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Movies
I've Seen Lately
by Matt Silcock
The
Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pier Paolo Pasolini,
1968) I didn't know if it was working or not while
I was watching it but by the very next day I could tell:
this movie is a landmark antidote to the Cecil B. DeMille
version of Jesus. And the only thing anyone in the family
might get offended by is the stunningly slow pacing.
It's been called a 'neo-neorealist' version of the life
of Christ, and that's exactly what it is. Like Bresson,
Pasolini casts non-actors; therefore, the twelve disciples
seem to be a lot of good-looking guys that Pasolini
was hitting on at the time. Jesus himself, played by
one Enrique Irazoqui, looks pretty 'street.' The pace
is glacial and eventually hypnotic, especially when
"Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child"
by Odetta plays on the soundtrack. The massacre
of the Innocents scene practically plays like it's
from a John Waters movie...but like Waters, it still
packs a punch.
Saló
(Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975) A cadre of respectable-seeming
bourgeoisie -- they look like bankers, lawyers, teachers,
politicians -- abduct a group of teenaged boys and girls,
and confine them in a complex for rape, humiliation,
and torture. As with the life of Jesus Christ, this
is a potentially unfilmable story, but Pasolini takes
the same dry and slow approach to both. Sure, there's
a grand dinner served where the main course is human
feces, but mostly the characters sit in a drawing room
and listen to old ladies tell perverted stories with
piano accompaniment. I've never read the de Sade, but
I get the feeling it was a deceptively perverse way
to say something so moral that it comes from the Bible:
Let he is without sin cast the first stone. By making
a story about perversion and sadism so dull and repetetive,
even the most respectable person might find themselves
wanting some kinkiness; sadism should at least be a
little more interesting than a middle-aged lady sitting
in a drawing room telling yet another story while someone
plays the piano. Every so often Pasolini throws us a
bone, but however shocking, these campy cruelties are
just as intentionally wooden as the rest of the film.
Until, that is, the final chapter ("Circle of Blood"),
when we realize we've fallen into a trap. Either too
boring or too sadistic, Saló is a pretty
unpleasant experience from beginning to end, as any
message about the pitfalls of our beloved drive to consume
should be.
Audition
(Takashi Miike, 2000) I haven't been this satisified
by a horror movie in quite a while. It seems like there
can't be an article or review of this movie without
phrases like "not for the squeamish" or "dramatic
tone shift" or "beware the second half"
being thrown around, but there's stuff in the first
half that's just as scary, partly because Takashi's
grasp of contemporary realism makes even, say, Cronenberg's
Dead Ringers seem like drive-in fodder. The way
he films Eihi Shiina as a heroine/villian/love interest/sex
object/monster captures a little too perfectly that
feeling you get when you're so attracted to someone
that it becomes scary even to look at his or her face
because of all the possibilities it represents.....including
the possibility that you're not even in love and just
hope to use this attractive person as an object. In
that sense, Audition is right up there with Vertigo...not
to mention, for other reasons, The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre, which makes for a pretty stunning combination.
Metalheadz
(John Klein, 1997) When I saw the title, I hoped
it would be another documentary on hessians, a la The
Decline of Western Civilization Part II or Heavy
Metal Parking Lot. Actually, I think it is anyway,
these just happen to be primarily Afro-Carribean U.K.
hessians instead of primarily Caucasian-American hessians,
and it's the 90s instead of the 80s so they listen to
techno music instead of Priest and Metallica. Rented
it for free from work because no matter how many Simon
Reynolds articles I read, I still can't figure out exactly
what even "acid house" means. I know what
your basic house groove sounds like and that 'jungle'
became 'drum 'n' bass,' but that's about it. Thing is,
70 or so drum 'n' bass producers and DJs talk to the
camera in this movie, and they don't seem to know how
to refer to the music either. One thing I eventually
learned is that jungle actually used to be called simply
'hardcore.' Can't say what else I learned, except that
one producer named Carl (Carl Craig??...this movie doesn't
make it too clear...if my copy of The Harder They
Come has subtitles, this should too...) sometimes
just gets a sound by making a mouth-noise into the mic
and then looping it. The real reason it's hard to learn
too much from Metalheadz is that it really isn't
a documentary at all, it's a 70-minute commercial for
a label called....
Metalheadz. It's edited just like MTV, with a different
producer or DJ talking every 10-15 seconds while hard
jungle grooves play in the background. Each DJ talks
about how "bloo'y ____" [insert synonym for
"fantastic"] the movement is in a thick patois
so hip you'd think you were watching a Guy Ritchie movie.
