Julien Donkey Boy (1999)

June 28, 2009 at 10:51 am · Filed under It stinks ·Tagged , ,

Ten minutes in and i knew i wouldn’t be enjoying or even liking this film.

No narrative arc (as the film critics like to say) to it. Incomprehensible mostly. Unintelligible manic distracting discomforting energy to it.

That’s the delusional reality schizophrenics live in is saying Harmony Korine. I’m getting you right into this donkey boys mad head. Give you the crazy cut up world from his whacked out perspective. Feel his discomfort as yours, inhabit your repulsion as his, gouge out this film worlds eyes with your antagonism (see, i’m getting into Korine’s head too!)

Apparently Korine has a mad schizo uncle this film is supposed to be doing homage to. Ewen Bremner is totally convincing; he doesn’t even seem to be impersonating or mimicking – ala Dustin Hoffman – mad man mannerisms; he is that man, he is that mad.

The film adheres to Dogme aesthetics: handheld video camera, no artificial light, no superfluous props,  no manipulated musical emotionality, no narrative arc (Lol), no pleasure-seeking cheap thrills. And yet mega post-production editing has gone into it. It’s like they had thousands of hours of digi vid to cut and shape -  and then gone mad to make it’s production seem unglossed up, wilfully unsmooth, provocatively unbeautiful: cus in crazy psycho-land, ugliness equals truth, grotesquerie authenticity.

At first i was, if not enjoying, at least admiring the aspiration to make the film formally challenging – to appropriately stylistically match how difficult the subjective material is. But before long it got tiresome. Very tiresome. Stop melanging it through opaque filters. Stop slow-moing! Stop jagging the edges! Stop jarring my senses. Stop jiggling my eyeballs. Stop fracturing the narrative! Stop all this self-conscious technique! Start making sense! Keep the camera still for christ-sake. Lets just watch something simple without all this manic fiddling and farting about contriving to make it all look so maddeningly mad, strangely estranging, complicatedly complex.

Korine grosses out on whacked out weirdnesses. Ewen donkey-boy Bremner is saying “He (Hitler) ate my mothers titties“; he’s stamping on the head of a turtle; he’s reading out a repetitious poem “Midnight chaos, noon chaos, eternity chaos etc” which papa Werner Herzog hates, and tells him is “too artsy-fartsy. I like the real stuff” (intended in-joke irony here i think) Herzog is hopelessly miscast; just because he’s reputedly a maverick bonkers film-director doesn’t mean he can act batty or bonkers; he’s made to do and say bonkers things: drink cough syrup out of a shoe; humiliate his grown-ups  kids; lie on the bed with a stupid fucking gas mask on his head distractedly smoking a fag listening to bluegrass.

God this film got tiresome!

And there was more whacked out weirdo weirdness: a masturbating nun; a black rapping albino and an armless drummer; Herzog wanting his wrestler wannabe son to put on his dead wife’s summer dress; bowling with retards; a hapless-looking magician regurgitating lit ciggies. Why? Don’t ask why. Wanting to know why is too normal. There is no why can explain this crazy fucked up ugly mad world. That’s why.

“I just can’t take it any longer” says Herzog about an hour in.

Neither could i

Dir: Harmony Korine, USA

3/10

With a name like “Harmony Korine” i suppose you’re doomed to be an unusual somebody special sort of guy. In the DVD interview he says: “We’re at the end of 100 years of cinema where film should be getting more complex – instead it’s going the other way; films are so simple now” I can kind of agree with that. But there’s complex which aspires to something eventually clarifying, essentially  lucid. And there’s the chaotic confusing self-conscious complex that this mad mess of a film is.

And anyway Harmony, you look too young (and too sweet) to be making perplexing, complexing, films. You need to grow up a bit son.

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Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

June 16, 2009 at 5:17 pm · Filed under It's ok ·Tagged

First thing to say is: this film isn’t as good as i assumed it would be. Maybe i got caught by the hype and the hoopla when it first came out. No, i don’t think so. To be honest i can’t even remember watching it.

