Report</span></a><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"> and a number of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Cornell#Sculpture_and_collage" target="_blank">Joseph Cornell boxes</a>. <br /><br />2 - This quote, along with most of the others found in this essay, comes from a letter Brakhage wrote to Robert Kelly while working on </span></i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Mothligh</span><span style="font-size: x-small;">t</span><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">, which can be found in his book Metaphors On Vision, which is available to download in PDF <a href="http://archive.org/details/metaphorsonvisio00brak" target="_blank"><u>here</u></a>. <br /> </span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">3 - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothlight<br /><br />4 - It may also be worth noting that there is one more (quite obvious but easily forgotten) added benefit of viewing </span></i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Mothlight </span><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">on film: the sound of the projector itself, which is reminiscent of beating wings and would also noticeably dissipate (though not stop completely) when the reel runs out.<br /><br />5 - OK, OK, so a bad video transfer on YouTube is going to be at something more like 29.97 frames a second as opposed to film’s 24, but you get the idea.</span></i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3144833490573685674.post-89291449539979487892013-07-31T21:16:00.000-04:002013-08-01T12:32:51.054-04:00After Midnight: The Vampira Show and Fog Island<i>by</i> <a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Allen%20Irwin" target="_blank">Allen Irwin</a><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">This is the first post in a new series called
Midnight Mass. It will be a place to examine different types of “midnight
movies” and to experiment with different types of criticism, from
information and link dumps to visual essays utilizing screengrabs and
other media (and maybe a video essay or two if I get ambitious). The
primary goal is to explore what makes a movie a “midnight movie” and how
watching movies after midnight can affect our viewing experience. The
only rule is that any movies I analyze must be watched... After
Midnight. </span></i><b><br /></b><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>A Condensed History of the Midnight Movie as Television Phenomenon</b></span><br />
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While the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0306804336" target="_blank">“Midnight Movie”</a> as a cinematic phenomenon arguably had its heyday in the 1970s, with films like <i>The Rocky Horror Picture Show</i> (1975) and <i>Eraserhead</i> (1977) screening alongside offbeat oddities like <i>Freaks</i> (1932) and <i>Reefer Madness</i> (1936) at counterculture hangouts, the original midnight movie mania occurred much earlier in unsuspecting living rooms around the country. Almost any movie can become a midnight movie given the right framing or state of mind, and that crucial framing device was just what Hunt Stromberg, Jr., had in mind when he asked a young woman named <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maila_Nurmi" target="_blank">Maila Nurmi</a> to dress up like a vampire and introduce old movies on Los Angeles ABC affiliate KABC-TV in 1954. Vampira was born.<br />
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In the early years of TV, the movie studios were still feeling threatened by the likes of Milton Berle and Lucille Ball; relinquishing their precious classics to the monstrosity that was stealing their viewership was out of the question. Not so for the output of the so called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_row" target="_blank">“Poverty Row”</a> studios: genre pictures of questionable quality, made to fill out the second half of double bills and full of second rate stars and third rate acting<sup>1</sup>. Looking to fill the seemingly never-ending needs of programming, the TV stations took what they could get. Sticking the movies in a late-night time slot didn’t seem to do the trick, so in a flash of inspiration, Stromberg decided to bring on a host to introduce them and set the mood. <br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-h3Ji_rPXBMc/UfmsVHGvblI/AAAAAAAAAog/WzTTIpoDcOU/s1600/Maila-Nurmi.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-h3Ji_rPXBMc/UfmsVHGvblI/AAAAAAAAAog/WzTTIpoDcOU/s320/Maila-Nurmi.jpg" width="241" /></a><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-SV7-mE5teqc/Ufmsrl-Y0OI/AAAAAAAAAok/m4tQ88oO3Eo/s1600/Vampira-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-SV7-mE5teqc/Ufmsrl-Y0OI/AAAAAAAAAok/m4tQ88oO3Eo/s320/Vampira-1.jpg" width="238" /></a></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Z-qubLBbPhc/UfmtZSSLWiI/AAAAAAAAAow/pWgZEqNxBqk/s1600/addams-family-cartoon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="288" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Z-qubLBbPhc/UfmtZSSLWiI/AAAAAAAAAow/pWgZEqNxBqk/s320/addams-family-cartoon.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Charles Addams' <i>New Yorker</i> cartoons inspired Vampira's aesthetic...</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-E-VD4Uw5dMM/Ufmtd9VujZI/AAAAAAAAAo4/4Fx9ooUygIc/s1600/EC-Comics-Crypt-Keeper.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="312" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-E-VD4Uw5dMM/Ufmtd9VujZI/AAAAAAAAAo4/4Fx9ooUygIc/s320/EC-Comics-Crypt-Keeper.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">...while the Horror Hosts of EC Comics inspired her morbid sense of humor.</td></tr>
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A creature entirely of Nurmi’s own conception, Vampira was a descendant of the New Yorker cartoons of Charles Addams and the horror hosts of EC Comics staples <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_from_the_Crypt_(comics)" target="_blank"><i>Tales from the Crypt</i></a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Haunt_of_Fear" target="_blank"><i>The Haunt of Fear</i></a>, and <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vault_of_Horror_%28comics%29" target="_blank">The Vault of Horror</a></i> - a walking (or rather, gliding) contradiction of genuine grotesquerie, campy humor, and unnerving sex appeal. Word soon spread, and she was an instant star: the first of many late-night horror hosts who lured a generation into the night where rubber monsters and cheap effects lay waiting.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="450" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/tb_EXSIfHjA" width="600"></iframe><br />
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Sadly, because early television cameras broadcast live without being recorded on machines called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinescope" target="_blank">kinescopes</a>, none of the televised Vampira segments survive. However, a kinescope from a commercial outtake re-using the same script from an earlier episode gives us a glimpse into what it was like to have Vampira introduce a film:<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="450" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/gs0ehPgyD3U" width="600"></iframe><br />
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Vampira provided a much needed spin to many otherwise unremarkable films. Her antics, and the late night hour, probably conspired to create a ghoulish Pygmalion-like effect, with viewers’ expectations of monsters, murder and the macabre actively enhancing any presence thereof. Regardless of the quality of the films<sup>2</sup>, the horror-host concept <i>worked</i>. While Vampira’s show only aired locally from May ’54 to April ’55, it was enough to make her an LA celebrity and get a four-page photo spread in <i>Life</i> magazine. Television audiences were ready for more midnight movies.<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-_dMOqhfinTM/UfmuuVULeHI/AAAAAAAAApM/XpxueEaIu6s/s1600/Vampira-3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="252" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-_dMOqhfinTM/UfmuuVULeHI/AAAAAAAAApM/XpxueEaIu6s/s320/Vampira-3.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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If “The Vampira Show” was the first wave of television programming of midnight movies, the floodgates truly opened in October of 1957 with the release to television networks of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_Theater" target="_blank">“Shock Theater”</a> (aka “Shock!”): a series of 52 classic Universal horror films that included <i>Dracula</i> (1931), <i>Frankenstein</i> (1931), <i>The Mummy</i> (1932), <i>The Invisible Man</i> (1933) and <i>The Wolf Man</i> (1941). Picking right up where Vampira left off, a host of colorful characters emerged to introduce the films, each haunting their own local cable station.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4RfKEEdq4yE/UfmvJBUU0_I/AAAAAAAAApU/6BiGgQ_8YmI/s1600/Zacherley.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="194" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4RfKEEdq4yE/UfmvJBUU0_I/AAAAAAAAApU/6BiGgQ_8YmI/s320/Zacherley.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Zacherley - "The Cool Ghoul"</td></tr>
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Most famous of this next wave of horror hosts was Zacherley / Roland (pronounced Ro<i>land</i>), the “Cool Ghoul” of Philadelphia and New York City, portrayed by John Zacherle. Not only did Zacherley continue Vampira’s proud tradition, he took it one step further by actually appearing <i>in</i> the films themselves as they were being broadcast, pre-dating the full on interactivity of <i>Mystery Science Theater 3000</i> by 30 years. This Zacherley compilation show includes some of Zacherley’s participational antics, as well as his introduction segments:<br />
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Film historian David J. Skal called “Shock Theater,” “the inaugural event of Monster Culture,”<sup>3</sup> and it was quickly followed in 1958 by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5Rjop9TsSo" target="_blank">Forrest J. Ackerman</a>’s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famous_Monsters_of_Filmland" target="_blank"><i>Famous Monsters of Filmland</i></a> in 1958. A whole generation had quietly become accustomed to the pleasures of late-night viewing through the lens of horror, and the stage was set for the midnight movie to flourish as a theatrical experience in the coming decades.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Fog Island</b></span><br />
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For this inaugural After Midnight column, I decided to recreate a night staying up to watch “The Vampira Show” (or “Lady of Horrors,” as it was originally called). Thanks to a <a href="http://shocktheater1.blogspot.com/2010/11/vampiras-pre-shock-programming-1954-55.html" target="_blank">wonderful blog post</a> listing the films screened on the show, I did a quick search for the earliest airing film that could be streamed online, which turned out to be 1945’s <i>Fog Island</i> (available in appropriately low-quality on YouTube <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awepJyPh3-U" target="_blank">here</a>).<br />
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The film, directed by Terry O. Morse<sup>4</sup>, is the type of generic haunted house style thriller that reached its zenith with <i>House on Haunted Hill</i> (1959). All the elements are here: treacherous characters mysteriously invited to a spooky mansion, the scheming owner of the house, multiple murders and betrayals, and the use of skulls/skeletons as props. However, even in this low budget, stock genre picture there is room for the kinds of little idiosyncratic flourishes, counterintuitive art, and free associations that come with the midnight viewing experience, adding additional layers of personal meaning over the thin haunted house premise.<br />
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The somewhat blurry quality of the YouTube presentation (and certainly, the 1950s television image that would have appeared to someone watching “The Vampira Show”) immediately enhances the atmosphere of obscured vision that opens the film. A <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isle_of_the_Dead_%28painting%29" target="_blank">Böcklin-esque isle</a> briefly floats through a haze and then disappears; the camera follows a man’s feet, walking outside, to a house. Finally, the camera angles up as the man peers through a window, all under heavy fog.<br />
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The most significant aspect of the film is, of course, this soup-thick fog that surrounds the titular island, making it difficult for characters to see each other and for us to see them. That no one is who they seem and everyone is trying to spy on each other is par for the course, but <i>Fog Island</i> is particularly deft at conveying the degree to which its characters’ treachery is blinding.<br />
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Immediately following the opening sequence of the man in the fog, a quick cut inside the house reveals a young woman. We see the man through the window, but she doesn’t: an unnerving image given how obviously his face sticks out of the window from our perspective. This image of two people caught in close proximity within the same frame with one of them unaware of the other’s presence unexpectedly becomes the defining metaphor of the film. Whether it was directorial intent or merely an efficient way of filming two characters in the minimum number of shots is impossible to know, but it is exactly the kind of detail that free associating during a late night viewing can tease out and turn into something compelling.<br />
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The plot of the film is by-the-numbers, involving Leo (George Zucco), a rich recluse with a murdered wife who invites a group of ex-friends to his island mansion with hopes of uncovering her killer. Everyone receives an invitation that hints at a reconciliation (a clever maneuver bolstered by Leo’s announcement that his wife left a fortune hidden somewhere on the island). “Their greed will lure them back,” he tells his adopted daughter.<br />
