(Almost) The Last of 2007: No Country For Old Men, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, The Simpsons Movie

Here are 3 of the last 5 films I saw in 2007. All three are some of the biggest acts to debut before the year's end, though my reaction to each of them spanned from "great" to "meh."

Monday, December 17, 2007

No Country For Old Men: I was terribly underwhelmed by this nebulous story on a western man in the dusk of his life, and thought it veered toward viciousness and violence rather carelessly. Stylistically, No Country is stunning, don't get me wrong. I have to tread on this thumbs-down criticism lightly, because there is no question the Coens are two of the most important and talented filmmakers of my generation. But at the same time I can't help but think the movie was too callous in the handling of its subject (the American West, its people) to be received with such adulation. I know I'm in a minority on this one, but I felt cheated by the movie's end; after two hours of slaughter there was hardly any account for its characters, as if they didn't matter to begin with. There is such a distance between the Coens and the characters they create that each one always feels forcefully drawn up, making it that much easier for them to be, finally, expendable.




Friday, December 21, 2007

And then came director Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and The Butterfly: a sheer visual delight, and a film that has such tenderness for human life. French Elle Editor Jean-Dominique Bauby is suddenly paralyzed from a stroke, and learns to communicate by blinking his left eye; one blink for "yes," two blinks mean "no." By these means he writes a short novel chronicling his experience trapped within his own body, with the assistance of a speech therapist who recites the alphabet until he blinks "yes" for the letter needed to complete his word. The film is based on this true short story, and features a performance by Max von Sydow as Bauby's (Mathieu Amalric) father that rivals for the most emotionally devastating moments on film.

If you don't like this movie, you can't be human.






Sunday, December 30, 2007

Yeah, I know, I got to this one right under the wire, just hours before the end of '07, and even then it's sort of pathetic to think I waited all this time for The Simpsons Movie to arrive before my eyes on DVD format. You could see the complexity of the animation, how this "episode" was crafted specially for the big screen. I kick myself for missing this one in theaters last summer for this reason; it truly was a spectacle that I missed (if not a cinematic phenomenon, it was surely a cultural one.) And yet, if you look at the animation there is nothing done that hadn't been done before, and the story was your typical Simpsons arc: Marge and Homer arguing, the whole family suffering a public humiliation for something minor one of the family members (most likely Homer) could have prevented easily; Lisa in love (and Milhouse in love with Lisa); Bart exacerbating an already bad situation by misbehaving; and Maggie as the mystery shooter. So yeah, it was, like, the greatest Simpsons episode ever. I still will always refer to this great review that sums up about everything there is to be said about The Simpsons Movie.

Some New Film, Some Old: Russian Dolls, Juno, and Carlito's Way

Sunday, December 9, 2007

L'Auberge espagnole (2002) was the first Cédric Klapisch film I saw, and now the second, appropriately, the sequel to L'Auberge, Russian Dolls (2005), is another lovely jaunt through Europe where I live vicariously through the characters who find amazing abodes in the heart of Paris, and meaningful, hair-pulling careers as writers. Ah, where is that bottle of Bordeaux? My glass is empty and I need a refill.

Russian Dolls finds the college flatmates now buried in work they are disappointingly tied to as they struggle to make do with a reality that doesn't mesh with their dreams of yore. Each one, teetering on bona-fide adulthood, is swept off their feet by love and lust, still in touch with that dewy freshness of youth and ideals. Pour heavy. That glass is already empty...

L'Auberge Espagnole and Russian Dolls are to Generation Y, who now march solemnly into the dawn of their thirties, what John Hughes and The Breakfast Club were to Gen X-ers in the 1980s: a celluloid catharsis that demands we not deny the spirit of youth, enlightenment, of who we are, of who we love, of what we want to do, of who we want to be. Pour on!



Friday, December 14, 2007

I listed Juno in the number 4 slot of this year's Top Ten List, but it very well could have been placed further up (or down?) depending on the day. I wrote a bit about Ellen Page on Seen's sister site Scarlett Cinema, which defines Page as one of the biggest female assets to the film industry. You can read about that right here.

I'm thirsty for more of Ellen Page's fresh attitude and wit that holds as much clout as her male counterparts.


















Saturday, December 15, 2007

Hello, Brian De Palma! I missed your movie Carlito's Way in 1993, but now, nearly fifteen years later, I finally saw it, and I have to say it's one of my favorites. Pacino is always great, that's a given (except for in Two For The Money), but the real winner is Sean Penn as the coke addled, high-power attorney. For as humorless and annoying as Penn can be of late, one ought not to forget his serious contributions to cinema; his acting is simply uncanny. I have yet to see Into The Wild, but did see The Pledge (2001) and remember being impressed with his skill as a director too.

Also, some brief observations on the camera work in Carlito's: an outdoor party scene in the Hampdens reveals Penn and Pacino in extreme long shot, from what looks to be a mile away from the subjects; the sound of their conversation is crystal clear, however, and it creates a real sense of surveillance. De Palma also has the incredible ability to make the streets of New York look like they're duplicates on a set; in a number of scenes outside of a night club and an evening exterior of a cafe look downright painted.

glimmer of happiness (bird speak part 1)

at the risk of sounding like a whiner people of the web wide world my life sucks these days...

i know i've done nothing but mostly moan and complain about stuff lately, but i'm not being a dramasaur when i say that my cousin larry completely destroyed everything i had going here in my new life in new zealand.

granted i did manage to fix things with owain, and i still have my job. however in this month of decemeber you'd hardly notice these things. that alone their being good.

owain went off to the north island to be with his family for x-mas, so i have NO one to hang out with (especially in light of craig's sudden disappearance).

though i have work to keep me occupied a lot of the time (i've taken on a bunch of extra shifts in light of nothing else to do) it is still just my regular old "boring" security job. larry managed to rob the fun of my job by pointing out how unglamourous it is (i really used to like it to). there hasn't been a sign of ms. rhonwyn or the new duties and responsibilities she gave me in my promotion.

much like novemeber i haven't posted much due to depression combined with the blog killer nothing happening in my life. can't talk about stuff that doesn't happen.

due to sheer boredom at the beginning of this week, caused by all the humans of dunedin doing x-mas stuff, i wandered aimlessly around the botanic garden before my next monotonous shift.

without thinking about it i strolled into the aviary, the site of the beginning and end of larry's visit. when i noticed where i was i initially didn't really care... until suddenly a bird's call caught my attention...

