Pick of the Week
Pina [Blu-ray] (Wim Wenders, 2011) Criterion Collection
I know that most do not want to see this movie even though
they think they probably should. Pina
is wonderful but because it shouts high art it is going to come across the
shelf to you as smug and lifeless. You are not going to enjoy this edification,
you tell yourself. I am not convinced that there is such a thing as high art
but if there is it is something that speaks to you and for you in ways that are
fundamentally powerful and evocative. In your experience of high art you are
written and you write a view of yourself and how you relate to the various
aspects of social and more abstract truths in such a way that is pertinent and
necessary. High art is not boring, it is crucial and its voice, once accessed,
becomes commanding and liberating.
This is the power of Pina.
I am aware that my descriptions of what it is are going to tend any reader in a
direction opposite to the one intended but these series of modern dance, both
on a stage and on the streets of a small German city refers to something that I
believe is inside of you, not universally, but idiosyncratically. The dancers
are outrageously gifted and their movements are suggestive of that winning
human combination of angry aggression and soothing grace. There are four main
pieces, all originally choreographed by Pina Bausch, presented here and they
have as their main source of expression the outrage of what it is to be trapped
in a life and the corresponding knowledge that awareness of this morass is in
itself a freedom. Bodies fly, eyes often shut or wide eyed open, women are
caught by men, perpetually seek embrace, the loving lead the blind, and the
truth of our hopes and failures are grounded in the physicality of the body and
the space within which it can move. And the dancers because of their spiritual
knowledge of their bodies are able to draft visions of enactments in space that
open the environment for all the viewers. They mock their limitations while
demonstrating them. The film is endlessly deep and will be different each time
you watch it. Ideally, you should have it on all the time. It is exciting,
visceral and participates in a type of thought given its absence of
declarations that I would silently call poetry.
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Also released:
And Now Tomorrow (Irving Pichel, 1944) R2 UK Simply Media
Emily Blair, the eldest daughter of a family rich enough to
live in Blairtown, has contracted meningitis and is now deaf. The immediate
result of this, of course, is that she feels obligated to postpone her
engagement to Jeff who deals with the pain by falling in love with her sister
Janice. It is not clear why Emily has come to this decision given her startling
ability to read lips and the fact that despite not hearing herself talk she
still speaks in a consistently measured and appropriately inflected cadence.
Truth be told the only appearance of her deafness is the claim that she is. It
is the lack of actual ramifications to her affliction that clues us in to the
bigger impairment that her deafness is only a metaphor for. Emily is a snob and
it takes the once poor hearing specialist Dr. Vance to cure her of both her
failings, the physical one she cannot help and the mental one she accepts. The
main problem with this problem and solution as it is presented in the film is
that Emily seems kind and lovely and Dr. Vance comes across as the epitome of
class resentiment. Offering her an
appointment in his working class Pittsburgh clinic which he pungently describes
as dirty and overly crowded she demurs, as you or I would if we could, and we
are still to be left with the image that she is spoiled to the core. The person
in the film who seems most governed by class stereotypes and disdain is Dr.
Lance and perhaps this is the more intriguing point: it is a problem if you are
so rich that you don’t hate others for who they are as it means the natures of
other people are not really hindrances to your life. Dr. Vance represents the
lowly at their lowest, gifted but blind to their own snobbery. The film has no
time for details, save Janice’s suggestion of being romantically stymied by a
guilty suitor in terms of sexual frustration, it cuts right to its moral points
and stays at them. As a strategy it fails if only because our dislike for Dr.
Vance prevents us from seeing his presumably correct agenda. We can all see why
he loves her, why she loves him is not as clear.
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Cujo [Blu-ray] (Lewis Teague, 1983) Olive Films
There is something about movies from the eighties, and not
exclusively Hollywood movies, that are terrible. I don’t like thinking this and
it is my deep hope that it is not true but if one was to do the research I
suspect you would find that the eighties were a period of odd transition. The
standards of what could be shown to a mainstream audience along with the
primacy of story over character make these dramas, along with too much flat
colour, tired and boring, family movies that have hints of darkness that no family
is looking for. Characters are types and decadence is not shown in actual
behaviour but through facial hair for the men (if you have it you are trouble)
and by extra weight for the women (unless you are jolly, serious and overweight
means evil). The good people are clean, part of their experience in awfulness
is how dirty they become, and well mannered, closer to mannequins than to our
neighbours. And the children are ideas of children, almost always outdoorsy and
drawn to the values of the 1950s even if their parents are not. The films in
total seek sentimental outcomes – instead of trying to inspire optimism against
odds (which I am for) they instead present the notion that good (clean) living
will win out because it is right (which I am against). Cujo is two films in one: the first is a lame presentation of a
suburban community in the throes of the usual cinematic issues of infidelity
and business trouble; the second is the gripping tension between a mother and
her son stalled in a car in the country pitted against a rabid Saint Bernard.