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The stakes firmly established, the guests venture off, on their own or in small groups, to spy on, backstab, and betray each other. Not only has their greed lured them back to the island, but it has also apparently made them incapable of even noticing each other as they stalk through the dark corridors of Leo’s mansion towards their sub-genre-pre-determined fate. It is at once darkly comic and subtly creepy, given how sparsely populated the film’s sets are and how close the characters come to one another.<br />
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In the end, every “bad” character not already murdered by the film’s conclusion meets their end in a booby-trapped room that locks them in and fills with water when they open a box that Leo has planted for them to find (which, naturally, contains a final letter spelling out his revenge). The final twist is no surprise, but the complete unawareness with which each character went through the motions of “scheme, spy, die” lingers. Maybe my first free association with Böcklin’s <i>Isle of the Dead </i>makes sense after all.<br />
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">1 - The films from “Poverty Row” were not without their fans - Jean-Luc Godard dedicated </span></i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Breathless</span><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"> (1960) to Poverty Row studio <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monogram_Pictures" target="_blank">Monogram Pictures</a>.</span></i><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">2 - Although there were a lot of stinkers, there were a number of quality films mixed in, including such classics as </span></i><span style="font-size: x-small;">White Zombie</span><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"> (1932), </span></i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Detour</span><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"> (1945) and even a mangled version of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s </span></i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Vampyr</span><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"> (1932) - re-named as </span></i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Castles of Doom</span><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">.<br /><br />3 - This quote, and a healthy chunk of the research for this article, comes from Skal’s indispensable book </span></i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Monster-Show-Cultural-Afterword/dp/0571199968" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror</span></a><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">, which I highly recommend<br /><br />4 - Morse was a director and editor most famous for editing the american version of </span></i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Godzilla: King of the Monsters</span><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"> (1954)</span></i>, <i><span style="font-size: x-small;">as well as shooting the new scenes featuring Raymond Burr.</span></i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3144833490573685674.post-1858525197899761612013-07-25T00:46:00.000-04:002013-07-31T23:12:09.850-04:00The City in the 60s - Lost Gems from Non-Theatrical Distribution<i>by</i> <a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Allen%20Irwin" target="_blank">Allen Irwin</a><br />
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Last weekend the National Gallery of Art screened a series of 16mm documentary and educational films organized around the idea of “The City in the 60s” to highlight the neglected area of film culture that is non-theatrical distribution. Of the 7 films screened, only one was shown theatrically in the United States, and the majority were shown in schools or other educational venues. Most of them are also available to watch online, and well worth checking out:<br />
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<b><i>Felicia</i> (1965)</b> - This short documentary about a young girl living in Watts, LA in the mid 1960s feels very much like a precursor to 1970s films like <i>Killer of Sheep</i> (1977) and <i>Bush Mama </i>(1979), albeit with a more straightforward documentary approach, and it was produced through the same UCLA film program that would be responsible for the later <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.A._Rebellion" target="_blank">L.A. Rebellion</a> film movement (of which Burnett and Gerima’s are a part). It also serves as a window into a very specific point in time, as it takes place only months before the 1965 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_Riots" target="_blank">Watts Riots</a>.<br />
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<b><i>Three Cures for a Sick City</i> (1964)</b> - This was the only film shown that I couldn’t find online - it investigates the ways that three different Washington, D.C. neighborhoods (Georgetown, Southwest, and Adams Morgan) approached urban renewal in the 60s.<br />
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<b><i>Village Sunday</i> (1960)</b> - A fun sampling of life in Greenwich Village on a Sunday afternoon. The playful narration is by Jean Shepherd, who wrote <i>A Christmas Story </i>(1983).<br />
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<b><i>Time Piece</i> (1965)</b> - A very early experimental film directed by (and starring!) none other than Jim Henson. It follows a vague narrative of a man in a hospital, and spins off into his subconscious the first chance it gets. There is a musical beat, action or cut for every second of screen time and Henson uses the syncopation to build an intricate structure of surreal images and associations. This is the one film here that was shown theatrically - on a bill with the French film <i>A Man and a Woman </i>(1966). Unfortunately this clip is only a segment from the film - see the whole thing if you get the chance. (<a href="http://blogs.indiewire.com/spout/short-starts-watch-jim-hensons-oscar-nominated-time-piece" target="_blank">Click here</a> and scroll down to see some more early Henson Shorts)<br />
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<b><i>Chicago: City to See in ’63</i> (1963)</b> - This portrait of 1963 Chicago was made by filmmaker Margaret Conneely to encourage attendance at the 1963 Photographic Society of America conference.<br />
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<b><i>Nightsong</i> (1964)</b> - An impressionistic ride through Chicago’s nighttime club and music scene with musician <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/willie-wright-mn0002615541/biography" target="_blank">Willie Wright</a> as your guide. Directed by Don Klugman (Check out more Klugman shorts on his <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/donklugman/videos" target="_blank">YouTube Channel</a>)<br />
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<b><i>The Battle for Michigan Avenue</i> (1968)</b> - This is a boots-on-the-ground documentary covering the protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Rather than using narration, it builds its story through immediate imagery and montage. It is part of a seven part series: “<a href="http://www.chicagofilmarchives.org/pres-projects/the-filmgroups-urban-crisis-series" target="_blank">The Urban Crisis and the New Militants</a>” - which can be viewed (along with a bunch of other cool films) at the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/chicagofilmarchives/videos" target="_blank">Chicago Film Archive’s YouTube Page</a>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3144833490573685674.post-10026578545758662792013-07-02T10:04:00.000-04:002013-07-31T23:11:58.815-04:00Jason Bourne in Middle Management<i>by</i> <a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Mark%20Paglia" target="_blank">Mark Paglia</a><br />
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<i>The Informant (2009)</i> - dir. Steven Soderbergh<br />
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I’ve always accepted Matt Damon as a versatile actor, but he does have a tendency towards one type of character: the peerless hero. The sort of person who’s just utterly better than everyone else. Sure, his characters probably harbor psychological stresses, but most screen time is taken up by feats of smooth perfection, be they intellectual (<i>Good Will Hunting</i>) or physical (the <i>Bourne</i> series). Even when he plays an everyman junior executive in <i>Syriana</i>, Damon winds up as an advisor to a foreign potentate, working his way into a muddled conspiracy theory and surviving missile strikes. The guy’s just unflappable.<br />
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Unless he <i>is</i> flappable for the purposes of comedy, as is the case in the <i>Ocean’s</i> movies, where he plays a quasi-nebbishy comic Bones to George Clooney and Brad Pitt’s Kirk and Spock. Though only <i>quasi</i>-nebbishy. Because while Linus, Damon’s character, gets flustered and serves as the butt of many jokes, he also shows considerable skill in pulling off heists. Linus is funny not only because of his embarrassments, but because of the incongruousness of a capable, handsome Matt Damon-type being so beleaguered. After all, we know we’re not just laughing at the misery of a pathetic loser because he can’t be a pathetic loser - he’s <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUa5oHgYV2k" target="_blank">Matt Damon</a>!</div>
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Which all serves a prologue to a terrific case of playing against type in <i>The Informant!</i>, a film that undercuts the <i>Bourne</i>-style glamour of espionage and inverts the <i>Ocean’s</i> formula of dealing setbacks to super-cool operators. Steven Soderbergh, also the director of the <i>Ocean’s</i> series, begins by doing the unthinkable: he make’s Matt Damon un-pretty. The cumbersome glasses, the helmet-like hairdo and wormy mustache, the eye-watering neckties, the slight paunch visible beneath his shirt - in <i>Syriana</i> Matt Damon played a business executive who looks like Matt Damon; in <i>The Informant!</i> he plays a business executive who looks like a business executive. The humor in watching his character Mark Whitacre is the inverse of watching Linus Caldwell: instead of laughing at a capable man screwing up, we can’t believe that this schlub in an ugly suit keeps doings things right. <br />
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As an anti-Jason Bourne, Mark Whitacre is a boring man trying to get information with minimal guidance and training. This sets up one of the running gags of the film, Whitacre’s self-aggrandizing belief that he actually <i>is</i> a spy like those depicted on movie screens. His casual reference to himself as 0014 (twice as smart as 007, though I wonder if 2 times 007 wouldn’t be 014), the Bond-esque sections of soundtrack, and the colorful mock-‘60s titles informing us of what city he’s in at various times all reinforce how Whitacre buys into the popular Hollywood image of a spy, even if he sees himself as more a Roger Moore than a Matt Damon. And this is only funny because within the world of the film, spying is dull. The real-life case that inspired the film involved agricultural companies committing price-fixing on feed additives, a true trifecta of boredom that Jason Bourne would just ignore while stopping evil C.I.A. supersoldier programs. Soderbergh and Damon are only able to make this interesting because of Whitacre’s oddities and delusions.<br />
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Speaking of delusions. We learn as the movie goes on that Whitacre is not being wholly honest with the F.B.I., or with us in the audience, since he addresses us in voice-over. Then, in addition to finding out that he’s lying to us, we find out that Whitacre has been suffering all along from bipolar disorder and the severe stress of leading an informant’s double-life. Suddenly we realize how deep his duplicity, which allowed him to function as an informant, goes. And we learn that rather than being a schlub who improbably made a good spy, Whitacre was a schlub who experienced very real schlubby problems related to his spying.<br />
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Both Soderbergh and Damon (as well as the screenwriter, Scott Z. Burns) do very specific things to increase the impact of these revelations. On the screenwriting/directing side of things, Whitacre imparts information to us throughout the film: either in voice-over or in conversation with another character he will describe a situation, which is later verified by other characters on-screen. But at a certain point the verification stops coming, and we’re left to wonder if what Whitacre says is true. On the flip side, small seemingly throwaway scenes early in the movie resurface as evidence of Whitacre’s confabulation. This is telegraphed very early in a subtle little twist: in one of the first voice-overs, Whitacre mentions that though his German is rusty, he loves the typically complex German word for “pen.” Still in the first act of the movie, a European character alerts Whitacre in German to the fact that his pen has gotten ink all over his dress shirt, but Whitacre doesn’t understand until the character repeats it in English. Watching it the first time, the scene appears to be inserted to show how hapless our protagonist is. Upon repeat viewing, it’s another example of Whitacre’s lies being exposed.<br />
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Damon, for his part, plays Whitacre in a way that makes it impossible to tell when he’s lying. Whether he’s making something up or accurately recounting events, Damon uses the same exuberant earnestness that makes Whitacre sound like maybe he’s just trying to please people by giving them invented answers. Take a minor scene in the middle of the movie: while on a business flight, a fellow executive asks whatever happened to a former secretary. Whitacre replies that she’s actually about to get married in the near future, and the conversation goes in another direction. But for the audience the question lingers: is Whitacre just saying that because he wants to sound knowledgeable and wants to satisfy his coworker’s curiosity? Is it just a weird coincidence that the secretary is about to be married, or is Whitacre subtly antagonizing the coworker, who expresses lust for her? And how easily can Whitacre transfer his aptitude for quick conversational invention to much more serious situations? The only clear answer is that Damon knows how to keep us guessing as to his truthfulness.<br />