"hello," i thought i heard. i looked over to see a parrot. i figured it was just one of those talking parrots you see in pirate movies. i wasn't in the mood to talk to a pirate today... it scwalked again in bird speak i couldn't understand with a "the" in the middle of it...

however i realized something. it wasn't in english... though it had a heavy accent, and was almost different in structure this parrot had spoke almost coelurosaurian.

this drew my attention right in. in hindsight the presentation of something unfamiliar and mysterious was just what the doctor had ordered to break me out of my depression/routine stupor.

"hello," i said back. the kea, i noted from her aviary sign, chirped happily back.

"how are you?" i asked slowly, making every word separate and clear.

she replied a long reply. not that i understood a bit of it.

"traumador," i said bobbing my head. this motion is the same a pointing at yourself in theropod. the reason we do this you might ask? well you try pointing with an arm that barely clears your chest!

she tilted her head clearly noting what i had done. i repeated it several more times.

i was gratified on the sixth or seventh time with "hine," her head bobbed.

so her name was hine... maybe... i wanted to test. "hine," i said arching my neck downward. the theropod version of pointing at something.

she immediately responded arching her neck as much as a parrot can "traumador."

i couldn't believe it... i was talking to a bird! sorta anyway... i'd noticed when i came to the aviary just before larry's arrival that i thought i heard familiar sounds in their voices, and that i should look into it, but in the wake of all the misery of late i forgot about this idea (probably of a brain the size of a peanut i guess).

i must have spent a couple hours standing there trying to talk to my new friend hine. despite a good start to this process things slowed down a lot from there. seems that bird speech has changed a lot in the 65 million years since we coelurosaurs went extinct...

if i'm gathering it right also the change of hunting forelimbs into flying wings has changed a lot of the torso down body language. the only thing we seem to understand of each other's is neck and head motions.

then came a big break through... pointing at the cage i got an answer i followed! "... makes ... ... feel trapped."

hine didn't like being caged... who would?... but i understood her! that and i could now put my talon on the emotion conveyed by her weird body sway.

it was an amazing start to our "friendship". two creatures distantly related MILLIONS of years apart! i immediately planned on regularly coming back to try and bridge this gap between us.

sadly as i needed to get to work soon (after what must of have been now 3-4 hours... i lost track of time for the first time in a month!) i tried to conclude. "bye," with the theropod motion of the tail for conclusion. she just looked at me blankly. "good bye." "farewell." "have to go."

nothing. rather than leave her confused i repeated "bye." to her a few more times, and than left at a slow but steady pace. just as i was leaving eye distance she said something three times. clearly trying to reinforce it like i had... i took it to be her version of "bye", and so i tried to copy it back to her. hoping i'd guessed right.

as i walked by other bird enclosures i tried a brief introduction to see if i'd just imagined the whole thing in a desperate attempt to forget my whole current situation. it looked grim for a few cages. none of the song birds responded specifically, that alone constructedly. all i got were random replies or even ignored out right.

i started to lose my optimism, and could feel my heart sinking as i thought i'd been day dreaming or something. snapping me out of my reemerging gloom a cockatoo called back "hello ..."

i tried out the name game, and was rewarded with yet another name. shoe. not exactly a normal sounding name, but than again my name isn't exactly one that comes up much either...

carrying on with the cages i found it was only parrots and other psittacines who could understand me and vice versa (psittacines is the fancy scientific name for the parrot bird family). this was an interesting development that i noted, and was going to have to explore soon.

for the first time in two months i felt exhilarated at work, and the time just flow by. i even decided it was time to get out and live a little. so i turned down working tomorrow's shift, and took my first day off from work this whole month.

what did i do with my day off? well i set out for port chalmers. now i haven't been to port chalmers since doing that show with andrew during my whole countdown of doom. as the name implies it was a port, but what does a tyrannosaur possibly want to do at a port you might ask?

well for starters its on the ocean. i LOVE the ocean. it has big boats. i LOVE big boats. making it different from most ocean type places that i've visited around dunedin and BC this one has all sorts of cool sci-fi looking machinery all over the place.

it's like the temperature on hoth suddenly increased melting all the ice, but yet the empire is still invading LOL

the biggest draw for me today though... where there's ocean there has to be fish!

come ice age or high water i wasn't leaving the port today until i caught at least one fish! not a boot fish like the last couple times (that's right not one occasion but two).

so i cast off my line, and took in the beautiful and cool scenery of the port as i waited for what i hoped would be my lucky day. after all don't they say the third ones a charm?

the only problem with fishing, especially salmon fishing that i was trying, is that you spend about 2 minutes prepping the hooks and line 10 seconds casting it off, and than the rest of the time just letting it sit there.

even with my ubber short attention span (thanks again to my small brain case) there's only so many waves, boats, sea birds, and false bite alarms that can distract me from what some might consider a very boring interlude in the fishing process.

where every other bit of ideal time in decemeber i'd have been brooding on my life post-larry, this time i found i was on happy thoughts. in fact grand thoughts...

what if i caught the biggest salmon ever seen? what if it wasn't just a bit bigger than your normal salmon, but was the Amphicoelias of fish.