The thing that connects the two tales is the argument about the existence of
monsters and it is here that the film tries to make a strong point. Unless the
mother is out there in the country with her son as cosmic punishment for her
marital lapse the existence of the rabid dog is there to show that, yes, even
though your existence is managed there are still gentle things out there that
can turn into ferocious beasts and your survival is not based on merit but on
luck. The film is right to devote its second half to a confrontation as it
erases the icky weirdness of the first half and re-contextualizes it: none of
that fake crap matters now that we are aware of the monster in our midst. The
film has all the tendencies of the trite but these do are erased in the actual
grip of a real terror. The film has the sense to end when it should without any
pontification about meaning when obviously there is none to be found because
that is a part of the monster.
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Deadly Blessing [Blu-ray] (Wes Craven, 1981) Shout! Factory
In a community of “Hittites” (which I think is a cross
between Hutterites and Mennonites and has nothing to do with the Anatolian
Hittities) a man, Jim, marries a woman, Martha, from outside the flock and is
ostracized for doing so. Oddly enough he sets up his farm next door to his
family which predictably exacerbates the tensions between them. Even though he
has been excommunicated this does not mean that he is not entitled to some
land. Martha is not given any such perks because she is deemed by the community
the less than neighbourly title of incubus. The label is inappropriate for a
number of reasons beyond the fact that the term is designated for males where a
succubus is the female equivalent. Martha is shown to us to be not overtly
sexually tempting as much as she is martially interested in her husband.
Confusions abound, tragedies strike, friends from California arrive without any
sense of how to deal with the stranger in their strange land. The film is an
awkward one with set and dream pieces working as examples of film-making
expertise that are then awkwardly fit into the picture as a whole. The whole
thing works its way to a conclusion that is surprising and disappointing given
that it resolves little and only adds an excusing plot twist in order to judge
no one as failing anything. The film is terrible with the only signs of life
coming from the elder Hittites. Compared to the California crowd I know who I
would rather spend the day with.
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Death Race 3: Inferno [Blu-ray] (Roel Reine, 2013) Universal Studios
Life sentenced convicts race against each other, free to
murder other drivers, in order to win the death race. Five victories and you
are freed from your sentence. It sounds like a great sport and fun but, predictably,
market forces are trying to commercialize the game in ways that are
compromising the spirit of the match. The film acts as an expose of how a group
of convicts seek to confront the inadequacies of the new corporate agenda. I
saw Death Race, the first, and while it did not end up on my year end best of
list it was a moderately enjoyable film that was horribly violent but not
without its guilty pleasure. I missed the second film and perhaps this has
impacted my ability to enjoy the third offering. However, I don’t think the
problem is that the plot was too complicated or that I was missing essential
pieces of who these people were and why they were there but instead any
momentum that the film developed was crushed by an exposition style that
deflated any forward movement. The film ends, after a confusing closing piece
that I was not paying much attention to anyhow, with a Keyser Soze revelation
sequence that does not drop your jaw but has you asking why are you doing this,
why are you showing me the dull ending twice? It was all silly played out with
no irony.