An extended sequence of Goldie and his boys getting
their faces in the camera and shouting while showing
off brand-name logos should give you the score -- this
is very much MTV-materialist lad-culture nu-hooliganism,
and while these guys are automatically cooler because
their music is a little better, it's only a few short
steps from here to Woodstock '99. Still, my biggest
beef with this vid is that, as with Ken Burns' Jazz,
a story of about a kind of music is mostly told
by one talking head after another, rather than
one playing head after another. Why isn't there
more footage -- and, just as importantly, voiceover-free
audio -- of DJ's gettin' live in a club?
Masters
of Comic Book Art (Unknown, 1987) I had to check
this out just so I could see people like Jack Kirby,
Steve Ditko, Neal Adams, and Frank Miller sitting there
and talking. They're almost all nerds, which is fine,
because I was too when I loved their work and I still
am today in my own special way -- no small thanks to
these guys. Kirby's actually not really a nerd -- he
strikes me as your basic blue-collar would-be worker-drone
commercial artist who somehow fell into the comic-book
niche and found a perhaps surprising capacity within
himself for personal freedom and simple mythic stories.
(His biggest influence: "The Bible.") Ditko
is as oddball as you might've guessed, but in a different
way: he doesn't appear on camera, opting instead to
read a particularly convoluted piece of home-spun philosophy
over a montage of his landmark art. Neal Adams is a
little younger but seems like your basic hard-working
responsible liberal type, and rather inspiring in the
way he talks about 'exploding the page' with his innovative
use of panels. Frank Miller comes off as your basic
long-haired guy who's into hard rock and martial arts,
which is probably exactly what he is. He seems like
a good guy, and he draws real good too -- a bunch of
page views from Ronin made me want to check that
mag out again. Too bad I sold the whole set back to
Dragon's Lair in Omaha for like eight bucks cash back
in 1988. (For "college money"!) Berni Wrightson
is the only featured artist who seems like he might
not be a nerd. French artist Moebius is featured, which
made me realize just how influential he is (he's the
guy behind the look of Heavy Metal magazine).
Not to mention that such legends as Will Eisner, Harvey
Kurtzman, and Art Spiegelman are also interviewed. Despite
its drab production, this vid really does gather perhaps
the 10 greatest comic book artists of the golden age
and beyond, and all of the art is something to behold.
Best of all, that fast-talking jock Todd MacFarlane
is nowhere to be found.
Wet
Hot American Summer (David Wain, 2001) Sure, it's
your basic Gen X parody of Meatballs-style comedies,
and it features people who used to be MTV stars (comedy
troupe The State), so you know that it's gonna push
those funny Gen X buttons, and it does -- just listen
to how well-chosen those Loverboy songs on the soundtrack
are. The good news is that it also goes deeper than
that, by creating an actual avant-garde atmosphere where
the pacing and timing of the jokes/skits/vignettes is
almost completely elastic. A tiny joke can go on for
minutes, while a huge joke flashes by in seconds. Another
bold innovation is with the use of profanity, with a
running joke in which certain characters will use words
like "fuck" and "bullshit" around
all the little cute camp kids. The kids use 'em too,
and it actually remains funny throughout. Not to mention
that the only sex scene (in a movie that is supposedly
all about wet hot summer chicks 'n' sex) occurs between
two nerdy gay men!
A
Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami, 1997) Facets
Multimedia in Chicago will tell you: Iranian cinema
is hot. They might not put it like that, but having
released several staples of Iranian cinema on their
in-house label, and staging an Iranian film festival
just a few months ago, the message is clear. After seeing
Jafar Panahi's The Circle I was already a believer,
but five minutes into A Taste of Cherry I was
pinned to the fricking wall by utter cinematic genius.
For the first half, the combination of minimalism and
suspense is so exquisite and wholly original (while
still reminding me of a Hitchcockian exercise like Rope
or Rear Window), that when the major plot point
was revealed, and the content shifted to somewhat Bergmanesque
existentialism, I was a bit let down. But within minutes,
Kiarostami's pacing, stark realism, and stunning imagery
had won me back over. Like The Circle, which
I now see as blatantly influenced by Kiarostami, most
of A Taste of Cherry is filmed in tight-to-medium
close-ups, creating one of the most intense senses of
place I've gotten from a movie. Considering that the
"place" is Iran, a country that George W.