Amphicoelias is a legendary almost mythical sauropod dinosaur who was based on a few monstrous vertebras indicated a long necked dino almost 67 metres long!

just imagine that. a long necked dinosaur twice the length of a blue whale! though it probably still weighed nothing compared to the whale, but twice as long is something!

so why isn't it celebrated as the largest dinosaur of all time? (i seem to want to quiz you this post people of the innerweb)

well the thing is, leading to Amphicoelias's mythical status, is that the vertebrae disappeared in the 1890's. discovered by cope during the famous bone wars (though how you get fossils to fight a war is a bit beyond me?!?) he drew a single picture of it, and no one of the time raised a fuss about this (which they would have at the time had he been making it up, as tensions among palaeontologists were a little high during this war), and than puff the bones disappeared...

leaving us with a fantastic benchmark for the fossil that got away...

so there i was picturing catching the biggest fish that you ever saw. snared on my line and brilliant step up bait and hook. throwing itself in and out of the water in desperate battle with my reeling. till the end i'm somehow triumphed.

than comes the make belief news coverage. i go from public enemy number one, like i still am every now and than on the TV. suddenly i'd be a national fishing hero. the kiwis are big on their fishing and outdoors stuff.

catching such a make belief, but ever so unpossible (but not impossible), fish would be the coolest thing ever. not to mention how it'd fix my problems.

suddenly interrupting my imagining, the line started to tug. which is funny cause until now i've never seen my line actually tug before!

i was at a slight confusion of what to do. i didn't think a boot could or would put up this much fight...

after seriously a 40 minute battle of the fishing trying for its life to escape, and me desperately trying to figure out how to actually pull in a fish the most amazing thing happened...

i actually caught a fish!!! my first one ever! it wasn't even a small one, but a 10 pound chinook salmon!!!

alright i'm definitely going fishing again! hopefully talking to the birds soon too...

so there you go people of the web wide world. sometimes it's the small things that make life worth going.

goners...

well now that it's december, and i wasted the whole month of november feeling sorry for myself, it's time to try and make things right. in the wake of my cousin larry's visit almost every aspect of my dunedin life has been shattered or altered. thus far i've done far too little to try and repair this damage.

of course as you know people of the web wide world i did manage to mend things with my buddy owain after his terrifying run in with my 15 metre relative. with the success of the direct approach with owain i decided i'd have to bite the bullet (which despite my massive t-rex jaw muscles would still hurt!... why is it people bite bullets before doing other painful things i wonder?) and try to fix my greatest mistake, and the biggest damage from larry's stay.
that was of course my directly attacking and insulting craig, my legal guardian. i totally fell into a mental trap set by larry convincing me that humans were my enemy, and i took this out on craig. the one human who has never been my enemy...

i'd hurt craig's feelings so bad (which in fairness i was harsh... he did raise me from the egg till i wanted to move out on my own) that he wasn't returning my calls or emails. meaning that the only way i could fix things was the direct approach... i figured i'd deal with the craig end first and track down an ammo store for the bullet later.

so first thing bright and early i plucked up my courage and set out for craig's home at salmond hall.

i'm not going to lie people of the webwide world i was not looking forward to this conversation at all. with owain he'd only been scarred by larry, and it had nothing to do with me, so it was an easy fix. craig on the other hand. man oh man. i'd been as big a JERK! to him as larry typically is to me...

arriving at craig's room i hesitated outside for several minutes hoping that somehow he'd start off this whole thing, and i won't have to... yeah okay kinda a dumb idea i admit people of the innerweb, but it seemed a lot easier than me doing it.

alas after several minutes of having no company but my pounding heart i finally knocked the door... the result of which was definately not what i expected.

the door just swung open! it hadn't been closed or locked at all.

reveiling a way less expected result. the room was completely EMPTY!!!

seriously everything was gone. it hardly looked like the same place i'd crashed when i first moved to new zealand.

i must have been so stressed about facing craig i'd gone to the wrong room or something. there wasn't a trace of him to be found anywhere.

that is till i turned around. there on the now empty dresser sat a vanilla coke... craig's calling card drink (he was addicted to this stuff when it came out, my hatching year so i'd know... he used to drink litres of the stuff).

i sat starring at the room even longer than i did the door. confusion and shock mostly replaced the stress (though a new stress was taking its place).

craig had simply disappeared. in the last couple days (owain had just talked to him) he'd somehow packed up and left. completely undetected.

his neighbors knew nothing of this. they didn't believe me when i came to ask. the front office could only tell me "an outside party had paid off his account".

so much for the direct approach.

rather than one loose end now i'm left with a whole unravelling knitted good worth of ends.
how am i going to fix things with him now? how am i going to contact him? is he okay? will i ever see or speak to him again?!? did he do this because of what i did?

to be honest people of the webwide world i feel worse right now than when i was fired from the tyrrell... which i thought was the most i've been cut off from home...

even though i didn't hang out with him much, having the only parent-like figure i've ever had run off after i pulled a hissy fit makes me feel like i cut myself off from home rather than vice a versa...

there's only one bright side... at least i didn't get the bullet first!

_

(Production Note from Prehistoric Insanity: We applogize for the delays in the Tyrannosaur Chronicles through the month of December. For the full behind the scene story check out the brand new Prehistoric Insanity Website. Not only does it have behind the scenes info on everyone's fav dwarf T-Rex, but will soon feature many of our other productions and projects!)

Short Experimental Films: Len Lye

Saturday, December 1, 2007

The Chicago Filmmakers' screening of Len Lye's short films earlier this month (12/01/07) was a fantastic film experience, and if you were so unlucky as to miss the 16mm tour of his oeuvre, there are a handful of Lye's films available for a peek on YouTube. I've posted my favorite above, Free Radicals (1958/1979), which begins at about 3:30 on the counter, and you can read a full description of each film in the series in an earlier post over at Seen's sister site Scarlett Cinema.

The Films of Pedro Costa

The Gene Siskel Film Center concluded its retrospective on filmmaker Pedro Costa a few weeks ago, and it was awesome. Here's a quick breakdown of what I saw, and again, please mind my brevity, but with two days left of 2007 I am scrambling to review everything that's been released in the past month. But, suffice it to say, in short, that everything I saw from Costa last month (and earlier this month) was fantastic and constitutes some of the best cinema I've seen in 2007.



Tuesday, November 27, 2007

With the release of Costa's Colossal Youth last year, his filmmaking has been at the fore of my mind, though not having seen any of his films before it was diffcult to gauge my expectations. Let me say now that the first Costa screening I attended in late November, Down To Earth (1994) was an aesthetic delight. The story follows a young nurse who travels back to her patient's rural hometown; he is in a coma, she seems in search of some meaning in her life. Surrounded by the mountainous landscape, littered with lava rocks and a scarce few trees, Costa's characters become abstract figures in disconnected space. His shot sequences lie somewhere in between the long takes of Bela Tarr that take on a life of their own, and the bouncy disconnect of Godard, a la Breathless, making us keenly aware of the technology that informs and mediates the actual landscape, at the same time showing us pure moments of beauty that mixes the live human being with the heavy force of nature.