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It’s worth pointing out that Mark Whitacre is not simply an Inspector Clouseau who serendipitously succeeds despite massive incompetence. Sure, there are some comic scenes of him bumbling, but there’s also a scene where he deftly reorganizes the seats at a conspirators’ meeting so that the F.B.I. see all of the attendees with a hidden camera. As the end credits remind us, the real-life Mark Whitacre unmasked a major scam conducted by the agriculture industry against consumers. As a character in the film, he embodies all of the double identities and deep duplicity that get hidden behind Jason Bourne’s stony face and played up as jokes with Linus Caldwell. And Matt Damon portrays Whitacre as a much more complex character than either of those two. This is to be expected when comparing a based-on-true-events schlub to genre heroes, but it remains an impressive acting turn. Damon proves that he’s not limited to playing handsome, stoic good guys. He can also play a conflicted, deluded, all-too-human jumble of contradictions who both is and isn’t the cinematic superspy he aspires to be.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3144833490573685674.post-433604499862330392013-06-23T14:07:00.000-04:002013-06-24T08:41:02.484-04:00Evil Dread<i>by </i><a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Adam%20Sweeney" target="_blank">Adam Sweeney</a><br />
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<i>Evil Dead (2013)</i> - dir. Fede Alvarez / <i>The Evil Dead (1981)</i> - dir. Sam Raimi<br />
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As with any other memory, it's relatively foggy. I remember few
specifics. I don't remember what day of the week it was, nor do I
remember my mother's purpose for going to Wal-Mart. What I do remember
is it was around Halloween. I remember wanting to buy a horror movie. I
remember there was a display with several VHS around the cosmetics
section of the store.<br />
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I remember my first glimpse of <i>The Evil Dead</i>.<br />
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The box wasn't anything to write home about. Frankly, the picture on the front looked like someone had shot it in their backyard: a good looking man with a chiseled chin, standing on a grave with a shotgun in one hand and an axe over his shoulder. He looks off frame into the danger that's in the woods. Or at least the off screen terror of his friend's backyard. On the back of the box was a short description of the film as well as a few pictures. What struck me most was a single quote. Not from a critic or a filmmaker<sup>1</sup>, but from an esteemed horror novelist:<br />
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"…The most ferociously original horror film of the year…" - Stephen King<br />
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Yes, that Stephen King.<br />
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I needed this movie. There was no way around it now. Screw the cover art, screw the alleged adult content and especially screw the impending nightmares after I get done watching the movie. I needed this movie.<br />
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I'd have to be sly. Not necessarily dishonest, but sly. I needed to approach my mother with the movie and pay for it with my own money. I had some money from my paper routes. I could do this. I had to do this.<br />
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I found my mother and inconspicuously placed the VHS in the cart. We headed to the checkout. I helped put the groceries onto the belt, placing a divider between her stuff and my tape. She gets finished checking out. The clerk moved the divider and scanned my purchase. It flagged, asking if I was 17. I wouldn't be for another four years. My mother looked up from her checkbook and nodded, telling the clerk it was okay. I paid for the VHS, got my change and took the bag. I ran out in front of my mother and into the parking lot. I had to get out before they became hip to my ruse.<br />
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I got home that night and ran up into my room. I took off the plastic, slid the tape out and loaded it into my VCR. What I watched for the next 85 minutes changed me. I don't mean that in the clich<span class="st">é</span> way, like I became a paranoid recluse for the rest of my life because of how much fear it instilled in me. No, not that at all.<br />
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I just became a paranoid recluse for the next couple of days. I went to high school and started telling all my friends about it. How it was like nothing I had ever seen. How there was so much blood in it. How some lady got raped by a tree. In fact, anytime I relayed that last fact, I'd get the response of, "The tree…raped someone?" and I would nod emphatically. Pretty soon, all my friends wanted to see this movie. <br />
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It quickly became one of my favorite movies, as well as a perennial viewing staple among my friends. We'd watch it on Halloween. Anytime we'd go out in the woods, we'd talk about how weird it would be to find a cabin out there with the Necronomicon on the book shelf. Who we thought would get killed first in that situation. The possibilities were endless.<br />
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All the preceding facts made me incredibly hesitant to put my support behind the idea of a remake of <i>The Evil Dead</i>. The movie meant too much to me for so many different reasons, I just couldn't get behind it. Remakes are a part of Hollywood. Have been for a while. It stems from a conception that people cannot come up with any original ideas, so they have to keep regurgitating old ones to see what happens.<br />
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Lately, remakes have become more prevalent. I guess you could blame Platinum Dunes for this. In 2003, the remake of <i>The Texas Chainsaw Massacre</i> was released to decent box office. Hollywood saw this as an opportunity and seized it. This is not to say that all the remakes suck, but a good majority of them have. <i>A Nightmare on Elm Street,</i> <i>Black Christmas, The Fog, When a Stranger Calls, Prom Night</i> are just a few of them. Since this started, I figured it was only a matter of time before they got to the movies I loved.<br />
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Thankfully, this was not one of the disappointments.<br />
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<i>Evil Dead</i> (dropping the <i>The</i> for some odd reason) is energetically directed and acted, but not without flaws. The original trilogy isn't without flaws, either, but a lot of things added in the remake seem to be the product of studio influence to spell things out and justify the events of the film. One such added subplot involves one character fighting drug addiction, as opposed to simply being paranoid in the original. Another unnecessary addition is a five-minute opener. It really made no sense. They show a different family dealing with a possessed girl with a bunch of cats hanging from the ceiling (this comes back later on). Had the writers and director just been confident in what they were doing, the first five minutes could have just been cut.<br />
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Okay. Now that that's out of the way, let's talk about the good things in this film.<br />
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The plot follows a classic horror trope: five friends go into the woods and bad things happen. This was covered in last year's <i>The Cabin in the Woods</i>, a parody without a point. <i>Evil Dead</i> works better on sheer audacity. The violence in this movie is unlike anything I have seen in a mainstream horror movie. I haven't the slightest idea how the hell this got an R rating. The things that happen in this movie include, but are not limited to, hands being yanked off, people being stabbed with a hypodermic needle, and an unfortunate scene with a piece of a mirror.<br />
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It's a movie that takes a little while to start, but once it does, never stops. The acting is okay. The problem with a movie like this is that it is almost deliberately underwritten. They're all relegated to stereotypes: brother, drug addict, nerd, doctor, girlfriend. Because of this, there isn't a lot of room for acting. There's a lot of things to react to, but nothing where one of the actors has to sit around and with the weight of the world on their shoulders.<br />
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That being said, the two fleshed out, if you excuse the pun there, characters are a brother and sister. The brother sees this as an opportunity to reconnect to his sister, a person who has turned to drugs after the death of their mother. The brother wasn't around for her death. There's guilt attached to that, but the filmmakers don't really seem to be concerned about that.<br />
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I know, I know. My critique seems a little confusing. How can I complain about there not being character development and then say this isn't the type of the movie to have character development?<br />
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The filmmakers had an opportunity to go this route and done an introspective story about drug addiction set against the backdrop of a “teens in the woods” movie. But it doesn't. It goes straight to the gore and doesn't really say much else about addiction. The movie is at odds with itself: it didn't need the drug addiction subplot to succeed. If they really wanted to use drug addiction in the movie then they should have used it more, made it an allegory somehow. Have it running through the veins of the movie. Instead it’s, "Oh hey, you're a drug addict? Now you're a possessed demon, puking blood on me? Thanks for the update."<br />
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All that aside, the movie works. It's one of those things where I am being nitpicky. It's my thing. I find something good and then expound on its faults instead of championing its strengths. Really, when it comes down to it, the movie is entertaining, well shot and paced and unbelievably gory. My concerns about it being one of those detestable remakes melted away after the first thirty minutes.<br />
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Taking all this into consideration, if you're looking for a fun time and have a strong stomach, you should see this movie. It's got about everything you could want in a horror movie.<br />
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Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go track down my VHS copy of <i>The Evil Dead,</i> hook up my VCR and feel like a freshmen in high school again.<br />
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Another Note: Anyone willing to sit through the credits will get a nice surprise. While it's anticlimactic and can barely be considered an Easter egg, it brings up a load of questions.</span></i><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">1 - I understand that Stephen King directed and wrote </span></i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Maximum Overdrive</span><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"> but, let's be serious, no one truly considers that a film. It's a movie about killer trucks. Killer trucks! With Emilio Estevez. That's not a film. </span></i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3144833490573685674.post-42516315418947490972013-02-24T15:42:00.001-05:002013-02-24T15:42:51.269-05:00New Films Attempt to Capitalize on the Success of Lincoln<i>by<b> </b></i><b><a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Luke%20Burns" target="_blank">Luke Burns</a></b><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Thaddeus "Rad Tad" Stevens</td></tr>
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<b><i>Radical Republicans </i></b><br />
<br />The breakout character from Lincoln, Congressman Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones), gets his own movie—with a twist! Thaddeus “Rad Tad” Stevens is the <i>raddest</i> of all the Radical Republicans. When President Andrew Johnson (Alan Rickman) proposes an overly lenient reconstruction plan for the southern states, the only way to set things right is for Rad Tad to challenge Johnson to an epic series of extreme sports competitions, freestyle rap battles, and dance-offs. And if a break dance beat-down doesn’t make President Johnson mellow out, then Rad Tad will just have to initiate some totally sweet impeachment proceedings.<br /><br />
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<i><b>30 Days</b></i><br />
<br />William Henry Harrison (John Cusack) thought he had it all: A big house, a fast horse, and a high-powered job working as President of the United States. But when he discovers that he only has thirty days to live, he realizes that life in the fast lane isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. With time running out, Harrison must reconnect with his wife Anna (Laura Linney) and his ten children, undo the policies of Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, and learn to loosen up and seize the day. But to start, he’s finally going to fulfill his lifelong dream of giving the longest inaugural address in U.S history.<br />
<br /><br /><i><b>The Cleveland Chronicles: Erie County</b></i><br />
<br />A corpse turns up in two non-consecutive pieces and it’s up to the young sheriff of Erie County, future president Grover Cleveland (Channing Tatum), to crack the case. The first film in a planned trilogy, Erie County aims to introduce the rich Grover Cleveland mythos to the general public without losing any of the elements that die-hard Grover-heads love. Keep an eye out for fan-favorite characters such as future Secretary of the Navy William Whitney (Taylor Kitsch) and, of course, Cleveland’s arch-nemesis, Benjamin Harrison (Josh Duhamel). <br />
<br /><br /><i><b>Webster, Clay, and Calhoun</b></i><br />