Bush just called "evil," I think that Facets
is right -- it's high time Middle America discovered
the work of Abbas Kiarostami. In Iran, he's like Hitchcock,
Kubrick, Maysles, Wenders, and Spielberg all rolled
into one; just the person to show us how the lives of
common people in an "evil" nation differ from
the apparently "good" lives we lead here.
The
Driver (Walter Hill, 1978) They used to call it
"offbeat," a style that was a veritable Hollywood
subgenre back in the 70s. Now "offbeat" is
"quirky," I guess, or, of course, "Tarantino-esque."
This strange movie is definitely offbeat, featuring
Bruce Dern, the all-time King of Offbeat, in a bizarre,
uncomfortable, and both intentionally and unintentionally
hilarious performance as "The Detective,"
who is obsessed with catching the latest hotshot criminal
free agent, the most skilled and most taciturn getaway
driver ever, played by Ryan O'Neal. The car-chase sequences
are exhilarating, and positioned like pictorials in
an article-heavy nudie mag: a big one at the
beginning, and a big one at the end, with a couple of
teases in between. O'Neal and the stunning Isabelle
Adjani (the female lead, known only as "The Player")
are both so taciturn that when they do a scene together
the story seems to almost stop moving completely, turning
the movie into a painting. Thing is, it's a good painting,
some sort of cosmo-contempo Edward Hopper update. Ronee
Blakely, strange and excellent in Nashville,
is downright haunting here, especially in light of a
terrifying scene with a mean hood (played by one Rudy
Ramos, a great early example of Hill's skill at casting
unknown actors in peripheral-but-memorable hood roles).
It's a weird one, but afterwards you're like "Hey,
that was a Bresson influence! Pickpocket with
car chases! For all his trying, Paul Schrader never
got this close!"
Tokyo
Olympiad (Kon Ichikawa, 1965) With the whole country,
myself included, currently caught up in (winter) Olympic
fever (you know you're getting old when you occasionally
don't boycott a de rigeur American media event),
I thought I'd rent this acclaimed documentary of Tokyo's
1964 Summer Games by an acclaimed Japanese film-maker.
When I watch this, I can literally feel how modern American
network television has shortened my attention span.
The style with which Ichiwaka shot and edited this movie
is so slow and calm, it almost seems like we aren't
watching the real games, but instead a faithful, idealized,
high-powered restaging. But the actual 1964 games they
are, and, once you get used to Ichikawa's classical
pace, relative lack of information, and odd close-up
perspectives in which he films athlete after athlete
as if every one of them is a Greek God, the good old
drama of high-level competetive sport starts reemerging.
The 10,000 meter run is especially a doozy..
Jeanne
Dielman, 23 Quai De Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal
Akerman, 1975) I don't know what to say about this
one -- I saw it for free in a crowded theater on the
campus of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois
and it was kind of a magical event. Three hours and
twenty minutes of a few extended moments in the life
of Jeanne Dielman...cleaning the house, making dinner,
making coffee, eating dinner, working as a prostitute...I
will say that I buy it more as a humanist statement
than I do a feminist statement, but that may just be
because I'm not a female. Either way, a great exercise
in restraint and rhythm. A masterpiece by both Akerman
and, in the title role, Ms. Delphine Seyrig, one of
my favorite actresses of all time.
Je
Tu Il Elle (Chantal Akerman, 1973) After Dielman,
had to get my VHS dub of this one out. There it was,
last on an EP-speed triple feature tape with The
Seventh Seal and Persona. I guess the theme
was that they're all B&W, slow moving, and European.
While fast-forwarding to Je Tu Il Elle, I was
briefly reminded just how ludicrously histrionic Persona
gets (do you remember the blood-sucking sequence???),
but fortunately I found Je Tu Il Elle quickly.
After being amazed by it again for a little over 20
minutes, I realized this was the farthest I'd ever gotten
into the movie without taking a break. The first section
is really even more minimalist than Dielman,
mainly because Akerman (playing the lead) is a less
expressive actress than Seyrig. I don't know if it's
intentional, but she almost succeeds in playing some
sort of plant life, even when she's walking around naked
or eating spoonful after spoonful of powdered sugar.
There's almost literally nothing happening. And when
something does happen, to have it be this vaguely proto-Suckdog
plant life performance art is really just too much.