Friday, November 30, 2007

Where Lies Your Hidden Smile (2001) is a must for anyone interested in editing, language, and the semiotics of them both. Following filmmakers Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub as they strain to find the precise moment to cut their film, the story is as much a show of their labor as it is a labor of love for one another. The filmmakers painstakingly advance and rewind the reel of celluloid frame-by-frame, in one scene, to find the the spot where the root of a character's smile begins, a subtle expression overlooked by the untrained eye. The film is an exercise in seeing how a film is edited, and though it requires an almost tedious amount of concentration, it's an experience unparalleled in its drive to show us what it takes to get just the right frame of film onscreen.


Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Colossal Youth was the big to-see film of 2006, and now that it has been released one year later I'm glad to say I finally saw it. Maybe it was the build-up of 365 days of rave reviews that made me slightly less than thrilled about the feature overall, but more likely, Colossal Youth simply fell to the shadow of the predecesors I was lucky enough to see before it, the aforementioned Down To Earth and Where Lies Your Hidden Smile. In retrospect, it actually seems like a familiar exercise for Costa who employs much of the same long-take/long shot aesthetic in Down To Earth (and undoubtedly others, which unfortunately I was unable to see), and, as illustrated in the image above, Costa's characters here too are contrasted against local buildings, structures, and other ubiquitous pieces of the landscape that really pull them out of space. Colossal Youth, for me, looked much like an urban version of Down To Earth. All of that being said, despite any repetition Costa exercised in this particular film it is still an individual masterpiece. The run-time is a bit longer than the others (and felt that way too), but you can think of this movie like you're taking an extended look at artwork on a museum wall; time is handled with a lot of texture that very much slows things down to make you notice everything you're seeing in the shot.

Bee Movie and Another 'B' Movie

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Late Marriage - 2001 - DVD

Late Marriage was a 2001 Israeli film that landed on my Netflix queue for reasons unknown. It won best everything from the Israeli Film Academy, but I found it just depressing. Though, before I begin to sound hateful of it, I'll stop; it wasn't the movie's fault I wasn't ready (or wanting) to watch it when it came, so I shall reserve criticisms for now.



















Monday, November 26, 2007

Most underwhelming and overhyped movie of the year: Bee Movie. Okay, Transformers was hyped more than Jerry Seinfeld's Bee flick, but I think most of us trusted that Seinfeld would end up with the smarter of the two animated films. Though I haven't seen Transformers to know for sure, the independent polling I took among friends and acquaintances was that Michael Bay's summer blockbuster was surprisingly fun. On the other end of the spectrum, I imagined hilarious and endlessly entertaining consequences for Seinfeld's script, so believe my profound disappointment when the movie turned out to be about not much more than a few jokes of the Seinfeld sort sprinkled throughout a contrived kids' story. The only thing good about the film was Seinfeld himself (as the bee's voice anyway), and I'd rather have him in non-computer animated form on the stand-up stage instead. Bummer, I was excited about this one...

A Few New Films in '07: Oswald's Ghost, I Think I Love My Wife, and The Darjeeling Limited

Friday, November 16, 2007

Oswald's Ghost was a short, and a shade sentimental documentary by Robert Stone on the Kennedy assassination's impact on U.S. society. As the title suggests, the film is centered on the role of Lee Harvey Oswald and the many subsequent conspiracy theories in the years after his murder. Though the film doesn't offer any new perspective on the history of the assassination, it does make use of long reels of news footage that are usually only seen in the length of a soundbite. Dan Rather is young, dewy-skinned freshman reporter, and the now gray and frazzled conspiracy theorists looked like young and frazzled conspiracy theorists; Jim Garrison is one in particular, the story of whom is the base of Oliver Stone's JFK (1991).

In all, what makes the movie compelling is not actually cinematic, but the result of the subject matter itself that's an inextricable part of the American political and social sphere. Looking at the Zapruder film up close and re-magnified is like living through that moment, now over forty years in our past, again for the first time (even for those of us who weren't alive to see it upon release.) The film mentioned a figure somewhere around the 70% range for the section of Americans that believe President Kennedy's death was conspired by our own government, using Oswald as he himself says on one famous newsreel, a "patsy." The film is kind of like an undergraduate level paper on the Kennedy assassination; interesting and genuinely curious and earnest in its questioning, but doesn't uncover anything new on the subject. That said, history buffs will delight (as I did) in the rekindling of facts it provides.


Friday, November 16, 2007

I Think I Love My Wife, Chris Rock's second directorial feature, was the most misogynist film of the year, gleefully congratulating itself with an internal monologue of cat calls from the film's lead character Richard Cooper (Chris Rock). Meanwhile back at home, his wife stakes her claim as a shrewish, demanding and humorless teacher/homemaker. Is Richard honestly shocked by their non-existent sex life when he is the only half of their so-called partnership that gets to have fun and make a joke or two?

Rock's adaptation is based on Eric Rohmer's Chloe in the Afternoon (1972), but is written for a much wider base; likely Rock's target audience is a far cry from those who sit down for the high concept ideas of Rohmer. The modern version of the film then becomes more of an exercise on bashing the low points of marriage, which are summed up from the male perspective only, thus pinning the roots of that anxiety on the boring, humorless wife. If only she were more fun, more spontaneous, then maybe he wouldn't be so tempted to undress every attractive woman with his eyes.



Sunday, November 18, 2007

Besides Rushmore (1998), The Darjeeling Limited might be the best Wes Anderson flick yet. I think the main criticism I've read about the film is its redundancy in terms of style, that it looks like every other W. Anderson film. His signature is surely there onscreen, but I adored it anyway. Everything from Bill Murray's opening cameo, to Jason Schwartzman's pepper spray scene was a lot of fun, and most of it was done with so little dialogue that it gave us a good chance to just watch a solely visual story. The fact that the three American brothers are deserted in a country where their language isn't understood in the first place, is a good premise for the muted scenes. Most notable are the shots of simple human movement: watching the brothers walk or run with old-school designer suitcases in tow, regular mundane exercises become elegant.