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Django [Blu-ray] (Sergio Corbucci, 1966) RB UK Argent Films
The opening shots are of the title character dragging a
coffin through the wilderness. The coffin looks heavy and the terrain is not
smooth, any viewer who has ever performed a camping trip portage will
immediately sympathize. I was immediately grabbed and as long as you are
passive in your attention the film will continue to enchant. We learn that
Django is after Major Jackson who murdered Django’s wife though there is no
reason to care. We know that Django quietly stands for something that we
support and we know that he is bound to run into something that is going to
challenge his righteousness. It does not matter what but to be fair Major Jackson
is a wonderful slice of awful; the sort of man who uses human beings as clay
pigeons. The film provides all the usual Western escapades, there are plenty of
gunfights in saloons and the not so great outdoors, a heist and a betrayal and
everything is punctuated with brutality. The most brutal aspect of the film is
the most powerful: the weather and the terrain shout of the dark cold wetness
and outside of Swedish dramas by Berman and August I have never felt so chilly
while watching a film. I mean this as high praise, the art direction is
wonderful, the mud is wet and impenetrable, the devastation of the landscape
believable and disturbing. The closing scenes of Django, hands smashed beyond
possible use, trying to find a way to pull his trigger while braced on the
irons of a cemetery cross are arresting and delightful. There is no shortage of
Christian imagery throughout the film but it is my sense that it just there to
add to the gothic pathos. He certainly does suffer and he exhibits a
respectable sexual propriety but he does not have anything resembling a
forgiving nature, as the coffin eventually attests.
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End of Watch [Blu-ray] (David Ayer, 2012) Universal
The pleasures here are found in the camaraderie of the two
central characters who are also LAPD officers. Their conversations have an
easy-going rhythm and their wit seems natural and tied to the actual domestic
and dull situations that they are in. They are the sort of people you may work
with or just simply know who are at ease with themselves and with others and
while you know they have some problems you also know they are not going to
burden you with them. You envy them their casual and comfortable way of making
a joke in whatever social situation and you want to resent them but their
likability resists even the possibility of developing anger towards them. This
is the key to their appeal and to why they semi-annoy. They are socially doing
fine, even when awkward they manage it well and it seems natural and not
learned. A film that only puts us into the company of two guys who are at ease
with one another and their world needs to give us something else to keep us
tuned in. If this is true it is too bad because it is this type of thinking
that gets movies into trouble. The police work that our officers are committed
to is unbelievable, the high level of aggression that they face from the
criminal element, the lack of knowledge they have about the context that they
are working in, the persistent ache of poverty and violence in the city. All of
this is believable. What is not is that if it is as persistent and as ugly as
it seems in the film that these two could manage to maintain their perpetually
jokey attitudes. I know that tough situations bring out the jokester in some of
us but the situation of the film is beyond tough and I would insist that it
must produce a psychic debt. In this sense, and only in this sense, the film
perturbs me as it seems a brochure advertising police careers that is going to
potentially or likely destroy that easy going nature of yours. It is propaganda
but it is very good propaganda.
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Frontier Horizon [Blu-ray] (George Sherman, 1939) Olive Films
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Hold Your Breath [Blu-ray] (Jared Cohn, 2012) Asylum Home Ent.
Some years ago I watched a stack of films in the After Dark
Horrorfest series. The films were not very good and I had learned my lesson
about the relationship between marketing and actuality. Then I watched Mulberry Street and I loved it. It was
gritty, the writing and the acting were compelling and it was about rat people.
The rat people angle was understandably what originally enticed me but I kept
with it because I was genuinely tickled by all of its aspects. I wish this had
not happened because I now have a precedent for surprise and so I keep watching
all sorts of dreck under the pretense of the big maybe, maybe this will be
great. And it still sometimes happens. Hold
Your Breath is an argument in the other direction – poorly made in every
way and unforgivingly dull. The idea is if you don’t hold your breath when you
pass a graveyard you run the risk of imbibing the spirit of an evil lost soul
that resides there and obviously seeks escape. It sounds promising but it is
not. The graveyard is a big one and as you might predict not everyone in a car
full of late adolescents (average age I put at about 25) is able to do what is
needed in terms of breath control despite the startling insistence of one of
the characters (who later shows herself to be clueless about every other sort
of danger except this one superstition). Menace takes over; the seeds of
mistrust boil over into relationships that seem to already be based on a lack
of trust. They are all idiots and they are all quickly outraged and prone to
tantrums that do not create tension but make the viewer feel like they need to
be the calm person in order to get through all this cheapness. There is no
metaphor here just a very loose idea that has me wondering whether the director
took the title’s advice when preparing the film.