<br />After a series of wacky misunderstandings, Senators Daniel Webster (Seth Rogan), Henry Clay (Jonah Hill), and John C. Calhoun (Michael Cera) are forced to share an apartment! These legendary statesmen will have to learn to make compromises about chores, bills, and whether territories will be admitted to the union as free or slave states. Can Webster bring himself to accept a deal that would strengthen the fugitive slave act? Will Clay keep the country from plunging into civil war? Can Calhoun win the heart of their neighbor, a kind-hearted schoolteacher (Emma Stone)? And will all three men learn something about the true meaning of friendship before their lease is up?<br /><br />
<i><b><br />William Jennings Bryan vs. The Golden Cross Monsters</b></i><br />
<br />At the Democratic National Convention of 1896, William Jennings Bryan (Liam Neeson) made a speech that everyone thought was about the gold standard. In reality, he was trying to warn the nation of a grave threat from beyond space. Now, with the help of his quirky assistant (Olivia Munn), he travels the country fighting off an invasion of interstellar monsters that are made of gold and shaped like crosses. This summer, “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!” Presented in eye-popping IMAX 3D.<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3144833490573685674.post-38904097791995469862013-01-11T11:46:00.000-05:002013-01-11T11:46:47.953-05:00Six Funny Things from the Films of 2012<i>by </i><a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Luke%20Burns" target="_blank">Luke Burns</a><br />
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This year, a few movies brought me to laughter with funny moments I wasn’t expecting. In no particular order, here are those moments:<br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>1. "I'm from the future!" - <i>Looper</i></b></span><br />
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Is there anything more frustrating in time travel movies than when everyone ignores the advice of a character from the future? Just do what he says, damn it, he’s from the future. <i>Looper</i> plays on this time travel trope in the scene in which Joe (Joseph Gordon Levitt) discusses his plans for retirement with Abe (Jeff Daniels), a mobster from the future who has been sent back to oversee his organization’s operations in the past.<br />
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Joe: I'm going to France. <br />
Abe: You should go to China. <br />
Joe: I'm going to France.<br />
Abe: I'm from the future! You should go to China.<br />
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This exchange encapsulates one of <i>Looper</i>’s central themes: the conflict between the arrogance of young people who think they can do anything and the arrogance of old people who think they know everything. It’s just not in Joe’s nature to listen to his elders, even an elder who KNOWS THE DAMN FUTURE. And when (in one timeline, anyway) Joe <i>does</i> wind up going to China, we understand that this represents an important turning point for the character. More importantly, though, Daniels’ sheer exasperation in his line reading cracked me up.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: small;">2. Euclid's First Common Notion -<i> Lincoln </i></span></b><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: small;"></span></b>There’s a lot to like about Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance in <i>Lincoln</i>. For one thing, he succeeded in making me feel sad that Lincoln died, and I thought I had already made my peace with that. Perhaps my favorite moment from the performance, though, is a very small one. When Lincoln first mentions Euclid, at the beginning of his rumination on the relationship between the first Common Notion and the idea of equal rights, he makes a triangle symbol with his fingers. It’s a delightful and weird detail. We know Eudlid was a geometry guy—is it necessary to make a triangle with your fingers to drive that point home, Abe? Is it some kind of mathematical gang symbol? And where did Daniel Day-Lewis come up with this idea in the first place? It made me laugh to beat the band. Nobody else in the theater seemed to find this as humorous as I did, but still. <br />
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<b>3.</b><i><span style="font-size: small;"><b> </b></span></i><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">Bagheads - <i>Django Unchained</i></span></b></span><br />
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Torch-wielding Klansmen<span style="font-size: x-small;"><sup>1</sup></span> with sinister masks covering their faces come sweeping down a hill on horseback to the strains of Verdi’s Requiem. Not exactly a likely prelude to comedy, is it? Well, this is a Tarantino movie. The scene that follows this sequence in <i>Django Unchained</i> is a flashback to a very funny extended exchange between the Klansmen about the merits of wearing bags on their heads, given that the bags are really hard to see out of. This is a wonderful way to undercut the aura of menace and power created by the previous sequence. We realize that, with or without their regalia, these bagheads are just a bunch of morons and jerks. Hilarious. <br />
<b><br />4. Hide & Seek - <i>Zero Dark Thirty</i></b><br />
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Towards the end of <i>Zero Dark Thirty</i>, during the raid on the Bin Laden’s compound, a Navy SEAL enters an empty room and whispers "Osaaamaaaaa…" He whispers in the same tone of voice that a kid playing hide and seek says, “Come out, come out, wherever you are…” The first thing this brought to mind was the Monty Python sketch, “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zekiZYSVdeQ" target="_blank">How Not to be Seen</a>.” (This may say more about me than it does about the film.) It also suggested a scenario in which, after all the years of work that went into tracking him down, Bin Laden confounds the SEALs and eludes capture or death by hiding under a blanket or in a hamper. The audience I saw the movie with laughed, and so did I. Later, I felt uncomfortable about having done so. <br />
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This sort of laugh would not feel out of place in a straightforward action romp, but it <i>does</i> feel out of place in a movie that features torture and opens with actual audio recordings from September 11. I wondered, did one of the SEALs who killed Bin Laden actually whisper, “Osaaamaaaaa…”? And if he did, does that make me more or less comfortable with my laughter? This moment points to the uneasy tension that sometimes arises when<i> Zero Dark Thirty</i>’s desire to work as a piece of journalism intersects with its impulse to be an action movie.<br />
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<b>5. Anne's Wheelchair - <i>Amour</i></b><br />
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I’m not going to argue that there’s a lighter side of <i>Amour</i> (<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-VVghX5xPyJI/T8wMCp-aWiI/AAAAAAAAMnY/DIfaeDl7m0g/s1600/lighter+side+of+1.jpg" target="_blank">Mad Magazine, take it from here!</a>), but the scene where Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) tries out her new motorized wheelchair got a smile and a little laugh out of me. There’s something delightful about the childlike joy and abandon that Anne exhibits while tooling around the foyer in her new wheels. My smile lasted until I thought about how the word “childlike” has different, darker connotations for an elderly or seriously ill person. Then I returned to being bummed out.<br />
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<b>6.<i> </i>"Strokin'" - <i>Killer Joe</i></b><br />
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<i>Killer Joe</i> can be funny, but it is also brutal. You’re never allowed to fully enjoy your laughs because of the uncomfortable speed with which the movie pivots between the humorous and the disturbing. The viewer is consistently denied the relief that comes with laughter, and at the end of the film there is a ton of unresolved tension. When Clarence Carter’s “Strokin<i>'</i>” starts playing as the credits roll - a dramatic shift in tone, to be sure - it is hilarious and a relief. <br />
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Finally, in the lyrics to “Strokin’” there are few questions related to the fleeting nature of time that I think provide an appropriate note upon which to end this list. For what is the primary concern of “the year-end list,” as a genre (of sorts), if not temporality?<br />
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<i>Didja make love yesterday? Didja make love last week? Didja make love last year? Or maybe it might be that you're planning on making love tonight… Strokin’!</i><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>1 - Technically they couldn’t be Klansmen, since the Klan didn’t exist until after the Civil War. But you see what I’m saying.</i></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3144833490573685674.post-29319445289839978542013-01-10T00:06:00.000-05:002013-01-11T11:13:44.046-05:00Stand-up Comedy - 2012 In Review<i>by </i><a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/James%20Folta" target="_blank">James Folta</a> and <a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Mike%20Yarsky" target="_blank">Mike Yarsky</a><br />
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<b>In a discussion of stand-up comedy specials, Mike Yarsky and James Folta talk about what they liked and didn’t like in 2012 and beyond.</b><br />
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<b>James Folta</b>: Lots of good comedy in the past couple years. I’ve been excited to discover John Mulaney, Hannibal Buress, Anthony Jeselnik and others. Who has excited you?<br />
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<b>Michael P. Yarsky</b>: Those people are definitely all great. Last year - in part because of <i>Louie</i> but also because he released a record, I discovered Doug Stanhope. In 2011, Doug Stanhope went onto a makeshift stage in Oslo with quasi-rehearsed material and spoke to people for whom English was their second language. At the beginning of the special, <i>Burning the Bridge to Nowhere</i>, he talks about how terrible and overly polished Comedy Central specials can get, and that his didn’t go remotely like it was captured on air. He said that it’s simply not indicative of live comedy or what it’s really like on the road. Not twenty minutes later or thereabouts, he is onstage, in a blurry shot and unsteady cameras, holding a plastic cup of beer, and he says, "I think that's why I hate observational comedy so much. Because there's no passion. There's no rage."<br />
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<b>JF</b>: The exasperation of that Stanhope set is really striking. It’s just so dark. He addresses this in the brief intro to the show, saying he wants this to be an antidote to the slick and edited Comedy Central style of stand-up specials. For his own CC special, he talks about a joke he made at the top, lampooning the fact that none of the crowd knew him and had only been warmed up and primed to laugh at him. In comparison, the special in Oslo will be a look into the road as he experiences it. And the performer we see does seem to have been living in a van for a while. Stanhope seems really tired and burned out but yet he’s still up there, performing, making people laugh, making people applaud. And that’s what makes this a great performance, it’s about the work of it. Getting up and taking a swing. Every stage, every night.<br />
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<b>MPY</b>: Part of me is definitely with him about observational comics. I tried to watch <i>The Epitome of Hyperbole</i> on Netflix and I find myself overwhelmingly distracted by acts that are squeaky-squeaky-clean. After hearing as much of <i>WTF with Marc Maron</i> as I have, and considering that the conceit of raw, tell-it-as-it-is comedy began with Lenny Bruce in the sixties, I definitely got adjusted to more enraged, by-no-means clean comedy. It’s at a point now where clean means censored, and censored means dishonest. Obviously there are comics who have vulgar material that also have amazing clean bits, but sometimes being exclusively clean is not a genuine move, but rather a pragmatic move, and it’s almost like it’s possible to sense a little bit of the disingenuousness. I always feel there’s some restraint there. I don’t want restraint from my comedy; I don’t want people to exercise caution or tread carefully.<br />
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Comedy’s a mystery and it’s incredibly subjective, so it’s very difficult to disentangle what it is that makes it click for one person and not another. One of them is the idea of raw material. Raw doesn’t need to be edgy - I’d say Cosby’s family stories are raw and by no means vulgar - and doesn’t need to be unpolished. Is it that raw is real? Is raw the right word? And would I take raw at the expense of funny? Is Tig Notaro’s <i>Live</i> as great as it is because it’s so immediate? Or would it have been better had it been tried out and trimmed and polished into these crystalline bits? At the very least, it’s just a straight take of a live show, which is wonderful. It’s great to have all those little moments left in.<br />
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<b>JF</b>: Tig Notaro’s set was really brilliant. I think a lot of us discovered it through Louis CK’s promotion of it, which is for all intents and purposes a highest honor. But I think you nail it when you say “immediate.” Whether it’s a conceit or not, her opening makes it feel like she decided to do that set while standing in front of the crowd: “fuck it, I’m not doing my normal jokes.” The confessions and the measured reveals of all these sad events that came pouring into her life make this feel like a special moment. It’s what we love about a great improv set: this is a one-off, this is only for tonight.<br />
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The ending of this recording is what seals the deal. The joke about the bee that she alludes to all throughout, the one example of the jokes she can’t do in her state, is of course the one we want to hear. And when she takes a request from the crowd, the answer is a forgone conclusion. And hearing it hits you in the gut, the sinking feeling of hearing “comedy,” that polished, pre-written joke about a bee in a car, seems so frivolous, so hilarious on the tail end of what we all listened through. This juxtaposition crashes home the previous tour of her open heart. The little cream-puff we are treated to at the end makes everything that much rawer. <br />