Otto Preminger Visits Chicago (and my living room)

Sunday, November 25, 2007

I've been watching a bit of Preminger lately, mostly due to a retrospective that ran at the Music Box Theatre. The screenings were once-a-week matinée shows on weekends; the first of which I saw was a gem from 1950, Where the Sidewalk Ends, starring Dana Andrews as a jaggedy-edged cop covering up a murder he didn't mean to commit.

Preminger cuts to the chase. From the start of the credit sequence we're already into the action, punctuated by the film's characters interacting directly with the title cards as they walk over the big, chalked letters on the sidewalk beneath them. City sounds abound: car horns honking, people chattering, it's an overall bustling buzz that hints more at a reality than style. Though that gritty reality is in and of itself a style.

Sgt. Mark Dixon (Dana Andrews) is a disturbed by something internally (is it the war? at this late date I can't recall if his character is war veteran), which he takes out rather aggressively on the rough-necks he picks up. He's warned by his superiors (one Lt. Thomas, played by Karl Malden) to cool it or he'll be suspended or demoted, or maybe worse; so when he pushes his last suspect, a war hero, a bit too hard, he knows his goose is cooked; he covers up the murder, and on down his cover-up spirals that eventually involves an innocent cabbie, the father of Dix's love interest, Morgan, played by the stunning Gene Tierney.



Monday, November 26, 2007

Fallen Angel (1945) graced my DVD player the next day and brought more of the same Preminger grittiness, though this time with a female lead who is much less graceful and pretty than Gene Tierney: Stella (Linda Darnell), the femme fatale who hooks con artist Eric Stanton (Dana Andrews) and inevitably trips him up in a no-win love affair. Stanton sweeps into town and courts the more wholesome hometown girl, June Mills (Alice Faye) who is heir to a small fortune following her parents' deaths, and which is not-so-coincidentally her most attractive feature to the swindling Stanton.

Darnell, who is the town's prostitute (though never overtly referred to as such in the film), is such a transient soul--both physically when she runs away and returns time after time, and emotionally, in her loosely defined love with Stanton--is Eric Stanton's center of gravity. But when she falls out of his life, he loses track of it himself. He's caught in a love triangle with a woman's money (and with a woman who loves him unconditionally) and with the woman who has stolen his heart, the cruel and corrupt Stella. Add in with the mix a murder for which Stanton is being framed, and what you have, once again, is a post-war, post-traumatic stress picture that disseminates Stanton's self-confidence in one quick blink.

Eric Stanton is a drinker in the movie (yet another escape from his unbearable being), and after learning recently that Dana Andrews was an alcoholic, I can't think of a more perfect actor to maintain the portrait of Stanton's male fragility. There's a double-layer to the character in Fallen Angel, kind of a transparency of Andrews's self that brings that extra edge of roughness to the film, and moreover, adds that harshness of reality that seems to sum up the signature of Preminger.

50s Transition Films: Murder By Contract (1958) and The Big Sky (1952)

Once a week since the beginning of September Chicago Reader film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has introduced films from the 1950s "transition" at the Gene Siskel Film Center. The movie plus a brief introduction and discussion following the film, comes in at a mere $4 (for Film Center Members), making it the best deal in Chicago for cinema. I made it out mid-way through November (finally) for two of the must-see movies on the schedule: Murder By Contract (1958) directed by Irving Lerner, a film said to have influenced Martin Scorsese, Jim Jarmusch and others; and Howard Hawks' The Big Sky (1952). The last film of the year is coming up this Wednesday (12/12) and is sure to please, Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon (1957). Actually, the print we will see is a UK version with twelve extra minutes of runtime, and officially titled, Curse of the Demon. No matter what you call it, it will be great; Tourneur is one of the finest horror and noir directors, the same man credited with Cat People (1942) and Out of the Past (1947).


Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Ah, double rates for women, indeed! Claude (Vince Edwards) is a swaggering contract killer who is hired to take out a target, but it isn't a hulky man like he's used to; it's not the kind he can envision like an old enemy of war, this time he's hired to kill a woman. Don't let her slight figure and delicate piano playing fool you, the lady's got a mouth like a sailor, terrorizing her police escorts and body guards with degrading tongue lashings. She's one of a handful of women scripted in the story, and it is no wonder she strikes fear in his heart, she's the only one of them with authority and voice. If we are to draw noir characteristics into the analysis of Murder, pianist Billie Williams (Caprice Toriel) is clearly Claude's femme fatale. He brustles past his two male counterpart, veritable babysitters employed to keep Claude on schedule and at ease, hence outings to the beach and to other Los Angeles attractions. On a one-week deadline to complete his mission Claude relaxes most of his days away until it is finally revealed to him that Billie isn't a man. With only two days left he hastily demands $10,000 to complete the job (up from his original fee of $500, I believe); the rate is guaranteed to him without any mention of why his stock suddenly soars so high in the murder market. The poster illustrates just how close Claude comes to his target, and he fails out of unspoken insecurities with women in general. It might have been the singularly oddest post-war picture of maladjusted men, and is clearly a part of an anxiety-riddled theme in Lerner's other films from the 1950s, none of which I have seen, but whose titles speak volumes: Suicide Attack (1951), Man Crazy (1953), Edge of Fury (1958), and City of Fear (1959).



Wednesday, November 28, 2007

If Hawks' Red River (1948) is homoerotic, The Big Sky is a confident acceptance of male companionship. Kirk Douglas and his much lesser-known co-star Dewey Martin play two comfortable companions on a fur trade expedition up the Missouri River with "Uncle Zeb" (Arthur Hunnicutt), another amiable character who is employed as the film's gentle voiceover narrator. When the story opens with Boone (Dewey Martin) knocking the lights out of Jim (Kirk Douglas) for no apparent reason, we think the movie will be demoted to a series of macho fights that declare superiority. To the contrary, Douglas's character is too calm mannered to care; he really is a guy resigned to the unwieldy western terrain, but he's rather thoughtfully at peace with that fact. And so, with the typical alpha-male tensions dissolved there's room for the characters to live and breathe together, and they are (as the introductory speaker mentioned; not Rosenbaum, who was out of town at a film festival) quite at ease in one another's company. The voiceover narration by Hunnicutt, in his unpretentious and wise country tone, frames the film with a sense of loyalty and male sentimentality rarely seen in a western.