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Indiscreet [Blu-ray] (Stanley Donen, 1958) Olive Films
In writing this column I have not set myself any rules but I
have a few guidelines. I avoid referring to actors and directors because my
critical interest is in the film itself and not in placing it within a context
of history of auteurism. I have no great prejudice against this sort of
criticism except that many of its purveyors tend to ignore the film itself or
reduce it to a line or two of plot summation. Reading someone like Jonathan
Rosenbaum can be maddening because much of what you are given is information
about the film, predominantly its supposed maker and how it relates to the
other films in the genre or the career of that director. As one of our most
praised living critics I am struck by how little his work creates enthusiasm
for the magic of particular films. I aim to celebrate and to comment (and given
the first may need to do some serious thinking about my obsessive vice of
wanting to cover as much as possible. Prior to doing this I believed I actually
liked most everything I saw) and I am very happily in no position to educate.
This brings us to Indiscreet and the
only reason to watch the film which is to witness Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman
working off of each other. Unlike you I have never been fond of Cary Grant. I
find him wooden and so filled with the affectation of charm to be charmless. He
is redeemed, constantly, by finding a way to challenge his own debonair image
with goofy gestures or some inspired silliness. This is Cary Grant at his best
but I am problematized by the lesson that sleaze tempered with awkwardness is
an ideal. In the film under consideration he plays another smoothie matched
with the equally cool and erudite Ingrid Bergman. They fall in love and work
out some issues mostly in ways that are disturbingly stupid. The main trick of
the film, which is also one of its premises (which I will not mention as it is
supposed to be a surprise) is lame and thankfully irrelevant. The joy of the
film is the snappiness of these two actors, mostly Bergman, as they work
through confusions of social fear, insecurity in personas governed by their
confidence, and the frustrating fear that maybe a person cannot be
self-defined. The banter is accurate and attaches itself to situations where
the viewer is impressed by how that is the smart and funny thing to say and can
believe that someone would say such a thing. They are wits, and they are smart,
and they deliver their carefully written dialogue as if it is occurring to them
in the moment. They play well with their scenery and this is all for the fun.
Like End of Watch (to which this film
is similar) we are being sold an image of splendour and sophistication that is
either paired with loneliness and pain to make it palatable or because it is
only honest to show that this is a part of the package. I don’t care if these
two get married except that increases the odds of them being seen together and
after two hours plus of them playing through a far-fetched plot it would be
pleasurably relaxing to hang out with them and listen to them riff.
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It’s In the Bag [Blu-ray] (Richard Wallace, 1945) Olive Films
My expectations were low given that madcap film of the
1940s, which I correctly predicted this to be, tend to demonstrations of the
chaotic that exhaust more than they entertain me. This story of a poor
conniving family managing a bit of an inheritance that they are sure to abuse
was inexplicably entertaining. I attribute the merriment to the personality of
the head of the family (the Floggles, who I concede would do anything to make
money off of a dead horse) and his relentless desire to serve himself along
with the assistance of his exhausted and blandly encouraging spouse. Rarely has
the neglect of children been so funny and the absolute lack of moral teaching
is refreshing. There is not a hint of redemption in anything that they
accomplish or fail so singularly directed is their intention to make a fortune
without effort. The two Floggle children have nothing in common with their
parents and so are of no interest except in where they are of use. Floggle does
not care, he knows he is dubious, he knows that no one can guess how dubious he
actually is and he uses the gap between perception and belief to do what he can
get away with. Their greed would not be nearly as charming if they were smart.
Their beauty is in their stupid desire to grab at everything, they please like
the monkey who already eating a banana works to possess the one belonging to
his brother. They will capture you unaware, unless you are too smart for them,
then, they will just annoy you. If this is the case I bet that is an annoying thing
about you.