Quest to find a stolen sword with legendary magical properties “The Green Destiny”. The story is silly and slight. In this version voices have been overdubbed into American. I’d have preferred to hear in its original Mandarin with subtitles. Big Chinese cheesy soundtrack. The kind of epic romantic melodrama i rarely want to buy into. I don’t do grandiose spectacular blockbusters. (It’s probably cus i never got read to as a child – not even fairy stories)

Granted there are incredible action set pieces – as in “in-credible”; meant to be mythical, metaphysical, miraculous. Much whirling swirling super swordery and supernatural gravity-defying chasing and leaping about up walls, through trees, flying over rooftops.

Apparently the fight sequence “effects” had minimal CGi manipulation; all done with invisible wires and pulleys; and the fighting is less Martial and more like Art; like doing super-fast balletic dance on Whizz. You kind of marvel at the physical dexterity.

There’s about 5 or 6 of these choreographed scenes that grabbed my attention; the rest of the film was way above my head (Lol) – as in floating around somewhere that defied my English logic to comprehend. Far too comic-book, far too much super-duper derring do to be believable in any small-scale psychological sense i’m ever likely to encounter.

Dir: Ang Lee, Taiwan/USA

6/10

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Solaris (1972)

June 12, 2009 at 8:41 am · Filed under It's ok ·Tagged

A ponderous film. Tarkovsky gives plenty of ponder time. Cus there’s never very much plot or action-narrative going on.

Tarkovsky’s beginnings are always visually compelling: here we start with greening and blueing nature, the earth exhaling mists, dandelions puffing off white heads, cuckoos, saturations of wateriness, miracle-seeming rain through sun, horses, humming bees; it all creates the effect of the Earth – planet earth that is – being a living being, a sumptuous sensual marvel.

At 40 minutes we finally lift off into Space; with minimal special effects we get transported into the strange and estranged world of Solaris ocean, somewhere distinctively Not-Earth.

Kris – the psychologist – has been rocketed up to find out what strange goings on have been going on. No space-suit.  None of that astronaut malarkey. He turns up in black leather jacket and tight fitting leggings.

On board the space-satelite is Snow – or “Snout” as it’s said in Russian; he’s also wearing a leather jacket (brown) and Sartorious;  he’s got the white jacket of a nutty Scientist on; Gilbarian has already topped himself. “This is all meaningless” he’s saying posthumously to video camera; but “it’s not madness, it has to do with conscience”.

The Solaris Ocean – being a thinking substance – has been emanating “disturbances”, materialising thoughts. Kris is soon having in existence his dead wife Hari (she killed herself 10 years ago) “Do you love me?” she’s immediately asking Kris. “Don’t say silly things” he replies. But it’s not silly. Turns out he’s resurrecting,or more precisely, replicating, her into life with (his) love.

“Perhaps we’re here to perceive, for the first time,  humans as a purpose for love“  – which seems to be one of the central messages of the film.

“What Man needs is man” seems to be another message. Not explorations into Deep Outer Space “out there” – but the Deep Inner Space within what it is to feel and be an earthly being.

Another message could be: “We need secrets to preserve simple human truths. The secrets of happiness, death, love” In other words there have to be necessary moral limitations to rational scientific “discovery”.

On some critics lists this one of the best Sci-Fi films ever made. Probably cus of it’s seriously committed tone, its exploration of ideas rather than robots blowing one another up. And of course you’ve got all of Tarkovsky’s spiritual iconery: beautifully seraphic women levitating like angels, sonerous use of J.S Bach, the watery world of lakes, rain, mists, the slow lingering of the camera searching significances of the natural world, sudden illuminations of light…etc blah….

But i got bored. Again. There’s always times in Tarkovsky’s films when i’m profoundly bored, and fast-forwarding through the many slow bits, the repetitive bits, the dead bits.

You’ll have to be in a state of devout meditative concentration – for 2 hours! – to watch this. Believing it to be seriously meaningful, spiritually significant.

I don’t have that belief anymore about Tarkovsky. Think i’d prefer to meditate on and in my own world. Listen to those birds outside my bedroom window.

Dir: Andrei Tarkovsky, Russia

6/10

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The Double Life of Veronique (1992)

June 8, 2009 at 8:32 am · Filed under Tedious ·Tagged ,

When i first saw this back in the 90’s I wanted to like it; it was Kieslowski, director of Decalog, it was gonna be great.