Movie Catch-Up: Eastern Promises, The Exorcist, Deep Red, Control, and Nights of Cabiria

The past two months have seen a tremendous influx in film viewing, and thusly, I am far too backlogged to give each and every film the proper analysis it deserves. That statement means doubly as much for the content of this post, chock-full of cinema geniuses young and old, from Cronenberg and Fellini, to Anton Corbijn, music video vet and director of 2007's Control. So bear with me in the next few updates that bring us right in to Top Ten season. Yes, the Top Ten Best Movies of 2007 are already being calculated and will be up and ready for debate by the end of this month.

Saturday, October 13, 2007

I'm a big David Cronenberg fan and Eastern Promises, the next feature film after his miraculous 2005 movie, A History of Violence, reassures that to the max. The crowing achievement in his new film must be the brutal and fleshy fight scene, in which actor Viggo Mortensen is stripped down to nothing and fights for his life against two large (and clothed) gangsters; not only for the way this scene makes the violence personal, but for the intimate camera of Cronenberg regular Peter Suschitzky, and the superb makeup from Stephan Dupuis (who won an Oscar in 1986 for another Cronenberg vehicle, The Fly), the movie becomes beautiful (yet bloody) in a personal way.


Saturday, October 27, 2007

The weekend before Halloween, a few friends and I met up for a "Horror Movie Marathon," (once one reaches their late twenties there will be no late-night celebrations on Wednesday workdays, apparently) involving cheap champagne, red vines and carrot cake. Combined with our gory double-feature that included Euro-Slasher classic Deep Red and Friedkin's 1973 terror, The Exorcist, naturally we felt sick by 2:00am when we wrapped up. If you haven't seen Italian director Dario Argento's Deep Red (Profondo rosso), please do; it'll give you a jump, and is more artful than exploitative than its horror counterparts. Ditto on The Exorcist, which somehow gets scarier every time you see it.


Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Control is the sort of fiction film that feels so real it could almost be a documentary. It's about Joy Division lead singer, Ian Curtis's rise to stardom before his suicide at age 23, and chronicles his aims at reaching adulthood prematurely: his wedding, the birth of his first child, and his extra-marital affairs. It is the quick rise and fall of a man too frustrated with his youthful identity to patiently grow beyond it, and find greatness. Shot entirely in black and white by Anton Corbijn, who is mostly known for his work in rock documentary and videos--One Night in Paris, not the movie you're probably thinking of, but rather a Depeche Mode concert--is one, and there are more that cover U2 and Metallica also. You can see the director's past genre influence on this film's style, and is a real tribute to Curtis's talent, and a quiet eulogy-in-retrospect on his death. The soundtrack is also phenomenal.


Tuesday, November 8, 2007

Somebody out there that I went to graduate film school with is probably shocked to learn I had never seen Federico Fellini's Nights of Cabiria until early last month. For whomever that may be I refer you to the brief Onion Opinion headline, "Oh My God, You've Never Seen Every Movie Ever Made?" So now that that's out of my system, I should say how lovely Nights is, tender and heartbreaking, but the clownish Cabiria (Giulietta Masina) keeps up our spirits regardless. I doubt there is anyone more adorable in screen history, excepting the male version of herself, Charlie Chaplin. I really loved this movie.

The Chicago International Film Festival

The sad reality of a day job prevents one from devoting full days to a fleshy portion of a film festival's schedule. But luckily a good chunk of the movies one has to miss for myriad reasons--scheduling of course, but probably the cost of a $13 ticket price, too--luckily, a lot of those movies will get released in the succeeding months. Thus, after finding out director Anton Corbijn's pseudo-documentary on the truncated life and times of Joy Division front man Ian Curtis in Control was sold out (and was to be released theatrically 2 weeks later); and that scheduling issues would make me miss Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and The Butterfly (yet to be released in the Chicago area), I made three ticket purchases with the following provisions: 1) something new and/or by a director I knew; 2) something with a lot of buzz that I'm unfamiliar with; and 3) a retrospective. There are pros and cons to be argued for these logistics, the cons being that treading on unfamiliar territory can lead to some rather dull cinema. But the inverse can also be true; there is something exciting about wandering into a film you know nothing about, it could end up being the best thing you see all year.


Thursday, October 11, 2007

The Walker, a new release by cinema veteran Paul Schrader, a screenwriter (Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980)), director (Affliction (1997), Autofocus (2002)), and occasional movie critic, was underwhelming in that "aw, shucks" kind of way (and certainly was not the best film I've seen all year.) By that I mean, with the set of credentials behind Schrader we want to be awestruck again with something that redefines what the world looks like, and it is usually its darker underside. Taxi Driver is seventies disillusionment defined; Raging Bull has a seedy swiftness that bowls you over in defeat; and his directorial contributions are likely to reveal regular peoples' more wretched sides (Autofocus takes this to a raunchy extreme.) The Walker stars Woody Harrelson as the homosexual son of a deceased senator with an outlandishly strong southern accent, an eye for high fashion, and a prejudice for almost no one. Weaving through the web of Washington society and politics he's a perfect fit among his gossipy gal pals (Lily Tomlin, Kristen Scott Thomas and Lauren Bacall) for weekly card games, but when a murder turns things terribly awry his friends disappear quickly. Washington politics are dirty, the story overtly goes. What's curious about The Walker, however, are how brightly lit his characters and sets are; the aesthetic is unnaturally sterile and symmetrical for a story regarding characters in up to their ears in deception, lies and greed. An irony that tips its hat directly to the planned, museum-like landscape of Washington, D.C. itself perhaps. If nothing more, Schrader remains consistent with The Walker in the way he shows us that nothing is ever as regal as it appears. It's the lack of urgency in this story where he diverges from his past.