The first time I saw it, I was taping a friend's copy,
and watched the first 15 minutes then walked away, quite
impressed by the audacity and technique but not in the
mood to stay with it. When I came back an hour or so
later to see how it was going, there was an intense
lesbian sex scene going on; one of the most realistic
such scenes ever filmed, with stunning minimalist takes
that put another spin on the "plant life"
interpretation. Or at least the old saw about "the
beast with two backs." Anyway, I gotta break into
the review here with a little Je Tu Il Elle anecdote:
This one guy named Shane once worked as a bartender
at the fine Lincoln, NE establishment Mars, where he
was in charge of the content that played over three
or four TV sets. Two of the screens were hooked up to
VCRs, and Shane would bring movies from home and show
them. I'll never forget when he brought Je Tu Il
Elle in. A week earlier the bar had been showing
some vintage Betty Page silent shorts where she just
dances and poses for the camera, and to go from that
to the first 30 minutes of Akerman's also B&W and
also solo performance piece was a head-turner, like
they were different riffs on the concept of the "hired
dancing girl in a cage or on a platform." The sex
scene played in its entirety, and by its end had created
a small murmur in the bar.
El
Exorcista II (John Boorman, 1982) I went to try
and finish Je Tu Il Elle, but I was distracted
by this dubbed version of Excorcist II: The Heretic
on the Spanish Channel. Man, they've been showing good
movies lately! Well, not good, but at least as good
as HBO: Speed with Keanu and Sandra and Dennis,
Freejack with Mick and Rene and Emilio and Anthony.
Last night was I Still Know What You Did Last Summer,
and on the other Spanish channel they're showing The
Right Stuff, mentioned last column! Anyway, this
bizarre flop sequel to the 70s horror classic has its
cult following. (Cf. Chris D's blurb about it in a 1989
issue of Forced Exposure.) The first time I saw it I
remember being impressed by a lot of the imagery, but
just plain confounded and bored by the attempt at a
story. Because of that, the dubbed Spanish version almost
seems like the ideal way to see it, because there's
no story or dialogue to even try to understand, and
therefore nothing to distract me from the imagery. And
let me tell ya, Boorman really pulled off some set pieces
here. He films Africa like he's still doing Zardoz,
with vast Dali-esque landscapes and screaming bush people
swarmed by locusts with James Earl Jones as some tribal
demigod. Meanwhile, back in America the budding young
Linda Blair almost sleepwalks off of a Manhattan skyscraper,
her white nightgown billowing in the wind while her
zoned eyes stare straight ahead, lost in great imagined
vistas of African tribal satanism. The confusing story
might be more forgivable if it wasn't for Richard Burton
as the priest hero character, who doggedly trudges through
the movie without getting anywhere and makes us suffer
along with him, in spite of some very over-the-top imagery.
(The "fleeing demon" sequence during an African
exorcism fever dream deserves to go down in horror movie
history. Perhaps Sam Raimi was watching...The Evil
Dead came out six years later.)
Branded
to Kill (Seijin Suzuki, 1968) Never heard of it
until I read the back of the video box, and I decided
to rent it because it clearly looked like something
that Tarantino would think was hip: a stylized B&W
Japanese gangster flick from 1968. Well, in many ways
this will not disappoint: the visuals are insane, with
lots of slapstick violence, kinky sex, alienating post-modern
editing, Godardian gumshoe revisionism, beat jazz on
the soundtrack...all the hipster goods. Problem is,
the action is so fast, the dialogue so terse, the editing
so elliptical, and the story and characters so shallow,
that there's really nothing of any depth moving the
story along. As a viewer all I could do was just wait
through all the confusion for the next cool stylized
shot or violent sequence. And the wait is never long.
(I was somewhat disappointed to discover that some of
the most inventive sequences from Jarmusch's powerhouse
Ghost Dog were cribbed directly from this flick.)
Opening
Night (John Cassavetes, 1977) He's made a lot of
movies, and I haven't seen 'em all, but this has got
to be Cassavetes' masterpiece. I haven't seen all of
Gena Rowland's performances either, but this has GOT
to be her masterpiece. She plays an actress of apparent
renown, who we immediately meet in yet another classic
Cassavettes cold opening, about fifteen seconds before
she takes the stage in front of a packed house. Before
we know it, Cassavetes has us sitting right in the audience,
all the way back around the 30th or 40th row, and whaddayaknow,
we're watching a play instead of a movie, a quirky tragicomic
play featuring Cassavetes himself as the male romantic
lead and Gena Rowlands as the female romantic lead.