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Is it Notaro’s breaking of the fourth wall that also makes this feel more immediate?<br />
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<b>MPY</b>: Louis CK in <i>Hilarious</i> talks to the camera and breaks the wall, but it’s way less shattering than a regular old cut to an audience member or the swell of laughter that goes up and down a little too neatly. There’s not a single audience member shown in his specials, and it’s made me notice it in other specials.<br />
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<b>JF</b>: One of my favorite specials this year seems to contradict the overall point we’re making here about raw comedy being superior to polished specials. Paul F. Tompkins’ Comedy Central special <i>Laboring Under Delusions</i> had the typically snappy visual setup of a special: well lit, packed house, cleanly shot and edited. Tompkins is in a dapper suit in front of a huge mural of himself and his name, rendered in a hip Soviet propaganda style.<br />
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His material is what sets it apart. The set is structured more like a one man show, all the bits and stories concerning jobs he once held. This is the same stylistic turn we saw from Mike Birbiglia between <i>Two Drink Mike</i> and <i>My Secret Public Journal Live</i>. The show is a guided, very personal tour of his life, focusing on small jobs and his journey towards being a full-time stand-up comedian. It’s pretty vanilla stuff, especially compared to what we’ve gotten into talking about thus far. But where the raw, seemingly unrehearsed, shot-from-the-hip nature of a Notaro or a Stanhope stands out as an antidote to overly polished mediocre jokes, Tompkins shines because he’s just plain good at what he does. He opens his special by saying he’s been a stand-up since he was 17 and it’s the longest he’s held any title. And it shows. <i>Laboring Under Delusions</i> is a well presented curriculum vitae.<br />
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<b>MPY</b>: Perhaps this is a good time as any to draw yet another - in all likelihood - broad and over-generalized distinction. I had recently re-watched <i>Bill Cosby: Himself</i> and listened to <i>To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With</i>, and they’re both masterpieces. Save for him asking “Well what if he’s an asshole?”, it’s clean, clean, clean. However, it feels raw. I have a very clear sense of, if not Bill Cosby’s person, then at least his persona, or rather that the truths he wishes to tell, whether or not they are run through an affected persona, simply ring true. The assumption with “raw” is that we’re dealing with something unsanitary, gristly, or non-sterile. It’s risky, unpleasant, and sort of foul. With “raw” I immediately get an image in my head of some form of raw meat, something corporeal and somewhat gory. But there’s also your array of raw seafoods, and raw sushi. Very elegantly orchestrated, fancy-pants, classy dining there. A stretch of a metaphor, to be sure, but rawness can manifest itself in various presentations, mostly meaning it is of its own essence. It’s not cooked or made to be something that it is not; it is fundamentally itself. The more processed the product becomes, the less recognizable it becomes. Like McNuggets, there are plenty of McComics out there too. I don’t mean to put people into a place where they are striving for rawness, but I think <i>Laboring Under Delusions</i> falls under the purview of rawness. It’s personal, autobiographical, and values the truth over the easy punchline. I don’t know if this is true-true, but Tompkins is professional enough to make me believe that.<br />
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<b>JF</b>: What did you think of Maria Bamford’s <i>Special Special Special</i>? This is an interesting one to consider in discussion of “rawness” in comedy, as she filmed the whole thing in her living room in front of an audience of just her parents.<br />
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<b>MPY</b>: I need to watch it again. I think it was a smart move to film it as such, because it’s damn cheap to do it all up like it’s very home-made, and you can market it as a surreal approach to making a special. So it’s simultaneously an artistic and economically practical move, and it’s possible that the incentive to keep costs low is what inspired her to go this particular comedic direction. I wonder how much the conceit of it is the way the special is filmed more than the material. I suppose this is the issue of a lot of the comedy we’ve talked about already, and this special’s the perfect example of seeing how something is filmed versus what is said can have an impact on what we see as raw or true or flat-out unfunny. If I talk about the special, do I start with a funny joke from it, or do I say, “Okay, so she decided to do it in her living room for her parents.” Is the overall gimmick more important or not?<br />
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<b>JF</b>: I think that’s true, they can overshadow the material, but I think these sorts of gimmicky framing device tell you a lot about the comic. It’s another chance to show us the world through their lens. I’m reminded of the “bros on tour” vibe of Dane Cook’s <i>Tourgasm</i> that was as much about the drama and prankster antics of the comics as it was about the stand up, and the fake twin interviews in Zach Galifianakis’ <i>Live at the Purple Onion</i> that gave him a chance to explore another character’s voice. These gimmicks bring us further into the comic’s world. Bamford’s comedy is much like how it was filmed: a little surreal, often odd, and somewhat uncomfortable. It’s a little too close; her confessions feel like something she’s revealing to her family, closer to rehearsing her jokes in a mirror than playing to a sold-out room.<br />
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I went to see Bamford live in San Francisco and walking out after the show, I got into a heated debate about how she treats her own mental health problems on stage. I maintain that it is brave and important to be frank and open about these things and that her treatment was fantastic. I believe comedy to be a powerful and healing medium. And her <i>Special</i> nicely reflects this visually. She’s often dealing with things that are so real, that we expect them to be relegated to an intimate setting. Her live show sometimes feels that way; we sometimes wonder if we should be here listening to these jokes or if we should just show ourselves out.<br />
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There is also something incredibly sweet about her just wanting to make her parents laugh.<br />
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<b>MPY</b>: I see what you mean. The stage as it is set up in her living room to just barely pass the illusion that there’s really a stage at all. Any time there is a straight shot of just her, the curtain, and the lights, there’s almost immediately a cut to a different angle that shows everything: the keyboardist, an amplifier sitting on a carpet, and even the ceiling fan. It’s symbolic of what the stage means for her, in a way. Like: the stage itself is a flimsy pretext for being intimate. It’s a paper-thin construction around what she hopes to portray as an intimate, real setting. And really, people perform on the flimsiest excuses of “stages”: maybe slight elevations in bar room corners, for example, to grant themselves that license. <br />
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So, with this conceit, I can feel the honesty behind it. One gimmick that drove me nuts this year was that, in Aziz Ansari’s new special, there were several occasions where he made the point - or made a punchline of - the fact that the story the audience just heard was totally made up. The crowd seemed to appreciate it, but I thought it was a huge negation. He’s an improv guy that should know to commit to even the most absurd of realities. But he enjoyed popping the illusion at the very end, and that made me sort of sad.<br />
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<b>JF</b>: Couldn’t agree more, unfortunately. I was disappointed with <i>Dangerously Delicious</i>. I mean, I wanted it to be good: Parks and Recreation is far and away one of the best shows on TV, I enjoyed <i>Intimate Moments for a Sensual Evening</i>, and was a fan of <i>Human Giant</i> from back when it was a UCB NY show. But something about this latest special just felt too much. The jokes did feel like a put-on, and I think the undercutting of his own premises that you’re referring to was deflating. The whole thing was too big and it felt sloppy and flat. His stand-up persona is getting a little too one-note, too close to the Jean-Ralphio end of the Tom Haverford spectrum.<br />
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<b>MPY</b>: I’m not as familiar with Aziz. I will say that it was quite a pleasure to dissect and parse apart the merits or weaknesses we find in the work of people way, way, way more considerably accomplished than myself. Not having seen everything out there this year - I still need to check out Kyle Kinane and James Adomian - I think one of the ones I’ve listened to, Tig Notaro’s is closest to my heart. I’m thrilled for seeing Louis CK in January and Marc Maron in February. That’s a way to get the raw experience, if anything. Instead of trying to seek out the perfectly filmed experience, just go see these people.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3144833490573685674.post-13630785255153680532013-01-05T17:07:00.000-05:002013-01-05T17:07:26.964-05:00Wes Anderson's New Wave<i>by</i> <a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Mark%20Paglia" target="_blank">Mark Paglia</a><br />
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<i>Moonrise Kingdom (2012)</i> - dir. Wes Anderson<br />
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Despite respectively revolving around heists, high school, family dynamics, oceanography, tourism, and a Roald Dahl book, Wes Anderson’s films have earned a reputation for all being alike. That is to say, they all possess a bright, anachronistic set design and sad adults played by actors surnamed Murray, Schwartzman, or Wilson. <i>Moonrise Kingdom</i> branches out in one obvious respect by making extensive use of child actors, and in other respects as well. Overall it lacks the coherence of his earlier films, but <i>Moonrise Kingdom</i> very nearly makes up for this with the promise it shows for Anderson to expand his style.<br />
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Of course, <i>Moonrise Kingdom</i> does fit into several stereotypes of a Wes Anderson film. Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman appear, surrounded by a knockout cast of Anderson newcomers. (Seriously: who else writes a couple of bit parts and gives them to Harvey Keitel and Tilda freakin’ Swinton?) The usual set design is in full swing; although the movie takes place in 1965 instead of the present day like his other works, Anderson’s fondness for vintage consumer goods makes this distinction undetectable. There’s his usual wry sense of humor and deadpan lines. And yes, the adults are very sad. Mr. and Mrs. Bishop (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand) are sad, Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis) is sad, and Scoutmaster Ward (Ed Norton) is a paragon of earnestness who is also sad. But their sadness is all somewhat tangential to the main story of Sam Shakusky and Suzy Bishop.<br />
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<i>Moonrise Kingdom</i> gives its child actors much more screen time that most movies that are made for an adult audience. Kara Hayward, as Suzy, is the standout, with her perpetual, wounded glower. Jared Gilman delivers several of Sam’s lines flatly, but this doesn’t detract too much from the film. In general, Anderson does a good job of writing kids’ dialogue that isn’t strained or overly adult-sounding. (At least, until he wants to with the Khaki Scouts, but we’ll get to that in time.) Roughly speaking, the first half of the movie depicts the revels of childhood and the second half brings in all the complications of the adult world. The childhood part begins with “A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” and a whimsical tour of the Bishop house and the island of New Penzance. (This too is typical Andersoniana, recalling the Tenenbaum house, Steve Zissou’s ship, the Darjeeling Limited train, and the Fox family’s den.) From here we spend most of the first half following Sam and Suzy’s camping trip across New Penzance, which exemplifies a child’s ignorance of consequences. The pair plan for months to run away and camp on a beach without any consideration of what will happen next. It’s as if they think that running to the far side of the island will solve all their problems, which is probably thought by many a child who impulsively and briefly runs away from home.<br />
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Not that all is idyllic. Sam’s fellow Khaki Scouts encounter our protagonists in a scene that is equal parts<i> Lord of the Flies</i> and Jean-Luc Godard, which also introduces the film’s more postmodern aspects. Well, not “introduces,” because that honor falls to the narrator, played by Bob Balaban. In <i>The Royal Tenenbaums</i>, we are guided through the characters’ backstories and plotlines by Alec Baldwin’s rich baritone. Balaban’s narrator is a far less conventional fellow. He addresses us directly, looking into the camera at various locales, explaining the setting but giving no details about the characters. Then, to make his role a little odder, the narrator enters a scene and addresses the adult characters. More than that, he drives the plot by telling them where he thinks Sam and Suzy are, revealing in the process that he taught Sam some of his camping skills. This sets up the second half, in which we explore the adults’ various miseries and Anderson starts throwing in genres left and right.<br />
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About those Khaki Scouts. They hold meetings in a whimsically absurd treehouse, and their dialogue channels tough-as-nails soldiers from old war movies. Why? Why not? To keep the film’s energy from flagging, Anderson inserts Swinton’s Nurse Ratched-homage Social Services, Keitel’s venerable old scoutmaster, and Schwartzman as a sort of summer camp Milo Minderbinder. We get a flood, a fire, lightning strikes, an overpowering Britten soundtrack, and a climax that is equally reminiscent of screwball comedies and <i>Looney Tunes</i>. Like the old screwball comedies, <i>Moonrise Kingdom</i> solves Sam and Suzy’s dilemma with a minute or two of quick dialogue that finally makes use of the fact that the Bishops are lawyers and that Captain Sharp is lonely. He adopts Sam and saves the kids from the sort of calamity that would usually befall Daffy Duck.<br />