Friday, October 12, 2007

The Man From London was the first film I've seen by Hungarian director Bela Tarr, and was decidedly the most important to watch at the festival after the critical buzz his past films had received. I am going to think of this film as an easier, or at least more digestible, introduction to Tarr, whose Sátántangó (1994) clocks in at 450 minutes (that's 7 1/2 hours), and Werckmeister harmóniák (2000) at 145 minutes. The two hour run time of The Man From London felt a touch longer than that, but only as an adjustment from the standard film fare these days that allows for an abundance of (some say unnecessary and/or sloppy) cuts and close-ups. The first thing to know about Bela Tarr is his penchant for the long shot and long take. The still image from the film above is a nice illustration of this, the primary establishing shot of the movie that later comes back as a bookend at the film's conclusion. What you won't glean from the image above is the thick texture of the picture, the deep contrast of black against white so dense and dimensional it's analogous to the sound of a needle on a dusty record, a tactile sound, and in Tarr's case, image. It is a movie to be seen on a big screen, on DVD-TV at home as a last-ditch effort, for much of the meditation on form will probably be lost in translation. The scenery is stark and minimal, yet enveloping and hypnotizing; there's a simple sense of space the characters live in that doesn't make it seem artificial, even though each scene is staged as much (if not more) than that of any other fiction film.

The story is simple: a man from London arrives in the opening scene smuggling a briefcase of money ashore; from the watchtower (the view as seen in the still above) a guard watches the man's actions, and his subsequent fight with a man at the dock edge unfold. Without seeing the character from whose eyes we're watching this drama, the camera pans inch-by-inch, back and forth across the window panes of his watchtower, careful not to be seen by anyone below. But after the guard steals the money the camera's perspective changes; we meet his family, towns people, and finally an investigator on his trail to get the money back; that is, he's as vulnerable being seen in public as the first man he witnessed sneaking the briefcase on land. A shot framed by the windows of his tower reveal a skyline of windows from which he too may be seen, and reveals an incredible amount of depth as to be a window itself, and not simply a projection onscreen.

My favorite shot takes place in the last third of the film as the watch guard Maloin (Miroslav Krobot) carries a grocery sack at his side, seen from the tracking low-angle shot directly at the bag's level, and about the height of Maloin's knees; a minor object becomes the subject of greater consideration, and therein lies the beauty of The Man From London, an attention to the mundane, to everyday objects that adorn life, and how they are placed and consume time within the bigger picture.


Saturday, October 13, 2007

One of the big retrospectives this year at the festival was Rouben Mamoulian's 1935 film based on William Makepeace Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair, one of the main characters of which is Becky Sharp. If you know the novel, you know her character, a conniving gold digger in search of permanent socialite status. I found the performances over-played, melodramatic, but inadvertently so; the color palette was the main pull of the film, shot originally in 3-strip Technicolor. From reel to reel you could see a drastic difference in the tone and color contrast, and a friend of mine pointed out after the screening that not every reel was a copy of the 3-strip process, but rather 2-strip Technicolor. The picture at left gives you a good idea of the garish color scheme employed, which in and of itself was dazzling. However, as a piece of cinema the staging and dialogue was too theatrical to be memorable.

the month of aftermath... (the pack part 5)

it has been almost a month since my cousin larry finally left dunedin after his 2 week long visit of awful.

i'd like to claim that i'd done something amazing with the month of novemeber, and fix all the problems that larry caused with his popping by. the truth is i've been too depressed to care up until lately. i let larry tear apart my life, but i could have easily stopped him by just saying no.

so here i am. a whole month gone by, and so little to show for it...

i've been back to work for the whole month after the 2 week impromptu break caused by larry. though ms. rhonwyn gave me a promotion, she hasn't contacted me since leaving the country, and thus work hasn't been any different on a day to day basis than it was before.

security guarding used to be so thrilling and exciting, but since larry and peter have been harping on about how lowly a position it is i've lost my interest for it. now it's just paying the bills, and a very boring way to do so...

though due to the lack of danger to the displays i've had plenty of time to further my exploration and learning in the museum. watching various films on the maori i'm starting to get a feel for this very interesting and cool culture.

perhaps the coolest thing i've had time to look at and learn more about were the moas. we have more moa skeletons in the natural history gallery than anything else. they give the dinosaurs at the tyrrell a run for their money on most skeletons in one gallery...

so with what i've learned time for some info sharing.

first things first... most moas are NOT known from true fossils!

to be a true fossil you have to be more than 10 000 years old. most moa remains are from within the last 650 years. way too young to be considered true fossils.

however as there are true fossil remains of moas dating millions of years into new zealands past, and the moa went extinct before modern style documentation could record them they are from prehistory, after a fashion.

what are moas?

well moas were large flightless birds from the ratites group. this group includes most large terrestrial flightless birds such as ostriches, emus, cassowarys, and kiwis. these birds all lack proper attachments for flight muscles which explains why they all have such short weak wings, and as a group don't have any flying members.

there were 11 species of moa in modernish times (i mean modern in geologic terms), and all were herbivores. their diets consisted of plants of various sorts. Ferns, flax, leaves, fruits, berries, twigs, and seeds were eaten by on type of moa or another. moa species varied in size from the 1.5 metre Pachyornis to the 3 metre tall Dinornis giganteus.

these largest known land animal of the Cenozoic in a land dominated by not mammals, but dinosaurian ancestors the birds. indeed new zealand was not just home to large land birds, but also the largest bird of prey ever the Haast's Eagle (pictured in the nice painting i found on the innerweb above) which hunted moas.

both the moa and eagle were hunted to extinction after the arrival of the maori people to new zealand. what makes the moa's so significant was their description and reconstruction by sir richard owen. the same guy who would name and describe dinosaurs a few years later (though he got the moas pretty much right... he kinda missed the mark on us dinosaurs).

so yeah after spending a bunch of times wandering through the moa gallery this is some of the info i picked up.