But it wasn’t. And isn’t. Not even now. I’m just as disappointed by it as i was then. I even feel mildly irritated.

I think its something to do with how precious it is. And while we’re at it – being precious – lets throw in specious too. All wafty visual tonery. And flopping about in expensive Parisian flats looking ethereally lost.

I don’t know if this is Irene Jacobs fault or how Kiewslowski’s directing her. It’s probably him. He sticks the camera onto her face and follows her lovingly around like a devoted doggie. The critics seemed besotted by her “ravishing” beauty too.

I’m not. She’s too pretty, too bloody angelic! Too much vague vacuity going on in lieu of expressive feeling, or even explicable feeling. She doesn’t say alot. Does lots of wan-looking, as though she’s lost her virginity somewhere but can’t remember when or with who.

“I have a strange feeling. I feel that i’m not alone in the world” says Polish Weronika to her dad. No, cus there’s a French doppelganger that looks just like her living in Paris called Veronique. Who also happens to be musically gifted, have a heart condition, have lovely teeth.

Weronika is getting giddinesses. Collapses dead on stage while singing her beautiful song. 27 mins in. The rest of the film is taken over by Veronique, and how she’s sensing the possible presence of Weronika around somewhere in tantalisingly vague ambiguous presentiments. Or maybe not. We can’t be sure what she’s experiencing cus she never really says anything. Just this lifted up longing in her face, beaming into beatific.

Its all far too slow, cooked on a slow simmering heat of semblence and seeming significance; spiritual speciousness.

And that “haunting” faux meaningful music of Zbigniew Preisner (used to irritating effect by Kieslowki in other films) makes my skin itch; its like listening to Polish pan-pipe music for the cerebrally inebriated.

Dir: Krzysztof  Kieslowski, Poland/France

5/10

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Simple Men (1992)

June 4, 2009 at 7:33 pm · Filed under Good ·Tagged ,

The Deadpan Po-Mo School of film-making. That’s where Hal Hartley belongs, along with directors like Jim Jarmusch, Aki Kaurismaki

Oddly punctuated dialogue, peculiar pauses; as if characters are talking with comic book style speech bubbles hanging ironically over their heads.

It’s all deliberately contrived to be cod-philosophical, cod-comical.

Mocking serious pretension with knowingly mockingly serious pretension.

“There’s no such thing as adventure or romance. There’s only trouble and desire. And the funny thing is when you desire something you immediately get in trouble. And when you’re in trouble you don’t desire anything at all“

Says Robert Burke. Is that meaningful? Or is it simply something clever to say? Or is it something so clever it’s winking at itself with inverted commas at how “meaningful” it’s supposed to be being?.

Who knows. The characters seem to be saying things that might be meant to be meaning something else. Fraught with implications. Or maybe just fraught for the sake of being fraught (cus its a film, and films are meant to be “at you”)

It’s contrived melodrama shorn of melodramatic cliches or clinches, but also drained dry of plausible emotional engagement by virtue of this deliberated deadpan detachment.

There’s a funny oddball dance about an hour in (in the pic above); i can imagine film graduate oddball-wannabes dancing it in a line in the living room when they’re getting warmly pissed together on wet communal Saturday afternoons.

Its cool man. We’re taking the piss out of bad dancing. But there’s no need for an exclamation mark. We know we’re cool. We’re deconstructing our idiosyncrasies.

You have to be in the mood – or a mood – for this kind of film. A mood of sincere bullshitlessness.

Dir: Hal Hartley, USA

7/10

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Stroszek (1977)

May 30, 2009 at 10:04 am · Filed under Tedious ·Tagged

One of those Werner Herzog films i saw back in my early 20’s. Oddly compelling at the time.

Not now though. Odd yes, but not especially compelling.

Bruno S – who plays Stroszek -  is odd bordering on idiot; he declaims his lines in a faux oratory style as if he’s acting being an actor .There’s no appropriate feeling going on to match whats being said. A simpleton sort of soul, vaguely sympathetic, but also strangely alienating. His personal peculiarities belonging somewhere along the Autistic spectrum, left of Aspergers. After a while i found his blank idiocy disingenuously disengaging.

