This thread is dedicated to Dumas, a man whose struggle against pseudo-intellectualism is an inspiration to us all...

Well, I'm back from vacation and I see these threads haven't moved an inch. 'Cept for the Buffy thread which I have no interest in. Anyway, I've just spent five straight days shit-face drunk on the streets of Los Angeles and really enjoyed myself, but I've also seen alot of movies and would like share the joy, the torment, the banality, the pseudo-intellectualism of my viewing experiences with all Comicon posters.

IRREVERSIBLE--European film's latest dubious contribution to world cinema is the use of splatter-shock effects and stylized gore. This isn't exactly new--it was best utilized in Godard's WEEKEND over thirty years ago--but at least it's a break from their usual precious little parables of repressed bourgeoisie and insufferably cute petite gamines such as Amelie.
BAISE MOI and TROUBLE EVERY DAY kicked this trend off and IRREVERSIBLE continues on from there. This movie comes with a hook: reports of screenings in which theatre-goers vomited, rushed in horror from the theatre or some combo of the two. This reaction centers around two scenes which, to be honest, aren't particularly shocking even to my delicate sensibilities. Why? Well, it's not that I'm desensitized...even though I do enjoy the wholesale slaughter that is GRAND THEFT AUTO no end. And there were moments in TROUBLE EVERY DAY when I felt sick to my stomach, but the difference there is that Denis' scenes are aesthetically justified and nicely woven into the fabric of the movie. Here they're just gimmicky and gratuitous. In the first scene, a rapist gets his head bludgeoned with a fire-extinguisher until all that's left is a gaping hole with a mouth. I'm actually curious how this effect was achieved since it all seems to be filmed in one take. In the second, Monica Belluci, soon to star in the THE MATRIX sequels, gets forcibly fucked up the ass and then has her head bashed in. The entire film runs backward, MEMENTO-style, a structural device wihch gives it the unjustified imprimatur of an art film when it's anything but. It's basically just a tasteless piece of shit.

THE PIANIST--I guess Holocaust movies really are critic proof. Simply mention the word Holocaust and you're basically guaranteed a receptive critical response and a best picture nomination. How else to explain the accolades given to this completely unremarkable and forgettable film? Adrian Brody was great, though.

SPIDER--This film is far to subtle for its own good. Cronenberg's direction is so restrained and his desire to not tip his hand vis a vis the "surprise" ending that both does and does not explain much of what we've just seen is so worked into the slow-moving pace of the film that it at times becomes slightly boring, a word I never thought I'd use in relation to one of his movies. But if you want a performance that will literally make your jaw drop for it's devotion to bringing the obssessive, self-enclosed word of the the typical schizophrenic to life you should catch Ralph Fiennes' performance in this. It's pretty fucking amazing.

ADAPTATION--I suppose the self-reflexive device that this movie is centered around--a real-life script-writer writing himself into his own script which becomes the film we are actually watching--might seem original to anyone who hasn't read, say, the last 50 years of literature where its become a cliche, or seen any number of Godard's films but mainly JLG/JLG, or even Wes Craven's NEW NIGHTMARE, ferchrisakes, in which Wes Craven appears playing "Wes Craven" writing a Freddy movie. Wes Craven--that's how tired self-reflexivity has become. Anyway, I'm a huge fan of BEING JOHN MALKOVICH which, in contrast to this movie, was truly original, so I was looking forward to this. The film has it's moments, mainly the beginning, but it ends up choking on its initial meta-film conceit. During the ending we're meant to recognize Donald's tasteless contributions to the script of the film we're now watching as they unfold--car chases, drug running intrigue, etc. But it goes on for too long and the wised-up humor the audience is supposed to see here basically dries up.

All in all, a crappy season so far. It might be premature to say this but the best movies this year will likely be the big, fat, evil, commercial blockbusters: the MATRIX sequels, X2, and THE HULK, all of which I'm really looking forward to. Tarantino's KILL BILL and Claire Denis' FRIDAY NIGHT are coming out too, though.

Films I'm most looking forward to in the next couple of weeks are Denis', THE MAN WITHOUT A PAST, and Guy Maddens' DRACULA: TALES FROM A VIRGIN'S DIARY.

The only review I've liked of IRREVERSIBLE is from Sight & Sound, where the critic (whose name escapes me) gets the whole rape-revenge B flick quality. But I'll see. I STAND ALONE was interesting enough.