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Ivan’s Childhood [Blu-ray] (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1962) Criterion Collection
Ivan is a twelve year old scout for the Russian army. Prior
to his acceptance to those ranks he had been a Partisan, undercutting the
regime whenever possible. He is an orphan who has also lost a sister. He is
hardened and has no interest in doing anything but keeping at the game of
retaliation. For him it must speak of a vague justice but this justice serves
mostly to compensate for that which has been lost. He is without mooring and so
he attaches himself to a series of parents, all military, to whom he seeks to
impress with his prowess and his bravery. He is not scared in the terrors of
the day because his sense of life is not present to him. He is only afraid when
he dreams. He is also only happy when he dreams. His dreams are beautiful and
suggest and show a world of harmonious and bountiful nature within which he is
a happy participant. These idyllic nature dreams have no bearing on his present
life and I suspect do not belong to the realm of actual memory either. They are
idealized visions of what was there before it was all taken away. Before it was
taken away, I am confident, his life was perceived and received as not much of
anything. But now that it is gone, it is now the symbol of everything and
symbols are only idols if they are not the icons of a truthful belief so his
dreams must be real and they must be the thing to protect even though their
existence can never be. His world is vicious and the imagery of everything
constantly pointing at him with a violence that has no anger is dark and
believable. Outside of the world of fantasy there is not a cheerful thought or
image in the movie. But the threat against life and hope is so powerfully
evoked you recognize that the honest portrayal of the worst is in itself a
source of cheer given that the alternative, that the dead and dying do not even
wound us, would be the end of all of us.
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King of the Pecos [Blu-ray] (Joseph Kane, 1936) Olive Films
Where the brevity of Frontier
Horizon is a flaw that demonstrates the ineptitude of that film in King of the Pecos it aids in creating
suspense. King of the Pecos, also an
early John Wayne, is a vastly superior film. Again, the rich are overwhelming
the poor, this time by bullying ranchers (the very soon to be rich) through
false legal claims to all the water in the vast region. John Clayborn, whose
father was killed at the beginning of the film, has come back to town to
prosecute Alexander Stiles, the man behind his father’s death. It is a run of
the mill Western theme but Stiles is so despicable and full of himself (you can
just guess where he sits on the weight scale) that the film transcends its
basics. Stiles sense of entitlement is so total that you cannot imagine him
being moved by anything except threats to his practical sense of desire. I am
smarter than these people and there is no way
that I am going to exist in tandem or cooperation with a land full of
rubes and boobs. And the ranchers except for the useless outsider Eli Jackson
and his more effective daughter Belle, are boobs and rubes. You can understand
Stiles disdain, they are toothless and deaf unable to see past their own
stupidity to know that they are being ripped off. The film is crisp, the scenes
are sharp, and it is over before you are done with it.
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Nature Calls [Blu-ray] (Todd Rohal, 2012) Magnolia Home Ent.
To be overly generous this movie was so morally confusing
that I think that its aims may be ironic or to mock itself. It is about two
brothers, one devoted to the boy scouts and nature, the other beholden to his
ATM business and to a lifestyle celebrating the joys of having twenty
televisions in one room. Besides knowing exactly with which of these two
brothers my loyalties basically lie there is eventually not much to choose
between them. Everyone makes terrible decisions which they seek to deny and no
one can be said to do the right thing or to even have given it much thought.
The red flag, for me, was the way that the media based family cursed constantly
in front of groups of children only to find that this shorthand warning of
decadence was repeated by the scout leaders in front of the same children.
Everyone is clueless to what they are doing was the point and being clueless
for some clueless reason is better outdoors. If the film is ironic it does not
take adequate care to be anything more than stupid. And if you are given a
choice of critical distinction between ironic and stupid, stupid will always be
the trump.
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Nobody Walks [Blu-ray] (Ry Russo-Young, 2012) Magnolia Home Ent.
Martine is looking for a sound editor for her art project. Peter,
who is in that business, takes her into his home where she lives with Peter’s
wife Caroline and their daughter Kolt. Peter and Martine hook up, Peter becomes
jealous of Martine’s interest in other people and eventually Martine, at
Caroline’s insistence, is asked to live. It is a slice of life if your life is
casually and carefully out of control, that is, if you live in a house with
people who have no actual affection for anyone. The movie is boring but it is
because I don’t like a single one of the people in it. The problem is that the
movie does not like them either. The art film within the film appears to be
about how insects are scavenging the dead but in the actual film the insects
only buzz around each other. Watching the film is like being invited to
someone’s house that is doing so well financially in a field that has a touch
of culture that they think that makes them interesting. I like my nihilism with
a bit more punch.