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The screwball ending is a bit at odds with the more serious elements of the story, and for that reason it fails to satisfy. Or rather, Sharp adopting Sam is fine, but the snappiness with which all the adults’ problems are solved mars the ending. Having saved Keitel earlier (from what one can only assume is an intentionally bad special-effects fire), Norton’s scoutmaster is seen happily overseeing his troop in October, when one might normally expect him to be at his day job as a math teacher. Mr. Bishop, after a brief scene in which he doubts that his responsibility to his children can stave off his depression, joins his wife in calling the kids to dinner, apparently signaling his recommitment to the family. This is where a <i>Tenenbaums</i>-style narrator could fill in the gaps for us and give a better sense of conclusion than these snippets do. We don’t mind if a screwball comedy ties together all the loose ends in a slapdash finale; but here it seems like short shrift to the existential crises plaguing the adult characters. And then there’s the matter of the first lightning strike. Part of Captain Sharp’s impetus for adopting Sam is the threat from Social Services that he may be subjected to electroshock therapy. The film’s climax involves Sam being hit by lightning and then transferring a spark to Suzy via a kiss. The seeming implication is that they have both received a natural form of electroshock therapy and will be more well-adjusted as a result. If this is the case, it proves Social Services’ point and legitimizes her off-putting ideas concerning troubled children. And furthermore, it’s unnecessary, since the sweet, understated final scene really does conquer cynicism with its suggestion that Sam and Suzy are just right for one another.<br />
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Wes Anderson’s previous movies possess their oddities, but remain more coherent and self-contained. This insularity gives them a good measure of their charm, but it also raised the worry that Anderson was bound to become monotonous. Sure, there were experiments with framing devices (<i>Rushmore</i> and <i>Tenenbaums</i>) and visuals (<i>The Life Aquatic</i> and <i>Fantastic Mr. Fox</i>), but <i>Moonrise Kingdom</i> shows Anderson pushing his boundaries in entirely new ways. It does not marry cinematic inventiveness to story as effectively as, say, <i>Annie Hall</i> or <i>Jules et Jim</i>. Yet the very elements that make <i>Moonrise Kingdom</i> fall short of Wes Anderson’s best work give his fans reason to be excited for whatever he does next.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3144833490573685674.post-67740020492416452742013-01-05T15:48:00.000-05:002013-01-05T15:48:37.993-05:00You Can Never Go There and Back Again<i>by<b> </b></i><a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/James%20Folta" target="_blank">James Folta</a><br />
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<i>The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)</i> - dir. Peter Jackson<br />
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J.R.R. Tolkien's <i>The Hobbit</i> was one of the first books I ever really loved. I read it over and over. In fact, the second thing I ever bought with my own money, out of my dragon-hoard of coins collected in a sock, was the BBC radio dramatization of <i>The Hobbit</i> (my first purchase being the VHS set of what was then the original <i>Star Wars</i> trilogy). Later, I wore out my copies of the <i>Lord of the Rings</i>. I even read <i>The Silmarillion</i> and acted like I enjoyed the experience. (Don’t lie to yourself, that book is only a badge - the true believers will back me up on this one.)<br /><br />So I was excited for the new film version of <i>The Hobbit</i>. I was excited when I first heard that Guillermo Del Toro would direct. I wasn’t even disappointed when he dropped out. (Though, can you imagine?) All this is to let you know that I’m biased towards <i>The Hobbit</i>. I want it to be great and live up to my childhood ideals. I’m inclined to be the Fox News to its GOP (Blam! Sucker Punch!). And, for the most part, it did satisfy me - watching this movie adapted what I loved most about the <i>Lord of the Rings</i> films to tell a tale with all the wonder and whimsy from the book’s sweeping mythology. It was fun in that Spielberg-directing-Indy rollicking adventure sort of way.<br />
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The strength for me ultimately lay in the nostalgia. The film has its flaws, certainly. But on the basis of the recollections it triggers in me, any detractions would have to overcome almost insurmountable obstacles. The books stamped me hard. Jackson’s previous movies too: <i>The Fellowship of the Ring</i> came out in 2001 when I was in eighth grade, still mostly concerned with getting good grades, playing video games, and horsing around with my friends. To say the <i>Lord of the Rings</i> intersected with my life at impressionable moments is an understatement. Any nerdy or even slightly marginalized kid knows the power of discovering something that feels made just for them but also serves as a membership card into a group of like-minded new friends.<br /><br />The film did a great job of reminding me why I love Tolkien’s world. The characters are all boldly drawn. They are, as they were to me as a child, larger than I’ll ever be: every Middle-Earth inhabitant is a giant. The good guys have strong beliefs and ironclad convictions and the bad guys are evil and ugly. Thorin Oakenshield is sufficiently steely, staring off and soliloquizing about his lost homeland. Bilbo is the bumbling fish-out-of-water we root for to overcome his small stature and reputation to accomplish great things. The main villain is Azog, the one-armed orc, pale and scarred atop a giant white warg, a fantasy Moby Dick that roars and slashes his way through scenes. Gandalf is the quintessential gray wizard, a little absent-minded, wondersome and scattered, but always returning at just the right moment with just the right flaming-pinecone spell. He is a deus ex machina in a robe.<br /><br /><i>The Hobbit</i> is structured as a series of set pieces strung together by sweeping overhead shots of various parts of Middle-Earth. These sequences are beautiful; we are treated to the band trudging through pristine forests, across striking mountains, and through gently undulating fields. For me, it approximated that openmouthed awe which the book inspired; each page felt like flipping through an atlas, leafing over to discover and rediscover how massive and epic this world was. The movie’s wide shots get at this feeling of history, of mystery, and of magic - all discussed and recalled in hushed and reverent tones. The action draws you in as well; it’s sufficiently kinetic and choreographed, best on display in the band’s hectic escape from the goblin kingdom, a hack and slash sprint over the rickety bridges and platforms of the subterranean fortress. It’s fun and exciting and at times, even funny.<br />
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It’s also nothing new. This escape scene is indicative of the flip side of my nostalgic response; we’ve already seen this before. The epic sequence of the goblin kingdom feels almost exactly like a scene from the <i>Lord of the Rings</i> trilogy. The CGI of the goblin bridges and catwalks built deep in the earth could be the exact same CGI used for the Uruk-hai factory. And when the goblin King lumbers up to block the heros’ way on a bridge, I almost expect him to shout “you shall not pass!” And it’s not just recalling the movies. Watching <i>The Hobbit</i> reminds me of the books, but this is a hazier memory, of words and imagination, not CGI and actors. In that way, I’m really only reminded of the thrill of discovery, of the feeling of the first time I read the book, before I knew that J.R.R. was John Ronald Reuel. <br /><br />Again, it’s fun, it’s great. It’s what I want. But it’s ultimately trodden, though hallowed, ground. The movie caters to this reminiscing with a number of do-you-remember-’cause-we-remember winks. The most glaring examples are whenever the One, Darkness-Binding Ring appears. It is treated to dramatic slow motion shots that revel in the significance we now know this jewelry has. Elijah Wood also appears, in the beginning of the film, as if to smooth the transition for viewers who might be queasy from too quick of a change in Hobbit protagonist. <br /><br />There is an interesting turn here: the reversal between first written and first filmed. <i>The Hobbit</i> becomes a prequel, not true of the book which came out (and I read) before the <i>Lord of the Rings</i> books. This changes the experience of some elements. Now, we as the audience know the power of the ring that tumbles from Gollum’s pocket, but in the book’s chronology, we have no idea what it is. The significance is still unknown. For the moment, it’s just a ring.<br /><br />I can’t say that this hindered my viewing, but once again, it wasn’t the same as what I remember. Which wouldn’t be a problem if I didn’t cherish my memory of these books. Of course, this isn’t always the case (I didn’t like reading <i>The Da Vinci Code</i>, the film didn’t have to meet any expectations), but the difficulty of satisfying anticipation is at the heart of the nerd rage backlash against any book/comic/game-to-film adaptation. We’ve reached a place where even film-to-remake adaptation requires staking out grounds. Now saying, “the old <i>Spiderman</i> was better,” requires clarification.<br /><br />I’m not complaining, per se; I understand that culture co-opts, appropriates, and reuses. Creative destruction, post-modern, mash-up, perpetual nostalgia, etc., etc., etc. But there’s a certain odd experience of watching your childhood memories come alive, and arrive off-center. It’s like if you were somehow to make a real woman out of a Barbie doll, only to have her die immediately because her lungs were too small. Some things are too idealized to be realized.<br /><br />But does it ultimately matter? I don’t think so. Was there too much Radagast compared to the book? Was Dead-head Radagast and his Iditarod racer of rabbits weird and fun? Yes to both. There are some itches that can’t be scratched and probably shouldn’t be. I guess that’s the fun and the difficulty of the nostalgia associated with watching the filmed version of <i>The Hobbit</i>. Is it not quite what you remember, or want to remember? Is it so fun that it might be protected by mythic Elvin joy-runes? Yes to both.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3144833490573685674.post-57562438156928855052013-01-05T02:27:00.001-05:002013-01-05T02:27:39.951-05:00A Map of Empathy<i>By </i><a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Mike%20Yarsky" target="_blank">Mike Yarsky</a><br />
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<i>Cloud Atlas (2012)</i> - dir. Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski & Lana Wachowski<br />
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Because this is the recursive, matroyshka-based <i>Cloud Atlas</i> I am discussing, it seemed appropriate that, in my review of the film, I would quote my review of the book, in which I quote somebody else:<br /><br />‘Roger Ebert wrote of Darren Aronofsky's <i>The Fountain</i>: "If [it] is an ambitious folly, that's hardly inappropriate because the movie itself is about one of humankind's most grandiose follies, the quest for eternal life...The movie has already been damned as silly and praised as audacious at film festivals from Venice to Toronto -- and both those assessments are valid, in part because of the movie's biggest aesthetic gamble: its earnestness." Substitute “the quest for eternal life" with "the will to power," and "its earnestness" with "its uniqueness of form," and that is mostly where I stand with <i>Cloud Atlas</i>.’<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />There is a big stink these days about the languishing of earnestness. The irony epidemic is upon us, say the nay-sayers, as is the slow atrophying of the young people’s will to empathize and take much seriously. David Denby tried his hand at nailing a pamphlet to a church door with his inscrutable, overwrought <i>Snark</i>, and R. Jay McGill Jr. got his 500-year history about sincerity flying off the shelves. Regardless of the anecdotal evidence, the ever-pervasive dread about the subsequent generation’s flagrant narcissism – which is really grand talk coming from the (shudder) <i>Baby Boomers</i> – that has existed since the beginning of time is once again wasting space in the cultural conversation. <br /><br />Unlike many, I am willing to acknowledge that I do not have a bird’s-eye view on the moral compass of an entire generation. I do not have an Alethiometer from a Philip Pullman universe that can gauge the true nature of men’s hearts, that can parse out the wounded idealist under the stoic cynic <i>en masse</i>. I doubt that aloofness and earnestness are distinctly opposed, and that the landscape between the two can be summed up in such a reductive and binary way. Perhaps irony and sincerity stem from and feed each other; perhaps the ironic comment does not preclude a mean, ironic heart. Or, more obviously, perhaps we’re using the word irony all wrong. Perhaps the very act of living itself is, despite everything, an act of utter earnestness.<br />