SPIDER was disappointing for me not because it was boring, but it betrayed itself by the end. Cronenberg has always been a very literal/rationalist director, despite how his films are often portrayed, and that quality became a weakness here. Without giving away the ending (as if it weren't perfectly obvious from the beginning), it becomes clear where the insanity stops and reality begins. All is cleared up. I'd hope that that wasn't where it was going, still think the film is well worth seeing, but was really let down by the pat resolution to all of Spider's problems (well, in turns of the story arc; he's still schizo at the end).

Although it's not nearly as sophisticated as MULHOLLAND DR., Cronenberg's movie is a bit more sly than you might at first think. I too was dissapointed by the pat ending, which seemed to have an "It was all a dream" obviousness. Then I thought about it for a bit and saw that it's possible that none of the events occured at all--the pilgrimage to his childhood neighborhood, the Lynn Redgrave/Mother character, all of it might have been woven into Spider's fantasy world and be a total delusion.

But you're right when you say that Croeneberg has a weakness for positivistic, rigidly representational imagery. Unlike Lynch, Cronenberg likes a dream to be a dream and for reality to be reality. Even EXISTENZ, which is supposedly about calling into question the line between reality and fantasy, cops out at the end. MULHOLLAND DR. is "filmic" in all the familair Godardian ways (at times you get the sense that Lycnh is saying that cinema itself is schizophrenic, not his charcters) but it's also completely mysterious and thrilling. You can't take your eyes off it. Can't say the same about SPIDER. But it's a must-see for the Fiennes performance.

As far as IRREVERSIBLE goes...well, I can't say I was bored but the movie as a whole is a failure. It starts out okay. Noe decides right at the beginning to help the audience out with the theme of the film when he has one of his characters proclaim "Time destroys everything." Ah, I see. That would explain the backward thing. What, does he think we're idiots? Anyway, of course time destroys everything. What else would it be doing? There's also a very well done scene at the beginning that makes this gay S&M club look like Dante's Inferno--darkly lit, writhing desperate bodies. One of them evern starts jerking off over the mutilated corpse I mentioned before. Anyway, you can take or leave the rest of this movie. Looking forward to the Kaurismaki film you mentioned. I'd also like to add RUSSIAN ARK as an excellent recent film.

Yeah, it could be interpreted as not so representational, but there are some problems with such a reading. [SPOILERS] First, it seems pretty clear that mom wasn't killed. The notion that a man could do his wife in, replace her with another woman (who's a wellknown slut) and go on about life wihtout a legal hitch is implausible. Additionally, in a great performance, Byrnes is a different dad in the 2 mom scenarios, which suggests there's nothing real going on in terms of the mom being replaced. Third, Spider might've imagined his killing his mother because of betraying the memory of the original version by lying that he no longer believed his dad killed her. But the original version pops up later, being confused with slutty version and the film demonstrates Spider's difficulty with identity through his seeing his mom as the nurse and subequently trying to remover her face. His realization at the end, that the nurse isn't his mom/the slut comes at the same narrative time as his presumed realization that he was the one who killed his mom. Yeah, all of it could be oneiric, but so could all of cinema. To me, it's pretty clear that the ending sets up vivid representational distinctions. That's quite an accomplishment on Cronenberg's and his actors' part, to make such subject/object distinctions within a largely subjective narrative without relying on any toodly-toodly stylistic trickery. However, the delusional images are left as objects for the audience to think about, study, debate over, maybe, but never really experience. It felt like a betrayal because the subjective experience is ripped off the viewer's brain like scotch tape at the end.

MULHOLLAND DRIVE, on the other hand, leaves one feeling like a reflective puddle. Funnily enough, I consider Lynch a rationalist director, too, only inside-out, whereas Cronenberg is outside-in.

A better double feature is pairing FEMME FATALE with M.H. to see how cinema as a dream is dealt with differently by the outside-in and inside-out camps.

And the Madden film I mentioned is PAGES, not TALES, FROM A VIRGIN'S DIARY.

Best film I've seen in the theatres this year was probably one that's over 25 years old. Saturday I went to see The Maysles Brothers' and co.'s Grey Gardens, a disturbing cinema verite look at Edith Bouvier Beale and Edith Bouvier Beale, the... slightly eccentric aunt and cousin of Jackie O. Mother and daughter lived reclusively together in a delapidated Long Island manse, the grounds overrun with plantlife gone wild, the innards being eaten by racoons... sorrounded by junk and their many cats. They also seem to swing maddeningly between finding a truly simpatico way of co-existing without benefit of the outside world on the one hand and shrieking at each other like The Furies come to life, about certain touchy subjects -- like singing and dating -- but also about anything and everything on the other.