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Officer Down [Blu-ray] (Brian Miller, 2012) Anchor Bay
Officer Down is
not nearly as much fun as End of Watch
but it is a bit more honest in its theme that immersion in systems of
perversity will have an effect on you. Formerly corrupt cop David Callahan,
however, was never a particularly winning personality. His interests are all
vices and when it comes to “normal” life his response is perfunctory; there is
no way that the day to day could compete with a life of willed and playful
oblivion. He is an empty man who is only partially interesting when filled with
bourbon and cocaine. Given a chance to remedy and redeem his existence he finds
that the whole cart of apples is rotten and that his desire for justice and
truth mark him as the same sort of outsider that he has been to others in his
life. He finds that what he was is what there is to be and that the systemic
supports to be something more stable and affirming only pay attention to these
virtues in terms of sophistical rhetoric. Again, and again and again, this
would be more powerfully presented if we had any sense that Callahan was more
than a shell of a man and that there was something human to him beside his
ability to collapse. He has no convictions, his defense of the good and true
are exactly what an exhausted person would do when they have grown tired, and
thus unable, to play the usual game. The point is that inspiration is not even
on the table, the reason to stop a life corrupted is only because it seems like
a work to keep going.
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The Quiet Man [Blu-ray] (John Ford, 1952) Olive Films
A nice film with finely realized characters all the more
impressive for also representing entire types from the red-haired firebrand,
the drunken matchmaker, the belligerent oaf, the overly educated young man, the
independent widow to cool for love but obviously desirous of it, to the American
arrival with his enlightened views and his respect for the ways that these
views are irrelevant. It is the American that the film is about and he is a
metaphor for us. Burdened by the violence of American not demanded of you but
tacitly expected and quickly forgiven, he has fled back to his Irish birthplace
in the hope of a tranquil, natural life where beating up your fellow man is not
part and parcel of what it is to life. The film is not so sentimental that he
is able to return to the idylls of innocence so thoroughly. He finds that you
have to fight here to, against the belief that traditions he does not live by
are arcane, and in order to show that life is worth fighting for. The measure
of what it is to fight are different and it is in this lesson that peace does
eventually come to him, a peace earned in the aggressive defense of something
that one loves and not merely something one feels that they have to do. The
film is masterful in all ways, from the setting of each individual shot to the
developments of each character. To be watched alone with a drink. I guarantee
that if you are over thirty you will hear its call and you will not be tricked
by its promise.
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Red Ball Express (Budd Boetticher, 1952) R2 UK Simply Media
When I write that this is a good movie I do not mean to
imply that it is going to knock you out or even leave you with much to think or
say. It is not the sort of film that you should highlight on family night at
the movies – not because it is vulgar but because its pleasures are small and
its methods so repeated that it cannot bear the weight of having a
responsibility in your entertainment life. This is the place of many a good
film. Marx was right that in a capitalist society leisure time becomes a
responsibility that cannot be squandered. If you watch two or three movies a
month you are going to miss a lot of films that will be good for you and to you
because they do not have the weight to justify their use of your time. This is
why, (although a download culture contributes to this) the most damning
criticism of a film today is that it was a waste of time. Money is not the
criteria, time is. And our time has become so scarce we need to make sure that
it is filled with exactly what we want it to be filled with. Red Ball Express is a World War II film
about Patton’s supply line and the ordinary and disgruntled soldiers who drive
the trucks filled with gasoline and ammunition. It has its usual adventure
elements and a love story between an American and a young French woman that
while thoroughly clichéd was handled in such a way that I felt actual
nervousness about their ability to unite. But the main plot point is the
relationship between a soldier and his superior, the soldier holding the
officer responsible for the death of his brother back in the States and bearing
a grudge that refuses any respect. It is fascinating how the tied of this
relationship shifts and we are slowly shown that the insubordinate soldier who
is commendable in all other ways is actually a fool in this regard. The social
dynamics, also neatly demonstrated in a racial question, are subtle and allow
for argument and rebuttal from the viewer given that they are content to be
only examples of how people are and not pronouncements of what they should be.
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Searching for Sugar Man [Blu-ray] (Malik Bendjelloul, 2012) Sony
I am a collector of albums from across the 20th
Century and I have no discretion in what I collect. I spend a lot of time
listening to music that I don’t much like because of an innate fascination
about the fact that it was ever made. Searching
for Sugar Man is the true story of how an American singer-songwriter by the
name of Rodriguez who made no name for himself in America was received as a
superstar bigger than Elvis in South Africa. None of this news made it back to
Rodriguez who toils in poverty in Detroit constantly trying to make ends meet.