Disingenuously disengaging is how i found the rest of the film too.

Apparently Ian Curtis -  of Joy Division – watched this the night he hung himself. I suppose if you were feeling especially alienated this film would speak to you, alienate you even better.

The scenes at the end; of the truck automatically circuiting round and round, the automated dancing chicken spinning itself madlessly about on its dish, Bruno S swung up high and helpless on the ski lift….these scenes disturbingly stick with you, like images from a bad dream you had, and don’t care too much to remember.

Herzog peoples this film with misfit eccentrics and their eccentricities (like he does in most of his films) losers living as outsiders, not fitting into the “norm”, not fit for the norm – even though they appear to have naive hope in US style normality, materialistic aspirations. You know they’re never gonna fit in, are doomed to be defeated by their automated failure-lifes. Just as alienated and automated as those dancing chickens really.

I don’t know about Werner Herzog. I suppose back in the 70’s he seemed like a mad mystic visionary. And then you get to hear how dull he is interviewed, like a softly spoken, mild-mannered NHS line-manager. And the films he’s made in the last 20 years or so seem stripped of that cult like allure.

Maybe its because we have access to so much film these days, via Dvds, the Internet, etc; we’ve got so much to see – so the tolerance level for stuff that looks willfully obscure, cerebral, or “difficult” is much lower. Well, it is with me. I’m just not prepared to put up with the Herzogs, Wenders, and Godards of this world boring me to death with their pet abstractions and obsessions.

And maybe i don’t need or want to watch films that don’t inspire me, don’t charm me, don’t move me; films – like this one is – that make life feel negatively displaced, estranged, futile.

Maybe i’ve just grown-up, got older, matured. I know better now the kind of films i “really” like to see, rather than the films i ought to be admiring.

Dir: Werner Herzog, Germany

5/10

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Cabaret Balkan (1998)

May 25, 2009 at 12:04 pm · Filed under Good

Took me a while to get into this film. Lots of episodic encounters between seemingly disconnected characters.

Scenes are intense and immediate; dialogues in which the possibility of violent emotion instead of rational resolution seems imminently and threateningly likely.

The film seethes with a kind of close-to-the-edge, end-of-our-tether rage; “Fuck you!” and “What the fuck!” is shouted a lot.

I guess it helps that we know the context for this anarchic, archaic, anger; Serbia under Milosevic, feeling beleaguered; Serbs tainted with being the bad guys, backed up into a corner; civil society going to pot (literally); guns and knifes having to come out as a form of self-preservation and protection.

It’s quite a political film, but the politics are dramatized from within and made to feel personal, psychological, essential.

It doesn’t take alot for the Anger of the disenfranchised to rise up against the Political Elite; take our present disillusion and seething resentment with our own Political Masters re how they’ve been diddling and fiddling us of “our” money. Seemingly reasonable and reasoning Politicians are now vilified as corrupt and morally bankrupt, self-serving parasites. We are not well served.

So imagine “war criminals” Milosevic and Karajic being our political overlords. Anger would be erupting out all over the place; society would be breaking down, broken down, into the kind of personal confrontations and violent vendettas that this film so vividly slaps your face with.

Think I’ll be watching this again.

Dir: Goran Paskaljevic, Serbia

7/10

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Let the right one in (2008)

May 20, 2009 at 11:09 am · Filed under Tedious

Went up to Exeter Picture House to see this. Had high expectations, even tho I usually wouldn’t watch a vampire movie; but there’d been favourable reviews by the critics.

Turns out my expectations were too high.

This film seemed confused as to what kind of film it wanted to be.  Too many jarring tonal shifts between childhood romance, social satire, and that stupefying OTT vampirism.

Think i would have preferred it to stay gently on the achingly melancholic little relationship between the 2 12 year old misfit kids, bullied blonde boy Oskar and undead Eli with her big dark drops of eyes.

Instead you keep getting sudden erruptions of grisly gorishness; not sown seamlessly into the introspective mood of the film, but kind of manically stitched on – then ripped apart, with much gnashing and slashing of teeth.