This single stationary shot goes on for at least six,
maybe ten minutes...and then the titles and brief credits
are superimposed! See how movies can still be interesting?
As the movie progresses, details accumulate: we have
just seen the opening night of a practice run that a
play is having in New Haven before it opens on Broadway.
The lead actress, played by Gena Rowlands, is having
a fairly serious emotional breakdown because she's playing
an older woman right about the time she's starting to
feel like an older woman herself. She lets the breakdown
infect her acting and her acting infect her breakdown.
She's way into the "derangement of the senses"
thing due to a habit of binge-drinking. Unable to get
into character because she already is that character,
she has no choice but to be herself and improvise everything.
In a spellbinding climax -- the New York City opening
night -- Cassavetes the actor figures out how to work
with her intensely personal approach, right there on
stage. Say what you will about 'improv acting' but this
is an example of people doing improv in order to save
each other's SOULS. And you want genre fun? Not only
is it a play-within-a-play-within-a-film and
a romantic dramedy, it's also a GHOST STORY. Masterpiece.
Together
(Lukas Moodysson, 2000) A 1975 period piece, set
in Stockholm, Sweden, about a bunch of bohos living
in a house together. This isn't about 'post-hippie fallout'
or anything like that...these people are just bohos,
into near-radical politics, alternative diets, psychedelic
music, red wine and candlelight. They're still all over
today, in fact six of my friends live in a house together
in Chicago and it's not a whole lot different than this
movie. They laugh, flirt, listen to music, relax with
drinks, and get onto each others nerves a lot, cuz they're
all interesting intelligent people who want their freedom
and also want to do good. This movie gets it on film,
even as some traits of some characters don't always
ring true...one character's passive-aggressiveness and
his girlfriend's promiscuity didn't strike me as very
naturalistic, but interesting points were still raised
by those characterizations. The movie's big move is
to challenge various countercultural traditions by throwing
kids into the mix, and the sequences with kids are fantastic.
The best performance (in a movie with several good performances)
is by Emma Samuelsson as 13 year old Eva. The soundtrack
includes International Harvester, and scenes where psychedelic
rock swells on the soundtrack while some character goes
through some everyday pain are masterful. The set design,
clothing, and cinematography are all flawless. And yes,
"Love Hurts" by Nazareth, without any aid
from irony or distance whatsoever, is as glorious of
a cathedral as heavy 70s rock ever built.
The
Idiots (Lars Von Trier, 1998) I had this bias against
Lars Von Trier and what I called his "contrived
misery." Still haven't seen Dancer in the Dark
and claim to not want to, but a friend who I trust told
me that I had to see The Idiots. I told her about
my bias, but she wasn't having it. The way she said
"Will you please just rent it tonight?" gave
me no choice. She did the right thing, because this
movie has given me a new lease on LVT. Now I'll probably
go ahead and see Dancer. I actually don't want
to give away anything about this movie because I had
no idea what it was about and it was a pleasure to find
out. A bizarre and original storyline...like Together,
it's about communal living among radicalized young people,
but this throws more into the mix, as it's a sort of
pseudo-documentary about a poetic prank that involves
therapeutic method acting exercises (both within and
without the storyline).
Susana
(Luis Bunuel, 1951) After the freewheeling Dali-driven
form-destruction of Un Chien Andalou and L'Age
D'Or, Bunuel seemed to take a more measured approach
to surrealism; like Hitchcock's concept of the "maguffin,"
the films from his Mexican period often seemed to present
isolated surrealist phenomena within otherwise realistic,
almost maudlin settings. For example, in The Exterminating
Angel, the complexion of a maudlin bourgeois dinner
party is changed competely by a single surrealist development:
the guests are unable to leave. In Susana, a
bourgeois family living on a country estate is visited
by the title femme fatale, a living symbol for pure
raw sexuality (portrayed by the amazing Rosa Quintata).
You can't get more literal than when the unconscious,
mud-slathered Susana is carried into the house from
the dark rainy wild wet night. The head maid is convinced
she's the devil, and it's hard not to see her point.
What follows reminds me of a story my father, a respected
ornithologist, told me about the mating rituals of certain
birds. It seems that when a female bird is ready to
mate, all she has to do is merely walk past groups of
male birds in order to send them into squawking paroxysms
of lust. Susana is one of Bunuel's most convincing
portraits of the base desires all humans have. It starts
as high exploitation-tinged melodrama, plays out as
dark ravishing poetry, and ends on a note of high Christian
moralism that you just know you shouldn't take too seriously.
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