The film itself is interesting and moving but I am equally drawn to this notion
of persons or a people making a totem out of a musical act who is, I am sorry
to say, a very ordinary talent at his very best. I am fascinated by the idea
that for every trivial and inspired recording there is someone or even a group
of people on this planet for whom this sound is everything. I don’t have any
conclusions to reach from my own fascination except to note and recognize that
I admire obsessives, those who are driven and drawn to a cultural force that
they fill with themselves and their own articulations as to what that thing
means. I find this stirring and dare say that those of us who are obsessed with
something/anything are less lonely and insecure than those who are not, for
those who find that living fills their days. All of these thoughts, and the
film itself, are furthered by the demonstration, once he enters the picture half
way through, that Rodriquez is a gem of a person. Actually humble, and both
shocked and non-plussed by the sudden attention, he does not let anything in
his life actually change. They may worship him but he is not about to begin to
worship his worshippers. This is, I concede, a good type of person to
innocently or ignorantly revere.
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The Seven-Per-Cent Solution [Blu-ray] (Herbert Ross, 1976) Shout! Factory
The idea that a perfect cinematic marriage is the minds of
Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud, under the pretense of curing Holmes’ cocaine
addiction is not one that most modern viewers would gravitate towards.
Thankfully the film is more than just a
movie about a cure and involves some nice scenes and a style of acting that you
do not see much of these days – actors committed to roles that are obviously
roles and not the illusion of actual people. These are people who you would
only find in a movie and there is something very rewarding about a person who
knows and recognizes their place. As a movie it is intriguing enough and some
of the visuals are memorable (a speeding and dismantled train) and shocking (a
team of white horses). The whole thing plays out exactly as it should – an
adventure matinee for precocious children. I am just now, at middle age entering
such a stage. The key to membership to this demographic is knowing when not to
make too much out of nothing.
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A Thousand Cuts [Blu-ray] (Charles Evered, 2011) Lorber Films
Cheaply made and basically bad, this play on film about a
director of slasher films defending himself against the distraught father of a
daughter murdered by a psychopath influenced by said films is intelligently
enough in its presentation of the debate. But it is not much more, and the
debate is not really interesting unless you have the terrible misfortune to
deeply identify with one of the two main characters.
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Ticks [Blu-ray] (Tony Randel, 1995) Olive Films
This is exactly the sort of film, of which there are
apparently an endless supply, that is completely muddled about its demographic.
It is too gruesome for children and too badly organized for anyone but a
forgiving child. The idea here is that marijuana growers through growth
steroids for their crops have inadvertently created a mutated form of the basic
wood tick. A group of inner city kids are forced to band together, first to
convince the always sceptical grown-ups that the problem is real, and then to
combat it through ridiculous acts of heroism and sacrifice. The ticks multiply
and there are some spooky scenes especially if you are creeped out by
quantities of large bugs skittering across the ground or floor. As a depiction
of the drug culture and its vampirish effect on the American teen it is telling
that the only people who have ever enjoyed this film are groups of teenagers
high on weed.
Trust [Blu-ray] (Hal Hartley, 1990) Olive Films
I am drawn to this film for the way it slides past all the
things that are wrong with it including an absence of set decoration, wooden
acting (except for Edie Falco who is unusually alive and real in this company)
and characters suddenly performing symbolic gestures in the place of what they
might have actually done. Maria, a pregnant teenager suddenly single and
homeless meets up with Matthew, abused by his father and overly dramatic about
his disdain for a television culture. These two going nowhere types are shown
to be already somewhere and their quiet non-romantic, non-sexual affection for
each other ingratiates itself into the viewer. You become startled by them
without caring about what else they do. All the unrealistic stuff they do with
other characters and the unrealistic situations expose themselves as not poor
movie making but a stylistic point – that stuff is fake because it is fake and
that it would take a heavily deluded person to believe that it looks real.
Their anomie and their fear freed by a sense of caring for one another we find
people in the place of these personas. The film seems to be suggesting that
love stories are fake, trust stories can’t be and that with trust all the fake
stuff can either be avoided or handled. It takes a careful cast and crew to
present the relation between the artificial and the real as both artificial and
real and compel the audience to make the same movement as the characters. This
happened for me, around the time that Matthew and Maria began to trust each
other I had begun to trust the film.
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