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But under the hand-wringing of the Baby Boomers about the next generation’s inability to really connect with the plight of others – which probably stems from a selfish anxiety that we will put them in homes or cut their Social Security – is an evaluation of our own generation that viciously critiques itself. The giant, bulbous pus-sack of the Internet self-flagellates and denigrates its “hipsters,” a now utterly vacuous and meaningless term that has devolved into meaning anybody that exercises the minutest semblance of discernment in how they consume popular culture. Meaning everybody. I am utterly unable to reconcile the diagnosis of the oblivion of sincerity with the seemingly more endemic onslaught of self-awareness. Sincerity is not the absence of self-awareness by any means, and I think earnestness and kindness can stem from that kind of reflective nature. It can even branch out of a preoccupation or self-obsession with one’s own conduct in relation to others. Sometimes that kind of selfishness has a sweeter taste to it than kindness that is enforced by decorum or propriety, as just about any 19th-century English novel we were forced to read will tell us at length. And I mean at length.<br /><br />I mention all of this only because sometimes a work comes along that demonstrates, in part, how empathy can be found in a self-occupied grandiosity, and places of almost unbearable self-consciousness. This is really the quest of <i>Cloud Atlas</i>, as a novel and as a book. This novel and film are the strongest evidence that even out of self-aware handwringing comes this wonderfully convincing understanding and sympathy for others. In the novel, David Mitchell takes six stories and inhabits their genres and voices so proficiently that it is equivalent to a virtuosic literary form of Method acting. These voices span centuries, and take on the accurately portrayed English language of yesteryear, but also a reasonably deconstructed, post-apocalyptic perversion of the language. The book laces these stories together – a little tenuously at times, and definitely with an ironic wink here and there – but their struggles, under all the pomp and artifice of such an ambitious and conceited novel, are remarkably human. This, in part, comes through a lot stronger in the film.<br />
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<i>Cloud Atlas</i> mires itself in the typically human, admittedly banal struggles of literature and cinema: a journalist uncovering a devilish corporate scheme that sacrifices the welfare of the public on the altar of profit; the struggle for survival of the ‘good ones’ against a roving tribe of cannibals; and the pratfalls of muted desires and unrequited love. These stories are set across vastly disparate times and time zones: from Europe to Asia to the middle of the Pacific Ocean. They are also deliberately placed within very specific formats in both the book and the film: the story of a clone is heavily informed by the sci-fi tropes of <i>Blade Runner</i>; the post-apocalyptic story and speech are purposefully gritty. What is new about the genre exercise, and is it fair to say they are new simply by force of juxtaposition? Are six somewhat familiar stories scrambled up and spliced together as such allowed to be called unfamiliar just because one film bounces between them?<br /><br />The extra dimension, here, is how the stories are connected, but this seems too obvious an answer, and is the primary problem of both book and film. The book connects these stories oftentimes in a groan-inducing cop-out wherein one person’s story is simply a fictional manuscript read by another, or the seed by which a movie script germinates. If <i>Cloud Atlas</i> intends to posit that our souls are interconnected, or inextricably linked by indomitable forces, it ought to have done a better job making a case for the interconnectedness by aiming for a much more concrete connection. That the connections are so shoddy does not bode well. Ultimately, the book gets bogged down in New Age-y theories about spiritual ancestry and the inheritance of souls, and this flirts too much with cosmic unknowns for me, especially since the phenomenon of interconnectedness is very beautiful and satisfying to point out within strictly secular contexts. The film reinforces this recurrence of souls by casting Tom Hanks everywhere, and even putting white actors in Asian roles (and letting them don make-up that just begs for, and ultimately received, racially-based consternation). It also panders to the lowest-common denominator by giving everybody a shooting-star birthmark which is put into focus mostly to demonstrate that the studio might not trust the audience with such a lofty and unmarketable premise.<br /><i><span id="goog_1168754276"></span><span id="goog_1168754277"></span><span id="goog_1168754279"></span><span id="goog_1168754280"></span></i><br />
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<i>Cloud Atlas</i> is ambitious, serious, and demands engagement from the audience with its material. This often gets reduced to the lovely and sometimes misappropriate word “pretentious,” which has now come to mean any form of self-importance, even the kind of self-importance it takes to get up in the morning and go to work. It is long, it is packed with stories, it is commenting on separate genres of fiction, experimenting with literary devices, connecting them in the most post-modern and abstract of ways, and making a statement about the evolution of voice and language over five-hundred or so years. It is political in its implications about the future of global society. This is a book and movie that should, on all signs, not seem at all engaged with the humanity of its characters. Such experimentation usually comes at the expense of empathy, not with its blessing. The epic scope and grandiosity – its macro-scale analysis of fiction and genre together – seems like such a grand, big-scheme comment on the flow of things that the specificity of its characters would get lost in the shuffle, but it does not.<br /><i> </i><br />
<i>Cloud Atlas</i> saves up empathy – deep, deep understanding – of characters that are in the most reprehensible of spots. It gives us a moment to reflect and connect with those with whom we’d like to connect the least. Below is an only vaguely spoiler of a quote from the book that gets tailored a little bit more for the film:<br /><br />"The lovelorn, the cry-for-helpers, all mawkish tragedians who give suicide a bad name are the idiots who rush it, like amateur conductors. A true suicide is a paced, disciplined certainty. People pontificate, 'Suicide is selfishness.' Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call it a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reasons: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching. The only selfishness lies in ruining strangers' days by forcing 'em to witness a grotesqueness."<br /><span id="goog_1168754298"></span><span id="goog_1168754299"></span><span id="goog_1168754296"></span><span id="goog_1168754297"></span><br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wG4yWKru_fI/UOfRtccKvII/AAAAAAAAAXw/_wkqHyl4UNw/s1600/Cloud-Atlas-Frobisher.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="168" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wG4yWKru_fI/UOfRtccKvII/AAAAAAAAAXw/_wkqHyl4UNw/s400/Cloud-Atlas-Frobisher.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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I agree, but that is hardly the point. The point is that <i>Cloud Atlas</i> deigns to rescue one of the most brutally stigmatized acts from the unjust throes placed upon it. It’s an immense relief that someone is willing to examine the humanity of such a drastic measure from the perspective of what it means to the perpetrator, not just how it pulls his or her companions out of complacency. Regardless of my quibbles about how poorly American culture handles or processes self-annihilation, the major point is that <i>Cloud Atlas</i> breaks through what many see as a grandiose and theatrical gesture, finds a kernel of deep human connection, and empathizes in earnest. These feelings and thoughts seem to spring from a place deep within, all the while maintaining that grandiosity. <br /><br />This attitude is indicative of both the film and the book in their entire. It seems it is possible to have self-aggrandizement and the recognition of others’ humanity wedded. It seems one can carry a critical distance evaluating its source material and simultaneously hold a sincere love for the material’s inhabitants. Once again, the “A vs. B” binary mode by which mankind filters just about any two things that coexist - whether it be two colleges in a town, two teams on a field, two parties in a Congress, or two late-night talk shows on TV – devolves into arbitrary and pathetic competition. Things are not that simple. These binaries and variances are all interconnected and interdependent. It all goes beyond yin and yang, or even life and death. <i>Cloud Atlas</i> does not happen in twos - it happens in six.<br /><br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3144833490573685674.post-54914451078619899132013-01-01T10:16:00.000-05:002013-01-01T10:18:03.585-05:00Issue 1 - Horror
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>VIRTUAL ROUND TABLE - Horror Scenes from Non-Horror Movies</b></span><br />
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<a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/2012/10/alien-surgery.html" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="111" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FIi-9TBrzK4/UHQ3j9IrqJI/AAAAAAAAAS4/be4Is_BZEsg/s200/independence-day-thumb.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/2012/10/alien-surgery.html" target="_blank"><b><span style="font-size: large;">Alien Surgery</span></b></a><br />
<i>by</i> <a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Brian%20Agler" target="_blank">Brian Agler</a><br />
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The dissection of a supposedly dead alien goes horribly wrong in Roland Emmerich's <i>Independence Day</i> (1996)<br />
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<a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/2012/10/dont-be-afraid-of-dark-be-afraid-of.html" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="111" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-UNJFioWXVvg/UH8Mz99qKaI/AAAAAAAAAVc/DxGdoIO_fhU/s200/kiss-me-deadly-thumb.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/2012/10/dont-be-afraid-of-dark-be-afraid-of.html"><b><span style="font-size: large;">Don't Be Afraid of the Dark - Be Afraid of the Light</span></b></a><br />
<i>by </i><a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Luke%20Burns">Luke Burns</a><br />
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<i>Kiss Me Deadly</i>'s (1955) Mike Hammer as monster in Robert Aldrich's bleak, cynical <i>noir</i><br />
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<a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/2012/10/the-opening-of-ark.html" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="111" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ohUOU7TZRjw/UHCbjKEkiYI/AAAAAAAAARs/uGP-soY2Njc/s200/opening-the-ark-thumb.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><b><a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/2012/10/the-opening-of-ark.html" target="_blank">The Opening of the Ark</a></b></span><br />
<i>by</i><b> </b><a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/James%20Folta" target="_blank">James Folta</a><span style="font-size: xx-small;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">The climactic opening of The Ark of the Covenant in Steven Spielberg's <i>Raiders of the Lost Ark</i> (1981)</span> </span><br />
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<a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/2012/10/plumbing-problems.html" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="112" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-FVifZ99qFBw/UHCVz_o6ecI/AAAAAAAAARY/cbVfvhvwOb0/s200/conversation-plumbing-problems.jpg" width="200" /></a><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/2012/10/plumbing-problems.html" target="_blank"><b>Plumbing Problems</b></a></span><br />
<i>by</i> <a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Allen%20Irwin" target="_blank">Allen Irwin</a><br />
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A look at Harry Caul's investigation of Room 773 in Francis Ford Coppola's <i>The Conversation </i>(1974)<b> </b><br />
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<a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/2012/10/the-haunted-house-in-clouds.html" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="111" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-v8BFdG7ZM4k/UHCdW-2HvyI/AAAAAAAAAR0/FHmek0kLock/s200/Cloud-City-thumb.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/2012/10/the-haunted-house-in-clouds.html" target="_blank"><b>The Haunted House in the Clouds</b></a></span><br />
<i>by</i> <a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Mark%20Paglia" target="_blank">Mark Paglia</a><br />
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An analysis of Irvin Kershner's <i>The Empire Strikes Back </i>(1980) as haunted house<br />
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<a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/2012/10/i-got-live-one-here.html" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="111" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-AI7r7Hz5A2Q/UIFB0U2FJaI/AAAAAAAAAV0/lewkB-iH6Mk/s200/batman-joker-thumb.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/2012/10/i-got-live-one-here.html"><b><span style="font-size: large;"> "I Got a Live One Here!"</span></b></a></span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>by</i> <a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Adam%20Sweeney">Adam Sweeney</a></span></span><b><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></b></span><br />
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Jack Nicholson mixes horror with the comic in Tim Burton's <i>Batman</i> (1989)<br />
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<a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/2012/10/the-incinerator.html" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="111" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-m2CnZ2D0eLc/UHCgTQaPPeI/AAAAAAAAASI/g72eNvnDK3A/s200/toy-story-3-incinerator-thumb.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><b><a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/2012/10/the-incinerator.html" target="_blank">The Incinerator</a></b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-size: small;">by</span></i><b> </b></span><a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Mike%20Yarsky" target="_blank">Mike Yarsky</a><br />
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Lee Unkrich's <i>Toy Story 3</i> (2010) unintentionally reveals the most horrifying truth of all<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>ESSAYS</b></span><br />