linking all my knowledge i can tell you one more tidbit. moa is not the traditional name for moas. rather the maori before europeans used to call them te kura. the story goes, but i'm not sure i believe it, that when europeans became interested in these bones they'd ask for "more, more". the maori still learning english thought this meant the europeans called the birds moas... yeah i'm not too sure i believe that either, but it's the story...

anyways that's the only highlight of work.

otherwise i just sit around here "patrolling" the completely safe and boring museum... there has been no sign of ms. rhonwyn around here. no calls, letters, or even mention of her on any recent memos. so unless she suddenly reappears out of the blue my promotion is just in name only (well okay and pay... can't complain too much i guess... my salary appears to have doubled... but for what work i wonder?)

after stewing in pity for myself i decided i needed to get out more, and change my surroundings. i needed to do something that relaxed myself...

there was one thing that got me out into the beauty of the countryside and the ocean which i hadn't tried in a while...

fishing! which i have to admit calmed me down a lot. it puts you in the moment, and allows your mind to let go the outside world.

you can just take in the tranquility of reality around you. the pristine hills around you. the calm elegance of the water...

and of course trying to catch dinner!!!

which i'd like to claim i'm closer to than my first attempt fishing... how do those spinosaurs do it?

where spinosaurs catch fish... i seem to catch nothing but old discarded footwear!

seriously this isn't funny like in the cartoons!

i've only caught old shoes! i want a fish!!!

so as you can see these fishing retreats only helped with the forgetting my troubles so much.

though i will unlock the spinosaur's secret, and thus get one step closer to being a better tyrannosaur than larry (like to see a big brute like him wait patiently on a pole and line!).

after nearly a whole month of this. work and than the odd fishing outing i grew weary of how my life had become devoid of people.

craig wasn't answering my calls, emails, or even mentioned in recent memos... oh oops sorry wrong tangent... you get the idea though. he'd cut off all contact with me after i was kinda mean to him due to larry messing with my head.

there was one person i could try to patch things up with i decided last week, and after wasting most of the month pouting and stewing i decided to take life by the horns (though hopefully not ceratopsian style horns!) and try to take back some of my old life from my mistakes...

owain, my best friend in new zealand thus far, had been terrified by his encounter with larry simply from true tyrannosaurian language... larry had convinced me this was because owain didn't respect my culture. in reality larry needs to face up to facts, we t-rexs are really scary when we talk (even if you're fluent in our tongue!).

fortunately owain agreed to meet with me so i could explain. though i thought the way things had gone last month i was just getting a more satisfying conclusion to this part of my life. what did i have to lose? i might as well at least get the applogy off my chest before he never called, emailed, memoed... ah nuts!... me again...


i told owain the majority of the story. which he listened to politely. what can i say owain is a real nice guy!

"that sounds like a rough visit man," owain stated at the end of my narrating. "no wonder i haven't heard from you in a little bit."


"i'm so sorry my cousin scarred you, and i didn't contact you in such a long time, and that i'm such a miserable friend!" i blurted all at once.

owain looked at me puzzled for a second in response...

than suddenly he broke out laughing. "traum you're so funny," he chuckled. "you thought i was upset with you too?"

"yeah," i hesitantly responded.

"not to fret my friend," owain assured me. "i won't lie, i could do without seeing your cousin ever again, but i didn't hold it against you. as for your disappearance these things happen. you had some stuff to sort. happens all the time. the important part is you re-emerged!"

i felt relieved, and kinda surprised to be honest. he wasn't mad at me, and for the first time since ms. rhonwyn met larry something to do with my cousin just blew over. no drama. no epic. it was just back to normal.

owain patted me on the head. than kinda embarrassed at the unusualness of the gesture noted. "i'd gave you a shoulder slap, but you don't have very defined shoulders..."

"yeah their kinda anchored around my ribcage," i joked.

"so what are you going to do?" owain asked. "this pack sounds like it might try to muck with you again."

"i don't know," i admitted. i had simply been thinking about what i'd already lost this whole month. owain was right though. the pack could very well return. whether it was just larry or someone else from their ranks.

"well i'm here for you if you need help," owain offered. "just so long as i don't have to take on something like you cousin," he amended.

"thanks. sadly i might need it," i pointed out. "i hope not, but the way my life tends to go..."

than i thought of something owain could maybe help me with right now! "you won't happen to be able to talk to craig, and help me fix that would you?"

owain's face took on a grave look. "he's pretty mad at you, but he won't talk about it. the couple times you've come up he just changes the subject," owain reported.

"oh man," i muttered in sadness. i could only imagine the hurt i'd inflicted on my legal guardian.

not only was inflicting that kind of emotional damage bad enough, but craig had been able to confront larry and make larry back off. craig knew about the pack, and probably could help get clear of whatever schemes they might launch at me.

instead i'd effectively kicked myself out of his life, and worse still craig probably thought that i was now part of the pack.

owain sensed my sadness. "cheer up man. with all of us united down here what can those bird wannabes do to us?" he raised his hand for a high five. "to a united front."

i gave him a high two back. "to a united front," i pretended to say enthusiastically. deep down i knew we didn't stand a chance if the pack really wanted to play rough. especially when our front consisted of just me and owain...

the rest of the afternoon was awesome though, and marked the end of my miserable month of november. me and owain hung out just like before larry's visit.

in fact everything about larry's visit graduated from my present day concern to the past. his visit could do nothing more. good or bad. it just had happened.

i had to face the future, and what the consequences of larry's visit were going to mean...

the first of these arrived in an eeeeemail waiting for me when i got back home to the dell.

it was from mike the librarian . he'd completed a brief for me about the pack. included in it was this symbol... the emblem of the pack of the primordial feather !

this was the face of my possible enemy. though made of individual dinosaurs, mike and craig had both warned me that once a part of the pack you simply became a branch of the pack. meaning that this emblem represented any one of them.

in its centre a tyrannosaur skull incarnation of coelurosaur power, floating above a theropod foot print made of feathers. surrounding this were orbiting talons and feathers. i understood the composition on a... i guess instinctive level... it was the symbol of hunters. of dinosaurs who weren't afraid to do what ever it took to get what they wanted.

i only hope that i never see this emblem again...