The film is utterly hilarious. Just when you think the gals are just lovable eccentrics to be admired for living any goddamn way they please, thanx -- then "Little Edie," as the daughter is sometimes called, starts singing and/or dancing wildly, or extolling the virtues of the piss the cats drop wherever in the house they will. Or the pair of them REALLY fly off on each other -- screaming simultaneous in unintelligable tirades. And you swear both of these people are seriously ill. (Little Edie in particular seems to be awfully fond of attacks of mania).

Of course, all of this also makes the film almost unendurably sad.

And it also makes it an incredibly intense -- and tense -- bit of viewing. At least if you're me. I was on edge almost from the git-go, even when I was laughing... even when I was getting pretty damn depressed over the physical and emotional squalor.

And that's just the gals themselves. There's a whole other level of discomfort going on in this film -- the questioning of the motives of the filmmakers. The ethics involved in this kind of intense candidness captured on film. Do these two know how they are coming off in this film? CAN they? Is this exploitation going on here -- how much difference, in the end, is there between this and a Jerry Springer episode?

Ultimately, I've got to feel that the film is a worthy document. This kind of raw chronicling of such an... extreme case as Edith and Edith Beale is something that I think is important, because it's a testament to how different are the forms the human condition can take. And I left the theatre with all sorts of questions stewing in my noggin', about stuff that I sometimes take for given as answered, simple -- but that probably isn't either. Difference and deviation, self vs society, yadda yadda, what is "normal" -- and where I fit into all of that.

Being cinema verite, it's marked by stretches that seem samey and test one's tolerance. That's practically the nature of the beast, it seems to me -- most cinema verite I've seen has at least some of this. But this doesn't make up too much of Grey Gardens. Far more of the film is hard to sit thru because of the intensity of the emotion spilling across the screen, the feeling of madness that often pervades this portrait of two very "different" people.

When I get a DVD player, I think I've got to get this film. Parodoxically, I don't think I'll be able to watch it too often, but I want to be able to do so whenever the right moment hits me. And I'm just so taken by the film that I want to *posess* it. It has probably now joined Salesman (also from the Maysles) and Best Boy as my favorite documentaries.

Matthew

That's a good one. Get SALESMAN, which is even better, and an obvious influence (to say the least) on Mamet's GLENGARRY GLENROSS.

SLIGHT SPOILERS ...

MAN WITHOUT A PAST was disappointing. A mise-en-scene similar to Lynch's but without the wit or charm. Imagine a widefocused shot, held past the point of the narrative action, over and over again, but for no reason and to little effect, and you'll get an idea of what the film's like.

Had to miss the new Denis film, because the one night it was playing coincided with the great Evan Parker playing with the equally great Alex von Schlippenbach. Denis isn't even the same ballpark within her respective medium.

X2 was enjoyable enough. Unfortunately, it runs on a downward trajectory from the excellent Nightcrawler "bampfing" battle at the beginning to Magneto's use of ballbearings to an intelligent suggestion as to how to kill someone with Wolverine's mutant abilities way down to the nadir of Jean Grey doing Heston in front of a blue screen. I really loved the swinish kraut accent of Nightcrawler, whom I always heard in my mind's ear as a thinner General Burkhalter. Some fine B moments, but commercial demands keep it from being particularly interesting. No better nor worse than the first.

Charles,

"That's a good one. Get SALESMAN, which is even better, and an obvious influence (to say the least) on Mamet's GLENGARRY GLENROSS."

Well, as I said, Grey Gardens has now joined Salesman and Best Boy as my favorite documentary. Salesman is another incredible portrait... You just see this human being totally disintegrate before your very eyes. It's heartbreaking.

I actually have a taping of the film off of PBS, but the picture quality is very, very poor, so Salesman and Best Boy are the other two documentaries I'll want to be sure to get on DVD, once I've got my player.

Debt to pay off, and a trip to see my folks first, tho -- so I'm not exactly sure when that'll be.

Matthew

Charles,

"MAN WITHOUT A PAST was disappointing. A mise-en-scene similar to Lynch's but without the wit or charm. Imagine a widefocused shot, held past the point of the narrative action, over and over again, but for no reason and to little effect, and you'll get an idea of what the film's like."

Wait -- you mean this is a remake of Death in Venice? Oh, no, that can't be... you said, "past the point of the narrative action," which would mean that you'd have some narrative action in the first place...

At any rate, I'd like to see The Man... myself. Never seen any Aki. Maybe I should start with the one Lily Taylor did with him, tho, as I love Taylor.

Matthew

Aw, sorry about that, Matt. I jumped right over that sentence of yours.