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<a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/2012/10/consent-horror.html" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="111" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wd_C23CQbqI/UH1rdJiC8QI/AAAAAAAAAUE/U-vK9lB_MuU/s200/audition_thumb.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/2012/10/consent-horror.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Consent & Horror</b></span></a><br />
<i>by</i> <a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Mike%20Yarsky" target="_blank">Mike Yarsky</a><br />
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An examination of the implicit agreements between horror films and their viewers, and the abuses thereof.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>REVIEWS</b></span><br />
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<a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/2012/09/everyday-horror.html" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="111" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wSp3jxijxr0/UHCiO_o3gkI/AAAAAAAAASQ/jXsAyoJkYS0/s200/Paranorman-thumb.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/2012/09/everyday-horror.html" target="_blank"><b>Everyday Horror</b></a></span><br />
<b><i>ParaNorman </i>(2012) </b><br />
<i>by</i> <a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Allen%20Irwin" target="_blank">Allen Irwin</a><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JCjmsVD338s/UHbW0XNEeMI/AAAAAAAAATg/3QbcDYssIQI/s1600/theatre-of-blood-thumb.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="111" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JCjmsVD338s/UHbW0XNEeMI/AAAAAAAAATg/3QbcDYssIQI/s200/theatre-of-blood-thumb.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/2012/10/theater-of-blood.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Lionheart's Greatest Performance</b></span></a><br />
<b><i>Theater of Blood</i> (1973)</b><br />
<i>by</i> <a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Adam%20Sweeney" target="_blank">Adam Sweeney</a><br />
<i> </i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3144833490573685674.post-49133195737116415592012-10-19T08:01:00.000-04:002012-10-19T08:01:29.376-04:00"I Got a Live One Here!" <i>by </i><a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Adam%20Sweeney">Adam Sweeney</a><br />
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<i>Batman </i>(1989) - dir. Tim Burton<br />
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About hallway through Tim Burton's <i>Batman</i>, the Joker sits down to a meeting with his mob connections. He’s just gotten through killing his old boss over the set-up that turned him from Jack Napier to the Joker, and he is explaining to his audience that he is taking over as mob boss.<br /><br />There is one man named Rotelli who sits at the opposite end of the table. He asks, "What if we say no?" in regards to the Joker's proposition of running the city into the ground. The Joker stands, seemingly gracious, and explains that he doesn't want a war and that they'll just shake hands. Rotelli seems a bit confused, but takes the Joker's hand anyway.<br />
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Suddenly, an electric buzzer is heard and Rotelli begins to shake. Turns out, the Joker had a hidden buzzer in his hand that electrocutes Rotelli where he stands. The Joker, finding humor in the situation, begins to sing an old show tune while Rotelli burns to a crisp in front of all his business partners. Once done, the Joker throws the now charred corpse of Rotelli back into his chair. He looks to the rest of the congregation of mobsters, tells them to think over his plan, and kicks them out.<br /><br />This is where it gets dark.<br /><br />The Joker is alone in a room with a blackened, smoky cadaver. He begins talking to the body, not just talking to it, but with it. This "conversation" leads the Joker to the conclusion that he must kill the rest of the people in the mob, while saying it was Rotelli's idea.<br /><br />This is not the Batman TV series of the sixties. This is a horrific act, and yet, we accept it.<br /><br />If you look at the Rotelli’s body, this isn't some wacky Tim Burton corpse (see <i>Sleepy Hollow</i>, <i>Batman Returns</i>). This is a burned body, not unlike one pulled from a car wreck. What we just witnessed was an execution. I'm not entirely sure how this film got away with a PG-13 rating.<br /><br />Maybe it was because of Nicholson's performance, juggling the funny with the downright insane. As an actor, his levity serves as a misdirection from the horror of the situation. You realize that he killed a man, that he electrocuted him and that he's intending to massacre the rest of the mob, but you still laugh. The things he says, the way he acts, his expressions. All of it lull you into this sense that you're not really seeing a murder. You're seeing a guy being playful with death.<br /><br />Something else to take note of : a lot of the music in the film, provided by Danny Elfman, is upbeat and entertaining. When it gets to the scene with Rotelli, it is incredibly dark. The juxtaposition of the comic (Nicholson's performance) and the horrific (the music as well as what actually is occurring on scene) is brilliantly mixed.<br /><br />So, what does this do to the audience? It establishes the Joker’s insanity, talking to a corpse, but also his brazen ruthlessness, killing a man in front of his allies. What makes the Joker’s actions so frightening is that, to him, death is just another stage of life, and should be treated with the same blasé attitude. To paraphrase Heath Ledger's Joker, he's just ahead of the curve.<br /><br />If this scene was handled by any other director or actor, it probably would have come off as too dark, too grim because, really, this scene is directly out of a horror movie.<br /><br />The Joker laughs off death because he has survived it already. He was dropped into a vat of chemicals and emerged from it a little the worse for wear, but relatively unscathed and, in many ways, stronger. Is Burton trying to tell us that death is not something to be afraid of? That we should start embracing it? It's entirely possible. The Joker certainly seems to think so. <br /><br />Even the Joker's face resembles that of a grinning ghost, who mocks Rotelli for failing to cheat death (as the Joker has). At the end of the movie when the Joker falls from the building to his supposed death, the police come upon the crater the impact created and hear laughter coming from it. The Commissioner reaches into his pocket and pulls out his lucky deck of cards, an item that aided the Joker in his first escape from death.<br /><br />Did the Joker cheat death a second time? The subsequent sequels never deal with that, though there is some speculation. What we do know is that the Joker jokingly embraces death, rather than fears it, a theme that features in many of Burton's movies: the horror mixed with the comic.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3144833490573685674.post-30919759664962949882012-10-17T09:32:00.000-04:002012-10-17T09:35:13.376-04:00Don't Be Afraid of the Dark - Be Afraid of the Light<i>by </i><a href="http://www.perpetualnostalghia.com/search/label/Luke%20Burns">Luke Burns</a><br />
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<i>Kiss Me Deadly</i> (1955) - dir. Robert Aldrich <br />
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The sinister truth about <i>Kiss Me Deadly</i> was right under our noses the whole time. There were plenty of clues: the terrifying, illegible, backwards-scrolling credits<sup>1</sup>; the fact that the movie opens with a woman running for her life from some unknown malign force; but most of all, it’s the main character, Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker), who shows us the true nature the movie we’re watching. <i>Kiss Me Deadly</i> isn’t just a film noir — it’s a straight up horror film. It’s a monster movie, and Mike Hammer, our hero, is the monster.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Mike Hammer looking like he stepped out of a<br />Universal Monster Movie.</i></td></tr>
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To be sure, Mike Hammer is a brutal, violent fellow. It would be easy to say that his capacity for violence is all the evidence you need to show that the man is a monster. Similarly, one might say that from the point of view an uptight repressed 1950s authority figure, Hammer and his renegade ways seem quite monstrous indeed. But neither of those explanations gets at the aura of visceral terror that surrounds Hammer. In order to understand the extent of the horror that Hammer inflicts, you have to look at how other characters react to him. Specifically, look at the reactions of two thugs (who I will refer to as Goon 1 and Goon 2) who come after Hammer on two separate occasions, and get more than they bargained for both times.<br />
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Take the <a href="http://youtu.be/yOt-5Ak8tpA?t=49m15s" target="_blank">scene</a> where Goon 1 and Goon 2 come after Hammer while he’s ostensibly changing into a bathing suit to take a dip in a bad guy’s pool (it’s a long story). The goons come towards the camera, advancing on Hammer, who is only visible as a dark shadow in the foreground, on the edge of the left side of the frame. Goon 1 approaches the shadow, stepping forward enough that his head is out of frame. With a dramatic and sinister sting of music, he’s thrown to the ground, unconscious. It would be a pretty standard scene of a PI treating a thug to some chin music, except that we don’t actually see what happens to Goon 1, and Goon 2 doesn’t stay and fight, he flees in terror. He cannot get out of the room fast enough, and once he’s gotten out, the camera lingers on his confused and frightened expression while eerie music plays. What did Hammer do to Goon 1 that was so bad it warrants that look of terror? What did he do that was so bad that it had to take place out of the frame?<br />
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A similar <a href="http://youtu.be/yOt-5Ak8tpA?t=1h13m4s" target="_blank">scene</a> plays out when Hammer, having been captured by the bad guys, manages to work his way free of his restraints. He’s going to escape! At this point, we expect a “hero on the run” sequence, with Hammer hiding from his captors, trying to elude them and get to safety. This does not happen. Hammer hides, but in the way that a monster hides in order to jump out and terrify his victims before devouring them.<br />
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Goon 1 (Unlucky Goon!) enters the room where Hammer is being held, prepared to send the nosy PI to meet his Maker. He barely has enough time to register that Hammer has escaped before the door behind him swings shut, seemingly by itself, plunging the room into darkness. Once again, we don’t see what happens to Goon 1. The film cuts to another room, where Goon 2 is contentedly looking out a window at the night sky. Then we hear the bloodcurdling scream of Goon 1 — it’s a scream of utter terror, not pain — and Goon 2 goes to see what’s wrong.<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-llBIJ8c7i9Y/UH6ytpG5XQI/AAAAAAAAAU0/vBJxDqacLfs/s1600/kiss-me-deadly-horror-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="241" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-llBIJ8c7i9Y/UH6ytpG5XQI/AAAAAAAAAU0/vBJxDqacLfs/s400/kiss-me-deadly-horror-2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Goon 2 enters the darkened room and nervously looks around. It’s a sequence that feels just like the part in a slasher movie where one of the characters goes off on their own to investigate “that strange noise…” There’s an odd kind of tension that builds because you expect Hammer — our hero, remember — to jump from the shadows at any moment to dispatch Goon 2. But he doesn’t. In true monster movie form, the monster has disappeared before we could get a good look at him. All that’s left is a corpse with a look of utter horror (and, let’s be honest, a little bit of goofiness) on its face. Another disturbing detail is that it’s not even clear how Hammer killed the guy! There doesn’t seem to be a mark on him! Goon 2 swallows hard. He’s still scared, but knows he’s lucky to be alive. It's easy to imagine this as the start of a monster movie. In the next scene, investigators would be called in to look at the aftermath of Hammer’s escape: “What could have done this, inspector?” “Well, whatever it was, it wasn’t human.”<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iUTP0TecQLk/UH6yyaSgkpI/AAAAAAAAAU8/frP8xre9GcI/s1600/kiss-me-deadly-horror-3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="242" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iUTP0TecQLk/UH6yyaSgkpI/AAAAAAAAAU8/frP8xre9GcI/s400/kiss-me-deadly-horror-3.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Once you understand Hammer’s true nature, you start to notice other monstrous things about him. Hammer gets shot in the gut at point blank range, but keeps going, Michael Meyers style. He lies on his couch for hours, like a slovenly vampire lolling about in a coffin, waiting for night to fall so he can begin his investigation. More broadly, there’s the delightful lumbering Frankensteinish quality that Meeker brings to his portrayal of Hammer.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The fire of the Atomic Age.</i></td></tr>
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Frankenstein is actually a good reference point for the end of the film, which shows that fire — in this case, fire of the atomic, end-of-the-world-variety — is still “baaaad”, and that there are worse things coming out of the lab than a reanimated guy made of stitched-together dead bodies. This latter fact is perhaps the main reason why we fail to see Hammer for what he really is. Your ordinary, run of the mill Frankenstein or Wolf-Man is small potatoes in the atomic age. Darkness, shadows and the monsters they contain are nothing in the face of the all-destroying power of the blinding, bright light of the bomb. What horror can compare to the horror of nuclear annihilation? Given the choice, we’ll take a good old-fashioned monster like Mike Hammer any day.<br />
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">1 - This style of credits would later be used by another horror noir, </span></i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Seven</span><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">.</span></i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0