It seems like normal narrative logic doesn’t apply to this Vampire genre; the more it doesn’t make rational sense the more frightened you’ll be with what you don’t understand; the more inexplicably incoherent internal motivations are the more fascinatingly “other” the wierdness is supposed to be – sparking off scary subconscious fears inside us who sit and gape.

Durr, no. All i start to become aware of is how clunkingly manipulative all the “horror” effects are being. I’m not scared! You’re not scaring me! So stop it – and start developing characters i can actually believe in, have sympathy for.

I mean, i don’t get: why the serial killer father is stringing up his victims in public places. Or, after he’s smashed to his death out of the hospital window, why Swedish social services aren’t knocking on the door of the flat to take his little daughter into care; or why the police aren’t cottoning on to all these grisly goings on in the locality (you don’t see them at all in fact)

I had confirmed to me why i don’t watch films about vampires. They’re preposterous!

All that ravenous neck sucking, and rabid blood guzzling. Not for me i’m afraid. Not that i was afraid. Merely faintly bemused by it all.

Dir: Tomas Alfredson, Sweden

5/10

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To get to heaven first you have to die (2006)

May 12, 2009 at 7:42 am · Filed under Tedious

I’m a sucker for titles like this.

A film of 2 halves. In the first half 20 year old virgin Kamal is wandering around desperate for a shag. He’s been married 3 months but can’t get it up. So he hops onto trains and buses, creeps around supermarkets and factories, desperately on the look out for shaggable females.

It doesn’t help that he seems to have the personality of a snail. Lots of mournful faced passive looking, hardly any talking, no touching.

He’s not getting anywhere. Not even with a prostitute. Seems like it could be a psychological problem he’s got – but we don’t get to know what kind of psychology he’s got; his inscrutable mutism makes him willfully obscure.

In the second half, the film changes tone. Kamal has slept – as in “slept” – with a hoodlum’s estranged wife. The hoodlum appropriates Kamal as an assistant burglar. And things get nasty. Knifes get stuck in. A rape happens (which we don’t see, but hear)

Kamal gets a shot gun, shoots hoodlum in head; goes back to hoodlums wife and shags her on a table; then he’s off back home, now able to give the wife a good seeing to too.

Manhood has been restored. Impotence will be cured when you  shoot your big gun into a nasty mans brains. Seems to be the message.

It’s all very dubious, questionable, unconvincing.

Dir: Djamshed Usmonov,  Tajikistan

5/10

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Buffalo 66 (1998)

April 28, 2009 at 11:57 am · Filed under Good ·Tagged , , ,

Billy Brown (Vincent Gallo) is an angry young man. He also needs a pee.

He’s just got out of jail. He grabs a young Miss Layla (Christina Ricci) around the mouth and drags her off to see his parents. He wants her to pretend to be his wife: “Just be nice. Be a decent girl. You’re there to make me look good“

He still needs to pee. We’ve got a bit of a bladder situation going on here.

He repeats every sentence 3 times to make sure everybody gets how angry he is. Billy is a horribly misunderstood person: “Just calm down Billy“. Billy is a screw-up. He’s got screwy parents (Angelica Huston and Ben Gazzara)  Tempers are flying. “Please calm down”. Layla is doing her bestest to make him look good. Look too good.

Billy thinks nothing of ripping into his best friend “Goon”: “You know why they call you Goon? You’re a retard, and you’re ugly. You’re an ugly retard, and they call you Goon because you’re ugly and retarded – and you’ll always be Goon. So fuck you!”

Gradually though we’re warming to Billy. Underneath that angry shouty facade is a little hurt boy. Little Billy No-mates. Little Billy who never had a girlfriend. Little Billy who can never please his parents.

Layla seems to know this. Even when Billy is chastising her sat on his knee in the photo booth (a funny and touching scene this): “Just look like you like me. Look like we’re husband and wife. Spanning time. Like you like me, like we’re in love. In love. Spanning time. Don’t do your best – just do it right”

We’re warming to Billy cus Layla is warming him up. Something tender is starting to happen. Something that looks like love – or might even be love – is being let in.

In the end its become a funny sad sweet oddball film thats got Vincent Gallo stamped all over it (he starred, wrote, directed and composed the music for it)

Dir: Vincent Gallo, USA

7.5/10

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